Business

June 21, 2007 is when the financial crisis - which had officially started on February 7 with an announcement by HSBC - hit home for Wall Street, with the news that Bear Stearns had staved off the collapse (not for long) of 2 subprime-focused hedge funds. This is what the NYT wrote that day:

The high-stakes game of brinksmanship began early yesterday on Wall Street, and continued throughout the day. Bankers traded telephone calls, frenetically negotiating the fate of two hedge funds.

 

Moments ago the Fed released the first phase of its annual stress test which, once again, found that all thirty-four of the US largest banks "passed", exceeding minimum projected capital and leverage ratios under severely adverse scenarios, based on their projected ability to withstand economic shocks, which  as Bloomberg notes, shows that "firms are getting the hang of the once-dreaded reviews." The result marks the third straight year all firms cleared the minimum requirements in the exams’ first phase, begging the question just how "stressful" this test truly is.

Oil bounced a bit (on Saudi noise)... banks dropped (ahead of CCAR)... Healthcare ripped again (on a bill that appears to be DOA)... and stocks gave up hope in the last few minutes...

Authored by Tsvetana Paraskova via OilPrice.com,

OPEC’s production cut deal is unlikely to survive beyond its current deadline in March 2018, with the agreement seen falling apart towards the middle of next year, in which case a huge amount of extra oil would hit the market, Ian Reid, head of European oil and gas research at Macquarie, told CNBC on Thursday.

OPEC’s deal has not had the cartel’s desired effect on the markets, neither in terms of oil prices nor in drawing down the global glut.

Just this morning we reported that as the global equity research market wrestles with how it will comply with the EU's MiFID II regulations, in a new study McKinsey said that banks will have no choice but to fire a ton of equity research analysts who write a bunch of stuff that no one ever reads...which seems like a reasonable guess.