ubmitted by Patrick Ceresna via Macrovoices.com,
In a podcast interview on MacroVoices, Macro Guru Raoul Pal makes some comments on some of the biggest imbalances in the markets today.
He compares the VIX contango trade to the portfolio insurance problem that was blamed for the 1987 crash...
With 2016 still fresh in most investors' minds, and questions about 2017 pressing, here is a summary, courtesy of Goldman's Allison Nathan, of where Goldman believes we closed out 2016, what is in store in the coming year, and ultimately, "what keeps Goldman up at night" about 2017.
2016, and a peek at 2017
Following this weekend's news that the massive Calgary fire, while still spreading, may soon be under control courtesy of some wet weather and favorable winds, as well as the stunner from Saudi Arabia that Ali al-Naimi was out, replaced with a puppet of the hawkish deputy drown prince Mohammed bin Sultan - a succession many saw as bearish for future oil prices - algos had refused to give up on recent momentum, and pushed WTI just why of $46/bbl overnight.
In the aftermath of China's gargantuan, record new loan injection in Q1, which saw a whopping $1 trillion in new bank and shadow loans created in the first three months of the year, many were wondering where much of this newly created cash was ending up.
We now know where most of it went: soaring imports of crude oil.
We know this because as the chart below shows, Chinese crude imports via Qingdao port in Shandong province surged to record 9.86 million metric tons last month based on data from General Administration of Customs.
One week ago, we wrote that as a result of the collapsing crude contango, oil tankers (such as the fully loaded Distya Akula which has been on anchor in the Suez Canal for one month unable to find a buyer for its cargo so it continues to wait) "will soon have to unload their cargo", in the process flooding the already oversupplied market with millions of barrels of crude oil, thus pushing the price of oil far lower. But how many millions of barrels, and how much lower will the price of oil go?