Submitted by Bill Bonner of Bonner & Partners (annotated by Acting-Man.com's Pater Tenebrarum),
Dow up again yesterday! According to Wall Street analysts, investors were front running a non-event. The Fed is in a credit “tightening cycle”, but without the tightening. On Wednesday, it announced it was leaving short-term rates unchanged at 0.5%.
(One was already too much…we simply cannot have too many of these sad scenes. Cartoon by Richard Cline)
One of the more surprising market developments of 2016 has been the violent obliteration of those who had taken part in the biggest consensus trade of 2015, namely long the USD. As the Fed finally admitted earlier this week, the US economy is sputtering and is woefully incapable of handling 4 rate hikes, or 3 for that matter.
Submitted by Roger Barris of Economic Man, by way of Acting-Man
A Lack of “V”
After the February jobs report, President Obama said “America’s pretty darn great right now.” He then went on to disparage the “doomsday rhetoric” of the Republicans, which he said was pure “fantasy.
Not everyone was delighted by Mario Draghi's decision on March 10 begin monetizing corporate bonds: chief among them was Bundesbank president Jens Weidmann whose opposition to unorthodox monetary policies is well known, and whose "Northern Block" was among those voting against the ECB's QE expansion (Weidmann himself was not among those voting last week). Of course, complaining about it does not mean stopping it, and for three years now the "Germans" on the ECB council have complained loudly even as the ECB is on track to double its balance sheet in the next few years.
Submitted by Ben Hunt via Salient Partner's Epsilon Theory blog,
Five Easy Pieces for the World-As-It-Is
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