2016 has been the year that investors turned bearish on central banks.
Something snapped in the market’s collective psyche when Kuroda went NIRP and things haven’t been the same since. It’s as though everyone suddenly realized just how utterly insane this global monetary experiment has become.
Global stocks and U.S. equity futures are mostly higher this morning (despite China's historic NPL debt-for-equity proposal) as traders await the main event of the day: the ECB's 1:45pm CET announcement, more importantly what Mario Draghi will announce during the 2:30pm CET press conference, and most importantly, whether he will disappoint as he did in December or finally unleash the bazooka that the market has been desperately demanding.
In what may be the biggest news of the day, and certainly with far greater implications than whatever Mario Draghi will announce in a few hours when we will again witness the ECB doing not "whatever it takes" but "whatever it can do", moments ago Reuters reported that China is preparing for an unprecedented overhaul in how it treats it trillions in non-performing loans.
The Democratic Party fight between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders—one likely to extend through the very last primaries if not all the way to the convention—might be compared to the contest between Ronald Reagan and Gerald Ford in 1976. A beloved movement figure is taking on an exhausted yet entrenched establishment, running much better than anyone expected. But like Reagan, even in defeat, Sanders clearly represents the future of the party.
The European Central Bank promised in January to "review and reconsider" its monetary stance this week. The question, as BloombergBriefs notes, is not if policy makers will ease but how. Haruhiko Kuroda's humbling in FX markets shows what Mario Draghi is up against tomorrow: namely, that even the most forceful policy decisions can be overwhelmed by events, positioning, or sentiment.