Three weeks into January things were looking rather grim.
Plunging crude, jitters about the ongoing (and increasingly unpredictable) yuan devaluation, and spillovers to global risk assets stemming from an ill-fated attempt by Chinese regulators to implement a stock market circuit breaker got US equities off to one of their worst Januarys in history.
While the prevailing dour (or perhaps sour) overnight mood was a continuation of the weak oil theme which started yesterday after Iran said the production freeze proposed by Saudi and Russia as "ridiculous", and Saudi oil minister Al-Naimi said that Saudi won't cut supply and that high-cost producers need to either "lower costs, borrow cash or liquidate” (ideally the latter), risk sentiment was further dented when BOJ Governor Kuroda says he won’t target FX rates or stocks, which is clearly nonsense, and further spooked Japanese asset prices (Nikkei -0.85), while s
In the past several years, many trees have been felled and pixels electrocuted in the service of discussion about the impact of Hispanics on the American electorate. No one knows for sure which way they’ll vote in the future but everyone is interested in discussing it. Curiously, though, an even larger political shift is taking place yet receiving almost no attention whatsoever from political reporters—the emergence of post-Christian America.
There are three certain things in life: death, taxes and paying vault storage fees to keep your gold safe. Or at least there were: recently the third of these certainties got somewhat muddied when, over the past year the government of India unleashed an attempt to soft-confiscate the nation's publicly held gold, by offering to pay interest for said gold. Incidentally, the effort has failed miserably as India has been able to collect only a few tons of gold as part of this gold monetization scheme.