There are 60 major stock exchanges throughout the world, and their range of sizes is quite surprising.
As Visual Capitalist's Jeff Desjardin notes, at the high end of the spectrum is the mighty NYSE, representing $18.5 trillion in market capitalization, or about 27% of the total market for global equities.
One look at Japan's bond yields, which moments ago hit a fresh record low for the 20Y maturity as the curve slowly but surely inverts...
.... and one would think Haruhiko Kuroda would be delighted.
After all, when he launched NIRP three weeks ago, a world in which negative rates are now a reality, it should have been clear to everyone even children, that yields would collapse as the scramble for any positive yield was unleashed.
As we predicted over a year ago, in a world in which QE has failed, and in which the ice-cold grip of NIRP has to be global in order to achieve its intended purpose of forcing savers around the world to spend the taxed product of their labor, one thing has to be abolished: cash.
Via Scotiabank's Guy Haselmann,
A well-known central banker once said to me, “if you don’t have a Plan B, then you don’t have a plan”. When he spoke those words over a year ago, he was referring to the Fed’s lack of an exit strategy from zero rates and its QE-swollen balance sheet. He was telling me that the Fed was so focused on bettering ‘today’ through aggressive stimulus that it could not worry about ‘tomorrow’. He speculated that central banks were “terrified of looking as if they were doing too little”.
The news keeps getting better for Donald Trump, a man who is fortunate in his critics and enemies:
Inserting himself into the Republican presidential race, Pope Francis on Wednesday suggested that Donald J. Trump “is not Christian” because of the harshness of his campaign promises to deport more immigrants and force Mexico to pay for a wall along the border.