In case you haven’t noticed, Iran is on a roll.
Much to the chagrin of Israel and any number of GOP lawmakers in the US, the nuclear accord is a done deal and creates a $100 billion windfall for Tehran.
And that’s just the beginning of the story.
Excerpted from Satyajit Das' new book "The Age Of Stagnation",
If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end; if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth, only . . . wishful thinking to begin, and in the end, despair. C.S. Lewis
For credit investors, 2015 was bad a year (for energy bonds it may have been the worst on record) culminating with the gating and liquidation of several credit-focused mutual and hedge funds.
However, judging by these heatmaps, 2016 is shaping up to be even worse.
When it comes to geopolitics, all anyone wants to talk about is Syria. And understandably so.
When it comes to financial markets, all anyone wants to talk about is China - an equally understandable fixation.
To be sure, China was already a big driver of risk on/ risk off sentiment going into August of 2015. The “is it a hard landing or is it not” question very often dominated global macro discussions among those who enjoy debating such things.
Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev has said that relations between the West and Russia have deteriorated so badly that a new Cold War has been launched in 2016. “On an almost daily basis, we are being described the worst threat – be it to Nato as a whole, or to Europe, America or other countries,” Medvedev said. “Sometimes I wonder if this is 2016 or 1962,” he went on. BBC News reports: The Cold War was a period of ideological confrontation between the former Soviet Union and Western countries.