flash

An outdoor camera captures footage of a meteor fireball burning up in the sky over St. Louis. Dozens of people have reported seeing the meteor at around 11:40 am on Monday morning. St. Louis Today reports: Reports on social media surfaced about the sight, described by some as as a flash that fell from the sky and disappeared a couple hundred feet above the horizon. Tom Stolze, who runs the website Ofallonweather.org posted a video of a bright light falling in the sky to the northwest of an outdoor camera in O’Fallon, Mo.

It wasn't just Japan's PMI which overnight printed at a disappointing 47.6, missing expectations and signaling the sharpest decline in operating conditions since December 2012. Overnight Markit showed that the Chinese credit-induced global slowdown is coming far faster than most (if not Morgan Stanley) expected, when the Eurozone flash PMI printed at 52.9, down from 53.0 in April, below the 53.2 expected, and the lowest in 16 months.

Following API's smaller than expected draw overnight, DOE data showed an unexpedted 1.31m barrel build (3.5m draw expectations). This was offset by considerably bigger than expected draws in Gasoline and Distillates and Cushing oinventories rose less than expected. Crude production also fell once again, to its lowest since Sept 2014. The initial kneejerk was a mini-flash-crash in crude prices.. but that was rapidly bid back to unch...

API:

Just around 2:14am local time (2am EDT), Asian traders were surprised to observe in the Chinese market something which until recently had been a purely development market phenomenon: a flash crash. A sudden plunge by Chinese stocks in Hong Kong had traders scrambling to find a trigger for the slump that coincided with a surge in futures volumes Bloomberg writes. 

Given the extraordinary jumps in several regional Fed surveys, hope was rife that US Manufacturing PMI's flash print would jump... it didn't. Hovering near multi-year lows at 51.4, PMI missed expectations of 51.9 by the most since Aug 2013. With record highs in wholesale inventories, Markit claims that "pre-production inventories decline at the steepest pace in over 2 years." The blame for this plunge: dollar strength, weak global demand, and Trump.

Not recovering...

As Markit explains,