It would be exceptionally foolish for me, the man who said Donald Trump could very well run the table, to predict the next twist and turn of this campaign with any confidence. It feels like this thing is now Trump’s to lose, since he will run better in South Carolina than Cruz will in Michigan, and the establishment is in deep disarray. It feels like Clinton needs a win to right her campaign, but that one is fairly assured her in South Carolina for demographic reasons.
It is safe to say that nobody expected the BOJ stunner announced last night, when Kuroda announced that Japan would become the latest country to unleash negative interest rates, for one simple reason: Kuroda himself said Japan would not adopt negative rates just one week ago! However, a few BIS conference calls since then clearly changed the Japanese central banker's mind and as we wrote, and as those who are just waking up are shocked to learn, negative rates are now a reality in Japan.
A state of emergency has been declared in Michigan as 100,000 of Flint city residents drank contaminated water that they say is causing their hair to fall out. The reason for contamination has been blamed on inadequate chemical treatment of water that contained lead leached from old pipes in 2014. YourNewsWire reader, Kushal Kumar, points out that a prediction of this exact scenario had been published in an astrological article entitled – “Astrological probable alerts for US in year 2016” – last year on 15 October, 2015.
It's official: two of America oldest publicly traded companies will combine, with Dow and DuPoint merging as equals in a combined company that will have a $130 billion market cap and will be named DowDuPont. And while shareholders already benefited from the deal with shares of both consitutents rising by 10% in the days preceding the official announcement, the biggest loser are once again the employees: the combined company announced that as part of the $700 million in restructuring efforts, 10% of the combined company's employees will be laid off.
Here are the details:
It was a relatively calm overnight session in which European stocks wobbled modestly, Japan was up, China was down following the Yuan's weakest fixing since 2011 as the PBOC continues to aggressively devalue since the SDR inclusion (stoking concerns capital outflows are once again surging), EM stocks stocks were weak and the dollar was unchanged ahead of today's retail sales data and next week's Fed meeting, and then suddenly everything snapped.