Yesterday morning, with the US closed for holiday but with S&P futures trading modestly lower on the latest set of North Korean geopolitical fears, we asked "is this time different", referencing last week's similar setup, when futures gapped lower on Monday after the Kim regime shot a missile over Japan, only to surge into the end of the week.
The USDJPY and 10Y yields snapped lower and gold kneejerked higher following the latest North Korea-related headline out of Bloomberg, according to which:
Bloomberg references a just released article in the Asia Business Daily, according to which North Korea started moving the ICBM-class missile, produced at a new Pyongyang research center, on Monday following Sunday's thermonuclear test.
It won't be the first time that a near-panicked Japan has came close to the edge when it comes to North Korea, and in preparation for an "emergency" was planning to evacuate its citizens located in South Korea. The last such notable spike in escalations took place in April, when as the Yomiuri Shimbun reported at the time, the Japanese government had asked the U.S.
Unable to make de-escalation progress using conventional diplomatic means at the United Nations, on Monday South Korean President Moon Jae-in proposed that the U.N. Security Council hold serious discussions about imposing an energy and capital blockade on North Korea, by cutting off oil supplies to Kim's regime coupled with a block of North Korean sources of foreign currency, the South Korean president's office said. Moon discussed the idea with his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, during a phone call, according to South Korea's Blue House.
U.S. United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley is escalating the rhetoric from Trump's "we'll see" comment and aggressive tweets as she tells an emergency meeting of the U.N. Security Council, that "enough is enough" and that North Korea's leader, Kim Jong Un, is "begging for war" with his "abusive use of missiles."
Haley admonished the council, urging the "strongest possible" response...