oil

Along with most of his Wall Street peers, BofA's Chief Investment Strategist Michael Hartnett flipped his outlook on risk assets shortly after the election, turning from quietly bearish to vocally bullish and forecasting a substantial rise in US equities, and even more substantial bounce for Japanese, European and UK stocks as well as oil.

So far, Hartnett has been correct, and according to recent fund flows, much of the investing community agrees.

Remember when back in April we showed a strange map of the Iranian oil tanker armada, which according to Windward data was storing as much as 50 million barrels offshore, yet which was just sitting on anchor going nowhere?

As a reminder, Iran has lacked sufficient land storage facilities to store its oil and, to enable it to keep pumping crude, has relied on its tanker fleet to park excess stocks until it can find buyers.

In a special report by Barclays' Michael Cohen, the analyst lays out what he believes are the 13 commodity "black swan threats" for the current year, divided into two "shock" categories: supply and demand, split evenly between bearish and bullish.

Four days after the first sporadic protests emerged in Mexico City, following the infamous "gasolinazo", or mandatory 15%-20% increase in Mexican gas prices which went into effect on January 1, the mood across the country has significantly deteriorated, with hundreds of demonstrators blocking highways, snarling traffic, raiding gas stations, jeopardizing critical supplies, and looting stores as angry but impotent motorists lashed out at the price surge, which is only going to get worse as inflation spikes even more following the record plunge in the Mexican Peso.

Submitted by Howard Kunstler via Kunstler.com,

“There is no other endeavor in which men and women of enormous intellectual power have shown total disregard for higher-order reasoning than monetary policy.

-David Collum

American Notes