As we previously noted, while speculatrs had been reducing their shorts in Treasury futures, they had added to Eurodollar shorts - pushing their bets on Fed rate hikes to record highs. However, as Bloomberg notes, signals are starting to emerge that traders who built up that heavy short, or hawkish, eurodollar base since the start of 2016 could be starting to throw in the towel on a March Fed rate hike.
Last August, we introduced readers to the hedge fund that we dubbed the "puppe master behind the US presidential election", which also happened to be the most successful hedge fund in history : Setauket-based Renaissance Technologies (a recent analysis by LCH found that Ray Dalio's Bridgewater, with $45 billion in absolute profits since inception, was the most successful but the ranking ignored Renaissance, which has return $10 billion more).
Submitted by Martin Armstrong via ArmstrongEconomics.com,
The Washington Post has announced that John Podesta will be joining them as a contributing columnist Podesta became a household name after emails from his personal account were dumped by WikiLeaks before the US presidential election and he is also the central character in the pizzagate scandal, which he recently claimed was fake news. The former chairman of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign has already written two op-eds for the paper, slamming the Trump administration on Russia and the president’s war with the media.
While bookmakers' odds are unchanged for a Le Pen victory, French bond yields have tumbled to one-month lows as the prospect of a centrist alliance in the country’s presidential election eased market anxiety that far-right candidate Marine Le Pen will win.