S&P 500

Asian stocks rose, led by Hong Kong, while European shares and U.S. equity-index futures are little changed. Euro, yen climb as the dollar posted an unexpected loss following some serious fireworks out of China, which intervened in funding market to crush offshore Yuan shorts.

Top news stories include Macy’s and Kohl’s cutting their outlook after weak holiday season, Deutsche Bank exploring lending money to PE firms buying distressed loans, Apple planning to invest $1b in SoftBank’s new technology fund.

Since The Fed decided unanimously to hike rates in mid-December, bonds, banks, and bullion are best but the broad stock market is lower. The key area of today's minutes was on the impact of Trump's policy agenda (which was the focus of Yellen's press conference), and they did note that there were "upside growth risks from fiscal policy" and this might mean Fed "needs to raise rates faster."

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Memo to Larry Summers: It’s Secular Saturation (Not Stagnation)

Written by Peter Diekmeyer (CLICK HERE FOR ORIGINAL)

Here’s a chart your broker won’t show you.

The entire move in the S&P 500 since the November 8 election has been driven by the move in the $USD/Yen pair. As you can see, these two items (USD/YEN and S&P 500) are essentially the same trade.

“So what, who cares?”, you might be asking.

Everyone should care, because this trend is ending.

The USD/Yen currency pair is now at MASSIVE resistance. The odds of this trend continuing are now less than 20%.

Which means… this move will be reversing, and stocks will be dropping, HARD.

Following another day of upbeat economic data, with growing signs that inflation on both sides of the Atlantic is accelerating, investors rediscovered their faith in the Trumpflation rally, pushing global stocks and US equity futures higher, fuelling a second day of 2017 equity gains ahead of today's release of the Fed's December minutes.