In the first few months of the year, a trading desk rumor emerged that even as institutional traders dumped stocks and retail investors piled into ETFs, a "mystery" central bank was quietly bidding up risk assets by aggressively buying stocks.
Submitted by Ronan Manly, BullionStar.com
On 5 February, the Financial Times of London (FT) featured a story revealing that the London Bullion Market Association (LBMA) plans to begin publishing data on the amount of real physical gold actually stored in the London precious metals vaulting network. The article titled “London gold traders to open vaults in transparency push” can be read here (accessible via FT subscription or via free monthly FT read limit).
During the months of March and April of 2016 we released a series of proprietary research reports indicating signficant weakneses that we found in the European banking system and released it for sale through the blockchain (reference The First Bank Likely to Fall in the Great European Banking Crisis).
Things are increasingly upside down in the brave new centrally planned world: thanks to negative deposit rates central banks have put an explicit cost on saving, while in various instances, such as taking out a mortgage in Denmark and the Netherlands, the bank actually pays the borrower, thus rewarding living beyond one's means. Curiously, it was just a month ago when an offer was spotted in Germany offering a negative -1% rate on small consumer loans issued by Santander Bank.
The Bank of Japan and the ECB are assisting me in teaching the world's savers, banking clients and corporations about the benefits of blockchain-based finance for the masses. How? Today, the Wall Street Journal published "Negative Rates: How One Swiss Bank Learned to Live in a Subzero World":