United States

By EconMatters

   The Mining Industry Approach

Michael Rubin has a question he wants to ask the presidential candidates:

Yuantervention overnight steadied the Chinese currency and despite a plunge in Asian equities, stabilized US equities thanks to an incvessant bid for USDJPY. However, this morning has seen PBOC's Ma crawl out from under the desk to attempt to calm investor panic with two-faced comments about the nation's new FX regime. Noting that PBOC will focus on stability of Yuan vs their new CFETS basket, Ma then back-handedly said two-way volatility was expected to increase (in a clear nod to stopping carry traders piling on).

Less than two months ago, on November 16, Goldman released its list of top trades for 2016, #1 of which was the infamous long USDJPY, short EURUSD equial-weighted basket which has led to massive losses for anyone who has since put it on. At the current rate of carry trade unwinds, we expect that this trade will be closed out shortly, and may have been overnight when the USDJPY plunged to the lowest since the ETFlash crash.

But while we wait, here is a reminder what the #6 top trade for 2016 was:

Once again, China was faced with the unpleasant task of deciding which asset class to intervene in: its plunging stock market, or its currency. It chose the latter, and as a result after a turbulent start the Shanghai Composite sank by 5.3% to close just above 3000 and down 15% in just the past 11 days, suggesting that the PBOC is increasingly seeing the CNY1.8 trillion (at least) spent to stabilize stocks as a sunk cost.