If Turkish president Erdogan needed one more reason to go ballistic in his daily comparisons of western leaders to Hilter and the Nazis, he got it this morning when a top executive at Halkbank, one of Turkey’s largest state-owned banks was arrested at JFK airport on charges of conspiring with an Iranian-Turkish financier who is awaiting trial for using his network of companies to circumvent Iranian sanctions.
As discussed earlier, on Tuesday afternoon Donald Trump signed an executive order undoing most of Obama-era climate change regulations that his administration says is hobbling oil drillers and coal miners, a move environmental groups have vowed to take to court. The decree's main target is former President Barack Obama's Clean Power Plan that required states to slash carbon emissions from power plants - a critical element in helping the United States meet its commitments to a global climate change accord reached by nearly 200 countries in Paris in 2015.
Authored by Mike Krieger via Liberty Blitzkrieg blog,
Most of you reading this are probably aware the U.S. auto market is a train wreck waiting to happen, but a recent report by Moody’s really puts the industry’s insane lending practices into perspective.
Reuters reports:
As U.S. auto sales have peaked, competition to finance car loans is set to intensify and drive increased credit risk for auto lenders, Moody’s Investors Service said in a report released on Monday.
With the reflation trade seemingly dead, the logical outcome is that the "disinflation" trade will soon follow. However, as that would undo most of the recent gains, central banks will fight tooth and nail to prevent that from happening, but can they? As RBC's Charlie McElligott writes in his morning note, "some large players in the market believe that the Fed had indeed been incorporating anticipation of ‘fiscal policy", Trump policy which may now not be coming until late 2017 or early 2018 (if at all).
European, Asian stocks have rebounded as investor anxiety over Trump economic policy and US tax reform eased following yesterday's remarkable comeback in the US market. S&P futures point to a slightly higher open, with oil higher and the dollar rebounding off fout month lows. It is a relatively quiet day in the US with the economic calendar focusing on wholesale inventories, consumer confidence and the Case-Shiller index.