United States

With the Treasury cash balance collapsing near zero, Treasury Secretary Mnuchin has written to Congress to warn them that Treasury will need to start taking extraordinary measures when statutory limit on U.S. debt is reinstated on March 16.

A copy of the letter dated March 8 was posted on Treasury website:

“Treasury anticipates it will need to start taking certain extraordinary measures in order to temporarily prevent the United States from defaulting on its obligations”

Via ConvergEx's Nicholas Colas,

Just when you thought the 8 year bull market for US stocks had shown us everything, something new comes along. 

 

Russia's largest bank, Sberbank, has confirmed that it hired the consultancy of Tony Podesta, the elder brother of John Podesta who chaired Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign, for lobbying its interests in the United States and proactively seeking the removal of various Obama-era sanctions, the press service of the Russian institution told TASS on Thursday.

"The New York office of Sberbank CIB indeed hired Podesta Group. Engagement of external consultants is part of standard business practices for us," Sberbank said.

Our Age Of Folly

Paul Craig Roberts

The United States has been growing progressively insane for a long time. For my generation, the realization descended upon us in the 1960s when the military/security complex convinced Americans that if we permitted Vietnamese nationalist leader Ho Chi Minh to unify Vietnam, the dominoes would fall until the Communist World Revolution had us in its grip. This despite the fact that Stalin had killed off the Trotskyist world revolutionaries and declared “Socialism in one country.”

Following the Trump presidential victory, two prominent macro strategists have undergone a significant change in their outlook: while David Rosenberg, who started off with a deflationary, and bearish outlook, then flipped to inflationary (and bullish), has recently once more "mean-reverted" and expects a further drop in yields as deflationary forces return, his SocGen peer, Albert Edwards - while still expecting a deflationary "ice age" in the longer-run (in case there is any confusion, he expressly states "make no mistake.