United States

The last time TCW's Ted Rivelle, whose firm at last checked managed roughly $195 billion, issued a warning was back in late September, when he cautioned that the "central banking Emperors have no clothes... when the supposed solutions to the Fed’s dilemma are merely new “problems,” you know you are approaching the cycle’s end... successful, long-term investing is predicated on not just knowing where the happening parties are during the reflationary parts of the cycle but, even more importantly, knowing when the time has come to leave the dance floor.

"After a Jan/Feb wobble, we believe stocks & commodities will have one last 10% meltup in H1," explains BofA's Michael Hartnett in his latest note, but, he adds, by the end of 2017 we will see a "meltdown." BofA awaits the endgame of the so-called "Icarus Trade" amid unambiguous signs of bullish investor Positioning, bullish Profit expectations & hawkish Policy from Fed/ECB, as well as outperformance from laggard risk assets; before calling for the Big Short.

The Icarus Trade

The cold war is officially back.

The Senate Armed Services Committee is currently hearing the testimony of retired Marine General James Mattis, picked by Donald Trump to take over the Department of Defense.

Preface: Washington's Blog reached out to Dr. Haering after reading several excellent articles on India's cash ban.  Dr. Haering then combined the information into a single article for us. We lightly edited the article for spelling and grammar.

With Amazon having an exponentially growing (if mostly part-time) work force, which as of Q3 amounted to just shy of 320,000 employees...

... not to mention a surging robotic support base, on Thursday the rapidly growing internet retailer issued a press release stating it "plans to create an additional 100,000 full-time, full-benefit jobs in the U.S. over the next 18 months."  Of course, it is likely that Amazon would have added that number of jobs anyway, simply by extrapolating its current growth rate.