Submitted by David Stockman via Contra Corner blog,
The S&P 500 closed at 2052 on November 18,2014. That was 405 days ago, and despite the rips and dips in the interim the broad market average has gone nowhere.
Moments after the Fed announced it would hike rates for the first time in 9 years on December 16, the ink on Yellen's statement was not yet dry and one after another bank announced it would hike its respective Prime rate - the benchmark rate on everything from small business loans to credit card monthly fees - from 3.25% to 3.50%.
Back in January we laid out the "two most crowded trades" in the hedge fund community as we entered 2015. The first was being long the US dollar, a trade which as we updated two weeks ago has gotten so big, it is now the biggest consensus trade by a factor of 3x...
... one which when it finally does blow up, will wipe out many macro and micro "hedge" funds who have been frontrunning the Fed's rate hike since mid-2014, and the second Yellen hints at a rate cut or worse the shockwave from the USD liquidation will be felt around the globe.
Despite the increasing perception of policy divergence between The US and the rest of the world, it appears 'factors beyond the control of the central planners' has stymied hope for any US-based sparking of global growth. Between The Fed's liquidity withdrawal and the deflationary tsunami from an emerging world buried in credit-fueled mal-investment, it is increasingly clear that central banks have lost control and everything is now going down together.
Submitted by Pater Tenebrarum via Acting-Man.com,
Hiking Into a Slowdown
It becomes ever more tempting to conclude that the timing of the Fed’s rate hike was really quite odd, even from the perspective of the planners – even though the U3 unemployment rate has fallen to a mere 5% and they are probably correct about the transitory nature of the currently very low headline “inflation” rate (as we have recently pointed out, actual monetary inflation currently stands at almost 8% y/y).