VIX

Spanish stocks and the euro fell, while Spanish government bond yields hit their highest levels in over a month after Catalan secessionists delivered an unexpected blow to the government of Spanish PM Rajoy by winning the Catalan regional election. Meanwhile across the Atlantic, U.S. equity futures and the dollar rose on the last trading session before the Christmas holiday. The MSCI index of world stocks was flat.

Yesterday we joked that with the US House of Representatives set to vote for the GOP tax bill on Tuesday, markets would "price in" the same tax legislation they have been pricing in every day for the past year, all over again...

Get ready for US markets to price in tax reform all over again in just a few short hours

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) December 19, 2017

In the latest installment of RealVision's interview series featuring Jim Grant, longtime publisher of Grant's Interest-Rate Observer, the newsletter publisher sits down with Alan Fournier, the billionaire founder of Pennant Capital, to discuss one of the most widely discussed topics across modern asset markets: Volatility - or rather, the systemic risks posed by not only the paucity of volatility in modern markets, but how risk parity and low-vol targeting strategies have created imbalances that could lead to massive dislocations should volatility spike.

Something snapped in the VIX complex, seconds after Friday's early close, sending it to a new record low of 8.56 at 13:00:14 ET...

... which as we showed yesterday, was less than 10% of the all time VIX high of 89.53, hit on October 24, 2008.

However, while the Friday VIX snap - which is still on the feeds and thus wasn't a fat finger error - is yet another indication of just how broken, and/or how overrun by vol sellers the market is, below we present two even more striking, longer-term perspectives on the VIX courtesy of Citi.

Authored by Kevin Muir via The Macro Tourist blog,