Archive

With VIX at multi-year lows (a 10-handle!!) and stocks at record highs amid Trumpian (Goldman) exuberance, it appears options traders in the VIX complex are anything but "believers."

Contrary to the popular way of thinking, the value of a paper dollar originates from its historical link to commodity money - which happens to be gold - and not government decree or social convention. Fiat money of the sort we use today could not and would not come about in a market setting.

The appointment of Peter Navarro to a formal White House post "shocked' Chinese officials who had hoped that Mr Trump would tone down his anti-Beijing rhetoric after assuming office. China will be even more shocked, however, if as CNN reports, Trump is about to implement a 10% import tariff, leading to an all out trade war with Beijing.

Here’s more evidence that the “recovery” never really happened, and good reason to think that the entire social safety net structure is doomed to fall apart.

"based on the tremendous cost and cost overruns of the Lockheed Martin F-35, I have asked Boeing to price-out a comparable F-18 Super Hornet!"

Ask yourself; what are the trades that make complete sense and all your instincts say are right, and then do the opposite.  Basically what you end up constructing is an out of consensus portfolio and we all know how consensus trades work out in this market.

Recent messages posted to the pro-ISIS "Secrets of Jihadis" group on the Telegram app included a list of churches in the United States and called for lone-wolf attackers to "turn the Christian New Year into a bloody horror movie."

The first video of the terrible events that occurred in Berlin this week has surfaced. As Reuters reports, a video clip from a car-mounted dashcam appears to show the moment a truck drove into a Berlin Christmas market on Monday in an attack that killed 12 people.

The market was waiting for the DOJ to announce the long-awaited settlement with Deutsche Bank today. Instead, it got news of a surprise lawsuit filed by the DOJ which sued Barclays after failing to settle a long-running probe into the UK bank's involvement in pre-crisis mortgage fraud.

Gold is collateral of last resort as it is near-universally accepted. Repo fails indicate, very strongly, collateral shortage. Put the two together and you get yet more evidence that central bankers really don’t know what they are doing. And, also like in Bagehot’s day, the repercussions are global.

According to Credit Suisse, pension funds that rebalance monthly and quarterly would need to sell $38BN in US stocks in coming days to rebalance to prior asset allocation levels, adding the "estimated rotation out of domestic U.S. equities would be one of the largest on record."