Tag: news

What’s $6 trillion between friends? “Everybody else was buying so I followed in their tracks…”

Global Capital Markets aggregate ‘wealth’ collapsed in the last two weeks… (bonds first, then stocks)…

 

79 of 94 global equity indices ended the week red…

 

China started badly and ended worse – biggest weekly loss since Jan 2016…

 

European stocks were a bloodbath, closing on their lows this week (second worst week since Jan 2016) at the lowest since Jan 2017…Italy was worst on the week (and is now in a bear market)

 

US equity markets were clubbed like baby seals…

Catching down to the rest of the world…

 

But a late Friday afternoon bounce flattered them in the end (see you Sunday night)…

 

It wouldn’t be ‘Murica if we closed red on a Friday…all of which lines up the perfect narrative that this confirms the worst is over

Take your pick of the headlines:

• *S&P 500, DOW AVERAGE, NASDAQ 100 END WORST WEEK SINCE MARCH

• *S&P 500 RALLIES 1.4% FOR BIGGEST GAIN SINCE APRIL

• *NASDAQ 100 SURGES 2.8% IN BEST RALLY SINCE MARCH

All US equity sectors were red on the week led by Materials and Industrials (and Financials floundered today despite the earnings)…Utes outperformed (but were still down 1.7%)

 

On the month so far, it’s carnage:

• Nasdaq 100 is on course for the worst month since Nov 2008

• Small Caps are on course for the worst month since September 2011

• S&P is on course for the worst month since August 2015 (China Deval)

 

All the major US equity indices ramped back up to their 200DMAs… (Russell well below, Dow to its 100DMA)

 

Interestingly, Value/Growth ended almost unchanged on the week…

 

FANGs were down on the week, but bounced today…

 

Small Caps joined Transports in the red YTD…

 

Tech, Consumer Discretionary, and Healthcare all together at the top as best performers of the year (but well off the highs) – all other sectors are red for 2018 with Materials worst…

 

US Equity breadth is a disaster…

 

VIX spiked almost 9 vols on the week – the biggest weekly jump since March, doubling since 10/3 as the curve massively inverts…

And the Put-Call Ratio is spiking…

HY Bonds were right… again!

 

Corporate bond breadth was also a catastrophe this week… as new 52-week lows spike in IG and HY…

 

Away from the bloodbath in stocks, bonds were notably bid… (maybe they just needed that day off on Monday?)

 

With 10Y Yields dropping most in 5 months (after last week’s biggest yield rise since Nov 2016)…

 

The yield curve flattened notably on the week…

 

The Dollar Index fell on the week (after two straight weeks higher)

 

But remains rangebound..

 

China fixed the yuan lower every day this week, clearly signaling something to Trump, as yesterday’s epic spike in Yuan roundtripped today..

 

Crypros were not spared from the carnage – dumping on Wednesday night when Asia opened (and KRW plunged)…

 

Black Gold was battered (global growth/demand and inventories) as Yellow Gold surged…

 

WTI Crude had its worst week since May, testing down to a $70 handle…

Oil tracked stocks – simple

 

Gold just had its best two-week gain since January…

Silver did not managed new highs…

Gold in Yuan remains well managed…

*  *  *

What does it mean when the most systemically important banks in the world are down 26% from their highs and accelerating lower?

 

Is this it?

via RSS https://ift.tt/2yi8uug Tyler Durden

As has become depressingly commonplace in contemporary society, street artist Banksy’s latest provocative anti-consumerist gesture has been exposed as just another marketing stunt. As the Financial Times reports, auction house Sotheby’s has completed the sale of Banksy’s “Girl with Balloon” painting – a sale that caused a stir in the art world when it self-destructed immediately after the auction-house gavel came down via a shredding mechanism hidden in the frame. Banksy’s handling services organization, Pest Control, has blessed the half-shredded painting as a new work, entitled “Love is in the Bin”, and the painting’s original winning bidder, an anonymous female European collector, has pressed ahead with the purchase, though she now has the option of re-selling it on the secondary market for an even larger premium.

The half-shredded painting is to go on public display at Sotheby’s London salerooms on Saturday and Sunday. Shocked art patrons looked on in horror a week ago when the painting, originally entitled “Girl With Balloon” self-destructed. But as many readers probably anticipated, the surprise shredding concept, which was incorporated in secret, was “integral” to the piece. Already, bidders had driven the price of the piece upwards from the expected 200,000 to 300,000 pounds to 1.04 million pounds. Now, experts say it could be worth many times that.

Sotheby’s said that, ahead of the sale, it had asked Pest Control for authorisation to remove the picture from the frame, to inspect it. The request was refused.

“We have handled many sales of Banksy artworks and, over the years, we have built a relationship of trust with his office, Pest Control,” Sotheby’s said in a statement.

“We asked on at least two occasions to check the work out of the frame, but we were told that the frame (which was glued) was integral to the work; breaking it would damage the work, and negatively impact its artistic and monetary value. As it turns out, the frame was integral to the concept of the artwork, just not in the way that we had expected.”

…And has only helped increase its value.

Since the painting has remained intact, albeit sliced to ribbons, art market professionals have said its notoriety is likely to have raised its market value. Following its quasi-destruction, a number of individuals subsequently approached the auction house with offers to buy the work.

At least four separate bidders drove up the price of the work at the sale, with the painting finally going to a telephone bidder whom Sotheby’s disclosed on Thursday was a female European collector. The purchase will be completed for £1,042,000, the original price achieved at auction including buyer’s premium.

After carrying out what has become his best-known stunt, the Bristol street artist later posted a video on his Instagram feed showing a hooded figure assembling an ornate gold picture frame equipped with a row of concealed scalpel blades and a number of electronic components.

Then again, maybe this was Banksy’s intention all along: Hoodwinking a wealthy art patron into paying a premium for a shredded canvas.

via RSS https://ift.tt/2yEe1uu Tyler Durden

Authored by James Howard Kunstler via Kunstler.com,

Looks like somebody threw a dead cat onto Wall Street’s luge run overnight to temporarily halt the rather ugly 2000 point slide in the Dow Jones Industrial Average – and plenty of freefall in other indices, including markets in other countries. A Friday pause in the financial carnage will give the hedge funders a chance to plant “for sale” signs along their Hamptons driveways, but who might the buyers be? Hedge funders from another planet, perhaps? You can hope. And while you’re at it, how do you spell liquidity problem?

Welcome to the convergence zone of the long emergency, where Murphy’s law meets the law of unintended consequences and the law of diminishing returns, the Three Amigos of collapse. Here’s where being “woke” finally starts to mean something. Namely, that there are more important things in the world than sexual hysteria. Like, for instance, your falling standard of living (and that of everyone else around you).

The meet-up between Kanye West and President D.J. Trump was an even richer metaphor for the situation: two self-styled “geniuses” preening for the cameras in the Oval Office, like kids in a sandbox, without a single intelligible idea emerging from the play-date, and embarrassed grownups all standing ‘round pretending it was a Great Moment in History. You had to wonder how much of Kanye’s bazillion dollar fortune was stashed in the burning house of FAANG stocks. Maybe that flipped his bipolar toggle. Or was he even paying attention to the market action through all the mugging and hugging? (He did have his phone in hand.) Meanwhile, Mr. Trump seemed to be squirming through the episode behind his mighty Resolute desk as if he had “woke” to the realization that ownership of a bursting epic global financial bubble was not exactly “winning.”

If I were President, I’d declare Oct 12 Greater Fool Day. (Nobody likes Christopher Columbus anymore, that genocidal monster of dead white male privilege.) The futures were zooming as I write in the early morning, a last roundup for suckers at the OD corral, begging the question: who will show up on Monday. Nobody, I predict. And then what?

The great false front of the financial markets resumes falling over into the November election.

The rubble from all that buries whatever is left of the automobile business and the housing market. The smoldering aftermath will be described as the start of a long-overdue recession — but it will actually be something a lot worse, with no end in sight.

The Democratic Party might not be nimble enough to capitalize on the sudden disappearance of capital. Their only hope to date has been to capture the vote of every female in America, to otherwise augment their constituency of inflamed and aggrieved victims of unsubstantiated injustices. It’s been fun playing those cards, and the Party might not even know how to play a different game at this point. Democratic politicians may also be among the one-percenters who watch their net worth go up in a vapor in a market collapse, leaving them too numb to act. The last time something like this happened, in the fall of 2008, candidate Barack Obama barely knew what to say about the fall of Lehman Brothers and the ensuing cascade of misery –  though unbeknownst to the voters, he was already a hostage of Wall Street.

Complicating matters this time will be the chaos unleashed in politics and governing when the long-running “Russia collusion” melodrama boomerangs into a raft of indictments against the cast of characters in the Intel Community and Department of Justice AND the Democratic National Committee, and perhaps even including the Party’s last standard bearer, HRC, for ginning up the Russia Collusion matter in the first place as an exercise in sedition. The wheels of the law turn slowly, but they’ll turn even while financial markets tumble. And the threat to order might be so great that an unprecedented “emergency” has to be declared, with soldiers in the streets of Washington, as was sadly the case in 1861, the first time the country turned itself upside down.

via RSS https://ift.tt/2OPaSlZ Tyler Durden

First the good news: recall that yesterday the WSJ reported yesterday that Sears’ biggest secured lenders, which include Bank of America, Wells Fargo and Citigroup, were pushing for a Chapter 7 liquidation due to their concerns that they could be further primed by secured debt and suffer recovery losses should the melting ice cube continue to operate with little hope of viability.

Now, according to Bloomberg, negotiations over Sears’ fate have moved away from a possible liquidation toward a plan that would keep some stores open through Christmas. That would mean that a Chapter 7 liquidation is no longer contemplated and that the company now envisions a Chapter 11 restructuring with Sears filing on Sunday at the earliest. To fund operations during the holiday season, negotiators are discussing a DIP loan of about $300 million to $500 million.

How many stores will be shut down as part of this latest plan to keep the 125-year old chain as a (far smaller) going concern? According to Reuters, Sears is planning to close up to 150 of its department and discount stores and keep at least another 300 open, while the fate of Sears’ remaining 250 stores uncertain and will likely be dependent on how much money the company can raise; the stores’ future could also hinge on Sears’ negotiations with landlords over their leases.

Some 90,000 jobs are at stake, according to Sears filings earlier this year.

In addition to dramatically shrinking its store base, America’s formerly largest retailers also hopes to sell stores and other assets, including its Kenmore appliances brand and home services business in court-supervised auctions while under bankruptcy protection during the Chapter 11 process. The auction stalking horse will be none other than Sears CEO Eddie Lampert (as well as its largest shareholder and creditor) who hopes to set an auction floor. It wouldn’t be surprising is he ends up owning the assets if/when other bidders fails to show.

Lampert could also help finance his bids for the assets by forgiving some of the money Sears owes him, as opposed to putting in more cash, Reuters reported on Thursday.

Separately Reuters reports that a key unresolved aspect of Sears’ negotiations with lenders involves setting deadlines for Sears to achieve specific business goals while under bankruptcy protections.

Finally, in terms of next steps, Sears will likely file for bankruptcy protection in New York as soon as Sunday night, though a court filing could slip into Monday.

via RSS https://ift.tt/2PseqHS Tyler Durden

Outspoken critic of The Fed and one of the few that can see through the endless barrage of bullshit to how this really ends, has laid out in a tweet “what happens next”…

Likely sequence of events:

1. Bear market;

2. Recession;

3. Deficits explode;

4. Return of ZIRP and QE;

5. Dollar tanks;

6. Gold soars;

7. CPI spikes;

8. Long-term rates rise;

9. Fed. forced to hike rates during recession

10. A financial crisis without stimulus or bailouts!

h/t @PeterSchiff

via RSS https://ift.tt/2ITTHu7 Tyler Durden

Authored by Martin Armstrong via ArmstrongEconomics.com,

An independent audit of the key temperature dataset that is being used by climate models has exposed more than 70 problems with the data which render it “unfit for global studies.” 

Problems include zero degree temperatures in the Caribbean, 82 degree C temperatures in Colombia and ship-based recordings taken 100km inland.

The audit has concluded that the studies are deliberately exaggerating temperatures to support a theory of global warming utilizing global averages that are far less certain than what is being forecast.

The audit has revealed that “that climate models have been tuned to match incorrect data, which would render incorrect their predictions of future temperatures and estimates of the human influence of temperatures.” Furthermore, the Paris Climate Agreement adopted 1850-1899 averages as “indicative” of pre-industrial temperatures is “fatally flawed.” The entire Paris Climate Agreement has an agenda to eliminate effectively the advancement of society and attempt to reset the clock to the pre-Industrial Revolution. This entire theory that before the Industrial Revolution, our planet’s atmosphere was somehow pristine and uncontaminated by human-made pollutants has been also proven to be completely bogus. 

Bubbles trapped in Greenland’s ice has revealed that we began emitting greenhouse gases at least 2,000 years ago. The Romans even constructed the first aqueduct was built in 312 BC because there was a serious problem with water pollution. Seneca (c 4BC-65AD), the adviser to Nero, wrote in 61AD: “No sooner had I left behind the oppressive atmosphere of the city [Rome] and that reek of smoking cookers which pour out, along with clouds of ashes, all the poisonous fumes they’ve accumulated in their interiors whenever they’re started up, than I noticed the change in my condition.”

This new audit argues even the most simple basic quality checks had not been done on the HadCRUT4 data which is managed by the UK Met Office Hadley Centre and the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia. The audit exposed that estimates were made of the uncertainties arising from thermometer accuracy, homogenization, sampling grid boxes with a finite number of measurements available, large-scale biases such as urbanization and estimation of regional averages with non-complete global measurement coverage.

The audit has exposed the dishonesty in this entire scheme and it appears to be directed at the goal of reducing the population. Anomalies it has identified include at St Kitts in the Caribbean, the average temperature for December 1981 was zero degrees, normally it’s 26C. For three months in 1978, one place in Colombia reported an 82 degrees Celsius average – hotter than the hottest day on Earth. Then in Romania, one September the average temperature was reported as minus 46°C, which has never happened. The data showed that supposedly ships would report ocean temperatures from places up to 100km inland. The paper also points out that the most serious flaws identified was the shortage of data. For the first two years, from 1850 onwards, the only land-based reporting station in the Southern Hemisphere was in Indonesia. Then there were ship observations at the time but Australian records had not started until 1855 in Melbourne, behind Auckland which started in 1853. This data appears to have been just made up.

According to the HadCRUT4 calculation of coverage, it was almost 1950 before there was data from even half of the Southern Hemisphere was available. Yet they claim global warming has taken hold for 100 years prior. Then the Paris Climate Agreement takes the HadCRUT4 average from 1850 to 1899 as an “indicative” temperature or pre-Industrial Revolution. There is absolutely no possible way the data set being used to support all this Global Warming is even valid for any forecast.

via RSS https://ift.tt/2RLeEv1 Tyler Durden