Archives
Welcome To The Currency War, Part 21: Japan Goes Negative; US To Return Fire In 2016
February 1st, 2016
Well that didn’t take long. Two weeks of falling share prices and the European and Japanese central banks caved. First the ECB promised new stimulus — which the markets liked — and then the BoJ upped the ante with ...
Big Companies, Huge Problems
January 28th, 2016
Apple is far from the only iconic US company that’s signaling a global slowdown. Three more are in the news today: “Caterpillar warns equipment sales still falling (CNBC) – Caterpillar saw retail sales of machinery fall 16 ...
Hedge Funds Keep Losing — And Closing — And Why It Matters
January 4th, 2016
Unmanageable Money, Part 2: Hedge Funds Keep Losing — And Closing — And Why It Matters How do you make money in a world where history is meaningless? The answer, for a growing number of big fund managers, is ...
This Is What Gold Does In A Currency Crisis, Canadian Edition
December 28th, 2015
Along with the currencies of most other commodity-exporting countries, the Canadian dollar has been in near-freefall lately. Gold, meanwhile, has been sucked down with the rest of the commodities complex, falling hard since 2013. But only in US dollars. ...
The Recession And Bear Market Of 2016, In Two Charts
December 23rd, 2015
Good friend Michael Pollaro just sent a couple of charts that show the US economy heading for a brick wall. The first illustrates what happens when business sales (the green line) turn negative. In the previous two boom/bust cycles, ...
Junk Bond Crisis Starts To Metastasize
December 15th, 2015
With junk bonds finally reverting to their intrinsic value, the question on everyone’s mind is “what blows up next?” Here’s the first in what might be a long, painful list: “CLOs Hammered as Energy Rout Plays Havoc ...
Falling Oil + Rising Dollar = Crisis For A Whole Lot Of People
December 10th, 2015
Oil is plunging again, this time in the wake of OPEC’s inability to limit its members’ production. The US dollar, meanwhile, is up on the divergence between Fed tightening and ECB/BoJ/BoC easing. This widening gap is a perfect storm ...
Money Is Becoming Unmanageable: Hedge Funds Post Losses, Face Outflows
December 3rd, 2015
Some of the money managers who made names (and billions of dollars) for themselves in the past decade are suddenly failing: ” Hedge Funds Brace for Redemptions (Bloomberg) – When BlueCrest Capital Management told investors Tuesday ...
Chinese Debt Snowball Gaining Momentum
November 30th, 2015
Financial crises can happen quickly, like the bursting of the tech stock bubble in early 2000, or slowly, like the late-1980s junk bond bust. The shape of the crash depends mostly on the asset in question: Equities can plunge ...
Welcome To The Currency War, Part 20: Corporate Profits Head South, Stock Prices To Follow?
November 26th, 2015
A too-strong currency is, in theory, supposed to make it harder to sell things to cheap-currency countries, thus crimping corporate profits and by implication pretty much everything else. The US dollar has been rising against the rest of ...
