I love the smell of burning Hodlers in the morning, FTAlphaville with the note: It’s not been a great start to the year for HODLers. If governments (other than El Salvador’s) have their way, it could get a lot worse. This week Russia, a massive centre for mining, proposed a clampdown on that and on
The modern seer. 100% right.
Nordea with the note: We have released new financial forecasts. We expect the Federal Reserve to be aggressive. This year we look for four rate hikes, and the same next year. And the Fed is expected to let its balance sheet shrink from the middle of this year. During the same period we expect the ECB
Marvelous: The Australian Open tennis tournament has been overshadowed by protests for a second time this year after Tennis Australia ejected two spectators for wearing T-shirts in support of Chinese player Peng Shuai. Video footage of security officials and police ejecting the two protesters, who had a banner and T-shirts emblazoned with the Chinese player’s
There will be a range of commodity impacts if Russia and Ukraine end up in open war. Oil and gas are the obvious ones as Russia-European pipelines are jeopardised. But there is also 34mt of iron ore to consider and a lot of wheat. If there were to be an oil price spike then
Markit with the good news: Australia’s private sector shrank for the first time in four months,according to Flash PMI® data, affected by the latest surge in COVID-19 infections. Private sector output and demand both declined in January which led to employment growth grinding to a halt. Meanwhile, amid the disruptions backlogged work continued to build
It is clear that the stock market stress I have been warning about for three months is mounting. Some on Wall St get it while others want to fight it right to the cliff’s edge. Permabull Goldman is the latter: Although a sharp jump in rates driven by concerns over a more hawkish Fed has
The ferrous complex was still riding the hot money wave on January 22, 2022: Some charts for ya. According to Mysteel, steel output is still very weak: Demand has improved a bit: Thermal coal consumption is roughly flat: Inventories are still fine so power prices should keep falling boosting steel recycling: I will add that
The Saturday Paper has a terrific expose on how PM Scott Morrison crashed the economy: As 2021 was drawing to a close, private pathology providers across Australia were counting up billions of dollars in profit, having met unprecedented demand for laboratory results during the Covid-19 pandemic. The simple trick of pooling multiple samples before conducting
As commodities integral to Chinese construction keep skyrocketing, Chinese construction keeps crashing. This past week saw no material progress in developer credit spreads: Defaults and downgrades keep piling up: Fitch Ratings has downgraded China Aoyuan Group Ltd. to ‘Restricted Default’, while China Evergrande Group’s dollar bonds climbed the most in four months after signs of
DXY was stable Friday night: AUD fell across the board: Even oil flamed out: Base metals were mixed: Big miners woke in fright: EM stocks are headed for new lows: EM junk lifted a bit more but the trend is very bad. Moreover, US junk is fraying a little: Yields were smacked and curve flattened:
JPM with the note on what’s irking stocks. In short, mid-cycle adjustment to earnings and the Fed. That is the if the latter does push so hard that this ends the cycle… US: Stocks closed on closed at/near their lows, reversing almost 3%. This follows yesterday’s behavior of a ~2% reversal. USD reversed higher with
Surely only in Australia parliamentary pig’s trough could this happen: Google says they’re trying to stop Clive Palmer’s United Australia Party from posting misinformation — paying to advertise it, on the other hand, seems to be a different story. During a parliamentary inquiry into online safety, Google Australia’s Lucinda Longcroft told MP Tim Watts the mega-company “do not seek to profit” from misinformation, as SMH
The attitude in markets is all one-way: China’s central bank set its strongest reference rate for the yuan in three years in a sign it’s loosening its grip on the currency amid a relentless rally. The People’s Bank of China set the reference rate at 6.3485 per dollar, the strongest since May 2018, similar to
From the always excellent Jeremy Grantham at GMO: Executive Summary All 2-sigma equity bubbles in developed countries have broken back to trend. But before they did, a handful went on to become superbubbles of 3-sigma or greater: in the U.S. in 1929 and 2000 and in Japan in 1989. There were also superbubbles in housing
The ferrous complex is blowing off as hot money chases anything on two legs: When we see overnight gains in paper markets like this it is a dead giveaway that global hot money is chasing Chinese easing. One can take this as a signal if we assume that China is on the verge of flood
The bear market property party is underway in China on its new, that is old, ponzi fix for developers to spend their client’s deposits on sustaining the unsustainable: Citigroup The potential easing will likely be executed at the local level on a case-by-case basis without a formal announcement, according to analysts including Griffin Chan The
Alan Kohler argues that today’s political failure is the result of decades of neoliberalism that has systematically hollowed out government processes and talent. True enough. But we shouldn’t let systemic explanations for the disastrous performance of the Morrison Government lead to us overlooking its peculiar contributions to national failure. After all, although untested, Labor has made
DXY is firming again as EUR wilts: AUD was firm across the board: Oil was also firm: Base metals are threatening to blow off: Big miners stalled: EM stocks did better: And junk: Thanks to an evening of bear flattening: Which cut stocks some slack: Westpac has the data wrap: Event Wrap US existing home
These figures are questionable but they’re the best real-time data that we have. Westpac: The shift is coast-to-coast: But it is all staples not discretionary so caution remains: There is also some good if old news from the ABS. Payrolls held up going into Xmas with a little bit of wages growth to boot: Though
For years we have pointed to the incredible labour abuse embedded in Australia’s mass immigration model. Eventually, we won the debate with the core of Australian blue chip economics acknowledging this truth and demanding change, right up to and including the Reserve Bank of Australia. For just as many years, The Guardian’s Greg Jericho has
The RATs debacle is now caught in Morrison’s usual web of lies: Rapid antigen test vendors are telling their customers that kits bound for personal and workplace use are being diverted to the national stockpile, contradicting the Prime Minister’s vehement denial this is happening. Retailers such as Werko, Star Hygiene and HiCraft have blamed federal
As I have said throughtout the last six months of global energy chaos, there is no underlying shortage of anything. What there is is two many dollars chasing crazed narratives that blow prices sky-high in a period of days before collapsing again. To decribe this as a crazy outcome in the most capex demanding and
The ferrous complex was strong on January 19, 2021 as China stimmies worked their Jedi magic:’ A pretty subdued response to new stimmies, all-in-all. My view is unchanged. Chinese property is not fixed and a much larger downdraft in property steel demand is already embedded than anybody has in their numbers. This is still the
Another attempted property fix is on the drawing board: Chinese regulators are considering lifting some restrictions on developers’ access to cash from presold properties tied up in escrow accounts, according to people with knowledge of the matter, a potentially major step toward easing the industry’s liquidity crunch. Regulators including the housing ministry and the banking
DXY eased last night: Which cut AUD some slack: Oil flamed out. Gold sure ain’t worried about inflation: Nickel is on a tear, other dirt was firm: Big miners to the moon: EM stock rout paused: As EM junk finally lifted: With Treasury yields easing: Though stocks still struggled: Westpac has the wrap: Event Wrap
The always entertaining Albert Edwards of SocGen: For all the Fed’s newfound bravado and bluster, we know by now that any attempt to ‘normalise’ interest rates will end in elephantine pivots, pirouettes and ignominy. It’s certainly been a lively start to the year for investors as they take another look at the Fed’s tardy
It’s kind of funny to watch, in the usual dark way. Having smashed house price gains into the earth last year by breaking RBA yield curve control, the Aussie bond market is now moving on swiftly to crash the property market entirely. As US bond yields rage higher on the prospect of a hawkish Fed,
Note from our good friends at Nordea: In response to rampaging US inflation, we now expect the Fed to hike rates four times this year followed by another four in 2023. We see more upside for long yields and expect EUR/USD to bottom by the end of the year. The Fed is turning more hawkish
Chalk up another epic fail for our useless PM: The Pharmacy Guild of Australia has plans to launch its own website to help people find stores stocked with rapid antigen tests after witnessing “market failure” and the competition watchdog’s crackdown on price gouging. …The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) has received more than 1,800
