by Wolf Richter • • Comments Off on Stocks on Speed: Leverage Spikes, As Does Risk Of Crash (Look at that Insane Chart!)
Margin debt is a crummy predictor of a crash. But it has a bone-chilling habit of peaking right around the time stocks do crash. In the last fifteen years, it spiked three times: during the final throes of the bubbles that imploded in 2000 and 2007; and now.
by Don Quijones • • Comments Off on Peaceful Indignation Turns to Violent Rage in Rajoy’s Spain
By Don Quijones: It was the first nationally coordinated grassroots response to repressive social and economic policies and widespread corruption of Spain’s ruling political caste. But it descended into violence– as the government is playing a dangerous game.
by Wolf Richter • • Comments Off on Dollar Hegemony Under Attack By Export-Superpowers Germany and China
The word dollar didn’t even come up when the Bundesbank signed the agreement with the People’s Bank of China. President Xi Jinping and Chancellor Angela Merkel looked on. It was serious business. Everyone knew what this was about. No one had to say it.
by Oilprice.com • • Comments Off on A US-Saudi Move to Lower Oil Prices To Punish Russia?
That the US could unleash a flood of oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to drive down prices has been pushed for weeks, most recently by George Soros, but has been dismissed as not a serious option. Then Obama went to Saudi Arabia.
by Wolf Richter • • Comments Off on Boss, We Got a Situation in Natural Gas
This winter, polar vortices sent the price of natural gas into dizzying spikes and plunges, head fakes, and whiplash-inducing turnarounds. But now winter is petering out, and we’re left with a peculiar situation.
by David Stockman • • Comments Off on Paul “Contrafactual” Krugman: The Laureate of Keynesian Babble
The Fed prints $4 trillion and the national debt jumps $9 trillion in six years. We’re now in month 57 of the expansion, beyond the average 53 months – already on borrowed time. Now comes Professor Krugman proposing to “do something.”
by Wolf Richter • • Comments Off on The Risk of Stock-Market Vertigo
What can possibly go wrong with stocks these days? Five years of the Fed’s QE and zero-interest-rate policy, and look what happened: risks no longer exist. They’ve been priced out of the equation. But now the illusion is ending.
by Wolf Richter • • Comments Off on Total Abenomics Fail Slams Japan Where It Hurts Most
Japanese corporations no longer even try to invest in Japan, but they’re falling all over each other grabbing the Bank of Japan’s freshly printed dough to invest it overseas.
