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 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 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 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.
by Wolf Richter • • Comments Off on The “Sanction Spiral” Elegantly Spirals Out of Control
The White House attacks Russian financial markets and oil, publicly and behind-the-scenes, Merkel suffers from “moral cowardice,” Russia develops the “Putin Doctrine” and threatens Estonia, and a crescendo of sanctions and counter-sanctions erupts. What gives?
by Wolf Richter • • Comments Off on Goldman Goes Bonkers Over Tesla
Wall Street once again stands out as history’s most glorious, most efficient, sophisticated, prolific “gigafactory,” to use Tesla’s newfangled term, for the production of self-serving BS. Investors beware!
