Home » Posts tagged 'Wall Street'

Tag Archives: Wall Street

Economic conditions just keep getting worse. As we prepare to enter 2023, we find ourselves in a high inflation environment at the same time that economic activity is really slowing down. And just like we witnessed in 2008, employers are conducting mass layoffs as a horrifying housing crash sweeps across the nation. Those that have been waiting for the U.S. economy to implode can stop waiting, because an economic implosion has officially arrived. The following are 15 facts that prove that a massive economic meltdown is already happening right now…

#1 Existing home sales have now fallen for 10 consecutive months.

#2 Existing home sales are down 35.4 percent over the last 12 months. That is the largest year over year decline in existing home sales since the collapse of Lehman Brothers.

#3 Homebuilder sentiment has now dropped for 12 consecutive months.

#4 Home construction costs have risen more than 30 percent since the beginning of 2022.

#5 The number of single-family housing unit permits has fallen for nine months in a row.

#6 The Empire State Manufacturing Index has plunged “to a reading of negative 11.2 in December”. That figure was way, way below expectations.

#7 In November, we witnessed the largest decline in retail sales that we have seen all year long.

#8 Even the biggest names on Wall Street are starting to let workers go. In fact, it is being reported that Goldman Sachs will soon lay off approximately 4,000 employees.

#9 The Federal Reserve is admitting that the number of actual jobs in the United States has been overstated by over a million.

#10 U.S. job cuts were 417 percent higher in November than they were during the same month a year ago.

#11 A recent Wall Street Journal survey found that approximately two-thirds of all Americans expect the economy to get even worse next year.

…click on the above link to read the rest…

No Surprise: Wall Street Wants to Raise the Target Inflation Rate above 2 Percent

December 14, 2022

No Surprise: Wall Street Wants to Raise the Target Inflation Rate above 2 Percent

Price inflation in the United States remains stubbornly high, with October’s print at 7.7 percent. The Fed’s preferred measure, so-called core inflation is only two-tenths of a percent below 40-year highs, at 6.3 percent. Yet, it was just last year that the Federal reserve and other “experts” were concerned that inflation wasn’t high enough. In January 2021, for example, Jerome Powell stated that the Fed wanted price inflation to run above the “2-percent goal” because it had run below 2 percent for too long. The 2-percent inflation target, of course, is the arbitrary target picked by the Federal Reserve (and many other central banks) as the “correct” inflation rate.

Now with inflation running near 40-year highs, many are wondering what will be necessary to bring price inflation back down to the target level. More specifically, how many hikes in the target interest rate will be necessary, and how severe of a recession will be required? Wall Street is especially interested in the answer to this question because Wall Street is no longer about fundamentals. Rather, the “market” depends overwhelmingly on how much easy money the central bank pumps out. Naturally, the banker class wants a return to “normal”—i.e., quantitative easing and ultralow interest rates—as soon as possible. Moreover, Washington wants the same thing since the political class wants low interest rates to help ease the path to ever more government debt and higher deficits.

It’s not the least bit surprising that we’re already hearing calls for the Federal Reserve to abandon the 2-percent inflation target and instead embrace even higher perpetual inflation rates. For example, last week Bank of America economist Ethan Harris suggested that the 2-percent target CPI inflation rate be raised. We’ve seen similar urgings from both the Wall Street Journal and from think tank economists in recent months.

…click on the above link to read the rest…

Morgan Stanley Jumps On The $100 Oil Bandwagon

January 22, 2022

Morgan Stanley Jumps On The $100 Oil Bandwagon

Morgan Stanley expects oil prices to hit $100 per barrel in the second half of the year, becoming the latest major Wall Street bank to expect triple-digit oil prices by the end of 2022.

The oil market is headed to a “triple deficit” of low inventories, low spare production capacity, and low investment, Morgan Stanley said in a note carried by Reuters.

The bank now expects oil at $100 in the third and fourth quarters of this year, lifting its previous Q3 and Q4 forecasts from $90 and $87.50 a barrel, respectively.

“The key oil products markets (gasoline, jet fuel, and gasoil/diesel) all show strong crack spreads, steep backwardation, and inventories that have fallen to low levels. None of this signals weakness,” Morgan Stanley analysts wrote in the note.

The bank is the latest investment institution to predict that oil is headed to triple-digit territory as soon as this year, amid resilient demand, falling inventories, and declining spare capacity at OPEC+ as the group ramps up production.

Triple-digit oil “is in the works” for the second quarter this year, Francisco Blanch, head of global commodities at Bank of America, told Bloomberg last week. Demand is recovering meaningfully, while OPEC+ supply will start leveling off within the next two months, Blanch said, noting that it will be only Saudi Arabia and the UAE that can produce incremental barrels to add to the market.

Oil prices could hit $100 this year and rise to $105 per barrel in 2023, on the back of a “surprisingly large deficit” due to the milder and potentially briefer impact of Omicron on oil demand, Goldman Sachs said this week…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

China’s Crackdown on Debt, Tech & Evergrande Sends Frazzled Wall Street Titans to China

September 22, 2021

China’s Crackdown on Debt, Tech & Evergrande Sends Frazzled Wall Street Titans to China

The property sector and its debts are possibly the biggest financial mess in China’s history.

The crackdowns by Chinese authorities on some of the biggest hype-and-hoopla industries have sent investors heading for the exits. There is a crackdown on debt to keep the financial system from imploding. There’s a crackdown on property speculation to tamp down on housing prices and on debt. There’s a crackdown on big tech – mostly internet, social media, and online gaming companies – for their monopolistic size and practices and a slew of other issues.

There’s a crackdown on education tech companies that sell off-campus educational courses that have driven the costs of education into the sky, discouraging Chinese couples from having more than one child. There’s a crackdown on all kinds of other activities that include reporting financial news and analysis in a way that the government doesn’t approve.

There are all kinds of reasons for these crackdowns, including the push by President Xi to create “common prosperity,” which has become a mantra to fight the ballooning wealth disparity linked to the surge in asset prices, including home prices that are now making homes unaffordable for the masses.

The crackdowns already resulted in some spectacular effects.

Wall Street is heavily involved in the stocks and bonds of these companies, both in the US and in China, many of which have dropped sharply, and some have collapsed.

Many Chinese companies have issued American Depositary Receipts, or ADRs, such as Alibaba. These ADRs aren’t actual stocks but were issued by an offshore mailbox entity in the Cayman Islands or wherever, that has a contract with the actual company in China.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Fed Says, “Let Me Squeeze Your Dollars…5 Basis Points at a Time”

August 22, 2021

The Fed Says, “Let Me Squeeze Your Dollars…5 Basis Points at a Time”

I still maintain no one will mark June 16th, 2021 as the day the world changed. Watching the dollar surge into this weekend thanks to a breakdown in the euro only validates that conclusion in my mind.

Remember, on June 16th Presidents Biden and Putin met for a summit which altered the course of geopolitics forever, agreeing to disagree about Nordstream 2 and reversing the worst of U.S./Russian relations among other things.

While that was happening the FOMC met and reversed the flow of dollars globally.

I told my Patrons something was up on June 18th. Then I did 2 hours worth of podcasts on it (here, here, and here) after thinking it through. Finally, after fully digesting it I wrapped it all up in a lengthy post on July 3rd.

The Fed’s decision to pay 5 basis point on Reverse Repos was the subtlest but most effective way to taper without tapering, tighten without tightening and undermine the WEF’s Great Reset while seemingly still supporting it.

I can hear the howls from the gallery who think otherwise so I’ll address them first.

Yes, normie macro-guys, the bond market has been screaming at the Fed that inflation is soaring and they need to raise rates.

Yes, first year domestic policy students, the Fed looks like it is putting pressure on Republicans to cave to Nancy Pelosi’s hardball over the Infrastructure, Budget and Debt Ceiling deadlock, so far to no avail.

Yes, second year geopolitics students, the Fed is forcing China to respond to soaring commodity prices while simultaneously trying to defend the yuan.

Yes, these are all effects of the Fed’s move in June.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Weekly Commentary: Dangerous Addiction

July 27, 2021

Weekly Commentary: Dangerous Addiction

July 20 – Reuters (Karen Pierog): “Risk-off sentiment that drove Monday’s sell-off on Wall Street and rally in U.S. Treasuries widened credit spreads on corporate bonds to multi-month highs. The spread on the ICE BofA U.S. High Yield Index, a commonly used benchmark for the junk bond market, spiked from 318 bps on Friday to 344 bps as of the last update late Monday, its highest level since late March, according to Refinitiv data. It was also the biggest widening in a day since last June.”

The S&P500 dropped 1.6% in Monday trading, as U.S. stocks followed global equities lower. The VIX Index spiked to 25, a two-month high, while 10-year Treasury yields dropped to a five-month low 1.17%. Germany’s DAX and France’s CAC 40 indices sank 2.6% and 2.5% – to lows since May. Hong Kong’s Hang Seng Index fell another 1.8%, with the Hang Seng China Financials Index trading this week at an eight-month low. Global “Risk Off” was gathering momentum.

July 20 – Bloomberg: “Fresh signs of a cash crunch at China Evergrande Group sent shares and bonds of the world’s most indebted developer to new lows on Tuesday, stoking fears of broader market contagion. The property giant’s stock tumbled to the lowest level since April 2017, extending its two-day loss to 25%. Several of Evergrande’s local and offshore bonds sank to records, with its dollar note due 2025 falling to as low as 54 cents. Bonds of other junk-rated Chinese borrowers declined, while a gauge of developer shares dropped to a nearly three-year low. The nation’s bank stocks also slumped.”

July 20 – Bloomberg (Rebecca Choong Wilkins and Alice Huang): “Rising concerns over the financial health of China Evergrande Group are weighing down the broader market of high-yield bonds as contagion fears rise…
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Struggling to Make a Profit, Fracking Investors are Searching for the Exit

May 13, 2021

Struggling to Make a Profit, Fracking Investors are Searching for the Exit

Banks and investors have given up on the U.S. fracking industry, which is bad news for current investors who waited too long to get out.

The outlook is increasingly bleak for oil and gas companies. The beginning of this year has seen the highest number of companies announce bankruptcy during the first quarter in five years. Eight oil and gas companies announced they were filing for bankruptcy during the first quarter of 2021.

Meanwhile, earlier this month The Financial Times noted that of 500 privately owned oil and gas companies in the U.S., 400 are losing money and unlikely to ever pay back their large debts. According to the Financial Times, the remaining companies are focused on a “last gasp” effort to look profitable to potential buyers in order to “secure a profitable exit.”

If they can’t secure a “profitable exit” that will help them pay back their debts, the most likely outcome is bankruptcy.

As Adam Waterous, head of the private equity group Waterous Energy Fund, told the Financial Times: “This business is broken. The industry is going through a multiyear process of wringing capital out of the sector, not bringing new capital in.”

Investors appear to be done with the fracking industry as they realize that the only people making money are the Wall Street banks and shale company executives. With investors losing interest in the fracking industry — and banks no longer interested in loaning money to fracking companies — there is a lack of new money available to prop up the struggling fracking business model.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

QE During the “Everything Mania”: Fed’s Assets at $7.7 Trillion, up $3.5 Trillion in 13 months

April 3, 2021

QE During the “Everything Mania”: Fed’s Assets at $7.7 Trillion, up $3.5 Trillion in 13 months

But long-term Treasury yields have surged, to the great consternation of our Wall Street Crybabies.

The Fed has shut down or put on ice nearly the entire alphabet soup of bailout programs designed to prop up the markets during their tantrum a year ago, including the Special Purpose Vehicles (SPVs) that bought corporate bonds, corporate bond ETFs, commercial mortgage-backed securities, asset-backed securities, municipal bonds, etc. Its repos faded into nothing last summer. And foreign central bank dollar swaps have nearly zeroed out.

What the Fed is still buying are large amounts of Treasury securities and residential MBS, though no one can figure out why the Fed is still buying them, given the crazy Everything Mania in the markets.

But for the week, total assets on the Fed’s weekly balance sheet through Wednesday, March 31, fell by $31 billion from the record level in the prior week, to $7.69 trillion. Over the past 13 months of this miracle money-printing show, the Fed has added $3.5 trillion in assets to its balance sheet:

One of the purposes of QE is to force down long-term interest rates and long-term mortgage rates. But long-term Treasury yields started rising last summer. The 10-year Treasury has more than tripled since then and closed today at 1.72%. Mortgage rates started rising in early January. Bond prices fall as yields rise, and the crybabies on Wall Street want the Fed to do something about those rising long-term yields and the bloodbath they have created in the prices of long-term Treasury securities and high-grade corporate bonds.

But instead, the Fed has said in monotonous uniformity that rising long-term yields despite $120 billion of QE a month are a welcome sign of rising inflation expectations and a growing economy:

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

wolf richter, wolfstreet, qe, quantitative easing, money printing, credit expansion, fed, us federal reserve, central bank, interest rates, wall street

Three-Card Monte, Wall Street-Style

February 1, 2021

Three-Card Monte, Wall Street-Style

Their operation was in jeopardy, their ‘business model’ at risk. Their reaction was typical for the brazen barons of finance, writes Michael Brenner.

Surer than Three Card Monte, from the Tricks with Cards series (N138) Duke, Sons & Co. to promote Honest Long Cut Tobacco, 1887. (Metropolitan Museum of Art/Jefferson R. Burdick Collection)

This week witnessed an historic event – one that deserves to be memorialized. A band of financial speculators were beaten at their own game, losing $3 billion. A bunch of clever young guys used the hedge fund’s own methods to turn the tables on them.

For years, those white-collar cheats have been dealing 3-card monte on Wall Street with impunity. Now, their operation was in jeopardy, their ‘business model’ at risk. Their reaction was typical for the brazen barons of finance.

They rushed to Washington to complain to their retainers, demanding protection of their constitutional right to pillage the American economy.

What they are demanding is a police escort to secure their 3-card monte scam by screening out anyone who might know their tricks. So, what happens?

Nearly everyone in power from Nancy Pelosi to the head of the SEC quickly pledges to investigate this affront to the country’s financial markets – evidently having no other affronts to tend to.

“Guilty is a word unspoken except where innocence dares to plead.”

The electronic trading services went so far as to bar the mavericks from using their facilities; only marks welcome. All agree that it is a national emergency.

I am shocked! Shocked to hear reports of an attempt to manipulate the financial markets – the most transparent, fairest in the world. Some of my best friends are hedge fund directors; they’re the finest, most honest people you’d ever want to know!

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Market Weekly: Game Stop Revolution or the Matrix Reloaded?

January 31, 2021

Market Weekly: Game Stop Revolution or the Matrix Reloaded?

I have to say as revolutions go, this one is hilarious.

Game Stop opened this morning above $330 per share, a sentence I never thought in a million years I’d ever write.

This open nearly ensures that all the attempts yesterday to push the price back down to bail out the hedge funds desperately short have failed spectacularly.

There’s options expiration today which will fundamentally change the way we look at markets if Game Stop closes in this range.

Because it shows that when people act in the aggregate they can overwhelm the attempts by a few central planners to control you.

Your best proof that this is at least a part of what’s going on is the way Wall St. and the regulators in D.C. are reacting. Because they are screaming that this is outrageous, that we need stronger enforcement tools to ‘ensure the integrity of our markets.’

That’s just code for ‘only we’re allowed to game the markets not the little people.’

And with options expiring on Game Stop nearly every week in February and March this game isn’t over by any stretch of the imagination.

Populist is a Four-Letter Work

In fact, It’s the beginning of a new form of populist revolt.

We’ve seen what they think of populist revolts. They have utter disdain for them. They squash them and hope to ignore the consequences.

Vote for Trump? Can’t have that happen again.

Speak out against any facet of the Great Reset? Get censored.

Try to build a new platform not controlled by them? Get deplatformed.

Show up at the Capitol to peacefully assemble? Get caught up in a false flag to justify arresting you and shaming you into submission.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

GameStop: Why the elites hate peer-to-peer power

January 31, 2021

GameStop: Why the elites hate peer-to-peer power

During Great Britain’s golden age of gambling, a Scot named William Cunninghame Graham—losing at cards, out of money, but not yet ready to quit for the evening—secured a loan of 1,000 pounds from a Colonel Archibald Campbell. Graham pledged as security the use of his estate to Campbell for the rest of Campbell’s lifetime should Graham be unable to repay the loan. Graham lost all the money. And thus, for a 1,000-pound loan did Graham gamble away his entire estate in one evening.

Today, a group of Wall Street hedge funds are acting like Graham on steroids in the face of a growing group of small investors who have awakened to the power of peer-to-peer communications made possible by social media. (More on peer-to-peer communications below.) In this particular case these small investors seem to be winning hand after hand by pledging much of their savings—in some cases their total life savings—to another risky but decidedly much more political proposition: Beating Wall Street hedge funds at their own game by forcing losses on them for bets the hedge funds have made against a down-on-its-luck retail chain called GameStop and other companies. The focus, however, has been on GameStop which specializes in video games and equipment which increasingly can be purchased online. Another blow to GameStop has been the ongoing pandemic which has kept people out of its retail stores.

The small investors, emboldened by an online Reddit group called WallStreetBets, have so far inflicted nearly $20 billion in losses on their arch short-selling foes as the stock price of GameStop has rocketed from about $17 a share on January 4 to $325 a share on Friday. The stock sold for under $4 a share as recently as July 31. On January 25 the stock closed at $76.79 a share. Two days later it closed at $347.51.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Update on Fed’s QE: The Crybabies on Wall Street, which Clamored for More, Are Disappointed

January 31, 2021

Update on Fed’s QE: The Crybabies on Wall Street, which Clamored for More, Are Disappointed

And five SPVs expired, including the one that bought corporate bonds and bond ETFs.

The Fed has now put on ice five of its SPVs (Special Purpose Vehicles) which had been designed back in March to bail out the bond market. It unwound its repo positions last June. Its foreign central bank liquidity swaps are now down to near-nothing except with the Swiss National Bank, which seems to have a need for dollars. The Fed has been adding to its pile of Treasury securities at the rate spelled out in its FOMC statements, thereby monetizing part of the US government debt. And it has been adding to its pile of Mortgage Backed Securities (MBS).

The result is that total assets on its weekly balance sheet through Wednesday, at $7.4 trillion, are roughly flat with the level in mid-December and are up by $200 billion from early June, with an average growth rate over the six-plus months of $30 billion a month.

And the crybabies on Wall Street that have for months been clamoring for more QE have been disappointed. It’s still a huge amount of QE, but for the crybabies on Wall Street, it’s never enough:

But the long-term chart shows just how hog-wild the Fed had gone, furiously trying to bail out and enrich the asset holders, which are concentrated at the very top, thereby creating in the shortest amount of time the largest wealth disparity the US has ever seen. From crisis to crisis, from bailout to bailout, and even when there is no crisis:

Repurchase Agreements (Repos) remained at near-zero:

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Lessons From Wall Street: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

January 29, 2021

Lessons From Wall Street: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

Whoever controls the narrative controls the world. That’s all you’re seeing in efforts to manage information via censorship, algorithm changes, “fact” checking, Russian propaganda panic, etc. Humans are story-driven animals, so if you control the stories you control the humans.

❖

Lessons from this whole Wall Street/Reddit ordeal:

The stock market is a scam.
There is no “free market” and there never will be.
Wall Street predators are the most despised people on earth.
The public can do more to fight back than it had previously assumed.
There’s surely a lot more we can do to fight back that we haven’t thought of yet.

❖

You can’t expose how rigged the system really is without pushing against its power structures according to its own rules. When the entire system pushes back and boots you out in front of everyone, more people are made more aware that it is rigged. This can only be a good thing.

❖

Every single hedge fund plutocrat has at some point in their lives thought the words “I can’t believe I’m getting away with this!”

❖

This is another one of those awkward “we need to shut down the rabble without looking like a totalitarian oligarchy” standoffs.

❖

Myth: The rich compete with each other and ordinary people benefit from it.

Reality: The rich collaborate with each other against ordinary people.

Example:

It will always tend to be more profitable to do bad things than good things: ecocide over preservation, exploitation over equality, war over peace. Humanity remains on a doomed trajectory for as long as its systems maintain profit-seeking as the driving force behind its behavior.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Instability

January 27, 2021

Instability

In every century the same thing happens at one point or another. Society loses the plot and gets caught up in a mania, a grandiose exercise in self delusion. It can be political, it can be religious, and yes it can be economic. Sometimes these manias are confined to regions or small groups of people, sometimes they are vast in reach and impact and have global consequences. We can all think of examples. Religious? How about witch burnings? Politics? How about Nazism? Economics? How about all the manias that had fervent believers and adherents that with the hindsight of time were completely insane? The South Sea Bubble, the Tulip mania, the 1929 mania, etc. All of these bringing about vast social instability versus the previous status quo with often disastrous consequences.

And whatever we got going here is now approaching a similar frantic delusion that appears to infect everyone.

All of these manic periods have something in common: Believing in something absolutely even though it is either completely wrong or unrealistic. Seeing reality becoming untethered.

I’ve long argued that central banks aiming to be a stabilizing force are actually bringing about societal instability. Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, the storming of the Capitol, angry Trump voters, angry Democrat voters and yes even Gamestop reddit buyers may all have different causes and triggers and motivations, but they actually have one thing in common: They are angry, angry at a system that has screwed them over, a sense of deep pervasive injustice and inequality, a fissure that keeps widening with every central bank intervention program.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Update on the Fed’s QE

December 14, 2020

Update on the Fed’s QE

No Wonder the Cry Babies on Wall Street are clamoring for more. Five SPVs, already on ice, will expire on December 31.

The Fed released details today of its corporate-bond purchases in November ($215 minuscule millions) and corporate-bond ETF purchases in November (zilch). Last time it bought any ETFs had been on July 23. It released details about its other activities in its Special Purpose Vehicles (SPVs), which are essentially on ice. Five of them will expire on December 31, including the SPV that handles the corporate bond purchases.

The Fed unwound its “repo” positions in early July down to zero, and more recently most its “central bank liquidity swaps.” Its purchases of residential mortgage-backed securities (MBS) have been in a holding pattern since mid-September. What it is still buying at a steady clip are Treasury securities, thereby monetizing part of the debt the government is adding monthly to its gigantic pile.

The net effect is that its total assets have edged up just 1.0% since June 24, with a dip in the middle, after exploding higher in the prior three months. This is the Fed’s tool to bail out asset holders during each crisis, and enrich them when there is no crisis:

There is now clamoring among the crybabies on Wall Street that the Fed should increase its asset purchases, and they’re pressuring the Fed to announce a big increase at the next meeting, because, I mean, how else are markets going to keep on going up?

In terms of 2020: Total assets on the Fed’s balance sheet for the week ended December 9 rose by $20 billion from the prior week to $7.243 trillion, but were down a smidgen from the peak on November 18, having gone essentially nowhere over the past five months:

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Tag Archives: Wall Street

Content

Post categories

Economic Links

Energy/Resource Links

Environmental Links

Geopolitical Links

Liberty Links

News Links

Other Links

Survival Skills

Post Archives by Category

Post navigation

Latest Posts