China’s State-Run Global Times Newspaper Declares Victory In The Trade War.
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Reuters reports any effort to reduce its U.S. Treasury portfolio would “inflict significant harm on U.S. finances and global investors, driving bond yields higher and making it more costly to finance the federal government.” But, the report notes, China’s leverage with treasuries is only good for as long as it holds them—suggesting any threat it poses may be empty.
Russia has been building its gold reserves as part of a continuing effort to reallocate its reserve portfolio.
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“Russia has been aiming to diversify its forex reserves for some time, but that process was accelerated by sanctions against the country last year,” said Martina Bozadzhieva, head of research for Europe, Middle East and Africa at Frontier Strategy Group. Continue reading
Stock markets opened lower on the first day of trading of 2015, and the credit markets that forewarned the 2007 crash are showing signs of strain
The FTSE 100 slid on the first day of trading in 2015. Here are 10 warning signs that the markets may drop further
Vix fear gauge
For five years, investor fear of risk has been drugged into somnolence by repeated injections of quantitative easing. The lack of fear has led to a world where price and risk have become estranged. As credit conditions are tightened in the US and China, the law of unintended consequences will hold sway in 2015 as investors wake up. The Vix, the so-called “fear index” that measures volatility, spiked to 18.4 on Friday, above the average of 14.5 recorded last year. Continue reading
Beware the naïve businessman mindset focused purely on ‘business as usual’ that believes there is no financial espionage from within the United States, as shown in the last sentence of this article. It’s always an error. Granted, blame shouldn’t be placed squarely 100% on them, as they were trained for business and not national security or intelligence careers. However, one can tell they don’t read the news outside of the business section.
It started at about noon ET. All the trades occurred in roughly the same time period—roughly noon ET to roughly 12:30 p.m.—and the volume in all the stocks was heavy, in most cases several times daily volume.
It all points to one likely explanation: somebody executed some kind of program.
Although both items need to be constantly looked at (50/50), the fundamental data lately is seemingly overriding the technical data. Observing geopolitics on a regular basis shows you the big picture where you can use inductive reasoning to hammer out the specifics in planning your future, be it from an investment standpoint or personal.
Had anyone asked back in January what kind of risks you thought might be giving financial markets a jolt by mid-year, odds are that you would have talked about the Federal Reserve’s intentions with respect to quantitative easing, the outlook for economic growth and whether S&P 500 companies are delivering the kind of earnings that analysts had been expecting.
Perhaps, given recent history, you might have thrown out an additional concern: That some unforeseen event in Spain or Italy might buffet the Eurozone and spill over into North American markets—after all, that has become an almost routine summertime occurrence. Continue reading
Global Geopolitics 