Yuan Tumbles As PBoC Gambit Puts The Brakes On – At Least For Today

I’m not sure it will ultimately be enough to get the job done, all things considered, but the PBoC’s decision to effectively remove a barrier to speculation against the yuan (that’s a crude way to describe it, but it gets the point across) by cutting a reserve requirement put in place in the days following the devaluation in 2015 seems to have succeeded in putting the brakes on the rally – if only for a day.

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No ‘Apocalypse Now’, But Maybe Later – Full Week Ahead Preview

This week’s market-moving events are likely to be unscheduled. Remember, Irma is still a catastrophic natural disaster even if it didn’t quite turn into a scene out of a bad Jake Gyllenhaal movie. And as the above mentioned Ben Purvis notes, “Kim Jong Un [could decide] to inject himself into the conversation again,” at any time.

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Ignorance By Design And The Social Costs Of Stupidity

“Within this universe, economic policies are designed primarily for political marketability; economic science exists largely to provide impressive diagrams and equations to sell them with. Phrases designed in think tanks and focus groups (e.g. free market, wealth creators, personal responsibility, shared sacrifice) are repeated like incantations until it all seems like such unthinking common sense that no one even asks what the resulting picture has to do with social reality.”

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This Is The ‘Trickiest’ Thing For Today’s Macro Traders

As Bloomberg’s Cameron Crise notes, this is “a particularly acute issue for currency and bond traders,” but given the fact that the fate of the risk rally depends in no small part on whether policymakers exhibit an “appropriate” level of dovishness as they attempt to normalize, one could well argue that it’s even more “acute” for equity investors, especially considering the fact that the retail variety isn’t usually very informed and is thus subject to being unhedged and blindsided.

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‘Real Question’ – Lindy West Blasts Ivanka In Truly Scathing NYT Op-Ed

“Ms. Trump’s self-professed commitment to corporate gender parity (about as milquetoast as feminism gets, but in Trump’s America, radicalism is relative) was trotted out incessantly during the campaign, especially as an antidote to her father’s self-professed commitment to nonconsensually sticking his hands on women’s genitals.”

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History Will Judge ‘Donald Trump’s Fed’

“History’s verdict on presidents rests more than they might wish on the competence of the Fed during their time in the White House. When it comes to those other Fed appointments, the president would be smart to reflect on what made Fischer such a good choice and strive, for his own sake as well as everybody else’s, to choose as wisely.” 

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One Bank’s Advice: ‘Stay Long Gold’

Gold’s recent rally has of course reignited the eternal debate about the relative merits of owning largely useless pieces of metal as a “hedge” against the end times. But perhaps more important than the debate about whether it makes sense to own something that can’t be eaten or burned as protection against a scenario that leaves us all living in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, is the question of where real rates are headed…

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‘The Clocks Stopped At 1:17’…

Ok, get ready.

For now, the fiscal-chaos-can has been kicked, Harvey is behind us, and North Korea’s latest nuclear test has come and gone.

But dead ahead is Irma’s landfall in Florida, North Korea’s “founding day” (which by most accounts will be “celebrated” with an ICBM launch), and of course, more gridlock in D.C. We are, figuratively and literally, in the eye of the storm on Friday.

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