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US dollar crash is virtually inevitable says Stephen Roach

Roach is a former Morgan Stanley Asia chairman and is now a senior fellow at Yale University.

  • “The U.S. economy has been afflicted with some significant macro imbalances for a long time, namely a very low domestic savings rate and a chronic current account deficit”
  •  “The dollar is going to fall very, very sharply.”
Roach spoke in an interview with CNBC, called for a 35% fall in the dollar.
  • These problems are going from bad to worse as we blow out the fiscal deficit in the years ahead”
He has further reasons too, here is the link

Friday will bring nonfarm payroll data from the US – Goldman Sachs preview

Goldman Sachs were very close to the money indeed for jobless claims.

I posted yesterday:
  • US Jobless claims data due Thursday – Goldman Sachs forecasts 5.25m
And then, prior to the data they boosted their forecast:
  • Goldman Sachs raises US weekly initial jobless claims forecast to 6 million, from 5.25 million previously
Note that this NFP report is unlikely to be instructive, the survey was mainly before the big impact of the coronavirus outbreak on the economy. Over to GS’ comments:
  • estimate for nonfarm payrolls is a decline of 180k in March
  • unemployment rate up 0.3 to 3.8% … risks skewed towards a larger increase
  • the March employment numbers are already fairly stale and insignificant in our view, because the April report will likely show job losses in the millions.
Goldman Sachs were very close to the money indeed for jobless claims.

Coronavirus – Chief financial officer of Jefferies Group dies

Jefferies LLC is a US multinational independent investment bank and financial services company.

  • The firm is headquartered in New York City.
A company statement says its chief financial officer Peregrine “Peg” Broadbent has died from “coronavirus complications”
The virus is cutting a swathe through New York, deaths in the city are nearing (if not above as I post) 1000.
Jefferies LLC is a US multinational independent investment bank and financial services company.

Goldman Sachs says the yen is undervalued – downside risk to 103 target

Via a Goldman Sachs note, says yen remains cheap, unlike many other safe havens

  • positive news out of the US-China meeting could weigh on yen in the near term
  • but its role as a portfolio hedge bodes will continue
Downside risks to GS’ 12-month USD/JPY target (at 103)
  • proprietary models set 95 as fair value
  • bullish yen view supported by BOJ having limited monetary policy space to ease further
  • net outflows from Japan have shifted to “cross-border direct investment from portfolio flows, and outbound foreign direct investment could pull back on global trade uncertainty”
More:
  • trade disputes
  • unsettled global markets
may lead to a choppy USD

Two Types of Traders

In general, I find there are two kinds of traders. The first kind trades visually, from patterns that are evident on visual inspection. Those include chart patterns, oscillator patterns, Elliott waves, and the like. Their trading decisions are discretionary, in that they elect to buy, hold, and sell based upon their perception of patterns and their judgment as to their meaning.
The second kind of trader distrusts visual inspection. Such traders are more likely to buy into the behavioral finance notion that unaided human perception and judgment are subject to a variety of biases. Accordingly, these traders use some form of historical/statistical analysis and/or system development to test ideas and trade only those that test out in a promising way.
Now here’s the interesting part: The first group of traders almost universally asks me to help them tame their emotions. They have problems with impulsive trading, failing to honor risk limits, failing to take valid signals due to anxiety, etc. The second group of traders, having researched successful strategies, almost universally asks me to help them take maximum advantage of their edge. They want help taking *more* risk and trading larger positions. (more…)

Germany Ban Short Selling

Germany’s financial-markets regular said it is banning naked short-selling of certain euro-zone debt and credit default swaps as well as some financial stocks effective at midnight local time, saying “excessive price movements” could endanger the stability of the financial system.

The ban will remain in effect through March 31, 2011. (more…)

The Inviolable Rules for Traders

1. Reward is always relative to risk: If any product or investment sounds as if it has lots of upside, it also has lots of risk. If you can disprove this, there is a Nobel Prize waiting for you.

2. Asymmetrical information: In all negotiated sales, one party has far more information, knowledge and experience about the product being bought and sold. One party knows its undisclosed warts and risks better than the other. Which party are you?

3.Good advice is priceless: I know, easier said than done. The Street buys the best legal talent, mathematicians and strategists that money can buy. Make sure you have expert advisers and lawyers working for you as well.

4. Motivation:Always ask, what is the motivation of the outfit selling me this product? Is it the long-term stability and financial health of my organization — or their own fees and commissions?

5. Legal documents are created to protect the preparer (and its firm), not you or yours: In the history of modern finance, no large legal document has worked against its drafters. Private placement memorandums, sales agreement, arbitration clauses — firms use these to protect themselves, not you.

6. Performance: How significantly do the fees, interest rates commissions, etc., have an impact on the performance of this investment vehicle over time? Determining for yourself what the actual cost of money is will avoid more heartache in the future.

7. Shareholder obligation: All publicly traded firms (including investment banks and bond underwriters) have a fiduciary obligation to their shareholders to maximize profits. This is far greater than any duty owed of care to you, the client. Always ask yourself whether this new product benefits the shareholders or your organization. (This is acutely important for untested products.)

8. Reputational risk: Who suffers if this investment goes down the drain? Who gets fired or voted out of office if this blows up? Who suffers reputational risk?

9. Keep it simple, stupid (KISS): It’s easy to make things complicated, but it’s very challenging to make them simple. The more complexity brought to a problem, the greater the potential for things to go awry — not just astray, but very, very wrong.

10. There is no free lunch: Repeat after me: There is no free money, no riskless trade, no way to turn lead into gold. If you remember no other rule, this is the one that will save your hide time and again.

For The First Time Ever, The "1%" Own More Than Half The World's Wealth: The Stunning Chart

oday Credit Suisse released its latest annual global wealth report, which traditionally lays out what has become the single biggest reason for the recent “anti-establishment” revulsion: an unprecedented concentration of wealth among a handful of people, as shown in Swiss bank’s infamous global wealth pyramid, an arrangement which as observed by the “shocking” political backlash of the past year, suggests that the lower ‘levels’ of the pyramid are increasingly unhappy about.
As Credit Suisse tantalizingly shows year after year (most recently one year ago), the number of people who control roughly half of the global net worth, or 45.9% of the roughly $280 trillion in household wealth, is declining progressively relative to the total population of the world, and in 2017 the number of people who were worth more than $1 million was just 36 million, roughly 0.7% of the world’s population of adults. On the other end of the pyramid, some 3.5 billion adults had a net worth of less than $10,000, accounting for just about $7.6 trillion in household wealth. And inbetween is the so-called global middle class – those 1.4 billion people whose rising anger at the status quo made Brexit and Trump possible.

As the report authors write, there is just one group to have benefited from the Fed’s post-crisis monetary policies: ” Our calculations show that the top 1% of global wealth holders started the millennium with 45.5% of all household wealth. This share was about the same until 2006, then fell to 42.5% two years later. The downward trend reversed after 2008 and the share of the top one percent has been on an upward path ever since, passing the 2000 level in 2013 and achieving new peaks every year thereafter. According to our latest estimates, the top one percent own 50.1 percent of all household wealth in the world.”
As the bank then laconically adds, “Global wealth inequality has certainly been high and rising in the post-crisis period.” And as the chart below shows, in 2017, for the first time ever, the richest 1% now controls just over half, or 50.1%, of global wealth. (more…)