Oil-Tanker Charters 17-Month Low as China Demand Slides http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-...arters-seen-falling-10-by-marex-on-china.html
German bunds still seeing monster inflows - five-year yields record low, two-year yields negative for first time. The slow-motion freakout continues... http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-...ld-below-zero-a-ninth-day-before-auction.html
Housing starts highest since April 2010, pre-market futures DECLINE on the news. Not good. More and more this smells like a hopium rally. We are long some ferts (AGU, CF) and enjoying the drought pop, but increasingly skeptical this is anything more than a greater fool stimulus play / temporary pessimism clear.
Zero Hedge: I SPIT ON YOUR HOUSING BOTTOM http://www.zerohedge.com/news/so-mu...shadow-housing-inventory-resumes-upward-climb
IMF warns of "sizable deflation risk" in Europe, urges ECB To buy "huge amounts" of govmt bonds http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/19/b...on-in-euro-zone.html?_r=1&partner=rss&emc=rss
YUM sees an uncharacteristic profit miss on poor China results, partially offset by fat Americans, er, Taco Bell dorito shells: http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/storie...ME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2012-07-18-17-18-12 YUM aside, what does this say about China? Can anyone really doubt the hard landing thesis? Further argument that the mandarins in Beijing can right China's hard landing trajectory via more stimulus is, at this point, probably just hope jag masturbation. China apologists, including the biggest China groupie of them all, Jim Rogers, have been AMAZINGLY hypocritical in their professed love of free market principles, as contrasted against their cheerleading of a command-and-control economy plagued by gross over-investment excesses. The USSR couldn't get it right, so why should Beijing? China's command-and-control version of capitalism may be closer to Japan Inc than the old Soviet Union, where state-directed resource allocation worked for a time, but the most redeeming aspect of a dynamic free market economy is its ability to flex and evolve as necessary, which simply doesn't happen under tight political reins. Nor does economic history support the idea of an economy growing at +10% for decades on end, yet avoiding all instances of hard landing "turbulence" along the way... if anything, economic history supports the reality of a seriously bumpy ride for any and all long-term growth trajectories. Just look what America went through in the first half of the 20th century. We may see some more dead cat bounce and delayed acceptance of reality, via beaten down emerging market indices, depressed commodity prices getting a bounce etc... but YUM's results reinforce the increasingly hard-to-refute truth that China's hard landing is real... and it's a matter of when, not if, forced acceptance of that reality is brought to bear (no pun intended) on markets...
Shiteload o' silver - 1,203 bars, equal to 48 tons or 1.4 million ounces - pulled up from three miles below the surface of the North Atlantic in possibly the deepest, largest precious metal recovery in history... http://news.discovery.com/history/b...uled-from-shipwreck-120718.html#mkcpgn=fbdsc8
<iframe src="http://player.vimeo.com/video/45784191" width="640" height="400" frameborder="0" webkitAllowFullScreen mozallowfullscreen allowFullScreen></iframe> Michelle Jenneke's pre-race routine is better than morning coffee...
US Ag Secretary prays for rain: http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/07/19/us-usa-drought-idUSBRE86F1D420120719