Tag Archives: Finance

U.S. index futures point slightly lower open. Asian shares rose while stocks in Europe fell as energy producers got caught in a downdraft in oil prices and reversed an earlier gain after Goldman unexpectedly warned that WTI could slide below $40 absent "show and awe" from OPEC. The dollar rose, hitting a four-month high against the yen and bonds and top emerging market currencies were back under pressure on Tuesday, following last week’s hawkish rhetoric from central bankers. Nonetheless,...

On his blog, John Kay speculates about the future of financial intermediation: The paradox of modern capital markets is that although there is less and less need for market activity from the point of view of either the end users of finance, or the investors who are the ultimate beneficiaries of finance, the volume of market activity has increased exponentially. … The growth of secondary market trading at the expense of an understanding of the underlying exposure led to disaster in the...

This is an extract and summary from “New Gold Pool at the BIS Basle, Switzerland: Part 1” which was first published on the BullionStar.com website in mid-May. Part 2 of the series titled “New Gold Pool at the BIS Basle: Part 2 – Pool vs Gold for Oil” is also posted now on the BullionStar.com website. “In the Governor’s absence I attended the meeting in Zijlstra’s room in the BIS on the afternoon of Monday,...

The following article by David Haggith was first published on The Great Recession Blog: We just saw a major rift open in the US stock market that we haven’t seen since the dot-com bust in 1999. While the Dow rose by almost half a percent to a new all-time high, the NASDAQ, because it is heavier tech stocks, plunged almost 2%. Tech stocks nosedived while others rose to create new highs. Is this a one-off, or has a...

Ben Bernanke’s creativity inspired a generation of economists and central bankers. QE, ZIRP and NIRP established a new class of economics that is mathematically sound but practically disastrous. Billions of dollars were transferred from savers to investors to boost the economy, but the wizards of quant forgot that something has to give. In this case, it was the formation of a pension crisis that threatens the golden...

Negative interest rates and the populist uprising that spurred the UK to vote for Brexit and Americans to elect Trump has helped reignite a rush into physical safe haven assets like gold and silver, which however has led to a shortage of safe venues where to store the precious metals (unlike bitcoin, gold actually has a physical dimension). And now companies that operate storage facilities for precious metals and other...

Negative interest rates and the populist uprising that spurred the UK to vote for Brexit and Americans to elect Trump has helped reignite a rush into physical safe haven assets like gold and silver, which however has led to a shortage of safe venues where to store the precious metals (unlike bitcoin, gold actually has a physical dimension). And now companies that operate storage facilities for precious metals and other valuables are ramping up their capacity to help cash in on the soaring...

History of Gold - How the gold industry has changed over 50 years Thomson Reuters GFMS have compiled an interesting high level history of the gold industry in the last fifty years. Topics covered and interesting historical facts to note include: - Gold market size- Gold mine production "peaked in 2015"- South African production collapse from 1,000 tonnes- South African gold was flown to London and Zurich and an airliner had its own designated...

With Monday’s financial media blasting reports about the VIX collapse to levels not seen in 24 years, going all the way back to 1993, it is worth remembering that the near record low volatility collapse of 1993 did not end well either for stocks, or for bonds, with the great 1994 bond tantrum.  Reminding us of that, and of broader implications for the cross-asset space, is SocGen’s Kit Juckes with his overnight note,...

The following is an excerpt from David Enrich’s nonfiction financial and legal thriller The Spider Network: The Wild Story of a Math Genius, a Gang of Backstabbing Bankers, and One of the Greatest Scams in Financial History.  (Read part of the prologue here; another excerpt can be found here) This excerpt takes place shortly after the accused mastermind of the Libor scandal, Tom Hayes, is fired from his job at...