Domain Mondo's weekly review of macro economic and investing news:
MacroView Feature • Davos a/k/a
World Economic Forum (WEF) Annual Meeting, will be held 17-20 January 2017, at Davos-Klosters, Switzerland, with
Chinese President Xi Jinping speaking at the opening plenary and leading
"an 80-strong delegation" of Chinese business executives and billionaires to the annual gathering of global elitists. Although WEF founder Klaus Schwab met with members of Trump’s staff in December, Trump spokeswoman
Hope Hicks told
Bloomberg.com that
“No one will be attending.” Another senior member of Trump’s transition told Bloomberg that the gathering of billionaires and political leaders represents
"the power structure that fueled the populist anger that helped Trump win the presidential election." See Davos Wonders If It’s Part of the Problem | Bloomberg.com:
"Kenneth Rogoff can pinpoint the moment he started to grow concerned Donald Trump would be the next U.S. president: It was when Rogoff’s fellow attendees at the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting last January said it could never happen. “A joke I’ve told 1,000 people in the months since leaving Davos is that the conventional wisdom of Davos is always wrong,” says the Harvard professor and former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund. “No matter how improbable, the event most likely to happen is the opposite of whatever the Davos consensus is.” The repeated failure of business and political elites to predict what’s coming—last year, that included the U.K.’s vote to leave the European Union—doesn’t strike those returning this month to the Swiss Alps as very funny. After a year in which political upsets roiled financial markets and killed off the careers of once-dominant Davos-going politicians, the concern for delegates attending this year’s meeting isn’t that their forecasts are often wrong, but that their worldview is." (emphasis added)
See also:
MacroView Feature • The U.S. Dollar Set To Soar?:
"[U.S.] dollars (USD) have a variety of utility value. They can used to buy other goods and services globally, serve as collateral for loans, earn interest with low transaction costs when converted into U.S. Treasury bonds, and so on. In certain ways, USD offer more utility value than gold or any tangible form of collateral/capital. If we refuse to recognize the high utility value of USD and its global ease of flow, then we will continue to misunderstand the demand for the dollar and its appreciation."--Charles Hugh Smith
Goldman Sachs alum and investor
Raoul Pal:
“Looking at the shortfall of dollars and what is happening in the world right now, I think it could probably rally something like 75% from its low, so that’s still a long way from here. My personal target for the last six years has been the euro goes to 75 cents against the dollar and the yen at 200.”--
Here’s why the U.S. dollar could soar by another 30% | MarketWatch.com. See also
Bitcoin Collapses, Chinese Latecomers Get Fleeced | WolfStreet.com: "The People’s Bank of China announced on Wednesday that it is probing the major bitcoin exchanges in Beijing and Shanghai – BTCC, Huobi, and OKCoin – for a list of violations, including market manipulation, money laundering, and unauthorized financing. This is part of the PBOC’s efforts to crack down on capital flight ...
The yuan lost 6.5% against the dollar last year, its worst year since 1994 ..."
Other Macro Economic and Investing News:
•
Billionaire investors and the
Trump Rally:
Carl Icahn, now appointed Trump's special adviser on regulation,
says he left Trump's electoral victory party in the early hours of the morning of November 9th, to bet about
$1 billion on
U.S. equities. Icahn told a TV interviewer in early November that while the U.S. economy still faced a number of problems, Trump's victory represented
"a major step in the right direction." WSJ.com reports billionaire investor (and Clinton supporter)
George Soros lost nearly $1 billion in the weeks after the Trump election (Soros thought the stock market would decline), while Soros's ex-deputy, Stanley Druckenmiller, profited by betting on the post-election
Trump rally in the stock market.
•
Jim Chanos warns markets could be on verge of historic shift: For famed short-seller
Jim Chanos, the big question for investors is to decide is
"whether Trump's victory represents a major once-in-fifty-year sea-change in thinking about capitalism. If it is then you have to pay attention," he says. Chanos added,
"if we look at the events of 2016 – Brexit, the Italian referendum, Trump, and the rise of nationalist China – are these the harbingers of something bigger? Or are they just a coincidence? The ground seems to be fertile for things to change globally." If so, this would have huge implications for investors:
"If we're in one of those periods now – if 2016 is like 1932 or 1979 – then you not only have to change your portfolio, you have to change your lifestyle ... If this is a major shift to populism, nationalism, greater state involvement, and less globalism, then you really have to rethink almost everything in your life."
•
Clinton Foundation shutting down the
Clinton Global Initiative:
Legal Notice filed with State of New York gives a "layoff date" of April 15, 2017, for the 22 affected employees. Whether the
Clinton Foundation will also close is unknown.
ZeroHedge.com reported donations to the foundation have collapsed
"as the political cout of the 'charitable' organization dried up and as the opportunity for any future 'quid pro quo' is now effectively gone," while also noting that a
FBI investigation into the Clinton Foundation regarding allegations of corruption is still ongoing.
•
Trump's Cabinet nominees appear to be on track for confirmation. The most impressive person among the
stellar group thus far? Secretary of State nominee
Rex Tillerson who testified for nine hours without notes and showed an impressive knowledge of global issues, watch video of the hearing
here. See also:
LIVE Video: Secretary of Defense & CIA Director Confirmation Hearings. Coming up this week is the
Wilbur Ross hearing, nominee for
Secretary of Commerce, at 10:00 a.m., Wednesday,
before the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation.
• Inauguration of
Donald J. Trump as the 45th President of the United States is set for Friday, January 20, 2017, see
58pic2017.org for more information.
 |
| U.S. Marines in the 2013 inauguration parade |
One More Thing:
Have You Heard the Latest Fake News from the Washington Post, New York Times, CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS, Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, Sunday Times, The Guardian, BuzzFeed et al?
Trump Aides Deny Sunday Times Report of Putin Iceland Summit | Bloomberg.com:
"That is 100 percent false,” a Trump aide said late Sunday.
“If you don't read the newspaper, you're uninformed. If you read the newspaper, you're mis-informed.”--Mark Twain
Why Did BuzzFeed Publish the Trump Dossier? | The Atlantic.com:
"In distributing a set of inflammatory allegations that it admitted it could not vouch for, BuzzFeed sidestepped [violated] a basic principle of journalism ... The reporter’s job is not to simply dump as much information as possible into the public domain, though that can at times be useful too, as some of WikiLeaks’ revelations have shown. It is to gather information, sift through it, and determine what is true and what is not. The point of a professional journalist corps is to have people whose job it is to do that work on behalf of society, and who can cultivate sources and expertise to help them adjudicate it. A pluralistic press corps is necessary to avoid monolithic thinking among reporters, but transparent transmission of misinformation is no more helpful or clarifying than no information at all."--David A. Graham, a staff writer at The Atlantic, where he covers U.S. politics and global news.
Read the tweet below carefully. This is journalism?
-- John Poole, Editor, Domain Mondo
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