20 Questions

It’s a bank holiday in Japan, the US, and Canada today, so markets are feeling a bit listless- though not quite as much as your author. Given that we’re well into Q4 now and Macro Man sees plenty of head-scratchers, what better time to play another game of 20 questions?

1) How real is the risk of a year-end melt-up in equities as pension and stock fund managers just throw money at the market out of a desire to show that they are overweight at year end?

2) How concerned should fundamental bulls be at the underperformance of Asian, supposed growth engine of the world, over the last month? (That’s equities, not currencies or growth data.)

3) Will banks throw a bone to public opinion and magically conjure some turd-related losses by year end, or will they just brazenly print big profits, stick their fingers in their ears, and chat “nicky-nicky-nah-nah” at taxpayers?

4) A Tory majority or a hung parliament?

5) Actually, does David Cameron even qualify as a Tory (other than privileged upbringing, etc.)?

6) If Gordon Brown is going to sell the family jewels (again!) to ease the budget deficit, shouldn’t sterling go up (given that h usually sells to foreigners)?

7) Is recent Fed rhetoric trying to prepare markets for a policy tightening of some description, or does it merely represent a return to the “anyone can say what they want” policy of the early Bernanke Fed?

8) The RBA was first. The Norgesbank will almost certainly be second. Of G10 central banks, who will be third?

9) Will the BOE augment its QE program by cutting the interest on bank reserves next month?

10) What’s happened to the Steelers’ defense? They can’t stop anybody in the 4th quarter this year.

11) Which trades first on front-contract oil: $60 or $85?

12) Which trades first on gold bullion: $900 or $1200?

13) Is the deterioration in recent G2 bond auction results (last week’s long bond auction in the US, today’s failed German bill auction) telling us something?

14) Can you believe that GM is running an ad campaign based on build quality? No wonder they’ve gone bust.

15) Angels, Dodgers, Phillies, or Yankees?

16) When will USD/RMB go below 6.80?

17) The current fixed-income sell-off: pause that refreshes or prelude to carry-trade carnage?

18) Has anyone else observed a deterioration in the performance of cross-asset RV trades?

19) When will Mrs. Watanabe give up punting online FX? Her performance has been awwwfulllll!

20) Didja put a cheeky fiver on Obama winning the “Nobel Prize” for economics?

Subscribe by RSS Subscribe by Email