Having passed 6,000 for the first time in April, Nasdaq has now soared 17% since then to surpass 7,000 today...
As soon as cash markets closed last Friday (quad witch), US equity futures spiked... then spiked again on Sunday night"s open, and again at the US equity cash open this morning...
And VIX has been crushed this morning...
In the few short days since Saudi Arabia erupted in a "pre-emptive coup", the nation"s credit risk has spiked dramatically higher, bets on a devaluation of the Riyal have surged, oil has jumped, and the Tadawul All-Share Index is... unch.
Saudi Credit Risk has spiked...The cost of insuring exposure to the country’s debt against default has spiked the most in seven months in the two days since it arrested dozens of princes, billionaires and public officials as part of an anti corruption drive
3-month Riyal forwards have plunged...
And the recently issued 3.625s of March 2028 have tumbled...
But the stock market has miraculously been panic-bid every day this week since the purge...
Driven by a surge in Saudi Banks!
"rigged"?
Heading into today"s vote, FX options markets had seen massive demand for downside protection against a result that threatened the euro"s existence. That didn"t happen and so those hedges are being unwound en masse with the biggest drop in EURUSD implied vols in history...
Close up, 1mo EURUSD vols erased all the damage from the last few weeks" fears...
And Risk-Reversals (which measure the skew or relative demand for downside protection over upside), have spiked back to near "normal" levels...
Notably EURJPY (which was one of the biggest movers tonight) has begun to fade quite significantly...
Retracing 50% of its spike as the world wakes up to debt ceiling concerns and what the ECB will do...
The 2017 Free Speech University Rankings have been released, and it turns out that London is a hotbed of campus censorship.
To find out what’s going on, spiked-online.com"s writer Jacob Furedi talked to fellow students about the state of free speech at their universities...
And in the US, it"s just as bad... Free speech on campus is facing a profound threat. Not at the hands of President Trump, nor even at the hands of the administrators and lawyers who have done so much to erode academia’s respect for freedom of expression.
No, as highlighted by the violent disruption and end of Charles Murray’s visit to Middlebury College in Vermont last week, the immediate crisis comes from one of freedom’s most ancient enemies: the angry mob.
It’s time for college leaders and law enforcement to take a stand: In our nation, this is not what democracy looks like.
While Americans rightly tend to focus on threats to freedom of speech from the authorities, we cannot overlook the danger of allowing people to be silenced by groups prepared to be violent.
While still at relatively low levels, the VStoxx index (Europe"s VIX) spiked over 17 this morning, its highest in 3 weeks and the biggest jump since September...
The post-election low vol regime is under pressure...
Is that regime about to change?
Time for Draghi to get even more dovish?
