The week ahead kicks off with a holiday, President's Day, in the U.S. and China's returning to the market from a holiday, the Lunar New Year. So it should be interesting.
Much of Friday's rally in U.S. markets, some say, stemmed from investors doing what they nearly always do going into a long weekend, close out risky bets that could swiftly turn sour while the market's closed.
Such could be the case in Asia with Chinese investors returning. It's been a rough and wild ride for investors for a while now as pundits of all stripes and veins speculated about what's going on. And as one might expect there's no shortage of theories. Nor is there a shortage of cheer leading, a good case is all the blabber about whether certain job numbers do or don't accurately signal an upcoming recession.
Spare yourself the concern. Much of the stuff is just what these folks love to do. It's just another form of meaningless economic masturbation like filling airtime. Much of this centers on the egos at stake between the half-empty and the half-full crowd, much of it on the entrenched who smell the growing possibility of a serious sea change not of their ruling.
A case in point is JP Morhan's CEO Jamie Dimon's much ballyhooed $26 million purchase of his bank's stock. The intended message was to put a floor under growing investor concerns about the credibility and solvency of the global banking system and indirectly that of central banking, both areas where there's been a landslide of inept game playing for a longtime.
The Dimon theme was look: The guy's putting up his own money and lots of it. Dimon had just received a pay increase of 35% over that of 2014 in a so-called no-inflation environment, $20 million of which was a bonus. Now it ain't like Dimon and his creed hadn't received bonuses, big bonuses, before. So even if his $26 million went Poof!, a very unlikely scenario, he really doesn't have much of his actual skin in the game.
He's really playing with house chips. You can't miss too much what you never received.
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