Ponzi markets and asset bubbles blown by central bank money printing in collusion with their oligarch accomplices are imploding under the weight of their own fraud and fictitious valuations. It is beautiful to behold... In the eurozone, shadow ratings already signaled red flags in the late 2000s in Greece and the other countries on the periphery. More recently, Ireland and Spain may deserve to be upgraded, following fiscal consolidation and reforms. Greece, however, remains a mess. Even with substantial reform to improve its growth potential, it will never be able to repay its sovereign debt and needs substantial relief.  An assessment of sovereign risk that is systematic and data-driven could help to spot the risks that changing global headwinds imply. To that extent, it provides exactly what the world needs now: an approach that removes the need to rely on the ad hoc and slow-moving approach of ratings agencies and the noisy and volatile signals coming from markets....The market is slowly eating itself. If you look at dividend cover trends companies are eating their own future to maintain dividend payments and keep share prices up...probably because that's usually what their management get rewarded on.  And the average dividend yields are heavily influenced by commodity companies, miners etc, who are taking a real hammering... Chinese stock market investors, many of whom are a newly formed middle class, are borrowing to invest. Same with UK house buyers. Most are hopelessly naïve and all are over-leveraged and indebted. Yet should the bubble pop we're all collectively screwed. So governments have little choice but to keep the bubbles inflated for as long as possible. The fact such bubbles should never have been allowed to form in the first place seems neither here nor there.... Its truly ridiculous.

The slowdown in China sent shockwaves on the commodity markets. The Bloomberg Global Commodity Index, which measures the evolution of 22 commodities, reached levels that have never been reached since the beginning of this century. The price of oil is the best barometer of the growth of the global economy, as this commodity fuels almost every industry and manufacturing sector of the global markets. The price of oil has dropped by more than half in a year, now getting closer to 40 dollars / barrel on the US market.   Also, the price of iron ore, an essential commodity for the Chinese foundries and the construction sector, has reached 56 dollars a ton, from 140 dollars a ton in January 2014.   The crisis of investing in resources - In the context of the decline of the price of oil and metals, many mining projects which have major loans have been taken out for are now in the red, and investors may never get profits from them...the most affected are the American exploitations of shale gas.  As the needs for refinancing in the sector are increasing, in the future there is the risk of quick contagion.  The domino effect - The pillars of the world's economy are beginning to fall. China is weakening, and the emerging markets that have consumed such huge volumes of commodities are being affected by the weakening of currencies. Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, the BRICS which seemed that they were going to uphold the growth of the world's economy, are now in "disarray".  Central banks are quickly losing control.  The stock market in China has already crashed, and a real disaster was avoided only through the government's intervention, which bought billions of shares. In Greece, the markets are having problems, amid the turbulences in the country. In the currency sector, investors have flocked to the Swiss franc in the beginning of the year, but the quantitative easing of 1,100 billion Euros announced by the Central Bank (ECB) has devalued the Euro, causing the Swiss National Bank to drop peg it had imposed four years ago on the EUR/CHF exchange rate.

ATHENS, Greece - Greece's president asked the main opposition party Friday to try to form a new government, a day after Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras resigned and called an early election next month to deal with a governing party rebellion over Greece's third bailout deal.  The opposition has few chances of uniting and forming a government, meaning that after more than five years of a worsening financial crisis, Greece is headed for its fifth national election in six years. Tsipras is widely tipped to win the vote, though if he fails to secure an outright majority he could have to seek a new coalition that could hamper his ability to govern.

Hardline lawmakers in Tsipras' radical left Syriza party announced Friday they were splitting from the party and forming their own anti-austerity movement, which becomes the third largest group in Parliament. Outgoing government officials say the likeliest election date is Sept. 20, just eight months after Tsipras was elected on promises to fight creditor-demanded spending cuts and tax hikes, terms he later agreed to in order to secure Greece a third bailout and keep it from falling out of the euro.  It will be the third time this year that Greeks vote, after January elections and a July 5 referendum Tsipras called urging voters to reject reforms that creditors were proposing during the bailout negotiations. Greece's European creditors did not appear dismayed by Tsipras' move, which was widely expected. "The step by Prime Minister Tsipras isn't surprising" considering he has lost his majority in parliament, said Steffen Seibert, spokesman for German Chancellor Angela Merkel. "The bailout program is a program that was agreed with the Hellenic republic ... and it will be valid through election dates." German Finance Ministry spokesman Juerg Weissgerber said that if there were delays in implementation of the bailout agreement due to the elections, "then it would mean that the next payments are delayed too." Funds from Greece's new three-year, 86 billion euro ($95 billion) bailout are being disbursed in batches following reviews of the country's progress on implementing reforms. The first installment was released Thursday so Athens could meet a debt repayment to the European Central Bank, and a first review is expected in October. On Friday, President Prokopis Pavlopoulos met conservative New Democracy party head Evangelos Meimarakis and asked him to try to form a government. Meimarakis has three days to seek coalition partners, after which the third largest party in Parliament would a chance for a further three days at most.

The third largest party is now the new movement formed by the 25 lawmakers who split from Syriza Friday. The group, named Popular Unity, will be led by former energy minister Panagiotis Lafazanis.

Meimarakis also met with the speaker of Parliament to seek her contribution in trying to cobble together a government and avoid early elections.

However, it is unlikely that Meimarakis or the new party will be able to form a government. At that point, Parliament will be dissolved and a caretaker government appointed to lead the country to early elections within a month.

Announcing his resignation in a televised address Thursday, Tsipras said he secured the best deal possible when he agreed to the new bailout from other eurozone countries to save Greece from a disastrous euro exit.

Last week, CNBC had a market analyst on after the close of trading who blurted out "If people can't make money on the stock market where can they make money". That's sort of the problem Wall St. faces. You have tens of thousands of these parasites whose livings are at risk. They are going to pull out all the stops ( using other peoples money) to try and buoy up their Ponzi scheme because if they don't they will be reduced to packing up their stuff into a cardboard box and walking out of their billion dollar office tower just like the folks at Lehman Brothers had to do almost 7 years ago.  Unfortunately, the taxpayer has had enough of these repulsive swindlers and the Fed is out of ammo so there will be no bailout this time. Its do or die for them this week and if they can't beg, borrow or steal enough money to pump the market back up they are going to be on the street, with no future. Dominic Rossi, chief investment officer for equities at Fidelity, has been warning that the stock market crash is a symptom of a “third wave of deflation” that will leave few countries untouched and should deter the US and UK central banks from raising rates any time soon.  After the financial crisis of 2008 and the eurozone crisis of 2011, Mr Rossi said this rout has “many of the hallmarks” of a classic crisis in emerging markets. “They always start in foreign exchange markets and in this one it’s been rolling its way through currency after currency.” The emerging market crash of the 1990s led to “goldilocks” conditions in the developed world, lowering prices, whereas the current drop is “more of a double-edged sword” of price and volume shocks that will be felt around the world, Mr Rossi said. While he thinks the crisis won’t completely derail the US or UK economic recovery, with a falling oil price likely to stimulate growth and the banks in better shape than in previous downturns, he expects the Federal Reserve and Bank of England to delay a rate increase – or else risk fuelling the deflationary forces already in action. “I think it’s inevitable now that a contraction of supply in developing nations will be required to stabilise prices and a fall in global supply is unavoidable.” His advice for investors is to step away from their broking account until the “ice age” of low inflation and rates starts to thaw. “The best thing at the moment is to do nothing and just let, as it will do, the volatility subside. Anything you try to do now will almost certainly be wrong.”

Quite a few people seem desperate for this to be the financial armageddon they've been predicting for, it seems like, forever. Well, there's a vested interest I'm sure but should their longed-for meltdown actually occur, I wonder how many of those Jeremiahs would remain unaffected....Wei Yao at Soc Gen has been crunching the numbers and calculates that today's reserve ratio easing will inject around $107bn into the economy. However, this may not be enough to fully offset the hundreds of billions Beijing has been using to prop up the value of the renminbi since August 11.

The PBOC now faces a difficult balancing act where it seeks to counter-act tighter policy as dictated by its foreign exchange regime with the need to keep the economy motoring along.

More from Wei:  "The battle to stabilize the currency has had a significant tightening effect on domestic liquidity conditions. It is the PBoC's decision whether or not to keep at it. If the PBoC wants to stabilize currency expectations for good, there are only two ways to achieve this: complete FX flexibility or zero FX flexibility. At present, the latter is also increasingly unviable, since the capital account is much more open. Therefore, the PBoC has merely to keep selling FX reserves until it lets go.  "In a nutshell, the PBoC’s war chest is sizeable no doubt, but not unlimited. It is not a good idea to keep at this battle of currency stabilization for too long." ...The ECB's Vitor Constancio has been speaking in Germany today and has dampened anxiety over a major economic slowdown in China.

Despite downside risks to inflation coming from falling oil prices, Mr Constancio said the ECB stood ready "to use all the instruments available within its mandate to respond to any material change to the outlook for price stability”. ... China won't intervene to support stocks again?  Do you seriously expect anyone to believe this?  They've just authorized the party apparatchiks of the Chinese National  Pension Fund to spend up to 30% of their assets on shares. Are we expected to have forgotten that?  That's $100 billion of possible buying orders coming down the road.
When these apparatchiks are told to buy, they'll buy, and buy again - as if their jobs depend on it, as they do.

German MPs voted to back a third bail-out for Greece on Wednesday as Dutch prime minister Mark Rutte faced the threat of a no confidence vote over his decision to support the €86bn rescue plan. After a three-hour debate, the Bundestag approved a new rescue package for Greece with a majority of 454 votes to 13. Eighteen MPs abstained.  Within Angela Merkel's ruling Christian CDU-CSU coalition, 228 MPs voted in favour of the deal, with 63 voting against and three abstentions. In an earlier vote in July, 60 coalition MPs voted "no" to new aid for Greece. Wolfgang Schaeuble, Germany’s finance minister, told policymakers … there was “no guarantee of success” … “If Greece stands by its obligations and the programme is completely and resolutely implemented” … An immediate payment of around €13bn is expected to be handed to Greece shortly so the country can make a €3.2bn loan repayment to the European Central Bank on Thursday.’ Right, let me hand you a bucket of money so you can pay me back a bit of what you already owe me that you can’t pay back. Please. As Einstein (or Mark Twain or Ben Franklin, depending on where you look) is reputed to have said, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. Surely a collective insanity is at work here, convincing otherwise sentient adults that giving a bankrupt money to discharge his debts, which he will then pay back, is insane...The total that is actually going to Greece itself will be around €3bn per year, peanuts in a €12.2trill annual GDP economy.

The U.S. banking sector may have very little revenue exposure to China — but they still have reason to be scared.  The fear building on Wall Street is that a worsening economy in China will delay the Federal Reserve from raising U.S. interest rates indefinitely. That would be bad for the banks because the sector has been waiting for a rate hike to turbocharge earnings on mortgages and other loans...China's woes — highlighted by its currency manipulation moves — threatens to dampen the sector's earnings expectations going into 2016, analysts warned.  "A significant slowdown in China could push the Fed to delay liftoff, leading to negative consensus revisions of 2016 earnings estimates," Bank of America research analysts Erika Najarian and Ebrahim Poonawala said in a recent research report.  Najarian and Poonawala see bank earnings per share hurt by 10% to 15% if the Fed delays raising rates until the end of 2016. A rate hike "is by far the single biggest positive catalyst remaining for bank stocks," the BofA analysts said.  A delay "would change our bullish outlook for the sector," they said in the report.   "Every single U.S. bank is affected by this," agreed Erik Oja, banking analyst with S&P Capital IQ. Citigroup also has indirect exposure to China in that it does business with countries, like Brazil, that sell raw materials to China, Oja warned.  In terms of direct revenue exposure, the danger is minuscule, analysts said. Citigroup has the greatest direct exposure at 1.2%, followed by JPMorgan Chase with just 0.7%.  This week, China weakened its currency in a bid to boost exports by making them cheaper. The central's banks' move to manipulate the currency has sparked fears that China's economic slowdown is worse than expected. That could push the Fed to move more cautiously when it comes to raising U.S. interest rates, which would signal a stronger U.S. economy.