Apr 20, 20234 min read

India most populous nation / CS / TSLA / AI 'taught itself' / SPX500 4150-4200 / BoJ next week

Google reveals its AI taught itself a skill that it wasn't supposed to have...are humans too late to regulate AI ?...loosing control of AI already ?
Fed's Goolsbee says he is watching for other 'credit shoes' to drop and ..Fed's Williams: Inflation still 'too high,' Fed will act to lower it
BOJ officials are wary of tweaking or scrapping yield control stimulus at next week's policy meeting so soon after the banking crisis clouded the outlook, people familiar said.
Accessing credit has become harder, Fed’s Beige Book shows. "Overall price levels rose moderately during this reporting period, though the rate of price increases appeared to be slowing"
Cost of oil, sugar, butter up nearly 20% in Switzerland, sounds familiar?
After Morgan Stanley, that's now four quarters in a row of essentially flat investment banking fees for the big five US banks - and at the lowest level since Q1 2019 (incl. BofA, Citi, GS, JPM, MS
The era of easy deposits is over for main street banks. Lenders like Citizens Financial and Hancock Whitney are paying more to keep depositors around (U.S centric but applies to parts of EU too..)
U.S car repo demand : 'In March, the percentage of subprime auto borrowers who were at least 60 days late on their bills was 5.3%, up from a seven-year low of 2.58% in May 2021 and higher than in 2009, the peak of the financial crisis.'
New Zealand CPI adds to evidence of peak inflation, aggressive tightening from RBNZ beginning to impact
TSLA : Musk says Tesla will put sales growth ahead of profit (cutting prices) - . Tesla posted gross margins of 19.3%, well below the 22.4% forecast, the lowest level since Q4 2020 >>> Where are the automotive gross margins? Free cash flow -87% miss from consensus estimates?
India is now officially the world's most populous nation. The south Asian nation has overtaken China, the UN says. The US is in a distant third spot
Russian ships accused of plotting North Sea sabotage with ghost ships
Global chart: why financial contagion is unlikely/Economist Intelligence
Switzerland’s Federal Council this week said it “acknowledges” Parliament’s vote to reject the CHF109 billion guarantee on the shotgun merger of UBS and Credit Suisse, but it won’t have any effect on the merger

Markets:

#MOVE index (bond vol) is one thing, #STIRT moving much faster lately, #VIX index is one thing, #0DTE stuff taking over lately >>> markets can and will move faster, particularly with the debt ceiling stuff too in Q2 (irrelevant of what anyone thinks, we've seen in March what can very swiftly happen to 10's of billion of deposit in some banks..), 3 and 4months Tbills - see below, you can add the 1y US CDS into the mix (debt ceiling risk-hedging etc)
Rates market has truly been wild, the huge discrepancy is what happens after 1 or 2more Fed hikes, the market is pricing in huge amount of cuts for next 2years
USDollar mixed, tried a little higher yesterday, short covering, #XAUUSD tested $1970 and rebounded to 2K again, huge expiries noted for next week in XAUUSD, strikes 2'050
SPX is trapped between the big 4200 resistance and the lower part of the trend channel. Time to move away from this trapped range sooner rather than later