Iran sanctions: Middle East stock markets crash as Tehran enters oil war

Stock markets across the Middle East collapsed as the lifting of economic sanctions against Iran threatened to unleash a fresh wave of oil onto global markets that are already drowning in excess supply.

Read more at the UK Telegraph
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Is the Market Swoon Signaling Recession?

It's hard not to wonder: Is the stock market telling us something? True, the market's record in forecasting recessions is horrendous. Stocks often move according to whim or fad. But just because the market is wrong much of the time doesn't mean it's wrong all the time. Could last week's turbulent trading be one of the times it's right? By Friday's close, stocks had dropped 6% for the week, a paper loss of $1.5 trillion, says Wilshire Associates. Are we staring at the next recession?

Read more at Real Clear Markets
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2015: The Year China Goes Broke?

Beijing’s efforts to defend both stocks and the currency are severely straining its finances. --China, the Financial Times noted Friday, could exhaust its foreign exchange reserves within a year as it defends the value of its plunging currency, the renminbi. The paper’s arithmetic is correct of course, but the projection, which at first sounds alarming, is actually optimistic. Beijing might be broke in months—and maybe by the end of this year—despite now holding the world’s largest foreign exchange reserves.

Read more at the National Interest
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Chinese Stocks Suffer Second Biggest Crash In History, 1,500 Companies Halted Limit Down

After pledging, investing and otherwise guaranteeing the Chinese stock market to the tune of 10% of GDP, and intervening on at least 40 different occasions in the past month ever since China's stock bubble burst in late June, with the subsequent crash nearly taking the Shanghai Composite red for the year, overnight China officially lost control for the second time, when after a weak start to the Monday trading session, things turned very ugly in the last hour, when the Shanghai Composite plunged by 8.48%, closing nearly at the lows, and tumbling some 345 points for its biggest one-day drop since February 2007 and its second biggest crash in history!

Read more at Zero Hedge
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Will Puerto Rico Cause An Inadvertent “Black Swan” Derivatives Melt-Down?

I really had not been paying much attention to the Puerto Rico debt situation. After all, $72 billion in debt that might go bad – big deal. The Fed can print up $72 billion in credit lines with the push of a button. --But a friend of mine happened to mention to me today (Monday) that MBIA’s stock was down over 23% and Assured Guaranty’s stock was down over 13%. That woke me up. --Companies like MBI and AMBAC underwrite credit “enhancement” guarantees on these massive cesspools of debt – and the associated derivatives that are “wrapped around” the debt structures – and stick them in VIEs.

Read more at Investment Research Dynamics
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