Hello my friends, today is September 28th and this is Markets Weekly. So this past week we got a lot of exciting developments in markets, although the major equity indexes didn't move too much. As many of you know, there is a large gamma pin on the S&P 500, so it's unlikely to move much until after Monday. So today let's talk about three things. First and foremost, we have to talk about the Chinese stimulus that is just rocketing through global markets. Secondly, although China is stimulating and we have geopolitical risks heating up, it doesn't seem like oil prices are very excited. So let's talk about how supply concerns seem to be weighing down on oil. And lastly, let's talk about how the Swiss National Bank and the European Central Bank are becoming increasingly davish.
Alright starting with China. So as we discussed last week, the Chinese economy has not been doing well largely because of the implosion in their property sector. Now the Chinese government has refrained from doing a lot of big stimulus because President Xi seems to have a philosophy that is just not the direction they want to go in. This past week, it seems like the government over there is changing their mind because we had two announcements both on the monetary stimulus front and on the fiscal stimulus front. And to show you the effects, let me just show you this chart of the Chinese stock market index. It looks like it went straight up. And actually it's up 15% in just a week. Obviously, that's a tremendous, tremendous amount.
Now let's start with the monetary stimulus they've announced. As usual, that means rate cuts, right? And the People's Bank of China has been more forceful in saying that they're going to offer monetary easing. But they also rolled out something new that is pretty interesting and that is a new lending facility to support the stock market. Now when your stock market is going down, the central bank obviously has a lot of ways to make it go up. Obviously you can cut rates and usually rate cuts make the stock market happy. Sometimes though, there are a lot of other concerns. Maybe rate cuts is not enough. And so even as the People's Bank of China has been cutting rates for some time, the Chinese stock market has not done well. Another thing you could do is suggest to have this under your bank straight out in buy stocks. And that's what the Bank of Japan did for some time. The People's Bank of China seems to be choosing somewhat of a middle path by offering this new financing facility that basically offers cheaper loans when you pledge stock as collateral. So in a sense, you can think about this through the banking sector offering investors cheaper margin loans to buy stocks in China. Again, cheap financing plus the People's Bank of China explicitly rolling out this facility is helping investors sentiment. So much so that you even have famous investors like David Tepper going on TV and saying he's buying everything China related. So that's on the monetary stimulus front.
On the second front that I think is more interesting is that the Chinese seem to be more interested in fiscal stimulus. Again, fiscal stimulus as we've seen recent years is in many cases much more influential than monetary stimulus because then the government is actually spending money rather than just toggling interest rates and whatnot. So the Chinese government is suggesting that they're going to do more fiscal stimulus, some estimates, a few hundred billion worth in dollars. And of course, there's language suggesting that they are going to prevent declines in the property markets. Again, there's not a lot of detail yet, but a lot of people are really happy to hear this because it shows that the government is changing their mind. Maybe this is the beginning of more measures and a few hundred billion dollars worth of stimulus. You know, it's not that much when you look at the size of the Chinese economy, but maybe it's the beginning of more. Something else that's also interesting is that the Chinese government is actually announcing checks to people who are suffering very low income people. Again, that's not quite on the scale of the helicopter checks we saw from President Biden, but it's also a change in policy. Now, some Bloomberg analysis is showing that the amount of money that's actually going to be sent out is not a lot and it's not going to be to a lot of people, but the markets are really liking this, again, suggest a potential shift in policy.
Now, when the Chinese economy is being stimulated, that, of course, has reverberations throughout the entire world. Looking at global commodity prices, for example, Chinese China, biggest consumer of raw commodities, especially things like base metals, you can see copper pricing, copper pricing taking a leg higher. And also encouraging for risk sentiment in the US and in Europe. You can see luxury brands like Louis Vuitton going basically straight up since Chinese stimulus, as many of you know, Chinese really, really like luxury goods. And another place you would expect to see very direct Chinese impact would be, say, its neighbors in Asia, like Japan. And that is actually initially what happened if you look at this chart of Nikkei futures and Nikkei futures were basically straight up at this news.
But unfortunately, there were also other events involved as well. In addition to Chinese stimulus, we also had elections in Japan and it looked like the outcome surprised markets were as the person who is now the new premier prime minister of Japan is someone that the market did not expect. Prime Minister Ishida appears to be perceived as more of a hawk of monetary policy. And so the market is thinking that he is not going to be more open to the Bank of Japan on normalizing interest rates. And so at his election, despite all this China stimulus news we saw first, the Japanese yen again, appreciate significantly and the Nikkei futures absolutely tanked 6% from their highs, 6%. So I think they're open this next week is going to be really fascinating.
Now one thing I would like to highlight is all these changes in the markets the past week from Chinese stimulus to Japanese elections are political developments. Politics and markets are deeply intertwined and at times the largest driver of movements and markets. So oftentimes up here, people complaining how can you talk politics and markets. Man, if you don't talk politics and markets, if you don't have a view of what public policy is, you are not going to make it seriously. Politics drives markets increasingly so. And when we look to a November election, I think that's going to have a huge impact on the trajectory of markets going forward. So pay attention very closely to political developments.
Now one thing that was really interesting about all this Chinese stimulus is that although it pumped commodity prices a lot, it actually didn't seem to do that much with oil, which leads us to our next topic. Now looking at oil prices the past few months, you'll notice that oil just can't seem to get a bid. It keeps going down lower and lower. And that's kind of strange because on the one hand, you have very obvious heating up of geopolitical conflicts. As I record this, we just have this huge, huge military strike of Israel against Hezbollah and Lebanon. And so there's a lot of things that are happening there and you would expect there to be more of a geopolitical premium, as has usually been the case. In addition to that, obviously China, one of the largest consumers of oil in the world, is doing fiscal stimulus, you would expect oil prices to go up as well.
But oil prices are not going up and it seems like a big part of that is supply concerns. Now there's some interesting reporting from the Financial Times the past week, from the Financial Times the past week about Saudi Arabia, basically telling everyone they're going to pump more oil. Now if we rewind a bit over the past couple years, Saudi Arabia has been trying to keep oil prices high. Now they got together with OPEC Plus and saying that, you know, guys, we have a lot of market power. We don't oil on oil prices to be too low. That impacts our revenue. So let's cut some production and try to manage oil prices so that they're at least very stable. But as they did this, and Saudi Arabia showed it a lot of the cuts, a couple of things happen. It was difficult to police the cuts from other countries that seem to be cheating and you have increased production from other players like the US and Canada.
And so Saudi Arabia seems to be basically giving up on policing oil prices and now is more concerned about market share. So they're telling everyone that those cuts that they had, they're going to roll them back. So the market is becoming increasingly concerned about an oversupply of oil, not just this, not just this coming year, but also next year as you have more and more projects, let's say offshore projects that are coming online. So it looks like we are in a place where oil prices are probably going to be low for some time until things change. Of course, many things change, but I think that's something to watch out with because when it comes to oil, it has a really big impact on inflation. Historically speaking, if you look at things like interest rates or break even inflation expectations, they're close to the price of oil where higher oil leads to higher perceived inflation and thus higher interest rates. And now we have this big disinflationary force that's happening simply through a big supply increase. All right.
The last thing that I want to talk about is what's happening with the some, with a couple European central banks. Now this past week, the Swiss National Bank cut interest rates again. And more interestingly, they seem to be hinting that they're going to cut interest rates again and also they've significantly realized lower their expectations of the path of inflation. Now Switzerland is a is again, every country is different. Now one thing to keep in mind when you're looking at Switzerland is a key mechanism of monetary policy is their interest rate. Now Switzerland in the middle of the European Union obviously is significantly impacted by the interest rates, by exchange rates. So they export a lot of things to the European Union and they import a lot of things to the European Union. Now over the past few months, we've seen their currency strengthen significantly in part due to say, flight to safety. Now that's been a big problem for them because when their currency strengthens a lot, it makes their exports less competitive and it also makes their import prices decline a lot. And so it's putting a lot of downward pressure on inflation. So what the Swiss National Bank is telling you is that they're very likely going to continue to cut interest rates and who knows, maybe they even go back to zero. But we have to be careful though, the Swiss National Switzerland is, you know, they have their own idiosyncratic economy. It's not necessarily, I wouldn't take signals away from this to imply that other major center banks may go back to zero.
But the ECB though, this past week also sent out some pretty dovish noises. Now, ECB executive members about Schnabel gave a really interesting speech and had a lot of slides that seem to suggest that the ECB is becoming more and more concerned about growth. Now, to be clear, the ECB does not have an employment mandate. They are an inflation mandate bank, but can center banks always care about the economy. Now, the takeaway from the presentation seems to be that, well, inflation in the Eurozone is getting closer and closer to target. We've had significant disinflation over the past couple of years. However, the growth is becoming more concerning. Now, if you look at real growth for the Euro area over the past couple of years, it's basically gone nowhere. It's stagnated. Whereas in the US, for example, the US continues to have pretty good growth. And if you look at, say, maybe potentially forward-looking data like PMI indicators, PMI data in the Eurozone has been trending lower and lower, that's telling you that businesses are thinking things are not getting better.
So there seems to be more of a concern about economic growth in the Eurozone. And at the same time, when you look at measures of inflation, let's say economists care a lot about inflation expectations in the Eurozone, they seem to be hitting lower. So the ECB seems to be in gear to be more confident that inflation is getting to where they want and seem to be switching gears a little bit to be a bit more concerned about growth. And that is leading to more and more speculation that the ECB may cut rates again as soon as October. So globally, again, this rate cut cycle is continuing among central banks and actually seems to be accelerating. And that is going to be something we can, I just think, look forward to. I think there's also additional speculation that even the Bank of Australia, the Reserve Bank of Australia, will be cutting rates as well. All right.
So that's a lot prepared for this week. Thanks so much for tuning in.
If you're interested in my latest thoughts this week, I'm going to write about what could potentially blow up the Treasury market based on what I'm hearing from the Treasury market conference at the Fed last week.
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Talk to you all next week.