Author: Doug Noland

The main focus for the week was on a slew of central bank tightening measures. But Putin’s speech marked an alarming ratcheting up of geopolitical risk. It essentially guarantees months of Putin hardball and associated uncertainty.

And it’s unclear whether the Fed, ECB, or other central banks are prepared to abruptly shift course and orchestrate another concerted QE program to re-liquify liquidity-challenged global markets. And this is a huge issue. The world could now be in the early stage of history’s greatest globalized de-risking/deleveraging cycle – and a global central bank liquidity backstop is not a policy focus.

Global “Risk Off” gathers momentum by the week. Crisis Dynamics fester, as global central banks coalesce around a united front for battling inflation. The reality that central bankers will aggressively hike rates until something breaks has begun to s…

The more things stay the same, the more they change. I’ll posit that we’ve now experienced the first Squeeze of the New Cycle.

Crisis Dynamics have, however, returned more powerful than ever. The old, the tried and true, isn’t working.

What was to unfold over three decades was nothing short of history’s greatest period of Credit and speculative excess. Now the dreadful downside. Virtually everyone seems unaware of the extraordinary challenges ahead.