One Trader Calls It: This Is The Day When It All Changes

Former trader Richard Breslow is out with his daily missive and Wednesday’s installment may very well be one of his best efforts ever.

First of all, Richard is sticking his neck out on this one. “I’m officially declaring today the very start of the entire change over process,” he notes, not necessarily calling the top, but rather calling for the return of the kind of two-way markets that ceased to exist years ago. Of course this is a largely riskless proposition for Richard. Because if he’s wrong, I bet you won’t have the guts to tell him. We’ve seen his colleagues go back and forth debating the merits of the de-dollarization thesis and all manner of other contentious points, but we’ve yet to see anyone challenge Breslow to a Hamilton-Burr-style duel. Here’s hoping, though.

Breslow’s contention rests on the assumption that the Fed is going to be disappointed in the extent to which the ECB and the BoJ will be willing to effectively allow the U.S. to get out ahead of everyone else on normalization without suffering any consequences in terms of the deleterious effect a coordinated global normalization would have on risk assets. The Fed’s assumption seems to be that as long as Draghi and Kuroda are still writing puts, the committee can unwind the balance sheet and lean hawkish with impunity. That is, other central banks will ensure there’s not a market mutiny which, by virtue of the communication loop between the Fed and investors, would be the equivalent of getting screamed at. The Fed then, is betting on a free ride.

That isn’t likely to pan out, Richard contends. And not necessarily because of the usual spiteful dynamics that accompany currency wars – but rather because the rest of the world simply won’t be able to afford it or otherwise suffer the pain.

Read below as Breslow spells it all out for in a truly fantastic piece…

Via Bloomberg