The Biggest Economic Story Going Into 2015 Is Not Oil

Isn’t it fun to just watch the market numbers roll by from time to time as you go about your day, see Europe markets up 3%+, Dubai 13%, US over 2% (biggest two-day rally since 2011!), and you just know oil must get hit again? Well, it did. WTI down another 3%+. I tells ya, no Plunge Protection is going save this sucker.

And oil is not even the biggest story today. It’s plenty big enough by itself to bring down large swaths of the economy, but in the background there’s an even bigger tale a-waiting. Not entirely unconnected, but by no means the exact same story either. It’s like them tsunami waves as they come rolling in. It’s exactly like that.

That is, in the wake of the oil tsunami, which is a long way away from having finished washing down our shores, there’s the demise of emerging markets. And I’m not talking Putin, he’ll be fine, as he showed again today in his big press-op. It’s the other, smaller, emerging countries that will blow up in spectacular fashion, and then spread their mayhem around. And make no mistake: to be a contender for bigger story than oil going into 2015, you have to be major league large. This one is.

The US dollar will keep rising more or less in and of itself, simply because the Fed has ‘tapered QE’, and much of what happened in global credit markets, especially in emerging markets, was based on cheap and easily available dollars. There’s now $85 billion less of that each month than before the taper took it away in $10 billion monthly increments. The core is simple.

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