Archive - Jun 4, 2011
PBS Hacker LulzSec Takes On Archnemesis FBI, Defaces FBI-Affiliate Website In Protest Against NATO And Obama
Submitted by Tyler Durden on 06/04/2011 23:25 -0500Even as the hacker collective known as Operation Empire State Rebellion, which back in March threatened to bring "peaceful revolution to America, and will engage in civil disobedience until Bernanke steps down" and has since largely fallen off the scene, presumably surprised by Bernanke complete lack of fazing, another hacker group, LulzSec, best known for recent hacking into PBS, has just taken the first step toward pissing off none other than its archnemesis the FBI, by defacing and taking control of an FBI affiliate website. From IBTimes: "In an apparent protest against the NATO and Obama administration, the LulzSec group announced the breach of FBI affiliate website, the Atlanta chapter of Infragard. The group raised claims that they have taken “complete control” over the website and has “defaced it”. They also announced that the data including passwords obtained from infragardatlanta.org would prove useful for them to hack into other FBI affiliates, since a lot of users tend to reuse their passwords even though the practice is generally unappreciated by FBI." So while OP_ESR continues to engage in emptry rhetoric and summons the population to one after another attempt at uprising (Apparently June 14th is the latest D-Day), LulzSec, which is also speculated to be behind the historic ongoing hacks of the various Sony networks, is taking cyber-matters into its own hands. We wonder however whether this escalation of cyberwarfare against the US by the US will necessitate a declaration of war by Obama against the US. Admittedly, that would be a Keynesian wet dream: think of the record boost to GDP if Geithner literally nukes the west and eastern seaboards, only to rebuild them again...
Are Nuclear Chain Reactions Still Occurring at Fukushima?
Submitted by George Washington on 06/04/2011 19:33 -0500Probably ...
Things That Make You Go Hmmm - "Is It Safe?"
Submitted by Tyler Durden on 06/04/2011 18:55 -0500But for a bailout of sorts, one of the most villainous performances in cinematic history would never have made it to the silver screen. Producer Robert Evans was set upon getting Laurence Olivier to play the part of Dr. Christian Szell in the movie adaptation of William Goldman’s book, Marathon Man. However, because Olivier at the time was riddled with cancer, he was uninsurable so Paramount refused to use im. In desperation, Evans called his friends Merle Oberon and David Niven to arrange a meeting with the House of Lords (the upper body of the UK’s parliament). There, he urged them to put pressure on Lloyds of London to insure Britain’s greatest living actor. The ploy succeeded and a frail Olivier started working on the film. In the end, not only did he net an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor, but his cancer also went into remission. Olivier lived on for another 13 years. The iconic scene in Marathon Man that, to this day has me squirming in my chair whenever I see it, involves Dr. Szell using particularly nasty dentistry techniques to torture poor Dustin Hoffman’s character, ‘Babe’, in order to establish whether the security of the stash of diamonds Szell has hidden has been compromised. Babe, however, genuinely has no idea what Szell is talking about. As Babe’s fear mounts, he tries giving Szell any and every answer to avoid the pain he is clearly about to face. He tells him ‘it’ is safe. He tells him ‘it’ is in grave danger - anything he thinks Szell wants to hear - but, unfortunately, Babe’s pain is inevitable and it is dispensed without compassion or humanity. Such is the way of the world.
Bank Of America's Ethan Harris Explains The Birth Death Adjustment
Submitted by Tyler Durden on 06/04/2011 17:16 -0500
Yesterday Zero Hedge pointed out that in addition to the 54,000 NFP number missing every single economist estimate, another very troubling statistic was that the BLS added some 206,000 "jobs" courtesy of its monthly birth/death adjustment: numbers which tend to be added on a monthly basis and then subtracted (especially during periods of economic contraction) in one annual benchmark revision which is largely ignored by everyone. In fact, as Peter Tchir pointed out, over the past 4 months, the NFP has added 752k jobs, of which 610k have been birth death jobs. B/D has added 271K jobs YTD in 2011, 510K in 2010, 585K in 2009, 825K in 2008, 883K in 2007, 1002K in 2006, etc, in in the last decade has never once subtracted from the full year tally, which would subsequently be revised lower. You get the picture. Well, yesterday, Bloomberg's Tom Keene sat down with Bank of America chief economist Ethan Harris, who just like every other Wall Street economist has been clueless on the direction of the economy in 2011, and asked him to explain just what the B/D model is, why it exists, and whether it represent data manipulation. The relevant segment begins just over 5 minutes into the clip below.
Guest Post: The Final Form of Human Government
Submitted by Tyler Durden on 06/04/2011 15:28 -0500As Donne reminds us, No man is an island, at least if he attains to the order, the harmony – that “pleasing combination of the elements” – for which he naturally yearns. Alone against the elements, man is as nothing, scratching out an existence unfit for his kind and indeed destructive of it, selfless because, in having no others with whom to associate, no true self exists. But in that convivium – that “living together” – a self emerges, or at least the reflection of a self, into which he gazes and through which he begins not only to act but to act human, the goal of which is always the satisfaction of the acting man’s desires. And that, as we have said, is the source and sustenance of the social enterprise...
20 Facts About US Inequality That Everyone Should Know (With An Update On The Uber-Wealthy And Global Wealth Inequality)
Submitted by Tyler Durden on 06/04/2011 15:10 -0500
Courtesy of the Stanford Center for the Study of Poverty and Inequality, we bring you the "20 facts about US Inequality that Everyone Should Know". For everything one has always wanted to know about wage inequality, CEO pay, homelessness, education wage premium, gender pay gaps, occupational sex segregation, racial gaps in education, racial discrimination, child poverty, residential segregation, health insurance, inter and intragenerational income mobility, bad jobs, discouraged workers, wealth inequality, labor market deregulation, job losses, immigrants and inequality and productivity and real income, this is the definitive resource.
On "China Dumps US Bonds" Attempts At Clickbaiting
Submitted by Tyler Durden on 06/04/2011 14:10 -0500
In the aftermath of last week's disclosure to preempt the massive hoax story sourced by one "Sorcha Faal" involving a whole lot of false allegations pertaining to DSK, Russia and gold, all of it based not one single, sourcable fact, we have now been inundated with emails directing us to a story which has appeared in CNS News (and the fact that it was carried by Drudge Report does make it any easier), titled "China Has Divested 97 Percent of Its Holdings in U.S. Treasury Bills." Once again, while most readers will see right through this superficial attempt at clickbaiting, for the benefit of everyone else, we would like to briefly respond to how this article would look like when one actually looks at the facts.
Spiegel Reports Greek Bailout #2 To Surpass €100 Billion
Submitted by Tyler Durden on 06/04/2011 12:45 -0500
It's the weekend, which means another Spiegel hit piece over the solvency and stability of the Eurozone is overdue. Sure enough, the publication comes through admirably with "New Greek aid to cost more than one hundred billion euros." As a reminder, until as recently as 24 hours ago it was expected that the bailout would be at most €80 billion, with half coming from Greek privatization efforts. Naturally, this means that even more money will be transferred from taxpayer pockets to bank capital deficiency accounts. Next up: Greek bailouts 3, 4, 5, by which point Goldman will have hopefully achieved its life long ambition of opening a Goldman Sachs-branded ATM at the main entrance to the Acropolis, which GS will have LBOed using discount window capital.
Berlin Conference 2.0: Russia To Bail Out Hyperinflationary Belarus As Colonization Scramble Heats Up
Submitted by Tyler Durden on 06/04/2011 12:01 -0500Who said that only Germany is allowed to annex Greece (and soon Ireland and Portugal)? (and if Der Spiegel has anything to say about it, again, Bailout #2 is far from certain... more on that shortly). In a surprising move, Russia has decided to remind everyone just how irrelevant the IMF is now that Russia and China run the "sovereign rescue" show, and that it too can play the imperialist game just as well as the Troica. Following the recent hyperdevaluation of the Belarus Ruble as discussed on Zero Hedge, and the country's collapse into a hyperinflationary hell, Reuters has just reported that Putin, that "White Knight" of former USSR imperialist dominance, has decided to "bailout" Belarus. From Reuters: "Cash-strapped Belarus will receive a three-year $3 billion loan from a Russia-led regional bailout fund as it seeks to stabilize its economy, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin's spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Saturday. The former Soviet republic on Friday unveiled a series of measures to end the crisis, including a vow to cut its budget deficit in half, after its currency lost 36 percent of its value in May and inflation reached 20.2 percent." It is unclear just how many billions in funds will need to be derived from forced "privatization" of Belarus assets for the benefit of the old KGB guard, or what the interest rate on the rescue loans will be. What is more than clear is that as more and more countries fall into the toxic debt spiral, their neighbors who actually have capital and/or natural resources (ergo the irrelevance of the IMF), will "bail them out" only to remind the world that colonization is what it has always been truly about. Berlin Conference ver 2.0 - here we come.
Guest Post: On The Ethics Of Mortgage Loan Default
Submitted by Tyler Durden on 06/04/2011 11:39 -0500Is it ethical for the American homeowner whose mortgage has been securitized to default, even If they are not financially distressed? First, consider it is unlikely that marketable, fee simple, insurable title can be obtained as a result of fulfilling the obligations of the related promissory note. On the contrary the titles to some 60 million homes in America are badly clouded. Secondly, encouraging investment in an asset class that has been artificially inflated, then deliberately destroying the price of the asset, as part of a separate profit making scheme is unethical, and any agreement based on this type of fraud is grounds to consider the original debt instrument used in the agreement null and void. Fortunately these grounds are unnecessary, as increasingly US courts are ruling that these mortgages are already invalid for numerous other reasons.
The REAL Flight to Quality Trade (It Ain’t Dollars)
Submitted by Phoenix Capital Research on 06/04/2011 11:26 -0500While the whole world seems to have turned against Gold in the last month, I’d like to note that this latest pullback in the precious metals’ space has given us an extraordinary opportunity to load up on premium quality inflation hedges at bargain basement prices. It’s also told us the following...
HFT Stock Manipulation Caught On Tape
Submitted by Tyler Durden on 06/04/2011 10:54 -0500It doesn't get any more blatant than this. Once again, courtesy of Nanex we present to our incompetent regulators prima facie evidence of what is outright tape painting via what is an apparent HFT algo trying either to front run an order, to test for the presence of other predatory algos, and in general to take advantage of Reg NMS only protecting displayed liquidity over non-displayed (a topic we discussed two years ago). In the example below, which shows unique trades in the stock of XEL.PR.G, in the span of 30 seconds, 430 shares are bought up on the way up from $90.5 to $102.25, and then sold off once again in another 10 seconds, hitting all bids as soon as they appeared. Now this is not some HFT-darling which trades millions of shares per day (and sees blasts of tens of millions of quote stuffing packets in hours) and thus will likely be ignored by the general population... until it does hit some stock that people do care about. Naturally the implication is that, as Nanex points out, if all stocks traded/quoted at this frequency, even the the SEC could figure this out in a few weeks, after assembling a multi-discipilanary team of course. Is it any wonder that virtually nobody trades on open exchanges anymore (yes, most trading, or what's left of it has shifted to Sigma X and other dark pools) where the only survival tactic for such legacy monsters as the NYSE and Nasdaq is to laterally buy up as many of their peers as they can now that organic growth no longer exists: gotta love a world in which there are 83 different ATS venues, all of which permit some permutation of millions of stock manipulation strategies.
Social Security - The Liberals are killing it!
Submitted by Bruce Krasting on 06/04/2011 10:17 -0500Allow me a rant on a nice Saturday morning.
Weekly Chartology, Or What To Do When You Are Dead Wrong And Every Economic Release Disappoints Relative To Consensus
Submitted by Tyler Durden on 06/04/2011 09:59 -0500Goldman's David Kostin is out with his latest chartpack which is as always chock full of pretty pictures, and the usual set of Monday morning quarterbacked recommendations. Just as it was Zero Hedge who first called Goldman's BS out in December of 2010 on their economic "fundamental shift" resurgence call, so it was ZH again first who suggested the QE Unwind compression trade, "Utilities and Consumer Staples as the long led in a compression trade, while shorting Industrials and Consumer Discretionary." Sure enough here comes Goldman observing "The rotation away from Cyclicals (Financials, Industrials, Materials) and into Defensive sectors (Health Care, Utilities, Consumer Staples, Telecom) continues to follow closely the historical trading pattern typically exhibited when the ISM index is declining from a peak back to 50" following a week in which "every US economic data release disappointed relative to consensus expectations. ISM manufacturing index (53.5 actual vs. median consensus expectation of 57.1), consumer confidence (60.8 vs. 66.6), nonfarm payrolls (54,000 vs. 165,000), and unemployment rate (9.1% vs. 8.9%) all posted negative surprises and pushed the cumulative 22-day rolling US MAP (macro data assessment) score to its lowest level since the beginning of our data in 2001. Domestic vehicle sales (9.2 million vs. 9.7) and home prices as measured by S&P/Case-Shiller index also disappointed." Perhaps it is time to launch the REDI Zero soft dollar machine: if Goldman makes billions and is dead wrong all the time, we would be trillioniares...So naturally, here's Goldman, pitching the high "Sharpe Ratio" basket, or back to defensives. Of course, anyone who listened to use almost three weeks ago already has this on.
ANGeLa and THe BLaCK SWaN
Submitted by williambanzai7 on 06/04/2011 01:21 -0500By William Banzai Yeats






