Archive - Oct 21, 2014

The sickening transformation of these United States into an authoritarian police state with an incarceration rate that would make Joseph Stalin blush, has been a common theme here. But now, as a result of our insane societal obsession with authority and disproportionate punishment, the WSJ reports that “nearly one out of every three American adults are on file in the FBI’s master criminal database.”

While we strongly suspect few are truly surprised by this turn of events, it is still yet another embarrassing stamp in the "do nothing stupid" foreign policy passport for President Obama's administration. As The Daily Beast reports, an ISIS-associated YouTube account posted a new video online Tuesday entitled, "Weapons and munitions dropped by American planes and landed in the areas controlled by the Islamic State in Kobani." While the authenticity of this latest video could not be independently confirmed, there is no doubt that the ISIS fighters in the clip are in possession of a rich bounty of American hand grenades, rounds for small rockets, and other supplies. The White House stated on CNN, "we feel very confident that, when we air drop support as we did into Kobani… we’ve been able to hit the target in terms of reaching the people we want to reach." Perhaps not all of them...

Spot the odd one out: Short-end Treasuries flat, JPY carry risk-off, IBM/KO/MCD dumped, HY Credit weak... Stocks best day in a year!

Summing it all up: Volumeless buying panic on ECB buying rumors!

What’s the true risk for the global economy? Its pronounced: /d??fl?SH(?)n/

The implication of the Ebola 2014 mutation rate is this:  A single Ebola mutation doesn't necessarily mean the virus will become 'airborne', or that the virus has altered tissue tropism, or that the virus spreads more easily.  But a high intrinsic rate of Ebola mutation means that such changes may become possible in the future.  If the number of people infected grows into the hundreds of thousands, or even low millions, then the probability of a significant 'constellation' of accumulated Ebola mutations with phenotypic impact becomes more likely.  The problem is that accumulated Ebola mutations will scale with the size of the population infected.  Conversely, in a small population, such Ebola mutations are not likely to have a significant impact.  It's a bit like the virus is buying lottery tickets... The more lottery tickets the Ebola virus 'buys', the more chances it has to 'win'. 

Just in case you need another reason to dislike the thieving Federal Reserve.

You know there's a problem with the media when Al-Jazeera is trusted more than NBC, CNN, and MSNBC...

On the heels of Sweden's military deployment (following the discovery of a damaged Russian sub), it appears Russia is taking no chances with its access to Arctic resources.As Reuters reports, the Russian defense minister announced today that Russian military units will be deployed along the entire Arctic border from Murmansk to Chukotka in 2014. Interfax adds that combat robots are also being deployed to protect Russian oil and gas infrastructure in the harsh environment of the Arctic. This should be no surprise as The Guardian notes, the Arctic’s hydrocarbon resources nevertheless exert a powerful pull. It has been compared to "a second Middle East", with oil and gas reserves thought to represent 17% and 30%, respectively, of the global total.

In what may be a resounding echo of March 2006, moments ago the New York Superintendent of Financial Services said that Ocwen had engaged in abuses that could potentially harm hundreds of thousands of borrowers. As AP reports, the state regulator issued a letter Tuesday to Ocwen Financial Corp., documenting the same kinds of suspicious actions that worsened the housing crisis and the Great Recession.

Extend the trendlines in these charts, and then ask yourself: where do they end? What will they trigger as they push ever deeper into uncharted waters?

As every good Keynesian 'knows', broken-windows are good for the economy; so that must mean that 'broken markets' are good for the... markets?

All the talk of “helping small business” and “creating jobs” is just that: talk. Those who actually show initiative to create business shouldn’t be overburdened with tax loads and bureaucratic red tap.

"For over a year now, central banks have quietly being reducing their support. As Figure 7 shows, much of this is down to the Fed, but the contraction in the ECB’s balance sheet has also been significant. Seen from this perspective, a negative reaction in markets was long overdue: very roughly, the charts suggest that zero stimulus would be consistent with 50bp widening in investment grade, or a little over a ten percent quarterly drop in equities. Put differently, it takes around $200bn per quarter just to keep markets from selling off."

"... it does not appear that we shall see the S&P futures trade into “The Box,” and that makes us all the more suspicious of share prices generally, for a market than cannot even retrace 50-62% of its previous weakness is a market that is weaker, internally, than it might at first appear. Worse, failure here suggest that a fully-fledged bear market has begun, for this would be a clear failure well below the highs of the last interim rally, with the lows of the last interim break having already been taken out to the downside." - Dennis Gartman

The NYSE has given up on re-opening the following 150 symbols in cash equities trading today... (including AAPL, XIV, and TVIX)