Archive - Nov 7, 2014

But... but... that weak jobs report was so very strong. Who could have possibly seen that coming?

Another month, another $14.5 billion increase in student and car loans, offset by a measly $1.4 billion in credit card debt, following last month's upward revised $200 million drop in revolving debt. Total consumer debt in September increase by $15.9 billion, just below the $16.0 billion estimate, and the problem is that with the Fed's credit injection fading, someone has to step on the borrowing pedal. Alas, if one takes away student and car loans, the credit creation is not nearly enough to push US consumption higher. In any event, the most amusing chart is the following. It simply screams sustainable.

If you like your boots-on-the-ground, you can keep them... and have some more. Whether a strawman or not, Reuters reports that according to US officials, the U.S. military has drawn up plans to significantly increase the number of American forces in Iraq, which now total around 1,400, as Washington seeks to bolster Iraqi forces battling the Islamic State. The White House and Pentagon were expected to announce further details later Friday.

"Surprises like this are poison to the stock market, and this is one of the big surprises," exclaims the head of listing for Nasdaq's Copenhagen exchange as OW Bunker A/S - a marine fuel bunker company - went from $1 billion-plus IPO in April to bankruptcy today.

Back in September, there was a summit meeting in a city that involved an organization that most Americans have never heard of. Mainstream media coverage was all but nonexistent. The place was Dushanbe, the capital of Tajikistan, a country few Westerners could correctly place on a map. But you can bet your last ruble that Vladimir Putin knows exactly where Tajikistan is. Because the group that met there is the Russian president’s baby. It’s the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), consisting of six member states: Russia, China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan. We should care what’s going on inside the SCO. Once India and Pakistan get in (and they will) and Iran follows shortly thereafter, it’ll be a geopolitical game changer.

In future years, when historians try to ascertain why on earth the massive middle class of the United States willingly allowed itself to be completely hollowed out......

Getting 'shellacked' in the Midterms, coming 2nd to Putin as the world's most powerful person, and now, as AP reports, The Supreme Court agrees to rule on insurance subsidies in a new challenge to ObamaCare. Simply put they will judge whether subsidies for middle- and lower-income people are legal... As Think Progress warns, "if it succeeds, the likely result will be a “death spiral” where higher premiums cause healthy consumers to drop out of the insurance market, which will cause higher premiums, which will cause more consumers to drop their insurance."

• Barclays PLC
• HSBC Holdings PLC
• Royal Bank of Scotland Group PLC
• UBS AG
• Citigroup
• J.P. Morgan Chase
• Bank of America Corp. Bank of America

What really matters... "It's time to be invested... the correction is over... we've got good jobs number [which was a miss], GDP is there [which is being revised lower each day], earnings are there [which have been revised drastically lower for the rest of 2014 and 2015]... and even if we do get a dip down, we've got Mr Bullard to come in and reassure the markets..."

In the space of the last 3 weeks, Japanese stocks have swung from the most overbought in 18 months to the most oversold in 3 years to the most overbought in 18 months again. This is the fastest and most violent swing in TOPIX on record as ever-more-desperate hot money chases central bank actions around the world. As Bloomberg reports, “Japan is a very unnerving market because it behaves like an uneducated brat,” said Mikio Kumada, Hong Kong-based global strategist at LGT Capital Partners, which manages about $50 billion. Following the double-whammy of GPIF allocations and BoJ expansion, he warns "you don’t know what it’s going to do in the next moment and in many ways it’s unpredictable."

Presented with no comment....

In reality, there is nothing surprising in Matt Taibbi's latest piece since returning to Rolling Stone from the Intercept, as it tells a story everyone is by now is all too familiar with: a former bank employee (in this case Alayne Fleischmann) who was a worker in a bank's (in this case JPM) mortgage operations group, where she observed and engaged in what she describes as "massive criminal securities fraud" and who was fired after trying to bring the attention of those above her to said "criminal" activity. The story doesn't stop there, and as Carmen Segarra already showed, when she revealed that Goldman runs the NY Fed, once Alayne was let go and tried to "whistleblow" on the house of Jimon from the outside, she found the that US Department of Justice headed by Eric Holder is just as, if not more, corrupt, and in his desperate attempt to prevent discovery and bring JPM et al to justice, he would stretch the statue of limitations on frauds committed during the crisis long enough to where nobody had any legal recourse any more, up to and including the US taxpayer.

Job cut announcements in tech doubled from a year ago. Worst year since 2009.