Archive - Apr 3, 2014

It appears the U.S. government is doing its best to ensure that nobody anywhere in any corner of planet earth will ever trust American technology again (or U.S. aid for that matter). This process of distrust first really got going with the Edward Snowden revelations, which demonstrated that essentially all major U.S. tech firms are mere wards of the state with little to no privacy protections, and absolutely zero backbone. This story of the U.S. government covertly creating a “Cuban Twitter” called ZunZuneo in order to overthrow the regime there has enormous long-term ramifications on many, many levels, which we will address below...

High Frequency Trading (HFT) covers such a broad swathe of 'trading' and financial markets that Mark Cuban (yes, that Mark Cuban), who has been among the leading anti-HFT graft voices in the public realm, decided to put finger-to-keyboard to create an "idiots guide to HFT" as a starting point for broad discussion. With screens full of desperate "stocks aren't rigged" HFT defenders seemingly most confused about what HFT is and does, perhaps instead of 'idiots' a better term would be "practitioners."

The most common pushback from any China bull, industrial commodity bull, US equity market bull, or in fact any risk market in general "bull" is "won't the authorities just pull the trigger? Won't they just stimulate?" As UBS Commodities group notes, the debate is most advanced for China and for industrial commodities, where the weakness in the economy, and the sharp commodity price falls of recent weeks, has consensus looking for a stimulus driven bounce. UBS does not think so - the authorities in China and the US have become increasingly focused on structural issues - which, simply put, means they are less willing to act than before. It appears last night's mini (railway-focused) stimulus supports the expectations of no "bazooka".

Goldman Sachs forecasts a 200k increase in non-farm payrolls for March - in line with consensus - and believe last month's 175k print supports the ongoing positive trend (in light of the weather effect). Key employment indicators looked mixed-to-better in March, and despite the continued cold temperatures, less extreme weather conditions overall should give an additional boost to job gains this month. Citi suggests the weather could have knocked 172k off payrolls overall from Dec to Jan and are more hopeful, expecting a 240k print. Their biggest fear, a greater than 275k print (which is the high bar that Joe Lavorgna has set) could see asset markets reacting badly (on the basis of quicker Fed tightening).

Japanese stocks have been bouncing back higher in the last few days as considerably worse data than expected combined with the looming consumption tax hike (which the government has to do to show the market that is, at a minimum, somewhat fiscally responsible) are driving both stocks and JPY to discount a near future dominated by an even bigger stimulus by the BoJ. However, casting a big shadow over all this is what happened the last time Japan raised its consumption tax...

Just buy the book Damnit, it’s all in there.

Exclusive image capture...

Yes, even Wall Street is a "victim" of open source.

This infographic (via Visual Capitalist), part two in our 2014 Gold Series (part 1 here), covers the full supply picture behind the yellow metal. Within the planet’s crust, there is only 1 gram of gold for every 250 tonnes (550,000 lbs) of earth. Gold’s rarity means that finding economic deposits is extremely difficult. To understand how gold mining and supply work, we must first unearth how gold deposits form...

Courtesy of Abenomics, all Japan managed to do is import the bad "non-core" inflation, which has sent food and energy prices through the rood (confused why the rest of the world is suffering from an episode of acute deflation? look no further than deflation-exporting Japan) and made "non-core" purchases like food and gas increasingly more unaffodrable to the ordinary Japanese consumer. Today it just went from bad to worse, because as Nikkei reports, gasoline prices at the pump surged to a 5-year high in Japan this week, due to tax increases. The Oil Information Center says the average retail price was 164.1 yen, or about 1.6 dollars, per liter, as of April 1st. That's an increase of about 4.9 cents from the previous week.

While we fail to see any occupations listed for "insider trading hedge fund managers" or "high frequency market manipulators" in the just released list by the BLS listing the number of workers and wages earned for all official US occupations, we supposed it will have to do, incomplete as it may be.

As the Ukrainian crisis festers and other dangers in the Pacific and the Mideast grow, an odd consensus among alternative analysts is taking hold — namely the belief that President Vladimir Putin and Russia represent some kind of opposition to globalization and the rule of corporate financiers. Perhaps moments in Putin’s rhetoric have seduced elements of the Liberty Movement into assuming that Russia is a “victim” in the grand schemes of Western oligarchy and that Russia is truly the "white knight", the underdog willing to stand up against the New World Order. We're sorry to say that nothing could be further from the truth. Russia is just as much a tool of the global elite today as it was after the Bolshevik Revolution, and Vladimir Putin is just as much a socialist puppet as Barack Obama.

So, they might be on the opposite side of the Atlantic Ocean, but the Europeans and the Americans have one thing very much in common.