Archive - Dec 20, 2015

And so Wall Street has set its sights on the next junk bond fund casualty, a name which is well-known to most equity market participants: none other than Waddell and Reed (WDR), the fund which rose to infamy in the aftermath of the May 2010 Flash Crash, after it was initially blamed by the SEC as the culprit behind the Dow's 1000 point crash...

"This ship is sinking," retired U.S. Army Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson tells Abby Martin, adding that "today the purpose of US foreign policy is to support the complex that we have created in the national security state that is fueled, funded, and powered by interminable war."

"The key to understand the situation here is that this is not normalizing, and we don’t have a precedent. We really don’t. We’re kind of all being soothed and reassured by the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg and the financial authorities that we’ve been down this path before, we’ve been down it many times, more often than not we’ve had rising markets as a result and, really, there’s nothing to worry about. The issue with that is there are many things this time that are entirely different..."

Unhappy with the demands for bribes from local officials, a disgruntled snake-charmer in the Uttar Pradesh region of Northern India took anti-corruption matters into his own hands...

Since The IMF 'blessed' the Yuan with the same ambivalence-to-currency-manipulation as the rest of the world's competitive devaluers, China weakened the currency for 10 straight days (a record streak). But the streak is over as tonight PBOC has decided to strengthen the Yuan fix (although admittedly by a small amount) to 6.4753 (barely off the 4 year lows).

Taken together with the rather steep drop in US industrial production, the risks of a full-blown and perhaps severe recession have undoubtedly grown. Unlike what the FOMC is trying to project via the federal funds rate, a rate that isn’t being fully complemented, either, at this point, visible economic risk is not just rising it is exploding.

Fukushima radiation just off the North American coast is higher now than it has ever been, and government scientists and mainstream press are scrambling to cover-up and downplay the ever-increasing deadly threat that looms for millions of Americans.

FIRPTA was implemented during a better era for Americans in response to international investors in the late 1980s and early 1990s buying U.S. farmland, as well as the more publicly visible buying of trophy U.S. property by the Japanese.  The US government has now expediently waived FIRPTA.

This weekend the force was strong with thirty (and forty, and fifty) year-olds, wishing to awaken memories of their youthful days with an admirable redo of the first Star Wars movie, first released nearly 40 years ago. But the force has never been stronger with Disney which is expected to rake in a record-breaking $238 million in opening weekend box office sales in the US and Canada, and a near-record $279 million overseas, a grand total of well over half a billion around the globe.

The premises of the rate increase are several: that the Fed knows best what interest rate is good for the economy... that a recovery is sufficiently established to permit an end to the emergency micro rates of the last seven years... and that otherwise everything is more or less hunky-dory. And they are all false!

With Hillary Clinton cast as their arch-nemesis, the new 'avenging superheroes' - some the same as the old avengers - of the GOP presidential nominee race each have their own unique skills...

The American people are asleep at the wheel. The blame is not totally their’s, but they do bare the brunt of the blame. The mainstream media does not report what is happening within our economy or the geopolitical arena, unless they can spew on and on about the endless rainbows, unicorns and how “America is the greatest and Putin is the devil." As Paul Craig Roberts warns, we are facing a world in change and the pace is quickening.

While world leaders signed the 'historic' agreement signed in Paris to fix the world's "greatest threat," a natural gas storage site in southern California is belching 145,000 pounds per hour of Methane - a greenhouse gas 70 times more potent than carbon dioxide. What is worse, while official proclaim this a "top priority" a fix won't arrive until spring as emergency crews recognize "the leak was far from routine, and the problem was deeper underground."