Archive - Apr 12, 2015

BANZAI7 FOOD AND BEVERAGE WARNING

The now-discontinued operation, carried out by the DEA’s intelligence arm, was the government’s first known effort to gather data on Americans in bulk, sweeping up records of telephone calls made by millions of U.S. citizens regardless of whether they were suspected of a crime. It was a model for the massive phone surveillance system the NSA launched...

Forget the weather, it must be the smog. China just announced total carnage in its trade data for March:

CHINA'S MARCH IMPORTS FALL 12.3% Y/Y IN YUAN TERMS; EST. -11.3%
CHINA'S MARCH EXPORTS FALL 14.6% Y/Y IN YUAN TERMS; EST. +8.2%
CHINA'S MARCH TRADE SURPLUS 18.16 BILLION YUAN; EST 250B YUAN

So what exactly was the Chinese stock market 'discounting'?

China (and Hong Kong) stock markets opened gap higher and kept going (China Merchants Bank up over 20%) as The China Securities Depositary and Clearing Co. (CSDC) announced that investors will no longer be restricted to only one stock account in China's A-share market and each can have up to 20 accounts from Monday. Which makes perfect sense because what every elementary-school-educated housewife speculator needs is 19 more places to speculate in.

A man leads San Bernardino, CA police on a two hour, highspeed horse chase before being tased and beaten by officers who were attempting to arrest him for identity theft and police in Cottonwood, AZ end up in a fatal melee with a family Christian band (who officers say were immune to pepper spray, stun guns, and batons) living out of their car in a Wal-Mart parking lot. 

As many are increasingly coming to terms with the 'obvious failure of fiat currency', the inevitavble question arises "what next?" Earlier this year, we discussed the possibility of a Chinese- or Russian-currency backed by gold, amid the increasing calls (domestically and abroad) for an end to USD Reserve hegemony; but this weekend, as Bloomberg reports, Lord Meghnad Desai, chairman of The Official Monetary and Financial Institutions Forum, stated that IMF Special Drawing Rights (SDR) should contain some gold to help stabilize the currency.

“In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act.” ? George Orwell

“You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you mad.” ? Aldous Huxley

In a critical disclosure this past Friday which quietly flew under everyone's radar, the Bundesbank director responsible for bank supervision, Andreas Dombret, who is also a member of the board of the European Central Bank’s Single Supervisory Mechanism told Bloomberg in an interview in Johannesburg that "German banks should expect to lose at least half of their investments in bonds of Austrian bad bank Heta Asset Resolution AG and make the appropriate provisions... I think this situation has to be taken seriously by the German banks... if I were to put a number on this I would say it should be a minimum of a 50 percent provision for potential losses."

We are sure this is nothing to worry about... and Japanese officials will re-iterate that everything is on track but when a snake-like robot sent to inspect a reactor containment vessel at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant dies three hours into the operation, one might wonder just how "contained" the radiation situations really is.

As Nanex's Eric Hunsader pointed out, while the well-paid HFT-lobbyists proclaim their rigging clients "knit together liquidity from all markets," it appears BATS' new CEO (since the lying old one left) disagrees. The exchange that caters significantly to the front-running HFTs believes it knows how to improve the market for thinly traded stocks... it will stop handling them.

Giving up the spotlight is never easy. The United States, like many aging celebrities, is struggling to share the stage with new faces, especially China. The upcoming meetings of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank – two institutions dominated by the US and its Western allies – provide an ideal opportunity to change that. The US must come to terms with the reality that the world has changed. The longer the US remains in a state of denial, the more damage it will do to its interests and its global influence, which remains substantial, if more constrained than before.

“I just have the same horrific sense I had" before, Druckenmiller said to an audience at the Lost Tree Club in North Palm Beach, Florida (according to a transcript obtained by Bloomberg). "Our monetary policy is so much more reckless and so much more aggressively pushing the people in this room and everybody else out the risk curve that we’re doubling down on the same policy that really put us there."

Some folks have stopped hoping...

With 'proxy' wars in the Middle East increasing morphing into actual confrontations, it is becoming ever more crucial to keep track of just who 'supports' (or does not) the various players...