Archive - Apr 2015

Sit back, grab some popcorn and just watch as the exponential gets exponentialer... and then it all goes splat.

Activists plan to protest in South Carolina today, according to Reuters, after a white police officer was caught on video fatally shooting a 50-year-old black man in the back as he ran away following a traffic stop. The officer has been charged with murder and the FBI and U.S. Justice Department are investigating the shooting, the latest in a series of incidents that have raised questions about U.S. policing and race relations.

The 34th fleet of the Iranian Navy has left for the Gulf of Aden and Bab al-Mandab Strait in line with the country’s policy of safeguarding naval routes for vessels in the region. The flotilla, which comprises the Bushehr logistic vessel and Alborz destroyer, left Iran’s southern port city of Bandar Abbas on Wednesday, Navy Commander Rear Admiral Habibollah Sayyari said on the sidelines of a ceremony to deploy the fleet.  And now the punchline: the two Iran warships will now be located in the immediate vicinity of not only two US aircraft carriers, CVN-71 Teddy Roosevelt and CVN-70 Vinson, but well as the big-deck amphibious warship Iwo Jima which as reported before is providing marine support should the situation demand it.

Everything this nation once stood for is being turned on its head. Free speech, religious expression, privacy, due process, bodily integrity, the sanctity of human life, the sovereignty of the family, individuality, the right to self-defense, protection against police abuses, representative government, private property, human rights - the very ideals that once made this nation great - have become casualties of a politically correct, misguided, materialistic, amoral, militaristic culture.

As auto-loan volumes explode (and terms are extended), many of the post-cash-for-clunkers herd are rapidly coming to the realization that the loan they are carrying (and increasingly not paying) is on a wasting asset. As Goldman Sachs notes, The Manheim Index measured 124.5 in March, essentially used-car prices flat yoy after four consecutive months of solid increases. On a sequential basis, the index posted a 0.5% decline in March, following a 0.2% decline in February, confirming Goldman's expectations for a correction in residual values going forward, driven by rising inventory in the off-lease channel... and this pricing pressure is likely to spill over into new car prices.

It was back in June 2011 when we first hinted that the time of Odious Debt is rapidly approaching. Today, nearly four years later, Odious Debt is now a reality in Greece, where Zoi Konstantopoulou, the head of the Greek parliament and a SYRIZA member, released two videos which have promptly gone viral, designed to promote the investigative parliamentary committee to look into the circumstances surrounding the signing of the country’s two bailout agreements that led Greece to implement its austerity measures. According to Greek Reporter, Konstantopoulou has said that the newly established “Debt Truth Committee,” will investigate how much of the debt is “illegal” with a view to writing it off.

Massive misallocations of capital stare at us like wild caged animals through the bars of a cage in the zoo!

To the 99%: Choose your poison: death or unemployment.

The following statistics seem impossible to believe. While I wonder how accurately the UK has been tracking these numbers historically, the enormous spread seems much too large to ignore, and is a national embarrassment that should be dealt with immediately.

"The world-beating surge in Chinese technology stocks is making the heady days of the dot-com bubble look tame by comparison...the industry is leading gains in China’s $6.9 trillion stock market, sending valuations to an average 220 times reported profits," Bloomberg reports, in yet another example of how stretched the margin-driven rally in Chinese stocks has become. We present the only chart you need to understand how this will end.

The future is upon us. JP Morgan, in an effort to stop its employees from rigging markets, aiding criminals, and generally doing all of the things that appear on the unofficial global investment bank perks of employment list, is going into full-on Minority Report mode by deploying algorithms designed to predict which employees will go rogue before it actually happens.

Just as we predicted five short days ago, US-armed, Iran-backed, Houthi rebels are set to stage a repeat of the ISIS Mosul central bank plunder as local residents report "suspicious" activity outside the Aden branch of Yemen's central bank.

With many of the world's nations drawing closer to the China-led AIIB, and The Greeks in Moscow today, the news that Vietnam has agreed all of the principle aspects in creating a free trade zone between the countries of the Russia-led Eurasian Economic Union, will likely come as yet another blow to Washington.

Earlier today we suggested that while paying 67x for the BG Group is an exercise in sheer desperation and will cost Shell's shareholders dearly, one group stood to profit handsomely: the bankers who were handed the deal on a silver platter, and who stand to make hundreds of millions in M&A fees without even loading up a merger model: the deal was predetermined from the moment the CEO of Shell called his counterpart at BG.  It turns out we were wrong, and there is one person who stand to reap even more massive benefits than the banks who are just there for window dressing.  That person is BG Group's CEO Helge Lund who, according to Bloomberg calculations, stands to pocket as much as $43 million less than two months after joining the company on February 9 from Norway's Statoil.

Smart meters are now being used by authorities to crack down on “water wasters” in the state of California, but this is just the tip of the iceberg as far as what they can be used for.  Ultimately, smart meters are designed to be part of an entire “smart grid” that will enable government bureaucrats “to control everything from your dishwasher to thermostat“.   And in recent years, there has been a massive push to install smart meters in as many homes in the United States and Europe as possible.