Archive - May 25, 2015

Another day, another dip to be bought aggressively in China. The only catalyst for moar - aside from "well it was up yesterday" - is the news that the Shanghai-HK Stock Exchange aggregate quota will be abolished, leaving room for more speculative excess to flood into 500%-gainers.  CSI-300 is now up almost 6% since Friday's close and Shenzhen and CHINEXT are soaring back from underperformance yesterday. To round things out on a superlative note, the Shenzhen Composite - which contains all the ponzi-based self-collateralized idiot-makers, is now up over 100% year-to-date. Simply put, you can't keep a bad market down...

Over the weekend, in a surprisingly close vote showing just how deeply the ruling Greek Syriza party has splintered, the hard line "Left Platform" a faction within Syriza, proposed that Greece stop paying its creditors if they continue with "blackmailing tactics" and instead seek "an alternative plan" for the debt-racked country. Its motion called for the government to default on the IMF loans rather than compromise to creditor demands, among which a change to value-added tax rates, further liberalization of the labor market and changes to the pension system, including further cuts to pensions and wages. According to the NYT, which reported the vote first, the proposal was narrowly rejected, with 95 people voting against and 75 in favor.

Just to confirm that if the US had hoped it could threaten Beijing into submission and force the Politburo into curbing its expanionist appetit, it was dead wrong, the nationalist Global Times, a paper owned by the ruling Communist Party’s official newspaper, the People’s Daily, said in a Monday editorial that war was “inevitable” between China and the United States unless Washington stopped demanding Beijing halt the building of artificial islands in the disputed waterway.

This sort of thing isn’t supposed to happen.

In real democracies, governments would do what the citizens who put them in office want them to do. The United States and other Western democracies make a mockery of that ideal. But, even so, there are limits; governments cannot defy public opinion on matters of great moment indefinitely. Enabling the Saudi ruling class, and the rulers of the other Gulf states, to direct American foreign policy to the extent that they do, and to get away with whatever they please, is hardly the least of it; but neither is it the only cause for concern.

Forget "you'll know it when you see it" - Chinese internet firms are hiring en masse...

Three weeks after the first supposed attack by Islamic State supporters in the US, in which two ISIS "soldiers" wounded a security guard before they were killed in Garland, Texas, the time has come to raise the fear stakes. In an article posted in the terrorist group's English-language online magazine Dabiq (which as can be see below seems to have gotten its design cues straight from Madison Avenue and is just missing glossy pages filled with 'scratch and sniff' perfume ads ) ISIS claimed that it has enough money to buy a nuclear weapon from Pakistan and "carry out an attack inside the United States next year."

True appreciation is measured by our depth of experience and understanding. Today, less than 1 percent of the population reaps the benefits resulting from the service and sacrifice of the less than 1 percent of the population who serve the politicians elected by the majority of people who separate, and have no direct involvement with, these two segments of society. And this disconnection and separation is no accident.

It’s amazing when you think about it– a combat veteran who lost a leg supposedly fighting for ‘freedom’ can’t have the medical procedure he needs because a destructive government bureaucracy.  That’s what freedom means today in America. And nobody’s fighting for it. Soldiers are off risking life and limb for oil companies, banks, and defense contractors. And citizens are distracted with bread and circuses. All the while, government power continues to expand at the expense of the individual.

Compare and contrast...

Following our exposure of the plunge in Lake Mead water levels post Friday's earthquake, officials were quick to point out that the drop was "due to erroneous meter readings" - which in itself is odd given we have not seen such an aberration before in the measurements. The data today shows a super surge in the Lake Mead water level - which, even more mysteriously, indicates from pre-earthquake to now, the Lake has risen by the most in a 3-day-period in years (as long as we have found history). How was this level 'manufactured' you ask? Simple - discharge flows from the Hoover Dam were curtailed dramatically. We are sure there is a simple explanation for all this...

Psychology is very often how societies avoid looking in the mirror. A major structural reason for the surging interest in happiness is somewhat more disturbing, and concerns technology. Until relatively recently, most scientific attempts to manipulate how someone else was feeling occurred within formally identifiable institutions, such as psychology laboratories, hospitals, workplaces, focus groups, or some such. This is no longer the case. In July 2014, Facebook published an academic paper containing details of how it had successfully altered hundreds of thousands of its users’ moods, by manipulating their news feeds. There was an outcry that this had been done in a clandestine fashion. But as the dust settled, the anger turned to anxiety: would Facebook bother to publish such a paper in future, or just get on with the experiment anyway and keep the results to themselves?

Never forget...

On June 5, all eyes will be on OPEC as the group convenes in Vienna to discuss its course for the second half of 2015.

What the honey-bee die-off means for humanity...