Archive - Jun 3, 2015

The revelation that the FBI assisted the Baltimore Police Department in monitoring April's violent protests prompted a wider investigation by The Associated Press. "The FBI is operating a small air force with scores of low-flying planes across the country carrying video and, at times, cellphone surveillance technology — all hidden behind fictitious companies that are fronts for the government," AP reports. 

"...the 'Ice Age' of low rates and low growth for a long time – as predicted by many analysts and economists – won’t happen. Instead, a crisis will cause a crash on Wall Street. The banks will go broke. The credit system will seize up. People will line up at ATMs to get cash and the cash will quickly run out. This will provoke the authorities to go full central bank retard. They will flood the system with “money” of all sorts. The ice will melt into a tidal wave of hyperinflation."

Ali and Frazier, Laurel and Hardy, Mayweather and Pacquiao, Liesman and Santelli, and now Schiff and Maloney. Peter and Mike join clash of the titan-like to discuss their investment strategies and expose the charts the government doesn't want you to seeas "people like Bernanke are taken seriously still and the people that did predict [the crisis] are dismissed as lunatics half the time." The wide-reaching conversation covers everything from gold and stocks to The Fed and The Dollar - Bernanke "took the coward’s way out because all he did was exacerbate the problems to postpone the day of reckoning." The air is coming out of the bubble, they warn, "Bernanke and Greenspan have absolutely destroyed America. People don’t realize what is coming..."

Presented with no comment...

Although a slew of ‘experts’ say the darndest things (e.g.Bloomberg ‘Intelligence’s Carl Riccadonna: “You had equity markets benefit from QE, but eventually QE also jump-started the broader recovery.. Ultimately everyone’s benefiting.”), we can’t get rid of this one other nagging question: who needs an expert to tell them that today’s markets are riddled with bubbles, given that they are the size of obese gigantosauruses about to pump out quadruplets?

In a sign of the times, ICAP, which handles nearly two-thirds of Treasury trading activity between HFTs and banks, is considering the implementation of circuit breakers in the Treasury market to halt trading in the event of an ‘accident.’

"It occurs to me that such massive speculation in COMEX silver futures may not be in keeping with the spirit and intent of commodity law and may suggest something is wrong with the price discovery process, since real producers and consumers of silver don't appear to be represented.... As one of the largest primary silver producers in the world, we feel that an effective and fair pricing mechanism is critical for the healthiness of our industry and for the millions of people impacted by what appears from the outside, to be manipulative practices by a concentration of players."

Yesterday, in what he has since dubbed "a tongue-in-cheek and ironic letter" to "stingy" US consumers, Fed mouthpiece Jon Hilsenrath asked, why even though "the sun shined in April... you didn’t spend much money." It appears that in the 24 hours that followed, America's "stingy" middle class decided to write back to Hilsenrath. This is what it said...

A national poll from CNN/ORC Tuesday morning found Clinton with her highest unfavorable rating in 14 years: Just 46% of those surveyed viewed her favorably, compared with 50% who viewed her unfavorably. (The last time her negatives were this high was in March 2001, when 53% of those surveyed viewed her unfavorably.) On whether Clinton “is honest and trustworthy,” CNN found just 42% of people say she is; 57% say she is not.

"In effect, you are graduating with a mortgage but no house. And what did you get? A subprime education."

"Graduates, you have been saddled with debt and bad ideas. Good luck, you're going to need it."

Taibbi called Goldman "a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity." This time, their victim was Sarvshreshth Gupta, a rookie analyst just 22 years old from the University of Pennsylvania. Gupta was found dead in a parking lot next to his apartment building on the corner of Sacramento Street and Brooklyn Place in San Francisco. He apparently fell from the building.After working 100 hours a week, he told his father, "This job is not for me." In March, he quit. However, like the crazy woman in Fatal Attraction, Goldman was not going to be ignored.

While not as obvious as spoofing crude or stock futures, today's broken market covers some of the largest and most widely-held stocks in the US market. From JPMorgan to Johnson & Johnson, and from Pfeizer to GE, shortly before the cash open this morning, 13 major stocks saw sudden massive swings from 5 to 15%...