Archive - Jul 19, 2015

Which Will Effect U.S. Stocks By ...

"If this plan is implemented, the streets of Athens will sound the tracks of tanks"...

Just when officials proclaimed Chinese stocks "the safest in the world," and added that "the stock market rout has been ended by timely measures," CSRC announces that they are studying an exit plan for the stock stabilization plan... and carnage ensues...

Australian consumers are more worried about the medium term outlook than at the peak of the financial crisis, and rightfully so. As The Telegraph reports, by the end of the first quarter this year, Australia’s net foreign debt had climbed to a record $955bn, equal to an already unsustainable 60pc of gross domestic product, and is set to rise as RBA's bet that depreciation in the value of the country’s currency would help to offset the decline in its overbearing mining industry hasn’t happened to the extent they would have wished. Furthermore, as UBS explains, China's real GDP growth cycles have become an increasingly important driver of Australia's nominal GDP growth this last decade. With iron ore and coal prices plumbing new record lows, a Chinese (real) economy firing on perhaps 1 cyclinder, and equity investors reeling from China's collapse; perhaps the situation facing Australia is more like Greece than many want to admit, as Gina Rinehart, Australia’s richest woman and matriarch of Perth’s Hancock mining dynasty stunned her workers this week: accept a 10% pay cut or face redundancies.

*SHANGHAI COMPOSITE REACHES 4,000 LEVEL

After two days of deleveraging and a squeeze into the expiration of CSI-300 Futures pushing Chinese stocks higher, the grandmas and farmers have decided now is an opportune moment to once again start adding margin debt. Who is to blame? Simple - Chinese officials have confirmed that "the stock market rout is over thanks to their timely measures." Futures opened modestly higher but are fading as the cash open looms...

You know your true level of inflation. You know it’s not 0.1%. You know it’s somewhere between 4% and 10%. You know your government is lying to you. You know the captured corporate media perpetuates the lies. You know those in control of the government must lie to keep their Ponzi scheme going. You know they are just following the Edward Bernays playbook: “The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society." They want you to believe it’s for your own good. Do you think it’s for your own good?

Just over a year ago, Janet Yellen did the unthinkable. In a moment of clarity, The Fed called out two darlings of the momentum-chasing euphoria-driven stock buying frenzy for 'special' treatment when Yellen uttered the Cramer-mind-blowing fact that "small cap social media and biotech stock valuations were substantially stretched." It appears, judging by today's market, that she was half right...

What both Wall Street in general as well as the Federal Reserve has wrought is a market so adulterated, so anemic, and so mistrusted the euphemistic “money on the sidelines” has more in common with nursery rhymes than it does with anything reality based. There is no money on the sidelines. Nobody wants “in” to this market. Anyone with half a brain and a modicum of common sense wants out – and the outflow numbers show it still to be true.

French President Francois Hollande said that the 19 countries using the euro need their own government complete with a budget and parliament to cooperate better and overcome the Greek crisis. “Circumstances are leading us to accelerate,” Hollande said in an opinion piece published by the Journal du Dimanche on Sunday. “What threatens us is not too much Europe, but a lack of it.”... Countries in favor of more integration should move ahead, forming an “avant-garde,” Hollande said.

During the Vietnam War, surveying the shelled wreckage of Ben Tre, an American officer famously remarked, “It became necessary to destroy the town to save it.” His comment came to epitomize the sort of self-defeating “victory” that undoes what it aims to achieve. Last week, China destroyed its stock market in order to save it. Faced with a crash in share prices from a bubble of its own making, the Chinese government intervened ruthlessly, and recklessly, to turn those prices around. Its heavy-handed approach seemed to work, for the moment, but only by severely damaging far more important goals and ambitions.

Many had believed that Russia was years behind the envelope when it comes to putting advanced robotic technology on the battlefield. Until today, when a video showcased Russia's latest military equipment in Sevastopol, ranging from the "Bastion" air defense and anti-ship complexes missile system to sniper rifles and special ops naval guns, also showed none other than the Platform-M combat robot mingling among the population of this most important Crimean city.

Despite the literal hundreds of thousands of pages of information about government snooping and the Congressional “investigations” that followed, nothing has been done to curb the unabated violations of Americans’ Constitutional rights to be secure in their homes and personal effects. Thus, as always, the free market began developing its own solutions. Earlier this year an inventor by the name of Benjamin Caudill announced a device he dubbed the ProxyHam which was going to literally change everything about how those concerned with privacy could connect to the internet. However, just hours before Caudill was to reveal a fully-functioning ProxyHam at the DefCon hacking conference his presentation was abruptly cancelled - No reason was given and Caudill posted several cryptic Tweets that left many baffled; the device had been disappeared, the company was cancelling production on retail units, and the source code and blueprints would no longer be released to the public.

How the intersection of Fed policy, the post-crisis regulatory regime, and illiquid markets turned ETFs into the new financial weapons of mass destruction.