Archive - Jul 2015

• WHEN ARE RESULTS DUE?
  
• WHAT ARE GREEKS BEING ASKED TO VOTE ON?
  
• WHAT DO THE POLLS SHOW?
  
• WHAT IF IT’S YES?
  
• WHAT IF IT’S NO?
  
• HOW WILL MARKETS REACT?

The Greece impasse set to culminate on Sunday continues to have a massive impact on at least one stock market, unfortunately it is the wrong one, located on a continent which is mostly irrelevant to the future of the Greek people (unless that whole AIIB bailout does take place of course). We are, of course, talking about China which as noted earlier, started off horribly, plunging over 7% with over 1000 stocks hitting 10% limit down, then in the afternoon session mysteriously recovering all losses and even trading slightly higher on the day, before the late selling returned once more, and the Shanghai Composite plunged to close down 5.8%: an unimaginable 20% total roundtrip move!

... at this very moment, politicians from Spain's Podemos to Italy Five Star movement are drafting memos demanding that the IMF evaluate their own debt sustainability. Or rather unsustainability.

We don’t have a “capitalist” economic system. What we have, instead, is a perversion of capitalism. This pseudo-capitalism is a suicidal model of pure, economic exploitation, combined with a plethora of nonsensical dogma and policies.

As Stalin said, “Those who vote decide nothing. Those who count the vote decide everything.”

Earlier this week the FISA court ruled the NSA can continue the bulk collection of phone metadata until November 29. This comes after Congressional gridlock allowed for Section 215 of the Patriot Act, the legal cover for the collection program, to expire on June 1. 

When a message needs to be sent by the powers that be, the German press can always be relied upon to send it, no matter how divisive (as they did here, here, and here). So it is no surprise that with the stakes appearing to have never been higher, Handelsblatt unleashes the following...

"Merkel's fear was that Athens would be unable to overcome its problems even with an additional haircut, since it would not be able to handle the remaining debt... Within the German cabinet, Finance Minister Wolfgang Schnaeuble alone continued to strongly back another haircut... with IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde described as undecided on the issue."

The top 1 percent aren't killing the American Dream. Something else is - if you live in the wrong place. We like to tell ourselves that America is the land of opportunity, but the reality doesn't match the rhetoric - and hasn't for awhile.

As one local reporter put it, despite being told not to say anything negative, "the government appeared to have lost its ability to manage the market." Chinese stocks are down 4-5% at the open, pressing new cycle lows with Shenzhen and CHINEXT now down 25% from last week. As The South China Morning Post reports, many investors said the government was at least partly to blame for the collapse because it encouraged them to go into the market - for months, state-owned media have issued daily commentaries to encourage people to load up on shares.

"Though its existence was secret until last year, JTRIG quickly developed a distinctive profile in the public understanding, after documents from NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed that the unit had engaged in “dirty tricks” like deploying sexual “honey traps” designed to discredit targets, launching denial-of-service attacks to shut down Internet chat rooms, pushing veiled propaganda onto social networks and generally warping discourse online."

"I believe there are two ways to give Greece Chinese aid. First, within the framework of the international aid through EU countries. Second, China could aid Greece directly. Especially considering the Silk Road Economic Belt and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank. China has this ability," Fan Mingtao director of the Quantitative Finance Department at China's Institute of Quantitative and Technical Economics told Sputnik China. It would be difficult to imagine a more fitting pilot program for the world’s newest supranational lender than a rescue package for the birthplace of Western democracy which has been brought to its knees by that most Western of all multilateral institutions, the IMF.

Hedges accounted for 15% of Q1 revenue for nearly half of North American E&P companies, Bloomberg reports. "Now the safety net is going away."

While the Chinese recently found out that making money from trading is, in fact, not "easier than farmwork," it appears in America, trading stocks is back en vogue... Meet 2014 Playmate of the Year, Kennedy Summers, who has given it all up to become a day trader...