Archive - Apr 1, 2015 - Story

One just has to laugh at this point.

Barron’s should have published its gushing cover story on Jamie Dimon’s stewardship of JPMorgan today – as an April Fool’s joke.

For the first time in the state's history, Governor Jerry Brown has directed the State Water Resources Control Board to implement mandatory water reductions across California, in an effort to reduce water usage by 25 percent.

With both channel stuffing and subprime out of the window if only for the time being, GM, whose China sales are falling off a cliff, had to come up with some urgent source of end demand. And thanks to recently disclosed data, we now know that "once a Government Motors, always a Government Motors", because just the first quarter of 2015, the average annual increase in sales to Uncle Sam, aka the Government was a whopping 24%, just  about 100% higher than GM's headline rate of sales increase!

It's the debt-saturated "worst since Lehman" economy!

Blogger Ben’s work is already done. In his very first substantive post as a civilian he gave away all the secrets of the monetary temple. The Bernank actually refuted the case for modern central banking in one blog. The truth is the real world of capitalism is far, far too complex and dynamic to be measured and assessed with the exactitude implied by Bernanke’s gobbledygook. In fact, what his purported necessity for choosing a rate “somewhere” actually involves is the age old problem of socialist calculation.

The Atlanta Fed's GDPNow model forecast for real GDP growth (seasonally adjusted annual rate) in the first quarter of 2015 has been downgraded once again... to 0.0 percent on April 1, down from 2.3 percent on Feb 13th.

The scenes seen on the video were chaotic and very wobbly, said Bild, adding, screams and shouts of "My God" in various languages could be heard, indicating the passengers knew what was happening.

Three weeks ago, when Hillary Clinton was scrambling to come up with a credible lie to explain why she was using a personal server for email distribution - one that was not US government property and thus exempt from official FOIA requests - she said during a press conference at the United Nations that the reason was simple: it was simply a matter of "convenience" of carrying just one device."when I got to work as secretary of State, I opted for convenience to use my personal email account, which was allowed by the State Department, because I thought it would be easier to carry just one device for my work and for my personal emails instead of two." As it turns out she lied. Again.

Is it possible that capitalism’s underlying focus on profits, and the necessity for endless purchases of goods and services, has a practical limit?

Despite the second (or third) dead cat bounce of the day in US equities (as machines pin the S&P to VWAP), US Treasury yields are collapsing-er to the lows of the day. While 30Y and 10Y yields are now down 10bps or so from earlier highs, the move in 2Y is most notable as it has broken below the 200-day moving average for the first time in 2 months... suggesting that no matter how assuredly The Fed says it will raise rates, the market sees Yellen cutting 'em back promptly.

Crude oil prices continue to push higher. Following the earlier drop in US crude production this week and PEMEX oil rig fire, we now have more substantive headlines from Switzerland:

*IRAN TAKES PAUSE IN TALKS, NO DOCUMENT SEEN TODAY: TASS CITES UNIDENTIFIED EUROPEAN DIPLOMAT

Of course, one wonders who really wants a deal now... with over-supply already a problem, any sanctions-lifting would boomerang back to US Shale firms and further destabilize the illusion of recovery in America.

"If you’re incompetent, you can’t know you’re incompetent. [...] the skills you need to produce a right answer are exactly the skills you need to recognize what a right answer is."