Archive - May 20, 2015 - Story

An official WalMart “New Associate Orientation” video has surfaced. In the poorly acted but exceedingly funny nine minute clip (entitled “Protect Your Signature”), WalMart patiently explains to new hires why unions are bad.

A robust economy would allow central banks to raise rates and still allow debts to be paid down. But that is not what is happening. And it won’t happen. Junkies rarely go out and get a job... and gradually “taper off” their habit. No. They have to crash... hit bottom... and sink into such misery that they have no choice but to go cold turkey. Now, major central banks are committed to QE and ZIRP forever. They have created an economy that is addicted to EZ money. It will have to be smashed to smithereens before the feds change their policies.

Weather or no weather, even the sell-side's most exuberant hope-mongers appear to be losing faith in 'revisions', 'double-seasonals', or 'rebounds' saving the US economy...

"The government agency charged with calculating the nation's growth rate is acknowledging problems with its numbers and pledging a series of fixes over the next several months", Steve Liesman reports, confirming that the BEA is about to do precisely what we predicted two days ago and seasonally adjust its seasonally adjusted data in what might very well be the most blatant instance of goal-seeking in the history of statistical analysis.

Asked whether he would repeat an assurance he gave in late 2012 that Greece wouldn't default, Wolfgang Schäuble told The Wall Street Journal and French daily Les Echos that “I would have to think very hard before repeating this in the current situation.” To which Moody's had just one thing to add: "there is a high likelihood of an imposition of capital controls and a deposit freeze."

Record highs in stocks....thanks to the illegal miracle of spoofing.

A gentle reminder from the minutes that many seemed to have missed: "some indicators suggested that valuations remained stretched for some asset classes."

"... it was suggested that the tendency for bond prices to exhibit volatility may be greater than it had been in the past, in view of the increased role of high-frequency traders, decreased inventories of bonds held by broker-dealers, and elevated assets of bond funds."

Federal Reserve officials meeting in late April doubted they would be ready to raise short-term interest rates by midyear, according to WSJ's Jon Hilsenrath's translation of the minutes of the meeting released Wednesday. They generally did not rule out the possibility of a June rate hike, Fed officials are trying to make sense of a first-quarter economic slowdown.

FED OFFICIALS GAVE NUMBER OF REASONS WHY 1Q WEAKNESS TRANSITORY
MANY FED OFFICIALS SAW JUNE RATE RISE AS UNLIKELY
FED OFFICIALS HIGHLIGHTED RISKS OF VOLATILITY AFTER LIFTOFF

and yet:

FED OFFICIALS GENERALLY DIDN'T RULE OUT RATE RISE AT JUNE FOMC

A new report from The International Labor Organization has quantified the economic impact of subpar global demand and it is astonishing... 

It is very rare to see Dow Industrials hitting new highs as Dow Transports prints new range lows... one of them is wrong here...

In a move that could shake up the dynamics of the global oil and gas industry, the desert Kingdom is restructuring its national oil company, Saudi Aramco.

"Do no evil..." that is part from the racist stuff, would appear to be Google's new meme as The Guardian reports the somewhat unbelievable fact that searches which include the racist slur “nigger” were shown to find the White House in Google Maps. “Some inappropriate results are surfacing in Google Maps that should not be, and we apologise for any offence this may have caused. Our teams are working to fix this issue quickly,” a Google spokesperson said, claiming that it had been experiencing “escalated attacks to spam Google Maps over the past few months”.