Archive - May 9, 2015 - Story

"When a Chinese honor guard joins a military parade in Russia’s capital this weekend, watched by China’s President Xi Jinping, it will mark more than just a symbolic recognition of the two countries' contributions to the Allied victory in 1945... They've basically come to a consensus that despite their differences over some national interests, they really face the same common enemy..."

The words "explosion", "New York", "black smoke", and "nuclear" strike fear into the heart of most people but according to Entergy - who runs Indian Point, "the nuclear facility has been safely shutdown following a transformer failure." Reports of a loud blast at the nuclear facility just 38 miles north of New York, with dense black smoke rising from Unit 3 are no concern and represent "no danger to public health and safety." The plant, which dates back to 1962 (although the currently used reactors were installed later in the 70s) had just been brought back online on Friday, after being shut down for a steam leak repair.

Peel back the layers of the TPP and you’ll find what some believe to be a “corporate Trojan horse.” Disguised as “free trade,” the TPP’s provisions and tactics undermine Constitutional safeguards and national sovereignty. But there’s also a silver lining. The TPP exposes who, in the marbled halls of political power, is working for whom. It forces politicians to put their cards on the table, and by their hands you will know them. Packaged as a gift to the American people that will renew industry and make us more competitive, the Trans-Pacific Partnership is a Trojan horse. It’s a coup by multinational corporations who want global subservience to their agenda. Buyer beware. Citizens beware.

"The sharp rise in bond volatility over the past week or so is reminiscent of the VaR shocks of October 2014 in US rates and April 2013 in Japanese rates," JP Morgan says, before explaining how volatility induced selling (i.e. a VaR shock) is behind the rout in German Bunds. Predictably, QE has helped create the conditions which make such episodes possible.

"If banknotes are outlawed you will be forced to hold money that is a liability of a commercial bank (deposits) and refused access to money that is the liability of the central bank (bank notes)... In such a world, zero-yielding gold would be a high-yielding instrument. If the authorities ever sought to restrict access to banknotes, then gold would suddenly find itself enfranchised as money for the first time in many decades. So, given the scale of these competing forces, it is just too early to say what might happen to the gold price, but the allure of gold will grow the more it becomes clear that central bank fiat has failed and the age of government fiat is dawning."

"... in the last decades, the basic principles of international cooperation have come to be increasingly ignored. These are the principles that have been hard won by mankind as a result of the ordeal of the war. We saw attempts to establish a unipolar world. We see the strong-arm block thinking gaining momentum. All that undermines sustainable global development. The creation of a system of equal security for all states should become our common task. Such system should be an adequate match to modern threats, and it should rest on a regional and global non-block basis. Only then will we be able to ensure peace and tranquillity on the planet."

"It's all relative," as Einstein likely said once, and the following 18 charts from Investir.ch's Loic Schmid highlight a few clear divergences - Overweight cash as "the end is near" for US equities, buy dips on weakness in EU debt and gold, position for increasing vol...

Why would financial firms pay so much for blogger Ben Bernanke’s thoughts? Aside from the marketing benefits we noted, there is one good reason. In essence, you’d want to know what Bernanke would think if he were wrong or ill-informed about some important economic issue. That is something money managers understand in a way that academics and policymakers do not, for being wrong – and knowing what to do next – is a critical skill for the professional. Getting the most information from Bernanke, either in a one-on-one or just reading his work online, boils down to just two questions: “What doesn’t he know” and “What is he sure of that is actually wrong?”

How many more shoes need to drop?

According to the IRS, in the first quarter of 2015 a record 1,335 Americans renounced their citizenship, 26% more than in the previous quarter, and 18% more than the previous all time high quarter which was in Q2 of 2013. If one anualizes the Q1 number, the number of 2015 expatriates is set to hit roughly 5,340, or a 56% increase to what was already the record expatriation year of 2014, in which 3415 Americans punched a hole through their passport.

In welfare state America its virtually certain that through one artifice or another taxes will go up and the national debt burden will rise to crushing heights in order to keep the baby boomers’ entitlements funded. While Keynesians and Wall Street stock peddlers are clueless about the implications of this - it actually doesn’t take too much common sense to get the drift. Namely, under a long-term path of fewer producers, higher taxes and more public debt, the prospects for rejuvenating the previous historically average rates of real output growth are somewhere between slim and none - to say nothing of the super-normal rates implied by the markets’ current bullish enthusiasm.

The amount of ten-year equivalents held by the Fed decreased to $1.835 trillion from $1.849 trillion in the prior week, which reduces the amount available to the private sector to $3.944 trillion from $3.919 trillion in the prior week. There were $5.778 trillion ten-year equivalents outstanding, up from $5.768 trillion in the prior week. After the Treasury issuance, maturing securities, rising interest rates, and Fed operations during the week, the Fed owned about 32.05% of the total outstanding ten year equivalents.

Meant to extend and widen trade and related commercial relationships between the participating countries, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) has also been presented as a way for the U.S. to maintain his economic and political power in East Asia in the face of the rising influence of China in that part of the world. What should be most clear is that the Trans-Pacific Partnership is not a free trade agreement. Parts of it may, no doubt, lower some trade barriers, thus making easier the production, sale and purchase of a wider variety of imports and exports. However, TPP, like all other trade agreements in the post-World War II era is a managed trade agreement.

Te most shocking development took place yesterday when the US State Department, via spokesman Jeff Rathke, told reporters that while it "regrets" that it did not get to review the new foreign government funding, it does not plan to look into the matter further, spokesman Jeff Rathke said on Thursday. "The State Department has not and does not intend to initiate a formal review or to make a retroactive judgment about items that were not submitted during Secretary Clinton's tenure," Rathke told reporters. And while the "unbiased" media kept its mouth shut, on person who did speak up was AP's Matt Lee who asked why the State Department wouldn't investigate further to determine if the tens of millions of dollars in donations had influenced her decisions while she was SecState.

Having faced up to the dreadful reality of a dust-bowl-esque California, and following Governor Jerry Brown's mandatory water restrictions, The LA Times reports a growing list of 'plans' to solve the state's water shortage is growing. From innovations to insanity - from iceberg-towing to biodegradable towels and from 'water pipelines' to bumper stickers - officials have cataloged more than 170 messages containing suggestions and received untold more in emails, phone calls and public meetings.