Archive - Jun 2015 - Story

With capital controls already imposed on Greece, some have wondered if this is as bad as it gets. Unfortunately, as the Cyprus "template" has already shown us, for Greece the nightmare on Eurozone street is just beginning.

The entire Western edifice rests on lies. There is no other foundation. Just lies. This makes truth an enemy. Enemies have to be suppressed, and thus truth has to be suppressed.

To summarize: the first revenue drop for the S&P in 5 years, a major downward revision in EPS now expecting just 1% increase in 2015 EPS, a 25% cut to GDP forecasts, a machete taken to corporate profits and 10 Yields, and not to mention double digit sales declines for some of the most prominent tech companies in the world. And that, in a nutshell, is the "strong fundamentals" that everyone's been talking about.

"...anyone who knows mathematics can see that the United States is on the verge of collapse because its debt has gone exponential, but no European (never mind American) politician can state the obvious, no matter how obvious it is. American officials and politicians are definitely puppets, controlled by corporate lobbyists and shady oligarchs. But here's a shocker: these are also puppets - controlled by the simple imperatives of profitability and wealth preservation, respectively. In fact, it's puppets all the way down. And what's at the bottom is a giant, ever-expanding, financial black hole."

"Local debt issuance sucks liquidity, reduces banks’ capital to buy bonds, contributes to stock slump," Haitong Securities says. The only option, according to the firm, is outright debt monetization by the PBoC.

"A true bubble is when something is overvalued and intensely believed. Education may be the only thing people still believe in in the United States. To question education is really dangerous. It is the absolute taboo. It’s like telling the world there’s no Santa Claus."

With massive strikes in France and now drivers shooting passengers, Uber is making headlines everywhere. While some might say any publicity is good publicity (and any disruption is good disruption), for the firm valued at $50 billion (with a stunning operating loss of $470 million and revenues of only $415 million) perhaps there is a limit to both press and disruption...

It has been a bad day for deals and deadlines all around: first Greece is about to enter July without a bailout program and in default to the IMF with the ECB about to yank its ELA support or at least cut ELA haircuts; also the US failed to reach a nuclear deal with Iran in a can-kicking negotiation that has become so farcical there is no point in even covering it; and now moments ago a third June 30 "deal" failed to reach an acceptable conclusion when Russia and Ukraine were unable to reach an agreement on gas prices at talks in Vienna on Tuesday. As a result, Ukraine is suspending its purchase of Russian gas.

Mouse finger poised and yet...

Every quarter ConvergEx's Nick Colas reviews a raft of unusual and less examined datasets with an eye to refining and adding perspective to the more traditional macroeconomic analyses. This quarter’s assessment of everything from large pickup truck and firearms sales to Google search autofills for “I want to buy/sell” shows a U.S. economy that is reasonably strong but growing only very slowly. The chief areas of concern: Food Stamp participation is still very high at 45.6 million Americans (14% of the total population) and indicators like used car prices and large pickup sales are flat.

After 8 weeks of drawdowns in crude inventories, API reports a 1.9 million barrel build in the past week. Crude's response is a 60c drop for now...

After seven long years of aggressively defending a monetary policy regime that's served to exacerbate the divide between the haves and the have-nots, the Fed looks at whether "the legend of Robin Hood" offers any helpful pointers about how to reignite America's economic growth engine. Spoiler alert: the Fed doesn't think "taking from the rich to give to the poor" would be very productive.

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