Transparency

With Nattie down 6% in early trading, the most in 2 months, pressing to new record lows and oil prices continuing their carnage, the energy complex is a mess. OilPrice.com's Nick Cunningham warns, while the glut in oil is expected to continue for the next year or so before balancing in late 2016, the pain for liquefied natural gas (LNG) could be just beginning...

As many hedge funds are getting “crushed” this year it has become fashionable to bash the industry’s entire fee structure…typically [but not always] 2% management fee & 20% of profits. Obviously, there won’t be too many 20% profit distributions to the portfolio management teams this year but the 2% management fee has been/will be applied. And that may “piss off” some people.

Overnight Hillary Clinton, in her latest populist push to present herself as "one of the people" wrote a NYT op-ed explaining "How I'd Rein In Wall Street", we were wondering if it would include draining Wall Street balance sheets with mandatory and far greater donations to her campaign by Wall Street firms - a strategy that may actually work as it hits banks where it hurts the most: their money. To our disappointment, this was not included.

Monetary policy 'rules' are no more accurate at determining interest rates than meteorologists are at forecasting the weather. The only difference between the two is that weathermen are precise on occasion, whereas the federal funds rate under the Taylor Rule is, at best, less wrong. Setting the price of money and credit in the name of unleashing the economy’s supposed potential output is the equivalent of enacting price controls on milk to unlock its full buying power. It’s a fallacy that cannot be achieved. The sooner the Fed pawns off its printing press, the sooner its market distortions will be lifted; and the sooner that each individual will be able to make rational decisions that make sense for not only himself or herself, but for the economy at large as well.

So what do you do when you’re a barbaric monarchy with a justice system remarkably similar to ISIS, but at the same time want to remain very close ally of the U.S. government? You create a sophisticated propaganda network, naturally.

For all intents and purposes, the National Security Agency has supposedly ceased its bulk collection of metadata from Americans’ phone calls, but read the fine print: nothing is going to change.

It is Pedro's "courage to write" what Bernanke conveniently forgot to add in his memoir, that makes this review so much more memorable than the generic sycophantic tripe written by his "access journalism" peers.

The IMF’s Executive Board decision today means that the yuan will be included in the SDR basket from Oct. 1, 2016, effectively anointing the yuan as a major reserve currency and represents recognition that the yuan’s status is rising along with China’s place in global finance. The weight in the basket will be 10.92%, larger than JPY and GBP. However, as politically-motivated as this decision may have been, now comes the hard part for China.

The IMF will decide if it's 'Game Over' for the reserve status of the Greenback...

CFTC meets this morning to propose a registration standard applying to as many as 100 firms that have changed markets by trading their own money using complex algorithms and advanced technology. As Bloomberg notes, this proposal follows more than 5 yrs of debate about market disruptions, such as the May 2010 flash crash. Crucially, as is well known now, high-speed, automated trading in recent years has surged to account for almost three-quarters of certain derivatives markets which means any regulatory crackdowns will no doubt have impacts on markets; as former CFTC chief Chilton noted “Clearly some of the rules are antiquated.”

In a world where every market is rigged and manipulated - either by central banks, by algos, or by human actors eager to "get rich quick" - we doubt many will care that the New York Attorney General has finally figured that the FX market was also rigged by spoofing (something we have pointed out since 2013), and yet this latest development is worth pointing out. The reason for that is not so much the companies which are named in this latest crackdown on widespread manipulation in the world's most important market (now that all central banks are engaged in currency warfare) but which are not.

Those who don’t understand history are doomed to repeat it, those that do understand are doomed to watch in horror while everyone else repeats it.

There are so many strands of lies and distortions that it is now almost impossible for Official Washington to disentangle itself from all the false narratives that the neocons and the liberal hawks have spun in support of their various “regime change” strategies. So, the American people are left with the mainstream U.S. news media endlessly repeating storylines that are either completely false or highly exaggerated. Official Washington’s many false narratives about Russia and Syria have gotten so tangled that they have become a danger to the struggle against jihadist terrorism and conceivably a threat to the future of the planet.

Janet Yellen’s astonishing letter to the Speaker of the House, Paul Ryan, is a sign that the central bank is panicking over the fact that Congress is unhappy with the job it has been doing.