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"The wealth management arm of Bank of America Merrill Lynch is liquidating its clients’ money from one of Paulson & Company’s funds and has put another fund under "heightened review,'" NY Times reports. As it turns out, this was not the year to be long Greece and Puerto Rico. 

We start off the overnight wrap up with the usual place, China, where in a mirror image of Wednesday's action, stocks once again started off uneventful, then gradually rose in the afternoon session and meandered near unchanged territory until the last half hour, when out of the blue they tumbled to close near the day's low, some 2.2% below yesterday's closing level.  What caused it?  One possible catalyst came from Reuters which reported that that Chinese banks were investigating their exposure to the stock market via wealth management products and loans backed by stock as collateral. 

The EU Commission has submitted a formal request to tap the mothballed EFSM for a bridge loan to Greece. The UK may look to block the proposal, but fortunately, Europe has a creative "soultion". 

On the heels of Sunday’s referendum wherein Greeks essentially gave the greenlight for an unceremonious EMU exit should Europe decide to spurn the IMF and stick to a “no debt relief” policy for Athens, PM Alexis Tsipras and his newly-appointed finance minister Euclid Tsakalotos are making a final push to break the stalemate with creditors before the ATMs go dark and a supplier credit crunch creates widespread shortages of imported goods.

Just when you think we have finally hit "peak farce" this happens:

NO EUROGROUP AGREEMENT IN SIGHT ON GREECE: EU OFFICIAL
EUROGROUP HAS BEEN 'INDEFINITELY SUSPENDED:' EU OFFICIAL
EUROGROUP MAY RECONVENE ONCE GREECE PROPOSAL RECEIVED: OFFICIAL

Germany throws its support behind a Greek referendum on euro membership while Putin invites Athens to join BRICS Bank. Meanwhile, Yanis Varoufakis has a plan for resolving Greece's debt problem — and he imagines the ECB chief is terrified of it. 

With a deal between Greece and its creditors seen as exceedingly unlikey at Monday's Eurogroup meeting, officials and analysts alike debate the logistics of default and a return to the drachma while Greeks may be called upon to choose between austerity or preparing for the possible introduction of a parallel currency and the economic malaise that will invariably follow. 

While the April payrolls came almost precisely as expected, at 223K, a tiny 5K below the 228K expected, the reason stock are soaring is that the already abysmal March payroll prints was revised even lower to just 85,000, the weakest print since June 2012, and pushing the 3 month average job gain to under 200K, or a level which the Fed has indicated previously it will hardly do much if anything material. And, as a result and as we noted in our market wrap today, with a June hike now looking unlikely, the S&P has exploded higher.

Greenlight's David Einhorn has come out swinging at the Fed-fueled fracking frenzy and, after pointing out facts that are extremely widely known, and have been explained innumerable times here, sent Shale stocks tumbling... led by the so-called "MotherFracker" - Pioneer Natural Resources... Einhorn concludes, "Either way the frackers are fracked."

"At the bottom of the cycle, firms cut labor faster than output. The higher productivity led to improving margins, earnings and stock prices. Now labor is being added faster than output, and with large companies like McDonalds, Walmart and Target announcing pay increases, unit labor costs are likely to increase further. All told, there is a good chance earnings will actually shrink this year. We think the market is too high if earnings have, in fact, peaked for the cycle, and we have reduced our net exposure by adding more shorts."

- David Einhorn

US foreign policy is becoming so easy and predictable, even Derek Zoolander can do it.

Two weeks ago, when discussing the relentless attempts to provoke, or at least greenlight another quasi war with Syria's president Assad, we wrote "one can be confident that the ISIS "campaign" will continue and get ever closer to Damascus until yet another appropriately-framed YouTube clip appears and leads to another war with Assad." Moments ago Reuters reported that "a group monitoring the Syrian civil war said on Tuesday government forces carried out a poison gas attack that killed six people in the northwest, and medics posted videos of children suffering what they said was suffocation."

As the world awaits to see if following his speech, Israel's PM will now proceed with launching a full on assault on Iran just to show he means business, or at least stage yet another false flag intervention to greenlight war in the middle east, several hundred kilometers to the northeast, the biggest offensive in the "war on ISIS" is now taking place after thousands of Iraqi soldiers and Shi'ite militiamen seek to retake the northern Iraqi town and birthplace of Saddam Hussein, Tikrit. And since there is much confusion all around since pretty much everyone in the middle east is now involved in this war on Iraqi/ISIS soil, here is a simple map showing who controls what..

Remember when shortly after the avalanche victory of the GOP in both the House and the Senate the pundits said that with the lame duck president in his final stretch, now is the time when long-overdue legislation would finally get passed? They were wrong.

• OBAMA NOTIFIES U.S. SENATE OF VETO OF KEYSTONE PIPELINE APPROVAL BILL
• OBAMA VETOES REPUBLICAN ATTEMPT TO FORCE KEYSTONE APPROVAL

As Bloomberg adds, Obama’s action sets up new round of votes in Congress that will likely fail as supporters don’t have enough backing to override veto. As a reminder, the Senate vote was 62-36, while House vote was 270-152; with a two-thirds majority required to override veto.

• Greece to submit loan request to euro zone, Germany resists (Reuters)
• Ukrainian forces start to quit besieged town (Reuters)
• Bank of Japan maintains policy, no surprises (FT)
• China Considering Mergers Among Its Big State Oil Companies (WSJ)
• Soros Shifts to Europe, Asia as Investors Cut U.S. Equities (BBG)
• Putin tells Kiev to let troops surrender as Ukraine ceasefire unravels (Reuters)
• Venezuela Squanders Its Oil Wealth (BBG)
• Swiss prosecutor raids HSBC office, opens criminal inquiry (Reuters)

• Republicans expect gains, but many races close on election day (Reuters)
• Ahead of tough election, White House blames dismay with Washington (Reuters)
• On Election Day, a Tale of the Young and the Old (WSJ)
• Because the recovery: Sprint to Cut 2,000 Jobs as Mobile Customers Keep Leaving (BBG)
• Ukraine's rebel leader is sworn in, crisis deepens (Reuters)
• Brilliant: Burkina Faso Army Promises Religious Leaders It Will Step Down (BBG)
• More Unknowns Leave Central Banks Facing Greater Internal Strife (BBG)
• Scapegoat found: IBM to Change Leadership at Global Services Unit (WSJ)
• Explains why Europe just slashed its GDP forecast: Don’t Be Fooled by Warm Spell as Cold Air About to Return (BBG)