SPY

With all the hoopla about missing airplanes, renewed wars of the cold variety, and rigged markets, it is easy to forget that America is now officially a totalitarian state of the Orwellian kind, where the population has - involuntarily - ceded all of its privacy in exchange for... something. Because it certainly isn't security. So we are happy to provide a reminder of just this, especially since as BusinessWeek notes, it gets harder to keep track of all the bizarre ways the National Security Agency has cooked up to spy on people and governments. This may help.

It is now quite clear why BATS CEO Bill O'Brien was so agitated during the Tuesday's screamfest on CNBC. As The Wall Street Journal's Scott Patterson reports, under pressure from the NYAG, BATS has hurriedly issued a statement correcting the CEO's false comments during the exchange with IEX's Brad Katsuyama. After Katsuyama said "you wanna do this, let's do this" clearly giving him an out, O'Brien stated that BATS priced its trades off 'high-speed' data feeds when in fact they price their trades off a much slower feed (and therefore 'enable' the exact HFT-front-running that is in question).

High Frequency Trading (HFT) covers such a broad swathe of 'trading' and financial markets that Mark Cuban (yes, that Mark Cuban), who has been among the leading anti-HFT graft voices in the public realm, decided to put finger-to-keyboard to create an "idiots guide to HFT" as a starting point for broad discussion. With screens full of desperate "stocks aren't rigged" HFT defenders seemingly most confused about what HFT is and does, perhaps instead of 'idiots' a better term would be "practitioners."

Just buy the book Damnit, it’s all in there.

after shocking the world with its unilateral decision to halt Russian money transfers without a direct order from the administration, Reuters reports that JPM has folded and will process said payment from Russia's embassy in Kazakhstan to insurance agency Sogaz, easing tension after Moscow accused the U.S. bank of illegally blocking the transaction under the pretext of sanctions.

The Nikkei shot up last night because the Yen was weak and, best of all, Japan's $1.25Tn pension fund will be handing money to the Banksters to put into the stock market. 

As if to prove all the HFT naysayers right, milliseconds before 3:30 pm - the traditional time when HFT algos come out and ramp stocks into the last half hour of the day, a massive E-mini order block slammed the tape, driven by a tremor in the USDJPY, sending the DJIA green for the year in the most unriggedly of manners.

Nikkei 225 (+1.04%) outperformed overnight, buoyed by S&P 500 posting a new all-time high, a dovish BoJ's Tankan inflation survey and reports that the GPIF is to invest in funds specializing in Japanese stocks with high returns. Overall, another quiet session this morning as market participants continued to position for the upcoming ECB meeting, with Bunds under pressure amid further unwind of expectation of more policy easing by the central bank. According to ECB sources, there is no clear consensus at present on policy action, intense debate seen on Thursday after March HICP data, adding that it fears "over-interpretation" by market of QE possibility.

Last week Congress overwhelmingly passed a bill approving a billion dollars in aid to Ukraine and more sanctions on Russia. The bill will likely receive the president’s signature within days. If you think this is the last time US citizens will have their money sent to Ukraine, you should think again. This is only the beginning. This $1 billion for Ukraine is a rip-off for the America taxpayer, but it is also a bad deal for Ukrainians. Not a single needy Ukrainian will see a penny of this money, as it will be used to bail out international banks who hold Ukrainian government debt. According to the terms of the International Monetary Fund (IMF)-designed plan for Ukraine, life is about to get much more difficult for average Ukrainians. The government will freeze some wage increases, significantly raise taxes, and increase energy prices by a considerable margin. But the bankers will get paid and the IMF will get control over the Ukrainian economy.

With friends like these, who needs Russians.

While it is easy to blame western sanctions for the recent tribulations at the world's largest aluminum company, Oleg Deripaska's Rusal, the reality is that the industry specific issues plaguing aluminum makers, certainly including former Dow Jones Industrial Average member Alcoa, which involve a fair share of manipulation of physical inventories at assorted global warehouses are much more responsible than some theatrical rhetoric flaring up between the West and East in the past month. Regardless of the cause, as FT reports, Rusal just announced it is on the verge of insolvency after it warned of "material uncertainty" about its future, and that it has asked its creditors to delay repayment on a maturity from its $10 billion debt pile due next month.

Making friends and mending fences and reinforcing his 'promise' noto to spy on friends and to have NATO's back... in Rome with Italy's newest Prime Minister Renzi...

• *RENZI SAYS OBAMA'S MESSAGE TO EUROPE SOUND, CLEAR
• *RENZI SAYS EU, U.S. SHARE VIEW ON UKRAINE
• *RENZI SAYS OBAMA'S CHALLENGE TO EU IS 'FASCINATING'

Fascinating indeed?

How Are The Spooks Messing With Your Computer and Reducing Your Productivity?

Earlier in the week the hypocrisy of the big tech firms was exposed when the NSA's senior lawyers "busted" their lies by explaining they knew full-well that they were engaged in the surveillance-state. Today comes yet more 'elite' hypocrisy as AP reports, Microsoft, which has skewered rival Google for going through customer emails to deliver ads, acknowledged Thursday it had searched emails in a blogger's Hotmail account to track down who was leaking company secrets. Scroogled, indeed.

As any long-time reader of this column knows, we routinely draw from historical lessons to highlight that this time is not different. History is full of examples, from ancient Mesopotamia to the Soviet Union, which show that whenever societies reach unsustainable levels of resource consumption and allocation, they collapse. We’ve been writing about this for years, and the idea is now hitting mainstream. A recent research paper funded by NASA highlights this same premise. According to the authors: "Collapses of even advanced civilizations have occurred many times in the past five thousand years, and they were frequently followed by centuries of population and cultural decline and economic regression." The results of their experiments show that some of the very clear trends which exist today– unsustainable resource consumption, and economic stratification that favors the elite – can very easily result in collapse.