SPY

Using espionage for gain in negotiations is an age-old tactic; but are the norms of 'appropriate' espionage changing?

"The CIA organised a fake vaccination program in the town where it believed Osama bin Laden was hiding in an elaborate attempt to obtain DNA from the fugitive al-Qaida leader’s family," The Guradian reports. Now, amid a deadly backlash again vaccinations and a resurgence of polio in Pakistan, the White House has promised that the CIA will never again use an immunization campaign as a tool of spycraft. While this is horrible in its own right, there is a much bigger story here. The fact that the United States holds no claim to any sort of moral high ground whatsoever.

• "May?" New Cold War May Emerge in Ukraine Crisis, Medvedev Says (BBG)
• Wristslaps will be fast and furious: EU Commission charges HSBC, JPMorgan, Credit Agricole with rigging (Reuters)
• Credit Suisse Rises as U.S. Guilty Plea Ends 3-Year Probe (BBG)
• After Martial Law Declaration, Thailand Waits for General's Next Move (WSJ)
• China property slowdown spells trouble for Asia bonds (FT)
• Russia Close to $400 Billion Gas Pipeline Deal in Pivot to China (BBG)
• Dimon-by-the-Sea Shows London Banking’s Engine of Growth (BBG)
• Modi Faces Greece-Sized Snag to Economic Revival (FT)
• U.K. Inflation Accelerates on Airfare Surge (BBG)

Two Former Government Officials Tell Us What It's All About ...

In the first case of its kind, US Attorney General Eric Holder has broght charges against five Chinese military officals on charges of economic espionage and other offenses related to computer hacking of US nuclear power, metals, and power industries:

• *FIVE CHINESE MILITARY OFFICERS CHARGED BY U.S. WITH ESPIONAGE
• *JUSTICE DEPARTMENT SAYS CHINA HACKERS PENETRATE U.S. COMPANIES
• *DOJ SAYS ESPIONAGE TARGETED WESTINGHOUSE ELECTRIC, U.S. STEEL, ALCOA, SOLARWORLD

Holder added that the "range of trade secrets and other senstivive business information stolen in this case is significant and demands an aggressive response."

American foreign policy is mindlessly driven by the machinery of our Warfare State - a vast accretion of economic, diplomatic, spying and military capabilities which are ceaselessly in search of missions and justifications for their colossal call on the nation’s resources. Absent a dismantlement of the Warfare State machinery, giant policy errors like the Bill Clinton’s double-cross on NATO and Obama’s foolish present confrontation with Putin are nearly guaranteed to recur.

In Case You Had Any Doubt ...

With two of Tepper's top six positions being new, and quite massive, calls in either the SPY or QQQ, we would be nervous too...

When obnoxiously wealthy pricks with the ability to bribe stock exchanges to place their trading computers on the floor of the exchange and financially induce the Wall Street banks to funnel trades through their dark pools in order to know what is happening a nanosecond before everyone else, and use this information to front run unknowing investors to generate risk free profits, it’s wrong. It really is black and white. I don’t care that it is supposedly “legal”.  By complying with Regulation NMS the smart order routers of institutional investor firms like Vanguard, Fidelity and Schwab simply funneled naïve investors into various snares laid for them by the unscrupulous high frequency traders. The bad guys always win and the good guys always lose on Wall Street. And no one does anything because they are all on the take. Lewis puts it in terms the average person can understand.

Having admitted that last week's air traffic control system crash was due to the fact that a U-2, Cold War-era, spy plane still in use by the U.S. military sparked a "glitch" in radar systems and grounded all west coast planes for over 45 minutes, Reuters reports that an inside account suggests this was due to a common design problem in the U.S. air traffic control system  - a lack of memory in the computer! What is perhaps more worrisome, in theory, the same vulnerability could have been used by an attacker in a deliberate shut-down, the experts said, and "shows a very basic limitation of the system," and could be used as a new "attack surface."

Are the S&P 500 and VIX right while the Russell and Treasury Rates are Dumb?

When it comes to returns, 2013 will be best remembered as the fifth consecutive year in which the S&P 500, lead by Chief Risk Officer and Portfolio Manager Ben Bernanke (replaced by Janet Yellen in 2014 following a bumper 30%+ year), outperformed about 90% of all hedge funds, which as the recent beta blow up has shown, have virtually no original "alpha" ideas, and all merely piggyback on the same high beta "greater fool", hedge fund hotel trades and/or lever on beta as much as their Prime Broker will allow them (in many cases quite a lot). And yet, hedge fund investors were perfectly happy to keep handing over 20% of their upside and paying a 2% management fee when they could have generated the same returns for free by simply buying the SPY ETF. How happy? According to a just released ranking by Institutional Investor magazine, The 25 top earners of 2013 raked in a total of $21.15 billion.

State media reports indicate that a foreign agent recruited Chinese netizens to provide information on military tech. According to the reports, a foreign intelligence agent using the alias “Feige” (“Flying Brother” in Chinese) recruited 40 people from 20 different provinces to gather information on China’s military development. None of the reports hinted at Feige’s nationality, or which country was behind the espionage.

“We Are No Longer a Nation Ruled By Laws”

One of the more peculiar news from last week was the grounding of all flights for several hours at several airports in the Southwestern United States and the grounding of planes bound for the region from other parts of the country. As so often happens when there is no specific reason at the time, the error was blamed on a computer "glitch" - the computer problem at a Federal Aviation Administration center slowed the journeys of tens of thousands of arriving and departing passengers at LAX. And that would have been all we heard of it had it not been for some additional digging by NBC which on Saturday, citing unnamed sources, reported a U-2, a Cold War-era spy plane still in use by the U.S. military, "passed through air space monitored by the Los Angeles Air Route Traffic Control Center and appears to have overloaded a computer system at the center."