After Hours

The Fed stimulates absolutely nothing but the media’s descriptions of it and the various economists and their models that depend solely on them being successful in doing so. If recessions are emotional and irrational pessimism as the monetary textbooks believe, then QE and ZIRP are just right sort of “happy pills” to push emotions back to the “right” direction. Is it any wonder the economy is in danger of sinking toward catastrophic failure?

Einhorn just found his next target: U.S. onshore E&Ps or the oil fracking companies.

Following yesterday's early MNI rumor that a Chinese QE is being "considered" and which sent the Shanghai Composite surging 3% and led to an initial boost in US stock futures, overnight the PBOC scrambled to once again deny such speculation. Of course, going full "cold Turkey" on Chinese stimulus would be too much for the market to handle, so in a piece by the WSJ also released overnight, the author said the PBOC would pivot from outright QE to mere LTRO, which is also not new and was reported over a week ago here in "China Floats QE Trial Balloon, PBoC May Launch LTROs." In any event, for now at least, Asian stocks are not happy despite Apple's latest blockbuster results, and neither is Europe, with the Stoxx 600 down 1%, and even the E-mini is hugging 2100 unable to levitate on any imminent central bank intervention.

IBM numbers in a nutshell: Revenue dropped by 11.9% to $19.6 billion; Net Income dropped by 2.4% to $2.3 billion...

And yet... GAAP EPS rose by 2.6% to $2.36!

Here's the accounting magic behind this "beat"

The past six years have transformed my disposition toward the markets from excitement to frustration to despair to disillusionment to sheer tedium.

In America’s fraudulent oligarch economy in which corruption and theft have become the preferred means to earn money, it’s no surprise doctors feel a need to participate. “Mr. Rorie was recruiting homeless people, prosecutors said, ...after hours of unnecessary tests and fake diagnoses, the homeless people would be sent off with sneakers - selected from stacks of shoeboxes in the clinics’ basements... "We can use the same patients like guinea pigs for anything we want,” Mr. Vainer was recorded saying in a government wiretap." Do no harm indeed.

Herbalife stock is up over 5% after hours after WSJ reports Bill Ackman (among others) made false statement about Herbalife's business models to regulators - in order to spur investigations into the company and lower its stock price. This comes just months after Ackman kinda-sorta-didn't-really insider-trade in the Allergan 'scam' that we detailed here. We suspect Whitney Tilson (and his Lumber Liquidators positions) is getting a little nervous now... and Carl Icahn is quietly laughing to himself.

The rich get richer and stock buybacks; the poor get poorer and pink slips. Rinse. Repeat.

Just as the existing 'truce' in Ukraine has been made a total farce as 1000s of military and civilians have been killed, so any 'hope' that this weekend's "peace efforts" will result in anything but more talk is rapidly diminishing... Germany's Merkel exclaimed honestly that it's "uncertain whether this will be successful," seemingly resigned to the fact as she added, "but it's at least worth making an attempt." French President Hollande admitted that Ukraine's eastern regions likely need "strong autonomy." Ukraine's Poroshenko blustered that he "trusts" Merkel, that the economy is collapsing (more money please), that the country does not need peacekeepers and a lack of arms is fueling conflict (so send us weapons) while pushing for a Russian withdrawal and quick cease-fire.  Finally Vladimir Putin blasted that Russia is unwilling to tolerate a post-Cold War global system dominated by one absolute leader, to which US VP Joe Biden remarked simply "get out of Ukraine." But apart from that, talks are going great...

In October, BBRY shares spiked (and dumped) on rumors that Lenovo had made an offer. Today, after a detailed report from Reuters explained that Samsung executives had offered to takeover the troubled phone-maker (or whatever they call themselves nowadays) and the stocks spiked up nearly 40% - perfectly running stopw through the mid-Nov highs and squeezing shorts out of the market... and now - after hours - BlackBerry issues a statement denying the whole thing... rigged much?

Herbalife: the harbinger of what happens when every stock buyback story inevitably turns very, very ugly.

Almost exactly a month ago, long before the Texas Ebola fiasco, when virtually nobody had heard of a small company out of Ronkonkoma, NY called Lakeland Industries and whose only product is "industrial protective clothing for industry, municipalities, healthcare and to first responders" i.e., Hazmat suits, we asked "i) who will get sick next and ii) how bad could it get?" For the answer we focused on the recently announced order of 160,000 Hazmat suits by the US State Department which had come at a time when the CDC was urging everyone that there is nothing to fear and that Ebola is under control. Fast forward to today when shortly after the close, and minutes after it announced the completion of another $11 million follow on offering, Lakeland surprised everyone, and especially those who are short the stock, when it released the following "Update on Business Activity Relating to Ebola Crisis" in which it announced that it has, by now, received a stunning 1 million Hazmat suit orders and rising exponentially.