About three hours ago, as US stocks were beginning a run back toward their highs of the session, a frequently used mouthpiece for the Communist Party dropped a hint that all was not well in the ongoing US-China trade talks, and that some disappointing (for equity bulls) news might be imminent.
Hu Xijin, the editor of the English language Global Times, affirmed that talks were making progress, but said that China kept its statement on this week’s talks brief because it “doesn’t want to raise the public’s expectations.”
Chinese side only released this brief news, scarce information from Chinese media also. I think this shows the cautious attitude of Chinese side. Talks have made new progress, but Chinese side doesn’t want to raise public’s expectation on the agreement now. https://t.co/h00TPxoMv9
A few hours later, the Nikkei Asia Review has published what appears to be a Beijing-directed leak confirming that the removal of US tariffs, which President Trump insisted earlier this month could be kept in place for a “substantial period of time”, has become a major obstacle in the negotiations, even as both sides vaguely insist that “progress” is being made.
Furthermore, according to an anonymously sourced report in the Nikkei Asia Review, Beijing feels it has already made concessions to Washington by passing laws cracking down on IP infringement and forced tech transfers. Now, it wants to see the US show a little trust, and agree to lift the tariffs that have become a headwind for Chinese economic growth.
China has not backed down on its stance. U.S. and Chinese leaders agreed to work on removing all additional tariffs in December, Vice Commerce Minister Wang Shouwen said. President Xi Jinping’s standing could be undermined if some duties remain.
Beijing has made some concessions, establishing laws to address U.S. concerns about intellectual property infringement and forced technology transfers. The China Securities Regulatory Commission said Friday that it would allow JPMorgan Chase to set up a brokerage joint venture, demonstrating the country’s efforts to open its financial market.
Chinese officials fear, however, that they will draw Xi’s ire if they receive nothing from the U.S. in return.
Given the difficulty of reaching a compromise, “Xi is wary about a summit with Trump,” said a diplomatic source in Beijing.
Anonymous US officials acknowledged that tariffs were an issue in reports on the talks published earlier this week, but they seemed confident that China would eventually accept the fact that some of the levies would need to remain in place for a period, for purposes of accountability.
They may have spoken too soon.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2JZZiTw Tyler Durden
The budget is blowing up in their face and they know it. The tax cuts did not pay for themselves and deficits are ballooning, federal spending is the highest in 10 years as tax receipts have been slowing. It’s a receipe for budget disaster. Don’t give me this two faced nonsense:
It’s cheerleading and playing the confidence game, while at the same time demanding a 50bp rate cut by the Fed, an utterly ridiculous suggestion especially in light of the earlier statement.
You knows who makes a statement such as this? Someone that’s worried about a lot of things. Worried that funding requirements are out of control and they can’t stop it. Worried about the slowdown morphing into a recession. NOBODY will admit to a recession being a possibility, too much is at stake and consumers need to be kept spending.
The real worry I suspect is obvious and is a political calculation: They don’t want a recession to coincide with the 2020 election. That’s how elections are lost. Trump knows this. Larry Kudlow knows this and even Stephen Moore knows this. Hence they’re asking for rate cuts.
Getting the Fed to stop the balance sheet rolloff and to stop rate hikes was the first obvious step and the Fed acquiesced claiming to be data dependent.
The second step: Get the Fed to cut rates. Markets are already pricing in a rate cut for 2019:
That’s recessionary risk this late in the cycle. But Larry Kudlow apparently thinks a recession can get averted by juicing markets with more cheap money.
Oh it’s just the tax cuts. Really? Weren’t tax cuts supposed to bring in all this growth that would pay for itself?
It hasn’t and it won’t, but the spread between increased government spending and reduced government income is widening the most since, well, the last recession:
Yea, you need a 50bp rate cut, cause otherwise the math doesn’t work.
To say that would be honest. But instead you get two faced nonsense. Don’t fall for it. Recession coming is a real risk here. But nobody will admit it.
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via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2WAXkL3 Tyler Durden
Former Democratic nominee for Nevada lieutenant governor Lucy Flores has accused former Vice-President Joe Biden of smelling her hair before planting a “big slow kiss” on her head in what has become somewhat of a predatory trademark maneuver.
The day of the 2014 rally, speakers gathered and took photos before going on stage. Flores (right) is pictured with Longoria and Biden before the uncomfortable encounter.
Describing the 2014 incident, the then-35-years-old Flores says she raced to a November 1 campaign rally with unwashed hair – spraying some “dry shampoo” in it to make due, only to have Biden creep up from behind and ‘do his thing.’
As I was taking deep breaths and preparing myself to make my case to the crowd, I felt two hands on my shoulders. I froze. “Why is the vice-president of the United States touching me?”
I felt him get closer to me from behind. He leaned further in and inhaled my hair. I was mortified. I thought to myself, “I didn’t wash my hair today and the vice-president of the United States is smelling it. And also, what in the actual fuck? Why is the vice-president of the United States smelling my hair?” He proceeded to plant a big slow kiss on the back of my head. My brain couldn’t process what was happening. I was embarrassed. I was shocked. I was confused. There is a Spanish saying, “tragame tierra,” it means, “earth, swallow me whole.” I couldn’t move and I couldn’t say anything. I wanted nothing more than to get Biden away from me. My name was called and I was never happier to get on stage in front of an audience. –The Cut
Flores notes in her article how after some time had passed, “pictures started to surface of Vice-President Biden getting uncomfortably close with women and young girls.”
Biden nuzzling the neck of the Defense secretary’s wife; Biden kissing a senator’s wife on the lips; Biden whispering in women’s ears; Biden snuggling female constituents. I saw obvious discomfort in the women’s faces, and Biden, I’m sure, never thought twice about how it made them feel. I knew I couldn’t say anything publicly about what those pictures surfaced for me; my anger and my resentment grew. –The Cut
This was an incredibly difficult thing to do, but something that felt necessary. It took awhile before I found the words and the support that made me feel like this was finally a story I could tell. https://t.co/Sr5Go3xuTe
The United States is on a path to financial ruin, and everyone can see what is happening, but nobody can seem to come up with a way to stop it. According to the U.S. Treasury, the federal government is currently 22 trillion dollars in debt, and that represents the single largest debt in the history of the planet. Over the past decade, we have been adding to that debt at a rate of about 1.1 trillion dollars a year, and we will add more than a trillion dollars to that total once again this year. But when you add in our unfunded liabilities, our long-term financial outlook as a nation looks downright apocalyptic. According to Boston University economics professor Laurence Kotlikoff, the U.S. is currently facing 200 trillion dollars in unfunded liabilities, and when you add that number to our 22 trillion dollar debt, you get a grand total of 222 trillion dollars.
Of course we are never going to pay back all of this debt.
The truth is that we are just going to keep accumulating more debt until the system completely and utterly collapses.
And even though the federal government is the biggest offender, there are also others to blame for the mess that we find ourselves in. State and local governments are more than 3 trillion dollars in debt, corporate debt has more than doubled since the last financial crisis, and U.S. consumers are more than 13 trillion dollars in debt.
When you add it all together, the total amount of debt in our society is well above 300 percent of GDP, and it keeps rising with each passing year.
But for the moment, let’s just focus on the giant mountain of debt that the federal government has piled up. The U.S. budget deficit for last month was 234 billion dollars, and that was an all-time record for a single month. Our exploding debt is an existential threat to our nation, and we are literally destroying the bright future that our children and our grandchildren were supposed to have.
And it isn’t just a 22 trillion dollar debt that we are leaving them with. We have also made tens of trillions of dollars worth of future promises that we expect future generations to keep. These are called “unfunded liabilities” because we do not currently have the money to fulfill those obligations.
Adding those two numbers together, we get a grand total of 50 trillion dollars.
Where in the world would we ever be able to get so much money when we are already drowning in debt?
Unfortunately, as is so often the case with government projections, those unfunded liability numbers are actually wildly optimistic.
Boston University economics professor Laurence Kotlikoff has been studying our unfunded liability crisis for many years, and according to him the real number is 200 trillion dollars…
Consumers will largely bear the brunt of the country’s financial ruin, according to Kotlikoff, which is why it is crucial to give them the power to make better financial decisions.
While the United States’ official debt is $20 trillion, the fiscal gap is really 10 times larger — $200 trillion. That comes from adding in off-the-book liabilities, including debt that’s in the Federal Reserve’s hands, Kotlikoff said.
If Kotlikoff is correct, that means that the true size of the financial obligation that we are imposing upon future generations is 222 trillion dollars, and that number just keeps rising month after month.
Many pundits speak of a day when America will be bankrupt in the future, but according to Kotlikoff we are bankrupt “right now”…
But Kotlikoff’s dire prognosis for the United States is enough to wake anyone out of even the deepest summer slumber.
“The evidence is in front of our eyes that we’re bankrupt,” Kotlikoff said. “It’s not bankrupt in the future. It’s bankrupt right now.”
Unfortunately, there doesn’t appear to be an easy way out. Any politician that would be foolish enough to even threaten to reduce Social Security and Medicare benefits would be immediately voted out of office. America’s population is rapidly aging, and about half of America’s seniors don’t have anything saved for retirement…
The bad news is that almost half of Americans approaching retirement have nothing saved in a 401(k) or other individual account. The good news is that the new estimate, from the U.S. Government Accountability Office, is slightly better than a few years earlier.
Of those 55 and older, 48 percent had nothing put away in a 401(k)-style defined contribution plan or an individual retirement account, according to a GAO estimate for 2016 that was released Tuesday.
America’s seniors are counting on us to keep the promises that we have made to them.
Sadly, it doesn’t appear that we are going to be able to do that for too much longer.
In the end, we are going to have to make some very tough choices. One Democrat actually started a petition to sell the state of Montana to Canada for a trillion dollars, and so far it has over 18,000 signatures. Of course we aren’t ever going to sell off pieces of our country, but we are going to have to find some way to come up with an enormous mountain of money.
When I ran for Congress last year, I made doing something about the national debt one of my top issues. Unfortunately, concern about the national debt is not a priority for either political party right now, and that is a huge mistake.
You can spend more money than you are bringing in for quite a while, but eventually a day of reckoning arrives. Anyone that has ever gone into too much credit card debt knows exactly what I am talking about. We have been on the biggest debt binge in the history of the world, and it has allowed us to enjoy a standard of living that is far beyond what we actually deserve, but the price that we will pay for such utter foolishness will be extremely painful indeed.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2CKbsdv Tyler Durden
After Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam’s now-infamous blackface scandal, the embattled leader vowed to focus on inequality. At least one item in his recent budget proposal—a measure to end driver’s license suspensions for unpaid court fines and fees—would help him make good on that promise.
If the amendment makes it through the state legislature, 627,000 Virginians will regain the right to drive.
“Having a driver’s license is essential to a person’s ability to maintain a job and provide for their families,” he said Tuesday at a news conference. “It is especially pertinent to those that live in rural Virginia because we don’t have public transportation that is adequate to get to employment.”
Northam is correct. Such policies prevent offenders who have already served their time from effectively reentering society, trapping them in a cycle of poverty and unemployment that makes it difficult to pay rent, much less court fees.
A report by the Lawyer’s Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area found that in California, license suspension rates for missed court fees and traffic debts are “directly correlated” with poverty and race. That should come as no surprise: Those who start with little will be hard-pressed to bounce back if the state blocks off their ability to work.
San Francisco’s Bay View/Hunter’s Point neighborhood is a microcosm of the phenomenon. With a 25.8 percent poverty rate and a 35.8 percent concentration of black tenants—the highest in the city—residents reported a 6.7 percent license suspension rate, more than three times the average across California.
What’s more, police officers can and do issue arrest warrants for those who fail to pay court-associated fines, disrupting their lives and compounding their debts. “Where the underlying issue is debt collection rather than public safety, it is counterproductive to divert public safety resources to these types of arrests,” the researchers conclude.
A driver’s license isn’t just frequently necessary to get to and from work: As The Atlantic‘s Alana Semuels points out, it’s often a prerequisite to being hired in the first place. Electricians and plumbers need to visit various clients; many construction workers have to drive a bulldozer on-site. These are the very jobs that can lift a person into the middle class, as they typically pay well above the minimum wage.
And suspended licenses affect not just employment but the most basic family needs, such as caring for a sick child. Just ask Brianna Morgan, a mother in Virginia whose license was suspended over an unpaid court fine. “A six-minute drive to my son’s school if he had an asthma attack turned into a 30-minute ride on the city bus,” she tellsThe Richmond Times-Dispatch.
Forty-one states currently suspend licenses for unpaid court debts. But Virginia is one of a growing number—like Ohio and Tennessee—where federal judges and lawmakers of both major parties are beginning the recognize the counterproductive nature of such restrictions.
“Taking an individual’s driver’s license away to try to make her more likely to pay a fine is not using a shotgun to do the job of a rifle: it is using a shotgun to treat a broken arm,” U.S. District Judge Aleta Trauger wrote as she ruled a Tennessee license suspension provision unconstitutional. “There is no rational basis for that.”
The American justice system has been criticized (and not without reason) for allowing white collar criminals to get off with fines, community service or probation, while poor mothers who – and we’re just throwing out an example here – used a relative’s address to enroll their child in a better public school system wind up in jail.
But as the backlash to the college cheating scandal intensifies, will Aunt Becky’s (aka Lori Loughlin) white privilege be enough to spare her from a stint in the big house? It’s looking increasingly plausible that it won’t.
To wit, the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday that federal prosecutors who have been negotiating pre-indictment plea deals with some of the 33 parents arrested in the college admissions cheating scandal are insisting on at least some jail time.
Federal authorities and at least some parents accused in the college-admissions cheating case are negotiating possible guilty pleas, according to people familiar with the matter.
Prison time may be included in pre-indictment plea deals, the people said. Nearly all the 33 parents accused in the case face a single charge of conspiring to commit what is known as honest-services fraud. Most haven’t been indicted.
The Wall Street Journal reported that prosecutors could add money laundering conspiracy charges for some of the parents as soon as next week. Two parents were indicted on such a charge on Tuesday.
Per WSJ, prosecutors are expected to indict some of the parents on charges of money laundering, to be added to the charges of honest services fraud (a type of mail fraud) that the group is facing. Most of the 33 parents who were arrested in the sweep haven’t been formally indicted, due to the opportunity to negotiate a pre-indictment plea.
And in a sign that prosecutors are putting the screws to parents, a lawyer for one couple who spoke with WSJ said his clients had rejected a deal offered by prosecutors, and would plead not guilty at trial.
“They are definitely incentivizing parents to plead now and get a better deal than if they are indicted,” Mr. Hooper said. He said he was told ahead of time that the money-laundering conspiracy charge would be added in the indictment.
All told, 50 people were charged for their alleged roles in a sprawling scheme allegedly masterminded by Newport Beach, Calif., college-admissions consultant Rick Singer who bribed test proctors, coaches and others to help get the marginal-student children of wealthy parents into a top school.
One thing is for sure: Given the media attention and intense public outrage over the scandal, prosecutors aren’t going to just let the parents off with a sweetheart deal. As the above-mentioned lawyer told WSJ: “They are trying to expand this.”
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2Oysxvs Tyler Durden
Summarizing Q1 in one chart: Stocks soared alongside a renewed surge in global money supply as top-down and bottom-up fun-durr-mental data collapsed…
It seems the world’s central banks have re-embraced their “don’t panic” role as they see something that’s just too scary for us average joes to be told…
Global stocks and global bond yields have decoupled dramatically in Q1…
We have seen this before…and it did not end well.
Quite a quarter!
Best quarter for world stocks since 2012
Best quarter for US stocks since 2009
Best quarter for oil since 2009
And…
Chinese stocks were panic bid overnight, ending the quarter up 24% (China’s best quarter since Q4 2014, and best Q1 since 2009)…
European markets ended Q1 up 12.3% led by a 16.1% gain for Italy (best quarter and best Q1 since 2015)
Best start to a year for S&P since 1998
US Stocks outperformed bonds dramatically as Gold and the dollar ended unchanged in Q1…as S&P earnings expectations tumbled by the most since Q1 2016
From the Mnuchin Massacre lows on Christmas Eve, the Nasdaq is up almost 25% and the Dow lagging at a mere 18.75%!!
Trannies and Small caps were up most on the week, Nasdaq and S&P lagged…
The S&P 500 manage to get back above 2800 but is still struggling to follow-through…
LYFT IPO opened at $87.24 (after pricing at $72) but faded from the open…they defended $80 but that broke into the close…
FANG stocks soared in Q1 by 23.5% – the best quarter since Q3 2013
Credit (HY CDX -100bps, IG CDX -24bps, biggest quarterly drop since Q1 2012) and equity (VIX -11.6 vols, biggest Quarterly drop since Q4’11) protection costs collapsed in Q1…
Global sovereign bond yields plunged in Q1 (and Q4 2018) to their lowest since Jan 2018… (this is the biggest 2Q drop in sov yields since the growth crisis in 2016)
US Treasury yields plunged in Q1 (extending Q4’s collapse)…
30Y Yields are below 3.00%, 10Y below 2.50%, and the rest of the curve plunged…
The US yield curve has now flattened for 8 of the last 9 quarters, plunging into inversion this week…
Overall, the dollar trod water in Q1 (ending up around 1%) – the 4th quarterly rise in a row…
Cable tumbled back to recent lows today after May’s 3rd (and final) attempt to get her deal done failed…
Cryptos managed gains on the week with Bitcoin back above $4000, but it is Litecoin that dramatically outperformed in Q1…
Crude and Copper surged this week as PMs lagged…
Gold eked out some gains for the second straight quarter as The Fed went full dovetard and after being dumped yesterday, found support at the 100DMA today…
WTI soared in Q1 by the most since Q2 2009 (after collapsing in Q4)…
Finally, we note that the markets have seen an unprecedented swing in their outlook for The Fed…
Rescuing stocks (for now) from their 1037 analog…
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2I0vDr1 Tyler Durden
The tides are shifting. Something’s in the wind. And it’s not just the fecund vapors of spring. The political soap opera of RussiaGate ended like a fart in a windstorm last weekend, leaving Mr. Mueller’s cheerleaders de-witched, bothered, and bewildered. And then a crude attempt was made to cram the Jussie Smollett case down Chicago’s memory hole. These two unrelated hoaxes emanating out of Wokester Land may signal something momentous: the end of the era when anything goes and nothing matters.
Welcome to the new era of consequences! All of a sudden, a whole lot of people who have been punking the public-at-large will have to answer for their behavior. Despite the fog of misdirection blowing out of The New York Times, The WashPo, CNN, and MSNBC, it’s become obvious that the RussiaGate hoax was kicked off by Hillary Clinton’s campaign and a cabal of Obama appointees in several executive agencies. The evidence is public, fully documented, and overwhelming that the so-called Steele Dossier was the sole animating instrument in both the 2016 pre-election effort to incriminate the Golden Golem of Greatness, and the Mueller Investigation launched post-election to cover-up those same political misdeeds of the Clinton campaign, the FBI, the Department of Justice, the CIA, NSA, and State Department.
It’s also very likely that Robert Mueller learned that the Steele Dossier was a fraud in the summer of 2017, if not shortly after his appointment in May of that year, and yet he dragged out his investigation for almost two years in order to defame and antagonize Mr. Trump – and deflect attention from the ugly truth of the matter. It is certain Mr. Mueller knew that the Steele Dossier was purchased by Glenn Simpson’s Fusion GPS political “research” company, which was simultaneously in the paid employ of Mrs. Clinton and the Russian political lobbying agency Prevezon (as reported by Sean Davis in The Federalist). If the FBI brass did not bring that to Mr. Mueller’s attention right away, then either their incompetence is epic or they are criminally liable for concealing the hoax.
There is your essential collusion, and a lot of participants are going down because of it. Mr. Mueller himself should be summoned to a grand jury to answer for his deceitful inquisition, his abuse of FISA warrants, and the malicious prosecutions of General Michael Flynn and Trump campaign supernumerary George Papadopoulos. This story is far from over and it is now moving in the opposite direction. Former CIA Director John Brennan is going down for chaperoning the Steele Dossier through congress, the FBI, and the news media. And many others will follow. It will go very hard on the claque of lunatics like Rep. Adam Schiff and MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow as the painful consequences unspool. The Democratic presidential hopefuls will have to run shrieking from this giant hairball, but it will roll over them anyway and possibly even flatten their party.
In another instance of justice miscarried, charges in the Jussie Smollett racial attack hoax were dismissed in a hasty, unannounced motion by the assistant to Cook County Prosecutor Kim Foxx, who had pretended to recuse herself from the case, but actually did not follow the proper procedure for doing it. Ms. Foxx has apparently been consorting with members of Jussie Smollett’s family and with Michele Obama’s former chief of staff, Tina Tchen, a Chicago political operator. It’s easy to imagine what they were bargaining about: the fear that Mr. Smollett would have a very hard time serving any sort of prison sentence, given his celebrity status, his sexual orientation, and the laughable idiocy of his crime. It was probably a reasonable fear — but not a viable excuse for summarily dropping the case. The further excuse that he had already paid the price by hanging out in Jessie Jackson’s Operation Push headquarters for two days is also a joke, of course.
The Chicago police chief and mayor objected loudly, as did the Illinois Prosecutors Bar Association, which declared the move was “abnormal and unfamiliar to those who practice law in criminal courthouses across the State.” An understatement for sure. What’s next for Jussie? The City of Chicago will tote up the cost of investigating his stupid prank and haul him into civil court to compel him to pay for it.
Further and greater consequences will emanate from the Smollett hoax. Despite former Vice-president Joe Biden’s recent lamentations over the wickedness of “white man’s culture,” many American’s will show a renewed interest in that hoary old system devised by white folks called Anglo-American law, which includes such niceties as due process. The Jussie Smollett scam may be the end of many intersectional culture heroes getting a free pass on their bad behavior. Won’t that be refreshing?
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2UcUU7O Tyler Durden
Those of us who think cops should be required to wear cameras may have to reconsider the scope of the benefits we hoped the technology would bring to policing.
A new paper by four George Mason University criminologists, published in Criminology and Public Policy, reviews 70 studies evaluating the cameras’ impact on officer behavior, officer perceptions, citizen behavior, citizen perceptions, police investigations, and police organizations. Most of these studies find that both officers and citizens support the cameras. Unfortunately, they have not identified strong and consistent changes in either police or public behavior that can be traced to the body-cams.
Some early studies found that requiring cops to wear cameras deterred both frivolous citizen complaints and excessive police aggression. But whether body-cams make a big difference in policing practices and citizen satisfaction turns out to depend on how much individual police departments limit officer discretion on when to record, how easily available the videos are to individuals filing complaints, and how they address personal privacy concerns, among other issues.
The use of body cameras does seem to have resulted in fewer citizen complaints against officers. “The question remains,” the authors write, “as to whether and to what degree these changes reflect citizens’ reporting behaviors or improvements in officers’ behavior or their interactions with citizens.” Cameras “may curb some of the worst police behaviors,” but they seem to show “little impact otherwise.” Most body-cam footage used by prosecutors has been deployed not to prosecute police misconduct but to prosecute citizen misconduct.
The authors conclude that the cameras’ “anticipated effects” have “perhaps…been overestimated.” Nevertheless, “agencies will almost certainly continue to adopt [body-worn cameras]. Given the ubiquity of personal video and audio recording devices, more and more police agencies are likely to conclude that they need to have their own recording of events for police-citizen encounters that go bad. There is also likely to be a growing expectation among the public that adopting [the cameras] is a marker of a responsive, transparent and legitimate police organization.”
For body-cams to really represent responsive and transparent policing, of course, agencies will have to refrain from stonewalling public requests for access to the recordings.
Attorney General William Barr wrote a Friday letter in response to Senate Judiciary Chair Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and House Judiciary Chairman Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) notifying them that a redacted copy of the Mueller report will be delivered to Congress, then available to the public, by mid-April “if not sooner.”
Barr says that his office is working with Special Counsel Robert Mueller to redact sensitive information which could affect ongoing matters, infringe on someone’s personal privacy or information which could comproimse the DOJ’s sources and methods of investigation.
The report will be nearly 400 pages, while Barr writes that there is no plans to let the White House review it beforehand.
Developing…
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2FJgWXD Tyler Durden
After Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam’s now-infamous blackface scandal, the embattled leader vowed to focus on inequality. At least one item in his recent budget proposal—a measure to end driver’s license suspensions for unpaid court fines and fees—would help him make good on that promise.
