Last month, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) posted a video of Mini Cheetah, a four-legged robot from the lab of Sangbae Kim. The robot dog is super light on its feet, with an identical running style to the killer robot dog in the Black Mirror episode called “Metalhead.”
The four-legged robot can bend and swing its legs wide, allowing it to walk either right-side-up or upside down, said MIT News. The robot can traverse over uneven terrain and even perform gymnastic stunts.
The Mini Cheetah is a miniature version of the Cheetah robot, which weighs 90 lbs making it the size of a large dog. Coming in at 20 lbs, the Mini Cheetah can trot untethered like its predecessor at 2.45 meters per second, but its smaller size allows it to have remarkable agility.
The most impressive move is its ability to perform backflips. MIT researchers claim Mini Cheetah is designed to be “virtually indestructible.”
If a component of the robot breaks, the mini cheetah is designed with modularity in mind: “Each of the robot’s legs is powered by three identical, low-cost electric motors that the researchers engineered using off-the-shelf parts. Each motor can easily be swapped out for a new one,” said MIT News.“You could put these parts together, almost like Legos,” says lead developer Benjamin Katz, a technical associate at MIT.
Researchers will be presenting the Mini Cheetah at the International Conference on Robotics and Automation, in the second to last week in May.
The lab is already building a small army of Mini Cheetahs, with ten more expected in the near term to be loaned out to other research facilities across the country for further testing. “A big part of why we built this robot is that it makes it so easy to experiment and just try crazy things, because the robot is super robust and doesn’t break easily, and if it does break, it’s easy and not very expensive to fix,” says Katz, who worked on the robot in the lab of Sangbae Kim.
To see the new Mini Cheetah perform backflips, check out the video below.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2T3OQKj Tyler Durden
The ambitious shale growth plans of the U.S. supermajors could in the future allow them to control so much of U.S. shale oil production that they could also control the price of the U.S. light tight oil going to foreign markets in an ‘OPEC of their own kind,’ Investing.com quoted John Kilduff, founding partner at Again Capital, as saying.
If the U.S. supermajors, such as Exxon and Chevron, end up controlling a lot of the U.S. shale production with their plans to significantly boost Permian production, and if smaller shale players bleed cash and decide to sell acreage and operations to Big Oil, then supermajors could be the ones determining the price of light crude oil, according to Kilduff.
Exxon and Chevron both announced increased targets for their Permian production last week. Chevron now sees its Permian unconventional net oil-equivalent production rising to 600,000 bpd by the end of 2020, and to 900,000 bpd by the end of 2023. Exxon revised up its Permian growth plans to produce more than 1 million oil-equivalent barrels per day by as early as 2024, which would be an increase of almost 80 percent.
The shale game is now a ‘scale game’, as Chevron Chairman and CEO Michael Wirth told CNBC last week after the company announced its latest Permian growth targets.
“With the majors going into the Permian to do roll-outs, the independents there are getting squeezed by the banks, which want them to cough out more money or get out,” Investing.com’s Barani Krishnan quoted Kilduff as saying.
According to Rystad Energy, the players with large-scale operations and acreage positions could get average returns of 20 percent in three years in the Wolfcamp A in the Permian Delaware, for example, even if WTI Midland oil price is at $45 a barrel. But smaller operators could struggle because of higher drilling, completion, operation, and transportation costs.
“These operators might struggle in the current price environment, and their best opportunity to monetize their investment could be to sell their acreage to larger operators with more efficient logistics, better infrastructure and more negotiating power through the value chain,” Rystad Energy senior partner Per Magnus Nysveen said last month.
“Size matters, even more so when drilling for shale oil in the Permian Basin,” Nysveen added.
According to Kilduff, as carried by Investing.com, “The stars are aligning for the super majors to take control of shale and determine pricing for light crude in Asia, if not the world. They’ll be OPEC by a different name.”
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2Hw2MKH Tyler Durden
The slowdown in global trade began many quarters before the Trump administration launched a trade war with China last May. The primary cause of the downturn is sharp declines in intra-Asian trade – mostly due to China’s deteriorating economy. While equity markets around the world have soared in the last several months from “trade optimism,” any deal between Washington and Beijing may not initially trough global trade and could leave the shipping industry in turmoil.
A rapid slowdown in global trade to rising marine fuel to capacity out of step with demand has generated new challenges for container-shipping operators in 2019, hurting the overall prospects for a global recovery in the near term.
The Wall Street Journal says that shipping companies will pass on $10 billion in extra expenses to cargo owners this year.
Container ships are essentially cargo ships that carry all of their load in truck-size intermodal containers, in a technique called containerization. These vessels move clothes, food, furniture, electronics and heavy-industry parts from emerging market countries to the developed world. Pre-2008 financial crisis, these ships fueled globalization, as demand for vessels rose as much as 8% annually and shippers spent billions to increase the size of their fleets.
Now, the industry is plagued with excess tonnage and collapsing freight rates. It is likely that the trade war will continue to push rates below the break-even levels for many companies this year.
With China’s economy faltering and trade volumes declining from the evolving trade war between Washington and Beijing, operators are slashing their full-year forecasts.
“We see clearly a global economic growth that is declining,” Soren Skou, chief executive of A.P. Moller-Maersk AS, the world’s top container operator by capacity, told an investor conference call recently.
“We see weaknesses, in particular, in China and Europe. We expect container demand growth to fall to 1% to 3% this year from 3.7% to 3.8% last year.”
The world’s largest shipper, Maserk, said 2019 would be a challenging year due to risks of further restrictions on global trade. It added that new regulations by the International Maritime Organization to cut emissions from ship stacks “will bring significant increases in fuel prices.”
“The fuel price increase is very significant and there will be a premium in freight rates,” Jeremy Nixon, CEO of Japan’s Ocean Network Express, told The Wall Street Journal in a recent interview.
“We are trying to pass on the fuel charge to customers, but we are not doing it very effectively.”
Consulting firm AlixPartners LLP. said in a recent report that ships traveling from Asia-to-Europe trade route would need to boost freight rates by 40%, and 33% for trans-Pacific trades to absorb the extra costs.
Shipping executives warn uncertainty over the availability of cleaner fuels makes freight rates this year little more than a guessing game. “It has turned the shipping market, the transportation market, into a casino,” said Andreas Hadjiyiannis, president of the Cyprus Union of Shipowners.
Freight rates soared in the second half of 2018 as US importers pulled orders forward to get ahead of tariffs. But by late August into September, rates collapsed after the importers were finished.
“We don’t believe a China-U.S. deal will be the last we have heard of trade tensions in 2019,” said Skou.
“There is also clearly an outstanding discussion between Europe and the U.S.”
Faltering global trade is a clear indication that container-shipping operators will have a challenging time in 2019. Compound that with marine fuel rising, new emission standards, and overcapacity in the industry, well, a perfect storm is brewing.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2UAOgVT Tyler Durden
On Sunday, March 11, 2019, Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell was interviewed by Scott Pelley on 60 Minutes. We thought it would be helpful to cite a few sections of their conversation and provide you with prior articles in which we addressed the topics discussed.
We have been outspoken about the role of the Fed, their mission and policy actions over the last ten years. We are quick to point out flaws in Fed policy for a couple of reasons. First, is simply due to the enormous effect that Fed policy actions and words have on the markets. Second, many in the media seem to regurgitate the Fed’s actions and words without providing much context or critique of them. The combination of the Fed’s power over the market coupled with poor media analysis of their words and actions might expose investors to improper conclusions and therefore sub-optimal investment decision-making.
With that, we review various parts of the 60 Minutes interview and offer links to prior articles to help provide alternative views and insight as well as a more thorough context of Chairman Powell’s answers.
Click the following links for the interview TRANSCRIPT and VIDEO.
Can the Fed Chairman be fired?
PELLEY: Do you listen to the president?
POWELL: I don’t comment on the president or any elected official.
PELLEY: Can the president fire you?
POWELL: Well, the law is clear that I have a four-year term. And I fully intend to serve it.
PELLEY: So no, in your view?
POWELL: No.
Our Take: Yes, the Federal Reserve Act which governs the Fed makes it clear that he can be fired “for cause.”- Chairman Powell You’re Fired
Does the Fed play a role in driving the growing income and wealth inequality gaps?
PELLEY: According to federal statistics, the upper half of the American people take home 90% of income, leaving about 10% for the lower half of Americans. Where are we headed in this country in terms of income disparity?
POWELL: Well, the Fed doesn’t have direct responsibility for these issues. But nonetheless, they’re important.
Our Take: Inflation hurts the poor and benefits of the wealthy. The Fed has an inflation target and therefore takes direct policy action that fuels the wealth divide. – Two Percent for the One Percent
Will Chairman Powell know when a recession is upon us?
PELLEY: This is the longest expansion in American history. How long can it last?
POWELL: It will be the longest in a few months if it continues. I would just say there’s no reason why it can’t continue.
POWELL: So, the U.S. economy right now is in a pretty good place. Unemployment is at a 50-year low.
Our Take: We continually hear about the strength of the labor market. While that may seem to be the case, wages and the labor participation rate paint a different picture. – Quick Take: Unemployment Anomaly (RIA Pro – Unlocked)
Do record high stock valuations represent healthy financial conditions?
PELLEY: We have seen big swings in the stock markets in the United States. And I wonder, do you think the markets today are overvalued?
POWELL: We don’t comment on the valuation of the stock market particularly. And we do though, we monitor financial conditions carefully. Our interest rate policy works through financial conditions. So we look at a very broad range of financial conditions. That includes interest rates, the level of the dollar, the availability of credit and also the stock market. So we look at a range of things. And I think we feel that conditions are generally healthy today.
Is the Fed Chairman aware of the burden of debt and its economic consequences?
PELLEY: But the overarching question is are we headed to a recession?
POWELL: The outlook for our economy, in my view, is a favorable one. It’s a positive one. I think growth this year will be slower than last year. Last year was the highest growth that we’ve experienced since the financial crisis, really in more than ten years. This year, I expect that growth will continue to be positive and continue to be at a healthy rate.
Does Chairman Powell bow at the altar of the President and Congress?
On December 17 & 18 of 2019 President Trump tweeted the following:
“It is incredible that with a very strong dollar and virtually no inflation, the outside world blowing up around us, Paris is burning and China way down, the Fed is even considering yet another interest rate hike. Take the Victory!”
I hope the people over at the Fed will read today’s Wall Street Journal Editorial before they make yet another mistake. Also, don’t let the market become any more illiquid than it already is. Stop with the 50 B’s. Feel the market, don’t just go by meaningless numbers. Good luck!”
PELLEY: Your Fed is apolitical?
POWELL: Strictly non-political.
Considering the Fed made an abrupt U-Turn of policy following the Tweets above, a sharp market decline and very little change in the data to justify it, we think otherwise. – The Fed Doesn’t Target The Market
Summary
The Fed has a long history of talking out of both sides of their mouths. They make a habit of avoiding candor about policy uncertainties in what appears to be an effort to retain credibility and give an appearance of confidence. The Fed’s defense of their extraordinary actions over the past ten years and reluctance to normalize policy is awkward, to say the least and certainly not confidence inspiring. As evidenced by his responses to Scott Pelley on 60 Minutes, Jerome Powell is picking up where Bernanke and Yellen left off.
This article aims to contrast the inconsistencies of the most current words of the Fed Chairman with truths and reality. Thinking for oneself and taking nothing for granted remains the most powerful way to protect and compound wealth and avoid large losses.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2W36xvr Tyler Durden
YouTube has finally gotten around to shutting down a notorious soft-core ‘pedo-centric’ channel months after its creator was arrested for molesting a 15-year-old girl in a Florida hotel room.
UK-based Ian Rylett, 55, was arrested in August of 2018 on suspicion of molesting the teen, shortly after she signed a contract to appear on his YouTube channels – one of which was “Seven Super Girls.” According to prosecutors, the contract required the girl to “remove any items of clothing as directed by management.“
According to an arrest warrant obtained by BuzzFeed News, detectives were called to Rylett’s Orange County hotel room on the morning of Aug. 16, after Rylett allegedly verbally abused the girl, demanding she undress in front of him against her will and “practice wrapping her breasts down, to make them appear smaller for the video shoot.” According to the report, the girl, who is under 16, claims Rylett touched her breasts and fondled her while repeatedly making her undress, eventually attempting to forcefully remove her underwear. The arrest report also alleges that Rylett “threatened to use the contract to fine her if she did not comply with his demand.” –BuzzFeed
According to prosecutors, Rylett wanted the teen’s chest to look smaller so she would appear younger in the videos, according to ClickOrlando.
While initially pleading not guilty in August, Rylett agreed to a plea deal on Wednesday and has been sentenced to 90 days in jail and five years of probation. He faced up to 15 years in prison if convicted.
In response, YouTube has finally shut down his operation.
The channel, which has nearly three million subscribers, features videos of children and young teens performing skits in costumes, going on vacation, or doing routine activities around their homes.
Over the past decade, at least six spinoff channels were created including “Seven Perfect Angels” and the flagship “Seven Super Girls.”
Known collectively as the SAK Channels, more than 17 million YouTube users subscribe to the videos, helping to generate more than 10 billion total video views.
Rylett’s UK-based company, Starcast Productions LTD, has operated the channels for at least the past five years, court records indicate. –Click Orlando
The channel containing Rylett’s sexually suggestive videos was brought to light by comedian Daniel Tosh in a 2017 segment on Tosh.0.
Tosh staged a “To Catch a Predator” style spoof on the type of viewers who were watching the seven girls’ videos. You guessed it….pedophiles. Unfortunately, their videos are extremely popular and serve as an indictment to the world’s pedophilic attractions.
The channel has nearly 3,000 videos uploaded. But this is no ordinary children’s show, and without a doubt, 1980’s era censors would have driven themselves mad in an attempt to shut down the perversion.
At first glance, the Seven Super Girls YouTube homepage, arguably, looks like one’s favorite porn site. Each under-18 girl has her own subchannel. To the unwitting, however, the site may look like girls dressed like girls, engaging in activities which girls enjoy — going to camp, hanging with friends by the pool, and playing dress up.
But to a pedophile, the site is a smorgasbord of smut, carefully crafted to serve as eye candy for adults and teenagers to indulge in their child-sex fantasies. After we clicked on the entire list of videos and selected to sort by most popular, it became clear to us at The Free Thought Project, the videos are in no way innocent. –Free Thought Project
In February, several advertisers including Disney and Nestle SA ceased their relationship with YouTube over a “soft-core pedo ring” operating in the comments sections of several pedo-centric YouTube videos.
Originally discovered in 2016 by YouTuber “reallygraceful” in a now-unavailable video – for which she was subject to MSM hit pieces (such as this one by the BBC‘s Mike Wendling), blogger Matt Wilson revived the controversy in a 20-minute.
Some of the videos involved in the pedo ring were placed next to Disney and Nestle advertisements, according to the report.
All Nestle companies in the U.S. have paused advertising on YouTube, a spokeswoman for the company said Wednesday in an email. Video game maker Epic Games Inc. and German packaged food giant Dr. August Oetker KG also said they had postponed YouTube spending after their ads were shown to play before the videos. Disney has also withheld its spending, according to people with knowledge of the matter, who asked not to be identified because the decision hasn’t been made public. –Bloomberg
When one clicked on one of the videos, YouTube algorithms then suggested similar ‘pedo-centric’ material.
In response, YouTube disabled the comments section for a wide swath of videos containing children.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2JbT3Mg Tyler Durden
For a few years now, since at least 2014, the phrase “global economic reset” has been circulating in the financial world. This phrase is used primarily by globalist institutions like the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to describe an event in which the current system as we know it will either die out or evolve into a new system where “multilateralism” will become the norm. The reset is often described in an ambiguous way. IMF banking elites will usually mention the end results of the shift, but they say little about the process to get there.
What we do know is that the intent of the globalists is to use this reset to create a more centralized monetary system and micro-managed global economy. At the core of this new structure would be the IMF along with perhaps the BIS and World Bank. It is a plan that has been supported openly by both western and eastern governments, including Russia and China.
As noted, the details are few and far between, but the IMF describes the use of open borders and human migrations during the reset as a means to transfer capital from various parts of the world. It is a novel if not utterly insane way to transfer wealth that only makes sense if you understand that the globalist goal is to deliberately conjure a geopolitical catastrophe.
The IMF also asserts that blockchain technology will make capital transfer easier and more efficient in this future environment, which explains the enthusiastic globalist support for developments in blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies despite the notion in cryptocurrency circles that blockchain would somehow make the bankers “obsolete”.
The IMF also acknowledges that in the meantime a slowdown in capital flows has occurred, and that this slowdown is ongoing since the crash of 2008. What they do not explicitly admit is that the crash of 2008 never ended, and that the decline we are witnessing today is merely an extension of the recession/depression that started ten years ago.
Certain facts have become obvious to anyone with any sense over the past year. First, as the Federal Reserve began tightening stimulus policies by raising interest rates and cutting assets from their balance sheet, the global economy began to return to steep declines not seen since the credit crisis. I predicted this outcome in my article ‘Party While You Can – Central Bank Ready To Pop The Everything Bubble’, published in January of 2018. The plunge has started in almost every sector of the economy, from housing, to autos to credit markets to retail. Now, even jobs, numbers which are highly manipulated to the upside, are beginning to falter.
The assertion in the mainstream media is that this recessionary downturn is new. This is not the case. What began in 2008 was an epic implosion of multiple national economies, and what we are seeing in 2019 is the final culmination of that process – The end game.
It is not a coincidence that the downturn started right after the Fed began tightening stimulus measures in 2017. With only a minor increase in interest rates and moderate cuts to their balance sheet, all the conditions the economy suffered in 2008 are suddenly returning. What this tells us is that the US economy and parts of the global economy cannot survive without constant and ever expanding central bank stimulus.
The moment the stimulus goes away, the crash returns.
Does this mean that central banks will try to keep QE going forever? No, it does not. So far, the Fed has not capitulated at all from the path of tightening. In fact, the Fed nearly doubled its normal balance sheet cuts from January 30th to the end of February, dumping over $65 billion in a 30 day period. The Fed also has not changed its dot plot projections for two more interest rate hikes this year. This means all the talk the past two months of the Fed going “dovish” was nonsense. Setting aside their rhetoric and looking at their actions, the Fed has been as hawkish as ever.
The only people who might find this to be news are most stock market daytraders, who ignore all other failing indicators and seem content to base their economic projections on equities alone. Set aside the fact that stocks plunged in December into near bear market territory. The bounce in January and February has convinced them that the Fed is stepping in and will not allow the economy to tank. But the “plunge protection team” is about to pull the rug out from under their feet after training them like Pavlovian dogs to salivate at the sound of the word “accommodation”.
Their mindset is based on a host of incorrect assumptions.
To be clear, while the Fed paid lip service to “accommodation” in their public statements, it was not the central bank that stepped in monetarily to stall falling stocks. That was actually the Chinese central bank, pumping billions in stimulus into global markets at just the right moment.
Chinese stimulus coupled with pension fund buying at the start of this year saved stocks from losses beyond 20%, but markets have met resistance on the way up. Without renewed stimulus measures from the Fed, equities have topped out multiple times and refuse to move towards their previous highs. This suggests that the two month bounce is over, and that stocks will now fall back down to December lows and beyond. If the projections I made in January are correct, then the Dow will fall into the 17,000 – 18,000 point range from the end of March through April.
The facade is slowly but surely melting away, not just in economics, but everywhere. I predicted both the success of the Brexit vote as well as Trump’s win in 2016 based on the theory that the globalists would allow or even help populists to gain a political foothold, only to crash the economic system on their heads and then blame them for the disaster. So far my theory is proving correct.
Trump’s trade war continues unabated despite claims by many that it would be over quickly. Currently, there are no plans for a March summit between Trump and Xi, and the possibility of a summit anytime soon has come into question as Trump’s negotiations with North Korea fell to shambles last month. The negotiations are a farce and are not meant to succeed. I continue to hold to my position that the trade war is a planned distraction and that Trump is playing a role in a globalist scripted drama.
The facade of Donald Trump as a “populist candidate” is quickly ending. His cabinet is loaded with think-tank ghouls and banking elites, so this should come as little surprise. But there are still some analysts out there that naively believe that Trump is playing “4D chess” and that he is not the pied piper he now appears to be. What I see is a president that claimed during his campaign that he would “drain the swamp” of elites, then stacked his cabinet with some of the worst elites in Washington D.C. What I see is a president who argued against Fed stimulus measures and the fake stock market during his campaign, and who now has attached himself to the stock market so completely that any crash will now be blamed on him no matter the facts. What I see is a willing scapegoat; a president that is going to fail on purpose.
In terms of the Brexit, I still predict that there will be a “no deal” event, and that this is by design. The Brexit deal with the EU is slated to be decided in the next few weeks. A “no deal” outcome would be a perfect excuse for a major financial crisis in Europe, which is why I think it will happen. While sovereignty movements in the US will get the blame for the crash through Trump, sovereignty movements in the UK will get the blame for a crash in Europe through Brexit.
It is important to remind the public that this narrative is entirely false.
The economy has been in a state of animated death since 2008. Central bank stimulus acted as a kind of fiscal formaldehyde, keeping the visible signs of the crash at bay for 10 years but also creating a bubble even larger and more destructive than the one before. The “Everything Bubble” has now been primed to explode with maximum damage in mind.
The Fed started the tightening process for a reason; the establishment is ready to start the “global economic reset”, and they have their populist scapegoats in place. The crash in fundamentals returned in mid-2018, and I believe that crash will finally be acknowledged publicly by the media in mid-2019.
The point of it all is described in the very IMF interviews and documents I linked to above – Total centralization of the global economic framework, managed by the IMF. They describe it as “multilateralism” or a “multipolar world order”; this is meant to fool us into believing that the reset is about “decentralization”. It isn’t. They intend to move us from one unipolar economic structure to another unipolar economic structure that is even more centralized. That is all.
The crash itself is simply a means to an end. It is a tool to gain fiscal and psychological leverage against the public. The everything bubble was created for a reason. The Fed has tightened into economic weakness over the past year for a reason. The timing of Trump’s trade war and summit failures have happened for a reason. The timing of the Brexit chaos is happening now for a reason. The globalists are pulling the plug on economic life support today; the crash is engineered, and sovereignty movements are supposed to take the blame.
The best option at this time is to continuously force the issue of central bank culpability. Liberty activists have to keep the focus on them and their criminal participation in economic sabotage, and we cannot assume that any government or political leader will be friendly to our cause. The globalists have started the crisis, and we must finish it by making sure they are held accountable.
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via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2EYXjct Tyler Durden
Moving forward with its plan to restrict sales of e-cigarettes in the name of preventing underage vaping, the Food and Drug Administration today unveiled a “draft compliance policy” that effectively bans all flavors except tobacco, mint, and menthol but prioritizes enforcement against products “offered for sale in ways that pose a greater risk for minors.” What that means is not completely clear, although it is bound to create headaches for manufacturers and retailers while making it harder for both former smokers and people interested in quitting to obtain the vaping products they prefer.
The FDA plans to “end current compliance policy” for e-cigarettes, except the three exempted flavors. That policy gave manufacturers until August 2022 to get FDA approval for their products, four years later than the original deadline. In the interim, they were allowed to continue selling products that were on the market as of August 8, 2016. The FDA intends to move the deadline up by a year for the disfavored flavors (i.e., nearly all of them) and end its policy of preapproval forbearance as it applies to those products. But the agency suggests that it won’t take immediate action against them unless they are sold in a way that implicates its enforcement priorities.
The FDA lists four of those priorities: 1) “products sold in locations that minors are able to enter at any time,” 2) “products sold through retail establishments and online retail locations that have sold to minors after issuance of the guidance,” 3) “products sold online with no limit on the quantity that a customer may purchase within a given period of time,” and 4) “products sold online without independent, third-party age- and identity-verification services that compare customer information against third-party data sources, such as public records.”
Although the list is not necessarily exhaustive, it seems reasonable to surmise that flavored e-cigarettes, pods, and e-liquids won’t be subject to immediate enforcement action if they are sold by stores that do not admit minors or by online vendors with age verification and quantity limits. Theoretically, a convenience store could get away with selling such products if it restricted them to a separate section where minors are not allowed, but the cost of doing that surely will be prohibitive in most cases. (That option seems to be aimed mainly at evading a provision of the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act that says the FDA may not “prohibit the sale of any tobacco product in face-to-face transactions by a specific category of retail outlets.”) The upshot is that adults who like the disfavored flavors will have to get them from vape shops, tobacconists, or websites with FDA-approved policies, as opposed to the thousands of other stores where they were heretofore available.
“We expect that some flavored e-cigarette products will no longer be sold at all,” says FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb. “We expect that other flavored e-cigarette products that continue to be sold will be sold only in a manner that prevents youth access, while premarket authorization for these products is sought from the FDA by 2021.” Retailers would be well-advised not to take Gottlieb at his word here, since they will be subject to enforcement action if they let customers younger than 18 enter their stores, even if they are scrupulous about checking IDs and never sell e-cigarettes to minors.
Gottlieb, who recognizes that e-cigarettes offer a “tremendous public health opportunity” as a harm-reducing alternative to the combustible kind, justifies the FDA’s flavor discrimination by observing that the restricted varieties are especially popular with teenagers. Yet they are also undeniably popular with adults. According to survey data cited by the FDA in its draft compliance policy, 63 percent of adult vapers prefer flavors other than mint or menthol.
Will every vaper who likes mango or watermelon backslide once such flavors are harder to get than the cigarettes he used to smoke? Will every smoker who tries vaping be deterred by the lack of flavor variety in the vast majority of stores? No, but there are bound to be some people in both categories, and they will face much greater health hazards than they otherwise would. The FDA is effectively encouraging smoking by trying to curb adolescent vaping with measures that go far beyond enforcing the minimum purchase age.
“This could have been worse,” says Liz Mair of Vapers United. “But we do not consider the debate surrounding vapor regulation to be anywhere near settled, and we would urge FDA to provide further clarity as soon as possible, while continuing to bear in mind that the priority here should be enabling existing smokers to try vaping as a method [of] quitting and/or reducing harm…rather than restricting the marketplace in a way that could inadvertently keep smoking rates where they are now or even lead to them rising again.”
The FDA will be accepting comments on its proposed policy for the next 30 days.
Seriously… China stocks plunge, US earnings tumbling, US macro data disappointment, Brexit uncertainty, bond yields plunge and still US stocks surge (we’ll explain why below)…
Chinese markets collapsed overnight with ChiNext plunging over 6% from Monday’s highs…
While China tumbled, European markets rallied with DAX outperforming on some positive economic data…
US equity markets surged once again (fading only on Boeing headlines and Trump China trade deal, then rebounding after UK voted against a no-deal brexit)…
Futures show another buying panic at the cash open
Boeing was ugly as Trump grounded their 737 Max planes…
And then Boeing was bid back into the green…
The S&P 500 broke above a key technical resistance level but ended back below it (a lower high)…
Wondering WTF is going on? It’s simple, as Charlie McElligott, managing director for cross-asset macro strategy at Nomura, wrote in a Tuesday note to clients:
The impending expiration of options contracts is fueling the purchase of those stocks as owning options becomes ever riskier as the expiration day approaches, a process called “rolling out.”
Options-related buying “is syncing up with corporate buyback flows, which typically run at a massive pace this week as well, ahead of going into a ‘blackout’ by next week,” McElligot wrote, referring to a period of when companies and corporate insiders are prohibited from repurchasing their own shares in the month before the release of their quarterly results.
“This demand double-whammy” are the “two largest catalysts” for the stock market’s upswing this week, he added.
Jeff Hirsch, editor of the Stock Trader’s Almanac and chief market strategist at Probabilities Fund Management, pointed out in a blog post that “March’s option expiration week performance is second only to December’s and has a bullish bias.”
But there’s some downside… the week after quad witch has been ugly…
Which is perhaps what bonds are worried about…
With stocks surging on their own on the heels of the biggest short-squeeze since the start of January..
And another surge in buyback-related stocks…
VIX and Credit collapsed further today…
Despite equity gains once again, bond yields were unchanged, dramatically diverging…
30Y Yields hovered around the 3.00% level…
The Dollar Index – DXY – tumbled for the 4th day in a row, well and truly breaking the 97.00 level…
Cable rallied notably as UK Parliament voted to rule out a no-deal brexit on March 29…
Cryptos broadly drifted lower on the day but Ripple rallied…
The drop in the dollar sparked more gains in commodities…
With gold extending its gains, back above $1300…
WTI Crude surged above $58 to 4-month highs after a surprise crude inventory draw…
Finally, something had to be done…
But, as we noted above, the week after quad witch usually does not end well.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2T693z0 Tyler Durden
In the entire history of the United States, consumers have never been in so much debt. And that would not be a crisis as long as the vast majority of us were regularly making our debt payments, but as you will see below delinquency levels are starting to rise to extremely alarming levels. In fact, some of the numbers that are coming in are even worse than we witnessed at any point during the last recession. If things are this bad already, what are they going to look like once the economy really gets bad?
Because even though it appears that we are heading into a new recession, according to the Federal Reserve it has not officially begun yet. That means that much worse is yet to come. Just like last time, millions of Americans will likely lose their jobs, and without an income most of those that suddenly find themselves unemployed will not be able to pay their bills. The stage is set for the largest tsunami of consumer debt defaults that this country has ever seen, and that will absolutely devastate major financial institutions all across America.
If you think that I am exaggerating even a little bit, please read over the following list very carefully. The following are 12 statistics that prove that the U.S. is facing a consumer debt apocalypse…
#1 Total consumer debt in the United States just surpassed the 4 trillion dollar mark. That has never happened before in all of U.S. history.
#2 When you throw in mortgages and all other kinds of individual debt, U.S. consumers are now 13.5 trillion dollars in debt.
#8 At this moment, more than 7 million Americans are delinquent on their auto loan payments. The figure has already surpassed what we witnessed during the peak of the last recession by about a million.
#12 One recent survey found that 78 percent of Americans “are living paycheck to paycheck”. Suffocating debt levels are a big reason why that figure is so incredibly high.
Since so many Americans are living paycheck to paycheck, that means that there is very little room for error. During the last recession, large numbers of Americans immediately began getting behind on their bills once they were laid off, and we saw mortgage defaults rise to unprecedented levels. Sadly, we haven’t learned from our past mistakes, and millions upon millions of Americans will find themselves drowning in an ocean of red ink once again during this next recession.
But even if you are not living paycheck to paycheck, carrying credit card balances is a very unwise thing to do.
Most Americans don’t realize that if you only make the minimum payment on a credit card every month, you can end up paying more in interest than you did for the original purchases. The following comes from USA Today…
If a credit-card borrower only made the minimum payments on $5,000 of debt, for example, they’d be in debt for more than 18 years and would end up paying $6,372 in interest based on national average interest rates, according to Ted Rossman, industry analyst for CreditCards.com.
If you keep playing this game, I promise you that you will never get rich. Instead, the only people that will be getting wealthy will be the people that are receiving your debt payments.
Credit card debt is one of my pet peeves. One of the best financial moves that anyone can make is to get out of credit card debt and never look back.
And that is particularly important at this juncture because the economy is really starting to slow down. Compared to last year, U.S. job cut announcements were up 117 percent in February.
We haven’t seen anything like that since the last financial crisis.
At this point, even mainstream economists are openly admitting what is coming. Mark Zandi, the chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, sounded downright gloomy in his most recent article…
The economy is throttling back. Way back. That’s the message in the near stall out of job growth last month. Job creation probably isn’t as bad as February’s disappointing numbers suggest — unusually poor weather played a role in limiting job growth to just 20,000 — but it is weaker than just a few months ago. Businesses are nervous, and sentiment is at risk of breaking if anything goes wrong.
And plenty could go wrong. A recession could materialize swiftly if businesses lose faith, and there is a good chance they will.
And when the next recession strikes, things are going to get very, very rough for U.S. consumers.
A consumer debt apocalypse is coming, and it is going to be incredibly painful.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2HssNe2 Tyler Durden
President Donald Trump said Wednesday the U.S. government will ground the Boeing 737 Max aircraft, days after an Ethiopian Airiness plane crashed and killed all 157 people aboard.
Trump will issue an “emergency order to ground all 737 Max 8 and the 737 Max 9, and planes associated with that line,” according to CNN. “Pilots have been notified, airlines have been all notified. Airlines are agreeing with this. The safety of the American people and all people is our paramount concern,” the president added, explaining that both Boeing and the Federal Aviation Administration were “in agreement.”
The plane that crashed in Ethiopia is similar to the Boeing Max 8 model that went down off the coast of Indonesia last October. It’s still not exactly clear what caused the Ethiopian Airlines crash. But in announcing that his country would be grounding Boeing 737 Max aircraft on Tuesday, Canadian Transport Minister Marc Garneau mentioned a “possible similarity” between both incidents, according to CBS News.
Similar “vertical fluctuations” and “oscillations” were evident in the tracing data from both flights, The New York Times reported Garneau as saying. In addition to Canada, governments from the European Union, China, and Iraq have also grounded Boeing 737 Max 8 planes. FAA Administrator Dan Elwell preiously said in a statement Tuesday the agency’s review of the 737 Max model “shows no systemic performance issues and provides no basis to order grounding the aircraft.” A Trump administration official did tell Politico that the White House and the FAA were in “constant contact” regarding the issue. Now, it appears the administration has decided otherwise.
“The FAA is ordering the temporary grounding of Boeing 737 MAX aircraft operated by U.S. airlines or in U.S. territory,” the FAA said in a statement. “The agency made this decision as a result of the data gathering process and new evidence collected at the site and analyzed today. This evidence, together with newly refined satellite data available to FAA this morning, led to this decision.”
It is important to note that there’s no universal consensus on whether the groundings are necessary. That’s because there isn’t yet clear-cut evidence that the Indonesia and Ethiopia crashes were related. While the plane that crashed last October had technical issues prior to takeoff, the Ethiopian Airlines flight did not. Retired airline pilot and current accident investigator John Cox explained in a Los Angeles Times column why we shouldn’t jump to conclusions:
Until the data from the recorders are analyzed, the FAA cannot determine if an “unsafe condition” exists. And only if they determine that an “unsafe condition” exists can they ground the airplane. Unless the actions the FAA takes are consistently based on facts and data, then they aren’t actually enhancing safety.
In the aftermath of an aviation catastrophe, everyone wants an immediate answer to ensure it doesn’t happen again. The news media highlight the questions and fears in their daily (or hourly) updates. Anxiety mounts. In this case we need to let the well-proven investigative process work. This process takes time, and we have to be patient.
As Reason‘s Stephanie Slade has pointed out, in the aftermath of deadly tragedies, airlines will voluntarily take precautions to ensure safety so that passengers aren’t afraid to fly with them. The same goes for plane manufacturers like Boeing.
Moving forward with its 
President Donald Trump said Wednesday the U.S. government will ground the Boeing 737 Max aircraft, days after an Ethiopian Airiness plane crashed and killed all 157 people aboard.