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As social unrest rages in New York City, a video surfaced on social media Tuesday, showing what appears to be an “undercover” police car that resembles a Yellow Cab NYC Taxi. 

The video, first posted via Twitter handle @dertyduchess, is narrated by a passerby, who spots an “NYC cab cop car.” The person went onto say, “this is the craziest shit I’ve seen.” As the person walks by the vehicle, they pointed out how “someone” was being detained inside the cab. 

THE NYPD IS DISGUISING AS TAXI DRIVERS AND TRICKING PROTESTERS THAT ARE TRYING TO GO HOME!!! SPREAD THIS AND BE SAFE pic.twitter.com/hc4uV3BqXJ

— emel BLM (@taxicabstruce) June 3, 2020

One Twitter user responded to the video by saying: “Cops in NYC pretending to be taxi drivers so they can trap protesters… I have never in my life seen or heard anything as SICK and TWISTED as this….,” tweeted @hisnameiselie.

While there are no official reports that NYPD uses undercover cabs, Motherboard filed several requests to the NYPD through the Freedom of Information Act to examine the issue more in-depth back in 2015. What they found is that NYPD operated a small fleet of these cars back then. However, the fleet has grown to new taxi cab models, as shown in the video above, with what appears to be a new Toyota corolla.

A video from 2013 shows an NYPD undercover taxi in action. 

As a note to rioting Americans, something we’ve written in the last several days, the lesson to be learned today is that while fleeing a protest or store that was looted in New York City — hoping into a taxi for the great escape could result in an arrest. 

Authored by Steve Watson via Summit News,

As violence, looting and rioting continue to plague almost every American city, virtue signalling leftist publication Teen Vogue told its readers that the ring leaders of the carnage, Antifa, really just wants to create a better world.

“Antifa grows out of a larger revolutionary politics that aspires toward creating a better world, but the primary motivation is to stop racists from organizing,” a tweet from the publication reads.

🗣 “Antifa grows out of a larger revolutionary politics that aspires toward creating a better world, but the primary motivation is to stop racists from organizing.” https://t.co/ShS2RPfDN2

— Teen Vogue (@TeenVogue) June 1, 2020

Well, that’s that cleared up then.

But hang on, why are legitimate protesters confronting and opposing Antifa chicken necks?

Black protester tackles Antifa rioter trying to loot store.

But wait, blue check marks on here told me Antifa are literally the same as WW2 troops who stormed the beaches of Normandy. https://t.co/3EnzMYyVTL

— Paul Joseph Watson (@PrisonPlanet) June 3, 2020

Teen Vogue’s assertion is based on a three year old interview with then Dartmouth College ‘historian’ Mark Bray, a known Antifa sympathiser who constantly tries to defend the organisation, and has even donated the profits of a book he wrote to Antifa.

“The vast majority of what they do does not entail any physical confrontation,” Bray claimed in the interview.

Bray also claimed that most of what Antifa does is “researching white supremacists and neo-Nazis”.

Not smashing up black-owned small businesses then?

Believe it or not, Bray is still at it though.

In an op-ed for The Washington Post Monday, Bray, who now lectures at Rutgers, described that the looting and rioting as “‘violent’ protest tactics.” with extra quotation marks around ‘violent’.

Bray suggests that Antifa protesters are engaging in “social revolutionary self-defense” against police, further claiming that the violence is merely “the targeted destruction of police and capitalist property”.

Refusing to call the rioting what it is, Bray described it as “a variety of forms of resistance during this dramatic rebellion.”

Someone more qualified than Bray to describe exactly what Antifa really is is Former Antifa member Gabriel Nadales, who now  admits that what the organisation does is the “very definition of domestic terrorism.”

U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson pledged on Wednesday to overhaul immigration rules and said Britain is considering providing a route to British citizenship for nearly three million Hong Kong residents in response to Beijing’s move to impose a far-reaching security law here that many fear will dismantle the city’s political freedoms and which will criminalize broadly worded offenses such as sedition, subversion and foreign interference. Beijing’s decision to bypass Hong Kong’s legislature has been heavily criticized by the British government, which signed an agreement in 1984 to ensure that Hong Kong remains autonomous from Beijing, except in matters such as defense.

The unprecedented move, which Johnson said he would implement when China formally enacts the security law, could emerge as among the most significant ramifications of Beijing’s effort to undercut Hong Kong’s freedoms and bring the city more closely under Communist Party rule. It would potentially grant British residency and working rights to up to 40% of Hong Kong’s population, raising the specter of a brain drain from the Asian financial center.

“Many people in Hong Kong fear their way of life—which China pledged to uphold—is under threat,” Johnson wrote in an op-ed that appeared Wednesday in the Times of London newspaper and Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post. “If China proceeds to justify their fears, then Britain could not in good conscience shrug our shoulders and walk away.”

Johnson’s vow comes as the United States, Canada, Australia and others face pressure from lawmakers and human rights groups to offer residency to Hong Kong people fleeing deteriorating political circumstances in the former British colony, which was promised a high degree of autonomy under the terms of its 1997 handover to China.

Johnson wrote that his government would allow holders of British National (Overseas), or BNO, passports to come to Britain for a renewable period of 12 months and gain the right to work. The move “could place them on a route to citizenship,” he said.

These passports, a holdover from British rule issued to people born before 1997, currently allow holders to stay in Britain for six months but do not afford work rights or residency. About 350,000 of Hong Kong’s 7.5 million residents hold British National Overseas passports, to which people who were citizens of Hong Kong before Britain returned the city to Chinese rule in 1997 are entitled.Johnson said a further 2.5 million people are eligible to apply for them, adding up to about 40% of Hong Kong’s population. Holders of those passports can visit the U.K. for a period of six months but currently don’t have the automatic right to live or work in the country.

That said, it is not clear exactly how immigration laws would be changed or if the U.K. would fully open its doors to the 2.8 million Hong Kong residents potentially eligible for a British National Overseas passport. It isn’t currently permitted to hold a British National Overseas passport while holding the nationality of another country. British Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab said on Tuesday that the U.K. had discussed with allies including Australia, Canada and the U.S. the possibility of “burden sharing if we see a mass exodus from Hong Kong.” He didn’t indicate any outcome of the discussions.

China, naturally, was not happy with this turn of events.

In response to the BoJo op-ed, China’s Foreign Ministry said Wednesday that Britain has no jurisdiction over Hong Kong. Britain must “step back from the brink” and “stop interfering in Hong Kong’s affairs and China’s internal affairs,” spokesman Zhao Lijian told reporters.

Hong Kong’s Office of the Commissioner of China’s Ministry of Foreign Ministry added that “the U.K. has no sovereignty power, nor does it have power of governing or “supervision” over Hong Kong after the region’s return to China” adding that “no terms in the Sino-British Joint Declaration grant rights to U.K. to interfere in Hong Kong affairs” and that “any foreign nations including the U.K. should not use the Joint Declaration as an excuse to meddle in Hong Kong affairs: statement.”

Needless to say, China has been especially critical with the proposal since Britain first floated the idea last week, and has denied that the security law breached the 1984 agreement with Britain. It has said it reserved the right to take unspecified “corresponding action.”

Asked about the British proposal on Wednesday, Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam said some foreign governments had adopted “blatant double standards” regarding China’s security law.

Comment on the proposal, Rabobank’s Michael Every was laconic, and warned that this is just the last geopolitical flashpoint that markets are clearly ignoring:

the UK is lobbying the 5-eyes Anglo group to allow millions of Hong Kongers to leave for Britain (who will take 2.9m), the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand: what does that suggest about the outlook?

As the former colonial ruler, London was a signatory to the Sino-British Joint Declaration in which China agreed to preserve Hong Kong’s political freedoms and way of life until 2047.

Last August, former NY Fed president Bill Dudley sparked outrage across both ideological camps when he published a Bloomberg op-ed in which he said the Fed should not only not get involved by providing stimulus during the then-raging trade war between the US and China but implicitly admitted that the it is Fed that decides who is – or isn’t – president, as it  “could go much further” beyond merely warning, as Powell did, that the Fed’s tools are not suited to mitigating the damage from trade war, but “could state explicitly that the central bank won’t bail out an administration that keeps making bad choices on trade policy, making it abundantly clear that Trump will own the consequences of his actions.”

This was ironic for several reasons, the first of which is that it was Powell’s own justification for easing that enabled Trump to immediate escalate the trade war.

The second reason Dudley’s warning ended up being one giant farce is that just one month later the Fed launched “NOT QE” (which we now know was well and truly QE) to bail out various banks (mostly JPMorgan) and countless hedge funds that had gotten caught offside by the repo crisis.

In effect, Trump read the Dudley op-ed and flipped it on its head, forcing the Fed to engage in ever escalating stimulus to avoid undoing a decade of interventions which had put the central bank “all in” in preserving the fake market it had created in the aftermath of the financial crisis.

Which brings us to today when Dudley, realizing any Fed gambit of the kind he proposed would never again work, spoke on Bloomberg TV and confirmed what “conspiracy websites” have been saying for the past decade, namely that the Fed’s actions could have the “unintended consequence of encouraging more risky behavior.”

“People who have high-yield debt that’s outstanding, a lot of times that’s happened by choice,” he told Bloomberg Television. “So for the Federal Reserve to intervene and support those asset prices, is basically creating a little bit of moral hazard in the sense you’re encouraging people to take on more debt.”

Dudley was referring to the following chart which was published by the Fed last week, and which shows which corporate bond ETFs, among them junk bond focused ones, the Fed has been – and will be – purchasing.

Realizing that by saying so he opened a can of worms that will be used at the next Congressional dog and pony show featuring Chair Powell, Dudley, who stepped down from the New York Fed in 2018, said the Fed’s intention was not to bail out individual borrowers, but ensure “that people actually can access that market and raise high-yield debt. And I think they’ve been quite successful in those efforts.’”

Here we will make some corrections to Dudley’s comment, who until last year was best known for espousing the lack of inflation by highlighting how cheap iPads are: the Fed is creating, not “basically”, an unlimited amount, not “a little bit” of moral hazard, which is why retail investors are now flooding into stocks, comfortable that even if there is another crash the Fed will always bail them out.

Commenting on this, Bloomberg macro commentator Richard Breslow this morning said that “as a fan of Fed Chairman Jerome Powell, I still found it unnerving to hear him say last week that “We felt called to do what we could do.” They are meant to fulfill the dual mandate. And, yes, keep the financial system functional. But God’s work is more appropriately left to others. It’s good, at least, that he said they had crossed many “red lines.” It’s going back over them that will be the hard part.”

Alas, now that moral hazard is not only institutionalized, but officially admitted as Bill Dudley has now done, not only will the Fed never go back on the “red lines” but it will continue trampling them until the Fed’s ownership of assets start approaching the chart from Deutsche Bank which last month “playfully” asked just how big the Fed’s balance sheet could become.

Finally, some thoughts on this from Rabobank’s Michael Every:

Meanwhile, back in the home of the real Hollywood, nationwide street protests show few signs of abating – and markets keep going up and risk remains on. There are two equally-depressing conclusions here:

1) We no longer have actual markets due to central-bank elevation of moral hazard to the foundational pillar of financial capitalism;

2) We still have markets, but they find the idea of the US military operating on the streets to quell popular unrest to be reassuring – just as it would be in a banana republic where the asset holders are traditionally happy to do ‘whatever it takes’ to keep the peasants in line.

And while the jury is still out on the latter, we just had confirmation on the former by none other than the former head of the most important regional Fed.

Update (1115ET): It appears, as Jonathan Turley details in a Twitter thread below, that Rosenstein is throwing McCabe under the bus…

Rosenstein just testified that he would not have signed the warrant application in 2017 on Carter Page because of the misconduct of FBI agents and the lack of evidence.

He said he did not know that the Steele dossier was discredited by that time. He said McCabe particularly “was not candid … or forthcoming.”

Notably, we now know that the Flynn investigation found no criminal acts by December 2016 and now Rosenstein said he would have ended the investigation of Page which was the focus of the early justifications of the Russian investigation.

Rosenstein just said he did not know that investigators by the early January 2017 asked for Flynn to be removed from the Crossfire Hurricane investigation. He signed off on these warrants and applications but was never informed of those critical facts.

Rosenstein insists that the information in appointing Mueller was based on that incomplete information at the time. He admitted that by August 2017 when he signed off on the Mueller investigation there was no evidence at all of collusion with the Russians.

Sen. Feinstein did a good job framing the use (or non-use) of the Steele dossier but went off the rails by stressing that none of the prosecutions relied on the dossier. However, the fact is that there was never any prosecution of any Trump person for colluding or conspiring …

…with the Russians. There was never any evidence of collusion with the Russian, a point reaffirmed by Rosenstein today. This hearing shows the value of oversight and the still unanswered questions in light of recently released material.

Grassley just said Rosenstein misled him and the public on the Flynn case. Rosenstein insisted that he did not know about the exculpatory evidence on Flynn and “that was news to me.” Rosenstein also said that he supports Durham investigating the dossier matter.

*  *  *

Authored by Daniel Payne via JustTheNews.com,

Former Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein told the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday that he would not have signed the renewal of the FISA warrant for Trump associate Carter Page if he had been aware of exculpatory information withheld from the FISA court. 

Rosenstein was responding to a question from Sen. Lindsey Graham, who asked him:

“If you knew then what you knew now, would you have signed the warrant application?”

“No, I would not,” Rosenstein said. 

“And the reason you wouldn’t have is because … exculpatory information was withheld from the court?” Graham asked, to which Rosenstein responded:

“Among other reasons, yes.” 

Appearing before the committee on Wednesday for a hearing concerning the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane investigation, Rosenstein told senators that the Justice Department “must take remedial action” against any misconduct it uncovers within its ranks, a bracing statement made in reference to investigative reviews that found “significant errors” in official procedures related to the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane investigation. 

Rosenstein in prepared remarks noted that internal investigations had revealed that the FBI “was not following the written protocols” in its execution of Crossfire Hurricane. 

“Senators, whenever agents or prosecutors make serious mistakes or engage in misconduct, the Department of Justice must take remedial action. And if existing policies fall short, those policies need to be changed. Ensuring the integrity of governmental processes is essential to public confidence in the rule of law,” he said.

How many more times will the market’s new muppets put up with the inability to execute their cunning trading strategies?

Robinhood is down… again!

Source: DownDetector

And it’s nationwide… again…

Source: DownDetector

And look what happened to the market when it went down…

It’s not the first time?

Precious metals are getting pummeled this morning – must be all the good news!??

Gold futures puked below $1700 on massive volume…

Gold broke below its 50DMA…

Silver also got hit (more than gold)…

But, the gold/silver ratio is rising very modestly once again…

Because nothing says dump bonds and bullion safe-havens like the worst social unrest in 50 years!

With some traders asking if the recent reversal in the seemingly unstoppable long momentum/short value trade is the start of a new “Great Rotation” beneath the market’s surface which sees inflation sensitive stocks rise at the expense of growth/momentum/Treasury equivalents…

… a rotation which Barclays writes overnight could have legs, helped by rising PMIs, stabilizing bond yields and a weaker dollar, this morning Nomura’s Charlie McElligott breaks it down in simpler terms, writing that the Equities “Value” factor is positively correlated to “bear-steepening” of UST yield curves in particular, and with the 5s30s curve now the steepest since 2016…

… then, according to the Nomura strategist, “the true accelerant for a potentially larger shift from the current “rebalancing” into an outright “rotation” away from Duration-Equities towards Cyclicals within the recently agitated US Equities “Value / Growth” trade dynamic would be an inflection away from the multi-year “long” built into Global Fixed-Income positioning, particularly within managed futures / CTAs as typical “first movers” on trend breakdown or reversal.”

What is curious is that according to Nomura’s CTA model, trend-followers remain “+100% Long” UST 10Y futures – even if other banks have far more muted assumptions – which to Nomura signals that its “CTA model remains deeply in-the-money ( = still far from deleveraging triggers) and somewhat bullet-proof *for now*, especially with good value and yield pick-up in the US long-end seemingly evident for FX hedged overseas investors on further cheapening.”

However, the story is different for Global Bonds where McElligott has seen a deleveraging “pivot” develop “as the prior legacy “+100% Long” position signals across many sovy bond futures have already turned lower over the past month, as some short-term lookback windows have actually turned and thus driven some position deleveraging (e.g. for RXA Euro Bund futures, we have seen the 2w, 1m and 3m signals all flip “short”—so the overall gross position inside the portfolio has been reduced from 20.5% to 11.1% over the past 1m)—over the past 1m we have seen EUR 10Y, AUD 10Y, FRA 10Y, ITA 10Y and ESP 10Y all go from +100% to now “just” + 53%, which in turn has reduced the overall portfolio allocation / exposure to bonds.”

This is shown in the table of CTA position estimates below:

So if the fate of the value/momentum trade is in the hands of the 5s30s, and CTAs are about to hit key trigger points to go from max long to short the 10Y TSY, McElligott suggests that “perhaps the asset to watch regarding the threat to legacy “fixed-income LONG” positioning held by systematic trend funds is that the US front-end Rates ED$ position, which is ever-so-slow nearing its own deleveraging trigger as well—this signal has been a “long” for almost the entirety of the time dating-back to Dec ’18; not surprisingly then, ED4 remains the single largest gross-exposure across the entire CTA Trend model portfolio.”