Category: zerohedge

The Trump administration is gearing up to issue an order that would designate the Muslim Brotherhood a foreign terrorist organization after Egypt’s president encouraged President Trump to do so while visiting the White House earlier this month, according to the New York Times, citing loose-lipped officials familiar with the matter. According to the report, National Security Adviser John Bolton and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo are supportive of the idea – which has been under consideration since 2017. 

The designation would bring the weight of American sanctions on the influential Islamist political movement which counts millions of members in its ranks, as well as those who interact with or support the organization (such as Turkey’s President Erdogan). 

The White House directed national security and diplomatic officials to find a way to place sanctions on the group after a White House visit on April 9 by President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt, for whom the Brotherhood represents a source of political opposition. In a private meeting without reporters and photographers, Mr. el-Sisi urged Mr. Trump to take that step and join Egypt in branding the movement a terrorist organization. –New York Times

The Muslim Brotherhood is already listed as a terrorist organization by Russia, Syria, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, the UAE and the post-Soviet CSTO states. 

The motion has sparked an internal debate within the administration, according to the report, “including at a senior-level meeting of policymakers from various departments convened last week by the White House’s National Security Council,” according to the leaky officials. 

“…the Pentagon, career national security staff, government lawyers and diplomatic officials have voiced legal and policy objections, and have been scrambling to find a more limited step that would satisfy the White House,” reports the Times. 

Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders acknowledged the push to designate the Muslim Brotherhood as terrorists, saying “The president has consulted with his national security team and leaders in the region who share his concern, and this designation is working its way through the internal process.” 

Officials opposed to the designation have argued that the criteria for designating a terrorist organization don’t apply to the Muslim Brotherhood, “which is less a coherent body than a loose-knit movement with chapters in different countries that either use that moniker or have strong historical ties to it.” Meanwhile, various political parties in places such as Jordan and Tunisia identify as being part of the Muslim Brotherhood, or acknowledge ties to it, while stating they oppose violent extremism. 

As a matter of policy, such a designation could have rippling consequences, including further stressing relations with Turkey, whose president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, is a staunch Brotherhood supporter. It is also unclear what the consequences would be for Americans and American humanitarian organizations with links to the group, and human rights officials have worried that Mr. el-Sisi might use it to justify an even harsher crackdown against his opponents.

Among the alternative ideas raised at the meeting last week were trying to identify and target a terrorist-linked group with ties to the Brotherhood that has not yet been designated or limiting any designation’s scope to the Egyptian branch, officials said. –New York Times

If you recall from 2013, el-Sisi is a former Egyptian general who helped lead a coup to overthrow Mohamed Morsi – Egypt’s first democratically elected president and a former leader within the Muslim Brotherhood. Morsi and other senior figures from the then-ruling Muslim Brotherhood was sentenced to 20 years in prison in connection with the killings of protesters during 2012 demonstrations.

The men were convicted in April 2015 on charges including kidnapping, torture and the killings of protesters during unrest in 2012. The Muslim Brotherhood denies responsibility and says that most of those killed were from its own ranks. –SMH

The Trump administration had weighed whether to designate both the Muslim Brotherhood and an arm of Iran’s military, the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, as terrorist organizations during its chaotic first weeks in 2017. But the ideas lapsed amid objections from career professionals and the fallout from other capricious early steps, like Mr. Trump’s ban on visitors from several predominantly Muslim countries.

But this spring, the administration abruptly pushed through the terrorist designation for the Revolutionary Guards. Mr. Pompeo, who has the most important voice in the debate besides Mr. Trump’s because the secretary of state controls the list of designated terrorist organizations, announced sanctions on the Iranian military arm on April 8, the day before Mr. el-Sisi visited the White House. –New York Times

The Muslim Brotherhood was founded in Egypt in 1928, and amassed a secret armed wing to fight against British colonial rule. It grew to 200,000 members by 1936, and over 2 million by 1948. After the Egyptian government arrested 32 leaders of the Brotherhood’s “secret apparatus” in 1948, banning the organization – its ranks fell to around 500,000 members or sympathizers across 2,000 branches. 

via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2PGJeW7 Tyler Durden

CNN and the BBC were quickly taken off the air in Venezuela on Tuesday by the government amid an apparent coup by forces loyal to National Assembly Leader Juan Guaidó.

As reported by CNN, “DirecTV, Net Uno, Intercable, and Telefónica all received orders from Venezuela’s government regulator Conatel to block CNN. (DirecTV and CNN are both owned by AT&T.)” while a spokesperson from the BBC told CNN that BBS Global News had been similarly taken off air by the South American country. 

Momento exacto cuando el gobierno dictador saca del aire a CNN (en inglés) de la parrilla de programación por cable (canal 706) y censura aún más con Conatel.

¿Alguno tiene duda de que la libertad de expresión no existe en Venezuela? pic.twitter.com/WR0XReOWNW

— Jhomar Lóp[e]z (@JhomarLopez) April 30, 2019

Earlier Tuesday, CNN broadcast footage of military vehicles running over protesters in the capital city of Caracas. 

🇻🇪 | REBELIÓN EN VENEZUELA: Tanquetas militares arrollan a grupo de manifestantes en Caracas: pic.twitter.com/BLirOAoFkP

— Alerta News 24 (@AlertaNews24) April 30, 2019

Meanwhile US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo claims that Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro was willing to leave the country for Cuba, only to be talked out of it by Russia. 

“We’ve watched throughout the day, it’s been a long time since anyone’s seen Maduro,” said Pompeo in an interview with CNN‘s Wolf Blitzer. 

“He had an airplane on the tarmac, he was ready to leave this morning as we understand it and the Russians indicated he should stay,” he added, noting “He was headed for Havana.” 

Secretary Pompeo just told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer that Maduro had a plane on the tarmac ready to go earlier today… but Russia talked him out of it

wow. pic.twitter.com/mouqKcGefW

— Jason K. Morrell (@CNNJason) April 30, 2019

via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2ZJ4HSR Tyler Durden

A new study revealed how youth suicides spiked to a two-decade high following the release of an online streaming television series on Netflix that depicted a young girl ending her life, read a press release.

The study, led by Nationwide Children’s Hospital, published the shocking report Monday, demonstrated how the first episode which aired on March 29, 2017, led to a massive increase in the suicide rate for 10- to 17-year-olds in the following month [April 2017].

“Youth may be particularly susceptible to suicide contagion, which can be fostered by stories that sensationalize or promote simplistic explanations of suicidal behavior, glorify or romanticize the decedent, present suicide as a means of accomplishing a goal, or offer potential prescriptions of how-to die by suicide,” said Jeff Bridge, PhD, director of the Center for Suicide Prevention and the lead author of the study.

More than 190 American tweens in April 2017 took their own lives. That resulted in a suicide rate of .57 per 100,000 people, more than 30% higher than in the preceding five years for the month. An additional investigation determined that the April 2017 suicide rate tagged 19-year highs.

“Portrayals of suicide in entertainment media should avoid graphic detail of the suicide – which the series did not – and adhere to best practice guidelines to reduce risk of subsequent suicide,” Bridge said.

Researchers used “interrupted time series and forecasting models” to examine monthly rates of youth suicides between 1Q13 through 4Q17 — the period of time before the release of “13 Reasons Why.”

“The researchers examined immediate effects and subsequent trends and adjusted for potential effects of seasonality and underlying trends on suicide rates. Data were obtained for cases in which suicide was listed as the underlying cause of death from the Web-based Injury Statistics Query and Reporting System (WISQARSTM) of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention,” read the press release.

Months after the “13 Reasons Why” airing date, Netflix increased the graphic content advisories and added a warning before the initial episode. Stating:

“13 Reasons Why is a fictional series that tackles tough, real-world issues, taking a look at sexual assault, substance abuse, suicide, and more. By shedding a light on these difficult topics, we hope our show can helps viewers start a conversation. But if you are struggling with these issues yourself, this series may not be right for you or you may want to watch it with a trusted adult. And if you ever feel you need someone to talk with, reach out to a parent, a friend, a school counselor, or an adult you trust, call a local helpline, or go to 13ReasonsWhy.info. Because the minute you start talking about it, it gets easier,” read the series’ warning.

Dr. John Ackerman, a co-author on the study and suicide prevention coordinator at CSPR, said this “study demonstrates parents should be cautious about exposing youth to this series. With a third season of the series expected to air soon, continued surveillance is needed to monitor potential consequences on suicide rates in association with viewing the series.”

Lisa Horowitz, a co-author and researcher at the National Institute of Mental Health, said suicide is one of the top causes of deaths for tweens and called it a “major public health crisis.”

It’s clear that young Americans are highly influenced by media. With a third season expected to return this year, parents have to be extra vigilant when allowing their children to watch such a graphic show.

via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2UQ11LF Tyler Durden

Authored by Justin Murray via The Mises Institute,

One of the most enduring justifications for State intervention in an economy is the concept of wealth inequality. As the story goes, just 1% of the population owns roughly half of the wealth in the world. This is used as justification for a long range of programs, such as welfare, the graduated income tax and multiple components of the Green New Deal. However, the problem with this narrative is it fails to address two major questions:

1. What are the components of that wealth?

2. Who are the primary beneficiaries of that wealth?

Wealth Isn’t Uniform

To begin, we need to first understand how wealth is defined. Wealth, in investment terms, is defined as “the value of all the assets of worth owned by a person, community, company or country.” The underlying issue of the definition of wealth is within the concept of value. Value is not an objective concept; each individual will value every good or service on the planet differently based on personal interests. This is best defined in theParadox of Value. Water is objectively more important to survival than a sack of diamonds; a person living by a river would trade truckloads of water for a sack of diamonds while a person stranded in the Sahara would eagerly trade a sack of diamonds for a CamelBak full of water. This is the underlying purpose of trade — to obtain something of relatively low supply locally for something of local abundance.

The problem here is that such valuations are subjective and highly reliant on meeting specific conditions. If we look at the components of wealth, the wealth of the 1% is made up predominantly of business ownership stakes .

Business ownership is typically represented by stock share in the company. How a person’s wealth is defined here is taking the current listed market price of the stock and multiplying it by the ownership stake of that individual. The problem with this definition is how equity is traded. The value of equity you will see on the Dow Jones is not the value of every share in existence. It is, instead, effectively the last marginal transaction for that particular company. So if Amazon is listing at $1,800 per share, all this means is that someone out there sold one or more shares for $1,800 to someone else. This does not mean that if someone waved $920 billion at the market, they’d be the sole owner of Amazon.

The vast majority of the ~500 million outstanding shares of Amazon are valued more than the listed market price by the holder. To get Jeff Bezos to part with his roughly 20 million shares would require a lot more than $37 billion. However, this does not mean Jeff Bezos is richer than advertised. Conversely, people who don’t own Amazon stock value it below the $1,800 market price. If Mr. Bezos were to face a life-or-death situation in which he needed to pay $37 billion in cash, he would be lucky to come up with a small percentage of that as attempting to dump that many shares on the market at once would collapse the market price.

The issue here is that maintaining high levels of wealth requires never trading in the goods. The only way the wealthy can remain wealthy is to never convert their equity into usable liquidity. While a single share of stock is, in accounting terms, classified as a liquid asset, a large block of shares is about as illiquid as owning a skyscraper or NFL stadium. Because of this, the wealth of the 1% is largely illusory since they realistically can’t use it for anything lest they destroy its apparent value.

Conversely, the bottom 99% posses roughly 15% of their assets in some kind of easily liquid form and their stock assets are significantly more liquid than those in the top. A person with $50,000 in assets can easily liquidate their property without causing a blip in the market pricing. In terms of assets that can be used without suffering a value impairment, the top 1% really only owns about 6% of the assets. While this is still unequal, it’s nowhere near the gaudy 50% frequently presented.

Who Really Benefits

One can easily counter this to say that those assets still primarily benefit the wealth individual and the rest of us are stuck holding the bag. However, this is also not held up as true. If we use the concept of CEO pay disparity, we can demonstrate who really benefits from that wealth.

Take Wal-Mart, a favorite target of unfair wage practice claims. The company’s CEO, Doug McMillon, is accused of earning 1,180 times more than the median worker with an annual compensation package of $22.8 million. To a single individual, $22.8 million seems like a lot of money. But consider that Wal-Mart also has in the order of 2.2 million employees. If the CEO were to take a $1 salary and the company were to spread that over each worker, the worker would receive a one-time bonus of $10. Mr. McMillon would quickly go bankrupt just trying to buy dinner for each employee just once.

If we look at Wal-Mart’s 2018 10-K report, the company produced revenues of $514 billion. Of that, $385 billion was a direct expense, primarily sent down the product chain to suppliers to pay for their workers and suppliers and so forth. Roughly $50 billion went to store workers. Another $107 billion was on SG&A, which can be assumed to be almost entirely labor related, either direct Wal-Mart employees or outside companies paying their workers.

All-told, an estimated $490 billion of those $514 billion in revenues ended up in the pockets of a direct worker somewhere in the world, supporting untold millions. Just the direct Wal-Mart employees collected an estimated 20-25% of the total revenues. The total C-Suite compensation package doesn’t even register as a rounding error. Investors got a dividend of $6 billion, or just 1% of that. It’s important to note that investors are primarily held in individual investment accounts or pension systems, so that also goes back to the line worker.

The wealthy owners of Wal-Mart, the Waltons, only see 0.2% of the economic activity generated by the company. That’s a far cry from the 95% paid to workers and the remainder going to retirement pension accounts for individuals. The workers, or the 99%, are overwhelmingly the beneficiaries of all that wealth the Waltons formally own.

Why the Rich Are Good for Us

Ultimately, these extremely on-paper wealthy individuals have been of an immense value to the rest of us. Without someone taking the risk to form a business, to collect all of our disparate skills that, alone, are worthless and combining them into an organization, we would not be living in a world where poverty and hunger continues to collapse and some countries have gotten so wealthy that people with broadband internet and smartphones are classified as impoverished. This is entirely thanks to all those rich people who are only asking to keep a very small portion of the production their assets produce. Attempting to destroy this with redistribution schemes will ultimately be harmful to the 99%.

via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2Wort08 Tyler Durden

The Sunday Times discovered dozens of billboards with cameras and facial detection software are targeting consumers at shopping malls across the country with personalized ads.

The report found 50 advertising screens with facial detection technology that identifies the age, gender, and mood of consumers, and even monitors their view time behavior of the personalized ads. For instance, millennial men could be standing in front of the billboard; seconds later, a Gillette shaving cream ad is displayed on a giant screen.

Advertisers operating the new system have claimed it fully complies with the Data Protection Act 2018 because no consumer is identified, nor is their data collected or stored.

UK law indicates there is no legal requirement to tell shoppers that they’re being surveilled for commercial purposes.

Ocean Outdoor is the first advertiser to adopt public surveillance technology for smart billboards.

Called the LookOut system, it uses artificial intelligence and cameras to serve adverts to consumers based on gender, age, facial hair, eyewear, mood, and engagement level, stated the Ocean Outdoor’s website.

The company lists several ways in which LookOut can be used:

• Optimization – delivering the appropriate creative to the right audience at the right time.
• Visualize – Gaze recognition to trigger creative or an interactive experience
• AR Enabled – Using the HD cameras to create an augmented reality mirror or window effect, creating deep consumer engagement via the latest technology
• Analytics – Understanding your brand’s audience, post-campaign analysis and creative testing

Ocean Outdoor’s chief executive Tim Bleakley told The Sunday Times: “We pioneered a facial detection technology which identifies the characteristics of the face to allow you to talk to advertisers about mood, gender, emotion and those kind of things.”

“We can measure the level of happiness or sadness. We can measure the dwell time.”

The creepy surveillance technology has already been installed in national supermarket chains like Waitrose Limited and Bleakley said the supermarket’s administrators were able to monitor consumer happiness levels in real-time.

In a promotional video of OutLook, consumers walked past billboards in Westfield. The video says: “3 cameras give the billboard eyes.”

The intelligent billboard’s cameras regularly analyze shoppers and can communicate to advertisers what kinds of people were shopping and when.

Another video showing one of its billboards at Canary Wharf stated that 49% of people who walked by of a given day were wealthy.

Ocean Outdoor plans to use the technology on roadside billboards to determine the model of a vehicle so that adverts based on car price can be be shown on the billboard.

French company Quividi sells facial detection technology says the pictures taken in the OutLook system of consumers are deleted in milliseconds.

Quividi said it could determine someone’s gender with 90% accuracy and age within a five-year bracket.

Mass surveillance with artificial intelligence is now an integral part of the social, economic and political lives of many in the Western world. Advertisers and mega-corporations are spying on British people like never before — as smart billboards with surveillance cameras are the latest evidence a free and open society is a thing of the past.

via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2VzU1GT Tyler Durden

Authored by Jon Street via Campus Reform,

Leftist comedian Bill Maher challenged liberals over the weekend on his HBO show “Real Time with Bill Maher” on a key 2020 issue: free college.

Unlike many in his party, though, Maher challenged the conventional thinking of “free college,” pointing out that it would only hurt the poor.

Maher’s comment came just days after 2020 Democrat presidential candidate Sen. Elizabeth Warren outlined her plan to offer “free” four-year college through raising some taxes. At least two more Democrat 2020 presidential candidates, Sen. Kamala Harris of California and Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, have also indicated they support the idea of “free” four-year college.

Warren, Sanders, Harris, and 2020 Democrat presidential candidate Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota support “free” two-year college for all. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), who is not yet old enough to run for president but introduced the Green New Deal, also is an outspoken supporter of “free” college for all.

Despite multiple presidential candidates in his party supporting “free” college, Maher took a step back, pointing out that “nothing is free.”

“If you have a Bachelor degree, you earn on average 65 percent more than someone who doesn’t have one. If you have a Master’s degree, 100 percent more over the course of your lifetime. So nothing is free. Like a free lunch? No. Neither is college,” Maher said.

“Somebody will be paying for this free college and it will be taxpayers, so are we really saying that someone who didn’t go to college should be subsidizing the people who went and got the benefit from going to college and made more money?”

Maher’s guest, conservative Grover Norquist, agreed, adding, “that’s an incredible transfer from lower-income people to higher income people. If you look at the beneficiaries of that proposal, it is a huge subsidy to higher income people and if you’re out buying votes, you go with the people you think are going to vote.”

via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2V7wqy6 Tyler Durden

For weeks now, those who can see past the White House’s ‘cautious optimism’ regarding the potentiality of the ongoing trade talks with Beijing have probably understood that the year-long trade war with China could end one of two ways: Either Trump walks away from the deal, risking a brutal correction in stocks (which, according to some, is the only barometer of his performance in office that matters to Trump) or cave on several of the administration’s most unpalatable demands.

So far, the White House has already purportedly punted on enforcement (though nothing is set in stone) and backed away from demands that Beijing scrap industrial subsidies.

And according to a just-released report in the FT, Trump has instructed his negotiators, who are presently engaged in talks in Beijing, to drop a demand that China halt the instances of cybertheft that have become such a widely publicized point of contention between China and the West.

To what we imagine is the frustration of Robert Lighthizer, the lead trade negotiator, who has insisted that the US take advantage of its ‘leverage’ to exact the best possible deal or simply walk away and wait, one source told FT that Trump “wants a deal.” End of story.

Donald Trump has dropped a central demand from trade negotiations with China that it halt alleged instances of commercial cyber theft, in order to end a long-running tariff dispute. Mr Trump has softened his administration’s opening position on what it originally characterized as “Chinese government-conducted, sponsored, and tolerated cyber intrusions into US commercial networks,” according to several people briefed on the negotiations. The US is instead likely to accept a watered-down commitment from Beijing as an alternative.

“A lot of issues are being jettisoned from this negotiation because President Trump wants a deal,” one of the people said.  The absence of strong provisions against Chinese theft of US trade secrets will raise concerns that the Trump administration is prepared to settle for limited progress on crucial “structural” reforms in the trade agreement.

Beijng has denied accusations of state-sponsored cyber espionage, and claims that it has been fully compliant with a promise it made to President Barack Obama in 2015. When it comes to the trade deal, the Chinese are adamant that language condemning cyberespionage not be included, per the FT’s source.

“With regards to enforceable benchmarks [on cyber theft], there will be nothing that goes beyond Xi Jinping’s broken promise at the White House in September 2015. They are just going to ignore a core feature of the original [US trade complaint],” the person said. 

And now that the White House has caved, it’s time for some revisionist history as one trade official said the US never expected Beijing to agree to its demands in the first place.

James Green, former head of the USTR’s Beijing office, said it was always unlikely that the trade talks would resolve the two sides’ bitter charges and countercharges over alleged commercial cyber theft. “I don’t think the administration seriously thought that trade talks or tariffs would curb those activities,” said Mr Green, who is now a senior adviser at McLarty Associates. “We could highlight the practice, but it would need to be law enforcement and national technical means that would actually do something,” he said.

Contrary to Mick Mulvaney’s insistence that Trump would only accept a great deal, the FT hinted that the US will be caving on other key demands as the White House scrambles to ensure that the next round of talks in Washington next week will be the last.

In the final stretch of talks, Mr Lighthizer and Mr Mnuchin are expected to try to eke out some eleventh-hour pledges from China in a number of areas, from biotech approvals, to cloud computing, to data protection for drug companies. They will also attempt to finalise the agreement on the enforcement mechanism to ensure compliance with the deal, and the fate of existing tariffs, with the US administration insisting to maintain some of its levies on $250bn of Chinese imports until Beijing meets certain implementation benchmarks. Although Mr Trump has frequently promised that a big trade deal with China was around the corner, US officials insisted that he might still walk away. 

If this report is accurate, then the trade pact might end up resembling Lighthizer’s worst nightmare: An agreement to significantly lower punitive tariffs and drop most of the US’s big demands in favor of a promise by Beijing to buy billions of dollars in agricultural goods – something that Trump could at least take home to America’s suffering farmers.

via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2GMWuod Tyler Durden

Authored by Paul Craig Roberts,

While the crazed and corrupt people who comprise the Democratic Party and US print and TV media continue to insist that Russiagate is real, a very real threat is emerging in Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran. The threat arises from the fact that Washington has taught each country to have no trust in America’s veracity. The governments of the four countries have learned that everything Washington says is a lie.

Moreover, the countries have learned that Washington does not accept their sovereignty and objects to their existence. Each of the four countries has experienced sanctions designed to overthrow their governments or cause them to submit to Washington’s will.

Russia long ago saw through Washington’s disingenuous claim that the missile ring that Washington has arrayed around Russia is defensive and directed against (non-existent) Iranian missiles. Putin has said many times that the “defensive” missiles can easily and quickly be converted into nuclear armed offensive missiles that leave Russia no response time. I have always been amazed at the utter stupidity of the Polish and Romanian governments for accepting these American missiles. No doubt the Polish and Romanian officials were paid handsome bribes, but money is no good to a dead person. You can bet your life that the Russians are not going to permit such operable weapons to be on Russian borders during a time of high tensions that exists today between the West and Russia.

Not content with this reckless provocation of Russia, the dumbshits that comprise the US government have announced a program to put weapons in space that can neutralize Russia and China’s nuclear deterrent. This reckless and irresponsible plan did not go unnoticed in Russia. Lieutenant General Viktor Poznikhir, Deputy Chief of the Russian General Staff Operative Command, declared last week that Washington’s “on-start interception” program reveals that Washington is preparing a preemptive nuclear attack on Russia and China. You can bet your life that Russia and China are not going to sit there and wait for Washington’s attack, expecially as Russia has coming into deployment hypersonic missiles incapable of interception by any known or deployed means.

What Washington and its corrupt European vassals are doing is preparing the grave for the Western world, a good riddance as far as the rest of the world is concerned.

In the US self-interested political propaganda has succeeded in crowding out all attention to real issues, such as mass displacement of jobs by robotics, global warming whatever the cause, and the rising risk of nuclear war. When the rest of the world looks at the West, it sees an insane asylum in which the two greatest threats to American national security are said to be Venezuela and a Russian agent in the Oval Office.

It is impossible for anyone to take a country this silly seriously. Consequently, American power is collapsing, to everyone else’s relief. Even Washington’s well paid puppets in Germany, Britain, and France are showing signs of independence that have not been seen since the days of Charles DeGaulle.

The Russians, Chinese, Iranians, and North Koreans know that they are dealing with fools, and they are not going to take any chances. They know that no agreement with America means anything and that Washington speaks only with a forked tongue.

Washington is going to be increasingly frustrated abroad as willingness to cooperate with the insane asylum vanishes. The consequence will be increasing tyranny at home.

via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2UTliA1 Tyler Durden

First, two quarters ago, Apple shocked investors when it said it would no longer disclose the number of iPhone it was selling – a clear signal that the selling was slowing dramatically. Shocked investors sold off the stocks… then BTFD with gusto sending AAPL sharply higher. A few months later, on January 3 2019, Apple once again shocked the market when it slashed its revenue guidance by8% for only the first time since this century (naturally, it blamed China). As AAPL stock tumbled, it reveberated across all capital markets, and even prompted a flash crash cascade in most yen and pound pairs. However, just like a quarter earlier, Apple’s “shock” was quickly overcome, and the after hours plunge actually marked the max pain for longs, and as the chart below shows, AAPL has soared 46%. And to think all it had to do was slash revenue guidance…

So with enough action to make an algos’ silicon head spin, everyone was asking just what disaster Apple would announce today to send its stock back to all time high?

Well, the stock is certainly spiking after hours, but this time there was no disaster, or even disappointment; in fact, the company just reported Q2 numbers that beat across the board, while the company guided above the consensus range for Q3, and also announced a new $75 billion stock repurchase authorization.

Here are the details:

• Q2 Revenue of $58.0BN, down from $61.1BN a year ago, but above the $57.49BN expected
• Q2 EPS of $2.46, down from $2.73 a year ago, but also above the $2.37 expected
• Q2 iPhone Revenue of $31.05BN, Exp. $30.50BN, down 17% Y/Y from $37.6BN
• Q2 China revenue $10.22BN, down 22% from $13.0BN Y/Y
• Q2 Service Revenue $11.45BN, up 16% from $9.850BN
• Q2 Gross margin $21.82BN

The company also announced that it is boosting its dividend to 77c/share from 73c/share. In short, ok numbers, but nothing breaktaking, especially when one considers the company’s guidance cut last quarter.

But what the market was far more impressed by was the company’s Q3 guidance, where it now sees revenue between $52.5 and $54.5BN, solidly above the consensus estimate of $52.22BN, on gross margin of 37-38%, in line with the 38% expectation.

Breaking down the numbers in detail, it is perhaps not a surprise that China revenues crashed 22%. even as Europe and Rest of Asia were also disappointing; only Japan and the Americas posted a modest improvement.

Another potentially troubling development: while Service revenue grew to a new record high of $11.45BN, up from $10.9BN in Q1, this was only a 16% increase Y/Y in service revenue, a clear secular decline in service revenue growth. Which begs the question: is Apple, the “service company” also peaking soon?

To summarize: iPhone sales tumbled 17% but this was offset somewhat by the surge in service sales. How long this trade off will continue is the $1 trillion question.

To offset the ongoing China weakness and potential service revenue growth concerns, and to make buying the stock after hours easier, Apple went back to doing what it has done best under Tim Cook: not innovate of course, but buyback its stock: in Q2 the company announced an additional $75 billion in share repurchases.

 

via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2DFf0hj Tyler Durden

Oil prices rallied on the day amid a sliding dollar and increased protests in Venezuela adding to concerns about supply (despite a slowdown in China PMI potentially questioning demand).

“The market is currently witnessing the largest number of barrels subject to potential outage in many years, between Venezuela, Iran, Nigeria, Algeria and Libya,” said Leo Mariani, a KeyBanc Capital Markets Inc. analyst.

API

• Crude +6.81 mm (+1.5mm exp)

• Cushing +1.353mm

• Gasoline -1.055mm (-1.5mm exp)

• Distillates -2.058mm (-1mm exp)

After a surprise crude build last week, expectations were for another small stock rise and yet another gasoline drawdown and API did not disappoint with a large 6.8mm crude build… This is the 11th weekly draw in gasoline (and 7th weekly draw in distillates) in a row…

“We have to keep in mind that with more than 12 million barrels being produced, until we ramp back those refineries up, we will probably see crude stocks build,” Gene McGillian, manager of market research at Tradition Energy, says

WTI hovered around $64 ahead of the API print and kneejerked lower after the

The developments in Venezuela triggered a spate of buying early on Tuesday, but that could reverse just as quickly if the opposition’s chances look shaky, said Michael Hiley, head of OTC energy trading at LPS Futures in New York. In the longer term, Maduro’s ouster could lower prices, he said.

“They have some of the best reserves in the world and you would just need the proper capital investment to crank that up again,” Hiley said. “It will ultimately end up with more oil on the market, but short-term the knee-jerk movement for prices is still up.”

via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2J6yBuo Tyler Durden