Tag: finance

Bezos Beat Batters Bears But Bonds & Bullion Bounce

Overheard on CNBC today… "today we get proof this is not a bubble…"

Nope..

h/t @Stalingrad_Poor

 

So Catalan secedes and Spain loses 22% of its GDP and still the Spanish stock market is outperforming the S&P in USD terms…

 

Before we start – let's take a quick look at today's cross-asset-class moves – Stocks Up (well durr!), VIX crashed (back below 10), Bonds Up (wait… that doesn't make sense), Gold Up (woah, why)… and the Dollar Down… (certainly doesn't sound like the epic stock market environment that the media proclaims it to be)…

 

This is the 5th weekly rise in a row for Nasdaq (best day since the election), 7th in a row for S&P and Dow… but Small Caps and Trannies ended the week red…

 

The Dow barely managed gains on the day…

 

Of course today was all about AMZN (best week since April 2015) and the big tech stocks… and as AMZN squeezed over 13% higher on the day, so Nasdaq followed…

 

VIX tumbled on the day, back below 10 – after topping 13 in the middle of the week…

 

And while Nasdaq VIX had decoupled from the index, today saw them reconnect somewhat as vol collapsed…

 

But can you spot the week's odd 'tech' out…

 

FANG Stocks best week in 3 months…

 

Given the decoupling between AMZN and its EPS expectations…

 

Perhaps you are wondering why it just hit $1100…(correlation between the level of G3 balance sheets and AMZN for the last year is well above 95%)

 

5 Tech stocks alone added a stunning $200 billion market cap today…

 

Tax hopes – "sell the news" again…

 

Financials outperformed the broad market on the week as the yield curve modestly steepened…

 

Treasury yields ended the week higher but amid today's exuberant equity market gains, bonds were bid

 

The Dollar Index rallied on the week (on yesterday's EUR tumble) but rolled back over today…

 

CAD (BoC), AUD (CPI), and EUR (ECB) weakness sent the dollar higher on the week…

 

EURUSD's worst week of 2017…

 

Bitcoin ended the week lower (yes lower) – first losing week in the last 5…

 

Despite the dollar strength, WTI Crude soared over 4% this week (Brent above $60 – highest since July 2015). Copper, Gold, and Silver slipped  (though the PMs rallied today)…

 

WTI's best week in 3 months…tagging $54 – the highest since March…

 

Finally, courtesy of Mr. 'Not' Jim Cramer…

via http://ift.tt/2zW2AOU Tyler Durden

False Flag Bombings, Murder Plots, Bizarre Phone Calls: The Stunning Revelations In The JFK Assassination Files

Following last night's release of the latest set of JFK Assassination Files, the public has been busy combing through the several thousand documents. Among the more notable discoveries so far are the following: the CIA contemplated mafia hits on Cuban President Fidel Castro, involving the "false flag" staging of bombings in Miami; Someone calling the FBI threatening to kill Lee Harvey Oswald a day before Oswald’s murder; the US examined sabotaging airplane parts heading to Cuba. As a reminder, following a deadline 25 years in the making, last night the National Archives released an abridged dump of JFK Assassination files. While president Trump blocked the release of some, arguably the most controversial, documents citing national security concerns, the release still left researchers and conspiracy theorists with 52 previously unreleased full documents and thousands in part to sift through.

Here are the key highlights from the trove so far, courtesy of CBS and AP:

  • Sabotaging plane parts

A national security council document from 1962, one year before Kennedy’s murder, referenced “Operation Mongoose,” a covert attempt to topple communism in Cuba. In the minutes of a secret meeting on Operation Mongoose from September 14,1962, “General (Marshall) Carter said that the CIA would examine the possibilities of sabotaging airplane parts which are scheduled to be shipped from Canada to Cuba.”

  • CIA-mafia plot on Castro

A 1975 document from the Rockefeller Commission detailing the CIA’s role in foreign assassinations said plans to assassinate Castro were undertaken in the early days of the Kennedy administration. The report said Attorney General Robert Kennedy, the President’s brother, told the FBI he learned the CIA hired an intermediary “to approach Sam Giancana with a proposition of paying $150,000 to hire some gunman to go into Cuba and kill Castro.” The attorney general said that made it hard to prosecute Giancana, a Sicilian American mobster.  “Attorney General Kennedy stated that the CIA should never undertake the use of mafia people again without first checking with the Department of Justice because it would be difficult to prosecute such people in the future,” the report reads. The report also said the CIA was later interested in using mobsters to deliver a poison pill to Castro in order to kill him.

  • CIA plots "False Flags" Terrorist events in Miami

During Operation Mongoose in 1960, the CIA also considered staging terror events in Miami and blaming it on pro-Castro Cubans.

“We could develop a Communist Cuban terror campaign in the Miami area, in other Florida cities and even in Washington. We could sink a boatload of Cubans enroute to Florida (real or simulated). We could foster attempts on lives of Cuban refugees in the United States even to the extent of wounding in instances to be widely publicized. Exploding a few plastic bombs in carefully chosen spots, the arrest of a Cuban agent and the release of prepared documents substantiating Cuban involvement also would be helpful in projecting the idea of an irresponsible government.”

  • UK paper warned of ‘big news'

According to a memo from the CIA’s deputy director to the head of the FBI, a senior reporter in the Cambridge News in England received an anonymous phone call, saying he should contact the American Embassy in London for “some big news,” before abruptly hanging up.

  • The FBI gets a death threat on Oswald the day before his murder

A document dated November 24, 1963, showed FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover addressing the death of Oswald at the hands of Jack Ruby. “There is nothing further on the Oswald case except that he is dead,” Hoover begins.Hoover said the FBI’s Dallas office received a call “from a man talking in a calm voice,” saying he was a member of a committee to kill Oswald. He said they pressed the Dallas chief of police to protect Oswald, but Ruby was nevertheless able to kill the gunman. 

“Ruby says no one was associated with him and denies having made the telephone call to our Dallas office last night,” Hoover said. Hoover went on to say the FBI had evidence of Oswald’s guilt and intercepts of Oswald’s communications with Cuba and the Soviet Union. He said he was concerned there would be doubt in the public about Oswald’s guilt and that President Lyndon Johnson would appoint a commission to investigate the assassination.

  • Passing blame for a coup in South Vietnam

A top secret document from 1975 for the Rockefeller Commission outlines the testimony of former CIA Director Richard Helms. In the transcript, Helms said he thought former President Richard Nixon believed the CIA was responsible for the death of South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem, who died following a coup linked to the CIA.

“There is absolutely no evidence of this in the agency records and the whole thing has been, I mean rather — what is the word I want — heated by the fact that President Johnson used to go around saying that the reason President Kennedy was assassinated was that he had assassinated President Diem and this was just … justice,” Helms said. Helms added: “where he got this from, I don’t know.”

The deposition continues, with him being asked if there was any way Oswald was in some way a CIA agent or an agent,” before the document cuts off.

  • Alleged Cuban intel officer said he knew Oswald

A cable from the FBI in 1967 quoted one man quipping Oswald must have been a good shot. The alleged Cuban officer returned, “oh, he was quite good.” Asked why he said that, the officer said, “I knew him.”

  • Jack Ruby’s connections with Dallas police

An informant told the FBI that Oswald’s assassin, Jack Ruby, had close links to local police in Dallas. Ruby, whose real name was Jacob Leon Rubenstein, was said to have had a “good in” with the authorities, who were served free drinks at his nightclub. A friend of Ruby’s, Lou Lebby, described him in an FBI document as “emotional, unstable and a person who made his living primarily from ‘scalping’ tickets to sports events.”

  • Soviets said killing was an ‘organized conspiracy’

FBI Director Hoover forwarded a memo to the White House in 1963, shortly after Kennedy’s death. The memo, obtained by the Church Committee and classified top secret, detailed US sources’ sense of the reaction in the USSR to Kennedy’s death. “According to our source, officials of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union believed there was some well-organized conspiracy on the part of the ‘ultraright’ in the United States to effect a ‘coup,'” the memo said. “They seem convinced that the assassination was not the deed of one man, but that it arose out of a carefully planned campaign in which several people played a part.”

The source said the Soviet officials claimed no connection between Oswald and the USSR, and described him as “a neurotic gunman.

  • CIA intercepts call from Oswald to KGB

A CIA memo from the day of Kennedy’s assassination outlined a CIA intercept of a call from Oswald, then in Mexico City, to the Russian embassy in Mexico. Oswald spoke to the consul, Valeriy Vladimirovich Kostikov, an “identified KGB officer” “in broken Russian.” The memo’s author said he was told by the FBI’s liaison officer that the bureau believed Oswald’s visit was to get help with a passport or visa.

The FBI was tracking Oswald before JFK's assassination

Oswald was being tracked by the New Orleans division of the FBI in October 1963 – the month before the assassination took place. An FBI report into the New Orleans division of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee said that, while the committee had been inactive since Oswald left the city, the bureau was planning to stay in contact “with Cuban sources for any indication of additional activity.” Copies of the report were sent to FBI divisions in New York and Dallas, the city in which Kennedy was killed.

  • Soviets Fear Assassination Would Lead To All Out War

The Soviet Union feared that the assassination of John F. Kennedy would lead to all-out war between it and the United States. A CIA source cited in the documents claimed that officials in the Communist Party believed the killing was part of a conspiracy by the “ultra-right” in the US, and were concerned that “without leadership, some irresponsible general in the US might launch a missile at the Soviet Union.” Soviet officials also described assassin Lee Harvey Oswald as “a neurotic maniac who was disloyal to his own country,” and played down the significance of his time within the Union.

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The Informant Cometh

Authored by James Howard Kunstler via Kunstler.com,

When you consider all the shadowy creatures scuttling around the backstage interstices of the Deep State, it’s a little wondrous that someone like this hasn’t stepped into the light before. Apparently now, a person whose name will soon be plastered across the pixel-verse, has been given clearance by the Justice Department to come forth and sing to the various house and senate committees about a fishy deal involving Russia and the Clinton dynasty.

The broad outlines of Uranium-Gate are already loaded like a platter of nachos grandes with piquant tidbits of suspicious detail. The informant worked for a DC Swamp lobbying firm that was hired by Tenex, a subsidiary of the Russian government-owned company Rosatom, to grease the skids for a deal to buy a Canadian company, Uranium One, which had substantial mining operations in the USA. According to The Hill website, the deal put about 20 percent of US uranium into the hands of the Russian company.

The informant recognized evidence of criminal behavior in the dealings he witnessed and voluntarily went to the FBI with it. The Hill report goes on:

     His work helped the Justice Department secure convictions against Russia’s top commercial nuclear executive in the United States, a Russian financier in New Jersey, and the head of a U.S. uranium trucking company in what prosecutors said was a long-running racketeering scheme involving bribery, kickbacks, extortion and money laundering.

Those charges, based on evidence gathered in 2009, were not taken to court until 2014. And that was supposed to be the end of it.

Now, it also happens that the deal for Tenex to buy Uranium One had to be approved by nine federal agencies and signed off on by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, which she did shortly after her husband Bill Clinton was paid $500,000 to give a speech in Moscow sponsored by a Russian bank. The Clinton Foundation also received millions of dollars in “charitable” donations from parties with an interest in the Tenex / Uranium One deal. It happened, too, that the CEO of Uranium One at the time of the Tenex sale, Frank Guistra, was one of eleven board members of the Clinton Foundation.

The informant remained undercover for the FBI for five years. None of the Clinton involvement was included in the previously mentioned federal bribery and racketeering prosecutions. Meanwhile, the informant had signed a nondisclosure agreement with the Obama Justice Department, only just lifted last week.

As of this morning, the story is absent from The New York Times, formerly the nation’s newspaper of record.

The FBI’s credibility is at stake in this case. Robert Mueller, who was Director of the agency during the Tenex /Uranium One deal, with all its Clintonian-Russian undertones is in the peculiar position now as special prosecutor for the Russian election “meddling” alleged to involve President Trump. Whatever that investigation has turned up is not known publicly yet, but the massive leaking from government employees that turned the story into roughly 80 percent of mainstream legacy news coverage the past year, has ceased – either because Mueller has imposed Draconian restraints on his own staff, or because there is nothing there.

The FBI has a lot to answer for in overlooking the Clinton connection to the Uranium One deal.

The informant, soon to be attached to a name and a face, is coming in from the cold, to the warm, wainscoted chambers of the house and senate committees. I wonder if Mr. Trump, or his lawyers, will find grounds to attempt to dismiss Special Prosecutor Mueller, given what looks like Mueller’s compromised position vis-à-vis Trump’s election opponent, HRC.

It’s hard to not see this thing going a long way – at the same time that financial markets and geopolitical matters are heading south. Keep your hats on.

via http://ift.tt/2y9R45d Tyler Durden

China’s Congress Is Over, And So Is The Period Of “Coordinated Global Growth”

It is hardly a secret that thanks to nearly $4 trillion (at least) in credit creation in 2017 – more than the rest of the developed world combined – China has been the proverbial (and debt-funded) “growth” dynamo behind the recent period of “coordinated global growth.” Unfortunately, much if not all of this was window dressing for the just concluded 19th Communist Party Congress, which in not so many words, made Xi Jinping into a de facto emperor with no apparent or otherwise heirs.

The problem is that with the Congress now over, so is the period of coordinated global growth. Here’s why.

As Citi writes, “China’s Party Congress has concluded and Xi Jinping’s position as President has been consolidated. Given there are no standing committee members in their 50s, it suggests there are no apparent heirs for Mr. Xi, opening the door for him to stay on beyond 2022. One of the key questions in the run up to the congress was that once power was consolidated, would China accelerate its economic reforms. We think this is unlikely but do expect a moderation of growth, with data momentum perhaps set to continue to slow at its current pace. Note how China’s MCI tends to lead Citi’s macro data index for China and our MCI is still tightening.”

It gets worse.

As Capital Economics writes in its China Activity Monitor note this week, the firm’s China Activity Proxy (CAP) suggests that growth in China slowed last month to the weakest pace in a year and with property sales cooling and officials continuing their efforts to rein in financial risks, Cap Econ thinks that looking ahead “the economy will slow further over the coming quarters.“

Some more details from CapEco:

The CAP is our attempt to track the pace of growth in China without relying on the official GDP figures. It is based on a set of low-profile indicators chosen to reflect activity across a wide section of the economy.

  • The CAP suggests that, following a sharp rebound in 2016, the economy expanded at a pace not far short of that shown on the official GDP data in the last three quarters. On a monthly basis though, we estimate growth actually peaked in July at 6.6% y/y before slowing to 5.6% last month, the weakest pace in a year. Growth also edged down last month in seasonally adjusted 3m/3m annualised terms, to 5.9% from 6.1% in August.
  • The breakdown reveals that two of the CAP’s five components were responsible for the latest slowdown. Passenger traffic growth fell in September to 1.6% y/y from 4.0% in August, hitting a six-month low. This may be due in part to distortions caused by the shift in timing of Mid-Autumn Festival from September last year to October this year. But even in seasonally-adjusted 3m/3m annualised terms, growth slowed from 4.0% to 3.5% last month.
  • Growth in domestic freight volumes also slowed in September in both y/y and annualised 3m/3m terms, with the latter hitting a three-month low.
  • Property construction growth continued to rebound in September, reaching the fastest pace in almost three years despite the recent contraction in home sales.

CapEco’s ominous conclusion:

Looking ahead, we think growth will continue to slow over the coming quarters. The current props to growth appear shaky. With investment contracting in real terms, industrial output will probably soften over the months ahead. Property sales also look set to weaken further as the government’s purchase curbs continue to expand. This will weigh on construction before long. More generally, with tighter monetary conditions weighing on credit growth, activity looks set to weaken further.

That the past 18 months of coordinated global growth will end in China, is quite symmetric: back in January 2016, as global markets were tumbling, aborting the Fed’s plans to hike rates 4 times in 2016 and resulting in sharp economic slowdowns around the globe, it was the (still mysterious) Shanghai Accord that “saved” the world, and unleashed a burst of unprecedented, and coordinated, growth… which only cost China some $8 trillion in debt.

It will only make sense that another major Chinese event will mark the top of this economic mini cycle, and lead to the next global downturn, not to mention spike in market volatility.

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The Coming Russia Bombshells

Authored op-ed by Kimberley Strassel via The Wall Street Journal,

The confirmation this week that Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee paid an opposition-research firm for a “dossier” on Donald Trump is bombshell news. More bombshells are to come.

The Fusion GPS saga isn’t over. The Clinton-DNC funding is but a first glimpse into the shady election doings concealed within that oppo-research firm’s walls. We now know where Fusion got some of its cash, but the next question is how the firm used it. With whom did it work beyond former British spy Christopher Steele ? Whom did it pay? Who else was paying it?

The answers are in Fusion’s bank records. Fusion has doggedly refused to divulge the names of its clients for months now, despite extraordinary pressure. So why did the firm suddenly insist that middleman law firm Perkins Coie release Fusion from confidentiality agreements, and spill the beans on who hired it?

Because there’s something Fusion cares about keeping secret even more than the Clinton-DNC news – and that something is in those bank records. The release of the client names was a last-ditch effort to appease the House Intelligence Committee, which issued subpoenas to Fusion’s bank and was close to obtaining records until Fusion filed suit last week. The release was also likely aimed at currying favor with the court, given Fusion’s otherwise weak legal case. The judge could rule as early as Friday morning.

If the House wins, don’t be surprised if those records include money connected to Russians. In the past Fusion has worked with Russians, including lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya, who happened to show up last year in Donald Trump Jr.’s office.

FBI bombshells are also yet to come. The bureau has stonewalled congressional subpoenas for documents related to the dossier, but that became harder with the DNC-Clinton news. On Thursday Speaker Paul Ryan announced the FBI had finally pledged to turn over its dossier file next week.

Assuming the FBI is comprehensive in its disclosure, expect to learn that the dossier was indeed a major basis of investigating the Trump team – despite reading like “the National Enquirer,” as Rep. Trey Gowdy aptly put it. We may learn the FBI knew the dossier was a bought-and-paid-for product of Candidate Clinton, but used it anyway. Or that it didn’t know, which would be equally disturbing.

It might show the bureau was simply had. Don’t forget that it wasn’t until January the dossier became public, and the media started unearthing details. And the more ugly info that came out (Fusion, Democratic clients, intelligence-for-hire) the more former Obama officials seemed skeptical of it. In May, former Director of National Intelligence Jim Clapper said his people could never “corroborate” its “sourcing.” In June, Mr. Comey derided it as “salacious and unverified.”

Yet none of this jibes with reports that the FBI debated paying Mr. Steele to continue his work. Or that Mr. Comey was so convinced by the dossier that he pushed to have it included in the intelligence community’s January report on Russian meddling. Imagine if it turns out the FBI was duped by a politically contracted document that might have been filled up by the Kremlin.

There’s plenty yet to come with regard to the DNC and the Clinton campaign. Every senior Democrat is disclaiming knowledge of the dossier deal, leaving Perkins Coie holding the bag. But while it is not unusual for law firms to hire opposition-research outfits for political clients, it is highly unusual for a law firm to pay bills without a client’s approval. Somewhere, Perkins Coie has documents showing who signed off on those bills, and they aren’t protected by attorney-client privilege.

Those names will matter, since someone at the DNC and at the Clinton campaign will need to explain how they somehow both forgot to list Fusion as a vendor in their campaign-finance filings. Some Justice Department lawyer is presumably already looking into whether this was a willful evasion, which can carry criminal penalties. It’s one thing to forget to list that local hot-dog supplier for the campaign picnic. It’s a little fishier when two entities both fail to list the firm that supplied them the most explosive hit job in a generation.

And there are still bombshells with regard to unmasking of Americans in surveilled communications. If the Steele dossier reports (which appear to date back to June 2016) were making their way into the hands of senior DNC and Clinton political operatives, you can bet they were making their way to the Obama White House. This may explain why Obama political appointees began monitoring the Trump campaign and abusing unmasking. They were looking for a “gotcha,” something to disqualify a Trump presidency. Of course, they were doing so on the basis of “salacious and unverified” accusations made by anonymous Russians, but never mind.

No, this probe of the Democratic Party’s Russian dalliance has a long, long way to go. And, let us hope, with revelations too big for even the media to ignore.

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Rand Volatility Surging Ahead Of ANC Leadership Conference

Volatility in the Rand is surging in the run up to a conference when the ruling ANC could replace Jacob Zuma as its leader.

According to Bloomberg, the South African rand’s price swings are set to increase over the next two months as the ruling African National Congress prepares to replace President Jacob Zuma as party leader during a Dec. 16-20 conference.

Two-month implied volatility for the currency against the dollar surged to the highest in more than 11 months on Thursday, a day after Finance Minister Malusi Gigaba rattled markets with a bleak budget speech. At 20 percent, it’s by far the highest among major emerging currencies, with Turkey’s lira next at 13 percent.

On Wednesday, Gigaba said he could no longer “sugarcoat” the South African economy’s problems, as he delivered bad news on growth and the nation’s widening deficit.

As Bloomberg details, South Africa forecast higher debt and wider fiscal deficits over the next three years, heightening the risk of further credit ratings downgrades as a fight for control of the ruling party limits policy choices. The nation’s currency and bonds weakened. Finance Minister Malusi Gigaba painted a bleak picture of the state of the country’s finances in his first mid-term budget on Wednesday, with growth and revenue set to fall well short of projections made in February. He warned there was little scope to raise taxes or cut spending. “It is not in the public interest, nor is it in the interests of government, to sugarcoat the state of our economy and the challenges we are facing,” Gigaba said…

The deteriorating debt trajectory threatens to trigger a downgrade of the country’s local-currency debt rating to junk by S&P Global Ratings and Moody’s Investors Service, which could spur massive capital outflows. S&P and Fitch Ratings Ltd. stripped South Africa of its investment-grade foreign-currency assessment in April, citing concerns about policy uncertainty and lackluster growth, just days after Gigaba replaced Pravin Gordhan as finance minister.

Bloomberg detailed Gigaba’s downgraded metrics for the economy.

The Treasury expects the economy to expand 0.7 percent this year, down from 1.3 percent predicted in the February budget, and trimmed its growth forecasts for the next three years. Tax revenue for this fiscal year will fall 50.8 billion rand ($3.7 billion) short of the initial forecast. Lower growth and revenue will feed through to a higher budget deficit. The gap is expected to jump to 4.3 percent of gross domestic product in the current fiscal year, up from a projected 3.1 percent. The shortfall will probably stay at 3.9 percent of GDP for the next three years. That’s a break from the Treasury’s past pledges to steadily narrow the deficit.

From the same report, a BNP Paribas analyst commented on prospects for the credit rating.

“Fiscal consolidation plans seem to have been largely abandoned,” Jeffrey Schultz, an economist at BNP Paribas in Johannesburg, said by phone.

 

“We believe that not enough was done to instil confidence that fiscal consolidation remains front of mind for the Treasury and as such I think ratings downgrades by S&P and Moody’s and Fitch are inevitable before the end of the year.”

Earlier this week, sacked cabinet minister and head of the South African Communist Party said that Zuma would become a “non-factor” after the December ANC conference.

According to The Citizen, former higher education and training minister Blade Nzimande says President Jacob Zuma will be a non-factor after the African National Congress’ upcoming national conference in December. In an interview with Talk Radio 702 on Monday night, the South African Communist Party (SACP) boss, who was fired from Cabinet last week and replaced with former home affairs minister Hlengiwe Mkhize, said Zuma was a major problem for the ANC-led tripartite alliance and country. “He must go because he’s the single biggest problem in the ANC, in our alliance and in the country. That’s why we’re calling on him to step down as the president of the Republic,” said Nzimande. Following last week’s Cabinet reshuffle, the SACP said the president’s actions would have wider implications on the tripartite alliance. The party said the reshuffle was a declaration of war on the entire SACP. Nzimande said he was not surprised that Zuma fired him from his portfolio, which he held since 2009.

We wish we weren’t so sceptical that Zuma’s “influence” is going to become a “non-factor” in South Africa politics in the next few months.

South Africa will go to the polls in 2019 to elect a new president, whoever the ANC picks as leader in December is likely win. Last week, the Rand weakened on rumours that Zuma would fire his ANC deputy, Cyril Ramaphosa, who is the most likely challenger in 2019 to Zuma’s chosen successor and ex-wife. From a Reuters report.

Jacob Zuma’s spokesman said on Friday there was no basis for reports that the South African president would axe his deputy Cyril Ramaphosa, speculation about which has weighed on the currency and bonds. The ruling African National Congress (ANC) party, of which Zuma is leader and Ramaphosa deputy, has been riven by bitter infighting ahead of a party conference in December at which a new leader will be chosen.

“It’s rumours and gossip, and we don’t comment on them at all,” Zuma’s spokesman Bongani Ngqulunga told Reuters. Ramaphosa, a trade unionist-turned-business tycoon, is viewed as the most likely rival candidate to Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, the former chairwoman of the African Union, who is Zuma’s pick for the leadership and is the president’s ex-wife. He has recently stepped up criticism of Zuma’s scandal-plagued government. Asked in parliament on Thursday whether he might be sacked, Ramaphosa said only that he would accept the president’s decision if he lost his job. On Friday, a spokesman for the deputy president said: “We are aware of the speculation, but it is just speculation.”

Trade union federation Cosatu and the South African Communist Party (SACP), both partners in the ANC’s ruling alliance, have endorsed Ramaphosa, 64, for the leadership. Zuma is under pressure to step down before then, with a recent South African court ruling that nearly 800 corruption charges against him should be reinstated prompting more calls for the president to go.

But hey, given what we have seen 'politicians' get away with in supposedly more developed nations, what's 800 corruption charges?

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Just Five Tech Stocks Add Insane $200 Billion In Market Cap In One Day

The Nasdaq is dramatically outperforming the rest of the major US equity indices today…

 

In fact this this is the biggest Nasdaq outperformance of the S&P since May 2009…

“We saw some weakness in the stocks of tech megacaps recently, not so much because of a concern about mediocre earnings but rather because a concern about valuations being stretched,” said Walter Todd, chief investment officer at Greenwood Capital Associates.

“The numbers Google and Amazon reported may trigger a rotation back into tech megacaps and probably a further rally. ”

Putting the massive gains in context…

The Nasdaq 100 has added over $180 billion in market cap today – the biggest addition since the day after Aug 2015's Flash Crash…

 

That is more market cap than 472 of the S&P 500. There are only 28 names with a larger total market cap in the S&P 500 than Tech names added today…

 

Just five Tech stocks – FB, AMZN, MSFT, AAPL, and GOOGL – added a wopping $200 billion in market cap…

 

FANG Stocks (FB, AMZN, NFLX, GOOGL) alone added over $120 billion… the biggest day ever….

 

And finally, as The FT reports, Amazon, Microsoft, and Alphabet alone added a stunning $144 billion – more than the entire market cap of IBM…

As we noted earlier, AMZN is soaring 12.5% today, At its session high of $1,105, Amazon added about $63.5 billion to its market value, more than the market value of 421 of the S&P 500.

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In Angry Tweetstorm, Venezuela’s National Oil Company Lashes Out At “Doomsayers”

As reported earlier, Venezuela’s state-run oil company surprised naysayers who speculated that today may be the day PDVSA finally defaults on its $842 million bond issue. In a statement, PDVSA “confirms its full solvency and capacity to fulfill its commitments, despite the economic war and the imposition of unjustified sanctions from Donald Trump,” the oil firm said in its statement.

The story is not over yet, however, as plenty of obstacles not to mention potential surprises remain, including the immediate challenge of ensuring that the cash makes it all the way into the accounts of creditors. As Bloomberg notes, in recent weeks, Venezuelan officials told investors that less-critical interest payments have gotten held up in the payment chain because U.S. sanctions on the government scared many international banks into refusing to take part in the cash transfers. There was also no reference to the $107 million in interest due. As we reported on Wednesday, the company and government have been using grace periods on more than half a billion dollars of such payments due this month, but the principal amount Friday had no such buffer. It’s next big challenge is the additional $1.2 billion owed on notes maturing next week.

“Given logistics and steps needed to get payment to bondholders, I doubt that the money will arrive by the end of today,” said Ray Zucaro, the chief investment officer at Miami-based RVX Asset Management. “Monday is more realistic, and then we will hear a big sigh of relief.”

Whatever happens on Monday, however, today was PDVSA’s day to gloat, and it did just that in an odd, angry rant reminiscent of Donald Trump’s Twitter forays.  After announcing that $841 million in bank transfers for the PDVSA bond had begun, it stated that Venezuela has “consistently honored its obligations” – even if meant unleashing hyperinflation, destroying the currency, and creating general social misery – before taking a shot at “doomsayers that bet on the economic ruin of the country and attack the Venezuelan people conspiring with the world economic oligarchy with the intention of destabilizing and sabotaging the Government’s economic progress.”

And if PDVSA was gloating, the market was relieved, and PDVSA’s notes due 2020 jumped 3.5 cents to 85 cents on the dollar as of noon in New York according to Bloomberg, while the securities due next week climbed to a three-year high of 95.8 cents. Sovereign bonds due in 2027 leaped 9.6 percent to 36.9 cents on the dollar.

Ironically, as the plight of Venezuelan society gets worse by the day, bondholders win again.

To be sure, there are plenty of Venezuela watchers — including economists such as Ricardo Hausmann — who have been urging the government to stop payments. They say the debt load is unsustainable, and sending dollars to foreign investors while cutting back on imports of food, medicine and basic goods for the Venezuelan people is immoral.

Of course, the reality is that Venezuela simply can not afford to stay current on its obligations. The government and PDVSA will owe international creditors $10 billion in bond payments next year and $14 billion in 2019, according to Capital Economics. International reserves have sunk to a 15-year low near $10 billion.

As a reminder, this is a scheduled of Venezuela’s upcoming bond payments:

 

“It remains a question of when — not if — PDVSA and the government default,” Capital Economics analysts said in a note today. When that day comes, PDVSA’s twitter account will be quiet.

via http://ift.tt/2yaiaZU Tyler Durden

First Twitter, Now Facebook: Company Introduces New Political Ad Transparency Policy

Facebook must’ve seen this tweet, published three days ago by a ProPublica journalist after Twitter unveiled a sweeping new transparency policy that included new disclosure rules for “political” and “issues-based” ads…

…because Mark Zuckerberg’s social-media behemoth on Friday announced a virtually identical policy requiring more detailed disclosures not just for political and issues-based ads, but all ads being run by a given page.

Like Twitter, Facebook is trying out its policy in a test market (Facebook’s test market is Canada) before rolling it out in the US and worldwide. The policy, Facebook noted, will be in effect before the 2018 mid-term election.

During the initial test, Facebook will only show active ads. However, when it expands to the US, it plans to begin building an archive of federal-election related ads so that it can show both current and historical federal-election related ads. In addition, for each federal-election related ad, Facebook plans to….

  • Include the ad in a searchable archive that, once full, will cover a rolling four-year period – starting from when we launch the archive.
  • Provide details on the total amounts spent.
  • Provide the number of impressions that delivered.
  • Provide demographics information (e.g. age, location, gender) about the audience that the ads reached.

In addition, buyers of political ads will need to complete an enhanced verification process.

As Joel Kaplan mentioned, we’re going to require more thorough documentation from advertisers who want to run election-related ads. We are starting with federal elections in the US, and will progress from there to additional contests and elections in other countries and jurisdictions. As part of the documentation process, advertisers may be required to identify that they are running election-related advertising and verify both their entity and location.

 

Once verified, these advertisers will have to include a disclosure in their election-related ads, which reads: “Paid for by.” When you click on the disclosure, you will be able to see details about the advertiser. Like other ads on Facebook, you will also be able to see an explanation of why you saw that particular ad.

And like Zuckerberg said in September, Facebook is developing machine learning tools to root out potentially fraudulent ad purchases in an attempt to crack down on the type of behavior that resulted in Facebook selling $100,000 in political ads to a reportedly Russia-linked troll farm.

The announcements comes as Facebook’s general counsel (along with his counterparts at Twitter and Google)  is preparing to testify next week before a joint meeting of the House and Senate intelligence committees.

As we’ve noted in the past, this policy represents a dramatic reversal of the company’s efforts to avoid exactly these types of disclosures. Back in 2011, the company hired Clinton attorney Marc Elias, who successfully lobbied the FEC to exempt Facebook from adding disclaimers to political ads, setting a legal precedent that equated social-media ads with campaign buttons and bumper stickers.

Now, we wait to hear from Google. But in the meantime, screenshots of the disclaimers are beginning to surface…

 

 

via http://ift.tt/2ianHEL Tyler Durden