Tag: finance

Submitted by Alex Christoforou via The Duran.com,

Russian "election hack" narrative falls apart in light of Chelsea Manning clemency.

We applaud Obama for commuting the prison sentence of Chelsea Manning from 35 years to 7 years.

Army soldier, Chelsea Manning was convicted in 2013 of leaking hundreds of thousands (some counts have the number at 750,000) classified documents about US national security activities to WikiLeaks.

Those documents included diplomatic cables, military intelligence in Iraq and Afghanistan, and video files showing US strikes against “terrorists”, and in one instance showing strikes that killed two Reuters journalists.

By granting Manning clemency, Obama admits that the massive leak of classified intelligence information (arguably the most damning US intelligence leak ever) was damaging, but not so damaging as to warrant a 35 year prison sentence.

Certainly Manning’s intelligence leak is magnitudes worse a leak (in relation to US national security) than the John Podesta emails, that have the entire US establishment up in arms and pleading for a heavy retaliation.

Keep in mind that Chelsea Manning has pleaded guilty and admitted to the intelligence breach. No evidence has ever been provided to the public that proves the Russian state was behind the Podesta or DNC document leak.

Which brings us to this argument.

The Democrat Party, and their outgoing President Barack Obama, are gravely concerned about “Russian election hacking”, concerned enough to impose sanctions on Russia, expel Russian diplomats, and even call for a “war-like” response towards Russia, with no evidence.

How does Obama, and his party, explain the sudden about face on Manning, and their forgiveness for Manning’s intelligence “betrayal”, that jeopardized the “fabric of US democracy” and “endangered US national security”?

 

Are we to believe that John Podesta’s emails as worthy enough for conflict with Russia, but Manning’s classified document release, that exposed the highest level of US military intelligence information, is now considered forgivable?

Or can we simply conclude that Obama’s “red scare” is simply a political ploy to damage President-elect Trump, and excuse Hillary Clinton (and the Democrat Party) from running the most pathetic election in history…because the false narrative that John Podesta’s email leak threatens to destroy “US democracy”, has know fallen completely apart.

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With just two days left to go until Trump’s inauguration, one of the President-elect’s biggest opponents during the presidential campaign, Mexican billionaire and the country’s richest man Carlos Slim, said on Tuesday that his cell-phone company America Movil is launching a a TV channel in the United State, Nuestra Vision, which “is focused on Mexicans, made by Mexicans and transmitted from Mexico,” putting it into competition with broadcasters like Univision and Telemundo.

The news comes at the same time as the Globe and Mail reported that Trump will begin NAFTA renegotiation within days of his inauguration, with an emphasis on trade and immigration policies that could several impact Mexico’s economy.

Slim’s new channel will be offered by the America Movil unit Publicidad y Contenido Editorial, the company said in a statement that was flanked by a promotional video online. Nuestra Vision – “Our Vision” – will broadcast news, movies and sports highlights, America Movil said, stressing the company’s pledge to be “100 percent” Mexican and promote Mexico’s heritage. The addressable market is massive: an estimated 35 million people living in the United States are Mexican or of Mexican background.

As the FT adds, Nuestra Visión will show movies, news and sports highlights from Uno TV and Claro Sports, with anchors and reporters direct from Mexico offering daily newscasts.“The Mexican population represents the most significant segment of Hispanic minorities in the United States,” said Victor Herrera, affiliate relations from Nuestra Visión, in a statement. He saw the new channel having a wide audience “reaching every age group”. The company gave no further details on when the new channel could be launched.

Slim, a major force in pay TV in Latin America, has been kept out of the Mexican market by regulators wary of the financial muscle he can bring to bear from his telecoms empire. America Movil is the biggest cell phone company in Latin America, and helped to make Slim the richest man in the world for several years.

Univision has a close alliance with Mexico’s top broadcaster Televisa, which has for years wrestled with Slim in the Mexican telecommunications market that he dominates.

Slim’s new channel launch coincides with a charged atmosphere between Mexico and the incoming U.S. president Donald Trump, who has taken an aggressive stance towards the Mexican economy and sparked dismay with outspoken comments on migrants.

Trump has proposed taking punitive steps against producers of Mexican-made goods in an effort to bring jobs and investment back to the United States, and has also threatened to tear up a joint trade deal that underpins Mexico’s export model.

Slim was critical of Trump during the U.S. election campaign, but after meeting the New York real estate magnate for dinner at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida before Christmas, he was left was a “very positive” impression from the president-elect, the Mexican mogul’s spokesman said.  Slim had previously warned during the election campaign that a Trump
presidency could be disastrous for the US. It remains to be seen if
Trump has forgiven and forgotten.

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While it will hardly come as a surprise to China watchers who have for years mocked China’s cooked “data”, overnight the state-run People’s Daily reported that the severely impacted by the commodity crunch of the past 2 years rust-belt province of Liaoning fabricated fiscal numbers from 2011 to 2014, raising fresh doubts about the accuracy of China’s economic data just two days ahead of the release of China’s GDP report.

The city of Shenyang in Liaoning province of China

City and county governments in the northwestern region committed fiscal data fraud in the period, Governor Chen Qiufa said at a meeting with provincial lawmakers Tuesday, Bloomberg adds. Not surprisingly, the fabricated economic data was meant to show a state of economic strenght with fiscal revenues inflated by at least 20%, and some other economic data were also false, the paper said, without specifying categories.

Why paint a rosier picture? The same reason as alwasy: Chen said the data were made up “because officials wanted to advance their careers.” The fraud misled the central government’s judgment of Liaoning’s economic status, he said, citing a report from the National Audit Office in 2016.

The admission of fraud comes now because with growth now moderating, officials have “sought to improve the credibility of economic data” as diffusing financial risks becomes a key policy consideration, along with keeping growth ticking along at a rapid clip.

And while the outgoing Obama administration is cracking down on “fake news”, Ning Jizhe, head of the National Bureau of Statistics, has said China is focusing on preventing “fake economic data” as well as increasing the quality of its statistics. Naturally, incidents such as this one will make China watchers that much more skeptical.

Fake economic data may be the least of Liaoning’s worries which in recent years has seen an unprecedented purge of more than 500 deputies from its legislature Bloomberg reports. The deputies were implicated in vote buying and bribery in the first provincial-level case of its kind in the Communist Party’s almost seven-decade rule, according to the official Xinhua News Agency. Former provincial party chief Wang Min, who led Liaoning from 2009 until 2015, was earlier expelled following corruption allegations by China’s top anti-graft watchdog.

As China’s debt-fueled economic impulse continues, if only for a few more months, we wxpect more such instances of fake data to swim to the surface.

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VIX spiked this morning to near 13 (shock horror) – the highest since January 3rd – as Goldman Sachs was unable to support the Dow, which dropped below 19750 for the first time since 2016…

And The Dow joined Small Caps in the red for 2017 briefly..

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In a speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Joe Biden took aim at president-elect Trump and Russian president Putin in what is likely his final public appearance as US vice-president.

The speech was long on scaremongery and war rhetoric and short on ‘fact’, as The Wall Street Journal reports, Mr. Biden said cooperation between the U.S. and Europe formed “the bedrock of the success the world enjoyed in the second half of the 20th century.”

“Strengthening these values—values that served our community of nations so well for so long—is paramount to retaining the position of leadership that Western nations enjoy.”

 

Mr. Biden also leveled sharp criticism at Mr. Putin, whom Mr. Trump has praised and said he would seek to cooperate with. Mr. Putin’s goal, Mr. Biden said, was “to return to a world where the strong impose its will through military might, corruption, and criminality, while weaker nations have to fall into line.”

 

“With many countries in Europe slated to hold elections this year, we should expect further attempts by Russia to meddle in the democratic process,” Mr. Biden said. “It will occur again, I promise you, and again the purpose is clear: to collapse the liberal international order.”

So – bottom line – according to the vice-president of the only US president to have been at war every day of their 8-year-term, the American people have ‘unwittingly’ voted a man who puts the entire world order at risk of collapse into office.

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Trump will soon assume his elected office, and potentially change FX markets forever. Well, it’s already happened. But what we’ve seen happen now, has been mostly ‘talk’ – whereas in 4 days, it will be ‘reality.’ First let’s look at the best example in FX of the Trump Effect, USD/JPY traded as (FXY), Guggenheim CurrencyShares Japanese:

(click to enlarge)

This long slide was a no-brainer trade of a lifetime. A blind bat with no wings could have flown through this tunnel. Once it was clear that Trump was going to implement a pro-USD policy one way or another (after the election) the USD strengthened against all pairs but most notably against the Japanese Yen . Note that, this chart represents the JPY going down, not up, as you would see in a USD/JPY chart which is quoted in the reverse.

Stock traders can trade FX in their stock accounts through ETFs. The downside, is that you don’t get leverage. The huge upside though – huge options! There are many deep out of the money options to play such an event. So what will happen to Guggenheim CurrencyShares Japanese now? Probably, a short reversal maybe back to 87 Max, and then a continued slide down to historic levels. That’s because FX markets haven’t priced in ‘The Trump Effect’ completely yet.

Take a look at any of Trump’s policies which can impact FX, let’s look at the potential scenario where Trump labels China a Currency Manipulator – for which they certainly are. But here’s the catch – EVERY fiat currency manipulates their currency via central bank policy. Here’s where the mainstream media is wrong. Fred Imbert of CNBC claims that Trump is wrong because China has allowed the Yuan to float against major currency pairs. This is true. But China imposes capital controls, which has given rise to a massive black market not only FX but for cash transfers too. The Yuan is highly controlled by the PBOC, even if that means selling Yuan to support FX operations in foreign markets.

It’s clear where Fred is getting his misinformation from:

“The notion of labeling China a currency manipulator in this day and age is just silly,” said Edward Alden, senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. “If Trump had said that China was a currency manipulator in 2006, I would have said, ‘hoorah,’ but in 2016, it’s a laughable mistake. I wonder who is advising Trump on this.”

So here we go. The CFR represents the ‘globalists’ that are behind the push to keep the global status quo, as is. They’re in China, and making good profits from the fact that China manipulates their currency. The best example being Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. (WMT) that directly benefits from the Chinese manipulation. Simply put, Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. profits huge because their supply is in China and their customer base is mostly in the United States in US Dollars. Not everything sold at Wal Mart comes from China, but almost nothing sold at Wal Mart is manufactured in the United States, with the huge exception of Wal Mart brand products “Equate” which are manufactured in Bentonville, AR (but, they are really ‘assembled there – they take huge advantages of their USD buyer base in foreign countries). Anyway, if the Yuan rapidly appreciated, Wal Mart would have a serious problem on their hands. It’s a question of good for consumers, bad for billionaires. Has Wal Mart greatly helped the economy? Many detractors say not, such as Noam Chomsky, who say that in the last 30 years corporate America has relied on financial manipulations, more than producing value. Wal Mart is a perfect example, as well as being a huge benefactor of a cheap Yuan.

Practically, a company as successful as Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. will adapt, it isn’t as if this is going to make Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. crumble – far from it. They’ll manufacture in Arkansas, there will be millions of illegals desperate for less than minimum wage factory jobs after Trump builds the wall. Let’s not forget that foreign companies such as Hyundai, Kia, and many others – manufacture their products in places like Alabama. BMW has a massive plant in South Carolina, in Spartanburg. So this trade situation is not a one way deal, nor is it as simple as fixing the Chinese Currency Manipulation problem. The point is that there are many factors at play here, corporate and political power, central bank policy, and of course real trade as seen in the Baltic dry index. And what Trump has accomplished, for better or worse, he’s made all this depend on his latest Tweet.

Tomorrow, Trump can make a Tweet that can cause the CurrencyShares British Pound Sterling ETF (FXB) to crash or skyrocket, based on the markets interpretation of it. That’s more powerful than his new job in the Oval Office. Such power maybe never existed before, because it’s always been reserved to big billionaire hedge fund traders, and it’s always been limited. Just because Kyle Bass makes a statement, it doesn’t move markets.

So whether you’re knowledgeable about FX or not, you should be, because it can impact the stock market in ways that has never seen before. Previous presidents have been globalists, which tend to want a stable, non-existant FX market – which resembles a one world currency. Trump’s policies are the opposite. By imposing sanctions on China, taxing imports from Mexico, and other pro-America policies, Trump is putting a force in the market that never existed before.

Bernanke had his ‘Bernanke Put’ – Trump has created something that we can only call the “Trump Call” because he’s betting long on America- whatever the consequences will be on the markets. What that means? It means that this plan wasn’t thought out too well. There can be collateral damage, there can be knee-jerk reactions, portfolio rebalancing, and a number of financial ramifications that can rock FX markets. It can potentially make Brexit look like a walk in the park.

One good thing for stock investors generally, it will make companies more evolved, for example half of listed issues do not hedge FX, but the other half do. Corporations who are at the tail end of the “Trump Call” (in 2016, 2015 it was called “Currency Headwinds”) will suffer greatly. Those ahead of the curve, will profit immensely. It can lead to a golden area of finance on Wall St. – but there certainly will be a huge number of firms that won’t evolve, won’t hedge the FX risk, and ultimately, will be bankrupt or bought out.

Companies like Fortress Capital offer signals for FX based on FX specific algorithms, that can easily be traded as ETFs in your stock account. There are many FX education providers that offer ways to learn this important market, and how to include it in your portfolio either directly (trading FX ETFs) or indirectly (assessing the FX impact on your favorite stocks).

The “Trump Call” is not only pro-America it’s pro-Wall St. and a great opportunity to make money, but you have to be in it to win it.

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Just a day after Trump’s WSJ comments on the dollar being overvalued, and criticism on the proposed Border-Tax Adjustment sent the dollar into a tailspin and hit global risk level, Trump appears to have walked back his statements in an interview granted to Axios in which he “walked back some of the more provocative statements he had made only days before.” As Axios notes, “a top adviser told us the sober tone reflects a bumpy few days inside Trump Tower — and the realization that he’s days away from truly running the nation.”

Here are the highlights from the Axios interview conducted on Tuesday:

• Trump said health care is his most urgent domestic topic, telling us he spoke with President Obama again on Monday about the topic. He back-tracked a bit from his promise of insurance for everybody, saying he wanted to find a mechanism — Medicaid block grants, perhaps — to help the poorest get insurance. “You know there are many people talking about many forms of health care where people with no money aren’t covered. We can’t have that,” he said.
• On Friday, he told The Wall Street Journal that border-adjustment, a vital part of the House Republicans’ corporate tax-reform plan, was “too complicated.” Now, it’s suddenly back on the table. “It’s certainly something that’s going to be discussed,” he said. “I would say, over the next month-and-a-half, two months, we’ll be having more concrete discussions. Right now, we’re really focused on health care more than anything else.”
• Trump earlier this week unsettled allies overseas by calling NATO obsolete and seeming to put Germany’s Angela Merkel and Russia’s Vladimir Putin on par as possible US allies. Trump told us ALL WORLD LEADERS are on par, with a fresh chance to prove themselves. “So, I give everybody an even start; that right now, as far as I’m concerned, everybody’s got an even start,” he said.
• Trump’s advisers tell us privately that many parts of the operation remain messy — in large part, they say, because New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie left them with virtually no preparation for a transition. Advisers told us horror stories of struggles to fill key roles — including getting handed files of candidates, most of whom were Democrats. This is only adding to the confusion and slowed policy-making discussions.

Trump also opined on recent intelligence briefings:  “I’ve had a lot of briefings that are very … I don’t want to say ‘scary,’ because I’ll solve the problems,” he said. “But … we have some big enemies out there in this country and we have some very big enemies — very big and, in some cases, strong enemies.”

He offered a reminder many critics hope he never forgets: “You also realize that you’ve got to get it right because a mistake would be very, very costly in so many different ways.”

Trump also told Axios that he likes his briefings short, ideally one-page if it’s in writing. “I like bullets or I like as little as possible. I don’t need, you know, 200-page reports on something that can be handled on a page. That I can tell you.“

Eventually Trump reverted to his familiar self:

• In the opening moment, asked why he hasn’t been able to deliver on his promise to heal divisions in the U.S., Trump reiterated his promise “to be a president for all Americans,” only to launch, unprovoked, into his fourth-consecutive day of attacks on Rep. John Lewis, the civil-rights icon. Think about that for a minute: He’s less than 72 hours from taking office and he was still stewing about a member of the Democratic minority in the House.
• Trump told us his confrontational style is misunderstood. “You know, I’m not really a divisive figure,” he said, before pinning the blame for bad press and bad blood almost entirely on the media: “In the history of politics, there’s nobody that has been treated worse by the press than I have.”
• Asked to name a decision he got wrong or a regret from the campaign, he didn’t.

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US Manufacturing output stagnated for the 14th month in a row in December with a mere 0.2% rise year-over-year (amid downward revisions), notably less than the expected 0.4% rise. While industrial production rose year-over-year for the first time since August 2015 (thanks to a surge in vehicle production). Natural gas utility output also soared 12.0% MoM providing some impetus to the headline print’s 0.8% MoM gain.

It appears the soft survey data is once again entirely decoupled from the hard reality data…

And just in case that’s too hard to read…

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Following an announcement that Edward Snowden’s Russian asylum status was extended for another three years allowing him to stay in the country until 2020, his lawyer said that the former NSA is legally eligible to obtain Russian citizenship.

Russian authorities said earlier on Wednesday they had extended a residency permit for Snowden, who was given asylum in Russia after leaking classified information about U.S. spy operations. That permit is now valid until 2020, the lawyer, Anatoly Kucherena, was quoted as saying by Russia’s RIA news agency.

“In effect, he now has all grounds to receive citizenship in the future, over the course of a certain period, since under the law we have a period of residence on Russia soil of not less than 5 years (to receive Russian citizenship),”  Snowden’s lawyer Anatoly Kucherena told RIA Novosti news agency. “This means that if he decides [to apply for citizenship] in the near future, it will be legally possible. He has now lived in Russia for almost four years, has not violated any laws, and there are no [legal] claims against him – this is one of the reasons his residence permit was extended,” Kucherena explained.

In a statement to Interfax cited by RT, Kucherena expressed hope that the incoming US administration headed by Donald Trump will change Washington’s attitude towards the former whistleblower.

“I hope that the administration of President-elect Donald Trump will be more sensitive and objective in its consideration of the Snowden issue and will change the attitude the official authorities [expressed] towards it,” Kucherena stated on Wednesday, noting that in order “to do this, they need only to work through Snowden’s story and realize that he did not commit any crime.”

The news of Russia extending Snowden’s residence permit was first announced on Tuesday, when Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova confirmed in a Facebook post that his asylum renewal had been secured.

Her post came in response to an op-ed by former CIA Director Michael Morell published Sunday in the The Cipher Brief, in which he suggested Edward Snowden be presented as the “perfect inauguration gift” from Vladimir Putin to Donald Trump.

Zakharova responded sharply, saying that Russia does not betray its principles and does not hand out “gifts,” especially when these “gifts” may face prosecution.

“You failed to understand Russia, Michael Morell,” Zakharova stated, implying that Russia does not surrender those who might be unfairly prosecuted in another country.

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US headline inflation rose for a 5th consecutive month, and has not seen a negative print since February, following today’s report that CPI in December rose 0.3%, and up 2.1% from a year ago, the highest since June 2014. Both measures came in line with expectations as energy and gas costs rise and rents and medical costs continued to rise.

Energy costs increased 1.5% from a month earlier, as gasoline rose 3%. Food prices were unchanged for a sixth month, however thiw as more than offset by shelter expenses which climbed 0.3%, reflecting a jump in rental costs.

As shown below, rent inflation rose 4.0% in December, the highest annual increase since December 2007, pushing shelter inflation up 3.6% Y/Y.

The core CPI measure increased 2.2 percent from December 2015, after rising 2.1 percent in the prior 12-month period.  Core inflation has now printed above the Fed’s target rate of 2.0% for 14 consecutive months.

Continued rising prices should further boost inflation and strengthening the case for the Fed to keep raising interest rates this year, although the Fed’s preferred gauge of inflation, the personal consumption expenditures price measure, which puts a lower emphasis on rents, rose only 1.4% in November from a year earlier; it hasn’t matched the central bank’s 2 percent goal since April

“Consumer prices have trekked higher over the past few months on the back of higher energy prices,” Sam Bullard, senior economist at Wells Fargo Securities LLC in Charlotte, North Carolina, said in a note before the report. The Fed is “well-positioned for multiple rate hikes in 2017” with inflation near target and unemployment below 5 percent, he wrote.

Some more details on core prices:

The index for all items less food and energy increased 0.2 percent in December. The shelter index rose 0.3 percent in December, the same increase as in November, with the indexes for rent and owners’ equivalent rent both repeating their November increases of 0.3 percent. The index for motor vehicle insurance rose 0.8 percent in December following a 1.0 percent rise the prior month. The medical care index, which was unchanged in October and November, rose 0.2 percent in December. The hospital services index rose 0.3 percent, and the index for prescription drugs increased 0.2 percent.

 

The education index also increased in December, rising 0.5 percent. The index for airline fares increased 1.9 percent after declining in November. The index for used cars and trucks rose 0.5 percent, its largest increase since April 2015. The index for new vehicles increased slightly, rising 0.1 percent after falling 0.1 percent in November. Also increasing in December were the indexes for tobacco (0.4 percent), personal care (0.3 percent), household furnishings and operations (0.1 percent), and alcoholic beverages (0.1 percent).

 

The recreation index was unchanged in December. The apparel index, which fell 0.5 percent in November, declined 0.7 percent in December. The communication index also fell in December, decreasing 0.1 percent.

In short, prices continue to rise and will only accelerate should any of Trump’s proposed fiscal measures be implemented.

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