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For the 11th week in a row, US oil rig counts declined (down 8 this week to 392). This is the first drop below 400 oil rigs since Dec 2009.
Judgiung by the neat perfect correlation between rig counts and lagged oil prices, we would expect further declines before any re-increase occurred.
Perhaps even more stunning, the total US rig count dropped to 489 rigs last week. 1 above the all-time record low 488 seen in April 1999…
via Zero Hedge http://ift.tt/1QY5vN3 Tyler Durden
Submitted by Claire Bernish via TheAntiMedia.org,
Monsanto is suing the State of California for its intent to include glyphosate — the main ingredient in its wildly popular herbicide, Roundup — on its Proposition 65 toxic chemicals list.
California’s decision came after the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) classified glyphosate as a “probable carcinogen” in March 2015. Researchers discovered “limited evidence” of a link between the weedkiller and non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma in humans, as well as “convincing evidence” of its link to other forms of cancer in rodents. Thus, IARC decided unanimously that glyphosate is “probably carcinogenic.”
California announced in September it would include glyphosate among the noxious chemicals under Prop 65, which “mandates notification and labeling of all known to cause cancer, birth defects, or other reproductive harm, and prohibits their discharge into drinking waters of the state,” Alternet summarized.
Monsanto has pushed back against the classification by the IARC from the beginning. Glyphosate-laden Roundup remains the most heavily used herbicide on the planet — despite an ever-widening list of nations implementing whole or partial bans on the substance.
Indeed, Center for Food Safety believes the addition of glyphosate to the Prop 65 list is so imperative, Alternet reports the organization filed a motion to intervene in the Monsanto lawsuit on Wednesday:
“CFS was one of the first public interest organizations to raise awareness about how the use of glyphosate in Roundup Ready crop systems fosters herbicide-resistant weeds and increases the use of the herbicide and the detrimental effects associated with it, and has repeatedly sought to prevent the planting and approval of glyphosate-resistant, genetically engineered crops through federal litigation.”
Echoing concerns of an increasingly knowledgeable public, CFS believes in transparency and the right to be informed of risks from being exposed to toxic substances. Monsanto’s lawsuit to block such labeling belies its indifference to harming the world’s population and contaminating the planet — or, worse, its intent to profit despite such harm.
Should Monsanto be victorious in this court battle, it would represent a major defeat for the people’s right to know when they could be harmed. Worse, it would be a victory for an already aggressively arrogant industry bent on profit at any and every cost.
via Zero Hedge http://ift.tt/1QyqUXD Tyler Durden
Following the smoke-and-mirrors, best-and-worst jobs data today, it seems President Obama is ready to take his victory lap (and likely gloat a little about The GOP debacle) in what appears to be a recorded press event (no live feed). As he expounds on the 'greatest jobs recovery' in modern history:
With the biggest drop in wages on record, we would say so yeah…
So what are you Trump supporters complaining about?
Perhaps the following nine charts will provide a little more color as just what "change" really meant…
And then there is this…
Today's #JobsReport is a testament to the American people's resilience–and to smart decisions made by @POTUS. And I'm proud of that.
— Vice President Biden (@VP) March 4, 2016
via Zero Hedge http://ift.tt/1YbuzQb Tyler Durden
With the S&P 500 set to go green for the year, the best and worst performing hedge funds of the year demonstrate that while the bulk of the marquee names continue to substantially underperfom the broader market, with Tiger, Pershing Square, Glenview and Trian standing out, there are quite a few names that have generated positive results YTD.
The full breakdown of Top and Bottom 20 funds is shown below courtesy of HSBC; we will spare commentary on the fact that the year’s best performing hedge fund is called the Tulip Trend Fund, a systematic trend follower.
Complete marquee name summary:
And for those interested, here is the Tulip Trend Fund:
via Zero Hedge http://ift.tt/1Qyh87V Tyler Durden
Submitted by John Rubino via DollarCollapse.com,
Peggy Noonan, former Reagan administration speech writer and current Wall Street Journal pundit has, like most of her peers, been wondering what’s gotten into the unwashed masses lately that makes them such unpredictable voters. And she’s come up with a useful conclusion: The rise of Donald Trump (and similar iconoclasts in other countries) is due to the gradual division of society into the protected — that is, people who make the rules and therefore benefit from them — and the unprotected, who don’t make the rules and end up getting screwed. The latter have finally figured this out and have stopped supporting the former. Here’s her latest OpEd piece, in its entirety:
We’re in a funny moment. Those who do politics for a living, some of them quite brilliant, are struggling to comprehend the central fact of the Republican primary race, while regular people have already absorbed what has happened and is happening. Journalists and politicos have been sharing schemes for how Marco parlays a victory out of winning nowhere, or Ted roars back, or Kasich has to finish second in Ohio. But in my experience any nonpolitical person on the street, when asked who will win, not only knows but gets a look as if you’re teasing him. Trump, they say.
I had such a conversation again Tuesday with a friend who repairs shoes in a shop on Lexington Avenue. Jimmy asked me, conversationally, what was going to happen. I deflected and asked who he thinks is going to win. “Troomp!” He’s a very nice man, an elderly, old-school Italian-American, but I saw impatience flick across his face: Aren’t you supposed to know these things?
In America now only normal people are capable of seeing the obvious.
But actually that’s been true for a while, and is how we got in the position we’re in.
Last October I wrote of the five stages of Trump, based on the Kübler-Ross stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. Most of the professionals I know are stuck somewhere between four and five.
But I keep thinking of how Donald Trump got to be the very likely Republican nominee. There are many answers and reasons, but my thoughts keep revolving around the idea of protection. It is a theme that has been something of a preoccupation in this space over the years, but I think I am seeing it now grow into an overall political dynamic throughout the West.
There are the protected and the unprotected. The protected make public policy. The unprotected live in it. The unprotected are starting to push back, powerfully.
The protected are the accomplished, the secure, the successful—those who have power or access to it. They are protected from much of the roughness of the world. More to the point, they are protected from the world they have created. Again, they make public policy and have for some time.
I want to call them the elite to load the rhetorical dice, but let’s stick with the protected.
They are figures in government, politics and media. They live in nice neighborhoods, safe ones. Their families function, their kids go to good schools, they’ve got some money. All of these things tend to isolate them, or provide buffers. Some of them—in Washington it is important officials in the executive branch or on the Hill; in Brussels, significant figures in the European Union—literally have their own security details.
Because they are protected they feel they can do pretty much anything, impose any reality. They’re insulated from many of the effects of their own decisions.
One issue obviously roiling the U.S. and Western Europe is immigration. It is the issue of the moment, a real and concrete one but also a symbolic one: It stands for all the distance between governments and their citizens.
It is of course the issue that made Donald Trump.
Britain will probably leave the European Union over it. In truth immigration is one front in that battle, but it is the most salient because of the European refugee crisis and the failure of the protected class to address it realistically and in a way that offers safety to the unprotected.
If you are an unprotected American—one with limited resources and negligible access to power—you have absorbed some lessons from the past 20 years’ experience of illegal immigration. You know the Democrats won’t protect you and the Republicans won’t help you. Both parties refused to control the border. The Republicans were afraid of being called illiberal, racist, of losing a demographic for a generation. The Democrats wanted to keep the issue alive to use it as a wedge against the Republicans and to establish themselves as owners of the Hispanic vote.
Many Americans suffered from illegal immigration—its impact on labor markets, financial costs, crime, the sense that the rule of law was collapsing. But the protected did fine—more workers at lower wages. No effect of illegal immigration was likely to hurt them personally.
It was good for the protected. But the unprotected watched and saw. They realized the protected were not looking out for them, and they inferred that they were not looking out for the country, either.
The unprotected came to think they owed the establishment—another word for the protected—nothing, no particular loyalty, no old allegiance.
Mr. Trump came from that.
Similarly in Europe, citizens on the ground in member nations came to see the EU apparatus as a racket—an elite that operated in splendid isolation, looking after its own while looking down on the people.
In Germany the incident that tipped public opinion against Chancellor Angela Merkel’s liberal refugee policy happened on New Year’s Eve in the public square of Cologne. Packs of men said to be recent migrants groped and molested groups of young women. It was called a clash of cultures, and it was that, but it was also wholly predictable if any policy maker had cared to think about it. And it was not the protected who were the victims—not a daughter of EU officials or members of the Bundestag. It was middle- and working-class girls—the unprotected, who didn’t even immediately protest what had happened to them. They must have understood that in the general scheme of things they’re nobodies.
What marks this political moment, in Europe and the U.S., is the rise of the unprotected. It is the rise of people who don’t have all that much against those who’ve been given many blessings and seem to believe they have them not because they’re fortunate but because they’re better.
You see the dynamic in many spheres. In Hollywood, as we still call it, where they make our rough culture, they are careful to protect their own children from its ill effects. In places with failing schools, they choose not to help them through the school liberation movement—charter schools, choice, etc.—because they fear to go up against the most reactionary professional group in America, the teachers unions. They let the public schools flounder. But their children go to the best private schools.
This is a terrible feature of our age—that we are governed by protected people who don’t seem to care that much about their unprotected fellow citizens.
And a country really can’t continue this way.
In wise governments the top is attentive to the realities of the lives of normal people, and careful about their anxieties. That’s more or less how America used to be. There didn’t seem to be so much distance between the top and the bottom.
Now is seems the attitude of the top half is: You’re on your own. Get with the program, little racist.
Social philosophers are always saying the underclass must re-moralize. Maybe it is the overclass that must re-moralize.
I don’t know if the protected see how serious this moment is, or their role in it.
Noonan nails the political/social zeitgeist but for some reason misses the financial side of the phase change: Governments and other protected classes have borrowed unmanageable amounts of money and are now maintaining their power by squeezing workers and savers. Corporations lower their costs by shipping jobs overseas while governments cut their debt service by reducing (or eliminating) interest rates on the bank accounts and bond funds that once allowed savers to build capital and retirees to eat.
In this sense, QE, ZIRP and NIRP are a declaration of war on the unprotected, and as the victims figure this out they’re lining up behind anyone who promises to 1) raise the minimum wage, limit immigration, and prevent corporations from moving jobs overseas; 2) break up big banks and jail Wall Street criminals; 3) hand out free stuff, paid for by confiscating the ill-gotten gains of the 1%.
In the US, this produces a political campaign with Donald Trump giving voice to the darkest impulses of the electorate and both major Democratic candidates running to the left of Barack Obama.
In Europe, fringe parties of both the right and left are taking over, leading almost inevitably to a dissolution of the eurozone and a radical scale-back of the European Union. For starters.
This is starting to look like the French Revolution, with bankers, CEOs and their favored politicians in the role of Marie Antoinette.
via Zero Hedge http://ift.tt/1Yblp64 Tyler Durden
For the seventh day in a row, WTI Crude futures have spiked dramatically intraday off a small dip. With April futures now up almost 9% on the week – the best since Aug 2015, crude is getting closer to unchanged on 2016 (at 2-month highs)…
via Zero Hedge http://ift.tt/1Qw3y8q Tyler Durden
Following the best 5-day performance of all 93 major global equity markets, the panic-buying in the Greek stock market has lifted the Athens Stock Exchange index over 32% in 3 weeks…
As is clear, we have seen this kind of exuberance before (in Sept/Oct) – and that did not end well.
via Zero Hedge http://ift.tt/1Qy7Ubx Tyler Durden
Yesterday morning we noted a very disturbing trend: over the past three days, a shortage of 10 Year treasury paper has manifested that has grown more and more acute with every passing day, until the repo rate hit as low as -2.95% yesterday morning just shy of the “fails” -3.00% minimum rate, the lowest on record, and suggesting that the marketwide treasury shortage has never been worse as a result of a huge short overlay.
As we also noted yesterday, some such as Stone McCarthy were hopeful that the shortage would cease following yesterday’s auction schedule announcement by the Treasury. We were more skeptical:
According to SMRA this is a temporary phenomenon: “pressure will likely ease up following its auction announcement this morning.”
However, on several previous occasions, that was not the case, and what ended up happening every single time was a sharp squeeze sending 10-Y prices surging.
We were right: a quick update on today’s repo shows the following, again from Stone McCarthy:
The 10-year note has hit the fails charge. The fails charge is either 0.00%, or the low end of the fed funds rate minus 300 basis points, so currently it is at -275 basis points, exactly where the 10-year note.
The record low repo rate is shown below:
In other words, the repo rate can’t go any lower, and as of this morning any demands to cover Treasury shorts are met with “Delivery Failure” notices. For those who are unfamiliar, a “Delivery Failure”occurs when one party fails to deliver a U.S. Treasury security, Agency Debt or Agency MBS to another party by the date previously agreed by the parties (Sifma has more).
It also means that there is an unprecedented (and based on the historical data, record) amount of shorts who would rather pay the fails charge than to cover their positions on the delivery demand, or alternatively, there is simply not enough Treasurys in the private market that are not locked up in short positions.
Finally, this means that the panicked scramble by various entities, including central banks, to short US Treasurys continues unabated.
What is strange, however is that even with this unprecedented shorting onslaught, the rising 10Y yield – which is also pushing up stocks at this very moment – can barely rise to 1.88%. The reason for this is structural: no matter how much higher the Fed and other participants try to push US paper, foreign buyers starving for yield in a NIRP world will sooner or later unleash their own buying spree and in the process send yields crashing, and furthermore since it will also include a scramble by shorts to cover, we expect that the next lew higher in 10Y will take out all time low yields in the U.S.
via Zero Hedge http://ift.tt/1So3IzK Tyler Durden
Inevitable?
Back to the highs…
Dow is back above 17000 for the first time since Jan 6th… (50DMA is 17046)
And S&P breaks above 2000… (breaking the 50DMA at 1999.84)
We wonder what happens when the pre-market stops are run and Europe closes?
via Zero Hedge http://ift.tt/1QqkYSq Tyler Durden
We already know that US jobs “growth” continues entirely on the back of (seasonally adjusted) minimum wage job growth, and since this has been one of our preferred topics exposing the hollow core of the so-called “recovery”, we once again show the divergence between the two job categories that have come to define the New Paranormal: waiters and bartenders, aka the only truly growing (minimum wage) job category, and manufacturing workers – well paid jobs which sadly are no longer being created.
Here is how this “recovery” has looked: since last February, the US has added 360K waiters; in the same time, a paltry 12,000 manufacturing workers have been added as shown in the chart below.
How about longer-term? The next chart shows the cumulative growth (and decline) in waiter and bartender jobs since the start of the depression in December 2007. Waiter jobs added: 1.6 million and rising by 40K in February; manufacturing jobs lost: 1.4 million and dropping by 16K in February.
And that, in one chart, is your “recovery.”
via Zero Hedge http://ift.tt/1Rt6ija Tyler Durden