Tag: finance

As the White House’s challenge to the publication of John Bolton’s book on National Security grounds winds its way through the federal courts, the judge overseeing the case said during a hearing on Friday that neither side may walk away with a clear victory.

At this point, the judge conceded, there’s nothing to be done to suppress the information in the book. Its most salacious claims have already been made public thanks to a series of coordinated leaks.

But the courts can still strip Bolton of the right to profit from sales of the book, since he walked away from a final review.

Here’s more from Bloomberg:

Former National Security Advisor John Bolton likely jumped the gun in submitting his tell-all memoir on President Donald Trump for publication, but it’s probably too late to stop the sales of the book, a federal judge said.

“The horse seems to be out of the barn” with hundreds of thousands of copies already circulating, U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth in Washington said at a hearing over the government’s request to block the book’s release on June 23.

Lamberth didn’t rule on the request but his comments indicate neither side in the dispute is set for a clear victory. While Bolton may succeed in getting the book out to the public, he may not get any profits from it as Lamberth said that Bolton walked away from a pre-publication review without getting the final sign-off as required.

Bolton’s lawyer Chuck Cooper said Bolton followed his contract “not just in spirit, but to the letter.” But Lamberth jumped in and disagreed, saying that’s not true. Bolton “went out on his own,” the judge said. “I don’t really understand why he decided to take that risk.”

Lamberth said he’ll hold another hearing on the dispute, in private.

The judge also castigated Bolton’s legal team over their client’s penchant for stirring up drama by “going out on his own” during the middle of a high stakes review with the country’s national security interests at stake.

It’s almost as if Secretary of State Mike Pompeo might have a point.

But even if the book does make it to shelves without any issues, Bolton’s sales might not be as high as he and his publisher probably hope.

Authored by Toby Cowern via The Organic Prepper blog,

I just wanted to share with you a couple of thoughts that have been on my mind lately and see how it resonates with you out there. It has been very interesting for me in tracking the rioting that’s predominately been going on in the US. It’s obviously happening in other countries as well in support of the Black Lives Matter movement and other organizations emerging around their concerns of systemic racism in the US.

One thing for those reading from the US: I don’t know if you’re aware of how widespread the support for that movement and this message actually is? Even here in Sweden, we’ve seen protests occurring in different areas, as well as clashes with the police under these slogans and banners.

Protesters have taken over several blocks in Seattle.

In the US on June 8th, a group of protesters took over a 6 block area in the Capitol Hill neighborhood of Seattle, Washington. A Black Lives Matter protest escalated and the police were driven out of the local precinct.  The group set up blockades barring law enforcement from entering the area and set up camp under the acronym CHAZ.

Photo Credit: Derek Simeone – Welcome to CHAZ

Within the zone, they set up a display dedicated to people who died at the hands of police and Black Lives Matter. Many buildings now bear BLM graffiti

Photo Credit: Jzesbaugh

There’s also a large street mural.

Photo Credit: By Kyle Kotajarvi

Descriptions of the area vary from it being a dangerous warzone to a utopian street fair. Politico says that Fox News is completely misleading readers and viewers and that Black Lives Matters organizers are running it, although other groups are also involved.

But it’s Fox that has been all over the story of the so-called Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone or CHAZ (which its Black Lives Matter organizers on Saturday renamed the Capitol Hill Organized Protest, CHOP): four-plus blocks of street and sidewalk in Seattle’s traditional gay and bohemian nightlife district, surrounding a boarded-up police precinct headquarters that the mayor ordered vacated last Monday to dampen a week-and-a-half of escalating confrontations between police and protesters. From there, the fluid protests, spearheaded by BLM but involving a wide spectrum of activists and ordinary citizens, coalesced with surprising rapidity into something like a provisional government. (source)

They have a list of demands, which you can read here.

The first thing that has my attention is the name change.

One thing that really stuck out in my mind happened just a few days ago. The Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, known as the CHAZ, changed its name to the Capitol Hill Occupy Protests. So it’s now CHOP. It’s very easy to dismiss that as something very small and insignificant. I see a lot of people when they’re writing, still calling it the CHAZ, and even to the extent of some mocking the name change: with “See? They can’t even decide what they are called’ type of commentary…

Why is this important to me? Why does this get my attention?

A couple of things really.

One, it’s about seeing if people are ‘on-script’. So if people are supporting that cause specifically, how quickly do they change the vocabulary? How quickly do they adopt new terminology? How “onboard” are they with the message?

That’s important for tribal identity reasons. Tribal identity is a very important factor in the strength of the movement going forwards. The second reason it’s important is that they were losing some ground under the title of CHAZ. These occupiers were losing some PR ground. They were getting mocked, basically, because people were saying, “Well, you’re not autonomous, you know. You’ve declared this an independent state. You’re saying you’re not part of America. Autonomous should mean self-sufficient and you’re clearly not. You’re constantly asking for help. You’re constantly asking for handouts. You’re constantly asking for donations. You’re constantly asking for support, so you’re not autonomous.”

So switching to CHOP, or as another “occupy” protest, basically mutes out that public relations problem because they no longer claim autonomy.

Now that’s very slick. That’s very savvy. That’s very smart, actually.

And that goes to a deeper part of the problem.

It’s very easy to look at this as just a scraggly, ragtag bunch of people just sort of wandering around with this Utopian vision. But this small thing really shows a much deeper commitment, leadership, structure, and ability. An order has come down from somewhere and is very quickly spread throughout the key people, and then down to the ‘foot soldiers’, “This is what we will now be called and this is why.”

Now we can look at it as a kind of PR swing, which in and of itself would be quite worrisome that they can be so on-message. But in addition to this, we should note how quickly the change was implemented, communicated, and adopted.

But then what’s really captured me is the name: Capitol Hill Occupied Protest.

Do you remember Occupy Wall Street?

The Occupy Movement gained strength from the back of the financial crisis in the last decade, and notably from 2009, swelled. You may remember, the political slogan was, “We are the 99%.” It peaked in 2011 with the Occupy Wall Street movement. So the Occupy movement is much much, much bigger enabler and tribal identity. In fact, there were Occupy movement protests through 2010 onwards in 31 different countries, and most of those were major Western countries.

So this is now basically allowing, tempting, and goading those people who identified with the Occupy movement to join and rally around this cause. There may have been a small sort of core key group, perhaps Antifa-type in the beginning, getting the boots on the ground, actually, performing the occupation, and now they can broaden out and become more widespread.

I think we’re going to see a very sharp consolidation of the power base of this movement and you’re going to see a massive increase in the ranks.

This is notable for me in two different ways.

One is timing. As of publication, it’s June the 19th. So you’re just two weeks short of July the fourth, or America’s Independence Day, which is obviously a massively iconic date and not only in the US. It’s interesting again, that a lot of Western countries have sort of adopted their own July 4th variation. It’s not exactly a worldwide holiday, but certainly a day of note. In two weeks, a lot can happen. We’ve seen that often this year. It’s enough time for major additional plans to be put in place and so this 4th of July could be very eventful.

Then there’s the second point that’s gotten my attention.

Think back to 2009-2011 – this was the real peak of the Occupy movement. We’re now in 2020. We’re nine years on.

So those young, idyllic people that were the main rank and file of that movement are 10 years older now. Those who were quite high profile students from good universities were getting behind this, what positions are they in nowadays? They’re going to be sitting at mid, or high-level management in major corporations. They’re going to have a whole other sphere of influence.

Or they might be on the city council.

A Seattle City Council member, Kshama Sawant, was part of the original Occupy Wall Street protests and is also part of this one.

While the protest does have some loose leadership, there are few formal structures. Sawant compares the space to the “Night of 500 tents” during the Occupy Wall Street movement in Seattle in October 2011, of which she was a part. Back then, Occupy protesters were able to drive police from their space before police returned and cleared out the area where the protests took place.

Already, said Sawant, CHOP has outlasted what they were able to achieve with that Occupy action, which only lasted three days. But she said she expects police to clear the area sometime in the near future. “I don’t think that we can in any way assume that the police will not come back and specifically attack this space,” she said. “I think we should expect that that could happen at any moment, because that’s exactly what happened in Occupy.” (source)

No longer is this about wearing a funny t-shirt and waving a flag on the street and feeling the reward of being ‘part of the crowd’ anymore. These people have progressed into places that they have major corporate clout.

And that leads to funding.

In the last week, there is something that has been notable in a way that I can’t say I’ve seen before with any of the previous campaigns. And that is how many major companies are openly pledging their support, either specifically for Black Lives Matter, or for affiliate organizations.

I’m not getting into the rights and wrongs of tackling racism. That’s not what this post is about. This is about identifying and really highlighting to you how keeping an eye on the big circle is worth it. These kinds of moments should get your attention.

Now we’re looking at major corporate identification, either through genuine backing of the cause, societal pressure, or the perception of societal pressure. I imagine that people in boardrooms are saying, “If we don’t get on board with this campaign, we really risk running a loss here or hurting our bottom line or affecting our sales base,” whichever the case may be.

Virtue signaling now begins to transform into more tangible corporate action. The key thing I’m seeing in the emails that I receive is donations. Big companies are saying. “We support this cause and we’re actively putting money into it.”

And it’s significant sums, like $50,000 a week, $100,000 a month, a one-time donation of $250,000. So not only are we seeing an increase in the number of participants, we’re seeing a massive increase in funding. And I do believe there was already significant funding for these organizations anyway.

This is all piled onto a situation that clearly has concise and controlling leadership behind it.

We’re trending toward a perfect storm.

I read a huge amount of news on a daily basis just to kind of track everything from China to America, and everything in between, locally, upscale, and downscale. When something really gets my attention, it is leaping out of a massive information maelstrom.

What I’m trying to highlight here is more of a thought process. You need to consume the news but not be consumed by it. But allowing yourself to absorb a wide stream of information from broad and varying sources gives you the chance, every now and then, too see how certain ‘key things’ fit together and gives the possibility of better trend assessment and therefore, a prediction.

I’m not going to say this is perfect storm territory yet, but it’s definitely trending in that direction. It’s something that I’m keeping my eye on more and more.  I just wanted to share with you a little bit of what was going through my thoughts in the last two or three days.

What I’d love on this particular issue is for you to please comment below if you’re seeing the same things? Are you getting those emails from companies pledging support? Are you hearing from work colleagues or friends or family that this is a movement they’re increasingly getting behind and they feel that they need to do something? Where is everybody else out with this?

And this isn’t just an American question. Again, go right back to the beginning. These movements are occurring in different countries at various levels of tenacity. And we’re definitely seeing the spread.

So wherever you’re based, please do share your observations, if you care to, in the comments below. Thank you so much.

The abrupt EU virtual summit held this week to try to break an impasse on a deal to finance the EU’s coronavirus rescue package before the continent slides into what many fear will be a punishing recession – perhaps even brutal enough to finally break up the eurozone – has ended in failure, with the “frugal four” – as they’re called in the European press – having garnered enough support to block the EU recovery plan, which must be approved by the entire EU27.

Yesterday, German Chancellor Angela Merkel ruled out the possibility of a deal being stuck during the hastily scheduled summit. With this in mind, she urged her colleagues again on Friday to try and come up with a deal before the summer break, acknowledging that the starting position isn’t an easy one.

“The pandemic shows us how vulnerable Europe is,” she told MPs…”Therefore I want to stress to you that cohesion and solidarity in Europe were never as important as they are today,” according to comments  shared with the press Friday morning.

Another anonymous EU official told another reporter that if a planned July summit can’t be held in person, an agreement likely wouldn’t arrive until the fall, when the worst hit countries like Spain and Italy may already be in the throes of a serious financial crisis as blown out budget deficits bump up against EU budgetary rules.

On Friday, EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, Michel Barnier, the chief Brexit negotiator, and the president of Croatia, Andrej Plenković, held a joint press briefing to discuss the outcome of the snap summit.

#EUCO press conference with President @vonderleyen@eucopresident Michel and @AndrejPlenkovic https://t.co/h2gsSqTyBt

— European Commission 🇪🇺 #UnitedAgainstCoronavirus (@EU_Commission) June 19, 2020

During the briefing, journalists from mostly European media outlets peppered the unelected bureaucrats with questions about the nature of the impasse, what, if anything, had been accomplished during the brief summit, and why the Commission believes a deal before the summer break is still possible.

For those who aren’t familiar with Brussels, the city essentially shuts down for a month beginning Aug. 1.

While Angela Merkel joined with French President Emmanuel Macron to back the compromise plan at the outset of the meeting, a group of northern European nations that once mostly relied on Germany to champion their interests in Brussels has turned against Berlin, and instead it has dug in its heels and refused to support any kind of compromise.

On Friday, Dutch PM Mark Rutte, known as the leader of the so-called “frugal four”, told reporters that the chances of a deal by the end of July actually aren’t all that high.

• RUTTE NOT SURE EU WILL REACH DEAL ON #RECOVERY FUND IN JULY – BBG
• RUTTE SAYS NOTHING WILL GO TERRIBLY WRONG IF NO DEAL IN JULY
• RUTTE SAYS ONLY SOLUTION TO EU BUDGET ISSUES IS REBATES

In the FT on Tuesday, Rutte and the leaders of Austria, Denmark and Sweden called for a “realistic level of spending”, and demanded that all of the money doled out in the recovery program eventually be paid back – the so-called “rebates” (thinly disguised sovereign debt). Brussels, meanwhile, insists that at least some of the aid take the form of grants, since the European economy is potentially facing its most terrifying recession in modern times. But on Friday, the frugal four picked up enough support in the Baltic states and eastern member states in criticizing the recovery fund compromise to block a deal from being reached during the summit.

Those tempted to label Rutte and his partners as heartless and ungrateful should keep in mind that Rutte is at the helm of his third government after a decade in power, and although he’s still tremendously popular – he’s widely considered the greatest Dutch leader of the postwar era – at home, euroskeptic forces in the Dutch Parliament recently cost his ruling four-party coalition the outright majority in the Dutch Parliament. The PM must now be extremely careful not to appear to be handing over Dutch taxpayer’s money to the profligate Southern Europeans.

As the urgency intensifies and the negotiations descend into acrimony, ECB chief Christine Lagarde has been pleading desperately with EU states to just strike a deal and get it over with, while each new batch of economic projections grows increasingly dire.

Meanwhile, the Trump White House has lashed out at the EU over its “digital tax” plans and other tax measures that would supposedly help finance the plan, which would effectively force American tech giants, which are being hit by antitrust lawsuits in the EU left and right, to help finance the EU coronavirus bailout. Two days ago, the Trump administration abruptly suspended fraught international tax negotiations with EU countries and warned that the bloc should expect retaliation if it moves ahead with plans to impose the new tax, which it is currently still planning to do. The Commission also wants to introduce new EU taxes, including a level on single-use plastics, a digital tax or a tax on multinationals, to help foot the bill. This will likely only further complicate the situation once Washington really starts throwing around its political heft.

If no agreement is reached, pretty soon, that Continental “worry list” might be growing even longer as millions of Europeans wonder what the point of it all even is?

As much as BarStool’s Dave Portnoy has become a punching bag for the commission-rakers (or sellers of quote traffic to HFTs) and asset-gatherers across America of all that is unholy about the speculative excess in the stock market, he has also done more than anyone before him to expose the real absurdity of the Fed-fueled farce that CNBC still likes to call a ‘market’ while helping retail investors crush both hedge funds the and the S&P500.

Today’s ‘performance’ pushed him to ’11’ on the amplifier of daytrading largesse when, in response to derogatory comments by former CNBC anchor and former hedge fund manager (or something like that) Ron Insana on CNBC this afternoon, Portnoy rage-tweeted:

“Imagine a talking head who tried to start his own hedge fund only to go bust instantly and then he runs back to Tv acting like an expert? Ron Insana is a punchline. Google him. He is a documented failure. Why even put him on Tv @CNBC ? Is he teaching classes on how to fail?”

And then proceeded to choose his next trading target through the CAPM recommended optimal asset selection process of picking Scrabble letters from a bag.

$RTX comes out of the scrabble bag. Smush letters and buy it. Give it a try Ron, you might not bankrupt your clients. #DDTG pic.twitter.com/semLRi6yBF

— Dave Portnoy (@stoolpresidente) June 19, 2020

He picked out R-T-X… Raytheon.

I think me and @RaytheonTech are gonna get along just fine pic.twitter.com/tosJCRTqce

— Dave Portnoy (@stoolpresidente) June 19, 2020

We’ll see how the stock does, although we fully expect it to soar premarket on Monday just because.

For now, we are sending this along to relevant parties to ensure they are fully aware of what they have done in the name of “saving” us all.

cc: @federalreserve @richardclarida @neelkashkari https://t.co/LcUAsWg5zj

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) June 19, 2020

Joking aside, and with the recent suicide of one such speculatively-challenged young man, the fact of the matter is that the dollars being levered into worthless stocks (and options) are real to many people and when this devil ether-chugging casino finally ends, there will be hell to pay, only this time everyone will know The Fed is responsible for enabling it and who knows: maybe one day street protests will finally appear before the Marriner Eccles building.

Bernie Sanders fan Joe Rogan – who admitted in April that he’d rather vote for President Trump Trump over former Vice President Joe Biden – says the left-wing media is ignoring Biden’s cognitive decline.

In a conversation highlighted by Breitbart‘s Josh Caplan, Rogan tells evolutionary biologist Bret Weinstein:

JOE ROGAN: I’m seeing this one thing that I keep hearing over and over again from people of the left that really disturbs me is this concession that what you’re voting for is the Cabinet, you’re voting for the Supreme Court, you’re voting for someone who’s not going to reverse Roe vs. Wade. That’s what I keep hearing from my friends on the left. They’ve basically made this concession in their head like, “Hey, you know, this is what I’m voting for now.” And the news media on the left has completely ignored all of these Biden speeches that clearly show some kind of cognitive decline.

Like David Pakman, who I respect a lot, he was kind of arguing against it, that it didn’t show his decline. I was trying to look at it in a way that made sense, I was trying to be rational about it, like maybe, “Okay, maybe he’s just exhausted, maybe this, and maybe it’s pressure.” Sometimes people get really tongue-tied and panic under pressure, and words come out all fucked up. That is possible. But there’s a trend. If you go back to when he was a younger man that trend didn’t exist. You’re seeing a change. The idea that as you get older you become less comfortable with the media, less comfortable with speaking publically, that doesn’t jive with me. That doesn’t make any sense.

BRET WEINSTEIN: I agree with you. I see a decline. But irrespective of what that is, Joe Biden is an influence peddler. He’s not an idea guy, right? He’s the same idea as Hillary Clinton in a different morphology.

In April, Rogan told Weinstein’s brother and Thiel Capital MP Eric Weinstein that Democrats are “making us all look dumb over Biden,” adding that he “could not” vote for the former Vice PResident.

Joe Rogan:

The Democratic Party “has made us all morons with this Joe Biden thing… I would rather vote for Trump than him. I don’t think he can handle anything.”
pic.twitter.com/IDYJCwRX2F

— Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) April 4, 2020

As The Epoch Times’ Katabella Roberts noted, Rogan, who previously endorsed Biden’s primary rival, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), went on to speak about Trump’s ability to handle the pressure that comes with being president of the United States, noting that the role appeared to take a visible toll on previous Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama.

“The pressure of being the president of the United States is something that no one has ever prepared for. The only one who seems to be fine with it is Trump, oddly enough. He doesn’t seem to be aging at all, or in any sort of decline. Obama, almost immediately, started looking older. George W, almost immediately, started looking older,” Rogan added.

Speaking of Biden, Rogan also noted that the former vice president can “barely talk,” and “forgets what he is saying halfway in the conversation.”

Meanwhile, Biden’s latest senior moment:

Joe Biden doesn’t know what Juneteenth is:

“He’s going down to Texas on Juneteenth, right? The first major massacre … of the Black Wall Street, right?”

1. President Trump is going to Texas today, not June 19
2. Juneteenth is about emancipation
3. The massacre was in Oklahoma pic.twitter.com/vpNDQLwqBj

— Trump War Room – Text TRUMP to 88022 & get the APP (@TrumpWarRoom) June 11, 2020

Is it time to go short?

With the Fed’s balance sheet posting its biggest weekly drop in 11 years, and hitting a plateau of sorts (at least until the next major QE push)…

… coupled with an ominous reversal on today’s quad-witch expiration, which saw stocks slump despite opening sharply higher, investors are starting to ask if it is once again time to start shorting (especially with Robin Hood realizing it is time to pull in the reins on its teenage trading army).

Well, at least according to Bank of America’s CIO Michael Hartnett the answer is, for now at least, no.

Writing in his latest Flows and Liquidity report titled “Only bull to short is credit…and Fed won’t let you”, Hartnett proposes that according to the Fed, it is still too early for Big Short: “Fed is “all-in” and will remain in that stance until US unemployment rate falls to acceptable level i.e. <5% (or claims <400k)."

Hartnett also warns that Fed rhetoric has been bigger than wallet thus far, which means Powell can easily crush shorts. Here’s why – the Fed’s facilities are operating at just a fraction of potential, and as Table 1 below shows, the Fed has spent just $173bn out of its potential $495bn in firepower (and it can always add more).

It’s not just the Fed: there is also the 2020 fiscal bazooka which has a way to go.

As Hartnett adds, the fiscal stimulus is taking 3 forms in 2020… spending, credit guarantees, loans & equity. BIS data shows US & Australia lead spending (>10% GDP), Europe is using aggressive credit guarantees (e.g. Italy 32% GDP), while Japan/Korea are stimulating via government loans/equity injections.

And while Hartnett echoes what we said last month, that it is “notable how Emerging Markets lagging in terms of fiscal ability to address pandemic/recession”, recall that last night we reported that China has now vowed to inject global credit amounting to 30% of GDP in the economy this year.

So does that mean don’t short under any conditions? Not exactly. As Hartnett summarizes, the tactical risk remains to the upside: 

positioning, policy, credit markets all still point to potential for or above 30Y TSY above 2%, IG CDX 60, SPX 3250, while credit markets are still too strong (see LQD, PFF, CWB)…

… to short stocks, even if like stocks, junk has only retraced partially versus quality bonds (see relative performance of CCC HY bonds vs 30-year Treasury – Chart 9); summer risk remains to upside driven by central bank repression of credit spreads (positive for “growth”…see world’s best performing market, Chinese Nasdaq (ChiNext), threatening to breakout to new highs – Chart 10), or via big RoW macro surprise to upside via fiscal stimulus (see soaring Baltic Freight Index); barbell of credit/tech and EU/US small cap value & banks.

But the structural risk is to the downside: Fall 2020 risks will be 1. Fear of double-dip recession & default risk, 2. Debasement of US dollar & disorderly bond markets, 3. Politics threatening 2021 EPS;

His parting advice for a tipping point back into shorts: watch the yield curve: a failure of the curve to steepen >80bps in June/July would signal “peak policy stimulus” and reinvigorate shorts.

Authored by Andrea Germanos via CommonDreams.org,

The head of the World Health Organization warned Friday that humanity is facing “a new and dangerous phase” of the coronavirus crisis.

“The pandemic is accelerating,” said WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. The remarks from came at a media briefing in Geneva where Tedros announced a grim milestone. “More than 150,000 new cases of Covid-19 were reported to WHO yesterday — the most in a single day so far,” he said.

Tedros acknowledged that people worldwide were eager to be free from lockdown restrictions but warned that “the virus is still spreading fast” and is “still deadly.”

He added that “strict and sustained implementation” of public health measures to curb the spread of the virus remains essential but also noted the difficulty of carrying out such efforts in refugee camps, where migrants face huge risks of being sickened by Covid-19.

The new comments come as a tally from Johns Hopkins University shows there have been 8,520,761 confirmed cases of the coronavirus and 454,889 deaths from Covid-19. The total cases include 2,203,659 just from the United States, where the virus has claimed the lives of 118,519.

Tedros, in his Friday comments, stessed the need for countries to focus on “the basics” to tackle the public health crisis, including testing.

President Donald Trump, meanwhile, told the Wall Street Journal this week that testing for Covid-19 is “overrated.”

In the wake a young user’s suicide, popular trading platform Robinhood has decided to tighten up its options platform.

As we sadly detailed here, the devastating suicide of 20-year-old Alex Kearns, after discovering he faced a loss of over $700,000 on his massively-levered options account, exposed the very real downside of the speculative mania occurring in American stock and option markets currently; and facing the potential of some seriously bad PR, Vlad Tenev & Baiju Bhatt, Co-Founders and Co-CEOs of Robinhood wrote in a blog post how they have worked to improve the customer experience (presumably in the hope of avoiding sudden suicide-inducing collapses in net worth?).

Full post (emphasis ours):

On Saturday, we learned that Alex Kearns, a Robinhood customer, died by suicide and left a note citing confusion with our product. We quickly reached out to Alex’s family to share our condolences and offer to speak. We are personally devastated by this tragedy. 

Over the past week, our team at Robinhood has been focused on identifying how we can improve Robinhood’s customer experience, specifically around our option flows involving multi-leg exercise and assignment. We want to share with you today what we are committing to as a company moving forward:

1. Eligibility: We are considering additional criteria and education for customers seeking level 3 options authorization to help ensure customers understand more sophisticated options trading. 

2. Educational resources: We are expanding our educational content related to options trading. We have added information on early options assignments to our help center and we will be hiring an Options Education Specialist to further enhance education related to our options offering.

3. User Interface: In the near term, we are rolling out improvements to in-app messages and emails we send customers about their multi-leg options spreads. We are also adding detail to the in-app history page to help users understand the mechanics of early options assignments. We are also working on changes to our user interface, including the way buying power is displayed. These changes will take a bit of time to roll out, but our teams are hard at work. 

While we recognize that nothing can ease the pain that Alex’s family is feeling now, in addition to the steps above, Robinhood is making a $250,000 donation to the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. If you or anyone you know is in crisis, please reach out for help. 

It is not lost upon us that our company and our service have become synonymous with retail investing in America, and that this has led to millions of new investors making their first investments through Robinhood. We recognize this profound responsibility, and we don’t take it lightly. Our aspiration is to innovate, lead, and go beyond the status quo.

We remain ever committed to providing the best investing experience as well as the resources customers need to get and stay informed.

So, is this an advertisement too?

As a family member said at the time, here’s the truth. AND PLEASE PAY ATTENTION TO THIS IF YOU’RE YOUNG.

The markets are bananas right now. It’s not the time for amateurs. Really really pay attention to position sizing. Stay away from exotic instruments like options and futures.

These are the times Buffett talks about being more careful because others aren’t.

Almost everything you see on this platform is coming from someone with a bias, myself included. Don’t pay attention to how many followers someone has, where they work, etc.

Judge investments on their own merits, as you understand them.

And, if you find yourself in a world of shit please talk to your family. Listen to @QTRResearch and @sanglucci pod about blowing up. Shit, hit me up. You are not alone. Finance isn’t worth losing your life over.

I do have one ask- if you know of Robinhood willingly extending way too much credit/margin please let me know. They are squarely on my radar and I have time for a research project.

Alex, R.I.P. You will forever be missed.

Once again we note that while it is all well and good to mock the likes of Dave Portnoy who has become the poster-child for the current round of speculative mania (picking stock tickers at random from a scrabble bag today for instance)…

Portnoy using scrabble letters at random to pick a stock right now..

lol pic.twitter.com/NvI1UfSewT

— momotrader (@momotrader) June 19, 2020

the fact of the matter is that the dollars being levered into worthless stocks (and options) are real to many people and when this liquidity-fueled shitshow ends, there will be hell to pay… and this time everyone knows The Fed is responsible for enabling it.

Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,

They’re hoping the endless circuses and trails of bread crumbs will forever distract us from their plunder and the inequalities built into America’s financial system..

The primary story of the past 20 years is the already-rich have gotten much richer, with destabilizing economic, social and political consequences. The Federal Reserve and its army of academic / think-tank / financier apologists, lackeys, toadies, apparatchiks and sycophants have several rather thin excuses to explain this away, including:

1. Gee, wealth/income inequality isn’t quite as bad as everyone claims. (Actually, it’s worse, but never mind unwelcome reality. Let us prove yet again how statistics can always be gamed.)

2. Wealth/income inequality is bad, but it’s not the Fed’s or policymakers’ faults; the causes are all beyond our control: globalization, winner-take-all disruptive technologies, etc. We’re just little old innocent bystanders. It’s like blaming us for gravity, for goodness sakes.

3. Gosh darn it, the Fed is just trying to help the little gal and guy by digitally printing $6.4 trillion and giving it to parasitic, predatory financiers, banks, corporations and speculators; we’re mystified how giving trillions to the already-super-wealthy somehow made them richer.

We’ve got hundreds of PhD economists working on some arcane mathematical models to help us understand the mystery of why giving trillions to the already-super-wealthy somehow made them richer. It’s a real puzzle, but we have our best people on it– yes siree, our best people.

4. We’re perplexed why so little of the trillions we’ve handed the already-super-rich has trickled down to the little gals and guys struggling to keep their heads above water. We thought the last big tax-cut giveaway would do the trick, but dang, we’re guessing it wasn’t enough.

So we’re thinking that giving the already-super-wealthy another $3 trillion or so might do the trick, and they might tip their maids, dog-walkers, gig drivers, yacht repair people, et al. a few extra bucks–but then maybe not, because the already-super-wealthy tend to be as greedy as all get-out. But we’ll keep trying to shovel a few more trillion their way because there’s just no other way to help the little people except to print up another trillion and give it to the already-super-wealthy.

What the well-paid army of apologists, lackeys, toadies, apparatchiks and sycophants never mention is that we as a nation have had to sacrifice everything else to ensure the rich will always get richer. Democracy was sacrificed so long ago there’s no cultural memory of a time when “democracy” wasn’t a pay-to-play bidding war between vested interests, insiders, billionaires, global corporations and political action committees pushing self-serving agendas.

The entire political order of the U.S. boils down to follow the money, as no cause or policy is what it claims. Somebody is inevitably angling for a self-serving sluice of cash that is politely hidden behind noble-sounding rhetoric (tm) delivered via micro-targeted ads served by the social media and advert-search monopolies.

Social cohesion has also been sacrificed, as there’s nothing binding the nation together except I got mine greed, narcissism and anger, all of which fuel a blood-soaked circus of fragmentation and disorder.

The systemic asymmetries are so vast, so glaring, so sinful, that the nation’s institutions have destroyed their credibility in their frantic efforts to justify the inequalities in wealth, income and power. Alarmingly, institutional insiders are completely tone-deaf when it comes to how their self-justifying bleating plays out in public.

Academics who’ve gorged on the $2 trillion in student loan debt that’s turned the nation’s youth into debt-serfs have no idea how lame they sound when they shrilly insist that their class is so valuable that, well, it’s worth any price. Students should be thankful they received such incredible value for their $100,000. As for how students are supposed to pay it all back with crushing mountains of interest due the predatory lenders–not our problem.

Healthcare and Big Pharma CEOs must not realize how offensively clownish their defense of $1 million medical bills sound to people who are being forced into bankruptcy so the CEOs can collect an extra $20 million in stock options this quarter.

Yeah, we can really tell how much you care about our health. Bleat away, bozos.

So let’s make sure we understand how America’s system works. If you’re a small business owner whose on the ropes, the federal government may loan you some money, but you have to personally guarantee the loan, meaning if your business fails, you’re on the hook as an individual or household to pay the loan back with interest.

If you can’t, then personal bankruptcy is your only alternative, meaning you’re left with the ’97 Corolla and the clothes on your back. Have a nice life, bucko, maybe you’ll restore your credit in five years.

If you’re the CEO of an airline or equivalent Corporate America darling, it’s a much different story. That you borrowed $46 billion and blew it buying back your own stocks so you could cash in millions of dollars in stock options that boosted your personal wealth–never mind that, here’s $50 billion in bailout money that won’t require you to make any personal sacrifice whatsoever.

No clawback on the billions squandered buying back stock to enrich insiders and rapacious financiers: perish the thought that corporate management would ever be held responsible for anything–certainly not for fraud or embezzlement.

Consider this data base of 6,300 major corporate fines and settlements from the early 1990s to 2015 compiled by Jon Morse. Nobody made any personal sacrifices or paid any personal fines or served any prison time for any of these thousands of violations.

If you want $100 million to buy back shares in your own company, the Federal Reserve and the rest of Wall Street is delighted to help you. That the buyback will increase your personal wealth by $50 million for doing absolutely nothing for society or the nation–you generated no new goods, services, innovations, research or jobs–that’s the way our system works.

Generating goods, services and jobs is for chumps. Get over it. The real money is made bellying up to the Fed’s free money for financiers spigot.

If you want to save your small business–well, try working a second shift for free.

If you can’t pay the staggering medical bills (neatly compiled in an inch thick sheaf of invoices), hey, life isn’t fair, declare bankruptcy and start over, you’re only 63.

What all the entrenched insiders in America’s parasitic, predatory institutions don’t dare admit is that to rig the system so they’ll keep getting richer, we’ve had to sacrifice everything else. Having stripped the society and economy bare, there’s nothing left but sound and fury, as if they’re hoping the endless circuses and trails of bread crumbs will forever distract us from their plunder and the inequalities built into America’s financial system.

Here’s looking at you, Federal Reserve: here’s a chart of your handiwork.

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Well that was a week of worrisome headlines (from World War 3 to global COVID reawakenings), awe-inspiring US macro-economic beats (which lose all context in relation to the collapse) as earnings outlooks remain just “off the lows”, and a stock market that refuses to go down despite bonds, the dollar, and commodities all signaling anything but strong growth ahead…

Given the mean-reverting nature of the US macro surprise index (3 standard deviations above the mean), this could be as good as it gets…

Source: Bloomberg

Leaving the gap between macro and micro at its greatest ever…

Source: Bloomberg

All hell broke loose this morning as the June S&P futures contract expired…

The market started lower the moment the June contract expired, but there were a number of triggering headlines for the legs lower…

• 1055ET *FLORIDA COVID CASES +4.4% VS. PREVIOUS 7-DAY AVG. 3.2%

• 1125ET *ARIZONA REPORTS A RECORD 3,246 NEW VIRUS CASES: ABC-15

• 1215ET *APPLE TO CLOSE SOME U.S. STORES AGAIN DUE TO COVID-19 SPIKES

• 1302ET *Fed’s Quarles Says Market Reaction to Covid-19 Is Not Over

• 1345ET *CRUISE LINES SUSPEND TRIPS OUT OF US PORTS TIL SEPT. 15: CNBC

• 1405ET *CALIFORNIA RECORDS LARGEST SINGLE-DAY INCREASE OF COVID CASES

On the week, all the US majors were higher with Nasdaq leading and The Dow lagging…

On the day only Nasdaq managed to close green…

With the late-day panic…

Nasdaq is up 6 days in a row and up 17 of the last 20 days…

The Nasdaq Biotech index spiked 3.5% today to new record high…

The Virus Fear Trade picked up again this week…

Source: Bloomberg

Banks started the weak with a panic-bid off opening weakness but that faded as the week proigressed and yields slid…

Source: Bloomberg

Crude prices crashed intraday, accelerating on heavy volume at 1230ET (After AZ,FL case counts) before bouncing back dramatically (as USO tumbled into red)…

 

Treasury yields fell today to end the week unch…

Source: Bloomberg

The dollar ended the week higher (up 6 of the last 7 days and 2nd up-week in a row)

Source: Bloomberg

Bitcoin ended the week lower but apart from Monday’s dump and pump, traded in a narrow range…

Source: Bloomberg

Gold surged today, back above $1750…

 

Silver rallied but failed to hold $18…

 

And finally, don’t forget, The Fed’s balance sheet shrank the most since 2009 this week…

Source: Bloomberg

Either TSY yields are dramatically too low or Dr.Copper is way over his recovery skis relative to gold…

Source: Bloomberg

Is volatility about the be resurrected?

And here’s a little context…

Source: Bloomberg