Steve Cohen Hoping To Raise $20 Billion For Re-Launch Of SAC Capital

Steven Cohen is hoping to raise $20 billion for a new fund he plans to launch soon after his ban on managing outside money expires in January 2018, the Wall Street Journal reports.

If Cohen is successful, it would be the largest hedge-fund launch on record. The sum would exceed the $16 billion his former firm, SAC Capital, managed at its peak – before the Securities and Exchange Commission forced him to shut it down and accept a four-year ban from the industry. Though, as WSJ notes, most – if not all – of Cohen’s $11 billion family fortune would likely be rolled into his new fund.

Raising such a sum would be “a show of resilience for the Wall Street veteran after years of legal fights,” The WSJ said. Government investigators eventually convicted eight of his former employees of securities fraud, but Cohen himself escaped prosecution.

But even if Cohen succeeds in meeting his target raise, it’s difficult to imagine how he’ll replicate his past market-beating performance without relying on some of the same tactics that initially attracted the Feds’ attention.

If his family office's recent returns are any indication, his fund might not be able to manage anything more than treading water.

As WSJ reports: Mr. Cohen, 60, has been overseeing his $11 billion family fortune at Point72 Asset Management LP, a 1,000-employee operation in SAC’s former Stamford, Conn., offices where Mr. Cohen’s desk sits at the center of the trading floor. While Point72 has made money since becoming a family office, last year its overall investment performance was roughly flat, Mr. Cohen’s second-worst ever annual showing, people familiar with the matter said.

To that end, Cohen is planning something that would've been "unthinkable" at SAC: He's considering lowering his fees, which once totaled as much as 3% of assets and half of all profits. Cohen's success would be notable not just for him, but for the industry as a whole, which suffered tens of billions in outflows last year.

Last year, hedge fund investors pulled more than $70 billion, the industry’s highest annual outflow since the crisis.

Cohen's quest for outside capital has already lead him back to the high-society circuit.

As WSj reports, he appeared at a gala to benefit Lincoln Center in January. And during a visit to SALT last month, Cohen “hosted a private dinner for staff and industry executives and attended closed-door events with speakers and sponsors including onetime rivals like hedge-fund manager Daniel Loeb, people familiar with the matter said."

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Amazon is Now Worth More Than Every Store in the Mall Combined

 

Content originally published at iBankCoin.com

 

Everyone knew Amazon was crushing retail, dating back at least a decade. But for some reason, very few went through with the easiest pair trade of all time — long AMZN, short shopping mall operators. What a simple, yet brilliant, trade. Is it not?

Here’s an old market cap chart of when Amazon topped Walmart. Now it’s worth two Walmarts.

Here’s another old chart that captures the spirit of Amazon’s sales explosion. The current annual run rate is in excess of $140b.

So how does Amazon’s $143b in annual revenues stack up against other retailers?

According to Exodus, there are 31 companies in the Apparel Stores industry, the names you’re all familiar with when shopping at the old dead mall, whose sales equal $107b combined, with net income of $13.6b. Their composite market caps are $81.69b, the inversion of the price/sales ratio is indicative of an industry in duress.

Amazon’s $143b in annual sales and net income of just $9b is rewarded with a market capitalization of $469b.

Think about that for a moment. The entire shopping mall, sporting +1.1% quarterly revenue growth, does more net income than Amazon, on 40% less in revenues, and yet Amazon is valued at 5x what the entire mall is being sold for on the market today.

The Department Stores are an even worse comparison. TJX, M, KSS, SHLD, DDS, JCP, SRSC, SHOS and BONT combined do revenues of $129b, netting $10.17b in income, yet the composite market caps are just $68b on -4.5% quarterly revenue growth.

I get Amazon is the future and they’re growing at 22% per annum. But is it worth more than all the department stores and apparel stores combined 3x over?

And now for the most egregious juxtaposition: Amazon vs the Discount/Variety Store industry.

The Discount Variety stores include WMT, TGT, COST, DG, DLTR, BURL, PSMT, BIG, FRED and TUES. An impressive set of retailers, no doubt. Together, they sport sales of $729b with net income of $51b, enjoying median quarterly revenues growth of nearly 5%.

Their market caps combined equal $389b. If you threw in another COST, you might get to match Amazon’s market cap.

Does any of this shit make sense to you?

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Which Companies Have The Highest Revenue Per Employee?

Authored by Ilya Levtov via Priceonomics.com,

For many companies, the biggest cost is talent. This is especially true of Silicon Valley, where companies sell clicks and digital goods that do not have any material cost. So which companies' workforces are able to generate the most revenue?

We decided to analyze every company in the Standard & Poor's 500 Index to see which ones had the highest and lowest revenues per employee. The  Standard & Poor's 500 Index (S&P 500”) includes the 500 largest American companies listed on the NYSE or NASDAQ. In 2016, S&P 500 companies generated $11 trillion in combined revenue and employed more than 25 million people worldwide.

We found that Energy companies have the highest average Revenue per Employee, while Industrials and Consumer Discretionaries perform worst on this metric.

Technology companies performed at the lower end of the range on Revenue per Employee; part of the reason for this however, is other companies in spaces like Energy and Healthcare have large non-employee costs that Technology companies do not have.

***

The table below shows the top 50 companies by Revenue Per Employee in 2016 in S&P 500.

Data source: Craft

AmerisourceBergen, a pharmaceutical distributor, tops the list, generating more than $7.9M per employee in 2016. With a reported team of 19,000, which is less than half the workforce of Cardinal Health (37,300) and McKesson (68,000), the company compares favorably to its peers on revenue per employee. Cardinal Health and McKesson's RPE were $3.3M and $2.8M, respectively. Overall, Healthcare companies score well on revenue per employee, though they have other huge costs (the costs of administering drugs and health services).

Energy companies Valero Energy Corporation and Phillips 66 take positions 2 and 3, with $7.6M and $5.7M in Revenue per Employee. With the exception of tobacco manufacturers (Altria Group and Reynolds American) and insurance providers (Aflac and XL Group), the top ranks are dominated by Energy and Healthcare sectors. 23 of the top 50 are Energy companies and one-fifth are Healthcare organizations. Like Healthcare companies, Energy companies also have large non-employee costs, however (the costs of the natural resources, for example) 

Grouping the companies into sectors in the chart below, we see the relative labour-intensity of different industries.

Data source: Craft

Average revenue per employee in the Energy sector is double that of Healthcare companies and almost four times as high as that of Information Technology companies.

The table below shows the lowest 10 companies in the index ranked by RPE.

Data source: Craft

It is perhaps unsurprising that Restaurant and Hotel chains make up the majority of the list. What is more striking is that IT providers Cognizant and Accenture have among the lowest revenue per employee in the Index.Amphenol Corporation, a manufacturer of interconnect products, recorded $101K Revenue per Employee, less productive than its competitor TE Connectivity, which generated $163K per Employee.

***

Next, we calculated the change in Revenue per Employee from 2014-16 to see if any trends emerged. The graph below shows S&P 500 companies with the highest and lowest growth rate in RPE.

Data source: Craft

Most of the RPE growth leaders made headcount reductions last year and thus saw their sales per headcount increase. The healthcare companies in this list with an exception for Vertex Pharmaceuticals experienced both revenue growth and headcount reduction, leading to sharp growth in RPE.

8 out of 10 companies with the lowest RPE growth experienced a drop in revenues in the period, while remaining Ball Corporation and Global Payments shrank in RPE mainly due to extensive recruiting.

 ***

We then looked specifically at Technology companies. Only Netflix (which is classed as Consumer Discretionary in the S&P500, not Technology), Apple and Facebook appeared among the top 50 companies by RPE, which required RPE of at least $1.3M.

The following table shows the top 20 Technology companies by revenue, ranked by RPE.

Data source: Craft

Apple has the highest revenue per employee in this selection of technology companies. However, they have substantial non-employee costs since selling hardware involves buying materials and making something tangible. Facebook and Alphabet (Google), on the other hand, make most of their revenue from selling a virtual good (advertising) and still have a tremendously high revenue per employee. VeriSign, which provides domain names and internet security, was a strong performer, generating $1.1Bn in revenue from only 990 employees, ranking fourth in the Technology sector, with $1.2M per employee.

*** 

Overall, Energy companies led the pack in Revenue per Employee, followed by Healthcare and Utilities. Technology companies showed themselves to be labour-intensive with RPE at the lower end of the range, and close to Consumer Discretionaries like restaurants and hotels. To see the full list of companies comprising S&P 500 Index, please click here.

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Putin: “Russian Meddling Is A Fiction Democrats Invented To Divert Blame For Their Defeat”

With McCarthyism 2.0 continues to run amok in the US, spread like a virulent plague by unnamed, unknown, even fabricated sources, over in France one day after his first meeting with French president Emanuel Macron, the man who supposedly colluded with and was Trump’s pre-election puppet master (but had to wait until after the election to set up back-channels with Jared Kushner) Vladimir Putin sat down for an interview with French newspaper Le Figaro in which the Russian president expressed the belief that Moscow and Western capitals “all want security, peace, safety and cooperation.”

“Therefore, we should not build up tensions or invent fictional threats from Russia, some hybrid warfare etc.,” the Russian leader told his French hosts. “What is the major security problem today? Terrorism. There are bombings in Europe, in Paris, in Russia, in Belgium. There is a war in the Middle East. This is the main concern. But no, let us keep speculating on the threat from Russia.”

Case in point, in the latest attempt to stir up an anti-Russian frenzy, America’s biggest neocon, John McCain said that Russia is even more dangerous than ISIS. “You made these things up yourselves and now scare yourselves with them and even use them to plan your prospective policies. These policies have no prospects. The only possible future is in cooperation in all areas, including security issues.”

“Hacking” Clinton And the DNC

Even with the FBI special investigation on “Russian collusion” with the Trump campaign and administration taking place in the background, Putin once again dismissed allegations of Russian meddling in last year’s U.S. presidential election as “fiction” invented by Democrats to divert the blame for their defeat. Putin repeated his strong denial of Russia’s involvement in the hacking of Democratic National Committee emails that yielded disclosures that proved embarrassing for Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Instead, he countered that claims of Russian interference were driven by the “desire of those who lost the U.S. elections to improve their standing.”

“They want to explain to themselves and prove to others that they had nothing to do with it, their policy was right, they have done everything well, but someone from the outside cheated them,” he continued. “It’s not so. They simply lost, and they must acknowledge it.” That has proven easier said than done, because half a year after the election, Hillary Clinton still blames Wikileaks and James Comey for her loss. Ironically, what Putin said next, namely that the “people who lost the vote hate to acknowledge that they indeed lost because the person who won was closer to the people and had a better understanding of what people wanted,” is precisely what even Joe Biden has admitted several weeks ago, and once again yesterday. Maybe Uncle Joe is a Russian secret agent too…

In reflecting on the ongoing scandal, which has seen constant, daily accusations of collusion and interference if no evidence (yet), Putin conceded that the damage has already been done and Russia’s hopes for a new detente under Trump have been shattered by congressional and FBI investigations of the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia. In the interview, Putin also said the accusations of meddling leveled at Russia have destabilized international affairs

Going back to the hotly debated topic of “influencing” the election, Putin once again made a dangerous dose of sense when he argued that trying to influence the U.S. vote would make no sense for Moscow as a U.S. president can’t unilaterally shape policies. “Russia has never engaged in that, we don’t need it and it makes no sense to do it,” he said. “Presidents come and go, but policies don’t change. You know why? Because the power of bureaucracy is very strong.” Especially when the bureaucracy in question is the so-called “deep state.”

Asked who could have been behind the hacking of the Democrats’ emails, The Russian leader added that he agreed with Trump that it could have been anyone. “Maybe someone lying in his bed invented something or maybe someone deliberately inserted a USB with a Russian citizen’s signature or anything else,” Putin said. “Anything can be done in this virtual world.” This echoed a remark by Trump during a September presidential debate in which he said of the DNC hacks: “It could be Russia, but it could be China, could also be lots of other people. It could be someone sitting on their bed that weighs 400 pounds.”

Assad, Red-Lines and Chemical Weapons

Putin was asked about French President Emmanuel Macron’s warning that any use of chemical weapons in Syria was a “red line” that would be met by reprisals, to which the Russian president said he agreed with that position. But he also reiterated Russia’s view that Syrian President Bashar Assad’s forces weren’t responsible for a fatal chemical attack in Syria in April. Putin said Russia had offered the U.S. and its allies the chance to inspect the Syrian base for traces of the chemical agent. He added that their refusal reflected a desire to justify military action against Assad. “There is no proof of Assad using chemical weapons,” Putin insisted in the interview. “We firmly believe that that this is a provocation. President Assad did not use chemical weapons.”

“Moreover, I believe that this issue should be addressed on a broader scale. President Macron shares this view. No matter who uses chemical weapons against people and organizations, the international community must formulate a common policy and find a solution that would make the use of such weapons impossible for anyone,” the Russian leader said.

On NATO’s Military Buildup across Russian borders

Weighing on the outcome of the recent NATO summit, at which Russia was branded a threat to security, Putin pointed to the ambiguous signals Moscow is receiving from the alliance. “What attracted my attention is that the NATO leaders spoke at their summit about a desire to improve relations with Russia. Then why are they increasing their military spending? Whom are they planning to fight against?” Putin said, adding that Russia nevertheless “feels confident” in its own defenses. Washington’s appeal to other NATO members to ramp up their military spending and alleviate the financial burden the US is forced to shoulder is “understandable” and “pragmatic,” Putin said.

But the strategy employed by the alliance against Russia is “shortsighted,” the Russian president added, referring to the NATO’s expanding missile defense infrastructure on Russia’s doorstep and calling it “an extremely dangerous development for international security.” Putin lamented that an idea of a comprehensive security system envisioned in the 1990s that would span Europe, Russia and US has never become a reality, arguing that it would have spared Russia many challenges to its security stemming from NATO. “Perhaps all this would not have happened. But it did, and we cannot rewind history, it is not a movie.”

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For Every Action, There Is An Equal And Opposite Reaction

Authored by Jeff Thomas via InternationalMan.com,

Newton’s third law of motion has proven the test of time, since he first stated it in 1686. If we were to apply the same concept to political history, we might say,

A nation that rises to a great height will fall to an equally great depth.

At first glance, that seems to be merely clever wordsmithing. However, historically, it does seem to play out exactly that way. Most countries tend to ebb and flow as to their prosperity, but those that rise to great heights, particularly those that rise to become empires, tend to crash with a weight equal to their strength at the height of their power.

If we consider that point when we observe the present dominant empire, the US, we would expect that, at the point that the empire is teetering on the edge of collapse, we would see signs of rot within the government, the economy, and even within many of the people. The closer we get to the tipping point, the more this would be borne out by lunacy in the media, the courts, even the hallowed halls of education.

So, let’s have a peek into present events – events that may not be the most crucial in the state of the union but are indicators that the system is self-destructing.

The following are three briefs on articles that recently appeared in the same publication on the same day (they have not been edited by me):

“Mike Adams Reports the Boston Herald to the FBI for Recommending That Those who Oppose Vaccines Should Be Executed by Hanging”:

Mike Adams, the owner of the Natural News website, is filing a complaint with the Boston FBI against the Boston Herald for publishing a violence-inciting editorial attributed to the Boston Herald. The editorial claims that vaccines don't cause autism and that it ought to be a "hanging offense" for anyone who opposes this conventional theory.

 

“Black Student Group at UC Santa Cruz Threatens Takeover”:

The African/ Black Student Alliance (A/BSA) physically occupied a building on the UC Santa Cruz campus and was granted all of its demands, which includes mandatory ‘diversity training’ for all incoming students. Now they are threatening more civil disruption if their new demands are not met.

 

“Tim Allen’s TV Sitcom Cancelled After He Said Being a Conservative in Hollywood Was Like Living in Nazi Germany”:

Tim Allen starred as a positive conservative character in the ABC sitcom, Last Man Standing, which was cancelled despite high ratings. The cancellation comes two months after he made a comment on a talk show comparing living as a conservative in Hollywood to Nazi Germany.

No need to go into the entire articles. You get the point. The fact that these articles appeared on the same day in the same publication exemplifies the fact that these are not isolated incidents. They are a part of an overall social/legal/cultural trend that we see not only in the US, where these incidents occurred, but in much of what was once known as “the free world.”

These incidents represent the antithesis of freedom. They are the acts of individuals and small groups taking the position that they should be afforded the authority to determine the behavior of all others. They represent power without accountability and have the support of the rulers, media, and courts.

But, how is it that they have become so pervasive? How are they even acceptable points of view? The answer lies in one word: education.

This danger was predicted by a young Thomas Jefferson, when he stated, "A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine."

Mister Jefferson was, to my mind, the greatest visionary of his time. He was eminently educated. He entered the prestigious College of William & Mary in 1760 and, upon graduation, rounded out his education under the great George Wythe in Williamsburg, Virginia. In Mister Jefferson’s day, education was the key to higher understanding.

He studied architecture, which led to his creation of several iconic buildings, whose designs are still studied today. He studied ancient history and improved upon the Athenian Republic when creating an outline for what would become the United States. He studied economics and successfully knocked down the ideas of a central bank and income taxes, as proposed by Alexander Hamilton, his nemesis in George Washington’s cabinet. These accomplishments were inspired by his education

A half-century ago, I was sent to school in Boston, which had long been regarded as the centre of higher education in the Western Hemisphere. In my final years there, I spent endless hours discussing higher concepts with others in and around the lawns of Harvard University, expanding my outlook. At that time, the emphasis in higher learning was on the expansion of the powers of reason—the ability of each individual to make use of existing knowledge in order to expand upon it. This was seen as essential, as those who were learning there were being prepared to lead the next generation in politics, economics, manufacturing, invention, and most every other endeavor.

And, yet, what was considered the very best in America has become, in many ways, the worst. Today, the nation’s universities, from Berkeley in California to Columbia in New York, have become the exact opposite of what they were created to be. Instead of cultivating the powers of reason in order to expand upon previous achievements, universities in America have become bastions of oppression, decrying and even punishing any thought that’s not strictly politically correct. And nowhere is this more true than at Harvard. It’s become a centre for collectivist thinking and a factory for the oppressors of the next generation.

To be sure, the students themselves did not create this atmosphere. But huge grants to both professors and schools have assured that the mindset of the instructors and the goals of the schools themselves have become the indoctrination of a future generation of leaders to a collectivist way of thinking.

The result of years of such indoctrination is that the US is today a culture in which the collectivist agenda is being pushed by those who are the most educated and respected. Not surprising then, that the media, the courts, and the public themselves now see collectivism as high-minded and fail to grasp what the American Founding Fathers knew: that a successful and progressive society is built upon freedom, not Orwellian domination.

Unfortunately, it’s ever-true that we’re the product of what we learn. More importantly, a country that’s successful in indoctrinating its youth to believe in oppression will bear fruit and become an oppressive nation.

The US rose to an unprecedented height in its developing years. In its decline, that hasn’t merely been diminished – it’s been reversed. Although some Americans do still grasp the Jeffersonian concept of freedom, the overall thrust of the nation is the opposite. The US still exists, but America has departed.

*  *  *

Freedom isn’t the only thing dying in the US. The country’s entire economic fabric is rapidly unraveling. Right now, we’re moving quickly toward a widespread financial collapse of historic proportions. And your hard-earned wealth is at far greater risk than you realize. This week, New York Times best-selling author Doug Casey is sharing straightforward strategies for protecting your money and profiting from the coming economic meltdown in an urgent video. Click here to watch it.

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The Internet Helped Kill Inflation In America, Says Credit Suisse

Whether or not San Francisco Fed President John Williams is right about US inflation and employment being about as close to the central bank’s targets as investors have seen – as he told CNBC two days ago – is irrelevant: The central bank is going to raise interest rates two more times this year no matter what happens to consumer prices, says Credit Suisse Chief Investment Officer for Switzerland Burkhard Varnholt.

That's because it's pointless waiting around for prices to rise when the real reason inflation is low – and will likely remain low – has nothing to do with the Fed, but with a structural shift in the US economy that’s being driven by technology giants like Amazon and Uber. Burkdard says these companies have “turned most companies and sectors into price takers rather than price makers."

“Well look, inflation has been gone for quite some time and what’s really killed inflation clearly isn’t the Federal Reserve’s monetary policy but the Internet – it’s the sharing economy, the network economy it’s the uber-deflationary companies like Uber, Amazon, Airbnb and the like who have transformed most companies and most sectors into price takers rather than price makers.”

 

When asked if there’s anything about the market that investors might be ignoring, Burkhart replied that investors might be underestimating demand for bonds in the coming years – especially at the long end of the curve.

“Monetary policy in 2017 will be about ‘walking the talk.” That means two rate hikes as [the Fed has] guided the public to expect will likely come forward, but that’s a small step in not a big picture, because the big picture – is that capital markets yields will remain lower for longer in the absence of inflation and also in the presence of structural excess demand for long-dated government securities from aging populations whose pension funds.”

Williams, who isn’t a voting member of the Fed’s interest-rate setting committee this year, has stuck to the Fed party line of calling for three rate hikes this year despite core consumer prices rising just 1.9% in April, the slowest pace in 19 months, while the labor force participation rate remains near multidecade lows.

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“I’m Sorry, I Went Too Far” – Kathy Griffin Apologizes For Video Of Beheaded Trump

Having been destroyed by the left (Chelsea Clinton: "vile and wrong"), the right (Trump Jr.: "Disgusting but not surprising"), and everyone in between ("you're a terrorist and an enemy of the state. She needs to be treated as such.") it seems 'comic' Kathy Griffin (most famous for presenting the New Year's Eve countdown) has decided to apologize for her video where she is seen holding the head of the president, which is slathered in fake blood.

And the response was not what she hoped for… (via DailyMail)

Ironically, it was a former first daughter that was quick to fire back at griffin, with Chelsea Clinton writing: 'This is vile and wrong. It is never funny to joke about killing a president.'

 

'This is discusting [sic] Kathy Griffin has never been funny,' said self-styled conservative paralegal NativeCA. 'This should be reported to the FBI & Twitter.'

 

Meanwhile, @nancygolliday said 'Parading beheading of POTUS makes @kathygriffing a terrorist and an enemy of the state. She needs to be treated as such.'

 

And Dr J wrote: 'You're disgusting. Honor our military but dishonor our President and Commander in Chief? You'd behead our President? Hypocrite.'

Even some self-described liberals got in on the act…

'Big time Liberal here – and a Kathy Griffin fan – and I agree,' said Tanya Crosse. 'This is not ok and there is no excuse. She should immediately apologize.'

 

Meanwhile, Simar wrote: 'We can't knock the alt right for promoting hate speech & then support Kathy Griffin for promoting violence against the President.' 

But then it got serious…

Which prompted a desperate career-saving PR rescue… "I'm sorry, I went too far, I was wrong"

We leave it to Donald Trump Jr. who summed up the hypocritical reality of America today so perfectly

And if anyone on 'the left', who has proclaimed with violence how 'hate speech' is not 'free speech', tries to defend this, it merely highlights just how low they will stoop into the hell of self-delusion to avoid facing the reality that Trump "is your president" whether you like it or not.

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Is This Saudi Arabia’s Newest Strategy To Boost Oil Prices?

Submitted by Nick Cunningham via OilPrice.com,

OPEC’s new strategy to balance the oil market is to cut oil exports to the U.S., a move intended to drain near-record-high crude oil inventories.

OPEC originally thought that six months of combined production cuts would be sufficient to balance the oil market, but the market still looks oversupplied. Not everyone agrees on this. The IEA has argued that we probably have already reached “balance,” which is to say, demand has caught up with supply. The energy agency says that the market is moving into a supply deficit situation in the second half of this year, if it hasn’t already.

But the problem is that the one metric that OPEC officials themselves have held up as the key barometer to watch is the level of global crude oil inventories, rather than the immediate supply/demand balance. And on that front, they sort of shot themselves in the foot by ramping up exports just ahead of the implementation of the cuts late last year.

Elevated exports in November and December meant that huge volumes of oil started reaching U.S. shores in January. It is no wonder that U.S. inventories surged in the first quarter. The flood of oil set back OPEC’s efforts right off the bat, and even close-to-100-percent compliance on the production cuts was not enough to drain inventories at the speed needed to declare victory by June.

The huge increase in U.S. inventories means that OPEC needs six months just to get inventories back to where they started at the end of last year. “Producers unintentionally accelerated activities that would ultimately obstruct, and for a period reverse, the very rebalancing they were trying to accelerate,Ed Morse, head of commodities research at Citigroup, said in April.

(Click to enlarge)

So, here we are, back at the starting line, this time with a promise of nine more months of cuts. OPEC’s strategy this time around is to directly target U.S. inventories, rather than simply taking barrels off of the global market. "Exports to the U.S. will drop measurably," Saudi energy minister Khalid Al-Falih told reporters after the OPEC meeting last week. Some sources familiar with the Saudi strategy told Bloomberg that Saudi oil exports to the U.S. will drop below 1 million barrels per day in June, a reduction of 15 percent below the average so far in 2017. If the Saudis keep exports below the 1 mb/d threshold, it will be the lowest level of exports to the U.S. in years.

In a global marketplace, why does it really matter where the Saudis send their oil? In terms of global supply, a barrel sent to Asia is the same as a barrel exported to the U.S., so what’s the point of targeting the U.S., specifically?

The logic is that the U.S. has nearly real-time data on crude oil storage, unlike most other places in the world – data that is publicly available. Some analysts believe that oil inventories have been falling around the world for quite a while even as they climbed in the U.S., but because the markets pay close attention to U.S. data, the increase in U.S. inventories in the first quarter weighed on sentiment and prices. After all, nobody really knows what is going on with storage levels in China, for example.

But precisely because the U.S. has transparent data, Saudi officials believe that they can provide a jolt to the market but attempting to put a dent in storage tanks along the U.S. Gulf Coast. The strategy could have some merit. "The market has been given clear independent and verifiable metric of how Saudi cuts — and hopefully broader OPEC — are working out over the summer,” Amrita Sen, chief oil analyst at Energy Aspects Ltd., told Bloomberg.

It will take a bit of time for the effects to be felt. The typical transit time for an oil tanker from the Middle East runs from 35 to 55 days, according to Bloomberg, which means that the U.S. import data should start showing some signs of the strategy by mid-July. If imports drop off, that will mean more oil will have to be drained out of storage. When that occurs, oil traders will grow more confident that the market is on the mend.

Of course, if Saudi Arabia simply reroutes some of those exports to Asia, then inventories in Asia could rise. But, because the data is poor, the markets might not realize that the barrels originally destined for U.S. shores are not actually coming off the market but are turning up elsewhere.

 

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NBC Seeking To Hike Advertising Rates For New Megyn Kelly Show

NBC is seeking to massively raise the rates advertisers pay for the network’s 9 a.m. slot that will soon be occupied by former “Kelly File” host Megyn Kelly, Variety reports.

Kelly, who positioned herself as a leader of the anti-Trump during the campaign, is expected to garner even more viewers at her NBC post as the network doubles down on its Trump-bashing coverage.

Variety reports that the push appears to be a part of a years-long effort by NBCUniversal executive Linda Yaccarino to convince advertisers to pay prime-time rates for programs airing in other, less desirable, time slots.

"NBCU appears to be continuing a years-long effort to get advertisers to assign higher value to TV time that has typically been seen as deserving lower cost. Last year, NBCU sought to get primetime ad prices for its late-night mainstay “Saturday Night Live” after announcing it would trim the show’s ad load by approximately 30%. In 2013, NBCU made a bid for significant CPM increases for its airing of “Modern Family” repeats on USA."

As Variety notes, the maneuver isn’t without risk for the network.

"What if advertisers don’t see the value that NBC does in the non-prime inventory? NBCU met with resistance, for example, when it tried to convince ad buyers that “Modern Family” reruns merited broader-than-normal rates. And there is a danger that NBC could get higher deals, only to find viewership for a show is not what it guaranteed its clients. Rivals could also woo potential sponsors by offering narrower rate changes. Last year’s effort behind “SNL” would seem to have paid off: The show had its best ratings in more than two decades."

The network, which is owned by Comcast Corp., is betting big on Kelly, pitting her against Kelly Ripa and Ryan Seacrest, who host ABC’s “Live…”.

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El Salvador Freaks Out As Trump Deports Hundreds Of MS-13 Gang Members

Content originally generated at iBankCoin.com

When migrants cross the border from El Salvador, they’re not sending their best. Criminals, drug dealers, and rapists have been sneaking into the United States in droves – which in the words of Donald Trump, “has become a dumping ground for everybody else’s problems.”

And while President Obama released nearly 600 illegal immigrants convicted of sex crimes in 2015 because their home countries wouldn’t take them – the ‘law and order’ President is doing the exact opposite…

The Washington Post, which, in a rare moment of journalistic integrity used verifiable sources, has reported that the government of El Salvador is freaking out over the record number of MS-13 gang members Trump has started to deport back to their home countries.

This year the U.S. government has deported 398 gang members to this country, compared with 534 in all of 2016, according to Salvadoran government statistics. This sharp increase in the rate of gang deportations — and the prospect of more gang roundups in the United States — has prompted Salvadoran authorities to hold emergency meetings and propose new legislation to monitor suspected criminals who are being sent home.

 

Trump has railed against MS-13

Throughout the 2016 election, Trump mentioned MS-13 in several tweets and speeches – citing the violent gang as a prime example of the types of violence which accompanies illegal immigration, and rightly so. MS-13 is possibly the most notorious street gang in the Western Hemisphere. Originating in refugee-rich neighborhoods in Los Angeles in the 80’s, the gang’s territory now extends all the way from El Salvador to Canada – engaging primarily in human trafficking and drug smuggling.

In Central America, MS-13’s presence has contributed heavily to making the “Northern Triangle” of Guatamala, El Salvador, and Honduras – the most violent place in the world not at war. (more)

ICE arrests

The New York Times – also using actual sources, reports that immigration arrests are up 38% for the first three months of 2017 over the same period last year.

From Jan. 22 to April 29, ICE officers arrested 41,318 people, at a rate of more than 400 people per day, compared with 30,028 over roughly the same period in 2016, the data showed.

 

“These statistics reflect President Trump’s commitment to enforce our immigration laws fairly and across the board,” said Thomas Homan, the acting director of ICE, on a phone call with reporters.

While about half of the increase in ICE arrests were for illegal immigrants who had otherwise committed no crime, the message is clear; there’s a line to enter the United States. Get in it and wait your turn. 

via http://ift.tt/2sjRazI ZeroPointNow