Category: zerohedge

.
.

CNN–According to a new CNN poll out Thursday, two-thirds of Americans surveyed agree that the current Congress is the worst in their lifetime. Nearly three-quarters of respondents — rich and poor, young and old, Democrats and Republicans — agreed this is a “do-nothing” Congress.

 

 

WB7–I disagree. I think this Vichy Congress does plenty in the destruction of civil liberties department and is the absolute worst ever when it comes to protecting our Constitution.

via Zero Hedge http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/zerohedge/feed/~3/b8wzY3Lmn24/story01.htm williambanzai7

We are happy to announce that the job market is officially fixed.

It was almost exactly a year ago when we reported that Delta Airlines received 22,000 applications for 300 flight attendant jobs in the first week after posting the positions outside the company. The applications arrived at a rate of two per minute. Said otherwise, the precious few lucky hires had overcome an acceptance ratio of 1.3%. Putting this into perspective, the acceptance ratio at Harvard, the lowest of any university, is 5.9%.

Fast forward to today and once can clearly see an improvement: over the weekend, Southwest Airlines Co. which last hired flight attendants from outside the company in 2011, received applications at a rate of only 80 a minute, getting a paltry 10,000 resumes for 750 openings.

“It was the first time we did that in a while, and of course anytime we do it, it’s like opening up the floodgates,” Chief Executive Officer Gary Kelly told employees in a weekly recorded message. “We knew it would be the same this time.” So “this time is different” only works for the S&P. But more importantly, the Southwest acceptance ratio was a safety-school comparable 7.5%, or 13.333 applicants for every vacant spot. Comparing this to the 73.333 applicants that Delta got a year ago and one can see just how much “stronger” the US job market, not to mention the seasonally adjusted, inventory boost-driven economy has become.

Finally, consider that 2 years ago the Atlanta-based carrier received 100,000 applications for 1,000 jobs when it last hired flight attendants in October 2010, or 100 applicants for every spot. 

When one looks at this trend, what can one say but unmistakeable, unambiguous jobs recovery.

Actually, on second read, the way Bloomberg phrases it may leave on with a doubt or two about the bolded statement:

The deluge of applications in two hours and five minutes at Dallas-based Southwest also underscores the demand for work even as U.S. economic growth gathers pace.… New hires at Southwest will earn about $24.39 an hour and work a minimum of 66 hours a month, Dan Landson, a spokesman for the Dallas-based company, said in a telephone interview. Hiring for the positions will be completed in the next year, he said.

So, $24.69 x 66 = $1,610 per month, or $19320 per year… pretax. It was unclear as of this writing who gets to foot the Obamacare bill since the hours worked is below the full-time worker minimum.

Oh well, job recovery or non-job, non-recovery, all that matters is that the $160 billion in joint liquidity injection between the Fed and BOJ (and another $200 billion or so from China) has managed to push global equity markets to daily fresh record highs. In retrospect, why does anyone need to work. Just BTFATH.

via Zero Hedge http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/zerohedge/feed/~3/YP6E0dfb3Ms/story01.htm Tyler Durden

Despite the mainstream media's premature exuberance over the 10Y yield breaking above 3.00%, it didn't (according to Bloomberg) but that didn't stop it from closing as close as it can get to the high yields of the year (and back to July 2011 levels) at 2.9905%. The USD drifted getly lower with GBP and EUR strength the biggest drivers. Commodities saw Gold and even more Silver jump at the open then drift while copper and oil limped higher. Volume in stocks was 20% below last Boxing Day which provided the perfect recipe for a VIX smack-down, slow meltup rally to new record-er highs.

 

The 10Y Yield did not (sorry not) cross 3.00% today (quite yet)…

 

The last 2 times 10Y was at 3%, S&P was at 1340 (and fell considerably after) and 1650.

 

It's been quite a run off the debt-ceiling lows…

 

But the last few (post-Taper) days have been remarkable with among the best runs in 3 years…

 

VIX was slammed back under 12% briefly (to 9-month lows) buy bounced for the rest of the day…

 

As VIX has been slammed 30% lower in the last 6 days – its biggest collapse since the start of the year…

 

Commodities saw gold and silver jump at their open then drift…

 

 

Charts: Bloomberg

Bonus Chart: WTFTWTR…

via Zero Hedge http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/zerohedge/feed/~3/pUluAZWlZo4/story01.htm Tyler Durden

It seems not only is the “market” adhering to the lower-left-to-upper-right mentality of newsletter-writers a little too literally but it it would appear we have found the limit of Birinyi’s ruler… Behold the Dow Jones Industrial Average on the straight-and-narrow. Because, when there’s no dip to buy, you BTFATH…

 

 

Chart: Bloomberg

via Zero Hedge http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/zerohedge/feed/~3/yi_PNq6qHJU/story01.htm Tyler Durden

Imagine, if you will, that you and your 15 closest unarmed, civilian friends are celebrating a young couple who has just started their lives together, and are on your way to their wedding party, when all of a sudden a remote-controlled US killing machine drops several air-to-surface tactical missiles on your group and kills you before you have a chance to blink. Macabre as it sounds, this is precisely what happened in the conflict-torn (courtesy of the CIA) republic of Yemen last month when a US drone mistakenly killed 15 people.

The US justification: the 15 civilians were mistaken for an Al Qaeda convoy (good thing this was not in Syria, where such an Al Qaeda convoy would have received US arms and funding), and in keeping with the US “superpower” walkthrough, the missiles were launched first, and questions would be asked later if ever. And while this happens daily around the globe (remember: they hate America for its freedoms, not because it rains hellfire on civilians without reason), this time the United Nations human rights watch actually had the temerity of calling out the US on its latest act of mass murder.

Reuters has the full story:

United Nations human rights experts told the United States and Yemen on Thursday to say whether they were complicit in drone attacks that mistakenly killed civilians in wedding processions this month.

 

The independent experts questioned the legitimacy of drone attacks under international law and said the governments should reveal what targeting procedures were used.

 

Local security officials said on December 12 that 15 people on their way to a wedding in Yemen were killed in an air strike after their party was mistaken for an al Qaeda convoy. The officials did not identify the plane in the strike in central al-Bayda province, but tribal and local media sources said that it was a drone.

 

Stressing the need for accountability and payment to victims’ families, the U.N. statement issued in Geneva said that two attacks, on two separate wedding processions, killed 16 and wounded at least 10 people.

 

“If armed drones are to be used, states must adhere to international humanitarian law, and should disclose the legal basis for their operational responsibility and criteria for targeting,” said Christof Heyns, U.N. special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions.

Poor Yemen, unclear that others’ sovereignty does not matter to the US, voiced a feeble protest: “Yemen cannot consent to violations of the right to life of people in its territory,” he added.” Good luck with non-consenting.

However, it was the UN that surprised onlookers with one of the harshest condemnations of what is essentially unaccountable murder by an American remote-control plane, controlled from thousands of miles away:

Juan Mendez, U.N. special rapporteur on torture, voiced concern about the legitimacy of the airstrikes. Each state was obliged to undertake due investigation into the reported incidents, including their effect on civilians, he said.

 

“A deadly attack on illegitimate targets amounts to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment if, as in this case, it results in serious physical or mental pain and suffering for the innocent victims,” Mendez said.

Wait, so cruel, inhuman and degra…. oh look, another all time high for the S&P! Quick BTFATH, and ignore all this irrelevant “stuff.”

via Zero Hedge http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/zerohedge/feed/~3/uVo2hVw2zoY/story01.htm Tyler Durden

Imagine, if you will, that you and your 15 closest unarmed, civilian friends are celebrating a young couple who has just started their lives together, and are on your way to their wedding party, when all of a sudden a remote-controlled US killing machine drops several air-to-surface tactical missiles on your group and kills you before you have a chance to blink. Macabre as it sounds, this is precisely what happened in the conflict-torn (courtesy of the CIA) republic of Yemen last month when a US drone mistakenly killed 15 people.

The US justification: the 15 civilians were mistaken for an Al Qaeda convoy (good thing this was not in Syria, where such an Al Qaeda convoy would have received US arms and funding), and in keeping with the US “superpower” walkthrough, the missiles were launched first, and questions would be asked later if ever. And while this happens daily around the globe (remember: they hate America for its freedoms, not because it rains hellfire on civilians without reason), this time the United Nations human rights watch actually had the temerity of calling out the US on its latest act of mass murder.

Reuters has the full story:

United Nations human rights experts told the United States and Yemen on Thursday to say whether they were complicit in drone attacks that mistakenly killed civilians in wedding processions this month.

 

The independent experts questioned the legitimacy of drone attacks under international law and said the governments should reveal what targeting procedures were used.

 

Local security officials said on December 12 that 15 people on their way to a wedding in Yemen were killed in an air strike after their party was mistaken for an al Qaeda convoy. The officials did not identify the plane in the strike in central al-Bayda province, but tribal and local media sources said that it was a drone.

 

Stressing the need for accountability and payment to victims’ families, the U.N. statement issued in Geneva said that two attacks, on two separate wedding processions, killed 16 and wounded at least 10 people.

 

“If armed drones are to be used, states must adhere to international humanitarian law, and should disclose the legal basis for their operational responsibility and criteria for targeting,” said Christof Heyns, U.N. special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions.

Poor Yemen, unclear that others’ sovereignty does not matter to the US, voiced a feeble protest: “Yemen cannot consent to violations of the right to life of people in its territory,” he added.” Good luck with non-consenting.

However, it was the UN that surprised onlookers with one of the harshest condemnations of what is essentially unaccountable murder by an American remote-control plane, controlled from thousands of miles away:

Juan Mendez, U.N. special rapporteur on torture, voiced concern about the legitimacy of the airstrikes. Each state was obliged to undertake due investigation into the reported incidents, including their effect on civilians, he said.

 

“A deadly attack on illegitimate targets amounts to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment if, as in this case, it results in serious physical or mental pain and suffering for the innocent victims,” Mendez said.

Wait, so cruel, inhuman and degra…. oh look, another all time high for the S&P! Quick BTFATH, and ignore all this irrelevant “stuff.”

via Zero Hedge http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/zerohedge/feed/~3/uVo2hVw2zoY/story01.htm Tyler Durden

Submitted by Michael Krieger of Liberty Blitzkrieg,

Apparently having 5% of the world’s population, but 25% of its prisoners simply isn’t good enough for neo-feudal America. No, we need to find more creative and archaic ways to wastefully, immorally and seemingly unconstitutionally incarcerate poor people. Welcome to the latest trend in the penal colony formerly known as America. Debtors’ prisons. A practice I thought had long since been deemed outdated (indeed it has been largely eradicated in the Western world with the exception of about 1/3 of U.S. states as well as Greece).

From Fox News:

As if out of a Charles Dickens novel, people struggling to pay overdue fines and fees associated with court costs for even the simplest traffic infractions are being thrown in jail across the United States.

 

Critics are calling the practice the new “debtors’ prison” — referring to the jails that flourished in the U.S. and Western Europe over 150 years ago. Before the time of bankruptcy laws and social safety nets, poor folks and ruined business owners were locked up until their debts were paid off.

 

Reforms eventually outlawed the practice. But groups like the Brennan Center for Justice and the American Civil Liberties Union say it’s been reborn in local courts which may not be aware it’s against the law to send indigent people to jail over unpaid fines and fees — or they just haven’t been called on it until now.

 

The Brennan Center for Justice at New York University’s School of Law released a “Tool Kit for Action” in 2012 that broke down the cost to municipalities to jail debtors in comparison with the amount of old debt it was collecting. It doesn’t look like a bargain. For example, according to the report, Mecklenburg County, N.C., collected $33,476 in debts in 2009, but spent $40,000 jailing 246 debtors — a loss of $6,524.

Don’t worry, I’m sure private prisons for debtors will soon spring up to make this practice a pillar of GDP growth.

Many jurisdictions have taken to hiring private collection/probation companies to go after debtors, giving them the authority to revoke probation and incarcerate if they can’t pay. Research into the practice has found that private companies impose their own additional surcharges. Some 15 private companies have emerged to run these services in the South, including the popular Judicial Correction Services (JCS).

 

In 2012, Circuit Judge Hub Harrington at Harpersville Municipal Court in Alabama shut down what he called the “debtors’ prison” process there, echoing complaints that private companies are only in it for the money. He cited JCS in part for sending indigent people to jail. Calling it a “judicially sanctioned extortion racket,” Harrington said many defendants were locked up on bogus failure-to-appear warrants, and slapped with more fines and fees as a result.

 

Repeated calls to JCS in Alabama and Georgia were not returned.

 

The ACLU found that seven out of 11 counties they studied were operating de facto debtors’ prisons, despite clear “constitutional and legislative prohibitions.” Some were worse than others. In the second half of 2012 in Huron County, 20 percent of arrests were for failure to pay fines. The Sandusky Municipal Court in Erie County jailed 75 people in a little more than a month during the summer of 2012. The ACLU says it costs upwards of $400 in Ohio to execute a warrant and $65 a night to jail people.

 

Mark Silverstein, a staff attorney at the Colorado ACLU, claimed judges in these courts never assess the defendants’ ability to pay before sentencing them to jail, which would be unconstitutional.

Full article here.

On a related note, I strong suggest everyone read the following article from The Atlantic called: I Got Myself Arrested So I Could Look Inside the Justice System.

You’ll never see the “justice” system in the same light again.

via Zero Hedge http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/zerohedge/feed/~3/LqUUiGJAsJI/story01.htm Tyler Durden

Submitted by Michael Krieger of Liberty Blitzkrieg,

Apparently having 5% of the world’s population, but 25% of its prisoners simply isn’t good enough for neo-feudal America. No, we need to find more creative and archaic ways to wastefully, immorally and seemingly unconstitutionally incarcerate poor people. Welcome to the latest trend in the penal colony formerly known as America. Debtors’ prisons. A practice I thought had long since been deemed outdated (indeed it has been largely eradicated in the Western world with the exception of about 1/3 of U.S. states as well as Greece).

From Fox News:

As if out of a Charles Dickens novel, people struggling to pay overdue fines and fees associated with court costs for even the simplest traffic infractions are being thrown in jail across the United States.

 

Critics are calling the practice the new “debtors’ prison” — referring to the jails that flourished in the U.S. and Western Europe over 150 years ago. Before the time of bankruptcy laws and social safety nets, poor folks and ruined business owners were locked up until their debts were paid off.

 

Reforms eventually outlawed the practice. But groups like the Brennan Center for Justice and the American Civil Liberties Union say it’s been reborn in local courts which may not be aware it’s against the law to send indigent people to jail over unpaid fines and fees — or they just haven’t been called on it until now.

 

The Brennan Center for Justice at New York University’s School of Law released a “Tool Kit for Action” in 2012 that broke down the cost to municipalities to jail debtors in comparison with the amount of old debt it was collecting. It doesn’t look like a bargain. For example, according to the report, Mecklenburg County, N.C., collected $33,476 in debts in 2009, but spent $40,000 jailing 246 debtors — a loss of $6,524.

Don’t worry, I’m sure private prisons for debtors will soon spring up to make this practice a pillar of GDP growth.

Many jurisdictions have taken to hiring private collection/probation companies to go after debtors, giving them the authority to revoke probation and incarcerate if they can’t pay. Research into the practice has found that private companies impose their own additional surcharges. Some 15 private companies have emerged to run these services in the South, including the popular Judicial Correction Services (JCS).

 

In 2012, Circuit Judge Hub Harrington at Harpersville Municipal Court in Alabama shut down what he called the “debtors’ prison” process there, echoing complaints that private companies are only in it for the money. He cited JCS in part for sending indigent people to jail. Calling it a “judicially sanctioned extortion racket,” Harrington said many defendants were locked up on bogus failure-to-appear warrants, and slapped with more fines and fees as a result.

 

Repeated calls to JCS in Alabama and Georgia were not returned.

 

The ACLU found that seven out of 11 counties they studied were operating de facto debtors’ prisons, despite clear “constitutional and legislative prohibitions.” Some were worse than others. In the second half of 2012 in Huron County, 20 percent of arrests were for failure to pay fines. The Sandusky Municipal Court in Erie County jailed 75 people in a little more than a month during the summer of 2012. The ACLU says it costs upwards of $400 in Ohio to execute a warrant and $65 a night to jail people.

 

Mark Silverstein, a staff attorney at the Colorado ACLU, claimed judges in these courts never assess the defendants’ ability to pay before sentencing them to jail, which would be unconstitutional.

Full article here.

On a related note, I strong suggest everyone read the following article from The Atlantic called: I Got Myself Arrested So I Could Look Inside the Justice System.

You’ll never see the “justice” system in the same light again.

via Zero Hedge http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/zerohedge/feed/~3/LqUUiGJAsJI/story01.htm Tyler Durden

To think it was just two weeks ago, on December 13, when the S&P was being supported by the “Independence Day” barrier of 1776. It was also on that day that Goldman’s strategist David Kostin updated his most recent forward S&P500 price targets for both 6 months ahead (i.e. June), and December 31, 2014. The numbers were 1850 and 1900 respectively.

What is just a little bit concerning, is that the S&P, following yet another 10+ point move today on what can only be characterized as “hilarious” volume, will hit Goldman’s S&P500 June price target some time tomorrow (or maybe today if the NY Fed trading desk sends the VIX to a 10, or single-digit, handle).

What is even a little bit more concerning is that applying the Birinyi rule of forecasting, the S&P will hit Goldman’s full year 2014 price target by Wednesday, or the latest Friday of the first week of 2014.

One just has to sit back and laugh at what the central planners have done.

via Zero Hedge http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/zerohedge/feed/~3/D9xw27g9UtI/story01.htm Tyler Durden

To think it was just two weeks ago, on December 13, when the S&P was being supported by the “Independence Day” barrier of 1776. It was also on that day that Goldman’s strategist David Kostin updated his most recent forward S&P500 price targets for both 6 months ahead (i.e. June), and December 31, 2014. The numbers were 1850 and 1900 respectively.

What is just a little bit concerning, is that the S&P, following yet another 10+ point move today on what can only be characterized as “hilarious” volume, will hit Goldman’s S&P500 June price target some time tomorrow (or maybe today if the NY Fed trading desk sends the VIX to a 10, or single-digit, handle).

What is even a little bit more concerning is that applying the Birinyi rule of forecasting, the S&P will hit Goldman’s full year 2014 price target by Wednesday, or the latest Friday of the first week of 2014.

One just has to sit back and laugh at what the central planners have done.

via Zero Hedge http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/zerohedge/feed/~3/D9xw27g9UtI/story01.htm Tyler Durden