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80 Percent of Americans Want to Label Food That Contains DNA

You might have heard that Americans overwhelmingly favor mandatory labeling for foods containing genetically modified ingredients. That’s true, according to a new study: 84 percent of respondents said they support the labels.

GMO

But a nearly identical percentage—80 percent—in the same survey said they’d also like to see labels on food containing DNA.

DNA

DNA.

The study, published in the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology Journal last week, also found that 33 percent of respondents thought that non-GM tomatoes “did not contain genes” and 32 percent thought that “vegetables did not have DNA.” So there’s that.

University of Florida food economist Brandon R. McFadden and his co-author Jayson L. Lusk surveyed 1,000 American consumers and discovered that “consumers think they know more than they actually do about GM food.” In fact, the authors say, “the findings question the usefulness of results from opinion polls as motivation for public policy surrounding GM food.”

My summary for laymen: When it comes to genetically modified food, people don’t know much, they don’t know what they don’t know, and they sure as heck aren’t letting that stop them from having strong opinions.

However, the authors do offer another, more charitable way to read their findings, suggesting that rather than simply throw up our hands and say that Americans are the Jon Snows of GM food, we should consider the possibility that the results “indicate how consumers psychological handle difficult questions.”

Perhaps “individuals attempt to economize on scarce cognitive resources by unconsciously substituting an easier question for a hard one. Rather than seriously weighing the pros and cons of a mandatory labeling, the similarity in responses to the DNA labeling question suggests people may instead be substituting these questions with a simper question like, ‘do you want free information about a topic for which you know very little?’ This psychological process would lead to similar levels of support to two very different policy questions.” Leaving aside the sick burn implied by the phrase “scarce cognitive resources” for a minute, this is a good point.

What’s more, the researcher found that even posing basic questions about GM food caused people to re-evaluate how much they knew, downgrading their own perceptions of their knowledge levels, while simultaneously becoming more confident about the safety of GM foods.

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Trump Escalates Clinton Attack, Calls Vince Foster Suicide “Very Fishy”

Just hours after Donald Trump released a clip in which the presumptive Republican presidential candidate hinted at Bill Clinton’s sexual transgressions which featured audio of two women – Kathleen Willey and Juanita Broaddrick – who have made rape accusations against Bill Clinton, Trump escalated his attack on Hillary and Bill Clinton in an interview with WaPo in which Trump called the circumstances of Vincent Foster’s death “very fishy.”

“He had intimate knowledge of what was going on,” Trump said of Foster’s relationship with the Clintons. “He knew everything that was going on and then all of a sudden he committed suicide.”

As a reminder, Vince Foster, a longtime friend of the Clintons, was deputy White House counsel in the first few months of Clinton’s presidency. He was found dead from a gunshot wound to the mouth in July 1993. The three official investigations into Foster’s death concluded he committed suicide as he suffered from depression, however unproven theories have constantly swirled that the Clintons were involved in Foster’s death.

The Washington Post was not pleased, saying that “Trump is reviving some of the ugliest political chapters of the 1990s with escalating personal attacks on Bill Clinton’s character, part of a concerted effort to smother Hillary Clinton’s campaign message with the weight of decades of controversy.”

The WaPo does correctly note that in many ways the race already appears to be “teed up as a referendum on the two candidates’ pasts – both of whom carry enough baggage to fill many books – rather than their visions for the country’s future.“

“Clinton has increasingly directed fire at Trump’s long history of derogatory statements about women, his bankruptcies and other controversies to argue he is unfit for office.”

Trump, meanwhile, has sought to brand the former secretary of state as “Crooked Hillary,” pointing to such issues as the Whitewater real estate controversy in the 1990s and foreign donations to her family’s philanthropic organization over the past decade. Trump also regularly accuses the Clintons of hypocrisy on women’s issues and argues that Hillary Clinton has been an “enabler” of her husband’s actions and attempting to discredit the women in question.

That is how the topic of Vince Foster emerged: according to the WaPo, “Trump said another topic of potential concern is the suicide of former White House aide Vincent Foster, which remains the focus of intense and far-fetched conspiracy theories on the Internet.“

Conspiracy theory or not, the issue of Foster’s death may just hit a live nerve in the Clinton campaign, something that is the ultimate goal of Trump.

One issue on Trump’s radar is the 1993 death of Foster, which has been ruled a suicide by law enforcement officials and a subsequent federal investigation. But some voices on the far right have long argued that the Clintons may have been involved in a conspiracy that led to Foster’s death.

He called theories of possible foul play “very serious” and the circumstances of Foster’s death “very fishy.”

“He had intimate knowledge of what was going on,” Trump said, speaking of Foster’s relationship with the Clintons at the time. “He knew everything that was going on, and then all of a sudden he committed suicide.”

He added, “I don’t bring [Foster’s death] up because I don’t know enough to really discuss it. I will say there are people who continue to bring it up because they think it was absolutely a murder. I don’t do that because I don’t think it’s fair.”

He has now, and we can only expect the topic of Clinton’s alleged rape as well as the Clintons’ involvement in Vince Foster’ death to become an increasingly prevalent, if circuitous, theme of future Trump attack campaigns, even if as he says he “doesn’t bring it up”, because the purpose is simple: to throw Hillary and her campaign off balance.

Finally, since as the WaPo puts it, the presidential race is a “referendum on the candidates’ past“, the one candidate who comes up with the most shocking – and thus most memorable, remarkable and entertaining – skeletons in the closet will likely win. For now Trump appears to be holding the advantage, especially since nothing Hillary has come up with has managed to penetrate Teflon Trump’s thick skin so far.

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China Reacts to U.S. Lifting of Arms Embargo Against Vietnam

While visiting Vietnam, President Obama announced the United States would be lifting the arms embargo against the country, calling it a “vestige” of the Cold War. The move is part of the “Asia pivot,” or as the Defense Department described it in their statement on the embargo, “emphasis on U.S. relations with partners in the Asia-Pacific region.”

Secretary of State John Kerry said today that the lifting of the embargo was about promoting a “rules-based order” in the region, which he called the fastest-growing marketplace in the world.

China initially signaled support for a lifting of the arms embargo against another communist country. A spokeswoman for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs called the ban “a product of the Cold War” that “should no longer exist.”

“We hope the lifting of all such bans will benefit regional peace and development,” she said. “And we are happy to see the United States and Vietnam develop normal cooperative relations.”

That was Monday. By Tuesday there were a number of editorials in government-mouthpiece newspapers that slammed the lifting of the embargo. Although nominally connected ideologically, Vietnam and China have a number of territorial disputes, including in the South China Sea, where other countries in the region, including the Philippines, Malaysia, and Taiwan, also make disputed claims.

An editorial in China Daily expressed concern about President Obama’s Vietnam trip bolstering U.S. containment of China. “Whatever common interests the two countries pursue,” the editorial declared, “they should never compromise China’s national interests and threaten regional security.”

The editorial insisted that despite disputes in the South China Sea, “China and Vietnam have made public their commitment to resolving their differences properly through cooperation and dialogue”.

China Daily criticized talk about the arms deal as part of the Asia pivot. “This, if true, bodes ill for regional peace and stability,” the editorial warned, “as it would further complicate the situation in the South China Sea, and risk turning the region into a tinderbox of conflicts.”

“It remains to be seen whether such a worry is justified,” China Daily acknowledged.

“To distance himself from a confrontational stance against China, Obama was quick to separate the decision to lift the Vietnam arms sales ban from any shared interest to contain China, saying it was based on completing the normalization of relations with Vietnam not on China,” the China Daily editorial read. “We hope Obama means what he says.”

The nationalist Global Times took a less charitable stance, calling Obama’s claim that the lifting of the arms embargo isn’t aimed at China as “a very poor lie which reveals the truth—exacerbating the strategic antagonism between Washington and Beijing” in its own editorial.

“Trade in arms between the US and Vietnam, two nations with completely different political systems, is of great symbolic significance,” the editorial declared. “Obviously, Obama is planning to create some diplomatic legacies before leaving office, as well as further promote the rebalance to the Asia-Pacific.

“When the US has an urgent need to contain China in the South China Sea, the standards of its so-called human rights can be relaxed,” the editorial continued. President Obama “nudged” Vietnam on human rights issues, as the Washington Post described it. At least three activists who were scheduled to meet with the president were prevented from doing so by Communist authorities, according to the president himself.

The Global Times claimed the U.S. had three “strategic emphases,” or “nets” they were knitting around China with the help of Vietnam—ideological, security, and economic. It said the U.S. was trying to “keep disseminating American values in the Southeast Asian region through underlining human rights and democracy,” and additionally “taking advantage of Vietnam to stir up more troubles in the South China Sea.” It was also, according to the Times, “promoting trade ties with Hanoi and reconstructing the production chain based on the Trans-Pacific Partnership” to help the U.S. with its pivot.

The Times noted that most Vietnam’s weapons systems were Russian-made, and so Vietnam was “incapable of achieving a short-term transformation over either personnel training or logistics support,” and insisted China’s “starting point to keep playing strategic games with the U.S.” was in the economic and trade sphere, through Chinese initiatives like “One Belt, One Road,” which seek to integrate China into the wider regional economy through more infrastructure and production outsourcing. The Obama administration has expressed frustration with China’s increasingly confrontational stance in the last several years, appearing to be oblivious to the connection it has to the “Asia pivot” itself.

The arms embargo is the last of the restrictions the U.S. put in place on Vietnam after the Vietnam War. In a joint op-ed in The New York Times, Vietnam veterans Kerry, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and former Sen. Bob Kerrey (D-Neb.), identified two U.S. lessons from Vietnam. The first was to “never again confuse a war with the warriors.”

The second lesson, according to the three, was that “our leaders need to be honest with Congress and the American people about our plans, goals and strategy when the lives of our fighting men and women are put at risk.” They noted that the first combat troops sent to Vietnam were described as “flood relief.” Kerry, of course, is a member of an administration that has obfuscated and prevaricated about the presence, actions of U.S. troops and the dangers they are exposed to in deployments to nebulous, ill-defined conflicts around the world.

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Iran’s Ayatollah: “The US Can’t Do A Damn Thing About Our Missile Program”

Over the weekend we reported that in the latest unspoken mockery of the Obama administration, the Iranian military had successfully carried out another two launches of short-range ballistic missiles – the Nazeat and the Fajr-5 – during ground forces exercises. As a reminder, Iran is technically not permitted (even if the prohibition is not enforced) to engage in such drills, because following the adoption of the JCPOA, the UN Security Council passed Resolution 2231, which prohibits Iran from engaging in activities related to ballistic missiles capable of delivering nuclear weapons.

Which, as we wrote, is precisely why Iran keeps doing just that in its ongoing attempts to mock the Obama administration as one which no longer has any leverage over what Iran does, something Trump, who has repeatedly said he would immediately cancel the deal if he is elected president, will use to his full advantage in the coming months.

Well, what until now was an “unspoken mockery” of the US just became very spoken, because as Iran’s semi-official Fars News Agency reported, cited by TOI, Iran’s supreme leader Ali Khamenei on Monday said the United States cannot “do a damn thing” about the Islamic Republic’s ballistic missile program, making it explicit that every preceding and future ballistic missile test is about one thing only: to humiliate the Obama administration.

Referring to the US, Khamenei said that “they have engaged in a lot of hue and cry over Iran’s missile capabilities, but they should know that this ballyhoo does not have any influence and they cannot do a damn thing.”

“The US and other powers are extremely sad at this issue and they have no other option; that is why they made huge efforts in order to bring the country’s decision-making and decision-taking centers under their control, but they failed and God willing, they will continue to fail,” Khamanei added.

The supreme leader, who has final say on state matters, slammed “arrogant” Western powers, arguing that efforts to shut down its nuclear program and missile tests were a pretext to meddle in Iran’s affairs. “The nuclear issue and missiles are excuses and of course excuses are useless and they can do no damn thing,” Khamenei said. “The point is Iran doesn’t follow arrogant powers.”

“In this war, willpowers are fighting. The stronger willpower will win,” Khamenei added.

Unless willpower is measured by the size of one’s gold handicap, we doubt Obama would disagree.

Elsewhere, the leader of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, general Qassem Soleimani, maintained that without the Islamic Republic, the Islamic State would now control all of Syria. The United States has been forced to back down in the region, he said, according to Iranian reports.

Iran also pivoted to its historic nemesis Israel. Last week, a senior Iranian military commander boasted that the Islamic Republic could “raze the Zionist regime in less than eight minutes.” Ahmad Karimpour, a senior adviser to the Iranian Revolutionary Guards’ elite unit al-Quds Force, said if Khamenei gave the order to destroy Israel, the Iranian military had the capacity to do so quickly.

“If the Supreme Leader’s orders [are] to be executed, with the abilities and the equipment at our disposal, we will raze the Zionist regime in less than eight minutes,” Karimpour said Thursday, according to the semi-official Fars News Agency.

A senior Iranian general on May 9 announced that the country’s armed forces successfully tested a precision-guided, medium-range ballistic missile two weeks earlier that could reach Israel, the state-run Tasnim agency reported.

“We test-fired a missile with a range of 2,000 kilometers and a margin of error of eight meters,” Brigadier General Ali Abdollahi was quoted as saying at a Tehran science conference. The eight-meter margin means the “missile enjoys zero error,” he told conference participants.

He was referring to a potential Israeli strike, something which has not escaped the Israelis, who also realize that Khamenei is absolutely right that the US “can’t do a damn thing” about the Iranian program, which may in turn lead to a return of the same concerns which emerged for the first time in 2010 and 2011 that Israel would launch a preemptive strike against Iran just to make sure Iran does not do the same.

For now, however, ISIS is providing a sufficient distraction to the much deeper and ongoing tensions in the middle east.

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How to turn $10,000 into $22 million

[Editor’s note: Tim Price, London-based wealth manager and frequent Sovereign Man contributor, is filling in while Simon is en route to Europe.]

As human beings it’s in our nature to seek out a great deal.

Whether we bag a steep discount on a new car, or stumble across that hidden gem of extraordinarily cheap airfare, we love the feeling that we’re getting a lot for our money.

If you’ve ever found a $20 (or 20 pound) note in an old jacket pocket, you know that feeling well.

But what’s really incredible is that this instinct to seek value rarely applies to investing.

Most investors will follow the rest of the crowd and buy extremely expensive stocks.

We invest when share prices are going up… AFTER the companies have become popular and more expensive.

What’s even more bizarre about this behavior is that there are so many obvious examples of how well value investing can work.

In fact, some of the most successful investors in the world (like Warren Buffett) have made nearly incalculable fortunes by focusing on value.

And many of them have been vocal in trying to educate the public of the virtues of value investing.

Yet as human beings, we are hard wired to stick to the crowd. We are, after all, highly social creatures.

So since most investors tend to prefer owning ultra-popular, expensive companies, it’s quite difficult to break away from the crowd and own something unpopular.

Not to mention, it can take months, even years for the price to measurably appreciate.

So it’s even more difficult to maintain discipline and wait patiently on a company that has a depressed stock price.

The ethos of value investing is simple: buy high quality businesses managed by competent people of integrity at valuations that are as low as possible.

And the longer-term results of this mindset are compelling. Just look–

In his book What Works on Wall Street, author James O’Shaughnessy compares the returns of two different investment strategies: value versus ‘anti-value’.

O’Shaughnessy reviewed historical data to determine how much money you would have made had you invested $10,000 in the 50 ‘most expensive’ vs. the 50 ‘least expensive’ US stocks over a period of five decades.

He calculated most vs. least expensive based on the companies’ Price/Book and Price/Earnings ratios.

Price/Book ratio tells us how much a company is valued in the stock market relative to the value of its net assets, or it’s ‘net worth’.

Price/Earnings tells us the same relative to the company’s profits.

For example, with a stock price of $71, pharmaceuticals giant Bristol-Myers Squibb is valued by the US stock market at roughly $120 billion.

It has net assets of $32 billion and net income of $1.5 billion. Thus, BMS has a Price/Book ratio of 3.75, and a Price/Earnings ratio of 80.

These are both high.

While it’s not such a robotic calculation, value investors seek companies ideally with Price/Book ratios of 1 (or less), and Price/Earnings ratios in the low single digits.

The bottom line? Had you invested $10,000 in the most expensive companies, you would ultimately have ended up with as much as $793,558 after 53 years.

That sounds impressive, until you realize what you could have earned by buying the LEAST expensive companies: over $22 million.

This data is extraordinary and shows that value investing works… as long as you have the discipline to be independent from the crowd.

Tim Price is co-manager of the VT Price Value Portfolio and editor of Price Value International.

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Main Street Suffers As Wall Street Cheers Oil Rig Count Declines

With stocks soaring on the heels of oil’s miraculous resurrection, the new normal narrative appears to be that higher oil prices are now “unequivocally good.” However, one glance at the following two charts and it’s clear Main Street feels anything like ebulient about the state of the oil industry in America…

As oil rig counts have plunged and oil prices have risen, so gas prices at the pump for the average joe have soared over 30% – the biggest spike since 2009 – which appears to have stymied any remaining confidence among American consumers…

And this does not help as rig counts collapse – ‘unequivocally good’ for oil prices and therefore bullish for Wall Street banks and CNBC anchors – so jobs have started to disappear at an accelerating pace…

So: lower rig count, higher oil price, higher joblessness – bad for Main Street, good for Wall Street. Who are you cheering for?

Charts: Bloomberg

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Is the Derivatives Market About to Implode the Big Banks Again?

The 2008 Crash was caused by the unregulated derivatives markets. And if you think that problem has been fixed, you’re mistaken.

Consider Deutsche Bank (DB).

DB sits atop the largest derivatives book in the world.

This one bank has over $75 trillion in derivatives on its balance sheet. This is over 20 times German GDP and roughly the same size as global GDP.

At this size, if even 0.01% of these derivatives are “at risk,” you’ve wiped ALL of the banks’ capital.

The bank’s CEO was “very disappointed” when Moody’s recently downgraded its credit rating.

Personally, we’d be a lot more disappointed by the share price.

DB shares have gone effectively NOWHERE for nearly 20 years. Moreover, this might be the single largest Head and Shoulders topping pattern ever. As we write this, we’re right on the neckline.

DB is perhaps the best example of the derivatives problem, but it is by no means the only one. US banks alone have over $200 trillion in derivatives sitting on their balance sheets.

And over 77% of these derivatives are based on interest rates.

This comes to roughly $156 trillion in interest rate-based derivatives… sitting on the TBTF balance sheets.

If even 0.1% of this money is “at risk” it would wipe out 10% of the big banks equity. If 1% were “at risk” it would wipe out ALL of the big banks’ equity.

Suffice to say, the Fed cannot afford a spike in interest rates without imploding the big banks: the very banks it has funneled TRILLIONS of dollars to in an effort to prop up.

At some point this whole mess will come crashing down just as it did in 2008. The derivatives market remains a $600 TRILLION Ticking Time Bomb.

On that note, we are already preparing our clients for this with a 21-page investment report titled Stock Market Crash Survival Guide.

In it, we outline precisely how the crash will unfold as well as which investments will perform best during a stock market crash.

We are giving away just 1,000 copies for FREE to the public.

To pick up yours, swing by:

http://ift.tt/1HW1LSz

Best Regards

Graham Summers

Chief Market Strategist

Phoenix Capital Research

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Three Weird Consequences Of NIRP

Submitted by Patrick Watson via MauldinEconomics.com,

Negative interest rates are all the rage at central banks, a symptom of the deflation that is slowing spreading worldwide. The Bank of Japan, European Central Bank, and Swiss National Bank already peg rates below zero. Even if the Federal Reserve doesn't formally join them, US rates are solidly negative in real terms.

Explicit or not, negative rates have odd and counterintuitive consequences. Imagine the entire banking system trying to stand on its head, and that's kind of how a deflationary, NIRP-driven world will look. Here are three early signs.

Everything's Price Will Fall

Today almost everyone, even economists, is used to living in an inflationary world. We assume most goods and services will get gradually more expensive. We don't even notice because it is so normal. We notice the exceptions, like technology and energy-but their falling prices are notable precisely because they're so unusual.

A deflationary world won't look like this. Prices will fall instead of rise. Since everything you own will be constantly losing value, you will want to own as little stuff as possible, for as briefly as possible. We see some of this already in the “sharing” economy. Companies like Uber and AirBnB help car and home owners shed some of their excess ownership.

Rising prices will move from being normal to unusual. This is already happening in Japan. This month an ice cream company called Akagi Nyugyo had to raise its prices for the first time in 25 years. The company so feared losing customers that it aired a TV commercial with executives bowing in contrition.

The Bank Pays You to Borrow

In normal times, you borrow cash from a bank and repay it slowly over time. When interest rates go below zero, the bank might have to pay you. It's happening right now in Denmark, where banks are paying interest to thousands of borrowers, instead of the other way around.

The pressure is spreading, too. Homeowners in Spain and Portugal with variable-rate mortgages are demanding their banks pay them. Their loans are tied to a benchmark rate called Euribor, which is now below zero. The laws and contracts didn't imagine any such scenario-but the math says banks should be paying borrowers.

Spanish and Portuguese banks are fighting for legal protection from this. Will they succeed? Maybe not. Banks themselves routinely argue that contracts are sacred when they want to foreclose on someone. Now the shoe is on the other foot and they don't like it at all.

Banks Demand Free Money

Banks make money on their interest rate “spread.” That's the difference between their cost of funds (interest paid to depositors, for instance) and the interest they collect from borrowers. The wider the spread, the greater the bank's profitability.

This doesn't work so well when interest rates are negative, so US banks are looking elsewhere for income. They freaked out this year when Congress changed a law that allowed them to collect tax-free, no-risk 6% dividends on their shares in the regional Federal Reserve Banks.

The American Bankers Association, considering a legal challenge, asserted in a letter to the Fed that banks have a Constitutional right to free cash from the Fed. Even Congress can't take it away, say the bankers.
The idea seems preposterous, so we'll see what courts think. But the fact that banks would make such a bold claim suggests they are desperate for revenue.

We'll see more weirdness if the winds of deflation and the perversions of negative interest rates persist.

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What Rate Hike: Only 4 Regional Feds Support Discount Rate Increase Compared To 9 Back In November

Moments ago, the Fed’s discount rate minutes for the months of March/April suggested that a rate hike may be indeed closer than some expect, because after just two regional Feds – those of Richmond Fed and Kansas City – requested an increase in the rate charged on direct loans from the central bank to 1.25% from 1% in the Feb/March meeting, this number doubled to four, with the inclusion of the San Fran and Cleveland Feds joining the group of regional Feds pushing for a 25 bps rate hike to the discount rate.

The four regional Feds, however, were overriden by the balance of the 12 regional Feds, including the Boston, New York, Chicago, Minneapolis, Dallas, Philadelphia, Atlanta, St. Louis Feds, all of whom recommended keeping the discount rate unchanged.

From the minutes:

Subject to review and determination by the Board of Governors, the directors of the Federal Reserve Banks of Chicago, Minneapolis, and Dallas had voted on April 14, 2016, and the directors of the Federal Reserve Banks of Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Atlanta, and St. Louis had voted on April 21, to reestablish the existing rate for discounts and advances (1 percent) under the primary credit program (primary credit rate). The directors of the Federal Reserve Banks of Cleveland, Richmond, Kansas City, and San Francisco had voted on April 14 to establish a rate of 1-1/4 percent (an increase from 1 percent). At its meeting on April 11, the Board had taken no action on requests by the Richmond and Kansas City Reserve Banks to increase the primary credit rate.

Federal Reserve Bank directors cited continued improvement in labor markets, including significant payroll gains and increases in labor force participation. Although many directors noted a recent slowdown in economic growth, they were generally positive about the prospects for moderate increases in economic activity going forward. Directors provided mixed reports on consumer spending, including some easing in the growth of auto sales. Several directors noted steady-to-increasing housing-sector activity, but others cited ongoing weakness in the agriculture and energy sectors. Some directors noted the potential implications of global economic and financial developments for export-related activity. Some directors reported moderate wage pressures for certain jobs, as well as difficulty hiring and retaining some types of skilled and unskilled workers. Inflation remained below the Federal Reserve’s 2 percent objective.

Against this backdrop, most Federal Reserve Bank directors recommended that the current primary credit rate be maintained. Other Federal Reserve Bank directors recommended increasing the primary credit rate to 1-1/4 percent, in light of current and anticipated economic conditions, improvements in the labor market, and expectations that inflation would rise toward the Federal Reserve’s 2 percent objective over the medium term.

Today, Board members considered the primary credit rate and discussed, on a preliminary basis, their individual assessments of the appropriate rate and its communication, which would be discussed at the meeting of the Federal Open Market Committee this week. No sentiment was expressed for changing the primary credit rate before the Committee’s meeting, and the existing rate was maintained. Thereafter, a discussion of economic and financial developments and issues related to possible policy actions took place.

Is this enough? Recall that on November 24, one month before the Fed did hike rates by 25 bps, a whopping 9 regional Fed requested a Discount Rate hike: that took place less than a month before the Fed’s first rate hike in nearly a decade. With only four regional Feds on the same page as of this moment, it is very unlikely that June is when the Fed’s rate hike will take place, and with July missing a press conference, it remains to be seen just how the Fed can proceeds with the much touted rate hike in the coming 2 months.

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Goldman Sachs is using Chinese Wall as a Beard for Tesla Conflict of Interest (Video)

By EconMatters

This isn`t the first time Goldman Sachs has tried to hide behind the notion of a “Chinese Wall” in a defense against an apparent conflict of interests. It is theoretically possible that this analyst operated in a complete vacuum at Goldman Sachs, but how likely is this fact given how interconnected Investment Banking activities are these days?

We would have to believe that Goldman Sachs analyst Patrick Archambault is basically the most clueless, blind, deaf and mute employee who has no networking connections whatsoever at Goldman Sachs. Basically, persona non grata around the ole water cooler. Frankly, if he didn`t in fact know about this deal, he probably should be let go from the firm on that basis alone, how could he not be that clued in to the goings on within the firm? I mean seriously I bet secretaries at Goldman Sachs knew about this deal just by accident.

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