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The retail sales control group – the components of retail sales that feed straight into the GDP calculation – rose at a pace of 2.4% in December, the lowest since 2009, and dropped 0.3% sequentially, the biggest drop since December 2011. What this means is that GDP growth – expected to be flourishing until recently and which Joe LaVorgna has at about 4% for 2014 – is about to be monkeyhammered. Why? Snow in the winter, of course.
via Zero Hedge http://ift.tt/1g1sWh8 Tyler Durden
For decades, all the way up to November 2010,
prohibitionists could rely on dismissive giggling and hand waving
any time the rest of us advocated legalizing drugs. And those
current or former pot smokers in or near power who should have
known better were often the ones leading the mockery. Matt Welch
says this is how prohibitionists and cowards alike avoided having
an argument: by playing to the insecurity of political elites who
were desperate to be taken seriously.
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Pam Martens of Wall Street on Parade does some excellent work, and I have featured her articles several times on this site. Most recently, I highlighted her article: New York is Drowning in Bribes and Corruption, which was a particularly popular post. In the article I have chosen today, she dives into a topic frequently discussed on the Wall Street on Parade site. Namely, the incestuous and entirely inappropriate relationship between JP Morgan and law enforcement, including the CIA itself. No wonder no one ever gets in trouble or goes to jail…
Here are some excerpts from her latest:
The nonstop crime news swirling around JPMorgan Chase for a solid 18 months has started to feel a little spooky – they do lots of crime but never any time; and with each closed case, a trail of unanswered questions remains in the public’s mind.
One reason that JPMorgan may have such a spooky feel is that it has aligned itself in no small way with real-life spooks, the CIA kind.
Just when the public was numbing itself to the endless stream of financial malfeasance which cost JPMorgan over $30 billion in fines and settlements in just the past 13 months, we learned on January 28 of this year that a happy, healthy 39-year old technology Vice President, Gabriel Magee, was found dead on a 9th level rooftop of the bank’s 33-story European headquarters building in the Canary Wharf section of London.
The way the news of this tragic and sudden death was stage-managed by highly skilled but invisible hands, turning a demonstrably suspicious incident into a cut-and-dried suicide leap from the rooftop (devoid of eyewitnesses or motivation) had all the hallmarks of a sophisticated covert operation or coverup.
The London Evening Standard newspaper reported the same day that “A man plunged to his death from a Canary Wharf tower in front of thousands of horrified commuters today.” Who gave that completely fabricated story to the press? Commuters on the street had no view of the body because it was 9 floors up on a rooftop – a rooftop that is accessible from a stairwell inside the building, not just via a fall from the roof. Adding to the suspicions, Magee had emailed his girlfriend the evening before telling her he was finishing up and would be home shortly.
If JPMorgan’s CEO, Jamie Dimon, needed a little crisis management help from operatives, he has no shortage of people to call upon. Thomas Higgins was, until a few months ago, a Managing Director and Global Head of Operational Control for JPMorgan. (A BusinessWeek profile shows Higgins still employed at JPMorgan while the New York Post reported that he left late last year.) What is not in question is that Higgins was previously the Senior Officer and Station Chief in the CIA’s National Clandestine Service, a component of which is the National Resources Division. (Higgins’ bio is printed in past brochures of the CIA Officers Memorial Foundation, where Higgins is listed with his JPMorgan job title, former CIA job title, and as a member of the Foundation’s Board of Directors for 2013.)
According to Jeff Stein, writing in Newsweek on November 14, the National Resources Division (NR) is the “biggest little CIA shop you’ve never heard of.” One good reason you’ve never heard of it until now is that the New York Times was asked not to name it in 2001. James Risen writes in a New York Times piece: [the CIA’s] “New York station was behind the false front of another federal organization, which intelligence officials requested that The Times not identify. The station was, among other things, a base of operations to spy on and recruit foreign diplomats stationed at the United Nations, while debriefing selected American business executives and others willing to talk to the C.I.A. after returning from overseas.”
Nice reporting work as usual New York Times.
Stein gets much of that out in the open in his piece for Newsweek, citing sources who say that “its intimate relations with top U.S. corporate executives willing to have their companies fronting for the CIA invites trouble at home and abroad.” Stein goes on to say that NR operatives “cultivate their own sources on Wall Street, especially looking for help keeping track of foreign money sloshing around in the global financial system, while recruiting companies to provide cover for CIA operations abroad. And once they’ve seen how the other 1 percent lives, CIA operatives, some say, are tempted to go over to the other side.”
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Having rallied yesterday and totally ignored the fact that Letta’s 10-month-old government was about to collapse, Italian equity and sovereign bond markets are falling this morning by their most in two weeks. The main bone of contention for Renzi-Letta fight is jobs and growth – there is none of either – and while Prime Minister Letta assures that the Italian economy grew in Q4 (GDP data to be released tomorrow) for the first time in 10 quarters, as Bloomberg’s Niraj Shah notes, real GDP is still smaller than it was in 2000. Letta has just canceled his UK visit (planned for 2/24) and did not take part in the Democratic Party meeting with a Renzi friend saying “[Letta] will resign.”
Via Ansa
Premier Enrico Letta said Thursday that he would not attend a meeting of his centre-left Democratic Party (PD) that has been called to decide whether it should continue backing his coalition government. New PD leader Matteo Renzi may call on the party to pull its support for Letta so he can take over as premier. Letta said he would not go to the meeting so that his party could “decide with serenity”.
However, with unemployment at record levels, we suspect few will care about some manufactured, goodwill-enhanced GDP print. Italians are, of course, used to the farce that is politics – there have been 64 government since 1945.
Source: Bloomberg
via Zero Hedge http://ift.tt/1hfEGC9 Tyler Durden
Having rallied yesterday and totally ignored the fact that Letta’s 10-month-old government was about to collapse, Italian equity and sovereign bond markets are falling this morning by their most in two weeks. The main bone of contention for Renzi-Letta fight is jobs and growth – there is none of either – and while Prime Minister Letta assures that the Italian economy grew in Q4 (GDP data to be released tomorrow) for the first time in 10 quarters, as Bloomberg’s Niraj Shah notes, real GDP is still smaller than it was in 2000. Letta has just canceled his UK visit (planned for 2/24) and did not take part in the Democratic Party meeting with a Renzi friend saying “[Letta] will resign.”
Via Ansa
Premier Enrico Letta said Thursday that he would not attend a meeting of his centre-left Democratic Party (PD) that has been called to decide whether it should continue backing his coalition government. New PD leader Matteo Renzi may call on the party to pull its support for Letta so he can take over as premier. Letta said he would not go to the meeting so that his party could “decide with serenity”.
However, with unemployment at record levels, we suspect few will care about some manufactured, goodwill-enhanced GDP print. Italians are, of course, used to the farce that is politics – there have been 64 government since 1945.
Source: Bloomberg
via Zero Hedge http://ift.tt/1hfEGC9 Tyler Durden
And so, prepare to see much more of this chart which as we warned will be used as justification to explain why retail sales not only just tumbled, but posted their worst miss since June 2012. Retail sales, which incidentally, just happen to be seasonally adjusted precisely to account for such shocking phenomena as snow in the winter:
In other words: yet another confirmation that the US consumer is tapped out thanks to draining his savings during the holiday season, and also hinting that the inevitable untaper is coming far sooner than expected.
Visually:
And before the spin brigade comes out, with their ridiculous justifications that Americans just refuse to shop on Amazon and click on Jeff Bezos loss leaders when it is, gasp, snowing outside in the winter, we wonder how they will expect that even as clothing and sporting goods sales dropped 0.9% and 1.4% respectively, that sales of building material actually rose 1.4% in December.
Perhaps Americans don’t buy winter clothing in the winter, and instead purchase patio furniture.
via Zero Hedge http://ift.tt/1evqc9i Tyler Durden
At 339,000 initial jobless claims, this is the 3rd miss in thelast 4 weeks and back above the 8-month average suggesting that the best in the layoff trajectory of this 'recovery' is over. Continuing claims remains slid modestly and, of course, emergency benefits remain at zero. Of course, as we showed here, it is not layoffs (and thus initial jobless claims) that matters – what is crucial is that there is no hiring…
As the chart below shows, using the most recent JOLTS data, while historically the hires and cumulative job change numbers have tracked each other almost perfectly, in the current environment, hiring is far below where it should be if one were to believe the headline job numbers.
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Now that we have entered the Post Taper world, at least until the data gets so horrendous that the Fed is forced to admit defeat and resumes Untapering, here is a cliff notes version of the “reality” narrative as spun by the media and pundits: if the data is “good” it is because of the recovery; if the data is “bad” it is due to the weather.
Which is why when retail sales are reported in a few minutes, we expect nothing less than more weather scapegoating. In fact, courtesy of Guggenheim’s Scott Minerd we can almost predict with surgical accuracy just how bad the retail sales miss will be based on the series’ correlation to average January temperatures. Because, you see, when it is snowing outside people just don’t use their computer to go to amazon.com and order negative margin loss leaders for Jeff Bezos…
Minerd’s take
The effects of December’s frigid temperatures have already been seen in recent U.S. economic data releases. With January temperatures more than three degrees colder than average, it is likely that economic activity will continue to be depressed in the first month of the year. Retail sales show a particularly strong correlation with temperatures in January, suggesting that data for January will likely show restrained growth.
Of course, on the off chance that retail sales should pull a Services ISM and surge, beating expectations, the narrative will quickly be flip-flopped to where the recovery is so strong and the $17 trillion US economy so resilient, it even managed to overcome the effect of snow in the winter.
via Zero Hedge http://ift.tt/1lIDSE7 Tyler Durden
Something funny happened on the Grecovery: the Grecession…. Actually, make that the Gepression. In a nutshell – according to Elstat, Greek unemployment in November rose to a record high on both a seasonally adjusted and unadjusted basis with 28% of the labor force without a job, the number of people unemployed rose to a record high 1.382 million, even as the number of labor inactive people keeps rising, hitting 3.377 million and on its way to catch up with the rapidly declining 3.55 million people employed, which incidentally in November also posted a new record low. And tying it all together was the Greek youth unemployment rate which posted a record high for November at 61.4%, and after a few months of declines which gave some hope that things are indeed improving is back to its old, soaring ways.
Greek employment table:
Record low number employed:
Record high number unemployed:
Record high unemployment:
Gerek youth unemployment: the latest trend is no longer your friend.
via Zero Hedge http://ift.tt/1hfrf57 Tyler Durden