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Yesterday higher oil prices were the catalyst for higher stock prices. Today lower prices – after OPEC slashed growth expectations – were "unequivocally" positive for Americans and sent Trannies soaring.  Of course, it was Draghi's promise that there's more to come that sustained USDJPY's levitation and thus stocks. Treasury yields slid 2-4bps higher on the day as the USDollar surged to +1.2% on the week after Draghi's chatter slammed EURUSD below 1.24. Gold and silver were flat (despite USD strength) as oil prices dipped to $78. HY credit diverged notably after EU closed as managers appeared to protect bond positions into the jobs data. VIX pumped then dumped and cracked back to a 13 handle as stocks closed at record highs (right before the uncertainty of tomorrow's NFP).

 

Since Bullard's utterance, we have had 12 up days and 4 down… (look at volume!)

 

Spot the difference…

 

Trannies were the day's big winners…

 

As VIX was smashed back under 14…

 

Crude and Stocks can't make up their mind on the correlation…

 

Financial stocks are screaming higher… financial credit markets are not… does this look sustainable?

 

HY credit was not playing along either…

 

Treasury yields pushed 2-4bps higher after Draghi promised moar… 4th day in a row of jiggery pokery between US open and EU close…

 

The USDollar surged after Draghi's promise, now up 1.2% on the week…

 

EURUSD  – spot the Draghi promise…

 

Gold and silver managed very small gains on the day even as the USDollar surged.. but oil slipped lower…

 

Charts: Bloomberg

Bonus Chart: It's that time of the month…

 

It's 'that time of the month' http://ift.tt/1tF8IlS

— Not Jim Cramer (@Not_Jim_Cramer) November 6, 2014

via Zero Hedge http://ift.tt/1GuwLuh Tyler Durden

What a difference a day makes…

 

Source: Cagle

via Zero Hedge http://ift.tt/1uCsimq Tyler Durden

Submitted by Andy Tully via OilPrice.com,

Saudi Arabia’s move to cut the cost of its oil to US customers has injected fear into the oil markets, bringing the price of OPEC crude below $80 and suggesting to some observers that the cartel is preparing for a global price war.

OPEC production has remained level despite worldwide demand, and as a result, on Nov. 5, the cartel reported that its basket price – the average price of its leading grades of crude oil – had dropped to $78.67 a barrel the day before, the lowest in about four years. And US production has reached its highest level in more than three decades, creating a buyer’s market for oil.

Saudi Arabia cut its price for US customers on Nov. 3. Meanwhile, along with Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Iran, two other major OPEC producers, also are cutting prices to Asian customers this month.

The reason for the Saudi move is a matter of some dispute. Some observers of the global oil market view the Saudi price cut to US customers as an effort to undermine the boom in American production of oil from shale.

“The market reacted to it very negatively, thinking, ‘Here we go, we’re going to have a price war in the United States,’ ” Anthony Lerner, a senior vice president of industrial commodities at brokerage R.J. O’Brien & Associates LLC, told The Wall Street Journal.

But another person familiar with the Saudi decision, whose name was not disclosed, told the newspaper that the aim was merely to lure US refiners to buy cheaper oil from Saudi Arabia and thus increase their profits.

Whatever the Saudi motivation, industry insiders and observers from OPEC officials to oil price news services view these actions as leading to a price war. In Baghdad, for example, Iraqi Oil Minister Adel Abdul Mahdi told parliament on Oct. 30 that the struggle is internal in OPEC, with members fighting one another to hold on to their shares of the petroleum market.

Meanwhile, the Oil Price Information Service (OPIS), which reports extensively on the oil trade, said in a Nov. 4 report that the Saudi move had caused a “panic” in the market.

“Global traders are in essence voting on a referendum as to whether they believe that a price war is looming among OPEC and non-OPEC producers,” the OPIS reported, according to The New York Times, “and for the moment, they are casting a ‘yes’ vote for the conflict.”

As frightening, or at least chaotic, as all this may sound, however, there are positive signs.

AAA, the US auto club, said Nov. 4 that the national average for regular gasoline had fallen to $2.97, down 6 cents from the previous week and 33 cents from the same date in October. And industrial customers including hotels, restaurants, railroads and airlines also are likely to benefit from lower fuel costs.

For now, the only losers are the oil and natural gas industries. They’ve been enjoying a kind of windfall in the past few years as they've increased exploration and production of shale oil. Now, though, their share prices are falling for fear that their profits will begin eroding.

*  *  *

Additionally, OPEC had some more words today:

• OPEC's El-Badri: "no target price for crude, we are concerned but not panicking about oil price"
• *OPEC SEES OIL SUPPLY AND DEMAND REASONABLE: EL-BADRI
• *OIL PRICE DECLINE IS MAINLY DUE TO SPECULATION: EL-BADRI
• *HIGHER-COST U.S. OIL UNPROFITABLE AT CURRENT PRICES: EL-BADRI

via Zero Hedge http://ift.tt/1u4aYoc Tyler Durden

Every now and then a person comes along who completely redefines the concept of “buying sight unseen.” That someone is longtime Cape Coral resident William Wilson who, at a foreclosure auction on Monday, purchased the house on SE 19th Lane with rusted iron gates on each window and every entrance. Four dead-bolts were chained at the front door. He paid $96,000.

So far so good. He arrived the next morning to evaluate his purchase, trim the hedges and mow the lawn. What he found inside was a body (and another case of immaculate bank due diligence).

A body was found today at this home on SE 19th Lane in Cape Coral.
A death investigation is being conducted.

According to the News-Press, “the corpse was on the floor of the master bedroom next to the bed. Longtime neighbors say an older woman from Miami last lived at the home with her sister, but they hadn’t seen or heard from her for several years.”

Some thought she moved, others said she just disappeared. Outside, the grass grew long and the community speculated. Inside, Wilson said all that remained were bones, skin and the smell of remains. In the living room was a bird cage and piles of feces.

“You couldn’t tell who it was,” Wilson said. “You couldn’t tell if it was a male or a female … it’s disappointing and a sad thing that nobody cared enough to check.”

And that, in a nutshell, is what America’s New Abnormal is all about: a foreclosure process that last over three years since banks have no incentive to sell houses at a loss, and social de-evolution to such an extent that a dead person can literally rot inside their house with nobody even bothering to look. And of course, daily all time highs in the S&P500.

“The inside was a mess,” Wilson said. “It looked like (someone) was packing to move. There were a lot of boxes, some pictures of children on the fridge.”

Authorities told him the most recent piece of mail was from November of 2011 and unpaid taxes went back three years.

Finally, with a three year delay, the local police did their job. In retrospect, it’s a miracle local murderers didn’t decide to use the forgotten house as a dumping ground for dead bodies. 

The Cape Coral Police Department responded to the scene Wednesday afternoon to conduct a death investigation. Officers cordoned the property with yellow caution tape. At dusk, one officer remained parked out front.

 

“It’s sad about the whole thing,” said Bill Harrigan, who lives across the street. “Nobody ever checked on her.”

 

Wednesday night, residents stood outside their homes and watched law enforcement come and go along the two-lane road.

 

“I didn’t know them,” said Liz Palma, 55, of Cape Coral. “It’s very strange, all those bars on the house. I never smelled anything … that’s just freaky. I’m freaked out.”

 

Next-door neighbor Gary Oben Jr., 30, said he used to park his van in the driveway because no one was ever around. The woman was nice, but reclusive and didn’t speak much English. He saw her a handful of times in a decade. She got the mail and she watered the lawn and liked his dogs.

The house was built in 2007 and previously owned by Carmen Garcia-Viso. “I had a hunch,” Oben said. “Either it was a grow house or there was a dead lady in there.”

It was the latter. It is unclear if the current owner, William Wilson, plans on flipping the house in the immediate future. Or the corpse.

via Zero Hedge http://ift.tt/1tMYnpp Tyler Durden

Riot police clashed with demonstrators in the Belgian capital of Brussels on Thursday amid a massive protest against government plans to reform the country’s welfare system. This comes on the heels of violent French, Italian, and Spanish youth protests in recent weeks as the citizens of the non-Germanic European Union decry the 'austerity' they have been crushed by. What is odd, though, is externally, there has been 'no' austerity with debt loads rising for all these nations and debt/GDP at record highs for most. So where is the disconnect between a people under increasing financial pressure and a sovereign issuing more and more debt at will? The Telegraph has the stunning answer: an audit, published this morning, found that £109 billion out of a total of £117 billion spent by the EU in 2013 was "affected by material error”. Brussels accounts have not been given the all clear for 19 years running. In other words, Brussels 'embezzles' billions of euros per year, and blames it on austerity. Is it any wonder, Europe is burning?

 

This is what happens… More than 100,000 marched through Brussels today…

 

And it turned ugly…

 

 

When your leaders steal… (as The Telegraph reports)

According to the annual report of the European Court of Auditors, seen by The Telegraph, £5.5 billion of the EU budget last year was misspent because of controls on spending that were deemed to be only “partially effective” by experts.

 

The audit, published this morning, found that £109 billion out of a total of £117 billion spent by the EU in 2013 was "affected by material error”.

 

It means that the Brussels accounts have not been given the all clear for 19 years running.

 

Treasury sources said that the disclosure shows why the EU needs “urgent reform”.

 

…

 

“More can and should be done to ensure money is spent according to rules,” it said.

 

Among the examples of misspent money was funding used to buy helicopters to help Spain defend Europe’s borders against entry by illegal immigrants.

 

“[Auditors] examined a project in Spain which consisted of the purchase of four helicopters, to be used 75 per cent of their operating time for EU border surveillance and control. However, the ECA found the helicopters were only used 25 per cent of the time for this purpose,” said the report.

 

In another case, the commission handed out £1.4 million in funding for social development in Moldova “for which no underlying expenditure had been incurred”.

 

…

 

“Far too much of the EU budget continues to be spent on poor quality projects with poor oversight. This is not only wasteful but undermines consent for the whole EU project,” said Christopher Howarth, an analyst at the think-tank.

 

“The EU should radically reform its budget to focus only on those areas where the EU adds value.”

*  *  *

The bottom line is that Europe's citizens are being cheated of the benefits of ultra-low interest rates repressed by the ECB that enables their inglorious leaders to issue debt at will and increase the nation's burdens, by a bureaucratic layer of embezzlement that has been going on – in size – for decades.

via Zero Hedge http://ift.tt/1thOPh1 Tyler Durden

It there is a better anecdote for everything the IMF stands for than the hedge fund of its former head, disgraced Dominique Strauss-Khan, going broke days after his partner, Thierry Leyne, 49, commits suicide in Tel Aviv under mysterious circumstances as reported previously, and subsequent revelations exposing at least one instance of fraud at the financial firm, we have yet to hear it.

former International Monetary Fund President Dominique Strauss-Kahn
seen here at a film festival in France in September: EPA

And while the tragic story of Thierry Leyne’s untimely has been extensively circulated, what may be less known is that DSK’s hedge fund may have imploded after a close encounter with a CYNK-like attempt to corner an illiquid company which however, blew up spectacularly in his face. The WSJ reported:

According to letters sent by Swiss hedge-fund firm Insch Capital Management SA to Luxembourg and Swiss financial regulators earlier this year and seen by The Wall Street Journal, an LSK unit had used money in Insch’s bank account to buy shares in a small Swiss insurance company without Insch’s knowledge. According to emails reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, employees of LSK said Insch instructed them to buy shares in the Swiss insurance firm.

 

The Swiss insurance company in question, Firstcaution SA, is thinly traded and majority-owned by LSK. The accusation of unauthorized trading comes as LSK regroups following Mr. Leyne’s death. A person familiar with the matter said Wednesday that Mr. Strauss-Kahn has left his role as chairman of the firm, while tradin

 

An LSK spokesman didn’t respond to requests for comment. A spokeswoman for Mr. Strauss-Kahn didn’t respond to a request for comment. On Tuesday, Assya Asset Management Luxembourg SA, the fund-management arm of LSK, filed an application for suspension of payments to creditors with the Luxembourg district court, according to a filing on the website of the Luxembourg financial regulator. Most of LSK’s website, including details of its operations and employees, had been removed by this past Tuesday.

 

* * *

 

According to a letter from Insch to the Luxembourg regulator, dated March 28 of this year and reviewed by the Journal, Assya had made “totally unauthorized purchases” of shares in Firstcaution and made a “false market for the FC shares.”

 

According to data from Euronext, on most of the days when trades occurred in 2011, only 10 shares of the little-trafficked firm typically changed hands per day, while there were no trades at all in 2012 or the first two months of 2013.

 

But volumes then spiked last year, with hundreds of thousands of shares changing hands on single days over the course of 2013, amounting to €6.6 million worth for the year.

 

A spokesman for Firstcaution said Wednesday that the firm is “currently putting together a group of investors (management & Swiss investors close to the company) to buy out the stake currently held by LSK Partners.” Firstcaution declined to comment about the trading patterns in its shares. In his letter to the Luxembourg regulator, Insch CEO Chris Cruden said Assya had tried to persuade Insch to buy shares in Firstcaution in September last year, but Insch declined.

Bottom line, there was at least one case of fraud involved at the fund, fraud which may well have been the reason for Leyne’s suicide:

Although the two firms already had an agreement in place that allowed Assya to buy and sell shares in Insch’s account, LSK employees say in emails reviewed by the Journal that Insch specifically instructed them to buy the Firstcaution shares. Insch disagrees in the emails and says the firm repeatedly didn’t act on its instructions to reverse the trade.

Fast forward to first the still unexplained suicide of Leyne in late October, and now this:

Leyne, Strauss-Kahn & Partners, the financial-services firm that was headed by former International Monetary Fund chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn and late financier Thierry Leyne, said on Wednesday that it is insolvent.

 

The Luxembourg-based firm said in a short statement that, after the “tragic death” of Mr. Leyne, the board had discovered “additional commitments within the group of which it was unaware and which aggravate the delicate financial situation.” It added: “Consequently [the board] has decided to declare insolvency.”

…

Insurer Bâloise Luxembourg, part of the Swiss insurance group Bâloise Holding AG , also filed a complaint in the Luxembourg court against LSK over the failure to return a €2 million portfolio that had been invested by an LSK unit, a spokesman said.

The good news: the implosion took place before the hedge fund could drag down even more naive widows and orphans:

Earlier this year, the firm announced plans to launch a global macro hedge fund and to raise $2 billion, and Mr. Leyne and Mr. Strauss-Kahn had spent time meeting potential investors in China.

The bad news, if only for DSK, is that the former IMF head who was this close to becoming president for France if only it wasn’t for his penchant for being at the wrong time and the wrong place, is truly cursed. The bad news for everyone else is that while DSK only harmed a few truly rich people, his successor at the IMF continues to do the same, only to everyone else.

via Zero Hedge http://ift.tt/1saE3sP Tyler Durden