Authored by Alastair Crooke via The Strategic Culture Foundation, Sometimes what doesn’t occur tells us much more than what did – as in Sherlock Holmes’ case of the dog that did not bark in the night. Yes, two things did not occur at the G20, at the end of last week: Why? And what do […]

That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is just one short excerpt: In the longer run, bringing charges against Meng is likely to accelerate the division of the world into two competing systems of law, technology and commerce — namely those of China and the U.S. That will encourage international relations to […]

Social psychologist and prominent “sexpert” author, Dr. Justin J. Lehmiller, a Research Fellow at Indiana University’s The Kinsey Institute, has actually compiled the data. He posed the question as part of his research: I’ve seen a lot of articles lately about sex robots and how they’re supposedly going to revolutionize our sex lives. A lot of these […]

Authored by Mac Slavo via SHTFplan.com, The Central Intelligence Agency made six remote-controlled dogs as a part of their MKULTRA “behavior modification” or mind control program.  Using brain surgery, newly requested documents show that the dogs were “field operational” and controlled by human beings. The CIA marked the 65th anniversary of the launch of Project […]

Just weeks after we noted that Australia’s household debt to income ratio has ballooned to shocking levels over the past three decades as Sydney is ranked as one of the most overvalued cities in the world, Australia’s regulators have been warned to prepare “contingency plans for a severe collapse in the housing market” that could lead to […]

Authored by Michael Snyder via The Economic Collapse blog, Somebody out there apparently does not want President Trump to make a trade deal with China.  Just after U.S. and Chinese officials agreed to suspend the implementation of new tariffs for 90 days, one of China’s most important tech executives was literally kidnapped as she was […]

The CIA has a long and checkered history of sending highly trained agents into very foreign environments to conduct everything from espionage to assassinations.  In order to pull off these clandestine and high-risk assignments, CIA agents must have a watertight cover story and a disguise that could fool your average Russian FSB officer as he flips through a […]

Authored by Caitlin Johnstone via Medium.com, The US State Department has issued a statement accusing the Syrian government of having carried out a false flag chemical weapons attack in northwestern Aleppo with the intent to blame it on the jihadist factions in the region, citing “credible info” that the public has not been permitted to see. Never […]

Your wife may not know about those little trips to that Thai massage place in the strip-mall, but your smartphone does – and it may be telling any one of at least 75 companies exactly what time you went, how you got there and where you stopped on the way – with staggering precision to within a few […]

Authored by Steven Mosher via The Epoch Times, On Nov. 20 President Trump’s trade advisor, Robert Lighthizer, issued an exhaustive report on China’s efforts to beg, borrow, and steal U.S. intellectual property. Eleven days later, on Dec. 1, Stanford University Professor Zhang Shoucheng, who had been collaborating with the Beijing regime’s drive to dominate hi-tech under its […]

In his first public comments in more than a week, French President Emmanuel Macron said on Monday that his administration will show “no mercy” towards “Yellow Vest” protesters who have committed violence over the last four weeks of demonstrations across the country, while also announcing a series of economic measures in an attempt to restore […]

Former Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen is worried about excessive leveraged lending and the level of corporate debt across Wall Street. “Corporate indebtedness is now quite high and I think it’s a danger that if there’s something else that causes a downturn, that high levels of corporate leverage could prolong the downturn and lead to […]

Donald Trump, it turns out, may have been the best thing that could have happened to American democracy. No, I haven’t lost my mind. Individual-1 is clearly a wannabe dictator who has contempt for the rule of law, not to mention being corrupt and probably in the pocket of foreign powers. But he’s also lazy, […]

Brexit opponents protest outside Parliament in London. (Christopher Furlong/Getty Images) December 10 at 5:45 PM Even if you’re not a fan of British humor, it’s hard not to laugh a little at Brexit. Sure, there have been bigger disasters in history, but it’s rare to find dumber ones. The whole idea, after all, behind Britain […]

by Bill McBride on 12/10/2018 05:22:00 PM

By EU2017EE Estonian Presidency (Theresa May) [CC BY 2.0], via Wikimedia Commons The U.K. will either leave the European Union or not on precisely March 29. This may seem like plenty of time; lots of members of the British Parliament, for instance, think three-and-a-half months is more than sufficient to produce the miracle that the […]

Jay Powell may have been appointed to the head of the Federal Reserve by Donald Trump, but this does not mean he is of a piece with the president of the United States. Perhaps you realized this at some point during Trump’s campaign to undermine a man he’d called “strong, committed and smart” less than […]

Inversion of the so-called yield curve is yet another reason to fear an earnings, or even an economic, recession in 2019, according to Morgan Stanley. The bank’s chief U.S. equity strategist told clients that while it’s difficult to forecast what an inverted yield curve means for stocks in the near term, he wasn’t surprised to […]

By Lambert Strether of Corrente. Trade “Why Trump’s trade war is pushing China to become smarter and stronger, faster” [Hellenic Shipping News]. “The final communiqués at these lovefests must usually be written beforehand for anything to be agreed. Trump is the exception. He likes one-on-ones. He is a professional deal maker in a way that […]

It appears that the stock market has finally succumbed to the omni-persistent chaos of this bleakly batshit moment in human history. Like everything else, equities are reflecting a notionally negative sense that the world is too confusing what with a growing majority of global leaders acting unmedicated. It’s very hard to feel certain about anything, so […]

by Bill McBride on 12/10/2018 01:10:00 PM

Donald Trump Owns This Stock MarketIt wasn’t smart to dump a dovish Fed chief, run up the deficit, and start a trade war. Trump did all three.Bloomberg, December 10, 2018 For those of you who are looking for an explanation why the stock market suddenly become tumultuous in the fourth quarter of 2018, you can […]

One day after Goldman Sachs finally capitulated on its call for four rate hikes next year (one hike more than the Fed’s dot plot, and four more than the not-quite-one hike that futures markets are currently pricing), Paul Tudor Jones, the founder of Tudor Investment Corporation, has one-upped the bank’s chief economist, Jan Hatzius (who […]

by Bill McBride on 12/10/2018 12:15:00 PM

A lot can change in less than two months: back on October 18, when the initial market drop seemed like just another dip-buying opportunity, JPM predicted that the odds of a recession in 1 year were a modest 27.6%, rising to 60% if the forecast period is extended to two years. Well not anymore, because […]

Authored by Kenneth Rogoff via Project Syndicate, The right way to think about cryptocurrency coins is as lottery tickets that pay off in a dystopian future where they are used in rogue and failed states, or perhaps in countries where citizens have already lost all semblance of privacy. That means that cryptocurrencies are not entirely […]

Accused Russian spy Maria Butina wants to change her plea to guilty according to a Monday filing with a DC Court.  Butina, who was arrested in July and remains in custody, is accused of working with South Dakota Republican Paul Erickson as a Kremlin spy.  Erickson, who has strong ties to both the National Rifle […]

Senior Communist Party officials let their frustration over the arrest and likely extradition of Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou be known over the weekend during meetings with the American and Canadian ambassadors to Beijing where they threatened “severe consequences” if Meng isn’t released. But these threats haven’t blunted the Canadian government’s determination to prosecute Meng for […]

All the major US equity indices are now underwater for the year as Nasdaq finally joined the S&P, Dow, Small Caps, and Trannies… Overnight saw early derisking on a multitude of factors, but the machines gently levitated futures into the open, before flushing at the open (not helped by AAPL)… And that has driven Nasdaq […]

After the ubiquitous ramp into the US cash market open, things have gone a little pear-shaped, with stocks tumbling back below last week’s lows and pushing critical 2018 support levels. As BMO’s Russ Visch writes, It’s a “make or break” day for the S&P 500, which closed right at key support at its October/November lows […]

Having correctly predicted (and explained) the broader market dump last week, and – more importantly – accurately defining the key CTA selloff levels much to the embarrassment of some of his peers who keep making wrong calls and, unable to make an accurate forecast for month instead chose to blame “fake news”, Nomura’s Charlie McElligott […]

Authored by Irina Slav for Oilprice.com, The U.S. Geological Survey has revised the technically recoverable reserves in the Wolfcamp Basin, in the Permian shale play, to 46.3 billion barrels of crude and 281 trillion cu ft of natural gas. That’s up from 20 billion barrels of crude and 16 trillion cu ft of gas in recoverable reserves […]

Update 2: After May and Corbyn exchanged vitriol soaked comments (with Corbyn accusing May of “losing control” and May accusing Corbyn of opportunistically attacking her despite having no workable alternatives), the pound has broken below 1.26 and is nearing 1.25… The anxieties surrounding May’s decision to delay the vote have apparently crossed the Atlantic and […]

Paul Tudor Jones said Monday that a new exchange-traded fund using JUST Capital’s Ranking of companies doing right by the American people is tracking the performance of the S&P 500 since its launch in June. Tudor Jones said in an interview with CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin that the Goldman Sachs JUST fund is down about […]

by Bill McBride on 12/10/2018 10:08:00 AM

By Jerri-Lynn Scofield, who has worked as a securities lawyer and a derivatives trader. She is currently writing a book about textile artisans. Senators Elizabeth Warren, Richard Blumenthal, Bernie Sanders, and Dick Durbin last week sent a letter to John Kelly, acting inspector general (IG) of the Department of Homeland Security, asking him to expand […]

Here’s the stock market from three perspectives Percentage change in the S&P 500 %+30+20+100-10-20Since Trump’s inauguration2018 to dateSince S&P’s peak20172018Correction territory Percentage change in the S&P 500 %+30+20+100-10-20Since Trump’s inauguration2018 to dateSince S&P’s peak20172018Correction territory Percentage change in the S&P 500 %+30+20+100-10-20Since Trump’s inauguration2018 to dateSince S&P’s peak20172018Correction territory Source: Refinitiv The S&P 500-stock index […]

The Federal Reserve needs to stop increasing interest rates or risk putting the U.S. economy into a recession, former Trump economic advisor Stephen Moore told CNBC on Monday. “The only thing that really worries me about the economy right now is what the Fed is doing,” said Moore, co-author with conservative economist Art Laffer of […]

Don’t Like Trump? Your Financial Analysis Might Be BiasedPartisanship should have no place in a corporate-credit rating. A new study says it does.Bloomberg, December 3, 2018 The dangers of political bias for investors has long been one of my favorite rants. Politics is tribal, opinionated and typically one-sided. These are emotional hot buttons that lead to […]

Billionaire investor Paul Tudor Jones says the stock market’s wild ride will continue in 2019. “I think we’re going to see a lot more of what we just saw, which is a lot more volatility,” Jones told CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin in a “Squawk Box” interview on Monday. “It’s really easy to say ‘I’m really […]

by Bill McBride on 12/10/2018 08:00:00 AM

My back-to-work morning train reads: • Bogle: RIAs Are the Future; Trading Is Investors’ Enemy (ThinkAdvisor)• Lessons From the Bernie Madoff Fraud, 10 Years Later (Barron’s) see also Madoff’s Victims Are Close To Getting Their $19 Billion Back (Bloomberg)• We’re No Longer in the Smartphone Plateau. We’re in the Smartphone Decline. (New York Magazine)• 2018 wasn’t a complete horror show. Here are […]

Ivey Business School at Western University (London Ontario, Canada) is looking for a Post doctoral Research Fellow to join our newly established CryptoEconomics Lab: http://cryptoeconomics-lab.com The focus of the position is on conducting foundational research in the emerging discipline of cryptoeconomics, which examines the protocols and incentives that govern the production, distribution, and consumption of digital […]

This entry was posted in Guest Post, Links on December 10, 2018 by Jerri-Lynn Scofield.

The Opening Bell is powered by The Water Coolest. (Confused? Don’t worry, we’ve made you a new friend.) Puff, puff, path to diversification [The Water Coolest] Altria plans to shell out $1.8B for a 45% stake in Cronos, a Canada-based cannabinoid company. Or for those less in tune with the “kids these days,” Cronos is a Canadian […]

This is quite astonishing: A decade after Bernard Madoff was arrested for running the world’s biggest Ponzi scheme, the bitter fight to recoup investors’ lost billions has astounded experts and victims alike. While no one will ever collect the phantom profits Madoff pretended he was earning, the cash deposits by his clients have been the […]

Jerri-Lynn here: The subject of this short post is UNCTAD’s 2018 Trade and Development Report, the subtitle of which – Power, Platforms and the Free Trade Delusion – suggests might itself  warrant closer scrutiny. The post revisits the Havana Charter on its 70th anniversary. US corporate interests derailed that agreement over concerns it provided too […]

The new hope for the UK being rescued from Brexit (as if there were any solution that not leave large swathes of the citizenry feeling bruised) is May’s handbag. I am not making that up. From The Times: Theresa May will seek to emulate Margaret Thatcher by travelling to Brussels to demand a better Brexit […]