Portugal Votes In Symbolic Ouster Of Failed Government, As IMF Is Now In Charge
Submitted by Tyler Durden on 06/05/2011 11:28 -0400

Today, in a much anticipated outcome, Portugal will vote to replace the caretaker Prime Minister Jose Socrates with opposition center-right Social Democrat Pedro Passos Coelho. Alas this is largely a symbolic vote as the new guy is just a continuation of the policies of the old guy: "Passos Coelho, who cast his vote at a polling station in Amadora on the outskirts of Lisbon, where reporters by far outnumbered voters, said Portugal had to stick to the bailout terms to regain market confidence and return to growth." Even the young people understand this: "Ricardo, a voter in his late 20s, expressed a common view that any new government just has to march to the beat of the lenders' drum. "I think the election won't bring anything new because it's the IMF in charge of the country now ... Any party that gets to the government will just have to follow IMF rules, " he said." Spot on. And we wonder how long before Mohamed El-Erian, or some other actual thinker, has an op-ed discussing the pitfalls of what we have now trademarked as "The Congress of Berlin 2.0: the scramble for Europe."

Open Interest Reveals Yet Another Layer Within The Footprint of Control

posted by Eric De Groot at Eric De Groot - 58 minutes ago

Alonzo, Training Day Source: hark.com A sharp increase is paper supply, short positions in excess of deliverable metal, has been used to cap demand surges since 2001. Once a paper operation breaks the shor...

 

 

 

 

China Car Sales Tumble For Second Month In A Row, As Goldman Sees Spike In China Inflation To Multi-Year Highs

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 06/05/2011 10:57 -0400

More bad news for China's stagflating economy: according to an industry group, China automobile sales dropped for the second month in a row in May, pointing to slowing demand after Beijing stopped offering incentives and introduced new limits on car purchases earlier this year. "Vehicle sales in China shed 13.95 percent on-month to 1.19 million last month, the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers (CAAM) said. It was a 29.74 percent increase compared to the same month last year. Auto output fell 14.36 percent from a month earlier to about 1.31 million units in May. The industry group attributed the continued decline in May sales to the end of the tax breaks and incentive policies in the country. The Chinese government ended tax breaks for purchases of small cars at the end of 2010 and reimposed a 10 percent tax at the beginning of this year. The tax breaks, introduced in 2009 to buoy domestic demand amid the economic slowdown, had boosted China's auto market and helped it overtake the United States as the world's largest in 2009 and 2010." This is yet another piece of bad news for GM, for whom China has recently become the dominant market (even as it stuff US dealers with record amount of inventory), and since the company has been unable to take advantage of the supply disruptions that have crippled Japanese car makers, expect to see GM stock take its current post-IPO low stock price even lower. "Wang Qingtao, analyst at China's Sealand Securities Co., expected the downward trend in the Chinese auto industry would likely continue for a while, saying "the market fundamentals are not likely to change drastically." And in the meantime, Goldman now anticipates China's May inflation to hit 5.5% Y/Y, the highest such increase in years, and the Stagflationary economy continues overheating, this time due to surging food prices as a result of the record drought previously discussed. 

 

 

 

 

 

PBS Hacker LulzSec Takes On Archnemesis FBI, Defaces FBI-Affiliate Website In Protest Against NATO And Obama

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 06/05/2011 00:25 -0400

Even as the hacker collective known as Operation Empire State Rebellion, which back in March threatened to bring "peaceful revolution to America, and will engage in civil disobedience until Bernanke steps down" and has since largely fallen off the scene, presumably surprised by Bernanke complete lack of fazing, another hacker group, LulzSec, best known for recent hacking into PBS, has just taken the first step toward pissing off none other than its archnemesis the FBI, by defacing and taking control of an FBI affiliate website. From IBTimes: "In an apparent protest against the NATO and Obama administration, the LulzSec group announced the breach of FBI  affiliate website, the Atlanta chapter of Infragard. The group raised claims that they have taken “complete control” over the website and has “defaced it”. They also announced that the data including passwords obtained from infragardatlanta.org would prove useful for them to hack into other FBI affiliates, since a lot of users tend to reuse their passwords even though the practice is generally unappreciated by FBI." So while OP_ESR continues to engage in emptry rhetoric and summons the population to one after another attempt at uprising (Apparently June 14th is the latest D-Day), LulzSec, which is also speculated to be behind the historic ongoing hacks of the various Sony networks, is taking cyber-matters into its own hands. We wonder however whether this escalation of cyberwarfare against the US by the US will necessitate a declaration of war by Obama against the US. Admittedly, that would be a Keynesian wet dream: think of the record boost to GDP if Geithner literally nukes the west and eastern seaboards, only to rebuild them again...

Things That Make You Go Hmmm - "Is It Safe?"

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 06/04/2011 19:55 -0400
But for a bailout of sorts, one of the most villainous performances in cinematic history would never have made it to the silver screen. Producer Robert Evans was set upon getting Laurence Olivier to play the part of Dr. Christian Szell in the movie adaptation of William Goldman’s book, Marathon Man. However, because Olivier at the time was riddled with cancer, he was uninsurable so Paramount refused to use im. In desperation, Evans called his friends Merle Oberon and David Niven to arrange a meeting with the House of Lords (the upper body of the UK’s parliament). There, he urged them to put pressure on Lloyds of London to insure Britain’s greatest living actor. The ploy succeeded and a frail Olivier started working on the film. In the end, not only did he net an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor, but his cancer also went into remission. Olivier lived on for another 13 years. The iconic scene in Marathon Man that, to this day has me squirming in my chair whenever I see it, involves Dr. Szell using particularly nasty dentistry techniques to torture poor Dustin Hoffman’s character, ‘Babe’, in order to establish whether the security of the stash of diamonds Szell has hidden has been compromised. Babe, however, genuinely has no idea what Szell is talking about. As Babe’s fear mounts, he tries giving Szell any and every answer to avoid the pain he is clearly about to face. He tells him ‘it’ is safe. He tells him ‘it’ is in grave danger - anything he thinks Szell wants to hear - but, unfortunately, Babe’s pain is inevitable and it is dispensed without compassion or humanity. Such is the way of the world. 

 

 

 

 

 

20 Facts About US Inequality That Everyone Should Know (With An Update On The Uber-Wealthy And Global Wealth Inequality)

Courtesy of the Stanford Center for the Study of Poverty and Inequality, we bring you the "20 facts about US Inequality that Everyone Should Know". For everything one has always wanted to know about wage inequality, CEO pay, homelessness, education wage premium, gender pay gaps, occupational sex segregation, racial gaps in education, racial discrimination, child poverty, residential segregation, health insurance, inter and intragenerational income mobility, bad jobs, discouraged workers, wealth inequality, labor market deregulation, job losses, immigrants and inequality and productivity and real income, this is the definitive resource. 

 

 

 

 

 

Advice every novice investor should read immediately
"It could mean the difference between comfort and misery somewhere down the road..."   

 

 

 

 

Ten questions every silver investor should be able to answer
"If you're concerned about the recent selloff, you may find the following very compelling..."