Wednesday, January 27, 2016

FBI Arrests Oregon Militia Leader, Six Others; One Dead






Trump "Won't Bother" With GOP Debate After Fox Refuses To Drop Megyn Kelly

"She's biased against me, she knows that, I know that. Do you really think she can be fair at a debate?"
"The truth is, he doesn’t get to control the media, and while he’s made his position clear about me after that firs



In Historic First, Massachusetts Attorney General Warns Gilead To Lower Cost Of Hep C Drug Or Face Lawsuit

In a Jan. 22 letter to Gilead chief executive John C. Martin, made public Wednesday, the attorney general wrote that the high price of the company’s Sovaldi drug, which cost $84,000 for a full course of treatment, and its Harvoni drug regimen, which cost $94,500, “may constitute an unfair trade practice in violation of Massachusetts law.” The newspaper adds that Healey’s letter said her office was looking into bringing an unfair commercial conduct complaint against the company. It is rare, if not unprecedented, for a state attorney general to confront a drug maker on the cost of a therapy.



Gold Stocks Are At A Key Juncture

Gold stocks are testing back up to the level of their recent breakdown to all-time lows; will it be a false breakdown, or the start of a new leg down ?



EUR Jumps Above 1.09 - We're Gonna Need More Draghi

The entire Draghi jawbone tumble in EURUSD has now been erased...



Downgrades Next?

With analyst expectations almost 50% above Apple's current price, and only 1 "sell" recommendation among the 52 analysts covering the "no brainer" stock, one has to wonder how long it will be before the 45 "Buys" downgrade their permabullish perspective...



Italian Banks Sink As "Bad Bank" Plan Underwhelms

Last week, we noted that Italy is rushing to defuse a €200 billion time bomb in the country’s banking sector as investors fret over banks’ exposure to souring loans. On Wednesday we learn that Italy has indeed managed to strike a deal with Brussels to help alleviate banks’ NPL burden but the agreement falls well short of the type of comprehensive "solution" the market was hoping to see.



"No Brainer" Apple Extends Losses Despite Analyst Pleas That Guidance "Better Than Feared"

Apple's guidance was considerably worse than expected, but always spinning positively, analysts proclaim somehows that it was "better than feared." It appears not as AAPL is now down almost 4% despite every sell-side analyst's pleas that "the bottom is in." The ultimate "no brainer" stock is now down over 28% from its highs last year and analyst targets are still at $137 on average - a nearly 50% gain from here. And finally, as if a crashing stock was not enough, Apple's Safari browser is reportedly crashing if users attempt to search - not a great day for Tim Cook.



Boeing Stock Tumbles After Drop In Revenue, Cash Flow; Huge Cut To Guidance

But the biggest hit to Boeing was its slashed guidance, which came in far below consensus estimates: Boeing's 2016 Core EPS guidance of between $8.15 and $8.35 was far below the $9.42 expected; Boeing's 2016Revenue of $93-$95 billion was also well below the $97.3 billion expected.



Bill Ackman Blames Abysmal Performance On Hedge Fund Groupthink

"While it is impossible to know for sure, we believe that our continued negative outperformance in the first few weeks of the year relates primarily to forced selling of our holdings by investors whose stakes overlap with our own."



Futures Slide On Apple Disappointment, Oil Slumps Ahead Of Fed Decision

"Nobody is really sure where we go from here, and nobody is brave enough to make the call,” Peter Dixon, Commerzbank AG’s global equities economist in London told Bloomberg. “Corporate earnings season won’t provide much of a support - markets may find a floor if the Fed is extremely dovish tonight. At least investors will have time to think and reassess valuations."



Nationalism & Its Discontents: A Deep Rumination On The Meaning Of Trump

The meaning of Trumpism is that Americans want to rid themselves of the burden of empire. Trump’s rise augurs a seismic shift in the foreign policy debate in this country, marking the end of the interventionist consensus that dominates both parties. And it certainly means the final defeat and humiliation of the neoconservatives, who are busy spewing vitriol at him and his 'plebeian' supporters. And that alone is worth whatever price we have to pay for the triumph of Trump. For the neocons are the very core of the War Party: their demise as a politically effective force inside the GOP is an event that every person who wants a more peaceful world has been longing for and should celebrate.



25 Years Of Fed Fueled M&A - The Enabling Of A Banking Oligopoly

Between 1990 and 2010, eventually 37 banks would become JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and Citigroup. The “Big Four” retail banks in the United States collectively hold 45% of all customer bank deposits for a total of $4.6 trillion... as the biggest got biggest-er all thanks to the very visible hand of The Fed's free money.



Americans Really, Really Hate The Government

by Michael Snyder, The Economic Collapse Blog:

If there is one thing that Americans can agree on these days, it is the fact that most of us don’t like the government.  CBS News has just released an article entitled “Americans hate the U.S. government more than ever“, and an average of recent surveys calculated by Real Clear Politics found that 63 percent of all Americans believe the country is heading in the wrong direction and only 28 percent of all Americans believe that the country is heading in the right direction.  In just a few days the first real ballots of the 2016 election will be cast in Iowa, and up to this point the big story of this cycle has been the rise of “outsider” candidates that many of the pundits had assumed would never have a legitimate chance.  Donald Trump, Ted Cruz and Bernie Sanders have all been beneficiaries of the overwhelming disgust that the American people feel regarding what has been going on in Washington.
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Charts With More Words Than COMEX Has Registered Ounces!‏

by Bill Holter, JS Mineset:
A reader recently sent me these charts. I do not know who put this collection together to give credit to but I do want to say these charts pretty much tell the WHOLE STORY!
Please note each graph has grey shaded areas which identify recessions. What we need to focus on is what has happened since the last “official” recession of 2008/2009. I put the word official in quotation marks because it is clear something has gone very wrong since 2009, have we really recovered?
Read More…



U.S. State Dept. Caught Attempting to Rig Iowa and New Hampshire Elections

from The Last Great Stand:
This is nothing people haven’t heard before, but I feel inclined to say it nonetheless. In addition to both being criminals, and both being guilty of dozens of counts of treason, Barack Obama and both the Clinton’s make up what can only be called “genetic garbage” that we as the human race can only hope gets washed out of our collective gene pool over time. They are crap, sludge. Junk! They are SO dirty, and SO corrupt, and SO filthy… I’d be amazed if they don’t have to get sprayed down by a hazmat team before getting into bed.
In the latest act of sleaze, The U.S. State Department has asked a federal court to grant it a one-month extension to complete its final release of all of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s work-related emails. Spokesman Mark Toner said Friday that the department would not be able to meet its January 29 deadline. About 9,400 of 55,000 pages are left and they contain “a large amount of material that required interagency review,” he said.
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One of World’s Biggest Construction Companies to Hit the Wall?

from Wolf Street:
Things are not looking good for Grupo Actividades de Construccion y Servicios SA (ACS), the world’s biggest international contractor. It started on December 4, when hedge fund manager Per Johansson told a conference in London that he was shorting the Madrid-based company because of its alleged accounting irregularities. And since then, ACS’ problems have snowballed.
According to Johanssen, the heavily leveraged construction company has drastically overstated its earnings, has “a lot of hidden liabilities,” and is suffering from “signs of problematic project execution.” He forecast a 40% decline in ACS’s share price. Shares have since plunged 25%.
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An Unavoidable Banking System Collapse And The Winds Of War

by Dave Kranzler, Investment Research Dynamics:
We are confronted by a geopolitical situation perhaps as dangerous as any we have faced since World War II: chaos and extremism in the Middle East, Russian aggression and expansion, and a weakened Europe threatened by horrendous unemployment, in no small measure caused by a failure to tackle structural reforms in many of the countries which form part of the European Union,” wrote Jacob Rothschild, a British investment banker and a member of the prominent Rothschild family, in an annual Strategic Report of RIT Capital Partners plc (RIT) – Dark Clouds Forming In Europe
Those are fighting words.  Throughout history the underlying cause has always been the constant:  an Empire in collapse.  On the surface the Empire appears to be the United Stats. But a lot of very bright people with whom I’ve been associated over the years would argue that the nexus of the Empire is the mysterious City of London.  To be sure, if the western Empire is interconnected by the bankers, the Rothschild family has its fingerprints all over the Fed, the Bank of England and the ECB – and the BIS.
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How a Small Company in Switzerland Is Fighting a Surveillance Law — And Winning

by Jenna McLaughlin, The Intercept:
A small email provider and its customers have almost single-handedly forced the Swiss government to put its new invasive surveillance law up for a public vote in a national referendum in June.
“This law was approved in September, and after the Paris attacks, we assumed privacy was dead at that point,” said Andy Yen, co-founder of ProtonMail, when I spoke with him on the phone. He was referring to the Nachrichtendienstgesetz (NDG), a mouthful of a name for a bill that gave Swiss intelligence authorities more clout to spy on private communications, hack into citizens’ computers, and sweep up their cellphone information.
The climate of fear and terrorism, he said, felt too overwhelming to get people to care about constitutional rights when people first started organizing to fight the NDG law.
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The Davos Blind Eye: How the Rich Eat the Poor and the World

by Prof. John McMurtry, Global Research:
The just-released Oxfam Davos Report which the mass media have ignored arrestingly shows that 62 individuals – 388 in 2010 – now own more wealth than 50% of the world’s population. More shockingly, it reports from its uncontested public sources that this share of wealth by half of the world’s people has collapsed by over 40% in just the last five years.
Yet the big lies persist even here that “the progress has been made in tackling world poverty” and “extreme poverty has been halved since 1990”.
Unbelievably, the endlessly repeated assertion of the form that ‘the poor are being lifted out of poverty in ever greater numbers’ continues on untouched despite the hard evidence that, in fact, the poorer half of humanity has lost almost half of their wealth in just the last five years.
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