A quiet day with the Dow Jones up 10 points (0.06%) and the Nasdaq up 33 points (0.81%)
A typical consolidation day in the market after heavy sell off over the last couple of days. The most oversold issues have bounced the most, hence the strong Nasdaq rebound. With earnings season just around the corner it will be interesting to see if the recent sell off develops into an actual bear market or another opportunity to “buy the dip”. Keep in mind, despite the recent sell off all of the major trends are still pointing up. In fact, it was just a few days ago that the Dow set an all time high. This highlights an important clue as to why most market pundits are not worried.
Should they be?
I believe so. Based on our mathematical and timing work the bear market of 2014-2017 is just around the corner. When it starts it will very quickly retrace last years rally and plunge the US Economy into a severe recession. If you would be interested in learning exactly when this bear market will start (to the day) and it’s internal composition, please Click Here.
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American Ingenuity. 12 yards long, 2 lanes wide. 65 tons of American pride & the real reason we will defeat all enemies….foreign or domestic. I was told there is a waiting list in the South.
As the USA/NATO prepare for war over Ukraine (economic, cold and possibly actual war) most American’s believe Ukraine is in China or Africa or even Alaska (WTF?) According to The Washington Post only 16% of American’s could correctly identify Ukraine on the map. (see full report below) Come on guys…..that’s where all the hot girls come from. You know, the one’s that have the tendency to wear high heels instead of Uggs. Yes, that’s Ukraine. Maybe more people will learn where Ukraine is after Russia invades and the US stock market craters. BIG MAYBE.
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BY KYLE DROPP, JOSHUA D. KERTZER AND THOMAS ZEITZOFF
Joshua Tucker: The following is a guest post from political scientists Kyle Dropp (Dartmouth College) Joshua D. Kertzer (Harvard University) and Thomas Zeitzoff (Princeton University).
*****
Since Russian troops first entered the Crimean peninsula in early March, a series of media polling outlets have asked Americans how they want the U.S. to respond to the ongoing situation. Although two-thirds of Americans have reported following the situation at least “somewhat closely,” most Americans actually know very little about events on the ground — or even where the ground is.
On March 28-31, 2014, we asked a national sample of 2,066 Americans (fielded via Survey Sampling International Inc. (SSI), what action they wanted the U.S. to take in Ukraine, but with a twist: In addition to measuring standard demographic characteristics and general foreign policy attitudes, we also asked our survey respondents to locate Ukraine on a map as part of a larger, ongoing project to study foreign policy knowledge. We wanted to see where Americans think Ukraine is and to learn if this knowledge (or lack thereof) is related to their foreign policy views. We found that only one out of six Americans can find Ukraine on a map, and that this lack of knowledge is related to preferences: The farther their guesses were from Ukraine’s actual location, the more they wanted the U.S. to intervene with military force.
Ukraine: Where is it?
Survey respondents identified Ukraine by clicking on a high-resolution world map, shown above. We then created a distance metric by comparing the coordinates they provided with the actual location of Ukraine on the map. Other scholars, such as Markus Prior, have used pictures to measure visual knowledge, but unlike many of thetraditional open-ended items political scientists use to measure knowledge, distance enables us to measure accuracy continuously: People who believe Ukraine is in Eastern Europe clearly are more informed than those who believe it is in Brazil or in the Indian Ocean.
About one in six (16 percent) Americans correctly located Ukraine, clicking somewhere within its borders. Most thought that Ukraine was located somewhere in Europe or Asia, but the median respondent was about 1,800 miles off — roughly the distance from Chicago to Los Angeles — locating Ukraine somewhere in an area bordered by Portugal on the west, Sudan on the south, Kazakhstan on the east, and Finland on the north.
Who is more accurate?
Accuracy varies across demographic groups. In general, younger Americans tended to provide more accurate responses than their older counterparts: 27 percent of 18-24 year olds correctly identified Ukraine, compared with 14 percent of 65+ year-olds. Men tended to do better than women, with 20 percent of men correctly identifying Ukraine and 13 percent of women. Interestingly, members of military households were no more likely to correctly locate Ukraine (16.1 percent correct) than members of non-military households (16 percent correct), but self-identified independents (29 percent correct) outperformed both Democrats (14 percent correct) and Republicans (15 percent correct). Unsurprisingly, college graduates (21 percent correct) were more likely to know where Ukraine was than non-college graduates (13 percent correct), but even 77 percent of college graduates failed to correctly place Ukraine on a map; the proportion of college grads who could correctly identify Ukraine is only slightly higher than the proportion of Americans who told Pew that President Obama was Muslim in August 2010.
Does accuracy matter?
Does it really matter whether Americans can put Ukraine on a map? Previousresearch would suggest yes: Information, or the absence thereof, can influence Americans’ attitudes about the kind of policies they want their government to carry out and the ability of elites to shape that agenda. Accordingly, we also asked our respondents a variety of questions about what they thought about the current situation on the ground, and what they wanted the United States to do. Similarly to other recent polls, we found that although Americans are undecided on what to do with Ukraine, they are more likely to oppose action in Ukraine the costlier it is — 45 percent of Americans supported boycotting the G8 summit, for example, while only 13 percent of Americans supported using force.
However, the further our respondents thought that Ukraine was from its actual location, the more they wanted the U.S. to intervene militarily. Even controlling for a series of demographic characteristics and participants’ general foreign policy attitudes, we found that the less accurate our participants were, the more they wanted the U.S. to use force, the greater the threat they saw Russia as posing to U.S. interests, and the more they thought that using force would advance U.S. national security interests; all of these effects are statistically significant at a 95 percent confidence level. Our results are clear, but also somewhat disconcerting: The less people know about where Ukraine is located on a map, the more they want the U.S. to intervene militarily.
We all know jobs are a lagging indicator, nevertheless, Bloomberg does it’s best to do a fluff piece for the subject matter at hand.According to Bloomberg the number of positions waiting to be filled in the U.S. climbed by 299,000 to 4.17 million in February, the most since January 2008, from a revised 3.87 million the month before, the Labor Department reported today in Washington.
First, can someone tell me where these 4.17 million supposed jobs are....the moon? Even if true, did you catch the second number? “The most since January 2008”. This is what you should be looking at. While spun as positive news, this is anything but that. Most businesses, governments and individual investors operate on the same lagging principal. They look at today’s environment and perpetuate it into the future. Exactly at the wrong time. As our mathematical and timing work suggests, the US Economy will fall into a severe recession by the end of 2014 (officially). When that happens, expect the jobs market to be flooded with pink slips instead number of open positions.
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Bloomberg Writes: Job Openings in U.S. Climbed in February to a Six-Year High
Job openings in the U.S. rose more than forecast in February to a six-year high as employers moved to boost hiring in response to rising consumer demand.
The number of positions waiting to be filled in the U.S. climbed by 299,000 to 4.17 million in February, the most since January 2008, from a revised 3.87 million the month before, the Labor Department reported today in Washington. The rate of hiring and the number of Americans quitting their jobs were little changed.
The figures, which are among nine labor-market barometers closely watched by Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen, reinforce other data showing steady improvement. Accelerated hiring would help provide bigger wage gains needed to boost consumer spending, which accounts for almost 70 percent of the economy.
“Everything is pointing to an improving labor market, which the Fed obviously wants to see,” said Jennifer Lee, a senior economist at BMO Capital Markets in Toronto. “But they want to see much more improvement in the labor markets before they consider the economy is healthy again.”
The median forecast in a Bloomberg survey called for 4.02 million openings in February after a previously reported 3.97 million a month earlier.
The Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey, or JOLTS, adds context to monthly payrolls data by measuring dynamics such as resignations, help-wanted ads and the pace of hiring. Although it lags other jobs data by a month, the figures are tracked by Yellen as a measure of labor-market tightness and worker confidence.
March Employment
Companies added 192,000 workers in March after 188,000 jobs the month before, Labor Department figures showed last week. The gain brought the number of private jobs, which exclude government agencies, to 116.1 million, surpassing the previous peak set in January 2008 before the start of the last recession. Unemployment held at 6.7 percent even as almost half a million people entered the workforce.
Just two of the nine indicators on Yellen’s employment dashboard — payroll growth and layoffs — have returned to pre-recession levels, indicating Fed policy makers will probably keep reducing the pace of stimulus while keeping interest rates low.
Yellen highlighted those contradictions in a March 31 speech, saying that the recovery “still feels like a recession to many Americans.”
Some 2.38 million people quit their jobs in February, little changed from 2.37 million a month earlier, today’s report showed. The quits rate, which was 2 percent when the recession started at the end of 2007, held at 1.7 percent in February.
Hiring Rate
The hiring rate — the number of people who got new jobs divided by the number who worked or were paid — held at 3.3 percent in February. The rate compares with an average of 3.8 percent during the previous expansion. Hires rose to 4.59 million from 4.52 million, today’s report showed.
Employers in the retail and leisure and hospitality industries took on more workers in February. Construction and health care were among industries cutting back on new hires.
Job openings continued to mount at retailers in February, while professional and business service companies and restaurants also put out more help-wanted signs.
Tammy King, 50, is planning to take her talents into a new field. She is attending courses in advanced manufacturing near her home in Alexandria, Kentucky, after losing her position as a real-estate title examiner. The training program, funded by an employer collaborative called Partners for a Competitive Workforce, teaches skills that are in demand at nearby factories.
Jobs ‘There’
“In the manufacturing world, the jobs are there,” King said. “Once I can get my education done I don’t think I’ll have trouble finding one.”
In the meantime, her unemployment benefits have run out and she can’t find part-time work to pay the bills.
“There’s nothing,” King said. “You apply. You don’t hear back. You call. Nobody’s hiring.”
Today’s report showed about 2.5 people are vying for every opening, up from about 1.8 when the last recession began in December 2007.
Dismissals, which exclude retirements and people who quit voluntarily, fell to a three-month low of 1.62 million from 1.7 million in January.
In the 12 months that ended in February, employers added a net 2.1 million jobs, representing 54.3 million hires and 52.2 million separations.
Lowe’s Cos.
Lowe’s Cos. is among those planning to add to headcount and seeking to improve worker productivity. The home-improvement retailer announced Feb. 19 that it will add about 25,000 seasonal employees this year for the industry’s busiest season.
Mooresville, North Carolina-based Lowe’s increased hours for its customer-service employees last year and is training and redeploying workers to improve sales, Chief Customer Officer Michael Jones said at a March 19 conference. Growth will be driven by improved productivity rather than store openings, he said.
“When you look at our fourth-quarter performance, you can see how, notwithstanding the fact that we’ve added labor to drive close rate, we’re able to flex that labor to protect our operating performance,” Jones said.
I don’t want to be spied on all the time….do you? I would rather die when some nutcase blows me up then have the US Government know everything about me. Which they already do.
“This is an unprecedented form of political interference that I don’t believe can be seen elsewhere in western governments,” he went on. “But no legal means currently exist to challenge such activities or to see penalties for such abuses,” he said.
Unfortunately, Snowden is right. There is no legal precedent to challenge the US Government on spying on it’s own citizens. Outside of living off the grid in the mountains of Tibet, does anyone know how one can legitimately avoid the US Surveillance machine? Please suggest your solutions in the comment section.
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No legal means exist to challenge mass surveillance, said NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, testifying to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe.
A former NSA contractor, Snowden was speaking to the PACE session in Strasbourg via a video link-up from Moscow.
Wanted in the US on treason charges, he sparked a huge international scandal last year he leaked to the media classified evidence of American government spying programs.
“I would like to clarify that I have no intention of harming the US government or straining bilateral ties between any nations. My motivation is to improve the government, not to bring it down,” Snowden said.
Snowden told the European parliamentarians that any kind of web traffic can be analyzed and searched with little effort.
The technique can be used to identify a person with a certain social or religious group and business interactions. Using this technology, NSA can also make a list of home addresses of people who match a certain criteria.
Snowden added, however, that there are no “nightmare scenarios” where the US government would, for instance, fingerprint all gay people. However, they can follow law violators as well as those where just had the bad luck to follow a wrong link on the internet, he said.
The NSA gathered “explicit sexual material regarding religious conservatives whose political views it disfavored and considered radical for the purpose of exposing it to damage their reputations and discredit them within their communities,” Snowden told PACE.
“This is an unprecedented form of political interference that I don’t believe can be seen elsewhere in western governments,” he went on. “But no legal means currently exist to challenge such activities or to see penalties for such abuses,” he said.
Mass surveillance is also used by the NSA, as well as by its partners and adversaries, for the purposes of economic espionage, Snowden said.
“The NSA had unlawfully compromised the world’s major transaction facilities to include SWIFT and Visa. And in their reports they explicitly noted that such information provided “rich personal information” including data that “is not about our targets,” Snowden told the parliamentarians gathered in Strasbourg.
In yet another sign of stupidity from traditional financial media, The Daily Ticker is trying to figure out why recent market action is “Not the start of a bear market”. Chief equity strategists from Citigroup delivers the well scripted answer (read below if you are really interested). Traditional financial media and most market pundits would lead you to believe that it is impossible to predict or time the financial markets. BS. We do it here everyday and we do it successfully.
While I am not at liberty to say if a bear market has already started (info available only to our premium subscribers), it is fairly easy to predict financial markets in both price and time once you have a complete mathematical breakdown and internal composition of the stock market. In fact, if you would be interested in learning when the bear market will start (to the day) and it’s internal composition, please Click Here.
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So are we seeing what could be a 5% to 10% correction for the market, or could this be the beginning of a bear market?
“To a great degree what we’ve seen is high-growth momentum stocks reversing direction,” Tobias Levkovich, chief equity strategist at Citigroup, tells us in the above video. He thinks people have misinterpreted the selling, saying investors are moving from small to large-cap stocks, from growth to value and toward quality. Levkovich says what we are seeing is “discreet parts of the market” like biotech, social media and cloud computing “start to lose what had been a small little bubble forming.”
He doesn’t think we’re going to see this horrible correction — he thinks this will remain more “discreet,” but says 5% to 10% would be normal, healthy and cleansing — and he’s expecting that in the first half of this year. He says he doesn’t expect a bear market, though.
Citi is still looking for the S&P 500 to end the year at 1975, posting 7% overall growth commensurate with earnings growth.
In a number of posts over the last couple of days I have made the case that Russia is laying the groundwork for their eventual invasion of East Ukraine.WHY? They must do so to counterbalance the US/NATO. If they don’t and Ukraine falls into Western/EU/NATO hands it will be viewed as a major defeat/disaster for Russia. Plus, Ukraine is a huge mess right now. It is literally facing a fiscal Abyss that will make the Great Depression in the US look like the tech boom of the late 1990’s. Further, people in East Ukraine are desperate to join Russia. Given their economic catastrophe and ethnic Russian background you will see people declaring independence and calling for referendums to join Russia, just as Crimea did. This is already happening.
Kiev will respond with force to put down the uprising (already happening) and Russia will be “forced” to go in to protect ethnic Russians. I will give this a maximum of 10-14 days to fully play out and for Russia to enter East Ukraine. As you can imagine this will spark a massive fight on an international stage between Russia/West and everyone else. In fact, I would expect the economic warfare and the cold war to intensify from this point on. Putin already suggested that Russian companies should de-list from foreign exchanges to avoid future problems. You must connect the dots here.
The US Stock market is not prepared for any of this. As such, when Russia invades expect stocks to crater and gold to surge.
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SEC is an absolute joke run by Wall Street. No surprise here. Madoff and recent High Frequency Trading scandal is a clear indication of that. In case of HTF, various people have been ringing the bell for at least 5 years. Yet, it was not until the 60 Minutes did a story on it that these lazy government shills decided to investigate. What recently departed SEC attorney had to say about the agency is even worse (see full story below). In no uncertain terms he states…..
The SEC has become “an agency that polices the broken windows on the street level and rarely goes to the penthouse floors,” Kidney said, according to a copy of his remarks obtained by Bloomberg News. “On the rare occasions when enforcement does go to the penthouse, good manners are paramount. Tough enforcement, risky enforcement, is subject to extensive negotiation and weakening.”
Kidney said his superiors were more focused on getting high-paying jobs after their government service than on bringing difficult cases. The agency’s penalties, Kidney said, have become “at most a tollbooth on the bankster turnpike.”
In other words, keep stealing Wall Street. No one is watching, checking or prosecuting.
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A trial attorney from the Securities and Exchange Commission said his bosses were too “tentative and fearful” to bring many Wall Street leaders to heel after the 2008 credit crisis, echoing the regulator’s outside critics.
James Kidney, who joined the SEC in 1986 and retired this month, offered the critique in a speech at his goodbye party. His remarks hit home with many in the crowd of SEC lawyers and alumni thanks to a part of his resume not publicly known: He had campaigned internally to bring charges against more executives in the agency’s 2010 case against Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS)
The SEC has become “an agency that polices the broken windows on the street level and rarely goes to the penthouse floors,” Kidney said, according to a copy of his remarks obtained byBloomberg News. “On the rare occasions when enforcement does go to the penthouse, good manners are paramount. Tough enforcement, risky enforcement, is subject to extensive negotiation and weakening.”
Kidney said his superiors were more focused on getting high-paying jobs after their government service than on bringing difficult cases. The agency’s penalties, Kidney said, have become “at most a tollbooth on the bankster turnpike.”
Photographer: Joshua Roberts/Bloomberg
The Securities and Exchange Commission has taken a beating from critics including… Read More
His March 27 remarks drew applause from the crowd of about 70 people, according to witnesses. In an interview, Kidney said he hadn’t heard any blowback from SEC officials.
Kidney, 66, has worked at the agency since 1986 except for a four-year stint at Aetna Inc. At the SEC he won a half-dozen insider-trading trials. His speech bemoaned the lack of SEC enforcers who “believe in afflicting the comfortable and powerful.”
The SEC has taken a beating from critics including lawmakers, judges and advocacy groups who say the agency has been too easy on the banks that helped fuel the 2008 crisis by peddling mortgage-backed securities of questionable value to unwary investors. No senior executive at a major financial firm has gone to jail and the SEC has brought civil charges against only a handful.
In his speech, Kidney also hit the agency for using misleading statistics to showcase its enforcement efforts. The SEC should focus on the quality of its actions, rather than try to file as many as possible just to tout its record to lawmakers and the media, he said.
“It is a cancer,” Kidney said of the agency’s use of numbers. “It should be changed.”
‘Lower Burden’
Kidney said in the interview that he will always be an SEC loyalist and was trying to offer constructive criticism that could help the agency. He said he wasn’t singling out any specific cases or officials in his comments.
“I don’t think we did a very aggressive job with all the major players in the crash of ’08,” he said, noting that as a civil enforcement agency, the commission does not need to prove its cases beyond a reasonable doubt like the Justice Department does. “The SEC has a lower burden of proof and we should be pushing the envelope a bit.”
The Goldman Sachs suit was one of the highest-profile SEC actions arising from the credit crisis. The bank agreed to pay $550 million to settle claims that it misled investors when it packaged and sold a complex security known as a collateralized debt obligation that was linked to subprime mortgages.
The SEC also sued Fabrice Tourre, who was vice president on the team that put together the deal at issue in the SEC case, known as Abacus 2007-AC1. A federal jury found Tourre liable last year, and he was ordered in March to pay $825,000 in penalties and other costs.
Goldman Executives
Kidney, who was part of the initial team that was building the Goldman Sachs case, pressed his bosses in the enforcement division to go higher up the chain. He later took himself off the team after being given a lesser role, according to people familiar with the matter.
In particular, the people said, Kidney argued that the commission should sue Tourre’s boss, Jonathan Egol. Kidney also wanted to bring a case against Paulson & Co. or some executives at the hedge fund, which helped pick the portfolio of securities that were underlying the Abacus vehicle and then bet against it.
The SEC ultimately decided not to sue Egol, the Paulson firm or any individuals from the hedge fund.
Andrew Williams, a spokesman for Goldman Sachs, declined to comment.
While Kidney declined to comment on the Goldman case in particular, much of his role is laid out in a September 2010 report by the agency’s inspector general’s office, which reviewed whether the SEC succumbed to political pressure in bringing the enforcement action. Kidney’s name is blacked out in the report.
‘Little Secret’
In his retirement speech, Kidney noted that he had been “involved in a high-profile case or two” and said he had gotten a message from above not to take too many risks.
“I have had bosses, and bosses of my bosses, whose names we all know, who made little secret that they were here to punch their ticket,” Kidney said. “They mouthed serious regard for the mission of the commission, but their actions were tentative and fearful in many instances.”
Stephen Crimmins, a former colleague of Kidney’s at the SEC who attended the retirement party, said he was one of the “finest lawyers ever to serve in the enforcement division.” Kidney was known for winning the SEC’s first jury trial, which was an insider trading case.
Kidney earned his legal degree at night from George Washington University’s law school while working as a Supreme Court reporter for the United Press International wire service and at U.S. News & World Report.
“People point to him as being very frank and not one to just say what people want to hear,” said Crimmins, now a partner at the K&L Gates law firm in Washington. Speakers at the party even ribbed Kidney about it, Crimmins said.
“There were some high-ranking people in the room, and everyone took it in stride,” Crimmins said. “Everyone there respected that.”
America has been on a roll lately, making friends in all the right places. Syria, Afghanistan, Egypt, Iraq, Iran, Russia, Ukraine, North Korea, Libya, China, etc…. Continuing in this tradition of fairness and brotherhood, the US warned China on it’s recent currency depreciation, raising “serious concerns” and suggesting that China gets back to the path of currency appreciation. You know, since everyone believed the Chinese Yuan would appreciate when floated at market.
That would be a solid advice if the US wasn’t trying to do exactly the same thing. Even thought the US Treasury/FED has been trying to inflate the dollar away over the last 2 decades (without too much luck), it is their Chinese counterparts that are succeeding. Yet, not by design. It appears that Yuan is declining based on market forces as opposed to government intervention. Either way, the US has no business telling other nations what to do with their currencies when every nation, more or less, is trying to succeed in competitive debasement of their own currency at the expense of their neighbors.
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(Reuters) – The United States warned Beijing on Monday that the recent depreciation of the Chinese currency could raise “serious concerns” if it signaled a policy shift away from allowing market-determined exchange rates.
Washington has been pressing China for years to allow its currency to trade at stronger values. A weak yuan makes Chinese exports cheaper for U.S. consumers at the expense of U.S. producers. A weaker yuan also makes Chinese consumers less able to buy foreign goods.
Last month, U.S. Treasury Secretary Jack Lew welcomed a decision by China to allow its currency to vary more against the dollar in daily trading.
Monday’s comments by a senior official from the Treasury Department suggested the United States was not completely sold on China’s intention to reduce authorities’ interventions in exchange markets.
“If the recent currency weakness signals a change in China’s policy away from allowing adjustment and moving toward a market-determined exchange rate, that would raise serious concerns,” the official, who asked not to be named, told journalists in a phone call.
In comments that outlined U.S. positions before meetings later this week of the International Monetary Fund and between Group of 20 nations, the official noted the widening of China’s currency trading band came just after a drop in the yuan’s value that coincided with reports of “considerable intervention” in exchange markets by Chinese authorities. That is exactly the sort of behavior Washington wants Beijing to ditch.
The United States also appears likely to pressure Europe at the meetings to act more decisively to fix its troubled banking sector.
The Treasury official said recent economic data from Europe showed the region was experiencing “chronic low inflation and weak demand.” That appeared to be a nod to growing concerns that Europe’s economy is so weak it risks falling into a dangerous spiral of falling prices and wages known as deflation.
“More needs to be done to support growth,” the Treasury official said.
The official had blunt words for other economic powers as well, saying that Japan should avoid engaging in too much fiscal austerity.
He said U.S. sanctions on Russian officials were already having an impact on Russia’s economy. The official also chided emerging markets for going too slowly in adopting free-floating currencies.
“Resistance in many emerging markets to moving more quickly to market-determined exchange rate regimes is hindering the rebalancing needed to ensure a lasting, strong global recovery,” the official said.
A quiet day with the Dow Jones up 10 points (0.06%) and the Nasdaq up 33 points (0.81%)
