Blogs y opiniones de economia en ingles

Below are the upside resistance targets based on the work of Edson Gould. The targets, based on the $0.18 low, are: $0.43 $0.52 $0.60 Each of the upside resistance targets are levels to expect that the price will either trade … Continue reading →

I recently attended a very interesting presentation by Dan Ariely hosted by one of the best consultants on corporate performance, and employee management, MindGym. These guys approach human resources from an angle that is truly based on science, not management theory or the latest fad in how to motivate people and manage organisations.

So, they teamed up with Dan Ariely, one of the best behavioural psychologists in the world, and asked what makes a company perform really well? The answer will surprise you: It’s their people. Everybody always says that we live in a knowledge economy, but hardly anyone seems to really understand what that means. One answer Dan provides is that you need a workforce that is highly motivated and feels that it is being treated fairly and can grow within the organisation. Leaving everything else equal, companies with a more motivated workforce perform better in terms of productivity, profitability, and share price according to Dan.

But, in my view, there is a step missing and that step is, as usual, hidden in the term “everything else equal”. If you work in the same company as Dilbert, which is full of morons, you can be as motivated as you like, neither you nor the company you work for will ever be successful. 

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So, step one is: hire skilled people that will succeed at their job.

In his presentation, Dan mentioned that interviewing candidates is one of the worst methods to select candidates for a job. It creates the illusion of knowledge about the candidate and an illusion of being able to predict his or her performance without any evidence that the interviewer actually gets better at predicting the performance of the candidate. In fact, first impressions are usually wrong when it comes to interviewing candidates because the three necessary conditions for first impressions to be informative are not met, as explained by Daniel Kahneman here. First impressions tend to be reliable if you are in a controlled environment, doing an exercise that you have done very often and you get immediate feedback. Job interviews may or may not be a controlled environment, but for most of us it is not something we do every day, and it certainly is not something where we get immediate feedback. In fact, feedback about the performance of the new hire is months down the road from our decision to hire him or her.

Second, there is plenty of evidence that people tend to hire people that are like them and that they can relate to. However, there is absolutely zero evidence that this leads to the selection of high-performing candidates.

If interviews are actually reducing your ability to hire high-performing candidates, what are the important attributes to look for? It’s not politically correct to say this, but the evidence is clear. The candidates with the highest cognitive ability tend to be the ones that perform best. So ideally, you would just ask every candidate to perform an IQ test including verbal reasoning skills, etc. And if you can’t do that, then here is a top tip: Look at the grades the candidates had in school or at university. The literature on human intelligence shows that school grades have no predictive ability to forecast if someone is successful in life, in the labour market, or elsewhere. The only thing that grades in school are highly correlated with is IQ. The reason why school grades are not predictive of success in life is not that schools don’t prepare students for real life, it is because real life does a horrible job at identifying skilled people and then promoting them.

But cognitive ability isn’t everything. Someone may be smarter than everybody else, but if he is a smartass then he won’t succeed. Cognitive ability is a foundation on which to build, it isn’t the finished product. A person will be successful only if he or she is willing to learn and not just in university or for tests but learn every day. And never, ever stop. I do this by writing these missives that force me to look for new things to learn and write about. You do this by reading these missives every day. Congratulations!

Finally, the last of the important predictors of a successful employee is emotional stability. It is incredibly difficult to work with someone who is an emotional volcano, ready to erupt at any time without prior notice. But it is also very difficult to work with someone who is so introverted and insecure that he or she will never dare to say anything or provide valuable insights. What you need are people that are in the happy middle. Emotionally strong, but not overbearing, resilient against stress, and not defeatist when facing challenges.

If you find all three elements (cognitive ability, a willingness to learn, and emotional stability) you have found a great new hire. Congratulations, now do that a couple of hundred times and you can move on to step two and read Dan Ariely’s research on how to motivate people.

In a nutshell, this society is a very useful Idiocracy...







First I will sum up the events of the past two weeks:
Going into last week's FOMC meeting, inflation hysteria was reaching a zenith. The WSJ warned that the Fed was leaning hawkish into the meeting, yet somehow the Fed's shifting forward the schedule on tightening STILL shocked markets. The very same pundits who had been screaming the Fed was behind the curve somehow didn't see the Fed changing course, even though it was their hysteria that forced the Fed to pivot their stance on rate hikes. There were many reasons why today's pundits were biased towards the inflation hypothesis. CEOs were using inflation as an excuse to raise prices. Billionaires were using it as an excuse to deride wage hikes. Ponzi schemers were using inflation as a reason to bid up over-priced homes, cyclical stocks, and Bitcoins. As always, there was plenty of conflict of interest to go around. 
Since that Fed pivot, there appears to be a lot of confusion over what just happened. Some pundits are of the mind that a Fed tightening will be good for cyclicals, however, that is not the case. Their argument is that higher interest rates are good for financials and other "short duration" trades. However, what the Fed-speak did was to flatten the yield curve meaning short term rates rose and long term rates fell. Future growth rates declined at the prospect of a tighter Fed. None of which is good for cyclicals. Which is why over the past week Wall Street has been rotating back to "long duration" trades - what I call deflation trades. This means long T-bonds and long Tech stocks.
It turns out that the cure for high prices is high prices. Inflation scaremongers should remember that fact, but they won't. So we will see this movie again no doubt.
These are not bright people. But they are useful idiots.
Here we see what "inflation" looks like on an absolute basis instead of the year-over-year pandemic comparison that has generated so much hysteria:



 

This is all very much deja vu of 2018 when the Trump tax cut came into effect and the global reflation trade imploded. Today in addition, we got news that Biden reached an agreement with the Senate on an infrastructure bill - one more thing that is fully priced into "momentum value" stocks. 
The entire rest of the world ex-U.S. is effectively part of the reflation trade. From Emerging Markets to the commodity heavyweights (Australia/Canada). While European value stocks are the best performing market year to date. 


 

All of which is why the Dow has yet to confirm the new all time high on the S&P and Nasdaq. Not only is the Dow heavy on cyclicals, but it's price weighted so it's not as overly influenced by the mega cap Tech stocks. Apple, which is the largest market cap stock in the world, is only weighted 20th in the Dow 30 index.








Here we see that breadth and new highs on the S&P 500 have collapsed. Only a very few massively overvalued and overbought mega cap Tech stonks are holding up the index.






Even within the Nasdaq breadth is abysmal





What's so good about conning people into believing something that isn't true?
It's extremely lucrative for those who are looking to sell things to unsuspecting sheeple. 





In summary, overnight risk has increased exponentially over this past week.

Births/deaths:

Outperformance:

He’d been solidly in the second quartile every year for 14 years in a row. And where do you think that put him for the 14 years overall within his competitive universe? 4th percentile. In normal life, we say, well, if you range from 27 to 47, where are you on average? About 37. And the answer in his case was 4. By being in the top half for 14 years, he was in the top decile for the whole period. And I thought that was a great realization.

Code:

Software is a lever on the real world.

Someone writes code, and all of a sudden riders and drivers coordinate a completely new kind of real-world transportation system, and we call it Lyft. Someone writes code, and all of a sudden homeowners and guests coordinate a completely new kind of real-world real estate system, and we call it AirBNB. Someone writes code, etc., and we have cars that drive themselves, and planes that fly themselves, and wristwatches that tell us if we’re healthy or ill.

Work all day:

“Research indicates that five hours is about the maximum that most of us can concentrate hard on something,” says Alex Pang, founder of Silicon Valley consultancy Strategy and Rest and author of several books examining the links between shorter working hours and productivity. “There are periods when you can push past that, but the reality is that most of us have about that good work time in us every day.”

Quits:

Workers have had more than a year to reconsider work-life balance or career paths, and as the world opens back up, many of them will give their two weeks’ notice and make those changes they’ve been dreaming about.

Surveys show anywhere from 25% to upwards of 40% of workers are thinking about quitting their jobs.

“I don’t envy the challenge that human resources faces right now,” says Anthony Klotz, an associate professor of management at Texas A&M University.

Have a good weekend.

Biden Refuses To Issue Erdogan Meeting Details: "I'll Let The Turks Tell You About It"

President Biden on Wednesday said he's feeling "very good" following the bilateral meeting with Turkey's Recep Tayyip Erdogan, but both sides have remained tight lipped about what was actually discussed in the Monday meeting on the sidelines of the one-day NATO summit.

US-Turkey relations were already at a low point going into the meeting, particularly after the Biden administration's formal recognition of the Armenian Genocide. But when asked by a reporter about the meeting, Biden declined to divulge any details:

President Joe Biden on Tuesday declined to offer details about his one-on-one meeting with Turkish President Recep Erdogan, saying he'd let the Turks talk about it.

'We had long discussions and I feel very good about our meeting. I'll let the Turks tell you about it,' he told reporters when he arrived at the Europa Building for meetings with European leaders.

Via Turkish Presidency's office

Erdogan had simply described the dialogue as "productive and sincere" - saying optimistically that "We think that there are no issues between US and Turkey relationship that are unsolvable and that areas of cooperation for us are richer and larger than problems."

But in terms of what expected to be the central most contentious issue of Turkey's acquirement of the Russian S-400 system, for which Washington has threatened sanctions, both sides are keeping mum.

Erdogan subsequently merely mentioned inter-NATO discussions about how the Afghan pullout is going, according to the Daily Mail:

"If they don't want us to leave Afghanistan, if they want [Turkish] support there, then the diplomatic, logistic and financial support that the United States will give us will of great importance," Erdogan said during a press conference following his meeting with Biden. While Biden reportedly said he and Erdogan had a "positive and productive meeting" and expressed confidence in making "real progress with Turkey and the United States," the Turkish president described the talks as "productive and sincere."

Seems about right: Erdogan emerged from his bilat with Biden saying "there are no problems in Turkey-US ties that don't have a solution", but the meeting did not actually produce any solutions. https://t.co/3FI5ms8SpT

— Gregg Carlstrom (@glcarlstrom) June 15, 2021

Recently the White House indicated it's still at this very late point attempting to convince Ankara to give back the S-400 missiles in its possession. The US has long dangled the US Army's Patriot systems as an 'alternative' which might induce Turkey to halt progress on taking the S-400 live in operation. 

It should be recalled that Biden has long vowed to "get tough" on Turkey and Erdogan, after the Democrats have long charged that Trump pursued a detrimental 'bromance' with the Turkish strongman. But judging by how things went Monday, and the apparent mutual silence on divulging details, it doesn't appear Biden accomplished much if anything regarding prior tough talk on Turkey at all.

Tyler Durden Tue, 06/15/2021 - 17:05

9 Signs That Some Of America's Long-Term Trends Are Starting To Become Very Serious Short-Term Problems

Authored by Michael Snyder via The Economic Collapse blog,

Ignoring long-term problems can work for a while, but eventually they catch up with you...

Over the years, I have written many articles about alarming long-term trends in our society that desperately needed to be addressed.  Of course the vast majority of those long-term trends never got much attention, because our political system tends to reward politicians that focus on short-term issues.  As a result, many of the long-term trends that I have written about previously have now gotten to a point where they have started to become very serious short-term problems.  In this article, I would like to share 9 examples of this with you.

#1 I have been warning about exploding debt levels for as long as I have been writing about the economy.  Most people know that the U.S. national debt has now crossed the 28 trillion dollar threshold, but hardly anyone is talking about the explosion of corporate debt that we have been witnessing in recent months.  According to the Federal Reserve, total corporate debt in the United States is now up to a whopping 11.2 trillion dollars…

Before the pandemic, U.S. companies were borrowing heavily at low interest rates. When Covid-19 lockdowns triggered a recession, they didn’t pull back. They borrowed even more and soon paid even less.

After a brief spike, interest rates on corporate debt plummeted to their lowest level on record, bringing a surge in new bonds. Nonfinancial companies issued $1.7 trillion of bonds in the U.S. last year, nearly $600 billion more than the previous high, according to Dealogic. By the end of March, their total debt stood at $11.2 trillion, according to the Federal Reserve, about half the size of the U.S. economy.

#2 Needless to say, this level of corporate debt is not even close to sustainable, and we are starting to see a lot of prominent names go bankrupt.  In fact, one of the largest mall owners in the entire country officially filed for bankruptcy on Sunday…

Washington Prime Group, a major mall owner of more than 100 locations across the United States, filed for bankruptcy, citing pandemic-related shutdowns.

The Columbus, Ohio-based company filed for Chapter 11 late Sunday, saying Covid-19 “created significant challenges” and that the move is “necessary.” Washington Prime secured $100 million in new funding to support its day-to-day operations so it can “continue in the ordinary course without interruption.”

#3 The standard of living in the United States has been going down for a very long time.  Here in 2021, inflation is growing at a much faster rate than wages are, and this is squeezing middle class families like never before.  One of the ways that families are dealing with this is by putting off major purchases, and that is one of the reasons why the average age of the vehicles on our roads has now reached an all-time record high…

The average age of vehicles on U.S. roadways rose to a record 12.1 years last year, as lofty prices and improved quality prompt owners to hold on to their cars longer.

It was the first time the average vehicle age rose above 12 years, according to data released Monday by research firm IHS Markit. While the average vehicle age has risen steadily over the last 15 years, the trend accelerated during the coronavirus pandemic partly because of a drop in new-car sales, IHS said.

#4 America’s growing homelessness crisis has accelerated greatly during the pandemic, and the big cities in California are being hit the hardest.  At this point, it is really difficult to navigate through the streets of San Francisco without stumbling over a tent or stepping in human excrement…

For a city as opulent as San Francisco, it’s long been jarring to see the extreme poverty of those experiencing homelessness on its streets. If you walk around downtown, tents, makeshift cardboard beds and human excrement can be seen littering the sidewalks. Impoverished people lie on the ground as a blur of highly paid professionals whiz by.

#5 The homelessness crisis is also one of the factors that is fueling the dramatic rise in crime rates that we have been seeing all over the nation.  Once upon a time, millions of eager tourists would flock to Venice Beach, but now the phrase “like hell went to hell” is being used to describe conditions at that once pristine tourist trap…

Year-to-date numbers show that robberies have nearly tripled since the same period last year. Homeless-related robberies are up 260 percent; homeless-related assaults with a deadly weapon is up 118 percent; property crimes and area burglaries are up 85 percent; and grand theft auto is up 74 percent.

According to Embrich, felony arrests are up 68 percent, while misdemeanor arrests have grown by 355 percent. But arrests aren’t enough: Suspects are often released back onto the streets within hours.

#6 The police are the ones that are supposed to protect us from crime and restore order when things get out of control, but now they are leaving public service in record numbers.  After being endlessly demonized by leftist activists and the mainstream media, police officers are either retiring or resigning at a staggering rate….

Police retirements have risen by 45 percent in the past year, with officers opting out of forces across the country amid Black Lives Matter demonstrations that fueled anti-cop rhetoric.

The alarming statistic was revealed by the Police Executive Research Forum on Sunday, with the organization also revealing that resignations rose by 18 percent during the same twelve month period.

#7 Have you noticed that many of our cities are becoming disgustingly filthy?  When I was growing up, I often heard the phrase “cleanliness is next to godliness”, but you never hear anyone use it anymore.  These days, filth and grime are everywhere, and that has resulted in widespread infestations.  Many of our cities now have massive problems with rats and bed bugs, but Chicago is the worst of them all…

The Windy City is known for quite a few things: hot dogs, deep dish, baseball. But here’s one thing you probably don’t associate with Chicago: bed bugs. Turns out these tiny hitchhiking pests are quite fond of our city, according to the latest numbers available through Atlanta-based Orkin, a company that specializes in pest control services.

In fact, Chicago ranked no. 1 on the 2021 list, according to Orkin, reclaiming the top spot for the first time since 2017, when it slipped to no. 3, just behind Baltimore and Washington. For the sixth year in a row, Orkin also ranked Chicago the “rattiest” city in America.

#8 I have been writing about the drought in the western half of the country for years, but here in 2021 it is the worst we have ever seen.  As I write this article, an astounding 88 percent of the West is officially in a state of drought…

Lakes at historically low levels, unusually early forest fires, restrictions on water use and now a potentially record heat wave: even before summer’s start the US West is suffering the effects of chronic drought made worse by climate change.

Eighty-eight percent of the West was in a state of drought this week, including the entire states of California, Oregon, Utah and Nevada, according to official data.

#9 When drought gets bad enough, it leads to water shortages, and we will want to watch developments in California very closely.  Water supplies have gotten very tight throughout the state, and officials in Santa Clara County just officially declared “a water shortage emergency”…

Santa Clara County is in extreme drought. We can’t afford to wait to act as our water supplies are being threatened locally and across California. We are in an emergency and Valley Water must do everything we can to protect our groundwater resources and ensure we can provide safe, clean water to Santa Clara County residents and businesses.

To better deal with these threats and the emergency they are causing, today my fellow Board Members and I unanimously declared a water shortage emergency condition in Santa Clara County. This declaration, which is among the strongest actions we can take under law, allows Valley Water to work with our retailers, cities and the county to implement regulations and restrictions on the delivery and consumption of water. We also are urging the County of Santa Clara to proclaim a local emergency and join us in underscoring the seriousness of the threats posed by the extreme drought.

Over the past few years, America has been hit by crisis after crisis, and many are yearning for a return to the good old days.  Unfortunately, that simply is not going to happen.

The United States is never going to be like it once was.  Too many things have changed, and our culture has been radically transformed over the past several decades.

Many of the items that I have shared in this article are simply symptoms of much broader cultural problems.  We are a deeply, deeply sick society, and it is getting worse with each passing day.

*  *  *

Michael’s new book entitled “Lost Prophecies Of The Future Of America” is now available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.

Tyler Durden Tue, 06/15/2021 - 16:45

WTI Extends Gains After Biggest Crude Draw In 5 Months

Oil prices extended their recent (meteoric) rise with WTI topping $72 - 32 month highs - as investors weighed the outlook for rising demand (hopes on gasoline and aviation fuel use rise from pandemic lows and global stockpiles are drawn down) against extended anti-virus curbs in some economies (with officials tackling the challenge posed by more infectious variants).

"The continuing good news on the demand front and upbeat sentiment on the financial markets as the key reasons for the latest upswing," Commerzbank analyst Eugen Weinberg said in a note.

" ... In our opinion, however, the crucial (fundamental) test for the oil market and its subsequent price performance is yet to come - will demand continue to recover as dynamically as it has been doing in recent weeks despite the new virus variants that keep sparking renewed restrictions?"

The latest test for this thesis will be tonight's inventory sneak peek ahead of tomorrow's official data.

API

• Crude -8.537mm (-4.2mm exp) - biggest draw since January

• Cushing -1.526mm

• Gasoline +2.852mm (unch exp)

• Distillates +1.956mm (+200k exp)

Analysts expected crude stocks to fall for the 4th straight week and were right as Crude stocks fell by the most since January (as product inventories rose for the 3rd straight week)...

Source: Bloomberg

WTI hovered around $72.25 (the highest since Oct 2018) ahead of the print and spiked higher on the big crude draw...

"The fact that oil prices are still showing few signs of slowing means there has to be some concern that if we go too much higher, we could start to see some early signs of demand destruction," said Michael Hewson, chief market analyst at CMC Markets UK.

"For now, that doesn't appear to be happening, but we've still made another 24-month high on Brent, pushing us closer to $75 a barrel and the highs from 2019," he said in a market update.

"If we go much above $80 that picture could change quite quickly."

Finally we note that brent crude prices have been tracking - almost perfectly - the optimistic rebound in global macro data...

And as OilPrice.com's Tsvetana Paraskova notes, although oil may not be headed to a new supercycle, prices still have room to rise from current levels because of a strong demand rebound and expected tightness in supply, some of the world's largest commodity trading groups say.

There is a chance for $100 oil, Jeremy Weir, chief executive officer at commodity trader Trafigura, told the FT Commodities Global Summit on Tuesday.

"You need higher prices to incentivize… and also maybe to build on the cost of carbon in the future as well. You also need to attract capital in the business," Weir told the online debate.

The largest commodity traders are bullish on oil in the near term, too.

Brent Crude traded at over $73.50 a barrel early on Tuesday, but the top executives of the trading houses see further upsides.

"Higher from here" for the next six months, Glencore's Head of Oil Marketing, Alex Sanna, told the same event today. According to Sanna, better news about vaccination programs, inflation bringing in investor cash, and the demand recovery will all contribute to rising oil prices.

Tyler Durden Tue, 06/15/2021 - 16:34

"We Can Now Return To Life As We Know" - More States Move To Reopen As US COVID Deaths Top 600K

As worries about the spread of deadly COVID variants prompts the UK to delay plans to reopen its economy, in the US, it's full steam ahead as more major states announced reopening measures on Tuesday, while the number of confirmed COVID deaths in the country topped 600K.

Daily US cases and deaths have fallen substantially as the percentage of the adult population that has been vaccinated has climbed. Now, with some states hitting their thresholds for herd immunity, they're loosening the yoke of repressive restrictions that were justified for more than a year because of COVID.

California, New York and Maryland all affirmed plans to drop most of their COVID protocols on Tuesday in what the press mostly characterized as a "full reopening" after months of lockdowns across the country.

Gov. Gavin Newsom of California rescinded the Golden State's stay-at-home order, ended capacity restrictions and stopped the state's tier system that determined which rules certain companies were forced to follow. Newsom announced a "grand reopening" for the state, which was memorably the first in the US to shut down in the March 2020, kicking off a wave of national lockdowns. The state has also "aligned itself" with the CDC's new guidelines for mask wearing which states that fully vaccinated people can ditch their masks in most settings.

In New York, Gov. Andrew Cuomo joyfully announced on Tuesday that the Empire State would be lifting all of its COVID-19 restrictions after the state on Monday passed the 70% threshold whereby 70% of the state's adults have received at least one dose of a COVID vaccine.

Capacity restrictions will be lifted in most settings, and mask and cleaning protocols will also be relaxed. Though restrictions will remain in some places, like, well, nursing homes (an area where Cuomo is notoriously vulnerable) hospitals and schools.

"What does 70% mean? That means that we can now return to life as we know," Cuomo said Tuesday.

"All the state-mandated restrictions are lifted on commercial social settings sports and recreation construction, manufacturing, retail buildings, all across the board we can get back to living and businesses can open, because the state mandates are gone," Cuomo said.

Masks will still be required on mass transit and in taxis and ride-hails since that is a CDC recommendation, but they are not required indoors anywhere anymore by the state of New York.

In the Old Line State, Gov. Larry Hogan said he would lift the state's COVID state of emergency orders as of July 1 now that 72% of Maryland adults have received at least one dose of the vaccine. Hogan said at a news conference in Annapolis that all emergency mandates and restrictions put in place in Maryland over the past 15 months will be terminated. There will no longer be a statewide mask order in effect in any setting, including schools, camps and child-care facilities (though businesses can still require masks be worn on their premises).

July 1 will mark the beginning of a "45-day grace period," in which some regulations will still be relaxed, Hogan said. That includes drivers' license renewals and a moratorium on evictions, which won't expire until Aug. 15. Right next door in Virginia, Gov. Ralph Northam has already said he will allow his state's emergency declaration to expire at the end of June.

Most of these states offered some kind of statewide vaccination lottery program offering rewards in the millions of dollars for a lucky few as an incentive to convince more adults to accept the vaccine.

But for a reminder of how quickly things can change, just look over toward the UK, where PM Boris Johnson revived restrictions for England yesterday, and where Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon said Tuesday that plans for easing restrictions will be put on hold due to the dangerous "delta" mutant strain which was first documented in India.

Tyler Durden Tue, 06/15/2021 - 16:29

Foreigners Dump The Most US Stocks Since 2019

Having broken its 4-month streak of buying in March (the longest streak since 2017), China sold US Treasuries for the second straight month in April (the latest TIC data available), down to fall to $1.096trn in April from $1.100trn in March...

Source: Bloomberg

But, Japan’s holdings increased in April by $36.4b to $1.277t

Source: Bloomberg

But, perhaps the most notable aspect of today's TIC data was that for the first time since April 2020, Foreigners sold US equities in April... (and that was the biggest net selling since August 2019 when we had the repo crisis and NOT QE)...

Additionally, the last twelve months' transactions in TSYs by foreign central banks just turned positive for the first time since Feb 2015...

Overall in April:

• Foreign net buying of Treasuries at $49.6b

• Foreign net selling of equities at $13.3b

• Foreign net buying of corporate debt at $10.1b

• Foreign net buying of agency debt at $46.8b

And finally, despite the 12mth net buying, the recent trend of rotation into Treasury reserves from gold may have just reverted...

Source: Bloomberg

Tyler Durden Tue, 06/15/2021 - 16:13

Bitcoin, Black Gold, & Breakevens Bounce As Retail Sales Slump Sinks Stocks

Futures trod water overnight but the wave of selling pressure began at the cash market open (remember Friday is Quad Witch and there is some serious gamma malarkey flying around as yesterday's closing ramp showed). Small Caps bounced hard after the European close but faded late on. Nasdaq was the day's biggest loser...

Stocks just could not sustain the idiocy of the late-day meltup in stocks yesterday...

A strong 20Y auction eased some of the weakness in Treasuries today, but 30Y yields are still up 6bps on the week...

Source: Bloomberg

But notably - ahead of tomorrow's FOMC - 10Y Yields were unable to break and hold above 1.50%...

Source: Bloomberg

Breakevens rebounded today...

Source: Bloomberg

The dollar broke out of its short-term narrow range to the upside today, testing stops above last week's payrolls print...

Source: Bloomberg

Cryptos managed gains today with Bitcoin leading once again, back above $41k, erasing the losses since the China crackdown crash...

Source: Bloomberg

After 4 straight limit down days, Lumber rebounded from limit down to limit up today before sliding into its close - but ended higher (finding support at $1000)...

Source: Bloomberg

Gold was down again today...

Copper crashed by the most since October (4th down day in the last 5)...

But crude surged ahead of tonight's API inventory data, with WTI back above $72...

Brent crude and the global macro economic surprise index have been glued at the hip since early March...

Source: Bloomberg

Finally, the dismal disappointment in retail sales today, combined with Empire Manufacturing's miss, a worse than anticipated drop in homebuilder confidence, and a bigger than expected drop in business inventories, the US macro surprise index fell to its lowest since May 2020...

Source: Bloomberg

Maybe Dr.Copper is on to something!?

Tyler Durden Tue, 06/15/2021 - 16:00

Feds Investigating Suspected Chinese Spies' Return To US Ahead Of COVID Travel Ban

Authored by Joseph Simonson via the Washington Free Beacon (emphasis ours),

Intelligence officials are investigating why suspected Chinese spies returned to the United States on student and work visas at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, according to internal government documents reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon.

Travelers at an Air China desk in Feb. 2020 / Getty Images

Hundreds of Chinese nationals are the subject of a federal probe after law enforcement officials flagged their travel at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. The Chinese nationals returned to the United States earlier than expected in January 2020, often having modified their travel plans. Then-president Donald Trump signed an executive order restricting entry from non-citizens and residents from China on Jan. 31, 2020.

The episode is recounted in an internal report that circulated among various national security and law enforcement agencies on June 3. That report surmises that the Chinese students returned to the United States earlier than expected in order to avoid future travel restrictions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. The United States recorded its first COVID-19 case on January 21, the same day a Chinese scientist said the virus could spread person to person.

"The team examined 58,000 inbound Chinese F/J visa holders in the [Passenger Name Record] database and identified 396 individuals whose return travel was [scheduled] after January 2020 but had returned in January 2020," the report reads.

Although intelligence officials have not concluded whether the hundreds of monitored students were confirmed spies, the students' modified travel suggests that many Chinese nationals were aware of the severity of COVID-19, in spite of assurances to the contrary from their government and U.S. health officials. The World Health Organization did not declare a global health emergency until Jan. 31, 2020, even though China ordered a quarantine for the entire city of Wuhan eight days before.

Education watchdogs say the memo highlights the risk to national security posed by America's lax student visa system.

"The Chinese government relies on nontraditional collectors of information as an important piece of its espionage efforts. Academia is not immune," said Rachelle Peterson, a senior research fellow at the National Institution of Scholars. "Cutting-edge research, technological inventions, and other forms of intellectual property are key targets for the Chinese government, which has sought to create in its foreign-based citizens a sense of obligation to bring back something of use for the Chinese Communist Party."

U.S. intelligence agencies have long warned universities and research facilities about the threat of Chinese espionage. Roughly 30 percent of all foreign students in the country come from China—totaling about 340,000 people. In September 2020, the United States canceled more than 1,000 student and research visas for Chinese students, claiming the recipients had ties to the Chinese military.

The Trump administration made confronting China's military and espionage practices a cornerstone of its agenda, with Trump spy chief John Ratcliffe calling China "the greatest threat to America today, and the greatest threat to democracy and freedom world-wide since World War II." Trump signed an executive order in May 2020 barring "certain graduate-level and above Chinese nationals associated with entities in China" from entering the country.

The National Institute of Health opened an ongoing investigation into recipients of its research grants in 2019. The Free Beacon reported on June 14, 2020, that at least 54 scientists who received National Institute of Health grants were fired for failure to disclose their ties to foreign governments, particularly China.

The investigation into the movements and purpose of the Chinese nationals remains ongoing, but the report serves as another indication that Chinese Communist Party officials deliberately obscured the origins and severity of COVID-19 while secretly taking precautions for themselves.

On May 26, Rep. Diana Degette (D., Colo.), the chairwoman of the House Energy and Commerce oversight subcommittee, endorsed a GOP-led call for an investigation into whether COVID-19 escaped from a Chinese research lab. Other Democrats, as well as members of the media, have called for greater scrutiny into the virus's origins after having dismissed questions as part of a right-wing conspiracy theory.

 

Tyler Durden Tue, 06/15/2021 - 15:50

US Is Already Grappling With Real Inflation Rates Above 10% Kyle Bass Warns

Following the latest hot inflationary print, more investors are becoming skeptical of the Fed's view that inflationary pressures are "transitory". Yesterday, famed investor Paul Tudor Jones lamented the deluge of money pumped into the financial system by fiscal and monetary policymakers, and warned that markets might go "bat sh*t crazy" after Wednesday's FOMC press conference, which PTJ believes could be the most important meeting of Chair Jerome Powell's tenure, as the Fed sees its grip on a rapidly overheating economy start to slip.

On Tuesday morning, billionaire hedge fund investor Kyle Bass warned during an appearance on CNBC that official gauges of inflation aren't accurately reflecting how much of Americans' wealth is being eroded by the Treasury and the Fed's twin money issuance programs, and that the actual amount by which inflation is eating away at Americans' savings is already in the double-digits.

Digging into the weeds, Bass said that Fed uses "chain-weighted inflation numbers" which are "designed to be artificially low." Because of this, Bass believes actual inflation in the US is more than 10% with rates at 0.

"We're in a new world where unfortunately the wealth gap is going to widen, the income gap is going to widen and we're going to see more social pressure in the markets," says @Jkylebass on the Fed maintaining low rates. pic.twitter.com/uO98FOuqID

— Squawk Box (@SquawkCNBC) June 15, 2021

Right now, investors who own stocks need to bank double-digit returns just to keep up, Bass said.

"Typically stocks keep up at about 85% of inflation so you're not going to lose too much by owning the market vis-a-vis inflation...but you're going to need to break mid-teens numbers if you want to make money like we're seeing today."

He pointed to Tuesday morning's wholesale price data as an example.

"If you look at retail sales, they're at all time highs in nominal terms today, much higher than they were pre-pandemic, and we still lack 8 million jobs. It's fascinating to see the net results of such Fed largess and the money that they've printed really generating a monster in this retail sales number."

As Bass sees it, much of the Fed's asset buying is actually hurting normal Americans by - for example - contributing to the forces that are pushing home and food  prices higher.

"I think we're in a new world where unfortunately the wealth gap is going to widen the income gap is going to widen and we're going to see more social pressure in the markets. but when you look at the fed itself...look at housing, housing is in very short supply in many places in the country and yet the Fed is buying $40 billion in new mortgages per month, they buy $6 billion a day...there's housing unaffordability everywhere, there are some policies that I deem to be inconsistent with 'rational' behavior."

But what does this all mean for investors?

"We have all seen what's happened in previous taper tantrums, and you've seen 10-12% pullbacks in the market. Will that be healthy? It would probably scare some people but I do think that in the end that you can't worry about the market's every move because in real terms, we have negative real rates of more than 10% today, meaning you're losing 10% of your purchasing power annually at the current moment. Negative real rates are pretty repressive. And when food prices start moving...that's a huge regressive tax on the poor."

"Negative real rates are pretty repressive. When food prices start moving, like the UN Ag & Food index has moved in the last 5 months, that's a huge regressive tax on the poor. The Fed has got to really start thinking about food prices," says @Jkylebass. pic.twitter.com/B4nTbgUtIB

— Squawk Box (@SquawkCNBC) June 15, 2021

In other words, investors are going to need to book returns in the mid-teens just to tread water in this new inflationary paradigm.

"The US has never increased its money supply by a third in 14 months in the history of our country...is it a new paradigm? It's a new techtonic shift in the amount of money that's in the system. The Fed doesn't know where this is going to end up and neither do you and I just know, it just makes sense to me, with that much more money in the system, it's no wonder we're seeing prices move the way we're seeing them move."

"When you think about real business movements, you're seeing a fairly predictable population move," says @Jkylebass the inflation trade. "There's a way to stay ahead of it by buying land within 2, 2.5 hours of major metropolitan areas and investing in environmental remediation. pic.twitter.com/h3mNYzid4q

— Squawk Box (@SquawkCNBC) June 15, 2021

Echoing Ray Dalio's infamous "cash is trash" slogan, Bass warned that people need to be more "defensive" about their capital since cash is hurting them with a massive negative real return. One option, as Bass sees it, is to invest in real estate.

"I think there's a way to stay ahead of it by investing in land that's within 2 hours of major metros,"Bass added.

The Fed's two-day meeting is set to begin Tuesday morning, and will conclude on Wednesday with a press conference held by Chairman Jerome Powell. The market will be closely scrutinizing his every word for any hint that the Fed might be bringing forward its planed rate hikes. If PTJ and Bass are correct and Powell moves the goalposts for the market on Wednesday, expect pandemonium to ensue.

Tyler Durden Tue, 06/15/2021 - 15:35

Politico Fact Bombs New York Times Over Criticism Of Leak Prosecutor

Authored by Jonathan Turley,

The New York Times faced a stinging contradiction from Politico this week after it ran a story besmirching the lead prosecutor in the leak investigation launched under former Attorney General Bill Barr.

The article relies on anonymous sources to claim that Assistant U.S. Attorney Osmar Benevenuto of the District of New Jersey was brought in by Barr as part of his “small circle of trusted aides officials.” 

In reality, it appears that Benevenuto was not initially selected by Barr and does not appear to have known him.

Here is what the New York Times wrote:

“… William P. Barr revived languishing leak investigations after he became attorney general a year later. He moved a trusted prosecutor from New Jersey with little relevant experience to the main Justice Department to work on the Schiff-related case and about a half-dozen others, according to three people with knowledge of his work who did not want to be identified discussing federal investigations.

In February 2020, Mr. Barr placed the prosecutor from New Jersey, Osmar Benvenuto, into the National Security Division. His background was in gang and health care fraud prosecutions.

Mr. Benvenuto’s appointment was in keeping with Mr. Barr’s desire to keep matters of great interest to the White House in the hands of a small circle of trusted aides and officials.

However, Politico ran a story that suggests that Barr did not know Benevenuto when he selected him in February 2020. Rather, it says that Barr asked the U.S. Attorney for New Jersey, Craig Carpenito who told Politico:

“The attorney general told me that he wanted someone who was an experienced prosecutor and wasn’t afraid to make decisions. What he wanted to know was whether or not there was anything to these investigations, whether they should be closed or brought forward,” Carpenito said in an interview.

“I told him Oz Benvenuto was someone I trusted to give him an honest answer and he has the experience to separate the wheat from the chaff. … I also told him Oz had the intestinal fortitude to give him a real answer: He would say, ‘yes or no.’”

Benevenuto is a registered Democrat and, while it is true that he did not previously conduct a leak investigation, few prosecutors have. Instead, he was an experienced prosecutor in cases that often involve heavy reliance on searches of electronic and text communications.  He was made a federal prosecutor in 2012 by Paul Fishman, U.S. Attorney in New Jersey under Barack Obama.

The Politico article is full of praise from career prosecutors and others for Benevenuto’s independence and judgment. One of his former colleagues in the U.S. Attorney’s Office in New Jersey, Andrew Bruck, “scoffed at the idea that his friend was carrying out political orders for Barr. ‘The idea that Oz is or was Bill Barr’s stooge is just laughable. It’s just outrageous.'”  Even Daniel Richman (the law professor who is a close friend of former FBI Director James Comey and acted as his intermediary in passing notes to the media) praised Benevenuto for his judgment, intelligence and integrity.

So who are these three unnamed sources? It appears that career prosecutors and others (including Democrats) uniformly deny that Benevenuto was part of any inner circle or some ally of Barr’s. Indeed, there was ample reason for Barr to go outside of the Main Justice since he was seeking to launch a leak investigation that would potentially include many people inside the Trump Administration, including some political appointees.  It made a great deal of sense to find a seasoned prosecutor with no ties to Washington.

However, anonymous sources have been repeatedly used to fulfill narratives in the media.

As I wrote this week in USA Today, there are compelling reasons to fully investigate the subpoenas targeting reporters and members of Congress.  However, there is already that all-too-familiar effort to frame the facts to fit a narrative.

Tyler Durden Tue, 06/15/2021 - 15:15

An Apparently Confused Biden Goes Silent After Fielding Question About Putin

More clips have surfaced which highlight Biden's apparent difficulty in handling unscripted back-and-forth discussion during his ongoing foreign policy focused Europe trip. As early as the weekend at the G-7 the Associated Press had noticed a "handful of verbal stumbles" the US president made. As we also highlighted there would be more to come. And then at his big Monday night NATO summit presser, there was the following bizarre moment...

Vladimir Putin laughed at the suggestion that you had called him a 'killer,'" a CNN reporter asked. "Is that still your belief, sir, that he is a killer?"

The reporter followed with a second question, also asking, "Do you believe if he does agree to cooperate, then what kind of a challenge do you find yourself in? How would you ever trust him? And if Ronald Reagan said, 'trust, but verify,' what do you say to Vladimir Putin?"

The leader of the free world's brain just completely broke when he was asked if Putin is a "killer" pic.twitter.com/q1pEK4nMFp

— Caleb Hull (@CalebJHull) June 14, 2021

After an unusually long and awkward silence as Biden grasped for words, he later forgets the second question and looks around the room for a verbal que. 

Many pundits have observed that it's alarming that the leader of the free world is about to go into the biggest foreign policy meeting of his presidency, with Vladimir Putin, and he's appearing to have trouble keeping track of simple questions and verbal exchanges.

Journalist Glenn Greenwald on Monday wrote the following:

"Given this genuinely disturbing videos and others like it, it's a good day to remind everyone that the warnings that Biden is suffering from serious cognitive decline came *not* from MAGA people or Bernie supporters, but from worried establishment Dems," Greenwald said Monday.

There's growing speculation that Biden's planned-for "solo news conference" - as opposed to the norm in a bilateral summit of two world leaders jointly taking question from the press - is really about ensuring a predictable and scripted enough exercise to avoid any personal embarrassment which might involve the US president stumbling in his thoughts or grasping for words.  

"Obama met several times with Mr. Putin... Obama came under criticism at the time from rights groups for giving Mr. Putin a platform and for not challenging the Russian president more directly on human rights."https://t.co/nV1vxpqXB9

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) June 14, 2021

Certainly the White House fears that Putin would seek to capitalize on any potential 'confusion' on display by Biden, hence the solo press conference.

Tyler Durden Tue, 06/15/2021 - 14:56

Jon Stewart Hijacks Colbert Show With Lab-Leak Rant, Liberal Twitter Explodes

Comedian Jon Stewart overpowered Stephen Colbert's ability to shill on Monday, hijacking the Late Show's return to a live (and fully vaccinated) audience with an epic rant on the COVID-19 lab-leak theory.

"I think we owe a great debt of gratitude to science. Science has, in many ways, helped ease the suffering of this pandemic, which was more than likely caused by science," Stewart said after Colbert asked how he was feeling about the scientific response to COVID-19.

"Do you mean perhaps there’s a chance that this was created in a lab?" asked Colbert, adding "There's an investigation."

"A chance?" shot back Stewart - kicking the door open.

"Oh my god, there’s a novel respiratory coronavirus overtaking Wuhan, China, what do we do? Oh, you know who we could ask? The Wuhan novel respiratory coronavirus lab. The disease is the same name as the lab. That’s just a little too weird, don't you think? And then they asked those scientists - they're like 'how did this... so wait a minute, you work at the Wuhan respiratory coronavirus lab. How did this happen?' and they're like 'mmmm - a pangolin kissed a turtle?' and you're like 'no... the name of your lab! If you look at the name! Can I... let me see your business card. Show me your business card. Oh - I work at the coronavirus lab in Wuhan. Oh, cause there's a coronavirus loose in Wuhan. How did that happen?'

'Maybe a bat... flew into the Cloaca of a turkey and... then it sneezed into my chili. And now we all have Coronavirus."

Stewart landed one final joke as Colbert desperately tried to control the situation;

"HOLD IT, HOLD IT! What about this, what about this... listen to this! 'OH MY GOD, there's been an outbreak of chocolately goodness near Hershey, Pennsylvania. What do you think happened?'

'Oh I don't know, maybe a steam shovel mated with a cocoa bean?'

"Or... it's the fucking chocolate factory! Maybe that's it!" Stewart screamed.

Right now: Jon Stewart on the Covid Lab Leak “theory” is solid laughs pic.twitter.com/WlRX35p9WK

— siskin.eth (@mns) June 15, 2021

"Can I say this about scientists?" Stewart said after the break. "I love them and they do such good work but they are going to kill us all."

As noted by pundit Stephen Miller, Liberal Twitter is not happy.

On the first Late Show back with a full audience, Jon Stewart dives intensely down the COVID lab-leak rabbit hole, rebuffing Colbert’s repeated efforts to save him from himself.

— Jonathan Goldsbie (@goldsbie) June 15, 2021

(Click into Miller's feed for an avalanche of similar...)

US Intelligence. The Secretary of State. Officials at NIH. Us Senators. A president - All crazy conspiracy theorists

Jon Stewart - Shit now we have to believe the lab leak.

— Stephen L. Miller (@redsteeze) June 15, 2021

pic.twitter.com/dwKoVYXpNm

— Stephen L. Miller (@redsteeze) June 15, 2021 Tyler Durden Tue, 06/15/2021 - 14:44

Price Discovery Is Alive And Well In Crypto

Authored by Doug French via The Mises Institute,

“If the market continues to see wild swings based on Elon Musk tweets, it’s going to be a big setback for this asset class,” Matt Maley, chief market strategist for Miller Tabak + Co. told Bloomberg.

“The fact that it sees such wild swings to the tweets from one person takes away the legitimacy of the asset class.”

Reminds a bit of a financial planner who told me bitcoin is “manipulated” and followed up with the ultimate smear “unregulated.” Yikes.

Then the Chinese government made all sorts of threats concerning the mining and holding of crypto's top brand.

A wag on Twitter responded with words to the effect that when the Chinese banned Google in 2010 it didn’t seem to slow down the company. 

Weston Nakamura in an interview with Real Vision’s Jack Farley made the trenchant point, “This is what markets look like when you don't have global central banks artificially suppressing volatility, intervention of central banks buying every dip, putting a safety net under every single slight tremor or taper tantrum or whatever it may be, this is what happens.”

Making money isn’t easy. Whether it be working 9 to 5 or trading markets.

The Fed seeks to smooth every bump so everyone will stay calm and carry on, buying stocks.

Perhaps a viewer or two of his recent 60 Minutes interview caught Powell’s off-hand comment that the central bank has bailed out money market funds twice in recent months. Money market funds? Most people believe that is cash. 

There was no mention of the Plunge Protection Team or other secret committees to ensure the safety and soundness of securities markets.

Just keep plugging your savings into those 401(k)s, folks, and let the experts handle it.

Cyrptoland is a little different.

“This is a 70 vol asset, 80 vol, or whatever it is. What that means is that—forget what the volatility is, this is what freely trading markets look like. We haven't seen what freely traded markets look like for, I don't know, a decade or so,” Nakamura told Farley.

“There's no Chairman Powell that needs to come out and announce something for you to put your capital to work. Free markets will do that. That was on display today. 70 vol assets don't exist except for here and this is what 70 vol assets behaves like. If there is a value proposition behind it, you will see investors take advantage of it.” 

Farley, somewhat of a financial history buff, chimed in, “Weston, who would say hey, we had this Wild West before the Federal Reserve, what we had was banking panics, we had deflation, we had banks issuing their own currency. One thinks of this whole, Dave Portnoy launching Safemoon, someone launching CumRocket, someone else launching—all these coins new every day, perhaps it would remind you of the Wild West of banking before the Federal Reserve.”

That’s right, there used to be gold in them there banks. Unfortunately, not enough to cover all the paper notes these banks would issue. However, there wasn’t runaway asset inflation either. Having all of these different bank notes floating around might have been confusing. However, the market created note clearinghouses, what Murray Rothbard describes in A History of Money and Banking in the United States before the Twentieth Century as “A Free-Market ‘Central Bank.’” The Suffolk Bank and the Bank of New York, provided, as Rothbard wrote describing the former, “an island of monetary stability in an America contending with monetary chaos.” 

Professor David Howden writes in his chapter “A Pre-history of the Federal Reserve” (included in The Fed at One Hundred), of the New York clearinghouse created in 1853 “as a solution to a complex settlement process among New York City Banks.” He cites monetary scholar Richard Timberlake, who saw the Federal Reserve as no more than “an evolutionary development of the clearinghouse associations.” 

Today’s not-so-free-market central bank has two stated mandates, price stability and full employment, as well as a third that Mr. Nakamura calls out, “where asset prices can never go down for a certain cohort of investors.” If there is such a mandate, Nakamura says, just say so and then we’ll know “there really is no real market anymore when you have an unlimited non-economic actor in the market distorting prices, and furthermore, that other investors perceive them to be there, whether or not they're there. That is not a functioning market at all.”

Meanwhile, when crypto collectively hit the ditch, “[w]hat you saw today was functioning markets, even not functioning platforms, but functioning markets,” Nakamura said. 

He explains, “Bitcoin is not a US asset, just like oil is not a US asset, just like gold is not a US asset. Now, those are denominated in USD.” Sure, Americans think in US dollars, but “it's BTC/fiat, and it's not an American asset. People need to get that in their head. If you actually look at BTC/JPY (Japanese yen), the levels make a hell of a lot more sense.”

Investors are simply looking for ways to escape the US dollar and “What this crypto space does is it allows for 1 trillion or 2 trillion of that excess froth to be diverted away from stocks and from real estate and all that and to go into this very benign asset,” Nakamura told Farley. 

There will be a day when the Fed, the Treasury and the SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission) will stick their long regulatory snouts into crypto. It may not mean the digital party is over, but the markets will lose the price discovery elasticity that currently works so well.

Tyler Durden Tue, 06/15/2021 - 14:36

Biden Administration Moving Forward With Trump-Era Proposal For US Uranium Reserve

The Biden administration is taking steps to establish a US uranium reserve, a proposal put forward by the Trump administration which could boost mining of the mineral as well as the potential to expand nuclear energy in the United States.

"Yellowcake" uranium coming off a conveyor line

In Tuesday testimony before the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said that her department is laying the groundwork for such a move.

"We’re about to issue a request for information [RFI] regarding establishing a reserve," she said, adding "We are, I think this month, issuing an RFI on that."

Jennifer Granholm

In a major funding bill passed late last year, Congress set aside funds to establish the strategic reserve, which would buy US-mined uranium from domestic producers, which we assume is separate from the US reserves bought by Russia during Hillary Clinton's Uranium One scandal.

When asked why the Biden administration's budget request for 2022 didn't include funding for the reserve, Granholm cited the existing funding for the project.

"It had been appropriated for last year so it’s carrying over," she said.

A 2020 Trump administration report endorsed spending millions on the reserve, which would aim to boost domestic mining.

The concept is similar to that of the already existing strategic petroleum reserve, where the government can hold up to 714 million barrels of that fuel in case of an emergency.  -The Hill

Zero Hedge readers will recall our coverage on the uranium sector, which we said in April was set to benefit from several factors - including upcoming infrastructure spending, the reddit short squeeze crowd, an extremely bullish case laid out by a BofA analyst, and a passionate tweetstorm by former hedge fund manager Hugh Hendry, who said "A lot of you are invested in uranium. I commend you. I wish I was. Uranium is the rockstar of commodities. It doesn't mess around - bull and bear markets are of epic proportions."

Furthermore, Michael "big short" Burry advocated for converting US to nuclear power as a way for Democrats to create jobs in a 'green' industry.

Related stocks moved higher on the news.

And to review what we said in April:

The first reason is a mix of regulatory and market developments.

As we reported earlier today, the spot price for U3O8 moved above $30 per pound for the first time this year as uranium producers and mine developers hoovered up above-ground inventories and reactor construction continues apace. Two new research notes from BMO Capital Markets and Morgan Stanley say today’s price marks a floor and predict a rally in prices over the next few years to the ~$50 level by 2024, which - all else equal - would translate into soaring stock prices for names such as CCJ, UEC, URA and URNM.

Indeed, as Mining.com said, the stars seem to be aligning for a new phase of nuclear energy investment with the US, China and Europe bolstering the bull case for the fuel this month.

And while nuclear energy was not (yet) mentioned explicitly in the $2 trillion Biden infrastructure proposal released today, its federally mandated “energy efficiency and clean electricity standard” is hardly achievable without it. 

Curiously, the big regulatory move may be coming out of Europe, where - as we expected - Uranium is now officially part of the cool ESG crowd as over the weekend leaked documents showed a panel of experts advising the EU is set to designate nuclear as a sustainable source of electricity which opens the door for new investment under the continent’s ambitious green energy program.

Then there is China - as Mining.com notes, China’s 14th five-year plan released a fortnight ago also buoyed the uranium market with Beijing planning to up the country’s nuclear energy capacity by 46% – from 48GW in 2020 to 70GW by 2025. There are several factors working in uranium’s favor, not least the fact that annual uranium demand is now above the level that existed before the 2011 Fukushima disaster when Japan shut off all its reactors:

• Uranium miners, developers and investment funds like Yellow Cake (13m lbs inventory build up so far) are buying material on the spot market bringing to more normal levels government and utility inventories built up over the last decade

• Major mines are idled including Cameco’s Cigar Lake (due to covid-19) which accounts for 18m lbs or 13% of annual mine supply.  The world’s largest uranium operation McArthur River was suspended in July 2018 taking 25m lbs off the market

• Permanent closures so far this year include Rio Tinto’s Ranger operation in Australia (3m lbs) and Niger’s Cominak mine (2.6m lbs) which had been in operation since 1978. Rio is exiting the market entirely following the sale of Rössing Uranium in Namibia

• Like Cameco, top producer Kazatomprom, which mined 15% less material last year due to covid restrictions has committed to below capacity production (–20% for the state-owned Kazakh miner) for the foreseeable future

• Price reporting agency and research company UxC estimates that utilities’ uncovered requirements would balloon to some 500m lbs by 2026 and 1.4 billion lbs by 2035  

• Roughly 390m lbs are already locked up in the long term market while 815m lbs have been consumed in reactors over the last five years, according to UxC

• There are 444 nuclear reactors in operation worldwide and another 50 under construction – 2 new connections to the grid and one construction start so far in  2021

• Much cheaper and safer, small modular nuclear power reactors which can readily slot into brownfield sites like decommissioned coal-fired plants (or even underground or underwater) are expected to become a significant source of additional demand.

The last bullet brings us to reason number 2: the coming "small modular reactor" frenzy:

As Nikkei Asia reports today, one of Japan's top industrial engineering companies will join a US-led project to build a new type of nuclear power plant designed with added precautions against meltdowns. These plants will be built in the US, where they will propel the uranium sector to level it hasn't seen in decades (indicatively CCJ traded roughly double where it is today as just before the 2008 financial crisis).

According to the Nikkei, Japan's JGC Holdings will help build a plant in the state of Idaho designed by NuScale Power, an American company whose proposal for a small modular reactor (SMR) involves immersing the containment units in a pool of water.

Small nuclear reactors have been hailed as an option for replacing fossil fuel power plants as nations commit to cutting carbon dioxide emissions in the coming decade

And here, we get one step closer to Uranium becoming part of ESG: when Joe Biden meets Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga for a summit in the U.S. later this month, fighting climate change will be on the agenda and "small nuclear" - and uranium - will be high on the agenda.

JGC has invested $40 million for a roughly 3% stake in NuScale, one player in the emerging field of SMRs. The Japanese group will work with NuScale's parent, U.S.-based engineering company Fluor, on construction management and other aspects of the Idaho project.

One thing is clear: as the SMR strategy takes off, much more uranium will be needed, as the partners eventually could set their sights on similar projects in the Middle East - where JGC boasts a long track record in oil and petrochemical infrastructure - and Southeast Asia. In fact, the entire world could soon be covered in small, safe nukes which will lead to an unprecedented renaissance for the uranium sector.

Why the scramble for SMR?

The first reason is simple: price. Nuclear plants on the scale of 1,000 megawatts cost around $10 billion to build using established reactor designs. NuScale's SMR design - which completed a technical review by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission in August 2020, ahead of rival proposals - reportedly costs around $3 billion for more than 900 MW. The Idaho plant will have a capacity between 600 MW and more than 700 MW, according to announced plans. NuScale also has a strategic partnership with South Korea's Doosan Heavy Industries and Construction, which will supply components for the plant.

The second, and far more important reason, is safety. Japan's Fukushima nuclear disaster a decade ago shows what happens when reactor cooling systems break down. The loss of emergency power after a devastating 2011 tsunami led to reactor meltdowns at the Fukushima Daiichi plant operated by Tokyo Electric Power Co. Holdings. Well, NuScale's SMR design seeks to remove this risk, as the water in the pool takes a month to evaporate and helps keep the reactor's temperature down.

The U.S. government supports research and development in small-scale reactors. A Green Growth Strategy announced by Japan last year calls for "providing active support" to Japanese companies participating in experimental overseas projects in this field. Many existing nuclear plants in Japan, the U.S. and other advanced economies have been in operation for decades and require upgrades or decommissioning.

In short, between recent bullish market dynamics, and a sector that is on the cusp of becoming the next ESG craze, the promise of new SMR technologies could ensure uranium demand is stable for decades, leading to a new golden age for uranium stocks.

Tyler Durden Tue, 06/15/2021 - 14:15

Watch: Roger Waters Tells "Little Pr**k" Zuckerberg To "F**k Off" Following Request To Use Iconic Pink Floyd Song For Ad

Authored by Steve Watson via Summit News,

Pink Floyd song writer Roger Waters slammed Mark Zuckerberg during a press conference recently, announcing that the Facebook owner had offered a “huge, huge amount of money” to use the iconic song Another Brick In The Wall Part II in an advert for Instagram.

Speaking at an event to raise awareness about imprisoned WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, Waters noted the deep deep irony of Facebook wanting to buy and use a song that rails against ‘thought control’ and mindless conformity.

Waters described the development as part of Zuckerberg’s “insidious movement… to take over absolutely everything.”

Waters read out Facebook’s request, which noted “We want to thank you for considering this project. We feel that the core sentiment of this song is still so prevalent and so necessary today, which speaks to how timeless the work is.”

“And yet, they want to use it to make Facebook and Instagram more powerful than it already is,” Waters urged, adding “so that it can continue to censor all of us in this room and prevent this story about Julian Assange getting out into the general public so the general public can go, ‘What? No. No More.’”

“So it’s a missive from Mark Zuckerberg to me… with an offer of a huge, huge amount of money and the answer is, ‘f**k you! No f**king way!’,” Waters boomed to rapturous applause.

“I will not be a party to this bullsh-t, Zuckerberg,” Waters added.

He then asked “How did this little pr**k, who started off going, ‘She’s pretty, we’ll give her a four out of five. She’s ugly, we’ll give her a one’… How the f**k did he get any power in anything?”

“And yet here he is, one of the most powerful idiots in the world,” Waters emphasised.

Watch:

“¡Vete a la chingada!”: @rogerwaters a Mark Zuckerberg. El músico contó que le ofrecieron “una gran cantidad de dinero” por permitir el uso de Another brick in the wall II para promover Instagram. Lo narró en un acto por la libertad de Julian Assange (@Wikileaks)#VideosLaJornada pic.twitter.com/gEVqaor8Eo

— La Jornada (@lajornadaonline) June 12, 2021

Following media attention, Waters requested trolls to pile on and call him a hypocrite for posting the video on “Zuckerberg’s crappy censored platform”:

.@petercronau, thank you for paying attention brother. Calling all trolls, come on you pricks, call me a hypocrite for posting this on Zuckerberg’s crappy censored platform @Facebook now. https://t.co/3NYrW7Pw2i

— Roger Waters (@rogerwaters) June 12, 2021

You would know for sure that we had descended into dystopian hell if this song was ever approved for promoting shiny Instagram graphics, urging kids to sign up to liquify their brains and act like every other insta-zombie uploading 4 million selfies every second:

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Brand new merch now available! Get it at https://www.pjwshop.com/

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Tyler Durden Tue, 06/15/2021 - 14:00

Arizona Senator: State Lawmakers Prepared To Act On Findings From Election Audit

Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times,

The Arizona legislature is ready to take action if the election audit taking place in the state’s largest county uncovers irregularities, a state senator said.

“It’ll be our duty to act in whatever way is appropriate,” Arizona Sen. Wendy Rogers, a Republican who has been closely tracking the audit in Maricopa County, told The Epoch Times.

Auditors, led by Florida-based Cyber Ninjas, started reviewing ballots from the 2020 election at Veterans Memorial Coliseum in Phoenix last month, along with machines used in the contest and other election materials. Auditors expect to finish their work by the end of this month. They will then produce a report outlining what they found.

Contractors working for Cyber Ninjas, who was hired by the Arizona State Senate, work during a 2020 election audit at Veterans Memorial Coliseum in Phoenix, Ariz. on May 1, 2021. (Courtney Pedroza/Getty Images)

Arizona Senate President Karen Fann, a Republican who authorized the audit, said last month that she thinks some irregularities will be uncovered.

“I hope we don’t find anything serious. I think we’ll find irregularities that is going to say, you know what, there’s this many dead people voted, or this many who may have voted that don’t live here anymore. We’re going to find those,” she said.

Alexander Kolodin, who formerly represented Cyber Ninjas and remains a lawyer for the Arizona GOP, said in a recent interview that the audit “is going to show that something went wrong, because something goes wrong in every election.”

“I think even Maricopa County would probably admit that the question is, to what degree did it go wrong? Okay, that’s question one. But even that doesn’t tell you so much. It went wrong, and someone caused it to go wrong. The next question is, does the audit tell you who caused it to go wrong?” he said on NTD’s “Wide Angle.”

“If the audit illuminates that there’s [sic] vulnerabilities in X, Y, and Z parts of our election system, state legislatures can target those with a laser beam and fix X, Y, and Z parts of our election system,” he added.

Maricopa County ballots cast in the 2020 general election are examined and recounted by contractors working for Florida-based company, Cyber Ninjas, at Veterans Memorial Coliseum in Phoenix, Ariz., on May 6, 2021. (Matt York/AP Photo/Pool)

If the audit reveals fraud, then there would be a referral to law enforcement authorities, according to Fann. The Arizona Senate would focus on closing any loopholes in the election system.

Speaking just hours after spokespersons for the audit shot down rumors that hundreds of thousands of ballots were found missing, Rogers said she’s not sure what auditors will uncover.

“As of now we do not know what the results will be,” she said.

The first-term state senator, a retired U.S. Air Force pilot, has been keeping close tabs on the audit. She has been a regular presence at the coliseum, consulting with Cyber Ninjas CEO Doug Logan and helping lead tours for legislators from other states who want to see what’s happening.

Delegations from over a dozen states, including Georgia, Pennsylvania, and Virginia, have visited the audit in recent weeks.

“They want to come in to see what a gold standard forensic audit is and this is a real deep dive into not only counting the ballots, but looking at the machines and interestingly, examining very closely, microscopically if you will, the ballots themselves,” she said. “They have been blown away.”

Pennsylvania Sen. Doug Mastriano, a Republican who toured the coliseum, told The Epoch Times last week that he was impressed by what he saw. He recommended lawmakers from battleground states go to Arizona to tour the facility. Pennsylvania Republicans are pushing for a similar audit in their state, but leadership has not yet decided on whether to order one.

Rogers wanted people to know that Arizonans “are resolute” and “will never quit” on election integrity efforts.

“We will get to the bottom of the truth, not only for truth’s sake, but also to restore election integrity for 2022,” she said.

Tyler Durden Tue, 06/15/2021 - 13:54