By EconMatters
By EconMatters
We discuss the Macro and Micro outlook for the Oil Market, and everything in between in this latest market video. Oil is being propped up on forward looking fundamentals right now, it very easily could be much lower based upon current inventory levels.
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Source: Oil Market Discussion (Video)
By Tyler Durden
The Central Intelligence Agency has published nearly 13 million pages of declassified files online, documents which previously were physically accessible only from four computer terminals at the National Archives in College Park, Maryland.
The record include info on Nazi war crimes, the Cuban Missile Crisis, UFO sightings, human telepathy (“Project Stargate”) and much more. The release has been a long time coming: Bill Clinton first ordered all documents at least 25 years old with “historical value” to be declassified in 1995. The agency complied, however anyone who wanted access had to trek all the way to the US National Archives in Washington DC to get a peak.
In 2014, a nonprofit journalism organization called MuckRock filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit pressing the CIA to post all of its documents online, but the agency said it would take up to six years to scan everything according to engadget. At the same time, journalist Mike Best crowd-funded more than $15,000 to visit the archives to print out and then publicly upload the records, one by one, to apply pressure to the CIA. “By printing out and scanning the documents at CIA expense, I was able to begin making them freely available to the public and to give the agency a financial incentive to simply put the database online,” Best wrote in a blog post.
“Access to this historically significant collection is no longer limited by geography,” said Joseph Lambert, the CIA’s information management director in a press release. The agency was aiming to publish the documents by the end of 2017, but finished the work ahead of schedule.
“We’ve been working on this for a very long time and this is one of the things I wanted to make sure got done before I left. Now you can access it from the comfort of your own home,” said outgoing CIA director of information Lambert. The agency continues to review documents for declassification, so the treasure trove has not been unearthed in full, and there’s definitely more to follow.
* * *
The online records, shed light on the agency’s activities throughout the Vietnam, Korean and Cold War conflicts; they also includes documents relating to UFO sightings and psychic experiments from the Stargate program, which has long been of interest to conspiracy theorists. The archives also cover events from the 1940s the 1990s (each year, a new batch are declassified) and include details about the flight of war criminals from Nazi Germany, the quarter-mile Berlin tunnel built to tap Soviet telephone lines, internal intelligence bulletins and memos from former CIA directors, UFO reports and more.
The released trove also includes the papers of Henry Kissinger, who served as secretary of state under presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, as well as several hundred thousand pages of intelligence analysis and science research and development.
Among the more unusual records are documents from the Stargate Project, which dealt with psychic powers and extrasensory perception. Those …read more
Source: CIA Releases 13 Million Pages Of Declassified Documents: Include Psychic Experiments, UFO Research
Trump is suing a small New York town over the tax assessment that was done on his golf course. It claims his course is worth $15.1 million, he says it’s only worth $1.5 million. …read more
Source: Trump’s fight to slash taxes on $50M golf course
Trump is suing a small New York town over the tax assessment that was done on his golf course. It claims his course is worth $15.1 million, he says it’s only worth $1.5 million. …read more
Source: Trump’s fight to slash the taxes on his $50M golf course
By Tyler Durden
Unlike the other big banks, Goldman’s earnings release is a breeze: since the bank has virtually no balance sheet to use as a source of income (or loss), it is all about the income statement. And it was here that for yet another quarter, Goldman surprised to the upside, reporting Q4 Revenues of $8.17BN, higher than the $7.76BN estimated, translating to EPS of $5.08, also above the $4.73 estimate, and nearly 4 times the $1.27 reported a year ago.
Like other banks, Goldman benefited from a big pick-up in trading activity during the period, as investors reset portfolios in anticipation of an interest-rate increase from the US Federal Reserve, and as the election of Donald Trump spurred big bets on stocks that stood to benefit. Net revenues from the institutional client services division were up 25% from a year earlier to $3.6bn, led by a 78% jump in revenues from the fixed-income, currencies and commodities unit.
“After a challenging first half, the firm performed well for the remainder of the year as the operating environment improved,” said Lloyd C. Blankfein, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer. “We continued to manage our expenses carefully and we enter the new year with industry leading positions across our businesses, as well as strong capital and liquidity.”
Broken down by key operating group, most segments reported numbers that beat expectations with the exception of Equities sales and trading, which came in at $1.59BN, fractionally below the $1.61BN expected.
Other segments performed better in Q4:
The full breakdown of Goldman’s various revenue segments is shown in the chart below:
Other metrics:
In a notable variance from the other banks, Goldman’s Q4 compensation expenses, while declining from $3.2 billion to $2.45 billion, came in modestly higher than the expected $2.31 billion, as Lloyd Blankfein decided to reward his team for a job well done. Or the team that’s left at least: total Goldman staff decreased 7% during 2016, with the firm closing the year with 34,400 workers. As the following chart shows, the average accrued banker compensation rose to $338,576, the highest since Q4 of last year.
Source: Goldman Beats, Profits Surge As Trading Revenues Jump; Average Banker Comp Hits $338,600
By Tyler Durden
US retailer woes continued this morning, a trend the began well prior to the poor holiday spending season, when retail giant Target not only announced ahead of its Feb 28 Q4 earnigns result that comparable sales during the combined November/December period decreased 1.3%, but that “as a result of this softer-than-expected sales performance, the Company updated its fourth quarter and full-year 2016 guidance.”
Target now expects fourth quarter comparable sales in the range of (1.5) percent to (1.0) percent, compared with prior guidance of (1.0) percent to 1.0 percent. In fourth quarter 2016, Target expects both GAAP EPS from continuing operations and Adjusted EPS of $1.45 to $1.55, compared with prior guidance of $1.55 to $1.75.
For full-year 2016, Target now expects GAAP EPS from continuing operations of $4.57 to $4.67, compared with prior guidance of $4.67 to $4.87. The Company expects full-year 2016 Adjusted EPS of $5.00 to $5.10, compared with prior guidance of $5.10 to $5.30. The 43-cent difference between these ranges reflects $0.44 of early debt-retirement losses and a $0.01 benefit from the resolution of income tax matters.
“While we were pleased with Black Friday sales, December digital sales growth of more than 40 percent and continued strength in our Signature Categories, these results were offset by early season sales softness and disappointing traffic and sales trends in our stores,” said Brian Cornell, chairman and CEO of Target.
Target shares tumbled as much as 4.9% on the news, which has dragged Wal-Mart as much as 1.5% lower.
Source: Target Tumbles After Cutting Guidance, Reports Poor Comps; Drags Wal-Mart Lower
The governor of Liaoning, a major industrial region in northeastern China, says false statistics boosted the province’s economic data from 2011 to 2014. …read more
Source: Chinese province falsified economic data for years
By Tyler Durden
Bloomberg's Anne Swardson, Zoe Schneeweiss, and Andre Tartar perfectly summed up the state of play right now during their discussion of the World Economic Forum's annual get-together: “Never before has the gap between Davos Man and the real world yawned so widely.”
As the world's top executives, financiers, academics, and politicians make their way to Switzerland, Trump – who won't have an official representative there – has expressed strong feelings about some of the countries sending delegations, including his own.
Source: Davos (According To Donald Trump)
By Tyler Durden
Submitted by Alice Salles via TheAntiMedia.org,
The U.S. government’s efforts against illicit drugs have finally run their course. With over one trillion dollars wasted over the past several decades and nothing to show but failure, taxpayers are beginning to ask a simple yet pertinent question: Is it time to end the bottomless funding of this utterly ineffective anti-drug crusade?
With a $29 billion budget for the 2017 fiscal year, the Department of Justice (DOJ) has secured vast resources to the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). With a sizeable budget — $2.8 billion in 2015 — the agency tasked with the chore of enforcing “the controlled substances laws and regulations … and [bringing] to the criminal and civil justice system … organizations and principal members of organizations involved in the growing, manufacture, or distribution of controlled substances appearing in or destined for illicit traffic in the United States” has continued to be the number one drug warrior within the federal government. But the DOJ’s Criminal Division, which is tasked with overseeing multiple offices, also houses the Organized Crime and Gang Section (OCGS), an agency that specializes in “developing and implementing strategies to disrupt and dismantle” gangs and organized crime, including drug trafficking. The 2017 budget for the Criminal Division alone is $198.7 million, which represents a “9.3 percent increase over 2016.”
Over the years, these agencies have time and again been tasked with capturing drug lords and low-level sellers, attempting to put an end to the flow of illicit substances into the country. But despite the copious amounts of resources used in this task alone — whether it’s through the DEA, the OCGS, or even the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) — illicit substance use (and abuse) has only grown across the country.
According to data released by the federal government, for example, “[a]vailability of methamphetamine remains high as evidenced by its accounting for the largest percentage of drugs identified from law enforcement seizures and its declining wholesale price.” And yet, President Barack Obama requested an increase in funding for agencies such as the DEA, FBI, and OCGS.
Despite these agencies’ failures, the supply of other substances, like heroin, has also increased.
With overdose rates doubling in most states between 2010 and 2012 and a staggering 28,000 Americans dying of opioid overdoses in 2014, it’s hard to understand the logic behind increasing the budget for an agency or group of agencies working unsuccessfully around the clock to put a stop to the drug trafficking business. Are these agencies helping to stop the flow of illicit drugs by enforcing current laws, or are they making the problem even greater by forcing users to rely on the black market?
In the real world, where employees of businesses or non-public organizations have to demonstrate proficiency in their trade to remain employed, these institutions …read more
Source: Here’s Why America’s Drug War Has Been An Epic Failure
By Tyler Durden
How do you know with certainty that Davos has not only jumped the shark, but has become a parody of itself? One answer: when you have a handful of semi, and not so semi, billionaires – perplexed by the populist backlash of the past year – sit down and discuss among each other how a “Squeezed and Angry” middle-class should be fixed.
As Davos puts it, “once the lynchpin of developed economies, it’s now threatened by job losses and stagnant wages, paving the way for the rise of populism. In emerging markets, middle class growth rates are stalling. Have middle class problems been forgotten?” It asks rhetorically “What can be done?”
Apparently the answer is to have three people completely disconnected from the real, sit down and provide answers:
In this session, starting at 0800 GMT, IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde, Italian Finance Minister Pier Carlo Padoan and Founder, Chairman and Co-CIO of Bridgewater Associates, Ray Dalio, discuss what’s needed to restore growth in the middle class and confidence in the future.
Watch it live below
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