President-elect Donald Trump will transfer his business holdings to a trust, but he won’t sell them — stopping short of what ethics lawyers say is the only surefire way to avoid conflicts of interest. …read more
Source: Trump will leave business, but won’t sell
Smucker, which owns Folgers and also sells Dunkin’-branded coffee in grocery stores, said it is raising coffee prices because of higher commodity costs. The move follows prices hikes from Starbucks last year. …read more
Source: Your morning cup of coffee will get more expensive
By Tyler Durden
As Vicent Cignarella, FX strategist who writes for Bloomberg, writes overnight, the “Dollar Rally May End If Dow Fails to Pass 20,000″ and the one variable that might determine if it does, is Donald Trump. Here’s why:
President-elect Donald Trump’s first press conference in six months will need to include some policy specifics if U.S. stocks and the dollar are to continue their post-election rallies. The Dow Jones Industrial Average has led the dollar higher since the November election with a correlation above 0.85, but a potential problem for dollar bulls has emerged as two technical indicators show the blue-chip index’s recent surge will leave it short of the 20,000 milestone.
Tom DeMark’s TD Sequential is signaling a pullback in the Dow at the same time mean reversion technicals are flashing caution. The indicator is a trend-reversal technique designed to predict a turn in a market using exhaustion points to determine peaks and troughs. “If everyone anticipates 20,000 will be broken they are already in the market awaiting that breakout, so what impetus is left to move the market above that level,” DeMark said in a Jan. 6 Bloomberg TV interview.
The equity index has failed to stay above the second standard deviation from its annual mean a handful of times in the past month, suggesting its next breakout will be to the downside. The Dow gained as much as 9% after the election and on Friday climbed within 0.37 point of the round-number milestone. The dollar hit a 14-year high on Jan. 3. A retreat in the Dow accompanied by a dollar slide would only worsen if the President-elect doesn’t deliver policy substance as markets are looking for clarity on everything from infrastructure spending to trade agreements that will impact the economy.
And here are some further details from Bloomberg, why traders can count Tom DeMark among the growing group of skeptics that the Dow – which hit 19,999.63 last Friday and faded – will rise above 20,000 anytime soon.
The chart analyst said investor psychology is acting as a ceiling on the gauge – everyone who expects the level to be surpassed has already purchased stocks, leaving an absence of buyers whenever it gets close.
“We’ve been confident the last three weeks we would not break 20,000,” DeMark said in an interview on Bloomberg Television. “I assume there’s a possibility intraday we could, but it’s so unanimous, it’s almost as if the election were being replayed within the market. Everyone’s confident the market’s going to break 20,000. If it does break, it may go quite a bit higher. But I don’t think it’s going to happen.”
The stock market appears to be in a topping process that traces back to its November low, DeMark said, citing a technical indicator known as an offset 13 in the Dow average that was hit in the last two days and flashes sell.
“It’s unanimous, every market, even the derivatives, they’re all identifying tops at this time, all upside projections,” he said. …read more
Source: Tom DeMark Says Put Your "Dow 20,000" Hats Away
By Tyler Durden
Tillerson’s confirmation hearing, in which the former Exxon CEO will seek to distance himself from Putin and say that Russia “must be held accountable for its actions” adding that “Russia today poses a danger, but it is not unpredictable in advancing its own interests.” begins at 9am Eastern, and can be watched below.
* * *
Earlier:
Anticipating questions at his upcoming confirmation hearing, in which his “close relationship” with Russia will likely be in the spotlight for most of the session, Donald Trump’s nominee for secretary of State on Wednesday will tell senators that Russia “must be held accountable for its actions” and that “Russia today poses a danger, but it is not unpredictable in advancing its own interests.”
“Our NATO allies are right to be alarmed at a resurgent Russia,” Tillerson, 64, will say before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Wednesday, according to his prepared remarks. At the same time, he faults a lack of U.S. leadership for Russia’s aggressiveness, citing “weak or mixed signals with ‘red lines’ that turned into green lights” adding “we must also be clear-eyed about our relationship with Russia.”
Having been accused of being friendly with Putin during his tenure as Exxon CEO, it should not come as a surprise that his remarks are a sharp departure from comments by Trump, who has called for a friendlier relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Critics have raised questions over Tillerson’s close ties to Russia since his nomination for secretary of State. He received Russia’s Order of Friendship Award from President Vladimir Putin in 2013 and he opposed sanctions against the country following its annexation of Ukraine’s Crimea region in 2014.
As Bloomberg adds, “it’s also a stark turnaround for an oil baron who staked billions of dollars on Russia’s crude bonanza and as recently as 3 1/2 years ago was feted by Russia with its Order of Friendship. One of Tillerson’s most decisive moves as chief executive officer and chairman of Exxon was to make Russia the company’s biggest single exploration prospect globally.”
Now, Tillerson faces the challenge of assuring lawmakers that he can pursue the broader interests of U.S. foreign policy after his 41-year career at Exxon, the world’s largest energy company by market value.
Tillerson’s hearing comes at an awkward time, just a day after reports surfaced that intelligence officials had briefed the president-elect on a shadowy, unverifiable dossier alleging the Russian government had compromising information on him. The 35-page document, made up of a collection of memos filled with explosive claims about Trump’s relationship to Russia – which may or may not have been originated on 4chan – has been circulating among journalists and officials for months.
Still, despite the recent surge in hacking-related newsflow, Tillerson will avoid the topic. In his testimony, Tillerson says Russia has acted against U.S. interests and urges an “open and frank dialogue” so that “we know how to chart our own course.” But, as Bloomberg adds, he makes no mention of U.S. intelligence findings that Russia hacked into …read more
Source: Rex Tillerson Confirmation Hearing: Live Webcast
By Tyler Durden
The price of bitcoin slid over 1,200 Yuan in heavy trading in China, crashing nearly 20%, and down more than $100 under $800 on comparable US markets Wednesday, after China’s central bank said it had launched “spot investigations” on bitcoin exchanges in Beijing and Shanghai in order to fend off market risks.
The investigation of exchanges, including BTCC, Huobi and OKCoin, was to look into “possible market manipulation, money laundering, unauthorized financing and other issues”, according to the statements posted on the People’s Bank of China’s website.
To regular readers this should come as no surprise: precisely one week ago, when Bitcoin hit record highs in China, we explicitly warned:
for those buying into bitcoin here on the momentum, most of which originates in China, we urge readers to be cautious as by now the PBOC has certainly noticed that the digital currency remains one of the final, and most successful, means of bypassing capital controls in China. Should Beijing mandate that bitcoin no longer be a means to illegally transfer capital offshore, there is risk of a dramatic, and sharp, drop in its price.
Well, Beijing noticed, and the “dramatic, sharp” drop in price has taken place as expected; worse with China now openly aggressive against bitcoin “manipulation” it is difficult to see where the next burst of buying momentum will come from, if only in the near term. However, one possibility is that Chinese capital control-evaders will now gravitate to other alternative digital currencies, such as Ethereum, which have so far been far less prominent among Chinese bubble chasers.
ETH up as BTC down. How soon until Chinese bubble shifts to Ethereum
— zerohedge (@zerohedge) January 9, 2017
As Reuters further adds on the Chinese crackdown, authorities have been ratcheting up efforts to stop capital outflows and relieve pressure on the yuan to depreciate. The currency lost more than 6.5 percent against the U.S. dollar last year.
With bitcoin’s soaring price and the relative anonymity it affords, some believe the digital currency has become an attractive option for tech-savvy Chinese to hedge against the yuan and circumvent rules that limit the amount of foreign exchange individuals can buy each year.
“Some”… such as this site, which said to buy bitcoin precisely on that catalyst back in September 2015 when it was $230. However, after surging five-fold it was inevitable that China would notice, and the time to take profit had come.
More:
The Shanghai arm of the PBOC said it visited BTCC on Wednesday.
“The checks focused on whether the firm was operating out of its business scope, whether it was launching unauthorized financing, payment, forex business or other related businesses, whether it was involved in market manipulation, anti-money laundering or (carried) fund security risks,” it said.
In a separate statement, the PBOC in Beijing, where officers visited the offices of OKCoin and Huobi, said “the spot checks were focused on how the exchanges implement policies including forex management and anti-money laundering”.
A Huobi executive who declined to be …read more
Source: Bitcoin Plummets After China Launches "Market Manipulation" Investigations Of Bitcoin Exchanges
Airbus said Wednesday its A380 superjumbo has a bright future — despite disappointing sales so far. …read more
Source: Airbus isn’t giving up on its A380 superjumbo
BuzzFeed’s decision to publish unverified memos alleging that Russian operatives have compromising personal and financial information about President-elect Donald Trump has set off a fierce debate about the ethics of the decision and the responsibilities of journalists. …read more
Source: Should BuzzFeed have published Trump memos?
By Tyler Durden
Submitted by Jeffrey Snider via Alhambra Investment Partners,
At the start of this new year, a new law took effect in Illinois which required hairdressers to obtain training in domestic abuse prevention. Hairdressers. The seeds of the idea were where any stylist in the state would take advantage of what is presumed a very close relationship between a woman and the person, presumed also to be a woman, using a hairdryer on her to spot possible abuse or even violence and know how to direct the victim toward help. Though protected, for now, from reporting requirements and shielded in untested fashion from liability, this is now part of the credentialing process for anyone seeking to enter the profession or stay within its ranks, at least in Illinois (and whichever states ultimately follow, as you probably have a good idea already those that will).
Thus, without one hour of training every two years a formerly credentialed hairstylist will transition simply to being a former hairstylist. Her (presumably) ability to wield objects of beautification being fully undisturbed, the loss of ability to perform with them as an economic service is clearly, in this case, not about those abilities.
You see occasionally statistics bandied about the internet where in the 1950’s fewer than one in twenty jobs required some government body’s expressed, explicit approval, but sixty years later the imposition of government credentials is somewhere between one and three or four. The world has become enthralled by them to the point of these kinds of extremes. Some of it is surely the desire for reduced liability, to retain or hire the credentialed expert so that if something goes wrong you are less likely to be sued for it. But what happens when in the real world “credentialed expert” makes that disastrous outcome more likely? Would that be the case where credentials themselves aren’t what they are supposed to be?
In August 2013, Paul Krugman was writing favorably about Milton Friedman. The context of that discourse was the period immediately following the “fiscal cliff” which was supposed to bring about immediate disaster, as Krugman himself predicted on several occasions. The favorable light under which Friedman was being remembered in this one specific instance boiled down to what Krugman called him being a “realist.”
One way to think about Friedman is that he was the man who tried to save free-market ideology from itself, by offering an answer to the obvious question: “If free markets are so great, how come we have depressions?”
In Krugman’s view, Friedman was acceptable in the narrowest sense because he opened the door for government intervention among the so-called right. I doubt Krugman was unaware that it was this same door that caused Friedman to apologize for it in the 1990’s given what it became. Ironically, it was in Friedman’s Nobel lecture in 1976 which describes Krugman’s brief positivity about him:
I well recall a dinner at a Cambridge University college when I was sitting between a fellow economist and R. A. Fisher, the great …read more
Source: The Well-Reasoned Basis Of Populism
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By Tyler Durden
UK Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn has a brilliant idea to 'fix' the supposed income-inequality problem – impose a maximum limit on how much people can earn in Britain. This proposal was immediately met by derision by economists and leaders as “incoherent”, “it doesn't make any economic sense at all, and “totally idiotic” – all of which are completely correct.
As The Telegraph reports, Corbyn told the BBC Radio 4 Today program…
“If we want to live in a more egalitarian society and fund our public services, we cannot go on creating worse levels of inequality…
I would like to see a maximum earnings limit quite honestly, because I think that would be a fairer thing to do.”
Mr Corbyn refused to say at what level the cap should be set, although he later told Sky News it would be “somewhat higher” than the £138,000 he earns as an MP and Leader of the Opposition.
However, before we move on to the responses to this proposal, it turns out that the income gap between the richest and poorest people in Britain is at a 30-year low, new figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) show.
Disposable income for the poorest fifth of the population in Britain rose by £700, or 5.1%, last year according to the ONS while disposable income for the richest fifth fell by £1,000, or 1.9%.
But those are just facts. Corbyn's plan has been branded “totally idiotic” by a former top economic adviser.
Academic Richard Murphy, who advised Mr Corbyn during his leadership bid, said the proposal was “incoherent”.
He told World At One: “It doesn't make any economic sense at all. You cannot impose such a cap.”
“Jeremy needs to sit down and get some proper advice. Whoever is advising him now is not giving the right advice or Jeremy isn't simply asking them before making these comments.”
Asked if the Government would consider taking up Jeremy Corbyn's wage cap proposal, a spokesman for the Prime Minister has said: “It is not a policy we are pursuing.”
They added that they had “not seen the details of what is actually being proposed”.
Danny Blanchflower, a former member of the Bank of England’s monetary policy committee and a former member of Corbyn’s economic advisory committee, has taken to Twitter to describe the wage cap proposal as “totally idiotic” and a “lunatic idea”.
Ouch!
Source: UK Labour Leader Slammed For "Totally Idiotic" Salary Cap Plan
Samsung Vice Chairman Lee Jae-yong has been summoned for questioning over suspicions including bribery, prosecutors said Wednesday. …read more
Source: Samsung heir is named as suspect in corruption probe
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