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By Tyler Durden

Submitted by Alexander Grover in Oslo, Norway

The Norwegian Economy Illustrated in Charts

Norges Bank continues to hold rates at .5%, signaling an upward bias but willing to cut if needed, depending on unforeseen external shocks like BREXIT. In my opinion, they really don’t know what to do while the country heads for stagflation (simultaneous rising unemployment and inflation). They are in a “damned if they do and damned if they don’t situation.”

As the currency weakens, import prices rise. If they raise rates to quell inflation, they will slow down an already lethargic economy and may burn down the housing market in the process. If they cut, inflation will continue to accelerate. Staying put appears to be the best option, waiting for the oil sector continues to recover. However, then they are betting against the engineering profession, determined to drive down extraction costs or make oil irrelevant. Rising rig counts in America and the return of Iran and Libya to the marketplace further dim hope for North Sea oil.

Siv Jensen (Finance Minister) stated that the Norwegian economy is “Rock Solid.” Instead, it is more like ice (in reverse): solid only under specific (temperature and pressure) conditions and wobbly otherwise, unable to support a meaningful load. Above the $70/barrel threshold, the Norwegian economy is invincible, able to support generous social programs while making deposits to sovereign wealth fund (referred to as The Fund). Below $70, “the ice melts;” the rate of which depends on the ambient temperature above freezing. If the oil is only slightly below $70, The Fund could cover budget gaps indefinitely, replenishing the drawdown with capital gains, interest and dividend payments. Perhaps they could levy some new taxes as well. However, when substantially below the key threshold, the melting accelerates, drawing down the fund quicker than it can be restored.

Although, The Fund holds over $800 billion, covering near-term budget gaps with ease. Waiting for $70/barrel is like waiting for hell to freeze over or the Americans to join the EU. Also, The Fund carries various risks, investing mostly in US and European based assets. The big question is when will Norwegian housing prices peak and reverse course. That day is impossible to predict.

The goal of this article is to give normal hardworking people insight into what is happening around them, which is difficult to comprehend. The following charts and commentary examine the underlying economy:

Real Interest Rates:

Sources: Norges Bank (The Norwegian Central Bank) and SSB.no (Norwegian Statistics Bureau)

Sources: US Federal Reserve and Bureau of Labor Statistics

The real interest rate, which subtracts inflation from the nominal one, is already negative, meaning that saving is losing. The weakening currency also makes Norwegian companies susceptible to foreign takeover, sending the profits abroad. Real interest rates should be at least zero and ideally positive, enticing people to put their money into the …read more

Source: The Struggling Norwegian Economy Illustrated in Charts

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By Tyler Durden

President Obama's “most transparent administration ever” is being accused of “failure by design” in the DoJ’s protocols for responding to public requests. The FOIA law states that agencies must “make reasonable efforts to search for the records in electronic form or format,” but as The Guardian reports, a new lawsuit alleges DoJ intentionally conducts inadequate searches of its records using a decades-old computer system when queried by citizens looking for records that should be available to the public.

In an effort to demonstrate that the DoJ does not comply with this provision, Shapiro requested records of his own requests and ran up against the same roadblocks that stymied his progress in previous inquiries. A judge ruled in January that the FBI had acted in a manner “fundamentally at odds with the statute”.

Now, armed with that ruling, Shapiro hopes to change policy across the entire department. Shapiro filed his suit on the 50th anniversary of Foia’s passage this month.

Foia requests to the FBI are processed by searching the Automated Case Support system (ACS), a software program that celebrates its 21st birthday this year. The FBI’s chief technology officer during the second George W Bush administration, Jack Israel, said he was unimpressed with the system in a Q&A cited in Shapiro’s complaint with the now-defunct site FierceGovernmentIT.

Not only is the interface archaic, but the way that you search data, the way you input data, all of those are archaic, wrote Shapiro in his complaint. Indeed, in 2012 a DoJ commission headed by Webster himself investigating the 2009 Fort Hood shooting called ACS “the FBI’s most outdated system”, noting that “[i]t is being phased out in favor of an impressive Web-based successor, Sentinel”.

More recently, the FBI’s own investigation into the September 11 attacks found that “[o]n September 11, 2001, the Bureau’s information technology was inadequate to support its counterterrorism mission”, noting further that “[t]he FBI’s legacy investigative information system, the Automated Case Support (ACS), was not very effective in identifying information or supporting investigations”.

Not only are the records indexed by ACS allegedly inadequate, Shapiro told the Guardian, but the FBI refuses to search the full text of those records as a matter of policy.

When few or no records are returned, Shapiro said, the FBI effectively responds “sorry, we tried” without making use of the much more sophisticated search tools at the disposal of internal requestors.

“The FBI’s assertion is akin to suggesting that a search of a limited and arbitrarily produced card catalogue at a vast library is as likely to locate book pages containing a specified search term as a full text search of database containing digitized versions of all the books in that library,” Shapiro said.

Shapiro told the Guardian that the reason the DoJ gave for refusing to use its $425m Sentinel software to process Foia requests after ACS had failed to recover records was that a Sentinel search “would be needlessly duplicative of the FBI’s default ACS UNI index-based searches and wasteful of Bureau resources”.

To Shapiro, this …read more

Source: US DOJ Accused Of Intentionally Using 21 Year Old System To Frustrate FOIA Requests

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for latest details. …read more

Source: Tech CEO to Trump: ‘Your campaign is un-American’

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Source: 3 police officers killed Baton Rouge shooting

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By Tyler Durden

When it comes to reactions in response to Obama’s increasingly more frequent, politicized speeches on the topic of police shootings, one expects republicans to express disgust and to accuse Obama of race baiting and hate-mongering: indeed, it barely registers. But when members of the very police force whose supreme commander resides in the White House accuse the same “commander” of having “blood on his hands” for his pandering rhetoric, suddenly visions of a countrywide police mutiny start to emerge.

In fact, such visions may be warranted right now, because following this morning’s latest police shooting in Baton Rouge, that killed three officers and injured at least three others, Cleveland Detective Steve Loomis who was invited on Fox to describe the unfolding situation, unleashed on none other than the president. As The Hill reports, Loomis – who is also president of the Cleveland Police Patrolmen’s Association – didn’t hold back from assigning blame during his interview with anchor Harris Faulkner.

“It’s absolutely insane that we have a president of the United States and a governor of Minnesota making the statements they made less than one day after the police-involved shootings,” said an emotional Loomis.

“And those police-involved shootings, make no mistake, are what absolutely have triggered this rash of senseless murders of law enforcement officers across this country. It’s reprehensible. And the president of the United States has blood on his hands that will not be able to come washed off.”

Since there has been a barage of breaking, deadly news in the past two weeks, readers may be forgiven if they have forgotten the subject of Loomis’ anger: the detective was referring to statements made by President Obama and Minnesota Gov. Mark Dayton, a Democrat, one day after the shooting of Philando Castile in Falcon Heights, Minn., by a police officer during a traffic stop.

“When incidents like this occur, there’s a big chunk of our citizenry that feels as if, because of the color of their skin, they are not being treated the same, and that hurts, and that should trouble all of us,” Obama said in a statement the following day. “This is not just a black issue, not just a Hispanic issue. This is an American issue that we all should care about.” Dayton’s comments caused an even bigger stir after he asked: “Would this have happened if the driver were white, if the passengers were white? I don’t think it would have.”

The same week, at a protest against police violence in Dallas, five officers were shot and killed by a lone gunman who was reportedly targeting white police officers. Loomis cast blame against the media, celebrities and athletes later in the interview with Faulkner.

“How the hell did we ever become the bad guys in this country?” he asked of police officers. “I cannot imagine how we got here. It’s the irresponsible reporting of the media. “And the irresponsible statements of people that are credible like the president of the United States,” added …read more

Source: Cleveland Cop Responds To Baton Rouge Shooting: "Obama Has Blood On His Hands"

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Police, federal agents and the military are mustering in Cleveland and Philadelphia with heavy-duty arsenals ahead of the Republican and Democratic National Conventions. …read more

Source: Cleveland’s $50M security plan for convention

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By Tyler Durden

Following a week during which President Obama focused on trying to reduce tensions and helping build trust between police and the communities they serve, it appears he failed as Friday’s “Day of Rage” is spilling over…

As OfficerDownTheThinBlueLine.org reports,

A Milwaukee police officer was shot in a “vicious” attack early Sunday as he sat in his squad car while colleagues investigated a domestic disturbance call.

The suspected shooter, identified by police as a 20-year-old West Allis man with two felonies on his record, was found dead in a nearby yard, they said. It appears his death was suicide.

The incident began as a response to a domestic disturbance call near South 17th Street and West Morgan Avenue at about 2 a.m. During that investigation, someone fired shots into the squad car, striking an officer “multiple” times,” Asst. Police Chief William Jessup said in a morning press conference.

The officer, a 31-year-old man with 13 years of service, was taken to Froedtert Hospital for surgery. Milwaukee police Sergeant Tim Gauerke said the injuries were not life-threatening.

“This is just another example of the risks our officers take each and every day to protect these citizens,” Jessup said.

* * *

RIGHT NOW: @MayorOfMKE addresses @MilwaukeePolice officer shot & #BatonRougeShooting. @tmj4 pic.twitter.com/EQZT9kEkeB

— Jonah Kaplan (@jonahpkaplan) July 17, 2016

As Donald Trump said earlier, “How many law enforcement and people have to die because of a lack of leadership in our country? We demand law and order.”

…read more

Source: "Day Of Rage" Continues: Milwaukee Cop Ambushed While Sitting In Car

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By Tyler Durden

With both the S&P500 and Treasury prices hitting record highs as recently as one week ago, many have been confused (perhaps none more so than Goldman’s clients as we reported yesterday), although the conventional fallback explanation that has again emerged, is a reversion back to the “Fed Model” according to which the lower yields go, the highest equity multiples should (and may) rise.

As a bearish Goldman explained, “bullish investors argue that sustained low rates will support P/E multiples of 20x or more. The Fed Model relates the earnings yield (5.7%) to the Treasury yield (1.5%). The current 420 bp yield gap is near the 10-year average. Exhibit 2 shows the sensitivity of this model. Assuming a steady bond yield, reversion to the 35-year average gap of 250 bp implies a S&P 500 year-end level of 3075 while the 5-year average gap implies 1900.” For the record, Goldman is not a fan of a 3,000+ S&P target, and instead expects the market to drop in the coming months (details here).

But while at this point nobody really knows what happens to stock prices from here on out, mostly as a result of “helicopter money” now entering the inflation, bringing with it the spectre of runaway inflation and a decoupling of long-bond yields, which implies a sharp steepening of the yield curve, one bank that disagrees that one should buy both bonds and stocks in a perverse feedback loop is Morgan Stanley, which in its Sunday Start note writes that “over the last 17 years, 10yr government debt in the US, Germany, the UK and Japan has produced a better return than the local equity market, with lower volatility. Over the next 10 years, our long-term return models suggest something different. Based on our expected returns for both bonds and stocks, and using historical volatility, 10yr government debt will post worse Sharpe ratios than equities (or credit) over the next decade.“

Maybe, maybe not. Many have tried (and been carted out), trying to short global bonds only for these to hit record low after record low. There is a reason why shorting JGBs is called the widowmaker trade.

However, while MS may again be premature in calling a bottom to global bond yields – after all central banks around the globe are hardly done monetizing debt by a long shot – Morgan Stanley’s Andrew Sheets does bring up a valid point, namely that bonds are no longer a proper “diversifier” to an equity portfolio for the following reason:

We often think of bonds as natural shock absorbers, ‘zigging’ when the market ‘zags’. It’s important to remember this wasn’t always the case. How could this change? One way would be if yields simply don’t have enough room to fall further to offset equity market declines. Take a 60/40 portfolio constructed today from the S&P 500 and US Treasuries. To make up for a 10% decline in the equity market, Treasury yields would need to go… negative. Not impossible, but certainly a high …read more

Source: Morgan Stanley: “To Make Up For A 10% Drop In The S&P, Treasury Yields Would Need To Go… Negative”

    

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Source: 3 Baton Rouge officers feared dead in shooting

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By Tyler Durden

Police have closed streets between Baton Rouge Police Headquarters and I-12 where at least three law enforcement officers have been shot. According to local media WBRZ, shots were fired around 9 a.m. Sunday morning kicking off a manhunt for the shooter or shooters. There is an active shooter situation in the area of Airline and Old Hammond Highways according to The Advocate. A police spokesperson was not ready to release specifics as of yet.

A witness told WBRZ News 2, a man was dressed in black with his face covered shooting indiscriminately when he walked out between a convenience store and car wash across from Hammond Air Plaza.

“The scene seems to be contained right now,” said Sgt. Don Coppola, Baton Rouge Police Department. “We’re asking everyone to stay out of the area.”

Live Feed:

* * *

SWAT now on scene…

State Police SWAT now on scene pic.twitter.com/r3Eni4aODL

— Michael Vinsanau (@MVinsanau) July 17, 2016

Multiple police ????….on Air Line Hwy. Right now. #BatonRouge pic.twitter.com/vhdR3N9r1H

— Biko Misabiko (@BikoTheGreat) July 17, 2016

…read more

Source: Major Manhunt Under Way After At Least 3 Police Officers Shot In Baton Rouge – Live Feed

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