Wang Jianlin, one of China’s richest men, is going on the offensive against Disney as the U.S. company prepares to open its new resort in the country. …read more
Source: Billionaire vows to crush Disney in China
By Tyler Durden
With the market still strongly disagreeing with the polls over how BREMAIN is a done deal…
TrueSinews' Sean Corrigan explains why in his contrite “case for Brexit”…
‘Dear True Sinews, what are your thoughts on Brexit? Roger Bootle wrote a piece in the Telegraph yesterday suggesting that just because everyone is saying one thing, it doesn’t necessarily follow they are right Currently, I sit firmly on the fence getting splinters! Neither side is convincing me either way.’
So wrote a friend the other day. What follows is my answer to his question.
Funnily enough, my first response to the letter to the Times, that highly-orchestrated, Orwellian protestation of orthodoxy, was to tweet about the infamous 364 economists who wrote decrying Howe’s 1981 budget under Thatcher. Ditto the IMF’s woeful track record or the Queen’s famous ‘How did no-one see it coming?’ question in 2008/9.
Consensus is never a determinant of truth and even, the cynic might say, is often proof of the opposite! Humanity has not moved from grubbing a living rooting for mammoth carrion to where it is today by being over respectful of consensus. In fact, the very nature of entrepreneurialism is to challenge consensus while mainstream economists are still denying the possibility that anyone could possibly have left a £10 note lying on the pavement!
The critical thing is not to get bound up in a further exercise of that stultifying doctrine of paralysis known as the ‘precautionary principle’ so beloved of the Khmer Vert eco-(in)activists. If we had never acted in any different fashion until we were absolutely certain of the outcome, we’d still be swinging from branches in the primaeval forest canopy.
Yes, there are risks – some calculable, many not – but there are also opportunities aplenty. That is why it is so shrewdly disingenuous of Project Fear to play up all the things that might go wrong and to try to paint the Leave camp’s case as insubstantial simply because the latter are being honest enough not to offer an entirely bogus prospectus of what they will do, once they’re out.
For the record, I don’t see Brexit as a panacea, but merely the chance to manage one’s own affairs and to conduct one’s own debates over what should or should not be done by the state in one’s name. As in all things, I hew to the principle that politics should be as parochial as possible, that we should be able to grab a delinquent politician by his lapels at any moment and set him to rights, as well as to clap a diligent one on the back in acclamation when he pops in the local pub for a pint.
Subsidiarity is the thing. Politics should work from the bottom up in widening circles of co-operation and conflict resolution, not diffuse down from on high as if it were Holy Writ. Thus, the smaller the state, the better. And before anyone quibbles about ‘Balkanisation’, being too small to suffer delusions of geopolitical grandeur and too narrowly based to succumb …read more
Source: The Case For Brexit
By Tyler Durden
Despite warnings that “your life is at risk,” the threat of Zika, a collapsing government, and rising social unrest, many will still visit Brazil this summer for the Rio Olympics. As a public service announcement, we believe that making the trip should be worthwhile for those strong-willed travelers treking to South America; and, courtesy of Deutsche Bank, we have found a ‘foolproof’ way to turn a 56% return… should you wish to.
Simple – Buy an iPhone 6 (or two) in United States (we are sure TSA will be too busy to check bags for anything less than a dozen), and then Sell them when get to Rio…
While the above suggestion is not meant to be taken literally (on advice of Zero hedge counsel), it is quite shocking how expensive the most ubiquitous electronic device in America is in nations with a fraction of the living standards there… and where Tim Cook’s growth is going to be coming from.
And if you can’t sell them, then we hear the view alone is worth the price of admission…
Source: If You’re Going To The Rio Olympics, Here’s How To Make A 56% Return ‘Legally’
By Tyler Durden
Fearing a “forced” evacuation, dozens of migrants have left the refugee camp at Idomeni on the Greek-Macedonian border and are reportedly hiding in the surrounding region. It is perhaps no surprise they are fleeing as KeepTalkingGreece reports, ten riot police squads left Athens this morning and are expected to take position at the camp to aid in what officials call “a friendly evacuation.” Other police forces from Northern Greece will be deployed in the area for “as long as it takes” to remove the 8,500 men, women, and children.
According to Greek media, the evacuation of the camp is scheduled to be launched at 6 a.m. on Tuesday and conclude after a week to ten days. Spokesman of Migration Coordination Body, Giorgos Kyritsis said Monday morning that operation may start “Tuesday or Wednesday.”
Buses will transfer the refugees to several open accommodation reception centers across the country. There are apparently empty places in refugee centers, however not enough to host all these people. Therefore, more reception places are to be established in the next days.
The evacuation plan has been prepared by the Ministry of Public Order and Greek police.
Authorities consider a “friendly evacuation” with the use of “as less violence as possible” as there are many children, babies and other vulnerable people in the camp. However, they do not exclude problems to arise if refugee groups and/or “solidarity organizations” that oppose the camp evacuation and support an open border policy.
It is not clear, how close Greek and international media will be allowed to cover the operation.
Greek government had long planned the evacuation of the camp, however reception places were not ready.
The evacuation will also free the rail track that has been “occupied” by refugees and migrants and allow trains to come through again.
Plans always seem perfect on the papers. Let’s see how “friendly” the evacuation will be implemented…
Source: Ten Riot Police Squads Deployed To Greek Refugee Camp As Evacuation Begins
By Tyler Durden
From Francesco Filia of Fasanara Capital
So far in May, base metals and Oil decoupled markedly (chart attached below). While the Oil price kept rising and moved closer to 50$, base metals fell off a cliff and descended below March lows.
We believe that Oil is the errant outlier, helped by deep but temporary supply outages in Canada and Nigeria and all-time record speculative flows, and is more likely to catch down to other commodities going forward rather than the other way round. We look at Oil gyrations as short-term heavy volatility, within a long-term downward trend.
On the other hand, weakness in commodities is consistent with fundamentals:
As such, at present, we find the price action so far in May to come in confirmation of our underlying thesis, thus expect more weakness in commodities from here, and Oil to eventually give in.
* * *
Extract from our latest Outlook
Investment Outlook 3rd May attached here
1. Strong US Dollar Factor:
The weak Dollar is the major factor propelling the reflation sentiment in the market – EMs and Commodities greeted it with enthusiasm. However, it seems to us more a story of appreciating Yen and Eur out of the failed attempts by the Boj and the ECB to reflate their economies, as markets doubt their capacity at negative rates. It is not the typical weak Dollar out of increasing US current account deficit and increasing spending / imports, positive for the world and inflation. We expect the USD to have another leg up in the months ahead. A stronger Dollar alone has the potential to revive January-type fears over Oil, CNH, EMs, leading to a risk off of global assets, including the S&P. We see drivers of USD strength as follows:
a. The FED took the steam off the Dollar by moving its expected path of tightening in 2016 from 4 hikes to 2 hikes only. The FED may become more dovish than that, but the market already discounts that. Of the 2 rate hikes planned, a tiny 20% is priced in at present. Not much headwind for the USD is left from FED’s communication. At the other end of the equation, after recent fails, the BoJ first and then the ECB will go back at it, trying again to reflate their stagnant economies, with the debasement of JPY and EUR either a working tool or a side effect.
b. …read more
Source: Who Is Right Between Oil And Other Commodities: One Hedge Fund’s Opinion
China says it wants to open its economy more to the rest of the world, but Beijing keeps a tight grip on technology and access to media. These 10 items are still off limits. …read more
Source: Banned! 10 things you won’t find in China
By Tyler Durden
Submitted by William Grigg via The Free Thought Project,
Following a year in which the public was relentlessly barraged with alarmist rhetoric about a “war on cops” and the dreadful impact of the so-called “Ferguson Effect,” official FBI statistics confirm that violent line-of-duty police deaths declined precipitously in 2015.
“Preliminary statistics … show that 41 law enforcement officers were feloniously killed in the line of duty in 2015. This is a decrease of almost 20 percent when compared with the 51 officers killed in 2014.” A greater number of officers (45) suffered fatal injuries in duty-related accidents, 41 of which involved motor vehicles.
Through May 17 of this year, according to the Officer Down Memorial Page, there have been 35 line-of-duty police officer deaths, 21 of which involve violence, such as gunfire or vehicular assault. This suggests that 2016 might see an increase in that grim total, but fortunately that remains only a possibility.
Throughout 2015, law enforcement officials, police unions, and even FBI Director James Comey warned of a “war on cops” that was supposedly an outgrowth of what they called the “Ferguson Effect” – police reluctance to use force because of concerns over negative publicity. On May 10, for instance, Comey reiterated that theme, insisting that the “viral video effect” has changed “the way police may be acting” by inhibiting them from taking assertive action to deal with violent crime. This supposedly leaves police more insecure, thereby emancipating criminals to wreak havoc on under-protected communities.
However, as former Baltimore police officer-turned-police reform advocate Michael Wood Jr. told The Intercept, there are cases in which less aggressive policing has corresponded to a decline in violent crime: Where police don’t treat the public as an enemy to be subdued, the public responds by seeking help, and giving it, in the effort to deter crimes against persons and property.
“Police now for the first time are having to consider the consequences of being brutal, being unethical, and doing things that for the longest time they could do and not be accountable for,” Wood declares. “But that doesn’t make crime happen.”
Comey’s melodramatic statements about a “chill wind blowing through law enforcement,” and reliance on things he has been told “in lots of conversations privately with police leaders” demonstrate that “he is pushing an ideology,” Woods continues. “Comey’s position is that if the armed enforcement wing of the government takes its boot off the neck of the public, just a little, then we will just become killers.”
While fewer police suffered violent deaths last year than in any year since 2013 – when 27 officers were feloniously killed – there is no evidence that the police have been inhibited in the use of deadly force. According to unofficial tabulations, at least 1,200 Americans died in violent encounters with the police last year. Official notice is taken of each of the exceedingly rare instances in which police are violently killed, but there is no official tally of people killed by …read more
Source: FBI’s Own Report Exposes "War On Cops" As Pure Propaganda
By Tyler Durden
Ask any trader what they believe to be the hallmark feature of any “rigged market” and the most frequent response(in addition to flagrant crime of the type supposedly demonstrated every day by Deutsche Bank and which should not exist in a regulated market) will be an institutionally bifurcated and legitimized playing field, one in which those who can afford faster, bigger, more effective data pipes, collocated servers and response times – and thus riskless trades – outperform everyone else who may or may not know that the market is legally rigged against them.
Think of it as baseball game for those who take steroids vs a ‘roid free game, only here the steroids are perfectly legal for those who can afford them. Or like a casino where the house, or in this case the HFTs, always win.
However, as it turned out, the vast majority of the public had no idea that a small subset of the market was juicing, despite our constant reports on the topic since 2009, until the arrival of Michael Lewis’ book Flash Boys, which explained the secret sauce that made all those HFT prop shops into unbeatable “trading titans“: frontrunning.
That’s really all one had to know about the mystical inner working of the modern market. All Reg NMS did was legitimize and legalize frontrunning at a massive scale for those who could afford (and hide) it, all the while the technology race ran in the background making it increasingly more expensive to stay at the top: fiber optics, microwaves, lasers, FPGAs, PCI-Express and so on.
And, as we have also discovered in recent years especially since the advent of IEX, for many exchanges providing a two-tiered marketplace was the lifeblood of the business model: the bulk of the revenues for “exchanges” such as BATS and Nasdaq would come from selling non-HFT retail and institutional orderflow to HFT clients. Since the HFTs made far more than the invested cost in permitting such perfectly legal frontrunning, they were happy, the exchanges were happy too as they betrayed only those clients who didn’t pay up the “extra fee”, and only the true outsiders lost. And any time they complained how rigged the system was against them, the HFTs would scream that “they provide liquidity” as they are the real modern-day market makers.
Except that’s not true: the only time HFTs provide liquidity it when it is not needed. When liquidity is truly scarce and required in the market, such as on days like the May 2010 flash crash, or August 2015… they disappear.
Meanwhile, nothing changes, because the regulators are just as corrupt as the exchanges and the HFTs, and their role is not to bring transparency to a broken, manipulated market, but to keep retail investors in the dark about just how rigged everything is.
It appears that the CME was doing just that as well.
According to Bloomberg, the CME Group – the world’s largest exchange operator – just completed an “upgrade” traders said …read more
Source: The CME Admits Futures Trading Was Rigged Under Old System
The wealthiest Americans say it’s not connections or talent that make you rich — it’s strong family values and hard work.
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Source: Millionaires: Hard work, family values yield success
By Tyler Durden
South Africa's Standard Bank has confirmed that it is the latest bank to be hacked into, admitting that it had credit card data stolen and used in an elaborate scheme carried out in Japan.
On May 15th, between 5am and 8am, more than 100 people withdrew $13 million from 1400 ATMs across Japan in less than three hours. The coordinated heist involved forged credit cards, and data stolen from South Africa's Standard Bank. As The BBC reports,
The withdrawals targeted 7-Eleven cash machines, which unlike most in Japan accept foreign cards.
South Africa's Standard Bank estimated its total losses at $19.25m.
“Standard Bank has taken swift action to contain the matter” it said in a statement.
Japanese police are now examining security camera footage to identify suspects, and both countries are working with world police body Interpol to investigate how the data was stolen and how the heist was co-ordinated.
Standard Bank described the heist as “a sophisticated, coordinated fraud incident.”
This is the latest in a series of incidents where bank cyber security measures have been insufficient to thwart hackers. Recall that just a few months ago $100 million was stolen from the Bangladesh central bank via the New York Fed, and just recently hackers stole another $12 million by rerouting “secure” global payment system transactions of Banco del Austro, an Ecuadorean bank.
At what point banks begin to get serious about cyber security remains to be seen, but one thing is clear, they are losing the game… and depositors money.
Source: South Africa’s Standard Bank Victim Of "Perfectly Coordinated Attack" In Japanese ATM Scam
Welcome to Esh Carmel Blog.
