By Tyler Durden
The most important aspect of the US economy – consumption – appears to face a headwind as
And Year-over-year shows no rebound here…
h/t @DougTee
Still who needs “hope” when the stock market keeps rising. As Jim Cramer explained to 'the people' this morning, “we need the stock market to go higher and the wealth effect to continue.”
Source: No Rebound Here
Today`s Baker Hughes Rig Count data spells real trouble for U.S. Oil Production for the remainder of 2016. At this pace, we are going to start having massive declines in U.S. Domestic Oil Production.
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Source: Baker Hughes Rig Count Analysis – Story of the Year in Oil Markets (Video)
By Tyler Durden
One of the truly remarkable things about Donald Trump’s run for the White House is the extent to which he has proven to be immune to criticism.
In many ways, the GOP frontrunner is a living, breathing negative ad for himself. Whether you hate him or you love him, you hold your breath when he opens his mouth because you understand there’s a decent chance something absolutely off the wall is about to come spilling out and you’re never really sure whether this will be “the one” – the Trumpism that finally pushes too far beyond the sensibilities of even the most ardent supporters.
Incredibly, Trump still hasn’t met his Waterloo. He’s called Mexicans drug dealing rapists. He suggested that John McCain is a loser for getting himself captured in ‘Nam. He’s theoretically banned the world’s fastest growing religion from North America. He’s promised to tax Chinese imports at 40%. He’s implied he’ll force Mexico to built a giant cage around itself to keep its people from escaping. And now he’s suggested that if abortion were illegal, he’d need to figure out the best way to punish women who break the law.
But here’s the thing: it works.
Trump is onto something. Apparently, America’s blood is boiling and “The Donald” has tapped right into a vein.
Now, the downtrodden masses – i.e. an electorate that’s sick and tired of the entrenched political aristocracy inside the Beltway and utterly fed up with being told to “eat cake” by the legions of modern day Marie Antoinettes that flit around Capitol Hill and Mahogany Row with their thumbs glued to Blackberry scroll balls that went extinct on Main Street a half decade ago – are mainlining the Trump brand of political heroine. Millions of Americans are nationalists without even knowing it. They’re speaking out against EM mercantilism without the slightest conception of what that means. And most importantly, they’re prepared to bet two-and-a-half centuries of history on a campaign platform built on an appeal to one man’s ad hoc version of Realpolitik.
Would a Trump presidency usher in a new era of American prosperity? Almost certainly not. But note we said “almost.” A Clinton presidency will definitely not change anything. And neither would a Cruz presidency or a Kasich administration. In short, Americans know two things for sure at this point: 1) both Trump and Bernie Sanders would bring real (as opposed to Obama-brand) “change” to America; 2) Trump can win his party’s nomination, while Bernie can’t.
The takeaway: if you want real change, you vote Trump.
In short, by simply saying what a whole lot of people are thinking anyway, Trump has instilled his campaign with a degree of authenticity that’s impossible for other candidates to emulate and that makes him virtually unstoppable save a misstep or two (or three) when someone like Chris Matthews presses him on specifics.
What the billionaire’s detractors have failed to understand is that the only way to beat Trump …read more
Source: "Maced Girl" Who Punched Trump Supporter May Be Charged By Police
Google’s April Fools’ prank has backfired, making a lot of users very angry and forcing the company to take it down early.
Source: Google’s April Fools’ prank backfires big time
Google’s April Fool prank has backfired, making a lot of users very angry and forcing the company to take it down early.
Source: Google’s April Fool prank backfires big time
The U.S. economy gained 215,000 jobs in March and the unemployment rate ticked up to 5%.
Source: U.S. economy gains 215,000 jobs in March
Former professional basketball player, Mark Davis, is not only bringing free solar power to low-income neighborhoods but he is also creating jobs.
Source: Creating jobs in low-income neighborhoods
Stocks are rolling over.
As we wrote about earlier this week, the S&P 500 was pushing for a final “kiss” of the broken bearish rising wedge pattern:
The next move should see us drop sharply.
Big picture stocks have effectively gone nowhere since QE 3 ended in November 2014. Yes it’s been a volatile ride, but all things considered stocks have largely traded sideways for 16 months.
Meanwhile, beneath this veneer of stability, the global economy has fallen off a cliff.
Last year (2015) marked the worst year for global trade since the Great Crisis.
The value of goods that crossed international borders last year fell 13.8 per cent in dollar terms — the first contraction since 2009 — according to the Netherlands Bureau of Economic Policy Analysis’s World Trade Monitor. Much of the slump was due to a slowdown in China and other emerging economies.
Source: Financial Times
The US is not immune to this. Wal-Mart, the single largest retailer in the US just posted its first ever drop in year over year revenues since going public 45 years ago.
Stocks are holding up for now… but once they adjust to the economic realities, the bear market is coming back with a vengeance.
Many investors are going to lose everything they’ve accomplished in the last six years.
If you’ve yet to prepare for a bear market in stocks we just published a 21-page investment report titled Stock Market Crash Survival Guide.
In it, we outline precisely how the crash will unfold as well as which investments will perform best during a stock market crash.
We are giving away just 100 copies for FREE to the public.
To pick up yours, swing by:
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Best Regards
Graham Summers
Chief Market Strategist
Phoenix Capital Research
Source: When Stocks Adjust to Economic Realities, Many Investors Will Lose Everything
By Sprott Money
Several months ago, a chart produced by one of the Big Banks was presented to readers . It was supposed to be innocuous data on global wealth distribution, but instead portrayed a horrifying picture.
The focal point of the aforementioned article was that when it came to “the world’s poorest people,” the Corrupt West has now produced a greater percentage of severe poverty in its own populations than in India, and an equal percentage of such poverty as exists in Africa.
Stacked beside this, we see that when it comes to the richest-of-the-rich, the Corrupt West remains in a league of its own. Supposedly, we are living in “the New Normal,” where life is supposed to get increasingly harder and harder. So why does the New Normal never affect those on top?
Of course all of these extremely poor people being manufactured by our governments (as these regimes give away our jobs, destroy wages, and eviscerate our social programs) have to come from somewhere. Certainly they don’t come from the Wealthy Class.
Indeed, the chart above provides us with a crystal-clear view of where all these poor and very-poor people are coming from: the near-extinct Middle Class. In order to manufacture hundreds of millions of impoverished citizens in our nations, the Old World Order has had to engage in a campaign to end the Middle Class.
We are conditioned to consider economic “classes” within our own societies, but with the chart above, we’re given a global perspective. Where does the Middle Class exist today, globally? At the upper end, it exists in China, and to a lesser extent, in Latin America and other Asian nations. At the lower end of the Middle Class, we see such populations growing in India and even Africa.
Only in the West, and especially North America, is the Middle Class clearly an endangered species. Two incredibly important aspects of this subject are necessary to cover:
1) How and why has the One Bank chosen to perpetrate Middle Class genocide?
2) What are the consequences of the Death of the Middle Class?
Attempting to catalogue the nearly infinite number of ways in which the oligarchs of the One Bank have perpetrated their Middle Class genocide is impractical. Instead, discussion will be limited to the five most important programs responsible for the Death of the Middle Class: three of them relatively new, and two of them old.
a) Globalization
b) Union decimation/wage destruction
c) Small business decimation
d) Money-printing/inflation
e) Income taxation
Globalization was rammed down our throats in the name of “free trade,” the Holy Grail of charlatan economists . But, as previously explained, real free trade is a world of “comparative advantage” where all nations play by a fair-and-equal set of rules. Without those conditions, “free trade” can never exist.
The globalization that has been imposed upon …read more
Source: The Great Divide: the Death of the Middle Class
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