Written by Gary
Premarkets were up and have been steadily falling to just being fractionally in the green. The oils have fallen further as Iranian officials visited Beijing to seek more oil sales after a framework nuclear deal that could lead to the lifting of sanctions. The U.S. Dollar is rising once again which usually reflects a drop in U.S. Equities
Markets are expected to open in the green, but not much volatility is expected until later today when the U.S. Consumer Credit report is released.
Here is the current market situation from CNN Money | |
European markets are sharply higher today with shares in France leading the region. The CAC 40 is up 1.70% while London’s FTSE 100 is up 1.41% and Germany’s DAX is up 1.18%. |
What Is Moving the Markets
Here are the headlines moving the markets. | |
February 2015 CoreLogic Home Prices Year-over-Year Growth Rate Now 5.6%Econintersect: CoreLogic’s Home Price Index (HPI) shows that home prices in the USA are up 5.6% year-over-year year-over-year (reported up 1.1% month-over-month). There is considerable backward revision in this index which makes monthly reporting problematic. CoreLogic HPI is used in the Federal Reserves’s Flow of Funds to calculate the values of residential real estate. | |
FedEx to buy TNT for $4.8 billion to expand Europe deliveries AMSTERDAM (Reuters) – FedEx Corp said it will buy Dutch package delivery firm TNT Express for 4.4 billion euros ($4.8 billion), aiming to take on bigger rivals United Parcel Service and Deutsche Post in Europe. | |
Russia To Offer Greece New Loans, Gas Price DiscountWhile Greece spent Easter weekend (not the Greek orthodox Easter that is) assuring the IMF (the “institution”, not the critical third member of the Troika that shall not be named) that the €450 million payment due to Christine Lagarde’s organization will be made despite Greece officially (rather than just unofficially) running out of money and being forced to prioritize repaying its creditors over paying wages and pensions, its Prime Minister is currently evaluating what the Plan B will be when he visits Vladimir Putin one day ahead of the double Greek deadlines of IMF payment and cash running out. As FT reports, “when Alexis Tsipras visits Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin on Wednesday there is a chance the Greek premier’s eastern manoeuvre will immediately bear fruit: kiwis, peaches and strawberries to be precise. Athens is hopeful that Moscow will lift a retaliatory ban on Greek soft fruits to demonstrate the abiding strength of Russo-Greek relations, just as both leaders feel a diplomatic chill with Europe over the Ukraine crisis and Athens’ bailout saga respectively.” Of course, every Greek request for a concession “quid” will be met with a proportional Russian quo, and it is this that worries European diplomats – namely will the Putin-Tsipras gladhanding amount to something more significant than fruit trade. “The big fear, in the words of one suspicious senior official, is a “Trojan horse” plot, where Russia extends billions in rescue loans in exchange for a Greek veto on sanctions — a move that would kill western unity over Ukraine.” | |
Greek parliament backs setting up committee to investigate bailout ATHENS (Reuters) – Greek lawmakers voted on Tuesday in favor of setting up a committee to examine the circumstances under which Greece agreed to bailouts totaling 240 billion euros ($260 billion) with the European Union and International Monetary Fund. | |
What European Policymakers Really Care About (In 1 Simple Chart)When it comes down to it, all that matters is ‘the market’. With European consumer confidence at its highest since 2007, and European unemployment barely off record highs, there is only one thing that European policymakers really care about… and it’s not ‘the people’. And that is why Draghi is pumping QE… because confidence is everything (and it appears unemployed people are not surveyed for confidence expectations?) Charts: Bloomberg
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Big Companies Pay Later, Squeezing Their Suppliers To help cash flows, food and packaged goods companies are delaying payments to suppliers, a practice that used to signal trouble. Stephen Brock, above, has largely quit selling equipment to Anheuser-Busch InBev after it imposed a 120-day period for paying vendors. | |
Futures tick up with eyes on FedExNEW YORK (Reuters) – U.S. stock index futures ticked up on Tuesday, following two sessions of gains on the S&P 500, with FedEx’s multibillion dollar transatlantic acquisition expected to lift the transports sector. | |
Oil falls as Iran, China discuss more supply LONDON (Reuters) – Brent crude oil fell below $58 a barrel on Tuesday on signs of growing oversupply as Iranian officials visited Beijing to seek more oil sales after a framework nuclear deal that could lead to the lifting of sanctions. | |
Samsung Shows Signs of a Turnaround The beleaguered South Korean manufacturer said that it expected its first-quarter earnings in 2015 to beat analyst forecasts. | |
Australia Regulator Furious As Central Bank Decision Leaked To HFTs For Third TimeFor the third month in a row, FX ‘traders’ in AUD “guessed” the Reserve Bank of Australia’s decision in the milliseconds before it was released to the public. Aussie regulators, seemingly furious at the blatant-ness of the front-running, confirmed they will be investigating the price spike overnight. As we noted last month, the rigged-ness of the markets was so clear as to suggest the decision was clearly leaked ahead of the public release as AUD spiked 70 pips on heavy volume in the 7 seconds before 230pm local time release. As ABC reports, concerns about whether some may be getting advanced notice of the central bank’s impending decisions led RBA Governor Glenn Stevens to note his own concerns “about reports that there had been extraordinary trades before the release of the Reserve Bank decision yesterday.” Will we see consequences this time? As ABC reports,
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Boeing beats Airbus in first quarter net orders, deliveriesPARIS (Reuters) – U.S. planemaker Boeing beat its European rival Airbus in net new airplane orders and deliveries in the first quarter, according to figures released on Tuesday. | |
Euro zone price discounting drives growth in activity LONDON (Reuters) – Price discounting drove growth in all of the euro zone’s major economies in March, helping business activity increase at its fastest rate for nearly a year, a survey showed on Tuesday. | |
FedEx Agrees to Acquire TNT Express in $4.8 Billion Deal The merger would greatly expand FedEx’s presence in Europe and comes less than two years since European regulators blocked a bid for TNT by UPS. | |
Global stocks boosted by M&A pipeline, Fed outlookLONDON (Reuters) – Global stocks rose on Tuesday, as many European bourses re-opening after the Easter break took on the positive tone set by U.S. markets overnight, with sentiment boosted by a potential trans-Atlantic acquisition. | |
Why U.S. Economic ‘Statistics’ Get More and More Absurd……….Written by Jeff Nielson Many recent commentaries have noted a distinct devolution in the numerical lies which the U.S. government calls its “economic statistics”. Numbers which used to be mere exaggerations (i.e. used to somewhat mirror the real world) have now become literally perverse: opposite to reality. As U.S. “retail sales” collapsed at the end of last year (and now into this year) with a string of negative numbers, we’re told that somehow U.S. “consumer spending” surged by 4.3% in the fourth quarter of 2014, something which is mathematically impossible, since the two numbers must mirror each other. With the U.S. economy showing even more obvious weakness than in previous years of this fantasy “recovery”, we’re supposed to believe that the U.S. economy just enjoyed its strongest quarters of growth in well over a decade. The economic lies are not merely far-fetched, they are totally ludicrous. This begs the question, why pervert these “statistics” to such silly extremes? The answer will come immediately to readers the moment they turn on their business news, and hear about yet more “record highs” in the U.S.’s bubble-mar … | |
Here Are The Key Triggers For Amazon’s StockThough our $295 price estimate for Amazon’s stock represents near-20% downside to the market, we believe there are certain plausible scenarios that can influence the stock significantly over the next few years, assuming the market prices in these developments correctly. Specifically, we think the possibility of lower profitability over our forecast period and faster-than-expected increase in international revenues are plausible scenarios that could trigger stock price changes for better or worse. | |
Could Greece Pivot To Russia And China?Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras heads to Moscow tomorrow amongst significant noise around a potential Greek pivot towards Russia and China. But how realistic a proposition is this? The short answer is, not very. Most of the noise is precisely that, just noise. But it is worth exploring in more detail just why this is the case and what it means for the current negotiations around Greece’s position in the Eurozone and EU-Russia relations. | |
Ben Bernanke Now Blogsby Keith Weiner Ben Bernanke presided over the Federal Reserve for two terms, from 2006 through 2014. A year and half into his first term, he began driving the Federal Funds Rate down. By the end of his frantic interest episode, this key overnight lending benchmark had been crushed. It hit bottom, and it hasn’t sprung back in over 6 years since. Everyone is harmed by zero interest policy. Who suffers the most is open to debate, but one obvious candidate is the retiree who lives on a fixed income. These are people who worked and saved their whole lives, and now they depend on interest to buy groceries and heat their homes. For them, zero interest is like breathing air without oxygen. They suffer a slow death by suffocation. In writing about this class of people, economist John Maynard Keynes used a term he intended to be pejorative—the rentier. In Keynes’ view, those who invest capital to earn a yield are parasites. In The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, he asserted that the rentier is a “functionless investor” (i.e. gets paid for doing nothing). Keynes Recently, former Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke has begun blogging at the Brookings Institution. He wrote that legislators said he was “throwing seniors under the bus.” He reassures us that he “was concerned about those seniors as well.” That is a neat little example of context-switching. These unnamed legislators did not ask Chairman Bernanke how he felt as he was throwing senior citizens under the bus. His feelings are not the issue. The is … | |
Sinosphere Blog: Leak Causes Another Blast at Chemical Plant Targeted by ProtestersA leak at a plant in the eastern province of Fujian set off a huge explosion Monday evening, injuring at least 12 people and fueling doubts about the safety at chemical factories. | |
Viacom to cut jobs, abandon titles, reorganize network groups(Reuters) – U.S. media company Viacom Inc said it will undertake a restructuring, including cutting jobs, abandoning some acquired titles and reorganizing three of its domestic network groups into two new organizations, to drive growth. | |
BlackRock’s Fink worries about impact of rising dollar (Reuters) – The rising value of the dollar is hurting American businesses and could ultimately result in a slowdown in future U.S. growth, BlackRock chief executive officer Larry Fink warned in a letter scheduled to go out to shareholders next week. | |
6 April 2015 Weather and Climate Outlook – Weekend Computer Revolt – SOI ReversesWritten by Sig Silber The recent extremes in the Continental U.S. weather: West versus East and North versus South have moderated. Spring is here and near-term projections now have high levels of uncertainty. The potential for an El Nino this coming winter is no clearer this Monday than it was last Monday. | |
Greece moves to quell default fears, pledges to meet ‘all obligations’ WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis said on Sunday that Greece “intends to meet all obligations to all its creditors, ad infinitum,” seeking to quell default fears ahead of a big loan payment Athens owes the IMF later this week. | |
Venture-backed U.S. IPOs hit lowest levels in two years(Reuters) – U.S. initial public offerings by venture-backed companies fell to a two-year low in the first quarter of 2015, according to data from the National Venture Capital Association and Thomson Reuters. | |
Bits Blog: Consumer Groups to Ask F.T.C. to Investigate YouTube Kids AppClose to a dozen consumer groups are asking the commission to investigate an application recently released by Google, arguing that its ads deceive children. |
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