Written by Gary
Markets closed down fractionally after this morning’s opening high. Oil has fallen off its morning high too along with gold. Volume was heavier than usual today, obviously more selling than buying. Is today’s trend going to be tomorrow’s follow on?
Todays S&P 500 Chart
The Market in Perspective
| Here are the headlines moving the markets. | |
 | Oil just marked its first U.S. supply drop in 17 weeksAfter 21 weeks of declines in the number of active U.S. rigs drilling for oil, it is finally happened — crude inventories dropped for the first time since early January, but traders don’t see it as a trend just yet. “The lack of output following the historical decline in rig counts is now showing in the data,” said Tim Evans, chief market strategist at Long Leaf Trading Group. The U.S. Energy Information Administration on Wednesday said crude-oil supplies fell 3.9 million barrels for the week ended May 1. That was the first decline since the week ended Jan. 2, even though oil-rig counts have been falling since December, based on data from Baker Hughes BHI, -0.03% At last count, as of May 1, the number of active U.S. oil rigs stood at 679. Following the collapse in crude-oil prices, which are still down more than 40% from their peak last summer, many crude suppliers halted operations to “adapt to the new realities in the global energy trade,” said Evans. “There is a lag effect that prevents the impact from being felt immediately,” he said. “We are seeing some of the impact now.”
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| Mapping Income Mobility: The Best (And Worst) Places To Grow UpA new study from Harvard economists Raj Chetty and Nathaniel Hendren seeks to quantify the financial impact of where America’s children are brought up. More specifically, Chetty and Hendren measure “the percentage earnings gain from growing up in each county [in America] relative to an average place for children in low-income families.” The goal of the study (and its predecessors) is to determine the most effective way to imporove economic outcomes for low-income children. Here, the researchers “focus on families who moved across areas to study how neighborhoods affect upward mobility.” Unsurprisingly, Chetty and Hendren “find that every year of exposure to a better environment improves a child’s chances of success.” Interestingly, the economists have actually quantified the improvement in order to “estimates of the causal effect of each county in America on upward mobility.” The map below, from NY Times, shows “how much extra money a county causes children in poor families to make” compared to national averages for low-income households:
Click here for interactive map More from NY Times:
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| E.U. Commission Opens Antitrust Inquiry Into E-Commerce Sector Officials said the investigation would address whether large players like American tech giants were impeding competition for European consumers. |
| Yellen warning, interest rate anxiety send Wall St. lower (Reuters) – U.S. stocks added to losses on Wednesday afternoon and the Dow sank into negative territory for 2015 after U.S. Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen warned of high valuations, adding to anxiety about future interest rates and a global bond rout. |
| JPMorgan probed over role in French tax evasion case PARIS (Reuters) – U.S. bank JPMorgan Chase has been placed under formal investigation in France as part of a probe into alleged tax evasion by senior managers at investment firm Wendel , a court official said on Wednesday. |
| Top NSA Official Who Created the Global Surveillance System: Fire the U.S. Intelligence Agencies: Hire Anonymous, InsteadWilliam Binney is the high-level NSA executive who created the agency’s mass surveillance program for digital information. A 32-year NSA veteran widely regarded as a “legend” within the agency, Binney was the senior technical director within the agency and supervised thousands of NSA employees. Binney sent Washington’s Blog an article from Monday showing that a member of the cyber collective Anonymous tipped off Texas police to the imminent shootings by Muslim extremists. Binney comments:
Binney and other top NSA whistleblowers have previously explained that the intelligence agencies should have stopped 9/11, the Boston Marathon bombing, the Paris shootings and other terrorist attacks. But |
| News Analysis: Police Struggle With Loss of Privileged Position Amid a rash of high-profile incidents involving allegations of police overreach, police unions are trying to adapt to a rapidly changing political context. |
| Dogbert Explains ‘Diversification’ In Today’s Market“risk goes away” – except when everything everywhere is driven by one factor…
Source: Dilbert.com |
| McDonald’s Southern California restaurants testing kale LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – McDonald’s Corp , which is testing a variety of new food products as part of a major turnaround effort, on Wednesday said nine southern California restaurants are trying out breakfast bowls made with what is becoming a state dietary staple: kale. |
| Private Employers Add Fewest Jobs in a Year, and Nonfarm Productivity Falls Payrolls in the private sector increased by 169,000 in April, the ADP National Employment Report showed, the fewest since January 2014. |
| U.S. Stocks FallU.S. stocks fell on Wednesday after Federal Reserve Chairwoman Janet Yellen drew attention to elevated valuations in the stock market. |
| German Greens Propose Radical Greek Debt SolutionSubmitted by Raul Ilargi Meijer via The Automatic Earth blog, In its German language edition, Der Spiegel ran a piece last night (translation is mine) about a proposal from the German Green Party (Die Grünen) to deal with the Greek debt crisis that is radically different from how its own government has so far approached the situation. The Greens are not in the Berlin government, but they are a force in German politics regardless, if only because the country loves so much to portray itself as green. The Green Party’s euro working group, made up of foreign policy, finance and economic specialists, first of all says that, realistically speaking, it will take 10-20 years to deal with Greece’s debt issues. Furthermore, while many of the Greek problems are ‘home-made’, the “one-sided focus”, on the part of its creditors, on a high primary surplus has led to further economic collapse and thus growing debts. “Austerity is broken and has failed.” (‘die Kaputtsparpolitik ist gescheitert’). Moreover, today’s short-term crisis management, which merely moves from one payment to the next, needs to stop. Future reforms should no longer target ordinary citizens, but above all the wealthy and the profiteers of ‘nepotism’. If Athens is consistent in applying these reforms, it would be rewarded with further reductions in interest rates and repayment terms. From this vantage point, the Green Party proposes the following scenario: |
| Yellen cites ‘potential dangers’ in U.S. stock valuations WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen on Wednesday said high equity valuations could pose potential dangers but that stability risks across the U.S. financial system remained in check. |
| Big Oil’s Disruptive Climate ChangeOil majors face a real risk of stranded assets—and not just related to efforts to limit carbon emissions. |
| Oil Gains on U.S. Stockpile Report, Ends Below Day’s HighOil prices spiked in a volatile session Wednesday as weekly data showed U.S. stockpiles fell for the first time this year, but the market gave back much of its gains amid a continued bearish backdrop. |
| Lockhart “September Rate Hike” Comments Send Stocks To 5-Week LowsWhile many hoped that Lockhart would play good cop to Yellen’s bad cop, he didn’t: *LOCKHART SAYS MARKET’S VIEW FOR SEPTEMBER HIKE ‘REASONABLE’ Which has sent stocks reeling back to the levels pre-payrolls in April.
The Dow is also in the red from pre-Payrolls (with Nasdaq holding on to gains for now)
Lockhart had more to say… *LOCKHART SEES REAL ESTATE, STOCK MARKETS SUPPORTING CONSUMPTION (umm ok) *LOCKHART: NOT `INTENSELY CONCERNED’ ABOUT STOCK VALUATIONS (jusdt ‘concerned’ then?) *LOCKHART: WE HAVE NOT SEEN DETERIORATION IN CORE NUMBERS (yes we have!) |
| Twitter Earnings Leak: A Payday for Wall Street’s Relentless Data PursuitBy EconMatters Twitter’s had a very bad week when its stock tanked ~ 27% in 5 trading days. It all started when its weak 1Q earnings was posted early by Nasdaq on Twitter’s IR web page. Twitter originally planned to release earnings after market close on Tuesday (so investors may have time to digest the not-so-impressive 1Q numbers to perhaps arrive at a more rational course of action). Press-release earnings after market-close followed by earnings call the next morning is a popular standard operational procedure of Investor Relations (IR) at many publicly traded companies. Twitter’s best laid plan was totally destroyed first by the big Nasdaq goof posting earnings about 2 hours before market-close, then by Selerity, a little-know cyber data sleuth that found and twitted Twitter’s disappointing 1Q results to the whole world. Investors jumped on the early ‘leaked’ info and rushed for the exit. Twitter had to halt trading briefly and wound up officially releasing the earnings shortly before the closing bell. The stock continued to drift lower and closed at $37.84 on Friday, down more than 27% or $14 for the week. |
| First Libor jury trial delayed in London LONDON (Reuters) – The London trial of Tom Hayes, a former UBS and Citigroup trader who is the first person in the world to face a jury trial over allegations of a conspiracy to rig Libor interest rates, has been delayed by two weeks. |
| Bits Blog: Google Loses to LinkedIn in Silicon Valley Headquarters Pitch Google’s plans for a space-age new headquarters received a major blow from the Mountain View City Council, which awarded most of the city’s future office space to another Internet company, LinkedIn. |
| Market Continues Slide After a Weak Hiring Report and Mixed Earnings The payroll processor ADP said hiring slowed in April. Meanwhile, LendingClub topped expectations with its earnings, while News Corporation missed. |
| Mizuho’s Ricchiuto Wipes The Floor With Deutsche’s Lavorgna: “Why Do I Even Bother?”The last time Mizuho’s Chief Economist Steve Ricchiuto was on CNBC, we suspected he would never be invited back. However, today, he dared to unleash the truthiness of the US economy, debating ‘truth’ with none other than Deutsche Bank’s meteoroconomist Joe Lavorgna. As soon as Ricchiuto stated unequivocal ‘facts’ about growth, productivity, and earnings; the smiling Lavorgna started talking over him to which Ricchiuto blasted “why bother… why do I even bother?” and Lavorgna fell back to the “well he has been short the market for 400 points” argumnet which Ricchiuto rebuffed aggressively… One of these guys is thoroughly pissed off… the rest are smiling.
The fireworks begin around 3:00 (but watch the intro for some facts) As a reminder, this was Ricchiuto’s last appearance…148 seconds of awkward uncomfortable truthiness… While Steve had a number of hard to hear quotes for the CNBC anchors – such as:
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| Priceline Can’t Name Its Own Share PriceAhead of the Tape: Priceline looks pricey and may get clipped by dollar strength and decelerating growth. |
| Business Travel: Business Travelers Want to Be Left to Their Own Devices Smartphones have already transformed vacation planning, but business travelers looking to use Uber, Airbnb and other tech tools find they must take on sometimes unyielding corporate travel policies. |
| Business Travel: U.S. Airports Are Better, but Not Best While they pale beside the best foreign airports, domestic terminals have improved significantly in the last 25 years, as facilities have expanded and terminals have been modernized. |
| Bank of America shareholders back board despite criticism NEW YORK (Reuters) – Shareholders voted to back Bank of America Corp’s executive compensation, board nominations and opposition to shareholder proposals at the annual meeting on Wednesday, despite earlier complaints about bylaws being changed. |
| U.S. private payrolls growth eases; productivity falls WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. private employers in April hired the fewest number of workers in more than a year, further diminishing hopes of a strong rebound in economic growth after the first-quarter slump. |
Summary of Economic Releases this Week
Earnings Summary for Today
leading Stock Positions
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