23Jun2016 Market Update: UK Referendum Headed For Bremain, Crude Price Fractionally Lower, Unemployment Benefits Fell To 43 Year Low

Here is the current market situation from CNN Money

North and South American markets are broadly higher today with shares in Brazil leading the region. The Bovespa is up 2.33% while U.S.’s S&P 500 is up 0.92% and Mexico’s IPC is up 0.53%.

Wall Street marches ahead as Brexit seen unlikely

(Reuters) – The three major U.S. stock indexes rose about 1 percent each to record their biggest percentage gains in a month as investors grew confident that Britain would choose to remain in the European Union in Thursday’s referendum.

Index shifts, Brexit vote could make Friday freaky on Wall Street

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Friday could offer an especially wild ride on Wall Street as traders react to the vote on British membership in the European Union and adjust their portfolios to the annual reconstitution of the widely followed Russell stock indexes.

U.S. jobless claims near 43-year low; new home sales decline

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The number of Americans filing for unemployment benefits fell last week to near a 43-year low, suggesting labor market resilience even though hiring slowed sharply in May.

EU regulators to rule on $130 billion Dow, DuPont deal by July 28

LONDON – EU antitrust authorities will decide by July 28 whether to allow the $130 billion merger of U.S. chemical company Dow Chemical Co and its rival DuPont , one of several large agribusiness deals.

Pay TV firms make billing changes after Senate report

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Cable TV companies Time Warner Cable and Charter Communications Inc agreed to provide billing credits and make other changes after a U.S. Senate committee found overbilling to thousands of consumers.

Behind Tesla carnage, signs of support for Musk’s SolarCity deal

(Reuters) – Some of Tesla Motor Inc’s biggest investors have signaled support for CEO Elon Musk’s plan to buy solar power company SolarCity Corp , although the electric car maker’s stock cratered on Wednesday, lopping more than the $2.8 billion value of the proposed deal off Tesla’s market capitalization.

Merrill Lynch to pay $415 million for misusing customer cash: SEC

(Reuters) – Bank of America Corp’s Merrill Lynch unit will pay $415 million in the largest customer protection settlement in the Securities and Exchange Commission’s history and admit to wrongdoing to settle charges that it misused customer cash, the U.S. regulator said on Thursday.

U.S. new home sales drop from eight-year high

WASHINGTON, (Reuters) – New U.S. single-family home sales fell in May from a more than eight-year high amid weakness in three regions, but the overall housing market remains intact.

Investor group DSW to go to court over Volkswagen emissions probe

FRANKFURT/BERLIN (Reuters) – German investors’ association DSW said on Thursday it was going to court to push for an independent investigation of the diesel emissions test-rigging scandal at Volkswagen .

Fed Up With The Corruption: Mexico On Brink Of Revolution

Via TheAntiMedia.org,

The Mexican government’s deadly crackdown on a teacher’s union protest has rattled the nation in recent days, as 200,000 doctors on Wednesday joined the ongoing national strike against President Enrique Peña Nieto’s neoliberal reforms.

Anti-government sentiment is mounting after police forces opened fire on a teacher protest in Oaxaca on Sunday, killing at least eight.

Since then, two high level government officials from that state, Oaxaca Minister of Indigenous Affairs Adelfo Regino Montes and Secretary of Labor Daniel Gutierrez, have resigned in protest of the “authoritarian actions that repress and kill Oaxacan people who defend their rights and the government’s negligence to any possibility of dialogue,” as Gutierrez put it.

On Wednesday, members of the medical organization Yo Soy Medico 17 from 32 states joined the ongoing strike, stating their opposition to Peña Nieto’s health reforms, which they say are a “disguised way of privatizing health in Mexico,”

The European Union: Government By Deception

Submitted by Raul Ilargi Meijer via The Automatic Earth blog,

I stumbled upon an article by Day of the Jackal author Frederick Forsyth, published last week in the Daily Express, that I think every Briton and European and everyone else should read. Forsyth doesn’t delve into the American pressure to form a European Union as a counterweight to the Soviet Union, he sticks with ‘founding father’ Jean Monnet and his reasoning behind the particular shape the Union took. And that is bad enough.

All Forsyth has to do is to quote from Monnet’s work, and I have to admit that while reading it I increasingly got the feeling that it’s quite remarkable that no-one, especially no journalist, does this. It’s there for everyone to see, but that means little if and when no-one actually sees it.

I have repeatedly talked about how the very structure of the EU self-selects for sociopaths and/or worse, but perhaps not enough about how that was deliberately built into the design. A feature not a flaw.

And I don’t think Monnet ever thought about how structures like that develop over time, in which the flaws in that design become ever more pronounced and the more severe cases of sociopathy increasingly take over the more powerful positions. A development that is well visible in present day Brussels.

For me, as I’ve written before, being here in Athens these days is plenty testimony to what the EU truly represents. Not only do we need to help feed many tens of thousands on a daily basis, depression levels are up 80% or so and life expectancy is plunging because proper health care is ever further away for ever more people in a country that not long ago had a health care system anyone would have been proud of.

Th …

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Asian Tycoons Will Be First Hit by ‘Brexit’ Vote

As ballot counting comes in before Europe awakes, Asian tycoons Li Ka-shing and Ratan Tata will be the first to feel the seismic waves of the vote result.

Orient Securities: Here Comes Another Leveraged Bet on China’s Market

Chinese brokerage Orient Securities plans to raise as much as $1 billion in its Hong Kong public offering. It’s hard to see why now.

London Markets: FTSE 100 ends at 2-month high ahead of Brexit outcome

U.K. stocks finish with a fifth straight win Thursday, as voting got under way to determine whether the U.K. will remain a member of the European Union.

Mark Hulbert: U.S. stocks will be higher in 12 months — even if Brexit happens

An academic study maintains that far from doing the opposite of what short sellers do, as conventional wisdom suggests, we should be following their lead.

Economic Report: Mortgage rates barely budge, lag behind a rise in Treasury yields

Rates hold near three-year lows, mortgage provider Freddie Mac said.