22Aug2016 Market Update: Crude Prices Have Fallen 2%, Gold Is Rising And The US Dollar Is Trending Down, Investors Are Clearly Confused To What Is Happening Or Going To Happen

Here is the current market situation from CNN Money

Wall Street declines as oil prices drop; Fed in focus

(Reuters) – Wall Street was lower on Monday as oil prices fell and investors remained cautious ahead of Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen’s speech this week.

U.S. clearance for ChemChina deal sends Syngenta stock soaring

ZURICH (Reuters) – A U.S. national security panel has cleared ChemChina’s $43 billion takeover of Swiss pesticides and seeds group Syngenta , the companies said, boosting chances that the largest foreign acquisition ever by a Chinese company will go through.

U.S. banks want to cut branches, but customers keep coming

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Despite banks’ nudging toward online tools, many U.S. customers are not ready to give up regular visits to their nearest branch, complicating the industry’s efforts to slim down.

Pfizer boosts cancer drug roster with $14 billion Medivation deal

(Reuters) – Pfizer Inc , beating out numerous other bidders, said it would buy U.S. cancer drug company Medivation Inc for $14 billion in cash, adding its blockbuster prostate cancer drug Xtandi to the company’s growing oncology roster.

AT&T signs deal to offer roaming services in Cuba

(Reuters) – AT&T Inc , the No.2 U.S. wireless carrier, said it had signed a deal with Cuba’s state-owned telecoms provider to offer direct roaming services to its customers visiting Cuba.

BlackRock upgrades outlook for emerging market stocks

NEW YORK (Reuters) – BlackRock Inc said on Monday it is upgrading its view on emerging market stocks, adding that the equities will continue thriving as central banks keep interest rates low.

Office Depot CEO Roland Smith to retire

(Reuters) – Office Depot Inc said on Monday Chief Executive Roland Smith would retire, three months after the second-largest U.S. office supplies retailer and bigger rival Staples Inc abandoned their planned merger.

Ex-Comverse CEO returning to U.S. to plead guilty in fraud case

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Ending a decade on the run, the former chief executive officer of Comverse Technology Inc who fled to Africa to avoid prosecution in a stock options scandal is returning to the United States to plead guilty in a fraud case.

Rio’s 29th sport: building the perfect corporate ‘dream house’

RIO DE JANEIRO (Reuters) – As the athletes strived for gold, the world’s biggest companies engaged in their own sport during the Rio Olympics – outglamming each other with spectacular hospitality houses.

“Sooner Or Later The Younger Generation Will Explode In Rage At The System”

Submitted by Howard Kunstler via Kunstler.com,

What the world is witnessing, without actually paying much attention, is the death of our debt-based economy — that is, borrowing the means to thrive in the now from a future that can’t really furnish it anymore. The illusion that the future would always provide was a legacy of the cheap energy era. That era ended in 2005. The basic promise is broken and with it the premise for living as we had been. The energy available today, especially oil, is no longer cheap enough to run the industrial economies designed to run on it. Any way that you look at the dynamic, Modernity loses.

With oil under $50 a barrel, and gasoline under $3 a gallon (back east), the public apparently thinks that the Peak Oil story is dead and gone. But when it costs $75 a barrel to pull the stuff out of the ground, and the stuff only sells for $47 a barrel, the oil companies’ business model doesn’t really work. The shale oil companies especially have been gaming the system by issuing bonds that pay relatively high interest rates in an investment climate where almost nothing else offers enough yield to live on, especially for pension funds and insurance companies. Two little upward bumps this year in the price of oil toward the $50 range prompted a wish that the good old days of high-priced oil were coming back, that the oil business would be profitable again.

The trouble is that high oil prices — say, over $100 a barrel, as it was in 2014 — crush advanced economies, so that demand for oil crashes, and with it productive activity. Without productivity, the debts issued by companies (and even governments) don’t get repaid. There really is no “sweet spot” in this energy cost equation.

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“Complete Chaos” – Equity Market Schizophrenia Soars

Every dip this morning has been met with a panic bid for stocks back to unchanged with Dow futures now having swung around 500 points intraday for no gain… as VIX is monkey-hammered lower…

Note the 5amET slump in stocks and spike in crude as oil tumbled in early European trading…

With Oil and bond yields consistently trending to the lows of the day…

One trader described the swings in stocks as “complete chaos” saying that machines were clearly in charge… “there’s no humans playing anymore.”

From Soccer Stars To Bahrain Princes: New Emails Reveal Hillary Clinton Gave Special Access To Foundation Donors

Update: It appears Judicial Watch’s fact-finding is blwoing the Clinton narrative…

*JUDICIAL WATCH `DISTORTING FACTS’ ON EMAILS: CLINTON CAMPAIGN

As we detailed earlier, the farce continues as detailed reckoning of Hillary Clinton’s State Department emails reveal former Hillary Clinton’s top aide Huma Abedin provided influential Clinton Foundation donors special, expedited access to the secretary of state. In many instances, as Judicial Watch exposes, the preferential treatment provided to donors (from a British soccer player to the crown prince of Bahrain) was at the specific request of Clinton Foundation executive Douglas Band.

As JudicialWatch.com details, the new documents included 20 Hillary Clinton email exchanges not previously turned over to the State Department, bringing the known total to date to 191 of new Clinton emails (not part of the 55,000 pages of emails that Clinton turned over to the State Department). These records further appear to contradict statements by Clinton that, “as far as she knew,” all of her government emails were turned over to the State Department.

The Abedin emails reveal that the longtime Clinton aide apparently served as a conduit between Clinton Foundation donors and Hillary Clinton while Clinton served as secretary of state. In more than a dozen email exchange …

Step Aside Peter Pan: Japan’s PM Abe Is Super Mario During Olympics Closing Ceremony

There is an odd infatuation among Japan’s ruling elite with fantasy characters: last June, BOJ governor Haruhiko Kuroda, who is running the greatest monetary experiment in history, essentially compared himself to Peter Pan in a formal speech at the BOJ-IMES conference, saying no matter what, one has to believe one can fly just like Peter Pan:

The issues I have raised so far are all complex, and there are no quick, definitive solutions for them. Nevertheless, I strongly believe that, at this one-and-a-half day conference, we will address the issues we currently face and find our way forward through lively discussions. I trust that many of you are familiar with the story of Peter Pan, in which it says, “the moment you doubt whether you can fly, you cease forever to be able to do it.” Yes, what we need is a positive attitude and conviction. Indeed, each time central banks have been confronted with a wide range of problems, they have overcome the problems by conceiving new solutions.

Overnight, Japan’s other distinguished ruler, premier Shinzo Abe did it again, when he took time away from his busy schedule of instructing the BOJ to monetize any ETF it can find, while buying now more than a third of all Japanese government bonds, and appeared in a brief but showstopping gig at the Olympics closing ceremony as the Nintendo game character Super Mario, in what AP said “offered a tantalizing glimpse at Tokyo’s plans for the 2020 games.”

The organizers for the Tokyo Olympics crammed the works into a brief two-minute film montage before Abe’s appearance: athletes participating in more than a dozen sports, as iconic Japanese images like Tokyo Tower, cherry blossoms, a bullet trai …

A Window of Opportunity Cracks Open at Valeant

Easing financial conditions could give Valeant’s new finance chief an assist.

One Policy to Rule Them All: Why Central Bank Divergence Is So Slow

The focus on the Fed raising rates masks the global easing in monetary policy.

Renesas-Intersil: Putting Down Chips for Automotive Jackpot

Renesas, a one-time supplier of chips to Apple iPhones, looks to be paving the road to supply the likes of Apple’s cars.

What is an Economic Depression?

Written by John Lounsbury

The concept used in economics for a “depression” is inexact and in conflict with the physical definition of the term. We will propose an analytically precise definition of the term and show a number of examples of how the new definition works in examining the business cycle.

Read more >>

Why some Louisiana homeowners may find it tough to get their insurance claim checks

The “mortgagee clause” can mean you’ll need your bank’s OK before you make repairs to your home

The New York Post: FBI finds thousands of Clinton documents that weren’t turned over to State Department

The FBI has found thousands of documents Hillary Clinton failed to turn over to the State Department when she stepped down as secretary of state — ensuring more legal trouble for the Democratic presidential candidate and further mandatory disclosures.