by Wolf Richter • • Comments Off on Tesla’s Sales Stall, Don’t Even Amount To A Rounding Error
March auto sales trickled out today. Beneath the wondrous hype about how they’d finally exceeded expectations, after they’d been perfectly awful for five of the prior six months, was a doozie. And the media, which normally fawns all over Tesla, covered it with a blackout.
by Wolf Richter • • Comments Off on I Just Got PayPal’s New Absolutely-No-Privacy-Ever Policy
Sunday, when no one was supposed to pay attention, PayPal sent its account holders an innocuous-sounding email with the artfully bland title, “Notice of Policy Updates.” PayPal didn’t want people to read it – lest they think the NSA is by comparison a group of choirboys.
by Bianca Fernet • • Comments Off on Broke Argentina Socks It To Warrant Holders, Saves $3 Billion
By Bianca Fernet: “Head in hands” photos or “plunging value” graphs that are traditionally displayed when markets fall were selected to accompany news that Argentine warrants tied to GDP crashed when the government revised 2013 GDP growth down to 3%.
by Wolf Richter • • Comments Off on Stocks on Speed: Leverage Spikes, As Does Risk Of Crash (Look at that Insane Chart!)
Margin debt is a crummy predictor of a crash. But it has a bone-chilling habit of peaking right around the time stocks do crash. In the last fifteen years, it spiked three times: during the final throes of the bubbles that imploded in 2000 and 2007; and now.
by Don Quijones • • Comments Off on Peaceful Indignation Turns to Violent Rage in Rajoy’s Spain
By Don Quijones: It was the first nationally coordinated grassroots response to repressive social and economic policies and widespread corruption of Spain’s ruling political caste. But it descended into violence– as the government is playing a dangerous game.
by Wolf Richter • • Comments Off on Dollar Hegemony Under Attack By Export-Superpowers Germany and China
The word dollar didn’t even come up when the Bundesbank signed the agreement with the People’s Bank of China. President Xi Jinping and Chancellor Angela Merkel looked on. It was serious business. Everyone knew what this was about. No one had to say it.
by Oilprice.com • • Comments Off on A US-Saudi Move to Lower Oil Prices To Punish Russia?
That the US could unleash a flood of oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to drive down prices has been pushed for weeks, most recently by George Soros, but has been dismissed as not a serious option. Then Obama went to Saudi Arabia.
by Wolf Richter • • Comments Off on Boss, We Got a Situation in Natural Gas
This winter, polar vortices sent the price of natural gas into dizzying spikes and plunges, head fakes, and whiplash-inducing turnarounds. But now winter is petering out, and we’re left with a peculiar situation.
by David Stockman • • Comments Off on Paul “Contrafactual” Krugman: The Laureate of Keynesian Babble
The Fed prints $4 trillion and the national debt jumps $9 trillion in six years. We’re now in month 57 of the expansion, beyond the average 53 months – already on borrowed time. Now comes Professor Krugman proposing to “do something.”
