EU Set to Levy Big Stupid Irish Tax Dodging Fine Against $AAPL, Despite Ireland Defending It

This is what you get for your EU membership: totalitarianism.

Apple has created thousands of jobs in Ireland, in exchange for leniency on taxes. The Irish government was fine with this arrangement and approved it with open arms. Now the EU anti-trust head, Margrethe Vestager, hailing from Copenhagen, is set to tell Ireland and Apple to fuck themselves by issuing a gigantic fine.

Secretary Lew is meeting with her now, asking that she please stop targeting US companies for regulatory issues that he feels are being done with extreme bias.

Conflict over trans-Atlantic tax practices escalated in February as Lew complained to commission President Jean-Claude Juncker that U.S. firms are unfair targets of state-aid investigations. The Treasury Secretary’s letter came after EU enforcement focused on fiscal pacts Apple, Amazon.com Inc. and McDonald’s Corp. have with Ireland and Luxembourg. The companies all say they acted within the law.

Several months back, Lew said the EU crusade was a “disturbing international tax policy precedents”, claiming it had “serious concerns about fundamental fairness”.

Vestager denies that she’s targeting American companies, unfairly, in spite of that her case load suggesting otherwise. She claimed companies simply needed to ‘play by the rules’ and all would be okay.

Crude oil has been going down in a straight line for the better half of the past month. Yet, simultaneously, stocks have risen to new highs, seemingly elated with the fact that a large swath of energy companies will become burdened with enormous debt repayments in 2017.

The absurdity of traders is only eminently exposed by the monthly returns of crude stocks–down just 1% vs a 10% decline in the underlying commodity. More than that, a great many of them have climbed higher, as the price of their product dropped.

Some of these names include SGY, CWEI, RICE, PE and FANG.

CLR has no business being up 5.5% for the month, as the price of WTI drops. There is a disconnect transpiring here, a disheveled lack of correlation between the stark and painful truth, and one residing in the fantasy land of mother goose and QE infused rallies, a seemingly endless array of bad characters permeating the marketplace with their brand of foul odor only a sand loving ostrich could endure.

Esther George is back to talking shit again. She refrained from insisting upon higher rates last month, thank to BREXIT and the week May jobs report. But she’s back, talking smack again, clamoring for higher rates.

“The economy is at or near full employment” said George, a voter this year on the policy-making Federal Open Market Committee, in a speech Monday in Lake Ozark, Missouri. “And yet short-term interest rates remain at historic lows. Keeping rates too low can also create risks.”

For the moment, the markets don’t give a shit.

I understand she’s now saying England will leave the EU, in order to become Prime Minister. But what was her position before the vote?

Here it is.

A UKIP donor had this to say, regarding a prospective May administration.

Speaking on the BBC’s The Andrew Marr Show, Mr Banks said he believed Mrs May would be “the death of Brexit, by a thousand cuts”, and would “absolutely” betray the referendum result.

He claimed she may delay triggering Article 50 until it is too late, and circumstances have changed, or echo the Norwegian “political elite” – allowing free movement in exchange for access to the single market.

Some believe the fix is in, which is one of the reasons why markets are surging. Time will tell.

What a wonderful stock’d market. We’re all just thrilled to see stocks hit new highs. I’ve been punching homeless men in the face with bags of cocaine this morning, even though I’m not leveraged long. I’ve been a crazy eyed bull my entire life, so I am entitled to invite myself to this grande extravaganza despite not being a bull anymore.

Some of you are pondering “what the fuck is going up so much” to cause all of this wanton degeneracy. I am here to show you.

These are the new market leaders, the enemies of the Death Star.

YTD gains
XOM +23%
AMZN +12%
JNJ +21%
FB +13%
T +27%
WMT +22%
VZ +24%
PFE +14%
CVX +20%
ORCL +13%
CMCSA +20%

There you have it: brand new, all time, motherfucking highs. I’m sure all of you hog butchers are HEAVILY long At&t and Verizon, no?

Stock picking isn’t dead yet. My Bubble Basket inside Exodus, an index targeted to find overvalued stocks, is down more than 17% for the year–in spite of the indices hitting all time highs. The last update to the index was given in December of 2015, until today.

Previous to this iteration, the index was heavily biased against biotechs–rightly so. Without giving the freeloaders here on the site access to my new picks, I will tell you that I’ve moved away from biotech and have added some silver, gold, REITs and maybe a few oil stocks–just to name a few.

The index isn’t comprised of the top performing stocks. Instead, it is almost solely based on fundamentals–something most of you eschew because it takes time, intelligence, and patience to understand.

Here are the broad strokes.

Median mkt cap: 4.64b
Median short %: 12.5%
Median p/s: 16x
Median PE: 134
Median Fundamental score (measured on a 1-5 scale by Exodus): 2.78

If it weren’t for the yen plummeting against the dollar, I’d throw a bottle of pear juice at this rally and say ‘bahumbug.’ Truth is, the fate of the world lies in Tokyo, center of the world as it pertains to Pokemon.

The yen strength has been a beacon of failure for the central banksters, a repudiation that told the narrative of wanton failure. If the Bank of Japan couldn’t weaken its own currency, in spite of having unlimited resources to throw at QE, how could one sleep at night with all of that danger lurking about the bend.

Never fear, Kuroda is here and he’s saved the day.

The yen is plunging, mind you, against the dollar, by almost 2%.

With renewed weakness in the yen, advantageous hedge funders can borrow in yen and buy a shitload of SPY futures with the proceeds. Or, they can borrow in yen and buy hamburger stocks. Either way, the yen is the keystone to liquidity for gamblers and financial engineers on a global scale, so it’s a good thing the value of it is decreasing.

We live in a fucked up world. Markets are hitting new all time highs today.

This man is a hero: Najih Shakir

An ISIS psychopath tried to detonate himself in Iraq to destroy the Sayyed Mohammad Shrine. Aside from the shrine, he intended to maim and kill hundreds of innocent people. The man above stopped the attacker and hugged him, giving his own life and reducing the explosion radius in the process.

The attack injured 70 and killed 38. But it would’ve been much worse had it not been for the heroic actions of Najih Shakir.

Rest in peace.

Japanese messaging app is due to come public in America on July the 14th. It sports 218 million users, mainly from Asians who like to send stickers of anime to one another. Patently absurd.

After the IPO launches, led by the catamites over at Goldman and Morgan Stanley, its market cap will likely top $7, maybe even $9 billion.

Sales are growing at a 40% clip to around a billion, placing its prospective price to sales ratio anywhere from 7-10x. Bear in mind, Line is up against the global hegemony called Facebook with its What’s App messaging app.

Line will trade under the ticker LN.

Retarded.

Shares of Nintendo are higher by another 22% this evening (trading in Japan), due to the overwhelming social success of the Pokemon Go app. The stock had gone higher by 10% on Friday of last week.

I’ve been summoned by my children to seek out Pokemon, walking around and driving. The app is a work of genius. Water pokemon can be found near the water, while other geographical elements dictate where you can find the other monsters. I’ll say it again, I’ve never seen anything like this affect young people. While the game still keeps people on their electronic devices,  it also is forcing them to go outside and actually walk. Amazing.

Nintendo owns 33% of Pokemon and stand to make a mint from this.