CRUZ SUSPENDS CAMPAIGN

After a long, ridiculous, speech, Rafael Cruz announced that he was dropping out of the race to become President of the United Steaks of America. In light of this news, the broke and disheveled John Kasich said he’s continuing his campaign, in order to win and become the next President of the United Steaks.

This, of course, is a trap and Trump is aware of this  ruse to snatch the nomination from him.

Congrats to Cruz for listening to the will of God.

Now Glenn Beck and Mark Levin will shut the fuck up, right?

Ted Cruz is making an absurd speech now, making the case for a contested nomination for the republican party,  in spite of being hated by virtually all but a handful of people lost in the deserts of Texas.

Trump won Indiana (51% to 35% aka landslide), a state that Cruz and his religious zealots viewed as a place where God would make his will known. Clowns, like Glenn Beck, took to fasting as a method to curry the favor of the Lord, in order to help the lying fuckhead, Rafael Cruz, win the primary in Indiana.

The Lord has spoken, Cruzbots, and he wants America to be great again.

I know some of you had a rough day. The market hasn’t exactly been a walk in the park the past week. Worldwide, central banks are falling flat on their collective faces, stuck with negative interest rates. Here at home, our central bank wants to try something different.

Instead of fighting the fires with water, they want to try shooting gasoline out from their hoses, at a very high psi, in order to see if it will extinguish those pesky little flames.

3 rate hikes for ’16, says the Sanfransicko Fed President.

What I’m about to show you is the strongest seasonal trend going in the market, along with ‘buy TLT in the summer.’

Like clockwork, energy stocks rip higher from January through April. Starting May, things start to sour, rapidly, in the oil patch. You’d be remiss to ignore this data.

Oil stocks are being ravaged today.

WTI showing some material weakness.

Ignore at your own peril.

APC has rallied quite a bit from the lows, but not today.

Naturally, they’re talking their book, as you would expect. But I find it fascinating, that on call after call, these oil companies are reporting record oil production levels. What happened to the theory that low prices would force production offline? The only lines being created in the oil patch are of the unemployment varietal. These companies have not stopped producing. Clearly, the pain hasn’t been maximized.

Notes via Briefing:

Company believes they will continue to see improvement of commodity prices with near term volatility.

Oil industry is in a ‘much better’ place than it was in at the end of last quarter.

Continue to see a ‘pretty strong’ interest from people looking to buy property from APC.

$700 mln of divestitures in Q2 expected. They will update cash and volume impacts once completed.

Company does not expect to increase capital budget in 2016, even if oil prices were to rise above $50/barrel.

Co has reduced cost per well ‘pretty significantly’ over the last quarter.

Believe they will be flat Y/Y on oil volumes.

Full disclosure, I never wanted markets to go down, but it was bound to happen. After all, rejection of a rally predicated upon crude trading higher isn’t a rally at all. The best tell, as far as I’m concerned, was the Apple warning.

But here we are, with markets getting slammed, as predicted almost to the precise day by yours truly. But you don’t see me bragging or comporting myself in a way that could be misconstrued as being a ‘poor winner.’

No.

Instead, you see me here, handling my effervescent victories with grace and the type of panache you’d expect from a space alien magician (SAM).

Markets are plunging.

Italy is getting meat ball’d because they have the worst banks.

Commodity stocks have rolled over and have begun to die.

Not even our dearly beloved Dow with all of its Caterpillar shares could withstand the barrage of sell orders.

The ark floats.

The Citi team is out with a doomful note of grave concern today, citing a sundry of reasons to be fearful, heretofore, of a global recession.

The reasons are clear and forthwith.

China, Emerging markets, political risk, U.S. economy surprisingly weak, and world central banks are out of ammo.

China’s recent return to a credit- and investment-led growth model “appears likely to exacerbate existing credit and investment excesses, and increase risks of an eventual credit and financial bust or a long-lasting period of low growth,” writes Citi’s team.
Emerging markets haven’t been fixed just yet
EM asset prices have been flattered by two things—”both of which may prove temporary,” write Rahbari and Co. While the U.S. dollar is weaker and expectations of an aggressive Fed tightening cycle have receded, “structural issues persist throughout many EM countries,” they say.
Omnipresent political risk
“A number of political risks threaten, including the risk of Brexit following the UK’s E.U. referendum on 23 June,” writes Citi.

The world’s economic engine is sputtering
“U.S. activity remains surprisingly weak,” the economists note.

If the whole rally since February is predicated upon some magical resurgence in crude oil prices and a stabilization of China, one would be hard pressed to defend that thesis under any minor degree of cognitive thinking and subsequent debate. Along those lines, should the price of crude drop again into the $30’s, it’d be supremely interesting to see how markets could absorb such a blow to its most central concern.

This made me cheerful this morning. H. Clinton was accosted by a former coal miner, who had just been fired due to his industry being in tatters, post Obama, quizzing Clinton how she could say she was gonna put a lot of coal miners out of business.

Her response was apologetic doublespeak horseshit, straight out of the book 1984.

Bo Copley, a West Virginian who recently lost his job at a coal company, teared up as he told the former secretary of state that he didn’t know how to explain his situation or her comments to his young children. Seated beside his wife, Copley slid over a photo of his kids to Clinton, who was seated a just few feet from him at the community round-table discussion.

He questioned how she could say what she said at a CNN forum in March —“We’re going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business” — and then “come in here and tell us how you’re going to be our friend.”
He also told her he was representative of the angry crowd who had assembled outside hours before.

Clinton then engaged in a very frank conversation about her comments, apologizing repeatedly and calling her comments a “misstatement.”“Those people out there don’t see you as a friend,” he said, referring to the dozens of protesters within earshot.

“What I said was totally out of context from what I meant because I have been talking about helping coal country for a very long time,” she said. “What I was saying is that the way things are going now, we will continue to lose jobs. That’s what I meant to say.”

Serious question, does anyone believe a thing this woman says? How on earth is she beating the communist in the primaries? Oh, that’s right, she’s facing a communist.

He didn’t find out his man crush Guy Fieri’s cooking show was cancelled. There wasn’t a death in the family, or legal concerns.

Steve Cohen lost 8% of his assets to a fucked up stock market in the month of February (gasp, no homo).

“One of my biggest worries is that there are so many players out there trying to do similar strategies,” Cohen said on Monday at the Milken Institute Global Conference in Los Angeles.

“If one of these highly levered players had a rough run and took down risk, would we be collateral damage?” Cohen said. “In February we drew down 8 percent which for us is a lot. My worst fears were realized.”

Stevie is super out of touch with reality, living inside The House of Cohen. What sort of fucked up world does Stevie’s mind reside in?

The trash can dollar is back with vigor, marking new annual highs v the Yen. The euro is within an earshot of new 52 week highs as well.

On the surface, this makes no sense, since we’re tightening rates while their trying to devalue their currencies via negative rates. The fact that the opposite of the desired outcome is happening is especially damning for both the ECB and the BOJ, which is likely why markets are on edge this morning.

The yen is up 12% v the dollar in 2016.