The Price of the US Stamp to GO DOWN–First time in 97 Years

Whoever decided to lower the price of the stamp, considering the precarious state of the U.S. Postal Office, is a moron.

That being said, I will save the additional 2 pennies and use them to throw at my local mail carrier, whenever I am feeling generous.

These are very minor ancillary fringe benefits from living inside of a deflationary vortex.

According to the US Postal Service, the price of a US-bound first class stamp will decrease 2 cents — to 47 from 49 cents — starting April 1o.

Stamp prices last declined in 1919 when the price of a first class stamp fell to 2 cents from 3 cents.

This expected decrease stems from an act of Congress passed in 2013 that allowed the USPS to add a 4.3% surcharge in order to stem the massive losses for the Service because of the Great Recession.

In a release from the USPS, the group said the act expires when the surcharges had accounted for $4.6 billion in revenue, which will happen April 10.

At that time, stamps will revert back to their inflation-pegged pricing, dropping the price to 47 cents for a first class stamp and sticking the USPS with an additional $2 billion in annual losses.

Postmaster General and CEO Megan Brennan says this will be a disaster for the postal service.

“The exigent surcharge granted to the Postal Service last year only partially alleviated our extreme multi-year revenue declines resulting from the Great Recession, which exceeded $7 billion in 2009 alone,” said Brennan in a release. “Removing the surcharge and reducing our prices is an irrational outcome considering the Postal Service’s precarious financial condition.

The last time the stamp went down in cost, Woodrow Wilson was president.

Just a few days since being indicted for rigging bids, the former CEO of CHK, a once force to be admired in the American oil boom, was found dead in an apparent car accident.

It looks like a suicide, according to police on the scene. Aubrey’s Tahoe caught fire after speeding and crashing into a wall.

Capt Balerrama of OK city said: “He pretty much drove straight into the wall.” No one else was hurt during the accident.

Condolences to his family.

Fed Williams, certified asshole from the Federal Reserve, said in a speech today that the ‘dot plot’ sketched out by the malevolent people at the Fed might be tweaked ‘here or there.’

I’m guessing that means more than 16 rate hikes, which is what the dot plot calls for, is in store–since these people are nuts.

Moreover and most importantly, he said economic data hasn’t changed since December, in spite of the market. He said the Fed was on the path to raise interest rates, in very plain words.

There “could be a tweak here or there” in projections known as the dot plot, Williams told reporters Wednesday in San Ramon, California. He declined to comment on whether he’d support a rate increase at the FOMC’s March 15-16 meeting, and said he won’t “opine” on how often policy makers will tighten borrowing costs this year.

Williams said economic projections haven’t changed by more than a “tenth here or there” compared to December, and he sees no signs of fragility in the U.S. economy. The Fed continues to be “on the path to raising rates.”

If it turns out more stimulus is warranted, policy makers should resort to forward guidance or more quantitative easing, he said. “We’re not doing negative interest rates.”

This news would’ve shaved a quick 300 off the Dow a few weeks ago. Now it’s viewed through rose colored glasses, since everything is magnificent again.

This market is quietly in beast mode. A few weeks ago I identified 5 stocks that embodied the risk inherent in the tape. I dubbed them TWDFM (these will definitely fuck me), so that you’d remember them. If, by chance, you are short any of these in recent weeks, you’re certainly feeling less than zestful about your financial future.

For the day, TWTR. WYNN, DB, FCX and M are up nearly 4% as a unit, spearheaded by FCX.

The old favorites of last year, FANG, have woefully lagged behind, indicative of the fact that investors are more interested in dumpster diving for distressed assets than buying serious companies with solid prospects.

All in all, markets are digesting recent gains with gallantry. The bias is certainly to the upside, with a watchful eye on the apocalypse, for it could rear its ugly head at any moment.

With over $500 billion in maturities due this year, you are going to be barraged with solicitations from advisors and will read lots of reports, such as the shit BofA touched upon today in an interview.

If you’re bullish on markets, I suppose bonds are a great buy. Otherwise, you’re entering a clownish world filled with ridiculous people. Naturally, the best credits are attractive, up to a point. But if the global economy is set to grind lower, buying corporate bonds now is not ideal.

The extra yield that investors demand to hold U.S. investment-grade bonds over Treasuries, or spread, may drop to 150 basis points by the end of the year from 211 on Feb. 26, said Hans Mikkelsen, head of U.S. investment-grade credit research at Bank of America Merrill Lynch. The measure last touched that level in July.

While issuers stepped to the sidelines this year because of increased volatility, more positive sentiment since mid-February is helping spur sales and tighter yield premiums, Mikkelsen said in an interview.

“There is a general sense among our investors that corporate balance sheets are late cycle and that leverage ratios are sort of getting to the peaks we have seen historically,” Mikkelsen said. “I just take the opposite view of that.”

Banks need their bonuses and their bread buttered. Buy bonds.

ADP, aka the least reliable data provider on earth, said 214k jobs were added over the past month, well ahead of expectations. Recent market success has indeed made you slothful and craven for more Federal Reserve induced pain.

What the fuck am I talking about?

First, let me just remind you that markets found a bid after market conditions wrecked portfolios and caused the very best propagandists on Wall Street to lobby the Fed to chill out. Since then, the Fed has eased up on their rhetoric, which has permitted stocks to rally.

And now all of the chatter on Twitter is pointing to a singular theme, which is ‘if the economy is doing so good, then the Fed must hike in March.’

Some of these people actually believe it’d be a good thing, since it worked out so grand the first time.

‘It’s not gonna be so bad. The economy can handle it.’

The fuck it can.

You will rue the day you clamored for that crazy woman, Yellen, to enter back into rate hike discussions. Be grateful for the respite you’ve enjoyed in recent weeks. Rest assured in knowing that the second rate hikes are back on the table, all of your degenerate gains will David Copperfield right out the fucking door in what will be a bidless market.

The truth will be laid bare in forex markets.

So what the Chinese gov’t have squandered an astounding $762 billion in forex reserves over the past year. Chinese stocks are moving higher this evening, up more than 4%–dispatching Moody’s downgrade with ease.

Without credible and efficient reforms, China’s GDP growth would slow more markedly as a high debt burden dampens business investment and demographics turn increasingly unfavorable. Government debt would increase more sharply than we currently expect,” Moody’s said.

The agency said its rating committee had discussed China’s status at a meeting on Feb. 9, during which the country’s institutional and fiscal strength, as well as its susceptibility to event risk, were reviewed.

The agency said the downgrade was driven by expectations that China’s fiscal strength will continue to decline, as well as the fall in its foreign exchange reserves which have shrunk by $762 billion over the last 18 months.

It also said that policymakers’ credibility was at risk of being undermined by incomplete implementation or partial reversals of some reforms.

“Interventions in the equity and foreign exchange markets over the past year suggest that ensuring financial and economic stability is also an objective, but there is considerably uncertainty about policy priorities,” Moody’s said.
Moody’s, however, retained China’s Aa3 rating, noting the country’s sizeable reserves gave it time to implement reforms and gradually address economic imbalances.

Eventually all chickens will come home to roost. But for now, the monster has been put back into the closet. War is being raged against fear. The very survival of the status quo depends upon the stability of world equity markets.

I suppose the orient are celebrating Donald Trump’s pledge to make America great again, through aggressive and debilitating trade wars that will completely fuck all of Asia.

Both Japan and China are celebrating their own demise, in earnest, with their broader indices almost 4% to the good.

Dow futures are marginally higher, by 42. Both gold and oil are mildly lower.

The Angelo Mozillo of the natural gas sector, the guy who revolutionized fracking and laid waste to CHK by over leveraging it, has been indicted for being a malefactor and also fixing bids.

I am not suprised in the least.

McClendon is accused of orchestrating a scheme between two “large oil and gas companies” to not bid against each other for leases in northwest Oklahoma from December 2007 to March 2012, the Justice Department said Tuesday in a statement. The charge is “wrong and unprecedented,” McClendon said in a separate statement.

The conspirators allegedly decided ahead of time who would win the leases and the winning bidder would then allocate an interest in the leases to the other company, the government said. The companies, which aren’t defendants in the case, are identified in the indictment as Company A and Company B. Mark Abueg, a spokesman for the Justice Department, declined to comment on their identities.

“The Justice Department has taken business practices well-known in the Oklahoma and American energy industries that were intended to, and did in fact, enhance competition and lower energy costs and twisted these business practices to allege an antitrust violation that did not occur,” McLendon’s lead lawyers, Abbe Lowell of Chadbourne & Parke LLP and Williams & Connolly LLP’s Emmet Flood, said in a statement. “We will show that this prosecutorial overreach was completely unjustified.”

According to the indictment, McClendon was the chief executive officer, president and a director of Company A until at least March 2012. Company B was a corporation with its principal place of business in Oklahoma City, according to the charging document. The Justice Department provided a copy of the filing, which couldn’t immediately be confirmed in court records.

Prosecutors said McClendon contacted an unnamed co-conspirator at Company B in 2007 and proposed they stop competing on bids to purchase leases.

The antitrust law McClendon is accused of violating, the Sherman Act, carries a maximum prison sentence of 10 years and a $1 million fine for individuals, according to the Justice Department statement.

“I have been singled out as the only person in the oil and gas industry in over 110 years since the Sherman Act became law to have been accused of this crime in relation to joint bidding on leasehold,” McClendon said in a statement. “I will fight to prove my innocence and to clear my name.”

This has no bearing on CHK, whatsoever. It’s amazing to me that this man was entrusted with $10 billion in financing after being ousted from Chesapeake.

Donald Trump laid into Rubio and Hillary Clinton in his winners speech, equating her to being an incompetent hack, while Rubio is persona non-grata, a major party controlled lightweight.

Look, he’s gonna build a giant 1,000-mile long wall and have the Mexicans pay for the damned thing. If China could build a 13,000 mile wall using donkeys and wheelbarrows, we can handle a 1,000-mile wall with Caterpillar tractors.

It’s gonna be fantastic. The best ever.

This is just part 1 of 3. My god damned laptop is crashing out on me and I am literally seconds away from smashing to pieces this $4,000 apple piece of shit. I’ll throw parts 2 and 3 up when I can. They were supremely entertaining.

The whole set up was great theatre, from an uber confident Trump to an imposing Governor Christie in the background with the poker face.

Here is part II.