Shortly after it first went public, Zynga hit a market cap of $9 billion. Since then, the company which had such one time hits as Farmville and Words with Friends has seen its valuation crater, with its public stock now valued at roughly $2 billion. However, excluding the company's $1.5 billion in cash implies that its underlying operations are valued at about half a billion dollars. Which is ironic because that is less than the value of the San Francisco-company's based headquarters.

Submitted by Mish Shedlock of MishTalk

Greece Shut Down By Protests And Strikes Over Pensions; Emergency Eurogroup Meeting Monday

In protest of still more pension cuts, Greek unions started a 3-day strike on Friday that has shut down much of the country.

The Greek parliament holds a pension reform vote on Monday. The vote is expected to pass but perhaps barely. Syriza has a slim three seat majority in the 300-seat Greek parliament.

Authored by Anis Shivani, originally posted at Salon.com,

Our awful elites gutted America. Now they dare ring alarms about Trump, Sanders — and cast themselves as saviors. Both parties ignored workers, spewed hate, enriched themselves, hollowed out democracy... And now the problem's populism?

This week, on the night of the Indiana primary, I read one of the most loathsome political screeds it has been my misfortune to encounter.

Following the biggest news of this weekend, the (anticipated) resignation/termination of Saudi Arabia's longstanding oil minister Ali al-Naimi, everyone has been wondering about what comes next and how this development will impact the price of oil. We laid out our preliminary thoughts as follows:

Ultimately this is not about the new oil minister: this is about Prince Mohammed taking full control over Saudi oil. So the question everyone now wants answered is "what does this mean for oil?"

 

Via NorthmanTrader.com,

Despite the large February – April rally stocks are down year over year (May 6 2015- May 6 2016). $SPX is down over 1%, the Nasdaq is down over 4% and small caps are down over 8%. On May 6 stocks closed basically where they were in the third week of March which implies they haven’t really gone anywhere in the past 7 weeks.