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.

Following 'Jade Helm' last summer, 2016 appears to have seen an escalation in social unrest and domestic terrorisim threat reaction among America's authorities. FEME undertaking domestic riot training in the south last month, battle-tanks rolling through Houston last week, and now the Department of Homeland Security plans a bioterrorism attack drill next in the NYC Subway.

Submitted by by Erico Matias Tavares via Sinclair & Co.,

On 23 June the British will vote in a referendum to decide whether their country should remain in or leave (BREXIT) the European Union (EU). The importance of this event cannot be overstated, since it will impact the future of the UK – and very likely that of Europe – for decades to come.

When it comes to tracking the nuances at the all important margin of the gold market, few are as observant as ADMISI's Paul Mylchreest, whose December 2014 analysis showed the stunning role gold holds in the new normal as a funding "currency" for BOJ interventions in the form of a long Nikkei/short gold (and vice versa) pair trade, indicating that central banks directly intervene in gold pricing (by selling, of course) when seeking to push paper asset prices higher.