After a significant draw the previous week, API reported a large 6.22mm build overnight, now confirmed by DOE with a 6.63mm build. Cushing was expected to see a considerable draw due to the outage at TransCanada's Keystone crude pipeline outage and was almost triple expectations (-1.76mm vs -610k exp). A larger than expected draw in gasoline inventories and build in Distillates was also evident as Production data fell for the 11th week of the last 12 to the lowest since Oct 2014. Oil prices are tumbling...

Genscape:

Bradley Birkenfeld is one of the most significant financial whistleblowers of all time, so you might think he’d be cheering on the disclosures in the new Panama Papers leaks. However, Birkenfeld is raising questions about the source of the information that is currently shaking political regimes around the world and believes the hacking of the Panama City-based firm, called Mossack Fonseca, could have been done by the U.S.

Perhaps the biggest farce to result from the Dodd-Frank legislation designed to "rein in" banks was the ridiculous notion of "living wills" -  a concept that makes zero sense in an environment where the failure of even one bank assures a systemic crisis and could - as the Lehman financial crisis showed - lead to the collapse of all other interlinked financial institutions.

Business inventory-to-sales ratio pushes to new deeply recessionary cycle highs at 1.41x...

As inventories met expectations of a modest 0.1% drop MoM in February but sales tumbled 0.4%.

Auto inventories rose 1.3% - the most since Sept 2015 (but sales were unchanged as opposed to +1.4% in Sept 2015). The breakdown is ugly across the board...

Q1 GDP takes a double whammy as not only did inventories drop (and recent gains were revised lower) but sales tumbled.

President Killary
Would The World Survive President Hillary?

Paul Craig Roberts

This is an English translation of an article that I wrote for the German magazine, Compact. I was encouraged by the high level of intelligent discourse that Compact brings to its readers. If only the US had more people capable of reaching beyond entertainment to comprehending the forces that affect them, there might be some hope for America.