Americas

Ahead of this week's AAPL earnings, investors were looking forward to more clues what the company with the quarter-trillion cash war chest would do with the funds that are now greater than the GDP of Greece, and aside from the token increase in shareholder distributions, they got little else, which has once again prompted speculation who Apple will acquire once the company decides to shift away from corporate bond holdings (recall that as of this quarter Apple now has more corporate debt on its books than the biggest bond mutual fund) to acquisitions.

 Manipulation's Persistence and Comex' Demise

• Comex Demise is a welcome event
• How Market Structure Impedes True Metals Price Discovery
• DGCX/ SGE Rising: The GoldenYuan Replaces the Petrodollar
• Manipulation's Persistence

via Soren K Group and MarketSlant

Authored by Peter Schiff via Euro Pacific Capital,

We Are All Going to Die From Coastal Flooding*

* Those having net worths of $10MM or more need not read.

via Soren K Group and Marketslant

The opinion piece at bottom is by Dr. Joe Romm, a Founding Editor of Climate Progress, “the indispensable blog,” as NY Times columnist Tom Friedman describes it. We thoroughly enjoyed reading it. And as writers with trading DNA we wanted to know where the trade was. 

For months now we've been warning that the great auto 'plateau' is nothing more than a debt-fueled bubble, courtesy of the Fed, that is on the verge of collapse.  Of course, bubbles typically get exposed when customer sell-through starts to slow but OEM's go on believing that 10% volume growth is possible in perpetuity...that usually results in inventory growth that looks something like this: