Business

One week ago we were stunned to learn, and report, that as part of the "sentencing" of former NY Fed employee Jason Gross who had admitted to stealing confidential Federal Reserve information and passing it on to his former boss Rohit Bansal, then employed at Goldman Sachs, in hopes of generating goodwill and a comfortable post-Fed job at 200 West, he somehow managed to avoid any jail time and instead was slapped with a draconian penalty: a $2,000 fine.... oh and some community service.

Jason Gross

Overall crude inventories rose for the 6th week in a row according to API. Despite draws in Gasoline, Distillates, and Cushing; Crude inventories surged 8.8mm barrels - the 2nd biggest weekly build in a year.

API, according to RTRS:

• Crude +8.796mm
• Cushing -1.37mm (confirming Genscape's data)
• Gasoline -4.3mm
• Distillates -391k

This was a big draw in Cushing but appears to be dominated by the surge in overall inventories...

Submitted by Lance Roberts via RealInvestmentAdvice.com,

In this past weekend’s newsletter, I stated

“While my “emotions” are currently screaming to start increasing equity allocations at this juncture, there are several reasons why my discipline is keeping me from doing so currently:

Belgian PM Charles Michel said earlier that "this is the deadliest attack on Brussels ever," and as we noted in this morning's pre-open wrap:

This morning's Brussels bomb attacks have led to risk-off sentiment across European asset classes, with Bunds higher and equities firmly in the red, although if the Paris terrorist attacks of November are any indication, today's tragic events may be just the catalyst the S&P500 needs to surge back to all time highs

Submitted by Thad Beversdorf via FirstRebuttal.com,

Free trade is a great concept, as are free markets and freedom.  The problem is none of these things exist in practice because they don’t provide sufficient advantages to the ruling class.  The Fed and HFT systems now dominate global markets, western nations systematically overthrow any (freely elected) foreign government that doesn’t bow down to them and free trade agreements are put in place to ensure investors maximize profits no matter what the costs to society.  Let’s focus on this last one.