Business

Popular US hotel chain Starwood Hotels and Resorts Worldwide has, according to a Reuters report, become the first company from the US to sign a deal with Cuba since 1959: Starwood will manage and market two properties in Havana and signed a letter of intent to operate a third. Such deals would normally be prohibited under the U.S. economic embargo of Cuba, but Starwood received special permission from the U.S. Treasury Department last week.

By EconMatters

It is pretty ironic that Netflix disrupted Blockbuster, causing Blockbuster to go the bankruptcy route, and ultimately On Demand is already disrupting Netflix as we speak. This is a Sea Change in the space, the worm has turned because of the market arrival of On Demand through multiple alternative platforms. This deflationary trend means all media content is actually a depreciating long term asset base.

One of the more surprising market developments of 2016 has been the violent obliteration of those who had taken part in the biggest consensus trade of 2015, namely long the USD. As the Fed finally admitted earlier this week, the US economy is sputtering and is woefully incapable of handling 4 rate hikes, or 3 for that matter.

Authored by Art Berman

Another False Oil Price Rally: Crossing A Boundary

The oil-price rally that began in mid-February will almost certainly collapse.

It is similar to the false March-June 2015 rally. In both cases, prices increased largely because of sentiment. As in the earlier rally, current storage volumes are too large and demand is too weak to sustain higher prices for long.

WTI prices have increased 47%  over the past 20 days from $26.21 in mid-February to $38.50 last week (Figure 1).

Exactly one month ago, when we learned that Goldman was looking to package its Hedge Fund VIP basket of stocks into an ETF we said, half jokingly, that we have discovered a "guaranteed way to make money: Short Goldman's "Hedge Fund VIP" ETF", adding that "with 5 of their Top 6 trades for 2016 already stopped out, and their recent heavy losses from swing-trading Gold,  one might question the demand for an ETF that tracks Goldman Sachs' hedge fund research tips, but, as Bloomberg reports,  David Kostin's "Hedge Fund Trend Monitor" report - tracking the 50 companies that matte