It turns out oilfield services isn't a good place to be during epic crude downturns.
Halliburton - which cut thousands upon thousands of jobs in 2015 - is back it, announcing an additional 5,000 layoffs on Thursdsay. The cuts amount to 8% of the company's remaining workforce. We say "remaining" because as CNN notes, "the latest pink slips bring Halliburton's job cut tally to between 26,000 to 27,000 since employee headcount peaked in 2014."
At the end of 2015 we wrote about what may have been the most amusing incident of Chinese corporate fraud in recent years, one in which China Animal Healthcare, whose stock was suspended nearly a year prior and which, was just waiting for its delayed audited financials to be released so its stock can resume trading. The problem, as a subsequent public filing revealed, is that a truck loaded with four years’ worth of its original financial documents was on its way to Beijing however, while the truck driver was taking a lunch break, the truck was stolen. One week later the truck was found...
At this point the manipulations are getting ridiculous.
“Someone” decided to step in a prop up stocks yesterday. How do we know it was a market prop and not real investors?
There were several “tells.”
They were:
1) The jump in stocks was based on a sudden move in one of the key asset classes the PPT are using to prop up the markets (they are: Oil, the VIX and Yen).
2) The price action was sudden and vertical: neither are the hallmarks of actual buyers.
3) The trading session differed dramatically from recent other sessions.
Submitted by Patrick Barron via The Mises Institute,
Something is broken in the US bond market.
One day after the NY Fed unexpectedly announced yesterday's Agency MBS POMO was cancelled (then rescheduled to later in the day) due to "technical difficulties", moments ago the US Treasury announced that with 10 minutes to go before today's 7 Year auction, that the auction is being rescheduled for tomorrow due to, drumroll, "technical issues."
This is the full statement it said:
NEW CLOSING DATE AND TIMES FOR TODAY'S 7-YEAR NOTE AUCTION