WalMart’s attempt to pacify the living wage crowd by giving the company’s lowest paid employees a tiny, across-the-board raise has been nothing short of a disaster.
The fiasco started early last year when the world’s largest retailer decided to spend some $1 billion to appease those who claim the company’s hourly workers don’t make enough to live with some semblance of dignity.
A week ago we warned of some insane movements and mysterious bid in OIL (the Barclays iPath oil tracking ETN) as it traded a stunning 36% rich to its underlying NAV. Well with oil resurgent today, as contracts roll, something just imploded in OIL...
As Barrons noted, the sharp performance divergence stems from the ETN’s massive price premium over the value of the index it tracks.
The U.S. may not be in an official technical recession yet (and it won't be until the NBER retroactively opines at some point in the next few years) but what about a half-recession? After all, nobody debates any more that the U.S. manufacturing sector is now contracting and it is only the services sector which is, at best, still growing (just ignore the last few Service ISM and PMI reports confirming that the manufacturing recession is rapidly spilling over).
When it comes to picking a poster child for everything that’s wrong with Wall Street and the financial industry in general, it’s sometimes difficult to decide just who gets the blue ribbon for “most nefarious.”
Indeed, since 2008 we’ve learned that virtually every systemically important financial institution on the face of the planet has at one time or another engaged in some manner of chicanery be it the manipulation of the world’s most important benchmark rates, the peddling of worthless mortgage bonds, or the rigging of FX markets.
Submitted by Charles Hugh-Smith of OfTwoMinds blog,
Once the power to manage expectations has been lost, the central bank bag of tricks is empty.
No one knows precisely how and when the global unraveling will impact their corner of the planet, but we do know one thing with absolute certainty: central banks are out of tricks.