Technology

Who could have seen this coming?

We have noted the stark divergence between still robust expectations/ surveys/ confidence (soft data) and relatively weak final sales/ production/ spending (hard data) numerous times in the past few months.

But note how the recent collapse in “soft” upside surprises has totally eliminated this gap.

This is relatively straight forward to explain in context. Both the underlying macro data change and consensus indices for soft data were running at post GFC highs at the end of March/early April.

Presented without comment...

Source: Ben Garrison

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.

In its seventh CIA leak since March 23rd, WikiLeaks has just revealed the user manual of a CIA hacking tool known as ‘Archimedes’ which is purportedly used to attack computers inside a Local Area Network (LAN).  The CIA tool works by redirecting a target's webpage search to a CIA server which serves up a webpage that looks exactly like the original page they were expecting to be served, but which contains malware. It’s only possible to detect the attack by examining the page source.  Per WikiLeaks: