United States

While not nearly as exciting as JPM cornering and manipulating the gold or silver markets, over the past few years Jamie Dimon's bank appears to have cornered a very prominent commodity traded on the London Metals Exchange, aluminum, resulting in price "anomalies" which as Reuters politely puts it "mean prices do not always reflect fundamentals" and which as we put it, reflect outright manipulation, however because regulators are captured have so far completely slipped through the cracks.

Submitted by Simon Black via SovereignMan.com,

“Prosperity is like a Jenga tower. Take one piece out and the whole thing can fall.”

That’s a direct quote from John Williams, the President of the San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank in a speech he gave a few weeks ago.

He could have just as easily been talking about propaganda. The Fed, the White House, Wall Street, the media have a vested interest in peddling a certain narrative about the economy.

Submitted by Mike Krieger via Liberty Blitzkrieg blog,

Starbucks Chairman Howard Schultz has said of the upcoming Concert for Valor:

 

Authored by Jessica Marmor Shaw, originally posted at MarketWatch.com,

For decades, California has been portrayed as the epicenter of earthquake country. Last year’s disaster movie “San Andreas,” in which a magnitude-9.0 quake lays waste to the state, was just the latest and most spectacular example.

Yet the Golden State has never been the No. 1 state for seismic activity. That title goes to Alaska, which sits atop two tectonic plates that bump into each other and produce an average of 1,000 tremors every month.

Even Bloomberg gets it.

In a note issued yesterday, the news behemoth reported what our readers had known for years: that "There's Only One Buyer Keeping S&P 500's Bull Market Alive", namely corporate buybacks, the same "buyer" of stocks that the smart money has been selling to for the past 7 weeks.

Dispelling any confusion about who the relentless buyer into the "wall of worry" is, this is what Bloomberg wrote: