Clinton simply cannot buy a break. She is losing far more often to Sanders than she is winning, and if she did not have all of the super delegates wrapped up Sanders would likely long ago have become the Democrat candidate. The current fight is in California, and we think Sanders could win, this is pretty crazy. This will go down to the convention, we expect a wild raucous floor fight.
The self drive vehicle market is going crazy, huge investments are being made, and some semi truck technology appears to be only a year or two away from implementation. Uber, Gett, Lyft, and many others are pairing with auto companies, hedge funds, and nations like Saudi Arabia to drive the technology forward, and be the first to market with their respective model. This is VHS vs BetaMax all over again but with lots of competitors! Cool! Bill Kristol trotted out a new Republican candidate, who few had ever heard about. This is was dud. Kristol needs to walk away from the party, he is a stupid old man who knows little and is never right. Over in Japan, Abe has admitted the economy is too weak to support his new sales tax policy, but claims this is not a failure. Huh? Perhaps it is now too late for Japan to correct its imbalances and return to growth, it needs immigrants, and it needs to free up its regulations, and inane restrictive laws. There is little evidence it will ever do this. In a rare change of heart, a Japanese company finally admitted it used Chinese slave labor during WWII, and has agreed to pay these people a sum of a bit more than $15,000. I wonder if the families of the 722 who were murdered by working them to death get a bit more? Probably not. China has been doubling down on crazy for decades. It has gluts in nearly all commodities, including a huge glut in steel, which is selling at rock bottom prices. They are also not producing much right now, because of this glut in commodities. And so they also have a glut in electricity. Yet they continue to produce entirely too much, and manage this problem by running many plants at middling output instead of shuttering many plants, and running the remaining at high output levels, which would be more efficient. We were also recently treated to a group of Chinese "scholars" who believe that China must teach more Marx, and less free market economics. Who knows if the CCP will agree, but it is in the midsts of a pretty serious crackdown, which will likely accelerate if the economy makes a hard landing. China is simply crazy. The Chinese steel glut has dropped prices 30% worldwide, and this is causing world wide steel industry to reevaluate whether it needs to keep steel mills open. This seems an easy question, but Obama was flummoxed by it and raised steel tariffs by over 520%. He is such a knob. The market would have little problem figuring this out, government finds this impossible and politicians find this yet another prime mechanism allowing them to create a new rich seam of graft and corruption. The federal government is in a snit about PayDay lenders, and has decided to regulate them. This means that these lenders will be lending less, not more. And so the poor person who needs a loan will be less able to turn to a more reputable PayDay lender, and likely have to turn to a loan shark, you know the criminals who actually break legs, and batter their "customers." This is done in the name of consumer protection. But it is really done to protect the delicate sensibilities of the progressive middle class soccer moms, and dads who have no idea how the real world works. Chalk another one up for loan sharks. The Brexit is clarifying before the June 23 vote. It appears to be the young, metropolitans, and the economically better off who wish to exit, against the old, poor, and uneducated who wish to stay. Essentially it is the dynamic makers against the unproductive takers. The takers need to worry what will happen if they win. Ultimately, it will likely result in the makers making less, and this will leave less for the takers to take! Mark you calendar. This will be interesting. Some are saying Brazil is only in a deep recession, but this has the characteristics of a depression, and it could drop into something like the Greek's serious intractable depression. The problem is the nation is roiled by socialist politics, and has been deeply damaged by the recent years socialist policies. If these are rescinded, the country has a chance, if not, it doesn't. The political issue will likely mean a significant recession regardless. We are assuming that Brazil will continue on its merry socialist way, although perhaps it will enact some minor reforms they will not be enough to do anything but reduce the depth of the carnage. Apparently, the French Navy has located the crashed EgyptAir black box, so we might yet find out what happened during the flight. Some debris was found but not enough to answer any questions. EgyptAir is an airline to avoid. The oil patch continues its reduction of the weakest members, and constant restructuring of the rest. Venezuela, Nigeria, Algeria, and Libya are all being pounded on the rocks. There will be no near term salvation for them, the "healthier" countries like Saudi Arabia, Russia, and the Arab oil producing states are likely all in much greater trouble than it appears. This can be seen since Russia and Saudi are both selling US assets, and attempting to sell their own bonds. They will have to pay high interest rates to attract buyers. The US debt is in high demand so they will get top dollar for those sales. South Africa has been on a decades long tear to achieve the near impossible task of totally destroying every aspect of the nations prior century long economic rise. Part of this was flirting with shockingly high crime rates, but the turn today is an attempt to finally drive the nations credit rating to junk status. We should know the outcome shortly, but anyone not treating South Africa credit like junk today is a fool. Unsurprisingly, Spain's Socialist party is undergoing something of a crisis immediately before elections, with two former regional governors being indicted on corruption charges. Spain is a corrupt place, with a complete lack of finesse in its corruptions. Italy on the other hand is corrupt with flair, finesse, élan. We don't like either, but from a distance we find the Italian more interesting. The Spanish former governors both maintain nothing criminal happened although perhaps there could have been irregularities without their knowledge. Corruption has been endemic in Spain since we can remember, it is like a tawdry telenovela. Sigh. Perhaps they could toss in a few busty, flouncy females once in a while for variety!? Fazebook continues its decent into totalitarian sycophancy, with its recent nod to that paean of democracy and republican governance, Vlad "the Impailer" Putin by taking down three twitter accounts antagonistic to the Russian regime. Why anyone would use a business which would act this way is unclear to us here at the Lair.
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