As COVID-19 Forces Classes Online, Colleges Face New Challenge: “Zoombombing” Authored by Blair Nelson via CampusReform.org, A new disturbing trend has emerged among Zoom conference calls called “zoombombing.”  Due to the coronavirus, colleges and businesses have had to relocate their classes and meetings onto online video conferencing platforms, such as Zoom. According to the FBI, many Zoom video conference calls have been subjected to some form of hijack. “The FBI has received multiple reports of conferences being disrupted by pornographic and/or hate images and threatening language.” There have been several incidents of this happening in various college courses and meetings. At the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, for example, a mandatory diversity workshop called I-connect was hijacked recently. An individual appeared … [Read More...]

“No One Has Ever Seen This Before”: With Companies And Analysts Flying Blind, Q1 Earnings Massacres Loom It’s appearing as though Wall Street hasn’t quite prepared for what is coming down the pipeline, as companies across the board prepare to blindside analysts with upcoming earnings reports.  Walgreens, this morning, was a perfect example. Everyone believed they were a company that was coronavirus-proof, yet the stock fell after the company admitted it was still seeing decreasing foot traffic – even after the company beat its earnings estimates. In the age of the coronavirus, almost all analysts are “flying blind”. And this is likely to lead to some shocks from earnings reports that will be felt across the street. Many companies have already admitted publicly that they have no … [Read More...]

Mysterious Colorado Doomsday Shelter For When “Law & Order Breaks Down” Sees Spike In Interest As the pandemic unfolds across the US, city dwellers are getting the hell out of dodge and escaping to rural areas. We noted this last week, with many leaving large metro areas in California, fleeing for the mountains and rural communities to limit their probabilities of contracting COVID-19. Now it appears the virus crisis is evolving, as fears of social unrest across large US metro areas are spiking interest in doomsday shelters.   The Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies warned last week that a “social bomb” is getting ready to explode across Western cities amid the collapse of economies and high unemployment. This has forced many people to request information … [Read More...]

Did Bill Gates Just Reveal The Real Reason Behind The Lock-Downs? Authored by Rosemary Frei via Off-Guardian.org, On March 24 Bill Gates gave a highly revelatory 50-minute interview to Chris Anderson. Anderson is the Curator of TED, the non-profit that runs the TED Talks. The Gates interview is the second in a new series of daily ‘Ted Connects’ interviews focused on COVID-19. The series’s website says that: TED Connects: Community and Hope is a free, live, daily conversation series featuring experts whose ideas can help us reflect and work through this uncertain time with a sense of responsibility, compassion and wisdom.” Anderson asked Gates at 3:49 in the video of the interview – which well over three million views now – about a ‘Perspective’ … [Read More...]

They Fought The Fed And Lost: How Powell Triggered A “Spectacular” Short Squeeze In LQD Over two years ago, in Jan 2018, we first showed that when it comes to betting on trouble in the investment grade bond market, investors had a preferred instrument for pessimism: shorting the LQD, the largest US investment grace corporate ETF. In retrospect, and loosely paraphrasing Crocodile Dundee, what happened to the LQD in Jan 2018 wasn’t trouble. This – as shown in the chart below – was “trouble”: between its all time high on March 6, and the ten year low hit just two weeks later on March 19, the LQD went bidless as the corporate bond bubble burst, and both investment grade and high yield debt ETFs and single names cratered. As LQD plunged, the shorts … [Read More...]

Major Technical Failures Confirm Bear Market Risk Authored by Lance Roberts via RealInvestmentAdvice.com, Major Technical Failures Confirm Bear Market Risk In last week’s discussion, we stated the “bear market” was not yet complete. This was despite the “market rally,” which convinced the media the “bull market was back.” While it was indeed a sharp “reflex rally,” and expected, “bear markets” are not resolved in a single month. Most importantly, as we discussed in our employment report on Thursday, “bear markets” do not end with “consumer confidence” still very elevated.  “Notice that during each of the previous two bear market cycles, confidence dropped by an average of 58 points.” This past week, we saw early indications of the unemployment that is coming to America … [Read More...]

The Shadow War Playing Out Behind The COVID-19 Crisis Authored by Gregory Copley via OilPrice.com, The rush to what is essentially a new wartime footing began consciously and urgently in the first quarter of 2020 between some of the most powerful geopolitical players of the modern era: the United States of America, the People’s Republic of China (PRC), and the United Kingdom. It was not about the “battle” to cope with the COVID-19 (coronavirus) epidemic, or the global fear pandemic which it engendered, but those contagions broke the cycle of globalism and the belief in the indissoluble nature of interdependence. It allowed what was already emerging as a fundamental move toward a new, bipolar global competition to come out into the open. By the end of March 2020, … [Read More...]

Trump Fires Ukrainegate Inspector General Who Helped Initiate Impeachment President Trump on Friday fired the intelligence community inspector general, Michael Atkinson, who brought a hearsay whistleblower complaint to Congressional Democrats, kicking off President Trump’s impeachment.  Atkinson’s closed-door testimony was so troubling to House Republicans that they launched an investigation into his role into what President Trump and his allies coined the ‘impeachment hoax.’ Ranking member of the House Intelligence Intelligence Committee Devin Nunes (R-CA) told SarahCarter.com that transcripts of Atkinson’s secret testimony would expose that he either lied or needs to make corrections to his statements to lawmakers. Trump notified the Senate and House Intelligence Committees of his decision to fire Atkinson, according to Politico, citing two congressional officials and a copy of … [Read More...]

Goodbye V-Shaped Recovery: Morgan Stanley No Longer Expects Return To Normalcy Before End Of 2021 Two weeks ago, when the first dire Q2 GDP forecasts emerged which were however followed by hilarious V-shaped recovery assumptions for Q3 and onward, we said it’s only a matter of time before the banks throw in the towel on a V-shaped recovery as the full devastation of the Covid depression emerges. We didn’t have long to wait. In a report from Morgan Stanley’s chief economist Ellen Zentner, the bank has not only surpassed both Goldman and JPMorgan in sellside gloom for how bad the Q2 depression will be, now expecting a massive 38% collapse in GDP, but more troubling for all those who believe the economy will recover overnight … [Read More...]

‘Mark It Zero’ – Triple-Levered Short Oil ETN Crashes To “Complete Loss” And just like that, it was gone! Following the biggest daily surge in oil prices ever… and another major surge in prices today, things have gone a little bit slightly turbo for “investors” in one leveraged oil ETN. Source: Bloomberg Unprecedented spikes in price along with a record ‘super-contango’ have left the VelocityShares Daily 3x Inverse Crude exchange-traded notes, or DWTIF, worthless, according to Credit Suisse. Source: Bloomberg “Because the Closing Indicative Value of the ETNs will be $0 on April 2, 2020 and on all future days… …investors who buy the ETNs at any time at any price above $0 will likely suffer a complete loss of their investment,” Credit Suisse said. As … [Read More...]