World Events

Authored by Tsvetana Paraskova via OilPrice.com,A year after the pandemic and the disagreement within OPEC+ over supply management crushed oil prices, the industry finds itself at an all-too-familiar crossroads: Will OPEC’s bet that U.S. shale’s “drill, baby, drill” is gone forever be right this time?  Analysts seem to concur that this is a safe bet, at…

The covid crisis may be over (with nearly 60% of the population vaccinated, one would certainly hope it's over), but covid crisis spending is here to stay.At 2pm, the Treasury released its latest Monthly Treasury Statement which showed that in March, the US budget deficit exploded once again, surging to $660BN, up five-fold from a…

In an article published last week, a group of Fed researchers argued that the high savings accumulated by US households over the last year might not be “excessive”. This, as most sellside researchers and most recently, Deutsche Bank rates strategist Stuart Sparks notes, is "an important claim because the reflation narrative posits that as the…

Authored by Steve Watson via Summit News,The Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is working on a COVID vaccine that will work on all variants and has developed an implantable microchip that it says will continuously monitor the human body for signs of the virus.Retired Colonel Matt Hepburn, an army infectious disease physician heading up…

In what is perhaps the largest shakeup since Ryan Cohen, the co-founder and former chief executive of online pet food company Chewy, joined its board in January, Reuters reports that GameStop is looking for a new chief executive to replace George Sherman as it pivots from being a brick-and-mortar video game retailer to an e-commerce…

Update (1520ET): President Biden weighed in on Monday to the shooting death of a black man in a Minneapolis suburb, after the police chief said he believed the officer involved accidentally used a gun instead of a taser."I think we've got to wait and see what the investigation shows. The entire investigation. You've all watched,…

And just like that the Fed's open-ended tapering discussion became event-based.Speaking on Bloomberg TV, St. Louis President James Bullard said that getting three-quarters of Americans vaccinated would be a signal that the Covid-19 crisis was ending, a necessary condition for the central bank to consider tapering its bond-buying program.When pressed on when will it be time to…

Authored by Adriana Hamacher via Decrypt.co,In briefInvestors are coming together to pool their funds and profit from high-value NFTs through fractionalization.But NFT fractions are a legal gray area and could be seen as securities.How can regular investors afford the eye-watering sums NFT (non-fungible token) artworks and other collectibles are commanding? And how can they ever hope to…

Despite trillions in Fed "stimulus" and endless government handouts, John Stanford, co-executive director of the Small Business Roundtable, told CNBC this week that "it continues to be a very painful time for small businesses.""We have to remember, PPP was a bridge program," Stanford said."It was meant to keep people on the payroll, it wasn’t meant…

By Zach Strickland of FreightWaves,The Inbound Ocean TEU Volume Index (IOTI), which measures maritime bookings for twenty-foot equivalent units for U.S. imports, is set to hit an all-time high this week. The IOTI starts in January 2019 but  covers one of the most active periods in maritime shipping thanks to the pandemic. With imports being…