Equity futures sink, gold rises after Trump imposes tariffs

• Gold gains ground on safe-haven flows
• Treasury yields fall while U.S. dollar loses ground
• Trading choppy after Trump tariff announcements
• 
  

Equity futures fell on Wednesday after the U.S. market close while safe-haven gold and bond prices rose as investors worried about U.S. President Donald Trump's announcement of 10% tariffs on all imports, with much higher rates for some trading partners.

S&P 500 E-minis stock futures initially rose after Wall Street indexes closed the regular session higher, but then lost ground as Trump went into detail about his tariff plans in a White House Rose Garden event.

S&P 500 futures ES1! fell 1.6% as Trump spoke while Nasdaq futures NQ1! fell 2.4%.

Trump, who has referred to Wednesday as "Liberation Day", outlined a range of levies for different countries including

“We view $CAN as the latest US-listed Chinese company to have deceived investors about its business”

One of the world's largest manufacturers of the ASIC devices that are used to "mine" cryptocurrency looks like a total Scam. 

"investigation of this bitcoin mining machine maker reveals undisclosed related party transactions, irregularities involving many customers and distributors, as well as a business model that we view as broken. Regardless of your outlook on the future of Bitcoin, we believe that CAN's business is simply far worse than promoted. "

"In the three months or so since listing, [$CAN]  has seen its share price collapse by almost half, from $9 to around $4.70 at pixel time (despite a rather unusual 80 per cent one-day surge in the middle of last month). And that's in a period during which bitcoin has climbed about 15 per cent."

See the story on FT Alphaville here: Canaan you believe this crypto stock got listed on the Nasdaq?

Blackstone's Byron Wien Singlehandedly Refutes The Double Dip, Hilarity Abounds

Blackstone's Byron Wien Singlehandedly Refutes The Double Dip, Hilarity Abounds

To all the bulls out there, we have a Wien-er just for you. In an essay that is basically a sequel to last week's job application in a second-tier position in the administration by a Moody's strategist and a Princeton economist (yes, yes, we know... oxymorons), the BlackStone head of something, Byron Wien, says the fututre for the market, the economy, and pretty much everything else is brighter than a nuclear bomb (incidentally one going off today would likely send the market into the greatest melt up in history). Lest there be any confuction what Byron's view is: "My view is that the economy is going through a temporary lull and business conditions will improve later this year and in 2011." At least Wien is honest: "In preparing this essay I used research from Goldman Sachs, Lord Abbett, Credit Suisse and International Strategy and Investments for arguments on both sides of the double-dip issue." Mmhmm - that some serious "both sides" source list. And the piece de resistance: "The factors that argue against a resumption of the recession are the strong liquidity position of corporations which have 6% of their assets in cash, a level not seen since the 1960s, and the fact that both housing and autos are at low levels of production and not likely to drop further." Over the weekend we will present an extended analysis finally putting to rest the inane argument that corporations are flush with cash: while true on a gross basis, the net level of cash vs debt, and especially vs equity, is at one of the worst levels in history. This ongoing childish avoidances of the liability side of the corporate balance sheet must stop and someone has to finally shut up these so called sophisticated economists and their endless lies.  Feel free to print out two copies of the attached Wien essay: we hear his work "product" is much better in two ply format.   h/t FMX Connect

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The MasterBlog: "It's Not A Market, It's An HFT 'Crop Circle' Crime Scene" - Further Evidence Of Quote Stuffing Manipulation By HFT | zero hedge

The MasterBlog: "It's Not A Market, It's An HFT 'Crop Circle' Crime Scene" - Further Evidence Of Quote Stuffing Manipulation By HFT | zero hedge