America

The Fed has invoked 2% as the magic number for inflation but claims that its goals have not been reached even though the economy is doing well and, therefore, interest rate hikes are justified. Inflation statistics depend on where one looks for inflation and the weighting given to different components. It is obvious that statistics can be manipulated and, unsurprisingly, consumer price inflation in the US is low, under 2%. Workers consequently do not have the argument of high inflation to justify requests for pay rises.

Nike, the world’s largest footwear maker, said on Thursday it would launch a pilot program with Amazon.com to sell a limited product assortment on its website.

In a call with analysts Thursday, Nike CEO Mark Parker said that Amazon would carry "a limited Nike product assortment" of footwear, apparel, and accessories, and that Nike was seeking to improve its presence on the e-commerce site. "We’re in the early stages, but we really look forward to evaluating the results of the pilot," Mr. Parker said.

The U.S. Supreme Court agreed to review a series of lower-court rulings blocking the Trump administration’s controversial travel ban on Monday, setting up a major showdown over presidential power and religious discrimination.

In an unsigned order issued on the Court’s last day before its summer recess, the justices scheduled oral arguments in the case for when they return in October. They also partially lifted the lower courts’ injunctions against Section 2(c) of President Trump’s executive order, which temporarily suspended visa applications from six Muslim-majority countries, as well as Section 6, which froze the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program and halted refugee entry into the United States.

Dan Gramza gives Picking Alpha a brief review of the USA grains markets and what June 2017 will bring to the markets.

Q.: Do you think there are grains or other Agri contracts that were negotiated while Donald Trump was visiting Saudi Arabia?

D.G.: The information we have so far is the primary focus was on financial agreements for defense, technology, and energy. I have not seen any information regarding the agricultural markets as part of the discussions. It is important to remember that the budget is the president suggestion and after Congress gets through with it, the final budget rarely ever looks like what the president has suggested.

The financial markets have become, to use David Stockman`s phrase, one huge gambling casino. The size of the derivative market, which is now an impressive $639 trillion, dwarfs the trivial Forex daily turnover of only $5 trillion. What is disturbing is that volatility has recently hovered at 10 or even below except for a slight blip a few weeks ago.

The number of Americans filing for unemployment aid dropped less than expected in the week ended June 2. The Labour Department reported on Thursday that initial jobless claims fell 10K to 245K last week, following the preceding week’s upwardly revised figure of 255K. Meanwhile, market analysts anticipated a bigger decrease to 241K during the reported week. Nevertheless, claims remained below the 300K level for the 118th consecutive week, the longest streak since 1973. The four-week moving average of claims, considered a better measure of the existing labour market trends, rose 2.25K to 242K during the reported week.

President Donald Trump on Monday reiterated his push for his executive order banning travel and immigration from six majority-Muslim countries, lashing out against his own Justice Department and potentially exacerbating the continued legal battle over the order.

"People, the lawyers and the courts can call it whatever they want, but I am calling it what we need and what it is, a TRAVEL BAN!" Trump said in the first of a series of tweets Monday morning.

Donald Trump aims to overhaul the financial services system’s regulation in order to simplify lending process for banks. In your opinion, is this intention reasonable? Why?

That is obviously not a simple question to answer for the reason that a reform of the financial regulatory system in terms of changing the Dodd-Frank needs to be done, but I do not think an overhaul is indeed necessary. What needs to happen is the implementation of some sort of regulations for small to mid-size banks, while regulations for large banks make sense for the most part. A few larger banks here and there need to be reviewed, but the simple fact is that by requiring significantly greater capital, the system is much more stable than it had been and it has been able to withstand the shock and not get into the kind of problems it faced ten years ago. When we talk about reforming the regulatory system, it needs to be done with an eye towards small and mid-size banks, not large banks. Unfortunately, the focus of attention is on larger banks, because they have more money in the government.