Not good. Maybe an uptick is occurring, but we need a serious uptick on silver. Many promote the industrial benefit of silver but correlation tends to lag on the alpha side. 

New post:
Flush with an influx of crude oil, independent global refiners are refining at breaking speed. Oil traders who bought at the lows in February ($26.01) are unloading to downstream channels. These sales should continue and will help E&P balance sheets, but only so much, as losses have greatly damaged the industry. Continued sales and revenue will repair the losses and allow for more seemingly comfortable M&A and integration.
Read more at Investing.com

Simply put, Gawker is not the New York Times, neither is the local news.
Gawker, local news, and blogs need to be held accountable for disrupting the standards of journalism and for endorsing mafia-like character assassination behavior. This is very similar to the news hacking scandal in London a few years back. Media must allow privacy and must adhere to a code of human ethics.

Lotte Group indicated it will shelve what may have been a $4.5 billion initial public offering for its hotel unit, the world’s biggest so far this year, after widening investigations pushed the South Korean conglomerate deeper into crisis.

- BBERG

If you value your $$$...

The current won't make the fundraising hurdle and you can't get those dollars back folks. There is literally NO way. In fact, the current runner should consider lending himself his own money. Americans need not give in this cycle. Put your money into the economy.

CNN Park City, Utah (CNN) Republican fund-raisers are beginning to fret that Donald Trump does not comprehend the enormity of the challenge before him, warning that if he fails to execute the basic tasks of fund-raising during a critical six-week stretch...

Romney retreat puts spotlight on Trump's fund-raising problem in critical stretch

http://goo.gl/rmh2yR

A legend of venture capital has passed.

I will remind myself to not make comments in old age that are so racy, 

but Perkins was his own person. 

It is too bad I will not be able to meet him, but I am fortune he was here and achieved what he achieved. He is perhaps the first legend of venture capital.

Thomas J. Perkins, Pioneering Venture Capitalist in Silicon Valley, Dies at 84 http://nyti.ms/1WH3kPT

VW Korea what a terrible fraud against the wonderful and ancient environment of South Korea 

Research from Torsten Sløk, Ph.D., Economist, Deutsche Bank Securities ---

I continue to get a lot of questions about how to interpret Friday’s employment report. One interpretation is that the economy is slowing and therefore the Fed will not hike anytime soon. The problem with this story is that there are no good reasons why the economy should be experiencing a slowdown now. If anything, the turbulence in markets in January and February is now further away and companies should feel more comfortable and increase hiring. This is the pattern we have seen for US consumers; as we have moved further away from January and February consumers have felt better and consumer spending growth has been accelerating. Another interpretation of the employment report is that the economy is very close to full employment. At full employment job growth will begin to slow because there are fewer qualified workers available to take jobs. And if there are fewer qualified workers available then wages should also be trending higher, which is exactly what we are seeing, see chart below. The bottom line is that when the incoming data surprises to the upside or the downside then we need a story why growth is accelerating or decelerating. And there are simply no good reasons why the economy should be slowing at the moment, in particular not in light of the ongoing acceleration in consumer spending. This view is also confirmed by the latest Atlanta Fed GDPNow estimate, which currently stands at 2.5%.

The housing bubble in mid-late 2008 (NBER lists the beginning at 12/2007) that is often blamed for the Great Recession (GR) was in fact not the main cause of the GR. 

In 2006 (April 2006) housing national averages began to fall. 

Many monetary economists blame the Fed for inaction.

Austrailia had a similar amount of circumstance but instead of hitting a brick wall they slid into moderation.

Developing...

Between 2005 - 2015 the beverage goons were asleep at the switch. But 2016 is a bad time to start a craft brewery. The goons are awake and they are thinking the way goons think, and our government needs to block this merger.

Valuations will be suppressed after this deal wraps - if it wraps.
Does anyone see a massive issue with this? Craft brew will be squeezed out and these two groups will have a global monopoly. What is my issue with this? For starters it is "just" beer. You can make beer in the bath tub, and what was once attractive (Stella, Woodchuck, Ballast Point, etc.) is now owned by corporate goons. Mega-corps cannot make craft products. Part of craft is the love of the craft, not the lust of the money behind it. Part of America is dying. These goons love destroying ideas and innovation for the benefit of their corporate jets, sponsorship of sporting events and buying private vineyards that their third wives name "Chantavia" or maybe something more terrible. Nevertheless it should be a crime, just like their hairplugs.

I hear a few beer heirs are still rummaging around the hallways of these beverage cos, no doubt attempting to recreate the 1850’s and make dead relatives happy. Dreams die hard. Adolphus is Adolf Hitler, and the legions of workers the SS. They are clearly driven by debt service needs and the dream of global domination of this intellectually drab industry. I'm glad my family doesn't own breweries, I'd have to cozy up with these goons and elephant walk it to a NASCAR race to dump the enterprise.

If you have a craft brew house, brew an ‘I Hate Miller InBev IPA’ and sell the hell out of it!

Disclosure - I don't drink alcohol and don't trade the industry. No horse in the race. 

RTRS- AB InBev launched its bid for SABMiller in November that would combine the company's Budweiser, Stella Artois and Corona brands with SABMiller's Peroni, Grolsch and Pilsner Urquell and brew almost a third of the world's beer.

Email InBev IR -  christina.caspersen@ab-inbev.com

I have been rolling my investor eyes at Uber for a while now. That valuation - what are they thinking??

Regardless, in order to discover the bloated valuation on public markets, Uber could list on global major exchanges (India, UK, Korea, China) and that would merit the type of valuation they need. 

RTRS - Uber raises $3.5 billion from Saudi Arabia's sovereign wealth fund.