China redraws map to claim 80% of South China Sea;

Each year, more than half of the world’s annual merchant tonnage passes through the South China Sea as well as a third of the global trade in crude oil and over half of LNG trade.

A Turkish friend of mine in Canada has insisted that civil war is breaking out in Turkey, no matter how much the government and the media might be saying otherwise. This article provides some background on what’s happening. Here’s a video of recent events. Here’s another.
Update: First hand account of what’s happening in Istanbul.

The Virginian;

Virtually all the major financial institutions use Bloomberg terminals. I say virtually all because it’s possible that there may be a hold-out, but Bloomberg is indispensable to the financial world. It now appears that the Bloomberg sales force, the guys at the bottom of the information pyramid, has access to their customer’s usage patterns and could see what they were doing. How much more can the top guy find out about what his customers are doing?
For people who are not in the financial industry an explantion is in order. The Bloomberg system is like Google, Bing, Facebook and the telephone company combined. It’s a vast data base for people who want to look up statistics and financial facts. But it’s also a communications network that allows Bloomberg’s customer to make trades. The people who run the Bloomberg System can monitor this, and Michael Bloomberg is at the top of that system.

Posted at CanadaListed.com, on January 18, 2012;

Description:
Do you look like Mayor Rob Ford? I need someone who looks like Rob Ford to play the mayor in my film. It’s a short shot of the mayor smoking a cigar and chuckling into the camera – as part of a montage. It’s a dark comedy set in Toronto. Please send a photo for consideration and more information.
Location: Toronto
Compensation: 20 bucks and good cigar for 21 minutes of your time
Principals only. Recruiters, please don’t contact this job poster.
Please, no phone calls about this job!
Please do not contact job poster about other services, products or commercial interests.

Huh.
(I see BCF had this up yesterday.) Screenshot
h/t CERDIP

Japanese Stocks Halted; Plunge 1500 Points. More.

Bloomberg: The New York Stock Exchange broke trades in Anadarko Petroleum Corp. (APC) after the shares briefly plunged 99 percent in the final minute of today’s session.

“The number of people on SSDI now exceeds the entire population of Greece. The aging of the population has nothing to do with the increase. In 1968 there were 51 workers for every person on disability. Today there are 13 workers for every person on disability.

Miami Herald;

The platoon of Chinese soldiers slipped across the boundary into India in the middle of the night, according to Indian officials. They were ferried across the bitterly cold moonscape in Chinese army vehicles, then got out to traverse a dry creek bed with a helicopter hovering overhead for protection.
They finally reached their destination and pitched a tent in the barren Depsang Valley in the Ladakh region, a symbolic claim of sovereignty deep inside Indian-held territory. So stealthy was the operation that India did not discover the incursion until a day later, Indian officials said.
China denies any incursion, but Indian officials say that for two weeks, the soldiers have refused to move back over the so-called Line of Actual Control that divides Indian-ruled territory from Chinese-run land, leaving the government on the verge of a crisis with its powerful northeastern neighbor.
Indian officials fear that if they react with force, the face-off could escalate into a battle with the powerful People’s Liberation Army. But doing nothing would leave a Chinese outpost deep in territory India has ruled since independence.”

h/t Maz2

The Chicago Purchasing Managers reported April’s Chicago Business Barometer fell 3.4 to 49.0, a 3-1/2 year low. Except for a minor gain in New Orders, all Business Activity measures weakened in April with five of seven now in contraction. BUSINESS ACTIVITY: SUPPLIER DELIVERIES, PRICES PAID, and PRODUCTION: all lowest since 2009; ORDER BACKLOGS: ten months of contraction in the past 12 months; EMPLOYMENT: third month over month decline. BUYING POLICY: CAPITAL EQUIPMENT longest since August 2012; MRO SUPPLIES shortest in five months.

Via

American Interest;

Worried by reports of rising defaults, investors turned up their noses at a new $225 million bond issue by Sallie Mae, the federal agency that packages individual student loans into large securities. The loan company canceled the offering after two weeks on the market.

Maxed Out Mama;

…now I’m staring at the March employment report in dazed bewilderment, because this is a truly BAD report. As you work through it the badness just keeps growing.
The best of it is in the Establishment report, but at 88K nonfarm jobs that isn’t much of a best. And then I look at the details, and I become uneasy. Wholesale trade and retail trade both racked up significant negatives. Transportation and warehousing is negative. Temporary help services are a big plus, which at least keeps one from drinking bleach.

Unexpected: “Retail sales in the U.S. unexpectedly fell in March by the most in nine months as employment slowed, showing households ended the first quarter on softer footing.”

Robin Harding explains why David Stockman doesn’t know what the hell he’s talking about: “David Frum” and inflation “at 1.3 per cent”.

The US: “The unemployment rate fell to 7.6%, amid a drop in Labor Force Participation.”
Canada: “Following an increase the previous month, employment declined by 55,000 in March, all in full time. The unemployment rate rose 0.2 percentage points to 7.2%.”
Saskatchewan: “While employment in Saskatchewan was little changed in March, the province experienced the strongest year-over-year growth in the country, at 4.6%. The unemployment rate was 3.9% in March, still the lowest among all provinces.”
Note, CDN numbers are not comparable to US numbers, different means of measurement. As I understand it, if the US followed CDN metrics, the US would be around 13-14% unemployed.

Zerohedge;

…the land down under is set to say goodbye to the world’s “reserve currency” in its trade dealings with the world’s biggest marginal economic power, China, and will enable the direct convertibility of the Australian dollar into Chinese yuan, without US Dollar intermediation, in the process “slashing costs for thousands of business” and also confirming speculation that China is fully intent on, little by little, chipping away at the dollar’s reserve currency status until one day it no longer is.

h/t peterj

David A. Stockman;

Since the S.&P. 500 first reached its current level, in March 2000, the mad money printers at the Federal Reserve have expanded their balance sheet sixfold (to $3.2 trillion from $500 billion). Yet during that stretch, economic output has grown by an average of 1.7 percent a year (the slowest since the Civil War); real business investment has crawled forward at only 0.8 percent per year; and the payroll job count has crept up at a negligible 0.1 percent annually. Real median family income growth has dropped 8 percent, and the number of full-time middle class jobs, 6 percent. The real net worth of the “bottom” 90 percent has dropped by one-fourth. The number of food stamp and disability aid recipients has more than doubled, to 59 million, about one in five Americans.
So the Main Street economy is failing while Washington is piling a soaring debt burden on our descendants, unable to rein in either the warfare state or the welfare state or raise the taxes needed to pay the nation’s bills. By default, the Fed has resorted to a radical, uncharted spree of money printing. But the flood of liquidity, instead of spurring banks to lend and corporations to spend, has stayed trapped in the canyons of Wall Street, where it is inflating yet another unsustainable bubble.
When it bursts, there will be no new round of bailouts like the ones the banks got in 2008. Instead, America will descend into an era of zero-sum austerity and virulent political conflict, extinguishing even today’s feeble remnants of economic growth.

Via Mark Steyn.