Daily Archives: February 6, 2021

Alternative LendingDigital BankingSavings and Investment

Stock market mania isnt new or innovative but, nonetheless, the future of investing for both retail and institutional money is set for rapid change as more and more participants come online.

Weekly Leading Article

Its a strange situation that unites Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ted Cruz and Donald Trump Jnr. to a common cause.

Just one month in, irony looks set to be the best performing asset class in 2021, surpassing puppies' 500 per cent bull-run in 2020 when demand for pedigree pooches skyrocketed under lockdown.

Last week Robinhood, not exactly true to its folkloric namesake, shut off market access to retail investors in favour, according to six million Reddit users, of Wall Street's evil hedge funds.

What transpired? Was it collusion? What does it mean for the future of investing in the stock market? Was it all just a tad overblown?

No doubt, much of the activities on Wall Street last week, that saw an army of Reddit users push the price of a battered analogue business heavily shorted by professionals sky-high, were due to a combination of lockdown boredom, speculative greed and vitriolic desire to stick it to The Man. But, something more profound was at work too.

The power of the crowd, helped by lower barriers to entry to invest in the stock market and the giddying power of social media brought about a huge rise in the price of GameStop as well as a number of other stonks (stocks). It also pushed some formerly powerful hedge funds to hurry out of short positions in these companies and away with a bloody nose. It would be short-sighted to expect this to be the end of the story.

Robinhood, the biggest, most deep-pocketed and most well-known name in the digital wealth sub-sector of fintech, acted for unknown reasons when irritating its users, half of whom had piled into GameStop, but no doubt it did so because it had to.

The contagion was not just felt in the US. Freetrade in the UK, which provides a similar level of market access for UK-based investors had to put in a weekend of hard graft to work to off-set issues it had with providing US market access to its customers owing to its FX partner bank.

If there is a long term trend of greater and greater dominance of the retail investor in markets underway this is both a good thing in terms of fulfilling fintechs promise to democratise financial services but also carries the risk of uncharted populism that might well end in Trumpian catastrophe, not least for those investors bidding up the share price of a failing company that will ultimately crash.

Principally this is the kind of un-checked animal spirits that encourages people to bet using money they cant afford to lose. Decades of regulation have been driven by a belief in theneed to protect the retail market and encourage sensible practices. But in the age of the Reddit forum, much of it clearly needs updating.

More retail investors could spell long-lasting positive change, however. Shareholders also hold sway over companies values, future direction and executive compensation via voting rights. Traditionally, fund managers have voted on behalf of their retail and institutional clients at company AGMs but if the last week has shown us anything, its thatsocial medias populist power can quickly galvanise behind a cause. This could lead to meaningful positive change in areas such as climate change and persecution of minoritiesbut as the politics of the past five years or so have shown, populismcan also lead to chaos.

The AltFi Leader is a new weekly view for 2021 from our editorial team. Wed love to hear your ideas, thoughts, feedback and constructive criticism.editorial@altfi.com

Read more here:

The AltFi view on Gamestonk: Populism is coming to fintech - AltFi

The American public has given President Biden favorable reviews since he took office last month, and the policies that he is hurrying to put in place appear broadly popular, according to polls.

And notably, as he signs a wave of executive actions and pushes a major $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief bill, Mr. Biden is facing muted opposition from Republicans so far a reflection of the partys weakened position as it juggles two increasingly divided factions.

I think that Republicans have found Biden to be much more progressive than they thought he was going to be, but I think were too busy trying to kill each other to really focus on it, said Sarah Chamberlain, the president of the Republican Main Street Partnership, a group of centrist Republicans that includes more than 60 members of the House and Senate.

This week, the Houses G.O.P. caucus met to discuss the fate of two lawmakers representing opposite ends of the partys identity: Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming, the chambers No. 3 Republican. Ms. Greene is one of the chambers most fervent loyalists to former President Donald J. Trump, while Ms. Cheney is pushing to unlink the party from his brand of populism.

The result of the meeting on Wednesday was a kind of stalemate, with the Republican leadership allowing Ms. Greene to keep her committee assignments despite a history of offensive and conspiracy-minded statements, and Ms. Cheney comfortably retaining her top position against a mutiny from Trump allies. On Thursday, the entire House voted to strip Ms. Greene of her committee positions over widespread G.O.P. opposition.

This intraparty division gives Mr. Biden the upper hand as he pushes his legislative agenda forward, said Doug Schwartz, the director of polling at Quinnipiac University, which released a nationwide poll on Wednesday. Hes advocating policies that have solid support in the public, so Republicans are in more of a defensive posture, as theyre opposing popular policies, Mr. Schwartz said.

The publics dissatisfaction with the state of affairs in the United States remains high: Roughly seven in 10 said they were unhappy with the way things were going, according to the Quinnipiac poll. But optimism is on the rise, and many are attaching their hopes to the new president. When asked about the coming four years under Mr. Biden, 61 percent of Americans described themselves as optimistic.

In a Monmouth University poll released last week, 42 percent of Americans said the country was headed in the right direction considerably less than half, but still more than in any Monmouth poll going back to 2013.

The Quinnipiac survey found that more than two-thirds of Americans supported Mr. Bidens coronavirus relief package, with wide majorities also backing certain key elements including a permanent increase to a $15 minimum wage and a round of $1,400 stimulus checks to individuals. On the question of the stimulus payments, even 64 percent of Republicans supported them.

On a range of other Biden policies, the poll found widespread support: rejoining the Paris climate accord, opening a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants and ending Mr. Trumps ban on travel from some predominantly Muslim countries.

The New Washington

Feb. 5, 2021, 9:20 p.m. ET

It bears mentioning that pollsters across the country undercounted support for Mr. Trump in November for the second straight time; until survey researchers complete a full post-mortem analysis of 2020 polling, it will be impossible to rule out the possibility that some polls may still be missing a share of his supporters.

Still, in general, the smart Republicans are trying to pick their battles, said Robert Cahaly, a Republican pollster in Georgia who has worked with candidates in both the partys populist wing and its establishment.

Mr. Biden, for his part, will be looking to capitalize on Republicans compromised position. In the end, America wanted a president that was more empathetic, but people do not want a president that looks weak, Mr. Cahaly said.

But he and other Republican strategists cautioned that if Mr. Biden moved too hastily on legislation that was seen as left-leaning, he could face a backlash from some of the disaffected Republicans who supported him in November. Ms. Chamberlain said that if Mr. Bidens environmental policies were perceived as harming the economy, he could find himself in a hole. I think you let them pass laws left and right, and then you expose them for what they are, Ms. Chamberlain said of her suggested strategy for Republicans.

Americans are not holding their breath for a new dawn of bipartisanship. Just 21 percent of respondents in the Monmouth poll said they were highly confident that Mr. Biden would be able to persuade lawmakers in Washington to work together more. Another 39 percent were somewhat confident.

While Mr. Biden receives favorable job reviews over all, 16 percent of Americans in both the Monmouth and Quinnipiac polls said they hadnt made up their minds. Many of these people are onetime G.O.P. voters who lost faith in the party under Mr. Trump and are waiting to see how Mr. Biden governs, said the longtime Republican pollster Whit Ayres.

Basically, the approval numbers on Biden are the disapproval on Trump, Mr. Ayres said. But the disapproval numbers on Biden are lower than the approval number on Trump which suggests there are some people who are hanging back to see what he does.

And there is evidence that those who are hanging back are giving him the benefit of the doubt. In an Associated Press/NORC poll released on Thursday, in which respondents were pushed to give an answer, his approval rose to 61 percent. Thirty-eight percent disapproved.

Opinions of the Republican Party, meanwhile, are much darker.

In the Quinnipiac poll, 64 percent of Americans said the G.O.P. was moving in the wrong direction, including an overwhelming 70 percent of independents and 30 percent of Republican partisans, according to the Quinnipiac poll.

The partys rank and file is now heavily tilted toward the Trump faithful. The Trump base is so big as a share of the party because so many of my type of Republicans have left the party, said Ms. Chamberlain, the head of the centrist group. But they want to come back to the party.

These staunch pro-Trump Republicans express deep frustration with their representation in Washington. Most G.O.P. voters continue to think the vote in November was rigged, echoing Mr. Trumps false claims, and many are irritated that legislators in Washington were not able to keep him in power.

Partly as a result, only 50 percent of Republicans said they were satisfied with G.O.P. lawmakers in Washington, according to the Quinnipiac poll. Thats down from 83 percent among Republican voters nationwide in a Quinnipiac survey a year ago.

Two people can both look at the same house and dislike it, but for different reasons, Mr. Cahaly said. Theres just an element of Republicans that want their old party back and hate the new populism. Then there are Republicans who like the idea of this being a working persons party and wish the old Republicans would just go be Democrats. This fight is going to take place in primaries, in town halls. This party is in a little bit of a civil war.

See the rest here:

Bidens Policies Are Popular. What Does That Mean for Republicans? - The New York Times

TipRanks

Weve got a full month of 2021 behind us now, and a few trends are coming clearer. The coronavirus crisis may still be with us, but as vaccination programs expand, the end is in sight. With President Trump out of the picture, and the Democrats holding both Houses of Congress and the White House, politics is looking more predictable. And both of those developments bode well for an economic recovery this year. Looking back, at the year that was, we can also see some trends that stayed firm despite the pandemic, the shutdowns, and the supercharged election season. One of the most important is the ongoing rollout of 5G networking technology. These new networks bring with them a fuller realization of the promises inherent in the digital world. Faster connections, lower latency, higher online capacity, clearer signals all will strongly enhance the capabilities of the networked world. And it wont just be mundane things like telecommuting or remote offices that will benefit 5G will allow Internet of Things and autonomous vehicles to further develop their potential. There is even talk of medical applications, of remotely located doctors performing surgery via digitally controlled microsurgical tools. And these are just the possibilities that we can see from now. Who know what the future will really bring? To this end, we pulled up TipRanks database to learn more about three exciting plays in the 5G space. According to the Street, we are likely to see further interesting developments in the next few years as this technology takes over. Skyworks Solutions (SWKS) The first 5G name were looking at, Skyworks, is a semiconductor chip manufacturer that brought in $3.4 billion in total revenues for FY2020. Skyworks, which is a prime supplier of chips for Apples iPhone series, saw a massive 68% year-over-year increase in 1QFY21 revenues the top line reached $1.51 billion, a company record, and also much higher than analysts had forecast. Much of Skyworks fiscal Q1 sales success came after Apple launched the 5G-capable iPhone 12 line. Strong sales in the popular handset device meant that profits trickled down the supply line and Skyworks channels a disproportionate share of its business to Apple. In fact, Apple orders accounted for 70% of Skyworks revenue in the recent quarter. iPhone wasnt the only 5G handset on the receiving end of Skyworks chips, however the company is also an important supplier to Koreas Samsung and Chinas Xiaomi, and has seen demand rise as these companies also launch 5G-capable smartphones. Finally, Skyworks supplies semiconductor chip components to the wireless infrastructure sector, specifically to the small cell transmission units which are important in the propagation network of wireless signals. As the wireless providers switch to 5G transmission, Skyworks has seen orders for its products increase. In his note on Skyworks for Benchmark, 5-star analyst Ruben Roy writes: SWKS significantly beat consensus estimates and provided March quarter guidance that is also well ahead of consensus estimates as 5G related mobile revenue and broad-based segment revenue continued to accelerate In addition to continued strength of design win momentum and customer activity, we are encouraged with SWKS confident tone relative to the overall demand environment and content increase opportunities. In line with his comments, Roy rates SWKS a Buy along with a $215 price target. At current levels, this implies an upside of 20% for the coming year. (To watch Roys track record, click here) Roy is broadly in line with the rest of Wall Street, which has assigned SWKS 13 Buy ratings and 7 Holds over the past three month -- and sees the stock growing about 15% over the next 12 months, to a target price of $205.69.(See SWKS stock analysis on TipRanks) Qorvo, Inc. (QRVO) Qorvos chief products are chipsets used in the construction of radio frequency transmission systems that power wifi and broadband communication networks. The connection of this niche to 5G is clear as network providers upgrade their RF hardware to 5G, they also upgrade the semiconductor chips that control the systems. This chip maker has a solid niche, but it is not resting on its laurels. Qorvo is actively developing a range of new products specifically for 5G systems and deployment. This 5G radio frequency product portfolio includes phase shifters, switches, and integrated modules, and contains both infrastructure and mobile products. Qorvo posted $3.24 billion in total revenues for fiscal 2020. That revenue represents a 4.8% year-over-year increase and the companys sales have been accelerating in fiscal 2021. The most recent quarterly report, for the second fiscal quarter, showed $1.06 billion in revenues, a 31% yoy increase. Rajvindra Gill, 5-star analyst with Needham, is bullish on Qorvos prospects, noting: Qorvo reported strong sales and gross margins as 5G momentum rolls into CY21 on atypical seasonality... The company is planning for 500M 5G handsets to be manufactured in 2021, with an incremental $5-7 of content/unit from 4G to 5G. Management believes that ultra-wideband adoption will be a key growth driver in for smartphones going forward..." To this end, Gill puts a $220 price target on QRVO shares, suggesting room for 31% upside in 2021. Accordingly, he rates the stock a Buy. (To watch Gills track record, click here) What do other analysts have to say? 13 Buys and and 6 Holds add up to a Moderate Buy analyst consensus. Given the $192.28 average price target, shares could climb ~15% from current levels. (See QRVO stock analysis on TipRanks) Telefonakiebolaget LM Ericsson (ERIC) From chipsets, well move on to handsets. Ericsson, the Swedish telecom giant has long been a leader in mobile tech, and is well known for its infrastructure and software that make possible IP networking, broadband, cable TV, and other telecom services. Ericsson is the largest European telecom company, and the largest 2G/3G/4G infrastructure provider outside of China. But that is all in the background. Ericsson is also a leader in the rollout of Europes growing 5G networks. Ericsson is involved in 5G rollout in 17 countries in Europe, the Americas, and Asia, and its product line includes infrastructure base units and handsets, giving the company an interest in all aspects of the new 5G networks. Ericssons revenue performance in 2020 was not notably distressed by the corona crisis. Yes, the top line dipped in Q1, but that was in line with the companys historical pattern of rising revenue from Q1 through Q4. While the companys 1H20 revenues showed small yoy declines, the 2H20 gains were higher. In Q3, the $6.48 billion top line was up 8.7% yoy, and Q4s $8.08 billion revenue was up 17% from the prior year. The companys shares have also performed well during the corona year, and show a 12 month gain of 64%. Raymond James 5-star analyst Simon Leopold bluntly assigns Ericssons recent gains to its participation in 5G rollouts. Japan's awaited 5G roll-out has started. Share gains continue as Ericsson benefits from challenges facing its biggest competitors and more operators embrace 5G it seems obvious that Ericsson should be gaining market share... Competitor Nokia shunned the Chinese 5G projects, citing profitability challenges, yet Ericsson appears to be profiting in the challenging region. Leopold rates this stock an Outperform (i.e. Buy), and his $15 price target implies an upside potential of ~14% for the year ahead. (To watch Leopolds track record, click here) The Raymond James analyst, while bullish on ERIC, is actually less so than the Wall Street consensus. The stock has a Strong Buy consensus rating, based on a unanimous 5 reviews, and the $16.50 average price target indicates 25% growth potential from the share price of $13.19. (See ERIC stock analysis on TipRanks) To find good ideas for 5G stocks trading at attractive valuations, visit TipRanks Best Stocks to Buy, a newly launched tool that unites all of TipRanks equity insights. Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the featured analysts. The content is intended to be used for informational purposes only. It is very important to do your own analysis before making any investment.

More:

How wealth inequality, populism have impacted stock market - Yahoo Finance

LONDON (Reuters) - Robinhoods army of small retail investors may have failed to storm the silver market, but the online brokers devotees certainly gave it an almighty shake.

Freshly smelted silver bars at the KGHM Copper and Precious Metals smelter and processing plant in Glogow, Poland, May 10, 2013. REUTERS/Peter Andrews/File Photo

The spot silver price surged by 20% between last Thursday and Monday this week, briefly hitting an eight-year high of $30.03 an ounce.

An increase in the margin required to trade silver on the CME exchange has curbed animal spirits and the metal has fallen back to $27.12, though a collective stampede for physical metal continues to deplete retail supplies of bars and coins.

The crowd has found that squeezing a commodity market such as silver is a very different proposition from cornering a short-seller in an individual stock such as GameStop. Particularly when the targeted big short doesnt exist.

Theyll probably be back again, though, in silver or the next big thing.

Crowd surges organised through social media regularly rock Chinese commodity markets and the strategy is starting to catch on in the West, even if this particular silver squeeze seems to be fizzling out.

The rallying call for an attack on the silver market came on Thursday in the form of a post on the r/wallstreetbets Reddit message board, the same one used to spark frenzied buying of GameStop and other shares shorted by hedge funds.

The post urged investors to buy physical silver via exchange-traded fund (ETF) iShares Silver Trust SLV, the shares of which represent ounces of silver sitting in vaults.

Retail investors heeded the call and snapped up 37 million ounces worth of shares in the next 24 hours, with others rushing to their local bullion dealers.

But who is the biggest short?

Not the hedge funds that were targeted by Reddit traders in the stock market. The fund community has been net long of the CME silver contract since the middle of 2019.

Ironically, the silver squeeze may have benefited the very funds that have come in for vilification for shorting stocks.

That counterintuitive outcome seems to have sapped morale among the core Reddit crowd, with many questioning whom they are supposed to be squeezing.

Chasing the big silver short has sucked the Robinhood stocks army into a whole different world of precious metals conspiracy theory and radical populism.

This is a world populated by those who believe that Wall Street is in cahoots with the U.S. government to keep the price of gold and silver artificially suppressed to protect the existing economic order.

Big banks have made big fortunes by manipulating the silver market for decades, said the #SilverSqueeze Manifesto.

This is a movement to help level the playing field between everyday people and the billionaires who control the big financial institutions that control the money, and thus control us, it said, adding that the silver market is the Achilles heel of the old system, and its time has come.

This belief that the likes of JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs are using futures short positions to suppress the price of physical metal has been around a long time.

It is based on a binary world view that paper transactions contradict physical reality.

Commodity markets operate more holistically than that, however, with transactions in the futures market often deriving from the need to hedge holdings of the physical commodity.

The Reddit crowd may have bought up 37 million ounces of silver in one day last week, but at the end of December there were another 33,608 tonnes of the stuff sitting in London vaults, according to the London Bullion Market Association.

Thats more than a billion ounces valued at $28.6 billion. That stockpile is continuously being borrowed, lent, bought and sold as banks interact with the industrial supply chain and the investment sector. Given its value, all of it will be hedged.

The biggest short on the CME silver contract is not the hedge fund community but the 52,750 contracts held in the producer/merchant/processor/user category.

The big paper short, in other words, is a big physical long. Squeeze it too hard and industrial quantities of silver may be coming your way.

While the Robinhood armys energies seem spent for now, the ability of the crowd to move prices, even in markets as globally deep as silver, has been amply demonstrated. And some early movers on the silver squeeze will have made large profits.

Chinese retail investors have been using the same mass effect for many years, coordinating surges in WeChat rooms.

The crowd moves from one hot market to the next, using its strength in numbers to generate a giant momentum machine. The target is often less important than the potential to catch a moving trend.

The Zhengzhou ferro-silicon contract was squeezed in 2019 simply because retail traders had been pushed out of the bigger steel market by exchange margin increases.

Shanghai copper has been crowd-shorted a couple of times in the past few years, in one instance in a collective battle of strength against a major fund long position.

Social media facilitates the same bewildering mix of mutual exhortation, snippets of genuine information and lots of wild rumour-mongering, as is evident in the #SilverSqueeze meme.

The phenomenon is spreading. In South Korea theyre called ants. In Thailand theyre called moths. Theres a lot of people in this world of low interest rates looking to make a fast buck in the markets.

Chinese regulators have been battling the problem for years. The first line of defence is to increase trading fees, the second is to issue increasingly strident government warnings and the third is to intervene directly, either by suspending some types of trade or mobilising a team of state-owned banks to crush the crowd.

CMEs margin hike and U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellens pending meeting with regulators to discuss recent market volatility conform to the standard Chinese operating procedure of how to deal with speculative excess.

Western regulators will need to catch up fast with their Chinese counterparts because the retail army is likely to resurface with new tactics.

Reddits Wall Street Bets community (...) has set a shining example that other movements can follow, according to #SqueezeSilver Manifestos anonymous author.

A dedicated army of everyday people can leverage their collective skills and resources (...) to alter deeply entrenched power dynamics and level the playing field.

Small investors from Shanghai to Seattle may well agree.

The opinions expressed here are those of the author, a columnist for Reuters.

Go here to see the original:

Column: Populist crowd fails to breach the silver fortress for now - Reuters

Europe's populists have seen their polling numbers dip since the coronavirus emerged on the continent, but as the economic impact of lockdowns and restrictions starts to be felt in earnest, widening income disparity, they could see a revival, some analysts forecast.

Others argue that won't happen, if incumbent governments and establishment parties can restore public faith in their competence, cushion lower-income and rural populations from economic misery, and get their countries back on track working again soon.

The populist challenge is dimming, they say, pointing to former U.S. President Donald Trump's November election loss on the other side of the Atlantic. "One reason is their trademark scorn for expertise, which enthuses a minority of voters but unsettles many more who are worried about their health and livelihoods," according to Tony Barber, Europe editor of the Financial Times.

While acknowledging that the populists have not had a "good" pandemic, Matthew Goodwin, a political scientist and visiting fellow at Britain's Chatham House research group, believes political turbulence generally lies downstream of crises and the Great Lockdown will have seismic effects that are hard to foresee.

"Emerging evidence shows it looks fairly certain the Great Lockdown will actually exacerbate divides in our society that began to sharpen a few decades ago, and were then worsened by the Great Recession," he said.

The European Union isn't helping to head off a possible revival in political populism on the continent, which recruits partly on the basis of euro-skepticism. Logistical missteps and hidebound bureaucracy have marred the EU's vaccine rollout, prompting rising public frustration with the pace of inoculations and adding to anxiety about a grim northern hemisphere winter ahead. Some commentators see this as a gift for populists with the low-paid, the unskilled and those in insecure jobs hit the hardest by prolonged lockdowns.

The EU's struggle to secure enough early doses to make headway in the inoculation of the bloc's 446 million people has put the bloc front and center of widespread anger. Last month, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen was framing prematurely the bloc's vaccine procurement strategy as a "European success story."

The 62-year-old German, French President Emmanuel Macron's pick for the top job at the EC, had maintained that Brussels should take the lead in negotiating and procuring vaccine supplies for all 27 member states. She had the support of German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who called a halt to negotiations already under way between vaccine developer AstraZeneca, a British-Swedish firm, and Germany's health minister, along with his counterparts in France, Italy and the Netherlands.

Von der Leyen, supported by Merkel, argued a collective approach would work better as it would avoid vaccine nationalism and competition among member states. Negotiating as a bloc would provide more leverage to haggle over pricing with the pharmaceutical giants.

But an overriding motivation was to show how well the EU could do. That would overshadow the bloc's lack of solidarity at the start of the pandemic, when calls for help from Italy, the first country to suffer the full force of the virus, were rebuffed, and member states competed for supplies of personal protective equipment and shut borders without consulting each other.

Some of the problems in the rollout have been country-specific but there are mounting doubts about the EU's collective approach to procurement and distribution. Go-it-alone Britain has vaccinated more than 13% of its adults so far while the EU average is barely nudging 2%, with the gap growing.

British regulatory authorities were quicker to approve vaccines and signed contracts with manufacturers three months before the EU. As a result, Britain has not been impacted as much as the EU by production delays and difficulties. On January 22, the EU reacted with fury when AstraZeneca disclosed it would have to reduce by around two-thirds doses expected over the next two months because of production difficulties.

"There are no signs that the vaccination rate in the EU is accelerating, unlike in the U.K. and U.S., where daily vaccination rates have increased substantially in the past few weeks," according to Guntram Wolff, director of Bruegel, a Brussels-based research group. "Part of the explanation is that the EU ordered too few vaccines too late. It was slow to order the BioNTech-Pfizer vaccine, even when it became the front-runner and its efficacy had been documented."

The Bruegel director has also faulted the EU for not thinking ahead and crafting a strategy to increase vaccine production by mobilizing other manufacturers to help to do so. He cautioned it is "impossible to say how things would have gone if there had not been joint EU action."

Nonetheless, the EU's logistical missteps are drawing fire.

Markus Soeder, the premier of the German state of Bavaria, and a contender to succeed Merkel when she quits in September, said the "operational responsibility" for the "more than unsatisfactory" situation rests with Brussels. "The decision was made in what I think is a typical, normal, bureaucratic EU procedure," he added.

Von der Leyen was the subject of a scathing article Sunday by Germany's leading magazine Der Spiegel, which said the vaccine rollout "might ultimately turn out to be the greatest disaster of her political career."

With lockdown frustration building the Netherlands experienced three days of riots last week after the government introduced a nighttime curfew and with anger building over the snail-like pace of inoculation, populists see a political opening. Some had aligned themselves with anti-vaccine skeptics but are moving away from that position and focusing now on the issue of EU competence.

France's Marine Le Pen, the euro-skeptic far-right leader, has seen her popularity surge. A poll last week showed her trailing Macron by just 52% to 48%. Macron faces a tough reelection bid next year.

Originally posted here:

Europe's Populists Ready to Seize on COVID Vaccination Bungle - Voice of America

(Repeats without change. The opinions expressed here are those of the author, a columnist for Reuters)

* Fund positioning on CME silver contract: tmsnrt.rs/2LiXUNw

LONDON, Feb 3 (Reuters) - Robinhoods army of small retail investors may have failed to storm the silver market, but the online brokers devotees certainly gave it an almighty shake.

The spot silver price surged by 20% between last Thursday and Monday this week, briefly hitting an eight-year high of $30.03 an ounce.

An increase in the margin required to trade silver on the CME exchange has curbed animal spirits and the metal has fallen back to $27.12, though a collective stampede for physical metal continues to deplete retail supplies of bars and coins.

The crowd has found that squeezing a commodity market such as silver is a very different proposition from cornering a short-seller in an individual stock such as GameStop. Particularly when the targeted big short doesnt exist.

Theyll probably be back again, though, in silver or the next big thing.

Crowd surges organised through social media regularly rock Chinese commodity markets and the strategy is starting to catch on in the West, even if this particular silver squeeze seems to be fizzling out.

The rallying call for an attack on the silver market came on Thursday in the form of a post on the r/wallstreetbets Reddit message board, the same one used to spark frenzied buying of GameStop and other shares shorted by hedge funds.

The post urged investors to buy physical silver via exchange-traded fund (ETF) iShares Silver Trust SLV, the shares of which represent ounces of silver sitting in vaults.

Retail investors heeded the call and snapped up 37 million ounces worth of shares in the next 24 hours, with others rushing to their local bullion dealers.

But who is the biggest short?

Not the hedge funds that were targeted by Reddit traders in the stock market. The fund community has been net long of the CME silver contract since the middle of 2019.

Ironically, the silver squeeze may have benefited the very funds that have come in for vilification for shorting stocks.

That counterintuitive outcome seems to have sapped morale among the core Reddit crowd, with many questioning whom they are supposed to be squeezing.

Chasing the big silver short has sucked the Robinhood stocks army into a whole different world of precious metals conspiracy theory and radical populism.

This is a world populated by those who believe that Wall Street is in cahoots with the U.S. government to keep the price of gold and silver artificially suppressed to protect the existing economic order.

Big banks have made big fortunes by manipulating the silver market for decades, said the #SilverSqueeze Manifesto.

This is a movement to help level the playing field between everyday people and the billionaires who control the big financial institutions that control the money, and thus control us, it said, adding that the silver market is the Achilles heel of the old system, and its time has come.

This belief that the likes of JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs are using futures short positions to suppress the price of physical metal has been around a long time.

It is based on a binary world view that paper transactions contradict physical reality.

Commodity markets operate more holistically than that, however, with transactions in the futures market often deriving from the need to hedge holdings of the physical commodity.

The Reddit crowd may have bought up 37 million ounces of silver in one day last week, but at the end of December there were another 33,608 tonnes of the stuff sitting in London vaults, according to the London Bullion Market Association.

Thats more than a billion ounces valued at $28.6 billion. That stockpile is continuously being borrowed, lent, bought and sold as banks interact with the industrial supply chain and the investment sector. Given its value, all of it will be hedged.

The biggest short on the CME silver contract is not the hedge fund community but the 52,750 contracts held in the producer/merchant/processor/user category.

The big paper short, in other words, is a big physical long. Squeeze it too hard and industrial quantities of silver may be coming your way.

While the Robinhood armys energies seem spent for now, the ability of the crowd to move prices, even in markets as globally deep as silver, has been amply demonstrated. And some early movers on the silver squeeze will have made large profits.

Chinese retail investors have been using the same mass effect for many years, coordinating surges in WeChat rooms.

The crowd moves from one hot market to the next, using its strength in numbers to generate a giant momentum machine. The target is often less important than the potential to catch a moving trend.

The Zhengzhou ferro-silicon contract was squeezed in 2019 simply because retail traders had been pushed out of the bigger steel market by exchange margin increases.

Shanghai copper has been crowd-shorted a couple of times in the past few years, in one instance in a collective battle of strength against a major fund long position.

Social media facilitates the same bewildering mix of mutual exhortation, snippets of genuine information and lots of wild rumour-mongering, as is evident in the #SilverSqueeze meme.

The phenomenon is spreading. In South Korea theyre called ants. In Thailand theyre called moths. Theres a lot of people in this world of low interest rates looking to make a fast buck in the markets.

Chinese regulators have been battling the problem for years. The first line of defence is to increase trading fees, the second is to issue increasingly strident government warnings and the third is to intervene directly, either by suspending some types of trade or mobilising a team of state-owned banks to crush the crowd.

CMEs margin hike and U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellens pending meeting with regulators to discuss recent market volatility conform to the standard Chinese operating procedure of how to deal with speculative excess.

Western regulators will need to catch up fast with their Chinese counterparts because the retail army is likely to resurface with new tactics.

Reddits Wall Street Bets community (...) has set a shining example that other movements can follow, according to #SqueezeSilver Manifestos anonymous author.

A dedicated army of everyday people can leverage their collective skills and resources (...) to alter deeply entrenched power dynamics and level the playing field.

Small investors from Shanghai to Seattle may well agree.

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RPT-COLUMN-Populist crowd fails to breach the silver fortress for now: Andy Home - Reuters

After losing a national election, its natural that a political party goes through a period of soul-searching and internal turmoil.

The Republican Party, though, has taken it to another level.

President Donald Trump brought most of the GOP along for the ride during his outlandish, conspiracy-fueled attempt to overturn the election, ending in the Jan. 6 riot at the US Capitol.

His loyalists have since been scouring the landscape searching for Republicans to censure or primary for insufficient loyalty to Trump during this interlude or his resulting second impeachment.

The most famous Republican House freshman mused not too long ago about a space laser associated with the Rothschilds starting the 2018 California wildfires, forcing an embarrassing debate about whether to sanction her.

And Trump has maintained his hold on the party seemingly effortlessly. Hes been deplatformed by social-media companies and hasnt done TV interviews, and still, youd think he were running a highly polished 24/7 political operation, rather than relaxing at Mar-a-Lago.

This dismaying chapter has predictably led to declarations that the party is doomed and calls to split it up.

A former chair of the Washington state GOP wrote in an op-ed in TheSeattle Timesurging, as the headline put it,Lets form a new Republican Party.He argued that dissident Republicans could and should band together and partner with the substantial Never Trump community of Republicans who have already left to form a new political enterprise.

This prompted a Chris Cillizza item at CNN headlined Should Republicans disband the GOP?

Theres been a spate of articles by erstwhile Republicans announcing they are done. The former Republican Rep. Mickey Edwards wrote one after Jan. 6 saying he was quitting the party because it has become the opposite of what it was.

Jonathan Last wrote a piece in TheNew RepublictitledThe Republican Party is dead. Its the Trump cult now.Washington Postcolumnist Kathleen Parker declared, The party isnt doomed; its dead.

This seems a mite premature about a party that represents roughly half the country and is on the cusp of a majority in the House, tied 50-50 in the Senate and in control of the governorships in 27 states and both the governorship and state legislature in 22 of those.

If we are going to consider this geographically diverse collection of officeholders whose careers in many instances predate Trump and will outlast him a mere personality cult, the word cult has lost its meaning.

The fortunes of our political parties ebb and flow and their iterations change over time, but they are robust, deeply embedded institutions of our public life that endure even after electoral disasters and self-sabotaging wrong turns.

As Dan McLaughlin, my colleague at National Review, points out, the Republican Party has since its inception been a fusion of a classical liberal wing with a more populist, elemental conservatism.

As McLaughlin writes, The partys ideals were universal, but its culture was Midwestern and Protestant. Early Republicans wanted an even-handed government, but one that reflected their values. Those values American nationalism, Christian moralism, economic self-reliance, law and order run throughout the partys history.

Whats different about Trump is that he represents the ascendance of the populist wing after it had long been in a subordinate position in the party.

Populism was part of the appeal of Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, John McCain and even the patrician George H.W. Bush in his winning 1988 campaign, but it was easy to miss. Trumps populism was unmistakable, even as he retained key policy priorities of the traditional GOP, from tax cuts and judges, to religious liberty and abortion.

That said, the party does need to get beyond Trump, who has remained potent despite being a three-time loser now in the 2018 midterms, in his 2020 reelection campaign, and in the Georgia runoff elections. In electoral terms, all the winning stopped circa November 2016.

At this juncture, though, it does feel as though the advent of the post-Trump GOP is coming approximately never.

But American politics moves quickly. Richard Nixon won a landslide in 1972 and resigned in 1974, leaving the GOP in utter disarray and yet Reagan won a landslide in 1980. The Tea Party didnt exist when Barack Obama won an overwhelming victory in 2008, sprang to life almost immediately in 2009, and by 2016 had disappeared, subsumed into the Trump phenomenon.

There will inevitably be an overwhelming controversy in the Biden administration or a crisis that moves us beyond the politics of the Trump presidency and the immediate aftermath.

New issues will emerge, and so will new movements and players on the right. There are plenty of talented, ambitious Republican politicians who think they are better suited to win a presidential election in 2024 and to be president than Donald Trump 2.0. The incentives are for them to continue to keep their heads down and to slipstream behind Trump for now, but that wont always be true.

The temptation to splinter from the GOP might be alluring to elements of both the populists and the Republican traditionalists, but this a dead end. Its more realistic that the populists, with the passion and the numbers, could make a go of a new party, but theyd only be ensuring their own defeat and that of the GOP.

The Republican Party is the only plausible electoral vehicle for any sort of right-of-center politics in America. It is worth fighting over, and it will be. That struggle is sure to be toxic and unpredictable, except for the fact that at the end of the day the Grand Old Party will still be standing.

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No, conservatives shouldn't quit the Republican Party - New York Post