May 31

Today’s News 31st May 2017

  • NATO Recoils From Trump Spending Salvos

    Authored by Finian Cunningham via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

    When US President Donald Trump addressed the opening of the NATO summit last week, it was an embarrassing display of American bullying. As Trump lectured the other leaders of the military alliance about laggardly financial commitments, there was much shuffling of feet and grimacing of faces. There were also contemptuous smirks as the president spoke.

    Speaking outside the new North Atlantic Treaty Organization headquarters in Brussels, Trump declared that many members «owed» the US a lot of money for their defense. He said it was unfair to American taxpayers that only five out of 28 current NATO members meet an agreed target of allocating 2 per cent of GDP to military spending.

    At a photo-op line-up, Trump was seen to push Montenegrin Prime Minister Dusco Markovic out of the way in order to get himself into a prime front row position. The fleeting moment spoke volumes of the American view of fellow NATO members.

    It was Trump’s first meeting of the US-led military alliance since his inauguration four months ago. During his presidential campaign, Trump derided the organization as «obsolete». After becoming president, he kind of retracted that complaint to civilian titular head Jens Stoltenberg at a meeting in Washington, when Trump performed a typical U-turn and said he no longer considered NATO obsolete.

    Other senior Trump administration officials have sought to repair the damage to relations by making earnest statements on American commitment to NATO. Vice President Mike Pence and Secretary of Defense General James Mattis have described the alliance as a bedrock of American policy.

    Trump’s debut in Brussels last week, however, has renewed the strains within NATO. His incessant demand for other members to cough up is aggravating relations – particularly between the US and Germany. His address in Brussels sounded boorish and ill-informed. Trump’s omission to pledge American commitment to «shared defense» under NATO’s Article 5 – as all US presidents customarily do – was also seen as another sign of Trump playing hardball.

    Nick Burns, a former US ambassador to NATO under George W Bush, told American news channel CNN that he was «stunned» by Trump’s speech.

    «This is the first president since 1949 not to mention Article 5. Every president has reaffirmed collective defense and today was the day for him to do it», said Burns, adding: «I support him on asking allies to spend more on defense. But there is a time and a place. And this wasn’t it. The lecture was the wrong tone and this was the wrong time».

    Trump has previously hinted that the US would not automatically come to the defense of other NATO members because of their relatively low financial contributions. That he again pointedly omitted mention of Article 5 in Brussels will unnerve some NATO members, particularly the Baltic states and Poland, who claim they are threatened by Russia, despite Moscow’s repeated assurances that it has no aggressive designs on Europe.

    Also of note, Trump cited terrorism as the main threat facing NATO. He did mention Russia as a security challenge in a perfunctory sort of way, but it was noticeable that the American president did not appear to view Moscow as an existential threat. That will further unnerve «Russophobes» within NATO.

    The frosty meeting in Brussels was in stark contrast to Trump’s glad-handing with Saudi and other Arab leaders days before. He kicked off his inaugural official foreign trip by first of all visiting Saudi Arabia during which Trump signed a $110 billion arms deal (part of a larger $350 billion sale over 10 years.)

    The same ballpark figure cropped up again later during Trump’s tetchy speech to NATO members. He said that if all members who do not currently meet their 2 per cent of GDP spending commitment were to do so then that would generate $119 billion in military allocation per year. Much of that extra cash would go directly into the US economy in the form of new orders for F-16 and F-35 fighter jets, Abrams tanks, Patriot anti-missile systems and other Pentagon-contracted hardware.

    It seems clear that the main purpose of Trump’s meet-and-greet the world tour was to drum up as much business as possible for US military industry. No wonder he was effusive in his praise for Saudi and Arab leaders when they were writing such mega checks for American weapons. Not so in Europe, where Trump evidently feels most of the NATO members are cheating the US out of tens of billions of dollars every year from their allegedly feckless commitment to defense.

    Has Trump got a point though? That is, are the European members of NATO are freeloaders on American chivalry? It’s not just Trump who thinks that way. His predecessor Barack Obama also griped about «freeloaders» not pulling their weight. There is a general American conception that its military presence in Europe and elsewhere around the world is a chivalrous act of protection, which countries should pay more for. Trump just happens to articulate this view in an unvarnished, gruff manner.

    NATO’s 2 per cent of GDP target is an arbitrary guideline. It is not binding. Each member spends on a separate national basis. There is no collective fund and there are no debts to others from those members who do not spend 2 per cent of GDP on military.

    It is true that the US is way and above the highest NATO military spender, allocating around 3.6 per cent of GDP annually – well over $600 billion. That represents over 70 per cent of the entire NATO budget.

    This compares with relatively low-spending Germany on 1.2 per cent of GDP, Italy on 1.1 per cent and the Netherlands on 1.2 per cent. Ironically, Belgium, which hosts the NATO headquarters, spends less than 1.0 per cent of GDP on military. These countries argue that they allocate a lot more than the US to overseas development aid in Africa and the Middle East, thereby addressing security concerns in a broader, civilian way other than narrow military terms.

    Only five members of NATO meet the arbitrary 2 per cent target: US, Britain, Greece, Poland and Estonia.

    But the gargantuan US spend is more a reflection of its economy being heavily dependent on a military-industrial complex, than on any supposed noble commitment to defending allies.

    Trump’s tour of the Middle East and Europe – while billed by the White House as a peace-building itinerary – was all too evidently really about pushing America’s military industry and global exports of US weaponry.

    By doing so, Trump is recklessly adding fuel to an already explosive Middle East. And on relations with Europe, the US president is acutely straining relations with his petulant, unfounded demands that they pay up more for NATO, and in effect subsidize the American economy.

    This will lead to further deterioration in relations between Washington and its European allies, especially Germany. Trump has castigated Germany as being not only a laggard in defense spending (a freeloader) but also exploiting the US consumer market with trade surpluses.

    Trump’s abrasive attitude to other NATO members last week brings out the real nature of the US relationship. The so-called alliance is really just a spending vehicle for the American economy. In these austere global times, such American bullying will only chafe on the Europeans. This will in turn reinforce calls already underway for an independent EU defense pact, separate from NATO, and possibly led by Germany and France.

  • A Voice Of Reason Speaks Regarding "The New Cold War"

    Authored by Mike Krieger via Liberty Blitzkrieg blog,

    Last week was interesting for me. I spent about half my time getting up to speed with the latest happenings in the crypto-coin world, and got really excited about a lot of what I saw. In fact, this was the first time I became totally consumed by the space in several years, going back to when I first investigated and started becoming involved with Bitcoin.

    What really caught my attention is the booming ICO market, and while it’ll invariably produce its fair share of total scams, I find it nonetheless captivating. I’m attracted to its dynamic wild west spirit, as well as its capacity to function as an alternative funding mechanism for startup projects utilizing a wider participatory structure consisting of anyone with a bit of crypto currency and a high-risk tolerance. It’s an entirely new experimental ecosystem funded by crypto currencies (mostly ethereum, but also bitcoin). It’s pretty mesmerizing (for more see: A New Financial System is Being Born).

    Spending so much time on this esoteric world kept me away from following U.S. politics as closely as I typically do, which was a great thing.

    The level of discourse from nearly all sides of the political spectrum has turned so toxic, divisive, hysterical and counterproductive, leaving that environment for several days made me feel great, as if I had taken a vacation from idiot island. As such, today I once again decided to spend some time reading up on the crypto-coin space and getting further up to speed on ICOs and how they work. That said, I realize I still need to pay attention to the crazy happenings in the wider world around me, so I thought I’d share an interview with a rarity in today’s political discourse, a voice of reason.

    What follows are excerpts from a Slate  interview with Stephen F. Cohen, professor emeritus of Russian studies and politics at NYU and Princeton:

    Stephen F. Cohen has long been one of the leading scholars of Russia and the Soviet Union. He wrote a biography of the Bolshevik revolutionary Nikolai Bukharin and is a contributing editor at the Nation, which his wife, Katrina vanden Heuvel, edits and publishes. In recent years, Cohen has emerged as a more ideologically dexterous figure, ripping those he thinks are pursuing a “new Cold War” with Russia and calling for President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin to form “an alliance against international terrorism.” Cohen has gone so far as to describe the investigations into the Trump campaign and Russia “the No. 1 threat to the United States today.”

    Cohen has been criticized by many people, myself included, for his defenses of Putin. (He once said the Ukraine crisis had been “imposed on [Putin] and he had no choice but to react.”) He scolded President Barack Obama for sending retired gay athletes to Sochi and recently went on Fox News to speak up for Trump’s war against leakers.

    I spoke by phone with Cohen, who is also a professor emeritus of Russian studies and politics at NYU and Princeton and the author of Soviet Fates and Lost Alternatives: From Stalinism to the New Cold War. During the course of our conversation, which has been edited and condensed for clarity, we discussed why Cohen won’t concede that the Democratic National Committee was hacked, whether it’s fair to call Putin a murderer, and why we may be entering an era much more dangerous than the Cold War.

     

    I heard you recently on Fox News. You said that the “assault” on President Trump “was the No. 1 threat to the United States today.” What did you mean by that?

     

    Threat. OK. Threat. That’s a good word. We’re in a moment when we need an American president and a Kremlin leader to act at the highest level of statesmanship. Whether they meet in summit or not is not of great importance, but we need intense negotiations to tamp down this new Cold War, particularly in Syria, but not only. Trump is being crippled by these charges, for which I can find no facts whatsoever.

     

    Wait, which charges are we talking about?

     

    That he is somehow in the thrall or complicity or control, under the influence of the Kremlin.

     

    I think it would help if he would admit what his own intelligence agencies are telling him, that Russia played some role in …

     

    No, I don’t accept that. I don’t accept that at all, not for one minute.

     

    People in the Trump administration admit this too.

     

    Well they’re not the brightest lights.

     

    And the president is?

     

    No. You didn’t ask me that. You asked me, you said, some of the president’s people. You’re referring to that intel report of January, correct? The one that was produced that said Putin directed the attack on the DNC?

     

    I was referring to that and many news accounts that Russia was behind the hacking, yes.

     

    The news accounts are of no value to us. I mean you and I both know …

     

    No value? None?

     

    No. No value. Not on face value. Just because the New York Times says that I don’t know, Carter Page or [Paul] Manafort or [Michael] Flynn did something wrong, I don’t accept that. I need to see the evidence.

     

    OK, let’s just go back to what you were saying about Trump being hamstrung.

     

    You need Trump because he’s in the White House. I didn’t put him there. I didn’t vote for him. Putin’s in the Kremlin. I didn’t put him in the Kremlin either, but we have what we have, and these guys must have a serious dialog about tamping down these cold wars, which means cooperating on various fronts. The obvious one—and they already are secretly, but it’s getting torpedoed—is Syria.

     

    So we come now with this so-called Russiagate. You know what that means. It’s our shorthand, right? And Trump, even if he was the most wonderfully qualified president, he is utterly crippled in his ability to do diplomacy with the Kremlin. So let me give you the counterfactual example.

     

    Imagine that Kennedy had been accused of somehow being, they used to accuse him of being an agent of the Vatican, but let’s say he had been accused widely of being an agent of the Kremlin. The only way he could have ended the Cuban Missile Crisis would have been to prove his loyalty by going to nuclear war with Russia. That’s the situation we’re in today. I mean Trump is not free to take wise advice and use whatever smarts he has to negotiate down this new and dangerous Cold War, so this assault on Trump, for which as yet there are zero facts, has become a grave threat to American national security. That’s what I meant. That’s what I believe.

     

    To use your Kennedy example, there was no evidence that Kennedy was an agent of either the Vatican or the Kremlin—

     

    No, but Isaac you’re not old enough to remember, but during the campaign, because he was the first Catholic, they all went on about he’s an agent of the Vatican.

     

    I know that. I’m old enough to have read “news accounts” of it. Anyway, there was a hacking of the DNC and—

     

    Wait actually no, Isaac stop. Stop. Now, I mean we don’t know that for a fact.

     

    That there was a hacking of the DNC?

     

    Yeah we do not know that for a fact.

     

    What do we think happened?

     

    Well …

     

    So you’re really going to argue with me that the DNC wasn’t hacked?

     

    I’m saying I don’t know that to be the case.

    OK.

     

    I will refer you to an alternative report and you can decide yourself.

     

    Can we agree on this much at least: that Trump said there was a hack, refused to say who he thought did it, encouraged the hackers to keep doing it, at the same time that he was getting intelligence reports that it was the Russians, and that he continued to talk very positively about Putin after he was told this?

     

    You’ve given me too many facts to process, but if Trump said he knew it was a hack, he was not fully informed. We just don’t know it for a fact, Isaac.

     

    So we don’t have any forensic evidence that there was a hack. There might have been. If there was a hack, we have no evidence it was the Russians, and we have an alternative explanation that it was actually a leak, that somebody inside did a Snowden, just stuck a thumb drive in and walked out with this stuff. We don’t know. And when you don’t know, you don’t go to war.

     

    Let’s turn to Putin and America. Why do you think we have entered a new Cold War?

     

    My view is that this Cold War is even more dangerous. As we talk today, and this was not the case in the preceding Cold War, there are three new fronts that are fraught with hot war. You know them as well as I do. The NATO military build-up is going on in the Baltic regions, particularly in the three small Baltic countries, Poland, and if we include missile defense, Romania. That’s right on Russia’s border, and in Ukraine. You know that story. That’s a proxy civil war right on Russia’s border, and then of course in Syria, where American and Russian aircraft and Syrian aircraft are flying over the same airspace.

     

    And there is the utter demonization of Putin in this country. It is just beyond anything that the American political elite ever said about Khrushchev, Brezhnev, and the rest. If you demonize the other side, it makes negotiating harder.

    In 2017, being a voice of reason has become a revolutionary act.

  • Emerging Markets Are Not All Created Equal

    For most investors, targeting foreign countries where there are high expectations for growth is a useful strategy.

    After all, in the United States, Canada, and Europe, economies are mostly growing at about 2% or less per year. And while these developed markets are less risky to invest in, finding value can be tricky.

    That’s why, as VisualCapitalist's Jeff Desjardoins notes, for many decades, investors have been allured by the fast growth of far-off economies. In the 1950s and 1960s, Japan’s economy regularly expanded at a 10%+ clip, and who can forget the “Four Asian Tigers” that followed in Japan’s footsteps? In the 2000s, the focus shifted to the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) – and more recently, attention has been on countries like Indonesia, Nigeria, Colombia, and Turkey.

    DIFFERENT RISKS IN EMERGING MARKETS

    Although emerging markets are similar in that they have high expectations for growth, it’s important to remember that these countries have very unique and different sets of risks.

    Today’s visualization comes to us from Charles Schwab, and it provides a simple breakdown of the types of risks faced by the economies of emerging markets:

    Courtesy of: Visual Capitalist

    As an example, Mexico and Chile have considerably different risks, according to the chart.

    Aside from currency risk, which they both share, Chile is particularly prone to sensitivity in the world’s commodity markets. That makes sense, because Chile is the world’s largest supplier of copper – and close to 50% of the country’s exports are copper-related, including refined copper (22.6%), copper ore (20.9%), raw copper (3.6%), and copper wire (0.5%).

    On the other hand, Mexico is noted as having particular sensitivity to what happens in developed markets such as the United States. This is because 81% of Mexican exports go to the U.S., while the next biggest buyer of Mexican goods is Canada at 3% of exports. If the buying power of the U.S. and Canada is affected, it could have big consequences on what will be bought from Mexico.

  • CNN Host Fareed Zakaria Destroys 'Tolerant' Liberals: "Freedom Of Speech Is Not Just For Your Warm Fuzzy Ideas"

    Authored by Mac Slavo via SHTFplan.com,

    The alternative media has, for good reason, slammed CNN time and again for fabricated news stories, untruths and left-leaning propaganda.

    But the following opinion report from CNN’s Fareed Zakaria is a must-watch, as it touches on the very core of the purported tolerance among liberals.

    As progressive Evergreen State College professor recently stated in an interview after demands by social justice warriors that he be fired for racism, “I am troubled by what this implies about the current state of the left.”

    While America’s White Left believes their policies of socialism, cultural assimilation and outright disdain for anything other than their own righteous ideologies are the only way forward, Zakaria succinctly explains that it goes against the whole idea of what Liberalism is supposed to be.

    American universities these days seem committed to every kind of diversity except for intellectual diversity… Conservative voices and views, already a besieged minority, are being silenced entirely… The campus thought police have gone after serious conservative thinkers like Heather McDonald and Charles Murray, as well as firebrands like Milo Yiannopoulos and Ann Coulter…

     

    Some were dis-invited… others booed interrupted and intimidated…

     

    It’s strange that this is happening on college campuses that promise to give their undergraduates a liberal education… the word ‘liberal’ in this context has nothing to do with today’s partisan language… but refers instead to the Latin root ‘pertaining to liberty’

     

    And at the heart of the liberal tradition in the Western world has been freedom of speech… from the beginning people understood that this meant protecting and listening to speech with which you disagreed.

     

    …

     

    Freedom of speech and thought is not just for just warm fuzzy ideas that we find comfortable… it’s for ideas that we find offensive.

     

    …

     

    There is also an anti-intellectualism on the left… an attitude of self righteousness that says we are so pure, so morally superior, we cannot bear to hear an idea with which we disagree.

     

    Liberals think they are tolerant, but often they aren’t.

     

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    The left is so intolerant of other ideologies that it is only a matter of time before their refusal to accept differences among cultures, races and creeds fractures their entire chaotic movement.

    We are literally at a point where wearing red, white and blue is considered blatant racism in some circles.

    Soon, like rabid animals, their intolerance will be the very catalyst that drives them to turn on each other.

  • Steve Cohen Hoping To Raise $20 Billion For Re-Launch Of SAC Capital

    Steven Cohen is hoping to raise $20 billion for a new fund he plans to launch soon after his ban on managing outside money expires in January 2018, the Wall Street Journal reports.

    If Cohen is successful, it would be the largest hedge-fund launch on record. The sum would exceed the $16 billion his former firm, SAC Capital, managed at its peak – before the Securities and Exchange Commission forced him to shut it down and accept a four-year ban from the industry. Though, as WSJ notes, most – if not all – of Cohen’s $11 billion family fortune would likely be rolled into his new fund.

    Raising such a sum would be “a show of resilience for the Wall Street veteran after years of legal fights,” The WSJ said. Government investigators eventually convicted eight of his former employees of securities fraud, but Cohen himself escaped prosecution.

    But even if Cohen succeeds in meeting his target raise, it’s difficult to imagine how he’ll replicate his past market-beating performance without relying on some of the same tactics that initially attracted the Feds’ attention.

    If his family office's recent returns are any indication, his fund might not be able to manage anything more than treading water.

    As WSJ reports: Mr. Cohen, 60, has been overseeing his $11 billion family fortune at Point72 Asset Management LP, a 1,000-employee operation in SAC’s former Stamford, Conn., offices where Mr. Cohen’s desk sits at the center of the trading floor. While Point72 has made money since becoming a family office, last year its overall investment performance was roughly flat, Mr. Cohen’s second-worst ever annual showing, people familiar with the matter said.

    To that end, Cohen is planning something that would've been "unthinkable" at SAC: He's considering lowering his fees, which once totaled as much as 3% of assets and half of all profits. Cohen's success would be notable not just for him, but for the industry as a whole, which suffered tens of billions in outflows last year.

    Last year, hedge fund investors pulled more than $70 billion, the industry’s highest annual outflow since the crisis.

    Cohen's quest for outside capital has already lead him back to the high-society circuit.

    As WSj reports, he appeared at a gala to benefit Lincoln Center in January. And during a visit to SALT last month, Cohen “hosted a private dinner for staff and industry executives and attended closed-door events with speakers and sponsors including onetime rivals like hedge-fund manager Daniel Loeb, people familiar with the matter said."

  • Amazon is Now Worth More Than Every Store in the Mall Combined

     

    Content originally published at iBankCoin.com

     

    Everyone knew Amazon was crushing retail, dating back at least a decade. But for some reason, very few went through with the easiest pair trade of all time — long AMZN, short shopping mall operators. What a simple, yet brilliant, trade. Is it not?

    Here’s an old market cap chart of when Amazon topped Walmart. Now it’s worth two Walmarts.

    Here’s another old chart that captures the spirit of Amazon’s sales explosion. The current annual run rate is in excess of $140b.

    So how does Amazon’s $143b in annual revenues stack up against other retailers?

    According to Exodus, there are 31 companies in the Apparel Stores industry, the names you’re all familiar with when shopping at the old dead mall, whose sales equal $107b combined, with net income of $13.6b. Their composite market caps are $81.69b, the inversion of the price/sales ratio is indicative of an industry in duress.

    Amazon’s $143b in annual sales and net income of just $9b is rewarded with a market capitalization of $469b.

    Think about that for a moment. The entire shopping mall, sporting +1.1% quarterly revenue growth, does more net income than Amazon, on 40% less in revenues, and yet Amazon is valued at 5x what the entire mall is being sold for on the market today.

    The Department Stores are an even worse comparison. TJX, M, KSS, SHLD, DDS, JCP, SRSC, SHOS and BONT combined do revenues of $129b, netting $10.17b in income, yet the composite market caps are just $68b on -4.5% quarterly revenue growth.

    I get Amazon is the future and they’re growing at 22% per annum. But is it worth more than all the department stores and apparel stores combined 3x over?

    And now for the most egregious juxtaposition: Amazon vs the Discount/Variety Store industry.

    The Discount Variety stores include WMT, TGT, COST, DG, DLTR, BURL, PSMT, BIG, FRED and TUES. An impressive set of retailers, no doubt. Together, they sport sales of $729b with net income of $51b, enjoying median quarterly revenues growth of nearly 5%.

    Their market caps combined equal $389b. If you threw in another COST, you might get to match Amazon’s market cap.

    Does any of this shit make sense to you?

  • Which Companies Have The Highest Revenue Per Employee?

    Authored by Ilya Levtov via Priceonomics.com,

    For many companies, the biggest cost is talent. This is especially true of Silicon Valley, where companies sell clicks and digital goods that do not have any material cost. So which companies' workforces are able to generate the most revenue?

    We decided to analyze every company in the Standard & Poor's 500 Index to see which ones had the highest and lowest revenues per employee. The  Standard & Poor's 500 Index (S&P 500”) includes the 500 largest American companies listed on the NYSE or NASDAQ. In 2016, S&P 500 companies generated $11 trillion in combined revenue and employed more than 25 million people worldwide.

    We found that Energy companies have the highest average Revenue per Employee, while Industrials and Consumer Discretionaries perform worst on this metric.

    Technology companies performed at the lower end of the range on Revenue per Employee; part of the reason for this however, is other companies in spaces like Energy and Healthcare have large non-employee costs that Technology companies do not have.

    ***

    The table below shows the top 50 companies by Revenue Per Employee in 2016 in S&P 500.

    Data source: Craft

    AmerisourceBergen, a pharmaceutical distributor, tops the list, generating more than $7.9M per employee in 2016. With a reported team of 19,000, which is less than half the workforce of Cardinal Health (37,300) and McKesson (68,000), the company compares favorably to its peers on revenue per employee. Cardinal Health and McKesson's RPE were $3.3M and $2.8M, respectively. Overall, Healthcare companies score well on revenue per employee, though they have other huge costs (the costs of administering drugs and health services).

    Energy companies Valero Energy Corporation and Phillips 66 take positions 2 and 3, with $7.6M and $5.7M in Revenue per Employee. With the exception of tobacco manufacturers (Altria Group and Reynolds American) and insurance providers (Aflac and XL Group), the top ranks are dominated by Energy and Healthcare sectors. 23 of the top 50 are Energy companies and one-fifth are Healthcare organizations. Like Healthcare companies, Energy companies also have large non-employee costs, however (the costs of the natural resources, for example) 

    Grouping the companies into sectors in the chart below, we see the relative labour-intensity of different industries.

    Data source: Craft

    Average revenue per employee in the Energy sector is double that of Healthcare companies and almost four times as high as that of Information Technology companies.

    The table below shows the lowest 10 companies in the index ranked by RPE.

    Data source: Craft

    It is perhaps unsurprising that Restaurant and Hotel chains make up the majority of the list. What is more striking is that IT providers Cognizant and Accenture have among the lowest revenue per employee in the Index.Amphenol Corporation, a manufacturer of interconnect products, recorded $101K Revenue per Employee, less productive than its competitor TE Connectivity, which generated $163K per Employee.

    ***

    Next, we calculated the change in Revenue per Employee from 2014-16 to see if any trends emerged. The graph below shows S&P 500 companies with the highest and lowest growth rate in RPE.

    Data source: Craft

    Most of the RPE growth leaders made headcount reductions last year and thus saw their sales per headcount increase. The healthcare companies in this list with an exception for Vertex Pharmaceuticals experienced both revenue growth and headcount reduction, leading to sharp growth in RPE.

    8 out of 10 companies with the lowest RPE growth experienced a drop in revenues in the period, while remaining Ball Corporation and Global Payments shrank in RPE mainly due to extensive recruiting.

     ***

    We then looked specifically at Technology companies. Only Netflix (which is classed as Consumer Discretionary in the S&P500, not Technology), Apple and Facebook appeared among the top 50 companies by RPE, which required RPE of at least $1.3M.

    The following table shows the top 20 Technology companies by revenue, ranked by RPE.

    Data source: Craft

    Apple has the highest revenue per employee in this selection of technology companies. However, they have substantial non-employee costs since selling hardware involves buying materials and making something tangible. Facebook and Alphabet (Google), on the other hand, make most of their revenue from selling a virtual good (advertising) and still have a tremendously high revenue per employee. VeriSign, which provides domain names and internet security, was a strong performer, generating $1.1Bn in revenue from only 990 employees, ranking fourth in the Technology sector, with $1.2M per employee.

    *** 

    Overall, Energy companies led the pack in Revenue per Employee, followed by Healthcare and Utilities. Technology companies showed themselves to be labour-intensive with RPE at the lower end of the range, and close to Consumer Discretionaries like restaurants and hotels. To see the full list of companies comprising S&P 500 Index, please click here.

  • "I'm Sorry, I Went Too Far" – Kathy Griffin Apologizes For Video Of Beheaded Trump

    Having been destroyed by the left (Chelsea Clinton: "vile and wrong"), the right (Trump Jr.: "Disgusting but not surprising"), and everyone in between ("you're a terrorist and an enemy of the state. She needs to be treated as such.") it seems 'comic' Kathy Griffin (most famous for presenting the New Year's Eve countdown) has decided to apologize for her video where she is seen holding the head of the president, which is slathered in fake blood.

    And the response was not what she hoped for… (via DailyMail)

    Ironically, it was a former first daughter that was quick to fire back at griffin, with Chelsea Clinton writing: 'This is vile and wrong. It is never funny to joke about killing a president.'

     

    'This is discusting [sic] Kathy Griffin has never been funny,' said self-styled conservative paralegal NativeCA. 'This should be reported to the FBI & Twitter.'

     

    Meanwhile, @nancygolliday said 'Parading beheading of POTUS makes @kathygriffing a terrorist and an enemy of the state. She needs to be treated as such.'

     

    And Dr J wrote: 'You're disgusting. Honor our military but dishonor our President and Commander in Chief? You'd behead our President? Hypocrite.'

    Even some self-described liberals got in on the act…

    'Big time Liberal here – and a Kathy Griffin fan – and I agree,' said Tanya Crosse. 'This is not ok and there is no excuse. She should immediately apologize.'

     

    Meanwhile, Simar wrote: 'We can't knock the alt right for promoting hate speech & then support Kathy Griffin for promoting violence against the President.' 

    But then it got serious…

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    Which prompted a desperate career-saving PR rescue… "I'm sorry, I went too far, I was wrong"

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    We leave it to Donald Trump Jr. who summed up the hypocritical reality of America today so perfectly…

    And if anyone on 'the left', who has proclaimed with violence how 'hate speech' is not 'free speech', tries to defend this, it merely highlights just how low they will stoop into the hell of self-delusion to avoid facing the reality that Trump "is your president" whether you like it or not.

  • Putin: "Russian Meddling Is A Fiction Democrats Invented To Divert Blame For Their Defeat"

    With McCarthyism 2.0 continues to run amok in the US, spread like a virulent plague by unnamed, unknown, even fabricated sources, over in France one day after his first meeting with French president Emanuel Macron, the man who supposedly colluded with and was Trump’s pre-election puppet master (but had to wait until after the election to set up back-channels with Jared Kushner) Vladimir Putin sat down for an interview with French newspaper Le Figaro in which the Russian president expressed the belief that Moscow and Western capitals “all want security, peace, safety and cooperation.”

    “Therefore, we should not build up tensions or invent fictional threats from Russia, some hybrid warfare etc.,” the Russian leader told his French hosts. “What is the major security problem today? Terrorism. There are bombings in Europe, in Paris, in Russia, in Belgium. There is a war in the Middle East. This is the main concern. But no, let us keep speculating on the threat from Russia.”

    Case in point, in the latest attempt to stir up an anti-Russian frenzy, America’s biggest neocon, John McCain said that Russia is even more dangerous than ISIS. “You made these things up yourselves and now scare yourselves with them and even use them to plan your prospective policies. These policies have no prospects. The only possible future is in cooperation in all areas, including security issues.”

    “Hacking” Clinton And the DNC

    Even with the FBI special investigation on “Russian collusion” with the Trump campaign and administration taking place in the background, Putin once again dismissed allegations of Russian meddling in last year’s U.S. presidential election as “fiction” invented by Democrats to divert the blame for their defeat. Putin repeated his strong denial of Russia’s involvement in the hacking of Democratic National Committee emails that yielded disclosures that proved embarrassing for Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Instead, he countered that claims of Russian interference were driven by the “desire of those who lost the U.S. elections to improve their standing.”

    “They want to explain to themselves and prove to others that they had nothing to do with it, their policy was right, they have done everything well, but someone from the outside cheated them,” he continued. “It’s not so. They simply lost, and they must acknowledge it.” That has proven easier said than done, because half a year after the election, Hillary Clinton still blames Wikileaks and James Comey for her loss. Ironically, what Putin said next, namely that the “people who lost the vote hate to acknowledge that they indeed lost because the person who won was closer to the people and had a better understanding of what people wanted,” is precisely what even Joe Biden has admitted several weeks ago, and once again yesterday. Maybe Uncle Joe is a Russian secret agent too…

    In reflecting on the ongoing scandal, which has seen constant, daily accusations of collusion and interference if no evidence (yet), Putin conceded that the damage has already been done and Russia’s hopes for a new detente under Trump have been shattered by congressional and FBI investigations of the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia. In the interview, Putin also said the accusations of meddling leveled at Russia have destabilized international affairs

    Going back to the hotly debated topic of “influencing” the election, Putin once again made a dangerous dose of sense when he argued that trying to influence the U.S. vote would make no sense for Moscow as a U.S. president can’t unilaterally shape policies. “Russia has never engaged in that, we don’t need it and it makes no sense to do it,” he said. “Presidents come and go, but policies don’t change. You know why? Because the power of bureaucracy is very strong.” Especially when the bureaucracy in question is the so-called “deep state.”

    Asked who could have been behind the hacking of the Democrats’ emails, The Russian leader added that he agreed with Trump that it could have been anyone. “Maybe someone lying in his bed invented something or maybe someone deliberately inserted a USB with a Russian citizen’s signature or anything else,” Putin said. “Anything can be done in this virtual world.” This echoed a remark by Trump during a September presidential debate in which he said of the DNC hacks: “It could be Russia, but it could be China, could also be lots of other people. It could be someone sitting on their bed that weighs 400 pounds.”

    Assad, Red-Lines and Chemical Weapons

    Putin was asked about French President Emmanuel Macron’s warning that any use of chemical weapons in Syria was a “red line” that would be met by reprisals, to which the Russian president said he agreed with that position. But he also reiterated Russia’s view that Syrian President Bashar Assad’s forces weren’t responsible for a fatal chemical attack in Syria in April. Putin said Russia had offered the U.S. and its allies the chance to inspect the Syrian base for traces of the chemical agent. He added that their refusal reflected a desire to justify military action against Assad. “There is no proof of Assad using chemical weapons,” Putin insisted in the interview. “We firmly believe that that this is a provocation. President Assad did not use chemical weapons.”

    “Moreover, I believe that this issue should be addressed on a broader scale. President Macron shares this view. No matter who uses chemical weapons against people and organizations, the international community must formulate a common policy and find a solution that would make the use of such weapons impossible for anyone,” the Russian leader said.

    On NATO’s Military Buildup across Russian borders

    Weighing on the outcome of the recent NATO summit, at which Russia was branded a threat to security, Putin pointed to the ambiguous signals Moscow is receiving from the alliance. “What attracted my attention is that the NATO leaders spoke at their summit about a desire to improve relations with Russia. Then why are they increasing their military spending? Whom are they planning to fight against?” Putin said, adding that Russia nevertheless “feels confident” in its own defenses. Washington’s appeal to other NATO members to ramp up their military spending and alleviate the financial burden the US is forced to shoulder is “understandable” and “pragmatic,” Putin said.

    But the strategy employed by the alliance against Russia is “shortsighted,” the Russian president added, referring to the NATO’s expanding missile defense infrastructure on Russia’s doorstep and calling it “an extremely dangerous development for international security.” Putin lamented that an idea of a comprehensive security system envisioned in the 1990s that would span Europe, Russia and US has never become a reality, arguing that it would have spared Russia many challenges to its security stemming from NATO. “Perhaps all this would not have happened. But it did, and we cannot rewind history, it is not a movie.”

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