A former Pfizer employee was charged with insider trading by the Securities and Exchange Commission after booking gains of 2,458% buying out-of-the-money call options one day ahead of the company’s Paxlovid announcement, the SEC alleges.

Former Pfizer statistician Amit Dagar and his close friend and business partner, Atul Bhiwapurkar, were charged in connection with the company’s November 5, 2021 announcement that a randomized, double-blind study of its COVID-19 antiviral treatment, Paxlovid, was successful – which sent the company’s stock up nearly 11%.

According to the SEC’s complaint, Dagar was a senior statistical program lead for the Paxlovid drug trial, which began in July 2021 as part of the company’s efforts to address the global health pandemic. On the day before the Paxlovid announcement, the complaint alleges, Dagar learned material, nonpublic information about the success of the trial. Specifically, the SEC alleges that Dagar’s supervisor informed him via chat that “we got the outcome,” there was a “lot of work lined up,” and that there would be a “press release tomorrow,” to which Dagar responded with “oh really” and “kind of exciting.” Several hours after that exchange, Dagar allegedly purchased short term, out-of-the-money Pfizer call options, including options that expired the very next day, and then tipped Bhiwapurkar, who also purchased similar call options in Pfizer. The complaint alleges that Dagar’s and Bhiwapurkar’s trading generated approximately $214,395 and $60,300 respectively in illicit profits, which amounted to one-day investment returns of 2,458 percent and 791 percent. -SEC

“As alleged in our complaint, Amit Dagar misused his access to confidential clinical trial results to enrich himself and his friend,” said Joseph Sansone, Chief of the SEC’s Market Abuse Unit. “Dagar and Bhiwapurkar allegedly leveraged this information by trading out-of-the-money call options to generate massive one-day returns. Thanks to our surveillance, the defendants must now face the consequences of their greed.” 

The complaint against the pair was filed in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, and charges both men with violating the antifraud provisions of Section 10(b) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 and Exchange Act Rule 10b-5 thereunder and seeks injunctive relief, disgorgement with prejudgment interest, and civil penalties. 

Meanwhile, the US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York announced parallel criminal charges against Dagar and Bhiwapurkar.

Days after US Secretary of State Antony Blinken held high-level talks in China with President Xi Jinping that turned out to be a bust after President Biden, who should quite honestly be in a nursing home, called Xi a “dictator,” The Wall Street Journal published a piece, citing what it does best: anonymous sources, which detailed the Chinese spy balloon that the Biden administration allowed to float over the US earlier this year was equipped with American-made equipment. 

On Wednesday, WSJ revealed an analysis by US defense and intelligence agencies of the debris recovered from the spy balloon shot down by a stealth fighter jet off the South Carolina coast in February was equipped with commercially available US equipment, some of which could easily be purchased online. 

*CHINESE BALLOON USED AMERICAN TECH TO SPY ON US: WSJ pic.twitter.com/QVnEl9fVwO

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) June 29, 2023

The US-made equipment was “interspersed with more specialized Chinese sensors and other equipment to collect photos, video, and other information to transmit to China,” officials told WSJ. The conclusion of the analysis disproves China’s claim the balloon was for ‘meteorological-puproses‘ and intended for intelligence gathering.

One of the officials said the Biden administration has not publicly shared its findings on the balloon and what components were used from the US. 

What’s still a mystery, and perhaps why some members of Congress are pressuring the administration to release critical information about the balloon’s capabilities, is why Biden allowed the spy balloon to fly over several sensitive US military sites. 

“Your administration has yet to provide the American people a full accounting of how this spy platform was allowed to traverse across sovereign US territory, what the balloon carried, and what it collected during its mission,” Republican Sens. Roger Wicker of Mississippi and Marco Rubio of Florida wrote to Biden earlier this month. 

Officials provided more insight into the balloon’s satellite-like device, including high-tech sensors, solar panels for power, and devices to capture photos, videos, and even radar. Biden has said the balloon was carrying a payload equivalent to “two boxcars full of spy equipment.” 

Investigators “traced purchase orders for some of the equipment and the purchasers’ relationship to the Chinese government,” the officials said. 

Meanwhile, members of the Select Committee on the CCP sent a letter to Blinken this week, requesting the Biden administration to sever the “Agreement Between the United States and the People’s Republic of China on Cooperation in Science and Technology” because US researchers have helped China advance weather balloon technology over the years:

“As you know, a few years later, the PRC used similar balloon technology to surveil US military sites on US territory,” representatives wrote.

The WSJ piece was published days after Blinken visited Xi to restore Sino-US relations and one day after reports the Biden administration is preparing to tighten export controls on some artificial intelligence chips to China. 

Authored by Christian Britschgi via RealClear Wire,

In April 2021, Adele Fox received a single shot of the Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine. Within a few hours, the 60-year-old resident of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, started feeling shooting pains in her legs, arms, and neck. The pain didn’t abate over the next few days. Instead, it got worse and was accompanied by nausea and debilitating fatigue.  

Within a few weeks, neurologists affiliated with Massachusetts General Hospital diagnosed her with several serious conditions they say were a result of her COVID-19 vaccine, including small-fiber neuropathy (which causes a painful tingling in the extremities) and Sjögren’s Syndrome (which leaves patients pained and fatigued, and in extreme cases, can damage internal organs).  

This shot, which was supposed to get Fox back to normal, instead left her with diminished ability to work and enjoy life. Persistent physical therapy and experimental treatments she’s taken since have done little to alleviate her symptoms.  

“I used to do so much, and now it’s a struggle,” she says. “Sometimes you just get down.” 

With her medical bills mounting and her condition not improving, Fox sought compensation for her damaged health. Federal liability protections prevent the vaccine-injured from directly suing vaccine manufacturers like Johnson & Johnson. Instead, claimants have to go to the federal government for compensation.  

But as Fox would soon learn, the government has two starkly different injury programs for vaccines. One operates like a civil court with a neutral judge, lawyers on both sides, and a guaranteed right of appeal. In recent decades, it has approved about 75% of claims and pays out hundreds of millions of dollars per year.  

The other, which handles COVID-19 vaccines, has rejected almost every claim brought to it, awarding less than $10,000 since the pandemic. And in a nation nearly numb to the pandemic’s toll and its scandals, the program is adding seething frustration atop lasting injury to Fox and people like her in a little reported aftermath to the government’s much criticized performance on vaccines – ranging from erratic booster advice to broad-brush vaccine mandates that cost people their jobs. 

Fox filed her claim two years ago, submitting hundreds of pages of medical documents about her condition and diagnoses. She’s nevertheless one of the 10,887 people still waiting on a decision. “You’re not even hearing anything from the organization that’s supposed be helping you,” she says. “The phone keeps ringing, no one is emailing, nobody is doing anything.”   

The federal agency overseeing the program, the Health Resources and Services Administration, said in a statement to RealClearInvestigations that the current number of claims “significantly exceeds the previous volume in the program” and that the program has “hired additional staff to address this growth in claims, and the President’s budget requests additional funding to support the additional staffing needed to process claims.”  

Tale of Two Compensation Programs 

The government’s two contrasting vaccine compensation programs are similarly named and thus easily confused. The first, Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP) was created in the 1980s and covers most routine vaccines. The second, the Countermeasures Injury Compensation Program (CICP), is a result of war-on-terror legislation in 2005 and now covers COVID-19 vaccines. Their bureaucratic differences help explain why a nation that has spent trillions of dollars on COVID relief programs has provided almost no assistance to people harmed by the vaccines that the government encouraged, and sometimes required, them to take. 

The earlier program was supposed to shore up pharmaceutical companies’ willingness to make childhood vaccines in the face of persistent vaccine injury lawsuits, while also giving the vaccine-injured a fair and expedited process for compensation.  

The vaccine-injured would not sue pharmaceutical companies. Instead, they’d petition the government in Federal Claims Court, where special masters (judges) would decide cases. Compensation came from a government-administered trust fund paid for by excise taxes levied on vaccine manufacturers.  

Between 2006 and 2021, this court adjudicated cases from 10,602 petitioners and issued compensation to 7,618 of them. The compensation trust fund sits at $4 billion and pays out about $200 million in compensation and attorneys’ fees each year.  

This earlier program bears little resemblance to the Countermeasures Injury Compensation Program, where the COVID-vaccine cases of Fox and many others are languishing. 

It was meant to incentivize pharmaceutical companies to be part of the federal response to one-off, one-in-a-million events like a bioweapon attack or an outbreak of a deadly pandemic. Although almost one billion doses of COVID-19 vaccines have been administered in the United States, and health authorities say boosters could become as common as the annual flu shot, it remains the only way people harmed by the shot can receive compensation. 

It’s far from guaranteed they’ll get it. 

Before the pandemic, this program received a little over 500 claims and had paid out compensation to only 30 people – mostly for H1N1 (swine flu) vaccine injuries. In just the past two years, it has been asked to make decisions on over 10,000 injury claims related to COVID countermeasures.  

As of June, it made decisions on just 919 of these COVID-related claims and rejected 894 of them. It has so far paid out only $8,593 in compensation to just four people who were injured by a COVID vaccine. The program has deemed another 20 people eligible for compensation, but has yet to pay them.  

It’s not a judicial process either. Rather, it’s an administrative process overseen by Health Resources and Services Administration, which is housed within Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). People file a claim and government medical reviewers decide whether to pay out or not. That’s an awkward arrangement, given that HHS is deciding whether to pay for damages caused by products it approved and in some cases mandated.  

Because it’s an administrative process, there’s no right to counsel and no neutral arbitrator. A denied claimant can file for reconsideration with HRSA, but otherwise has no right to appeal. 

Unlike the earlier program, the CICP offers no compensation for pain and suffering and doesn’t pay attorneys’ fees. Most successful claimants have received compensation totaling a few hundred dollars or a few thousand dollars. The highest award for a COVID-19 vaccine injury sufferer was $3,957.66 to a person who got myocarditis (a heart condition) from a vaccine.  

It also has shorter filing deadlines. People have to file a claim within one year of vaccination, a much shorter window than the earlier program’s standard of three years from the onset of symptoms. Of the 894 claims that CICP has rejected, 444 of them were for missing the filing deadline.  

CICP also only awards compensation in cases where there’s “compelling, reliable, valid, medical, and scientific evidence” that someone’s injury is linked to a covered countermeasure. HRSA describes this as “a high evidentiary standard.” Renée Gentry, a practicing vaccine injury lawyer who directs the Vaccine Injury Litigation Clinic at George Washington University, says it’s a much higher bar than what the earlier vaccine injury compensation program requires, which contributes to a much lower rate of successful claims.  

The Countermeasures Injury Compensation Program’s nature as a small emergency program has seen its capacity strained by a flood of COVID-related injury claims. Of the 11,806 COVID-related claims filed, 10,887 are still pending. Those four cases where COVID compensation was paid out didn’t come until after April 2023, over two years since the first vaccines were administered.    

Pain and Suffering  

The shortcomings of CICP are all too apparent for the people who are forced to wade through it. Even folks who seem to have done everything right are left waiting or disappointed by the program.  

Fox filed her claim in May 2021, which was relatively early in the immunization campaign. She also had clear diagnoses from well-credentialed doctors linking her conditions to her COVID-19 vaccination. Fox says she provided the program with no shortage of documentation as well. 

After filing all that paperwork, she hasn’t been idle either. After months of not hearing anything back from CICP, Fox started to reach out repeatedly to anyone she thought might be able to move the needle. She spoke repeatedly with representatives from Sen. Jeanne Shaheen’s and Rep. Chris Pappas’ offices. She also kept calling program administrators, trying to figure out what was taking so long.  

“I’m sure they saw my number, and said ‘Ah, Fox, oh no, not her [again]’,” she jokes.  

Her congressional representatives did reach out to CICP on her behalf. That was at least effective at getting program administrators to call Fox personally twice, once in July 2022 and again in June 2023. But each time, they could only offer her reassurance that her paperwork had been received. On both calls, Fox says she was told that the program was vastly overburdened by the flood of COVID-19 claims it had received. She, like thousands of others, would have to wait.  

The few decisions on COVID-19 claims that have trickled out haven’t offered much relief to the people who’ve received them. That includes Cody Flint, one of the 894 people who’ve had their COVID-related claims rejected.  

Flint was vaccinated in February 2021, when he received a single Pfizer dose. He says that he started to feel headaches and had affected vision within 30 minutes of the shot. He was still experiencing symptoms two days later when he headed to his job as a crop-dusting pilot.  

While flying that day, he started to experience extreme tunnel vision, followed by a sensation he describes as “a bomb [going] off in my head.” He barely managed to get his plane back to his runway, where his coworkers found him slumped over his controls and shaking. 

He was diagnosed with perilymphatic fistula (or tear of the inner ear) caused by elevated intracranial pressure – which could only be relieved through repeated draining of his spinal fluid. Given the timing of his symptoms and the fact that he’d passed a flight physical just a couple weeks prior, his doctors said his condition was almost certainly caused by the vaccine. His injury prevented him from returning to work as a pilot, and his mounting medical bills saw him draw down all of his savings.  

In April 2021, Flint filed a claim. In May 2022 – just a few weeks after Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith asked HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra about his case specifically in a committee hearing – Flint’s claim was rejected. The program’s medical reviewers told Flint that it was more likely his injuries were caused by barotrauma from flying a plane.  

He petitioned for a reconsideration of his case. His doctors argued that there was no way he’d have experienced barotrauma from flying just a few hundred feet off the ground. Commercial airliners, they noted, are pressurized at 6,000 to 8,000 feet of elevation. Flint’s lawyers also submitted recent studies linking the symptoms he’d experienced to COVID-19 vaccinations.  

Nevertheless, a separate medical reviewer at HRSA upheld the CICP’s initial denial in January 2023. That letter succinctly stated that HHS has “no appeals process beyond this reconsideration” and “there is no judicial review of a final action concerning CICP eligibility.”  

Efforts at Reform  

The federal government’s liability protections for COVID-19 vaccines aren’t scheduled to expire until the end of 2024. Once they do, those claiming a vaccine injury will be able to pursue claims against vaccine manufacturers in state courts.  

While liability protections remain in effect, the federal program is injured claimants’ only potential source of compensation.  

Whether or not the HRSA succeeds in boosting staffing in line with its statement to RCI, those seeking compensation have started to get organized. They’ve formed the group React19, which is dedicated to advocating for additional research into the side effects of COVID-19 vaccines. It’s grown into a network of tens of thousands of people who say they suffered adverse injuries from the shot. Flint, the pilot, is on its board of directors.  

“It’s a very pro-vaccine community,” says Christopher Dreisbach, the group’s legal affairs director. “You say anything about vaccine injuries, you’re branded as anti-vaxxers. We are pro-science, we are not political. We’re just dealing with a very politicized issue.”  

He says the politicization of vaccines has made their efforts at compensation reform a challenge.  

When the CICP, and the 2005 Pandemic Response and Emergency Preparedness (PREP) Act that created it, were first being debated, Republican lawmakers were its main advocates, while its main critics were Democrats. The partisan politics of the program and liability protections for pharmaceutical companies has done a 180 since COVID.  

In 2005, Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee argued during the House floor debate on the PREP Act that the law’s liability shield would leave injured healthcare workers with little protection or chance of compensation. Come 2023, she would return to the floor of the House to argue in favor of mandating those same healthcare workers receive a vaccine covered by the PREP Act’s liability shield.   

The PREP Act’s harshest critics during COVID, meanwhile, have mostly been Republicans.  

“I call the PREP Act medical malpractice martial law,” says Rep. Thomas Massie, who complains that its liability shield is both incredibly broad and improperly preempts state law. “I think it’s sort of anathema to the way our government is set up. I found it hard to believe that Congress would pass something, much less that a Republican president would invoke it.”  

In March 2022, Sen. Mike Lee introduced a bill that would have amended CICP to give claimants the same framework for pursuing compensation as the VICP. They could file in Federal Claims Court and receive an expedited, judicial adjudication of their injury claim.  

Gentry argues that it would be far simpler to just move the COVID-19 vaccines into the VICP program, which already has a successful track record of adjudicating injury claims. In order for that to happen under the law that created the VICP, the CDC needs to recommend the vaccines for routine administration to children (which has already happened) and vaccine manufacturers would have to start paying excise taxes. That latter condition will require action from Congress.   

VICP needs a number of updates as well, says Gentry, including expanding the number of special masters to handle the backlog of cases and increasing the available levels of compensation (which haven’t been updated since the 1980s).  

Increasing the number of special masters is particularly important if the VICP program is going to be expected to process tens of thousands of COVID claims, she says. But she argues it’s the best way of getting the vaccine injured out of CICP and into a program that will work for them. “If you’re taking away someone’s constitutional right to sue, you really have to give them a reasonable and meaningful alternative and that’s what this program is, for all of its faults,” says Gentry.  

While efforts at reform in Washington lumber on, React19 has started a privately funded compensation program that’s thus far paid out $552,000.  

“Is that making a meaningful difference to all the vaccine injured everywhere? No, that’s not enough,” says Dreisbach, but he notes that it’s far more than what CICP has paid out. “That should be pretty embarrassing to the federal government.”   

A bizarre surge in exports (came out of nowhere) sent Q1 GDP jumping to 2.0% this morning (in its 3rd look), and that is very much not what the market was looking for.

Rate-hike expectations soared with markets now pricing in a 50% or so chance of 2 more rate-hikes by year-end…

Source: Bloomberg

Equities swung wildly as the rotation back to value from growth  (Small Caps outperforming Nasdaq) stirred…

Gold was pummeled down near $1900 – another lower high and lower low…

Treasury yields soared, with the short-end underperforming…

Which sparked a serious flattening in the yield curve (deeper inversion), erasing almost all of the SVB steepning…

Finally, the dollar rallied on the hawkish reaction in rates…

Nomura’s Charlie McElligott asked yesterday (reflecting oin the equity market meltup) – So what would it take to blow this thing out?  

His answer may well be worth paying attention to this morning…

Just spitballing…

Perhaps what is required (easier said than done!) is a proper “Correlation 1” event where the current dispersion wave reverses, especially if Grosses keep growing – potentially requiring some sort of AI crunch from the Long side (earnings expectations mania overshoots reality? – seems too early for that just yet)…

…or maybe from the Short-side, where US economic data does indeed see that aforementioned “animal spirits” trade and actually reaccelerates to such an extent that markets either begin adding-in fresh terminal rate…

…OR where heavily-short economically sensitives begin trading “early cycle” and get grabbed-into / painfully.squeezed.

No one was expecting that kind of ‘animal spirits’ growth? And The Fed can’t stand for that.

The second revision to Q1 GDP – data which comes some three months after the quarter in question is long over (and is still not the final revision as the data continues to be massaged higher or lower for years to come) – is usually a very boring affair: after all, the BEA is supposed to have all of the estimates and soft data replaced with hard actuals by now, and the bottom line number should be fine-tuned at best to the tune of 0.1%, 0.2% at most.

Not this time: moments ago, the BEA reported that according to the third estimate of Q1 GDP, the US economy grew much faster than expected at the start of the year, rising at a 2.0% SAAR, up dramatically from the 1.3% GDP print reported in the second estimate one month ago, and up almost 100% from the 1.1% initial Q1 GDP report published two months ago.

More importantly, the number was a two-sigma beat to consensus expectations of a 1.4% increase, the biggest outlier to the third GDP estimate in over a decade, a testament to how unexpected today’s beat was.

The GDP estimate for the first quarter was revised up 0.7 percentage point from the “second” estimate, primarily reflecting upward revisions to exports and consumer spending.

The increase in the first quarter primarily reflected an increase in consumer spending that was partly offset by a decrease in inventory investment.

• The increase in consumer spending reflected increases in both goods (led by motor vehicles and parts) and services (led by health care, food services and accommodations, and “other” services).
• The decrease in inventory investment primarily reflected decreases in wholesale trade and manufacturing.

Looking at the bottom-line contributors we get the following breakdown:

• Personal Consumption: 2.79% of the bottom line number, up from 2.52% in the second estimate.
• Fixed Investment: down modestly to -0.08% from -0.03%
• Change in private investment was unchanged at -2.14% of the bottom line GDP print.
• Net trade was the biggest change: exports were revised from 0.58% to 0.86%, while imports subtracted only -0.28% from the bottom line GDP, a big drop from the -0.57% subtraction previously. In total, net trade became a 0.58% contributor to growth, up from a tiny 0.01% booster in the latest revision, effectively responsible for almost all of the 1.3% to 2.0% GDP increase.
• Finally, government consumption was almost unchanged at 0.85%, down from 0.89%.

It was not immediately clear what was the source of this dramatic trade data revision.

Elsewhere, while very much irrelevant now that we are about to enter July and the second half of the year, the report also revealed that according to the BEA, the GDP price index rose 4.1%, below the 4.2% expected, but up from 3.8% in the previous estimate. Core PCE also rose less than expected, up 4.9% vs exp. 5.0%.

While today’s number is irrelevant for markets and the bigger picture, what is curious is how aggressive the upward data revision was. And as such, it suggests that the BEA’s bean counters have far less “fudge” space to make Q2 and Q3 GDP look stronger, as such don’t be surprised to find GDP in the current and next quarters come in well weaker than expected, which is key since many analysts expect the recession to start some time this summer.

Authored by Peter Barry Chowka via AmericanThinker.com,

NewsNation’s 90-minute town hall broadcast live from Chicago Wednesday with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. was an intellectually stimulating and emotionally moving event. Despite the hour of mostly put downs that preceded it (hosted by Chris Cuomo with featured guest Bill O’Reilly) and the half hour of analysis that followed it (Chris Cuomo again with a panel that included Former Wisconsin Republican Gov. Scott Walker – the most fair and objective), Kennedy more than met the challenging questions presented to him by town hall host Elizabeth Vargas and a number of pre-selected Democrat and Independent voters in Chicago, New Hampshire, and South Carolina.

Elizabeth Vargas and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. on stage at the NewsNation Town Hall June 28, 2023, Photo courtesy NewsNation

By the end of the ninety minutes of town hall, I kept thinking of this statement attributed to Ronald Reagan: “The person who agrees with you 80 percent of the time is a friend and an ally – not a 20 percent traitor.”

I found myself agreeing with Kennedy at least 80% of the time.

[ZH: Early on he addressed the small elephant in the room – explaining how he came to have a raspy voice, noting a neurological disease in his 40s.]

Even when, near the end, Kennedy countered a particularly obnoxious and challenging gay voter from South Carolina who attempted to get him off stride and sandbag him with a snide accusation, Kennedy pledged his lifelong support of LGBTQ rights (which he described as “LGBQT”) I could sympathize with what Kennedy was trying to do – in essence, to reach out in the darkness. Too bad that he wasn’t asked about his feelings about the current move to give special rights to transgender people, as in allowing them to participate in sporting events with people of the opposite biological sex.

The issues at hand were much larger and more significant as the hour-and-a-half provided Kennedy with time to expand on the points that he’s made in his half dozen live interviews on FOX News since he declared for president two months ago. Thus far, to my knowledge, he has not been invited to appear on CNN or MSNBC.

As in the FOX interviews, Kennedy revealed himself to be a thoughtful, sincere, and passionate man of significant achievement – who himself, as he confided, had endured a 14-year long addiction which he overcame four decades ago. His accomplishments since then have been hardly insubstantial.

After the debate, a complete transcript was not available – only selected excerpts provided to journalists by NewsNation. An article at the channel’s Web site (one of a number) reported the highlights.

Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. would not pledge to support his party’s nominee, stood by his claims about vaccines and announced that “I want my party back” in his first national town hall presented by NewsNation on Wednesday.

“I’m running because I feel like my party has lost its way,” Kennedy told NewsNation’s Elizabeth Vargas.

Kennedy — an environmental lawyer and nephew of President John F. Kennedy — has positioned himself as a populist set on returning to the “exact values that would have been promoted by my father and uncle.”

Despite never holding elective office, Kennedy’s campaign has generated attention within the party. Among Democrats, Kennedy is polling at 15%, according to a recent Harvard CAPS-Harris Poll. Still, Biden is well ahead at 62%.

In order to win the nomination, Kennedy will have to do something no primary challenger has done in modern U.S. history — unseat an incumbent president for their party’s nomination.

Right out of the gate, Kennedy declined to take the bait and attack his potential opponents.

Vargas asked Kennedy what he thought of Donald Trump after the former president praised him as a “common sense guy” in a recent interview.

The Democratic hopeful said he’s focused on unity, not division.

“I’m not going to attack other people personally,” he said. “What I’m trying to do in this race is bring people together.”

Kennedy had the same attitude toward the current president.

“You won’t hear me saying bad things about President Biden,” Kennedy said. “I’m not going to attack him as a man.”

Instead, Kennedy said he is focused on policy disagreements, such as his differing views on war, censorship and COVID lockdowns.

[ZH: Additionally, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. says sealing the border is “not that hard.” He discusses his immigration plan.]

Kennedy’s comments and particularly his answers to questions seemed incredibly honest and thoughtful – which took some getting used to since this is hardly the domain of almost all major politicians today.  For example:

When asked whether he would support the Democratic nominee no matter what, Kennedy declined.

“Of course, I’m not gonna do that,” he said.

Kennedy said he’ll wait to see if the person who emerges from his party is “living up to Democratic values.”

Those values, as he described them, include fighting for the middle class, protecting civil liberties and embracing debate.

“We need to figure out a way to start talking to each other and start healing each other,” Kennedy said.

“This polarization is more dangerous” than at any time since the Civil War, he added.

And that was my major takeaway from the Kennedy town hall – a pledge on the candidate’s part to truly try to unify this sickly divided country. Of course, talk is easy – but Kennedy indicated his interest in reaching out to a wide variety of voters with his startling positions (for a Democrat) on, among others, the border, the war in Ukraine, guns (he’s more interested in solving the problem of why people want to kill), and the medical-industrial complex and its propaganda stranglehold on modern medicine and public policy.

[ZH: RFK Jr expanded on his vaccine stance, saying that the FDA can’t be trusted when it gives regulatory approval, noting that “saying I’m anti-vaccine is a way of silencing me”. ]

It’s these and other positions of his that have caught the attention of many conservatives including Tucker Carlson and suggested that there is potential support for RFK, Jr. across a broad spectrum of Americans, and not just the left

[ZH: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. struck a personal tone, talking about his battles with addiction. He said he would decriminalize marijuana, tax consequent income federally and “use that money to build these healing centers in rural areas” for those struggling with addiction.]

In watching and listening to Kennedy, I felt like he was channeling the best energy of and the inspiration represented by his father, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, and his uncle, President John F. Kennedy, both of whom were assassinated in the prime of life.

It has often been said that if either man were alive today, he’d be unwelcome in the current Democrat party and would likely be a Republican.

While Kennedy insisted that he is a lifelong Democrat, he cited his research and writings about his family and his commitment to their ideals. Think JFK’s “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country,” and his father’s stand in 1968, unpopular among most 1960s Establishment Democrats, against the continuation of the Vietnam War – at a time when the Pentagon Papers (published in June 1971 after being leaked by the late Anthony J. Russo, Jr. and Daniel Ellsberg, who died earlier this month) confirmed that the powers that be had determined that the war was lost.

Kennedy:

“I’m running because I feel like my party has lost its way [emphasis in NewsNation transcript] – that the values, my uncle represented, my father represented when they were Democrats have been neglected, let’s say. And I want to try to bring the Democratic Party back to those values, the values that were you know, in favor of a focus on on the middle class in this country focused on, on on labor on racial on you know, on the well-being of minorities in this country, focused on the environment, particularly on civil liberties and freedom of speech which the party has, seems to have forgotten about.”

Regarding Ukraine (again, almost channeling his late father in 1968 during the height of the Vietnam War), Kennedy said (to paraphrase) that in ten years history will show that our country’s course in encouraging the prolongation of the war in Ukraine would be seen as a failure.

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. from his campaign Web site kennedy24.com

I have been following national politics for a long time – and for many years early on, reporting from the campaign trail. My first political hero was Arizona Republican conservative Sen. Barry Goldwater, who ran against President Lyndon Johnson in 1964 and lost in a landslide. In March 1968, as a student, and a student journalist, in Washington, D.C., I attended a nighttime rally in a black ghetto in the nation’s capital featuring Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, who had declared his candidacy for the presidency the week before. A friend and I were among the handful of white people in attendance – and the vibe, as they say, was good. Sen. Kennedy had that rare ability, by his very presence and his words, to unify and unite – as he did a week or so later when he addressed a mostly black crowd at a campaign speech in Indianapolis, Indiana and announced the news that Rev. Martin Luther King had just been assassinated. His spontaneous remarks were later made into a documentary film, A Ripple of Hope. That city was one of the few that was not burned during the riots that followed the death of Rev. King. From the Wikipedia entry about that speech:

William Crawford, a member of the Black Radical Action Project who had stood about 20 feet from Kennedy, credited Kennedy’s speech for not resulting in riots. Crawford claimed to the Indianapolis Star in 2015 “Look at all those other cities” and “I believe it would have gone that way (in Indianapolis) had not Bobby Kennedy given those remarks.”

And last night, as I heard a genuine echo of the energy, the hope, and the optimism of America a half century ago, these were the closing comments by RFK, Jr. at the end of the NewsNation town hall:

Our country is going to start healing when the government tells the truth.

By Michael Msika, Bloomberg Markets Live reporter and strategist

Europe’s equities have lost a third of their annual gains in just about a week, and so far dip buyers are proving hard to find.

Hit by a slew of hawkish central-bank comments, the Stoxx 600 fell for six straight sessions before halting the losing streak on Tuesday. While far from a correction, the benchmark’s longest stretch of declines since October highlights the near absence of investors who were ready to buy the dip sooner during previous pullbacks.

“Optimistic market participants are currently having a hard time resisting the tendency to take profits,” says Andreas Lipkow, strategist at Comdirect Bank. “The interest in buying is not sufficient and there is still a lack of positive impetus, which is due to the current summer doldrums in international financial markets. This situation will not change for the time being.”

With trading volume already down ahead of the seasonal summer lull, the moves to the downside may be exacerbated. On the technical side, breadth is deteriorating, but hasn’t yet reached levels that signal a bounce ahead.

The next big support level for the Stoxx 600, after it breached 50- and 100-day moving averages this month, is the 200-day level — roughly 2% below where the gauge is currently trading. On a more granular level, the proportion of stocks below their 10-day moving average has the potential to go lower before buyers step in.

Looking at the composition of this year’s rally, 39% of Europe’s gains have come from the biggest 15 companies. The median stock has gained a modest 4%, versus the broader gauge’s 6.6%. Some large caps are now showing weakness, which bodes ill for the Stoxx 600.

“While the broader European index isn’t at a technically relevant level, beneath the surface, the biggest three stocks in the region are,” says Carl Dooley, head of EMEA trading at TD Cowen, pointing out that LVMH, Novo Nordisk and Nestle are all pinned around their 100-day moving averages. The next move in that group will likely drive the rest of the market from here on, he adds.

Momentum based on MACD is weakening across the board, and has turned outright negative for most of the main indexes in Europe — a sharp contrast with the all-green readings of last month.

On Monday, we flagged the cracks appearing in the bull case for stocks, with mounting macroeconomic concerns clearly not reflected in the price. While a collapse in volatility has supported equity markets, credit spreads are still elevated, pricing in more economic trouble ahead.

For BofA derivative strategists including Riddhi Prasad, equity volatility is unlikely to sustain the extreme lows seen recently through the fall, “given a still hawkish ECB and fundamental risks to growth after a record tightening cycle,” they wrote last week.

Goldman Sachs strategist Peter Oppenheimer expects most equity markets to remain in a “fat and flat” range over the next 12 months. Poor earnings growth at the index level coupled with high valuations will cap the upside, according to him.

Just after the weekend of chaos in southern Russia due to the short-lived Wagner march on Moscow, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg, mused before reporters in Lithuania: “I think what we’re seeing in Russia over the last days demonstrates the fragility of the [Russian] regime, and, of course, it is a demonstration of weakness.” He further claimed, “We see the weakness of the Russian regime and it also demonstrates how difficult and dangerous it is for President Putin.”

In follow-up, on Wednesday Stoltenberg and other NATO officials commented on the presence of Wagner Group in Belarus, following its founder and chief, Yevgeny Prigozhin, having landed in Minsk in his private jet on Tuesday. Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko had teased the possibility of Wagner Group being activated inside his territory, in support of Belarusian armed forces. 

Both Stoltenberg and Lithuanian President Gitanas Nauseda have responded to these reports, expressing alarm over “instability” in the region, and threat of attacks from mercenaries. 

“If Wagner deploys its serial killers in Belarus, all neighboring countries face even bigger danger of instability,” the Lithuanian president said. 

Stoltenberg agreed there’s reason to be alarmed, though he said it’s “too early” to say what Wagner in Belarus could mean for NATO, but reaffirmed the alliance will protect “every ally, every inch of NATO territory” against threats from either “Moscow or Minsk.”

“We have already increased our military presence in the eastern part of the alliance and we will make further decisions to further strengthen our collective defense with more high-readiness forces and more capabilities at the upcoming summit,” Stoltenberg said.

The major NATO summit, where Sweden’s potential membership will also be high on the agenda, is set to be hosted in Vilnius July 11-12. Germany has meanwhile committed 4,000 more troops to be stationed in Lithuania as part of a combined force.

Polish President Andrzej Duda has expressed that Wagner in Belarus should be a discussion point regarding security on NATO’s eastern flank. “This is really serious and very concerning, and we have to make very strong decisions. It requires a very, very tough answer of NATO,” Duda said.

Apparently, Lukashenko and Prigozhin have the ‘warmest relationship’ going back years.
This clip is from Lukashenko’s interview to Gordon recorded in 2020. #Lukashenko #Belarus #Russia #Wagner #Prigozhin pic.twitter.com/b5CtOtbDmt

— Natalka (@NatalkaKyiv) June 28, 2023

Russia’s President Putin in a series of public statements this week confirmed that a deal had been made with Wagner and its now exiled leader: Wagner fighters now have the option of signing a contract with the defense ministry, or “they can go to Belarus,” in the president’s words.

Via The Cradle,

The Swedish government gave approval to organizers of a Quran-burning demonstration outside of a mosque in Stockholm on June 28.

The decision is expected to draw the ire of Turkey and hinder the Nordic country’s potential NATO membership, as has happened previously.

NATO officials are looking to admit Stockholm into the US-led alliance during the Vilnius Summit in Lithuania next month. Officials have previously clarified that not resolving Sweden’s admission by July would send a dangerous and humiliating message to the security alliance’s enemies.

Ever since Russia launched its military operation in Ukraine in February 2022, Sweden and Finland have sought to join NATO as a defense mechanism in the event that the war in Ukraine was to hypothetically expand into Europe.

Acquiring membership would require a unanimous vote from NATO’s members, but Turkiye and Hungary have voted against the Nordic country’s application.

Ankara has accused Helsinki and Stockholm of harboring members and supporters of the PKK and its Syrian offshoot, the People’s Protection Units (YPG), which Turkey deems as terror organizations.

At the end of March, Turkey granted Finland eligibility to join NATO. Sweden’s admission is still pending.

Despite high expectations for Stockholm in relation to the upcoming summit in July, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan recently shot down the prospects of Sweden joining NATO over Stockholm’s failure to uphold several of Ankara’s requirements for joining the security alliance, such as recently permitted supporters of the PKK to demonstrate on the streets of its capital.

Turkey has previously condemned the Swedish authorities for allowing a far-right anti-immigrant group to burn several Qurans outside of the Turkish embassy in Stockholm earlier this year, which resulted in Ankara stalling its decision to permit the country into NATO. 

Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson described the act of burning the Quran as “extremely serious” and an attempt to sabotage the nation’s NATO application.