Authored by Paul Sperry via RealClear Wire,

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky isn’t the only one demanding more military assistance from President Biden to protect Kiev from Russian forces. So too is a close Delaware friend and financial backer of Biden, who owns several luxury car dealerships around the Ukrainian capital. 

By sending billions of dollars in weapons and other military aid to help defend Ukraine, Biden also is securing the investments of millionaire car magnate John Hynansky, a Ukrainian American and longtime supporter of the president. 

Over the course of Biden’s political career, Hynansky and his family have contributed more than $100,000 to his campaigns, including $8,000 in 2020, Federal Election Commission records show. Hynansky family members have been guests at the White House, and Hynansky has floated hundreds of thousands of dollars in loans to Biden family members, property records show. Hynansky’s son, Michael, who helps run his car empire, lent the use of his Lear jet to Biden when he was a senator.

Since Russia started shelling the area around Kiev in February 2022, the U.S. government has spent $77 billion to help Ukraine rebuild and repel future attacks. 

Government ethics watchdogs say the president’s friendship poses a potential conflict of interest that demands a full accounting of how the massive foreign aid, which includes open-ended humanitarian and economic assistance, has been used and who has benefited from it. On the military side, moreover, billions of dollars have gone to unspecified areas, such as “security,” “intelligence,” and “training.” In the past, Hynansky has supplied the police cars and ambulances in several regions of Ukraine. 
 
The Biden administration helped Hynansky’s team in Ukraine prepare for the invasion, including placing calls to his top executive in Kiev 13 days in advance of Russian tanks crossing the border. It has sent billions of dollars to help rebuild war-torn cities where Hynansky operates the largest share of the country’s car showrooms and service centers specializing in Porsches, Jaguars, Land Rovers, and Bentleys, among other non-American brands he imports.  

Although supporting Ukraine is a policy with widespread – though not universal – bipartisan support in Washington, the president’s close relationship with Hynansky illustrates larger ethical questions that have long surrounded Biden and his family members, who often have financial interests directly affected by policies he endorses. While serving as President Obama’s point man in Ukraine in 2015,  Biden famously demanded the firing of a prosecutor who was investigating a natural gas company, Burisma, that was paying his son Hunter $80,000 per month to serve on its board. Recent revelations of lucrative dealings with concerns tied to China’s Communist government while Joe Biden was both in and out of office have also raised questions about his current policy toward Beijing. 

At a time Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’s relationship with a generous billionaire is fueling complaints among Democrats about money and politics, Biden’s friendship with Hynansky also raises red flags.  

Helping ‘My Very Good Friend’ 

The connection between Joe Biden and Hynansky’s business ventures dates back to 2009, when the then-vice president made his first visit to Ukraine. In a speech in Kiev to government officials, Biden singled out Hynansky for praise, noting that he had just had breakfast with “my very good friend, John Hynansky.” (The previous year, Hynansky had individually contributed more than $33,000 to the Obama-Biden ticket primarily through the Obama Victory Fund, according to FEC records.)

Within months of his hobnobbing with the vice president and local officials in the Ukrainian capital, Hynansky scored his first international development loan from the U.S. Overseas Private Investment Corporation, or OPIC, a federal body whose board was appointed by President Obama. Hynansky used the $2.5 million to break ground on a new headquarters and massive distribution center outside Kiev that prepares 8,000 cars for sale every year. In 2012, Hynansky landed another $20 million in OPIC funding to expand his dealership facilities, federal records show, helping him corner roughly 25% of the luxury car market in Ukraine. 

“The proceeds of the loan will be used to construct and operate two new, state-of-the-art dealership facilities for Porsche and Land Rover/Jaguar automobiles, and repay any outstanding balance of an existing OPIC loan,” according to a 2012 OPIC financing document. 
 
The terms of the OPIC loans state that all cars sold at his dealerships would be imported from Europe, not the United States, which meant that American-based automakers would not benefit from the taxpayer-backed venture. Under “U.S. economic impact,” the loan summary states that the jobs created from the deal would be created in “the host country, Ukraine,” not America. The terms of the loan also deferred Hynansky’s paying the principal on the loans for almost three years during construction, according to the OPIC document, which called the deferment a “grace period.” 
 
The next year, acting as Obama’s point man in Ukraine, Biden pushed for the ouster of what he called the country’s Russia-friendly president and helped set up a coalition government in 2014 while promising millions in aid for the Ukraine energy industry. That same year, Hunter Biden, who is a close childhood friend of Hynansky’s daughter, Alexandra (who was listed as a sponsor on the OPIC loans), was appointed to the board of Burisma.

In 2015, Joe Biden’s younger brother, James, and his sister-in-law, Sara Biden, became overextended financially after purchasing a six-bedroom, four-bathroom beach house plus guest house on Keewaydin Island, Fla., which was dubbed “The Biden Bungalow” after the vice president spent time there as well. Owing almost $700,000 in tax liens and contractor debts, the Bidens turned to Hynansky for help in lieu of a traditional lender. The car dealer came to the rescue with loans totaling $900,000. 
 
The bailout occurred as Hynansky’s powerful American pal oversaw U.S. policy in Ukraine, and as OPIC authorized new loans allowing his company to build a new 7,300-square-foot Porsche dealership along the highway that connects downtown Kiev to the Boryspil International Airport. 
 
Mortgage records initially reported the Bidens’ lender as “1018 PL, LLC,” obscuring Hynansky as the source of the loans. But the corporate entity is controlled by Hynansky, a 2018 document would later reveal. 
 
The Bidens sold the waterfront house in 2018, and Hynansky released his lien on the property. However, Hynansky did not acknowledge full payment and satisfaction of the loans, according to the details laid out in documents recorded in Collier County, Fla. 
  
Attempts to reach James Biden for comment were unsuccessful.

Hynansky is politically connected in Kiev as well as Washington. President Zelensky also calls Hynansky a good friend and in recent years has bestowed state awards on him. Kiev Mayor Vitaliy Klitschko also is close to the prominent Wilmington businessman. 

In August 2021, Hynansky secured a $24 million loan from the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) to expand its Ukraine operations into electric vehicles, including building new Renault and Volvo dealerships in Lviv. The U.S. is a founding member of EBRD and provides 10% of its capital. The Biden administration has been pushing such “green” deals. 
 
“In the near future, we intend to increase our presence on the Ukrainian market,” Hynansky’s top official in Ukraine, Petro Rondiak, said at the time.  
 
The White House did not respond to queries about the president’s relationship with Hynansky. 

Though Biden is silent about his actions in Ukraine as they concern Hynansky and his businesses there, he has repeatedly denied that his son’s Burisma dealings influenced his official actions in Ukraine — which included handing over more than $50 million in U.S. support to assist the Ukrainian energy industry, an aid package Biden personally announced in Kiev the month before Burisma hired his son in 2014. 
 
Republicans are investigating whether those funds were intended to help his son’s business interests in Ukraine. Less explored is whether U.S. tax money has also been used to protect or boost Hynansky’s Ukrainian investments. 
 
Paul Kamenar, counsel to the National Legal and Policy Center, a Washington watchdog group. said that in dealing with Ukraine, Biden increasingly is drawing suspicion he may be putting his own political fortunes ahead of the national interest.  

Many of Hynansky’s dealerships ‒ organized under the Winner Group Ukraine ‒ are located around the Kiev airport. Though the American head of Winner Group Ukraine fled the country after Russia’s invasion, the dealerships are still “operational,” according to a spokesperson at Hynansky’s headquarters in Delaware. All told, his Ukrainian subsidiary controls some 55 dealerships and service centers employing more than 800 workers. 

Thanks to the shipment of U.S. weaponry ‒ including Stinger missiles, howitzers, and Abrams tanks ‒ properties around Kiev airport are now secure enough that Biden was able to use the train station just 19 miles away to visit Zelensky during February’s anniversary of the invasion. And though Boryspil International Airport is still closed, Ukrainian forces have retaken strategically important suburbs of Kiev near the airport. 

Since taking control of the House, Republicans have threatened to curb aid to Ukraine and audit the massive funds the Biden administration and the Democratic-controlled Congress have funneled there. 

Winner executives have been clamoring for more U.S. military aid and direct intervention by Biden and other Western leaders. Before the invasion, the company had reported its best year in Ukraine. 
 
Rondiak, Hynansky’s top executive in Ukraine, has called for greater military intervention from America and the West, including setting up a “no-fly zone” over Ukrainian airspace. “Dear western ally politicians,” he tweeted in December, “when will the gloves come off?” 
 
Added Rondiak, “The flow of weapons must increase quickly.” He’s also called for a military counteroffensive “to punish Putin.” 
 
Although car sales are down, he said virtually all of Hynansky’s “dealers are operating” in Ukraine thanks to Biden administration support. He also praised the State Department for calling him to warn him to leave Kiev for his own safety two weeks ahead of the invasion.  

U.S. Aid ‘as Long as It Takes’  

Biden has pledged to keep sending U.S. funds to Ukraine “as long as it takes,” continuing indefinitely an already unprecedented spending stream. Support to Ukraine from other countries lags far behind the United States. Britain is providing less than 10% of what America is sending there, despite ranking second in total aid, according to Council on Foreign Relations data. 
 
Kamenar suggested that a special inspector general may be needed to audit U.S. spending in Ukraine, similar to the one Congress created to monitor U.S. aid and reconstruction contracts in Afghanistan.  

House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer said he suspects the kind of fraudulent and wasteful spending the Pentagon IG uncovered in Afghanistan “could be happening in Ukraine, where we are spending a significant amount of tax dollars.” 
 
“I know some of the tax dollars are going for ammunition. I know some of it’s going for humanitarian aid,” Rep. Comer told CNN last week. “But we hear that not all of it is.”  

Some administration critics say that Biden has done a poor job of explaining why supporting Ukraine is in America’s interests. Irrespective of that complaint,  the Biden’s financial entanglements with Hynansky muddy the waters – and have gone unreported in the news coverage about his intense focus on the embattled country. 
 
Long before Hunter Biden landed a lucrative oil and gas deal in Ukraine, despite having no prior experience inUkraine or the energy industry, Biden benefactor Hynansky began investing heavily in Ukraine — with Joe Biden’s help. 

Paul Sperry is an investigative reporter for RealClearInvestigations. He is also a longtime media fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution. Sperry was previously the Washington bureau chief for Investor’s Business Daily, and his work has appeared in the New York Post, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and Houston Chronicle, among other major publications.

After a series of activist disruptions and bizarre rants, trans lawmaker Zooey Zephyr, who was initially censured, is now banned from the floor of the Montana State Legislature for the rest of 2023.  Zephyr (a biological male identifying as a trans bisexual woman), is a representative from District 100 of Montana centered in Missoula.  Being one of the few districts in the state with a dominant college culture and a majority Democrat population, the trans label helped Zephyr win easily in 2022.

The representative “came out” as trans only a couple years priors to his election, with little identifiable background other than some notoriety as a video game competitor. 

Montana is now considering a number of bills designed to protect children from trans indoctrination in schools, sexualized drag shows as well as banning sex-change surgeries and hormone therapies for kids.  It is one of many states acting to contain the political indoctrination of children by trans activists and the far-left.  Zephyr insinuated that should they pass bills such as SB 99 into law blood might spill.  He states “I hope the next time there is an invocation when you bow your heads in prayer, you see the blood on your hands.” 

“Trans people exist,” State Rep. Zooey Zephyr of Montana said, as she rebuked a bill that would ban gender-affirming care for transgender minors, adding that denying care is “tantamount to torture.” Zephyr is the Legislature’s first transgender lawmaker. https://t.co/Gr5rAT8dCp pic.twitter.com/he8Q2W3ats

— The New York Times (@nytimes) April 21, 2023

He also suggested that “forcing” children to go through puberty was akin to “torture.”

The mantra of “blood on your hands” has become prominent after the recent mass shooting at a Christian school in Nashville, TN by transgender activist Audrey Hale.  The assertion being that conservatives (rather than the trans shooters) are the people responsible for any such events because they are passing laws to block trans surgeries for children.  Restrictions on gender based procedures and chemical therapies for minors are often compared to “trans genocide,” ostensibly because the only way trans activists can perpetuate their numbers is for children to be converted.

The statement has been interpreted by Montana lawmakers as threatening language, leading to the decision to censure and then remove Zephyr.

Media proponents argue that banning Zephyr from debating on the floor is censorship of a “marginalized voice”, but the action is legal within Montana and Zephyr will still be able to vote on all bills remotely. Rules against the breaching of decorum on the house floor are a means to force legislators to present facts and evidence instead of utilizing personal attacks and rhetoric.  Montana’s legislature determined that Zephyr broke decorum and acted unprofessionally.  

The event is perhaps a natural reaction to an ideology seen by many as “unhinged,” with conservative states growing weary of activists trying to justify and rationalize the targeting of minors.  Democrats have been attempting to obscure the reality that most of the conservative bills they oppose revolve around protecting children, leaving adults free to make their own decisions.  Instead they have sought to conflate the legislation with “threats to democracy,” making any meaningful debate almost impossible.     

Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Officials with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have made multiple false statements this month regarding possible COVID-19 vaccine side effects, continuing a trend of mis- and disinformation from the public health agency.

Dr. Tom Shimabukuro, a top CDC official, recently repeated the lie that the agency has never detected a safety signal for ischemic stroke for the old COVID-19 vaccines.

“No safety signals were detected for ischemic stroke for primary series or monovalent boosters for Pfizer or Moderna vaccines in U.S. and global monitoring,” Shimabukuro told the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, a CDC advisory panel, on April 19.

CDC researchers identified ischemic stroke as a safety signal for the original Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines, according to files obtained by The Epoch Times. More recently obtained documents show the CDC detected the signal as early as May 6, 2022.

The CDC acknowledges in official documents that any adverse events following COVID-19 vaccination that meet a certain criteria constitute “a safety signal.”

Shimabukuro, who also made the false claim during an earlier meeting in February, has not responded to requests for comment.

A CDC spokesperson previously doubled down on the claim, falsely stating that Shimabukuro was correct.

Ischemic stroke happens when the brain fails to get enough blood supply, according to the Mayo Clinic. It causes brain cells to die within minutes and often leads to death.

Another unnamed CDC official falsely told NBC that the agency has not found data “suggesting a link between COVID-19 vaccines and tinnitus,” a condition that has symptoms such as constant ringing in the ears.

The CDC identified tinnitus as a safety signal in its analysis of possible signals in data from the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), according to the files obtained by The Epoch Times.

Bert Kelly, a CDC spokesman, told The Epoch Times in an email: “To date, we have no data to support tinnitus and its link to COVID-19 infection or vaccination.”

After becoming aware of reports to the adverse event system of tinnitus after COVID-19 vaccination, the CDC analyzed data from a different surveillance system called the Vaccine Safety Datalink. CDC researchers did not identify any “clustering of tinnitus diagnoses” in the datalink system in the 70 days after COVID-19 vaccination, according to Kelly.

He did not make the data available.

Barbara Loe Fisher, co-founder and president of the National Vaccine Information Center, noted that there have been more than 24,000 reports of tinnitus submitted to VAERS after COVID-19 vaccination.

“There is mounting evidence in the medical literature that tinnitus involves inflammation in the brain,” Fisher said, pointing to several studies. “CDC officials should be taking the tinnitus signal seriously and actively pursuing every available avenue of research to find out what is going on rather than doing everything they can to quickly dismiss the reported risk for developing chronic ringing in the ears after COVID shots.”

Tinnitus is listed as a potential side effect of Johnson & Johnson’s COVID-19 vaccine and regulators in some countries list the condition as a potential adverse event following AstraZeneca’s COVID-19 vaccine. Moderna and Pfizer haven’t been formally linked with tinnitus, though some research has found a statistically significant increase in tinnitus following COVID-19 vaccination, which researchers said “suggest an association between the COVID-19 vaccines” and tinnitus.

Read more here…

After last week saw The Fed’s balance sheet continue is decline back from its bank-bailout resurgence, all eyes will be back on H.4.1. report this evening to see if things have continued to ‘improve’ or re-worsened amid regional bank shares re-testing post-SVB amid earnings disappointments.

Following the unexpected OUTFLOW the previous week, this week saw money market funds resume their trend with a $53.8 billion INFLOW…

Source: Bloomberg

The breakdown was $48.9 billion from Institutional funds and $4.98 billion from retail funds.

That pushed assets back up near their $5.277 trillion record high and suggests last week’s deposit OUTFLOWS may be about to re-accelerate – not good news for banks?

Source: Bloomberg

On top of the news from First Republic this week, one could argue that Round 2 of the banking crisis (bank superwalk as Jim Bianco has put it) is just beginning.

Bear in mind though that it’s tax-time and their are some odd seasonal impacts to the data.

Though not wanting to piss all over those hopeful fireworks, we note that reverse repo continues to rise…

Source: Bloomberg

However, the most anticipated financial update of the week – the infamous H.4.1. showed the world’s most important balance sheet shrank for the 5th straight week last week, by $30.5 billion, notably more than last week’s tumble (helped by a $16.6bn QT)…

Source: Bloomberg

The Total Securities held outright on The Fed balance sheet fell to $7.84 trillion, the lowest since Sept 2021…

Source: Bloomberg

Looking at the actual reserve components that were provided by the Fed, we find that Fed backstopped facility borrowings ROSE AGAIN last week from $144 billion to $155.2 billion (still massively higher than the $4.5 billion pre-SVB)…

Source: Bloomberg

…but the composition shifted, as usage of the Discount Window rose by $4 billion to $73.8 billion (upper pane below) along with an $8 billion increase in usage of the Fed’s brand new Bank Term Funding Program, or BTFP, to $81.3 billion (middle pane) from $79.0 billion last week. Meanwhile, other credit extensions – consisting of Fed loans to bridge banks established by the FDIC to resolve SVB and Signature Bank were relatively unchanged at around $170BN (lower pane)…

Source: Bloomberg

Scanning down the H.4.1, we note that Foreign repo down another $20 billion back to $0 finally and Other Fed Assets (loans to FDIC etc) rose $2.3 billion to $170.4 billion…

Of course we get to see the actual deposit outflows (or inflows) tomorrow after the bell, but it appears the hopeful bounce was nothing more than the tax-related seasonal we warned about last week.

With three out of five FAAMG stocks – which of course is now known as GAMMA ever since Facebook’s ignominious rebranding to Meta (at least until the company  quietly changes its name to MetAI) – having already reported solid results helping push the market back into the green for the week, investors are keenly looking to Amazon earnings after the close today to (almost) round out the picture for the resurgent market generals while could set the tone for the rest of 2023… or at least until the Fed meeting next week.

As previewed earlier, Amazon is expected to post sales of $125 billion, up 7.1% from a year earlier. According to Bloomberg, analysts and investors will be watching for insights into consumer spending patterns, both in terms of confidence in the overall economy and with regard to how much they are spending online vs. in stores. Investors will also be watching to see how Amazon’s cloud computing business and advertising business are holding up.

Investors will also want to see signs that CEO Andy Jassy’s cost-cutting measures – which included cutting 27,000 corporate employees – are helping to slash expenses and boost profits. Amazon had 1.5 million employees at the end of 2022, mostly blue-collar workers in its warehouses. In addition to the corporate cuts, Amazon tends to trim its warehouse workforce after the holiday shopping season.

But by far the most important variable will be Amazon Web Services, which is expected to post sales growth of 14%, the slowest since Amazon began breaking out the cloud-computing division’s performance with data going back to 2014. AWS almost always accounts for more operating income than the rest of Amazon’s businesses combined. But the unit has been hit hard as businesses pare their technology spending. Among the biggest questions for Amazon during this year of cost cutting and layoffs is how low AWS’s growth might sink.

What about Artificial Intelligence, which has been the core theme of Microsoft, Google and Meta’s earnings calls so far this week. How will Amazon play it? The company’s shown its hand, to an extent, on how generative AI will boost their business. But the focus is on AWS and targeting cloud customers (rather than Amazon’s consumer-facing arms).

Finally, while Amazon stock has badly underperformed the rest of the GAMMA names, heading into today’s earnings the stock gained and was on track to notch its biggest two-day jump since February. So far this year, the shares are up about 31%.

So with all that in mind, here is what Amazon just reported for its just concluded quarter

• Q1 EPS 31c,up from a 38c loss YoY, and beating the estimate of $0.21
• Q1 Net sales $127.358 billion, +9.4% y/y, beating the estimate of $124.7 billion
  • Online stores net sales $51.10 billion vs. $51.13 billion y/y, beating estimate $50.57 billion
  • Physical Stores net sales $4.90 billion, +6.6% y/y, beating estimate $4.77 billion
  • Third- Party Seller Services net sales $29.82 billion, +18% y/y, beating estimate $28.7 billion
  • Subscription Services net sales $9.66 billion, +15% y/y, estimate $9.29 billion
  • North America net sales $76.88 billion, +11% y/y, beating estimate $75.54 billion
  • International net sales $29.12 billion, +1.3% y/y, beating estimate $27.65 billion
  • Third-party seller services net sales excluding F/X +20% vs. +9% y/y, beating estimate +13.9%
  • Subscription services net sales excluding F/X +17% vs. +13% y/y, beating estimate +11.8%
  • And the most important one: AWS net sales $21.35 billion, +16% y/y, beating estimate $21.03 billion
    • Amazon Web Services net sales excluding F/X +16% vs. +37% y/y, estimate +13.8%
• Operating income $4.77 billion, +30% y/y, beating the estimate $3 billion
• Operating margin 3.7% vs. 3.2% y/y, beating the estimate 2.38%
• North America operating margin +1.2% vs. -2.3% y/y, beating the estimate +0.34%
• International operating margin -4.3% vs. -4.5% y/y, beating estimate -8.49%
• Fulfillment expense $20.91 billion, +3.1% y/y, beating estimate $20.72 billion
• Seller unit mix 59% vs. 55% y/y, estimate 56.8%

Of note, FX headwinds were a factor in the quarter with AMZN booking $2.4 billion unfavorable impact from year-over-year changes in foreign exchange rates throughout the quarter. Excluding that impact, net sales increased 11% in 1Q compared with first quarter of 2022.

It’s also notable that a big positive for Amazon was its continued revenue mix shift to providing services and advertising to independent merchants as opposed to selling goods directly to shoppers as a retailer. This is a more profitable business model for Amazon with less risk on inventory. Advertising revenue grew by more than 21% and seller services by 18%. Meanwhile, fulfillment expenses grew by just 3% and shipping costs by just 2%. Amazon is making more money off of its e-commerce and logistics operation while keeping expenses in check.

Bottom line here, Amazon beats expectations for Q1 across the board, and most importantly AWS came in well above expectations on both revenue growth and profit margin basis, which is why AMZN stock is seeing a buying frenzy after hours pushing it more than 10% higher.

There is another reason for the surge: the company’s Q2 guidance was stellar:

• Sees net sales $127.0 billion to $133.0 billion, in line with the sellside estimate $130.1 billion;  this represents growth between 5% and 10% compared with Q2 2022 and “anticipates an unfavorable impact of approximately 30 basis points from foreign exchange rates.”
• Sees operating income $2 to $5.5 billion, estimate $4.74 billion

The Q2 outlook, with sales of up to $133 billion and operating income of up to $5.5 billion, indicates it expects the positive momentum to continue.

In short, solid earnings beating expectations across the board, while guidance came generally in line with Wall Street expectations.

Commenting on the quarter, CEO Andy Jassy said that “we like the fundamentals we’re seeing in AWS, and believe there’s much growth ahead.” He added that “our Advertising business continues to deliver robust growth, largely due to our ongoing machine learning investments that help customers see relevant information when they engage with us, which in turn delivers unusually strong results for brands.”

Digging into the numbers we find that operating margins soared, more than doubling form 1.8% last quarter which was the lowest in at least five years, to 3.7%, smashing the consensus est of 2.38%.

While the market was clearly happy with the overall profit margin, it also appeared happy with the profit margin breakdown where the AWS profit margin dipped to the lowest since 2017. At the same time, international operating margin remained negative, with US online sales still just barely turned green, generating a 1.2% profit margin.

Maybe the AWS profit margin could have been better (which would be difficult when competitors are now aggressively cutting prices to capture market share), the silver lining was that revenue growth of 16% Y/Y to $21.354 billion, was better than the expected $21.03 billion.

Jassy had said in his annual shareholder letter a couple of weeks ago that AWS was facing some short-term headwinds. That idea is carried through into the earnings statement, where he says:

“While our AWS business navigates companies spending more cautiously in this macro environment, we continue to prioritize building long-term customer relationships both by helping customers save money and enabling them to more easily leverage technologies like Large Language Models and Generative AI with our uniquely cost-effective machine learning chips (‘Trainium’ and ‘Inferentia’), managed Large Language Models (‘Bedrock’), and AI code companion CodeWhisperer. We like the fundamentals we’re seeing in AWS, and believe there’s much growth ahead.”

And while AWS sales growth came in strong, the sales growth for Advertising Services came in even stronger at 23% YoY, a 35.5% beat relative to consensus.

On the expense side, we already know that AMZN has joined other companies in laying workers off, but a bigger question is whether its employees have plateaued and whether it will start replacing them with robots. Well, in Q1, employment dropped 10% to 1.47 million, well beyond the 27,000 corporate layoffs; furthermore Amazon is shedding blue collar warehouse workers as well, which is typical in the first quarter.

Elsewhere, fulfillment expenses, the cost of packing and shipping goods, were also close to expectations, indicating spending is under control.

The market was also focused the company’s revenue growth forecast which is in a range of $127-$133BN (midline at $130BN), which was on top of the $130.1BN expected. The problem is that at just 7.2%, this would be tied for the lowest annual growth in company history (just Q2 2022 would be comparable).

Finally for those asking, Amazon has clearly also jumped on the AI bandwagon, mentioning the phrase “AI” 8 times in the earnings release, and the full phrase “artificial intelligence” twice.

Responding to the results, Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Poonam Goyal said that “Amazon did much better than expected, especially in the face of inflation and thoughts from other company leaders who have said consumer spending has slowed recently. It’s quite promising that Amazon is still able to deliver. We don’t think it is promotions. We think it is demand, and consumers are flocking to Amazon for day-to-day needs.”

The market agreed, and its reaction was euphoric at least initially, with the stock spiking as much as 12% higher in kneejerk before dipping modestly, but still solidly in the green on the day.

Authored by Victor Davis Hanson via American Greatness,

Massaging a U.S. election by conspiring to concoct a disinformation campaign must be as actionable as Dominion’s post-election claim of $757 million in damages. That’s exactly what happened in 2016…

Fox News is reeling, both financially and with respect to its talent, after being drawn into a long lawsuit by Dominion Voting Systems. 

The network just settled for an astounding $757.5 million and soon after released Tucker Carlson, the network’s highest-rated host.

The voting machine company had alleged some of Fox’s hosts had either promulgated, or allowed their guests to push, a false narrative that the corporation’s voting machines were “fixed” and misreported the vote count in some precincts of the 2020 presidential election.

In other words, Dominion walked away with hundreds of millions of dollars on the accusation that some raving guests and a few Fox journalists insinuated, falsely, that the machines had thrown the election to Joe Biden.

Yet no one argues that such post facto accusations influenced the election. The postelection dispute instead was over whether a news organization was responsible for all that its hundreds of guests and hosts say that proved later to be not substantiated, false, or defamatory.

Fox settled with Dominion reportedly to avoid messy revelations of its internal texts and to stop the hemorrhaging of its brand.

But by doing so, the network may have inadvertently set a dubious standard that any speculative opinion, voiced in public media, however nutty and later proven to be inaccurate, will be actionable.

If that is the standard, we are going to see a lot more costly lawsuits.

Compare Dominion’s writ with the twin “Russian collusion” and “Russian disinformation” hoaxes.

Lots of journalists and guests on network news, cable, public broadcasting, and internet news sites ran daily with the utter lie that the concocted Christopher Steele dossier was accurate.

Four years later, they were still claiming that Donald Trump had won the 2016 election only by enlisting the aid of the Russians—as an “asset” and puppet of Vladimir Putin.

All that was demonstrably untrue.

No one on these news shows ever produced any information validating the dossier, much less offered apologies to those whose lives they ruined, as in the case of Lt. General Michael Flynn and Trump campaign volunteer Carter Page.

The steady two-year drumbeat of media and DNC-fabricated untruths neutered the first two years of the Trump Administration.

Robert Mueller’s $40 million, 22-month special counsel “investigation” leaked wild and lurid rumors of Trump indictments to come, and yet ultimately found no proof of collusion.

No matter. The agendas of the Democratic Party’s collaboration with the media were fulfilled. The Trump Administration was wounded, forced on defense to reply to countless new fabrications, and smeared to the point of caricature.

The incumbent president went into the 2020 election crippled by years of media-voiced lies about collusion. Given all that, did these miscreants learn anything the second time around?

No. They redoubled their efforts. This time, the new farce was “Russian disinformation,” even as the playbook of smearing remained the same.

• First, once again, the Left enlisted the media. It helped to spread the lie that Hunter Biden’s incriminating laptop was a product of “Russian disinformation” aimed at helping Donald Trump.

• Second, once more,  the FBI helped to further what the agency knew was a lie. So the agency either persuaded or paid social media companies in Silicon Valley to suppress news that pointed to an authentic Biden laptop—whose contents revealed embarrassing details about Joe Biden’s (“The Big Guy”) apparent quid pro quo profiteering with foreign nations. 

• Twitter was hired as a news suppressor. The FBI paid the company $3 million to suss out “disinformation.” 

• Joe Biden’s campaign operative, current Secretary of State Antony Blinken, tapped former interim CIA Director Mike Morell on the eve of the 2020 presidential debate to round up 50 former senior intelligence officials.

• The “experts” publicly promulgated the lie that the laptop “bears the hallmarks of Russian disinformation.”

• Then, as planned, Biden in the debate used the experts’ phony consensus—dreamed up by his own campaign team—to play the victim of Trump/Russian disinformation.

• He blasted Trump as a demagogue who unfairly had suggested Biden and his family were trading influence for cash.

One conservative poll suggested that the farce influenced enough voters to have changed the election.

Again, no one has apologized—not the current secretary of state, not the former interim CIA Director, not the 50 experts who signed the bogus letter. 

Massaging a U.S. election by conspiring to concoct a disinformation campaign must be as actionable as Dominion’s postelection claim of $757 million in damages.

Did not Twitter, the FBI, CNN, and MSNBC knowingly try to influence an election by spreading what they must have known was an absurd lie?

Almost no one after the election swallowed the notion that Dominion had rigged its voting machines. But millions before the election may have been swayed by the Biden campaign and the media-generated lie that the authentic Biden laptop was part of a Russian intelligence operation. 

And that lie, unlike the Dominion charge of postelection defamation, might have changed history.

Ugly growth (GDP), uglier inflation (Core PCE), ugliest housing data (pending home sales), and ugliest-er manufacturing sentiment (KC Fed)… but hey, META beat so BTFD in Mega-Cap Tech…

META is up 15% because their earnings dropped 20% but they mentioned AI 57 times.

That helped Nasdaq extend its outperformance (best day since Feb 2nd). The S&P managed a 2% gain before limped lower into the close and Small Caps were the solid runners up in the squeeze race today… The Dow, S&P, and Nasdaq all just took off as soon as cash trading opened…

Today’s rampage saw S&P and Dow get back to even on the week while Small Caps lag as Nasdaq soars. Notably, S&P and Dow stalled perfectly at unch and held it, unable to push higher…

Nasdaq is back at recent highs…

There was a notable divergence between 0DTE VIX and ‘Old’ VIX (the latter offered as the former was bid)…

Source: Bloomberg

Under the hood, this had the smell of 0DTE call-buying and longer-dated put-covering (both implicitly positive delta and supporting the rally). Notably, later in the day, 0DTE saw major put-covering also as call-buying faded…

Source: SpotGamma

This was also notable, given the rise in 0DTE today. Ultra-short-dated options vol has been an early warning system for ‘event risk’ over the last year….

VIX1D Post! The CBOE has generously back-filled the data for a year. And in the process, they’ve made it easy to illustrate a theme we followed closely over this time period, namely that “event risk” was priced into ultra-short dated SPX vol as a function of FOMC and CPI day pic.twitter.com/yRwHpm3BaK

— Alpha_Ex_LLC (@Alpha_Ex_LLC) April 26, 2023

Treasuries were clubbed like a baby seal today with the short-end underperforming. 30Y yield is almost back to unchanged on the week (while the short-end remains notably lower)…

Source: Bloomberg

2Y back above 4.00%…

Source: Bloomberg

And the yield curve (2s10s) flattened significantly…

Source: Bloomberg

The dollar slipped modestly lower today, back to unchanged on the week…

Source: Bloomberg

Bitcoin rebounded from last night’s Mt.Gox fake news FUD crash

Source: Bloomberg

Oil prices managed small gains today but in context to the clubbing of the last few days, meh…

Spot Gold rallied back above $2000 overnight, only to be sold back below it as US GDP hit…

Source: Bloomberg

Finally, as Bloomberg notes, the concurrent breakdown in copper and the Dow Jones Transportation Average is a telling sign that expectations for an economic hard landing have some merit.

Additionally, the copper-to-gold ratio which is nearing its 2022 lows, pointing to a brewing economic storm if the path of least resistance remains down.

Hard-landing and inflation incoming!

Another lockdown fanatic is attempting to rewrite history.

Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers (which coordinated with the DOJ to label concerned parents domestic terrorists), claimed this week in front of the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, that her organization “spent every day from February on trying to get schools open,” adding “We knew that remote education was not a substitute for opening schools.”

AFT President Randi Weingarten: “We spent every day from February on trying to get schools open. We knew that remote education was not a substitute for opening schools.” pic.twitter.com/1qNL05VD3u

— Washington Free Beacon (@FreeBeacon) April 26, 2023

Except, as Twitter users quickly noted, Weingarten is misrepresenting her prior positions – having called attempts to reopen schools in the fall of 2020 “reckless, callous and cruel.”

What’s more, her union pushed aggressively for closures at the local level, while areas with high union influence remained closed much longer.

As the Epoch Times notes;

Throughout questioning, Weingarten appeared to ramble and change the topic frequently, twice pleading her age and failing memory as a reason for lacking clarity.

“Look, I’m 65 years old. I don’t remember anything anymore. I’m sorry,” she said. When admonished for not responding directly to a question, she said, “Sorry, I’m just slow.”

…

Weingarten insisted that she and the AFT placed a high value on in-person education, understood the harmful effects of prolonged school closure on students, and felt “terrified” as they fended for themselves to define safety and operational policies in the absence of guidance from the Trump administration.

“What we were simply looking for was clear, scientific guidance. And when we couldn’t get it, we did it ourselves,” she said.

So, Randi is full of shit, once again.

Other lockdown all-stars, Anthony Fauci and Canadian PM Justin Trudeau, have also claimed they didn’t force anyone to do anything.

We also learned from the more recent Twitter files, Fauci lied under oath about his role during the pandemic – claiming he had ‘nothing to do with Twitter’ and other social media platforms, while he had actually taken over the White House’s Twitter account for covid response.

Meanwhile, as True North news noted during the height of the pandemic, Canada was ranked the 10th most restrictive country in the world in terms of government Covid-19 measures, according to the University of Oxford’s Covid-19 Government Response Stringency Index.

Perhaps best summed up by Jesse Kelly… “Wildest thing is that once we’re all dead and gone, this dishonesty you’re seeing now from all the COVID lockdown communists will be remembered as fact.“

Wildest thing is that once we’re all dead and gone, this dishonesty you’re seeing now from all the COVID lockdown communists will be remembered as fact. They’ll spend a few years rehabbing their images and those will be the history books.

Makes me question everything I “know”. https://t.co/uWe7mocCsj

— Jesse Kelly (@JesseKellyDC) April 27, 2023

The ride-hailing service Lyft is slashing 26% of its workforce, or about 1,072 employees, as it attempts to reduce operating expenses. Coupled with the 13% reduction in headcount from November, the company has let go of 36% of its staff in about six months. 

“The plan involves the termination of approximately 1,072 employees, representing 26% of the Company’s employees. The Company has also decided to scale back hiring and has eliminated over 250 open positions,” the company said in a regulatory filing Thursday. 

Lyft to Terminate About 1,072 Employees, 26% of Workforce

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) April 27, 2023

The 8-K filing stated the company anticipates incurring approximately $41 million to $47 million in restructuring costs and other charges related to employee severance and benefits. These charges are expected to be recorded in the second quarter. 

Combine today’s layoff announcement with the one from November. Then, Lyft has reduced its workforce by 36% in just six months.

Last fall, Lyft CEO Logan Green and President John Zimmer warned about a “recession” in 2023 and rising ride-share insurance costs as reasons for the headcount reductions. 

Lyft’s stock is down 86% since the initial public offering in early 2019. 

Add Lyft to the long list of tech companies hemorrhaging workers amid increasing threats of recession. As we noted days ago, a job recruiter told Yahoo Finance, “the layoff cycle isn’t done.” 

Authored by J.W.Verret via CoinTelegraph.com,

Senators Elizabeth Warren and Roger Marshall want to make your crypto wallet illegal… and their plan runs contrary to the principles they campaigned on…

In 2022, Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren authored a bill that would require cryptocurrency wallet providers to comply with bank Anti-Money Laundering rules. Not crypto exchanges, mind you, but the wallets themselves. Kansas Senator Roger Marshall joined her on the proposal as a co-sponsor.

Sadly, Marshall betrayed the populist principles he ran on as a candidate.

The bill also betrayed the civil liberties and privacy tenets of progressivism that Warren espouses.

Warren and Marshall are planning to reignite that debate on Capitol Hill this summer and have enlisted law enforcement advocates to their cause. Prosecutors and federal agents doubtless support the bill, as they have every other bill that turns the one-way ratchet of financial surveillance. If they had their way, our personal bank account and credit card logins would rest on a central repository for the Department of Justice to access at will and without a warrant.

The Warren bill would require that anyone who designs a crypto wallet (a computer program designed to store the encryption code that helps to keep your crypto tokens secure) register as a money services business and, essentially, be regulated like a financial institution.

This means that any computer programmer entrepreneur who writes code to help customers control crypto investments from their phone — and to help keep the crypto secure from hackers — would need to register with the Treasury Department as if they were Western Union. Good luck with that, crypto startups.

Last year, Senator Warren introduced a bill that would adopt’s China’s approach, by imposing a de facto ban on public blockchains hidden under the guise of AML compliance.

Reports say the bill will be reintroduced again soon.

Let’s not take our cues on crypto from the CCP.

— Jake Chervinsky (@jchervinsky) February 17, 2023

Warren instigated the bill. The quiet part she is not saying out loud (and that Marshall doesn’t seem to understand) is that this blunt application of rules for Western Union, when applied to entrepreneur computer coders, doesn’t work. They can’t comply, and she knows it.

This bill is a Trojan horse designed to destroy the crypto markets under the false guise of a pro-national security bill. It’s a smart strategy. Convince national security conservatives that this is an answer to a perceived problem, particularly members with little background knowledge of how crypto works, and then let crypto development die off.

The legislation also seeks to outright ban crypto privacy tools. If the vision of Bitcoin as a means of payment will ever be realized, it needs to be private. Without privacy tools that would be banned by this legislation, every time you use Bitcoin to pay for a coffee, the barista can use your public key to look up your entire transaction history. Thieves and hackers can do the same.

There are tools on popular blockchains like Bitcoin and Ethereum that can provide user privacy, and they are being used around the world, as we speak, by citizens of totalitarian regimes like Iran’s. Women in Afghanistan living under Taliban rule use these crypto tools to provide for their families in secret. The Warren/Marshall crypto bill to end privacy would expose all of these crypto users to surveillance by the Taliban, Russia and North Korean hackers alike. That ultimately harms national security.

join elizabeth warren’s anti-crypto army pic.twitter.com/f8h75aHm3X

— Shibetoshi Nakamoto (@BillyM2k) March 31, 2023

When donors sent Bitcoin to Canadian trucker protestors over vaccine mandates in Canada — protesters aligned with Marshall’s views against censorship and cancel culture — the Canadian government tracked down those donors and aggressively canceled their bank accounts.

The proposed bill would force crypto wallet providers to adopt regulations similar to those imposed on traditional banks that were used by Canadian authorities against the truckers. Marshall was glad to get help from Trump voters in his reelection, but now seems to be doing an about-face on that commitment. Marshall promised to fight against censorship and cancel culture — not give Warren allies more tools for censorship.

It’s ironic that even after Marshall gave trucker protest leaders a tour of the United States Capitol, he now supports a tool that has already been used against Canadian trucker protesters and those who tried to donate Bitcoin to support them. Ultimately, Marshall’s decision to co-sponsor this bill betrays the populist and pro-Trump principles he ran on as a candidate.

When Marshall was asked to choose between taking a stand against the financial regulatory tools progressives use to cancel anyone they disagree with or standing with Warren and her Trojan horse bill to destroy cryptocurrency, he chose to stand with Warren. Hopefully, his Republican colleagues in the Senate will not make the same mistake.

Law enforcement’s tired refrain that some really bad crimes might occur without the latest surveillance law should fall flat in Congress. And if it does not, civil libertarians on the Supreme Court — such as Justice Neil Gorsuch — may be crypto’s last hope.