Author: Elite E Services

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There Is Now A Staggering $11.7 Trillion In Negative Yielding Debt

Elite E Services
It was not even a month ago when we last looked at the total amount of negative yielding debt around the globe, and were shocked to find that according to Fitch, for the first time in history (obviously), there was over $10 trillion in negative yielding debt. Fast forward 4 weeks later, and the grand total is now $1.3 trillion higher, or $11.7 trillion.
The split between positive and negative yielding debt is shown in the chart below:
In a report released earlier, Fitch updates on the “investors’ flight to safe assets following the UK’s EU referendum on June 23” and finds that the global total of sovereign debt with negative yields was a staggering $11.7 trillion as of June 27, up $1.3 trillion from the end-May total. Brexit-related concerns drove more long-dated bond yields negative, with particularly big shifts in German, French and Japanese yield curves during June.
As Fitch notes, worries over the global growth outlook, further fueled by Brexit, have continued to support demand for higher-quality sovereign paper in June. Widespread adoption of unconventional monetary policies, including large-scale bond-buying programs and negative deposit rates, have driven the large increases in negative-yielding debt seen this year.
The chart below highlights the monthly changes in the outstanding par amount of negative-yielding sovereign debt by maturity bucket. The biggest drivers of the total increase during June were seen in longer-dated bonds. For example, German 10-year bund yields swung into negative territory and sub-zero yields moved further out on the curve for Japan — now out to 17 years. Also, in Switzerland, virtually all sovereign debt carried a negative yield on June 27.
As DB’s Jim Reid writes, yesterday we saw the Swiss yield curve actually trade negative the whole way out the curve. The longest dated Swiss government bond due in 2064 (so 48 years) touched -0.0082% at one stage before settling at +0.011% by the close. The chart below shows the Swiss yield curve to show how remarkable this is. We’ve also added the JGB curve where the longest dated bond due in 2056 (40 year) is trading at a minuscule 6bps and the Bund curve where the longest dated 30y bond is trading at 42bps.
Japanese government bonds (JGBs) continue to represent about two-thirds of the global total ($7.9 trillion), while Germany and France each now have over $1 trillion in sovereign debt with sub-zero yields. Japan’s negative-yielding debt total grew by about 18% during the month, while Germany and France’s total grew by 8% and 13%, respectively. European negative-yielding debt increases were offset in part by an approximately $0.2 trillion reduction in the Italian total since May 31. This likely reflected investor risk aversion related to Italy leading up to and following the Brexit referendum.
The spread of negative yields into longer-dated paper was particularly evident in June. A total of $2.6 trillion in sovereign bonds with maturities of seven years or more now trade at a negative yield. This compares with the end-April total of $1.4 trillion.
The increasing amount of long-term negative-yielding debt underscores the challenges faced by large bond investors such as insurance companies that need to match long-term liabilities with similar maturity assets. As more of the global universe of safe assets drops into negative-yielding territory, income for these investors continues to fall.
UK sovereign bonds continue to trade at positive yields across the curve, but the Brexit vote has had a dramatic effect on the UK yield curve. Following the June 23 referendum, 10-year gilt yields dropped by 44 bps to 0.93% as of June 27, according to Bloomberg. 
The $11.7 trillion total, which includes $3.2 trillion of short-term and $8.5 trillion of long-term sovereign debt, is influenced by the dollar’s exchange rate with the yen and euro. During June, the dollar rose slightly against the euro, but weakened significantly (approximately 9%) versus the yen. This had a major impact on the dollar value of yen-denominated negative-yielding debt in our latest analysis, pushing the JGB total up by approximately $0.6 trillion beyond increases that would have occurred on an FX-neutral basis.
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Who Is The “European Movement” And Why The Answer May Change How You Vote On “Brexit”

Elite E Services
EU Basics – Your Guide to the Referendum
The British people should be clear about just what they will be voting on at the EU referendum this Thursday. What does it actually mean to stay in the EU? What does it mean to exit?
Concerning the second question, the dominant issue in the debate has been the question whether there will be a significant negative economic impact on the UK from exiting the EU. Prime Minister David Cameron, together with the heads of the IMF, the OECD and various EU agencies have given dire warnings that economic growth will drop, the fiscal position will deteriorate, the currency will weaken and UK exports will decline precipitously. George Osborne, the chancellor of the exchequer has threatened to cut pensions if pensioners dare to vote for exit. But what are the facts?
I have been trained in international and monetary economics at the London School of Economics and have a doctorate from the University of Oxford in economics. I have studied such issues for several decades. I have also recently tested, using advanced quantitative techniques, the question of the size of impact on GDP from entry to or exit from the EU or the eurozone. The conclusion is that this makes no difference to economic growth, and everyone who claims the opposite is not guided by the facts. The reason is that economic growth and national income are almost entirely determined by a factor that is decided at home, namely the amount of bank credit created for productive purposes. This has sadly been very small in the UK in recent decades, thus much greater economic growth is possible as soon as steps are taken to boost bank credit for productive purposes – irrespective of whether the UK stays in the EU or not (although Brexit will make it much easier to take such policy steps). We should also remember that a much smaller economy like Norway – thought more dependent on international trade – fared extremely well after its people rejected EU membership in a referendum in 1995 (which happened against the dire warnings and threats from its cross-party elites, most of its media and the united chorus of the heads of international organisations). Besides, Japan, Korea, Taiwan and China never needed EU membership to move from developing economy status to top industrialised nations within about half a century. The argument of dire economic consequences of Brexit is bogus.
As for the first question, namely what it means to stay inside the EU, we should consult the EU itself. Happily, the EU released a major official report about its key policies and what it plans to achieve in the near future in October 2015. This report was issued in the names of the “Five Presidents“ of the EU. In case you had not been aware that there was even a single, let alone five presidents of the EU, these are: The unelected president of the European Central Bank, Goldman Sachs alumnus Mario Draghi, the unelected president of the European Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker, the unelected Brussels Commissar and “president of the Eurogroup“, Jeroen Dijsselbloem, the “president of the Euro Summit“, Donald Tusk, and the president of the European Parliament, Martin Schulz. What is the message of this not negligible number of EU presidents concerning the question of where the EU is going? The title of their joint report is a give-away: “The Five President’s (sic) Report: Completing Europe’s Economic and Monetary Union“. https://ec.europa.eu/priorities/publications/five-presidents-report-completing-europes-economic-and-monetary-union_en
The report starts with the frank admission that “with 18 million unemployed in the euro area, a lot more needs to be done to improve economic policies” in the EU. Well said. But what exactly needs to be done?
“Europe’s Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) today is like a house that was built over decades but only partially finished. When the storm hit, its walls and roof had to be stabilised quickly. It is now high time to reinforce its foundations and turn it into what EMU was meant to be…“
“ we will need to take further steps to complete EMU.”
The central planners in Brussels and at the ECB in Frankfurt are not unaware that under their command, a historically unprecedented economic dislocation has taken place in the EU during the past ten years, including massive asset and property bubbles, banking crises and large-scale unemployment in all the periphery countries – with over 50% youth unemployment in Greece, Spain and Portugal, as well as the lack of any serious controls of the EU external borders to prevent an influx of unparalleled numbers of illegal immigrants and economic migrants.
However, the EU central planners are in denial about the fact that these problems have been caused entirely by their own misguided and disastrous policies. As a result, they argue that the solution to such problems can only be further concentration of powers into their hands: “We need more Europe“, as Mrs Merkel put it (source: please read these Merkel claims about the EU http://www.euractiv.com/section/eu-priorities-2020/news/merkel-calls-for-political-union-to-save-the-euro/) This is what they propose to implement in the coming years, by turning all EU members into one single country.
So the Five Presidents‘ Report makes clear that the EU is not simply a free trade area. That project had been left behind with the 1992 Maastricht Treaty and a very different kind of Europe has become enshrined with the 2007 European Constitution (called ‘Lisbon Treaty‘, since the people of Europe in several referenda rejected it. Source: please read what the author of the rejected European Constitution says: http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/commentators/valeacutery-giscard-destaing-the-eu-treaty-is-the-same-as-the-constitution-398286.html ). Instead, the EU is the project to abandon all national sovereignty and borders within and melt away all European nations that don’t succeed in exiting in time, into a merged, joint new single country, with one central European government, centralised European monetary policy, centralised European fiscal policy, centralised European foreign policy, and centralised European regulation, including of financial markets and banking. This United States of Europe, an undemocratic leviathan that the European peoples never wanted, is the culmination of the much repeated mantra of “ever closer union“.
This project has been implemented steadily and stealthily over several decades, despite major and consistent policy blunders and scandals involving the central planners (e.g. in 1999 the entire European Commission – the unelected government and cabinet of the European superstate – resigned in disgrace, as it was found to have taken bribes and engaged in fraud, while the EU’s own Court of Auditors has repeatedly refused to sign off the EU’s official books).
The economics is clear: there is no need to be a member of the EU to thrive economically, and exiting does not have to impact UK economic growth at all. The UK can remain in the European Economic Area, as Norway has done, or simply agree on a trade deal, as Switzerland did, and enjoy free trade – the main intention of European agreements in the eyes of the public. The politics is also clear: the European superstate that has already been formed is not democratic. The so-called ‘European Parliament‘, unique among parliaments, cannot propose any legislation at all – laws are all formulated and proposed by the unelected European Commission! As a Russian observer has commented, the European Parliament is a rubber-stamping sham, just like the Soviet parliament during the days of the Soviet Union, while the unelected government is the European Commission – the Politibureau replete with its Commissars.
Big business and big banks, as well as central bankers and the IMF, constitute the financial elite that is behind this purposeful concentration of power – giving ever more power into the hands of ever fewer people. The undemocratic nature of EU institutions has reached such an extent that I have heard a recently retired member of the ECB governing council in private confessing that his biggest worry is the undemocratic nature and extent of the ECB’s powers, which have increasingly been abused for political ends. These facts have been drowned out by the constant drip of propaganda emanating from the powerful elites behind the creation of the United States of Europe.
During these years and decades of steady transfers of powers and sovereignty from nation states and their democratically elected assemblies to the unelected Brussels bureaucracy, I had always been puzzled by the apparent strong US support for all this. Whenever the ‘process‘ of ‘ever closer union‘ seemed to have hit an obstacle, a US president – no matter the post holder’s name or party affiliation – would intervene and in no uncertain terms tell the troublesome Europeans to get their act together and speed up unification of Europe into one state. In the naivety of my youth this had struck me as surprising. Likewise, the British public has recently been told by US president Obama that dropping out of the EU was not a good idea and they had better vote to stay in.
While it is not surprising that the global elite that has benefitted from the trend towards concentration of power is getting increasingly hysterical in their attempts to cajole the British public into voting to stay inside the EU, it is less clear why the US president and his government should be so keen on the EU project. We had been told in the past by the European media that the concentration of economic and political decision-making in Europe was being engineered in order to create a counter-weight against the US dominance. This seemed to motivate some pro-EU voices. Surely the US president must have heard about that?
There is another mystery. Only yesterday, an impressive-looking leaflet was dropped into the letterbox of my Winchester home, entitled “EU Basics – Your Guide to the Referendum“. It was issued by an organisation called the “European Movement“. The 16-page colour and high gloss booklet argues for Britain to stay in the EU. Who is this “European Movement“, and who is funding it? This little-known organisation seems financially powerful enough to drop a high-quality print booklet into every household in the entire UK.
The declassification of formerly secret records has solved both mysteries. For as it turns out, they are connected. In the words of Nottingham University academic Richard Aldrich:
“The use of covert operations for the specific promotion of European unity has attracted little scholarly attention and remains poorly understood. … the discreet injection of over three million dollars between 1949 and 1960, mostly from US government sources, was central to efforts to drum up mass support for the Schuman Plan, the European Defence Community and a European Assembly with sovereign powers. This covert contribution never formed less than half the European Movement’s budget and, after 1952, probably two-thirds. Simultaneously they sought to undermine the staunch resistance of the British Labour government to federalist ideas…. It is also particularly striking that the same small band of senior officials, many of them from the Western [note: this means US] intelligence community, were central in supporting the three most important transnational elite groups emerging in the 1950s: the European Movement, the Bilderberg Group and Jean Monnet’s Action Committee for a United States of Europe [ACUE]. Finally, at a time when some British antifederalists saw a continued ’special relationship‘ with the United States as an alternative to (perhaps even a refuge from) European federalism, it is ironic that some European federalist initiatives should have been sustained with American support.“
There is much more to read in this explosive piece of scholarly research (Richard J. Aldrich (1997), OSS, CIA and European unity: The American committee on United Europe, 1948-60, Diplomacy & Statecraft,8(1), pp. 184-227, online athttp://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09592299708406035#.V2exrU36voo )
UK journalist and former Brussels correspondent Ambrose Evans-Pritchard was the only journalist to report on such academic research findings, in two articles in 2000 and 2007:
“DECLASSIFIED American government documents show that the US intelligence community ran a campaign in the Fifties and Sixties to build momentum for a united Europe. … US intelligence secretly funded the European Movement, paying over half its budget. Some of Europe’s founding fathers were on the US payroll….
“The documents confirm suspicions voiced at the time that America was working aggressively behind the scenes to push Britain into a European state. Lest we forget, the French had to be dragged kicking and screaming to the federalist signing table in the early 1950s. Eisenhower threatened to cut off Marshall aid unless Paris agreed to kiss and make up with Berlin. France’s Jean Monnet, the EU’s mastermind, was viewed as an American agent – as indeed, he was. Monnet served as Roosevelt’s fixer in Europe during the war and orchestrated the failed US effort to stop de Gaulle taking power.
“One memorandum, dated July 26, 1950, gives instructions for a campaign to promote a fully fledged European parliament. It is signed by Gen William J Donovan, head of the American wartime Office of Strategic Services, precursor of the CIA. … Washington’s main tool for shaping the European agenda was the American Committee for a United Europe, created in 1948. The chairman was Donovan, ostensibly a private lawyer by then. The vice-chairman was Allen Dulles, the CIA director in the Fifties. The board included Walter Bedell Smith, the CIA’s first director, and a roster of ex-OSS figures and officials who moved in and out of the CIA. The documents show that ACUE financed the European Movement, the most important federalist organisation in the post-war years. In 1958, for example, it provided 53.5 per cent of the movement’s funds. The European Youth Campaign, an arm of the European Movement, was wholly funded and controlled by Washington.
“The leaders of the European Movement – Retinger, the visionary Robert Schuman and the former Belgian prime minister Paul-Henri Spaak – were all treated as hired hands by their American sponsors. The US role was handled as a covert operation. ACUE’s funding came from the Ford and Rockefeller foundations as well as business groups with close ties to the US government.
“The head of the Ford Foundation, ex-OSS officer Paul Hoffman, doubled as head of ACUE in the late Fifties. The State Department also played a role. A memo from the European section, dated June 11, 1965, advises the vice-president of the European Economic Community, Robert Marjolin, to pursue monetary union by stealth.
“It recommends suppressing debate until the point at which “adoption of such proposals would become virtually inescapable“.
“Fifty years after the Treaty of Rome, the architects of post-war US policy would be quite pleased, I think, if they were alive today. …
(excerpted from: Ambrose Evans-Pritchard (2000), Euro-federalists financed by US spy chiefs, The Daily Telegraph, 19 September 2000; http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/1356047/Euro-federalists-financed-by-US-spy-chiefs.html and Ambrose Evans-Pritchard (2007), The scare of a superstate has passed, but do we want to lose the EU altogether? The Daily Telegraph, 7 April 2007)
No wonder Mr Evans-Pritchard has now concluded that he will vote for Brexit:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2016/06/12/brexit-vote-is-about-the-supremacy-of-parliament-and-nothing-els/
The revelation that the EU is the result of a major US secret service operation – effectively just yet another secret creature of deception launched by the CIA (taking seat of honour in the hall of infamy that includes false flag operations, invasions, coup-detats, and the establishment of organisations such as Al Qaida and ISIS) solves the third mystery, namely how on earth the allegedly democratic European nations could design such an undemocratic, virtually dictatorial structure. With the EU/United States of Europe the US not only achieves its geo-strategic goals in Europe, but it has also eliminated the role of pesky national parliaments that could on occasion get in the way of US or CIA foreign policy. And another puzzle is solved, namely why the EU had so readily agreed to a US request a few years back that US spy agencies get access to all European emails and telephone calls….
A vote to stay in the EU thus is a vote to abolish the United Kingdom as a sovereign state and merge it into the undemocratic United States of Europe which the European elites are building under US tutelage. That the European public – and, it seems, even European politicians – have little or no input in key European decisions can be seen from the increasingly aggressive NATO stance against Russia (Brussels-based NATO being the military arm of the EU, which is overtly under direct US control), and the one-sided sanctions against Russia that the US could simply order the Europeans to implement (causing significant losses in incomes and jobs in Europe, while boosting US business interests). Immigration policies are another case in point. If the US had in the past considered the largely homogeneous European populations a source of potential European resistance against its plans for Europe, then the policy to replace them with balkanised failed ‘melting pots‘ also makes sense.
Norway voted in 1995 on EU membership. Leading parties were all in favour. Big business and central banks, major media outlets and the talking heads on TV were frantically bullying and cajoling the Norwegian public to vote ‘in‘. The people remained steadfast and voted ‘out‘. Norway did splendidly. And so much more will the UK.
Professor Werner is Director of the Centre for Banking, Finance and Sustainable Development at the University of Southampton. He is known for proposing the concept of ‘Quantitative Easing‘ in Japan. His 2003 book Princes of the Yen warned of the dangers of excessive central bank independence and predicted that the ECB was likely to create credit bubbles, banking crises and recessions in the eurozone.

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Meanwhile In London, A Stunning Scene Emerges

Elite E Services
When one thinks of lines of people waiting patiently to obtain “hard currency”, one may think Russia, as was the case in December 2014 when the currency was plunging…
… or Greece in the summer of 2015…
… one would certainly not expect it in the city considered by many as the capital of capitalism: London.
And yet, as the FT shows in what may be the first of many such stunning images, “long queues stretched outside foreign exchange bureaux in the City of London on Thursday as people cashed in their pounds ahead of the EU referendum.”
Behold: London, circa right now.
Line in front of a Longon foreign exchange bureau.
In scenes reminiscent of the queues that formed outside branches of Northern Rock and led to its collapse in 2007, City workers queued impatiently around the block outside forex bureaux on Wednesday afternoon. Summaya, a 31-year-old employee of a retail bank who declined to give her surname, lined up outside the Foreign Exchange Services shop on Cannon Street. She said she was going to change “several thousand pounds” into US dollars and euros because she was convinced the public mood was shifting in favour of Brexit.
“I’m protecting my money. I will stick it under the mattress until Friday,” she said, adding that Tuesday night’s televised debate had swung opinion among her friends and colleagues in favour of Brexit. “People are changing their views.”
Odd: one would not get that impression based on the several moneyed bettors who were skewing the bookies lines. Luckily, sentiment on the ground is avaiable and much more actionable than manipulated indirect data. In any case, this is what is really taking place in the UK as of this moment:
The Post Office said Tuesday’s sales of foreign currency were nearly four times higher than the same date last year, while sales in branches were nearly 49 per cent higher. Currency sales on Tuesday were up 74 per cent year on year, said the Post Office.
Thomas Cook said: “There’s been a surge in customers buying euros in the last six weeks and euro sales have been consistently strong, building day by day.”
Several economists predict a Leave outcome would trigger a dramatic fall in the pound when markets open on Friday, while a vote to Remain should see the pound rally. But several analysts said this week’s sharp sterling recovery probably limited the scope of the currency’s rise.
Daniel Priori, an Italian who has been working as a cashier at the International Currency Exchange kiosk at Waterloo station for a year, said he and his two colleagues had dealt with many more customers than usual.
Asked why, he replied: “Because they are scared about tomorrow.” He said the majority of transactions were people changing sterling into euros.
To be sure, not everyone is terrified of the inevitable collapse in sterling in case of Brexit (which is what the Scaremongering campaign is all about). Some just want some vacation money…
[S]everal of those queueing were exchanging their holiday money. Standing in a queue outside Thomas Exchange on Cannon Street, 44-year-old Chris Nobbs, who works in insurance, said: “I go to Alicante in Spain in a couple of weeks, so I’m just taking my euros out today instead of next week. I do not take more than what I need on holiday, but who knows, maybe this will earn me some extra cups of coffee.”
In the queue outside City Forex, on Leadenhall Street, City worker Ed was planning to change “a few hundred quid” before travelling to Greece on holiday next week. “I don’t have a strong sense of the [referendum] result, but just want to hedge against the downside. I’ll change half now and half later,” he said.
… But it’s safe to say that the vast majority of those lining up have far more existential concerns. Whether or not these are validated will be revealed as soon as the FX markets open for trading after the Brexit vote is released.
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HFTs Lose: IEX Granted Exchange Status As SEC Says The Speed Race Is Over

Elite E Services
Earlier this week when we reported that the SEC staff had unexpectedly granted approval of the IEX exchange, the culmination of a long battle between free and unrigged market supporters on one hand and the HFT lobby and the NY Fed’s “arms length” HFT operation and gargantuan retail order internalizer better known as Citadel on the other, we warned not to get too excited: “it is possible that the final vote will contain some variation on “protected quote” clause, thereby giving IEX its long-awaited exchange status but stripping its clients of the much needed anti-HFT protections, which are precisely the reason why so many vocal supporters of IEX have emerged in recent months.”
We were wrong: in a late vote on Friday evening, the Securities and Exchange Commission voted to certify IEX as the U.S.’s 13th national stock exchange, giving the startup a license to challenge the Intercontinental Exchange, Nasdaq. and BATS. More importantly, the SEC’s decision resolved a clash over whether its rules, which sped the transition to fully electronic markets, allow IEX to use a “speed bump” that slows orders by just 350 millionths of a second, as popularized in Michael Lewis’ book Flash Boys. Ultimately IEX will get unconditional status.
We were also partially right on the “protected quote” debate: as the WSJ writes, SEC Chairman Mary Jo White, and Commissioner Kara Stein, a Democrat, approved IEX’s bid. Republican Commissioner Michael Piwowar backed the broader move to approve IEX as an exchange, but dissented from a decision to give IEX what is known as a “protected quote,” which – as noted above – requires brokers to send orders to IEX when it shows the best price across all 13 national stock exchanges.
Having won approval, IEX will effectively become the first HFT-free venue, and will likely attract substantial institutional interest as the risk of being frontrun by HFT parasites is no longer present. Ironically, its competitors had said that IEX’ model threatens investor benefits, when the reality was precisely the opposite.
Citadel and high-frequency trading firms deluged the SEC with letters that argued IEX’s speed bump would violate rules that require orders be “immediately accessible” to traders. Intercontinental Exchange Chief Executive Jeff Sprecher, whose firm owns the New York Stock Exchange, told analysts in February that granting IEX permission would be “un-American” because it would create a new “monopoly,” with IEX as the only exchange with a speed bump.
Citadel’s founder, billionaire Kenneth Griffin, got personally involved in the fight against IEX, meeting with the SEC as recently as June 3 to lobby against its exchange bid, according to a regulatory notice.
We are delighted, if stunned, that the SEC disagreed.  That said Citadel’s anger was palpable: “Today’s decision will test and potentially reverse the gains in fairness, efficiency and transparency that have been made to our markets over the last decade,” Citadel said. “We must be vigilant to identify unintended consequences, and firm in our commitment to equitable and consistent treatment for all investors.”
What is surprising is that it is well-known among market participants, and originally reported here, that the NY Fed transacts by way of Citadel at key market inflection points, when bursts of momentum ignition out of the Chicago HFT powerhouse prevent ther market from tumbling when they break a downward spiral in prices. A question thus emerges if the SEC’s snub to Citadel was also an indirect snub to the NY Fed and market manipulation.
While it remains to be seen what the SEC’s rationale was for granting IEX exchange status, one possible explanation is that even the SEC had noticed the unprecedented collapse in investor and trader interest, especially at the retail level, as the topic of how rigged the market has become is now a daily occurrence. As such the SEC felt compelled to take a stand. Or maybe not, and there is some other ulterior motive. We hope to find out.
For those unfamiliar with the IEX story, the exchange says its 350 microsecond delay is just long enough to protect investors from predatory high-speed trading that can front-run the orders of slower investors. Opponents such as Citadel LLC, the hedge-fund manager and electronic market maker, had warned that any delays would create stale prices and the potential for manipulation.
“It does mark a pendulum shift where ‘speed is king’ may have reached the furthest point it can go,” said Andrew Upward, head of market structure at brokerage Weeden & Co. “They’ve had a victory in this debate about the importance of speed in markets, and it’s a setback for those who think speed and efficiency are the end all and be all.”
On its website, Brad Katsuyama, CEO of IEX wrote the following letter of gratitude:
To our Sell-Side and Buy-Side Partners,
On behalf of the entire IEX team, I would like to sincerely thank you all for supporting us throughout our application to become an exchange. We are thrilled that the SEC has approved our Exchange Filing which puts us on track to commence a symbol-by-symbol roll-out on August 19th, concluding on September 2nd.
It’s been quite a journey from working in a windowless room with no money in 2012, to launching our ATS, and now completing the lengthy (and I’m sure for many…tiring) Form 1 process.
We have faced several obstacles along the way and we learned along the way, but we hope our partners realize that our team’s hearts and minds are in the right place – our goal is to bring real competition to the exchanges by challenging the rising cost model for data and technology while also protecting investors and delivering superior execution quality.
The IEX team is extremely excited about the road ahead, and we are grateful to be in the position to improve fairness, simplicity and transparency in our industry.
Thank you again for your support.
That said, the SEC’s decision may not be the end of the fight. Last month, attorneys for Nasdaq argued that the SEC could be sued if it approves IEX. The lawyers said the SEC would first have to change its own rules to explicitly allow for a speed bump. Absent that step, the lawyers wrote, the SEC lacked the authority to approve IEX’s proposal.
To this, the SEC issued an interesting response: addressing concerns about the legality of speed bumps – widely used by most of IEX’s exchanges however in an inverse way, where premium paying clients are exempt from delays which are then abused by HFT frontrunners, the SEC separately said that delays of less than one millisecond (less than the time it takes to blink an eye) are consistent with its Regulation NMS. This is what the SEC said in its updated guidance under Reg NMS:
The Staff believes that, consistent with the Commission’s interpretation regarding automated quotation under Rule 600(b)(3) of Regulation NMS, delays of less than a millisecond are at a de minimis level that would not impair fair and efficient access to a quotation, consistent with the goals of Rule 611.  The Staff’s view is informed by the efficient operation of the markets and the geographic and technological latencies experienced by market participants. Today, a one millisecond intentional access delay is well within the current geographic and technological latencies already experienced by market participants when routing orders between trading centers.  Accordingly, the Staff believes that such a delay would be de minimis and consistent with the Commission’s interpretation of “immediate” as used in Rule 600(b)(3) of Regulation NMS.
The Staff notes that the Commission’s proposed interpretation included guidance reflecting a sub-millisecond standard.  Though the Commission did not adopt that guidance as part of its final interpretation, the Staff notes that commenters on the proposed interpretation were divided on the appropriateness of an intentional access delay but did not advocate for a different specific standard.  Further, the Staff believes the sub-millisecond standard is a reasonable line to draw, as it is broadly consistent with the latencies experienced by market participants today when routing orders around the primary exchange data centers, and is well within the maximum geographic latencies experienced when routing orders to the most geographically remote exchange data center.
The Staff acknowledges that market participants using the most sophisticated technology may today encounter access delays of substantially less than one millisecond when accessing the quotes of a single exchange whose data center is co-located with their own or located nearby.  However, even the most technologically advanced market participants today encounter delays in accessing protected quotations of other “away” automated trading centers that can substantially exceed one millisecond, that either are transitory (e.g., as a result of message queuing) or permanent (e.g., as a result of physical distance).  In today’s market environment, the Staff considers that intentional delays of less than a millisecond in quotation response times are de minimis in that they would not impair a market participant’s ability to fairly and efficiently access a quote, consistent with the goals of Rule 611.  While the Staff believes that intentional access delays that are less that one millisecond are de minimis, that does not necessarily mean that all intentional delays that are one millisecond or more are not de minimis.
The technical interpretation of the above is that according to the SEC, IEX’s 350 microseconds delay is negligible, and thus the market is automated and the quote is protected.
The far more important practical interpretation, is that the SEC has set a ceiling for what it deems the speed race among HFT firms, which over the past decade have moved from fiber optics, to microwaves to lasers in their endless quest to be faster and quicker than their competitors in order to frontrun them.
Well, no more, because with its decision, the SEC has capped what technological advancement in trading can achieve going forward, as now a 350ms delay will become the norm, while anything below 1 millisecond is deemed a de minimis delay. 
This is catastrophic for HFTs for whom microseconds mean all the difference between profit and loss.
And once the vast majority of the trading public shifts over to IEX which is by definition HFT free, it will mean that the HFT scourge, already having largely cannibalized itself over the past several years, is about to end.
This is tremendous news, as it puts to rest a key part of our crusade launched in April 2009 when we first explained just how destructive for market functioning HFTs really are.
Now we can shift all our attention to central banks, the last remaining violator of free and efficient markets.
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Don’t Tell Anybody About This Story on HFT Power Jump Trading

Elite E Services
Far from Wall Street in a Chicago neighborhood once synonymous with urban blight, two futures industry veterans are using secrecy and speed to mint fortunes.
Their firm, Jump Trading LLC, was all but invisible until it was among six companiessubpoenaed in April by New York prosecutors. Jump has ascended the ranks of high-frequency traders during the past 15 years to become one of the top firms on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, where $925 trillion of derivatives changed hands last year. Its annual revenue has exceeded half a billion dollars.
The company was founded by traders Bill DiSomma and Paul Gurinas, whose level heads caused them to stand out in the cacophony of a Chicago trading floor. Today, the pair parcel money among 20 or so teams, each guarding its computer models from the others to trade stocks, bonds and commodities with strategies that go almost as fast as light.
“Billy was one of the few upright, stand-up guys in the pits,” said Yra Harris, owner of Praxis Trading who knew DiSomma when they worked in the Chicago trading pits during the 1990s. “He had a very good presence. There were all kinds of games being played in the pits, but he wasn’t one of those who messed others around.”
Befitting its history of stealth, neither the firm nor its principals spoke for this article, and three people familiar with the matter said former employees were told not to speak with Bloomberg News.

‘Low Profile’

Jump’s reluctance to speak comes as arrangements between financial exchanges and HFT firms are being examined by New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman and the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission. Jump hasn’t been publicly accused of wrongdoing by any government investigator.
“Although Jump is well known and respected within the industry, they keep a very low profile beyond the narrow confines of electronic trading,” said William Sterling, former chief of UBS AG’s global equities electronic business who co-runs Headlands Technologies LLC, a quantitative trading firm.
Jump’s headquarters are north of Chicago’s financial district in an area once dominated by one of the nation’s most dangerous public-housing projects, the Cabrini-Green Homes, whose high-rises were demolished during the last decade. Its offices are in the former warehouse of Montgomery Ward, a remnant of the city’s days as the mail-order capital of the U.S.
Jump has about 350 employees who also work in offices in New York, London and Singapore, according to a version of its website that was deleted earlier this year. While the closely held company, which trades with its own money, makes few disclosures about its inner workings or finances, there are clues to its size.

Public Filings

Some of its financial filings are public. In 2010, Jump reported net income of $268 million and operating revenues of $512 million for that year, according to documents filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Profit amounted to $316 million in 2008, according to another filing with the regulator. At the end of March 2014, it owned U.S. stocks valued at $239 million, according to data compiled by Bloomberg from an SEC filing.
Last year, Jump paid CME Group Inc., the world’s largest futures exchange, $83 million in trading fees while receiving about $17 million for market making activities, according to a separate SEC filing that doesn’t identify Jump by name.
In April, Jump sought to force Twitter Inc. to reveal who was posing as one of its employees posting tweets. After Bloomberg News in April revealed that Schneiderman subpoenaed Jump as part of an industry investigation, the trading firm erased most of its website.

‘Made Billions’

“From what I understand, they’ve made billions in profits,” said James Koutoulas, chief executive officer of Typhon Capital Management LLC in Chicago, who said he has friends with ties to Jump. After the controversy stirred by Michael Lewis’s book “Flash Boys,” which said the U.S. stock market is rigged, “the high-frequency trading guys are trying to avoid any type of publicity,” he said.
Neither DiSomma, 49, nor Gurinas, 46, responded to phone or e-mail requests for interviews, and Jump didn’t respond to messages sent to its “media inquiries” e-mail address. The firm declined to meet with Bloomberg News on an unscheduled visit by a reporter to their offices in April. Subsequent meetings with Jump’s chief operating officer, Matt Schrecengost, arranged by Tessa Wendling, the firm’s general counsel, were canceled. She didn’t return phone calls or e-mails seeking comment.

Innate Humility

Humility is innate in Gurinas, according to his mother.
“He doesn’t like stories about him, and so wouldn’t want any of his friends to talk about him,” Nola Gurinas said in a phone interview.
While some high-frequency firms were created by computer programmers, DiSomma and Gurinas were pit traders at the CME — the guys who shout and wave their arms to get the best prices. They met in 1992, and, as financial markets started migrating to electronic trading, they saw the potential of using computers to take advantage of price discrepancies in different markets, a tactic called arbitrage.
In 1999, DiSomma and Gurinas left to start their own firm, Akamai Trading LLC, partnering with John Harada. William Shepard, a board member of CME Group since 1997, bought a stake while agreeing not to get involved in management, according to a former Jump employee. Harada left to co-start rival Allston Trading LLC, and DiSomma and Gurinas changed Akamai Trading’s name in 2001 to Jump, a nod to how traders attract attention to themselves on exchange floors.

CME Link

Shepard is the only CME Group director without a photo next to his biography on the exchange’s website. His links to Jump require the exchange to disclose any financial relationship between the two companies because of his status as a board member. CME Group didn’t name the firm he works for in the regulatory filing earlier this year that disclosed the payments between Jump and the exchange. Shepard didn’t return phone calls or e-mails seeking comment.
CME Group’s conflict of interest policy prohibits board members from voting on matters where they could stand to benefit, said Anita Liskey, a spokeswoman for the exchange. She declined to comment on Shepard or Jump.
Jump hired scientists, mathematicians and programmers to build complex algorithms for trading U.S. and European equities, futures, currencies and bonds at speeds measured in fractions of a second. Unlike other firms that lease microwave towers to shave milliseconds off the time it takes to send trade orders in the U.S. and Europe, Jump buys them through a subsidiary, including one tower in Belgium that was once used by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

‘Industry Leader’

“We have become an industry leader, quietly setting the standard for sophisticated trading strategies,” Jump said on a now-erased version of its website.
Jump is one of the few HFT firms that have made the investment to become a clearing member at Chicago-based CME Group. That means it pays the lowest trading fees in return for maintaining preset capital minimums, according to CME Group’s rules. It also must contribute cash and securities to CME Group’s clearinghouse default fund.
DiSomma and Gurinas, who grew up in the Chicago area and graduated from the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, are opposites, according to former employees. DiSomma is outgoing and cracks jokes, while Gurinas is reserved and prefers the quiet life, people who know them said.

‘Quiet Guy’

Scott Davis worked alongside Gurinas in the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index futures pit during the late 1990s. “He was not your typical loudmouthed, boisterous guy in the pit,” said Davis. “He was a quiet guy. He went about his business.”
DiSomma lives modestly by Wall Street standards. He sometimes drove to work in a pickup truck and owns a 111-year-old house in Chicago’s Oak Park suburb — an area known for the diverse economic backgrounds of its residents. DiSomma bought his house, located a block south of railroad tracks, for $645,000 in 1999, according to county records. By contrast, the founder of another high-speed trading firm, Virtu Financial Inc.’s Vincent Viola, is selling his 19-room Manhattan townhouse for $114 million, real-estate listings show.
DiSomma also owns a 623-acre (2.5 square kilometers) farm in Cuba, Illinois, about 200 miles (322 kilometers) southwest of Chicago where he hunts for deer, pheasant and turkey and fishes for largemouth bass, according to photos on the property’s website.

Hospital Donation

His family foundation had $29.8 million at the end of 2012, according to the latest tax filings. DiSomma donated $25 million to a hospital and medical college in Peoria, Illinois, in 2011, according to the Journal Star, a newspaper in the city. The hospital had treated his daughter after she was injured in an all-terrain vehicle accident.
“At Jump Trading, what we do … it’s not exactly God’s work,” DiSomma said in February 2010 interview with the Journal Star. “What you guys do down here is closer to God’s work,” he said referring to OSF Saint Francis Medical Center’s children’s hospital, which used DiSomma’s donation to build a training facility called the Jump Trading Simulation and Education Center.
Gurinas, whose wife is a recruiter at Jump, lives with his family in Lincoln Park, an upscale neighborhood on Chicago’s north side. He spent $3.1 million in 2006 on a 3,690-square-foot home, according to the Cook County Assessor. Gurinas also owns land and aranch in Montana. A Jump affiliate has a microwave license in Missoula, Montana.

Government Reports

One of the firm’s specialties is trading quickly on the information contained in government statistical releases, according to two competitors of the firm and a former employee. Jump pre-loads its trading algorithms based on whether, say, the unemployment rate will rise or fall, then executes the strategy within tiny fractions of a second following the announcement, the former employee said.
The programmed trades often exploit price differences between exchange-traded funds based on the S&P 500 stock index and futures based on the S&P traded at CME Group, the former employee said. They follow this arbitrage across many equity indexes and futures, such as the Nasdaq or Russell groupings of stocks, as well as in markets in the U.K. and Germany, the person said.
To succeed in the U.S., Jump needed the fastest connection between the data center for the New York Stock Exchange in New Jersey and CME Group’s facility outside Chicago.

Saving Time

Then, as now, firms competed fiercely to shave milliseconds off the round-trip time. That meant if Jump had signed a lease on one fiber-optic network and then a faster one was built later, it would rent space on that one, too, the former employee said. At one point, the firm had access to four distinct fiber-optic lines, the former employee said.
The firm was also among the first to use microwave towers to send information between Illinois and New Jersey, according to executives at rival firms. Jump also uses microwaves in Europe, including a tower it bought last year that relayed messages for the U.S. military during the Cold War. Though it can carry less data, microwave can travel distances in roughly half the time of even the most advanced fiber-optic cables.
Jump guards its brand. In April, it filed a petition in an Illinois circuit court to compel Twitter to disclose who was behind an account using the name “jumptrading@algoswild.” Jump said the account was unauthorized and it needed the name of the account holder “who may be responsible in damages for impersonating Jump Trading and infringing Jump’s intellectual property, including its trademarks.”

Case Dropped

Without specifying why, Jump and Twitter requested that the case be dismissed at the end of June, which it was, according to court records in Chicago. The Twitter account is no longer active. Stacie Hartman, a lawyer for Jump listed on the petition, and Twitter’s legal representative, Jade Lambert, didn’t return phone calls requesting comment.
Jump’s industrial-style offices, which occupy two floors of the eight-story building, are amishmash of concrete pillars, exposed overhead cabling and sleek lighting and glass doors.
The office atmosphere is akin to a Silicon Valley startup, with employees dressing casually. They have catered lunch every Friday, company-sponsored happy hours and sporting events. The firm holds annual summer picnics and holiday parties have been held at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Field Museum.

‘Highly Sought’

“Jump is among the high-frequency trading shops that is highly sought after by our candidates, who’ve often told us they have a very strong work-hard-and-reward-hard culture,” said Deepali Vyas, founder of VnV Partners, a recruitment firm in New York.
While Jump describes itself as having a “casual atmosphere and flat organizational structure,” according to a former version of its website, it has an unusual setup compared with rivals.
Jump rents out computers and other infrastructure to its traders, who are organized into independent trading teams. The groups operate as separate cost centers and are staffed by as few as two people or as many as about 20, according to two former employees. Some groups trade across markets while others focus on one.
Jump applies its secrecy ethic within the firm. The teams don’t share information about trading strategies with each other — profitable groups are rewarded with more technology or money to trade with, former employees said.

Founders’ Teams

DiSomma and Gurinas sit with the traders and each have their own teams. Jump Core Strategies, run by Gurinas, caused resentment within the firm because of the growth of its assets, former employees said.
Among the successful teams are Statistical Trading Group, or STG, which has been run by former Citadel LLC traders Tom Gallagher and Satyanarayana Dharanipragada. Other groups have been led by Igor Pavlovsky, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology graduate who trades currencies, and ex-Citadel employees Ken Terao and Alexei Kamenev. Messages left for Gallagher, Dharanipragada, Pavlovsky and Terao weren’t returned, and Kamenev declined to comment.
An exodus of employees to Jump from Citadel was the subject of a clash between billionaire Ken Griffin’s Chicago hedge-fund firm and Jump in 2012. Citadel said former workers may have taken proprietary trading strategies and computer code worth hundreds of millions of dollars to Jump. Jump said that Citadel was misusing the courts to get information on a competitor.

James Chiu

An Illinois judge rejected Citadel’s bid to compel Jump to identify ex-employees who joined the firm since 2005, and any strategies they later developed. The case was dismissed in October 2012.
At Jump, James Chiu — whom ex-employees said was in the trading firm’s Oceans group — broke CME Group rules in 2010, according to a CME Group disciplinary memo from 2014.
A CME Group panel found that from Aug. 30 through Sept. 15, 2010, Chiu manually entered orders, supplementing trades that he had already placed, then canceling them before his other orders could be executed, the exchange said in a March 3, 2014, notice on its website. His actions potentially disrupted the market, the panel said.
The exchange said Chiu was employed as a proprietary trader by a member firm, but didn’t name Jump in the disciplinary action. The panel found that Chiu broke the exchange’s rule prohibiting “dishonorable or uncommercial conduct,” among others. Chiu, whose LinkedIn Corp. profile says he was a former team leader at Jump, settled with the CME Group without admitting or denying wrongdoing. He was ordered to pay a $155,000 fine and was suspended from any trading on the exchange’s markets for two months.

Predicting Future

Chiu, who now runs his own proprietary-trading firm, Vatic Labs, in San Francisco, said in a phone interview that CME Group issues disciplinary actions all the time and his was nothing out of the ordinary. Vatic is a word meaning something that describes or predicts what will happen in the future.
About two months after the CME Group rule violations that Chiu was later punished for, DiSomma, Gurinas and Schrecengost met with then-chairman of the CFTC, Gary Gensler. They discussed the definition of spoofing — or illegally canceling bids and offers quickly after placing them in order to create a false impression of demand — as well as high-frequency trading and the May 6, 2010, market plunge known as the flash crash, according to themarket regulator’s website. The meeting was part of the regulator’s efforts to implement new market rules stemming from the Dodd-Frank Act.

As for his old firm, Chiu hewed to the company line.
“I’m not allowed to talk about my time at Jump,” he said.
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The Bilderberg 2016 Agenda: Trump, Riots, Migrants, Brexit

Elite E Services
Every year, the world’s richest and most powerful business executives, bankers, media heads and politicians sit down in some luxurious and heavily guarded venue, and discuss how to shape the world in a way that maximizes profits for all involved, while perpetuating a status quo that has been highly beneficial for a select few, even if it means the ongoing destruction of the middle class. We are talking, of course, about the annual, and always secretive, Bilderberg meeting.
And, as the Guardian notes, “you know Bilderberg’s about to begin when you start seeing the guns.”

Workers erect a barricade outside the Taschenbergpalais hotel in Dresden
The Taschenbergpalais hotel in Dresden – the venue of “Bilderberg 2016” which starts tomorrow and continues until June 12 – is filling up with pistol-packing plainclothes security as the last guests are ushered out. The frowning gunslingers head up and down the corridors with their hotel maps, trying door handles and checking the lay of the land while, down in the hotel lobby, corporate goons gather in muttering huddles.
A glimpse at what is about to unfold: according to the local newspaper DNN, at least 400 police officers will be surrounding the venue for the three days of the talks. There’s already a ring of concrete blocks around the entrance.
Is that not enough? What are they expecting? The charge of the light brigade?
The hotel is being trussed up tighter than Reid Hoffman’s trousers. No one gets in or out without the right lanyard. As Ed Balls remembers only too well, from that awkward business in Copenhagen. Inside the security cordon, the final nervy tweaks are being made by conference staff. They’ve got to make sure Henry Kissinger’s curtains don’t let any light in. A single ray could be fatal.
Year after year, a sizeable number of extremely rich and powerful workaholics seem to think it’s worth strapping on their Bilderberg lanyard. But why? What’s getting the head of Google, two prime ministers, a vice-president of the European commission and the chairman of HSBC together in the same hotel basement for the same three days in June?  On its official website, Bilderberg attempts an answer. It describes itself as “a forum for informal discussions” that are “designed to foster dialogue between Europe and North America”. Dialogue which is designed to foster dialogue. Talk for talk’s sake.
Of course, as Charlie Skelton notes, that’s nonsense. And yet Bilderberg insists “there is no desired outcome”. That’s like a Club 18-30 rep saying there’s no desired outcome of his tequila groin-slurping contest. Someone’s getting something out of the event. Even if that something is chlamydia.

Taschenbergpalais hotel in Dresden
What is really discussed is how to take the existing trends in the world, some favorable, some undesired, and mold them in such a way as to create even more wealth for the world’s 0.01%, while perpetutating the existing system, one which even the IMF agrees is no longer working.
This time, as Paul Joseph Watson infers, the secretive Bilderberg Group whose Steering Committee Advisory Group consists of one David Rockefeller, will discuss how to prevent Donald Trump from becoming president, the possibility of mass riots as a result of wealth inequality, the migrant crisis, as well as the United Kingdom’s vote on leaving the European Union.
As noted above, the official list of “key topics” to be discussed is both broad quite vague and includes:
  1. Current events
  2. China
  3. Europe: migration, growth, reform, vision, unity
  4. Middle East
  5. Russia
  6. US political landscape, economy: growth, debt, reform
  7. Cyber security
  8. Geo-politics of energy and commodity prices
  9. Precariat and middle class
  10. Technological innovation
That’s just for public consumption. After all, who needs massive concrete blocks and 400 police officers for protection to discuss “technological innovation” – better yet, just open up the session to the press and public.
Of course, that won’t happen, because the real agenda must remain under wraps. However one can infer from the agenda and some of the names on the participant list what the group will be discussing in more detail. As PJW writes, the attendance of anti-Trump Senator Lindsey Graham is an obvious sign that Donald Trump will be a prominent topic of discussion at this year’s Bilderberg meeting, with the likely focus on how to prevent Trump from defeating Bilderberg’s chosen candidate, Hillary Clinton, who has already raked in tens of millions in fees from “speaking” before numerous participants at the meeting that begins tomorrow.
In 2015, the Bilderberg elite was confident that Clinton could shake off her GOP challengers, but Trump’s self-funded campaign and his public opposition to globalism and internationalist trade deals like NAFTA has shocked the Bilderberg elitists. As a result, it will now have to spend much more time dealing with the damage control.
Brexit will be another major topic. With the British referendum vote to leave the EU taking place in just two weeks, and withDavid Cameron getting concerned, a vote to secede threatens the future of the European Union federal superstate that was the brainchild of Bilderberg in the first place.
The inclusion of “precariat and middle class” on the list also means that the powerful lobby group will be ruminating on how they can exploit and manage the inevitability of more riots and civil unrest in the west – and increasingly, the east with an emphasis on China whose government is terrified about the prospect of rising social unrest – a topic that elitists were also concerned about at the 2015 Davos Economic Summit. “Precariat” describes those who are struggling to survive in today’s economy and who have no long term wage security. Studies have shown that wealth inequality increases the likelihood of mass social disorder. Furthermore, as the Fed itself admitted recently, it is the Fed, by way of manipulating markets higher, that has been an instrumental catalyst behind record wealth inequality.
The flooding of Europe with third world migrants, a process which has driven European voters into the arms of nationalist parties that typically oppose Bilderberg’s wider agenda, will also be a key topic of discussion, as per bullet point 3.
As Watson observes, aone interesting name that pops up on this year’s list is that of Richard Engel, NBC News’ chief foreign correspondent.  “Normally, a semi-secret meeting of over 100 of the most powerful people on the planet would be a monumental news scoop, but don’t expect Engel to utter a word.” After all, real journalists are not allowed anywhere on the premises; Engel likely has to sign an NDA.
Indeed, Bilderberg operates under Chatham House Rules, which means that none of the participants are able to reveal any comments made during the conference. As the Guardian floridly puts it, “after the politicians drag their drained and bloodless bodies back to their respective parliaments, they don’t say a word about what happened. They act like abuse victims. “It’s just our little secret,” murmurs Kissinger as he pops the politicians back in their limos. “Chatham House rules. You remember? Yes, of course you do. Now off you go.” And he nimbly licks a heart shape on to the car window with his black tongue before it speeds off.”
Although it was reported in the German media that German Chancellor Angela Merkel would attend this year’s conference, her name does not appear on the list. However, it is a common practice for Bilderberg to omit names from the official list if the individual’s attendance is politically sensitive.
* * *
So what do the politicians and public officials get from the deal? For the more ruthless, it’s a chance to line up future employment. As the Guardian reminds us of the then head of MI6, Sir John Sawers, networking with the chairman of BP on a Copenhagen patio in 2014. A year later he was sitting on the oil firm’s board of directors.
For those who don’t use the event as a glorified LinkedIn mixed for billionaires, the motive is far simpler: make even more money. In this regard the Guardian’s amusing conclusion is spot on:
Tony Blair admitted he found the 1993 conference “useful”. And I’m sure it was. It’s useful to know in what direction in the world is being led by the people that own it, so you can trot along in the right direction. And if you learn to play the game, to fit in with the in crowd, then maybe, like Blair, you can end up with a cushy job with US investment bank JP Morgan.
Ultimately, what is decided will never see the light of day, or rather it won’t over the next 4 days. Instead it will emerge as official policy, fiscal but mostly monetary as central bankers live to serve the Bilderberg elite, laws, regulations, and social norms. And if history is any indicator, it will only make the current global situation even worse.
* *  *
CHAIRMAN
  • Castries, Henri de (FRA), Chairman and CEO, AXA Group
  • Aboutaleb, Ahmed (NLD), Mayor, City of Rotterdam
  • Achleitner, Paul M. (DEU), Chairman of the Supervisory Board, Deutsche Bank AG
  • Agius, Marcus (GBR), Chairman, PA Consulting Group
  • Ahrenkiel, Thomas (DNK), Permanent Secretary, Ministry of Defence
  • Albuquerque, Maria Luís (PRT), Former Minister of Finance; MP, Social Democratic Party
  • Alierta, César (ESP), Executive Chairman and CEO, Telefónica
  • Altman, Roger C. (USA), Executive Chairman, Evercore
  • Altman, Sam (USA), President, Y Combinator
  • Andersson, Magdalena (SWE), Minister of Finance
  • Applebaum, Anne (USA), Columnist Washington Post; Director of the Transitions Forum, Legatum Institute
  • Apunen, Matti (FIN), Director, Finnish Business and Policy Forum EVA
  • Aydin-Düzgit, Senem (TUR), Associate Professor and Jean Monnet Chair, Istanbul Bilgi University
  • Barbizet, Patricia (FRA), CEO, Artemis
  • Barroso, José M. Durão (PRT), Former President of the European Commission
  • Baverez, Nicolas (FRA), Partner, Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher
  • Bengio, Yoshua (CAN), Professor in Computer Science and Operations Research, University of Montreal
  • Benko, René (AUT), Founder and Chairman of the Advisory Board, SIGNA Holding GmbH
  • Bernabè, Franco (ITA), Chairman, CartaSi S.p.A.
  • Beurden, Ben van (NLD), CEO, Royal Dutch Shell plc
  • Blanchard, Olivier (FRA), Fred Bergsten Senior Fellow, Peterson Institute
  • Botín, Ana P. (ESP), Executive Chairman, Banco Santander
  • Brandtzæg, Svein Richard (NOR), President and CEO, Norsk Hydro ASA
  • Breedlove, Philip M. (INT), Former Supreme Allied Commander Europe
  • Brende, Børge (NOR), Minister of Foreign Affairs
  • Burns, William J. (USA), President, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
  • Cebrián, Juan Luis (ESP), Executive Chairman, PRISA and El País
  • Charpentier, Emmanuelle (FRA), Director, Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology
  • Coeuré, Benoît (INT), Member of the Executive Board, European Central Bank
  • Costamagna, Claudio (ITA), Chairman, Cassa Depositi e Prestiti S.p.A.
  • Cote, David M. (USA), Chairman and CEO, Honeywell
  • Cryan, John (DEU), CEO, Deutsche Bank AG
  • Dassù, Marta (ITA), Senior Director, European Affairs, Aspen Institute
  • Dijksma, Sharon A.M. (NLD), Minister for the Environment
  • Döpfner, Mathias (DEU), CEO, Axel Springer SE
  • Dyvig, Christian (DNK), Chairman, Kompan
  • Ebeling, Thomas (DEU), CEO, ProSiebenSat.1
  • Elkann, John (ITA), Chairman and CEO, EXOR; Chairman, Fiat Chrysler Automobiles
  • Enders, Thomas (DEU), CEO, Airbus Group
  • Engel, Richard (USA), Chief Foreign Correspondent, NBC News
  • Fabius, Laurent (FRA), President, Constitutional Council
  • Federspiel, Ulrik (DNK), Group Executive, Haldor Topsøe A/S
  • Ferguson, Jr., Roger W. (USA), President and CEO, TIAA
  • Ferguson, Niall (USA), Professor of History, Harvard University
  • Flint, Douglas J. (GBR), Group Chairman, HSBC Holdings plc
  • Garicano, Luis (ESP), Professor of Economics, LSE; Senior Advisor to Ciudadanos
  • Georgieva, Kristalina (INT), Vice President, European Commission
  • Gernelle, Etienne (FRA), Editorial Director, Le Point
  • Gomes da Silva, Carlos (PRT), Vice Chairman and CEO, Galp Energia
  • Goodman, Helen (GBR), MP, Labour Party
  • Goulard, Sylvie (INT), Member of the European Parliament
  • Graham, Lindsey (USA), Senator
  • Grillo, Ulrich (DEU), Chairman, Grillo-Werke AG; President, Bundesverband der Deutschen Industrie
  • Gruber, Lilli (ITA), Editor-in-Chief and Anchor “Otto e mezzo”, La7 TV
  • Hadfield, Chris (CAN), Colonel, Astronaut
  • Halberstadt, Victor (NLD), Professor of Economics, Leiden University
  • Harding, Dido (GBR), CEO, TalkTalk Telecom Group plc
  • Hassabis, Demis (GBR), Co-Founder and CEO, DeepMind
  • Hobson, Mellody (USA), President, Ariel Investment, LLC
  • Hoffman, Reid (USA), Co-Founder and Executive Chairman, LinkedIn
  • Höttges, Timotheus (DEU), CEO, Deutsche Telekom AG
  • Jacobs, Kenneth M. (USA), Chairman and CEO, Lazard
  • Jäkel, Julia (DEU), CEO, Gruner + Jahr
  • Johnson, James A. (USA), Chairman, Johnson Capital Partners
  • Jonsson, Conni (SWE), Founder and Chairman, EQT
  • Jordan, Jr., Vernon E. (USA), Senior Managing Director, Lazard Frères & Co. LLC
  • Kaeser, Joe (DEU), President and CEO, Siemens AG
  • Karp, Alex (USA), CEO, Palantir Technologies
  • Kengeter, Carsten (DEU), CEO, Deutsche Börse AG
  • Kerr, John (GBR), Deputy Chairman, Scottish Power
  • Kherbache, Yasmine (BEL), MP, Flemish Parliament
  • Kissinger, Henry A. (USA), Chairman, Kissinger Associates, Inc.
  • Kleinfeld, Klaus (USA), Chairman and CEO, Alcoa
  • Kravis, Henry R. (USA), Co-Chairman and Co-CEO, Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co.
  • Kravis, Marie-Josée (USA), Senior Fellow, Hudson Institute
  • Kudelski, André (CHE), Chairman and CEO, Kudelski Group
  • Lagarde, Christine (INT), Managing Director, International Monetary Fund
  • Levin, Richard (USA), CEO, Coursera
  • Leyen, Ursula von der (DEU), Minister of Defence
  • Leysen, Thomas (BEL), Chairman, KBC Group
  • Logothetis, George (GRC), Chairman and CEO, Libra Group
  • Maizière, Thomas de (DEU), Minister of the Interior, Federal Ministry of the Interior
  • Makan, Divesh (USA), CEO, ICONIQ Capital
  • Malcomson, Scott (USA), Author; President, Monere Ltd.
  • Markwalder, Christa (CHE), President of the National Council and the Federal Assembly
  • McArdle, Megan (USA), Columnist, Bloomberg View
  • Michel, Charles (BEL), Prime Minister
  • Micklethwait, John (USA), Editor-in-Chief, Bloomberg LP
  • Minton Beddoes, Zanny (GBR), Editor-in-Chief, The Economist
  • Mitsotakis, Kyriakos (GRC), President, New Democracy Party
  • Morneau, Bill (CAN), Minister of Finance
  • Mundie, Craig J. (USA), Principal, Mundie & Associates
  • Murray, Charles A. (USA), W.H. Brady Scholar, American Enterprise Institute
  • Netherlands, H.M. the King of the (NLD)
  • Noonan, Michael (IRL), Minister for Finance
  • Noonan, Peggy (USA), Author, Columnist, The Wall Street Journal
  • O’Leary, Michael (IRL), CEO, Ryanair Plc
  • Ollongren, Kajsa (NLD), Deputy Mayor of Amsterdam
  • Özel, Soli (TUR), Professor, Kadir Has University
  • Papalexopoulos, Dimitri (GRC), CEO, Titan Cement Co.
  • Petraeus, David H. (USA), Chairman, KKR Global Institute
  • Philippe, Edouard (FRA), Mayor of Le Havre
  • Pind, Søren (DNK), Minister of Justice
  • Ratti, Carlo (ITA), Director, MIT Senseable City Lab
  • Reisman, Heather M. (CAN), Chair and CEO, Indigo Books & Music Inc.
  • Rutte, Mark (NLD), Prime Minister
  • Sawers, John (GBR), Chairman and Partner, Macro Advisory Partners
  • Schäuble, Wolfgang (DEU), Minister of Finance
  • Schieder, Andreas (AUT), Chairman, Social Democratic Group
  • Schmidt, Eric E. (USA), Executive Chairman, Alphabet Inc.
  • Scholten, Rudolf (AUT), CEO, Oesterreichische Kontrollbank AG
  • Schwab, Klaus (INT), Executive Chairman, World Economic Forum
  • Sikorski, Radoslaw (POL), Senior Fellow, Harvard University; Former Minister of Foreign Affairs
  • Simsek, Mehmet (TUR), Deputy Prime Minister
  • Sinn, Hans-Werner (DEU), Professor for Economics and Public Finance, Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich
  • Skogen Lund, Kristin (NOR), Director General, The Confederation of Norwegian Enterprise
  • Standing, Guy (GBR), Co-President, BIEN; Research Professor, University of London
  • Svanberg, Carl-Henric (SWE), Chairman, BP plc and AB Volvo
  • Thiel, Peter A. (USA), President, Thiel Capital
  • Tillich, Stanislaw (DEU), Minister-President of Saxony
  • Vetterli, Martin (CHE), President, NSF
  • Wahlroos, Björn (FIN), Chairman, Sampo Group, Nordea Bank, UPM-Kymmene Corporation
  • Wallenberg, Jacob (SWE), Chairman, Investor AB
  • Weder di Mauro, Beatrice (CHE), Professor of Economics, University of Mainz
  • Wolf, Martin H. (GBR), Chief Economics Commentator, Financial Times
* * *
Finally, for those who are skeptical about the massive power and reach of the relatively small Bilderberg group, here is a recent graph which shows the members’ connections to virtually every important and relevant organization, company and political entity in the world.
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