Cuba struggled for a fourth day Monday to contain a massive blaze at a fuel depot in the northern part of the country. The depot supplies the largest power plant in the communist country -- there are no indications yet if crude supplies to the thermoelectric plant have been disrupted. 

Another wave of turbulence rocked the US airline industry as hundreds of cancellations and thousands of delays made air travel an utter nightmare on Sunday. 

The flight-tracking website FlightAware reported 950 flight cancellations and more than 7,700 delays across, into, and out of the US on Sunday. 

Chicago O'Hare International Airport recorded the most cancellations and delays yesterday, with 12% of all flights canceled and over 40% of flights delayed. The reason for air travel disruption was heavy rain across the Chicago metro area. 

One week ago, when stocks were melting up at a time and steamrolling ever more bearish when hedge managers, JPM tech/TMT trader Ron Adler put it best when he said that "frustration sums up the past few sessions perfectly. Expensive shorts & momentum shorts are leading the way higher for the market and tech. The consternation is profound; from P&L to positioning, traders feel like they can’t get anything right, as SPX 4200-4300 feels almost as inevitable as 3500-3600 did just a month ago (with perhaps a modest fed pivot and little new fundamentally)."

In short, in a market with zero liquidity, with increasingly more binary outcomes (Fed cuts or hikes; China invades Taiwan or doesn't, inflation or deflation), and with no love from Powell, and where August is shaping up even more turbulent than July, traders lack a course of action .

Addressing many of these issues, in a weekend note from Goldman's head of hedge fund S&T, Tony Pasquariello (available to zh...

After doing everything in their power to help Joe Biden win the 2020 election - including the yellowest of journalism to downplay the NY Post's credible report on Hunter Biden's evidence-filled laptop - CNN appears to have gone against their child-sniffing commander-in-chief.

"This terrorist group is based in the Al-Tanf zone, supplied and trained by instructors from the US Army Special Operations Forces," the Russian Defense Ministry said. "Operating from the desert, the Liwa Shuhada al-Qaryatayn militants carried out acts of sabotage against the civilian population and civilian infrastructure in Syria."

The Pentagon confirmed that the strikes took place in comments to Newsweek, but didn’t provide any details. US Central Command told Newsweek that "CENTCOM is aware of the strike, but does not have information to provide to you on this."

The US was said to cut off support for ShQ in 2017. In 2018, the group was said to be relocating from the southern area near al-Tanf to northern Syria.

The strikes mark the second time that Russia has targeted US-backed fighters near al-Tanf. Back in June, Russia targeted Maghawir al-Thawra, formerly known as the New Syrian Army. Russia notified the US before launching the...

Readers will recall that according to Jerome Powell's own presser, the Fed's first 75bps rate hike in more than two decades was erroneously prompted by an abnormally higher preliminary UMich 5-10 year inflation print (which was subsequently revised lower in the final number). Well, if the Fed is so data-dependent that it now react to preliminary econ data prints, then the latest data out of the NY Fed's monthly Consumer Expectations survey would suggest a rate cut may be on deck.

US shale is still acting with restraint in terms of production growth despite President Biden's calls to increase supplies to squash energy prices that were driven up due to soaring demand, decarbonization efforts, lack of refinery capacity, limited spare capacity, and, of course, geopolitical uncertainty surrounding Russia's invasion of Ukraine. 

ConocoPhillips, Pioneer Natural Resources, and Devon Energy recorded soaring profits in the second quarter, though many of these top shale oil and gas producers were reluctant to boost capital spending to increase output despite elevated prices for crude, according to Financial Times. 

Executives of these companies are under pressure from Wall Street to return record profits in the form of dividends and share buybacks to investors rather than increasing capital expenditures to boost production. It comes after years of burning cash and issuing equity to survive the multiple boom-bust cycles that paralyzed the...