tybs
Bill Cosby set to be released from prison after court vacates conviction
Disgraced comedian Bill Cosby will be released from prison after the Pennsylvania Supreme Court overturned his conviction for sexual assault.
The state Supreme Court looked at two parts of the case that Cosby's attorneys had challenged in an appeal last year: the judge's decision to allow all five accusers to be called by prosecutors and an agreement that Cosby had with a former prosecutor that he would never be charged.
The court said the previous prosecutor's decision not to charge Cosby led to his engagement in a civil lawsuit against him, giving testimony which was key in his later conviction. "The circumstances before us here are rare, if not entirely unique," the court wrote in its wrote in its opinion.
The justices concluded that Cosby had suffered "far greater" due to the testimonies given at his two trials and rebuffed a suggestion that a third criminal trial be conducted. Instead, they wrote that overturning his conviction would be the only action that would suffice. "A contrary result would be patently untenable. It would violate long-cherished principles of fundamental fairness. It would be antithetical to, and corrosive of, the integrity and functionality of the criminal justice system that we strive to maintain."
"For these reasons, Cosby’s convictions and judgment of sentence are vacated, and he is discharged."
https://thehill.com/blogs/in-the-know/in-the-know/560943-bill-cosby-set-to-be-released-from-prison-after-court-vacates
had to get sum lunch before it got crowded.
Credit Suisse Major Shareholder Qatar Investment Authority Trims Stake
One of Credit Suisse Group AG’s biggest and longest-term shareholders, the Qatar Investment Authority, trimmed its stake in the bank, a blow to the beleaguered Swiss lender.
QIA, a sovereign-wealth fund of the gas-rich Gulf state, cut its stake to 4.8% from 5.2% on Wednesday, according to its filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Credit Suisse is under pressure to revamp following twin scandals from the failures of Archegos Capital Management and Greensill Capital.
QIA didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. A Credit Suisse spokesman declined to comment.
The Qatar fund first took a large stake in Credit Suisse in 2008 and helped shore up its capital as the financial crisis hit. It reported a stake of just under 10% in Credit Suisse shares and derivatives that year and reduced the stake since then.
Credit Suisse lost around $5.5 billion this spring from exiting large, concentrated stock positions of Archegos Capital, a New York-based family office that came undone when some of the stocks fell and it couldn’t meet margin calls. Other banks including Morgan Stanley and UBS Group AG also lost money.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/credit-suisse-major-shareholder-qatar-investment-authority-trims-stake-11625076685
Do We Hear A Trillion: Fed's Reverse Repo Hits Record $992 Billion, Up $150 Billion In One Day
There's not much we can add here: after all we have beaten to death the topic of the Fed's soaring reverse repo facility (see "With Fed's Reverse Repo Hitting Half A Trillion, Wall Street Scrambles To Figure Out What Comes Next" and especially "Powell Just Launched $2 Trillion In "Heat-Seeking Missiles": Zoltan Explains How The Fed Started The Next Repo Crisis"), but while many were expecting fireworks for month and quarter end, nobody expected that a record 90 counterparties (up from 74 on Tuesday) would park an additional $150 billion in loose liquidity (for context, all of QE2 was $600 billion) at the Fed's reverse repo facility where it is now earning 0.05% compared to the 0.00% rate prior to the June FOMC, bringing the total reverse repo usage to a mindblowing $991.9 billion, after printing a record $841.2 billion on Tuesday (across 74 counterparties).
In an amusing twist, whereas once upon a time banks would flood into the Fed's repo facility at quarter end to window dress their balance sheet, now it is an all out scramble to just get rid of excess liquidity which the Fed continues to inject at a pace of $120 billion.
But while today's print is likely an outlier due to quarter end, we expect the new normal reverse repo usage to rise above $1 trillion shortly for the very reason Zoltan Pozsar explained last week: with the banks repurchasing well over $100 billion in stock, their CET1 balance sheet capacity is about to collapse by over $2 trillion due to the 20x leverage. As a reminder this is what we said:
... imagine what will happen to the RRP facility if banks indeed proceed to repurchase $142BN in stock; applying Pozsar's 20x leverage multiple, this means that bank balance sheets will shrink by just under $3 trillion, including trillions in reserves which will have to be parked at the Fed, which also means that in the coming weeks usage on the Fed's reserve facility is set to explode to unprecedented levels.
Today is the first day that we see this prediction in action, and it will only get much worse: expect total repo usage to soar in the coming days, with the total inert cash parked at the Fed hitting north of $2 trillion in a few weeks**
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/do-we-hear-trillion-feds-reverse-repo-hits-record-992-billion-150-billion-one-day
https://apps.newyorkfed.org/markets/autorates/temp
**dunno if he talking on a daily basis or wut...this total is at $18.361T since April 8th.
see this....
>>66154 Federal Reserve Bank of New York Reverse Repo. Ops-Week of June 20th: $3.954T
werd
HFT Giant To Challenge Citadel's Dominance Of Retail Stock Trading
By now it's common knowledge that the golden goose that powers the tremendous revenue and cash flow juggernaut of HFT giant Citadel, which resulted in record EBITDA of $4 billion last year, more than doubling the prior year results..... not to mention the driving force behind Ken Griffen's mansion and artwork collection, is Citadel's near monopoly when it comes to controlling retail orderflow in the US: Citadel Securities estimates that it commands 27% of equity volume market share in the U.S., up from 21% in 2017 a recent loan private presentation revealed; the company is especially dominant in retail order flow, with 46% of the market.
There's more: according to Bloomberg, Citadel's EBITDA for Q4 was $1 billion and a whopping $4.1 billion for the year, also a record. It also means that Citadel has an EBITDA margin of more than 60%, an unprecedented number even for a high-margin brokerage.
So seeing how Citadel's near-monopoly of this particular corner of the market had led to such staggering monetary gains, we were always confused why there is so little competition in the retail orderflow business.
Well, that's finally changing.
According to WSJ, Hudson River Trading, one of the biggest high-frequency trading firms, is planning to enter the business of executing stock trades for retail investors. By doing so, the New York-based Hudson River sets its sights on two huge rivals: Citadel Securities and Virtu Financial, which combined handle more than 70% of individual investors' stock orders.
The firm - which handles 8% of daily U.S. stock-trading volume, or about a third of Citadel's market share - has been building out a so-called retail wholesaler business. It aims to launch later this year or in early 2022, an executive at the firm told The Wall Street Journal. Wholesalers - such as Citadel and Virtu - execute orders to buy and sell stocks submitted by people using online brokerages such as Robinhood Markets Inc. and TD Ameritrade. In fact, Citadel has long been the single biggest paying client to Robinhood...
... and what it gets in exchange for these orderflow payments, is a first look at what everyone in the retail space is buying and selling, both en masse and at the individual level. Which of course is known as frontrunning, but because "everyone does it", payment for orderflow is viewed as perfectly legal in the US.
Why? Because of the universal "get out of jail" card - namely that wholesalers "provide liquidity" which of course is bullshit - liquidity collapses once these wholesalers have no more retail trades to frontrun or when volatility surges, resulting in numerous flash crashes, as for bid/ask spreads, these shrink simply because the HFTs position themselves inbetween the natural buyers and sellers in hopes of getting the trade ahead of everyone else. "We have a lot of respect for Citadel Securities and Virtu and their ability to provide great execution for retail investors," Adam Nunes, Hudson River's head of business development, told the WSJ. "We do see demand from retail brokers for an additional wholesaler. We are confident that we can compete with Citadel Securities and Virtu in providing liquidity to retail investors, the same way we do on exchanges." This too, is a joke: as even the WSJ admits, "most retail traders would be unlikely to notice the effect of increased competition from Hudson River. Investors typically save a small amount of money, often just a fraction of a penny per share, by having their orders routed to wholesalers." However, it does mean that there will be one more shark swimming in the waters, hoping to frontrun their orders away. What Hudson River's involvement really means is that Citadel's market share of retail orderflow is about to drop as competition ramps up, while the money firms like Robinhood who sell retail traffic, will pocket from HFTs should rise as there is more competition for the same limited universe of orders.
moar
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/hft-giant-challenge-citadels-dominance-retail-stock-trading
Nuffin gonna change here..Hudson River is just going to be used to say "see we have competition with three nao instead of two
GTMO845 US Navy Beech Huron departed San Angelo Regional Airport east from an arrival on 0627 from NAS JAX