Someone's Not Happy -- All Major Indices Down -- Biggest Week Of The Year For The Fed? -- And Folks Aren't Happy? -- July 30, 2019

Summer doldrums: all major indices down in pre-market trading. So why is the market falling? 3-second soundbite -- Chinese trade negotiations not going well.

Hack: Capital One headline -- 100 million customers affected -- full story suggests a much less alarming story.

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Earnings:

• McDermott: plummets on forecast for full-year loss. 
• BP: profit outstrips forecasts; lifted by higher oil output -- wasn't BP leading the industry in "going green"? Whatever. I guess the money is still in oil, not wind turbines or solar panels; very comfortable with demand growth outlook;
• Mastercard: beats profit estimates
• P&G: pushed up prices in all five of its main divisions in 4Q18
• US Silica: tops profit estimates on higher volumes; better-than-expected quarterly profit; sold 13% more sand quarter-over-quarter
• BRK-A/BRK-B: to report earnings Saturday, August 3, 2019; Barron's says to watch stock buyback number

I'm reminded of all that hand-wringing a month ago that 2Q19 earnings were going to be "ugly," and Jim Cramer's mantra for the quarter: not nearly as big as feared.

Calendar today, 292 companies reporting today, a huge day:

• AAPL; after close today
• MDU: forecast, 27 cents
• Halcon Resources (HK): forecast, a loss of 7 cents/share
• Halcon Resources Corp (HKRS): forecast, a loss of 8 cents/share
• ONEOK: after market close, forecast, 71 cents

Mexico: AMLO wants to cut rates.

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For Those Who Advocate Censoring, Regulating Facebook

From Kevin Birmingham's 2014 The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce's Ulysses, p. 156:

By 1921, the General Intelligence Division had files on nearly half a million subversives, and that was just a start. Ezra Pound would have a file. So would Ernest Hemingway, Theodore Dreiser, Langston Hughes and John Steinbeck. So would James Joyce. The files were methodically cataloged and cross-referenced by the division's ambitious young director, J. Edgar Hoover. He had received his appointment on the eve of the Red Raids, when he was twenty-four years old, and he got his start as a government librarian.

From wiki:

Around the time of World War I and the First Red Scare, William J. Flynn of the Bureau of Investigation had J. Edgar Hoover set up a General Intelligence Division (GID). Hoover used his experience working as a library clerk at the National Archives to set up the system using extensive cross-referencing.

The GID took files from the Bureau of Investigations (later renamed the Federal Bureau of Investigation) and 'systematized' them via index cards; according to Walker and contrary to evidence, the cards covered 200,000 people.

But by 1939, Hoover had more than 10 million people 'Indexed' in the FBI's domestic file system.

Although the GID was shut down in 1924 after objections from people such as William J. Donovan who called into question its constitutionality, Hoover and the FBI continued to expand the Index system for use by the agency, by Hoover, and by Hoover's political associates well into the 1970s. Today, the Index files covering untold numbers of Americans are still accessible by the FBI and its 29 field offices.