Archive - Apr 2011

The Supreme Court drastically limited class action lawsuits today. Two senators and a congressman are trying to roll back the decision ...

If you are confused why at one point every word the Chairman said was the equivalent of one pip lower for the DXY and 10 cents higher for gold, wonder no more. Here is Citi's Steven Englander asking, and explaining why the USD just hit a new cyclical low.

RANsquawk Market Wrap Up - Stocks, Bonds, FX etc. – 27/04/11

"Mr. Chairman, first, thanks for doing this. This is a tremendous development." Steve Liesman

When I met Phil the other night, he was on fire, enraged by what he believes is the scam of the century that no one wants to talk about, because so many powerful people armed with legions of lawyers want unquestioning allegiance, and will sue you into silence.

BERKSHIRE SAYS COMMITTEE FOUND SOKOL LZ TRADING VIOLATED TERMS
BERKSHIRE SAYS SOKOL'S PURCHASES VIOLATED CO. POLICIES

And next, David Sokol takes down Charlie Munger.

There's your whopper of a YTD stock. Just don't try to buy anything with the proceeds from those booked (cause they are booked right?) gains.

All you need to know...

Regardless or Bernanke’s personal qualities, the fact is that it doesn’t matter what he does next. Whether or not he issues QE 3, raises interest rates, references inflation differently, or what have you is irrelevant. We will see some kind of Crisis in the near future because of his policies. If he raises interest rates, the debt market and derivative implodes. If he launches QE 3, the Dollar collapses and trade wars erupt. If he doesn’t launch QE 3, the stock market collapses.

Ben lies: we're sheep; No more; and by being sheep we suffer the heart-ache and the thousand pricing shocks unmeasured by the CPI, 'tis a consumer tax, despite what you had wish'd. Ben lies; we're sheep: living a dying dream: Aye, there's the rub; when fleecing sheep what jobs may come when we have scuttled all their buying power?

GOLD FUTURES RISE TO RECORD $1,522.80 AN OUNCE

The below Bloomberg TV interview with Paul O'Neill pretty much jumps the shark in Mutual Assured Destruction. Whenever someone says "people who are threatening not to pass the debt ceiling are our version of Al-Qaeda terrorists. Really. They're really putting our whole society at risk" it is obvious that the issue is beyond rational and has crept up into the demented extreme of demagogy. This one statement may have just doomed the whole debt hiking debate as nobody will cede to being perceived as not only a terrorist but, what is far worse, a weak terrorist by the general population.

It's getting weirder in Pirate land. One man's thought on Greece.

On the face of it, American households were not that affected by the bursting of the housing bubble. If we look at the Fed Flow of Funds report, the Balance Sheet of Households and Nonprofit Organizations, we find that net worth only declined by about 11% ($7.3 trillion) from 2007 to 2010: a $2.9 trillion decline in financial assets and a $4.9 trillion decline in tangible assets, i.e. real estate and consumer durable goods...Before the housing bubble, households owed about $5 trillion in mortgages. The housing bubble came along, introducing the fantasy of home-as-ATM-cash-withdrawal-machine, and mortgages ballooned to over $10 trillion. Back at the top of the bubble, the middle class had $6 trillion more assets on the books. Considering the Mortgaged Middle Class now owns about $6 trillion in net assets, then the bursting of the housing bubble caused their net worth to drop by 50%.

Remeber when, oh yesterday, gold was plummeting and everyone knew, just knew, the rally was over? Well, you may want to save some one ply dollar paper yet. The market took a sniff at the FOMC statement, and the robotic consensus is: more QEasing.