Archive - Nov 2015

Last week, under pressure from companies including Buffett’s BNSF - which has spent more money lobbying Congress this year than any other railroad - U.S. legislators passed, and President Obama signed, a law that delays the so-called positive train control mandate. That means railroad operators can put off having to buy and install equipment that safety advocates say would have prevented accidents that have claimed more than 245 lives and caused over 4,200 injuries since the NTSB began calling for the technology in 1969.

The world is bankrupt after thirty years of borrowing from the future to throw a party in the present, and the authorities can’t acknowledge that. But they can provide the conditions for disguising it, especially in the statistical hall of mirrors that once-upon-a-time produced meaningful signals for the movement of capital. The Dow, the S&P, and the NASDAQ are the only signaling mechanisms that the legacy media pays attention to, and the politicos take their cues from them, in a feedback loop of false information that begets more delusional positive psychology in those same markets.

“Nobody wants to go back to the days of the Cold War ... but the concept of contingency forces … that is exactly what we should be doing.”

"What difference does it make?"

Today’s system is essentially a system that can drift ever further away from reality through temporal discoordination, resource misallocation and eventually capital consumption. The final coordinating mechanism is nothing less than economic recession. Without them society would regress, impoverishing first the poor, then the middle class and in the end all socioeconomic layers of society.

The EU expects 3 million refugees in 2016. This year, there will be ‘only’ 1 million. Of which resettlement deals have been made for 160,000, and at last count 116 have actually been resettled. The 1 million refugees in 2015 have already strained resources, international relationships and indeed entire governments to such an extent, wars could start just because of that. Add another 3 million, and the chances of a peaceful 2016 in Europe grow terribly slim.. The fact is that Europe risks being strained to the point of military conflict.

It has not been a good year for former Bear trader "right person at the right time" with his subprime short, John Paulson who after getting slammed on Valeant, if not quite as badly as Ackman, moments ago saw a quarter of his investment in Mallinckrodt - where he is a top3 holder - wiped out, when Citron tweeted that "MNK has significantly more downside than Valeant" and is a far worse offender of the reimbursement system.

Having dramatically converged to the tumbling price of WTI Crude, Trannies are jumping dramatically after Bloomberg runs the following flashing-red headline: *CANADIAN PACIFIC SAID TO EXPLORE TAKEOVER OF NORFOLK SOUTHERN. Amid crashing railcar loadings (down over 23% YoY - worst since the financial crisis), this 'syngery' may make some sense but will likely only mean moar layoffs as "two wrongs do not make a right."

"Historically, the statistical or mathematical properties of the financial markets have shifted as the economic recovery nears full employment (i.e., at about the 5% unemployment rate the contemporary recovery has reached). Traditionally, at this point in the recovery, the stock market suffers more frequent declines, bond yields rise more often, average annualized returns from both asset classes are lower, diversification benefits tend to diminish, and recession risk is enhanced."

Moments ago in what we initially thought was a joke, abc9 reported that close to two dozen train cars derailed after a crash Monday morning. Lt. Brett Grimshaw of the Des Moines County Sheriff’s Office said the crash happened a little after 8 a.m. when a coal train hit a road grader that had been backed up onto the tracks. And before you ask, yes, this train, too, belongs to BNSF, which in turn belongs to Warren Buffett,

Having noted the plunge in consumer spending expectations to record lows last month, The Fed faces an even bigger problem this month. Despite the apparent wage growth in Friday's magical BLS data, The New York Fed admits "public expectations of future income took a big hit," as the index suffered its biggest one-month decline on record. But the news gets even worse, as 3-year-ahead inflation expectations plunged to record lows (confirming the record low inflation expectations from UMich's) and entirely discounting Stan Fischer's inflation excuses last week. Fianlly, as stocks have stagnated this year as wealth creator for The Fed, consumer expectations of housing price gains have tumbled to series lows. It appears a desperate-to-hike-rates fed is cornered by, as UMIch previously noted, "a disinflationary mindset is taking hold."

In short: end demand far weaker, saved by Primary Dealers, as suddenly foreign central banks are far less interested in US paper just at a time when yields are rising and purchases of said paper that much more attractive.