Archive - Dec 10, 2015

"The middle class is disappearing,” says Alison Fuller, a 25-year-old university graduate working for a medical start-up in Smyrna, Georgia, who sees herself voting for Mr Trump."

The next financial crisis could manifest itself in the coming months. If so, it will mark the end of current central bank monetary policies and state control of markets, as free markets reassert realistic pricing. Government bond yields will normalise, stock markets will fall, and banks will almost certainly fail. When something as epochal as this happens, we can expect the macroeconomic establishment to be clueless with respect to the problem itself and its scale.

This afternoon we got another completely amorphous claim from The Pentagon regarding the death of a “senior” ISIS commander when Special Presidential Envoy for the Global Coalition to Counter ISIL (whatever that is) Brett McGurk took to Twiiter to announce the death of an Islamic State FinMin.

Flashing red headlines, business media anchors exuberant as gun-maker stocks weresold after CT Governor Malloy unveiled his executive order and following White House chatter that officials were finalizing proposal that would expand background checks on gun sales without congressional approval. We thought the following charts would provide a little context for this "selling"...

The UFC is going to have to make some changes if they are going to take their sport to the next level; promoting women fighters in bikinis can only fool the sports buying public for so long.

"2015 was like commuting by rollercoaster. There were heart-stopping drops, there were nearly vertical ascents, and when it was all over you got off just about where you started and it cost you money."

"This should be a wakeup call for all of us. This is a moment to seize here in America," Gov. Dannel Malloy plans to sign the first executive order in the nation to ban the sales of guns to people on government watch lists.

Janet, you have a problem...

The just concluded 30-Year bond reopening of Cusip RP5, in which the US Treasury sold another $13 billion in long-dated paper in this year's final auction of 30 Years, was almost a carbon copy of yesterday's 10 Year auction.

The U.S. establishment has been aggressively pushing against the American public’s right to private communications, i.e. encryption, ever since the terror attacks in Paris. This push continues unabated, with the latest shots fired earlier this week by FBI chief James Comey at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing. “I don’t want to tell them how to do their business... but there are costs to being an American business."

"Clinton is also increasingly seen as the least honest in the field, with 46% of likely Democratic primary voters now saying she is least honest out of the three remaining candidates...That's up from 33% in September and 28% back in June." Yet, they will still nominate her.

The Supreme Court may shortly decide an obscure case entitled Federal Energy Regulatory Commission v. Electric Power Supply Association (FERC v EPSA). The issue before the court is whether FERC can compel regional power markets to pay consumers who reduce their electricity usage at critical peak periods. And if so, at what price?

At the moment, the strength of the USD correlates very strongly to equities. When King Dollar is torpedoed like it was yesterday, stocks plummet. So does this mean that a rate hike next week will be tremendously bullish for stocks?

In the latest example of the rising idicoy in today's colleges, Lebanon Valley College in Pennsylvania, students remarkably want to rename a building commemorating Dr. Clyde A. Lynch, the college’s 11th president who served during the Great Depression and WWII, because the word “lynch” has racist implications.

“We're at a moment of historic opportunity”. 

Gold is one of the few investments that every investor should have in their portfolio.

We are now at the dangerous end-game period of a very bold but very reckless & disappointing experiment with the world's fiat (unbacked) currencies. If this experiment fails -- and we observe it's in the process of failing -- gold will provide one of the best forms of wealth insurance. But like all insurance products, it only works if you buy it before you need to rely on it.