Archive - Apr 2015

“Promoted by the intellectual glitterati of the central banks, our economic system has become addicted to all forms of debt, much of which has been unproductive." The seemingly universal agreement that the prerequisite for a healthy economy is the growth of debt at all costs highlights both a lack of discipline and an aversion to consider different ideas on the part of economic policy-makers.

Take note, Gold is officially money for the most powerful entities in the world. They are not only accepting Gold as collateral but are openly trying to insure that they have their own Gold in safe custody.

Not long ago we noted that contrary to the old adage, money can indeed buy happiness. Given this, it stands to reason that the converse is likely true as well. That is, no money probably contributes to unhappiness. Sure enough...

In the Common Knowledge Game, fundamentals – whether they are of the stock-picking sort or the macroeconomic sort – don’t matter a whit, and your personal view of those fundamentals matters even less. The only thing that matters is whether or not the QE-works lesson has been absorbed by the learning process of investment professionals, and that’s driven by the lesson’s transformation into common knowledge by Missionaries (like Deutsche Bank's Torsten Slok).

While day after day we are bombarded with musings from talking-heads proclaiming that no matter what happens in the future, buying stocks and buying moar stocks is the way to go, the data has a different story to tell. As Goldman Sachs notes, at a forward PE of 17.5x, the equity market looks more expensive today than it was during any of the last four cycles. Furthermore, as Goldman puts it, we find it more challenging to rationalize the current high PE multiples.

Warfare today (and in the future) is (and will be) fought differently.  In the 1950’s with the creation of more destructive bombs and weaponry, the idea was ‘Mutually Assured Destruction’ (MAD).   The movie War Games helped us learn that there are no winners.  The warfare ideology today is ‘Multilateral Unconstrained Disruption’ (MUD).  This unrestrictive warfare is meant to disrupt societal functioning; to ‘poison’ information to elevate distrust of all computer information. Cyber-activity is the new ‘cold war’.

Dear CFTC, it's us again and today we bring you 3 examples of spoofing in gold futures which should help out in your very serious quest to eliminate all vesitges of illegal manipulation from our beloved markets.  

Against expectations of a 3.3mm bbl build, API reported a 4.2mm bbl build - the 16th weekly build in a row (and record streak). Cushing saw a small draw of 162k bbls. WTI Crude fell back below $57...

Honest price discovery is essential to capitalist prosperity since it is the miraculous mechanism by which capital is raised from savers and investors and efficiently allocated among producers, entrepreneurs and genuine market-rate borrowers. What the central banks have generated, instead, is a casino that is blindly impelled to churn the secondary capital markets and inflate the price of existing assets to higher and higher levels - until they ultimately roll-over under their own weight. The Easy Button addiction of our central bankers is thus not just another large public policy problem. It is the very economic and social scourge of our times.

One look at the charts below and one should start wondering just how viable is social media any more as a business model.

"Twitter has likely the greatest array of company-specific catalysts of any company in its sphere this year, including Periscope, core monthly active user (MAU) acceleration from the Google partnership, and new core features like embedded video.... building out the "tail" should allow Twitter to grow well-above average over the next several years. With a global ad load between 1% to 2% and 85% from mobile, we think TWTR has more revenue runway than any other company in the Internet space. Our target is $55."

Presented with no comment...

"...my greater source of personal concern, outrage... is focused upon an American political elite that have shipped middle class and working class jobs away from Baltimore and cities and towns around the US... plunged tens of millions of good hard-working Americans into economic devastation... in order to control an unfairly impoverished population living under an ever-declining standard of living and suffering at the butt end of an ever-more militarized and aggressive surveillance state."

Well, the leak (which ironically came out on Twitter only, and not Facebook) was right, and the full story is even worse than Selerity reported:TWITTER 1Q LOSS PER SHARE 25C; TWITTER INC 1Q ADJ. EPS 7C , EST. 4C.
That much we knew. Here is where it gets worse:

• TWITTER 1Q REV. $ 435.9M, EST. $456.2M
• TWITTER SEES 2Q REV. $470M TO $485M, EST. $538.1M
• TWTR SEES YR REV $2.170B-$2.270B, SAW $2.3B-$2.35B, EST $2.37B

And now perhaps someone will ask how much of Facebook's 1.4 billion "users" are actually real.