Archive - May 1, 2015

The final Q1 GDP revision was just released and we saw that GDP has again missed expectations by such a large margin that 2015 is another write off for a 3% growth year.  Almost comically we heard the same excuses we got last year.  “Weather was wintery and next year is going to be the turnaround year”.  So in order to explain to these supposed economic and market ‘experts’ who seem wholly incapable of understanding economic and market forces with any sense of accuracy, let’s run through a few fundamentals.

With London, Paris, and Basel’s compliance, Nazi Germany had just looted 23.1 metric tons of gold without a shot being fired.

It appears the situation in Baltimore just got a lot more serious as MD State Attorney Marilyn Mosby states that charges have been filed against 6 Baltimore PD police officers, arrest warrants have been issued for the charged cops, and that Gray's death was a homicide.

Racism, it seems, is not only alive and well, but worse than it has ever been. Or is it? Could it be that most Americans, regardless of the color of their skin, are perfectly fine having people of other races as their friends, neighbors and colleagues, and that certain people in positions of power are using their influence to manipulate the masses?

Have you noticed that we are starting to be bombarded with images of troops in the streets?  Have you noticed that the term “martial law” is coming up a lot in movies, news broadcasts and even in television commercials?  In recent years, it seems like the solution to almost every major crisis involves bringing in troops.  In fact, it has already gotten to the point where when something really bad happens a lot of Americans immediately cry out for troops to be brought in.  And we are seeing the same patterns over and over again.

On April 28, Zero Hedge presented what was unmistakable evidence of manipulation by spoofing in the gold market in "Dear CFTC: Here Is Today's Illegal "Spoofing" In Gold Futures." Two days later, the CME said it bas suspended two traders for placing precisely the trade we profiled previously intending to manipulate the gold market. Dear CME - you are welcome. Now if only you pursued all those other documented instances of S&P futures manipulation with the same speed and resolve...

The goal of equality of opportunity is both absurd and vicious. Achieving it would require that children all be raised in the same environment and have the same genetic inheritance. In contrast, what we should actually strive for is the freedom of opportunity. Freedom of opportunity means the ability to exploit the opportunities afforded by reality, without being stopped by the initiation of physical force, in particular the initiation of physical force by the government or that takes place with the sanction of the government.

Despite claiming that its “people’s Uber” service in China, involving private drivers, is simply a type of car-pooling service; the bubblicious company continues to burn its series ZZ financings on legal briefs around the world. That appears to be a total waste when it comes to China as IBTimes reports, police, transport and commercial officials in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou have raided the local offices of online car service company Uber, amid continuing tension in China over the legality of ride-booking apps using private vehicles, which officials say have disrupted the country’s heavily regulated taxi market.

Deutsche Bank's LIBOR settlement likely should have landed the bank on the SEC's "bad actor" list, but thankfully, the CFTC was willing to write language into its settlement with the bank which effectively allows the German lender to skirt Dodd-Frank, proving yet again that it's good to be TBTF.

We have never, ever, seen a larger divergence between long-term earnings growth expectations and equity valuations...

Q: How do you make a small fortune on Wall Street?

A: Start with a large fortune.

~ old investing adage

A look at the current data on executions by country shows that although China is still number one over the long haul, two other countries have put on a strong showing YTD...

BANZAI7 FOOD AND BEVERAGE WARNING...

While we are delighted that you take advantage of the daily posts on Zero Hedge detailing flagrant spoofing across various asset classes (which you use to promptly ban two gold manipulators yesterday), the reality is that with every passing day the market becomes more disjointed, more fragmented, more broken.

"Too Big to Fail is a license for recklessness. These institutions defy notions of fairness, accountability, and responsibility... They benefit from the upside and expose the rest of us to the downside of their decisions. These banks are too powerful politically as well... Effectively we're hostages because their failure would be so harmful. They're likely to be bailed out if their risks don't turn out well and the largest financial firms in America can hide an enormous amount of risk in derivatives which creates a house of cards — a very fragile system."