Archive - Jun 2015

Most Americans are deathly afraid to go to the hospital these days – and it is because of the immense pain that it will cause to their wallets.  If you want to get on a path that will lead you to bankruptcy, just start going to the hospital a lot.  In America today, hospitals and doctors are blatantly ripping us off and they aren’t making any apologies for it.  As you will read about below, some hospitals mark up treatments by 1,000 percent.  If the U.S. health care system was a separate country, it would actually be the 6th largest economy on the entire planet.

As recently as several months ago, the financial press was surprised when a wave of Deutsche Bank employees, particularly those in the bank's legal department (such as here and here), decided to take their own lives. Now at least one Deutsche Banker, perhaps perturbed by the recent news involving the unexpected departure of his co-CEOs coupled with the even more unexpected raid of the bank's global headquarters, has decided to show the jump from sui- to homicide is a simple one.

As China builds its own multilateral institutions, Beijing has been keen to dispel the notion that it seeks to supplant the Bretton Woods order with its own brand of Eastern hegemony and although one can certainly question the degree to which China’s aims are rooted purely in an inclination to be benevolent towards nations in need of fixed asset investment, Beijing is making an effort to distance itself from the way the US governs the institutions under its control.

When forecasting how much oil will be available in future years, most agencies, including EIA, IEA and BP appear to adopt a similar 'work-backwards from GDPO growth expectations' method. It seems that this approach has a fundamental flaw. It doesn’t consider the possibility of continued low oil prices and the impact that these low oil prices are likely to have on future oil production. Hoped-for future GDP growth may not be possible if oil prices, as well as other commodity prices, remain low.

"Ultimately I think to deal with Putin you need to deal from strength - he's a bully and ... you enable bad behavior when you're nuanced with a guy like that."

Central banking has truly taken over the entire planet.  At this point, the only major nation on the globe that does not have a central bank is North Korea.  Yes, there are some small island countries such as the Federated States of Micronesia that do not have a central bank, but even if you count them, more than 99.9% of the population of the world still lives in a country that has a central bank.  The global elite dominate us because we allow them to dominate us.  Their debt-based system greatly enriches them while it enslaves the remainder of the planet.  We need to expose their evil system and the dark agenda behind it while we still have time.

20 years ago this month, Bill Clinton unveiled the National Home Ownership Strategy, a 100-point plan designed to drive the home ownership rate in America to all-time highs. The plan succeeded — and now it has unraveled completely.

"We take issue with the widespread notion that the problem is solely due to regulators having raised the cost of dealer balance sheet, and could be ameliorated if only there were greater investment in e-trading or a rise in non-dealer-to-non dealer activity... illiquidity is a growing concern even in markets like equities and FX, which use barely any balance sheet at all, and where e-trading is the already the norm rather than the exception."

"Today, Europe is not independent… The US is drawing us [the EU] into a crusade against Russia, which contradicts the interests of Europe,” said the former French Prime Minister Fillon while the chief economist at Bremer Landesbank adds that as a result of US policies "unmeasurable damage lies in an elevated geopolitical risk situation for the people in the EU.”

In what looks like the latest threat to the US taxpayer stemming from the government's trillion-dollar student loan portfolio, VC-backed tech startups are using attractive refi offers to siphon off the best loans, leaving taxpayers with a book full of IBR enrollees and severely delinquent borrowers who aren't even thinking about making payments.

Taking heads and supposed market gurus bloviate enthusiastic comments about how it should be easy to benefit from volatility exchange-traded products. But how likely is it that these individuals are able to extract the divine trading signals, similar to what they have proposed? over the past 2 years that only less than 5% of users of these derivative products, such as mass-market available volatility ETFs, would have earned a skilled profit from it (as opposed to from haphazard guessing). So at best, only 1 in 20 people are making money on VXX and its kin.

If it is indeed deja vu, all over again, look for bond yields to tumble over the next 6 months.