Archive - Jun 2015

New rules at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in conjunction with lower FHA premiums helped to drive down payments on single family homes to their lowest level since Q1 2012 in the first quarter.

More and more analysts are beginning to take note of the “War on Cash.” However, they’re missing the fact that the actual template for what’s coming to the US first appeared in Europe back in 2012.

There are some valid points raised in Lee Siegel's 1100 word rant against college loans (if not so much against college education). There are some bad ones. But two things are is clear: the words "personal" and/or "responsibility" were used precisely zero times, and the op-ed writer, who described himself as "the author of five books who is writing a memoir about money", is hardly a glowing advertisement for an education attained (funded with either debt or equity) at one of the Ivy League's "best", Columbia University... that, or the return on money after wasting nearly a decade in university and taking out tens of thousands in loans to achieve a Master of Philosophy degree.

"Do investors want to own bonds at 1% or 1-2bp yield per bp of realized vol, if risk is exploding? The EGB market is at historical highs in terms of total market risk!"

This breakdown marks the first day that Exxon Mobil has ever closed below this trendline. Now, assuming the stock’s behavior around the trendline is not completely random, and considering its capacity as the 2nd biggest stock in the equity market, the effect of this breakdown may be profound. Absent an immediate reversal back above the trendline, this loss of 28-year support would appear to open the door to more downside in the stock.

In a scene straight out of "The Shawshank Redemption", two convicted murderers apparently busted through a steel wall, maneuvered down catwalks, cut through a steel pipe, left a Post-it note with the message “Have A Nice Day”, and crawled their way to freedom, emerging from a manhole outside of a New York maximum security prison on Saturday.

Should a person or group that has never experienced what is known by all as “real life” while simultaneously being seen by many legal standards as not having the full credentials to be recognized as an “adult” have the ability to vote directly for, or vote for candidates responsible in the setting of the nations wage laws, tax laws, business law, national debt, business tax structures, business mandates, international trade policies, monetary policy, or most importantly – whether to send their brethren off to war where people die for real – not in some video game or movie?

Why has the dollar jumped in recent weeks?  Global conspriacy and lies?  Are thousands of investors and participants being deluded?  

In yet another sign that Russia and China are set to work together to extricate themselves from a dependence on the dollar specifically and on Western financial institutions more generally, Russia’s largest bank has, for the first time, extended yuan-denominated letters of credit in concert with the Chinese Export-Import bank.

Some events make us question in which of the two we might actually be living in: what if it was some version of Bizarro?

Earlier today, Barack Obama, together with 6 of the world's most powerful leaders (but certainly not Vladimir Putin) congregated in the Bavarian town of Krun where they will for the next two days hunker down at the luxurious Scholss Elmau for the latest G-7 meeting, covering an agenda dealing with climate change, global extremism, and of course, solving the Ukraine crisis (with or without instructions from George Soros on how to proceed). Serious stuff. Obama, however, decided to keep it "folksy" and the lame duck president, content with the direction the world is going, pulled a page right out of National Lampoons European vacation and kicked it back.

"Anshu Jain and Jürgen Fitschen, the embattled co-chief executives of Deutsche Bank AG, plan to announce their resignations, according to people familiar with the matter, an abrupt move that throws into question the future direction of one of the world’s largest banks," WSJ reports. John Cryan, former UBS CFO, is reportedly in line to take the helm. 

What government can do for you...

In the latest jobs report we find the following stunner: since the start of the Second Great Depression, the US has added 2.3 million "foreign-born" workers, offset by just 727K "native-born". This means that the "recovery" has almost entirely benefited foreign-born workers, to the tune fo 3 to 1 relative to native-born Americans!

Sometimes we get the feeling the ruling elites are investing the laws they enact with a kind of impertinent, slap-in-your-face black humor. How else to explain the Orwellian names given to the liberty-crushing laws that have been put in place since the “war on terror” started?