Archive - Jun 2015

"Cook also told these millennials, 'Don't shrink from risk.' That's a musty old standard for commencement addresses: Find your passion, follow your dreams, take some risks, blah-blah-blah-blah-blah-blah. It cannot be lost among the most discerning grads that these commencement tips are coming from a generation that left them with crushing student debt, a wobbly job market, unaffordable real estate and cities increasingly ablaze."

All too often investors are bombarded with bullshit presented as facts by talking heads in constant denial and forever protecting their commissions - as opposed to protecting their client's interests. One notable case in point is the "it's different this time" meme surrounding IPOs and their apparent 'realness' in the current new normal vs the 199/2000 dotcom boom/bust. As the following chart shows: yes, this time is different - there has never, ever, been a greater perecentage of unprofitable companies IPOing...

Promptly upon release of today’s GDP update, Steve Liesman and his Wall Street economist pals spent 10 minutes bloviating about why the negative print should be completely ignored. The MSM cheerleaders like Liesman and his pals cannot see the handwriting on the wall because central bank bubble finance has essentially abolished the old rules of macro-economics. Someone should tell them that an economic deja vu is about to happen... all over again!

Can you imagine, say, Steve Jobs allocating 30% of Apple's profits - - forever - - to a given charitable cause?

The EU issued a press release this morning which could perhaps be summed up in 2 words - "not fair." Following the denial-of-entry by Russia of several EU politicians, Russia has released a list of 89 names who will face travel bans - of exactly the same type as EU and US enforced upon numerous Russian elites. Europe is displeased that Russia would dare do unto them as they have done unto others... "we deem this measure as totally arbitrary and unjustified," they exclaimed, adding, "we don’t have any further information on the legal basis or the criteria or the process of these decisions."

Capitalism takes you into the future... with innovation, failure, and surprise. You invest, you lose your money, you try something different, and you stumble forward. Capitalism is constantly burying its mistakes and discovering tomorrow. Cronyism, on the other hand, keeps you in the past. It is today and yesterday trying to stop tomorrow from happening.

One might be predisposed to thinking that monetary policies aimed explicitly at inflating prices for the assets most likely to be concentrated in the hands of the wealthy would have a high likelihood of exacerbating the wealth divide. Not so, says Ben Bernanke in a new blog post. "Certainly, inequality and lack of social mobility are issues of first-order significance for economic policy in general. Should they also be first-order considerations for the making of monetary policy? I have my doubts."

It is time for another sacrificial gold market manipulation crackdown (the same gold market, mind you, which CFTC commissioner and HFT lobby sellout extraordinaire Bart Chilton said was completely unrigged). Only it's not Barcalys, JPM, Virtu, Citadel, the NY Fed, the Bank of England, or even the PBOC - i.e., the real market manipulators -  who is the receiving end of the CME's special breed of "justice." It is another "trade from his parents' home" Indian.

The banking system must be doing great... just days after JPMorgan announced mass layoffs, SkyNews reports that HSBC is preparing to announce a revised headcount target, which insiders said that it was likely to be between 10,000 and 20,000 job cuts.

The banking problems we see all over the world are a direct expression of the limits to growth, specifically the limits to debt creation. We can’t continue to borrow from the future to pay for our comforts and conveniences today because we have no real conviction that these debts can ever be repaid. We certainly wish we could, and the central bankers running the money system would like to pretend that we could by making negligible the cost of borrowing money and engaging in pervasive accounting fraud. But that has only served to cripple the operation of markets and pervert the meaning of interest rates — and, really, as a final result, to destroy any sense of consequence among the people running things everywhere.

If the Fed end its strategy of reinvesting TSY holdings, net supply of treasury paper will be close to a trillion dollar per year, for the next decade, as the gigantic pile of securities on the Fed balance sheet shrinks and interest rate expenses explodes.