Archive - Mar 10, 2010 - Blog entry

David Loglisci, who was Hevesi's chief investment officer at New York's state pension fund, has agreed to dish to investigators for Attorney General Andrew Cuomo on a culture of corruption that existed in the office.

What do the January unemployment numbers mean? How about February?

GATA must be gulping hard as Goldman, GETCO, Citadel, MS, UBS & DRW announce the purchase of minority stakes in NYSE Liffe U.S., which administers 100 oz. gold futures, 5,000 oz. silver futures, options on gold and silver futures, and mini-sized 33.2 oz. gold and 1,000 oz. silver futures. The long-suspected ringleader of silver futures short-sided shenanigans, JPM, was conspicuously absent from today's NYSE press release. David Simon himself (The Wire) couldn't write a seedier script of flagrant fraud and regulatory remiss.

1st Q for the SSTF is like all of last year. Bad news.

My favorite party boy economist, Nouriel Roubini, just came out with his analysis for the second half and he notes that we may be heading toward a double-dip recession. Too much negative news, he frets. I have been saying this for some time.

It would appear that European leaders are back at their usual table.

Speaking at the Bookings Institute before meeting with the US administration, Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou blamed “unprincipled speculators” and “ill-regulated” financial markets for pushing Greece to the brink of financial ruin and dragging down the euro. Along the way he convinced France’s Nicholas Sarkozy, that another financial crisis is around the corner if the CDS market is not curtailed. Sadly, we agree with the conclusion, but many European “leaders” are confusing cause and effect. Keith McCullough, at Hedgeye, explained it best yesterday when he said, “markets don’t lie; politicians do . . . hearing politicians talk about markets is like watching a southern belle try to ice fish.”

If you think that the world of crime has to be shady and underhand, you are wrong. With the beginning of the fourth world war, organised crime has globalised its activities. In this new war, politics, as the organiser of the nation state, no longer exists. Now politics serves solely in order to manage the economy, and politicians are now merely company managers. An oft misunderstand leader, Subcomandante Marcos, now Delegado Zero, tried to warn us more than 12 years ago that "it takes no more than a few minutes for companies and states to be sunk", and that they would be sunk, not by military theater operations, but by hurricanes of finance. More than a decade later, with many of his predictions now coming true, perhaps it's finally time we started listening to him.

A detailed overview of the current state of charge-offs, delinquencies and (yes) improvements in the mortgage industry - and most importantly what can be discerned from these trends...

Running our cars on moonshine is far more expensive than it looks. Cruising to Wal-Mart in our Hummers, while Africa and Asia starve. Corn grown for ethanol now occupies 10% of the total arable land in the US. The world’s largest producer, Brazil, is shut out of the US to keep our prices high. The birth of yet another entrenched lobby in Washington. Is Iowa really worth it?