Archive - Apr 2012 - Blog entry

The 2 Millions Missing Jobs. Without them, nothing will work.

So let's talk Greece, Paris and Natural Gas. 

This is the mother of all bombshells in Europe and no one is talking about it. Germany basically announced that it will allow German banks to DUMP euro-zone government bonds off their balance sheets. It also announced it will provide up to 400 billion euros in backstops and 80 billion euros for bank recapitalization.

Bankruptcies, jobs, and the hoped-for deus ex machina....

The Apple trade, it works very well... util it doesn't. What happens when ALL of those funds change course???

Fuel Pool 35 Miles from Boston – which Is Highly Vulnerable to Earthquakes – Contains More Radioactive Cesium than Released In BOTH Major Nuclear Accidents and ALL Nuclear Bomb Tests

And we thought the 25:1 WTI to Henry Hub ratio reached in August 2009 was parabolic...

The European debt struggle may have just entered a new phase. Don’t blink. Like any classy magician’s trick the idea is to get you looking one place while the real action is going on somewhere else. And that has been the recipe over the past week or so. While everyone has been watching the Spanish and Portuguese debt auctions, the real damage was done in Germany where the German government’s bid-cover ratio on a ten-year bund auction came in less than ‘one.’  

So, which is it? Are we in the midst of an epic bull run, or an epic run of bull shit. Place your bets.

Late last year, I paid a visit to Josh Brown ("The Reformed Broker") and had a pleasant chat. I went to his blog a week later and put up a comment, shown below, stating my belief that Facebook's IPO day would mark an important turning point in the market.

What makes this time different? Several items:

1. The Crisis coming from Europe will be far, far larger in scope than anything the Fed has dealt with before.
2. The Fed is now politically toxic and cannot engage in aggressive monetary policy without experiencing severe political backlash (this is an election year).
3. The Fed’s resources are spent to the point that the only thing the Fed could do would be to announce an ENORMOUS monetary program which would cause a Crisis in of itself.

The real problem with CDS trading by large banks such as JPM is not the speculative positions but instead the vast conflict of interest between the lending side of the house and the trading side

Since the 1980s, the U.S. Has Secretly Helped Japan Build Up Its Nuclear Weapons Program ... Pretending It Was "Nuclear Energy" and "Space Exploration" ...

If we all were to make the significant decisions in our lives based upon a happiness quotient instead of the resultant monetary gain, how drastically would our world and our reality change?

But anyway, the big thing is liquidity right now, not whether or not you have a job.