Archive - Jun 2013 - Blog entry

$1.4 trillion in QE bought a bear market for Japan. Good luck to the rest of the QE crowd.

What do NYU Stern School of Business, world renknown professors of risk and analytics, and BoomBustBlog have in common? Wild horses couldn't drag a penny of our money through the French banking system!

This past March, Jeroen Dijsselbloem, the head of the finance ministers of the eurozone, shocked the markets with seemingly off-the-cuff comments suggesting that the Cyprus banking solution will, “serve as a model for dealing with future banking crises.”¹ Depositors across Europe took a collective gasp of horror – could banks possibly confiscate depositors’ funds in a form of daylight robbery? Indeed they could, and last week the Bank for International Settlements (“BIS”), the Central Bank's Central Bank, published what we have referred to as ‘the template’; a blueprint outlining the steps to handle the failure of a major bank and the conditions to be met before ‘bailing-in’ deposits.

Repossessions! Home repossessions in the USA increased by 11% in May. Foreclosure filings (default notices and scheduled auctions as well as repossessions) were also up by 2.3% (148, 054) according to a report just published today by RealtyTrac.

Apple bond buyers, after paying a premium to bathe in the Steve Jobs RDF (Reality Distortion Field), consequently get bathed with a 9% loss within weeks. I suppose an "I told you so" would be inappropriate here?

This week, the US Ministry of Propaganda presented a patently absurd gem of a news article in which it equated a growing percentage of US workers quitting their jobs in April as a sign that Americans’ confidence in the US economy is returning.

Foreigners are net buyers of Japanese stocks in the most recent week.  When they have bene sellers it has been very small amounts.  Japanese investors for their part continue to sell foreign assets and at arond the average pace seen over the last several months.  

Paul Fisher Head of Markets at the Bank of England told the economic worriers of the UK that the BoE would not pull the stoppers out on the economic stimulus plan in the UK and that the “macroeconomic outlook here is not as bright as in the US, therefore we are some way behind them in terms of return to anything like trend growth”. Has Mr. Fisher been to the US recently?

BANZAI7 FOOD AND BEVERAGE WARNING APPLIES!

The Dirty Little Secret About Mass Surveillance: It Doesn’t Keep Us Safe

Dare 'Ye Test the Analysis To Ascertain It's Virility? Madness, I say! Sheer, Utter Madness! In other words - SYSTEMIC RISK is here, NOW!

Milton Friedman once said that “if you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in five years there’d be a shortage of sand”. I think if he were around still, he would need to revise that.

Goldman Sachs has suggested that there may be up to 349 Initial Public Offerings (IPOs) taking place in China this year. But, it’s not the Chinese capital markets that those companies will be wanting. Chinese firms are still hell-bent on getting floated on the world’s biggest and best stock exchange, and rightly so.

A Roundup of What's REALLY Going On ...

You have nothing to fear, if you have nothing to hide--Joseph Goebbels