Archive - May 15, 2015 - Story

“the creepiest thing David Cameron has ever said.”

Un-Photoshopped Reuters photo sums up US foreign policy perfectly as Abdul Latif bin Rashid Al Zayani, representing the Gulf Co-operation Council, appears to leave U.S. President Barack Obama hanging during a welcome ceremony at the White House this week.

Satellite images dated October 2014 appear to show a battery of six ZPU-4s lined up in front of "some sort of downrange targets" just outside of Pyongyang, suggesting that executions by anti-aircraft gun may not be all that uncommon in North Korea and reinforcing the following message: "No napping."

Last week, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and New York Mayor Bill de Blasio published their prescription for reviving the American dream. They are right to focus on the dream. They are wrong in their understanding of American history and the role government can play in restoring and fostering the dream.

While America may have troops in around 150 countries around the world, it still has not 'officially' invaded as many as Britain managed throughout its history... but there's still time.

Did you know there exists a highly lucrative business in America that consists of helping pregnant Chinese women get into the U.S. merely to give birth and get their children passports?

May is usually the time when farmers in Japan's Fukushima prefecture - best known for being the tragic venue of the 2011 Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant disaster - plant rice. This year, however, they will be planting something else: an unknown, and quite lethal, amount of radioactive dust.

There is a specter haunting America... and all the developed nations of the world. It is the specter of a debt revolution.  Few in the White House realized they had made such a calamitous mistake when the president ended the convertibility of the dollar into gold. And yet it created a world in which parents and grandparents could prey on their grandchildren... for the next 44 years. And it’s still not over.

"China is reversing course on a major effort to tackle its hefty local government debt problem, marking a setback for a priority reform aimed at getting its financial house in order," WSJ reports. The abrupt about-face by Beijing, which will now allow local governments to once again tap shadow banking conduits for high interest loans, comes as the PBoC gets set to ramp up an LTRO-like program designed to essentially monetize trillions in local government debt. The interplay between the debt swap program, Chinese-style LTROs, and the decision to drop the ban on LGFV financing could set the stage for a dramatic increase in the country's already massive debt pile.

For decades in art circles it was either a rumour or a joke, but now it is confirmed as a fact. The Central Intelligence Agency used American modern art – including the works of such artists as Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko – as a weapon in the Cold War.

"Distract"-gate...

We present the likely winner of the next election...

"Global trade of goods and services has been in the doldrums [and] if predominantly structural, EM economies should not count on meaningful demand boosts coming from above-trend growth in DM. With Fed rate hikes looming, a jammed trade channel means less growth offsets to the anticipated tightening in financial conditions."

While the market was topping out, Tepper was actively adding to his bullish exposure, but not in the form of many new stock positions, when in fact he partially unloaded 15 of his 38 positions, while adding 12 new positions. It was 2 of these new additions that were particularly notable: just like in early 2014, Tepper is once again back to index investing, having added a whopping $939 million in notional-equivalent SPY Calls, and $413 million in notional-equivalent QQQ Calls. In other words, Tepper is once again making a very levered beta bet that the market will resume climbing, and he can capture the upside through SPY and QQQ calls.

"To critics who warn that pumping trillions of dollars into the economy in a short period is bound to drive up inflation, today's central bankers point to stagnant consumer prices and say, 'Look, Ma, no inflation.' But this ignores the fact that when money is nominally free, strange things happen, and today record-low rates are fueling an unprecedented bout of inflation across asset prices."