Archive - Aug 2015 - Story

With the usual two year delay, others such as Reuters, are starting to notice that under the Tesla hood there are nothing but cockroaches. And now that the growth "story" has taken a back seat following the latest guidance cut in deliveries, fears that the company will have to dilute shareholders to keep the "story" afloat, are rapidly emerging. Case in point, Reuters calculation of a fact that was known to most observers but certainly not to retail enthusiasts who "bought the stock just because others bought the stock", i.e., that Tesla loses about $4000 on ever car it makes.

... in under a minute, the hateful script had taken offline the entire system in much the same manner as chucking a spanner into a running engine might stop a car. The databases, as always, were flushing their precious data onto many different disks as this happened, so massive, irreversible data corruption occurred. That was it, the biggest computer system in the bank, maybe even the world, was down. And it wasn't coming back up again quickly. At the time this failure occurred there was more than $12 TRILLION of trades at various stages of the settlement process in the system. This represented around 20% of ALL trades on the global stock market.

The police and surveillance state predicted in the forward-looking 1940s classic “1984” by George Orwell, has slowly, but steadily, come to fruition. However, like a frog sitting idly in a pan of steadily-warming water, too many Americans still seem unaware that the slow boil of big government is killing their constitutional liberties. The latest sign of this stealth takeover of civil rights and freedom was epitomized in recent Senate testimony by FBI Director James Comey, who voiced his objections to civilian use of encryption to protect personal data – information the government has no automatic right to obtain.

"The risk could be that brokers may not be able to execute forced liquidations in case of sharp declines in the overall stock market. It can be positive if they are using the funds to develop new businesses but negative for China’s financial market if they keep lending out for margin financing."

"There's a saying, 'if there's peace, it will start from Cizre, and if there's war, it will start from here as well.' And we can say we have a civil war in Turkey."

We truly live in a country run by idiots. The contradictions between common sense and government actions are just too many to have happened by accident or chance. But perhaps the leaders are not the idiots. Maybe the people tolerating such leaders and laws are the true idiots.

After 30 years of torrid expansion, perhaps the single most consequential factor in China’s economy is how much of it is a “black box”: a system with visible inputs and outputs whose internal workings are opaque. China’s recorded history stretches back thousands of years, but in terms of applicable financial and economic parallels to the current economy, there is no precedent. China’s leadership is truly in uncharted waters. This in itself heightens the risk of miscalculation and basing policies on faulty premises.

“In spite of all the rhetoric, we will go deeper in debt, the Fed will print more money, and the value of the dollar will continue to plummet.” - Ron Paul

Never in history have the economic and political structures been so manipulated by those who are responsible for their safekeeping; never has so much been at stake, in so many countries, and facing collapse, all at the same time.

A rising interest rate trend would, according to Gibson, encourage prices to rise towards and likely through the Fed's 2% target inflation rate. This is not how financial traders see it, nor does the Fed. They expect the exact opposite, believing that rising interest rates are bad for demand and commodity prices, which is why the decision has been deferred for so long. The evidence tells us this view is mistaken and that rising interest rates will be accompanied by rising commodity prices.

"This guy's hair so strange. I thought it was Photoshopped at first."

Overnight we got another acute reminder of just who is lying hunched over, comatose in the driver's seat of global commerce: the country whose July exports just crashed by 8.3% Y/Y (and down 3.6% from the month before) far greater than the consensus estimate of only a 1.5% drop, and the biggest drop in four months following the modest June rebound by 2.8%: China.

During the most recent quarter debt issuance by US companies reached an all-time high, raising a question as to why companies still need to borrow so much after selling $7 trillion of U.S. debt securities since 2008. This weeks S&P Media index swoon leaves no doubt as to the answer. Companies have not been borrowing to grow; they have been borrowing in order to flush cash into the casino. Charles Ponzi once had a scheme that was not essentially different. Yes, and it worked until it didn’t.

Peak-er Debt... or redistribution... or both?

It makes logical sense that China would understate its gold aspirations. If you had the means to acquire hundreds, or even thousands, of tons of gold, you’d want to do so as stealthily as possible in order to avoid tipping off the market. If your strategic objective was to dramatically boost gold reserves over a period of several years, you wouldn’t want to see the price rise – at least not while you’re still accumulating. And if you had no ethical qualms about interfering in the market, you’d want to rig prices lower so you could obtain more ounces. Chinese officials are more than willing to manipulate markets, whether through subterfuge, deceit, or outright force.