Archive - Story

American adults spent an average of $251 on lottery tickets.  With a return of 53 cents on the dollar, this means the average person threw away $118 on unsuccessful lotto tickets – not a great investment.  So why are we spending so much?  Well, lotteries are a fun, cheap opportunity to daydream about the possibility of becoming an overnight millionaire (or in this case billionaire), but on the flip side people tend to overestimate the odds of winning.  Lower-income demographics spend a much greater portion of their annual earnings on lottery tickets than do wealthier ones. 

While the President will do his best to put a positive spin on the current economic environment, and the success of his policies, when he gives his “State of the Union” address, it would be worth remembering whom he is actually addressing. It is also worth considering that much of this is likely the reason that Donald Trump is surging in Conservative polling. As with all things – it is the lens from which you view the world that defines what you see. For Wall Street, things could not be better. For Main Street, most everything could be better. The President has a lot of “convincing” to do if he expects to change voter’s attitudes between now and the 2016 Presidential election.

It's not the economy (or fundamentals), stupid - It's The Fed!

This decline is inevitable in fast-expanding economies that play fast and loose with credit/debt and leverage. All the phantom wealth piled up in China's boost phase is now melting down, and the China Syndrome will trigger a meltdown in global phantom assets.

Ammon Bundy and the armed militiamen holed up at a remote bird sanctuary in Orgeon tore down a government fence on Monday in a move they say will give local ranchers access to federal pastureland. The group also doubled down on their pledge to remain at the wildlife refuge until the government frees Dwight Hammon and his son Steven, who were sent back to jail last week on arson charges.

Jim Cramer is so imbricated within the strictures of CNBC, so enamored of his guests, so genuflective and collegial that he has no critical distance to see the flaws of the very system of which he is a part. People like Cramer who are so invested (literally and figuratively) in the current financial system are loathe to realize that it is farcical, that it is built on toothpicks, that the corporate and government numbers are cooked, that the ‘recovery’ is a joke, that the ‘markets’ are rigged by central banks, that wrongdoing is epidemic, that there are no longer any rational connections between prices and fundamentals, that we have passed beyond reality into fantasyland. Cramer is the embodiment of a society awash in information but starved in meaning.

... more than 100% of Alcoa's "EPS" in the quarter was due to what management thought was another quarter of recurring "non-recurring", non-one time "one-time" charges.

"Bikers, hooligans, and bouncers" - oh my! It's vigilante justice time in Cologne, where "gangs" of angry Germans organized a "human hunt" on Facebook before attacking a group of Pakistanis in the city center.

Presented with no comment...

The problem is that when this sucker goes down, to paraphrase the immortal words of George W. Bush, you have to wonder how much other stuff of everyday life for everyday people it will take down with it. The discovery phase of our predicament began ever so crisply in the very first business week of the new year. The loss of faith in value of all kinds will play out sequentially. It is starting in financial “assets” because so many of these are just faith-based stories, and in this quant-and-algo age it has gotten awfully hard to tell what is good story and what is just a swindle.

"... after four long years without any profits growth, the risk is that MSCI World mean-reverts to its original 2011 PE multiple, which would imply a further 50% decline from here. Even decline back to average would imply a 15% drop."

Risk is now everywhere. If you invest in the markets, there is risk of temporary or permanent loss of capital. Even if you do nothing and simply hold cash in a bank, there is bail-in risk and financial repression. This is our reality now...Nothing is risk-free in this system of chaos. In a way, today’s mad scientist central bankers have engineered financial dinosaurs back into our time. They think they can control the system. But judging just from the first chaotic week in financial markets so far in 2016, life is finding a way.

The default of Sherwin Alumina, a US subsidiary of Glencore, refocused the market's attention on the one company which in September was among the hardest hit in the post-China devaluation rout, and the immediate result was that while Glencore stock plunged and is once again approaching all time lows, a more ominous development was that GLEN's CDS spiked to as much as 950 basis points, the highest since April 2009 and suggesting far more pain is in store for the commodity trading giant.