ilene's blog

Who could have imagined that the topic of the Speech you give on options expiration day with the dollar making new lows would just so happen to drive the dollar even lower and squeeze the markets higher - that is just a gosh-darn freaky coincidence!

Devaluing the dollar by 12.5% costs US Citizens $3.75Tn of their Dollar-denominated assets in the past 5 months and even if we did hire 1.2M factory workers because it boosted exports (it didn’t and we didn’t), that would still be costing us over $3M per job!

What is to stop U.S. banks and their customers from creating $1 trillion, $10 trillion or even $50 trillion on their computer keyboards to buy up all the bonds and stocks in the world, along with all the land and other assets for sale, in the hope of making capital gains and pocketing the arbitrage spreads by debt leveraging at less than 1% interest cost? This is the game that is being played today.

If only our own Fed were somehow held accountable to the people of this country - even symbolically…

FINRA not only failed, but the question that needs to be fully explored is whether it acted on material, nonpublic information as it liquidated its ARS bonds in 2007, at the expense of the investors it was supposed to be protecting.

As the Joker says in the "what plan?" link above - Nobody panics when things go according to plan, EVEN WHEN THE PLAN IS HORRIFYING!

Then they got cute and produced either the actual note, a copy of the note or a forged note, or an assignment or a fabricated assignment from a party who at best had dubious rights to ownership of the loan to another party who had equally dubious rights, neither of whom parted with any cash to fund either the loan or the transfer of the obligation. . . .

That disgusting, vile, son-of-a-bitch (just my opinion, we report - you decide!) Newt Gingrich is on a 12-city pre-election tour where he is advising Republican candidates to frame the choice for voters between Democrats as "the party of food stamps" while selling the GOP as "the party of paychecks."

GRANDPA JOE: But this roof is made of glass. It’ll shatter into a thousand pieces. We’ll be cut to ribbons! WILLY WONKA: Probably.

We enjoyed being criminals, and enjoyed the money. We had no empathy for the people we hurt. We didn’t even need the money, just wanted more.

Obama said he would be “very interested” in finding ways to lower the corporate tax rate so U.S. companies operating overseas aren’t disadvantaged so MORE FREE MONEY for our Multinational Masters and Bernanke said he refuses to be out-eased by Japan and he's got a whole fleet of helicopters lined up to dump money on our Multinational Masters as well.

If history is any guide, KPMG demonstratively failed to learn the lesson of their misdeeds during the Crazy Eddie audit. I wonder if they are at least better in covering up their mistakes this time around.

Our research on Interoil (IOC) leads us to believe there may be a lot of skeletons in its closet, making it a top choice for our next bearish position.

Another day another falling dollar.

Good thing too or we'd be heading for the toilet this morning.

What Wall Street bears no relationship to any longer is its primary mission in the U.S. economy: to be a fair and efficient allocator of capital to worthy businesses and innovators to propel job growth while also providing a medium for allowing investors to buy or sell stocks and bonds of those businesses at a fair price.