Book Value

You could even make a case that QE is part of TBTF. Chew on that for a while Shirley.

More and more in fashion lately in the financial world is companies taking huge write-downs of some flopped acquisitions....

The NY Fed is the single most powerful entity in charge of the Fed’s daily operations. How can any investor believe that the Fed can manage the system and restore trust when the NY Fed granted MF Global primary dealer status a mere nine months before the latter went bankrupt?

The 2008 crash resulted from the bursting of the biggest bubble in financial history, a ‘credit super-cycle’ that spanned more than three decades. How did this happen? Some might draw comfort from the observation that bubbles are a long established aberration, arguing that the boom-and-bust cycle of recent years is nothing abnormal. Any such comfort would be misplaced, for two main reasons. First, the excesses of recent years have reached a scale which exceeds anything that has been experienced before. Second, and more disturbing still, the developments which led to the financial crisis of 2008 amounted to a process of sequential bubbles, a process in which the bursting of each bubble was followed by the immediate creation of another. Though the sequential nature of the pre-2008 process marks this as something that really is different, in order to put the 'credit cuper-cycle' in context, we must understand the vast folly of globalization, the undermining of official economic and fiscal data, and the fundamental misunderstanding of the dynamic which really drives the economy.

Bigger Tax Payer Bank Bailouts Cometh? If You Think Taxes Are Gonna Be Higher You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet! I welcome one and all to show me how it will not be so.

Investors in the TBTF banks need to understand that the business model for this industry has changed.  Thank Liz Warren

Isn't it amazing that you can get more notoriety for showing your ass and a pretty smile than you can get for outing the scam of the decade through intellectual analysis? More money was lost through the Facebook scam IPO at $38 than Bernie Madoff could ever have pulled off.

AMZN - Profitless, but making it up in volume.   

Define irony: when the most vocal supporter of a dramatic change to the existing tax policy takes advantage of the last few days of the old one...

• BERKSHIRE HAS PURCHASED 9,200 OF CLASS A SHRS AT $131,000-SHR
• BERKSHIRE RAISED PRICE LIMIT FOR BUYBACKS TO 120% BOOK VALUE
• BERKSHIRE MAY BUY ADDED SHRS AT NO MORE THAN 120% BOOK VALUE
• BERKSHIRE BOOSTS BUYBACK PRICE LIMIT TO 120% BOOK VALUE VS 110%

A total $1.2 billion spent to avoid a few hundred million in new taxes. And now back to the hypocrticy of the "Buffett tax", and "Patriotic Millionaires for America." In other news, total donations to pay down the debt in Fiscal 2013 (starting October 1): $290,195.03.

Will Congress go over the fiscal cliff?  Yes, we've been going for decades, really since the social unrest of the 1970s. 

The details of the Spanish bad bank are being released and it is ugly - far uglier than many had expected. And while the Spanish government expects priovate interest to take some of this massively discounted 'crap' off their hands, we have three words: 'deleveraging' and 'no bid!'.

• *RESTOY SAYS BAD BANK AIMS TO BE PROFITABLE
• *SPAIN BAD BANK TO DISCOUNT LOANS AVG 46%; FORECLOSED ASSETS 63%
• *SPAIN AIMS FOR BAD BANK NOT TO COUNT TOWARDS PUBLIC ACCOUNTS
• *SPAIN TO DISCUSS BAD BANK WITH INVESTORS IN COMING DAYS
• *SPAIN BAD BANK TO INCLUDE FORECLOSED ASSETS, LOANS, STAKES

The Spanish government remain in a world of their own with this level of self-delusion. Discunt details below...

With the Associated Press report appended here, the German gold audit story has just exploded into the English-language press with some important revelations.

Overall, the acquisition of ANNB by FNB looks like a transaction that will create value for the acquirer’s shareholders, but it comes at a full price.

German Federal auditors handed in a report slamming the Bundesbank for not inspecting their foreign held gold reserves to verify their book value. The report says the gold bars "have never been physically checked by the Bundesbank itself or other independent auditors regarding their authenticity or weight." Instead, it relies on "written confirmations by the storage sites."  The lion’s share of Germany's gold reserves (nearly 3,400 tons estimated at $190 billion) are housed in vaults of the US Federal Reserve, the Bank of England and the Bank of France since the post-war days, when they were worried about a Cold War Soviet invasion. The Bundesbank stated, “There is no doubt about the integrity of the foreign storage sites in this regard". In contrast with best industry practices Germany’s gold reserves do not seem to be independently verified by a third party. Philipp Missfelder, a politician from Merkel’s own party, has asked the Bundesbank for the right to view the gold bars in Paris and London, but the central bank has denied the request, citing the lack of visitor rooms in those facilities, German’s daily Bild reported. The Bundesbank won't let German parliament members inspect the German gold vaulted abroad because the central bank vaulting facilities supposedly lack "visiting rooms." And yet one of those vaults, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, offers the public tours that include "an exclusive visit to the gold vault".

Somewhere deep in the bowels of the world’s Western central banks lie vaults holding gargantuan piles of physical gold bars… or at least that’s what they all claim.

Our analysis of the physical gold market shows that central banks have most likely been a massive unreported supplier of physical gold, and strongly implies that their gold reserves are negligible today. If Frank Veneroso’s conclusions were even close to accurate back in 1998 (and we believe they were), when coupled with the 2,300 tonne net change in annual demand we can easily identify above, it can only lead to the conclusion that a large portion of the Western central banks’ stated 23,000 tonnes of gold reserves are merely a paper entry on their balance sheets – completely un-backed by anything tangible other than an IOU from whatever counterparty leased it from them in years past. At this stage of the game, we don’t believe these central banks will be able to get their gold back without extreme difficulty, especially if it turns out the gold has left their countries entirely. We can also only wonder how much gold within the central bank system has been ‘rehypothecated’ in the process, since the central banks in question seem so reluctant to divulge any meaningful details on their reserves in a way that would shed light on the various “swaps” and “loans” they imply to be participating in. We might also suggest that if a proper audit of Western central bank gold reserves was ever launched, as per Ron Paul’s recent proposal to audit the US Federal Reserve, the proverbial cat would be let out of the bag – with explosive implications for the gold price.... We realize that some readers may scoff at any analysis of the gold market that hints at “conspiracy”. We’re not talking about conspiracy here however, we’re talking about stupidity. After all, Western central banks are probably under the impression that the gold they’ve swapped and/or lent out is still legally theirs, which technically it may be. But if what we are proposing turns out to be true, and those reserves are not physically theirs; not physically in their possession… then all bets are off regarding the future of our monetary system.