CDO

Ever since it started making complicated bets against some leveraged ETFs, Miller’s Catalyst Macro Strategies Funds has since grown from $500,000 in assets at the start of the year to about $170 million. It achieved a more than 50 percent return this year, placing it far ahead of its competitors.

Everybody can see Janet Yellen standing naked in that corner - more like a box canyon - and it’s not a pretty sight. But the mundane truth probably is that events have finally caught up with the structural distortions of a financial world running on illusion. To everything there is a season, turn, turn, turn, and economic winter is finally upon us. All the world ‘round, people borrowed too much to buy stuff and now they’re all borrowed out and stuffed up. Welcome to the successor to the global economy: the yard sale economy, with all the previously-bought stuff going back into circulation on its way to the dump.

Impunity has been the norm. The reason there have been no efforts made to criminally investigate is obvious. Former banking regulator and current securities Professor Bill Black told Bill Moyers  that "Timothy Geithner, then Secretary of the Treasury, and others in the administration, with the banks, are engaged in a cover up to keep us from knowing what went wrong."

Are you a yield-starved investor? Joshua Siegel has a deal he wants to sell you and it involves subordinated loans originated by "35 community banks, some of them so small they don’t have credit ratings." 

Hedge fund manager exposes the ugly truth about America's energy revolution: it's like the housing bubble but larger!

"I don’t hide tattoos, I don’t take earrings out. I just don’t do that, because ultimately if you don’t like who I am, you’re not going to like what I do."

"As you know, the environment for global macro fundamentals-based trading continues to be challenging. That factor, combined with the lack of certainty over when a recovery will take hold, led us to conclude that the time was right to return capital to you."

On the heels of a veritable bloodbath in Chinese equities overnight which saw the SHCOMP slide a harrowing 8.5%, the entire world is now beginning to take a hard look at the notion that dramatic bouts of selling pressure are aggravated and perhaps triggered by an unwind in the multiple backdoor margin lending channels that allowed investors to skirt official restrictions on leverage and helped to drive the market’s world-beating rally. Here is the complete guide to China's CNY4 trillion shadow margin edifice.

China’s central bank is officially in the business of financing leveraged stock buying and as Bloomberg reports, the country's state-run margin lender now has the capacity to pump the equivalent of five Greek bailouts into leveraged stock trades. 

"The selling pressure so far has mainly come from stock-related borrowings via various unofficial channels where the leverage is much higher," BofAML says of the dramatic sell-off in Chinese equities. On Wednesday, the country's securities regulator moved to reassure markets as the unwind of hundreds of billions in leveraged trades threatens to collapse China's world-beating stock bubble.

China's margin loan balance sits at around CNY2.2 trillion, and while that’s certainly impressive, there’s every reason to believe that at least another CNY500 billion in margin lending has been funneled into the Chinese stock market via the country’s shadow banking complex. As regulators tighten the screws on shadow margin lending, are stocks in for a rude awakening?

This is the REAL issue with interest rates, NOT the economy. 

Elizabeth Warren may or may not understand the "global banking system" as Jamie Dimon alleges, but the JPM CEO certainly does as the following 14 "reasons" clearly confirm...

Two years ago, bank analyst Mike Mayo asked JPM chief Jamie Dimon a simple question: why should affluent customers not pick UBS over JPM due to a mismatch in capital ratios, to which Dimon's response was even simpler: "that's why I'm richer than you." To which we then added: "No logic, no rationale: all about the bottom line, which to Jamie at least is all that matters. The bottom line was indeed all, because as Bloomberg calculated overnight, over the past several years, Jamie Dimon quietly became not just "richer than you", but "much" richer: his net worth is now well over $1 billion!

On Tuesday, Deutsche Bank agreed to a $55 million SEC settlement tied to allegations it hid billions in losses by mismarking its crisis-era derivatives book. The bank has always contended its valuation methodologies were sound. Here is the real story...