Fat Cats

While it is already known that the first Friday the 13th of 2012 will be very memorable, at least for France, a bigger, and more philosophical question is, whether Friday the 13th is in general unlucky for stocks. UBS' Art Cashin provides the veteran perspective, as well as unravel some false myths about the term Triskaidekaphobia.

This tax is going to happen, and we're going to hate it.

Now we all get to wince once again watching Greenberg trying to get his final Fat Cat licks in.

I wonder what goes through Ben Bernanke’s mind as he sits in his gold plated boardroom in the majestic Marriner Eccles building in Washington DC and decides to screw grandmothers in order to further enrich Wall Street bankers. He just pledged to keep interest rates at zero percent for two more years. Ben is a supposedly book smart man. Does he have no guilt or shame for what he has wrought? How does he sleep at night knowing he has created bloody revolutions around the globe due to his inflationary zero interest policy? People are dying because he has decided that an elite group of Wall Street bankers who recklessly brought down the worldwide financial system in 2008 deserve to be kept alive and enriched at the expense of the many.

Excuse the rant............

Juvenal makes reference to the Roman practice of providing free wheat to Roman citizens as well as costly circus games and other forms of entertainment as a means of gaining political power through populism. Roman politicians devised a plan in 140 B.C. to win the votes of the poor: giving out cheap food and entertainment, “bread and circuses”. The Roman politicians realized this would be the most effective way to rise to power and stay in power. With the revolting display of political theater in the last few weeks, I couldn’t help but consider the parallels between the Roman Empire and the American Empire. The entire debt ceiling farce was a circus on an epic scale – The Greatest Show on Earth. The American public was treated to high wire acts of near debt experiences, Senators putting their heads into the mouths of lions, and hundreds of clowns riding tiny bikes with squeaking horns. In the end, American politicians did what they do best - pretended to solve a spending problem without cutting spending. Only in America could politicians put the country on course to increase its national debt from $14.5 trillion to $23 trillion by 2021 and declare they are cutting spending. For those that need to visualize the lies of politicians, take a gander at this chart and try to find the cuts in spending.

There's an EMERGENCY ... give us all your money!!!

Take a guess who the winner is? (Hint: If you're not big oil, you're the loser on this trade)

My take on what may happen to confidence.

A look at one of those "new ideas" to resolve the debt limit impasse. I think it is a No Sale.

On a very slow trading day, some big picture observations from Russ Certo of Gleacher: "Good afternoon. The S&P 500 slid for a sixth straight week, its longest swoon since July 2008. The Dow closed below 12,000 for the first time since March, and 6.7% off the highs and has been bantering around all day today. Declining stocks outpaced advancing ones by 4-to-1 ratio on Friday. Stock, money market and muni funds had a weekly net outflows averaging $4.2 billion, $1.1 billion and 141 million respectively, in the latest four weeks. Investment grade corporate issuance fell to its slowest pace of the year last week spooked by a host of global, sovereign and geopolitical items. Just $6.3 billion in new investment grade bonds were sold last week in this climate. The “Sell in May and walk away” mantra is on trader’s minds as last year the Dow receded nearly 14% from late April through early July. Remember the calls to attention to the Hindenburg formations which cast a cloud over markets before they climbed a wall of worry since?"

Pictures are worth a thousand words. These pictures tell the story of QE.

Adding insult to injury, the SEC costs business billions of dollars annually – probably scores of billions, if you take all the secondary and trickle-down costs into account: direct fees, legal fees, printing, mailing, and other costs of compliance. They have a direct budget cost of something over a billion dollars per year, but that’s trivial relative to the indirect costs they impose on the economy. They ought to be ashamed, diverting a significant fraction of GDP from productive use into the pockets of parasites, in the name of protecting business and investors, when they do the opposite. The SEC is like a Pied Piper who attracts ravening hordes of rats with his flute instead of getting rid of them – and then charges people tenfold for the “service.” This is one agency I would abolish, immediately and completely. Not a single one of its functions should even be handed off to other agencies. The SEC serves absolutely no useful purpose whatsoever – just the opposite. It’s not a question of getting it under control or paring it back. It should be eliminated in toto.

We're getting fleeced, and the President hires the best fleecer out there as his adviser.

Sounds good, but it will backfire. It's not the billionaires who will pay.