Gambling

It's not easy being a millionaire in the New Normal.

The leniency shown former CIA Director (and retired General) David Petraeus by the Justice Department in sparing him prison time for the serious crimes that he has committed puts him in the same preferential, immune-from-incarceration category as those running the financial institutions of Wall Street, where, incidentally, Petraeus now makes millions. By contrast, “lesser” folks – and particularly the brave men and women who disclose government crimes – get to serve time, even decades, in jail. Behold, the virtual immunity enjoyed by the well connected.

But GOVERNMENT Is the Main Problem ... and Re-Distribution of Wealth Is NOT the Answer

With escorts forced to travel and with spending on alcohol and gambling on the decline, there's still one area of the vice economy which offers a compelling investment opportunity and thanks to Bloomberg, we now know which 55 stocks to focus on in order to capitalize off of the rise of legalized marijuana. 

If you’re inclined to agree with the notion that trends in cash-based businesses are a good leading indicator when it comes to assessing where consumer spending (and thus the US economy) is headed going forward, you should expect the string of retail sales misses to continue because as Andrew Zatlin notes, spending on hookers, booze, and gambling is now sliding, forcing some escorts to take their show on the road.

Central bankers in the U.S., Europe and Asia have created another massive bubble. This time it is a bubble in stocks, bonds and real estate simultaneously. There is no place to hide. But we’d put my money on war, chaos, and revolution. There will be no impunity for our gambling.

The biggest star of today's ECB's press conference was not Mario Draghi but 21-year-old German feminist, Josephine Witt, an ex-Femen activist who jumped on Draghi's desk wearing an "ECB Dick-tatorship", a slogan she repeatedly screamed as she was led away by security guards. She threw paper copies of her demands at Mr Draghi, while showering him with confetti that were created from her finely chopped up manifesto. Who is Josephine Witt and what is her message?

As the ongoing collapse in economic productivity continues in America, and Alan Greenspan's concerns grow, the call for an end to the diversion of corporate spending to instantly shareholder-friendly actions comes from an unusual source. Larry Fink - CEO of the largest asset manager in the world - has unleashed a letter to 500 CEOs around the world  - telling them that "the effects of the short-termist phenomenon are troubling both to those seeking to save for long-term goals such as retirement and for our broader economy,” bucking the dividend/buyback trend that investors are demanding. As NYTimes notes, the shortsightedness that pervades corporate America is just a symptom of a larger issue. "This is not just a corporate problem," Fink explains, "It's a societal problem, we’re currently living in a "gambling society."

Hillary rose to fame delivering an idealistic commencement address at the beginning of her career. But like the generation she represents, she has betrayed those grand ideals over a lifetime of compromise, expediency, self-promotion and complacent acquisition of power, wealth and fame. She doesn’t deserve another stint at the podium - let alone the bully pulpit.

The problem with the relentless scramble into London real-estate is that it was almost entirely driven by the high end, which as we have reported tirelessly over the past 4 years, has become - alongside the US ultra luxury real estate market - the new "Swiss bank account": a mostly anonymous place (with anonymous LLCs and Corps buying on behalf of uber-rich foreign oligarchs) where tax evaders can park their cash, with the NAR's, and the government's, blessing. And now, the party is over. As the FT reports, "sales of homes worth more than £2m have dropped by 80 per cent in the past year."... "It is like the 1970s again, when waves of wealthy people left Britain and it was a disaster.”

GE’s announcement that its getting out of the finance business should be a reminder of how crony capitalism is corrupting and debilitating the American economy. The ostensible reason the company is unceremoniously dumping its 25-year long build-up of the GE Capital mega-bank is that it doesn’t want to be regulated by Washington as a systematically important financial institution under Dodd-Frank. Oh, and that its core industrial businesses have better prospects. We will see soon enough about its oilfield equipment and wind turbine business, or indeed all of its capital goods oriented businesses in a radically deflationary world drowning in excess capacity. But at least you can say good riddance to GE Capital because it was based on a phony business model that was actually a menace to free market capitalism. Its deplorable raid on the public purse during the Lehman crisis had already demonstrated that in spades.

“I’m staying conscious. Some people are buying stocks like they’re gambling in Macau," an investor in Hong Kong tells Bloomberg, underscoring what happens when a bubble in one market begins to spill over into another market. We suppose this is further evidence that no one is planning on listening to the China Securities Regulatory Commission, who recently warned that investors “shouldn’t be thinking if they don’t buy now, [they’ll] miss it.”

At this point 15 years ought to count for something. After all, we have now used up one-seventh of this century. So you can’t say its too early to tell what’s going on or to identify the underlying trends. So, after another Jobs Friday: here is the tally: The number of breadwinner jobs in the US economy is still 2 million below where it was when Bill Clinton still had his hands on matters in the Oval Office.

Why QE will never induce consumers to spend and is in fact DE-flationary.

The root of support for the drug war is simply this: trust in government. Unnecessary, irrational, and naive trust in government. The war on drugs is a war on individual liberty, private property, limited government, the Constitution, American taxpayers, personal responsibility, the free market, and a free society that has ruined more lives than drugs themselves. Every facet of government that contributes in some way to the monstrous evil that is the war on drugs should be dismembered, root and branch, and cast to the four winds.