Real estate

"At least 50% of real estate agents have closed down."

"The market is only those who can afford to pay cash."

"Giddy up! The Four Horsemen of Tech", July 17, 2015 - "Google, Apple, Amazon, and Facebook -- helped push the Nasdaq to an all-time high Friday morning."

"Cramer's Four Horsemen Of Tech" - September 25, 2007 "Apple, Research in Motion, Google and Amazon.com are up 31% as a group since he recommended them back on June 6. Despite the market being down today, each of these four stocks hit new highs."

"The Four Horsemen Of The New Economy" - October 2, 2000 "More than any other collection of companies, Oracle, Sun Microsystems, EMC, and Cisco Systems represent the building blocks of Net business."

Two sides separated by the money line.

You know your true level of inflation. You know it’s not 0.1%. You know it’s somewhere between 4% and 10%. You know your government is lying to you. You know the captured corporate media perpetuates the lies. You know those in control of the government must lie to keep their Ponzi scheme going. You know they are just following the Edward Bernays playbook: “The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society." They want you to believe it’s for your own good. Do you think it’s for your own good?

Everyone seems to be focusing on Greece these days – a country so indebted that it needs even more loans to repay just a fraction of its gigantic credits. Clearly this is unsustainable and something has to give. Even the IMF agrees. But what about the other Southern European countries? Actually, Portugal’s financial situation is looking particularly shaky, and any hiccups could have serious cross-border repercussions from Madrid all the way to Berlin.

The WSJ has released yet another gold hit piece calling it a "pet rock' and gold bugs "subjects of a laboratory experiment on the psychology of cognitive dissonance" just one day after the PBOC reveals it has added the biggest amount of gold in history in order to "ensure security." But the biggest irony is that none other than Citigroup made a far bolder case that it is not the ownership of gold but of stocks that is the ultimate act of faith: "investors remain united in their faith in the central banks – if not for their ability to create growth, then at least in their ability to push up asset prices. And yet the limits of that faith are increasingly on display." So who is right?

The ongoing downshift in property construction will continue to undercut China's demand for commodities, raw materials and machinery, weigh on property as well as mining and industrial investment, and be a drag for overall GDP growth in 2016. The most direct and important channel through which this impact spreads is trade linkages, given China's role as the top exporter and second largest importer in the world.

Due to significant retail participation and the fact that the equity mania in China has served as a distraction for a nation coping with decelerating economic growth and a bursting property bubble, some (and we were among the first) began to suggest that the broader economy and indeed, social stability, may be at risk in China if stocks continued to fall. The extent to which this suggestion represented a real concern (as opposed to the ravings of a tin foil hat fringe blog) was underscored by the extraordinary measures China adopted in a desperate attempt to stop the bleeding and, later by several sellside strategists who began to warn about possible spillovers into the real economy. Now, with Beijing still struggling to restore the stock bubble, the first signs of knock-on effects are beginning to emerge.

The last time these criteria were met... stocks plunged over 90% over the next 24 months.

Just a little over a month after we learned that Jamie Dimon recently became a billionaire, Bloomberg reports that yet another TBTF CEO has joined the billionaire banker club and frankly, we’re surprised it took this long because after all, when you’re the CEO of the blood-sucking cephalopod that holds the political and financial fate of the world in its tentacles, it seems only right that you would have been a billionaire long before any other banker on the Street.

While the markets have improved since the "resolution" of the Greek crisis, in my opinion we would have expected substantially more given the overall "angst" that the situation was generating. Yet, the market remains in a bearish consolidation pattern. Furthermore, relative strength, momentum and volume remain a detraction from the "bullishness" of this week's "crisis resolution rally."

The trick is to borrow as much as you can and leverage it to the hilt, and buy, buy, buy.

Having taken on hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of loans to achieve the ultimate goal of becoming an Ivy League law graduate, it appears, in at least one case, that your abilities are not required. As WSJ reports, Adam Leitman Bailey, a Manhattan attorney who runs a real estate firm, says he looks to hire law school graduates who have grit, ambition and a resolve to succeed in the legal profession. For that reason, he says, his firm has instituted a rule: If your resume lists your law school as Yale, Harvard, Columbia, Cornell or University of Pennsylvania, you need not apply because you won’t get the job.