Goldman Sachs

Barron’s should have published its gushing cover story on Jamie Dimon’s stewardship of JPMorgan today – as an April Fool’s joke.

It's the debt-saturated "worst since Lehman" economy!

Having already proven that their institutions are above the law in the aftermath of the financial crisis, executives at the “Too Big to Fail and Jail” banks have decided it’s time to teach Senate Democrats a lesson. Not being content with trillions in taxpayer backed bailouts to protect and further consolidate virtually all wealth within their oligarch fiefdoms, these bankers are irate at the notion that a commoner would dare criticize their unassailable crony privilege. What Wall Street wants is one hundred Chucky Schumers in the Senate.

New report says there are only "20 years of known mineable reserves of gold." Most of the larger gold producing countries, not just Australia, the U.S. and South Africa but also Canada, Peru, Indonesia and others, have all seen production drops in recent years - see charts.

In addition to Janet Yellen's confused ramblings at 3:45 pm on Friday, which did all they could to push the S&P to close green for the year, the other catalyst that sent stocks higher on Friday afternoon was the unconfirmed rumor reported by the WSJ that Intel would purchase Altera, the news of which briefly sent INTC stock higher than the entire market cap of Altera on what can only be described as the latest short squeeze. Yet one entity that appears unhappy with this news is none other than Goldman Sachs which likely was snubbed as an advisor or an underwriter by Intel in recent months, and which all else equal, once again slaughtered the muppets who listened to its recommendation to Sell Intel stock (just days after another comparable slaughter by Goldman on SanDisk longs this time on the Conviction Buy side).

With speculation growing of a Greek pivot from The Twilight Zone to The Eurasian Zone, the following somewhat mind-numbing chart tells you all you need to know about how The Greek people feel...

It's a day of ‘master of the universe,’ central bank speeches as both Bank of England governor Mark Carney and Fed chief Janet Yellen preach their ultra loose policies and certain market participants lap up the Gospel according to Mark … and Janet ...

All Wars Are Bankers’ Wars

Update: We remove SanDisk from the Conviction List post the negative preannouncement this morning. Our positive call has clearly been wrong and the timing was particularly poor.

If you liked it at $83, you'll love it at $66... is apparently the message from Goldman Sachs as last week's transition of Sandisk to the company's "Conviction Buy" list has left clients with a Cramer-esque muppet-hole of around 17% (and rising). One wonders if it is still a conviction buy... or if Goldman should be convicted for selling it to clients...

Oil prices bounced back on March 24 on a sliding U.S. Dollar, and then again overnight on Middle East turmoil, but the pain may not be over yet.

The China-led development bank essentially marks an epochal shift away from traditionally US-dominated multinational institutions like the IMF and the ADB. Meanwhile, it also represents an implicit attempt by the Chinese to usher in a kind of sino-Monroe Doctrine. The more isolated the US becomes as it relates to the new venture, the more transparent its motives seem. This was never about “standards” (the original excuse for Washington’s opposition to the bank), but rather about stifling Chinese ambition. "America seems to be confirming China’s darkest fears: it has adopted a policy of containment that is wrong in principle and has failed in practice," notes The Economist.

Four and a half years after Brazil's FinMin Guido Mantega first re-introduced the world to the term "currency wars," it appears the Brazilians have admitted defeat. Amid what Goldman calls a sharp decline in consumer confidence - to the lowest level in series history - which could also extend the ongoing macroeconomic adjustment processes and therefore delay the recovery of the economy; Brazil's central bank has announced that it will no longer intervene to support the Real via its Dollar-Swap program. In a SNB2.0-esque move, though somewhat anticipated by the market, Brazil enables the devaluation that has occurred to perhaps extend (improving competitiveness) and removing what was becoming a notable fiscal drag. Implicitly, Brazil just followed the Swiss and admitted defeat in the global currency war...

Back in 2010, a panel of Financial Times "experts" was asked to rank Europe's finance ministers. Nineteen European finance ministers were judged. Greece's then finance minister George Papaconstantinou was found to have the best political skills among the 19 EU ministers and got an over 8th rank overall. Specifically, as Keep Talking Greece reported then, the FT said Papaconstantinou  had "the best political skills after displaying “panache” in his handling of the country’s economic crisis." That was then, this is now: Yesterday a special court found him guilty of fabricating a Swiss bank account document and  handed him a one-year suspended prison sentence.