Warren Buffett

Tank cars, once feverishly ordered during the US shale boom, are sitting on sidings. Lessors are obtaining car rents 20-30 per cent below early 2015 — “if you’re lucky enough to keep your car in service”, said James Husband of RailSolutions, a consultancy.

When will we know that the United States is really close to “normalizing interest rates”? The U.S. dollar will no longer exist, and (hopefully) neither will the Federal Reserve – the entity which promised to “protect” that dollar.

Obama's Keystone pipeline rejection "mission accomplished" banner has just led to a big slap on the face of the former constitutional expert, and could carry a multi-billion dollar chage after late this afternoon, TransCanada filed a lawsuit in Federal court in Houston, suing the U.S. government and claiming the Obama acted unconstitutionally when he rejected the Keystone XL, while also seeking $15 billion alleging the pipeline denial was "arbitrary and unjustified."

A lot of people were expecting some really great things to happen in 2015, but most of them did not happen.  But what did happen? A global financial crisis began during the second half of 2015 threatens to greatly accelerate as we enter 2016. This is what the early stages of a financial crisis look like, and the worst is yet to come.

In a clash of the billionaire titans, Warren Buffett just defeated Elon Musk. The fight was over solar net-metering in Nevada...

My overriding theme and the central drama for the coming year is that unexpected events can take on greater importance as the Federal Reserve ends its near-decade-long Zero Interest Rate Policy. Consensus premises and forecasts will likely fall flat, in a rather spectacular manner. The low-conviction and directionless market that we saw in 2015 could become a no-conviction and very-much-directed market (i.e. one that's directed lower) in 2016. There will be no peace on earth in 2016, and our markets could lose a cushion of protection as valuations contract. (Just as "malinvestment" represented a key theme this year, we expect a compression of price-to-earnings ratios to serve as a big market driver in 2016.) In other words, we don't think 2016 will be fun.

"Security prices are not low. I wouldn’t say high, but full. So people are thinking cautiously but they’re acting bullish and they’re behaving in a pro-risk fashion. While investor behavior hasn’t sunk to the depths seen just before the crisis, in many ways I feel it has entered the zone of imprudence... The market is not an accommodating machine. It will not go where you want it to go just because you need it to go there."

"It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you’ll do things differently." – Warren Buffett

It appears not!!

Dear Santa Claus, I am an activist investor in your company who has been infuriated for many years by your wilfully eccentric approach to capital allocation, pricing, brand strategy and supply chain management. Life at St Nicholas is one long party. Free food for your elves, who receive generous compensation to make bespoke, non-standardised products. Presents offered to anyone who writes you a begging letter and has been “good” according to some vague metric. Jingle bells, rides in one-horse open sleighs, eggnog cocktails: Oh, what fun you have with my money.

There’s only one investment we can think of that many people either love or hate reflexively, almost without regard to market performance: gold. And, to a lesser degree, silver. It’s strange that these two metals provoke such powerful psychological reactions - especially among people who dislike them. Nobody has an instinctive hatred of iron, copper, aluminum, or cobalt. The reason, of course, is that the main use of gold has always been as money. And people have strong feelings about money. From an economic viewpoint, however, money is just a medium of exchange and a store of value. Efforts to turn it into a political football invariably are signs of a hidden agenda, or perhaps a psychological aberration. So, let’s take some recent statements, assertions, and opinions that have been promulgated in the media and analyze them.

There are many half-truths perpetrated on individuals by Wall Street to sell product, gain assets, etc. However, if individuals took a moment to think about it, the illogic of many of these arguments are readily apparent. The index is a mythical creature, like the Unicorn, and chasing it has historically led to disappointment. Investing is not a competition, and there are horrid consequences for treating it as such.

Because the Novo Banco auction process went so smoothly, Portugal has decided to throw billions more in taxpayer dollars at a failed lender. This time it's Banif, which will be split into a "good" and "bad" bank just weeks ahead of new EU rules that would have seen uninsured depositors take a haircut as part of the wind down process.

“To the intelligent man or woman, life appears infinitely mysterious, but the stupid have an answer for everything.” ~Edward Abbey

“Communist Party graft busters have been taking officials, one by one, to a hotel close to the [CSRC’s] headquarters to press them to come clean or report on others."