Fail

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.

Views on volatility are often only within recent context, causing sometimes influential advisers and investment banks to misguidedly extrapolate correction or premature rebound calls with far greater frequency then they actually occur (excessive false positives).  In this article we see everything through a pertinent wider lens.  We focus on how and when volatility moves from one level, to another. 

The EU Commission has submitted a formal request to tap the mothballed EFSM for a bridge loan to Greece. The UK may look to block the proposal, but fortunately, Europe has a creative "soultion". 

But... but... they just provide liquidity.

Greece is saved!!! I mean BANKERS are saved!!! The market will celebrate the total capitulation of Greece to the EU bankers. Nothing has been resolved. The debt won’t be repaid. The can has been kicked again. Portugal, Spain, Italy, Ireland and even France are essentially insolvent. It’s all a ponzi scheme. The bankers win and the people lose. Hope is not a strategy. Hussman’s weekly tome shows how a crisis plays out. Bad shit happens and the powers that be react with bad solutions that keep their wealth and power protected. Their bad solutions lead to a worse crisis. More bad solutions. And so on, until complete collapse.

• Greece Capitulates to Creditors’ Demands to Cling to Euro (BBG)
• Euro zone strikes deal with Greece after all-night struggle (Reuters)
• Tsipras Moves From Predator to Prey at Euro 'Torture' Summit (BBG)
• Euro’s Greek Boost Evaporates as Analysts Predict Losses to Come (BBG)
• Greek Fury Meets Resignation at Demands for Concessions (BBG)
• Poland Blames ‘Carefree’ Greek Populists for Tough EU Aid Deal (BBG)
• Europeans Press for Iran Nuclear Deal on Monday (WSJ)
• Iran nuclear talks: Deal 'near completion' (BBC)
• In speech, Clinton to put wages at heart of economic policy (Reuters)
• China’s Incendiary Market Is Fanned by Borrowers and Manipulation (NYT)

When Warren Buffet put $5 billion in Berkshire Hathaway funds into Goldman Sachs the week after Lehman failed, amidst total turmoil and panic, it appeared from the outside a high risk bet. Buffet had long tried to portray himself as a folksy engine of traditional stability, investing only in things he could understand, so jumping into a wholesale run of chained liabilities may have seemed more than slightly out of character. We have no particular issue with Buffet making those investments, only the pretense of intentional mysticism that surrounds them. The reason the criticism of crony-capitalism sticks is because this was not Buffet's first intervention to "save" a famed institution on Wall Street. If Buffet's convention is to stick with "things you know" then he has been right there through the whole of the full-scale wholesale/eurodollar revolution.

The one undeniable truth about the debt drama in Greece is that each of the conventional narratives - financial, political and historical - has some claim of legitimacy. These facts matter not only because contagion from Greek debt defaults may ripple in dangerous ways through the financial system, but because they are also true for many other members of the Eurozone. The Euro is a fatally-flawed monetary concept and what we now seeing playing out was eminently predictable from the start.

This weekend's events in Europe have clarified who is really running the show across the 'union'. Hans-Werner Sinn, Chairman of the Ifo Institute for Economic Research, vehemnt euroskeptic, and head of the so-called 'five wise men' advising the German government and specifically Angela Merkel, confirmed his call from 2012 for a "temporary grexit from the euro." The right wing economist previously explained "Greece and Portugal have to become 30-40% less expensive to be competitive again. This is being attempted through excessive austerity measures within the euro zone, but it won't work. It will drive these countries to the brink of civil war before it succeeds. Temporary exits would very quickly stabilize these countries, create new jobs and free the population from the yoke of the euro." Anyone positioning for more centrist union-supporting rhetoric, hope is no longer a strategy as the hardest conservatives are now in charge.

For students of history, the China stock market crash looks eerily familiar. It’s playing out much like the Wall Street stock market crash of 1929. One of the factors fueling the soaring stock market of the 1920s was an influx of new, financially unsophisticated investors who saw the rising numbers and saw an opportunity for quick and easy profits. And that’s exactly what’s happened in China over the past year or so.

On Thursday this past week there were a few attempts at crisis management that should go into textbooks (as well as history books) everywhere in years to come as: Crisis Management 101.a – Lessons in Ineptitude. The responses as to settle the angst in an ever-more-skeptical, as well as frightened investing class was not only inane as demonstrated by the responses (or better yet; lack there of) given at the NYSE by way of “answering” as to why it halted its operation for nearly 4 hours. Was only outdone by what many view as the near insane when one views the steps taken in China to “calm” their markets. Is that how one instills confidence? It instills something – however the term isn’t anything resembling “confidence.”

After a day-long meeting of the Eurogroup, the European FinMins were unable to reach a conclusion on the third Greek bailout and instead once again punted the revised term sheet, this time with absolutely draconian terms, back to Tsipras, and told him he has until tomorrow to agree to the terms, and until Wednesday to pass them into law, for talks to even begin!

What happened in the China stock market is the latest culmination of the slippery slope of governmental and central bank intervention in financial markets.....

Perhaps the most concerning is the fact that should a “systemically important” financial entity go bust, any deposits above $250,000 located therein could be converted to equity… at which point if the company’s shares, your wealth evaporates.

Non-bombastic look at the price action and speculative positioning, with the hope of anticipating next week's developments.