Tag Archives: newsletter

With January just around the corner, the world’s billionaires, CEOs, politicians and oligarchs prepare to take their private planes to Davos, Switzerland for their annual convocation at the World Economic Forum, where they discuss such diverse topics as global warming due to greenhouse gases (which exempts Gulfstream jets) and the dangers of record wealth inequality (which exempts them), while snacking on $39 hot dogs...

  Barbarous Huns Life is one long struggle in the dark. – Lucretius BALTIMORE – In January of this year, the Empire Herald reported that a “meth-addled couple” had eaten a homeless man in New York City’s Central Park. Later, Now8News reported that a can of cookie dough had “exploded in a woman’s vagina”; the woman was alleged to be shoplifting. . The fellows depicted above certainly mesh perfectly with the image of...

  Sentiment Extremes Below is an update of a number of interesting data points related to the gold market. Whether “interesting” will become “meaningful” remains to be seen, as most of gold’s fundamental drivers aren’t yet bullishly aligned. One must keep in mind though that gold is very sensitive with respect to anticipating future developments in market liquidity and the reaction these will elicit from central banks....

If we had to guess which areas will likely experience the smallest declines in prices and recover the soonest, which markets would you bet on? Though housing statistics such as average sales price are typically lumped into one national number, this is extremely misleading: there are two completely different housing markets in the U.S. One is hot, one is not so hot. Just as importantly, one may stay relatively hot while...

Headlines Week Ending December 23 , 2016 Who has read Milton Friedman knows that the Trump reflation trade is now showing its positive side. US wages are rising by 2.5%, while inflation is still relatively low. According to Friedman, inflation will increase only later. This implies that speculators are long the dollar and short the Swiss franc and the euro. The last ECB meeting showed that the ECB might be dovish for a...

Swiss Franc EUR/CHF - Euro Swiss Franc, December 27(see more posts on EUR/CHF, ). FX Rates As skeleton teams return to the trading desks in New York, the US dollar is largely where they left it at the end last week.  Japanese markets were open yesterday, while UK, Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong and Canadian markets are still closed today. The Australian and New Zealand dollars are up about 0.2% from before the...

People were poor by today’s standards, so why do people remember the plantation life fondly? The answer is simple: community, purpose, sacrifice and meaning. Allow me to connect two apparently unconnected dots. Dot #1: The last sugar plantation in Hawaii is closing down, ending more than a century of plantation life in the 50th state. Dot #2: a new study found that Nearly 95% of all new jobs during Obama era were...

It will be the middle class that accepted the notion that “real estate is the foundation of family wealth” that will be stripmined by higher taxes on immobile assets such as real estate. Correspondent Joel M. submitted an article that struck me as a harbinger of the future: In Greece, Property Is Debt: “At law courts throughout Greece, people are lining up to file papers renouncing their inheritance. Not necessarily...

In our latest Toward a New World Order, Part III we ended by promising to look closer at investment implications from the political and economic shift we currently find ourselves in; and that story must begin with the dollar. While known to the investing public for years, the Bank of International Settlements (BIS) recently acknowledge that the real risk-off / risk-on metric in global markets is the dollar and...

Shortly after last night’s news that Deutsche Bank had settled with the DOJ for $7.2 billion, of which it would pay $3.1 billion in a civil penalty, far lower than the $14 billion number initially speculated (the stock popped as much as 4% before settling just over 2% higher currently), Credit Suisse likewise closed the books on its pre-crisis RMBS fraud when the largest Swiss bank agreed to pay $5.28 billion to...