The Oracle on Helicopter Ben: Buffett has complete faith in Bernanke's ability to unwind QE but notes that when rates rise "it's likely to be the shot-heard round the world." Both Berkshire and the country as a whole have "benefited significantly from what the Fed has done [but] the unwind [will be] more difficult than [the] buying." In the mean time, Buffett is entertained: "This is like watching a good movie … I don't know how it will end." (NY Times, WSJ) [View news story]
Millions of used-to-haves Americans will not find the unwinding of QE and rising interest rates as entertaining as the 1% who have enjoyed the "movie" as their private losses and Wall Street bonuses were collectivized onto public balance sheets.
Those public balance sheets that have bloated to unprecedented levels to support uneconomic interests and malinvestments cannot withstand rising interest rates once the QE teaser rates expire.
J.C. Penney Resorts To Begging For Business [View article]
The swoon JCP stock took when the "new" old CEO was announced which reversed the brief bounce after the disastrous reign of Ron Johnson was terminated was the right one. How does bringing on the previous failed CEO who was replaced by the last failed CEO solve the mounting problems their policies have only exacerbated already?
Answer: Once again, JCP is stuck in it's declining rut from the past except deeper in debt with fewer customers after a brief, delusional interlude as a wannabe Apple store trying to sell Chinese commodity merchandise at high prices.
Tesla's Q1 Earnings, An Epic April Fools Prank [View article]
In an era where The Bernank levitates financial assets with $trillions of nearly free money to insiders it becomes hard to remember that the stock market is ultimately a weighing machine, not a voting machine (Graham).
Intrinsic value will be found even among today's favorite tulips such as Tesla (hint: far, far lower) which for now rival the worst excesses of the dotcom bubble. For now.
The Reinhart - Rogoff Study Controversy [View article]
Thanks for the multitude of common sense nuggets, proof of whose validity is how well they inflame and debunk the "viciously statist."
No, that the US government and it's cheerleader beneficiaries, academic and otherwise, are hellbent on consuming as much US capital and squandering it as uselessly as possible growing itself and it's codependent interests is the greatest threat to a recognizable US recovery from appearing.....ever. As these threats consume and deter private enterprise they create dangers far beyond the economic as tyranny, long incubated in a dumbed-down, more easily herded and increasingly dependent US citizenry, has become the all-too-easily imposed default position of Washington.
Of course vicious statists will claim throughout any of this as they always do that they have the higher calling, insight and studies to justify hijacking ever higher levels of capital from grubby private enterprise to finance their "high" aspirations all the more as their failures and collateral damage mount.
U.S. Dollar Down 99% Against Gold Since Great Depression [View article]
The author doesn't need cherry-picked timeframes to support his main point that currency debasement really took off since 2008 and, "massive currency debasement has always been a predecessor to high inflation and economic decline."
Too bad for blowhard, self-dealing politicians (98%) that money printing on such an epic scale isn't good for stocks, bonds or the economy for very long as each dollar printed or placed onto the public debt yields less and now sometimes negative economic results requiring ever-vaster policies of debasement and public insolvency to maintain even a farcical and fictitious "story" of recovery such as we have now.
A revenue miss, light Q2 guidance, and a downgrade to Neutral from Macquarie are leading eBay (EBAY -5.4%) to take a post-earnings breather. During the earnings call, eBay mentioned "a weaker Europe and British pound" are weighing on results, and that new users (of which eBay has been adding plenty) "have a tendency to be less engaged at the early stages of their lifecycle." Needham is staying positive, arguing the user growth will drive a 2H revenue pickup. Touting mobile's potential, eBay claims "multiscreen users buy twice as much as non-multiscreen." [View news story]
"New users (of which eBay has been adding plenty) 'have a tendency to be less engaged at the early stages of their lifecycle.'"
So why then does Ebay abuse it's small sellers so relentlessly with disadvantageous rules and rising fees? These are the most engaged users of the site as buyers also, but fall afoul of some of Ebay's and Paypal's security alerts, like selling "excessive" merchandise even after a strong and lengthy track record, and they are treated like criminals. Or if they are lucky, like wayward children.
Oh, by the way, Feebay just increased it's commission on sales to a round 10%, astronomical especially when added to Paypal's 4%. Keep going to that well and someone, maybe Google, will step into the sea of seller discontent that Ebay CEO John Donahoe just can't resist adding to every time he needs to goose the often flagging results that stem from his anti-small-seller policies.
Markets And Copper: A Lot To Think About [View article]
Thanks for pointing out one of the most glaring non-confirmations of these most manipulated of markets.
Perpetual gold skeptics, Wall Street charlatans and political fixers may be crowing right now since the plunge in PM's, but the turmoil also appears to be a leading edge of large troubles under the surface of the largest fraudulent paper ponzi in history. This includes most Western sovereign debt and much leveraged TBTF "product," which portends dimmer days soon enough for them when wildly diverging markets revert to levels closer to their intrinsic values.
Further Signs Of Demand Weakness Now Hit The iPad Mini [View article]
"This is a win win situation for both and should have been done years ago."
No need when Apple products couldn't be kept in stock even at full price. Besides, the most successful products sold at say, Tiffany's, would never consider going downmarket all the way to Walmart unless they were having trouble moving their merchandise.
Wall Street Breakfast: Must-Know News [View article]
"Half of those companies are using the debt to increase capex and 25% to expand their operations, although only 10% for hiring."
Apparently the US has become such a dumbed-down nation of recipients of government checks that they will accept the portrayal of a continual loss of labor participation as a "reduced unemployment rate" while electing and re-electing politicians whose policies make private employment impossible and ZIRP borrowing rates for insiders that create incentives to automate and reduce employees further.
Further Signs Of Demand Weakness Now Hit The iPad Mini [View article]
The commentators above who appear so convinced that the latest Apple products appearing in Walmart discounted is a plus for Apple should consider working for the government and pumping the Bernanke "recovery."
And hopefully for them all of their investments aren't just just about hope and "close enough for government work."
A Johnson-Less J.C. Penney Is Still Dead In The Water [View article]
Too bad JCP's pathetic upper management is such a complete ship of fools. To suffer through Johnson's insane plan of burning cash together with elimination of coupons and then recalling the same CEO that got them in trouble in the first place is a case study in how the grossly overpaid, pampered insularity of upper management, corporate and government in the US, leads to utterly clueless decisions and completely unearned golden parachutes for this self-annointed American aristocracy that runs companies and the whole nation into the ground without personally suffering the consequences they visit the rest of Americans.
"But the promise of a turnaround at some future time does not impress me. There are better places to park money."
The points of the article are well taken. CEO Whitman is obviously a highly skilled corporate infighter whose highest accomplishment may be in deflecting blame from herself for decisions she participated in fully. And she always talks the corporate-speak that worked at Ebay where she managed her undistinguished tenure by successfully milking a newly-rising cash cow but without reinvesting much into the shabby marketplace site. This left a huge opportunity for Amazon in ecommerce.
Talent at standard-issue corporate management and in the collection of personal bonuses demonstrates no indication that Meg Whitman has the vision HPQ requires in her alleged field of IT.
Wall Street Breakfast: Must-Know News [View article]
"When do these CEO's realize that their huge salaries may be killing the companies?"
Don't hold your breath. Corporate CEO's in the US are mainly glorified managers paid as if they were entrepreneurs. Wall Street bailouts were partially justified to keep those "prevailing levels" of compensation intact. After all, the dream of our political class in Washington is to sell out to the highest bidder and then take one of those megabucks jobs at the top level in the "private" sector upon retirement from "public service."
Ron Johnson did such a spectacularly bad job by driving JCP's sales down 30%+ last year that his dip in compensation is unusual. But he would have received a bonus had he run a TBTF corporation, marketed and leveraged fraudulent paper and required a taxpayer bailout. And the only reason the goalposts might not be moved for him to reap stock options at lowered benchmarks is the publicity his amazing feat of hubris and incompetence has attracted.
Still, he is likely to get at least a $10 million golden parachute plus lush lifetime benefits upon his exit, which would have paid for a lot of additional salesforce on the floor at JCP and proves the point of inane overcompensation at the top and the harm it does to businesses and government.
When the work product of Wall Street and Washington hits the fan again, high yield, i.e: High risk bonds will suffer and expire en masse due to their poor credit quality.
Is a normal correction possible now in the bond market, with derivatives and insolvency by governments more widespread than ever? Treasuries will be at risk due to the blatant printing that will be required to sustain their lies and the follow on effect will obliterate much high yield/high risk paper even more.
Back testing has it's limits as do the sovereign balance sheets that have been trashed to bail out politically-connected failures. Softening the next crisis does not seem to have good prospects of succeeding via even more garish financial engineering at which time high yield bond results, like the stock market, will truly implode.
If bitcoins are safer than gold in convenience and convertibility they could be assuming a safe haven role. This role may also noticeably undercut the dollar in upcoming crises since it's use as a "safe haven" has been based on the inertia of it's ingrained role in the Western banker-centric financial system that is now imploding.
The Oracle on Helicopter Ben: Buffett has complete faith in Bernanke's ability to unwind QE but notes that when rates rise "it's likely to be the shot-heard round the world." Both Berkshire and the country as a whole have "benefited significantly from what the Fed has done [but] the unwind [will be] more difficult than [the] buying." In the mean time, Buffett is entertained: "This is like watching a good movie … I don't know how it will end." (NY Times, WSJ) [View news story]
Those public balance sheets that have bloated to unprecedented levels to support uneconomic interests and malinvestments cannot withstand rising interest rates once the QE teaser rates expire.
J.C. Penney Resorts To Begging For Business [View article]
Answer: Once again, JCP is stuck in it's declining rut from the past except deeper in debt with fewer customers after a brief, delusional interlude as a wannabe Apple store trying to sell Chinese commodity merchandise at high prices.
Tesla's Q1 Earnings, An Epic April Fools Prank [View article]
Intrinsic value will be found even among today's favorite tulips such as Tesla (hint: far, far lower) which for now rival the worst excesses of the dotcom bubble. For now.
The Reinhart - Rogoff Study Controversy [View article]
No, that the US government and it's cheerleader beneficiaries, academic and otherwise, are hellbent on consuming as much US capital and squandering it as uselessly as possible growing itself and it's codependent interests is the greatest threat to a recognizable US recovery from appearing.....ever. As these threats consume and deter private enterprise they create dangers far beyond the economic as tyranny, long incubated in a dumbed-down, more easily herded and increasingly dependent US citizenry, has become the all-too-easily imposed default position of Washington.
Of course vicious statists will claim throughout any of this as they always do that they have the higher calling, insight and studies to justify hijacking ever higher levels of capital from grubby private enterprise to finance their "high" aspirations all the more as their failures and collateral damage mount.
U.S. Dollar Down 99% Against Gold Since Great Depression [View article]
Too bad for blowhard, self-dealing politicians (98%) that money printing on such an epic scale isn't good for stocks, bonds or the economy for very long as each dollar printed or placed onto the public debt yields less and now sometimes negative economic results requiring ever-vaster policies of debasement and public insolvency to maintain even a farcical and fictitious "story" of recovery such as we have now.
A revenue miss, light Q2 guidance, and a downgrade to Neutral from Macquarie are leading eBay (EBAY -5.4%) to take a post-earnings breather. During the earnings call, eBay mentioned "a weaker Europe and British pound" are weighing on results, and that new users (of which eBay has been adding plenty) "have a tendency to be less engaged at the early stages of their lifecycle." Needham is staying positive, arguing the user growth will drive a 2H revenue pickup. Touting mobile's potential, eBay claims "multiscreen users buy twice as much as non-multiscreen." [View news story]
So why then does Ebay abuse it's small sellers so relentlessly with disadvantageous rules and rising fees? These are the most engaged users of the site as buyers also, but fall afoul of some of Ebay's and Paypal's security alerts, like selling "excessive" merchandise even after a strong and lengthy track record, and they are treated like criminals. Or if they are lucky, like wayward children.
Oh, by the way, Feebay just increased it's commission on sales to a round 10%, astronomical especially when added to Paypal's 4%. Keep going to that well and someone, maybe Google, will step into the sea of seller discontent that Ebay CEO John Donahoe just can't resist adding to every time he needs to goose the often flagging results that stem from his anti-small-seller policies.
Markets And Copper: A Lot To Think About [View article]
Perpetual gold skeptics, Wall Street charlatans and political fixers may be crowing right now since the plunge in PM's, but the turmoil also appears to be a leading edge of large troubles under the surface of the largest fraudulent paper ponzi in history. This includes most Western sovereign debt and much leveraged TBTF "product," which portends dimmer days soon enough for them when wildly diverging markets revert to levels closer to their intrinsic values.
Further Signs Of Demand Weakness Now Hit The iPad Mini [View article]
No need when Apple products couldn't be kept in stock even at full price. Besides, the most successful products sold at say, Tiffany's, would never consider going downmarket all the way to Walmart unless they were having trouble moving their merchandise.
Wall Street Breakfast: Must-Know News [View article]
Apparently the US has become such a dumbed-down nation of recipients of government checks that they will accept the portrayal of a continual loss of labor participation as a "reduced unemployment rate" while electing and re-electing politicians whose policies make private employment impossible and ZIRP borrowing rates for insiders that create incentives to automate and reduce employees further.
Further Signs Of Demand Weakness Now Hit The iPad Mini [View article]
And hopefully for them all of their investments aren't just just about hope and "close enough for government work."
A Johnson-Less J.C. Penney Is Still Dead In The Water [View article]
Meg Whitman Owns HP Now [View article]
The points of the article are well taken. CEO Whitman is obviously a highly skilled corporate infighter whose highest accomplishment may be in deflecting blame from herself for decisions she participated in fully. And she always talks the corporate-speak that worked at Ebay where she managed her undistinguished tenure by successfully milking a newly-rising cash cow but without reinvesting much into the shabby marketplace site. This left a huge opportunity for Amazon in ecommerce.
Talent at standard-issue corporate management and in the collection of personal bonuses demonstrates no indication that Meg Whitman has the vision HPQ requires in her alleged field of IT.
Wall Street Breakfast: Must-Know News [View article]
Don't hold your breath. Corporate CEO's in the US are mainly glorified managers paid as if they were entrepreneurs. Wall Street bailouts were partially justified to keep those "prevailing levels" of compensation intact. After all, the dream of our political class in Washington is to sell out to the highest bidder and then take one of those megabucks jobs at the top level in the "private" sector upon retirement from "public service."
Ron Johnson did such a spectacularly bad job by driving JCP's sales down 30%+ last year that his dip in compensation is unusual. But he would have received a bonus had he run a TBTF corporation, marketed and leveraged fraudulent paper and required a taxpayer bailout. And the only reason the goalposts might not be moved for him to reap stock options at lowered benchmarks is the publicity his amazing feat of hubris and incompetence has attracted.
Still, he is likely to get at least a $10 million golden parachute plus lush lifetime benefits upon his exit, which would have paid for a lot of additional salesforce on the floor at JCP and proves the point of inane overcompensation at the top and the harm it does to businesses and government.
Bond Bubbles And Credit Quality [View article]
Is a normal correction possible now in the bond market, with derivatives and insolvency by governments more widespread than ever? Treasuries will be at risk due to the blatant printing that will be required to sustain their lies and the follow on effect will obliterate much high yield/high risk paper even more.
Back testing has it's limits as do the sovereign balance sheets that have been trashed to bail out politically-connected failures. Softening the next crisis does not seem to have good prospects of succeeding via even more garish financial engineering at which time high yield bond results, like the stock market, will truly implode.
Are Bitcoins Killing Gold's Price? [View article]