Home » Posts tagged 'casino'

Tag Archives: casino

Olduvai
Click on image to purchase

Olduvai III: Catacylsm
Click on image to purchase

Post categories

Post Archives by Category

A Scam Called Valeant——Why The Casino Is Going To Blow

March 24, 2016

A Scam Called Valeant——Why The Casino Is Going To Blow

If you need evidence that Wall Street is a financial time bomb waiting for ignition look no further than the recent meltdown of Valeant Pharmaceuticals (VRX). In round terms, its market cap of $90 billion on August 5th has suddenly become the embodiment of that proverbial sucking sound to the south, having plunged to less than $12 billion by Wednesday’s close.

That’s nearly a 90% haircut and VRX was no microcap penny stock. It was a giant inhabitant of a hedge fund hotel.

Needless to say, the cliff-diving pattern in the graph below provides evidence that the ticking bombs in the casino are of the neutron variety. In this case, the hotel may be still standing but the inhabitants have been ionized. On a single day last week, hedge funds lost $5.3 billion in value.

Condign justice, some might say, for the likes of rank gamblers like William Ackman (Pershing Square) and Jeffrey Ubben (ValueAct Holdings) who lost $700 million each that day. The fact that they have successfully promoted themselves for so long as masters of the universe, however, is the real moral of the story.

The financial markets and media have been so corrupted by central bank bubble finance that they did not even recognize that Valeant was a monumental scam and that Ackman and Ubben are snake oil salesman in $5,000 suits.  Presently it will become clear that the hedge fund hotels are heavily occupied by many more of the same.
VRX Chart

Alas, Valeant wasn’t caught selling poisoned pills or torturing kittens during the last seven months. What it was doing for the past seven years——aggressively pursuing every one of the financial engineering strategies that are worshipped and rewarded in the Wall Street casino——finally came a cropper.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Price Isn’t Right——-How Central Banks Are Fixing To Ambush The Casino

March 8, 2016

The Price Isn’t Right——-How Central Banks Are Fixing To Ambush The Casino

The casino is incorrigible. After a monumental short squeeze that has lifted the averages right into the jaws of danger, Goldman Sachs has the temerity to print the following:

“Our model suggests SPX calls are more attractive than at any time over the past 20 years”. 

There must have been a mullets’ breeding frenzy awhile back because it’s hard to fathom how Goldman has any real customers left. Then again, its current preposterous call is just indicative of the horrible threat heading menacingly toward what remains of main street’s 401k investments.

To wit, the Fed and other central banks have thoroughly falsified financial market prices and destroyed all of the ordinary mechanisms of financial discipline. Foremost among these are short sellers and a meaningfully positive cost of carry trades.

Markets are therefore unhinged from any connection to fundamental economic and financial reality, meaning that they are capable of an extended period of spasmodic deadcat bounces that will have only one end result.

Namely, the naïve and desperate among main street investors who still, unaccountably, frequent the casino will presently be taken out back and shot yet another time. The market technicians are pleased to call this “distribution”. Would that someone on Wall Street man-up and amend the phrase to read ” distribution…….of losses to the mullets” and be done with the charade.

The S&P 500 is heading through 1300 from above long before it ever again penetrates from below its old May 2015 high of 2130. And now that 97% of Q4 results are in, there is a single number that proves the case.

Reported LTM profits as of year-end 2015 stood at just $86.46 per S&P 500 share. That particular number is a flat-out bull killer. At a plausible PE multiple of 15X, it does indeed imply 1300 on the S&P 500 index.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Spook In the Casino—–Recession Just Ahead, Part 1

February 9, 2016

The Spook In the Casino—–Recession Just Ahead, Part 1

The wise guys keep buying the dips owing to the simple proposition that there is never a lasting bear market without a recession. So after today’s blow-out we are likely to get another call to scoop up the “bargains” because the correction has run its course and the US economy is still chugging along notwithstanding the contretemps in China and other places of purportedly limited moment.

Indeed, on the basis of Wall Street’s muscle memory alone there is surely another dead cat bounce on its way any day. But here’s the memo. BTFDs is not working any more and, more crucially, there is a recession coming and soon. And then the bear will maul, not simply paw as today.

The fact is, BTFD hasn’t worked on a net basis hasn’t for about 730 days now. The S&P 500 closed today where it first crossed in February 2014.
^SPX Chart

^SPX data by YCharts

In light of this extended dwell time in no man’s land, it is not surprising that the market is getting spooked. After all, the real driver of the post-March 2009 rebound of the stock indices was the Fed’s massive intrusion in money and capital markets, not a sustainable recovery of main street business activity or real household incomes. Real net CapEx is still below 2007 levels, for example, as is the real median household income.

And most certainly the market’s 220% gain between the post-recession bottom of 670 and the May 2015 peak of 2130 was not owing to an explosion of corporate earnings. If you set aside Wall Street’s annually renewable ex-items hockey stick, what you actually have on the profits front is a paltry 8% cummulative gain since the pre-crisis earnings peak way back in June 2007.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Now Comes The Great Unwind—-How Evaporating Commodity Wealth Will Slam The Casino

January 1, 2016

Now Comes The Great Unwind—-How Evaporating Commodity Wealth Will Slam The Casino

The giant credit fueled boom of the last 20 years has deformed the global economy in ways that are both visible and less visible. As to the former, it only needs be pointed out that an economy based on actual savings from real production and income and a modicum of financial market discipline would not build 65 million empty apartment units based on the theory that their price will rise forever as long as they remain unoccupied!

That’s the Red Ponzi at work in China and its replicated all across the land in similar wasteful investments in unused or under-used shopping malls, factories, coal mines, airports, highways, bridges and much, much more.

But the point here is that China is not some kind of one-off aberration. In fact, the less visible aspects of the credit ponzi exist throughout the global economy and they are becoming more visible by the day as the Great Deflation gathers force.

As we have regularly insisted, there is nothing in previous financial history like the $185 trillion of worldwide credit expansion over the last two decades. When this central bank fueled credit bubble finally reached its apogee in the past year or so, global credit had expanded by nearly 4X the gain in worldwide GDP.

Moreover, no small part of the latter was simply the pass-through into the Keynesian-style GDP accounting ledgers of fixed asset investment (spending) that is destined to become a write-off or public sector white elephant (wealth destruction) in the years ahead.

Global Debt and GDP- 1994 and 2014

The credit bubble, in turn, led to booming demand for commodities and CapEx. And in these unsustainable eruptions layers and layers of distortion and inefficiency cascaded into the world economy and financial system.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Fed’s Painted Itself Into The Most Dangerous Corner In History—–Why There Will Soon Be A Riot In The Casino

December 10, 2015

The Fed’s Painted Itself Into The Most Dangerous Corner In History—–Why There Will Soon Be A Riot In The Casino

The chart below crystalizes why the Fed is stranded in a monetary no man’s land. By the time of next week’s meeting the federal funds rate will have been pinned at about 10 bps, or effectively zero, for 84 straight months.

Yet during that same period, the consumer price level has risen by 1.75% per year. And that’s if you give credit to all of the BLS gimmicks, such as hedonic adjustments for quality change, homeowners “imputed” rents and product basket substitution, which cause inflation to be systematically understated.

On a basis that is close enough for government work, therefore, the real money market interest rate has been negative 2% for seven years. But that’s so crazy, unjustified, and unprecedented that even the Keynesian money printers who run the Fed have run out of excuses.

Presumably, Yellen and her posse know that we did not have seven years running of negative real money market rates even during the Great Depression of the 1930s.

So after one pretension, delusion, head fake and forecasting error after another, the denizens of the Eccles Building have painted themselves into the most dangerous monetary corner in history. They have left themselves no alternative except to provoke a riot in the casino——-the very outcome that has filled them with fear and dread all these years.

CPI and Fed Funds - Click to enlarge

Indeed, Yellen and Bernanke before her have made a huge deal out of communications clarity and forward guidance. But how do you explain to even the credulous gamblers and day traders on Wall Street that the business cycle has not been outlawed and that free money can not last forever, world without end?

Likewise, after all these years of saying that the dollar’s exchange rate is the responsibility of the US Treasury— and that the Eccles Building only does domestic monetary policy—– how will the Fed heads explain that they have wrapped themselves around the axle of an unrelentingly strong dollar?

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Central Banks Have Shot Their Wad——-Why The Casino Is In For A Rude Awakening, Part I

July 23, 2015

Central Banks Have Shot Their Wad——-Why The Casino Is In For A Rude Awakening, Part I

There has been a lot of chatter in recent days about the plunge in commodity prices—–capped off by this week’s slide of the Bloomberg commodity index to levels not seen since 2002. That epochal development is captured in the chart below, but most of the media gumming about the rapidly accelerating “commodity crunch” misses the essential point.

To wit, the central banks of the world have shot their wad. Accordingly, the 12-year round trip depicted in the chart is not about the end of some nebulous “commodity supercycle” that arrived from out of the blue after the turn of the century. Nor, most certainly, is it evidence of the Keynesians’ purported global shortage of “aggregate demand” that can be remedied by an even more extended spree of central bank monetary stimulus.

No, the Bloomberg Commodity index is a slow motion screen shot depicting the massive intrusion of worldwide central bankers into the global economic and financial system. Their unprecedented spree of money printing took the aggregate global central bank balance sheet from $3 trillion to $22 trillion over the last 15 years.

The consequence was a deep and systematic falsification of financial prices on a planet-wide scale. This unprecedented monetary shock generated a double-pumped economic boom—–first in the form of an artificial debt-fueled consumption spree and then a sequel of massive malinvestment.

Now comes the deflationary aftermath. Soon there will follow a plunge in corporate profits and collapsing prices among the vastly inflated risk asset classes which surfed on these phony booms.

So it is worth recounting how we got here. In the first phase, central banks engineered a massive wave of household borrowing and consumption/housing spending in the DM economies which, in turn, ignited an export manufacturing boom in China and among its caravan of EM suppliers. This China/EM export boom eventually over-taxed the world’s existing capacity to supply the raw materials required by a booming industrial economy—hydrocarbons, iron ore, met coal, aluminum, copper, nickel etc.

 

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Stay Out Of Harm’s Way—-The Casino Is Fixing To Blow

June 5, 2015

Stay Out Of Harm’s Way—-The Casino Is Fixing To Blow

Shock waves have been rumbling through the global bond market in the last few days. On April 17 the yield on the 10-year German bund pierced through the 5bps level, but yesterday it tagged 100bps. That amounted to a 20X move in 39 trading days.

It also amounted to total annihilation if you were front running Mario Draghi’s bond buying campaign on 95% repo leverage and didn’t hit the sell button fast enough. And there were a lot of sell buttons to hit. The Italian 10-year yield has soared from a low of 1.03% in late March to 2.21% last night, and the yield on the Spanish bond has doubled in a similar manner.

Needless to say, this is not by way of a lamentation in behalf of the euro-bond speculators who have had their heads handed to them in recent days. After harvesting hundreds of billions of windfall gains since Draghi’s mid-2012 “whatever it takes ukase” they were overdue to get slapped around good and hard.

Instead, what we have here is just one more striking demonstration that financial markets are utterly broken. The notion of honest price discovery might as well be relegated to the museum of financial history.

The exact catalyst for yesterday’s panicked global bond sell-off, apparently, was Draghi’s public confession that although the ECB would stay the course on its $1.3 trillion QE program, it cannot prevent short-run “volatility” in the trading pits.

Why that should be a surprise to anyone is hard to fathom, but it does crystalize the “look ma, no hands” essence of today’s markets. The trading herd goes in the direction enabled by the central banks until a few dare devils finally fall off their bikes, causing an unexpected pile-up and inducing the pack to temporarily reverse direction.

 

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Olduvai IV: Courage
Click on image to read excerpts

Olduvai II: Exodus
Click on image to purchase

Click on image to purchase @ FriesenPress