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THIS is What a Margin Call Looks Like: the Consequences of Stock Market Mania

A couple of weeks ago, we reported on various examples of stock market mania that have exploded in 2021.

Now it’s time to examine a major event that could be a clear harbinger for “the big one” to come. It starts with a name you never heard of before March, a modest hedge fund operating as a “family office” named Archegos Capital, and it ends with some of the world’s biggest brokers engaged in a mutually-destructive fire sale that wiped out $35 billion in market value.

Let’s take a closer look at what Slate’s Alex Kirshner calls The Dumbest Financial Story of 2021 (so far).

Leverage: Fantastic on the Way Up, Hideous on the Way Down

Bill Hwang, convicted inside trader, founded Archegos as a “family office.” Kirshner explains this legal nicety “functions like a hedge fund but manages the assets of just one or a few wealthy families. In theory, a family office gives a problem trader less opportunity to harm others, because they are not playing with outsiders’ money.”

At Forbes, Antoine Gara explains why this matters: “a family office exempts it from the Securities and Exchange Commission’s reporting requirements for investment firms.”

Hwang’s new firm approached big banks including Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Japan’s Nomura and Switzerland’s Credit Suisse. These firms extended leverage, or margin loans, to Archegos, which invested heavily on swap trades:

Swaps are an effective tool to take big risks without disclosing much. Total return swaps, for instance, allow an investor to negotiate a trade with their broker to own the total return of a stock, or basket of stocks, for a predetermined size and period of time, and at an agreed cost…

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

birch gold group, archegos, financial markets, leverage, hedge funds, leverage

Market Weekly: Game Stop Revolution or the Matrix Reloaded?

January 31, 2021

Market Weekly: Game Stop Revolution or the Matrix Reloaded?

I have to say as revolutions go, this one is hilarious.

Game Stop opened this morning above $330 per share, a sentence I never thought in a million years I’d ever write.

This open nearly ensures that all the attempts yesterday to push the price back down to bail out the hedge funds desperately short have failed spectacularly.

There’s options expiration today which will fundamentally change the way we look at markets if Game Stop closes in this range.

Because it shows that when people act in the aggregate they can overwhelm the attempts by a few central planners to control you.

Your best proof that this is at least a part of what’s going on is the way Wall St. and the regulators in D.C. are reacting. Because they are screaming that this is outrageous, that we need stronger enforcement tools to ‘ensure the integrity of our markets.’

That’s just code for ‘only we’re allowed to game the markets not the little people.’

And with options expiring on Game Stop nearly every week in February and March this game isn’t over by any stretch of the imagination.

Populist is a Four-Letter Work

In fact, It’s the beginning of a new form of populist revolt.

We’ve seen what they think of populist revolts. They have utter disdain for them. They squash them and hope to ignore the consequences.

Vote for Trump? Can’t have that happen again.

Speak out against any facet of the Great Reset? Get censored.

Try to build a new platform not controlled by them? Get deplatformed.

Show up at the Capitol to peacefully assemble? Get caught up in a false flag to justify arresting you and shaming you into submission.

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

GameStop: Why the elites hate peer-to-peer power

January 31, 2021

GameStop: Why the elites hate peer-to-peer power

During Great Britain’s golden age of gambling, a Scot named William Cunninghame Graham—losing at cards, out of money, but not yet ready to quit for the evening—secured a loan of 1,000 pounds from a Colonel Archibald Campbell. Graham pledged as security the use of his estate to Campbell for the rest of Campbell’s lifetime should Graham be unable to repay the loan. Graham lost all the money. And thus, for a 1,000-pound loan did Graham gamble away his entire estate in one evening.

Today, a group of Wall Street hedge funds are acting like Graham on steroids in the face of a growing group of small investors who have awakened to the power of peer-to-peer communications made possible by social media. (More on peer-to-peer communications below.) In this particular case these small investors seem to be winning hand after hand by pledging much of their savings—in some cases their total life savings—to another risky but decidedly much more political proposition: Beating Wall Street hedge funds at their own game by forcing losses on them for bets the hedge funds have made against a down-on-its-luck retail chain called GameStop and other companies. The focus, however, has been on GameStop which specializes in video games and equipment which increasingly can be purchased online. Another blow to GameStop has been the ongoing pandemic which has kept people out of its retail stores.

The small investors, emboldened by an online Reddit group called WallStreetBets, have so far inflicted nearly $20 billion in losses on their arch short-selling foes as the stock price of GameStop has rocketed from about $17 a share on January 4 to $325 a share on Friday. The stock sold for under $4 a share as recently as July 31. On January 25 the stock closed at $76.79 a share. Two days later it closed at $347.51.

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

944 Trillion Reasons Why The Fed Is Quietly Bailing Out Hedge Funds

January 18, 2020

944 Trillion Reasons Why The Fed Is Quietly Bailing Out Hedge Funds

On Friday, Minneapolis Fed president Neel Kashkari, who just two months earlier made a stunning proposal when he said that it was time for the Fed to pick up where the USSR left off and start redistributing wealth (at least Kashkari chose the proper entity: since the Fed has launched central planning across US capital markets, it would also be proper in the banana republic that the US has become, that the same Fed also decides who gets how much and the entire democracy/free enterprise/free market farce be skipped altogether) issued a challenge to “QE conspiracists” which apparently now also includes his FOMC colleague (and former Goldman Sachs co-worker), Robert Kaplan, in which he said “QE conspiracists can say this is all about balance sheet growth. Someone explain how swapping one short term risk free instrument (reserves) for another short term risk free instrument (t-bills) leads to equity repricing. I don’t see it.“

To the delight of Kashkari, who this year gets to vote and decide the future of US monetary policy yet is completely unaware of how the plumbing underneath US capital markets actually works, we did so for his benefit on Friday, although we certainly did not have to: after all, the “central banks’ central bank”, the Bank for International Settlements, did a far better job than we ever could in its December 8 report, “September stress in dollar repo markets: passing or structural?”, which explained not just why the September repo disaster took place on the supply side (i.e., the sudden, JPMorgan-mediated liquidity shortage at the “top 4” commercial banks which prevented them from lending into the repo market)…

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

The Wealthy Are Hoarding Physical Gold

December 11, 2019

The Wealthy Are Hoarding Physical Gold

The world’s rich are hoarding gold – this according to data buried in a recent Goldman Sachs note to clients.

In the note published over the weekend, Goldman recommended diversifying long-term bond holdings with gold, citing “fear-driven demand” for the yellow metal.

Hedge funds and other large speculators boosted their bullish bets on gold by 8.9% through the week ended Dec. 3, according to government data released last Friday. That represents the biggest gain since the end of September.

The Goldman note cited political uncertainty and recession fears as the catalyst for the move toward gold. It also mentioned worries about a wealth tax, increasing interest in Modern Monetary Theory (essentially money-printing) and the current loose central bank monetary policy.

Data buried in the note also revealed that owning physical gold appears to be the preferred method to “hedge against tail events” by the rich.

Since the end of 2016 the implied build in non-transparent gold investment has been much larger than the build in visible gold ETFs.”

Goldman said the data is consistent with reports that vault demand is surging globally.

Trade data implies that gold in storage has increased far more rapidly than is reflected by financial market instruments, indicating a widespread preference for physical gold instead of gold-linked financial assets … Political risks, in our view, help explain this because if an individual is trying to minimize the risks of sanctions or wealth taxes, then buying physical gold bars and storing them in a vault, where it is more difficult for governments to reach them, makes sense.
“Finally, this build can also reflect hedges by global high net worth individuals against tail economic and political risk scenarios in which they do not want to have any financial entity intermediating their gold positions due to the counter-party credit risk involved.”

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

Oil Prices Unlikely To Breakout Or Collapse

July 31, 2018

Oil Prices Unlikely To Breakout Or Collapse

Oil prices took a breather in the second half of July, but the price correction may have been a temporary reprieve rather than the start of another downturn.

On Monday, WTI breached $70 per barrel for the first time in over two weeks, rising once again on fears of supply outages.

Part of the reason that prices sank so sharply in mid-July was because of a wave of liquidation by hedge funds and other money managers, selling off their bullish positions in crude futures. Two weeks ago, investors slashed their long positions on crude oil by the most in a single-week in more than a year. As Reuters points out, the shift in positioning was concentrated in the cut of long bets, rather than the increase in shorts. That suggests profit-taking rather than a belief that a deep downturn is imminent.

The reduction of net length helped push down oil prices for a few weeks, but it also let some steam out of the futures market. Investors had become overly bullish in their positions, so the reduction in net length leaves the market a bit more balanced. That means that there is now more room on the upside for oil prices.

Last week, money managers began scooping up bullish bets once again, with net length in Brent rising by more than 4 percent. That coincided with a recovery in oil prices and it suggests that oil traders believe the price correction went far enough. “It lines up with our call to buy the dip in July,” Chris Kettenmann, chief energy strategist at Macro Risk Advisors LLC, told Bloomberg. “We’ve been pretty vocal about adding to length through the July sell-off.”

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

The Greek Fraud Reads Like a Crime Novel

December 16, 2017

The Greek Fraud Reads Like a Crime Novel

Tamara de Lempicka The refugees 1937Note: I feel kind of sorry this has become such a long essay. But I still left out so much. You know by now I care a lot about Greece, and it’s high time for another look, and another update, and another chance for people to understand what is happening to the country, and why. To understand that hardly any of it is because the Greeks had so much debt and all of that narrative.

The truth is, Greece was set up to be a patsy for the failure of Europe’s financial system, and is now being groomed simultaneously as a tourist attraction to benefit foreign investors who buy Greek assets for pennies on the dollar, and as an internment camp for refugees and migrants that Europe’s ‘leaders’ view as a threat to their political careers more than anything else.

I would almost say: here we go again, but in reality we never stopped going. It’s just that Greece’s 15 minutes of fame may be long gone, but its ordeal is far from over. If you read through this, you will understand why that is. The EU is deliberately, and without any economic justification, destroying one of its own member states, destroying its entire economy.

A short article in Greek paper Kathimerini last week detailed the latest new cuts in pensions the Troika has imposed on Greece, and it’s now getting beyond absurd. For an economy to function, you need people spending money. That is what keeps jobs alive, jobs which pay people the money they need to spend on their basic necessities. If you don’t do at least that, there’ll be ever fewer jobs, and/or ever less money to spend. It’s a vicious cycle.

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

Blockbuster Story – How Hedge Funds Invest Heavily in Washington D.C.’s Culture of Corruption

May 14, 2016

Blockbuster Story – How Hedge Funds Invest Heavily in Washington D.C.’s Culture of Corruption

Earlier today, Ryan Grim and Paul Blumenthal published a blockbuster piece in the Huffington Post, titled: The Vultures’ Vultures: How A New Hedge-Fund Strategy Is Corrupting Washington.

It details the secretive world of the dark money groups representing mercenary hedge funds in their insatiable quest for more and more money. In many ways, it’s merely a microcosm of America in 2016. A culture in which ethics has become so irrelevant, it isn’t even a nuisance; it simply never factors into the equation.

The first few paragraphs set the stage perfectly:

WASHINGTON – Take Robert Shapiro.

A Harvard-trained economist, Shapiro is the head of a consulting firm called Sonecon. That business card doesn’t do it for you? He’s got a few more in his wallet:

Senior fellow at the Georgetown University School of Business.

Adviser to the International Monetary Fund.

Director of the Globalization Initiative at NDN, a progressive think tank.

Shapiro, a Democrat, has advised presidents and presidential candidates, and has held powerful government posts. It stands to reason, then, that when he has thoughts on public policy, he can find an outlet ready to publish them.

Recently, he’s had ideas on how the government can address the debt crisis in Puerto Rico and how it can end the conservatorship of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac by moving them into the private market. Before that, he had a take on how to deal with Argentina’s debt crisis. For all three, he produced academic-looking papers, complete with footnotes and charts.

All three situations have one thing in common: If they were resolved the way Shapiro suggested, a variety of bets placed by a select group of the most politically powerful hedge funds would pay off in a huge way. In the case of Argentina, they mostly have.

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

Chaos & Volatility On The Rise

May 7, 2016

Chaos & Volatility On The Rise

The systems that support us are breaking down

No, that’s not a ‘click bait’ sensationalist title. Things are getting ‘weird’ out there if you’re trying to be polite, and downright ‘chaotic’ if you’re being blunt. Everywhere we look, we see signs that the systems that support us are breaking down.

The economy no longer spins off enough surplus for the elites to take what they consider their share with enough left over for everyone else. So the wealth gap grows unchecked into politically and socially destabilizing levels.

The oceans are rapidly dying off: with corals bleaching, tide pools acidifying, and phytoplankton disappearing. Weather weirdness is now so entrenched that all of the 50, 100 and 500-year events that happen each week are mainly reported on locally and garner little national and international attention.

Financial markets are increasingly volatile and dominated by an unruly universe of computer algorithms that now mainly play against each other, having driven off all the humans.

Politically, we’re seeing the former fringes of both parties increasingly come into power as they appeal to increasingly disenfranchised and disappointed electorates.

All of these are signs that the status quo has failed and continues to fail us. But the form of power expressed by our so-called ‘leaders’ today seems nearly incapable of healthy introspection coupled to correct action; preferring instead to do more of the same things that got us into this mess in the first place.

Those of us who can read the signs for what they are, not what we wish or believe them to be, have a special duty to first prepare ourselves for what’s coming and then help others. To put on our own oxygen masks first, and then help the others around us.

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

Unmanageable Money, Part 2: Hedge Funds Keep Losing — And Closing — And Why It Matters

January 3, 2016

Unmanageable Money, Part 2: Hedge Funds Keep Losing — And Closing — And Why It Matters

How do you make money in a world where history is meaningless? The answer, for a growing number of big fund managers, is that you don’t.

Hedge funds, generally the most aggressive species of money manager, do a lot of “black box” trading in which bets are placed on previously-identified patterns and relationships on the assumption that those patterns will repeat in the future.

But with governments randomly buying stocks and bonds and bailing out/subsidizing everything is sight, old relationships are distorted and strategies that worked in the past begin to fail, as do the money managers who rely on them. A few recent examples:

Whitebox Closes Its Mutual Funds Ahead Of January Liquidation

(Value Walk) – Ending its foray into mutual funds, Whitebox Advisors LLC, said it has shuttered all three of its three mutual funds after poor results. According to Amara Kaiyalethe, a spokeswoman, the three mutual funds, which collectively held over $300 million, were closed on December 17th, and will be liquidated January 19th. She said the decision to close the mutual funds was related to performance and the concentration risk investors that remained in the funds faced as redemptions accelerated.

The Whitebox Tactical Opportunities Fund is the biggest among the three mutual funds, which less than two years ago managed over $1 billion, but tumbled by over 21% this year. The fund has suffered a rush of investors heading towards the exits. The fund managed about $240 million at the time it was closed.

——————-

Hedge Fund Lutetium Plans to Liquidate, Return Investor Cash

(Bloomberg) – Lutetium Capital LLC, a hedge-fund firm that invests in distressed securities, is liquidating its two credit funds and returning all of the money it was managing to investors by next month, according to co-founder Michael Carley.

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

This Is What A Financial Crisis Looks Like

December 15, 2015

This Is What A Financial Crisis Looks Like

Just within the past few days, three major high yield funds have completely imploded, and panic is spreading rapidly on Wall Street. Funds run by Third Avenue Management and Stone Lion Capital Partners have suspended payments to investors, and a fund run by Lucidus Capital Partners has liquidated its entire portfolio. We are witnessing a race for the exits unlike anything that we have seen since the great financial crash of 2008, and many of those that choose to hesitate are going to end up getting totally wiped out. In case you are wondering, this is what a financial crisis looks like. In 2008, other global stock markets started to tumble, then junk bonds began to crash, and finally U.S. stocks followed. The exact same pattern is playing out again, and the carnage that we have seen so far is just the tip of the iceberg.

Since the end of 2009, a high yield bond ETF that I watch very closely known as JNK has been trading in a range between 36 and 42. I have been waiting all this time for it to dip below 35, because I knew that would be a sign that the next major financial crisis was imminent.

In September, it closed as low as 35.33 at one point, but that was not the signal that I was looking for. Finally, early last week JNK broke below 35 for the very first time since the last financial crisis, and since then it has just kept on falling. As I write this, JNK has plummeted all the way to 33.42, and Bloomberg is reporting that many bond managers “are predicting more carnage for high-yield investors”…

Top bond managers are predicting more carnage for high-yield investors amid a market rout that forced at least three credit funds in the past week to wind down.

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

If The Economy Is Fine, Why Are So Many Hedge Funds, Energy Companies And Large Retailers Imploding?

November 19, 2015

If The Economy Is Fine, Why Are So Many Hedge Funds, Energy Companies And Large Retailers Imploding?

If the U.S. economy really is in “great shape”, then why do all of the numbers keep telling us that we are in a recession? The manufacturing numbers say that we are in a recession, the trade numbers say that we are in a recession, and as you will see below the retail numbers say that we are in a recession. But just like in 2008, the Federal Reserve and our top politicians will continue to deny that a major economic downturn is happening for as long as they possibly can. In this article, I want to look at more signs that a dramatic shift is happening in our economy right now.

First of all, let’s consider what is happening to hedge funds. For many years, hedge funds had been doing extremely well, but now they are closing up shop at a pace that we haven’t seen since the last financial crisis. The following is an excerpt from a Business Insider article entitled “Hedge funds keep on imploding” that was posted on Wednesday…

BlackRock is winding down its Global Ascent Fund, a global macro hedge fund that once contained $4.6 billion in assets, according to Bloomberg’s Sabrina Willmer.

“We believe that redeeming the Global Ascent Fund was the right thing to do for our clients, given the headwinds that macro funds have faced,” a BlackRock spokeswoman told Business Insider.

The winding down of the Ascent fund is the second high-profile hedge fund closing in 24 hours. The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday that Achievement Asset Management, a Chicago-based hedge fund, was closing.

And those are just two examples. Quite a few other prominent hedge funds have shut down recently, and many are wondering if this is just the beginning of a major “bloodbath” on Wall Street.

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

Two Outs in the Bottom of the Ninth

September 26, 2015

Two Outs in the Bottom of the Ninth

The housing market peaked in 2005 and proceeded to crash over the next five years, with existing home sales falling 50%, new home sales falling 75%, and national home prices falling 30%. A funny thing happened after the peak. Wall Street banks accelerated the issuance of subprime mortgages to hyper-speed. The executives of these banks knew housing had peaked, but insatiable greed consumed them as they purposely doled out billions in no-doc liar loans as a necessary ingredient in their CDOs of mass destruction.

The millions in upfront fees, along with their lack of conscience in bribing Moody’s and S&P to get AAA ratings on toxic waste, while selling the derivatives to clients and shorting them at the same time, in order to enrich executives with multi-million dollar compensation packages, overrode any thoughts of risk management, consequences, or the impact on homeowners, investors, or taxpayers. The housing boom began as a natural reaction to the Federal Reserve suppressing interest rates to, at the time, ridiculously low levels from 2001 through 2004 (child’s play compared to the last six years).

Greenspan created the atmosphere for the greatest mal-investment in world history. As he raised rates from 2004 through 2006, the titans of finance on Wall Street should have scaled back their risk taking and prepared for the inevitable bursting of the bubble. Instead, they were blinded by unadulterated greed, as the legitimate home buyer pool dried up, and they purposely peddled “exotic” mortgages to dupes who weren’t capable of making the first payment. This is what happens at the end of Fed induced bubbles. Irrationality, insanity, recklessness, delusion, and willful disregard for reason, common sense, historical data and truth lead to tremendous pain, suffering, and financial losses.

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

Canadian Mortgage Insurer Tells US Hedge Funds Why Canada’s Housing Bubble Is Immortal. Hilarity Ensues

June 4, 2015

Canadian Mortgage Insurer Tells US Hedge Funds Why Canada’s Housing Bubble Is Immortal. Hilarity Ensues

Home prices in Canada’s two largest metro areas have been red-hot for years. In May, the average selling price for all types of homes in the Greater Toronto Area jumped 11% from a year ago to C$649,600 on a 6% increase in sales. In Greater Vancouver, the composite benchmark price for all homes rose 9.4% to C$684,400 on a 23% increase in sales.

But these overall price changes paper over what’s happening with detached homes,whose prices soared 14% to C$1,104,900 in Vancouver and 18% to C$1,115,120 in Toronto.

Already last summer, Fitch fretted about overvaluation in housing and the high debt burden relative to disposable income of Canadian households. At about the same time, seven in ten mortgage lenders expressed concerns in a poll by FICO that home prices were in a “bubble” that could burst any time. Last October, the Bank of Canada thought that the housing bubble could threaten Canada’s financial stability.

This January, Deutsche Bank estimated that homes in Canada were 63% overvalued. In March, the IMF warned that high household debt levels and the “overheated housing market” are two risks it would “need to keep an eye on.” In April, the Economistdetermined that home prices in Canada were overvalued by 35% when compared to incomes, and 89% when compared to rents.

Now hedge funds are trying to engineer ways to short the Canadian housing market one way or the other, because surely this would be another “short of a lifetime.”

Maybe they’re right: beyond Toronto and Vancouver, the housing market is already drifting lower.

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

Something Smells Fishy

May 30, 2015

SOMETHING SMELLS FISHY

It’s always interesting to see a long term chart that reflects your real life experiences. I bought my first home in 1990. It was a small townhouse and I paid $100k, put 10% down, and obtained a 9.875% mortgage. I was thrilled to get under 10%. Those were different times, when you bought a home as a place to live. We had our first kid in 1993 and started looking for a single family home. We stopped because our townhouse had declined in value to $85k, so I couldn’t afford to sell. In 1995 I convinced my employer to rent my townhouse, as they were already renting multiple townhouses for all the foreigners doing short term assignments in the U.S. We bought a single family home in 1995 with the sole purpose of having a decent place to raise a family that was within 20 minutes of my job.

Considering home prices on an inflation adjusted basis were lower than they were in 1980, I was certainly not looking at it as some sort of investment vehicle. But, as you can see from the chart, nationally prices soared by about 55% between 1995 and 2005. My home supposedly doubled in value over 10 years. I was ecstatic when I was eventually able to sell my townhouse in 2004 for $134k. I felt so smart, until I saw a notice in the paper one year later showing my old townhouse had been sold again for $176k. Who knew there were so many greater fools.

This was utterly ridiculous, as home prices over the last 100 years have gone up at the rate of inflation. Robert Shiller and a few other rational thinking people called it a bubble. They were scorned and ridiculed by the whores at the NAR and the bimbo cheerleaders on CNBC. Something smelled rotten in the state of housing.

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

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