sell! sell! sell!

[tiznow]

Well he's the most schooled and prepared libertarian we got.. Also most of the party line lol observations are kooky hard liners that don't know how to tone down and moderate the message to the masses .. And the libertarian message and how it makes a lot of sense when put up against the hypocracy of the one party system... Guess we'll see how it goes.. Record level of dislike for both sides and doesn't look like anybody else is throwing their hat into the ring..

Will see if he can crack 15% to get on the debate stage to at least make some noise..

 

[tiznow]

Great summary of the last 15+ years of monetary madness and why we yet again sit at the edge of the cliff...

-------------

Imagine

John P. Hussman, Ph.D.
All rights reserved and actively enforced.
Reprint Policy
Imagine the collapse of an extended speculative tech bubble, resulting in a broad economic recession. Imagine if the Federal Reserve had persistently slashed short-term interest rates during the downturn, to no avail, leaving rates at just 1% by the time the S&P 500 had lost half of its value and the Nasdaq 100 collapsed by 83%. Imagine that the Fed kept rates suppressed, in the initially well-meaning hope of encouraging lending, growth and employment. Imagine that the depressed level of interest rates made investors feel starved for yield, and drove them to look for safe alternatives to Treasury bills.
Imagine that investors found the higher yields they sought in mortgage securities, which had historically always been safe, and that Fed policy inadvertently created voracious demand for more of that debt. Imagine Wall Street had weak enough requirements on capital and underwriting standards that financial institutions had an incentive to create more “product” by lending to borrowers with lower and lower creditworthiness. Imagine that by the magic of “financial engineering” and lax oversight of credit ratings, Wall Street could pass these mortgages off to investors either directly by bundling, slicing and dicing them into mortgage-backed securities or by piggy-backing on the good faith and credit of the government by transferring them to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in return for funds obtained from investors in these “agency” securities.
Imagine that this Fed-induced yield-seeking speculation changed the dynamics of the housing market, and produced a bubble in home prices, coupled with overbuilding and malinvestment. Imagine that the Federal Reserve, focused exclusively on exploiting the very weak links between monetary policy and its “mandates” of employment and price stability, ignored the phrase “long-run” in those mandates, and wholly disregarded the speculative effects of its actions, which any thoughtful central banker should have viewed as a significant risk to the long-run economic health of the nation. Imagine that the then-head of the San Francisco Federal Reserve, Janet Yellen, answered questions about 1) whether speculative risks existed, 2) whether the Fed had any role in addressing them, and 3) whether there was any doubt that the Fed could halt a resulting economic downturn if it occurred, responding with a dismissive “No, No, and No.”
Imagine that this second speculative bubble collapsed anyway, producing the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, and that persistent easing by the Fed failed to stop any of it, just as it failed to do so during the preceding collapse. Imagine that the Fed violated the existing provisions of section 13.3 of the Federal Reserve Act (later rewritten by Congress to spell it out like a children’s book) and created off-balance sheet shell companies called “Maiden Lane” to take bad assets off of the ledgers of certain financial institutions, in order to protect the bondholders of those companies and facilitate their acquisition by purchasers. Imagine that the crisis continued, and that what actually ended the crisis was a change in FASB accounting rules in the second week of March 2009, which relieved the need for financial institutions to mark their distressed assets to market value, and instead allowed them “significant judgment” in valuing those assets, instantly removing the specter of widespread financial insolvencies with the stroke of a pen. Imagine that legislation following the crisis was heavy on paper regulation, signed assurances, and living-wills, but was light on capital requirements, and contained provisionsthat essentially tied the hands of the FDIC and instead gave veto power to the Treasury and the best friend of the banking system, the Federal Reserve Board itself, in deciding whether a “too-big-to-fail” bank would actually go into receivership (where bondholders often lose money, but depositors are protected) if it was to become insolvent.
Imagine that in response to the collapse of a yield-seeking mortgage bubble, a resulting global financial crisis, and a 55% collapse in the S&P 500, the Federal Reserve insisted on pursuing more of what created the bubble in the first place; refusing to admit the weak cause-and-effect relationship between monetary easing and the real economy, pushing interest rates to zero, and expanding the monetary base to the point where $4 trillion of zero-interest hot potatoes constantly had to be held by someone in the financial markets. Imagine that despite pursuing this experimentation for years, the response of the real economy was no differentthan could have been predicted using prior values of non-monetary variables alone. Imagine that the main effect of this unprecedented intervention was to drive the most reliable measures of stock market valuation (those best correlated across history with actual subsequent 10-12 year market returns) well beyond double their historical norms, and that it prompted massive issuance of low-grade, “covenant lite” debt, in much the same way yield-seeking speculation encouraged the issuance of low-grade mortgage debt in the preceding bubble.
Imagine that the Fed not only refused to take serious account of the distorting impact of yield-seeking speculation on the financial markets, but actually welcomed it, citing it as an example of the “effectiveness” of quantitative easing, in the appallingly misguided belief that “wealth” is inherent in the price you pay for a security, rather than in the long-term stream of cash flows that the security will deliver over time. Imagine that investors adopted the same overconfidence in a Fed “put option” that they held before the 2000-2002 and 2007-2009 market collapses. Imagine the Fed failed to take any steps at all to reduce the size of its balance sheet at historically low interest rates, and painted itself into a corner because despite the weak relationship between short-term interest rates and the real economy, any normalization of policy threatened to burst a bubble that was already at a precipice.
Imagine that as a result of a massive combined deficit in the government and household sectors after the housing collapse, corporate profit margins temporarily soared to the highest level in history (an implication of the saving-investment identity under assumptions that typically hold in U.S. data). Imagine that because of this temporary elevation of profit margins, many of the borrowers that issued debt most heavily during this yield-seeking bubble were companies with elevated short-term profitability, but more fragile prospects over the full economic cycle. Imagine that energy and mining companies were among these, but were only the tip of the iceberg, exposed sooner than the rest because of early weakness in commodity prices.
Imagine if central banks took the position that when the relationship between their policy instruments and the real economy proves to be weak, the only option is to push those instruments beyond even the most extremist, historically unprecedented, and wholly experimental limits. Imagine that after years of persistent yield-seeking speculation, valuations were driven so high that the prospective 12-year return on a conventional 60% stocks, 30% bonds, 10% Treasury bills investment portfolio was compressed to just 1.6%. Imagine that corporate, state, and municipal pension funds were still assuming a 7% annual return on their investments, and that as a result of this mismatch, pension funds were becoming both massively underfunded, and vulnerable to severe capital losses over the completion of the market cycle.
Imagine that despite the delusion that low interest rates made stocks “cheap relative to bonds,” years of speculation had already created a situation where stocks were actually likely to underperform even the depressed yield on 10-year Treasury securities in the decade ahead, making the majority of corporate stock repurchases (which are typically financed by debt issuance), negative contributors to shareholder value. Imagine that the latest stick-save by central banks, in response to initial weakness following the 2015 peak of the bubble in global equity markets, had brought the median price/revenue ratio of the S&P 500 to the highest level in history, far exceeding even the 2000 peak (which was more focused on large-capitalization stocks, particularly in technology).
Imagine that all of this could be demonstrated with a century of reliable evidence, but that hardly anyone, particularly in the investment profession, gave it any more attention than the empty lip-service they offered during the tech and housing bubbles. Imagine that central bankers were focused instead on toy models that had weak theoretical and empirical foundations, inadequate transmission mechanisms, and an inability to explain more than a tiny fraction of economic variation over-and-above what could be explained in the absence of their deranged monetary activism. Imagine that they ignored real data in preference for the comfort and bizarre allegiance to a “Phillips Curve” that does not exist (Phillips’ work actuallydemonstrated a relationship between unemployment and wage inflation - and real wage inflation at that, given that he studied a century of British data when the U.K. was under the gold standard).
Imagine that a divided Congress, incapable of agreeing on fiscal policies to encourage productive investment in the public and private sectors, instead allowed a handful of unelected bankers and college professors to become the untethered de-facto overlords of the financial markets, repeatedly promoting destructive speculative bubbles. Imagine that nobody cared to recognize the role of financial speculation and malinvestment as the primary source of repeated economic dislocations and crises, because they were, nearly to a person, too lazy, uninformed, or dogmatic to actually get their hands dirty by questioning their assumptions or carefully examining the historical data.
Imagine that years of speculative recklessness had driven the S&P 500 to the second most extreme level of equity market overvaluation in postwar U.S. history (the third highest if one includes the 1929 peak), and to the single most extreme point of overvaluation for the median stock. Imagine that market internals and momentum had already deteriorated, and that the market had traced out an extended top-formation, as it had in late-2000 and again in late-2007.
Now imagine what might happen next.
A side-note. Though I was one of the few market participants who correctly anticipated the tech and housing collapses (also adopting a constructive or aggressive investment outlook following every bear market decline in three decades as a professional investor, and navigating complete market cycles admirably over that span), I regularly acknowledge that my 2009 insistence on stress-testing our discipline against Depression-era data, coupled with a Fed policy focused on intentionally encouraging financial speculation, inadvertently created an Achilles Heel for us in the advancing portion of this market cycle. We addressed those challenges in mid-2014. See the “Box” in The Next Big Short for the complete narrative. This episode of central bank recklessness will likely end in tears, and while I can certainly be blamed for the challenges that followed my 2009 stress-testing decision, it strikes me as ill-advised to dismiss a century of reliable objective evidence on the basis of subjective challenges that were highly unique to elements of our own discipline (specifically, the impact of QE on the outcomes of “overvalued, overbought, overbullish” syndromes, in the absence of weakness in market internals).
A few charts

 

[tiznow]

[h=1]Raoul Pal: The Brexit vote is about so much more than Britain leaving the EU - Yahoo Finance[/h]Closely-followed former global macro fund manager Raoul Pal says the United Kingdom's European Union referendum —no matter how the "Brexit" vote goes— could have really bad unintended consequences for the rest of Europe.
The EU is made up for 28 member countries, and it allows for the free movement of goods, services, workers, and capital. Basically, if you're a citizen of an EU member country, you can freely live and work in another member country like Spain and use its health-care sytem and other services. A key focus of those who support a "Brexit" has been concerns about the recent rise in immigration to the UK.
On Thursday, British citizens will vote on whether the UK should remain in the EU or leave. The polls suggest that the vote is going to be close.
[h=3]It's about Europe, not Britain[/h]Whether the UK remains or leaves, with a small margin of victory either way, it won’t matter for Britain so much as it will for the rest of Europe, according to Pal.
“The biggest issue is going to be Europe," Pal told Yahoo Finance, adding, "Regardless of what happens to the vote, something has really changed in the markets. It looks like they're starting to discount that if a Brexit happens, then it's a really big event for Europe more than it is tor the UK because it may allow other countries to think about leaving the EU. The risk is of Europe falling apart"
Pal pointed that there's been a "bit of a panic" going on in the market, with European bank stocks already in a free-fall and European government bonds negative yielding.
If the UK leaves on its own free-will, it could give the signal to other countries that they can leave. It could have a domino effect.
"What's stopping Greece saying 'we just want out too'? If the fifth largest economy has walked away, what's to stop anyone else? What's to stop the Spanish?"
Even if that doesn't happen, just having a vote in the first place isn't a good thing for Europe.
Let’s say “remain” wins 51% to 49%, the unintended consequence is that it gives other European countries a hope that maybe if they were to have a referendum they would be able to exit, Pal explained.
The thought is that if “remain” wins the vote, the market might have a relief rally after. However, it’s not about the reaction of the day, but the reaction in the weeks and months following.
“Regardless of outcome, it’s going to make everyone realize that Europe has a problem. If the UK leaves, it will split the nation 50/50. If it remains, it will create a problem for Europe that they got the fifth largest economy to remain but only just. I really think it makes Europe a much weaker place.”
It could also be more difficult for the EU to impose rules on the UK if 50% of the country doesn't want it.
"The EU gets a bit more paralyzed in what they can do. It's a bad all around outcome."
Pal, a UK citizen who has lived in Spain, previously co-managed GLG's global macro fund, one of the largest in the world. He retired in 2004 at age 36.
He now authors a research letter, The Global Macro Investor, which is read by some of the most prolific hedge fund managers. Pal is also the co-founder of Real Vision Television, an online subscription financial-news service.

 

[eek.]

The real fear is in the EU camp.
If the UK leaves then the EU could fall apart at the seams. If we did OK after leaving other countries would want out as well.

On the flip side, if we stay in the EU then the youngsters have no-one but themselves to blame this time around if things go up
Everyone and his dog knows that all us oldies wanted out of the EU

 

[eek.]

And it's been a relatively peaceful affair really, with only a single casualty

Attempts at Secession in the USA has been a tad more violent over the years, lol

 

[eek.]

They know it's not over yet, it's intriguing to watch Boris Johnston disappear from the face of planet earth

He's the face of the EU out vote... and yet he has ceased to exist on the BBC website.... nothing on either the front page or the politics page about him at all today... kinda like airbrushing Donald Trump off CBS 3 days before the presidency vote...

Long live Democracy!

 

[tiznow]

Duh.. Everything I'm reading now in mainstream press about how bad things gonna be if they leave yada yada.. Same old story for past few decades..the status quo beats the populace with fear until they get their way... And the global inequality keeps increasing... Think people slowly waking up but taking way too long ..

 

[tiznow]

Trump wouldn't last too long even if he somehow made it large portion of population absolutely hate this guy.. He's just having some fun making a mockery of the republicans.. Get off the trump stuff eek... It's all one big circus for Hillary... One party system always gets their guy or gal...

----------

US election: Arrested Briton 'wanted to shoot Donald Trump'

Watch the moment the man accused of trying to grab a gun at a Donald Trump rally is removedA Briton who tried to grab a police officer's gun at a Donald Trump rally in Las Vegas said he wanted to shoot the candidate, court papers say.
Michael Steven Sandford, 19, did not enter a plea when he appeared before a judge in Nevada and was remanded in custody until a hearing on 5 July.
According to the court papers, he went to the Trump rally on Saturday.
He reportedly tried to seize the gun from the police officer after saying he was seeking the candidate's autograph.
He said he had been planning to try and shoot Mr Trump for about a year but had decided to act now because he finally felt confident enough to do so, court papers say.
A federal judge found Mr Sandford to be a danger and risk of non-appearance, and he was ordered detained pending his preliminary hearing.
When asked about the arrest of Michael Sandford, a Foreign Office spokesman said: "We are providing assistance following an arrest of a British national in Las Vegas."
Earlier on Monday, Mr Trump fired his campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, who oversaw his triumph in the primary contests.
'Expected to be killed'

According to the court papers, Mr Sandford said he had never fired a gun before but went to a range in Las Vegas on 17 June to learn how to shoot.
At the rally he allegedly tried to grab the officer's weapon because it was in an unlocked position and therefore, he said, the easiest way to get a gun to shoot Mr Trump.
Court Documents say Mr Sandford acknowledged he knew he would only be able to fire one or two rounds, and expected to be killed during an attempt on Mr Trump's life.

APPeople attending the rally in Las Vegas on Saturday had to pass through metal detectors manned by police and casino security officialsHe told police if he had not tried to kill Mr Trump at this rally he would have tried again at a rally in Phoenix, for which he had already booked tickets, the papers say.
He told investigators he had been in the US for one and a half years, the court papers say.
Court research showed he was unemployed, living out of his car and in the US illegally, the Associated Press news agency reports.
A federal public defender said he had autism and had attempted suicide, the agency adds.
Recent opinion polls suggest Mr Trump is trailing his Democrat opponent Hillary Clinton, with most voters viewing him as "strongly unfavourable".
There were reports over the weekend that Mrs Clinton's campaign was ahead in spending in key swing states.

Mr Trump's former campaign manager says he still supports the his candidacy, despite being sacked.
Corey Lewandowski said the billionaire businessman had changed the way American politics was viewed for the better.
Barbara Plett-Usher reports: Corey Lewandowski's "aggressive style sometimes got him in trouble"Reports in American media say he clashed with the more traditional strategists Mr Trump has hired recently to try and reshape his operation for the November election.
Mr Trump is facing strong resistance from senior members of his own party over his strident tone, hard-line immigration policy and falling poll numbers.
Americans go to the polls on 8 November to elect a president to succeed Democrat Barack Obama, who is stepping down after two terms in office, which have seen the Republicans gain control of both houses of Congress.

 

[tiznow]

Clintons campaign 42 mil, super PAC 52 mil

trump 1.3 mil

its over before it even starts as planned

 

[PatsFan1283]

Is he really not even going to try to raise money? What is going on there?

I booked a bet with a friend at 10-1, laid 1k to win 100 bucks that Trump will be the nominee. He thinks he can still get screwed at the convention. I really can't imagine I lose this, figured odds were way lower than 10% but we'll see.

 

[snoop]

Musk is trying to bail out his child SolarCity. SCTY pops 20% on the news.

Tesla shareholders are not so happy, they're dumping TSLA hard, down 10%.

 

[tiznow]

Well one things for sure the guys not afraid to push all in ha

thimgs gonna get really dicey for him assuming a big shitstorm comes soon.. As that combined company is gonna burn tons of cash for a while still and getting backers will get tougher during a shitstorm

 

[tiznow]

Best knee slapping headline I've seen In a while

cnn: brexit:the uks trump movement

yeah let's equate wanting your independence and being able to better control your own fate going forward.. To backing a freak show reality tv fascist type guy for president.. Hilarious

 

[tiznow]

Hilarious watching market swing with latest Brexit polls... Still say near zero chance of exit winning... Betfair says roughly 27%

 

[tiznow]

It's over before voting started as expected eek ... Down to 15% chance at befair.. Overvalued Markets using as excuse to squeeze higher... Status quo whores win every battle as usual...

 

[tiznow]

ben took off and now whoring himself out to financial elite while laughing and saying have fun Yellen..

-------------

However, the best, and last, Q&A was with California Rep. Edward Royce who asked whether the Fed was merely propping up stock prices.

ROYCE: I'm worried that the Federal Reserve has created a third pillar of monetary policy, that of a stable and rising stock market. And I say that because then-Chairman Bernanke, when he appeared here, stated repeatedly that, "the goal of QE was to increase asset prices like the stock market to create a wealth effect." That seems as though that was goal. It would stand to reason then that in deciding to raise rates and reduce the Fed's QE balance sheet standing at a still record $4.5 trillion, one would have to be prepared to accept the opposite result, a declining stock market and a slight deflation of the asset bubble that QE created. Yet, every time in the past three years when there has been a hint of raising rates and the stock market has declined accordingly, the Fed has cited stock market volatility as one of the reasons to stay the course and hold rates at zero. So indeed, the Fed has backed away so many times from rate normalization that - and I think this is a conceptual problem here that the market now expects stock market volatility to diminish the odds of a rate increase. So Madame Chair, is having a stable and rising stock market a third pillar or the Federal Reserve's monetary policy if I go back to what I originally heard Ben Bernanke articulate?

YELLEN: It is not a third pillar of monetary policy. We do not target the level of stock prices. That is not an appropriate thing for us to do.
​

 

[eek.]

Down to 15% chance at bet-fair

It's just the scalpers etc closing out.
If they leave the market open after the 10pm mark until close to results time on Friday am we could see some wild swings

 

[eek.]

The chap who predicted the last election correctly, unlike the big polling companies, has brexit around 40%

The big problem is the liars who say the opposite to which way they'll vote(There's a sub-culture of mischief makers with polls in the UK) and the huge number, 10-15% of "don't knows"... who do know but won't say.
Older conservative (Tory) voters are particularly bad for not declaring their intentions.
The oldie don't-knows I know have all voted for brexit when it came to the crunch.

It's going to be an interesting 24 hours

 

[tiznow]

They'll rig it if necessary anyway...

sad part is leave had a great shot and all the momentum if not for that one "crazy" guy that killed jo cox for whatever reason.. Any sane person knows that action will help the stay camp greatly... Anywho..

 

[eek.]

The scary bit is the markets have taken a massive gamble on Remain winning...
If Brexit wins it's going to be a financial bloodbath

Everybody is a bit shell-shocked at the way the market has moved so aggressively (towards Britain remaining in the EU)," said Saxo Bank's head of FX strategy John Hardy.
"If you are stuck with a short position, you are being forced out without even knowing the result, but what this also means is that a Brexit result is now a catastrophic risk."
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-global-markets-idUSKCN0Z901Z