I still havent gotten over the fact that theres a capital management group out there having named itself Cerberus. Those of you who were not asleep in Miss Buttkickers Intro to Western Civ will recognize Cerberus; the rest of you may have picked up the mythological fix from its reprise as Fluffy in the first Harry Potter novel. Wherever you get your culture, Cerberus is the three-headed dog who guards the gates of Hell. It takes three heads to do that of course, because its never clear, in theology or finance, whether the idea is to keep the righteous from falling into the pit or the demons from escaping out of it (the third head is busy meeting with the regulators).
The restrictions, known as gates, were triggered after clients sought to pull more than 16.5 percent of their money from Cerberus Partners LP by the end of the year, according to a Dec. 19 letter sent to clients. Cerberus said investors could get 20 percent of their year-end redemption requests, while the limits on the rest will last as long as a year.
And so it begins. All that is gold does not glitter, not all those who wander are lost; the old that is strong does not wither, deep roots are not reached by the frost. From the ashes a fire shall be woken, a light from the shadows shall spring; renenwed shall be blade that was broken, the crownless again shall be king.
If I were a qualified investor and could actually invest in these funds, I'd be withdrawing everything come Monday. Since the government sees to it that I'm protected from these risky schemes, I don't know how they work... so, I imagine most of them contracturally prohibit calls like that. But, like hell I'd want to have money "locked up" by some AM bleeding $$$ out of every corporate orafice.
Of course it's just one of their hedge funds. Probably one that invested heavily with Madoff. I wonder if Madoff is the counter party for all of the CDS^2?
Seriously though, It's great to see the last scraps of the TARP circling the drain. Weeeeeeeeeee!
âAll that is gold does not glitter, not all those who wander are lost; the old that is strong does not wither, deep roots are not reached by the frost. From the ashes a fire shall be woken, a light from the shadows shall spring; renenwed shall be blade that was broken, the crownless again shall be king.â Rob Dawg | 12.23.08 - 8:38 pm | #
Industry assets peaked at $1.9 trillion in June, according to Hedge Fund Research Inc. in Chicago. Investment losses and withdrawals may shrink that amount by 45 percent by the end of this month, according to estimates by analysts at Morgan Stanley.
~~~~
That's a lot of leverage to be pulling out of the markets ... I wonder how much has been done so far ...
What does it mean to have the entire investment community subconsciously chanting the mantra: "In a recession cash Is king?"
Sardonic | 12.23.08 - 8:41 pm | #
"a light from the shadows shall spring; renenwed shall be blade that was broken, the crownless again shall be king."
I'm Arthur, King of the Britains!
King of the who?
The Britains.
Who are the Britains?
We all are, and I am your king.
Well I didn't vote for you...
You don't vote for King.
Well how'd you become king then?
The Lady of the Lake, her arm clad inthe purest shimmering samite held aloft Excalibur from the bosom of the water, signifying by divine providence that I, Arthur, was to carry Excalibur. THAT is why I am your king.
Listen, strange women lyin' in ponds distributin' swords is no basis for a system of government. Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.
"We still believe we bought well," he said of Chrysler and GMAC. "In those cases, we got caught in what we see as a 'perfect storm' in the auto and housing sectors."
I wonder how he defines "bought well". I do not think those words mean what he thinks they mean.
The real hedge fund panics when investors realize in March or April that the gates have allowed managers to further eviscerate their funds (and hence the investors' money).
Everybody should be real Madoff all over this event. A supposedly $27b fund with more than 2 months advance notice couldn't liquidate enough to cover $4.1 billion in redemption requests. Am I the only one suspicious? The obvious truth is that the fund isn't worth anywhere near $27 billion. IMO it is actually worth 1/2 a Madoff.
Probably old news to this crew, but I really see these events as ushering in the death of the hedge fund industry (for a while, at least). Their business model (huge leverage to buy "safe assets") is dead, and the trust factor has just been shattered by Madoff, frozen redemptions, etc. Why would anyone leave a significant amount of money that you can't follow day to day, may not be able to withdraw when you want, and by the way, may be stolen by the fund manager/invested in a ponzi scheme.
Made the offer on the previous thread just before it died, if anyone wants a copy of my December Strategy report, shoot me an e-mail at dhvd_2004@yahoo.com
If we could establish intent on the part of just one of Cerberus' heads, would they all go to jail? If we decapitated the head that belongs in jail, wouldn't the whole dog die? What a conundrum.
What its into: Debt and equity securities, mergers, restructurings and recapitalizations, venture capitalism, real estate, and emerging markets, including India
Strategy: Plenty of arbitragefor instance, in risk and mergers. Farallons clients include institutions, especially university endowments, and super-rich individuals. The fund is highly event-driven, always on the lookout for companies undergoing major changes that will result in increased value. Spotting these, Farallon invests, usually hedging on short positions in other financial instruments to help offset potential losses. For instance, Farallon may have recently cashed in on bargains resulting from the housing markets troubles. In March, it partnered with Simon Property Group to acquire another real estate investment trust, Mills Corp., and also injected a $230 million loan into Accredited Home Lenders Holding Co., helping stave off its subprime pressures. In April, it bought Affordable Residential Communities, a manufactured-home community business.
Slightly off topic: I have to wonder when the slowdown in consumer spending will begin to impact advertising. I would think that the first reaction might be MORE ads, to try to stimulate spending, but surely sooner or later businesses will come to understand that consumers are not spending because they don't have the money, and ads to try to get them to do so, are largely a pointless and wasteful expense.
Hedge funds including D.E. Shaw & Co. LP and Farallon Capital Management LLC this month imposed gates so they wouldnt be forced to raise cash by liquidating assets at distressed prices. Magnetar, based in Evanston, Illinois, told clients who asked for redemptions by Dec. 31 that they will get 10 percent of their requests in cash and 5 percent in shares of its two credit funds, the people said.
10 REM
20 PRINT "HOW MUCH MONEY DO YOU WISH TO WITHDRAW FROM CEREBRUS?"
30 REM
40 INPUT X
50 REM
60 X= X - 1000000
70 REM
80 PRINT "YOU MAY HAVE " X " DOLLARS AT THIS TIME"
90 PRINT "IS THAT ACCEPTABLE: YES/NO?"
100 INPUT Z
100 IF Z = YES THEN GOTO 60
110 IF Z = NO THEN GOTO 120
120 PRINT "THANKS FOR INVESTING WITH CEREBRUS. HAVE A GREAT DAY"
I exited EEV a month or two ago during the panic. I just checked in and can't believe my eyes.....
now that we are in the hardest crash landing since the GD, EEV is only in the high 50's?! Am I missing something, or is this just Mr Market with a Christmas present?
starting hfa=hedge funds anonymus
first, recognize your problem
second, put yourself in the hands of a higher power
third: fill the tank of the SUV and get the hell out of tow
I thot most or all hedge funds had gates in their "rules". And i thot alot had had rules that investers had to notify them 90 days in advance of a redemption. Why is every one so surprised about that the gates got slammed??
"Harvard University's admission that it lost $8 billion from its $36 billion endowment fund, as staggering as it sounds, may grossly underestimate the true magnitude of the loss between from July 1 through Oct. 31 2008. According to a source close the Harvard Management Corporation (HMC), which runs the fund for Harvard, the loss is closer to $18 billion if the losses on the fund's illiquid investment are realistically appraised."
. 23 (Bloomberg) -- Reserve Management Co., owner of the collapsed Reserve Primary Fund, said the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission plans to charge it and senior executives with violations of securities law.
The SECs enforcement division told the company last week it will recommend suing the company and Chairman Bruce Bent, who created the first money-market mutual fund, Reserve said today in a statement on its Web site. The closely held firm expects civil charges also to be filed against Bents sons, Bruce Bent II and Arthur Bent III.
Oh come on nova, $100 Bil is mere pocket change for the Wall Street crowd.
OCDan | 12.23.08 - 9:12 pm | #
Have you ever dug for clams? You walk along, poking your clam gun on the ground in front of you. Once one of the little bastards burps, you find a nest of them. Especially, the Pacific Razor. Man, what a clam.
There is only one way to buy an explosive market at the bottom.
That is to catch a falling knife just before it turns.
If you pay attention to this board and you don't buy something energy here, you're a total fool.
I would highly recommend DBE, mixed energy commodities. It has no trading volume, so put in a limit order 2-3% below tomorrow's opening price. Just hold it a year or two. You'll double your money.
You don't think these hedge funds could've been used to hide the actions of our Federal Reserve Bank?
Madoff's last act was to buy $10B worth of treasuries... or something like that?
There were some interesting calls on right-wing radio this afternoon regarding Arnold signing off on the legislatures illegal tax, which is going to happen next week (Merry Christmas!).
Here's to the people fighting back and passing some type of Proposition more draconian to "increasing state revenues" than Proposition 13.
Some ideas I heard:
- If legislatures cannot balance a budget by a certain date there is a re-election
- 75% approval for any tax increase
- "Tax" will now also include "fees" and other synonyms.
- Similar proposition against immigration that has been passed in Arizona (ie cut off everything except for education and health car services)
Who cares if we BK the current state. We need to set up a viable government at some point, right?
I'd be interested if the left-wingers like this as well? Also, I can see myself making ads for this campaign for free. All I have to do is stand there in front of a camera with my children and talk about
the future of my children and gradnchildren.
More cockroaches? A 100 billion here, a 100 billion there, next thing ya know is you need another TARP
nova | Homepage | 12.23.08 - 9:14 pm | #
Agreed!
However, the speed with which all the info is getting out and all the air is fizzing out of the bubble is getting scary, no matter how many cans of soup, rice, and beans one has.
We are literally watching a worldwide economic catastrophe no one has ever seen.
In regards to an earlier thread about transparency and banks showing the books.
They won't because only a handful aren't broke.
If we the people find out who is toast, I bet the economy would shrink by 50% overnight. Yes, you read that right, 50% overnight. And by the time it all ended, maybe 75%.
Look, I don't agree with everything Denninger writes, but he right about the GDP being as large as it is because of debt.
Take that credit away and look out.
No more scrapbooking/costume/Michaels stores on every corner.
Besides, I was just invited to join a super exclusive hedge funds that my doctor and real estate agent have been in for years. They've kept me out until this month. Lucky for me, they just had an opening available because somebody's second cousin dropped out. I'm not ashamed to say that I feel special to be part of these investors, and am pleased I'll have something to distinguish me from the mouth breathing indexers!(yep, that's what they call you). They are wealthier than me, and obviously know lots and lots about finance and money and stuff.
I exited EEV a month or two ago during the panic. I just checked in and can't believe my eyes.....
now that we are in the hardest crash landing since the GD, EEV is only in the high 50's?! Am I missing something, or is this just Mr Market with a Christmas present?
Like I said, there's an amazing amount of speculative activity at work for a "deflationary depression." A lot of that speculation has poured into bashing EEV, TWM and SRS over the last month. Maybe, Ben just don't like them and wishes them gone.
But now is a great time to buy EEV, TWM and SRS. Just wade in...don't dive.
Keyness genius a very English one was to insist we should approach an economic system not as a morality play but as a technical challenge. He wished to preserve as much liberty as possible, while recognising that the minimum state was unacceptable to a democratic society with an urbanised economy. He wished to preserve a market economy, without believing that laisser faire makes everything for the best in the best of all possible worlds.
This same moralistic debate is with us, once again. Contemporary liquidationists insist that a collapse would lead to rebirth of a purified economy. Their leftwing opponents argue that the era of markets is over. And even I wish to see the punishment of financial alchemists who claimed that ever more debt turns economic lead into gold.
Yet Keynes would have insisted that such approaches are foolish. Markets are neither infallible nor dispensable. They are indeed the underpinnings of a productive economy and individual freedom. But they can also go seriously awry and so must be managed with care. The election of Mr Obama surely reflects a desire for just such pragmatism. Neither Ron Paul, the libertarian, nor Ralph Nader, on the left, got anywhere. So the task for this new administration is to lead the US and the world towards a pragmatic resolution of the global economic crisis we all now confront.
I am building a small position in DBC since it seems to be a pretty diversified basket of commodities but I want a little more exposure to oil.
Anyone have any thoughts on USL vs USO to get pure exposure to oil? It equal weights the next 12 months of oil futures equally so you don't have the same amount of roll costs each month.
@counterp: Hah! Flattering with horse farts! Haven't heard that expression in ages. Best epithet I can come up with for the hedgies is wang ba dan but then I'm not fluent in the vernacular any more...
Dec. 23 (Bloomberg) -- Pakistans National Clearing Co., which handles all of the nations stock transactions, said a 10th of brokers are at risk of defaulting on share payments after the benchmark index plunged 24 percent in seven days.
Around 20 brokers from the Karachi Stock Exchange are heading for default, Mohammed Shoaib Memon, a National Clearing board member, said in an interview today. There are 200 brokers at the Karachi Stock Exchange.
The long commodity trade is the most CROWDED trade in the market right now. Only the short treasury/dollar trade can come close to matching it in terms of interest.
Being a contrarian to the core, the very fact that EVERYONE and their grandma wants in on these trades tells me that not enough fear and capitulation have occurred in spite of the massive massive losses sustained by those shorting treasuries or going long commodities.
Even K. Marx believed that workers should only be paid if they add value. Pragmatism always before ideology, but semantic spin is still inevitable. Punishing an insolvent banker is pragmatic, so is trying to make use of whatever skill he has in the future.
RockyR - you have nights at Subway? Yikes. You need to get out more. Or stay in more.
Now is a great time to go out or stay in!
Got the lads out for pints tonight. And where did we go? Well, the only obvious place:
RECESSIONS. L St between 18th and 19th. Counterpointer | 12.23.08 - 9:13 pm | #
Haha! Well, C, take my advice: should you find yourself at a Subway with the munchies tomorrow morning at about, say 230a, avoid the Tuna Salad. I may not be much for investing advice, but I speak from experience on this one!
It reads like Toyota plans on cutting in NA with a very sharp knive...
The company, which has 30,000 employees in North America, is exhausting options to trim costs after halting work on the Blue Springs, Mississippi, plant that was to make Prius hybrids starting in 2010, and paring January production schedules at plants in the U.S. and Canada.
Analysts including Keller and Haig Stoddard at forecaster IHS Global Insight Inc. said North American payroll cuts may be inevitable for Toyota in 2009 unless market conditions improve.
There were signals in the last three years that the market was slowing, said Maryann Keller, an independent auto analyst and consultant in Greenwich, Connecticut. They didnt need the San Antonio factory and they absolutely did not need the Mississippi factory. Now theyve got too much capacity in North America.
Being a contrarian to the core, the very fact that EVERYONE and their grandma wants in on these trades tells me that not enough fear and capitulation have occurred in spite of the massive massive losses sustained by those shorting treasuries or going long commodities.
Why would anyone believe the foreign plants here would stay? Aren't NA jobs near the top on the chopping block? Just curious, but it will be fun to see Shelby flip and the Big 6 bailout pass in March.
As people wake up to the fact that this is WW lll in the form of financial warfare, more and more money will be put in harms way and God will favor the winning side.
yogi - it depends on how aggressive you and your accountant want to be. Since they are separate funds, with different stated objectives, different cusips and tickers you could argue that they aren't subject to wash sale rules. You're trading in a product based on front month oil and replacing it with one that equal weights 12 months of futures contracts on oil.
In March, it partnered with Simon Property Group to acquire another real estate investment trust, Mills Corp.,
check the history on the mills deal. I believe it was circa '06 the GS boys saved it from impending BK with a pier loan. a billion or so was at risk. a great stick save. I think i lost around 10g's on that one.
rich,
Thanks for the tip on GSC. Key difference between DBC and GSC is structually GSC is an Exchange Traded Note and unless I'm mistaken is debt of Goldman Sachs - I'm not in the mood to be their creditor at this time.
Dirk writes:
No more scrapbooking/costume/Michaels stores on every corner.
OCDan | 12.23.08 - 9:20 pm | #
Actually the NYT had an article on them today, doing well right now. Inferior goods, dude, inferior goods. they always do well in a downturn.
Dirk | Homepage | 12.23.08 - 9:33 pm | #
I am not against these stores per se. It is that they are in every town out here in LA/Orange county.
We don't need no more stinkin' costume shops or Micahels. What are the gas stations of the 80s? On every corner. At least it feels that way to me.
Milan (AsiaNews) - In the United States, the danger of debt insolvency is growing, putting at risk the currency reserves of foreign countries, China chief among them. According to new figures published by Bloomberg in recent days (Nov. 25, 2008 [1]), the American government has employed a total of 8.549 trillion dollars to stop the financial crisis. This means a total of about 24-25.4 trillion dollars of direct or indirect public debt weighing on American taxpayers. The complete tally must also include the debt - about 5-6 trillion dollars - of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which are now quasi-public companies, because 79.9% of their capital is controlled by a public entity, the Federal Housing Finance Agency, which manages them as a public conservatorship.
"Why would anyone leave a significant amount of money that you can't follow day to day, may not be able to withdraw when you want, and by the way, may be stolen by the fund manager/invested in a ponzi scheme."
Broward - we played pool at Recessions, ridiculously small table considering some of the party were almost 7' tall. No challenge with the "long" shots.
I think Manic Depression on Wall St is more like it:
try Gomez (man, the intertubes search for this is a nightmare after some Selena Gomez chick got famous).
Chinese monetary authorities, thanks to a steeply undervalued artificial exchange rate, by about 55%, have limited imports (including food) and have achieved an export surplus. This has allowed them to accumulate a large stockpile of dollar reserves. In a currency crisis, China risks losing much of the value of its accumulated currency reserves. At the same time, pressure on imports (wheat, other grains, and meat) have led to inflation in the prices of food, the most important expenditure for more than 900 million Chinese
They are going to dump dollars for commodities to keep feeding the unemployed? With exports down about 30% there is probably a handful of hungry Chinese hanging around the closed factory gates.
rich said "Like I said, there's an amazing amount of speculative activity at work for a "deflationary depression." A lot of that speculation has poured into bashing EEV, TWM and SRS over the last month. "
I don't get that--- I would have thought that the speculative activity which has driven EEV down is the expectation that the Obama stimulus will save the day...not of a deflation...
The good news is Jas Jain is apparently shacking up with George Michaels former lover, so he doesn't have time to comment here anymore (no longer lonely). At least, that is what I believe ever since Ken came around.
One way to gauge whether the U.S. economic recovery is proceeding is through the Treasury International Capital System (TICs data), a report from the U.S. Treasury that tracks money flowing into and out of the United States .
Booker says that if the TICs data, which recently dropped to just above $50 billion, is not in the $70 billion to $100 billion range, it will indicate an insufficient demand for dollars and U.S. dollar denominated assets; and a sub $50 billion reading would indicate a more protracted recession.
To assure the transmission of easy money occurred, the treasury terminated the 30-year bond auctions and dried up the supply, Wilkinson explains. That put a bid under the 10-year note and helped to flatten out the curve, he says, adding that there is still plenty of steepening left for the curve to take before the situation became dire.
Cash and carry
Another emerging trend in the currency markets is the end of the carry trade as we know it, with the low yielding Japanese yen and Swiss franc serving as funding currencies. Booker explains that in order for the carry trade to work, interest rates must collectively be on the rise, but that we are entering an elongated period when interest rates are coming down.
The conditions that foster the carry trade no longer exist, Booker says. We see a massive reversal in the carry trade. As firms realize that more and more, we see a cross rate in the GBP/JPY and the EUR/JPY that come much, much further down.
Another possibility is that the U.S. dollar could become a funding currency, McDonald says. We have been a yielding currency forever, because our interest rates have been fairly high across the G-10. We fell to sixth a while back and now our interest rates are fairly low when you compare us to everyone else. We are at 3%, the Swiss is at 2.75%. The only thing lower than that is the yen. People are going to seriously start looking to the U.S. currency as a funding currency and playing that against the Australian, the New Zealand or even the pound, as a yielding currency, she says..
See Last week: TIC flows were expected to be right around $40 billion, just slightly below what is necessary for us to fund our deficits. But the actual TIC flows were barely positive at just $1.5 billion. Could the rest of the world finally be tiring of our US Treasuries?
In October, as part of the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act, the Congress approved a debt limit increase to $11.3 trillion. Currently the national debt stands at $10.6 trillion. If the U.S. maxes out its credit line (a highly likely scenario) that would translate into a 7% increase in debt outstanding. Since foreigners are not the only buyers of U.S. debt, someone will have to fill that gap, especially if the decline in foreign ownership continues. The trillion dollar question is, will the new buyer agree to the same 0% terms that the current buyers are receiving?
Hmmm...I was unaware of the perl module getAssets. cpan doesn't seem to have it.
It's not open source. However I have it on good authority that the original version, before the comment was added, suffered from a pointer arithmetic error.
Thus getAssets behaviour was undefined, leading to random heap memory allocation errors, core dumps, and the occasional transfer of some of the clients' assets to an offshore account in Zimbabwe.
With nine days to go before British troops become an illegal presence in Iraq, sources say that lawyers are working on an alternative that would bypass Parliament and give Nouri al-Maliki, the Prime Minister, a free hand. But this, too, needs parliamentary approval and Western officials are concerned that it may not work.
"Thus getAssets behaviour was undefined, leading to random heap memory allocation errors, core dumps, and the occasional transfer of some of the clients' assets to an offshore account in Zimbabwe.
April 2008: Booker says that if the TICs data, which recently dropped to just above $50 billion, is not in the $70 billion to $100 billion range, it will indicate an insufficient demand for dollars and U.S. dollar denominated assets; and a sub $50 billion reading would indicate a more protracted recession.
Last week: TIC flows were expected to be right around $40 billion, just slightly below what is necessary for us to fund our deficits. But the actual TIC flows were barely positive at just $1.5 billion. Could the rest of the world finally be tiring of our US Treasuries?
All these companies cutting 401(k) matching will provide impetus for the forced buying of government bonds. Seems like the playbook has been publicized... We're all Belshazzar now!
"Could the rest of the world finally be tiring of our US Treasuries?"
Naw, man. They're making them out of Bounty paper towel and dipping 'em in all the Meth the DEA is rounding up. Of course lack of sleep does cause irrational behavior. The term "wired, but tired..." comes to mind.
This remains an important turning point related to The Arab Oil Embargo of about 1973:
One important theoretic development came from a Czech mathematician, Oldrich Vasicek, who argued in a 1977 paper that bond prices all along the curve are driven by the short end (under risk neutral equivalent martingale measure), and accordingly by short-term interest rates. The mathematical model for Vasicek's work was given by an Ornstein-Uhlenbeck process, and has since been discredited because the model predicts a positive probability that the short rate becomes negative and is inflexibile in creating yield curves of different shapes.
"Could the rest of the world finally be tiring of our US Treasuries?"
Hey man! Our Treasuries are the best in the world. USA! USA! Those smelly foreigners love our country. They'll send us money forever because we've got the best soldiers and football and Hollywood and huge malls!
"A few years ago, the Guatemalan government frustrated at its police force's inability to control the gangs encouraged limpieza social, or social cleansing. It was an overt message for communities to organize and dispose of gang members, whose numbers are today estimated at 80,000. What happened, wrote a newspaper columnist recently, was the creation of a societal "Frankenstein.""
Buffet took the ragged remnants of his dignity and retreated back to Omaha.
Last I heard he was in negotiations with Kelly Lepler of REmax to buy Cheyenne Mountain and retire. The seller is quibbling over accepting preferred shares in Goldman Sachs as payment. Buffet was heard to remark, "You have got to be kidding." Talks continue.
No, no. Needless to say I am unsympathetic to Chabad. They were a little early on that Messiah call and they freeride off the IDF, then cause trouble. They can keep Madonnna.
And so it begins. All that is gold does not glitter, not all those who wander are lost; the old that is strong does not wither, deep roots are not reached by the frost. From the ashes a fire shall be woken, a light from the shadows shall spring; renenwed shall be blade that was broken, the crownless again shall be king.
Rob Dawg
We will be decommissioning the legacy cme.com and cbot.com websites at end of business on Friday, January 9, 2009. Please continue to use the Feedback link to provide comments.
xxxxx: This same moralistic debate is with us, once again. Contemporary liquidationists insist that a collapse would lead to rebirth of a purified economy.
Have to take issue with the author's depiction.
Particularly the millenarian overtones the argument is lent when rendered in caricature here.
It is certainly interesting to hear Martin Wolf, you know, "go on" about this stuff. But his article is basically some aphorisms, some stupendously obvious observations, a good quote from Minksy, and "yeah, like, do what works".
Obviously, Martin, I have an idea what I think will work, as do we all.
What we are doing now -- it has not worked. It has, in fact, produced a toxic arena. One where we really have to ask, is it worth even worrying about zombie banks on the face of such a looming series of sovereign and sub-sovereign defaults?
Don't tell me, that I am an ideologue because I don't want to watch the public authorities funnel the US annual GDP into a bunch of bankrupt firms rather than turn them into receivership -- and STILL achieve no remedy.
I don't think we need a "purified" financial system. I'm not sitting here in a white robe with a candle meditating on select Ayn Rand passages. With have a bunch of insolvent firms with liabilities far exceeding their capital. Either the public or their creditors can be on the hook.
Don't urge me in a spirit of worldy togetherness to pledge a decade of my personal income to pay off the bad casino markers of your Eaton and club chums. There is sharp practice going on here and if we are going to engage in eye-popping exercises of fiscal stimulus to sustain global aggregate demand, can we at least have some systemic reform?
Martin even talks about it at the end while cautioning us against "liquidationism". So the author gives us a perscription for broad systemic reform, just not anything too specific or too narrow or the kind that changes anything radically.
Here's my winning "Minsky quote":
The objective is also clear: to preserve an open and at least reasonably stable world economy that offers opportunity to as much of humanity as possible. We have done a disturbingly poor job of this in recent years. We must do better. We can do so, provided we approach the task in a spirit of humility and pragmatism, shorn of ideological blinkers
Martin, I hate to inform you of this, but you are the very definition of the "apparatus". You write a column for the FT, you are a functionary of the system. Author is proving that the key component to the political side of this crisis is that you have to build the policy that gets you out with the apparatus that got you there.
Buffet was all over the MSM in Sept when Berkshire was sporting a $140k handle. At $95k not so much book to talk up. What was he buying? Insurance, banks, real estate. Would you be anxious to talk about that?
"With have a bunch of insolvent firms with liabilities far exceeding their capital. Either the public or their creditors can be on the hook."
"Don't urge me in a spirit of worldy togetherness to pledge a decade of my personal income to pay off the bad casino markers of your Eaton and club chums."
Name a biilionaire that hasn't lost 40% of his/her net worth over the last 150 days. I'm not saying it hasn't happened, I just cannot think of one. - Elvis
Byzantine Ruins - Wolf's injunction about what needs to be after this crisis is a bit like a doctor saying to a terminal cancer patient, "what you need is robust health".
Sure, we can all agree on that.
Once the doctor has said that, we hear....
/sound of crickets, churning stomachs, more pain.
This is no prescription at all.
I've been around excellent economists talking to developing country counterparts saying you need X,Y, and Z preconditions in order to develop in a sustainable and inclusive way. [That is, you need to look like Sweden before you have a hope in hell].
Hardly productive and not a great conversation starter.
"The objective is also clear: to preserve an open and at least reasonably stable world economy that offers opportunity to as much of humanity as possible."
I don't think those extra 700 million young people soon coming to working age between 2010-2020 will give a shit about what you ivory tower economists are thinking or what your lovely world improving mighty goals are. Especially because there are no jobs available for them!
Those restless ones are going to be mighty mad and not going to take it anymore. And guess what huge surplus of young unemployed men usually means...
It's WW lll and you need to understand the weapons being used to destroy your cash:
The state price deflator (spd) is a positive process with the property that the price of any market instrument deflated by spd is a martingale under the physical measure P.
By precluding market arbitrages, assume the existence of an Equivalent Martin-gale Measure Q under which bond prices discounted by the money market account are martingales (see Duffie (2001) for details).
State-price deflators. Let L + = { ψ ∈ L : ψ (t, ω ) ≧0 ∀(t, ω )} denote the cone of non-negative adapted pro-cesses in L . 3 The interior L ◦+ of the cone,L ◦+ := { ψ ∈ L : ψ (t, ω ) > 0 ∀(t, ω )}
It is kind of funny that Americans bitch about mere 75 million baby boomers and their retirement troubles.
Meanwhile, in the developing world the size of REAL SUPERBIG baby boomer generation (1985-2000) is WHOPPING 1000-1200 MILLION!! About four times the population of USA.
Byz I don't feel like registering to read that FT article. Funny, I assumed from above quote he was referring to New Deal 2.0. My idea of pragmatism is regulate banking just like a utility. Hank said it's a vital organ. When the electric company wants to raise rates there are public hearings. Electrons for the masses. Bust the trust.
Article and clip. We posted the bank run clip here a few times over the last couple of years -- Real Estate and Urban blog picks it up after the NYT article, and Econview mentions it as well. And check out how much the author despises Uncle Billy:
Rob Dawg writes:
Name a biilionaire that hasn't lost 40% of his/her net worth over the last 150 days. I'm not saying it hasn't happened, I just cannot think of one. - Elvis
"Funny, I assumed from above quote he was referring to New Deal 2.0. My idea of pragmatism is regulate banking just like a utility. Hank said it's a vital organ. When the electric company wants to raise rates there are public hearings. Electrons for the masses. Bust the trust."
~~~
Yep, the bright lights of the Ivy League and Chicago have burned down the barn ... Time for a public central bank and banking system ... We'll need it to pay for the damages.
If you are a billionaire and you lose 40% of your wealth, you still have 600,000,000.00. That's 600 mil. Assumming a 5% CD return, that poor billionare still makes 30 million per year in interest, more than everyone on this blog put together. Wealth disparity has destroyed the middle class. Are we still allowed to say middle class.
HELL, New York (CR) -- A ferry transporting hedge fund investors capsized while crossing the river Styx. Investigators on the scene believe the cause of the accident was due members of the American elite attempting to force the ferry to turn around, hoping to allow the passengers to postpone their appointments in hell.
As of 11:00pm, there have been no updates of potential survivors. Members from the economic transition team will be working around the business cycle to extract survivors. The only material known to be strong enough to withstand the powerful currents of the river Styx are the cured hides of taxpayers wound into lengths of rope. The government is requesting the assistance of citizens. Citizens should be aware that providing assistance is mandatory. Please report to your local Patriot Center immediately.
Counterpointer(Excellent) writes: Byz - went back to yr question, will come back shortly. Gee, you know how ask hard questions.
Thanks.
FWIW, I have friends who can help, with Hong Kong, Singapore, other Chinese language non-mainland locales, if I need to read research from diaspora locales.
Is anybody's CR Companion freaking out just now? "Persecuted Comrade Anonymouse" keeps flashing in and out of the Authors box, and the comments keep flipping between 234 & 245.
The really hard part about his, and one which is open to permanent debate is where you fix homeostatic equilibrium in the Ch state ie what is the broadly accepted, defined and operational state for Ch to be run? The answer, at least following the meltdown of the Legalists and Confucians over 2000 years ago was that the latter prevailed, but not without contest as there were legalist schools, enclave pockets, and individuals placed in the imperial family to push these ideas, and in the wider county magistrate system to push these ideas and often it ended it blood.
Why?
Because crusading county magistrates would attempt to upset the structural balance, would face revolt from their own very powerful permanent local staff, who would in some cases engineer civil disorder and tax revolts and oust the crusading magistrate. In some cases this would happen to high officials too, witness, or googlies "Hai Rui Dismissed from Office", in which a straight guy gets skrood.
So, to turn your question around, this was not capture by vested interests, but failure of a newish regime to overturn structural continuity of vested interests. And as I think Huang makes clear, once the failure of the Rites bureau to insist that the Emperor actually did his protocol duty failed, the implicit mandates and urgency of a slew of government functions actually failed too; the Huang He embankments were not maintained, there were food supply distortions, taxation at local level reached rapacity, the military got on the opium, the numbers of official expelled to the Wall to build of administer increased and so on. From top signals, the whole system started to revert to the worst corruption and degeneracy that a stronger emperor would have forestalled.
Parallels to the present are of course completely unjustified.
I'll try to post some decent primary material over the next couple of days.
YLSP writes:
Topher,
This is the rally.
YLSP | 12.23.08 - 10:05 pm | #
mmckinl writes:
The continued liquidation comes during the PE/Obamas market rally thats coming in the next couple of months.
Dont drink the Kool-Aid.
Topher
~~~~
BO has already been discounted by me ...
Market's too big, unless of course he takes on the banks or goes for a single payer health plan, then you have some action.
Otherwise I don't see it ...
mmckinl | 12.23.08 - 10:08 pm | #
I think well get something in January. The Dow has been hanging around 8500. Going to go one way or another 15-20+%. IMO
The DXD and SDS paid out the dividends today. Both were down 23%-12% this morning in early trading.
I had to call Schwab to see what the heck was going on. I was tempted. I still would like to get the DD S&P when/if the S&P gets to 950-1000 and Dow 10K if it happens in january.
Kramer was foaming at the mouth again about the DD ETF's last night. lol
Wolf quoted at 9:24 above >The election of Mr Obama surely reflects a desire for just such pragmatism. Neither Ron Paul, the libertarian, nor Ralph Nader, on the left, got anywhere.<
Now this is outright ignorant. We here know it isn't pragmatism but a desperate attempt to hold the bankrupt center, with a huge middle class still in denial, but now with half an eye open. And to impute anything to a prisoner's dilemma election is silly.
But Keynes lived in a time in which to associate with an Ideology was a matter of life or death. The old labels are still used as weapons, Comrade.
Russia has thrown down a new gauntlet to Barack Obama with an announcement that it will sharply increase production of strategic nuclear missiles.
~~~~
More of the Bush Legacy ... NATO moving towards Moscow, radar and anti ballistic missles on Chek and Polish ground, Georgia~ Abkazia ...
the military bases in the "Stans " ...
If one alters a Euclidean space so that its inner product becomes negative in one or more directions, then the result is a pseudo-Euclidean space. Smooth manifolds built from such spaces are called pseudo-Riemannian manifolds. Perhaps their most famous application is the theory of relativity, where empty spacetime with no matter is represented by the flat pseudo-Euclidean space called Minkowski space, spacetimes with matter in them form other pseudo-Riemannian manifolds, and gravity corresponds to the curvature of such a manifold.
A pseudo-Riemannian manifold is a differentiable manifold equipped with a non-degenerate, smooth, symmetric metric tensor which, unlike a Riemannian metric, need not be positive-definite, but must be non-degenerate. Such a metric is called a pseudo-Riemannian metric and its values can be positive, negative or zero.
The signature of a pseudo-Riemannian metric is (p,q) where both p and q are non-negative.
So now everyone is going to bash Friedman and the 'Chicago' school. What nonsense.
Ritholtz had a harangue against the 'Chicago' school recently. Utter stupidity. The guy is talking his book as a sell side asset gatherer and had the intellect to see what most of us already knew. Yet I respect him. He has a forum. I don't want one.
Take all the damned isms and pit them against each other and you'll find political economics forcing you to take sides. Yet only 2 or 3 sides are offered. Why! Why must I choose.
What if, like 50% of the electorate chose not to play?
I propose a simple solution. Any election must have at least a 60% turn out and a line item of 'none of the above' inserted as an option. It might take a while but eventually the two monopoly parties will have to offer up real choices.
It would never happen. We'll get a Praetorian Guard before any form of a Republic is restored. Sad.
In a related story, the Cerberus withdrawl limit has been reported to have stoked the fires of Hell. The mind numbing screachings from the mauled souls of former Real Estate agents and brokers has turned into an almost pleasant cooing.
"With all the recently released hot air," a former agent, who requested anonymity for obvious reasons, "has begun to filter into the Housing market here. I hate to say it, but this market is hot, hot hot!"
The twisted soul of a former mortgage broker cried, "Look, were in the friggin' bowels of hell. Prices have only one way to go...and down here..." the soul chuckled briefly before being gnawed in half by several particularly hideous looking, decomposing ponies, "...down is not an option." The soul finished, grimacing in pain and ecstacy all at once.
The two types of funds are very different for purposes of this discussion. GD | 12.23.08 - 9:40 pm | #
Thank you. I was going to point that out once I finished reading all the posts. You saved me the effort.
If anyone is feeling too smug about not being stuck in these funds, remember your state pension and university endowment funds (particularly California, New York, and Alaska) are invested in these puppies. Any shortfall will be made whole by you the taxpayer.
Lost Inside Kona,
I use degenerate conic b-splined surfaces and anisotropic edge centered concurrent elements to model composite aerospace structures. Don't assume everyone here has no idea what you are talking about.
If you had a billion dollars where would you put it? Even after all the beach houses, racing cars, and hookers I think that might be over the FDIC limit.
So, to turn your question around, this was not capture by vested interests, but failure of a newish regime to overturn structural continuity of vested interests.
I'll have to review the Huang. The spouse has it currently. I primarily took away that the Ming started with an inadequate bureaucratic apparatus and never built a better one.
Look at the logistical arrangements. Raw materials for imperial projects piled outside the palace! Really! Emperors in dynasties before and after would have sighed at that.
Anyway, just wondering if there is any corpus of non-classical literature relating to state failure and the processes at work in decaying dynasties and other state forms qua the processes, rather than an exceptionalistic study of the individual events.
I'm unclear on why anyone would consider buying EEV, since it clearly is not doing its job of being the inverse of EEM. It just made a YTD low this month, which makes no sense if you look at the chart of EEM. Why not short EEM instead? If EEV isn't the inverse of EEM, what is it?
primer dude:(GD) what are the capital requirements for the respective funds? irreverent | 12.23.08 - 9:44 pm | #
None.
View them as mutual funds with higher fees (2%) and a performance bonus (20%) that can invest in anything allowed by the offering document and with redemption rights restricted to the terms laid out in the offering document (quarterly with 45 to 90 days notice, annually with 90 days notice, cash payout as investments are realized, or some sort of "at the discretion of the adviser" to cover side letters with fund of funds investors.
Most folks don't read and comprehend the offering document. If the offering document says that investors can only redeem once a year at December 31 with withdrawal notice required by September 30, they act all amazed that they can't pull funds on April 10 to pay their taxes.
P.S. If you are an investor who sues your fund, then remember that costs for legal defense are usually considered fund expenses which are passed through to the fund's investors so you get to pay for both sides of the lawsuit. Sweeeet.
Byz - hmmm, when I was a young lecturer I think I heard the basics direct from my prof, an exiled Cambridge genius, not from texts. I certainly raised homeostatic equilibrium in my .201 class. I have a gut feeling there was someone at Duke doing this stuff, or maybe Imperial in London. It's been almost 20 years and I'm a bit rusty. Too much time IN China, rather than ON China (!).
Hosted Jonathan Spence back in 92 or so. Quelle blow'arde as the french say.
The big pendulum is aimed squarely at Big Ponzi. Better stay out of its way, it isn't made of paper and it moves fastest as it approaches the balance point.
Buffet was all over the MSM in Sept when Berkshire was sporting a $140k handle. At $95k not so much book to talk up. What was he buying? Insurance, banks, real estate. Would you be anxious to talk about that?
Rob Dawg | 12.23.08 - 10:26 pm | #
But he's buying for the long term!
And as far as 'the long term', lots of bulls and bears are assuming we'll have a bear market rally before the next leg down begins, but after that bottom the new bull market will start from the lowest valuations since the early 80s. Seems a little too easy for it to work out that way.
But what if the 'new' bull performs like the Nikkei did after its RE bubble burst in 1989? And another 15 years of sideways to down market action?
Anyone else notice the market's been churning below resistance (Dow 9000, S&P 900)on low volume rather than basing above support? I'm beginning to think we've already had our rally.
The first of many ...
Obviously they need that money to inject into Chrysler.
Well, I mean you know...When detoxing from financial opiates, it's always good to limit withdrawls...
Nostrovia,
How is this legal?
Nemo writes:
Obviously they need that money to inject into Chrysler.
~~~~
or investor lawsuits ...
Arf!
There's an old saying my grandmother said was used in Ningbo, something like this-
you are lower than gargled dog vomit
Sorry - but that 3 headed beast getting TARP funds kinda ticks me off.
Wonder if they had money with Madoff?
"As we all know, Cerberus is the three-headed dog who guards the gates of Hell."
More like a money hotel...it goes in and never comes out.
Nostrovia,
Tanta posted this on 12/15/06:
I still havent gotten over the fact that theres a capital management group out there having named itself Cerberus. Those of you who were not asleep in Miss Buttkickers Intro to Western Civ will recognize Cerberus; the rest of you may have picked up the mythological fix from its reprise as Fluffy in the first Harry Potter novel. Wherever you get your culture, Cerberus is the three-headed dog who guards the gates of Hell. It takes three heads to do that of course, because its never clear, in theology or finance, whether the idea is to keep the righteous from falling into the pit or the demons from escaping out of it (the third head is busy meeting with the regulators).
Good news for Chrysler.
Down 16% my @ss, what are they marking GMAC at? What are they marking Chrysler at? Seems like a dyslexic slip up to me in the article
That's the next big question ...
What funds will lock their investors in and which will be liquidating come January ...
Someone here at CR pointed out that the last market drop was the start of last quarter ...
Liquidations have got to be higher now with the Maddof scandal ...
with two and twenty for the privilege
The restrictions, known as gates, were triggered after clients sought to pull more than 16.5 percent of their money from Cerberus Partners LP by the end of the year, according to a Dec. 19 letter sent to clients. Cerberus said investors could get 20 percent of their year-end redemption requests, while the limits on the rest will last as long as a year.
And so it begins. All that is gold does not glitter, not all those who wander are lost; the old that is strong does not wither, deep roots are not reached by the frost. From the ashes a fire shall be woken, a light from the shadows shall spring; renenwed shall be blade that was broken, the crownless again shall be king.
If I were a qualified investor and could actually invest in these funds, I'd be withdrawing everything come Monday. Since the government sees to it that I'm protected from these risky schemes, I don't know how they work... so, I imagine most of them contracturally prohibit calls like that. But, like hell I'd want to have money "locked up" by some AM bleeding $$$ out of every corporate orafice.
Of course it's just one of their hedge funds. Probably one that invested heavily with Madoff. I wonder if Madoff is the counter party for all of the CDS^2?
Seriously though, It's great to see the last scraps of the TARP circling the drain. Weeeeeeeeeee!
Nostrovia,
What does it mean to have the entire investment community subconsciously chanting the mantra: "In a recession cash Is king?"
âAll that is gold does not glitter, not all those who wander are lost; the old that is strong does not wither, deep roots are not reached by the frost. From the ashes a fire shall be woken, a light from the shadows shall spring; renenwed shall be blade that was broken, the crownless again shall be king.â
Rob Dawg | 12.23.08 - 8:38 pm | #
Little Stairway there, Dawg?
Misean, welcome back. Your comments are appreciated by this lurker.
The restrictions, known as gates
Wow. You couldn't make this stuff up.
You can do that?
Whoa!! Couldn't see that coming. Man, cuppa tea and a lie-down in order.
Misean - you're back!? Did you post bail or what?
C
Little Stairway there, Dawg?
RockyR
Oh ye of little culture. Tolkien. Although there is that Misty Mountain song.
Industry assets peaked at $1.9 trillion in June, according to Hedge Fund Research Inc. in Chicago. Investment losses and withdrawals may shrink that amount by 45 percent by the end of this month, according to estimates by analysts at Morgan Stanley.
~~~~
That's a lot of leverage to be pulling out of the markets ... I wonder how much has been done so far ...
What does it mean to have the entire investment community subconsciously chanting the mantra: "In a recession cash Is king?"
Sardonic | 12.23.08 - 8:41 pm | #
Momma told me not to come.
YouTube -
Rob Dawg,
"a light from the shadows shall spring; renenwed shall be blade that was broken, the crownless again shall be king."
I'm Arthur, King of the Britains!
King of the who?
The Britains.
Who are the Britains?
We all are, and I am your king.
Well I didn't vote for you...
You don't vote for King.
Well how'd you become king then?
The Lady of the Lake, her arm clad inthe purest shimmering samite held aloft Excalibur from the bosom of the water, signifying by divine providence that I, Arthur, was to carry Excalibur. THAT is why I am your king.
Listen, strange women lyin' in ponds distributin' swords is no basis for a system of government. Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.
Nostrovia,
Volker - what goes on between you and your Momma should perhaps remain private.
Jus' sayin
C
OK this article is just a treasure trove.
"We still believe we bought well," he said of Chrysler and GMAC. "In those cases, we got caught in what we see as a 'perfect storm' in the auto and housing sectors."
I wonder how he defines "bought well". I do not think those words mean what he thinks they mean.
Always important to note which way the gate swings when trying to define were Hell really is.
Nemo, in this case,
"Bought well" = "Seemed like a good idea at the time"
I wonder how he defines "bought well". I do not think those words mean what he thinks they mean.
Nemo
~~~~
The NEW two most important words in the English language :
Due Diligence ...
Counterpointer writes:
Volker - what goes on between you and your Momma should perhaps remain private.
My momma's dead. Been dead comin on to eight year. But that's okay. I accept your attempt and give it a 6.5.
Why would investors want to pull their money out of Cerberus? Doesn't the US Government compensate investors for hedge fund losses?
Maybe they should rename themselves "Tantalus Asset Management". You know, because whenever you reach for your money, it recedes...
Biting the hand that feeds them, all 3 at once.
"money hell" bwahahaha
Doesn't anybody trust Dan Quail to invest their money ?
ROTFLOL
Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony. - Comrade Misean is Dope
See the violence inherent in the system! Help, help! I'm being repressed.
Where you benn Misean you had us all worried.
Welcome back Comrade Misean, we were worried about you!
ever been a better time to halt redemptions.
Exit- without wanting to pai ma pi, that was a great earthy quote.
I'll see you and raise you:
That basta#d is lower than snakes' balls.
C
Why would investors want to pull their money out of Cerberus? Doesn't the US Government compensate investors for hedge fund losses?
Not until next year, Bond Girl.
...
I see the private, but what happened to the equity?
Didn't Warren Buffet say something to the effect of "Hell is really easy to enter, but hard to leave."
Misean - You doing Reserve duty?
Volker, you are cranky tonight.
The real hedge fund panics when investors realize in March or April that the gates have allowed managers to further eviscerate their funds (and hence the investors' money).
It's a great time to buy or to sell a U.S. automobile manufacturer.
Volker, you are cranky tonight.
nova | Homepage | 12.23.08 - 8:54 pm | #
Well, it is just me and the cat.
The road to hell is paved with the skulls of priests and bankers.
St. John Bosco (sort of)
So they are probably down, oh, closer to 35% like most of my co-workers 401(k)s?
Those self ordained financial geniuses at these various hedge funds are going to bite the big one before this is over. The leverage religion is dead!
Exit - actually there's a great Beijing dialect phrase:
shang tu, xia xie
It relates to extreme gastric illness. Both ends at once.
Sounds like a number of hedgies...
Apologies to the EST crowd who have just had dinner.
C
Well, you knew that when Blackrock went public the game was just about up ...
They are not going to give away performance ... at any price ...
Everybody should be real Madoff all over this event. A supposedly $27b fund with more than 2 months advance notice couldn't liquidate enough to cover $4.1 billion in redemption requests. Am I the only one suspicious? The obvious truth is that the fund isn't worth anywhere near $27 billion. IMO it is actually worth 1/2 a Madoff.
Comrade Misean!!! Where ya' been, my man! Good to "see" you!!!
Probably old news to this crew, but I really see these events as ushering in the death of the hedge fund industry (for a while, at least). Their business model (huge leverage to buy "safe assets") is dead, and the trust factor has just been shattered by Madoff, frozen redemptions, etc. Why would anyone leave a significant amount of money that you can't follow day to day, may not be able to withdraw when you want, and by the way, may be stolen by the fund manager/invested in a ponzi scheme.
Oh ye of little culture. Tolkien. Although there is that Misty Mountain song.
Rob Dawg | 12.23.08 - 8:43 pm | #
THAT'S where I got confused. Same album, plus LZ loved Tolkien. I've only read the Trilogy twice
I burst out laughing over "the three-headed dog who guards the gates of Hell"
Made the offer on the previous thread just before it died, if anyone wants a copy of my December Strategy report, shoot me an e-mail at dhvd_2004@yahoo.com
My Xmas gift to the CR community
If we could establish intent on the part of just one of Cerberus' heads, would they all go to jail? If we decapitated the head that belongs in jail, wouldn't the whole dog die? What a conundrum.
Lotsa pissed off billionaires ...
There is a God!
They may have come by different paths, but at this point Madoff and Cerberus have delivered identical results.
The largest Hedge funds
source: Foreign Policy: The List: The World’s Largest Hedge Funds
2007
JPMorgan Asset Management
Assets: $33 billion
Goldman Sachs Asset Management
Assets: $32.5 billion
Bridgewater Associates
Assets: $30.2 billion
D.E. Shaw Group
Assets: $27.3 billion
Farallon Capital Management
Assets: $26.2 billio
Ola, all.
Took a much needed vacation. Celly off, laptop at home. Kicking around some neat wilderness.
Lotsa fun. The times I picked up a WSJ on Saturday were very disturbing.
Thanks for the wishes all.
Merry Christmas.
Now back to blogging the apocolypse.
Nostrovia,
Exit - actually there's a great Beijing dialect phrase:
shang tu, xia xie
It relates to extreme gastric illness. Both ends at once.
Sounds like a number of hedgies...
Counterpointer | 12.23.08 - 8:58 pm | #
Actually, it sounds like a bad night at Subway!
Sorry! Couldn't resist.
bummer, lost my atm
This does not sound so good...
Farallon Capital Management
Assets: $26.2 billion
What its into: Debt and equity securities, mergers, restructurings and recapitalizations, venture capitalism, real estate, and emerging markets, including India
Strategy: Plenty of arbitragefor instance, in risk and mergers. Farallons clients include institutions, especially university endowments, and super-rich individuals. The fund is highly event-driven, always on the lookout for companies undergoing major changes that will result in increased value. Spotting these, Farallon invests, usually hedging on short positions in other financial instruments to help offset potential losses. For instance, Farallon may have recently cashed in on bargains resulting from the housing markets troubles. In March, it partnered with Simon Property Group to acquire another real estate investment trust, Mills Corp., and also injected a $230 million loan into Accredited Home Lenders Holding Co., helping stave off its subprime pressures. In April, it bought Affordable Residential Communities, a manufactured-home community business.
From R.K : http://www.321gold.com/editorials/kirby/kirby122308.gif
Slightly off topic: I have to wonder when the slowdown in consumer spending will begin to impact advertising. I would think that the first reaction might be MORE ads, to try to stimulate spending, but surely sooner or later businesses will come to understand that consumers are not spending because they don't have the money, and ads to try to get them to do so, are largely a pointless and wasteful expense.
I guess not - This month =Dec. 08
Hedge funds including D.E. Shaw & Co. LP and Farallon Capital Management LLC this month imposed gates so they wouldnt be forced to raise cash by liquidating assets at distressed prices. Magnetar, based in Evanston, Illinois, told clients who asked for redemptions by Dec. 31 that they will get 10 percent of their requests in cash and 5 percent in shares of its two credit funds, the people said.
10 REM
20 PRINT "HOW MUCH MONEY DO YOU WISH TO WITHDRAW FROM CEREBRUS?"
30 REM
40 INPUT X
50 REM
60 X= X - 1000000
70 REM
80 PRINT "YOU MAY HAVE " X " DOLLARS AT THIS TIME"
90 PRINT "IS THAT ACCEPTABLE: YES/NO?"
100 INPUT Z
100 IF Z = YES THEN GOTO 60
110 IF Z = NO THEN GOTO 120
120 PRINT "THANKS FOR INVESTING WITH CEREBRUS. HAVE A GREAT DAY"
So it IS a run.
Down 16 percent through November?
Overperforming the market by a wide margin.
The 2 funds above, plus Madoff = 100 billion plus ponzi scheme? None have the cash on hand?
I agree. Jan-Feb will be hedge fund redemption hell.
I was an EEV junkie.
I reformed myself.
But I can't help it.
Tomorrow, I'm fixing on EEV.
At this point in the meltdown I believe it is safe to say, esp. on this blog, that just about the entire US eCONomy is a GINORMOUS PONZI SCHEME.
Hedge Funds = Money Asylums for the insanely wealthy.
Sure, I've got 200 million. Let me give it all to you to invest in something I don't know anything about, so I can get 15-25% returns every year.
Golly gee, Gomer, the Mob doesn't even get those kind of returns, but these Hedgies do.
Kill them, kill them all!
ova writes:
The 2 funds above, plus Madoff = 100 billion plus ponzi scheme? None have the cash on hand?
nova | Homepage | 12.23.08 - 9:11 pm | #
Oh come on nova, $100 Bil is mere pocket change for the Wall Street crowd.
RockyR - you have nights at Subway? Yikes. You need to get out more. Or stay in more.
Now is a great time to go out or stay in!
Got the lads out for pints tonight. And where did we go? Well, the only obvious place:
RECESSIONS. L St between 18th and 19th.
Classic.
C
rich writes:
I agree. Jan-Feb will be hedge fund redemption hell.
It already is. I bet if I did the research I would find all the gates on every fund were triggered this month.
10 percent of their requests in cash and 5 percent in shares of its two credit funds, the people said.
nova | Homepage | 12.23.08 - 9:07 pm | #
There you are...
5% in shares of 2 credit funds.
Correct me if I am wrong, but isn't it the largest credit bubble in history, which has caused this entire blow up.
Great, just what we needed, more shares in credit funds.
Yawn.
Call me if I get paid.
OCDan | 12.23.08 - 9:12 pm |
More cockroaches? A 100 billion here, a 100 billion there, next thing ya know is you need another TARP
rich,
I exited EEV a month or two ago during the panic. I just checked in and can't believe my eyes.....
now that we are in the hardest crash landing since the GD, EEV is only in the high 50's?! Am I missing something, or is this just Mr Market with a Christmas present?
Q: What's the difference between a ponzi scheme and a fund where they lost all your money?
A: Criminal indictments and ten cents on the dollar.
Is this a "Storm the Bastille" moment for Hedgies?
starting hfa=hedge funds anonymus
first, recognize your problem
second, put yourself in the hands of a higher power
third: fill the tank of the SUV and get the hell out of tow
I thot most or all hedge funds had gates in their "rules". And i thot alot had had rules that investers had to notify them 90 days in advance of a redemption. Why is every one so surprised about that the gates got slammed??
ova - I was picking bonfire of the hedgies this month, based on the SEptember redemptions requests and the 3-month gates.
Waaah. I'm so disappointed.
But your Jan/Feb pick makes sense and fills me with grim joy. About the only kind I can find right about now.
Surely there's some thread music for this...
C
"Harvard University's admission that it lost $8 billion from its $36 billion endowment fund, as staggering as it sounds, may grossly underestimate the true magnitude of the loss between from July 1 through Oct. 31 2008. According to a source close the Harvard Management Corporation (HMC), which runs the fund for Harvard, the loss is closer to $18 billion if the losses on the fund's illiquid investment are realistically appraised."
Edward Jay Epstein: How Much Has Harvard Really Lost?
They just woke up?
. 23 (Bloomberg) -- Reserve Management Co., owner of the collapsed Reserve Primary Fund, said the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission plans to charge it and senior executives with violations of securities law.
The SECs enforcement division told the company last week it will recommend suing the company and Chairman Bruce Bent, who created the first money-market mutual fund, Reserve said today in a statement on its Web site. The closely held firm expects civil charges also to be filed against Bents sons, Bruce Bent II and Arthur Bent III.
Oh come on nova, $100 Bil is mere pocket change for the Wall Street crowd.
OCDan | 12.23.08 - 9:12 pm | #
Have you ever dug for clams? You walk along, poking your clam gun on the ground in front of you. Once one of the little bastards burps, you find a nest of them. Especially, the Pacific Razor. Man, what a clam.
Counterpointer | 12.23.08 - 9:17 pm
C, that was Rich. I don't have a clue.
rich writes:
"Tomorrow, I'm fixing on EEV."
What's your rationale and horizon? What about SRS? Thanks.
There is only one way to buy an explosive market at the bottom.
That is to catch a falling knife just before it turns.
If you pay attention to this board and you don't buy something energy here, you're a total fool.
I would highly recommend DBE, mixed energy commodities. It has no trading volume, so put in a limit order 2-3% below tomorrow's opening price. Just hold it a year or two. You'll double your money.
ova,
"The closely held firm expects civil charges also to be filed against Bents sons, Bruce Bent II and Arthur Bent III."
Gives new meaning to the term "Get Bent!"
Nostrovia,
You don't think these hedge funds could've been used to hide the actions of our Federal Reserve Bank?
Madoff's last act was to buy $10B worth of treasuries... or something like that?
There were some interesting calls on right-wing radio this afternoon regarding Arnold signing off on the legislatures illegal tax, which is going to happen next week (Merry Christmas!).
Here's to the people fighting back and passing some type of Proposition more draconian to "increasing state revenues" than Proposition 13.
Some ideas I heard:
- If legislatures cannot balance a budget by a certain date there is a re-election
- 75% approval for any tax increase
- "Tax" will now also include "fees" and other synonyms.
- Similar proposition against immigration that has been passed in Arizona (ie cut off everything except for education and health car services)
Who cares if we BK the current state. We need to set up a viable government at some point, right?
I'd be interested if the left-wingers like this as well? Also, I can see myself making ads for this campaign for free. All I have to do is stand there in front of a camera with my children and talk about
the future of my children and gradnchildren.
Stating a Dodge next year?
YouTube - CRANKING A 1947 DODGE
ova writes:
OCDan | 12.23.08 - 9:12 pm |
More cockroaches? A 100 billion here, a 100 billion there, next thing ya know is you need another TARP
nova | Homepage | 12.23.08 - 9:14 pm | #
Agreed!
However, the speed with which all the info is getting out and all the air is fizzing out of the bubble is getting scary, no matter how many cans of soup, rice, and beans one has.
We are literally watching a worldwide economic catastrophe no one has ever seen.
In regards to an earlier thread about transparency and banks showing the books.
They won't because only a handful aren't broke.
If we the people find out who is toast, I bet the economy would shrink by 50% overnight. Yes, you read that right, 50% overnight. And by the time it all ended, maybe 75%.
Look, I don't agree with everything Denninger writes, but he right about the GDP being as large as it is because of debt.
Take that credit away and look out.
No more scrapbooking/costume/Michaels stores on every corner.
I thot that the DJIA garanteed 7% per annum growth over the average lifetime
Wasn't long ago Hedge's was the new "IN".
Kinda like so complicated only the in was in.
Wonder how many is up side down, underwater and pushing on a string.
Oh well. I'm not concerned.
Besides, I was just invited to join a super exclusive hedge funds that my doctor and real estate agent have been in for years. They've kept me out until this month. Lucky for me, they just had an opening available because somebody's second cousin dropped out. I'm not ashamed to say that I feel special to be part of these investors, and am pleased I'll have something to distinguish me from the mouth breathing indexers!(yep, that's what they call you). They are wealthier than me, and obviously know lots and lots about finance and money and stuff.
I'll let you know how it goes.
Money goes where money is needed most .... they say
ova - you're right, I wasn't looking at the quote vs your addition.
So, rich, bonfire postponed but imminent?
Misean - I got the Bent thing too.
Far out.
C
Now is a great time to want no part of or demand access to TARP money.
Easter Everywhere | 12.23.08 - 9:21 pm
Nice, did you get Bent as part of the initation ceremony?
OCDan - maybe these are just hollow shells gushing money and thats were the trillions are...
Like I said, there's an amazing amount of speculative activity at work for a "deflationary depression." A lot of that speculation has poured into bashing EEV, TWM and SRS over the last month. Maybe, Ben just don't like them and wishes them gone.
But now is a great time to buy EEV, TWM and SRS. Just wade in...don't dive.
OT-
Here's and interesting excerpt from a Financial Times article:
FT.com / Columnists / Martin Wolf - Keynes offers us the best way to think about the financial crisis
Keyness genius a very English one was to insist we should approach an economic system not as a morality play but as a technical challenge. He wished to preserve as much liberty as possible, while recognising that the minimum state was unacceptable to a democratic society with an urbanised economy. He wished to preserve a market economy, without believing that laisser faire makes everything for the best in the best of all possible worlds.
This same moralistic debate is with us, once again. Contemporary liquidationists insist that a collapse would lead to rebirth of a purified economy. Their leftwing opponents argue that the era of markets is over. And even I wish to see the punishment of financial alchemists who claimed that ever more debt turns economic lead into gold.
Yet Keynes would have insisted that such approaches are foolish. Markets are neither infallible nor dispensable. They are indeed the underpinnings of a productive economy and individual freedom. But they can also go seriously awry and so must be managed with care. The election of Mr Obama surely reflects a desire for just such pragmatism. Neither Ron Paul, the libertarian, nor Ralph Nader, on the left, got anywhere. So the task for this new administration is to lead the US and the world towards a pragmatic resolution of the global economic crisis we all now confront.
rich or anyone else that cares to comment.
I am building a small position in DBC since it seems to be a pretty diversified basket of commodities but I want a little more exposure to oil.
Anyone have any thoughts on USL vs USO to get pure exposure to oil? It equal weights the next 12 months of oil futures equally so you don't have the same amount of roll costs each month.
Re: EEV
It's global Quanmastive Easturbation. All countries are vigorously stimulating themselves.
should have been a super exclusive "hedge fund"
how do you hedge "this sucker's going down!"
talk to me people
It's global Quanmastive Easturbation. All countries are vigorously stimulating themselves.
If it is a EU country there will be no ciggerette allowed afterwards.
how do you hedge "this sucker's going down!"
talk to me people
Marry it?
yes yes yes
lights cigarette
Next stock market bonfire is scheduled for late Jan early Feb. Be careful in next 2-3 weeks. Then
Roll out the Falles...
Marry it?
Mike in Long Island |
Bad idea. Not only your money goes away...
well, it could be worse. your local bank could limit withdrawals ....
@counterp: Hah! Flattering with horse farts! Haven't heard that expression in ages. Best epithet I can come up with for the hedgies is wang ba dan but then I'm not fluent in the vernacular any more...
Good examination of the banks and the bail out money.
What About the Bank BailOut Money ? « blog maverick
well, it could be worse. your local bank could limit withdrawals ...
such an optimist
Bloomberg = Doomberg tonight
Dec. 23 (Bloomberg) -- Pakistans National Clearing Co., which handles all of the nations stock transactions, said a 10th of brokers are at risk of defaulting on share payments after the benchmark index plunged 24 percent in seven days.
Around 20 brokers from the Karachi Stock Exchange are heading for default, Mohammed Shoaib Memon, a National Clearing board member, said in an interview today. There are 200 brokers at the Karachi Stock Exchange.
The long commodity trade is the most CROWDED trade in the market right now. Only the short treasury/dollar trade can come close to matching it in terms of interest.
Being a contrarian to the core, the very fact that EVERYONE and their grandma wants in on these trades tells me that not enough fear and capitulation have occurred in spite of the massive massive losses sustained by those shorting treasuries or going long commodities.
recommended music:
YouTube - velvet underground - venus in furs
Even K. Marx believed that workers should only be paid if they add value. Pragmatism always before ideology, but semantic spin is still inevitable. Punishing an insolvent banker is pragmatic, so is trying to make use of whatever skill he has in the future.
No more scrapbooking/costume/Michaels stores on every corner.
OCDan | 12.23.08 - 9:20 pm | #
Actually the NYT had an article on them today, doing well right now. Inferior goods, dude, inferior goods. they always do well in a downturn.
YLSP writes:
"... Arnold signing off on the legislatures illegal tax, which is going to happen next week (Merry Christmas!)..."
Link to press coverage? Haven't seen this.
I think what you are looking for is GSC. More oil exposure than DBC but diversified among mixed commodities.
I'm going long squirrels again. And pigeons.
Nostrovia,
RockyR - you have nights at Subway? Yikes. You need to get out more. Or stay in more.
Now is a great time to go out or stay in!
Got the lads out for pints tonight. And where did we go? Well, the only obvious place:
RECESSIONS. L St between 18th and 19th.
Counterpointer | 12.23.08 - 9:13 pm | #
Haha! Well, C, take my advice: should you find yourself at a Subway with the munchies tomorrow morning at about, say 230a, avoid the Tuna Salad. I may not be much for investing advice, but I speak from experience on this one!
Who cares if we BK the current state. We need to set up a viable government at some point, right?
I'd be interested if the left-wingers like this as well?
~~~~
Cal ? We need a parliament ... lose confidence ... you're out !
On the ascent of Grandson Toyoda...
It reads like Toyota plans on cutting in NA with a very sharp knive...
The company, which has 30,000 employees in North America, is exhausting options to trim costs after halting work on the Blue Springs, Mississippi, plant that was to make Prius hybrids starting in 2010, and paring January production schedules at plants in the U.S. and Canada.
Analysts including Keller and Haig Stoddard at forecaster IHS Global Insight Inc. said North American payroll cuts may be inevitable for Toyota in 2009 unless market conditions improve.
There were signals in the last three years that the market was slowing, said Maryann Keller, an independent auto analyst and consultant in Greenwich, Connecticut. They didnt need the San Antonio factory and they absolutely did not need the Mississippi factory. Now theyve got too much capacity in North America.
I guess you don't have any USO.
It nose-dives at noon every day.
Rich I want to harvest tax losses with my USO. What else is a good substitute besides GSC?
Thanks
Volker?
i currency soon yogi - have you considered using USL to replace USO?
Surely there's some thread music for this...
Your momma.
During depressions, one should always listen to mindless happy pop music from the eighties.
YouTube - Baxter Robertson - Silver Strand
What's the Strand like now, Dawg?
I guess I'll go play pool. Billiard balls don't wear out very fast.
.
Kona writes:
Money goes where money is needed most .... they say
~~~~
"Money always finds its rightful owner."
That would be God because it is being vaporized...
Bailout the Big 6! (Honda, Toyota, Nissan).
Why would anyone believe the foreign plants here would stay? Aren't NA jobs near the top on the chopping block? Just curious, but it will be fun to see Shelby flip and the Big 6 bailout pass in March.
ova writes:
Volker?
Yes?
I think we need a primer here on the differences between a hedge fund and a private equity fund:
The two types of funds are very different for purposes of this discussion.
I don't think that would wash.
just checking to make sure you were not catatonic
well, it could be worse. your local bank could limit withdrawals ....
norma
~~~~
Quiet !
mmckinl,
As people wake up to the fact that this is WW lll in the form of financial warfare, more and more money will be put in harms way and God will favor the winning side.
There is no "general" rule for hedge funds. They fall outside of The Securities Acts by definition. Many have 2 year lockups.
yogi - it depends on how aggressive you and your accountant want to be. Since they are separate funds, with different stated objectives, different cusips and tickers you could argue that they aren't subject to wash sale rules. You're trading in a product based on front month oil and replacing it with one that equal weights 12 months of futures contracts on oil.
ASIA - UNITED STATES U.S. debt approaches insolvency; Chinese currency reserves at risk - Asia News
Best epithet I can come up with for the hedgies is wang ba dan but then I'm not fluent in the vernacular any more...
skewed | 12.23.08 - 9:28 pm | #
It reminds me of an outburst I once heard from an NCO, which I had never heard before, nor have since:
You don't think I'm angry! I'm as angry as a gorilla in a phone booth with a jock strap pulled over his nose!
In March, it partnered with Simon Property Group to acquire another real estate investment trust, Mills Corp.,
check the history on the mills deal. I believe it was circa '06 the GS boys saved it from impending BK with a pier loan. a billion or so was at risk. a great stick save. I think i lost around 10g's on that one.
primer dude:(GD) what are the capital requirements for the respective funds?
tg is a born & bred dope in
Is that an offical Chinese state opinion? If so, that might be very bad.
Let's modernize that crufty old BASIC:
// Cerberus money management routines
class CerberusClientMoney
{
public:
assets* getAssets();
private:
assets* _assets;
};
assets* CerberusClientMoney::getAssets()
{
// return _assets;
throw new Exception("sorry, we're broke");
}
i'm lookin' for a jock strap
rich,
Thanks for the tip on GSC. Key difference between DBC and GSC is structually GSC is an Exchange Traded Note and unless I'm mistaken is debt of Goldman Sachs - I'm not in the mood to be their creditor at this time.
World Bank bars Satyam for 8 years
Why only world bank bars the indian company ? (for installing a spy software)
can't the Indian company be barred by US DoJ and US Dept of Visas ?
I think such companies will not be allowed to land on US Soil (which is already corrupted to the core)
Dirk writes:
No more scrapbooking/costume/Michaels stores on every corner.
OCDan | 12.23.08 - 9:20 pm | #
Actually the NYT had an article on them today, doing well right now. Inferior goods, dude, inferior goods. they always do well in a downturn.
Dirk | Homepage | 12.23.08 - 9:33 pm | #
I am not against these stores per se. It is that they are in every town out here in LA/Orange county.
We don't need no more stinkin' costume shops or Micahels. What are the gas stations of the 80s? On every corner. At least it feels that way to me.
tg is a born & bred dope in
Even tho it is a Vatican? site... Do the Chinese float political statements and views through other agencies?
WOW ! Great get tg is a born & bred dope in a ...
Milan (AsiaNews) - In the United States, the danger of debt insolvency is growing, putting at risk the currency reserves of foreign countries, China chief among them. According to new figures published by Bloomberg in recent days (Nov. 25, 2008 [1]), the American government has employed a total of 8.549 trillion dollars to stop the financial crisis. This means a total of about 24-25.4 trillion dollars of direct or indirect public debt weighing on American taxpayers. The complete tally must also include the debt - about 5-6 trillion dollars - of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which are now quasi-public companies, because 79.9% of their capital is controlled by a public entity, the Federal Housing Finance Agency, which manages them as a public conservatorship.
ASIA - UNITED STATES U.S. debt approaches insolvency; Chinese currency reserves at risk - Asia News
Merry Christmas !
Not "substantially identical" to me based on different time frame but not sure I want to take a chance with a hungry IRS. Thanks for the suggestion.
"Why would anyone leave a significant amount of money that you can't follow day to day, may not be able to withdraw when you want, and by the way, may be stolen by the fund manager/invested in a ponzi scheme."
You mean like Social Security Taxes-
I'd kindly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today.
Love the Monty Python and the Tolkien by the way.
Kona writes:
ASIA - UNITED STATES U.S. debt approaches insolvency; Chinese currency reserves at risk - Asia News
Wowser !
Broward - we played pool at Recessions, ridiculously small table considering some of the party were almost 7' tall. No challenge with the "long" shots.
I think Manic Depression on Wall St is more like it:
try Gomez (man, the intertubes search for this is a nightmare after some Selena Gomez chick got famous).
YouTube - We Haven't Turned Around - GOMEZ
In fact I prolly posted this last time Misean showed up...!
C
Anyone have any thoughts on USL vs USO to get pure exposure to oil?
Mike , your the resident options pro, right?
why not directly to nymex with you?
I thought this was the key statement...
Chinese monetary authorities, thanks to a steeply undervalued artificial exchange rate, by about 55%, have limited imports (including food) and have achieved an export surplus. This has allowed them to accumulate a large stockpile of dollar reserves. In a currency crisis, China risks losing much of the value of its accumulated currency reserves. At the same time, pressure on imports (wheat, other grains, and meat) have led to inflation in the prices of food, the most important expenditure for more than 900 million Chinese
c_s,
Hmmm...I was unaware of the perl module getAssets. cpan doesn't seem to have it.
I can haz linkage.
OKTUGB,
Nostrovia,
>I think Manic Depression on Wall St is more like it:
Please don't quote Jimi and mention that street in the same sentence.
They are going to dump dollars for commodities to keep feeding the unemployed? With exports down about 30% there is probably a handful of hungry Chinese hanging around the closed factory gates.
ova
$25 trillion is a lot of debt and backstop ... even for the country that prints the stuff.
Misean,
You are back. Welcome. I thought you were in Guantanamo Bay.
Hey, the hedge fund gates swung closed to hold money in. Meanwhile, and at the same time, the Chinese gates swung closed to keep workers out.
Well-written article by Alex Cockburn, all about the Bernie Madoff scandal:
CounterPunch: Tells the Facts, Names the Names
rich said "Like I said, there's an amazing amount of speculative activity at work for a "deflationary depression." A lot of that speculation has poured into bashing EEV, TWM and SRS over the last month. "
I don't get that--- I would have thought that the speculative activity which has driven EEV down is the expectation that the Obama stimulus will save the day...not of a deflation...
anyway, looks like a buy.
Misean no doubt you are aware of the untimely passing of Tanta.
Did you know CR has a new companion? Quite the fox.
$25 trillion is a lot of debt and backstop ...
particularly when into denial
Elvis,
"I thought you were in Guantanamo Bay."
SHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!
That was quite the swim, don't want to do it again.
Thank Glod for squirrels. They make great shark flares.
Nostrovia,
$25 trillion is a lot of debt and backstop ...
In 2001 we were paying down our debt and had a surplus year.
What if we got hit now ?
I hear they are using all the FBI anti terror units to investigate financial fraud now ...
Plantagenet - the old turtle egg put. Nice. Doesn't translate into English with any weight but it's hellish offensive in Chinese.
I learned all my best Beijing dialect in pool halls. The language was as blue as the air.
C
"Misean no doubt you are aware of the untimely passing of Tanta."
No...is this true? I truly have been offline since the day after Thanksgiving.
Nostrovia,
Oil Equations,
Well I don't have a futures account to trade the options on the future for one.
For the other I'm looking for longer term exposure that I don't have to watch too closely since I've been busy at work.
Where'd you get the notion that I'm an expert on anything
Sadly, yes.
Ah Plantagenet is here ...
Would you mind sharing with us the short term outlook (2 months) on Dow Commodities, MSCI Asia ?
What's the Strand like now, Dawg?
I guess I'll go play pool. Billiard balls don't wear out very fast. - Broward Horne
Thanks, never saw that before. The Strand is all cheek and jowl houses now. Fresno-By-The-Sea.
They don't teach any type of parables at Chabad? Don't put all your matza in one basket?
Misean,
The good news is Jas Jain is apparently shacking up with George Michaels former lover, so he doesn't have time to comment here anymore (no longer lonely). At least, that is what I believe ever since Ken came around.
Similar link to above.
ASIA Economic crisis: US, China and the coming monetary storm - Asia News
Fresno-By-The-Sea.
hilarious ....
Chez Bakersfield ....
I could have sworn you were quoting greeks within the last year. It made my haed explode... and made me make sure i paid attention when you post.
That's why i was confused when you were looking for direct exposure to oil.
It still is the best way. get yourself a commodities account already!
They don't teach any type of parables at Chabad? Don't put all your matza in one basket?
YLSP | 12.23.08 - 10:01 pm |
They now started teaching Tao of Buffet
"Diversification protects wealth...where as concentration builds wealth...put all in one stock"
mmckinl writes:
That's the next big question ...
What funds will lock their investors in and which will be liquidating come January ...
Someone here at CR pointed out that the last market drop was the start of last quarter ...
Liquidations have got to be higher now with the Maddof scandal ...
mmckinl | 12.23.08 - 8:37 pm | #
IMO
The continued liquidation comes during the PE/Obamas market rally thats coming in the next couple of months.
Dont drink the Kool-Aid.
Counterpointer: Thanks for the Gomez link. Reminds me of John Fogerty/CCR for some reason.
Clues from the tube:
02 Apr 2008
The U.S. Dollar & Gravity’s Pull - Undesignated - Resource Investor
One way to gauge whether the U.S. economic recovery is proceeding is through the Treasury International Capital System (TICs data), a report from the U.S. Treasury that tracks money flowing into and out of the United States .
Booker says that if the TICs data, which recently dropped to just above $50 billion, is not in the $70 billion to $100 billion range, it will indicate an insufficient demand for dollars and U.S. dollar denominated assets; and a sub $50 billion reading would indicate a more protracted recession.
To assure the transmission of easy money occurred, the treasury terminated the 30-year bond auctions and dried up the supply, Wilkinson explains. That put a bid under the 10-year note and helped to flatten out the curve, he says, adding that there is still plenty of steepening left for the curve to take before the situation became dire.
Cash and carry
Another emerging trend in the currency markets is the end of the carry trade as we know it, with the low yielding Japanese yen and Swiss franc serving as funding currencies. Booker explains that in order for the carry trade to work, interest rates must collectively be on the rise, but that we are entering an elongated period when interest rates are coming down.
The conditions that foster the carry trade no longer exist, Booker says. We see a massive reversal in the carry trade. As firms realize that more and more, we see a cross rate in the GBP/JPY and the EUR/JPY that come much, much further down.
Another possibility is that the U.S. dollar could become a funding currency, McDonald says. We have been a yielding currency forever, because our interest rates have been fairly high across the G-10. We fell to sixth a while back and now our interest rates are fairly low when you compare us to everyone else. We are at 3%, the Swiss is at 2.75%. The only thing lower than that is the yen. People are going to seriously start looking to the U.S. currency as a funding currency and playing that against the Australian, the New Zealand or even the pound, as a yielding currency, she says..
Also see: Who's Piloting U.S. Treasury Bonds' Flight to Safety?
-- Seeking Alpha
In October, as part of the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act, the Congress approved a debt limit increase to $11.3 trillion. Currently the national debt stands at $10.6 trillion. If the U.S. maxes out its credit line (a highly likely scenario) that would translate into a 7% increase in debt outstanding. Since foreigners are not the only buyers of U.S. debt, someone will have to fill that gap, especially if the decline in foreign ownership continues. The trillion dollar question is, will the new buyer agree to the same 0% terms that the current buyers are receiving?
Topher,
This is the rally.
Oil Equations,
Yes I know the greeks but that just means I can tell you which one caused me to lose money lol.
Hmmm...I was unaware of the perl module getAssets. cpan doesn't seem to have it.
It's not open source. However I have it on good authority that the original version, before the comment was added, suffered from a pointer arithmetic error.
Thus getAssets behaviour was undefined, leading to random heap memory allocation errors, core dumps, and the occasional transfer of some of the clients' assets to an offshore account in Zimbabwe.
Clever dud3z, those Cerberus hack3rz.
With nine days to go before British troops become an illegal presence in Iraq, sources say that lawyers are working on an alternative that would bypass Parliament and give Nouri al-Maliki, the Prime Minister, a free hand. But this, too, needs parliamentary approval and Western officials are concerned that it may not work.
Britain gets ready for urgent Iraq pullout - Times Online
Get the troops home just in time for the economic firestorm in January.
Weird they let this get so close to a deadline.
c_s,
"Thus getAssets behaviour was undefined, leading to random heap memory allocation errors, core dumps, and the occasional transfer of some of the clients' assets to an offshore account in Zimbabwe.
Clever dud3z, those Cerberus hack3rz."
Bwahahahahahahahahhahahahahahahahahahahaha!
Nostrovia,
The continued liquidation comes during the PE/Obamas market rally thats coming in the next couple of months.
Dont drink the Kool-Aid.
Topher
~~~~
BO has already been discounted by me ...
Market's too big, unless of course he takes on the banks or goes for a single payer health plan, then you have some action.
Otherwise I don't see it ...
"The trillion dollar question is, will the new buyer agree to the same 0% terms that the current buyers are receiving?"
Foreigners are already leaving, look at the latest Foreign net purchases, only about 1.5 billion for October. So sing along:
"So long and thanks for all the fish
So sad that it should come to this
We tried to warn you all but oh dear?
You may not share our intellect
Which might explain your disrespect
For all the natural wonders that
grow around you
So long, so long and thanks
for all the fish
The world's about to be destroyed
There's no point getting all annoyed
Lie back and let the planet dissolve
Despite those nets of tuna fleets
We thought that most of you were sweet
Especially tiny tots and your
pregnant women
So long, so long, so long, so long, so long
So long, so long, so long, so long, so long
So long, so long and thanks
for all the fish
(yeah)
So long and thanks for all the fish
So sad that it should come to this
We tried to warn you all but oh dear?
(oh dear)
Despite those nets of tuna fleets
We thought that most of you were sweet
Especially tiny tots and your
pregnant women
So long, so long, so long, so long, so long
So long, so long, so long, so long, so long
So long, so long and thanks
for all the fish"
April 2008: Booker says that if the TICs data, which recently dropped to just above $50 billion, is not in the $70 billion to $100 billion range, it will indicate an insufficient demand for dollars and U.S. dollar denominated assets; and a sub $50 billion reading would indicate a more protracted recession.
Hello, anyone home?
Misean!
great to see you are back and in your usual good form!!!
All these companies cutting 401(k) matching will provide impetus for the forced buying of government bonds. Seems like the playbook has been publicized... We're all Belshazzar now!
Yslp it's one of the big Ten: Don't carry the Lord's name in vain. It's not about cursing...
"Could the rest of the world finally be tiring of our US Treasuries?"
Naw, man. They're making them out of Bounty paper towel and dipping 'em in all the Meth the DEA is rounding up. Of course lack of sleep does cause irrational behavior. The term "wired, but tired..." comes to mind.
Nostrovia,
Anonymous, I'm no expert but that seems very bad? Not surprising, but bad nonetheless...
orma writes:
Didn't Warren Buffet say something to the effect of "Hell is really easy to enter, but hard to leave."
norma | 12.23.08 - 8:54 pm | #
Havent seen his mug on TV for a while. He seemed to be out in the MSM quite a bit a couple of months ago.
Hmmm
This remains an important turning point related to The Arab Oil Embargo of about 1973:
One important theoretic development came from a Czech mathematician, Oldrich Vasicek, who argued in a 1977 paper that bond prices all along the curve are driven by the short end (under risk neutral equivalent martingale measure), and accordingly by short-term interest rates. The mathematical model for Vasicek's work was given by an Ornstein-Uhlenbeck process, and has since been discredited because the model predicts a positive probability that the short rate becomes negative and is inflexibile in creating yield curves of different shapes.
"Could the rest of the world finally be tiring of our US Treasuries?"
Hey man! Our Treasuries are the best in the world. USA! USA! Those smelly foreigners love our country. They'll send us money forever because we've got the best soldiers and football and Hollywood and huge malls!
/big-mouth America
"A few years ago, the Guatemalan government frustrated at its police force's inability to control the gangs encouraged limpieza social, or social cleansing. It was an overt message for communities to organize and dispose of gang members, whose numbers are today estimated at 80,000. What happened, wrote a newspaper columnist recently, was the creation of a societal "Frankenstein.""
Fed Up, Ordinary Guatemalans Turn To Vigilantism : NPR
Social cleansing in today's Guatemala. Law and order at the street level.
It's different here.
Pat... Pat Robertson? I was waiting for your thoughts on Madoff... now I know how to think.
I'm not in the mood to be their creditor at this time.
Mike in Long Island | 12.23.08 - 9:46 pm | #
That is OK. Paulson has their back.
Righto
What's the frequency Benneth, or is it Hanky Po??
YouTube -
I'll get some Asia numbers up shortly. Not postive.
C
How much US paper is China holding?
Buffet took the ragged remnants of his dignity and retreated back to Omaha.
Last I heard he was in negotiations with Kelly Lepler of REmax to buy Cheyenne Mountain and retire. The seller is quibbling over accepting preferred shares in Goldman Sachs as payment. Buffet was heard to remark, "You have got to be kidding." Talks continue.
No, no. Needless to say I am unsympathetic to Chabad. They were a little early on that Messiah call and they freeride off the IDF, then cause trouble. They can keep Madonnna.
And so it begins. All that is gold does not glitter, not all those who wander are lost; the old that is strong does not wither, deep roots are not reached by the frost. From the ashes a fire shall be woken, a light from the shadows shall spring; renenwed shall be blade that was broken, the crownless again shall be king.
Rob Dawg
Rob, don't bogart that joint. pass it over to me
"Social cleansing in today's Guatemala. Law and order at the street level.
It's different here.
Citizen Jacked"
"Dude, your mom and sister were gang members. That is why I raped them and then killed them."
"Right, and same with the owner of that jewelry store. That is why I took all his jewelry and money and killed him."
Website Decommissioning
We will be decommissioning the legacy cme.com and cbot.com websites at end of business on Friday, January 9, 2009. Please continue to use the Feedback link to provide comments.
oh boy... no more data for the nerdZ
xxxxx:
This same moralistic debate is with us, once again. Contemporary liquidationists insist that a collapse would lead to rebirth of a purified economy.
Have to take issue with the author's depiction.
Particularly the millenarian overtones the argument is lent when rendered in caricature here.
It is certainly interesting to hear Martin Wolf, you know, "go on" about this stuff. But his article is basically some aphorisms, some stupendously obvious observations, a good quote from Minksy, and "yeah, like, do what works".
Obviously, Martin, I have an idea what I think will work, as do we all.
What we are doing now -- it has not worked. It has, in fact, produced a toxic arena. One where we really have to ask, is it worth even worrying about zombie banks on the face of such a looming series of sovereign and sub-sovereign defaults?
Don't tell me, that I am an ideologue because I don't want to watch the public authorities funnel the US annual GDP into a bunch of bankrupt firms rather than turn them into receivership -- and STILL achieve no remedy.
I don't think we need a "purified" financial system. I'm not sitting here in a white robe with a candle meditating on select Ayn Rand passages. With have a bunch of insolvent firms with liabilities far exceeding their capital. Either the public or their creditors can be on the hook.
Don't urge me in a spirit of worldy togetherness to pledge a decade of my personal income to pay off the bad casino markers of your Eaton and club chums. There is sharp practice going on here and if we are going to engage in eye-popping exercises of fiscal stimulus to sustain global aggregate demand, can we at least have some systemic reform?
Martin even talks about it at the end while cautioning us against "liquidationism". So the author gives us a perscription for broad systemic reform, just not anything too specific or too narrow or the kind that changes anything radically.
Here's my winning "Minsky quote":
The objective is also clear: to preserve an open and at least reasonably stable world economy that offers opportunity to as much of humanity as possible. We have done a disturbingly poor job of this in recent years. We must do better. We can do so, provided we approach the task in a spirit of humility and pragmatism, shorn of ideological blinkers
Martin, I hate to inform you of this, but you are the very definition of the "apparatus". You write a column for the FT, you are a functionary of the system. Author is proving that the key component to the political side of this crisis is that you have to build the policy that gets you out with the apparatus that got you there.
Welll, Sth Korea very crabby, red all over the shop:
INDEX\tVALUE\tCHANGE\t%CHANGE\tTIME
KRX 100 INDEX\t2,366.12\t-53.87\t-2.23%\t21:48
KOSPI INDEX\t1,117.49\t-26.82\t-2.34%\t21:47
KOSPI 200 INDEX\t145.63\t-3.30\t-2.22%\t21:48
KOREA KOSPI 100 INDEX\t1,079.97\t-24.77\t-2.24%\t21:48
KOREA KOSPI 50 INDEX\t969.46\t-22.52\t-2.27%\t21:48
KOSDAQ INDEX\t332.42\t-6.34\t-1.87%\t21:48
KOSDAQ STAR INDEX\t834.40\t-20.58\t-2.41%\t21:4
Japan even grumpier:
INDEX\tVALUE\tCHANGE\t%CHANGE\tTIME
TOPIX INDEX (TOKYO)\t825.77\t-22.95\t-2.70%\t21:00
TOPIX CORE 30 IDX (TSE)\t482.30\t-17.80\t-3.56%\t21:00
TOPIX LARGE 70 IDX (TSE)\t728.99\t-17.50\t-2.34%\t21:00
TOPIX 500 INDEX (TSE)\t652.33\t-18.94\t-2.82%\t21:00
TOPIX SMALL INDEX (TSE)\t839.61\t-13.12\t-1.54%\t21:00
TOPIX MID 400 INDX (TSE)\t856.38\t-20.57\t-2.35%\t21:00
TOPIX 100 INDEX (TSE)\t569.20\t-18.01\t-3.07%\t21:00
TSE2 TOPIX 2ND SECT INDX\t1,900.25\t-14.15\t-0.74%\t21:00
NIKKEI 225\t8,488.95\t-234.83\t-2.69%\t21:30
NIKKEI 300 INDEX\t168.35\t-4.88\t-2.82%\t21:30
NIKKEI 500\t741.09\t-17.17\t-2.26%\t21:30
JASDAQ: STOCK INDEX\t46.61\t-0.25\t-0.53%\t21:01
NIKKEI JASDAQ\t1,062.41\t-10.37\t-0.97%\t21:48
TSE REIT INDEX\t899.77\t-25.46\t-2.75%\t21:00
TSE MOTHERS INDEX\t319.12\t-9.42\t-2.87%\t21:00
OSAKA SE HERCULES INDEX\t479.58\t-6.77\t-1.39%\t21:01
Wahoo, Santa Claus! Oh wait... Biggest X in the region is gruuumpyyy on futures:
\tVALUE\tCHANGE\t% CHANGE
Nikkei 225\t8,510.00\t-230.00\t-2.63
Topix\t825.50\t-24.00\t-2.83
Hang Seng\t14,097.00\t-104.00\t-0.73
Singapore Straits Times\t1,735.00\t10.00\t0.58
S&P/ASX\t3,569.00\t-78.00\t-2.14
But wait, great news, Dhaka is up! The bottom is in!!!
INDEX\tVALUE\tCHANGE\t%CHANGE\tTIME
DSE General Index DGEN\t2,598.11\t13.49\t0.52%\t12/23
Thank dog for that. I was beginning to think there was problem.
C
"We will be decommissioning"
And then they will sink them, so they can become artificial coral reefs.
Buffet was all over the MSM in Sept when Berkshire was sporting a $140k handle. At $95k not so much book to talk up. What was he buying? Insurance, banks, real estate. Would you be anxious to talk about that?
Hmmm...I was unaware of the perl module getAssets. cpan doesn't seem to have it.
Comrade Misean is Dope | Homepage | 12.23.08 - 9:52 pm | #
thought that was C#
Rob, don't bogart that joint. pass it over to me
Lowell George
Man you got stoned and you missed it*. That was more a "Shortcut to Mushrooms" than a Misty Mountain melody.
"Rob Dawg writes:
Buffet was all over the MSM in Sept when Berkshire was sporting a $140k handle."
Name a biilionaire that hasn't lost 40% of his/her net worth over the last 150 days. I'm not saying it hasn't happened, I just cannot think of one.
Oh, and Counterpointer, left you a note one thread back.
"With have a bunch of insolvent firms with liabilities far exceeding their capital. Either the public or their creditors can be on the hook."
"Don't urge me in a spirit of worldy togetherness to pledge a decade of my personal income to pay off the bad casino markers of your Eaton and club chums."
Comrade Byzantine_Ruins | Homepage | 12.23.08 - 10:26 pm
Hear! Hear! ... and may ten thousand maggots find their bowels while they still beathe ...
Name a biilionaire that hasn't lost 40% of his/her net worth over the last 150 days. I'm not saying it hasn't happened, I just cannot think of one. - Elvis
Hank Paulso
Byzantine Ruins - Wolf's injunction about what needs to be after this crisis is a bit like a doctor saying to a terminal cancer patient, "what you need is robust health".
Sure, we can all agree on that.
Once the doctor has said that, we hear....
/sound of crickets, churning stomachs, more pain.
This is no prescription at all.
I've been around excellent economists talking to developing country counterparts saying you need X,Y, and Z preconditions in order to develop in a sustainable and inclusive way. [That is, you need to look like Sweden before you have a hope in hell].
Hardly productive and not a great conversation starter.
C
Did Credit Suisse get this idea from reading Tanta?
Commentary: Give bankers some of their own medicine - CNN.com
A VERY HAPPY FESTIVUS TO EVERYONE
"The objective is also clear: to preserve an open and at least reasonably stable world economy that offers opportunity to as much of humanity as possible."
I don't think those extra 700 million young people soon coming to working age between 2010-2020 will give a shit about what you ivory tower economists are thinking or what your lovely world improving mighty goals are. Especially because there are no jobs available for them!
Those restless ones are going to be mighty mad and not going to take it anymore. And guess what huge surplus of young unemployed men usually means...
It's WW lll and you need to understand the weapons being used to destroy your cash:
The state price deflator (spd) is a positive process with the property that the price of any market instrument deflated by spd is a martingale under the physical measure P.
By precluding market arbitrages, assume the existence of an Equivalent Martin-gale Measure Q under which bond prices discounted by the money market account are martingales (see Duffie (2001) for details).
State-price deflators. Let L + = { ψ ∈ L : ψ (t, ω ) ≧0 ∀(t, ω )} denote the cone of non-negative adapted pro-cesses in L . 3 The interior L ◦+ of the cone,L ◦+ := { ψ ∈ L : ψ (t, ω ) > 0 ∀(t, ω )}
paulson dude made money...not hank, the other one
jeff
your musical tastes are no doubt eclectic
RockyR,
I wouldn't know C# from Db.
Nostrovia,
Misean, velcome doma.
Having a good year here. Working on my 3rd million. Gave up on the first 2!!!
It is kind of funny that Americans bitch about mere 75 million baby boomers and their retirement troubles.
Meanwhile, in the developing world the size of REAL SUPERBIG baby boomer generation (1985-2000) is WHOPPING 1000-1200 MILLION!! About four times the population of USA.
Byz - I don't do Cooper's Panopticon, can you perhaps repost here?
Ta.
C
Byz I don't feel like registering to read that FT article. Funny, I assumed from above quote he was referring to New Deal 2.0. My idea of pragmatism is regulate banking just like a utility. Hank said it's a vital organ. When the electric company wants to raise rates there are public hearings. Electrons for the masses. Bust the trust.
mp if you are around, ask Conjure if his love of dog balls includes those of dogs with 3 heads
Exit - brilliant, thanks for the vid previous thread, love it.
Byz - went back to yr question, will come back shortly. Gee, you know how ask hard questions.
C
Comrade Misean is . . . Alive
(__/)
(='.'=)
(")(")
X-mas bunny approves
Misean,
How was Betty Ford's this time?
Article and clip. We posted the bank run clip here a few times over the last couple of years -- Real Estate and Urban blog picks it up after the NYT article, and Econview mentions it as well. And check out how much the author despises Uncle Billy:
Wonderful? Sorry, George, It's a Pitiful, Dreadful Life - NY Times
Rob Dawg writes:
Name a biilionaire that hasn't lost 40% of his/her net worth over the last 150 days. I'm not saying it hasn't happened, I just cannot think of one. - Elvis
Hank Paulson
Rob Dawg |
TRUE.
"Funny, I assumed from above quote he was referring to New Deal 2.0. My idea of pragmatism is regulate banking just like a utility. Hank said it's a vital organ. When the electric company wants to raise rates there are public hearings. Electrons for the masses. Bust the trust."
~~~
Yep, the bright lights of the Ivy League and Chicago have burned down the barn ... Time for a public central bank and banking system ... We'll need it to pay for the damages.
These long holiday weekends when emerging markets are open and U.S. is closed is when you want to get some EEV.
When emerging markets don't have Ben and Timmy to watch their backs and set their alarm clocks, they start to panic.
That's when you can smoke 'em.
I wouldn't know C# from Db.
Comrade Misean is Dope | Homepage | 12.23.08 - 10:39 pm | #
That's OK. It would take me all night and most of tomorrow to understand that arbitrage equation above.
PCA,
Well, now alive is one of those debatable things.
Sometimes dead is better.
If you are a billionaire and you lose 40% of your wealth, you still have 600,000,000.00. That's 600 mil. Assumming a 5% CD return, that poor billionare still makes 30 million per year in interest, more than everyone on this blog put together. Wealth disparity has destroyed the middle class. Are we still allowed to say middle class.
HELL, New York (CR) -- A ferry transporting hedge fund investors capsized while crossing the river Styx. Investigators on the scene believe the cause of the accident was due members of the American elite attempting to force the ferry to turn around, hoping to allow the passengers to postpone their appointments in hell.
As of 11:00pm, there have been no updates of potential survivors. Members from the economic transition team will be working around the business cycle to extract survivors. The only material known to be strong enough to withstand the powerful currents of the river Styx are the cured hides of taxpayers wound into lengths of rope. The government is requesting the assistance of citizens. Citizens should be aware that providing assistance is mandatory. Please report to your local Patriot Center immediately.
Yes, we can!
Counterpointer(Excellent) writes:
Byz - went back to yr question, will come back shortly. Gee, you know how ask hard questions.
Thanks.
FWIW, I have friends who can help, with Hong Kong, Singapore, other Chinese language non-mainland locales, if I need to read research from diaspora locales.
Elvis writes:
"Name a biilionaire that hasn't lost 40% of his/her net worth over the last 150 days."
Dr. Jim Simons and his Medallion Fund.
Jim Simonss Incentives - Market Movers - Portfolio.com
If you know anything about quants, you've heard of him.
I know this way OT, but WOW - what fun!!!
\t\t\t\t\t \t\t\t\t \t\t \t \t \t \t \t \t \t \t \t \t \t \t \t \t\t \t \t\t \t\t \t \t\t \t\t\t\t \t\t \t\t\t \t\t\t\t\t\t\tRussia to raise nuclear missile output fourfold \t\t\t\t\t\t \t\t\t\t\t\t\t⢠70 ICBMs intended to pressure US in treaty talks
⢠£95bn package includes tanks, ships and planes \t\t\t\t\t\t \t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t \t\t\t\t\t \t\t\t
\t \t\t\tRussia has thrown down a new gauntlet to Barack Obama with an announcement that it will sharply increase production of strategic nuclear missiles.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/dec/24/russia-nuclear
I lifted this from Drudge, so my sources... they, uhhh, may not be so good...
Is anybody's CR Companion freaking out just now? "Persecuted Comrade Anonymouse" keeps flashing in and out of the Authors box, and the comments keep flipping between 234 & 245.
Byz
The really hard part about his, and one which is open to permanent debate is where you fix homeostatic equilibrium in the Ch state ie what is the broadly accepted, defined and operational state for Ch to be run? The answer, at least following the meltdown of the Legalists and Confucians over 2000 years ago was that the latter prevailed, but not without contest as there were legalist schools, enclave pockets, and individuals placed in the imperial family to push these ideas, and in the wider county magistrate system to push these ideas and often it ended it blood.
Why?
Because crusading county magistrates would attempt to upset the structural balance, would face revolt from their own very powerful permanent local staff, who would in some cases engineer civil disorder and tax revolts and oust the crusading magistrate. In some cases this would happen to high officials too, witness, or googlies "Hai Rui Dismissed from Office", in which a straight guy gets skrood.
So, to turn your question around, this was not capture by vested interests, but failure of a newish regime to overturn structural continuity of vested interests. And as I think Huang makes clear, once the failure of the Rites bureau to insist that the Emperor actually did his protocol duty failed, the implicit mandates and urgency of a slew of government functions actually failed too; the Huang He embankments were not maintained, there were food supply distortions, taxation at local level reached rapacity, the military got on the opium, the numbers of official expelled to the Wall to build of administer increased and so on. From top signals, the whole system started to revert to the worst corruption and degeneracy that a stronger emperor would have forestalled.
Parallels to the present are of course completely unjustified.
I'll try to post some decent primary material over the next couple of days.
Regards
C
YLSP writes:
Topher,
This is the rally.
YLSP | 12.23.08 - 10:05 pm | #
mmckinl writes:
The continued liquidation comes during the PE/Obamas market rally thats coming in the next couple of months.
Dont drink the Kool-Aid.
Topher
~~~~
BO has already been discounted by me ...
Market's too big, unless of course he takes on the banks or goes for a single payer health plan, then you have some action.
Otherwise I don't see it ...
mmckinl | 12.23.08 - 10:08 pm | #
I think well get something in January. The Dow has been hanging around 8500. Going to go one way or another 15-20+%. IMO
The DXD and SDS paid out the dividends today. Both were down 23%-12% this morning in early trading.
I had to call Schwab to see what the heck was going on. I was tempted. I still would like to get the DD S&P when/if the S&P gets to 950-1000 and Dow 10K if it happens in january.
Kramer was foaming at the mouth again about the DD ETF's last night. lol
Wolf quoted at 9:24 above >The election of Mr Obama surely reflects a desire for just such pragmatism. Neither Ron Paul, the libertarian, nor Ralph Nader, on the left, got anywhere.<
Now this is outright ignorant. We here know it isn't pragmatism but a desperate attempt to hold the bankrupt center, with a huge middle class still in denial, but now with half an eye open. And to impute anything to a prisoner's dilemma election is silly.
But Keynes lived in a time in which to associate with an Ideology was a matter of life or death. The old labels are still used as weapons, Comrade.
Russia has thrown down a new gauntlet to Barack Obama with an announcement that it will sharply increase production of strategic nuclear missiles.
~~~~
More of the Bush Legacy ... NATO moving towards Moscow, radar and anti ballistic missles on Chek and Polish ground, Georgia~ Abkazia ...
the military bases in the "Stans " ...
Bush has screwed the pooch ...
UB,
How can the Yield Curve go negative?
??: Euclidean space - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
If one alters a Euclidean space so that its inner product becomes negative in one or more directions, then the result is a pseudo-Euclidean space. Smooth manifolds built from such spaces are called pseudo-Riemannian manifolds. Perhaps their most famous application is the theory of relativity, where empty spacetime with no matter is represented by the flat pseudo-Euclidean space called Minkowski space, spacetimes with matter in them form other pseudo-Riemannian manifolds, and gravity corresponds to the curvature of such a manifold.
A pseudo-Riemannian manifold is a differentiable manifold equipped with a non-degenerate, smooth, symmetric metric tensor which, unlike a Riemannian metric, need not be positive-definite, but must be non-degenerate. Such a metric is called a pseudo-Riemannian metric and its values can be positive, negative or zero.
The signature of a pseudo-Riemannian metric is (p,q) where both p and q are non-negative.
Byz - contacts always welcome, I was on the phone to HK contacts tonight surveying the damage. Eek.
C
I think well get something in January. The Dow has been hanging around 8500. Going to go one way or another 15-20+%. IMO
~~~
75/25 DOW down ....
So now everyone is going to bash Friedman and the 'Chicago' school. What nonsense.
Ritholtz had a harangue against the 'Chicago' school recently. Utter stupidity. The guy is talking his book as a sell side asset gatherer and had the intellect to see what most of us already knew. Yet I respect him. He has a forum. I don't want one.
Take all the damned isms and pit them against each other and you'll find political economics forcing you to take sides. Yet only 2 or 3 sides are offered. Why! Why must I choose.
What if, like 50% of the electorate chose not to play?
I propose a simple solution. Any election must have at least a 60% turn out and a line item of 'none of the above' inserted as an option. It might take a while but eventually the two monopoly parties will have to offer up real choices.
It would never happen. We'll get a Praetorian Guard before any form of a Republic is restored. Sad.
dr strangemoney,
In a related story, the Cerberus withdrawl limit has been reported to have stoked the fires of Hell. The mind numbing screachings from the mauled souls of former Real Estate agents and brokers has turned into an almost pleasant cooing.
"With all the recently released hot air," a former agent, who requested anonymity for obvious reasons, "has begun to filter into the Housing market here. I hate to say it, but this market is hot, hot hot!"
The twisted soul of a former mortgage broker cried, "Look, were in the friggin' bowels of hell. Prices have only one way to go...and down here..." the soul chuckled briefly before being gnawed in half by several particularly hideous looking, decomposing ponies, "...down is not an option." The soul finished, grimacing in pain and ecstacy all at once.
Nostrovia,
"but must be non-degenerate."
--Lost Inside Kona
You are talking about some other yield curve than the one I am seeing.
The two types of funds are very different for purposes of this discussion.
GD | 12.23.08 - 9:40 pm | #
Thank you. I was going to point that out once I finished reading all the posts. You saved me the effort.
If anyone is feeling too smug about not being stuck in these funds, remember your state pension and university endowment funds (particularly California, New York, and Alaska) are invested in these puppies. Any shortfall will be made whole by you the taxpayer.
Lost Inside Kona,
I use degenerate conic b-splined surfaces and anisotropic edge centered concurrent elements to model composite aerospace structures. Don't assume everyone here has no idea what you are talking about.
So now everyone is going to bash Friedman and the 'Chicago' school. What nonsense.
~~~
With good reason ... Their ideological crap has crippled this country ...
If you had a billion dollars where would you put it? Even after all the beach houses, racing cars, and hookers I think that might be over the FDIC limit.
T-bills?
Any shortfall will be made whole by you the taxpayer.
NorkaWest | 12.23.08 - 11:23 pm | #
hmmm.... we may just have to ask exactly how much government we really need.
So, to turn your question around, this was not capture by vested interests, but failure of a newish regime to overturn structural continuity of vested interests.
I'll have to review the Huang. The spouse has it currently. I primarily took away that the Ming started with an inadequate bureaucratic apparatus and never built a better one.
Look at the logistical arrangements. Raw materials for imperial projects piled outside the palace! Really! Emperors in dynasties before and after would have sighed at that.
Anyway, just wondering if there is any corpus of non-classical literature relating to state failure and the processes at work in decaying dynasties and other state forms qua the processes, rather than an exceptionalistic study of the individual events.
Anyway.
Kona: Man you and that yield curve -- an epic struggle. Daniel in the Lion's Den!
Check out the whole cold fusion quantum computing thing going on at nyt. You can have some serious fun in the comments over there.
T-bills?
Beach Blvd
~~~~
Solvent bank in a decent market ...
Chris Cox defending his record at the SEC in an interview with the Wash Post....
"What we have done in this period of turmoil is stay calm, that has been our greatest contribution."
SEC Chair Defends His Restraint During Financial Crisis - washingtonpost.com
Dirk- "ask Conjure if his love of dog balls includes those of dogs with 3 heads"
Conjure says, "Three heads, six balls, a Christmas feast."
I can't believe it. I simply can't believe it. Cerberus buying RMBS in September.
Conjure says, "Hey, Dan (Quayle)! How do you spell "moron?"
"BWAHAHAHA!"
Kona, even offer-topic: Bjork has started an icelandic investment fund to encourage green tech.
"What we have done in this period of turmoil is stay calm, that has been our greatest contribution."
~~~~
Yeah ... like the "no short" list ... Cox ought to be banned from the U.S. with BB and Hanky ...
Beach Blvd: T-bills?
Political influence. That's the hot asset class over the next twenty years.
mp,
"Conjure says, "Hey, Dan (Quayle)! How do you spell "moron?""
MOEron. N'yuck, N'yuck, N'yuck.
Nostrovia,
"What we have done in this period of turmoil is stay calm, that has been our greatest contribution."
Amazing what you can do with the right prescription medications.
mmckinl,
Anything taken to extreme is dangerous. All isms gain coherts for profit. The golden mean is longed for.
We need hysterisis for our economic system. Set at 72 and forget.
The Fed was supposed to be the thermostat but it was co-opted by first labor and then capital.
I know not the answer except to respect the cyclical nature of emotions.
I'm unclear on why anyone would consider buying EEV, since it clearly is not doing its job of being the inverse of EEM. It just made a YTD low this month, which makes no sense if you look at the chart of EEM. Why not short EEM instead? If EEV isn't the inverse of EEM, what is it?
>Friedman and the 'Chicago' school. What nonsense.<
Sorry, couldn't resist. If his theories didn't justify the ruling elites, no, no Nobel.
"What we have done in this period of turmoil is stay calm, that has been our greatest contribution."
Cox seems to have confused calm and comatose. I've met rocks with more vim and vigor...and they don't live anywhere near volcanoes.
Nostrovia,
The Fed was supposed to be the thermostat but it was co-opted by first labor and then capital.
~~~~
Wrong ... first it was the Military Industrial Complex then the Financials ...
Ya can't walk with both legs broken.
primer dude:(GD) what are the capital requirements for the respective funds?
irreverent | 12.23.08 - 9:44 pm | #
None.
View them as mutual funds with higher fees (2%) and a performance bonus (20%) that can invest in anything allowed by the offering document and with redemption rights restricted to the terms laid out in the offering document (quarterly with 45 to 90 days notice, annually with 90 days notice, cash payout as investments are realized, or some sort of "at the discretion of the adviser" to cover side letters with fund of funds investors.
Most folks don't read and comprehend the offering document. If the offering document says that investors can only redeem once a year at December 31 with withdrawal notice required by September 30, they act all amazed that they can't pull funds on April 10 to pay their taxes.
P.S. If you are an investor who sues your fund, then remember that costs for legal defense are usually considered fund expenses which are passed through to the fund's investors so you get to pay for both sides of the lawsuit. Sweeeet.
It's about cottonpickin' time that EEV recovers.
I've been holding on and learning a lesson about emerging markets. That's one that I've held onto despite the acid reflux.
TBT is one that I'm going to move out of finally. The government is intent on depressing the curve longer than I apparently have a lifespan.
Lesson learned.
Nice to see you back, Misean. Bit worried, there...
Byz - hmmm, when I was a young lecturer I think I heard the basics direct from my prof, an exiled Cambridge genius, not from texts. I certainly raised homeostatic equilibrium in my .201 class. I have a gut feeling there was someone at Duke doing this stuff, or maybe Imperial in London. It's been almost 20 years and I'm a bit rusty. Too much time IN China, rather than ON China (!).
Hosted Jonathan Spence back in 92 or so. Quelle blow'arde as the french say.
C
"Political influence. That's the hot asset class over the next twenty years."
Jesus H. Chrysler, the hell dog already has plenty of that.
But I guess as our government and civil service reaches Mexico status, you can never have too much.
Misean, welcome back.
The big pendulum is aimed squarely at Big Ponzi. Better stay out of its way, it isn't made of paper and it moves fastest as it approaches the balance point.
fried writes:
Chris Cox defending his record at the SEC in an interview with the Wash Post....
"What we have done in this period of turmoil is stay calm, that has been our greatest contribution."
Pretty easy to stay calm when you are fast asleep
mmckinl,
Military industrial complex? You mean Chysler making Shermans for WWII? The Fed predates Ike's speach by a few decades.
You need to ask for a refund from that history class you took at ITT Tech.
CF Walter Reuther and the Mafia controlled Longshoremen in 1942.
Anyone have any thoughts on USL vs USO to get pure exposure to oil?
Mike , your the resident options pro, right?
why not directly to nymex with you?
Oil Equations | 12.23.08 - 9:50 pm | #
Are the BP Warrants on Prudhoe Bay still available?
UB,
See you another night! The battle does go on!
If you had a billion dollars where would you put it?
Beach Blvd | 12.23.08 - 11:27 pm | #
Land, lots of land, with trees and full water and mineral rights.
Buffet was all over the MSM in Sept when Berkshire was sporting a $140k handle. At $95k not so much book to talk up. What was he buying? Insurance, banks, real estate. Would you be anxious to talk about that?
Rob Dawg | 12.23.08 - 10:26 pm | #
But he's buying for the long term!
And as far as 'the long term', lots of bulls and bears are assuming we'll have a bear market rally before the next leg down begins, but after that bottom the new bull market will start from the lowest valuations since the early 80s. Seems a little too easy for it to work out that way.
But what if the 'new' bull performs like the Nikkei did after its RE bubble burst in 1989? And another 15 years of sideways to down market action?
Anyone else notice the market's been churning below resistance (Dow 9000, S&P 900)on low volume rather than basing above support? I'm beginning to think we've already had our rally.
If you had a billion dollars where would you put it?
Beach Blvd | 12.23.08 - 11:27 pm | #
Land, lots of land, with trees and full water and mineral rights.
Comrade Bear (tj & the bear) | 12.23.08 - 11:47 pm |
I recommend lots of arable land and water. All else is bonus.
Ross
Conspicuous consumption and planned obsolescence to generate taxes for the Cold War from high tax rates on everybody for the MIC...
Then cheap interest and two worker families to generate taxes through debt subsidized consumption to generate income for financials...
TBT is one that I'm going to move out of finally.
Homedad43 | Homepage | 12.23.08 - 11:41 pm | #
Dunno... that's the ultimate buy and hold, 'cuz when the bonds blow it'll be nuclear.
mp, does Conjure have a favorite recipe for 3 headed dog balls, perhaps simmered in some banker blood?
mp, et. al.,
Again thanks. It's nice to be missed, even from a bunch of grumpy bears.
Always the optomist, I'm gonna fa-la-la-la around the reloader this Christmas, and deck the halls with bows and arrows.
Gotta change the batteries on the Super Colander Tin Foil Hat, then get some sleep. I'm jet laggy and tired of doing laundry.
Man I wish I had enough juice to wrap my head around B-R's stuff tonight, but I'm far too bleary eyed.
Night all.
Nostrovia,