What did SGA see that the rest of the town didn’t and doesn’t? As the Fool explains, “There are around 30 casinos on the Las Vegas Strip, about two dozen more nearby (such as on Fremont Street), and dozens more elsewhere. Yet with so many gambling halls available and so few people to fill them, casino operators could delay their recovery by continuing to operate them all. Perhaps the new normal for Vegas should be fewer casinos.”
So, what does the McLaughlin Group, the real thing led by the late John McLaughlin or SNL’s led by Carvey, have to do with the price of...well..Bitcoin. It just so happens to be the extraordinary massive spread between what the cryptocurrency’s price could fall to...zero, and how high the creme de la creme of crypto coin could go to….infinity!
Speaking to corporate financial officers, Saylor said eventually no one will ever sell their Bitcoins, because it would be irrational to do so. Bitcoin will continue to appreciate while any U.S. dollar debt incurred will be depreciated away by the Fed’s money printing.
It’s possible the pandemic will fizzle, someone will snap their fingers, and everything will revert back to the pre-Covid economy. But, indications are, commercial real estate, will take lumps, some that will be fatal.
This storyline may not scream OSCAR to you, but, in director Chloé Zhao’s hands, “Nomadland” is a 7-1 favorite to win the best picture academy award according to goldderby.com. Zhao is the 10-3 favorite for best director ahead of heavyweights David Fincher and Aaron Sorkin.
Money velocity is the result of the equation: price level times aggregate real value of transactions in a given time frame divided by total nominal amount of money in circulation on average in the economy. Murray Rothbard scathingly wrote, “But it is absurd to dignify any quantity with a place in an equation unless it can be defined independently of the other terms in the equation.”
As it turned out, Mr. Whipple used to get more of a squeeze out of a roll Charmin than the great 2021 silver squeeze. The price went from $25 an ounce to $30 and back down within a couple of days. “Is that all there is?” Peggy Lee once sang.
Financial complexity has far outstripped the knowledge and imaginations of central bankers. Same think, group think, derivatives and herd mentality have caused markets to far overshoot reasonable valuation. Citigroup Inc.’s chief U.S. equity strategist Tobias Levkovich “panic/euphoria” index illustrates the point. On this measure, euphoria is its highest on record, exceeding even the tech bubble, reports Bloomberg.
It’s no secret Mr. Putin initiated the strategy to “de-dollarize” Russia’s economy. The yellow metal is now the second-largest component of the central bank’s reserves after the euro, which make up a third of its reserves. Chinese yuan reserves make up 12 percent.
Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and social media company XYZ own the platforms that Trump communicates from and these firms have every right to accept and reject users as they see fit. Even in the case of the person who yells “fire” in a crowded theatre, that person “has no right to do so because he is aggressing against the contractual property rights of the theater owner and of the patrons of the performance,” Rothbard wrote.
Rosenberg’s first line sounds like John Maynard Keynes’s “Paradox of Thrift” theory which claims that personal savings are a net drag on the economy during a recession. The second line sounds more like Ludwig von Mises, who wrote, “Capital is not a free gift of God or of nature. It is the outcome of a provident restriction of consumption on the part of man. It is created and increased by saving and maintained by the abstention from dissaving.”
Referring to Dizard’s FT piece in a series of tweets just after Christmas, Bank analyst Chris Whalen said, “"With 30-year conventional mortgage rates closing in on 2.5% APR and the FOMC buying 1.5% MBS coupons as part of quantitative easing, this is a good time to take cash off the table in IMBs and REITs, and go buy a well-located residential home."
ADG consulted interest rate historians Sidney Homer and Richard Sylla who opined “nominal negative yielding debt had never been seen in material size in the 4,000 years of interest rate history prior to the current cycle.” Economist Ludwig von Mises never imagined such a thing,
“He wants to put his inheritance toward ending capitalism,” Zoë Beery wrote for the NYT, “and by that he means using his money to undo systems that accumulate money for those at the top, and that have played a large role in widening economic and racial inequality.” Wow, that is some self-loathing. If only Ludwig von Mises were able to counsel young Jacobs, whose grandfather founded Qualcomm, and is set to inherit $100 million. In his book Epistemological Problems of Economics, Mises wrote, “Through all the changes in the prevailing system of social stratification, moral philosophers continued to hold fast to the fundamental idea of Cicero’s doctrine that making money is degrading.”
The US economy is split into “the weirdest economy ever” when writing about The Trucking Boom and Online sales, and “the most distorted economy ever” when addressing the record low junk bond yields.
Libertarians who claim the government’s actions are worse than the disease, are giving the government too much credit. Consumers are driving the slow-down, not governments.
In investmentland, it’s “Bitcoin, Bitcoin, Bitcoin,” again knocking on dollar door number 20,000, where it ventured in late 2017. Bloomberg’s November 21st edition features this flashy headline sure to inspire FOMO (fear of missing out) the predecessor of the more quaint Keynesian Animal Spirits
Meanwhile, the ever-unloved asset, gold, goes unnoticed by the stock trading debutantes. After a sprint upward in price above $2,000, the yellow metal hangs listlessly around $1,870 these days, while the aforementioned Bitcoin is repeating a parabolic move toward $20,000.
Trump’s lady in waiting for the Federal Reserve, Judy Shelton, is losing Republican support by the day. The Washington Post unleashed its comeliest columnist, Catherine Rampell, to finish off Ms. Shelton, who’s primary negative is her past support for the gold standard, and her questioning the need for the central bank at all.Adherents of the Austrian School of Economics have been cuckoo for Shelton for those very reasons, but, Ms. Rampell describes the Fed nominee as “a demonstrably unqualified partisan quack.”
Think about it; with Joe Biden in the White House, Janet Yellon at Treasury and Jerome Powell at the Eccles Building, do you own enough gold?
