I popped awake at 1:00am, anxiety my alarm clock. A half-hour later I feared someone was already on their way to be first in line for a prized lot, overlooking the city, one of only four being released by a large publicly held homebuilder for that subdivision.
Real estate investors can feel it too. Last week The Las Vegas Review-Journal reported that developers reached a deal to buy 2 acres in CityCenter on the Strip for $80 million. LVRJ report Eli Segal described the price as “a sky-high valuation that exceeds land deals on Las Vegas Boulevard even during the frenzied mid-2000s real estate bubble.”
To the sensible and experienced, it seems late indeed. But, does piling into U.S. dollars, made less worthy each day by the Powell Fed a good idea? The US central bank now has a climate change mandate, in addition to full employment. Soundness of the currency used to be top of mind for central bankers, but that horse left the Eccles building long ago.
A-J Aronstein, who has revised 3,000 résumés wrote a few days ago in the New York Times, “Recruiters often say they spend six seconds reviewing the average candidate. Are you worth seven?”
So job applying can be equated with staying on a bucking bull for the required time needed to score. Aronstein writes,
What Read did best was raise money while catering to what Rothbard called the “high school” of liberty. The current president of the country of Mar-a-Lago also successfully raises money while mouthing freedom bromides to housewives and the like.
When the pandemic struck, banks dumped plenty in their loan-loss provisions, $60 billion, expecting the worst. The cavalry arrived led by Jerome Powell’s Fed liquidity flood, Steven Mnunchin’s PPP loans, Congress’s CARES Act, and moratoriums on foreclosures and evictions. Instead of an Austrian Business Cycle cleansing, the cracks were papered over, including bailing out money-market funds allowing us to watch the pandemic comfortably on TV.
When I asked the phlebotomist why the TV in my oncologist’s office was always tuned to HGTV, he seemed amused while he drained a half-pint of blood from my arm for immediate disposal in the bright red waste can next to me. “Oh, I think it has something to do with them wanting programing with no violence, or sex, or cussing,” he said in Philipino-accented English, followed by a shrug and smile.
Using the same logic as shooting a hole in the barn and then painting the target around it to determine marksmanship accuracy, the USPS is trying to achieve its goals by gaming the metrics. “Last year, first-class mail hit its service target 89.7% on average, well below its 96% goal,” write Jennifer Smith and Paul Ziobro for the WSJ.
Roger McKinney doesn’t see eye-to-eye with the pope. In his book “God is a Capitalist: Markets from Moses to Marx,” Mckinney “shows how Biblical economic principles answer the most vexing problems the world faces today, such as poverty, inequality and pollution.”
“The serpent in the market, the beast in the market, will push him and push him until they break him again,” says McDonald. “They've broken the Fed four or five times since 2013. It's going to happen again, but just think this time, the Fed is going to be more proactive. If the Fed doesn't give the serpent enough, doesn't give that piece in the market enough, they will push and then break the Fed in the next two meetings.”
Obviously, there are just plain math problems with defined benefit pension plans. But, beyond that, see this tiny item in today’s Almost Daily Grant’s, “On Tuesday, the Danish Financial Supervisory Authority issued an executive order that cuts the maximum interest rate that pension providers can promise investors in guaranteed-rate products to minus 0.5% from the current 1%, effective July 1.”
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.
