The daily link

[Doug Coulter]

A good article by IT over on Seeking Alpha on which I've commented in my DCFusor persona.

http://seekingalpha.com/article/289972- ... -your-edge

[Doug Coulter]

Anyone learning this game needs to own a copy of Bill O'Niell's book mentioned here.
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/conver ... 2011-09-13
The only caveat I have with it is you want to also recognize the type of market you're in now - his data covers the past, and that you have to tune and adjust a bit depending on how "twitchy" markets are compared to average - in times of fear the time constants all get shorter.

[Doug Coulter]

I really avoid partisan politics these days. There seems no point when both sides have the same goals, the same behavior, and only slightly different methods. Thus, the finger in the picture below could be pointed at the wrong person. One guy didn't do all this....his owners might have had a say...(Not that I'd defend him either).

Ouch. Too close to reality

ThanksObama.jpg (21.36 KiB) Viewed 26320 times

There's no difference in the parties we have here in USA that means anything. You don't get a choice when you vote, because who you can vote for has been decided by the entities that effectively own both parties already - they don't care which clown wins, and why should they? Both are only interested in maintaining a system that robs from the poor to give to the rich.
Else, you'd see, perhaps, this nutcase being nominated, rather than being utterly ignored by the mainstream media -- even when he kicks ass in the debates over and over. Not that it's hard to do, we have one Rick Perry -- Bush without the intellect (!). Mitt Romney, master follower of polls when we need leadership, a psychotic nice looking disaster called Michelle Bachmann who regularly gets caught in gaffes (evidently hasn't read the Constitution) and outright lies, but hey, she's cute, and this guy -- Ron Paul, who's been saying the same things for many years, and has correctly predicted our malfunctioning system would lead us to ...right where we are. But you'll never get a chance to vote for him as one of the major parties. Not bought. Not that I think he's less of a whack job than the rest, just not bought and sold like they are. How could it hurt to have an honest man in the job, vs what we usually get?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWMDF92Z ... re=related


Having said all that -- I pretty much hate/ignore politics as much as I can. Perhaps all too many people do. But perhaps that's because we've already boiled, like that frog. We don't really have much choice at all. When we vote out one set of ignorant incumbents, the ones we have to vote in (we don't have a none of the above on ballots, and we need that badly - and worldwide), they assume they have a mandate! And we don't get to try again for so long they forget we just voted out the last guys -- and had no choice in who we voted in instead. This system is broken by any definition that includes "for the people" in it.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QiKh9Ko3 ... re=related
Not that he isn't raising plenty of money and doesn't have a crap load of popular support. Our media simply represses any "unpleasant facts" that would tend to tip them off the top of the pile.




Interesting take on the social unrest over in Yurp. Seems I'm not alone as to the causes of some of it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pry5iL4TIa8

[Doug Coulter]

Name of the URL says it all. Uh oh.
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/shadow-ba ... unterparts

Yes, US banks have been secretly loaning money to the failing European banks and taking bad mortgage paper as collateral. Fed->our banks->their banks. Crap, here we go again.

[Doug Coulter]

Picked up this interesting tip today. Check the URL
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/quote?tic ... :IND#chart

This is some ratio of lagging and coincident measures of economic health. If you go to the interactive chart lower on the page, put in 5 years, and add say SPY as a comparison. Note this forewarned the fall nicely...I hear a few people base their bearish or bullish positions on the slope of this, though I'm not so sure this last month's uptick will hold on it - I'll be going back to check this one now and then (I didn't know this was on BBurg -- I'll have to do some more fishing over there and see if there's anything else as interesting).

[Doug Coulter]

I meant to post this yesterday, which would have proved I'm prescient. Oh well, I'm not, just lucky sometimes.

bull_vs_bear.jpg (115.79 KiB) Viewed 26285 times

[Doug Coulter]

We were discussing the financial issues elsewhere here around the riots in UK. No one believed my numbers that there was paper out there several times the net value of the entire planet.
Well, here's the numbers for *US* banks, alone. Was I kidding?

The latest quarterly report from the Office Of the Currency Comptroller is out and as usual it presents in a crisp, clear and very much glaring format the fact that the top 4 banks in the US now account for a massively disproportionate amount of the derivative risk in the financial system. Specifically, of the $250 trillion in gross notional amount of derivative contracts outstanding (consisting of Interest Rate, FX, Equity Contracts, Commodity and CDS) among the Top 25 commercial banks (a number that swells to $333 trillion when looking at the Top 25 Bank Holding Companies), a mere 5 banks (and really 4) account for 95.9% of all derivative exposure (HSBC replaced Wells as the Top 5th bank, which at $3.9 trillion in derivative exposure is a distant place from #4 Goldman with $47.7 trillion). The top 4 banks: JPM with $78.1 trillion in exposure, Citi with $56 trillion, Bank of America with $53 trillion and Goldman with $48 trillion, account for 94.4% of total exposure. As historically has been the case, the bulk of consolidated exposure is in Interest Rate swaps ($204.6 trillion), followed by FX ($26.5TR), CDS ($15.2 trillion), and Equity and Commodity with $1.6 and $1.4 trillion, respectively. And that's your definition of Too Big To Fail right there: the biggest banks are not only getting bigger, but their risk exposure is now at a new all time high and up $5.3 trillion from Q1 as they have to risk ever more in the derivatives market to generate that incremental penny of return.

And here's the link to the government report.
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/five-bank ... ting-fx-de

Yes, it's really that bad. And there's no simple solution. Declaring all this junk null and void would create other issues...it's not a simple problem with a simple solution other than just making all this ability to write "bad paper" illegal going forward, and maybe hanging a bunch of bankers on the nearest lamposts till it goes away. You can't just declare contract law "all gone" you know, there are other repercussions of that as in causing immediate failures elsewhere. And would that mean the guys who sold this paper have to give the money they got for it back? They don't have it, at any rate.

Each and every one of us must remember to thank our bought, utterly corrupt governments for allowing this to exist in the first place. Yes, they knew, and yes, they knew the implications, but they took the bribes...er, campaign contributions, and looked the other way. And now, they feel fine about sending you the bill. You didn't share the profits when things were going well, but...you're holding the bag, no matter where on earth you live and under which government. No place won't be affected when this tower of paper burns.

[Doug Coulter]

I think I should start a humor category, but since this is a link, it's here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L1jAr466 ... r_embedded

"What if computer problems manifested as reality?"

A few good opportunities were missed here. What about burning a CD, or executing a program?

[Doug Coulter]

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/nanex-whi ... dden-costs
Check out those charts. The end is near, I think.
We need cats, lots of cats.

I think I'll take a break for awhile. This is nuts.

[Doug Coulter]

Good British humor on the banking behavior here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lWDdcD-1 ... re=related


and here
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ScwGBNMH ... re=related