The Q4-2024 banks earnings season officially started with JP Morgan, Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs, BNY Mellon, and Citigroup kicking off the “beat expectations” parade: Between one “Kumbaya!” and a “High Five!”, one small detail across all these earnings reports clashes significantly with reality: provisions for expected credit losses. Before diving…
Category:Macro
STATE FARM KNEW A LOS ANGELES (FINANCIAL) CATASTROPHE WAS ONLY A MATTER OF TIME
Insurance isn’t really an area that I had much interest in, mostly because in the countries where I’ve lived, it has generally been a well-run and stable business. However, the recent Los Angeles wildfires prompted me to look into this sector in California more closely, and what I discovered is…
THE CENTRAL BANK “KING” IS MORE AND MORE “NAKED”
“Why are central banks cutting rates while yields are going up? How is this possible?” This is the question many people are asking themselves at the moment. Surprisingly, those experiencing the highest degree of confusion and bewilderment appear to be institutional investors rather than retail investors. The reason is that…
THE BIG MISUNDERSTANDING ON WHY CHINA BOND YIELDS KEEP FALLING
China’s 10-year government bond yields have just hit a historic low at 1.64%. Despite this downward trend continuing for a while, there is still a great deal of misunderstanding about what’s happening here in the Western part of the world (with many mainstream media and social media “gurus” not missing…
WHAT IF MICROSTRATEGY BECOMES TOO BIG TO FAIL?
After markets closed on December 23rd, MicroStrategy shocked the world by filing a proposal to increase its number of authorized Class A shares by a staggering 10 billion, equivalent to approximately 97% dilution for current shareholders (SEC Filing). Crazy, isn’t it? Indeed, but there’s definitely more to this than meets…
FARTCOIN IS THE LATEST PROOF OF HOW DIAMETRICALLY WRONG CENTRAL BANKS POLICIES ARE
As I write, “Fartcoin” is worth more than HALF A BILLION USD, and many observers are shocked by the meteoric rise of this crypto meme coin. Why are people willing to pay to buy Fartcoin? The answer is very simple: there is so much excess liquidity sloshing around in the…
WHY SOUTH KOREA IS OFFERING A PREVIEW OF GERMANY’S ECONOMIC IMPLOSION
Despite being geographically very distant from each other, South Korea and Germany are, in reality, more similar economically speaking than everyone thinks. Both countries appear “very safe” considering the very low public debt-to-GDP ratio they both showcase: 46% for South Korea and 62% for Germany. What if we add private…
HOW A FIAT CURRENCY SYSTEM DIES OF A THOUSAND CUTS
The result of the US elections should have rung warning bells everywhere in the world, but apparently, it didn’t. Europe, Canada, Japan, South Korea – the list of economies that persist in feeding asset bubbles is long. The US is still part of it, considering the market is forcing (sorry,…
IS THE GREAT AGE FOR FINANCIAL CRIME COMING TO AN END?
The past 4 years of the US Biden administration have been disastrous, to say the least, but that isn’t the whole story. In many articles, I did my best to highlight how financial criminal activity was running wild and in plain sight, with authorities turning a blind eye to it….
MARKETS ARE QUIET – TOO QUIET
This is supposed to be a “quiet” week ahead of US Thanksgiving that ushers in the last month of the year when no money manager is willing to spoil their performance and put their year-end bonus in danger by trying to make changes in asset allocation. The VIX term structure…