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Markets still falling like whoa


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36 minutes ago, B00M said:

But our war machine has been cranked up for 80 years. I suspect anastasis was talking about defending our currency, a truly irresponsible reason to kill, but undoubtedly not the worst justification we've used. 

it's something i've believed for a long time.  we owe eleventy trillion bucks.  to whom? well, no one with more nukes than us.

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46 minutes ago, BehoId, The Underminer! said:

it's something i've believed for a long time.  we owe eleventy trillion bucks.  to whom? well, no one with more nukes than us.

That's the thing. Most of it we owe to ourselves. We're going to have to nuke everyone on/about to be on Social Security to fix the problem.

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With trump basically running on his claims of a q3 economic explosion and there being two major ways he measures the economy - jobs and stock market, I’m tempted to load the f up for the next 2-3 mos as he and jpow get coked up. He can’t really do much for jobs, covid has that on lockdown pretty well. But he can damn well brrrrrt the market.

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On 7/21/2020 at 2:48 PM, GRHorn said:
The biggest exit scam ever. 

Distributional Neutrality by the Fed is pure propaganda. Was in 2008 as well. 

 
 
 
 
 
 
4
Spoiler

How and Why Bankers Still Enjoy a Global Rescue Network

During the years leading up to the Great Financial Crisis, Fed officials began to tell outsiders more and more about what members of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) were thinking in setting operative interest-rate and price-level targets. My new INET Working Paper is adapted from a chapter in a book I am now writing. It treats the flood of selected policymaking information released by the committee after each meeting as misleading patter meant to distract the committee’s audience from observing the hard-to-defend cumulative effects Fed policies have had on the distribution of income and wealth. As in stage magic, lobbying activity that determines how differently FOMC policies actually impact the rich, the poor, and the middle classes still takes place behind an informational curtain.

Today, as during the Great Financial Crisis, the Fed’s policy strategy has been to prevent open insolvencies at US megabanks by making subsidized loans to US megabanks’ insolvent foreign counterparties (and to the foreign taxpayers that would otherwise have been asked to rescue them). At the same time, Fed leaders have resisted a broad-based bailout of insolvent US homeowners and landlords. During the GFC, they stood by as US banks foreclosed on all but a few privileged categories of distressed mortgage borrowers. Although households are receiving some help in the current go-around, forbearance is not forgiveness. Unpaid rents and mortgage payments are still mounting up.

The overwrought praise that Wall Street and the media subsequently heaped on Treasury and Federal Reserve leaders for being willing to punish lower-income households to get the rich through the Great Financial Crisis established a nasty precedent that is guiding monetary policy today. This unspoken precedent is “Bankers and Brokers first.”

A precedent is a previous event or action that sets a standard or guide for how one or one’s successors should (and therefore probably would) act in similar circumstances in the future. The 2008 troika of Bernanke, Geithner, and Paulson congratulated themselves for having the “courage” to put the interests of foreign bankers and major US financial institutions (including a few of its automobile makers — think the airlines and tourism industry today) ahead of ordinary US citizens. The victory laps that Barney Frank and Chris Dodd are taking this week for passing Dodd-Frank not only celebrate this approach, but provide opportunities for them to claim that they rescued rich and poor alike from complete and utter ruin [see, e.g., Bernanke, Geithner, and Paulson (2018)].

This portrait of distributional neutrality is propaganda of a high order. Current and former Fed and Treasury officials cannot fail to understand that, in accepting so much adulation, they have cemented a series of dangerous precedents. If public-service norms were more evenly balanced, instead of simply accepting praise, they might feel an obligation to identify the downside of following their lead in the future.

Aggressively devising creative, nontransparent, and arguably extralegal ways to transfer massive amounts of US taxpayer resources to wealthy stakeholders in zombie megabanks around the world is a dangerously elitist strategy. An important fourth crisis manager was left out of the celebration: former FDIC Chairman Sheila Bair. This was in large part because she was only a woman and because in Bair (2019) she dared to argue that, if future crisis managers were to distribute rescue costs in the ways the troika did, they were bound to encounter the kind of angry protest movements we are seeing today.

With a wink and a smile, bankers, regulators, and politicians assured us all in 2010 that a few carefully crafted words in the Dodd-Frank Act (DFA) could and would prevent generous anti-egalitarian taxpayer support from becoming available to the financial industry in the next crisis. Contrary to centuries of experience in the banking industry, the Dodd-Frank Act asks us to believe that governments can prevent crises by merely asking banks to post more (and possibly better) capital on their balance sheets. My research establishes that accounting-based requirements lose force the longer they are in place. This is because accountants take it as a challenge to circumvent them and in fact do this better and better the longer a particular rule stays in force.

In the decade since the DFA was enacted megabank lobbyists have sped up the natural rate of capital-requirement decay by convincing regulators of the need to “custom tailor” accounting formulas to the special circumstances of different categories of banks. Each nick and tuck that regulatory tailors devise in the way capital requirements are calculated open new and often unintended loopholes for other classes of financial institution to exploit.

Loopholes are part of any regulatory system. To make them hard for the public to see, bankers prefer that regulatory benefits be distributed in implicit ways. By that, I mean access to these benefits is based on understandings about how regulators should and will react in crisis circumstances. In the Covid crisis, the bogus restraints celebrated in the DFA have—as my 2012 paper predicted—simply lost their teeth. Bank examiners and accountants were directed to soften loss recognition and the Fed went on to devise (at last count) 14 openly discriminatory lending programs aimed at preserving particular classes of financial contracts and interests.

Confidence in the availability and sustainability of implicit safety-net support creates powerful incentives for megabankers to pry themselves loose from the bite of capital requirements and other regulatory restraints over time. This is the central message of my research career. I have asked readers to picture the mix of endless opposition and circumvention that financial rulemaking and enforcement entails as a dialectical process. After each crisis, sponsors of tougher capital requirements and other elaborate rules claim to have found ways to force bankers and their creditors to stay strong enough to absorb losses more or less as they occur. But sponsors seldom acknowledge that corporate-level restraints are bound to fail eventually. Placing accounting and other kinds of restraints on banker behavior fail because they do not directly attack either bankers’ appetite for tail risk or regulators’ incentives to forbear when times get tough.

Experience teaches us that corporate-level reforms do not and cannot hold their effectiveness over time. Rules beget regulation-induced innovations and these burden-reducing innovations become more and more successful over time. The difficulty governments face in devising and enforcing appropriate punishments for individual bankers that knowingly exploit safety-net protections converts national and regional safety nets into what amounts to a global Protection Racket operated by —and for the benefit of— thieving megabankers. My new paper explains how governments could make this racket far less profitable if for some unlikely reason politicians might conclude that toughening fraud laws would be a good thing.

References

Bair, Sheila, 2019. “Bank Bailouts Propped up the Financial System. But We Should Never Repeat Them,” Washington Post (May 5), https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/bank-bailouts-propped-up-the-financial-

system-but-we-should-never-repeat-them/2019/05/23/f50e001a-7bee-11e9-8ede-

f4abf521ef17_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.6a6b29423edf.

Bernanke, Ben S., Timothy F. Geithner, and Henry M. Paulson Jr., 2018. “What We Need to Fight the Next Financial Crisis,” New York Times, (Sept. 12), https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/07/opinion/sunday/bernanke-lehman-anniversary-oped.html.

Kane, Edward J., 2012. “Missing Elements in US Financial Reform: A Kübler-Ross Interpretation of the Dodd- Frank Act,” Journal of Banking and Finance 36 (March 2012), 654-66.

https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/immaculate-deception

 

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2 hours ago, 52-80 said:

Who shit on Intel's bed ?

Intel had a huge announcement yesterday that they 10nm and 7nm chip fab processes are delayed at least another 6 months.

For context: intel has delayed 10nm for the last two years running and recently said they were skipping to 7nm because 10nm had stalled.

Intel shit intel's bed, unfortunately. And AMD is eating their lunch in every market segment from laptop, to consumer desktop, to server.

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On 7/21/2020 at 3:43 PM, Captainant said:

I challenge you to justify the current market climates without using the word "stonks", because shit is violating basic principals of free markets right now. This is one hell of a bubble that is happening during the worst unemployment in modern history

 

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9 minutes ago, Redpuma said:

 

That article is headspinning lol. They're arguing to "just go with it" and to not look at data when evaluating prices in favor of looking at job postings and social media entries of employees to determine stock value.

That's a bubble, my dude

What's driving stock values up isn't the enthusiasm for an employer - it's the trillion plus dollars dumped into the markets via the fed buying up corporate junk bonds like it's going out of style.

Edited by Captainant
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2 minutes ago, Captainant said:

That article is headspinning lol. They're arguing to "just go with it" and to not look at data when evaluating prices in favor of looking at job postings and social media entries of employees to determine stock value.

That's a bubble, my dude

def bubble but today's investing...

children-playing-music-chairs-illustrati

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20 hours ago, tokamak said:

Intel needs to be firing top people left and right. Maybe they have been, I dunno. The way they've fumbled away a giant lead over AMD over the last 5-ish years is going to be studied in business schools.

I mean, their Q2 earnings are up 20% year over year... Do you think a temporary performance edge for AMD will actually affect Intel's bottom line or is it just a short term PR/stock hit?

Edited by B00M
Out sourcing more production including CPUs and trailing AMD long term, per that Tom's article, probably will
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18 minutes ago, B00M said:

I mean, their Q2 earnings are up 20% year over year... Do you think a temporary performance edge for AMD will actually affect Intel's bottom line or is it just a short term PR/stock hit?

This isn't a short term lead for AMD - Intel still does not have a response to this new architecture, they're still using their 10+ year old CORE architecture. And it's been delayed until at least 2021, but more likely 2022. 

Intel got into this position from their business driving engineering goals. Spectre, meltdown, Intel's IME vulnerability, the list goes on and on as far as short-term shortcuts to get more performance and features at the cost of security and long-term viability

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20 years ago when I was in the semiconductor game, I competed against Intel at one company, and they were an investor and customer at another. At the time, other than the dominance of the x86 architecture,  their biggest advantage was their superior process technology. In those days, they were commonly 1 or 2 generations ahead of their competition and more importantly they seemed to hit their release targets far more often than not. Always being at the lower geometries gave them a lot of advantages. I worked at a DSP IP startup and they took our IP and ran it on their advanced process labs in Israel, and attained performance results that even our processor architects were surprised by.

They were never particularly skilled at entering new markets, but the world bought a shit ton of x86 processors and they could make them better and realize higher margins than everyone else. And they were ruthless. Their tactics to keep competitive companies/technologies from encroaching on their customer base was always on the edge of violating competition law, and in my mind frequently crossed over it. But behind it all was the superior technology in their fabs. To hear that advantage has been completely erased and they are now behind the game is amazing to me. Andy Grove is probably spinning in his grave.

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On 7/23/2020 at 4:23 PM, Parliament said:
On 7/22/2020 at 10:22 AM, Cheeseweasel said:
That's the thing. Most of it we owe to ourselves. We're going to have to nuke everyone on/about to be on Social Security to fix the problem.

So let's do it already.

Covid19 is doing it for ya :)

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7 hours ago, Blotto said:

their biggest advantage was their superior process technology. In those days, they were commonly 1 or 2 generations ahead of their competition and more importantly they seemed to hit their release targets far more often than not. 

This is key, and is the biggest red flag to me. Somehow they've lost this, whether it's due to a different direction from management or due to loss of talent. Bodes well for AMD (and TSMC) through this generation of processors.

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Since I read a couple of articles on this topic I am a certified internet expert on the subject matter now.  From what I understand, INTC is still stuck on 10 nm technology while others are already rolling out chips with 7 nm tech.  Some are apparently getting close to having 5 nm.  The reason for the stock beat down is INTC is now saying they won't have a reliable 7 nm chip until probably 2022(?).  While they are farting around trying to get 7 nm to work, those other companies may have 5 nm all worked out by then.  In other words, instead of being the worldwide leader as they were for decades INTC is now a generation behind a lot of others.

Also, INTC was known for manufacturing all their own shit which was supposedly better for margins as they weren't paying third parties to do it for them.  Now they sound like they are going to have to abandon that philosophy and start farming out manufacturing to TSMC which will eat into their margins.  In sum, they are definitely going to lose market share since they are so far behind on the technology front and they are going to make less profit per chip since they will incur higher manufacturing expenses.

Not to be overly dramatic, but it's a definite "changing of the guard" in the semiconductor industry.

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https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-07-30/inside-goldman-s-five-day-race-to-seal-a-1mdb-deal-with-malaysia

 

interesting recount of high-stakes negotiations.  really high-stakes.  like a couple of billion dollars high.

goldman initial offer was 200M.  malaysia wanted 7B.  they settled on 4B.  i guess the most powerful figures in the most powerful company in finance weren't that strong-armed.

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Just now, Fudge Nuggets said:

Futures were already down before the GDP release but once the numbers were made public, futures did basically fuck all.

If a 32.9% drop in GDP doesn't move things, we're going higher.

If GDP is plummeting but stock values go up, and unemployment remains at record highs, isn't that what stagflation looks like?

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18 minutes ago, Captainant said:

Seeing reports that the GDP report is going to be brutal. Thankfully, it's already priced in and we're ready for more record high stock prices!

Edit: -32.9% for Q2 GDP growth. Holy fuck

But zerohedge expected -99% GDP rate, so this is pretty much counts as an earnings GDP beat, right?

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2 minutes ago, bluto said:

So lemme get this right... markets are forward looking and the gdp number actually wasn’t even as bad as anticipated yet the market took a big shit based on gdp report?

In the same quarter:

US unemployment hit record highs

US economic output shrunk by 10%, correlating to a -32.9% annual GDP growth 

US stock market hit record highs

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