The NBA suggested Thursday North Carolina could lose the 2017 All-Star game over an anti-LGBT law that was signed this week.
Source: NBA hints North Carolina could lose 2017 All-Star game over anti-LGBT law
By Tyler Durden
Earlier today and on several occasions since Tuesday morning when the Bakraoui brothers blew themselves up at the Brussels airport and city metro, we’ve documented the connection between the Brussels attacks, the brazen assault on Paris in November, and other terror-related events that have unfolded in Belgium over the past 14 months.
Here are some bullet points worth noting:
And the list goes on. The takeaway seems to be that beginning some years ago, Abdelhamid Abaaoud (who allegedly became Emir of War in Deir ez-Zor after Omar the Chechen was transferred to Iraq) established the Brussels cell and it’s been growing and building its operational capabilities ever since.
For those interested in understanding how it all fits together, we bring you the following org chart
Source: Presenting The Complete Brussels ISIS Cell Org Chart
Ford CEO Mark Fields told CNN’s Poppy Harlow that he is committed to adding U.S. jobs, but he also plans to bolster the company’s presence abroad.
Source: Ford CEO to Trump: We’re adding U.S. jobs
By Tyler Durden
Further, the majority of the “Best-10” and “Worst-10” days are contained primarily within those 80% spans.
So, yes, I am absolutely going to be “wrong” at the tops of markets and at the bottoms while I await confirmation of a longer-term “trend” to emerge. For those that are inherently “bullish” who choose “hope” over what prices are “actually” doing, the historical outcomes have been brutal, to say the least.
As I have said before, my methodologies are my own. They are not new ideas. They are not innovative. They are simply the lessons I have been repeatedly taught over the last 30-years of managing money. If the markets reverse the current long-term sell signals, I will happily put a lot more money to work. Until then, I will wait rather than trying to “draw to an inside straight.”
Think about it this way – if betting in the markets was really the way to build wealth, wouldn’t the vast majority of Americans be wealthy versus just the top 1%? Just a thought.
I have discussed the problems with earnings and earnings estimates in the past stating:
“In a 2010 study, by the McKinsey Group, they found that analysts have been persistently overly optimistic for 25 years. During the 25-year time frame, Wall Street analysts pegged earnings growth at 10-12% a year. Unfortunately, earnings only grew at 6% which, as we have discussed in the past, is the growth rate of the economy.”
“The McKenzie study also noted that on average “analysts’ forecasts have been almost 100% too high” which leads investors to make much more aggressive bets on the financial markets. “
My friend Salil Mehta from Statistical Ideas recently published a great piece on this issue.
“The gap between the 2016 forecasts and the YTD returns through January is 13% (8% target minus the -5% YTD). Annual returns have a nearly 20% standard deviation (or 19% if you only look from the end of January onward). So it is still plausible — though rather unlikely, with only a one in five probability — to reach the 8% target gain for 2016. (For statistics wonks, the test statistic decomposes the 13% gap to a ~9% move in addition to the typical 4.5% annualized return, and then factors in a 19% standard deviation.) Now that we are further into the year (mid-March), euphoria and complacency are back to extreme market top levels.
It’s also worth noting that strategists at major firms are consistently bullish, year after year. The sources of the most optimistic prognostications also don’t change. Sorted from most to least bullish, they are Federated Investors, JP Morgan, Prudential, Bank of America, and Columbia.”
“In the table below, two pieces of …read more
Source: 3 Things: 80% Or Bust, Mind The Gap, It’s A Bunny
100% Pure Garcinia Cambogia Extract – Appetite Suppressant – Carb Blocker Capsules – 2100 MG – 90 Caps
Looking for something special ? Find The Lowest Price HERE
By Tyler Durden
Seriously!!
Had enough… there is more!!
Emory's student newspaper, The Wheel, said Wagner outlined four steps that administrators plan to take in order to address the issues raised by the protesters who said they were in pain in a campus-wide email.
Wagner added that the Freedom of Expression Committee is meeting to address whether the person or people responsible for the chalking were in compliance with Emory’s policy.
He said that they would debate technical issues, such as whether or not the chalkings were done on an appropriate surface.
However, he believes that the broader concern motivating the protests had to do more with the ideas the chalkings stood for than how they were done.
The Wheel also reported that the students this week chanted, 'You are not listening! Come speak to us, we are in pain!' shortly before Wagner agreed to meet with them.
Poor babies. Social media responded…
'The crybaby students forfeited any expectation of an open discussion with their demands that any talk or chalk of Trump should be banished from their fantasyland.'
'I have no idea how you kids will survive once you get out into the real world. People have different opinions than you. You need to grow up, and fast.'
One person also wrote: 'Within a year I am ashamed of both my undergraduate college (Yale) and my graduate university (Emory Law, '77).
'I am a liberal supporter of Clinton and Sanders (the former by a shade) and I want to shout at the thin-skinned crybabies on these campuses who are so obsessed with 'safe spaces' and so dismissive of free speech values: “GROW THE F*** UP !”
As we summed up recently, no matter where you go in life, someone will be there to offend you. Maybe it’s a joke you overheard on vacation, a spat at the office, or a difference of opinion with someone in line at the grocery store. Inevitably, someone will offend you and your values. If you cannot handle that without losing control of your emotions and reverting back to your “safe space” away from the harmful words of others, then you’re best to just stay put at home.
Remember, though: if people in the outside world scare you, people on the internet will downright terrify you. It’s probably best to just accept these harsh realities of life and go out into the world prepared to confront them wherever they may be waiting.
Source: Emory Students "Scared, In Pain" After Safe-Space Violated By Word "Trump" Written In Chalk
U.S. corporate debt rating hit a 15-year low, prompting concerns that defaults could spike for low-grade companies.
Source: U.S. corporate debt ratings near 15-year low
These are some of the most interesting new cars and concepts at the Big Apple’s car show.
Source: Cool cars from the New York Auto Show
By Tyler Durden
Submitted by John Mauldin via MauldinEconomics.com,
Last month I ran across a fascinating study by economist John Cochrane. He is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, former University of Chicago professor, and adjunct scholar with the Cato Institute.
Cochrane wrote a paper on economic growth last year as part of a project to design presidential debate questions where he took a matter-of-fact approach to the growth problem.
What are the barriers to productivity growth, and what can we do to remove them? Not surprisingly, most barriers are the result of counterproductive government policies. I’ll highlight here a few from Cochrane’s paper.
Barrier #1: Government Interference
The government interferes in just about every segment of the economy. Sometimes it brings benefits like traffic safety and clean air. More often, regulation simply slows growth in order to transfer wealth from one group to another.
It interferes with growth by impeding competition and distorting economic incentives. It distorts the signal that individuals send markets about their preferences and adds a great deal of noise and cost, which distorts economic activity from being its most efficient.
Barrier #2: The Dodd-Frank Financial Regulations
The Dodd-Frank financial regulations had the laudable goal of preventing future bank crises, but in reality, they simply work against other government policies. Washington encourages and subsidizes debt and then tries to prevent the inevitable consequences.
We wouldn’t need Dodd-Frank if the government were not rewarding excessive debt. Excessive, unproductive debt of the type we are generating in the US and Europe actually inhibits growth.
Barrier #3: Obamacare
We’re all frustrated by Obamacare and health insurance generally. What we need is simple, portable, catastrophic health insurance. Instead of promoting it, the government makes it illegal.
Barrier #4: Energy Subsidies
Here again the government works at cross-purposes with itself. It subsidizes energy so that it costs less, then tries to prevent us from using too much of it. Cochrane says the ethanol mandate helps no one but the large corn-producing companies. Ditto for solar subsidies.
Barrier #5: Taxes
Taxes should raise revenue, but instead we use them to redistribute income and encourage/discourage behavior. A simpler tax code would remove massive economic distortions, and it would be far better to tax consumption instead of income.
Barrier #6: Income-Based Social Programs
Cochrane sees no need to be stingy with helping people in genuine need. Welfare programs are far less costly than the many subsidies we give the middle class and large corporations.
The problem is that perverse incentives trap people and make them permanently dependent. He suggests consolidating all the aid programs and making them time-based, like unemployment benefits, rather than income-based.
Barrier #7: Immigration Terms
We can end illegal immigration overnight, says Cochrane, by making it legal. The question is the terms we apply to legal …read more
Source: These Are The 8 Biggest Barriers To Economic Growth
100% Pure Garcinia Cambogia Extract – Appetite Suppressant – Carb Blocker Capsules – 2100 MG – 90 Caps
Looking for something special ? Find The Lowest Price HERE
By Tyler Durden
Submitted by John Mauldin via MauldinEconomics.com,
Last month I ran across a fascinating study by economist John Cochrane. He is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, former University of Chicago professor, and adjunct scholar with the Cato Institute.
Cochrane wrote a paper on economic growth last year as part of a project to design presidential debate questions where he took a matter-of-fact approach to the growth problem.
What are the barriers to productivity growth, and what can we do to remove them? Not surprisingly, most barriers are the result of counterproductive government policies. I’ll highlight here a few from Cochrane’s paper.
Barrier #1: Government Interference
The government interferes in just about every segment of the economy. Sometimes it brings benefits like traffic safety and clean air. More often, regulation simply slows growth in order to transfer wealth from one group to another.
It interferes with growth by impeding competition and distorting economic incentives. It distorts the signal that individuals send markets about their preferences and adds a great deal of noise and cost, which distorts economic activity from being its most efficient.
Barrier #2: The Dodd-Frank Financial Regulations
The Dodd-Frank financial regulations had the laudable goal of preventing future bank crises, but in reality, they simply work against other government policies. Washington encourages and subsidizes debt and then tries to prevent the inevitable consequences.
We wouldn’t need Dodd-Frank if the government were not rewarding excessive debt. Excessive, unproductive debt of the type we are generating in the US and Europe actually inhibits growth.
Barrier #3: Obamacare
We’re all frustrated by Obamacare and health insurance generally. What we need is simple, portable, catastrophic health insurance. Instead of promoting it, the government makes it illegal.
Barrier #4: Energy Subsidies
Here again the government works at cross-purposes with itself. It subsidizes energy so that it costs less, then tries to prevent us from using too much of it. Cochrane says the ethanol mandate helps no one but the large corn-producing companies. Ditto for solar subsidies.
Barrier #5: Taxes
Taxes should raise revenue, but instead we use them to redistribute income and encourage/discourage behavior. A simpler tax code would remove massive economic distortions, and it would be far better to tax consumption instead of income.
Barrier #6: Income-Based Social Programs
Cochrane sees no need to be stingy with helping people in genuine need. Welfare programs are far less costly than the many subsidies we give the middle class and large corporations.
The problem is that perverse incentives trap people and make them permanently dependent. He suggests consolidating all the aid programs and making them time-based, like unemployment benefits, rather than income-based.
Barrier #7: Immigration Terms
We can end illegal immigration overnight, says Cochrane, by making it legal. The question is the terms we apply to legal …read more
Source: These Are The 8 Biggest Barriers To Economic Growth
100% Pure Garcinia Cambogia Extract – Appetite Suppressant – Carb Blocker Capsules – 2100 MG – 90 Caps
Looking for something special ? Find The Lowest Price HERE
By Tyler Durden
This, of course, raises the question as to what might account for the higher P/E if it isn’t interest rates. At the end of one of our recent pieces1 we speculated that the Fed might well have a role to play in a broader sense than simply its interest rate decisions. We cited the late, great Nicholas Kaldor from a paper he wrote in 1958 arguing:
Reliance on monetary policy as an effective stabilizing device would involve…a high degree of instability…in the capital market…The capital market would become far more speculative… longer run considerations of… profitability would play a subordinate role. As Keynes said, when the capital investment of a country “becomes the by-product of the activities of a casino, the job is likely to be ill-done.”
Effectively, the Fed created enormous “moral hazard” and investors have been force-fed risk assets. (Hence we have occasionally referred to this as a foie gras market.) Whilst this seemed preeminently plausible to us, we didn’t have any evidence to offer until recently.
In a delicious stroke of irony, the idea for our approach actually stemmed from research originating at the Fed! In 2013, two economists at the New York Federal Reserve published a paper entitled “The Pre-FOMC Announcement Drift.” In this paper the economists document “large average excess returns on U.S. equities in anticipation of monetary policy decisions made at scheduled meetings of the FOMC in the past few decades” (Lucca & Moench, 2013).
In a nutshell, the authors found that significant amounts of annual stock market returns over the past 30 years were made on FOMC meeting days. What is more, the authors found that “these pre-FOMC returns have increased over time and account for sizeable fractions of total annual realized stock returns.”
The New York Fed economists utilized tick data from the stock market to aid in their explorations. They were interested in determining whether these divergences could be explained by actual new information passed on to the market after the FOMC had made its decisions or whether they were due to simple anticipation by the markets of the FOMC decisions. They concluded that the returns could not be explained by markets “pricing in” FOMC decisions.
We were less interested in this particular aspect, but the approach sparked an idea in relation to what we might call the Kaldor hypothesis, which is essentially that the Fed has had a meaningful impact on market behaviour. Rather than using tick data as the Fed researchers did, we used full-day data, but reached a very similar conclusion.
Exhibit 2 plots the S&P 500 together with an adjusted series, which shows the impact of removing the days when the FOMC was meeting. Exhibit 3 plots the same data in relative cumulative space (effectively a strategy of going long the market on days when the FOMC was meeting, and zero all the other days of the year). A cursory glance at either chart shows that sometime around 1985 …read more
Source: The Stock Market Is A Monetary Policy Junkie – Quantifying The Fed’s Unprecedented Impact On The S&P
Welcome to Esh Carmel Blog.
