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Here are the best ideas from some of the world’s greatest investors

From Zero Hedge:

While Paul Singer, Kyle Bass, and Stan Druckenmiller got the headlines, there were in total 14 worthwhile speakers at yesterday’s Ira Sohn Conference.

Though many of the themes were unsurprising, it is nonetheless useful to compare your own views to those of these professional money managers who are now bludgeoned daily by the ‘idiot-maker’ rally… of course, that is, until they are proved 100% correct.

Jones Trading Recap of Ira [...]

Yukon Huang: China’s banks have become ‘too big to manage’

from FT:

It is easier to make money than sense out of China’s banks. These big four state-owned commercial banks are huge profit centres, but many who see vulnerabilities in China’s economy think that these banks are the problem when they actually reflect symptoms of distortions elsewhere. China’s banks are in fact too secure – and their performance could be improved by strengthening competition and breaking up the “too big to [...]

The Fed Worry About Overheating Markets, CEOs Worry About ‘Uncertainty’, Investors/Consumers Worry About Tax Hikes And Spending Cuts, No One Is Worry About The Debt Time Bomb, Fed’s Balance Sheet, Or Inflation!

The Fed is worried about overheating markets, CEOs Worry About ‘Uncertainty’, investors worry about tax hikes and spending cut, no one is worry about Debt Time Bomb and inflation.

 

You can’t make this up: Federal Reserve officials now say they’re worried about “overheating markets”

Federal Reserve officials are voicing increased concern that record-low interest rates are overheating markets for assets from farmland to junk bonds, which could heighten risks when they reverse their [...]

Michael A. Gayed: Very suddenly, it feels like we are in the midst of a perfect storm. Our ATAC models keeping the portfolios we manage completely out of the stock market.

breaking

from Michael A. Gayed:

The decline in the S&P 500 and worldwide equities has been unrelenting so far this month, as the corrective risks I highlighted Oct. 1 and in every single writing since then have abruptly ended the reflation trade post QE3. On Nov. 5 I began pounding the table to ” forget the elections ” on the stark warning price was signaling through the return of [...]

Stephen King: Heed churlish Mervyn King on limits of QE

From FT:

It’s not so much that monetary policy is ineffective. Rather, people expect too much from it. Indeed, I would argue that unconventional policies create distortions that make an early return to economic health rather unlikely Read more

DEUTSCHE BANK: Western Economies Are Screwed, And Investors Face A ‘Disturbing Paradox’

In a new report entitled Gold: Adjusting For Zero, Deutsche Bank analysts Daniel Brebner and Xiao Fu paint an incredibly dark picture of the bind the global economy is in right now.

 

Brebner and Xiao are pretty frank about how levered up the financial system is at the moment, and they warn that the next shock will be totally involuntary and unexpected.

Here is what the analysts have to say about how upside down the world is [...]

Goldman’s Definitive Post-Mortem On Europe’ Third Bond Buying Attempt

From Goldman’s Dirk Schumacher

ECB meeting: Introducing the OMT

The announcements made at today’s ECB press conference were broadly in line with our expectations. An overwhelming majority of the Governing Council agreed to “address severe distortions in government bond markets, which originate from, in particular, unfounded fears on the part of investors of the reversibility of the Euro”. We view the ECB’s determination to provide a “fully effective backstop” as credible and, [...]

We Will Be Destroyed By Inflation That Paralyzes The Economy

KWN

 

Today legendary value investor Jean-Marie Eveillard, who oversees $60 billion, warned King World News that we are headed towards runaway inflation and an economy that will be become paralyzed by the enormous distortions created by this inflation.  Here is what Eveillard had to say:  “Inflation creates enormous distortions, and if you take the extreme example of Weimar Germany in the early 30s, it (inflation) paralyzes and almost destroys economic activity because [...]

Doug Casey Predicts Day of Economic Reckoning Is Near

Source: Karen Roche of The Gold Report (8/24/12)

 

It is a deal with the devil: Governments churn out more and more cash for the promise of continued prosperity. But the day of reckoning is near, according to Doug Casey, chairman of Casey Research and an expert on crisis investing. As the epic battle between inflation and deflation continues on, Casey discusses his predictions for the new world market in this exclusive [...]

BofA: The US Economy Is ‘In The Eye Of The Storm’

Optimism has seized stock markets in the past month on the back of better economic data in the United States and a late-summer lull in the euro crisis. Market volatility is at its lowest level in years.

 

BofA’s top economist Ethan Harris says investors shouldn’t be fooled in a pretty downbeat note to clients – he thinks the U.S. economy is “in the eye of the storm” right now.

Here is what Harris sees on [...]

US Government Proposes Law Making It Illegal For Them To Kill You

by Simon Black of Sovereign Man blog,

Last Friday, US Congressman Dennis Kucinich introduced HR 6357, a bill which aims to ‘prohibit the extrajudicial killing of United States citizens’ by the federal government. In other words, in the Land of the Free, they need to pass a law to prevent the government from indiscriminately murdering its own citizens.

Now if this doesn’t give one reason to pause and consider the distortions of liberty that have taken place in [...]

Must-read post exposes the No. 1 lie behind Obamacare

From Economic Policy Journal:

Anyone who understands basic economics and how interventionist government leads to greater interventionist government knew this was going to happen.

Market price signals are destroyed, supply and demand distortions start to occur, and the regulative power centers are captured by insiders. Costs go up, care goes down, and the only solution the interventionists can think of are more interventions.

WSJ has the details:

So Boston’s latest adventure deserves particular scrutiny, since [...]

LIBOR EXPERT: The Fed Has Destroyed LIBOR

Intentional distortions of one of the world’s most important financial benchmarks has sparked a worldwide scandal.

What’s more, suggestions that central banks knew about manipulations of the London Interbank Offered Rate (LIBOR) and looked the other way have led many to accuse central banks of failing in their duty of keeping the financial markets working properly.

Manipulations of the LIBOR rate, while minuscule to most individuals, had much more substantial effects in the money markets, [...]

Weakest Pace Since 2009: China Slowdown Cuts Luxury Spending, Hong Kong Retailing

China’s slowdown dragged Hong Kong’s retail-sales growth to the weakest pace since 2009 as shoppers visiting from the mainland cut back on purchases of luxury goods such as jewelry and watches.

Sales increased 8.8 percent in May from a year earlier to HK$36 billion ($4.6 billion), the government said on its website yesterday. That was the smallest gain since September 2009, excluding seasonal distortions each January and February.

The deceleration of Asia’s [...]

Mass Mis-reporting: Bombshell Report Says ‘Fast And Furious’ Was Never About Tracking Guns Through Mexico

Fortune Magazine’s Katherine Eban has a major scoop this morning, reporting that the notorious “Fast and Furious” operation was really focused on halting gun sales at the border with phony purchases—and not intended to track guns into Mexican drug cartels.

 

For years, the media has reported that the operation was a botched attempt to go after the Sinaloa drug cartel. According to that version of the story, in 2010, American Border Agent [...]

TIME BOMB: Banks Pressured To Buy Up Government’s Debt

US and European regulators are essentially forcing banks to buy up their own government’s debt—a move that could end up making the debt crisis even worse, a Citigroup analysis says.

Regulators are allowing banks to escape counting their country’s debt against capital requirements and loosening other rules to create a steady market for government bonds, the study says.

While that helps governments issue more and more debt, the strategy could ultimately explode [...]

Romney raises bar on what constitutes good unemployment rate

May 4 (Bloomberg) — Mitt Romney raised the bar for what comprises an unemployment rate worth celebrating as he used the latest jobs figures to criticize President Barack Obama’s management of the economy while campaigning in Pennsylvania.

“Anything over four percent is not cause for celebration,” the presumptive Republican presidential nominee said inside a warehouse of a specialized cement and corrosion- resistant materials manufacturer in Pittsburgh.

“I’m going to get America working [...]

Romney’s Budget Attack

Typical distortions. Not intellectual honest enough to fight on a factual basis.

http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2…ref=fpnewsfeed

BRIAN BEUTLER APRIL 17, 2012, 1:45 PM 2853 45
In a new effort to turn the country’s debt and deficits into political problems for President Obama, Mitt Romney’s campaign is promoting a new infographic that draws a comparison between federal and household budgets.

It may be a political winner, but it’s a deeply flawed way to look at budgeting, as even [...]

John Williams: Unemployment Rate at a Staggering 22.2%

kingworldnews.com

John Williams, of Shadowstats, notes that manipulated government statistics are not changing the fact that the true SGS Unemployment Measure now sits at a staggering 22.2%.  Williams also demonstrates that despite the hype from Wall Street about a recovery, parts of the economy remain collapsed.  Here is what Williams had to say about the situation:  “Adding the SGS estimate of excluded long-term discouraged workers back into the total unemployed and labor [...]

Chinese industry gets first profit drop since 2009

By Chris Oliver, MarketWatch

Reuters

A circuit board production line in Suining, China.

HONG KONG (MarketWatch) — Chinese industrial companies reported weaker profits in the first two months of the year — the first such broad earnings drop since 2009 — stoking fresh concerns the economy hit a soft patch after rebounding in the final quarter of last year.

Data released by the National Bureau of Statistics on Tuesday showed the [...]

People cannot be killed by fists?? Crockett, don’t defend indefensible positions- stupidly.

Almost all of the news items about George Zimmerman and Trayvon Martin contains a combination of false statements, opinions presented as facts, transparent distortions, and a complete absence of some of the most relevant details. Almost all news items are written solely from the point of view of the grieving family. The media also fills their articles with outdated baby-faced pictures of Trayvon. Very few include that he was a [...]

An ‘Obamacare’ Cost Explosion?

Typical distortions.

http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2…ref=fpnewsfeed
An ‘Obamacare’ Cost Explosion? Hardly — GOP Distorts CBO Report

SAHIL KAPUR MARCH 15, 2012, 2:09 PM 3804 31
Republicans and conservative media are cherry-picking a figure in a new Congressional Budget Office spending estimate (PDF) to assert that the cost of “Obamacare” has nearly doubled to $1.76 trillion. But the claim ignores the corresponding savings during the additional period of the spending projection, thus distorting the actual cost estimates of [...]

QE Set To Leave British Pensions $141 Billion In The Hole

by Adam Taylor

A second round of quantitative easing in the UK will leave the country’s pension funds £90 billion ($141 billion) out of pocket, the National Association of Pension Funds (NAPF) announced on the third anniversary of QE in the UK.

Joanne Segars, Chief executive of NAPF, said:

“Businesses running final salary pensions are being clouted by QE. Deficits that were already big now look even bigger because of its artificial distortions. 

“Pension funds want [...]

Rival Chinese manufacturing surveys indicate mild improvement, but underling data suggest further weakening in the nation’s economy.

By Chris Oliver, MarketWatch

HONG KONG  — Rival Chinese manufacturing surveys released Thursday indicated mild improvement in February, though underling data showed surging input prices and deteriorating new orders, suggesting further weakening in the nation’s economy.

The closely watched manufacturing Purchasing Managers’ Index (PMI) for February rose to 51.0 on the 100-point scale, up from 50.5 in January, according to the government-backed China Federation of Logistics & Purchasing.

The result, [...]

The Virus of GOP Ignorance: Why Don’t Media Protect Us From the Lies Spewed in the Republican Primary?

Reporters representing reliable media outlets are supposed to defend the discourse from the virus of this ignorance.

It is a symbol of our current political predicament that anytime anyone tells the truth about anything in the contest for the Republican nomination, a new scandal erupts. Newt Gingrich was briefly drummed out of the Republican Party for accurately terming Paul Ryan’s destructive Medicare plan a “radical” step toward “right-wing social engineering.” Jon [...]

Doug Casey: On the Greater Depression, Currency Debasement, Technology, the Middle Class, Investing, and Our Future

Doug Casey, who in the 1980′s predicted that the Soviet Union would collapse within 10 years, is interviewed by James Turk below. The video is embedded at the bottom of this post and covers more than what is contained in the following notes.

Doug Casey’s 3 Definitions of Economic Depression:

Definition 1: A period of time during which most people’s standard of living drops significantly. We entered into a Greater Depression in 2008. The way [...]

How the USA got to where it finds itself, why the full faith and credit of governments is inferior to real assets and how we can fix it once and for all

by Robert Paulson

Title: How the USA got to where it finds itself, why the full faith and credit of governments is inferior to real assets and how we can fix it once and for all

I used to think like a statist, and I used to agree with them. It’s appealing to redistribute wealth, especially when it’s not fairly achieved.

But what I’ve realized is that the solution [...]

Bob Chapman: Fearing An Even Worse Inflationary Depression Ahead

Bob Chapman
International Forecaster
Thursday, September 1, 2011

The debauching of currencies worldwide goes on with great abandon, and of course, leading the pack in the US, UK and Europe. What these countries and others are doing is awakening the hidden forces of inflation and destroying the value of their currencies.

In Europe the Germans, over the past six months, have said at the polls they do not want to [...]

Jim Grant at his best: Tie Central Bankers’ Hands, Return to Gold Standard

European & U.S. Bank Leverage
Insight on the amount of leverage European banks have in comparison to the U.S., with James Grant, Grant’s Interest Rate Observer, who says there is no market check on what we borrow; with CNBC’s Steve Liesman.

Central bankers are in the business of “currency manipulation,” James Grant, editor of Grant’s Interest Rate Observer, told CNBC Thursday.

He wants a “modernized, 21st century gold standard that checks [...]