Infinite Unknown

- Is It Beginning? Biggest JGB Price Collapse In Over 10 Years Triggers TSE Circuit Breakers (ZeroHedge, April 5, 2013)

Tags: Bank of Japan, Bonds, cds, Debt, Japan

- $600 Billion In Trades In Four Years: How Apple Puts Even The Most Aggressive Hedge Funds To Shame (ZeroHedge, Jan 27, 2013):

Everyone knows that for the better part of the past year Apple, Inc. (“AAPL”, or “The Company”) was the world’s biggest company by market cap, with Exxon finally regaining that title on Friday, following AAPL’s latest price drop in the aftermath of its disappointing earnings. Most know that AAPL aggressively uses all legal tax loopholes to pay as little State and Federal tax as possible, despite being one of the world’s most profitable companies.Many also know, courtesy of our exclusive from September, that Apple also is the holding company for Braeburn Capital: a firm which with a few exceptions (Bridgewater; JPM’s CIO prop trading desk) also happens to be one of the world’s largest hedge funds, whose function is to manage Apple’s massive cash hoard, with virtually zero requirements, and whose obligation is to make sure that AAPL’s cash gets laundered legally and efficiently in a way that complies with prerogative #1: avoid paying taxes.

What few if any know, is that as part of its cash management obligations, Braeburn, and AAPL by extension, has conducted a mindboggling $600 billion worth of gross notional trades in just the past four years, consisting of buying and selling assorted unknown securities, or some $250 billion in 2012 alone: a grand total which represents some $1 billion per working day on average, and which puts the net turnover of some 99% of all hedge funds to shame!

Finally, what nobody knows, except for the recipients of course, is just how much in trade commissions AAPL has paid over the past four years on these hundreds of billions in trades to the brokering banks, many (or maybe all) of which may have found this commission revenue facilitating AAPL having a “Buy” recommendation: a rating shared by 52, or 83% of the raters, despite the company’s wiping out of one year in capital gains in a few short months.

The Perfectly Legal Tax Evasion Scheme

Continue reading »

Tags: Apple, cds, Derivatives, Derivatives market, Economy, Global News, Taxes, U.S.

- Egyptian Stocks Plunge 9.6% As ‘Islamofascism’ Rises; Clashes Escalate (ZeroHedge, Nov 25, 2012):

Egyptian stocks cliff-dived by their most since the Arab Spring in January 2011 as Morsi’sreach-for-omnipotence sends concerned ripples through the nation that they have replaced ‘military fascism’ with so-called ‘islamofascism’. Tensions are rising once again in Tahrir Square, but as Russia Today notes in this clip, the new regime is somewhat more heavy-handed than the previous one in its control of protesters. Critically, the Musilm Brotherhood’s opposition forces, who have been quite divided recently, are joining to fight the common enemy as clashes between pro-Morsi and anti-Morsi forces are erupting. Perhaps just as worrisome as the social unrest is the fact that Egypt’s Stock Exchange Director Said Hisham Tawfiq fears “Egypt announces bankruptcy within 3 months in the case of the continuation of the current situation,” though we note Egypt CDS are near 16-month lows.

The EGX50 dropped a massive 9.5% today as markets are stunned my Morsi’s move…

and from Russia Today:

Tags: cds, Collapse, Dictatorship, Economy, Egypt, Fascism, Global News, Government, Military, Muslim Brotherhood, Politics, Stock Market

- Global Shadow Banking System Rises To $67 Trillion, Just Shy Of 100% Of Global GDP (ZeroHedge, Nov 18, 2012)

Tags: Banking, cds, China, Collapse, ECB, Economy, EU, Europe, Fed, Federal Reserve, GDP, Global News, India, Japan, Mexico, Quantitative Easing, Switzerland, Turkey, U.K., U.S.

- US infrastructure on brink of thermodynamic breakdown (PressTV, Sep 14, 2012):

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke has warned that the country’s unemployment situation “remains a grave concern” as the hiring process in the job market stays sluggish.

“Fewer than half of the eight million jobs lost in the recession have been restored and at 8.1 percent, the unemployment rate is nearly unchanged since the beginning of the year and is well above normal levels,” Bernanke told reporters on Thursday, AFP reported.

Bernanke also pointed out that the Federal Reserve does not have the means to offset the economic shock from the public spending cuts and tax hikes, scheduled for the end of 2012.

Press TV has conducted an interview with Webster Griffin Tarpley, author and historian from Washington, to further talk over the issue. the following is an approximate transcript of the interview.

Press TV: The Fed has announced that it will resume its policy of pumping more money into the economy. Will that be enough to stave off the unemployment?

Tarpley: No, it cannot. Right now we have an economic depression in the United States and around the world and the real unemployment in this country is much higher than the Federal Reserve seems to want to admit. It is about 30 million people minimum that are out of work which is significantly more than the government estimates.

The problem with the Federal Reserve is that they see their task as saving failed banks; we have to call them ‘zombie banks’ because they are bankrupt entities that sit there; they absorb government and Federal Reserve resources; they do not provide investment; they do not create jobs; there is no plan and equipment or capital goods investment going on.

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Tags: Banking, Barack Obama, Ben Bernanke, Bonds, cds, Debt, Derivatives, Derivatives market, Economy, Fed, Federal Reserve, Global News, Government, Obama administration, Politics, Quantitative Easing, U.S., Webster Tarpley

- Buffett Joins Team Whitney; Sees Muni Pain Ahead As He Unwinds Half Of His Bullish CDS Exposure Prematurely (ZeroHedge, Aug 20, 2012):

Just under two years ago, Meredith Whitney made a much maligned, if very vocal call, that hundreds of US municipalities will file for bankruptcy. She also put a timestamp on the call, which in retrospect was her downfall, because while she will ultimately proven 100% correct about the actual event, the fact that she was off temporally (making it seem like a trading call instead of a fundamental observation) merely had a dilutive impact of the statement. As a result she was initially taken seriously, causing a big hit to the muni market, only to be largely ignored subsequently even following several prominent California bankruptcies. This is all about to change as none other than Warren Buffett has slashed half of his entire municipal exposure, in what the WSJ has dubbed a “red flag” for the municipal-bond market. Perhaps another way of calling it is the second coming of Meredith Whitney’s muni call, this time however from an institutionalized permabull. Continue reading »

Tags: Bonds, cds, Debt, Derivatives, Derivatives market, Economy, Global News, Meredith Whitney, Muni Bonds, U.S., Warren Buffett

YouTube Added: 01.08.2012

Tags: Adolf Hitler, Al-Qaeda, Al-Qaida, Alex Jones, Bank of England, Banking, Barack Obama, Cancer, cds, Civil rights, Constitution, Derivatives, Derivatives market, DHS, Dictatorship, Drones, Economy, EU, Europe, Facebook, Fascism, FDA, Fed, Federal Reserve, Fertilizer, Genetically Modified Organisms, Global News, GMO, Goldman Sachs, Government, High Frequency Trading, Homeland Security, HSBC, India, Israel, JPMorgan, Law, Libor, Martial Law, Max Keiser, Mitt Romney, Monsanto, New World Order, Obama administration, Police, Police State, Politics, Quantitative Easing, Rainwater, Roundup, Roundup Ready, Society, Suicide, Terrorism, Terrorists, U.K., U.S., Wall Street, Water

- All The Olympic Charts That’s Fit To Print, And More (ZeroHedge; July 27, 2012)

Tags: Bonds, cds, Debt, Global News, Government, Olympic Games, Olympics, Politics, Rating, U.K.

- The Financial Crisis Was Foreseeable … Thousands of Years Ago (ZeroHedge, July 20, 2012):

We’ve known for 4,000 years that debts need to be periodically written down, or the entire economy will collapse. And see this.

We’ve known for 2,500 years that prolonged war bankrupts an economy.

Continue reading »

Tags: cds, Central Bank, Debt, Derivatives, Derivatives market, Economy, Fed, Federal Reserve, Financial Crisis, Global News, Government, Great Depression, Military, Politics, Quantitative Easing, War

- Criminal Inquiry Shifts To JPMorgan’s Mispricing Of Hundreds Of Billions In CDS: Is Dimon The Next Diamond? (ZeroHedge, July 16, 2012):

On the last day of May, when we first learned via Bloomberg that there was even the scantest likelihood that JPM may have been massaging its CDS marks within the (London-based of course) CIO organization – the backbone of hundreds of billions in notional exposure, and thus a huge counterfeited benefit to trader bonuses and corporate earnings – we wrote, “The Second Act Of The JPM CIO Fiasco Has Arrived – Mismarking Hundreds Of Billions In Credit Default Swaps“ in which we explained precisely how this activity would and did take place, precisely why other traders caught doing the same are on the verge of being thrown in jail, precisely why everyone else does it, and precisely why the biggest CDS self-reporting and client/banker owned-organization (this is where images of Libor should appear), MarkIt, may well be implicated in everything – very much in the same way that the BBA is the heart of Lie-borgate. Because unlike all other allegations of impropriety, most of which rely on Level 2 and Level 3 assets whose valuations are in the eye of the oh so very sophisticated beholder (in this case JPM) who has complex DCFs and speaks confidently when explaining marks to naive, stupid outsiders (in other words baffles with bullshit), when it comes to one of the last places where Mark to Market is still applicable and used: the OTC CDS market, and where daily P&L records are kept, it will take any regulator, enforcer, or criminal investigator precisely 1 minute to find out if there was fraud, or gambling, going on here.

Then lo and behold, none other than JPM admitted minutes before releasing its Q2 earnings that it had been doing precisely what Zero Hedge accused it of doing nearly 2 months earlier (but of course Jamie Dimon had no idea, no idea, what the media accused his firm of doing), and in doing so exposed itself to just as much litigation risk as Barclays in the Lie-borgate scandal, while further throwing a monkey wrench into the CDS market, where all the other banks (who had been doing just the same), will no longer be able to pick off the bid/ask spread in the process crushing CDS trader bonuses, and resulting in billions in foregone imaginary profits.

Most importantly, it opened up the firm to a criminal investigation. Which as Reuters reports, is precisely what has now happened.

From Reuters’ Matt Goldstein and Jennifer Ablan: Continue reading »

Tags: Banking, Bob Diamond, cds, Derivatives, Derivatives market, Economy, Fraud, Global News, Jamie Dimon, JPMorgan, U.S.