Investor question of the day: How scared are you about our overall society and how these topics end up getting resolved?
I’ve been writing the Revolution Investing newsletter for Marketwatch for nearly three years now, and the whole reason we’d launched it when we did was because we thought it would be increasingly important for people to navigate the political and technological revolutions that we’re living through today. As I wrote in the inaugural issue: And see, the very reason we’re calling this product you’re reading “Revolution Investing with Cody Willard” is because those trillion dollar corporate welfare programs and the new bills for health care and financial regulatory agencies and rules that now override the economic paradigm we’ve been living under in this country since the 1930s were ramped up by several orders of magnitude – IN JUST THE LAST TWO YEARS.
As you read today’s must-reads, think about my investor question of the day: How scared are you about our overall society and how all of the above topics end up getting resolved? Because you can sense the important economic, political and societal trends that developing today and which will have big impacts on all of us and our portfolios tomorrow. With that in mind, here are some very important headlines that every investor and trader should probably be reading and thinking about today.
Indicator Update: Focus on Energy Prices – Energy prices are really hurting lots of people I know here in the southwest. Would $5/gallon gas be a black swan for this economy?
After slaying of 16 Afghan civilians, American Army sergeant held for investigation and Six in Ten Criticize the Afghanistan War Truly tragic on a human level. And as one commenter put it: What do we know now that we didn’t know in 2011, 2010, or 2009? And remind me who was President in 2011, 2010, and 2009? Was it that same guy who courageously opposed “dumb wars” back in 2008? Just asking. And I’d ask: How does all of this tie into energy prices this time next year? How about in three years from now?
‘US bank dividends set to double‘ – If the entire financial system is still so fragile as to require the trillions in ongoing unprecedented subsidies, legalized accounting fraud, asset and risk transfers from taxpayer-funded FNM and FRE, no prosecutions and so on…then somebody explain to me why are banks being allowed to boost dividends and bonuses much less how they’re allowed to pay dividends and bonuses at all? As long as the banking system and individual banks continue to hold our economy and system hostage with threats of financial collapse without government assistance, then there should be absolutely no bonuses or dividends. The banks are not privately-funded at all any more and they should not be able to pay out profits until they are 100% off every form of guarantee, subsidy or other welfare handouts.
Lawyer for Banks Accuses MBIA Chief of Insider Trading – Looking at the chart of MBIA and seeing it crack even as most of the TBTF-Banking-Industrial Complex and its offshoots like LPS continue to climb, I’m thinking it’s time to add this one as a short to the Revolution Investing portfolio. Stay tuned for details.
“I think (the ultra-wealthy) actually have an insufficient influence” – Ken Griffin and his welfare-company Citadel have been the recipient of billions of dollars from the AIG payouts and other during these “crisis times in finance” since 2008. This dude gives millions to the Republican side of the Republican/Democrat Regime which panders to the very “corporate leaders who have “groveled” for tax breaks” that this dude badmouths in this article. Can you say hypocrite?
The 1 percent recovery – Christia Freeland hired me to write a monthly investment column for the Financial Times a few years ago and I’ve had tremendous respect for her management and viewpoints ever since I met her. Great points in her column today (she’s now at Reuters): In the 2010 recovery, 93 percent of the gains were captured by the top 1 percent. That’s because top incomes grew 11.6 percent in 2010, while the incomes of the 99 percent increased only 0.2 percent.
S&P 500 corporate earnings update – stable is the watchword – See how this ties into the topic above? In that same inaugural newsletter, I’d written: Clearly, the stock market and earnings and dividends have been moving somewhat
in tandem. That’s a different discussion than the one most analysts have when they rant about how seemingly “disconnected Wall street has become from Main Street”. Main Street’s and the broader economy are still hurting and showing little improvement. At best you can say that Main Street and the broader economy and the average Joe has seen things “stabilize”, but even if monthly job losses are “just a tenth of what they were a year ago”, that means that Main Street and the broader economy and the Average Joe are still seeing things get worse.
Six Things Rich People Need to Stop Saying – “Once I pay for the helicopter, the helicopter fuel, the townhouse and the Lexus, I barely have more spending money than your entire yearly salary.”For people who are grinding through overtime just to keep up with their bank’s late fees, this induces an urge to storm a gated community with pitchforks and torches and make those people go spend a year in a trailer park or in a city apartment so small that when you flush the toilet, little droplets splatter onto the bed. I have lived in some of the seediest, smallest, nastiest, cockroach-infested apartments in NYC and Brooklyn over my first five years in that city, and I remember exactly the anger these people feel about bankers who are living on welfare and bending the rules that you and I live by and then complain about not having enough. The difference between now and back then is that TARP, TBTF, 0% interest rates, AIG-payouts, auto-bailouts, FNM and FRE socialized didn’t exist.
Gallup: Most admired in 2011 – And to be clear, very few people actually hate “rich people”. Donald Trump, Warren Buffett and Bill Gates are all top 10 most admired men in this country, after all. But as for Jamie Dimon and the other welfare bank CEOs? We hate people who have gotten rich deceptively or by profiteering. And that pretty much explains why we hate the TBTF banks and the rich people who work in them today.
The Legal Lie at the Heart of the $8.5 Billion Bank of America and Federal/State Mortgage Settlements – When the Federal/State Mortgage Settlements are actually new and improved backdoor bailouts and full of new and improved legalized accounting fraud, is there any hope for justice and rule of law?
Madness of March: NCAA gets paid, players don’t – I played JuCo basketball on a full ride academic scholarship at Blinn College and after being what I’m sure is probably still the only JC hoopster to be recruited by Harvard, I ended up walking on and playing for the University of New Mexico Lobos in 1994-95, the very year the athletes mentioned in this article were organizing. Very cool to see it rehashed again this year. I played and traveled but never got a real shot at playing in a real game under Dave Bliss and I pretty much hated the entire culture of college sports by the time I graduated. I wrote a few research economic papers that questioned the entire paradigm of a taxpayer-funded sports-driven university and I think there’s no question that the NCAA is like the Olympics, the World Cup, the Republican/Democrat Regime, the TBTF banks and supranational corporations like Apple are all part of an increasingly corrupt system that treats individuals as chattel.
NCAA Men’s Basketball: 2012 Tournament – I’ll boycott the NCAA tournament if you will. The fact is, I’ve pretty much boycotted all college sports since the last time I took off my jersey and walked up the ramp after we got knocked out of the WAC tourney in the Pit in 1995. You should consider doing the same.
Do you see how regulations and in rules in so many of our major systems of today are so full of repression, oppression and propaganda? Are we hitting some breaking points?
My investor question of the day: How scared are you about our overall society and how all of the above topics end up getting resolved?
