Submitted by Simon Black via SovereignMan.com,
I’ll start with a confession.
Based on the returns I’ve just prepared for 2015, my tax bill for the year amounts to exactly $0.00.
In fact, for the second year in a row, I legitimately owe zero tax. And I’m damn proud of that.
(And no, it’s not from any illegal tricks. I’ll explain how I did it later.)
Not a shred of my efforts goes to help finance bombs, wars, debt, and utterly useless waste.
For those who believe that broad-based stimulus is coming to save the world from China (via RRR cuts or even pure QE) - as opposed to the hole-filling credit pump they just supported - think again. As we warned last year, this is 'western' thinking as the go to policy of the rest of the world's central banks has been - put on pants, print money, paper over cracks, proclaim victory. However, in China there is one big problem with this... stoking inflation...
Submitted by Thad Beversdorf via FirstRebuttal.com,
When people stop trusting a market they stop using that market. Trust is at near 20 year lows. The conundrum is that as volumes decline it becomes ever easier for price insensitive participants to manipulate the market only furthering the distrust. This first three charts depict the deterioration of volumes and capital outflows in the face of a ‘7 year bull’. A hard to explain phenomenon.
Raw Price to Monthly Volume:
And the capital outflows….
For some people, such as the Horseman Global hedge fund which has been net short since 2012, fighting the Fed can be profitable (even if March was a different story). For others, it is become a nightmare. One such person is Crispin Odey who has - so far - had a truly terrible year.
Coming off a year in which Wall Street experienced the lowest average bonus since 2012, it now has to brace itself for new regulation on incentive compensation. One of the last pieces of Dodd-Frank to be written and implemented, regulators are looking to firm up the rules surrounding incentive pay for banks. The final regulation, once agreed upon, will not just apply to banks, it will also apply to investment advisers, broker dealers, credit unions, and executives at mortgage finance companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac according to the Wall Street Journal.