Business

As regular readers are no doubt aware, we like to check in on the hookers from time to time.

By that we of course mean SouthBay Research’s Vice Index, which tracks spending on fun activities in the cash economy.

Fun activities like boozing, gambling, and escort hiring. “Luxury good spending is sensitive to shifts in the economic winds, vice is even more so,” Andrew Zatlin reminds us. “A prostitute costs almost two days of after-tax wages [and] the consumer’s stack of money has to be a certain height before they can get on that ride.”

Earlier this month, Kyle Bass asked a funny question in a discussion with CNBC’s David Faber. To wit: “If some fund manager in Texas is saying that your currency is dramatically overvalued, you shouldn’t care on a $10 trillion economy with $34 trillion in your banks. I have, call it a billion -  it’s so small it should be irrelevant and yet somehow it’s really relevant.”

Submitted by Erico Matias Tavares via Sinclair & Co.,

William R. White is the chairman of the Economic and Development Review Committee at the OECD in Paris. Prior to that, Dr. White held a number of senior positions with the Bank for International Settlements (“BIS”), including Head of the Monetary and Economic Department, where he had overall responsibility for the department's output of research, data and information services, and was a member of the Executive Committee which manages the BIS. He retired from the BIS on 30 June 2008.

One thing that became abundantly clear in the wake of the financial crisis was that everything - and we do mean everything - was being manipulated by Wall Street’s biggest and most systemically important financial institutions.

First we learned that the most important benchmark rate on the planet was nothing more than a tool submitters used to inflate the value of their traders’ books, something we flagged way back in 2009.

Perhaps the only company's results we have more fun spreading that Netflix, is Tesla's for the simple reason that the company has managed to convert GAAP reality into a singularity of such non-GAAP bullshit, which is no longer merely laughable but is solidly inside the ridiculous, if not criminal (of course, nobody cares as long as the stock keeps rising but the second it plunges, watch those lawsuits soar), that none other company can even come close.