Authored by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, publish op-ed via The Wall Street Journal,
Worry less about the banking system, but commodities, epidemics and climate volatility could be trouble
How should we think about financial risks in 2016?
Submitted by John Rubino via DollarCollapse.com,
How do you make money in a world where history is meaningless? The answer, for a growing number of big fund managers, is that you don’t.
Hedge funds, generally the most aggressive species of money manager, do a lot of “black box” trading in which bets are placed on previously-identified patterns and relationships on the assumption that those patterns will repeat in the future.
As Wilbur Ross so eloquently noted, for Puerto Rico "it's the end of the beginning... and the beginning of the end," as he explained "Puerto Rico is the US version of Greece." However, as JPMorgan explains, for some states the pain is really just beginning as Municipal bond risk will only become more important over time, as assets of some severely underfunded plans are gradually depleted.
Wilbur Ross discusses Puerto Rico's debt struggles and where it goes from here...
http://www.bloomberg.com/api/embed/iframe
By EconMatters
The bigger news in the cable industry is that the U.S. Justice Department's threat to block the purchase/merger of Comcast (NASDAQ: CMCSA) and Time Warner Cable (NYSE: TWC) did result in Comcast withdrawing its stock-swap proposal to acquire TWC in April, 2015. However, TWC soon afterwards entered into an agreement to be acquired by Charter Communications in May.
With hedge fund short positions near record highs and speculators at their least bullish in almost five years, oil prices have spurted higher in the early trading as the diplomatic gloves come off in The Middle East. Despite record levels of crude inventory around the world, WTI Crude is trading above $38, up over 3% from its $37.07 close on New Year's Eve. Algos ran the stops above last week's highs ($38.32) but for now prices are not as excited as many would have expected.
WTI tags last week's highs but is holding for now...