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Coming in a little late to the game, UBS today released its top 5 themes and 19 trades for 2018. Not surprising from the bank whose base case S&P forecast is 2,900 one year from now (with potential upside to 3,200), and who just told CNBC that "valuations are still somewhat cheap", the bank is optimistic, if not "rationally euphoric" and writes that it all boils down to one question: will the Kool-Aid party continue, or "will underlying macro shifts reveal fragilities in asset valuations" and more specifically, will the yield curve invert. To wit:

Authored by Joseph Young via CoinTelegraph.com,

According to Stefan Molyneux, a highly regarded Canadian podcast host, it is more important to recognize the free fall of fiat currencies, more so than to acknowledge the exponential growth rate of Bitcoin.

Molyneux says:

“It's not so much that Bitcoin is going through the roof - it's that fiat currencies are in free fall, but only Bitcoin is noticing.”

The decline of fiat currencies

Know government regulation, know moral hazard.

No government regulation, no moral hazard.

We have been reading quite a bit about rumors of governments trying to regulate crypto currency.  If and when they do, we will be told that it is for our own safety, of this I am certain.   We will also be told that the crypto currency markets are not capable of self regulation, of this I am also certain, so they will try to roll it up under the authority of the banks.  

Self regulation? Not effective?  

lol

While many in the 'resistance' have vociferously denounced the Senate tax reform bill in the last 48 hours, former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers took the proverbial biscuit by warning that "thousands will die as a consequence of this new tax bill."

The Congressional Budget Office estimated that the tax bill could reduce insurance coverage by 13m people, which to be conservative we can round down to 10m people.

 

The following article by David Haggith was published on The Great Recession Blog:

As soon as President Trump put his Goldman boys, Gary Cohn and Steven Mnuchin, in charge of his tax plan, I knew Trump’s tax plan would never fulfill his and his henchmen’s promises of helping the middle class and of not giving additional tax breaks to the rich. The Trump Tax plan, as it now exists, proves those conjoined promises to be the greatest lie Trump ever told.