Business

Last December we joked that the Norwegian sovereign wealth fund had responded to sinking returns and withdrawals required to fund budget deficits by allocating another $130 billion in assets to what appeared to be an already massively overpriced equity bubble in return for an extra 40bps of "expected average annual real returns" (see: Norway Buying $130 Billion In Global Equities As Sovereign Wealth Fund Continues To Bleed Cash).  The extra equity purchases pushed the fund's total equity allocation to a staggering 70% of their $860 billion in assets under management.

What would you guess? Five…twenty five…fifty?

James Stafford, editor of Oilprice.com not only does the math, but explains the energy-driven geographic arbitrage currently driving bitcoin mining. 

There were plenty of bad actors that contributed to the housing crisis in 2009...the banks that underwrote mortgages for people that they knew couldn't afford the home they were buying and then turned around and sold those loans to unsuspecting insurance companies via RMBS structures...the high school janitor making $50,000 a year who suddenly figured he could afford a $750,000 home...the 22-year-old Las Vegas stripper who took out millions in mortgages so she could make "easy money" flipping homes...there was plenty of blame to go around. 

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

Is the Federal Reserve’s Great Unwind already coming unwound? I thought it would be good to check up on Federal Reserve balance sheet reduction since the Fed is supposed to be up and running on the move out of quantitative easing this month. It should be fascinating to see what progress the Fed is making as it happily applauds its own successful recovery. 

The Federal Reserve balance sheet reduction that didn’t happen

While Jamie Dimon, Warren Buffett, Ray Dalio and Larry Fink have all revealed themselves to be skeptics of bitcoin, accusing it of being a bubble, at best, and a fraud, at worst, one longtime investor who made his name scooping up “value” stocks in the 1990s has quietly posted astonishing returns betting on the digital currency, predating a wave of more than 100 asset-management shops that have sprung up to manage portfolios of cryptocurrencies.