Business

Authored by Simon Black via SovereignMan.com,

The Great Financial Crisis happened because Wall Street was financing homes for people who couldn’t afford them.

Leading up to the GFC, there was a voracious appetite from investors for “AAA”-rated mortgage debt. So lenders would make lots of loans to subprime borrowers and sell them to Wall Street. Wall Street would pool them together and one of the major ratings agencies (like Moody’s or Standard & Poor’s) would stamp the steaming pile of garbage with AAA.

By Chris at www.CapitalistExploits.at

In the late 90's and early 2000's, I spent a lot of time travelling through a host of the world's airports.

12,000 jobs may not sound like much but that's roughly how many jobs Canada adds to its economy each month. Only in this case, that's how many workers are about to find themselves without a job because overnight Sears Canada announced plans to liquidate its remaining 150 stores instead of restructuring, the latest admission of brick and mortar defeat in the war with Amazon, with the result some 12,000 job losses in the coming weeks.

WTI/RBOB had bounced back modestly today (on OPEC jawboning) ahead of the API data with bulls hoping the trend of gasoline builds stalls. With the effects of Harvey beginning to fade (and exports at record highs), we are getting a cleaner picture of the state of the energy complex and it's no so pretty for the record-long-specs. Crude inventories saw a surprise 3.1mm build (expectations for a 2.4mm draw), Cushing saw the 7th straight week of restocking and while gasoline inventories dropped, distillates saw a big build.