Business

Via Dana Lyons' Tumblr,

One survey finds the lowest investor cash position since the stock market top in 2000.

One of Wall Street’s first bitcoin analysts believes the chances that the SEC will approve the first bitcoin exchange-trade fund by the end of 2018 have improved substantially since the agency rejected two proposed funds back in March.

“Things have changed. My odds of Bitcoin ETF approval within 18 months are WAY up,” said the analyst, Spencer Bogart, formerly of investment bank Needham & Co., in a tweet.

As you know, we’ve been tracking the sub-prime auto-loan industry closely.

Our view is that this industry represents the worst of the worst excesses of our current credit bubble, much as the subprime mortgage industry represented the worst of the worst in excess for the Housing Bubble.

For this reason, we refer to sub-prime auto-loans as Subprime 2.0.

Back in December 2014, the start of the worst oil rout since the financial crisis claimed its first victim when 113 year old Phibro, then owned by Occidental Petroleum after its sale by Citigroup, would liquidate in the US after it failed to buy a buyer. Phibro, of course, was made famous or perhaps infamous (after his $100 million Citi bonus in 2008 prompted a Congressional inquiry) by its star employee, "oil god" Andy Hall.

Following mixed US manufacturing survey data earlier in the week (and disapopinting French/German PMIs), US Services were even more mixed with PMI printing at 6-month highs (new business expanding at its fastest in two years), and ISM collapsing to 11-month lows.

Despite the ongoing collapse in 'hard' economic data (against even weaker expectations), surveys of US Services employers by PMI are ebulient, but it seems the people that ISM are talking to are dysphoric...