Jimi

Heh Lee! How did you move cash from your house sale in Florida into euros? If we reach parity, I think I'd move a chunk of dollars into euros in anticipation of an eventual retirement apartment.

Fartuculs will do that....

Wow

Weird, since there's so many rich to steal from & so many poor in need....

Texas Instruments... miss in the afterlife.

Microsquish in line in the afterlife

Google miss in the afterlife

Spent some brief time camping in Scott's Bluff 30 years ago with a GF. Beautiful piece of the country... uhh, that part of Nebraska was nice, too.

Pinched this from Twitter. It's supposedly the financing terms for Musk's acquisition of... Twitter. They are... completely insane. Someone check my math... weighted average rate is SOFR + 4.74%. SOFR follows the Fed: So, let's entertain that two more rate increases of 50bps gets done at the next two meetings. That'd put SOFR at ~1.3%. 1.3% + 4.74% = ~6.04%. Let's call it 6%. 6% on $25b = $1.5b in annual interest. Next, let's look at Twitter's financials the past two years: specifically, operating profit (i.e., gross profits - SG&A).* 2021 = $3.279B - $1.760b = $1.519b 2020 = $2.349B - $1.450b = $0.899b So... financing of this deal under a 50bps/next two meetings consumes all Twitter's recently observed annual operating profits. Let's assume simply a Fed panic and SOFR of 0%: annual financing still would be 4.74% X $25b = $1.185b. Goldman Sachs has the Fed capping out at 3-3.25%. https://www.reuters.com/article/usa-fed-research/goldman-sachs-sees-five-rate-hikes-in-2023-idUSL3N2VO0WL Just for giggles, what if the Fed loses control and has to ramp rates aggressively to say... 5.25%? 5.25% + 4.74% = ~10%. Well, that math is easy: 10% of $25b = $2.5b. The terms of this deal appear... somewhat... "orthogonal" to some ROI associated with Musk's $21b capital outlay. But then, most regrettably, I'm not a genius multi-billionaire founder of visionary companies. I'm just a guy with a calculator.... *Twitter includes R&D as an operating expense, but I don't want to include that because it's a discretionary use of capital/past profits to generate future profits: I'm only interested in observed profits generated by business operations. Data from here: https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/TWTR/financials/

Pas de raison. C'est simplement la meme connerie d'hier et de demain....

Spent the weekend in LA to attend an old friend's son's bar mitzvah. Moved mainly between wealthy San Fernando Valley & wealthier Santa Monica/West LA, haunts familiar from living & visiting for decades. The wealth encountered was extraordinary. The cars... the houses... the yards.... 10-figure people are social pikers. A rich guy just-met showed my wife & me an additional house he'd recently bought - sight unseen - for over $3m. Gargantuan villas under construction, seemingly testing the limits of building codes & under the habituated assumption of an inevitable bid. I think in addition to portfolios, the impact of coastal real estate gains is also a consideration: if you purchased a house over 10 years ago in a rich zip code, you are sitting on millions & millions in paper equity gains. If you think those gains are permanent because "our house is special and someone will always want into this neighborhood at our asking or more," then you think your risk-budget can accommodate a more aggressive portfolio, which has also "worked," and thereby "confirms" one's social station and investment acumen. Can capital keep capturing the vast bulk of economic benefit and productive gain indefinitely... and simply get richer & richer? Or are they going to be subject to a Great Reset? My mom once told me about a place where she grew up in Pittsburgh up on a hill where some very the rich people lived. Locals called it "Cracker Hill," because when the Depression came, the people up there no longer could afford their massive properties and were reduced to eating crackers....

So glad Macron won. Reverberations from LePen winning would have been most unwelcome.

Euro hammered.

Futures open with some continuation from Friday.

t

30 min chart today putting in the famous "A bunch of black crows surrounding one misplaced sparrow" formation.

Fancy that.

I almost wrote, "If only someone had warned us...."

Bears staggering around the ring....

Help me out here. Doesn't... having a banker friend... make you an asshole? I'm just kidding, good man!

In the current conditions of high uncertainty, we will maintain optionality, gradualism and flexibility in the conduct of monetary policy…. Inflation increased to 7.5 per cent in March, from 5.9 per cent in February…. The upside risks surrounding the inflation outlook have also intensified, especially in the near term. The risks to the medium-term inflation outlook include above-target moves in inflation expectations, higher than anticipated wage rises and a durable worsening of supply-side conditions…. We are very attentive to the current uncertainties and are closely monitoring the incoming data in relation to their implications for the medium-term inflation outlook. The calibration of our policies will remain data-dependent and reflect our evolving assessment of the outlook. We stand ready to adjust all of our instruments within our mandate, incorporating flexibility if warranted, to ensure that inflation stabilises at our two per cent target over the medium term. https://www.ecb.europa.eu/press/pressconf/2022/html/ecb.is220414~fa5c8fe142.en.html Words… words… more words….

Something... something... clashes.... something... something... over-sold conditions... something... something.... There was an important lesson once I think I learned. Growing old(er) sucks. I can never remember stuff anymore.

(For the slow/stoner kids in the back of class, "Crypt" "O"....)

Goes boom