It’s 1929 for Goldbugs...wait.

Blackstone Real Estate In Trouble (BREIT)

Apr 04, 2023

Floyd Norris: Who Needs Gold When We Have Greenspan? (May 4, 1999)

…universal money whose value was based not on gold in the vaults, but on the wisdom of Mr. Greenspan and his successors at the Federal Reserve. Few fear that one of those successors might resemble G. William Miller, the Fed chairman in the late 1970's who seemed to have no idea how to slow inflation.

Gold was about $287 an ounce when the above was written.

**“People would rather believe in a doctor's hood than in their own eyes.” - Abbé Nicolas-Pierre-Henri de Montfaucon de Villars (1670)**

Rand Paul speech against the No TikTok on United States Devices Act.

Whatever you think of Rand otherwise, he’s excellent on Constitutional issues.

Also, Senator Mark Warner is a big proponent of this bill. Warner is so bad on free speech that I've actually noticed him over the years, in a sea of terrible people.

"If liberty means anything at all,
it means the right to tell people
what they do not want to hear."

George Orwell

Speaking of propaganda, I happened across this article today, where some site proudly announced that they had “received a perfect rating—100/100—from NewsGuard, a journalistic innovation designed to combat poor journalistic practices in the age of prolific misinformation.”

Let me tell you the miserable truth about Newsguard.

(If that link looks funny to you, it’s a long Twitter thread I did that is now only retrievable because Archive.org happened to save it (in an odd format.)

Still, I think it’s a great example of how these media “gatekeepers” (i.e., gaslighters) are often literally the same people who gave us the Iraq War.

Greenspan: Housing market worst may be over (October 2006)

Housing bottomed nationally 5 years and 4 months later.

JPMorgan executives joked about Jeffrey Epstein’s behaviour, US Virgin Islands alleges

Last week, the USVI also issued subpoenas for documents to Google co-founder Sergey Brin, as well as Thomas Pritzker, the chair of Hyatt Hotels, as part of the evidence-gathering process in the case against JPMorgan, a person directly involved said.
News of the subpoenas, which were also sent to real estate and media mogul Mortimer Zuckerman and Hollywood super-agent Michael Ovitz, were first reported by The Wall Street Journal.

I last mentioned some of these names in The Ends Justify The Means:

Also check out One Nation Under Blackmail.

What a guest list. These guys all had to have known what Epstein was into, and - at best - they didn’t care.

Where: [Epstein’s] East Side townhouse
Table seats: 30
Guest list: Mort Zuckerman, Google co-founder Sergey Brin, David Blaine, Donald Trump, Leslie Wexner of the Limited, disgraced British Cabinet minister Peter Mandelson, Bill Clinton aide Doug Band
Menu: Private chef, though last month Rocco DiSpirito cooked dinner after Epstein bid $50,000 for his services at a Hamptons charity.
Make it MY place: Epstein hates restaurants, so he often entertains at home. “The dialogues are so engaging that serving even the most extraordinary food sometimes seems inappropriate, like eating pizza at the ballet,” he says.

“I had rich shock!” one stunned guest says about Epstein’s house, which the owner claims is the largest private dwelling in the city. At a recent dinner organized by Ghislaine Maxwell, Blaine amused a group of barely clad models with card tricks. Alas, Clinton—around whom the evening had been organized—never showed, though his Secret Service would have appreciated Epstein’s numerous security cameras.

December 2003: MEDIA; Post-Mortems for a Media Deal Undone

Last Monday, Donny Deutsch, the advertising executive, and Michael Wolff, the often-caustic media columnist, were the toast of the New York Magazine Awards at the Four Seasons restaurant. Seated at a table along with Caroline Miller, editor in chief of the magazine, and Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, the two men, visible representatives of Mortimer B. Zuckerman's much-followed bid to buy New York, found themselves accepting early congratulations for their seemingly inevitable victory.
What Mr. Deutsch and Mr. Wolff did not know was that Ms. Miller had spent five hours the night before, along with other executives at the magazine, briefing a less outspoken bidder.
The bidder, Bruce Wasserstein, a longtime Wall Street deal maker, swooped in and took the magazine off the auction table with a $55 million bid -- more than $10 million over the Zuckerman offer -- leaving the Zuckerman team wondering where their bid had gone astray.
Mr. Zuckerman and his partners -- Mr. Deutsch, the investor Nelson Peltz, the film executive Harvey Weinstein and the money manager Jeffrey Epstein -- had campaigned publicly and confidently for the magazine, openly speculating about the changes to come once they took over.

Good grief - Donny Deutsch, Nelson Peltz, Harvey Weinstein and Jeff Epstein? I could not make up a better satirical list if I tried. This sounds like CNBC’s daily lineup. Note that Donny Deutsch does not mention his own relationship with Jeff Epstein in this July 2019 clip:

"There are a lot of powerful men I think having sleepless nights right now as a result of Mr. Epstein..." - Donny Deutsch

Exactly. That’s why they murdered Epstein a month later.

More fun, from 2004: Radar mag to get up to $25 million from Zuckerman, Epstein

“In some ways, this is going to be a new magazine” says Radar founder and editor-in-chief Maer Roshan. “Some significant time has lapsed since (the last issue came out), and we need to update what we are trying to do. This is a magazine that is trying to be irreverent, provocative and literate.” The first issue published with money from Mort Zuckerman and Jeffrey Epstein will appear next April..

A new low! Negative 1.455% as of Monday evening.

I tried to recreate this on a longer time frame using different FRED monthly data series. The below chart dates back to 1953, not 1982, but it still rhymes with the above chart. We are now in a weird period seen to this degree before only twice in 70 years - 1973-1974 and 1979-1981. I don’t remember those periods as being good for stocks.

The Housing Collapse Continues…Prices UP Only 4.4% YOY.

CoreLogic: House Prices up 4.4% YoY in February; Increased 0.8% MoM in February NSA

An eight percent drop is apparently the worst case scenario: US house prices may tumble another 8% this year as homebuyers feel the squeeze, KPMG says

“Tumble another 8%”? House prices are still UP year over year, at least nationally.

We’re still very much in a housing bubble:

J.P. Morgan Guide to markets Q1 2023

For what it’s worth.

Bank Turmoil Collides With Tech Slump in Battered San Francisco
On Friday, city officials forecast a $780 million deficit for the next two fiscal years, more than $50 million worse than projected in January. Downtown San Francisco’s office-vacancy rate soared to a record 29.5% in the first quarter, up from just 4% before the pandemic…Ridership on the Bay Area Rapid Transit service has only returned to about 40% of pre-pandemic levels…Charles Schwab Corp…moved its headquarters to Texas at the start of 2021, a relocation cited as an example of the city’s failure to nurture home-grown companies…The Bay Area trails only Austin, Texas, in the share of LinkedIn members who have arrived in the last 12 months[Is this supposed to be a good thing? - rh]…you can literally move basically anywhere in the United States and the cost of living will be significantly lower than it is in the Bay Area.”

Just one sentence on the city’s horrific leadership:

‘Longstanding problems like safety, homelessness and affordable housing haven’t changed all that much.’

Then there’s this, from the San Francisco Chronicle Editorial Board:

San Francisco could be on the verge of collapse. What should California do about it? The words “crime” and “drugs” don’t appear in the article.

Shareholders asked to redeem $4.5 billion last month from Blackstone Real Estate Income Trust…the company said Monday in a letter. BREIT allowed about $666 million to be withdrawn, or about 15% of what was requested.

**Google to cut down on employee laptops, services and staplers for ‘multi-year’ savings**

Oh no!

The spot price of gold is currently around $2024. Try buying an ounce of actual gold for that amount.

Since Dogecoin is making a resurgence: The pic below from March 2021. Would be worth about $30,000 today.

A handful of related pics I’d saved for posterity…

Let us come to the point now. It would be nice to hold on to the common belief that the UFO's are craft from a superior space-civilization, because this is a hypothesis science fiction has made widely acceptable, and because we are not altogether unprepared, scientifically and even, perhaps, militarily, to deal with such visitors. Unfortunately, however, the theory that flying saucers are material objects from outer space manned by a race originating on some other planet is not a complete answer. However strong the current belief in saucers from space, it cannot be stronger than the Celtic faith in the elves and the fairies, or the medieval belief in tutins, or the fear throughout the Christian lands, in the first centuries of our era, of demons and satyrs and fauns. Certainly, it cannot be stronger than the faith that inspired the writers of the Bible—a faith rooted in daily experiences with angelic visitation.
- Jacques F. Vallée