Peter Schiff will have his revenge on Seattle.
Glitter Disco Synthesizer Night School
Those Who Do Not Learn From History Are Doomed To Repeat It (Or, as I like to say, Those who remember history are condemned by those who repeat it.)
Some interesting observations from Carl Swenlin…
“I have looked at the 1929-1932 Bear Market chart many times over the last 40 years, but it was always with an emphasis on the 1929 Crash and the nearly -90% decline into the 1932 bottom. Recently, I realized that there was something else just as interesting and added new annotations to the chart. If we assume that a decline of over -20% is a bear market, and an advance of over +20% is a bull market, it is shocking how to realize how confusing that period must have been for investors. The decline from the 1929 top to the 1932 bottom was a secular bear market, but also within that period there were six cyclical bear markets and five cyclical bull markets. Eleven reversals in 32 months!”
“Do I think we're in for a thrashing of this magnitude? Well, remember that during the 2000-2002 Bear Market the Nasdaq Composite declined about -80%, and the Nasdaq 100 (QQQ) about -85%. Nobody knows what is really going to happen, but the Nasdaq Composite and Nasdaq 100 are already down -32%, and it is well to remember that, depending one's exposure, catastrophic losses are not just myths relegated to the bad old days. As for whiplash reversals like those on the chart, it is too soon to tell, but the 2020 Bear Market demonstrates that it is not out of the question.”
Sources say Gopuff shuttering up to 22 warehouses “Both Gorillas and Getir also laid off significant proportions of their global workforces this week. And earlier this year, ultrafast delivery startups 1520, Buyk and Fridge No More all shut down. Another firm, Jokr, is rumored to be shopping its business after reports emerged that it was losing $159 per order in the U.S.” We sure had a bull market in goofy company names.
Saw this (no free link): The vacancy rate for office properties in St. Louis increased to 18 percent in the first quarter, its highest level since 2013 Hopefully the St. Louis Fed will someday be vacant.
Steve Roth’s Vornado sells Lincoln Road building for $94M, nearly 30 percent less than it paid a decade ago Interesting headline considering we’re seemingly at the top of the biggest real estate bubble since the last one.
“some tech folks have lost up to a third of their stock portfolio’s value this year. Along with other buyers who have down payments invested in stocks, they are certainly more wary than they had been previously” I’ve had a (not-unique I’m sure) hypothesis for a while that a lot of these super-expensive coastal California properties are paid for by cashing in stock-options. Go to any company’s insider trades, and you can see the boatloads of money that’s been minted - and I don’t mean just by CEO’s. A lot of those fun coupons will go away now with many stocks like Peloton down 90% off their highs (and don’t forget their ridiculous spikes over the past couple years, largely due to especially horrific monetary policy.)
“Zillow Offers appears to have made both mistakes and done so at a large enough scale to result in hundreds of millions of dollars of losses…” Nobody saw this coming.
Looks like Diana Olick has become the new David Lereah (or maybe the new Ben Stein, Tom Adkins and Mike Norman?). Ben Jones comments. (I personally don’t know about a housing crash. Last time we peaked around 2006 and bottomed, what, six years later or so? I’m more in the slow-slide camp for now, depending on the area. I’m not going anywhere, except maybe into the sea.)
TerraUSD Crash Led to Vanished Savings, Shattered Dreams “A surgeon in Massachusetts can’t stop thinking about how he lost his family’s nest egg. A young Ukrainian considered suicide after losing 90% of his savings. Other investors have given up dreams of starting new businesses or quitting their day jobs. All of them were swept up in the mania for TerraUSD…” What about the poor souls who invested in Blue Apron?
“The crash caught many investors off guard because TerraUSD was a stablecoin…” [This is where on Twitter I’d insert a funny video]
Takes me back to this, from 2002: “Like Cynthia, I had done what my broker suggested, asking few questions and working on blind faith. As a result, I've lost more than half of my children's college fund.” BOOM!
Via friend of the show @Menlobear: "Bolt, the San Francisco startup with permanent 4-day workweek, lays off nearly a third of its employees"
Wastefulness haunts Israeli startups as crisis looms Oh boy…
Not even going to bother with the NFT disaster stories out lately…
L.A. is banning most gas appliances in new homes. Get ready for electric stoves See, this seems completely stupid to me. What does the L.A. City Council think is going to be providing the electricity? Coal?
U.S. Natural Gas Prices Are Set For A Sustained Rally “Asian and European natural gas prices stand at $35 per mmbtu, versus $8.20 per mmbtu here in the United States.”
Fertilizer Prices Drop 30% Following Demand Destruction That’s the headline. Sounds like deflation, right? Here’s the chart.
The Decade of Cheap Rides Is Over “How American life was changed by a subsidy Uber and Lyft can no longer afford.” As someone wrote back in 2020: “Is anyone not getting that the goal of Doordash and Uber are monopolies with then hugely inflated prices?"
There’s a monetary policy analogy here
I posted a lot of information about Jeff Epstein, Apollo and Leon Black on Twitter, and now no one can read it. The Epstein/Maxwell/Wexner network is the story of the century, and nobody in the MSM cares.
I also wrote a lot about Saudi government involvement in 9/11. Nobody cares: A ‘state secret’ no more: New FBI report says Saudi government officials provided support network for 9/11 hijackers Here is a new podcast interview with the author of this piece.
Just for kicks the other day I did a long-term QQQ: $Gold ratio chart, and they’re basically neck and neck since 1999. (If I start at 2000, gold, a pet rock, has outperformed.) I don’t think dividends really matter here - I just thought it was interesting. I bet one in a hundred people would think they were even close.
We do miss you on Twitter
It’s weird how nobody cares. I think most of us refuse to let go of the comforting myths that structure our lives. Reading Yanis Varyfoukis’ book The Global Minotaur. Very interesting take on capitalism and society.