R.I.P Pat Tillman

I remember this blogger Sudden Debt as being quite prescient during the bubble before this bubble. Some food for thought:

In June 2008 Lehman Brothers announced a loss of $2.8 billion and went bankrupt shortly thereafter. The vast majority of its losses came from its mortgage securities portfolio which it had to write down by $5.8 billion, ie mark the securities to market and take a charge to earnings.

In late May 2022 the Fed released its financial statement for 1Q22 from which we infer that it is carrying at least $330 billion in unrealized losses in its portfolio, mostly from its mortgage securities. That is to say, it has not (yet) marked them to market. Even worse, interest rates have gone higher since and bond prices fallen further.  Some analysts calculate that unrealized losses have now reached $400 billion or more.

Does the Fed have to mark to market? Not really…. Unless, that is, it starts selling bonds from its portfolio to the open market. And guess what?  That’s exactly what it has to do, in order to carry out Quantitative Tightening - which it has to, in order to combat soaring inflation. 

Let’s think about it…. The Fed currently has losses 100 times bigger than Lehman. And that’s the lender of last resort? The issuer of currency? Really? 

Hello, anyone read The Emperor’s New Clothes recently?

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Friend of the show Grant Williams had a recent discussion with Bennett Tomlin and George Noble. One of Noble’s comments stood out to me:

“…we live in the post truth society where what matters increases not the truth but what people say is the truth. And the regulators are asleep at the switch. And we have so many charlatans on Wall Street, bad actors who are not being taken to task.”

Jim Chanos, who says that we live in a golden age of fraud, is in a new interview here with Bennett.

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I told Dave Collum yesterday that sometimes I get discouraged.

One big reason is that our mainstream media is so awful.

Awful not just on Wall Street crime, but on all the wars, the ongoing Epstein/Maxwell/Wexner Et al. operation, the pervasive political corruption (unless it’s the other tribe), etc.

An anti-war newspaper will have no advertisers. A pro-war newspaper will have ads from war profiteers. The mass media that works for Scams will always have higher production values than the honest ones, and so they are the ones that normies will believe.

It's just like the show before
The news is
Just another show

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Happy Memorial Day. Don’t worry, I’m not sad, just observant.

“It was the tension between these two poles - a restless idealism on one hand and a sense of impending doom on the other - that kept me going.” - Hunter S. Thompson