With an impending railroad strike that can torpedo the US economy (but if that is possible, why is the Biden Clan vacationing in Nantucket for Thanksgiving weekend when Joe should be talking with railroads and the unions to not let this happen?), let’s see what interest rates are telling us.
First, the US Treasury 10Y-2Y yield curve continues to descrend into the abyss (now at -80 basis points).
Second, the latest Fed Dot Plot (from September, new one will be issued during December) show that The Fed thinks that their target rate, while rising in 2023, will likely start falling again in 2024.
Third, since it is Thanksgiving Day, US bond markets are closed. But in Europe, the 10-year sovereign yields are falling, a sign that the ECB is reversing course by increasing monetary stimulus and/or a European are slow down.
Fourth, US mortgage rates have cooled since peaking (locally) at 7.35% on November 3, 2022 and now sit at 6.81%, a decline of 54 basis points. A clear sign of cooling.
Fifth, how about Fed Funds Futures data? It is pointing to a peak Fed Funds Target rate of 4.593% at the June FOMC meeting. Then a decline in rates to 2.301% by January 2024.
Now, go and enjoy your Thanksgiving dinner with friends and family (up 20% since last year), courtesy of Jerome Powell, Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer.
Again, why did people with professional investment managers not look under the hood, so to speak, when touting FTX and Sam Bankman-Fried’s scam? Or why didn’t Washington DC politicians like Maxine Water (D-CA) look into what was going on with their second largest donor after George Soros?
Former FTX Trading CEO Sam Bankman-Fried, NFL quarterback Tom Brady, supermodel Gisele Bundchen and comedian Larry David are among a celebrity-studded list of people accused of defrauding investors who lost money in the cryptocurrency exchange’s sudden collapse.
A proposed class-action filed in federal court in Florida late Tuesday names those four, along with other athletes and entertainers, as defendants in the case. All promoted FTX, one of the world’s largest crypto trading platform exchanges before it declared bankruptcy on November 11, with the company now under investigation for possible securities violations.
“It is still very difficult to comprehend that just one company defrauded more than $11 billion dollars from consumers, all from our backyard here in Miami,” Adam Moskowitz, the attorney leading the class action, said in an email.The suit seeks unspecified damages and is the first filed against Bankman-Fried and his companies since FTX filed for bankruptcy protection. BECAUSE MR MOSKOWITZ, NOBODY LOOKED UNDER THE HOOD.
Other current and former athletes named in the suit are NBA star Stephen Curry; NFL quarterback William Trevor Lawrence; baseball player Shohei Ohtani; tennis player Naomi Osaka; and broadcaster and former basketball player Shaquille O’Neal. Kevin O’Leary, a host of “Shark Tank,” is also named in the complaint, which was filed Nov. 15 in the Southern District of Florida.
The exchange shuffled customer money between affiliated entities, using new investor funds and loans to pay interest to the old ones in an attempt “to maintain the appearance of liquidity,” Moskowitz alleged, adding that FTX used public figures to give the operation an air of credibility.
Larry David, Trevor Lawrence and Naomi Osaka got stung by SBF like Tom Brady and Step Curry in a fraud scheme. True, celebrities should have excercized caution with dealing with SBF (I would love to see SBF’s investor presentation, but there may not have been one).
Or did SBF show this Bitcoin chart with Fed tightening? Or did ARK’s Cathy Wood look at this chart?/
Despite the recent FTX-fueled crypto market collapse, Cathie Wood, founder and CEO of Ark Invest Management, stood by her prediction that Bitcoin would reach $1 million by 2030.
$16,500 to $1,000.,000 by 2030? In 8 years??
“FTX were geniuses at public relations and marketing, and knew that such a massive Ponzi scheme — larger than the Madoff scheme — could only be successful with the help and promotion of the most famous, respected, and beloved celebrities and influencers in the world,” he said.
FTX did not reply to a request for comment.
FTX’s creditors will be first in line to get whatever assets a bankruptcy judge deems appropriate to distribute as the company seeks to restructure as part of its Chapter 11 filing. Investors in the Bahamas-based company, which had raised some $2 billion in venture capital, come next.
That means FTX account holders, who used the platform to trade bitcoin, ethereum and other digital currencies, may have to wait years to get their money back – if they ever do.
And so it goes. I doubt that Maxine Waters House Financial Services Committee will do anything constructive. The hearing will be a battle cry for more regulation and perhaps even paint SBF as victim of volatility.
The really sad part of this story is that SBF is still trying to raise money to do it all over again. But there are always investors who want to buy a piece of the blue sky, or a bridge in Brooklyn.
The global economic slowdown has one nice unintended consequence: as the 10-year Treasury yield softens, mortgage rates decline.
US mortgage rates retreated sharply for a second week, hitting a two-month low and providing a bit of traction for the beleaguered housing market.
The contract rate on a 30-year fixed mortgage decreased 23 basis points to 6.67% in the week ended Nov. 18, according to Mortgage Bankers Association data released Wednesday.
Rates have plunged nearly a half percentage point in the past two weeks, the most since 2008, as recession concerns mount, inflation shows signs of cooling and a number of Federal Reserve officials say it may soon be appropriate to slow the pace of monetary tightening.
The slide in borrowing costs helped stir demand as the group’s index of applications to buy a home climbed 2.8%. That marked the third-straight increase since the gauge stumbled to the weakest level since 2015.
The pickup in demand allowed the overall measure of mortgage applications, which includes refinancing, to rise for a second week, but it still remains depressed. The index of refinancing activity edged up from a 22-year low.
The Refinance Index increased 2 percent from the previous week and was 86 percent lower than the same week one year ago.The unadjusted Purchase Index increased 9 percent compared with the previous week and was 41 percent lower than the same week one year ago.
But you need an electron microscope to see the increase in both purchase and refi apps.
One indicator of a slowing global economy is the decline of FANG (Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Google) with declining liquidity.
During the Covid crisis of 2020 (red box). consumer credit declined and households were saving. But following the end of US Covid economic shutdowns, we saw inflation soaring to 40-year highs as Biden declared war on fossil fuels and a Pelsoi-led Congress went on an epic spending spree. But with soaring inflation, came a decline in personal savings and soaring consumer credit outstanding in an attempt to cope with Bidenflation.
Meanwhile, in the crypto universe, CNBC’s Jim Cramer and ARK’s Cathie Wood are going big for cryptos. With Wood buying Bitcoin and Cramer touting Coinbase.
Hmmm.
But at least Litecoin and the others are up today. Likely because Cramer and Wood are touting cryptos with “buy the dip!” strategy.
And on the Sam Bankman-Fried fiasco front, I am watching the deflection of wrongdoing from SBF to his girlfriend and now the co-CEO of Alameda Research, Sam Trabucco.
Bloomberg: He has a degree from MIT and cut his teeth as a trader at Susquehanna International Group. Yet the former co-head of Alameda Research made it clear that poker and black-jack tables were where he honed the gambler’s instincts he applied to cryptocurrency trading.
“I may or may not be banned from 3 casinos for this,” Sam Trabucco once tweeted about counting cards at black jack tables.
The chaos created by Sam Bankman-Fried (FTX Crypto Exchange) and Alameda Research (SBF’s hedge fund) will go down in history as one of the biggest scams. And should earn a top spot on Phil Hall’s 100 Years Of Wall Street Crooks.
Sam Bankman-Fried’s bankrupt crypto empire owes its 50 biggest unsecured creditors a total of $3.1 billion, new court papers show, with a pair of customers owed more than $200 million each.
FTX-linked entities owe their single biggest unsecured creditor more than $226 million, according to a redacted list of top 50 creditors filed late Saturday. All of them were listed as customers and ten have claims of more than $100 million each, the filings show.
The creditors, whose names and locations weren’t disclosed, are among the vast array of people and institutions caught up in FTX’s insolvency. The 50 largest claims are all from customers owed $21 million or more.
In the US, bankrupt companies are required to disclose information about their debts as part of insolvency proceedings. Creditors will get to weigh in on the best way for FTX to repay its debts as the bankruptcy unfolds.
FTX said it has assets and liabilities of at least $10 billion each in preliminary court papers. The case may involve more than one million creditors, according to lawyers for FTX.
The case is FTX Trading Ltd., 22-11068, U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware.
On top of that, SBF is attempting to raise MORE money. The question is … who would be dumb enough to listen to SBF?
Crytpo continue to fall as investor confidence in crytpo has waned since SBF’s fraud was exposed. (In SBF’s defense, I am sure that current House Financial Services committee Chair Maxine Waters will declare he is a victim of changing market conditions, not historically massive fraud and political influence pedaling).
Didn’t SBF or his Alameda Research girlfriend Caroline Ellison look at Bitcoin as inflation roared under Biden and Fed started to remove its epic monetary stimulus? Or did any of the investors or their representatives bother to look at the books of FTX or Alameda Research??
I have the sneaking suspicion that Caroline Ellison or some other little fish will take the fall for SBF’s fraud. SBF has bought-off too many politicians.
As I have said before, Sam Bankman-Fried and FTX exemplifies loose Fed monetary policy and its unintended consequences: shoddy investment practices by both sides and ridiculous claims that are unverified.
Like Sam Bankman-Fried tweeting that FTX and his team were held as paragons of running an effective company.
I am sure that SBF’s attorneys (like his parents) are telling Spam to stop tweeting ridiculous defenses. As in its all the fault of crypto volatility. We now know that at best SBF had a total lack of corporate controls and thought risk management was the Hasbro board game. And SBF while virtue signaling failed to mention his twisted relationship to Ukraine funding.
(Bloomberg) — Advisers now overseeing the carcass of Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX Group are struggling to locate the company’s cash and crypto after finding poor internal controls and record keeping at the now-bankrupt company.
“Never in my career have I seen such a complete failure of corporate controls and such a complete absence of trustworthy financial information,” John J. Ray III, the group’s new chief executive officer who formerly oversaw the liquidation of Enron Corp., said in a sworn declaration submitted in bankruptcy court.
“From compromised systems integrity and faulty regulatory oversight abroad, to the concentration of control in the hands of a very small group of inexperienced, unsophisticated and potentially compromised individuals, this situation is unprecedented,” he added.
Advisers have located “only a fraction” of the digital assets of the FTX Group that they hope to recover during the Chapter 11 bankruptcy, Ray said. They’ve so far secured about $740 million of cryptocurrency in offline cold wallets, a storage method designed to prevent hacks. The company’s audited financial statements should not be trusted, Ray said. Advisers are working to rebuild balance sheets for FTX entities from the bottom up, he said.
FTX “did not maintain centralized control of its cash” and failed to keep an accurate list of bank accounts and account signatories, or pay sufficient attention to the creditworthiness of banking partners, according to Ray. Advisers don’t yet know how much cash FTX Group had when it filed for bankruptcy, but has found about $560 million attributable to various FTX entities so far.
Although restructuring advisers have been in control of FTX for less than a week, they’ve seen enough to depict the crypto company as a deeply flawed enterprise. Lasting records of decision making are hard to come by: Bankman-Fried often communicated through applications that auto-deleted in short order and asked employees to do the same, according to Ray.
Well, this story keeps getting worse and worse and makes Sam The Sham look like a common criminal rather than a Democrat Saint.
Didn’t SBF’s chief economist show this chart to him and his Alameda team? The one where crytpos soars at The Fed and Federal government go wild on stimulus, then back-off? As The Fed tightens, cryptos are getting crushed.
At least Bitcoin rallied a bit today to $16,564.21, but other cryptos are down … again. Litecoin is actually up 4.57% while Solana is down -4.35%.
SBF, like Janet Yellen, will claim he didn’t see it coming.
The cryptocurrency market is getting hammered thanks mostly to two things: 1) Sam Bankman-Fried’s horrid failure with FTX (fraud, Enron, front-running, stupid investors, Democrat-Ukraine connection) and 2) Fed tightening to combat high inflation.
Bitcoin, the Mac Daddy of cryptos, is down another 2% today.
The rest of the story.
The NEW face of the US Federal government and why they will sweep the Bankman-Fried fiasco under the rug, just like Hunter Biden’s laptop fiasco.
Of course, it is easy to blame the figure on rapidly rising mortgage rates and Federal Reserve tightening.
But the rest of the story (as Paul Harvey used to say) is that US REAL wage growth has been NEGATIVE for 19 straight months. This alone makes housing unaffordable for the middle class and low wage workers.
Again, why are Biden and Trudeau wearing Mao jackets in Bali? And why is Biden looking like a robot?? Biden does look like he is saying “Take me to my leader, Pei.”
US mortgage rates fell last week by the most since the end of July, slipping below 7% and helping generate a bounce in purchase applications that otherwise remain depressed, but only in the Seasonally Adjusted data. The NON-Seasonally Adjusted data show a hefty decline.
The contract rate on a 30-year fixed mortgage decreased 24 basis points to 6.9% in the week ended Nov. 11, according to Mortgage Bankers Association data released Wednesday. The group’s index of applications to buy a home rose 4.4% — the most since June — but is still near the weakest level since 2015.
But the bounce was in Seasonally Adjusted data only. The NON-seasonally adjusted data remained depressed.
Mortgage applications decreased -10.0 percent SA from one week earlier, according to data from the Mortgage Bankers Association’s (MBA) Weekly Mortgage Applications Survey for the week ending November 11, 2022. This week’s results include an adjustment for the observance of Veterans Day.
The Refinance Index decreased -11.44% percent from the previous week and was 88 percent lower than the same week one year ago.The unadjusted Purchase Index decreased -10 percent compared with the previous week and was 46 percent lower than the same week one year ago.
Mortgage purchase applications will continue to fall in NSA terms since it is the Winter and home buying season won’t really start until January. Refinancing applications actually dropped -11.44% even with the drop in mortgage rates.
The data. As my former students know, I like the “raw” data, better known as NON-seasonally adjusted (NSA) data and avoid seasonally-adjusted data (SA) since it hides what is going on.
And on The Fed Futures Front, The Federal Reserve is still looking a hiking their target rate from 4% to just under 5%.
We know that Federal Reserve monetary policy, with the exception of Paul Volcker, has been incredibly loose helping to produce asset bubbles. Particularly under Bernanke, Yellen and Powell.
But cryptos like Bitcoin saw an amazing run-up in price, once in 2017 which came to a halt as The Fed raised their target rate and started to let their balance sheet shrink. Then came Covid in early 2020 and The Fed’s massive overreaction by pushing their target rate to 0.25 basis points (again) and massively expanded their balance sheet. During the Covid “crisis” and the massive Fed response, we saw Bitcoin soar in price.
But starting in 2022, we saw The Fed counterattack inflation by raising their target rate and the expectation of future rate rose rapidly. With this tightening of rates, we saw Bitcoin come crashing back down. I can see Bitcoin crashing further to 7,000 as The Fed continues their counterattack.
My question is … did Sam Blankman-Fried and his team even notice that cryptos were plunging with Fed tightening? Or did he even care? And what were his models? Or Alameda Research’s models? I would love to look at them.
Confounded Interest - Anthony B. Sanders 
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