As Americans prepare to hit the road for Thanksgiving, average gas prices will be at their highest seasonal level ever, according to GasBuddy.
GasBuddy says the national average is projected to stand at $3.68 on Thanksgiving Day. This is nearly 30¢ higher than last year, and over 20¢ higher than the previous record of $3.44 set in 2012.
And diesel prices, the life blood of the shipping industry, relative to gasoline prices, are soaring. Highest since 2004.
As we approach Thanksgiving Day, it is important to be thankful … that things aren’t even worse under Billions Biden. US CRB foodstuffs are up 49% under Biden while diesel fuel is up 102%.
Now, gasoline prices fell recently as WTI crude prices slipped on slowing demand. And as stimulus wears out.
And its now only food.
Have a holly jolly Thanksgiving!!
My Thanksgiving dinner, because of the cost, will be a Jersey Mike’s turkey and provolone sub (mini). Or this canned dinner.
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 mentioned on Varney and Company on Fox Business, housing is going to suffer when The Fed starts to tighten their monetary policy. And here we are, folks!
US existing home sales fell a staggering -28.43% YoY in October as M2 Money growth grinds to almost a halt.
October’s existing home sales YoY of -28.43% is the WORST since The Great Recession and collapse of Lehman Brothers.
The median price of existing home sales slowed to 6.6% YoY. Inventory of EHS remains below pre-Covid levels.
Unrelated to housing, Prince Imhotep (Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis President Neel Kashkari) said Friday that the whole idea of cryptocurrency is “nonsense” after the implosion of FTX revealed the industry’s shortcomings.
“This isn’t case of 1 fraudulent company in a serious industry,” Kashkari said on Twitter, commenting on an article about how investors fell for FTX. “Entire notion of crypto is nonsense. Not useful 4 payments. No inflation hedge. No scarcity. No taxing authority. Just a tool of speculation & greater fools.”
Or it could be that investors don’t trust The Fed or Federal government to act in their best interest.
Here is a crypto investor (in red fez) being lectured by Minneapolis Fed President Neel Kashkari.
There is another Fed Open Market Committee (FOMC) meeting on December 14th and everyone is interested in what The Fed will do. Or how much will The Fed raises rates?
Recent inflation numbers are still terrible (for the US, that is). But slowing, giving Fed officials reason to slow down the pace of rate increases.
But now the Cleveland Fed has introduced a new inflation measure: Indirect Consumer Inflation Expectation index. And unfortunately it shows that consumers expectations for inflation is actually rising rapidly over the past two weeks to over 8%.
I have stopped listening to the various Fed Presidents (like Collins, Bostic and Bullard) babbling about what The Fed will do like so many bobbleheads in a car. I like Fed Funds Futures data. And it is showing a rate increase at the December 14th meeting of 52 basis points (that is, 50 basis points will some investors betting on 75 basis points).
So, consumers think inflation is hotter than the CPI data indicates.
As of today, the US Treasury 10yr-2yr yield curve is the most inverted since 1981 at -70 basis points.
Meanwhile, equity put/call ratio from CBOE spiked yesterday to highest since 1997.
I am disappointed that The New York Times cancelled their $2,400 event to listen to Sam The Sham Bankman-Fried, Vlad “Show my your money!” Zelensky, Larry “The Big Fink” Fink and Janet “We never saw it coming” Yellen. I would have loved to do the New York Times job for them and ask hard questions to Sam The Sham and Zelensky about money laundering.
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 Philadelphia Fed’s Business Outlook plunged to 1-9.40% YoY, the worst since 2012. Notice how the Philly Phed Plunge is related to M2 Money growth YoY.
Privately‐owned housing starts in October were at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 1,425,000. This is 4.2 percent below the revised September estimate of 1,488,000 and is 8.8 percent below the October 2021 rate of 1,563,000. Single‐family housing starts in October were at a rate of 855,000; this is 6.1 percent below the revised September figure of 911,000. The October rate for units in buildings with five units or more was 556,000.
The noticeable trends are the decline in 1-unit detached housing starts relative to 5+ unit (multifamily) start as mortgage rates rise/
Privately‐owned housing units authorized by building permits in October were at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 1,526,000. This is 2.4 percent below the revised September rate of 1,564,000 and is 10.1 percent below the October 2021 rate of 1,698,000. Single‐family authorizations in October were at a rate of 839,000; this is 3.6 percent below the revised September figure of 870,000. Authorizations of units in buildings with five units or more were at a rate of 633,000 in October.
The housing permits chart looks quite similar to the starts chart above. Single-family starts are now lower than before Covid while multifamily permits are still above pre-Covid levels.
Here is a nice chart as well for total housing starts and permits.
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.
Confounded Interest - Anthony B. Sanders 
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