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.
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 Biden Administration is setting all sorts of records. One is the worst inflation rate in 40 years. Another is highest gasoline prices in history (until the latest global slowdown). The list goes on, but here is another one: the US Treasury 10Y-2Y yield curve is now at -72.5 basis points, the more inverted curve since 1981.
This is the US Treasury version of 50 Shades Of Grey.
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.
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.
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%.
Between Biden’s green energy mandates and the spendathon by the Pelosi/Schumer led Keynesians in Congress (or Kongress), we saw a 40-year high in inflation.
But with roaring Bidenflation, we have the S&P 500 index experiencing, in real terms, the worst performance since 1872.
That is, the worst since President Ulysses Grant.
President Biden is dressed in his Mao outfit with Canada’s Justin Trudeau.
And the WEF’s Klaus Schwab.
At least Biden, Trudeau and Schwab are wearing different colored Mao jackets.
Confounded Interest - Anthony B. Sanders 
You must be logged in to post a comment.