Groucho Marx on principles

These are my principles. If you don’t like them I have others.

~ Groucho Marx

(Quoted by John Hathaway at the 56:45 mark on The Grant Williams Podcast, October 28, 2020.)

John Hathaway on QE5

There’s no turning back.  Each iteration of QE has been bigger and the current one – I guess it’s QE5 – it’s $120 billion a month, $4 trillion a year of balance sheet expansion.  And if anyone thinks there isn’t going to be another QE they’re absolutely smoking pot… as we do here in Colorado. 

~ John Hathaway, "Super Terrific Happy Hour Ep. 7 - John Hathaway: Being A Doyen Is A Good Thing, Right?," The Grant Williams Podcast, October 28, 2020

Jack Schwager on contrarian trading based on the word "despite"

One of the traders I interviewed, a fellow by the name of Jason Shapiro, is a real contrarian trader. One of the most useful things he said in that interview was his favorite word is "despite." "If you ever see the market went up today despite this news," he said, "that's a really bullish signal." Because when they can't even even explain why the market - they have to explain it went up despite opposite news, that itself is telling you something.

~ Jack Schwager, "Secrets of the Market Wizards with Jack Schwager," Stansberry Investor Hour, December 3, 2020

Jim Rogers on potential conflict with China

Throughout history, when you had a dominant power who is flat and or declining and another rising power, it has often led to war.  I'm not the first person to figure this out, especially in times when raw materials become scarce; it has nearly always led to war... shooting war.  It's absurd.  Nobody's ever won any of those shooting wars in the end, but that has usually been the way history has usually played itself out.  And I sit here and I say to myself, "This is totally absurd... In fifteen years, everybody's going to be telling 20-year old kids you've got to kill those 20-year old kids because they're evil and vicious." And it's all because guys were making mistakes in 2020, 2021. It's always led to this... It doesn't do any good for anybody in the end, but... I can sit here and say this all day long; it doesn't do any good. I know history. And the problem with history is - the main lesson of history is, nobody's learned the lesson of history.   You and I can sit here and say, "Guys, it's very clear how this ends."  They say, "We're smarter than history."  You go to Washington now, Mr. Trump says, "Who cares about history?  I'm smarter than history.  I don't need history."  Well, maybe he's right, but very few people have been smarter than history and nobody learns the lessons of history.

~ Jim Rogers, "The End Game Ep. 11 - Jim Rogers," The Grant Williams Podcast, 24:30 mark, November 14, 2020

Roger Waters on first playing The Dark Side of the Moon for his wife

When the record was finished I took a reel-to-reel copy home with me and I remember playing it for my wife then, and I remember her bursting into tears when it was finished.  And I thought, "This has obviously struck a chord somewhere," and I was kinda pleased by that.  You know when you've done something, certainly if you create a piece of music, you then hear it with fresh ears when you play it for somebody else.  And at that point I thought to myself, "Wow, this is a pretty complete piece of work," and I had every confidence that people would respond to it.

~ Roger Waters, Pink Floyd bassist, 2006 interview

Kevin Duffy on divisiveness and the state

The state is masterful at creating conflict: left vs. right, rich vs. poor, black vs. white, male vs. female, us vs. them. This is meant to distract us from the real conflict: the state living at the expense of the rest of us, i.e., parasite vs. host.

~ Kevin Duffy

Marc Faber: "The Chinese economy will be the size of Europe and America combined"

If I were an American, I would hold some assets outside America and I would not only listen to the "China bashers," but also try to understand that the Chinese economy will be the size of Europe and America combined...  And whether you like the Chinese or not, and whether you're racist or not, I think that portfolios will have to own some assets in China, whether it's real estate or stocks or bonds.  In all the global indices, China is way underweight.  I have many friends - they invest in China - and they find world class companies.  Nobody can deny that Netease or Alibaba or Tencent are not world class companies.  There are also industrial companies.  There are also beverage companies that are world class. When Grant [Williams] asked the question, "How do you protect yourself?", I think you need an international diversification.  I think China is an option. 

~ Marc Faber, "The End Game Ep. 8 - Dr. Marc Faber," The Grant Williams Podcast, 1:03:50 mark, October 7, 2020

Marc Faber on dishonest central bankers

Everybody applauds the central banks.  Because of course the fund managers, they want the central banks to print money because their fees go up.  They don't want an honest central bank.  They want a dishonest central bank.  At the same time they want dishonest politicians because everybody's dishonest so they can also stay dishonest as fund managers. 

~ Marc Faber, "The End Game Ep. 8 - Dr. Marc Faber," The Grant Williams Podcast, 22:00 mark, October 7, 2020

The Wall Street Journal on two BlackRock executives joining the Biden administration economic team

Wall Street bankers, and in particular those from Goldman Sachs Group Inc., have long held senior positions in the White House.  Under President-elect Joe Biden, such roles are going to executives of BlackRock Inc. 

A former Goldman executive held the Treasury secretary post in three of the last four administrations, but the firm is absent so far from the White House this time.  Instead, two executives who have worked at asset-management giant BlackRock will be the senior Wall Street representatives. 

Mr. Biden is expected this week to name BlackRock’s head of sustainable investing, Brian Deese, to run the National Economic Council, said people familiar with the matter.  Adewale “Wally” Adeyemo, a former chief of staff to BlackRock’s chief executive, was named Tuesday to be the No. 2 at the Treasury Department.

~ Dawn Lim and Gregory Zuckerman, "BlackRock Emerges as Wall Street Player in Biden Administration," The Wall Street Journal, December 1, 2020

Peter Atwater on brain drain into politics as contrary indicator

I think it's really interesting that you're seeing an influx of asset managers, a.k.a.  BlackRock employees into the Biden White House team.  It reminds me, if we go back to the '60s - you had [Robert] McNamara at Ford going into the political space at the top of [the Go-Go '60s].  You've had Gary Cohn and the [investment] banking folks, [Henry] Paulson, [Steve] Mnuchin from the private equity space.  I think it's like hosting the Olympics.  You only host the Olympics at the very top.  You only go into political life at the very top.

~ Peter Atwater, "Super Terrific Happy Hour Ep. 8 - Peter Atwater: Our Sentimental Friend," The Grant Williams Podcast, 56:00 mark, December 13, 2020

Peter Atwater on the everything bubble

Everywhere I look it's mania.  Cryptocurrencies, in bonds, sovereign debt in Europe... you just go one category after another and go "Is nothing sane?"

~ Peter Atwater, "Super Terrific Happy Hour Ep. 8 - Peter Atwater: Our Sentimental Friend," The Grant Williams Podcast, 32:00 mark, December 13, 2020

Helen Buyniski on corporate wokeness in 2020

Corporations went headlong into performative wokeness this year, falling over themselves to embody the spirit of diversity and inclusion.  They mostly succeeded in alienating customers and bringing down torrents of mockery instead.

~ Helen Buyniski, RT News, "RT’s The Wokies: Top 10 CORPORATE panderers who plumbed new depths in 2020," LewRockwell.com, December 28, 2020

Smedley Butler: "War is a racket"

War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives. 

A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small “inside group” group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes. 

In the World War [1] a mere handful garnered the profits of the conflict. At least 21,000 new millionaires and billionaires were made in the United States during the World War. That many admitted their huge blood gains in their income tax returns. How many other war millionaires falsified their tax returns no one knows.

~ Smedley Butler, War is a Racket

Mike Green on how passive investing is distorting capital allocation

That is actually a very important role: taking money from bad companies and giving it to good companies is a critical role in the capitalist system, effectively allowing those who are efficient and intelligent allocators of capital, to give money to management teams that have good prospects in terms of generating future wealth.  What we've created now is a distortion that's a funhouse mirror effect, right?  Where we've presumed everyone is doing this for us where it is a fool's game to do it for ourselves.

~ Mike Green, "Why The Rise of Passive Investing Might Be Distorting The Market," Odd Lots podcast with Joe Weisenthal and Tracy Alloway, January 23, 2020

Fred Hickey: "It might be that the growth possibilities for these FAANG stocks are over"

It might be that the growth possibilities for these FAANG stocks are over.  They're too high, the regulators have them in their sights, they might get broken up.  Google's growth doesn't come from search, it comes from YouTube.  Facebook's growth doesn't come from Facebook, it comes from WhatsApp and those kind of things.  And if they can't acquire, and you just have a platform that they have to acquire and grow, then the growth rate goes away, and people over time become less enamored with them.

~ Fred Hickey, "The End Game Ep. 12 - Fred Hickey," The Grant Williams Podcast, December 1, 2020

Albert Einstein on authority

Blind belief in authority is the greatest enemy of truth.

~ Albert Einstein

Albert Einstein
1979

Jim Grant on ESG

ESG is a bull-market luxury.  In a bear market, people I think are much more concerned about survival than they are about making a political statement.

~ Jim Grant, "Living Economic History: Q&A with Jim Grant," The Coffee Can Portfolio, December 10, 2020

Albert Einstein on revenge

Weak people revenge.  Strong people forgive.  Intelligent people ignore.

~ Albert Einstein

Mike Green on evolution, fragility and survival of the least fit

People think about evolution as progress.  Evolution's not progress.  Evolution is fitness within an environment.  And it actually breeds its own fragility, right?  If I'm a finch who happens to inhabit the Galapagos Islands and nobody has a beak that's seven inches long that can reach into a particular pine cone, then I can grow a beak that is first 1 1/2", then 2", then 3", and eventually it's 7"; it provides a huge advantage.  But if that environment changes, a 7" beak becomes an extraordinary disadvantage and I go extinct almost immediately.

What we have done is create a system that is so stable and where the focus itself becomes stability -  preserving the status quo - that we've created all the problems of specialization and fragility and inequality associated with it, where very few members of our society control so much of the resources and are actually in a position to defend those resources...  That sort of environment needs to be disrupted.

~ Mike Green, "The End Game Ep. 3," The Grant Williams Podcast, 1:25:35 mark

Carroll Quigley on the globalism movement

There does exist, and has existed for a generation, an international Anglophile network which operates to some extent, in the way the radical right believes the Communists act.  In fact, this network, which we may identify as the Round Table Groups, has no aversion to cooperating with the Communists, or any other groups, and frequently does so.  I know of the operations of this network because I have studied it for twenty years and was permitted for two years, in the early 1960’s to examine its papers and secret records. 

I have no aversion to it or to most of its aims and have, for much of my life, been close to it and many of its instruments.  I have objected, both in the past and recently, to a few of its policies (notably to its belief that England was an Atlantic rather than a European power and must be allied, or even federated, with the United States and must remain isolated from Europe), but in general my chief difference of opinion is that it wishes to remain unknown, and I believe its role in history is significant enough to be known.

~ Carroll Quigley, Tragedy and Hope

Albert Einstein on solving problems

If I had an hour to solve a problem, I'd spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem, and 5 minutes thinking about solutions. 

~ Albert Einstein

Almost Daily Grant's on the year in credit

A year to remember in credit, as the March panic has quickly given way to something resembling an opposing extreme.  Last week, the Goldman Sachs Financial Conditions Index reached its most accommodative level on record going back to 1990, while total corporate bond issuance foots to a record $2.5 trillion for the year according to Bank of America.  Thanks to that borrowing spree, gross leverage among investment grade and junk borrowers has reached record highs near four and six times Ebitda, respectively, the Financial Times reports today. 

Needless to say, the Federal Reserve’s March 23 announcement that it would, for the first time, directly purchase investment-grade corporate debt, loomed large in the bond market’s dramatic turnaround. Indeed, Jonny Fine, U.S. head of debt syndicate at Goldman Sachs, describes those interventions to the FT as: “the most important piece of central bank policymaking I have seen in my career.”

~ Almost Daily Grant's, December 22, 2020

Kevin Duffy explains libertarianism

The core principle of libertarianism is the non-aggression principle (NAP). The initiation of violence should not be tolerated. Proportional violence in self-defense, including protecting one’s property is permitted. Hiring agents (through peaceful, voluntary exchange) to defend one’s life, liberty and property is also consistent. 

Government, because it resorts to initiating violence, is inconsistent with NAP. This even applies to agents of self-defense (e.g., military, police, courts) because they are funded coercively. 

To the extent the left and right accept government intervention, they reject libertarian principles. They are two sides of the same interventionist coin and have much more in common than they realize. 

Libertarianism is value-agnostic and judges the morality of means employed. Every libertarian, of course, has their own unique set of values, as do all of us. I’m guessing nearly all believe moral means have the best chance of achieving those values. Interventionism, on the other hand, is ends-focused. The ends justify the means. Proponents believe their values have the best chance of being achieved through State coercion. 

Libertarians believe immoral means lead to trouble. Since most people are wired for intervention, any crisis is typically blamed on freedom (e.g. the free market, or capitalism) which brings about cries for even more intervention.

~ Kevin Duffy, "What are the basic principles of libertarianism?," Quora, December 17, 2020

Jordan Peterson on environmentalism

This is also the problem I have with much of the environmentalist movement: There is a powerful stream of anti-human sentiment that motivates it, and masquerading under the guise of virtue on a planetary scale.

~ Jordan Peterson, interview with Helen Lewis of British GQ, 1:18:25 mark, October 30, 2018

Bob Farrell on crowd behavior

When all the experts and forecasts agree, something else is going to happen.

~ Bob Farrell

John Stuart Mill on paternalistic government

The worth of the State, in the long run, is the worth of the individuals composing it; and a State which postpones the interest of their mental expansion and elevation to a little more of administrative skill, or of that semblance of it which practice gives in the details of business; a State which dwarfs its men, in order that they may be more docile instruments in its hands even for beneficial purposes - will find that with small men no great thing can really be accomplished; and that the perfection of machinery to which it has sacrificed everything will in the end avail it nothing, for want of the vital power which, in order that the machine might work more smoothly, it has preferred to banish.

~ John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, p. 187

Kevin Duffy on the cyclical nature of the libertarian movement

Before getting too down on the libertarian movement, it helps to look at where we are in the cycle.  Ron Paul's popularity peaked around 2008-10 alongside the Great Financial Crisis.  12 years of bull markets and the greatest financial bubble in history later, it's incredible the movement even has a pulse. 

The crowd is completely detached from reality.  Signs in the financial markets include Tesla exceeding Berkshire Hathaway in market cap, Robinhood, day trading, option buying, SPACs, and the hottest IPO market since 2000.  The Fed can do no wrong.  No surprise, a parallel mania is taking place with Covid and worship of the medical authorities.  There is no way 2020 madness happens in a bear market.  These bubbles will burst as they always do.  Our job is to poke fun at them, not to convince people.  Sure, you might be able to convince a few, but the vast majority are in la la land.  Only when the bubble bursts will people be desperate for answers and ready to consider the non-interventionist point of view. 

For promoters of liberty, today's famine is tomorrow's feast.

~ Kevin Duffy, comment on The Tom Woods Show podcast, December 20, 2020

Christopher Davis on volatility and investing

Volatility minus emotion equals opportunity.

~ Christopher Davis, "A Lesson in 'Value vs. Price'," Stansberry Investor Hour, December 17, 2020

John Stuart Mill on public schooling

A general State education is a mere contrivance for moulding people to be exactly like one another; and as the mould in which it casts them is that which pleases the predominant power in the government - whether this be a monarch, priesthood, an aristocracy, or the majority of the existing generation - in proportion as it is efficient and successful, it establishes a despotism over the mind, leading by natural tendency to one over the body.

~ John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, p. 177

Anti-federalist (under the pseudonym "Brutus") opposed ratifying the Constitution

… when the people once part with power, they can seldom or never resume it again but by force. 

~ Brutus No. 1, Anti-federalist Papers

Dwight D. Eisenhower shows his admiration for General Robert E. Lee

General Robert E. Lee was… one of the supremely gifted men produced by our Nation.  He believed unswervingly in the Constitutional validity of his cause which until 1865 was still an arguable question in America; he was a poised and inspiring leader, true to the high trust reposed in him by millions of his fellow citizens; he was thoughtful yet demanding of his officers and men, forbearing with captured enemies but ingenious, unrelenting and personally courageous in battle, and never disheartened by a reverse or obstacle.  Through all his many trials, he remained selfless almost to a fault and unfailing in his faith in God.  Taken altogether, he was noble as a leader and as a man, and unsullied as I read the pages of our history. 

From deep conviction, I simply say this: a nation of men of Lee’s calibre would be unconquerable in spirit and soul.  Indeed, to the degree that present-day American youth will strive to emulate his rare qualities, including his devotion to this land as revealed in his painstaking efforts to help heal the Nation’s wounds once the bitter struggle was over, we, in our own time of danger in a divided world, will be strengthened and our love of freedom sustained. 

Such are the reasons that I proudly display the picture of this great American on my office wall.

~ Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1960

(As quoted by Pat Buchanan, "After Lee, It's Lincoln's Turn," December 18, 2020.)

Confederate Generals Lee and Jackson
1936-1937

Mark Twain on the Mississippi River's influence on his writing

The face of the water, in time, became a wonderful book- a book that was a dead language to the uneducated passenger, but which told its mind to me without reserve, delivering its most cherished secrets as clearly as if it uttered them with a voice. And it was not a book to be read once and thrown aside, for it had a new story to tell every day.

~ Mark Twain

Mississippi River Bridge
1898

Pat Buchanan on Lincoln's crimes against native Americans

A renaming committee of the San Francisco school district wants the Great Emancipator’s name removed from Lincoln High School for crimes against Native Americans. 

Our 16th president ordered the Navajo tribe off their Arizona lands into New Mexico, resulting in a forced march of 450 miles. He approved the hanging of 38 Dakota Indians who had fought in the Dakota War in Minnesota in 1862, the largest mass execution in U.S. history. 

Lincoln’s Homestead and Pacific Railway acts led to the loss of large swaths of tribal lands.

~ Patrick Buchanan, "After Lee, It's Lincoln's Turn," LewRockwell.com, December 18, 2020

Indian Hunting Buffalo
1898

Tom Woods on the use of hand sanitizer

You know all that mad disinfecting everyone has been doing?  You'll never guess. It's pointless. 

Even the Washington Post, in an article last week called "We Are Over-Cleaning in Response to COVID-19," wrote: "We don't have a single documented case of COVID-19 transmission from surfaces.  Not one. So why, then, are we spending a small fortune to deep-clean our offices, schools, subways, and buses?"  Meanwhile, though, lots of restaurants are still using disposable menus.  Now that's what you call not following the science. 

And now here's the problem.  We know surfaces aren't the issue, and that we're wasting enormous time and resources pointlessly deep-cleaning.  The reason we're still doing it is that the general public is still in panic mode, even after all we now know.  And because the public, convinced it's "listening to the science," is in fact not following the science at all.  So when you endure some pointless practice here and there, whose only effect is to cause you pain or at least serious inconvenience, it's very often not because a private entity seriously wants to engage in it.  It's because they have to cater to hysterics who don't know anything.  

This isn't just a matter of the government.  It's public opinion that's making the craziness possible.

~ Tom Woods, December 16, 2020

Preston Athey on the value of technical analysis

My favorite chart is generally the chart that makes everyone else ill.

~ Preston Athey, portfolio manager, T. Rowe Price Small Cap Value Fund

Jon Miltimore on news that Goldman Sachs is considering moving its HQ to Florida

On Sunday, news broke that the multinational financial services company Goldman Sachs, one of the largest companies in the US, is considering a plan to move its headquarters to the South. 

[...]

Goldman’s announcement could not come at a worse time for New York City, which currently “has the most office space available since the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attack,” according to Bloomberg. Goldman Sachs has an estimated market value of $71 billion and employs more than 38,000 people worldwide.

[...]

The reality is the coronavirus exacerbated New York’s economic plight, but it’s not the source of it. The city’s fundamental problem is an open hostility to markets and freedom. From policies such as universal pre-K and mandated paid sick leave to the city’s $15 minimum wage, rent-controlled housing, and oppressive tax climate, New York’s political class has shown a disdain for capitalism, private property, and business concerns, and a troubling affinity for central planning.

[...]

A departure from Goldman Sachs would signal that New York City’s days as the financial capital of the world are over. In some ways, the only surprise is that it took so long.

~ Jon Miltimore, "Goldman Sachs Eyes Florida Exit as Financial Exodus from New York Continues," FEE.org, December 8, 2020

John Del Vecchio and Brad Lamensdorf on unprofitable companies outperforming the market in 2020

The stock market remains on fire...  We are now in full pause mode.  One of the most worrisome factors is the quality of the rally recently.  The less profit a company makes and the more cash it burns, the better is does.  Stocks losing money and burning cash are up over 40% year to date.  Meanwhile, profitable, cash generating companies are under-performing the Russell 3000 benchmark.  We know from our own testing that while money losing, cash burning companies can have periods of big runs, it’s not a sustainable area of the market for investment.

~ John Del Vecchio and Brad Lamensdorf, "Profits? We Don't Need No Stinkin' Profits!," LMTR.com, December 14, 2020

Karen DeCoster Campbell on how Aldous Huxley anticipated the 2020 loss of liberty 59 years ago

Aldous Huxley, who authored "Brave New World" in 1931, said this in a 1961 speech: 

There will be, in the next generation or so, a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them, but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda or brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods. And this seems to be the final revolution.

(Aldous Huxley, Tavistock Group, California Medical School, 1961) 

Huxley referred to the tyrants of the future as "social engineers" and he warned that advanced technology would be used for social conditioning and controlling human behavior. He also warned us about the kind of people who would eagerly adopt the mentality of "Give me television and hamburgers, but don’t bother me with the responsibilities of liberty."

That precisely describes what we are witnessing today, especially under the pretense of so-called "unselfish, responsible, adult-in-the-room" Democrats.  Nothing is less "adult in the room" than these spineless people who willingly turn themselves over to their Overlords and completely trash 250 years of liberty in the process.

~ Karen DeCoster Campbell, Facebook post, December 15, 2020

Jeffrey Tucker: "Fauci is a performance artist"

Fauci is a performance artist who wakes up in the morning and tries to more than anything else figure out his media gigs.  He doesn't look at the science...  He knows his talking points and he clearly believes in the noble lie, as he himself admitted on the mask [issue].  And he's flip flopped on every issue from schools to PCR testing to travel restrictions to business closures and so on.  This man will say anything.  He is impressed with himself as a performance artist; that's what he is...  His main concern is "what am I supposed to say today to achieve my political goals and please my benefactors?"...  This is the most untrustworthy intellectual in the 21st century as far as I'm concerned.

~ Jeffrey Tucker, "Fauci Slammed by Nobel Prize Winner with Jeffrey Tucker," OAN via YouTube, December 14, 2020

Jim Doughan on selecting an alternative investment manager

Perhaps instead of looking for the best fishermen we should instead focus on finding fishermen that work in reliably profitable waters.  Waters that they know well.  Good fishing holes. 

There are many things that can make a fishing hole a good one.  It can be hidden so competitors can’t find it and it doesn’t get fished out.  It can be remote and hard to get there and back.  It can be too small for the big boats to get to, or too far out to sea for all but the most seaworthy vessels.  Perhaps one needs special equipment, training or licensing to safely work there.  Maybe like Maine lobstermen the fisherman can get a right to exclude others from their fishing areas.  There are a multitude of potential explanations.

~ Jim Doughan, Chief Investment Officer, Accord Family Office, "Fishing Holes: A metaphor for understanding the economic rationale for claims of edge," Context 365, November 2, 2020

Jim Grant compares medical authorities to economic authorities

The medical authorities remind me of the economic authorities.  Both pretend to draw a bead on the future. Let’s compare them both to the meteorological authorities.  The National Weather Service spends over a billion dollars a year and takes tens of millions, if not billions, of discrete observations of wind, weather, tide, temperature, what have you.  But notice the 5 and 10 day forecasts on your trusty iPhone are ever changing.  This is the weather.  Temperature gradients don’t have feelings, they don’t get jealous of the millionaire next door, they don’t watch CNBC, yet our forecasting ability goes out maximum 10 days. Even so, the economists think nothing of calling next year’s GDP.

~ Jim Grant, "Living Economic History: Q&A with Jim Grant, The Coffee Can Portfolio, December 10, 2020

Ed Yardeni puts Tesla valuation in perspective

Christmas is coming early for Tesla founder Elon Musk.  He just leapfrogged Bill Gates to become the second-richest person in the world.  Musk's net worth has risen over $100 billion to 2020 alone. Santa's little helper in this case is Standard & Poor's, which announced on Nov. 16 that Tesla will be joining the S&P 500 Index on Dec. 21.  The stock is up 46.8% in the 13 trading days since then through last Friday's close, and 616% year to date. It's having its very own Santa Claus rally.  Tesla is now the sixth-largest publicly traded U.S. company, with a market capitalization of $568 billion.  It's almost wotht more than the entire S&P 500 energy sector!  Tesla currently trades at forward price/earnings and price/sales of 153.6 and 12.5 respectively. 

Are we partying like it's 1999 all over again?  Tesla may be doing just that. In 1999, Yahoo! surged 64% in the 5 trading days between the announcement that it would be added to the S&P 500 on Nov. 30 and its inclusion after the close of trading on Dec. 7.  Yahoo! was eventually bought by Verizon Communications (VZ) in 2017 at a price approximately 75% lower than where the shares traded the day it was announced that the company would join the S&P 500.

~ Ed Yardeni, Morning Briefing, Yardeni Research, December 8, 2020

Lord Liverpool on paper money

The tendency of an inconvertible paper currency is to create fictitious wealth - bubbles - which, by their bursting, create inconvenience. 

~ Lord Liverpool, 1818

(This comment was made "on the eve of Britain's returning to the gold standard after the paper money interlude of the Napoleonic wars," according to Jim Grant.  Grant cited this quote during his podcast on September 26, 2020.)

Evan Lorenz on the use of leveraged loans to pay dividends to private equity firms

So far this month, 24% of all leveraged loans have been used to fund dividends as private equity sponsors. So basically companies piling on debt just to pay private equity dividends in the midst of the sharpest, fastest recession in U.S. history.

~ Evan Lorenz, Grant's podcast, September 26, 2020

Francis Menton on progressivism and reality

To be a woke progressive the first requirement is that you must refuse to acknowledge the real world as it exists.  You must pretend that the world is something else, something immediately transformable into a fantasy of perfection through coercive collective action.  You also must firmly close your eyes to any facts or evidence that might contradict such progressive fantasy, and indeed you must demand that any such facts or evidence be suppressed and never mentioned.

~ Francis Menton, The Essence Of Progressivism Is Refusal To Deal With Reality, Manhattan Contrarian, December 9, 2020

MarketWatch.com on the Airbnb IPO

The San Francisco company, which was founded in 2008 and has become a platform for people to rent out their homes all over the world, started the day having raised at least $3.5 billion at a valuation of more than $40 billion. By the end of trading, Airbnb’s market capitalization was roughly $86.5 billion, slightly higher than the market cap of Booking Holdings Inc., a larger and more established online-travel company. Other valuation methods put the company’s worth at more than $100 billion, which would be roughly the same as the combined market caps of Booking plus another rival, Expedia Group Inc.

~ MarketWatch.com, "Airbnb stock more than doubles after IPO, making it worth more than larger rival Booking," December 10, 2020

Ed Bugos and the end days for American empire

Locally we have the Cultural Marxists pushing to erase the conservative cultures of the West and institute progressive programs similar to what Mao did in China for his 5 year plan, and internationally we have the globalists pushing for a new world order.  Both are effectively exploiting the end days for empire and the demise of the current financial/monetary system.

~ Ed Bugos, private note, December 10, 2020

Dan Gertner on working for Jim Grant

When you’re talking to Jim, you can see his eyes darting and almost literally see the wheels turning.

~ Dan Gertner, "Jim Grant Is a Wall Street Cult Hero. Does It Matter If He's Often Wrong?," Institutional Investor, by Michelle Celarier, September 18, 2019

Kevin Duffy on marriage

Is marriage an impulse purchase?

~ Kevin Duffy

William Makepeace Thackeray on writing

There are thousands of thoughts lying within a man that he does not know till he takes up the pan and writes.

~ William Makepeace Thackeray