Crazytown!

Guest Post by Rudy Havenstein

Waiting for something to happen​

Look at this TBTF crap from CNBS:

There is no Constitutional right that you make money in stocks. ​

Sometimes – and I know this is exceedingly rare – sometimes stocks go…down.

Who do you think you are, Lloyd Blankfein or John Mack??

Suck it up & don’t expect others to bail you out.​

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Easy come, easy go.​

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“Some of the things I’ve seen last night are a lot of people who got it wrong for 10 years interviewing a lot of people who got it wrong for 10 years. It’s like hello, you should be interviewing people that got it right.”

Michael Yon on the election post-mortems

The GOP has elected John Thune to be Senate Minority Leader.​

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Nowhere in this article is the Federal Reserve’s massive role in spiking wealth inequality mentioned.

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Have you noticed that they now often report CPI/PPI/PCE as month over month, and many headlines don’t mention year over year at all?​

This is intentional.​

What happened in 1971?

There was no October 2025 fake government inflation number, so obviously no way – even using NASA’s top scientists – to calculate YOY.​

Let’s see…

0.4% in a month…if I annualize that I get…

400% inflation! Or something.

Still way above target after almost 6 years.​

Wonder if this is related to the cost of living…​

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“Since December, M2’s grown at a 6.5%…and ODL…it’s growing at almost 8%…They’re saying they’re committed to inflation, but money supply growth is still accelerating and bank loans are exploding, and the Federal Reserve is waiting for something else to happen.”

Lacy Hunt

PPI came in at 6.5% YOY?​

Great quarter, guys! ​

Number Go UP!​

Core CPI

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“We’re running a six and change percent fiscal deficit in the U.S. with a four one unemployment rate. And, you know, GDP is pretty strong. This is crazy town.”​

Harley Bassman

Governments “love inflation. Inflation is the silent tax on the middle class, right?”​

This Isn’t Fred Hickey’s First Rodeo​

Q: “Not sure I understand why you would reduce puts on AAPL (can understand taking profits on AI related.) While memory price declines (later) may restore some gross margin, hard to see how AAPL does not struggle given forecast, price points, lack of revenue growth, and valuation.”

Fred Hickey:

I expect this bear market to be a drawn-out process (I could be wrong on this). In 2000, the bubbleheads gave up only grudgingly and kept rotating into so-called “safe havens.” After the dot.coms blew up first in March, they rotated into PC-related stocks such as Intel & then when that cratered in the Fall of 2020, they rotated into the Ciscos, EMCs & Suns (they collapsed later). Investors have been trained to “buy the dip” – which has seemed to be a successful strategy (until it doesn’t work). Investors still care nothing about valuations. That’s why the P/E ratios of AAPL, COST, & WMT & other “safe havens” remain in the stratosphere. They’re supposedly “safe.” But they’re not.

You’re right. Apple is a hot mess. Apple guided lower with their Q2 report and the stock fell hard. Then the boys rallied it to a record high. Apple guided lower again with their Q3 report this week, the stock initially fell hard again (I sold most of my puts) and then rallied to another record high. I expect they’ll guide lower in late January too. As we get closer to that point, and we get past a likely seasonal rally around the upcoming holidays (& also because the techs may be oversold currently), I plan to increase my puts against AAPL again. I’ve kept some of my longer-term AAPL puts (in case I’m wrong about this scenario). But inevitably, AAPL is going a lot lower. It’s just a matter of timing.

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Back in 2002, Sun Microsystems CEO Scott McNealy explained why paying 10x sales was (fundamentally) nuts. I did a free FinViz screen and I saw 91 companies with over a $10 Billion market cap selling for more than that.

Of companies over $200 Billion, there’s 18:




Ed Zitron pointing out that this is not about Jensen Huang’s girlfriends:

“It’s about the very obvious, extremely large illegal smuggling ring that has led to billions of dollars worth of chips getting to China.”​

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Mind the Gap!



CSCO

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“Today, several risks – overvaluation, high debt, cash flow shortfalls, volatility, rising interest rates, interconnections, financial games, poor safeguards – are creating the perfect conditions for a financial crash.”​

Satyajit Das

White House Warns Conservative Groups It Is ‘Monitoring’ Their Statements​

The White House Office of Public Liaison, which works with outside groups, sent a memo to more than 3,000 conservative organizations that laid out a list of Trump’s accomplishments in office and pledged to prevent newly ascendant Democrats from reversing them. The memo concluded with a sentence that was highlighted in yellow.

“As always, we are monitoring statements, press releases, and media engagements from your organizations,” the memo said…Asked for comment, a White House spokeswoman said the email wasn’t a threat.

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“It’s the prices. Everybody wants to point to rates, but it’s about the prices.”

Melody Wright

Melody Wright​

“When I got home from my first trip in 2023, I was in complete shock. I could not stop asking myself what the heck was happening and why. I very much feel that way again. No one has provided a real roadmap for the what and why of the AI buildout. We hear things about an arms race with China, etc. but I don’t think those arguments hold up when you look at the scale of what’s happening out there. Instead, it feels like we are building our own roads to nowhere – first in residential and now in nonresidential.”

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For the wealthiest and most powerful people in this country, datacenters are the #1 priority.​

Datacenters aren’t among the top 1,000 priorities of almost everyone else, unless it’s to oppose them. Maybe that partly helps explain the election.​

“I’m honestly honestly tired of hearing that word, datacenter. It’s just so exhausting. They should rename it “natural-resource guzzling monster.”

Laks Ganapathi, Unicus

More Laks​

“The market says, “Ooh, look, there are no repos, so we must be doing fine.” No, there are bunch of cars that are piling up somewhere and nobody wants to touch it, because if the bank takes the repo, they have to show it in their books. Now, what happens if you show it in your book? If you show it in your book, then you have to increase your provisions for credit losses or you have to take a charge off. Okay? So, what do you do? We were told it’s a denominator game, so when things go bad – whether it’s commercial real estate or automobiles – you have to increase the originations. So the more originations you increase, the lesser the default looks, and it doesn’t look that bad.

So you end up pushing Vantage score instead of FICO, and you give loans to everybody and anyone who has a heartbeat, and extend it as much as you can. You don’t need to show the provisions. You can reduce the provisions for credit losses. Your earnings go up. You don’t need to take the charge offs. You look great. There are no repos on the book. It’s fine.”

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Dan Oliver:

“As a reminder, the PE industry now controls $1.5 trillion of life insurance industry balance sheet and has so far shoveled $849 billion of the $2 trillion private credit market on to unsuspecting policy holders. And the PE market is frozen: the Wall Street Journal estimates that there was $3.91 trillion of portfolio companies stuck on PE balance sheets as of September 2025. Major investors agree to extend the PE funds because institutions do not want the investments marked to market at valuations that would look awkward on their own balance sheets.”

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There are about $2.3 trillion in multifamily commercial real estate (CRE) loans out there, backed by buildings with rental apartments. The US government, via Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, holds about $1.2 trillion of that. Fannie and Freddie have become very aggressive multifamily CRE lenders. So, dear taxpayer, you’re on the hook for about half of the multifamily CRE debt.

The rest is held around the globe by banks, insurance companies, real estate funds, alternative asset managers – a melted-down mortgage just hit Bridge Investment Group, a unit of PE giant Apollo (more on that in a moment) – holders of Commercial Mortgage-Backed Securities (CMBS) and Collateralized Loan Obligations (CLOs).

All of them have gotten hit by melted-down mortgages as the higher interest rates make it just about impossible to refinance the balloon payments when they come due on fixed-rate loans, or even make interest payments on variable-rate loans pegged to SOFR, which jumped when the Fed started hiking its policy rates. The result has been wave after wave of multifamily defaults, and it keeps getting worse.

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Starwood Property Trust Reports $390M Q3 Loss, but Sternlicht Remains Resolute​

“Starwood’s net income declined sharply for the second quarter in a row, fueled by a $336.6 million credit loss provision”

Now I know why Barry was on CNBC the other day crying for lower rates. CNBC is where billionaires go when they need a bailout.​

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Doug Smith from Castle Rock Capital Funding​

There’s “a fund that is currently lending – they do development for small builders, bigger investors that want to do town homes development, ground-up construction, that type of thing – and as I was looking at the resumes of the people that were in charge of this $4 billion fund, not a one of them had a credit background. It was all real estate or construction. Great backgrounds, don’t get me wrong, but as I was sitting in on a conference call that I was invited to, I’m like, God, these people do not know credit. They don’t understand how the loans that they’re making are just going to explode, and they can’t figure that out. They’re getting super aggressive on the loan to values. Their margins are compressing and it’s just going to end poorly for them.”

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Steve Eisman​

• “Incentives trump ethics every time.”
• “You could own the S&P and think you’re diversified, but you’re not diversified because it’s really just one trade right now.”
  
  
  

“When major major institutions like the sovereign wealth fund of Norway need to park money for five years, they buy U.S. treasuries because that’s the most liquid, safest market in the world. If there was an alternative to treasuries, I would take the deficit arguments much more seriously.

Now in in support of the deficit arguments, 10, 15 years ago, the percentage of buyers of treasuries who were what you would call central banks, entities that were price-insensitive, was 70% of the treasury market. Today it’s down to 40%, but it’s still 40%.

You know, this is the difference between us and France? We have a $40 trillion market. France has a $4 trillion sovereign debt market. And nobody on planet Earth needs to own French sovereign bonds. That’s the French problem. People do need to own U.S. treasuries. So I do I worry about it? Yeah, I worry about it. Do I lose sleep over it? Not even one evening.”


Q: Is there any consideration in your view to looking outside of the United States for potential investment opportunities?

Eisman: Never. Absolutely never.




Cute faces like Muse Charm are a Trojan horse for exploitative AI tech

Companies developing AI know that predators, stalkers and abusers will look for ways to exploit their technology…

There’s a reason Big Tech sells AI with cute mascots and heartwarming commercials about parents, children and the small joys of everyday life. It’s easier to convince people to hand over their private information when the technology asking for it looks like a helpful friend.

But behind the friendly branding are extraordinarily powerful systems with access to increasingly intimate details of our lives.

A monster is still a monster, even when it’s been carefully designed to make us forget what it’s capable of.

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“Shall Congress take from Government and the people all power to issue and regulate the quantity of the public currency and grant it unreservedly…to a private corporation controlled by the big banks owned by Wall Street?​

Shall it by law create and turn loose…a huge incorporated central money trust in private hands to monopolize and control without any effective regulation or restraint the country’s entire supply of money and bank credit?”​

Alfred Owen Crozier, 1912







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Here’s how everyone voted.​

Thomas Massie’s resolution to impeach Pete Hegseth failed in the House 211-204, after 11 Democrats failed to show up for the vote.

If those 11 Democrats had showed up, Hegseth would have been impeached 215-211.

Nancy Pelosi (CA-11)
Haley Stevens (MI-11)
Julia Brownley (CA-26)
Lou Correa (CA-46)
Laura Gillen (NY-4)
Steven Horsford (NV-4)
Jonathan Jackson (IL-1)
Brittany Pettersen (CO-7)
Melanie Stansbury (NM-1)
Marilyn Strickland (WA-10)
Frederica Wilson (FL-24)​

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Joe Kent on who “they” are: “We got a glimpse of it with the Epstein files” ​

• “It was a high-profile political assassination. If you just want to kill somebody, there’s a bunch of ways to kill them. You assassinate people in public for a reason. Charlie Kirk was very much against the the Iran war, and in many cases, on on the things that President Trump seems to have changed his mind on or done a reversal on, Charlie was somebody who had enough gravitas with the President that he could walk into the Oval Office.”
• “I think that [the Iranians] are keeping their general doctrine of proportional response, but also them really wanting to keep that kind of moral high ground, especially because we’ve conducted two different sneak attacks against them during negotiations. We’ve hit a lot of civilian infrastructure over there. We tragically struck the girls school that killed 160 school girls. The world sees this, and I think if you look at the way the world is reacting to Iran, you wouldn’t really think that Iran was at war with the world’s sole superpower that most countries do trade with. Most countries are still dealing with Iran.”
• “The Iranians have been pretty clear that they want us to get back into the seven conditions of the MOU, and they’re not going to negotiate on the nuclear issue until those seven conditions are met. Those seven conditions are pretty bold, but we did sign on to it, and then we broke it. So I don’t see us getting back into the MOU, and I don’t see the Iranians letting us skate on that either. I think we fail to realize just how radicalized and galvanized the Iranians are right now because of all the civilian casualties and the blood that’s been spilled, the fact we killed their supreme leader, members of his family. I don’t think Iranian negotiators right now can make very many concessions to us because they probably fear getting hung from a lamp pole back home because their people are like, “No, we’ve we’re the ones that have been aggrieved here. We we’ve been attacked twice during negotiations, and if you don’t actually push back on these guys, then they’re going to keep coming for us.” So, I think that makes negotiations really, really challenging.”
• “The Israelis have used their access to our members of the House and the Senate to get basically a merger. It’s the easiest way to put it. It’s not a merger in the sense that Israeli commanders are going to be commanding American troops, but we’re basically giving by the National Defense Authorization Act, we’re giving the Israelis access to some of our most sensitive capabilities in research and development, quantum AI, ballistic missiles, etc. And so the Israelis are going to get way more from that in the long run than they will from any kind of aid package that we give them. The same thing’s happening on the intel side in the Intelligence Authorization Act. There’s a provision that’s going to basically give Mossad access to the Central Intelligence Agency and other parts of the US intelligence community as well. And that’s get codified into law. So the Israelis are kind of like one step ahead of us in terms of public sentiment here. They’re not going to have to ask for aid money anymore. They’re basically just part of our system, baked into the cake.”
• “The Israelis have been able to interject their intelligence into our system because of the personal relationships they have with people like Marco Rubio.”
• “At some point, when they need a fall guy for the war, it’s going to be it’s going to be Hegseth. I personally think the President’s entire national security team needs to be removed because of the war. However, to put all the blame on the Secretary of War – I don’t think that’s right, because he has been the one who’s been executing the policies that were dictated to him. The people who allowed the bad intelligence, the fake intelligence that got us in this war – that was wrong about everything, and everyone can see it now. They’re the ones that should go first. Rubio and Ratcliffe. The head of the CIA, and the National Security Advisor and Secretary of State. They are the ones who allowed the Israel lobby and Mossad to come in and circumvent the USIC.”
• “I’m frustrated that this administration went the way that it did. We had so much potential to do so much good for the American people. I frankly felt that I had no other choice. Number one, for me, it was a moral decision to leave. And I’m not trying to be holier than thou and say that I’m some guy who can’t be involved in something I disagree with. However, I spent the majority of my young life overseas fighting in these wars. I realized on about my third deployment that we were lied to get into the Iraq war. And I was very frustrated that people like Colin Powell, people that were in positions of responsibility and authority, who had the experience from Vietnam, that they allowed us to get sucked into another quagmire based off lies. And I had told myself a long time ago that if I was ever in a position of power to prevent the next generation of young men, young women from going off and fighting and dying in a war that was not in our national interest, that I would actually do something about it. I wouldn’t be a guy like Colin Powell that knew better, but went along with it anyways because it was better for my career or whatever. So because of that I knew I had to leave.”
• “This war in Iran I do think will inspire more homegrown terrorists here to conduct terrorist attacks. We already saw that with the carnage coming out of Gaza, because a lot of that carnage was put onto social media. It did serve as a lightning rod for people to be self-radicalized and do terrorist attacks here.”

Recommended viewing.

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Jared Kushner​

Kushner’s apparent betrayal of the public trust, however, went further than his failure to disclose the secret Alpha account in the UAE or the Beta account in Israel. By giving him access to roughly $2 billion, regardless of how the money was used, MBZ and MBS were paying for his influence within the US government. Any efforts he made to shape US policy that came from a foreign government that had provided him with money would make him an agent of a foreign power. US law requires citizens who lobby on behalf of a foreign power to declare themselves and the country they are working on behalf of to the Justice Department.

One former prosecutor who worked on the Mueller investigation said that if Kushner promised anything to MBZ and MBS in return for the money they offered him—even if it was just speaking to his father-in-law—he may have violated federal bribery laws, as well as the foreign agent statute.

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“Consider, for example, the Fed’s enormous purchases of Treasuries…It was, in fact, a backdoor bailout of highly leveraged hedge funds”​

Bill Dudley, 2020

November 2003​

Late 1999​

Just something I came across, since I’d looked into this topic a little here…

Philadelphia Inquirer
February 5, 1982
By Frank Rossi

The Question of Jonestown​

“It’s a wonder John Judge’s brain has not turned to oatmeal. He is in his mid-30s and already he has spent half his life reading government documents.

John Judge may be the only person in the world to have read the entire Warren Commission Report — 26 volumes, 26,000 pages. He has concluded the report isn’t worth a crock.

For subjecting their minds to an incessant tangle of bureaucratic prose, Judge and his associate, Sandy Meredith, are paid nothing. Indeed, Judge works as a draft counselor, for which he is paid next to nothing, and Meredith is a librarian, and they spend most of their earnings looking for government corruption.

Mostly, they go after the CIA. They are like two woodpeckers trying to sink a battleship, but they do it anyway. Maybe they figure they’ll get lucky.

The hair.

John Judge’s boyish face is covered by a beard. His hair is ’60s-style, long, and he keeps it tied back. He’s wearing a heavy green work shirt, buff corduroys and the kind of boots lumberjacks favor. Sandy Meredith wears a flannel dress and sweater.

“You know,” Judge smiles, “I don’t buy stereos and cars, or go chasing up and down the street after a bunch of nonsense. I try to spend it on what’s happening.”

“What’s happening” right now for John Judge is embodied in the three fat notebooks of newspaper clippings resting to his right on a mohair sofa that looks as if it’s going to fall apart within 30 seconds. The notebooks — there are two more, just as fat, in the bedroom — contain thousands of stories on Jim Jones and the deaths of 900 cultists at the People’s Temple in Guyana.

Judge says he believes that Jonestown was part of a 30-year CIA mind-control experiment called MK Ultra.

“I came to the conclusion myself when I studied various assassinations and the patterns in history of the various intelligence operations. I smelled a rat in Jonestown within the first few days,” Judge says.

The questions.

Judge and Meredith base their CIA theory on circumstantial evidence, but it’s obvious to them that there still are too many unanswered questions about Jonestown.

Right after the deaths occurred, Hoag Levins of the Daily News reported that the Guyanese government, with the help of the U.S. Embassy, had kept reporters out of Jonestown, lied about certain aspects of the deaths, and destroyed documents pertaining to Jones. Those records, Levins’ articles say, linked Jones to Guyanese Prime Minister Forbes Burnham in a couple of shady deals.

“The first thing that tipped me,” Judge says, “was the change in body count. The original article said 408. Then they said 712. Sandy tracked down six different explanations for the change in the body count.” The final figure was 912.

The dumbest explanation of all, according to Sandy Meredith, was that bodies were found underneath other bodies. According to Inquirer files, the “bodies on top of bodies” statement was made by U.S. Air Force Capt. John Moscatelli. The question Judge and Meredith ask is how 400 bodies — 100 of which were children — could cover 512 other bodies.

“Rounded up.”

“I think people were literally searched out and rounded up over a period of days and either killed at the camp or killed in the woods and dragged back dead to the camp,” Judge says.

Judge and Meredith also point out:

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• That Jim Jones was a close friend of a government agent, now dead, and that Jones’ “religious” empire blossomed in the early ’60s after he returned from a stay in a region of Brazil where the agent happened to be stationed.
• That Dr. Leslie Mootoo, Guyanese chief medical examiner, testified that 80 to 90 percent of the Jonestown victims did not commit suicide but were murdered. Stanley Clayton, a Jonestown cult member who escaped the carnage, told the Chicago Tribune the same thing in a copyrighted Nov. 24, 1978, article.
• That Laurence L. Layton, the father of Jim Jones’ gun-toting lieutenant Larry Layton, had worked with various government intelligence agencies on chemical-warfare projects and possibly worked directly with the CIA on mind-control experiments.

All of which shows, Judge and Meredith say, that the full story of Jonestown has not yet been told. It does not prove, however, that Jonestown was a CIA mind-control experiment. Judge and Meredith persevere, nevertheless, always searching for the one link that will put it all together. If their claims are accurate, their work is nearly impossible. Woodpeckers never sink battleships.”

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Fargo Season 3, Episode 9​

“The problem is not that there is evil in the world, the problem is that there is good. Because otherwise, who would care?” – V.M. Varga (if you haven’t seen Fargo, Season 3, Varga is a very evil guy)




Gloria Burgle: It’s over. The good guys lost.

Winnie Lopez: For the present, but we all know Jesus wins in the end.

Gloria Burgle: I’ll drink to that.



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