Enough

Guest Post by Rudy Havenstein


“Some of the things that are happening in America now are are genuinely banana republic type stuff, and if America, this shining city on a hill, has turned into a banana republic, what chance do the rest of us have?”

Grant Williams



The K(leptocracy)-Shaped Economy

---

At a party given by a billionaire on Shelter Island, the late Kurt Vonnegut informs his pal, the author Joseph Heller, that their host, a hedge fund manager, had made more money in a single day than Heller had earned from his wildly popular novel Catch 22 over its whole history.

Heller responds, “Yes, but I have something he will never have…Enough.”

Jack Bogle









That’s some deficit you got there for the best economy ever.

Wait – what?​

Link

Ben Hunt in 2017​

“There’s a lot of ubiquitous private information about powerful people and powerful ideas trapped in the crowd today, just waiting for a Missionary to release it as common knowledge. The more powerful the person or the idea to be brought low, the bigger the Missionary (and platform) required. But nothing’s too big, and once the common knowledge is created, behavior changes fast. My pick for the big idea that gets taken down? The idea that inflation is dead. We all know it’s not true. We all know in our own heads that everything is more expensive today, from rent to transportation to food to iPhones. But it’s not common knowledge. Each of us may believe that inflation walks among us, but none of us believes that everyone else believes that inflation is here.

Not yet.

But we’re only one big Missionary statement away.”




I made this three years ago…



“To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child.” – Cicero

---

I love how gold dropped on the news. Real rates ain’t positive in the real world.​

---

“U.S. retail physical gold demand is at its 2nd-lowest level in history. The only lower level was in 2000… The beginning of an 11-year gold bull market. Despite gold’s massive rally, U.S. retail investors are once again showing little interest. While the East is draining the world of physical gold supplies, Western investors are barely participating.”

---

Link

Donald ‘Weimar’ Trump:

Never forget:​

---

“My favorite inflation index is the import/export price index, because it doesn’t have adjustments… based upon these, the purest of the inflation measures, inflation is actually running at about 7%. No wonder consumer sentiment is at such a depressed level.”

Jeff Gundlach


“US export prices surged by 11.6% year-over-year in September 2026…import Prices in the United States increased 8.1% year-on-year in September 2026, the most since July 2022″








From Grant’s Evan Lorenz:

“In a new paper this month, Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh estimates that American firms will add 188 gigawatts’ worth of new data centers between 2025 and 2032 at a cost of $9 trillion in current dollars… To validate the investments that do get made, Van Nieuwerburgh continues, data-center operators will need to earn at least a 10% unlevered return on capital. Assuming a 50% operating cash-flow margin, this means AI revenues will account for 8.8% of GDP by 2032, or about as much as Americans today spend on food, twice the current bill for software or triple the outlays on defense.”

---

Link

“I think there’s a profound truth to Pascal’s saying that every human has a God-shaped hole in their heart. And it’s important to understand that many of these folks in Silicon Valley who are building this technology have filled that hole with the machine god of AGI.”​

Palantir CTO Shyam Sankar

---

A.I. “has nothing to do with thought, humanity, or feeling.”​

---

Link

---

“Imagine a company that sells you equipment, invests money in your business, and then rents back what you build with it. It’s your supplier, your investor and your customer all at once,” notes Ruipeng Liu in a post on Open Forum last week. “That’s known as circular financing. Many artificial intelligence (AI) companies, including Microsoft, Amazon, Google and Nvidia, have adopted a version of this opaque method of financing.”

---

For “everyone who doesn’t trade junk or trade CDS or credit, 200 is junk, just so we’re clear.”​

Ben Brey

---

Anthropic is offering Blackstone a high yield of more than 10 per cent to finance its latest chip deal, highlighting the start-up’s willingness to stomach steep borrowing costs to finance expensive AI infrastructure.

Click to expand...

---

“A Fed backstop to a billionaire. That’s a sweet deal.” ​

Dan Ferris with Ben Hunt on A.I. bailouts

---

The carnage in chips stocks is almost unbearable… ​

Link

---

According the A.I., the current energy sector weight in the S&P 500 is roughly 3.4%–3.6%, less than half the historical average.

The peak was apparently 28%-30% in 1980, and the low was about 2% in 2020.

At Robinhood’s Mecca for Risk-Loving Traders, Everyone Has a Tale of Getting Rich​

In recent weeks1, professional money managers have grappled with a punishing bond selloff, rising fuel costs and a stock-market rally that is increasingly dependent on a handful of tech stocks.

In Houston, nobody was all that worried.

“The trend is always going to be up and to the right,” said Sara Brescia O’Rear, a former pharmacist who retired in her 40s thanks to her investing success. “I’m willing to take on risk because I know it can pay off.”

Click to expand...

---

Chart o’ the Day: Cerebras (CBRS)​

I hear these names – I never own them, on the upside or the downside – and sometimes I check the charts.

This one does something A.I. I don’t think they make any money, not that that matters.



Link

Not to be confused with Cerberus, which is evil.

---

“Private equity groups are seeking to offload some of the UK’s best-known high street brands, including restaurant chain PizzaExpress, supermarket Morrisons and sushi group Itsu…Last week the US buyout group Sycamore struck an $8.9bn deal to sell health and beauty chain Boots to Canada’s billionaire Weston family”

---

Dan Rasmussen​

• “If you talk to large allocators they still love private equity. It hasn’t fully dawned on them that they got screwed.”
• “A few years back a couple of people called me and said, “Hey Dan, have you ever looked into aged whiskey barrels?” I said, “No, I’ve never looked into aged whiskey barrels.” They said, “Oh, we’re getting pitched to this aged whiskey barrel trade.” After I heard it from the third person, I called up everyone else. I said, “I’ve heard it from three people now. Someone’s trying to dump aged whiskey barrels, you’re gonna get screwed. I don’t know how. And then like two years later, of course, I saw this article that there was a huge glut in aged whiskey barrels. The entire market’s collapsing. And you’re like, “Yeah, but someone tried to offload that stuff onto retail like two to three years ago.” And that’s what’s happened. Look at what’s happening with private equity and private credit. It’s getting rolled out to retail right now. And to be honest, Jack Bogle should be rolling over in his grave, because I got an email from Vanguard saying I should be investing in private equity out of a Vanguard private equity fund, and I thought, “Holy smokes, whoever is CEO of Vanguard should be fired because this is just an outrage.””
• “Investors often mistake yield for return, and private credit is the the ultimate at marketing this. They say, “Oh, you know, we have a 15% yield.” And the investor thinks, “I’m going to earn 15%.” And you’re like, “No, no, no, no, no. You know, lending is the second oldest profession. The only reason one thing yields more than another is the default risk is higher, or your duration risk is higher.” But in private credit, it’s more about default risk.”
• “The biotech A.I. trade is one of the leading indicators for the A.I. trade, right? It’s the frothiest part, and I think when that starts to sell off, I’d get more nervous about the more mainstream A.I. plays.”2

---

“Wall Street is not really about investing. It’s about asset gathering…Indexes don’t just come about because they’re good investments, they come about because it’s an opportunity for a management company to gather assets..”

– Steve Bregman, 2020

---

Tom Gober​

”Mark Walter was put on notice 12 years ago….why in the ensuing 12 years did none of the state regulators raise this issue? It took the federal prosecutor to bring it up in a criminal case rather than the state regulators addressing it.”

You can Google Mark Walter if you’re unfamiliar with the saga. The above quote is from part 2 of an interview of Gober with George Noble. For reference, I’ve mentioned Gober before, extensively here, and briefly here and here and here.

“I’ve heard people claim that the Boomers are hogging the houses. So let me see if I’ve got this right – I should sell my house, which the younger generation can’t afford at all, and then downsize to a house they might have a prayer of buying, except I’m bidding against them now?”​

Dave Collum

---

I got a kick out of this post:

Back in 2022/2023, I was full time in real estate selling DH Horton concrete prisons to the normie cattle. If you called Zillow in PHX on a house in my zip code, there was a high likelihood I would get to flirt with your wife behind your back that friday touring a house.

Back in 2022 (even during 120° summer) I would receive HUNDREDS of phone calls a week. About 20% losers without money. Almost half were illegals who sometimes showed up to a showing smelling like a rat covered in **** and thought you could buy a house with a VISA. But some of those were solid leads—people who are stupid enough to think $3500 /month for a toasty gray floor whitewash shitbox in a sand-colored favela was somehow going to improve their life. Those watery-eyed Disney Adults who would flop out of a Honda Odyssey with a useless Rocket Mortgage pre-approval gripped tightly in their grimy paws. On average during off season I probably did about 15 house showing appointments a week.

I had my fun, made some money along the way, and got out of the industry. But I get calls every now and again from former clients and colleagues. Usually shooting the ****. Just had one call me earlier this evening asking what I think about selling his house I bought him (VA loan, great floor plan, very affordable). Military wants him to relocate so he’s been on the market for 100+ days. Price cut down to the lowest in his area (300s). Open house every weekend. Nothing. He’s panicking and asking me what to do.

I get a wild hair and text my old head-taker (MLO who won loan officer of the year twice in a row) to see what’s shaking. Turns out he had to sell his boat last month and considering his house. He used to sling refis and HELOCs like a drug mule does fent on Indian School and the 17. Guy made close to a million a year 2020-2023. You wouldn’t know it because he’s a few bad more months before going broke.

I do not see a future where real estate doesn’t crash. There’s simply too many illiquid deranged boomers who are drunk on decades of cheap money, shitty margaritas and will either be forced into selling or die like a 3% interest rate pharoah. I worked with too many of them (I have hundreds of stories) of Deborahs and Chucks, Dales and Sues, Bobs and Jeanies who are do not understand that Zoomers cannot afford the lifestyle inflation nor want their decrepit upranches.

Remember; every day 10,000 boomers hit 65. Then 5500 die daily. Consider that real estate supply is already high, demand is already low and this is before a wave of Margaritaville Shitboxes hit the market at delusional prices. If Meemaw and Peepaw are calling the shots they are going to drag their feet until their heels turn to hamburger—even if nobody puts an offer in. That means buyers will wait longer and make them bleed because a $4800 a month payment at 7+% interest rate is not feasible for an Amazon Prime Ring Doorbell goyserf family. And if they get put in a house or croak the kids always want cash out. They’ll price cut until they sell, which means tanking the whole neighborhood’s value.

Enjoy the show.

Click to expand...

---

Nick Gerli: “Prices matter way more than rates”​

“So if you were to look at a 130-year chart of the US housing market going back to like 1890, 1895, and you were to compare mortgage rates to inflation-adjusted prices, one thing becomes very clear. A mortgage rate near 6% and a half, or 7%, or 7 and a half percent is not crazy. That’s pretty normal if you go back 130 years, right? Even in the 90s, we had rates like 8 to 9%.

But what is completely different is inflation-adjusted home prices. Inflation-adjusted home prices on that graph – and I could send it to you guys – it’s through the roof. It’s even higher than the ‘06 bubble.

And so when you look at that graph, it becomes very clear what the problem is. The problem is prices. 7% mortgage rates are annoying, especially relative to how high prices are today. But talk to people who lived in the ‘70s and ‘80s and ‘90s. 7% mortgage rate is no big deal. I think it’s more that rates were so artificially suppressed in the 2010s and early stages of the pandemic, that that’s kind of giving this idea that a 7% mortgage rate is too high.”

Glitchy video but the audio is good:​

“One of the most frustrating things to me is people talking about a housing shortage. We have more housing per capita than we’ve ever had, and it’s obvious when you drive around.”

Melody Wright

“Why is the stock market ignoring higher interest rates? Because they’re not high. They were way too low for too long, and we got used to that.”​

Jim Bianco

Written by Chris Isaak’s bass player, Rowland ‘Roly‘ Salley:​

End Too Big To Jail​

Dear Secretary Bessent,

My name is Everett Stern. In 2010 I was a compliance officer at HSBC. From a back office in New Castle, Delaware, I watched billions of dollars move to drug cartels, sanctioned regimes, and terrorist organizations. The enemies of the United States. I documented it, I escalated it, and when the bank would not act, I took it to the FBI, the CIA, and eventually the SEC.

The result was a $1.92 billion settlement. At the time, it was one of the largest in American history. It was also about five weeks of the bank’s profit. Not one banker was charged. Not one went to prison.

I paid a different price. I lost my career, my savings, and my place in the industry I had trained for. I was blacklisted. Every door in American finance closed at once. I slept on a camping cot in a 300 square foot apartment because I could not afford a bed, and I waited tables at PFChangs to eat. I tell you this not for sympathy, but so you understand that I know exactly what it costs to do the right thing in American finance, and exactly how little the system does in return.

I made that sacrifice because I believed it would change something.

Yesterday, your department fined Bank of America $1.2 billion for failing to report more than $5 billion in suspicious transactions, some of it tied by your own findings to
Chinese laundering networks, narcotics, and the southwest border, alongside 475 apparent sanctions violations touching Russia, Iran, and global terrorism. The bank admitted it willfully violated the Bank Secrecy Act.

Fourteen years after HSBC. A bank with “America” in its name. And once again, not one individual charged.

Secretary Bessent, I want to say plainly what I believe you already know. The fines are not working.

A fine is paid by shareholders, absorbed by the balance sheet, and forgotten by the next earnings call. Bank of America reported earnings this morning. Nobody who set the alert thresholds, nobody who decided the 2024 cease and desist could wait, nobody who chose the backlog over the law will lose a single thing they value. Their lives are untouched. That is the entire reason the behavior repeats.

This is money laundering. This is blood money. Money that reaches a cartel buys fentanyl that kills Americans. Money that reaches a terrorist organization buys the next attack. This country has fought a war on drugs and a war on terror for decades, at enormous cost in lives and treasure, and all the while we have allowed the financing to flow through institutions we charter and regulate. Cut off the money and we win. We have never seriously tried.

There is also a question of equal justice that I cannot let go.

Before I walked into the FBI building to report HSBC, I stopped in front of the Great Seal on the wall and read the words engraved beneath it: “Justice is the defense of our liberty.” I believed that. I still want to. But every day in this country, people go to prison for crimes that are nothing next to moving money for the people who want Americans dead. A suit, a title, and a corporate badge should not be a shield from the consequences that apply to everyone else. If a street dealer goes to prison for what he sells, the banker who moved the cartel’s money should be standing next to him.

I also want to raise something that is rarely said in these conversations. Why has no one inside Bank of America come forward the way I did? The answer is that everyone in American banking knows what happened to me, and to the whistleblowers who came after. The last person who spoke up is the only policy anyone believes. That is a culture problem, and it starts with leadership, in the banks and in the agencies that regulate them.

This is not a political issue. It has spanned administrations of both parties. It is a national security issue, and I am asking you to treat it as one.

Three things would change the math overnight.

Refer individuals for criminal prosecution. Not the analyst in the queue. The executives who set the thresholds and chose the risk. One banker in handcuffs would do more than every fine in Treasury’s history combined.

End “too big to jail.” An institution cannot be too big to fail and too big to jail at the same time. If it is the first, it must be held to a higher standard, not a lower one.

And if Bank of America will not act as America’s bank, review its charter. A national charter is a privilege granted on behalf of the American people. It should be conditioned on not moving money for the people trying to kill them.

Secretary Bessent, you said yesterday that these actions send a clear message that even the biggest institutions are not above the law. With respect, the institution was never the problem. The people inside it are above the law, and they know it. Until that changes, I will keep writing letters like this one, and the next bank will keep paying the next fine.

I gave up everything I had to stop this. I am asking you to use the power you have to finish it.

Respectfully,

Everett A. Stern
HSBC Whistleblower
Founder and Intelligence Director, Tactical Rabbit

8:01 AM · Oct 14, 2026

Click to expand...

---

The money laundering was of course committed by the brick and mortar of Bank America’s various real estate holdings, and by their shareholders.

No Bank of America employees were involved.

Total joke.

End too big to jail!​

Link

From Jan. 1, 2022 to Dec. 31, 2025, the S&P went up around 43%.​

I saw this ad for the Democratic Senatorial candidate in Mississippi and thought it was very effective. This is not an endorsement of anyone:

“It was always the women, and above all the young ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and nosers-out of unorthodoxy.”​

George Orwell, 1984

2002:​

2026:​

• After 3 Years, Mainstream Media Accepts That Netanyahu Knew Oct 7 Would Happen—And Allowed It
• Israel’s New – and Terrifying – Security Doctrine
• The War on Afghanistan Was Launched 25 Years Ago. It Still Hasn’t Ended.
• CIA Releases 71 Presidential Daily Briefs Detailing Intelligence Before 9/11 Attacks

Link

---

---

2014: In Ukraine, the US is dragging us towards war with Russia​

For the first time since the Reagan years, the US is threatening to take the world to war. With eastern Europe and the Balkans now military outposts of NATO, the last “buffer state” bordering Russia – Ukraine – is being torn apart by fascist forces unleashed by the US and the EU. We in the west are now backing neo-Nazis in a country where Ukrainian Nazis backed Hitler.

Having masterminded the coup in February against the democratically elected government in Kiev, Washington’s planned seizure of Russia’s historic, legitimate warm-water naval base in Crimea failed. The Russians defended themselves, as they have done against every threat and invasion from the west for almost a century.

But NATO’s military encirclement has accelerated, along with US-orchestrated attacks on ethnic Russians in Ukraine. If Putin can be provoked into coming to their aid, his pre-ordained “pariah” role will justify a NATO-run guerrilla war that is likely to spill into Russia itself.

Click to expand...

AI Interviewer vs AI Agent​

Staged, but amusing.





Man Gets 18 Months in First U.S. AI Music Streaming Fraud Case After $8M Royalty Scheme

A federal judge has sentenced a North Carolina musician to 18 months in prison for using AI-generated songs and thousands of automated accounts to produce billions of fake streams and collect more than $8 million in royalties…The scheme ran from 2017 through 2024 and eventually involved as many as 10,000 bot accounts at once…

As the operation grew, Smith turned to artificial intelligence to generate hundreds of thousands of songs, allowing him to spread the fraudulent plays across a huge catalog and reduce the chances that unusually high activity on any one track would trigger anti-fraud systems.

The scale was striking. In April 2023, prosecutors said Smith’s bots generated 80.9 million YouTube Music streams through family plans. Taylor Swift’s entire catalog received 9.3 million family-plan streams on the platform during the same month. Those fake plays ultimately generated more than $8 million in royalty payments for Smith.

Click to expand...

I find Blackjack to be boring:






DJIA Hourly Chart October 1987


October 19, 1987





Grief should be the instructor of the wise;
Sorrow is knowledge: they who know the most
Must mourn the deepest o’er the fatal truth,
The Tree of Knowledge is not that of Life.

Byron : Manfred, Act i., Sc. i.





Subscribe

Share

“ending the wars”​

1


If you’re having trouble with some of these “archive” links, try using a VPN. Bing has a free one that seems to work better.

2


It looks like the “pure plays” in A.I. biotech that Grok suggested to me have already crashed (RXRX, SDGR, ABSI, GENB). As for ETF’s, ARKG was as the top of the list:



Link
Tweet

Continue reading...

[ H/T The Burning Platform ]