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| | Tavakoli Structured
Finance, Inc. |
| | "Of
course, there is still much work to be done. That means honestly confronting
the crisis of Islamic extremism and the Islamists and Islamic terror of all
kinds." -- President Trump in Riyadh
"Where are you headed, Europe? Rise from your knees
and from your lethargy, or you will be crying over your children every
day." -- Polish Prime Minister Beata Szydlo
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| | Not So Fast
The UK, famous for mismanaging it's internal social crisis, is now dragging the USA into an alleged nerve agent attack by Russia. I don't have the answers, but I have a few comments. The UK is not behaving as if it is a true ally of the USA. Prime Minister Theresa May owes us an explanation.
Ten years ago this week Bear Stearns was bailed out. This led to a series of bailouts. Yet the WSJ, seems to think there may be another bailout. Wait. Do you mean to tell me journalists do not realize that every day, we continue the global bailout via interest rate suppression, credit support and more? How quickly they forgot. Here's my brief comment.
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| | | "Was not Plato perfectly right when he wished that his
pupils should be first of all well grounded in mathematics?" —Galileo, Two New Sciences,11 |
| A Revolution
Tucker Carlson Tonight presented a segment on the
crisis facing men in the USA—low testosterone levels, high suicide rates,
and more— due in part, to the demoralizing effects of ideological subversion.
This
is a devastating crisis for women, too. If our society were healthier, a women’s
march would protest against the causes of the destruction of our males (instead
the marchers seem to advocate the self-destruction of women, motherhood, and
marriage).
How do we remedy
this?
“If you have your children in a school, and they talk about
equity—and there’s class—diversity, inclusivity, white privilege, systemic
racism,--any of that—you take your children out of the class. They are not
being educated. They’re being indoctrinated. And there’s absolutely no excuse
for it.”
If we run out of schools in this country, Dr. Peterson
asserts, “that would be just fine. The sooner the better.”
An education revolution
is in order in the USA. Why are we paying high local taxes for school systems
that indoctrinate children, when many parents don’t want this at all? This is taxation without representation.
Parents who love their children—and who want them to grow up
in an intelligent and sane society—must take charge of their educations and
might consider becoming more active in local politics. |
| Bad Educations Harm Women, Too
Upon reflection, it was staggering--not funny-- to hear Cathy Areu, a Leftist "journalist," tell Tucker Carlson that a lot of people are offended by the use of the word "man." Purdue U. issued a guide of how to change words in the English language to be less "offensive."
Tucker asked if they'd dare tell Goldman Sachs to change its name, and she responded that they probably wouldn't shop there. (Tucker immediately let her know it is a bank, but apparently either she didn't hear him, or it went over her head.) She'd be happier if it changed its name to Goldperson Sachs. You can view the relevant part of the exchange is at 4:15.
This is what a bad education, a lack of intelligent curiosity, and poverty of general knowledge looks like.
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| | Portfolio Growth in 2018?
No one can time the market, and given the persistent
decline in what the dollar buys, everyone's portfolio needs real growth. Morgan
Stanley is predicting three Fed rate hikes in 2018, but nothing close to where
real rates, much less nominal rates, would be in a fair market. In a
manipulated rising stock market, we all look as if we're investment geniuses,
even though bubblenomics drives the S&P. Where we'll end up is anyone's
guess. Today's investment landscape looks very far away from value investing.
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| | Decisions: Life and Death on Wall Street
Amazon has again chosen Decisions for its Prime Reading program. Members of Amazon Prime read it for free. Tell your friends!
Janet Tavakoli's brief Wall Street memoir of personal and professional decisions that reshaped financiers' lives, drove some to suicide, and changed the landscape of global finance.
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| | Citi Resurrects Synthetic CDOs, Bane of the Credit Crisis
Sridhar Natarajan, Dakin Campbell and Alastair Marsh of Bloomberg authored an excellent take on Citi's claims (September 26, 2017) "Citi is Bringing Back One of the Most Infamous Bests of the Credit Crisis." The bottom line is that the risk is mispriced. Oh, but Citi claims this structure is safer.
Here's an excerpt:
“There is a whole generation
of people in finance who never knew or forgot what the problems were with synthetic CDOs,” said Janet Tavakoli, a 30-year veteran of the financial markets who runs a consulting firm and has written books on structured credit and CDOs. “Just as derivatives can lever up the upside, they can lever up the downside.” |
| | USA's Constitutional Crisis of the Century
The Wall Street Journal's editorial board wrote a mea culpa,
admitting it was wrong to criticize President Donald Trump when he made
the shocking allegation that his campaign had been wiretapped by the
Obama administration. It turns out that President Trump was correct, and
this is the Constitutional Crisis of the century.
In an unprecedented abuse of power, the Obama administration abused government power and resources, spied on its political opposition, and apparently manufactured a ludicrous fake report as the pretext for getting a FISA court warrant to do it.
WSJ is now demanding answers.
You'll recall that many people spoke up to deny President Trump's allegation. Either they didn't know what they were talking about—yet tried to undermine the President, anyway—or they lied, hoping their lie would never be revealed for what it is. These people all owe President Trump an apology and some of them may deserve to be prosecuted. They include (I'm probably missing many): Speaker Paul Ryan (third in line to the presidency), Senator Richard Burr, Senator Mark Warner, former CIA Director James Clapper, Senator Kamala Harris, former U.S. Attorney General loretta Lynch, and former FBI Director James Comey. The latter lied under oath.
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| | Better Than Money
If you want to help your country, instead of contributing money to politicians, why not contribute a solution to one of your country’s problems?
I sent my paper, “Importance of Data Preservation in the Application of Set Theory to Counterterrorism,” to a former instructor at the National Defense Intelligence College who subsequently forwarded to colleagues. (This paper is not available to the public.)
My method compares lists of associates of organizations to quickly identify high probability persons of interest using set theory techniques. There is no need to know in advance whether alternate spellings of targets’ names or aliases exist, as long as association records are kept as complete as possible. A subsidiary goal was to support efforts to gain inter-agency cooperation in the compilation and preservation of data, since operatives of the Obama administration actively destroyed useful records.
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