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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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| | The Memo: I have an unreported observation.
You can read the Republican
intelligence committee members’ memo here and draw your own conclusions. I’d
like to draw your attention to the pretext for the counterintelligence
investigation launched by biased FBI agent Peter Strzok. A minor Trump campaign
worker, Peter Papadopoulous, was allegedly drunk in a London bar in May 2016 and told an Australian that
someone had told him that Russia
had thousands of Hillary Clinton’s emails that would embarrass her. Then a
couple of months later, Wikileaks began posting Hillary’s emails.
State Department
is Constant Target of Cyber Attacks
The entire USA had access to hacking news. “The
State Department, like any other large organization that has a global span, is
a constant target of cyber attacks,” State Department spokesman Jeff Rathke
told reporters. (“State Department's unclassified email systems hacked,” Reuters,
November 17, 2014.)
April 2, 2016, Wikileaks released
information about an internal meeting that embarrassed the IMF. People both
speculated and asserted (bombasts!) that any minute now, Wikileaks would
release emails that would embarrass Hillary Clinton. Personally I thought known-hacker China had the emails and would release them via Wikileaks or by other
means. Others speculated the Russia. The USA is great at hacking, too. Good
thing I wasn’t blowharding to a foreign diplomat in a bar, while working a
minor role in the Trump campaign. My conversation would probably have become the pretext for a counterintelligence investigation by the FBI. |
| | SOTU: "Americans are Dreamers, too!"
President Trump delivered a great unifying State of the
Union (SOTU) address to Congress and the American people last night. “Americans
are Dreamers, too!” You
can listen to the address here. It seems only those who wish the USA to
become the socialist nightmare epitomized by Venezuela refused to stand.
This has been a great years: Judges have been appointed who
will interpret the Constitution as written i.e., they won’t politicize the law.
More such judges have been appointed than in any other president’s first year.
(I believe that’s true for our entire history, but I’d have to double check
this. It’s certainly true of our recent history.) Money is pouring back into
the USA.
Some key issues this coming year: The USA needs an
alternative to Obamacare. Merely opting out isn’t an alternative, because that
will leave people without medical insurance. President Trump said he’ll address
high drug prices, but what about the control fraud known as opaque medical care
charges? Medical care costs are wildly out of control, and insurance companies
are complicit.
A DACA deal is unwanted by many in President Trump’s base. I’m
included in the former. What happened to rule of law? Each of those individuals
should be assessed on merit, with no possibility of chain migration, especially
for illegal alien parents or other relatives who broke the law to bring them
here in the first place.
Defense – Revitalizing our military after eight years of
poor leadership from the former White House.
Deep State – I’d like to see a long list of criminal charges
for abuse of power that makes Watergate pale in comparison.
The USA needs protective McKinley-style trade tariffs.
Tax reform is not complete. Eliminating estate taxes will
bring money to the USA from around the globe.
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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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