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| | Tavakoli Structured
Finance LLC
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| | “Allow me to issue and control a nation’s money, and I care not who makes the laws.”
—Mayer Amschel Rothschild |
| | When You've Made the Sale, Stop Selling
October
13, 2023
After
a horrific attack on Israeli civilians, the USA supports Israel’s attempt to eradicate
the terrorist organization known as Hamas. We know there will be (likely
wildly disproportionate) collateral damage. That’s war. Bill Ackman could have
taken the political win. Instead, he has to be RIGHT, and it didn’t go well.
What did he expect?
How
can Bill’s argument be made more compelling?
I
know! Let’s amend the Constitution to say that an American life is worth 2.8%
of an Israeli life! Then all Americans will appreciate Bill’s point!
Via
Twitter:
Bill
Ackman’s argument:
For context on what is to come, ask yourself how the
U.S. would respond if 2,500 Mexican terrorists invaded Texas, brutally killed
1,200 of our citizens including women, children, and babies — raping
decapitating and burning them alive — and kidnapped 150 more, including
infants.
Karl Denninger’s
response: We'd do nothing. Because we haven't, and they have. They're
just buried in the several million, and NOBODY CARES. Literally NOBODY cares
Bill, including YOU.
Bill
Ackman’s argument:
Now adjust the numbers to reflect our 35.5 times larger
population: What if 42,600 Americans were killed and 5,325 were kidnapped? How
would we respond?
Karl
Denninger’s response:
We'd bomb some other nation, rather than the one who did
it. Just like we did after 9/11. |
| | Fifty Years in Wall Street
I’ve been restoring Henry Clews’s Fifty Years in Wall
Street (1908). I have the original book, but the pages have yellowed, and
the hinge is cracked. One can download a pdf of the original for free—public
domain—from archive.org. Among the gems in this book is an address he gave to
Yale students in 1907. If I ever have to give such a speech to students, I’ll
adapt his speech of advice to young men starting out in life.
Clews’s story of Commodore Vanderbilt’s short squeeze was
fictionalized in “Face the Music,” the third episode of HBO’s The Gilded Age.
For my own purposes, I split the book into two parts: Part
One and Part Two. I
added a table of date of birth, date of death, and age at death of the men illustrated
in the original book. I added the dates of birth and death to each photo.
Otherwise, I couldn’t keep all the
generations of Roosevelts, Vanderbilts, Clewses, Astors, and Rothschilds
straight. |
| | American Culture Is Eurocentric
Multiculturalism is a lie or rather a series of lies: the
lie that European-American culture is uniquely oppressive; the lie that culture
has been formed to preserve the dominance of heterosexual white males; and the
lie that other cultures are equal to the culture of the West. What needs to be
said is that no other cultures are equal to the culture of the West. What needs
to be said is that no other culture in the history of the world has offered the
individual as much freedom, as much opportunity to advance; no other culture
has permitted homosexuals, non-whites, and women to play ever-increasing roles
in the economy, in politics, in scholarship, in government. What needs to be
said is that American culture is Eurocentric, and it must remain Eurocentric or
collapse into nothingness. Standards of European and American origin are the
only possible standards that can hold our society together and keep a competent
nation. If the legitimacy of Eurocentric standards is denied, there is nothing
else. There are no standards from any other quarter of the globe that we can
agree upon. Islam cannot provide standards for us, nor can Africa or the Far
East. Yet a single set of standards is essential to a sense of what authority
is legitimate, what ideal must be maintained. The alternative to Eurocentrism,
then, is fragmentation and chaos.
—Robert Bork (Slouching Towards Gomorrah, 1996, P.
311) |
| |
3rd Edition
Released February 23, 2022
"Tavakoli's research work has been endorsed by, for example, the late Nobel prize winner, Merton Miller, and the "Big Short" hedge fund manager, Michael Burry."
Intelligent Commodity Investing
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| | Via Reddit: Reconstructing Burry's Research Process
Michael Burry, Interview by the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission,May 18, 2010/
From FCIC staff audiotape of interview with
Michael Burry, Cornwall Capital[between timestamps 1:36:20 and 1:38:40]:
"
... It was a dark market. I was onto WorldCom pretty early and they went from
investment grade to bankrupt overnight ... I wondered why I didn't make more
money on this ... it hit me that's the way to short companies ... and I noted
there was a lot of these highly rated super leveraged companies where you could
buy credit default swaps ... and so I bought books ... Janet Tavakoli's 1998
book, and that was the first book I read ... I didn't take all those equations
and apply them ... but I got the basics of the market from that." |
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