Short the Humblebrag

by Johnny Debacle

While making out with Kate Upton last night, it hit me. I turned to KitKate, my name for her, and stared straight into her eyes.

“Baby, I just had an idea.”

Her eyes stared back, empty just like her head.

“Baby, my idea is really true.”

It was then that I realized that I hadn’t actually been staring at her eyes but at her breasts, her perfectly shaped, amply proportioned breasts, the ones I got to play with every single night — if I cared to. I turned my gaze upwards, towards her pretty little face.

“Baby, this humblebrag shit is really just a way for the user of the term to show his or her audience that they themselves are ‘cool’ enough to be up-to-date on hipster crap and memes — the tired act of labeling something a ‘humblebrag’ is itself a ‘humblebrag’ of sorts.”

She stared back, a gaze still empty just like her head, an empty head that now nodded in dumb consent. Then she fed me a hamburger which my buddy, Bobby Flay, had been preparing in my kitchen. I removed my hands from her breasts, their usual location on Tuesday nights like this, and walked towards the window, still chewing delicious bites of my buddy Bobby’s burgers.

I surveyed Central Park through the floor to ceiling windows, taking it all in. Behind me, Kate hadn’t moved, but her eyes now devoured the burger that remained half-eaten in her hand. I pulled out my iPhone 7SG, the one Steve Jobs left me in his will along with the words “Only you can follow in my footsteps, JD, take this future phone and change the world [by selling overstretched global consumers luxury phones that have a closed ecosystem which lock them into your company forever]”, and placed a call.

“Hey Gosling, what’s up. No, I’m here with Kate and Bobby. No, Upton not Beckinsale. It’s Tuesday, dude. Yeah, just chilling. How are things with you? Cool cool. So I was thinking, don’t you think this humblebrag shit is played out? Like it’s a weird obsession, because is it really a bad thing to humblebrag? Isn’t it preferable to humblebrag then to brag? Usually it’s just a way of being factual for someone who has a much better life than you, or even someone who had a marginally better situation happen to them than you. How else can you ever share any good news? Or anything that is cool? And the person calling out humblebrags is being hypocritical and douchey. Yeah, I knew you’d agree with me 100% Gosling — that is why we’re best friends, I guess, hunh? Anyways, good talk. I have to go finish the rest of Flay’s burger before Kate does. You know how Kate can get! Also, see you at Jay-Z’s white party next week. Ok, cool, later man.”

Recommendation: Short the Humblebrag. It’s been around for a year and it’s as tired as the Kanye meme. We’d be overweight the vanilla Brag, but we’re too busy racing each other in the flying cars we bought with the bonuses we paid ourselves from successfully raising Dangerous Fund II.


Quotes Entirely Relevant to Investing 04/29/2012: May Day

by Mr Juggles

My own country is hopeless. It was almost better under the czars. At least the czar didn’t have to strain his empty head over a lot of theory. Lenin took whatever he could understand of Marx’s theory and used it to his own advantage, and Stalin took whatever he could understand of Lenin’s theory (which wasn’t much) and used it to his own advantage. The narrower a man’s intellectual grasp, the more power he is able to grab in this country.
-Boris from The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

Past Quotes Entirely Relevant to Investing


Dangerous Fund II

by Johnny Debacle

Tinderbox Capital LLC, an incendiary investment management firm and subsidiary of Long or Short Capital LLC, announces its second fund, Dangerous Fund II.

Dangerous Fund II will specialize in lighting money on fire. Tinderbox Capital will allocate physical cash into positions in which it will ignite. These positions will include the log cabin, the teepee, the lean-to, the obscene pile, the model bonfire, and the Scrooge McDuck. Tinderbox Capital’s due diligence process has consisted of earning merit badges in the arcane arts of fire-making at Camp Cedar, where the fund managers were also prepared for life in the real world by their indoctrination into Camp Cedar’s so-called “Color Wars.”

Tinderbox Spokesman Johnny Debacle:

“The investment management universe is inefficient at providing risk. We find this to be the case because the investment management universe is structurally obsessed with return. Our last fund, Dangerous Fund I, has performed very well, we think, losing so much money and doing so in such complicated fashion that it’s been difficult for us to calculate just how much it’s lost (rest assured, investors, you lost a lot and did so very riskily), so difficult that we may have just given up and started focusing on launching our new product, Dangerous Fund II. As an aside, our lifestyles are incredibly expensive, so expect the cadence of new products to increase and the quality of our management of old products to necessarily decrease. New products are where we make money, old products are those that we neglect.

We’ve learned several lessons from Dangerous Fund I, lessons we plan on incorporating into new products.

First, if your funds’ returns are improperly calculated because of complexity, sloth, or indifference, the investors are receiving another layer of risk on top of the risk they have in the underlying investment. This risk would be known in some circles as “Reporting Risk,” if those circles were dull and uninspired; since those circles aren’t square, that risk is known as “Nauditing Risk.” The creation of Nauditing Risk is something that can be marketed and sold. More on that later, probably in 2015.

Second, there is excess demand from investors for so-called “simple risk,” e.g. risk that generates no return whatsoever and does so with certainty. This is known in some circles as “The Keno Certainty Principle” or “Riskless Risk.” Dangerous Fund II is designed to mine this rich vein of risk appetite.

Dangerous Fund II will seek to disintermediate the middleman from the process of lighting money on fire by physically igniting investors’ dollars for them. It will generate the highest levels of Riskless Risk in the industry. It will charge a traditional 2 and 20 fee structure, which fees will be collected from the Five Year Fee Reserve, which reserve will be set aside whenever investors put money into Dangerous Fund II. See the prospectus for more details.

We know that young risk-seeking investors demand places to put their money to work, places where they can allocate $10,000 and potentially lose it all. This is the niche that Dangerous Fund I filled. But we also know that young risk-seeking investors demand places to put their money to work, places where they can allocated $10,000 and certainly lose it all. This is the niche that Dangerous Fund II will fill. We give you all the risk you will ever need and guarantee that we will either potentially or certainly lose it all. Dangerous Fund I and II will be appropriate for investors whose portfolios are overweight return and underweight risk and are thus seeking proper balance.

We just need your money to fuel our fires.”

Tinderbox Capital LLC is an investment firm that offers a focused set of investment products to a global institutional and high net worth client base. Tinderbox Capital LLC is currently structured to directly manage strategies in so-called “dangerous” trades and also to literally light money on fire. Despite this structure Tinderbox Capital is uniquely unqualified to manage your money well and uniquely qualified to manage your money poorly.


Short Structural, Long Cyclical

by Mr Juggles

Time is tough. People struggle to understand it. We can make sense of what’s happening now, can kind of remember what happened in the recent past, and can’t fathom the long-term. All of this is probably because of Twitter or because people no longer write each other long, boring letters like they did during the Civil War or ancient Greece or whenever. For whatever reasons, our attention spans are not only short, but also narrow, able to understand history only as if looking at it through a roll of paper towels.

It is increasingly apparent that everyone — investors, politicians, businessmen, consumers, etc. — have mistaken cyclical trends to be structural in many different areas. We are now at a crescendo as the long arc of history turns and heads back down in the other direction. This is a great opportunity to take advantage of people for whom the short term (the last 1 year, the last 3 years, the last 10 years, the last 30 years, depending on context) is the only relevant term. This is most everyone. It’s a rather large opportunity.

Some facts:

  • Global interest rates are not in secular decline. They have been in a 30yr cyclical decline and the 30yr reversal is now in process.
  • China is not locked in a structural vendor financing agreement with the US & EU. They are ending a long, cyclical run with an under-priced currency.
  • Europe’s imbalances are not the result of a structurally strong, responsible Germany and spendthrift periphery. They are the result of a cyclical trade imbalance due to domestic policies that increased German exports and savings rates while the inverse was true in Span, Greece, etc. The swing is coming back the other way now.
  • Keynesian intervention was not a structural improvement in the operation of the modern fiscal and monetary apparatus. It was a cyclical increase in leverage, starting from a time of low leverage and great demographics. Prepare for the payback.

To quote myself from The Model Business Model: “What is that expression? How does it go? Shit’s way different at this point in history, dude?” Maybe, just maybe, it’s not so different. Maybe we’re just lacking the benefit of the full context.

Recommendation: Short the so-called structural trends. Get long the true, underlying cycle.


Melissa Moody Does Greece, or Rather a Greek

by Melissa Moody

Greece

Previous Rating Greece: BFFAE (Best Friends Forever and Ever)
New Rating Greece: Whore

Ratings Rationale: Just when you think you found the one, you realize that the one is not…the one. He was so hot. A beautiful specimen. OMG, he was a god, a Greek God, an actual Greek God. He went by Helios. I wanted to prove my independence after I graduated college, so I drew down on my parents’ savings to finance a 6 week back-packing trip across Europe’s five star hotels in such exotic places as the Riviera, Croatia, Cinque Terre (too cute for words), and lastly, and amazingly, Mykonos.

This is where I met him, my Helios, the perfect man. He had long dark hair, Helios did, and so much charisma. He showed me around town, me with arms wrapped around his waist as he steered his scooter along sea roads. He lavished me with drinks, booked us in a lovely little hotel where our room had a balcony that looked out on the water. And in bed, let’s just say my world was his oyster. Or maybe his oyster was my world? I’m really bad at metaphors like he was really good in bed. No austerity anywhere to be seen.

But one morning I woke up and he was gone. He had retired to some location unknown, maybe to put in some face time at the “job” which he’d mentioned once in passing but which he never seemed to have to go to — not unlike how the married men I’ve slept act towards their families. In his place on the bed was one thing: the bill. He was asking me to finance his romancing of…me! He’d LITERALLY left me with the bill! I felt used, betrayed, like our entire relationship — his trade of money and time and hotness for my trade of young, female and American attentions — was for naught. So frustrating!

When he came back, after spending two hours at his “job,” a glass of ouzo in one hand, I confronted him, waving the bill in his face. He said some stuff in Greek to me. I stared back blanky. It was actual Greek. 10 years of boarding school and I only knew classical Greek. Then, in his bedeviling broken English, he said: “Look, toots, we both got something out of this, so let’s drop the naive kitten act and start calling a spade a spade. What we had was swell, baby, while it lasted. But I’m no Croesus, baby. You’re American, so you’re probably not cultured enough to know who he is, but Croesus had real money, mega bucks, baby. But me, I don’t have a pot to piss in or a window to throw it out. I just have an unfinished (for tax purposes) condo in Athens, a vacation home in Mykonos, an investment property in Turkish Cyprus, and an 8 hour per week job that pays peanuts, only €150,000 per year under the table. So, see, I can’t handle the bills for our little fling, these threads, or even these digs.”

I had never noticed that his bedeviling broken English took all its euphemisms and structure from 1940’s B movies. I looked him in those rich chestnut eyes. “This has to stop now, Helios. I can’t afford to continue to subsidize us. Either you leave this union, or pay me back.”

“Ok, it’s going to be ok, baby. We’ll work something out, you can bank on it. Just give it a little time, a few more days, or months, or years, or decades. I’ll put up some of my assets. Maybe my yacht or this little island I own. The whole kit and caboodle. But before I do that, why don’t you and me and a bottle of ouzo go for a weekend in Athens. We’ll take in the sights, we’ll see the people, I’ll take you for a spin, a real wild time, kitten.”

2 years of daily back and forth and amazing moments — moments even better than my JYA — later I came to my senses. Melissa Moody realized Helios wasn’t going to pay her back. He was my Greek God and he was great. But he was an irresponsible debtor, with no interest in austerity and less interest in repaying debt. He could, maybe, but he wouldn’t. And my parents are super rich relative to what money of mine he spent, so it didn’t really represent any systemic Moody family threat; we just wrote it off. But it was the principle of the thing, and I’d say it set a really bad precedent for my other more expensive long-term flings with Joao, Donal, and Sergio.

Ratings Methodology:
Hey everyone! It’s me, Melissa Moody…not that other Moody, Moody’s, you have been reading about. Actually that’s why I’m here I’m just so sick and tired of that other Moody! Their ratings stink, and they don’t know nearly as much as I do about debt, it’s true, I’m maxed out on 4 out of 7 credit cards I know I have a problem but I just can’t stop,ha ha. I can do a better job than Moody’s and that is what I’m gonna do! And let’s face it, their old ratings were too complicated. I mean Aa3, Baa1, Caa2, B1 who knows what that means? My ratings will be simple:

  • BFFAE (Best Friends Forever and Ever)
  • BFF
  • BFFLAF (Best Friends For Like Almost Forever)
  • BFFBAS (Best Friends Forever But Also a Slut)
  • BFFBIHH (Best Friends Forever But I Hate Her)
  • Whore


The Model Business Model

by Mr Juggles

Notwithstanding its conservative investment portfolio, the central bank remains highly profitable because of its unique business model. Rather than paying for funding, it simply creates the money that it needs at no cost. The return on its investments, as a result, almost all flows directly to the bottom line.
NY Times

So simple and so beautiful. What kind of genius entrepreneur would invent such a perfect business model? “Economist” John Law of the 17th and 18th centuries. Not only did he invent the perfect business model, but he also made significant advances in the business of Bubbles. How did his business model innovation turn out? Like most incredibly brilliant men who come up with bold ideas too early, John Law “ultimately fled the country disguised as a woman for his own safety.” 10 years later, Law “contracted pneumonia and died a poor man.” This is all according to Wikipedia, which, according to Wikipedia, is the source for the unvarnished and unbiased truth.

In the twenty-teens, our central bankers are much more advanced, more ethical, and more American. Importantly, they also look way less good in drag and wouldn’t “pass”. There should be no way this ends as badly as all the other times this has been done. What is that expression? How does it go? Shit’s way different at this point in history, dude.

Recommendation: Long the best business model, short all inferior business models, as the former will compete away the latter.

HT to the Paleofish


Solutions to Problems: Healthcare

by Machem Raiser

Healthcare continues to get ever more expensive. Healthcare is crucial to quality of life in America. How best to reconcile the former with the latter is an issue that has divided, and will continue to divide, people along many lines: have & have-not, 1% & 99%, Republican & Democratican. Healthcare is an issue, I agree. But it is an issue that, despite whinging by just about everyone (especially meek cries your ears can pick out from hospital beds in the distance), is eminently solvable. Simply, kill the sick.

Most people are small-minded and only consider what is lost, which, in this case, is sick people. But think of all the savings! It’s a difficult pill to swallow that things get expensive when there isn’t enough of them, so it’s difficult to swallow that there isn’t enough healthcare for the amount of sick people. Historically, society has dealt with expensive healthcare by increasing the amount of it; classic 20th century thinking and demonstrably too expensive. The right way to cure this ill, to make healthcare cheaper, is to decrease demand by ridding ourselves of the (almost) dead weight that the sick represent. The absence of the needy sick will make hospitals, doctors, pill-makers, breast implanters, and the whole healthcare system compete for customers, healthy customers who have practically no ailments whatsoever. Prices will plummet, affordability will skyrocket.

It’s time to live in the future, the future that is now, the now in which a modern healthy consumer can no longer afford the continued living of the unhealthy consumer. How else can a healthy modern consumer afford $15k per year to tutor each kid on top of the $50k he spends to send each to private nursery schools starting in pre-pre-pre-K? How else can he belong to three golf clubs (each with $1500 minimum monthly spends at the snack bar or clubhouse, mind you), have season tickets to the Knicks, and have a reasonable summer home in a 2nd tier vacation spot like Martha’s Vineyard? How else can he always pay a homeless person $50 in cough syrup to wait in line to get him the new iPad (which is actually called the new iPad) on the first day it comes out? The modern healthy consumer shouldn’t be asked to forgo the bare necessities of life to subsidize the sick. We can dick around with these please everyone solutions or we can get serious about healthcare and simply kill the sick.

Machem Raiser heads a consultancy shop, MLR Associates, which is “renowned” for providing “bold, clear-thinking” white papers to industry leading businesses. His ideas have had “a devil of a time” getting traction, but, per MLR Associates, “not one person has disputed that [MLR’s] solutions make sense.” The firm’s motto is: “The world can be better. Let’s make it so. Simply.” LoS has negotiated a pretty sweet deal for all MLR research, research which we are providing to our clients gratis, which means “free” in some old language, probably Babylonian or whatever they spoke in Ur (was it Babylonian?).


A Rebuke, Literally in Public

by Mr Juggles

From Georgetown’s own, “Elizabeth,” in the comment thread for Pomegranate Capital Thinks Women Can Run Money Better, Is Wrong:

This is quite literally the most ridiculous article and comment thread I have ever read. Are you men really so afraid of a little competition that you have to kill it before it becomes a serious threat? I suggest that you spend less time bashing women and more time getting an education and getting out of your tiny elitist and anti-female bubbles. I am so embarrassed for your gender reading these comments…

My reply:

You are LITERALLY the most ridiculous poster in that entire thread, Eliza. Literally! As successful men, we are always “killing it.” So your implied suggestion — let’s call it what it is, Beth, a rebuke — that we NOT “kill it” is offensive. Literally offensive. But the embarrassment you, Lizzie, feel for our gender (I usually fill out all Government forms that ask for my “Sex” as “Yes,” just to make it harder for the Government to know what my gender is. But I digress, I LITERALLY digress) is nothing compared to the embarrassment that we feel for not only your gender, but for your Common App safety school, and for your parents, and for that time you read A Modest Proposal and thought “Gee this Dr. Swift guy is practically the antichrist, how does he think can solve poverty and the ills of the underclass by eating their babies, I am so embarrassed for his gender, profession, language, countrymen, yadda yadda, et alia and cetera.”

LITERALLY,
Mr. Juggles

PS Chin up, the world needs coffee-makers, too. Human ones. With skirts.

PPS But it wouldn’t hurt to learn to type.


Never Trust A Mullet

by Mr Juggles

Recommendation: Do not own stock of, or hold prime brokerage balances at, companies run by mullet-toting executives.


Math Too Hard: Qualitative Easing a Literal No-Brainer

by Kaiser Edamame

Unfortunately it seems that, when we recommended Quantitative Easy, even though it was super easy, it didn’t gain a lot of traction. The markets haven’t been nearly as easy as Ben had hoped. So we here at LoS went back to the blackboard for a new idea, something on which we could write a clean, articulate white paper.

(Aside: yes we have a BLACKboard. Funny story because see last election cycle we realized that voting for Obama was a sweet get out of racism card, like buying carbon offsets so you feel ok about how much “damage” you do every time you fly in a plane, and while this came in very handy as a guilt hedge, based on his performance we don’t think we can vote for him again, plus it wont be nearly as “urban cool” to vote for a candidate with the slogan “Change, Again, Seriously.” So we thought, what else could we do to show cultural diversity? And we came up with installing a blackboard as the most obvious answer.)

After furious sessions, much chalkyness and vigorous eraser banging, what did we come up with? Qualitative Easing. As mentioned in our last Easy piece math is hard, almost as hard as lifting weights (which are VERY heavy by the way, just found this out). But Ben, the Bernank, is a hard man, capable of bearing an Atlassian load without so much as a shrug.

Qualitative Easing will have no math (rejoice!), it will just be a touchy, feely, sensual qualitative description of how the Bernank is going to increase prices for things that you OWN (stocks, bonds, homes) and keep prices the same for things you BUY a lot (gas, food, chia pets, viagra, tickets to Japanese hologram concerts).

Assuming he accepts my draft of his Qualitative Easing announcement speech (practically a fait accompli), it would go something like this:

Dear Americans,

I, the Bernank, am going to buy all of your assets from you at much higher prices and, like a hot shower with mango body wash, it is going to feel so good for both of us. I know you’re worried about the fact that the cost of everything is going up more than your income, but worry not: it is always darkest before dawn, and a beautiful dawn it will be with the prices of all the things you want to be more valuable growing like the rising hot solar star in space that we call the sun. Simultaneously, congruently, and coincidentally, the price of everything you want to be lower will fall like the delicate summer rain which wets the earth and promulgates the freshest of smells: moisty asphalt.

My warmest and kindest and biggest love to you,
Ben Bernanke


Things Are Too F**king Complicated

by Mr Juggles

Sept 29th’s FT contains two alarming articles. Martin Wolf calls for the EU to get the printing presses running because everything else has failed. We respect Mr. Wolf as one of the only three journalists in the world today who thinks for himself and does not have his head wedged up his ass. We respect his idea as well. He may be wrong but his idea is simple, to the point, and he admits it’s desperation (he calls it “the unthinkable”).

In the second article, George Soros explains how to prevent a “Second Great Depression.” Mr. Soros is an investing genius and a very smart man. Perhaps too smart. Because I have no f**king idea what he is talking about.

“This is how it would work. Since a eurozone treaty establishing a common treasury would take a long time to conclude, in the interim the member states have to appeal to the ECB to fill the vacuum….

It would require a newly created intergovernmental agency to enable the EFSF to cooperate with Europe’s central bank. This would have to be authorised by Germany’s Bundestag and perhaps by the legislatures of other states as well….

The EFSF would be used primarily to guarantee and recapitalise banks. The systemically important banks would have to sign an undertaking with the EFSF that they would abide by the instructions of the ECB as long as the guarantees were in force. Banks that refused to sign would not be guaranteed. Europe’s central bank would then instruct the banks to maintain their credit lines and loan portfolios while closely monitoring the risks they run for their own account…

To relieve the pressure on the government bonds of countries such as Italy, the ECB would lower its discount rate. It would then encourage the countries concerned to finance themselves entirely by issuing treasury bills and encourage the banks to buy the bills. The banks could rediscount the bills with the ECB but they would not do so as long as they earned more on the bills than on the cash.”

Ok, so I skipped a bunch of parts but WTF George? What are you talking about? I read this article excited to learn the solution to our woes but now I just need a stiff drink. I have literally no idea what he is talking about.

Neither do the regulators. Unfortunately, that will not stop them from implementing some inferior version of his plan. After all, they love complicated stop-gap measures that buy them a few more days/weeks/months and pass the buck to the next unlucky legislator.

As a society, we have outsmarted ourselves. Things are too complicated. No one — not George Soros, not The Bernank, not The Maestro — can understand how all the pieces fit together and where all the unintended consequences will pop up. And yet we add more towers to our castle built on sand.

Recommendation: Initiate a complication index spread trade. Get long short-term complication and confusion while shorting the out-year complication basket. Things are going to simplify, one way or the other.


Translating Corporate Speak: Wynn [Unforeseen Upside Edition #5]

by Mr Juggles

Steve Wynn used to discuss business trends on his quarterly conference calls. No longer necessary now that the Macau business generates almost a billion dollars of revenue and over $300mm of EBITDA per quarter. Instead, he is free to opine on the macro and political situation. It’s still the most entertaining call of the quarter even though it is sad when he no longer feels the need to mock investors and competitors. But at least he’s calling Jeff Immelt a Judas. Someone had to.

Wynn on Obama:

Well, here’s our problem. There are a host of opportunities for expansion in Las Vegas, a host of opportunities to create tens of thousands of jobs in Las Vegas. I know that I could do 10,000 more myself, and according to the Chamber of Commerce and the visitors and convention bureau, if we hired 10,000 employees, it would create another 20,000 additional jobs for a grand total of 30,000.
I believe in Las Vegas, I think its best days are ahead of it, but I’m afraid to do anything in the current political environment in the United States. You watch television and see what’s going on on this this debt ceiling issue, and what I consider to be a total lack of leadership from the President, and nothing is going to get fixed until the President himself steps up and wrangles both parties in Congress.

But everybody is so political, so focused on holding their job for the next year that the discussion in Washington is nauseating. And I’m saying it bluntly that this administration is the greatest wet blanket to business and progress and job creation in my lifetime. (our emphasis) And I can prove it and I could spend the next three hours giving you examples of all of us in this marketplace that are frightened to death about all the new regulations, our health care costs escalate, regulations coming from left and right, a President that seems, you know – that keeps using that word redistribution. Well, my customers and the companies that provide the vitality for the hospitality and restaurant industry, in the United States of America, they’re frightened of this administration.

And it makes you slow down and not invest your money. Everybody complains about how much money is on the side in America. You bet. And until we change the tempo and the conversation from Washington, it’s not going to change. And those of us who have business opportunities and the capital to do it, are going to sit in fear of the President. And you know, a lot of people don’t want to say that. They say “oh, God, don’t be attacking Obama.” Well, this is Obama’s deal. And it’s Obama that’s responsible for this fear in America. The guy keeps making speeches about redistribution, and maybe we ought to do something to businesses that don’t invest, they’re holding too much money.

You know, we haven’t heard that kind of talk except from pure socialists. Everybody is afraid of the government. And there’s no need – there’s no need, you know, soft pedaling it. It’s the truth. It is the truth. And that’s true of Democratic businessmen and Republican businessmen, and I am a Democratic businessman and a – I support Harry Reid, I support Democrats and Republicans, and I’m telling you that the business community in this country is frightened to death of the weird political philosophy of the President of the United States. And until he’s gone, everybody is going to be sitting on their thumbs.

Wynn on taxation on capital abroad:

If the government – if the administration in Washington isn’t frightening the dickens out of those of us who create jobs and build buildings and make lives for their employees, they’re attacking China where in the case of my company, the vitality of capital to improve Las Vegas has come from.

You know, it’s the double whammy. American companies that have ventured abroad to broaden their markets are bringing money – have reinvested much of that in America. And so the rhetoric about offshore capital, there would be a lot more of it brought back here if the government did intelligent and encouraging things to bring capital back. But this is a very business, job creating unfriendly administration and that’s the plain truth of it. And so you know, you want to build condominiums? Why? You want to protect yourself in this environment. Everybody is in a defensive crouch, except for Jeff Immelt, who is sort of a Judas goat. (emphasis ours)

Wynn on TSA:

Coming to the United States is tougher than going almost anywhere else in the world. Homeland Security has, you know, we seem to have been safe more or less but so much of it is excessive and irrational, you know, like patting down babies and old ladies and stuff like that. But it is very difficult – it’s more difficult today to get to the United States for people who have been coming here for years, for decades.

Our customers that are big businessmen that have been coming to America for 10, 15, 20 years, are asking us for help to relieve the bureaucratic congestion of government overregulation in this area. We’ve talked to Homeland Security. They’re aware of the problem. So is Customs and Immigration and the State Department. And you know, when we talk to any given individual in those organizations, in those bureaucracies, they’re very sympathetic. And they know the truth of the complaint.

And they know the truth of the fact that these things are very often excessive and unnecessary. But yet there seems to be a tremendous amount of inertia to move government in America, whether it’s the deficit management and coming to some kind of logical conclusion before August 2 or whatever it is, or whether it’s getting visas. Everybody has a clear understanding of the problem, but when it comes to our government it seems to be getting more and more sclerotic, more and more inflexible. By its own device, it keeps growing and growing and getting more and more onerous, more and more sluggish in its responses to real problems, and sluggish in its ability to take advantage of real opportunity. And it’s frustrating for me because I got a front row seat.

Update: While Wynn failed to mock investors or competitors, we were remiss not to include his mocking of some (past) customers.

We did not lower our rates like some of our competitors did. We’ve come to the conclusion here, incidentally, I’d like to add this parenthetically, having tried this before and failed, we don’t want to make the mistake again. This place is not set for price cutting. We lower the price, we can fill the rooms in an instant because they’re such fancy rooms. But we get people that carry their beer in from 7-Eleven, move their own bags, and don’t eat in our fine dining. We can’t use them. This is not a place for folks that have that kind of economy mentality. (our emphasis) This is a place for people who expect superior service, higher quality food, beverage and everything else.


Ben Bernanke announces Quantitative Easy

by Johnny Debacle

Hi everybody. It’s me, Ben Bernanke. As many of you know, I’ve been extremely busy. During Quantitative Easing I and II, I’ve spent almost all of my time finding just the right amount of flation. This is very difficult for one person to do, but don’t worry — I have a calculator that helps me compute the perfect amount. Not sure it would be possible without my calculator; I can see why every other central banker in history couldn’t get it right and why all their systems ended in some sort of systemic catastrophe. Between my calculator and the advance of knowledge, monetary science is better understood at the present time than in those days of old.

But what hasn’t changed is how much people hate things being hard. I know I do. And in spending time with my calculator, furiously pushing her buttons, I realized that QE I and II were just too hard for me. And in receiving a deluge of explicit and implicit inquiries from the market about when QE would end, what would happen when it did end, why QE wasn’t just blowing bubbles for the sake of blowing bubbles, I realized that QE I and II were just too hard for you all, too. So I sat down and said to my calculator, “Calculator, markets are too hard. Let’s make them easy. Let’s help boost assets prices with a new program called, Quantitative Easy.” My calculator didn’t reply but I could tell from the light reflecting off her display that she loved the idea.

So here we go everyone. Quantitative Easy. I know there will be a rush of people asking questions, so let me answer some obvious ones for you now:

What is Quantitative Easy? Quantitative Easy will be a program run by me, Ben Bernanke, that will make asset prices go up. This in turn will lead people to be happy. It will get their juices flowing, their animal spirits will stir in their hearts, and they will buy things. If we all agree to buy things, even if we we can’t afford to, then everyone will get rich. Easy.

How will it work? Asset prices, all of them, will go up. Like I said: QE I and II were too hard, people were constantly trying to figure out which assets would go up and when. Worse, people were worried that asset prices might actually go down at some point. Crazy, I know. Quantitative Easy is going to be easy. Everything is going to go up. Forever.

What should I buy? A horse. A rainbow. Mykonos (which is for sale fyi). Netflix stock. A mansion in Vancouver. A 1987 Topps Mark McGwire card. A slightly used Japanese nuclear plant. US Treasuries. Portuguese bonds. The only limit is your own creativity.

How can the Fed afford to do this given its balance sheet? That’s a good question. Next question, please.

Where will the money come from? We have a very complex process, involving machinery and paper, too complex to get into here. Make it easy for yourself and don’t try to understand it. Just trust us.

This sounds to good to be true. Is there a catch? No. Would I lie to you?


You Cannot Escape Doom

by Mr Juggles

One of the other two writer/PMs signed up Mister Juggles’ email for something called “Roubini Global Economics” (ed note: we will not be linking any of the mentioned material for reasons that will be made clear, bear with us). “They” made a huge mistake. At the time it seemed innocuous enough – “hey this guy sometimes has some insights, just like sometimes that dead clock over there tells me what time it is.” Roubini Global Economics is an attempt to parlay the Dr. Doom schtick into serious global economic monitoring with a Doom bias. Fine, knock yourself out buddy. Nouriel Roubini’s role in the project is as “Chairman,” and all of Latveria rejoices in his genius. Sample headlines include: “Meltdown, Anyone?” (Mar’08), “Are Commodity Prices Getting Ahead of Fundamentals?” and “Green Shoots or Yellow Weeds” (May’09). But there were too many emails, too much self-promotion, and too much repetition. I can only take so much information and so much email before I just tune it all out. I unsubscribed two years ago. Simple enough, really.

Except that I didn’t stop getting various RGE emails. No, no, no, into my inbox, Roubini still snuck. Email types received include: “The RGE MONITOR,” “The RGE Content Weekly Roundup,” “Welcome to the New EconoMonitor,” “New and Improved RGE Newsletters,” “From Nouriel’s Blackberry,” and “From the Desk of Nouriel Roubini.” I unsubscribed over and over and over and Nouriel did not go away. And he was a goddamned sneak about it, too. Like, for a couple weeks, I’d be in the clear and think: “Finally, this unsubscription took! I’m a-OK and Roubini free!” Then boom I’d get an email like: “From Nouriel’s Blackberry: Greek Contagion Risks – Much Ado About Relatively Little”; Roubini’s way of saying: “I’m not done with you yet, I’m economic hepatitis.”

And like in my lifetime fight against hepatitis, I roared and I raged. The whole thing gave me pause. What does it mean that since 2008 I have been unable to unsubscribe from Nouriel Roubini’s bearish soothsaying? Maybe it’s not the RGE that is unsubscribeable at all. Maybe, just maybe, what is really unsubscribeable is doom. You, one, me, we, WE cannot unsubscribe from doom.

Recommendation: You cannot escape doom.


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