BigStewMan Posted February 1, 2021 Share Posted February 1, 2021 Just now, Dave A said: Yes right when prime interest rates hit 21% in April that year. ain't it strange that in varying times some make it well and others suffer. Strange world. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jeff Matthews Posted February 1, 2021 Share Posted February 1, 2021 Just now, BigStewMan said: ain't it strange that in varying times some make it well and others suffer. Strange world. Bankers vs. debtors. 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BigStewMan Posted February 1, 2021 Share Posted February 1, 2021 . Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Coytee Posted February 1, 2021 Share Posted February 1, 2021 17 hours ago, Bubo said: What Is Naked Shorting Naked shorting is the illegal practice of short selling shares that have not been affirmatively determined to exist. Ordinarily, traders must borrow a stock, or determine that it can be borrowed, before they sell it short. So naked shorting refers to short pressure on a stock that may be larger than the tradable shares in the market. Despite being made illegal after the 2008–09 financial crisis, naked shorting continues to happen because of loopholes in rules and discrepancies between paper and electronic trading systems. I was told (informed??) many many years ago that a market maker in a stock can short an unlimited number of shares, as long as it's reflected on their books as a liability. I don't know this to be true or not.....but it does make sense to me. Note that this applies only to market makers, not traders, hedge funds nor you & me. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bubo Posted February 1, 2021 Author Share Posted February 1, 2021 22 hours ago, BigStewMan said: an internet search shows that mortgage interest rate in 1980 was 18.45% -- that's insane. honestly, I wasn't the slightest bit concerned with interest rate or the stock market or CD yields back then; but who could have afforded to finance a home back then? it must have been a buyer's market big time. Article could have been written this morning Paul Volcker: Gold Was the Enemy Former Fed chairman talks about the Fed and gold By Valentin Schmid March 26, 2015 Updated: March 26, 2015 NEW YORK—Paul Volcker is a living financial legend. As a chairman of the Federal Reserve in the early ′80s, he was singlehandedly responsible for quashing stagflation by raising interest rates to an unheard of 20 percent by June 1981. What ensued was an unprecedented economic expansion and bull market in stocks, which was only seriously stopped by the Internet bust in 1999, caused by the lax monetary policy of Volcker’s successor Alan Greenspan. ........................................... Indeed, the end of Carter’s term in 1981 saw the peak of inflation at a mind-boggling 13.5 percent, but it didn’t come down soon enough get him re-elected. .................................................. “[Reagan] had all these Republican advisers who were all against the Federal Reserve and I was the only person to defend the Federal Reserve. At the end, President Reagan, to the best of my knowledge never publicly said anything bad against the Federal Reserve and our policies,” Volcker said. Volcker also argued that the Fed and the White House should keep an appropriate distance for the Fed to remain independent of politics. .................................................. Gold, the Enemy When it comes to a hot topic of today’s investment world, Mr. Volcker always had a very strong view on gold. “Gold was the enemy to me because that was a speculative vehicle while I was trying to hold the system together. [The speculators] were on the other side.” Then and now, the gold price is viewed as the inverse price of the confidence in the system. If gold is high, it usually means something is amiss. In Volcker’s time, the high inflation and budget deficits of the 70s propelled gold from a low of $35 before 1970 to a high of $668 in 1980. After Volcker got inflation under control and Reagan’s policies ushered in a period of economic growth, gold went down to a low of $260 in the early 2000s. Gold was the enemy to me. — Paul Volcker, former chairman, Federal Reserve In recent times, inflation as well as an exponential rise in private and government debt across the world, as well as different financial crises boosted gold to a high of $1,826 in 2011. Gold supporters like Ron Paul have also advocated the auditing of the Federal Reserve, because they want to know exactly how much gold lies in Fort Knox. Volcker thinks they are mistaken because it’s not the Fed who actually controls the gold. “The Treasury holds the gold, not the Federal Reserve. The Treasury issues a gold certificate to the Fed. The paper gold is on deposit at the Federal Reserve. It belongs to the United States. If you say: ‘We want an audit of the gold stock, we want to go to Fort Knox and count the gold bars.’ That was a popular idea at that time, but the Treasury never did it. For all we know the bars don’t exist,” he said with a smirk. Having raised interest rates to a higher level than any other Fed chairman, he was coy about the current Fed’s opportunity to raise rates. https://www.theepochtimes.com/paul-volcker-gold-was-the-enemy_1299447.html 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bubo Posted February 1, 2021 Author Share Posted February 1, 2021 7 hours ago, Coytee said: I was told (informed??) many many years ago that a market maker in a stock can short an unlimited number of shares, as long as it's reflected on their books as a liability. I don't know this to be true or not.....but it does make sense to me. Note that this applies only to market makers, not traders, hedge funds nor you & me. The closest I ever traveled into the inside of the gearbox in Manhattan aka Wall Street, was briefing analysts, and selling lots and lots of high speed communications equipment to every kind of company on Wall Street. When they put in new regs and sarbox etc, it changes the rules and structure. Something like 30% of all US communication infrastructure was in Manhattan at the time pre 9-11, the WTC was full of analysts and everything else market related, and lots of global trade companies, we had friends with companies located in the WTC. Since 9-11 everything is mirrored off site, multiple back up sites, lots of fiber everywhere makes Manhattan less strategic, it's being on a fiber or direct microwave link to an access node on a fiber trunk. With the lock-down nonsense, everyone is working from home and or mirror and back-up sites, Manhattan may never recover. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bubo Posted February 1, 2021 Author Share Posted February 1, 2021 Paul Volcker Was Inflation’s Worst Enemy As Fed chairman, he shored up the dollar and set the stage for decades of economic growth. By John B. Taylor Dec. 9, 2019 7:26 pm ET US abandons Breton Woods Agreement .................................. Quote Volcker was at the August 1971 Camp David meeting where President Nixon decided to impose wage and price controls and abandon the international monetary system by closing the gold window. US Abandons Gold Standard for Trade Quote Countries would allow the value of their exchange rates to depreciate when they had a trade deficit and let their exchange rates rise when they had a surplus...................... Soviet Style Controls on wages and prices lead to Soviet results Quote The job Mr. Carter gave Volcker in the late 1970s was even more important and more difficult. The wage and price controls imposed in 1971 had led to an inflationary monetary policy at the central bank under Chairman Arthur Burns. Inflation and unemployment skyrocketed and economic growth fell. ......................... Decoupled from Gold, it won't take long until printing solves all problems instead of tough choices, inflation by printing is a tax on savings. Quote With his emphasis on the money supply, Volcker could say that it was the market that determined the interest rate, and thus he could allow the interest rate to go higher, which he did. The federal-funds rate reached 20% in 1981. 20% interest rates sucked the credit out of the economy, slowing asset and wage inflation Quote ..................... Inflation fell dramatically and created conditions for a quarter-century of strong economic growth. His successor at the Fed, Alan Greenspan, maintained Volcker’s focus on keeping inflation low. Wall street creates their own money from nothing to speculate We see this with the apparent naked shorting in the Game Stop and other shorts Quote He weighed in on the causes of the global financial crisis, arguing for higher capital requirements and for what would be called the “Volcker rule” to curtail proprietary trading. Works great for the insiders that get the zero bucks Quote “While zero interest rates may be necessary at the moment, they lead to some dangerous possibilities in terms of breeding more speculative excesses,” Interest rates rise above zero, exponential growth of debt takes over US was paying $400 Billion yr to the private owners of the FED when Trump took office, this is why he beat the FED down to zero interest rates on money they create out of thin air to buy treasuries. Quote The American economy still needs change. Despite tax and regulatory reforms, the federal deficit remains large and the federal debt is rising. The answers are as simple as they were in Volcker’s time: Get back to sound and predictable budget policy. Paul Volcker’s career shows the way. Good economics leads to good policy, which leads to good results. https://www.wsj.com/articles/paul-volcker-was-inflations-worst-enemy-11575937617 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bubo Posted February 1, 2021 Author Share Posted February 1, 2021 Much less flattering Volker article, laid the foundations for the now LewRockwell.com ANTI-STATE•ANTI-WAR•PRO-MARKET Paul Volcker: The Man Who Vanquished Gold By Joseph T. Salerno Mises.org December 23, 2019 ..................... Mr. Volcker certainly deserves credit for curbing the Great Inflation of the 1970s. However, he also merits a lion’s share of the blame for unleashing the Great Inflation on the US and the world economy in the first place. For it was Mr. Volcker who masterminded the program that President Nixon announced on August 15, 1971, which unilaterally suspended gold convertibility of US dollars held by foreign governments and central banks, imposed a fascist wage-price freeze on the US economy, and slapped a 10 percent surcharge on foreign imports.1 Tragically, by severing the last link between the dollar and gold, Volcker’s program scuttled the last chance of restoring a genuine gold standard. More than two years before Nixon slammed down the “gold window,” Volcker, the recently appointed undersecretary of the treasury for monetary affairs, gave an oral presentation to Nixon and his closest advisors on US balance-of-payments problems. The presentation was based on a memo that the secret “Volcker group,” initiated by Henry Kissinger, spent five months preparing. Among other things, Volcker recommended a continuation of capital controls to prop up the inflated dollar’s overvalued exchange rate and a massive appreciation or “revaluation” of the currencies of less inflationary countries such as West Germany, placing the burden of adjustment to unrestrained US inflation on these countries. Volcker then planted the time bomb that would eventually detonate and seal the fate of the gold standard. He suggested to Nixon that if these measures did not work to sustain the pseudo–gold standard of the Bretton Woods System, a run on the US gold stock could only be avoided by unilaterally repudiating the postwar US pledge to convert foreign official dollar holdings into gold. Unfortunately, the Volcker Group report summarily dismissed the alternative of raising — possibly doubling — the dollar price of gold, i.e., “devaluing the dollar,” which would have increased the value of the US gold stock and facilitated the restoration of a genuine gold standard. Only a real gold standard could have halted and reversed the slow-motion collapse that the international monetary system had been undergoing since the mid-1960s due to large and persistent US payments deficits driven by profligate dollar creation.2 Volcker, however, hated and wanted to get rid of the last vestiges of the gold standard and replace it with a fixed exchange-rate system dominated by the US fiat dollar to further enhance the power and prestige of the US in international affairs. According to Volcker, “the stability and strength of our currency was important to sustaining the broad role of the United States in the world.” Years later, Volcker revealed, “I have never been able to shake the feeling that a strong currency is generally a good thing, and that it is typically a sign of vigor and strength and competitiveness.”3 One of his biographers intimated that Volcker’s longstanding regret at having been rejected for military service during World War II because of his height was at the root of his single-minded determination to maintain “the supremacy of the American dollar as the world’s premier currency.”4 Indeed, Volcker struggled mightily to make the dollar appear strong, even while rampant money printing to finance Great Society welfare programs and the Vietnam War inexorably weakened it. But Volcker bitterly opposed raising the price of gold, because he feared that open devaluation of the inflated dollar would not only diminish the status and reputation of the US, but also reward people and countries he detested, namely, speculators in gold and gold-producing countries such as the Soviet Union and South Africa. (Degualle Punked the US ) He especially loathed and wanted to punish President Charles de Gaulle and the French for embarrassing and discrediting the US by withdrawing from NATO and exposing the weakness of the dollar by insisting on converting their dollars into gold in the face of US threats to remove military protection against the Soviet Union. (To add insult to injury, de Gaulle had sent naval ships to retrieve French gold.) .................. https://www.lewrockwell.com/2019/12/joseph-salerno/paul-volcker-the-man-who-vanquished-gold/ Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jeff Matthews Posted February 1, 2021 Share Posted February 1, 2021 Can anyone help me figure out why I regularly see discrepancies in earnings history of companies? Here's an example: The first pic. is from mactrotrends.com: (source: https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/T/at-t/eps-earnings-per-share-diluted) This next pic. is from NASDAQ.com: (source: https://www.nasdaq.com/market-activity/stocks/t/earnings) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jeff Matthews Posted February 1, 2021 Share Posted February 1, 2021 Here's the scoop from AT&T, directly: (source: https://about.att.com/story/2021/q4_earnings_2020.html) I see what they did. There was a large, non-cash expense taken, for which they made an adjustment. It looks like some sites report adjusted EPS, while others don't. Kind of sucks. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
oldtimer Posted February 1, 2021 Share Posted February 1, 2021 The key word from the prior post was "diluted" and also "adjusted." What sucks is accountants, and accounting. In business school a prof asked a question about if they would be in favor of a particular change, and when many raised their hands, he laughed and said well you would be putting yourselves out of a job. You are talking reported versus adjusted. Welcome to the arcane world of manipulation (accounting). 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Moderators Travis In Austin Posted February 2, 2021 Moderators Share Posted February 2, 2021 3 hours ago, Bubo said: The American economy still needs change. Despite tax and regulatory reforms, the federal deficit remains large and the federal debt is rising. The answers are as simple as they were in Volcker’s time: Get back to sound and predictable budget policy. Paul Volcker’s career shows the way. Good economics leads to good policy, which leads to good results. Mr. Taylor is a professor of economics at Stanford, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, and co-author, with George P. Shultz, of “Choose Economic Freedom: Enduring Policy Lessons From the 1970s and 1980s,” forthcoming next month. Copyright ©2020 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. It's no big deal, but it would help us if you could post the link, and maybe on paragraph. It's not good for there to be rampant copyright infringement going on. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JJkizak Posted February 2, 2021 Share Posted February 2, 2021 Remember this that half the national debt is for domestic programs which Congress could care less about. JJK Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Moderators Travis In Austin Posted February 2, 2021 Moderators Share Posted February 2, 2021 1 hour ago, Jeff Matthews said: Can anyone help me figure out why I regularly see discrepancies in earnings history of companies? Here's an example: The first pic. is from mactrotrends.com: (source: https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/T/at-t/eps-earnings-per-share-diluted) This next pic. is from NASDAQ.com: (source: https://www.nasdaq.com/market-activity/stocks/t/earnings) When you hear, XXX is going to take a "charge" you should watching very, very closely. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Moderators Travis In Austin Posted February 2, 2021 Moderators Share Posted February 2, 2021 On 1/30/2021 at 9:41 PM, Bubo said: Was anyone on the Forum involved in RH and Game Stop ? I had never heard of RH until a few days ago. Just wondering if anyone had first hand experience with the current blow up ? My son came and asked me about it yesterday. Which was way out of the blue for him. Then my wife told me later that there is a viral story out there that a 10 year old made a bunch of money out there with the set up, which explains my son's curiosity. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bubo Posted February 2, 2021 Author Share Posted February 2, 2021 15 minutes ago, dwilawyer said: It's no big deal, but it would help us if you could post the link, and maybe on paragraph. It's not good for there to be rampant copyright infringement going on. Thanks I missed the link on that one Attribution was there already Since we are not selling anything, I doubt if anyone would mind if we direct traffic to them or put their name out for free. My two cents..... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
richieb Posted February 2, 2021 Share Posted February 2, 2021 12 minutes ago, dwilawyer said: My son came and asked me about it yesterday. Which was way out of the blue for him. Then my wife told me later that there is a viral story out there that a 10 year old made a bunch of money out there with the set up, which explains my son's curiosity. No wonder then the Hedges are running for cover, and being covered. They hate having the shite beat out of them by 10 year old bullies - 1 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bubo Posted February 2, 2021 Author Share Posted February 2, 2021 1 hour ago, oldtimer said: The key word from the prior post was "diluted" and also "adjusted." What sucks is accountants, and accounting. In business school a prof asked a question about if they would be in favor of a particular change, and when many raised their hands, he laughed and said well you would be putting yourselves out of a job. You are talking reported versus adjusted. Welcome to the arcane world of manipulation (accounting). The CEO of a Company calls the annual planning meeting he asks each of his VPs "What kind of year are we going to have" ? Sales "If I get the extra salesmen I am asking for we will have 10% growth" Manufacturing "If I get the new machines we can expand production 20%" HR "We have great benefits, and the new recruiters will get us the best" Finance "Just tell me what kind of year you want to have" 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Moderators Travis In Austin Posted February 2, 2021 Moderators Share Posted February 2, 2021 5 minutes ago, Bubo said: Thanks I missed the link on that one Attribution was there already Since we are not selling anything, I doubt if anyone would mind if we direct traffic to them or put their name out for free. My two cents..... Klipsch minds if it's more than a name or an acceptable quote. I'm just a volunteer moderator. Go read the terms of service and tell me which term you are violating when you copy and paste an entire article. Like I said, it's not a big deal, we all need a reminder on it, DO NOT, please, copy and paste an entire article, including the copyright notice (which is like waiving a red flag in front of a bull). Attribution isn't the issue, I don't care if they are attributed. You are fine on fair use with a paragraph about a key point, or the intro paragraph with the link should always be a safe harbor. Then they do get the traffic, if the person is interested they will click and everyone is happy. Selling something isn't the standard for infringement, making a copy, whether you charge for it or not, is all it takes for infringement on a patent. With copyright it is technically copying and pasting any portion of a work. However fair use says that in a non-commercial context, like education, public discussion, etc. is "fair" and they don't have the right to complain. Thanks 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jeff Matthews Posted February 2, 2021 Share Posted February 2, 2021 The Gamestop kids were in it together as they drove it up, but now that it's over, they abandon their loyalty to the group as they bail for the last of the cash. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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