Wall Street and Donald Trump

     Expressed as a percentage of GDP, the U.S. debt burden has always risen dramatically during wartime, reaching 110% after WW II and around 25% at the end of our 3 previous wars.  Then these numbers would trace a long and healthy cyclical decline.  Recently however, what we see as sovereign financing used to buy votes by one of the political parties has exacerbated the math to the point where it looks like our debt burden is, at best, never going to get paid off, so central bankers went ahead and nationalized the U.S. Treasury bond markets with ZIRP and NIRP, acronyms for old-fashioned money printing, used in large part this time to support resultingly mispriced financial markets.  Central bankers can only step out onto a playing field established by fiscal policy, so the spotlight for the mess really needs to be turned on Congress and the Administration, but hasn't.

     Interest payments represent the cost of borrowing money.  With ZIRP and NIRP, that cost is set artificially low, and the economic theory these people follow says they can keep overspending as much as they want this way, so they will unless somebody comes along and stops them.

     Enter Donald Trump.

     To us, the problem here is twofold.  The nationalization has marked securities prices up to overextended levels as investor money that used to go into sovereign debt, can't - the return is way too low - so increasingly desperate market participants have been bidding up everything else that provides them with decent, but less safe, income.  Concurrently, for many years now a currency war has systemically altered the amount of foreign earnings American corporations report to shareholders while pretty much the entire world has been gimmicking U.S. Dollar exchange rates to undercut our prices on goods sold from here.  Both sides to the problem may have set the stage for some kind of global recession/depression if the trends get reversed.  

     Looks like President Trump will be reversing both of them too, given what the candidate has said so far.  To us, that's why Wall Street adamantly opposes The Donald.  They've got a good thing going under socialized financial markets.

     Getting back to capitalism would ruin everything.

Liberal Male Menstruation a Problem at Brown University

     We have no words, and this kind of thing left the WTF realm long, long ago:

http://dailycaller.com/2016/09/07/even-men-get-free-tampons-at-brown-university/

Negative Interest Rates and the Mafia Annuity

     Rocco "Quick Sauce" Corleone wants to set up a Mafia Annuity for five elderly capos, and he tells Vito "Beancounter" Borrellione to do the math.  The Mafia Annuity is the one where you have a capo depart, don't ask how, at the end of every five year period, but on the last day of each plan month all capos get a black satchel filled with cash for as long as they remain undeparted.  The final satchels delivered to the soon-to-be departeds (offed right then and there mostly) get returned to Quick Sauce, along with everything in the departed's pockets and his bling, so there's no need for management fees, especially with the bling.  Monthly satchels are tossed out a limo window by the largest of six or seven goons in a drive-by, tailed once every five years by a marinara delivery truck carrying the Corleone clean-up crew.

     Quick Sauce tells the capos they're putting up three big ones each as lump sum payment for their generous and affordable policies, and Beancounter spreads the numbers, showing up at The MacDougal Post for review by our in-house CPA, who gives the spreadsheet the kind of meticulous attention to detail accountants reserve for financials like this in trying to keep their shinbones from being attacked by baseball bats.

     The printout is correct.  $15 million gross lump sum payment, $3 million apiece from 5 annuitants, 900 total satchels out the limo window, 60 a year in years 1 through 5, 48 per in years 6-10, 36 per in years 11-15, 24 in years 16-20 and 12 in years 21-25.  Gross lump sum divided by total satchels equals $16,666.67 a satchel, or $200,000 a year.  

     Not bad, for everyone involved, overlooking an actuarial detail or two.  Okay, five actuarial details if you're following this closely.  CPA wonders what an annuitant would get if he didn't join the death pool and instead set up a $3 million 25 year plan like this for himself.  Answer is....$10,000 per satchel, or $120,000 each year.  Mafia Annuity turns out to be much better, aforementioned actuarial detail(s) overlooked.  Problem here begins in the 26th year, the geezer-outlives-his-money-thing that financial advisers occasionally place a distant second to their hands (both usually) in your aging pockets too.

     CPA notes that Quick Sauce isn't assuming any return on that gross lump sum.  Zilch.  No return at all.  The don has obviously considered the impact negative interest rates are likely to have on the insurance industry.  Quick Sauce ain't gonna pay no bank no money to buy no bond.  He'll hold up the joint first.

     Google "Mafia Annuity" and you might get googled yourself at the local FBI office, only they've got better google than you, so CPA decides not to do that.  Instead he compares that $3 million 25 year individual plan with no investment return with the same exact thing returning 7% a year - that is, each and every single year for 25 of them, you earn 7% on the principal.

     That $10,000 a month, or $120,000 a year with no investment return at all, more than doubles if you get 7% on your money, a number often cited as the historical return on common stock investments, becoming $21,203 a month, or 
$254,441 annually.

          Before the Financial Apocalypse of 2007-08, major insurance companies were held in the highest regard by Wall Street.  Industry leaders understood their books and backed prudently-calculated liability estimates with gilt-edged investments across the entire risk window, assuring that appropriate financing would be there whenever needed.  People had reason to believe that these operations would continue to run like clockwork for as far as a seer's eye could see.  The knowledgeable investor had at least a couple of life and/or property and casualty outfits in the portfolio, maybe a dash of reinsurance and broker/agency exposure as well.

     Then came the AIG bailout and, with it, this new thing called a derivative, throwing in some really scary counter-party risks through what struck us as the surprise emergence of seemingly thousands of crazy-ass speculators embedded inside our money markets, for goodness sakes, and the insurance business-model just seemed to blow up in The Street's face, like all of a sudden too.

     Since then, we've been watching another weapon of mass destruction creep silently into position for a second colossal smackdown: negative interest rates.  Only recently has the potential catastrophic impact of this central planning fiasco fallen into our intermediate term forecasts, so we're compelled to pass along our thoughts to you.

     And we just did.  The unknowns are formidable here, and the only numbers we can draw on come from that non-existent Mafia Annuity example.  It's clear to us the insurance industry may have to make some big changes, the nature of which we can only surmise, hence that's unpublishable for now.  Is a switch from bonds to direct real estate investments in the works?  How about buying up corporations to hold and manage them a la Warren Buffett.  Will policies become far more expensive in the future?  Will contracts have to be rewritten?  We don't pretend to know the questions here, let alone the answers.

     Finally, remember the Mafia Annuity structure?  You know, where Rocco "Quick Sauce" Corleone had an annuitant depart, don't ask how, at the end of every five year period.  That's an Ordinary Annuity, and for those of you who went ahead and asked how anyway, the don can just as easily draw up an Annuity Due, where an annuitant departs at the beginning of every five year period.

     Lets hope Quick Sauce didn't find out you asked.

      

Dichotomy

     One often reads that we are passing along the outsized costs of today's government to future generations, but that is wrong.  We are not.  They are, they being members of the American Communist Party, who came out of the closet upon nationalizing the Treasury bond market a while back to keep themselves in power.  Under the former free market system, interest on the burgeoning federal debt would've risen to appropriately outrageous levels, driving voters to send these failed politicians packing.  That free stuff everyone talks about is only free by way of illusionary diversion.  A magic trick.  In reality, investors are already paying a devastating price for it through their loss of secure income from what used to be safe investments before the commies severed government's longstanding pact with the people to conduct its financial affairs responsibly.  The other shoe is scheduled to drop at some point in the future with one humdinger of an economic breakdown, followed by the mother of all Great Depressions.

     We here at The Post feel that these two events will be rolled into one with the simple acknowledgement that our beleaguered nation became The United Communist States of America with the aforementioned nationalization, the transition peacefully consummated some years later with the central bank acquiring 51% of every common stock held in the public arena.

     No runaway inflation.  No market crash.  Simply the total loss of personal freedom.  That will be the economic humdinger, followed by the mother of all Great Depressions: life under communist rule.  It will start with the cessation of all dividend payments, based, of course, on legal stockholder votes, concurrently replaced with deposits of egalitarian amounts from the United States Department of Health and Human Services.  Egalitarian in the sense that single mothers with large numbers of mouths to feed obviously need bigger bank deposits than you.

     No, we are not passing along squat to future generations.  They are.  People, it's long past time to correct anyone who says otherwise.

Armed Robbery, Brazilian Style

     A recent incident outside the Olympic Village had four American swimmers handing over their wallets to gunman after three of the boys were ordered down on their knees and demands had been made of a fourth to do so at gunpoint.  The Brazilian government claims this was not a holdup because the gunmen were "security staff" making the boys pay for something they'd broken.  Later, officials took two of the athletes off their flight home and seized their passports to make them say whatever the government wanted them to say before being allowed to leave the country.  A photo-op demonstration was staged at the airport, stooges chanting "liars", when the two walked through the terminal after being released by interrogators.

   Meanwhile, the United States Olympic Committee (USOC) issued a statement apologizing for something, though it wasn't clear what, stating, in part, that "an argument ensued between the athletes and two armed gas station security staff, who displayed their weapons, ordered the athletes from their vehicle and demanded the athletes provide a monetary payment."

     Ignoring whatever precipitated the armed robbery as irrelevant, how is that last part not armed robbery?  We're told this wasn't the only Olympics-related holdup, and are anxiously awaiting an explanation of the laws in Brazil, if any, covering gunmen loose in the streets.

     This story comes at a time when Americans are wondering why we're being screwed through trade agreements all across the globe.  Maybe the day has arrived to pull out of these POS treaties with these POS countries, and the games are just showing us why.

Their Current Market Forecasts

     We hate to keep repeating ourselves, but nobody else seems to get it.  Central bankers have successfully nationalized the United States Treasury bond market, and because the commie propaganda machine has been looking the other way, all guruland is pretending like it never happened.

     Do you think our Central Party is going to privatize anything they've gotten their filthy pinko hands on?

     Of course not, and such being the case, we will never see a secular rise in interest rates again.  Since our totalitarian leadership in Washington intends to eliminate the need to ever pay the free market cost of uncontrolled commie spending,  the fraud of calling these obscenities "interest rates" will continue, bringing whatever they really are close to zero, OR LOWER, and keep them there.  As Federal budget deficits are just going to sky higher and higher into the financial stratosphere, any hope that the Trotskyites will return debt financing to a free market arena is laughable.

     That makes large cap, blue chip, dividend-paying stocks the only major public source of long term income that won't screw the income investor over when future maturity dates roll around.  Oh, you can hold T-Bonds for "safety" if you ignore inflation, or as trading vehicles, but the risk involved in considering any long term debt instrument for income has gone off the charts under current Marxist rule.

     Face it, the sector of our stock market that contains the aforementioned issues, as tracked by their own very specific indices such as, for example, the Dow Jones Industrial Average, will have to just keep going up, up, up over time.  The law of (diminishing) supply (through buybacks) and (increasing) demand will make it so.  Price action has been reflecting this "market theme" for a while now, and that's not going to change any time soon.  Ever, if the commies are allowed to run amuck, as the propagandists' treatment of Donald Trump's Presidential campaign suggests they will.

     Valued subscribers, please keep these points in mind when reading any financial forecast that scrolls across your screen.  Without going here, the depressing place we've just shown you, today's fortune teller has no idea what he/she is going on about.

     And, near as we can tell, possibly never will.

Our Current Market Forecasts

     The 1% got the bulk of its money by pilfering ownership interest from middle class shareholders through a massive theft of Average Joe's family savings deliberately mislabeled "stock options".  Over the past 36 years and counting, CEO's and them have used these criminal asset seizures to obscenely enrich themselves and pay off politicians for enabling such elicit activities, the pack of them coalescing into the Central Party that now runs Washington.

     More recently, central bankers across the globe have shut down free markets in sovereign bonds pretty much everywhere important as a means of preventing wild-spending politicians from facing the kind of interest rates that would've otherwise driven them from power.

     Today, investors far and wide are confronted with the wealth confiscation tax deliberately mislabeled "negative interest rates".  Under any kind of economic theory that makes sense, actual interest rates stop at zero.  Quoting anything lower than that is simply misdirection - the con artist's way of telling you he's not levying a tax on anyone now suckered into, or required to, pay a tax to park money with some governmental financial arm.

     To the extent that numbnuts everywhere accept the frauds and the fraudulent terms without as much as casting a wary eye at these big time crooks, the world probably deserves what it's getting: totalitarian communist rule.

     None of this could've been foretold, so we at your MacDougal Post have decided to go there to find out where it'll all head next.  Taking into consideration everything we can possibly predict that couldn't possibly be predicted to actually happen as of this point in time, your staff has come up with the following forecast:

     1) neither Donald Trump nor Hillary Clinton will be elected to run the country during the next presidential term; (our best guess: this probably means that Bill Clinton will return to power through the back First Hubby door);

     2) U.S. financial markets will continue to advance broadly for at least 4 more years, dropping interest rates on all investment grade bonds, including corporates, into that wealth confiscation tax zone and lowering dividend yields on blue chip large caps down remarkably closer to zero than the kind of integers the world has gotten accustomed to seeing over our former years of free market capitalism;

     3) China will pull off another statistical hoax convincing the world government propaganda machine that the age of dramatic global economic prosperity has reawakened, and numbers everywhere will start spraying forth in epic growth mode once again.