Babylon Bee

This is a satire site, in the spirit of The Onion or Private Eye (minus the serious stuff). I signed up for their email list. This was the welcome letter that was auto generated by their mailing list system:

Seth here, CEO of The Babylon Bee. I want to personally thank you for joining our email list. Well, “personally” might be a stretch. This is an automated message that gets sent to everyone who subscribes. And to be honest, I didn’t even write it. CEOs don’t have time to write emails. But I did tell somebody to write it, so you are actually hearing from me, albeit indirectly.

We all know that Biden doesn’t write his own speeches. Neither did Trump. But somehow they all feel they have to pretend, or at least not come out and acknowledge that some spotty intern wrote that stream of platitudes that passed for a speech.

Brain injuries

An astonishingly high number of people suffer from traumatic brain injuries. One in ten according to this article from The Economist. I would never have guessed that it was as high as this.

Markets chatter

• The Ever Given, currently blocking the Suez Canal, might break up. If that happens, oil will bounce higher. One way of expressing a relatively pure view of this is via the NOK.SEK currency pair. Given the highly contingent nature of this, maybe an option would work best.

• From Grant’s Almost Daily newsletter:

It’s good to be the boss.  According to data from LCD, supply of domestic leveraged loans used to fund dividend recapitalizations (i.e., payouts to the borrower’s private equity sponsor) have footed to $20 billion so far this year, marking the busiest quarter for loans undertaken for that purpose since the end of 2016. 

While adding debt to reward insiders might appear to be an adverse credit development, some take a more sanguine view.  A Tuesday bulletin from S&P Global Ratings announced an upgrade of Luxembourg-based vehicle glass repair company Belron Group, S.A., to double-B-plus from double-B.  The rationale: “Resilient performance and proposed dividend recapitalization.”

(The newsletter is free, but you have to sign up.)

Memento Mori Mondeo

The Mondeo, successor to the Sierra, successor to the Cortina and for a long time the best selling car in the UK is going out of production. Electric vehicles are the future, believes Ford, or – at least – Ford is required to believe.

Kagame, Killer

Paul Kagame’s admirers say that as ruler of Rwanda, a once-benighted land, he is beneficent, even benevolent. Not if you believe even half of “Do Not Disturb”, a new study of his government by Michela Wrong, a journalist. Under her scrutiny, Mr Kagame has almost no redeeming features. Brought up among Tutsi exiles in Uganda, Rwanda’s neighbour to the north, in this telling he was the school sneak. He rose in the Ugandan intelligence service. Then Mr Kagame reconquered Rwanda. As a disciplinarian leader, she reports, he was known to comrades as “Pilato” (after Pontius Pilate) for overseeing punishments while washing his hands of moral responsibility. He is blasted, too, as a menace in the region. He should bear the bulk of guilt, reckons Ms Wrong, for a high death toll in civil wars initiated mainly by him in Congo. This book, full of detailed research, will enrage Mr Kagame and rattle his friends at home and abroad. |

Tony Blair is a fan. You probably already guessed.

UK Inflation Risk

Martin Wolf takes thousands of words to argue that there is a material risk that the UK may suffer inflation. He points out that we have strongly negative real rates, high debt levels, both public and private, and an explosive growth of M3. The UK has a more gradually rising M3 than the USA (as of today), but we could catch up, as Bailey seems to be a new convert to MMT.

Market Risk

Just prior to the recent dip, the median stock trading over-the-counter (i.e. penny stocks, i.e. lottery tickets) was over 300% above its 52-week low.

That's greater than any other rally in 20 years. By double. pic.twitter.com/MKqiGVU0QT

— SentimenTrader (@sentimentrader) March 24, 2021

Archegos Capital Archewent

Hedge Fund Triggers Record Crash in U.S. Media Stocks

Stocks of major U.S. media companies - ViacomCBS (ticker: $VIAC) and Discovery (ticker: $DISCA) - declined by about 27.5% on Friday, March 27th. The crash is said to have been triggered due to forced liquidation from a hedge fund called Archegos Capital. Discovery announced in a press release that the trading activity was not a result of insider transactions.

From Unhedged.