Robert @ragranov

@TimmerFidelity Insightful. But in global recession or crises? Correlations go 1, everything sold together, reflexivity, deleverage, liquidity, things that lose less same gain much less, when does diversification becomes diworsification?Are billions made in concentration, trends and compounding?

@gnoble79 Look closely at insurers with highest annuity sales Athene, Standard Benefit, Jackson, others. Owned by investment firms is trouble.

Last week we showed you the $2 trillion time bomb sitting inside America's life insurance companies, and in Episode 2 of our series with Tom Gober, we start naming names. Tom calls it the cash cow: premiums pour into an insurance company 365 days a year, and when a private equity owner sits on both sides of the table, he can steer that money into his own businesses while the policyholders pay him a fee for the privilege. Here's what we're going over in Episode 2 “Sports Empires & the Liquidity Trap” of The Insurance Reckoning with Tom Gober: - The billionaire who owns the Dodgers is under a federal criminal investigation in New York, and Tom shows how his insurers ended up with roughly 400% of their surplus in his own paper when the NAIC suggests a cap of 50%. - Tom called out this exact scheme back in 2014 as the expert on a complaint that exposed a straw man buying the reinsurer so it wouldn't look affiliated, and the case settled almost immediately. In the 12 years since, none of the state regulators raised it, and it took a federal prosecutor in a criminal case to bring it back up. - South Carolina just moved to put 2 companies into receivership, and their private equity owner is the same group that sued its own rating agency to stop a downgrade. That group has 3 more carriers in Utah, and Tom says the exact same playbook is running at the other private equity controlled carriers. Since we filmed, Florida has suspended the life insurer's license in the state. - If your insurer moves its money to an affiliate offshore, you have no legal claim on it, and Tom puts the liabilities that have already left US life insurers for offshore reinsurers and secret captives at more than $1.6 trillion. I got angry in this one. I believe the zombie companies need to go bankrupt and the people running them need to go to jail, because not a single big bank CEO did time after 2008 and look at the mess we have now. I also made a promise on camera to every state insurance regulator in America, and I intend to keep it. Figures don't lie, but liars figure.

George Noble @gnoble79

a week ago

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ The Insurance Reckoning with Tom Gober Part 1: The Whistleblower ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ I believe the scandal building inside America's life insurance industry is bigger than Madoff and bigger than Enron, and it might

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just imagine, walking into a meeting, introducing this guy, singing This is Howie Dewitt

Jim Chanos explains why this AI boom carries more financial risk than almost any boom in history “So, my friend Paul Kedrosky, I don’t know if you heard him recently, he had a wonderful point." "I teach the history of financial-market fraud, but as part of it, we teach financial cycles because the fraud cycle follows the financial cycle, usually with a lag." "And Paul made a wonderful point. I think he made it on your podcast, that major booms are either credit-related, government-related, technology-related, or real-estate-related." "He said this is the first one in a long, long time, if not ever. I forget. I think railroads might have been the other one where all four boxes are checked." "It’s government policy. It’s certainly technology. It’s certainly credit-driven now. And it’s real-estate-related with the buildout of data centers." "And so you’ve got four giant drivers for this cycle that all need to be harnessed and going in the right direction, and that increases the financial risk that we’ve been talking about.”

Fireside Alpha @firesidealpha

2 weeks ago

Steve Eisman says Michael Burry’s AI depreciation thesis “too academic” and says an OpenAI failure is the much larger risk “I think, with all due respect to Michael, I think his argument is too academic." "Put it this way: if AI succeeds because Anthropic and OpenAI grow like

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The best performing stocks in the S&P 500 over the last 5, 10, 15, and 20 years...

@gregoryblotnick What happened to markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent? Please share with us the list of managers who have beaten S&P 500 over the last 10, 15 and 20 years? And if they are have less than 15 positions please compare them to XLK ETF as well. MM not list

@varunshenoy_ @FoundersPodcast @davidsenra Situational Awareness 2.0 what if current AI is not yet ROI positive in the use cases their levered buyouts are modeling?

This chart shows the sensitivity to growth and inflation for different assets and trading strategies. Source: AQR

@firesidealpha That they carry nuclear liabilities that are growing and it’s unsustainable. This is all not mutually exclusive.

@firesidealpha Yes they are trying to scare everyone now because it serves them! They’ve build out large enough. Yes they have no moat, but they also know that the security issues are very real and can not be addressed unilaterally, that they steal IP to keep improving their models, and

@chamath Is making it public worldwide helpful or harmful? Was China trying to hurt the world or solve in its usual way its own ageing population crises? Covid could have been designed to kill the older population. This talk is comparing apples to a nuclear bomb drop. Not as simple at all

@chamath Yes agreed. But this is a much bigger investigation with much bigger blocker besides the ones he ids, China itself. And then there’s national security considerations. Suppose US intelligence already knows it was a lab leak and if it was accidental or intentional?

@firesidealpha AI companies will on purpose continue to demonstrate increased threat of uncontrolled AI to trigger regulation and to close US market to Chinese AI. They will then become regulations shielded oligopolies and work to capture their regulators. This is the only way US AI can work!

@firesidealpha Centralized control of China wins over free markets and rule of law in AI and the answer is to create centralized control through intense regulation and ultimately government sanctioned law exemptions if not partial or full nationalization.

@firesidealpha Nvidia can be forced by open source and other AI along with Chinese chips. AI itself has no moat! Is easily copied. AI is built by stealing IP and has endless liability for lack of its own security and harm its agents and models can cause.

@firesidealpha So that will work only if huge profits collected by memory and chips are reinvested to lower future costs and or increase value. Memory can be forced to expand production by growing competition from China.

@firesidealpha So growing debt is fueling earnings and the only way that works is if enough value is created to pay it back plus generate ROI on it, and value created has to be in excess of the insane margins being collected by memory and chips.

You need to stop and read this again… Warren Buffet’s final words of advice from his very last annual letter 🥹 "One perhaps self-serving observation. I’m happy to say I feel better about the second half of my life than the first. My advice: Don’t beat yourself up over past mistakes – learn at least a little from them and move on. It is never too late to improve. Get the right heroes and copy them. You can start with Tom Murphy; he was the best. Remember Alfred Nobel, later of Nobel Prize fame, who – reportedly – read his own obituary that was mistakenly printed when his brother died and a newspaper got mixed up. He was horrified at what he read and realized he should change his behavior. Don’t count on a newsroom mix-up: Decide what you would like your obituary to say and live the life to deserve it. Greatness does not come about through accumulating great amounts of money, great amounts of publicity or great power in government. When you help someone in any of thousands of ways, you help the world. Kindness is costless but also priceless. Whether you are religious or not, it’s hard to beat The Golden Rule as a guide to behavior. I write this as one who has been thoughtless countless times and made many mistakes but also became very lucky in learning from some wonderful friends how to behave better (still a long way from perfect, however). Keep in mind that the cleaning lady is as much a human being as the Chairman." And then today, his last letter to shareholders as chairman…

Evan @StockMKTNewz

4 weeks ago

Warren Buffett is stepping down as chairman of Berkshire Hathaway $BRK.B, effective immediately - CNBC

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@bgurley We have free unobstructed discourse daily in the stock market, history showed what wisdom of disturbed crowds can do, we regularly boom and crash and end up worse off with all taxpayers funding bailouts. Bill Im afraid you might be talking your own book here.We should get serious