October 31: Daily Contrarian Reads

Something’s Going Bump In The Night—–20 Charts That Even Scare  Top Wall Street Strategists

Forget scary clowns. For finance professionals, Corporate America’s credit cycle and the U.S. economic outlook — not to mention Brexit-induced stresses and debt dynamics in Asia — are all spookier than a deranged-looking Bozo. With Halloween just around the corner, we asked top analysts around the world for charts about things that go bump in the night — and we’re not just talking about the daily yuan fix. Here’s what they said scares them.

21 Things We Learned About Hillary From WikiLeaks That The MSM Won’t Share

In the 11 years that they’ve been publishing documents, they have not been disproven a single time. Their record for authentication is perfect. So this means that a person would be pretty silly to disregard anything in the reams of information about Hillary Clinton, the Democratic Party, the Clinton Foundation, and the political shenanigans that would put the Machiavellis to shame….Here are 21 of the most important things that have come out about Hillary Clinton, that unfortunately, no one is reporting on in the mainstream.

Mind The Soybeans And The Statistical Noise—–That’s What The Q3 GDP Was All About

……As far as exports, the difference this quarter as compared to the prior quarters of the “rising dollar” is perhaps a bit less ridiculous as inventories, but only in the sense of the raw numbers. Exports did increase by a noticeable if still relatively small amount, of which the vast majority of that number was, as ZeroHedge points out, soy beans alone. It isn’t quite the economic revival that it might at first appear….The change in Net Private Inventories was exceedingly small, however, where in Q2 they shrank by $15 billion in Q3 they expanded by not quite $10 billion. For GDP, what counts is the second derivative or the distance between the rates of change from each quarter. In the tabulation for the statistic it was significant that inventories didn’t shrink again whereas for the actual economy this is splitting hairs after years where “growth” had depended on significant inventory accumulation.

The Ballyhooed Mosul Campaign—-It’s All War Party Hype, ISIS Is A Paper Tiger

As a former soldier and war correspondent who has covered 14 conflicts, I look at all the media hoopla over tightening siege of Mosul, Iraq and shake my head. This western-organized “liberation” of Mosul is one of the bigger pieces of political-military theater that I’ve seen.

Islamic State(IS), the defender of Mosul, is a paper tiger, blown out of all proportion by western media.  IS is, as this  writer has been saying for years, an armed mob made up of 20-something malcontents, religious fanatics, and modern-day anarchists.  At its top is a cadre of former Iraqi Army officers with military experience.

Mind The Yuan—–Capital Again Taking Flight From The Red Ponzi

Capital outflows from China are accelerating. The hemorrhage has reached the fastest pace since the currency panic at the start of the year. The latest cycle of credit-driven expansion has already peaked after 18 months. Beijing has had to slam on the brakes, scrambling to control property speculation that the Communist authorities themselves deliberately fomented

If You Want Perpetual War—–Vote for Hillary The Hawk

If you want to see war without end, vote for Hillary Clinton. It is tremendously ironic that Hillary Clinton and the mainstream media have attempted to portray Donald Trump as “dangerous” and “temperamental”, because it is Clinton that actually has a long history of being emotionally unstable. She has a temper that is absolutely legendary, and she has been cussing out the men and women in her security detail for decades. Hillary Clinton played a key role in starting the civil war in Syria, thanks to her Libya is a post-apocalyptic wasteland today, and now she is picking a fight with the Russians before she has even won the election. Of all the candidates there were running for president this election cycle, there was nobody that was even close to as dangerous as Hillary Clinton, and if she wins the election I am fully convinced that World War 3 will begin before her time in the White House is over.

Slumping Used Car Prices Spell Disaster For Subprime Auto Securitizations

As we’ve argued in the past, the main reason auto sales have bubbled over is due to the continuous degradation of lending standards over the past 6 years fueled by the Wall Street securitization machine.  Of course, the problem with “rigging” new car sales in this way is that eventually all of those vehicles come back to flood the used car market with excessive supply resulting in lower used car prices and higher securitization losses…and that’s when the whole ponzi starts to unravel.  Which, as the Wall Street Journal points out, is exactly what is starting to happen right now.

Get Ready For The (Bad) Dream—-Waking Up In Hillary Clinton’s America

In this election, Hillary has crafted her talking points regarding the causes of the last financial crisis as weapons against Trump, but they hardly begin to tell the real story of what happened to the American economy. The meltdown of 2007-2008 was not mainly due to “tax policies that slashed taxes on the wealthy” or a “failure to invest in the middle class,” two subjects she has repeatedly highlighted to slam the Republicans and their candidate. It was a byproduct of the destruction of the regulations that opened the way for a too-big-to-fail framework to thrive. Under the presidency of Bill Clinton, Glass-Steagall, the Depression-era act that once separated people’s bank deposits and loans from any kind of risky bets or other similar actions in which banks might engage, was repealed under the Financial Modernization Act of 1999. In addition, the Commodity Futures Modernization Act was passed, which allowed Wall Street to concoct devastating unregulated side bets on what became the subprime crisis.

What’s Really Different this Time: Business Investment Drops to Lowest September since 2010

The chart below shows 22 years of orders for nondefense capital goods excluding aircraft – the approximation for business investment. Orders surged before recessions and formed a clearly identifiable peak either just before the official recession began (2000) or after it began (2008). Then orders plunged as companies struggled with their debts or restructured them, often in bankruptcy court, and they curtailed their investments in equipment for a while. Sometime near the end of the recession, companies began again to buy more capital goods, and orders rebounded sharply for years.

The Donald Is Right—-The System Is Rigged

Is the election really rigged?  Probably not in the way Mr. Trump intends listeners to believe. But the “system” is so rigged that the election results hardly matter. A real conservative would shift the debate away from fanny pinching and other ungentlemanly comportment to how it is rigged. Americans want to know. How come the economy no longer grows as it used to? How come most Americans are poorer today than they were in 1999? How come we no longer win our wars?