ZeroHedge: With The Unwind Approaching, Here Are $18.6 Billion SAC Capital’s Largest Stock Positions

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Nearly three years ago, following the publishing of “Is The SEC’s Insider Trading Case Implicating FrontPoint A Sting Operation Aimed At S.A.C. Capital?” which exposed the key biotech aspect of SAC’s insider trading strategy, and which linked SAC, and the hedge fund world in general, to expert networks three weeks before virtually anyone outside of the 2 and 20 (or 3 and 50 as the case may be) world had heard of them and befre they became a household euphemism for insider trading information, we expected the full rabid fury of the world’s best paid legal team to fall upon us. It didn’t, which meant only one thing: we were correct, or they had bigger problems on their mind. Turns out it was both.

In the months and years following our publication, what we speculated has become fact, and as Vanity Fair’s Bryan Burroughs reports, some 71 people have now been convicted or admitted guilt in the case of the government vs Stevie Cohen.

 But the final blow against the formerly infallible hedge fund that redefined the concept of “information arbitrage”, and whose track record was almost as successful as that of Bernie Madoff, came from Blackstone, which as Reuters reported moments ago, has decided to pull all its money from SAC, which is the official end of SAC as an outside investment asset management operation. Because once the fund of funds operator, and the largest outside investor in SAC, votes no confidence in Cohen, it’s game over, and at best SAC may remain as a family and employee-funded office, assuming of course the DOJ doesn’t actually decide to demand restitution for years and decades of insider trading.

Actually, one outside investor may remain: the always amusing Anthony Scaramucci, head of the PR company, which has an occasional FOF operation, SkyBridge Capital. From NYT:

A group of Mr. Cohen’s investors continue to stand by him and hope that he stays in business. For Anthony Scaramucci, chief executive of the hedge fund firm SkyBridge Capital and a friend of Mr. Cohen’s, sticking with SAC has as much to do with friendship and loyalty as it does its superior performance.

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RussiaToday: US takes to streets to march against Monsanto & GMO future

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Protesters across the US are joining the worldwide rally against biotech giant Monsanto and genetically engineered crops. The mass protest comes shortly after the Senate turned down a bill that would allow states to require the labeling of GM foods –

RT’s Anastasia Churkina reports from New York City.

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ZeroHedge: Bill Black: Our System Is So Flawed That Fraud Is Mathematically Guaranteed

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Submitted by Adam Taggart via Peak Prosperity blog,

“When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.”

- Frederic Bastiat

Bill Black is a former bank regulator who played a central role in prosecuting the corruption responsible for the S&L crisis of the late 1980s. He is one of America’s top experts on financial fraud. And he laments that the US has descended into a type of crony capitalism that makes continued fraud a virtual certainty – while increasingly neutering the safeguards intended to prevent and punish such abuse.

In this extensive interview, Bill explains why financial fraud is the most damaging type of fraud and also the hardest to prosecute. He also details how, through crony capitalism, it has become much more prevalent in our markets and political system. 

A warning: there’s much revealed in this interview to make your blood boil. For example: the Office of Thrift Supervision. In the aftermath of the S&L crisis, this office brought 3,000 administration enforcements actions (a.k.a. lawsuits) against identified perpetrators. In a number of cases, they clawed back the funds and profits that the convicted parties had fraudulently obtained.

Flash forward to the 2008 credit crisis, in which just the related household sector losses alone were over 70x greater than those seen during the entire S&L debacle. Read more »

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RussiaToday: ‘Monsanto is all-in-one horseman of GMO Apocalypse’

[video]

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A wave of rallies is rolling across the globe in protest at biotech giant Monsanto. Thousands of campaigners and environmentalists in more than 40 countries accuse the multi-national corporation of aggressively expanding into the food market and spreading hazardous products.

Geopolitical analyst and author of “Seeds of Destruction: The Hidden Agenda of GMO” F. William Engdahl explains why Monsanto menaces farmers and food producers around the globe.

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ZeroHedge: Gold And The Fiat End-Game

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Our current fiat currency standard is terminal, nations around the world are dropping the U.S. dollar as a medium of exchange, central banks are buying gold, and Americans are seeing price inflation during an economic downturn. In order to avoid a systemic financial crisis here in the U.S., we need to focus on solutions. This mini-documentary expounds the problems and a solution to the real economic crisis hiding under the safety blanket of an equity market at all-time highs.

 

    

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ZeroHedge: The 3 Reasons Why Stocks Have Skyrocketed Over the Past Couple of Years

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Stocks have soared since 2009 because the Fed's quantitative easing has – intentionallypumped them up.

They've also skyrocketed because central banks are directly buying stocks.

NBC News reports on a third major reason that stocks took off … corporate buybacks:

It's the narcissist rally.

 

***

You may want to spare a thought, and a healthy dose of worry, for what is one of the biggest, and least appreciated, reasons for the rally: buybacks.

 

Flush with cash and a world of opportunity at their doorstep, companies have decided there's nothing more attractive than themselves. So, they're offering big money to buy back their own stock. This year, big U.S. companies have given the go-ahead for $286 billion of buybacks, up 88 percent from the same period last year, according to Birinyi Associates, a market research firm. If the pace continues for the rest of the year, the tally will exceed the record set in 2007.

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TFMR: The Riff-Raffle Drawing

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via TF Metals Report

With a little help from my glamorous assistant, the official drawing was held earlier today.

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ZeroHedge: There is a Word For This Kind of Market: It’s Bubble

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We are now seeing clear signs that the US is moving back towards a recessionary territory.

 

The first quarter US GDP data showed the US economy growing at an annualized rate of just 2.5% (3.0% was expected).

 

The only reason growth was even this high was because the Government understated inflation, recording a GDP deflator of 1.2%. This is bizarre given that the “official” inflation data point, the Consumer Price Index or CPI, is currently pegged at 2.1%.

 

Had the GDP number been based on the CPI, first quarter GDP would have been just 1.63%. And had it used real inflationary data, it would have been even lower than that.

 

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ZeroHedge: Broke Detroit’s Pension Fund "Trustees" Use Public Funds To Fund Hawaii Trip

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“When you have city employees, police, and firefighters have taken pay cuts, it doesn’t look good,” is the somewhat understated response from Detroit’s emergency manager to the city’s latest debacle. Amid the deepening financial crisis the crumbling region faces, four trustees of its public pension funds spent $22,000 of retirement funds to attend a conference at Waikiki Beach, Honolulu. “It’s one of these things we trustees must do to stay on top of the field,” is how one of the trustees defended the decision, a second would not comment, and the other two could not be found according to Reuters (we can only imagine what they were up to). Conference representatives noted that “these are intelligent folks there to do a job, not there for vacation,” yet many funds did decide to boycott the event as it sent the wrong message. But irony of ironies, Detroit decided it was appropriate – perhaps since one well attended session covered ‘how to avoid front-page scandals.’

 

Via Reuters,

The city of Detroit may be facing a deepening financial crisis but that hasn’t stopped four trustees of its public pension funds from spending $22,000 of retirement system funds to attend a conference in Hawaii this week.

 

 

“It especially doesn’t look good when you have city employees, police, firefighters having taken pay cuts,” said Bill Nowling, spokesman for Orr.

 

 

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ZeroHedge: Deadbeat Carriers Compete, aka #MarginCompression!!!

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Following up on the many emails, but not so many actual site comments from yesterday’s post “Deadbeat Carrier Creative Destruction In The Ongoing Mobile Computing Wars” I bring you hard evidence that there’s about to be a massive disruption in the telecomm space. We’re not just talking Google Fiber here. The smallest, most upstart of carriers has broken the holy grail and did away with multi-year, hardware subsidizing contracts while at the same time materially boosting its bandwidth, coverage and throughput. This means that the price-gouging competitors are going to fave that Apple thingy, #MarginCompression.

As states in yesterday’s post, T-Mobile’s subway experience delivers Verizon FiOS speeds via LTE. Well, T-Mobile must have read that post for they turned LTE on in Brooklyn and that’s what I’m using to make this very article. It’s very fast, very cheap, its opening in more places than many would have thought. What does this mean? It means prices will probably collapse across the board, you know… #MarginCompression. It ain’t just AppleRIMM and Nokia!

For those who don’t believe my, I come bearing gifts. First, a pretty charts…

Reggie Middleotns Carrier Cost ComparisonReggie Middleotns Carrier Cost Comparison

Wait until people realize how much they are actually paying for those “free”, subsidized phones… Then things will really get interesting…

Reggie Middleotns Carrier Subsidy Cost ComparisonReggie Middleotns Carrier Subsidy Cost Comparison

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