Bitcoin Clown Slapped After Hackers Ransack Exchange for $65 Million

It was down 6% earlier, but now it’s down a tad under 4%. The Winklevoss twins and the rest of the silicon valley, baby blood sucking elite, prefer to have a stateless digital currency, as opposed to the jingoistic racist shit the U.S. Treasury circulates. As such, the Bitcoin will be provided succor, for as long as the new Ceasars of the economy deems it necessary.

“Yes – it is a large breach,” Fred Ehrsam, co-founder of Coinbase, a cryptocurrency wallet and trading platform, wrote in an e-mail. “Bitfinex is a large exchange, so it is a significant short term event, although Bitcoin has shown its resiliency to these sorts of events in the past.”

Bitfinex confirmed in a message to Bloomberg News on Wednesday that the hackers took 119,756 bitcoin, or about $65 million at current prices. More than $1.5 billion has been wiped out from bitcoin’s market capitalization this week, according to research from CoinDesk.

“We will look at various options to address customer losses later in the investigation,” Bitfinex wrote in a blog post. “We ask for the community’s patience as we unravel the causes and consequences of this breach.”

You fucking morons keep buying this shit, in the hopes of a material explosion at the Treasury, or something that will deter people from trusting the U.S. greenback. While I might not trust the people who print the money, I certainly prefer to have my money backed by aircraft carriers and Navy Seals, rather than some seedy fucked face tech guy who can’t keep his hob-nosed website secure when holding millions of dollars worth of bitcoins for a bedraggled public.

Everything is good. European banks have been detonated and strewn all over the market place, like the guts of an animal festooned at your local butcher’s shoppe. The terror plague continues, unabated. The elections loom. And, lastly, the great big, dumbass, decline in WTI continues.

The wall of worry is in fact large, even larger than the one D. J. Trump intends to build with Mexican tax payers pesos.

Even still, I remain ardently steadfast in my whole hearted belief that I will, one day soon, preside over your bedraggled graves. In the interim, go smoke some marijuana cigarettes and protest the police department, while demanding freedom of expression for persons who practice sharia law.

Out.

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Now that crude traders have been dispatched and crushed into 10,000 pieces, you must be pondering how the oil stocks have faired? After all, the oil companies that belong to these stocks are wholly dependent upon the price of said commodity to fund their operations. Or, am I missing something here? Are they selling dirty magazines to their employees working on site too? Maybe they sell egg salad sandwiches to workers to hedge against these CATASTROPHIC drops in their only product.

Let’s have a look.

WTI -21%

CLR -7.9%

CXO -0.3%

CVE -3.9%

LNG +1.1%

AR -1.9%

XOM -8.6%

CVX -5.6%

TOT -4.8%

NBL -6.5%

COG -8%

MPLX -5%

XEC -3.8%

Of course. It’s all just a big, fucking, joke. It’s one thing for stocks to inversely correlate to oil. I can get my mind around the idea that somehow the overall economy benefits from lower inputs. But for crude stocks to ignore or even trade higher in the midst of WTI carnage is the result of a servile and wholly dysfunctional booze hound culture of corrupt and inept money changers, unwilling or able to see the forest through the dense and smoke laden trees.

The fucking forest is burning down. You just can’t see it with those goggles on.

In light of today’s report that stated spending in June rose by 0.4% and personal income dropped by 0.1%, people are getting real panicky that back to school shopping budgets might not meet expectations. After all, Americans are dipping into their savings. For most Americans, savings is something reserved for leftover food, not actual currency.

As a result, carnage is taking place in Jeffrey Macke’s sandbox, with losses, larger than life, in the following names: M, KSS, DDS, SHOO, BOOT, DECK, SSI, JWN, GPS, BKE,  FRED, BIG, CONN, RH and WSM.

Macy’s, the biggest department-store company, suffered a sales downturn in July, following improving trends in late May and June, Cleveland Research said in a note. The slowdown has forced the retailer to be more aggressive with markdowns, the firm said. Nordstrom, meanwhile, is getting less of a bump from its famous Anniversary sale, according to Detwiler Fenton.

While the National Retail Federation is predicting a rise in back-to-school budgets this year, Commerce Department data from June showed that households are dipping into savings to fuel their spending. That could mean current levels can’t be maintained.

“It’s not sustainable, and items like clothing are among the first things that are going to get cut out of that spending,” said Bridget Weishaar, an analyst at Morningstar Investment Service.

Seasonally speaking, this is the trough period for retailer, heading into September, which is traditionally the absolute worst time to be long mall related names. The problem with retailers, ultimately, is two fold. Not only are they dealing with a miserly consumer; but they’re also trying to fend off the black hole that is Amazon–a company that intends to destroy the very fabric of brick and mortar and replace it with rubble.

Everyone was jerking off to the news that Monte del Paschi was going to receive a $5b bailout yesterday, until they read the details. Pray tell me, fucked face, how does a bank with a market cap of $1b raise $5b in capital? If so, do you think that’s good for shareholders? No one really gives a shit about lowly stock holders. We’ve seen this show before. The bond holders make out like fucking bandits, while everyone else holds a bag of dicks.

So now the entire Italian banking system is being called into question. Banks are getting orangutan’d by heavy losses. Don’t you worry a wink, however, about the sovereigns. Those will be purchased by the ECB, who magically creates new money, out of thin air, for the explicit purposes of reducing borrowing costs for runaway fiscal budgets.

Art is echoing the same shit I’ve been saying for months. Maybe you’ll listen to it now, coming from the olde guard of the iced cub bucket.

It was a beguiling thing to bear witness to, frankly speaking. With equity markets on the ropes, one would expect oil to crush lower. But it was up 2%, early going. But now it’s enveloped in the hardest and most vicious sell off in months.

All of the oil bulls have mysteriously vanished. Poof!

Intra-day collapse

As such, major selling is underway in a sundry of oil stocks, particularly the drillers. My personal favorite companies to one day go bust include CLR, OAS, WLL and BBG. They’re all trash, all worthy of a short sale.

For now, I remain in TLT and I am short FCX, as of yesterday. That started out at an 18% position. I am supremely confident that I’ll be right on this one.

In what can only be described as the single worst investment vehicle in the history of the markets, the volatility index is raging higher today, following three straight months of deleterious decline.

Here are today’s ETF winners, courtesy of Exodus.

Conversely, the single best investment has been to bet against the VIX, via XIV. These small little respites for the VIX have proven, over time, to be transitory (extra Yellen). However, every 3-6 months or so, we get a fucking market scare for the ages, which forces every asshole into puts–in turn sending the VIX higher.

I avoid trading it like the plague.

It started in Japan last night. There has been a major shift in investor behavior away from bonds the past two days, which, interestingly, has gone unnoticed in the gold sector. Typically, the two sectors trade in tandem, in a perverse risk on/risk of world.

JGBs plunges last night, with yields dropping 8bps to -0.05%. Over in Germany, bunds are getting hammered, down 5 bps. And, naturally, this is crossing over into other European bond markets, as well as ours.

Typical of a risk off environment, the Yen is exploding higher, now up 1.5%.

U.S. markets are taking it all in stride, barely down 100 points at the moment.

Our markets are pretty much belching off the rout in Europe. But it’s serious over there now, especially with the banks.

In every European country, post stress test results, which showed how fragile the entire European banking system is, shares are getting ramshackled.

Santander -5%

Unicredit -9%

Commerzbank -12%

The company reported earnings today and spoke about how truly awesome they were.

“In general, Commerzbank is one of the most un-riskiest stocks in banking that you can currently get. We are well-capitalized, we have a strong leverage ratio, we have an extremely low NPL (non-performing loan) ratio and in that sense, that is a good reason to invest,” Stephan Engels, chief financial officer of Commerzbank told CNBC on Tuesday.

“Secondly, we are still the second biggest bank in the fourth biggest economy in the world which is still growing so there is a lot of good argument to go for the stock.”

And I borrowed this gem from Zerohedge. DB is doing great today, down only 4%

UBS -8%

Banco Popolare -10%