IT’S TIME TO GET BACK INTO THE GOLD MINE

I sold all of my gold positions on July the 11th 2016, right dead smack near the fucking highs for the year. Thank you very much. I’ve waited, with the patience of a sloth in a tree, for the price to correlate with the time needed to make money in this trade. And it has finally arrived.

The Fed is a lying sack of shit. They aren’t going to hike rates, because $20t in national debt says they can’t. But, they might jawbone from here until October about the specter of its grandiosity, alluding to a rate hike because the economy is swimming along. This, my friends, will be another lie. However, let’s remember the central bankers are serial liars and often lose track of the labyrinth of lies they place themselves in. That being said, they’ve made it inexorably clear that they intend to use ALL TOOLS available to them to produce more wealth in the upper 1% of income earners, globally.

This is one gigantic oligarch party and hardly any of you were formally invited.

But you can play their degeneracy in an indirect way, through the purchase of gold shares.

As the perception of central bank insanity crystallizes for everyone out there, the shares of gold and miners should roar again. With the sector maligned in recent losses, down by more than 15%, coupled with a stretched oscillator in Exodus–suggesting the bottom might be near–I reinitiated positions in the sector, with about 13% of my assets. I will allocate another 12% into the sector after Yellen’s JACKSON’S HOLE speech.

This is a core thesis trade being reapplied here and isn’t subject to daily hand wringing. I will change this bias only after fundamental conditions change. Details of my positions are in Exodus and are provided there in real time.

When Carson Block, founder of Muddy Waters, first start talking greasy about companies, I viewed him as a caitiff, a profiteer of doom. I was quickly courrected (extra Delbert Grady) and he was proven right over and over again. Since my last courrection, I’ve learned to avoid placing my delicate hands on hot stoves. Mr. Block is suggesting STJ is about to lose HALF of their revenues. As a result, shares are diving.

Muddy Waters Capital is short St. Jude Medical, Inc. (STJ US). There is a strong possibility that close to half of STJ’s revenue is about to disappear for approximately two years. STJ’s pacemakers, ICDs, and CRTs might – and in our view, should – be recalled and remediated. (These devices collectively were 46% of STJ’s 2015 revenue.) Based on conversations with industry experts, we estimate remediation would take at least two years. Even lacking a recall, the product safety issues we present in this report offer unnecessary health risks and should receive serious notice among hospitals, physicians and cardiac patients.

We have seen demonstrations of two types of cyber attacks against STJ implantable cardiac devices (“Cardiac Devices”): a “crash” attack that causes Cardiac Devices to malfunction – including by apparently pacing at a potentially dangerous rate; and, a battery drain attack that could be particularly harmful to device dependent users. Despite having no background in cybersecurity, Muddy Waters has been able to replicate in-house key exploits that help to enable these attacks.

We find STJ Cardiac Devices’ vulnerabilities orders of magnitude more worrying than the medical device hacks that have been publicly discussed in the past. These attacks take less skill, can be directed randomly at any STJ Cardiac Device within a roughly 50 foot radius, theoretically can be executed on a very large scale, and most gallingly, are made possible by the hundreds of thousands of substandard home monitoring devices STJ has distributed. The STJ ecosystem, which consists of Cardiac Devices, STJ’s network, physician office programmers, and home monitoring devices, has significant vulnerabilities. These vulnerabilities highly likely could be exploited for numerous other types of attacks.

Full report

In a response to these trifles, the company said Muddy Waters’ allegations were ‘absolutely untrue.’

Let the fuckery commence!

I must admit to being wantonly entertained by this woman, hemming and hawing on live teevee, trying to spin an unspinnable yarn. Sully tried to take it to her, but ultimately failed in making her look like the absurd caricature of the human being she really is.

She likened the current state of healthcare to the mortgage crisis of 2007, suggesting in simple terms that it was going to explode and turn this great steak’d nation into an apocalyptic wasteland ruled by centaurs and flesh eating goats. Ultimately, she’s pissed off that Obamacare doesn’t pay for her absurdly overpriced drugs. She cites her list price of $608 as being something never intended for the retail customer. I guess it was meant as a joke that was accidentally taken serious, like someone at Macy’s forgetting to put a 40% off sign over the rack. However, she never really justified why in the world that price is at $608 to begin with, only that she’s dismayed that people are bellyaching over their fucking insurance plans not taking tax payer dollars and tossing it at Mylan, so that she might ingratiate herself with exorbitant pay hikes so that she might build giant statues of herself, in front of her sprawling estate.

Heather Bresch, CEO of Mylan, former lobbyist and daughter of US Senator Joe Machin, wants you to get more ‘engaged’ to help solve the ‘health care crisis’ now plaguing this nation. Please explain this to me, again like I’m a moron baby. How does the system make her hike prices on Epipen by 461%? Isn’t Mylan and others like it the core problem with the system? If the drugs weren’t so god damned expensive, then the healthcare insurance wouldn’t be so fucking high, no? This isn’t a chicken v the egg debate. Mylan is God and made both the chicken and the egg. Don’t tell me the hikes are used to fuel r&d, while their profits are through the roof and CEO compensation has reached AROD levels

“The system incentivizes higher prices,” Mylan CEO Heather Bresch told CNBC’s “Squawk Box” on Thursday.

The price of EpiPens, a lifesaving medication and delivery system for people with severe allergies, has increased more than 400 percent in the past decade.
The price hikes have gotten national scrutiny. Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton called the increases “outrageous,” saying they put “profits ahead of patients.” Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, the head of the Senate Judiciary Committee, has written Mylan asking how EpiPen’s prices were determined.

“No one’s more frustrated than me,” Bresch said. “My frustration is, the list price is $608. There is a system. I laid out that there are four or five hands that the product touches, and companies that it goes through before it ever gets to that patient at the counter. Everyone should be frustrated. I’m hoping that this is an inflection point for this country.”

Mylan responded on Thursday by expanding already existing programs for patients who are facing higher out-of-pocket costs.
“Congress and the leaders of this country need to quit putting their toe in this topic and really fix this — we have an outdated system.”

The company is reducing the cost of EpiPens through the use of a savings card that will cover up to $300 for the EpiPen 2-Pak. Patients who were previously paying the full price for the EpiPen will have their out-of-pocket cost cut by 50 percent. Mylan also is doubling the eligibility for its patient assistance program.

But Bresch said to do that, she had to go “around the system,” and that drug list prices were only part of the problem causing a health-care crisis in the U.S.
“Congress and the leaders of this country need to quit putting their toe in this topic and really fix this — we have an outdated system,” Bresch said. “The patient is paying twice.”

She also called on patients to “get engaged” with their health care.

“People don’t understand their coverage — and how could they? It’s complicated,” she said. “This isn’t a Mylan issue. This is a health-care issue.”

Shares of MYL are up 2.7% on this news.

Dominic Konstam, analyst from Deutsche Bank, has no fucking idea what the hell is going on with productivity. It could be IT robber baron chicanery, or some sort of cancerous fuckery plaguing end user demand. All he knows, frankly, is this shit is really bad.

This one made me laugh out loud.

“It’s a rigged, disgusting, system.”

With a 95% unfavorable rating amongst black Americans, Trump is trying to force feed them the red pill. They’ve been sucking on the blue one for several decades now– and to no avail, frankly.

Well, at least someone is cognizant enough to question the fuckery. It’s typical to hear intelligent men, like Mohammed Apabhai, accept brazen market rigging as an acceptable form of central bank policy. These people are drunk at the punch bowl, with their cocks stuck in glory holes, as Yellen, Kuroda and Draghi perform fellatio on an industrial scale.

I am very sorry for that midnight imagery. But some of you need to swallow the red pill and be woken the fuck up.

What exactly is the US Navy trying to accomplish with their peevish and beta-male approach to dealing with the Iranians. Last year they permitted sailors to be placed under arrest, their fucking boats taken, and dignity destroyed. Now they’re ordering a fucking Destroyer to tuck tail and run from a few peasant Iranian speed boats. Literally.

This is the USS Nitze during a training excersize.

And this is what they did when four asshole terror boats came within 300 yards of them, ‘at a high rate of speed’, in the Straits of Hormuz.

The U.S. defense official said that in Tuesday’s incident the USS Nitze tried to communicate with the Iranian vessels 12 times, but received no response. It also fired 10 flares in the direction of two of the Iranian vessels.

“The Iranian high rate of closure… created a dangerous, harassing situation that could have led to further escalation, including additional defensive measures by Nitze,” the official said.

USS Nitze had to change course in order to distance itself from the Iranian vessels, the official said, adding that the incident could have led to a diplomatic protest, but the United States does not have diplomatic relations with Iran.

An official, speaking under the protection of anonymity–for reasons inexplicable to me– said the Iranian moves were “unsafe and unprofessional.”

My one question is WHY IS THIS OFFICIAL SCARED TO PUT HIS NAME TO A STATEMENT LIKE THAT?

This is fantastic for navy morale.

As you were.

Doomed. Before you know it, robots will takeover the blogging industry and scores of unemployed ‘citizen journalists’ will hit the streets, in a scornful rage against the internet overlords who destroyed their millstone.

I cannot be more disappointed by this advancement in technology. I understand how Uber and asshole companies like nuTonomy want higher profit margins; but this is egregious. Think about what these assholes just did. They launched a ‘cool’ and hip livery service that was connected by a GPS app. They lured thousands of yellow cab and black car drivers to their ranks, which in turn fueled their growth, which in turn gave them the metrics to raise more capital and to scale their business globally. Like Saturn eating his son, they’re now turning on their own employees and attempting to replace them with autonomous driving cars.

A small company beat out Uber as first to market with this horseshit, by a matter of a week or so. Uber is slated to unveil their soon to be crashing into brick wall cars in Pittsburgh in a few weeks.

The service will start small — six cars now, growing to a dozen by the end of the year. The ultimate goal, say nuTonomy officials, is to have a fully self-driving taxi fleet in Singapore by 2018, which will help sharply cut the number of cars on Singapore’s congested roads. Eventually, the model could be adopted in cities around the world, nuTonomy says.

For now, the taxis only will run in a 2.5-square-mile business and residential district called “one-north,” and pick-ups and drop-offs will be limited to specified locations. And riders must have an invitation from nuTonomy to use the service. The company says dozens have signed up for the launch, and it plans to expand that list to thousands of people within a few months.

The cars — modified Renault Zoe and Mitsubishi i-MiEV electrics — have a driver in front who is prepared to take back the wheel and a researcher in back who watches the car’s computers. Each car is fitted with six sets of Lidar — a detection system that uses lasers to operate like radar — including one that constantly spins on the roof. There are also two cameras on the dashboard to scan for obstacles and detect changes in traffic lights.

The testing time-frame is open-ended, said nuTonomy CEO Karl Iagnemma. Eventually, riders may start paying for the service, and more pick-up and drop-off points will be added. NuTonomy also is working on testing similar taxi services in other Asian cities as well as in the U.S. and Europe, but he wouldn’t say when.

“I don’t expect there to be a time where we say, ‘We’ve learned enough,'” Iagnemma said.
Doug Parker, nuTonomy’s chief operating officer, said autonomous taxis could ultimately reduce the number of cars on Singapore’s roads from 900,000 to 300,000.

“When you are able to take that many cars off the road, it creates a lot of possibilities. You can create smaller roads, you can create much smaller car parks,” Parker said. “I think it will change how people interact with the city going forward.”

Good thing Obama is lenient and generous with his welfare programs. There will be scores of unemployed cab drivers and employees of livery car services in need of it soon.

The parallels of what Farage did in the UK, getting his country to get the hell out of the EU, and what Trump is trying to accomplish by pushing against the globalist elite, cannot go unnoticed.

It’s only natural to see Farage at a Trump rally, talking greasy against the H and the thin man in the White House.