Martin Shkreli Offers $10 Million for Exclusive Rights to New Kanye West Album

This man is a straight up villain. He’s moved on from AIDS drug price gouging to attempting to monopolize the release of rap music. Next thing you know, he’s buying all of the music and we’ll have nothing left to listen to on the radio, aside from old school jams.

Bernie Sanders would not be happy about this sort of “rich man” horseshit that Marty is trying to pull off.

Are you enjoying yourselves thus far? Markets are in turmoil. Peter Schiff is a genius again. And, most notably, Dennis Gartman hasn’t been wrong in two months.

The world is upside down, so prepare for the closing salvo of this renewed global panic. The nefarious Greeks are about to step into the fold, very, very soon.

We have yet to see a credible plan for how Greece will reach the very ambitious medium-term surplus target that is key to the government’s plans for restoring debt sustainability,” Poul Thomsen, head of the International Monetary Fund’s European Department, wrote in a blog post on Thursday. “A plan built on over-optimistic assumptions will soon cause Grexit fears to resurface once again and stifle the investment climate.”

Greece will need both reforms to its pension system and debt relief from its European creditors to bring its debt levels under control, said Thomsen, who oversees the IMF’s Greek bailout program. Without pension reforms, the country won’t be able to reach its goal of a primary surplus of 3.5 percent of gross domestic product, he said.

Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras has said on several occasions, most recently this week, that any further pension cuts are a “red line” for his government. The fund’s insistence on additional savings from the pension system, in the context of belt-tightening measures of as much as 5 percent of Greek gross domestic product, or about 9 billion euros ($10 billion), may put it on a collision course with Greece’s anti-austerity coalition. Farmers plan to take to the streets of Athens Friday protesting the government’s pension-system overhaul plans.

“Ultimately a program must add up: the combination of reforms plus debt relief must give us and the international community reasonable assurances that by the end of Greece’s next program, after almost a decade of dependence on European and IMF assistance, Greece will finally be able to stand on its own,” Thomsen said.

Greece has a 28 billion-euro loan program with the IMF that expires in March, but the Washington-based fund hasn’t released any funds from the program since June 2014.

Don’t worry a wink. Greece is ready to stand on its own.

Year to date, or the past 30 days of trade, the U.S. stock market has shed $2 trillion in market cap–due to this egregious global rout. At the same time, Janet Yellen has been of the mindset that the economy was too strong and required higher interest rates, in order to fend off rapid inflation.

She is the Don Quixote of central bankers, furiously steaming towards a legion of windmills with the intent to slew them where they stand.

It’s a helpless endeavor, trying to figure out what’s driving her to madness.

However, I do know a few things about markets and human emotion. We need to stick this landing. Everything has gone wrong in 2016, but gold and treasuries. We haven’t had a long enough rally to enjoy a purchase through settlement date.

That needs to end right now.

We must comport ourselves with the equanimity of “The Dude”, drink a few dozen white russians, then take this market higher…man.

Bonds are selling off. Stocks are bouncing off the lows. Let’s see if we can get something starting during the final hour of trade.

In her testimony today, she still thinks inflation is going to 2%. She was surprised by the drop in oil and rise in the dollar. And, she believes the economy is strong.

Most importantly, she explicitly stated that the Fed would keep an eye on things, but didn’t want to rule out more rate hikes. She said they’d discuss it during the March meeting.

Investors didn’t want to hear more bullshit.

Gold is higher by 4.5%. Crude is plummeting through the fucking floor boards. Stocks are off by 300. And the ark is crowded with all sorts of animals and humans; TLT is up more than $2.

Look at some of these gold winners in Exodus today.

News just broke that BA is under scrutiny from the SEC for its Dreamliner accounting. My guess, this is a shakedown. It will likely be settled and done with inside 6 mos.

But this is the wrong day for this type of news to hit. Shares are getting gut punched.

Being that BA is a Dow component, it just tacked on a new layer of hurt to the indexes.

Yellen testimony is the sane as yesterday. She’s leaving door wide open for March rate hike. Too funny.

There’s some bullshit story out about an oil production freeze, concocted by the beggars in Venezuela. The story is going mainstream and they even tie the House of Saud in with it. As a result, oil is bouncing and so are stocks.

I really liked the open, with stocks delving into the lower bands of sanity and then recoiling from the fires of hell. This is precisely what bottoms look like.

Now we need Yellen is grow a fucking beard and step up her Fed chief game. Ever since she’s been chief, markets have been miserable. I vividly remember saying stocks should be sold when Bernanke left his post at the Fed. That call ended up being right.

I’ll make another call for you here. Janet Yellen will go down as the single worst Fed Chair in history.

Moving on. I had a whole post lined up, pointing to Bill Ackman’s positions getting clobbered today. But then I felt like a bully, so I scrapped it. It’s very easy to demonize guys like Bill, treat them as sub humans and have a good belly laugh at their displeasure. But that’s not who I am, really. If I saw Bill in the subways, I’d place a $5 bill in his coffee cup to help him out. I’m done discussing the trials and tribulations of a Mr. William Albert Ackman. I wish him the best of luck.

My current position is 50% SPY, 25% TLT, 25% cash.

Grab an Exodus free trial now. I’ll be ending access to them tomorrow.

In my favorite segment of CNBC, the 8:55 spot when Jim Cramer let’s loose before his show begins, he said Yellen was relying on ridiculous 1976 economics– when pointing to the labor market and being completely and utterly blind to the world blowing up around her.

He is, however, perplexed as to how the U.S. got lumped in with all of the other pieces of shit economies of the world. I suppose Jim believes America is special, completely immune to the contagion that is spreading like cancer in a DuPont chemical facility.

Just a few more percent lower and Jim is going to go completely ape on the Fed. I can’t wait.

Regarding Yellen: In a 2005 speech in San Francisco, Yellen argued against deflating the housing bubble because “arguments against trying to deflate a bubble outweigh those in favor of it” and predicted that the housing bubble “could be large enough to feel like a good-sized bump in the road, but the economy would likely be able to absorb the shock.” In July, the Senate Banking Committee voted 17 to 6 to confirm her, though the top Republican on the panel, Senator Richard C. Shelby of Alabama, voted no, saying he believed Yellen had an “inflationary bias”.

Congratulations Janet Yellen for reserving a special seat in hell. You’ve managed to undo all of the good your predecessor built with Wall Street and completely abandon the Federal Reserve’s place in western finance, as protector of capital, creator of wealth. Like a villain, you’ve turned the Fed into an evil organization whose sole purpose is to destroy lives and capital and the American way.

The FTSE MIB is leading the charge lower, down 5.2%, at the vanguard of Europe’s crash. Italian banks are getting hammered.

WTI crude is down more than 4% to $26.26 and gold is soaring, up 3.5%.

Over in Germany, Deutsche Bank is down 8.5% and Commerzbank -6%.

In the UK, Barclay’s is off by 6%.

In France, Socgen is down 12%.

In Switzerland, Credit Suisse is down 7%.

You get my drift.

S&P futures are lower by 300, all thanks to Janet Yellen’s absurd and childish insistence to hold the line on interest rate hikes.

Bonds are racing higher, with TLT up $2 in the pre-market.

Oh, and the PIGS sovereign yields are blowing out v the rest of Europe, especially in Portugal and Italy.

Portuguese-German spreads now 399 bps.

European indices are down 3%+ and U.S futs are off by 320, setting up for a most horrendous trading day.

French stocks are the hardest hit, with the CAC off by more than 4%, thanks to banks getting smashed–particularly Socgen–which is off by 10%.

Deutsche Bank is sharply lower and all Italian banks. Essentially, the oil crisis has shifted to the banks.

That’s called contagion.

On the upside is gold, higher by 2% and bonds.

This is getting repetitive. Thank heavens for our robust labor market. Let’s see how much longer that will last with wealth being destroyed at the current rate.

Oh, crude is trading in the $26s now, off by 3% or so. Who’s counting anymore?

Worst of all is the unraveling of the yen carry. Look at the spike in the yen.

Tremendous pain out there.

Credit Suisse’s CIO, John Woods, responded to Kyle Bass’s bearish case for Chinese collapse, suggesting the Chinese NPLs pales in comparison to what occurred 15 yrs ago and how the government may need to nationalize debt and write some of it down to deal with the situation. Clearly, the pace at which the Chinese government is drawing down their FX reserves, down from $4 trillion to $3.1 trillion over the past 12 months, they cannot bail everyone out.

Credit Suisse believes they’ll need to devalue the yuan, significantly, down to $6.80-$7.00, to better deal with the looming debt kerfuffle they find themselves in.

Current CNY/USD cross stands at $6.57.