All Eyes on Deutsche Bank Ahead of What Should Be Miserable Earnings or Lack Thereof

I hope you’re all enjoying the markets today, the little boy on the tricycle — hastily speeding around the edges of a volcano. There are so many narratives to talk about, in light of the recent blow ups at UA-CMG-AAPL. But I’d prefer to fixate on DB.

Their earnings are coming out tomorrow and they’re expected to post dismal results, a loss in the magnitude of 610m euros. Sales are expected to decline as much as 12% to 1.9b euros. And, moreover, they’ll likely discuss the evergreen burden of litigation costs — in light of the DOJ’s $14b fuck you.

I expect numbers to come in much worse than expected, especially since the company was under extreme duress for most of the quarter. Full disclosure, I am short DB and hope and pray to the Gods that it unravels like a ball of yarn — sliding down a steep ramp and into the claws of a vicious cat.

That being said, the price action of the market is reminiscent of dozens of apathetic tapes prior to a big move. Naturally, there are those who believe that move is going to be higher — all entirely possible. My only reservation against the bullish backdrop is the inexorable fact that nothing on the ground speaks to an energetic economy. It seems to me, the only spirited rise these days is in populism — seeing Americans wake up to the rot and waste around them.

Nonetheless, central banks will continue to rig markets in order to preserve their place atop the capstone of the ruling elite. But every so often, the plebeians get to peer at the hideous visage — marred by decades of corrupt and overzealous policies. I do believe we will see such a thing in the earnings of DB tomorrow.

I’m not a big conspiracy theorist, in spite of playing one here on ibc from time to time. Often times, I’m merely amused by things and want to discuss them, only to later regret it after seeing drivel in the comments section. I don’t believe all the polls are fake and would hate to believe every single person at the Washington Post is a bad person, but it’s true.

An old hobby of mine is perusing old newspapers. I collect them and enjoy reading how stupid everyone else was, with the benefit of hindsight.

For example, 36 years ago, to the day, Gallup polls shows Carter up 8 on Reagan.

Even worse than that, on the eve of what would turn out to be the biggest landslide victory in modern America history, the scoundrels and dogs at Washpo showed Carter with a lead, in one of their little polls.

Dated 1984

Washpo is an organization of very low standards, who employs all of the worst students from all of the very worst schools of journalism in America.

I have no reason to constantly keep tabs on the olde sport, but I just can’t help myself until this saga is concluded.

In yet an amazing blow up, Pershing Square, seemingly, timed another gigantic purchase horribly. About a month or so ago, Ackman announced he’d taken a $1.2b position in CMG, or 2.9m shares, a 9.9% stake in the beguiled burrito maker.

Unfortunately for Bill, his deal with the devil has expired and all of his picks are now made using his stupid narcissistic brain of his.

Shares of CMG have imploded today, off by 30 points after reporting abysmal numbers and operating margins that might inspire Jeff Macke to start drawing cartoons about the whole ordeal.

Pershing Square is down roughly 20% for the year, with assets around $10-12b — down by about half from his peak a few years ago.

Many lower tier, third rate, stocks have fallen hard in recent weeks. Over the past year, plenty of high valuation IPOs have come public and they’ve been introduced to their maker recently. As those investors get whipped on the gibbet, the Wall Street elite, the fat slobbish cats, find themselves immune to the pangs undertaken by the average working class, mid 7 figure, Wall Street trader.

There are a group of stocks, mega capped and hovering near 52 week highs, that is keeping the Dow and the S&P intact.

Over in Exodus, I’ve created an early warning system, placing these names in a basket to watch over — ever so carefully.

Here they are.

These stocks are up 20% for the year, wildly impressive and way better than the overall market. They’re flat in recent weeks and showing a bit of weakness today, thanks to Apple.

Stocks should bounce today, or do very little worth talking about.

Back in 2000, when G. Bush cold snatched the election from the very weak Al Gore, there was a lot of resentment between the Clinton’s and Gore. He’d been pissed off at the President since ’93, when he appointed his wife to preside over healthcare reform instead of him. Then Bill’s perverted escapades fucked up Gore’s chances at the White House, topped off with Hillary running for the senate in 2000, sucking up lots of campaign donations that would’ve otherwise gone to Gore.

Plus, he never endorsed her in 2008 and he refused to endorse her until after Bernie was done.

He can’t fucking stand her.

This isn’t exactly news, is it? We all know Washpo to be the government controlled media only feigning as free press. But to see this sort of stuff documented in an email communique removes all doubt and simply paints a very sad and miserable narrative about the state of our press — wanton sycophants who cowtow to every whim of HRC.

Here’s an email from Clinton’s senior foreign policy advisor, Jake Sullivan, discussing Washpo reporter, Anne Gearan, and how she professed to be a ‘big fan’ of HRC — calling her ‘warm.’ That’s like the exact fucking opposite of what anyone would consider Hillary to be. Cold and calculating? Maybe. Warm? Never.

Now with that established, we can better appreciate her ‘work’ covering the Trump campaign.

Integrity.

Let’s do some 4th grade logic this morning, boys and girls. If the consumer is in the shitter, as suggested by early reports from SHW, MAS, AAPL and CMG, then don’t you think the holiday shopping season could be at risk. As such, 4th qt GDP might miss expectations? I was just listening to CNBC’s Liesman literally ramble on about fucking soybean prices and how it might affect our GDP. You know what pal? Fuck yourself.

The chances of a Fed hike in December is now 72%, which is down from yesterday. Who cares, really? Once Black Friday comes in as a disaster, the Fed will bend to the caprices of Wall Street. Nevertheless, bonds are getting slammed this morning — due to a litany of people who believe in higher America rates.

German Bunds are higher by 6bps to .09%. Fucking high yield!

Stocks are pointing to a lower open, most likely due to Apple. Truth is, investors are frozen solid until after this clownish nightmare of an election passes.

Remember when Apple refused to give the government access to the terrorist’s phone in San Bernadino? They put on this grande show for the world to see, placing itself as the champion for American privacy. After all, if they were unwilling to hand over the data of a dead terrorist’s phone, then they’d probably fight to the grave for the ordinary Joe, yes?

WRONG.

It was all a show, as evidenced by this Wikileaks document.

Apple VP to Clinton chief: “Strong encryption does not eliminate Apple’s ability to give law enforcement meta-data” https://t.co/xzbukwld9F pic.twitter.com/InbDGluW2D

— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) October 26, 2016

My friend Joe Wiesenthal was gracious enough to correct the record, pointing out that Apple had disclosed this fuckery, openly, months ago.

@The_Real_Fly They admit this quite publicly. https://t.co/Grneqgs9Vi

— Joe Weisenthal (@TheStalwart) October 26, 2016

But if you compare the text of the Wikileak document to what they said in the article, the scale that Apple is betraying its customers is orders of magnitudes greater than had previously been disclosed.

Here is Apple exhibiting the spirit of full transparency.

In the back half of 2015, the US government made 1,250 to 1,499 national security requests of Apple affecting 1,000 to 1,249 accounts. That’s up from 750 to 999 requests affecting 250 to 499 accounts during the first half of last year.

There is a huge difference between granting 1,250-1,499 (odd numbers, no?) and ‘thousands per month’ as plainly stated in the Wikileaks document. Or am I a fucking orangutan unable to decipher simple arithmetic?

I understand there is hysteria taking place right now and everything is a gotcha moment. Believe me, I’m filtering out lots of stuff and only posting things that I believe are worthy of your attention. This is a big deal, in my opinion.

Ira Magaziner, former healthcare advisor for President Clinton and current CEO of the Clinton Health Access Initiative for the Clinton Foundation contacted Amitabh Desai, foreign policy advisor for the Clinton Foundation, in December of 2011 — chagrined by comments made by Bill Clinton, suggesting that the deliriously high price of aids drugs in the U.S. needed to come down.

Here was Ira’s rationale for keeping drug prices expensive in the U.S.

Source: Wikileaks

This note and the attached memo are in response to your inquiry as to whether CHAI has any thoughts on how to proceed on the comments President Clinton made on lowering domestic AIDS drugs prices at the World AIDS day event. Attached is a detailed memo with recommendations on how CHAI and President Clinton could be helpful in the domestic fight against AIDS. We have been working on this memo since the last CHAI board meeting when this issue first came up and had planned to send it to President Clinton and the CHAI board in December for further discussion.

We were taken by surprise by President Clinton’s comments on world AIDS day and wish that someone had consulted with us before he made these comments.As you will see when you read this memo, we think that publicly pressuring the US and European AIDS drug companies to lower prices and bringing pressure to allow generic AIDS drugs into the United States will have limited if any success and could seriously jeopardize our negotiations to continually lower prices in poor countries. We also believe that there are other more impactful ways to address the US AIDS crisis today.

In other words, Ira was pissed Bill made a speech without his prior approval. Moreover, he didn’t want Bill lobbying the drug companies to lower their prices in America — because it would hinder negotiations for cheap prices in poor countries. These people aren’t American, but foreign mercenaries working on behalf of corporations. This is proof.

We have always told the drug companies that we would not pressure them and create a slippery slope where prices they negotiate with us for poor countries would inevitably lead to similar prices in rich countries. If we were going to change our view on this, we should have informed the companies before President Clinton went public with his statement and attempted to negotiate a way for them to participate in and get credit for whatever steps we could have persuaded them to take to help the crisis in the states. We might or might not have been successful in getting them to do something, but we believe the chances of success would have been higher than by trying to pressure them through a public campaign. It has taken us many years to build positive relationships with these companies while at the same time pushing them to continually lower their prices.We will now have to try to repair these relationships.Since President Clinton’s comments were made, we have been contacted by a number of advocacy groups who are now intending to wage a public campaign to bring in generics and lower drug prices.

By making a speech calling for lower prices for life saving aids drugs, President Bill Clinton fucked up long term relationships with big pharma. As a result of this faux pas, pesky, liberally minded, advocacy groups contacted Ira to wage campaigns for generics and lower prices. What these advocacy groups didn’t know was that Ira and the Clinton Foundation wasn’t a liberal organization and not interested, whatsoever, in lower prices in the developed world. Fuck America.

We do not feel we can participate in this without jeopardizing our work around the world. We cannot oppose what they might do, but we also cannot be publicly supporting it either. This campaign will not get started until January, so we have some time to figure out and act upon our own strategy. If we do try to do something in this area, we suggest that we approach the innovator companies that can currently sell products in the US with the idea of making donations to help clear the ADAP lists. For a variety of reasons, the companies will likely favor a donation approach rather than one that erodes prices across the board. I would guess that they would also likely favor a solution that involved their drugs rather than an approach that allowed generic drugs from India to flood the US market at low prices or one that set a precedent of waiving patent laws on drugs. This will be complicated to work out, but it might be possible. We would have to initiate discussions with multiple state health officials as well as HHS in addition to talking with the drug companies. If President Clinton wishes for us to be proactive, we suggest that we try a cooperative approach first. We can go to war with the US drug companies if President Clinton would like to do so, but we would not suggest it.

Ira was between a rock and hard spot. He couldn’t let the advocacy groups know he supported very high drug prices in America, while damaging the hard fought relationships with his buddies in big pharma. Could you imagine if the fucking Indians flooded America with affordable life savings drugs? Ira must’ve soiled himself by the prospect. Nevertheless, like Tony Montana, Ira was willing to ‘go to war’ if Bill wanted to.

Whatever we decide, we need to make a decision quickly and President Clinton and CHAI need to be in synch. I do not think it is a good idea for President Clinton to be taking one position and CHAI another. Once we have decided what to do on the drug question, we can then decide if we want to work with state health authorities in the ways that the memo suggests to implement programs to expand testing and treatment. CHAI management is willing to expand the mandate of CHAI to add a focus on domestic AIDS, though this will involve having to build an organization to do the work and significant time and resources. We would need to go to the CHAI board for approval as it would represent a major add on to the strategy that we presented to the board and that the board approved at its last meeting.

And of course if we do this, we need to find a way to get it funded. I do not know if President Clinton has any thoughts on funding for a domestic AIDS project. Even a negotiation on how to clear the ADAP lists by getting drug companies and state officials and the federal government to work together on a deal would take a significant amount of time and resources to accomplish. We can undertake it, but unless we can get the work funded or the board gives us leave to do it as an unfunded project, we could not move forward.

Perhaps we should have a discussion with President Clinton about next steps.

Thanks Ira

One question for you night owls out there: Does the Clinton Foundation sound like an ‘American First’ organization?

You fuckers are desperate.

Some truly obscure website, with an Alexa ranking higher than 1 million and less than 3k Twitter followers, is causing shares of TWTR to spike by 5% in the after-hours, after publishing a ‘RARE ALERT‘ that Disney might bid for Twitter.

Without getting into the nuances of small websites trying to make big splashes to gain traffic, this rumor is stupid — especially since the Disney brand should never become tainted by the perverts and miscreants who traverse Twitter. It would be a very bad deal for both entities.

For the love of God, the article hasn’t even been retweeted and was only liked by 4 people.