Alright, it seems like the benevolent Tea Part folk have decided to share their complete inability to grasp simple concepts with the world, by forced contrition on the populace. It is time to eat our peas. Following the line of Obama’s hatred for those damn jet plane flying 1%-ers, the Tea Party have chosen to one up him, by destroying the 1% in its entirety. An unfortunate and slight side effect may be to destroy the other 99% of the country in the process, but hey…sometimes sacrifices must be born for the good of everyone. So making moves for the ill of everyone is the only logical course of action.

In an attempt to honor Argentina’s dim witted socialist president Fernández de Kirchner for her blood clot, the Tea Party have magnanimously extended a show of us revisiting that countries darkest moment, a point from which it has never recovered: elective default.

Remember that one time the global economy nearly collapsed because a single line of business for US banks bet large sums of money that non-creditworthy citizens would default at abnormally low rates in exchange for paper thin margins on those loans?

Well the entire global economy and all of finance has bet gargantuan sums of money that this non-creditworthy country will never default for no fucking margins.

By all means, how do you think this ends?

Frankly, I don’t care anymore, and am all in. Lay your neck under the axe, and taunt these pussies with all your hatred. See if they have the sack to swing.

What’s the alternative? You can turn all short doubling your money with the end of civilization, just in time to burn it to stay warm? You can barter that paper desperately for some precious metals that aren’t for sale? You can get shot by rioters and have it taken off your corpse?

Because if we actually default, it’ll be to late to go out and prepare. Just think of all the mechanisms that are tied to treasuries. There will be bank failures. And a slow, agonizing process as US spending on interest careens towards $1 trillion annually.

In the meantime, staying in our means would require we basically slash in half one of the following:

The entire defense budget OR
The entire non-defense budget

The point of the matter is that if we default, this place is going to get so screwed up anyway, what does it matter? At some point if the decision were not reversed, the man you know as Cain Hammond Thaler would simply cease to exist. His 9th floor office would be deserted; the only clue that he was ever there at all being an empty safe that used to house his silver and firearms and row upon row of cleaned out bookshelves.

I would simply take up my favorite pocket watch and walking stick, and slip away into the night…never to be heard from again.

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Earlier this week on Twitter, I was no less than accosted by a deranged individual for suggesting that I would very much like a surprise Bernanke additional term. This man has dedicated himself to the proposition that we are on the verge of a near total collapse of stocks, insulting the “dip buyers” for their “stupidity”.

Amusingly, his handle was a Sesame Street character dead on the sidewalk, shot in the head.

This is fitting, as this clown has just had his skull split wide open. This is what you get for being a jackass.

How can there possibly be shorts left alive anywhere? Where are you hiding, or what pathetically small positions have you taken on that you can still get off calling yourself “short”?

The status quo has prevailed again. This charade went a little further than I thought, but it was still just a charade.

My only hesitation here is that the implementation of ACA may shock a weak recovery. I will hold a 20% cash position at all times, because of this reality. But make no mistake, I am long. Christmas is almost upon us, and Janet Yellen is a printing psychopath.

Now if you can excuse me, I have an obsene amount of money to make.

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I have a hedge position in SCO, which is up nicely from $27.36 where I purchased it. I will be dropping it on Monday and not looking back. I don’t much care for trading positions based on global events. It’s a messy business, and rarely works out. But this is an exception.

Iran’s behavior has simply changed too much to be ignored. First by acknowledging the holocaust, now having a conversation with the President. It was a subtle shift at first, but it is very noticeable.

You must understand, the president of Iran operates beneath the Ayatollah. The same people have headed Iran since 1980. Supreme Leader Khamenei himself served as president of Iran from 1981 until 1989.

So, pretending that Iran has suddenly completely changed their whole outlook on life is stupid.

Which makes one ask, why is Iranian posture changing? Have incentives correspondingly changed, somehow? Perhaps we’ve finally broken their less charismatic personality traits with our sanctions?

Look, it was just four short years ago that I watched the Basij, with clear backing from the IRG, firing shots into crowds of protesters, running down students on the backs of motorcycles, and generally beating the hell out of anyone who opposed the Iranian government. These protests didn’t look that disruptive. The people who attended weren’t violent, or trying to declare a state of anarchy, or generally doing anything a reasonable person would consider unethical. They were just protesting. And this lot, directly supported by Iran, road in and just slaughtered everybody they could.

Also, we’ve been sanctioning Iran literally since the inception of its current form in 1979. We’ve upped those sanctions continuous, notably in 1992, 1995, 1996, 2001, and 2010, while the EU and international community got more involved in 2010 and 2012. So you’ll forgive me if I don’t think Iran has cracked under sanctions.

But this sudden shift in behavior is attention getting. And so I don’t want exposure to the short side of oil.

There are many reason Iran could be cooling off their rhetoric. Yes, a general outreach for peace with their neighbors is such a reason. Unfortunately, their immediate intention to set off a nuclear test warhead is another.

Iran cannot test a bomb in the middle of calling for the extermination of two UN members. While such foul language may be merely unnerving in normal circumstances (and good for riling up nationalism behind their government), if Iran were to succeed in setting off a bomb while shrieking for the eradication of the United States and Israel, the resulting emotions would be nothing short of panic. War-inducing, perhaps…

If they want to test a warhead, they need to put in the time to convince the rest of the world that they really aren’t as batshit crazy as they’ve been pretending, and can really be trusted not to ruin everything.

You can talk crazy while you build a Bomb. But you have to talk sane when you detonate it.

I can’t see the future. For all I know, this sudden, unexpected shift with Iran is exactly what the good men and women of the US Press thinks it is. But if you any experience with the track record of the US Press Corps, whether their first impression of major events (like the Arab Spring), judgement of character (such figures as John Edwards comes to mind), or general literacy of the complex (I can’t think of a piece on Obamacare this year not riddled with errors)…and it starts to actually make it worse that the press thinks this communication between Iran and the West is so cut and dry for the good.

These are not the lot with which you would want to run with first impressions…

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Name a period, if you can, not dominated by a draft or egregious “total war” conditions, where equities were hit by our nation performing warfare. I think you would be under some effort to do so.

War is great for the US economy, which is probably why we dabble in it so frequently. Syria isn’t a trade partner with us. Back before 2011, according to Census estimates, we did about $600 million with them, gross. Private defense contractors and local economies will pull billions more in than that just in the effort to bomb Syria back to the Stone Age.

Sure, it’s all back to the US debt. But you know what? It’s a drop in the bucket. Blasting foreign nationals to pieces is nothing next to the entitlement culture we have growing under the couch here. Sure the cost of the military is huge – the cost to maintain it, that is. But using the military is cheap. A Syrian war doesn’t make that big of a difference. Unless you think we can just decomission the US armada, in which case I’d say the savings are an illusion…because we can’t do that.

Trying to argue the market should sell off because of more war in the Middle East is just a non-starter. Syria has been in civil war for two years. Have the oil markets noticed? We’re over $100 /barrel, and the latest economic numbers have gotten rough again, so oil is probably due another sharp collapse in prices, back to that $80 mark, from which it always seems to flawlessly recover. But we’ve been here so many times in the last three years, why is it relevant?

European countries have been in recession forever. Why would further Syrian turmoil hit them any harder now than it did in 2011 when the fighting started? It’s the same oil supply concern, but it’s been there for so long, it shouldn’t be a problem.

Here’s how a Syrian war will play out. We will crush Assad’s forces. Then the Muslim Brotherhood will take over, replacing hard liners with hard-er liners. Then we will act all shocked and surprised and crush the Muslim Brotherhood. Basically, we crush all of Syria, but one half at a time, so that we can pretend like we’re there to help.

We’ve been due for a market selloff for a while now. Let’s have one, I guess. But what a stupid reason to do it.

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This is definitely amusing, watching the North Korean leadership try and play tit for tat, essentially against themselves. This is the kind of bravado that can only be fostered living in a hole in the ground. What do they think is going to happen?

The old lines of warfare have been killed out, largely thanks to the financial industry. Unprecedented levels of cooperation and mutual interests have been aligned over the last sixty years. Those aren’t going to just erase themselves.

The roots of NAFTA have sprouted a magnificent tree that is even now holding the countries together. Does North Korea think China has its back in a war against the South? South Korea and the US are far more important to China than North Korea is. I would venture that North Korea is actually a liability for China.

If markets seem unusually calm at North Korean warmongering, it’s probably because North Korea will get their clocks cleaned if they pick this fight. Any effective war against the US by the part of China would send that country screaming into a depression. They’ve come too far to see it all get ruined by old world communists.

But hey, let’s call North Korea’s bluff and find out.

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