Jefferies Snitches on Icahn; Ackman Uses Information to Walk Down the Price of $HLF

Guess who isn’t getting an invite to the next Icahn event? You guessed it, Jefferies.

Apparently, Carl was trying to unload some of his HLF positions and one of the sages at Jefferies thought it’d be a good idea to call up Billy Ackman to see if he wanted to buy the stake. You know, to cover his ridiculously unprofitable short.

Ackman said no, and then immediately ran to the media to spread the news.

“If Carl sells, I think it can accelerate the demise of the company,” Ackman told CNBC. “With Carl there, they may have a better chance of keeping top distributors. With Carl exiting, I think it’s over and it’s over quickly.”

On the day Herbalife’s FTC settlement was announced, Icahn declared victory, saying in a written statement that “the shorts have been completely wrong on Herbalife.”

Jefferies has a long standing relationship with Icahn. For them to tell Ackman that he’s selling shares was either really stupid or done on purpose to hurt the benevolent dictator, Uncle Carl Icahn.

HLF was down more than 7% earlier this morning and has since crept back up a little.

She also wanted to make black gangs, who were ‘super predators’ ‘bring them to heel.’

Here are some olde clips of Hillary and Bill sounding like a lot different from the shit they’re saying now.

source: Infowars

Don’t worry, you’re all gonna make a fortune after tomorrow’s Jackson Hole speeches.

Meanwhile back on planet earth, Chinese NPLs are becoming such an issue it’s creating huge demand for credit mitigation warrants, which is another term for CDS.

The National Association of Financial Market Institutional Investors said in an Aug. 17 statement that it had allowed China Securities Co. to sell credit-risk mitigation warrants, a Chinese version of credit-default swaps. The contracts’ underlying assets will be the senior tranche of Agricultural Bank of China Ltd.’s non-performing-loan-backed securities, NAFMII said. The products, which must be written on specific underlying debt, were introduced in 2010 and none have been sold since 2011.

Chinese investors have called for tools to hedge credit risks after at least 18 firms missed local bond payments this year, compared with seven for the whole of 2015. NAFMII was considering starting trading of new versions of CDS products and held a meeting in Beijing in May at which some market participants voted to pass proposed rules, people familiar with the matter said around that time.

“Credit risks are much higher than before,” said Chen Kang, a bond analyst at SWS Research Co. in Shanghai. “Both regulators and market participants are actively pushing for the new CDS to be launched.”

In few years hence, China’s debt to GDP will top 300%.

This is an important topic that isn’t being talked about by the evil and corrupt main stream media. What the fuck are bloggers doing the night before JACKSON’S HOLE? We all want to know, don’t we? We’re all brimming with juvenile excitement to learn, so I’ll get straight to it.

Zerohedge: Hillary Clinton is Super Duper Corrupt, More on the Email Saga

Mish: Grim, Fucking, Disastrous August

Contra Corner: The Fed is Filled with Boardroom of Baboons

Financial Sense: Share Buybacks Just Plunged, Get Ready for a 1929 Style Crash

Wolf Street: Hedge Funds Sucking Wind Cause Greatest Redemptions Since Financial Crisis

Howard Lindzon: FRED WILSON IS MY HERO (he really said that)

Business Insider: Anderson Cooper Shills for Bigot Hillary Clinton in Trump Interview

Dealbreaker: Heather Bresch is a Super Asshole Lying Epipen Price Hiking Devil

Marketwatch: HERE ARE 4 JACKSON HOLES. YOU MAY NOT HAVE MORE OR LESS THAN JUST 4

Recode: Once Anti-Ad, What’s Ap is Now Sucking Ad Dicks

The Verge: Tim Cook is About to Ruin the 2017 iPhone

Uncle Fred: A Tweet Storm is Coming

Not enough fire and brimstone for me.

Instead of milquetoasting it on Maddening Money, Cramer should’ve called for the execution of the entire Mylan board, by way of bee attacks. This whole ordeal is very straight forward. These are caitiffs who prey on the weak and disadvantaged to make a fortune. This is not the behavior of ‘normal’ functioning human beings who have empathy.

I say, give them the guillotine, the dick guillotine.

I love underwriters. This piece of shit just came public on July the 29th, 2016. Today, on August the 25th, 2016, it has been destroyed.

The usual suspects are to blame, investment bankers who didn’t bother to do basic due diligence and identify potential immediate red flags.

Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan and Barclay’s led the charge on this bowser.

Here are the details.

• Reports Q2 (Jun) loss of $1.84 per share, $1.53 worse than the Capital IQ Consensus of ($0.31); revenues rose 38.0% year/year to $25.4 mln vs the $25.1 mln two analyst estimate.
• Free cash flow was ($2.1) mln, compared to free cash flow of ($4.3) mln for 2Q15, an improvement from (23%) to (8%) of revenue for the period. For the first half of 2016 TLND was approximately free cash flow breakeven.
• Co issues guidance for Q3, sees EPS of ($0.27)-($0.24) vs. ($0.25) Capital IQ Consensus Estimate; sees Q3 revs of $26-$27 mln vs. $25.64 mln Capital IQ Consensus Estimate.
• Co issues guidance for FY16, sees EPS of ($1.01)-($0.93) vs. ($0.97) Capital IQ Consensus Estimate; sees FY16 revs of $103-$105 mln vs. $101.81 mln Capital IQ Consensus Estimate.

Here is the CEO of Talend, Mike Tuchen, explain why he chose to go public and why his company was such an enticing bargain for investors. Fucker.

Shares are down 20% in the after hours.

Markets are on pause ahead of Janet Yellen’s Jackson Hole speech, where she’s expected to talk in strange tones, utter complete indiscernible gibberish.

I seriously doubt she will take a dovish tone with all of this elaborate and ornate decadence surrounding markets. Instead, she might poke a little at  hawkish concepts, alluding to a potential rate hike. This will provide succor to the financial sector, which has been maligned by underperformance. It might cause a sell off in REITs, utilities and maybe even bonds. But longer duration bonds, such as TLT, should do fine.

But it’s all gonna be a giant fiction, a well orchestrated lie for the world to enjoy.

Both gold and REITs should be bought on dips. In the event she strikes a neutral or dovish tone, I am well prepared with 13% of my assets long gold and miners.

But, rest assured, a storm is coming. The waters are very docile now and you’re all enjoying the perverse climes, aren’t you? This will end soon. The closer we get to Halloween, the scarier it will become. Animated skeletons will walk the streets of Wall, chopping off dicks with their little skeleton hands. Janet Yellen will eat one too many buttered scotched candies and perish, under a deluge of clubbed sandwiches.

H. Clinton will be elected and criminality will trickle down, causing crime waves of a military nature to run freely throughout the streets of America.

Everything is about to change. Brace yourselves.

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.