The End of Excess

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If you are driving all day long with a friend, and there’s nothing but blue sky and straight roads ahead, your conversation will probably wander to all kinds of topics. Perhaps you’ll listen to some music or news together. Maybe you’ll tell a funny story or share some thoughts about something going on in the world. It’s a good way to pass the time.

On the other hand, during the same trip, if you hit a huge patch of ice and start spinning around, putting you and your companion at risk of slamming into ongoing traffic of tumbling down a cliff, the priorities are going to change in a big hurry. You’re not going to be chit-chatting and laughing. You’re going to be focused on the emergency at hand and trying to save your life. Searching the FM radio dial for a good station simply isn’t going to occur to anyone.

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First Republic Deposit Infusion Fails To Quell The Crisis (by Portfolio Armor)

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Janet Yellen Plays J.P. Morgan

According to the four women at Bloomberg who wrote this article, the $30 billion deposit infusion from big banks to First Republic Bank (FRC) was Janet Yellen’s idea: 

Jamie Dimon and Janet Yellen were on a call Tuesday, when she floated an idea: What if the nation’s largest lenders deposited billions of dollars into First Republic Bank, the latest firm getting nudged toward the brink by a depositor panic […]

Already the rescue spearheaded by Dimon is sparking comparisons to the Panic of 1907, when J. Pierpont Morgan — who built up the company Dimon now leads — corralled Wall Street financiers into his private library and browbeat them into propping up the Trust Company of America, seeking to stop a string of bank runs that threatened to upend the industry.

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Lulz from the SVB Website

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Since I entered Friday massively short, and have zero buying power left, I was bored enough to wander over to a place I’ve never been in my life – – the Silicon Valley Bank website – – and take a look around.

I thought I’d share some nuggets from there, since, for the moment, the website is still up and running. As you might guess, since this is a financial institution, it is absolutely SLATHERED with virtue-signaling. Indeed, there’s not a white male to be found anywhere except for their actual senior leadership page, which is the kind of do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do hypocrisy rampant in modern American corporations, particularly banks.

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What You’re Paying For

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Moments ago, I mailed off, as I do every year, a very large check to Wall Street Horizon. It’s by FAR the most expensive data Slope pays for, and it gets us one thing and one thing only: the earnings dates for companies.

It may seem odd to pay so much for such a niche tidbit of data. The cruel irony is that I could get similar data for FREE, but the quality wouldn’t be as good. You know the worst part? You wouldn’t even notice. Not a single person would recognize the difference. But in such an instance, I would know that I’m pushing crap data on you, and I simply cannot do that, even though most websites can.

Thus, understand I am paying top dollar for something that no one even realizes is there, merely because I want to trust the information I am providing is of the highest possible quality. There are many pages that rely on the earnings date information (particularly for Platinum users), and even though I don’t like writing big checks, I can at least know that I’m doing my best for you. So there ya go.