It was the Gubinator who left California bankrupt

Huffington: Ever since Arnold Schwarzenegger took over as host of NBC’s “The Celebrity Apprentice,” former host President Donald Trump has made a contest out of comparing the show’s ratings between its old and new leadership. It’s no secret that Trump is not a fan of his replacement.

Most recently, the reality-star-turned-president opened the annual National Prayer Breakfast by suggesting that the elected officials and religious advocates in attendance pray for his TV show after its shakeup.

“I want to just pray for Arnold, if we can, for those ratings,” the president said, after claiming that “Apprentice” is currently “a total disaster.”

Shortly afterward, Schwarzenegger hit back at Trump with a video posted to Twitter.

“Hey, Donald, I have a great idea,” the bodybuilder-turned-entertainment-icon-turned-governor-turned-back-to-entertainment-icon began. “Why don’t we switch jobs? You take over TV, because you’re such an expert in ratings, and I take over your job. And then people can finally sleep comfortably again. Hm?”

A stutter in the Asian rebalance

Bloomberg: China’s escalating crackdown on capital outflows is sending shudders through property markets around the world.In London, Chinese citizens who clamored to purchase flats at the city’s tallest apartment tower three months ago are now struggling to transfer their down payments. In Silicon Valley, Keller Williams Realty says inquiries from China have slumped since the start of the year. And in Sydney, developers are facing “big problems” as Chinese buyers pull back, according to consultancy firm Basis Point.“Everything changed’’ as it became more difficult to send money offshore, said Coco Tan, a broker associate at Keller Williams in Cupertino, California.Less than a month after China announced fresh curbs on overseas payments, anecdotal reports from realtors, homeowners and developers suggest the restrictions are already weighing on the world’s biggest real estate buying spree. While no one expects Chinese demand to disappear anytime soon, the clampdown is deterring first-time buyers who lack offshore assets and the expertise to skirt tighter capital controls.“If it’s too difficult, I’m out,’’ said Mr. Zheng, 66, a retired civil servant in Shanghai who declined to give his first name to avoid attracting regulatory scrutiny. He may abandon a 2.4 million yuan ($348,903) home purchase in western Melbourne, even after shelling out a 300,000 yuan deposit last August. He’s due to make another big payment next month.

Dunno yet how this turns out.  My first experience at watching the spectacle. 

Is this our way of going on recession?

Berkeley anti-free speech movement

UC Berkeley erupts in protests over Milo Yiannopoulos speech

The sad part is that they do not get the irony, too uneducated

Trump to enforce one California policy with force!

Trump Threatened To Send Troops To Mexico To Stop The "Bad Hombres"

In the associated transcript, the Trumpster told Nieto that Baja California must be returned.  John Fremont had no right to cede Lower California to the Mexicans. 

Long live the united California!!

Its is the plan, not the threat

Retired Gen. David Petraeus told Congress on Wednesday that the US shouldn't take the existing international order for granted.The former CIA director told the House Armed Services Committee that the post-World War II world order had begun to face an "unprecedented threat from multiple directions.""Americans should not take the current international order for granted," Petraeus said. "It did not will itself into existence. We created it. Likewise, it is not naturally self-sustaining. We have sustained it. If we stop doing so, it will fray and, eventually, collapse."

We are not on your side Petraeus.. Your world order has been a horrible, costly blunder. And you tell the band of thieves out there that bond defaults by the usa are on the way, courtesy of McCain..

Obamacare, saying good bye

LA Times: Healthcare experts have been warning that Republican dithering on a replacement for the Affordable Care Act would be a further discouragement for participating insurance companies.Now, the first shoe has dropped: Aetna, which sharply reduced its ACA footprint this year, is signaling that it will be entirely out of the market in 2018. Mark Bertolini, Aetna’s chairman and chief executive, put it bluntly during a conference call Tuesday with investment analysts: “We have no intention of being in the market for 2018,” he said. He cited “the unclear nature of where regulation’s headed.”That lack of clarity, he said, means that Aetna won’t know what the individual market looks like until 2019. “If you look at the notion of policy development, legislative language and then regulation,” he said on CNBC, “the nearest time we could have a completely new program is 1/1/2019.”

Rush to liquidity

Elliott Management, the $31.6 billion New York hedge fund run by Paul Singer, is prepping for a wide swath of market moves as Donald Trump's presidency takes shape. 

"Now more than ever, we want to be positioned for as many permutations as possible in order to preserve capital if market conditions deteriorate," Elliott wrote in its fourth-quarter letter released in January, a copy of which was reviewed by Business Insider.

Another:

Dalio, who had been hopeful about a Trump presidency and some of his economic policies, seems to have struck a less optimistic tone, according to a letter obtained by Bloomberg.In the letter, Dalio warned that there was a high level of uncertainty in the market and told clients to avoid investing too heavily in a particular asset, according to the Bloomberg report. 

They are telling us that the pit boss is accumulating bit error, forcing real inventories down.  What the hedge funds ae seeing is a bit of chaos, two thing intermix.  We are adapting to the traditional first half slow down, and we got the Trumpster.  They atre trying to sort the two effectsnand find the hedges.

Welcome to pure cash

Uneasy money by Hawtrey, quoting the mathematician.

And a few moments after that:

The place that [dynamic programming] is used the most upsets me greatly — and I don’t know how Dick would feel — but that’s in the so-called “quants” doing so-called “financial engineering” that designed derivatives that brought down the financial system. That’s all dynamic programming mathematics basically. I have a feeling Dick would have thought that’s immoral. The financial world doesn’t produce any useful thing. It’s just like poker; it’s just a game. You’re taking money away from other people and getting yourself things. And to encourage our graduate students to learn how to apply dynamic programming in that area, I think is a sin.

Allowing for some hyperbole on Dreyfus’s part, I think he is making an important point, a point I’ve made before in several posts about finance. A great deal of the income earned by the financial industry does not represent real output; it represents trading based on gaining information advantages over trading partners. So the more money the financial industry makes from financial engineering, the more money someone else is losing to the financial industry, because every trade has two sides.

The author wants the sandbox, and give us the smart card. 

The sandbox says anyone can find optimal bets. Bellman found the way around the lattice. The sandbox makes a lattice that minimizes running around. 

Fly first, inflation second

Reinhart: Of course, there may be yet another factor motivating major central banks’ tolerance for higher inflation. But their leaders may be unwilling to acknowledge it openly: as I have argued elsewhere, a steady dose of even moderate inflation will help to erode the mountains of public and private debt advanced economies have built up in the past 15 years or so.

Policy makers are a bit delusional.  
Actuarial inflation, recorded losses by the currency banker when at  maximum entropy;  this is the inflation needed, to get interest payment relief.  Raising consumer prices on the little browns won't do.