Tag: finance

Christmas: perhaps the most celebrated holiday in the US, regardless of religion, race, ethnicity, gender, or any other background characteristic. At least, according to a recent Pew study which found that nine-in-ten Americans say they celebrate Christmas, and three-quarters say they believe in the virgin birth of Jesus. But only about half see Christmas mostly as a religious holiday, while one-third view it as more of a cultural holiday. Virtually all Christians (96%) celebrate Christmas, and two-thirds see it as a religious holiday. More surprisingly, fully eight-in-ten non-Christians in America also celebrate Christmas, but most view it as a cultural holiday rather than a religious occasion.

 

The findings are less surprising when Pew looked into how Americans celebrate the holiday: 86% of U.S. adults say they intend to gather with family and friends on Christmas this year, and an identical number say they plan to buy gifts for friends and family. Roughly nine-in-ten adults say these activities typically were part of their holiday celebrations when they were growing up.

 

 

Something has changed with the passage of time, however: fewer Americans say they will send Christmas or holiday cards this year than say their families typically did this when they were children. The share of people who plan to go caroling this year also is lower than the share who say they typically did so as children. And while about seven-in-ten Americans say they typically attended Christmas Eve or Christmas Day religious services when they were children, 54% say they plan to attend Christmas services this year.

There are significant generational differences in the way Americans plan to celebrate Christmas this year, with younger adults less likely than older adults to incorporate religious elements into their holiday celebrations. Adults under age 30 are far less likely than older Americans to say they see Christmas as more of a religious than a cultural holiday. They are also less likely to attend Christmas religious services and to believe in the virgin birth. This is consistent with other research showing that younger Americans are helping to drive the growth of the religiously unaffiliated population within the U.S. But the new survey also shows that even among Christians, young people are more likely than older adults to view Christmas as more of a cultural than a religious holiday.

One-in-five adults say they are the parent or guardian of a child in their household who currently believes in Santa Claus. An additional 14% of Americans are parents or guardians of at least one child under the age of 18 but say their children do not believe in Santa Claus. (About two-thirds of Americans are not the parents or guardians of any children in their household.) Nearly six-in-ten Hispanics say they are parenting minor children in their homes, including 38% who have children who believe in Santa Claus. By comparison, fewer blacks and whites say they currently have Santa-believing children (21% and 15%, respectively), in part because blacks and whites are less likely than Hispanics to have minor children in the home.

Among those who have a child who believes in Santa Claus, seven-in-ten (69%) say they plan to pretend that Santa visits their house on Christmas Eve this year. But even among U.S. adults without a child who believes in Santa, sizable numbers plan on receiving a visit from Old St. Nick. Roughly one-in-five parents whose children do not believe in Santa (18%) say they will pretend to get a visit from Santa this year, as do 22% of those who are not the parents or guardians of minor children in their household.

Other highlights from the survey:

• Among the religiously unaffiliated, 87% say they celebrate Christmas, including 68% who view Christmas as more of a cultural holiday.
• Roughly eight-in-ten Americans (79%) say they plan to put up a Christmas tree this year. By comparison, 92% say they typically put up a Christmas tree when they were children.
• Nearly six-in-ten Americans say they plan to give homemade gifts this holiday season, such as baked goods or crafts. There is a big gender gap on this question; two-thirds of women (65%) plan to give homemade gifts, compared with 51% of men.
• Those who celebrate Christmas as more of a religious event are much more apt than those who view it as a cultural occasion to say they will attend religious services this Christmas (73% vs. 30%) and to believe in the virgin birth (91% vs. 50%). But on other measures, the differences in the ways the two groups will mark the holidays are much smaller. Roughly nine-in-ten in both groups will gather with family and friends and buy gifts this Christmas, and identical shares of each group will pretend to get a visit from Santa Claus on Christmas Eve (33% each).

And some of the findings in detail:

What do Americans look forward to the most and lest in Christmas:

 

More religious or cultural:

 

Will there be a Christmas tree?

 

Who is buying gifts:

 

Was Jesus born of a virgin?

 

 

Instead of just purchasing gifts, how many actually prepare them:

 

 

How many are gathering with the family?

Source: Pew Research

via Zero Hedge http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/zerohedge/feed/~3/GGbmCb3Tpog/story01.htm Tyler Durden

 

The biggest problem facing investors today is that “the rules” of the game change almost every year.

 

What I mean is that any basic rule investors took for granted could be thrown out the window. Indeed, in the last five years we’ve seen:

 

1)   Accounting standards at financial institutions suspended.

2)   Capital requirements for banks (Basel III) postponed multiple times.

3)   Fraud go unpunished.

4)   Obvious insider trading amongst political officials and banking insiders.

5)   Central bankers openly admit that they will lie to investors.

 

Why are so many laws and rules being thrown out?

 

The Powers That Be are committed to propping the system up by any means possible.

 

Consider Spain.

 

Spain’s banking system, by any reasonable analysis, is totally bankrupt.

 

The reason for this is that Spanish banks are all packed to the brim with garbage assets (mortgage loans and Spanish Government bonds… which aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on).

 

Consider the story of Bankia.

 

Bankia was formed by merging seven bankrupt regional Spanish banks in 2010.

 

The new bank was funded by Spain’s Government rescue fund… which received “preference shares” in return for over €4 billion (from taxpayers).

 

These preference shares were shares that a) yielded 7.75% and b) would get paid before ordinary investors if Bankia failed again. So right away, the Spanish Government was taking taxpayer money to give itself preferential treatment over ordinary investors.

 

Indeed, those investors who owned shares in the seven banks that merged to form Bankia lost their shirts. They were wiped out and lost everything.

 

Bankia was then taken public in 2011. Spanish investment bankers convinced the Spanish public that the bank was a fantastic investment. Over 98% of the shares were sold to Spanish investors.

 

One year later, Bankia was bankrupt again, and required the single largest bailout in Spain’s history: €19 billion. Spain took over the bank and Bankia shares were frozen on the market (meaning you couldn’t sell them if you wanted to).

 

When the bailout took place, Bankia shareholders were all but wiped out, forced to take huge losses as part of the deal. The vast majority of them were individual investors (the bank currently faces a lawsuit for over 140,000 claims of mis-selling shares).

 

So that’s two wipeouts in as many years.

 

The bank was taken public a year a second time later in May 2013. Once again Bankia shares promptly collapsed, losing 80% of their value in a matter of days. And once again, it was ordinary investors who got destroyed.

 

Indeed, things were so awful that a police officer stabbed a Bankia banker who sold him over €300,000 worth of shares (the banker had convinced him it was a great investment).

 

Which brings us to today.

 

Bankia remains completely bankrupt. But its executives and the Spanish Government continue to claim that things are improving and that the bank is on the up and up. Indeed, just a few weeks ago, the Wall Street Journal wrote an article titled “Investors Show Interest in Bankia.”

 

The story featured a quote from Spain’s Finance Minister that, “… it is logical. The perception of Spain has improved and Banki has improved a lot.”

 

Bear in mind, this is a bank that has wiped out investors THREE times in the last THREE YEARS. So that’s three different rounds of individual investors being told that Bankia was a great investment and losing everything.

 

Every single one of these wipeouts was preceded by both bankers and Spanish Government officials claiming that “everything had been fixed” and that Bankia was a success story.

 

And now the Spanish Government is trying to convince them to line up for a fourth round.

 

This kind of fraud and lawlessness is unbelievable to me. But it is indeed how the world works today. Those who have power will do anything they can to retain it. This includes, lying, cheating, and stealing.

 

And while certain items relating to this story are unique, the morals to Bankia’s tale can be broadly applied across the board to the economy/ financial today.

 

Those morals are:

 

1)   Those in charge of regulating the system will lie, cheat and steal rather than be honest to those who they are meant to protect (individual investors)

2)   Any financial problem that surfaces will be dealt with via fraud or lies rather than taking a hit. This will include short selling bans, stocks being frozen, bail-ins, and worse.

3)   When the inevitable collapse finally does hit, it will be individual investors and the general public who get screwed.

 

For a FREE Special Report outlining how to profit from bear market crashes and bull market runs, swing by: http://phoenixcapitalmarketing.com/special-reports.html

 

Best Regards

Phoenix Capital Research 

 

via Zero Hedge http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/zerohedge/feed/~3/kilQQFdWBZU/story01.htm Phoenix Capital Research

Submitted by Lance Roberts of STA Wealth Management,

 

via Zero Hedge http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/zerohedge/feed/~3/gWFad6Om1f0/story01.htm Tyler Durden

Once upon a time, money – in the form of precious metals – used to be literally dug out of the earth. Limitations on the amount that could be mined, and on how much growth could be borrowed from the future (all debt is, is future consumption denied), is why eventually the world’s central bankers moved from money backed by precious metals, to “money” backed by “faith and credit”, in the process diluting both. It was the unprecedented explosion in credit money “creation” that resulted once money could be “printed” out of thin air that nearly destroyed the western financial system. Which brings us to Bitcoin, where currency “mining” takes place not in the earth’s crust, or in the basement of the Federal Reserve, but inside supercomputers.

It is these supercomputers, that are the laborers of the virtual mines where Bitcoins are unearthed, that the NYT focuses on in a recent expose:

Bitcoins are invisible money, backed by no government, useful only as a speculative investment or online currency, but creating them commands a surprisingly hefty real-world infrastructure.

 

Instead of swinging pickaxes, these custom-built machines, which are running an open-source Bitcoin program, perform complex algorithms 24 hours a day. If they come up with the right answers before competitors around the world do, they win a block of 25 new Bitcoins from the virtual currency’s decentralized network. The network is programmed to release 21 million coins eventually. A little more than half are already out in the world, but because the system will release Bitcoins at a progressively slower rate, the work of mining could take more than 100 years.

As the following chart shows, in addition to the surge in the price of Bitcoin, another explosion witnessed recently is in the processing power of the Bitcoin network: from non-existent a couple of years ago, the “mining” power dedicated to hashing, or the calculations used to extract new Bitcoins, has risen to nearly 10 quadrillion per second!

So what do these supercomputer-populated mines look like? Below we look at two examples of just that.

* * *

First, we look at Hong Kong, where one of the largest Bitcoin mines in the world is located.

In an industrial backwater near Hong Kong’s massive port, one of Asia’s largest Bitcoin mines is quietly turning raw computing power into digital currency.

Located about eight miles from the city’s finance hub, the entire facility is no larger than a two-bedroom apartment. Aside from a small bathroom, the mine offers no creature comforts.

It is dominated by vertical racks that house hundreds of ASIC chips. Shorthand for application-specific integrated circuits, these chips are custom-built to mine bitcoins.

These racks house hundreds of ASIC chips used to mine bitcoins.

Chinese investors have been enthusiastic early adopters, a trend amplified by a lack of more traditional investment vehicles in the country

The Kwai Chung mining facility is extremely quiet — except for the whirr of computers

Industrial bitcoin mines devote their massive amounts of computing power to working on the algorithm, and are rewarded with an equivalent share of bitcoins. Currently, a winner is rewarded with 25 bitcoins roughly every 10 minutes.

A closer look at the towers. Most of the facility is devoted to mining for an investor group in China.

Miners are lured to Hong Kong because of its proximity to chipmakers in China and the city’s permissive regulatory environment.

A bubbling liquid produced by 3M cools the ASIC chips.

This mine was purpose-built by Allied Control for clients based in China.

Kar-Wing Lau, Allied Control’s vice president of operations, said the mine is cheaper to run and more efficient than many others because it uses a technology called immersion cooling.

Heat sinks and fans are typically used to disperse the heat generated by massed ranks of computer chips, but this Hong Kong mine is liquid-cooled using a product developed by 3M.

The processors used in the mine were build specifically for mining. They have no other function. “These ASIC chips, they can mine bitcoins and do nothing else,” Lau said. “Given the pace of advancement, we need them to be constantly upgraded.”

These radiators, housed on a balcony outside the mine, help disperse heat produced by the chips.

Immersion cooling allows Allied Control to leave less space between the chips, which saves money that would otherwise be spent on rent.

The technology also cuts down on electricity use — one of the other major costs associated with Bitcoin mining. Lau wouldn’t reveal how much it cost to build the mine, but he said that electricity bills for a fully-operational mine of this size would typically exceed $50,000 per month.

“The real question from a business perspective is how efficiently you can run your mining operation,” Lau said.

The inside of the racks used to house the mining chips.

Cooling, however, is only one of the key factors when determining Bitcoin “mine” placement. Another key one: access to cheap electricity, because those massive servers sure soak up a lot of electricity: electricity, whose costs can quickly add up once a parallel processing cluster gets big enough.

* * *

Which brings us to Bitcoin mega-mine #2 in Iceland.

It is here that the NYT goes searching for digital excavators used to procure the digital currency.

On the flat lava plain of Reykjanesbaer, Iceland, near the Arctic Circle, you can find the mines of Bitcoin.

 

To get there, you pass through a fortified gate and enter a featureless yellow building. After checking in with a guard behind bulletproof glass, you face four more security checkpoints, including a so-called man trap that allows passage only after the door behind you has shut. This brings y
ou to the center of the operation, a fluorescent-lit room with more than 100 whirring silver computers, each in a locked cabinet and each cooled by blasts of Arctic air shot up from vents in the floor.

 

“What we have here are money-printing machines,” said Emmanuel
Abiodun, 31, founder of the company that built the Iceland installation,
shouting above the din of the computers. “We cannot risk that anyone
will get to them.”

 

Mr. Abiodun is one of a number of
entrepreneurs who have rushed, gold-fever style, into large-scale
Bitcoin mining operations in just the last few months. All of these
people are making enormous bets that Bitcoin will not collapse, as it
has threatened to do several times.

Iceland’s low electric bill and its effective infrastructure, may be a reason why the one country that rebelled against the banker syndicate and jailed some of its bankers, may become the place where the bulk of Bitcoin mining takes place:

The computers that do the work eat up so much energy that electricity costs can be the deciding factor in profitability. There are Bitcoin mining installations in Hong Kong and Washington State, among other places, but Mr. Abiodun chose Iceland, where geothermal and hydroelectric energy are plentiful and cheap. And the arctic air is free and piped in to cool the machines, which often overheat when they are pushed to the outer limits of their computing capacity.

 

The operation can baffle even those entrusted with its care. Helgi Helgason, a burly, bald Icelandic man who oversees the data center that houses the machines, said that when he first heard that a Bitcoin mining operation was moving in he expected something very different. “I thought we’d bring in machines and put bags behind them and the coins would fall into them,” said Mr. Helgason, with a laugh.

No coins, but the cash miners get in exchange for BTC, especially if each Bitcoin continues to trade close to $1000, the mining can be quite lucrative. The flipside, however, is that the business is just as if not more capital intensive than running a gold mine for the same profit.

Until just a few months ago, most Bitcoin mining was done on the home computers of digital-money fanatics. But as the value of a single Bitcoin skyrocketed over the last few months, the competition for new coins set off a race that quickly turned mining into an industrial enterprise.

 

“Even if you had hardware earlier this year, that is becoming obsolete,” said Greg Schvey, a co-founder of Genesis Block, a virtual-currency research firm. “You are talking about order-of-magnitude jumps.”

 

The work the computers do is akin to guessing at a lottery number. The faster the computers run, the better chance of guessing that right number and winning valuable coins. So mining entrepreneurs are buying chips and computers designed specifically — and only — for this work. The machines in Iceland are worth about $20,000 each on the open market.

…

 

In February, Mr. Abiodun used the investors’ money to buy machines
from a start-up dedicated solely to manufacturing specialized mining
computers. The competition for those computers is so intense that he had
to pay for them and wait for delivery.

 

When the delays became lengthy, however, he went on eBay and paid
$130,000 for two high-powered machines, which he set up in June in a
data center in Kansas City, Kan.

 

This was the beginning of Mr. Abiodun’s company, Cloud Hashing, which
rents out computing power to people who want to mine without buying
computers themselves. The term hashing refers to the repetitive code
guessing that miners do. 

 

Today, all of the machines dedicated to mining Bitcoin have a
computing power about 4,500 times the capacity of the United States
government’s mightiest supercomputer, the IBM Sequoia, according to
calculations done by Michael B. Taylor, a professor at the University of
California, San Diego. The computing capacity of the Bitcoin network
has grown by around 30,000 percent since the beginning of the year.

What is the upside of mining?

At the end of each day, the spoils are divided up and sent to Cloud Hashing’s customers. Last Wednesday, for example, the entire operation unlocked 225 Bitcoins, valued at around $160,000 at recent prices. Cloud Hashing keeps about 20 percent of the capacity for its own mining.

To be sure, like any industry in its infancy, there are numerous glitches, and mining for Bitcoins is no different:

Some Cloud Hashing customers have also complained on Internet forums that it can be hard to get a response from the company when something goes wrong. But this has not stopped new contracts from pouring in. Cloud Hashing now has 4,500 customers, up from 1,000 in September.

 

Mr. Abiodun acknowledges that the company has not been prepared to deal with its rapid growth. He said he had used $4 million raised from two angel investors to add customer service representatives to offices in Austin, Tex., and London. Cloud Hashing is now preparing to open a mining facility in a data center near Dallas, which will hold more than $3 million worth of new machines being produced by CoinTerra, a Texas start-up run by a former Samsung chip designer.

 

The higher energy costs — and required air-conditioning — in Texas are worth it for Mr. Abiodun. He wants his operation to be widely distributed in case of power shortages or regulatory issues in one location. But he is also expanding his Icelandic operation, shipping in about 66 machines that have been running for the last few months near their manufacturer in Ukraine.

 

Mr. Abiodun said that by February, he hopes to have about 15 percent of the entire computing power of the Bitcoin network, significantly more than any other operation.

Hopefully Bitcoin will still be around by then.

* * *

The future of Bitcoin mining is uncertain. There are a fixed number of bitcoins available — and more than half have already been extracted. Kar-Wing Lau of the Hong Kong-based Allied Control, compared the explosion of professional mining operations to an arms race. For now, it appears to be a profitable endeavor. Lau said that Allied Control is currently exploring other mining platforms, including a mine built in a shipping container — something that could prove useful if regulators crack down on the currency.

via Zero Hedge http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/zerohedge/feed/~3/4MWtLPESfGA/story01.htm Tyler Durden

Since Carl Icahn is offline (one can’t tweet the market or AAPL higher when it’s closed), here is Bill Gross with some twitter Christmas non-cheer.

Gross: HoHoHo! Who cant like a ~25% gain in 2013? Only a Grinch who worries abt record profit margins, corp buybacks &Fed checkwriting. Moi?

— PIMCO (@PIMCO) December 25, 2013

Of course, the 25% return in 2013 was for Bernanke’s favorite asset class: stocks. Bonds… not so much.

via Zero Hedge http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/zerohedge/feed/~3/_FmIHLX5gvM/story01.htm Tyler Durden

Since Carl Icahn is offline (one can’t tweet the market or AAPL higher when it’s closed), here is Bill Gross with some twitter Christmas non-cheer.

Gross: HoHoHo! Who cant like a ~25% gain in 2013? Only a Grinch who worries abt record profit margins, corp buybacks &Fed checkwriting. Moi?

— PIMCO (@PIMCO) December 25, 2013

Of course, the 25% return in 2013 was for Bernanke’s favorite asset class: stocks. Bonds… not so much.

via Zero Hedge http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/zerohedge/feed/~3/_FmIHLX5gvM/story01.htm Tyler Durden

While millisecond by millisecond we spend our lives focused on the machinations of the “markets”, a lot of ‘other stuff’ happened in 2013. The following incredible image from Beutler Ink’s Mario Zucca packs in an entire year’s worth of 2013’s major events.

 

 

And Mario has been kind enough to provide a ‘cheat sheet’…

via Zero Hedge http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/zerohedge/feed/~3/7R18QvonIXk/story01.htm Tyler Durden

via Zero Hedge http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/zerohedge/feed/~3/nzqLEb1XRdg/story01.htm williambanzai7

The only thing missing from the cartoon below is there is a minimum net worth requirement for “free money” eligibility.

h/t @bondskew

via Zero Hedge http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/zerohedge/feed/~3/9zlELh3XKGc/story01.htm Tyler Durden

While one may criticize now-ex CFTC commissioner Bart Chilton for years and years of sound and fury signifying nothing, countless promises of regulatory enforcement (all of which fell short of the target) and finally putting an end to precious metals manipulation only for the world to discover that while every other asset class is manipulated (involving such individuals as JPM’s chief currency dealer), gold and silver are exempt, one must admit the former regulator does have a way wtih words (and of course haircuts). Sure enough, Chilton’s most memorable parting gift will not be something he did, but rather what he said.

William Cohan memorializes his parting message: “As we long suspected, Wall Street continues to use every trick in its playbook to do whatever it can to eviscerate numerous post-financial-crisis rules. The arsenal includes high-powered lobbyists who outnumber lawmakers 10-to-1; $1,000-an-hour letter-writing lawyers who gain strength from negotiating over arcana; and the occasional hoodwinking of a president whose knowledge of the ways of finance are close to nil.”

Chilton’s take home message: “The lesson for me is: The financial sector is so powerful that they will roll things back over time,” Chilton says. “The Wall Street firms have tremendous influence, and they can impact policy to a greater degree than any one regulator or a small group of regulators can.”

Well, one sure can’t say that those 30 years he spent in Washington of which nearly 7 years at the CFTC were lost on the Alexander Godunov lookalike: at least he figured out who runs the show. Of course, finding a way how to prevent the financial sector from being in charge, i.e., doing his job, would have been preferable, but close enough for government work.

What are Chilton’s other laments? Why being underfunded of course. Because if the CFTC only had more money, all would have been fixed.

In fiscal 2013, for example, the CFTC requested funding of $308 million and got only $195 million ($10 million less than the previous year) despite many new responsibilities. “There are crooks who are getting away with crimes because we don’t have the resources to go after them,” Chilton says. The SEC has a similar discrepancy between its appropriation and what it needs to fulfill legal mandates.

 

With its regulators overwhelmed and underfunded, Wall Street firms then move to the relentless negotiation stage. “As you try to deal with the regulatory agency,” he says of Wall Street, “the first thing you do is you say, ‘Well, would you exempt us?’ And when that doesn’t work, you try to ameliorate your regulation.” If that strategy fails, the industry defaults to litigation.

Sounds like the generic justification anyone would make for failing at their job. But it could be just us.

Some more deep thoughts from Bart Chilton:

Chilton said he has noticed one additional tactic that Wall Street has been employing lately: stalling or thwarting nominees to regulatory agencies. The nomination of Timothy Massad, the U.S. Treasury Department official who managed the Troubled Asset Relief Program, to replace Gary Gensler as CFTC chairman came late in the year and a confirmation vote has now been delayed, probably to February 2014. That means further Dodd-Frank rule-writing and enforcement could be delayed, too, because only two of five commissioners will be seated and they would both have to agree to get anything done. “It’s a gift to Wall Street,” he said. “This is what they’ve been trying to do. They’ve been trying to stop Dodd-Frank.”

 

Chilton knows why Wall Street always seems to win. Financial-industry executives contribute more money “in every election, than any other sector, and they have made more profits in every single quarter since the fall of 2008 when many of them helped crash the economy,” he explains. “So while the rest of the nation is suffering still, and trying to get a leg up to get out of the ditch, the financial sector didn’t miss a beat.”

 

In case you didn’t catch Chilton’s meaning, here is the shorter version: Unless and until Wall Street’s disproportionate ability to bully Washington is curtailed, the rest of us will be held hostage to its agenda. For those interested in the fuller version, Chilton has been writing a book. Its working title: “Theft.”

Oh, we caught Chilton’s meaning all right. What we are more interested in is how long after Theft is a monetary failure will the silver-haired regulator apply for a job at Goldman, JPMorgan or Citi. Because one thing we have learned observing Washington apparatchiks, is that in addition to sharing deep thoughts on occasions (if unmatched by actions), hypocrisy also happens to be a recurring theme.

For those who yearn for one last dose of Chilton’s deep thoughts, here is his most recent speech, “The Boss“, appropriately enough before the Society of American Business Editors and Writers, New York City. After all, the man has to get in with the publishing lobby next.

via Zero Hedge http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/zerohedge/feed/~3/arZcjnYkLRM/story01.htm Tyler Durden