Disqus - Latest Comments for Rosabarba

Re: Wynn Earnings Call Tidbits - Q4 2014 - Kid Dynamite's World

Rosabarba — Wed, 04 Feb 2015 17:19:21 -0000

... or just a colorful flourish of hyperbole.

Re: Wynn Earnings Call Tidbits - Q4 2014 - Kid Dynamite's World

Rosabarba — Wed, 04 Feb 2015 13:34:31 -0000

Wonder if "1800 pound" was meant to be 1800 *page*. Insert your own joke about Massachusetts bureaucracy here, but a ton of paper seems kinda out there, man.

Re: Volatility vs. Choppiness - Macroeconomic Blog - TheDOCument.com

Rosabarba — Tue, 13 Jan 2015 14:03:55 -0000

Apropos of your public member letter, Doc: Congrats on your copper short.

Re: Consider Your Perspective: A Chart - Gold vs U.S. Debt - Kid Dynamite's World

Rosabarba — Fri, 05 Dec 2014 14:53:03 -0000

The focus on debt to the exclusion of all else ends up telling you very little, IMO.

The US has been adding to the public debt more or less continuously since the Jackson administration. If we're on 180 years of borrowed time, we might need something better than an arbitrary debt ceiling to tell us when the music is about to stop. Seems that growth and prosperity are possible without making a fetish of debt reduction.

As a percentage of GDP, the current level is close to the end of WWII. How was that managed? For a few years, by surpluses (cutting the debt from about $269B to $252B from '46 to '48, or all of about 7 percent), but what really pushed it down was growth.

Public debt is only one part of the economic picture of a country. Too many goldbugs ignore too much when they make their appraisals, and their hidebound intellectual vanities force them to cry "manipulation" or what have you when the world doesn't conform to their expectations.

Re: A Leveraged ETF Trading Flow Case Study: Gold Miners - $GDX $NUGT $DUST Kid Dynamite's World

Rosabarba — Tue, 14 Oct 2014 14:47:03 -0000

Crude oil, reminding everybody today that the only thing that matters when it comes to the price of real things is the size of the Fed's balance sheet.

Re: A Leveraged ETF Trading Flow Case Study: Gold Miners - $GDX $NUGT $DUST Kid Dynamite's World

Rosabarba — Mon, 13 Oct 2014 00:54:52 -0000

Funny thing is (as I'm sure you realize), there's no blog easier to reproduce than HO's. Download the COT report, note the flows with an ominous gloss, predict GLD has no physical gold, note any bank closures ... badda bing, badda boom, you're done. Literally anybody could to it any time.

This "court order," if it ever turns out to be more than a rumor (care to lay odds on that score?), just means some other unimaginative nutter now has an opportunity to own that sweet franchise.

Re: Jon Stewart Skewers Congressional Idiocy

Rosabarba — Mon, 29 Sep 2014 15:19:05 -0000

I'm not sure "never" means what you think it means:

http://www.mediaite.com/tv/...

http://www.huffingtonpost.c...

http://popwatch.ew.com/2012...

http://www.washingtonpost.c...

Re: A Historic Summer of Gold Manipulation

Rosabarba — Fri, 12 Sep 2014 12:35:44 -0000

You are just *begging* for a lame pun to be made on your name, KD.

Re: Gold Manipulation Continues Unabated

Rosabarba — Tue, 10 Jun 2014 19:57:08 -0000

Take a closer look at the text under the second May 19 chart. One word in particular ...

Re: The Incredible Shrinking Hard Drive

Rosabarba — Fri, 30 May 2014 14:06:21 -0000

So much for hyperinflation ;-)

Re: As Details of Gold Manipulation Come To Light, Price Action Makes More Sense

Rosabarba — Mon, 26 May 2014 16:34:32 -0000

Big players shoving the price around for a quick clip here and there is one thing. That's not what goldbugs suggest, though. To them, it is possible for the Fed/BBanks/Jewish Cabal/Lizardmen to keep the price of gold artificially low for years or decades, accomplishing it without causing the shortages that always accompany official efforts to control prices below the market-clearing level. It's that simplistic worldview and the non-evidence for its validity that gets criticized here, not the idea of market actors playing a few games when they think they can get away with it.

Re: As Details of Gold Manipulation Come To Light, Price Action Makes More Sense

Rosabarba — Mon, 26 May 2014 15:57:28 -0000

Oooh, what a zinger there at the end. I'm sure this will mark the blog's final entry. To get served thus ... too much to bear. Lilies to your widow, KD.

Myself, I'm off to the gold market to stock up, since modern life can't be lived without it. An ounce ought to do for the week, don't you think? Then off to the coffeeshop to talk gold with friends and strangers while checking the spot price every few minutes, as is common custom. Then back home to marvel at how the sheeple don't realize they're living in pre-industrial penury, somehow anesthetized to it all by a government mission to suppress the price of gold (while also allowing it to climb robustly for a dozen years, but whatevs).

Re: As Details of Gold Manipulation Come To Light, Price Action Makes More Sense

Rosabarba — Sun, 25 May 2014 14:09:34 -0000

Mind = blown

Re: One Month of Gold Manipulation - In Pictures Kid Dynamite's World

Rosabarba — Tue, 13 May 2014 15:24:19 -0000

Spend a little time surveying trading blogs/Twitter feeds/etc. (and it's certainly not confined to gold enthusiasts), and you will find no shortage of people who would rather feel right than make money.

Re: One Month of Gold Manipulation - In Pictures Kid Dynamite's World

Rosabarba — Tue, 13 May 2014 12:05:31 -0000

I'm not sure how recent the bias is ... Nixon closed the gold window 43 years ago.

And I think you might have missed something in my response: The idea is that the people must be kept in the dark about QE being inflationary/hyperinflationary, and that this is done by suppressing the price of gold indefinitely, yes?

I don't buy it, and *part* of the reason I don't buy it is inflation/hyperinflation doesn't confine itself to gold but to all real goods. So that's why I asked about oil. There would have to be an Oil Desk at the Fed's secret price-control lair. There would have to be a lot of desks, actually, covering goods far more important to the modern world than gold.

If QE is Weimaring us all into penury, and the only reason we don't know it is the rascals have magically supressed gold below its natural price of $10k without causing shortages, you'd see inflation all over the place: Oil, copper, corporate bonds, nominal wages, and on and on. Those disparate markets are either all under the perfectly controlling thumb of the US (who, again, are managing all of this price suppression without causing shortages) since QE started, or the goldbugs have some holes in their stories.

Re: One Month of Gold Manipulation - In Pictures Kid Dynamite's World

Rosabarba — Mon, 12 May 2014 23:22:41 -0000

Maybe you need Cullen Roche to do a guest post on endogenous money, with an examination of aggregate supply/demand dynamics thrown in.

Re: One Month of Gold Manipulation - In Pictures Kid Dynamite's World

Rosabarba — Mon, 12 May 2014 22:22:11 -0000

The "government has an interest in keeping Gold's price low" line certainly gets thrown around a good bit in certain quarters and has for years. It always begs some questions.

Why gold, especially? More than oil, say. Goldbugs always seem to have this solipsistic impression that the average citizen shares their interest and bases their faith in the system on the gold price.

I never heard my friends or family bring it up when it was on its multiyear bull run, but maybe I'm atypical. But why gold and not something pretty much everybody has to use and about which everyone has constant price consciousness? Crude has been trading sideways for three years. Is the Fed/JPM/Whoever naked-short billions of barrels of "paper oil" for that stretch as QE has gone about its merry way, and then performing the same shortage-preventing magic it/they use for high-demand commodities under price controls?

I've lost track of whether the its supposed to be the major banks or the feds directly who are keeping their thumbs on gold, but if it's the former, it's a shame for the gold enthusiasts that years of crying "manipulation" haven't delivered the results they expect (even, oddly enough, when the price of gold was trending up) when it only took a few months for the JPM London Whale trades to go belly-up for a few billion. I guess manipulating gold is wildly easier than CDSs, in which case, why are goldbugs bothering with metal in the first place?

Re: <em>Game of Thrones</em> Goes Off Script—for Better or for Worse?

Rosabarba — Mon, 28 Apr 2014 19:57:26 -0000

Hey, speaking of that ziggurat ...

Am I the only one who wonders why, at this point, Daenerys even wants to invade Westeros?

Practically without firing a shot, she's taken control of one sprawling, gleaming, impossibly marvelous city after another. Why even bother shipping her legions over just to risk battle to control, apart from King's Landing, a collection of muddy shitholes and the treacherous bastards who live there?!?

Declare victory and call it a day, Khaleesi.

Re: Who Drives the Price of Gold? Kid Dynamite's World

Rosabarba — Mon, 17 Mar 2014 13:57:39 -0000

What a killjoy, using Occam's Razor to slice the fun out of the online role-playing game that is PM market commentary. Shame on you, KD.

Re: Guest post: ‘God is Done with You’: Pensacola Christian College and Sexual Violence

Rosabarba — Thu, 13 Mar 2014 00:13:13 -0000

The impact wouldn't be diluted by spreading the blame, it would be accentuated. The victim was failed not just by the school, but by law enforcement as well, if in fact that is what happened. We don't know, and quite a few people don't seem to want to know.

I honestly don't understand why the actions/inactions of the police seem irrelevant for a crime of this magnitude and a failure on the part of PCC of this magnitude. She certainly shouldn't have had to bear the consequences alone, and an effective response by law enforcement could have helped redress that wrong. As a citizen, I want to know how the police acted, or failed to act, in a case this awful. If it were my daughter (even if it were not my daughter), I'd be livid if something like were abetted by the authorities and I'd want them to explain their actions or reasons inaction. All that said, I do understand my specific objections are not shared by many of the posters here.

Re: Guest post: ‘God is Done with You’: Pensacola Christian College and Sexual Violence

Rosabarba — Wed, 12 Mar 2014 23:08:04 -0000

I'm not claiming the police would necessarily take action when there's evidence. I want to know whether they did or didn't in this case, and more shame on them if they didn't.

The point is the story doesn't say either way. If PCC was able to punish a victim in part due to police inaction, that's a relevant part of the story. If the police did make a case and PCC still punished the victim, that's also a relevant part of the story. As it is, we have no idea what the police did or didn't do.

Re: Guest post: ‘God is Done with You’: Pensacola Christian College and Sexual Violence

Rosabarba — Wed, 12 Mar 2014 22:37:44 -0000

The details of the assault were already disclosed by the victim and are in the story. I'm not asking for more from or about her. I'm asking: What did the police do with that information and why or why not. If the police failed her, I want to know that. They deserve the scorn, not the victim. If that failure allowed PCC to punish a victim of a horrible crime on its premises, I want to know that, too. If the police made a case, that's a significant part of the story, and on top of it how PCC could then justify or try to explain away its own actions. Nothing more is required of the victim, only the writer.

Re: Guest post: ‘God is Done with You’: Pensacola Christian College and Sexual Violence

Rosabarba — Wed, 12 Mar 2014 22:21:03 -0000

We don't need a guilty verdict. There are police reports, arrest reports, depositions, indictments, trial records, all of which could be referenced without needing an actual guilty verdict to shed light on how the police handled things (or didn't).

I'm not assuming the cops are blasé. I'm not assuming anything. I'm just trying to point out that the piece forces the reader to make assumptions if it is to be taken at face value, and that, in my view, is the shortcoming of the story.

Re: Guest post: ‘God is Done with You’: Pensacola Christian College and Sexual Violence

Rosabarba — Wed, 12 Mar 2014 22:17:13 -0000

If that is how it played out, that would be extremely pertinent to the story. If that's what happened, the writer could have contacted the police, the police would have said, "We're letting the school deal with it." Then we would know that's how it played out and could judge accordingly.

But we don't know that's how it played out. We're left to guess or assume things that could have been addressed when this article was being written.

Re: Guest post: ‘God is Done with You’: Pensacola Christian College and Sexual Violence

Rosabarba — Wed, 12 Mar 2014 22:13:35 -0000

It wouldn't be necessary to ask anything more of the victim. According to the story, she provided extensive details about a horrible experience. With that in hand, the writer could easily have contacted the police to ascertain what, if anything, they did about it. We are not told, one way or the other, how they treated this case. That is a shortcoming in the story I don't assume: It's simply not there.

Learning this would have shed light on how PCC failed the victim. Did a law-enforcement disinterest abet PCC shielding the perpetrator? Or did they proceed with the case, and PCC thumbed their nose in the face of the investigation? We're not told, and I wish it were otherwise.