Bitcoin has no role in institutional or retail investors portfolios. It is not a currency: not an unit of account, not a scalable means of payment & is a highly volatile store of value. It is heavily manipulated: look at the investigation of  Bitfinex by US law enforcement. 1/n See also the academic evidence that Tether is used to manipulate the Bitcoin market. And look at the recent indictment of BitMex and his criminal CEO & gang. It has no intrinsic value, it is not backed by any asset, it is not legal tender, it cannot be used to pay taxes. 2/n

Trump mostly likely knew on Tuesday that he was sick & Covid-positive when he debated Biden. He likely got infected at the ACB super-spreader event at the WH last Saturday. And since he gets tested daily he must have known he was positive by Sunday 1/n slate.com/news-and-polit… So by Sunday he knew he was Covid-positive as tested once a day. But as he was still asymptomatic & didn't want to miss the debate hoping to beat Biden & to delay revelation he was sick he lied about it. Then he & his sick clan arrived late to debate site 2 avoid being tested 2/n

The topic of my NourielToday.com broadcast today Tuesday July 28th at 10am ET will be: Revisiting the White Swans of 2020. In February I wrote a column warning that “a number of potentially seismic white swans are visible on the horizon this year." 1/n "Any of these White Swans could trigger severe economic, financial, political, and geopolitical disturbances unlike anything since the 2008 crisis.” It is now time to reassess and update these White Swans hypothesis. See me @ 10am ET at NourielToday.com for this update 2/n

The topic of my NourielToday.com broadcast tomorrow Tuesday July 28th at 10am ET will be: Revisiting the White Swans of 2020. In February I wrote a column warning that “a number of potentially seismic white swans are visible on the horizon this year." 1/n "Any of these White Swans could trigger severe economic, financial, political, and geopolitical disturbances unlike anything since the 2008 crisis.” It is now time to reassess and update these White Swans hypothesis. NourielToday.com 2/n

The topics of my NourielToday.com broadcast tomorrow Friday June19th at 10am ET are: Short and Medium Term Challenges for Monetary and Fiscal Policy in a World of Low Growth, Low Inflation and Low Interest Rates. What is the end game of this massive debt monetization? 1/n Keep the 2% inflation target or change it to a lower or higher level to avoid the zero bound? Persistent fiscal stimulus/deficits to avoid the zero bound for policy rate & secular stagnation or risk of unsustainable deficits leading to debt crisis? See NourielToday.com 2/n

I speak live today Tuesday April 28th at 10am ET (with replay available after) @ my NourielToday.com broadcast on the topic of The Coming Greater Depression of the 2020s: Ten Risky Trends That Will Tip The Global Economy Into A Greater Depression in the Coming 2020s Decade While this year the CoronaVirus Recession will be a U-Shape Greater Recession rather than an L-shape Greater Depression or a V-shape Mild Recession, 10 risky trends in the global economy emerged after the GFC and would have led to the 2020s Depression even without this pandemic

The topic of my NourielToday.com broadcast tomorrow Tuesday April 28th at 10am EST will be “The Coming Greater Depression of the 2020s: Ten Risky Trends That Will Tip The Global Economy Into A Greater Depression in the Coming 2020s Decade.” 1/n This year the CoronaVirus crisis will be a U-Shaped Greater Recession rather than an L-shaped Greater Depression or a V-shaped Mild Recession. But 10 ominous trends that emerged after GFC that would have led to a Great Depression in the 2020s even without the current pandemic 2/n

Replays of my video broadcasts (April 1st, 8th, 10th, 14th) are available at NourielToday.com

April 1: The Greater Recession of 2020 & Why It Could Turn Into A Greater Depression Leading To A Severe Bear Market. Implications for US/Global Equities & Other Markets 1/4 NourielToday.com
April 8: The Shape of The COVID-19 Recession: U-shape Greater Recession or V-Shape Mild Recession or L-shape Greater Depression? 12 Reasons Why It Will Be a U, 8 Reasons Why Equity Markets Followed a V-shaped Recovery & 5 Factors Why The Rally Will Fizzle

Whatever you wanted to know about Helicopter Drops of Money & you never dared to ask! Watch at NourielToday.com today April 14th at 10am EST my 80 minutes talk on direct monetary financing of fiscal deficits & impacts on risky & safe assets returns. A boon or a bane? 1/n Here are questions I will answer today on Helicopter Drop of Money: Is It Different from QE Financing of Budget Deficits? What Are Its Implications 4 Economic Growth, Debt, Inflation, Financial Assets & Their Returns?Is helicopter drop a boon or a bane for economy & markets? 2/n

MY TALK ON HELICOPTER DROP OF MONEY. My new NourielToday.com broadcast will be tomorrow Tuesday April 14th at 10am EST (you can also watch replays of my previous 3 talks). The topic of my talk will be: Helicopter Drop of Money (ie Modern Monetary Theory): Boon or Bane? 1/n Is Helicopter Drop of Money Different from QE Financing of Large Budget Deficits? What Are Its Implications for Economic Growth, Debt, Inflation & Financial Assets and Their Returns? Is helicopter drop of money (monetized large fiscal deficits) a boon or a bane? 2/n

Idea of gov or Fed buying equities or taking equity positions in firms is totally dumb. Equity is junior to debt in capital structure. So if you take equity position you bail out creditors & you take equity risk of being wiped out 1st. Right support is senior credit guarantees. Gov credit guarantees need to be senior relative 2 other debt creditors as gov support is like Debtor In Possession financing. But in bailout package the gov is pari passu, not senior vs other creditors. The legal et al arguments for pari passu rather than DIP seniority were lame

Suppression is vastly superior to mitigation in terms of overall costs!

Does Social Distancing Matter? By Michael Greenstone, Vishan Nigam

This paper estimates and monetizes the impact of moderate social distancing on deaths due to COVID-19 in the USA.
bfi.uchicago.edu/working-paper/… Using the Imperial College simulation model of COVID-19’s spread & mortality impacts (Ferguson et al 2020) we project that moderate social distancing would save 1.7 million lives between March 1 & October 1 with 630,000 due to avoided overwhelming of hospital intensive care units

Trump now speaks of a $2 trillion fiscal stimulus. But a lot of it is smoke & mirrors that doesn't help the average American. Too much of it is going to the large/middle sized firms, many that are cash rich & used previous bailout for share buybacks. Not enough going to workers! Over half of Americans are gig workers, partially employed, contractors, freelancers, hourly workers, informally employed, undocumented workers, workers with no formal contract, business-owners with 10 workers or less, who are now near 0 income. They are totally wiped out now!

JP Morgan predicts an ugly global recession: "global economy is poised to contract this quarter & next with the US projected to decline at a -14% and the Euro area at a -22% ar next quarter." But my view is that it's highly unlikely that growth grows >0 by Q3. At the earliest Q4! Which global recession? V or U or L or I? For now it is is an I as global GDP is free falling at a faster rate than the GFC or even the Great Depression. Q2 will be even uglier with growth at -15 to 20% in US & Europe. That will limit the recovery of China in Q2 after an I in Q1

Many of you have been asking me daily: when the stock market will bottom out & recover? Will it will go lower & how much & till when? My BoomBust Signal ( TheBoomBust.com ) is a subscription service that provides very strong, powerful and useful signals of the markets. It uses macro dynamics algorithms and macro info/analysis to get the peaks and bottoms of various markets (stocks, bonds, gold, oil, etc). It signaled right that the stock market was overbought in mid-January and it shows it being neutral now...

In 2015-16 it took 2 risk-off episodes of August-September'15 & January-February'16 - i.e. 7 months - for those HY spreads to spike to 900bps. This time it took 1 month 2 already spike to 800bps. They will soon be above 1000bps (as macro & debt worse) 2 trigger a huge DEBT CRISIS

https://twitter.com/FerroTV/status/1239857372807540739

Credit markets are on verge of full crisis. Toxic leveraged loans, CLOs, a trillion $ of fallen angels in HG, trillions of junky leveraged HY debt, covenant-lite & other loose lending standards are now imploding. HY spreads spiking, all credit markets shut down with 0 new issues

explanation of the run on toilet paper (TP). Soon most folks will run out of income/savings and their credit lines too. So to survive they need to resort to some other means of payment that liquifies some existing useful asset folks already hold. That is where TP comes handy... So maybe someone should rather create a virtual version of TP currency that to be credible gotta be fully backed by actual TP. But given hoarding of TP that is hard. Maybe TP producers can introduce this virtual version of TP-Paper Money that is fully backed by actual TP stock!..

In EZ we got LTROs and TLTROs plus OMT and SMP. In the US we will see a return to the alphabet soup of liquidity and credit facilities of the GFC - TAF, TALF, etc - as well as massive T-bills purchases and a spectrum of OMO repos - as the Fed did massively yesterday. Expect also subsidized access to discount window, subsidies to banks to provide credit to illiquid but solvent SMEs as in new TLTRO.

The mainstream conventional wisdom is now that we will have a two quarters rolling global recession, in Q1 led by China, Japan, Korea, Italy and a few other weak EM, and in Q2 led by US and Eurozone. However my view is that this will be more than a 2 quarters rolling recession. It is highly likely that most of the Eurozone and even the US may be in a recession already in Q1, not just Q2. And it is likely that the E7 & US and other G10 recession will spillover from Q2 into Q3