Faber News Flow

An insider confided to a friend that all he is doing right now is transaction work for real estate holders who are selling now before the market crashes. His clients, members of Sin City's illuminati, once bitten by the '08 crash, believe they'll beat the crowd to the sales window before the local retail and office market collapses. Tiny capitalization rates translating into unsustainable values are being dangled in front of these folks and they are willing to absorb the tax consequences to cash out and be ready to repurchase their properties back at a discount in a couple years. Easy peasy. With the country just emerging from lockdown, where's the crash already? The original grave dancer, Sam Zell, has left the cemetery and is "following the pack and spending big on something safer," Peter Grant wrote in the  Wall Street Journal . One of Zell's companies paid $3.4 billion for  Monmouth Real Estate Investment  Corp. Not all distressed, Monmouth "owns

Old hands on Wall Street have been wary of being bearish for one reason, and no, it's not the Federal Reserve:  the old hands have been waiting for retail--the individual investor-- to go  all-in  stocks. After 13 long years, this moment has finally arrived:  retail is all in. If you doubt this, just look at record highs in investor sentiment, margin debt and the Buffett Indicator  (see chart below). Current valuations are so extreme that the previous extreme in the 2000 dot-com bubble now looks modest in comparison. I have my own sure-fire indicators for when retail is all-in.  One is my Mom's financial advisor recommends shifting her modest nest-egg out of safe bonds into the go-go stocks that are topping out. Back in late 1999, it was Cisco Systems and the other dot-com leaders, today it's the FANGMAN stocks. Sure enough, my Mom just informed me her advisor recommended moving money from bonds into a FANG-dominated stock fund. Bingo, we have a winner. Second indicator: av

The real yield on 10-year Treasuries fell to a record low as concerns mounted over the outlook for economic growth even as investor flows fueled appetite for inflation-linked debt. The real rate, which strips out the expected impact of inflation over the next decade, fell as much as six basis points to minus 1.13%. The move was compounded by a lack of trading liquidity, with the 10-year  breakeven  rate -- a market proxy for the predicted average annual rate of consumer price gains over the next decade -- topping 2.41% Monday in the wake of substantial flows into the largest exchange-traded fund that's tied to inflation bonds. While the shift up in inflation expectations was substantial, the ongoing decline in real yields suggests investor sentiment is continuing to sour amid the rapid spread of the delta variant of the coronavirus that threatens to derail the economic recovery. "We are in a regime of growth deceleration in the U.S., as the recovery becomes more mature and bro

When the International Energy Agency released its Roadmap to Net Zero report, OPEC slammed it as "destabilizing." Russia said the IEA's plan could push oil to $200 per barrel. Even the IEA itself said the targets in the roadmap were going to be challenging. And yet, the people who will foot the bill for the energy transition are being told nothing about challenges. Bjorn Lomborg, environmentalist and president of the  Copenhagen Consensus , recently addressed this discrepancy between the public narrative and the realities of the energy transition in this  article  for the Financial Post. In it, Lomborg noted the paradoxical claims that, on the one hand, net-zero will be the most challenging thing humankind has ever had to do (per IEA) and, on the other, "No one is being asked for a sacrifice" (per John Kerry, President Biden's climate envoy). "George Orwell called this willingness to espouse contradictory claims doublethink,"  Lomborg noted in his

" This work was strictly voluntary, but any animal that absented himself from it would have his rations reduced by half." George Orwell, Animal Farm Everything is now political. ESG, climate change, racism, gender, vaccines. Ask yourself why is it that  all of these things are non-negotiable? Why can't they be discussed? Why is there no room for dissent, questioning, and discourse? Something is amiss. Think about it. The pointy shoes at the IMF tell us that the pandemic will cost the world $28 trillion by 2025, which means it'll be much, much more. The truth is the pandemic isn't the cause. The lockdowns, however, are. Understanding what exactly this "pandemic" is, is really critical to understanding everything taking place globally and in financial markets both now and in the future. This virus is statistically as dangerous to the population as a bad flu.  "No, not possible, Chris. Look at the response by governments. Surely that's disproportio