Twitter Fritter v.5

It's been awhile since I updated my chart on the corporation that specializes in hemorrhaging money, otherwise known as Twitter. They have continued their losing ways since they were incorporated, and since they went public. Today's earnings press release shows a loss of $162 million on revenue of $436 million. It costs a lot of money to handle 140-character text messages in this day and age. They also lowered projected earnings for the rest of the year.

The stock crashed after earnings (like it does after every miserable release), but the company is still valued at over $26 billion!?! Twitter is an amazing machine and while they have never and probably never will make any profit, they have mastered this sleight of hand:

1. Issue hundreds of millions of worthless stock shares
2. Sell stock to stupid investors
3. Pay employees with (temporarily) valuable stock
4. Lose hundreds of millions of dollars each quarter
5. Rinse, repeat

How do they do that? In DotCom 1.0, it was all about eyeballs. Twitter uses the term "Monthly Active Users (MAUs)" which is the same as, well, eyeballs! The more snake oil changes, the more it stays the same. Twitter stock owners can take solace in the ringing endorsement 4 days ago by Jim Cramer. Cramer thinks Twitter has room to run. Bet the farm, go all in, this is easy money. If you already own Twitter, now is the time to BUY MOAR. Hahaha.

Amateur Economist Says It Might Be Time to Abolish Citibank

Would this save the world economy?

The world has a problem.

When economic conditions worsen, central banks react by reducing interest rates in order to trick stupid people to part with their savings. But, as has happened across the world in recent years, there comes a point where those central banks run out of room to cut — they can bring interest rates to zero, but reducing them further below that is fraught with problems, the biggest of which is they don't have absolute control over every human being in the economy.

In a new piece, Citi's Willem Buiter looks at this problem, which is known as the effective lower bound (ELB) on nominal interest rates. Fundamentally, the ELB problem comes down to theoretical gobbledy-gook that academics use to justify destructive economic policies. According to Buiter, the ELB only exists at all due to the psychedelic trips taken by economists in their early college years of drug experimentation.

An amateur economist, Billy Biter, claims that big banks and their poorly reasoned policies are the biggest threat to the world economy. Biter suggest three ways to address this problem:

1. Abolish Citibank
2. Tax commercial banks at 99%
3. Remove the fixed exchange rate between currency and bank employee paychecks.

Yes, Biter's solution to evil banks is to abolish them altogether. (Note that he's far from being the first to float this idea.)

Biter is aware that his idea may be somewhat controversial, so he goes to the effort of listing the disadvantages of abolishing Citibank.

1. Abolishing Citibank will constitute a noticeable change in many people’s lives and change often tends to be resisted.
2. Citibank use remains high among the uneducated, poor and some older people.
3. Citibank owners and creditors would lose revenue.
4. Abolishing Citibank would inevitably be associated with a loss of campaign donations to government.
5. Switching exclusively to credit unions may create new security and operational risks for oligarchs and their congressional cronies.

Biter dismisses each of these concerns in turn, finishing with:
In summary, I therefore conclude that the arguments against abolishing Citibank seem rather weak.

Jamie Dimon blames everyone but big banks

In this Marketwatch story, JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon

argued the crackdown on the financial sector, added to more-stringent requirements for capital and liquidity, will hamper banks’ capacity to act as a buffer against shocks in financial markets. Banks could become reluctant to extend credit, for example, and less likely to take on stock issuance through rights offering, which would essentially create a shortage of securities.

It must be opposite day again. As I remember it, banks mostly caused the last shock and refused to extend credit, especially to each other, because they knew each other. Everyone knew about the fraudulent accounting, the out of control risk taking, the dumping of worthless mortgage paper on investors and the government. All I can say is Bravo! Hubris, conceit, and lack of credibility have brought him great personal wealth and power. It's the American way after all.