changegonnacome

Shades, gold chain, black trench coat, glassy bloodshot ketamine eyes, baby mama can't get in touch with him for days - speaking at the CONSERVATIVE! Political Action Conference. Very conservative indeed- this might be one of the finest political comedies ever written....if it weren't reality. All I'll say is I can't wait for the documentaries on all this & god bless whoever has to tidy up the mess being created right now.

Not saying the US is/was an angel - far from it but this is a relative game......but when one thinks about this problem (let's call it global stability, prosperity & existentialism in the nuclear age) it's almost like a currency pair.....one should think about the status quo relative to the possible alternative.......perhaps the alternative is all pizza and fairytales......I tend to think we might look fondly back at the unipolar moment and the historically benign hegemon that was the United States Empire......you dont miss your water till the well runs dry......and I suspect we wont miss the rules based order with all its deep deep flaws, imbalances and exploitations till its gone and replaced by a system which inherently will be anarchistic. Time to bust out the 4th Turning to see what happens next.......but If I remember correctly......it seems like a bunch of people are going to have re-learn how important overarching institutions are......which can only be learned it seems by experiencing a touch of anarchy for a while.....if my mental cliff notes are right from that book!

Absolutely - Ukraine would not be in the situation its in today if it did not foolishly believe the USA and UK's assurances around security guarantees giving up its 1200 nukesor whatever it was and signing the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons in exchange for verbal vibe assurances around its borders. Deeply deeply foolish move by the Urkanian leadership at the time. The post-WWII ideal of nuclear non-proliferation was completely correct and again back to my point about the short sightedness of these Trump/Hegseth moves......you dismantle the global security architecture (however imperfect/costly) at your peril .....in the nuclear age the concept of national security for a superpower via isolationism is quaint & naive......a concept from a time when the world didn't have ICBM's and 100 megaton bombs ...the US withdrawing into itself and away from Kissinger-esque stable equilibriums or balances of power which manifest themselves in supra-national organizaitons.....really does not enhance the safety of Americans, it makes them less safe over the long pull...in a world without rules with no cop on the beat so to speak.....nuclear proliferation is now the logical default position for any sovereign nation.....that looks at the rules based system (NATO, UN, WTO etc.) being sidelined or completely deconstructed by Trump. I admire what Trump is doing in terms regulation, the deficit and backing us philosophically out of this crazy woke cul-de-sac we were in I actually applaud him on these polcies.... but as it relates to foreign policy (tarriffs on allies, UN/WTO/NATO) I must say I dont see a President optimizing for America's interests over the long pull.....I see a guy smashing away at a load bearing wall with no plan for what's going to hold up the roof up after he's done with the wall.

Yes that's the obvious answer...Europe should load up on weapons......the issue with re-arming Europe is like the person who buys a gun to protect his family from somebody breaking into their home.....not realizing that by bringing a lethal weapon into his house he's made his family statistically less safe, not more safe. See the other, somewhat unarticulated, purpose of NATO for many years.......was to create a security umbrella under which European players but mainly France & Germany had no need to build up a military defensive capabilities. This type of re-arming is exactly how the continent has been wrecked twice in the last hundred years or so. European history is the story of nations—especially France and Germany—expanding their military capabilities in the name of defense.....the issue here however is that external parties defensive military investments are kind of indistinguishable from offensive investments because its impossible to know the full intent of another countries leadership or more impossible still it's impossible to know the intent of future political leaders whom may come to power in those countries. This is important as say for example the far right in Germany seems to be gaining political traction. Security competitions but lets call it defense spending, as I've described, has a way of breaking out into full blown military conflicts because as at a certain point one party reasons that the best defense is a good offense and so they should strike first to gain a desceive military advantage over their competitor. Perhaps Europe can build a military capability that is abstracted away from a France or Germany and sits at a supra-national level - and if that's possible it should desperately try to build out this European Defense Force - the only issue remains that the EU construct is quite a weak foundation I think.....when push comes to shove....old habits die hard and I dont see in Europe a European nationalism like I do in the US.......I see 27 distinct nations....who've pooled some sovereignty for economic upside but I see very very little pooling of national identity into an overarching European one.....no child in Europe goes to school in the morning and pledges their allegiance to the United States of Europe....this is a big problem if individual nations in Europe go on a spending spree in the name of national defense..........nations & persistent nationalism are forged in the fire....perhaps a United States of Europe will be created when Putin & Xi's armies pour across the borders of Belarus into Poland and beyond but at this point I dont see it.......Europe at this point IMO is more likely to fragment than to come together to create a European Defense Force......I see little Brexit's everywhere I look in Europe right now

Interesting times - and have many thoughts on this.... Strategically the US to seemingly save a few lousy bucks......with this defacto withdrawal from NATO/Europe is being 'penny wise pound foolish' move IMO - making monkeys out of the European's to supposedly 'pivot' to Asia is simply short sighted and makes a kind of mockery of the pivot to Asia strategy itself......hitting Europe with tariffs would be doubly so....dont really want to get into the politcs of this....but its consistent with my view that Trump/Hegseth have a very limited framework for how they think about the complexity of international security....which one would expect from a Manhattan real estate developer turned TV personality turned US president...and a foot soldier turned Fox TV personality turned United States Secretary of Defense. See Europe's lack of military capability is/was a feature not a bug of NATO.....Europe's lack of strategic autonomy i.e. their complete dependence on the US from a military/security umbrella standpoint - is what makes them such beautiful subservient partners to overarching global dominance of US foreign policy.....Europe for the longest time has had an overwhelming incentive to go along with whatever hair brained scheme the American's came up with whether that's economic (sanctions, tariffs on China or withholding technology from China (ASML)) or military (Iraq, Afghanistan etc.).......pivoting to Asia.....which is a containment strategy around China not moving out beyond the first island chain is enhanced by the US having effective strategic (military & trade) oversight over the world's wealthiest aggregate economic block of consumers.....the US has 331 million wealthy buyers of Chinese goods which is great leverage......but the EU (with the UK) has ~540m first world wealthy consumers......the combined leverage against mercantilist China is simply immense.....a fracturing of the US/EU coalition in anyway is a good day for Beijing.....China's aim is to maximize its relative power within the global system.....the European's peeling away from the Americans which one can envisage on foot of this Ukraine pivot with potential tariffs to follow.....increases China's relative power in the system while diminishing the US's.....this is not how you run a railroad folks! Now in regards to the Ukraine: The reality for those paying attention is that in a very real sense the Western coalition lost the war in the Ukraine perhaps 18 months ago.......there's no doubt that Russia now and for many months now has had the upper hand on the battlefield and most importantly has the will and the capacity to continue the offensive indefinitely. The same can not be said for Ukraine....most importantly they are running out of men......next they are running out of artillery (as the Russian artillery absolute advantage grows)....and most importantly they are running out of 'partners' who are willing to bankroll the whole thing. This was all depressingly predictable. For all our hot air in the 'West' about "Adolf Putin" - Russia proved that it cared more about the conflict than we did..how could they not care more?...many pages back in this thread I pointed this out...Ukraine is/was a side project for the EU/USA......a kind of liberal democratic nation building project that liberals are so enamoured with but fail at time and time again........nobody in the core EU ever seriously considered the threat inflation of the Biden rhetoric of Russia marching on Warsaw, then Berlin to be anything other than good old threat inflation. For Russia - the Ukraine is and always will be existential.......perseverance which is measure of how much one cares about something......remains the most under-appreciated factor in most military conflicts......and the most consistent mistake in international security and conflict frameworks is the complete over-estimation of military power to effect strategic goals......ask the American's in Afghanistan, Iraq, Vietnam etc. or the British in its various colonies...or the Israeli's in Gaza/West Bank/Lebanon.......I'm not sure how many times folks need to be taught this lesson.....but in the era of nationalism there are profound limitations to hard power. The reality in the war in Ukraine is that Russia expanded their military industrial base commensurate to how much they cared about their strategic objectives..........and we in the West with our 'We Stand with Ukraine' flags & all the puffery from European and US leaders never truly matched our rhetoric with concrete military industrial actions. For example by late 2024, many analysts noted that Russia was manufacturing more ammunition than all NATO countries combined – reportedly about 7× the West’s monthly output. Importantly the asymmetry in terms of artillery capability occured after the invasion of March 2022 and not before it.....the West wasn't blindsided by some secret Russian build up of artillery capability....it happened in plain sight with Ukraine's military reporting privately and publicly to its partners the growing asymmetry on the battlefield. The reality as evidenced by the hard reality of artillery production capability is that we simply didn't care enough about what happened to Ukraine on the battlefield. Its depressing but true - as I said many pages back and to mangle the Buffet adage - you shouldn't get involved in a war for twenty seconds that you wouldn't be happy to be involved in for twenty years.

Alot of folks seem confused about what's happening here....let me help Trump is introducing a defacto US federal sales tax levied on imported goods.......its just being hidden such that it wont show up on your Amazon/Walmart receipt or when you buy that new car from the dealer. It's a tax revenue raising measure, masquerading as nationalism.....I must say this nationalism vehicle for stealth tax rises seems to be working a treat as evidenced by a bunch of posters here who've seem to have bought the spin hook, line and sinker. Sure the Republican spin points have a sliver of truth to them (like all good talking points): - some of the 'taxes/tariffs' will get eaten by foreign producers taking a margin hit, they will pay some of this new federal sales tax - some import substitution might occur which will be good for American manufacturing - and some currency appreciation might take a little bit of the sting out of it at the point of sale But all these minor spin points are just there to muddy the water on the big big picture reality.."Donald Trump just raised taxes" ...the US federal government , under Trump, just got bigger and is going to be taking more money out of American pockets and sending it to D.C. to prop up busted entitlement programs and various tax breaks like carried interest. He's sucking those tax tariff dollars up into the Federal budget swamp to help plug the 7% deficit...while pretending that without touching entitlements DOGE is going to meaningfully shrink the deficit.......that folks believe this nonsense he sellings just tells you what a brilliant salesmen he is.

Well the beauty of momentum/herding from a traditional asset managers perspective......is that you get hosed at the exact time everybody else is i.e. all your competitors are getting hosed too........much easier conversation with a pension fund or endowment when every other manager they have on their books is having a bad year too. Being up when other are down.......and down when others are up........is a terrible business model for a money management firm......its an invitation to get your head chopped off by your clients.......I'm sympathetic to institutional allocators....what I just described could be a manager giving true alpha (across the cycle)....or it could be a manager giving you beta minus 10%....the problem is it'll take about 8-10yrs to be absolutely certain which one it is.

@Vish_ram I think that's right - the US indices have become so service and software heavy (capital light writ large) that the old models are going say its expensive no matter where we are in the cycle versus the past....the average SPY company is now simply a better business than the average SPY company from 20,40, 60yrs ago.....margins, ROIC, global TAM's feeding into global growth avenues all requiring little incremental capital to do so etc. You can and should pay up more for this versus the past.........within limits of course.....so a model rooted in the capital heavy past would of course flash red as Hussman's has forever basically.

Centene investor day has now gone virtual....previously it was to be held in person at NYSE on Dec 12th..... https://investors.centene.com/2024-12-05-CENTENE-CORPORATION-TO-HOST-VIRTUAL-INVESTOR-DAY-ON-DECEMBER-12,-2024 Very sad state of affairs that this is where we are now.

Hate to break it to folks.....but the premise of Breaking Bad no longer really stacks up..........Walter White at the next ACA open enrollment period could have signed up for a top tier coverage plan.....with no pre-existing condition exclusions and no waiting period for coverage to start!

This does not exist anymore - the individual mandate at a Federal level is gone....only California, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Rhode Island, and the District of Columbia retained their own state level mandate.

Southpark is on point as always! No healthcare system is perfect........but what I've seen hybrid private-public healthcare systems I've encountered globally are probably the best........a single payer system with blanket universal access......creating a base layer of care and cutting off the tails of medical bankruptcy.........but where private hospitals & private insurers......compete for incremental healthcare spend because they are providing incremental outcomes, speedier turnarounds, better service over the basic public option. Not perfect - but as @Castanza has pointed out - too many talented people are shackled in the US by the employer health insurance chain.........it has undoubtedly suppressed entrepreneurship over the last couple of decades.

Totally agree - disconnecting the patient from the price of service via the HMO cut-out then abstracting the cost of the overall insurance even further by embedding it as a group benefit paid for by your employer (but then ultimately paid by everyone that purchases goods or services from that employer)....is one of the many ways that the US healthcare 'vampire squid' financial shakedown has increasingly got out of control.......its a kind of zombie bloated bureaucracy where no individual provider or worker in it could ever be accused of the shakedown.... but rather the shakedown is the labyrinth system itself for which there are thousands of little innocent cogs that dont need to be there..... The American healthcare system represents a kafkaesque nightmare......as most know on this forum being involved in the finance world....when you encounter something that is needlessly complex......well......where there's mystery, there's margin'......

You know your in trouble when Jeremy Siegel is calling for S&P in 2025 to return 0 to 10% If Tom Lee or Dan Ives....comes out and says anything less than 20% return for SPY in 2025.....I'm selling everything

I hope they do. The economy really needs to be brought to its knees there to create the right conditions for some sort of settlement next year.........cause every report I'm reading right now from the front lines is bleak....... showing a Red Army on the march and clearly in the ascendency....by contrast Ukrainian reports are of relentless shortages of artillery, men and moral........some 50 ATCAMS, for all the talk, are not changing the overall trajectory of what is fundamentally a ground war.....there is very little military incentive right now for Russia to come to the negotiating table on January 20th....increasing economic pain on Russia is now the most viable pathway through which the West can help Ukraine (& itself) save face with a deal that may be defensible relative to all the hot air spewed in 2022.