riggins

I assume you mean OP?

> The entire world (including the US federal government) has taken a short position on the US dollar

I read this as a prediction of some type of crisis.

Anyway, wrt the US Federal Government, having government debt is not that same as having a short position. For one, the US Fed govt's revenue (i.e. tax collection) is denominated in the same USD as the debt. So if USD goes up, tax collection go up.

> Donald Trump declared a national emergency so he could bypass Congress and raid the military budget to build a wall.

your argument is that Obama should be more like Trump? Declaring a fake national emergency and raiding the military budget is dubious action. Obama was never going to do ish like that and we should all be happy about that.

Also as Obama pointed out in his medium posts, policy positions get converted into action through electoral wins.

I'm old enough to remember that Trump was elected in part due to Obama backlash.

I'm also old enough to remember the backlash when Obama said Cambridge police acted stupidly (the police arrested a Harvard professor in his own house when he had to go through a window bc he lost his keys)

I know people are disappointed Obama didn't accomplish more. Obama is such an impressive person you just assume he can work magic. But Obama was constrained by the system of democracy and that limits what is possible.

I'm sad this comment hasn't been upvoted higher. The comment explain how the mutation could be possible.

The key is that the mutation would prevent reproduction. If you never age, you never reproduce.

You can think about different cancers. A mutation that causes fatal childhood cancer doesn't get passed on. A mutation that causes prostate cancer can spread.

But what about their propensity to drive really slow?

Warren Buffet is on the phone for you ... He says when the intrinsic value of a company is greater then the price implied by the stock, buybacks benefit the shareholders .. And when the intrinsic value is less than the price implied by the market price of the stock buybacks are bad for shareholders.

BTW if you could really earn 11% with no risk of principal loss ... Just borrow as much as you can and collect the interest spread ...

I don't know why your comment is being down-voted. George Soros based his entire career on this dynamic and even coined the term 'reflexivity' to describe it.

Here's where and why I think the disconnect happens. Most of our possessions in day to day life tend to have a relatively stable value. Your iPhone 6 is worth $600 dollars, oranges are $2/lbs, a t-shirt is $20. Markets for non-capital goods (i.e. goods that are consumed with 1 yr or so) are very efficient most of the time. However, the claim that 'markets are efficient' (and the kinda-corollary that there's some stable intrinsic price) gets applied to all markets all the time. But markets for capital goods are not efficient all the time (by capital goods I mean something where the lifetime is greater than 1 year ... e.g. houses, airplanes, financial investments like stocks & bonds). Because most things in our everyday life have some 'true' value its seems wrong that there are assets that don't have an 'intrinsic' value or whose value is determined by perception.

However value is determined by perception. A great example of this is GE. A little history ... up until the early 90's GE used to fund itself almost entirely with short term debt. GE was able to do this because everyone considered GE a AAA credit risk. This 'AAA' expectation from the market actually meant huge additional profits for GE because GE could continually borrow short term debt at short term rates (say 1%) and turn around and lend their customers money at longer term rates (say 5%) picking up spread. In the early 1990's Bill Gross came out and basically said 'this is crazy ... there's no way a company that is financed almost entirely with short term debt is a AAA credit'. Subsequently, GE was forced to term out their debt and this coincided with GE no longer outperforming the market (I haven't followed that closely but I think that GE has slowly been winding down GE Finance). The point here is that expectations (specifically that GE was a AAA credit) had a huge impact on the 'intrinsic' value of the company.

I see the Broken clock right twice a day. sentiment expressed in a couple places in this thread.

I think it warrants mentioning that Michael Burry had a very successful career before nailing the credit swaps trade. I think the sentiment that he's a perma-bear that just happened to get lucky is very unlikely. First, Michael Burry manufactured the credit swap trade that he is known for. What I mean by that is that Burry didn't trade options regularly. Rather, somewhat like Elon Musk, he reasoned from first principles. Burry started from the fact that certain housing markets were deteriorating and loan standards had been massively relaxed. Then figured out exactly what loans were in which CDO's and which tranches would be impacted by bad loans. Then he went out and bought credit default swaps against those specific tranches. There was very little luck involved.

In addition to that, prior to the credit default swaps trade, Burry had been running Scion very successfully using a value strategy (wikipedia quotes Michael Lewis as follows in his first full year, 2001, the S&P 500 fell 11.88 percent. Scion was up 55 percent. The next year, the S&P 500 fell again, by 22.1 percent, and yet Scion was up again: 16 percent. The next year, 2003, the stock market finally turned around and rose 28.69 percent, but Mike Burry beat it again—his investments rose by 50 percent. That is amazing performance.

Burry really is worth listening to. I went back and read his Scion Capital letters and IMO he actually is a genius wrt investing. I don't know quite how to express it other than its got the same feel as Warren Buffett's letters. He doesn't get swayed by fear or greed, he's just incredibly logical.