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Larry Fink is Not Your Friend

Morning Meeting

VBL

Mar 28, 2024

∙ Paid

Housekeeping: Good Morning.

Bretton Woods Three is a Process, Not an Event

Today:

Larry Fink is not your friend
Premium: CA on Gold and USD

Yesterday’s Activity:

US equities rallied on Wednesday ahead of a slew of economic data releases the next two days.

Market Commentary:

Good morning. I’d like to address the Indian community of potential investors as well as Americans who see these.

Larry Fink, the other day had a interview on CNBC, a conversation about India and its capital markets.

He was extolling the virtues of American capital markets and saying that India's propensity to save in assets like gold were hindering its economic growth.

Now there are merits to this concept. The US capital market has been a great thing in helping leverage innovation and ingenuity towards economic growth and progress for all humanity. But all things can get overdone, especially when capital doesn’t get allocated based on merit.

And upon being overdone, abused capital markets, like anything not taken in moderation, cause great strife for those of us not in the cadre of elitists who carry politicians like loose change in their pockets.

And certainly not the way they were framed by Mr. Fink.

Let's be clear about what Mr. Fink was doing.

He was marketing on CNBC to Indians to open up India to more Western financialization and his products.

That in and of itself is not a bad thing.

But he's doing it at a time when the U.S. way of doing things, specifically the leverage and financialization, which he surreptitiously marketed to listeners as “the multiplier effect” is unwinding in the West and leaving destroyed bridges both domestically and European in its wake.

Leverage grants, in healthy doses, (and accompanied by robust trust in those utilizing such leverage), the ability for a healthy economy to grow.

It can also easily be abused and then become a vehicle for bubble creation, poor risk management, and what I call white-collar welfare, more commonly known as corporate socialism.

BlackRock is one of those companies that, when making loans that went bad, or failed to properly manage its own portfolio risk, asked the Fed to bail it out. The fed of course obliged them, rather than letting the poorly run companies die they vacuumed up their losing trades represented as bonds and ETF portfolios at exorbitant values.

Now, these central banks, having implemented QE to the delight of the world's blackrocks, are taking major portfolio losses. Those losses are going to suck money from infrastructure development and social safety nets, at a time when we can not afford to cut back on either and are, in fact expanding them.

Which means, more printing. Which means more inflation. Which means, more crime, poverty, and lowered standards of living. All to bailout the Blackrocks of the world who are moving on to the next town to sell their products.

So when a man like Larry Fink tells you a pet rock hurts capital markets by just sitting there, when people like he were at ground zero for the greatest wealth confiscation in a generation.

You know who you're dealing with:

A salesman who is a capitalist when he makes money and a socialist when he loses money.

A man who's desperate to sell more product to an opening market as the one he has operated in for decades is now literally crumbling under his “multiplier effect”

Gold is a barometer of trust in the people running things, and from where we sit, that trust is starting to run low. All the sales pitches in the world will not make it come back. Make them earn your trust. Better yet, make their replacements earn your trust

CNBC Story here

Price Action

Gold- The buyer is back
Silver-
Miners-
Oil-
BTC/ETH-
Stocks-
Bonds-
Dollar-

Market News:

"Janet Yellen warned in a Wednesday speech that China’s surplus of clean energy products is depressing prices in global markets and squeezing U.S. green manufacturing Source: CNBC
"A top Federal Reserve official has said “disappointing” inflation data means the US central bank should “push back” the timing of cutting interest rates from their current 23-year high. Source: FT
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