iApe

...

[iApe @HODLJournal]

Date: 26.12.2022
#BTC:16.846,72
#ETH:1.217,13
#DOT:4,52
#ATOM:9,08
#MINA:0,4680
#ROSE:0,03619
#CELR:0,1033
#ACA:0,1234

Let the journey begin...

[Jim Stewartson, Decelerationist 🇨🇦🇺🇦🇺🇸 @jimstewartson]

It’s called INVESTOR FRAUD.

Google is buying GPUs from Nvidia through SpaceX to boost revenue IN ITS OWN INVESTMENT.

Google owns 5% of SpaceX.

It’s more circular bullshit financing to justify an INSANE valuation. These people are just stealing from us.

[Paul Graham @paulg]

This is an actual page on the White House web site. It reads like something written about a third world dictator. So embarrassing. I have not seen any branch of the federal government sink this low in my lifetime.

[TheFrenchie @ML3democrats]

Remember when they said Zelensky desecrated the sanctity of the White House by not wearing a suit

[Dr Alexander D. Kalian @AlexanderKalian]

You should probably not buy OpenAI, Anthropic, or SpaceX stock at IPO.

All 3 are deeply unprofitable, trillion-dollar market cap science projects - not sound businesses, as things stand.

The VCs who fueled these valuations mostly understand this. They are just relying on you to be their exit liquidity, where you will be left holding the bags for a multi-year deep bear market.

They need you to be the sucker. But you are within your rights to refuse.

There may be some short-term hype and a speculative rally in these stocks - from major funds buying in and retail investors chasing sci-fi dreams for their own portfolios.

But in the longer term, some sort of correction seems likely.

It doesn't matter if your business is lemonade stands, car washes, AI, satellites, spaceships, or levitating laser-powered UFOs...

... the point of a business is to generate a profit. Long-term stock market valuations reflect a fair risk-reward against the profit being made and forecasted.

In terms of revenue multiples, current profit margins, and forecasted future paths to profitability - all 3 of these companies are extremely overvalued.

[Foreigners in Taiwan 🇹🇼 外國人在台灣 @foreignersinTW]

Nothing happened on June 4, 1989. Never forget!

[Visegrád 24 @visegrad24]

A rare photo of the aftermath of the Tiananmen Square massacre of June 4th 1989.

[雪柔 @xu96175836]

永遠都不能忘記 ......

[Visegrád 24 @visegrad24]

Today is 37 years since the Tiananmen Massacre

On this day in 1989, the Chinese Communist Party ordered the People's Liberation Army to open fire on its own citizens.

Peaceful pro-democracy students and workers who gathered in Beijing's Tiananmen Square demanding freedom, anti-corruption, and basic human rights were crushed under tanks and gunfire.

The protests began in mid-April 1989, triggered by the death of reformist leader Hu Yaobang. On May 13, students began a hunger strike. Martial law was declared on May 20, but protesters remained peaceful.

In the early hours of June 4, troops advanced with tanks and live ammunition. Soldiers fired on unarmed civilians blocking their path in the streets surrounding the square.

Hundreds to thousands were killed. Thousands more were imprisoned, tortured, or disappeared.

To this day, the Chinese government censors all mention of it, erases it from history books, and threatens anyone who remembers.

[Luthen’s Reality 🟢 @RealLuthen]

This is exactly why billionaires can’t exist. This man is burning the entire world down because he cannot accept his daughter for who she is. And he has the money to actually do it. No one can have that power.

[Jim Stewartson, Decelerationist 🇨🇦🇺🇦🇺🇸 @jimstewartson]

I have to give Elon Musk credit. He is an artist.

It takes the greatest con artist of all time to convince the entire financial system to jailbreak itself to force retirees to fund his $2 trillion pump and dump.

[War Monitor Clips @WarMonitorClips]

Man dodges arrows in shootout between tribes, Papua New Guinea 2025

[Thierry from arvy 🇨🇭 @ThierryBorgeat]

Imagine you spent 40 years doing the boring, responsible thing.

You opened a 401k at 23. You contributed every paycheck. You ignored the noise. You bought the index because Bogle told you to, because Buffett told you to, because every honest piece of financial advice for 30 years told you the index was the safest, most diversified, most rules-based way to own America.

The whole point was the rules.

The rules said: a company must trade for 12 months before joining the S&P 500. The rules said: it must show four consecutive quarters of GAAP profitability. The rules existed because in 1999 the index quietly bought a lot of stocks at the top, and pensioners paid the bill.

After the dot-com crash, S&P tightened the rules. Nasdaq tightened the rules. FTSE Russell tightened the rules.

For 23 years, those rules held.

Then SpaceX filed for IPO.

And the rules changed.

The S&P 500 waived the profitability requirement. Nasdaq cut its trading-history window from 90 days to 15. FTSE Russell cut its to 5.

Bloomberg Intelligence estimates the major index funds will absorb between 19% and 24% of SpaceX's float within six months. That's over $30 trillion of passive 401k and retirement money, mechanically buying a single newly public company at IPO valuations, because the rules said they had to.

Except the rules used to say they didn't.

Here's the thought exercise:

If you spend 40 years building a system designed to protect ordinary savers from buying overpriced stocks, and then you waive the protections the moment a sufficiently large stock asks you to, what was the system actually protecting?

Most of investing is about understanding what's a rule and what's a guideline.

A rule binds the rule-maker.

A guideline binds the saver.

You're allowed to find out which is which only after the fact.

[🌽🌽 Erica, The White Trash Socialist 🌽🌽™️ @herosnvrdie69]

They said the rich would leave the US if we raised taxes on them. It turns out if you cut taxes, give tax breaks and let them exploit as many workers as possible they will actually just leave anyway!

[Mehdi Hasan @mehdirhasan]

A reminder that no serious historian, academic or anyone who has spent even minutes looking at Nazi Germany agrees with this. Hitler locked up the left, denounced the left. He was not a 'hardcore socialist.'

The only people who say this are... Nazi sympathizers & the far right.

[SightBringer @_The_Prophet__]

⚡️Turkey is what monetary credibility death looks like before the state itself collapses.

The country still functions.

People still go to work.

Banks still open. Markets still trade. The government still rules. But the currency has been spiritually broken. The lira still works as a payment rail, but it no longer works as a trusted vessel for stored time.

That is the real fracture.

Once citizens stop believing the unit of account, everything becomes defensive. Households flee into dollars, gold, real estate, crypto, inventory, foreign assets, anything that might hold value better than the domestic paper. Businesses price with devaluation in mind. Workers demand wage adjustments before prices move again. Foreign investors demand absurd yields to hold local debt. The central bank has to fight not just inflation, but memory.

Memory is the killer.

People remember being diluted. They remember being lied to. They remember watching savings die. Once that memory embeds, policy credibility becomes brutally expensive to restore. A 30%+ yield is not “opportunity.” It is the bond market saying trust has to be rented at emergency prices.

Turkey’s story is not just bad monetary policy. It is political control overriding monetary discipline until the currency became the shock absorber for the regime. That is the lesson. When leadership treats the currency as a tool of political convenience, eventually the population treats the currency as something to escape.

That is when the loop becomes self-feeding.

Weak lira raises import costs. Import costs raise inflation. Inflation weakens trust. Weak trust drives dollarization. Dollarization weakens the lira further. Higher rates slow the bleeding but also punish the real economy. Political stress rises. The government intervenes again. The market trusts even less.

That is credibility hell.

The lira has experienced a generational collapse in purchasing-power trust. The exact percentage matters less than the behavioral shift: citizens no longer treat the currency as a safe claim on the future.

For Bitcoin, this is the cleanest philosophical advertisement. People in reserve-currency countries treat hard-money arguments as ideology. People in weak-currency countries understand them as self-defense. Turkey is why the “what is money?” question is not academic. Bad money steals the future quietly, then suddenly.

For the U.S., the lesson is not “America becomes Turkey.” The U.S. has the reserve currency, deeper capital markets, military power, energy, tech dominance, and global collateral demand. Totally different structure.

The warning is colder: credibility is the ultimate reserve.

The dollar can absorb far more abuse than the lira because the U.S. system has empire-scale privilege. But even empire money is still belief-backed. Deficits, inflation, political pressure on the Fed, fiscal dominance, and financial repression all matter because they chip away at the invisible trust layer.

Turkey shows the end-state of that process in a weaker system.

[Heidi @blockchainchick]

The SpaceX IPO is the most brazen retail fleecing in modern market history.

NASDAQ has REWRITTEN the index rules specifically for this listing. The 10% minimum free float requirement: gone. The 3 to 12 month seasoning period before index inclusion: cut to 15 trading days. Companies with small floats can now be weighted at 3x their actual float.

Translation: every passive index fund, every 401k, every pension is about to be force-fed SPCX whether they want it or not.

And what exactly are they buying?

Class A shares carrying ONE vote each, while Musk holds 93.6% of the Class B super voting shares at TEN votes each. That gives him 85.1% of voting power on a 42% economic interest. He cannot be outvoted. He cannot be removed. CEO, CTO and board chairman simultaneously.

For reference: Zuckerberg controls 61% of Meta. Buffett 35% of Berkshire. Musk: 85.1%.

SpaceX is also claiming "controlled company" status, exempting it from needing a majority of independent directors. Shareholders waive the right to a jury trial. They waive the right to class actions. Mandatory arbitration only, courtesy of an SEC rule change pushed through on a party line vote last September.

$1.75 trillion valuation. $80 billion raise. Largest IPO in history.

The rules of the game were quietly rewritten so one man could extract maximum capital from retail while answering to no one.

[JerryRigEverything @ZacksJerryRig]

at this point I'm just going to assume anyone who defends J-6ers has also touched kids.

[Joe G @EastEndJoe]

The difference between CLASS and TRASH!