Angela (LayZEdge 🦔)

Lighthearted reflections of markets to date in 2021: 1. Wild intraday gyrations (that once would have been impressive as monthly gains) are now normalized. 2. Heightened emotions, to say the least (ref. WSB and Twitter). 3. Retail investors using options like lottery tickets.

@kirawontmiss It’s cos most third graders can’t grasp the concept of infinity so they dumb it down till the kids are mature enough for complex ideas at a later stage. I remember this as well

who’s gonna tell them

@PauloMacro Whatever happened to their YCC and can they just crank than on/up (again)?

This is the JGB 40Y yield tonight (and over the past 5yrs for the Zoom Out Bros). +10bps in an hour. Of course, this could never happen in America as so many people reminded me today on twitter. Probably because we are exceptional, and I am apparently a doomsdayer or some such.

@janekm @wmhuo168 Curious where does blockchain instant settlement technology sit with either of these systems, or is that a way to change leadership between them if not already incorporated. And does this have anything to do with the Euro CBDC announcement?

@wmhuo168 Yes the trajectory is certainly in CIPS favour… especially now.

The dollar just lost a round in the global currency war. While the West slept, China’s CIPS cleared more cross-border payments than SWIFT. April 16 may be remembered as the day the tide turned.

@EpsilonTheory Needed USDs to pay some arbitrary trade equalization duties 🥸

Oh my fucking god.

I need to get some sleep but I can’t stop watching the world burn.

@Birdyword Strong USD also makes it expensive for travelers

Astonishing chart from Goldman showing the slump in overseas passengers arriving to the US. Presumably not largely because of the tariffs but because of the horror stories about random incarceration.

@DavidBCollum Also WTO MFN rules, so would need to drop for all other trading partners no?

Asking for a friend: what is stopping countries from dropping their tariffs? Seems like kind of an obvious solution.

@stevehou Slight distinction, though same consumer impact: opportunism from free market vs collusion to artificially distort market

Isn't going after price gouging communism? "The Justice Department is investigating whether the nation’s largest egg producers are conspiring to keep prices high" politico.com/news/2025/03/0…

@Jonathan_Witt “Megaphone diplomacy”, he said 📣

What kind of diplomacy is this?

@dmartkc @davidsacks47 Don’t they have blind trusts available for this sort of thing? At least to maintain a facade of propriety when assuming public office 🤦🏻‍♀️

@Jesse_Brenneman As laudable as it is to reduce debt and cut slack, it is essentially a closed system and it’s be great if DOGE also put together a plan for how to redeploy the mass of displaced federal workers to grow the economy 🤔

America is finally being run like a business: a business acquired by private equity that’s being stripped for parts before being liquidated.

@jam_croissant Oh so that’s why he proposed a US SWF 🤔

"There could be a problem, we've been reading about that, with Treasuries,… That could be an interesting problem because it could be that a lot of those things don't count…"Therefore maybe we have less debt than we thought.” Translation: “I visited Japan 🇯🇵 2 days ago & during my visit my advisors told me about how Japan bought all of its own debt & that debt doesn’t actually matter… I didn’t realize this was an option until just now… We will soon begin monetizing our debt, like Japan, & will have less debt than we thought.”

@Geiger_Capital Plus inflation, disruption to small businesses and industries that utilized migrant labor, housing that rented to migrant labor or economic sectors catering to them eg agriculture, construction, logistics

On top of tariffs and cutting spending… You could also include Trump restricting immigration. He risks weakening the labor market and the economy under his own administration, while instead focusing on some longer-term impacts. Also mentioned that in my 2025 Macro Post:

@EndWokeness And all their property and possessions should be given to the victims to pay for their therapy and restitution

This couple r*ped their adopted 9 and 11 year old sons and then handed them to unnamed clients. Today they got 100 years in prison. Prison justice is coming.

@dampedspring Long convertible bond short stock might be difficult to implement if stock price is rising whereas conversion is at a set date far off in future(?)

Convert 101 $MSTR. A lot has been said about the terms of the convert. It missed the point imho The convert has a zero coupon and a call on MSTR stock at a 55% premium to spot on issue date Is that a stupid thing to buy. The question is what is its relative value not what is its absolute value. Its relative value needs to be assessed vs other possible investments in MSTR capital structure and expectations of future volatility of MSTR as a company. I'll keep it basic Having spent most of my early career trading, pricing, underwriting and inventing convertible bonds of all sorts I have some experience in this space. Let's start here. What is a convert will simply it's a corporate bond stapled to a long term call option on the stock of the company. Let's break the MSTR convert down. It's a zero coupon bond maturing in 5 years + a 5 year call struck at 672.40 Ok. What's the zero coupon bond worth. Well let's assume a 5 year bond priced to be worth 100 would need a coupon of 8%. In that case the zero coupon is worth 68% That means if one bought the concert at 100% they implicitly bought the call option at 32% 68% + 32%. Is 100 which makes the concert fairly priced in a relative sense. It's up to you to decide if 8% is the correct corporate bond yield and 32% is the correct call value. But this is how you decide. FWIW the 2.2 year 670 call is priced at 32% in the options market so if anything the 8% coupon assumption is too low. Anyway that's relative value. I think the convert is pretty cheap to be honest in relative value and I would likely have bought it in prior lives. However is it absolutely cheap. In that case it depends on the price of the shares. In my view the share price is massively overvalued and absolutely rich. So for me to buy the convert I would want to extract its relative value as its absolute value sucks almost as bad as the stock. To do that I would buy the convert and short the stock. Because many hedge funds are willing to do this trade selling 3BN was no biggie. But the convert wasn't hard to sell what was hard is to get common stock holders to buy from hedge funds who want to short at an absolutely high price

@josephwang Maybe it’s just anti-Trump policies, looking at earlier election years esp. 2012, not necessarily pro Dems 🤔

All this pearl clutching about Fed independence is nonsense. Fed is not independent, it is basically a branch of the Democratic party. You can see this in many ways. 1) Political donations by Fed employees overwhelming go to the Democrats. 2) Former FRBNY president is comfortable writing columns suggesting Fed conduct policy against Trump. 3) Former Fed Chair and Fed Vice Chair just sliding into senior roles in the Biden White House. 4) Fed Chair happily supporting Biden fiscal policy, then feigns ignorance afterwards. 5) Fed making moves on political issues like climate regulations for banks. 6) Fed staff pumping research on climate change and DEI stuff that just aren't in their mission. I think the Fed would better serve the public if it were more politically balanced.

@Chrisjjosephs So is someone retiring before March 2027?

For the first time ever, Senators stuck a deal to ban congressional stock trading Since we run the Pelosi Tracker & built the first way to automatically copy their trades via Autopilot We thought we'd chime in Here's everything you need to know about the bill

Thread of positive stories that will restore your faith in humanity 🧵 1. Man posing with photo of forest he revived

@PauloMacro Why couldn’t he have just declared an intention not to rerun, so they could have switch him out ages ago, and more smoothly, and he would gracefully bowed out on a high. A replacement would have been better planned. Everyone would have understood a decision not to rerun no?

Wow this whole thing is scripted. NYT “Biden Struggles.” CNN bashing him. Pres debates are always after conventions. Biden NGMI - they switching him out. Who’s next?

@JayBryja @zerochills Hysterical. The disturbance made it through her noise cancelling headset and the dangling rabbit and bewildered look are 👌

Ain’t no way

@josephwang Thought it was cuz a) borrowing connotes discipline via imposing a cost of capital and b) to thereby instill confidence for the greenback and outstanding debt 🤔

btw this is the right answer. twitter.com/sidprabhu/stat…

IME senior folks in the public sector are basically actors. They have an army of people write speeches for them and photoshopping their images, but they themselves actually have no idea what they are doing. It becomes obvious in any candid conversion.