Stock Picks & Trades

A crypto exchange has gone down. Read the full story here. Users can not access their accounts. They can not pull money out. They do not have any real answers. Users of crypto currencies think they are safe from fraud. From the article:

The short history of cryptocurrencies has been rife with hackers and stolen bitcoin, so issues with exchanges are quick to unnerve investors. In the most famous case, Mt. Gox filed for bankruptcy in 2014 after losing hundreds of thousands of its clients bitcoins.
Kraken is one of the exchanges that the CME Group Inc. is using to price the bitcoin futures it introduced last month.
Lack of communication from fledgling companies, delays in withdrawals and transfers, high fees, and the creeping fear of a malicious attack are some of the issues largely retail investors face, and discourage many more from jumping in.
With not even a phone number or e-mail listed on Kraken’s status page, the exchange’s clients vented on Twitter.

I suspect this problem goes way beyond one exchange. At the top their is always fraud and stupidity. You don’t have a realized profit in any crypto currency until your money is back in your bank account.

Opened up a new position in FGM. Take a look at the performance tab.

Tyler Cowen has an excellent article posted about African immigration. I have not done the research to confirm this is true or not but my personnel experiences would suggest he is correct. In college and in my master program, African immigrants were always the top performers. Cowen writes:

One of the most striking facts about immigration to the U.S., unbeknownst even to many immigration advocates, is the superior education of Africans coming to this country. If we consider adults age 25 or older, born in Africa and living in the U.S., 41.7 of them have a bachelor’s degree or more, according to 2009 data. For contrast, the native-born population has a bachelor’s degree or more at the much lower rate of only 28.1 percent in these estimates, and foreign-born adults as a whole have a college degree at the rate of 26.8 percent, both well below the African rate.
How about high school degrees? About one-third of immigrants overall lack this credential, but only 11.7 percent of African-born migrants don’t have a high school degree. That’s remarkably close to the rate for native-born Americans, estimated at 11.4 percent.

Well, 25.9 billion to be exact. That is the amount of money the fed pays on excess reserves to banks. I made a short comment on excess reserves here. The full release is below:

The Federal Reserve Board on Wednesday announced preliminary results indicating that the Reserve Banks provided for payments of approximately $80.2 billion of their estimated 2017 net income to the U.S. Treasury. The 2017 audited Reserve Bank financial statements are expected to be published in March and may include adjustments to these preliminary unaudited results.
The Federal Reserve Banks’ 2017 estimated net income of $80.7 billion represents a decrease of $11.7 billion from 2016, primarily attributable to an increase of $13.8 billion in interest expense associated with reserve balances held by depository institutions that was partially offset by an increase of $2.5 billion in interest income on securities acquired through open market operations. Net income for 2017 was derived primarily from $113.6 billion in interest income on securities acquired through open market operations (U.S. Treasury securities, federal agency and government-sponsored enterprise (GSE) mortgage-backed securities (MBS), and GSE debt securities) and foreign currency gains of $1.9 billion that result from the daily revaluation of foreign currency denominated investments at current exchange rates. The Federal Reserve Banks had interest expense of $25.9 billion primarily associated with reserve balances held by depository institutions, and incurred interest expense of $3.4 billion on securities sold under agreement to repurchase.
Operating expenses of the Reserve Banks, net of amounts reimbursed by the U.S. Treasury and other entities for services the Reserve Banks provided as fiscal agents, totaled $4.1 billion in 2017. In addition, the Reserve Banks were assessed $724 million for the costs related to producing, issuing, and retiring currency, $740 million for Board expenditures, and $573 million to fund the operations of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Additional earnings were derived from income from services of $442 million. Statutory dividends totaled $784 million in 2017.

Why I don’t take people who talk about ‘white privilege’ serious presented in one chart.

The bitcoin Miami conference is not accepting bitcoins because of manual inputting of data in the ticketing platform. What does that mean? No one knows. What could possibly be said at this conference that people are willing to pay a 1,000 USD dollars?

Here is the message:
Spend a 1000$ USD to come hear us tell you how bitcoin is the future of money. No, sorry… we don’t accept bitcoin as money.