Juggling Dynamite

Preparing for my talks out West this weekend, a couple of chart updates really stand out.  This one suggesting a big head and shoulders pattern on the broad Canadian stock market.
Source:  Cory Venable, CMT, Venable Park Investment Counsel Inc.

And this one on the Canadian Venture Exchange (resource companies) which tends to lead the risk trade to the downside.  Past suggesting…this index has already completed a foreboding right shoulder and is now trading back at the level where the latest commodities boom (bubble?) began with the credit bubble in 2000.  Interesting that the waistline on both of these charts is somewhere around the 2009 bottom.  Secular bears tend to revisit the prior cycle low with each recession.  Will this one break precedent?
Source:  Cory Venable, CMT, Venable Park Investment Counsel Inc.

Citigroup CEO Vikram Pandit lost his bid last month for a pay plan that would have awarded him $15 million when Citi shareholders rejected the proposal. But he is still in the job making obscene amounts and shareholders need to do more. We need to fire the executives who led these institutions into the financial crisis–fire all of them. And prosecutors need to bring criminal charges in order to restore any sense of justice and trust in the financial sector.

The below clip highlights the outcome of a whistle-blower law suit recently won against Citi group. Citigroup admitted approving loans for government insurance that didn’t qualify under Federal Housing Administration rules.

By 2006, the bank was buying mortgages from outside lenders with doctored tax forms, phony appraisals and missing signatures, she says. It was Hunt’s job to identify these defects, and she did, in regular reports to her bosses.

Executives buried her findings, Hunt says, before, during and after the financial crisis, and even into 2012.

In March 2011, more than two years after Citigroup took $45 billion in bailouts from the U.S. government and billions more from the Federal Reserve — more in total than any other U.S. bank — Jeffery Polkinghorne, an O’Fallon executive in charge of loan quality, asked Hunt and a colleague to stay in a conference room after a meeting.

The encounter with Polkinghorne was brief and tense, Hunt says. The number of loans classified as defective would have to fall, he told them, or it would be “your asses on the line.”

Hunt says it was clear what Polkinghorne was asking — and she wanted no part of it.

Citigroup behaving badly as late as 2012 shows how a big bank hasn’t yet absorbed the lessons of the credit crisis despite billions of dollars in bailouts, says Neil Barofsky, former special inspector general of the Troubled Asset Relief Program.

“This case demonstrates that the notion that the bailed-out banks have somehow found God and have reformed their ways in the aftermath of the financial crisis is pure myth,” he says.

As a reward for blowing the whistle on her employer, Hunt, the country girl turned banker, got $31 million out of the settlement paid by Citigroup.

Here is a direct link.

I was lucky to grow up in my grandparents’ huge vegetable garden. I have had less success finding the time and sunny space to grow much myself. Two years ago our family was inspired while visiting the “Living with the Land” ride at Disney’s Epcot Centre, which highlights innovative methods of farming with little land and water. Here is a video clip that shows the tour (it starts in the dark, and goes into the light at 7:00.

This week a friend sent me the link to a personal use garden that replicates similar techniques.  It is called the Tower Garden.  They retail presently for around $600, but I have no doubt a similar system could be constructed, if one had the interest, for less.  Meanwhile families can save money and benefit their health by growing their own fresh, organic produce with minimal time, land and water.  Win, win, win .  Here is a direct link to a video that demonstrates.

More on the origins of the Tower Garden, here is the direct link.