We know what’s coming and we are prepared.
🇨🇭🏦 Is this the beginning of a repeat of Lehman Bros 2008?
UBS just halted withdrawals of a $469 million real estate fund and told investors they can't have their money back for up to 3 years.
Why does this matter? Back in June of 2007, Bear Stearns did the same thing at two of their hedge funds. One year later, Lehman Brothers collapsed and the global financial crisis happened.
UBS looked at their real estate portfolio, realized the buildings are not worth what they paid for them and they cannot sell them without admitting HUGE losses.
Commercial real estate office vacancies are at record highs. Buildings are worth a fraction of what they were. Everyone has been trying to avoid marking their portfolios down to actual current value. But they cannot ignore it any longer.
🔗 FX Hedge
We hear a lot of rhetoric that 'Islam has conquered Europe'.
Clearly there are problems with mass migration here.
Yet this has been built in the Great State of Texas.
So the problems seem to be everywhere!
🇮🇱🇺🇸⚔️🇮🇷 Let's take a step back and consider the bigger picture.
Strategic goals on day one of the war:
• Israel: eliminate Iran and Hezbollah as threats to Israel
• Iran: survive, deter future aggression
Fast forward to today, six weeks in, and it's obvious the Israeli war effort has failed. Their ideal state for Iran is Balkanization, or a second Syria, unable to mount any cohesive efforts against Israel. But the Iranian state remains stable, the regime change attempts failed. The IDF again failed to do more than push a few miles into Lebanon. Whatever the Israelis were attempting to do to destroy Hezbollah with the cooperation of the Lebanese government also seems to have failed. And Hezbollah seems much stronger than anyone assumed before this conflict.
The Israeli ability to achieve these goals hinged on sucking the US into maximal commitment in war against Iran. A second GWOT would have been ideal, with the US bogged down in Iran for years or even decades. At the moment, ...
