CNBC Interview with Social Capital CEO Chamath Palihapitiya

This interview occurred yesterday on their Halftime Report. I am an Investment Adviser and the last half of this video is MUST WATCHING, as he takes to task the smug CNBC interviewer Scott Wapner.

And it looks like this afternoon, the late sell off was a blown up hedge fund ordered to liquidate.

As individuals, we are very punitively taxed for short term trading, as compared to long term cap gains. Hedge funds are exempt from that and get special treatment that allows them to churn stocks by the hour. And when they cause financial havoc? The tax payer picks up the tab. When they go bankrupt and fail, the expense is that of the American people. This should have all been long fixed, but the politicians of our country are so crooked that they keep all this in place.

There are two very promising medical developments that are being reviewed by the FDA for application against COVID-19.

The first is a French study that used the malaria drug, chloroquine along with an anti-biotic, azthromycin, to treat 22 individuals with the disease. Six of the 22 were asymptomatic carriers. In all cases the patients showed near complete reduction of the viral load within 6 days.

The second development was a serum (blood sample) test that was developed in China that detected the COVID-19 antibodies and could be mass produced and applied to many more asymptomatic people in this country than the expensive PCR (DNA sample) testing being used now on only those who show symptoms or know they had contact with an infected person. This would allow many more people to have confidence they weren’t carriers and could go back to work.

The small sample size of the French study is not large enough for the FDA to trust that the therapy can be used on a wider American population without doing harm so larger phase 3 randomized trials are underway and could take a few weeks.

The FDA still needs to validate the Chinese serum tests to ensure that they meet US standards for false positives and, most significantly, false negatives. This will take months but is promising.

...the malaria drug, chloroquine along with an anti-biotic, azthromycin,...
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Can someone with a medical background explain how azithromycin is effective against a virus when the hydroxychloroquine is an ionophore that is used to breach the virus cell in order to introduce something that will disable it?

Hydroxychloroquine & zinc, I can understand.

I am sort of laughing at the finacial experts adamant recommendation that we have to “fix” the problem of the highly leveraged hedge funds. I am not saying he is wrong, I am just saying that should that be fixed, the financial crooks will just find the next best loophole to feed their avarice and they will blow another bubble somewhere else, leaving the middle class holding the bag as usual.

He is talking about Hedge Funds being leveraged 10x and more. He is talking about stock buy-backs rather than companies re-investing funds.

From what he said, the DOW should never have gone above 20,000. The S&P 500 should never have gone above 2,200. All the rest of it was “funny money”. Not profit or true growth.

Indeed, President Trump’s de-reguations and tax cuts had a massive growth affect on our nation, which is why unemployment fell and wages rose and businesses thrived. But stock valuations were still 30% over reality due to Hedge Fund leveraging and massive stock buy-backs.

It was all funny money. The markets are now falling down to around where our healthy economy would have them. Only our economy is no longer healthy. It is being body-slammed into a sharp recession by the halt in world commerce brought on by the Coronavirus, unless you are a toilet paper manufacturer.

So the market is likely to drop at least another 20% from here, and possibly 30% I am no financial expert and I don’t want to pretend I am. I am just hearing what these experts are saying and they are saying there was a lot of funny money in the markets. You get a $50 billion hedge fund leveraged to 10x and they are adding a half-billion dollars “funny money” to stock prices. No wonder the Dow Jones went from 7,000 in 2009 to 30,000 in 2019.

It always struck me as illogical. Now it makes sense. In 2006 it was the housing bubble. Today it is insane leverage. Thank goodness it is just the off balance sheets doing this and not the banks themselves, or we would be heading to 1929 again.

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