Doomscroll News

Tag: finance

  • The “Good” Buyback vs. the “Bad” Buyback

    Imagine a successful company like Apple. It generates enormous amounts of free cash flow, far more than it needs to run its business and invest in future growth. It uses this excess profit to buy back its own shares. This reduces the number of shares outstanding, which increases Earnings Per Share (EPS) and the ownership stake of the remaining shareholders. In this scenario, shareholder equity remains robust and positive because it is constantly being replenished by massive retained earnings.

    Now, consider a company with stagnant growth, inconsistent profits, or a struggling business model. To make its financial ratios look better and to prop up its stock price, the management might decide to buy back shares. But where does the money come from if not from excess profits? It often comes from taking on new debt or draining cash reserves that are needed for operations and innovation.

    This is the “bad” buyback. The company isn’t creating new value; it’s using leverage to manipulate its financial appearance. On the balance sheet (Assets = Liabilities + Equity), liabilities (debt) go up, and assets (cash) go down to pay for the shares. This combination aggressively eats away at the equity portion of the equation. When a company buys back so many shares that the cost exceeds its retained earnings and initial capital, shareholder equity flips to negative. It means the company’s liabilities now exceed its assets, a state of technical insolvency.

    Even more concerning, is when a company does both buybacks and dilutions (selling new shares). This is a major red flag. It’s like a frantic attempt to tread water: they sell new shares to raise needed cash (diluting your ownership), and then use cash (often borrowed) to buy back other shares to support the stock price. This financial churn suggests a lack of a coherent long-term strategy, prioritizing short-term stock performance over fundamental business health.

  • The White House’s Troubling Embrace of Sharia Finance

    The most insidious threat is the normalization of the political ideology that fuels terrorist groups: Islam. While TX Gov. Abbott is fighting back, recently reaffirming the state’s ban on Sharia law, the White House is moving in the opposite direction. It is actively promoting Sharia as a legitimate financial system. Hidden in plain sight on the White House’s own website, among glowing press releases about “trillions in great deals,” is a statement from Franklin Templeton’s CEO, Jenny Johnson. She praises the Trump administration’s policies for helping her company, a global asset manager, grow “leadership in global Sukuk and Sharia compliant investing.” Let that sink in. The Trump White House is celebrating, as a key economic victory, the expansion of a financial system based on religious laws that are fundamentally hostile to American liberty and Constitutional principles. It is a full endorsement of the financial arm of a political ideology we should be fighting, not funding.

    https://www.whitehouse.gov/articles/2025/05/what-they-are-saying-trillions-in-great-deals-secured-for-america-thanks-to-president-trump

    https://archive.is/72BVI

  • The American Engine

    A Stablecoin is the exhaust from the American Dollar. Every other digital token is a blueprint with no factory. 

    The Dollar is the engine: anchored in the American heartland, powered by nuclear energy, and backed by the President’s signature and the nation’s steel. 

    First, they offshored the factory. Now, they’re trying to offshore the vault.

  • The Textbook and the Black Hole

    Hearing a statement like, “Reducing interest rates increases inflation, dumb***,” is a perfect example of a textbook classic. It’s a solid rule for a straightforward game. The only issue is the assumption that we’re still playing that same simple game.

    This level of complexity might not even be new. It’s entirely possible that a layered reality, with a simple narrative for the public and a far more intricate one behind the scenes, has been the standard operating procedure for a long, long time.

    The very data used to form these opinions requires a massive leap of faith in its authenticity. As a show like “Rabbit Hole” on Paramount+ pointed out, deepfakes are not just about eroding trust; they are a tool for constructing a completely false reality to get a specific reaction. The fake TV broadcast in the opening scene that sets the whole story in motion is a perfect metaphor; what is presented as ‘the news’ or ‘market data’ could easily be a meticulously crafted illusion.

    This concept extends directly into the financial system itself. The problem of “fails to deliver” is not a simple clerical error; it’s the financial system’s version of a deepfake. Attempts to get the raw FTD data through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests hit a black hole. The trail goes cold under the official reasoning that it’s proprietary “corporate” information, a designation that can make it more secret than classified documents. A mechanism like that being in place during the massive market convulsions and wealth transfers of the COVID era makes tracing what really happened almost impossible.

    Therefore, hearing a simple, clean economic rule is difficult to take at face value. In a world of systemic financial deception and deepfakes that can manufacture reality, claiming to know what’s really going on is a profoundly optimistic stance.

  • Abolish the BLS Jobs Report

    There’s a compelling argument that the government’s method of mass counting jobs serves to obscure, rather than clarify, the true composition of the labor force. The BLS itself acknowledges that its surveys likely include illegal aliens, as the system isn’t designed to identify their legal status. This aggregate approach allows for the convenient bundling of all workers, making it impossible to discern the number of jobs held by citizens versus non-citizens, including undocumented workers or those on temporary visas. A system of transparent, individual company reporting would bring immediate clarity. If companies were responsible for reporting their own hiring data, any significant reliance on non-citizen labor would be far more apparent, holding both the companies and policymakers accountable for the real-world effects of immigration and labor policies.

    The monthly BLS jobs report is an obsolete and harmful system that should be abolished. Its monthly release is a recurring trap for retail investors, who are systematically disadvantaged by high-frequency trading algorithms that instantly trade on the numbers before the public can react (you’re literally at work and they’re gaming you). This turns a supposedly transparent economic indicator into a tool for institutional players to profit from manufactured volatility.

    Furthermore, the data itself is often unreliable, with significant upward or downward revisions frequently undermining the accuracy of the initial reports that cause these market shocks.

    Fundamentally, a free country should not rely on the government to be the central arbiter of economic information. This mass counting of jobs is an overstep of its role. Instead, we should foster a system where companies report their own data, allowing for a more organic and less centralized flow of information. This would end the monthly market convulsions and restore a measure of fairness for the individual investor.

  • Trump’s Intel Bailout: An “America First” Scam

    The recent $10 billion government investment in Intel is a sham disguised as an “America First” initiative. In reality, it’s a bailout to service the company’s massive debt, which was approximately $50.15 billion as of March 2025. This raises the question: is President Trump getting some kind of kickback for orchestrating this deal? The claim of putting America first is further undermined by Intel’s continued reliance on Taiwan’s TSMC, a move that prioritizes Taiwan and raises concerns about the prominence of the English language in our own tech sector.

    It’s laughable that a company like Intel, supposedly at the forefront of American innovation, has a market value of around $107 billion, while an entertainment app like TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, is valued at over $330 billion. This entire situation smacks of corruption, especially since they refuse to release the Oval Office tapes from the meeting between Trump and Intel’s CEO. With the administration also planning to reinterpret treaties to sell heavy attack drones, it’s only a matter of time before Intel’s overseas supply chains face retaliatory attacks. This isn’t a serious investment; it’s a high-risk gamble with taxpayer money that seems destined to fail.

    https://wccftech.com/intel-will-use-tsmc-forever-says-cfo-as-shares-rise-after-he-confirms-plan-to-use-us-funding-to-pay-back-debt

    https://archive.is/RTObf

  • The Unholy Alliance: Are Goldman Sachs and Apple Secretly Stockpiling Gold?

    Disclaimer: The following is a speculative theory presented for discussion only. It is not based on factual research and is not intended to be a statement of fact.

    Here’s a thought: What if Goldman Sachs’s recent bold prediction of $5,000 gold is a strategic move? They have a massive financial partnership with Apple through high-yield savings accounts. At the same time, Apple’s need for physical gold for its semiconductors is ever-increasing.

    Could Goldman be creating a public narrative to sell the idea of gold to everyday investors, while in the background, they work with Apple in a kind of “unholy alliance” to use their financial machinery to build a massive, stealth stockpile of physical gold? This would secure Apple’s future supply chain for a critical mineral, potentially leaving the average investor holding the bag. It’s a sneaking suspicion that this could be a form of financial engineering hiding in plain sight.