Trade Alert – The facts about the fiscal-cliff bill and a couple trims into the euphoria

For the last three years now, I’ve been preaching that we should buy mainstream market/media panics and sell mainstream media/market euphoria. Today’s huge rally is obviously euphoric.

So I suggest continuing to follow the playbook and to trim down some of the purchases we were making in the recent panics over the Fiscal-cliff nonsense that supposedly ended today for at least until late January or early March or next December or take your pick of any of the above. The Republican/Democrat Regime and the mainstream media who reports on it are already trying to get the panic started over the next round of these supposed austerity worries.

Rather than regurgitating the same stuff you’re hearing and seeing reported every where else, let’s do what we always do and get down to the real dirt.

To start with, these guys just got through an endless cycle of panicky coverage of how if they don’t do something about the budget and the debt and the deficit right now (like today!) then our country’s $16 trillion debt balance is going to crush us tomorrow (like right now!). But in the end, after all that supposed tension, they’ve come to a deal that doesn’t reduce the deficit, the debt or create “austerity” for anybody but the middle class and retired folks.

For example, did you know that the middle class is losing 2% of their income in this settlement in 2013, as the payroll taxcut was allowed to lapse, meaning that it goes from 4.2% in 2012 to 6.2% in 2013. As my old friend Heidi Moore puts it in today’s Guardian:

“The cost is noticeable. It will amount to $1,000 a year out of the pocket of Americans making $50,000pa. That could be a mortgage payment, or nearly a year’s cellphone bills, or a vacation.”

How you like ‘dem apples?

So if the government is raising taxes on the guy making $50k a year and worried about his job, his future, his pension, his health care and his family, then how is it that this deal doesn’t actually cut the deficit?

Did you know that the global media conglomerates just scored themselves another welfare score in this bill? No, you probably won’t hear Disney’s ABC, Time Warner’s CNN, Comcast/GE/Universal’s CNBC and MSNBC nor News Corp/20th Century Fox mention that in the bill that just passed in the name of avoiding the “fiscal-cliff” and reducing the country’s deficit that in Sec. 317 is all about “Extension of special expensing rules for certain film and television productions”. This welfare givewaway to the companies who diligently whipped up the panic over this bill will cost taxpayers at least a couple hundred million dollars over the next couple years.

Railroad companies are already beneficiaries of trillions of dollars of legacy welfare and subsidies and land possession benefits from the Republican/Democrat Regime, but they’re in line for more from this very seriously “austerity-ish” bill. Sec. 306 provides tax credits to the very biggest railroad congolomerates in this nation for…wait for it… maintaining their tracks. That’ll cost taxpayers another billion or so in the next decade.

Wanna get even more angry about this so-called resolution to the so-called fiscal-cliff?

Sec. 328 extends “tax exempt financing for  York Liberty Zone,” which was, for crying outloud, originally a 9/11 reparation program. It enabled Goldman Sachs, Bank of America and other giant corporations sell bonds tax free to “finance the construction” of their downtown castles, er office buildings. I filmed a politically-charged segment for the Tonight Show with Jay Leno a couple years ago in which we hired a Michael Moore lookalike with a megaphone and a crowd of people to fake march around Goldman’s Sachs stunning new headquarters that were financed with these taxpayer backing and other subsidies. As the security guards and police assigned to the building followed the crowd, a camera crew followed me into the GS lobby and filmed me being stopped by yet more guards inside as I told them, “Hey, I just wanted to use my public space here. Is this a private or a public space?” Why they need to extend their welfare financing for that building in the name of “austerity” is beyond me.

Sec. 322 is an “Extension of the Active Financing Exception to Subpart F. Read this Washington Post piece, and you’ll see that GE, Caterpillar, and JP Morgan and other giant corporations reporting record profits this year and projected to do the same next year are the big winners of this multi-billion dollar welfare handout.

And we can’t ask giant corporations which are paying a never-before-seen low level of share of annual tax revenue to pay taxes that the original tax code that the rest of us use lays out, can we? Sec. 323 is an extension of the “Look-through treatment of payments between related CFCs under foreign personal holding company income rules.” There goes another few billion in the name of “austerity”, I guess.

I’ve only tapped the surface of the wild handouts to giant corporations in this “necessary austerity” bill that the mainstream media is reporting will “return the US to a period of economic growth and confidence” as I heard on CNBC this morning. There’s hundreds of billions of dollars of more corporate welfare handouts hidden in this bill that the Senate and Congress passed today.

I said from the beginning that the fiscal-cliff didn’t matter one iota to Revolution Investors because it was all kabuki theatre. Can you believe that you were supposed to be freaking out and now you’re supposed to be feeling euphoric relief that this kind of a bill was passed?

I’m trimming a few Apple calls, my closest-dated and lowest strike prices — March’s with strikes around $600 or so. I’ll also look to trim down a little Amazon and some Sandisk as we’ve got big gains in the calls we were buying during the aforementioned panics.

Know your facts. Base your analysis on those facts. Be flexible and objective in that analysis. It can be pretty straightforward, no?