Free Republic

Three Arrows Capital co-founder Su Zhu was arrested in Singapore while trying to leave the country. Su Zhu, the co-founder of the collapsed crypto hedge fund Three Arrows Capital (3AC), was arrested in Singapore on Friday. Zhu was taken into custody while attempting to leave the country from Singapore’s Changi Airport, as reported earlier by Bloomberg. Teneo, the liquidation firm in charge of liquidating 3AC’s assets, says it received a committal order against Zhu after he failed to comply with a court order that compelled him to cooperate with the liquidation process. That committal order directs Singaporean police to arrest...

ome builders broke ground on more new houses than expected in February, a sign that higher interest rates are not weighing down the housing market as much as they were earlier. Housing starts jumped 9.8 percent in February to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 1.45 million. Economists had expected an increase of just 0.1 percent to 1.31 million after the very depressed January figure came in much lower than expected.

Billionaire investor Bill Ackman says the US government should consider a "highly dilutive" bailout of Silicon Valley Bank amid jitters about its financial position. The bank's failure "could destroy an important long-term driver of the economy as VC-backed companies rely on SVB for loans and holding their operating cash," Ackman said in a series of tweets on Thursday. "If private capital can't provide a solution, a highly dilutive gov't preferred bailout should be considered," he said.

If there was one piece of advice the boss of hedge fund Citadel LLC would give to the Federal Reserve, it would be to stop talking so much. Every time Fed chair Jay Powell opens his mouth to discuss all the progress the central bank has achieved cooling off last year’s red-hot inflation, he may actually just be making his own job harder by confusing investors with different messages. Citadel founder Ken Griffin, the most successful hedge fund manager on Wall Street last year, urged Powell to stick to just one key talking point so as to anchor inflation expectations...

A Norfolk Southern cargo train derailed near Springfield on Saturday night, the second loss of the company’s trains in Ohio in a month. Unlike February’s devastating derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, a company spokesperson assured the Columbus Dispatch no potentially harmful chemicals were involved. The train, which did not have passengers, derailed at around 5pm near the Clark County Fairgrounds, the Dispatch report detailed.

Nishad Singh is third person in founder’s inner circle agreeing to cooperate with federal prosecutors ... The collapse of FTX has set off the largest crypto-related bankruptcy ever ... Singh said that in mid-2022 he learned that Mr. Bankman-Fried’s crypto hedge fund Alameda Research was borrowing FTX customer funds. By September 2022, Alameda was no longer able to repay the billions of dollars that it had taken from FTX, Mr. Singh said. He said that, at the direction of Mr. Bankman-Fried, he falsified FTX’s revenues to make the company more appealing to investors. ... Mr. Singh also pleaded guilty to...

The last time we looked at the massive money-printing (literally) hedge fund that also moonlights as the Swiss National Bank, we were stunned to learn that its US equity holdings had exploded to a record $177 billion at the end of Q1 2022, orders of magnitude more than the mere $27 billion it held as recently as 2014.Since then things haven't gone exactly as planned for the massive asset gatherer, and the value of its US equity longs has tumbled by almost $50 billion from the record high in Q1 to $139.8 billion as of Q3, a two year low......

Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) on Friday shrugged off a recent barb from former President Trump, who lashed out at him as speculation builds that Youngkin might run for the White House in 2024. “Listen, you all know me. I do not call people names,” the governor told reporters. “I really work hard to bring people together … That’s not the way I roll and not the way I behave.” Trump made fun of Youngkin’s last name in a post on Truth Social, suggesting that it sounds “Chinese,” while also claiming that the Virginia governor could not have won in...

John Fredericks explains why he thinks the Dr. Oz endorsement was a good move by Trump. Whether you agree with him or not, it's worth a listen.

Defending freedom is going to cost,” declared President Biden, announcing an import ban on Russian oil. And no doubt our Commander-in-Chief is right. Everything we do comes at a cost. The goal in peacetime, of course, is to engage in activities where the beneficial returns exceed the price of our inputs. War is no such pursuit. Everyone loses. The victors simply suffer less than the vanquished. In Europe’s last major conflict, the Allies defeated Germany. Russia’s victory cost it 20-40 million lives and economic devastation, a cost indelibly etched into Russia’s psyche. War forces us to determine what we are...

A band of more than 17,000 crypto enthusiasts, identified as ConstitionDAO, had crowdfunded more than $40 million via social media earlier this week.Ken Griffin, billionaire CEO of hedge fund Citadel, paid $43.2 million for a first-edition copy of the U.S. Constitution at a Sotheby’s auction on Thursday, outbidding a group of cryptocurrency investors. The amount more than doubles its $20 million high estimate, setting a world auction record for any book, manuscript, historical document, or printed text, according to Sotheby’s. A band of more than 17,000 crypto enthusiasts, identified as ConstitionDAO, had crowdfunded more than $40 million via social media...

In an interview last year, Mr. Freeman argued that the austere cuts enacted at his newspapers reflected a more realistic understanding of the industry’s direction and better positioned Alden-owned publishers for the pandemic’s downswing. “We were prepared for a real step down in terms of a recession because we were honest about what was needed in the future,” he said. “Numbers don’t lie.” The newspaper industry’s numbers looked bleak even before the pandemic. Annual advertising revenue dropped 70%, or $34 billion, between 2005 and 2018, according to estimates by the Pew Research Center. More than 1,800 newspapers closed between 2004...

‘It’s the definition of insanity,’ Wedbush analyst says. ‘The shorts keep doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result’

U.S. stock index futures dropped on Monday after Wall Street’s surge in the prior session as major lenders came under pressure on concerns over possible spillover effects of a hedge fund’s default on margin calls. Nomura and Credit Suisse warned of significant losses after the U.S. hedge fund, named by sources as Archegos Capital, defaulted, hitting shares in some big U.S. media and Chinese tech companies. The news has sparked fears that other lenders could be in the process of exiting these positions too. Shares in Bank of America Corp, Citigroup Inc, JPMorgan Chase & Co, Goldman Sachs, Wells Fargo...

Something happened related to the stock market yesterday that has everyone up in a frenzy this morning. I don’t really understand it all, but it involves Reddit, something called sub-Reddit and a group of day traders who assemble there, abusive hedge fund managers, short-selling, big tech oligarchs, NASDAQ and GameStop stock, which went way up during the day, but was driven back down in after hours trading. Naturally, at the end of the day, the Big Tech oligarchs took sides with the big-money hedge fund oligarchs and shut down the day-trader sub-Reddit group for allegedly saying bad things. Because that’s...

Hedge fund Melvin Capital closed out its short position in videogame retailer GameStop Corp., CNBC reported Wednesday. Fund manager Gabe Plotkin told CNBC's Andrew Ross Sorkin that the position was closed out Tuesday afternoon following a huge loss. Shares of GameStop have soared more than 600% in January after retail investors, organized via Reddit's WallStreetBets forum and other platforms, sought to push up a handful of heavily shorted stocks. Hedge funds Citadel and Point72 infused nearly $3 billion into Melvin Capital to shore up the fund, news reports said earlier this week. Plotkin told CNBC that speculation the fund would...

There’s nothing more tiresome than hackneyed references to The Matrix, except for the constant propaganda we’re hosed down with by the Establishment and its media lackeys about how everything is groovy in our totally free, free enterprise paradise of freedom and happiness and more freedom. Some of us have been woke for a while, having realized the undeniable truth that the system is rigged for the benefit of a garbage ruling class, whose sole accomplishment is to perpetuate a paradigm in which they maintain power and prestige by controlling institutions they didn’t create or build. Instead, they are cultural trust...

Go ahead, punk, make my day.If you don’t understand hedge funds here’s a Cliff’s Notes version: A hedge fund is a pooled investment structure set up by a money manager designed to make a return on capital.A hedge fund isn't a specific type of investment, but rather a vehicle for investment.Big Hedge Funds use capital from accredited investors (High Net Worth Individuals, Pension Funds, Charitable Foundations, University Endowments) to execute various market transactions.Often the types of transactions involve risky instruments such as short selling, leverage, derivatives (puts, calls, options, futures) intended to “hedge” the risk exposure of the fund’s capital...

Representative Paul Gosar has called the Department of Justice to investigate Robinhood and their relationship with the hedge fund Citadel.Robinhood, one of the most popular free trading apps in America, stopped ordinary investors from being able to buy shares in GameStop, after users from the subreddit r/WallStreetBets and others engaged in a short squeeze of the stocks, costing hedgefunds billions of dollars as a result. Many other trading apps and exchanges also stopped the buying of the “memestock” shares, and delisted them from their platforms.In a statement, Robinhood claimed that they had to shut down the buy orders on GameStop...

Update: The Reddit subgroup WallStreetBets is back up this evening. What an amazing story! Reddit shut down its WallStreetBets subreddit page on Wednesday afternoon after rookie stock market investors in the general public joined together to purchase stock in targeted companies causing a major disruption in the stock market and resulting in several hedge funds to go bust. Of course, Reddit blamed “racism” and “hate speech” for removing the community. According to The Verge, Discord has banned the r/WallStreetBets server. Reddit’s WallStreetBets subreddit is the driver of an unprecedented rally of GameStop stock, and has received a great deal of...