The Jones Act is the bedrock of the U.S. maritime and shipping industry. @TransportDems are protecting American-made ships and jobs as costs continue to rise from the Administration’s war with Iran.

One of my favorite charts from the new book: → In 1900, roughly 80% of US stock market value came from industries like railroads, coal, steel, and textiles. → Today, about 70% of the market comes from industries that were tiny—or didn't exist at all—125 years ago. One of the great lessons of investing: The stock market is constantly renewing itself. The future winners rarely look like the past winners. What industries dominate this chart in 2125? → Pre-order Investing in America: amzn.to/4vsujBv → Learn more about the book: investinginamericabook.com/

Jefferies is not promoting any shorting activity regarding any IPO.  Any suggestion to the contrary is WRONG.

I started to read $NSTS 3Q, but then I realized some paint was drying on the house next door and rushed over to watch it instead. 43k shares repurchased. May they live through interesting proxy seasons.

Brenda has worked at this bank for twenty-seven years and she knows which farmers are three months behind on their equipment loans but still good for it and which ones are current on paper but won't make it through the winter, and she knows that Mr. Henderson's weekly deposit should be exactly $2,847.12 every Friday unless he sold extra calves that week, and she knows that the Peterson kid's checking account went negative three times last month which means he's probably using again, and she knows that the widow Morrison always withdraws exactly $300 every second Tuesday for her grandson's piano lessons even though the grandson is now thirty-four and lives in Denver, and this knowledge lives in her head and nowhere else because there is no field in the core banking system for "Morrison withdraws $300 for dead grandson" or "Henderson's deposit timing correlates with cattle market" or "Peterson family addiction patterns affect loan performance," and when the acquisition closes next month Brenda will train her replacement for exactly forty-seven minutes on how to process a wire transfer and how to order new checks and how to run the daily cash report, but there is no training manual for twenty-seven years of watching the same families grow up and fail and get married and default and die, and the acquiring bank's efficiency experts have calculated that eliminating her $47,000 salary will improve the cost-to-income ratio by thirty-six basis points, and they are correct about the math and completely wrong about everything else, and Brenda will clean out her desk on a Friday afternoon and take her coffee mug and her photos of her grandkids and walk out of the building where she has spent more waking hours than her own home, and the bank will continue operating and the customers will learn to use the ATM and the drive-through and the mobile app, and the new systems will process transactions faster and more efficiently than Brenda ever could, but no computer will ever know that Henderson's late payment means he's probably getting divorced again, and no algorithm will recognize the early warning signs in the Peterson kid's account activity, and no spreadsheet will track the subtle rhythms of a rural economy that Brenda could read like sheet music, and six months later when three farmers default in the same week and the loan committee wonders how they missed the warning signs, there will be no one left to explain that the signs were all there if you knew how to look, but the person who knew how to look got eliminated for efficiency.

Breaking: JPMorgan offered a former banker $1 million to settle his lurid sex claims weeks before he filed a lawsuit that has captivated Wall Street on.wsj.com/3QOz6OR

Happy $FSEA 3 year anniversary.

I have built a spreadsheet. It has 847 rows. Each row is a community bank in the United States with a market cap below $200 million, a price-to-tangible-book ratio under 0.85, a non-performing loan ratio below 0.4%, and a CEO who has been in the role for at least twelve years. I update it every Sunday from 6 AM to 11 AM while my family attends church without me. I have visited the headquarters of nineteen of these banks in person. I have eaten a complimentary lobby cookie at each one. The cookies are how you can tell. A bank with a good cookie is a bank that respects its depositors. A bank with a stale cookie is a bank that will be acquired within 36 months at a 40% premium. I am never wrong about the cookies. The cookies have never lied to me. The cookies are the only thing left that tells the truth.

A major new study has confirmed what many of us know from reading all previous research. Socialists in NYC should care about this, bc Mayor Mamdani has filled his administration with developer hawks in hopes of delivering the Affordability Agenda. It won’t.

smokin grass... jamie dimon is not lending to PC lenders. it's well known. fwiw it's been a great call. jpm won't be the pin on this grenade. cliffwater getting 14% reds a far bigger issue. $1bn per/mo equity inflow (~$2bn of PC loans per month) going to zero. that's an issue.

$FFBW 4th quarter & y/e eps. otcmarkets.com/stock/FFBW/ne… otcmarkets.com/stock/FFBW/ne…

Every tweet this account puts out makes me wanna say, “Tell me you know nothing about banks without telling me you know nothing about banks.” But, ya know, ai slop….

What’s it say about the state of politics when the arms manufacturer is the adult in the room.

A regional bank makes a $100 NDFI loan to a BDC. The loan is collateralized by $133 of middle-market loans placed in a bankruptcy-remote SPV, and the BDC takes the first loss. The lawyers structure it so it qualifies as a securitization. Question: How much capital must the bank set aside for this loan? a) $8 - same as direct loan (100% RW) b) $12 - slightly riskier (150% RW) c) $100 - BDCs are super-risky... dollar for dollar (1250% RW) d) $1.60 - safer because of overcollateralization (20% RW)