Epic Hail, originally uploaded by Shiny Things.

Hail piled up outside St. Paul's Cathedral on Flinders Street after the Gigantic Hailstorm Apocalypse this afternoon.

Apocalypse Now, originally uploaded by Shiny Things.

If I wanted gigantic storms, I'd have stayed in Singapore!

This was the scene at the corner of Flinders and Russell Streets, in the middle of the most ferocious storm to hit Melbourne in twenty years. Hail, lightning, and probably two inches of rain in ten minutes. (The road was under a foot of water by the time the rain calmed down.)

In the meantime, here's something to chew on: you are more likely to be shot dead in Omaha, Nebraska (home of Berkshire Hathaway and not much else) than in Los Angeles.

Is it, as per this JRE post from last year, to mask them with some tactful asterisks?

Or is it, as per this week's Rebuilding RBS briefing, to print 'em all and damn the torpedoes?

Why did RBS’s bit of ABN lose so much money? It may reflect arbitrary accounting allocations after the event. Even so, there is little question that ABN’s investment bank was a weak business. A former ABN credit officer who left before 2007 says its risk systems and communication lines were a “complete clusterfuck”.

(Not that I mind either way. A bit more swearing in the Economist would liven it up immeasurably.)

Remember Charlie Ellis' famous 1975 classic: "Winning the Loser's Game: Timeless Strategies for Successful Investing?" Like Napoleon Hill's "Think & Grow Rich" everyone on Wall Street has read it. Well, guess what: Charlie failed us the past decade. Wall Street lost trillions, lost 11% of your money. Adjusted for inflation, Wall Street lost 20% of your money. Warning: Wall Street will do it again by 2020.

Another 20% (inflation adjusted) down-leg by the end of 2020? Yeah, I'll take that bet.

You cannot win at Wall Street's "Loser's Game." The past decade proves it. The house always wins in Vegas and on Wall Street.

The past decade proves it... and what about the nineties? The eighties? The seventies? The sixties? The fifties? The forties? The... okay, not the thirties... the twenties? The teens? the 1900s? The 1890s? Hell, the 1860s saw a 12% annualised return, and the 1840s were pretty rockin' as well.

So why bet on the house? Why bet with the Wall Street casino for another decade?

Because sixteen out of the past eighteen decades have had positive returns, and the two "down" decades were both within spitting distance of flat?

Why? You're betting in a rigged casino. Worse, they keep adding powerful new tools, scams and algorithms to their "financial weapons of mass destruction" arsenal, as Warren Buffett calls this mysterious $670 trillion global shadow banking world of derivatives. You cannot win.

Oh, god, here we go, he's going to start ranting about how credit default swaps will blow up your pension fund.

Statistically, the odds now predict Wall Street losing another 20% of your money in the next decade.

Which odds would those be? 'cause I've already said I'll take the other side of that bet.

The momentum's headed down. So, what should you do? Sell all your stocks, ETFs, bonds and funds. Get out of commodities and gold. Sell.

And put the money in what, exactly? Canned goods? Aren't those commodities too? (But give him credit: by saying "sell gold", he's managed to distinguish himself from the usual gold-and-guns crazies.)

What do you expects some kind of divine intervention will save you? Get real, consider the "Swiss Family Robinson" scenario.

...oh, wait, he is saying to put everything in canned goods. I dunno. The yield on canned goods isn't so crash hot. Is there anything this guy does like investing in?

Studies prove that nobody -- neither Wall Street pros nor Main Street amateurs -- can predict long-term trends. But we do know Wall Street's high-frequency quant traders are making thousands of millisecond bets every second gambling on short-term shifts in volatile markets.

See? He likes investing in high-frequency stat-arb hedge funds! (He seems to be absolutely convinced that HF guys are taking all of his hard-earned, so that's where he should be putting his money.)

Eight reasons Wall Street will lose another 20% in the next decade...

Whatever; whatever; whatever; that's not right that's not even wrong; whatever; whatever; seriously? Lobbyists?; whatever.

The Wall Street casino's version of "Liar's Poker" is a "Loser's Game,"[...]

I thought the Wall Street casino's version of "Liar's Poker" was Liar's Poker.

So again I ask you: Do you really want to bet on the market winning for the next decade? Do you really believe that stocks, mutual funds, ETFs, commodities and bonds will make a profit in the next decade after Wall Street's miserable performance the past decade? Trust them, you lose.

Yeah. Yeah, I do want to bet on the market winning. Because while stocks were down over the decade, gold had a blinder (up 250% over the decade). Even boring old US Treasuries made 110% total return over the decade. Commodities as a whole were up. Aussie stocks were up 50%. Chinese stocks doubled (although they got there the long way, losing 25% between 2000 and 2005). The point is: diversify.

Gold's just had a huge run higher, and it'll probably have a pretty crappy decade. But stocks should do well. Bonds are a bit iffy, but they'll still give you yield no matter which way they go. The point is, if you diversify, you'll be less exposed to the vagaries of a single asset class (which is what this guy seems to be ranting about, even though he's suggesting bailing on every single asset class except guns).

Okay, I know this whole post was a bit facetious. And I know Farrell and Marketwatch.com are just whoring for page-views. But I don't think I've ever seen so much wild-eyed rubbish in one place before (with one notable exception). Seriously, Paul mate... switch to decaf.

Six high-level business leaders banded together on Monday to address service standards in Singapore, which they said are in dire straits.

Harsh words were used to describe the service sector here. The CEO of Capitaland Group Liew Mun Leong said he was concerned about 'the severe deteriotation of service quality', an 'appalling situation that appears chronic'.

So does this mean the nauseatingly earnest Are You Being Served campaign (previously on JRE) isn't helping improve service standards? Oh well. Back to the drawing board.

Here's one-third of his setup:

So, I'm officially stumped: how the hell would anyone use forty monitors? I'm assuming he's doing some sort of systematic trading mumble swerve, but there's still no way that that takes forty screens. So what's going on here? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?

Green lawns and sand traps are now replacing ancient villages and tropical forests on Hainan Island, one of China's most pristine spots. Necessary development, or destructive clear-cutting?

I'll take "destructive clear-cutting" for 200, Alex. And get a load of this:

While between 100 and 300 courses are expected to be built here, the most mysterious project -- and by far the most audacious -- is the latest offering from Hong Kong's Mission Hills Group, already owners of a 12-course resort in southern China's Guangdong province. Its Hainan club, when completed, will be the world's largest, with some 22 courses covering an area nearly 1.5 times the size of Manhattan.

Who on earth needs twenty-two golf courses in one place? WTF, China?!

Every hedge fund in the world is short a stack of EUR; George Soros sues for copyright infringement...

POUND COULD COLLAPSE WITHIN WEEKS, PREDICTS BILLIONAIRE FINANCIER JIM ROGERS; Marc Faber and Slavoj Zizek sue for copyright infringement...

And in news from Dubai: a 2-million-litre shopping-mall aquarium holding 400 sharks and stingrays has sprung a leak; the makers of Mega Shark Versus Giant Octopus sue for copyright infringement.

I do like Gizmodo's take:

So how long do you think it's going to be until [Dubai] can't afford to keep up all this ridiculous shit they've built and the entire thing turns into a post-apocalyptic wasteland with lawless bandits scavenging for all of the luxury items no one is around to pay for? Should be exciting!

Mel Gibson sues for copyright infringement.

And then he took his pants off (previously on JRE) and ran around yelling "ooh ooh look at me I'm on TV and I'm going to keep spouting complete rubbish as long as CNBC keeps giving me screen time look at me look at me LOOK AT ME".

Chenggong is a new town near Kunming, one of the main cities in the south-west of China. Construction started in 2003 and the results are now apparent in 13 immaculate local government buildings, each clad in marble tiles. A high school boasts an impressive indoor swimming pool and several of the region’s main universities have built large campuses. Pristine high-rise apartment blocks stand in rows, their new windows glinting in the subtropical sun.

The one drawback: at the moment, Chenggong is almost completely empty. Its wide streets are all but bereft of traffic, a bank branch has no customers and leaves collect in the foyers of the municipal offices.

(Update: am I seeing things, or have the FT (hi Alphaville!) moved this article outside the paywall? If so, two thumbs up.)

Memo to CCP: the capitalist running dog lackeys of the decadent western media will stop writing about boondoggle ghost cities when you stop building boondoggle ghost cities.

And in related "WTF, China?" news: Huaxi, a town 50 miles down the road from Shanghai with 30,000 people and a per-capita income of about US$12,000 p.a. (which makes it the "richest village in China"), is building a residential tower that will be one of the 30 tallest buildings in the world. (With 200 residents able to pony up US$1.5 million each for a share in the tower, it probably has the highest Gini coefficient in the world as well.) But it gets better:

Huaxi has an even more ambitious project coming up: a 6 billion yuan, 538-meter skyscraper that would today rank as the world’s second tallest. The only loftier building is the new Burj Khalifa in Dubai.

WHY?!

Some selected highlights, courtesy of Pravda's Twitter feed:

• A deficit of $7.2bn, 2.6% of GDP (boo-ring. I hear a foghorn. Boo-ring);
• $1.4 billion in cash splashes - whoops, typo, meant to say "direct transfers for households";
• Wives who are taxpayers can claim "spouse relief" of $2000 (in other news, Deng Xiaoping was wrong: in Singapore, to get married is glorious);
• Tiered property taxes - from 0% at the bottom to 6% for the most expensive private houses;
• "Govt to commit $100 million over five years to scale up support for business associations to drive productivity at the industry level"... uh, what?;
• And apparently there's a 250% tax deduction for donations to "Institutions of a Public Character", whatever those are. (Interestingly, donations to charities in Singapore aren't tax deductible - only donations to IPCs are deductible, and there are stiff criteria for the upgrade from "charity" to "IPC".)

So, uh, do the EFF and Reporters Without Borders count as "institutions of a public character"?

1989 should have been the best year ever for Rock Sugar, the big haired heavy metal band that had just broken the top 41 on the rock radio charts with their solid brass debut album "Bang You Like A Drum". But instead of headlining concerts, Rock Sugar made the headlines when they were presumed lost forever after playing an extremely ill advised gig celebrating the bat mitzvah of 13-year-old Lisa Rosenberg.

[...]

Having been denied rescue, the band credit their miraculous ability to make it to the shore alive only because of their firmly held belief that "sharks don't eat metal". Left to their own extremely questionable survival skills, Rock Sugar managed to salvage several items from the sunken yacht. In addition to their instruments, they retrieved a hot pink battery powered boom box covered with stickers of Hello Kitty, a crate of batteries, 158 cases of schnapps and numerous articles of teenage girls clothing, most of which the band admit to trying on and several pieces of which apparently fit and looked "pretty frickin' awesome". But things got worse when the horrified rockers discovered that the only music available for them to listen to was little Lisa Rosenberg's very pop, very 13 year-old girl's, very '80's CD collection.

Don't Stop The Sandman (the first track from their new album) should give you a pretty good idea of what they're about. The clip is right down below.

(Also - I can't decide whether Shook Me Like A Prayer (it's exactly what you think it is) is sacrilegious or sacrilicious, but it can't be as criminal as Celine Dion's awful, awful, awful version - which was voted the Worst Cover Song Ever and previously mentioned on JRE as justification for invading Canada.)

Special bonus: here's a pic from earlier today of the crush at Harbourfront train station, the jumping-off point for Sentosa and the casino.

Unsurprisingly, the local media's pretty enthusiastic about the new casino, and about all the money that will inevitably roll in. (Side note: why on earth is Pravda resorting to an AFP wire story about the casino opening? Could they not get one solitary reporter down there?) But here's an interesting take from Time (emphasis added):

For Genting, operator of Resorts World Sentosa, recouping its $4.5 billion investment won't be easy. Even though it will be one of two exclusive casino operators, unlike Macau or Las Vegas, where there is fierce competition within a much larger pool, analysts and investors have set their initial expectations for Sentosa's gaming revenues "far too high," says Citigroup analyst Dominic Noel-Johnson.

To meet Citigroup's relatively conservative 2011 gaming revenue estimate of $1.2 billion for Resorts World Sentosa -- more than a third less than the consensus of other brokerage houses -- every single foreign tourist expected to come to the island that year would have to visit either one of Singapore's two integrated resorts. In addition to that unlikely scenario, every adult 21 and over in Singapore would have to go to one of the casinos five times a year, and every adult resident of neighboring Malaysian state Johor would have to go twice every year.

Is all that likely? No, Noel-Johnson says, even though such robust expectations are clearly reflected in the high price of Genting Singapore's stock, currently the most expensive gaming stock in the world. According to Noel-Johnson, Genting Singapore is trading at an estimated price-to-earnings ratio of over 60 for the current fiscal year. Even though he believes Resorts World Sentosa has the potential to be "a long-term success," Citigroup has slapped a "sell" rating on the stock.

And there's a competing casino due to open in less than three months.

Update: regarding those revenue figures... as a very rough approximation, you could stack 'em up against Crown Casino, which is a monopoly casino with a roughly similar catchment area (Singapore's roughly the same size as Melbourne, and they'll be targeting the same Asian whales). Crown Casino pulls in almost bang on $1.5 billion a year in revenue (page 5) - but Crown's a local monopoly, while the Sentosa casino will have to fight with Marina Bay Sands for revenue. The $100 casino entry levy in Singapore will throw a fairly major wrench in RWS's revenue stream, as well.

So $1.2 billion for RWS might be doable... but it'll take a lot of work.

(Even older, and just as awesome: the Blue Marble.)