Silicon Valley is approaching its anxiety the way it knows best. So now there is on-demand therapy. Therapy metrics. Therapy R.O.I. And algos matching therapists with clients using the tools of online dating.

Swipe right for “and how does that make you feel?”; swipe left for “let’s get in touch with your inner child.”  Yes, psychotherapy is the latest industry that Silicon Valley has identified as ripe for disruption, according to a New York Times piece on Friday.

Over the past half-decade start-ups have been popping up promising innovations ranging from data science, artificial intelligence, peer-to-peer networks -- hell, even hypnotherapy:

Mindset Health creates hypnotherapy apps that it says can treat anxiety, depression and irritable bowel syndrome.

Mindset Health was founded by two brothers, Alex and Chris Naoumidis, who previously created a peer-to-peer dress-sharing app for women. When that app failed, the brothers felt overcome with anxiety.

Oh, the classic dress-sharing app-cum-hypnotherapy-as-a-treatment-for IBS play. That's what the kids call "a pivot." What’s next in techno-therapeutic innovation: a bitcoin address that sends Deepak Chopra quotes to the highest bidder?

It gets better. From the company’s own website:

Hypnotherapy is an effective but underused tool. It's been clinically shown to be an effective tool in improving IBS, chronic pain, anxiety and depression but isn't accessible due to misconceptions, high costs and a fragmented industry.

Yes, the reason doctors don’t treat irritable bowels by recommending that you fix your gaze at a swinging pocket watch is because of ‘misconceptions.’ If only your physician whispered into your ear, “let my words wash over you and take my suggestions as you desire them” -- you would be as regular as Bernie Madoff’s reported monthly investment returns. Oh, hypnotherapy -- what an infamously ‘fragmented’ industry!

Another psych-disruptor startup, Kip, seeks to put therapy ‘in the cloud’:

Traditional therapists scribble notes and review them later, possibly with a mug of chamomile. In the Kip system, notes quickly turn into data. Weeks of therapy are broken down with quizzes to determine exactly how happiness and anxiety levels are progressing, and how quickly. Kip offers an app that encourages clients to record their moods in real time, prompted by questions that a therapist can choose to have pop up throughout the day.

Kip has revolutionized therapy by giving it a sans privacy technocratic twist:

But there are risks. Elizabeth Kaziunas, a postdoctoral researcher at New York University... noted that these apps gathered and organized data that you might not want gathered. “There’s no guarantee or legal protections built in,” Ms. Kaziunas told me. “This mental health data could be bought or sold.”

For example, an anxiety diagnosis could raise my life insurance rates, she said, adding something new for me to be anxious about. “It’s kind of scary, isn’t it?” she said. “Like when you think about it?”

Kip has distilled psychotherapy into its Silicon Valley essence: entering personal information into an anonymous, unaccountable platform that may or may not sell your data.

One can only imagine the automated responses patients may soon receive: We would have preferred not to have pawned your colorful sexual history to the highest bidder, but data privacy is just not scalable. Our sincerest apologies for all the Ashely Madison ads you will receive for the rest of your life.

There can be no doubt that these companies will soon displace antiquated forms of therapy such as journaling, going outside, and seeing a trained professional. And this disruption cannot happen soon enough -- after all, don’t we all want to spill our most intimate secrets to an app designed by a micro-dosing intern?

Follow Jack Farley on Twitter @JackFarley96

The [Open Market Trading] Desk will offer three 14-day term repo operations for an aggregate amount of at least $30 billion each. The Desk also will offer daily overnight repo operations for an aggregate amount of at least $75 billion each, until Thursday, October 10, 2019.

This announcement accommodates growing calls that the Fed provide more routine support to the overnight money market, which this week was struck with the greatest liquidity-chill since the 2008 financial crisis.

Beginning on Tuesday, the Fed has provided daily capital injections to cash-strapped banks, which so far total $278 billion. These efforts have achieved their stated goal of pushing down overnight rates to within the Fed’s targeted range:

The operations have calmed the funding market, with repo rates declining to more normal levels after soaring to 10% Tuesday, four times last week’s levels. Overnight general collateral repurchase agreement rates remained steady Friday, trading around 1.90%, according to ICAP.

A consensus on what caused the liquidity-chill earlier this week has not yet been reached. The stated reasons from Fed Chairman Jerome Powell are as follows: corporate tax-day on Monday decreased banks’ reserves, while Thursday’s new Treasury issuances (which banks wanted to buy so they could sell them later to their clients at a high mark-up) increased their demand for cash. 

There are, of course, other theories, that have to do with Dodd-Frank, the retirement of QE, and even Saudi Aramco’s oil spill this Sunday.

Some business leaders have adopted a less speculative approach. On his BlazeTV show on Thursday, financial oracle Glenn Beck acutely opined: “there is something very wrong here.”

So, no one knows the cause of the problem, but everyone [ie bold name investment bankers and their friends at the Fed] seems to have identified the solution: Mo' money. In its announcement today, the Fed also stated that October 10th may not mark the end of its repo-shenanigans:

After October 10, 2019, the Desk will conduct operations as necessary to help maintain the federal funds rate in the target range, the amounts and timing of which have not yet been determined.

It remains unclear why, in a world with $17 trillion of negative-yielding debt, there is not enough liquidity for banks to keep their lights on.

Follow Jack Farley on Twitter @JackFarley96

In a Business Roundtable survey released today, the country’s business leaders forecasted sluggish sales and slumping capital investment. A fifth of the executives said they expected their businesses’ sales to decrease within the next six months (as compared to 9% last quarter), while a full 63% predicted no positive net change in their CapEx. Projections about new hirings declined as well, although not as notably.

What is turning these Knights of the Round Table into such nervous Nellies?

Well, for one thing, the surveyed expressed apprehension about the global slowdown in economic growth. They forecasted 2019’s GDP growth rate to cap off at 2.3%, a percentage 0.3pp lower than their 2.6% estimate last quarter.

But the deeper reason the paladins plan on buying fewer trebuchets has to do with trade. The members of the Business Roundtable cited concerns about “geopolitical uncertainty” and underscored that current U.S. trade policy was bad for business:

Business Roundtable posed a special question this quarter asking CEOs to look back at the last twelve months and report how U.S. trade policy and retaliation from foreign nations has affected their businesses. Almost no CEO reported a positive impact on their business.

More than half of CEOs reported a somewhat or very negative impact on sales. One-third of CEOs reported a somewhat or very negative impact on hiring. One-fourth of all CEOs – and 40% of CEOs within the manufacturing sector – reported a somewhat or very negative effect on CapEx.

Business Roundtable President Joshua Bolten went further, saying that uncertainty about trade is “preventing the full potential of the economy from being unleashed." Bolten highlighted that “opening markets and promoting rules-based trade remains vital to U.S. economic prosperity, and called on Congress and the President to enact the new U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement.

What does Business Roundtable Chairman Jamie Dimon think of these grave matters?

“The U.S. needs strong, sustained long term economic growth in order to remain globally competitive and expand opportunity for more Americans. Business Roundtable CEOs stand ready to work with policymakers to address our nation’s biggest challenges to create conditions for inclusive growth, investment and job creation here in America.”

Dimon was later heard telling a reporter that the sun typically rises in the east, and that dropped objects fall at least two-thirds of the time. He also remarked at some length on his deep fondness for puppies.

The Business Roundtable has received praise for its reorientation of corporate shareholder value. It remains to be seen whether its ringing of the alarm bell will be met with similar accolades.

Follow Jack Farley on Twitter @JackFarley96

On Wednesday, the hedge fund manager denounced the proverbial dart-throwing monkeys in an email exchange with Bloomberg News:

[P]assive investing has removed price discovery from the equity markets. The simple theses and the models that get people into sectors, factors, indexes, or ETFs and mutual funds mimicking those strategies -- these do not require the security-level analysis that is required for true price discovery.

Burry compared these passive funds to subprime CDOs:

This is very much like the bubble in synthetic asset-backed CDOs before the Great Financial Crisis, in that price-setting in that market was not done by fundamental security-level analysis, but by massive capital flows based on Nobel-approved models of risk that proved to be untrue.

According to Burry, passive funds can inflate the prices of the underlying securities they represent, exerting upward pressure without introducing real liquidity (just like CDOs). As Burry wrote, “the theater keeps getting more crowded, but the exit door is the same as it always was.”

Burry also worried that the derivatives used to correlate stocks and indices could be very difficult to unwind should the market go into free-fall. In such an environment, traders seeking to arbitrage price differences between indices and their underlying securities could get their faces ripped off.

Burry particularly bemoaned the overrepresentation of large-cap stocks within passive funds, and identifies some tremendous opportunities in small-cap Japanese stocks:

It is not hard in Japan to find simple extreme undervaluation -- low earnings multiple, or low free cash flow multiple. In many cases, the company might have significant cash or stock holdings that make up a lot of the stock price.”

Burry then proceeded to extol the virtues of several specific Japanese stocks, including Sansei Technologies Inc., which assembles elevators, Nippon Pillar Packing, which produces highly-prized sealants and gaskets, and Murakami Corp, which manufactures the best damn automotive mirrors the world has ever seen. 

Of the stocks Burry listed, his fund happens to own all of them. This is a coincidence, to be sure, but it does raise the question: is Burry decrying the dart-throwing chimps over his concern for common investors? Or because the monkeys never even considered throwing a dart at Burry’s amazing, rational, well-selected portfolio of Japanese small-cap stocks?

Interestingly enough, following his remarks, the stock prices of many of the stocks Burry listed went up by a significant percentage, some by as high as 11%. But don’t sell yet -- Burry’s analysts indicate they could go a heck of a lot higher than that. 

Follow Jack Farley on Twitter @JackFarley96

Jeffrey had a severe case of what’s called satyriasis, the male counterpart of nymphomania. [H]e was beset with [this] pathology, like a disease.

Pivar, who said Epstein was his “best pal for decades,” acknowledged that he had witnessed Epstein’s virulent libido “at close range.” Despite his own claims that Epstein “did stuff with underage girls...by the hundreds,” Pivar continued to mount a dubious defense of Epstein, in which he blamed the transgressions of his fallen friend on this supposed malady.

As it happens, satyriasis, or sex addiction, is not listed among the over 300 conditions detailed in the Diagnostic Statistical Manual for Psychiatric Disorders (DSM-V). But that didn’t stop Pivar from rebranding Epstein's predatory behavior as a serious medical condition:

Jeffrey was a very, very, very sick man. He couldn’t help himself, he was afflicted with [satyriasis]. If he had tuberculosis it wouldn’t be called a perversion, would it? Because he coughed too much?

Perhaps Pivar’s perspective can help us better understand some of the world’s infamous financial scandals. 

Maybe Theranos’s Elizabeth Holmes wasn’t a con-artist, but just an overwhelmed visionary struggling with Imposter’s Syndrome. 

Maybe Enron’s Kenneth Lay wasn’t a crook, but just a kind old man whose Intermittent Hoarding Disorder caused him to make a few inaccurate statements. 

And J.P Morgan's infamous “London Whale”? Treatment-Resistant Gambling Disorder is no joke and the very fact that you had to ask shows that you are part of the problem.

There was, however, one incident that gave Pivar pause. He spoke with one of his Epstein’s victims, Maria Farmer, who confided in Pivar that Epstein had abused her at his Ohio estate alongside longtime accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell, whom Epstein entrusted with procuring new underage girls, or as Maxwell called them; “nubiles."

Pivar found Maria’s account harrowing, as well as that of Maria’s sister Annie, who was also assaulted by Epstein and Maxwell, this time at Epstein’s ‘Zoro’ ranch in New Mexico (the one he planned to use as a site to inseminate women en masse to create a superior race of piano-playing math geniuses). 

But while Pivar showed genuine empathy for the traumatized Farmer sisters, he had far less compassion for the scores of Epstein’s other victims. From his perspective, the underage girls ensnared in Epstein’s predatory circle knew what they were getting themselves into:

Jeffrey... [dealt] with a bunch of women who were totally complicit. For years, they went, came there time and time and time again. He did stuff with underage girls who knew what the hell they were doing.

He expressed specific doubt about Virginia Giuffre’s account, who accused both Alan Dershowitz and Prince Andrew of sexual assault, saying, “[t]hat trollop… has made an industry for herself out of inventing calumnies against all these respectable people.” While Pivar found much of Epstein’s behavior “inexcusable,” he reminded us that “that’s the thing satyriasists do -- because they can’t help themselves!”

Maybe Stuart Pivar himself is afflicted with "a rare disease." In fact, he shows all the symptoms of White Glove Syndrome, or what doctors call Affluenzal Cathected Hypochondriacism (ACH). This highly-selective disorder gives patients an intense desire to launder the nefarious crimes of their wealthy friends by inventing medical disorders to which to attribute their otherwise-unpardonable behavior. 

From the perspective of ACH patients, there are only two types of people: powerful friends whose real-life-Pizzagate atrocities require constant pathologization, and the lying floozies who abuse their largesse. 

So, who's the real victim here?

Follow Jack Farley on Twitter @JackFarley96.

On Tuesday, a mysterious landlord known only as “120 East 16th Street Co. LLC” sued WeWork, alleging that the company used a shell entity to circumvent its liabilities. In a complaint filed with the New York State Supreme Court, the landlord claimed that this restructuring violated the terms of its October 2016 lease.

This is an action for declaratory judgment seeking a determination that… Tenant has committed an incurable default under its lease with the Plaintiff. As a result, the Plaintiff is entitled to terminate the lease at its option and seek relief against WWCI, or its successor, as the corporate guarantor, based upon an acceleration of rents.

Apparently, WeWork transferred liability for the lease from its parent company, WeWork Incorporated Inc., to the newly created WeWork Companies LLC.

...on or about June 23, 2019, the Landlord received a belated notice without any detail to the effect that [WeWork Incorporated Inc.] [(“]WWCI[”)] had already undergone an undefined "holding company reorganization" under which a new entity known as WeWork Companies LLC ("WWC LLC") became the corporate holding company [of the lease].

The landlord further alleged that this move is in violation of the “Net Worth Clause” contained in the lease, which requires that, in the event that WeWork were to replace WWCI with another company as guarantor (which, to be clear, is exactly what WeWork did), that new company would have to have a net worth of at least $150 million.

But in its complaint, 120 East 16th Street Co. LLC expressed its skepticism that this new shell company actually has the cash:

Recent financial reports in the media, however, cast great doubt on the financial viability of WWC LLC…. Defendants are effectively foisting on the Landlord a guarantor not of its choosing, without the required prior notice and prior proof that the substitute guarantor has a net worth of at least $150 million.

These “recent financial reports in the media” might have included Triton Research’s searing analysis of WeWork’s financial alchemy, or the FT’s report this Sunday that WeWork’s extensive use of shell companies will make it harder for its landlords to enforce obligations should those shell companies go bankrupt. 

While using an LLC to sign a lease is common in commercial real estate, the amount of rental obligations WeWork has left unguaranteed is not ($41.2 billion out of a total of $47.2 billion of future lease liabilities, or roughly 83%, according to the IPO prospectus it filed last week).

Are the folks at 120 East 16th Street Co. LLC hedging against a potential WeWork bankruptcy? Perhaps they figured it’s better to sue WeWork now, rather than wait to sue WeWork’s bondholders for money not already flushed down WeWork’s thousands of toilets. Either way, it seems they want to avoid a scenario in which WeWork’s investors remain whole while its landlords join the alligators in the sewers of the world’s high-cost business centers.

Follow Jack Farley on Twitter @JackFarley96.