Jun 19

Today’s News 19th June 2017

  • The Fed Rate Hike and Gold, Report 18 June, 2017

    The big news this week comes from the Fed, which announced two things. One, it hiked the Fed Funds rate another 25 basis points. The target is now 1.00 to 1.25%, and there will be further increases this year. Two, the Fed to reduce its balance sheet, its portfolio of bonds. It won’t do this by actually selling, but by not reinvesting some of the principle repaid as the Treasury rolls over each bond at maturity. This is like reducing the workforce by a hiring freeze and attrition, rather than by layoffs.

    We are no Fed insiders, but if we were to take an educated guess, we would read the last part as a shuffle between the Fed and the banks. No one can afford rising long-term bond yields, as the banks hold plenty of them and this would be a capital loss. Also, if bond prices drop then all other asset prices would drop too. Banks would take another hit.

    Right now, the banks are lending to the Fed at 1.25%. The Fed uses this cash to finance its purchase of long Treasury bonds. The 10-year bond closed on Friday at a yield of 2.16%. If the Fed can arrange for the banks to swap, basically slowly draw down their excess reserves and buy the bonds, then it would not cause the bond market to crash. At the same time, the Fed can say that it has shrunken its balance sheet. There would be no change in the bond market, but the banks can bypass the Fed, while increasing their net interest by about 0.9%.

    This move would have one nonobvious side effect. The duration risk moves from the Fed to the banks. This is the risk of capital loss, if the interest rate should move upwards. At least the risk moves to the banks nominally. In practice, the Fed will have to bail out the banks should they get hit by this (or assure the banks that the Fed will do everything it can to prevent long bond yields from rising).

    We present the issue in these terms, because bank solvency (and the Fed’s own solvency) is the real motivation of the Fed. Price stability—defined to make Orwell proud, as rising prices of 2% per year—is not occurring right now. That is, the Fed has failed to stimulate the price increases that it wishes.

    And the Yellen Fed does wish for rising prices. In a key paper she wrote in 1990 with her husband George Ackerlof, Yellen presented her theory of inflation and the labor market. Let’s strip the academic regalia, to see it in plain terms.

    1. Disgruntled employees don’t work hard, and may even sabotage machinery.
    2. So companies must overpay to keep them from slacking.
    3. Higher pay per worker means fewer workers, because companies have a finite budget. Yellen concludes—you guessed it:
    4. Inflation provides corporations with more money to hire more people.

    It’s not much as a theory of labor, but does rationalize money printing rather neatly.

    The mainstream belief held by Yellen, along with her most trenchant critics, is that rising quantity of money causes rising prices. Never mind that it has failed to work out that way since the Fed turned on the printing press afterburners in 2008. It remains the prevailing belief. So it is somewhat amazing that, with consumer prices falling short of the Fed’s official policy goal of 2% per annum, the Fed is decelerating.

    Maybe, Yellen feels that jawboning—saying the economy is getting stronger, etc.—will be more effective than another round of quantitative easing. Maybe. The Keynesians have a cherished belief that so called animal spirits animate markets (and Yellen is a member of the New Keynesian School).

    Or, it could be that banks are getting strangled. Banks don’t care about unemployment, nor about consumer prices. They don’t even care about the dollar, being both long and short. That is, they are both borrowers and lenders. They borrow short to lend long.

    While the short-term rate has been rising, the long-term rate is back to falling again (which has been the trend since 1981). The effect on banks is: margin compression. The banks are choking, for lack of net revenue oxygen. They will breathe a bit easier if they can make 2.16% rather than the 1.25% as now.

    What does this have to do with inflation? Another news item this week illustrates. Amazon bought Whole Foods. Amazon has unlimited access to credit through the bond and stock markets. The lower the interest rate, the more access the big corporations have, to dirtier cheaper credit. They can’t necessarily use this credit to grow their real businesses (one cause and also effect of it being so cheap) but they can use it to make acquisitions. Acquisitions that would not be economic at higher rates.

    What will Amazon do with Whole Foods? We would guess that they will pursue Jeff Bezos’ stated vision for the future: that people will always want faster delivery and lower prices. Amazon will use its superior information technology, logistics, scale—and dirt cheap credit—to drive down costs, prices, and margins at Whole Foods. And all other grocers will likely have to follow suit.

    So much for higher prices. An expansion of the credit supply (the dollar is not money, which would be gold) is supposed to stoke higher prices, and here is a case where it causes lower prices.

    By the way, lest anyone think that this is good because consumers get lower prices, it’s not. Sure, consumers benefit for now. But the real damage comes from the fact that the whole process is fueled by burning investor capital. That is the real nature of too-cheap credit.

    And this right here is the indictment of the dollar. Not rising prices, skyrocketing prices, or hyperinflation. At least not now nor the foreseeable future. Falling interest, capital consumption, wage pressures, and unfair advantages handed to crony corporations. All managed by a Fed Chair with a frivolous theory on inflation who knows not what she does.

    What does this have to do with the price of gold? Well, the price jumped up early on Wednesday as weak retail sales and inflation data numbers came out. But when Yellen spoke, the gold price fell back down, giving back the whole move and then some.

    Which is all just noise. Speculators gonna speculate, but the fundamentals of gold supply and demand do not change with an inflation data report or a Fed Chair monetary policy announcement.

    Over time, if people perceive gold as an inflation hedge, and continue to see a lack of inflation, maybe they won’t buy gold or even sell it. If so, they are betting on the dollar as it continues on in its ultra-low interest rate (and long-term falling) environment.

    We will take a look at the Wednesday intraday gold basis overlaid with the gold price, below.

    …

    This week, the prices of the metals fell. Gold went down about $13, and silver about 50 cents. As always, we are interested in the supply and demand fundamentals. But first charts of their prices and the gold-silver ratio.

    letter-june-18-prices2

    Next, this is a graph of the gold price measured in silver, otherwise known as the gold to silver ratio. It moved up a sharply.

    In this graph, we show both bid and offer prices. If you were to sell gold on the bid and buy silver at the ask, that is the lower bid price. Conversely, if you sold silver on the bid and bought gold at the offer, that is the higher offer price.

    letter-june-18-ratio2

    For each metal, we will look at a graph of the basis and cobasis overlaid with the price of the dollar in terms of the respective metal. It will make it easier to provide brief commentary. The dollar will be represented in green, the basis in blue and cobasis in red.

    Here is the gold graph.

    letter-june-18-gold2

    We had a rising price of the dollar (the mirror image of the dropping price of gold). The abundance fell (the basis) and the scarcity increase (the cobasis).

    Our gold fundamental price shows a decrease of about $10 to $1,334 (see chart here on our website).

    Here is the intraday graph of Wednesday (all times are London) showing the gold price overlaid with the August basis.

    letter-june-18-wed-intraday-gold2

    The basis starts a little over 0.6% and droops along with the price from about $1,266 to $1,265. As the price shoots up $12, the basis shoots up 12bps. Later, the price begins to drop and so does the basis.

    While the amount is coincidence, the relationship is not. It is causal. This is what first speculative buying, then speculative selling, looks like. All in one day.

    Now let’s look at silver.

    letter-june-18-silver

    In silver terms, the dollar rose more (i.e. the price of silver fell more). The decrease in abundance and increase in scarcity were correspondingly greater.

    Our silver fundamental price increased two cents (to $17.54). That gives us a fundamental gold-silver ratio of 76.07 (see chart on our website). Not too far from the close on Friday of 75.12 bid and 75.29 offer.

     

    Monetary Metals will be exhibiting and FreedomFest in Las Vegas in July. If you are an investor and would like a meeting there, please click here.

     

    © 2017 Monetary Metals

  • Washington's "Good Terrorists, Bad Terrorists" Policy In Middle East

    Submitted by Nauman Sadiq,

    Karl Marx famously said that history repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce. The only difference between the Afghan jihad back in the ‘80s that spawned Islamic jihadists like the Taliban and al Qaeda for the first time in history and the Libyan and Syrian civil wars, 2011-onward, is that the Afghan jihad was an overt jihad: back then, the Western political establishments and their mouthpiece, the mainstream media, used to openly brag that the CIA provides all those AK-47s, RPGs and stingers to the Afghan so-called “freedom fighters” to combat the Soviet troops in Afghanistan.

    After the 9/11 tragedy, however, the Western political establishments and corporate media have become a lot more circumspect, therefore this time around, they have waged covert jihads against the Arab-nationalist Gaddafi regime in Libya and the anti-Zionist Assad regime in Syria, in which Islamic jihadists (aka terrorists) have been sold as “moderate rebels” with secular and nationalist ambitions to the Western audience.

    Since the regime change objective in those hapless countries went against the mainstream narrative of ostensibly fighting a war against terrorism, therefore the Western political establishments and the corporate media are now trying to muddle the reality by offering color-coded schemes to identify myriads of militant and terrorist outfits that are operating in Syria: such as the red militants of the Islamic State and al-Nusra Front, which the Western powers want to eliminate; the yellow Islamic jihadists, like Jaysh al-Islam and Ahrar al-Sham, with whom the Western powers can collaborate under desperate circumstances; and the green militants of the Free Syria Army (FSA) and a few other inconsequential outfits, which together comprise the so-called “moderate” Syrian opposition.

    If we were to draw parallels between the Soviet-Afghan jihad of the ‘80s and the Syrian civil war of today, the Western powers used the training camps located in the Af-Pak border regions to train and arm Afghan “Mujahideen” against the Soviet troops in Afghanistan.

    Similarly, the training camps located in the border regions of Turkey and Jordan are being used to provide training and weapons to Sunni Arab militants to battle the Shi’a-dominated Syrian regime with the collaboration of Turkish, Jordanian and Saudi intelligence agencies.

    During the Afghan jihad, it is a known historical fact that the bulk of so-called “freedom fighters” was comprised of Pashtun Islamic jihadists, such as the factions of Jalaluddin Haqqani, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, Abdul Rab Rasul Sayyaf and scores of others, some of which later coalesced together to form the Taliban Movement.

    Similarly, in Syria, the majority of so-called “moderate rebels” is comprised of Sunni Arab jihadists, such as Jaysh al-Islam, Ahrar al-Sham, al-Nusra Front, the Islamic State and myriads of other militant groups, including a small portion of defected Syrian soldiers who go by the name of Free Syria Army (FSA).

    Moreover, apart from Pashtun Islamic jihadists, various factions of the Northern Alliance of Tajiks and Uzbeks constituted the relatively “moderate” segment of the Afghan rebellion, though those “moderate” warlords, like Ahmad Shah Massoud and Abul Rashid Dostum, were more ethnic and tribal in character than secular or nationalist, as such.

    Similarly, the Kurds of the so-called “Syrian Democratic Forces” can be compared with the Northern Alliance of Afghanistan. The socialist PYD/YPG Kurds of Syria, however, were allied with the Baathist regime against the Sunni Arab jihadists for the first three years of the Syrian civil war, i.e. from August 2011 to August 2014.

    At the behest of American stooge in Iraqi Kurdistan, Massoud Barzani, the Syrian Kurds have switched sides in the last couple of years after the United States policy reversal and declaration of war against one faction of the Syrian opposition, the Islamic State, when the latter overstepped its mandate in Syria and overran Mosul and Anbar in Iraq in June 2014, from where, the US troops had withdrawn only a couple of years ago in December 2011.

    Regarding the Western powers’ modus operandi of waging proxy wars in the Middle East, since the times of the Soviet-Afghan jihad during the eighties, it has been the fail-safe game plan of the master strategists at NATO to raise money from the oil-rich emirates of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, UAE and Kuwait; then buy billions of dollars’ worth of weapons from the arms’ markets of the Eastern Europe; and then provide those weapons and guerilla warfare training to the disaffected population of the victim country by using the intelligence agencies of the latter’s regional adversaries. Whether it’s Afghanistan, Chechnya, Libya or Syria, the same playbook has been executed to the letter.

    More to the point, raising funds for proxy wars from the Gulf Arab States allows the Western executives the freedom to evade congressional scrutiny; and the benefit of buying weapons from the unregulated arms’ markets of the Eastern Europe is that such weapons cannot be traced back to the Western capitals; and using jihadist proxies to achieve strategic objectives has the advantage of taking the plea of “plausible deniability” if the strategy backfires, which it often does. Remember that al-Qaeda and Taliban were the by-products of the Soviet-Afghan jihad, and the Islamic State and its global network of terrorists are the blowback of the proxy war in Syria.

    On the subject of the supposed “powerlessness” of the US in the global affairs, the Western think tanks and the corporate media’s spin-doctors generally claim that Pakistan deceived the US in Afghanistan by not “doing more” to rein in the Taliban; Turkey hoodwinked the US in Syria by using the war against Islamic State as a pretext for cracking down on Kurds; Saudi Arabia and UAE betrayed the US in Yemen by mounting airstrikes against the Houthis and Saleh’s loyalists; and once again Saudi Arabia, UAE and Egypt went against the ostensible policy of the US in Libya by destabilizing the Tripoli-based government, even though the renegade general in eastern Libya, Khalifa Haftar, is an American stooge who had lived for two decades in the US right next to the CIA’s headquarter in Langley, Virginia.

    If the US policymakers are so naïve then how come they still control the global political and economic order? This perennially whining attitude of the Western corporate media that such and such regional actors had betrayed them otherwise they were on the top of their game is actually a clever stratagem that has been deliberately designed by the spin-doctors of the Western mainstream media and foreign policy think tanks to cast the Western powers in a positive light and to vilify adversaries, even if the latter are their tactical allies in some of the regional conflicts.

    Fighting wars through proxies allows the international power brokers the luxury of taking the plea of “plausible deniability” in their defense and at the same time they can shift all the blame for wrongdoing on the minor regional players. The Western powers’ culpability lies in the fact that because of them a system of international justice based on sound principles of morality and justice cannot be constructed in which the violators can be punished for their wrongdoing and the victims of injustice, tyranny and violence can be protected.

    Leaving the funding, training and arming aspects of insurgencies aside, but especially pertaining to conferring international legitimacy to an armed insurgency, like the Afghan so-called “freedom struggle” of the Cold War, or the supposedly “moderate and democratic” Libyan and Syrian insurgencies of today, it is simply beyond the power of minor regional players and their nascent media, which has a geographically and linguistically limited audience, to cast such heavily armed and brutal insurrections in a positive light in order to internationally legitimize them; only the Western mainstream media that has a global audience and which serves as the mouthpiece of the Western political establishments has perfected this game of legitimizing the absurd and selling Satans as saviors.

  • The Fallacies Of The 'Russia-Truthers'

    Authored by James Carden via ConsortiumNews.com,

    The anti-Russia hysteria – now rivaling past Red Scares with Russians hiding under every bed – has led to factual errors in press accounts and has erased standards of political fairness.

    One of the more extraordinary developments since the U.S. presidential election is that the paranoia and the grotesque disregard for facts, evidence and logic that characterized the Trump-inspired “birther movement” can now be reasonably said to characterize the Left’s stance toward Donald J. Trump.

    Russian President Vladimir Putin, following his address to the UN General Assembly on Sept. 28, 2015. (UN Photo)

    There seems to be nothing that Trump opponents will not say and no charge, however low, they will not stoop to making as long as it furthers the goal of removing Trump from office. But, alas, the liberal case against Trump rests upon little more than widely shared fictions and unsubstantiated claims about Trump’s alleged ties to Russia.

    For instance, testifying before the Senate Intelligence Committee on June 8, former FBI Director James Comey cast doubt on a Feb. 14 New York Times report titled “Trump Campaign Aides Had Repeated Contacts With Russian Intelligence.”

    The article, which relied on “four current and former government officials,” said that “Phone records and intercepted calls show that members of Donald J. Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and other Trump associates had repeated contacts with senior Russian intelligence officials in the year before the election” and that “the intercepts alarmed American intelligence and law enforcement agencies, in part because of the amount of contact that was occurring while Mr. Trump was speaking glowingly about the Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin.”

    Comey was asked about the report during an exchange with Sen. James Risch, R-Idaho.

    RISCH:  I remember, you — you talked with us shortly after February 14th, when the New York Times wrote an article that suggested that the Trump campaign was colluding with the Russians. This is not factual. Do you recall that?

     

    COMEY: Yes.

     

    RISCH: OK. So — so, again, so the American people can understand this, that report by the New York Times was not true. Is that a fair statement?

     

    COMEY: In — in the main, it was not true.

    Later in the hearing, Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Arkansas, asked Comey: “Would it be fair to characterize that story as almost entirely wrong?” To which Comey replied: “Yes.”

    Spreading Hysteria

    However, the anti-Russian hysteria has spread well beyond the pages of The New York Times and even beyond the circumstances of the 2016 presidential campaign. Allegations about Russian meddling have included U.S. government attacks on Russia’s RT network for allegedly undermining Americans’ faith in their democracy by broadcasting debates among third-party presidential candidates and covering the Occupy Wall Street movement.

    The Washington Post building in downtown Washington, D.C. (Photo credit: Washington Post)

    Even American journalists have come in for a taste of the lash for not joining in the Russia-bashing. Last Thanksgiving Day, The Washington Post ran a front-page story based on an anonymous Web site called PropOrNot that accused 200 Web sites – including Consortiumnews.com, Counterpunch, Truthout, Truthdig and other leading independent news sources in America – of peddling “Russian propaganda,” presumably in part, because they questioned the State Department’s narratives about the Ukraine crisis or the Syrian conflict.

    The Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank founded by Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman John Podesta, recently issued a report warning that Russian President Putin is building a European “5th column” to advance a goal of undermining Western democracy. Anybody who does not join in the ritual denunciations of Putin and Russia is under suspicion.

    Yet in light of Comey’s testimony, perhaps it is worth recalling a number of other instances in which Russia was accused of seeking to disrupt and discredit Western democracies and see how well they’ve held up.

    In April of last year, Dutch voters rejected a referendum on whether to approve an Association Agreement between the European Union and Ukraine. Russia was quickly accused of meddling in the referendum.

    One New York Times headline screamed: “Fake News, Fake Ukrainians: How a Group of Russians Tilted A Dutch Vote.” The Times reported that two Russians had worked against the referendum for the Dutch Socialist Party.

    But, as the Dutch journalist and author Chris Kaspar de Ploeg points out, the Times story credits “these mere two (!) individuals” with having “tilted the Dutch vote.” In the end, De Ploeg notes, the Times was forced to admit that “no one has yet come up with concrete evidence that the Russian state, rather than individual Russians, is working to skew the election and many wonder why Moscow would even bother trying to do so in a small country.”

    Brexit Accusations

    Similar accusations of meddling were leveled against Russia in the run-up to the June 2016 Brexit vote. Joerg Forbrig of the German Marshall Fund told the Daily Beast, “I do think that the Kremlin has been trying to reach out to the leave campaign. There may well be support but it will be very hard to find out about this because they will be extremely discrete.”

    Russians taking part in an Immortal Regiment march, honoring family members who died during World War II, on May 9, 2017.

    “We do know,” said Forbrig, “that the Kremlin is also materially supporting other actors that have potential to undermine European unity, and the European Union.”

    After the “Leave” campaign emerged victorious, Labour MP Ben Bradshaw told the House of Commons “I don’t think we have even begun to wake up to what Russia is doing when it comes to cyber warfare.”

    And yet, despite all the handwringing, U.K. Foreign Minister Boris Johnson was recently forced to admit: “We have no evidence the Russians are actually involved in trying to undermine our democratic processes at the moment. We don’t actually have that evidence. But what we do have is plenty of evidence that the Russians are capable of doing that.”

    A December 2016 New York Times editorial also expressed concern that Putin had set his sights on Europe, citing “ominous signs that Russia is spreading propaganda and engaging in cyberattacks in Europe in advance of several national elections next year.”

    And yet, according to Politico Europe, a year-long investigation by German intelligence issued in February 2017 “failed to uncover evidence of Kremlin-backed meddling” and “found no concrete proof of disinformation campaigns targeting the government.”

    In the run-up to May’s presidential election in France, Sen. Richard M. Burr, R-North Carolina, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, told the New York Times: “I think it’s safe by everybody’s judgment that the Russians are actively involved in the French elections.”

    Speculation about Russian interference went into overdrive just hours before the vote when emails from the campaign of pro-E.U. candidate Emmanuel Macron were leaked. The culprit? You guessed it! According to a May 6 report in The Independent, “Vitali Kremez, director of research with US-based cyber intelligence firm Flashpoint, said his analysis indicated that APT 28, a group tied to Russia’s GRU military intelligence directorate, was behind the leak.”

    But once again, no evidence was to be found. In an interview with the Associated Press, Guillaume Poupard, director general of France’s cyber-defense agency, said his agency “found no trace that the Russian hacking group known as APT28, blamed for other attacks including on the U.S. presidential campaign, was responsible” for the leak.

    But that didn’t stop Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Maryland, from repeating the accusations. After all, why let facts get in the way of a good story? Raskin screeched to protesters at the so-called “March for Truth” that Russia “hacked and trashed Macron, in a bid to elect the right-wing, immigrant bashing Marine Le Pen.”

    Viral Distortions

    Needless to say there have been many reports of Russian cyber attacks in the U.S. that have gone viral but were quickly shown to be untrue.

    A busy tourist scene in St. Petersburg, Russia. (Photo by Robert Parry)

    Of these, perhaps the best known was a story in Slate by former New Republic editor Franklin Foer in which Foer claimed a computer server belonging to the Trump Organization was secretly communicating with what Hillary Clinton described as a “Putin-tied bank” in Russia.

    And yet, as On the Media’s Bob Garfield sardonically noted, “it took cyber experts about 5 minutes to knock that story down.” As it turns out, the “secret server” wasn’t secret and the domain in question didn’t even belong to Trump; it belonged to a marketing company called Cendyn.

    The link to the Russia’s Alfa bank? Executives from Alfa frequented Trump hotels and as a matter of course received marketing/promotional emails from Cendyn on behalf of the Trump Organization. Cyber expert Robert Graham described Foer’s story as “nonsense.”

    Yet Foer, was if anything, in good company. The Washington Post, in a December 2016 story accused the Russian government of hacking into an electrical grid in Burlington, Vermont. The sensational headline read: “Russian operation hacked a Vermont utility, showing risk to U.S. electrical grid security, officials say.”

    Vermont Governor Peter Shumlin was quick to denounce the Kremlin, declaring “Vermonters and all Americans should be both alarmed and outraged that one of the world’s leading thugs, Vladimir Putin, has been attempting to hack our electric grid, which we rely upon to support our quality-of-life, economy, health, and safety.”

    But, alas, the story was quickly debunked by the electrical utility in question, which released a statement, which read, in part: “There is no indication that either our electric grid or customer information has been compromised. Media reports stating that Burlington Electric was hacked or that the electric grid was breached are false.” The Post had to append an embarrassing editor’s note explaining why their story didn’t hold up to the minutest scrutiny.

    Given all this, our hardy band of “Russia Truthers” might do well to curb their hysteria until such time as Independent Counsel Robert Mueller concludes his investigation. Maybe then there might be at least some evidence attached to the various allegations. But the prospects for such self-control are not good. There is too much momentum – and political self-interest – behind the sordid campaign to paint the 2016 election result as the product of sinister Russian interference.

  • Stunning Footage Of American's Crumbling Infrastructure

    Via StockBoardAsset.com,

    It’s no secret that America’s infrastructure is in dire need of repairs. Earlier this year, America received her infrastructure report card from the American Society of Civil Engineers’ and received a repulsive D+. The ASCE guesstimates the US would need to spend $4.5 trillion by 2025 on infrastructure.

    Here’s the breakdown of the report card:  

    • Aviation: D
    • Bridges: C+
    • Dams: D
    • Drinking Water: D
    • Energy: D+
    • Hazardous Waste: D+
    • Inland Waterways: D
    • Levees: D
    • Parks and Recreation: D+
    • Ports: C+
    • Rail: B
    • Roads: D
    • Schools: D
    • Solid Waste: C+
    • Transit: D-
    • Wastewater: D+

    With that being said, I’ve spent the entire weekend inspecting America’s infrastructure at the Port of Baltimore.

    At some locations, I was given special access to a behind the scenes view of America’s crumbling infrastructure that the public is not allowed to see. The reasons you’re left out of the know is because it destroys the mainstream narrative that everything is awesome.

    Even Jack Ma, the founder of Alibaba Group says, “the US wasted trillions on warfare instead of investing in infrastructure”.

    In the Sunday Edition, Alastair Williamson is on site at a marine terminal in the Port of Baltimore. He provides an interesting view of America’s deteriorating infrastructure blended with the current shape of the US economy.

    In this video, Alastair is given special access to behind the scenes of America’s crumbling infrastructure. This view is rarely seen by the mainstream public. Enjoy!

  • Mueller Has "Not Yet" Decided Whether To Investigate Trump: ABC

    In the biggest political story of the past week, one which was timed to coincide with Donald Trump’s Birthday, the WaPo reported citing anonymous sources, that Special Counsel Robert Mueller was investigating President Trump for possible obstruction of justice. Just a few hours later on Thursday night, the DOJ’s Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who is overseeing the Russia probe due to Jeff Sessions recusal, released a stunning announcement which urged Americans to be “skeptical about anonymous allegations” in the media, which many interpreted as being issued in response to the WaPo report.

    “Americans should exercise caution before accepting as true any stories attributed to anonymous ‘officials,’ particularly when they do not identify the country — let alone the branch or agency of government — with which the alleged sources supposedly are affiliated. Americans should be skeptical about anonymous allegations. The Department of Justice has a long-established policy to neither confirm nor deny such allegations.

    Then on Sunday, the plot thickened further when according to ABC, special counsel Robert Mueller has not yet decided whether to investigate President Trump as part of the Russia probe, suggesting the WaPo report that a probe had already started was inaccurate.

    “Now, my sources are telling me he’s begun some preliminary planning,” Pierre Thomas, the ABC News senior justice correspondent, said of Mueller on ABC’s “This Week” although he too, like the WaPo, was referring to anonymous sources, so who knows who is telling the truth.

    “Plans to talk to some people in the administration. But he’s not yet made that momentous decision to go for a full-scale investigation.”

    //platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

    On Friday, Trump responded to the Washington Post story by tweeting: “I am being investigated for firing the FBI Director by the man who told me to fire the FBI Director! Witch Hunt.” But also on Sunday Trump’s lawyer Jay Sekulow insisted the president was not literally confirming the investigation but was just referring to the story.

    “Let me be clear: the president is not under investigation as James Comey stated in his testimony, that the president was not the target of investigation on three different occasions,” Sekulow said Sunday. “The president is not a subject or target of an investigation.”

    “Now Mueller faces a huge decision,” Thomas told “This Week” host Martha Raddatz. “Does he believe the president, who says there’s no wrongdoing here, or does he go after the president in the way James Comey wants him to do?”

    And so, yet another blockbuster media report has been cast into doubt as a result of more “he said, he said” innuendo, which will be resolved only if Mueller steps up and discloses on the record whether he is indeed investiating Trump for obstruction, or any other reason. That however is unlikely to happen, and so the daily ping-ponging media innuendos will continue indefinitely.

  • With New Patent, Amazon Will Collect As Much Customer Data As Google

    A day after Amazon announced it would jump head-long into the bricks-and-mortar grocery business by agreeing to buy Whole Foods Market for $13.4 billion, reports from earlier this week about a new patent issued to the company are starting to make more sense. The patent, which was first reported by the Verge, is for wireless technology that can effectively block customers in Whole Food’s retail locations from “showrooming." "Showrooming" is the practice of using retail locations to test out products before buying them online – a practice that Amazon, by making it easy to comparison shop on a smartphone, helped pioneer.

    In its report, the Verge focuses on how the technology will help the company solve a problem that Amazon itself helped create – a problem that has plagued virtually every other traditional retailer.

    "Systems and methods for controlling online shopping within a physical store or retailer location are provided. A wireless network connection may be provided to a consumer device at a retailer location on behalf of a retailer, and content requested by the consumer device via the wireless network connection may be identified. Based upon an evaluation of the identified content, a determination may be made that the consumer device is attempting to access information associated with a competitor of the retailer or an item offered for sale by the retailer. At least one control action may then be directed based upon the determination.”

    But the technology described in the patent also raises serious concerns about the company’s plans for vastly expanding its capacity to collect and store customers' data. As MarketWatch’s Theresa Poletti reports, with this added capability, Amazon may soon be gathering as much data on its consumers now as Alphabet’s Google Inc.

    Stephen DiFranco, an executive-in-residence at the Plug and Play Tech Center in Sunnyvale, Calif., offered a few disturbing hints about the scope of Amazon’s data-collection capabilities in an interview with MarketWatch.

    “[The technology] will also triangulate your position in the store, market to you while you are in the store, and understand your behavior in the store,” said DiFranco, who previously worked at Broadcom’s Internet of Things business and led the sale to Cypress Semiconductor CY, -1.72% “If they can collect the same kind of info that they can get while I am surfing on their site, they are going to be able to deliver the same value, the same experience that I get on their site…The company that knows more about the online behavior of me, will now own this same science…while I am in the Whole Foods retail environment.”

     

    The positive aspect, he said, is that it will result in better, more convenient shopping experiences for consumers, with their preferences and habits known. It has the ability to turn into a real assistant for shopping. “You passed the milk, you always get milk,” your smartphone may tell you while shopping.

     

    DiFranco said that by combining the data Amazon already has about its current customers, plus far more frequent data that comes from grocery shopping, will turn it into an even bigger giant with vastly more data. “This is jet fuel in retail analytics that no one else will have.”

    But while some customers might balk at the prospect of shopping in a store where literally every single action and preference is being recorded, investors don't seem to mind.

    Whole Foods’ Market’s largest competitors lost a combined $32 billion in market capitalization yesterday after the announcement. Sell-side analysts have long been calling for a stronger management team to step in and take control of Whole Foods after years of chronically weak earnings and sluggish stock performance. Amazon’s stock also climbed 2.4% on the news, helping it slough off broader weakness in the FAAMG contingent.

    Amazon, which already operates a grocery-delivery service in select markets, announced its plans for entering the bricks-and-mortar grocery business late last year when it opened its first small-format grocery store. At the time, the company said it could envision expanding to 2,000 stores. One of the store's most widely publicized features was its use of automation and AI technology to eliminate check-out lines and allow customers to freely walk out with their purchases. But following the latest revelation about Amazon’s big-data tactics, investors should hope the ecommerce giant also plans to address the more prosaic flaws plaguing Whole Food’s business: Namely, that, as stagnant wages and rising rents force consumers to cut back on spending, the “Whole Paycheck” image will likely continue to alienate shoppers.

  • Van Slams Into Pedestrians Near London Mosque Leaving "Number Of Casualties", Driver Arrested

    Live Feed from Sky News:

    * * *

    A van plowed into pedestrians on Seven Sisters road in the Finsbury Park area in north London just after 12:20am London Time, in what the police has described a “major incident.” There are “a number of casualties being worked on at the scene,” London police said in a statement, with at least 10 people injured according to press reports.

    The incident happened near the prominent Finsbury Park Mosque as witnesses claim the driver intentionally struck the victims; a male driver, who has not been identified, has been taken into police custody while the van appears to be rented. LBC radio adds that there has been a “huge emergency response” and ambulances have been dispatched to help the injured.

    One witness told Sky News that the incident happened after worshippers were leaving the Finsbury Park mosque after midnight prayers.

    Eyewitnesses reported seeing bystanders wrestle the suspect to the ground and pin him down until officers arrived.

    According to the Telegraph, pictures posted on social media show more than a dozen emergency vehicles near the UKCG Help Centre at the junction of Seven Sisters Road and the A503 Tollington Road.

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    So far, the incident is not being called a terrorist attacks, as a person has been arrested unlike previous incidents.

    One eyewitness speaking to LBC said the van had hit people on the pavement, but had not collided with a building. “It looked like he had lost control of the van or something,” he said.  Locals said they had heard shouting and a helicopter was circling overhead.

    Another caller told LBC her sister was at the scene when it happened. She said she described it as “something from a horror movie, everyone running everywhere”.

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    Some social media reports describe the attack as “Islamophobic”, and described the attack as a van “randomly swerving off the main road and running over several Muslim men.”

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    The U.K. Muslim Council of Britain said they had been told worshippers were ran over as they left a local mosque. “Our prayers are with the victims,” they said on Twitter.

    The van used tonight at Finsbury Park mosque is shown below

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    One caller told LBC said people from a local mosque had been drinking coffee at a cafe by the mosque. He said he had seen six people on the floor. Another caller said:  “I saw police giving CPR, getting the heart going again and another guy on the floor.”

    There was no immediate word on an exact number of victims according to LBC, whose live broadcast can be heard here.

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    According to the Guardian, Al Qaeda operatives including the “shoebomber” Richard Reid and Zacarias Moussaoui attended the Finsbury Park mosque. In 2002, weapons training had taken place inside the building. The mosque rose to notoriety when Abu Hamza al-Masri became Imam of the Mosque due to his extremist ideologies and views on terrorism.

  • NATO Holds Defense Drill Simulating Russian Invasion Of Baltics

    NATO officials are growing increasingly nervous about the possibility of an invasion of the Baltic states ahead of Russian wargames planned this fall on the border of Belarus and Poland that could involve as many as 100,000 troops. That "anxiety" was on display this week, when US and British troops carried out the first NATO military exercise that involved a simulated defense of the Suwalki Gap, an area in northern Poland on the border with Lithuania that serves as the gateway to the Baltic region.

    In other words, a drill against a Russian invasion of the Baltics states, and by extension, Europe.

    NATO officials described the area as a “choke point” that, if it were taken by an invading force, could potentially isolate the Baltic states from their NATO allies, according to Reuters.

    "The gap is vulnerable because of the geography. It's not inevitable that there's going to be an attack, of course, but … if that was closed, then you have three allies that are north that are potentially isolated from the rest of the alliance", said U.S. Lieutenant General Ben Hodges.

     

    "We have to practice, we have to demonstrate that we can support allies in keeping (the Gap) open, in maintaining that connection," he said.

     

    Since Russia’s annexation of Ukraine back in 2014, NATO has shifted four battlegroups totaling just over 4,500 troops to Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland.

    US and UK aircraft took part in the exercises, alongside troops from Poland, Lithuania and Croatia in a simulated defense of the potential flashpoint in an area several hours' drive from where a U.S. battalion is stationed at Orzysz base in Poland, Reuters reported.

    Of course, Russia has repeatedly said it has no plans to invade the Baltics, and has warned that the "defensive" buildup in NATO forces against its borders is an unprovoked act of aggression againt Russia.

    However, Russia's protests have done little to sway the US Senate, which passed new sanctions against Russia this week, allegedly in retribution for Russia’s meddling in the US election. The measures were included in an Iran sanctions bill that was widely expected to pass, but as the Hill reported yesterday, President Donald Trump is leaning on House Republicans to drop the bill because he fears it could damage US-Russia relations.

    In addition to Trump, Germany and Austria have also voiced their displeasure for one measure outlined in the sanctions bill, asking the US drop its opposition to the Nord Stream 2 pipeline that would pump Russian gas to Germany beneath the Baltic Sea. Austria's Chancellor Christian Kern and Germany's Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel said earlier this week that it appeared that the opposition of the pipeline was aimed at securing US energy jobs and pushing out Russian gas deliveries to Europe.

    “Europe's energy supply is a matter for Europe, and not for the United States of America," Kern and Gabriel said.

    Meanwhile, NATO acknowledged the symtoblic nature of the drills, saying the exercises were more of a gesture than a dress rehearsal for war. As Brigadier General Valdemaras Rupsys, head of Lithuania's land forces, explained, “this is only a small-scale drill compared to what would be needed in case of a real attack.”

  • The Big Collusion Narrative Keeps Melting Down

    Authored by David French via National Review,

    After two days and almost six hours of high-stakes public testimony, I’m struck by the total lack of any compelling claims supporting the “big” collusion narrative, that Russia conspired with Trump or Trump officials to “hack” election.

    While we certainly aren’t privy to all the relevant information or all the relevant testimony, nothing that James Comey said last week or that Jeff Sessions said this week (much less any of the questions directed his way) contained so much as a meaningful hint that the Committee was on the verge of uncovering the political scandal of the century.

    Rather, the focus keeps shifting to much narrower questions regarding Trump’s decision to fire James Comey – questions that are important but far less historically consequential than any claim that a president or his attorney general are traitors to their country.

    Here’s where we stand:

    1. Not only is there no evidence that Trump personally colluded with Russians or ordered anyone to collude with Russians, there’s now evidence that he hasn’t been under personal investigation by the FBI.

     

    2. There is absolutely zero available evidence that Jeff Sessions colluded with the Russians.

     

    3. Similarly, there is so far no evidence that even Trump’s more unsavory aides – men like Paul Manafort and Michael Flynn — colluded to influence the election

     

    4. To the extent that there is evidence of wrongdoing connected with a foreign power, it deals not with the election itself but rather with Flynn’s alleged failures to disclose foreign payments and contacts.

    Millions of American believe the worst about their current president, claims every bit as toxic in their own way as “truther” smears against George Bush or “birther” smears against Barack Obama.

    The Trump collusion narrative has gotten a far wider and more respectable hearing than either of the two conspiracy theories that plagued the Bush and Obama administrations.

    Truth is truth, and it’s important for responsible people to not just understand and respond to actual evidence – no matter where it leads – but also acknowledge its absence. And so far the absence of evidence points to Trump’s innocence of some of the worst allegations ever leveled against an American president or his senior team.

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