- "The Spiritual Center" of the Democratic Party, John Lewis, Says Trump Is Illegitimate Because Muh Russians
The cuckery has reached a fevered pitch and the democratic party, in what can only be construed as a traumatic emotional breakdown on an institutional level, are throwing the gauntlet down here and now by sending out the so called ‘spiritual center’ of the party, Congressman John Lewis — declaring Trump ‘illegitimate’ because (wait for it) MUH RUSSIANS.
It has been an absolute blitzkrieg of U.S. intelligence leaks and disinformation, all designed to damage the incoming President — coordinated by uniparty shills in both the republican and democratic parties.
Here’s Chuck Todd, channeling Ceasar Flickerman’s disingenuous and overly dramatic cadence from the movie The Hunger Games, interviewing Congressman John Lewis — who said he would not be attending the inauguration because the Russians hacked John Podesta’s email box and revealed the democratic party was an organization rife with both corruption and criminality at the highest levels. These revelations must’ve been the difference between electoral college winship and bitter defeat, obviously.
Top Congressional Shill, John Lewis, says Trump Presidency Illegitimate. pic.twitter.com/a4fiM0A1o6
— The_Real_Fly (@The_Real_Fly) January 14, 2017
Charles Krauthammer, hardly a Trump fan, calls bullshit on all of these events — suggesting a conspiracy to diminish the office of the President is at hand.
Content originally generated at iBankCoin.com
- Is This The Coup In America? "U.S. Troops On Russian Border" To Start War Before Inauguration
Submitted by Mac Slavo via SHTFPlan.com,
Is there a coup underway, while America is in the transition period, and before Trump swears in as the 45th president of the United States?
How real is the clash between the rogue Manhattan billionaire and the intelligence gang behind the throne? Who will win the struggle for power over foreign policy? These are serious times and require serious considerations.
The U.S. sent an entire armored brigade to the Russian border, and Vladimir Putin is preparing as if for war. Missile defense systems are raised; tall claims and serious charges have been leveled; diplomatic relations have chilled to a permafrost. Several Russian diplomats have turned up dead recently, including one murdered in front of cameras during a dramatic assassination in Turkey. Russia has bucked U.S. order in the Middle East, and carved out a potential peace deal in Syria without their consultation.
Things are reaching a flashpoint, and the system is concerned about controlling President-elect Trump given his rumored friendliness with Putin and plans to drop sanctions.
Will there be a “shock” designed to correct Trump’s foreign policy, and set-off the ticking time bomb between East and West into all-out hostilities?
Though these two world powers have clashed repeatedly in recent years, there several key factors that make this round extra alarming – and put a peaceful transition into question of exploding into total war, and an undermining force from within the deep state, CIA and shadow government:
- Until Donald Trump swears in and settles into the White House, the U.S. remains in a strange air, with an open window for a coup to take place, or a major unforeseen disruption (including something like a terrorist attack). If the deep state wants to start a war which President Trump will be forced to finish, they can. If the deep state wants that same war to block Trump from taking power, or from making major decisions, they will.
- With claims that Russia hacked the U.S. election, foreign policy has never been more warlike. Despite lacking evidence, and a politically-heavy spin on events, the powers-that-be intend to drive home the narrative that Putin crossed the line, while Trump is his puppet, and the alternative media his mesmerized “fake news” cheerleaders. This narrative is false, but could fan the flames for war. The new Cold War has been solidified; the aggressive rhetoric in Washington, and highly militarized movements such something big is coming down the pipeline. Though there may not be all out war, tensions will be very high; people will be placed under suspicion; nuclear war and other highly deadly scenarios are on the table like never before. The stage is set for world war three.
- Leftists and angry Hillary supporters are revolutionary, if severely misguided. Rosie O’Donnell was only the latest celebrity figure to call for martial law in order to postpone the inauguration, and put Trump on trial. The deep state crew that tags along with Hillary are also quite dangerous – the CIA and shadow advisor types. It is possible that some of these figures are involved in assassinating diplomats, chauffeurs and personal aides close to Putin and his network.
- In his final week in office, lame duck Obama could lay an egg that hatches the war. Or, intelligence community figures could go rouge; black ops, a false flag or a successful provocation/antagonization event could trigger a massive kick off to war that no president could simply stop with the stroke of a pen. There is the distinct possibility that if things go hot in a very short span of time, national emergency and outright war will put all other considerations behind them. Gear up for major conflict could be the only way to reset the devastating economic conditions, and the debt bomb that the federal government and federal reserve are prepared to drop on us.
- Defensive measures, including setting up anti-missile defense shields has moved inward, encircling Moscow, and those being used in the Ukraine, in Syria and elsewhere along the grand chessboard suggest extremely pugnacious diplomatic gestures – since true diplomacy has frozen up after repeated insult from Washington.
via the Daily Mail:
Russia has deployed anti-aircraft missile systems around Moscow to protect the capital from attack in the latest sign Vladimir Putin is preparing for war.
The s-400 Triumph air defence system has been providing air cover for Russian forces in Syria since November, and is now being deployed on home soil.
It is capable of hitting moving airborne targets including planes and incoming missiles and has a range of 400km.
The news has emerged the day the US sent more than 3,000 troops to Poland in response to Nato’s concern Russia was becoming more aggressive.
via Russia Insider:
A US armored brigade (3rd Armored Brigade, 4th Infantry Division) is on the move to Russia’s Baltic border. After its equipment begun arriving in Europe last week so now have its soldiers.
The move is so big it will require 37 trains and over one thousand rail cars to transport from Germany to Poland.
A US armored brigade fields over 400 tracked and over 1300 wheeled vehicles including 80 62-ton Abrams tanks, 140 Bradley armored fighting vehicles and 400 humvees.
There is always saber-rattling and hyperbolic claims of war, but right now is a critical time that will decide the next several decades of U.S. world power.
Probably, they aren’t going to take any chances, and as desperate as they are, are looking to reignite public support for U.S. struggles abroad – by any means necessary.
Beware these next few weeks, and remember that the continuity of government “Doomsday” command-and-control planes were brought out after the election as a public show of power to Trump and the American people. The shadow government is real, and for now, maintain dominance.
"Mysterious" plane circling over Denver was "just" an E-6B Mercury "doomsday” plane https://t.co/SqJlBkdIqg pic.twitter.com/oE0BBWrhFL
— The Aviationist (@TheAviationist) November 17, 2016
This is not the time for games. Constitutional government is in jeopardy; war provocations and assassinations are taking place, and the duly-elected next president of the United States should be very carefully protected, watched over and pray for a peaceful transition.
We are at risk of entering a very difficult and dangerous time.
- New York Real Estate Prices Plunge In 4Q As Listing Days and Discounts Soar
After reviewing the Elliman Report on the New York City Real Estate market at the end of 3Q 2016, we concluded that sellers had simply refused to accept the fact that the Manhattan real estate bubble had burst and rather than dropping prices had decided to simply let their apartments sit on the market unsold while hoping for a miracle. Here was our conclusion (see “NYC Real Estate Bubble Bursts As Apartment Sales Crash 20%“):
In conclusion, the lesson seems to be that the marginal New York City buyer has been priced out of the market (volume down 20%) while sellers have not yet accepted that the bubble has burst deciding instead to maintain listing prices while letting their apartments sit on the market longer amid growing inventory levels. Meanwhile, the luxury market is the only segment that seems to be holding up which only serves to prove that Chinese billionaires still have cash they would like to hide in the U.S.
Alas, with the release of Elliman’s 4Q 2016 report, it has become apparent that that miracle never materialized for New York’s hedgies and i-bankers. In fact, the data from Manhattan real estate sales was almost universally bad with median pricing down 8.7% YoY, volume down 3.7%, listing days up 14.6% and discounts up to 5.5%.
Meanwhile, a view of the longer term sales and pricing trends for Manhattan seems to suggest that the 2013-2015 expansionary period has officially turned.
As was the case last quarter, the re-sale market was among the hardest hit segments with median prices down 6.3% YoY and volume down 1.5%.
Also like previous quarters, the luxury market, despite sinking volumes, is the only segment to continue to show growth in median sales prices.
And while buyers are abandoning Manhattan en masse, Brooklyn seems to be the key beneficiary with purchases there soaring 22% YoY and median prices climbing 15%. Per Bloomberg:
Home buyers in Brooklyn competed for a record-low number of listings in the fourth quarter, driving up prices in the New York borough that’s historically been seen as a refuge from Manhattan’s high costs.
Purchases in Brooklyn rose 22 percent from a year earlier to 2,582, while the median price of those deals climbed 15 percent to a record $750,000, according to a report Thursday by appraiser Miller Samuel Inc. and brokerage Douglas Elliman Real Estate. The number of homes for sale at the end of December tumbled 31 percent to 2,232, the fewest since the firms started keeping the data in 2008.
The sales market in Brooklyn, the city’s most populous borough, is moving in the opposite direction to Manhattan’s, where rising supply is offering buyers more choices and the option to walk away from listings they view as overpriced. Manhattan’s median home price dropped 8.7 percent in the fourth quarter to $1.05 million as sellers awakened to a slowdown after years of holding out for all they could get, the firms said last week.
“You have a disconnect with sellers in Manhattan, and Brooklyn is poaching some of that demand,” Jonathan Miller, president of Miller Samuel, said in an interview. “Overall, it’s generally a lower price point, and affordability has been a big issue the last couple of years.”
Seems that “Bridge & Tunnel” is starting to have a nice ring to it.
- Stunning Before And After Pictures Of The California Drought And Devastating Rain Storms
Just as California’s liberal elites had convinced everyone that climate change had permanently altered global weather patterns such that the entire state was doomed to be stuck in a perpetual drought which would inevitably render it about as inhabitable as the surface of Mars within years, an unrelenting series of storms has struck and in a matter of days filled lakes, overflowed rivers and buried mountains in snow. And just like that, 40% of California was lifted from a drought that had plagued the state for a decade.
Of course, that much rain, in such a short period of time, can have devastating consequences as this video from Big Sur illustrates.
River campgrounds and cabins at Big Sur under water as river rages through #CAstorm #CAflood pic.twitter.com/jV1gxcMlIb
— Evan Sernoffsky (@EvanSernoffsky) January 9, 2017
As does this dashcam video of a flash flood in norther California.
In all, the rainfall totals from around Northern California over the past 14 days are staggering with certain areas receiving nearly 2 feet of rain according to SFGate.
Downtown San Francisco has received 5.53 inches of rain since Jan. 1. The last time the city has seen a number higher than this was 1982 when 7.53 inches fell between Jan. 1 and Jan. 11. During last year’s El Niño year, S.F. had received close to three inches by this date.
More impressive numbers: The coastal range mountains outside Guerneville, where roads and homes went underwater when the Russian River flooded, has received some 21 inches of rain since Jan. 4.
In Downieville, where the Yuba River gushed with a heavy flow all week, some 23 inches of rain were recorded in the past seven days.
And as bad as the flooding has been in parts of Northern California, it would have undoubtedly been even worse but for the the ability to divert some of the excess water into previously depleted reservoirs scattered throughout the state.
The super soakings have filled reservoirs that were mere mud puddles, their cracked lake beds once exposed at the height of the drought that plagued the state for five-plus years and still persists in many regions, especially in Southern California.
The reservoirs in Northern California have gained some million acres of storage in the past seven days, Michael Anderson, a climatologist with the California Department of Water Resources estimates. And total surface storage for the state is roughly 97 percent of average, with the the total storage for the largest reservoirs being at 111 percent of normal.
Lake Oroville, the state’s second-largest reservoir, gained a bit more than 620,000 acre-feet in the first 10 days of January alone.
“That is almost 18 percent of its capacity,” Anderson said. “Since Oroville was about 750,000 acre-feet below its storage limits during flood season (a consequence of the drought), they can keep all that water for future use and largely offset storage impacts from the drought.”
Meanwhile, the transformation of the state’s reservoirs, in just a matter of weeks, is astonishing.
What a difference a year makes with most reservoirs now near capacity….
…versus ~30% of capacity last year.
But we’re sure this abundance of rain is ever bit as much due to global warming as the lack of rain was last year…but we’re still waiting for official confirmation on that from our respected political leaders in Sacramento.
- The US Economy: Back On Track?
Submitted by Erico Matias Tavares via Sinclair & Co.,
The weekly rail traffic report published by the Association of American Railroads (“AAR”) provides a great snapshot of US economic activity almost in real (weekly) time.
Last July we noted that we were starting to witness some signals of a trend change, now suggesting a softening. But much has happened since then, including a broadly unexpected change in the political direction of the US. Have those signals been reversed as a result?
Let’s start with some general indicators.
The US ISM Manufacturing Purchasing Managers Index reported by the Institute for Supply Management fell briefly into contraction territory last August, which is often a presage for economic weakness ahead. However, it recovered handsomely in the following months and just printed the highest number in two years.
A significant reversal to the upside was also observed in the latest National Federation of Independent Business (“NFIB”) Optimism Index for Small Businesses – the real wealth generators in the economy, which after some weakness mid-year just printed the highest level since the Financial Crisis of 2008.
Not to be outdone, US investors have pushed equities to new historical highs, as shown in the graph above (by finviz.com).
So things are looking up in the US right? Perhaps so… but the railroads aren’t feeling it.
Rail intermodal traffic registers the long-haul movement of shipping containers and truck trailers by rail whenever combined with (a much shorter) truck movement at one or both ends. It covers a broad range of goods that Americans consume regularly, from laptops to frozen chickens, and is thus a great indicator of how consumers are doing. Given the huge importance of consumption for the US economy as a whole, for us this is the most revealing category.
The grey cloud in our rail shipment graphs (in units) depicted henceforth shows the maximum and minimum volume range recorded for the same week over the five years prior (2011-2015). The green line shows the readings for 2016, now for the full year.
After a strong start of the year, rail intermodal traffic started to underperform, although some pickup was observed later in the year. Aggregating the numbers by year provides a clearer picture, and here are the figures since 2006 (in MM units):
For the first time since the lead up to the 2009 recession, yearly values are down versus the prior year. In percentage terms the 2015-16 decline is almost the same as the 2007-08 decline, when the Financial Crisis was raging.
While clearly not a good sign this is just a warning given the still high transactional levels compared to prior years. If weakness persists in this category into 2017 then we will start getting really, really worried about the broader condition of the US economy.
What about housing, another key industry? The forest products category includes lumber, a major input of house construction, and is shown in the graph below:
Volumes were generally weak throughout the year, setting new five year lows. However, as per US Census Bureau data privately-owned housing completions in November came out at a very solid 15% (±13.5%) above the revised October estimate and a whopping 25% (±15.0%) over the prior year. How can these two seemingly disparate trends be reconciled?
The answer might be in the brackets after the percentage growth figures. These statistics are estimated from sample surveys, so the Census Bureau provides a standard error to indicate a range where the real number might actually lie. And quite a wide one in fact. As such, the actual year-on-year figure could be somewhere in the range +10% to +40%. Given falling volumes transported by the railways even the lower estimate from these surveys looks optimistic. Another category to keep a close eye on.
The motor vehicles and parts graph shown below includes all sorts of vehicles (used and new), passenger car and bus bodies, parts and accessories and other related equipment:
This industry is of course very important for US manufacturing. Last July we noted that it had been the bright spot out of all the categories, recording new cycle highs up until then. And while that persisted for a while longer some weakness sipped in towards the end of the year.
Still, volumes reached the highest level in 2016 since the go-go days of 2007. Not bad at all, but hopefully that year-end weakness is nothing to worry about… because as we shall see other industries – particularly in the primary sector – continue to struggle.
After a terrible performance through 2015, metallic ores (shown above), which include all kinds of ores (iron, copper, lead, zinc and so forth) and waste scrap, managed to do even worse in 2016. Not much reason for optimism here (unless as a contrarian).
The same can be said about coal, with volumes collapsing since the start of the year. Not even the recovery in the second half could avoid a miserable performance overall.
What about oil production?
Using rail shipments of crude oil and refined products to gauge production levels is a little tricky because volumes can be diverted to pipelines and/or the mix can change. That being said, the declines in rail shipments throughout 2016 are consistent with the drop in US production as reported by the IEA, shown in the graph below (in MM bopd):
The silver lining is that the weekly oil rig count as reported by Baker Hughes has responded positively to the recent recovery in crude oil prices, as shown in the graph below (with WTI pushed forward a number of weeks):
So we may see some pickup in activity going forward, as long as prices continue to hold. Other than that it’s pretty safe to say that the US extractive sector as a whole had another miserable year.
And last but certainly not least, here are the rail shipments of grains:
Volumes exploded higher in the second half of the year. The flipside of such volume increases was a continued correction in grain prices, particularly in corn and wheat (soybeans managed to hold up). Great news for consumers, but terrible for farmers: according to the latest USDA estimates in 2016 net farm income dropped to the lowest level in six years.
***
If so many industries continued to struggle in 2016, with some key ones even deteriorating towards year-end, how come small businesses are so wildly optimistic?
Perhaps the graph above, taken from the same NFIB small business report, provides the answer: while actual sales have languished expectations of future activity have gone through the roof. And that differential between actual versus expectations reached the highest level in many years.
It is hard to dissociate this from all the economic promises of the incoming Administration. That may explain why small business owners across the US – and indeed stock investors – have become so optimistic. However, the hard goods-traded reality continues to show some concerning signs of weakness.
Whether or not the new economic policies will prove to be successful the railways will likely feel it before anyone else. That’s why we will continue to keep an eye on the data.
And with that, here’s our economic wish for 2017: Make Railways Great Again!
- Artist's Impression Of Obama's Farewell Address
- Why Ridiculous Official Propaganda Still Works
Submitted by CJ Hopkins via Counterpunch.org,
For students of official propaganda, manipulation of public opinion, psychological conditioning, and emotional coercion, it doesn’t get much better than this. As Trump and his army of Goldman Sachs guys, corporate CEOs, and Christian zealots slouch toward inauguration day, we are being treated to a master class in coordinated media manipulation that is making Goebbels look like an amateur. This may not be immediately apparent, given the seemingly risible nature of most of the garbage we are being barraged with, but once one understands the actual purpose of such official propaganda, everything starts to make more sense.
Chief among the common misconceptions about the way official propaganda works is the notion that its goal is to deceive the public into believing things that are not “the truth” (that Trump is a Russian agent, for example, or that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, or that the terrorists hate us for our freedom, et cetera). However, while official propagandists are definitely pleased if anyone actually believes whatever lies they are selling, deception is not their primary aim.
The primary aim of official propaganda is to generate an “official narrative” that can be mindlessly repeated by the ruling classes and those who support and identify with them. This official narrative does not have to make sense, or to stand up to any sort of serious scrutiny. Its factualness is not the point. The point is to draw a Maginot line, a defensive ideological boundary, between “the truth” as defined by the ruling classes and any other “truth” that contradicts their narrative.
Imagine this Maginot line as a circular wall surrounded by inhospitable territory. Inside the wall is “normal” society, gainful employment, career advancement, and all the other considerable benefits of cooperating with the ruling classes. Outside the wall is poverty, anxiety, social and professional stigmatization, and various other forms of suffering. Which side of the wall do you want to be on? Every day, in countless ways, each of us are asked and have to answer this question. Conform, and there’s a place for you inside. Refuse, and … well, good luck out there.
In openly despotic societies, the stakes involved in making this choice (to conform or dissent) are often life and death. In our relatively liberal Western societies (for those of us who are not militant guerillas), the consequences of not conforming to the official narrative are usually subtler. Despite that, the pressure is still intense. Conforming to the consensus “reality” generated by these official narratives is price of admission to the inner sanctum, where the jobs, money, professional prestige, and the other rewards of Capitalism are. Conforming does not require belief. It requires allegiance and rote obedience. What one actually believes is completely irrelevant, as long as one parrots the official narrative.
In short, official propaganda is not designed to deceive the public (no more than the speeches in an actor’s script are intended to deceive the actor who speaks them). It is designed to be absorbed and repeated, no matter how implausible or preposterous it might be. Actually, it is often most effective when those who are forced to robotically repeat it know that it is utter nonsense, as the humiliation of having to do so cements their allegiance to the ruling classes (this phenomenon being a standard feature of the classic Stockholm Syndrome model, and authoritarian conditioning generally).
The current “Russian hacking” hysteria is a perfect example of how this works. No one aside from total morons actually believes this official narrative (the substance of which is beyond ridiculous), not even the stooges selling it to us. This, however, is not a problem, because it isn’t intended to be believed … it is intended to be accepted and repeated, more or less like religious dogma. (It doesn’t matter what actually happened, i.e., whether the “hack” was a hack or a leak, or who the hackers or leakers were, or who they may have been working for, or what whoever’s motives may have been. What matters is that the ruling classes have issued a new official narrative and are demanding that every “normal” American stand up and swear allegiance to it.)
The ruling classes are not exactly making it easy for their followers this time. Their new official narrative (let’s go ahead and call it “The Putinist Putsch to Destroy Democracy”) is so completely fatuous that it’s beyond embarrassing. The plot is more or less what you’d expect from a mediocre young adult novel or a Game of Thrones-type fantasy series. And if that wasn’t already humiliating enough for the liberals being asked to pretend to believe it, the PR folks in charge couldn’t even be bothered to assemble a new collection of liars to market their childish fairy tale for them. Not only are they insisting that liberals take the word of the “Intelligence Community” and the mainstream media that sold the world the “Saddam Has Secret WMDs” hoax, they actually dispatched James R. Clapper to sit there, in more or less the same spot he sat in the last time he lied to Congress, and do his dog and pony show again.
Meanwhile, the ruling classes’ papers of record, which cosmopolitan liberals rely on to provide a simulation of “serious journalism,” highbrow “arts and culture,” and so on, have descended to the level of the National Enquirer. Among the recent highlights was The Washington Post‘s “Russians Hacked the Vermont Power Grid” story, which it turned out involved neither Russians nor hackers, nor the Vermont power grid’s actual computers, and was basically just another made-up story, like the one about Putin’s Fake News Army. The New York Times, which has also been dutifully rolling out the new official narrative, has taken the leash off Charles M. Blow (aka “The Withering Gaze”), who is accusing Trump of being Russia’s appointment” and proclaiming his election “an act of war.” And now, as I was writing this piece, they hit us with the “Golden Showers” story, in which Trump paid a bunch of Russian hookers to pee on the bed where Obama slept. Any day now we are going to be told that Elvis is secretly working with Putin to deploy a Zhirinovskian gravitational weapon in a UFO disguised as Jesus that Assange and Snowden will personally pilot across the Atlantic to sink America. It’s like some kind of loyalty test in which the ruling classes are trying to determine just how far they can go with this crap before liberals refuse to salute any more of it.
The point of all this propaganda is to delegitimize Donald Trump, and to prophylactically reassert the neoliberal ruling classes’ monopoly on power, “reality,” and “truth.” In case this wasn’t already abundantly clear, the neoliberal ruling classes have no intention of giving up control of the global capitalist pseudo-empire they’ve been working to establish these last sixty years. They’re going to delegitimize and stigmatize Trump (and any other symbol of nationalist backlash or resistance to transnational Capitalism), bide their time for the next four years, and then install another of their loyal servants … after which life will go back to “normal,” and liberals will do their best to forget this unfortunate period where they pretended to believe this insipid neo-McCarthyite nonsense.
If I wasn’t worried that Trump is going to launch an all-out War on Islam, or that one of “our boys” in the tanks Obama has theatrically ordered to the Russian border was going to go bonkers and try to “git some” for Clinton, I’d be looking forward to seeing just how batshit crazy it’s going to get.
- "China's Next Time Bomb" – A Look Inside The Insane World Of China's Bitcoin Traders
The recent tumble in bitcoin, driven by a stampede of Chinese sellers who until last week were willing buyers at any price, has exposed the weakest link in bitcoin’s until recently exponential rise: the mood and social psychology of Chinese momentum and bubble chasers, who like clockwork rush into any one given asset, bid it up to ridiculous levels, watch the bubble burst, before moving on to the next bubble.
The good news is that courtesy of $25 trillion in local savings, or more than double the amount in the US, the bubble eventually returns to where it burst. The bad news is that in the meantime, those who chased the original bubble lose most if not all of their money.
Unfortunately, for most of China’s bitcoin traders, the bad news may be just starting.
Take the story of Ding Wen, who by the age of 34 had built up a personal fortune of more than two million yuan after years of hard work at an internet company in Nanjing, in east China’s Jiangsu province. But, as SCMP recounts his tale, Wen saw most of that wealth go up in smoke on January 5, when China’s bitcoin market crashed, sending the price of the virtual currency plunging 40 per cent in just a few hours after lunch.
With the market in free fall, Ding was unable to log into his account with China’s biggest bitcoin trading platform, Huobi, meaning he could not sell off his holdings or top up his principal to meet the margin call. By the time he managed to log on in the evening, most of the bitcoins in his account had been compulsorily sold off by Huobi for 6,361 yuan each, lower than his purchase price of 8,101 yuan. This included the part of his investment he had bought using a loan he obtained from Huobi by pledging the bitcoins he owned originally.
“I have taken on big risks when making leveraged betting, but the collapse of the trading system made me unable to run stop-loss orders, so I think the platform should compensate for investors’ losses,” Ding said.
The platform disagrees.
Ahead of the market crash, Ding had borrowed 995 million yuan from Huobi by pledging a principal consisting of the 409 bitcoins he already owned. He then bought a further 1,228 bitcoins with the loan. Most of his holdings were compulsorily sold out by Huobi during the price collapse while he was unable to access his account.
Meanwhile, Wu Xing, head of marketing at Huobi, said the log-in delay was caused by a torrent of visits and selling orders, which exceeded the capacity of the website. “[The loss] was due to irresistible factors and not included in the compensation scope. We are sorry and understand the feelings of the investors,” she said.
So to recap… trading the extremely volatile bitcoin on massive, unregulated margin, in an exchange that arbitrarily locks out its clients?
What can possibly go wrong.
* * *
According to SCMP, “many analysts and investors fear China’s bitcoin market is quickly turning into another time bomb like the scandal-hit peer-to-peer (P2P) lending sector. A series of P2P lending platform frauds rocked the country last year and washed away tens of billions of yuan of investment from small investors, creating a headache for local and central governments, which feared social unrest.”
Now speculation, derivative products, leveraged betting and program trading appear to be spreading in the largely unregulated bitcoin market. Such practices are thought to be responsible for pushing up the price of bitcoin by more than 260 per cent since early 2016.
The market hit a historic high of 8,995 yuan on January 5… Just ahead of the crash.
Most of the transactions are happening on three privately owned platforms or through P2P trading.
Data provider Bitcoinity shows trading volume in China accounted for more than 98% of the global total during the past 30 days amid more pronounced price fluctuations. Until now, no regulator has overseen this market, which sees daily turnover worth tens of billions of yuan. However, things appear to be changing fast.
After the great bitcoin crash, the People’s Bank of China announced on Wednesday afternoon that it had sent inspection teams to the country’s top three bitcoin trading platforms to scrutinise their practices. It is the first regulatory move China’s central bank has made publicly involving the virtual currency.
The PBOC has been in talks with the platforms from time to time in private since 2013 and asked them for data and information, according to an executive from a major trading platform, who asked not to be named. But the authorities have not formally listed bitcoin under their regulatory framework. Nor have they issued any rules to govern the market.
Like all other central banks, the PBOC defines bitcoin as a commodity rather than a currency, which ruled it out of their existing regulatory coverage in late 2013. Aurélien Menant, founder and chief executive of Gatecoin, a cryptocurrency and blockchain assets trading platform based in Hong Kong, said: “Given the dominant role of Chinese exchanges, which represent 95 per cent of global bitcoin trading activity, at more than 50 billion yuan every day, it’s likely that the PBOC recognises the growing significance of this new and so far unregulated alternative financial market.
“The PBOC has been engaging with the major cryptocurrency exchanges in China for several years, but given the sudden price movements and high volumes traded over the past few weeks, it’s very clear that now it just wanted to step up their checks on market manipulation and money laundering.”
In an announcement issued on Wednesday, the central bank said it was joining forces with the Beijing Financial Bureau to probe trading platforms including Huobi and OKCoin to check if they were running in accordance with foreign-exchange management, anti-money-laundering and trading exchange rules.
Mainland media reported in recent months that bitcoins had become a popular tool for investors to export money out of China, circumventing capital controls that had been tightened by the regulators amid the yuan’s sharp depreciation. Cheung Chun-yin, a PwC China fintech partner, said it was possible for bitcoin holders in China to circumvent domestic capital control limits by selling bitcoin to an overseas buyer in exchange for foreign currency.
“In theory, the bitcoin market is borderless, and as long as you could find a buyer overseas, you would be able to get US dollars, and the trade could happen without leaving a trace, with no record in the traditional banking system,” he said, adding that the volume of capital flow through this channel was likely to be quite limited.
Feeling attacked, the local industry quickly rose up in defense. Zhao Dong, owner of Jiandong Tech, a company that buys and sells bitcoin, agreed that the actual amount of capital leaving the country through bitcoin was not likely to be very high.
“Among the 16 million bitcoins already dug out across the world by now, there are around four to five million held by the Chinese. That already caps the total value, while most of the owners are more interested in short-term speculation on the mainland market than exporting them for foreign currencies,” he said. Cheung said that although neither the mainland nor Hong Kong financial regulators had included bitcoin in the existing regulatory framework, bitcoin-related activities were “evolving and bearing the features of traditional financial market activities” and overlapping with the traditional financial system. That makes it more important than ever that the regulators start to take notice.
The biggest problem for the Chinese bitcoin market, according to Zhao, is that “the trading platforms are facing the challenge of having to prove themselves innocent” because many investors accuse them of inside trading or market manipulation. The market boom and the quick build-up of leverage had left the market in urgent need of official regulation, he said. Chen Yunfeng, a senior partner with Zhonglun W&D law firm, based in Shanghai, said he was dealing with an increasing number of bitcoin-related disputes. These included cases of bitcoin theft and scams in which investors have been unable to verify their trading partners.
“The bitcoin market is facing great risks, with turnover and leverage climbing quickly, and mixed up with unregulated foreign-currency trading and money laundering. I think it is time that the PBOC prepared new policies,” he added.
Industry players said the PBOC was mulling the idea of introducing third-party custodian services to govern the market by taking care of the account records, cash or bitcoins on behalf of the platforms. In early August, investor confidence in bitcoin took another knock when Bitfinex, a prominent Hong Kong-based digital currency exchange, reported the theft of about US$65.8 million worth of bitcoins. About 119,756 bitcoins were lost in a security breach, the company said.
In early 2014, Japan-based bitcoin exchange MtGox collapsed over the loss of nearly US$390 million worth of the virtual currency. Police later arrested its chief executive, Mark Karpeles, who was suspected of having accessed the computer system of the exchange and falsifying data on its outstanding balance.
* * *
Meanwhile, overnight BTCChina announced (and other exchanges allegedly followed) that it had suspended its margin loan service indefinitely. The move came after the exchange received “informal guidance” from the PBoC, which has been more actively engaged with domestic bitcoin exchanges amid the run-up in bitcoin prices seen at the start of the year. While the move may flush out much of the bubbly euphoria, it may also lead to a far more stable market.
Alternatively, it may just accelerate the blow up of China’s “bitcoin time bomb.”
- Some Election Interference Is More Equal Than Others – How Ukraine Meddled On Behalf Of Clinton
Submitted by Mike Krieger via Liberty Blitzkrieg blog,
A couple of days ago, Politico published a fascinating piece describing how factions associated with the current Ukrainian government apparently interfered in the U.S. election on behalf of Hillary Clinton. The findings seem pretty damning, and certainly warrant at least some conversation within the American media given the 24/7 obsession with Russia. Nevertheless, most of you have probably never heard of this saga, since when it comes to the corporate media news cycle, some election interference is more equal than others.
The article is lengthy, and can be confusing at times given all the moving parts, but I highly encourage you to read it. Ukrainian interference in the election can be traced to essentially two sources. First, there was the apparent collaboration between the Ukrainian embassy in Washington D.C. and a highly paid Ukrainian-American DNC consultant, Alexandra Chalupa. The second angle is far more disturbing, and involves the publicization of a so-called ledger demonstrating corruption between Paul Manafort and pro-Russian elements in Ukraine, by a parliamentarian named Serhiy Leshchenko. Bizarrely, the investigation was effectively dropped after Trump won the election, making you wonder if there was anything really there in the first place.
What follows are excerpts from the excellent piece, Ukrainian Efforts to Sabotage Trump Backfire:
Donald Trump wasn’t the only presidential candidate whose campaign was boosted by officials of a former Soviet bloc country.
Ukrainian government officials tried to help Hillary Clinton and undermine Trump by publicly questioning his fitness for office. They also disseminated documents implicating a top Trump aide in corruption and suggested they were investigating the matter, only to back away after the election. And they helped Clinton’s allies research damaging information on Trump and his advisers, a Politico investigation found.
A Ukrainian-American operative who was consulting for the Democratic National Committee met with top officials in the Ukrainian Embassy in Washington in an effort to expose ties between Trump, top campaign aide Paul Manafort and Russia, according to people with direct knowledge of the situation.
The Ukrainian efforts had an impact in the race, helping to force Manafort’s resignation and advancing the narrative that Trump’s campaign was deeply connected to Ukraine’s foe to the east, Russia. But they were far less concerted or centrally directed than Russia’s alleged hacking and dissemination of Democratic emails.
Politico’s investigation found evidence of Ukrainian government involvement in the race that appears to strain diplomatic protocol dictating that governments refrain from engaging in one another’s elections.
The Ukrainian antipathy for Trump’s team — and alignment with Clinton’s — can be traced back to late 2013. That’s when the country’s president, Viktor Yanukovych, whom Manafort had been advising, abruptly backed out of a European Union pact linked to anti-corruption reforms. Instead, Yanukovych entered into a multibillion-dollar bailout agreement with Russia, sparking protests across Ukraine and prompting Yanukovych to flee the country to Russia under Putin’s protection.
In the ensuing crisis, Russian troops moved into the Ukrainian territory of Crimea, and Manafort dropped off the radar.
Manafort’s work for Yanukovych caught the attention of a veteran Democratic operative named Alexandra Chalupa, who had worked in the White House Office of Public Liaison during the Clinton administration. Chalupa went on to work as a staffer, then as a consultant, for Democratic National Committee. The DNC paid her $412,000 from 2004 to June 2016, according to Federal Election Commission records, though she also was paid by other clients during that time, including Democratic campaigns and the DNC’s arm for engaging expatriate Democrats around the world.
She said she shared her concern with Ukraine’s ambassador to the U.S., Valeriy Chaly, and one of his top aides, Oksana Shulyar, during a March 2016 meeting at the Ukrainian Embassy. According to someone briefed on the meeting, Chaly said that Manafort was very much on his radar, but that he wasn’t particularly concerned about the operative’s ties to Trump since he didn’t believe Trump stood much of a chance of winning the GOP nomination, let alone the presidency.
Chalupa said the embassy also worked directly with reporters researching Trump, Manafort and Russia to point them in the right directions. She added, though, “they were being very protective and not speaking to the press as much as they should have. I think they were being careful because their situation was that they had to be very, very careful because they could not pick sides. It’s a political issue, and they didn’t want to get involved politically because they couldn’t.”
Shulyar vehemently denied working with reporters or with Chalupa on anything related to Trump or Manafort, explaining “we were stormed by many reporters to comment on this subject, but our clear and adamant position was not to give any comment [and] not to interfere into the campaign affairs.”
Shulyar said her work with Chalupa “didn’t involve the campaign,” and she specifically stressed that “We have never worked to research and disseminate damaging information about Donald Trump and Paul Manafort.”
But Andrii Telizhenko, who worked as a political officer in the Ukrainian Embassy under Shulyar, said she instructed him to help Chalupa research connections between Trump, Manafort and Russia. “Oksana said that if I had any information, or knew other people who did, then I should contact Chalupa,” recalled Telizhenko, who is now a political consultant in Kiev. “They were coordinating an investigation with the Hillary team on Paul Manafort with Alexandra Chalupa,” he said, adding “Oksana was keeping it all quiet,” but “the embassy worked very closely with” Chalupa.
In fact, sources familiar with the effort say that Shulyar specifically called Telizhenko into a meeting with Chalupa to provide an update on an American media outlet’s ongoing investigation into Manafort.
Telizhenko recalled that Chalupa told him and Shulyar that, “If we can get enough information on Paul [Manafort] or Trump’s involvement with Russia, she can get a hearing in Congress by September.”
Sure seems like pretty close coordination between a DNC consultant and the official embassy of Ukraine in the midst of a Presidential election.
Nevertheless, that’s small potatoes compared to what happened within the Ukrainian parliament itself. As Politico notes:
While it’s not uncommon for outside operatives to serve as intermediaries between governments and reporters, one of the more damaging Russia-related stories for the Trump campaign — and certainly for Manafort — can be traced more directly to the Ukrainian government.
Documents released by an independent Ukrainian government agency — and publicized by a parliamentarian — appeared to show $12.7 million in cash payments that were earmarked for Manafort by the Russia-aligned party of the deposed former president, Yanukovych.
The New York Times, in the August story revealing the ledgers’ existence, reported that the payments earmarked for Manafort were “a focus” of an investigation by Ukrainian anti-corruption officials, while CNN reported days later that the FBI was pursuing an overlapping inquiry.
Clinton’s campaign seized on the story to advance Democrats’ argument that Trump’s campaign was closely linked to Russia. The ledger represented “more troubling connections between Donald Trump’s team and pro-Kremlin elements in Ukraine,” Robby Mook, Clinton’s campaign manager, said in a statement. He demanded that Trump “disclose campaign chair Paul Manafort’s and all other campaign employees’ and advisers’ ties to Russian or pro-Kremlin entities, including whether any of Trump’s employees or advisers are currently representing and or being paid by them.”
A former Ukrainian investigative journalist and current parliamentarian named Serhiy Leshchenko, who was elected in 2014 as part of Poroshenko’s party, held a news conference to highlight the ledgers, and to urge Ukrainian and American law enforcement to aggressively investigate Manafort.
“I believe and understand the basis of these payments are totally against the law — we have the proof from these books,” Leshchenko said during the news conference, which attracted international media coverage. “If Mr. Manafort denies any allegations, I think he has to be interrogated into this case and prove his position that he was not involved in any misconduct on the territory of Ukraine,” Leshchenko added.
These are some really serious allegations, which makes his current behavior, which I’ll highlight later, that much more concerning.
Manafort denied receiving any off-books cash from Yanukovych’s Party of Regions, and said that he had never been contacted about the ledger by Ukrainian or American investigators, later telling POLITICO “I was just caught in the crossfire.”
The scrutiny around the ledgers — combined with that from other stories about his Ukraine work — proved too much, and he stepped down from the Trump campaign less than a week after the Times story.
At the time, Leshchenko suggested that his motivation was partly to undermine Trump. “For me, it was important to show not only the corruption aspect, but that he is [a] pro-Russian candidate who can break the geopolitical balance in the world,” Leshchenko told the Financial Times about two weeks after his news conference. The newspaper noted that Trump’s candidacy had spurred “Kiev’s wider political leadership to do something they would never have attempted before: intervene, however indirectly, in a U.S. election,” and the story quoted Leshchenko asserting that the majority of Ukraine’s politicians are “on Hillary Clinton’s side.”
Well, well, well…but there’s more.
An operative who has worked extensively in Ukraine, including as an adviser to Poroshenko, said it was highly unlikely that either Leshchenko or the anti-corruption bureau would have pushed the issue without at least tacit approval from Poroshenko or his closest allies.
“It was something that Poroshenko was probably aware of and could have stopped if he wanted to,” said the operative.
And, almost immediately after Trump’s stunning victory over Clinton, questions began mounting about the investigations into the ledgers — and the ledgers themselves.
An official with the anti-corruption bureau told a Ukrainian newspaper, “Mr. Manafort does not have a role in this case.”
And, while the anti-corruption bureau told Politico late last month that a “general investigation [is] still ongoing” of the ledger, it said Manafort is not a target of the investigation. “As he is not the Ukrainian citizen, [the anti-corruption bureau] by the law couldn’t investigate him personally,” the bureau said in a statement.
Note that the only thing that changed is Trump won the election, which apparently caused the Ukrainian government to backtrack on the entire thing after its sabotage failed to deliver the desire outcome.
Some Poroshenko critics have gone further, suggesting that the bureau is backing away from investigating because the ledgers might have been doctored or even forged.
And in an interview this week, Manafort, who re-emerged as an informal advisor to Trump after Election Day, suggested that the ledgers were inauthentic and called their publication “a politically motivated false attack on me. My role as a paid consultant was public. There was nothing off the books, but the way that this was presented tried to make it look shady.”
As shameless as all of this is, it doesn’t end there.
Poroshenko’s allies are scrambling to figure out how to build a relationship with Trump, who is known for harboring and prosecuting grudges for years.
A delegation of Ukrainian parliamentarians allied with Poroshenko last month traveled to Washington partly to try to make inroads with the Trump transition team, but they were unable to secure a meeting, according to a Washington foreign policy operative familiar with the trip. And operatives in Washington and Kiev say that after the election, Poroshenko met in Kiev with top executives from the Washington lobbying firm BGR — including Ed Rogers and Lester Munson — about how to navigate the Trump regime.
Weeks later, BGR reported to the Department of Justice that the government of Ukraine would pay the firm $50,000 a month to “provide strategic public relations and government affairs counsel,” including “outreach to U.S. government officials, non-government organizations, members of the media and other individuals.”
The fact that foreign influence is purchased like this is simply disgusting, but I digress.
In fact, I’ve saved the best for last…
The Poroshenko regime’s standing with Trump is considered so dire that the president’s allies after the election actually reached out to make amends with — and even seek assistance from — Manafort, according to two operatives familiar with Ukraine’s efforts to make inroads with Trump.
After essentially claiming that Manafort was a hired gun for Putin to intervene in the internal affairs of Ukraine, the government is now reaching out to him? You don’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to see something’s not adding up here. Was the entire investigation a fraud to help Hillary Clinton win the election? If so, isn’t that election interference?
Nevertheless, I somehow I doubt we’ll see America’s three stooges, Graham, Rubio and McCain make a big stink over this one.
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