- One Reader Tried To Get The Recording Of Yellen's "World-Saving Phone Call"; This Is What The Fed Replied
Two weeks ago we showed something striking: while combing through Janet Yellen’s recently disclosed daily diary, we noticed that on February 11 and 12, the Fed chair held two critical phone calls, one with BOE governor Marc Carney and the next day, with BOE president Mario Draghi.
But what was especially shocking, and the reason why we dubbed them “the phone calls that saved the world“, is that the first call took place quite literally the very hour that the market hit its 2016 lows.
Zoomed out:
We asked if thanks to Yellen’s diary we got “the closest glimpse of Keyser Soze the global Plunge Protection Team communication by phone call?” before concluding that “only the NSA knows.”
This was not enough for one of our readers who decided to find out more and as a result, he sent a FOIA request to the Fed on the day of the post, in which he requested the audio file or any documentation of the nature of the telephone call between Yellen and Carney and, subsequently, Draghi.
The Fed’s response: a resounding “no”, for the following reason: “the responsive document contains nonpublic commercial or financial information” and while “the document containing the exempt information was reviewed… no reasonably segregable nonexempt information was found.”
Case closed.
Of course, if the phone contains the information many suspect it does, then the Fed is probably wondering why is someone so naive as to ask how the sausage is made when they can just BTFD and live happily ever after.
More seriously, when the Fed parades around with its “transparency” it clearly has this in mind.
But when it comes to truly important things like the content of a phone call that may very well have prevented the market from collapsing, well you better work at Goldman Sachs to get that particular confidential Fed data…
- The Fed Sends A Frightening Letter To JPMorgan, Corporate Media Yawns
Submitted by Pam Martens and Russ Martens via WallStreetOnParade.com,
Yesterday the Federal Reserve released a 19-page letter that it and the FDIC had issued to Jamie Dimon, the Chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase, on April 12 as a result of its failure to present a credible plan for winding itself down if the bank failed. The letter carried frightening passages and large blocks of redacted material in critical areas, instilling in any careful reader a sense of panic about the U.S. financial system.
A rational observer of Wall Street’s serial hubris might have expected some key segments of this letter to make it into the business press. A mere eight years ago the United States experienced a complete meltdown of its financial system, leading to the worst economic collapse since the Great Depression. President Obama and regulators have been assuring us over these intervening eight years that things are under control as a result of the Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation. But according to the letter the Fed and FDIC issued on April 12 to JPMorgan Chase, the country’s largest bank with over $2 trillion in assets and $51 trillion in notional amounts of derivatives, things are decidedly not under control.
At the top of page 11, the Federal regulators reveal that they have “identified a deficiency” in JPMorgan’s wind-down plan which if not properly addressed could “pose serious adverse effects to the financial stability of the United States.” Why didn’t JPMorgan’s Board of Directors or its legions of lawyers catch this?
It’s important to parse the phrasing of that sentence. The Federal regulators didn’t say JPMorgan could pose a threat to its shareholders or Wall Street or the markets. It said the potential threat was to “the financial stability of the United States.”
That statement should strike fear into even the likes of presidential candidate Hillary Clinton who has been tilting at the shadows in shadow banks while buying into the Paul Krugman nonsense that “Dodd-Frank Financial Reform Is Working” when it comes to the behemoth banks on Wall Street.
How could one bank, even one as big and global as JPMorgan Chase, bring down the whole financial stability of the United States? Because, as the U.S. Treasury’s Office of Financial Research (OFR) has explained in detail and plotted in pictures (see below), five big banks in the U.S. have high contagion risk to each other. Which bank poses the highest contagion risk? JPMorgan Chase.
The OFR study was authored by Meraj Allahrakha, Paul Glasserman, and H. Peyton Young, who found the following:
“…the default of a bank with a higher connectivity index would have a greater impact on the rest of the banking system because its shortfall would spill over onto other financial institutions, creating a cascade that could lead to further defaults. High leverage, measured as the ratio of total assets to Tier 1 capital, tends to be associated with high financial connectivity and many of the largest institutions are high on both dimensions…The larger the bank, the greater the potential spillover if it defaults; the higher its leverage, the more prone it is to default under stress; and the greater its connectivity index, the greater is the share of the default that cascades onto the banking system. The product of these three factors provides an overall measure of the contagion risk that the bank poses for the financial system.”
The Federal Reserve and FDIC are clearly fingering their worry beads over the issue of “liquidity” in the next Wall Street crisis. That obviously has something to do with the fact that the Fed has received scathing rebuke from the public for secretly funneling over $13 trillion in cumulative, below-market-rate loans, often at one-half percent or less, to the big U.S. and foreign banks during the 2007-2010 crisis. The two regulators released background documents yesterday as part of flunking the wind-down plans (living wills) of five major Wall Street banks. (In addition to JPMorgan Chase, plans were rejected at Wells Fargo, Bank of America, State Street and Bank of New York Mellon.) One paragraph in the Resolution Plan Assessment Framework and Firm Determinations (2016) used the word “liquidity” 11 times:
“Firms must be able to reliably estimate and meet their liquidity needs prior to, and in, resolution. In this regard, firms must be able to track and measure their liquidity sources and uses at all material entities under normal and stressed conditions. They must also conduct liquidity stress tests that appropriately capture the effect of stresses and impediments to the movement of funds. Holding liquidity in a manner that allows the firm to quickly respond to demands from stakeholders and counterparties, including regulatory authorities in other jurisdictions and financial market utilities, is critical to the execution of the plan. Maintaining sufficient and appropriately positioned liquidity also allows the subsidiaries to continue to operate while the firm is being resolved. In assessing the firms’ plans with regard to liquidity, the agencies evaluated whether the companies were able to appropriately forecast the size and location of liquidity needed to execute their resolution plans and whether those forecasts were incorporated into the firms’ day-to-day liquidity decision making processes. The agencies also reviewed the current size and positioning of the firms’ liquidity resources to assess their adequacy relative to the estimated liquidity needed in resolution under the firm’s scenario and strategy. Further, the agencies evaluated whether the firms had linked their process for determining when to file for bankruptcy to the estimate of liquidity needed to execute their preferred resolution strategy.”
Apparently, the Federal regulators believe JPMorgan Chase has a problem with the “location,” “size and positioning” of its liquidity under its current plan. The April 12 letter to JPMorgan Chase addressed that issue as follows:
“JPMC does not have an appropriate model and process for estimating and maintaining sufficient liquidity at, or readily available to, material entities in resolution…JPMC’s liquidity profile is vulnerable to adverse actions by third parties.”
The regulators expressed the further view that JPMorgan was placing too much “reliance on funds in foreign entities that may be subject to defensive ring-fencing during a time of financial stress.” The use of the term “ring-fencing” suggests that the regulators fear that foreign jurisdictions might lay claim to the liquidity to protect their own financial counterparty interests or investors.
JPMorgan’s sprawling derivatives portfolio that encompasses $51 trillion notional amount as of December 31, 2015 is also causing angst at the Fed and FDIC. The regulators wanted more granular detail on what would happen if JPMorgan’s counterparties refused to continue doing business with it if rating agencies cut its credit ratings. The regulators asked for a “narrative describing at least one pathway” for winding down the derivatives portfolio, taking into account a number of factors, including “the costs and challenges of obtaining timely consents from counterparties and potential acquirers (step-in banks).” The regulators wanted to see the “losses and liquidity required to support the active wind-down” of the derivatives portfolio “incorporated into estimates of the firm’s resolution capital and liquidity execution needs.”
According to the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency’s (OCC) derivatives report as of December 31, 2015, JPMorgan Chase is only centrally clearing 37 percent of its derivatives while a whopping 63 percent of its derivatives remain in over-the-counter contracts between itself and unnamed counterparties. The Dodd-Frank reform legislation had promised the public that derivatives would all become exchange traded or centrally cleared. Indeed, on March 7 President Obama falsely stated at a press conference that when it comes to derivatives “you have clearinghouses that account for the vast majority of trades taking place.”
But the OCC has now released four separate reports for each quarter of 2015 showing just the opposite of what the President told the press and the public on March 7. In its most recent report the OCC, the regulator of national banks, states that “In the fourth quarter of 2015, 36.9 percent of the derivatives market was centrally cleared.”
Equally disturbing, the most dangerous area of derivatives, the credit derivatives that blew up AIG and necessitated a $185 billion taxpayer bailout, remain predominately over the counter. According to the latest OCC report, only 16.8 percent of credit derivatives are being centrally cleared. At JPMorgan Chase, more than 80 percent of its credit derivatives are still over-the-counter.
Wall Street Mega Banks Are Highly Interconnected: Stock Symbols Are as Follows: C=Citigroup; MS=Morgan Stanley; JPM=JPMorgan Chase; GS=Goldman Sachs; BAC=Bank of America; WFC=Wells Fargo.
Three of the five largest U.S. banks (JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Wells Fargo) have now had their wind-down plans rejected by the Federal agency insuring bank deposits (FDIC) and the Federal agency (Federal Reserve) that secretly sluiced $13 trillion in rollover loans to the insolvent or teetering banks in the last epic crisis that continues to cripple the country’s economic growth prospects. Maybe it’s time for the major newspapers of this country to start accurately reporting on the scale of today’s banking problem.
- The Difference Between Bernie's & Hillary's Tax Plan Explained In 1 Simple Cartoon
On the one hand…
One can't help but look at the current debacle and consider whether, just as we warned, The Cloward-Piven strategy is reaching a pivotal moment…
In the mid-sixties at the height of the “social revolution” the line between democratic benevolence and outright communism became rather blurry. The Democratic Party, which controlled the presidency and both houses of Congress, was used as the springboard by social engineers to introduce a new era of welfare initiatives enacted in the name of “defending the poor”, also known as the “Great Society Programs”. These initiatives, however, were driven by far more subversive and extreme motivations, and have been expanded on by every presidency since, Republican and Democrat alike.
At Columbia University, sociologist professors Richard Cloward and Francis Fox Piven introduced a political strategy in 1966 in an article entitled 'The Weight Of The Poor: A Strategy To End Poverty'. This article outlined a plan that they believed would eventually lead to the total transmutation of America into a full-fledged centralized welfare state (in other words, a collectivist enclave). The spearpoint of the Cloward-Piven strategy involved nothing less than economic sabotage against the U.S.
Theoretically, according to the doctrine, a condition of overwhelming tension and strain could be engineered through the overloading of American welfare rolls, thereby smothering the entitlement program structure at the state and local level. The implosion of welfare benefits would facilitate a massive spike in poverty and desperation, creating a financial crisis that would lead to an even greater cycle of demand for a fully socialized system. This desperation would then “force” the federal government to concentrate all welfare programs under one roof, nationalize and enforce a socialist ideology, and ultimately, compact an immense level of power into the hands of a select few.
…
The tactic can only decrease wealth security by making all citizens equally destitute. As we have seen in numerous socialist and communist experiments over the past century, economic harmonization never creates wealth or prosperity, it only siphons wealth from one area and redistributes it to others, evaporating much of it as it is squeezed through the grinding gears of the establishment machine. Socialism, in its very essence, elevates government to the role of all-pervasive parent, and casts the citizenry down into the role of dependent sniveling infant. Even in its most righteous form, Cloward-Piven seeks to make infants of us all, whether we like it or not.
Equality through universal dependence.
- One Man Asks Why Was Tritium Found At 9/11 Ground Zero
Authored by Shepard Ambellas via Intellihub.com,
Although it’s now public knowledge that former Florida Sen. Bob Graham told the Tampa Bay Times that the secret 28 pages of the 9/11 Commission report are poised to be released within the next few months, one can only question what the White House’s new and urgent motive for their release is.
One thing comes to mind, right off the bat, and that is the fact that strong evidence exists suggesting that up to three thermonuclear devices were detonated at the World Trade Center site on 9/11, hence the nickname “Ground Zero.”
I mean, what better way than to dupe the people yet once again by slowly conditioning them, over an extended period of time, to accept the fact that criminal factions of their very own government orchestrated the Pearl Harbor-like attack onto skyscrapers, buildings, in an American city.
That’s right, when the not so secret 28 pages are actually released, in a few months, they will likely show Saudi involvement and government foreknowledge, like we already knew.
So tell us something we didn’t know; like the fact that a Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Department of Energy, study found high trace levels of tritium inside the WTC complex after the attack. Not only were abnormal levels of tritium found inside the WTC complex, in the basement of “WTC 6” and the “storm sewer,” but they were also found in the water.
Study of Traces of Tritium
at the World Trade Center (Oct. 2002)/U.S. Department of Energy“Tritium is an important component in nuclear weapons. It is used to enhance the efficiency and yield of fission bombs and the fission stages of hydrogen bombs in a process known as “boosting” as well as in external neutron initiators for such weapons,” according Wikipedia; meaning that the only way it would be present in high trace levels is if a nuclear device (or three) detonated within proximity. Additionally it’s important to note that tritium is “extremely rare on Earth” and again — should not be found in at levels reported to be ’55 times higher than normal.’
And just to be clear, I am not saying that micro nukes were solely responsible for bringing down the towers — and IMO were likely only used at the base of Towers 1 and 2 and possible the base of building 7 and were strategically placed 50 feet below street level, somewhere in the basements of the buildings or subway access tunnels. This would also explain numerous eyewitness reports of “large” explosions in the basement or “lobby” of the towers.
It has also been proven that Nano-thermite was used and was present in dust samples, less than 2 microns in diameter, that were taken from the WTC site after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks as pointed out early on by Richard Gage of the grassroots organization Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth.
Moreover there are also signs that advanced barometric bomb technology, which uses triggering devices derived from the U.S. Nuclear Weapons Program, was also deployed in the attack — technology which incorporates gaseous elements in a “yellowish, brownish combustible mixture” and uses Aluminum Silicate Red Oxide and other ingredients” that would have surrounded and permeated the air around key structural columns on all floors before being triggered by a “specific high-voltage pattern” which the element combination is responsive to.
One bomb specialist, who wanted to remain anonymous for obvious reasons, can be seen in the proceeding video, testifying to the existence of such technology and said:
“[The high-voltage pattern] produces sort of a stairway pattern in the molecular structure of the cloud. Part of that pattern is a hydro-dynamic power generator, energy source, permeating the cloud which is then energized with another energy source and then is detonated. This causes the cloud itself to explode in such a fashion that if the cloud is circulating around the pillar — then it crushes the pillar from all sides and turns that pillar literally to dust and leaves only the rebar behind. So if you’ve got this cloud permeating all the way around the first floor, wherever it is, anything within its path gets crushed, imploded, to dust instantaneously. And when that happens of course there is nothing left to hold up the upper floors above, so bang, they come down like a pancake.”
This also explains why an eyewitness by the name of Kenneth Summers, who was in the lobby of tower 2 at the time, actually saw such a gas-like substance mixing with the air just a “tenth of a second” before the witness was blown back out the lobby doors. Kenneth Summers told NBC what he saw just before being eject from the lobby by a massive explosion and stated:
“All of a sudden it seems like the whole lobby, the door I was in, filled up with a yellowish, brownish, combustible mixture. It didn’t really smell any different, but was so quick to happen, it was like a tenth of a second.”
Summers testimony starts at 5:08 into the following video:
Look, all I know is the actual impact from the alleged passenger planes did not cause the collapse of the WTC’s towers 1 and 2 that stood proud above the New York skyline, nor did the jet fuel fires or random fires burning throughout the buildings. In fact we can clearly see that this was not the case, because the tops of the buildings actually started to collapse first, dustifying themselves in mid-air as reported by Dr. Judy Wood who conducted an independent investigation.
Micro-nukes exist and have for a long time
According to Wikipedia:
The Special Atomic Demolition Munition (SADM) was a family of man-portable nuclear weapons fielded by the US military in the 1960s, but never used in actual combat. The US Army planned to use the weapons in Europe in the event of a Soviet invasion. US Army Engineers would use the weapon to irradiate, destroy, and deny key routes of communication through limited terrain such as the Fulda Gap. Troops were trained to parachute into Soviet occupied western Europe with the SADM and destroy power plants, bridges, and dams.
The project, which involved a small nuclear weapon, was designed to allow one person to parachute from any type of aircraft carrying the weapon package and place it in a harbor or other strategic location that could be accessed from the sea. Another parachutist without a weapon package would follow the first to provide support as needed.
The two-person team would place the weapon package in the target location, set the timer, and swim out into the ocean where they would be retrieved by a submarine or a high-speed surface water craft.
In the 1950s and 1960s, the United States developed several different types of lightweight nuclear devices. The main one was the W54, a cylinder 40 by 60 cm (about 16 by 24 inches) that weighed 68 kg (150 lbs). It was fired by a mechanical timer and had a variable yield equivalent to between 10 tons and 1 kiloton of TNT. The W54 nuclear device was used in the Davy Crockett Weapon System.
Now do I have your undivided attention?
On 9/11 there is no doubt that multiple bombs were detonated inside the WTC complex — this fact can not be disputed and is clearly documented in hundreds of videos and backed up by many eyewitness testimonies, including highly credible first responders and firefighters. In fact, seismic readings from that day indicate that at least 3 large man-made explosions, possibly nuclear by signature, took place underground inside the WTC complex. Could these be the actual blasts that took out the cores of buildings 1, 2 and 7? Is this what the U.S. government has been hiding all along?
Interestingly, previous tests have been conducted by factions of the U.S. government in which they used micro-nukes to demolish rather large buildings and the results were astonishing to say the least, almost a perfect mirror of the collapse of buildings 1, 2, and 7 that took place in Sept. of 2001.
The use of micro-nukes in the WTC complex on 9/11 – the smoking gun
It’s safe to say that high energy releases have a distinct look.
Dr. Ed Ward has documented what he believes is the use of micro-nukes on the World Trade Center complex attack that took place in September of 2001.
One of the smoking guns in this case is that over 5.3 billion pounds of steel was instantly turned into 2 billion pounds of dust, but that’s not all — massive steel beams were bent like pretzels as the towers collapsed.
One video shows the penthouse on building 7 being demolished on the roof just before the building comes down. This proves that a top-down demolition process was being utilized, otherwise the buildings might have just twisted and naturally would have just fell over themselves. But perhaps the most startling revelation that nuclear devices were used is the fact that vehicles that were found up to a half mile away from the WTC looked incinerated — not to mention the tens of thousands of tiny body parts that were found on the rooftops of neighboring buildings which is not indicative at all of a gravitational collapse.
The fact that many of the first responders are now dead, if not very sick, does not sound like the byproduct of a falling building, but rather sounds more like they got a massive dose of deadly radiation. Most of the responders have died of blood cancer and Thyroid cancer, consistent with heavy radiation exposure.
Other red flags include:
- Cars not hit by falling debris yet totally destroyed far away from the towers
- Molten metal was seen in and around the debris of the WTC for months, indicative of nuclear fission.
- There is also the fact that the debris field was substantially low for the magnitude of buildings that were destroyed, thus signifying that most of the debris was incinerated upon the demo blast.
- Massive craters under the WTC complex were formed, likely from the detonation of micro-nukes, as the rock was even melted smooth. Later after the site was fairly cleaned up and the craters were excavated, the city of New York Port Authority continued to wash down the cavities with hoses daily for years as traces of Tritium were found, signifying that radiation was present.
Additionally the fact that the WTC buildings were pulverized into a fine dust cannot be ignored. This is a tell-tale sign of a high energy release typical of a nuclear explosion. Eyewitness accounts and personal testimony indicate that people were thrown an entire city block from what was described as a warm wind just as the towers begin to collapse.
There were also multiple reports of “hanging skin” or “melted skin” on victims around ground zero. This was a common occurrence in the Hiroshima blast. Major hot spots were also reported in and around the debris at the World Trade Center complex and were prevalent for up to six months after the attacks. This type of activity, seen with the hot spots, is commonly referred to as “China Syndrome”, where nuclear material will continue to undergo fission for a period of time, generating massive heat plumes.
To no surprise, videos obtained via Freedom of Information ACT (FOIA) requests, captured on and after Sept. 11, 2001 near the WTC site, have had sections, clips, of the video and audio removed, especially during the beginning of the collapse of the towers. However, the explosions can be heard on many independent videos, now floating around the web and can all be accounted for.
Not to mention the hijackers, some of which have still been proven to be alive, were recruited by the CIA, as can be seen in the following video:
The truth is out there.
- Filthy Lucre
From the Slope of Hope: When I was a boy growing up in Louisiana, our youth group at church had us do an enlightening exercise: we all fasted for a day.
Now, not eating anything for 24 hours isn’t a huge deal. No one is going to die from hunger. But for suburban kids accustomed to eating three meals a day, plus snacks, it’s a big change, and having access to only water quickly gave us a small sliver of empathy about what it would be like to actually not have a choice about being hungry.
When we met at the church the following night, we had all been fasting 24 hours. At that point,
the minister picked about six kids at random, had them walk up to the stage, and he gave each of them a McDonald’s bag with a meal inside of it. They joyfully ate their meal, while all the rest of us watched on with true envy. It was the first time I knew what it was like to be jealous of someone who had something to eat when I was hungry. That is a memory that has stuck with me my entire life.I will now tell you another story from the past to lead in to my general point.
Although I will not go into details, the family I married into was once one of the wealthiest in China. In the first part of the 20th century, the old man made a staggering fortune, and he enjoyed one of the privileges of wealth at the time, which was multiple wives. He had many, many children, and he had vast financial holdings.
Once the Communists seized power, all of that wealth disappeared. The descendants scattered to various parts of the world. China, of course, had varying degrees of passion about its communist ethos, and during the late 1960s anyone who wasn’t basically an uneducated peasant was subjected to terrible abuse.
China today, of course, has a somewhat similar situation as Russia: that is, a formerly Communist state whose deeply corrupt culture now masquerades as a quasi-capitalist society,
having sold off former state assets to businesspeople who were required to line the pockets of those in a position of power to hand over those assets in the first place. In my opinion, anyone rich from Russia or China has almost certainly garnered their fortune through corrupt means, and one glance at the air or water of Beijing will tell you just how much the businessmen care about the environment or the people who have to wallow around in it.The offspring of these crooks strike me as especially vile, not only because their wealth is ill-gotten, but they didn’t even have the industrious character to steal it in the first place. They simply have access to it as an accident of birth. And, of course, given the voyeuristic society we inhabit, they’ve run off and made a television show:
Because of my deep love for Slope, I held my stomach and actually watched the above. I was reminded of a term that I heard on occasion in the deep south where I grew up. Forgive me as I type the term out bluntly, but we’re all adults here: “nigger rich.” Now, to my ears, this actually has nothing to do with race. It has to do with a person who happens to have access to money, but they have absolutely no class. The aforementioned term suggests a person who needs to be flashy, garish, and flaunty, but lacks substance. It’s an offensive term, I admit, but it really has nothing to do with skin color. It has to do with attitude.
Watching the girls in the video, who seem to be pretty much in their early 20s, the politically incorrect term I’ve mentioned fits them to a “T”. This garrulous group of tittering twats strikes me as vain, insipid, and supremely dull. Very early on in the program, they order an expensive red wine, which these nitwits drink with straws. A biblical phrase leaps to mind: pearls before swine.
I’ve written about money many times before, and I have no problem with someone having millions or billions of dollars. However, if they didn’t either (a) earn it through their own honest efforts or (b) inherit it and apply themselves to use the assets in a creative, positive way, then they have none of my respect. As a youngster, I couldn’t understand why the Communists would want to kill the rich. Now, I am beginning to understand.
If, in years to come, the majority of Chinese people begin to genuinely suffer, you can be assured they’re going to want to chop girls like this into the “Wagyu Beef” which one of them describes herself as being.
As for my own reaction, it obviously doesn’t matter to me one way or another if these girls live or die. I have pondered, however, what it is I find unsettling about their very existence. As is so often the case, Mr. Spock provides the answer I need. Here I quote him from Squire of Gothos, in which he responds to Trelane, who is wondering why Spock doesn’t like him:
I object to you. I object to intellect without discipline; I object to power without constructive purpose.
Right as always, Spock. These tasteless, witless leeches will have a life of existential despair if, in their later years, they actually take a good, hard look at themselves. In the meantime, there are plenty of vendors and service providers who will be perfectly happy to distract them with Lamborghinis, Gucci handbags, and countless other knickknacks from the Western world, just to keep their collective minds off of how utterly pointless their lives are.
- What Happens Next (In Europe)?
A year ago today, European equities hit their highest levels ever. But, as Bloomberg reports, the euphoria about Mario Draghi’s stimulus program didn’t last, and trader skepticism is now rampant. The Stoxx Europe 600 Index has lost 17% since its record, and investors who piled in last year are now unwinding bets at the fastest rate since 2013 as analysts predict an earnings contraction. The trading pattern looks familiar: a fast run to just over 400 on the gauge, then disaster…
To Benedict Goette of Crossbow Partners, the odds of another crisis are higher than a rally to fresh records.
“The 2009-2015 rally originated from two main drivers: a massive stimulus, and credit expansion in China,” said Goette, who’s a partner at his firm in Zug, Switzerland and helps oversee 1 billion Swiss francs ($1 billion).
“European earnings have not followed suit so far. Skepticism regarding central-bank operations has started to emerge.”
Bloomberg notes that investors have withdrawn money from funds tracking the region’s equities for nine straight weeks, the longest streak since May 2013, according to a Bank of America Corp. note dated April 7 that cited EPFR Global data.
- Investigating Deutsche Bank’s €21 Trillion Derivative Casino In Wake Of Admission It Rigged Gold And Silver
Submitted by Mike “Mish” Shedlock
Deutsche Bank Admits Rigging, Will Expose Other Riggers
Deutsche Bank has admitted it rigged both the Gold market and the Silver market. ZeroHedge has the details in his report Deutsche Bank Agrees To Expose Other Manipulators.
Many asked me to comment. I am shocked?
No. In the wake of admissions of rigged LIBOR and rigged Euribor (bank to bank interest rates in dollars and euros respectively), one would really have to wonder “What isn’t rigged?”
To the Moon, Alice?
While some think gold would have “gone to the moon” without this rigging, I wonder if it got as high as $1900 an ounce because of rigging.
The same applies to silver when it topped over $40.
It’s logical to believe riggers don’t much care about the direction as long as they make money. Hopefully we get more details from Deutsche Bank soon.
This could get interesting.
What Isn’t Rigged?
While pondering the above question, let’s dive into Deutsche Bank’s 2015 Annual Report to investigate other bid-rigging opportunities.
Consolidated Balance Sheet
Deutsche Bank has over €515 billion in “positive derivative values” in comparison to €496 billion in “negative derivative values”.
Hooray! Deutsche Bank is about €20 billion to the good. But how much was bet?
Deutsche Bank’s Derivatives Casino
The total size of Deutsche Bank’s derivatives casino is €21.39 trillion, notional.
Casino Breakdown
- Interest Rate: €15.41 trillion
- Currency Related: €4.78 trillion
- Equity Index: €0.90 trillion
- Credit Related: €0.27 trillion
- Commodity Related: €0.08 trillion
How Much Risk on €21.39 Trillion?Inquiring minds may be asking: How much risk is there on €21.39 trillion?
Perhaps surprising little. After all, interest rate risk could easily be controlled with a few timely phone calls from the Fed and ECB.
What risk isn’t controlled that way can always be controlled other ways (as we have seen).
I am pleased to note Deutsche Bank uses “central counterparty clearing services for OTC clearing” and the bank “benefits from the credit risk mitigation achieved through the central counterparty’s settlement system.”
“Margin requirements for uncleared OTC derivative transactions are expected to be phased in from September 2016.”
Whew!
And we can all count on the obvious fact that Dodd-Frank reform has fixed everything.
So, nothing can possibly go wrong with €21.39 trillion in casino bets, just as €20 billion in profits (.0935%) shows.
- These Are The 10 Worst (And Best) Jobs In America
A new survey of the best and worst jobs in the country has declared that being a newspaper reporter (blogger may or may not fall under the umbrella) is the worst career you could be pursuing.
Careercast.com has released their annual job rankings, where they rank 200 jobs from best to worst. At the very bottom, The survey put the annual median salary of a print reporter at $37,200.
Not surprisingly for an industry in its twilight days, it is the third year in a row that a newspaper reporter ranked as the worst job. Being a broadcaster didn’t fare much better. It came in third worst on the list.
“The news business has changed drastically over the years, and not in a good way,” former Broadcaster Ann Baldwin, president of Baldwin Media PR in New Britain, Connecticut told Fox5NY. “When people ask me if I miss it, I tell them ‘I feel as if I jumped off of a sinking ship.’”
The report says that one factor that has many media jobs among the worst is the decline of advertising revenue. And, a drop in advertising sales translates to a decline in positions for advertising sales people. Advertising Sales Person appears on the 10 worst jobs list for the first time (#193), after finishing just outside the bottom 10 a year ago.
As for the best job of the year, that went to data scientists. The survey cited a strong growth outlook and an annual median salary of $128,240. If you are lucky enough to find them, the top jobs will be in Information Technology, Healthcare, and Mathematics.
It was not immediately clear where the most rapidly growing job category in the “new normal” American recovery, those of waiters and bartenders, fell within this list.
Here is the summary of the 5 best and worst jobs:
And here is the detailed breakdown of the 10 best and 10 worst in the U.S. right now.
First, the top 10 best jobs according to the Careercast rankings:
And here are the top 10 worst jobs. We’ll begin with the worst according to Careercast, which happens to be a newspaper reporter. As noted above, blogger – especially, and ironically, one chronicling the failure of a broken socio-economic system – may or may not fall into this umbrella definition.
- The Scourge Of Socialism
Authored by StraightLineLogic's Robert Gore, via The Burning Platform blog,
Every socialist is a disguised dictator
Ludwig von Mises, Human ActionHuman progress has been three steps forward, two steps back. That a non-fringe candidate of a major political party in the United States can call himself a socialist constitutes a leap backward. That it can happen after a century of socialistic horrors: impoverishment, ruination, tyranny, war, and tens of millions dead, bespeaks not just deadly ignorance and delusion, but depravity.
Socialism is a political system whereby the state owns or controls the means of production for goods and services. It can be partial—government control of some industries, or total—government control of all industries. According to Marx, who advocated the total version, the goods and services would be produced by each according to his or her ability, and distributed according to each individual’s need: production severed from distribution. No particular acuity is necessary to see the fatal flaw. The “needy”—and those who garner political power by distributing goods and services to them—are all for this system, but what’s in it for the able? They have to be coerced to produce, and something has to be done with those who object or refuse to submit.
Coercion sounds like slavery and that something has to be done sounds like repression. That is what socialism has produced—slavery, concentration camps, and slaughter—on a scale unimaginable prior to the twentieth century. Once you reach 10 million killed you’ve plumbed the depths of evil. Additional deca-millions are redundant blood on your hands, but the Titans in the Socialist pantheon—Lenin, Stalin, and Mao—killed around 100 million between them, while lesser lights like Pol Pot and the Kim dynasty in North Korea killed single digit millions. The numbers are exclusive of war dead.
What about Adolf Hitler? The full name of his political party was Nationalsocialistiche Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, or Nationalist Socialist German Workers’ Party, which sounds like a group of socialists. However, modern socialists try to distance themselves from Hitler by arguing that the Nazis allowed private ownership of the means of production, were supported by wealthy German industrialists and bankers (wealthy Brits and Americans, too), persecuted Communists, and fought the Soviet Union. Once the Nazis assumed full control, especially after Germany began waging war, the owners of businesses had to comply with their directives or else. Under the circumstances, full government ownership of the means of production versus full government control that allowed nominal private ownership was a distinction without a difference. However, to give today’s socialists their best case, exclude Hitler’s deca-millions from the tally.
The case the socialists aren’t allowed is the one they always make: comparing purely hypothetical, daydream, visionary socialism with real life socio-economic-political systems. Either fantasy socialism gets measured against fantasy capitalism or fantasy welfare-statism or some other fantasy, an obvious waste of time, or the real life socialism gets measured against other real life systems. SLL is partial to capitalism, so let’s take as real life capitalism the closest the world has ever come to laissez-faire: Industrial Revolution America from 1865 to 1913. It is indisputable that the Industrial Revolution produced the greatest economic growth and rise in living standards, as measured by per capita income (which was not subject to an income tax—Happy Tax Day!), in America’s history. It also produced the biggest scientific and technological explosion in human history. It is true that millions worked for very low wages while others made vast fortunes—income inequality. However, jobs were plentiful and upward mobility the norm.
Whatever its flaws, there was no deca-million body count in Industrial Revolution America. A telling detail: millions of immigrants came to America to be “exploited” (they didn’t come for the government benefits; there were none), and laws were passed to restrict immigration, while real life socialist countries built walls and otherwise made it difficult and dangerous to try to leave their workers’ paradises. Many have died trying.
The coercive foundation of socialism leads to slavery and slaughter. Capitalism is an economic system in which the means of production of good and services are privately owned, characterized by voluntary exchange and the state’s protection of contract and property rights. It is the economics of freedom. That conceptual foundation leads to progress and prosperity.
In a political order where individuals and groups cannot forcibly or fraudulently take what others have produced, capitalism will be the natural evolution. If you can’t take, you must produce and exchange. You own the ultimate means of production—your talents, aptitudes, training, experience, ingenuity, capacity for work, and intelligence—and if you want something you haven’t produced, you must exchange for it with someone else on mutually advantageous and agreeable terms. Capitalism’s extraordinary results when it has been given anything approaching full reign are unsurprising. Humans accomplish extraordinary deeds…when they are free to do so.
Modern education has for the most part abandoned teaching history, facts, or concepts, replacing them with toxic goo. The zombie minds at colleges and universities (both students and professors) fail or refuse to grasp the conceptual and ethical distinctions between capitalism and socialism. They are unaware of, indifferent to, or deny the yawning chasm between Industrial Revolution America and the twentieth century’s socialist horror shows.
What they do know is that avuncular Bernie Sanders is promising free university education and lots of other free stuff, paid for by someone else, just like in those European welfare states, which by the way, is what they really mean by socialism, or to use the popular euphemistic moniker, “democratic socialism.” And they intend to be either the “needy,” or better yet, running the government that “cares” for the needy. Only fools raise their hands when the call goes out for the able to pull the load, although someone has to.
Welfare states are on a fiscally and demographically unsustainable course, de facto bankrupt. You do run out of other people’s money to spend, especially when the load-pullers get tired of working for you. Welfare states are unstable ideological halfway houses between capitalism and socialism, inexorably sliding towards the latter.
Banking offers an example. Banks have been both captured and have captured governments, and when they run into trouble they become wards of the state and its taxpayers. Modern banking is more socialist than not, yet Sanders’ critique condemns it as capitalism. The problems of banking—regulatory capture, cronyism, excessive leverage and concentration, borrowing at preferential, below market rates, too big to fail, and taxpayer-backed speculation—flow directly from banks’ involvement with the government. Yet Sanders’ reforms entails more government. Real reform would go the opposite direction: elimination of the Federal Reserve, too big to fail, and deposit insurance.
It’s easy to be the great guy in the bar when you’re buying rounds on someone else’s dime.
Uncle Bernie is peddling poison and calling it craft brew. If you encounter someone who’s feeling the Bern, listen patiently as they wax enthusiastic about the coming socialist utopia…if only we’ll all wise up and elect him. When they’re done, offer to buy them a one-way plane ticket to North Korea, Cuba, or Venezuela, but only if they’ll stay there for a year. That, of course, is not what they have in mind, and those nations are not, of course, the intended models for the United States. Intentions, of course, don’t mean squat. You shall know socialism by its dark deeds. Nothing would be more gratifying than seeing its proponents discover darkness the hard way. Unless, of course, they take the rest of us with them.
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