- Who Gets To Push The Nuclear Button?
Authored by Paul Craig Roberts,
William Binney is the former National Security Agency (NSA) official who created NSA’s mass surveillance program for digital information. He says that if the Russian government had conspired with Trump, hacked the Democratic National Committee’s computer, or in any way influenced the outcome of the last US presidential election, the National Security Agency would have the digital evidence. The fact that we have been listening to the unsubstantiated charges that comprise “Russiagate” for more than one year without being presented with a scrap of evidence is complete proof that Russiagate is entirely fake news.
The fake news originated with CIA director John Brennan and FBI director Comey conspiring with the DNC in an effort to discredit and unseat President Trump and at a minimum prevent him from damaging the vast power and profit of the military/security complex by normalizing relations with Russia.
Consider what this means.
The directors of the CIA and FBI made up a totally false story about a newly elected President and fed the lies to the presstitutes and Congress. The presstitutes never asked for a drop of evidence and enlarged the Brennan/Comey lie with a claim that all 17 US intelligence agencies had concluded that Russia had interfered. In actual fact, a handful of carefully selected people in three of the agencies had prepared, perhaps under duress, a conditional report that had no evidence behind it.
That it was fake news created to control President Trump was completely obvious, but corrupt security officials, corrupt senators and representatives, a corrupt DNC, and corrupt media used constant repetition to turn a lie into truth.
Having shoved Trump into the militarist camp, his enemies have turned on Trump as an unstable, volatile person who might push the button. Senator Bob Corker (R, TN) and Senator Chris Murphy (D,CT) are using the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to portray President Trump as a quixotic person who shouldn’t have his finger on the nuclear button. We have gone full circle, from Trump who wants to defuse nuclear tensions to Trump who might push the button.
If Senators Corker and Murphy were really concerned and not just orchestrating a new way to attack Trump, they would bring out the fact that Russiagate is a hoax that has made nuclear war more likely. As I have pointed out, Washington has convinced Moscow that Washington is planning a surprise nuclear attack on Russia and also collecting Russian DNA for a tailored Russian-specific bio-weapon. I cannot think of anything more likely to trigger nuclear war than the escalated tensions that Russiagate is preventing Trump from reducing.
For the record, contrary to the erroneous assertions of “nuclear experts,” the president cannot simply order a nuclear attack.
The president either has to accept a Joint Chiefs war plan and order a launch when the military is ready, or
…he has to accept the advice of his national security adviser to launch in retaliation for incoming enemy ICBMs.
If a president simply ordered a nuclear strike, he would be ignored.
If it is not the president who must make the nuclear decision, who is it to be? The military? We should be thankful that that was not the case when the Joint Chiefs pressured President John F. Kennedy to approve a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union.
The question who should have launch authority is an easy one to answer. No one.
If nuclear missiles are incoming, launching does not protect you. You are already going to be destroyed. Why destroy the other side of the world in an act of revenge. It is pointless.
There is no such thing as a preemptive strike that prevents retaliation.
Nuclear war is an act of insanity. Nothing can justify it.
The purpose of diplomacy is to prevent war. However, ever since the Clinton regime attacked Serbia, US diplomacy has been used to cause wars. During the 16-years of George W. Bush and Obama the US destroyed in whole or part seven countries, killing and maiming millions of peoples and producing millions of refugees. Not a single one of these wars was justified. Everyone of these wars was based in lies. The last US government that showed any respect at all for truth was the George H. W. Bush administration.
Before launching each of these acts of unprovoked aggression, Washington demonized the leader of the country. To get rid of one person, Washington did not flinch at murdering large numbers of people and destroying the infrastructure of the country. This tells you that Washington has no morality. None. Zilch. Therefore, Washington is capable of launching a preemptive nuclear strike. Back when nuclear weapons were puny by today’s standards, Washington nuked two Japanese cities while Japan was trying to surrender. That was in 1945, a lifetime ago. Whatever bits of morality that still existed then are long gone.
Today a CNN editor-at-large named Chris Cillizza, published online an article titled, “There’s a massive moral vacuum in the country right now.” At last, I thought, a presstitute has realized that Washington’s constant nuclear threats against other countries shows a complete disrespect for the life of the planet and indicates a moral vacuum. But no, the presstitute is talking about sexual harassment, especially that of Roy Moore in the 1970s. And it is all Trump’s fault. How can he lead when he harasses women himself?
President Trump intended to normalize relations with the other major nuclear power. He has been prevented from doing so by the military/security complex, the DNC, and the presstitutes.
Cillizza says sexual harassment is a “very big” consequence of Trump’s election. I am left wondering if CNN’s editor-at-large considers nuclear war to be as serious as sexual harassment.
- "Worst Case Scenario" Looms As Merkel's "Jamaica Coalition" Collapses; EUR Sinks
We warned on Friday that German Chancellor Angela Merkel faced a 'night of the long knives' in her efforts to bring together the co-called 'Jamaica' coalition of four parties and after a desperate weekend of talks, Bloomberg reports Merkel's efforts at forming a coalition have failed meaning a second election looms and sending the euro sliding.
As Bloomberg reports, talks on forming German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s next government collapsed, throwing the future of Europe’s longest-serving leader into doubt and potentially pointing the world’s fourth-biggest economy toward new elections.
After a 12-hour negotiating session that ended shortly before midnight Sunday, the Free Democratic Party walked out of the exploratory talks, saying the differences with the Green party were too great to bridge.
Merkel has sought for four weeks to enlist the two smaller parties for her fourth-term coalition.
“It’s better not to govern than to govern badly,” FDP head Christian Lindner told reporters in Berlin.
No further coalition talks were scheduled, he said. There was no immediate comment from Merkel.
EURUSD is down aroound 80 pips on the news…
As MINT Partners' Bill Blain noted previously, Germans are not used to multiple elections – and a second vote early next year would be massive negative for Merkel herself – she may even have to stand down if coalition looks like falling. That could be massive shock.
As a result, the prospects for more volatile European peripheral markets, particularly Greece and Italy, are likely to be exacerbated, and we might well see some of the currency and European stock market froth blow away in coming days as the scale of the “German Problem” becomes clearer.
- My worst case Germany scenario is a second election early next year, political uncertainty as Mutti Merkel finds herself squeezed out, and a scramble to build a new coalition government in her aftermath.
- The best case scenario isn’t much better: that Merkel manages to forge a new coalition, but it will be a long drawn out affair and the resulting administration will be vulnerable, weak and fraxious.
These sound like German problems, but they mean the “leader of Europe” is likely to be entirely inward focused in coming months/years.. at a time when the European union will be facing a host of new issues regarding closer union, banking union and reform of the ESM, bailout and QE policies. There will also be new potential crisis points – Italian elections next year, Greece bailout, renewed immigration crisis or a blow-up with Trump. And these are just the known unknowns.
This has profound implications for the so-called French/German axis as it slides towards Paris. We are not going to see a new German government “waste time” on issues like closer EU union, European Banking Union, or critical finance issues like reforming ESM or new approaches on QE and Bailout funds. Forget Wiedemann for ECB president, it’s more likely to another Frenchman (Trichet II) – I’m sure its already underway. In short.. Germany negotiations could get very fraxious while Europe is dragged down in its wake. I doubt the markets have discounted it yet.
- Victoria's Secret Staff Think The Chinese Are Spying On Them
Stories about the shambolic Victoria’s Secret fashion show – which is slated to take place Tuesday Nov. 28 in Shanghai – just keep getting weirder.
Chinese bureaucrats have so far refused to cooperate with the show’s producers and planners, denying visas to Gigi Hadid, one of the show’s highest-profile models, and Katy Perry, the US pop superstar who was slated to be the musical guest.
The Communist Party has also inexplicably refused to issue press passes and visas to members of the western media who were supposed to travel to China to cover the event.
Already, we imagine the marketing brass at L Brands have learned their lesson, and that this will be both the first, and the last, VS fashion show held in China.
But as if all this weren’t enough, the New York Post is now reporting that the show’s organizers believe the Chinese government is spying on them. Which, of course, is probably true, given Chinese authorities’ well-known penchant for monitoring foreigners.
The Post says e-mails of VS show staffers and production crew are apparently being monitored by Chinese authorities.
TV and media-industry insiders who are desperately trying to figure out what’s going on amid the production chaos are getting frustrated by messages from colleagues in China simply saying that they can’t speak frankly about the issues with the government because their communications are being watched.
Perry had her visa application declined because she once showed support for Taiwan (which is in an independence struggle with China) during a Beijing concert. Hadid’s was denied because of a picture her sister, Bella Hadid, published on Instagram that the Chinese public deemed offensive. Plus, fellow Angel Adriana Lima’s visa application has been imperiled by an unknown “diplomatic issue.” Meanwhile, a host of other models have also had their visas denied.
Many fashion bloggers have also been denied visas, and TV producers have discovered that they need permits to shoot outside of the Mercedes-Benz Arena, where the show, which is slated to air on CBS later this month, is set to take place.
As one source put it, “If you’re going to China you want to show that you’re in China!”
The surveillance is apparently making it difficult for the show’s organizers to find replacements for the models who have been denied entry. Harry Styles has already been booked to fill in for Perry.
“They want to discuss what’s going on as far as replacements for those denied visas and alternative arrangements, but they have to be tight-lipped because it seems that the government is watching their e-mails,” said a source.
With more than a week to go before the show, we can only imagine what fresh entanglements will crop up as the date draws nearer.
- Top NSA Whistleblower Claims "Russiagate" A Fake To Increase War-Spending
Authored by Eric Zuesse via The Strategic Culture Foundation,
William Binney is the mathematician and Russia-specialist, who quit the NSA in 2001 as its global Technical Director for geopolitical analysis, because of the lying about, and manipulations of, intelligence, that he saw — distortions of intelligence by the George W. Bush Administration — in order to ‘justify’ systematic, massive, and all-encompassing, Government snooping into all Americans’ private electronic communications. His, and some colleagues’, efforts to get the Inspector General of the US Department of Defense to investigate the matter, produced FBI raids into their homes, and seizures of their computers, so as to remove incriminating evidence they might have against higher-ups. According to Binney, NSA's Director, Michael Hayden, had vetoed in August 2001 a far less intrusive and more effective system of signals-intelligence collection and analysis, which might have enabled the 9/11 attacks to be blocked — a more effective system that would have been less expensive, less intrusive, and not violated Americans’ Constitutional rights. Hayden went on to head the CIA, until the end of George W. Bush’s Presidency. Afterward, Hayden joined the Chertoff Group and other military-industrial-complex contractors of the US federal Government. There were no such rewards for any of the whistleblowers.
Binney viewed Hillary Clinton as continuing George W. Bush’s neoconservatism, and so, though reluctantly, voted for Donald Trump in the 2016 election.
On November 15th, an interview of Binney was published at the Washingtonsblog news-site, titled “How to Instantly Prove (Or Disprove) Russian Hacking of US Election”, in which Binney provides technical details to explain why he strongly believes that the Democratic Party’s allegations, which say that Russia was the source of the leaks of information from the computers of the Democratic National Committee and from Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager John Podesta, are nothing more than intentional concoctions and distortions, which are backed and promoted by America’s military-industrial complex, whose stock-values rise accordingly with the lies.
He believes,
there’s a huge part of the story that the entire mainstream media is missing …
Specifically, Binney says that the NSA has long had in its computers information which can prove exactly who hacked the DNC … or instead prove that the DNC emails were leaked by a Democratic insider. …
And he stressed:
If the idiots in the intelligence community expect us to believe them after all the crap they have told us (like WMD’s in Iraq and “no we don’t collect data on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans”) then they need to give clear proof of what they say. So far, they have failed to prove anything.
Which suggests they don’t have proof and just want to war-monger the US public into a second cold war with the Russians.
After all, there’s lots and lots of money in that for the military-industrial-intelligence-governmental complex of incestuous relationships.
His technical explanation of how he came to this conclusion, is provided in that Washingtonsblog article. He doesn't think that the elements within the intelligence community which are promoting the Russiagate allegations can possibly be so stupid as to actually believe what they are saying. He claims that they know that what they are saying is false, because if it weren’t false, then they could provide, to the public, evidence that it is true, and do it without violating anyone’s rights, nor revealing any legitimate US national-security information.
Basically, he is saying that the keepers of the keys are blocking the public from the truth, because they know that the truth will expose the fact that they’ve been lying to the public, all along.
His technical explanation of the details employs a number of undefined terms, which aren’t understandable to persons who are not themselves technically knowledgeable about the field, such as his saying:
First, from deep packet inspection, they would have the originator and ultimate recipient (IP) of the packets plus packet series 32 bit number identifier and all the housekeeping data showing the network segments/path and time to go though the network. And, of course, the number of packet bits. With this they would know to where and when the data passed.
From the data collection, they would have all the data as it existed in the server taken from. That’s why I originally said if the FBI wanted Hillary’s email, all they have to do is ask NSA for them.
All this is done by the Narus collection equipment in real time at line rates (620 mbps [mega bits per second,] for the STA-6400 and 10 gbps [giga bits per second] for the Insight equipment).
Binney explained what these numbers mean: Each Narus Insight device can monitor and record around 1,250,000 emails each second … or more than 39 trillion emails per year.
However, no one who is promoting the Russiagate allegations is taking him on, to debate Binney’s allegations. Instead, all of the newsmedia are plastered with allegations of ‘Russia’s meddling in American democracy’.
There are people who know what the terms that Binney is using refer to. But, thus far, none of these people is saying that Binney is a liar. Instead, they’ve all just been ignoring him – and none of the major newsmedia have been inviting Binney and the promoters of the military-industrial-complex’s position onto their forums in order to debate these issues in public.
It’s just like the situation was about ‘Saddam’s WMD,’ in 2002 and 2003 prior to our invasion and destruction of Iraq as a supposed ‘response’ to the 9/11 attacks.
- Big Brother Is Here: Twitter Will Monitor Users Behavior 'Off Platform'
In perhaps the most intrusive move of social media platforms' efforts signal as much virtue as possible and appease their potentially-regulating government overlords, Twitter has announced that it is cracking down on what it defines at hate-speech and not just by looking at its own site.
In what amounts to a major shift in Twitter policy, Mashable's Kerry Flynn reports that the company announced on Friday that it will be monitoring user's behavior "on and off the platform" and will suspend a user's account if they affiliate with violent organizations, according to an update to Twitter's Help Center on Friday.
Abusive Behavior
We believe in freedom of expression and open dialogue, but that means little as an underlying philosophy if voices are silenced because people are afraid to speak up. In order to ensure that people feel safe expressing diverse opinions and beliefs, we prohibit behavior that crosses the line into abuse, including behavior that harasses, intimidates, or uses fear to silence another user’s voice.
Context matters when evaluating for abusive behavior and determining appropriate enforcement actions. Factors we may take into consideration include, but are not limited to whether:
- the behavior is targeted at an individual or group of people;
- the report has been filed by the target of the abuse or a bystander;
- the behavior is newsworthy and in the legitimate public interest.
Violence: You may not make specific threats of violence or wish for the serious physical harm, death, or disease of an individual or group of people. This includes, but is not limited to, threatening or promoting terrorism.
You also may not affiliate with organizations that – whether by their own statements or activity both on and off the platform – use or promote violence against civilians to further their causes.
Abuse: You may not engage in the targeted harassment of someone, or incite other people to do so. We consider abusive behavior an attempt to harass, intimidate, or silence someone else’s voice.
Hateful conduct: You may not promote violence against, threaten, or harass other people on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, religious affiliation, age, disability, or serious disease.
Hateful imagery and display names: You may not use hateful images or symbols in your profile image or profile header. You also may not use your username, display name, or profile bio to engage in abusive behavior, such as targeted harassment or expressing hate towards a person, group, or protected category.
Furthermore, Twitter says it will control the stream of information more broadly…
At times, we may prevent certain content from trending.
As Kerry Flynn notes, these changes comes amid aggressive moves by Twitter to curb abuse and harassment on the site after more than a decade of essentially letting the abusers operate freely.
Over the last week, Twitter has taken action against the accounts of white supremacists. Twitter permanently banned Tim "Treadstone" Gionet, a prominent alt-right troll more widely known as Baked Alaska, earlier this week. It also removed the verification badges of Jason Kessler, one of the organizers of the racist Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, and of alt-right activist Richard Spencer.
Twitter's decision to monitor users off site sparked concern from free speech advocates such as Andrew Torba, founder of social network Gab.
"This is a scary precedent to set," he wrote in an email to Mashable.
"Rules like this will only force dissidents and those who are speaking truth to power to silence themselves or risk being silenced by Twitter."
Twitter's new rules will not be enforced until December 18th…
We’ve updated our rules around abuse and hateful conduct as well as violence and physical harm. These changes will be enforced starting December 18. Read our updated rules here: https://t.co/NGVT3qGFvg
— Twitter Safety (@TwitterSafety) November 17, 2017
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
And of course, "if you're doing nothing wrong, then why would this be an issue for you" will be instant reposte of those defending yet more intrusion within America's surveillance state.
- How A Half-Educated Tech Elite Delivered Us Into This Chaos
Authored by John Naughton, op-ed via The Guardian,
If our supersmart tech leaders knew a bit more about history or philosophy we wouldn’t be in the mess we’re in now…
One of the biggest puzzles about our current predicament with fake news and the weaponisation of social media is why the folks who built this technology are so taken aback by what has happened. Exhibit A is the founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, whose political education I recently chronicled. But he’s not alone. In fact I’d say he is quite representative of many of the biggest movers and shakers in the tech world. We have a burgeoning genre of “OMG, what have we done?” angst coming from former Facebook and Google employees who have begun to realise that the cool stuff they worked on might have had, well, antisocial consequences.
Put simply, what Google and Facebook have built is a pair of amazingly sophisticated, computer-driven engines for extracting users’ personal information and data trails, refining them for sale to advertisers in high-speed data-trading auctions that are entirely unregulated and opaque to everyone except the companies themselves.
The purpose of this infrastructure was to enable companies to target people with carefully customised commercial messages and, as far as we know, they are pretty good at that. (Though some advertisers are beginning to wonder if these systems are quite as good as Google and Facebook claim.) And in doing this, Zuckerberg, Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin and co wrote themselves licences to print money and build insanely profitable companies.
It never seems to have occurred to them that their advertising engines could also be used to deliver precisely targeted ideological and political messages to voters.
Hence the obvious question: how could such smart people be so stupid? The cynical answer is they knew about the potential dark side all along and didn’t care, because to acknowledge it might have undermined the aforementioned licences to print money. Which is another way of saying that most tech leaders are sociopaths. Personally I think that’s unlikely, although among their number are some very peculiar characters: one thinks, for example, of Paypal co-founder Peter Thiel – Trump’s favourite techie; and Travis Kalanick, the founder of Uber.
So what else could explain the astonishing naivety of the tech crowd? My hunch is it has something to do with their educational backgrounds. Take the Google co-founders. Sergey Brin studied mathematics and computer science. His partner, Larry Page, studied engineering and computer science. Zuckerberg dropped out of Harvard, where he was studying psychology and computer science, but seems to have been more interested in the latter.
Now mathematics, engineering and computer science are wonderful disciplines – intellectually demanding and fulfilling. And they are economically vital for any advanced society. But mastering them teaches students very little about society or history – or indeed about human nature. As a consequence, the new masters of our universe are people who are essentially only half-educated. They have had no exposure to the humanities or the social sciences, the academic disciplines that aim to provide some understanding of how society works, of history and of the roles that beliefs, philosophies, laws, norms, religion and customs play in the evolution of human culture.
We are now beginning to see the consequences of the dominance of this half-educated elite. As one perceptive observer Bob O’Donnell puts it:
“a liberal arts major familiar with works like Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, or even the work of ancient Greek historians, might have been able to recognise much sooner the potential for the ‘tyranny of the majority’ or other disconcerting sociological phenomena that are embedded into the very nature of today’s social media platforms. While seemingly democratic at a superficial level, a system in which the lack of structure means that all voices carry equal weight, and yet popularity, not experience or intelligence, actually drives influence, is clearly in need of more refinement and thought than it was first given.”
All of which brings to mind CP Snow’s famous Two Cultures lecture, delivered in Cambridge in 1959, in which he lamented the fact that the intellectual life of the whole of western society was scarred by the gap between the opposing cultures of science and engineering on the one hand, and the humanities on the other – with the latter holding the upper hand among contemporary ruling elites.
Snow thought that this perverse dominance would deprive Britain of the intellectual capacity to thrive in the postwar world and he clearly longed to reverse it.
Snow passed away in 1980, but one wonders what he would have made of the new masters of our universe. One hopes that he might see it as a reminder of the old adage: be careful what you wish for – you might just get it.
- Hezbollah On "High Alert", Says It Will Be Blamed For 'False Flag' Assassination Attempt
Submitted by Elijah Magnier, Middle East based chief international war correspondent for Al Rai Media
Hezbollah has raised its military readiness on the whole Lebanese territory in the last few days and put its forces on high alert in the light of the threats it has received from a number of countries, and especially from Israel and Saudi Arabia. Hezbollah forces have been mobilized in the event of any hostile activity on the borders or in the country, notwithstanding the ongoing conviction of its leadership that Israel will not wage a direct war in the near or distant future.
According to well informed sources, Hezbollah fears the possible assassination of a well-known Lebanese figure, Sunni or Christian, similar to the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri in 2005. The aim would be to re-mix the cards on the Lebanese scene, accuse Hezbollah and to embarrass President Michel Aoun.
Image source: Reuters via The Jerusalem Post.Aoun has raised the challenge against Riyadh during the recent events related to the televised resignation of Prime Minister Saad Hariri, and he has accused Saudi Arabia of holding Hariri as a hostage (for more than two weeks), defining the Prime Minister’s submission to this act as “unconstitutional and illegitimate.”
Moreover, Hezbollah, in coordination with Iran, has issued orders not to transfer weapons sent to it from Iran via Syria to Lebanon for the following clearly defined reasons:
- There is no longer a reason to store weapons in Lebanon because the Lebanese-Syrian front has become united.
- Hezbollah needs to maintain accurate and long-range missiles in Syria (not Lebanon), confirming what Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah and Syrian President Bashar Assad have said, that “Syria is one front against Israel in the next war.”
- Hezbollah’s weapons stores in Lebanon are full, and its warehouses are overflowing. Hezbollah therefore could maintain a long war if Israel did decide to attack Lebanon, and has the capability of launching hundreds of rockets and missiles daily.
It is clear that President Bashar al-Assad has emerged stronger from the war that has been going on for more than six years. His thinking is now orientated towards the Israeli threat, to tune in with Hezbollah and to assure Saudi Arabia and Israel that Hezbollah will not be left alone in any future battle because the front from Naqoura (in southern Lebanon) to the Golan is now united. Assad is determined and able to respond to any Israeli violation following the total defeat of the “Islamic State” in all the Syrian cities.
Thus, Assad has lived with and survived the war and has learned to accept losses: during the hard days of the war, the number of soldiers killed reached hundreds in some battles. The Syrian leadership is in a better position to accept the consequences of any future war with Israel as long as the goals are reached despite the sacrifices required.
But Assad will not be alone facing any future attack on Hezbollah. There are thousands of fighters in Syria from neighboring countries, available at the request of the Syrian government. These shall certainly not be neutral in the next war with Israel if it should happen.
Damascus will be careful not to provoke the United States directly in the next war with Israel, but it will give a free hand to the Syrian resistance if the US decides to occupy north-east Syria.
The presence of Russian troops in the Levant may not allow all belligerents to be dragged into a large war with multiple frontiers and certainly not a third world war. Israel is so far giving signs that its forces are aware of the future danger and won’t be dragged into a war in the region despite Saudi Arabia’s financial offers and support. The Saudis were responsible for kidnapping the Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri (who was "released" this weekend), aiming to present Lebanon as more vulnerable, inviting Israel, in vain, to attack what the Kingdom defines as the “arms of Iran” in the Middle East.
Russia has no agreement with Israel on anything related to the presence of the Iranian forces and its loyalists in Syria and particularly on the borders with Israel. The Kremlin is not negotiating and disposing of Syrian soil because these matters concern the Syrian government, which intends to recover the occupied Golan after the end of the ISIS threat and al-Qaeda, the Takfiri extremists, in Syria.
Saudi Arabia's renewed power ploy in the Middle East is likely to more than meet its match because it seriously underestimates Hezbollah as an effective military arm of Iran
- Is Financial Argmageddon Bullish For Stocks? One Bank's Surprising Answer
Everyone knows that after nearly a decade of capital markets central planning by the world’s central banks, “good news is bad news.” But did you also know that financial armageddon has become the most bullish catalyst to buy stocks? That’s the understated take-home message from the year ahead preview by Macquarie’s Viktor Shvets published last week. It is also the conclusion that One River Asset Management’s Eric Peters reached in his latest weekend notes.
While we will have much more to comment on Macquarie’s rather macabre 2018 preview, which is arguably one of the most honest, comprehensive, and objective predictions of what to expected from the “central bank/market confidence boosting nexus”, we will highlight the one argument that has served to promote countless BTFD algo-driven stock rips, summarized in the following blurb, which is a sublime explanation by Viktor Shvets the worst things are, the more you should buy:
If volatilities jump, CBs would need to reset the ‘background picture’. The challenge is that even with the best of intentions, the process is far from automatic, and hence there could be months of extended volatility (a la Dec’15-Feb’16). If one ignores shorter-term aberrations, we maintain that there is no alternative to policies that have been pursued since 1980s of deliberately suppressing and managing business and capital market cycles. [T]his implies that a relatively pleasant ‘Kondratieff autumn’ (characterized by inability to raise cost of capital against a background of constrained but positive growth and inflation rates) is likely to endure. Indeed, two generations of investors grew up knowing nothing else. They have never experienced either scorching summers or freezing winters, as public sector refused to allow debt repudiation, deleveraging or clearance of excesses. Although this cannot last forever, there is no reason to believe that the end of the road would necessarily occur in 2018 or 2019. It is true that policy risks are more heightened but so is policy recognition of dangers.
We therefore remain constructive on financial assets (as we have been for quite some time), not because we believe in a sustainable and private sector-led recovery but rather because we do not believe in one, and thus we do not see any viable alternatives to an ongoing financialization, which needs to be facilitated through excess liquidity, and avoiding proper price and risk discovery, and thus avoiding asset price volatilities.
Translation: central banks remain trapped by the mountain-sized bubble they have blown with years of QE and ZIRP/NIRP, and once volatility returns, and risk assets plunge, CBs will have no choice but to scramble right back and prevent the pyramid from keeling over and undoing a decade of fake “wealth creation” which was pulled from the future to the tune of $15 trillion in central bank asset purchases, which while still rising is about to go into reverse in just over a year’s time.
If that’s not enough, here is One River’s Eric Peters, with the exact same conclusion:
Anecdote
“The market has an accident, the Fed returns to QE, slashes interest rates, bonds surge, stocks recover,” said the CIO, high atop his prodigious pile, alone. Staring into the distance. Squinting, straining.
“The correlation between bonds and equities remains negative, the risk parity equity/bond portfolios are dented but not destroyed. And we descend to the next lower level in real interest rates. US bond yields turn negative. In essence, we prolong the paradigm that has driven markets for a few decades.”
Far below, economies hummed in harmony, capitalists collecting their expanding share. “A continuation of this paradigm is what everyone believes. And I just doubt that outcome so sincerely.” Hidden within the distant economic whir, labor strived, struggled. Their wage growth anemic, their children indebted, career prospects uncertain.
“It has taken time, but the political context for a regime shift is now established; populism is evident in recent elections. And the academic context for a seismic economic policy shift is in place too.”
The extraordinary response to the global financial crisis prevented depression. But the price of salvation is proving to be as profound as it is impossible to precisely measure — unexpected election outcomes, political paralysis, an isolationist America, de-globalization, fake news, opioid epidemics.
And connecting it all, a corrosive, woven thread; injustice, unfairness, inequality, hypocrisy, distrust, endemic, growing. “We are on the cusp of great change, the old paradigm is set to shift,” he said, at altitude, the air crisp, clear.
“The market has an accident, monetary policy is seen to be bust, the models have been wrong, we have to change what we do, we can’t go down the same route, we need to move to a different policy mix. Fiscal expansion, infrastructure, labor over capital. We’re moving to something that may be great for the economy, but no good for asset markets. New Regime — end of story.”
- "You're So Dumb, You're Beyond Hope" – ESPN Host Hits Out At Conservative Critics
Authored by Alex Thomas via SHTFplan.com,
Over the last few years the once dominant sports news outlet ESPN has come under fire for their perceived political bias after the network fired multiple employees for conservative viewpoints while propping up those that pushed the companies anti-Trump agenda.
From firing baseball icon Curt Schilling to allowing prime-time SportsCenter news anchor Jemele Hill to smear the president on Twitter, the network has an obvious liberal leaning and many conservatives have rightly called out this transparent bias.
Now, in a fiery interview with Sports Illustrated, one of the networks poster boys, Scott Van Pelt, has responded to his conservative critics by attacking them for even having the gall to question ESPN’s political bias in the first place.
Van Pelt attempted to act like a tough guy, calling out said critics for being cowards who he believes only speak out against ESPN on the internet but would never do so in real life.
“This make believe world where everyone talks shit, this shit talking, poke you in the chest virtual whatever it’s just there’s nothing more chicken shit than that, because it’s the easiest thing in the world to do,” Van Pelt laughably said before targeting those who have boycotted his network in the past.
In what one can only assume was a network approved attack on their critics, Van Pelt then described those that have boycotted ESPN as so dumb that they don’t even deserve to be prayed for.
If you truly wanna boycott the NFL and you wanna boycott ESPN, the notion that some guy sitting out there, or gal, and they decide, ‘you know what, I’m gonna cut my entire cable package because ESPN gave an award on a made-up show in July because there’s no sports, to a woman who used to be a man.
So I’m now not gonna have any cable TV at all and I’m gonna sit around at night and read books by candlelight like olden times because of that,’ that’s not happening.
And if you did that, than you’re so dumb that I can’t even pray for you because you’re beyond hope.
Yep, that is apparently what the networks most visible personality (and thus presumably the network as a whole) thinks about conservatives.
From Hollywood to the media, and now apparently the sports world, anyone with conservative viewpoints are being openly attacked and labeled racist as a means to silence all dissenting thought against the liberal world establishment.
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