- Top German Journalist Admits Mainstream Media Is Completely Fake: "We All Lie For The CIA"
With the increasing propaganda wars, we thought a reminder of just how naive many Westerners are when it comes to their news-feed. As Arjun Walia, of GlobalResearch.ca, notes, Dr. Ulfakatte went on public television stating that he was forced to publish the works of intelligence agents under his own name, also adding that noncompliance with these orders would result in him losing his job.
He recently made an appearance on RT news to share these facts:
I’ve been a journalist for about 25 years, and I was educated to lie, to betray, and not to tell the truth to the public.
But seeing right now within the last months how the German and American media tries to bring war to the people in Europe, to bring war to Russia — this is a point of no return and I’m going to stand up and say it is not right what I have done in the past, to manipulate people, to make propaganda against Russia, and it is not right what my colleagues do and have done in the past because they are bribed to betray the people, not only in Germany, all over Europe.
It’s important to keep in mind that Dr. Ulfakatte is not the only person making these claims; multiple reporters have done the same and this kind of truthfulness is something the world needs more of.
One (out of many) great examples of a whistleblowing reporter is investigative journalist and former CBC News reporter Sharyl Attkisson.
She delivered a hard-hitting TEDx talk showing how fake grassroots movements funded by political, corporate, or other special interests very effectively manipulate and distort media messages.
Another great example is Amber Lyon, a three-time Emmy award winning journalist at CC, who said that they are routinely paid by the US government and foreign governments to selectively report and even distort information on certain events. She has also indicated that the government has editorial control over content.
Ever since Operation Mockingbird, a CIA-based initiative to control mainstream media, more and more people are expressing their concern that what we see in the media is nothing short of brainwashing.
This is also evident by blatant lies that continue to spam the TV screen, especially when it comes to topics such as health, food, war (‘terrorism‘), poverty, and more.
Things have not changed, in fact, when in comes to mainstream media distorting information and telling lies. They have gotten much worse in recent years, in fact, so it is highly encouraging that more people are starting to see through these lies, even without the help of whistleblowers like Dr. Ulfakatte.
One great example is the supposed ‘war on terror,’ or ‘false flag terrorism.’ There are evenWikileaks documents alluding to the fact that the United States government planned to “retaliate and cause pain” to countries refusing GMOs.
Mainstream media’s continual support of GMOs rages on, despite the fact that a number of countries are now banning these products.
The list of lies goes on and on. It’s time to turn off your T.V. and do your own research if you are curious about what is happening on our planet. It’s time to wake up.
- One Third Of UK Children Spend Less Time Outdoors Than US Prison Inmates
Over the course of his campaign, Bernie Sanders has made it clear that criminal justice reform is something he cares quite a lot about.
“I consider reforming our criminal justice system one of the most important things that a president of the United States can do,” the Vermont senator told a Chicago crowd in December. Sanders has called the incarceration rate in America “an international embarrassment,” and earlier this month, he said the following during a debate with Hillary Clinton:
“Where we are right now, is having more than 2.2 million people in jail — more than any other country on Earth. This is a campaign promise: At the end of my first term, we will not have more people in jail than any other country.”
Given the high rate of incarceration in the US, it’s important that Americans don’t take their freedom for granted because, well, because the government won’t hesitate to throw you in jail. Once there, UN guidelines only require that you get to breathe fresh air for one hour a day – the standard minimum guidelines call for “at least one hour of suitable exercise in open air daily.”
You can believe that inmates cherish that hour and you can imagine how shocked the residents of Indiana’s Wabash maximum security prison were to find out from researchers that one third of all children aged 5 to 12 in the UK play outdoors for less than 30 minutes each day, while a fifth of parents surveyed said their children don’t go outside at all.
“Outdoor play isn’t happening,” the “Dirt Is Good” initiative found in a survey of 12,000 parents. “Almost a third of children play outside for 30 minutes or less a day and one in five don’t plan outside at all on an average day.” Watch below as inmates react to the study.
So what are kids in the UK doing instead? Why, staring at screens of course. “Children spend twice as much time on screens inside as they do playing outside,” the same study found.
But it’s not all bad news. Children in the UK are far more likely to be able to make up for lost time outdoors later in life than are kids in the US. The incarceration rate in the UK is around five times lower than it is in America.
- These Energy Companies Are Most At Risk From The "Spring Redetermination"
In late September, during the peak of fall borrowing base redetermination , many oil and gas companies got their first glimpse of just how bad their liquidity would get when as a result of collapsing commodity prices, the value of their collateral crashed when PV-10s plunged by up to 80% Y/Y as of December 2015…
… and resulted in plunging access to secured liquidity as borrowings bases were eviscerated as much as 38% (for those unfamiliar with the basics of the semiannual redetermination process, the WSJ has a handy and brief 101).
Incidentally, it would have been far worse if the Dallas Fed and OCC had not stepped in and told lender banks to take it as easy on the debtors as possible, and in some cases, even suspend market-based calculations for price decks. The reason for this kid glove treatment was that many banks were unprepared to reserve and write down the value of their energy loans down to fair values as of the fall.
Now, six months later, neither the OCC nor the (Dallas) Fed will be quite as generous and demand that banks act as a benevolent cartel. In fact, from what we have heard, it will be quite the opposite which explains the urgent scramble by many banks to force their debtor clients to issue equity and use the proceeds to repay secured loans.
As such, the imminent spring redetermination may prove to be just the catalyst to push the recently latent energy crisis to the next level.
So which companies are most at risk of a suddenly air pocket in liquidity? For the answer we go to a recent Bloomberg Intelligence slide deck prepared precisely for the purpose of showcasing the companies with maxed out credit lines. These are as follows:
However, while these companies certainly have pulled the short stick, ironically they may not be the first to go: after all, at least they had the foresight of using up their entire available revolvers (and in the odd case of PostRock, more than 100% of it) – it doesn’t matter if now the banks decide to collapse their borrowing base – the funds have already been wired and good luck getting a refund.
No, the companies most at risk may actually be those with that currently have some of the most highly utilized borrowing bases, ranging anywhere from 62% for Contango to 94% for Vanguard. It is these companies that will suddenly find themselves with zero incremental sources of liquidity as the banks proceed to whack anywhere from 30 to 50% of their borrowing base, leaving them scrambling to preserve liquidity and ultimately leading to bankruptcy court, in no small part under the pressure of secured and soon to be DIP lenders (and in most cases, the post reorg equity) who will demand the least amount of Enterprise Value be wiped out in the months before bankruptcy. Here are the names.
We would be most worried about the near-term viability of the companies shown above: in our humble opinion these are the companies most at risk from the upcoming spring redetermination period.
As for the companies shown below, we would not be quite as worried about them, although we are confident that in a few weeks time these “largest borrowing bases” will be substantially smaller.
Finally, courtesy of Haynes and Boone, here is a less impartial perspective thanks to a poll of banks, PE firms, and oil service companies who were asked to share their thoughts on the upcoming spring redetermination. Among the key findings:
- Overall respondents expect 79% of the borrowers to see a decrease in their borrowing base in spring 2016
- Overall respondents, on average, expect to see borrowing bases to decrease by 38% compared to what they were in fall 2015
- As to the most likely path to be taken by lenders and borrowers who face a borrowing base deficiency this spring: 36% of respondents said the would negotiate an amendment or extension with the lender; 31% said they would sell non-core assets; 15% said they would seek capital from a hedge fund or private equity fund; 4% said sell the company; 13% said restructure or declare bankruptcy
- Lessons From Brussels – America Should Get Out Of The Middle East
Submitted by Justin Raimondo via AntiWar.com,
The vicious attack on the Brussels airport and metro underscores the futility of focusing on the Syrian “Caliphate” as the epicenter of terrorism: as I’ve been saying in this space since 2001, the snake has no head. Both al-Qaeda and now ISIS are protean entities with a vast geographical spread, and what the Brussels attack – and, before it, the Paris attack – show is that they have successfully colonized Europe.
If the “Islamic State” proclaimed by ISIS was defeated and eliminated tomorrow, the terrorist and criminal networks that pulled off the Brussels attacks would still exist.
The population of Brussels is nearly 25 percent immigrants from Muslim countries, primarily Morocco and Algeria. And as it turns out the two brothers who were the core of the ISIS cell were habitués of the now notorious Molenbeek neighborhood, which consists primarily of the descendants of immigrants who settled there decades ago. Poor, and beset by petty crime, it is a pool in which terrorist recruiters fish with much success. The Syrian civil war has become a cause that attracts young toughs with no prospects, who are looking for some sense of meaning – and a way to express their alienation from the larger society in which they live. Molenbeek was also the base for those who planned and carried out the Paris attacks – it is, in effect, a general headquarters for ISIS to carry out its European operations. Salah Abdeslam, the chief planner of the Paris attacks, fled there and found sanctuary for four months before being caught.
In short, the problem of terrorism in Europe is an internal phenomenon, not something that comes from the outside. The Europeans imported it – and, as Germany’s welcoming of hundreds of thousands of refugees from the war-torn Middle East dramatizes, they are continuing to import it. Now they are living with the consequences.
In response, various right-wing populist parties have emerged in Europe that focus on stopping immigration from Muslim countries: in France, Britain, and Germany the rise of the anti-immigration movement has liberal elites in a panic. And yet these movements are for the most part exercises in futility, because that horse is already out of the barn. France, for example, is not going to deport the millions of North African Muslims who have lived in the country for a generation and more: they are French citizens. The same goes for Britain, and all the former empires of Europe whose colonial adventures brought in large numbers of the colonized. Now they are learning – too late – that colonialism is a two-way street.
What Brussels also showed is that the universal surveillance championed by the War Party as a necessary corollary of the “war on terrorism” would not have stopped the attacks: the ISIS cell consisted of two brothers, which not only ensured against infiltration but also made it next to impossible for any but the most intrusive surveillance to have had any effect. Indeed, the key to stopping the attacks was intelligence – which the Belgian authorities ignored. It turns out that Brahim el-Bakraoui had been deported from Turkey and the Belgians had been warned he was dangerous. They ignored the warning.
The Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz claims that the Belgian authorities had “advance and precise intelligence warnings” about the attack on the airport and the subway but failed to take sufficient action to prevent them. This highlights another lesson of the Brussels attacks: the European authorities are utterly incompetent and unprepared for the challenge they face.
Beyond that, however, is a larger problem: the ISIS phenomenon is largely a creation of the Western powers and its allies in the Gulf. The Saudis, the Qataris, and the Kuwaitis have long been funding Wahabist extremism, and they are the real progenitors of the ideology that inspired the creation of al-Qaeda and ISIS. Furthermore, regime change in Syria has long been on the American-European agenda, with funding for ‘moderate” Islamist head-choppers flowing from the US Treasury directly into the pockets of extremist gangs in the region. The same enabling action took place in Libya, where – led by Hillary Clinton – the Obama administration sided with “pro-democracy” rebels who turned out to be terrorists.
With the Syrian civil war as their training ground, the ISIS recruits of Molenbeek and other similar ghettos underwent the transformation from petty criminals to battle-hardened jihadists. And now they are swarming all over Europe, with reportedly thousands of them traveling back to Belgium, France, Britain, and elsewhere to wreak havoc in the name of their newfound cause.
For us here in America, the lessons of the European tragedy are there to be learned. There is only one solution to the problem of terrorism and it doesn’t involve going abroad in search of monsters to destroy. The point is to make sure those monsters never reach our shores.
Furthermore, we must withdraw from the Middle East – a possibility that doesn’t bear the economic consequences it once did, given the creation of new technologies that make domestic oil production far easier.
We are spending billions defending and sustaining the Saudi monarchy and the Gulf states – some of the most repressive regimes in the world. And for what? The interventionists declare that America’s role as a “global leader” represents the defense of our values. But does a regime that beheads “infidels” represent American values? Indeed, there is no operative difference between the internal rule of the ISIS “caliphate” and the Saudi Kingdom. Yet we are obsessed with destroying the former and cuddling up to the latter.
It’s too late for the Europeans, who are now forced to sleep in the bed they so assiduously made. It isn’t too late for America: we can learn the lesson of Brussels if only we have the will to do so.
- With Hillary Clinton's Email Lies Unravelling, 147 FBI Agents Are On Her Heels
Earlier this month, conservative legal advocacy group Judicial Watch released a series of documents obtained via an FOIA request which appear to prove that Hillary Clinton knew her BlackBerry wasn’t secure when she and her staff moved into Mahogany Row (the nickname given to the set of offices reserved for senior officials in the Department of State).
E-mail exchanges between Senior Coordinator for Security Infrastructure Donald Reid and the NSA show Clinton was intent on obtaining a secure BlackBerry that she could use in restricted areas.
Although Clinton would of course be given a desktop computer on which she could safely conduct state business, Reid said the Secretary had become “addicted” to her BlackBerry during her ill-fated 2008 Presidential campaign. “The issue here is one of personal comfort,” an e-mail from Reid reads. “S [Secretary Clinton] does not use a personal computer so our view of someone wedded to their email (why doesn’t she use her desktop when in SCIF?) doesn’t fit this scenario … during the campaign she was urged to keep in contact with thousands via a BB … once she got the hang of it she was hooked … now everyday [sic], she feels hamstrung because she has to lock her BB up.”
When the NSA wasn’t receptive, long-time Clinton aid and BlackRock crony Cheryl Mills tried her hand at convincing security officials to find a work around for Clinton’s BlackBerry but she too was rebuffed. “The department’s designated NSA liaison, whose name was redacted from the documents, expressed concerns about security vulnerabilities inherent with using BlackBerry devices for secure communications or in secure areas,” AP recounts, adding that “Clinton began sending work-related emails through private accounts soon after, in March 2009.”
Or so the story goes. In fact, however, Clinton may have begun using the private server housed in her basement before March. And while there’s some ambiguity, that would seem to contradict statements she made under oath.
“Conservative legal watchdogs have discovered new emails from Hillary Clinton’s private email server dating back to the first days of her tenure as secretary of State,” The Hill reports, referencing newly released messages turned up by Judicial Watch. “The previously undisclosed February 2009 emails between Clinton from her then-chief of staff, Cheryl Mills, raise new questions about the scope of emails from Clinton’s early days in office that were not handed over to the State Department for recordkeeping and may have been lost entirely.” Here, for instance, is a message dated February 13 that appears to reference the meeting Mills had with the NSA:
Just to clarify, this is a problem because Clinton’s campaign has contended that she did not use the personal account prior to March and the publicly released e-mails begin on March 18.
Again, there’s some ambiguity here. “[Clinton] has previously acknowledged that she emailed with department officials before March 18, 2009, the date of the first email in the collection that former Secretary Clinton provided to the Department in December 2014,” a State Department official said last week. “Former Secretary Clinton has also indicated that she does not have access to work-related emails beyond those she turned over to the Department.”
So essentially, the argument is that although there were indeed work related e-mails sent prior to March 18, Clinton could not access them to turn them over – or something. The story keeps changing. And indeed that’s the whole problem. At this point it’s abundantly clear that Clinton would have been far better off telling the truth from the very beginning and the fact that incremental information continues to surface certainly seems to suggest that the former First Lady fully intends to admit only what someone else can prove. That doesn’t exactly inspire much trust.
“So now we know that, contrary to her statement under oath suggesting otherwise, Hillary Clinton did not turn over all her government emails,” Tom Fitton, the head of Judicial Watch said in a statement. “We also know why Hillary Clinton falsely suggests she didn’t use clintonemail.com account prior to March, 18, 2009 — because she didn’t want Americans to know about her February 13, 2009, email that shows that she knew her Blackberry and email use was not secure.”
While we would note that there’s a bit of confirmation bias going on there (i.e. Fitton said the messages he uncovered earlier this month were proof that Clinton knew her BlackBerry wasn’t secure and now he says the new e-mails are proof that that proof was indeed proof), Fitton is probably right. Clinton most likely would rather not have been forced to admit that she and Cheryl Mills essentially tried to browbeat the NSA into figuring out how to accommodate the BlackBerrys because the very fact that they had the conversation in the first place suggests Clinton and Mills knew the devices weren’t secure.
But more importantly, it seems exceedingly unlikely that Clinton couldn’t have turned over the messages from February had she wanted to. That is, how is it that she had access to mail on her private sever from March 18 but not from the beginning of February? Did she permanently delete the messages? And if so, why?
Well the FBI intends to find out, because as a new Washington Post piece (which you’re encouraged to read in its entirety) details, the Bureau now has 147 agents on the case. “One hundred forty-seven FBI agents have been deployed to run down leads” WaPo writes, adding that “the FBI has accelerated the investigation because officials want to avoid the possibility of announcing any action too close to the election.”
While we can always hold out some hope that Clinton will one day be held accountable and that someone, somewhere will dispel with the notion that America’s political aristocracy is above the law, we can’t help but suspect that we’ll never see Hillary Clinton in black and white stripes – unless it’s a pantsuit.
- Saudis To "Modernize" Economy As Interbank Rates Surge & Money Supply Collapses At Record Pace
For the first time since January 2009, 12-month Saudi interbank rates have breached 2.00% – double the 1% lows of August.
This 'stress' is also evident in the record pace of collapse of Saudi money-supply.
While Riyal forwards have rallied back from extreme bets on devaluation, they remain concerning for Saudi officials who to undertake some deep and fundamental changes to their economy, reforms that no amount of browbeating from organizations like the IMF could induce.
As OilPrice.com's Nick Cunningham details, a new report from The Atlantic Council finds that the extensive decline in oil revenues is focusing minds in Riyadh. The fiscal pressure is forcing “the kingdom’s leadership to modernize the economy,” the report concludes.
Saudi Arabia ran a fiscal deficit of about $98 billion in 2015, a figure that will decline only slightly to $87 billion this year. That deficit total is also probably closer to $120 billion in reality though, given that the costs from the war in Yemen were not included.
The fiscal squeeze is forcing some changes. First, the Saudi government is looking at new taxes, including a 5 percent value added tax (VAT). That may seem like a run-of-the-mill austerity measure, but for Saudi Arabia it is a novel proposal: it will be the first tax imposed in the country.
More to the point, the VAT is illustrative of where Saudi Arabia is heading. The Atlantic Council argues that the kingdom is starting to reform its economy in fundamentally positive ways. Low oil prices are forcing it to rely more upon taxes and less on oil revenues. That would start to make Saudi Arabia less of a “rentier state,” a country that has no need to build much of an economy because resource extraction is so lucrative. Rentier states often suffer from greater corruption and a deeper lack of responsiveness to the needs of the public, since abundant oil revenues mean that the government does not need revenue from its populace.
Another major shift in Saudi Arabia could be the partial privatization of Saudi Aramco. Prince Mohammed bin Salman made news in early January when he told The Economist that the government was mulling over such a step. There has been a lot of speculation about why an IPO would be staged. Transparency appears to be a top concern. While Aramco routinely publishes operational data, detailing production figures, shipments, and downstream activity, the company reveals very little about its finances. “The most likely explanation for Saudi Aramco’s lack of financial transparency is that it wants to hide how much money is siphoned off to the royal family,” The Atlantic Council report suggests.
By privatizing some Aramco assets (likely downstream) and cleaning up and publishing data from the company’s books, the Saudi government apparently is showing some recognition that its relationship with the public must change. “Naturally, the royal family is unlikely to find itself cut off from any of the oil benefits to which it is accustomed. However, what is likely to change is that the family will no longer see itself as able to access funds without being held responsible by the Saudi public.”
Obviously, the downturn in oil prices is not exactly something that the Saudi government is happy about. Although it has about $616 billion in cash reserves, enough to finance its large fiscal deficits for years, Saudi Arabia is burning through those reserves at a rapid clip. In 2014, Saudi Arabia had $746 billion in reserves at its highest point.
Also, the government’s perennial top concern is social stability. Having to introduce new austerity measures, reduce subsidies, raise some taxes, and generally acknowledge that the country’s luxurious days could be coming to an end, the fall in oil prices presents some new risks. As The Atlantic Council notes in its report, any instability in a country that accounts for 10 percent of the world’s oil production would be felt across the globe.
Still, the reforms underway are long overdue, and in that sense, there is a silver lining in the crude price crash. In recent years, Saudi Arabia has succeeded in starting to build a more diversified industrial economy, with new facilities producing chemicals, fertilizers, aluminum, cement, and other industrial products. Up until now, however, economic diversification has not gone as far as it could. Part of the reason is that Saudi Arabia, as a “rentier state,” does not tax manufacturing, and thus, has had little incentive to promote its growth. For that matter, it has had little incentive to promote the growth of any non-oil sector of its economy.
Now, the reforms underway – new taxes, subsidy cuts, and the partial privatization of Saudi Aramco – are making Saudi Arabia “increasingly resemble most modern economic states.”
However, it is still early days and the reforms are far from assured. “Admittedly, complete change will not come overnight, but it is nonetheless being prodded on by the decline in income,” the report concludes.
- The US Election 'Shame' Of Thrones
It appears George R.R. Martin’s best-selling book series has a lot of similarities to the ‘ice’ and ‘fire’ of the current election campaign. Two powerful families (the establishment vs Bernie and Trump) of liars and honest men (and women) playing a deadly game for control of the ‘kingdom’…
h/t @g_mastropavlos
- Ron Paul: A European PATRIOT Act Will Not Keep People Safe
Submitted by Ron Paul via The Ron Paul Institute for Peace & Prosperity,
It was not long after last week’s horrifying bombings in Brussels that the so-called security experts were out warning that Europeans must give up more of their liberty so government can keep them secure from terrorism. I guess people are not supposed to notice that every terrorist attack represents a major government failure and that rewarding failure with more of the same policies only invites more failure.
I am sure a frightened population will find government promises of perfect security attractive and may be willing to allow more surveillance of their personal lives. They should pause a little beforehand and consider what their governments have done so far to keep them “safe.”
The government of France, for example, has been particularly aggressive in its Middle East policy. Then-French President Sarkozy was among the most determined proponents of “regime change” in Libya. That operation has left the country in chaos, with much of the territory controlled by an ISIS and al-Qaeda that were not there before the “liberation.” As we learned last week from Hillary Clinton’s emails, Sarkozy and British Prime Minister David Cameron were much more concerned with getting their hands on Libya’s oil after the overthrow of Gaddafi. The creation of a hotbed of terrorism that could easily make its way to Europe was not important. They wanted to secure enormously profitable deals for well-connected French and English energy companies.
Likewise, European governments have been very active in the five-year, US-led effort to overthrow the Assad government in Syria. This foolish move has boosted both ISIS and al-Qaeda in Syria to the point where they nearly over-ran the country late last year. It has also led millions to flee their war-torn country for a Europe that has opened its doors with the promise of generous benefits to anyone who can make it there. Is it any surprise that so many hundreds of thousands took them up on the offer? Is it any surprise that in this incredible flood of people there may be more than a few who are interested in more than just free housing and a welfare check?
Europeans should be demanding to know why their governments provoke people in the Middle East with aggressive foreign policies, and then open the door to millions of them. Do their leaders just lack basic common sense?
Usually the so-called security experts who advise more government surveillance after a terrorist attack have a conflict of interest. They often benefit when the security state is given a bigger budget. Insecurity is the bread-and-butter of the security “experts.” But why is it that after a terrorist attack, governments are rewarded with bigger budgets and more power over people? Shouldn’t failure be punished instead of rewarded?
As in the United States, the security crisis in Europe is directly tied to bad policy. Until bad policy is changed, no amount of surveillance, racial profiling, and police harassment can make the population safer. Europeans already seem to understand this, and as we have seen in recent German elections they are abandoning the parties that promise that the same old bad policies will this time produce different results. Hopefully Americans will also stand up and demand a change in our foreign policy before bad policy leads to more terrorist violence on our shores.
- Japanese Retail Sales Plunge Most Since 2010
Just one more cut in rates more negative and just a little more ETF buying and bond purchases and we are sure the Japanese will start spending as wages rise…
4th monthly decline in a row and absent the tsunami and tax-hike reaction, this is the worst drop since Dec 2010…
At what point do you just admit failure?
- Full Metal Retard Part Deux: CIA-Backed Rebels Now At War With Pentagon-Armed Fighters In Syria's Aleppo
It would be difficult to find a program that better exemplifies the word “failure” than the Pentagon’s “train and equip” effort in Syria.
Last May, US Central Command issued a hilariously absurd press release outlining what was quite obviously going to be a disastrous effort to arm rebel fighters. “The US military and partner forces have begun training the initial class of appropriately vetted Syrian opposition recruits this week to support the effort to degrade and ultimately defeat ISIL in Syria,” the PR read.
The idea was to field a contingent of more than 5,000 fearsome warriors by the end of the year.
(File photo: Dec. 17, 2012 Syrian rebels attend a training session in Maaret Ikhwan near Idlib, Syria)
Long story short, the effort was a fiasco – a complete debacle – a hilarious screwup. First, Colonel Nadim al-Hassan and an unknown number of other fighters from “Division 30” were kidnapped in the Aleppo countryside in July. “A senior U.S. defense official confirmed the snatched fighters had gone through the initial vetting process to receive training in Turkey,” The Daily Beast wrote at the time. “But then, for reasons that remain unclear, they traveled to Syria before they were ready to do battle with ISIS.” Subsequently, al-Nusra simply arrested them at a checkpoint near Zahart al-Malkia.
“We warn soldiers of (Division 30) against proceeding in the American project,” the al-Qaeda affiliate said in a statement distributed online. “We, and the Sunni people in Syria, will not allow their sacrifices to be offered on a golden platter to the American side.
As humiliating as that most certainly was, it got far, far worse. In late September, rumors circulated that Division 30 commander Anas Ibrahim Obaid had defected to al-Nusra after he disappeared in Aleppo.
Reports since yesterday claim US-backed leader Anas Obaid has betrayed US & handed weapons to Jabhat al-Nusra #Syria pic.twitter.com/yTZqVT3CI0
— Charles Lister (@Charles_Lister) September 22, 2015
Apparently, Obaid entered Syria from Turkey the day before with some 70 new graduates of the US program and a dozen or so four-wheel vehicles equipped with machine guns and ammunition. Although there are competing accounts as to what exactly happened next, Division 30 ultimately handed over all of the ammunition and the pickup trucks to al-Nusra in exchange for “safe passage.”
“They handed over a very large amount of ammunition and medium weaponry and a number of pick-ups,” one Abu Fahd al-Tunisi, an al-Nusra member, said on Twitter. “A strong slap for America… the new group from Division 30 that entered yesterday hands over all of its weapons to Jabhat al-Nusra after being granted safe passage,” he added.
Yes, “a strong slap for America” that came just days after “a strong slap” for taxpayers who on September 16 learned that only “four or five” graduates of the $500 million program were still fighting in Syria.
The program was understandably mothballed a few weeks later, but that doesn’t mean US-trained forces didn’t continue to rack up embarrassing battlefield losses to al-Nusra. In fact, it was exactly two weeks ago that al-Nusra took over Maarat Numan from Division 13 (one of the first rebel groups to receive US-made TOWs), confiscating anti-tank missiles, armored vehicles, a tank, and other arms in the process. “We congratulate [al-Nusra chief Mohammad] al-Jolani on this conquest!” Division 13’s leadership exclaimed, sarcastically on Twitter.
????? #????_?????? ???? ??????? ????? ?????? ???????
????? ?? ???????? ??? ?????? ?? ????? ??? ???? ???
?????? ???????? ??? ????? !— ?????? 13 (@13alferqa13) March 13, 2016
Throw in the fact that the FSA – not to mention all the other “moderate” rebels fighting in and around Aleppo – just got finished having their proverbial asses handed to them by Russia and Hezbollah and you’d think things couldn’t get much sillier for the Pentagon.
But you’d be wrong.
As The LA Times reports, Pentagon-armed Kurdish units (so these are different fighters from those involved in “train and equip”) are now engaging in firefights with CIA-armed forces in what is surely the most ridiculous example of US strategy gone horriby (and hilariously) awry to date.
“Syrian militias armed by different parts of the U.S. war machine have begun to fight each other on the plains between the besieged city of Aleppo and the Turkish border, highlighting how little control U.S. intelligence officers and military planners have over the groups they have financed and trained in the bitter five-year-old civil war,” the Times writes. “The fighting has intensified over the last two months, as CIA-armed units and Pentagon-armed ones have repeatedly shot at each other while maneuvering through contested territory on the northern outskirts of Aleppo, U.S. officials and rebel leaders have confirmed.” Here’s more:
In mid-February, a CIA-armed militia called Fursan al Haq, or Knights of Righteousness, was run out of the town of Marea, about 20 miles north of Aleppo, by Pentagon-backed Syrian Democratic Forces moving in from Kurdish-controlled areas to the east.
“Any faction that attacks us, regardless from where it gets its support, we will fight it,” Maj. Fares Bayoush, a leader of Fursan al Haq, said in an interview.
Rebel fighters described similar clashes in the town of Azaz, a key transit point for fighters and supplies between Aleppo and the Turkish border, and on March 3 in the Aleppo neighborhood of Sheikh Maqsud.
The attacks by one U.S.-backed group against another come amid continued heavy fighting in Syria and illustrate the difficulty facing U.S. efforts to coordinate among dozens of armed groups that are trying to overthrow the government of President Bashar Assad, fight the Islamic State militant group and battle one another all at the same time.
At first, the two different sets of fighters were primarily operating in widely separated areas of Syria — the Pentagon-backed Syrian Democratic Forces in the northeastern part of the country and the CIA-backed groups farther west. But over the last several months, Russian airstrikes against anti-Assad fighters in northwestern Syria have weakened them. That created an opening which allowed the Kurdish-led groups to expand their zone of control to the outskirts of Aleppo, bringing them into more frequent conflict with the CIA-backed outfits.
The reference to “Kurdish-led” groups is a nod to the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), a make-believe alliance between the YPG and “Syrian Arabs.” As we noted last autumn in our classic post “Full Metal Retard: US Launches ‘Performance-Based’ Ammo Paradrop Program For Make-Believe ‘Syrian Arabs’“, there is no such thing as the SDF. The US was looking for a way to arm the YPG without enraging Erdogan, and so Washington tried to say that the Kurds had in fact joined forces with moderate Arabs in an ad hoc anti-Assad coalition. The Pentagon then promptly dropped 50 tons of ammo into the middle of the desert on pallets for the Kurds to retrieve (Erdogan saw right through the ruse, but that’s another story). “The group is dominated by Kurdish outfits known as People’s Protection Units or YPG,” the Times goes on to note. “A few Arab units have joined the force in order to prevent it from looking like an invading Kurdish army, and it has received air-drops of weapons and supplies and assistance from U.S. Special Forces.”
Of course none of this should surprise anyone. The Kurds are looking to bridge the territory they control east of the Euphrates along the Syrian-Turkish border with that which they control in Aleppo and that means moving into the Azaz corridor (i.e. the grey area between the purple areas on the map below).
The Kurd’s recent move to declare federalism will only make the push to unite their territory in northern Syria more urgent.
What makes this especially absurd is that Erdogan is firing on the YPG in and around Azaz. And by “YPG” we mean the Pentagon-backed “SDF.” So summing up, you have the Pentagon-backed Kurds fighting CIA-backed Islamists in an area where US-ally Erdogan is firing on the same Pentagon-backed Kurds.
And believe it or not, that’s not the punchline. The punchline is that Obama is considering restarting the train and equip program which would mean that in addition to the Pentagon-backed Kurds fighting in close proximity to and sometimes against CIA-backed rebels, you’d have a separate group of Pentagon-backed fighters operating in the very same area and everyone would be dodging artillery fire from the Turkish army.
Perhaps an unnamed US official who spoke to the LA Times summed it up best: “This is complicated.”
* * *
- Is Trump Wrong About A Border Wall? One Stunning Chart Has The Answer
Submitted by Jacob Bojesson via DailyCaller.com,
Several European countries have erected fences to keep migrants out, and, according to the numbers, every case appears to have a large impact.
Hungary was a popular pathway for refugees on their way to Germany during the fall. When the daily illegal border crossings were at 7,000 per day, Prime Minister Viktor Orban decided to erect a fence along the border to Serbia and Croatia.
The result speaks for itself:
Illegal border crossings in Hungary in October, 2015. (Hungarian Police/The Daily Caller News Foundation)When the fence went up Oct. 17, the influx went down to 870 from 6,353 only a day earlier. Illegal border crossing were steadily below 40 per day throughout the rest of the month. The number picked up slightly in February, after migrants destroyed part of the fence, but it remains in the low hundreds.Another successful example is Macedonia — the first step on the Balkan route, which separates Greece from the rest of the EU. Macedonia had more than 60,000 migrants enter the country in January. The migrant influx was cut significantly, leaving tens of thousands stranded in Greece. The desperation among refugees led to clashes with Macedonian military in late February.
Germany’s rising anti-immigration party, Alternative fur Deutschland (AfD), proposed a fence along its border in March.
AfD leader Joerg Meuthen mentioned several examples where fences work, particularly in Spain, where it forces North African migrants to take a long detour to get to Europe.
“They have to go around the Mediterranean” to find a way in, Meuthen said at a rally, according to news agency AFP. “Yes, fences have an impact.”
* * *Of course, as we previously noted that it wasn't just the fence that kept them out of Hungary… it was the tear gas, water cannons, and baton beatings AT the fence.
- 2016 US Presidential Election Voter's Guide
in this day-and-age of infinitesimally short attention spans, we thought the following flowchart would provide today’s Millennial voter a quick-and-dirty solution for making their decision come November…
Source: The Burning Platform h/t Joe
- US Drops Case Against Apple After FBI Successfully Hacks Terrorist's iPhone
Dear Tim Cook, the DoJ and FBI will no longer require your assistance in unlocking the iPhone of Syed Farook who, along with his wife Tashfeen Malik, murdered more than a dozen people at an employee holiday party in San Bernardino last December.
- U.S. DROPS APPLE CASE AFTER SUCCESSFULLY ACCESSING IPHONE DATA
As we outlined last week, Israel’s Cellebrite, a provider of mobile forensic software, was set to assist the Feds in their attempt to unlock the iPhone. “The government has now successfully accessed the data stored on Farook’s iPhone and therefore no longer requires the assistance from Apple,” the Justice Department said in a filing (embedded below). Here’s the mainstream media line from The New York Times:
Yet law enforcement’s ability to unlock an iPhone through an alternative method raises new uncertainties, including questions about the strength of Apple’s security on its devices. The development also creates potential for new conflicts between the government and Apple. Lawyers for Apple have previously said that the company would want to know the method used to crack open the device. The government may make that method classified.
“From a legal standpoint, what happened in the San Bernardino case doesn’t mean the fight is over,” said Esha Bhandari, a staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union. She noted that the government generally goes through a process whereby it decides whether to disclose information about certain vulnerabilities so that manufacturers can patch them.
“I would hope they would give that information to Apple so that it can patch any weaknesses,” she said, “but if the government classifies the tool, that suggests it may not.”
Right. Or this could all be nonsense. That is, Apple may have just made America an unwitting participant in an iPublicity stunt, as it were. As we suggested just five days ago, “the entire Apple ‘stand’ for privacy and consumer rights might be one big theatrical spectacle as both parties involved clearly were aware the iPhone can be penetrated with the right tools.” Here’s AP:
The FBI says it successfully used a mysterious technique without Apple’s help to break into an iPhone linked to the gunman in a California mass shooting.
The surprise development effectively ends a pitched court battle between Apple and the Obama administration.
The government told a federal court Monday without any details that it accessed data on gunman Syed Farook’s iPhone and no longer requires Apple’s assistance. Farook and his wife died in a gun battle with police after killing 14 people in San Bernardino, California, in December.
Apple did not immediately comment on the development.
A U.S. magistrate last month ordered Apple to provide the FBI with software to help it hack into Farook’s work-issued iPhone. The order touched off a debate pitting digital privacy rights against national security concerns.
So just like that, it’s all over. No hard feelings. And all of this on the heels of what is almost sure to go down as one of the biggest product launch flops in company history. The timing of it all certainly leaves us with more questions than answers.
306201341 DOJ Requests SB iPhone Order Vacated
- Deutsche Bank: "We Expect The S&P To Be Between 1925 To 2100 Until The Election"
Deutsche Bank may have gotten the corporate bond QE from the ECB that it so desired (even if it means another drop in negative rates) even if that did not help its stock rebound anywhere near to pre-crash levels, and its economist department may be gripped by a bout of raging schizhophrenia as erstwile permabull Joa LaVorgna is now one of the market’s bigger bears contrasted with super optimistic DB strategist Torsten Slok (who is seemingly unaware of what his year end bonus was) but that doesn’t prevent the bank from having a very outlook of where the market will be come the November general election, namely “range bound between 1925 to 2100.”
Here is the latest outlook from DB’s strategist David Bianco
We expect the S&P 500 to be range bound between 1925 to 2100 until after the US general election. We do not expect the S&P to fall back into correction territory as a double-dip correction already happened and it would likely take clear signs of an impending US recession or a new global shock to cause renewed investor panic.
While April into May is usually a strong period for S&P 500 performance, we think upside is capped given that 1Q S&P EPS will be down y/y and likely sequentially, Fed speak is likely to be more hawkish especially upon further market gains, Brexit vote risk, and the usual summer softness especially given Presidential campaign headline and geopolitical risks.
We are more comfortable that the dollar will not surge nea -term given the Fed lowered its 2016-2017 rate forecasts and the ECB and others acknowledge the limited benefits of negative interest rates and currency devaluation. However, we do not expect the dollar to fall as nothing like the Plaza Accord of 1985 has occurred. Moreover, we doubt a strong rebound in commodity prices.
If the S&P 500 doesn’t reach a new low, then Feb 11 2016 marks the trough of this market correction. During this double dip correction, S&P was sold off -14.2% from May 21 2015 to Feb 11 2016 (183 trading days). It has been 28 trading days since the market trough, this compares to 119 average trading days between 5%+ S&P dips since 1960. This is supportive, but summer and fall are often weaker than usual in election years.
* * *
What is unsaid is that if DB’s forecast is just a little too optimistic, and if stocks indeed proceed to tumble, guess which European bank will be scrambling to get a bailout by a very unhappy German taxpayer…
- Next Came Death: What The Moment Before A Bombing Looks Like
Belgium. Iraq. Pakistan.
Each of those countries was rocked by at least one horrific suicide blast last week. In Belgium, it was a crowded airport and metro. In Iraq, a soccer field. In Pakistan, a park popular with women and children.
The combined death toll from those attacks alone: more than 130.
Terrorism, by its very nature, is meant to instill fear. That means terrorists must be unpredictable, and to a certain extent indiscriminate in who and what they target. But today’s terror is in some ways fundamentally different in character than that which the world has witnessed in the past. Al-Qaeda, for instance, did not target the World Trade Center because they hated tall buildings and if their sole purpose was to kill 4,000 people, they could have figured out a far simpler way to do it.
In Bin Laden’s eyes, the towers were an ostentatious symbol of capitalism – a monument to everything the “infidels” stood for, cherished, and sought to force upon the Muslim world. For him, more important than the number of people killed were the indelible images that will forever remain seared in America’s collective consciousness. Although civilized society likes to pretend that the victims will remain in the public’s thoughts and prayers for all eternity, Bin Laden knew that wasn’t true. Rather, he wanted to make sure that the phrase which is so often repeated after a tragedy – i.e. “we will never forget” – actually meant something when it came to his legacy. That necessitated the destruction of symbols, not people. Sure, you can’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs so “some” (maybe even several thousand) people would have to die, but the final number didn’t matter. It could have been 30, 300, 3,000, or 30,000. The point was to send a message. Does that make it any less horrific or in any way excuse it? Obviously not, but that isn’t the point.
Many of the attacks we see today cannot be justified by an appeal to the kind of perverse, psychopathic logic that Bin Laden and his ilk so often employed. Bombing women and children at a crowded park in Lahore, killing fans at a soccer match, and targeting civilians standing in line at an airport Starbucks are senseless acts of violence – meaningless even in the minds of the murderous. Consider for instance that before his death, Bin Laden himself derided the brutal, indiscriminate violence employed by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq which was the precursor to ISIS.
None of this is to say that one terrorist is “better” than another, or that the world should long for the days when terrorism “made sense.” Rather, it’s simply to say that now more than ever, tragedy can strike anytime, anywhere. The term “targets” is now meaningless. The question isn’t “who or what should we hit?”, it is “who or what can we hit?”
With that as the backdrop, consider the following collection of visuals from artist Simon Menner who, after combing through hours of footage from suicide bombs, car bombs and attacks, captured the following images of the very last frame before tragedy struck.
From The Washington Post:
“It is very absurd, but apparently the war needs a PR department to function,” artist Simon Menner said. Many new battlefields and weapons of war — drones, surveillance, snipers, cyberterrorism — are invisible and rely even more on media to affirm their existence and threat.
Menner’s ongoing project, “Last Frame Before Blast,” dwells in invisible warfare. In combing through hours of found footage from suicide bombs, car bombs and attacks around the world, what he found most striking was the moment before a blast. A Russian street scene–the white car is about to blow up. A government office in Sri Lanka–a woman reaches into her sari to detonate her explosive vest.
A photograph takes a split second in time, and stretches it into eternity. For those caught in Tuesday’s horrific attacks in Belgium, many would probably like nothing more than to return to that last moment of normalcy before the bombs shredded the Brussels airport.
Menner’s frames captures a bit of this wistfulness. But they are also heavily pregnant with anxiety about where the blast will come from, and the knowledge that everything is about to change. “Once you perceive the threat it is almost indistinguishable from the real threat,” Menner said via email.
- U.S. Lifted The Crude Oil Export Ban, And Exports Went… Down
Submitted by Charles Kennedy via OilPrice.com,
Just over three months after the authorities lifted the four-decade ban on crude oil exports, the U.S. has actually exported less this year than it did over the same period the year before, when the ban was still in place.
According to Clipper Data market intelligence cited by the Financial Times, we’ve seen a 5 percent decline in U.S. crude oil export volumes since the beginning of this year. The data suggests that on average we are exporting (waterborne) 325,000 barrels per day now, compared to 342,000 barrels per day during the first months of 2015.
And there’s no official data yet—not since the beginning of this year, when the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) noted that during the week ending 22 January, the U.S. had exported just shy of 400,000 barrels of oil, which again was 25 percent less than what was exported for the same week in 2014.
An oil tanker that reached a French port in January was the first post-ban delivery of U.S. crude oil, but things haven’t really picked up pace since then.
January’s cargoes, totaling about 11.3 million barrels, marked a 7 percent decline from U.S. crude exports in December, according to data by the U.S. Census Bureau. Shipments during January went to Curacao and France, in addition to Canada, the primary destination. The total number of tankers that have set sail with U.S. crude oil will not be known until comprehensive data on February’s shipments is released by the U.S. Census Bureau.
The immediate beneficiaries of the ban suspension are gas and oil companies such as Chevron and Exxon Mobil—among the most tireless lobbyers against the ban—and oil trading giants such as Vitol Group BV and Trafigura Ltd Pet.
Europe and Asia are flooded with oil from Russia and the Middle East, though the first two shipments to leave the U.S. post-export ban went to Europe: one to Germany and the other to France, to be used in a refinery in Switzerland. Dutch media outlets reported in January that a tanker from Houston had reached Rotterdam port, but this remains just a drop in the global export bucket.
In Asia, even China’s state-run Sinopec—the world’s second-largest refiner—has imported a consignment of U.S. oil, according to a Reuters source. Japan's Cosmo Oil was the first Asian buyer of U.S. oil, purchasing some 300,000 barrels of U.S. crude in mid-January, which will be delivered to its refineries in mid-April.
The very first South American country that will import U.S. crude oil is Venezuela. In early February, Venezuela’s state-run oil company PDVSA imported a 550,000-barrel cargo of West Texas Intermediate (WTI) through its U.S.-based Citgo Petroleum affiliate. Venezuela started importing foreign crudes in 2014 amid a fall in its own production – buying mostly Angolan and Nigerian light grades.
WTI is also expected to be exported to Israel, where Swiss commodities house Trafigura will ship some 700,000 barrels. Atlantic Trading & Marketing, the U.S. trading unit of French Total SA, has been planning an export cargo of U.S. crude from Cushing.
Also, earlier this month, Exxon became the first U.S. oil company to export U.S. crude, sending a tanker from Texas to a refinery it owns in Italy.
However, storage is now at the highest level in at least a decade. U.S., crude storage levels hit 487 million barrels in early November, closing in on the 80-year high of 518 million barrels in the last week of February. According to the EIA, about 60 percent of the U.S. working storage capacity is filled.
Globally, the picture isn’t much better, with the International Energy Agency (IEA) saying that 1 billion barrels were added to storage in 2015 alone. OPEC has reported that crude oil stockpiles in OECD countries currently exceed the running five-year average by 210 million barrels.
- It's Official: The Oil Surge Was Driven By The Biggest Short-Squeeze Ever
Two months ago, just before crude dropped to 13 year lows, we warned oil traders that there is “a constant short squeeze threat” because “oil shorts are at all-time highs“, adding that “we have seen extreme short positioning building up in the oil futures market. The quantity of short positions opened is at an all-time high for Brent, and still high for WTI futures.”
We also warned that “a positive surprise could happen quite sharply, as short positions are likely to be squeezed by a profit-taking move. On WTI, the in-the-money short positions are really dominating at the front end of the curve while out-of-the-money long positions are dominating at the long end of the curve: the front end of oil curve could thus be more exposed to some profit-taking.”
It was, and just a few days later, the algos took this warning to heart and, courtesy of the most recurring headline (that of a “farcical” oil production freeze) as a recurring catalyst, unleashed an historic short squeeze. Actually make that a record short squeeze.
Wait, that’s impossible: surely it was more than just shorts covering and oil rose because actual longs were piling in, one could say.
One would be wrong, and it is now official: as crude soared 50% since Feb. 11, Bloomberg writes, the number of bets on increased prices has barely budged. “Instead, the upward pressure on prices appears to have come from traders cashing out of bearish wagers at an unprecedented pace. The liquidation of short positions during the last seven weeks covered by data from the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission was the largest on record.“
“The rally has come from shorts getting scared out of their positions, and you’re not seeing a lot of money coming in on the long side,” said John Kilduff, partner at Again Capital LLC, a New York hedge fund focused on energy. “It really calls into question the fortitude and staying power of the rally.”
The details: “short positions on West Texas Intermediate crude, or bets that prices will fall, have dropped by 131,617 contracts since Feb. 2, the biggest liquidation in CFTC data going back a decade. To close out a bearish position, traders buy back futures and options, putting upward pressure on prices. In the same period, bullish wagers fell by 971. In the past 10 years, there have been only two other seven-week short-covering streaks, CFTC data show. The first started in September 2009 and the second in December 2012. Both were much smaller than the recent one and were accompanied by oil rallies.”
It gets better: as we showed previously, the irony is that as oil futures shorts were squeezed out, ETF longs actually declined instead of growing as absolutely nobody – except those who have to buy-in – believes this quote-unquote rally.
Bloomberg notes that the rebound faltered a day after WTI prices touched a four-month high of $41.45 a barrel on March 22, tumbling 4 percent in New York after government data showed U.S. crude supplies surged the prior week to the highest level since 1930.
Perhaps there are no more shorts left to squeeze, in which case watch out to the downside: “When energy markets get loaded to one side of the boat like that, you can have vicious reversals,” said Kilduff. And vice versa.
- Dallas Fed Respondent Sums It Up: "Anyone Saying We're Not In Recession Is Peddling Fiction"
Headlines will crow of the seasonally-adjusted 'beat' of expectations for the Dallas Fed survey (-13.6 vs -25.8 exp) but this is the 15th month in contraction (below 0) – something only seen in recession. Scratching below the surface we see employees, workweek, and capex all in contraction and forward expectations for new orders and employment tumbled. Perhaps that reality is what drove one respondent to rage, "anyone who says the economy is not in recession is peddling fiction."
The Respondents…
The instability of the domestic oil and gas exploration and production activity continues to wreak havoc on demand for our products.
Uncertainty is the main issue regarding oil pricing and refining cash flows.
The positive March versus February comparison (as well as the six-months-ahead view) is due entirely to an extremely poor February. Volume remains well below monthly volume in the fourth quarter. Headcount was reduced in February, allowing remaining staff to return to a 40-hour workweek.
We are expanding due to longer-term strategy. While we are spread among a plethora of general manufacturing nationwide, we are experiencing a major falloff of inquiries and orders in Texas directly related to the restricted price of oil.
As a long-lead-time capital equipment manufacturer, we are working off backlog. Anyone who says the economy is not in recession is peddling fiction.
It appears the oil and gas business won't be back for 12–18 months. We are actively pursuing other industries, with varying degrees of success depending on the industry. We may very well survive.
We are looking into new markets as the deepwater drilling is pretty slow.We are generally just bumping along in a weak macro environment.
Again, the dollar is too high affecting several of our customers, therefore creating a significant impact on our business. The uncertainty in business is huge, and everyone is holding cash including ourselves. We are not making investments on growth or capital expenditures at this time. Oil prices are also creating a major problem in the oil and gas industry, with consolidations and layoffs happening very frequently.
We expect the weakening in the energy sector to ripple through to our primary end users in Texas. So far activity statewide has maintained some strength, but we are cautious that it will start to have a broader impact later in the year and into 2017. The degree to which the Texas economy holds up to the trouble in energy will be a testament to the alleged diversification in the state. We are preparing for the worst and hoping for better.
Our export business continues to be our biggest challenge. The strong dollar will be an obstacle to growth for the foreseeable future. We are simply growing less competitive to our European challengers.
One of our customers has changed its terms, which has caused us to lose coolers at the front of the store. The coolers are really the only place in the store where our gross margin exceeds our cost of service. Couple this giant hit with a general 1–3 percent long-term decline in soft drink sales, and the next year looks bleak.
We have been told that companies are cutting their advertising budgets that affect printing. We are getting more phone calls from press and bindery operators looking for work. I am hoping this slowdown is short lived and that the economy improves in the next few months.
Our turnover in the past year has been triple of the previous nine years: competitors poaching employees, retirements, people we put a ton of training into for two or three years moving out of state for family reasons, and other reasons. We're trying to build staff for new customers coming on board but can’t seem to hold our gains. It is very frustrating. I'm more optimistic about the year than I was in January.
We have picked up in March but only because February was so dismal. We were super slow with many 3.5 to four-day workweeks in the plant. Activity is trying to pick up, and it appears we will be busier in the coming months than we have been.
But apart from that, everything is awesome.
- 2015 Ends With a Stratospheric P/E Multiple Of 23x
The Q4 earnings season is over and the numbers are in the bag. The GAAP numbers that is, not the non-GAAP garbage that lately everyone from Warren Buffett, to Factset, even to the SEC (and of course this site since 2013) has been bashing.
We wonder if they will continue bashing the GAAP numbers once they learn what they are, because as the charts below show, the earnings carnage on a real, unadjusted is simply unprecedented. Case in point: Q4 GAAP EPS just dropped even more from our previous estimate, and using IBES data, it is now down from 21 to 19.7, the lowest quarterly print since Q1 2010 when GAAP earnings were just 19.4 (and when the S&P was roughly half where it is now).
What about on an LTM and full year basis? As the chart below shows, the growing trailing 12 month divergence in the past few quarters between GAAP and non-GAAP has grown to proportions not seen since the financial crisis. What one can say with absolute certainty is that unless oil rebounds, and does so fast, all those “one-time, non-recurring” pro forma addbacks which have kept the non-GAAP EPS of the S&P500 flat while GAAP has plunged, will very soon be revised sharply lower.
Which brings us to the full year snapshot: what if Buffett, and Factset, and the SEC (and of course this website) are right and GAAP is the proper way of looking at earnings? Then we have a big problem, because instead of the 118.0 in 2015 non-GAAP S&P earnings, which translate into a P/E multiple of 17.3x as of today’s 2037 market close, the real, GAAP EPS of just 88.9 for the full year 2015 means the P/E multiple is now a gargantuan 22.9x!
It also means that GAAP earnings for the broader market are at a level last seen in 2010 when, as noted earlier, the S&P 500 was trading at about half where it closed today.
Digest powered by RSS Digest
Saving...