- On This "Atom Bomb"-Anniversary, You're Being Lied To About Hiroshima (And Much More..)
Japan marked the 71st anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima on Saturday by renewing calls for a nuclear weapons free world and urging leaders to follow the example of President Barack Obama and visit the bomb sites. –Washington Post
It is the anniversary of dropping an atom bomb on Hiroshima. But the Hiroshima narrative is a lie.
We’ve reported at considerable length about how the whatever was dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki didn’t have the kind of immediate destructive impact that is portrayed.
Crawford Sams who ran the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission in Japan had this to say about the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (Transcript HERE.) :
When the bomb went off, about 2 thousand people out of 250 thousand got killed [in Hiroshima] – by blast, by thermal radiation, or by intense x-ray, gamma radiation … You see, it wasn’t “Bing” like the publicity here [said]: a bomb went off and a city disappeared. No such thing happened. That was the propaganda for deterrent …
When I came back to this country, I was appalled, from a military standpoint, to find that our major planners in the War Department were using their own propaganda, 100 thousand deaths, Bing! …
You don’t hear much about the effects of Nagasaki because actually it was pretty ineffective. That was a narrow corridor from the hospital … down to the port, and the effects were very limited as far as the fire spread and all that stuff. So you don’t hear much about Nagasaki.
We’ve reported that a squadron of 66 bombers were launched on August 6th (666) to bomb the municipality of Imabari, even though Imabari. had been bombed already, twice.
This bombing squadron may well have fire-bombed Hiroshima instead, as Hiroshima was not far away. HERE is a video on the squadron and also a narrative from a book by Edwin Hoyt entitled Inferno, the Firebombing of Japan.
Here is some narrative from a PERTINENT PAGE in the actual book.
“Suddenly, one day, I was told something unexpected,” Manabe said. “When I was looking at the train timetable, I found that no trains stopped at Imabari station … I wondered why the third largest city in the province had no train service. It sounded ridiculous…
The other guy said, “Wow! No Imabari Station. But … all the trains pass by Imabari Station.”
A third guy stepped up … “It’s not strange at all. There’s no stop because there’s no Imabari City anymore. It got burned up last April in the air raid … No buildings, no houses, no people … The whole city burned up and the people ran away …”
A fellow soldier explained to Manabe. “The air raids came on the 26th of April and the 8th of May. Imabari was burned up. My father was in business there. We had a wholesale draper business. All gone. All burned up.”
The attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were horrible and tragic. But whether they were results of “atom” bombs (certainly in the sense that people understand them today) is at least seriously questionable.
More from the Post:
Quoting part of Obama’s speech in Hiroshima in May, Mayor Kazumi Matsui urged countries with nuclear weapons to “have the courage to escape the logic of fear, and pursue a world without them …
“I once again urge the leaders of all nations to visit the A-bombed cities.” Like Obama’s, he said that such visits “will surely etch the reality of the atomic bombings in each heart.”
Visiting Hiroshima and Nagasaki won’t etch anything into your heart but lies.
And the sickening falsehoods allow politicians a faux rhetorical nobility that they don’t deserve.
Whatever happened at Hiroshima and Nagasaki is nothing like what is being recited today.
Bikini Atoll, where additional atomic bombs were tested following the Hiroshima and Nagasaki attacks, was repopulated by 1968, even though radiation estimates suggested the island would be uninhabitable for a thousand years.
The actual bomb blasts seem to have been faked. Two years ago, the controversial but prolific investigator Miles Mathis – an artist and mathematician – published a debunking HERE entitled, The Bikini Atoll Nuclear Tests were Faked.”
…For more proof, we can go to Google. You can get a picture of the Bikini Atoll today from Google Earth. That’s dated 2013, not 1945. We are told the locals can’t live there now because of radioactivity, but we see at least three proofs against that.
…We see lots of plant life both on and offshore. Radioactivity affects plants just as it .affects animals, so the island should be barren.
Remember, the Bikini Atoll wasn’t said to be blasted by only Able and Baker. It was blasted 23 times, including three of the biggest blasts ever from US testing: the 4.5 megaton Navajo and the 5 megaton Tewa, in 1956; and the 15 megaton Bravo in 1954.
Why would Bikini Island tests have been faked if the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were real?
Did the US suddenly run out of bombs?
And what about Russia? How did the USSR make nuclear bombs while the Pentagon was faking theirs?
Mathis writes some photographs of USSR nuclear explosions appear fake.
When did the USSR get the “bomb?” And even more importantly, when did the US finally create the weapons of mass destruction that so frighten us today?
When did the Cold War really start? Did both sides know that nuclear weapons were not as powerful as advertised? Or maybe that they didn’t exist at all as described?
Hiroshima and Nagasaki themselves are thriving small cities and there is no appreciable difference in radiation between these two municipalities and other cities in Japan.
Additional issues (See sources at the end of this article.):
- Death rates at Hiroshima and Nagasaki are not higher than elsewhere.
- Three days after the Hiroshima bombing, a trolley was running again.
- The bank at “ground zero” remains standing to this day.
- Eight Jesuits hiding in their church survived the blast at ground zero to tell the tale – spared only by the intervention of the Virgin Mary.
- Outside of the Jesuits, and one communist reporter who hated the US, there was no significant reporting from either Hiroshima or Nagasaki for at least a month.
- For years in both Japan and the US, it was a crime punishable by death to speak or write about the bombings.
- The entire atom bomb narrative created by the Pentagon was delivered to the public via a single writer from the New York Times who later turned out to be on the Pentagon payroll.
The narrative of the bombings was surely shaped just as the Pentagon and its controllers wished for it to be. It was acquiesced to by the Japanese government that had its own reasons for promoting nuclear untruths.
Whatever happened at Hiroshima and Nagasaki has not been accurately reported. In fact, it is probably not too strong to say that what has been reported may constitute (in aggregate) one of the most profound lies of the 20th century.
It calls into question further “truths” about Western society that we live with to this day.
Nuclear weapons are a perfect propaganda for the state.
-Their tests cannot be ascertained at close range because they are too powerful.
-Their inner workings cannot be disseminated because they are “top secret.”
-Their programmatic elements cannot be observed by the normal media because too much information available to the public can stimulate adversarial or even terrorist activity.
Modern Western society is a virtual tissue of lies designed to make you believe you are living in a “civil society” (no, it’s not civil) faced by life-threatening challenges that only Western governments and the shadowy powers behind them can overcome.
The world is not running out of food, nor water. It’s not going to burn to a cinder because the air is clogged with “carbon.”
The economic disasters we face are purely man-made. Absent monopoly central banking, they would not exist.
Now we are facing “radical Islam” – another false narrative put in place by the same banking elite that has tortured the West for centuries.
This follows on the heels of numerous, serial US wars and the obscene, manufactured Hell of World Wars One and Two.
Thank goodness for the Internet and what we have called the Internet Reformation.
Thanks to information that has emerged from secret recesses (and the patterns they portray), we know more about the Way the World Really Works than any single group of individuals in recorded history.
Conclusion: It has been a great privilege to live in these unusual times. However, please take note: The reality of the world has revealed a titanic struggle between good and evil. Which side are you on? And just as importantly, what are you going to do about it?
* * *
Some Nuclear Anomalies and Sources Pertaining to Questionable Hiroshima and Nagasaki Events
- The dreaded mushroom cloud presented by the Hiroshima memorial is actually a photo of Hiroshima on fire. HERE.
- A squadron of 66 bombers was directed to Imabari. in the early morning of August 6 (666) – the morning of the A-bomb – but Imabari. had been bombed already, twice. This bombing squadron might have fire-bombed Hiroshima instead. HERE.
- Initial reports in Japan were that Hiroshima was firebombed. AP filed the same report. HERE.
- In the aftermath of the explosion, Hiroshima (and Nagasaki) look no different than Tokyo after it was firebombed. HERE and HERE.
- In Hiroshima numerous buildings are standing along with erect tree stumps. HERE.
- Limited trolley service was revived in Hiroshima after only three days. HERE.
- The Hiroshima bank at the epicenter of the bomb is fully functional and can be seen HERE.
- Predictions of endless radiation poisoning for thousands of years proved untrue. Today, Hiroshima and Nagasaki’s radiation levels are normal. HERE.
- Outdoor shadows and other dramatic evidences of the Hiroshima bombing seem to be faked. HERE.
- The initial American reporting on Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs came from Wilfred Burchett and William L. Laurence. One was a communist (Burchett) who hated America and reportedly ended up on the Kremlin’s payroll. HERE.
- The other was secretly a paid employee of US armed forces. He was the man who rode with the crew to witness the nuke dropped on Nagasaki. His report on the attack is painful to read for all the wrong reasons. HERE.
- Laurence was also the only reported to cover the development of the atomic bomc, see the initial bomb testing (from 20 miles away) and to report from Nagasaki. In other words, only one reporter, paid by the US war dept, provided the entirety of the initial civilian narrative for the testing of nuclear devices and then bombing of Nagasaki. Just one. It was roughly the same at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Reporters were not allowed to visit. HERE.
- Military officers were asked to exaggerate the injury count.
- Hiroshima and Nagasaki were apparently shut down for months. There was no influx of Western reporters. The nuclear narrative was developed by the Pentagon from what we can tell. HERE.
- It was immediately made a crime punishable by death in both the US and Japan to discuss nuclear attacks and the technology that created them. (“The restricted dataclauses of the US Atomic Energy Act specifies that all nuclear weapons-related information is to be considered classified unless explicitly declassified, and makes no distinction about whether said information was created in a laboratory by a government scientist or anywhere else in the world by private citizens.”) HERE.
- As for Little Boy, the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, photos show it seems to lack the necessary antennas to function. HERE.
- There were apparently several Little Boys of various sizes, not just one. HERE.
- The narrative surrounding the dropping of the Hiroshima bombing is reportedly inaccurate. “Levers” were “pulled” to drop the bomb, but the automatic system did the job. HERE.
- The automatic targeting system itself was an inaccurate device that reportedly might drop bombs miles from where the pilot hoped to deliver them. The odds that both bombs ended up delivering effective blasts are surprisingly low.
- The Nagasaki bombing narrative was confused for decades. The story kept changing. Even the pilot was misidentified. The crews were switched. HERE.
- The photos of the Nagasaki mushroom cloud are suspicious. They appear to be composite images with cloud cover inserted to ensure that identification of Nagasaki is impossible. HERE. Other Nagasaki photos appear fake.
- One of the two famous and supposedly identical photos of the Nagasaki mushroom cloud includes part of a plane. One of the photos is thus fake, or at least retouched. HERE.
- For events of such magnitude, there are surprisingly few eyewitness accounts of the actual blast. Many eyewitness accounts start the day after the blast or during the firestorm. Only a few Japanese survivors have stepped forward to become regular “faces” of the blast.
- There don’t seem to be any civilian photos of either mushroom cloud taken by Japanese civilians or even military facilities. This one HERE looks evidently faked.
- Much of the Western Hiroshima narrative regarding the blast was developed by a single Jesuit priest who, along with other Jesuits, had survive at the epicenter of the blast through the intervention of the Virgin Mary. HERE.
- The eyewitness accounts of the blast itself have a repetitive and artificial quality to them, at least the ones we read. One doctor claims to have treated 2000-3000 injured on the first day. HERE.
There are other disturbing elements to the Nagasaki and Hiroshima bombings, and if you are interested, you can see more documents calling many elements of the attacks into question HERE.
See information on an alternative theory regarding nuclear weapons HERE:
Additional DB Nuclear Articles to Share (With Links)
North Korea Nuclear Hoax Heightens Alternative Media Skepticism March 10
The Trillion Dollar Nuclear Weapons Fraud April 15
NASA and Nuclear Activities: More Scrutiny Needed May 25
NY Times Uses Hiroshima to Justify Gun Control, Even as More Evidence Questions A-Bomb Scenario June 15
NY Times: Hiroshima Mushroom Cloud Actually ‘Smoke from Raging Firestorm’ June 20
Brexit’s Modern Manipulation and Its A-Bomb Beginnings June 29
Pentagon’s Not Properly Funding Its Trillion-Dollar Nuclear Costs July 1
More Nuke Questions: Lies About Trident, Hiroshima, Nagasaki and Now Bikini, Too July 25
North Korea Nuclear Tensions Said to Increase – But How Do We Know It’s True? July 28North Korea Has Missiles, but Does It Have Nuclear Weapons? August 3
How Dangerous, Really? Trump Now Denies Asking Why US Does Not Use Nuclear Weapons August 3
- 14% Of Americans Have Negative Wealth
According to the New York Federal Reserve, 14% of the U.S. population lives in households that have “negative” wealth. In other words, these are households that have more debts piled up than assets, which puts their net worth in minus territory.
But what does a negative wealth household look like?
In the following chart, VisualCapitalist’s Jeff Desjardins compares the data on negative wealth households with the data on their positive counterparts. There are some obvious and stark contrasts…
Courtesy of: Visual CapitalistHouseholds that are deep in the red have the majority of their wealth in the family car – automobiles make up 45% of the value of their total assets. Housing makes up 20% of their assets by value.
For positive wealth households, it is the reverse: 40% of wealth is in the home, and 15% in vehicles.
The composition of debt is also very telling. Negative wealth households have a whopping 47% of debt in student loans, while positive houses have just 6%.
- The Propaganda War With Putin
Submitted by Renee Parsons via Strategic-Culture.com,
If it had not already been apparent, the net effect of the DNC email hack has been to kick open the door to a deep American antagonism towards Russian President Vladimir Putin.
In what has become an old fashioned American pile-on, President Barack Obama, Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, the Democratic Party and what seems the entire political establishment as well as the MSM, have united to undermine Putin as if to prime the American public for war with Russia.
War is, after all, more successful when the people have been thoroughly programmed. For instance, for a war-weary American public ‘we are bombing civilians out of a humanitarian necessity’ may work well. If necessary, a little hysteria wouldn’t hurt but most of all, a necessary requirement is to efficiently tutor the public consciousness to despise the adversary. In this case, Clinton has identified Putin as the adversary and that he is one evil reincarnation of Adolf Hitler.
Among media outlets, Politico, once considered a ‘liberal’ magazine ran “Inside’s Putin’s Information War” whose author has found a lucrative book deal on the subject and yes, this is the same Politico that requested DNC permission to publish re the Sanders/Clinton primary. The Times of London joined the effort to demonize Putin with several anti Russian articles over the weekend including “Putin’s Information War” which ran on July 30th followed by “Inside Putin’s Info War on America’ in the Wall Street Journal on July 31st. Keep your eyes peeled as the “Putin Info War” concept is sure to catch on.
As part of the effort to synchronize public antipathy to an appropriately belligerent level, the Associated Press recently published an article for wide distribution entitled “Clinton v. Putin: Russian television shows what Kremlin thinks of her.” Perhaps the AP presumed to rouse the American public in defense of Hillary Clinton.
The first paragraph began with the admission that Clinton’s entire acceptance speech had been broadcast live on nationwide television in Russia. If anyone yearns for the day when a Putin speech will be broadcast across American television, forgetaboutit. A good guess is that the intellectually-lazy American public including many liberals who have forgotten how to think, would not make the effort to inform themselves of world events.
Thereafter, the AP article followed with a series of assertions that dazzled the reader with its irony such as:
“Viewers were told that Clinton sees Russia as an enemy and cannot be trusted” and “the Democratic convention was portrayed as proof that American democracy is a sham.” The story added that Channel One introduced Clinton “as a politician who puts herself above the law, who is ready to win at any cost and who is ready to change her principles depending on the political situation.”
If the AP reporter wrote with the intention that the American public would rise up en masse and demand satisfaction; how unfair of those Russkies to write like that about our Gal Hill – that reporter was dead wrong.
What the reporter did not mention was that a significant number of Americans, including some of those who plan to hold their collective noses while voting for Clinton in sheer terror of Trump, agree with those quotes. What the reporter did not mention was that the Sanders and Trump campaigns have been largely based on those sentiments giving Clinton an unexpected run for the money which explains why she has had to pull out all the stops to beat Trump, a candidate who, by any standard, should have been a piece of cake.
Giving a wink and a nod to the MSM, Clinton formalized her accusations on Sunday Fox News that ‘Russian intelligence” was responsible for the DNC hacking and linked her opponent Donald Trump to Vladimir Putin.
Using the DNC hack issue as an opportunity to further hammer on Putin, Clinton asserted during the Fox interview that ‘we KNOW that Russian intelligence services hacked into the DNC and we KNOW that they arranged for a lot of those emails to be released and we KNOW that Donald Trump has shown a very troubling willingness to back up Putin, to support Putin.”
A good follow up by an engaged journalist might have been what does Clinton know, how does she know it and when did she know it? If the proof exists, why the reluctance to provide specifics to the American public – but that might require initiative, transparency and some candor? While challenging Trump on his commitment to the Constitution (who clearly could use an Intro 101 class), wasn’t Clinton trained, as an attorney, to understand that evidence comes before the accusation?
This is not the first time that Clinton has personally attacked Putin. In March, 2014 before a University of California audience, she said he was “thin-skinned,” was trying to “re-sovietize Europe while threatening instability and the peace of Europe.” In citing ‘Russian aggression,” she is smart enough to know the difference between protecting ethnic Russians who have centuries of deep cultural roots in Ukraine and Crimea as compared to Hitler’s invasions of eastern Europe.
An impartial observer can only assume Clinton has knowingly skewed the chronology of events in the Ukraine which began with the US-initiated overthrow of a democratically elected President on February 22, 2014; followed by an overwhelming vote on March 16th by Crimean citizens to reunite with Russia which was then followed by the legal annexation of the Crimean peninsula to Russia on March 18th. What is so difficult to understand?
Thanks to Clinton’s repetitive disinformation campaign, accusations of ‘Russian aggression’ are now widespread; repeated without regard to the evidence throughout the mainstream media and by Members of Congress, many of whom choose to remain uninformed.
Back to the Fox interview, she could not resist adding, with mock indignation, that “I think laying out the facts raises serious issues about Russian interference in our elections, in our democracy.” And as if the rest of us were asleep at the wheel and could not distinguish fact from fiction, she further added that “For Trump to both encourage that and to praise Putin despite what appears to be a deliberate effort to try to affect the election I think raises national security issues.”
Does she not see that ‘interference in our elections, in our democracy’ is exactly what the DNC did to the Bernie Sanders campaign?
And has no bright eyed, eager beaver staff person yet pointed out to Clinton that if Russia and Putin had been intent on disrupting the American presidential election, why wouldn’t they have gone after Clinton’s ‘classified’ State Department emails on her personal server that were subject to an FBI investigation and with the potential of criminal charges? Then again, an educated assumption might be that Russian intelligence does have those emails in their possession. Now there’s a real national security issue.
In her eagerness to further aggravate US – Russian relations, apparently Clinton is not only unfamiliar with the State Department’s Foreign Service Protocol for the Modern Diplomat guidelines for rules and process of diplomatic protocol (or perhaps it does not apply to her), but appears she did not receive the memo from the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) James Clapper.
Responding to the DNC-Russian furor in a more blasé and introspective manner than might be expected, Clapper stepped in as a calm voice of reason stating that he was ‘somewhat taken aback by the hyperventilation on this” and that the US was in “reactionary mode” regarding cyber-attacks. Clapper further indicated he was ‘not ready’ to identify Russia as the hacker “I don’t think we are quite ready yet to make a call on attribution.”
Interestingly, Clapper commented that “cyber warfare is not ‘terribly different than what went on during the Cold War” suggesting that it is ‘just a different modality.” He further suggested that the American people ‘need to accept’ and ‘become more resilient’ since cyber threats are a major long term challenge. Americans should ‘not be quite so excitable when we have yet another instance.” Hmm…wonder to whom he was referring.
In other words, we spy on them, they spy on us – all’s fair in love and war and that there is a certain level of honor among (cyber) thieves.
- Visualizing 31 Incredible Facts About Gold
No metal can claim a legacy comparable to gold.
As VisualCapitalist's Jeff Desjardins notes, gold has been used to show affectionate love, but it has also represented power, status, and riches for the greatest kings of antiquity. Gold’s history is truly legendary, ripe with colorful tales and anecdotes from people ranging from William Shakespeare to Christopher Columbus.
But gold doesn’t just “talk the talk”.
Gold also walks the walk, because its grandeur is backed up by impressive chemical properties and uses. As we documented in our extensive Gold Series, it’s been used as a monetary metal for thousands of years by ancient civilizations such as the Lydians, Greeks, Chinese, and Romans. It’s the most malleable and ductile metal, and it doesn’t tarnish or corrode. Over time, these properties have helped people to associate gold with concepts such as immortality or royalty.
Even today, people are still finding new uses for gold that are impressive in their own right. For example, scientists recently discovered a gold alloy that is four times tougher than titanium.
Without further ado, here are 31 incredible facts about gold…
Courtesy of: Visual Capitalist - Establishment Tries To Suppress "Dissident Actuaries" Explosive Report On Public Pensions
Submitted by Walter Russell Mead via The American Interest,
America’s slow-motion public pension train-wreck (by some estimates, the shortfall currently exceeds $3 trillion) has been kept in motion for years by deeply dishonest accounting practices employed by state and local governments, which presume unrealistically that pension funds can consistently earn white-hot annual returns approaching eight percent. So it’s disappointing, but not particularly surprising, that the actuarial establishment moved to suppress a report pointing this out.
Pensions and Investments reports:
The American Academy of Actuaries and the Society of Actuaries Monday abruptly disbanded its longtime joint Pension Finance Task Force, objecting to a task force paper challenging the standard actuarial practice of valuing public pension plan liabilities.
“This paper (is) being censored by the AAA” and SOA, said Edward Bartholomew, who was a member of the former task force, in an interview. “They didn’t want it to get out.”
Others who were members of the task force also said in interviews the two actuarial groups are trying to suppress publication of the paper.
There are powerful interests that don’t want public pensions to be governed by the same kinds of accounting principles used in the private sector because… well, because if they were, public pensions would go from seriously underfunded to catastrophically underfunded.
Union officials and state legislators (in both parties) seem to believe that it makes more sense to allow public pension funds to play “let’s pretend” with public money. To be sure, the sudden imposition of a tougher standards would cripple business as usual in many state and local governments, so there can and should be some reasonable accommodations made to allow the adjustment to take place in a less disruptive fashion. Governing by catastrophe is almost never a good idea, and a series of small and incremental changes is usually (though not always) a better way to manage public affairs.
In the long run, shifting to a more portable system of public pensions—defined contribution, rather than defined-benefit—wouldn’t just help save states and municipalities from fiscal ruin. It would also do much to improve the performance of the civil service. The current system creates a jobs-for-life mentality in public employment because workers need to stay at their positions for decades to collect the full value of their pensions. Somebody who was a good teacher at 30 but wants to leave and should leave at 40 is currently trapped. Also, one of the reasons the unions fight quality evaluations so fiercely is that the loss of job and pension is so much more draconian than simply losing a job.
The report from dissident actuaries might have helped push state and local pension systems down a more sustainable path. And the conduct of American actuarial leaders—disbanding a reputable task force that had prepared a report that the bureaucracies didn’t like, and then hinting at legal action if the report is published—is irresponsible at best and corrupt at worst. Is it any wonder that Americans are fed up with experts and the institutions they manage?
- Why Oil Under $40 Will Bring It All Down Again: That's Where SWFs Resume Liquidating
After several months of aggressive selling of stocks in late 2015 and early 2016, the culprit for the indiscriminate liquidation and concurrent market swoon was revealed when it emerged that the seller was not only China (which was forced to sell USD-denominated reserves to offset a surge in capital outflows following the Yuan devaluation), but also Sovereign Wealth Funds belonging to oil-exporting countries, who were dumping billions in risk assets to offset the collapse of the price of oil, which in turn exacerbated current account and budget deficits.
Among the prominent sellers was Norway and Saudi Arabia, arguably the biggest casualties of the death of the Petrodollar to date, as well as Abu Dhabi, Kuwait and most other SWFs, listed on the tabel below.
As JPM calculated back in January, the SWF equity selling was inversely proportional to the price of oil: according to the bank, SWF’s would liquidate some $75 billion in equities in 2017 assuming oil at $31 per barrel. Needless to say, the lower oil goes, the more selling there would be.
“This prospective $75bn of equity selling by SWFs in 2016 is not huge but becomes significant after taking into account the potential swing in equity fund flows,” JPM continued, in an attempt to discuss the impact this will have on markets. “Last year retail investors bought $375bn of equity funds globally. This year we expect an amount between 0 and $200bn. Subtracting $75bn of selling from SWFs would leave the overall equity flow from Retail+SWF investors barely positive for 2016.”
Then starting in February, oil – which had just tumbled to the low-$20s, its lowest price in over a decade – underwent a miraculous surge catalyzed by erroneous, if constantly reiterated, narrative of an imminent OPEC supply cut, a short squeeze, an algo stop hunt, an unprecedented Chinese importing spree to replenish its now almost full Strategic Petroleum Reserve, and even speculation of central bank intervention to prop up the “black gold.” In fact, just a few months after February, oil had doubled, reaching $50 even as we and many others warned, that there simply is not enough demand and far too much supply to sustain such a price.
No matter the cause, the biggest benefit of this oil surge is that the same SWFs which were actively selling stocks in early late 2015 and early 2016 put their liquidation on hold as oil rose above $40. And in this illiquid, low volume market, the absence of a determined seller is all that it took to push the S&P to all time highs, and as of Friday’s close, just shy of 2,200, a level which even sellside brokers such as Goldman believe is effectively in bubble territory and in the 99% percentile of all overvalued metrics.
However, just a few weeks later we are now back in a crude bear market, with oil briefly dipping under $40, on the back of concerns about a gasoline glut and fears that the resurgent dollar will further pressure oil. Worse, with oil returns back to the $40 range and threatens to accelerate the move to the downside, it also brings back with it the specter of SWF liquidations, because as JPM’s Nikolaos Panigirtzoglou points out in his latest weekly note, that’s where the wealth fund selling returns.
Here is why as oil approaches $40, the price of crude suddenly matters a lot to equity bulls:
We had noted in F&L April 22nd what the impact would be of a $45 average Brent oil price on SWF behavior. At the time, we noted that the stability in oil prices meant that the pressure on SWFs to abruptly sell assets would diminish over time. In addition, we argued that SWF selling should focus more on fixed-income securities during the last three quarters of the year, given that SWFs mostly liquidated equity and HF mandates during last year and the first quarter of this year. However, given recent declines in oil prices, we revisit the analysis assuming an average oil price of $40 for 2016 vs $45 before. The YTD average has already fallen to $42.
In our previous analysis based on a $45 average oil price for 2016, we projected the current account balance for oil-producing countries to worsen from around -$70bn in 2015 to -$140bn in 2016. This estimate is based on the same sensitivity of the current account balance to the change in oil prices as last year, i.e. between 2014 and 2015. However, the depletion of official assets could be higher than the current account deficit if these countries also experience capital outflows as it happened last year. If we assume $80bn of capital outflow for 2016, the same level as last year, we project a depletion of $150bn in FX reserves and a depletion of $50bn in SWF assets.
If we assume an average oil price of $40 for 2016 instead, using a similar sensitivity analysis and assumptions as described above, we project the current account balance for oil-producing countries to worsen from around -$70bn in 2015 to -$183bn in 2016. This would imply depletion of $170bn in FX reserves and a depletion of $75bn in SWF assets.
The differences in the SWF selling using the two different average oil price assumptions can be seen in Figure 9.
A $40 average oil price, and assuming that these reserve managers and SWFs sell in accordance to their average allocation, would imply selling of $118bn of government bonds and $45bn of public equities. If we assume reserve managers and SWFs are mostly done with selling equities and that they are more likely to liquidate fixed-income mandates, this would imply selling of around $120bn-$160bn of government bonds and $10bn-$15bn of corporate bonds. However, should oil prices continue to fall further below $40 on a sustained basis, SWFs would face greater pressure to sell equity mandates, similar to the end of last year and the beginning of this year.
Indeed: the lower the price of oil drops, the faster what until recently had been a paradoxical disconnect (and even a negative correlation between oil and risk assets as we showed earlier), will recouple. And it’s not just the SWF selling: recall that earlier this week, JPM’s head quant Marko Kolanovic warned that should oil return back to the $30s, it would also trigger program selling of stocks.
CTA signals for oil recently turned from strongly positive to moderately negative. This has contributed to past-month divergence between S&P 500 and oil (~1.5 standard deviations) and is closely monitored by equity and high yield credit investors. It is our view that the risk of CTAs significantly increasing oil shorts over the next 1 month is low. For oil momentum to further deteriorate, oil would need to drop to ~$30 at which point the medium term momentum (strongest signal) would turn negative and trigger selling.
To summarize, if oil were to drop back under $40, not only would it precipitate even more selling of oil as momentum strategies flip, but it would catalyze a liquidation by those SWFs who thought they were done selling equities, leading to a return of the same sellers that pushed the S&P back to the low 1,900s a short 6 months ago.
So for all those curious where stocks are going next, the simple answer is: keep an eye on what oil does next.
- Hillary Clinton: "I May Have Short-Circuited The Truth" About The Email Scandal
One of the biggest surprises over the past week was Donald Trump’s dramatic meltdown, and subsequent escalation, with the family of Humayun Khan, the US Muslim captain killed in Afghanistan in 2014, who during the DNC, tangentially accused Trump and his potential policies of being responsible for their son’s death (he wasn’t). What is most striking is that instead of ignoring this attempt to bait the Republican candidate in public, to which he most gladly obliged, he should have simply moved on and stayed on the offensive, pressing Hillary over the recent Wikileaks disclosure revealing the cronyism and corruption within the Democratic Party, as well push the familiar narrative of her email scandal.
Conveniently, Hillary helped him do just that yesterday, when she acknowledged on Friday afternoon that she may have “short-circuited” when she claimed in recent interviews that FBI Director James Comey said she was “truthful” about her use of a private email server as secretary of state. In doing so Hillary once again shifted the news spotlight away from Trump and back on to herself, as she once again revealed that the only consistent thing about Hillary Clinton are the constant lies.
Following a heavily covered interview with Fox News’ Chris Wallace, Hillary stated that Comey had found her statements “truthful” and “consistent” with what she has said publicly. Clinton’s lying led The Atlantic to publish an article titled “ Why Can’t Hillary Clinton Stop Lying?” and the Washington Post’s fact checker Glenn Kessler awarded her four “Pinocchios”, adding that “Clinton is cherry-picking statements by Comey to preserve her narrative about the unusual setup of a private email server. This allows her to skate past the more disturbing findings of the FBI investigation.” Notably, the NYTimes did not publish anything related to this flop and it took the Public Editor, whose job it to be the readers’ advocate at The NYT, to write an op-ed titled The Clinton Story You Didn’t Read Here.
After an almost universally bad week for her opponent Donald Trump, Hillary went out of her way once again to explain away her home-brew server, only this time it led to a less than favorable outcome.
Clinton insisted in two televised interviews aired this week, including one with Fox News’ Chris Wallace aired Sunday, that Comey had found her statements “truthful” and “consistent” with what she has said publicly. The Democratic nominee, speaking at a joint convention for African-American and Hispanic journalists, remarked that she was “pointing out in both of those instances that the Director Comey had said that my answers in my FBI interview were truthful.” She then reiterated the “truthful” assessment in an interview with a Colorado television station later in the week.
According to Politico, Hillary stressed that “that’s really the bottom line here. And I have said during the interview and many other occasions over the past months, that what I told the FBI, which he said was truthful, is consistent with what I have said publicly,” Clinton explained Friday. “So I may have short-circuited it and for that, I, you know, will try to clarify because I think, you know, Chris Wallace and I were probably talking past each other because of course, he could only talk to what I had told the FBI and I appreciated that.”
“But I do think, you know, having him say that my answers to the FBI were truthful and then I should quickly add, what I said was consistent with what I had said publicly. And that’s really sort of in my view trying to tie both ends together,” she added.
Asked about 4-Pinocchios statement on FBI Director Comey and her emails, Hillary says she may have “short-circuited” https://t.co/bEd9iHERGR
— Independent Journal (@TheIJR) August 5, 2016
Notice the difference between her original statement and revision. In the first one, James Comey confirmed her statements about her email setup were consistent and truthful. In her revision, the FBI director confirmed that what she told the FBI was truthful. Perhaps because lying to the FBI is a crime but lying to the American population is not?
Her word choice of “short-circuiting” confirms what many voters in this election feel about Hillary. Her answers are memorized, poll tested and scrutinized by hundreds of staffers, almost in a robotic fashion, to ensure she does not “bend” the truth. This is why Hillary does a press interview every 240 days at best
Finally, having finally found a new opening to dig itself out of the hole it has found itself in, Donald Trump’s campaign laced into Clinton over her latest “pretzel-like response.”
“Hillary Clinton’s habitual lying about the use of her secret server to send and receive classified, top secret information shows her blatant disregard for national security and a continued pattern of bad judgment,” senior communications adviser Jason Miller said in a statement. “Clinton knows the actions she has taken are disqualifying for someone wishing to become commander-in-chief, and that is why today’s painful, pretzel-like response to a simple question about her illegal server was obvious to everyone watching.”
Now the only question is whether Trump can keep his mouth shut long enough to give Hillary more chances to stick her foot in hers, and do to her own polling what Trump has been so eager to do to his over the past two weeks.
- Saving The System: Exposing The 4 Fallacies Of Modern Monetary Policy
Submitted by Alasdair Macleod via GoldMoney.com,
Monetary policy, we are told, is all about staving off recession and stimulating economic growth.
However, not only is monetary debasement in any form counterproductive and destroys the personal wealth of the masses, but the economists who devised today’s monetarism have completely lost their way.
This article addresses the confusion surrounding this subject, and concludes the real reason for today’s global monetary policies is an ultimately futile attempt to prevent a systemic and economic crisis.
Wrong tools for wrong targets
Central banks set themselves targets, such as unemployment that is deemed to be “full”, in other words the optimal low rate that will not lead to a pick-up in price inflation. CPI is the second target, typically set at 2% per annum. The hope is that these targets will lead to sustainable growth in GDP.
Unfortunately, estimates of unemployment do not tell us whether or not people are being employed productively. The term productive conjures up questions as to whether or not a government employee who is not customer-driven is economically productive, or whether or not a temporary barman should be deemed properly employed. There is also considerable tension between low rates of official unemployment, and near-record levels of the labour force not in work.
Recorded price inflation is even more flaky, with large discrepancies between official CPI and independent estimates, such as those of Shadowstats.com and the Chapwood Index in America. Their independent statistics record a far higher rate of price inflation in the US than the official CPI, and there is little doubt people are experiencing the higher rate. Assuming the GDP deflator should approximate to the actual rate of price inflation, independent estimates tell us that the US economy has been in recession every year since the dot-com bubble burst.
The statistical tools are obviously useless, and so is the principal target. GDP is a money-total, no more, no less. Imagine an economy where the total quantities of money and credit never vary, and all credit is fully backed by money instead of conjured up out of thin air. Prices for individual goods and services are free to change, but the total money deployed cannot. Credit shifts from the failures to the successes. But because credit is wholly backed by sound money, if the credit is extinguished, the money lives on. Therefore, GDP does not increase or decrease.
Alternatively, imagine you construct a balance sheet of the economy, and you introduce some more money. The balance sheet totals will increase accordingly, but it does not tell you how productively the extra money is deployed. What we seek in GDP is not found there: what we really want to know is whether or not economic conditions for the vast majority of people are improving. The only evidence of this would be increasing average wealth for all employed classes, and we are not talking about measures of wealth denominated in unsound currencies, nor are we talking about the apparent wealth that results from credit inflation. It has to be real.
Equally, it cannot be measured, but framed that way, we can begin to get a better sense of perspective as to what economic policy should attempt to achieve.
Take the example of helicopter money, which is increasingly talked about. It would undoubtedly boost nominal GDP. But if we think in terms of economic progress, we quickly realise that helicopter money is actually economically destructive as can be easily demonstrated.
Let us assume that a central bank distributes money through the banking system to the bank accounts of consumers, who will undoubtedly spend most of this windfall. The immediate effect will be to increase the GDP total, as described above. But it creates a shortage of goods, so prices can be expected to quickly rise, nullifying any perceived benefit. And because the distribution is so well telegraphed, no sensible manufacturer is going to respond by increasing his production significantly for a one-off benefit. Therefore, as the money is spent its purchasing power will decline fairly rapidly, the costs of production will rise, and a slump will ensue. Unless, that is, there are continuing helicopter drops, but that, everyone can agree, is the path to wealth destruction through hyperinflation, and therefore the end of all economic progress.
Just by rephrasing the question, from fostering GDP growth to fostering economic progress, leads to some diametrically opposed answers, as the helicopter money example illustrates. In this vein, I shall now address four of the most destructive fallacies about the relationship between money, credit, and economic progress.
Fallacy 1: Monetary debasement benefits the economy
Modern economists mistakenly ignore the intertemporal effects of changes in the quantity of money. When money or credit is expanded, the first receivers of it get to spend it on existing products before anyone else. Therefore, they benefit from the extra money before prices have risen to reflect its addition into general circulation. The second receivers have a similar advantage, but incrementally less so. Therefore, after this new money has progressed through many hands with a tendency to drive up prices every time, the last receivers of the additional money find that prices for nearly all goods have already risen and the purchasing power of their wages and savings has effectively fallen.
This is known as the Cantillon effect. It amounts to a wealth transfer from the poorest in society, the unskilled workers, pensioners and small savers, to the government and its agents. Bankers, licensed to produce credit out of thin air at no cost, thrive. The second receivers, the businesses that benefit from bank credit and unfunded government contracts, do almost as well. The result is government, banks and their close supporters enjoy a wealth benefit at the expense of ordinary people.
It is therefore hardly surprising the establishment and its lobbyists strongly favour monetary expansion, but the Cantillon effect cannot be denied, in theory or empirically. It is the single most important reason why inflating money and credit will always be counterproductive. We see this effect today, with the gap between rich and poor widening dramatically. It is monetary policy that impoverishes the masses, more surely than anything else.
Fallacy 2: Low interest rates are beneficial
The emotional appeal of low interest rates has its origin in the old religious association of interest with usury. Keynes promoted this view, not expressed so blatantly in moral terms, but by conjuring up an image of work-shy capitalists profiting from the deployment of their money for interest. His term for these capitalists, rentiers, condemned them in his followers’ minds.
Keynes’s view is consistent with the idea that it is the rentiers who set the price for money, holding the entrepreneur to ransom, when in fact it is the other way round. In a free market where interest rates are set by consenting parties, it is the entrepreneur that sets the savings rate by bidding up the interest rate. It is this phenomenon that resulted in the long-held correlation between the price level and interest rates, demonstrated in Gibson’s paradox, which Keynes, Fischer and Friedman were all unable to explain.
The fact that this correlation demonstrably existed from 1730 up to the 1970s is clear evidence that entrepreneurs were prepared to pay a rate of interest that related to the one thing they knew better than anything else, and that was the price they expected to obtain for their product in the market. There can be no other credible explanation. Equally, it shows that central bank attempts to manage price inflation by varying the interest rate are doomed to fail, because there is no natural correlation between the two.
This was certainly the case until the late 1970s, when the Fed raised interest rates to the point where normal business activity could not be financed profitably. Since then, monetary policy has taken over control of interest rates to the point where they ignore market forces entirely. The idea that central banks can manage unemployment, price inflation and GDP by varying interest rates has also been disproved by experience, yet they still persist in this crazy quest.
The expansion of bank credit that accompanies suppressed interest rates will increase GDP, assuming the credit expansion is not aimed at non-GDP items, such as financial assets. But that is a very different matter from fostering economic progress, which requires an interest rate that correlates with the price level, and not the rate of price inflation.
Fallacy 3: Expanding money and bank credit stimulates business
In a sound-money environment, some businesses prosper and others fail. The ones that prosper do so through success, not subsidy, and there is no subsidy for the failures. The business environment is of necessity one of constant change, as mistakes are quickly rectified. Capital resources for profitable enterprises are released from those that are less so or even unprofitable. Assuming a steady savings rate, the release of inefficiently deployed capital is vital for successful enterprises to flourish. Importantly, there can be no credit-driven business cycle to disrupt economic progress.
This is not a happy environment for legacy industries, unwilling to face the change progress imposes, or no longer relevant to the future. Often these businesses dominate communities, and are costly and inefficient compared with their modern competitors operating in lower-cost conditions. They lobby hard and successfully for subsidies. And if there is free money and credit in the offing, all businesses well-connected to political circles want their share of the largesse.
This is why today’s monetary environment is of unsound money, the expansion of money and credit designed to increase GDP. The result is good businesses no longer have to attract capital resources from the less profitable and the failures. All businesses, the successful and the failures, draw on freely available credit, either for genuine production or to avoid failure. The consequence is a growing accumulation of unproductive debt, whose default is continually deferred.
As the bad businesses compete with the good for scarce labour and raw materials, which unlike unsound money cannot be conjured out of thin air, prices begin to rise. And as higher prices work through to final products, easy money encourages consumers to alter their money-preferences in favour of goods. After all, unemployment is low and things are booming, so why go without?
At this point, central banks are forced to interrupt their expansionary policies and raise interest rates to curb unforeseen price inflation, and to only stop raising rates when widespread bankruptcies are threatened.
For anyone interested in promoting economic progress as opposed to just growing the GDP numbers, inflating money and credit is obviously not the way to go about it. Those who do not grasp the difference between real economic progress and raising GDP are likely to persist in trying to grow GDP, putting the lessons of experience behind them. Welcome to the world of central banking.
Fallacy 4: Lower exchange rates benefit the economy
This is a policy of giving preference to exporters at the expense of everyone else, and in that sense is another variation of the Cantillon effect. It is a deliberate policy of reducing the value of the wages of exporters’ employees and other domestic costs, a wealth-transfer that eventually affects everyone. It destroys personal wealth, particularly for those who can least afford it.
Economic planners appear to be blind to the true origin of trade deficits. In a sound money environment, everyone is forced to pay their bills. If you buy something, whatever its origin, you will have earned or borrowed sound money from someone else to pay for the goods purchased. Therefore, trade deficits, other than those arising from self-correcting timing differences on settlements, cannot exist. Attempts to correct trade deficits by manipulating the exchange rate, while pursuing unsound monetary policies, are in consequence futile.
It is no accident that a trade deficit is often accompanied by a government budget deficit, because the latter is bound to lead to the first, assuming the savings rate remains unchanged. The reason has already been stated above: the private sector pays its bills, so trade deficits can only arise from unsound money and unfunded government deficits.
Empirical evidence and analysis of national accounts support this analysis, yet nearly everyone automatically subscribes to the fallacy that reducing the exchange rate is a good thing for the economy. Devaluing the currency does not correct trade deficits, and the policy amounts to an ongoing destruction of a currency’s purchasing power for no gain.
Devaluations, which go hand in glove with unsound monetary practices, can be expected to lead to an increase in the money-total of GDP, but they hinder economic progress by destroying the wealth central to the financing of market-driven industrial investment. The post-war experience of Germany with its strong mark, compared with that of Britain with its weak sterling, refers.
The real reason behind unsound money policies
The neo-classical economists that populate government and central banks are finding out the hard way that their fallacies and their dishonest use of the state’s seigniorage of money and credit have lead everyone into a dead-end debt trap. They show no understanding of how they got us all here, but are becoming acutely aware of the consequences.
Unsound monetary practices favour debt financing over financing from genuine savings, because of the wealth-transfer effect that benefits debtors. The result of decades of unsound monetary policies is that the major welfare economies have become overloaded with an accumulation of government debt, which can never be repaid, only devalued. Additionally, escalating welfare liabilities have to be financed, which means that the welfare-states’ need for low-cost financing through the expansion of bank credit and raw money has now become more or less infinite.
It is obvious that a government can only discharge its welfare liabilities by acquiring yet more of the private sector’s wealth. The wealth destruction suffered by the private sector simply detracts from its ability to fund future government spending. <b/p>
Not only are the private sectors in welfare states burdened with increasing state depredations on their wealth, they themselves have accumulated large amounts of unproductive debt as a result of decades of easy under-priced bank credit. The result is evident in very low rates of genuinely productive employment, and the impoverishment of the masses. While these problems are more evident in some nations than in others, all welfare states are affected.
Some countries like France conceal their unemployment problem by socialising large swathes of the economy, either directly or indirectly. Unemployment is officially recorded at about 10%, the state accounts for the majority of economic activity, and there is a large agricultural sector of predominantly subsistence-farming smallholders. The whole economic structure is inherently unproductive. In other welfare nations, the unemployment problem is more obvious.
Italy is a good example, with a youth unemployment rate of 37%. The state accounts for about 52% of GDP, and non-performing loans on the banking sector’s balance sheets are recorded at 18% of GDP. Stripping out the state, NPLs are 37.5% of private sector GDP. It is therefore clear that not only is the private sector collapsing under the weight of its own debt, but there must be a growing incentive for companies which can service their debt not to do so, because their banks might not be around in the future to reward them by extending more credit. Those that see the Italian crisis as a banking problem miss the point. It is the Italian economy that’s the problem, and the banks are merely the prosciutto in the sandwich.
Italy is in the vanguard of welfare state failures. Central banks formulating monetary policy are becoming increasingly aware of this fact and the similarities with their own position. Their priority now is to avoid a global debt-induced economic crises. They see this being staved off by increasingly desperate attempts to promote GDP growth. They will pursue this policy at accelerating speed right into the buffers at the end of the line.
The partying is over. The days of transferring wealth from the middle-classes and the poor through monetary debasement to benefit the welfare states, the banks and their preferred customers, are now numbered. The implications for future monetary policy are simple: the Fed, Bank of Japan, European Central Bank and Bank of England are working together to keep their respective GDPs from falling. The Bank of Japan is leading the way into deepening negative interest rates and more asset-supporting quantitative easing, and the others are all set to follow its example.
- MF Global 5 Years Later: PWC Set To Take The Fall As Corzine Still Untouched
Jon Corzine, former Governor of New Jersey and CEO of Goldman Sachs, took over the helm of MF Global in March 2010. When revenue at the bank failed to live up to expectations, Corzine developed a scheme to place a massive $6BN bet on the sovereign debt of the aptly named PIIGS (Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece, Spain) through a financial structure known as a “Repo to Maturity”. To summarize the strategy for all you aspiring CEO’s, when you find it difficult to generate organic revenue growth sometimes the better option is to just bet your entire firm on a single, massively-levered trade on the sovereign debt of countries on the verge of insolvency.
Well, not so much. Deterioration of the Eurozone economies in mid-2011 resulted in massive margin calls on Corzine’s trade and a liquidity crisis at MF Global. By the time the dust settled there was $1.6BN of cash “missing” from customer accounts which should have been segregated. And with that, less than 2 years after Mr. Corzine took the CEO seat, MF Global filed for bankruptcy protection on October 31, 2011 in the Southern District of New York.
We know what you’re thinking…sounds reckless to risk an entire firm on the highly volatile sovereign debt of a group of countries labeled the “PIIGS”, right? Well apparently it’s not that big of a deal unless you’re the scapegoat accountants.
Yesterday, U.S. District Court Judge Victor Marrero of New York denied PwC’s motion for dismissal of a $1 billion professional malpractice suit filed by MF Global against the accounting firm saying that the administrator had “presented sufficient evidence to create a material factual dispute” as to whether advice from PwC ultimately played a role in the bankruptcy filing. According to the WSJ:
MF Global sued PwC in March 2014 for at least $1 billion, alleging that the firm’s accounting advice helped cause MF Global’s 2011 collapse. Officials in charge of MF Global’s liquidation claimed PwC gave “flatly erroneous” advice on how to account for the European sovereign debt that tipped MF Global into bankruptcy.
MF Global’s lawsuit against PwC claims the accounting firm’s advice is what allowed Mr. Corzine to make such a big bet in the first place, a charge PwC has denied.
In a 69-page decision, the judge said the administrator “has presented sufficient evidence to create a material factual dispute” as to whether PwC’s accounting advice played a role in MF Global’s bankruptcy in the fall of 2011.
“This is a major victory for the MF Global estate,” said Nader Tavakoli, MF Global’s lead director. “It sends a strong message concerning the need for responsibility and accountability, and we hope to secure a substantial recovery for MF Global’s stakeholders.”
Daniel Fetterman, a lawyer from Kasowitz Benson Torres & Friedman LLP who is representing MF Global, called the ruling a “significant victory” in the legal fight.
“We look forward to presenting at trial the evidence concerning PwC’s extraordinary and egregious malpractice alleged in the complaint and its role in causing MF Global’s demise,” he said.
For its part, PwC has maintained that reckless trading decisions and “adverse market conditions” were the real cause of the bankruptcy filing, not faulty accounting of the trades.
In response, James P. Cusick, PwC’s lawyer, said the accounting firm stands by its work for MF Global, and that the commodity broker correctly accounted for the so-called repo-to-maturity transactions at issue in the lawsuit.
“MF Global’s collapse was caused by its own business decisions and adverse market events, not any accounting determination” said Mr. Cusick, a litigator at King & Spalding.
Lesson learned. If you commit a murder it’s the gun’s fault, if you gain 20 lbs it’s the fork’s fault and if you place a massively levered trade that blows up your firm then it’s the accountant’s fault. After all, it’s not the losses of a failed trade that caused the liquidity crisis at MF Global but rather the timing of the realization of those losses that are truly to blame.
As for Jon Corzine, last we heard he was trying to raise capital for a new hedge fund (one which may have trouble getting a primary dealer designation) and we are confident he will succeed for two reasons.
Reason #1:
And Reason #2:
* * *
For those interested, the full decision can be read below:
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