- China's Re-Bubble – Stocks Soar 10% In 3 Days, 2nd Best Run Since 2014
Because nothing says ‘stability’ like a 10% surge in the ‘price’ of stocks in 3 days. Having trodden water between in a narrow range for a month, the last 3 days (ahead of US payrolls and China’s weekend) are the biggest rally since China first banned short-selling in July, and 2nd biggest since December 2014 when the epic bubble really took off in Chinese stocks. Now, with China ‘fixed’, all The Fed needs is a “not terrible” payrolls print tomorrow and December is a done deal…
Up 10% in 3 days… “normal”
The biggest jump since the short-selling ban and 2nd biggest since December…
Charts: Bloomberg
- If This Doesn't Convince You to Exit the Global Banking System, Then Absolutely Nothing Will
Today, bankers all around the world are making it more and more difficult to withdraw more than $3000 or €3000 per day, and simultaneously making it impossible to pay for, in cash, any item with a price tag in excess of these levels. Though most people are not questioning why this is, this global banker movement to ban all cash transactions should be interpreted as a clear and present danger to the purchasing power of everyone’s lifetime of accumulated savings. If you’re still not convinced, then think about what the Carbanak theft of $1 billion from global banks truly means. If we investigated how this hacking group accomplished their theft, we would discover that, at times, they even hacked into bank servers to create currencies out of thin air before transferring this newly created currency to themselves. The fact that these hackers could create currency that did not even exist on the bank’s books and then steal it should compel all of us to ask ourselves, “Do we really want to hold the earnings of our cumulative lifetime of labor in digital currencies that have intrinsic values of nearly nothing?” If we realize that bankers can store tens of millions of currency literally on just a few bits on a hard drive on their bank server, and if we understand that we can purchase a 5 Terabyte Western Digital hard drive that can hold 40,000,000,000,000 bits on Amazon for just US$179, then we really should question why we believe that digital bits will ever preserve our lifetime of savings for the next 10 years, or even for just the next 2 years.
It seems that most of us have already forgotten, quite conveniently, that banker digitalization of payments for our labor allowed bankers to easily steal 47.5% from all Bank of Cyprus accounts greater than €100,000 just a couple of years ago. With our compliance with such actions and our and acceptance of digital bits for our labor, as noted today here on ZeroHedge, Bank of Ireland bankers were recently able to ban withdrawals of less than €700 from all of its branches with little protest and relative ease. While most of us would realize that something sinister is afoot right now in the global banking system if we merely diverted our attention away from the Sunday football game or the Game of Thrones episode on our TV for just 10 minutes to think about these issues, unfortunately, the vast majority of us still do not ever stop to think about the meaning of such events.
In an attempt to prod everyone to really consider the meaning of such events, without further ado, I present to you, our latest SmartKnowledgeU_Vlog_0010: “If This Doesn’t Convince You to Exit the Global Banking System, Then Nothing Will!”
Additional reading today: “Is this the Gold & Silver Mining Stock Washout For Which We’ve Been Waiting All Year Long?”
About the author: JS Kim is the Managing Director & Chief Investment Strategist for SmartKnowledgeU, a fiercely independent research, consulting, and education firm that focuses of analyzing banking & investment industry fraud and manipulation as the primary tool in formulating wealth preservation strategies to yield positive returns during the escalating global currency wars.
- Giant Sucking Sound of Capital Destruction in US Oil & Gas
Wolf Richter www.wolfstreet.com
Chesapeake Energy is a good example. The second largest natural gas producer in the US, after Exxon, reported its debacle yesterday.
Revenues plunged 49% from the quarter a year ago, when the oil bust had already set in. The company has been slashing costs and capital expenditures. In June, it eliminated its dividend. And yesterday, it recognized $5.4 billion in impairment charges, bringing impairments for the nine months to a staggering $15.4 billion.
Impairment charges are a sudden accounting recognition of accumulated capital destruction. These impairments pushed its losses from operations to $5.4 billion in Q3 and to $16 billion for the nine months.
Chesapeake currently gets 72% of its production from natural gas, 17% from oil, and 11% from natural gas liquids. The oil bust has been going on since the summer of 2014. The US natural gas bust has been going on since 2009! Two natural gas producers have already gone bankrupt this year: Quicksilver Resources and Samson Resources.
Its annual free cash flow has been negative since 1994, even during good times, with only two tiny exceptions (Bloomberg chart). After living off borrowed money, it’s now trying to hang on by selling assets and lowering its mountain of debt. But it still owes $16 billion, much of which QE-besotted, ZIRP-blinded, yield-hungry investors had handed it over the years, based on hype and false hopes.
Its shares last traded at $7.50, down 75% from peak hype in June 2014. Its 4.875% notes due 2022 and its 5.75% notes due 2023, according to S&P Capital IQ LCD yesterday, traded for 66 cents on the dollar.
In terms of capital destruction, Chesapeake is in good company, and not even the leader. A new report by Evaluate Energy, which covers Oil & Gas companies around the globe, examined the financial statements of the 48 US oil & gas companies that have reported earnings for the third quarter so far. The amounts and the speed of deterioration are just stunning.
Turns out, what started in Q4 last year is getting worse relentlessly. And now it’s getting serious: plunging revenues, squeezed operating margins, whopping impairment charges, and horrendous losses are combining into a very toxic mix.
Evaluate Energy determined that net income of those 48 companies was a gigantic loss for the three quarters combined of $57 billion.
On a quarterly basis, the losses in Q3 jumped 58% from Q2 and 70% from Q1 to $25.5 billion. This fiasco, which has been spiraling down at a breath-taking pace, looks like this:
The biggest factor in these losses, as in Chesapeake’s case, was the impairments. For this study, Evaluate Energy only counted impairments of property and equipment, not of financial assets such as “goodwill.” Including charge-offs of goodwill, it would have been even worse (an example is Whiting Petroleum, which we’ll get to in a moment).
Of the 48 companies, 38 recognized impairment charges totaling $32.8 billion in Q3 alone, a 79% jump from Q2, when impairments hit $18.4 billion. Since Q4 2014, these 48 companies recognized impairments of $84.6 billion; 39% of that in Q3.
Devon Energy was king of the hill, with $5.9 billion in impairments in Q3, after having recognized impairments every quarter this year, for a total of about $15.5 billion.
Our natural-gas hero Chesapeake is in second place, if only barely, with $5.4 billion in impairments this quarter, and $15.5 billion for the nine months.
Of note, Occidental Petroleum, with impairments of $3.3 billion in Q3, Murphy Oil, Whiting Petroleum, and Carrizo Oil & Gas all recognized over 90% of their respective impairments this year in this misbegotten third quarter. They were in no hurry to grant their investors a peak at reality.
However, Whiting’s impairments of $1.7 billion do not include an additional $870 million in write-offs of goodwill in connection with its once highly ballyhooed acquisition of Kodiak Oil & Gas, which closed in December last year.
In Q4 2014, many investors thought the oil bust was a blip, that this was just a correction of sorts in oil prices and that they’d rebound in early 2015. But in 2015, oil and natural gas both have plunged to new cycle lows. And yet, over and over again, sharp sucker rallies gave rise to hopes that it would all be over pronto, that the price would settle safely above $80 a barrel, or at least above $65 a barrel, where some of the oil companies could survive.
But now that oil in storage is practically coming out of our ears, globally, the meme has become “lower for longer,” and the game has boiled down to who can slash operating costs and capital expenditures fast enough without losing too much production, who has enough cash to burn through while this lasts, and who can still get new money at survivable rates. And that game is accompanied, as in Q3, by the giant sucking sound of capital destruction.
Banks, when reporting earnings, are saying a few choice things about their oil & gas loans, which boil down to this: it’s bloody out there, but we made our money and rolled off the risks to others in a trade that has become blood-soaked. Read… Who on Wall Street is Now Eating the Oil & Gas Losses?
- The "War On Terror" Is The Hoax Foundation Of The Police/Spy State
Submitted by Paul Craig Roberts,
The “war on terror” was a hoax. Americans were deceived by policymakers, who are pursuing a hegemonic agenda. The American people were too trusting and too gullible and, consequently, Americans were easily betrayed by Washington and by the presstitute media.
The consequences of the deceit, gullibility, and betrayal are horrendous for Americans, for millions of peoples in the Middle East, Africa, Ukraine, and for Washington’s European vassals.
The consequences for Americans are an aborted Constitution, a police/spy state and rising resentment and hatred of America around the world.
The consequences for peoples in Somolia, Libya, Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Pakistan, Syria, Palestine, and Ukraine have been massive deaths and dislocations, infrastructure destruction, internal conflicts, birth defects, invasions, bombings, drones. Millions of peoples have been murdered by Washington’s pursuit of hegemony, and millions have been turned into refugees.
The consequences for Washington’s European vassals is that the millions of refugees from Washington’s wars are now overruning Europe, causing social and political discord and threatening the European political parties that enabled, and participated in, Washington’s massive war crimes in eight countries.
The populations of the eight countries and Washington’s vassals are stuck with the consequences of Washington’s evil, vicious, and illegal actions. And Americans are stuck with the police/spy state and militarized police who murder three Americans each day and brutalize countless others.
The countries we have destroyed have no recourse to restitution.
Our European vassals will have to provide from their own pockets for the refugees that Washington’s wars are sending to them.
As for Americans, they seem to have settled into acquiescence to the brutal police/spy state that has crowded out freedom and democracy.
But Americans could do something about it.
It is a proven fact that the police/spy state rests on a foundation of lies and deceptions, and these lies and deceptions are now known. Even George W. Bush has admitted that Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction. Thousands of independent experts consisting of physicists, nanochemists, structural engineers, highrise architects, fire fighters and first responders, and military and civilian pilots have provided the detailed explanations of September 11, 2001, that Washington failed to provide. Today not even an idiot believes the official explanation. The corrupt neoconservative Bush regime created a false reality and sold it to a trusting population that was anxious to prove its patriotism.
The American electorate knew that the Bush/Cheney regime had deceived them about many things, and the people, believing Obama’s promises of change, put him in office to rectify the situation. Instead, Obama protected the criminal Bush/Cheney regime and continued with the neoconservatives agenda.
We don’t have to stand for this. We can turn off Fox “News,” CNN, NPR and all the rest of the presstitutes who lie for a living. We can cease purchasing the useless newspapers. We can demand that the police/spy state that was created entirely on the basis of lies and deceptions be rolled back.
Who can possibly believe that the massive PATRIOT Act was written so quickly in the aftermath of 9/11? It is not possible that every member of Congress and the staff does not know that such a massive document was sitting on the shelf waiting its opportunity.
Who can possibly believe that a handful of Saudi Arabians acting without the support of any state and any intelligence service could outwit the entire apparatus of the American National Security State and inflict a humiliating defeat on the world’s only superpower?
9/11 is the worst national security failure in world history. Who can possibly believe that not a single one of the national security officials who so totally failed in their responsibilities was held accountable for their failures that brought total humiliation to the proud United States?
Who can possibly believe that the Bush regime’s invasion and destruction of Iraq was a response to 9/11 when Bush’s Treasury Secretary publicly stated that the invasion of Iraq was the topic of the Bush regime’s first cabinet meeting long prior to 9/11?
Are the American people really such washed-up sheeple, such cowards, that they acquiesce to a police/spy state, the foundation of which consists of nothing but lies told by criminals and repeated endlessly by whores pretending to be journalists?
If so, the American people are not a people who any longer matter, and they will continue to be treated by Washington and by their local police as people who do not matter.
- East Chicago Re-Elects Councilman Facing Murder & Drug Charges
While "innocent until proven guilty" is all well and good, when it comes to electing officials, one would hope the voting public is at minimum curious when the official is facing murder and drug charges.
Meet Robert "Coop" Battle, East Chicago, Indiana's newly-elected 3rd District Councilman, who spent election day in the Lake County jail…
He's accused of shooting to death on Oct. 12 Reimundo Camarillo Jr., in the 4200 block of Euclid Avenue in East Chicago, according to court records.
He also faces a federal drug charge stemming from a traffic stop in Porter County where police found 73.22 grams of marijuana and $100,700 in cash.
Despite his pending legal battles that could take months if not years to sort out in the courts, Battle ran unopposed in Tuesday's election.
Battle initially said through his then attorney, Walter Alvarez, that he shot Camarillo after Camarillo pulled a knife on him, according to the affidavit. As the conversations continued, Battle said there was no struggle before the shooting, according to court records.
On Tuesday, Lake County Criminal Judge Clarence Murray granted the state's motion for a DNA mouth swab from Battle. According to their motion, prosecutors want to compare his DNA to evidence collected at the scene.
Battle is expected to appear in court again Nov. 17 seeking to get bail set in the case.
His attorney, John Cantrell, said he is offended by people who are calling for his client to resign.
"He is presumed innocent until he is proven guilty," Cantrell said. "If he is acquitted, he'll keep his job."
East Chicago City Council members made $42,356 a year in 2014, more than five times the average salary of council members of 75 community governments, according to the Indiana Association of Cities and Towns.
East Chicago Mayor Anthony Copeland said Battle's fate was in the hands of the courts and declined to comment further.
Cantrell said he will keep Battle informed about council business while he is in jail.
Buncich, who is also the county's Democratic chairman, said he is embarrassed about Battle's situation.
"The right thing to do at this time would be to resign, step aside so the East Chicago citizens in the third district can be represented properly," Buncich said.
Standing outside the Martin Luther King Jr. Center, one woman, who did not want to identified, said she voted for Battle and thought he was being ambushed. "I believe what he said, that the man was attacking him and he was defending himself," she said. The woman recalled Battle brought her food and water when her brother died.
A voter at the polling place in the 4900 block of Gladiola Avenue who also did not want to be identified described her councilman as a "good guy" who created a summer program for the children in her neighborhood. The woman does worry about how her neighborhood will now be represented. "How can he represent us when he's facing his own issues," she said.
* * *
Drug dealing, Murder? Hillary has a long way to go yet…
- "There's A Total Lack Of Confidence" McCain Warns Obama Of Growing "Military Dissatisfaction"
Conjuring images of "the kind of incrementalism that defined much of the Vietnam conflict," John McCain came out swinging today exposing the frustration top military officers have with President Obama's policies. "There’s a total lack of confidence in the president's leadership," the warmonger raged, adding – as perhaps a veiled threat – "there’s a level of dissatisfaction among the uniformed military that I’ve never seen in my time here."
Interestingly, as The Washington Times reports, Rep. Adam Smith, the ranking Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, echoed McCain's comments, demanding that, The White House be "more inclusive in the decision-making process," rather than 'icing' The Pentagon out
"People who have spoken truth to power get retired," ranted McCain, "all you have to do is look at a map of the Middle East in 2009 and then compare it to a map of today," to see an utterly failed strategy.
Mr. McCain argued that the frustration on Capitol Hill and at the Pentagon stems from the administration’s “complete lack of any kind of coherent strategy, much less a strategy that would have any success on the battlefield” against Islamic State and the Assad regime.
“We’re sending 50 — count them, 50 — special operations soldiers to Syria, and they will have ‘no combat role,’ the president says,” said Mr. McCain. “Well, what are they being sent there for? To be recreation officers? You’re in a combat zone, and to say they’re not in combat is absurd.”
But the White House, he argued, has effectively blinded itself to such absurdities by promoting a system over the past seven years that suppresses dissenting voices.
"Compliant and easily led military leaders get promoted,” he said.
When it comes to actual policy, Mr. McCain lamented, the administration pursues half-measures and decisions, “when they are made, consistently disregard recommendations from the uniformed military.”
The failure to break Islamic State’s hold on Syria and Iraq, and its spread into North Africa, have resulted in “very poisoned relations that now exist between many in both houses of Congress and the president,” said Mr. McCain.
“There’s a total lack of confidence in the president’s leadership,” he said.
Mr. McCain said Mr. Obama’s past claims that things were improving in the region have undercut his credibility today.
* * *
It sounds like the neocons are upset at the progress Putin has made… and are stirring the pot for moar war. It appears to be working to get the general public on their side…
More than 6 in 10 now disapprove of President Obama’s handling of the threat posed by the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, according to an Associated Press-GfK poll published Thursday, an 8-point jump compared to a similar poll last January.
* * *
Of course, this is a theoretical question since Obama, the former Constitutional Law Professor, did not seek Congressional approval before sending American troops to Syria.
Here is Dr. Paul's column from 2013:
President Obama announced this weekend that he has decided to use military force against Syria and would seek authorization from Congress when it returned from its August break. Every Member ought to vote against this reckless and immoral use of the US military. But even if every single Member and Senator votes for another war, it will not make this terrible idea any better because some sort of nod is given to the Constitution along the way
Besides, the president made it clear that Congressional authorization is superfluous, asserting falsely that he has the authority to act on his own with or without Congress. That Congress allows itself to be treated as window dressing by the imperial president is just astonishing.
The President on Saturday claimed that the alleged chemical attack in Syria on August 21 presented "a serious danger to our national security." I disagree with the idea that every conflict, every dictator, and every insurgency everywhere in the world is somehow critical to our national security. That is the thinking of an empire, not a republic. It is the kind of thinking that this president shares with his predecessor and it is bankrupting us and destroying our liberties here at home.
According to recent media reports, the military does not have enough money to attack Syria and would have to go to Congress for a supplemental appropriation to carry out the strikes. It seems our empire is at the end of its financial rope. The limited strikes that the president has called for in Syria would cost the US in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey wrote to Congress last month that just the training of Syrian rebels and "limited" missile and air strikes would cost "in the billions" of dollars. We should clearly understand what another war will do to the US economy, not to mention the effects of additional unknown costs such as a spike in fuel costs as oil skyrockets.
I agree that any chemical attack, particularly one that kills civilians, is horrible and horrendous. All deaths in war and violence are terrible and should be condemned. But why are a few hundred killed by chemical attack any worse or more deserving of US bombs than the 100,000 already killed in the conflict? Why do these few hundred allegedly killed by Assad count any more than the estimated 1,000 Christians in Syria killed by US allies on the other side? Why is it any worse to be killed by poison gas than to have your head chopped off by the US allied radical Islamists, as has happened to a number of Christian priests and bishops in Syria?
For that matter, why are the few hundred civilians killed in Syria by a chemical weapon any worse than the 2000-3000 who have been killed by Obama's drone strikes in Pakistan? Does it really make a difference whether a civilian is killed by poison gas or by drone missile or dull knife?
In "The Sociology of Imperialism," Joseph Schumpeter wrote of the Roman Empire's suicidal interventionism:
"There was no corner of the known world where some interest was not alleged to be in danger or under actual attack. If the interests were not Roman, they were those of Rome's allies; and if Rome had no allies, then allies would be invented. When it was utterly impossible to contrive an interest – why, then it was the national honour that had been insulted."
Sadly, this sounds like a summary of Obama's speech over the weekend. We are rapidly headed for the same collapse as the Roman Empire if we continue down the president's war path. What we desperately need is an overwhelming Congressional rejection of the president's war authorization. Even a favorable vote, however, cannot change the fact that this is a self-destructive and immoral policy.
- Is Iran Opening A "Secret Passage" To Asia For Russian Crude?
Submitted by Dave Forest via OilPrice.com,
Russia is looking to expand its influence through oil trade. And a little-reported deal this week may give it access to an entirely new part of the planet when it comes to crude exports.
That's the Persian Gulf. Where reports suggest Russia is close to negotiating a "secret passage" for its oil shipments.
The move is coming through a deal with Iran, which that government says could open the door for crude oil swaps between the two countries — facilitating exports of "Russian" oil out into Asia and beyond.
Iran's Deputy Petroleum Minister Amir Hossein Zamaninia told local press Monday that Russian energy company representatives will be arriving in Iran this week to discuss such a swap deal.
Here's how it would work.
Russia lacks access to ocean shipping routes beyond the Pacific and Arctic. Iran has better access, through its ports on the Persian Gulf.
But Russia does have ports on the Caspian Sea. And as the map below shows, that provides a short shipping route into Iran.
Russia and Iran can exchange crude oil shipments along the Caspian Sea
The swap scheme would see Russian crude oil sent to Iran, in exchange for equal shipments of Iranian crude flowing to Russia.
And from there, it will be interesting to see what happens.
Officials said that Russian oil would likely be used within Iran's northern provinces. But the swaps agreement opens up another possibility — Russian crude could be sent further south, and even exported through Persian Gulf ports.
That would give Russia unprecedented access to markets around the Indian Ocean — including go-to crude buyers in Asia, greatly changing the dynamics of oil markets in this part of the world.
It's unclear how much oil might be exchanged under the swap agreements. We should have more details after this week's meetings are completed — watch for more details coming.
Here's to a crude exchange.
- Another Abenomics Fail: New Survey Shows Inequality Growing In Japan
One thing that’s become abundantly clear in the post-crisis world is that round after round of QE are enriching the few at the expense of the many.
Ben Bernanke (the architect of the current DM CB regime) will tell you that the growing divide between the haves and the have nots isn’t attributable to central bank policy because after all, the poor have been getting poorer vis-a-vis the rich for decades and so whatever effect the Fed may have had is surely minimal from a historical perspective.
That is of course absurd. When you deliberately inflate the value of the assets that are most likely to be held in the hands of the rich, you are explicitly exacerbating the wealth gap and the effect QE has had on the value of financial assets the world over is certainly no secret.
Nowhere is this more apparent than Japan, where central bank Governor Haruhiko Kuroda has become the poster child for Keynesian insanity after commandeering 52% of the domestic ETF market on the way to providing daily plunge protection for the Nikkei.
We’ve documented the effect this has had on stocks on any number of occasions and we also noted back in April that according to Akio Doteuchi, a senior researcher at the NLI Research Institute, anyone in the middle class is now at risk of falling into poverty.
Well, even as the BoJ recently “disappointed” the market by not announcing more QE, the wealthy are still getting wealthier under Abenomics. Here’s Bloomberg with the most recent read on household wealth:
Signs of inequality in Japan are increasing as people living on their own fall further behind and wealthier households accumulate more assets, according to surveys released Thursday by the Bank of Japan.
The ratio of single-member households with no financial assets climbed to almost 48 percent in 2015, the highest level since 2007, from about 39 percent a year earlier, according to an annual survey by the central bank. At the same time, households with two or more people who held assets such as stocks and bonds saw these rise to a record high 18.2 million yen ($149,597), a separate BOJ report showed.
The widening inequality highlights Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s challenge as he seeks to spread the benefits of record corporate profits and stock prices that this year reached levels not seen since 1996. Low-income households are feeling the effects of last year’s sales-tax hike and limited wages gains while more well off Japanese are benefiting from the swelling value of their investment portfolios.
“Inequality seems to be widening,” said Hiroshi Hanada, head of economic research at Sumitomo Mitsui Trust Bank Ltd. “A sales-tax hike and price increases last year hit households hard. Abe hasn’t succeeded to bring benefits to most ordinary people.”
Right. Abe hasn’t really “succeeded” in doing much, but as the above seems to indicate, one thing that hasn’t been a problem is making the rich richer. Of course improving the plight of everyday Japanese is an entirely different story…
…and inflation expectations are a disaster…
…and as for the economy, well…
So, there you go. But as long as the rich are doing well, we suppose this is fine.
Of course then again, what’s about to happen here is that Japan is going to run out of monetizable government bonds. Once that happens, the BoJ will need to consider two alternatives: 1) buying pretty much the entirety of the Japanese ETF market, and/or 2) resorting to direct deficit financing (i.e. “helicopter money”).
While neither of those options will fix the country’s demographic problem or do anything to change the fact that Tokyo is headed for “failed state” status by 2018, there may still be some more room for the rich to get a little richer vis-a-vis the peasantry so, mission accomplished?
- Monetary Bazookas Or Not, "Global Crisis Is Inevitable"
Submitted by Saxobank's Dembik Christopher via TradingFloor.com,
- There is an "inevitable" global financial crisis on the way
- We are near the end of the global recovery cycle even if it may not feel like it
- China could delay the crisis through a QE 'monetary bazooka'
- A new paradigm is emerging but we could jump from deflation to hyperinflation
Reuters Plaza in Canary Wharf is a symbol of the global economy, but, accommodative policies notwithstanding, a "global crisis is inevitable". Photo: iStock
Until recently, the consensus assumed a strengthening of the global economy in 2016. It won’t happen. If the global economic growth manages to reach 3.1% next year, as forecast by the IMF, it will be a miracle.
We haven’t realised that the global economic recovery is already here for over six years. This recovery phase is weaker than previous ones and much more disparate.
Since the onset of the global financial crisis in 2007, the potential growth rate has been much lower everywhere: from 3% to 2% for the US, from 9.4% to 7.20% for China and from over 5% to below 4% for Poland.
Many regions, such as the euro area, have remained on the sidelines and experienced stalling economic growth. Over the last two decades, economic cycles have been shortened due to the financialization of the economy, trade globalization, deregulation and the acceleration of innovation cycles.
Since the 1990s, the US went through three recessions: in 1991, 2001 and 2009. It is erroneous to believe that the recovery has just begun. We are close to the end of the current economic cycle. The outbreak of a new global crisis in the coming years is inevitable.
The lack of economic momentum next year and short periods of deflation related to falling oil prices will certainly push central banks to pursue their disastrous “extend-and-pretend” strategy which will increase the price of financial assets and global debt.
Low oil prices will see central banks revert to 'pretend-and-extend' policies. Photo: iStock
The European Central Bank could push further interest rates into negative territory and could increase or lengthen the purchase program. Several options are on the table: the central bank could drop the 25% purchase limit on sovereign bonds with AAA rating or could add a program to help the corporate bond market.
Following the same path, China could take out the monetary bazooka in the first half of 2016 by launching its own version of QE-style bond buys. Along with a dovish monetary policy, China could implement a massive Keynesian stimulus programme, relying on the already-expected bond issue plan which could raise 1 billion yuan.
This move could temporarily reassure world markets.
The only central bank that has a leeway to hike rates is the US Federal Reserve. 52% of investors expect a tightening of US monetary policy in December. However, the speed and magnitude of tightening will remain low. It is unlikely the rates will be back anytime soon to where they were before the global financial crisis. Too high interest rates could cause a myriad of bankruptcies in heavily indebted industries, such as the shale oil sector in the US.
The Fed and other central banks are in a dead-end having fallen in the same trap as the Bank of Japan. If they increase rates too much, they will precipitate another financial crisis. It is impossible to stop the accommodative monetary policy.
China could open the QE floodgate to help alleviate the global economy, temporarily. Photo: iStock
Because of the persistent low-rate environment and the risk of a new global crisis, finding the right investment has never been harder. No one is able to know the outcome of the central bank printing press.
The world could go from deflation to hyperinflation without a stop in between for inflation as predicted by Nassim Taleb. In this uncertain context, gold remains certainly the best investment that can be used as a hedge against the coming crisis.
Since the sudden drop of the EURCHF floor last January, the Swiss franc is no more a reliable safe haven. This decision has hurt irremediably the Swiss National Bank's credibility. Investors understood they cannot blindly believe the words of central bankers.
Although the yuan is not a safe haven, it may be the right time to invest in the Chinese currency. It is well-placed to grow in popularity and become stronger.
By the end of 2016, the yuan could be the third most traded currency in the world, behind the US dollar and the euro. The new Silk Road has been probably the most ambitious global economic strategy in the past 50 years. It is likely to succeed and to push investors to hold more yuan products.
The paradox of the current state of the economy is that innovation clusters, linked to cloud computing or digital fabrication for instance, have never been so numerous and the growth so weak. The economy is switching to a new paradigm.
The three biggest trends for investors are related to changing global demographics, low economic growth and climate change. An aging population will boost the development of elderly care services. Greater inequalities between the haves and have-nots will stimulate shared creation, production, trade and consumption of goods and services by different people and companies.
The energy transition towards renewable energy will encourage the development of financial products still little used, like the green bonds. It is a very challenging time for investors because financial markets have never been so much influenced by central banks but plenty of investment opportunities exist in the new economy.
The juxtaposition of old and new is a feature of the new paradigm. Photo: Martin O'Rourke
- "Get Covered" America Or "Take Cover" America
Isn’t it interesting the mainstream media makes barely a peep about the ongoing and worsening Obamacare debacle. Healthcare premiums, co-pays and deductibles are soaring, while doctor and plan choices contract to a minuscule level.
Recent surveys reveal the hardship being inflicted upon families across the nation. As The Burning Platform's Jim Quinn details, those who are willfully baffled by the lack of consumer spending need look no further than Obamacare and its impact on the budgets of hard working Americans.
According to a survey by LIMRA, an insurance and financial services trade association, six in 10 workers agreed that the rising cost of health insurance directly affects how much they set aside in their workplace retirement savings plan. Employees are being forced to cut back on their retirement savings in order to meet the skyrocketing cost of their health insurance. Based on the numbers being bandied about by the Kaiser Family Foundation, it seems average families will soon have to decide between food and healthcare. Remember Obama’s quotes in 2008- 2009 when he was selling this bloated pig of a plan to you?
“We will start by reducing premiums by as much as $2,500 per family.”
“If you like the plan you have, you can keep it. If you like the doctor you have, you can keep your doctor, too. The only change you’ll see are falling costs as our reforms take hold.”
Millions of people have been kicked out of their existing health plans and have seen their premiums and deductibles go up by double digits. Small business owners are being forced out of business. And now the fines, mandates, and taxes really begin to kick in. At least median household real wages are lower than they were in 1989. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation:
Single and family average premiums for employer-sponsored health insurance rose 4% this year over last. The average annual premium for single coverage is $6,251, of which workers pay an average of $1,071; the average family premium is $17,545, of which workers pay an average of $4,955. Deductibles have risen more sharply than premiums. That’s the amount that consumers must pay out of pocket before insurance pays for anything, except for certain preventive services that are covered at 100%. The average deductible for workers with employer-sponsored health insurance who face a deductible is $1,318 for single coverage this year, up 44% from $917 in 2010. By contrast, over that same period, single premiums are up 24% and wages have risen 10%, just outpacing general inflation at 9%.
The brain dead proponents and cheerleaders for Obamacare reveal themselves to be nothing more than liberal control freaks who care not for the people they supposedly are helping with “free” healthcare. They need to falsify enrollment figures in order to prove how successful they’ve been in destroying the health system. They only care about press releases and winning the PR battle with the Republicans. It’s all about votes. It’s not about what is best for the uninsured. Families being forced into the limited number of Obamacare plans are seeing weekly costs of $300 to $400 for barely acceptable coverage.
The poor suckers forced into the Obamacare marketplace have to contend with health plan deductibles that are even higher than those with workplace-based coverage. The average 2016 deductible for a silver plan on the Obamacare exchanges is $3,117 for individual coverage, up 6% from 2015, while the average silver family deductible is $6,480, up 8% from this year, according to a recent analysis by HealthPocket, a technology company that ranks and compares health plans.
The entire reason Obama and his liberal minions forced Obamacare down the throats of a public that did not want it, was to provide insurance for the 30 million uninsured Americans. He failed, as there are still close to 30 million uninsured Americans, only they now get to pay a penalty to the IRS. It’s laughable for the MSM and brainless liberal twits to hail Obamacare as a huge success in covering the low income uninsured, when a poor family has to meet a $6,480 deductible before insurance pays a dime. How many poor families have $6,480 to spare? We know for a fact that more than half the households in the country don’t have $1,000 in savings, let alone the poor households. It’s a joke to say they have health coverage.
Obamacare is an unequivocal disaster that has resulted in less job growth, small business closures, worse care, less options for consumers, higher health insurance premiums for all, and soaring profits among mega-insurers, mega-hospital corporations, drug conglomerates, drug stores, drug wholesalers, and the political campaign coffers of corrupt bought off politicians. It’s the gift that keeps taking from hard working Americans.
- CIA, Saudis To Give "Select" Syrian Militants Weapons Capable Of Downing Commercial Airliners
Wednesday brought a veritable smorgasbord of “new” information about the Russian passenger jet which fell out of the sky above the Sinai Peninsula last weekend.
First there was an audio recording from ISIS’ Egyptian affiliate reiterating that they did indeed “down” the plane. Next, the ISIS home office in Raqqa (or Langley or Hollywood) released a video of five guys sitting in the front yard congratulating their Egyptian “brothers” on the accomplishment.
Then the UK grounded air traffic from Sharm el-Sheikh noting that the plane “may well” have had an “explosive device” on board.
Finally, US media lit up with reports that according to American “intelligence” sources, ISIS was probably responsible for the crash.
Over the course of the investigation, one question that’s continually come up is whether militants could have shot the plane down. Generally speaking, the contention that ISIS (or at least IS Sinai) has the technology and/or the expertise to shoot down a passenger jet flying at 31,000 feet has been discredited by “experts” and infrared satellite imagery.
But that’s nothing the CIA can’t fix.
With the Pentagon now set to deploy US ground troops to Syria (and indeed they may already be there, operating near Latakia no less), Washington is reportedly bolstering the supply lines to “moderate” anti-regime forces at the urging of (guess who) the Saudis and Erdogan.
Incredibly, some of the weapons being passed out may be shoulder-fire man-portable air-defense systems, or Manpads, capable of hitting civilian aircraft.
But don’t worry, those will only be given to “select rebels.” Here’s more from WSJ:
The U.S. and its regional allies agreed to increase shipments of weapons and other supplies to help moderate Syrian rebels hold their ground and challenge the intervention of Russia and Iran on behalf of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, U.S. officials and their counterparts in the region said.
The deliveries from the Central Intelligence Agency, Saudi Arabia and other allied spy services deepen the fight between the forces battling in Syria, despite President Barack Obama’s public pledge to not let the conflict become a U.S.-Russia proxy war.
Saudi officials not only pushed for the White House to keep the arms pipeline open, but also warned the administration against backing away from a longstanding demand that Mr. Assad must leave office.
In the past month of intensifying Russian airstrikes, the CIA and its partners have increased the flow of military supplies to rebels in northern Syria, including of U.S.-made TOW antitank missiles, these officials said. Those supplies will continue to increase in coming weeks, replenishing stocks depleted by the regime’s expanded military offensive.
An Obama administration official said the military pressure is needed to push Mr. Assad from power.
“Assad is not going to feel any pressure to make concessions if there is no viable opposition that has the capacity, through the support of its partners, to put pressure on his regime,” the official said.
In addition to the arms the U.S. has agreed to provide, Saudi and Turkish officials have renewed talks with their American counterparts about allowing limited supplies of shoulder-fire man-portable air-defense systems, or Manpads, to select rebels. Those weapons could help target regime aircraft, in particular those responsible for dropping barrel bombs, and could also help keep Russian air power at bay, the officials said.
Mr. Obama has long rebuffed such proposals, citing the risk to civilian aircraft and fears they could end up in the hands of terrorists. To reduce those dangers, U.S. allies have proposed retrofitting the equipment to add so-called kill switches and specialized software that would prevent the operator from using the weapon outside a designated area, said officials in the region briefed on the option.
U.S. intelligence agencies are concerned that a few older Manpads may already have been smuggled into Syria through supply channels the CIA doesn’t control.
If that sounds insane to you, that’s because it is. Even as US intelligence (which we can only assume emanates from the CIA) indicates that IS Sinai likely brought down a Russian passenger jet with 224 people on board, the same CIA is working with the Saudis to supply “select rebels” with weapons capable of shooting down commercial airliners.
In order to make sure no one ends up blowing a 747 out of the sky, Washington will “retrofit” the weapons with “special” software that makes sure they can only be used in certain areas.
Make no mistake, this has gone beyond absurd and is now bordering on the bizarre. It’s apparently not enough that the US is supplying anti-tank missiles to rebels shooting at the very same Iran-backed militias that the US implicitly supports across the border in Iraq so now, the CIA and Saudi Arabia will give these rebels the firepower to shoot down planes, meaning that in the “best” case scenario they’ll be firing at Russian fighter jets, and in the worst case scenario these weapons will end up in the “wrong” hands and be used to down commercial flights.
It’s difficult to see how John Kerry can attend “peace” talks in Vienna and keep a straight face while chatting with Sergei Lavrov. That’s not to say that Russia bears no responsibility for its role in the conflict (sure, Moscow is supporting a “legitimate” government in Syria but they’re still dropping bombs on populated areas), but the US and the Saudis are arming Sunni extremist groups and encouraging them to shoot at Russian and Iranian forces. For Obama to suggest this isn’t a proxy war is absurd.
Putting this all together, it now appears possible that the US is, i) sending anti-tank weapons to rebels who are shooting at Iranian soldiers, ii) embedding ground troops near Latakia which means they’ll almost certainly be engaging Hezbollah directly, and iii) passing weapons capable of downing a commercial airliner to “select” militants days after a Russian passenger jet exploded in the skies above the Sinai Peninsula.
This is all in conjunction with the Saudis and Erodgan, who just rigged an election in Turkey on the way to rewriting his country’s constitution.
And the Western media reports this with a straight face as though it all makes some measure of sense…
- A Practical Guide to Hawaiian Secession
Submitted by Ryan McMaken via The Mises Institute,
The BBC reports this week that a secession movement in Hawaii continues to simmer under the surface:
An upcoming election has highlighted the deep disagreement between native Hawaiians over what the future should look like. For some, it's formal recognition of their community and a changed relationship within the US. Others want to leave the US entirely – or more accurately, want the US to leave Hawai'i.
Much of the antipathy to DC stems from the grievances of the indigenous population which is quite familiar of how wealthy white ranchers in the late 19th century overthrew the legitimate government of Hawaii and formed a pro-US puppet government in its stead. Eventually, annexation followed.
Nevertheless, the fact that some Hawaiians want independence does not mean that most do. While it's true that whites are only 25 percent of the Hawaiian population, it's also true that indigenous Hawaiians and other pacific islander groups only comprise ten percent of Hawaii's population. The largest demographic group in Hawaii is Asian-Americans, who make up 38 percent of the population (not including people of mixed parentage.)
If the secessionists are ever to sell secession to the overall population, they would have to offer something more practical than solidarity with the indigenous population or appeals to local patriotism.
Potentially, the costs of secession could be high if the US decided to regard the Hawaiian government as a hostile regime (thus bringing economic sanctions), and of course, spending by the US government in Hawaii — funded by mainland taxpayers — is extensive.
Practically speaking, however, there is a lot of real estate between the current status quo for Hawaii and full-blown independence. It is unlikely that Hawaii would fully remove the US from the islands any time soon, no matter how unpopular the regime in DC became. It is likely that Washington would resort to military action before it would be willing to give up its military installations in and around Pearl Harbor. Look, for example, at how the US has held onto Guantanamo Bay, even when Cuba became aligned militarily with the Soviet Union.
However, there is no reason that that Hawaii could not reach a compromise with the US in which Hawaii obtains domestic autonomy while remaining a military ally and resource for the US. The world is full of such arrangement, and many countries have relationships with regions (many of which are islands and overseas territories) that use their own currency and have their own systems of government while remaining part of a larger political body.
It does not follow logically, of course, that Hawaii, even if it were to allow a US military presence, would have to use US currency or submit to US regulations of trade.
In fact, freedom from federally imposed restrictions on trade would be among the greatest benefits for Hawaiians in the case of independence. As Gary Galles noted here in Mises Daily, Hawaii, as part of the US's domestic market, is heavily restricted by the Jones Act. The Jones Act restricts the nature and extent of shipping that can take place in and out of American ports. Galles writes:
Jones Act costs are made clearest in Hawaii, Puerto Rico, and Alaska, where it most severely limits supply lines.
In 2014, shipping a forty-foot container from Los Angeles to Honolulu reportedly cost more than ten times shipping it to Singapore. Dependent on Jones Act shipped petroleum for three-quarters of its electricity generation, Hawaii’s electricity prices are almost double the next most expensive state.
A 2012 report found that sending a container of household goods from the east coast to Puerto Rico cost more than double that to nearby Santo Domingo. A GAO study found that some Puerto Rico companies had shifted sourcing from America to Canada, due to cost savings from escaping Jones Act restrictions.
Alaska is restricted from shipping oil by tanker to the lower forty-eight states or to Hawaii, due to Jones Act restrictions. The costs are so extensive that the state’s governor is mandated to use “all appropriate means to persuade the United States Congress to repeal those provisions of the Jones Act.”
(International trade is restricted by the Jones Act as well, although not in the same way as domestic shipping.)
Thanks in part to trade restrictions such as these, the cost of living in Hawaii is notoriously high. For example, in nominal terms, Hawaii has a rather high median income at $59,000. (The US median is $58,000.) But when adjusted for cost of living, the median income in Hawaii plummets to $50,900. This disparity is the nation's largest, although, New Jersey comes in just slightly behind Hawaii in this measure:
We can't blame all of this on federal law, of course, as Hawaii is a long way from other major shipping ports, but the fact remains that the Jones Act severely limits what can be shipped from the US mainland, and by whom, while international trade further is controlled by a Congress where only four people out of 535 are from Hawaii.
Thus, economic freedom for Hawaii would allow Hawaiians greater power to control tariffs and trade in a manner that benefited Hawaii rather than special interests far away on the mainland. (Naturally, I prefer unilateral free trade in this regard.) This isn't to say that some Hawaiians never benefit from US trade restrictions. International trade restrictions on sugar are a famous example. But for every pro-Hawaii government regulation, there are countless others that benefit far away interests much more.
The US cannot be faulted for all of Hawaii's inability to take advantage of its geographical advantages. As just one example, we might note that a majority of Hawaiians have long refused to allow gambling on the islands, even though such a move could turn the islands, or a subregion of them, into a Monaco of the Pacific where wealthy Asians and Americans would leave behind thousands of dollars in gambling losses with every trip.
The biggest obstacle to successful secession for the time being, however, is not ideological. As long as the federal money keeps coming in the form of social security checks, welfare checks, and military spending, its unlikely many will want to kill that golden goose. If those checks ever start bouncing, however, and if the feds start to scale back the fiat-money and taxpayer funded largesse, things will start to look very different.
- Play The Forex Fix – JPY And CHF Pairs Range Bound
The Forex market is very unusual; it’s the largest market in the world with the least amount of significant players (a handful of large banks and central banks control the Forex market).
We see everyday in the news more and more proof that the Forex market, to a large degree, is fixed. Just today, two traders from Rabobank have been convicted of rigging Libor rates:
Two British citizens face lengthy prison sentences in the US after being convicted of rigging Libor interest rates, in the first case of its kind to reach a courtroom across the Atlantic. The two former traders at the Dutch bank Rabobank – Anthony Allen, Rabobank’s former global head of liquidity and finance, and Anthony Conti, a former senior trader – both intend to appeal against the verdicts reached by a federal jury in Manhattan.
The US justice department said the verdicts showed that the authorities were determined to crack down on financial crime.
Instead of getting into the detail of how and why the Forex market is different, and that it’s fixed; let’s look at some charts of USDJPY and EURCHF.
USDJPY 1 Hour
EURCHF 1 Hour
As you can see from the above 2 pairs which are not connected or correlated, there are defined ranges and little direction. While USDJPY has a slight trend up and EURCHF has a slight trend down, they mostly are range bound.
Why is this? Both the BOJ and the SNB have intervened in the market to influence the Forex market, and in some cases have defined predetermined ‘fix’ levels where they want the currencies to be. They can do that, because they are the primary emission of the currency!
A simple range bound strategy – trade the ranges
If you have the ability to trade spot Forex, trading these ranges is simple. In the case of USDJPY, simply sell when there’s a big move up and buy when there’s a big move down. There are ways to use algorithms to execute this as well – simply program them to trade against the market – if USDJPY is going up – sell, and if USDJPY is going down, buy.
Of course, there are situations where they will break out of the range – which is why it is always prudent to use stop losses and other account protection methods. The ranges certainly will not last forever – but the point is to make money while they last!
Trading ranges with options
If available at your broker, trading these ranges with options is great, especially with options such as ‘double no touch’ which allows traders to bet that a pair will stay within a certain range.
For serious traders, sell a call above the range and sell a put below the range for the duration you believe the range will last (30 days, a reasonable time). Or in the reverse and in the money, buy a put above the range and buy a call below the range.
What this bet is really all about – the Forex Fix
Not only do the banks fix Forex market rates, the central banks openly manipulate the Forex market in many ways:
- Most basically, setting the interest rates
- Capital controls (such as the case with emerging markets)
- Actual Forex market intervention
See a short timeline of central bank intervention from Reuters here.
What are the best range bound Forex pairs?
Simply open your platform and look hourly or daily charts. Currently any CHF pair should be the best, and the best CHF pair – EURCHF. Any pair which is connected to a central bank that openly intervenes in the market, is subject to such behavior. JPY is a little more volatile than CHF, as Japan has a real economy it needs to manage (no offense, Switzerland!).
Remember – Forex is a countertrend market. It always pays in Forex to bet against the trend. Forget “The trend is your friend” and start listening to “Home, home on the range.”
About Elite E Services Forex
For updated Forex strategies, checkout Elite E Services blog, Elite Forex Blog.
- Ceasefire Is Over: Kurds Call Time After Erdogan Engineers Election Victory
In the wake of Turkey’s “elections” held a few days back, the question was how the market would ultimately view the results of the country’s trip to the ballot box.
Make no mistake, this was to certain extent a complete farce. That is, as soon as it became apparent that elections held in June yielded results that did not support President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s bid to alter the constitution on the way to consolidating his power, it was clear that Ankara would undercut the coalition building process on the way to calling for snap elections.
In short, Erdogan wanted a mulligan and in order to boost the odds that new elections would yield the outcome he wanted (i.e. more support for AKP and less support for HDP), he engineered a NATO sponsored civil war with the PKK in order to scare voters into backing away from their support for the Kurds.
What the market wants, of course, is stability, which is why the lira rallied hard in the immediate aftermath of Sunday’s elections. But in reality, this was a lose-lose for Ankara. Either AKP won back its majority at the expense of democracy or the opposition once again put up a strong showing, validating the democratic process but prompting a renewed crackdown from the regime. In other words, there will likely be instability either way.
Well, now that Erdogan has won, the PKK has called off a pre-election cease fire. Here’s Reuters with more:
Kurdish militants scrapped a month-old ceasefire in Turkey on Thursday, a day after President Tayyip Erdogan vowed to “liquidate” them, dashing hopes of any let-up in violence in the wake of a national election.
The Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) militant group said the ruling AK Party, which won back its parliamentary majority in Sunday’s election, had shown it was on a war footing with attacks launched this week.
“The unilateral halt to hostilities has come to an end with the AKP’s war policy and the latest attacks,” it said in a statement carried by the Firat news agency, which is close to the militant group, based in the mountains of northern Iraq.
Erdogan, who oversaw a peace process with the PKK that collapsed in July, vowed on Wednesday to continue battling the group until every last fighter was “liquidated”.
Yes, Erdogan is going to fight the Kurds until Ankara “liquidates every last fighter” which means the country’s civil war is going to continue unabated. That portends further danger for civilians. Make no mistake, Erdogan’s most powerful weapon over the past six or so months has been fear and the PKK has variously accused Ankara of effectively terrorizing their own people in order to strengthen the position of the regime.
Well now, in the wake of what many view as rigged elections, the PKK has called an end to the cease fire. Here’s Reuters with more:
Kurdish militants scrapped a month-old ceasefire in Turkey on Thursday, a day after President Tayyip Erdogan vowed to “liquidate” them, dashing hopes of any let-up in violence in the wake of a national election.
The Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) militant group said the ruling AK Party, which won back its parliamentary majority in Sunday’s election, had shown it was on a war footing with attacks launched this week.
“The unilateral halt to hostilities has come to an end with the AKP’s war policy and the latest attacks,” it said in a statement carried by the Firat news agency, which is close to the militant group, based in the mountains of northern Iraq.
Erdogan, who oversaw a peace process with the PKK that collapsed in July, vowed on Wednesday to continue battling the group until every last fighter was “liquidated”.
The PKK’s latest declaration, on top of the renewed surge in violence, was a fresh source of concern for foreign investors who broadly viewed Sunday’s election as offering the potential for increased stability in NATO-member Turkey.
However, generally weaker Turkish financial markets showed little immediate reaction to the PKK move.
The PKK – designated a terrorist group by Turkey, the United States and the European Union – declared the ceasefire on Oct. 10, saying it wanted to avoid violence that might prevent a fair election. The government dismissed it as an electoral tactic.
Right, an “electoral tactic,” much like starting a civil war in an effort to frighten the electorate into “voting” for a dictator.
As we’ve documetned extensively, the interesting thing to note here is that this comes as Washington is set to, i) embed spec ops with the PKK-affiliated YPG in Syria and, ii) fly missions from a Turkish airbase to support that effort.
So the question is this: if the PKK steps up its attacks on the Erdogan regime, how will Ankara reconcile that with Washington’s move to place ground troops with the group’s Syrian sister organization and what will that mean for two air forces that are flying from the same base at Incirlik?
- Owner Of Bankrupt Casino Offers To Unleash Thousands Of Syrian Refugees In New Jersey
No, not Donald Trump.
Recall that back in April 2012, an ecstatic Atlantic City basked in the neon blue glow of its most recent, “category-killer” casino-hotel, the Revel.
Revel promotional materials: archive
The taxpayer-backed casino was supposed to provide thousands of jobs and millions in much needed tax revenue for both the city and the state for years to come. It did none of that because less than 10 months later, it filed for its first bankruptcy. 16 months later it filed its second bankruptcy as the Atlantic City hotel/casino business model was officially pronounced dead.
Revel’s problems did not end there.
Two days after the current owner of the former casino, Florida developer Glenn Straub who bought the building (unwillingly: in November 2014 Canada’s Brookfield ended up winning the liquidation auction with a $110 million bid but it subsequently backed out, leaving “back up” Straub as the owner in February 2015) its sole source of electricity, heat and water cut off utility service after it could not agree with Straub on a contract. New Jersey’s Department of Community Affairs ordered the power plant to provide limited electricity to keep fire and safety systems powered, but the situation is beset by litigation on all sides.
On Monday, a judge delayed a request by a sewer utility to cut off service to Revel when the utility claimed it hadn’t been paid. Straub must put $140,000 into an escrow account pending a January hearing. In other words, what seemed like a slam dunk deal just 9 months ago has once again turned into a money pit.
And all this without any real vision of how to convert the building into anything that can generate revenue. In fact, even Straub has given up. Which is why, according to AP, he has proposed using it as an indoor water park, a medical tourism resort, an equestrian facility, and a so-called “genius academy” where the world’s top minds would tackle society’s problems.
Which brings us to Straub’s latest proposal how to use the vacant, money-losing building: use it as shelter for Syrian refugees.
Straub told The Associated Press on Tuesday that he’s willing to let people displaced by the civil war in Syria stay at the 47-story Revel resort as he fights in court over its future.
“We treat our dogs better than we treat the Syrians right now,” he said. “If the government wanted to house Syrian refugees, I’d give them use of the building and let them put those people there.“
Which is great news for Obama: recall that recently the White House announced it would accept 100,000 refugees in the US starting in 2017. Surely a few thousand of them wouldn’t mind staying in the luxury building.
Straub added the building is likely to remain vacant for the foreseeable future while he hashes out a half-dozen lawsuits or regulator battles involving its utilities, taxes and former business tenants.
Is Straub doing this out of the goodnews of his own heart? Hardly: he told AP that his “only request would be to be reimbursed for the cost of operating the building while refugees were staying there.”
In other words, the Florida developer made a terrible deal, found himself stuck with a terrible “asset” which he can’t refund or resell, and on top of that, he now has to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in municipal fees even if the building remains vacant forever. His solution: unleash a few thousand Syrian refugees in New Jersey because, drumroll, he is such a noble guy.
Somehow we doubt a few millions New Jerseyans would share the “kindness” of his heart if asked whether they are willing to cohabitate with a few thousand Syrian refugees living in the taxpayer-funded luxury of a recently bankrupt casino.
- For WHO, Red Meat Is A Red Herring
Submitted by Yuri Maltsev via The Mises Institute,
Our booming green-industrial complex built up by administrations of both parties in the US is effectively using the United Nations, its thirty two “sister” institutions — such as the World Bank, UNESCO, and numerous “tribunals” — and hundreds of training and research centers. This huge international bureaucratic buildup is already employing over a million “international civil servants” to administer what our socialist visionaries hope will become the world government of the future.
An increasingly important “sister institution” of the UN system is the highly politicized "World Health Department" also known as the World Health Organization (WHO) which, as part of a new scare campaign, has issued new declarations that sausages, hot dogs, bratwurst, and ham are carcinogenic, and that all red meat is “probably carcinogenic.”
This new anti-meat campaign, however, is not about your health, but about the “health of the planet.” WHO’s attack on meat is happening just before the Paris gathering on global warming and is a part of the slow motion socialist revolution poorly disguised as “climate change awareness.” As usual, socialist policies today are justified as “necessity for future generations.” Famous Nobel Laureate in physics, Dr. Ivar Giaever, once an Obama supporter, now stands against the president on global warming. “I would say that basically global warming is a non-problem.” Giaever ridiculed Obama for stating that “no challenge poses a greater threat to future generations than climate change.” The physicist called it a “ridiculous statement” and that Obama “gets bad advice” when it comes to global warming. I am sure that Obama and other politicians are peddling the climate change agenda not because of “bad advice,” but because advocates provide them with the argument for central planning and curtailing of individual liberty.
The 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference, which will be held in Paris from November 30 to December 11, is designed by the Obama administration as the major leap forward toward world government and central planning. It will be the twenty-first yearly session of the Conference of the Parties to the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), and the eleventh session of the Meeting of the Parties to the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. The conference objective is to achieve a legally binding and universal agreement on climate, from all the countries, including the US.
All globalists were mobilized for preparation to this event. Pope Francis, for example, published an encyclical called Laudato Si’ help to secure success for the conference. The encyclical calls for immediate action against human-caused climate change. The International Trade Union Confederation, which traces its origins back to the First International founded and addressed by Karl Marx, has called for the goal to be "zero carbon, zero poverty," and its general secretary Sharan Burrow proclaimed that there are “no jobs on a dead planet.”
The war on meat is part of this public relations blitz. Lord Stern of the UK, a former chief economist of the World Bank, believes that “meat is a wasteful use of water and creates a lot of greenhouse gases. It puts enormous pressure on the world’s resources. A vegetarian diet is better.”
Another Stern, this time our own, is a US special envoy for climate change appointed by the Obama administration to secure a strong climate agreement at the Paris climate conference. Ambassador Todd Stern is now traveling to Brazil and Cuba to obtain support from these corrupt socialist governments to stand against “the global threat of climate change.”
In the US, socialist zealots and their “capitalist” cronies have already destroyed the coal industry and the whole energy sector is under attack. Now they are after the meat industry which is, according to them, “unsustainable.” The left-wing Union of Concerned Scientists lists meat-eating as the second-biggest environmental hazard facing the Earth. (Number one is fossil-fuel vehicles.)
In the Soviet Union, when it existed, beef was available only to Communist Party functionaries and everybody else could only find it on the black market. It was “explained” to the masses that meat was bad for their health. In Cuba today you cannot find beef in the food stores. Ground beef (usually mixed with soy), chicken, sausage, and ham are rationed by the government in the amount of a half pound per person every fifteen days. My Cuban friends complain, however, that most of these deliveries are unreliable and can be “canceled” without any explanation.
In the US, the 2015 Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee worked on concocting a 571-page report of pseudoscientific “evidence” to encourage Americans to avoid red meat. US departments of Agriculture and Health and Human Services will use this junk science to guide federal nutrition policy, including the $16 billion school lunch program.
And it’s all being done at our own expense. The United States is bankrolling the UN and its “sister” institutions, including WHO, from one-quarter to one-third of their operating budgets. Let’s hope we don’t get all the world government we’re paying for.
- NY Attorney General Launches Crack Down On Exxon Over Global Warming Denial
Last May, when the Obama administration was furiously cracking down on the Kremlin in the aftermath of the CIA-backed Ukraine presidential coup and the resulting “territorial expansion” by Russia which promptly took over the Crimea peninsula (and is on its way to annexing the Donetsk republic) with attempts to “isolate” Russia, one prominent US company dared to defy the White House embargo and extended its partnership with Moscow.
This is what we posted last May: “Several of the largest oil companies in the world are doubling down in Russia despite moves by the West to isolate Russia and its economy. ExxonMobil and BP separately signed agreements with Rosneft – Russia’s state-owned oil company – to extend and deepen their relationships for energy exploration. The U.S. slapped sanctions on Rosneft’s CEO Igor Sechin in late April, freezing his assets and preventing him from obtaining visas.
However, the sanctions do not extend to Rosneft itself, allowing western companies to continue to do business with the Russian oil giant. ExxonMobil signed an agreement with Rosneft, extending its partnership to build a liquefied natural gas (LNG) terminal on Russia’s pacific coast. Known as the Far East LNG project, the export terminal will receive natural gas from Russia’s eastern fields as well as from Sakhalin-1, an island off Russia’s east coast. Rosneft announced the deal in a press release on its website on May 23.
By defying the White House, the oil majors salvaged what would have otherwise been an embarrassing event for the Kremlin. The absence of the world’s largest companies would have demonstrated Russia’s increasing isolation. Instead, Russia used the event to detail plans to expand its massive energy sector. “(They’re) eager to continue work on projects in Russia,” Russia’s Energy Minister Alexander Novak said of ExxonMobil and Royal Dutch Shell.
To be clear, the oil companies are not legally running afoul of international sanctions. But their collective shrug in the face of European and American pressure to boycott Russia – along with the $400 billion natural gas deal Russia signed with China last week – illustrates the difficulty with which the West will have at undermining Russia’s energy sector, if it chose to do so. Russia is too big of a prize for the likes of ExxonMobil, BP, and Shell. Or viewed another way, the moves to deepen business in Russia suggest that the world’s biggest oil companies are confident that the U.S. and Europe won’t be so bold as to truly attack Russia’s energy machine.
To be sure, back than oil was over $100, and perhaps now that it is below $50 a different reality would have been unveiled, but for all intents and purposes, the take home was that while Obama was scrambling to show a united front in his ideological war against Russia, Exxon dared to cross Obama’s latest “red” line.
And now it’s payback time.
As the NYT reports, the New York AG has “begun a sweeping investigation of Exxon Mobil to determine whether the company lied to the public about the risks of climate change or to investors about how those risks might hurt the oil business.”
According to people with knowledge of the investigation, Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman issued a subpoena Wednesday evening to Exxon Mobil, demanding extensive financial records, emails and other documents.
The NYT adds that “the focus includes the company’s activities dating to the late 1970s, including a period of at least a decade when Exxon Mobil funded groups that sought to undermine climate science.”
It is unclear just which science is envisioned: perhaps the “science” that was purchased thanks to the more than $79 billion in “climate change” money spent in the 21st century as the infamous 2009 Climate Money report by Joanne Nova revealed.
Or perhaps it was the “science” that Australia PM Tony Abbott dared to challenge? Recall Abbott previously questioned the reliability of climate science, and had proceed to probe the “statistics and data” behind the Australian Bureau of Meteorology. This “probe” threatened a potentially massive revenue stream for Goldman in the form of carbon credits, and which is why Abbott was replaced by Malcolm Turnbull: a former Chairman of Goldman Sachs Australia from 1997 to 2001.
Which “science” the NY AG is referring to is unclear, but one thing is clear: Exxon has dared to deny “climate change” and now it must be punished. As the NYT says “a major focus of the investigation is whether the company adequately warned investors about potential financial risks stemming from society’s need to limit fossil-fuel use.”
A “need” spearheaded, incidentally, by the “bleeding heart humanitarian” and infinite humanist, Goldman Sachs, which stands to make billions from such programs as cap-and-trade. Here is a quick reminder of just how Goldman’s profit motive is aligned with the “science” Obama finds beneficial to society, from 2009:
it’s early June in Washington, D.C. Barack Obama, a popular young politician whose leading private campaign donor was an investment bank called Goldman Sachs – its employees paid some $981,000 to his campaign – sits in the White House. Having seamlessly navigated the political minefield of the bailout era, Goldman is once again back to its old business, scouting out loopholes in a new government-created market with the aid of a new set of alumni occupying key government jobs.Gone are HankPaulson and Neel Kashkari; in their place are Treasury chief of staff Mark Patterson and CFTC chief Gary Gensler, both former Goldmanites. (Gensler was the firm’s co-head of finance.) And instead of credit derivatives or oil futures or mortgage-backed CDOs, the new game in town, the next bubble, is in carbon credits – a booming trillion dollar market that barely even exists yet, but will if the Democratic Party that it gave $4,452,585 to in the last election manages to push into existence a groundbreaking new commodities bubble, disguised as an “environmental plan,” called cap-and-trade.
The new carbon-credit market is a virtual repeat of the commodities-market casino that’s been kind to Goldman, except it has one delicious new wrinkle: If the plan goes forward as expected, the rise in prices will be government-mandated. Goldman won’t even have to rig the game. It will be rigged in advance.
Here’s how it works: If the bill passes, there will be limits for coal plants, utilities, natural-gas distributors and numerous other industries on the amount of carbon emissions (a.k.a. greenhouse gases) they can produce per year. If the companies go over their allotment, they will be able to buy “allocations” or credits from other companies that have managed to produce fewer emissions: President Obama conservatively estimates that about $646 billion worth of carbon credits will be auctioned in the first seven years; one of his top economic aides speculates that the real number might be twice or even three times that amount.
The feature of this plan that has special appeal to speculators is that the “cap” on carbon will be continually lowered by the government, which means that carbon credits will become more and more scarce with each passing year. Which means that this is a brand-new commodities market where the main commodity to be traded is guaranteed to rise in price over time. The volume of this new market will be upwards of a trillion dollars annually; for comparison’s sake, the annual combined revenues of all’ electricity suppliers in the U.S. total $320 billion.
Goldman wants this bill. The plan is (1) to get in on the ground floor of paradigm-shifting legislation, (2) make sure that they’re the profit-making slice of that paradigm and (3) make sure the slice is a big slice. Goldman started pushing hard for cap-and-trade long ago, but things really ramped up last year when the firm spent $3.5 million to lobby climate issues. (One of their lobbyists at the time was none other than Patterson, now Treasury chief ofstaff.) Back in 2005, when Hank Paulson was chief of Goldman, he personally helped author the bank’s environmental policy, a document that contains some surprising elements for a firm that in all other areas has been consistently opposed to any sort of government regulation. Paulson’s report argued that “voluntary action alone cannot solve the climate-change problem.” A few years later, the bank’s carbon chief, Ken Newcombe, insisted that cap-and-trade alone won’t be enough to fix the climate problem and called for further public investments in research and development. Which is convenient, considering that Goldman made early investments in wind power (it bought a subsidiary called Horizon Wind Energy), renewable diesel (it is an investor in a firm called Changing World Technologies) and solar power (it partnered with BP Solar), exactly the kind of deals that will prosper if the government forces energy producers to use cleaner energy. As Paulson said at the time, “We’re not making those investments to lose money.”
* * *
Cap-and-trade is going to happen. Or, if it doesn’t, something like it will. The moral is the same as for all the other bubbles that Goldman helped create, from 1929 to 2009. In almost every case, the very same bank that behaved recklessly for years, weighing down the system with toxic loans and predatory debt, and accomplishing nothing but massive bonuses for a few bosses, has been rewarded with mountains of virtually free money and government guarantees – while the actual victims in this mess, ordinary taxpayers, are the ones paying for it.
And, best of all, Goldman’s next and potentially perhaps largest ever revenue stream has the cover of doing what is “socially right”, and is, according to the NY AG, “backed by science.”
That, in a nutshell, are the two sides of the “climate change” debate, and without taking either side, we show whose financial interests are most at stake.
But back to Exxon, whose financial interests are certainly at stake now that it is suddenly in the crosshairs of allegedly denying “climate change”, a charge which will result in billions in settlement fees or worse.
Here is the NYT:
The Exxon Mobil investigation might expand further, to encompass other oil companies, according to the people with knowledge of the case, though no additional subpoenas have been issued to date.
The people spoke on the condition they not be identified. The Martin Act, a New York state law, confers on the attorney general broad powers to investigate financial fraud.
Mr. Schneiderman’s decision to scrutinize the fossil-fuel companies may well open a sweeping new legal front in the battle over climate change. To date, lawsuits trying to hold fossil-fuel companies accountable for the damage they are causing to the climate have been failing in the courts, but most of those have been pursued by private plaintiffs.
Attorneys general for other states could join in Mr. Schneiderman’s efforts, bringing far greater investigative and legal resources to bear on the issue. Some experts see the potential for a legal assault on fossil fuel companies similar to the lawsuits against the tobacco companies in recent decades, costing those companies tens of billions of dollars in penalties.
“This could open up years of litigation and settlements in the same way that tobacco litigation did, also spearheaded by attorneys general,” said Brandon L. Garrett, a professor at the University of Virginia law school. “In some ways, the theory is similar — that the public was misled about something dangerous to health. Whether the same smoking guns will emerge, we don’t know yet.”
The premise behind the probe is whether Exxon was “funding”, and thus influencing, the other side of the argument, namely “deniers”.
The sources said the attorney general’s investigation of Exxon Mobil began a year ago, focusing initially on what the company had told investors over the course of decades about the risks that climate change might pose to its business.
News reporting in the last eight months added impetus to the investigation, the sources said. In February, several news organizations, including The New York Times, reported that a Smithsonian researcher who had published papers questioning established climate science, Wei-Hock Soon, had received extensive funds from fossil fuel companies, including Exxon Mobil, without disclosing them.
This reminds us of the NYT’s other expose on “pay-for-research” professors such as University of Houston’s very own Craig Pirrong who recently made waves reporting that commodity traders are not a “systemic risk” when it quickly became clear that they are. However, the truth is that there have been such anti-intellectual mercenaries for decades: people who will goalseek a conclusion to benefit the party that commissioned the study; Pirrong is just one of them, Wei-Hock Soon may be another, but what about the tens of billions spent to fund research slamming “climate change deniers” which incidentally, is far more prevalent and far more pervasive among the progressive media than the counter?
Logic aside what happens next is that “climate change deniers” will be treated just the same as big tobacco.
That struck some experts as similar to the activities of tobacco companies that had contrived scientific papers to suggest that smoking was safe, ultimately leading to court findings that they had defrauded the public.
More recently, Inside Climate News and The Los Angeles Times have reported that Exxon Mobil was well aware of the risks of climate change from its own scientific research, and used that research in its long-term planning for activities like drilling in the Arctic, even as it funded groups from the 1990s to the mid-2000s that denied serious climate risks.
To be sure, Exxon has a different take on things.
Mr. Cohen, of Exxon, said on Thursday that the company had made common cause with such groups largely because it agreed with them on a policy goal of keeping the United States out of a global climate treaty called the Kyoto Protocol.
Ah yes, the Kyoto Protocol treaty which commits member states to reduce greenhouse gases emissions, and which the overly sensitive about global climate change United States (together with India and China) has refused to sign and has said will not ratify any treaty that will commit it from legally reducing CO2 emissions.
It is almost as if the US is applying a double standard: one when applying moral suasion in preaching what is good for the public, and why Exxon must be punished, and a totally different one when actually implementing the pursuit of reducing cabon emissions.
But everyone knows the US would never do that.
As for Exxon, “Wall Street analysts reacted to the legal action against Exxon Mobil with mixed concerns about a company that, like other oil and gas companies, is already suffering from a plunge in commodity prices. “This is not good news for Exxon Mobil or Exxon Mobil shareholders,” said Fadel Gheit, a senior oil company analyst at Oppenheimer & Company. “It’s a negative, though how much damage there will be to reputation or performance is very hard to say.”
Brian Youngberg, senior energy analyst at Edward Jones, said, “There is headline risk, but the actual financial impact will not affect the company for a long time, if ever. I think there will be a modest overhang.”
And that is precisely what Obama wants: to keep a lid, both literally and metaphorically, on yet another sector, and have all the leverage (mostly monetarily) over an industry that for the past decade was one of the few bright spots in the US economy. Because soon energy companies, like banks, like biotechs, are about to become another “utility” of the government which will decide just how much profit is fair, and how much isn’t… and has to go into the government’s pocket.
More importantly, as the title suggest, with this salvo, it is now open season on “climate change deniers” everywhere. And it will certainly teach companies far and wide to defy Obama in public and make a global mockery of his ironclad foreign policy.
- Bank Of Ireland Bans "Small" Cash Withdrawals At Branches
As central planners the world over grapple with the effective “lower bound” that’s imposed by the existence of physical banknotes, there’s been no shortage of calls for a ban on cash.
Put simply, if you eliminate physical currency, you also eliminate the idea of a floor for depo rates.
After all, if people can’t withdraw paper money and stash it under the mattress, then interest rates can be as negative as the government wants them to be in order to “encourage” consumption. If, for instance, you’re being charged 10% for saving your money, then by God you will probably spend that money rather than see the bank collect a double-digit fee just for holding on to your paycheck.
In the absence of physical cash, there’s no way for depositors to avoid that rather unpalatable outcome unless the public starts buying hard assets like commodities with their debit cards. If you think that sounds far-fetched, just consider the fact that everyone from Citi’s Willem Buiter to economist Ken Rogoff to the German Council Of Economic Experts’ Peter Bofinger have now floated the idea.
“With today’s technical possibilities, coins and notes are in fact an anachronism,” Bofinger told Spiegel back in May.
Now, in what should be a wake up call to the world, Bank of Ireland has banned branch withdrawals of less than €700.
Seriously.
Here’s The Irish Times explaining that tellers will still assist the “elderly” if they have trouble using automated methods of obtaining cash:
Under new rules, designed to streamline in-branch services, Bank of Ireland said withdrawals of less than €700 will no longer be facilitated with the assistance of tellers.
From mid-November, customers will have to use ATMs or mobile devices for small and modest-sized withdrawals.
Lodgements of up to €3,000 and those involving less than 15 cheques will also have to use the bank’s dedicated lodgement ATMs.
“Bank of Ireland understands these changes may be a new way of banking for some of our customers, and the branch teams will be available to help and guide them through this change,” the bank said in a statement.
So, if you are, i) wanting less than €700, ii) have less than 15 checks to deposit, or iii) aren’t looking to put at least €3,000 into your account, you are no longer welcome inside Bank of Ireland branches.
For his part, Irish Finance Minister Michael Noonan seems to think that this is, for lack of a better description, absolutely nuts:
Minister for Finance Michael Noonan has described restrictions to be imposed by Bank of Ireland on over-the-counter lodgements and withdrawals as both “surprising and unnecessary”.
“I expect the bank to fully honour this commitment and ensure that customers will be facilitated through the existing arrangements where required. I would welcome a clarification form Bank of Ireland on the issue,” he said in a statement.
Yes, Noonan is demanding some “clarification,” and you should too, before you discover that the world’s central bankers planners have absconded with your physical cash on the way to instituting a regime that will allow for the micromanagement of your purchasing decisions.
- US Planes Fired On Fleeing Civilians, Doctors Without Borders Says
Just a few days ago, the Saudis followed in the footsteps of their counterparts in Washington when the kingdom’s warplanes “accidentally” bombed a Doctors Without Borders hospital in Yemen.
The “incident” came less than a month after the Green Berets – who were battling for control of Kunduz in Afghanistan in an effort to beat back a Taliban advance – apparently decided that in order to rid an MSF hospital of some “insurgents” who were apparently hanging out inside (and by “hanging out” we mean “were injured and that’s why they were in the hospital in the first place”), they needed to call in an AC-130 gunship which proceeded to make five passes and engage the building for an hour, eventually killing dozens of people as tends to happen when advanced air assault technology squares off against unarmed people lying on gurneys.
Here are some of the visuals for anyone who missed it:
And here’s a look inside the building courtesy of BBC:
Now, in a revelation that likely won’t surprise those who frequent these pages, MSF says the US fired on civilans who were running from the building. Here’s Reuters:
Medical aid group Medicins Sans Frontieres (MSF) said on Thursday it was hard to believe a U.S. strike on an Afghan hospital last month was a mistake, as it had reports of fleeing people being shot from an aircraft.
At least 30 people were killed when the hospital in Kunduz was hit by the strike on Oct. 3 while Afghan government forces were battling to regain control of the northern city from Taliban forces who had seized it days earlier.
The United States has said the hospital was hit by accident and two separate investigations by the U.S. and NATO are underway but the circumstances of the incident, one of the worst of its kind during the 14-year conflict, are still unclear.
MSF General Director Christopher Stokes told reporters the organization was still awaiting an explanation from the U.S. military.
“All the information that we’ve provided so far shows that a mistake is quite hard to understand and believe at this stage,” he said while presenting an MSF internal report on the incident.
The report said many staff described “seeing people being shot, most likely from the plane” as they tried to flee the main hospital building.
Let’s just be clear so that it doesn’t appear we’re being bombastic for the sheer hell of it: MSF is now accusing the US of firing on civilians fleeing a hospital.
And in case you have any questions as to whether US Spec Ops knew this was a hospital, recall the following from AP:
In the days before the attack, “an official in Washington” asked Doctors without Borders “whether our hospital had a large group of Taliban fighters in it,” spokesman Tim Shenk said in an email. “We replied that this was not the case. We also stated that we were very clear with both sides to the conflict about the need to respect medical structures.”
Taken together, the revelations raise the possibility that U.S. forces destroyed what they knew was a functioning hospital, which would be a violation of the international rules of war.
MSF went on to say that there were 20 wounded Taliban fighters at the facility, which shouldn’t surprise anyone because i) it’s a hospital, and ii) “treating wounded combatants is not a crime” (that’s a quote from MSF General Director Christopher Stokes). Back to Reuters:
MSF says the site’s location had been clearly communicated to both Afghan forces and the Taliban and it was clearly identifiable as a hospital.
“That night, it was one of the few buildings with electrical power, it was fully lit up,” Stokes said.
He also said that inspections of the area around the hospital since the Taliban withdrew from Kunduz last month did not reveal signs of heavy fighting.
So, while the Western media is busy accusing the Russians of accidentally hitting hospitals in Syria, MSF itself is now out accusing the US of gunning down fleeing civilians after engaging what Washington absolutely knew was a functioning medical facility. Here, for what it’s worth, is Washington’s excuse:
“Several Afghan officials have suggested Taliban fighters were using the hospital as a base.”
Maria Zakharova, if you’re listening, we can’t wait to see what you do with this.
Digest powered by RSS Digest
Saving...