Hillary Archives - Page 11 of 15 - The Automatic Earth

Surging rates on dollar Libor contracts are rapidly tightening conditions across large parts of the global economy, incubating stress in the credit markets and ultimately threatening overvalued bourses. Three-month Libor rates – the benchmark cost of short-term borrowing for the international system – have tripled this year to 0.88pc as inflation worries mount. Fear that the US Federal Reserve may have to raise rates uncomfortably fast is leading to an acute dollar shortage, draining global liquidity. “The Libor rate is one of few instruments left that still moves freely and is priced by market forces. It is effectively telling us that that the Fed is already two hikes behind the curve,” said Steen Jakobsen from Saxo Bank. “This is highly significant and is our number one concern. Our allocation model is now 100pc in cash. This is a warning signal for the market and it happens extremely rarely,” he said.

Goldman Sachs estimates that up to 30pc of all business loans in the US are priced off Libor contracts, as well as 20pc of mortgages and most student loans. It is the anchor for a host of exotic markets, used as a floor for 90pc of the $900bn pool of the leveraged loan market. It underpins the derivatives nexus. The chain reaction from the Libor spike is global. The BIS warns that the rising cost of borrowing in dollar markets is transmitted almost instantly through the global credit system. Changes in the short-term policy rate are promptly reflected in the cost of $5 trillion in US dollar bank loans,” it said. Roughly 60pc of the global economy is linked to the dollar through fixed currency pegs or “dirty floats”, but studies by the BIS suggest that borrowing costs in domestic currencies across Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, and Africa, move in sympathy with dollar costs, regardless of whether the exchange rate is fixed. Short-term “Shibor” rates in China have been ratcheting up.

The cost of one-year swaps jumped to 2.71pc last week, and the spread over one-year sovereign debt is back to levels seen during the Shanghai stock market crash last year. This is not a pure import from the US. The Chinese authorities themselves are taking action to rein in a credit bubble. It is happening in parallel with Fed tightening, each reinforcing the other, and that makes it more potent. Three-month interbank rates in Saudi Arabia have soared to 2.4pc. This is the highest since the global financial crisis in early 2009 and implies a credit crunch in the Saudi banking system. The M1 money supply has fallen 9pc over the last year. The Bank of Japan has doubled its window of dollar credit for Japanese banks to head off an incipient dollar squeeze, drawing on the country’s ample foreign reserves.

It may not be so easy for others. Credit analysts are becoming nervous about the spread between Libor and the overnight index swap, the so-called Libor-OIS spread that is used to gauge problems in the plumbing of the credit system. It has widened to 38 basis points, near levels seen in the eurozone debt crisis and past bouts of stress. The message from the ‘TED spread’ is similar, if less severe. This measures the spread between eurodollar rates in London and three-month futures contracts for US treasuries. The picture is complex. These signals have been distorted by new rules for US prime money market funds, which have shrunk by $560bn and led to a contraction of commercial paper. The deadline for this reform has come and gone, yet the spreads have not settled.

Only thing left to do now is find buyers.

• China as Factory to World Mulls the Unthinkable: Price Hikes (BBG)

China’s factories may be on the cusp of delivering a new shock to the global economy after years of undercutting rivals with cheaper costs. This time, increases in prices could reverberate around the world. To understand why, consider the dilemma facing Jiangmen Luck Tissue Mfy Ltd., now caught in a squeeze between surging wages and tepid demand. The company has already slashed staff by half, shaved prices and automated production to survive. Now, with margins razor thin, it’s weighing the first price increases since 2010. “There’s just no possibility for me to cut prices any more,” says deputy director Roger Zhao, 52, whose company is based in the city of Jiangmen in southern Guangdong province.

“Because costs are already pretty high and I don’t see any possibility they’ll go down, I’m seeking opportunities to raise prices a little bit.” That push to recover lost margins – even as demand remains muted – was shared by exporters of everything from clocks to jacuzzis interviewed in Guangzhou last week at the Canton Fair, a biannual gathering where 25,000 exhibitors and 180,000 mostly foreign buyers ink export deals in booths spanning exhibition space equivalent to about 3,400 tennis courts. For the world economy, decisions from companies like Jiangmen Tissue to stop cutting prices – and even raise them where demand allows – removes a source of disinflationary pressure.

To be decided is whether China, the factory to the world, swings from becoming a drag on consumer prices to a source of pressure nudging them higher. China’s manufacturing prices rose in September for the first time in almost five years and overall producer prices also clambered out of negative territory. Those likely to feel the biggest lift if Chinese export prices follow through with sustained increases would be the country’s top five markets: the U.S., Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea and Mexico. “China’s return to positive growth in producer prices marks a very significant turning point in deflationary pressures both in China and globally,” said Shane Oliver at AMP Capital Investors in Sydney. “This is only step one, though. We are still waiting for step two: stronger global demand and trade.”

Draghi to the rescue. He better be fast.

• European Banks Stuck With $1.3 Trillion of Bad Loans, KPMG Says (BBG)

Eight years after Lehman Brothers’ collapse sparked the financial crisis, Europe’s banks still have €1.2 trillion ($1.3 trillion) of non-performing loans and will probably be stuck with them for decades to come, according to KPMG. Anemic economic growth across the region is making it harder for lenders to off-load toxic assets, hurting profitability while banks also come under pressure from tougher capital rules and fines for misconduct, London-based KPMG said in a report published Monday. Firms could take “decades rather than years” to reduce their exposures, hampering profitability. European lenders are battling to cut soured loans as they face evaporating income from lending amid negative interest rates from the ECB.

Net interest margins, the difference between income from lending versus cost of funding, average about 1.2% in the region compared with about 3% in the U.S., according to KPMG. “Reversing the profitability of European banks is not a lost cause but it will certainly be a lot of hard work,” Marcus Evans, a partner at KPMG’s ECB office, said in a statement. “It’s clear that across Europe banks are still grappling with the new world of low, or negative, interest rates and mounting capital and regulatory costs.” The total value of toxic loans in Europe has surged since 2008 from about 1.5% of lending to more than 5% since 2013, according to the report. This has a negative impact on profitability from unpaid interest, raising provisions against impaired assets and realizing losses when disposing bad debts, according to KPMG.

Lots of Weiner and Comey stuff today. Lots of guessing going on. Accurate picture is slow to seep through.

• FBI Obtains Warrant; Agents Waited Weeks To Tell Comey About Emails (WaPo) (WaPo)

FBI agents investigating Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server while secretary of state knew early this month that messages recovered in a separate probe might be germane to their case, but they waited weeks before briefing the FBI director, according to people familiar with the case. Director James B. Comey has written that he was informed of the development Thursday, and he sent a letter to legislators the next day letting them know that he thought the team should take “appropriate investigative steps designed to allow investigators to review these emails.” That missive ignited a political firestorm less than two weeks before the election. Almost instantly, Comey came under intense criticism for his timing and for bucking the Justice Department’s guidance not to tell Congress about the development.

And his announcement means that Clinton could have to contend with the news that the FBI has resumed its investigation of her use of a private email server — without any clarity on whether its investigators will find anything significant — up to and beyond Election Day. The FBI has obtained a warrant to search the emails found on a computer used by former congressman Anthony Weiner that may contain evidence relevant to the investigation into Clinton’s private email server, according to law enforcement officials. The warrant was obtained in New York, as FBI agents there have possession of the laptop. [..].. officials familiar with the case said the messages include a significant amount of correspondence associated with Clinton and her top aide Huma Abedin, Weiner’s estranged wife.

People familiar with the case said that agents on the Clinton email team had known about the messages since soon after New York FBI agents seized a computer related to their investigation into Weiner [..] Officials said the agents probing Clinton’s private email server didn’t tell the director immediately because they were trying to better assess what they had. “It’s a step-by-step process,” said one senior law enforcement official. “There are many steps along the way that get you to a place where the director can be appropriately briefed in order to make a decision” about whether to move forward.

Even his wife was on to him. ‘They felt that he betrayed them and brought disgrace on the bureau by letting Hillary off with a slap on the wrist.’

• Why Comey Jumped At The Chance To Reopen Hillary Investigation (DM)

James Comey’s decision to revive the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s email server and her handling of classified material came after he could no longer resist mounting pressure by mutinous agents in the FBI, including some of his top deputies, according to a source close to the embattled FBI director. ‘The atmosphere at the FBI has been toxic ever since Jim announced last July that he wouldn’t recommend an indictment against Hillary,’ said the source, a close friend who has known Comey for nearly two decades, shares family outings with him, and accompanies him to Catholic mass every week. ‘Some people, including department heads, stopped talking to Jim, and even ignored his greetings when they passed him in the hall,’ said the source.

‘They felt that he betrayed them and brought disgrace on the bureau by letting Hillary off with a slap on the wrist.’ According to the source, Comey fretted over the problem for months and discussed it at great length with his wife, Patrice. He told his wife that he was depressed by the stack of resignation letters piling up on his desk from disaffected agents. The letters reminded him every day that morale in the FBI had hit rock bottom. ‘He’s been ignoring the resignation letters in the hope that he could find a way of remedying the situation,’ said the source. ‘When new emails that appeared to be related to Hillary’s personal email server turned up in a computer used by Huma Abedin and Anthony Weiner, Comey jumped at the excuse to reopen the investigation.

‘The people he trusts the most have been the angriest at him,’ the source continued. ‘And that includes his wife, Pat. She kept urging him to admit that he had been wrong when he refused to press charges against the former secretary of state. ‘He talks about the damage that he’s done to himself and the institution [of the FBI], and how he’s been shunned by the men and women who he admires and work for him. It’s taken a tremendous toll on him. ‘It shattered his ego. He looks like he’s aged 10 years in the past four months.’ But Comey’s decision to reopen the case was more than an effort to heal the wound he inflicted on the FBI. He was also worried that after the presidential election, Republicans in Congress would mount a probe of how he had granted Hillary political favoritism.

Maybe the agents should have spoken out earlier?

• FBI in Internal Feud Over Hillary Clinton Probe (WSJ)

The surprise disclosure that agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation are taking a new look at Hillary Clinton’s email use lays bare, just days before the election, tensions inside the bureau and the Justice Department over how to investigate the Democratic presidential nominee. Investigators found 650,000 emails on a laptop that they believe was used by former Rep. Anthony Weiner and his estranged wife Huma Abedin, a close Clinton aide, and underlying metadata suggests thousands of those messages could have been sent to or from the private server that Mrs. Clinton used while she was secretary of state, according to people familiar with the matter.

It will take weeks, at a minimum, to determine whether those messages are work-related from the time Ms. Abedin served with Mrs. Clinton at the State Department; how many are duplicates of emails already reviewed by the FBI; and whether they include either classified information or important new evidence in the Clinton email probe. Officials had to await a court order to begin reviewing the emails—which they received over the weekend, according to a person familiar with the matter—because they were uncovered in an unrelated probe of Mr. Weiner.

The new investigative effort, disclosed by FBI Director James Comey on Friday, shows a bureau at times in sharp internal disagreement over matters related to the Clintons, and how to handle those matters fairly and carefully in the middle of a national election campaign. Even as the probe of Mrs. Clinton’s email use wound down in July, internal disagreements within the bureau and the Justice Department surrounding the Clintons’ family philanthropy heated up, according to people familiar with the matter.

“Accidentally removing a single classified message from controlled spaces, without any evidence of intent or exposure to hostile forces, can get you fired and cost you your clearance. Repeated instances will land you in prison.”

• Hillary’s Emails Matter: A Retired CIA Officer Explains Why (Hill)

Nobody uses a private email server for official business. Period. Full stop. The entire notion is, to borrow a phrase from a Clinton campaign official, “insane.” That anyone would presume to be allowed to do so is mind-boggling. That government officials allowed Hillary Clinton to do so is nauseating. Classified and unclassified information do not mix. They don’t travel in the same streams through the same pipes. They move in clearly well defined channels so that never the twain shall meet. Mixing them together is unheard of and a major criminal offense. If you end up with classified information in an unclassified channel, you have done something very wrong and very serious.

Accidentally removing a single classified message from controlled spaces, without any evidence of intent or exposure to hostile forces, can get you fired and cost you your clearance. Repeated instances will land you in prison. Every hostile intelligence agency on the planet targets senior American officials for collection. The Secretary of State tops the list. Almost anything the Secretary of State had to say about her official duties, her schedule, her mood, her plans for the weekend, would be prized information to adversaries. It is very difficult, in fact, to think of much of anything that the Secretary of State could be saying in email that we would want hostile forces to know. As we wait for more information on the latest revelations, let’s quickly note what we already know Hillary Clinton did.

While Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton exclusively used a private email address for official business. Instead of using a State Department account, she used a personal email account, housed on a private server located in her home in Chappaqua, New York. The Department of State exercised zero control or oversight in this process. No government security personnel were involved in protecting them. When the House Select Committee on Benghazi asked to see these emails, the Department of State said they did not have them. Clinton’s lawyers then went through all the emails on her server. They turned over 30,000 emails they decided were work related and deleted all of the rest. How they made the decision as to which emails to share and which to destroy remains unknown. Active government officials not were involved in this process.

Hillary says she did not use the account to transmit classified information. This has been proven false. The FBI found over 100 messages that contained information that was classified when sent, including numerous email chains at the level of Top Secret/Special Access Programs. They don’t get any more highly classified, it’s the virtual summit of Mt. Everest. [..] While serving in one of the most senior positions in the United States Government, Hillary Clinton was at a minimum, grossly negligent in the handling of classified information and when confronted with this practice, acted immediately to destroy information and prevent a full, fair and complete investigation of any damage to national security. Anyone else who did such things in the government would long ago have been tried, convicted and sent to jail. ou decide if you want to send her to the White House instead.

A bit of extra juice. And for many a big surprise.

• Ex-FBI Official: ‘Intensive Investigation’ Ongoing Into Clinton Foundation (DC)

Tom Fuentes, a former assistant director at the FBI and a CNN analyst, said Saturday that the bureau has an open investigation into the Clinton Foundation. The statement undermines a report from a team of CNN reporters in August that the Justice Department quashed an investigation into the Clinton family’s non-profit earlier this year. “The FBI has an intensive investigation ongoing into the Clinton Foundation,” Fuentes said Saturday, citing current and former senior FBI officials as sources. “The reports that three divisions came in with a request to Washington to open cases and that they were turned down by the Department of Justice, that’s not true,” he said, referring to the CNN report. “What was turned down was that they be the originating office. Headquarters at the FBI made the determination that the investigation would go forward as a comprehensive unified case and be coordinated,” he added.

[..] Fuentes was discussing the investigation in the context of a letter that FBI director James Comey sent to Congress on Friday stating that the bureau was reopening the investigation into Clinton’s emails. [..] Fuentes asserted that the emails could pertain to the original Clinton email investigation, which was closed in July, as well as to the Clinton Foundation probe. “In a sense, it’s almost turned into a one-stop shopping for the FBI as they could have implications affecting three separate investigations on one computer,” said Fuentes, who served as assistant director at the FBI during the George W. Bush administration.

Precious few voices have dared speaking of a constitutional crisis, though the threat seems obvious. Whoever wins.

• Clinton Supporter Doug Schoen Reconsiders, Cites Constitutional Crisis (RCP)

Hillary Clinton supporter, Fox News contributor, and former pollster Doug Schoen told FNC’s Harris Faulkner Sunday night that the newly renewed FBI investigation into Hillary Clinton is forcing him to “reassess” his support for the Democratic candidate. DOUG SCHOEN: As you know, I have been a supporter of Secretary Clinton… But given that this investigation is going to go on for many months after the election… But if the Secretary of State wins, we will have a president under criminal investigation, with Huma Abedin under criminal investigation, with the Secretary of State, the president-elect, should she win under investigation. Harris, under these circumstances, I am actively reassessing my support. I’m not a Trump —

HARRIS FAULKNER, FOX NEWS: Whoa, whoa, wait a minute. You are not going to vote for Hillary Clinton? SCHOEN: Harris, I’m deeply concerned that we’ll have a constitutional crisis if she’s elected. FAULKNER: Wow! SCHOEN: I want to learn more this week. See what we see. But as of today, I am not a supporter of the Secretary of State for the nation’s highest office.

We don’t need to know reality to survive. So we don’t know it. “..you might believe you are reincarnated from a monk and I might believe my prophet flew to heaven on a winged horse but we can both get through the day just fine.”

• James Comey – As Seen Through The Persuasion Filter (Adams)

As my regular readers know, the Persuasion Filter is related to the idea that the human brain never evolved to accurately comprehend reality. In order for us to be here today, our predecessors only needed to survive and procreate. They had no need to understand reality at any basic level. And we have no such need either. That’s why you might believe you are reincarnated from a monk and I might believe my prophet flew to heaven on a winged horse but we can both get through the day just fine. Many different interpretations of reality are good enough for survival. I like to describe reality as each person living their own movie, which works well unless our script’s conflict. When that happens, one of us goes into cognitive dissonance and rewrites our past to make the movies consistent.

That’s how I see the world. Last year in this blog I suggested that the most productive and predictive way to view reality is through what I call the Persuasion Filter. That’s what I have been using to make spooky-good predictions about the election so far. And that’s what I’ll use today to give you an alternate movie about James Comey. Compare it to the movie you are running in your head and see which one better predicts the future. The base assumption of the Persuasion Filter is that people are irrational 90% of the time and only rarely – when no emotions are involved – truly rational. This is the reverse of the common filter for reality, in which people are assumed to be rational 90% of the time and a bit crazy 10% of the time. That’s some background for context.

[..] The way you know the new emails are disqualifying for Clinton is because otherwise our hero would have privately informed Congress and honored the tradition of not influencing elections. Comey is smart enough to know his options. And unless he suddenly turned rotten at his current age, he’s got the character to jump in front of a second bullet for the Republic. According to this movie, no matter who gets elected, we’ll eventually learn of something disqualifying in the Weiner emails. And we can’t say we weren’t warned. Comey took two bullets to do it. So compare this movie to your own movie and see which one does the best job of explaining the observed facts. And when we find out what is in the Weiner laptop emails, compare that news to my prediction that the information is disqualifying.

Hard hitting Brits.

• Theresa May Lied And Lied Again To Become PM (G.)

Theresa May appeals to a stereotype that has a deep grip on the English psyche. Sober and commonsensical, she behaves with the moral seriousness we expect from a vicar’s daughter. She may be a little clunky, but what a relief it is to have a straightforward leader from the heart of the country after the flash, poll-driven phonies of the past. I am not saying her public image is all a pretence. No focus group told her to campaign against the modern slave trade when she was home secretary. There were few Tory votes in stopping the police targeting young black men, either. But the dominant side of Theresa May is more superficial than David Cameron and more dishonest than Tony Blair. It is a tribute to the power of cliches to stop us seeing what is in front of our noses, that so few have noticed that the only reason she’s prime minister is that she put ambition before principle.

Last week, Downing Street spin doctors were trying and failing to downplay the importance of a secret speech she gave to Goldman Sachs on 26 May, which was leaked to Nick Hopkins and Rowena Mason of the Guardian. In private, May was unequivocal. “The economic arguments are clear,” she told the bankers. Companies would leave the UK if the UK left the EU. In public, however, she made just one speech during the referendum campaign. You forgot it the moment you heard it. May never mentioned the danger of companies fleeing. Her economic case, such as it was, came down to a flaccid, pseudo-impartial argument that “there are risks in staying as well as leaving”. As an orator, May was hopeless. As a politician on the make, she was close to perfect.

When Craig Oliver, Cameron’s former chief of communications, wondered if she was secretly an “enemy agent” for the Leave side, he was being too Machiavellian. May was just making the smart move. She kept her views about the economic consequences of Brexit quiet, so that the Conservative right would accept her as leader if Cameron lost. Failing to state your honest opinion on the most important decision Britain has taken in decades may seem cowardly enough. But the consequences of May’s pretence do not stop with one referendum. Her manoeuvres have forced her into a position where she must make arguments she cannot possibly believe, on behalf of causes she cannot possibly believe in.

Just lovely.

• The Dirty Secret Beneath Hong Kong’s Wealth: Slavery (SCMP)

Hong Kong, a city commonly associated with finance and wealth, has one of the highest proportions of people enslaved across Asia, a new report has found. At least 29,500 people out of a population of more than seven million are trapped in modern slavery in one of the 10 richest cities in the world based on its gross domestic product, according to the Global Slavery Index 2016, which assessed the problem in 167 countries and regions. The sobering figures which specifically concern Hong Kong may come as a surprise, but the hard-hitting report stated that the city has become one of the worst places in Asia for its poor response to the problem, performing worse than mainland China.

The city urgently needs tougher laws and a “transparent plan of action” to combat the problem, human rights group Justice Centre Hong Kong said. Jade Anderson, anti-human trafficking coordinator for the campaign group, said the Global Slavery Index, produced by charitable organisation Walk Free Foundation, came as a “shock” to some Hongkongers. But her organisation’s research had found there were major human rights abuses that went unpunished in the city, and the number of slaves could be much higher than researchers have estimated, she said. The Justice Centre’s investigation involving 1,000 migrant domestic workers found 17% were carrying out “forced labor”, which she said equated to about 55,000 of the city’s 320,000 helpers.

Again: just lovely.

• EU And Canada Sign CETA Free Trade Deal (G.)

The EU and Canada signed a free trade deal on Sunday that was almost derailed last week by objections from French-speaking Belgians , exposing the difficulties of securing agreement from 28 member states as Britain prepares for Brexit talks. The European commission president, Jean-Claude Juncker, said there was no parallel between the deal struck with Canada and looming Brexit talks. “I don’t see any relation between what we are signing today and the Brexit issue,” Juncker said, before greeting Canada’s prime minister, Justin Trudeau, in Brussels Trudeau and top EU officials signed the comprehensive economic and trade agreement, known as Ceta, paving the way for most import duties to be removed early next year. However, the treaty needs the approval of at least 38 national and regional parliaments, including the UK’s, to take full force.

Trudeau was meant to fly to Brussels last Wednesday but he stayed at home when the Wallonia region raised objections that held up agreement until Thursday. Belgium’s regional parliaments endorsed a compromise deal, which addressed concerns about competition for Wallonia’s farmers from Canada, on Friday. Donald Tusk, the president of the European council, who stood beside Trudeau at a news conference, said the delay was caused by Belgium’s internal politics and that the deal would be far less contentious when it went before national parliaments. Tusk said: “Fortunately we live in a democratic system and democracy is less predictable than other political systems but I still prefer democracy. My prediction is there is no huge problem with European parliaments. After my talks with all 28 member states’ leaders, I have no doubt Ceta is the least controversial trade agreement you could imagine.”

Amazing he was still walking free.

• Turkey Detains Editor Of Opposition Newspaper Cumhuriyet (AFP)

Turkish police detained the editor-in-chief of the opposition newspaper Cumhuriyet, state media reported Monday, while CNN Turk said 13 arrest warrants were issued for journalists and executives from the daily. Murat Sabuncu was detained while authorities searched for executive board chairman Akin Atalay and writer Guray Oz, the official news agency Anadolu said. The daily said Oz had already been detained. Police were searching the homes of Atalay and Oz, Anadolu said. The latest detentions came as authorities pressed a massive crackdown over a failed July bid by a rogue faction of the military to oust President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.Tens of thousands of civil servants have since been suspended, fired or detained, with the government pointing the finger of blame for the coup bid at exiled Muslim preacher Fethullah Gulen.

The government has also shut more than 100 media outlets and detained dozens of journalists as it presses a purge that has come under fire by Western leaders and human rights organisations. Sabuncu’s arrest also came as the government fought an insurgency from the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). The government’s operation against the Cumhuriyet daily was launched over its alleged “activities on behalf of” the Gulen movement and the PKK. The PKK — proscribed as a terrorist organisation by Ankara, the EU and US — has waged an insurgency inside Turkey since 1984. Cumhuriyet’s former editor-in-chief is Can Dundar, who was sentenced in May by a Turkish court to five years and 10 months in prison for allegedly revealing state secrets. Dundar is now believed to be in Germany after he was freed earlier this year pending an appeal.

It’s too late for an October surprise from Erdogan, but this stuff is so insane it makes you wonder.

• Erdogan Says Greek Islands ‘Used To Be Ours’ (Kath.)

In what was widely seen as a fresh dig at Greece, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Saturday reiterated that several Greek islands in the eastern Aegean “used to be ours.” The Turkish leader made waves recently in Greece when he said that the Treaty of Lausanne, which set the borders between Greece and Turkey in 1923, was unfair on his country. He returned to the subject on Saturday, saying he didn’t understand why his remarks had raised so many objections. “I said Lausanne and they got annoyed. Why are you annoyed?” he said, adding that “these islands were ours.” “We have our monuments and our mosques there [on the islands],” he said. “Whoever signed [for their passing to Greece] bears the responsibility.”

Debt Rattle October 30 2016

Oct 302016

October 30, 2016 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 11:12 am Finance Tagged with: Abedin, Carney, Comey, DOJ, GMO, Hillary, Iceland, nuclear waste, Trump, Turkey 1 Response »

Harris&Ewing The White House kitchen, Washington DC 1909

• Democrats Should Ask Clinton To Step Aside (Kass)

• FBI Still Does Not Have Warrant To Review New Abedin Emails (Yahoo)

• DOJ Officials Warned FBI’s Comey About Sending Letter on Clinton Emails (WSJ)

• Huma Abedin ‘Doesn’t Know How Emails Wound Up On Husband’s Computer’ (WaPo)

• Clinton Hid Email Scandal From Her Own Staff (WE)

• The First 100 Days Of A Trump White House: Sea Change (AFP)

• Finland’s Millionaire Premier Freezes Pay in Bid to Save Economy (BBG)

• Iceland Pirate Alliance Falls Short Of Majority (G.)

• Mark Carney Could Quit His Bank of England Role Within Days (DM)

• Turkey Fires Another 10,000 Civil Servants In Post-Coup Purge (AFP)

• Erdogan Says Turkey Soon Will Bring Back Death Penalty (AP)

• UK Taxpayers Will Pick Up Costs Of Hinkley Nuclear Waste Storage (G.)

• The Broken Promise of Genetically Modified Crops (NY Times)

Make that ALL Clintons.

• Democrats Should Ask Clinton To Step Aside (Kass)

Has America become so numb by the decades of lies and cynicism oozing from Clinton Inc. that it could elect Hillary Clinton as president, even after Friday’s FBI announcement that it had reopened an investigation of her emails while secretary of state? We’ll find out soon enough. It’s obvious the American political system is breaking down. It’s been crumbling for some time now, and the establishment elite know it and they’re properly frightened. Donald Trump, the vulgarian at their gates, is a symptom, not a cause. Hillary Clinton and husband Bill are both cause and effect. FBI director James Comey’s announcement about the renewed Clinton email investigation is the bombshell in the presidential campaign. That he announced this so close to Election Day should tell every thinking person that what the FBI is looking at is extremely serious.

This can’t be about pervert Anthony Weiner and his reported desire for a teenage girl. But it can be about the laptop of Weiner’s wife, Clinton aide Huma Abedin, and emails between her and Hillary. It comes after the FBI investigation in which Comey concluded Clinton had lied and been “reckless” with national secrets, but said he could not recommend prosecution. So what should the Democrats do now? If ruling Democrats hold themselves to the high moral standards they impose on the people they govern, they would follow a simple process: They would demand that Mrs. Clinton step down, immediately, and let her vice presidential nominee, Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia, stand in her place.

Democrats should say, honestly, that with a new criminal investigation going on into events around her home-brew email server from the time she was secretary of state, having Clinton anywhere near the White House is just not a good idea. Since Oct. 7, WikiLeaks has released 35,000 emails hacked from Clinton campaign boss John Podesta. Now WikiLeaks, no longer a neutral player but an active anti-Clinton agency, plans to release another 15,000 emails. What if she is elected? Think of a nation suffering a bad economy and continuing chaos in the Middle East, and now also facing a criminal investigation of a president. Add to that congressional investigations and a public vision of Clinton as a Nixonian figure wandering the halls, wringing her hands.

I read about this before but couldn’t get it verified when writing my article yesterday. But it’s apparently true: the DOJ may deny the FBI a warrant to look into the emails. They should try. Meanwhile, I wrote the article this morning: James Comey, American Hero.

• FBI Still Does Not Have Warrant To Review New Abedin Emails (Yahoo)

When FBI Director James Comey wrote his bombshell letter to Congress on Friday about newly discovered emails that were potentially “pertinent” to the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private email server, agents had not been able to review any of the material, because the bureau had not yet gotten a search warrant to read them, three government officials who have been briefed on the probe told Yahoo News. At the time Comey wrote the letter, “he had no idea what was in the content of the emails,” one of the officials said, referring to recently discovered emails that were found on the laptop of disgraced ex-Rep. Anthony Weiner, the estranged husband of top Clinton aide Huma Abedin. Weiner is under investigation for allegedly sending illicit text messages to a 15-year-old girl.

As of Saturday night, the FBI was still in talks with the Justice Department about obtaining a warrant that would allow agency officials to read any of the newly discovered Abedin emails, and therefore was still in the dark about whether they include any classified material that the bureau has not already seen. “We do not have a warrant,” a senior law enforcement official said. “Discussions are under way [between the FBI and the Justice Department] as to the best way to move forward.” That Comey and other senior FBI officials were not aware of what was in the emails – and whether they contained any material the FBI had not already obtained – is important because Donald Trump’s campaign and Republicans in Congress have suggested that the FBI director would not have written his letter unless he had been made aware of significant new emails that might justify reopening the investigation into the Clinton server.

But a message that Comey wrote to all FBI agents Friday seeking to explain his decision to write the controversial letter strongly hinted that investigators did not not yet have legal authority establishing “probable cause” to review the content of Abedin’s emails on Weiner’s electronic devices.

“FBI officials were also concerned that if they didn’t act, the information might leak out anyway, in a less controlled manner”. Again, see James Comey, American Hero.

• DOJ Officials Warned FBI’s Comey About Sending Letter on Clinton Emails (WSJ)

Justice Department officials warned FBI Director James Comey that his letter to Congress about newly discovered emails potentially related to an investigation of Hillary Clinton would contradict the department’s long-established election policy, according to people familiar with the discussions. Mr. Comey acted “independently” when he decided to send the letter, the people said. The FBI is reviewing newly obtained emails linked to its previously closed investigation into Mrs. Clinton’s handling of classified information as secretary of state. Friday’s announcement came just days before voters to go to the polls to choose a new president.

Before the letter was sent, the FBI told senior Justice Department officials what Mr. Comey planned to do, and those officials warned that doing so would contradict the department’s rules against taking steps that could influence—or be seen as trying to influence—an election, these people said. Mr. Comey, however, decided it was better to share the information rather than face possibly greater criticism for keeping quiet until after the election, according to the people familiar with the discussions. FBI officials were also concerned that if they didn’t act, the information might leak out anyway, in a less controlled manner, these people said.

[..] The emails in question were found during the search of a device in the FBI probe of former Rep. Anthony Weiner, a New York Democrat, who is being investigated for allegedly sending sexually explicit messages to a minor. Many of the emails were discovered on a laptop used by both Ms. Abedin and Mr. Weiner, according to people familiar with the matter. In searching the laptop, investigators found thousands of emails, and they determined earlier this week that some of the emails involved Ms. Abedin discussing work issues. Authorities haven’t yet determined how many emails involved such work discussions or if any of those included classified information, these people said. They also haven’t determined if the work emails in question are copies of messages already reviewed by the FBI.

Should be start to feel pity for here? Abused both at work and at home?

• Huma Abedin ‘Doesn’t Know How Emails Wound Up On Husband’s Computer’ (WaPo)

Top Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin has told people she is unsure how her emails could have ended up on a device she viewed as her husband’s computer, the seizure of which has reignited the Clinton email investigation, according to a person familiar with the investigation and civil litigation over the matter. The person, who would not discuss the case unless granted anonymity, said Abedin was not a regular user of the computer, and even when she agreed to turn over emails to the State Department for federal records purposes, her lawyers did not search it for materials, not believing any of her messages to be there.

That could be a significant oversight if Abedin’s work messages were indeed on the computer of her estranged husband, former congressman Anthony Weiner, who is under investigation for allegedly exchanging lewd messages with a 15-year-old girl. So far, it is unclear what — if any — new, work-related messages were found by authorities. The person said the FBI had not contacted Abedin about its latest discovery, and she was unsure what the bureau had discovered. According to federal law enforcement officials, investigators found thousands of messages on Weiner’s computer that they believe to be potentially relevant to the separate, Clinton email investigation. How they are relevant — or if they are significant in any respect — remains unknown.

If/when the entire story gets out, we’re not going to believe it. Or rather, that his person ran for/became president.

• Clinton Hid Email Scandal From Her Own Staff (WE)

Hillary Clinton’s closest aides hid the private email scandal from her campaign team in the months before the official launch of her presidential campaign, emails made public by WikiLeaks show. Robby Mook, Clinton’s campaign manager, John Podesta, Clinton’s campaign chair, and Neera Tanden, co-chair of Clinton’s transition team, each expressed shock at the revelations about her private server as they emerged in early March 2015. Although Clinton’s team had performed research on her in 2014 as staff prepared for her campaign, Clinton’s inner circle apparently steered Mook and others away from the issue until it was too late. When Podesta asked Mook if he had “any idea of the depth of this story,” Mook answered simply, “Nope.”

“We brought up the existence of emails in reserach [sic] this summer but were told that everything was taken care of,” Mook added in his email reply. Although how Mook approached the emails with researchers in 2014 is not entirely clear, the exchange provides more evidence that Clinton’s team set up her server with the intent to conceal emails from the Freedom of Information Act given their expectation that she would run again for president. In an email to Podesta in July 2015, Tanden hinted that the results of an upcoming CNN poll would likely show Sen. Bernie Sanders, Clinton’s primary opponent, ahead among Democratic voters. “Do we actually know who told Hillary she could use a private email? And has that person been drawn and quartered?” Tanden joked. “Like whole thing is f***g insane.”

Podesta said their party would have to be “suicidal” to consider nominating Sanders over Clinton. A number of the emails obtained illegally form Podesta’s inbox and published in 20 batches by WikiLeaks have exposed the Clinton campaign’s struggle to confront the controversy over Clinton’s private server. A few days after stories about Clinton’s personal email use broke for the first time, Philippe Reines, a longtime Clinton aide, admitted “there is just no good answer” to questions about her server. Later, Tanden pressed Podesta on why Clinton’s team did not disclose their private emails months earlier in order to avoid such a massive distraction around the time of her campaign kickoff. “[I] guess I know the answer,” Tanden said. “[T]hey wanted to get away with it.”

And now for something completely different.

• The First 100 Days Of A Trump White House: Sea Change (AFP)

Donald Trump believes he will score a “tremendous” victory on November 8. If he does, the Republican presidential candidate has indicated he will bring vast change in America during his first 100 days in office. At a recent campaign rally in North Carolina, he promised “a very busy first day,” adding: “The change will begin my first day in office.” The 70-year-old Manhattan real estate mogul, who insists the country suffers from a “rigged” political system, has pledged to “make America great again” with two key ideas: jumpstarting the economy and bolstering national security. He is certainly not without ideas. Trump offered a list of them on October 22 in his own “Gettysburg address” at the same place where Abraham Lincoln tried to unite a divided nation during the Civil War in 1863.

From the first day, Trump has pledged in his “revolutionary Contract with the American Voter” to renegotiate NAFTA and withdraw from the Trans-Pacific Partnership. He plans to lift restrictions on producing fossil fuels, relaunch the Keystone XL oil pipeline project put on hold by President Barack Obama, and cancel billions of dollars in payments to UN climate change programs. The billionaire will work to “begin removing the more than two million criminal illegal immigrants from the country and cancel visas to foreign countries that won’t take them back.” He would “suspend immigration from terror-prone regions where vetting cannot safely occur” and carry out “extreme vetting” of those seeking to enter the country. “Our campaign represents the kind of change that only arrives once in a lifetime,” he said.

Trump has also vowed to “drain the swamp” of what he sees as systemic corruption in Washington – impose term limits on members of Congress, freeze federal hiring and ban lawmakers and White House staff from becoming lobbyists for five years. He also has promised to “cancel every unconstitutional executive action” undertaken by Obama. Despite his tense ties with the Republican Party, which for now controls both houses of Congress, Trump says he will work with lawmakers to introduce and pass legislation that would see at least 25 million jobs created in a decade.

The dark days are coming to the north.

• Finland’s Millionaire Premier Freezes Pay in Bid to Save Economy (BBG)

The Nordic region’s only euro member is still struggling with austerity. After being stripped of its top AAA credit grade at all three major ratings companies, the government is asking Finns to tighten their belts to keep up with the Germans and the Swedes, who are more productive exporters. Failure to do so will jeopardize Finland’s path away from economic limbo and growing indebtedness, the government warns. Prime Minister Juha Sipila, a self-made millionaire who won elections last year on pledges to reinvigorate Finland’s ailing post-Nokia economy, says exports are the key to economic success. But that requires Finns to produce more without getting more pay if the nation is to close a competitiveness gap as wide as 15 percent relative to its main trading partners.

“We’re behind our main competitor countries,” Sipila said in an interview in Helsinki on Wednesday. “Our problem is that exports are lagging and that growth relies on domestic demand.” But if the economy is to recover, “exports should become the growth motor again.” Finland has been trapped in a low-growth cycle since exiting a series of economic contractions in 2015. Its once dominant paper industry has succumbed to the advent of digital media. The poster child of its consumer technology boom, Nokia Oyj, sold its handset unit off to Microsoft in 2013 after failing to see the potential of smart phones. And the economic crisis in Russia, with whom Finland shares the EU’s longest border, has battered trade.

Maybe not that bad if they get some more time to learn the ropes.

• Iceland Pirate Alliance Falls Short Of Majority (G.)

With about 80% of votes counted, the Pirates, founded four years ago by a group of activists, anarchists and former hackers, and their three left-of-centre partners held 27 seats – five short of a majority in the country’s 63-seat parliament. The Independence party won nearly 30% of the vote, significantly more than pre-election polling had predicted, and with its coalition partner of the past three years, the Progressive party, looks set to end up with 29 seats. “I cannot deny that if the results stay this way … it would be natural that we are a leading party in the next government,” said the leader of the Independence party, Bjarni Benediktsson, one of the its 21 MPs. In a campaign dominated by widespread public discontent with the country’s traditional elites and desire for political reform, the Independence party pledged to lower taxes and keep Iceland’s economic recovery on track.

The preliminary results mean the seven MPs from the newly established, liberal Regeneration party, which split from the Independence party over the issue of Europe earlier this year, could be kingmakers – making coalition negotiations more tricky than usual. Riding a wave of public anger at what many see as endemic political corruption in the wake of the 2008 financial crash and the Panama Papers scandal in April, the Pirates had been predicted to score as high as 20% and possibly even become Iceland’s largest party. But the party’s co-founder, Birgitta Jónsdóttir, an activist, poet and former WikiLeaks collaborator, said it was satisfied with the result, which saw it finish second equal on more than 14% of the vote and with 10 MPs – more than three times as many as in the previous 2013 elections.

Britain is ruled by vile allegations wherever you look. ‘He never seems to want to recognize the result of the referendum and get on with it. It looks like he is a sore loser.’

• Mark Carney Could Quit His Bank of England Role Within Days (DM)

Mark Carney’s days as Governor of the Bank of England appear to be numbered amid rumours he could resign within days. The Canadian – who has been a controversial figure since the Brexit vote as many of his ‘Project Fear’ predictions are yet to materialise – could elect to return to his homeland next year due to family reasons. A decision will be made before the end of the year and could be announced at the Bank’s quarterly inflation report next Thursday. Tory MP Jacob Rees-Mogg, a Treasury Select Committee member and one of Dr Carney’s most outspoken critics, has been touted as a potential replacement, according to Bloomberg.

Mr Rees-Mogg said earlier this month: ‘On every occasion he wants to talk down the economy and find doom and gloom, which doesn’t seem to me to be the job of the governor of the Bank of England. ‘He never seems to want to recognize the result of the referendum and get on with it. It looks like he is a sore loser.’ Just days ago, Dr Carney delivered a stark warning in the House of Lords that interfering with the independence of the Bank of England could send sterling into a fresh tailspin. In an apparent dig at Theresa May, the governor said markets had ‘taken note’ when politicians criticised monetary policy in the past.

I lost count, I must admit. How they keep the country going, no idea.

• Turkey Fires Another 10,000 Civil Servants In Post-Coup Purge (AFP)

Turkish authorities have fired over 10,000 additional civil servants as the government presses a crackdown over the failed July coup, the official gazette said. A total of 10,131 government employees were removed, mainly from the education, justice and health ministries, according to announcements published late Saturday. The government also announced the closure of 15 pro-Kurdish and other media outlets. University rector elections have also been suspended, with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan set to pick the winners from a pool of candidates selected by the nation’s education authority. The moves came three months after the government declared a state of emergency following a failed bid by a rogue faction of the army to oust Erdogan. More than 35,000 people have been arrested since then, and many dozens of teachers, police officers and judges have either been suspended or fired.

Blood and circus.

• Erdogan Says Turkey Soon Will Bring Back Death Penalty (AP)

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan says the government will soon submit a bill to Parliament to reinstate the death penalty amid calls for the execution of the plotters of a failed coup in July. Addressing crowds in Ankara on Saturday, Erdogan said he would ratify such a bill once it passed despite any objections it might spark in the West. Erdogan made the comments in response to public chants calling for the death penalty, which Turkey abolished in 2004 as part of its bid to join the European Union. Erdogan said: “Soon, our government will bring (the bill) to Parliament…It’s what the people say that matters, not what the West thinks.”

Excuse me, but does this surprise anyone? It’s what’s going to happen everywhere, no matter what any ‘leader’ says.

• UK Taxpayers Will Pick Up Costs Of Hinkley Nuclear Waste Storage (G.)

Taxpayers will pick up the bill should the cost of storing radioactive waste produced by Britain’s newest nuclear power station soar, according to confidential documents which the government has battled to keep secret for more than a year. The papers confirm the steps the government took to reassure French energy firm EDF and Chinese investors behind the £24bn Hinkley Point C plant that the amount they would have to pay for the storage would be capped. The Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy – in its previous incarnation as the Department for Energy and Climate Change – resisted repeated requests under the Freedom of Information Act for the release of the documents which were submitted to the European commission.

“The government has attempted to keep the costs to the taxpayer of Hinkley under wraps from the start,” said Dr Doug Parr, Greenpeace chief scientist. “It’s hardly surprising as it doesn’t look good for the government’s claim that they are trying to keep costs down for hardworking families.” But, earlier this month, on the very last day before government officials had to submit their defence against an appeal for disclosure of the information, the department released a “Nuclear Waste Transfer Pricing Methodology Notification Paper”. Marked “commercial in confidence”, it states that “unlimited exposure to risks relating to the costs of disposing of their waste in a GDF [geological disposal facility], could not be accepted by the operator as they would prevent the operator from securing the finance necessary to undertake the project”.

Instead the document explains that there will be a “cap on the liability of the operator of the nuclear power station which would apply in a worst-case scenario”. It adds: “The UK government accepts that, in setting a cap, the residual risk, of the very worst-case scenarios where actual cost might exceed the cap, is being borne by the government.”

OK, now kick ’em out. It’s taken far too long already.

• The Broken Promise of Genetically Modified Crops (NY Times)

The controversy over genetically modified crops has long focused on largely unsubstantiated fears that they are unsafe to eat. But an extensive examination by The New York Times indicates that the debate has missed a more basic problem — genetic modification in the United States and Canada has not accelerated increases in crop yields or led to an overall reduction in the use of chemical pesticides. The promise of genetic modification was twofold: By making crops immune to the effects of weedkillers and inherently resistant to many pests, they would grow so robustly that they would become indispensable to feeding the world’s growing population, while also requiring fewer applications of sprayed pesticides.

Twenty years ago, Europe largely rejected genetic modification at the same time the United States and Canada were embracing it. Comparing results on the two continents, using independent data as well as academic and industry research, shows how the technology has fallen short of the promise. An analysis by The Times using United Nations data showed that the United States and Canada have gained no discernible advantage in yields — food per acre — when measured against Western Europe, a region with comparably modernized agricultural producers like France and Germany. Also, a recent National Academy of Sciences report found that “there was little evidence” that the introduction of genetically modified crops in the United States had led to yield gains beyond those seen in conventional crops.

At the same time, herbicide use has increased in the United States, even as major crops like corn, soybeans and cotton have been converted to modified varieties. And the United States has fallen behind Europe’s biggest producer, France, in reducing the overall use of pesticides, which includes both herbicides and insecticides. One measure, contained in data from the United States Geological Survey, shows the stark difference in the use of pesticides. Since genetically modified crops were introduced in the United States two decades ago for crops like corn, cotton and soybeans, the use of toxins that kill insects and fungi has fallen by a third, but the spraying of herbicides, which are used in much higher volumes, has risen by 21%. By contrast, in France, use of insecticides and fungicides has fallen by a far greater %age – 65% – and herbicide use has decreased as well, by 36%.

The potential harm from pesticides, however, has drawn researchers’ attention. Pesticides are toxic by design – weaponized versions, like sarin, were developed in Nazi Germany – and have been linked to developmental delays and cancer. “These chemicals are largely unknown,” said David Bellinger, a professor at the Harvard University School of Public Health, whose research has attributed the loss of nearly 17 million I.Q. points among American children 5 years old and under to one class of insecticides. “We do natural experiments on a population,” he said, referring to exposure to chemicals in agriculture, “and wait until it shows up as bad.” The industry is winning on both ends – because the same companies make and sell both the genetically modified plants and the poisons. Driven by these sales, the combined market capitalizations of Monsanto, the largest seed company, and Syngenta, the Swiss pesticide giant, have grown more than sixfold in the last decade and a half.

James Comey, American Hero

Oct 302016

October 30, 2016 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 7:51 am Finance Tagged with: Abedin, BoJ, Clinton, Comey, devices, FBI, Hillary, Lynch, warrant, Weiner 1 Response »

Jack Delano The Chicago & North Western between Chicago and Clinton, Iowa 1943

It looks like I owe you an update. Things move fast in the FBI vs Huma Abedin case. When only some 24 hours ago I started writing my article “Throw Huma Under the Bus?”, there was one thing I did not know at all, one thing I was guessing at as much as the reporters who brought it up, and one I couldn’t verify sufficiently to feel comfortable about including it in the piece.

First, what I did not know at all was the role of Department of Justice head and US Attorney General, Loretta Lynch. Nobody I had read wrote a single word about her role, and I said “Wait a minute! Anybody seen Loretta Lynch lately?”. 24 hours later we know that Lynch, and the DOJ, actively attempted to keep James Comey from writing his infamous letter to members of Congress.

These attempts were ostensibly based on a ‘longstanding’ tradition of the DOJ and FBI to minimalize any potential interference in (presidential) elections. Given that Comey didn’t have ‘enough’ solid evidence gathered from the emails, Lynch et al apparently told him he should not come forward. But it turns out there’s a dark flipside to this argument, please bear with me.

Second, there was the ‘rumor’, or whatever we may call it, that Comey faced pressure from agents (or ‘assets’) in the Bureau to either come forward or risk having details leaked into the press from within the FBI. This is still not verified, and maybe never will be, but it does fit a narrative that’s starting to take shape. Though perhaps not quite the way one might have suspected.

Third, something I couldn’t verify sufficiently, was the issue of a warrant the FBI would need to examine the emails on devices owned by, and in at least some cases shared by, Huma and husband Anthony Weiner. I had seen this, and wrote in yesterday’s Debt Rattle at the Automatic Earth that “The NY Post suggests that NBC suggests that the FBI needs a fresh warrant to study the new batch of emails..”. Nobody else mentioned it though.

But now there’s more on that aspect, and it changes the story, perhaps a lot. In an overall pretty good article, Yahoo’s Michael Isikoff has this:

FBI Still Does Not Have Warrant To Review New Abedin Emails Linked To Clinton Probe

When FBI Director James Comey wrote his bombshell letter to Congress on Friday about newly discovered emails that were potentially “pertinent” to the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private email server, agents had not been able to review any of the material, because the bureau had not yet gotten a search warrant to read them, three government officials who have been briefed on the probe told Yahoo News.

At the time Comey wrote the letter, “he had no idea what was in the content of the emails,” one of the officials said, referring to recently discovered emails that were found on the laptop of disgraced ex-Rep. Anthony Weiner, the estranged husband of top Clinton aide Huma Abedin. Weiner is under investigation for allegedly sending illicit text messages to a 15-year-old girl.

As of Saturday night, the FBI was still in talks with the Justice Department about obtaining a warrant that would allow agency officials to read any of the newly discovered Abedin emails, and therefore was still in the dark about whether they include any classified material that the bureau has not already seen. “We do not have a warrant,” a senior law enforcement official said.

When I saw that confirmed, a whole new picture started emerging. You have on the one side James Comey who does something ‘unprecedented’, for which he knows he’ll face a lot of flack. On the other you have Loretta Lynch, a staunch Democrat not known to be nearly as impartial as Comey, trying to keep him from sending the letter.

And on top of that you have ‘negotiations’ between the DOJ and FBI about obtaining a warrant to get access to the emails. The DOJ can, and still may, refuse to grant the FBI that warrant. But that chance is a lot smaller now than if Comey had not sent his letter. By bringing the matter out into the open, he’s hugely increased the pressure on Lynch to issue the warrant.

What we have here in fact is a power struggle. And as I hinted before, this may not be Lynch vs Comey directly, but it may come from within the FBI. Where various ‘assets’ have become so frustrated with how the investigations have been conducted so far that they have put pressure on Comey that may even have taken the form of an ultimatum. “We’ll leak unless we get a warrant”.

But it’s quite possible that Comey himself is the one behind the pressure on the DOJ, it’s quite possible that he has grown as weary as his people of the ‘progress’ in the entire Hillary email proceedings.

There is no indication from the eight-page FBI report on the interview, however, that the agents ever pressed her on what has now turned into an explosive issue in the final days of the 2016 campaign: Did Weiner have access to any classified government documents on his laptop and iPhone — devices that, he apparently used to exchange sexually charged messages with women he met online, including in one alleged case, an underage teenager in North Carolina?

The fact that FBI agents failed to follow up on this shows that the original probe into the Clinton email server was “not thorough” and was “fatally flawed,” said Joseph DiGenova, a former U.S. attorney and independent counsel who has been a strong critic of Comey and the FBI probe. “The first thing they should have done was gotten a sworn affidavit about all her accounts and devices,” he said, adding that agents should have immediately attempted to obtain the devices, including Weiner’s.

We don’t know why the agents haven’t. The suggestion I referred to yesterday that Huma Abedin may have been granted a ‘secret immunity’ deal could have played a big part in that. After all, there must be some reason why no devices were seized in ‘part 1’ of the investigation; even if that reason is not exactly public knowledge. The ‘secret immunity’ and the lack of devices seized, of course remind us again of Lynch’s meeting with Bill Clinton on a tarmac in Phoenix back in June.

Agents may simply not have had the authority to ‘obtain’ the devices. Whether that was because the DOJ actively frustrated their investigation, or the orders came from Comey, we don’t know and we never may. But something’s changed since then. That’s what Comey’s letter, and its timing, strongly seems to suggest.

About the material found on Weiner’s devices, Hillary’s side of course has a good idea what’s in the emails. Huma has been thoroughly grilled by now, if she hadn’t been before. The FBI probably has at least a partial idea: it’s highly likely they have seen things when investigating Weiner that would now be a part of the Hillary email investigation if the warrant were issued.

Hillary and other Dems can now protest Comey’s actions all they want, and demand full openness, but they know full well that this openness depends on ‘their own Loretta Lynch’ granting the FBI that warrant. And every single second that the warrant is not issued is a dark cloud on Hillary’s campaign, and indeed on the whole of America.

Of course the Democrats would love to lift this whole thing over November 8, and that’s why they seek to play for time and focus -again- not on the content but on the process, the proceedings and the individuals involved. People inside the FBI -whether that includes Comey or not- appear to think that would not serve democracy. But they have tens of thousands of mails to dig through even if they get the warrant, and that takes time. Will they get that time?

There’s no way Comey is not smart enough to have seen coming what’s happening now. From the Democrats’ favorite son he’s become in their eyes so incompetent they even suggest he may be yet another of Putin’s assets in America.

Is he seeking to right a wrong? Did he think that no matter what he did he would be fed to either the Republican or the Democrat sharks anyway? Or was he pressured by his ‘assets’? Right now, it seems too soon to tell. But don’t be surprised if James Comey comes out of this looking like a true American Hero. Even if it costs him his job.

Throw Huma Under the Bus?

Oct 292016

October 29, 2016 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 1:30 pm Finance Tagged with: Abedin, classified, Clinton, Comey, FBI, Hillary, server, Weiner Comments Off

Alfred Palmer U.S. Marine Corps glider detachment training camp, Parris Island, SC 1943

There is so much in innuendo and guesses and biased opinion floating around on this ‘morning after’ the Comey bombshell that the only option we have is to read and watch a ton of stuff and see what sticks. One thing that definitely should stick was published late last night by Paul Sperry for the New York Post.

He scores a solid and massive point that looks as damning for the FBI itself (or at least the superiors), as it does for Hillary Clinton. It is, in that regard, perhaps telling that one of the alleged reasons whispered for FBI director Jim Comey to come forward on Friday is that he feared details of the probe would otherwise be leaked to the press.

Sperry’s point: the emails that are at the center of Friday’s announcement that Hillary Clinton ‘s entire email server investigation will be re-opened -whether formally or not is moot-, were obtained by seizing devices from Anthony Weiner in relation him sexting to a 15-year old girl.

And seizing devices was exactly what was never done in Hillary’s case, though “agents assigned to that case knew Abedin hoarded classified emails on her electronic devices.” They were seized neither from Hillary nor from her closest aide Huma Abedin, who now probably- and probably rightly- fears that she may be thrown under the bus at the first convenient moment.

Hillary doesn’t appear to know what exactly is on the Weiner/Abedin device, but her staff is undoubtedly preparing a defense based on Hillary denying she knew anything about what emails Huma kept and/or sent. Such a defense may well be useless, depending on the contents of the mails. But by now it’s full blown panic danger control in the campaign.

While at the FBI the mood may now be that a second consecutive investigation that would end in a second consecutive ‘dismissal’ would be unacceptable to -a lot of- agents. Something Comey is undoubtedly painfully aware of. His ‘own people’ may have given him an ultimatum: either you do it right this time, or we will.

A few bits from Paul Sperry’s piece:

On page 3 of their 11-page report, the agents detail how they showed Abedin a classified paper on Pakistan sent from a State Department source which she, in turn, inexplicably forwarded to her personal Yahoo email account — an obviously unclassified, unencrypted, unsecured and unauthorized system. The breach of security was not an isolated event but a common practice with Abedin.

This is one of those things that Hillary will likely try to plead innocence on. Not that that should be good enough: the server, illegal as it may have been, was still her responsibility. That either she herself or Abedin would play fast and loose with the confidentiality and classification of the material involved, on top of using a server whose very existence played fast and loose with the law, is the kind of thing that disqualifies her from public office, let alone the presidency.

Hillary’s ‘defense’ has been ‘I made a mistake’, and that was enough for her, for Comey, and for the entire American media. It’s still hard to believe. And it certainly doesn’t look like it will be enough a second time. Just imagine what some FBI agents must have thought when they found out, and when Comey subsequently decided to hush the case.

“She routinely forwarded emails from her state.gov account to either her clintonemail.com or her yahoo.com account,” the agents wrote. Why? “So she could print them” at home and not at her State Department office. Abedin contended that she “would typically print the documents without reading them” and “was unaware of the classification.” Uh-huh.

The FBI also pointed out that “the only person at DoS (Department of State) to receive an email account on the (clintonemail.com) domain was Abedin.” “Multiple State employees” told the FBI that they considered emailing Abedin “the equivalent of e-mailing Clinton.” Another close Clinton aide told the FBI that “Abedin may have kept emails that Clinton did not.”

The phrase “the equivalent of e-mailing Clinton” says a lot about how closely the two worked together. And that in turn says something about the odds that Huma acted alone, without Hillary knowing.

In her April interview with the FBI, Abedin incredulously maintained that she “did not know that Clinton had a private server until about a year and a half ago, when it became public knowledge.” [..] .. another witness told agents that he and another Clinton aide with computer skills built the new server system “at the recommendation of Huma Abedin,” who first broached the idea of an off-the-grid email server as early as the “fall (of) 2008.”

So if you believe Abedin, she didn’t know the private clintonemail.com server that hosted her huma@clintonemail.com account even existed until she heard about it in the news. Comey was a believer; he didn’t even bother to call her back for further questioning. Case closed.

Yes, Huma knew the server existed, long before she admitted knowing it. That’s a bold faced lie. But wait, didn’t she get immunity? Apparently perhaps not officially (?!), but FBI agents seriously suspect she did:

During research, FBI assets and federal law enforcement sources concluded the only way Abedin could have walked away from the probe without criminal charges was because her legal team struck a secret immunity deal with Justice. “She has a deal in place or (FBI Director James) Comey and (Attorney General Loretta) Lynch let her just walk out the door,” a FBI source said.

Wait a minute! Anybody seen Loretta Lynch lately? Did she know Comey would make his announcement Friday? She’s his boss…

If Huma knew the server existed when she said she did not know, it’s 99% sure Anthony Weiner knew it, too. Which is important in more than one way. They shared at least one device, which means he had access to classified material. That in itself is highly illegal. And in the -year long- first stage of the probe, FBI agents knew this, or could have suspected it, and asked Huma for details. Apparently, that didn’t happen.

Perhaps even more important, Weiner is a huge and obvious risk as a blackmail target. For all we know, he may have already provided classified files to parties threatening to go public with photos he sent exposing his weiner to underage girls.

Was the clinton email server hacked? So far the word is there’s no proof of that, but… Did Huma delete and/or bleach-bit information on her devices the same way Hillary did? We can’t know, because despite Huma’s obvious untruths, these devices were not seized for the earlier investigation.

Why? We can only guess. But to quote Hillary from last night (albeit on a slightly different topic): “your guess is as good as mine, and that’s not good enough”.

What we do know is that, obviously, there is still enough material left for the FBI to re-open the case. They may have found as many as tens of thousands of mails belonging to Huma (well, actually, to the US government) on Weiner’s laptop.

[..] Abedin’s role in this caper begs for fresh scrutiny. Making false statements to a federal agent is a felony. So is mishandling classified information. By forwarding classified emails to her personal email account and printing them out at home, Abedin appears to have violated a Classified Information NonDisclosure Agreement she signed at the State Department on Jan. 30, 2009, in which she agreed to keep all classified material under the control of the US government.

Classified emails sent to an unprotected server and printed out at home. How dumb exactly is Huma Abedin? And how dumb does all this make Hillary?

Let’s see if Comey puts the screws to Abedin and leverages her for information on her boss. If he agrees to cut another immunity deal, we’ll know the fix is still in.

Will the media propaganda caravan now turn on Hillary to save its face? I would predict perhaps not immediately, since they bet a lot on their horse. But give it a few days and they may conclude it’s high time to cut their losses. And so may a lot of other parties involved.

The thumbscrews put on Huma this morning by the campaign must be hurting. Can she cut another immunity deal or will she end up under the bus?

Debt Rattle October 29 2016

Oct 292016

October 29, 2016 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 9:29 am Finance Tagged with: Assange, bombshell, Comey, Deutsche, emails, FBI, Hillary, soybeans, Trump, Weiner Comments Off

Unknown No Dog Biscuits Today

• It’s A First: Hillary Wants FBI To Publish Everything About Emails (DM)

• Bernstein: New Evidence “A Real Bombshell” Or FBI Would Not Reopen Case (RCP)

• 2006 Audio Emerges of Hillary Proposing Rigging Palestine Election (Obs.)

• China Laughs, Says US Choosing Between ‘A Crazy Guy’ And ‘A Swindler’ (DC)

• Inside The Invisible Government: War, Propaganda, Clinton, Trump (John Pilger)

• Prof. Michael Hudson: The Criminals Control The US (Renegade)

• Sorry, But The US Economy’s Growth Spurt Isn’t Going To Last (CNBC)

• The Story Of The Self Destruction Of Deutsche Bank (Spiegel)

• No 10 Must Have Made Nissan Big Promise, Say Ex-Business Minister (G.)

• EU-Canada CETA Trade Deal To Be Signed On Sunday (BBC)

• Iceland Voters To Choose Between Pirates And Establishment This Weekend (R.)

• The Strange Tale Of A Dating Site’s Attacks On Wikileaks Founder Assange (McCl.)

Clinton says she’s confident the new mails will not change the FBI’s conclusion in July. Thing is, if that were so, they probably wouldn’t have announced the mails on Friday.

• It’s A First: Hillary Wants FBI To Publish Everything About Emails (DM)

The FBI is investigating Weiner’s lewd texts with an underage girl, revealed in September by DailyMail.com. ‘We’ve heard these rumors,’ said Clinton – who sat near Abedin on her campaign on the flight to Des Moines. ‘We don’t know what to believe and I’m sure there will be even more rumors. That’s why it is incumbent upon the FBI to tell us what they’re talking about,’ she said. ‘Because right now your guess is as good as mine and I don’t think that’s good enough.’ [..] Meanwhile, it was also revealed on Friday that Comey reportedly told bureau staffers in separate memo that he broke custom in telling Congress about the reopening of the investigation because of its political sensitivity. In the internal memo obtained by Fox News, Comey said the bureau would not ordinarily communicate with the public about its ongoing investigations, but said he felt he needed to do so as amid the looming election.

He also notes he felt an ‘obligation’ to inform lawmakers about the investigation given he had testified repeatedly that their investigation into Clinton’s email was completed. ‘Of course we don’t ordinarily tell Congress about ongoing investigations, but here I feel an obligation to do so given that I testified repeatedly in recent months that our investigation was completed,’ Comey wrote in the memo. ‘I also think it would be misleading to the American people were we not to supplement the record. ‘At the same time, however, given that we do not know the significance of this newly discovered collection of emails, I don’t want to create a misleading impression. ‘In trying to strike that balance, in a brief letter, and in the middle of an election season, there is significant risk of being misunderstood, but I wanted you to hear directly from me about it.’

The NY Post suggests that NBC suggests that the FBI needs a fresh warrant to study the new batch of emails they suggest is connected to their investigation of Hillary Clinton’s use of a private server, which in turn is linked to possible mishandling of classified informaton. The (1000?!) mails were found on a laptop (and/or phone?) used by both Huma Abedin and Anthony Weiner. The ‘new warrant’ issue may be why Comey says “..the FBI cannot yet assess whether or not this material may be significant..”. They’ve seen things that led to Comey’s letter yesterday that perhaps they had no legal position to investigate. But they’ll get that warrant of course. Question is how long it will take. The Hillary camp can in the meantime try and use the uncertainty to say again and again that they don’t think the new revelations will change the FBI’s position that there was no reason to charge her, but as I suggested late last night (European time), and as Carl Bernstein confirms, for Comey to speak up now means this can only be a bombshell. Which means NOT speaking out now would down the line be seen as more partisan than speaking.

• Bernstein: New Evidence “A Real Bombshell” Or FBI Would Not Reopen Case (RCP)

CARL BERNSTEIN: Well, there’s no question that the e-mails have always been the greatest threat to her candidacy for president, that her conduct in regard to the e-mails is really indefensible and if there was going to be more information that came out, it was the one thing, as I said on the air last night, actually that could really perhaps affect this election. We don’t know what this means yet except that it’s a real bombshell. And it is unthinkable that the Director of the FBI would take this action lightly, that he would put this letter forth to the Congress of the United States saying there is more information out there about classified e-mails and call it to the attention of congress unless it was something requiring serious investigation. So that’s where we are… Is it a certainty that we won’t learn before the election? I’m not sure it’s a certainty we won’t learn before the election.

One thing is, it’s possible that Hillary Clinton might want to on her own initiative talk to the FBI and find out what she can, and if she chooses to let the American people know what she thinks or knows is going on. People need to hear from her… I think if she has information available to her from the FBI or any other source as to her knowledge of what these e-mails might be, hopefully she will let us know what they are and what is under discussion here. Right now we’re all talking in a vacuum but I want to add here that in the last, oh, 36, 48 hours, there has been an undercurrent of kind of speculative discussion among some national security people that something might surface in the next few days about e-mails, and I think the expectation in this chatter – and I took it as just chatter but informed chatter, to some extent – was that it would relate to another round of WikiLeaks e-mails, which our Justice Department people seem to be saying is not the case, but there has been some noise in the national security community the last day or two of this kind of possibility of some kind of revelation.

But this is her achilles heel and we have to remember that it also comes on the – back to the word heel – of the revelations about the Clinton Foundation. So the confluence of all of this is bad for her as it stands now but with some knowledge she might be able to stop, turn things around, and give us some idea of what’s going on in a way we might not otherwise know, and also it’s very possible that some members of congress very quickly are going to get an idea of what these e-mails are, and what this is all about, and for whatever purpose put some information out there.

Everyone’s talking about the domestic effects of things like this, but the international ones may well be much more significant.

• 2006 Audio Emerges of Hillary Proposing Rigging Palestine Election (Obs.)

On September 5, 2006, Eli Chomsky was an editor and staff writer for the Jewish Press, and Hillary Clinton was running for a shoo-in re-election as a U.S. senator. Her trip making the rounds of editorial boards brought her to Brooklyn to meet the editorial board of the Jewish Press. The tape was never released and has only been heard by the small handful of Jewish Press staffers in the room. According to Chomsky, his old-school audiocassette is the only existent copy and no one has heard it since 2006, until today when he played it for the Observer. The tape is 45 minutes and contains much that is no longer relevant, such as analysis of the re-election battle that Sen. Joe Lieberman was then facing in Connecticut.

But a seemingly throwaway remark about elections in areas controlled by the Palestinian Authority has taken on new relevance amid persistent accusations in the presidential campaign by Clinton’s Republican opponent Donald Trump that the current election is “rigged.” Speaking to the Jewish Press about the January 25, 2006, election for the second Palestinian Legislative Council (the legislature of the Palestinian National Authority), Clinton weighed in about the result, which was a resounding victory for Hamas (74 seats) over the U.S.-preferred Fatah (45 seats). “I do not think we should have pushed for an election in the Palestinian territories. I think that was a big mistake,” said Sen. Clinton. “And if we were going to push for an election, then we should have made sure that we did something to determine who was going to win.”

“In the US, political elites and media magnates have the freedom to say anything they want, while others can only choose to repeat their words or shut up..”

• China Laughs, Says US Choosing Between ‘A Crazy Guy’ And ‘A Swindler’ (DC)

China is laughing at America’s election and the media’s coverage of the election, noting that both make a sad argument for Western democracy. “In the past, I thought the US had the best education and most developed democracy in the world, but now what do they have for president? Either a crazy guy or a swindler,” a Chinese business owner told the Global Times. “The race to the bottom will … make [people] rethink the value of democracy,” the Global Times previously said of the elections. The election, deemed one of the “dirtiest” since World War II, “reflects the decay of U.S. politics and a deeply divided society,” the Xinhua News Agency argued. “People forget serious issues. They talk about sex, locker room conversation, men and lousy behavior.”

“Debates are getting nasty and that undermines the strength of Western democracy,” Yang Rui, an anchor for China’s state television, told the BBC. He added that using a ballot box to make major decisions is a bad idea because “you have to suppose every voter is rational and reasonable.” “[China’s non-democratic system] has allowed China forty years of uninterrupted growth within a stable system. Quiet deliberation is a more effective form of policy than a public shouting match, because policy making is complicated,” Fang Xinghai, a senior Communist Party of China official and the vice chair of the China Securities Regulatory Commission, told reporters. China regularly uses American elections to attack the U.S. political system and justify its non-democratic, authoritarian system.

“For a long time, the United States has boasted about how its extremely lively election is a sign of the superiority of the system, and it has even used this to willfully criticize the vast majority of developing countries,” asserted the People’s Daily, “The extreme self-confidence and arrogance by the ‘preacher of democracy’ should be reined in.” Beyond attacking the democratic process, Chinese critics of the election also targeted the mainstream media and America’s treasured freedom of speech, pointing out that the media has undermined this tradition. “CNN and other mainstream media’s freedom of speech only serves Hillary Clinton,” said one netizen on Guancha.cn. “In the US, political elites and media magnates have the freedom to say anything they want, while others can only choose to repeat their words or shut up,” said another, according to the Global Times.

Pilger’s never weak.

• Inside The Invisible Government: War, Propaganda, Clinton, Trump (John Pilger)

Some may remember in 2003 a succession of BBC reporters turning to the camera and telling us that Blair was “vindicated” for what turned out to be the crime of the century. The US television networks produced the same validation for George W. Bush. Fox News brought on Henry Kissinger to effuse over Colin Powell’s fabrications. The same year, soon after the invasion, I filmed an interview in Washington with Charles Lewis, the renowned American investigative journalist. I asked him, “What would have happened if the freest media in the world had seriously challenged what turned out to be crude propaganda?” He replied that if journalists had done their job, “there is a very, very good chance we would not have gone to war in Iraq”.

It was a shocking statement, and one supported by other famous journalists to whom I put the same question – Dan Rather of CBS, David Rose of the Observer and journalists and producers in the BBC, who wished to remain anonymous. In other words, had journalists done their job, had they challenged and investigated the propaganda instead of amplifying it, hundreds of thousands of men, women and children would be alive today, and there would be no ISIS and no siege of Aleppo or Mosul. There would have been no atrocity on the London Underground on 7th July 2005. There would have been no flight of millions of refugees; there would be no miserable camps.

When the terrorist atrocity happened in Paris last November, President Francoise Hollande immediately sent planes to bomb Syria – and more terrorism followed, predictably, the product of Hollande’s bombast about France being “at war” and “showing no mercy”. That state violence and jihadist violence feed off each other is the truth that no national leader has the courage to speak. “When the truth is replaced by silence,” said the Soviet dissident Yevtushenko, “the silence is a lie.”

The banks control it all. Hudson suggests Trump should have claimed he stiffed the banks by going bankrupt six times, and say “if I can do that for me, I can do it for all of us”.

• Prof. Michael Hudson: The Criminals Control The US (Renegade)

Prof. Michael Hudson, economist and author of ‘Killing the Host- How Financial Parasites and Debt Destroy the Global Economy’, speaks to Ross Ashcroft about the difficult choice faced by Americans in the upcoming US elections.

“Soybeans? Yes, there has been a record bumper crop this year in the U.S., and strong demand from China helped fuel an export bonanza.”

• Sorry, But The US Economy’s Growth Spurt Isn’t Going To Last (CNBC)

The U.S. economy grew in the third quarter at its fastest pace in two years, due largely to factors that are unlikely to last. GDP increased at a 2.9% rate, above expectations and at the best rate since the 5% posted in the third quarter of 2014. The positive surprise comes as the Fed contemplates its second interest rate hike in more than 10 years, and Americans are set to elect a new president in less than two weeks. However, a look under the hood shows that the U.S. is likely stuck in the same growth trap in which it has found itself since the Great Recession ended in mid-2009. Many of the gains came due to a surge in soybean exports. Soybeans? Yes, there has been a record bumper crop this year in the U.S., and strong demand from China helped fuel an export bonanza.

However, that’s not expected to last, and the U.S. also is likely to face competition in the market. But there were other factors besides soybeans not to like in this report. Consumer spending cooled to 2.1% from 4.3% in the previous quarter, residential investment tumbled by 6.2%, equipment purchases declined by 2.7% and the growth rate of final sales to domestic purchasers increased by just 1.4%. “Accordingly, a reasonable case could be made that this is actually a disappointing GDP report,” Paul Ashworth, chief U.S. economist at Capital Economics, said in a client note. In addition to the soybean-led export growth, the GDP report also was aided by a 0.6 %age point gain in inventories.

Excluding “transitory” effects, the actual growth rate would have been closer to the 1.5% rate of the past four quarters, even including Friday’s reading, according to David Rosenberg, chief economist and strategist at Gluskin Sheff. “In other words, nothing here to write home about,” he said in his morning note.

A German view of a once German bank.

• The Story Of The Self Destruction Of Deutsche Bank (Spiegel)

Greed, provincialism, cowardice, unfocused aggression, mania, egoism, immaturity, mendacity, incompetence, weakness, pride, blundering, decadence, arrogance, a need for admiration, naiveté: If you are looking for words that explain the fall of Deutsche Bank, you can choose freely and justifiably from among the above list. The bank, 146 years after its founding, has become the target for all manner of pejoratives, and not just from outside observers. All of the above terms were used in interviews held during months of reporting into the causes of the downfall of Germany’s largest financial institution. They popped up over the course of several hours of interviews with four Deutsche Bank CEOs, three former and one current.

And they were uttered in interviews with eight additional senior bank managers and board members conducted over the course of several years, from the 1990s until today, and in meetings with captains of industry who know the bank well and during encounters with major stakeholders. More than anything, the disparaging words come up frequently in interviews with those who have worked or still work at the bank as customer service advisors, as branch managers or in positions lower down on the food chain. What we have found in the course of these myriad interviews – combined with the hours spent analyzing bank balance sheets, thousands of pages of files, committee meeting minutes and archive material – is that the collapse of Deutsche Bank is the result of years, decades, of failed leadership, culminating in the complete loss of control of the company by top managers during the period between 1994 and 2012.

It is a story about how Hilmar Kopper, Rolf E. Breuer and Josef Ackermann, the leaders of Deutsche Bank during those fateful years, essentially turned over the bank to a hastily assembled group of Anglo-American investment bankers before Anshu Jain, the prince of these traders, rose to the top and spent three more years sailing the bank full-speed-ahead into the shoals. It is also a story of how these bank heads, along with numerous other members of the management and supervisory boards, stood aside as Jain and the many other new investment banking heroes modified the staid German financial institution to serve their own purposes – essentially looting it and robbing it of its very soul – without leaving behind a better, stronger bank.

You bet.

• No 10 Must Have Made Nissan Big Promise, Say Ex-Business Minister (G.)

A former business minister has said that Nissan had previously suggested it could move production to France if it was not protected from trade tariffs. Anna Soubry said that No 10 must have privately told Nissan that Britain was remaining in the EU customs union or promised mitigation against any future tariffs before the car firm announced plans to build two new models in the UK. Greg Clark, the current business secretary, has insisted that no financial compensation was offered during numerous discussions with Nissan, which allowed the Japanese carmaker to commit to building its new Qashqai and X-Trail vehicles at its Sunderland plant. It is understood that the government provided a “letter of comfort” to Nissan promising that the UK car industry would remain competitive after Brexit.

Ministers, however, would neither confirm nor deny whether such a letter had been sent. Sources said the letter was understood to give an undertaking that Nissan would not face “additional costs” after the UK leaves the EU, implying that the taxpayer could be liable for subsidising the car industry in the event of tariffs being imposed on automotive exports. Downing Street also declined to say if more specific informal promises had been offered to Nissan and by implication to other carmakers, but industry sources have said they have been reassured by the government that they would not suffer from tariffs after the UK leaves the EU. No 10 is under pressure to publish the letter and Clark is to be called before the Commons business committee to explain what he has offered in the way of support to Nissan.

Soubry, who was a senior minister in the business department until July, said the carmaker had privately suggested to her in the past it would move production to France if it did not have a guarantee that it would be protected from tariffs or if the government did not do “something to mitigate the damage of tariffs”. “They didn’t give the detail of what they wanted, they made it very clear that without a guarantee that they would not be subject to tariffs or if they were subject to tariffs the government would do something to mitigate the damage of tariffs … that without that, they told me, my understanding actually was that they would go to Renault because they clearly had the capacity there,” she said. The Japanese car company has a strategic partnership with the French manufacturer.

One question: how many Europeans would vote for CETA if they had the opportunity to do so?

• EU-Canada CETA Trade Deal To Be Signed On Sunday (BBC)

Canada and the European Union are to sign a long-delayed landmark trade deal at a summit in Brussels on Sunday. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau described it as “great news” and said he looked forward to attending. A signing ceremony planned for Thursday had to be cancelled after a Belgian region vetoed the agreement. But after marathon talks, a consensus was finally reached allowing all 28 EU states to formally approve the deal on Friday. “Mission accomplished!” European Council President Donald Tusk tweeted. Mr Trudeau tweeted back: “Great news and I’m looking forward to being there.”

The Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement with Canada, known as Ceta, required all EU member states to endorse it. But seven years of negotiations were left hanging in the balance after Belgium’s French-speaking region of Wallonia demanded stronger safeguards on labour, environmental and consumer standards. It also wanted more protection for Walloon farmers, who would face new competition from Canadian imports. On Thursday, Belgian Prime Minister Charles Michel said that after marathon talks they had agreed on an addendum to the deal which addressed regional concerns. Prime Minister Robert Fico of Slovakia, which currently holds the EU presidency, said the final approval of the deal was “a milestone in the EU’s trade policy”.

Their numbers are not THAT strong: “..support for the Pirates has been steady at around 20% over the past months, well above the 5% it won in the 2013 election but below a 40% peak.”

• Iceland Voters To Choose Between Pirates And Establishment This Weekend (R.)

Iceland holds parliamentary elections on Saturday, with polls showing the opposition led by the anti-establishment Pirate Party could topple the current center-right ruling coalition. Icelanders’ faith in their political and financial establishment was shaken after the 2008 financial crisis and further eroded this year when several senior government figures were named in the Panama Papers. The biggest protests in the country’s history ultimately led to the resignation of Prime Minister Sigmundur David Gunnlaugsson of the Progressive Party and the early election this weekend. Founded by internet activists and led by poet Birgitta Jonsdottir, the Pirates promise to clean up corruption, look at granting asylum to former U.S. spy contractor Edward Snowden and relax restrictions on the use of the bitcoin virtual currency.

Recent polls show the Independence and Progressive parties stand to lose their current majority in the Althing, often described as the world’s oldest parliament, which means they would have to find a third coalition partner to stay in power. The Pirates would be looking to form a majority with the current opposition parties: The Left-Green Movement, the Social Democratic Alliance and Bright Future. An Oct. 27 poll conducted by Visir and Stod 2 showed 37% support for the government parties, while the four opposition parties polled around 47% combined. In a tight race, newly-established Vidreisn, the Reform Party, could become king-maker. The pro-European, liberal Vidreisn has not taken sides yet, but some analysts predict it would favor the current government as its economic policy leans rightwards. While the Independence Party remains the biggest party, support for the Pirates has been steady at around 20% over the past months, well above the 5% it won in the 2013 election but below a 40% peak.

This stinks ten ways to Sunday.

• The Strange Tale Of A Dating Site’s Attacks On Wikileaks Founder Assange (McCl.)

For an online dating site, toddandclare.com seems really good at cloak-and-dagger stuff. Disconnected phones. Mystery websites. Actions that ricochet around the globe. But the attention grabber is the Houston-based company’s target: Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, whose steady dumps of leaked emails from Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign have given supporters of Donald Trump the only cheering news of the last few weeks. In some ways, toddandclare.com’s campaign against Assange is as revelatory as the leaked emails themselves, illustrating the powerful, sometimes unseen, forces that oppose WikiLeaks.

Whoever is behind the dating site has marshaled significant resources to target Assange, enough to gain entry into a United Nations body, operate in countries in Europe, North America and the Caribbean, conduct surveillance on Assange’s lawyer in London, obtain the fax number of Canada’s prime minister and seek to prod a police inquiry in the Bahamas. And they’ve done it at a time when WikiLeaks has become a routine target of Democratic politicians who portray Assange as a stooge of Russian President Vladimir Putin and his reported efforts to disrupt the U.S. election. One part of toddandclare’s two-pronged campaign put a megaphone to unproven charges that Assange made contact with a young Canadian girl in the Bahamas through the internet with the intention of molesting her.

The second part sought to entangle him in a plan to receive $1 million from the Russian government. WikiLeaks claims the dating site is “a highly suspicious and likely fabricated” company. In turn, the company lashed out at Assange on Thursday and “his despicable activities against American national security,” and warned journalists to “check with your libel lawyers first before printing anything that could impact or endanger innocent people’s lives.” So why are the parties to the melee coming out with both barrels blazing? That remains a mystery of the kind that might take a WikiLeaks-style document dump to suss out.

Debt Rattle October 28 2016

Oct 282016

October 28, 2016 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 9:11 am Finance Tagged with: Abenomics, Assange, bubble, Calais, deflation, Hillary, money velocity, Trump, war, Xi Comments Off

Theodor Horydczak Washington Monument 1933

• China Capital Flight Flashes Warning As Authorities Prick Property Bubble (AEP)

• Unacceptable Cures for the Days Ahead (Dent)

• Japan Consumer Prices Keep Falling, Household Spending Slips (BBG)

• Bank of Japan Loses Bark And Bite Under Humbled Kuroda (R.)

• The Gap Between Poor And Rich Regions In Europe Is Widening (Economist)

• Xi Jinping Becomes ‘Core’ Leader Of China (R.)

• Waking Up in Hillary Clinton’s America (Nomi Prins)

• Donald Trump Has Won, Even If He Loses The US Election (Malmgren)

• Why Is the Foreign Policy Establishment Spoiling for More War? (Kucinich)

• Assange First Interview Since Being Censored (JJ)

• Wither Democracy (Lessig)

• Calais Children Abandoned At Former ‘Jungle’ Camp Site (EuO)

“The worry is a “negative feedback loop between a weakening yuan and capital flight”.

• China Capital Flight Flashes Warning As Authorities Prick Property Bubble (AEP)

Capital outflows from China are accelerating. The hemorrhage has reached the fastest pace since the currency panic at the start of the year. The latest cycle of credit-driven expansion has already peaked after 18 months. Beijing has had to slam on the brakes, scrambling to control property speculation that the Communist authorities themselves deliberately fomented. How this episode could have happened is astonishing, given that premier Li Keqiang has warned repeatedly that excess credit is becoming dangerous and will ultimately doom China to the middle income trap. It will be clear by early to mid 2017 that the economy is rolling over and that the underlying ‘quality of growth’ has deteriorated yet further. “We think the recovery will run out of steam early next year,” said Chang Liu from Capital Economics.

This stop-go rotation – an all-too familiar pattern – coincides with an incipient liquidity squeeze in global finance as dollar LIBOR and Eurodollar rates ratchet upwards. A rate rise by the US Federal Reserve will clinch it. Since the commodity rebound is in great part driven by demand for Chinese industry and construction – and by a touching belief that China’s economy will sail majestically through 2017 – this looming slowdown spells trouble. Stress is already visible in the capital account. Morgan Stanley estimates that net outflows reached $44bn in September. Capital Economics thinks the figure was closer to $55bn, led by a surge in purchases of off-shore securities through the Shanghai-Hong Kong Stock Connect Scheme.

This does not yet match the capital flight seen late last year when a mismanaged shift in exchange rate policy set off outflows averaging $70bn a month, and triggered the global equity rout of January and February. But it is nearing a neuralgic threshold for currency traders. Beijing is clearly alarmed. Nikkei’s Yusho Cho reports that the authorities have ordered banks in Shanghai and Guangzhou to restrict access to foreign currency, and have imposed a “gag order” to keep it quiet. Institutions must now justify why they need foreign exchange. The worry is a “negative feedback loop between a weakening yuan and capital flight”. The central bank (PBOC) spent roughly $50bn defending the yuan last month, but this has not stopped the exchange rate sliding to 6.77 against the dollar – the weakest in six years.

The PBOC has burned through $800bn of foreign reserves since mid-2014, when they peaked at $4 trillion. It still has ample fire-power but bond sales automatically tighten China’s internal monetary policy since it is hard to sterilize the effect, and tightening may the last thing they want if the economy is slowing hard next year. “Our view is that the RMB (yuan) will depreciate 20pc against the US dollar to 8.1 by the end of 2018 as deflation of the property bubble leads to more capital outflows,” Zhiwei Zhang from Deutsche Bank. “This is deflationary for global trade.”

Velocity of money is the no. 1 Deflation indicator.

• Unacceptable Cures for the Days Ahead (Dent)

Then Dr. Lacy Hunt took the stage… As I was telling Boom & Bust subscribers in their 5 Day Forecast email on Monday, he’s the only economist (outside of Steve Keen from Australia, who’s currently in hibernation in London) that I recommend you to follow. He’s classically trained and deeply knowledgeable, and goes beyond the theoretical nature of his chosen field. He understands how debt and financial bubbles build and deleverage, a rarity among economists today. And he has possibly the best explanation of money velocity. Basically, it’s a sign of how productive investment in the economy is. Productive investment creates more profits, jobs and expansion, and hence, greater M2 velocity. Speculation, stock buybacks or empty buildings do not. His money velocity chart was my favorite of the conference.

With this single chart, Lacy shows the level and falling trends for money velocity across the U.S., Europe, Japan and China. And as you can see, the most unproductive investment is in China! See, solid proof from perhaps the most competent economist in America! Building stuff for no one isn’t productive for the economy. This is the most concrete proof yet of something that should be obvious. Despite 6-10% growth rates, China’s money velocity is even lower than Japan’s most dismal “coma economy” that is surviving solely on endless QE as they age and see exponential growth in debt levels… Do you get this? China is worse than Japan when you reflect the truth of money velocity. You can also see why we are the best house in a bad neighborhood. Our money velocity, despite continually slowing since 2000, is 50% stronger than the euro and three times that of Japan and China.

The end of Abenomics nears..

• Japan Consumer Prices Keep Falling, Household Spending Slips (BBG)

Japan’s consumer prices fell for a seventh straight month and household spending slumped again in September, underscoring the challenges Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and Bank of Japan Governor Haruhiko Kuroda face in trying to revive the world’s third-largest economy. The downbeat inflation and spending data came despite an increasingly tight labor market. The unemployment rate slipped to 3% in September, equal to the lowest since 1995. The low jobless figure hasn’t yet resulted in significant wage gains, a key element of efforts to reflate Japan’s economy.

…and that is also the end of Kuroda.

• Bank of Japan Loses Bark And Bite Under Humbled Kuroda (R.)

As his term winds down, Bank of Japan Governor Haruhiko Kuroda has retreated from both the radical policies and rhetoric of his early tenure, suggesting there will be no further monetary easing except in response to a big external shock. In a clear departure from his initial “shock and awe” tactics to jolt the nation from its deflationary mindset, he has even taken to flagging what little change lies ahead, trying predictability where surprise has failed. This new approach will be on show next week, when the BOJ is set to keep policy unchanged despite an expected downgrade in forecasts that could show Kuroda won’t hit his perpetually postponed 2% inflation target before his five-year term ends in April 2018. “The days of trying to radically heighten inflation expectations with shock action are over,” said a source familiar with the BOJ’s thinking. “No more regime change.”

Kuroda told parliament last week that while the BOJ might again stretch the timing for its inflation target, he saw no need to ease at the Oct. 31-Nov. 1 policy meeting. “There may be some modification to our forecast that inflation will hit our 2% target during fiscal 2017,” he said, the first time he has offered hints on upcoming projections. In the past, the market has learned to expect the unexpected. In 2013, when the BOJ deployed its massive asset-buying program, dubbed “quantitative and qualitative easing” (QQE), his shock therapy boosted stocks and weakened the yen. Further surprises came with an expansion of QQE in October 2014, and then the switch to negative rates early in 2016, which he had denied was an option just days before. But the law of diminishing returns bought him less bang for each buck.

Nice research, the graph shows hoe German data hide the sinking of Europe. Quite poorly reported, though.

• The Gap Between Poor And Rich Regions In Europe Is Widening (Economist)

The beautiful but rubbish-strewn streets of Catania, Sicily’s second-biggest city, are a world away from swanky Trento, in the country’s richer north. About a quarter of Sicilians are “severely materially deprived”—meaning that they cannot afford things like a car, or to heat their home sufficiently—compared with just 5% in Trento. Italy is not unique. In many places, the divide within countries appears to be getting worse. According to an analysis by The Economist, the gap between richer and poorer regions of euro-zone countries has increased since the financial crisis. Our measure of regional inequality looks at the average income per head of a country’s poorest region, expressed as a%age of the income of that country’s richest part. The weighted average for 12 countries shows that regional inequality was declining in the years leading up to the financial crisis of 2007-08, but has increased since then (see chart).

The poorest area in Slovakia, the euro zone’s most geographically unequal economy, now has an income per person of just 28% of the richest, a slight fall from before the crisis. In Calabria, Italy’s poorest region, income per person as a share of the country’s best-off part, the province of Bolzano, was 45% in 2007 but is only 40% now. Elsewhere poor regions of the euro zone have seen income falling in both relative and absolute terms. An exception is Germany: in its once-communist east, excluding Berlin, GDP per person reached 67% of that in former West Germany last year. (Most of the catch-up took place in the early 1990s, but continues more slowly.) Deindustrialisation is partly to blame. Most of the euro zone’s 19 members have fewer manufacturing jobs than in 2008.

Manufacturing employment is high in many of Europe’s poorer countries, but they have lost international competitiveness in part because of an overvalued euro. Tight public spending also plays a role. Since 2008 the number of civil servants in the euro zone has fallen by about 6%. This has often hurt needy regions most. Cuts in welfare benefits also hit harder. A paper by Luca Agnello, Giorgio Fazio and Ricardo Sousa, three economists, found that austerity led to higher regional inequality in 13 European countries between 1980 and 2008. This suggests that the problem will continue: public funds will be tight for years to come, while weak public spending on education and infrastructure will crimp future growth. Even if the euro zone starts to grow strongly again, the geographical scars will be plain to see.

China will be calling out loud for a strong leader as its economy grinds to a halt.

• Xi Jinping Becomes ‘Core’ Leader Of China (R.)

China’s Communist party has given the president, Xi Jinping, the title of “core” leader, putting him on par with previous strongmen Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping, but signalled his power would not be absolute. A lengthy communique released after a four-day meeting of senior officials in Beijing emphasised the importance of collective leadership. The system “must always be followed and should not be violated by any organisation or individual under any circumstance or for any reason”, the party said. But all members should “closely unite around the central committee with comrade Xi Jinping as the core”, said the document, released through state media. The core leader title marks a significant strengthening of Xi’s position before a key party congress next year, at which a new standing committee, the pinnacle of power in China, will be constituted.

Since assuming office almost four years ago, Xi has rapidly consolidated power, including heading a group leading economic change and appointing himself commander-in-chief of the military, though as head of the central military commission he already controlled the armed forces. While head of the party, the military and the state, Xi had not previously been given the title “core”. Deng coined the phrase “core leader”, and said he, Mao Zedong and Jiang Zemin were core leaders, meaning they had almost absolute authority and should not be questioned. Xi’s immediate predecessor, Hu Jintao, was never called the “core”. The plenum meeting paves the way for a congress, held every five years, in autumn 2017, at which Xi will further consolidate his power and which could indicate who may replace him at the 2022 congress.

Nomi’s very mild and polite.

• Waking Up in Hillary Clinton’s America (Nomi Prins)

To date, $10 trillion worth of assets sits on the books of the Big Six banks. Since 2008, these same banks have copped to more than $150 billion in fines for pre-crisis behavior that ranged on the spectrum of criminality from manipulating multiple public markets to outright fraud. Hillary Clinton has arguably taken money that would not have been so available if it weren’t for the ill-gotten gains those banks secured. In her usual measured way, albeit with some light admonishments, she has told them what they want to hear: that if they behave – something that in her dictionary of definitions involves little in the way of personalized pain or punishment – so will she.

So let’s recap Hillary’s America, past, present, and future. It’s a land lacking in meaningful structural reform of the financial system, a place where the big banks have been, and will continue to be, coddled by the government. No CEO will be jailed, no matter how large the fines his bank is saddled with or how widespread the crimes it committed. Instead, he’s likely to be invited to the inaugural ball in January. Because its practices have not been adequately controlled or curtailed, the inherent risk that Wall Street poses for Main Street will only grow as bankers continue to use our money to make their bets. (The 2010 Dodd-Frank Act was supposed to help on this score, but has yet to make the big banks any smaller.)

And here’s an obvious corollary to all this: the next bank-instigated economic catastrophe will not be dealt with until it has once again crushed the financial stability of millions of Americans. The banks have voted with their dollars on all of this in multiple ways. Hillary won’t do anything to upset that applecart. We should have no illusions about what her presidency would mean from a Wall Street vs. Main Street perspective. Certainly, JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon doesn’t. He effectively endorsed Hillary before a crowd of financial industry players, saying, “I hope the next president, she reaches across the aisle.” For Wall Street, of course, that aisle is essentially illusory, since its players operate so easily and effectively on both sides of it. In Hillary’s America, Wall Street will still own Main Street.

“Reality TV Land will immediately install itself in the Oval Office if he wins. Then, anything goes.”

• Donald Trump Has Won, Even If He Loses The US Election (Malmgren)

Donald Trump has already won the US presidential election and Hillary Clinton has already lost it, even if she emerges with the title of commander-in-chief. It is already apparent that Trump will not skulk off the global stage. Nor will he have to. Consider what happens if he loses the presidential race. He will most likely launch a reality TV show that will undoubtedly attract a record number of viewers. From this ridiculously unconstrained and lucrative perch, he’ll relentlessly attack President Clinton, the Republican Party and the Democratic Party alike. In retrospect, it will be clear that his entire campaign was a trailer for the blockbuster show that follows. In this way he will continue to influence, if not dominate, public opinion.

[..] he won’t go away. Neither will the forces that swept him to the top of politics: the anger, the loss, the sense of unfairness, the inability of the traditional parties to deliver a better outcome for most Americans. Meanwhile, the expectation that a Clinton presidency could conquer these forces is also likely to be proved false. The Oval Office is a highly constrained place that limits the influence of its occupant especially in the face of broader political disarray. She can try and set the tone but the rest of the political establishment looks too dysfunctional, and largely unwilling, to be able to help her. Her presidency seems set to open with high expectations and low approval ratings. Trump, however, could move to the next phase of his career with low expectations and high TV ratings.

Both have faced threats of prosecution throughout this long and increasingly ugly campaign. But, does Trump care if the courts or the government put his tax returns or the sexual allegations against him to the test? He won’t. Will he care if his emails are leaked? No. The real “public prosecutor” for Trump is the Fourth Estate – the media. It will prosecute him just as relentlessly if he becomes commander-in-chief but probably with the same limited impact. Will it matter to Clinton if her emails, from the past or future, are displayed to the public? Will it matter if the Clinton Foundation faces further allegations of “crooked” behaviour? But, we live in the internet age. The real “public prosecutor” for Clinton is and will remain Julian Assange and Wikileaks. His sights will continue to be firmly set on her. He does not care about Trump and Trump doesn’t care about him. Once again, Trump wins.

Trump’s only real threat of looking like the loser comes if the polls are wrong and he ends up winning. Many wonder whether he really wants the job. After all, the Oval Office is the political equivalent of a straightjacket. In theory, Trump won’t be able to shoot words from the hip so freely once he is sitting in the big shiny chair with his finger on the literal and metaphorical button. But, Reality TV Land will immediately install itself in the Oval Office if he wins. Then, anything goes. In the meantime, he will “win” in his effort to redefine America’s political landscape. As president, it won’t matter to him if the House and Senate block him. He is not concerned with process. His job is to break down the traditional political establishment.

“Any report advocating war that comes from any alleged think tank ought to be accompanied by a list of the think tank’s sponsors and donors..”

• Why Is the Foreign Policy Establishment Spoiling for More War? (Kucinich)

The American people are fed up with war, but a concerted effort is being made through fearmongering, propaganda, and lies to prepare our country for a dangerous confrontation, with Russia in Syria. The demonization of Russia is a calculated plan to resurrect a raison d’être for stone-cold warriors trying to escape from the dustbin of history by evoking the specter of Russian world domination. It’s infectious. Earlier this year the BBC broadcast a fictional show that contemplated WWIII, beginning with a Russian invasion of Latvia (where 26% of the population is ethnic Russian and 34% of Latvians speak Russian at home). The imaginary WWIII scenario conjures Russia’s targeting London for a nuclear strike.

No wonder that by the summer of 2016 a poll showed two-thirds of UK citizens approved the new British PM’s launching a nuclear strike in retaliation. So much for learning the lessons detailed in the Chilcot report. As this year’s presidential election comes to a conclusion, the Washington ideologues are regurgitating the same bipartisan consensus that has kept America at war since 9/11 and made the world a decidedly more dangerous place. The DC think tanks provide cover for the political establishment, a political safety net, with a fictive analytical framework providing a moral rationale for intervention, capitol casuistry. I’m fed up with the DC policy elite who cash in on war while presenting themselves as experts, at the cost of other people’s lives, our national fortune, and the sacred honor of our country.

Any report advocating war that comes from any alleged think tank ought to be accompanied by a list of the think tank’s sponsors and donors and a statement of the lobbying connections of the report’s authors. It is our patriotic duty to expose why the DC foreign-policy establishment and its sponsors have not learned from their failures and instead are repeating them, with the acquiescence of the political class and sleepwalkers with press passes.

“As I said it has long been our analysis that Hillary Clinton will win the election because she has all the establishments on her side..”

• Assange First Interview Since Being Censored (JJ)

“Wikileaks is one of the fighting dogs that has a lot of energy and runs around fighting all the time. It is built to fight it loves nothing more than to fight. And so when my internet was cut off we had long ago made strategic contingency plans for exactly this situation. So despite bombs raining down on us from statements by high US officials, media and so on this is exactly the sort of situation we enjoy so there was not even one day pause. We just continued on publishing the next day even though I was cut off from my team.” “As I said it has long been our analysis that Hillary Clinton will win the election because she has all the establishments on her side and we can see it in terms of polling.

If someone like Donald Trump – who has a great many problems I’m sure all of you are aware of it – but if he managed to get up to the 48% or 50% level in the polling which he has just on two occasions across the different polls united, immediately those big media networks and the funders get together and smash him back down. So I don’t think there’s any chance of Donald Trump winning the election. That would probably be bad inside the United States. It would probably be good outside the United States. Even with the amazing material we have published and will continue to publish because even though we publish it and there’s a lot of people reading it on the internet directly, most of the media originations in the United States are very strongly aligned with Hillary Clinton.

Two reasons really, a lot of them are owned by big businesses which are owned by banks which like Hillary Clinton. And the other is a class reason. Most journalists and media workers are very middle class and Donald Trump represents in their minds, white trash. So to do anything that looks to be like it might be supporting Donald Trump looks like you’re supporting white trash. And to those rivals that they have within their class they are white trash. So it lowers their social status and that’s a very dangerous thing to do in an institution, to have your social status lowered, because someone might get your job or the job that you want to have within the institution. So there is a lot of conformity and fear around criticizing Hillary Clinton in any way at all and it reduces the impact of even very significant material that is being released.”

Can Iceland give the world back its lost democracy?

• Wither Democracy (Lessig)

On the eve of the Icelandic Elections… WITHER DEMOCRACY, by Professor Lawrence Lessig, speaking from the University of Iceland. Lessig explains how democracy has failed the US and other citizens of the world, and how Iceland is on the brink of implementing an entirely new and improved system, based on a PEOPLE’S CONSTITUTION. Yes, it’s a world first, but then Iceland was the first country ever to form a parliament. Lester Lawrence “Larry” Lessig III is an American academic, attorney, and political activist. He was the co-founder, with our beloved Aaron Swartz, of Creative Commons. He is the Roy L. Furman Professor of Law at Harvard Law School; and the former director of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University.

Our moral bankruptcy in all its splendor.

• Calais Children Abandoned At Former ‘Jungle’ Camp Site (EuO)

Scores of children have been left out in the cold, after French authorities flattened the make-shift migrants camp in Calais, in northern France, earlier this week. Journalists report that around a hundred children were sleeping rough on the remains of the camp, among burned-out shacks and riot police. The Guardian spoke to children who had been lured off the camp site, with promises of being transferred to reception centres where their asylum claims would be assessed. Instead, riot police cornered the group while bulldozers razed the camp. Media and NGO reports of the children’s treatment triggered protests of British home secretary Amber Rudd, who told her French counterpart, Bernard Cazeneuve, on Thursday, that children remaining in Calais had to be properly protected.

Cazeneuve later issued a statement saying he was surprised by Rudd’s declaration. He said France had given shelter to 1,451 minors since 17 October recalling that Britain had a legal duty to take those children that have a link to the UK, for instance through family. 274 children have been allowed to travel to the UK in the last two weeks. The decision to clear the camp came from French president Francois Hollande, calling it a ”humanitarian emergency” during a visit in September. French authorities started evacuating the camp, also known as the Jungle, on Monday (24 October) and said they had relocated almost all of the 6,000 people estimated to have been living there to other parts of France. [..] British baroness Shas Sheehan, who has been working as a volunteer teacher in the camp prior to its dismantlement, accused France and the UK of human rights violations, pointing to official assurances by both sides that the site wouldn’t be demolished before all the children were safeguarded.

Debt Rattle October 27 2016

Oct 272016

October 27, 2016 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 9:46 am Finance Tagged with: algorithms, deflation, globalization, Hillary, landfill, layoffs, mass extinction, nuclear, Putin 1 Response »

Marion Post Wolcott. Unemployed coal miner’s mother in law and child. Marine, West Virginia 1938

• With 70% Of Wildlife Gone, We Face Mass Extinction On Scale Of Dinosaurs (YP)

• Mass Consumption Is Causing Mass Extinction. Can We Stop Ourselves? (TP)

• Our Landfill Economy (CH Smith)

• Mike Maloney: DEFLATION FIRST! (Max Keiser)

• Globalization Goes Into Reverse (BBG)

• The Next 10 Years Will Be Ugly for Your 401(k) (BBG)

• Deutsche Bank Probes “Misstated” Derivative Valuations, Finds “Divergences” (ZH)

• Goldman Sachs Does Mass Layoffs Piece by Piece (BBG)

• US Election: Nothing to Lose (Steen Jakobsen)

• Hacked Memo Offers Angry Glimpse Into Conflicted ‘Bill Clinton Inc.’ (Pol.)

• Clinton Adviser Proposes Attacking Iran to Aid the Saudis in Yemen (NYMag)

• Putin Tried to Warn Us About Syria Three Years Ago (TAM)

• UK Deploys Hundreds Of Troops And Aircraft To Eastern Europe (G.)

• Merkel Accuses Facebook, Google Of “Distorting Perception” (ZH)

• Nuclear Power Is Over In The US Without More Government Subsidies (BBG)

To be correct, we don’t so much face it as live it.

• 70% Of Wildlife Gone: World Faces Mass Extinction On Scale Of Dinosaurs (YP)

Global wildlife populations will have fallen by more than two thirds on 1970 levels by the end of the decade, conservationists warn today. An assessment of more than 3,700 species of mammals, birds, fish, amphibians and reptiles reveals a fall of 58% between 1970 and 2012, with no sign of a slowdown in the annual two per cent reduction in numbers. By 2020, populations of vertebrate species could have fallen by 67pc over half a century, unless action is taken to reverse the damaging impacts of human activity, the Living Planet report from WWF and the Zoological Society of London said. The figures prompted experts to warn that nature was facing a global “mass extinction” for the first time since the demise of the dinosaurs.

African elephants in Tanzania have seen numbers decimated by persistent poaching, while maned wolves in Brazil are threatened by grasslands being turned into farmland. Leatherback turtles in the Atlantic have seen populations reduced by up to 95pc, and European eels are also in decline. Wildlife faces further threats from over-exploitation, climate change and pollution, the report warns. Among the species most at risk are tigers, with only 3,900 left in the wild, and Amur leopards, whose numbers have fallen to just 70 in the face of hunting and the destruction of their habitat. Giant pandas have a population of just 1,864 in the wild in China, and although numbers are increasing, the species is still threatened by climate change and impacts of human activity.

Humans themselves are also victims of the deterioration of nature, the report warns, since they depend on breathable air, water and nutritious food. [..] Mike Barrett, director of science and policy at WWF-UK, said: “For the first time since the demise of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, we face a global mass extinction of wildlife. “We ignore the decline of other species at our peril, for they are the barometer that reveals our impact on the world that sustains us. “Humanity’s misuse of natural resources is threatening habitats, pushing irreplaceable species to the brink and threatening the stability of our climate.”

This elephant is thought to have died after eating crops sprayed with pesticides in Assam, India REUTERS

No we can’t. But we will be stopped.

• Mass Consumption Is Causing Mass Extinction. Can We Stop Ourselves? (TP)

Populations of wild animals have plummeted 58% in the past four decades as humans have pushed them into ever-smaller habitats or killed them for food and financial gain, according to a new report from a leading environmental group. World Wildlife Fund researchers said the losses could be reversed over the 21st century by systematically factoring the value of nature into how we produce and consume goods and services, as well as adopting farming methods that work with ecosystems rather than against or in spite of them. WWF compiled data on more than 14,000 populations of 3,706 vertebrate species for the latest edition of its biennial Living Planet Report and found that global populations of amphibians, birds, fishes, mammals, and reptiles sank by an average of 58% between 1970 and 2012.

These populations could drop another 9% by 2020 based on current trends, the report stated. Freshwater wildlife populations dropped a dramatic 81%—meaning that for every 10 pond frogs that existed during Richard Nixon’s first term in the White House, there were fewer than two at the beginning of Barack Obama’s second. Terrestrial and marine species populations dropped by 38% and 36%, respectively, over the same period. The leading driver of wildlife population losses has been food production—overfishing and natural habitats converted to crop and grazing land—followed by pollution, invasive species, and climate change.

All five threats are symptoms of overconsumption of natural resources, the report stated, which has far outstripped the capacity of ecosystems to restore the fertile soil and clean water that support wildlife as well as human health and welfare. “Humanity currently needs the regenerative capacity of 1.6 Earths to provide the goods and services we use each year,” the report noted, and the short-term goals of most economic systems offer no incentive to change.

It had been a while since I last saw that term.

• Our Landfill Economy (CH Smith)

Correspondent Bart D. (Australia) captured the entire global economy in three words: The Landfill Economy. Stuff is manufactured, energy is consumed shipping it somewhere, consumers buy it and shortly thereafter it ends up as garbage in the landfill. This is of course the definition of “economic growth”: waste, inefficiency, environmental destruction–none of these matter. Only two things matter: maximize “growth” by any means necessary, and maximize profits by any means necessary. The Landfill Economy now encompasses the entire planet. The swirling gyre of plastic trash the size of Texas between Hawaii and California: it’s just one modest example of the planetary trash dump that “growth” and profit generate as byproducts/blowback.

The planet’s oceans are one giant trash dump. Everything from plastic water bottles to abandoned fishing nets to radiation to containers that fell off ships is floating around even the most distant corners of the seas. Seabirds nesting in remote islands die of starvation as their guts fill with plastic bits of “permanent growth.” Globalization has turned the planet’s land masses and rivers into trash dumps. Want to make a quick profit along a tropical sea coast? Dig some big holes near the coast, dump in baby prawns, food and chemicals to suppress algae blooms and diseases and then harvest the prawns to ship to the insatiable markets of the developed world. Once the prawn farms are poisoned wastelands, move on and despoil another coastline elsewhere.

Globalization has greased the slippery slope from factory to landfill by enabling the global distribution of defective parts. Whether they are pirated, designed to fail or just the result of slipshod quality control, the flood of defective parts guarantee that the entire assembly they are installed in–stoves, vacuum cleaners, transmissions, electronics, you name it–will soon fail and be shipped directly to the landfill, as repairing stuff is far costlier than buying a new replacement.

Mike Maloney is one of the very few people who, like the Automatic Earth, have emphasized Deflation and The Velocity of Money as driving forces ever since we both predicted the 2008 fiasco. It’s funny, because Mike is all gold and stuff, and we have been saying all the time that there are more important things, like growing your own food etc etc. But that’s just a matter of who you’re addressing, and our audience unlike Mike’s isn’t necessarily investors, but ‘normal’ people.

• Mike Maloney: DEFLATION FIRST! (Max Keiser)

Mike Maloney appears on Keiser Report to discuss how velocity of currency determines what happens next in the cycle. You’ll learn how central banks are manufacturing a crisis of epic proportions.

You heard it here first.

• Globalization Goes Into Reverse (BBG)

There’s a backlash against globalization underway in many Western countries. Although Americans still say positive things about international trade and immigration, political candidates like Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders have gotten a lot of support for opposing both to a degree that would have been unthinkable a decade ago. Meanwhile, trade deals like the relatively innocuous Trans-Pacific Partnership are suddenly in danger. Britain’s divorce from the European Union is also commonly interpreted as a rejection of globalization. But there’s a likelihood that today’s anti-globalization warriors are fighting yesterday’s war. By many measures, globalization has been in full retreat since the crisis of 2008. First, there’s trade. For many decades up until 2008, global trade volumes had been increasing at a healthy clip. But the crisis and recession stopped trade growth in its tracks, and it hasn’t recovered; 2008 was the all-time peak of world trade as a % of total output:

And the next 10 after that.

• The Next 10 Years Will Be Ugly for Your 401(k) (BBG)

It doesn’t seem like much to ask for—a 5% return. But the odds of making even that on traditional investments in the next 10 years are slim, according to a new report from investment advisory firm Research Affiliates. The company looked at the default settings of 11 retirement calculators, robo-advisers, and surveys of institutional investors. Their average annualized long-term expected return? 6.2%. After 1.6% was shaved off to allow for a decade of inflation1, the number dropped to 4.6%, which was rounded up. Voilà. So on average we all expect a 5%; the report tells us we should start getting used to disappointment. To show how a mainstream stock and bond portfolio would do under Research Affiliates’ 10-year model, the report looks at the typical balanced portfolio of 60% stocks and 40% bonds.

An example would be the $29.6 billion Vanguard Balanced Index Fund (VBINX). For the decade ended Sept. 30, VBINX had an average annual performance of 6.6%, and that’s before inflation. Over the next decade, according to the report, “the ubiquitous 60/40 U.S. portfolio has a 0% probability of achieving a 5% or greater annualized real return.” One message that John West, head of client strategies at Research Affiliates and a co-author of the report, hopes people will take away is that the high returns of the past came with a price: lower returns in the future. “If the retirement calculators say we’ll make 6% or 7%, and people saved based on that but only make 3%, they’re going to have a massive shortfall,” he said. “They’ll have to work longer or retire with a substantially different standard of living than they thought they would have.”

Deutsche senses legal threats, ‘volunteers’ to cooperate.

• Deutsche Bank Probes “Misstated” Derivative Valuations, Finds “Divergences” (ZH)

Perhaps the single biggest reason why Deutsche Bank’s stock has been drastically underperforming most of Europe’s banks, in addition to its skyhigh leverage and lack of capital buffer, is the market’s concern about what is hidden on its books, namely whether the bank’s billions in loans and its trillions in derivatives have been marked correctly. Which is why a just released report from Bloomberg that Deutsche Bank is reviewing whether it “misstated” the value of derivatives in its interest-rate trading business, will hardly spark optimism in the bank’s critical asset marking practices; the good news is that according to the report the biggest German lender is sharing its findings with U.S. authorities, according to people with knowledge of the situation.

Zero-coupon inflation swaps are derivatives that help customers bet on, or hedge against, inflation. Two parties agree to exchange a payment in the future whose size is determined by how much an inflation index rose or fell. The issue, however, is not the underlying security, but the total notional involved, which based on the DB’s latest public filings, could be in the hundreds of billions (or more), and how substantial the impact on DB’s P&L any variation from true market values will be. Specifically, DB is looking at valuations on a type of derivative known as zero-coupon inflation swaps. The reason for the probe is that, as has been a recurring case with many of its peers of the last few years, the bank found valuations that “diverged from internal models” at which point it began questioning traders.

The push to finally open its books comes after CEO John Cryan’s vow in February to try to resolve his institution’s legal challenges swiftly. As Bloomberg sarcastically adds, “he is still working on it.” The bank has been facing regulatory and enforcement pressure around the world, including a money-laundering investigation tied to its Russia operations, inquiries into mortgage-bond trading before and after the financial crisis and charges that the bank colluded to help falsify the accounts of Italy’s Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena. More importantly perhaps is the reason why DB has decided to share its internal probe with the US, whose Justice Department asked in September for a $14 billion settlement, an amount the bank said it wouldn’t pay.

The figure was big enough to unleash a selling frenzy in the stock, sending it to all time lows, leading to repeating rumored discussions with outside sources, most recently of Saudi and Chinese origina, about raising capital. The bank last year hired Steven F. Reich as its general counsel for the Americas to help navigate its legal probes. Reich is a former official at the Justice Department and attorney for former President Bill Clinton. Perhaps it is time for Deutsche to make some donations to the Clinton Foundation?

Spare a thought for a Goldman banker.

• Goldman Sachs Does Mass Layoffs Piece by Piece (BBG)

The first “plant layoff” notice came in February: 43 people would lose their jobs. The second arrived six weeks later, increasing the cuts to 109 workers. Then a third, in April, for 146 more. And a fourth, in June: 98. Three more notices followed, including 20 dismissals announced last week. The “plant” in question – Goldman Sachs. Like all big companies in New York State, the firm is required to file a “WARN notice” with state authorities when it plans to shed large numbers of employees as part of a plant closing, or “mass layoffs” involving 250 or more. Employers also must inform the state of smaller reductions under certain circumstances, and Goldman Sachs cited a “plant layoff” in each case. Last week’s notice brings this year’s job-cut tally to 443.

With the run of notices, seven since the start of the year, the bank has signaled its intention to dismiss hundreds of employees in New York without placing a single, headline-grabbing number on the overall reduction, already its largest since 2008. The company’s approach differs from competitors, including Morgan Stanley, who have shown a preference for larger, one-time cuts. “When there’s a big number, people right away get that something is happening at that firm – it’s a negative,” said Jeanne Branthover, a partner at New York-based executive-search firm DHR International. “This is more, ‘We’re having layoffs and we don’t want to explain it.’ It’s more under the radar screen.”

It also reflects the firm’s philosophy. The company doesn’t see a reason to make announcements about job cuts since it’s part of the normal course of business and something that needs to be done if the environment calls for it, CFO Harvey Schwartz said last year. “You just have to run the business, and if the revenue environment is such that you’re in a period of decline, you just need to take those actions,” Schwartz said in November at a conference. “So, you probably won’t hear us make lots of announcements.”

“..the US presidential campaign comes up short in many categories except one: failure is almost guaranteed.”

• US Election: Nothing to Lose (Steen Jakobsen)

My present macro speech is titled “Ugly: Don’t fight with ‘ugly’ people as they have nothing to lose”. To me, this is the essence of the US presidential campaign. The ugly truth surrounding this ballot lies in the bigger picture, as whomever becomes president will go down in history as the “non-president” – the president who made us need, see, and demand something else. For all of the colourful headlines, and the almost McCarthy-esque pursuit of Trump by mainstream media, this is not going to be about “Trump, the person” or his more or less moronic views; Trump merely represents the catalyst for change. He is the anti-establishment candidate, yes, but not our vision for the future. Ultimately, Trump may still win despite (rather than because of) being… Trump.

That does not excuse mainstream media for not going after Clinton. If elected, she will be the least-liked president in US history, and I doubt any of her policies will do anything good for America. More Barack Obama-type policy is not what the world needs. Obama may have created more jobs, but the average income for American has actually fallen during his presidency. What does this mean? It means he has presided over an economy that has created more jobs but less valuable ones, and growth during his tenure has been lower than during any other president, with the largest build-up in debt. I am pretty sure that even this economist could create jobs with the amount of money Obama has spent!

Mind you I am 100% agnostic, politically-speaking. In fact, I don’t even think this election really matters! No, this is not a new trend; no, Clinton is not the answer… but what this is a generational repositioning and renegotiation of the social contract. The last time that this happened was in the 1960s, when the children of World War II went for peace, love, and a lot of drugs. Now we have the Berlin Wall generation coming of age, and this time the focus is anti-globalisation and anti establishment sentiment… and yes, again a lot of drugs. The real election issue in America, but also in Europe. is how to deal with a broken social contract.

Society has been pushed so far away from its natural equilibrium in terms of markets, social homogeneity, equality, and productivity that the move back to “normal” will bear both a political price and a penalty in terms of growth and outlook. Put differently, when we look throughout history we know that part of the process of evaluation is to smell, feel, taste, and experience what we don’t need in order to move towards what we do – a better version of society, but mainly a better one of ourselves. The next election cycle is about protest; it will be followed by crisis and then new beginnings.

Boy what a mess. And all they can think of is blaming the Russians. And the media just copy that, no questions asked.

• Hacked Memo Offers Angry Glimpse Into Conflicted ‘Bill Clinton Inc.’ (Pol.)

As a longtime Bill Clinton adviser came under fire several years ago for alleged conflicts of interest involving a private consulting firm and the Clinton Foundation, he mounted an audacious defense: Bill Clinton’s doing it, too. The unusual and brash rejoinder from veteran Clinton aide and Teneo Consulting co-founder Doug Band is scattered across the thousands of hacked emails published by WikiLeaks, but a memo released Wednesday provides the most detailed look to date at the intertwined worlds of nonprofit, for-profit, official and political activities involving Clinton and many of his top aides.

The memo at one point refers bluntly to the money-making part of Clinton’s life as “Bill Clinton Inc.” and notes that in at least one case a company – global education firm Laureate International Universities – began paying Clinton personally after first being a donor to the Clinton Foundation. The 12-page document, prepared in November 2011 by Band with input from Clinton adviser John Podesta, came as Chelsea Clinton was pressing for changes to the foundation’s governance and complaining that Band, Teneo co-founder Declan Kelly and others were profiting from their ties to her father and the foundation. In the memo, addressed to outside lawyers conducting a review of the foundation’s governance, Band insists that the relationship actually benefited the foundation financially, by bringing in new donors.

[..] A spokesman for the Clinton Foundation declined to comment on the memo or confirm the authenticity of the document, which was apparently stolen in a massive hack of Podesta’s Gmail account. Hillary Clinton’s campaign has taken a similar tack, declining to comment on the emails, while pointing to evidence that their release is part of a Russian government effort aimed at interfering in the presidential election.

Morell’s perspective is in line with that of a new report on Middle East strategy released by the Center for American Progress and the thinking of Clinton’s top national-security aide Jake Sullivan, who recently declared, “We need to be raising the costs to Iran for its destabilizing behavior and we need to be raising the confidence of our Sunni partners.” On Tuesday, Morell put this sentiment in terms both more concise and grandiose: “We’re back and we’re going to lead again.”

• Clinton Adviser Proposes Attacking Iran to Aid the Saudis in Yemen (NYMag)

Michael Morell is a former acting director of the CIA and a national security adviser to Hillary Clinton — one who is widely expected to occupy a senior post in her administration. He is also an opponent of the Iran nuclear agreement, a defender of waterboarding, and an advocate for making Russia “pay a price” in Syria by covertly killing Putin’s soldiers. On Tuesday, Morell added another title to that résumé: proponent of going to war with Iran, for the sake of securing Saudi Arabia’s influence in Yemen. “Ships leave Iran on a regular basis carrying arms to the Houthis in Yemen,” Morell said, in remarks to the Center for American Progress, the liberal think tank founded by Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta. “I would have no problem from a policy perspective of having the U.S. Navy boarding their ships, and if there are weapons on them, to turn those ships around.”

Morell did note, per Bloomberg’s Eli Lake, that this policy “raised questions of international maritime law.” Which is a bit like saying, “Breaking into someone’s home, putting a gun in their face, and demanding they hand over all their weapons raises questions about armed-robbery law.” Understatement aside, Morell’s stipulation suggests that he might be dissuaded from initiating a naval war with Iran if the legal issues prove too pesky. But the fact that a person who has Clinton’s ear on national security thinks this proposal makes sense from a “policy perspective” is alarming. Forcibly boarding another nation’s naval or civilian vessels (outside one’s own territorial waters) and confiscating their weapons can reasonably be construed as an act of war, a point that would be unmistakable if the roles here were reversed.

How many Americans (whose paychecks aren’t directly or indirectly subsidized by Gulf State monarchies) think keeping Yemen within Saudi Arabia’s sphere of influence is a cause worth entering another Middle Eastern war over? How many would think so if they knew that the Saudis had recently bombed a Yemeni funeral hall, killing 140 people and leading the Obama administration to reconsider its support for the Saudi intervention? Or that some observers of the conflict contend that the Saudis are exaggerating Iran’s role, in order to justify the kingdom’s own expansionist ambitions?

And the west pretend they don’t know this. So we can create chaos and used it to take over resources.

• Putin Tried to Warn Us About Syria Three Years Ago (TAM)

As Russia and the United States approach arguably the most dangerous crossroads in history — and as Western media continues to crucify Russia for its actions within Syria — a closer look at the rationale Putin used for intervening in the Syrian war paints a sane explanation of how we ended up at this juncture of a global conflict. Unsurprisingly, the explanation comes from the Russian president himself and was actually offered over 3 years ago. As expected, the Western corporate media and the Obama administration chose to ignore Vladimir Putin’s explanation for Russia’s stance on Syria and continued a number of policies that have completely exacerbated the conflict.

In a live interview with RT in June 2013, Putin was asked for an explanation regarding Russia’s support for Bashar al-Assad in Syria, even though this support has made some people very angry at Russia. Putin’s response was that Russia does not support the Assad government or Assad himself, but before defining Russia’s official position, he explained what Russia does not want to do within Syria or across the Middle East: “We do not want to interfere into the internal schism of Islam, between Shias and Sunnis. These are internal issues of the Islamic world. We have very good relations with much of the Arabic world, Iran for example, and others.” However, according to Putin, what worries Russia can be identified by having a look “at what is going on in the Middle East in general.”

“Egypt is not calm. Iraq is not calm – and it is not assured in its continued existence as one state. Yemen is not calm; Tunisia is not calm. Libya is witnessing inter-ethnic, inter-tribal conflict. So the entire region has been engulfed, at a minimum, into a state of conflict and undecidedness. And now Syria, down the same path.” In Putin’s eyes, these events are no accident. As he puts it, these events happened for a reason: “Some people, from the outside, think that if they can ‘comb’ the region to how they see fit – some of them call this ‘democracy’ – then the region will come into calmness and order. That’s not how it is. Without taking into account the history, the traditions, religious particularities, you must not do anything in the Middle East, especially as an outsider.”

Don’t you guys have enough trouble at home?

• UK Deploys Hundreds Of Troops And Aircraft To Eastern Europe (G.)

The UK is deploying hundreds of troops, as well as aircraft and armour to eastern Europe as part of the biggest build-up of Nato forces in the region since the cold war. The deployment is taking place during growing tensions over a series of high-profile Russian military manoeuvres. RAF Typhoon aircraft from RAF Coningsby will be sent to Romania for up to four months, while 800 personnel will be sent with armoured support to Estonia, 150 more than previously planned, the Ministry of Defence (MoD) has said. France and Denmark will also commit more troops, the British government said. The announcement was made soon after a Russian fleet, believed to be bound to take part in the fighting in Syria, passed close to the British Isles.

On Wednesday, Russia withdrew a request to refuel its boats in Spanish territory, as Nato put pressure on Madrid to deny permission. Tensions between Nato members and Russia have been heightened since Moscow annexed Crimea in 2014 and Ukraine descended into civil war as a result. The deployment of British troops to Estonia forms part of a wider Nato commitment to station four new battalions, totalling around 4,000 personnel, on the alliance’s eastern flank. David Cameron confirmed at Nato’s summit in Warsaw in July that the UK was to send 650 troops to Estonia. As well as announcing the extra 150, the MoD on Wednesday gave further details of the deployment, including the Typhoons, a detachment of drones and Challenger tanks.

“The algorithms must be made public, so that one can inform oneself as an interested citizen on questions like: what influences my behavior on the internet and that of others?”

• Merkel Accuses Facebook, Google Of “Distorting Perception” (ZH)

While Facebook and Google have been repeatedly accused of media bias and manipulating public opinion, especially during the US presidential campaign, an unexpected attack on the two media giants came today not from the US but from Germany, when Chancellor Angela Merkel launched a full-on attack at the two companies, accusing them of “narrowing perspective,” and demanding they disclose their privately-developed algorithms. Merkel previously blamed social media for anti-immigrant sentiment and the rise of the far right. “The algorithms must be made public, so that one can inform oneself as an interested citizen on questions like: what influences my behavior on the internet and that of others?” said Merkel during a media conference in Berlin on Tuesday cited by RT.

What she said next echoed similar complaints lobbed at the media giants by those considered less than mainstream: “These algorithms, when they are not transparent, can lead to a distortion of our perception, they narrow our breadth of information.” In a tech-driven world, Google uses an algorithm to decide which search results are first shown to a user (and which are not, for example when one searches about Hillary’s health), while Facebook arranges the order of the news feed, and decides to include certain posts from a user’s liked pages and friends, at the expense of others. Both sites also promote links to news articles, often based on a user’s own media interests. However, it is still a human’s job to write and calibrate these algorithms which are at the core of the intellectual property of any social media or search website, and comprise some of the most highly-protected trade secrets in the world, potentially worth billions.

No internet giant has ever revealed its inner workings. Merkel did not specifically name Facebook, Google or Twitter, but implied that the large platforms are creating “bubbles” of self-reinforcing views, and squeezing out smaller news providers. One could also call it propaganda. “The big internet platforms, via their algorithms, have become an eye of a needle which diverse media must pass through to reach users,” warned Merkel. “This is a development that we need to pay careful attention to.” In their defense, Google and Facebooks have retorted that the so-called social media bubble is largely a “myth”, and that online users have a wider access to differing views than under a pre-internet model, where most news would be acquired from just a handful of newspapers and one or two TV channels.

It’s decomissioning that will be teh most expensive. Hey, US, what’s going on at Yucca mountain?

• Nuclear Power Is Over In The US Without More Government Subsidies (BBG)

Nuclear power will come to an end in the U.S. if the industry doesn’t get more government support, according to Carlyle Group, one of the world’s largest investment firms. The nation’s nuclear reactors need more subsidies to keep running, such as a federal carbon tax that’ll reward them for their zero-emissions power, Bob Mancini, co-head of Carlyle Group’s power unit, said at a conference in New York. Carlyle, which has $176 billion in assets under management across funds, invests in natural gas- and coal-fired power plants and renewable energy projects. Its outlook comes as nuclear power generators including Exelon and Entergy make plans to shut reactors across the country.

Low power prices, fueled by an abundance of natural gas from shale drilling and weakening demand, have squeezed their profits just as their operating costs rise amid mounting regulation. “We will see the end of the nuclear industry in the next coming decades” without legislation, incentives or other support to keep reactors open or encourage new builds, Mancini said at S&P Global Platts’s Financing U.S. Power Conference on Tuesday.

Debt Rattle October 26 2016

Oct 262016

October 26, 2016 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 9:52 am Finance Tagged with: Antarctic, AT&T, bankruptcy, employment, euro, Hillary, oil, Syria, Trump, war, yuan Comments Off

Dorothea Lange Depression refugee family from Tulsa, Oklahoma 1936

• The Euro Has Been A Disaster For Southern European Production (Gefira)

• Washington: Don’t Think It’s Over When Trump Loses (Steve Keen)

• 213 North American Oil Industry Companies Have Now Declared Bankruptcy (FF)

• China Tightens Capital Controls Amid Yuan’s Continuing Slide (Nikkei)

• London House Prices Forecast to Plunge as Brexit Chokes Market (BBG)

• AT&T Is Spying On Americans For Profit (DB)

• The US Is Currently Bombing Seven Countries (PF)

• Trump Says Clinton Policy On Syria Would Lead To World War Three (R.)

• Most Americans Do Not Feel Represented By Democrats Or Republicans (G.)

• The Biggest F*ck Ever Recorded In Human History (Michael Moore)

• Antarctic Glaciers Are Melting at a ‘Staggering’ Rate (Gizm.)

Why it has to stop. Or rather, why it will be stopped.

• The Euro Has Been A Disaster For Southern European Production (Gefira)

Some say that the common currency prevents less productive economies from cheating by weakening their national currencies and forces them to become more efficient and competitive. Industrial production data shows that it is not the case. Italy, France, Greece and Portugal have not only stopped producing more; they are producing now less than in 1990! The decay started immediately after the introduction of the euro in 2002! The OECD industrial production data analysis leads to the following conclusions: 1. since 1990 industrial production (manufacturing and construction included) has been growing in volume at large, even in the most developed countries; 2. the disproportion between industrial output in Germany and two other biggest euroarea economies, Italy and France, occurred already just after the 2001-2002 crisis; 3. Southern Europe’s economies have lost their ability to rebound in industrial production alongside the adoption of the euro.

1. Industrial output can increase In most of the most developed countries in the world industrial production has grown in volume since 1990, although a great deal of manufacturing capacities have been moved from the West to the emerging markets. Moreover, in countries like the USA, Israel, Switzerland, Austria and Germany the output has surpassed the 2008 pre-crisis levels. However, if we take a look at the euroarea or the Group of Seven (G7), then numbers are still lower than in 2008 but definitely higher than in 1990.

2. The euroarea has a problem A closer look at the European industrial production numbers gives a clear signal: something bad has happened after 2000. Before the introduction of euro, production trends ran more or less in the same direction. Meanwhile after the 2001-2002 crisis, French and Italian output did not rebound, while production in Germany expanded enormously and was able to reach the 2008 level quickly after the last crisis. Industry in France and Italy not only has not rebounded but also has started to curb.

3. Southern Europe will not rebound with the euro
Countries with a sovereign currency can easily build up their economies because of one simple mechanism: depreciation. A relatively strong currency (strong in comparison to the economic condition) would not have to be a problem for Italy or Greece if there still were some capacities for more debt. Then internal consumption could prop up industrial production. But Spain, Greece, Italy and Portugal have had neither a weak sovereign currency nor the possibility of incurring more debt.

Industry is very important for the economy, as it creates jobs and innovations. The euroarea in the current form is preventing Southern Europe’s industry from developing because of a different type of economy there. “Roman” economies are not worse than than Germany’s. They just need other tools, so restricting all these various economies in the German fashion will destroy the euro as well as the European unity.

Steve Keen on which employment numbers are actually relevant. Curious to see how many people think Hillary’s got it in the bag. As an example, here’s a Bloomberg poll that just came out:

• Washington: Don’t Think It’s Over When Trump Loses (Steve Keen)

Trump’s fans certainly have their “dark fantasies”, but Washington and Krugman have a “bright fantasy” if they believe that unemployment is genuinely low. My favourite and unimpeachable proof that this is false is an easily-obtained data series: the percentage of Americans aged 25-54 who have a job. While the “Unemployment Rate” is back within half a per cent of its pre-crisis low, the percentage of Americans aged 25-54 who have a job today is 2% lower than it was before the crisis. Perhaps an even more important fact that explains the anger behind Trump (and Sanders too, before he was eliminated by the Democratic Party’s peculiar primary process) is that the employment rate actually peaked in 2000, and even after this recovery, it is still 4% lower than in 2000 (78% today versus 82% in 2000).

What that means in terms of people with jobs is even more telling. The number of people aged 25-54 with a job in the USA peaked at 104.7 million in December 2007. It bottomed at 100.3 million in October 2013, and as of February 2015 (the most recent data) it was 101.2 million. So when Washington is talking about achieving “full employment” again, there are still more than 3 million less people employed today than in 2007. Demographic change has caused this segment of the population to decline since December 2007—from 126 million then to 125 million in February 2015—but that still means 2 million more people are unemployed today than in 2007. So if you look at the unemployment rate, everything is wonderful. That seems to be what Washington insiders—all with well-paying jobs—are doing. But if you look at the employment rate, the economy is still in the doldrums. Which series is telling the truth about the US economy?

The employment to population ratio is telling the truth, because it’s derived by asking employers how many people they have on their payroll. The unemployment rate, on the other hand, lies about the real level of unemployment, because it is derived by asking individuals whether they fulfil a number of criteria, including whether they have looked for a job in the last 4 weeks. The employment ratio accurately tells you the number of people receiving a salary; the unemployment ratio does not accurately tell you who is not receiving one. It’s no comfort to someone not receiving a salary to be told that they are not also unemployed, according to the official definition. Their justified reaction is to tell the “official definition” what to do with itself.

A few billion here and a few billion there in debt.

• 213 North American Oil Industry Companies Have Now Declared Bankruptcy (FF)

Fewer and fewer oil exploration and production companies are declaring bankruptcy. But more oilfield service companies are. So far this month, only one North American E&P firm filed for Chapter 11 protection, according to data released on Tuesday by the Dallas law firm Haynes & Boone. That’s down from two in September, three in August and four in July. But it’s been an especially tough few months for service companies. As crude prices began crashing in 2014, drillers started idling rigs. That led to fewer jobs for the companies that make their money helping producers pump oil and gas. Moreover, when producers did hire service companies, they often forced them to heavily discount their rates.

Eight service companies filed this month. Seven filed last month, and eight again the month before. Almost 50 have filed in the last six months, half of the 108 over two years. In total, 213 North American oil and gas companies have now filed for bankruptcy since the start of 2015, listing more than $85 billion in debt. The most recent exploration firm: the private oil and gas company Mountain Divide, based in Montana, filed on Oct. 14, and listed $83 million in debt. On the oilfield services side, Houston-based Key Energy Services filed on Monday, with more than $1 billion in debt. And Basic Energy Services, headquartered in Fort Worth, said Monday it had reached an agreement with debt holders to file by Tuesday.

While at the same time letting Chinese foreign purchases escalate.

• China Tightens Capital Controls Amid Yuan’s Continuing Slide (Nikkei)

China has toughened restrictions on capital flows to prevent a negative feedback loop between a weakening yuan and capital flight. The State Administration of Foreign Exchange has introduced new capital measures in areas such as Shanghai and Guangzhou since the beginning of autumn, asking foreign and regional banks to cap the amount of foreign currency they will sell to customers during 2016. These limits, though ostensibly up to banks’ discretion, are set by negotiation with authorities and so are essentially directed by the government, a financial sector source said. A gag order has been imposed surrounding the measures, the source said. Some banks apparently have set steep exchange rates to pre-emptively curb foreign currency sales, a practice that could pose issues for foreign companies in China trying to repatriate earnings, for example.

China’s trade has flagged in recent months, with exports dropping 10% in September from the year-earlier level in dollar terms. The prospect of an interest rate hike in the U.S., meanwhile, has market players expecting further declines in the yuan’s value. Stashing assets abroad, rather than keeping them in China, is increasingly seen as the safer option. This view has led to further selling of the yuan, giving rise to a downward spiral that capital controls aim to break. Both the foreign exchange regulator and the People’s Bank of China have given banks several directives this year to curb outflows and the currency’s slide. Institutions are asked to report on corporate clients’ plans for buying foreign currency. Large fund transfers that involve foreign currency purchases must be explained by the institutions ahead of time. Individuals traveling overseas are asked to make reservations when exchanging money.

The yuan continues to depreciate despite these efforts. The central bank Tuesday set its daily guidance rate for the Chinese currency at 6.77 yuan to the dollar – just a little shy of the 6.82- to 6.83-to-the-dollar range at which the yuan was fixed for nearly two years following the September 2008 financial crisis. At the time, the goal was to prevent the currency from strengthening to stave off an economic slump. The concern now is that the yuan will become weaker and capital will flow out.

The best thing to could happen in Britain.

• London House Prices Forecast to Plunge as Brexit Chokes Market (BBG)

London property prices are set to fall next year as uncertainty about Britain’s exit from the EU damps the U.K. housing market, according to the Centre for Economics and Business Research. London, and especially the priciest areas of the capital’s housing market, will be most affected, with prices dropping 5.6% in 2017, according to the consultancy’s predictions. Across the U.K., while property value growth will accelerate to 6.9% in 2016, it’s set to slow to 2.6% next year. “Nervousness and uncertainty are starting to show,” said Kay Daniel Neufeld, an economist at Cebr. “We expect to see house-price growth across the U.K. slowing considerably in the fourth quarter of 2016, a trend that is set to continue in 2017.”

While the housing market was already facing headwinds from tax changes before June’s EU referendum, investors are becoming increasingly nervous about the possibility of a so-called hard Brexit. That could see the U.K. giving up membership of Europe’s single market for goods and services to secure greater control of immigration. Accelerating inflation, increasing unemployment and slowing business investment are all set to weigh on house prices, while curbs on migration and a retreat from the single market could slow demand from international buyers, the Cebr said.

Wait till we find out what Google does.

• AT&T Is Spying On Americans For Profit (DB)

In 2013, Hemisphere was revealed by The New York Times and described only within a Powerpoint presentation made by the Drug Enforcement Administration. The Times described it as a “partnership” between AT&T and the U.S. government; the Justice Department said it was an essential, and prudently deployed, counter-narcotics tool. However, AT&T’s own documentation—reported here by The Daily Beast for the first time—shows Hemisphere was used far beyond the war on drugs to include everything from investigations of homicide to Medicaid fraud. Hemisphere isn’t a “partnership” but rather a product AT&T developed, marketed, and sold at a cost of millions of dollars per year to taxpayers.

No warrant is required to make use of the company’s massive trove of data, according to AT&T documents, only a promise from law enforcement to not disclose Hemisphere if an investigation using it becomes public. These new revelations come as the company seeks to acquire Time Warner in the face of vocal opposition saying the deal would be bad for consumers. Donald Trump told supporters over the weekend he would kill the acquisition if he’s elected president; Hillary Clinton has urged regulators to scrutinize the deal. While telecommunications companies are legally obligated to hand over records, AT&T appears to have gone much further to make the enterprise profitable, according to ACLU technology policy analyst Christopher Soghoian.

“Companies have to give this data to law enforcement upon request, if they have it. AT&T doesn’t have to data-mine its database to help police come up with new numbers to investigate,” Soghoian said. AT&T has a unique power to extract information from its metadata because it retains so much of it. The company owns more than three-quarters of U.S. landline switches, and the second largest share of the nation’s wireless infrastructure and cellphone towers, behind Verizon. AT&T retains its cell tower data going back to July 2008, longer than other providers. Verizon holds records for a year and Sprint for 18 months, according to a 2011 retention schedule obtained by The Daily Beast.

Just so you know.

• The US Is Currently Bombing Seven Countries (PF)

For this fact check, we wondered if the U.S. is bombing seven countries. That at least has been so: In September 2014, PunditFact rated True a bombed-countries claim by Ryan Lizza of The New Yorker. Lizza referred to President George W. Bush and his successor, Barack Obama, in a tweet that said: “Countries bombed: Obama 7, Bush 4.” At the time, the U.S. on Obama’s watch had bombed Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, Libya and Syria. When we asked Stein for her backup information, spokeswoman Meleiza Figueroa pointed out various web posts including a September 2014 CNN news story stating that Obama had ordered air strikes in seven countries through the bulk of his eight years in the office.

[..] The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, a nonprofit news service based at City University London, maintains a running list of U.S. military actions in a number of countries. The bureau annotates each incident with links to press reports. When we looked, the bureau’s accounts by country indicated the latest U.S drone strike in Pakistan occurred in May 2016; the latest strike in Somalia was in September 2016; and the latest U.S. strikes in Yemen and Afghanistan were in October 2016. Separately, we noticed, the Department of Defense said in an Oct. 11, 2016, web post that countries including the U.S. battling the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, or ISIL, have conducted 15,634 air strikes to date – 10,129 in Iraq, 5,505 in Syria – with the U.S. conducting 6,868 in Iraq and 5,227 in Syria. In a Sept. 30, 2016, post, the U.S. Air Force said attacks from the air have affected ISIL’s “ability to fight and conduct operations in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan.”

Too, in August 2016, the New York Times reported the U.S. had “stepped up a new bombing campaign against the Islamic State in Libya, conducting its first armed drone flights from Jordan to strike militant targets” in Libya’s coastal city of Sirte. That news story quoted Obama saying during a news conference that the airstrikes were critical to helping Libya’s fragile United Nations-backed government to drive Islamic State militants out of Sirte, which the group has controlled since June 2015. Obama promised the air campaign would continue as long as necessary to make sure that the extremist group “does not get a stronghold in Libya,” the newspaper said.

Trump -rightly- mirrors something I said a few days ago in Ungovernability “..her harsh criticism of Putin raised questions about “how she is going to go back and negotiate with this man who she has made to be so evil,” if she wins the presidency.”

• Trump Says Clinton Policy On Syria Would Lead To World War Three (R.)

U.S. Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump said on Tuesday that Democrat Hillary Clinton’s plan for Syria would “lead to World War Three,” because of the potential for conflict with military forces from nuclear-armed Russia. In an interview focused largely on foreign policy, Trump said defeating Islamic State is a higher priority than persuading Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to step down, playing down a long-held goal of U.S. policy. Trump questioned how Clinton would negotiate with Russian President Vladimir Putin after demonizing him; blamed President Barack Obama for a downturn in U.S. relations with the Philippines under its new president, Rodrigo Duterte; bemoaned a lack of Republican unity behind his candidacy, and said he would easily win the election if the party leaders would support him.

“If we had party unity, we couldn’t lose this election to Hillary Clinton,” he said. On Syria’s civil war, Trump said Clinton could drag the United States into a world war with a more aggressive posture toward resolving the conflict. Clinton has called for the establishment of a no-fly zone and “safe zones” on the ground to protect non-combatants. Some analysts fear that protecting those zones could bring the United States into direct conflict with Russian fighter jets. “What we should do is focus on ISIS. We should not be focusing on Syria,” said Trump as he dined on fried eggs and sausage at his Trump National Doral golf resort. “You’re going to end up in World War Three over Syria if we listen to Hillary Clinton.”

[..] On Russia, Trump again knocked Clinton’s handling of U.S.-Russian relations while secretary of state and said her harsh criticism of Putin raised questions about “how she is going to go back and negotiate with this man who she has made to be so evil,” if she wins the presidency.

“Less than half the public (43%) say they have a great deal of confidence that their vote will be counted accurately..”

• Most Americans Do Not Feel Represented By Democrats Or Republicans (G.)

As they go to the polls in a historic presidential election, more than six in 10 Americans say neither major political party represents their views any longer, a survey has found. Dissatisfaction with both Democrats and Republicans has risen sharply since 1990, when less than half held that neither reflected their opinions, according to research by the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI). The seventh annual 2016 American Values Survey was carried out throughout September among a random sample of 2,010 adults in all 50 states. Both party establishments have been rattled by the outsider challenges of Donald Trump, who was successful in winning his party’s nomination, and Bernie Sanders, who was not. In a year that seems ripe for third-party candidates, Libertarian Gary Johnson and Jill Stein of the Green party are seeking to capitalise but have fallen back in the polls in recent weeks.

61% of survey respondents say neither political party reflects their opinions today, while 38% disagree. 77% of independents and a majority (54%) of Republicans took this position, while less than half (46%) of Democrats agree. There was virtually no variation across class or race. Both Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton and Republican standard bearer Trump continue to suffer historically low favourability ratings, with less than half of the public viewing each candidate positively (41% v 33%). Clinton is viewed less favourably than the Democratic party (49%), but Trump’s low rating is more consistent with the Republican party’s own favourability (36%).

The discontent with parties and candidates extends to the electoral process itself, which Trump claims is rigged against him. Less than half the public (43%) say they have a great deal of confidence that their vote will be counted accurately, while 38% have some confidence and 17% have hardly any confidence. [..] The PRRI found that pessimism about the direction of the US is significantly higher today (74%) than it was at this time during the 2012 presidential race, when 57% of the public said the country was on the wrong track.

Slightly confused: I thought he was pro-Hillary?!

• The Biggest F*ck Ever Recorded In Human History (Michael Moore)

I know a lot of people in Michigan that are planning to vote for Trump and they don’t necessarily agree with him. They’re not racist or redneck, they’re actually pretty decent people and so after talking to a number of them I wanted to write this. Donald Trump came to the Detroit Economic Club and stood there in front of Ford Motor executives and said “if you close these factories as you’re planning to do in Detroit and build them in Mexico, I’m going to put a 35% tariff on those cars when you send them back and nobody’s going to buy them.” It was an amazing thing to see. No politician, Republican or Democrat, had ever said anything like that to these executives, and it was music to the ears of people in Michigan and Ohio and Pennsylvania and Wisconsin – the “Brexit” states.

You live here in Ohio, you know what I’m talking about. Whether Trump means it or not, is kind of irrelevant because he’s saying the things to people who are hurting, and that’s why every beaten-down, nameless, forgotten working stiff who used to be part of what was called the middle class loves Trump. He is the human Molotov Cocktail that they’ve been waiting for; the human hand grande that they can legally throw into the system that stole their lives from them. And on November 8, although they lost their jobs, although they’ve been foreclose on by the bank, next came the divorce and now the wife and kids are gone, the car’s been repoed, they haven’t had a real vacation in years, they’re stuck with the shitty Obamacare bronze plan where you can’t even get a fucking percocet, they’ve essentially lost everything they had except one thing – the one thing that doesn’t cost them a cent and is guaranteed to them by the American constitution: the right to vote.

They might be penniless, they might be homeless, they might be fucked over and fucked up it doesn’t matter, because it’s equalized on that day – a millionaire has the same number of votes as the person without a job: one. And there’s more of the former middle class than there are in the millionaire class. So on November 8 the dispossessed will walk into the voting booth, be handed a ballot, close the curtain, and take that lever or felt pen or touchscreen and put a big fucking X in the box by the name of the man who has threatened to upend and overturn the very system that has ruined their lives: Donald J Trump.

They see that the elite who ruined their lives hate Trump. Corporate America hates Trump. Wall Street hates Trump. The career politicians hate Trump. The media hates Trump, after they loved him and created him, and now hate. Thank you media: the enemy of my enemy is who I’m voting for on November 8. Yes, on November 8, you Joe Blow, Steve Blow, Bob Blow, Billy Blow, all the Blows get to go and blow up the whole goddamn system because it’s your right. Trump’s election is going to be the biggest fuck ever recorded in human history and it will feel good.

“.. like ice cubes rising as a soft drink is poured into a glass.”

• Antarctic Glaciers Are Melting at a ‘Staggering’ Rate (Gizm.)

Scientists have long viewed the Amundsen sea embayment as the Achilles heel of West Antarctica, with papers in the 1970s and ‘80s describing it as “uniquely vulnerable,” “unstable,” and the “weak underbelly” of the continent. The fear, then and now, was that warm ocean waters lapping against the foot of the glaciers could cause the ice to pop up off of its rocky floor, like ice cubes rising as a soft drink is poured into a glass. When ice detaches from its so-called “grounding line,” it kickstarts a chain reaction that can trigger a lot of melting. “When water gets between ice and land, it moves quickly, bringing lots of heat in, and melting the ice above it more rapidly,” said Thomas Wagner, the director of NASA’s polar science program. “The Amundsen sea embayment is a place where we know this is happening.”

Indeed, satellite and radar data show that two of West Antarctica’s largest glaciers, Pine Island and Thwaites, have seen their grounding line retreat many miles since 2000, causing fresh water to pour off the ice and into the ocean. This process is so effective that glaciologists recently declared the total collapse of the Amundsen sea embayment—whose glaciers contain enough water to raise global sea levels by four feet—to be “unstoppable.” Here’s the rub: We still have no idea how quickly all of that ice will go, meaning we have no idea whether to prepare for a lot more sea level rise in ten years, in a generation, or at the end of the century. A new study, led by glaciologist Ala Khazendar of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, points to ice disappearing sooner rather than later.

For years, NASA has been conducting an airborne campaign called Operation Ice Bridge, flying across sections of our planet’s north and south polar ice sheets and using ground-penetrating radar to measure changes beneath the surface. When Khazendar examined Ice Bridge’s datasets for the Amundsen sea embayment, he realized that NASA flew almost exactly the same path in 2009 that it did in 2002. “This presented an excellent opportunity to look at how ice thickness changed,” he said.

NOTE: we know our Comments section doesn’t function properly. We’re looking into it.

Debt Rattle October 25 2016

Oct 252016

October 25, 2016 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 9:26 am Finance Tagged with: deficit, eurozone, FBI, Hillary, M5S, Orwell, outflows, poverty, Pyatt, rage, subprime Comments Off

NPC Grief monument, Rock Creek cemetery, Washington DC 1915

• The Eurozone Is Turning Into A Poverty Machine (Tel.)

• Barclays Warns ‘Politics of Rage’ Will Slow Global Growth (BBG)

• China Capital Outflows Highest Since Data Publishing Began In 2010 (BBG)

• Credit Card Lending To US Subprime Borrowers Is Starting To Backfire (WSJ)

• Bank of England Optimism Evaporates in Long-Term Debt (BBG)

• The Deficit Is Too Small, Not Too Big (McCulley)

• Welcome to the George Orwell Theme Park of Democracy (Jim Kunstler)

• How Democrats Killed Their Populist Soul (Matt Stoller)

• Hillary Clinton Is The Republican Party’s Last, Best Hope (Heat St.)

• Clinton Ally Aided Campaign of FBI Official’s Wife (WSJ)

• M5S Blasts Italian Constitutional Reform Proposed By PM Renzi (Amsa)

• 100 Million Canadians By 2100? Key Advisers Back Ambitious Goal (CP)

• A 1912 News Article Ominously Forecasted Climate Change (Q.)

• Refugee Camp On Lesbos Damaged In Riots As Rumors Fly (Kath.)

• Ex-US Ambassador To Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt Now Ambassador To Greece (Kath.)

Why does this truth have to come from the right wing press?

• The Eurozone Is Turning Into A Poverty Machine (Tel.)

There are constant bank runs. The bond markets panic, and governments along its southern perimeter need bail-outs every few years. Unemployment has sky-rocketed and growth remains sluggish, no matter how many hundreds of billions of printed money the ECB throws at the economy. We are all tediously aware of how the euro-zone has been a financial disaster. But it is now starting to become clear that it is a social disaster as well. What often gets lost in the discussion of growth rates, bail-outs and banking harmonisation is that the eurozone is turning into a poverty machine. As its economy stagnates, millions of people are falling into genuine hardship. Whether it is measured on a relative or absolute basis, rates of poverty have soared across Europe, with the worst results found in the area covered by the single currency.

There could not be a more shocking indictment of the currency’s failure, or a more potent reminder that living standards will only improve once the euro is either radically reformed or taken apart. Eurostat, the statistical agency of the European Union, has published its latest findings on the numbers of people “at risk of poverty or social exclusion”, comparing 2008 and 2015. Across the 28 members, five countries saw really significant rises compared with the year of the financial crash. In Greece, 35.7pc of people now fall into that category, compared with 28.1pc back in 2008, a rise of 7.6 percentage points. Cyprus was up by 5.6 points, with 28.7pc of people now categorised as poor. Spain was up 4.8 points, Italy up 3.2 points and even Luxembourg, hardly known for being at risk of deprivation, up three points at 18.5pc.

It was not so bleak everywhere. In Poland, the poverty rate went down from 30.5pc to over 23pc. In Romania, Bulgaria, and Latvia, there were large falls compared to the 2008 figures – in Romania for example the percentage was down by seven points to 37pc. What was the difference between the countries where poverty went up dramatically, and those where it went down? You guessed it. The largest increases were all countries within the single currency. But the decreases were all in countries outside it. It gets worse. “At risk of poverty” is defined as living on less than 60pc of the national median income. But that median income has itself fallen over the last seven years, because most countries inside the eurozone have yet to recover from the crash. In Greece, the median income has dropped from €10,800 a year to €7,500 now.

[..] Why should Greece and Spain be doing so much worse than anywhere in Eastern Europe? Or why Italy should be doing so much worse than Britain, when the two countries were at broadly similar levels of wealth in the Nineties? (Indeed, the Italians actually overtook us for a while in GDP per capita.) Even a traditionally very successful economy such as the Netherlands, which has not been caught up in any kind of financial crisis, has seen big increases in both relative and absolute poverty. In fact, it is not very hard to work out what has happened. First, a dysfunctional currency system has choked off economic growth, driving unemployment up to previously unbelievable levels. After countries went bankrupt and had to be bailed out, the EU, along with the ECB and the IMF, imposed austerity packages that slashed welfare systems and cut pensions. It is not surprising poverty is increasing under those conditions.

If you ask me, they’ve got it the wrong way around. If growth hadn’t slowed down, there’d be much less rage.

• Barclays Warns ‘Politics of Rage’ Will Slow Global Growth (BBG)

Brexit, rising populism across Europe, the ascent of Donald Trump in America, and the backlash against income inequality everywhere. A slew of political and economic forces have nurtured a growing narrative that globalization is now on life support—a potential game-changer for global financial markets, which have staged a rapid expansion since the end of the Cold War thanks to unfettered cross-border flows. No more: Trade volumes have stalled while the “politics of rage” has taken root in advanced economies, driven by a collapse in the perceived legitimacy of political and economic institutions, a new report from Barclays warns.

The result, the bank says, is an oncoming protectionist lurch—restrictions on the free movement of goods, services, labor, and capital—combined with an erosion of support for supranational bodies, from the EU to the WTO. “Even mild de-globalization likely will slow the pace of trend global growth,” Marvin Barth, head of European FX strategy at Barclays, writes in the report. “A sense of economic and political disenfranchisement due to imperfect representation in national governments and delegation of sovereignty to supranational and intergovernmental organisations” has generated the backlash, he said. He cites as a major factor the collapse in support for centrist parties in advanced economies and adds that the role of income inequality may be overstated.

The report echoes Harvard University economist Dani Rodrik’s earlier contention that democracy, sovereignty, and globalization represent a “trilemma.” Expansion of cross-border trade links—and the attendant increase in the power of supranational authorities to adjudicate economic matters—is a direct threat to representative democracy, and vice-versa. The veto Monday of the EU’s free trade deal with Canada by the Belgian region of Wallonia—whose leader said the deadline to secure backing for the deal was “not compatible with the exercise of democratic rights”—is a sharp illustration of this trilemma.

Breaking the dollar peg is a dangerous game, given the amount of debt denominated in USD. It can get expensive quite fast.

• China Capital Outflows Highest Since Data Publishing Began In 2010 (BBG)

The offshore yuan traded near a record low as Chinese policy makers signaled they are willing to allow greater currency flexibility amid a slump in exports and an advance in the dollar. The exchange rate was at 6.7836 a dollar as of 1:01 p.m. in Hong Kong, after dropping to 6.7885, the weakest intraday level in data going back to 2010. In Shanghai, the currency was little changed at 6.7760, close to a six-year low and past the 6.75 year-end median forecast in a Bloomberg survey. The Chinese currency has come under increased pressure on signs that investors are taking more money out of the country. A gauge of the dollar rose to a seven-month high versus major currencies Monday as traders bet that the Federal Reserve may raise borrowing costs soon.

Unlike the yuan selloff earlier this year which sparked a global market rout, there’s no sense of panic yet as policy makers maintain a steady exchange rate against other currencies. “The central bank is tolerating more orderly depreciation of the yuan,” said Gao Qi, a Singapore-based foreign-exchange strategist at Scotiabank. “But it will step in to avoid market panic arising from a sharp yuan depreciation. The 6.8 level is critical in the near term.” [..] The onshore yuan has weakened 4.2% this year, the most in Asia. It has declined in all but two sessions this month as some analysts speculated that the central bank has reduced support following the yuan’s inclusion in the IMF’s basket of reserves on Oct. 1.

A net $44.7 billion worth of payments in the Chinese currency left the nation last month, according to data released by the State Administration of Foreign Exchange. That’s the most since the government started publishing the figures in 2010. [..] Chinese policy makers have downplayed the importance of the yuan-dollar exchange rate, saying they aim to keep the yuan steady against a broad basket of currencies. A Bloomberg gauge mimicking China Foreign Exchange Trade System’s yuan index against 13 major currencies has been little changed around 94 since August after falling more than 6 percent in the previous eight months.

Imagine my surprise.

• Credit Card Lending To US Subprime Borrowers Is Starting To Backfire (WSJ)

Credit-card lending to subprime borrowers is starting to backfire. Missed payments on credit cards that lenders issued recently are higher than on older cards, according to new data from credit bureau TransUnion. Nearly 3% of outstanding balances on credit cards issued in 2015 were at least 90 days behind on payments six months after they were originated. That compares with 2.2% for cards that were given out in 2014 and 1.5% for cards in 2013. The poorer performance on newer cards pushed up the 90-day or more delinquency rate for all credit cards to 1.53% on average nationwide in the third quarter. That’s the highest level since 2012.

The recent increase in subprime lending is one of the big contributors. Lenders ramped up subprime card lending in 2014 and have been doling out more of these cards recently. They issued just over 20 million credit cards to subprime borrowers in 2015, up some 20% from 2014 and up 56% from 2013, according to Equifax. Separately, missed payments in states with large oil or energy sectors continue to worsen. The share of card balances that were at least 90 days past due increased 12% in Oklahoma, 10% in Texas and 20% in Wyoming in the third quarter from a year prior, according to TransUnion.

Really? They thought Carney could save the day?

• Bank of England Optimism Evaporates in Long-Term Debt (BBG)

Long-term sterling bonds suggest investors are quickly losing confidence in the Bank of England’s ability to support debt markets through the U.K.’s departure from the EU. Holders have lost about 10% in as little as seven weeks on long-dated notes issued by Vodafone, British American Tobacco and WPP. The bond sales took place after the central bank announced plans in August to buy corporate debt, sparking investor optimism. The mood has since soured because of concerns about a so-called hard Brexit, sterling’s tumble and the outlook for inflation. “With the benefit of hindsight, August was the best time to issue,” said Srikanth Sankaran, head of European Credit and ABS strategy at Morgan Stanley. “The market was more focused on the Bank of England’s support rather than the longer-term Brexit risk.”

McCulley used to be something big at PIMCO. He’s right, but it’s doubtful a change of course would be sufficient at this point. Austerity has killed a lot.

• The Deficit Is Too Small, Not Too Big (McCulley)

[..] while Clinton gets my vote, her insistence at the final debate that her proposed fiscal program will not “add a penny” to the national debt is fouling my wonk serenity this morning. Every penny of new expenditure, she says, will be “paid for” with a new penny of tax revenue. Her deficit-neutral fiscal proposal is, I readily acknowledge, better than the status quo, as her proposed new spending would add 100 cents on the dollar to the nation’s aggregate demand, while her proposed tax increases would not subtract 100 cents on the dollar. Why? Because she proposes getting the new tax revenue from those with a low marginal propensity to spend, or alternatively, a high marginal propensity to save. To wit, from the not poor, including yes, the rich.

Thus, in simple Keynesian terms, there is some solace in her deficit-neutral fiscal package: It would be net stimulative to the economy, because it would – in technical terms – drive down the private sector’s savings rate. In less technical terms, it would take money from people who don’t live paycheck to paycheck, who would still spend the same, but just have less left over to save. And I have no problem with that. What sends me around the bend is the notion that the only way to boost aggregate demand is to drive down the private-sector savings rate, in the context of holding constant the public sector’s savings rate. But, you retort: The public sector, notably at the federal level, has a negative savings rate; it runs a deficit! Are you nuts?

No, I am not. Unless faced with an incipient inflation threat, born of an overheated economy, there is no reason whatsoever that the public sector should ever have a positive savings rate. What it should have is a positive, a bigly positive, investment rate. And in fact, a higher public investment rate and a lower public savings rate are exactly what our economy presently needs. Yes, a larger fiscal deficit. [..] investment drives aggregate demand, which begets aggregate production and thus, aggregate income, the fountain from which savings flow. Thus, if and when there is insufficient aggregate demand to foster full employment at a just income distribution, the underlying problem is a deficiency of investment, not savings. More investment is the solution, and investment is constrained not by a shortage of savings, but literally a deficiency of investment itself.

“..the demonization of Russia – a way more idiotic exercise than the McCarthyite Cold War hysteria..”

• Welcome to the George Orwell Theme Park of Democracy (Jim Kunstler)

If Trump loses, I will essay to guess that his followers’ next step will be some kind of violence. For the moment, pathetic as it is, Trump was their last best hope. I’m more comfortable about Hillary — though I won’t vote for her — because it will be salutary for the ruling establishment to unravel with her in charge of it. That way, the right people will be blamed for the mismanagement of our national affairs. This gang of elites needs to be circulated out of power the hard way, under the burden of their own obvious perfidy, with no one else to point their fingers at. Her election will sharpen awareness of the criminal conduct in our financial practices and the neglect of regulation that marked the eight years of Obama’s appointees at the Department of Justice and the SEC.

The “tell” in these late stages of the campaign has been the demonization of Russia – a way more idiotic exercise than the McCarthyite Cold War hysteria of the early 1950s, since there is no longer any ideological conflict between us and all the evidence indicates that the current state of bad relations is America’s fault, in particular our sponsorship of the state failure in Ukraine and our avid deployment of NATO forces in war games on Russia’s border. Hillary has had the full force of the foreign affairs establishment behind her in this war-drum-banging effort, yet they have not been able to produce any evidence, for instance, in their claim that Russia is behind the Wikileaks hack of Hillary’s email.

[..] The media has been on-board with all this. The New York Times especially has acted as the hired amplifier for the establishment lies – such a difference from the same newspaper’s role in the Vietnam War ruckus of yesteryear. Today (Monday) they ran an astounding editorial “explaining” the tactical necessity of Hillary’s dishonesty: “In politics, hypocrisy and doublespeak are tools,” The Times editorial board wrote. Oh, well, that’s reassuring. Welcome to the George Orwell Theme Park of Democracy.

Absolute must read by Stoller, American history you didn’t know.

• How Democrats Killed Their Populist Soul (Matt Stoller)

While not a household name today, Wright Patman was a legend in his time. His congressional career spanned 46 years, from 1929 to 1976. In that near-half-century of service, Patman would wage constant war against monopoly power. As a young man, at the height of the Depression, he challenged Herbert Hoover’s refusal to grant impoverished veterans’ accelerated war pensions. He successfully drove the immensely wealthy Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon from office over the issue. Patman’s legislation to help veterans recoup their bonuses, the Bonus Bill—and the fight with Mellon over it—prompted a massive protest by World War I veterans in Washington, D.C., known as “the Bonus Army,” which helped shape the politics of the Depression.

In 1936, he authored the Robinson-Patman Act, a pricing and antitrust law that prohibited price discrimination and manipulation, and that finally constrained the A&P chain store—the Walmart of its day—from gobbling up the retail industry. He would go on to write the Bank Secrecy Act, which stops money-laundering; defend Glass-Steagall, which separates banks from securities dealers; write the Employment Act of 1946, which created the Council of Economic Advisors; and initiate the first investigation into the Nixon administration over Watergate.

Far from the longwinded octogenarian the Watergate Babies saw, Patman’s career reads as downright passionate, often marked by a vitality you might see today in an Elizabeth Warren—as when, for example, he asked Fed Chairman Arthur Burns, “Can you give me any reason why you should not be in the penitentiary?” Despite his lack of education, Patman had a savvy political and legal mind. In the late 1930s, the Federal Reserve Board refused to admit it was a government institution. So Patman convinced the District of Columbia’s government to threaten foreclosure of all Federal Reserve Board property; the Board quickly produced evidence that it was indeed part of the federal government.

Kind of like a second chapter to Stoller’s piece above.

• Hillary Clinton Is The Republican Party’s Last, Best Hope (Heat St.)

While Trump has pushed a populist, anti-free trade message, Hillary champions the large multinational corporations that create jobs for everyday Americans. As secretary of state, she worked tirelessly to advance the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the “gold standard” of trade agreements. As a candidate, she expertly silenced the gullible radicals supporting Bernie Sanders by pretending she won’t sign TPP into law as president. (She will.) Hillary’s disdain for left-wing agitators does not end there. She has also gone to bat for the heroes in America’s fracking industry, telling environmentalists to “get a life” in emails uncovered by Wikileaks. [..]

One of the greatest sources of frustration for Republicans during the Obama presidency has been his weak-sauce, isolationist foreign policy. In the absence of strong American leadership, the world has plunged into chaos. Trump shares Obama’s ideology of avoiding foreign entanglements, even going so far as to question the need for NATO as Putin runs amok unchecked. It is precisely at this moment that America needs the hawkish leadership of Hillary Clinton to defend American exceptionalism and reassert our hegemony on the world stage. Among her fellow neoconservative war hawks, Hillary is admired for her sterling record on foreign policy — from supporting the invasion of Iraq in 2002 to her valiant efforts as secretary of state to persuade Obama to stop being such a pushover on the world stage.

During the Arab Spring in 2011, Hillary impressed upon Obama the need for a U.S.-led “coalition of the willing” to help mold the future of the Middle East in the name of freedom. Muammar Gaddafi wound up dead in a ditch. Later, when the president sought input on Syria, Hillary recommended force and arming rebel groups. Obama’s failure to follow her advice led to the current migrant crisis and ongoing tragedy in Syria. Bashar al-Assad is still alive and well. Imagine our enemies cowering in the shade as President Hillary’s massive drone armada blocks out the sun en route to visit death upon the enemies of freedom. Slay Queen, indeed. Voters looking for a reliable pro-business, conservative hawk to undo eight years of Obama’s feckless progressivism and combat the cancer of Trumpism need look no further than Hillary Rodham Clinton. She is the GOP’s last, best hope.

Incredible. Just incredible.

• Clinton Ally Aided Campaign of FBI Official’s Wife (WSJ)

The political organization of Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, an influential Democrat with longstanding ties to Bill and Hillary Clinton, gave nearly $500,000 to the election campaign of the wife of an official at the FBI who later helped oversee the investigation into Mrs. Clinton’s email use. Campaign finance records show Mr. McAuliffe’s political-action committee donated $467,500 to the 2015 state Senate campaign of Dr. Jill McCabe, who is married to Andrew McCabe, now the deputy director of the FBI. The Virginia Democratic Party, over which Mr. McAuliffe exerts considerable control, donated an additional $207,788 worth of support to Dr. McCabe’s campaign in the form of mailers, according to the records.

That adds up to slightly more than $675,000 to her candidacy from entities either directly under Mr. McAuliffe’s control or strongly influenced by him. The figure represents more than a third of all the campaign funds Dr. McCabe raised in the effort. Mr. McAuliffe and other state party leaders recruited Dr. McCabe to run, according to party officials. She lost the election to incumbent Republican Dick Black. [..] Dr. McCabe announced her candidacy in March 2015, the same month it was revealed that Mrs. Clinton had used a private server as secretary of state to send and receive government emails, a disclosure that prompted the FBI investigation. At the time the investigation was launched in July 2015, Mr. McCabe was running the FBI’s Washington, D.C., field office, which provided personnel and resources to the Clinton email probe.

That investigation examined whether Mrs. Clinton’s use of private email may have compromised national security by transmitting classified information in an insecure system. [..] At the end of July 2015, Mr. McCabe was promoted to FBI headquarters and assumed the No. 3 position at the agency. In February 2016, he became FBI Director James Comey’s second-in-command. As deputy director, Mr. McCabe was part of the executive leadership team overseeing the Clinton email investigation, though FBI officials say any final decisions on that probe were made by Mr. Comey, who served as a high-ranking Justice Department official in the administration of George W. Bush.

“Di Maio was also ironic about the endorsement of the reform received by Renzi from President Obama during a recent visit to Washington. “Let’s say it is not the first time Obama has intervened concerning a referendum in another country, he supported ‘Remain’ in England and ‘Brexit’ won. Now he is backing the Yes vote and so the No front should be reassured..”

• M5S Blasts Italian Constitutional Reform Proposed By PM Renzi (Amsa)

The anti-establishment Five Star Movement (M5S) will vote No in the December 4 referendum on Constitutional reform because the law “deprives us of democratic rights”, party bigwig and Deputy House Speaker Luigi Di Maio said on Monday. “In our opinion, the title of the law does not in any way reflect its content, in the same way that the title of the Good School law does not in any way reflect the content of that reform,” Di Maio told radio broadcaster Rtl 102.5. The M5S recently lost a legal challenge against the question in the consultative referendum, which echoes the wording of the title of the constitutional law, arguing it amounts to a “deceptive” advertisement for the government’s position in favour of a Yes vote.

On December 4, Italians will be called to answer ‘yes’ or ‘no’ on a question that reads: “Do you approve a constitutional law that concerns the scrapping of the bicameral system (of parliament), reducing the number of MPs, limiting the operating costs of public institutions, abolishing the National Council on Economy and Labour (CNEL), and amending Title V of the Constitution, Part II?”. The reform approved by parliament in April would turn the Senate into a leaner body of indirectly elected regional and local representatives with limited lawmaking powers. Critics of the reform, including M5S and a left-wing faction within Premier Matteo Renzi’s own Democratic Party (PD), say it will actually make procedures more complicated.

Di Maio was also ironic about the endorsement of the reform received by Renzi from US President Barack Obama during a recent visit to Washington. “Let’s say it is not the first time Obama has intervened concerning a referendum in another country, he supported ‘Remain’ in England and ‘Brexit’ won. Now he is backing the Yes vote and so the No front should be reassured,” he said.

There is a reason why Canada is sparsely populated. Let’s not tell them. Don’t spoil the fun.

• 100 Million Canadians By 2100? Key Advisers Back Ambitious Goal (CP)

Imagine Canada with a population of 100 million — roughly triple its current size. For two of the most prominent voices inside the Trudeau government’s influential council of economic advisers, it’s much more than a passing fancy. It’s a target. The 14-member council was assembled by Finance Minister Bill Morneau to provide “bold” advice on how best to guide Canada’s struggling economy out of its slow-growth rut. One of their first recommendations, released last week, called for a gradual increase in permanent immigration to 450,000 people a year by 2021 — with a focus on top business talent and international students. That would be a 50% hike from the current level of about 300,000.

The council members — along with many others, including Economic Development Minister Navdeep Bains — argue that opening Canada’s doors to more newcomers is a crucial ingredient for expanding growth in the future. They say it’s particularly important as more and more of the country’s baby boomers enter their golden years, which eats away at the workforce. The conviction to bring in more immigrants is especially significant for at least two of the people around the advisory team’s table. Growth council chair Dominic Barton, the powerful global managing director of consulting firm McKinsey, and Mark Wiseman, a senior managing director for investment management giant BlackRock, are among the founders of a group dedicated to seeing the country responsibly expand its population as a way to help drive its economic potential.

The Century Initiative, a five-year-old effort by well-known Canadians, is focused on seeing the country of 36 million grow to 100 million by 2100. Without significant policy changes on immigration, the current demographic trajectory has Canada’s population on track to reach 53 million people by the end of the century, the group says on its website. That would place it outside the top 45 nations in population size, it says.

It goes back quite a bit further.

• A 1912 News Article Ominously Forecasted Climate Change (Q.)

Published Aug. 14, 1912. (The Rodney and Otamatea Times and Waitemata and Kaipara Gazette)

A short news clip from a New Zealand paper published in 1912 has gone viral as an example of an early news story to make the connection between burning fossil fuels and climate change. It wasn’t, however, the first article to suggest that our love for coal was wreaking destruction on our environment that would lead to climate change. The theory—now widely accepted as scientific reality—was mentioned in the news media as early as 1883, and was discussed in scientific circles much earlier than that. The French physicist Joseph Fourier had made the observation in 1824 that the composition of the atmosphere is likely to affect the climate. But Svante Arrhenius’s 1896 study titled, “On the influence of carbonic acid in the air upon the temperature on the ground” was the first to quantify how carbon dioxide (or anhydrous carbonic acid, by another name) affects global temperature.

Though the study does not explicitly say that the burning of fossil fuels would cause global warming, there were scientists before him who had made such a forecast. The earliest such mention that Quartz could find was in the journal Nature in December of 1882. The author HA Phillips writes: “According to Prof Tyndall’s research, hydrogen, marsh gas, and ethylene have the property to a very high degree of absorbing and radiating heat, and so much that a very small proportion, of say one thousandth part, had very great effect. From this we may conclude that the increasing pollution of the atmosphere will have a marked influence on the climate of the world.” Phillips was relying on the work of John Tyndall, who in the 1860s had shown how various gases in the atmosphere absorb heat from the sun in the form of infrared radiation.

Now we know that Phillips was wrong about a few scientific details: He ignored carbon dioxide from burning coal and focused more on the by-products of mining. Still, he was drawing the right conclusion about what our demand for fossil fuels might do to the climate. Newspapers around the world took those words published in a prestigious scientific journal quite seriously. In January 1883, the New York Times published a lengthy article based on Phillips’ letter to Nature, which said: “The writer who has partially discussed the subject in the columns of Nature has fixed upon 1900 as the date when the earth’s atmosphere will become entirely irrespirable. This is probably a misprint, for unless the consumption of cigarettes increases unlooked-for rapidly the atmosphere ought to remain respirable until 1910, or even 1912. At the latter date all mankind will have perished, and nothing except the hardier plants will be living on the surface of the earth.”

The EU is a failure of historical proportions economically, politically and above all morally.

• Refugee Camp On Lesbos Damaged In Riots As Rumors Fly (Kath.)

Migrants on Monday attacked the premises of the European Asylum Support Office (EASO) inside the Moria hot spot on the eastern Aegean island of Lesvos, completely destroying four container office units and damaging another two during a protest that was contained by riot police. Officials said the protesters, most of them men from Pakistan, threw rocks and burning blankets at the EASO facilities, allegedly frustrated at delays in processing their asylum applications. Riot police were called in to contain the riot. The blaze was put out by the fire service before it could cause further damage. There were no reports of injuries.

The violence at Moria prompted authorities on other migrant-hosting islands, including Chios, Samos, Kos and Leros, to beef up their security measures. Speaking on condition of anonymity, a local government official told Kathimerini that migrant riots were often triggered by rumors. “Refugees and migrants are told that if their facilities are destroyed they will have nowhere to stay and so they will be transferred to the mainland,” the source said.

Victoria Nuland’s neocon and Kiev coup instigator buddy. Bad news for Greece. Wonder what the pressure on Tsipras has been.

• Ex-US Ambassador To Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt Now Ambassador To Greece (Kath.)

The official welcome ceremony for new US Ambassador to Greece Geoffrey R. Pyatt took place on the US 6th Fleet command and control ship USS Mount Whitney, in the port of Piraeus south of Athens, Monday. Earlier in the day, Pyatt presented Greek President Prokopis Pavlopoulos with his diplomatic credentials at the Presidential Mansion. The ceremony was attended by Foreign Minister Nikos Kotzias. Nominated by President Obama, Pyatt is widely regarded as an experienced diplomat. He previously served as US ambassador in Kiev and had to deal with the fallout of the Ukrainian crisis. His appointment comes at a key time for both Athens and Washington. Recent developments in the wider region have created challenges as well as opportunities for the two NATO allies. Obama is expected to visit Athens in November. Political and military officials have been exchanging visits ahead of the trip.

Ungovernability

Oct 232016

October 23, 2016 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 7:55 pm Finance Tagged with: Brexit, Economics, election, EU, Growth, Hillary, Putin, Trump Comments Off

Inge Morath Street Corner at World’s End London 1954

Over the summer I introduced a two-fold assertion: 1) global economic growth is over (and has been for years and won’t come back for many more years) and 2) the end of growth marks the end of all centralization, including globalization. You can read all about these themes in “Globalization Is Dead, But The Idea Is Not” and “Why There is Trump” There are also extensive quotes of the second essay in wicked former UK MI6 spymaster Alastair Crooke’s “‘End of Growth’ Sparks Wide Discontent”.

When I say ‘the end of growth’, I don’t mean that in a Limits to Growth kind of way, or peak oil or things like that. Not because I seek to invalidate such things, but because I mean economics, finance only. Our economies simply ceased growing, and quite a few years ago. The only reason that is not, and very widely, recognized is the $21 trillion and change that central banks have conjured up ostensibly to kickstart a recovery that always remains just around the corner.

That those $21 trillion will have massive negative effects on all of us is not my point either right now. Just that growth is gone. And that’s hard enough to swallow for a system that’s based uniquely on that growth. That is what this ‘essay’ is about: what consequences that will have.

All that said, I don’t have the idea that too many people are willing to accept the notion of the end of eternal economic growth (let alone right this minute), nor of globalization’s demise. Which may be partially understandable, but not more than that. Instead, quite a few people may honestly feel that the end of growth will make ‘leaders’ try for more, not less, centralization/globalization, but that, if it happens, is temporary. Unless, as I wrote earlier, we see dictators in the west.

Because, as I said in those articles, the overbearing principle is, and must be, that when centralized power ceases to deliver benefits to people, they will no longer accept that decisions about their – ever poorer- lives are taken by people hundreds or thousands of miles away from where they live. People allow that only when they reap sufficient benefits from it. With growth gone, there are no such benefits left. Look at Greece and Italy and Brexit, and look at why Trump is where he is.

Since it will apparently take a while for the above to sink in – which is not because I’m wrong-, I’m a little hesitant to introduce the next assertion, which is very closely related to the other two and takes it a step further. That assertion is that there are multiple countries in the western world -and perhaps beyond- today that run a serious risk of becoming de facto ungovernable. I’ll refrain from using the term anarchy.

I’ve been playing around in my head for a while with the thought that it is striking that the last two major global powers, which together have dominated world politics and economics for over 200 years, look well on their way towards becoming ungovernable. It is perhaps even more striking that nobody appears to understand or even contemplate this.

Both Britain and America are caught in an apparent trap in which various groups of their citizens blame each other for everything that’s going wrong with their lives -which admittedly is plenty-. But that’s where the end of growth and globalization comes in: societies are in urgent need of new ways of organizing themselves, of formulating new goals, priorities and policies.

And since nary a soul recognizes that the old ways have expired, this is bound to be a very difficult process. Before formulating anything new, we will first see (well, we already do) forces, movements and individuals rise to the fore whose claim to fame is kicking against the existing grain without providing much in the way of -coherent- ideas of what should come next.

In fact, most of these ‘transitory forces’ don’t even realize or acknowledge the need for any novel paradigms; they -often hugely- gain in popularity basing themselves on talk of tweaking existing paradigms, on the notion of pretty much leaving things as they are but with a few different focus points here and there. Re-arranging deckchairs.

And if anyone would try on ‘real change’, they’d likely be voted down in record numbers, because the end of growth will mean loss of wealth and prosperity everywhere. And neither the people nor the times are ready for that message. Let alone the media machine or the establishment it serves. Which would rather go to war than admit they lost and give up their profits.

Before moving on to the most prominent and perhaps urgent examples, the US and UK, let’s take a look at a handful or so European countries. By the way, the European Union is a prime example of an entity that is caught blinded on the way towards being ungovernable like a deer in 27/28 pairs of headlights. No growth, no EU.

In the same way that, as I explained in the earlier articles, all supranational entities face the fate of the dodo. Or at least the existing ones do, with their structures geared towards ever increasing centralization of power and money. Countries, societies, people will always find ways to trade and cooperate, and they will again, but the next time they do it will be only if and when they keep control over decisions that concern what’s important to them.

But on to those European countries on their way towards challenging existing power structures and governability. Italy has a -constitutional- referendum on December 4, and it looks right now like PM Renzi will lose that, opening the way for our friend Beppe Grillo and his M5S Five Star movement to take over. Beppe wasn’t against the euro when we met in 2010, but he is now. And M5S has since grown hugely, into a solid national force.

In the rich core of the EU, there are general elections in Holland in March 2017, France in April and Germany in September 2017. Holland’s traditional parties have been losing clout for a long time, and Geert Wilders’ anti-Islam anti-EU pro-Freedom party scores big in the polls. And that in a country that says it’s doing great, talks about raising wages across the board and is stuck in a massive housing bubble.

France has a president, Hollande, who’s polling lower numbers (a while ago it was 6%) than any US president probably ever did in history, and that’s saying something. France has new crown princes on Hollande’s Socialist side in PM Manuel Valls and Economy Minister Emmanuel Macron, but they are badly tainted by Hollande’s ‘achievements’.

They have old crown princes for the Republican conservative party in ex-PM Sarkozy and the for some reason very popular Alain Juppé, but both can really only try and steal votes from Marine Le Pen’s Front National by leaning ever further right. Which leaves Le Pen, who has sworn to take France out of the EU, as the no. 1 contender.

Given what might happen in Italy, Holland and France, one must wonder what the September 2017 German elections will even matter anymore when they happen. Unless an M5S type movement stands up there, Merkel will have no choice but to pull sharply to the right to try and hold off the right wing AfD from getting into a kingmaker position. Germany’s once proud and strong left wing movement looks bound for near extinction.

Belgium and Spain don’t have elections scheduled for 2017, but both have recently endured long periods without functioning governments, and both look no closer to solving the issues than they were before. Just look at Wallonia blocking the CETA trade deal between the EU and Canada. One might say they already are, for all intents and purposes, on the verge of being ungovernable.

Grillo, Wilders, Le Pen and Spain’s Podemos are very different people and movements, but what they have in common is they can produce such a backlash in their respective countries, win or lose, that they can render the existing political structures obsolete and thereby their countries ungovernable. Maybe, then, those structures are already obsolete, and maybe that’s why they’ve gained such popularity?!

Plenty of candidates in Europe for governmental chaos; and I haven’t even touched on many countries, including in Eastern Europe, where the end of growth will shatter many dreams and promises of better lives that have been put on hold indefinitely. Even as many Czechs and Polish workers risk being sent back home from countries like Britain. Europe truly is a continent full of powder kegs. Even before you add refugees.

However, I still think the US and UK are first in line when it comes to the risk of being rendered ungovernable. Partly simply because of timing, and partly because the differences between various ‘groups’ and movements are as pronounced as they are already today. Both countries are running out of carpet to sweep their dirt under.

A conspicuous part in all this is played by the nations’ respective media, who seem to have given up all attempts at pretending to be neutral, a.k.a. ‘journalistic’. Traditional media, newspapers and radio and TV channels, used to have reporters and then, separately, they would have opinion columns, and the difference would be clear. But that’s all gone, every single article is now an opinion piece, which goes a long way towards explaining why people turn their backs on them.

The MSM media are digging their own graves. Or, rather, their graves were being digitally dug anyway, and they’re greatly speeding up the process of their own demise. What America and Britain would need right now is a ‘traditional media outlet’ -just one- that is actually objective; the first one that tries that approach could make a killing, but all are scared of being killed in the process.

Moreover, most ‘reporters’ have fooled themselves into thinking that they ARE objective; that ‘objective’ means Trump and Brexit MUST be condemned, as well as everyone and everything that has anything to do with the two, and some that don’t, like Putin. Which happens to play a major role into how both countries inexorably slide down into a state of chaos.

Their traditional political parties are self-immolating as we speak, and yet in neither country is there space for new parties to stand up. That seems to be a major difference (perhaps it’s an Anglo thing?) from countries in continental Europe, and even there things are screaming out of hand. The post-growth model appears to be: new parties or not, the incumbents are toast. Plenty room for big gaping holes.

Post Brexit, the UK has the Tories, who lost the Brexit vote but for some reason are still in power, just with a different figurehead. But they are hopelessly divided in pro-Brexit and pro-EU factions, and they appear so far to be messing up anything at all having to do with Brexit. All the egos collide too, of course; egos are all that politics has left to provide us.

Then there’s the Labor Party, which is equally hopelessly divided into the pro-Corbyn camp and the anti-Corbyn ‘Blairites’, which have conducted a kind of guerrilla warfare that might put the Viet Cong to shame. The Blairites have made such a fuss over Corbyn not being electable that they made their wishes come true like a boomerang. But that’s the MPs, not the voters or even the party members, who are behind Corbyn in massive droves.

The UK doesn’t have a general election scheduled until 2020, but with all the infighting and even more importantly the ‘real’ start of Brexit that’s supposed to come in early 2017, and/or a potential parliamentary vote seeking to make the referendum null and void, it’s hard to see how the country could NOT descend into total chaos way before 2020.

The people who were comfortable before June 23 blame it all on ‘Brexiteers’, but they conveniently forget that before that date they completely ignored the people who did vote to Leave the EU, and are therefore now grasping at straws when it comes to explanations. The term ‘deplorables’ has been patented by the Hillary camp, but it seems to express quite well how Remain feels about Brexit voters today. And that’s toxic for any society.

This is just not good enough. Brexit voters from what I can see are a mix between those who have been hit hardest by former PM Cameron and his goon squad (and ignored by Remainers), and those who really find the EU a failed experiment, an aspect I rarely see discussed in Britain. They should be elated to be rid of Brussels, but it’s all only about how much money they will have short term, not about identity or pride or anything.

A country full of people pointing fingers at others, while remaining blind to their own failures. The mote and the beam, a recipe for mayhem. So you have this entire godawful political mess, and now imagine throwing in the end of growth, and deteriorating economic circumstances from here on in.

Britain had better start some kind of National Conversation first on where it wants to go, hire something in the vein of a bunch of National Therapists to tell people it’s not okay to blame everything on somebody else, whether they’re Brits or foreigners, or, with Scotland planning another independence vote, we could be back all the way to Braveheart.

That leaves the US. The country that has elections before any of the other ‘basket cases’. And, this being America, the land that’s better than anyone at painting pictures of itself as tempting as they can be false, the antagonism is dripping off the walls and through the streets. The land that discusses which lives matter.

It’s glaringly obvious that the majority of the US media would like you to believe that when it comes to ungovernability, a Trump victory would be a sure bet to lead the US into political mayhem. That may be true, though it’s by no means guaranteed, they make it up as they go along, but a Hillary win may well end up being even worse.

As I wrote mid-September in “Hillary Became Unelectable Long Ago”, Mrs. Clinton faces a ton of unanswered questions that will not just go away just because she might win a vote. If anything, scrutiny may well increase, and a lot, if she wins on November 8. And that’s not just because the Donald is a sore loser (which also may or may not be true).

There are a lot of intelligence (FBI) voices protesting the decision to not charge Hillary for her email shenanigans. There are plenty of serious issues related to the capture of the DNC by Hillary’s campaign, and the subsequent ousting of Bernie Sanders and all his supporters. The campaign went so far as to pay people to -violently- disrupt Trump events. Now spell democracy for me.

What may play an even bigger role going forward is the unrelenting blame game played by the campaign on Russia and Vladimir Putin, a litany of allegations for which precious little proof, if any, has been presented. Trying to link Putin to Trump to Julian Assange may have seemed a winning election strategy, and it may prove to be one, crazy as it is, but on November 9 the world will still keep turning and-a churning. And where are they all then?

Trump will not forget this. The Republicans won’t. The FBI won’t. All the people who support Wikileaks won’t. Vladimir Putin won’t. And neither will the leaders of a lot of other countries. They have now seen that sovereign nations and their leaders can be used as cannon fodder in a US election, or any other US political purposes, and that’s going to make them feel queasy, and then some, for a long time.

It’s very hard to see how Hillary and her people, as well as the American media, can climb down from the stance they’ve taken. It’s not exactly something you can easily apologize for after the fact. So the only thing to do would be to dig in and persevere.

For the media, as I said, it’ll be merely another step towards irrelevance. Just a bit steeper. For Hillary and her supporters, it won’t be that smooth of a way down. When they dig in deeper into their trenches, all that’s left them is to try and escalate the Russia tension.

But while an attack on Russia may go down reasonable well in American minds, Hillary would need to involve NATO, and there are plenty of member countries, and their citizens, who will not accept anything of the kind, no matter what their leaders say. The fact that NATO relies on unity would become a liability instead of an asset, in the same way that the EU will experience.

NATO would fall apart if the US under a Hillary presidency attacks Russia. So would the EU, which will fall apart anyway. And that’s just on the international front.

Domestically, the Obama reign has been ‘saved’ by those trillions from the Fed, by the crazy growth in debt, both public and private, and by a list as long as your arm of questionable ‘official’ data, unemployment numbers, personal ‘wealth’, that sort of thing. While we all know that there would not be a Trump if those numbers reflected Americans’ real lives.

Trump may go away, though it won’t be in silence, but what he represents will not. And what he represents is 180º squarely removed from Hillary. And it’s not going to be subdued, silent or obedient. Blaming that on Trump, or on things he says, misses the point by a mile.

Given what the Hillary campaign has perpetrated, given the links to the Clinton Foundation, and given a ton of other things, it’s not all that crazy that Trump says he may not accept an election result off the bat. And given what many voices in the Democratic party, including Obama, have said in the past about elections and systems being rigged, it’s nonsense to try and demonize him for suggesting that.

Of course American elections can be rigged. Hanging chads or not. As long as people have to wait in line for hours in certain districts to cast their vote, and as long as Diebold machines are used, they can be rigged. But you can’t say it out loud?

Look, if Trump wins, how docile will the Democrat crowd be, given the propaganda machine targeted at Putin and Assange and anyone else (Bernie!) who dared stand in Hillary’s way? If the result is close, will Hillary accept it without a single protest or question? She won’t. But if Trump says he’ll keep you in suspense about the exact same thing, he’s a threat to democracy itself?

Points of view and belief are so far apart that indeed, democracy is under threat. But not because of Trump. That threat goes back to times long before him.

Hillary owes her position, and her wealth, to the Saudis and Qataris and Wall Street banks and US industrial/military neocons. And they will all demand that she return the favor. But they want something completely different than the people who vote for her. And since the economy is shrinking, she will have to take whatever it is they demand in return for putting her on her pedestal, away from the people who voted for her.

And no matter how much propaganda is unleashed upon Americans, as they see their lives deteriorate, they will be on to this, more and more. And they will lean towards Trump or Bernie Sanders -or someone else in the future-, anyone they feel expresses their frustration.

Hillary won’t be able to ‘cure’ the economy any more than Obama has, she won’t have the Fed’s virtual trillions to help her veil the real state of the economy, and she’s already close to the lowest ‘likeability’ rate in history to begin with.

I’m thinking Trump would probably be an awful president, but he perhaps wouldn’t be the worst option. And I’m saying that from the point of view of keeping America governable going forward, something he may well screw up yuugely, but at least he’s not certain to.

It’ll be hard to keep America quiet in the years to come whoever wins, and I’m going to have to think about this more, I just wanted to say for now that what many people think and claim is a given, is not. And that is a big thing given that the elections are only 16 days away.

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