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White House Set To Release Secret Pages From Sept 11 Report
White House Set To Release Secret Pages From Sept 11 Report
Over the past several weeks, the White House has been very vocal about its opposition to both the Bipartisan Bill that would allow families of Sept 11 victims to sue Saudi Arabia for its involvement in the WTC attack, as well as stonewalling when it comes to releasing the confidential “28 pages” that have been withheld from the Congressional inquiry report into 9/11 and which allegedly provide damning evidence about the the perpetrators of the worst terrorist attack on US soil.
As reported last weekend, none other than Saudi Arabia made its displeasure with any potential revelations quite public when it threatened it would sell up to $750 in US assets held by the kingdom should the White House allow more public scrutiny into Saudi involvement in Sept 11.
Perhaps in response to the spike in public interest following the resurgence to prominence of “Document 17”, Obama appears ready to make concessions. Recall that as we reported last week, according to a 47-page US memo known as document 17, written in 2003 and quietly declassified last year, the FBI learnt that the flight certificate of one of the Sept 11 pilots was in an envelope from the Saudi embassy in Washington.
Saudi Arabian embassy in Washington, AP Photo
And now, as AP reports this morning, the Obama administration will likely soon release at least part of a 28-page secret chapter from a congressional inquiry into 9/11 that may shed light on possible Saudi connections to the attackers.
The documents, kept in a secure room in the basement of the Capitol, contain information from the joint congressional inquiry into “specific sources of foreign support for some of the Sept. 11 hijackers while they were in the United States.”
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
“This Is Catastrophic” – Thousands Of Gallons Of Radioactive Waste Leak At Nuclear Site
“This Is Catastrophic” – Thousands Of Gallons Of Radioactive Waste Leak At Nuclear Site
The ongoing radioactive leak problems at the Hanford Site, a nuclear storage tank in Washington State, are nothing new.
We first wrote about the ongoing radioative leakage at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, created as part of the Manhattan Project to build the atomic bomb, in 2013.
As a reminder, during the Cold War, the project was expanded to include nine nuclear reactors and five large plutonium processing complexes, which produced plutonium for most of the 60,000 weapons in the U.S. nuclear arsenal. Alas, the site has been leaking ever since, as many of the early safety procedures and waste disposal practices were inadequate and Hanford’s operations released significant amounts of radioactive materials into the air and the neighboring Columbia River.
Hanford’s weapons production reactors were decommissioned at the end of the Cold War, but the decades of manufacturing left behind 53 million US gallons of high-level radioactive waste, an additional 25 million cubic feet of solid radioactive waste, 200 square miles of contaminated groundwater beneath the site and occasional discoveries of undocumented contaminations.
The Hanford site represents two-thirds of the nation’s high-level radioactive waste by volume. Today, Hanford is the most contaminated nuclear site in the United States and is the focus of the nation’s largest environmental cleanup. The government spends $2 billion each year on Hanford cleanup — one-third of its entire budget for nuclear cleanup nationally. The cleanup is expected to last decades.
However, as Krugman would say, the government was not spending nearly enough, and after a major documented leak in 2013, over the weekend, thousands of gallons of radioactive waste are estimated to have leaked from the Site once again, triggering an alarm and causing one former worker to label it as “catastrophic.”
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
“War, Confiscation Or Redistribution” – An Anecdote On Systemic Reset
“War, Confiscation Or Redistribution” – An Anecdote On Systemic Reset
Excerpted from One River Asset Management’s Eric Peters’ comments…
Anecdote: “People work in order to convert their time into a unit of account,” he said. “We call that money, and it’s an invention that allows us to store time.”
Most people have stored little or none. So when they receive money, they quickly purchase necessities; food, shelter, health care.
“People who are able to save money inevitably purchase real estate, stocks, bonds – all of which are alternative vehicles for storing time.”
One share of Google stores 30 hours of work for the average American, or 30 minutes of copying-and-pasting formation documents for the average hedge fund attorney.“Bill Gates has stored enough time to fund a 1bln person army for 20 years.”
As the gulf between people’s income has grown, the amount of stored time has accumulated in fewer hands.
“Wealthy people convert their hours into financial assets so that they can accumulate excess hours relative to their fellow man. But the average worker is simply thinking how to exchange hours for dollars and then exchange those for food.”
Central banks face a different problem altogether. They need to get people who’ve saved time to exchange it for something other than clever inventions that store it. They’ve largely failed. So now, everything that stores time is extremely expensive and offers little or negative return, while the pace of economic activity slows.
“The problem that we face now is that there is simply too much time that’s been saved. Another way of saying it is that there’s too much capital in the world, in too few hands.”
To restart the system, capital needs to exchange hands or be destroyed, spurring people to rebuild their store of time, rather than just save it.
“It is an elemental truth that at some point, through inflation, war, or confiscation and redistribution, this imbalance will correct, and the system will then restart.”
Federal Regulators Accuse Banks Of Not Having Credible Crisis Plans, Would Need Another Bailout
Federal Regulators Accuse Banks Of Not Having Credible Crisis Plans, Would Need Another Bailout
Perhaps the biggest farce to result from the Dodd-Frank legislation designed to “rein in” banks was the ridiculous notion of “living wills” – a concept that makes zero sense in an environment where the failure of even one bank assures a systemic crisis and could – as the Lehman financial crisis showed – lead to the collapse of all other interlinked financial institutions.
Which is why we were not surprised to read this morning that federal regulators announced that five out of eight of the biggest U.S. banks do not have credible plans for winding down operations during a crisis without the help of public money.
Which is precisely the point: now that the precedent has been set and banks know they can rely on the generosity of taxpayers (with the blessing of legislators) why should they even bother planning; they know very well that if just one bank fails, all would face collapse, and the only recourse would be trillions more in taxpayer aid.
As Reuters writes, the “living wills” that the Federal Reserve and Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation jointly agreed were not credible came from Bank of America, Bank of New York Mellon, J.P. Morgan Chase, State Street, Wells Fargo. What is more impressive is that the Fed and FDIC found any living will to be credible.
Also amusing: it was only the FDIC which alone determined that the plan submitted by Goldman Sachs was not credible while the Goldman-dominated Fed gave its blessing; alternatively, the Federal Reserve Board on its own found that the plan of Morgan Stanley – Goldman’s arch rival in investment banking – not credible. Citigroup’s living will did pass, but the regulators noted it had “shortcomings.”
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Former IMF Chief Economist Admits Japan’s “Endgame” Scenario Is Now In Play
Former IMF Chief Economist Admits Japan’s “Endgame” Scenario Is Now In Play
Back in October 2014, just after the BOJ drastically expanded its QE operation, we warned that the biggest risk facing the BOJ (and the ECB, and the Fed, and all other central banks actively soaking up securities from the open market) was a lack of monetizable supply. We cited Takuji Okubo, chief economist at Japan Macro Advisors in Tokyo, who said that at the scale of its current debt monetization, the BOJ could end up owning half of the JGB market by as early as in 2018. He added that “The BOJ is basically declaring that Japan will need to fix its long-term problems by 2018, or risk becoming a failed nation.”
Which is why 17 months ago we predicted that, contrary to expectations of even more QE from Kuroda, we said “the BOJ will not boost QE, and if anything will have no choice but to start tapering it down – just like the Fed did when its interventions created the current illiquidity in the US govt market – especially since liquidity in the Japanese government market is now non-existent and getting worse by the day.”
As part of our conclusion, we said we do not “expect the media to grasp the profound implications of this analysis not only for the BOJ but for all other central banks: we expect this to be summer of 2016’s business.”
Since then, the forecast has panned out largely as expected: both the ECB and BOJ, finding themselves collateral constrained, were forced to expand into other, even more unconventional methods of easing, whether it be NIRP in the case of the BOJ, or the outright purchases of corporate bonds as the ECB did a month ago.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Ron Paul Warns “The Conflict Between Government & Liberty Is At A Boiling Point”
Ron Paul Warns “The Conflict Between Government & Liberty Is At A Boiling Point”
This is excerpted from the introduction of Ron Paul’s Liberty Defined: 50 Essential Issues that Affect Our Freedom.
Liberty means to exercise human rights in any manner a person chooses so long as it does not interfere with the exercise of the rights of others. This means, above all else, keeping government out of our lives. Only this path leads to the unleashing of human energies that build civilization, provide security, generate wealth, and protect the people from systematic rights violations. In this sense, only liberty can truly ward off tyranny, the great and eternal foe of mankind.
The definition of liberty I use is the same one that was accepted by Thomas Jefferson and his generation. It is the understanding derived from the great freedom tradition, for Jefferson himself took his understanding from John Locke (1632–1704). I use the term “liberal” without irony or contempt, for the liberal tradition in the true sense, dating from the late Middle Ages until the early part of the twentieth century, was devoted to freeing society from the shackles of the state. This is an agenda I embrace, and one that I believe all should embrace.
To believe in liberty is not to believe in any particular social and economic outcome. It is to trust in the spontaneous order that emerges when the state does not intervene in human volition and human cooperation. It permits people to work out their problems for themselves, build lives for themselves, take risks and accept responsibility for the results, and make their own decisions.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
“The Game Is Rigged”: From Luxurious Lake Como Villa, Finance Professor Admits “QE Adds To Inequality”
“The Game Is Rigged”: From Luxurious Lake Como Villa, Finance Professor Admits “QE Adds To Inequality”
While attending the ultra-exclusive Ambrosetti Workshop, University of Chicago finance professor Luigi Zingales took a few minutes to discuss income inequality in an interview with Bloomberg.
We were delighted that the irony of being at a luxurious villa on the shores of Lake Como discussing income inequality wasn’t lost on the Booth PhD: “First of all it’s a bit funny to discuss about income inequality here at this luxurious villa in Como next to George Clooney’s villa”
As Jeb Bush might say, “Please laugh.”
Moving on: when asked if central bank policy is making people feel that they’ve really lost out, Zingales reiterates what we’ve known all along, namely that the real consequences of central bank actions don’t matter, what matters is simply how people perceive the central bank and its actions. If people are told enough by smart people on television that the economy has been fixed, and the market is a reflection of the fundamentals, then they’ll blindly support anything the fed does. After all, as long as whatever voodoo is going on over at the Eccles building is pushing 401k balances higher, then it must be right.
He then goes on as far as stating that capitalism in the U.S. has failed and been converted into a perverted, mutant, crony version and that “the game is rigged.”
“I think that people are willing to support capitalism if capitalism is providing growth, providing better income for everybody, and also if it has some at least appearance of being fair. Unfortunately, none of these conditions are in place today in the United States. I think that growth is limited, and disproportionately goes to a small fraction of the population. And there is a sense that the game is rigged.”
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Putin Denounces “Panama Papers” As U.S. Plot To Destabilize Russia
Putin Denounces “Panama Papers” As U.S. Plot To Destabilize Russia
The last few days days have been rife with speculation about the motivation, if any, behind the release of the Panama Papers, with the most prominent example coming from Wikileaks two days ago on Twitter which accused the journalist consortium behind the leak, the ICIJ, of being a “Washington DC based Ford, Soros funded soft-power tax-dodge which has a WikiLeaks problem” and adding that “PanamaPapers Putin attack was produced by OCCRP which targets Russia & former USSR and was funded by USAID & Soros.”
#PanamaPapers Putin attack was produced by OCCRP which targets Russia & former USSR and was funded by USAID & Soros.
Rothschild Humiliates Obama, Reveals That “America Is The Biggest Tax Haven In The World”
Rothschild Humiliates Obama, Reveals That “America Is The Biggest Tax Haven In The World”
In his speech yesterday, following the Treasury’s crack down on corporate tax inversions, Obama blamed “poorly designed” laws for allowing illicit money transfers worldwide. Since the speech came at a time when the entire world is still abuzz with the disclosure from the Panama Papers, Obama touched on that as well: “Tax avoidance is a big, global problem” he said on Tuesday, “a lot of it is legal, but that’s exactly the problem” because a lot of it is also illegal.
There is one major problem with that: of all the countries in the world, it is none other than the country of which Obama is president, the United States, that has become the world’s favorite offshore “tax haven” destination.
As Bloomberg, which first broke the story about Nevada’s use as a prominent tax haven early this year, writes, “Panama and the U.S. have at least one thing in common: Neither has agreed to new international standards to make it harder for tax evaders and money launderers to hide their money.”
Over the past several years, amid increased scrutiny by journalists, regulators and law enforcers, the global tax-haven landscape has shifted. In an effort to catch tax dodgers, almost 100 countries and other jurisdictions have agreed since 2014 to impose new disclosure requirements for bank accounts, trusts and some other investments held by international customers — standards issued by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a government-funded international policy group.
In short: while Obama is complaining about corporate tax avoidance and slamming Panama, he is encouraging it in the U.S.
Places like Switzerland and Bermuda are agreeing, at least in principle, to share bank account information with tax authorities in other countries. Only a handful of nations have declined to sign on. The most prominent is the U.S. The other ona is, of course, Panama, and we just saw what happened there.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
How To Hack A Presidential Election
How To Hack A Presidential Election
There is a growing recognition of the increasing tail wagging the dog nature of the internet’s control over election outcomes. We recently detailed “the hidden persuaders” at work showing how the internet has spawned subtle forms of influence that can flip elections and manipulate everything we say, think and do. Confirming all of this to be chillingly true is Andrés Sepúlveda, who rigged elections throughout Latin America for almost a decade. On the question of whether the U.S. presidential campaign is being tampered with, he is unequivocal – “I’m 100 percent sure it is.”
Liberty Blitzkrieg’s Mike Krieger excerpts a must-read Bloomberg article,
In July 2015, Sepúlveda sat in the small courtyard of the Bunker, poured himself a cup of coffee from a thermos, and took out a pack of Marlboro cigarettes. He says he wants to tell his story because the public doesn’t grasp the power hackers exert over modern elections or the specialized skills needed to stop them. “I worked with presidents, public figures with great power, and did many things with absolutely no regrets because I did it with full conviction and under a clear objective, to end dictatorship and socialist governments in Latin America,” he says. “I have always said that there are two types of politics—what people see and what really makes things happen. I worked in politics that are not seen.”Rendón, says Sepúlveda, saw that hackers could be completely integrated into a modern political operation, running attack ads, researching the opposition, and finding ways to suppress a foe’s turnout. As for Sepúlveda, his insight was to understand that voters trusted what they thought were spontaneous expressions of real people on social media more than they did experts on television and in newspapers. He knew that accounts could be faked and social media trends fabricated, all relatively cheaply.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
The Trade Wars Begin: China Retaliates To Steel Tariffs With Global Anti-Dumping Duties
The Trade Wars Begin: China Retaliates To Steel Tariffs With Global Anti-Dumping Duties
When looking back in history, December 23, 2015 may be the date the global trade wars officially began. On that day, as we reported at the time, the U.S. imposed a 256% tariff on Chinese steel imports.
It did so perhaps with good reason: with its local end markets mothballed, China was desperate to dump as much excess capacity as possible offshore with shipments of steel, oil products and aluminum all reaching new highs according to trade data from the General Administration of Customs, and the result was a dramatic drop in US prices.
On the other hand, with Chinese mills, smelters and refiners all producing far more than can be purchased domestically amid slowing domestic demand, as well as the government’s anti-pollution crackdown, China’s decision to ship the excess overseas was also understandable.
As Bloomberg wrote at the time, “the flood of Chinese supplies is roiling manufacturers around the world and exacerbating trade frictions. The steel market is being overwhelmed with metal from China’s government-owned and state-supported producers, a collection of industry associations have said. The nine groups, including Eurofer and the American Iron and Steel Institute, said there is almost 700 million tons of excess capacity around the world, with the Asian nation contributing as much as 425 million tons.”
2016 was expected to get even worse: Colin Hamilton, head of commodities research, said the the price of hot-rolled coil, used in everything from fridges to freight containers, may decline about 13 percent next year. China’s steel exports, which have ballooned to more than 100 million metric tons this year, may stay at those levels for the rest of the decade as infrastructure and construction demand continues to falter.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
According To Morgan Stanley This Is The Biggest Threat To Deutsche Bank’s Survival
According To Morgan Stanley This Is The Biggest Threat To Deutsche Bank’s Survival
Two weeks ago, on one of the slides in a Morgan Stanley presentation, we found something which we thought was quite disturbing. According to the bank’s head of EMEA research Huw van Steenis, while in Davos, he sat “next to someone in policy circles who argued that we should move quickly to a cashless economy so that we could introduce negative rates well below 1% – as they were concerned that Larry Summers’ secular stagnation was indeed playing out and we would be stuck with negative rates for a decade in Europe. They felt below (1.5)% depositors would start to hoard notes, leading to yet further complexities for monetary policy.”
As it turns out, just like Deutsche Bank – which first warned about the dire consequences of NIRP to Europe’s banks – Morgan Stanley is likewise “concerned” and for good reason.
With the ECB set to unveil its next set of unconventional measures during its next meeting on March 10 among which almost certainly even more negative rates (for the simple reason that a vast amount of monetizable govt bonds are trading with a yield below the ECB’s deposit rate floor and are ineligible for purchase) the ECB may cut said rates anywhere between 10bps, 20bps, or even more (thereby sending those same bond yields plunging ever further into negative territory).
As Morgan Stanley warns that any substantial rate cut by the ECB will only make matters worse. As it says, “Beyond a 10-20bp ECB Deposit Rate Cut, We Believe Impacts on Earnings Could Be Exponential.”
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Citi: “We Have A Problem”
Citi: “We Have A Problem”
In his latest must read presentation, Citigroup’s Matt King continues to expose and mock the increasing helplessness and cluelessness of central bankers, something this website has done since 2009 knowing full well how it all ends (incidentally not in a deflationary whimper, quite the opposite).
Take Matt King’s September 2015 piece in which he warned that one of the most serious problems facing the world is that we may have hit its debt ceiling beyond which any debt creation is merely pushing on a string leading to slower growth and further deflation. Or his more recent report which explained why despite aggressive easing by the BOJ and ECB, asset prices continue to fall as a result of quantitative tightening by EM reserve managers and China, which are soaking up the same liquidity injected by DM central banks.
Overnight, he put it all together in a simple and elegant way that only Matt King can do in a presentation titled ominously “Don’t look down: You might find too many negatives.”
In it he first proceeds to lay out how things have dramatically changed in recent months compared to prior years: first, the “appalling” asset returns and the “rising dislocations” between asset prices in recent months and especially in 2016, or a broken market which is not just about Crude (with correlation regimes flipping back and forth), or China (as YTD bank returns in Japan and Switzerland are far worse than those in the China-exposed Eurozone), as appetite for risk has effectively disappeared. Worse, as the Japanese NIRP showed, incremental easing in the form of QE actually triggered ongoing weakness, sending both the Nikkei and the USDJPY plunging, suggesting that central bank grip on markets is almost gone.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Germany Reintroduces “Border Controls” With Austria, Sends Riot Police As Refugee Crisis Spirals Out Of Control
Germany Reintroduces “Border Controls” With Austria, Sends Riot Police As Refugee Crisis Spirals Out Of Control
Two weeks ago, in what was the first official shot across the bow to Europe’s long-standing “Schengen” customs union, we reported that the Italian province of Bolzano across from the Austrian border announced it is willing to “temporarily suspend Schengen” and “restore border controls” following a request by the German state of Bavaria.
Today, none other than Europe’s master state, Germany itself, is about to launch an ICBM at Schengen when, as BBC reports, “Germany is to reintroduce some form of controls on its border with Austria to cope with the influx of migrants, German and Austrian media report.” While the BBC said that it is not clear what measures would be introduced, it is likely that a full return to the pre-Schengen era, with extensive customs checks of every border crosser is imminent.
BBBC further reports that”more than 13,000 migrants arrived into Munich alone on Saturday. Germany’s vice-chancellor said the country was “at the limit of its capabilities”. Germany’s Bild newspaper and Austria’s Kronen Zeitung said controls would be in place on the Bavaria-Austria border. Germany expects 800,000 migrants to arrive this year.”
Also, according to Germany’s Spiegel, German Interior Minister, Thomas de Maiziere, would make an announcement in the coming hours. Since last month, Mr de Maiziere said the Schengen agreement, which allows free movement between a large number of European countries, could be suspended, it is quite likely that as of today, Europe’s customs union will officially be halted if only temporarily.
Kronen Zeitung said that Bavarian police will begin to carry out checks “to determine immediately who is entitled to asylum”, but it is not clear how such checks would be made.
Earlier on Sunday, Germany’s Vice-Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel, who is also economy minister, warned the country was being stretched to its limits by the new arrivals.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
