Month: June 2016

Explosions, Gunfire, Multiple Injuries And Casualties Reported At Istanbul’s Ataturk Airport

Two explosions, together with gunfire, took place moments ago at Ataturk International Aiport in Istanbul, according to Bloomberg and the major newswires. The interior ministry adds that there have been multiple injuries following the explosions, while CNN Turk adds that there are casualties.

  • 2 EXPLOSIONS OCCURED IN ISTANBUL ATATURK AIRPORT: INTERIOR MIN.
  • MULTIPLE INJURIES IN ISTANBUL AIRPORT BLASTS: INTERIOR MIN.
  • TAXIS FERRYING WOUNDED PEOPLE FROM ISTANBUL AIRPORT – WITNESS ON CNN TURK
  • TURKEY MAY DECIDE TO CLOSE ATATURK AIRPORT TO FLIGHTS: DHMI

It was not immediately clear what caused the explosions. An eye witness told CNN Turk television that blasts took place shortly after gun fire between police officers and unknown persons near the airport’s car park. CNN Turk also adds that casualties have been reported.

Turkish media adds that two grenades were thrown into the airport with others suggesting that suicide bombers detonated early after being spotted by the security. According to Twitter report, the attack took place in the parking lot.

More details:

 

Photos from the scene of the explosion below.

 

This is a developing story.

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What’s Next For The S&P: “All Eyes On 1,950” The Charts Say

With global equity and especially FX markets underoing historic moves in the last two days, every trader’s playbook has been tossed aside as setups and trendlines everywhere have been broken. So for everyone trading on nothing but momentum – which these days is most, and certainly all algos  –  here are some observations from BofA’s chief technicial Stephen Suttmeier who says that with the S&P failing to breach 2,100 again, and having broken 2025, “all eyes are now on 1950.”

The S&P 500 has once again stalled within the 2100-2135 resistance. Today’s break of 2025 (May low), if sustained into the close, places the focus on 1950-1930 or 8-9% down from the early June high. The latter level is near the 61.8% Fibonacci retracement of the February to early-June rally near at 1928.69

 

Another interesting chart: US stock leadership is posting a new weekly high vs. rest of the word.

The US remains leadership and scored another new weekly relative high vs. the rest of the world last week. The last big relative up cycle for MSCI US (MXUS) vs. MSCI World ex-US (MXWOU) was from a November 1988 low until a January 2002 peak. If the current cycle lasts as long, the US could outperform the rest of the world until early 2021.

 

What about the future? Suttmeier points out a rare event in the S&P: the SPX is up over 1% on Thurs & down over 3% on Fri

Last Thursday’s gain of 1.34% followed by Friday’s drop of 3.59% was the 76th time going back to 1928 that the S&P 500 had a session gain of at least 1% followed by a session loss of at least 3%. This is also the first time this has happened since 11/9/2011 and 8/10/2011. Following this rare event, the S&P 500 has negative average and median 10, 20, and 30-day returns, sub-par 65, 130, 190, and 250-day returns, and is up less often than average over these periods.

 

Finally, note that Friday (6/24) was was 400 calendar days since the S&P 500 hit a new 252-session (52-week high). This has happened only 19 times since 1929. After going 400 calendar days without a new 52-week high, the S&P 500 has sub-par 10, 20, 30, 65, 130, and 190-day returns but the 250-day return is more in line with the historical average (Table 6). We believe a new 52-week high on the S&P 500 after a long pause would be bullish and this has proven to be elusive given stiff 2100-2135 resistance. However, the silver lining is that 13 out of the prior 18 times the S&P 500 went 400 days without a new  52-week high the S&P 500 hit a new 52-week high within the next year.

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Forget Hikes – Rate-Cut Odds Soar For September As NIRP “Bets” Hit Record High

Despite a modest bounce today, the collapse in stock prices and bond yields since the 'non-event' "won't affect our market" Brexit vote has sent market-implied rate-hike odds careening lower. In fact, there is now a 0% chance of a rate hike to November and a 23% chance of rate-cut in September with December (post-election) rate-hike odds just 7.7%!!! Fed Credibility is official dead…

Fed rate movement expectations have collapsed…

 

With stunning 23% chance of cut now in September…

 

And market bets (Par Eurodollar Call Open Interest) on NIRP in 2017 are soaring to record highs…

 

Charts: Bloomberg

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Satyajit Das: What Does Brexit Really Signify?

Authored by Satyajit Das (former banker and author whose latest book is ‘A Banquet of Consequences’), originally posted at Yves Smith's Naked Capitalism blog,

The Brexit debate has made unprecedented demands on vocabulary, adjectives and hyperbole. The word ‘historical’ is exhausted.

The only fact is that a majority of those who voted have elected for Great Britain to leave the European Union. All else is conjecture.

Few political analysts, super-forecasters, pollsters, betting shops and financial markets anticipated the result. Undaunted, the same people are now outlining the consequences and likely outcomes. Although close reading indicates that the trite consensus is ‘uncertainty’. Familiarity with four words – “I do not know”- is sadly lacking.

Perhaps the most interesting commentary after the vote was the gallows humour of trader: “Brexit could be followed by Grexit, Departugal, Italeave, Czechout, Oustria, Finish, Slovakout, Latervia and Byegium. Looks like only Remania will stay”.

When they sit down to provide the final verdict on 23 June 2016, future historians will ponder several issues.

First, the fact that the referendum was called will cause bafflement. Conservative leader David Cameron pledged to hold the referendum to placate anti-EU sections of his own party and out-flank a perceived challenge from the U.K. Independence Party. Given his frequent mention of the risks of Brexit, the wisdom of calling the referendum in the first place remains puzzling.

 

David Cameron, who did much to make the Tories electable and won a famous victory, has gone, leaving behind a divided Conservative party. The Labour Party too are damaged and may acquire a new leader. Its support of the Remain campaign put it at odds with its core constituencies. The episode has left behind a divided country, which will prove difficult to unite or even hold together.

 

Second, the unedifying debate will merit careful analysis. The tone was shrill, lacking civility. The shooting of one MP was a symptom of the febrile atmosphere created.

 

The participation of respected analysts, commentators and supposedly non-political public officials brought them no credit. Facts were water boarded to support partisan positions. A future of economic damnation outside the EU and a revival of Empire without it are equally illusory. A debate about immigration policy is not automatically racist in nature.

 

Foreign plenipotentiaries, including the US President, weighed in with advice on how the British should vote. One European government took out newspaper ads seeking to influence the vote. There will be speculation on the effects of these unprecedented interventions on the result.

 

Third, the surprise at the result among those who voted to remain will be scrutinised. The wilful ignorance of the affluent, educated and cosmopolitan on how divided and polarised British society has become is striking. The voting patterns mirrored divisions along the lines of class, economic standing, education, age, residence and ethnicity.

 

The debate was always between economics and sovereignty (in the guise of immigration and border control). Exaggerated claims of economic losses, based on macro-economic models which have failed repeatedly over recent years, to engender fear were rejected. Interestingly, some UK regions reliant on exports to the EU voted strongly to leave.

 

For the disenfranchised, the fruits of growth, investment and international trade remain unattainable. Threats, perceived or real, to jobs and uncertainty about nationality are powerful. The inconvenience of the Non-EU line at immigration, freedom of movement or ability to own a holiday retreat does not concern those who do not have those opportunities. As one voter told the Guardian with stunning simplicity: “If you’ve got money, you vote in … if you haven’t got money, you vote out”.

 

Fourth, the significance of the ultimate decision on core beliefs will be eagerly studied. The failure of the economic arguments to sway the vote may spell the end of economic rationalism which began with Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. It may be that the vote against the EU was in part a protest vote against the long term changes in economic structure of the UK economy which has destroyed many working and middle class lives.

 

Insofar as the decision represents a retreat to economic nationalism and closed borders, it may highlight the diminishing appeal of globalisation. Free movement of goods and services, lowering of trade barriers and cheaper foreign labour has not benefitted everybody.

 

Conservative American politician Pat Buchanan’s observation in Pittsburgh Post Gazette on 3 January 1994 remains uncomfortably accurate: “…it is blue collar Americans whose jobs are lost when trade barriers fall, working class kids who bleed and die in Mogadishu…the best and brightest tend to escape the worst consequences of the policies they promote…This may explain …why national surveys show repeatedly that the best and wealthiest Americans are the staunchest internationalists on both security and economic issues…”

 

Increasing scepticism about experts and expert advice may also be one effect. The views of the governor of the Bank of England and the Archbishop of Canterbury were disregarded equally.

 

In a pivotal moment in the campaign, challenged to name a single expert who thought that Brexit would economically benefit Britain, Justice Secretary Michael Gove’s defiant response was that: “I think people in this country have had enough of experts.” Attacked for being anti-intellectual, Mr. Gove’s position highlighted the fact that over-reaching and arrogant experts, especially on economic matters, have been often incorrect, sometime disastrously.

 

The reality is that experts no longer relate to ordinary people. Policy orthodoxy, such as free trade, de-industrialisation and, in the aftermath of the 2008 crisis, austerity and unconventional monetary policy, have not benefitted large parts of the population. Ordinary people’s appetite for sacrifice in return for unquantified future benefits promised by experts has waned. The gravitational pull of aspiration, central to Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan’s brand of conservatism, has faded as trickle-down economics has betrayed many people.

 

Fifth, the obsession with financial market effects in the aftermath of the decision will confound posterity. Markets complacently assumed that Britain would remain an EU member and backed it with other people’s money. There is no guarantee that their highly changeable views are reliable. Ascribing a 45% to Britain leaving in a result which was always binary is curious. Panic from the masters of the universe at the slightest sign of uncertainty does not support their claims for perspicacity, superiority and understanding of risk.

 

The immediate effects on currencies and interest rates were significant. But it will take time to see whether there are major casualties as a result of the usual highly leveraged bets or what the longer term effects are. The real economy and political effects will take time to emerge and is highly dependent on events not yet known.

 

The decision to downgrade the UK’s credit rating to a still very strong ‘AA’ was curious. The UK’s ability to meet its obligations have not changed. It was never part of the single currency and has the ability to create Pounds Sterling to meet its obligations. With rates near zero, the effect of any change in rating is likely to be minimal.

 

Sixth, history will have to decide whether the vote was simply a mutiny on H.M.A.S Britannia or an influential one on the shape of the modern world, the structure of society and values which resonates and leading to change in other countries. If the latter proves correct, then the event will prove truly significant.

 

The Leave campaign may have won the vote but there is confusion about the UK’s redefined relationship with the EU. Maintaining UK’s continued special access to European markets would require accepting many policies rejected by a majority of those who voted. The decision by Boris Johnson, an Etonian like David Cameron and of similar background and leanings, to back the Leave vote showed ruthless calculation and accurate political sensitivities. His position reflected his aspirations for leadership not solidarity with the Leave voters or fundamental policy shifts. In an editorial after the vote, Mr. Johnson seized with post Brexit Bre-gret or Bre-morse suggested that wholesale changes in the relationship between the UK and the EU were now unnecessary.

 

The prospects of meaningful reform within the EU also seems remote. European Council President Donald Tusk, speaking for a number of Eastern European nation, admitted that the EU’s utopian visions are not shared by ordinary people. But other leaders, especially in the EU Commission, do not recognise the problem. German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier promised that “we won’t let anyone take Europe from us.” The unfortunate malapropism (about the “us”; whether it was the EU or Germany) highlighted a central, unresolved problem.

 

The EU is circling the wagons, painting Britain as a reluctant European and seeks to punish her to dissuade other nations from similar actions. EU Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker’s tart summary reflects this view: “It’s not an amicable divorce, but it never really was a close love affair anyway”.

 

The intellectual response is framed by cognitive dissonance. Kenneth Rogoff, Professor of Economics and Public Policy at Harvard University, saw it as “Russian roulette for republics”. He complained that the simple majority system of those who voted (36% of eligible voters voted for leaving) was an absurdly low bar. Professor Rogoff argued that such a significant decision should not be made without appropriate checks and balance. In an editorial price for the Business Insider, American opinion-ist Josh Barro termed the decision “a tantrum”. British voters had made “a bad choice”. It was an “error of direct democracy”. Such important decisions should not be decided by voters but left to “informed” elected officials.

 

In essence, for those who believe they are born to rule, Brexit signals the need to limit democracy to ensure that important decisions are left to self-certified experts. European Parliament President Martin Schultz was refreshingly clear: “It is not the EU philosophy that the crowd can decide its fate”.

History may well record that little changed as a result of Brexit after the long tortured process of negotiation of the terms of withdrawal and arrangements regarding trade and other matters with the EU. Those in charge and their attendant retinues continued, as British blogger John Ward wrote in 2015, to ignore the individual, State sovereignty, debt mountains, currency realities, poverty, its responsibilities and every legal and constitutional restraint on their power.

If the deep seated economic and social divisions within Britain or other societies cannot be dealt with peacefully and through existing processes, the risk is that it will unleash the furies of nationalism and isolationism in unknown ways and with unpredictable results.

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Live Feed From London Anti-Brexit Protest

It was bound to happen: just days after a shocking Brexit outcome which was arguably lost due to the low turnout of the pro-Remain, youth vote…

… today the same youth, unhappy with the outcome it could have prevented, has congregated on London’s Trafalgar square which is the venue of the first, so far completely peaceful, anti-Brexit protest to hit London.

Watch live below.

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The GOP’s New Health Care Plan Shows That Republicans Have Become Trapped By Obamacare

House Republicans have been promising to propose an Obamacare replacement since at least 2010. Last week they finally delivered on that promise. It wasn’t worth the wait.

The plan is less of a fully realized proposal and more of a quick sketch of the sort of health care policy Republicans might pursue if given the chance.

As it turns out, the health care policy that Republicans might pursue looks, well, a lot like Obamacare—except, possibly, worse.

Although the plan starts by repealing the health care law in its entirety, it ends up replacing many of its central components with similar provisions: preexisting coverage rules, subsidies for the purchase of insurance, and even an (implicit) mandate.

Cato Institute Health Policy Director Michael Cannon, writing at Forbes, identifies a number of striking similarities between the House GOP plan and Obamacare, including the use of tax credits to help subsidize insurance coverage, regulations requiring insurers to sell to all comers regardless of health status, the millennial mandate to cover dependents up to age 26, and the sort of political definition of what constitutes qualifying coverage that is inevitable with any plan that doles out subsidies to some plans but not others.

The GOP plan would also create a kind of an insurance mandate. While there’s no rule requiring people to maintain coverage or pay a fine, the existence of tax credits ends up pulling everyone into the system anyway, by essentially declaring that everyone who does not maintain qualifying coverage has to pay more in taxes.

The plan also retains a modified version of an Obamacare rule known as community rating, which, in very general terms, requires insurers to judge risk based on the properties of a group rather than on an individual. Essentially, it’s a form of price controls. And as Cannon argues, the price controls in the Republican plan, combined with the loosening of some other regulations, might actually make the insurance that is offered in the individual market worse than it is under Obamacare, trapping people in a cycle of ever-worsening coverage.

Granted, not all of the ideas are bad.

In particular, the expansion of Health Savings Accounts (HSAs) is a useful idea that if anything could benefit from further expansion. The proposal might help weaken the link between health insurance and employment. 

But what this plan, as with the plans released by GOP presidential candidates last summer, demonstrates most is an inability to move substantially beyond the framework established by the Affordable Care Act.

The Republican plan to repeal and replace Obamacare, then, is to repeal the law and replace it with something that isn’t an exact Obamacare clone, but works from many of the same principles, modified to Republican preferences. Maybe that’s not too surprising, given that Obamacare was, after all, based on a Republican idea. 

In any case, it’s clear that Republicans have become trapped by Obamacare, their policy imaginations and political inclinations limited by the president’s health law and the world it has created. 

Even that, however, may give it too much credit: This thin sketch of a plan lacks a number of crucial details, like the size of the credit it would offer, saying only that it would be big enough to cover the cost of a typical pre-Obamacare plan. Without that number, it is impossible to produce any serious cost or coverage estimates, which means it is impossible to even make an educated guess about what its real world effects on either individual health coverage or the federal budget would be. It is like listening to a real estate developer describe a building, but finding out that no measurements exist, and thus you cannot even see a render of what the final product might look like. 

The Republican plan to replace Obamacare is here, in other words, and it is not a plan at all.

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Odey Makes 21% In Past 2 Days, Nearly Wiping Out Abysmal Start To The Year

It has been a… volatile year for Crispin Odey. After a less than stellar 2015 in which his flagship fund loss 20%, Odey was delighted when his bearish strategy worked during the selloff in early 2016, resulting in a 14% profit in the first two weeks of the year, leading to his mid-February prediction that “This Shorting Opportunity Is As Great As 2007-2009“. 

What followed next was the most brutal short squeeze in history, pushing US stocks in a near-straight line to just why of all time highs with global stocks going along for the ride. By late March, Odey’s head was spinning when as we reported citing his investor letter, his $11 billion fund was being rocked by unprecedented 5% daily swings, lamenting “It’s No Longer A Market But A Battlefield.”

By mid-April it was carnage: according to the FT, “the value of the €729m Odey European Fund had fallen 31.1% YTD, dragging it back to its lowest level since January 2012. His large bets against currencies and equities have gone awry, making his stockpicking fund one of the worst performers among large vehicles this year.” And yet, Odey refused to stop fighting the central banks:

Losses in the banking sector at this point in the cycle are really bad news because banks are already suffering from weakening margins. They need rights issues to deal with these losses, but why should anyone subscribe to a rights issue when zero interest rates promise no let up to a fall in profits? The only way that banks could become attractive to underwriters of the shares are if profits are rising and the only way that profits can rise is if their loan book gets repriced. Yes, only higher interest rates would make banks attractive, but higher interest rates would bring on the recession that has been kept at bay by QE and zero interest rates. Less QE and more QED.

Impressive conviction, even more impressive that it came at a time when Odey was down over 30% for the year.

Well, after a truly hair-raising first half to 2016, if not so much for billionaire Odey as for his LPs, he appears to have finally hit a home run with Brexit. According to  Bloomberg, Odey’s “winning run continued with the flagship Fund up 21% in just two days.” The days in question: Friday and Monday, when the market’s reaction to the Brexit vote was nothing short of surreal (it does, however, make one wonder what his loss would have been had Leave won).

In any case, congratulations to Odey. Here are the details:

Odey Asset Management’s boost from last week’s vote for Britain to leave the EU continued into a second day, with the flagship Odey European Inc. (OEI) fund recording a total gain of ~21% over Friday and Monday, according to an e-mail to investors seen by Bloomberg News.

Fund performance on Friday June 24:

  • OEI +15.7%, OEI Mac +15.7%, Swan +12.4%, Opus +3.66%

Fund performance on Monday June 27:

  • OEI +5.3%, OEI Mac +5.4%, Swan +5.1%, Opus +0.2%

Still, despite this impressive 2-day surge, Odey is likely still down for the year as the flaghsip fund was down 24.8% through June 15, which is still an improvement from the -40.7% through the end of May.

So has he changed his dramatically bearish outlook? Not at all. According to Bloomberg, his positioning remains little changed as Odey thinks there is no change to the global outlook; in his email he notes that GDP growth is slowing worldwide, EU banks are still in serious trouble, China’s credit stimulus is ending with no boost to GDP and adds that monetary stimulus and the banks’ transmission mechanism has failed.

Finally, for those curious what Odey’s top positions are, here are his biggest holdings as of May 31; we doubt these have changed much in the past 4 weeks.

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Clinton Slams Benghazi Report As “Discredited, Conspiracy Theories”

On Tuesday, after more than two years of work and $7 million in expense, the House Select Committee on Benghazi released a massive, 800-page report which according to The Hill, is filled with new criticism of Hillary Clinton.

The full report can be found here, and the key highlights are as folows:

What has also emerged is a picture of the State Department eating up valuable time by insisting that certain elements of the U.S. military respond to Libya in civilian clothes and that it not use vehicles with United States markings. Both restrictions appear to have been concessions to the Libyan government that did not want an identifiable U.S. military presence on the streets of Libya. We will never know exactly how long these conditions delayed the military response but that they were even a part of the discussion is troubling.

 

And at the same time the State Department appeared to waste time on what our soldiers would wear, it also appeared to waste time and focus on the YouTube video that the administration would later blame, falsely, for the attack. It has emerged that during an emergency call at 7:30 p.m. on the night of the attack involving Secretary Clinton and other high-level officials from the Department of Defense, State Department, and CIA that a full five of the eleven action items from the meeting related to the video.

The Hill provides a quick summary of the findings, much of which is already largely known by those paying attention to the investigation. Clinton is criticized more for her actions before and after the night of the attack, rather than during the attack itself.

The report says that Clinton and other officials did not adequately pay attention to concerns about the growing extremism in Benghazi and other parts of Libya.

“It is not clear what additional intelligence would have satisfied either [Undersecretary of Management Patrick] Kennedy or the secretary in understanding the Benghazi Mission compound was at risk—short of an attack,” the report claimed.

 

“The intelligence on which Kennedy and the secretary were briefed daily was clear and pointed—Al Qa’ida, al Qa’ida like groups, and other regional extremists took refuge in the security vacuum created by the Libya government and its inability to take command of the security situation.”

After the attacks occurred, Clinton is accused of knowing full well that the event was sparked by extremist militia members, but instead chose to blame the attack on an anti-Muslim video.

The day after the violence, Clinton told Egypt’s prime minister that U.S. officials “know that the attack in Libya had nothing to do with the film.

 

“It was a planned attack — not a protest,” she added.

 

In public, however, Clinton and other senior officials appeared to conflate the violence with the video for days to come.

 

Then-United Nations Ambassador Susan Rice caused a stir when she appeared on multiple Sunday political shows offering a performance scoffed at even by government officials.

 

“I think Rice was off the reservation on this one,” one senior State Department official working on Libya wrote in an email after her appearances.

 

“Off the reservation on five networks!” responded another official.

In addition to The Hill’s summary, here are a few other notable new findings from the report.

  • Despite President Obama and Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta’s clear orders to deploy military assets, nothing was sent to Benghazi, and nothing was en route to Libya at the time the last two Americans were killed almost 8 hours after the attacks began. [pg. 141]
  • A Fleet Antiterrorism Security Team (FAST) sat on a plane in Rota, Spain, for three hours, and changed in and out of their uniforms four times. [pg. 154]
  • The Libyan forces that evacuated Americans from the CIA Annex to the Benghazi airport was not affiliated with any of the militias the CIA or State Department had developed a relationship with during the prior 18 months. Instead, it was comprised of former Qadhafi loyalists who the U.S. had helped remove from power during the Libyan revolution. [pg. 144]
  • In August 2012—roughly a month before the Benghazi attacks—security on the ground worsened significantly. Ambassador Stevens initially planned to travel to Benghazi in early August, but cancelled the trip “primarily for Ramadan/security reasons.” [pg. 99]
  • Former Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta bluntly told the committee “an intelligence failure” occurred with respect to Benghazi. Former CIA Deputy Director Michael Morell also acknowledged multiple times an intelligence failure did in fact occur prior to the Benghazi attacks. [pg. 129]

The Pompeo-Jordan report, written as “additional views” to the main GOP report, adds this additional color, courtesy of the Washington Examiner:

  • Secretary Clinton did not make every effort to ensure the Americans being sent to Libya were safe, a project she has full ownership of from start to finish. They were inadequately protected and their requests for help fell on deaf ears.
  • Following the attack, the administration misled the public about the events of that night in Benghazi. The State Department and Secretary Clinton learned quickly that this was a terrorist attack, but rather than be square with the American people and risk losing an election, they opted to blame a video?inspired protest that never happened.
  • Our government did not move heaven and earth to rescue our people. The American people expect that our leaders will do whatever is necessary to save our people when things go wrong. We now know the U.S. military never reached Benghazi and the government never directed men or machines to enter the fight there.
  • The administration broke its promise to bring those responsible to justice. Now four years after the attack, only one person has been arrested and was brought to America before proper interrogation took place.
  • The administration never had a sincere interest in helping the Committee and working with us to find the truth. It was politics, deceit and deception.

* * *

The Clinton campaign responded quickly, downplaying the report as being full of “discredited conspiracy theories.”

“The Republicans on the House Benghazi Committee are finishing their work in the same, partisan way that we’ve seen from them since the beginning. In refusing to issue its report on a bipartisan basis, the Committee is breaking from the precedent set by other Congressional inquiries into the Benghazi attacks. And in leaking out select portions from their report in the middle of the night, without even allowing some of the Committee’s own members to see it, Republican members are clearly seeking to avoid any fact-checking of their discredited, conspiracy theories.” said Clinton campaign spokesman Brian Fallon in a statement.

The five Democrats on the committee released a rebuttal report on Monday in an attempt to get ahead of the formal report being released. “We are issuing our own report today because, after spending more than two years and $7 million in taxpayer funds in one of the longest and most partisan congressional investigations in history, it is long past time for the select committee to conclude its work.” Democrats said.

The Democrat report, according to The Hill claimed that nothing uncovered by the Select Committee on Benghazi altered the underlying narrative about the events of September 11, 2012. “Although the select committee obtained additional details that provide context and granularity, these details do not fundamentally alter the previous conclusions.” the Democrats wrote. The report also said that no on in the military issued a “stand down” order, and that Clinton was active and engaged on the night of the attacks and in the days that followed.

* * *

In summary, after all of the expense and rhetoric, we find ourselves right back to square one in this saga.

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‘Labor Unions Now Play a Particularly Boutique Role in the Economy’

As president of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) from 1996-2010, Andy Stern was called “the nation’s most politically influential union president.” Now Stern believes that labor unions are increasingly irrelevant. “Labor unions now play a particularly boutique role in the economy,” he told The Atlantic in an interview about his new book, Raising the Floor, which advocates for a universal basic income (UBI).

A UBI-type system, in which traditional welfare programs would be abolished and each citizen would get a certain yearly handout (regardless of personal income or worth), has been supported by libertarians, liberals, and conservatives alike over the past few decades. As automation, globalization, and the information economy make many jobs obsolete, advocating for a UBI—also known as a “basic income guarantee” (BIG)—has been coming back in intellectual vogue. 

“I believe that this is not our father’s or our grandfather’s economy, that the 21st century will not be employer-managed,” Stern said. “It’s going to be self-managed, because the growth in alternative work relationships—contingent, freelance, gig, whatever you want to call it—is clearly going to increase. Although the economy can grow in terms of GDP and productivity, it no longer means there will be wage growth or job growth, as opposed to the 20th century.”

Stern left traditional labor organizing because he “could not figure out anymore how a shrinking labor movement, a changing economy, a changing structure of work” could lead to economic security for Americans. “If you can’t figure out where you’re leading an organization, it’s pretty hard to get up everyday and go to work. So I resigned,” he told The Atlantic. And it wasn’t just SEIU resistant to change, of course. “I would say that unions are not generally oriented towards thinking too far into the future,” Stern said.

We spend most of our time chasing the future and trying to understand it rather than finding ideas that put us where the future was heading and have it come towards us. We are spending, appropriately, a large amount of energy on $15 an hour wages, getting governments to promote paid family and sick leave. In the absence of unions being able to make changes in workers’ lives, people are turning to the government as a solution to do that on a broad scale.

But unions have rarely thought 10 or 20 years ahead, and universal basic income requires that kind of thinking. What I’m hopeful, somewhat from this book, is that unions can look up from the defensive crouch they’re in, look into the future, and understand that so many of the things they’re doing now that are enormously important could be very insufficient. And that they’ll begin to think of universal basic income as they think of minimum wage, as an idea that becomes essential if we’re going to end inequality, provide stability, and keep the American dream alive.

It’s interesting that while mainstream liberals and Democrats, including Hillary Clinton, push plans to shoehorn new on-demand-economy work into traditional employment and labor-union structures, someone straight out of the belly of the beast is saying no, no, no, that’s the exact opposite of what we should do. Read the whole Atlantic interview with Stern here. For more on basic income proposals, see: 

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After Brexit, A Trump Path To Victory

Submitted by Patrick Buchanan via Buchanan.org,

Some of us have long predicted the breakup of the European Union. The Cousins appear to have just delivered the coup de grace.

While Scotland and Northern Ireland voted to remain in the EU, England voted for independence. These people, with their unique history, language and culture, want to write their own laws and rule themselves.

The English wish to remain who they are, and they do not want their country to become, in Theodore Roosevelt’s phrase, “a polyglot boarding house” for the world.

From patriots of all nations, congratulations are in order.

It will all begin to unravel now, over there, and soon over here.

Across Europe, tribalism, of all strains, is resurgent. Not only does the EU appear to be breaking up, countries appear about to break up.

Scotland will seek a second referendum to leave the U.K. The French National Front of Marine Le Pen and the Dutch Party for Freedom both want out of the EU. As Scots seek to secede from the U.K., Catalonia seeks to secede from Spain, Veneto from Italy, and Flemish nationalists from Belgium.

Ethnonationalism seems everywhere ascendant. Yet, looking back in history, is this not the way the world has been going for some centuries now?

The disintegration of the EU into its component nations would follow, as Vladimir Putin helpfully points out, the dissolution of the USSR into 15 nations, and the breakup of Yugoslavia into seven.

Czechoslovakia lately split in two. The Donbass seeks to secede from Ukraine. Is that so different from Transnistria splitting off from Romania, Abkhazia and South Ossetia seceding from Georgia, and Chechnya seeking separation from Russia?

After World War II came the disintegration of the French and British empires and birth of dozens of new nations in Africa, Asia and the Middle East. America returned the Philippine islands to their people.

The previous century saw the collapse of the Spanish Empire and birth of a score of new nations in our own hemisphere.

In Xi Jinping’s China and Putin’s Russia, nationalism is rising, even as China seeks to repress Uighur and Tibetan separatists.

People want to rule themselves, and be themselves, separate from all others. Palestinians want their own nation. Israelis want “a Jewish state.”

On Cyprus, Turks and Greeks seem happier apart.

Kurds are fighting to secede from Turkey and Iraq, and perhaps soon from Syria and Iran. Afghanistan appears to be splintering into regions dominated by Pashtuns, Hazaras, Uzbeks and Tajiks.

Eritrea has left Ethiopia. South Sudan has seceded from Khartoum.

Nor is America immune to the populist sentiments surging in Europe.

In Bernie Sanders’ fulminations against corporate and financial elites one hears echoes of the radical leftist rhetoric in Greece and Italy against EU banking elites.

And as “Brexit” swept the native-born English outside of multiracial, multiethnic, multicultural, multilingual London, populist-nationalist Donald Trump and antiestablishment Ted Cruz swept the native-born white working and middle classes in the primaries.

In Britain, all the mainstream parties — Labor, Tory, Liberal Democrat, Scottish National — supported “Remain.” All lost.

Nigel Farage’s UK Independence Party alone won.

In the past six months, millions of Democrats voted for a 74-year-old socialist against the establishment choice, Hillary Clinton, as Bush-Romney-Ryan Republicanism was massively repudiated in the Republican primaries.

As Trump said last week, “We got here because we switched from a policy of Americanism — focusing on what’s good for America’s middle class — to a policy of globalism, focusing on how to make money for large corporations who can move their wealth and workers to foreign countries all to the detriment of the American worker and the American economy.”

Yesterday, news arrived that in May alone, the U.S. had run a trade deficit in goods of $60 billion. This translates into an annual deficit of $720 billion in goods, or near 4 percent of our GDP wiped out by purchases of foreign-made rather than U.S.-made goods.

In 40 years, we have not run a trade surplus. The most self-sufficient republic in all of history now relies for its necessities upon other nations.

What might a Trumpian policy of Americanism over globalism entail?

A 10 to 20 percent tariff on manufactured goods to wipe out the trade deficit in goods, with the hundreds of billions in revenue used to slash or eliminate corporate taxes in the USA.

Every U.S. business would benefit. Every global company would have an incentive not only to move production here, but its headquarters here.

An “America first” immigration policy would secure the border, cut legal immigration to tighten U.S. labor markets, strictly enforce U.S. laws against those breaking into our country, and get tough with businesses that make a practice of hiring people here illegally.

In Europe and America, corporate, financial and political elites are increasingly disrespected and transnationalism is receding. An anti-establishment, nationalist, populist wave is surging across Europe and the USA.

It is an anti-insider, anti-Clinton wave, and Trump could ride it to victory.

via http://ift.tt/28YlW7b Tyler Durden