Month: December 2018

Since taking over troubled German lender Deutsche Bank back in April, Christian Sewing has watched the recidivist lender’s troubles go from bad to worse.

On Friday, the bank’s shares reached an all-time low; they’re now down 50% YTD, making Deutsche the worst performer in a poorly performing index of the world’s largest global banks. The latest selloff was inspired by the Frankfurt prosecutor’s office deciding to raid six Deutsche buildings, including the bank’s headquarters The raid, which continued for two days, doubled as the first public revelation about the latest criminal scandal involving Europe’s biggest bank by assets, which has already paid $18 billion in legal penalties since the financial crisis. Prosecutors revealed that they were investigating at least two employees in the bank’s wealth management unit (part of the division overseen by Sewing before he took the CEO job) for allegedly helping customers set up accounts in offshore tax shelters and helping criminals launder their ill-gotten gains – allegations that prosecutors said were inspired by the infamous ‘Panama Papers’ leak. During their raid, prosecutors searched the offices of five senior Deutsche executives, including the bank’s chief compliance officer, who was rumored to be leaving the bank in a report published just days before nearly 200 police officers, tax inspectors and prosecutors showed up outside Deutsche’s international headquarters and demanded that everybody step away from their computers.

Given the abysmal week the bank just had, it’s hardly surprising that the financial media has published a barrage of negative stories featuring anonymously sourced quotes from Deutsche “investors” effectively demanding that, if Sewing can’t get his shit together in the next quarter or two, he will need to abandon the “strategic alternatives” (cost-cutting, shifting the bank’s investment strategy to emphasize growth in wealth management) that he championed as a road toward salvation (alongside cost-cutting, of course) and seriously consider a sale.

Here’s Bloomberg:

While many of Deutsche Bank’s largest investors, contacted before the raids, said they still back him, they argued he only has another quarter or two to prove his approach can work. At the same time, strategic alternatives are getting ever more painful for shareholders because of the low stock price.

The bank just finished slashing 10,000 jobs across its global operations. But after posting a Q3 decline in net income that was the largest in eight years, many investors (possibly even the activist investor who disclosed a 3% stake in the bank back in November, arguing that he was going “all in” on Sewing) will push for another wave of layoffs. And even cutting its global workforce to the bone may not be enough to bring the bank back toward profitability (particularly if it is slapped with another mutli-billion dollar fine).

Other investors are bailing out of their Deutsche Bank stakes: Chinese conglomerate HNA is reportedly still in the process of offloading its stake in the lender, held through a complex array of derivatives. And out of the top ten largest positions in DB, two are net short.

Meanwhile, Cerberus Capital, which owns stakes in Deutsche and rival German lender Commerzbank, is reportedly pushing for a merger between the two, something it believes will allow for the elimination of “redundancies” (i.e. tens of thousands of jobs) that would improve the overall profit profile of the combined lender.

But Sewing isn’t ready to give up just yet: And given the bank’s historically weak share price, a merger would almost inevitably result in DB becoming the junior partner in whatever conjoined entity would emerge. Which is probably why Sewing spent the weekend rebuffing rumors of an imminent takeover, as Reuters reported.

Speculation about a possible merger has continued despite the bank’s dismissal in September of reports that it could consider tie-ups with Switzerland’s UBS (UBSG.S) or German peer Commerzbank.

“I don’t have any indication of that,” Christian Sewing told Bild am Sonntag. “We are on track to make our first profit for three years. It is only a matter of time before this progress is reflected in the share price.”

To be sure, rumors about a possible merger, takeover or even a breakup of Deutsche have been circulating for years. But if the bank’s shares continue to flounder, its CEO may not have a choice. Several consecutive CEOs have now failed to realize their grand visions for a turnaround, and shareholders are growing impatient. With this in mind, we feel like now would be as good a time as any to take a moment to review the bank’s (limited) options for survival.  To that end, we’d like to share some insights from a quick rundown provided by Bloomberg, which are quoted in full below (emphasis ours):

More Cuts

Sewing took over in April with a mandate to accelerate cost cuts, but he has recently emphasized efforts to invest again in growth after years of falling revenue. Still, additional savings aren’t entirely off the table. The CEO said privately that he’ll review his strategy if it’s becoming clear that it’s not working, a person familiar with his thinking has said. His current plan has set only vague targets beyond 2019 and investors will likely soon demand more detail.

Further reductions to the U.S. operations would be welcome, two large investors said asking not to be identified discussing individual investments. Wherever the bank will shrink, it won’t be at the expense of revenue, Chief Financial Officer James von Moltke has said.

A German Merger

This is the option that’s been most hotly debated in the past year. Cerberus Capital Management, the biggest private investor in rival Commerzbank AG, a year ago revealed owning a large stake in Deutsche Bank, too. A deal would enable the newly formed bank to cut possibly tens of thousands of jobs, hundreds of branches and an uncounted number of IT systems, positioning it for higher profit in the overbanked German market.

Many top executives agree it could make sense for the two to join at some point, according to people briefed on their thinking. But they also say a tie-up would be difficult as long as both banks are locked in multi-year turnaround programs. The long, painful decline in the share price of Deutsche Bank, the larger of the two, is another obstacle, though it may make a deal more palatable to Commerzbank.

A European Deal

Many people inside Deutsche Bank prefer a merger with a bank outside Germany that would complement the German lender rather than making big parts of it redundant. The bank’s top executives and its supervisory board went through several scenarios at their annual strategy meeting in September, though in the end decided that the time isn’t right.

The biggest obstacle to such a scenario, again, is Deutsche Bank’s low share price. Any deal at the current valuation means Deutsche Bank may end up as the junior partner. UBS’s market capitalization, for example, is more than twice as high. A higher share price would open more strategic options for Deutsche Bank, a key reason why top management is opposed to making a decision too soon, according to one of the people.

Teaming Up

A less disruptive approach to grow some revenue would be a joint venture. Sewing has repeatedly touted the idea over the past few months as an alternative to bank consolidation and a way for European banks to bulk up retail platforms against a potential threat posed by large Internet firms such as Google, Amazon and Facebook.

Deutsche Bank has already teamed up with other firms to create online product offerings such as the digital identity management app Verimi. But that is a very small start. If Sewing really sees joint ventures as an alternative to mergers, he must have bigger things in mind.

Splitting Up

While Sewing is trying to win over shareholders by showing his current plan is starting to bear fruit, he’s been discussing changes that would make a deal simpler to execute. The lender has been weighing a move to split its core businesses under a holding company, a measure that would make it easier to break up in a crisis and more agile in potential mergers, people with knowledge of the discussions told Bloomberg in September. Implementation would face many regulatory and operational hurdles, however, and CFO von Moltke said the discussions were “not strategic.”

A holding structure would also make it easier to split up the bank into a retail lender and an investment bank. A proposal to do so was tabled at the last annual general meeting in May. Although Deutsche Bank’s management board recommended voting against the proposal, arguing that splitting the bank would damage the business, it still received more than 5 percent of the vote.

Trudging On

There’s still a chance that no change in plan will be needed. Some regulators and several investors agree that it will be hard for the bank at the current juncture to pull off a deal that radiates strategic vision rather than desperation, the people said. If Sewing manages to stabilize earnings – despite the fresh headwinds – investors may regain confidence.

While this latest investigation into Deutsche is the most prominent facing the bank right now, it is by no means the only one. The bank still has a massive derivatives exposure of roughly 48 trillion euros – equivalent to more than 3x the GDP of the European Union.

More than two years ago, Deutsche Bank Chief Risk Officer Stuart Lewis assured investors during a widely circulated interview not to worry about the bank’s derivatives exposure (which was cited as one reason why the IMF had, at the time, just labeled it the most systemically risky bank in the world). “We are not dangerous”, he said. 

Clearly, the market disagrees.

Just remember, DB is not LEH…

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Authored by Guy Milliere via The Gatestone Institute,

On November 11th, French President Emmanuel Macron commemorated the 100th anniversary of the end of World War I by inviting seventy heads of state to organize a costly, useless, grandiloquent “Forum of Peace” that did not lead to anything. He also invited US President Donald Trump, and then chose to insult him. In a pompous speech, Macron — knowing that a few days earlier, Donald Trump had defined himself as a nationalist committed to defending America — invoked “patriotism”; then defined it, strangely, as “the exact opposite of nationalism”; then called it “treason”.

In addition, shortly before the meeting, Macron had not only spoken of the “urgency” of building a European army; he also placed the United States among the “enemies” of Europe. This was not the first time Macron placed Europe above the interests of his own country. It was, however, the first time he had placed the United States on the list of enemies of Europe.

President Trump apparently understood immediately that Macron’s attitude was a way to maintain his delusions of grandeur,as well as to try to derive a domestic political advantage. Trump also apparently understood that he could not just sit there and accept insults. In a series of tweets, Trump reminded the world that France had needed the help of the USA to regain freedom during World Wars, that NATO was still protecting a virtually defenseless Europe and that many European countries were still not paying the amount promised for their own defense. Trump added that Macron had an extremely low approval rating (26%), was facing an extremely high level of unemployment, and was probably trying to divert attention from that.

Trump was right. For months, the popularity of Macron has been in free fall: he is now the most unpopular French President in modern history at this stage of his mandate. The French population has turned away from him in droves.

Unemployment in France is not only at an alarmingly high level (9.1%); it has been been alarmingly high for years. The number of people in poverty is also high (8.8 million people, 14.2% of the population). Economic growth is effectively non-existent (0.4% in the third quarter of 2018, up from 0.2% the previous three months). The median income (20,520 euros, or $23,000, a year,) is unsustainably low. It indicates that half the French live on less than 1710 euros ($1946) a month. Five million people are surviving on less than 855 euros ($ 973) a month.

When Macron was elected in May 2017, he promised to liberate the economy; however no significant measures, were taken. In spite of some cosmetic reforms– such as limits on allowances for unfair dismissal or the slightly increased possibility that small businesses could negotiate short work contracts — the French labor code, still one of the most rigid in the developed world, expertly blocks job creation. The tax burden (more than 45% of GDP) is the highest in the developed world. Even if some taxes were abolished since Macron became President, many new taxes were created. Public expenditure still accounts for about 57% of GDP (16% above the OECD countries average) and shows no signs of waning.

Macron also promised, when he was elected, to restore security. Lack of security, however, has been exploding; the number of violent assaults and rapes has been steadily on the rise. No-go zones are as widespread as a year ago and fiercely out of control. The influx of unvetted illegal immigrants into the country has sadly turned entire neighborhoods into slums.

In May, Macron warned that in many suburbs, France has “lost the fight against drug trafficking”.

When Minister of the Interior Gérard Collomb resigned in on October 3, he spokeof a “very degraded situation” and added that in many areas “the law of the strongest — drug-traffickers and radical Islamists — has taken the place of the Republic.” He was simply confirming the chilling assessments of “out of favor” commentators such as Éric Zemmour, author of Le Suicide Français, and Georges Bensoussan, author of Une France Soumise (A Submissive France).

Riots are frequent; they indicate the growing inability of the government to maintain order. Public transport strikes, which took placeduring the entire spring of 2018, were accompanied by demonstrations and an enthusiastic looting of banks and shops. France’s victory at the soccer World Cup in July was followed by jubilation, which quickly gave way to violence by groups who broke store windows and attacked the police.

Since entering political life, Macron’s remarks have not only revealed a contempt for the French population, but also have multiplied. That has not helped. As early as 2014, when Macron was Minister of the Economy, he said that the women employees of a bankrupt company were “illiterates“; in June 2017, just after becoming president, he distinguished between “those who succeed and those who are nothing”. More recently, he told a young man who spoke of his distress at trying to find a job, that he only had to move and “cross the street”. During a visit to Denmark, he announced that the French were “Gauls resistant to change”.

One of the few issues Macron did seem eager to work on was Islam. He stressed several times his determination to establish an “Islam of France“. What he failed to take into account werethe concerns ofthe rest of the population about the rapid Islamization the country. In June 20, 2017, he said (not quite accurately, for example here, here, here, here, here and here), “No one can make believe that (Muslim) faith is not compatible with the Republic”. He also seems to have failed to take into account the risks of Islamic terrorism, which he hardly ever calls by its name. He seems to prefer using the word “terrorism“, without an adjective, and simply acknowledges that “there is a radical reading of Islam, whose principles do not respect religious slogans”).

The current Minister of the Interior, Christophe Castaner, whom Macron appointed to replace Collomb, dismissed the concerns raised by his predecessor, and described Islam as “a religion of happiness and love, like the Catholic religion”.

Another area in which Macron has acted relentlessly is the “fight about climate change”, in which his targeted enemy are cars. On vehicles over four years old, mandatory technical controls were made more costly and failure to comply with them more punitive, evidently in the hope that an increasing number of older cars could be eliminated. Speed ​​limits on most roads were lowered to 80 km/h (50 mph), speed control radars multipled, and tens of thousands of drivers’ licenses were suspended. Gas taxes rose sharply (30 cents a gallon in one year). A gallon of unleaded gas in France now costs more than $7.

The small minority of French people who still support Macron are not affected by these measures. Surveys show that they belong to the wealthy layers of society, that they live in affluent neighborhoods, and almost never use personal vehicles.

The situation is painfully different for most other individuals, especially the forgotten middle class.

A recent decision to increase gas taxes was the final straw. It sparked instant anger. A petition demanding that the government roll back the tax increase received almost a million signatures in two days. On social networks, people discussed ​​organizing demonstrations throughout the country and suggested that the demonstrators wear the yellow safety jackets that drivers are obliged to store in their cars in case of roadside breakdowns. So, on November 17, hundreds of thousands of protesters blocked large parts of the country.

The government ignored the protesters’ demands. Instead, officials repeated the many unproven imperatives of “climate change” and the need to eliminate the use of “fossil fuels” – but refused to change course.

After that, another national protest day was selected. On November 24, the demonstrators organized a march on Paris. Many, it seems, decided, despite a government ban, to head for the Champs Elysées and continue toward the presidential Elysée Palace.

Clashes took place, barricades were erected and vehicles were torched. The police responded harshly. They attacked non-violent protesters and used thousands of tear gas grenades and water cannons, which they had never done in the past. Although many of the protestors were holding red flags, indicating they were from the political left, the newly appointed Minister of the Interior Castaner said that the violence had come from a fractious and seditious “far right”. One member of the government fueled the fire by equating the French “yellow vests” with the German “brown shirts” of the 1930s. Macron declared that those who try to “intimidate officials” should be “ashamed“.

Finally, on November 25, Macron ended up recognizing, with visible reluctance, the suffering of the “working classes”. Two days later, Macron delivered a solemn speech, announcing that he would create a “high council for the climate”, composed of ecologists and professional politicians, and that his aim was to savethe planet and avoid “the end of the world”. He still did not utter a single word about the economic grievances that had poured forth during the previous ten days.

The spokesman for the center-right party, The Republicans, Laurence Saillet, remarked, “The French say, ‘Mr. President, we cannot make ends meet,’ and the President replies, ‘we shall create a High Council [for the climate]’ Can you imagine the disconnect?”.

Marine Le Pen, president of the right-of-center National Rally (the former National Front party, and today the main opposition party in France), said, “There is a tiny caste that works for itself and there is the vast majority of French people who are abandoned by the government, and feel downgraded, dispossessed “.

The “yellow jackets” now have the support of 84% of the French population. They are demanding Macron’s resignation and an immediate change of government. Those who speak on radio and television say that Macron and the government are hopelessly blind and deaf.

 The revolt in the country is intensifying and shows no sign of slowing down.

The political scientist Jean-Yves Camus said that the “yellow jackets” movement is now a revolt of millions of people who feel asphyxiated by “confiscatory” taxation and who do not want to “pay indefinitely” for a government that seems “unable to limit spending”.

He added, ” Some do not measure the extent of the rejection that the demonstrators express”.

Dominique Reynié, professor at the Paris Institute of Political Studies, said that “Macron and the government had not expected that their tax policy would lead to this”.

European elections are to be held this May, 2019. Polls show that Le Pen’s National Rally party will be in the lead, far ahead of the party created by Macron, La République En Marche! [The Republic on the Move!].

In a little more than a year, Macron, elected in May 2017, has lost almost all credit and legitimacy. He is also one of the last European leaders in power who supportsthe European Union as it is.

Macron, who claimed that he would defeat the “populist” wave rising throughout the continent, has also claimed that leaders who listened to people eager to defend their way of life were “leprosy” and “bad winds“.

The “populist” wave is now hitting France; it could well mean the end of Macron’s term as president.

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Winter is always a period of increased work for health services, with statistics every year proving this in the most blunt of fashions.

Excess winter death figures represent the difference in the number of people dying during the winter months compared the rest of the year and, as Statista’s Martin Armstrong points out, are a good indicator of just how hard the cold season has been.

You will find more infographics at Statista

The winter of 2017/18 was especially hard and, combined with a strong flu and problems associated with vaccines, it was the worst winter for excess deaths in over 40 years.

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Authored by Eric Peters via EricPetersAutos.com,

The Evil Has Died

A bit of good news: George H.W. Bush is dead, finally. At least he’ll do no more harm. But the harm he did do was enough.

Like the Nazis his father did good business with, Bush wanted a New World Order – and spoke of it lovingly and often. And now it’s upon us, in no small measure because of his machinations and those of his frog-torturing, mass-murdering, war criminal son – who was elevated to the position from which he was able to commit mass murder solely on the juice provided by his connected father.

The entire Bush family is a crime syndicate that puts the Corleones to shame (with George W. Bush playing the role of Fredo).

Bush Sr. – who wasn’t in Dallas on November 22, 1963 and not a CIA officer at the time – was later proved to be both of those things. His leprous fingerprints are all over the termination of the last American president who wasn’t a wholly owned subsidiary of the military industrial complex.

The Bush family was also good friends with another family. The Hinckley family. And then a curious thing happened on March 30, 1981.

And the leprous hands assumed control of the tiller. The chastened Gipper knew where things stood after that.

In due course, the anointed one officially assumed the purple – and we got the No New Taxes his lips told us not to read.

He then worked with Clintigula to stomp Ross Perot, who told us all what was going to happen as a result of the “free trade” deals being stuffed down the throats of the American people like a pate de foi gras goose.

And they did.

And here we are.

Now there will be a period of unction and prostration before the effigy of this quintessential political hack and fixer, who used this country like a Twink at San Quentin for the advancement of his loathsome family’s interests.

It is only because of the out-of-nowhere good fortune of the Orange One that we are not currently afflicted with another Bush’s hands on the tiller. We have that to be eternally grateful for, at least.

Meanwhile, the corpse of the creature will be displayed like Lenin and Stalin for the wailing and gnashing of teeth. But the guy who takes out the trash each week is deserving of infinitely higher esteem.

He, at least, does productive work and hasn’t killed anyone.

But it is not too late to make good use of the stringy old stiff. There are homeless cats that need to be fed. Possibly also some experiments could be performed that would yield scientifically valuable information – such as how long does it take various acids to penetrate the scaly skin of bipedal reptiles? How long to render one into so many gallons of viscous goo, to be flushed down the toilet and out to sea… the only fitting burial for the thing called George H.W. Bush.

H.W. Bush greatly deepened the swamp Trump now has to drain.

Bush will be remembered as one of the worst Presidents in our history. He spent eight years as Vice President undermining President Reagan. As President, he reversed nearly every Reagan accomplishment.  In 2016 he voted for Hillary Clinton ,because the Deep State Swamp sticks together.

“RIP Poppy” Say hello to McCain.

Source

Good riddance rather than goodbye.

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It appears that Tesla owners have found another use for “autopilot” aside from just slamming into inanimate objects at high rates of speed: drunk, but eco-friendly, people drivers are also reportedly using it as a designated driver. A report from ARS Technica recounts the story of a California Highway Patrol pulling over a Model S driver who “appeared to be asleep at the wheel.”

The vehicle was traveling on Highway 101 in Palo Alto and reportedly led police on a 7 mile excursion before they were able to get the driver’s attention.

“One of the officers basically ended up going in front of the vehicle and basically tried to slow it down,” a CHP spokesman stated, and it took about seven minutes for an officer pursuing the vehicle to get it to pull over.

The driver was subsequently arrested for driving under the influence.

While the article notes that authorities can’t yet confirm if the “Autopilot” system was turned on, it seems to be the obvious leading suspect in such a case. 

Then the question becomes: how could the “Autopilot” have been engaged if the driver’s hands weren’t on the wheel? As ArsTechnica reminds us, Tesla recently released a software update that is supposed to warn drivers in as little as 30 seconds that the “Autopilot” will disengage if their hands aren’t placed on the wheel. If the driver was asleep, as suggested, the vehicle should have started slowing down.

This situation echoes a similar incident that took place in January of this year when police found a man asleep behind the wheel of a Tesla on the San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge. After he was woken up, he insisted that he was fine because the vehicle was on “Autopilot”, despite the fact that he was drunk by more than twice the legal limit.

Arguably worse than his arrest, the driver was then subsequently trolled by the California State Highway Patrol’s Twitter account:

In the January case, the driver’s car was found stopped. Obviously, that wasn’t the case with the most recent arrest. That also leads us to ask: is it possible that not every single problem Tesla has is fixable with a software update? Who would have thought.

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By Michael Wilson, chief US equity strategist at Morgan Stanley

Last week, our macro team released its outlook for 2019. While clients only see the final report, it requires extensive effort and  debate among our strategists and economists to arrive at a cohesive and consistent view, with special help from Andrew Sheets  and the entire cross-asset team. In the end, we settled on a new narrative that we titled The Turning Point, reflecting our  conclusion that several key markets and biases will begin to reverse powerful and long-standing trends in the year ahead.

Specifically, we expect the following outcomes in 2019:

• US and European yields converge
• The US dollar makes a definitive cycle peak
• Emerging markets (EM) stocks and bonds outperform
• US equities and high yield underperform
• Within equities, value outperforms growth

Many of us were in Singapore this past week at our 17th annual Asia Pac Summit, where we discussed our outlook with a large and diverse group of clients. While pushback wasn’t overwhelming, clients didn’t exactly embrace our views, with the least support for value over growth and international stocks outperforming the US. Most agreed with our bearish stance on the US dollar but think we are early. On the other side of the ledger, many were in sympathy with our positive view on EM local debt.

We also encountered a high level of uncertainty, which usually leads people to hold on to their winners and avoid taking risks with a new view. This is a refrain I’ve often heard at major turning points, especially when existing trends have been so powerful and in place for so long – it’s hard to imagine them reversing. But anticipating changes in investment cycles is the essence of a macro strategist’s job. There’s no use identifying a turning point after it’s passed.

What do we see driving these changes? First, our economics team expects the US to slow materially next year from its blistering pace in 2018. The team thinks EM and European economic growth should remain steadier while Japan reaccelerates. This means growth differentials between EM and the US should widen back out just as they narrow between international developed economies and the US.

This should lead to interest rate convergence between the US and Europe, and a weaker US dollar, especially given how long the dollar the world is after eight years of buying US assets. From an earnings standpoint, difficult comparisons and the growing margin pressure we see only compound the issue of slowing US economic growth. This implies slower earnings growth in the US relative to international markets, driving better relative performance for international equities.

In the era of QE and fiscal austerity, equity investors have favored a barbell of quality and growth, a strategy that has worked brilliantly. However, with that era coming to an end, we don’t think this barbell will work so well. As we’ve discussed previously, a period of global reflation began two years ago with the bottoming of nominal rates and inflation breakevens in 2016. This coincided with the resynchronization of global growth between EM and developed markets, providing a powerful elixir for stocks of all types, as equity risk premiums were too high for this new world. Throw in the still exceptionally low interest rates at that time, and voilà, P/Es expanded materially as earnings growth accelerated. Now that US rates are up nearly 100% from the 2016 lows, combined with a strong argument for higher equity risk premiums, valuations are suddenly constrained, at least in the US.

Since Fed tightening was one of the pillars of our bearish outlook for risk assets in 2018, I would be remiss if I didn’t address Jerome Powell’s more dovish tone last week. I never doubted the Fed would consider financial conditions in its policy decisions. However, Powell’s comments do nothing to change our earnings outlook. With rates still hanging around 3%, there’s no reason to expect the S&P 500 to break above the top end of our previously stated near-term range (2650-2825). Some might argue, or be hoping, for an overshoot on valuation, but that’s a bull market view. I would caution that the rolling bear is still in the woods; he is simply resting at the moment.

Finally, writing this note before the Trump/Xi meeting on Saturday night at the G-20, I remain skeptical that anything will result that differs materially from what’s been leaked. More importantly, I don’t think trade tensions are the primary reason why asset markets have disappointed in 2018. As with the Fed’s dovish tilt last week, I see no reason to change our view of a range-bound market for the rest of the year.

Enjoy your Sunday. As for me, I’ll be in the stands rooting for the Chicago Bears to maul the New York Giants on Sunday afternoon.

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Authored by Raul Ilargi Meijer via The Automatic Earth blog,

The way ‘news’ is reported through known outlets changes so fast hardly a soul notices that news as we once knew it no longer exists. This is due to a large extent to the advent of the internet in general, and social media in particular. On the one hand this has led to an absolute overkill in ‘news’, forcing people to pick between sources once they find they can’t read or view it all, on the other hand it has allowed news outlets to flood the former news waves with so much of the same that nobody can compare one source with the other anymore.

Once you achieve that situation, you’re more or less free to make the news, rather than just report on it. The rise of Donald Trump has made the existing mass media realize that one-sided negative reporting on the man sells better than anything objective can. The MSM have sort of won the battle versus the interwebs, albeit only in that regard, and only for this moment, but that is enough for them for now; just like their readers, they don’t have the scope or the energy to look any further or deeper.

This is in a nutshell, and we really should take a much more profound look but that’s another chapter, what has changed the news, and what will keep on changing it until the truth sets us all free. This is what drives outlets like CNN, the New York Times and the Guardian today, because it provides them with readers and viewers. Which they would not have if they didn’t conduct a 24/7 war on a set list of topics they know their audience can’t get enough of.

For these outlets, there are are three targets: Assange, Putin and Trump. And it’s especially the alleged links between the three that gets media -and politicians- excited, because if such links exist, the case against the individual targets is greatly reinforced. Trump can be portrayed in a much more damaging light if he’s painted off as Putin’s stooge, Putin becomes an enemy of America, Britain and the EU is he’s deciding elections in these countries (and poisoning people), and Assange can really only be set in a negative light if he aids and abets both of them.

The problem would be evidence. Or it would seem to be, at least. But the news has changed. We are well into the second year of ‘reporting’ on how Trump and Putin have conspired against Hillary, and there is still no proof other than intelligence services swearing on their mothers’ graves that really, Assange, Putin and Trump have targeted our democracies in order to take over control of them by illegal means.

They are the enemy, and you, who are of course on the other side, are their victims. But your trusted media will save you from a grueling fate. Now, if the passing of George HW Bush makes anything clear, it’s how united politicians and media are in praise of him, and against everyone else. The Observer, Guardian’s Sunday sister, puts it ever so eloquently today:

“Whether it’s his shabby efforts to defend Mohammed bin Salman, the Saudi crown prince accused of ordering the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, his professed “love” for North Korea’s ruthless dictator, Kim Jong-un, or his unashamed kowtowing to Putin, Trump undermines his office.

What a sorry contrast he presents with the dignified former president, George HW Bush, who died this weekend. Bush Sr wasn’t perfect, but he understood what making America great really means.”

It shouldn’t be necessary for anyone to point out that HW was basically a war criminal in thinly veiled disguise, who ordered the bombing of a caravan of civilians in Iraq 27 years ago, as the US had invaded Iraq because Saddam Hussein had taken Kuwait egged on by that same US. If you can call that dignified, you have issues.

By the same token, it shouldn’t be necessary for anyone to point out that the umpteenth Guardian hit piece on Julian Assange was just that, and invented from A to Z as well. If, when seeing the headline, you didn’t see that in the first fraction of a second, you haven’t been paying attention; you’re well into the news matrix. By now, everyone should recognize these things for what they are. But it only appears to get harder. It’s what outlets like to report, and readers like to read. It paints the world into a nice neat scheme, in which the bad guys are easy to spot, and you find yourself in a safe and cozy corner.

The problem, though, is that the entire thing is fantasy. The headline Manafort Held Secret Talks With Assange In Ecuadorian Embassy, Sources Say does not contain one iota of truth. But what does it matter? Assange has been cut off from the world, he can’t defend himself. Manafort is about to be thrown in jail for lying. The Russians can’t be trusted on anything, whatever they say must be a lie. And Trump gets so much of this stuff, he wouldn’t know where to begin anymore if he’d want to sue for libel.

One interesting detail about that ‘article’, after we’ve already established that they made it up, we know there’s not a single sign of Manafort having been in London around the time he allegedly met with Assange, is the connection between the Guardian and Ecuador. The paper has stationed people in Quito, the country’s capital. And sources within the Ecuadorian government appear to be feeding them material. Such as the claim that Manafort visited Assange. He wasn’t there. We know that from his passports and surveillance cameras.

The Guardian has a vendetta with Julian Assange, and Ecuador’s new president uses the paper to smear Assange’s name, painting him as an unwashed slob and a cat hater. This is your news, Britain and other anglo readers, this is what it’s come to. Already. And we’re just in the first inning of the game of making up the news as we go along.

The byline of that Manafort/Assange fantasy piece says “Luke Harding and Dan Collyns in Quito”. Now, on May 16 2018 I published an article entitled I Am Julian Assange, in which I referred to no less than three Guardian articles all published the day before, and all with the same topic.

The first one, Revealed: Ecuador Spent Millions On Spy Operation For Julian Assange, lists Dan Collyns, Stephanie Kirchgaessner, Luke Harding, Fernando Villavicencio and Cristina Solórzano as authors. The second one, How Julian Assange Became An Unwelcome Guest In Ecuador’s Embassy, lists Luke Harding, Stephanie Kirchgaessner and Dan Collyns.Number three is Why Does Ecuador Want Assange Out Of Its London Embassy?, written by poor lonely Dan Collyns in Quito all by himself.

It seems obvious that ‘Ecuador’ didn’t get sick of Assange. What happened was Ecuador changed presidents. Rafael Correa’s longtime friend and right hand man Lenin Moreno ran for president as his logical successor, only to turn against his former mentor as soon as he was elected. And not long after that, the Guardian has sources in Quito which it could use to smear Assange even further.

This way of ‘making’ the news is not limited to the Guardian, and it’s not limited to its coverage of WikiLeaks. We must ask ourselves every step of the way if we can still call this sort of thing ‘news’, ‘coverage’ and ‘reporting’. Let’s hope both WikiLeaks and Paul Manafort sue the paper, but apparently they’ll need a lot of money to do it. An additional layer of protection for fake news.

The Guardian is not just after Assange, and it’s not just Luke Harding writing hit pieces. Here are the paper’s editors on November 30. The fallout of the Manafort/Assange piece has made them sort of careful in that they say: “what we say is probably not true, but imagine if it were! Wouldn’t that be terrible?!”

America’s Compromised Leader (Guardian Op-Ed)

Earlier this week Donald Trump stood on the south lawn of the White House and ridiculed Theresa May’s Brexit agreement as a “great deal for the EU”. He is likely to make the same contemptuous case during the G20 summit in Argentina this weekend, although pointedly there is no planned bilateral. Given the political stakes facing her back home, Mrs May must feel as if 14,000 miles is a long way to travel for the weekend merely to be trashed by supposedly her greatest ally. When this happens, though, who does Mrs May imagine is confronting her? Is it just Mr Trump himself, America First president, sworn enemy of the international order in general and the European Union in particular?

That’s a bad enough reality. But might her accuser also be, at some level, Vladimir Putin, a leader whose interest in weakening the EU and breaking Britain from it as damagingly as possible outdoes even that of Mr Trump?

That prospect is even worse. Such speculation would normally seem, and still probably is, a step too far. The idea that a US president is in any way doing the Kremlin’s business as well as his own is the stuff of spy thrillers and of John le Carré TV adaptations. Yet the icy fact is that the conspiracy theory may now also contain an element of truth.

[..] Days before he took office in 2017, Mr Trump said that “the closest I came to Russia” was in selling a Florida property to a Russian oligarch in 2008. If Mr Cohen’s statement is true, Mr Trump was telling his country a lie. What is more, the Russians knew it. Potentially, that raises issues of US national security. If Mr Putin knew that Mr Trump was concealing information about his Russian business interests, this could give Moscow leverage over the US leader. Mr Trump might feel constrained to praise Mr Putin or to avoid conflicts with Russia over policy. All this may indeed be very far-fetched. Yet Russia’s activities in the 2016 election against Hillary Clinton and in favour of Mr Trump are not fiction.

They prompted the setting up of the Mueller inquiry into links between the Russian government and the Trump campaign. Another document this week suggests a longtime Trump adviser, Roger Stone, may have sought information about WikiLeaks plans to release hacked Democratic party emails in 2016. There is nothing in the documents released this week that proves that Mr Trump conspired with Russian efforts to win him the presidency.

Yet those efforts were real. For two years, Mr Trump has gone to unprecedented lengths to attack the special counsel. After November’s midterms, he seemed on the verge of firing Mr Mueller. He may yet do so. But this week’s charges suggest that there is plenty more still to be revealed. Mr Trump still has questions to answer from the investigating authorities, from the new Congress – and from America’s long-suffering allies.

You see what they do, and how they do it? Big statement, and then say it’s probably not true. Post Manafort/Assange disaster piece, their lawyers have provided a way to legally make outrageous claims. It’s still smear, and it’s still slander, but they’ve already covered their asses by saying it’s probably a step too far. Still managed to say it though… And hey, what’s not to like about the phrase “..America’s long-suffering allies”?

Also on November 30, the Guardian ran the following piece. Note the headline. And realize there never was a deal. Which the article acknowledges of course. Just not in the headline.

Trump Calls Russia Deal ‘Legal And Cool’ As Mueller Inquiry Gathers Pace

Donald Trump, drawn deeper into an investigation into Russian meddling in US elections, has defended his pursuit of a business deal in Moscow at the same time he was running for president as “very legal & very cool”. Trump appeared rattled this week after Michael Cohen, his former personal lawyer, confessed that he lied to Congress about a Russian property contract he pursued on his boss’s behalf during the Republican primary campaign in 2016. The surprise admission cast the president himself as a pivotal figure in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into alleged collusion for the first time. In a series of tweets from Buenos Aires, where he is attending the G20 summit, Trump recalled “happily living my life” as a property developer before running for president after seeing the “Country going in the wrong direction (to put it mildly)”.

Smear Slander Rinse and Repeat. All you need to do is add “it’s probably not true” here and there, and you’re good to go. People claim that the coming age of AI and algorithms is a threat to news dissemination, but at this pace there won’t be much left to threaten.

I think I’ll close with that Observer quote I posted above. It’s just perfect.

Donald Trump’s Growing List Of Failures (Observer Op-Ed)

“Whether it’s his shabby efforts to defend Mohammed bin Salman, the Saudi crown prince accused of ordering the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, his professed “love” for North Korea’s ruthless dictator, Kim Jong-un, or his unashamed kowtowing to Putin, Trump undermines his office. What a sorry contrast he presents with the dignified former president, George HW Bush, who died this weekend. Bush Sr wasn’t perfect, but he understood what making America great really means.”

Okay, can’t help myself. MbS: not shabby efforts, but a refusal to risk being singled out and be blamed for $400 oil prices by the same Senators who tolerated Saudi behavior for decades. Kim Jong-un: Trump is closer to peace in Korea than anyone in decades. The claim Trump is ‘kowtowing’ to Putin only makes sense if you believe the unproven allegations of collusion. Robert Mueller hasn’t provided any evidence of it in 18 months, but a bunch of guys in a London office know better? As far as the dignity of Bush 41 is concerned, I see no reason to add one single syllable.

I will never get tired of defending Julian Assange. I do get tired of defending Trump, but the media leaves me no choice. There’s a dire need for at least a little balance in what passes for the news, and that balance seems to get further out of reach every passing day. News outlets have resorted to propaganda campaigns against individuals, organizations and even entire nations because it helps them sell copies, ads and airtime.

And frankly, we must prepare for smear and allegations thought up out of thin air just to make a profit, to be used to lock away people for life regardless of what a nation’s laws say, for presidents to be impeached because it suits the owners of papers or TV stations (despite Trump being their meal ticket), and we must for the inevitable endgame, fake news as the reason to start a -nuclear- war.

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While just a few hundred miles south, WTI is flirting with the one year low price of $50/barrel, Canada’s oil-producing hub, Alberta, would be ecstatic to have its oil trade at anything even remotely close to this level.

As we reported recently, Canadian oil producers are in an increasingly tough predicament. With high and increasing oil demand around the globe over the last year, Canadian oil production has increased accordingly. All of this is simple and predictable economics, but in the process Canadian oil hit a massive roadblock. Producers have the supply, and they have more than enough demand, but they don’t have the means to make the connection. Canadian export pipelines simply don’t have the capacity to keep up with either the supply or the demand.

Canadian oil producers have now maxed out their storage capacity, and the Canadian glut continues to grow while they wait for a solution to the pipeline problem to materialize. As pipeline space is at a premium and storage has hit maximum capacity, oil prices have fallen dramatically, and the differentials that had previously been hitting heavy oil hard in Canada (now at below $14 a barrel for the first time since 2016) have now spread to light oil and upgraded synthetic oil sands crude as well, leaving overall Canadian oil prices at record lows.

So in a long-awaited and according to local energy traders, overdue response, Canada’s largest oil producing province ordered what Bloomberg called “an unprecedented output cut”, an effort to ease a worsening crisis in the nation’s energy industry and adding to global actions to combat a recent price crash ahead of this week’s OPEC+ summit where oil exporters will similarly seek to slash output (something which all OPEC+ nations agree upon, but nobody wants to be the first to cut its own production).

Alberta Premier Rachel Notley followed the advice of local producers like Cenovus Energy and Canadian Natural Resources, which have been hammered by record low prices for heavy Canadian crude. The crisis has caused some producers to reduce production on their own, slash dividends and delay next year’s drilling plans, while the Alberta economy has – by local accounts – slumped into a recession.

“Every Albertan owns the energy resources in the ground, and we have a duty to defend those resources,” Notley said in a statement. “But right now, they’re being sold for pennies on the dollar. We must act immediately, and we must do it together.”

The plan, which was announced late on Sunday, will reduce production of raw crude and bitumen from Alberta by 325,000 barrels a day, or 8.7% from January until excess oil in storage is drawn down. The reduction would then drop to 95,000 barrels a day until the end of next year at the latest.

The cut by Canada, the world’s fifth-biggest producer, follows fresh promises over the weekend by Saudi Arabia and Russia to extend their deal to manage the oil market. Global prices crashed last month by the most in a decade, a plunge that particularly battered producers in Alberta amid the abovementioned surging oil-sands output, a shortage of pipeline space, as well as heavy U.S. refinery maintenance.

The news out of Canada, together with this weekend’s temporary trade war truce between the US and Canada, helped lift U.S. benchmark prices as Canada’s output cuts will likely slash the volume of oil flowing into Canada’s southern neighbor and the world’s biggest consumer; as a result WTI rose as much as 5% Monday morning in Asia.

To many, the production cut was not only long overdue, it was also inevitable in light of the record production coupled with record low price, a disastrous combination which would otherwise culminate with mass defaults.

That said, one wonders just how much of an impact this initial step to rationalize the Canadian oil market will have: the amount being cut is more than the total production of each of OPEC’s three smallest members: Equatorial Guinea, Gabon and the Republic of Congo. It is still relatively modest in the grand scheme of things.

Notley said that the curtailment plan, which will apply to both oil-sands and conventional producers, should narrow the discount between Western Canada Select and U.S. benchmark oil by at least $4 a barrel and add an estimated C$1.1 billion ($830 million) in government revenue in the fiscal year starting April 2019.

Alberta expects the 325,000-barrel-a-day reduction to be in place for the first three months, while storage is drawn down to historical levels. After that, the government will work to match capacity with production. Further reductions in the curtailment are expected in the fall and winter as additional rail capacity comes online. The measure could be removed earlier than the end of 2019, based on market conditions, the government said.

The output cut also seeks to stabilize the local economy: the action is designed to prevent job cuts by letting companies keep people on because they can “see a light at the end of the tunnel,” Notley said at a news conference.

Alberta Premier Rachel Notley makes announcement on oil industry https://t.co/cCA2bJTGS5 https://t.co/CKgEmfo6nZ

— CBC Politics (@CBCPolitics) December 3, 2018

The announcement was lauded by the chief executive officer of Cenovus, Alex Pourbaix. “I would like to commend Premier Rachel Notley and her government for making the difficult but necessary decision to implement a temporary mandatory oil production cut in Alberta,” he said in a statement. “Under normal circumstances, oil and gas producers would never advocate for government intervention in the market, but these are not ordinary circumstances.”

To protect smaller drillers, the first 10,000 barrels of a producer’s output will be exempted from the cut. Each company’s level of curtailment will be based on six months of its highest level of production over the past 12 months, according to the statement. The province expects the curtailment to affect about 25 producers.

Underscoring the severity of the local oversupply crisis, the Alberta announcement marks the first time the provincial government has ordered a production cut since the 1980s, and that previous move was meant to protest federal energy policies, not solely to boost prices.

A chorus of companies, investors and industry leaders has rallied to the idea in recent weeks, saying that no other measure could help work down the glut of oil backed up in storage as quickly. Even Notley’s main political rival – United Conservative Party Leader Jason Kenney – has called for a curtailment. The only dissenting voice has come from Canada’s integrated oil companies, whose refineries have been benefiting from the cheaper feedstock.

Still, Notley’s announcement was generally priced in after Notley last week assured Albertans that a decision on curtailing output was coming; that helped boost heavy Canadian crude prices by 49% last week, although even after that gain, Western Canada Select crude was trading for $29 a barrel less than U.S. benchmarks. As shown in the top chart, WCS closed at $13.46 a barrel earlier this month, the lowest on record. The grade’s discount to U.S. benchmark oil prices widened to $50 a barrel last month, also a record.

And now, with the Canadian announcement set to raise both US crude and gasoline prices – both the nemesis of Trump’s agenda – pundits are eagerly looking forward to the president’s reaction to Notley’s price-boosting announcement. One suggestion has already been floated as shown below:

‘the very untalented Notley is raising oil prices. not good! we may increase our big beautiful dairy exports to compensate. sad!’

-potential Trump tweet

— Lee Saks (@Lee_Saks) December 3, 2018

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When it comes to the Clintons’ heavily promoted speaking tour, it seems that even the crickets are taking the night off. 

The New York Times‘s Maureen Dowd has penned what can only be described as a sad state of affairs for the Clintons – after paying $177 for a ticket to hear the former Democratic party superstars speak. As journalist Byron York notes – had Dowd simply waited until the day of the event, she could pave paid less than $10 for the event. 

Maureen Dowd paid $177 for a ticket to hear Bill & Hillary Clinton. If she had waited til day of the event, she could have gotten one for less than $10. That’s how popular the tour is… https://t.co/UmWW1F4J6P

— Byron York (@ByronYork) December 2, 2018

As Dowd illustrates, the Clintons are the Democrats’ Rasputin – refusing to be extinguished so that the fractured party can move forward. 

The Clintons refuse to be discarded. It has been their joint project for half a century to be at the center of the public scene and debate. The way that the whole thing came crashing down in 2016 is too hard for them to bear. They would like to rewrite the ending, but there is no way to do that. –Maureen Dowd via NYT

Read the entire piece below via the New York Times: 

TORONTO — The snow is falling lightly.

My thoughts are racing darkly.

I’m feeling something foreign, something I’ve never felt before. It takes me a moment to identify it.

I’m feeling sorry for the Clintons.

In the 27 years I’ve covered Bill and Hillary, I’ve experienced a range of emotions. They’ve dazzled me and they’ve disgusted me.

But now they’re mystifying me.

I’m looking around Scotiabank Arena, the home of the Toronto Maple Leafs, and it’s a depressing sight. It’s two-for-the-price-of-one in half the arena. The hockey rink is half curtained off, but even with that, organizers are scrambling at the last minute to cordon off more sections behind thick black curtains, they say due to a lack of sales. I paid $177 weeks in advance. (I passed on the pricey meet-and-greet option.) On the day of the event, some unsold tickets are slashed to single digits.

I get reassigned to another section as the Clintons’ audience space shrinks. But even with all the herding, I’m still looking at large swaths of empty seats — and I cringe at the thought that the Clintons will look out and see that, too. It was only four years ago, after all, that Canadians were clamoring to buy tickets to see the woman who seemed headed for history.

It’s a sad contrast with the sold-out boffo book tour of Michelle Obama, who’s getting a lot more personal for the premium prices. But introspection has never been within the Clintons’ range.

I can’t fathom why the Clintons would make like aging rock stars and go on a tour of Canada and the U.S. at a moment when Democrats are hoping to break the stranglehold of their cloistered, superannuated leadership and exult in a mosaic of exciting new faces.

What is the point? It’s not inspirational. It’s not for charity. They’re not raising awareness about a cause, like Al Gore with global warming. They’re only raising awareness about the Clintons.

It can’t be the money at this point. Have they even spent all the Goldman gold yet? Do they want to swim in their cash like Scrooge McDuck?

The Clintons’ tin cup is worthy of the Smithsonian. They hoovered more than $2 billion in contributions to their campaigns, foundation and philanthropies.

After the White House, the money-grubbing raged on, with the Clintons making over 700 speeches in a 15-year period, blithely unconcerned with any appearance of avarice or of shady special interests and foreign countries buying influence. They stockpiled a whopping $240 million. Even leading up to her 2016 presidential run, Hillary was packing in the speeches, talking to the Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries, the American Camp Association, eBay, and there was that infamous trifecta of speeches for Goldman Sachs worth $675,000.

“What scares me the most is Hillary’s smug certainty of her own virtue as she has become greedy and how typical that is of so many chic liberals who seem unaware of their own greed,” Charlie Peters, the legendary liberal former editor of The Washington Monthly, told me. “They don’t really face the complicity of what’s happened to the world, how selfish we’ve become and the horrible damage of screwing the workers and causing this resentment that the Republicans found a way of tapping into.” He ruefully worries about the Obamas in this regard, too.

Indeed, in the era of Trump, greed is not only good. It’s grand. The stock market is our highest value. Mammonism rules.

But watching the Clintons hash over their well-worn tale of falling in love at Yale Law School, I realize that it’s not only about the money.

Some in Clintonworld say Hillary fully intends to be the nominee. Once more, in Toronto, she didn’t rule it out, dodging the question with a lame joke. She carries herself with the air of a president in exile. Her consigliere, Philippe Reines, has prodded reporters on including her name when they write about 2020 candidates.

And Bill has given monologues to old friends about how Hillary knows how she’d have to run in 2020, that she couldn’t have a big staff and would just speak her mind and not focus-group everything. (That already sounds focus-grouped.)

After losing to an orange puffer clown fish who will go down as one of the most destructive forces in American history and flushing the Obama legacy down the drain, that’s delusional. Some Obama associates say the former president has some regrets about throwing his support solely behind Hillary and knows he misread the anger and frustration of voters.

Bill was radioactive in the midterms and Hillary was the Ghost of Christmas Past. Her approval rating is at a record low of 36 percent. The only American who seems truly interested in her these days is President Trump, who can’t stop tweeting about her. She’s still money in his book.

The Clintons refuse to be discarded. It has been their joint project for half a century to be at the center of the public scene and debate. The way that the whole thing came crashing down in 2016 is too hard for them to bear. They would like to rewrite the ending, but there is no way to do that.

Nothing they have done lately suggests that they have learned anything, including their obtuse post-#MeToo comments about Monica Lewinsky, who has been far more candid and sympathetic in the 20th anniversary retellings of the impeachment saga. The Clintons are still unable to hold themselves accountable. The formerly golden couple who dominated their party for nearly three decades is traveling North America in a bubble, shockingly un-self-aware.

Their pathological need to be relevant in America is belied by a Canadian arena, where stretches of empty seats bear witness to the passing of their relevance.

It’s a pity.

I invite you to follow me on Twitter (@MaureenDowd) and join me on Facebook.

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A fleet of aircraft injecting sulfates into the lower stratosphere could help protect the world from climate change. Well, that is according to a peer-reviewed paper published Nov. 23 in the journal Environmental Research Letters by researchers from Harvard and Yale universities.

It sounds like rhetoric from the tinfoil-hat chemtrail conspiracy community. Large commercial airliners spraying sulfate microparticles into the stratosphere, anywhere from 8 to 30 miles high. The purpose is to help shield the Earth from sunlight to maintain lower temperatures.

The report is one of the most in-depth and modern study yet of “stratospheric aerosol injection” (also known as “solar dimming” or “solar engineering” and or in the conspiracy community – “chemtrails”). Researchers examined how effective and expensive a solar geoengineering project would be beginning in the early 2030s. The goal of the program would be to halve the temperature increase caused by heat-trapping greenhouse gases, sort of like the global cooling effects of volcanic eruptions.

Gernot Wagner, a research associate at Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, is the lead author of the paper. He said their study shows this type of geoengineering “would be technically possible strictly from an engineering perspective. It would also be remarkably inexpensive, at an average of around $2 to $2.5 billion per year over the first 15 years.”

The study’s co-author of the paper and lecturer at Yale, Wake Smith, explained that an entirely new aircraft needs to be designed for the chemtrail program. “No existing aircraft has the combination of altitude and payload capabilities required.”

Researchers investigated what it would cost to develop an aircraft they call he SAI Lofter (SAIL). The report indicates the fuselage would have a stubby design and the wing area, as well as the thrust, would need to be twice as large. The estimated cost of the plane, a whopping $2 billion and $350 million to modify existing engines.

The American Meteorological Society (AMS) expressed great concern about the project, which said, “reflecting sunlight would likely reduce Earth’s average temperature but could also change global circulation patterns with potentially serious consequences such as changing storm tracks and precipitation patterns.”

In other words, screwing with the mother nature might have unintended consequences and likely trigger a new set of problems.

This report should undoubtedly cause discussion in the chemtrail conspiracy community.

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