How Rich Is Rich?

With an ever-growing chorus of ‘soak the rich’ rising from the left-er of the leftists, it is becoming increasingly important to know what “rich” is – How much would you have to earn in a year in the U.S. before someone considered you rich?

Statista’s Niall McCarthy has the answer. According to a recent YouGov poll, that depends heavily on you ask…

The research found that the American public considers an annual income between $90,000 and $100,000 necessary to be deemed rich. The fieldwork for the survey was carried out in September 2018 and it found that 76 percent of respondents think an annual income of $10,000 constitutes being poor.

That label gets shaken off once yearly earnings hit $30,000 with half of the population saying someone in this income category is neither rich nor poor.

Infographic: How Rich Is Rich? | Statista

You will find more infographics at Statista

While there is a sense of division as to whether a $90,000 paycheck makes someone rich of poor, a majority of 56 percent of respondents agree that a person earning $100,000 a year is rich. The survey also asked people how rich or poor they consider themselves with 64 percent saying they are neither.

According to the Department of Health and Human Services, the 2019 poverty line for a family of four in the U.S. is an income of $25,470 a year. 12.3 percent of the population, 39.7 million people, were classed as living in poverty in 2017.

via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2HJAKxh Tyler Durden

How Russia-gate Rationalized Censorship

Authored by Joe Lauria via ConsortiumNews.com,

Russia-gate mania spread beyond a strategy for neutralizing Donald Trump or removing him from office into an excuse for stifling U.S. dissent that challenges the New Cold War…

At the end of October 2017, I wrote an article for Consortium News about the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s campaign paying for unvetted opposition research that became the basis for much of the disputed story about Russia allegedly interfering in the 2016 presidential election on the orders of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Hillary Clinton speaking with supporters at a campaign rally in Phoenix, Arizona, March 21, 2016. (Gage Skidmore)

The piece showed that the Democrats’ two, paid-for sources that have engendered belief in Russia-gate are at best shaky. First was former British spy Christopher Steele’s largely unverified dossier of second- and third-hand opposition research portraying Donald Trump as something of a Russian Manchurian candidate.

And the second was CrowdStrike, an anti-Putin private company, examining the DNC’s computer server to dubiously claim discovery of a Russian “hack.” In a similar examination using the same software of an alleged hack of a Ukrainian artillery app, CrowdStrike also blamed Russia but its software was exposed as faulty and it was later forced to rewrite it. CrowdStrike was hired after the DNC refused to allow the FBI to look at the server.

My piece also described the dangerous consequences of partisan Democratic faith in Russia-gate: a sharp increase in geopolitical tensions between nuclear-armed Russia and the U.S., and a New McCarthyism that is spreading fear — especially in academia, journalism and civil rights organizations — about questioning the enforced orthodoxy of Russia’s alleged guilt.

After the article appeared at Consortium News, I tried to penetrate the mainstream by then publishing a version of the article on the HuffPost, which was rebranded from the Huffington Post in April this year by new management. As a contributor to the site since February 2006, I was trusted by HuffPost editors to post my stories directly online. However, within 24 hours of publication on Nov. 4, HuffPost editors retracted the article without any explanation.

This behavior breaks with the earlier principles of journalism that the Web site claimed to uphold. For instance, in 2008, Arianna Huffington told radio host Don Debar that, “We welcome all opinions, except conspiracy theories.” She said: “Facts are sacred. That’s part of our philosophy of journalism.”

But Huffington stepped down as editor in August 2016 and has nothing to do with the site now. It is run by Lydia Polgreen, a former New York Times reporter and editor, who evidently has very different ideas. In April, she completely redesigned the site and renamed it HuffPost.

Before the management change, I had published several articles on the Huffington Post about Russia without controversy. For instance, The Huffington Post published my piece on Nov. 5, 2016, that predicted three days before the election that if Clinton lost she’d blame Russia. My point was reaffirmed by the campaign-insider book Shattered, which revealed that immediately after Clinton’s loss, senior campaign advisers decided to blame Russia for her defeat.

On Dec. 12, 2016, I published another piece, which the Huffington Post editors promoted to the front page, called, “Blaming Russia To Overturn The Election Goes Into Overdrive.” I argued that “Russia has been blamed in the U.S. for many things and though proof never seems to be supplied, it is widely believed anyway.”

After I posted the updated version of the Consortium News piece — renamed “On the Origins of Russia-gate” — I was informed 23 hours later by a Facebook friend that the piece had been retracted by HuffPost editors. As a reporter for mainstream media for more than a quarter century, I know that a newsroom rule is that before the serious decision is made to retract an article the writer is contacted to be allowed to defend the piece. This never happened. There was no due process. A HuffPost editor ignored my email asking why it was taken down.

Support from Independent Media

Like the word “fascism,” “censorship” is an over-used and mis-used accusation, and I usually avoid using it. But without any explanation, I could only conclude that the decision to retract was political, not editorial.

The New York Times’ connect-the-dots graphic showing the Kremlin sitting atop the White House.

I am non-partisan as I oppose both major parties for failing to represent millions of Americans’ interests. I follow facts where they lead. In this case, the facts led to an understanding that the Jan. 6, 2017 FBI/NSA/CIA intelligence “assessment” on alleged Russian election interference, prepared by what then-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper called “hand-picked” analysts, was based substantially on unvetted opposition research and speculation, not serious intelligence work.

The assessment even made the point that the analysts were not asserting that the alleged Russian interference was a fact. The report contained the disclaimer: “Judgments are not intended to imply that we have proof that shows something to be a fact. Assessments are based on collected information, which is often incomplete or fragmentary, as well as logic, argumentation, and precedents.”

Under deadline pressure on Jan. 6, Scott Shane of The New York Times instinctively wrote what many readers of the report must have been thinking: “What is missing from the public report is what many Americans most eagerly anticipated: hard evidence to back up the agencies’ claims that the Russian government engineered the election attack. … Instead, the message from the agencies essentially amounts to ‘trust us.’”

Yet, after the Jan. 6 report was published, leading Democrats asserted falsely that the “assessment” represented the consensus judgment of all 17 U.S. intelligence agencies – not just the views of “hand-picked” analysts from three – and much of the U.S. mainstream media began treating the allegations of Russian “hacking” as flat fact, not as an uncertain conclusion denied by both the Russian government and WikiLeaks, which insists that it did not get the two batches of Democratic emails from Russia.

(There is also dissent inside the broader U.S. intelligence community about whether an alleged “hack” over the Internet was even possible based on the download speeds of one known data extraction, which matched what was possible from direct USB access to a computer, i.e., a download onto a thumb drive presumably by a Democratic insider.)

However, because of the oft-repeated “17 intelligence agencies” canard and the mainstream media’s careless reporting, the public impression has built up that the accusations against Russia are indisputable. If you ask a Russia-gate believer today what their faith is based on, they will invariably point to the Jan. 6 assessment and mock anyone who still expresses any doubt.

For instance, an unnamed former CIA officer told The Intercept last month, “You’ve got all these intelligence agencies saying the Russians did the hack. To deny that is like coming out with the theory that the Japanese didn’t bomb Pearl Harbor.”

That the supposedly dissident Intercept would use this quote is instructive about how imbalanced the media’s reporting on Russia-gate has been. We have actual film of Japanese planes attacking Pearl Harbor and American ships burning – and we have the eyewitness accounts of thousands of U.S. soldiers and sailors. Yet, on Russia-gate, we only have the opinions of some “hand-picked” intelligence officials who themselves say that they are not claiming that their opinions are fact. No serious editor would allow a self-interested and unnamed source to equate the two in print.

In this groupthink atmosphere, it was probably easy for HuffPost editors to hear some complaints from a few readers and blithely decide to ban my story. However, before it was pulled, 125 people had shared it. Ray McGovern, a former CIA analyst and frequent contributor to Consortium News, then took up my cause, being the first to write about the HuffPost censorship on his blog. McGovern included a link to a .pdf file that I captured of the censored HuffPost story. It has since been republished on numerous other websites.

Journalist Max Blumenthal tweeted about it. British filmmaker and writer Tariq Ali posted it on his Facebook page. Ron Paul and Daniel McAdams interviewed me at length about the censorship on their TV program. ZeroHedge wrote a widely shared piece and someone actually took the time, 27 minutes and 13 seconds to be exact, to read the entire article on YouTube. I began a petition to HuffPost’s Polgreen to either explain the retraction or restore the article. It gained 3,517 signatures. If a serious fact-check analysis was made of my article, it must exist and can and should be produced.

Watchdogs & Media Defending Censorship

Despite this support from independent media, a senior official at Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, I learned, declined to take up my cause because he believes in the Russia-gate story. I also learned that a senior officer at the American Civil Liberties Union rejected my case because he too believes in Russia-gate. Both of these serious organizations were set up precisely to defend individuals in such situations on principle, not preference.

Vladimir Putin with German Chancellor Angela Merkel on May 10, 2015, at the Kremlin. (Russian government photo)

In terms of their responsibilities for defending journalism and protecting civil liberties, their personal opinions about whether Russia-gate is real or not should be irrelevant. The point is whether journalists should be permitted to show skepticism toward this latest dubiously based groupthink. I fear that – amid the frenzy about Russia and the animosity toward Trump – concerns about careers and funding are driving these decisions, with principles brushed aside.

One online publication decidedly took the HuffPost’s side. Steven Perlberg, a media reporter for BuzzFeed, asked the HuffPost why they retracted my article. While ignoring me, the editors issued a statement to BuzzFeed saying that “Mr. Lauria’s self-published” piece was “later flagged by readers, and after deciding that the post contained multiple factually inaccurate or misleading claims, our editors removed the post per our contributor terms of use.” Those terms include retraction for “any reason,” including, apparently, censorship.

Perlberg posted the HuffPost statement on Twitter. I asked him if he inquired of the editors what those “multiple” errors and “misleading claims” were. I asked him to contact me to get my side of the story. Perlberg totally ignored me. He wrote nothing about the matter. He apparently believed the HuffPost and that was that. In this way, he acquiesced with the censorship.

BuzzFeed, of course, is the sensationalist outlet that irresponsibly published the Steele dossier in full, even though the accusations – not just about Donald Trump but also many other individuals – weren’t verified. Then on Nov. 14, BuzzFeed reporter Jason Leopold wrote one of the most ludicrous of a long line of fantastic Russia-gate stories, reporting that the Russian foreign ministry had sent money to Russian consulates in the U.S. “to finance the election campaign of 2016.” The scoop generated some screaming headlines before it became clear that the money was to pay for Russian citizens in the U.S. to vote in the 2016 Duma election.

That Russia-gate has reached this point, based on faith and not fact, was further illustrated by a Facebook exchange I had with Gary Sick, an academic who served on the Ford and Carter national security staffs. When I pressed Sick for evidence of Russian interference, he eventually replied: “If it walks like a duck and talks like a duck…” When I told him that was a very low-bar for such serious accusations, he angrily cut off debate.

Part of this Russia-gate groupthink stems from the outrage – and even shame – that many Americans feel about Trump’s election. They want to find an explanation that doesn’t lay the blame on the U.S. citizenry or America’s current dysfunctional political/media process. It’s much more reassuring, in a way, to blame some foreign adversary while also discrediting Trump’s legitimacy as the elected president. That leaves open some hope that his election might somehow be negated.

And, so many important people and organizations seem to be verifying the Russia-gate suspicions that the theory must be true. Which is an important point. When belief in a story becomes faith-based or is driven by an intense self-interest, honest skeptics are pushed aside and trampled. That is the way groupthink works, as we saw in the run-up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq when any doubts about Iraq possessing WMD made you a “Saddam apologist.”

As the groupthink grows, the true-believers become disdainful of facts that force them to think about what they already believe. They won’t waste time making a painstaking examination of the facts or engage in a detailed debate even on something as important and dangerous as a new Cold War with Russia.

This is the most likely explanation for the HuffPost‘s censorship: a visceral reaction to having their Russia-gate faith challenged.

Why Critical News is Suppressed

But the HuffPost’s action is hardly isolated. It is part of a rapidly growing landscape of censorship of news critical of American corporate and political leaders who are trying to defend themselves from an increasingly angry population. It’s a story as old as civilization: a wealthy and powerful elite fending off popular unrest by trying to contain knowledge of how the insiders gain at the others’ expense, at home and abroad.

Trump being sworn in on Jan. 20, 2017. (Whitehouse.gov)

A lesson of the 2016 campaign was that growing numbers of Americans are fed up with three decades of neoliberal policies that have fabulously enriched the top tier of Americans and debased a huge majority of the citizenry. The population has likewise grown tired of the elite’s senseless wars to expand their own interests, which these insiders try to conflate with the entire country’s interests.

America’s bipartisan rulers are threatened by popular discontent from both left and right. They were alarmed by the Bernie Sanders insurgency and by Donald Trump’s victory, even if Trump is now betraying the discontented masses who voted for him by advancing tax and health insurance plans designed to further crush them and benefit the wealthy.

Trump’s false campaign promises will only make the rulers’ problem of a restless population worse. Americans are subjected to economic inequality greater than in the first Gilded Age. They are also subjected today to more war than in the first Gilded Age. American rulers today are engaged in multiple conflicts following decades of post-World War II invasions and coups to expand their global interests.

People with wealth and power always seem to be nervous about losing both. So plutocrats use the concentrated media they own to suppress news critical of their wars and domestic repression. For example, almost nothing was reported about militarized police forces until the story broke out into the open in the Ferguson protests and much of that discontent has been brushed aside more recently.

Careerist journalists readily acquiesce in this suppression of news to maintain their jobs, their status and their lifestyles. Meanwhile, a growing body of poorly paid freelancers compete for the few remaining decent-paying gigs for which they must report from the viewpoint of the mainstream news organizations and their wealthy owners.

To operate in this media structure, most journalists know to excise out the historical context of America’s wars of domination. They know to uncritically accept American officials’ bromides about spreading democracy, while hiding the real war aims.

Examples abound: America’s role in the Ukraine coup was denied or downplayed; a British parliamentary report exposing American lies that led to the destruction of Libya was suppressed; and most infamously, the media promoted the WMD hoax and the fable of “bringing democracy” to Iraq, leading to the illegal invasion and devastation of that country.  A November 2017 60 Minutes report on the Saudi destruction of Yemen, conspicuously failed to mention America’s crucial role in the carnage.

I’ve pitched numerous news stories critical of U.S. foreign policy to a major American newspaper that were rejected or changed in the editorial process. One example is the declassified Defense Intelligence Agency document of August 2012 that accurately predicted the rise of the Islamic State two years later.

The document, which I confirmed with a Pentagon spokesman, said the U.S. and its Turkish, European and Gulf Arab allies, were supporting the establishment of a Salafist principality in eastern Syria to put pressure on the Syrian government, but the document warned that this Salafist base could turn into an “Islamic State.”

But such a story would undermine the U.S. government’s “war on terrorism” narrative by revealing that the U.S.-backed strategy actually was risking the expansion of the jihadists’ foothold in Syria. The story was twice rejected by my editors and has received attention almost entirely — if not exclusively — on much-smaller independent news Web sites.

Another story I pitched in June 2012, just a year into the Syrian war, about Russia’s motives in Syria being guided by a desire to defeat the growing jihadist threat there, was also rejected. Corporate media wanted to keep the myth of Russia’s “imperial” aims in Syria alive. I had to publish the article outside the U.S., in a South African daily newspaper.

In September 2015 at the U.N. General Assembly, Russian President Vladimir Putin confirmed my story about Russia’s motives in Syria to stop jihadists from taking over. Putin invited the U.S. to join this effort as Moscow was about to launch its military intervention at the invitation of the Syrian government. The Obama administration, still insisting on “regime change” in Syria, refused. And the U.S. corporate media continued promoting the myth that Russia intervened to recapture its “imperial glory.”

It was much easier to promote the “imperial” narrative and to ignore Putin’s clear explanation to French TV channel TF1, which was not picked up by American media.

“Remember what Libya or Iraq looked like before these countries and their organizations were destroyed as states by our Western partners’ forces?” Putin said. “These states showed no signs of terrorism. They were not a threat for Paris, for the Cote d’Azur, for Belgium, for Russia, or for the United States. Now, they are the source of terrorist threats. Our goal is to prevent the same from happening in Syria.”

Why Russia Is Targeted

So, where are independent-minded Western journalists to turn if their stories critical of the U.S. government and corporations are suppressed?

Tomb of the Unknown Soldier outside the Kremlin wall, Dec. 6, 2016. (Photo by Robert Parry)

The imperative is to get these stories out – and Russian media has provided an opening for some. This has presented a new problem for the plutocracy. The suppression of critical news in their corporate-owned media is no longer working if it’s seeping out in Russian media (and through some dissident Western news sites on the Internet).

The solution has been to brand the content of the Russian television network, RT, as “propaganda” since it presents facts and viewpoints that most Americans have been kept from hearing. But just because these views – many coming from Americans and other Westerners – are not what you commonly hear on the U.S. mainstream media doesn’t make them “propaganda” that must be stigmatized and silenced.

As a Russian-government-financed English-language news channel, RT also gives a Russian perspective on the news, the way CNN and The New York Times give an American perspective and the BBC a British one. American mainstream journalists, from my experience, arrogantly deny suppressing news and believe they present a universal perspective, rather than a narrow American view of the world.

The viewpoints of Iranians, Palestinians, Russians, North Koreans and others are never fully reported in the Western media although the supposed mission of journalism is to help citizens understand a frighteningly complex world from multiple points of view. It’s impossible to do so without those voices included. Routinely or systematically shutting them out also dehumanizes people in those countries, making it easier to gain U.S. popular support to go to war against them.

Russia is scapegoated by charging that RT or Sputnik are sowing divisions in the U.S. by focusing on issues like homelessness, racism, or out-of-control militarized police forces, as if these divisive issues didn’t already exist. The U.S. mainstream media also seems to forget that the U.S. government has engaged in at least 70 years of interference in other countries’ elections, foreign invasions, coups, planting stories in foreign media and cyber-warfare.

Now, these American transgressions are projected onto Moscow. There’s also a measure of self-reverence in this for “successful” people with a stake in an establishment that underpins the elite, demonstrating how wonderfully democratic they are compared to those ogres in Russia.

The overriding point about the “Russian propaganda” complaint is that when America’s democratic institutions, including the press and the electoral process, are crumbling under the weight of corruption that the American elites have created or maintained, someone else needs to be blamed. Russia is both an old and a new scapegoat.

The Jan. 6 intelligence assessment on alleged Russian election meddling is a good example of how this works. A third of its content is an attack on RT for “undermining American democracy” by reporting on Occupy Wall Street, the protest over the Dakota pipeline and, of all things, holding a “third party candidate debates.”

According to the Jan. 6 assessment, RT’s offenses include reporting that “the US two-party system does not represent the views of at least one-third of the population and is a ‘sham.’” RT also “highlights criticism of alleged US shortcomings in democracy and civil liberties.” In other words, reporting on newsworthy events and allowing third-party candidates to express their opinions undermine democracy.

The report also says all this amounts to “a Kremlin-directed campaign to undermine faith in the US Government and fuel political protest,” but it should be noted those protests by dissatisfied Americans are against privileges of the wealthy and the well-connected, a status quo that the intelligence agencies routinely protect.

There are also deeper reasons why Russia is being targeted. The Russia-gate story fits neatly into a geopolitical strategy that long predates the 2016 election. Since Wall Street and the U.S. government lost the dominant position in Russia that existed under the pliable President Boris Yeltsin, the strategy has been to put pressure on getting rid of Putin to restore a U.S. friendly leader in Moscow. There issubstance to Russia’s concerns about American designs for “regime change” in the Kremlin.

Moscow sees an aggressive America expanding NATO and putting 30,000 NATO troops on its borders; trying to overthrow a secular ally in Syria with terrorists who threaten Russia itself; backing a coup in Ukraine as a possible prelude to moves against Russia; and using American NGOs to foment unrest inside Russia before they were forced to register as foreign agents. Russia wants Americans to see this perspective.

Accelerated Censorship in the Private Sector

The Constitution prohibits government from prior-restraint, or censorship, though such tactics were  imposed, largely unchallenged, during the two world wars. American newspapers voluntarily agreed to censor themselves in the Second World War before the government dictated it.

In the Korean War, General Douglas MacArthur said he didn’t “desire to reestablish wartime censorship” and instead asked the press for self-censorship. He largely got it until the papers began reporting American battlefield losses. On July 25, 1950, “the army ordered that reporters were not allowed to publish ‘unwarranted’ criticism of command decisions, and that the army would be ‘the sole judge and jury’ on what ‘unwarranted’ criticism entailed,” according to a Yale University study on military censorship.

After excellent on-the-ground reporting from Vietnam brought the war home to America and spurred popular anti-war protests, the military reacted by instituting, initially in the first Gulf War, serious control of the press by “embedding” reporters from private media companies which accepted the arrangement, much as World War II newspapers censored themselves.

It is important to realize that the First Amendment applies only to Congress and not to private companies, including the media. It is not illegal for them to practice censorship. I never made a First Amendment argument against the HuffPost, for instance. However, under pressure from Washington, even in peacetime, media companies can be pressured to do the government’s dirty work to censor or limit free speech for the government.

In the past few weeks, we’ve seen an acceleration of attempts by corporations to inhibit Russian media in the U.S.  Both Google and Facebook, which dominate the Web with more than 50 percent of ad revenue, were at first resistant to government pressure to censor “Russian propaganda.” But they are coming around.

Eric Schmidt, executive chairman of Alphabet, Google’s parent company, said on Nov. 18, 2017 that Google would “derank” articles from RT and Sputnik in the Google searches, making the stories harder for readers to find. The billionaire Schmidt claimed Russian information can be “repetitive, exploitative, false, [or] likely to have been weaponized,” he said. That is how factual news critical of U.S. corporate and political leadership is seen, as a weapon.

“My own view is that these patterns can be detected, and that they can be taken down or deprioritized,” Schmidt said.

Though Google would effectively be hiding news produced by RT and Sputnik, Schmidt is sensitive to the charge of censorship, even though there’s nothing legally to stop him.

“We don’t want to ban the sites. That’s not how we operate,” Schmidt said cynically. “I am strongly not in favor of censorship. I am very strongly in favor of ranking. It’s what we do.”

But the “deranking” isn’t only aimed at Russian sites; Google algorithms also are taking aim at independent news sites that don’t follow the mainstream herd – and thus are accused of spreading Russian or other “propaganda” if they question the dominant Western narratives on, say, the Ukraine crisis or the war in Syria. A number of alternative websites have begun reporting a sharp fall-off of traffic directed to their sites from Google’s search engines.

Responding to a deadline from Congress to act, Facebook on Nov. 22, 2017 announced that it would inform users if they have been “targeted” by Russian “propaganda.” Facebook’s help center will tell users if they liked or shared ads allegedly from the St. Petersburg-based Internet Research Agency, which supposedly bought $100,000 in ads over a two-year period, with more than half these ads coming after the 2016 U.S. election and many not related to politics.

(The $100,000 sum over two years compares to Facebook’s $27 billion in annual revenue. Plus, Facebook only says it “believes” or it’s “likely” that the ads came from that firm, whose links to the Kremlin also have yet to be proved.)

Facebook described the move as “part of our ongoing effort to protect our platforms and the people who use them from bad actors who try to undermine our democracy.” Congress wants more from Facebook, so it will not be surprising if users will eventually be told when they’ve liked or shared an RT report in the future. [The suppression of dissident news and manipulation of information has since grown worse with the advent of NewsGuard and the discovery of the Integrity Initiative.]

While the government can’t openly shut down a news site, the Federal Communications Commission’s  vote on whether to deregulate the Internet by ending net neutrality will free private Internet companies in the U.S. to further marginalize Russian and dissident websites by slowing them down and thus discouraging readers from viewing them.

Likewise, as the U.S. government doesn’t want to be openly seen shutting down RT operations, it is working around the edges to accomplish that.

After the Department of Justice forced, under threat of arrest, RT to register its employees as foreign agents under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, State Department spokeswoman Heather Nuaert said last Tuesday that “FARA does not police the content of information disseminated, does not limit the publication of information or advocacy materials, and does not restrict an organization’s ability to operate.” She’d earlier said that registering would not “impact or affect the ability of them to report news and information. We just have them register. It’s as simple as that.”

Then on Wednesday the Congressional press office stripped RT correspondents of their Capitol Hill press passes, citing the FARA registration. “The rules of the Galleries state clearly that news credentials may not be issued to any applicant employed ‘by any foreign government or representative thereof.’ Upon its registration as a foreign agent under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), RT Network became ineligible to hold news credentials,” read the letter to RT.

Even so, Russia-gate faithful ignore these aggressive moves and issue calls for even harsher action. After forcing RT to register, Keir Giles, a Chatham House senior consulting fellow, acted as though it never happened. He said in a Council on Foreign Relations Cyber Brief on Nov. 27, 2017: “Although the Trump administration seems unlikely to pursue action against Russian information operations, there are steps the U.S. Congress and other governments should consider.”

commented on this development on RT America. It would also have been good to have the State Department’s Nuaert answer for this discrepancy about the claim that forced FARA registrations would not affect news gathering when it already has. My criticism of RT is that they should be interviewing U.S. decision-makers to hold them accountable, rather than mostly guests outside the power structure. The decision-makers could be called out on air if they refuse to appear, as many may well do.

Growing McCarthyite Attacks

Western rulers’ wariness about popular unrest also can be seen in the extraordinary and scurrilous attack on the Canadian website Globalresearch.ca. The attack started with a chilling study by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization into the relatively obscure website, followed by a vicious hit piece on Nov. 18 by the Globe and Mail, Canada’s largest newspaper. The headline was: “How a Canadian website is being used to amplify the Kremlin’s view of the world.”

Lawyer Roy Cohn (right) with Sen. Joseph McCarthy.

“What once appeared to be a relatively harmless online refuge for conspiracy theorists is now seen by NATO’s information warfare specialists as a link in a concerted effort to undermine the credibility of mainstream Western media – as well as the North American and European public’s trust in government and public institutions,” the Globe and Mail reported.

“Global Research is viewed by NATO’s Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence – or StratCom – as playing a key accelerant role in helping popularize articles with little basis in fact that also happen to fit the narratives being pushed by the Kremlin, in particular, and the Assad regime.”

I’ve not agreed with everything I’ve read on the site. But it is a useful clearinghouse for alternative media. Numerous Consortium News articles are republished there, including a handful of mine. But the site’s typical sharing and reposting on the Internet is seen by NATO as a plot to undermine the Free World.

Drawing from the NATO report, The Globe and Mail’s denunciation of this website continued: “It uses that reach to push not only its own opinion pieces, but ‘news’ reports from little-known websites that regularly carry dubious or false information. At times, the site’s regular variety of international-affairs stories is replaced with a flurry of items that bolster dubious reportage with a series of opinion pieces, promoted on social media and retweeted and shared by active bots.”

The newspaper continued, “’That way, they increase the Google ranking of the story and create the illusion of multi-source verification,’ said Donara Barojan, who does digital forensic research for [StratCom]. But she said she did not yet have proof that Global Research is connected to any government.”

This sort of smear is nothing more than a blatant attack on free speech by the most powerful military alliance in the world, based on the unfounded conviction that Russia is a fundamental force for evil and that anyone who has contacts with Russia or shares even a part of its multilateral world view is suspect.

High-profile individuals are now also in the crosshairs of the neo-McCarthyite witchhunt. On Nov. 25 The Washington Post ran a nasty hit piece on Washington Capitals’ hockey player Alex Ovechkin, one of the most revered sports figures in the Washington area, simply because he, like 86 percent of other Russians, supports his president.

“Alex Ovechkin is one of Putin’s biggest fans. The question is, why?” ran the headline. The story insidiously implied that Ovechkin was a dupe of his own president, being used to set up a media campaign to support Putin, who is under fierce and relentless attack in the United States where Ovechkin plays professional ice hockey.

“He has given an unwavering endorsement to a man who U.S. intelligence agencies say sanctioned Russian meddling in last year’s presidential election,” write the Post reporters, once again showing their gullibility to U.S. intelligence agencies that have provided no proof for their assertions (and even admit that they are not asserting their opinion as fact).

Less prominent figures are targeted too. John Kiriakou, a former CIA agent who blew the whistle on torture and was jailed for it, was kicked off a panel in Europe on Nov. 10 by a Bernie Sanders supporter who refused to appear with Kiriakou because he co-hosts a show on Radio Sputnik.

Then last week, Reporters Without Borders, an organization supposedly devoted to press freedom, tried to kick journalist Vanessa Beeley off a panel in Geneva to prevent her from presenting evidence that the White Helmets, a group that sells itself as a rescue organization inside rebel-controlled territory in Syria, has ties to Al Qaeda. The Swiss Press Club, which hosted the event, resisted the pressure and let Beeley speak.

Russia-gate’s Hurdles

Much of this spreading global hysteria and intensifying censorship traces back to Russia-gate. Yet, it remains remarkable that the corporate media has failed so far to prove any significant Russian interference in the U.S. election at all. Nor have the intelligence agencies, Congressional investigations and special prosecutor Robert Mueller. His criminal charges so far have been for financial crimes and lying to federal authorities on topics unrelated to any “collusion” between the Trump campaign and Russians to “hack” Democratic emails.

Former FBI Director James Comey.

There may well be more indictments from Mueller, even perhaps a complaint about Trump committing obstruction of justice because he said on TV that he fired Comey, in part, because of the “Russia thing.” But Trump’s clumsy reaction to the “scandal,” which he calls “fake news” and a “witch hunt,” still is not proof that Putin and the Russians interfered in the U.S. election to achieve the unlikely outcome of Trump’s victory.

The Russia-gate faithful assured us to wait for the indictment of retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, briefly Trump’s national security adviser. But again there was nothing about pre-election “collusion,” only charges that Flynn had lied to the FBI or omitted details about two conversations with the Russian ambassador regarding policy matters during the presidential transition, i.e., after the election.

And, one of those conversations related to trying unsuccessfully to comply with an Israeli request to get Russia to block a United Nations resolution censuring Israel’s settlements on Palestinian land.

As journalist Yasha Levine tweeted: “So the country that influenced US policy through Michael Flynn is Israel, not Russia. But Flynn did try to influence Russia, not the other way around. Ha-ha. This is the smoking gun? What a farce.”

There remain a number of key hurdles to prove the Russia-gate story. First, convincing evidence is needed that the Russian government indeed did “hack” the Democratic emails, both those of the DNC and Clinton’s campaign chairman John Podesta – and gave them to WikiLeaks. And, further that somehow the Trump campaign was involved in aiding and abetting this operation, i.e., collusion.

There’s also the question of how significant the release of those emails was anyway. They did provide evidence that the DNC tilted the primary campaign in favor of Clinton over Sanders; they exposed the contents of Clinton’s paid speeches to Wall Street, which she was trying to hide from the voters; and they revealed some pay-to-play features of the Clinton Foundation and its foreign donations.

But – even if the Russians were involved in providing that information to the American people – those issues were not considered decisive in the campaign. Clinton principally pinned her loss on FBI Director James Comey for closing and then reopening the investigation into her improper use of a private email server while Secretary of State. She also spread the blame to Russia (repeating the canard about “seventeen [U.S. intelligence] agencies, all in agreement”), Bernie Sanders, the inept DNC and other factors.

As for the vaguer concerns about some Russian group “probably” buying $100,000 in ads, mostly after Americans had voted, as a factor in swaying a $6 billion election, is too silly to contemplate. That RT and Sputnik ran pieces critical of Hillary Clinton was their right, and they were hardly alone. RT and Sputnik‘s reach in the U.S. is minuscule compared to Fox News, which slammed Clinton throughout the campaign, or for that matter, MSNBC, CNN and other mainstream news outlets, which often expressed open disdain for Republican Donald Trump but also gave extensive coverage to issues such as the security concerns about Clinton’s private email server.

Another vague Russia-gate suspicion stemming largely from Steele’s opposition research is that somehow Russia is bribing or blackmailing Trump because Trump has done some past business with Russians. But there are evidentiary and logical problems with these theories, since some lucrative deals fell through (and presumably wouldn’t have if Trump was being paid off) — and no one, including the Russians, foresaw Trump’s highly improbable election as U.S. President years earlier.

Some have questioned how Trump could have supported detente with Russia without being beholden to Moscow in some way. But Jeffery Sommers, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin, wrote a convincing essay explaining adviser Steve Bannon’s influence on Trump’s thinking about Russia and the need for cooperation between the two powers to solve international problems.

Without convincing evidence, I remain a Russia-gate skeptic. I am not defending Russia. Russia can defend itself. However, amid the growing censorship and a dangerous new McCarthyism, I am trying to defend America — from itself.

via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2Rv0U6k Tyler Durden

Loan Fund Outflow Streak Extends To 11 Weeks As Apollo Is Forced To Pay Up For Frozen Loan

While credit spread and leveraged loan prices rebounded sharply in the past month, the pain for leveraged loan funds has continued with another $935 million in outflows in the week ended Jan. 30, extending the losing streak to 11 weeks. According to Lipper, $718 million was pulled from mutual funds and $216 million from ETFs. In total, investors have pulled $3.15 billion from the funds year-to-date.

This week’s exodus is the latest in a string of outflows for leveraged loan funds which started in mid-November, and which included four of the biggest weekly withdrawals on record. The 11 week stretch of outflows is the longest such streak since 2017 according to Bloomberg data.

While in recent years loan funds saw persistent inflows on expectation of rising interest rates, this has now changed with the Fed’s tightening phase now largely seen as over and the market expecting the next move from the Fed to be a rate cut.

The leveraged loan market was slammed by four record-setting outflows in December, as existing loan prices plunged sharply to a more than two year low and some liquid names fell multiple points as the market was, on occasion, bidless. While the moderation of fund outflows from December’s records  has allowed the loan market to stabilize in January, the continuous run has hamstrung the recovery. While the S&P/LSTA Leveraged Loan Index is returning 2.6 percent this month, most of the gain came in the first six sessions.

And, as Bloomberg notes, with the stabilization in prices, the capital market machine has revved back into gear. Even though the volume is slighter lower than January 2018, new loan launches hiked to $32.8 billion this month, with new money making up the bulk. CLOs, the largest buyer of loans whose purchases ground to a halt in December, have also seen new issuance come back.

Even so, some new deals struggled to attract enough buyers, forcing some banks to fund underwritten deals themselves or push syndication to 2019. In fact, as Bloomberg reported earlier today, private equity giant Apollo let some of its lenders off the hook as it agreed, or rather was forced to put up more equity to close its acquisition of a $1 billion portfolio of energy-related investments from General Electric.

The PE firm had to rely on additional equity contributions from outside investors and some of its own partners to replace a $275 million loan that a group of lenders led by Royal Bank of Canada had failed to syndicate. The partially failed deal highlights how private equity firms have been making some concessions to help banks clear a pipeline of unsold loans that grew to over $3.6 billion when investors pulled back from risky investments at the end of last year.

A similar approach was taken by CVC Capital Partners, which agreed to contribute more equity to allow its buyout of ConvergeOne to close this month, Bloomberg previously reported. CVC’s banks, however, are still stuck with over $1 billion of unsold loans for that deal. As we reported previously, Royal Bank of Canada, Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Bank of Montreal had agreed to provide debt financing for Apollo’s acquisition, which was announced in October. They were forced to fund the loans before the new equity injection came in.

via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2WyrMpV Tyler Durden

Ex-NSA Spies Ran UAE Intelligence Unit Which Hacked Dissidents

The United Arab Emirates has been recruiting American former spies in order to monitor its own citizens, and according to an explosive new lengthy Reuters investigation, the Americans which include former NSA cybersecurity specialists were increasingly asked to “cross a red line” by spying on US citizens as part of an operation called ‘Project Raven’.

The story has been revealed by multiple Americans who were part of the operation, who admitted to spying on “enemies” of the UAE monarchy including journalists, activists, and foreign governments, but who only had qualms about what they were doing when asked to monitor fellow Americans. 

One of the American UAE hackers had previously worked alongside Edward Snowden while still at the NSA in 2013.

The story begins by detailing how alarmingly fast the gulf Arab country and close GCC ally of Saudi Arabia is able to scoop up career US intelligence operatives in some cases a mere days or weeks after leaving their agencies:

Two weeks after leaving her position as an intelligence analyst for the U.S. National Security Agency in 2014, Lori Stroud was in the Middle East working as a hacker for an Arab monarchy. She had joined Project Raven, a clandestine team that included more than a dozen former U.S. intelligence operatives recruited to help the United Arab Emirates engage in surveillance of other governments, militants and human rights activists critical of the monarchy.

Stroud and her team, working from a converted mansion in Abu Dhabi known internally as “the Villa,” would use methods learned from a decade in the U.S intelligence community to help the UAE hack into the phones and computers of its enemies.

It’s also partly a tale of the booming and unaccountable world of the defense contractor industry and how the gulf monarchies are increasingly outsourcing defense and security work.

In Stroud’s case for example, she was initially recruited by a Maryland-based cybersecurity contractor called CyberPoint which had a contract for advancing UAE hacking operations, but then her team got transferred to a UAE firm called DarkMatter, which brought all decision-making and oversight directly under the control of the Emiratis. This meant further that in recruiting career NSA experts, the UAE was able to bring a wealth of NSA methods, knowledge, and tools for use by their own intelligence service. And interestingly, the report notes, Stroud had previously in her career worked alongside Edward Snowden while still employed by the NSA at a base in Hawaii in 2013.

At this point Reuters notes, “Stroud and other Americans involved in the effort say they saw the mission cross a red line: targeting fellow Americans for surveillance.” She admitted to Reuters that she came to the realization that, “I am working for a foreign intelligence agency who is targeting U.S. persons,” and that, “I am officially the bad kind of spy.”

“Some days it was hard to swallow, like [when you target] a 16-year-old kid on Twitter,” she described. “But it’s an intelligence mission, you are an intelligence operative. I never made it personal.”

Career NSA officer Lori Stroud, who in 2014 became a contract intelligence operative for the UAE. Image source: Reuters.

The team, working from their secretive Abu Dhabi location at “the Villa,” utilized cutting edge cyber tools to hack into the iPhones of hundreds of activists, as well as engaged in phishing operations to track UAE political opponents, and what’s described by former members as counter-terror operations against ISIS cells. This included targeting adversaries in countries like Qatar, Iran, Turkey, Yemen, and even involved tracking people who so much as criticized the UAE government. 

However, an even more secretive unit was tasked with spying on and hacking American citizens, according to Reuters:

The hacking of Americans was a tightly held secret even within Raven, with those operations led by Emiratis instead. Stroud’s account of the targeting of Americans was confirmed by four other former operatives and in emails reviewed by Reuters.

The FBI is now investigating whether Raven’s American staff leaked classified U.S. surveillance techniques and if they illegally targeted American computer networks, according to former Raven employees interviewed by federal law enforcement agents. Stroud said she is cooperating with that investigation. No charges have been filed and it is possible none will emerge from the inquiry. An FBI spokeswoman declined to comment.

Stroud, who was the only one of nine total former American Raven team members willing to use her name in the Reuters interview detailing for the first time the UAE operation, said she and others had starting salaries of over $200,000 a year, with some in supervisory positions making more than $400,000.

The team raked in major pay utilizing their NSA training in US intelligence collection and cyberwarfare methods, but while attempting to root out dissent sometimes targeting Americans and activists living in the West  as determined by their Emirati directors. As one particularly prominent example from the Reuters piece highlights:

One of the program’s key targets in 2012 was Rori Donaghy, according to former Raven operatives and program documents. Donaghy, then 25, was a British journalist and activist who authored articles critical of the country’s human rights record. In 2012, he wrote an opinion piece for the Guardian criticizing the UAE government’s activist crackdown and warning that, if it continued, “those in power face an uncertain future.”

Before 2012, the former operatives said, the nascent UAE intelligence-gathering operation largely relied on Emirati agents breaking into the homes of targets while they were away and physically placing spyware on computers. But as the Americans built up Raven, the remote hacking of Donaghy offered the contractors a tantalizing win they could present to the client.

Yet members of the team, represented by Stroud, didn’t question what they were doing so long as Americans weren’t immediately targeted. “We’re working on behalf of this country’s government, and they have specific intelligence objectives which differ from the U.S., and understandably so,” Stroud explained to Reuters. “You live with it.”

Reuters uncovered many other such egregious examples of spying on dissidents in the service of Emirati intelligence trying to stamp out speech, which in many cases involved the Project Raven team sweeping up Americans’ communications, even when not conducting specific missions on US citizens. 

“It was incredible because there weren’t these limitations like there was at the NSA. There wasn’t that bullshit red tape,” Stroud explained further of work she found “exhilarating”. And she said further, “I feel like we did a lot of good work on counterterrorism.”

But at this point it is perhaps the FBI that will determine the degree of illegality in the team’s UAE work, as it’s conducting an ongoing investigation. The NSA refused to comment for the Reuters report; however Rhea Siers, a former NSA deputy assistant director for policy did note that should American communications have been hacked or stolen by US citizens working on behalf of foreign intelligence, “It would be very illegal.”

Though we expect that the mainstream networks will likely shrug and yawn at this bombshell Reuters story, given that it doesn’t involve Putin or Russia, but merely one of Washington’s chief Arab gulf oil and gas allies. 

via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2S3ghYQ Tyler Durden

Regime Change In Venezuela: Army Defectors, Russian Mercs, & Disappearing Gold

Via Southfront.org,

Over the past few days, the intensity of anti-government protests in Venezuela has declined despite attempts of the US-led bloc to warm them up through both public and clandestine measures. However, the conflict continues to develop amid the acute standoff in the media sphere between the Maduro government and its opponents backed by the US-led bloc.

On January 29, CNN released an interview with two “Venezuelan army defectors” who appealed to US President Donald Trump to arm them to defend “freedom” in Venezuela. They claimed to be in contact with hundreds of willing defectors via WhatsApp groups and called on Venezuelan soldiers to revolt against the government of President Nicolas Maduro.

“As Venezuelan soldiers, we are making a request to the US to support us, in logistical terms, with communication, with weapons, so we can realize Venezuelan freedom,” one of the alleged defectors, Guillen Martinez, told CNN.

Another one, Hidalgo Azuaje, added: “We’re not saying that we need only US support, but also Brazil, Colombia, Peru, all brother countries, that are against this dictatorship.”

During the entire clip, these persons were presented in a manner alleging that they had just recently defected and are now calling on others to follow their step. However, therein lies the problem. The badges on their uniform say FAN – Fuerza Armada Nacionales. This is an outdated pattern, which has been dropped. Now, Venezuela’s service members have a different badge – FANB, which means Fuerza Armada Nacional Bolivariana. So, either the “Venezuelan army defectors” somehow lost the letter B from their uniform, or the entire interview is a staged show involving former Venezuelan service members, who have been living for a long time outside the country, or in the worst case –  actors.

The interview came amid increasing US political, media and sanction pressure on the Maduro government. White House National Security Adviser John Bolton was even spotted with a mysterious note about the deployment of 5,000 US troops to Colombia, the US ally which borders Venezuela. In this situation, a large-scale military uprising or at least formation of some opposition within the army would become a useful tool in a wider effort to overthrow the country’s government. On the other hand, the use of such CNN-styled content shows that so far the US and its proxies have achieved little success in buying the support of Venezuelan service members.

On January 29, Venezuelan lawmaker Jose Guerra claimed via Twitter that a Boeing 777 of Russia’s Nordwind Airlines landed in Caracas on January 28 to spirit away 20 tons of gold bars, worth some $840 million, from the country’s central bank. When asked how he knew this, Guerra provided no evidence. By January 30, these items of breaking news had rocked the headlines of most of the mainstream media.

Another version, which was also quite popular among pro-opposition media, is that the plane, which reportedly made the trip directly from Moscow, moved in a group of Russian private military contractors to support the Maduro government. This version is fueled by reports claiming up to 400 Kremlin-linked private military contractors may have arrived in Venezuela.

The developing crisis is also accompanied by the growth of citizen journalism. Bellingcat members already created a Twitter page named “In Venezuela”, which provides field news about the crisis from Toronto, Canada. It’s easy to expect some “open source intelligence investigations” revealing crimes of the Maduro government against peaceful protesters very soon if the conflict escalates further.

Roughly speaking, the mainstream media presents the audience with the following story: The Maduro government is about to fall and is already moving the country’s gold reserves somewhere via Russian planes. At the same time, Vladimir Putin sent his mercenaries to rescue Maduro and to keep the corrupt regime in power in order to secure Russia’s economic and political interests. This, as well as the oppressive nature of the regime, are the only reason why the forces of good have not yet achieved victory.

Fortunately, there is the shining knight of democracy, Juan Guaido, who was democratically appointed as the Interim President of Venezuela from Washington. He, his Free Venezuelan Army consisting of hundreds of WhatsApp defectors and a group of unbiased US/NATO-funded citizen journalists and investigators are ready to stand against the Maduro-Putin alliance and to defend freedom and democracy in Venezuela… with a bit of help from the Trump administration for sure.

There are no doubts that modern Venezuela is allied with Russia and Moscow will employ its existing influence to resolve the crisis and thus defend its investments and oil assets. Furthermore, Maduro and his supporters showed that they are not going to give in to the US-led pressure. At the same time, The level of MSM hysteria, including an open disinformation campaign against the Maduro government and attempts to demonize it through various means, including its ties with Moscow, show that the Washington establishment is serious in its regime change efforts and may even be ready to instigate a Syria-style “proxy war” in the country in order to achieve own goals.

via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2MJsBYz Tyler Durden

January Payrolls Preview: 100 Straight Months Of Job Creation

Tomorrow at 830am, the BLS is expected to announce that in January the US added 165k payrolls, a sharp drop from December’s 312K, while both average hourly earnings and unemployment are expected to remain unchanged at 3.2% and 3.9%, respectively. More importantly, absent some unexpected shock, if the jobs number is positive it will represent the record 100th month of job creation.

That said, the 800,000 furloughed workers in the past month and recent hard data makes the post-shutdown jobs report more of a focus than usual.

Below, courtesy of RanSquawk are the key highlights of what Wall Street expects:

  • Non-farm Payrolls: Exp. 165k, Prev. 312k
  • Unemployment Rate: Exp. 3.9%, Prev. 3.9% (the FOMC projects unemployment will stand at 3.5% at the end of 2019, and 4.4% in the longerrun)
  • Average Earnings Y/Y: Exp. 3.2%, Prev. 3.2%
  • Average Earnings M/M: Exp. 0.3%, Prev. 0.4%
  • Average Work Week Hours: Exp. 34.5, Prev. 34.5
  • Private Payrolls: Exp. 170k, Prev. 301k
  • Manufacturing Payrolls: Exp. 17k, Prev. 32k
  • Government Payrolls: Prev. 11k
  • U6 Unemployment Rate: Prev. 7.6%
  • Labour Force Participation: Prev. 63.1%

EXPECTATIONS: The Street is expecting a slower pace of payroll additions (165k) at the February release when compared to both the 12-month average of headline nonfarm payrolls (202k for Feb 2018-Jan 2019) and the previous blowout figure of 312k. Capital Economics notes that the release will only be partly affected by the Federal shutdown as those affected who will now receive pay for the reference period will be counted as employed. As such the main impact may be felt in the private payrolls component as a result of jobs contingent on Federal contracts, alongside the unemployment rate due to employees who stayed home during the shutdown. ING expects slower payroll growth in 2019 vs. 2018 because of “fading support from the fiscal stimulus, lagged effects of higher interest rates and the strong dollar plus ongoing fears about trade protectionism at a time of weaker external demand”. These analysts also cite a nearterm lack of availability of workers to employ, as evidence by the NFIB reporting that 39% of US small businesses have vacancies that they cannot fill. As such they expect payroll growth of 140k.

While weather likely contributed to the 312k December gain, Goldman expects only a partial payback tomorrow (of around 10-25k), as January was also relatively warm and dry during the reference week. In terms of the impact of the partial government shutdown, the BLS has clarified that furloughed and unpaid government workers will be included in tomorrow’s payroll counts.

Arguing for a stronger report:

  • Jobless claims. Initial jobless claims edged lower on net over the four weeks between the payroll reference periods (averaging 221k vs. 223k in the December payroll month). While initial claims rebounded sharply in today’s report, this increase occurred after the January payroll month, and it also followed a 49-year low in the previous week. Given this and the possibility that seasonal distortions related to the Martin Luther King holiday affected the data, we continue to believe that the pace of layoff activity remains low (albeit somewhat higher than in the early fall).
  • Labor supply constraints. Historically, labor supply constraints are less likely to bind in January, perhaps reflecting the relatively low hiring rates (and high layoff rates) in that month of the year. January first-print private payrolls have accelerated relative to the previous months in 4 of the last 5 tight-labor-market years—defined as years in which the employment gap (NAIRU minus the unemployment rate) is already positive in the first quarter.1 And as shown in Exhibit 1, job growth on average peaks in January of those years.
  • ADP. The payroll-processing firm ADP reported a 213k increase in January private payroll employment—32k above consensus and just above its average pace over the prior six months (+205k). While the inputs to the ADP model likely contributed to the strength, the ADP report suggests that the pace of job growth remained solid at the start of the year.

Arguing for a weaker report:

  • Service-sector surveys. Service-sector business surveys were generally soft in January. Similarly, the employment component to Goldman’s non-manufacturing survey tracker declined to a 27-month low (-1.4pt to 52.3). Service-sector job growth rose 227k in December and averaged 164k over the last six months.
  • Winter weather. Last month’s blockbuster payroll report likely received a boost from mild winter weather of around 75k. However, some of this reflected the unwind of a sizeable drag in November. Additionally, January weather has been warmer than usual, and our population-weighted snowfall series was slightly below average during the January payroll reference week (see chart below). Taken together, we expect the net effect of weather on January payroll growth will be a small or moderate drag (perhaps between -10k and -25k).

  • Government Shutdown. We expect only a modest drag from the partial government shutdown on payroll growth. The BLS clarified that the roughly 800k furloughed and unpaid federal workers will be included in the January payroll counts (in the establishment survey). However, we still see scope for a modest drag on federal hiring (we expect unchanged government payrolls mom sa) and on government contractor employment in the private sector (a possible drag on the information and business services categories)

FED: With the Fed reaffirming its data dependent stance, and the market jitters noted in December extending their reverberations into the new year enough to see the Fed fall back into neutral gear, the labour market release this time round will have magnified focus as the now-rectified Government shutdown has furloughed the market of both hard data and Government workers. ING believes that “any slowdown in jobs growth this month is as much due to a lack of available workers as it is to a slowdown in hiring intentions after a bumper end to 2018”. Whilst payroll additions are seen moderating from the astronomical print of 312k in January, ING has additionally quoted wage growth as a key take away from the report. They note that “wage pressures [are] clearly ris[ing] in the US with the annual rate of pay growth running at 3.2%” and believe that this will continue to climb “given the intense competition to find suitable workers when unemployment is at multi-decade lows”.

JOBLESS CLAIMS: Claims fell to 216k against a consensus 233k within the relevant survey period, whilst the four-week average rose marginally to 221,750. Analysts at SocGen suggested that the claims figure might have been even lower had the US government shutdown not played a role as around 380k of the 800k workers furloughed by the US government shutdown became eligible to submit jobless claims, suggesting a strong labour market. Whilst not reflected in the upcoming labour market report, this effect has only been exacerbated in the following weeks, with suggestions of a slowing labour market stoked by the 1 ½ year high print of 253k (vs. Exp. 215k) in the latest report.

ADP PAYROLLS: ADP reported 213k nonfarm payrolls additions, beating expectations of 178k, which Moody’s Zandi cited as evidence of the “job market weather[ing] the government shutdown well. Despite the severe disruptions, businesses continued to add aggressively to their payrolls”. Analysts at Pantheon Macroeconomics digested this print as “inevitable” and a “healthy-looking gain”. It did note, however that ADP likely overstates the official NFP print as ADP is generated by “a model which incorporates lagged official data”. Pantheon added that it “can’t say for sure how big this effect was, because ADP does not release its model”, and given the small error in their ADP forecast (220k) they have left their 180k prediction for NFP unchanged as “labor demand remains extremely strong, despite the pressure on the manufacturing sector from China’s slowdown and the trade war; manufacturing accounts for only 8.4% of U.S. payrolls”.

BUSINESS SURVEYS At the ISM Manufacturing release in January, the employment subcomponent fell 2.2ppts to 56.2 from 58.4 with ISM noting that “employment continued to expand, supporting production growth, but at the lowest expansion levels since June 2018, when the index registered 56 percent”. In a reaction to the data release analysts at Pantheon warned that the figure could fall much further without a rebound in new orders. The non-manufacturing release also saw a similar decline in January, with a fall of 2.1ppts to 56.3 to its lowest point since July 2018 and comments from respondents stating they were “adding staff to address growing orders” alongside noting that whilst capacity constraints have lessened, employment-resource challenges remain.

JOB CUTS: Challenger reported US employers had announced 52.988k in January an increase of 9.104k on a monthly basis and above the three-month average of 45k. Challenger Gray & Christmas noted that “Employers are continuing the trend of reducing staff that we saw in the fourth quarter of last year, as several industries pivot to emerging technologies. Companies are battling economic uncertainty and, while consumer confidence was high, consumer spending missed estimates at major retailers during the holiday season”. The retail sector led the pack in job cuts with 22,327, with them noting “Retail is going through a transformation that may cost many jobs, but is also creating many jobs” after Gymboree’s plan to liquidate their stores in the US and Canada.

via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2DPzYL1 Tyler Durden

Who Will Guard Us From The Guardians? YouTube “Protects” Users By Hiding “Conspiracy Theories”

Authored by Robert Bridge via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

Flat earth, 9/11 ‘inside job’, and the Kennedy assassination ‘cover-up’. These are just some of the ‘conspiracy theories’ that YouTube will baby proof going forward, hiding such content from users as if they were not cognitively thinking adults capable of making rational decisions.

This month, disgraced Buzzfeed performed yet another astonishing feat of shoddy, agenda-driven journalism by reporting that it took just nine mouse clicks on YouTube to go from a PBS report on the 116th Congress to a video entitled ‘A Day in the Life of an Arizona Rancher,’ produced by a Washington immigration reform group known as The Center for Immigration Studies (CIS).

The video that so enraged Buzzfeed details the story of Richard Humphries, an Arizona resident and former narcotics officer living just miles from the US-Mexico border. Humphries, increasingly concerned with the number of illegals traversing his 75-acre ranch, built a watchtower on his sprawling property to help him and federal border agents track illegal aliens. Considering the ‘extremist nature’ of the content, is it any surprise that the CIS was branded in 2016 a ‘hate group’ by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), a group itself that has been portrayed as touting a leftist agenda, yet is quietly partnering with YouTube to flag ‘hate’ content?

The Buzzfeed article took exception with many other ‘right-wing’ videos that had the audacity to rear their racist heads in YouTube’s auto-select function. One of those channels is called PragerU, which hosts popular liberal bugbears, including Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson, James Damore and Charlie Kirk. The channel, which filed a lawsuit to stop Google and YouTube from illegally censoring its educational videos and discriminating against its right to freedom of speech, operates on the principle of providing “knowledge and clarity on life’s biggest and most interesting topics… ranging from history and economics to science and happiness.”

Sounds pretty radical, yes? Well, only if you happen to be situated on the left of the political spectrum, as the overwhelming bulk of the IT undoubtedly is. Then yes, all that free right-wing speech may seem radical and worth tweaking the almighty algorithm to ensure they never see the light of day. Never mind that the original YouTube algorithm was built on a market-driven principle where the most popular videos shot to the top in the feeds, a phenomenon that presented a direct threat to the mainstream media message. Given the Left’s hot embrace of Cultural Marxist principles, it shouldn’t come as any surprise that Silicon Valley shuns the free market when it works against its own interests.

Now YouTube, obeying the Buzzfeed dog whistle, has pledged to turn the screws even more on ‘conspiratorial’ (i.e. right-wing) creators by “taking a closer look” at how the “Up Next” videos that autoplay after each video ends can lead viewers astray into the dense field of conspiracy-theory, pockmarked as it is with rabbit holes of various sizes and shapes.

Google announced it will begin “reducing recommendations of borderline content and content that could misinform users in harmful ways—such as videos promoting a phony miracle cure for a serious illness, claiming the earth is flat, or making blatantly false claims about historic events like 9/11.”

Although Google said the changes will not affect “whether a video is available on YouTube,” judging by the personal experience of several popular YouTube commentators, for example, Mark Dice, the new algorithm is so effective that even when the exact title of one of his ‘controversial’ videos is entered into the channel’s search field it will not yield the correct result.

The New York Times reported on this latest crackdown against social media creators by saying YouTube and other communication platforms have faced rising criticism for “failing to police the content” that creators share.

That is an extremely disconcerting comment when it is considered that we are not talking about hate speech, but rather ideas that have not been awarded the stamp of approval by both the government and the mainstream media. Yet it is the media – the hallowed Fourth Estate – that was originally designed to keep government in check on behalf of the people. The mainstream media, due to its incestuous relationship with Corporate America has failed dramatically on that score. Now we find the two agencies closely aligned in not only promulgating a particular narrative on every major story that surfaces, but cracking down on those alternative voices that would dare suggest a different version of events.

The number of YouTube commentators that have been purged from the video platform is simply staggering, and reveals the true nature of ‘American democracy,’ which is more concerned with fortifying the status quo than bothering itself with truth and justice.

Tragically, the American Founding Fathers, when they were setting down the First Amendment to the Bill of Rights, which has been in force since December 15, 1791, could not have foreseen the development of two major obstacles that would greatly offset their freedom-loving legislation.

The first is the advancement of powerful private corporations, which fly under the radar of the First Amendment. This would have tremendous implications on free speech since corporations, which have largely cornered the market on all communications, are free to establish their own rules with regards to what they want their customers to see and hear. They are powerful enough to tell their customers ‘if you don’t like our policies, you don’t have to use our services,’ while knowing full well that there are not many alternative options. And since the major IT companies all tend to hold neo-Liberal political views, it is their vision of the world that is being pushed to the forefront.

Meanwhile, and this leads us to the second obstacle to free speech, an increasing number of voices from the political right are being smeared and silenced on the pretext of promoting ‘conspiracy theories.’ It should be kept in mind that no police detective worth his or her salt would stop following a particular lead in a case for fear of being branded a ‘conspiracy theorist.’ Indeed, the world-famous detective Sherlock Holmes would not have been able to solve a single crime had he been accused of being a ‘conspiracy theorist’ by his colleagues, many of whom could not follow his subtle train of thought.

In closing, allow me to just reproduce, for those who have forgotten its essence, the First Amendment: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

When will corporations be forced to live up to the law of the land, especially considering they have in many cases become an actual arm of the government?

via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2UrgphE Tyler Durden

Yuan Plunges After China Caixin PMI Tumbles To 3 Year Low; Biggest Drop On Record

One day after China’s official manufacturing PMI number printed in contraction territory for the second month in a row, moments ago the Caixin/Markit China manufacturing PMI confirmed that China’s manufacturing sector is effectively in recession, when it tumbled from 49.7 in December to 48.3 (from 51.5 a year ago), its second consecutive month in contraction territory, and missing estimates of a 49.6 print. This was the lowest print in the series of the revised index which came online in March of 2016.

The 1.4 post slump may not sound like a lot, but it was the biggest drop in the series’ 3 year history.

Among the key indicators, output fell to 48.1 from 50.3 in Dec, the lowest reading since June 2016 and reverses the recent expansion trend; Meanwhile, new orders also fell vs prior month, sliding to the lowest reading since Sept. 2015.

In the monthly report, Caixin said that the latest survey data signaled subdued overall operating conditions in the Chinese manufacturing sector at the start of 2019. Production and total new work were both slightly down at the start of the year, despite a renewed increase in export orders. Relatively muted demand conditions underpinned the first fall in purchasing activity for 20 months, while firms also registered lower inventories of both purchased and finished items.

There was a silver lining in the employment and confidence indicators: workforce numbers at manufacturing firms in China fell only slightly in January. Furthermore, the rate of reduction was the slowest seen for nine months. At the same time, companies reported a further modest increase in the amount of outstanding orders. The softer fall in employment was accompanied by a slight improvement in business confidence. Notably, sentiment regarding the 12-month business outlook was at its most positive since May 2018. Some firms anticipate new products and planned company expansions to boost output over the next year.

That said there was no mistaking what was an almost uniformly negative print, as manufacturers also adopted a cautious approach to inventories, as firms reduced their holdings of both stocks of purchases and finished items at the start of 2019. After broadly stabilizing at the end of 2018, average suppliers’ delivery times also increased across China’s manufacturing sector in January. 

More concerning is that deflation appears to be re-emerging, because in contrast to the marked increases seen through most of 2018, average input costs faced by Chinese manufacturers fell for the second month running.  “According to panelists, lower cost burdens were due to reduced prices for raw materials. At the same time, output charges also fell in January, amid reports of a general drop in market prices.”

Commenting on the poor print, Zhengsheng Zhong said “The subindex for new orders dipped further into contractionary territory, pointing to a moderate contraction in demand across the manufacturing sector. Yet the gauge for new export orders rose notably above the 50 level, the dividing line that separates contraction from expansion, reaching its highest point since March 2018, showing that companies’ export orders have obviously rebounded since the truce in the China-U.S. trade war.”

So some good news, perhaps? Well, not really, because as the report admitted, “on the whole, countercyclical economic policy hasn’t had a significant effect. While domestic manufacturing demand shrank, external demand turned positive and became a bright spot amid positive progress in Sino-U.S. trade talks. As companies were more willing to reduce their inventories, their output declined, indicating notable downward pressure on China’s economy.”

The report’s conclusion: “China is likely to launch more fiscal and monetary measures and speed up their implementation. Yet the stance of stabilizing leverage and strict regulation hasn’t changed, which means the weakening trend of China’s economy will continue.

Following the report, the Yuan tumbled almost 300 pips, falling for the first time in 8 days, and undoing much of the recent trade talk optimism.

via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2MHvE3f Tyler Durden

Krieger: We’re All “Just Manipulated Serfs On An Oligarch’s Digital Plantation”

Authored by Mike Krieger via Liberty Blitzkrieg blog,

By now it’s no longer restricted to individual companies or even to the internet sector. It has spread across a wide range of products, services, and economic sectors, including insurance, retail, healthcare, finance, entertainment, education, transportation, and more, birthing whole new ecosystems of suppliers, producers, customers, market-makers, and market players. Nearly every product or service that begins with the word “smart” or “personalised”, every internet-enabled device, every “digital assistant”, is simply a supply-chain interface for the unobstructed flow of behavioural data on its way to predicting our futures in a surveillance economy.

– From the must read piece: ‘The Goal Is to Automate Us’: Welcome to the Age of Surveillance Capitalism

A lot of my content over the past couple of years has focused on the momentous geopolitical changes I see on the horizon, and this macro perspective reaches two significant conclusions. First, that the planet is moving away from a unipolar world dominated almost entirely by the U.S. toward a more multi-polar world. Second, that this fundamental shift in geopolitical landscape, coupled with what appears to be a forthcoming reckoning with the largest global debt bubble in human history, will lead to a once in a generation reset of the world economy and the global financial system that keeps it functioning.

As has become increasingly clear in recent months, the two primary protagonists in this major historical shift are the U.S. and China. While I’ve speculated about how increased tensions between these two economic giants will likely usher in the end of globalization as we know it (and possibly a bifurcated global economy), I’ve spent less time talking about what the internal situations will look like within individual countries themselves. This is a major oversight because what really matters to Chinese and U.S. citizens ten years from now isn’t which nation has more military bases abroad, but what will everyday life be like for regular people?

In this regard, China and the U.S. both seem to be headed in similar and very dystopian directions when it comes to the freedom-destroying marriage of overbearing government and ubiquitous surveillance technology. I read a couple of excellent articles on this topic over the past week, which forced the issue to the top of my mind. In other words, does it really matter who wins the geopolitical game of risk if “we the people” end up being controlled, surveilled and completely subjugated by the very technology we so eagerly embraced and assumed would make the world a more liberated place just a few years ago?

Everyone reading this is probably aware of the mind-bogglingly creepy and terrifying social credit system being unveiled in China. The first paragraph of a recent must read Wired article, Is Big Tech Merging with Big Brother? Kinda Looks like It, puts the situation into stark terms:

A friend of mine, who runs a large television production company in the car-mad city of Los Angeles, recently noticed that his intern, an aspiring filmmaker from the People’s Republic of China, was walking to work.

When he offered to arrange a swifter mode of transportation, she declined. When he asked why, she explained that she “needed the steps” on her Fitbit to sign in to her social media accounts. If she fell below the right number of steps, it would lower her health and fitness rating, which is part of her social rating, which is monitored by the government. A low social rating could prevent her from working or traveling abroad.

Most Americans will read this and think there’s no way this could happen here, but the truth is a lot more complicated, and in some respects we’re at least headed in a similar direction.

We live in a situation where we still have Constitutional protections like freedom of speech on paper, but with so much of the public discussion being dominated by a couple of tech giants who ban people arbitrarily, it’s being eroded in practice. As I noted in last year’s piece, Americans Need Social Media Guided by the Rights Enshrined in the U.S. Constitution:

I say in theory because in practice we’re learning how easily speech can be marginalized to the point of becoming erased from public discourse. We’ve allowed the digital public square to be dominated by corporations focused on profit maximization and whose policies quite explicitly do not reflect the law of the land and values that we supposedly hold dear.

If you’re like me and you think the civil liberties enshrined in the U.S. Constitution are fundamental to who we are as a people, it must necessarily be unacceptable that a handful of private technology corporations that do not adhere to these principles have dominated the rails of public communication to the point a handful of executives get to decide what acceptable speech is.

But it’s even worse than that. The tech giants are in bed with government or government-funded institutions in one way or the other, so to simply characterize them as private companies isn’t really accurate. Though it may come as a surprise, I think Amazon is the most pernicious and dangerous of them all. Worse than Google and even worse than Facebook.

The aforementioned Wired article touches on the Amazon problem. For example:

Last year, Amazon Web Services announced the opening of the new AWS Secret Region, the result of a 10-year, $600 million contract the company won from the CIA in 2014. This made Amazon the sole provider of cloud services across “the full range of data classifications, including Unclassified, Sensitive, Secret, and Top Secret,” according to an Amazon corporate press release.

Once the CIA’s Amazon-administered self-contained servers were up and running, the NSA was quick to follow suit, announcing its own integrated big-data project. Last year the agency moved most of its data into a new classified computing environment known as the Intelligence Community GovCloud, an integrated “big data fusion environment,” as the news site NextGov described it, that allows government analysts to “connect the dots” across all available data sources, whether classified or not.

The creation of IC GovCloud should send a chill up the spine of anyone who understands how powerful these systems can be and how inherently resistant they are to traditional forms of oversight, whose own track record can be charitably described as poor.

Amazon’s IC GovCloud was quickly countered by Microsoft’s secure version of its Azure Government cloud service, tailored for the use of 17 US intelligence agencies. Amazon and Microsoft are both expected to be major bidders for the Pentagon’s secure cloud system, the Joint Enterprise Defense Initiative—JEDI—a winner-take-all contract that will likely be worth at least $10 billion.

With so many pots of gold waiting at the end of the Washington, DC, rainbow, it seems like a small matter for tech companies to turn over our personal data—which legally speaking, is actually their data—to the spy agencies that guarantee their profits. This is the threat that is now emerging in plain sight. It is something we should reckon with now, before it’s too late.

You can’t really read the above and simply refer to Amazon as a private company. The truth of the matter is Amazon at this stage is kinda part of the government, and it should be treated that way. It should be subject to far more transparency and oversight at the very least, if not broken up. This should be a consequence of being so intimately tied to U.S. intelligence agencies. Do you really trust a company making so much money from contracts with spooks to keep your information private and free from rampant surveillance? You shouldn’t, and nobody should.

Amazon, which both collects and analyzes consumer data and sells a wide range of consumer home devices with microphones and cameras in them, may present surveillance agencies with especially tempting opportunities to repurpose their existing microphones, cameras, and data.

While Amazon troubles me the most, all the tech giants are deeply problematic and present a real threat to freedom, privacy and human dignity.  Yes, the situation is that serious.

Unbeknownst to many, these companies so dominate how the internet itself works, it’s virtually impossible to get away from them. For example, a Gizmodo journalist recently tried to stop interacting with Amazon for a week and found it was impossible. Essentially, if you want to use the internet at all, you can’t really avoid Amazon.

Ultimately, though, we found Amazon was too huge to conquer.

AWS is the internet’s largest cloud provider, generating 0ver $17 billion in revenue last year. Though Amazon makes much more in gross sales—over $100 billion—from its retail business, if you scrutinize its earnings reports, you’ll see that the majority of its profits come from AWS. Tech is where the money is, baby.

Launched in 2006, AWS has taken over vast swaths of the internet. My VPN winds up blocking over 23 million IP addresses controlled by Amazon, resulting in various unexpected casualties, from Motherboard and Fortune to the U.S. Government Accountability Office’s website. (Government agencies love AWS, which is likely why Amazon, soon to be a corporate Cerberus with three “headquarters,” chose Arlington, Virginia, in the D.C. suburbs, as one of them.) Many of the smartphone apps I rely on also stop working during the block…

Amazon has embedded itself so thoroughly into the infrastructure of modern life, and into the business models of so many companies, including its competitors, that it’s nearly impossible to avoid it.

The U.S. economy is becoming less and less of a free market every single day, and the tech giants are increasingly a big reason for this pernicious trend.

Of course, I’d be remiss if I didn’t give Facebook honorable mention for being the creepy, dishonest, surveillance corporation masquerading as a platform that it is. In just the last 24 hours, we learned the following…

As disturbing as all of this is, I’m convinced we can turn it around. Much of this Orwellian world of gigantic tech surveillance corporations, and the governments that work with them, was created in the background while much of the public had no real understanding how their business models worked and the terrifying real world implications that come with ubiquitous surveillance for profit and social control. We are only slowly waking up from a long slumber and while many think it’s too late to turn back the clock, I say it’s never too late. Even for China, you never know what can happen. You can only abuse people for so long before they snap.

The truth of the matter is we have little choice. Technology is just a tool which can be used for good, evil or any spectrum in between. Society is leaning hard and fast toward the maliciousness path with most governments happy to encourage and partner with it.

Either we turn this thing around or we’ll be reduced to little more than swiping, liking, manipulated serfs on an oligarch’s digital plantation.  To leave such a legacy to our children and grandchildren is unconscionable.

I’d like to think we can do better than this.

*  *  *

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via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2G06A77 Tyler Durden

More Alarm Bells As 440 Chinese Companies Issue Profit Warnings In One Day

Alarm bells are ringing in China as Beijing continues its relentless crackdown on shadow banking.

Hundreds of Chinese companies issued profit warnings, telling their investors that earnings for the full year were going to be below expectations, according to Bloomberg. No less than 440 zombie companies disclosed the bad news on Wednesday, still one day before the deadline for such disclosures. The companies cited the country’s economic slowdown (which is also catalyzing sales of Chinese-held U.S. real estate), as well as recent accounting changes that followed a $2.3 trillion equity market selloff last year. 

The change is stunning: out of more than 2400 mainland listed companies, 373 have said they’re going to post a loss – and what’s more concerning, 86% of those companies were profitable in 2017.

There may be more bad news on the way: Thursday is the official deadline for companies to disclose whether or not they expect “substantial changes” in their financial results, so expect even more guidance cuts.

Meanwhile, fears about China’s economy, and corporate profitability in a time of record bankruptcies now that the government is no longer backstopping every corporation, has become a collective concern among market participants.

Lv Changshun, a money manager at Beijing Dajun Zhimeng Investment Management Co., told Bloomberg: “Private companies are particularly vulnerable to the economic downturn. The deleveraging campaign and the deterioration of their corporate health is normal for any economy that is shifting gears and slowing down.”

Among those issuing the concerning guidance are companies like Ford’s biggest partner in China, Changan which warned that 2018 profit was likely going to tumble 93%. China Life, a massive insurer by market share in China, said its net income could be lower by 70%. 

Beijing HualuBaina Film & TV Co., cloud-storage operator Gosun Holding Co. and First Tractor Co. also all said they’d post billions of yuan in losses for the year after having profitable 2017s. Anhui Shengyun Environment Protection Group Co. and Anhui Ankai Automobile Co. disclosed that their net losses would be twice as big as they were in 2017. Guangdong Homa Appliances Co. was halted limit down during Wednesday trading after guiding for a loss in 2018 after stating just months ago that they’d be profitable.

And since profit warnings in China – where companies notoriously misrepresent the rosy state of their finances (recall that one week ago, a Chinese company which filed for bankruptcy, reported that it “had” 15 times more cash than due debt yet it couldn’t meet its debt obligations) tend to be an early warning for liquidity problems, or worse, insolvency, the bond market has also felt aftershocks. The bonds of Chinese furniture maker Yihua Lifestyle Technology Co.’s fell to less than half of par. Air conditioning producer Zhejiang Dun’an Artificial Environment Co. has been put on a negative watch Chinese credit agency China Lianhe Credit Rating Co. 

One reason why China’s companies are suddenly “coming clean” was suggested by Qi He, a fund manager at Huatai Pinebridge Fund Management, who said that “companies whose shares are already quite battered have nothing to lose by lowering earnings forecasts or taking large impairments for 2018. Many of these companies are actually ‘taking a bath’ to begin anew in 2019.”

Meanwhile, others are understandably worried that it’s only going to get worse: Yu Dingheng, a fund manager at Shenzhen Flying Tiger Investment & Management Ltd. said: “we’re only just seeing the beginning of deterioration in corporate earnings as the economy slows further. Things will continue to go downhill for firms seeing business slowing and even as the macro-economy recovers, these individual firms will never be what they were.”

As for China’s economy recovering, that still remains wishful thinking for now: after China’s greatest liquidity injection ever (over 1.1 trillion yuan two weeks ago) and after weak Chinese macro data in the last few months, which saw a plunge in China’s trade data…

… all eyes were on last week’s avalanche of Chinese economic data. The Q3 bounce in macro data was extremely weak. We reported just last week that China’s 2018 GDP growth had slowed significantly. China’s annual GDP growth in 2018 was +6.6% – the weakest annual GDP growth since 1990.

Which is why as Rabobank’s Michael Every said earlier today “That Chinese stimulus had better arrive soon…”

via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2Sj5oBv Tyler Durden