Brunei will begin stoning gays and adulterers to death starting next week, after the tiny nation on the island of Borneo converted to sharia law in 2014.
Sultan Hassanal Bolkiah of Brunei with his wife Raja Isteri Pengiran Anak Saleha
While the new laws were announced five years ago and gradually phased in by the country’s sultan, Hassanal Bolkiah – who is also the prime minister, the death penalty for homsexual sex and adultery will begin on April 3, according to CNN. Brunei’s roughly 450,000 residents were notified of the April 3 start date after the country’s attorney general posted a December 29 notification on his website.
Human rights groups are horrified.
“Brunei must immediately halt its plans to implement these vicious punishments, and revise its Penal Code in compliance with its human rights obligations. The international community must urgently condemn Brunei’s move to put these cruel penalties into practice,” said Amnesty International Brunei specialist Rachel Chhoa-Howard in a statement.
Brunei became the first country in the region to adopt sharia law, and Islamic legal system known for its strict corporal punishments.
Here’s a map of mostly Islamic republics where homosexual acts are illegal and/or punishable by death.
Places where homosexual acts can be punished by death
Afghanistan
The Afghan Penal Code does not refer to homosexual acts, but Article 130 of the Constitution allows recourse to be made to Sharia law, which prohibits same-sex sexual activity in general. Afghanistan’s Sharia law criminalizes same-sex sexual acts with a maximum of the death penalty. No known cases of death sentences have been meted out since the end of Taliban rule.
Iran
In accordance with sharia law, homosexual intercourse between men can be punished by death, and men can be flogged for lesser acts such as kissing. Women may be flogged.
Nigeria
Federal law classifies homosexual behavior as a felony punishable by imprisonment, but several states have adopted sharia law and imposed a death penalty for men. A law signed in early January makes it illegal for gay people countrywide to hold a meeting or form clubs.
Qatar
Sharia law in Qatar applies only to Muslims, who can be put to death for extramarital sex, regardless of sexual orientation.
Saudi Arabia
Under the country’s interpretation of sharia law, a married man engaging in sodomy or any non-Muslim who commits sodomy with a Muslim can be stoned to death. All sex outside of marriage is illegal.
Somalia
The penal code stipulates prison, but in some southern regions, Islamic courts have imposed Sharia law and the death penalty.
Sudan
Three-time offenders under the sodomy law can be put to death; first and second convictions result in flogging and imprisonment. Southern parts of the country have adopted more lenient laws.
Yemen
According to 1994 penal code, married men can be sentenced to death by stoning for homosexual intercourse. Unmarried men face whipping or one year in prison. Women face up to seven years in prison.
Mauritania
Muslim men engaging in homosexual sex can be stoned to death, according to a 1984 law, though none have been executed so far. Women face prison.
United Arab Emirates
Lawyers in the country and other experts disagree on whether federal law prescribes the death penalty for consensual homosexual sex or only for rape. In a recent Amnesty International report, the organization said it was not aware of any death sentences for homosexual acts. All sexual acts outside of marriage are banned.
And now we can add Brunei.
—
There are 65 countries where homosexual acts are illegal
Noteworthy laws:
Pakistan
Death penalty laws exist but are unlikely to be implemented, according to the 2016 IGLA report.
Chad
A 2014 law makes same-sex relations a crime punishable by 15 to 20 years in prison.
India
A ban on same-sex relationships was tossed by the legal system in 2009 but reinstated in 2013. The supreme court said the government, not the courts, would have to change the law.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2HZaLjD Tyler Durden
Back on January 1, we showed what was arguably the strangest move that took place on the last trading day of 2018, when the overnight general collateral repo rate shot up from 2.5% to as high as 6.125%, the biggest one day move on record, bringing overnight GC repo to the highest level since January 2001.
While violent quarter and especially year-end moves are well-known in the overnight funding markets, the magnitude of the Dec 31 surge was simply unprecedented, and commenting on the GC Repo surge, Scott Skyrm, EVP at Curvature Securities said that “the cash never came in,” noting that while “funding pressure should be about 50 basis points” and yet what we got was “350 basis points.”
What he is referring to is the odd predicament the US financial system finds itself in, whereby in complete opposite from 2015 when there was a shortage of safe assets, there is now a glut, largely thanks to the flood of T-bills and coupon Treasurys required to fund the soaring US budget deficit coupled with what appears to be a shortage of excess reserves, which as recent events in the market demonstrated are not nearly enough, and is the reason why the Fed ended its balance sheet rolloff prematurely (it is now expected to end around September, well ahead of its previous summer of tentative 2020 due date).
Now, as we have discussed on prior occasions, one means to address this collateral mismatch is the proposed and speculated Fed overnight fixed-priced, full allotment overnight repo facility, which would eliminate such year-end general collateral repo spikes which are the result of too many securities chasing too little cash. However, in the biggest surprise from the most recent FOMC meeting, the Fed did not indicate that it was preparing to rollout such a facility, which means that until there actually is an operating Fed-backed O/N repo facility, we will continue to see collateral spikes like the one shown above.
Which brings us to tomorrow’s quarter-end, which will likely result in more general collateral repo fireworks.
Commenting on what to expect, we go back to Curvature Securities’ repo-market expert Scott Skyrm, who in his daily note writes that “quarter-end is everything in the Repo market right now and how it trades tomorrow will impact not just on financing P&L, but future quarter-ends, and potentially Fed policy tools in the future (an RP facility?).”
As noted above, last year-end, so many banks had cut their balance sheets so that there was insufficient cash to fund the Repo market and overnight rates spiked to over 7.00%, and as Skyrm writes, “the Repo market is worried that the same scenario could occur tomorrow. As a result, the Repo market is “on edge.”
Case in point, on Thursday – one day before the end of the month and the quarter – the quarter-end General Collateral moved from 3.50% this morning up to 3.85%, then down to 3.45% and now back up to 3.65%, just in the space of several hours.
And while Skyrm is not sure the direction of rates tomorrow, he is sure that “there will be volatility” and predicts that “rates will trade anywhere between 5.00% and 2.00% during the day.” In short, it is very possible that in addition to the now familiar pension rebalancing, the market may experience a severe, if brief, liquidity shortage as banks scramble to soak up the repo flood with increasingly scarce dollars.
Incidentally, an interesting proposal that was floated this week by former Fed analyst and current Credit Suisse repo-wizard Zoltan Pozsar, arguably the most erudite voice when it comes to repo-market recommendations, when it comes to releasing much of the dollar liquidity currently stuck in various shadow markets, Pozsar called on the Fed to “use the exorbitant privilege” of the reserve currency state and to cap the foreign Reverse Repo facility, a step that would release as much as $200 billion in new liquidity and would likely make its way into the bill market where there is a growing glut of paper chasing not enough dollar funds:
$200 billion hitting the FX swap market indirectly or directly is a lot, especially when cross-currency bases are barely negative (on a Libor-Libor basis). Barely negative bases mean that the €/$ and $/¥ markets are pretty much clearing through matched books, and so a marginal $200 billion of new lending could tip the basis quite positive, quite fast – that’s the scenario where Libor-OIS goes negative (re-read page 13 here, s-l-o-w-l-y).
Sometimes, when you come in to work, weird stuff just happens. The SNB ending the Swiss franc’s peg to the € was one of those days. It sent spot FX flying (see Figure 3). If the Fed re-caps the foreign RRP facility, we could have another one of those days: a day when the FX swap market realizes the amount of flow that’s about to hit directly or indirectly and traders re-price forward dollars to discount an abundance of dollar supply.
Figure 4 shows what that day could look like on your screens…
…similar to the day when the franc’s peg ended, but different in that the big move was in the spot FX rate back then, whereas the big move would be in forward FX rates today.
For more, please see “Global Money Notes #21 It’s Time to Use the Exorbitant Privilege”, authored by Zoltan Pozsar and published by Credit Suisse on March 25.
Which brings us to the TL/DR version: keep a close eye on repo GC tomorrow – if the financial system liquidity shortage has gotten worse since Dec 31, and it likely has as the Fed’s balance sheet has shrunk by over $100 billion since then, then expect fireworks. Just how big those fireworks will be will indicate how bad the overall liquidity shortage in the system is, which provides a critical glimpse into the overall systemic weakness that exists on US bank balance sheets if one eliminates the roughly $1.5 trillion in Fed-created excess reserves.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2JO1iyt Tyler Durden
Two years ago authors Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes wrote in their book Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign that within 24 hours of her 2016 electoral loss, Hillary Clinton’s senior campaign staff decided to blame the loss on Russian interference. Given the apparent source of the charge in opposition researchfunded by the Clinton campaign, the move seemed both desperate and pathetic— a thread for Clinton’s true believers to hang onto, an effort to keep campaign contributions rolling in and a ploy to cleave liberals from the left through red-baiting.
For perspective, from the time leading up to the 2016 election through today, I chose to live amongst poor and working-class people of color, with occasional forays into the rural working and middle classes and the urban bourgeois. What became apparent early on is that the audience for the Russian interference story was the urban and suburban bourgeois who had seen their lots by-and-large restored by Barack Obama’s bank bailouts and who had no knowledge of, or interaction with, the 90% of the country that is living, by degree, hand-to-mouth.
What this implies is that the received wisdom amongst bourgeois Democrats— the bosses, bank managers, academics, realtors and administrative class, looks to be what it is: a combination of class loathing that their ‘lessors’ didn’t perceive the munificent blessing of their electoral choice; mass delusion on the part of self-styled ‘high-information voters’ about who really controls American ‘democracy;’ and studied ignorance of the consequences of the last half-century of bi-partisan neoliberal governance.
“Prior to the 2016 presidential election, if one were to ask what single act could seal a new Cold War with Russia, align liberals and progressives with the operational core of the American military-industrial-surveillance complex, expose the preponderance of left-activism as an offshoot of Democratic Party operations and consign most of what remained to personal invective against an empirically dangerous leader, consensus would likely have it that doing so wouldn’t be easy.”
The Clinton campaign’s decision to blame her electoral loss on Russian interference demonstrates why she was, and still is, unqualified to hold elected office. In the first, the U.S. – Russian rivalry is backed-up by hair-trigger nuclear arsenals that could end the world in a matter of minutes. Inciting tensions based on self-serving lies is stunningly reckless. In the second, the claim demonstrates utter contempt for her most loyal followers by feeding them purposely misleading explanations of the loss. And most damagingly for political opponents of Donald Trump, these actions give credence to the insurgent status of his retro-Republicanism against liberal and left defenders of the political establishment.
Most damaging to the burgeoning left in the U.S. is the deeply ugly character assassination of poor and working-class voters carried out by the urban bourgeois, many from the self-described radical left. People I know and like, but with whom I disagree politically but am working hard to convert, have spent the last three years being derided as traitorous, marginally literate hicks too stupid to know they are pawns of the Kremlin. The irony, if you care to call it that, is that they knew the Russian interference story was cynical bullshit all along while the graduate degree crowd was following every twist and turn as if it were true knowledge.
The Democratic Party ‘leadership’ that pursued this story is as stupid as it is corrupt. The purpose of Russia-gate was apparently to keep the Party faithful, faithful. But as was demonstrated in 2016, the faithful alone can’t win an election. This leadership turned what could have been an effective ‘give ‘em enough rope’ strategy against arrogant jackass Trump back on itself. The establishment-left had been in the process of giving self-described socialists someone to vote for in 2020. Too-clever-by-half liberal twaddle about ‘post-truth’ now has liberals— universally conflated with the left, perceived as both idiots and liars. And rightly so.
Democrats who spent the last three years making less than plausible (and politically retrograde) accusations against Mr. Trump likely still don’t understand their current position. Their call for an exhaustive investigation carried out by people they trust was honored. While the investigation was underway, the mainstream press put one ludicrous fantasy after another forward as news. This while a host of real issues affecting real people’s lives were studiously ignored. As incredulous as I am that it could be done, liberal Democrats have made corrupt oligarch Trump appear to be righteously aggrieved. Who says these people have no talent?
The New York Times and Washington Post have been publishing politically motivated ‘fake news’ in support of establishment interests since their inceptions. Their service to powerful interests is why they are still around. The FBI, CIA and NSA have been putting out politically motivated bullshit since their respective inceptions. They exist to serve the rich and powerful against all comers. To claim these as bastions of integrity was always a tough sell. To continue to claim it is the stuff from which revolutions are made. In this case, right-wing revolutions.
While the urban bourgeois have long been dismissive of the ‘burn it down’ contingent of Trump voters, they seem incapable of seeing their own roles as defenders of the establishment as corrupt and ultimately, politically suicidal. I voted for a woman for president and a black man for vice president in 2016. But they weren’t Democrats. Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 election because she is a corrupt, neoliberal, militaristic piece of shit. Ironically, or not, most of Trump voters I’ve spoken with know more about the Democrats’ actual record than the highly educated urban bourgeois pontificating on NPR or in the New York Times.
A quick bet is that the 2020 presidential election is now Donald Trump’s to lose.
Lying sacks of shit like James Clapper and John Brennan will tie their lots to whomever will fund their adventures in mal-governance as the world burns and species become extinct. The tragedy here is that there are real issues in need of resolution. The Democrats’ three-year adventure in red-baiting served to legitimate a financial-military-industrial complex that apparently intends to end the planet as it makes as many people miserable in the process as is possible. Congratulations assholes.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2U2R6GU Tyler Durden
Insecure parents across the country have been gifted a new scapegoat they can blame their child’s shortcomings on: the admissions scandal cheaters. And this Thursday, they may need it – that marks the day that tens of thousands of prospective new students will hear from Ivy League schools like Harvard, Yale and Princeton about admission, according to Bloomberg.
On Friday, one day later, many of the 33 parents charged in the scandal will wind up in federal court in Boston for their first appearance related to the scandal. They should be able to avoid serving jail time if they plead guilty, according to lawyers.
Liz Pleshette, a former Columbia University admissions officer and director of college counseling at the private Latin School of Chicago said: “Families have been overvaluing some smoke and mirrors. The wizard has been revealed behind the curtain.”
Kyle Schoeneborn, an 18-year-old senior awaiting word from the University of Pennsylvania said: “It might end up being an excuse for a lot of people to say, ‘Oh, I didn’t get into my dream school because this is going on or my parents didn’t pay $50 million to get recruited to a certain sports team.’’’ And in light of recent events, his hyperbole is not that far off…
It is becoming more difficult to get into Ivy League schools like Yale. Data shows that the university accepted 22% of applicants in the early 1980s versus 6.3% last year. This has been a result of students being able to apply electronically, which has increased the number of applications per student. Students who submitted seven or more applications increased to 35% in 2016, compared to 10% in 1995.
Ivy League schools are also targeted because they provide the most financial aid, and the cost of college has risen “far faster than inflation”. Parents also see the Ivy League as a way to preserve the prestige of their family’s name and financial position “at the top”. Ten years after leaving college, Harvard students had a median annual income of $89,700 compared to the State University of New York, where it was $61,600.
This leg-up has led parents to push their children into activities and sports in a race to get an edge for admissions.
Meanwhile, Lisa Damour, a psychologist in the Cleveland suburb of Beachwood, said that the admissions scandal is actually psychologically healthy for students. It helps them see that rejection isn’t their fault. “It’s not all bad for the curtain to be pulled back,’’ she said. The mother of one student, Cailee Olitt, who finished in the top 5% of her class, has played soccer for 4 years, edits the school’s newspaper and scored a 1570 out of 1600 on her SATs, was aghast when her daughter was still deferred from Duke.
“Sadly there’s not much we can do when people are accepting bribes. You just hope for the best for our kids and they’ll get seen for all their hard work and rewarded for doing it the right way,’’ her mom, Dari, said.
Cailee is still waiting to hear from Brown and has been accepted to Tulane, Emory and the University of Virginia.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2HWHg21 Tyler Durden
That might seem like a silly question, but according to research, developing prejudice towards others does not require a high level of cognitive ability and could easily be exhibited by robots and other artificially intelligent machines.
The study, conducted by computer science and psychology experts from Cardiff University and MIT, revealed that groups of autonomous machines could demonstrate prejudice by simply identifying, copying, and learning the behavior from each other. The findings were published in the journal Nature.
Robots are capable of forming prejudices much like humans.
In a press release, the research team explained that while it may seem that human cognition would be required to form opinions and stereotype others, it appears that is not the case. Prejudice does not seem to a human-specific phenomenon.
Some types of computer algorithms have already exhibited prejudices like racism and sexism which the machines learning from public records and other data generated by humans. In two previous instance of AI exhibiting such prejudice, Microsoft chatbots Tay and Zo were shut down after people taught them to spout racist and sexist remarks on social media.
This means that robots could be just as hateful as human beings can be. And since they’re thousands of times smarter than us, can you imagine the future if they developed a bias against humanity?
No human input is required.
Guidance from humans is not needed for robots to learn to dislike certain people.
However, this study showed that AI doesn’t need provocation and inspiration from trolls to get it to exhibit prejudices: it is capable of forming them all by itself.
To conduct the research, the team set up computer simulations of how prejudiced individuals can form a group and interact with each other. They created a game of “give and take,” in which each AI bot made a decision whether or not to donate to another individual inside their own working group or another group. The decisions were made based on each individual’s reputation and their donating strategy, including their levels of prejudice towards individuals in outside groups.
As the game progressed and a supercomputer racked up thousands of simulations, each individual began to learn new strategies by copying others either within their own group or the entire population.
Co-author of the study Professor Roger Whitaker, from Cardiff University’s Crime and Security Research Institute and the School of Computer Science and Informatics, said of the findings:
By running these simulations thousands and thousands of times over, we begin to get an understanding of how prejudice evolves and the conditions that promote or impede it.
The findings involve individuals updating their prejudice levels by preferentially copying those that gain a higher short term payoff, meaning that these decisions do not necessarily require advanced cognitive abilities.
It is feasible that autonomous machines with the ability to identify with discrimination and copy others could in future be susceptible to prejudicial phenomena that we see in the human population.
Many of the AI developments that we are seeing involve autonomy and self-control, meaning that the behaviour of devices is also influenced by others around them. Vehicles and the Internet of Things are two recent examples. Our study gives a theoretical insight where simulated agents periodically call upon others for some kind of resource. (source)
What will happen if developers and computer scientists can’t figure out a way to keep AI unbiased?
Last year, when Twitter was accused of “shadow banning” approximately 600,000 accounts, CEO Jack Dorsey discussed the challenges AI developers have in reducing accidental bias.
The risk of something seriously dangerous happening is in the five year timeframe. 10 years at most. Please note that I am normally super pro technology and have never raised this issue until recent months. This is not a case of crying wolf about something I don’t understand.
The pace of progress in artificial intelligence (I’m not referring to narrow AI) is incredibly fast. Unless you have direct exposure to groups like Deepmind, you have no idea how fast — it is growing at a pace close to exponential.
I am not alone in thinking we should be worried.
The leading AI companies have taken great steps to ensure safety. They recognize the danger, but believe that they can shape and control the digital superintelligences and prevent bad ones from escaping into the Internet. That remains to be seen… (source)
Musk added, “With artificial intelligence, we are summoning the demon.”
What do you think?
A robot apocalypse straight out of the movie theaters seems to be approaching. What if robots form biases against certain groups of people – or humanity overall?
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2HYBNb0 Tyler Durden
A large and fast-melting glacier in Greenland is growing again, according to a new NASA study. The Jakobshavn (YA-cob-shawv-en) glacier on Greenland’s west coast had reportedly been retreating by around 1.8 miles and thinning by nearly 130 feet annually in 2012.
May 30, 2012, photo shows an iceberg in or just outside the Ilulissat fjord that likely calved from the Jakobshavn glacier in west Greenland. (Ian Joughin/Associated Press)
According to a study published in Monday’s peer-reviewed Nature Geoscience, however, the glacier began growing at about the same rate over the past two years. That said, the authors of the study swear it’s temporary.
“At first we didn’t believe it,” said lead author Ala Khazendar who works at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). “We had pretty much assumed that Jakobshavn would just keep going on as it had over the last 20 years.”
Jakobshavn glacier (photo: Google Earth)
Co-author Josh Willis said that while this is “good news” on a temporary basis, it’s still “bad news” over the long term because it means that ocean temperatures are a larger factor in the growth and melting of glaciers than previously thought.
“In the long run we’ll probably have to raise our predictions of sea level rise again,” says Willis, pointing to inevitable doom from man-made global warming.
“That was kind of a surprise. We kind of got used to a runaway system,” said Jason Box, a Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland ice and climate scientist who was not involved in the study.
Think of the ocean temperatures near Greenland like an escalator that’s rising slowly from global warming, Khazendar said. But the natural North Atlantic Oscillation sometimes is like jumping down a few steps or jumping up a few steps. The water can get cooler and have effects, but in the long run it is getting warmer and the melting will be worse, he said.
Four outside scientists said the study and results make sense.
University of Washington ice scientist Ian Joughin, who wasn’t part of the study and predicted such a change seven years ago, said it would be a “grave mistake” to interpret the latest data as contradicting climate change science.
What’s happening, Joughin said, is “to a large extent, a temporary blip. Downturns do occur in the stock market, but overall the long term trajectory is up. This is really the same thing.” –AP
Of course, what will they say if and when the sun enters a Maunder Minimum in 2020? The last time there was a prolonged solar minimum, it lead to a mini ice-age which was scientifically known as the Maunder minimum
Data from NASA’s TIMED (Thermosphere Ionosphere Mesosphere Energetics and Dynamics) satellite shows that the thermosphere (the uppermost layer of air around our planet) is cooling and shrinking, literally decreasing the radius of the atmosphere. This reduction of solar activity could result in a global cooling phase.
“The thermosphere always cools off during Solar Minimum. It’s one of the most important ways the solar cycle affects our planet,” said Mlynczak, according to The New American.
The new NASA findings are in line with studies released by UC-San Diego and Northumbria University in Great Britain last year, both of which predict a Grand Solar Minimum in coming decades due to low sunspot activity.
Both studies predicted sun activity similar to the Maunder Minimum of the mid-17th to early 18th centuries, which coincided to a time known as the Little Ice Age, during which temperatures were much lower than those of today.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2WxhKEO Tyler Durden
“We are at an inflection point in in the history of our world,” Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) pronounced when kicking off her candidacy in January. “We are here because the American dream and our American democracy are under attack and on the line like never before.”
Apocalyptic rhetoric isn’t just for Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders anymore, writes Matt Welch. It’s the whole damn Democratic field.
A new alarming parallel between today’s eviction crisis and the sub-prime mortgage crisis which helped spur the Great Recession has surfaced. The economy is sending warning signs to those who choose to take heed.
The eviction crisis is worsening to the point that Georgia State University authors feel that protections should be put in place to safeguard renters, such as longer eviction notices and legal protection, according to Market Watch. However, that could make the crisis much worse by homeowners simply refusing to rent their properties out at all. More government intervention (whether it’s designed to protect people or not) will only make a very bad situation worse.
Evictions have become a real visible effect of the volatility in today’s economy. Stable housing is increasingly out of reach for many Americans, as both rentalsand homes to own grow more expensive, options dwindle, and wages remain stagnant. But some scholars at Georgia State University, in conjunction with a ProPublica journalist, completed a new study which shows that not all evictions are created equal.
The researchers who conducted the study examined “serial” eviction filings (those done repeatedly by a landlord against a tenant). By comparing serial evictions to ordinary ones, the researchers found patterns of landlord “behavior and intentions”, some of which are reminiscent of the worst of the housing crisis a decade ago.
Similarly to the foreclosure crisis that foreshadowed the Great Recession in 2009, there appears to be a race element that needs to be discussed. Evictions are currentlydisproportionately hitting African-Americans. Black women in Milwaukee, for example, were evicted at a rate three times their share of the population, and black renters in metro Seattle were evicted four times as frequently as whites there, according to earlier research. This data bears mentioning, but keep in mind, that there’s no reasoning behind the whys of these evictions. If people aren’t paying rent, they will and should be evicted especially if a contract is signed.
“Filings can be the beginning of a forced removal process, but they are also frequently a tool used to enforce the collection of rent and fees,” the researchers noted. Which is incredibly fair, when taking emotion out of the equation. A contract is a contract, but this eviction crisis is a symptom of the larger problems with the economy rather than the media hyped narrative of “the rich are keeping the poor down” which was basically the conclusion of the Georgia State University study.
Protecting oneself and one’s family against eviction is usually as simple as having an emergency fund. If you can, save up three to six months worth of expenses so that in the event of an emergency or decrease in income, you will not be breaking your contract (which is your word you signed off on) with a homeowner who has agreed to let you live in a home they own in exchange for a monthly fee (called rent.)
Saving can seem like a daunting task, but if you buckle down when times are good, a catastrophic emergency becomes nothing more than an inconvenience.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2UkqRLp Tyler Durden
US-backed self-declared “Interim President” Juan Guaido has been barred from holding public office in Venezuela for 15 years by the Maduro government, Reuters reports, citing Caracas officials.
Venezuelan state comptroller Elvis Amoroso in public statements on Thursday said it was the maximum punishment allowable by law, and charged that Guaido had “inconsistencies in his personal financial disclosures and a spending record that did not match his level of income,” according to Reuters.
Image source: Getty
After the shock announcement it remained unclear what this means in terms of Guaido’s immediate fate as majority leader of the National Assembly.
Crucially Guaido’s being banned from public office came less than 24 hours after the opposition leader announced plans for his supporters to launch “tactical actions” starting next week as part of his “Operation Freedom” to overthrow President Nicolas Maduro.
He began publicly referencing the plan earlier this month at opposition rallies and described it as a “full-fledged revolution in all states of Venezuela simultaneously.”
¡Atención!
Anunciamos el inicio de la fase preparatoria de la #OperaciónLibertad para lograr el cese de la usurpación. Llegó el momento de la organización, la movilización y la estrategia para liberar a Venezuela.
This has even included talk of “Operation Freedom” operatives and mass protesters ultimately marching on the Miraflores presidential palace – home to President Maduro.
Tweeting with the hashtag #VamosOperaciónLibertad, Guaido further appealed to “constitutional forces” within the Venezuelan army to rise up and switch loyalties.
Washington’s very overt promotion of Guaido as “legitimate” leader of Venezuela has resulted in threats from Maduro himself to have Guaido arrested. White House efforts to ramp up pressure on Maduro included hosting a delegation headed by Guaido’s wife, Fabiana Rosales, at the White House on Thursday.
“Eighty percent of the population in Venezuela has no power. They are trying to break our morale,” Venezuela’s new Interim First Lady said at the White House today. “But let me tell you that there is light, and the light is here.”
Notably the White House called Rosales “Venezuela’s new Interim First Lady” in statements related to the event.
No doubt, Caracas is now sending its own firm message in banning Guaido for public office for 15 years, something sure to result in a swift US reaction.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2HYZoYZ Tyler Durden
The Federal Reserve is an often misunderstood entity, not only in the mainstream, but also in alternative economic circles. There is this ever pervasive fantasy on both sides of the divide that the central bank actually “cares” about forever protecting the US economy, or at least propping up the US economy in an endless game of “kick the can”. While this might be true at times, it is not true ALL the time. Things change, agendas change, and sometimes the Fed’s goal is not to maintain the economy, but to destroy it.
The delusion that the Fed is seeking to kick the can is highly present today after the latest Fed meeting in which the central bank indicated there would be a pause in interest rate hikes in 2019. As I have noted in numerous articles over the past year, the mainstream media and the Fed have made interest rates the focus of every economic discussion, and I believe this was quite deliberate. In the meantime, the Fed balance sheet and its strange relationship to the stock market bubble is mostly ignored.
The word “capitulation” is getting thrown around quite haphazardly in reference to the Fed’s tightening policy. And yet, even now after all the pundits have declared the Fed “in retreat” or “trapped in a Catch-22”, the Fed continues to tighten, and is set to cut balance sheet assets straight through until the end of September. Perhaps my definition of capitulation is different from some people’s.
One would think that if the Fed was in retreat in terms of tightening, that they would actually STOP tightening. This has not happened. Also, one might also expect that if the Fed is going full “dovish” that they would have cut interest rates in March instead of holding them steady at their neutral rate of inflation. This has not happened either. In fact, I’m not exactly sure how anyone can claim with a straight face that the Fed has given up on Quantitative Tightening (QT). Despite the many assumptions out there that the Fed is going to reverse on interest rates, I believe this is wishful thinking and that the Fed will not reverse rates in 2019.
What I do see is the Fed using rhetoric and head fakes to give the impression that they plan to go dovish in the future. And, this is being wrongly interpreted as the Fed being dovish now. But why is the Fed doing this while also continuing to dump its balance sheet? In my view, it is because they are almost finished with the task they set out to accomplish with QT in the first place, and they now have to make it appear as though they want to accommodate as the system breaks down.
In my article ‘Party While You Can – Central Bank Ready To Pop The Everything Bubble’, I outlined a process or tactic which the Fed has used on many occasions in the past: The creation of economic bubbles through inflation and artificially low interest rates, followed by abrupt tightening and higher interest rates into economic weakness. This tactic is highly effective in accomplishing ONE GOAL – financial collapse.
It is the same strategy the Fed used at the beginning of the Great Depression. It is also what the Fed used to trigger the crash of 2008. And, in 2018-2019, the Fed is doing it again.
For over two years now the Fed has been instituting tightening measures after inflating perhaps the largest economic bubble in modern history, also known as “the everything bubble”. The Fed did this despite extreme weakness in economic fundamentals, and is continuing forward until the fourth quarter of this year despite nearly every sector of the economy showing steep declines or a greatly reduced pace of growth.
It is perhaps not a coincidence that the Fed announced it would be cutting assets until September just as the Treasury Yield curve inverted for the first time since 2007. The same thing happened just before the crash and recession that started in 2008. An inverted yield curve is generally a sure sign of a decelerating economy or recession/depression.
What bewilders me are the numerous claims in the mainstream and alternative media that the Fed is somehow oblivious to what it is doing. This is simply not true. Jerome Powell in his statements in the Fed Minutes of October 2012 explains plainly exactly what would happen if and when the Fed tightened policy into weakness. He essentially admits that a crash will occur.
Four years later in the wake of the Trump presidency, Powell somehow conveniently finds himself the Chairman of the Fed, and what does he do? He tightens policy into economic weakness fully aware of what would happen next. I’ll repeat this point again because I don’t think some analysts out there get it: The central bankers KNOW that they are causing a crash. They are doing it deliberately. The question we need to ask is, why?
Over the past ten years the Fed may have acted as a crutch for markets, but this was not their true goal. Rather, the 2008 credit bubble collapse was used by the bankers as a rationale to create an even bigger bubble; a bubble that now encompasses every aspect of our financial structure. QT was needed to pop this bubble, and so the Fed tightened.
For many months now the Fed has stated that the US economy is “strong” and “in recovery” despite the evidence at hand. In March, they did not reverse tightening; they only admitted in an indirect way that the economy is not in recovery. They have until September to finish using QT for a controlled demolition of the Everything Bubble. This is more than enough time.
As noted in recent articles, US housing, autos, credit, retail, and even employment are faltering, while prices in most necessities remain high or are climbing. All that is left is for stock markets to follow the fundamental indicators down (as they usually do). This trend started at the same time as the Fed’s tightening began. All that was needed to set the avalanche in motion were moderate rate hikes and asset cuts.
The timing of the current crash is perfect for the banking elites for a number of reasons. Most importantly, they now have a scapegoat to pin the crash on in the form of “populist movements”. I warned about this ploy way back in early 2016 before the Brexit vote and the presidential elections. It is the reason why I predicted the Brexit vote would succeed and that Donald Trump would be president. The elites needed someone to blame for the collapse of the everything bubble they have been planning for the past 10 years.
The Brexit has turned into a three ring circus, a major distraction from the ultimate intended end game which I have long believed will be a “no deal” scenario. A no deal event is being painted in the mainstream media as a kind of economic doomsday for Europe, and I believe it will be, but not for the reasons they describe. Europe has been set up for a fall, just like the US, for many years now. Government and corporate debt levels are at extreme highs and major banks in Germany and Italy are on the verge of implosion.
A hard Brexit is useful to the elites as a scapegoat for a crash that was going to happen anyway.The bankers don’t plan on facing the music, they want “populist” groups to get the blame.
Trump has been a very effective ally to the banking class. After loading his cabinet with these “swamp creatures”, he then went on to take full credit for the very stock market rally he originally criticized during his campaign as a fraudulent bubble created by central bank stimulus. Then, he started a trade war which has dragged on for many months. It has shown no signs of slowing, and, is providing excellent cover for the Fed as it pulls the plug on life support for the economy.
Trump’s exoneration in terms of the Mueller probe and the Russiagate farce was easy to see coming. I have been saying for the past two years that Trump will never be impeached (or never impeached successfully) exactly because the banking elites WANT him right where he is. Russiagate was meant to drive leftists even further into extremism, it was NOT meant to unseat Trump.
If the markets were to tank this year (in January I predicted they would retest December lows starting at the end of March through April), then Trump would get total credit in the mainstream for the crisis and the Fed would avoid the majority of the blame.
Once again, lets consider the timing of current events – The Fed is tightening until September but pretending as if it is backing off. The yield curve has inverted. Major fundamentals are dropping exponentially. At the same time, we have Europe on the verge of a fabricated crisis in the form of a potential no deal Brexit, and we have US trade negotiations which have been delayed once again, perhaps until June, maybe longer.
I don’t believe in the “perfect storm” as a matter of coincidence, but I do believe according to the evidence that perfect storms can be deliberately engineered. Bottom line, no matter what the mainstream says in the coming months, the Fed knew what it was doing.
There are many advantages to an engineered crash. As noted, it was going to happen eventually anyway. It is simply delusion to think that the central bank can prop up the system forever. We sometimes hear the claim that this was done in Japan, but the Fed increased its balance sheet to $4.5 Trillion dollars in the span of two years – it took the Bank of Japan decades to get to the same level. There comes a point in which stimulus and increased debt provides diminishing returns when trying to hide economic weakness, and the Fed has already hit that point.
The Fed is crashing the system now because they have sovereignty activists and nationalists to point the finger at. They are also crashing the system now because the everything bubble is at its peak. Corporate and consumer debt are at historic highs, and the bankers are looking to cause maximum damage. Finally, the banking establishment has loyalties to certain agendas which are far outside national interests, including the often mentioned Agenda 2030 and the “global economic reset”. These agendas call for greatly increased global centralization of economic power as well as geopolitical power; in other words, global governance.
No matter what the mainstream media says over the course of this year, I want readers to remember that this was a disaster at least ten years in the making. It is not something that suddenly fell out of the sky. It was not something that was unexpected or unpredictable. It was highly predictable to those with the eyes to see. It was NOT a mistake.
* * *
If you would like to support the work that Alt-Market does while also receiving content on advanced tactics for defeating the globalist agenda, subscribe to our exclusive newsletter The Wild Bunch Dispatch. Learn more about it HERE.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2FBI1L5 Tyler Durden
