In a world where central banks have repressed savers with over a decade of zero and negative interest rates, crushing the middle class and turning the US into a banana republic whose middle class is now shrinking so fast…
… it is perhaps remarkable that workers are still able to leave the workforce and enjoy some years of peaceful retirement instead of working every day until they die.
Of course when it comes to retirement, some countries are more equal than others – especially those where worker entitlements have been historically so generous that removing them would lead to nothing short of revolution, even if it means a slow motion fiscal suicide for the state which can no longer afford such generosity.
So for all those asking which countries have the most generous retirement systems, here it the answer. We doubt it will come as a surprise that some of Europe’s most fiscally challenged countries are also those that offer the longest retirement across the entire OECD universe. Incidentally, those pointing out the “sexism” that women tend to live longer and enjoy a longer retirement, we are confident that no feminists will touch that particular “inequality” with a ten foot pole.
A tangent of the chart above: just because some of Europe’s most socialist nations have the most retirement regimes right now, does not mean they will in the future: as the next chart shows, in an progressively aging world, where there is roughly 45 retirees per 100 workers, this number is set to skyrocket by 2050, when such retirement havens as Italy and Greece will sport more than 100 retirees per 100 workers, a regime that is absolutely unsustainable.
And one bonus chart: yes, places such as Greece may have one of the most generous retirement regimes, but working all those long years to finally hit retirement in the thrice insolvent European nation is hardly a walk in the park: as the next chart shows, there is a great dispersion between those countries that have the most stressful working environment such as Greece, Turkey, Hungary and Spain, and those where work is a joy such as Scandinavia, New Zealand and the UK (although we somehow doubt the latter will remain on this list for long). Perhaps it’s only fair that after working in hell, one should at least be entitled to a few years of peaceful retirement.
American nationalism binds the whole-to-its-parts by using narrative to weaponize emotions and broadcast the idea of American ‘wholeness’ as somehow exceptionally greater than the sum of its parts.
There can be no doubt that zealotry became the dynamic forging the American character . First and foremostly, enunciations spat out by bearded prophets were carried on the winds of ontological time and eventually landing on the shores of the new world along with bible and crucifix to stave off inequities and help shape a mind-set (and foreign policy) for those taking possession of the Kingdom of God. A colonial policy that inevitably consigned the population of the occupied territories into misery and poverty would in time come to be regarded as regime change. The Protestant reformation was always about gilding the God narrative with a work ethic equal to the sum of its mercantile whole.
To this very day, individual achievements take precedence over collective values as missionary zeal is believed to have the potential to sublimate the libido and divert energy into productive work activities. The nub of the narrative being the ineffable Protestant-cum-existentialist credential underpinning the virtues of 19th century Anglophile culture that found ways of appeasing the mind with dreamlike emoluments to convey the promise of earthly rewards for the industrious of mind…or simply put; mercantilism became a-one-size-fits-all solution for man’s irascible struggle with his existential hairshirt.
In time, European mercantile classes would invasively penetrate every corner of the globe for the purpose of wealth extraction. Those who sought material gratification would eventually come to define democracy as freedom to pursue individual desires. What emerged from this was class-identified gentrification and fake sugar-coated democracy supporting a form of fake-individuality that created a class system based on the exploitation on just about everything.
As time passed the existential stature of the state grew, while the existential stature of the individual remained the same. With the advent of mercantilism came a national economic policy designed to maximize exports and minimize imports, with the state taking a more adversarial role in all business arrangements. For the state to be greater than the sum of its parts meant exporting a greater quantity of its manufactured products to its trading partners while minimising the amount of goods they imported from them.
To do this it was necessary to devise policies that aimed to reduce a possible current account deficit and achieve a current account surplus. Mercantilism introduced a national economic policy aimed at accumulating monetary reserves through a positive balance of trade, especially in finished goods…fine policies in theory, but when push came to shove in the competitive arena, greed inevitably exposed these polices to the raw ‘talents’ of people like Sheriff Trump and most of his contemporaries , who interpret business as dealership and mawkishly set out to wage economic warfare on all and sundry.
The practice of sucking in wealth associated with the resources of Africa, India, the Americas, India and other Asian destinations was so successful that Britain…almost inadvertently…found itself in possession of an empire. It had reached a plateau where the sum was greater than its parts and to sustain its ‘sum-status’ meant creating an alliance of collusive narratives to justify its pre-eminence…and the best way to do so and retain control of the narrative was to resort to propaganda and trophy issues that would weaponize the emotions of the population. Hence the modern state found a way to prioritize itself at the expense of the individual. Over time, business cartels in tandem with the government would create ever more contextual paradigms for the individual to deal with.
What was required to sustain the status quo was a narrative to make the people feel proud of the fact that they were part of a-top-dog-team in action. Once the authors of the narrative realized that propaganda, when coupled with patriotism, could produce adherents imbued with convictions that were inherent in the narrative, they realized that language itself could cement a profitable relationship between buyer and seller and public relations became a force unto itself.
If you were part of the bourgeoisie who came into existence in the 19th centuries as a consequence of the wealth pouring into Europe and Britain from the colonial exploitation of Africa or India, Ireland, Asia etc. and your conscience was troubled by virtue of being party to a culture sliding grandiosely up its own existential arse, you could find balm within the isolated confines of the psychiatrist’s couch if your pockets were deep enough. If you were of a humble disposition, there was the pastor or the priest who could deal with your existential woes. If you made it to the 20th century you probably would have become so conditioned by events as to be unaware of other people’s suffering…and if you made it to the 21 century…perish the thought!
It was in this phase of history that commerce cleverly entered the business of explaining the meaning of existence per educational fiat…for a price! Thereafter it would be secular experts who explained the meaning of life to anybody who could afford to pay for enlightenment while simultaneously repressing revolutionary instincts that could, in the first instance, allow the light of reason to filter through.
With the crafting of the existential narrative, more and more people came to see themselves as parts in a new whole. Personal history became the curveball of the 20th century, promoting a vision of America as utopia on steroids, which in turn, produced a sky-is-the-limit kind of optimism. America had long taken over from where Britain had left off after experiencing a fin de siecle stampede through its pearly gates in the 19th century which eventually produced an adrenaline rush to end all adrenaline rushes by the time it put a man on the moon. The net result was that American industry became kingpin for a century which left it convinced of its own invincibility.
When did America start to believe that it had to possess the biggest nuclear arsenal for it to feel that ‘whole’ America had become greater than the sum of its rival’s parts? Which raises the question; given the way power is used by the modern democratic-capitalist state, is the American constitution merely an example of baggage retained for baggage sake? Is there anything beyond raw power that may define its essence? Does it have an essence, or is it merely guided by some dark light that emanates from a single word…’democracy’…that stands alone on the blank piece of paper that was placed in a bottle and cast upon the ocean with information that might help ‘the people’ fulfil their desires?
Do the people not see that they need to be free from illusions that enfold them before they can revolutionize their system…and move on?
The elites who control the narrative remain invisible, they are neither deep nor surface stakeholders, they simply control the money flow. They are the sum-total of the faceless state, protected by protocols, secret intelligence agencies and the reality of the military budget that is put in place to maintain top-dog status for the elites and the illusions that comfort the multifarious minions now quarantined in citizen- zones that continue to emasculate their revolutionary spirit.
The current impeachment process in America best illustrates the sterility the population is immiserated in. They should be impeaching themselves (instead of looking for a scapegoat) for their inability to confront their own record. They seem unaware that they are party to a bloodbath that has devastated much of the Middle East and many other societies across the globe.
Once again, Americans are involved in the early stages of an election that leaves the question of America’s foreign policy in the too hard basket. A charade that would make Machiavelli blush. But alas, when blush comes to shove, American might is a God given right and collateral damage is not something that would soon alter the tone of its pugnaciously thick-skinned approach to reality.
Then there is ever more evidence of the schism that is corporate existentialism as opposed to individual existentialism. The former owning the right to squash the latter ever since Corporate America took the civil out of civilisation by assiduously seeking to remove voices/data/information/truth and honourable journalism from serving the public interest.
To observe how Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden (also Daniel Ellsberg, Jeffrey Wigand, Thomas Andrew Drake and Frank Serpico) were treated for divulging the execrable crimes of the American state are odious to say the least. That so many Americans, in condoning “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts” mentality, and dismissive of the service their whistle-blowers are providing, is appalling. A new class of people have come into existence and they hate whistle-blowers because they speak truth to power…pity the millions of Americans who don’t think that way!
And what does the MSM really think of all this? That the New York Times continues to readily publish Bibi Netanyahu’s blandishments concerning existential threats to Israel while ignoring the fact that Palestine have had their country invaded and countless Palestinians now live under appalling conditions where existential rights do not even apply to them. The hurt that is inflicted on Palestinians is akin to the hurt that can be extended to say, Julian Assange, because both insidiously demean the human spirit.
These are actions that highlight the schism that exists between governance and the governed…existence of the state in relation to the existence of the individual…or any other agent in the individual legal zone we recognise as being separate from the privileged existential zone of governments that includes corporations who enjoy limited liability by virtue of their status in law. Existentialism, at the individual level, is a concept born of leisure (think affluence), but when dealing with fiscal reality, finds its sovereignty somewhat overshadowed by the external trappings of an existential system designed to keep the checks and balances that favour the imperial narrative.
Six months ago when the US Government slammed Assange with 17 charges under The Espionage Act for publishing the Chelsea Manning Leaks, indications were that these actions were taken to stifle the existence of a precedent that challenged the rights of a government to suppress the existence of truth itself; eventually it became their right to gag the message and the messenger.
The American police state is a multi-billion-dollar boondoggle meant to keep the property and the resources of the American people flowing into corrupt government agencies and their corporate partners. In its present incarnation, it unmistakably exists as a pariah whose insidious meddling in other people’s systems knows no limitations. It unrelentingly spews out lies at every opportunity which vaunt variations on a theme of America’s self-righteous greatness ad nauseam. Its porous foreign policy exists to suck-out the essence of vulnerable states that are exposed to the gravitation pull of weaponised systems such as Wall Street and The Pentagon.
The systems that have weaponized American culture have spawned a host of ‘yes’ men and women…the MSM is aglow with them. The emotional and intellectual life of main street America is ominously self-righteous and defensive. To understand how reflexive American politics is, is to discover…by merely surfing channels…that the American public has become the meat in a political-duopoly sandwich.
To listen to Elizabeth Warren expostulating on Bolivia attests to a form of political incest that bedevils America. The Massachusetts Senator wanted to air her foreign policy bona fides in an interview with a former Barack Obama administration apparatchik on the podcast “Pod Save America.”
Warren praised Trump’s strategy of appointing the deflated Venezuela coup leader Juan Guaido as president and declared, “I support economic sanctions.” She also described the country’s democratically elected president Nicolas Maduro as a “dictator.” …although the interview was conducted back in February, video clips have recently resurfaced and gone viral on social media.
Which brings me back to the observation that America’s mawkish culture is viral in ways that are mainly lethal for those it disapproves of. It behaves like a giant octopus forever extending its tentacles into places that it wishes to exploit or annihilate. And behold The American Posse has morphed into stealth forces that operate outside of international law, human decency or basic accountability. It abhors the idea that leaders like Nicolas Maduro could curb the extortionist practices of corporate America and set about eliminating poverty in his beloved Bolivia. Worst of all is the fact that the American public condones regime change and all the other rapacious practices it is known for.
Sadly, America has become like an illiterate robot in a mathematical minefield stomping and headbutting everyone and everything it perceives as a competitor while waving its nuclear missiles and pruning shears at spectres of the existential sub-particle kind that threaten to lead humanity in a direction where it might discover that dancing the socialist fandangle might be o.k. after all.
Epstein Tapes? Sordid Case Takes A Bizarre Turn After Mystery ‘Hacker’ Emerges
Shortly after Jeffrey Epstein’s August death in a Manhattan detention facility, a shadowy figure claiming to have set up encrypted servers for the convicted sex offender told several attorneys and the New York Times he had a vast archive of incriminating evidence against powerful men stored on overseas servers, including several years worth of the financier’s communications and financial records which allegedly showed he had vast amounts of Bitcoin and cash in the Middle East and Bangkok, and hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of gold, silver and diamonds.
Going by the pseudonym Patrick Kessler, self-described ‘hacker’ said he had “thousands of hours of footage from hidden cameras” from Epstein’s multiple properties, which included former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, lawyer Alan Dershowitz, and Prince Andrew, along with three billionaires and a prominent CEO, according to the Times.
Armed with nothing more than blurry photos of what he claimed were high-profile individuals in compromising situations, Kessler approached lawyers representing several Epstein accusers, John Pottinger and David Boies – the former of whom suggested that billionaire Sheldon Adelson – an ally of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu – might pay for the alleged footage of Barak.
According to excerpts viewed by The Times, Mr. Pottinger and Kessler discussed a plan to disseminate some of the informant’s materials — starting with the supposed footage of Mr. Barak. The Israeli election was barely a week away, and Mr. Barak was challenging Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The purported images of Mr. Barak might be able to sway the election — and fetch a high price. –New York Times.
After several weeks, the attorneys invited the New YorkTimes to speak with Kessler in mid-September. Then things got even more unbelievable. Following a mid-September meeting with The Times in the Boies Schiller offices, Kessler went rogue – contacting the paper and accusing Boies and Pottinger of an extortion plot against the subjects of said tapes.
Barely an hour after the session ended, the Times reporters received an email from Kessler: “Are you free?” He said he wanted to meet — alone. “Tell no one else.”
…
Kessler complained that Mr. Boies and Mr. Pottinger were more interested in making money than in exposing wrongdoers. He pulled out his phone, warned the reporters not to touch it, and showed more of what he had. There was a color photo of a bare-chested, gray-haired man with a slight smile. Kessler said it was a billionaire. He also showed blurry, black-and-white images of a dark-haired man receiving oral sex. He said it was a prominent C.E.O.
“At one point, he showed what he said were classified C.I.A. documents,” writes the Times.
Weeks after the meeting, the lawyers struck a deal with the Times during the last Friday in September. They would send a team overseas to download Kessler’s evidence from his servers (and had alerted the FBI and the US Attorney’s Office in Manhattan of their intention to do so), and would then share all the evidence with the paper on the condition that they would have discretion over which men could be written about, and when.
Separately, Kessler had arranged to give the Times his evidence using a convoluted series of steps. On the day the data was to be transmitted, Kessler canceled at the 11th hour, claiming ‘a fire was burning’ and he had to flee to Ukraine.
In early October, Kessler said he was ready to produce the Epstein files. He told The Times that he had created duplicate versions of Mr. Epstein’s servers. He laid out detailed logistical plans for them to be shipped by boat to the United States and for one of his associates — a very short Icelandic man named Steven — to deliver them to The Times headquarters at 11 a.m. on Oct. 3.
Kessler warned that he was erecting a maze of security systems. First, a Times employee would need to use a special thumb drive to access a proprietary communications system. Then Kessler’s colleague would transmit a code to decrypt the files. If his instructions weren’t followed precisely, Kessler said, the information would self-destruct.
Specialists at The Times set up a number of “air-gapped” laptops — disconnected from the internet — in a windowless, padlocked meeting room. Reporters cleared their schedules to sift through thousands of hours of surveillance footage.
On the morning of the scheduled delivery, Kessler sent a series of frantic texts. Disaster had struck. A fire was burning. The duplicate servers were destroyed. One of his team members was missing. He was fleeing to Kyiv.
Except two hours later, Kessler contacted Pottinger and didn’t mention any emergency. Instead, he asked Pottinger to formulate two schemes for prying up to $1 billion from potential targets with the footage which the Times suggested may have been a trap.
Pottinger obliged, describing two options for capitalizing on the evidence. The first, a “standard model” for legal settlements, would include splitting the money among Epstein’s victims, a charitable foundation, Kessler, and the lawyers – who would get up to 40%.
In the second hypothetical, the lawyers would approached the high-profile men, convince them to hire them to ensure they wouldn’t get sued, and then “make a contribution to a nonprofit as part of their retainer.”
Pottinger would effectively represent a victim, settle their case, and then represent the victim’s alleged abuser – a legal, yet morally questionable practice for an attorney to engage in.
Dershowitz and the weird recorded phone call
In late September, Dershowitz’s secretary related a message that Kessler wanted to speak with him about Boies – with whom Dershowitz has a long-running feud. Dershowitz recorded the call, during which Kessler said he no longer trusted Boies and Pottinger.
“The problem is that they don’t want to move forward with any of these people legally,” said Kessler, adding “They’re just interested in trying to settle and take a cut.”
“Who are these people that you have on videotape?” Mr. Dershowitz asked.
“There’s a lot of people,” Kessler said, naming a few powerful men. He added, “There’s a long list of people that they want me to have that I don’t have.”
“Who?” Mr. Dershowitz asked. “Did they ask about me?”
“Of course they asked about you. You know that, sir.”
“And you don’t have anything on me, right?”
“I do not, no,” Kessler said.
“Because I never, I never had sex with anybody,” Mr. Dershowitz said. Later in the call, he added, “I am completely clean. I was at Jeffrey’s house. I stayed there. But I didn’t have any sex with anybody.”
As the Times asks, “what was the purpose of Kessler’s phone call? Why did he tell Mr. Dershowitz that he wasn’t on the supposed surveillance tapes, contradicting what he had said and showed to Mr. Boies, Mr. Pottinger and The Times? Did the call sound a little rehearsed?”
Dershowitz told the Timeshe has no idea why Kessler called him.
Holding out hope
In a November 7 email, Boies told the Times “I still believe he is what he purported to be,” adding “I have to evaluate people for my day job, and he seemed too genuine to be a fake, and I very much want him to be real.”
That said, he also noted “I am not unconscious of the danger of wanting to believe something too much.”
Ten days later, Mr. Boies arrived at The Times for an on-camera interview. It was a bright, chilly Sunday, and Mr. Boies had just flown in from Ecuador, where he said he was doing work for the finance ministry. Reporters wanted to ask him plainly if his and Mr. Pottinger’s conduct with Kessler crossed ethical lines.
Would they have brokered secret settlements that buried evidence of wrongdoing? Did the notion of extracting huge sums from men in exchange for keeping sex tapes hidden meet the definition of extortion?
Mr. Boies said the answer to both questions was no. He said he and Mr. Pottinger operated well within the law. They only intended to pursue legal action on behalf of their clients — in other words, that they were a long way from extortion. In any case, he said, he and Mr. Pottinger had never authenticated any of the imagery or identified any of the supposed victims, much less contacted any of the men on the “hot list.”
When the Times showed Boies text exchanges between Kessler and Pottinger, he “showed a flash of anger and said it was the first time seeing them.”
Eventually, Boies concluded that Kessler was probably a con man.
“I think that he was a fraudster who was just trying to set things up,” adding that he had probably baited Pottinger into writing things that were more nefarious than they really were.
Pottinger, meanwhile, claims he was stringing Kessler along – “misleading him deliberately in order to get to the servers.”
Despite Kessler’s story falling apart, the Times asks if his claims are plausible.
Did America’s best-connected sexual predator accumulate incriminating videos of powerful men?
Two women who spent time in Mr. Epstein’s homes said the answer was yes. In an unpublished memoir, Virginia Giuffre, who accused Mr. Epstein of making her a “sex slave,” wrote that she discovered a room in his New York mansion where monitors displayed real-time surveillance footage. And Maria Farmer, an artist who accused Mr. Epstein of sexually assaulting her when she worked for him in the 1990s, said that Mr. Epstein once walked her through the mansion, pointing out pin-sized cameras that he said were in every room.
“I said, ‘Are you recording all this?’” Ms. Farmer said in an interview. “He said, ‘Yes. We keep it. We keep everything.’”
During a 2005 search of Mr. Epstein’s Palm Beach, Fla., estate, the police found two cameras hidden in clocks — one in the garage and the other next to his desk, according to police reports. But no other cameras were found.
So – it appears that Kessler was either a fraud or an operative, and the entire saga may have been designed to cast doubt over whether tapes actually exist. Or, Kessler is for real – and for some reason hasn’t found a way to release the videos. That said, since he says he’s not interested in extortion, what’s the hold-up?
More than thirty years ago a giant tower was built in Manzanares, Spain, to produce electricity in a way that at the time must have seen even more eccentric than it seems now, by harnessing the power of air movement. The Manzanares tower was, sadly, toppled by a storm. Decades ago, several other firms tried to replicate the idea, but none has succeeded. Why?
A simple idea
The idea behind the so-called solar wind towers is pretty straightforward. The more popular version is the solar updraft tower, which works as follows:
On the ground, around the hollow tower, there is a solar energy collector—a transparent surface suspended a little above ground—which heats the air underneath.
As the air heats up, it is drawn into the tower, also called a solar chimney, since hot air is lighter than cold air. It enters the tower and moves up it to escape through the top. In the process, it activates a number of wind turbines located around the base of the tower. The main benefit over other renewable technologies? Doing away with the intermittency of PV solar, since the air beneath the collector could stay hot even when the sun is not shining.
A more recent take on solar wind towers involved water as well. Dubbed the Solar Wind Downdraft Tower, this project first made headlines in 2014, but since then there have been few updates, and those have been far between. The latest was from last year, when the company behind it, Solar Wind Energy Tower, announced a letter of intent by an investment company to provide financing for the project. That financing was to come from investors that the company was yet to find.
Here’s how the company describes the power generation process in the downdraft tower:
“To start, a series of pumps deliver water to the Tower’s injection system at the top where a fine mist is cast across the entire opening. The water introduced by the injection system then evaporates and is absorbed by hot dry air which has been heated by the solar rays of the sun.
As a result, the air becomes cooler, denser and heavier than the outside warmer air, and falls through the cylinder at speeds up to and in excess of 50 mph. This air is then diverted into wind tunnels surrounding the base of the Tower where turbines inside the tunnels power generators to produce electricity.”
The tough reality
There is normally one reason why otherwise promising—at least on the face of it—technologies never take off: cost. One solar tower executive said as much to National Geographic in 2014.
“The capital costs are very high,” said Rudolf Bergermann, who is co-founder of Schlaich-Bergermann and Partner, a company specializing in updraft solar tower technology. In a paper on its project, SBP admitted that costs of solar towers are high, but said the electricity that they generate is cheaper than all comparable solar technology.
The company also wrote, “However, the approaching shortfall of fuel reserves in combination with dramatically increasing demand will soon balance the cost difference of today and later even reverse it. We expect this ‘break-even-point’ already at a value of 60 to 80 $/barrel of crude oil.”
Brent is currently trading around $60 a barrel today, but there is no news of solar towers getting built on any scale. Investors are still wary of pouring money into a concept that has not been proved despite the promising theory behind it. That’s especially true of the downdraft tower: it sounds like it will need to use substantial amounts of water and the company is not saying where this water will come from and how much it will add to the cost of the whole thing.
Challenging the dominant tech
The way things stand now in renewable energy, solar wind towers may never become part of the global energy mix. While the electricity they could generate may indeed be cheaper than comparable technology, the upfront costs and the stability problems related to the height of the tower, which is in direct proportion to its efficiency, are enough to doom this technology. But the final nails come from the competition.
Solar and wind energy research has achieved impressive production cost reductions in the past decades when the technology has moved from an interesting alternative to power plants to a mainstream source of energy.
Solar panels are today a lot cheaper than they were just fie years ago, and costs continue to fall. These will doubtlessly reach a bottom at some point, before low cost begins to compromise quality, but the cheaper PV tech becomes, the less competitive their alternatives get.
Wind energy is also getting cheaper as towers become taller and turbines become more efficient at no additional cost.
“Wind now supplies clean and efficient power to the equivalent of 32 million American homes, sustains 500 U.S. factories, and delivers more than one billion dollars a year in new revenue to rural communities and states,” the American Wind Energy Association said last month in a report that revealed the United States had more than 100 GW in wind capacity, most of it onshore.
The creators of the solar wind downdraft tower compare their facility in terms of cost with a nuclear power plant. However, what they should compare it to are solar installations and wind farms. Some of these are already cheaper than fossil fuel-fired power plants. They are the reason such fascinating but expensive technology will likely never make it to the market, not cheap oil and gas.
BET Founder Says 2020 Election Is “Trump’s To Lose”
Millions of Americans slept in on Friday morning after spending the early morning hours battling their way to the front of the line to take advantage of those sweet, sweet Black Friday deals.
Meanwhile, CNBC interrupted its coverage of the holiday sales madness to bring Robert Johnson, the founder of BET, on for an interview with Hadley Gamble. Johnson is no stranger to CNBC: He appears every few months, usually to discuss how the mainstream media distorts minorities and their view of President Trump.
Though he didn’t dwell on whether he voted for Trump, Johnson insisted that the media has the narrative wrong, and that plenty of minorities – the target audience for BET (Black Entertainment Television) – actually like Trump (despite the insistence of Wealthy White Liberals that he has no support among communities of color) because of the president’s abrasive style.
“I think the president has always been in a position where it’s his to lose, based on the fact that he’s bringing a disruptive force into what would be considered political norms, whether it’s the way he conducts foreign policy, the way he takes on the government agencies and the way he takes on immigration – he brings his style. And a lot of people who voted for him like this style.”
Looking ahead to the 2020 vote, Johnson warned the Dems who are still jousting for the nomination not to focus so much on Trump’s style (i.e. what he says and what he tweets) but instead to focus on his actual policy decisions (tax cuts for the wealthy, stepped-up deportations), which Johnson believes are far less popular.
“What Democrats need to be careful about is to not focus on stylistic Trump, but to focus on substantive Trump,” Johnson said.
But at the end of the day, Johnson wouldn’t be surprised to see Trump steamroll the Dems once again (though he lost the popular vote in 2016, he won the electoral college by a substantial margin) because Trump has a special ability to dominate a news cycle – something that no other politician can accomplish.
These skills apparently take time to develop, since Trump has been working the media to his advantage since the late 1970s.
Meanwhile, there’s one pitfall that Dems must avoid: Accusing Trump’s supporters of being racists and bigots.
“His ability to dominate the news cycle and get the narrative going about what he said to me has sort of a double effect on the Democrats. First they get all agitated about what he said, then they extend that to the voters.”
“What they’re doing is they simply adding to his support by saying ‘Trump is bad, and if you support Trump, then you’re bad’ – which is a really silly way to talk to the American people.”
It might seem like common sense to the rest of us, but labeling nearly half the country as a bunch of evil nazi bigots is clearly not the best strategy for winning over the hearts and minds. Yet, that’s what many on the far-left flank of the Democratic Party would like to see happen.
British banking giant HSBC plans to move $20 billion worth of assets to Digital Vault, a new blockchain-based custody platform by March 2020. By deploying the platform, the global investment bank aims to digitize paper-based records of private placements in order to increase standardization and speed up processes in the growing industry, Reuters reports Nov. 27.
HSBC reportedly expects the global volumes of private placements to surge 60% from 2017 to hit $7.7 trillion by 2022. The bank could not estimate how much the platform will save for the company or its clients, Reuters states.
HSBC to help investors track securities on private markets in real-time
Specifically, the Digital Vault platform will purportedly allow investors to track securities bought on private markets in real-time.
As private placements are usually conducted on paper, its processes are often associated with a lack of standardization, while access to documentation can be complicated and time-consuming. By deploying blockchain, the company hopes to reduce the time needed to make queries on holdings by investors.
No major savings in the first 18 months
While HSBC has not provided any estimations for the potential outcomes of adopting the platform, an independent blockchain expert suggested major savings would be unlikely during the first stages of the project.
Windsor Holden, an independent consultant who tracks blockchain and cryptocurrencies, told Reuters that he does not expect to see savings from increased efficiency in the first year to 18 months.
Private placement in the crypto and blockchain industries
Private placements are funding rounds of securities which are sold not through a public offering, but through a private offering. Private placement is considered to be an option to an initial public offering for a company looking to raise capital for expansion.
In July 2019, American digital asset management fund Grayscale Investments resumed private placement of Grayscale Bitcoin Trust shares, allowing investors to put money in Bitcoin (BTC) using a traditional investment structure.
The Trust private placement is offered on a periodic basis throughout the year to accredited investors for daily subscription. Previously, South Korea’s messaging app operator Kakao Corp. revealed its plans to offer a private placement to attract investors to develop their blockchain subsidiary.
QE Or Not QE? Here Is The Market’s Answer In One Simple Chart
After a month of constant verbal gymnastics by the Fed – and its army of sycophants who can’t think creatively or originally and merely parrot their echo chamber in hopes of a blue checkmark and likes/retweets – that the recent launch of $60 billion in T-Bill purchases is anything but QE (whatever you do, don’t call it “QE 4”, just call it “NOT QE” please), two weeks ago one bank finally had the guts to say what was so obvious to anyone who isn’t challenged by simple logic: the Fed’s “NOT QE” is really “QE.”
As we reported on November 15, in a note warning that the Fed’s latest purchase program – whether one calls it QE, QE4, QE ∞ or NOT QE – will have big, potentially catastrophic costs, Bank of America’s Ralph Axel wrote that in the aftermath of the Fed’s new program of T-bill purchases to increase the amount of reserves in the banking system, the Fed made an effort to repeatedly inform markets that this is not a new round of quantitative easing, and yet as the BofA strategist notes, “in important ways it is similar.”
But was it QE? Well, in his October FOMC press conference, Fed Chair Powell said “our T-bill purchases should not be confused with the large-scale asset purchase program that we deployed after the financial crisis. In contrast, purchasing Tbills should not materially affect demand and supply for longer-term securities or financial conditions more broadly.” Chair Powell also gave a succinct definition of QE as having two basic elements: (1) supporting longer-term security prices, and (2) easing financial conditions.
Here’s the problem: as we have said since the beginning, and as Bank of America wrote, “the Fed’s T-bill purchase program delivers on both fronts and is therefore similar to QE,” with one exception – the element of forward guidance.
The upshot to this attempt to mislead the market what it is doing according to Bank of America, is that:
the Fed is continuing to “ease” even though rate cuts are now on hold, which is supportive of growth, higher interest rates and higher equities, and
the Fed is loosening financial conditions by increasing the availability of, and lowering the cost of, leverage, which broadly supports asset prices potentially at the cost of increasing systemic financial risk.
And while we have repeatedly argued why we think that, stripped of all its semantic veneer, the Fed’s latest asset purchase program is, in fact, QE, BofA effectively confirmed why we are right.
Which brings up a tangential, if just as important question: Why is the Fed so concerned about not signaling QE, and why are so many Fed fanboys desperate to parrot whatever Powell is saying day after day? Simply said, there are several reasons why the Fed is making a great effort to let the world know that its security purchases are not QE and are not reflective of any change in monetary policy stance.
The first is the obvious issue of signaling concern around the economic outlook which would run counter to its cautiously optimistic and often upbeat assessment. After all, why do QE if the economy has “never been stronger”, and the Fed was hiking rates as recently as a December. Included here are the concerns about running out of ammunition at the zero lower bound of rate policy. With negative rates increasingly off the table – until push comes to shove of course and the Fed is forced to join the ECB, BOJ and SNB in going subzero – QE is meant to be reserved as dry powder for a rainy day when conventional tools are exhausted (even if QE is in fact taking place this very instant).
A less obvious concern for the Fed is connecting monetary policy to bank demand for Fed liabilities, which as BofA admits, “is not something that fits neatly within its dual mandate”: last January, the Fed made a “momentous decision” to run an “abundant reserve regime” also known as a floor system, where the central bank decided not to return to its pre-crisis days of zero excess reserves. As such, the central bank now views the proper level of excess reserves (a Fed balance sheet liability) not in terms of its dual mandate for inflation and employment, but in terms of how banks prefer to meet regulatory liquidity requirements and how this preference impacts repo and other markets.
In short, the Fed’s dual mandate has been replaced by a single mandate of promoting financial stability (or as some may say, boosting JPMorgan’s stock price) similar to that of the ECB.
Here BofA ominously added that “by deciding to dynamically assess bank demand for reserves and reduce the risk of air pockets in repo markets, we believe the Fed has entered unchartered territory of monetary policy that may stretch beyond its dual mandate.” And the punchline: “By running balance-sheet policy to ensure overnight funding markets remain flush, the Fed is arguably circumventing the most important brake on excess leverage: the price.“
So if NOT QE is in fact, QE, and if the Fed is once again in the price manipulation business, what then?
According to BofA’s Axel, the most worrying part of the Fed’s current asset purchase program is the realization that an ongoing bank footprint in repo markets is required to maintain control of policy rates in the new floor system, or as we put it less politely, banks are now able to hijack the financial system by indicating that they have an overnight funding problem (as JPMorgan very clearly did) and force the Fed to do their (really JPMorgan’s) bidding.
While it is likely that beyond year-end, the additional tens of billions in reserves will have the required soothing effect, what is less clear is that the Fed can make sure the bank repo lending footprint is resilient to dips in the bank credit cycle.
And this is where BofA’s warning hits a crescendo, because while repo is fully collateralized and therefore contains negligible counterparty credit risk, “there may be a situation in which banks want to deleverage quickly, for example during a money run or a liquidation in some market caused by a sudden reassessment of value as in 2008.”
Got that? Going forward please refer to any market crash as a “sudden reassessment of value”, something which has become impossible in a world where “value” is whatever the Fed says it is… Well, the Fed or a bunch of self-serving venture capitalists, who pushed the “value” of WeWork to $47 billion just weeks before it was revealed that the company is effectively insolvent the punch bowl of endless free money is taken away.
To Bank of America, this new monetary policy regime actually increases systemic financial risk by making repo markets more vulnerable to bank cycles. This, as the bank ominously warns, “increases interconnectedness, which is something regulators widely recognize as making asset bubbles and entity failures more dangerous.“
Think of this as Europe’s infamous “doom loop”, only in the US and instead of linking bank equity values with the price of sovereign debt, it uses repo as a risk intermediary – one which is both used to grease the financial system, and which henceforth will also be an indicator of systemic bank stress.
In short, not only is the Fed pursuing QE without calling it QE, but by doing so it is implicitly raising the odds – more so than if it simply did another QE and rebuilt reserves to abour $4.5 trillion or more by purchasing coupon bonds – of another market crash.
It was, however, BofA’s conclusion that we found most alarming: as Axel writes, in his parting words:
“some have argued, including former NY Fed President William Dudley, that the last financial crisis was in part fueled by the Fed’s reluctance to tighten financial conditions as housing markets showed early signs of froth. It seems the Fed’s abundant-reserve regime may carry a new set of risks by supporting increased interconnectedness and overly easy policy (expanding balance sheet during an economic expansion) to maintain funding conditions that may short-circuit the market’s ability to accurately price the supply and demand for leverage as asset prices rise.“
In retrospect, we understand why the Fed is terrified of calling the latest QE by its true name: one mistake, and not only will it be the last QE the Fed will ever do, but it could also finally finish what the 2008 financial crisis failed to achieve, only this time the Fed will be powerless to do anything but sit and watch.
The reason we bring up this especially critical topic again today, is because we now have almost two full months of data since the start of NOT QE, which IS QE, and which conveniently gives us a snapshot of how the market – not we, not Bank of America, not pro or anti-Fed pundits – are responding to the expansion in the Fed’s balance sheet, which between repos, term repos, and permanent open market operations, has grown by $293 billion in just under the past three months.
The simple answer is the following: whether one wants to call it QE or not QE, ever since the Fed announced on Oct 11 that it would start purchasing $60 billion in T-Bills each month until “at least into the second quarter of 2020” – being careful to note that “these actions are purely technical measures to support the effective implementation of the FOMC’s monetary policy, and do not represent a change in the stance of monetary policy“, i.e., this is not QE, the Fed’s balance sheet has grown for 7 out of 8 weeks.
The market’s response? Just like during the POMO days of QE1, QE2, Operation Twist, and QE3, stocks have risen on every single week when the Fed’s balance sheet increased, following the three weeks of declines that led to the October 11 announcement. What about the one week when the Fed’s balance sheet shrank? That was the only week in the past two months since the launch of “NOT QE” when the S&P dropped.
So while Fed watchers, pundits, strategists, rank amateurs and virtually anyone else can debate whether or not what the Fed is doing is or is not QE, the market has made up its mind: if the balance sheet is rising, so are stocks, and vice versa. And since only POMO matters – so to speak – as it did back in the days of QE1 through QE3, we will do what we did back then, and list a schedule of all the upcoming days in which the Fed conducts liquidity injections – regardless of how one wants to call them (the latest schedule can always be found on the following page).
One final point for all those who despite the above, will still claim that just because the Fed is not purchasing coupon Treasuries, and thus is not changing either the duration of securities in the open market or investor risk preference, it is not, not, not QE, here is a snippet of what JPMorgan’s Nikolaos Panagirtzoglou wrote in his latest Flows and Liquidity newsletter:
… we see the Fed likely to conduct some of its balance sheet expansion next year via Treasuries.
Translation: some time in 2020, the Fed will stop pretending it is “NOT” QE.
Living on the opposite side of the world to the USA I am obliged to follow American politics as a stone thrown into the Washington swamp sends ripples that reach this far.
With less than a year to go until the next presidential election it is time to assess the current political landscape.
Trump of course is the focus of massive media noise. This must be ignored if a rational analysis is to be produced. 2016 proved that opinion polls must also be ignored.
As things stand today Trump holds the following chips in his stack:
He is the incumbent
The official employment numbers are in his favor
The official economic numbers are in his favor
His Republican approval is over 90%
His Hispanic/black approval ratings are at record levels for a Republican
He has made a dent in the illegal immigration problem
He has not started any new wars
Both Trump and the RNC are raking in record amounts of campaign cash
He will have the vote of most people with a 401(k) account
He will have the vote of most people in the military
He is in control of the social media narrative
He pushed the concept of the deep state and fake news into the mainstream
Democrat controlled cities are clearly in serious decline
He forced the DNC to defend their lunatic far left fringe and embrace their views
He forced the Democrats into the farcical impeachment process
The Democrats have little cash on hand
The Democrats do not have a viable policy platform
The Democrats do not currently have a viable contender for the nomination
Probably the most important fact we have learned since the election of Trump is that the deep state does exist in America and that it is a massively powerful hand on the tiller of American policy.
It has also become abundantly clear that this faction was strongly opposed to the policies Trump ran on in 2016 and that they have tried to impede him ever since he announced his candidacy. It is not unreasonable to conclude that this faction does not wish Trump to win re-election.
The question then becomes how far are they prepared to go in stopping him.
1. The most obvious way to stop Trump would be at the the ballot box. However, given the factors outlined above this is a long shot bet. None of the declared Democrat candidates can beat him. Hillary Clinton would fail again. A Republican cannot unseat him. Obama has been keeping a very low profile, it is possible that his wife Michelle could win, if she could be persuaded to run. Oprah?
2. What would turn the world of Trump upside down would be a financial crisis of a similar magnitude to 2008, or a major dollar collapse (Putin said last week the dollar would collapse soon). If there were a consensus among the deep state to take such action it would be incredibly easy for them to achieve given the highly unstable fabric of markets today.
The corporate credit markets could be pushed into panic by Jamie Dimon alone if he wished such an outcome and had the blessing of his buddies. Indeed, the cynic might argue that the groundwork has been laid since the start of the repo problem in mid September and the launching of QE4. Last time around the patsie was Lehman, has Deutsche Bank been singled out to take the fall this time? Time is running short for this to be an option, a crisis must be in play by spring next year to stymie the Orange Man.
3. The third way Trump could be stopped does not bear thinking about but it happened before to JFK 56 years ago.
Epstein did not kill himself.
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Newsweek Reporter Fired After Peddling Fake News That Trump Golfed On Thanksgiving
Newsweek has fired a reporter who penned a snarky, misleading article suggesting that President Trump spent Thanksgiving ‘tweeting and golfing,’ when he actually flew to Afghanistan for a surprise visit with US troops.
The fired journo, Jessica Kwong, wrote in an article entitled “How is Trump Spending Thanksgiving? Tweeting, Golfing and More,” that the president “has been spending his Thanksgiving holidays at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida.”
The golfing claim comes later in the article, as Kwong notes that Trump played golf on Thanksgiving Eve “from mid-morning to mid-afternoon.” The headline, of course, suggests Trump golfed on Thanksgiving.
After Trump popped up in Afghanistan, Kwong and Newsweek took heat over Twitter for refusing to edit the article or delete the viral tweet promoting the lie.
This caught the attention of the Trump family, who promptly called out the beleaguered news outlet:
Eventually, Kwong caved by deleting her tweet, and Newsweek edited the article – at first with no mention of the edit, and then an editors note only after virtually the entire piece had been rewritten.
“This story has been substantially updated and edited at 6:17 pm EST to reflect the president’s surprise trip to Afghanistan. Additional reporting by James Crowley,” reads the update.
“Newsweek investigated the failures that led to the publication of the inaccurate report that President Trump spent Thanksgiving tweeting and golfing rather than visiting troops in Afghanistan,” a Newsweek spokesperson told TheNew York Post in an email. “The story has been corrected and the journalist responsible has been terminated. We will continue to review our processes and, if required, take further action.”
After Trump tweeted “I thought Newsweek was out of business?,” The Wrap reminds us that “The former owners of the publication and a faith-based online media company were accused of attempting to defraud lenders in an indictment filed in October 2018,” adding “High-ranking editorial staffers have been leaving the publication and three senior editorial staffers were fired in retaliation for a story about a legal investigation into the company in February 2018.”
Not quite out of business, but certainly not in a position to afford further reputational risk from obvious fake news.
Meanwhile, her fellow Democrats appear abysmally unconcerned about the human and financial toll…
The Democratic establishment is increasingly irritated.
Representative Tulsi Gabbard, long-shot candidate for president, is attacking her own party for promoting the “deeply destructive” policy of “regime change wars.” Gabbard has even called Hillary Clinton “the queen of warmongers, embodiment of corruption, and personification of the rot that has sickened the Democratic Party.”
Senator Chris Murphy complained:
“It’s a little hard to figure out what itch she’s trying to scratch in the Democratic Party right now.”
Some conservatives seem equally confused. The Washington Examiner’s Eddie Scarry asked:
“where is Tulsi distinguishing herself when it really matters?”
The answer is that foreign policy “really matters.”
Gabbard recognizes that George W. Bush is not the only simpleton warmonger who’s plunged the nation into conflict, causing enormous harm. In the last Democratic presidential debate, she explained that the issue was “personal to me” since she’d “served in a medical unit where every single day, I saw the terribly high, human costs of war.” Compare her perspective to that of the ivory tower warriors of Right and Left, ever ready to send others off to fight not so grand crusades.
The best estimate of the costs of the post-9/11 wars comes from the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University. The Institute says that $6.4 trillion will be spent through 2020. They estimate that our wars have killed 801,000 directly and resulted in a multiple of that number dead indirectly. More than 335,000 civilians have died—and that’s an extremely conservative guess. Some 21 million people have been forced from their homes. Yet the terrorism risk has only grown, with the U.S. military involved in counter-terrorism in 80 nations.
Obviously, without American involvement there would still be conflicts. Some counter-terrorism activities would be necessary even if the U.S. was not constantly swatting geopolitical wasps’ nests. Nevertheless, it was Washington that started or joined these unnecessary wars (e.g., Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Yemen) and expanded necessary wars well beyond their legitimate purposes (Afghanistan). As a result, American policymakers bear responsibility for much of the carnage.
The Department of Defense is responsible for close to half of the estimated expenditures. About $1.4 trillion goes to care for veterans. Homeland security and interest on security expenditures take roughly $1 trillion each. And $131 million goes to the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development, which have overspent on projects that have delivered little.
More than 7,000 American military personnel and nearly 8,000 American contractors have died. About 1,500 Western allied troops and 11,000 Syrians fighting ISIS have been killed. The Watson Institute figures that as many as 336,000 civilians have died, but that uses the very conservative numbers provided by the Iraq Body Count. The IBC counts 207,000 documented civilian deaths but admits that doubling the estimate would probably yield a more accurate figure. Two other respected surveys put the number of deaths in Iraq alone at nearly 700,000 and more than a million, though those figures have been contested.
More than a thousand aid workers and journalists have died, as well as up to 260,000 opposition fighters. Iraq is the costliest conflict overall, with as many as 308,000 dead (or 515,000 from doubling the IBC count). Syria cost 180,000 lives, Afghanistan 157,000, Yemen 90,000, and Pakistan 66,000.
Roughly 32,000 American military personnel have been wounded; some 300,000 suffer from PTSD or significant depression and even more have endured traumatic brain injuries. There are other human costs—4.5 million Iraqi refugees and millions more in other nations, as well as the destruction of Iraq’s indigenous Christian community and persecution of other religious minorities. There has been widespread rape and other sexual violence. Civilians, including children, suffer from PTSD.
Even stopping the wars won’t end the costs. Explained Nita Crawford of Boston University and co-director of Brown’s Cost of War Project: “the total budgetary burden of the post-9/11 wars will continue to rise as the U.S. pays the on-going costs of veterans’ care and for interest no borrowing to pay for the wars.”
People would continue to die. Unexploded shells and bombs still turn up in Europe from World Wars I and II. In Afghanistan, virtually the entire country is a battlefield, filled with landmines, shells, bombs, and improvised explosive devices. Between 2001 and 2018, 5,442 Afghans were killed and 14,693 were wounded from unexploded ordnance. Some of these explosives predate American involvement, but the U.S. has contributed plenty over the last 18 years.
Moreover, the number of indirect deaths often exceeds battle-related casualties. Journalist and activist David Swanson noted an “estimate that to 480,000 direct deaths in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan, one must add at least one million deaths in those countries indirectly caused by the recent and ongoing wars. This is because the wars have caused illnesses, injuries, malnutrition, homelessness, poverty, lack of social support, lack of healthcare, trauma, depression, suicide, refugee crises, disease epidemics, the poisoning of the environment, and the spread of small-scale violence.” Consider Yemen, ravaged by famine and cholera. Most civilian casualties have resulted not from Saudi and Emirati bombing, but from the consequences of the bombing.
Only a naif would imagine that these wars will disappear absent a dramatic change in national leadership. Wrote Crawford:
“The mission of the post-9/11 wars, as originally defined, was to defend the United States against future terrorist threats from al-Qaeda and affiliated organizations. Since 2001, the wars have expanded from the fighting in Afghanistan, to wars and smaller operations elsewhere, in more than 80 countries—becoming a truly ‘global war on terror’.”
Yet every expansion of conflict makes the American homeland more, not less, vulnerable. Contrary to the nonsensical claim that if we don’t occupy Afghanistan forever and overthrow Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, al-Qaeda and ISIS will turn Chicago and Omaha into terrorist abattoirs, intervening in more conflicts and killing more foreigners creates additional terrorists at home and abroad. In this regard, drone campaigns are little better than invasions and occupations.
For instance, when questioned by the presiding judge in his trial, the failed 2010 Times Square bomber, Faisal Shahzad, a U.S. citizen, cited the drone campaign in Pakistan. His colloquy with the judge was striking: “I’m going to plead guilty 100 times forward because until the hour the U.S. pulls its forces from Iraq and Afghanistan and stops the drone strikes in Somalia and Yemen and in Pakistan and stops the occupation of Muslim lands and stops Somalia and Yemen and in Pakistan, and stops the occupation of Muslim lands, and stops killing the Muslims.”
Ajani Marwat, with the New York City Police Department’s intelligence division, outlined Shahzad’s perspective to The Guardian:
“’It’s American policies in his country.’ …’We don’t have to do anything to attract them,’ a terrorist organizer in Lahore told me. ‘The Americans and the Pakistani government do our work for us. With the drone attacks targeting the innocents who live in Waziristan and the media broadcasting this news all the time, the sympathies of most of the nation are always with us. Then it’s simply a case of converting these sentiments into action’.”
Washington does make an effort to avoid civilian casualties, but war will never be pristine. Combatting insurgencies inevitably harms innocents. Air and drone strikes rely on often unreliable informants. The U.S. employs “signature” strikes based on supposedly suspicious behavior. And America’s allies, most notably the Saudis and Emiratis—supplied, armed, guided, and until recently refueled by Washington—make little if any effort to avoid killing noncombatants and destroying civilian infrastructure.
Thus will the cycle of terrorism and war continue. Yet which leading Democrats have expressed concern? Most complain that President Donald Trump is negotiating with North Korea, leaving Syria, and reducing force levels in Afghanistan. Congressional Democrats care about Yemen only because it has become Trump’s war; there were few complaints under President Barack Obama.
What has Washington achieved after years of combat? Even the capitals of its client states are unsafe. The State Department warns travelers to Iraq that kidnapping is a risk and urges businessmen to hire private security. In Kabul, embassy officials now travel to the airport via helicopter rather than car.
Tulsi Gabbard is talking about what really matters. The bipartisan War Party has done its best to wreck America and plenty of other nations too. Gabbard is courageously challenging the Democrats in this coalition, who have become complicit in Washington’s criminal wars.
