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Authored by Michael Snyder via The American Dream blog,

Are we going to see violence in the streets of our major cities following the mid-term elections in November? 

President Trump seems to believe that this is a very real possibility, and he shared his thoughts on this with a group of top evangelical leaders on Monday night. 

Previously, those that have warned that a “civil war” is coming to America have been heavily criticized, but perhaps people will start taking this more seriously now that President Trump is saying it. 

Of course we have already seen dozens of attacks on Trump supporters all over the nation, but the mainstream media largely ignores those because it does not fit the narratives that they are pushing.  The mainstream media wants to make Trump and his supporters look as bad as possible, and so they do not like to report anything that may cause the public to view them in a positive light.  But everyone can see that anger and hatred are rising to unprecedented levels in this country, and the mainstream media and key politicians on the left are adding more fuel to the fire with each passing day.

On Monday, somewhere around 100 top evangelical leaders gathered for an intimate dinner with Trump, and this dinner made headlines all over the nation…

About 100 evangelical leaders were invited to dinner at the White House Monday night for what was a prayer-filled event that’s been compared to a church camp meeting and a campaign rally.

Dubbed a “state dinner” for evangelical leaders, the event was held specifically in the “honor of evangelical leadership.” The dinner was attended by dozens of evangelical pastors, evangelists and activists who’ve been involved in informally advising the administration including well-known figures like Franklin Graham, James Dobson, and Greg Laurie.

During his remarks at the dinner, Trump acknowledged that “the level of anger is unbelievable”, and he warned that there will be violence if Republicans lose in November…

“The level of hatred, the level of anger is unbelievable,” he said. “Part of it is because of some of the things I’ve done for you and for me and for my family, but I’ve done them. … This Nov. 6 election is very much a referendum on not only me, it’s a referendum on your religion, it’s a referendum on free speech and the First Amendment.”

If the GOP loses, he said, “they will overturn everything that we’ve done and they’ll do it quickly and violently, and violently. There’s violence. When you look at Antifa and you look at some of these groups — these are violent people.”

With only a little more than two months to go before the mid-term elections, I think that President Trump is starting to realize how dire the situation is.  Pro-Trump Republicans have lost in primaries in Arizona, Idaho and elsewhere, Democratic candidates are raising far more money than Republican candidates are, and the left has far more energy and enthusiasm than the right does at the moment.

If the mid-term elections were held right now, the Democrats would almost certainly take control of the House, and they might even win a majority in the Senate.

And Trump is correct that there will probably be violence if Republicans lose, but there will also probably be violence if Republicans win.  Either way, Antifa and other groups on the radical left will continue to escalate the rhetoric and the violence.

In addition to rioting in the streets like we have already witnessed in cities such as Portland, individual Trump supporters are already being attacked at an alarming rate as well.

You can find a fairly comprehensive list of attacks on Trump supporters right here.

This nation is becoming a cauldron of fury, and it isn’t going to take much to set off widespread chaos.

At the dinner on Monday night, Trump also warned evangelicals that our religious freedoms are in serious jeopardy…

“I just ask you to go out and make sure all of your people vote. Because if they don’t — it’s November 6 — if they don’t vote, we’re going to have a miserable two years and we’re going to have, frankly, a very hard period of time,” he said.

“You’re one election away from losing everything that you’ve gotten,” he added. “Little thing: Merry Christmas, right? You couldn’t say ‘Merry Christmas.’ “

And even though we probably aren’t going to lose the right to say “Merry Christmas” any time soon, the truth is that we are certainly seeing our religious freedoms being eroded at a staggering pace.

In fact, earlier today I came across an article about a plaque containing the Ten Commandments that was just removed from a park in Ohio.  The left wants to remove every trace of the Christian faith from public life, and they are absolutely relentless in their effort to get this done.

If the Democrats take control of both the House and the Senate in November, they will probably make an effort to impeach President Trump.

But if President Trump gets impeached, Mike Pence will become president, and many on the left hate Pence even more than they hate Trump.

In his brand new book about Pence, radical leftist Michael D’Antonio attempts to portray Mike Pence as a “Christian supremacist” that is basically functioning as “a president-in-waiting”…

Biographer Michael D’Antonio is releasing a new book about Vice President Mike Pence, and though he’s clearly not in Pence’s corner, his appearance Tuesday on CNN summed up perfectly the Christian values that drive the vice president’s actions.

D’Antonio told CNN’s John Berman that he is confident Pence feels God is “calling him” to “function as a president-in-waiting.” The biographer, promoting the new book, “The Shadow President: The Truth About Mike Pence,” argued “absolutely everything” the vice president does is about “becoming president.”

Ultimately, removing Trump from the picture won’t change a whole lot.  The left would still be seething with hatred and anger, and we would continue to see more violence all around the country.

At this point, there really isn’t any conservative that the left would be willing to accept in the White House.  And there are many on the right that would not be willing to acknowledge any liberal as a legitimate president.

America is rapidly getting to the point of becoming ungovernable, and no matter who wins in November, it is quite likely that we will soon see clear evidence of this as chaos reigns in our streets.

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In a market such as this one, where even a monkey throwing darts can outperform hedge funds, and the S&P only goes up in the year’s second melt up episode after a similar rush to stocks in January ended poorly, one would be troubled to find reasons why anyone would engage in insider trading.

And yet, moments ago that’s exactly what happened today when Super Bowl LII champion Mychal Kendricks was charged by federal authorities with insider trading, as U.S. attorney William McSwain announced in Center City, Philadelphia, on Wednesday. Tied to illegal investments he made in 2014, when he was still playing for the Eagles, the charges are likely to precede a guilty plea by the linebacker, as The Philadelphia Inquirer’s Jeremy Roebuck reported.

According to prosecutors, Kendricks – who know plays with the Cleveland Browns – used insider trading tips from an acquaintance to make about $1.2 million in illegal profits on four major trading deals.

U.S. Attorney William McSwain said co-defendant Damilare Sonoiki was paid $10,000 in kickbacks as well as perks like tickets to Philadelphia Eagles games. Kendricks played for the Eagles before signing with the Browns in June.

TV writer and former Goldman Sachs analyst Damilare Sonoiki was “brazenly passing along insider information,” including heads-ups on stock mergers and acquisitions, to Kendricks from 2013 to 2015,” the Philadelphia Inquirer reported. In exchange for the inside information, Kendricks allegedly provided $10,000 in cash and Eagles tickets to Sonoiki. An IMBD profile lists Sonoiki as a writer on the popular TV series “Black-ish” as well as other movies and TV shows.

Kendricks says in a statement released by his lawyer Wednesday that he’s sorry and “deeply” regrets his actions.
He says he “didn’t fully understand all of the details of the illegal trades.” His full statement is below.

“I would like to apologize. Four years ago, I participated in insider trading, and I deeply regret it. I invested money with a former friend of mine who I thought I could trust and who I greatly admired. His background as a Harvard graduate and an employee of Goldman Sachs gave me a false sense of confidence. To this point, I had worked my tail off since I was 5 years old to become a football player. I was drawn in by the allure of being more than just a football player. While I didn’t fully understand all of the details of the illegal trades, I knew itwas wrong, and I wholeheartedly regret my actions. 

Since the beginning of the investigation, I have fully cooperated with the authorities and will continue to do so. I accept full responsibility for my actions. Although I did not take any of the profits for myself, I am committed to repaying all of the funds gained illegally and accept the consequences of my actions.

I sincerely apologize to my coaches, the owners, and my teammates on the Eagles and the Browns, the NFL, and themagnificent fans to whom I owe my career. I also apologize to my family, who I have failed in this. You all deserve better, and I will work my hardest to re-earn your trust and respect, serve as an advocate to educate others, and show you that I will never be involved in anything like this again. Thank you.”

In a statement from the Cleveland Browns, the organization said it was aware of the situation and gathering more information adding that “Mychal will not make the trip to Detroit.”

Mychal Kendricks is facing federal insider trading charges.

Here’s the Browns statement. pic.twitter.com/4Omij9qOjK

— SB Nation (@SBNation) August 29, 2018

NFL spokesman Brian McCarthy says the league is reviewing the situation.

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One week ago we reported that even as the market hit fresh all time highs, the hedge fund community has had a(nother) terrible year, with YTD return for the average equity hedge fund now a negative 1%.

There were three main reasons for that: the sharp underperformance of some of the most beloved “hedge fund hotel” stocks such as Facebook, which was the most widely held hedge fund stock as of June 30 just before it tumbled in July, a correction from which it has so far failed to recover… 

… an acute decline in net exposure as most hedge funds pulled back from a market which has been painfully unpredictable for the “smart money”…

… but most of all, as a result of the relentless short squeeze that continues to push the most hated stocks relentlessly higher. According to Goldman, a basket of the 50 Russell 3000 stocks with market caps greater than $1 billion and the largest outstanding short interest as a share of float has outperformed the S&P 500 by 14 percentage points YTD (+21% vs. +7%), with concentrated shorts outperforming primarily in favorite hedge fund sectors including Info Tech.

Many have speculated that this rolling entry of shorts – mostly in the FAANG names – followed by prompt short covering (given a helping hand by corporate stock buybacks), has been one of the factors behind the Nasdaq’s straight line levitation to new all time highs.

So in light of the constant pain that shorts have suffered to over the past year in shorting tech – demonstrated most famously by David Einhorn whose short tech basket has cost him double digit P&L this year – one would assume they had learned their lesson.

They have not. In fact, according to the latest data from financial analytics firm S3 Partners LLC, short positions against FAANGs have surged by more than 40% in the past year as investors continue to bet against the biggest drivers of the global bull market.

The latest data reveals that bearish investors have shorted about $37 billion worth of FAANGs, up 42% from a year ago. Amazon – which just hit a new all time high on the latest upgrade from Morgan Stanley which now sees the company’s market cap hitting $1.2 trillion – leads the way with almost $10 billion in short interest, according to data compiled by Bloomberg ,as of Aug. 28.

“Tech stocks have had a large run-up in price this year,” S3 head of research Ihor Dusaniwsky told Bloomberg “The greater the rise, the greater the fall so they are being targeted as the stocks to short. With the bull market possibly entering the backstretch, portfolio managers are bracing for a selloff and increasing their overall market short exposure.”

So far, however, tech stocks refuse to fall, and instead continue to rise even as tech names make up half of the 10 largest short-interest positions in the world, with Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group at the top of the list with almost $19 billion worth of stocks short, as shorts continue to pile on hoping for some logic in what Bloomberg’s Richard Breslow dubbed a “surreal” market. That is more than double the 19% weighting the sector has in the MSCI All-Country World Index of the world’s largest developed and developing market stocks.

One of the biggest non-tech positions on the list is Tesla, which has become a magnet for bearish bets despite the recent “going private” scare which has since been pulled off the table. Insurer Ping An Insurance Co. of China Ltd. is the highest-ranked non-tech name in the group, the data show.

Meanwhile, with the Nasdaq now comfortably above 8,000 (having taken the 1000 point move from 7,000 in the shortest time on record), the FAANGs accounted for 48% of the index’s advance this year.

And while so far the most immediate consequence of shorting tech stocks has been a forced short squeeze as one after another group of shorts is forced to cover, below we present some arguments, courtesy of Bloomberg, why the smart money continues to press its luck by shorting some of the world’s top performing stocks:

Alphabet (+18 percent stock gain YTD)

Bears are on alert with Google now trying to get back into China, almost 10 years after exiting the world’s second-largest economy over political censorship concerns. The parent of Google and the rest of the FAANG cohort have already seen selloffs this year as investors questioned the persistent rally in the shares, as well as increasing privacy and censorship concerns that have arisen amid an investigation into possible Russian meddling in the U.S. election.

Alibaba (+3 percent)

It’s been an up-and-down year for Alibaba, with the stock little changed as the Chinese e-commerce giant has pulled back its presence in Silicon Valley amid escalating trade tensions between the U.S. and China. Currently Alibaba’s focus includes its Ele.me food delivery platform, which competes against Tencent-backed rival Meituan Dianping. Both are incurring big losses as they fight for market share in China.

Ping An Insurance (-7 percent)

Insurance stocks in China have been under pressure this year as premium income has dropped and regulators move to curb financial risks, leaving an opening for bearish investors looking for further downside. In an August interview after the insurer reported its latest earnings, Ping An’s Chief Insurance Business Officer Lee Yuan Siong argued the company’s stock still doesn’t completely reflect the value of its technology segment, or its integrated financial services, which have helped the company dominate in China.

Tesla (+0 percent)

Where to start? Volatile electric car maker Tesla has been a lightning rod for bears all year, with Elon Musk clashing with analysts and short sellers while spending long hours at the factory struggling to ramp up production of the Model 3 sedan. Then Musk ignited a firestorm this month when he tweeted his plan to take the company private — before scrapping the whole idea weeks later. It’s got investors and analysts questioning Musk’s health and stability, and the SEC probing his actions. In spite of all that, Tesla stock remains flat for the year.

Netflix (+92 percent)

Netflix looks like a prime target for short sellers with the streaming service still one of the top performers in the S&P 500 this year even after second-quarter earnings disappointed as net subscriber additions missed forecasts. The company “burns cash like a drunken sailor,” Michael Pachter, an analyst at Wedbush Securities Inc., said in a July interview. Pachter has a sell rating and $125 price target for Netflix — a third of the stock’s current $368.49 level.

Facebook (+0 percent)

Shares of the social media giant look vulnerable as users have grown disenchanted with the platform amid public scandals over privacy and content. Facebook warned in July sales growth will continue to slow through the rest of the year. Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, endured two days of grilling before Congress in April on the company’s privacy standards.

Amazon (+65 percent)

Shorts may be targeting the online retail giant because of its long-term success, as the stock has more than tripled over the past three years. While sales in the most recent quarter came in slightly below estimates, Amazon’s profitability has improved, generating more income in the first half of 2018 than the previous seven quarters combined. The company has also had to withstand frequent Twitter attacks from President Donald Trump.

Apple (+30 percent)

Short sellers may be betting the world’s largest company, which hit a $1 trillion market cap in August, will continue to struggle with plateauing global demand for smartphones as iPhone unit sales missed estimates last quarter while beating on price. Apple is looking to services and accessories for future growth as iPhone prices appear to have hit a ceiling.

Microsoft (+29 percent)

Markets have soured on Microsoft recently with the stock suffering its longest losing streak in a year in August as it detected and seized web domains created by cyber-attackers linked to the Russian military. Microsoft surged to a record in July after its latest earnings report and forecasts boosted confidence it will be able to increase cloud sales and squeeze more profit while also cutting into Amazon’s lead.

Takeda Pharmaceutical (-28 percent)

Short-sellers are keeping a close eye on the 237-year-old drugmaker as it seeks approvals from regulators around the world to complete its $62 billion acquisition of U.K.-listed Shire Plc, the biggest-ever overseas deal by a Japanese company. A small but vocal opposition group among shareholders has also voiced concerns over the risks the purchase poses to Takeda’s dividend and credit ratings.

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Authored by Dmitry Orlov via Club Orlov blog,

John McCain is dead, and many people are celebrating whereas they should be sad. He wasn’t a friend of mankind – he was its enemy, but a really bad one. But with such grossly incompetent enemies – who needs friends?

McCain did a great deal to destroy America. He devoted his entire lifetime to American destruction. To start with, he was quite effective as a protester against America’s genocidal war on the people of Vietnam. Other Americans just marched around ineffectually, waving banners and shouting antiwar slogans, but not McCain! His own father had a lot to do with starting that war, but McCain made up for that by destroying 26 American war planes. That’s quite something! If every American flyer crashed as many planes, countless innocent lives would have been saved.

Of course, he could have done even better – and he did try. He almost managed to destroy the US aircraft carrier Forrestal by setting it ablaze. To top off his illustrious military career, he surrendered to the enemy and spent five years in a Vietnamese prison. This made him a hero – in Americans’ eyes only, while the rest of the world saw in him a murderer of Vietnamese children.

His “martyrdom” as a POW helped pave his way to a political career, first in Congress, then in the Senate. During his obscenely long career in national politics, McCain did what he could to make American “democracy” look like a complete joke and to hasten America’s collapse. This, by the way, wasn’t a tall order: American “democracy” had long been a cesspool—a playground for lobbyists and political technologists based on a fully gerrymandered system of fake elections. But he did his thing, and is therefore twice the hero.

Defecating into the cesspool of American politics doesn’t alter its chemistry much, but McCain pushed the limits here as well. If only he and the native genius that is Sara Palin had won the Presidency! This surely would have hastened American collapse by quite a substantial amount, bringing his life’s work to fruition. This was perhaps his greatest failing: he turned out to be a traitor to his own friends and a faithful servant to his political enemies. He shut down his electoral campaign two weeks before the election. Then he did whatever he could to kiss up to Obama and helped wreck the repeal of Obamacare. McCain deserves to have a gigantic sausage-shaped obelisk erected in his honor, made of the same lumpy, brown material that he was so full of throughout his political career.

Internationally, McCain was a stellar performer when it came to meddling in the affairs of other nations, often in ways that helped undermine America’s standing in the world. Whenever he visited a foreign country, the likelihood of civil war breaking out there went up by a notch, sometimes by two. He always had a warm place in his heart for terrorists—be they Ukrainian neo-Nazis or the homicidal maniacs of the Islamic Caliphate (a.k.a. ISIS). He managed to perform in spite of not being very smart: in 2013 he published an article on the website Pravda.ru, thinking that it was Russia’s main newspaper (which was at that point two decades defunct).

He was one of the prime architects of the Ukrainian government’s “anti-terrorist operation” against its own citizens in the east of the country. His actions helped assure American defeat and Syrian victory in Syria and set the Ukrainian government he had helped install in 2014 on a course for self-destruction. Russia owes him a debt of gratitude for its reunification with Crimea after its two lost decades in the Ukrainian wilderness. He was also a champion of America’s own self-destruction through national bankruptcy, always being in favor of its profligate, fantastically corrupt and otherwise ineffectual defense spending.

His crowning achievement was his successful push for anti-Russian sanctions. They made it very difficult for Russian government officials to appear serious and resist the urge to say “May we have some more sanctions, please?” Thanks to these sanctions, Russia has moved rapidly toward achieving food security and has become one of the world’s major agricultural exporters; it has achieved or will soon achieve complete self-sufficiency in defense and in many other industrial sectors; and it is quite far along in making itself independent of the US dollar and of Western finance.

The effect of the sanctions in simultaneously driving down both the ruble and the Russian stock market has allowed the Russian government to sell dollars high and to buy up Russian industrial stocks low, effectively re-nationalizing Russian industry at bargain-basement prices, shifting the share of its government ownership from around 16% to at least 65% while squeezing out Western financial interests. The profits that would have otherwise been pocketed by Western investors are now flooding into the Russian treasury, to be spent on health, education, housing, roads and bridges and so on. McCain, you socialist you!

McCain also had a wonderful talent for being not just wrong but exactly wrong, as in the exact opposite of right. He called Russia “a gas station masquerading as a country.” That was great for Russia, because Russia was at the time a country masquerading as a gas station, to buy itself the time it needed to rebuild and rearm. Now that it has done so, the mask can come off, and Russia is most grateful to McCain for having given it plenty of cover just at the time when it most needed it.

It is a sad moment now that McCain’s untimely demise has sent him off to an eternity in Hell, because he didn’t get to finish his life’s work: destroying the United States. Nevertheless, we should call it a job well done, for the course on which he helped set the country is now unalterable. Even if he is replaced in his Senate seat by someone actually competent and able to act in his nation’s interest, this won’t alter its course by much, and certainly will not reverse it. Let us now observe a minute of silence in honor of John McCain, for upon his passing the American Collapse Party has lost a true leader.

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President Trump on Wednesday confirmed that White House counsel Don McGahn will be leaving his position in the fall, “shortly after the confirmation (hopefully) of Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the Untied States Supreme Court,” tweeted Trump. 

White House Counsel Don McGahn will be leaving his position in the fall, shortly after the confirmation (hopefully) of Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the United States Supreme Court. I have worked with Don for a long time and truly appreciate his service!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 29, 2018

McGahn, who spent 30 hours interviewing with special counsel Robert Mueller’s team, is said to have “extensively cooperated” with the investigation.  

Developing…

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WTI rallied overnight, in the face of dollar gains, as Iran supply fears reignited, dominating API inventory builds across the board, and spiked notably after DOE reported a bigger-than-expected 2.566mm crude draw.

But bear in mind that seasonal refinery maintenance is about to start, which will “begin to affect the crude stocks and refined product output,” Kyle Cooper, a consultant at ION Energy, says

API

• Crude +38k (-1.49mm exp)

• Cushing +130k (+50k exp)

• Gasoline +21k

• Distillates +982k

DOE

• Crude -2.566mm (-1.49mm exp)

• Cushing +58k (+50k exp)

• Gasoline -1.554mm

• Distillates -837k

Crude inventories fell for the 2nd week in a row…

Crude production was unchanged last week (remember, the data only moves in 100k increments now, so unless a decent shift, then no change occurs).

East Coast weekly crude imports dropped to their lowest since 2015.

And Gasoline Demand hit a record high…

After a brief dip on last night’s API report, WTI has surged overnight – bucking the stronger dollar – to trade around $69 as DOE data hit, then spiked higher, breaking resistance…

U.S. sanctions on Iran are “already starting to materialize,” said Bjarne Schieldrop, Oslo-based chief commodities analyst at SEB AB. “This is driving up the physical crude-oil market, shifting the Brent crude curve into backwardation.”

Meanwhile, the pipeline problems in the Permian have smashed the discounts to other sources near record highs…

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Authored by Michael Lebowitz via RealInvestmentAdvice.com,

We would like to introduce you to Sam and his finances. Currently, Sam does well for himself, earning $100,000 a year. Sam loves the good life, and to maintain it he consistently spends more than he earns. To fund this continual budget shortfall, he borrows money. The graph below shows his rising income (green) and accumulating debts (red) since 1966.

Unfortunately, Sam is not a hypothetical person. Sam, as represented in the graph above, is really Uncle Sam. The graph proportionately scales U.S. tax revenue and government debt outstanding data to Sam’s current income of $100,000. Currently, annual tax revenue stands at $1.908 trillion while the total amount of government debt outstanding is $21.090 trillion.

To further emphasize the growing divergence between tax revenue and debt outstanding, consider that debt grew by 6.26% and revenue shrank by 6.03% over the last year. While the recent decline in revenue is largely a function of the new tax legislation and may not last, the long-term trends are not encouraging. Over the last five and ten years, tax revenue increased annually by 2.22% and 2.09% respectively, while debt outstanding increased by 4.69% and 8.37% annually.

If the graph above were truly the financial situation of a guy named Sam, we would confidently tell you he went bankrupt 20 years ago. Fortunately for us, Uncle Sam or the U.S. government is not just any guy named Sam. The U.S. has had very little trouble borrowing well beyond its means. The U.S. dollar, acting as the world’s reserve currency, has enabled fiscal imprudence and is more of a curse than a blessing.

Consider the graph below, showing the ratio of tax revenue to the debt outstanding. Currently, for every dollar of debt there are only nine cents of revenue to cover it.

Interest Expense

Interest rates have been in a multi-decade declining trend. In 1981 the ten-year Treasury yield was approaching 15%, and today, even after rising 1%, it stands at a paltry 2.90%. This trend lower in rates greatly benefited the government’s finances as the interest expense on debt remained relatively low. In the third quarter of 1997, the interest expense on $5.413 trillion of debt was $367 billion. In the third quarter of 2009, the interest expense was an identical $367 billion despite outstanding debt more than doubling to $11.909 trillion over the prior twelve years. Over that period, the yield on the ten-year U.S. Treasury Note declined from 6.57% to 2.74%.

Over the last ten years, interest expense has been less contained, in large part because interest rates cannot decline nearly as much as they did in prior years to offset the increase in debt.  In the second quarter of 2009, the ten-year yield was 3.32%, or about 0.40% higher than the current rate. Despite the slight drop in yield, interest expense has grown by over 50% in this time frame as the amount of debt outstanding has risen substantially.

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) expects government debt outstanding to rise by over $1 trillion per year for each of the next four years. At the same time, neither we nor the CBO expect to see interest rates decline meaningfully. However, and of grave concern, the possibility of higher rates is real. Given the outlook for rising debt and flat to rising interest rates, interest expense will continue to make Uncle Sam’s financial problems even more daunting.

Summary

Judging by historically low-interest rates, investors, ourselves included, are not concerned that the U.S. government will default. Given the government has a printing press, we see little reason for such a concern.

That said, we are greatly worried that the growing imbalance between debt outstanding and the means to pay it off will encourage further reckless monetary policy. The Federal Reserve has been complicit in this scheme by keeping rates artificially low. Further, they have used QE to manipulate interest rates lower when investors were not willing to help. As such, the financial imbalance, which will likely only worsen appreciably, leaves little doubt in our mind that policy tools such as QE and negative interest rates will be used when the fiscal imbalances become more obvious to investors.

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