Author: admin

Authored by Patrick Buchanan via Buchanan.org,

If ex-CIA Director John Brennan did to Andrew Jackson what he did to Donald Trump, he would have lost a lot more than his security clearance.

He would have been challenged to a duel and shot.

“Trump’s … performance in Helsinki,” Brennan had said, “exceeds the threshold of ‘high crimes & misdemeanors.’ It was … treasonous.”

Why should the president not strip from a CIA director who calls him a traitor the honor and privilege of a security clearance? Or is a top-secret clearance an entitlement like Social Security?

CIA directors retain clearances because they are seen as national assets, individuals whose unique experience, knowledge and judgment may be called upon to assist a president in a national crisis.

Not so long ago, this was a bipartisan tradition.

Who trashed this tradition?

Was it not the former heads of the security agencies – CIA, FBI, director of national intelligence – who have been leveling the kind of savage attacks on the chief of state one might expect from antifa?

Are ex-security officials entitled to retain the high privileges of the offices they held, if they descend into cable-TV hatred and hostility?

Former CIA chief Mike Hayden, in attacking Trump for separating families of detained illegal immigrants at the border, tweeted a photo of the train tracks leading into Auschwitz.

“Other governments have separated mothers and children” was Hayden’s caption.

Is that fair criticism from an ex-CIA director?

Thursday, The New York Times decried Trump’s accusation that the media are “the enemy of the people.”

“Insisting that truths you don’t like are ‘fake news’ is dangerous to the lifeblood of democracy. And calling journalists ‘the enemy of the people’ is dangerous, period,” said the Times.

Fair enough, but is it not dangerous for a free press to be using First Amendment rights to endlessly bash a president as a racist, fascist, sexist, neo-Nazi, liar, tyrant and traitor?

The message of journalists who use such terms may be to convey their detestation of Trump. But what is the message received in the sick minds of people like that leftist who tried to massacre Republican congressmen practicing for their annual softball game with Democrats?

And does Trump not have a point when he says the Boston Globe-organized national attack on him, joined in by the Times and 300 other newspapers, was journalistic “collusion” against him?

If Trump believes that CNN, MSNBC, The New York Times and The Washington Post are mortal enemies who want to see him ousted or impeached, is he wrong?

We are an irreconcilable us-against-them nation today, and given the rancor across the ideological, social and cultural chasm that divides us, it is hard to see how, even post-Trump, we can ever come together again.

Speaking at a New York LGBT gala in 2016, Hillary Clinton said:

“You could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables … racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic … Some of those folks … are irredeemable, but … they are not America.”

When Clinton’s reflections on Middle America made it into print, she amended her remarks.

Just as Gov. Andrew Cuomo rushed to amend his comments yesterday when he blurted at a bill-signing ceremony:

“We’re not going to make America great again. It was never that great.” America was “never that great”?

Cuomo’s press secretary hastened to explain, “When the president speaks about making America great again … he ignores the pain so many endured and that we suffered from slavery, discrimination, segregation, sexism and marginalized women’s contributions.”

Clinton and Cuomo committed gaffes of the kind Michael Kinsley described as the blurting out of truths the speaker believes but desperately does not want a wider audience to know.

In San Francisco in 2008, Barack Obama committed such a gaffe. Asked why blue-collar workers in industrial towns decimated by job losses were not responding to his message, Obama trashed these folks as the unhappy losers of our emerging brave new world:

“They get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

These clingers to their Bibles, bigotries and guns are the people the mainstream media, 10 years later, deride and dismiss as “Trump’s base.”

What Clinton, Cuomo and Obama spilled out reveals what is really behind the cultural and ideological wars of America today.

Most media elites accept the historic indictment – that before the Progressives came, this country was mired in racism, sexism, homophobia and xenophobia, and that its history had been a long catalog of crimes against indigenous peoples, Africans brought here in bondage, Mexicans whose lands we stole, migrants, and women and gays who were denied equality.

The people who cheer Trump believe the country they inherited from their fathers was a great, good and glorious country, and that the media who detest Trump also despise them.

For such as these, Trump cannot scourge the media often enough.

via RSS https://ift.tt/2ODqeG8 Tyler Durden

Led by a collapse in Americans’ views of the current situation, University of Michigan’s Sentiment Survey dropped to 11-month lows, dramatically missing expectations for a rise.

• Sentiment index decreased to 95.3 (est. 98) from prior month’s 97.9; lowest since Sept., below all analyst estimates

• Current conditions gauge, which measures Americans’ perceptions of their finances, fell to 107.8 from 114.4 in July; 6.6-point drop is biggest since Aug. 2011

• Expectations measure unchanged at 87.3

As Bloomberg reports, consumers showed a broad drop in confidence about major purchases, a possible caution signal for spending following strong gains in the second quarter.

Buying conditions for large household durable goods slipped to the lowest level in almost four years;

Vehicle-buying views were the least favorable since 2013;

and home-buying conditions were seen less favorably than any time in about a decade.

“Consumers voiced the least favorable views on pricing for household durables in nearly ten years,” Richard Curtin, director of the University of Michigan consumer survey, said in a statement. “The recent favorable GDP report had only a small positive impact on growth prospects for the economy and on unemployment expectations.”

Respondents also continued to express concern about how trade tensions may affect the economy. Negative references to levies remained widespread, with 32 percent citing unfavorable references to the trade policy in early August, according to the report, following 35 percent in July.

And this adds to the recent spate of soft survey data catching down to the uglier reality of US economic real data…

Hope is not a long-term strategy.

via RSS https://ift.tt/2OFlnnY Tyler Durden

In the aftermath of Musk’s bizarre, emotional tell all in the NYT, as Tesla’s “going private” chaos turns more “ominous”, and as the SEC continues to get ever closer while new lawsuits for market manipulation lawsuits filed daily by disgusted shorts against Elon Musk, investors are taking a step back Tesla stock is tumbling, and this morning TSLA plunged as low as 311%, down 7% and far below the “going private” price of $420, down $20 last as the narrative so carefully sculpted by Musk for years appears to finally be crumbling.

Meanwhile, as Bloomberg notes, the debate over the company’s Model 3 car rages on. On Thursday Evercore ISI analysts said production of the sedan was continuing unabated in the midst of the going-private confusion, and Tesla seemed “well on the way” to achieving a steady weekly production rate of 5,000 to 6,000 units per week. The Bloomberg tracker for Model 3 also shows a similar uptick.

However, on Friday, UBS analyst Colin Langan said the basic Model 3, which was once expected to be priced at $35,000, would lose about $6,000 per car. Understandably, the cash burning company is currently is not offering the base model on its website.

via RSS https://ift.tt/2Mx7URT Tyler Durden

“If your blood is not boiling,” begins former fund manager and FX trader Richard Breslow, “it’s fine to cut out” he threatens as it seems market participant ‘centrally-planned conditioning-biased’ ignorance or perhaps just blind faith in BTFD because of PPT and Midterms has left the US equity market the lone pretender in a world of de-risking.

Via Bloomberg,

I understand it’s a Friday in August. I get that people are claiming they’ve had a hard week and want to call it a day. It’s no surprise that weekend-position-aversion remains a problem for risk takers. But with so much going on, if traders can’t be inspired to trade and challenge the status quo, it is safe to conclude that markets remain well and truly broken…Maybe forever.

Or perhaps we just sleep-walk until a proper blow-up forces some sort of response.

Of course, if we are confronted with the accusation that we should have acted differently, we can always claim Ambien made us do it.

As I’ve been sitting here:

• the Turkish lira dropped as much as 7%,

• the Shanghai Composite closed at its lowest level since January 2016

• and German bunds are trading back below 30 basis points.

• The Governor of the RBA just said what every central banker wishes they could — that he encourages a weaker currency.

• The Malaysian ringgit is the latest Asian currency to experience the effects of slowing growth, sliding to the lowest in nine months.

• BTPs remain at levels the Italian government can’t afford as their equity markets continue to noticeably underperform their brethren.

• And U.S. equities are impervious to it all.

There’s a lot going on and traders need to ditch their base case that monetary policy will, at the end of the day, save all.

And the really dumb one, that calmer heads will ultimately prevail causing geopolitical and trade tensions to ease.

Did you ever think there would be such a systemic need for a new generation of aggressive hedge funds?

Another fatality of quantitative easing. Why stay up at night selling currency when you can just roll into the office at a decent hour and buy whatever the sovereign wealth funds are currently feasting on?

Incidentally, “base case” is now joining my list of banned expressions and words. It’s just commentator speak for I could be totally wrong but hope to be right somewhere down the line. And I’ll get back to you when it happens. While I’m at it, Purchasing Power Parity and the ground meat version of it are also out. It’s just a useless way into a misguided mean-reversion argument.

How appropriate as next week brings the 20th anniversary of when LTCM went hat-in-hand to banks. Make money, make money, lose it all. Sadly, another word in exile, “existential”, is due to return with great fanfare when the Italian government negotiates its budget with the EU.

Strictly off the record, bullies get their way until someone proves they can be stood up to. It may turn out that Erdogan is the unlikely bearer of that message.

via RSS https://ift.tt/2PbcTpT Tyler Durden

The Wall Street Journal continues to counter  the  liberal mainstream media’s Trump Derangement Syndrome, dropping uncomfortable truth-bombs and refusing to back off its intense pressure to get to the truth and hold those responsible, accountable (in a forum that is hard for the establishment to shrug off as ‘Alt-Right’ or ‘Nazi’ or be ‘punished’ by search- and social-media-giants).

And once again Kimberley Strassel  – who by now has become the focus of social media attacks for her truth-seeking reporting – does it again this morning, as she points out – hours after former CIA Director Brennan threw a tantrum over having his security clearance removed – that while Justice has released some damning documents – particularly on what Bruce Ohr was doing – much of the truth is still classified.

Via The Wall Street Journal,

What Was Bruce Ohr Doing?

The Federal Bureau of Investigation and Justice Department have continued to insist they did nothing wrong in their Trump-Russia investigation. This week should finally bring an end to that claim, given the clear evidence of malfeasance via the use of Bruce Ohr.

Mr. Ohr was until last year associate deputy attorney general.

He began feeding information to the FBI from dossier author Christopher Steele in late 2016 – after the FBI had terminated Mr. Steele as a confidential informant for violating the bureau’s rules. He also collected dirt from Glenn Simpson, cofounder of Fusion GPS, the opposition-research firm that worked for Hillary Clinton’s campaign and employed Mr. Steele. Altogether, the FBI pumped Mr. Ohr for information at least a dozen times, debriefs that remain in classified 302 forms.

All the while, Mr. Ohr failed to disclose on financial forms that his wife, Nellie, worked alongside Mr. Steele in 2016, getting paid by Mr. Simpson for anti-Trump research. The Justice Department has now turned over Ohr documents to Congress that show how deeply tied up he was with the Clinton crew – with dozens of emails, calls, meetings and notes that describe his interactions and what he collected.

Mr. Ohr’s conduct is itself deeply troubling. He was acting as a witness (via FBI interviews) in a case being overseen by a Justice Department in which he held a very senior position. He appears to have concealed this role from at least some superiors, since Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein testified that he’d been unaware of Mr. Ohr’s intermediary status.

Lawyers meanwhile note that it is a crime for a federal official to participate in any government matter in which he has a financial interest. Fusion’s bank records presumably show Nellie Ohr, and by extension her husband, benefiting from the Trump opposition research that Mr. Ohr continued to pass to the FBI. The Justice Department declined to comment.

But for all Mr. Ohr’s misdeeds, the worse misconduct is by the FBI and Justice Department.

It’s bad enough that the bureau relied on a dossier crafted by a man in the employ of the rival presidential campaign. Bad enough that it never informed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of that dossier’s provenance. And bad enough that the FBI didn’t fire Mr. Steele as a confidential human source in September 2016 when it should have been obvious he was leaking FBI details to the press to harm Donald Trump’s electoral chances. It terminated him only when it was absolutely forced to, after Mr. Steele gave an on-the-record interview on Oct. 31, 2016.

But now we discover the FBI continued to go to this discredited informant in its investigation after the firing—by funneling his information via a Justice Department cutout. The FBI has an entire manual governing the use of confidential sources, with elaborate rules on validations, standards and documentation. Mr. Steele failed these standards. The FBI then evaded its own program to get at his info anyway.

And it did so even though we have evidence that lead FBI investigators may have suspected Mr. Ohr was a problem.

An Oct. 7, 2016, text message from now-fired FBI agent Peter Strzok to his colleague Lisa Page reads: “Jesus. More BO leaks in the NYT,” which could be a reference to Mr. Ohr.

The FBI may also have been obtaining, via Mr. Ohr, information that came from a man the FBI had never even vetted as a source—Mr. Simpson. Mr. Steele had at least worked with the FBI before; Mr. Simpson was a paid political operative. And the Ohr notes raise further doubts about Mr. Simpson’s forthrightness. In House testimony in November 2017, Mr. Simpson said only that he reached out to Mr. Ohr after the election, and at Mr. Steele’s suggestion. But Mr. Ohr’s inbox shows an email from Mr. Simpson dated Aug. 22, 2016 that reads, in full: “Can u ring.”

The Justice Department hasn’t tried to justify any of this; in fact, last year it quietly demoted Mr. Ohr. In what smells of a further admission of impropriety, it didn’t initially turn over the Ohr documents; Congress had to fight to get them.

But it raises at least two further crucial questions.

First, who authorized or knew about this improper procedure? Mr. Strzok seems to be in the thick of it, having admitted to Congress interactions with Mr. Ohr at the end of 2016. While Mr. Rosenstein disclaims knowledge, Mr. Ohr’s direct supervisor at the time was the previous deputy attorney general, Sally Yates. Who else in former FBI Director Jim Comey’s inner circle and at the Obama Justice Department nodded at the FBI’s back-door interaction with a sacked source and a Clinton operative?

Second, did the FBI continue to submit Steele- or Simpson-sourced information to the FISA court? Having informed the court in later applications that it had fired Mr. Steele, the FBI would have had no business continuing to use any Steele information laundered through an intermediary.

*  *  *

Strassel concludes with the point that she and The Wall Street Journal Editorial Board have been hammering for months…

We could have these answers pronto; they rest in part in those Ohr 302 forms. And so once again: a call for President Trump to declassify.

It’s time for things to get more serious than slaps on the wrist, firings, and self-inflicted black-eyes!

 

 

 

via RSS https://ift.tt/2nKgcaT Tyler Durden

While emerging markets recently tumbled into a bear market, the US stock market continues to surge, defying all fears of a Chinese slowdown, a global trade war, and peak earnings. But why? As Macquarie strategist Viktor Shvets writes this morning, US resilience is due to its role as the largest supplier of end-user demand, printer of reserve currency, and quality of its corporates. Meanwhile, EMs are an artefact of global forces, and of Chinese cooperation with the US. As a result, for synchronized growth one needs liquidity, trade and reflation. According to Shvets, these three are possible only when the US & China cooperate. He notes that “we are not there yet.“

Below we share more details from Shvets on the most vexing divergence of 2018:

Why are US markets so resilient? Three reasons:

One of the more popular questions that clients asked us recently is why are US equity markets so resilient and when do we think EMs might break out from their bear market trajectory? US resilience is based on three factors.

• First, US’s role as the single-largest pool of global end-user demand. Unlike Eurozone and Japan that are essentially riding China’s reflationary waves, the US (Anglo-Saxons, in general) are the only generators of sustainably high deficits. The US is the other side of excessive savings in the rest of the world.
• Second, US$ role as the global reserve currency. While over the longer term, it is not good for anybody, in the short-to-medium term, it offers the US massive advantage in attracting capital and using it as a lever in negotiations.
• Third, quality of US corporates. More than any other region, the US corporate sector embraced arbitrage opportunities that have become available over the last three decades in global product, labour & capital markets. Consequently, they are asset-light and cash-generative, which explains SPX strength.

EMs performance needs specific outcomes

EMs on the other hand are a tentative future promise but not yet a delivery and they need abundant liquidity, low volatilities, free trade and global reflationary momentum to prosper. While most of these conditions were in place in 2016-17, this has not been the case through 2018. EMs as an investable concept is an artefact of globalization, generally weaker US$ over long stretches for the last three decades as well as rapid global financialization, which lubricated trade and domestic consumption while drastically reducing cost of capital.

However, the global economy is now in a deglobalization phase, as the only strategy to reconcile political dilemma of the world (nation states, local politics and globalization are not compatible), while manufacturing is no longer the king’s road for EM convergence (due mostly to rapid changes in how products are manufactured and traded).

At the same time, CBs are determined to drain liquidity (mostly US$ liquidity, as the Fed ‘burns’ US$50bn per month) while raising cost of capital. We are also seeing the single-most important supplier of demand and printer of global currency (US) refusing to perform its role of lubricating global demand and liquidity.

Only possible when China & US cooperate. Watch US$ & Trade

It is only reversal of these fundamental factors that would get EM equities out of the bear market trajectory. However, to achieve it we need to have a close cooperation between US and China. US determines global liquidity and cost of capital while also providing end-user demand, while China is able to reflate global economy through its intensive commodity & investment business model, sheltered behind capital controls.

We maintain that only severe domestic pain would change the US narrative. The easiest way to see how it might happen is if the US$ massively overshoots, and then blows back via various transmission mechanisms (from liquidity to SPX EPS growth rates). At that point, Trump, the Fed and China would be on the same page. We are not there yet.

via RSS https://ift.tt/2nJQEKX Tyler Durden