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As Donald Trump’s inauguration looms ever closer, the last few days have seen the honeymoon in markets starting to fade as the reality of economic policy uncertainty suddenly seems to matter again.

If the past 20 years of global historical data is anything to go by, that ‘awakening’ of uncertainty is very bad news…

 

But, as your friendly local asset-gatherer will tell you – “it’s probably nothing” and “the market is not the economy.”

Even Janet Yellen is starting to notice…

• YELLEN: IT’S IMPORTANT TO TAKE UNCERTAINTY INTO ACCOUNT

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Submitted by MiddleEastEye.net via TheAntiMedia.org,

A UN envoy held talks with Yemen’s President Abd Rabbuh Hadi on Monday as the United Nations said the death toll from the war had reached 10,000.

The envoy, Ismail Ould Cheikh Ahmed, was in Aden for the meeting that focused on a return to a ceasefire and to political talks to end the nearly two-year war.

The talks came as fighting in the southern Shabwa area on Monday reportedly killed 34 people and wounded 16 others during clashes between Houthi fighters and pro-government forces.

The United Nations said the civilian death toll in fighting since a Saudi-led force intervened in March 2015 had reached 10,000, up from the previous figure of 7,000.

The Saudi-led coalition has been blamed for most of the civilian casualties. The devastation has also drawn attention to the role of western powers who have continued to provide Riyadh with weapons, logistical support and intelligence. The Houthis have also been accused of human rights violations.

The higher toll “underscores the need to resolve the situation in Yemen without any further delay”, said UN spokesman Farhan Haq in New York. “There is a huge humanitarian cost.”

Jamie McGoldrick, humanitarian coordinator of the UN Development Programme, said the latest death toll is based on lists of victims gathered by hospitals and the true figure could be higher.

McGoldrick said up to 10 million Yemenis were also in urgent need of humanitarian assistance.

Ould Cheikh Ahmed is hoping to revive peace prospects in Yemen after Hadi rejected his proposed roadmap. He is due to report to the UN Security Council later this month.

The roadmap provides for a new unity government in Yemen and a rebel withdrawal from the capital and other cities.

“A peace agreement, including a well-articulated security plan and the formation of an inclusive government, is the only way to end the war that has fuelled the development of terrorism in Yemen and the region,” Ould Cheikh Ahmed said in a statement.

 

“I asked the president to act swiftly and engage constructively with the UN’s proposal for the sake of the country’s future.”

 

“The current political stalemate is causing death and destruction every day. The only way to stop this is through the renewal of the cessation of hostilities followed by consultations to develop a comprehensive agreement.”

Under the proposal, Hadi’s powers would be dramatically diminished in favour of a new vice president who would oversee the formation of the interim government that will lead a transition to elections.

Houthi rebels and forces loyal to former president Ali Abdullah Saleh, who control the capital, Sanaa, have faced a military campaign by the Saudi-led coalition to restore President Hadi as the recognised government.

The campaign has been unable to dislodge the Houthis from the capital and their strongholds in the north of the country and has been criticized for causing widespread civilian casualties and destruction of infrastructure.

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Ever get the feeling you’re being watched?

It’s because you are – and, as Visual Capitalist's Jeff Desjardins details, for a rough proxy of this, use the browser extension Ghostery to see how many tracking scripts are watching you on a typical media site. (It doesn’t work for everything, but a large media site like Vice.com has 50+ trackers, with 40 of them focused on advertising).

Capturing this user data helps sites sell their inventory to advertisers, but a select few companies operate in this capacity at a whole different level. Google and Facebook are the best of examples of this, as nearly $0.60 of every dollar spent on digital advertising goes to them. They both have the sophistication and ubiquity to capture incredible amounts of information about you.

GOOGLE IS EVERYWHERE

Today’s infographic, which comes to us from Mylio, focuses in on Google in particular.

The search giant is massive in size, and there is a good chance you tap into Googleverse in some way:

• Global market penetration for Android is 61-81%.

• Google has a 78.8% market share for online search.

• The company generates $67.4 billion in annual ad revenue.

• Google processes two trillion searches annually.

• 30-50 million websites use Google Analytics to for tracking.

• There are 700,000 apps available in the Google Play store.

• 82% of videos watched online come from YouTube.

• In total, Google has at least 79 products and services.

According to Google’s documentation, it uses these services to pull out information on the “things you do”, “things you create”, and the things that make you unique.

SEE WHAT GOOGLE COLLECTS

All in all, Google tracks your activity history, location history, audio history, and device history. It also builds a profile for you for serving ads – age, gender, location, income, and other demographic data.

You can view and actually download this history by using a tool called Google Takeout.

Many people understand that their data helps support advertising revenues on websites they enjoy. Others are rightly concerned about their privacy, and how their information is used. Regardless of which category you fit in, becoming informed about how privacy on the internet works will help you craft an experience that best fits your preferences.

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Submitted by Wayne Madsen via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

It was October and the Democratic Party’s presidential candidate was faltering in the polls after the Democratic National Convention. The Republican Party’s presidential candidate began negotiating with a foreign government to cook up a scheme to embarrass the Democratic candidate. The scheme was successful and the Democratic candidate went on to lose the election to a Republican candidate who was feared by many for his unorthodox stance on several domestic and foreign issues.

 

If one thinks the above description is about the recent 2016 election, he or she would be wrong.

In 1980, Democratic President Jimmy Carter, running for re-election under the cloud of the U.S. embassy in Tehran having been seized by radical Iranian students and 52 members of its staff being held hostage, was trying desperately to pull off an «October Surprise» to salvage his presidency.

Unbeknownst to Carter, the campaign of his Republican rival, Ronald Reagan, had secretly negotiated an «arms-for-no-hostages» deal with the Ayatollah Khomeini’s regime in Iran. 

In return for the shipment of embargoed military items, including spare parts for Iran’s U.S.-supplied F-14 Tomcat fighter planes and Phoenix air-to-air missiles for the planes, before the November 4 election, the Reagan team was promised by the Iranians that Tehran would hold the hostages until after the November election. Upon Reagan’s defeat of Carter, Iran held true to its promise and did not release the American hostages until noon Eastern Standard Time on January 20, 1981, the very moment Reagan raised his hand to take the presidential oath of office.

Although the media today is rife with reports of so-called «treasonous» contacts between Donald Trump advisers and officials of the Russian government, the media was not to be found anywhere in October 1980 when the Central Intelligence Agency, working with the Reagan campaign, contracted with a U.S. merchant vessel, the «SS Poet», to deliver the U.S. military contraband to Iran. In 1980, vice presidential candidate George H. W. Bush and Ronald Reagan’s campaign manager William Casey secretly met with Iranian government officials, reportedly in Paris, and worked out the covert «arms-for-no-hostages» plan. The Reagan team was worried that Carter would beat them to the punch because of the White House’s own secret negotiations with Iranian representatives to have the hostages freed in October, giving Carter a much-need campaign boost.

The Reagan conspirators included, in addition to Bush and Casey, Robert Gates and Donald Gregg, the CIA's moles inside the Carter National Security Council. Carter's national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, not happy with Carter's human rights stance, may have given a «wink and a nod» to the treason. The entire caper was conducted without the knowledge of Stansfield Turner, Carter's friend and U.S. Naval Academy classmate who served as CIA director.

The «SS Poet», a World War II-era U.S. merchant vessel, was at the center of the Reagan team’s treasonous plot. Little has been written about the fate of the vessel because the CIA arranged to have it sunk while outbound from the Persian Gulf after it delivered its weapons cache to the Iranian port of Bandar Abbas. The ship was officially listed as «lost at sea» somewhere in the mid-Atlantic after departing from Philadelphia's Girard Point marine pier #3 on October 24, 1980. The ship was ostensibly bound with a cargo of 13,500 tons of corn for Port Said, Egypt, but, in reality, had military equipment loaded in its rear number four cargo, contraband bound for Iran. 

The crew of 34 U.S. citizens was declared «missing at sea» by a U.S. Coast Guard board of inquiry, which was under heavy pressure from the CIA to cover up the ship's fate in the Gulf. The Reagan team sweetened the deal with a cash payment to Iran. Gates was said to have overseen the transfer of money to an Iranian bank account at Banque Worms in Geneva.

The Coast Guard report on the «Poet's» disappearance was tainted by an individual who claimed to have been a former third assistant engineer on the vessel. A year after the «Poet» disappeared, the witness told the Coast Guard, after the Board of Inquiry had already issued its conclusion about the fate of the ship, that the vessel was not seaworthy. However, this individual later was discovered to have been an impostor, likely hired by Casey’s CIA, who never served on board the «Poet».

The CIA's cover story, dutifully echoed by the Coast Guard, was the Poet sank without a trace in three minutes and without a distress call. One of the Poet's previous trips, in the months prior to sailing to Iran, was to Israel. The vessel had been chartered by Hawaiian Eugenia Corporation, the Poet's owner and a firm with murky CIA links, to sail to Israel. There is a strong possibility that the Israelis rigged the ship with explosives that would be detonated after its delivery of weapons to Iran on behalf of the CIA and Reagan-Bush campaign plotters.

There was a feeble attempt by certain remaining pro-Carter elements within the CIA and Justice Department to investigate the involvement of a foreign power – Iran – in the 1980 election. A March 16, 1981, memo written by then-unconfirmed Associate Attorney General Rudolph Giuliani to the Acting Criminal Division chief, John Keeney, which was titled «CIA Referral – Alleged Foreign Government Interference With 1980 Presidential Election», suggests that the CIA referred to the Justice Department certain evidence that there was criminal activity involving a foreign power in the 1980 presidential election.

Keeney and Giuliani agree to draft a letter from Deputy Attorney General Edward C. Schmults to the CIA to ask for a full report on the criminal referral. The CIA report, which was never written, would have been available to Justice personnel on a strict need-to-know basis. It can be assumed that after Casey took over at the CIA, he immediately quashed the investigation of the involvement of Iran in the 1980 election.

In any case, the investigation was stopped dead in its tracks. The Attorney General at the time of the Giuliani memo was Reagan confidante William French Smith. Smith's special assistant at the time was David Hiller, who later became the publisher, president, and CEO of the Los Angeles Times. Hiller's fellow special assistant for Smith was John G. Roberts, Jr., later nominated by George W. Bush to the Supreme Court as Associate Justice, followed by his nomination to be Chief Justice.

The «Poet's» official charter to sail a cargo of corn to Port Said was oddly appended with a «war risk» clause, even though Egypt was not in a state of war. The only state of war that existed at the time was in the Gulf between Iran and Iraq. The charter also involved Universal Shipping Company, a CIA front company headquartered in Rosslyn, Virginia, along with other firms controlled by CIA weapons smuggler Edwin Wilson. Later convicted and imprisoned for smuggling weapons to Libya, Wilson, a «retired» CIA operative, contended that his weapons smuggling operations were carried out with the approval of the CIA.

There is an interesting current news peg to the story of the 1980 election and the «Poet.» The Iranian side in the «arms-for-no-hostages» conspiracy was led by the then-speaker of the Iranian parliament, Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani. He would later become a key cog in the Iran-contra scandal that almost brought down the Reagan administration. Rafsanjani died recently at the age of 82. Considered a leading Iranian moderate, Rafsanjani traveled widely throughout the United States prior to the Iranian revolution in 1979 and he may have served as a deep cover CIA asset. With his death disappears from the scene another witness to the treachery involving the disappearance of the «SS Poet».

When the CIA wants to advance a meme that a foreign nation interfered in a U.S. election, it can coax its puppets in the media to hype the story, as seen now with the frivolous allegations about Russia and the Trump campaign. However, when the Langley boys want to bury their own chicanery and skullduggery in election interference, as is currently the case with CIA and British MI-6 involvement in the 2016 election on behalf of Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton and as was the situation in 1980 with Iran and the Reagan campaign, the media dutifully follows.

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via http://ift.tt/2iUe3I6 George Washington

While ECB President Mario Draghi may sound slightly hawkish at tomorrow’s press conference after an unexpectedly strong acceleration in CPI in December and European economic growth modestly picking up, the ECB is set to argue on Thursday that its extra-easy policy stance is still needed to keep the recovery on course. As a result, it is all but certain to leave current monetary policy in place and maintain a promise for lengthy stimulus, having extended its bond-buying program just last month coupled with the tapering (just don’t call it a taper) of its bond purchases this year.

ECB President Mario Draghi can argue the bank has done its part to mend growth, but he will also note the recovery is not self-sustaining, underlying inflation is weak and political risk from key elections weighs on the outlook. So turning down the ECB taps now is inappropriate, he is expected to say.

According to Reuters, on the face of it, Draghi should be relaxed. Inflation hit a three year high of 1.1% last month (the ECB expects it to hit 1.7% in 2019), manufacturing activity is accelerating and confidence indicators are firming, all pointing to solid growth at the end of last year. Additionally, euro zone business growth was the fastest in more than five years in December, order books are surging on export demand, and consumption is holding up, despite rising energy costs, all pointing to the sort of resilience not seen since before the bloc’s debt crisis. Of course, it could all be transitory as the “Trump” effect shifts to Europe, but the answr won’t be known for a few more months.

So what does Wall Street expect? According to a Bloomberg survey, the ECB will wait until at least its meeting on Sept. 7 to announce any new policy measures As a result, Bofa strategists expect Draghi to sound “as dull as possible” to keep the message sent at the previous meeting intact. Confirming this, ECB’s Yves Mersch said on Jan. 6 that improving euro-area economic numbers and a faster-than-forecast inflation pickup aren’t enough to warrant an immediate shift in the policy.

Here is a summary breakdown of select outlooks:

BofAML (Athanasios Vamvakidis, Gilles Moec)

• Draghi will endeavor to be as dull as possible, so as not to generate too many expectations on any further change in stance any time soon
• Any deviation from the December message on the inflation outlook and/or further delay in the implementation of the new QE parameters would create scope for bonds to underperform current forwards
• Risk for euro small and balanced; any hawkish statements that strengthen the euro during the Q&A could be an opportunity to sell EUR/USD again

JPMorgan (strategists including Fabio Bassi)

• Don’t expect the ECB meeting to break much new ground; ECB will likely express satisfaction at the improvements in the growth and inflation outlook, at the same time stressing that there is no reason to think about tapering more quickly than the Dec. announcement

NatWest Markets (Anna Tokar, Giles Gale)

• Unlikely to give significant new clues to the ECB’s reaction function
• Since the Dec. meeting, data has been solid; expect the Council’s economic assessment may be slightly more optimistic, in line with the assessment of the Eurozone growth outlook
• However, policy debate should be unchanged and simply reference the decisions taken in Dec

Citi (strategists including Harvinder Sian)

• Meeting is too close to the policy moves enacted last month to warrant a material shift in ECB tone, even if data has been more buoyant than expected
• Any change to the reference of growth risks being to the downside will have to await more data and perhaps even clarity on the new U.S. administration’s policies
• Think that any further tapering risk starts from June meetings onwards, but the rise in oil prices and a drop in euro could see markets re-price from the March staff forecasts
• Expect some focus on the 33% issue limit, with Draghi likely to repeat that there are legal issues in up- sizing the issuer limit on legal grounds; many investors don’t believe the limit is a hard line in the sand –- despite the fact Portuguese and Irish bond valuations already reflect a less supportive ECB backdrop

UniCredit (economist Marco Valli)

• ECB President Draghi will sound constructive, but dovish
• He will probably acknowledge that risks in the short term are moving toward faster-than-expected headline inflation and more balanced growth assessment
• Also expects Draghi to emphasize that uncertainty remains elevated and the medium-term outlook hasn’t changed much from last month
• ECB still wants financial conditions to remain very loose

Deutsche Bank (strategists including Francis Yared)

• Next step for the ECB should be to shift to a neutral stance by removing reference that rates may go lower in the introductory statement; may be too early to do so in Jan. meeting, but the overall tone of the press conference should suggest that the policy stance is evolving in that direction

ING (Carsten Brzeski)

• The December decision has put the ECB on autopilot at least until the summer and until after the Dutch and French elections. This autopilot should also immunize the ECB against short-term volatility in macro data.

Commerzbank

• The lending channel is no longer clogged up, but it is not completely free either and progress has only been possible thanks to massive measures by the ECB. If monetary policy were to be tightened again, and the burdens from existing loans were to increase once more, the lending channel would close and the economic picture would worsen considerably again.

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Submitted by John Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,

“There are two ways by which the spirit of a culture may be shriveled. In the first – the Orwellian – culture becomes a prison. In the second – the Huxleyan – culture becomes a burlesque. No one needs to be reminded that our world is now marred by many prison-cultures…. it makes little difference if our wardens are inspired by right- or left-wing ideologies. The gates of the prison are equally impenetrable, surveillance equally rigorous, icon-worship pervasive…. Big Brother does not watch us, by his choice. We watch him, by ours…. When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience, and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; culture-death is a clear possibility.”— Professor Neil Postman

Donald Trump no longer needs to launch Trump TV.

He’s already the star of his own political reality show.

Americans have a voracious appetite for TV entertainment, and the Trump reality show—guest starring outraged Democrats with a newly awakened conscience for immigrants and the poor, power-hungry Republicans eager to take advantage of their return to power, and a hodgepodge of other special interest groups with dubious motives—feeds that appetite for titillating, soap opera drama.

After all, who needs the insults, narcissism and power plays that are hallmarks of reality shows such as Celebrity Apprentice or Keeping Up with the Kardashians when you can have all that and more delivered up by the likes of Donald Trump and his cohorts?

Yet as John Lennon reminds us, “nothing is real,” especially not in the world of politics.

Much like the fabricated universe in Peter Weir’s 1998 film The Truman Show, in which a man’s life is the basis for an elaborately staged television show aimed at selling products and procuring ratings, the political scene in the United States has devolved over the years into a carefully calibrated exercise in how to manipulate, polarize, propagandize and control a population.

Indeed, Donald Trump may be the smartest move yet by the powers-that-be to keep the citizenry divided and at each other’s throats, because as long as we’re busy fighting each other, we’ll never manage to present a unified front against tyranny in any form.

This is the magic of the reality TV programming that passes for politics today.

It allows us to be distracted, entertained, occasionally a little bit outraged but overall largely uninvolved, content to remain in the viewer’s seat.

The more that is beamed at us, the more inclined we are to settle back in our comfy recliners and become passive viewers rather than active participants as unsettling, frightening events unfold.

Reality and fiction merge as everything around us becomes entertainment fodder.

We don’t even have to change the channel when the subject matter becomes too monotonous. That’s taken care of for us by the programmers (the corporate media).

For instance, before we could get too worked up over government surveillance, the programmers changed the channels on us and switched us over to breaking news about militarized police. Before our outrage could be transformed into action over police misconduct, they changed the channel once again to reports of ISIS beheadings and terrorist shootings. Before we had a chance to challenge what was staged or real, the programming switched to the 2016 presidential election.

“Living is easy with eyes closed,” says Lennon, and that’s exactly what reality TV that masquerades as American politics programs the citizenry to do: navigate the world with their eyes shut.

As long as we’re viewers, we’ll never be doers.

Studies suggest that the more reality TV people watch—and I would posit that it’s all reality TV—the more difficult it becomes to distinguish between what is real and what is carefully crafted farce.

“We the people” are watching a lot of TV.

On average, Americans spend five hours a day watching television. By the time we reach age 65, we’re watching more than 50 hours of television a week, and that number increases as we get older. And reality TV programming consistently captures the largest percentage of TV watchers every season by an almost 2-1 ratio.

This doesn’t bode well for a citizenry able to sift through masterfully-produced propaganda in order to think critically about the issues of the day, whether it’s fake news peddled by government agencies or foreign entities.

Those who watch reality shows tend to view what they see as the “norm.” Thus, those who watch shows characterized by lying, aggression and meanness not only come to see such behavior as acceptable and entertaining but also mimic the medium.

This holds true whether the reality programming is about the antics of celebrities in the White House, in the board room, or in the bedroom.

It’s a phenomenon called “humilitainment.”

A term coined by media scholars Brad Waite and Sara Booker, “humilitainment” refers to the tendency for viewers to take pleasure in someone else’s humiliation, suffering and pain.

“Humilitainment” largely explains not only why American TV watchers are so fixated on reality TV programming but how American citizens, largely insulated from what is really happening in the world around them by layers of technology, entertainment, and other distractions, are being programmed to accept the brutality, surveillance and dehumanizing treatment of the American police state as things happening to other people.

The ramifications for the future of civic engagement, political discourse and self-government are incredibly depressing and demoralizing.

This not only explains how a candidate like Donald Trump with a reputation for being rude, egotistical and narcissistic could get elected, but it also says a lot about how a politician like Barack Obama—whose tenure in the White House was characterized by drone killings, a weakening of the Constitution at the expense of Americans’ civil liberties, and an expansion of the police state—could be hailed as “one of the greatest presidents of all times.”

This is what happens when an entire nation—bombarded by reality TV programming, government propaganda and entertainment news—becomes systematically desensitized and acclimated to the trappings of a government that operates by fiat and speaks in a language of force.

Ultimately, as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the reality shows, the entertainment news, the surveillance society, the militarized police, and the political spectacles have one common objective: to keep us divided, distracted, imprisoned, and incapable of taking an active role in the business of self-government.

If “we the people” feel powerless and apathetic, it is only because we have allowed ourselves to be convinced that the duties of citizenship begin and end at the ballot box.

Marching and protests have certainly been used with great success by past movements to foment real change, but if those marches and protests are merely outpourings of discontent because a particular politician won or lost with no solid plan of action or follow-through, then what’s the point?

Martin Luther King Jr. understood that politics could never be the answer to what ailed the country. That’s why he spearheaded a movement of mass-action strategy that employed boycotts, sit-ins and marches. Yet King didn’t march against a particular politician or merely to express discontent. He marched against injustice, government corruption, war, and inequality, and he leveraged discontent with the status quo into an activist movement that transformed the face of America.

When all is said and done, it won’t matter who you voted for in the presidential election. What will matter is where you stand in the face of the injustices that continue to ravage our nation: the endless wars, the police shootings, the overcriminalization, the corruption, the graft, the roadside strip searches, the private prisons, the surveillance state, etc.

Will you tune out the reality TV show and join with your fellow citizens to push back against the real menace of the police state, or will you merely sit back and lose yourself in the political programming aimed at keeping you imprisoned in the police state?

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A Judicial Watch lawsuit seeking records related to potential collusion between the Justice Department and Hillary Clinton operatives during her email investigation has resulted in a federal judge issuing a rare order instructing the DOJ to preserve the Gmail records of the now infamous Assistant Attorney General Peter Kadzik.  The order came from U.S. District Court Judge Emmet Sullivan, a Clinton appointee, and gave the DOJ until this morning to report back on steps taken to preserve the personal email accounts of Kadzik.  Per Politico:

“Defendant shall take all necessary and reasonable steps to ensure the preservation of all agency records and potential agency records between the dates of December 1, 2014 and November 7, 2016 in any personal email account of Assistant Attorney General for Legislative Affairs Peter Kadzik. Any question about whether a record is an agency record shall be resolved in favor of it being an agency record.”

Of course, as we pointed out back in the fall, various emails provided by WikiLeaks exposed Kadzik repeatedly colluding with the Clinton campaign by providing campaign manager, and long-time friend, John Podesta with inside information on the DOJ’s investigation of Hillary’s email scandal.  Moreover, proving just how close they were, in a Sept. 2008 email, Podesta emailed an Obama campaign official to recommend Kadzik for a supportive role in the campaign saying that Kadzik was a “fantastic lawyer” who “kept me out of jail”…now that’s a bond that lasts.

 

Of course, in response to Judge Sullivan’s order, the DOJ promptly noted that Mr. Kadzik was unable to locate any work-related emails on his Gmail account…well how convenient.

“It is the government’s understanding that Mr. Kadzik has located no agency records or potential agency records in his Gmail account and that, therefore, there are no such documents to preserve. Nevertheless, out of an abundance of caution and consistent with the preservation order that Judicial Watch seeks, the government has instructed Mr. Kadzik to preserve any potential agency records in his Gmail account, should any exist, and Mr. Kadzik has agreed to do so,” the Justice Department filing said.

And since we have no doubt that Kadzik performed a thorough, impartial scan of his Gmail account while resisting the urge to delete “inconvenient” records, we assume that he simply overlooked this email which provided a very timely “Heads up” to John Podesta regarding confidential information about DOJ hearings and FOIA requests.  Simple, honest mistake, no doubt.

 

How long can this farce continue on before government officials are finally forced to do what private corporations have been forced to do for years, namely requiring that their employees use secured, archived email systems for official communications and impose stiff penalties for non-compliance.  Seems simple enough.

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Submitted by Saxo Bank's Martin O'Rourke via TradingFloor.com,

• Donald Trump's inauguration to take place on Friday
• China's relationship with president-elect off to difficult start
• Trump angered China by fielding call from Taiwanese counterpart after victory
• Trump's anti-supranationalism might favour China if TPP is abandoned — Wei Li
• Currency manipulation attacks not borne out by long term — Wei Li
• Anti-trade rhetoric difficult to sustain in intricate global trade chain — Wei Li
• Trumpflation trade may boost commodity exporters out of China
• Geopolitical risk possible but markets have been adept at absorbing pain — Wei Li

Read more on Saxo's page dedicated to Trump's inauguration

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