Category: zerohedge

Authored by Simon Black via SovereignMan.com,

Are you ready for this week’s absurdity? Here’s our Friday roll-up of the most ridiculous stories from around the world that are threats to your liberty, your finances and your prosperity.

Air Force Missile Command finally retires 1960s era Floppy Disks

I suspect our younger readers might not know what a floppy disk is, let alone have ever seen one.

Whereas today we have USB drives etc. to copy and store files, the standard used to be ‘floppy disks’ several years ago.

(As a kid in the early 1980s, I used to play on my dad’s computer, which had dual 5 ¼ inch floppy disk drives. It was a real beast of a machine…)

A 5 ¼ inch floppy disk had a maximum capacity of 1.2 megabytes. Today even the smallest USB stick is at least 1,000x the size.

The history of floppy disks goes back to the 1960s when 8-inch floppy disks were developed.

And the 8-inch floppies could store a whopping 80 kilobytes of data– that’s barely enough space to store a single email.

It’s now late 2019, and the United States Air Force has finally phased out 8-inch floppy disks.

Up until now, the Air Force had been using these floppy disks to store data crucial to operating its intercontinental ballistic missile command, control, and communications network!

Click here for the full story.

Now it’s discrimination for straight men to refuse sex with “women” who have penises

An adult filmmaker in the United Kingdom contacted a local woman who had recently posted seductive photos on social media and asked if she would like to participate in a pornographic scene with him.

Unbeknownst to this man, the woman he contacted is transgender and still has male bits and pieces.

When he found this out, the man withdrew his offer to shoot a scene with her. It wasn’t the scene he was looking for, and he wasn’t personally willing to participate in the act.

She has subsequently called the police, claiming that, because the man refuses to sleep with her, his transphobic discrimination is unfairly holding back her modeling career.

And believe it or not, police are investigating the incident as a hate crime.

Click here for the full story.

Last Weekend no one was shot in NYC for the first time since 1993

Whitney Houston’s “I Will Always Love You” was the number one hit in the US the last time New York City had a weekend where no one was shot.

That was 1993.

It took 26 years for another weekend to go by in NYC without a shooting.

We just wanted to say congratulations to New York City for having a weekend free of shooting deaths.

That’s a pretty sad track record for a city with some of the tightest gun control laws in the country…

Click here for the full story.

China tells a citizen protesting overseas to “think of your family”

An Chinese citizen living in Germany recently participated in a hearing in Berlin that was investigating Chinese human rights abuses. Then he got a strange phone call.

It was from his sister, who he hadn’t heard from in years. She asked him to stop speaking out against the Chinese government.

And then an unnamed Chinese official took the phone and told him “You’re living overseas, but you need to think of your family while you’re running around doing your activism work in Germany,” he said. “You need to think of their safety.”

Click here for the full story.

While Rudy Giuliani has tried to keep a low media profile in recent weeks, it has not been easy for Trump’s personal attorney, and now NBC reports that on the night of Oct. 16, Giuliani accidentally “butt-dialed” a reporter he had spoken to earlier in the evening, accidentally leaving a 3 minute voicemail during which he is heard speaking to someone else located in the same room.

According to the report, Giuliani can be heard discussing “overseas dealings” while lamenting a need for cash, although the full context of the conversation is indiscernible.

“You know,” Giuliani says to an unknown person, at the start of the recording. “Charles would have a hard time with a fraud case ‘cause he didn’t do any due diligence.” It’s unclear who Charles is, or who may have been implicated in a fraud. In fact, much of the message’s first minute is difficult to comprehend, in part because the voice of the other man in the conversation is muffled and barely intelligible.

Giuliani then says something else that’s crystal clear.

“Let’s get back to business. I gotta get you to get on Bahrain.” According to NBC, Giuliani has connections in Bahrain which he visited last December and had a one-on-one meeting with King Hamad Bin Isa al-Khalifa in the royal palace.  Giuliani runs a security consulting company, but it’s not clear why he would have a meeting with Bahrain’s king.

Giuliani can then be heard telling the man that he’s “got to call Robert again tomorrow. Is Robert around?” Giuliani asks.

“He’s in Turkey,” the man responds.

Giuliani replies instantly. “The problem is we need some money.”

The two men then go silent for a while then Giuliani speaks again: “We need a few hundred thousand,” he says.

While the context here, too , is unclear, the NBC report notes that Giuliani is known to have worked closely with a Robert who has ties to Turkey: his name is Robert Mangas, and he’s a lawyer at the firm Greenberg Traurig (which until May 2018 was also Rudy’s employer) as well as a registered agent of the Turkish government.

Mangas’ name appears in court documents related to the case of Reza Zarrab, a Turkish gold trader charged in the United States with laundering Iranian money in a scheme to evade American sanctions. We profiled Zarrab previously in “Mysterious Turk At Center Of “Secret Gold” Trade With Iran, Vanishes From Federal Jail.”

In 2017, Giuliani was brought on to assist Zarrab, when the former NYC mayor traveled to Turkey with his former law partner Michael Mukasey in hopes of striking a deal with Turkey’s President Erdogan to secure the release of their jailed client. Giuliani and Mangas were both employed by Greenberg Traurig at the time. The firm and Mangas had registered with the Justice Department to lobby the U.S. government on behalf of Turkey, according to an affidavit from Mangas.

At that point, Giuliani partner can be heard responding to the “few hundred thousand” comment:

“I’d say even if Bahrain could get, I’m not sure how good [unintelligible words] with his people,” the man says.

“Yeah, okay,” Giuliani says.

“You want options? I got options,” the man says, to which Giuliani responds “Yeah, give me options.”

The exchange took place at the 2:20 mark in the voicemail message. The other man does most of the talking in the remaining 40 seconds, and it’s difficult to piece together what he says.

* * *

This was not the first time Giuliani was caught butt-dialing someone: the late-night Oct 16 call came 18 days after a mid-afternoon Giuliani butt-dial, in which Giuliani left another 3-minute voicemail to an NBC news reporter in which Trump’s lawyer is heard talking to at least one other person. The conversation appears to pick up almost exactly where Giuliani’s phone call with the reporter left off, with Giuliani insisting he was the target of attacks because he was making public accusations about a powerful Democratic politician.

“I expected it would happen,” Giuliani says at the start of the recording. “The minute you touch on one of the protected people, they go crazy. They come after you.”

“You got the truth on your side,” an unidentified man says.

“It’s very powerful,” Giuliani replies, and then spends the entire three minutes railing against the Bidens.

“There’s plenty more to come out,” Giuliani says. “He did the same thing in China. And he tried to do it in Kazakhstan and in Russia.”

“It’s a sad situation,” he adds. “You know how they get? Biden has been been trading in on his public office since he was a senator.”

Shortly after, Giuliani turns to Hunter Biden. “When he became vice president, the kid decided to go around the world and say, ‘Hire me because I’m Joe Biden’s son.’ And most people wouldn’t hire him because he had a drug problem.”

“His son altogether made somewhere between 5 and 8 million,” Giuliani says. “A 3 million transaction was laundered, which is illegal”, Giuliani continues.

Last week, Hunter Biden – who had kept an even lower profile than Giuliani ever since the Ukraine scandal broke out – said that he will step down from the board of the Chinese investment company that he joined in October 2017. Separately, one of Hunter Biden’s early business partners was Christopher Heinz, stepson of former Secretary of State John Kerry. But even Heinz objected to Hunter Biden’s decision to work for the Ukrainian gas company and ultimately cut ties with him.

The recording ends the same way it began. “They don’t want to investigate because he’s protected, so we gotta force them to do it. And the Ukraine, they’re investigating him and they blocked it twice. So what the president was [unintelligible word], ‘You can’t keep doing this. You have to investigate this.’ And they say it will affect the 2020 election.”

“No it….” Giuliani adds, but the recording cuts off before he can finish the thought.

Authored by Michael Snyder via The End of The American Dream blog,

Throughout human history we have seen great nations rise and fall, and for many of them it was not actually an external threat that took them down.  When the social decay inside a society gets bad enough, it is just a matter of time before that society falls apart.  That is why what is happening to the United States is so deeply troubling.  Everywhere around us there is evidence that the social order in this country is rotting.  At one time we were the most respected nation on the entire planet, but now we have become the laughingstock of the world.  And instead of setting a good example for the rest of us, our leaders are some of the greatest examples of corruption and filth.

Our founders would be absolutely nauseated if they could see what our federal government has become today.  There is so much corruption in Congress that nobody is really fazed when yet another scandal breaks.  This week, the public learned about the twisted sexual adventures of Democratic congresswoman Katie Hill, and there isn’t that much public outrage because we have come to expect this sort of thing from our representatives.  The following is how the Daily Mail summarized some of the key facts in this case…

• Hill was pictured kissing and brushing her young female staffer’s hair, who DailyMail.com can identify as Morgan Desjardins from Santa Clarita, California

• The then 22-year-old began a throuple relationship with Hill and her husband Kenny Heslep shortly after she started working for Hill in 2017

• Texts and photos between Hill, Heslep and Desjardins reveal their throuple was steamy at first, but ended with Hill leaving them ‘high and dry’

• The congresswoman was also seen posing naked while smoking a bong on 9/11 in 2017, as a tattoo of a Nazi-era Iron Cross on her bikini line is on full display

It has also come out that Hill and her husband posted nude photos of her on “wife sharing” websites in 2016.

Is this really who we want representing us in Washington?

Hill has also been accused of having an inappropriate sexual relationship with legislative director Graham Kelly.  At first she lied and completely denied it, but after a ton of evidence came out she was finally forced to admit what happened…

On Tuesday, Hill said she did not have a relationship with legislative director Graham Kelly, but she walked back that account the next day, saying in a letter to constituents that she got involved with Kelly “during the final tumultuous years of my abusive marriage,” the Los Angeles Times reported.

“I know that even a consensual relationship with a subordinate is inappropriate, but I still allowed it to happen despite my better judgment,” the letter read.

Having a sexual relationship with a subordinate is so serious that it could potentially get Hill kicked out of Congress, but if she survives she will probably be re-elected in 2020.

So far, it is mostly Republicans that are calling for her to resign, but that is only because she is a Democrat.

When the extremely disgusting sexual behavior of Republican members of Congress is brought up, all of a sudden “conservatives” have all sorts of excuses about why they should be allowed to stay in office.

If you only condemn sexually immoral behavior when a member of the other party does it, you are a hypocrite.

Speaking of weird and twisted sexually behavior, it is certainly not limited to members of Congress.  For example, just check out what a Florida man recently did in the toy department of a Target store…

A man has been arrested for having sex with a stuffed ‘Olaf’ snowman toy in front of horrified shoppers at a Target store in Florida.

Cody Meader was detained on Tuesday afternoon after repulsed eyewitnesses claim they saw him ‘dry-humping’ the large snowman toy from Disney’s ‘Frozen’ at the store in St Petersburg.

I am almost hoping to find out that we was on drugs, because nobody in their right mind should ever do such a thing.

What is wrong with us?  It is almost as if a large percentage of the population has been transformed into drooling zombies without any social awareness whatsoever.

This next story is perhaps even more disturbing.  In one county in Georgia, a group of sex offenders is suing the sheriff because he was putting signs in their front lawns warning children not to trick-or-treat at their homes…

A group of sex offenders in the U.S. state of Georgia are suing a sheriff’s department after local authorities placed “No Trick-Or-Treat At This Address!!” signs on the front lawns of their homes.

While Butts County Sheriff Gary Long claims that the move is meant to keep children safe on Halloween, the pedophiles claim that the move was unjust and violates their rights to privacy and free speech.

But I haven’t shared the most shocking part of this story with you yet.

Last October, the sheriff put up more than 200 warning signs because there are that many registered sex offenders that live in his relatively small county…

On September 24, attorney Mark Yurachek filed a complaint on behalf of plaintiffs Christopher Reed, Reginald Holden, and Corey McClendon, all of whom served prison time for sexual offenses against children. The court filing accuses the sheriff’s office of putting up warning signs on the front lawns of over 200 registered sex offenders in the county last October.

Unfortunately, this is not an anomaly.

Today, there are more than 859,000 registered sex offenders in the United States, and that number is growing rapidly each year.

Switching gears, what would an article about social decay be without at least some discussion of the human feces in our streets?

Normally I bring up examples on the west coast, but today let me share with you what has been happening in downtown Miami…

“The situation is the worst I’ve seen in my 25 years here,” said business owner Jose Goyanes. “The stench is really bad, even after you hose it down. We see people urinating against buildings or pulling their pants down and squatting because they have nowhere else to go.”

Deposits of human waste can be seen in planters, doorways, gutters — or right in the middle of the block. The pavement behind the old Macy’s department store is soaked with urine. Feces ferment in front of vacant storefronts for days when there’s no landlord to clean up. People who work and live downtown are calling in a Code Brown.

Sadly, this is a perfect metaphor for what is happening to the country as a whole.

We need to call a “Code Brown” on the entire nation, because America is rapidly being transformed into a rotting, decaying cesspool of filth, corruption and wickedness.

“It’s not political” – just remember that!

Amid the avalanche of subpoenas and secret-squirrel hearings surrounding the Congressional impeachment inquiry, an Obama appointed District Court judge has ruled in favor of Democrats’ court order, compelling the U.S. Justice Department to turn over grand-jury materials from Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report on Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election by Oct. 30.

The House Judiciary Committee had shown “that it needs the grand-jury material referenced and cited in the Mueller Report to avoid a possible injustice in the impeachment inquiry,” Beryl Howell, chief judge of the U.S. District Court in Washington, said Friday in a 75-page ruling.

“In carrying out the weighty constitutional duty of determining whether impeachment of the President is warranted, Congress need not redo the nearly two years of effort spent on the Special Counsel’s investigation, nor risk being misled by witnesses, who may have provided information to the grand jury and the Special Counsel that varies from what they tell [the House Judiciary Committee].”

As The Hill reports, the order directs the Justice Department to turn over all information that was redacted from the Mueller report in order to protect grand jury secrecy. That includes more than 240 redactions from the first volume of the report alone.

*  *  *

Full ruling below:

The biggest short-squeeze in six weeks, mirroring the mid-September rebound…

Source: Bloomberg

Sent stocks to record highs today…

Source: Bloomberg

Despite global uncertainty being at all-time record highs…

Source: Bloomberg

It’s a full Risk-Astley-tard market…

And everyone knows, you never go full Rick-Astley-tard!

While stocks reached record highs, perhaps the bigger news was the massive explosion higher in cryptos with Bitcoin up over $1200 on the day…This is the biggest daily gain for Bitcoin since April

Source: Bloomberg

Chinese stocks ended notably higher on the week after Friday’s buying spree

Source: Bloomberg

European stocks were mostly higher on the week with DAX leading the way as trade hopes revived but UK’s FTSE disappointed on Brexit progress being stymied…

Source: Bloomberg

US Equities were all higher on the week with Trannies the biggest gainer, followed by Nasdaq…

 

With S&P 500 leaving the key 3,000 behind and ramping above the closing record high (and within 0.5 points of the intraday record high)…

S&P Record Closing High 3025.86 (3027.98 intra)

Amazon’s collapse overnight sparked a panic-bid from the cash market open (NOTE – the ramp really accelerated from the US open to the EU close)…

Momo was lower for the 3rd week in a row – tumbling most since the quant quake in September…

Source: Bloomberg

VIX was monkeyhammered back to a 12 handle for the first time since July…

Source: Bloomberg

Financials outperformed the market this week, decoupling from the yield curve…

Source: Bloomberg

Treasury yields ended the week higher after their spike today with the belly underperforming…

Source: Bloomberg

30Y Yields spiked up to Monday’s highs today…

Source: Bloomberg

The Dollar ended the week higher, but well off the October highs

Source: Bloomberg

Cable sold off this week – after 3 huge weeks higher…

Source: Bloomberg

Offshore Yuan rallied for the fourth week in a row…

Source: Bloomberg

Cryptos ended the week higher after today’s huge buying…

Source: Bloomberg

With Bitcoin bouncing perfectly off its 200-day moving-average

Source: Bloomberg

Silver and Crude outperformed this week but all major commodities were higher

Source: Bloomberg

WTI topped $56 – to its highest since September…

Gold futures got back above $1500…

And silver soared back above $18…

 

Global negative-yielding debt rose very modestly this week…

Source: Bloomberg

Finally, we note that October is currently the most disappointing macro month since April 2017…

Source: Bloomberg

But then again, it’s not about fun-durr-mentals…

Source: Bloomberg

Authored by Chris Whalen via TheInstitionalRiskAnalyst.com,

Sisyphus is a figure from Greek mythology. For sins in mortal life, he was punished by Zeus to forever roll a boulder up a hill in the depths of Hades, only to see it to roll down again.  The Federal Open Market Committee is essentially trapped in the torment of Sisyphus. They keep trying to add liquidity to the domestic US money markets, only to see it leak out into the vast offshore market for dollar funding.

This week the FOMC announced that the minimum size of its overnight repurchase-agreement operations will rise to $120 billion, from what had been at least $75 billion. Long-term repo operations will rise from a minimum daily offering size of $35 billion and go up to $45 billion in interventions scheduled for Thursday and Oct. 29. The longer-term repo operations are scheduled to carry over into November, but you can expect the operations to be extended into next year.

Trouble is that these larger operations are unlikely to be effective.  Why?  Because the US and foreign banks that hold liquidity have no incentive to make this liquidity available to domestic borrowers in the US.  Indeed, the entire intellectual construct that allowed the FOMC to think in 2018 that they could actually raise interest rates is shown to be a complete fallacy.

“Everyone in the markets focused on repo problem as technical, given the competition for funding from T-bills/reserves,” notes Ralph Delguidice at Pavilion Global Markets.

“Fed asset swap ‘not QE’ designed to force cash out of T-bills into general collateral (GC), but is now failing as sellers of those Bills (foreign official mostly) park cash in reverse repurchase (RRPs) instead. But problem isn’t cash not flowing UP to repo, it is cash not flowing DOWN to repo.”

A number of analysts such as George Selgin at Cato Institute have rightly focused on the “leakage” in the Fed’s “floor” system for fed funds, but the offshore dimension may be a more significant factor thwarting the efficacy of Fed policy. It’s about the spread everybody.  Duh.

The fact that regulatory policies such as Dodd-Frank and Basel III are blocking the movement of funding is easily understood by the markets (but not Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, it seems).  Most of the TBTF/G-SIB banks must shrink going into year end to avoid a G-SIB capital surcharge penalty.  Last December’s liquidity crisis was a function of JPMorgan (JPM) and other large banks backing away from the short-term markets.  Thanks Elizabeth!

With the level of bank reserves now lower than a year ago, the rocks in the proverbial stream are starting to appear.  The Fed is trying to address their error by dumping more reserves back into the system via QE and repo, but the “liquidity” is running out of a hole in the bucket thanks to the spread between what a cash provider earns on repo – say +75bps over LIBOR in Treasury and agency repo – and the higher yields available in the $10 trillion market for currency swaps. Call it 2%.

Delguidice believes that as US interest rates have risen, demand in the $10 trillion market for currency swaps (aka “Eurodollars”) has soared, proving an impossible situation for the Fed as it tries to manage the 1.75-2.0% target range for Fed funds.

“FX-swaps are a ten trillion-dollar market and are functionally equivalent to a repo to lenders of USD (most of the time), only with higher rates reflected by the basis,” says Delguidice. 

“They also receive derivative treatment on balance sheets, unlike REPO, so dealers would MUCH rather do them. You only have count MTMs in the capital charge, but unlike repo they MUST be physically settled when they mature. They cannot just be rolled over.”

Many sellers of T-bills are non-US banks.  Many of these then take the cash and go into the RRP market away from the Fed. These banks get UST collateral that they can hypothecate to, you guessed it, access dollar liquidity.  Many of these non-US banks in China and other Asian nations are profoundly short-dollars and hold trillions in dollar loan assets. Important, you cannot hypothecate the RRPs at the Fed.  See BIS paper on the “missing debt” parked offshore for your happy reading this weekend.

Bottom line is that the rate paid and earned for RPs and RRPs is important, but the actual flow of cash vs “excess reserves” measured by our friends at the Fed is another matter.  The Fed is uniquely ill-equipped to deal with such tactical issues.  The Fed’s balance sheet may grow, but the supply of cash liquidity in the broad market may not.  The liquidity that the Fed is adding may not “trickle down” to the GCF and fed funds markets outside the primary dealers.

Indeed, each day there is a 20-30 basis point differential between what the Fed charges primary dealers (~1.85% today and the rest of the market (~2.05%).  This effective rate differential is likely to widen as the year comes to a close.  Truth is, not only has the FOMC lost control of the Fed’s balance sheet to the financial markets, but the offshore Eurodollar market may force the FOMC to collapse US rates to eliminate the rate differential or “spread” between domestic fed funds and repo and the effective negative cost of funds offshore.

The Fed and prudential regulators could take a lot of pressure off the money markets by adjusting the G-SIB capital surcharge and a couple of other relatively minor tweaks to the bank regulatory environment, but Senator Warren is having none of it.

“So now the worst single thing that can possibly happen has happened,” notes Delguidice. 

“Elizabeth Warren wants to complicate what could have been a simple and straightforward hostage negotiation with JPM’s Jamie Dimon over regulatory relief and the eventual Fed acquisition of the UST he is having increasing difficulty funding in the GC markets on his balance sheet.”

Remember, the TBTF/G-SIBs will again be shrinking their balance sheets going into year-end thanks to Basel III/IV and Dodd-Frank.  Now you understand why the Fed just doubled down on adding repo liquidity to the markets, but it may not work.  And a socialist presidential candidate named Elizabeth Warren is perfectly willing to crash the US financial markets to advance her never ending quest for celebrity and fame.

Fed Chairman Jay Powell is Sisyphus. Elizabeth Warren thinks she is Zeus.  This will not end well. Good weekend. 

Billionaire Ron Baron was back on CNBC, making the case to investors that they need to buy stocks and ignore all risks and dream big because the market will be up massively in 50-years. 

The “buy-and-hold” billionaire said “fear is evident” in the stock market, and suggested to viewers that the Dow Jones Industrial Average could hit 650,000 by 2069/70. 

Source: Bloomberg

Even on a log scale this acceleration looks a bit much.

Source: Bloomberg

As to the “fear” Baron describes in the Dow — we aren’t sure if he is accurately describing the current outlook because the index is about 1% from ATHs (mainly on trade optimism, hopes of central bank easing, and the expectation that a 2016 style rebound in the global economy is imminent in 2020). 

Baron refers to the current stock market environment as very similar to 1969, except there’s one thing he left out — stocks plunged that year – and so far this year — stocks are at record highs. 

But anyways he said: “Everybody is worried about something. If you invested in 1969, amidst turmoil in 1969, you would have made 25 times your money.”

“I think the 6.5% annual growth [in the market] is going to continue, on average, for the next 50 years, at least,” he added, making the point that investors should forget the day-to-day market gyrations and stay focused on the long term.

“People forget about compounding” money over time, he said.

Baron added, “I’m thinking the next 50 years is going to be similar to the last 50 years,” which he is suggesting implied that the Federal Reserve stands ready to pump trillions of dollars into Wall Street to hyperinflate the stock market to levels in line with his forecast. 

The timing of Baron’s stock market forecast is undoubtedly suspicious. Stocks remain at ATHs, while he’s suggesting the Dow will hyperinflate over the coming decades.

Now where have seen that before?

Source: Bloomberg

Or maybe it doesn’t, and Baron is using this time to unload stocks onto gullible millennials who will be bagholders for generations to come.

Authored by Adam Taggart via PeakProsperity.com,

Much of what we truly value is at risk…

Prolific and exceptionally perceptive author Charles Hugh Smith returns to discuss the insights in his just-launched book Will You Be Richer Or Poorer? Profit, Power & AI in a Traumatized World (the first chapter of which can be read for free here)

The current narrative that our standard of living is not only the best it has been in human history, but thanks to modern technology, is now improving at an accelerating rate.

Smith turns this belief on its head, pointing out the many and various ways — many of them “intangible” and not currently measured in dollars — the human condition is fast worsening. Health, purpose, social connection, civil liberties, access to natural resources, career mobility; these are but a few examples.

And technology is actually fast sending us down a darker path. One that empowers the central state, decimates jobs, destroys privacy, and has created today’s “landfill economy”.

I’ve written on these big, long dynamics of cycles, where there’s not just economic cycles or business cycles, but also social cycles where people find fewer reasons to cooperate with each other and society is fragmented. They often are associated with inflation or high unemployment, a decay of the real economy, resources becoming scarce and expensive, and so on.

Well, we’re clearly in that cycle — a Kondratieff winter, a Fourth Turning, one of Peter Turchin’s long cycles. And it’s only beginning.

Things are not going to resolve themselves quickly. There’s going to be a reset or a reckoning where we’re going to have to downsize and live within our means, and find some new social structures that are sustainable. It’s not just a physical, material world adjustment where we have to use less energy and fewer resources, we’ll also have to psychologically change. To not fear the changes ahead, but find ways to step into them positively.

Starting by trying to calculate the value of all the capital that we don’t measure is a very powerful first step. Realizing that you have all these forms of intangible capital that no one taught us to measure–or even recognize– is a very powerful process psychologically. If you start trying to prioritize the forms of capital that are important to you, it’s a kind of psychoanalysis because you really have to dig down into yourself and ask, “What forms of capital do I have that I can invest in another way of living, another livelihood, another form of community?”

There’s always going to be trade-offs. You’re not going to be able to get rich speculating in the stock and bond markets–and run a farm, and build a community. You’re going to have to give stuff up. You’re going to have to sacrifice some things in order to get what’s really fulfilling to you.

That’s wrenching in and of itself, but what’s worse is when people wait until bad things happen and then they realize the trade-offs have been imposed on them. Like they eat a highly-processed food diet, and they have a heart attack, and then they suddenly realize, “Wow, I’m going to die if I don’t change.” Or you get fired from your job or your corporation gets rid of your entire division. Then you’re forced to look at a different lifestyle and a different livelihood.

But we really do have the power to make those changes before catastrophe strikes.

I’m actually trying to deliver a positive message:  that anyone can do this. You may not be able to revolutionize your life in one fell swoop; but you can certainly make progress towards what’s important, and get busy building and accumulating the capital that truly is meaningful to you.

Click the play button below to listen to Chris’ interview with Charles Hugh Smith (51m:20s).

Less than 30 minutes after President Trump tweeted early Friday, “Our soldiers have left and are leaving Syria for other places, then…COMING HOME!” — Defense Secretary Mark Esper confirmed prior reports that the Pentagon will indeed leave behind a small military presence to include “mechanized forces” at “the oil fields”.

As we reported yesterday per a WSJ report, the plan is likely to include some 500 troops stationed at the major oil fields east of the Euphrates, and sending dozens of battle tanks and other equipment to protect them. So perhaps merely some troops are actually coming home, while the tanks are moving in. 

To be expected, the justification Esper gave is focused on the perpetual “threat” of a reconstituted Islamic State. “We are now taking some actions… to strengthen our position at Deir al zor, to ensure that we can deny ISIS access to the oil fields,” Esper told reporters at a briefing. “We are reinforcing that position, it will include some mechanized forces,” Esper said. Like Osama bin Laden after 9/11, ISIS is the bogeyman that keeps on giving, conveniently used as an excuse for the Pentagon to never leave the region, apparently.

Trump is clearly bending to the demands of his generals, who not only want to leave the Syrian Kurds a major bargaining chip to play in dealing with Assad, but continued control over Syria’s domestic energy resources can be used by Washington as potential leverage in future negotiations over Syria.

It’s also perhaps to deflect the growing mainstream media and Democratic criticism (along with some key Republican allies) that Trump has supposedly “handed the Middle East to Russia”. It further fits with Trump’s Thursday tweet, declaring:

“We will NEVER let a reconstituted ISIS have those fields!”

Like with prior declarations of Trump expressing desire to leave Syria in past years, notably in early 2018, the immediate fierce bipartisan backlash in both Congress and the media (not to mention the ‘deep state’) typically results in a slow walk back of the policy, eventually to the point that nothing actually changes regarding Syria. 

Of this latest backlash and Trump’s “softening” the original withdrawal plans, Reuters describes: 

Trump has been softening his pullout plans for Syria after a backlash from Congress, including among key Republicans, who say he enabled a long-threatened Turkish incursion against Kurdish forces in Syria who had been America’s top allies in the battle against Islamic State.

And yet all of this is happening as Russia is actually bolstering its forces in Syria, specifically sending about 300 new military police to the northeast, taking over areas which had a prior US special forces presence. 

Early this week Kremlin officials condemned looming US plans to ‘secure’ the oil fields, saying Syria’s natural resources belong only to the legitimate government in Damascus. 

So again it appears that after all of the hype, and constant statements of “we’re bringing the troops home” — we are left with a few hundred US troops shifted to western Iraq, and tanks going in. 

With the cumulative budget deficit for the first 11 months of fiscal 2019 already hitting $1.067 trillion as of August 31, the only question on deficit watchers’ minds was whether after the final month in the fiscal year, which ends on Sept 30, the US deficit would be greater or less than $1 trillion.

At 2pm today we got the answer, when the US Treasury reported that thanks to a $82.8 billion surplus in September, the full year deficit for fiscal 2019 was shy of $1 trillion, but just barely, printing at $984.4 billion, a whopping $205 billion, or 26.4% increase, to the $779 billion deficit hit in 2018.

This was $24 billion more than the CBO’s own forecast in August, which predicted a 2019 deficit of $960BN.

As shown below, the $83 billion monthly surplus was thanks to $374 billion in receipts, offsetting $291 billion in outlays. The biggest source of income were income taxes ($183BN), social security and retirement ($104BN), and corporate income taxes ($60BN), while the biggest outlays were Social Security ($88BN), Defense spending ($55BN), healthcare ($53BN), and Medicare ($26BN).

That said, the fact that the US failed to hit a $1 trillion deficit in 2019 merely means that the D-Day has been postponed for one year, as most analyst forecasts and government budgets anticipate will happen in 2020.