Category: zerohedge

Authored by Curtis Houck via NewsBusters

What do ABC’s Tom Llamas (with colleagues Lucien Bruggeman, and Matthews Mosk), CNN’s John King, Michelle Malkin, The New Yorker’s Adam Entous, John Solomon, and James Risen all have in common? 

Apparently, CNN deemed those people to be conspiracy theorists on Friday since they’ve raised questions about Joe Biden’s interactions with the Ukranian government while son Hunter Biden was on the board of a Ukrainian energy company.

CNN Right Now host Brianna Keilar was adamant viewers know this, twice teasing about how an upcoming segment would “fact-check the conspiracy theory” concerning the former Vice President.

Teeing up political correspondent Sara Murray, Keilar sought to discredit the Biden/Ukraine questions by citing the press’s latest DEFCON-1 declaration over the President’s communications with the head of Ukraine that led to a whistle blower complaint.

“So, here’s the conspiracy theory the Trump campaign has been urging Ukraine to look into. Essentially they claim that Joe Biden used his power as Vice President to protect his son, Hunter Biden, who worked with a Ukrainian gas company. The catch? Well, the theory has been thoroughly debunked,” Keilar pompously asserted.

Murray then dutifully did her part for the Biden campaign, boasting that the Biden comment that Trump’s “been bother[ed]” by was Biden’s recollection of when “he cracked down on this Ukrainian prosecutor that he felt was very corrupt and threatened to withhold U.S. aid.”

After a Biden soundbite, Murray relied on — what else — anonymous sources to tell her that there’s nothing to worry about because Biden’s intentions of having the Ukrainian prosecutor axed or have the U.S. withhold aide from the country was “because they felt like he wasn’t doing his job” even though that same prosecutor had been investigating the energy company Hunter worked for.

Murray continued with her spin (click “expand”):

[T]hat investigation was already closed. These things were not happening simultaneously and Biden has denied over and over again that he was doing this in any way to try to benefit his son or to use his influence as vice president to benefit his son. So there is no proof whatsoever that Joe Biden did anything wrong or that Hunter Biden did anything wrong. Does it look great? It doesn’t look great, but — but there is no evidence there. These things just kind of were both occurring….Ukraine’s prosecutor general, he left in August, but back in May he said, “I do not want Ukraine to again be the subject of the U.S. presidential elections. Hunter Biden did not violate any Ukranian laws — at least as of now we do not see any wrongdoing.”

She added that there was pressure on the Ukrainians from other international groups, so that meant everything was above board!

On the way to scoring points with the Biden campaign and currying favor with more anonymous sources, CNN neglected to mention colleague John King, who stated the following on May 12’s Inside Politics: “Hunter Biden worked for a natural gas company in Ukraine, which is totally fair game. Did the vice president’s son use his dad’s influence to make money somewhere in the world? That’s is totally fair game.”

Quick: Someone call H.R.!

Just like those As Seen on TV commercials, there’s more! Not only were these concerns about the Bidens out there before that quote from the Ukrainian prosecutor general, but also well afterward. 

On June 20’s Good Morning America, World News Tonight anchor David Muir informed viewers of an “ABC News investigation into Biden’s son….Did Hunter Biden and his firm make millions overseas in countries where his father, the former vice president, acted as the top U.S. diplomat?”

Here’s more of what my colleague Kyle Drennen wrote at the time:

In the 7:30 a.m. ET half hour, correspondent Tom Llamas pointed out: “This is actually an issue Joe Biden has been dealing with since 2014, but it’s come up again because he’s now running for president.” The reporter warned that “Republicans, including President Trump, are trying to hammer Biden over this,” and framed the story: “At issue, was Hunter Biden profiting off his dad’s work as vice president and did Joe Biden allow it?”

“In 2014, Ukrainians, sick of corruption, revolted. Vice President Joe Biden went to Kiev to help the new government,” Llamas explained. That was followed by a soundbite of Biden telling the Ukrainians: “You have to fight the cancer of corruption.” Llamas exposed the apparent hypocrisy of that statement: “Just three weeks later a Ukrainian natural gas company, Burisma, accused of corruption, appoints Hunter Biden, seen here in their promotional videos, to their board of directors, paying his firm more than a million dollars a year.”

Not only did the report mention Hunter Biden’s suspicious foreign deal making, it also highlighted his past drug use: “Hunter, a lawyer, who had just been discharged from the Navy Reserves for testing positive for cocaine.”

After Entous’s profile of Hunter was published on July 1 that argued his business decisions haven’t exactly been sound, the ABC morning newscast again was the lone network to highlight these conflicts of interest.

Curtis Houck is the Managing Editor of NewsBusters for the Media Research Center

South Korean exports collapse most since 2009… European PMIs were ugly (Germany worst since 2013)… US Services PMI Employment contracts most since 2009… but apart from that, trade-talks might or might not be going well or terribly.

This was the worst global macro data disappointment day since May and pushed it back into contraction…

Source: Bloomberg

A late day buying panic made China’s stock slump look a little better, but it was ugly out there…

Source: Bloomberg

European stocks plunged on the dismal PMIs and never bounced…

Source: Bloomberg

European bond yields cratered today (10Y BTPs -10bps)

Source: Bloomberg

US equity markets would not be held back by all the global (including their own) data dumps as three hours of dovish Bullard headlines finally ignited some momentum in the last hour… but that spike faded quickly into the close (only The Dow managed gains)…

Futures show the chaos best, but we note that markets remain notably lower since the farm visits were canceled…

“Most Shorted” stocks down 5 days in a row – longest streak since March 2019…

Source: Bloomberg

Algos desperately pushed for S&P 500 to get back to 3,000…

Source: Bloomberg

Momo managed gains out of the gate but faded as the day wore on with a bid for value…

Source: Bloomberg

Cyclicals started off rough but were bid off the lows and after Europe closed, the machines rotated from defensives to cyclicals…

Source: Bloomberg

Netflix was a bloodbath (back in the red for 2019) – despite headlines about The Emmys…

Source: Bloomberg

Leaving FANG Stocks at a key support level…

Source: Bloomberg

Treasury yields were volatile intraday, opening higher, crashing on EU PMIs, tumbling on US PMIs, then ramping back for the rest of the day…

Source: Bloomberg

10Y Yields down 6 days in a row (after 8 days up in a row)…

Source: Bloomberg

Despite The Fed’s Jim Bullard claiming otherwise, the UST yield curve inversion is getting worse once again…

Source: Bloomberg

The curve has been inverted for 85 days (bar one)…

Source: Bloomberg

The Dollar ended the day modestly higher (spiking on EUR weakness on PMIs, then fading)…

Source: Bloomberg

Yuan ended the day higher after tumbling overnight…

Source: Bloomberg

Cryptos are down from Friday’s close (not helped by some chaos today with a dump, pump, and slow dump)…

Source: Bloomberg

Bitcoin is back below $10,000 (and flash-crashed today)…

Source: Bloomberg

Commodities were all higher led by a huge surge in Silver…

Source: Bloomberg

Oil traded chaotically intraday to end unchanged after conflicting headlines about how long before Saudi production is back online (a week or eight months!)

Source: Bloomberg

Silver exploded higher – its 3rd best day since Nov 2018… (the other 2 were also in September)

Source: Bloomberg

Silver dramatically outperformed gold…

Source: Bloomberg

Finally, the San Francisco Fed notes that, according to new market-based estimates, the probability of a return to the lower bound by the end of 2021 is about 24%. This is roughly in line with other survey-based and model-based estimates of zero lower bound risk. In recent months, the market-based measure of lower bound risk has increased markedly. And traders are increasingly betting in NIRP being here…

Source: Bloomberg

Point72 successfully shorted names like Weight Watchers and Dave and Busters this year based on “big data” it bought and combed through, according to Bloomberg. 

Using geo-location data that was tied to anonymous credit card information, Point 72 discovered that when customers went to entertainment venue Topgolf that spending at a nearby Dave and Busters suffered. This helped Point 72 add to its conviction to short Dave and Busters in August, a position it has now covered. Dave and Busters shares fell about 5% in the first half of August, but have since recovered. 

The trade exemplifies how hedge funds continue to use alternative data for Wall Street wagers. Point 72 continues to spend heavily on these types of data sets, in conjunction with quants, to improve their trading.

In January, the company took a “deep dive” into social sentiment surrounding dieting. It also looked at online search and credit card transaction data to round out a picture of Weight Watchers as a potential short. Point 72 saw declines in searching and social media at Weight Watchers, while offerings like the Keto Diet proved more popular. 

As a result of its findings, Point 72 shorted the company in January. Its shares fell for the firs two months of the year, before also recovering. Point 72 has since covered the position. 

Point 72 said it talks to about 1,200 ‘alternative data’ vendors a year, but only purchases data from about 30 or 40 of them. The company’s Chief Intelligence Officer, Matthew Granade, said: “There is a tremendous amount of data that has to get sorted through, and that’s huge part of challenge. The vast majority of people on our platform, our discretionary investors, are using this data. This was not true four or five years ago.”

Point 72 is up about 12.5% this year through August. 

Back in July, we wrote about hedge funds mining all types of “alternative data” to try and gain trading edges. In that article, we reported that alternative data was being bought hand over fist by hedge funds like Point72 and Ken Griffith’s Citadel. 

Michael Marrale, chief executive officer of M Science, said back in July:

 “There is not one major hedge fund or asset manager that doesn’t have data initiatives underway or that are not using alternative data in some way.” 

Via SchiffGold.com,

Peter Schiff has been saying that the price of gold and silver are going to take off.

But why?

Peter isn’t just taking a wild guess or gazing into a mystical crystal ball. He’s basing this prediction on the unavoidable economic consequences stemming from decades of Federal Reserve mechanizations. In s nutshell, the central bank has checked us into a monetary roach motel. Once it entered the current policy there was no way it would ever be able to leave.

In this SchiffGold Videocast, Peter explains exactly what the Fed has done, what it’s doing now, and why no matter what it does next, gold and silver are going much higher!

Despite checking us into a monetary roach motel, somehow, the central bankers managed to convince the world that it could indeed check us out. After holding rates at zero for some seven years and initiating three rounds of quantitative easing, the Fed somehow made everybody believe it was going to normalize rates and shrink its balance sheet.

The Fed fooled the markets.

In the early days of the post-2008 crash easy money era, the markets weren’t quite so sure. Gold rose to $1.900 per ounce in 2011 and silver was as high as $50 per ounce. But a lot of people don’t realize that the bull rally in gold and silver actually started as the Fed’s easy-money policies blew up the housing bubble in the early 200os. In 2001, gold was under $300 per ounce and silver was under $4.

After that 2011 peak, the gold and silver market went into a correction. What sparked that? The false belief that the Fed could actually succeed in unwinding its balance sheet and normalizing interest rates.

Ironically, gold hit the bottom of this correction at the same time the Fed started to raise rates. At the time, naysayers claimed that gold was about to really tank as the central bank pushed rates up. The opposite happened. Gold began to climb. The interest rate increases had already been factored in. In fact, the market was anticipating more hikes than we got.

And now the hiking is over. In September, the Fed delivered its second rate cut. But as Peter pointed out, something more significant happened. The Fed basically launched the equivalent of QE4.

What the Federal Reserve is doing is expanding its balance sheet, creating money out of thin air to buy government debt and other debt to artificially suppress interest rates.”

Of course, they aren’t calling it “quantitative easing,” which was actually a term made up in the first place to make people feel good about the policy. Now quantitative easing has a bad rap so they’re calling it POMO (Permanent Open Market Operations.) Peter said no matter what you call it, it’s basically just good old fashioned debt monetization.

That’s what banana republics do. America is doing the same thing except we don’t have the bananas.”

When you boil it all down, quantitative easing is creating money out of thin air to increase the money supply. It is inflation. It’s not a good thing, so the Fed tried to make it sound good by calling it something else that didn’t sound so bad – quantitative easing.

Interestingly, in the early days of the Great Recession, then-Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke assured Congress that the Fed was not monetizing debt. He said the difference between debt monetization and the Fed’s policy was that the central bank was not providing a permanent source of financing. He said the Treasurys would only remain on the Fed’s balance sheet temporarily. He assured Congress that once the crisis was over, the Federal Reserve would sell the bonds it bought during the emergency.

As Peter put it, he was lying through his teeth. Most of those bonds are still on the books. And they’re about to add more.

So now, what was once an emergency tool that would be used only in a dire emergency like the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, right? the Fed had to reach for this tool in an emergency Now, just as I said, this has become normal operating procedure — central banking 101. Because as I said from day one, once the Fed took us down this road, there was no going back. Once you hook somebody on drugs, they’re hooked for life. They can’t kick the habit without going through massive withdrawal.”

In effect, the Fed has created a phony policy that is dependent on the continuation of these easy-money policies.

The illusion, the myth the Fed created that there was an end-game, that there was an exit strategy, is going to be shattered.”

Remember, the reason gold went into correction was the wrongheaded belief that the Fed really could end QE and normalize interest rates.

When the markets figure out that QE is infinite, it’s permanent, it’s never going to end, that interest rates are stuck at zero indefinitely, then the price of gold is going to take off. Because the only reason that it stopped rising back then is the false confidence that the central bankers were able to engender. All that confidence is going to be lost. People are going to be rushing out of fiat money, the dollar in particular, into gold, into silver.”

Eventually, interest rates will be forced higher. We already saw these rumblings in the repo market. And the Fed isn’t going to have any choice. If it keeps trying to suppress them indefinitely, we’ll end up with hyperinflation.

Regardless of whether or not the Fed ultimately makes the right or wrong choice, before that happens, the price of gold and silver are going much, much higher. If they make the wrong choice, it will go infinitely higher.”

Peter said he doesn’t know how much longer the window to buy gold and silver will stay open before it makes new highs.

But those people who are waiting for new lows, people who are waiting to buy gold below $1,000, or maybe buy silver below $10, that’s not going to happen. You’re not going to see those prices. What you need to do now is just buy into the market.”

Indonesian investigators are expected to release a formal report in October, criticizing Boeing’s design flaws in the 737 MAX aircraft for the fatal crash of a Lion Air 737 MAX that killed all 189 people on board last October, reported The Wall Street Journal.

Sources told WSJ that the Indonesian report’s draft conclusions would be the first formal government report that outlines defects in the plane’s design, also identifies a series of pilot errors and maintenance problems that contributed to the crash. 

The malfunctioning Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS) system is expected to be highlighted in the report next month as a significant cause of the Lion Air crash. 

And in a fatal crash in March, an Ethiopian Airline 737 MAX aircraft experienced similar failures of the MCAS software during a sudden plunge that took 346 lives, prompted Boeing to ground all 737 MAX aircraft across the world, now six months and counting. 

Indonesian investigators declined to comment on the upcoming report, except to say the final report will be released in the first week of November. 

The report has already been reviewed by Boeing, Lion Air, and the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). 

Soerjanto Tjahjono, the head of Indonesia’s transport safety committee, told Reuters that stakeholders have already received the report and are currently evaluating it.  

The US National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) is expected to publish a series of safety recommendations in the coming weeks, from improving pilots’ manual flying skills to ensuring more transparency during the evaluation of new aircraft designs. 

“The goal is to ensure pilot proficiency when automated systems are malfunctioning or turned off, to help ensure appropriate responses to contradictory cockpit warnings such as those that occurred prior to the MAX crashes, the officials said. The board also is expected to emphasize the importance of setting priorities when executing emergency checklists,” WSJ said.

The Justice Department recently opened a criminal probe into the Federal Aviation Administration’s (FAA) 2017 approval of MCAS. Earlier this month, a Senate appropriations subcommittee supported new legislation that would require FAA officials “to address recommendations from ongoing investigations and audits,” WSJ said. 

There is no firm timetable for allowing 737 MAX jets to fly again.

Boeing is working with US and foreign officials to return the MAX to the air in the coming months, but new reports from several airliners have said timetables could be mid-1Q20 – but really nobody knows. 

The Indonesian report “is expected to list more than 100 elements of the crash chronology,” sources told WSJ, adding that some of the points are expected to “refer to missteps by pilots and mechanics (MCAS) initially revealed last year in Indonesia’s preliminary report.” 

And with Boeing trading at the 378-handle, about -14% from the ATH that was seen in late February, right before the Ethiopian Airline crash in March, it’s likely that the upcoming report could add some downward pressure on the equity – as there’s no clear timetable to get the 737 MAX back in the air. Any further delay would be disastrous for Boeing.

Authored by James Howard Kunstler via Kunstler.com,

The swamp abides. The latest news media dumpster fire over President Trump’s phone conversation with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky is a three-way ruse.

Ruse 1: deflect attention from the main issue, which is Joe Biden’s trolling for payoffs on his missions to foreign lands as vice-president, first Ukraine, where son Hunter was gifted a board of director’s chair and $50K-a-month salary with Ukrainian gas company Burisma, and then a $1.5 billion “private equity investment” to Hunter Biden’s wealth management fund from the state-owned Bank of China.

Ruse 2: to deflect attention from the damage soon to be inflicted on the Deep State by the forthcoming DOJ Inspector General’s report on FISA court abuses.

Ruse 3. To set in motion yet another obstruction of justice trap for Mr. Trump on the basis of false charges.

This comes at the instigation of Intelligence Community Inspector General Michael Atkinson, who was formerly senior legal counsel to John Carlin head of the National Security Division of the Department of Justice, deeply implicated in the FISA court matters of 2016 under investigation by federal prosecutor John Durham.  Mr. Atkinson cited a complaint by an unnamed whistleblower who claims to have heard from a source that the President offered a quid pro quo to Ukrainian President Zelensky for reopening the Burisma case. The “whistleblower” may be Mr. Atkinson himself.

Of course, gaffe-prone Joe Biden spilled the beans on video earlier this year, when he bragged about shaking down Ukraine’s then-president Petro Poroshenko over a billion-dollar loan guarantee unless he fired the prosecutor investigating Burisma, which he did. Is there any ambiguity here?

The coordination between the news media and the Deep State is impressively blatant in this new gambit, with former acting FBI director Andrew McCabe (dismissed for cause in 2018), in his new position as a CNN “contributor” (while awaiting prosecution) teeing up a new “Trump collusion” narrative with The New York Times, WashPost, and NBC marching in step. In this new age of disinformation, narratives are the political weapon of choice in the campaign to harass and disable the winner of the 2016 election. The big play of RussiaGate failed, the play of “racism” is failing, so UkraineGate is next up.

It’s also obviously an effort to reenergize the impeachment operation in congress, badly botched so far by Jerold Nadler’s House Judiciary Committee. But it’s hard to imagine a better entertainment than an impeachment of Donald Trump in congress. Unless the Deep State wants to throw former President Obama under the bus, along with dozens of his associates (including Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Biden), they might be advised to call off that circus. A trial in the Senate, where the GOP runs the proceedings, would be an even better table-turner than the rousing climax of Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.

I have a new theory about where the 2020 election is heading: if the Democratic Party candidate happens to lose, the party’s lawyers will unleash a blizzard of litigation in every voting district where the outcome was a couple of thousand ballots against them. It will be the 2000 “hanging chad” fracas on steroids and they will go so far as render the election inconclusive, therefore provoking the most parlous constitutional crisis since the start of the Civil War. In other words, they will dare to disable the republic.

Something or somebody will have to put a stop to these seditious turpitudes. The machinery of the law must be turned on the “resistance” and its operatives in the Deep State. Mr. Barr has the opportunity to do that. A globe of silence has enclosed his doings for many months. Impatient observers jump to the conclusion that the silence means he is doing nothing. I am not so sure of that. Given the purposeful hysteria ginned up so dishonestly in the press — and so injuriously to the actual public interest — don’t you suppose he would want to avoid tossing dynamite into that dumpster fire? By the same token, those actively stoking the dumpster fire are revealing their utter desperation. The unexpected consequence will be the suicide of the Democratic Party. But then people don’t necessarily get what they expect, they get what they deserve.

“I shouldn’t be up here. I should be back in school on the other side of the ocean. Yet you all come to us for hope. How dare you. You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words.”

…

“You are failing us, but the young people are starting to understand your betrayal,”

“We will not let you get away with this.”

Presented with no comment…

Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg at #UNGA: “This is all wrong…You all come to us young people for hope. How dare you! You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words—and yet, I’m one of the lucky ones.” https://t.co/YTVSvKxTkg pic.twitter.com/px90HghuQd

— ABC News (@ABC) September 23, 2019

Bonus GIF…

If a picture is worth 1,000 words then this GIF is worth 100,000 #ClimateWeek2019 pic.twitter.com/AqXdeUzgk3

— NowThis (@nowthisnews) September 23, 2019

Authored by Ron Paul via The Ron Paul Institute for Peace & Prosperity,

President Trump deserves credit for resisting the war cries from neocons like Sen. Lindsey Graham and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo after last week’s attack on two Saudi oil facilities. Pompeo was eager to blame Iran because he wants war with Iran and anything that can trigger such a war is fine with him. So he put the president in a difficult spot by declaring Iran the culprit: suddenly the president’s options in the media and in Washington were limited to “how to punish Iran.”

A week has now passed since the attack and Pompeo’s rush to judgement has been shown for what it was: war propaganda. That is because there has still been no determination of who launched the attack. Yemen’s Houthis took responsibility right away and Iran denied any involvement. We have seen nothing to this point that contradicts this.

President Trump likely understands that a US war on Iran will be his undoing as president. Who knows, maybe that’s what his closest advisors want. But according to a Gallup poll just last month, only 18 percent of Americans were in favor of military action against Iran. Seventy-eight percent of Americans – including 72 percent of Republicans – want the president to pursue diplomatic efforts over war. Iran has made clear that any attack on its territory will trigger a total war. The Middle East would be engulfed in flames and the US economy would be in the tank. Suddenly we’d see Democrat challengers pretending to be antiwar!

The message to Trump is pretty clear – war with Iran would be deeply unpopular – and it seems clear he understands the message. Just hours after his Secretary of State put the US on war footing with Iran, President Trump was forced to walk back Pompeo’s aggression. When asked about going to war with Iran, President Trump said, “Do I want war? I don’t want war with anybody.”

Unfortunately, with pressure on President Trump to “do something” even as Iran has not been found to have been behind the attack, the president has settled on two measures – one pointless and  the other dangerous. On Friday Trump announced yet even more sanctions on Iran, leaving many of us to wonder what is possibly left to sanction. He also announced a deployment of US military forces to Saudi Arabia of a “defensive nature.” Why should the military be sent to “defend” one of the wealthiest and most repressive countries on earth? It is hard to see how putting US servicemembers into harm’s way – into a war zone – to defend Saudi Arabia can in any way make America great again. I believe most Americans would agree.

President Trump should immediately cancel the order to send US troops to Saudi Arabia and should immediately remove what troops are already on Saudi soil. Then the Saudis would understand that they must end their aggression against Yemen.

Attempting to placate the neocons is a fool’s errand, because they are never satisfied even up to and including war. The tide is turning in America – and even in Washington – against Saudi Arabia. After the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi and a catastrophic four-year Saudi war on Yemen, no American politician is any longer in the mood to stick his or her neck out to defend Saudi Arabia. President Trump would be wise to use caution: it’s always dangerous sticking one’s neck out when the Saudi government is around.

Billionaire hedge fund manager Paul Singer is the founder & CEO of Elliott Management. Singer is preparing to raise additional funds from investors to build up a war chest of cash to spend on new opportunities, as he anticipates a market downturn could be imminent, reported the Financial Times. 

Elliott Management, a $38.3 billion activist fund, has spent the summer months stockpiling cash, closed a $2 billion co-investment fund in August to take companies private.

Now Singer is scrambling to raise an additional $5 billion, in a new funding round, before the cycle turns, according to FT sources. 

“The hedge fund is using a drawdown structure that will feed into the main fund, an arrangement that is often used by private equity firms but has become more popular among activists,” sources said. 

A drawdown structure will allow investors not to immediately front capital to Elliott but instead will be called overtime as opportunities emerge. 

Elliott used a similar structure in 2017 when it raised money for market disruptions. At the time, Singer told investors in a letter that the firm wanted to raise funds before investor liquidity dried up. 

FT suggests Elliott’s dash for cash is a sign that “Singer is anticipating a market meltdown. The billionaire investor, who has been vocal about complacency in global financial markets, recently predicted that the economy was headed for a significant downturn with risk at an all-time high.” 

“The global financial system is very much toward the risky end of the spectrum in terms of debt,” Singer said during a panel at the Aspen Ideas Festival in July. “Global debt is at an all-time high, derivatives are at an all-time high, and it took all of this monetary ease to get to where we are today.” 

In a separate report from Sunday, Claudio Borio, Head of the Monetary and Economic Department at the BIS, warned about the increasing acceptance of negative interest rates has reached “vaguely troubling” levels. 

Borio said that the effectiveness of monetary policy is severely waning and might not be able to counter the next global downturn. 

“The room for monetary policy maneuver has narrowed further. Should a downturn materialize, monetary policy will need a helping hand, not least from a wise use of fiscal policy in those countries where there is still room for maneuver.”

The BIS, known as the ‘central bankers’ bank,’ said the recent easing by the Fed, ECB, and PBOC, has pushed yields lower across the world, contributing to the more than $17 trillion in negative-yielding tradeable bonds. 

Borio also warned about the corporate debt market, specifically major imbalances in leveraged loans known as collateralized loan obligations (CLOs) which “represent a clear vulnerability” to the global financial system. 

And it should become increasingly disturbing to readers that not just a billionaire hedge fund manager [Singer] is anticipating a market crash, but as we reported Sunday, the ‘central bankers’ bank’ [BIS] is warning of imminent financial disaster.

Singer is building cash to take advantage of the coming implosion of corporate debt markets in the US. 

 

Authored by Caitlin Johnstone via Medium.com,

“I honestly think the annoyingness of a certain candidate’s supporters on Twitter prevents other reporters/analysts from pointing out that said candidate’s campaign obviously isn’t going that well,” griped the popular statistician/establishment narrative manager Nate Silver on Twitter today, following angry backlash from American progressives for a controversial racially charged tweet a few hours earlier in which he referred to Bernie Sanders’ diverse base as “residue”.

We’ve been seeing many such complaints from elitists of the political/media class about the way Twitter’s somewhat egalitarian structure allows ordinary citizens to effectively criticize their posts, and it’s been growing louder and louder in recent years. Slate’s Ashley Feinberg published an article earlier this month documenting New York Times columns over the last two years that have been dedicated to NYT columnists using their massive platforms to whinge about the comments they receive on Twitter. Feinberg’s article was inspired by the hilarious melodramatic hissy fit thrown by neocon Bret Stephens over some random guy calling him a “bedbug” on the social media site, but it’s amazing how many other columns the editors of the New York Times thought worthy of publication on this matter.

This ongoing meltdown by elitist narrative managers over the fact that mere commoners now dare address them in public without reverence and respect is the result of the novel nature of this dynamic. It used to be that the unwashed masses were kept quarantined from the narrative makers of the plutocratic media; they’d stay safely insulated among their own kind and they’d tell the rabble what to think from behind a wall of inaccessibility. Now if you’re in politics or media you’re expected to maintain a social media profile so that potential future employers can see what a good establishment lackey you are, but this new dynamic is clashing with the surging western populist movements who have an ever diminishing respect for that same establishment.

I honestly think the annoyingness of a certain candidate’s supporters on Twitter prevents other reporters/analysts from pointing out that said candidate’s campaign obviously isn’t going that well.

— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) September 22, 2019

This freakout arguably began being shoved into mainstream consciousness with the completely bogus “Bernie bro” narrative in 2015, when pundits and political influencers began seeing their comments sections light up with angry replies every time they moved to sabotage the 2016 Sanders campaign. Their discomfort at this new dynamic was falsely spun as the result of being targeted by sexism and racism because they could never get away with calling it what it really was: the experience of cognitive dissonance caused by the common riff raff criticizing them in a way to which they were not accustomed.

The mass media narrative managers are able to use their plutocrat-sponsored influence to create the illusion of an epidemic where one does not exist, as we’ve seen them do in the UK with the entirely fabricated “Labour antisemitism crisis”. It should come as no surprise, then, that Twitter has now taken steps to appease this elitist class by rolling out a new “hide replies” function in the US and Japan.

The function is typical of Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey’s “I just want everyone to get along and keep giving me billions of dollars” mentality, allowing people to choose which replies to their posts are visible but including an option to “view hidden replies” for those who know where to look. You can tell the function is designed to appease the elitists of the political/media class by those who are happy about it, like the president of the Center for American Progress think tank Neera Tanden, who spends much of her time on Twitter smearing everyone to the left of Elizabeth Warren and tweeted “This is great” in response to the news about the “hide replies” function. Meanwhile those of a more anti-establishment political inclination have been voicing nothing but objections to the change.

Now that the Hide Replies button is more widely available on Twitter it’s worth talking about why it’s so good.

— Heidi N. Moore (@moorehn) September 22, 2019

Establishment loyalism (often mislabeled “centrism” despite its violent, extremist nature) is always necessarily elitist, since the sole function of that ideology is the preservation of elite power structures. We can learn a bit more about why their ilk loves this new “hide replies” function so much from a recent thread by a mainstream media denizen named Heidi N Moore, who has over 100,000 followers, and describes herself as follows: “Frequent guest on TV and radio, including MSNBC, CNBC and NPR, and my specialty is explaining difficult topics concisely and accurately. Bylines in The New York Times, The New York Times Book Review, the Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, USA Today, the Financial Times, the Washington Post, Slate, Mashable and Fortune.com.”

Moore, who often complains bitterly about Sanders supporters and despises Jeremy Corbyn, says the new function is great because before she had to rely on using Twitter’s quality filter or only reading the replies of verified (blue-checkmarked) accounts, which was insufficient for silencing objections and problematic because, while having a large account comes with the advantage of “algorithmic authority”, “people desperate for attention love to free-ride on large accounts for clout.”

“Those trolls are depending on a siphoning effect: If a tweeter is important enough for the algorithm, then their reply might be too,” Moore’s elitism-swollen head proclaims. “They might pick up a few followers by replying snottily. It’s a grift.”

“Anyone who’s ever tweeted knows that your snottiest or spiciest sentiments will get shared more widely than positive ones,” Moore argues. “So there’s a technological incentive to create and boost sentiments around disrespect, dunking, misogyny, hatefulness etc etc etc.”

Note the deliberate conflation of “disrespect” and “dunking” with “misogyny” and “hatefulness”. Citing no evidence, Moore strongly implies that “Twitter swarms” (large numbers of disagreeable comments) are primarily directed at women with large or verified accounts, thus making the new function an ideal weapon against sexist silencing tactics.

Twitter has gradually added features to enable high-profile users to insulate themselves from criticism, with the “hide replies” feature being the latest example. This is done in the name of combatting “toxicity.” Of course, people sometimes deserve “toxic” criticism

— Michael Tracey (@mtracey) September 22, 2019

“In addition, Hide Replies isn’t censorship — it puts the jerks into a little leper island, which anyone is free to visit,” Moore says. “But — here’s the genius — we all know that endless scrolling is the way we engage. How many people will stop and read all the replies AND hidden replies?”

Indeed, how many people will do so? Probably not many. Which is precisely why these once-completely unaccountable political/media class elites are so thrilled about this new function they’ve been whining and whining and whining for since 2015. They understand that whoever controls the narrative controls the world, so they don’t like having their narratives disrupted by the plebs.

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