Category: zerohedge

Though Syria has long fallen out of featured coverage in international media, it appears the war to take back Idlib province is heating up once again. Recall that on prior occasions over the past few years Washington has threatened some level of military intervention each time Syria and Russia prepared to finally liberate the northwest region from al-Qaeda and Turkish-backed jihadists (especially connected with ‘rebel’ claims of chemical weapons usage by government forces). 

On Monday Russian jets pounded a camp full of Turkish-backed militants in Idlib, killing at least 60. Some media sources are reporting possibly over 70 killed and 100+ injured, making it one of the single deadliest airstrikes of the entire almost decade long war.

“The strike targeted the group Faylaq al-Sham, whose base is near several refugee camps in the heavily populated province of Idlib,” The New York Times reports.

And further according to the report, it’s likely to escalation tensions with Turkey, given not only Faylaq al-Sham works closely with Turkey’s military and intelligence, but also given the strike happened so near the border: 

The fighters’ camp was at Kafr Takharim, near the Turkish border. The attack was the most violent breach of a cease-fire agreement that Russia and Turkey reached in March. Russia has occasionally made smaller strikes on militant groups, but such a large strike so close to the Turkish border is unusual.

The earliest reports put the death toll at over 34, which continued to rise through the day. The NY Times notes further that “Video footage from the scene showed the bodies of at least a dozen fighters wrapped in blankets on the floor of a clinic.”

Update: I’m told the death toll from #Russia‘s strike is now 76, with 100+ injured.

= One of the most deadly single airstrikes in #Syria‘s 9-year conflict. https://t.co/DJ2ZAqtG3t

— Charles Lister (@Charles_Lister) October 26, 2020

Previous Russian-Turkey ceasefire agreements related to Idlib have been conditioned on Turkey rooting out clearly designated terrorist groups. However, groups which Turkey and the West have dubbed “moderate” are often seen by Russia and Damascus as terrorists. 

In this case the Western allies that have been covertly involved in Syria have long thought of Faylaq al-Sham as supposedly moderate. Russia clearly thought otherwise.

Currently, some analysts are speculating that Russia could be sending a message to Turkey at a moment Ankara appears to be getting more deeply involved supporting its ally Azerbaijan against Armenia in the contested Nagorno-Karabakh region.

The New York Police Department is investigating an incident Saturday evening where a police officer in a patrol cruiser in Brooklyn blared “Trump 2020” through the loudspeaker – and urged bystanders to film it, reported RT News. 

“Trump 2020,” the officer said several times. Multiple videos show the incident, which appears to include at least three officers. By Monday morning, the video uploaded to Twitter has a little more than 2 million views, sparking backlash from officials and residents.

Police officer in Brooklyn uses a loudspeaker to say “Trump 2020” while on the job pic.twitter.com/ZujQIfqonH

— Fifty Shades of Whey (@davenewworld_2) October 25, 2020

The NYPD tweeted Sunday morning they were aware of the incident and said, “it is under investigation by our Brooklyn South Investigation Unit.” 

“Police officers must remain apolitical,” the department said.

We are aware of this video and it is under investigation by our Brooklyn South Investigation Unit.

Police officers must remain apolitical. https://t.co/a3XyWCNceb

— NYPD NEWS (@NYPDnews) October 25, 2020

In another tweet, the NYPD said the officer who used the “vehicle’s loudspeaker for political purposes had been suspended, effective immediately.” 

Suspended without pay; The police officer who is under investigation for using a department vehicle’s loud speaker for political purposes has been suspended, effective immediately.

— NYPD NEWS (@NYPDnews) October 25, 2020

A second video, recorded by a passerby, told the officer in the car to “do it again,” referring him to use the loudspeaker to tout “Trump 2020.” Sure enough, the officer did, blaring “Trump 2020,” causing the passerby, presumably a liberal, to ignite in hate and called the officer a “f**king fascist.” 

NYPD Commissioner Dermot Shea said the incident was “one hundred percent unacceptable. Period.” 

“Law Enforcement must remain apolitical, it is essential in our role to serve ALL New Yorkers regardless of any political beliefs,” Shea said. “It is essential for New Yorkers to trust their Police.”

One hundred percent unacceptable. Period.

Law Enforcement must remain apolitical, it is essential in our role to serve ALL New Yorkers regardless of any political beliefs.

It is essential for New Yorkers to trust their Police.

Updates to follow after initial investigation. https://t.co/C4zyVYWZvN

— Commissioner Shea (@NYPDShea) October 25, 2020

While some commend the NYPD for immediately suspending the officer, critics, or mainly liberals, went berserk, saying City Hall and NYPD were not doing enough to enforce division in policing and politics. 

“My tax dollars did not pay for NYPD officers to broadcast Trump 2020 from their cruiser,” one resident tweeted. 

“Meanwhile, NYPD is using taxpayer dollars to blast ‘Trump 2020’ from their loudspeakers,” activist Matt Sutton said.

This is not the first time a police department has launched a similar investigation. Last week, the Miami Police Department investigated one of its officers wearing a “Trump 2020” face mask while in uniform. 

The DoJ’s push to punish Google in the first of what’s expected to be a flurry of civil actions against the Big Tech players could have seriously negative repercussions for a third party: Apple.

As the Wall Street Journal highlighted in a recent story highlighting commentary and research recently produced by Toni Sacconaghi, a longtime tech analyst at A.B. Bernstein, Apple and Google have a special link – and it’s one of the elements of Google’s business that’s come under the microscope as a key element of the government’s case.

The government says Google’s arrangement to pay Apple billions of dollars to set Google’s search engine as its default has been essential in maintaining its market dominance, and preventing another rival search engine from rising up to challenge Google.

“There’s a risk, if you play it out, that there actually could be more financial impact to Apple than there is for Google,” said Toni Sacconaghi, an analyst for Bernstein. He estimates that Apple’s stock could fall as much as 20% if the deal with Google were to be eliminated entirely. At the same time, he and others say, any damage could be far less if Apple is able to offset it through other deals involving Google and its competitors, as many investors and analysts say could happen.

The two companies first struck a deal in 2005, when Steve Jobs was still Apple’s CEO, to make Google the default in Apple’s Safari web browser on Mac computers. The deal expanded with the arrival of the iPhone two years later, according to the government’s lawsuit.

But back in 2016, details about the agreement were revealed in an unrelated court battle. It showed Apple received a cool $1 billion in 2014 as part of the deal to default its products to Google’s search engine. When the deal was first struck in 2005, back when Steve Jobs was still CEO, Google paid Apple to default Safari to Google’s search engine. That default setting was later included on iPhones, iPads etc. At that time, Apple booked nearly $200 billion in sales during the 2014 fiscal year.

While $1 billion back then might not have seemed like such a large chunk, Wall Street analysts believe the amount Google has been paying Apple for the privilege has likely expanded significantly, with some projecting that Google might be paying as much as $12 billion annually for the arrangement across all of Apple’s products and services. 

Since the costs associated with licensing something like a default browser setting are negligible for the company that controls the browser and the devices, losing out on $12 billion in pure profit would be equivalent to a 20% hit to annual profits (Apple reported $55.26 billion in profits for fiscal 2019).

With so many close links between Google and Apple, disrupting this relationship could also hurt Apple’s service business in other ways, but as another analyst pointed out, there’s more than enough standing to argue that what Apple and Google are doing is no different than every supermarket’s relationship with the brands that it sells.

Apple is expected to report its fiscal 2020 results Thursday. We suspect Tim Cook & Co, will have some more to say about the DoJ/State AG legal antitrust push, which threatens to upend the big tech status quo.

Of course, as Sacconaghi points out, Google has just as much to lose. Should the arrangement unravel, Apple could scoop up a small competitior, say DuckDuckGo, and start to muscle in on Google’s search traffic, which supplies much of the data that the company repackages for resale to its clients.

As far as American courts are concerned, this isn’t the first time a lawsuit or civil action has exposed collusion between the biggest American tech firms in the area of personnel (informal no-poaching agreements). It’s reasonable to expect that while Apple, Amazon, Google and Facebook are nominally “competitors”, when it comes to this antitrust action, they’re all in the same boat.

If you feel like some self-flagellation, you can watch the entire Schumer show before the vote here:

After today’s confirmation vote, (and soon to occur, socially-distanced swearing-in-ceremony at The White House), Jonathan Turley details in the following op-ed at The Hill, what he calls ‘the parade of horribles’ proposed by academics for changing the Court to legislatively negate the majority of conservative justices after the addition of Amy Coney Barrett to the Court.

The concern is that this is little beyond enablement by commission as Democrats claim license to do lasting harm to one of the most important institutions in our constitutional system.

The GOP-controlled Senate has voted on Barrett’s nomination and as widely expected confirmed her as the 115th justice on the nation’s highest court.

*U.S. SENATE HAS VOTES TO CONFIRM BARRETT; VOTE ONGOING

A senior White House official confirmed that Justice Clarence Thomas will swear in Judge Amy Coney Barrett as an associate justice on the Supreme Court later this evening.

So what happens next (apart from an avalanche of whiney, angry press statements from Democratic party leaders)?

As Turley explains, the vote on Monday to make Judge Amy Coney Barrett the 115th Supreme Court justice will be more than a confirmation. It will be a dispensation, according to former Vice President Joe Biden and various Democratic senators. They have cited the vote as relieving them of any guilt in fundamentally changing the court to manufacture a liberal majority. Like school kids daring others to step over a line as an excuse to fight, Democrats insist that filling this vacancy will invite changes ranging from “packing” the court to stripping it of authority to rule in certain cases.

The problem is that the line the Senate will step over is set by the Constitution, while the proposals by Democrats would retaliate against the use of a power granted by the Constitution. Democrats are floating a parade of horribles to “reform” the Supreme Court and negate its growing conservative majority. Biden said this week that the court is “out of whack” and, as president, he would assemble a commission of “experts” to explore “a number of alternatives that go well beyond packing.” The commission would report to him 180 days after his inauguration.

Polls show almost 60 percent of Americans oppose the court packing scheme supported by Democrats, including Biden’s running mate, Senator Kamala Harris. One person not polled was the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who denounced such a scheme as guaranteeing the court’s destruction.

A New York Times and Siena College poll found only 31 percent favor court packing. That is a familiar figure: For the last four years, the same 30 percent of both parties have supported the most destructive political measures and rhetoric. Those extremes continue to control our politics, while the vast majority of us in the middle watch in disbelief as virtually every Democratic senator embraces one of the most reviled tactics in American history.

Those senators are not alone.

A host of professors (who likely will be on the short list for Biden’s commission) are giving credibility to court packing.

Harvard professor Michael Klarman attacked the foundations of Congress before attacking the foundations of the court. Klarman condemned a “malapportionment” in the Senate that he believes gives Republicans greater power, and referred to their refusal to vote on Obama court nominee Merrick Garland as “stealing a seat.” While controversial (and I was among those calling for a vote on Garland), that decision was clearly constitutional. Yet Klarman illogically calls it “court packing” to justify any act of retaliation: “Democrats are not initiating this spiral. They are simply responding in kind.”

He then says not to worry about Republicans responding with their own court packing when they return to power. He insists Democrats can change the system to guarantee Republicans “will never win another election,” at least not without abandoning their values. Of course, Klarman concedes “the Supreme Court could strike down everything I just described” so the court must be packed in advance to allow these changes to occur. Here are some of the other wacky ideas to get the court back into “whack.”

Jurisdiction stripping

Several professors argue for a court packing alternative that moves to the opposite approach: If you cannot make the court bigger, then shrink its authority. By using “jurisdiction stripping,” Democrats would bar federal courts from reviewing certain types of legislation. So, faced with a conservative court, a Democratic Congress would make the courts into a nullity to give itself unchecked authority in various areas. Assuming courts would allow such a move, it would create a race to the bottom as more and more legislation was protected from judicial review.

Supermajority voting

Another approach is to leave the Supreme Court at its current size but effectively “pack” the vote by requiring supermajority decisions. A Democratic Congress would enhance the votes of the court’s minority by requiring a two-thirds vote or even unanimity for certain types of cases or laws. It is an ironic idea since, against the advice of many, Democrats got rid of the Senate filibuster for judicial nominations when it held the majority — fundamentally changing longtime protections for a Senate minority. In this case, Democrats would designate favored areas or types of cases protected by supermajority rules, thereby manipulating the court’s votes.

Balanced bench

Pete Buttigieg and some academics have proposed disregarding any pretense of nonpartisan justices. They would convert the court into a kind of judicial Federal Communications Commission, with Democrats and Republicans each picking five justices who would then pick five more from federal appeals courts to serve terms of one year. That would make the Supreme Court a crude reflection of our dysfunctional political times.

Notably, the Supreme Court is reviewing such a partisan court system in Carney versus Adams. The case must be familiar to Biden, since it deals with a moronic Delaware constitutional requirement that the five seats on the state’s Supreme Court be divided between Democrats and Republicans — preventing an independent from becoming a justice. In Delaware, a “balanced court” apparently means you must first establish that you are from the right party before you can mete out justice The proposal would have a continually shifting court and, since the five transient justices would be selected based on party affiliation, they likely would become pawns in a partisan calculation.

Another proposal would “solve” the “problem” of a conservative majority by literally turning every judge into an associate justice. A lottery would be held every two weeks to randomly select nine justices to hear cases, with each panel limited to no more than five judges nominated by a president of the same political party. Senator Bernie Sanders actually endorsed this looney idea. It is akin to the character “Syndrome” in “The Incredibles” explaining he would give everyone superpowers because “when everyone’s super … no one will be.” Most Americans are unlikely to want to replace today’s court with a law by lottery approach.

As someone who proposed expanding the Supreme Court decades ago, I am not opposed to reform. However, Biden’s proposed commission is not about reform. It is about packing, stacking, and stripping schemes to achieve political outcomes on the Supreme Court. Biden is offering up the institution to the 30 percent demanding extreme measures to satiate their anger. Biden once denounced court packing as a “bone headed idea” — but he may now appoint a commission to convert a variety of bone headed ideas into bona fide proposals.

By Evan Gove of Porthole Cruise

The CDC has updated a level 3 warning to avoid nonessential travel, citing cruises in particular as a known spreader of COVID-19.

The update on the CDC website doesn’t leave any room for interpretation: 

Cruise passengers are at increased risk of person-to-person spread of infectious diseases, including COVID-19, and outbreaks of COVID-19 have been reported on several cruise ships.

It goes on to say the following: 

Recent reports of COVID-19 on cruises highlight the risk of infections to cruise passengers and crew. Like many other viruses, COVID-19 appears to spread more easily between people in close quarters aboard ships and boats. As the COVID-19 pandemic continues, there remains a risk of infected passengers and crew on board cruise ships.

With the CDC’s no-sail order scheduled to end at the conclusion of this month, the updated warnings against traveling by cruise ship send mixed messages about whether or not the agency will truly lift the order in six days time. At the very least, it’s the CDC reaffirming their position that it’s too early for cruising to come back.

According to the Cruise Lines International Association (CLIA), the suspension of the industry has cost more than 160,000 jobs and billions in lost revenue since it began in March. 

Optimism for 2020 Cruises

At Seatrade Cruise Virtual earlier this month, cruise line brass expressed optimism that America would see ships sailing again by the end of the year. Carnival Corporation CEO Arnold Donald even said he had a 4.9 out of 5 confidence level that it could be done.

Since then, nothing has gone right for an industry relegated to inactivity for the better part of this year. A call scheduled with the Whitehouse Coronavirus Task Force, including Vice President Michael Pence and CDC Director Robert Redfield, had to be postponed due to a COVID-19 outbreak among those at the highest levels of government.

While the call did happen a week later, news broke over this past weekend that five people close to the Vice President, including his chief of staff Marc Short, have tested positive for the virus. From a sheer optics standpoint, it looks bad when the head of an infectious disease task force is struggling to protect his own team from said disease.

While we know you want to cruise, public perception around the industry is at an all-time low and that could potentially hamstring any sort of restart for the rest of this year. Many cruise lines have already pushed their start date back well into December with others already looking ahead to 2021. 

A terrorist being described as al-Qaeda’s #2 in central Asia has been killed by Afghan special forces days ago. The national government in Kabul made the announcement Sunday that Husam Abd al-Rauf, also known as Abu Muhsin al-Masri, had been killed in an Afghan special forces raid in Ghazni province which happened last week.

Al-Rauf is listed on the FBI most-wanted list as al-Qaeda’s top propagandist. However, it’s interesting that while a decade or more ago such news as a top Qaeda commander being taken out would have featured central in American media, the successful operation was barely covered on the major networks. This also as foreign policy has essentially been completely dropped from the presidential debates or pre-election coverage.

Few details were immediately released of the classified raid as US and allied Afghan elite forces continue their operations against Islamic State and Qaeda terrorists is the area which lies some 90 miles southwest of Kabul.

Politico reports of the scant details which have been released: “Amanullah Kamrani, the deputy head of Ghazni’s provincial council, told The Associated Press that Afghan special forces led by the intelligence agency raided Kunsaf, which he described as being under Taliban control.”

The report continues: “On the village’s outskirts, they stormed an isolated home and killed seven suspected militants in a firefight, including al-Rauf, Kamrani said.”

The red-headed al-Rauf is an Egyptian national who got his start fighting with the US-backed mujahedeen against the Soviets.

Like other foreign jihadists of the 1980’s this top al-Qaeda commander was initially supported by the CIA and US allies like Pakistan at the end of the Cold War.

By the mid-2000s he was accused of conspiring to kill American citizens and belonging to a designated foreign terrorist organization.

Authored by James Rickards via The Daily Reckoning,

Elites are extremely hostile to the idea that gold should have any role whatsoever in the monetary system. To them, gold is truly a barbarous relic, as John Maynard Keynes was supposed to have said. You might as well propose bringing back the horse and buggy.

Except Keynes never said gold was a barbarous relic.

What he did say was more interesting. In his 1924 book Monetary Reform, Keynes in fact wrote “the gold standard is already a barbarous relic.”

Keynes was discussing not gold, but the gold standard. There might not seem to be a difference, but there is. In the 1924 context, he was right.

The classical gold standard ended in 1914 with the outbreak of WWI. To pay for the war, combatants printed massive amounts of money.

After the war many wanted to return to the pre-war gold standard. In 1925, for example, the British Exchequer was Winston Churchill. He wanted to return to the old gold price, ignoring the fact that the wartime money printing demanded a much higher gold price. He in effect overvalued the pound.

Keynes told Churchill this would be a deflationary disaster. If Britain was to go back on a gold standard, it would have to set the gold price higher. But Churchill ignored his advice.

The result was massive deflation and depression in Great Britain, years before depression struck the rest of the world.

The notoriously flawed gold exchange standard that prevailed until 1939 should never have been adopted, and should have been eliminated before WWII did the job.

These days, there isn’t a central bank in the world that wants to go back to a gold standard. But that’s not the point. The question is whether they will have to.

I’ve had conversations with several Federal Reserve Bank presidents. When you ask them point-blank, “Is there a theoretical limit to the Fed’s balance sheet?” they say no. They say there are policy reasons to make it higher or lower, but that there’s no limit to the amount of money you can print.

That is completely wrong. That’s what they say; that’s how they think; and that’s how they act. But in their heart of hearts, some people at the Fed know it’s wrong. Luckily, people can vote with their feet…

I always tell people who say we’re not on the gold standard that, in a way, we are. You can put yourself on a personal gold standard just by buying gold. In other words, if you think that the value of paper money will be in some jeopardy, or confidence in paper money may be lost, one way to protect yourself is by buying gold. And there’s nothing stopping you.

The typical response is, “What’s the point of owning gold? They’re just going to confiscate it, like Roosevelt did in 1933?” I find that extremely unlikely.

In 1933, we’d just come through four years of the Great Depression, and Roosevelt was new in office. People talk about the first hundred days, but he closed the banks right after he was sworn in. And he confiscated gold only a few weeks later.

And it wasn’t as if Elliot Ness was going door to door, breaking into your house and taking gold. They wanted to get a small number of people who had 400-ounce bars in bank vaults. And they got those people because they were able to close the banks and use them as intermediaries to confiscate that gold.

But now, gold is far more dispersed, and there’s far less trust in government.

If the government tried to confiscate gold today, there would be various forms of resistance. The government knows this. So they wouldn’t issue that order, because they know it couldn’t be enforced, and it might cause various kinds of civil disobedience or pushback.

As long as you can own gold, you can put yourself on your own gold standard by converting paper money to gold. I recommend you do that. I’m not suggesting you convert all your dollars to gold. Not at all.

But I do recommend having 10% of your investable assets in gold for the conservative investor, and maybe 20% for the aggressive investor — no more than that.

Those are very high allocations relative to what people have. Most people own no gold.

If demand spiked suddenly, there’s not enough gold in the world — at current prices — to satisfy that demand. Gold prices would have to rise dramatically to bring them in line with demand.

If some scenarios play out, you are going to see the price of gold rocket to the moon. And it may happen in a very short period of time. You shouldn’t expect a steady, gradual increase. Gold may to drift along sideways, going nowhere for a period. Then you’ll see a spike, then another spike, and then a super-spike. It could happen within months.

At that point, gold becomes a major force. Ultimately I expect gold to reach $10,000-$15,000 an ounce or more. Those figures are not made up. I didn’t come up with them to be provocative. They’re a product of the actual math. They’re the numbers you get when you simply divide the money supply by the amount of gold in the market.

When the super-spike happens, you’re going to have two Americas. You’re going to have one America that was not prepared. Paper savings will be wiped out; 401(k)s will be devalued; pensions, insurance and annuities will be devalued through inflation. That’s because it’s not just the price of gold going up. It’s the dollar going down. Gold is an indicator.

It’s like taking the temperature of a patient with a fever and blaming it on the thermometer when it reads 104. The thermometer’s not to blame for the fever; it’s just telling you what’s going on.

Likewise, the price of gold is not an economic object or aim in itself; it’s a price signal. It tells you what’s going on in the economy. And gold at the levels I’m talking about would mean that you’ve now verged into hyperinflation, or something close to it, because nothing happens in isolation.

It seems unlikely now, but once expectations shift towards inflation, it can be dramatic. Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), for example, is now big in Democratic circles. MMT is basically a recipe for massive money printing. If it ever comes into being, expectations could shift dramatically towards inflation.

Still, central banks will never voluntarily return to a gold standard. But if gold is such a barbarous relic, if gold has no role in the monetary system, if gold is a “stupid” investment, then why are the Russians and Chinese stockpiling gold hand over fist? Are they stupid?

Well, I’ve spoken with many of them and I can assure you they’re not stupid.

But if there’s a run on paper currencies (which is entirely possible) or borderline hyperinflation (also possible), central banks may have to go to a gold standard. Not because they want to, but because they find it necessary to calm the markets.

I suggest you buy your gold at current levels — around $1,900 — and ride the wave up to much higher levels. It’ll protect your wealth in the days ahead.

Like every market, it will fluctuate. Nothing goes up in a straight line. But you want to focus on the longer term picture. And it looks very bright for gold.

So I invite you to go on your own personal gold standard. One day, the rest of the world may join you.

Last week the world’s largest stockpile of gold was revealed when Russia’s largest gold producer, Polyus PJSC, said its untapped Sukhoi Log deposit in Siberia holds the world’s biggest reserves.

A company audit showed Sukhoi Log has 40 million ounces of proven reserves as measured by international JORC standards, with an average gold content of 2.3 grams per ton, according to Chief Executive Officer Pavel Grachev. Additionally, the estimated Mineral Resources for Sukhoi Log stand at 1,110 million tonnes, with an average grade of 1.9 g/t Au and containing 67 million ounces of gold as at 31 May 2020. This means that the monetary value of the estimated gold holdings is just over $127 billion at today’s prices.

That means the field – accounting for more than a quarter of Russian gold reserves – is bigger than Seabridge Gold Inc.’s KSM Project in Canada and Donlin Gold in Alaska.

“The estimate of the reserves is an important milestone in development of the field,” Grachev said in interview in Moscow.

Sukhoi Log, located in the isolated Irkutsk region deep in the heart of Siberia, was discovered by Soviet geologists in 1961 and studied in the 1970s. The government had long considered offloading the deposit, and in 2017 sold the field in an auction to Polyus and a state partner, which the mining company later bought out.

Some more details on Sukhoi Log:

• The audit shows that as well as economically mineable reserves, the deposit has 67 million ounces of total resources, up from 63 million ounces previously estimated.
• That figure may rise after more drilling and studies.
• Main investment is due to start in 2023. Polyus has already started spending on infrastructure for the project, including co-investing with the government on the reconstruction of a local airport.

The world’s biggest gold deposits will likely remain untouched for the foreseeable future. According to Bloomberg, Polyus said earlier this year that it would focus on smaller projects and reducing its debt ratio in the coming years before developing the giant field. The company plans to announce details on expected production and investment at Sukhoi Log once a pre-feasibility study is ready by year-end. It previously said that costs could reach $2.5 billion, with annual output totaling about 1.6 million ounces, or just over $3 billion at current gold prices.

While developing giant deposits is typically a lengthy and costly process, the field may allow Polyus to boost annual output by at least 70%. Gold prices have rallied about 60% since the company purchased it, and reached a record in August as vast amounts of stimulus were pumped into economies to curb the damage from the coronavirus pandemic.

“We want to show that a project of this quality and scale can and should be carried out, taking into account the best environmental standards, despite the hard-to-reach location,” Grachev said.

Authored by Paul Joseph Watson via Summit News,

Hillary Clinton is STILL salty about losing to Trump four years later, telling a New York Times podcast that she was “born” to be president.

Clinton made the comments during a recent appearance on Kara Swisher’s ‘Sway’ podcast.

The former First Lady was asked if a woman president would have responded better to the coronavirus pandemic, immediately asserting, “I have no doubt, especially if it were me.”

“I was born for that. I mean, that’s why I knew I’d be a good president. I was ready for crises and emergencies, and I would have done what you see these women leaders doing,” said Clinton.

four years, yet the anger still burns pic.twitter.com/AVvclbAVpV

— Jessica O’Donnell (@heckyessica) October 26, 2020

Asked about Trump being re-elected, Hillary said that she “can’t entertain the idea of him winning,” and that the very thought of it made her physically ill.

What makes Hillary’s bitterness even funnier is that she hides it by claiming she lives rent free in Trump’s head, when the opposite is actually true.

“Well, I think I live rent-free in his head,” she said.

“He does not live rent-free in my head, because I have very little regard for him.”

This from the same woman who admits she thinks about a rematch with Trump “all the time.”

*  *  *

In the age of mass Silicon Valley censorship It is crucial that we stay in touch. I need you to sign up for my free newsletter here. Also, I urgently need your financial support here.

Senior editor, Ash Bennington, joins managing editor, Ed Harrison, to talk through the social, political, and economic ramifications of the various U.S. presidential election outcomes in tandem with the risk of a more forceful and perhaps lethal second wave of COVID-19. Ash and Ed discuss how the policy outcomes in a Biden administration are more limited than what a Trump administration would be such as the fate of FAANG and Trump’s recent executive order regarding the dismissal of civil servants. They also consider what would happen to stimulus after the election, how markets have priced in a blue wave and how the outcome could be deviations away from expectations, and what the policy response might be to a rise in hospitalizations. Ed also explains what the hysteresis effect would be on the economy and consumers and how that could lead to more durable consumption changes post-COVID. Real Vision reporter Haley Draznin analyzes China’s Ant Group raising $34 billion, making it the largest IPO in history.