The US Supreme Court has done next to nothing to enforce the Constitution and stop the government’s spying on the population.
Phone calls, text messages, emails, credit card purchases, state driver’s license databases, literally everything about our lives is collected as privacy-violating information.
Yet the Supreme Court – based on speculation about the government’s motives – has blocked the 2020 Census from finding out how many of the people living in the US are citizens. Apparently, the jurists on the court regard whether one is or is not a citizen as the only piece of private information that can’t be collected.
Apparently, the Supreme Court is responding to the organizers of Hispanics, such as the Mexican-American Legal Defense Fund, who are protecting their power in numbers and who speculate that the citizenship question is being used to reduce immigrants’ willingness to participate in the census survey, with the result being an undercount of Hispanics and, thus, less representation in legislatures.
Many Americans are concluding that the Supreme Court wants to make sure that illegal aliens are as represented in elected legislatures as US citizens. Identity Politics has produced a Supreme Court that regards achieving diversity more important than citizenship. The precedent is being established that citizenship is established by mere presence. If a person can place a foot on US territory, the person becomes a citizen.
President Trump’s attempt to enforce US borders is regarded as a racist act.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2G4A02w Tyler Durden
The founder of Black Entertainment Television Robert Johnson says that the Democratic party has become too liberal to beat President Trump in the upcoming 2020 election.
In an interview with CNBC, Johnson – the country’s first African American billionaire – said “The party in my opinion, for me personally, has moved too far to the left,” adding “I think at the end of the day, if a Democrat is going to beat Trump, then that person, he or she, will have to move to the center and you can’t wait too long to do that.”
“The message of some of the programs that Democrats are pushing are not resonating with the majority of the American people.”
Johnson said the current far-left state of the Democratic Party will work well in the primaries but won’t help in a general election, especially since he feels Trump has his base locked up. The BET founder, who supported Hillary Clinton in 2016, even praised some of Trump’s recent accomplishments. –Fox News
“I think the economy is doing great, and it’s particularly reaching populations that heretofore had very bad problems in terms of jobs and employments and the opportunities that come with employment,” said Johnson, adding “African-American unemployment is at its lowest level… I give the president a lot of credit for moving the economy in a positive direction that’s benefiting a large amount of Americans.“
Johnson, 73, also said that tax cuts have clearly helped stimulate the economy, while partisan politics have gone overboard.
“I think business people have more confidence in the way the economy is going,” said Johnson, who gives Trump an “A+ for the economy. “If business people are concerned about anything, it’s the clear, clear partisan politics that’s become very wicked and very mean.”
Wow! Lifetime-Democrat, Hillary supporting BET founder admits the Left has gone absolutely nuts & Trump HAS done good for this nation.
At this stage it’s no longer Trump-supporters vs. the Left.
One of the most iconic feuds of our times may soon be ending.
In what appears to be a peace offering, ending years of bad blood between some of the world’s richest people, Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, co-founders of the New York-based crypto exchange Gemini, and the people who lost out on tens of billions after Mark Zuckerberg stole their Facebook concept website, HarvardConnection, may soon join the Libra Association, the consortium governing Facebook’s proposed cryptocurrency.
“We’re definitely looking at it in earnest and we’re excited about the project,” Cameron told CoinDesk Tuesday.
Tyler, who along with his brother made billions by being early investors in bitcoin, added that in their view, Libra is a harbinger of cryptos to come:
“Our feeling is, this is the first of many FANG [Facebook, Amazon, Netflix and Google] companies to have a token project. Our prediction is in the next 24 months almost every FANG company will have a coin or be working on some sort of project.”
As Coindesk notes, while joining Libra might be a surprise move to some, considering the Winklevoss brothers’ legendary fight over control of Facebook with their former Harvard classmate, CEO Mark Zuckerberg, they now want to be “frenemies”with a mutual goal of promoting mainstream crypto adoption. Additionally, the twins are aiming to diversify Gemini’s token offerings by 2020, and recently applied for a broker-dealer license through the FINRA, which would allow Gemini to list digital securities.
The Libra white paper, unveiled last month, envisions “a competitive network of exchanges buying and selling Libra,” enabling holders to easily convert the coin, backed by a basket of stable government currencies, into local fiat.
Since then, Libra has become a smash hit if only at congressional hearings, with no less than several dozen mentions today during Powell’s congressional testimony, typically in the context of an alternative, central bank-free, reserve currency.
So far, only one crypto exchange, Coinbase, has joined the Libra Association, whose ranks also include traditional financial players such as PayPal, Visa and Mastercard and VC firms such as Union Square Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz.
Additionally, since the Winklevoss are also invested in both Filecoin and Tezos, those might offer examples of the types of “utility tokens” they’d like to offer on the exchange with regulatory approval, Tyler said.
“We ask [regulators] for permission, not forgiveness,” Cameron added.
To be sure, until now U.S. lawmakers have given Facebook’s cryptocurrency project – and we use the term loosely because what Libra is, is rather a fiat-backed stablecoin – an icy reception, even urging the association to halt development. Despite its early complications, Libra’s vision of a global currency otherwise aligns with the twins’ goals for their own exchange. Cameron said they want to expand internationally, starting with Europe and Asia.
“Our marketplace will be virtual commodities, virtual securities, and on and on,” Tyler said. “Pretty much anything that can come onto a blockchain.” Of course, Ross Ulbricht did the same with the Silk Road portal, only to end up busted by the Feds, spending the rest of his life in prison.
As for what “mainstream adoption” means from the Winklevi perspective, it’s simple: higher cryptocurrency prices, making their fortune even bigger.
“If bitcoin really is Gold 2.0, it has to have a market cap of $7 trillion,” he said. “I think that market cap is a good measure of adoption and how many people are actually in crypto.”
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2XGCUjE Tyler Durden
At the time, we felt the photo was notable, if for no other reason than one of the men pictured was carrying a ‘Bitcoin’ bag, which allowed us to joke about junior DB bankers inundating crypto startups with resumes.
But as we learned on Wednesday, the story behind the photo is much more complex – and a much worse look for the bank’s managers, who accidentally stumbled into an embarrassing PR blunder.
As Financial News reports, on the morning that DB was beginning the process of laying off 18,000 employees, some MDs in its London office were getting fitted for suits that cost £1,500 ($1,875).
The two men pictured above? They’re not traders or analysts – they’re tailors. Those are garment bags they’re carrying. Their names were Ian Fielding-Calcutt and Alex Riley, and they work for Fielding & Nicholson Tailoring.
“It was just a coincidence that we were snapped coming out of the building at the time others were being sacked,” Fielding-Calcutt, the owner of the tailoring firm, told Financial News.
On Sunday, DB unveiled its $8.3 billion restructuring plan, which involves suspending its dividend, shuttering its global equities business, and dramatically reducing its headcount, and will likely result in the bank booking a net loss this year. The layoffs began on Monday at the bank’s offices in Asia, then continued throughout the global day.
And the layoffs were telegraphed well in advance, meaning that the MDs knew they would be getting fitted for suits as thousands of employees were being let go. They just didn’t care.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2XXdZN1 Tyler Durden
Tesla is withholding employee bonuses, despite a record 95,200 cars delivered in the second quarter, according to electrek.
The company had previously promised that all sales and delivery employees would get a bonus if a June goal of 33,000 cars delivered was met. Instead, despite its record quarter, Tesla said the goal was missed by just 200 cars and made no mention of employee bonuses. electrekwrote:
In early June, they set an extremely ambitious goal of delivering 33,000 cars in the month and they promised a $1,200 bonus for every sales employee and a $550 bonus to every delivery employee, which is a first for delivery employees, if they could reach the goal.
The North American sales and delivery teams worked nonstop to achieve the goal in June and help Tesla achieve record numbers.
Two sources said that “Tesla’s management has stopped mentioning the bonuses” and that “employees are not expecting them anymore.”
Is it any wonder we reported just yesterday that at least 11 members of Tesla’s Autopilot team all left within a couple months of one another? Elon “Realistic Expectations” Musk was reportedly upset that some team members had told him that they couldn’t meet his timelines for developing the technology.
Even the pro-Tesla bloggers at electrek are forced to point out how cruel of a move withholding the bonus is:
This is a real bummer.
Tesla’s goal of 33,000 deliveries in North America in June was extremely ambitious and it’s incredible that employees came within 200 units of it.
I am still hoping that Tesla changes its mind and gives the bonuses, if only at least partial, to those employees.
We said yesterday and we will say again: this just furthers our belief that Elon Musk is going to find out the hard way that you can’t treat employees (or customers, for that matter) as if they’re worthless – especially when they’re both your most coveted assets.
We look forward to reporting on that much needed wake-up call when it inevitably happens.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2XDNz3r Tyler Durden
Conservative political cartoonist Ben Garrison has been disinvited from a White House Social Media Summit on Thursday over cries of anti-Semitism, according to Politico Playbook.
THE WHITE HOUSE told us last night that Ben Garrison, the cartoonist who drew this cartoon that has been widely labeled anti-Semitic, will no longer be attending the administration’s social media summit. As of Tuesday morning, Garrison was invited — he posted the invite he got on Twitter — and people in the administration were privately defending the invitation.
OF COURSE, it doesn’t take much to see why the cartoon is considered anti-Semitic. It shows the Rothschilds — a Jewish family — controlling George Soros, another Jew, on puppet strings, who, in return, has David Petraeus and H.R. McMaster wearing military garb, attached to puppet strings. Jews controlling the strings of government is a decades old anti-Semitic meme.
BUT IT DID TAKE ALL DAY to get the White House to engage on this subject. At first, they responded to questions about Garrison by offering a boilerplate statement saying that President DONALD TRUMP “wants to engage directly” with people who have experienced social media bias. But they wouldn’t say if and why he was invited, punting on the guest list. –Politico Playbook
The move comes after several prominent liberal pundits such as CNN‘s Jake Tapper and former Clinton campaign aide Yashar Ali brought to light a cartoon which was labeled Anti-Semitic by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL).
Ben Garrison, who drew this cartoon, will be a guest at the White House on Thursday for the social media summit.
It’s important to note the name in the upper right hand corner. The Rothschilds have been the subject of Anti-Semitic conspiracy theories for centuries. pic.twitter.com/fgp4ZPn8GA
It may be a good time to remind everyone of an old market adage: Nobody will ring a bell when market cycles end. There won’t be a grand announcement that a top is in. There won’t be a massive reversal that will make it clear to everyone that a major top is in, a top for years to come. Wall Street won’t announce it, nor will the Fed, and any warnings will be dismissed.
Nobody can call a top in advance, tops are only clear in hindsight. Not the day after, but often only months later.
In fact tops can be very sneaky, innocuous, uneventful, subtle. Indeed there was nothing special about key market pivot points in 2000 or 2007.
Here’s the lead up to the 2007 top and the action right there after:
There was nothing drastic about it at the 1570 level, the next day was an inside day, then an outside day and a couple slightly lower days following that. Nothing there suggested markets would embark on a journey toward 666 by March 2009.
Again: Nobody will ring a bell and nobody can call it, it’ll only be clear in hindsight. Heck even in December of 2007 one could’ve argued new highs would come again. They obviously didn’t, but the action was just chop and a lot of back and forth. Tops are processes. And at every single one of them Wall Street will have higher targets.
Case in point: At the end of 2007 these were the 2008 targets:
2008 famously ended at $SPX 900.
2000 was no different, while $SPX peaked in March it had another big rally into the summer to near the all time highs:
Nothing dramatic happened the day after either, or any of the 10-20 days after, just slow drip. But it was the beginning of a long journey down.
Both of these events happened in conjunction of an inverted yield curve:
…with weakening internals and participation and slowing growth. It’s the same backdrop we have now.
The only difference in my mind is how low rates are already, the massive amounts of debts that have been accumulated and the desperation with which they (The Fed, Powell, Mnuchin, Kudlow, Trump etc.) try to sweet talk markets every single day while unemployment is at a cycle low and bond markets screaming caution with equities still drifting higher:
As passive investing has become all the rage investors have embraced a fantasy, that markets will rise forever and ever and central banks will keep all corrections contained and minimized in duration.
And I can’t blame investors for believing this. They have been trained to be believe it:
$NDX Yearly:
$AMZN yearly:
$MSFT Yearly:
$DIS Yearly:
$MCD Yearly:
Stocks and indexes that haven’t corrected in meaningful ways in a decade, but remain on a steady ascent as the size of the investable universe is shrinking.
Fewer companies to invest in:
with ever fewer shares to buy as the outstanding float keeps shrinking courtesy buybacks and splits:
Ever more passive investment money buying into an ever shrinking universe of shares and stocks all covered by an expanding universe of ETFs tracking the fewer available investable shares.
Permanent levitation. Infinite growth in a no yield low growth world. Believe it to be true if you wish, just know nobody will ring a bell if it’s not.
Now we may still grind higher (Sell Zone) or we may not. After all we entered the sell zone and so far prices rejected from there. But be sure Jerome Powell will do his best to keep the fantasy alive. In 2007 the final high came on the heels of the Fed’s first rate cut. 50bp it was then under Bernanke, the same Fed Chair who said subprime was contained. Markets peaked 2 weeks later.
And nobody rang a bell. Not the Fed, not Wall Street. And investors were left holding the bag.
* * *
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via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2JwyQh2 Tyler Durden
Russian and Turkish state sources confirmed Wednesday that deliveries of S-400 anti-aircraft missile systems are now underway, with parts for the advanced Russian systems already having arrived in Turkey via transport planes with a team of Russian specialists, reportedly in the eastern Anatolian city of Malatya as well as the capital of Ankara.
Russian Presidential Spokesman Dmitry Peskov announced of the provocative transfer which has for the past year been met with condemnation by the United States – including the threat of sanctions and blockage of F-35s to Turkey – that “Deliveries of Russian S-400 complexes to Turkey are carried out as planned.”
Image source: AFP
The US this week again warned of “real and negative” consequences if Turkey completes the purchase of the S-400, which is now definitively a done deal with the S-400 equipment arrivals in Turkey. “Those consequences include participation in the F-35 program,” a State Department spokesperson said Tuesday.
Turkey, for its part, shot back on Wednesday that the US must avoid taking the “wrong steps,” with the foreign ministry saying in a statement, “We are inviting the US to avoid taking the wrong steps which would exclude diplomacy and dialogue and harm relations.”
Starting months ago Turkey consistently affirmed it’s “a done deal” and that there would be no cancellation, even as Washington urged “alternatives” such as US Patriot missiles.
But as of today it now appears there’s no further dialogue to be had on the S-400, which early this week President Recep Tayyip Erdogan declared would be a positive development for the defense of the region “and for the world”. On Wednesday Erdogan further described to reporters:
“Some people have a question about why we buy the S-400, why we make such an investment. If we have to, we will have the right to use them. If someone attacks us, we will use these air defense systems. That’s why we make such an investment.”
Interestingly, the new US Ambassador to Turkey, David Satterfield, just arrived in the country to take up his post at the US Embassy in Ankara on same day the S-400 deliveries began.
The State Department’s stance is that “nothing has changed” concerning US resistance to the S-400 deal. Concerns have been driven over fears that it would allow Russia to access sensitive information on the defenses of NATO aircraft, especially if Turkey’s military is simultaneously operating the Lockheed Martin made F-35 advanced stealth fighter.
“The Turkish authorities know the legislation that has been passed in Congress as it relates to CAATSA,” U.S. State Department spokeswoman Morgan Ortagus said on Tuesday . “We have said that Turkey will face real and negative consequences if they accept the S-400, including participation in the F-35 program.”
At least two batches of the S-400 surface-to-air missile batteries are expected to be delivered in total, however, they likely won’t be ready for deployment until October, according to reports.
The question of which side decides to blink or compromise first will be interesting, given we’re now past the point of no return.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2xKoDYE Tyler Durden
“It is very difficult to look at these markets and listen to Jay Powell and make any sense of it,” exclaimed CNBC’s Rick Santelli.
Even the typical cheerleaders are losing faith. None other than CNBC’s Steve Liesman asked (rhetorically):
“At 3000 on the S&P and 1.83 on the 2Y, how much looser do financial conditions need to be.”
Powell spent the morning explaining how much “uncertainty” there is and why that means a rate cut is urgently needed… trouble is, stocks don’t care in the least…
Perhaps of even more note, even The Fed is waking up to the fact that it is – in fact – manipulating markets…
“While overall financial conditions remained supportive of growth, those conditions appeared to be premised importantly on expectations that the Federal Reserve would ease policy in the near term to help offset the drag on economic growth stemming from uncertainties about the global outlook and other downside risks.”
The Fed suddenly realizes the reflexive impact of its policies (and perhaps the vicious cycle endgame they know they will be unable to escape from by the time this is over).
Stocks only track global liquidity…
And nothing else…
So are bonds right? Or stocks?
Simply put, it’s madness:
Nasdaq (all time closing high) outperformed on the day, but it was the S&P crossing above 3,000 that made the headlines. Trannies ended red…
NOTE – stocks dipped into the European close before rebounding.
S&P tagged 3k at the open but failed twice to get back up there…
Small caps continue to dramatically underperform the S&P…
Defensive stocks once again dominated the gains…
FANG stocks are at critical resistance…
Treasury yields tanked on Powell’s reaffirmation of uber-dovishness, with the short-end massively outperforming (2Y -8.5bps, 30Y +3bps)…
10Y Yields stalled at the pre-FOMC levels and dumped on Powell…
But the 2s10s curve steepened dramatically…
One of the biggest steepening days of the last decade…
But while the curve steepened, 3m10Y remains inverted for 35 straight days…
The odds of a 50bps rate cut have exploded today, from 0% to 23%…
Before we leave rates-land, debt-ceiling anxiety is increasingly evident in the yield curve…
The dollar dumped on the day after Powell promised rate-cuts but remains well off the pre-payrolls levels…
NOTE – The move has been extremely technical, with the dollar index stalling at pre-FOMC levels and rolling over.
Cryptos had a bad day, tumbling on Powell’s prepared remarks and the incessant questions from Congress on Libra…
With Bitcoin bashed back below $12k…
Commodities were all higher on the day as the dollar dived but oil was the huge outlier…
WTI Crude exploded higher today, back above $60 as inventories showed major draws and tensions in the MidEast picked up once again…
Gold jumped back above $1400…
Finally, as Credit Suisse notes, this has been the longest period of negative macro surprises in the past 20 years – while it of course also has been the longest expansion ever…
But, since the June FOMC meeting, gold remains the easy winner…
Perhaps the precious metal is pricing in policy failure on an increasingly catastrophic level.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2xDs8jQ Tyler Durden
Researchers in Norway have discovered radiation levels in excess of 100,000 times normal next to a Soviet-era nuclear submarine which sank in the Arctic 30 years ago – a reading which is higher than those taken 12 years ago, according to Norwegian news outlet TV2.
The Kosomolets went down in the Barents Sea in 1989, killing 42 out of its crew of 69, according to the Moscow Times. It is sitting at a depth of 1,665 meters (5,462 ft) with a severely damaged hull from sitting on the seabed for 30 years.
The radioactivity was detected near a ventilation hole which has been observed to kick up ‘mysterious’ dust clouds.
We have observed a kind of cloud coming out of this hole once in a while. In connection with the test in which we measured pollution, a cloud came out of the hole. This may indicate that the pollution comes out in pulses, says Heldal.
It is assumed that the ventilation hole at the top of the submarine tower is in direct contact with the reactor inside the wreck. This hole will now be monitored extra closely by the researchers the rest of the cruise, which is scheduled to be completed tomorrow. –TV2
“The results are preliminary. We will examine the samples thoroughly when we get home,” said Hilde Elsie Heldal of the Norwegian Institute of Marine Research. Heldal believes that the plumes might be caused by ocean currents, tides or other conditions related to the movement of the ocean.
The samples were taken as part of a joint operation between Norway and Russia which set sail from northern Norway on Saturday.
In other news, Russian servicemen reportedly avoided a “planetary catastrophe” after a recent nuclear sub accident. No cluewhat it had onboard, but we’re guessing it would do more than vent little clouds of radiation.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2XYjECz Tyler Durden
