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Authored by Adrian Zmudzinski via CoinTelegraph.com,

Miami-based Bitcoin automatic teller machines (ATM) firm Bitstop has partnered with the largest shopping mall operator in the United States, Simon Malls, to install Bitcoin ATMs at several locations. 

image courtesy of CoinTelegraph

BitStop announced on Nov. 26 that the firm has already installed Bitcoin ATMs at five Simon Malls locations in California, Florida and Georgia. Bitstop co-founder and CEO Andrew Barnard said that the machines were installed ahead of the holiday season:

“With the strategic timing of this new installation of Bitcoin ATMs at Simon Mall locations, customers can conveniently buy Bitcoin while doing their Black Friday and Christmas holiday shopping.”

Bitsop, which claims to be licensed and regulated, plans to grow its teller machine network by over 500 locations by the end of 2020, according to Barnard.

The new partnership builds on the firm’s previous installation of a Bitcoin ATM at the Miami International Airport, which it announced in mid-October. 

Global Bitcoin ATM network grows

As Cointelegraph reported earlier this month, the number of Bitcoin ATMs installed worldwide surpassed a new milestone. Data at the time showed that there were over 6,000 such machines worldwide, over 65% of which are in the United States.

Still, authorities are increasingly wary of such services. The United States Internal Revenue Service’s Criminal Investigation Chief John Fort, for instance, recently said that the regulator is looking into potential tax issues caused by Bitcoin ATMs and kiosks.

In addition to possible tax issues, Fort claimed that the operators of crypto kiosks should be obliged to follow the same Know Your Customer and Anti-Money Laundering rules as other cryptocurrency-related businesses.

During the past few years we extensively covered a bizarre surge in banker suicides, pointing out the various conspiracy theories linking various high-level bank executives and inside scandals at the very highest levels across financial institutions, and no bank had more high profile suicides than Deutsche Bank.

It all started on January 26, 2014 when a 58-year-old former senior executive at German investment bank behemoth Deutsche Bank, William Broeksmit, was found dead after hanging himself at his London home. He had been involved in the bank’s risk function and advised the firm’s senior leadership; according to a suicide note found after his death, he had been “anxious about various authorities investigating areas of the bank where he worked” (we profiled the suicide extensively in “an Inside Look At Two “Unrelated” Banker Suicides Reveals A Fascinating Rabbit Hole“).

Broeksmit’s death appeared to set off an unprecedented series of banker suicides throughout the year which included former Fed officials and numerous JPMorgan traders. A few months later, in October, another Deutsche Bank veteran committed suicide when the bank’s associate general counsel and former SEC enforcement attorney, 41 year old Calogero “Charlie” Gambino, who was found on the morning of Oct. 20, having also hung himself by the neck from a stairway banister.

Fast forward to this week when Thomas Bowers, a former Deutsche Bank executive and head of the bank’s US private wealth-management division (i.e., the group catering to ultra wealthy clients), killed himself by hanging in his Malibu home last Tuesday, November 19th, according to the coroner’s initial report. Bowers was 55.

News of Bowers death was first reported by New York Times reporter, David Enrich, who is currently finalizing his book “Dark Towers” which includes extensive first-person accounts from Val Broeskmit, the son of the late Deutsche Bank risk executive, William Broeksmit who as noted above, hung himself in London in January 2019.

I’ve learned that Tom Bowers, a former senior @DeutscheBank executive, died last week at 55 in Malibu, Calif. I knew him. It’s very sad.

— David Enrich (@davidenrich) November 26, 2019

The University of Boston graduate was most recently Chief Operating Officer of Starwood Capital Group according to his bio: “Bowers is responsible for driving Starwood Capital’s priority strategic initiatives and enhancing the operational effectiveness of the Firm’s public and private operating companies and entities.”

More notably, prior to joining Starwood Capital in 2015, Bowers was Co-Head of Asset and Wealth Management-Americas at Deutsche Bank, where has started in 2005 and was responsible for managing the U.S. and Latin American wealth management businesses, and had joint responsibility for the integration of Deutsche Bank’s wealth and institutional asset management businesses in the Americas. Bowers was also a board member of Deutsche Bank Securities: if anybody knew where the bodies are buried, he would be one of them.

Just as notable is that both Bowers and Broeksmit appear to have held key functions for Deutsche Bank’s US wealth-management division, with Broeksmit operating through the murkier Deutsche Bank Trust Company Americas, or DBTCA.

But what is most remarkable is that according to a March 2019 report by the same David Enrich, Bowers was boss to Trump’s personal banker Rosemary Vrablic, who according to the NYT report helped steer more than $300 million in loans to Donald J. Trump in the years before he was elected president.

“Rosemary is widely recognized as one of the top private bankers to the U.S. ultra high-net-worth community,” Bowers said in a September 2006 news release announcing Vrablic’s hire from BofA’s Private Bank. To lock the hire, Deutsche Bank reportedly paid Vrablic a $3 million guarantee, which back in 2006 was a lot of money for a private welath banker.

According to the NYT, Vrablic was “not a traditional private banker, and her bosses at Deutsche Bank encouraged her to be aggressive.” Throughout her career, Vrablic was instrumental in providing Trump and his real estate organization with hundreds of millions in loans. As the NYT further adds, Trump “used loans from Deutsche Bank to finance skyscrapers and other high-end properties, and repeatedly cited his relationship with the bank to deflect political attacks on his business acumen. Deutsche Bank used Mr. Trump’s projects to build its investment-banking business, reaped fees from the assets he put in its custody and leveraged his celebrity to lure clients.”

Trump’s relationship with Vrablic was so close that she was “bundled in a hooded white parka in a fenced-off V.I.P. section” during Trump’s 2017 inaugural address.

Here is where the rabbit hole gets deeper: according to ForensicNews journalist Scott Stedman, “one source who has direct knowledge of the FBI’s investigation into Deutsche Bank said that federal investigators haved asked about Bowers and what documents he might have.”

5/ One source who has direct knowledge of the FBI’s investigation into Deutsche Bank said that federal investigators haved asked about Bowers and what documents he might have.

— Scott Stedman (@ScottMStedman) November 27, 2019

Stedman also said that “another source who has knowledge of Deutsche Bank’s internal structure said that Bowers would have been the gatekeeper for financial documents for the bank’s wealthiest customers.”

* * *

So is Bowers, Ms. Vrablic’s former boss, linked to the loans made to Trump by Deutsche Bank, and was he indeed targeted by the FBI for his knowledge of DB’s secret dealings? Most importantly, was his suicide in any way a result of these loose ends?

While the answer is unknown as of this moment, we paraphrase Enrich when he wrote that after “Trump won the 2016 election, the German bank shifted into damage-control mode, bracing for an onslaught of public scrutiny, according to several people involved in the internal response.” It is possible that that scrutiny may have now cost the life of one more Deutsche Banker.

Authored by Graham Noble via LibertyNation.com,

At this point, Democrats appear to have dug themselves a rather deep impeachment hole, and at least a few of them are now looking for a ladder. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) saw this coming but could not withstand the Trump-derangement tide. They do have a way out, and at least a few of them – along with their surrogates in the media – realize that censure, rather than impeachment, is their best option for dealing with President Trump in a way that will not come back to bite their carefully guarded posteriors.

Nancy Pelosi

Regardless of what one may think of Pelosi’s political bent, she has always been more pragmatic than her more strident party colleagues. Sure, she will step in front of any camera and talk about how Trump is spitting on the Constitution, crushing the souls of hard-working Americans, and planning to detain all non-white people before our very eyes. But, for the most part, she understands political realities.

With Republicans in control of the Senate, the California elder stateswoman always knew that articles of impeachment would have to be based on crimes so egregious and beyond doubt that even Republicans would have had no choice but to convict the president.

In their impeachment inquiry, congressional Democrats have come nowhere near that standard. Worse still, they may barely have the votes to advance articles of impeachment to the Senate. As the balance of power in the House now stands, the majority Democrats can afford to lose no more than 16 votes from their own caucus in order to impeach – assuming they get no Republican votes. The math may not be on the Democrats’ side, as they have 31 House members representing districts won by Trump in 2016.

Pelosi simply cannot discount the fact that at least half – and maybe more – of those Democrat representatives will consider their own chances of re-election as they cast their votes on articles of impeachment.

Second Thoughts?

Rep. Brenda Lawrence (D-MI) is not one of those who represent a 2016 Trump-voting district.

Brenda Lawrence

In fact, her safe Democrat district encompasses part of eastern Detroit. Even so, Lawrence has seen the writing on the wall: Among independent voters, enthusiasm for impeachment is waning, and Lawrence – who previously supported the idea – is perhaps now thinking beyond her own chances of re-election.

“I will tell you, sitting here knowing how divided this country is,” Lawrence explained Nov. 24 during a radio interview, “I don’t see the value of taking [Trump] out of office, but I do see the value of putting down a marker saying his behavior is not acceptable.”

An editorial, published Nov. 23 by The Detroit News, suggests censure of the president rather than impeachment, and The Chicago Tribune followed suit on Nov. 25. It is neither unfair nor inaccurate to point out that the left-wing media rarely take up a political narrative not preapproved by someone within the Democratic Party. So the sudden appearance of editorials arguing for censure strongly suggests that Democrat strategists are leaning in that direction or at least testing the waters.

What Is Censure?

Unlike impeachment, censure is not a constitutional measure. That is not to say that censure is unconstitutional, but that it is simply a course of action devised by Congress and not described in the nation’s founding document. There is no mandatory consequence to censure, and nobody would suggest that censure could lead to removal from the office of president. It has been used most often to rebuke or reprimand members of Congress, though Trump, were he censured, would not be the first commander in chief to have faced it.

In effect, censure is an act of disapproval. For a member of Congress, it may entail such undesirable consequences as loss of committee memberships or even suspension; it comes with no penalties when used against executive branch officials. And that is how it should be, or the concepts of separation of powers and co-equal branches of government would likely be swept away in an avalanche of partisan censure votes.

Both the Senate and the House have the power to censure or reprimand, and each chamber may do it without the approval or involvement of the other. Censure requires only a simple majority. At least some Democrats, surely, are considering how much easier than impeachment censure will be. They also may be considering how a censure resolution will provide the opportunity to pontificate at length – on live TV – about Trump’s moral turpitude and failings, both as a human being and as a president.

In 1834, Democrat President Andrew Jackson was censured by a Whig Senate for firing the Treasury secretary. President John Tyler, a Democrat-turned-Whig who may have been even more of a boat-rocking maverick than Trump, was reprimanded (another form of censure) in 1842 by the House of Representatives. President James Polk was reprimanded in 1848 by the House. President Abraham Lincoln was reprimanded by the Senate in 1864.

Some members of Congress argued for censuring, rather than impeaching, President Bill Clinton, and that brings up an important point about impeachment: Attempting to remove a president from office by any means other than a general election is, without a doubt, the gravest and most consequential action the Congress can take. If the constitutional republic – with its democratic method of choosing a president – is to be preserved, a president should not be removed from office by Congress for anything less than an act that directly endangers the American people or the U.S. government.

Jackson, Tyler, and Lincoln did nothing that justified such a measure. Polk took the country to war without congressional approval – very much an impeachable offense, many would argue. How about Clinton? He was not impeached for having sexual relations with a White House intern but for lying about it to Congress.

If every politician were removed from office for lying, we would have no political leadership at all. Clinton’s lie did not jeopardize the security or stability of the United States, and one could certainly argue that his was not an impeachable offense. At the time, the American people appeared to agree.

The Founding Fathers proscribed impeachment for treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors. These are serious crimes – high crimes. Removing from office a duly elected president for anything less is congressional tyranny. Perhaps, before they step into the abyss, some Democrats are coming to that realization. Or perhaps they are simply guarding their posteriors.

There have been few sectors dripping with apathy of late quite like the oil services sector. 

On Tuesday, The Philadelphia Oil Service Sector Index fell 2% again, adding to a 15% drubbing it has taken this year so far, according to Bloomberg. Over the same period of time, the S&P 500 index has risen 25%.

Piper Jaffray sent analysts to New York recently to gauge investor interest in the industry, which remains tepid. The company’s analysts wrote in a note: “Not surprisingly, interest in oil service stocks is at a career low, if one’s marketing schedule is an indication of interest.”

They stated that marketing trips in the oil services sector consist of “a sparse two-day schedule featuring plenty of coffee time between meetings.” Years prior, such trips would often include back-to-back meetings along with group lunches and dinners, the analysts said.

Oilfield stocks remain a concern due to their leverage, profitability concerns and poor well returns. 

Bank of America even commented in a recent note that Apple, on its own, is worth more than the S&P 500 Energy Index, which includes names like Conoco, Exxon and Chevron. 

Many oil stocks now have dividend yields between 3% and 5%, but that hasn’t been enough to convince investors to buy into the weakness. “Collectively, the consensus view is that the oil service sector remains un-investable,” Piper’s analysts concluded.

But not everybody agrees. Recall, just last week we noted that Sam Zell and other billionaires were starting to circle the oil industry like vultures, scooping up assets from distressed companies on the cheap. 

Authored by Christopher Hull via The Epoch Times,

The Obama holdover heading the Pentagon office reportedly under investigation by the U.S. attorney who is conducting the criminal probe of the Trump–Russia investigation was accused of leaking a classified document, in a recent court filing for retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn.

The connection hasn’t been previously reported.

According to a Nov. 21 report by independent journalist Sara Carter, U.S. Attorney John Durham is questioning personnel in the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment (ONA). ONA awarded about $1 million in contracts to FBI informant Stefan Halper, who appears to have played a key role in alleged U.S. intelligence agency spying on 2016 Trump campaign advisers Carter Page and George Papadopoulos.

In addition, however, a court filing indicates that ONA’s director, James H. Baker, “is believed to be the person who illegally leaked the transcript of Mr. Flynn’s calls” to The Washington Post. Specifically, the filing states, “ONA Director Baker regularly lunched with Washington Post Reporter David Ignatius.”

The filing adds that Baker “was Halper’s ‘handler’” at ONA. Moreover, according to the court filing, the tasks assigned to “known long-time operative for the CIA/FBI” Halper “seem to have included slandering Mr. Flynn with accusations of having an affair with a young professor (a British national of Russian descent).”

Baker didn’t respond to a request for comment by The Epoch Times as of press time.

The filing notes that Flynn’s defense team has requested phone records for then-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, likewise in order to confirm contacts with Ignatius. The filing singles out records for Jan. 10, 2017, when, according to the filing, “Clapper told Ignatius in words to the effect of ‘take the kill shot on Flynn.’”

Clapper didn’t respond to a request for comment by The Epoch Times as of press time.

The Pentagon’s current inspector general has already found that Baker’s office “did not maintain documentation of the work performed by Professor Halper or any communication that ONA personnel had with Professor Halper.” As a result, according to the inspector general, ONA staff “could not provide sufficient documentation that Professor Halper conducted all of his work in accordance with applicable laws and regulations.”

Acting Pentagon Inspector General Glenn A. Fine in November 2017 started an investigation into charges that Baker retaliated against a whistleblower who red-flagged “rigged” contracts, including Halper’s. Another $11 million in contracts under scrutiny went to the Long Term Strategy Group (LTSG), which is run by a schoolmate of Chelsea Clinton, whom she has referred to as her “best friend.”

According to the whistleblower’s attorney, “Baker’s interest was his awareness of the LTSG-Clinton connection; his presumptive desire to exploit that to his advantage in the event of a Clinton election win; and the fact that contractors like LTSG served as a lucrative landing pad for ONA retirees.”

The attorney charged that Baker’s claims about the whistleblower were “demonstrably false,” calling Baker “partisan and highly vindictive.”

At the time, Richard Perle, Ronald Reagan’s former Assistant Secretary of Defense, called Baker “a shallow and manipulative character that should have gone with the change in administration.” Perle further charged that the whistleblower “clearly was the target, for political reasons, of an effort to push him out of government,” saying “he’s a Trump loyalist, and it was launched and sustained by an Obama holdover.”

That inquiry is being carried out by the inspector general’s Investigations of Senior Officials Directorate.

Raising additional questions, a 2016 report further revealed that the ONA had failed to produce the top-secret net assessments the office was established to conduct for more than 10 years, even with a yearly budget approaching $20 million.

Baker was named as ONA director on May 14, 2015, during the Obama administration. A contemporaneous report called his appointment “part of a wave of new Pentagon personnel moves in recent days, senior-level officials who will outlast President Obama’s final term in office.” Baker replaced Andrew W. Marshall, nicknamed “Yoda” for his “wizened appearance, fanatical following in defense circles, and enigmatic nature.” Obama Defense Secretary Ash Carter, in selecting Baker, “passed over several of Marshall’s acolytes who were in the running for the position.”

The House Judiciary and Oversight committees—which interviewed almost two dozen witnesses—concluded in December 2018 that the Obama Justice Department treated Trump and Clinton unequally, affording Clinton and her associates extraordinary accommodations, while potentially abusing surveillance powers to investigate Trump’s associates.

Jacqueline Deal, president of LTSG, wrote in an email to The Epoch Times: “My colleagues and I began performing work in support of the Office of Net Assessment during the George W. Bush administration, over a decade before the office’s current director was appointed. … None of the awards received by LTSG from the Department of Defense resulted directly or indirectly from the actions or influence of Secretary [Hillary] Clinton. Any statement or implication otherwise is false.”

Most desks may be quietly emptying ahead of the holiday but there was more than enough traders to gobble up today’s 7Y treasury auction.

In the week’s last coupon auction which due to a truncated holiday schedule took place one day earlier than normal, the US Treasury sold $32 billion in 7 Year notes, which printed a t a high yield of 1.719%, right on the screws with the When Issued, and up from 1.657% in October. This was also the fourth consecutive month of rising 7Y auctton rates, although as recently as July, the 7Y stopped just shy of 2%.

The Bid to Cover of 2.442 was just above the six auction average of 2.35, and was just below last month’s 2.457.

The internals were most impressive, however, with Dealers taking down 20.3%, in line with last month’s 20.0%, and with Directs taking down just 10.1%, the lowest since October 2018, Indirects were left with 69.6%, the highest since January 2018.

The strong auction came as the 10Y yield jumped as much as 3bps earlier following the stronger than expected Q3 GDP and capital goods data; that said, the morning’s modest concession was enough to build up substantial demand for the paper, and 10Y rates dipped modestly after the impressive auction.

After several major polls revealed a sharp decline in support for impeaching President Trump in the wake of unconvincing public testimony by aggrieved bureaucrats (and at least one House Democrat publicly opposing the move), Reuters/Ipsos now claims support for impeachment has increased.

The latest poll, conducted on Monday and Tuesday, found that 47% of adults in the United States felt Trump “should be impeached,” while 40% said he should not.

The result, combined with Reuters/Ipsos polling over the past several weeks, showed that the number of Americans who want to impeach the president increasingly outnumbers those who do not. –Reuters

The problem? Reuters sampled a disproportionate number of Democrats. Buried at the bottom of their report, they disclose:

The Reuters/Ipsos poll was conducted online, in English, throughout the United States. It gathered responses from 1,118 adults, including 528 Democrats, 394 Republicans and 111 independents. It has a credibility interval, a measure of precision, of 3 percentage points.

In other words, Reuters sampled more Democrats than Republicans and independents combined to arrive at their conclusion. They also reveal that ” about eight in 10 Democrats [were] supportive of impeaching Trump, and eight in 10 Republicans opposed,” and that seven in 10 Republicans felt the House impeachment inquiry had not been conducted fairly.

Moreover, “Only two in 10 [Republicans] said an inquiry would be justified for a president who uses his powers for unfair political advantage over an opponent, as Trump is accused of doing.”

Reuters being Reuters…

As we noted during the 2016 US election, Reuters/Ipsos wasoversampling Democrats  when they found that Hillary Clinton had a giant lead over Donald Trump – using a poll that sampled 44% Democrats and 33% Republicans.

But hey, Adam Schiff needs something to back his claim that support for impeachment has grown “dramatically” over the past two months.

Adam Schiff says that public support for impeachment has grown dramatically in the past two months.

He conveniently left out the polls from this week showing a decrease in support, especially among independents, after finally allowing public testimonies. pic.twitter.com/rLalX1PEqb

— Benny (@bennyjohnson) November 24, 2019