Trump’s Favorite ‘Prayer Rug’ Immigrant Story Seems Like Fake News and Shoddy Journalism

In a Friday morning tweet, President Donald Trump promoted a Washington Examiner article that claims ranchers are finding Muslim “prayer rugs” along the U.S.–Mexico border.

The president’s tweet excerpted a portion of a quote from the New Mexico rancher at the center of the Examiner article—an anonymous woman who claims that she’s found these Muslim rugs on her property.

“There’s a lot of people coming in not just from Mexico,” the rancher tells the Examiner’s Anna Giaritelli. “People, the general public, just don’t get the terrorist threats of that. That’s what’s really scary. You don’t know what’s coming across. We’ve found prayer rugs out here. It’s unreal. It’s not just Mexican nationals that are coming across.”

Even a cursory reading of the story raises a series of red flags—enough of them to make you wonder why the Examiner published the story in the first place.

The sole source for the “prayer rug” claim is the rancher. Her name is withheld, we are told, in order to protect her against potential retaliation from the cartels that are supposedly responsible for bringing those Muslims across the border.

The use of a single, anonymous source should always make a reader skeptical, but it’s not enough to discount the story altogether. What’s really odd is that the photos and video accompanying the print story do not show any evidence of the prayer rugs that the source supposedly found. She has photos of the trash that she claims illegal immigrants left on her property, but not the prayer rugs?

Even if the anonymous rancher is telling the truth about discovering these prayer rugs, a savvy news consumer should question the rancher’s story’s internal logic. The Examiner is asking you to believe that a group of devout Muslims illegally immigrated to the United States by traveling to Mexico and then making an arduous overland journey into America—and that they were so devout in their Islamic faith that they undertook that entire journey with their prayer rugs, which Muslims kneel upon to say their daily prayers. It’s also asking you to believe that, after carrying those rugs with them for the entire trip, they cast them aside like a piece of garbage as they passed through this rancher’s property.

Of course, the story also not-so-subtly implies that any Muslim carrying a prayer rug is somehow a threat to the United States. In an article filled with unstated and implied threats, this is perhaps the most ridiculous (and certainly the most xenophobic).

Unfortunately, fear-mongering about prayer rugs is not new in certain corner of right-wing media. An infamous Breitbart story from 2014 claimed the prayer rugs had been found in Arizona near the Mexico border, but the “rugs” turned out to be nothing more than torn t-shirts. It’s a shame to see that the Washington Examiner, a reasonably respectable conservative publication, fall to that level.

Trump’s tweet about the piece is another shameful effort to fear-monger about the threat allegedly posed by illegal immigrants. Trump has repeatedly, and falsely, claimed that nearly 4,000 terrorists have been caught coming across the border in the past year. The actual number is six. (For more on the Trump administration’s misleading rhetoric about terrorists pouring over the border from Mexico, read Matt Welch’s piece here.)

The Examiner describes the author of the piece as having been “press secretary for an immigration policy group.” That omits the fact that the group in question is the Foundation for American Immigration Reform, which advocates not just cracking down on illegal immigration but reducing “overall immigration.”

No, Giaritelli’s prior job should not in itself discredit her reporting. But in this case, her reporting should discredit her reporting.

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Small Caps Soar To Best Start Since 1987 As China Adds Record Liquidity

Wondering why stocks are soaring?

Simple really – Global Central Bank balance sheets are soaring again…

And China just injected a record 1.16 trillion yuan into the financial system… (yea trillion with a ‘t’)

Sigh…

Which lifted Chinese stocks handily…

And European stocks soared…

 

It seems the algos did not get the message the first time as Trade headlines pumped and dumped… and then they ripped…

 

Trannies are best this week…

 

Trannies are also the best performer of the US majors YTD, but the Russell 2000 is off to its best start to a year since 1987…

 

But Canada is better – up 7% YTD – the best start since 1980…

 

The S&P is up 4 weeks in a row – just like it was to start 2018…

 

 

“Most Shorted” stocks continue to squeeze higher (up 14% YTD!)

“Most Shorted” Stocks are up (squeezed) 13 of the last 14 days

But, as Bloomberg noted, bearishness remains stubbornly high, judging by the SPDR S&P 500 ETF. At 5.4% as of a couple of days ago, short interest is roughly double the two-year average (with most of that span of time covering a steady grind higher).

“Bird Box Buying”

Fannie and Freddie exploded higher on headlines that Treasury is considering how to exit conservatorship…

 

Tesla tumbled – catching down tot its bonds reality once again…

This was one of its biggest drops in history…

 

Credit Spreads collapsed again after decoupling initially from VIX…

 

Treasury yields surged across the curve this week with the belly underperforming (7Y +10bps)…

 

with 10Y yield at 2019 highs…

 

 

And investors should perhaps be careful what they wish for from stocks as the markets’ implied expectations for 2019 rate hikes has shifted back into hawk territory – now expecting 3.5bps of tightening…

 

The dollar surged this week – its first weekly gain in 5 weeks – bouncing off significant support at around 1180…

 

Yuan tumbled on the week – biggest weekly drop in 3 months (accelerating as the dollar surged this afternoon on trade talks headlines)

 

Cryptos were down across the board in a very choppy week…

 

Despite dollar strength crude and copper surged on the week with PMs weak…

 

WTI neared $45 but faces serious resistance…

 

Silver’s demise at the same time as Oil’s surging seems to have found historical support working again…

 

 

Finally, US equity markets are right back where they were at the end of the year… the year 2017!

And with a big h/t top Gluskin Sheff’s David Rosenberg, we note that “More How fascinating to have seen on the same day a ripping production report on the back of the auto sector coinciding with consumer auto buying intentions falling to a five-year low.”

So if you bought the market today on the heels of great industrial production data – don’t hold your breath.

Spot The Odd One Out…

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Pennsylvania Man Tries to Save a Deer’s Life, Could Get Fined Instead

A Pennsylvania man’s unsuccessful efforts to nurse an injured deer back to health have drawn the ire of the state’s game commission, who might fine him for daring to transport the animal to his home.

The story started Saturday at Gifford Pinchot State Park in Warrington Township, where five deer had fallen through an icy lake. For hours, John Stoll Jr. aided park officials, fire department personnel, and Pennsylvania Game Commission officers in the rescue effort. Three of the deer survived (one made it to safety on its own), and a fourth drowned.

The fifth deer, a pike buck, was brought up to shore, though it was badly injured. Stoll tells The York Dispatch that rescuers took it to the opposite side of the lake from where he and two game wardens were. Stoll quickly made his way to the other side of the lake and put the injured deer in his truck, believing the game wardens would have euthanized the creature or let it die. “I don’t even know how far [the wardens] made it before I actually got the deer,” he tells the Dispatch.

He had good reason to hurry. According to Pennsylvania Game Commission Press Secretary Travis Lau, there’s “a good possibility the deer would have been euthanized…because deer are poor candidates for rehabilitation.”

“As a rule they’re not rehabilitated,” Lau tells Reason, though he noted it’s difficult to say what would have happened.

So Stoll drove the deer home and tried to save it. “Nobody said I couldn’t take it,” he tells the Dispatch. A series of Facebook videos show the deer in his garage, covered in blankets with its head rested on a pillow. But Stoll’s efforts were to no avail. “We have some sad news,” he says in a video posted to his wife Terri’s Facebook page on Sunday. “Our main little boy—he did not make it.”

Stoll later buried the animal, telling the Dispatch that he and his family “were so devastated.” But that wouldn’t be the end of it. On Monday, a game warden paid the family a visit. Stoll wasn’t home at the time, but the warden asked his stepson questions. Later, the warden told Stoll over the phone that he might be cited. “He said it’s unlawfully taking wild game from the wildlife and taking him home,” Stoll tells the Dispatch. He says he was warned that he could receive two fines, one for $100-$200 and another for $400-$800.

What had Stoll done wrong? Speaking to the Dispatch, Lau explains that “all wildlife in Pennsylvania is protected—no one owns it.” Speaking to Reason, he adds: “When any wildlife is rehabilitated, it’s required to be done through a licensed wildlife rehabilitator. Your average Joe can’t just take in an animal and rehabilitate it.”

Stoll acknowledges the law. But he believes he still did the right thing. “In the long run, I just feel like we gave the guy a chance,” he tells Reason. The deer likely wouldn’t have survived out in the cold, but “at least I gave him a chance.”

Stoll has not yet been charged, according to a statement published today on the game commission’s website. But “the situation remains under investigation,” the release adds. And Lau suggests that Stoll might be looking at more than two violations.

This isn’t the first time that government officials have taken the phrase “no good deed goes unpunished” literally when it comes to animals. In 2013, Washington Post reporter (and former Reason staffer) Radley Balko noted the case of Giggles, a baby deer who had been taken in by an animal shelter. Thanks to a state law banning wild animals from being adopted, Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources killed Giggles.

Then there’s the case of Tammie Hedges, a North Carolina woman who sheltered pets during Hurricane Florence, only to face criminal charges. The charges were eventually dropped, but only because the county was getting bad publicity.

Stoll says if given the chance, he’d “100 percent” make the same decision. “I’d do it all over again,” he says.

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Friday Humor: Progress On Toxic Masculinity Turns Woman’s Boyfriend Into “Weepy Little Pansy”

Via The Onion,

APPLETON, WI – Expressing disbelief at her romantic partner’s dramatic behavioral shift, local woman Emily Kittleson, 30, told reporters Friday that she had not expected her boyfriend’s attempts to recognize and curtail toxic masculinity would eventually turn him into a “weepy little pansy.”

“Christ, I know the dope is trying to be conscious of the effects of his words and actions and to be more open and honest with his emotions, but there’s got to be a limit,” said Kittleson of her boyfriend Shane Magnusen, 31, whose efforts to reject toxic masculinity have begun to irritate her as she claims he has evolved into “a fragile fucking flower about everything” in recent weeks.

“Of course I’m happy for social progress and all, but this ineffectual shit is not what I signed up for.

Instead of suppressing his emotions about major issues in his life, he cries at sad commercials. Our fights used to be him screaming at me for a few minutes and that was it, not great but not terrible. Then last night we get into an argument that somehow turns into me nodding and making comforting noises while he talks about his strained relationship with his dad until well after midnight. Like, come on, I don’t have time to indulge this self-centered crap.”

Kittleson was also compelled to interrupt her statements twice, groaning and rolling her eyes while responding to text messages from Shane regarding their couples’ therapy appointments later that week.

*  *  *

And while we are at it – any thoughts on Gillette’s marketing hypocrisy

h/t The Burning Platform

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DOJ To Interrogate Ecuadorian Embassy Staff After Dubious Manafort-Assange Report

The US Department of Justice has issued formal requests to six current and former staff from the Ecuadorian Embassy in London following a controversial article in The Guardian claiming that former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort met with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in the Embassy right around the time he joined the Trump Campaign. 

According to the Defend Assange Campaign, the DOJ “has issued an international subpoena for six diplomatic staff who were in the embassy with Julian Assange.” 

WikiLeaks attorneys provided the following statement to the Gateway Pundit‘s Cassandra Fairbanks, who visited Assange in the Embassy earlier this month. 

“Ecuador’s new regime has done a 180 turn in relation to protecting Mr. Assange and is now assisting the U.S. government to prosecute him in flagrant violation of its binding legal obligations under refugee law to not do so. The pretext? An indisputably fabricated story planted in the Guardian newspaper citing anonymous Ecuadorian intelligence agents,” the WikiLeaks legal team said in the statement. “Last month The New York Times reported that Ecuador’s current President Lenin Moreno offered to illegally trade Mr. Assange for US ‘debt relief’. This unscrupulous, lawless behavior is entirely contrary to international norms on refugee protection and press freedoms.” –Gateway Pundit

The November Guardian article alleged that Manafort visited Assange in the Embassy in 2013, 2015 and 2016 – a claim which has been vehemently denied by both parties, while WikiLeaks announced on Monday that it would be suing The Guardian over its reporting. 

The article has been widely panned by members of the media, while several holes have been poked in the story. 

In December, a former consul and first secretary at the Ecuadorian embassy in London, Fidel Narváez, refuted the story. Narváez, who worked in the Embassy between 2010 and 2018 told The Canary that The Guardian‘s claim is entirely false. The Canary has also reviewed a copy of correspondence between the Guardian and Narváez in which he makes a formal complaint accusing the paper of fabricating an earlier story about a Kremlin plot to smuggle Assange to Russia. 

Narváez – initially consul and then first secretary at the embassy, told the Canary that to his knowledge, Manafort never visited the embassy while he was employed there. What’s more, his account supports points made by The Intercept‘s Glenn Greenwald about visitation rights at the embassy. 

It is impossible for any visitor to enter the embassy without going through very strict protocols and leaving a clear record: obtaining written approval from the ambassador, registering with security personnel, and leaving a copy of ID. The embassy is the most surveilled on Earth; not only are there cameras positioned on neighbouring buildings recording every visitor, but inside the building every movement is recorded with CCTV cameras, 24/7. In fact, security personnel have always spied on Julian and his visitors. It is simply not possible that Manafort visited the embassy.

The Guardian responded to Narváez’s comments, stating: 

“This story relied on a number of sources. We put these allegations to both Paul Manafort and Julian Assange’s representatives prior to publication. Neither responded to deny the visits taking place. We have since updated the story to reflect their denials.”

Further disproving the Guardian report are Manafort’s passport stamps, which the Washington Times reported reveal just two visits to England in 2010 and 2012, which support his categorical denial of the “totally false and deliberately libelous” report in The Guardian, which said that Manafort visited Assange in the Ecuadorian Embassy – ostensibly to coordinate on the WikiLeaks release of Hillary Clinton’s emails. 

WikiLeaks, meanwhile, bet The Guardian “a million dollars and its editor’s head that Manafort never met Assange.” 

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Judge Rules Against Syracuse University Students’ Free Speech Rights

SUA judge has dealt a significant blow to the free speech rights of students at Syracuse University, a private school in New York.

James McClusky, a justice of the New York Supreme Court 5th Judicial District, ruled earlier this month that Syracuse may suspend several members of the Theta Tau fraternity for private, offensive behavior—despite the promise, contained within the university’s student code of conduct, that students generally have the right to express themselves freely.

Syracuse first took action against the students in June after video footage of them privately roasting one another—making immature and demeaning but satirical comments about each other—were leaked to the student newspaper. The language used by the students was offensive, and Syracuse’s administration was right to describe it as “extremely racist, anti-Semitic, homophobic, sexist, and hostile to people with disabilities.” Note, though, that this was a private, comedic event, and the hurtful language was aimed at willing participants.

In any event, the student code of conduct states that students “have the right to express themselves freely on any subject provided they do so in a manner that does not violate the code.” Administrators characterized the speech as harassing and threatening, and thus outside the protection of the code.

McClusky disagreed, writing that he could imagine some on campus feeling threatened “after a debate on abortion, a debate on the support of Israel, or a debate on the confirmation of Justice Kavanaugh, issues upon which one would think an institution of higher education would encourage debate.”

But despite outlining a rationale for overturning the punishments, the judge ultimately sided with Syracuse. “The Court will not overturn this finding,” he wrote.

The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education’s Zach Greenberg characterized the decision as “contradictory” and reckless:

FIRE is disappointed that this court refused to apply one of the most basic principles of our legal system: Institutions must generally adhere to the promises they make, especially the clear, written policies advertised by a university in its student code of conduct and similar policy materials. Just as a college cannot take a student’s tuition and then refuse to provide any sort of education, SU may not purport to uphold its students’ expressive rights and then suspend them for speech protected under First Amendment standards.

FIRE has called out this hypocrisy again and again at SU, a university that has the words of the First Amendment emblazoned on its school of communications, yet continually displays a disturbing disregard for freedom of speech. From SU’s expulsion of an education student for his Facebook post to its investigation of a law student over his satirical blog, the university has made it clear that its stated commitment to student rights is worthless.

This court ruling will only encourage private schools like SU to create, advertise, and then refuse to enforce illusory promises of free speech. Based on the logic of this ruling, students at private colleges can be expelled for flaunting universities rules, but these colleges should fear no consequences for defaulting on their obligations. SU students should know that their expressive freedoms are determined not by university policy, but by the arbitrary whims of university administrators, who may defy student’s rights with impunity.

The students plan to appeal the decision, and for good reason. Universities that make free speech guarantees must keep their promises, even when the speech in question embarrasses or offends the campus.

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Oregon Likely to Become the First in the Nation to Adopt Statewide Rent Control

As home and rental prices rise across the country, more and more locales are giving serious consideration to a policy long denounced by economists: rent control. That includes Oregon, which increasingly looks likely to become the first state in the country to adopt rent control statewide.

“We are long past the point when we should have passed meaningful tenant protections,” state House Speaker Tina Kotek (D–Portland) says to Willamette Week. “Clearly more needs to be done statewide to give renters more security and stability.”

Kotek, along with her counterpart in the state Senate, Ginny Burdock (D–Portland), have introduced SB 608, which would forbid landlords from increasing rents during the first year of a person’s tenancy and would cap future rent increases at seven percent per year plus inflation thereafter.

These caps would apply to all rental properties save for those built within the last 15 years, and for landlords who are providing reduced rents as part of some sort of government housing program.

There are no vacancy controls in SB 608, meaning that landlords would be able to raise rents an unlimited amount once a tenant moves out. For this reason, the bill also bans no-cause evictions: A landlord will have to show a government-approved reason for kicking a tenant out.

These are all controversial policies in Oregon, where there is a state-level preemption on cities passing their own rent control measures, and where a no-eviction bill died in the legislature just two years ago.

There’re also risky policies, says Mike Wilkerson of ECONorthwest, an economics consulting firm.

“You’d be hard-pressed to find any economist who comes out in favor of rent control as a means to help improve whatever failure you are experiencing,” whether that’s a lack of supply or rapid rent hikes, says Wilkerson.

Economists’ chief complaint about rent control is that it reduces the return a landlord or developer can earn from throwing up new units, meaning you’ll wind up with fewer overall units, worsening housing affordability in the long run.

This holds true for what is being proposed in Oregon, says Wilkerson, though the specifics of SB 608—particularly its 15-year exemption of new buildings and its 7 percent cap—complicate the picture.

“Being able to increase rent at whatever you want for the first 15 years, that doesn’t really impact the financial feasibility of getting that building built,” says Wilkerson. That means the minority of developers who plan on constructing rental units and then operating them in perpetuity would be less likely to be deterred from going through with a project.

The policy would have a greater impact on the majority of developers who construct buildings with the intention of selling them off to investors. The longer-term caps on rent increases reduce how much those investors are willing to pay for a project. That lowers returns for developers looking to sell, thus dissuading many of them from going through with the projects in the first place.

There’s also the risk that rent control would give the owners of existing rental properties an incentive to take the properties off the market entirely.

While SB 608 bans no-cause evictions, it does allow a landlord to evict tenants if they plan on renovating a unit or moving into it themselves. That leaves open the door for landlords to kicks tenants out, renovate units, and then put them back on the market as condominiums that they can sell for whatever price they want.

A 2018 Stanford study of rent control in San Francisco found that the city’s supply of rental housing fell by 15 percent as owners converted their rent-controlled properties into pricier condos. Citywide rents went up, not down.

If you want housing to be more affordable, the thing you really want is more supply.

Indeed, in Portland—the largest city in Oregon—record apartment construction in the last two years has resulted in a fall in rents. According to the website Apartment List, year-over-year rents in Portland declined by 1.2 percent and are likely to keep falling.

ECONorthwest estimates that only 5 percent of buildings in Portland increased rents above what would be allowed by SB 608 in 2018. That compares to 25 percent of buildings in 2015 and 2016.

If Oregon policymakers wanted to keep the ball rolling, they should look at policies that would make housing construction even easier.

Some of that is already on the table. At the end of last year, Kotek floated the idea of upzoning urban areas where currently only single-family homes are permitted. If passed, that would allow a greater number of multi-family buildings to be built.

As a new report from the Cascade Policy Institute shows, Oregon also maintains aggressive urban growth boundaries, which prevent rural and agricultural land near cities from being redeveloped into housing. Ditching these would allow for a lot more suburban development across the state, bringing prices down.

All of those policies would be far preferable to rent control. Unfortunately, it looks like rent control is what Oregon is likely to get.

In addition to having the support of the Democratic leadership in the legislature, SB 608 was endorsed by Gov. Kate Brown this week. Willamette Week reports that the legislature as a whole has become more amenable to rent control, and that some landlord associations—historically the biggest critics of rent control—are staying neutral on this bill.

That bodes well for the bill. It does not bode well for affordable housing in Oregon.

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Hedge Funds Suffer Massive $22.5 Billion In Q4 Outflows

While there were countless argument offered to explain December’s near-record market drubbing, we said on several occasions last month that the simplest reason for last month’s plunge was also the simplest one: faced with a mountain of redemption requests, hedge funds were forced to sell their holdings into a market that had never been more illiquid, which meant hitting each and every bid and culminating with the brief, December 24th bear market.

We now have confirmation, because according to Hedge Fund Research, investors fled hedge funds as markets plunged in the fourth quarter (or is that markets plunged as investors fled hedge funds), pulling a massive $22.5 billion, the most in more than two years. The exodus added to the total withdrawals of $34 billion in 2018, or about 1% of hedge fund industry assets, the largest quarterly outflow since Q4 2016 when investors redeemed about $70 billion.

Large fund outflows were concentrated in several firms which closed and returned capital to investors, with approximately two dozen firms experiencing net asset outflows of greater than $500 million for the quarter. Despite the overall negative trends on flows and performance, but reflecting the trend of larger hedge fund relative outperformance, approximately one dozen firms received net asset inflows of greater than $500 million for the quarter.

Flows by firm size also showed net outflows across all firm sizes, with firms managing greater than $5 billion experiencing outflows of $15.6 billion. Mid-sized firms managing between $1 and 5 billion saw outflows of $2.8 billion for the quarter, while firms managing less than $1 billion saw outflows of $4.1 billion.

“Hedge fund outflows in 4Q were driven by several factors, most notably investor reaction to steep losses in traditional asset investments and the sharp spike in equity market volatility leading to redemptions” stated Kenneth J. Heinz, President of HFR.

The spike in redemptions came as hedge funds suffered their worst performance since 2011 in a year marked by two corrections, a bear market, and a spike in year-end volatility.

Additionally, as Bloomberg notes, several big names exited the industry last year, including T. Boone Pickens, Leon Cooperman and Philippe Jabre, while virtually everyone else struggled to generate any alpha (with a few exceptions ). “Outflows also included several large fund closures,” said HFR President Kenneth Heinz in the quarterly report, including instances of family office conversions and orderly, manager-initiated returns of investor capital.

Broken down by strategy, equity hedge funds suffered the biggest outflows, with investors pulling $16.8 billion in the quarter and a total of about $23 billion for the year, according to HFR. Hedge funds in this group fell 5.9% on an asset-weighted basis in 2018, the worst performers of all strategies tracked by HFR. Confirming that the redemptions were liquidity and not performance driven, even the year’s top performing macro managers, up 1.6%, ended 2018 with outflows of $12.3 billion.

There was a silver lining: event-driven (ED) funds brought in $6.4 billion in the quarter – the only strategy to see inflows – and $6.9 billion for the year, although performance weakness decreased total ED capital to $819 billion from the prior quarter. ED sub-strategy flows were driven by Distressed/Restructuring and Special Situations funds, which experienced inflows of $6.5 billion and $1.4 billion, respectively.

Fixed income-based Relative Value Arbitrage (RVA) strategies led industry performance in 2018, as the HFRI Relative Value Index (Asset Weighted) added +0.5 percent for the year, while the HFRI Relative Value (Total) Index posted a narrow decline of -0.2 percent for 2018. In 4Q18, RVA strategies experienced outflows of $5.4 billion, decreasing total RVA capital to $835 billion from the prior quarter.

“Trends in Macro, CTA, and RVA/Credit Multi-Strategies, and stronger relative outperformance of larger funds were all favorable throughout the intense market dislocations of December and 4Q. While the overall investor flows and performance trends were negative, it is likely that discriminating institutional investors which experienced or observed areas of strong performance through the most difficult equity and commodity trading environment in a decade will factor these positive dynamics into portfolio allocations for 2019.”

With volatility set to return with a vengeance once this algo-driven bear market rally ends, 2019 promises to be just as challenging for the 2 and 20 crowd.

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Global Debt Tops 244 Trillion Dollars As “Nearly Half The World Lives On Less Than $5.50 A Day”

Authored by Michael Snyder via The Economic Collapse blog,

The borrower is the servant of the lender, and one of the primary ways that the elite keep the rest of us subjugated is through the $244,000,000,000,000 mountain of global debt that has been accumulated. 

Every single day, the benefits of our labor are going to enrich somebody else.  A portion of the taxes that are deducted from your paycheck is used to pay interest on government debt.  A portion of the profits that your company makes probably goes to servicing some form of business debt.  And most Americans are continuously making payments on their mortgages, their auto loans, their credit card balances and their student loan debts.  But most people never stop to think about who is becoming exceedingly wealthy on the other end of these transactions.  Needless to say, it isn’t the 46 percent of the global population that is living on less than $5.50 a day.

The world has never seen anything like this mountain of debt ever before, and one of the central themes of The Economic Collapse Blog is that all of this debt will ultimately destroy our society.  According to the Institute of International Finance, the total amount of global debt is now  “more than three times the size of the global economy”…

The world’s debt pile is hovering near a record at $244 trillion, which is more than three times the size of the global economy, according to an analysis by the Institute of International Finance.

The global debt-to-GDP ratio exceeded 318 percent in the third quarter of last year, despite a stronger pace of economic growth, according to a report by the Washington-based IIF released on Tuesday.

But it isn’t as if all of this spending has lifted billions of people out of poverty.  In fact, 46 percent of the population of the world is “living on less than $5.50 a day” according to the World Bank…

Over 1.9 billion people, or 26.2 percent of the world’s population, were living on less than $3.20 per day in 2015. Close to 46 percent of the world’s population was living on less than $5.50 a day.

Global inequality continues to grow worse with each passing year, and that is because the global financial system is literally designed to funnel as much wealth to the very top of the pyramid as possible.

Of course things could be very different.  We don’t actually need to have a debt-based system which systematically makes the rich even richer.

One of the big secrets that nobody is supposed to talk about is the fact that governments don’t actually have to borrow money.  For example, the U.S. government could start issuing debt-free “United States notes” tomorrow, and this actually happened for a very brief period of time under President John F. Kennedy in the 1960s just before he was assassinated.  It is highly immoral for us to be borrowing trillions of dollars that we expect future generations to repay, and that is why I have been a huge proponent of shutting down the debt-based Federal Reserve system and ending the debt-based currency known as “Federal Reserve notes”.

But these days, only a small minority of the population seems to care.  We are literally debt slaves, and most Americans have seemingly embraced their enslavement.  I really like what Devvy Kidd had to say about this in her latest article…

The average American is a debt slave already at birth. And by the time he dies, his debt will have increased exponentially, thus passing on an even bigger debt and greater enslavement to the next generation.

This is a vicious circle that has gone on for just over 100 years. A very small elite has become incredibly wealthy and the masses have become enslaved by private and government debt.

For the majority of people, it will be impossible to extricate themselves from this massive debt stone around their neck. Instead they will add to the debt by taking on more debt.

Wake up!

At least the “yellow vests” in France are willing to take a stand against the systematic tyranny that is raging all around them.  In America today, most people don’t really care about much of anything unless it somehow intrudes on the bubble of mindless entertainment that most Americans have constantly surrounded themselves with.

And guess who produces all of that mindless entertainment?

It is produced by giant media corporations that are owned by the same global elitists that control our giant mountain of debt.

The system of our enslavement is far more sophisticated than it was in previous eras of human history, but it is still deeply insidious.

There is one more thing that I would like to mention today.  On many previous occasions, I have discussed how the elite have transformed Wall Street into the largest casino on the entire planet, and it is true that some people have made a lot of money in that casino.

But so many others have been deeply burned and have lost everything.  Here is just one example…

I had quit day-trading back in November but was still using a swing trading system that damn near never lost (really), until I got completely run over last week. Literally every move I made was wrong, and I managed to completely wipe out my entire gambling account. I want to be clear, we’re not broke or anything near it (still get to claim millionaire status), but holy crap did I decimate my account something stupid.

So, I’m here to tell you that the scary stories you hear from elders who quit trading? They’re true. Trading is a losing game. It’s just gambling.

Most people who claim to be winners just ignore their losses and pretend everything is ok. To be sure, some people really can make a living at it, and good for them. But the odds are massively against you. The system is designed to take your money while you’re stressed, guessing, nervous, angry, depressed, or most of all – desperate.

The game is literally rigged against us, and we need to realize what we are up against.

Tinkering around with the current system is not going to fix anything.  We need to ditch this current system and start again from scratch, but it will probably take a horrific collapse before most people start to understand this.

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Trump, Kim To Hold Second Summit In Late February

After months of waffling about the prospects of another summit between North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and President Donald Trump, the White House announced Friday afternoon that a meeting has finally been tentatively scheduled for late February, following a series of meetings involving North Korea’s chief negotiator that culminated in meeting the president at the Oval Office.

Following the announcement, the White House said that it has continued to make progress with North Korea, though sanctions will remain intact.

Pomp

According to the Associated Press, Gen. Kim Yong Chol, the lead negotiator for North Korea and a former spy chief, met with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo Friday after previously scheduled talks between the two had been abruptly canceled in November. After meeting with Pompeo at a hotel in DuPont Circle – a meeting for which Stephen Biegun, the US special representative to NK, was also in attendance, Kim traveled to the White House to meet with Trump. A State Department spokesman said that Kim had a “good discussion” with Pompeo and Biegun.

None of the parties responded to questions about the location of the summit, which will follow a historic Singapore summit between the two leaders that took place back in June.

WH Press Secretary Sarah Sanders said Trump met with Kim for 90 mins to discuss denuclearization and the possibility of a second summit, and that Trump looks forward to meeting with the North Korean leader again.

However, it’s unclear whether any material progress has been made on the biggest sticking point between the US and NK: That is, the US’s demands that the North complete the denuclearization process before any sanctions are lifted. The North has been pushing for a gradual schedule of sanctions relief whereby it surrenders some nukes in exchange for some sanctions being lifted. The US has repeatedly said this is out of the question.

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