The Future Is What We Make of It – Part 2

I want to really think differently than the very consistent liberal-media line of, Well if they just knew better they would vote differently. They’re under-informed, they’re under-educated. I think it really misunderstands something, which is that, just because people are not acting rationally in accordance with what you think is rational, doesn’t mean that they’re not acting rationally. And I think there’s perfectly rational voter behavior in voting for Trump. For economic reasons and social reasons. 

Life is getting worse. You are less comfortable in your own house, in your own town, in your own skin. Your outlook for the future is worse with every passing year. And you conscientiously voted for people through this entire time. So it is actually an established fact that the system did not work for you. This representative democracy thing. And so you go and lob a grenade at it, when the grenade becomes available. And that is rational.

– From the excellent interview of Masha Gessen via The Atlantic

In yesterday’s post, I discussed the future opportunity and danger presented by that large mass of the American public that self-identifies as part of “the resistance.” Before I continue, we should revisit a few of the key points made. For example:

With Trump’s election, the mask is finally off. Even Trump supporters admit that his election was a reaction to how corrupt and fraudulent our economy and society had become during the 21st century — first under Bush and then Obama. Independents such as myself, despite finding Trump revolting and dangerous, tend to agree with this assessment.

The only significant group of people who simply refuse to admit this fact are those who proudly proclaim themselves to be part of “the resistance.” Many of them thought everything was going just fine for the country while Obama was President simply because things were going well for them, which is just human nature. If things are going fine for you on a individual level, there isn’t much incentive to peek behind the curtain and question what’s really going on. You’re simply too busy feeling good about yourself and focusing on getting ahead. I know because I’ve been there.

Also this:

It’s tempting to just write these people off as useful idiots being easily corralled into the vicious arms of neocons and deep state psychopaths following the emotional trauma inflicted upon their psyche by the election of Donald Trump. It’s tempting to do that, because in many ways that’s a fairly accurate description of what’s going on, but I want to try to be less judgmental right now. When thinking back to the early days of my awakening, I remember how malleable my mind was to all sorts of influences, both positive and negative. This is what happens to people when your entire worldview is suddenly shattered or disrupted. Human nature is to look for an alternative narrative that can help you once again make sense of the world. Unfortunately for most card-carrying members of “the resistance,” nefarious characters within corporate media and U.S. intelligence agencies were ready with a comforting narrative which gave them permission to avoid confronting reality: Russia did it.

We should not write off our fellow humans simply because they voted for Trump, or because they foolishly embraced some delusional conspiracy which blames Russia for everything. There are tens of millions of very decent people within both these groups who genuinely care about the country and making things better. We must never forget that convincing one group of voters to hate and dehumanize another group of voters serves the interests of the power structure and no one else. People have been successfully manipulated into thinking that their fellow citizens with essentially zero power are the real enemy as opposed to the oligarchs who actually destroyed and pillaged the country. This is why I focus pretty much all my posts on the bigger picture and direct my energy to calling out those with actual power. If you spend your entire day fuming about how stupid Trump voters are, or how “the resistance” are just a bunch of brainwashed useful idiots, you’re being intentionally played by those who’re really in power.

continue reading

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Fight Over CFPB Director Shows—Again!—How Powerful Government Entities Backfire on Their Creators

Today the architect of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), attended a rally to protest President Donald Trump’s appointment of Mick Mulvaney to be acting director of the powerful regulatory agency.

Appointing Mulvaney, Warren warned in a series of tweets on Saturday, will “destroy the agency” and “turn the CFPB into a disaster.”

There is both a legal and a political side to the controversy that erupted this week when both Mulvaney and former CFPB deputy director Leandra English claimed they were the rightful heads of the agency. Unusually and importantly, the bureau is run by a single person instead of a multi-person panel. Former CFPB director Richard Cordray appointed English as the agency’s deputy director before resigning last week, but federal law gives the president the power to appoint agency heads when vacancies occur. Both Mulvaney and English have reasonable claims based on different federal statutes, but Mulvaney’s claim is probably a little stronger, for reasons Peter Suderman detailed yesterday.

Federal courts will settle the legal question. As a matter of politics, though, the progressives who championed the creation of the CFPB find themselves in a difficult spot here. They can oppose Mulvaney’s appointment to run the agency on the grounds that he will use the CFPB’s powers to radically alter the relationship between financial institutions and consumers, or they can oppose libertarian critiques of the unaccountable power vested in the singular position of the agency’s director.

They can’t have it both ways. To support the CFPB as an entity that should not be subject to significant oversight from either Congress or the White House means that the director gets to do pretty much whatever he or she wants.

Congress built the CFPB to be isolated from oversight. Its budget comes directly from the Federal Reserve, removing Congress’ ability even to control the purse strings. That means Democrats won’t be able to steer a Trump-appointed director at the CFPB even if they take back control of the legislative branch after the midterms. This has been one of the chief critiques of the bureau ever since the CFPB was created. Indeed, it was the subject of a federal lawsuit that led a three-judge panel to rule the agency’s structure unconstitutional. The ruling was appealed and re-heard by the full court in June.

“The Director enjoys significantly more unilateral power than any single member of any other independent agency,” wrote Judge Brett Kavanaugh in the unanimous opinion. “Indeed, other than the President, the Director of the CFPB is the single most powerful official in the entire United States Government, at least when measured in terms of unilateral power.”

This has been a point of contention since the inception of the CFPB. Ordinarily, independent agencies authorized by Congress—like the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Federal Communications Commission—must have a multi-member commission at the helm. The CFPB was created by Congress but a political compromise during negotiations over Dodd-Frank left the bureau with a single executive.

That’s a compromise that CFPB supporters might now wish hadn’t been made, because the unchecked power of the CFPB’s director may soon reside in the hands of someone who, in Warren’s mind at least, wants to tear down the agency she worked to create.

For what it’s worth, Mulvaney told reporters yesterday that “rumors that I’m going to set the place on fire or blow it up or lock the doors are completely false.” Still, he added, “anybody who thinks that the Trump administration CFPB will be the same as an Obama administration CFPB is simply being naïve.”

The shortsidedness is stunning. As long as the right people are running agencies like the CFPB, Warren seems to be saying, then the unaccountable nature of the bureau is just fine. The problem is that no one will always agree with the people who run government agencies, and the only solution to that problem is to stop handing over so much power to unelected—and in the case of the CFPB, unaccounable—executive branch officials.

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You Probably Should Have Bought Bitcoin, Because It’s Almost at 10,000

“I am not a bitcoin multimillionaire,” writes Senior Editor Brian Doherty in the current issue of Reason magazine. “I could have been: I was aware of the cryptocurrency’s existence in July 2010.

“I should have been: Dozens of smart people with sympatico worldviews to my own eagerly explained to me how the creation of an online “blockchain”—a reliable yet anonymous ledger of transactions—had the potential to change the world.

“And I would have been: Had I shelled out, say, $2,000 on this innovative, anti-inflationary currency even a lazy six weeks after I was introduced to it, today I would be sitting on 28,571 bitcoins, the equivalent at press time of over $212 million in cash.

“But I didn’t.”

Sound familiar?

Read the whole glorious saga of bitcoin won and lost by your libertarian brethren right here on the day that the cryptocurrency might break 10,000. I promise FOMO, schadenfreude, and other complex emotions:

One of the bitcoin-wealthiest libertarians I spoke to for this story, who asked to be identified as “Jason,” says he took what he admits was a crazy risk by sinking around $100,000—about half of what he’d made flipping Southern California real estate after starting with a small inheritance—into bitcoin in 2011. Its price rise has allowed him to live a very interesting life of travel and to give generously to liberty-oriented causes (as well as more traditional philanthropy, such as ending tropical diseases). His burn rate is $20,000–$30,000 a month.

Yet if many libertarians managed to go from rags to riches by being early adopters of bitcoin, the holders of this new wealth have been stubbornly elusive. An oft-derided radical edge of the American political spectrum may have finally notched a win with an absurdly huge potential financial upside—but the specific winners are, by and large, anonymous.

I managed to find and communicate with around two dozen people whose libertarianism made them aware early of bitcoin’s awesome potential. It turns out that converting early awareness and even early adoption into fiat-currency mega-wealth was a good deal trickier than envious boat-missers like me might have guessed.

And hey, if you are one of the lucky few who bought and held at the right time, consider dropping us a fraction of a fraction of a bitcoin. It’s Reason webathon week, after all.

View this article.

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European Union Approves Weedkiller

GlyphosateEUOliverBeckhoffdpapictureallianceNewscomThe European Commission has extended the license for European farmers to use the popular weedkiller glyphosate by five years. That’s good news: Every scientific committee and regulatory agency but one that has evaluated the safety of the glyphosate has found it safe for human beings and the natural environment. And the sole exception, a highly conflicted report from the International Agency for Research on Cancer, was marked by confirmation bias and conflict of interest.

So science and evidence won out over a massive disinformation campaign run by anti-pesticide and anti-GMO activists funded by the Big Organic. Naturally, those activists are furious that they were not able to scare the commission into a glyphosate ban.

“Today’s approval, even if only for five years, is a missed opportunity to get rid of this risky weedkiller and start to get farmers off the chemical treadmill,” Adrian Bebb of Friends of the Earth Europe told Agence France-Presse. Greenpeace’s Franziska Achterberg added: “The people who are supposed to protect us from dangerous pesticides have failed to do their jobs and betrayed the trust Europeans place in them.”

Sadly, French President Emmanuel Macron has vowed that the herbicide will be banned in his country.

One of the most clear-eyed analysts of anti-technology disinformation campaigns is David Zaruk, who teaches risk communications at Université Saint-Louis Brussel. At his Risk-Monger blog, Zaruk pulls no punches about how close activists came to derailing evidence-based decision-making:

Clearly the activists had the perfect storm with glyphosate. So many other interests collided over the last two years, with new trans-Atlantic partnerships of vile opportunists and silos of slime forming into armies of intolerance, including:

• Anti-GMO American carpetbaggers salivating at removing the chief motivation for farmers to benefit from Roundup-Ready maize and soy by manipulating the European precautionary handicap.

• American class-action lawyers seeking to exploit the EU’s hazard-based regulatory approach to create a confusion over the safety of public health exposure to profit from lawsuits against industry.

• Anti-industry activist groups from both sides of the Atlantic have united flush with funds from the burgeoning organic food industry lobby seeking to incapacitate conventional farming and create market-friendly conditions for their unsustainable agricultural production process.

• An alarming scientific ignorance at the heart of the European Commission. Many of the activist groups involved in pushing their anti-evidence agenda were involved in removing the post of EU Chief Scientific Adviser just three years ago.

• Agroecologists have been pining to return Europe to a pre-industrial Malthusian paradise, and banning the use of agri-technology was their first important step. Having their lunatics in charge of the European risk assessment process would have been the icing on the cake! Not just yet.

Only time will tell if politicians and regulators can continue to resist such chemophobic campaigns.

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This Is How The Islamic State Stored Its Stolen Oil

Amid efforts to liberate the Iraq region from ISIS, the local army has discovered new details about how the terrorists operated, including their logistical infrastructure in stolen oil (which as a reminder was sold to Turkey in general and Erdogan in particular). A recently emerged video shows secret underground repositories of black gold, which the terrorists were presumably forced to create to hide their stolen wealth from the anti-terrorist coalition.

The video reveals oil tanks with a capacity of several thousand metric tons dug several feet into the ground. In these makeshift underground shelters, the oil repositories would go unnoticed by the Iraqi military and reconnaissance aircraft.

At least, that was the case during the heyday of the Islamic State. Since 2015, ISIS’ wealth in stolen natural resources in Syria and Iraq has been decimated, especially after a concentrated campaign launched by Russian air power to destroy smuggled oil heading for the Turkish border, as we first reported in 2015. In November 2015, the Russian Aerospace Forces launched a major concentrated attack targeting oil tankers, destroying an estimated 1,000 oil tankers, as well as oil refineries and oil storage facilities in a five day campaign in northern and eastern Syria. The US-led coalition reported destroying another 280+ tankers later that month, with both sides launching further strikes.

After a series of Syrian, Russian, and US-led attacks, terrorists from the Islamic State were forced to change their tactics, switching to the use of small, hidden, makeshift refineries and storage facilities, Sputnik reports. In 2016, US analysts estimated that the terrorists were making about $20 million a month from the stolen oil, down from as much as $3 million per day in 2014.

Of course, the Islamic State is now on the verge of defeat in both Syria and Iraq, its local influence virtually non-existent amid separate major Syrian and Iraqi offensives to free their countries from the terrorists. Last week, Syrian forces announced that a patch of territory along the west bank of the Euphrates River is now the only area in Syria where the terrorist group remains operational

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Watch Live: President Trump To Address Reporters After Meeting With Senate Leaders Cancelled

Following an eventful morning for Trump that has included everything from a Twitter spat with “Chuck and Nancy” over budget and tax reform negotiations, to yet another North Korean missile launch, the White House has just announced that the President will address reporters at 3pm EST.

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Stocks Soar As Senate Budget Committee Advances Republican Tax Bill On Party-Line Vote

Somewhat calming anxiety over the tax reform bill making it out of committee, Senator Ron Johnson confirmed he would vote 'yes'…

Senator Ron Johnson, a Wisconsin Republican, pushed to change the way pass-through businesses would be treated by increasing a proposed 17.4 percent deduction for pass-through business income to at least 20 percent.

 

Johnson would pay for the heftier tax break by eliminating the corporate deduction for state and local taxes.

 

Johnson said he voted to approve the measure "based on the progress" in recent days. “I’m getting commitments we are going to get this fixed,” he said.

And a few minutes later, the budget committee had enough votes to advance the Republican tax bill. Stocks extended their gains, USDJPY spiked and gold dropped…

As Bloomberg reports, the 12-11 party-line vote Tuesday came after Republican leaders addressed objections raised by GOP committee members who threatened to block it. The House passed its own tax-cut measure last month, and Senate Republicans can afford to lose no more than two votes among their ranks to pass the measure without Democratic help.

All those North Korean nuke worries gone…

 

Stocks bounce to record highs…

 

As Gold dumps…

 

That leaves it up to the Senate (and McCain, Corker, and Flake)…The legislation faces an open amendment process on the Senate floor that may spell substantial changes before a final vote that’s expected Thursday.

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“My Crazy $17,000 Target For Bitcoin Is Looking Less Crazy”

Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,

The basis of this admittedly crazy forecast was simple: capital flows.

image courtesy of CoinTelegraph

I think we can all agree that bitcoin (BTC) is "interesting." One of the primary reason that bitcoin (and cryptocurrency in general) is interesting is that nobody knows what will happen going forward.

Unknowns and big swings up and down are characteristics of open markets. It's impossible to forecast bitcoin's future price because virtually all the future inputs are unknown.

We've lived so long with managed markets that only loft higher that we've forgotten that unmanaged markets are volatile and full of unknowns. We've forgotten that markets are reflections of all sorts of things, from human emotions to herd behavior to changes in the underlying Mode of Production, i.e. how stuff gets done, made, distributed and paid for.

Last May, when bitcoin was around $580, I distributed a back-of-the-envelope forecast of $17,000 per bitcoin to my subscribers and patrons ($5/month or $50 annually). (In June, I presented the case to subscribers of PeakProsperity.com, where I'm a contributing writer.)

The basis of this admittedly crazy forecast was simple: capital flows. There is around $300 trillion in financial "wealth" sloshing around the global economy, and another $200 trillion in real estate. (The sum of financial wealth is now much higher, due to the extraordinary gains in global markets.) I reckoned that if a tiny slice of that financial wealth flowed into bitcoin–1/10th of 1%– the inflow of capital would push bitcoin to around $17,000 per coin.

If 1% of all that wealth sloshing around looking for yield and safety decided to find a home in bitcoin, the forecasted price was an insane $170,000.

Compared to this, $17,000 per BTC looked almost conservative. But since bitcoin was under $600 at the time, $17,000 looked pretty darn crazy. But the math looked compelling to me: $300 trillion in mostly mobile capital sloshing around an inherently unstable system, and little old bitcoin was worth a meager $9 billion. Given that the total number of bitcoin was limited to 21 million, it didn't seem much of a stretch to imagine a tiny sliver of all that capital flowing into BTC.

I heard many reasons why my scenario didn't hold water. Fair enough: the future is unknown, I could have been completely wrong, and BTC could have dropped back to $60 or $6.

I repeated my analysis to my subscribers and patrons in December 2016, when BTC had reached $900.

So now we know bitcoin didn't go to $60, or zero; it has climbed to $9,500 or so, a bit over halfway to my rough and unsophisticated back-of-the-envelope forecast of $17,000. Could BTC suddenly drop to $7,000? Of course it could; given its history, we should expect dizzying declines of up to 30% or more.

The interesting thing to me is that nobody knows what will happen going forward. Not knowing is refreshing. So is the opportunity to be right or wrong. This is what investing is supposed to be about.

There are all sorts of scenarios out there. Some will be right, some will be wrong, some will be half-right, and in all likelihood, stuff will happen that nobody predicted.

Here is a chart prepared by Tuur Demeester way back in 2013. It's interesting because nobody has a crystal ball, so we're all guessing based on what we expect to happen and what we see as the primary dynamics in play.

For what it's worth, here are my notes to subscribers/patrons from last May/June. To me, this was more or less stating what I took to be obvious. As for all the quibbles about centralization and decentralization: yes, yes, yes and yes–I realize fiat currency issued by banks has certain features of decentralization and that bitcoin is vulnerable to the dominance of (or manipulation by) self-serving players. But the question boils down to: what matters most going forward?

Musings Report #21 5-21-16 (emailed to subscribers/major patrons)

Unlike precious metals, crypto-currencies are easy mediums of exchange: you can send or receive bitcoin as easily as you send or receive dollars with PayPal, Dwolla or similar services. The great problem going forward for many people will be transferring their remaining financial wealth out of depreciating currencies in their homeland to some other currency in another more stable country.

When governments clamp down on bank transfers and impose other capital controls, this will become increasingly difficult in conventional channels. Should demand for bitcoin rise, the price will skyrocket. Right now all 17+ million bitcoin in existence are worth about $8 billion–a drop in the bucket of the world economy's $200+ trillion in financial assets and a tiny sliver of gold's global $7 trillion valuation.  It would take very little to push bitcoin's valuation to $80 billion, and this would still be a very thin slice of total financial assets.

Musings Report #22 5-28-16 (emailed to subscribers/major patrons)

The primary reason to follow crypto-currencies such as bitcoin and Ethereum's ether currency is that they are outside the control of the self-serving exploitive elites that control the credit money issued by central banks and states.

Crypto-currencies are revolutionary because they are independent of central banks and an easy medium of exchange. Gold and silver are independent forms of money, but other than silver coins, the precious metals don't lend themselves to acting as mediums of exchange in an increasingly digital world.

The key point here is the current financial system is highly centralized, while crypto-currencies are decentralized. Should a government decide to recapitalize bank losses with a bail-in, i.e. expropriating depositors' money to cover banks' losses, as was done in Cyprus, the depositors have no recourse: the state sends the order to the banks and the depositors' accounts are legally robbed.

While some people believe the government will be able to outlaw the use of crypto-currencies, or expropriate bitcoin just like it does with regular bank accounts, the decentralized nature of crypto-currencies makes this more difficult than in a system dominated by five Too Big To Fail banks and a central bank.

Another reason to follow the growth of blockchain applications (the technology underpinning bitcoin) is that these big banks have jumped on the blockchain and "smart contracts" technology of Ethereum. The politically potent banks recognize that they must either adopt these technologies or they will wither on the vine, and they will not look kindly on any government effort to outlaw the technologies that are their future.

The last reason to follow crypto-currencies is their potential to gain value. In a currency-swap, bitcoin acts solely as a medium of exchange between yuan and dollars. But due to the structural limit on the total number of bitcoin that can be created/mined (21 million, of which 17 million are in circulation), bitcoin is a store-of-value currency as well as a medium of exchange.

Global financial assets total $294 trillion.

All the gold in the world is currently worth about $7 trillion.

All the bitcoin in circulation total $8 billion–an order of magnitude smaller than gold. Were bitcoin to represent 1% of total global financial assets, i.e. $2.9 trillion, that would represent a 362-fold increase, suggesting a price per bitcoin of $172,000.

That sounds insane, so let's say bitcoin becomes a mere 1/10th of 1% of total global financial assets. That equates to a price of $17,000 per bitcoin.

Impossible? let's check back in 5 years in 2021, and in 10 years, in 2026, before we declare this impossible.

In June 2016, I wrote:

The point is that value is ultimately driven by demand, and demand is driven by utility. As bitcoin’s utility increases in a world of rising financial repression, capital controls and expropriations, devaluations, etc., the demand for bitcoin will likely rise as well.

And as bitcoin’s stability and valuation increase, the potential for a self-reinforcing feedback loop increases: as bitcoin’s value rises, it attracts more capital, which pushes prices higher, and so on.

Perhaps bitcoin will remain a financial novelty; perhaps it will suffer some fatal technological snafu. Maybe some new cryptocurrency will replace bitcoin. All of these are possibilities. But at this point, given the seven-year history of bitcoin and cryptocurrencies, the regulatory acceptance of the technology in the U.S., the Gold Rush mentality of major corporations into these technologies, and the rise of financial repression globally, it seems like a reasonably safe bet that cryptocurrencies may not just be around in seven years–they might play a larger role in global finance.

*  *  *

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Obamacare Set To Drive New Wave Of Hospital Bankruptcies

Back in 2008, one of the biggest arguments in favor of Obamacare was that the legislation would help alleviate bad debt at hospitals created by people who required emergency care but didn’t have health insurance or the financial means to cover their treatment.  Of course, like most promises made about Obamacare, the exact opposite of the Left’s original theories has played out in reality as restructuring lawyers are now warning that the healthcare industry is about to experience a massive wave of hospital bankruptcies.  Per Bloomberg:

A wave of hospitals and other medical companies are likely to restructure their debt or file for bankruptcy in the coming year, following the recent spate of failing retailers and energy drillers, according to restructuring professionals. Regulatory changes, technological advances and the rise of urgent-care centers have created a “perfect storm” for health-care companies, said David Neier, a partner in the New York office of law firm Winston & Strawn LLC.

 

Some signs are already there: Health-care bankruptcy filings have more than tripled this year according to data compiled by Bloomberg, and an index of Chapter 11 filings by companies with more than $1 million of assets has reached record highs in four of the last six quarters, according to law firm Polsinelli PC. Junk bonds from companies in the industry have dropped 1.4 percent this month, a steeper decline than the broader high-yield market, according to Bloomberg Barclays index data.

 

Since 1997, health-care cases have made up only 5.25 percent of all U.S. bankruptcy filings, according to Bloomberg data. Year to date, they already comprise 7.25 percent of all filings. Emergency-room operator Adeptus Health, cancer-care provider 21st Century Oncology, and cancer treatment specialist California Proton Treatment are the largest filings. Those statistics exclude pharmaceutical company Concordia, which is restructuring in Canada, and Preferred Care Inc., one of the U.S.’s largest nursing home groups, operating 108 assisted living facilities.

Hospital

So what has caused the sudden onset of hospital failures?  Well, because Obamacare’s architects were so certain their legislation would completely eliminate uninsured citizens in the U.S., they decided to offset the costs of the “Affordable Care Act” by eliminating subsidy payments to hospitals that had previously been used to cover losses from treating uninsured patients…

Hospitals, including private rural ones, may be among the hardest hit, Winston & Strawn’s Neier said. The Affordable Care Act, known as Obamacare, reduced payments to hospitals that serve a large number of poor and uninsured patients, known as “disproportionate share hospitals,” on the theory that more patients would be insured under the law. Congress delayed those cuts several times, but didn’t do so for the current fiscal year, which may “single-handedly throw hospitals into immediate financial distress — many operate on less than one day’s cash,” he said in an interview.

 

“Smaller hospitals have already been struggling for years,” said Kristin Going, a partner in the New York office of Drinker, Biddle & Reath LLP. Both lawyers declined to discuss specific companies. Since 2010, a growing number of patients have enrolled in high-deductible health plans that force them to shoulder more of costs when they get treatment, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That has translated into more bad debt from customers for hospitals and other providers.

 

Some publicly traded hospital companies that were already under pressure from high debt loads have been further buffeted by this year’s hurricanes. Community Health Systems Inc., with $1.9 billion in debt maturing in 2019, has suffered doctor revolts over crumbling, cash-strapped facilities, as well as losses linked to the storms in Texas and Florida earlier this year. A representative for Community Health didn’t return a call seeking comment.

…of course, here in reality, things didn’t quite play out so perfectly as surging Obamacare premiums have pushed more and more people into  high deductible plans or have forced them to forego insurance altogether and opt instead to simply pay the tax penalties levied by the legislation.  Shocking that folks could simply absorb a doubling of their healthcare premiums in 4 years.

Just more proof that Obamacare is working perfectly and should be left just as it is…

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Gold Jumps, Nasdaq Dumps Into Red After North Korean Missile Launch

Following headlines that North Korea test-fired its first ICBM since September, US equity markets have stumbled (Nasdaq now red for the day), gold jumped (spot testing towards $1300) while the dollar and bond yields drop…

Gold and bonds bid as stocks and the dollar are offered…

 

And Nasdaq is now red…

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