Tag: finance

With at least 29 dead, and over 3500 houses destroyed, the devastating series of fires that has ravaged Northern California's Wine Country has to be seen to be believed. As smoke clogs the air up to 100 miles away and with schools and sports programs shut down across the entire NorCal region, this disaster is already being called states deadliest wildfire in history.

“These fires are a long way from being contained, so we’re doing the best we can for people that have been displaced and help them to hopefully rebuild their lives” said Barry Dugan, a Sonoma County spokesman.

Have already burned more than 191,000 acres – an area nearly the size of New York City.

Entire neighborhoods have been lost…

But the park survived…

But Kmart was not so lucky…

As the following shocking aerial footage shows, there is nothing left of some of the states (and country's) most beautiful places to live…

Aerial footage shows the devastating aftermath of the wildfires in California: whole neighborhoods razed to the ground. At least 29 dead. http://pic.twitter.com/LpFgHxDgrq

— BNO News (@BNONews) October 12, 2017

But, as Michael Snyder notes, the true extent of the devastation will not be known until the crisis is over, and it looks like the worst chapters may still be ahead. USA Today is reporting that no rain is in the forecast, and strong winds are going to continue to push wildfires very rapidly across the region…

“No rainfall is forecast for ongoing fires in California,” the weather service said.

 

“Strong winds behind the front will bring elevated-to-critical fire weather threats to active fires across northern California today.”

Normally, it is one of the most beautiful areas on the entire planet, but now it is literally being transformed into a complete and total nightmare.

via http://ift.tt/2xBDLKj Tyler Durden

And the hits just keep on coming…

Until today's headlines indicating the possibility of another breach of Equifax's security, dip-buyers had been enjoying a few days' relief as analysts clammored to explain how one of the biggest cyberhacks of all time did nothing to hinder Equifax's business model. Tonight, they might just start questioning that as Politico reports The IRS has temporarily suspended the $7.2 million, no-bid contract it awarded to Equifax to verify the identities of taxpayers.

As Politico reports, the short-term suspension means that taxpayers will not be able to establish new accounts through a program called Secure Access, which grants them access to online records and transcripts. Those taxpayers who already have accounts will not be affected, the agency said.

The IRS plans to continue reviewing the security of Equifax's systems during the suspension.

 

The agency had previously said its hands were tied and it had to keep the contract with Equifax.

 

"The IRS emphasized that there is still no indication of any compromise of the limited IRS data shared under the contract. The contract suspension is being taken as a precautionary step as the IRS continues its review," agency spokesman Matthew Leas said in a statement.

For now the dip-buyers have slowed down…

In letters to IRS Commissioner John Koskinen, some members of Congress questioned whether Equifax could be trusted to handle taxpayer data and suggested the contract should be revoked.

Is Equifax's business model starting to come into question?

via http://ift.tt/2yjRAMe Tyler Durden

Has Mario Draghi's 'leak' weapon lost its mojo?

ECB officials are considering cutting their monthly bond buying by at least half starting in January and keeping their program active for at least nine months, according to Bloomberg who cites 'officials familiar with the debate'.

Reducing quantitative easing to 30 billion euros ($36 billion) a month from the current pace of 60 billion euros is a feasible option, said the officials, who asked not to be identified because the deliberations are private. While the central bank’s governors are split on the need to identify an end date for purchases, a pledge to keep buying bonds until September — with the proviso that it could be extended if needed — may offer grounds for compromise, they said.

 

Policy makers led by President Mario Draghi are becoming increasingly confident that ECB policy makers will on Oct. 26 agree to the specifics of how much debt the euro-area’s central banks will buy in the coming year. After more than 2 1/2 years of trying to revive the region’s economy through bond purchases, some governors see the recent period of robust growth as a reason to rein in the support. Others are concerned that inflation remains too weak.

EURUSD dipped a whole 15 pips on the headlines… then rallied it all back.

Typically this kind of leak is a strawman aimed at testing the market's response in an effort to gauge just how ready traders are to accept the punchbowl being removed.

In this case the now-blinkered traders in FX land seem to have either lost all confidence in these leaks, or all belief that Draghi can ever pull out without immediately piling back in at the first sign of weakness.

via http://ift.tt/2ydgOwx Tyler Durden

Authored by Paul Brodsky via Macro-Allocation.com,

Investors understand that asset markets are experiencing dynamic change (think ETFs), but have not yet broadly recognized that the fundamental nature of wealth itself is changing too. Before the decline of active asset management runs its course there will be an imperative to focus on active currency management. Wealth maintenance and creation demands a clear understanding of this transformation. 

Debt Tokens 

The majority of us are not as rich as we think. Our wealth is held in debt tokens or assets denominated in them with increasingly dubious prospects. Some accounting identities are in order.

Classically, an asset is something with intrinsic value that transcends time and money. It has some value no matter how or when one measures it. Only two people – a potential buyer and seller – need to value something for it to be an asset.

A currency, meanwhile, is a unit of account that provides users with a means of measuring and exchanging value. In a hypothetical barter economy, production itself is would be currency. Currencies representing saved wealth are necessary because we need to value goods, services and assets relative to each other.

Modern currencies are widely misunderstood. They are actually the product of bank system double-entry accounting – ultimately un-reserved, 100 percent faith-based obligations of centralized entities (governments, central banks or currency boards) to manufacture enough actual base money in the future (i.e., inflate) to settle all claims for money that was already created by private banks through the lending process. It is important to note that credit and credit-currencies are claims on money, not claims on assets. Depending upon how one counts, there is either 3 times (M2), 5 times (bank assets), 12 times (total credit market debt), or 25 times (total unfunded liabilities) the amount of claims on US dollars than the amount of actual US dollars in existence (base money). There are no plans to remedy this overwhelming leverage. In fact, this month the Fed is beginning to increase currency leverage again by reducing the size of its own balance sheet, which will effectively re-leverage banks by reducing bank reserves.

This state of monetary affairs is a big deal for financial asset investors. As it stands today, investors could not hypothetically exchange all assets (or liabilities) for base money, or even for credit currencies (M2), at or near current prices. To do so, banking systems would have to first create new liabilities, which in turn would dilute and diminish the purchasing power value of currencies in which assets are denominated.

To be good money, a currency must also be a store of value, meaning it also has to be an asset or be backed by an asset. In the current regime, there are no assets with quantifiable value directly associated with fiat currencies…other than the ability to tax.

The ability to tax is indeed an asset of governments, but one with greatly diminished value. In the US, fiscal year 2016 tax revenues were $3.3 trillion.1 Meanwhile, baseline government spending was about $3.4 trillion, including $1.06 trillion for Medicare and Medicaid; $910 billion for Social Security; $600 billion for non-defense discretionary spending to fund federal departments and agencies; $585 billion for the Defense Department; and $240 billion for interest on federal debt.2 These expenditures are rising faster than tax revenues and do not include truly discretionary government spending. (It seems legislators only have true discretion over how they deficit-spend.) 

While the incalculable value of assets of the United States government (including its strong military and hegemonic control over shipping lanes and bilateral trade) may exceed its currency obligations, such assets cannot be transferred to creditors (i.e., dollar holders) to satisfy obligations. Thus, from both stock (leverage) and flow (budget deficit) perspectives, the US dollar is a very poor credit in real terms. Indeed, other fiat currencies may be worse and all of them are effectively unreserved debt tokens.

The quantity of systemic liabilities – including debt-based credit and credit-currencies – has come to vastly exceed the forward real value of unencumbered assets (adjusted for necessary currency devaluation). It is not possible to net all assets against all liabilities without dramatically reducing the real purchasing power value (PPV) of assets. What does this imply for assets denominated in credit-currencies? Today’s wealth has been borrowed to such an extent that it cannot be broadly recognized in the currencies in which assets are currently denominated. Looking forward, we think the most influential input into wealth creation will be getting the underlying currency right.

If today’s currencies are, in realty, unreserved debt tokens, and assets are denominated and measured in them, then how does one value assets in real terms? Here’s three-step logic we think makes sense:

1. Take the nominal value of an asset priced in a certain currency

 

2. Adjust the nominal value by the implicit leverage embedded in that currency

 

3. Present Value the future nominal cash flows of the asset against future currency dilution

Applying this metric makes clear that assets – equity, debt, plant, equipment, labor, goodwill, whatever – priced in certain currencies may hold significantly more or less value today than similar assets priced in other currencies with similar nominal asset valuation metrics (i.e., P/Es, Price to Book, Cap Rates, etc.).

Not surprisingly, assets have taken on many of the qualities of currencies, which makes sense given that both are effectively unfunded obligations. Neither assets nor currencies can have intrinsic value. Currencies may only be valued against other currencies and assets may only be valued against other assets. Is it any wonder that financial asset markets have become places to “save” and that low-cost passive investment vehicles like ETFs are becoming the vehicles of choice? It was inevitable that today’s government-sponsored, bank-executed monetary system would eventually be disintermediated, and the shift to “saving” through passive investing in asset markets is a step in that process.

Value Exchange

What happens when value begins to be exchanged directly on the internet itself, rather than through centralized portals that sit atop it like toll booths? Block chain technology is effectively an open source triple-entry accounting system that includes all participants in the value transfer process. The combination of the technology, its applications, and its accessibility are genuinely transformative.

What will happen to the value of highly-leveraged credit-currencies relative to less leveraged or zero leveraged stores of value that arise from this transformation? What will happen to Foreign Exchange (FX) cross rates in a peer-to-peer world where nothing is foreign? What about the real value of assets?

Looking forward, a growing portion of value, regardless of what form it takes, will be exchanged peer-to-peer, and any value leftover will be stored in whichever form counterparties agree – fiat currencies, cryptocurrencies, commodity-backed currencies, maybe even direct claims for commodities, goods, services or equity.

Value Exchange (VX) rates could look something like the hypothetical table below:

Table 1: Hypothetical Value Exchange Rate (VX) Table – 2027

We should expect value to flow directly between producers and consumers of that production, rather than through public and private sector intermediaries charging them rent. Rentiers and sovereign authorities will formally embrace this brave new world – not out of a sense of altruism, but because the technology is already here and human incentives cannot be denied.
 

via http://ift.tt/2wS8iPM Tyler Durden

Content originally published at iBankCoin.com

This has got to be some sort of mass social experiment to determine how stupid people are.

CNN is reporting that Russian propagandists used the popular Pokémon Go game, in which players go on a real-world scavenger hunt to find and “train” Pokémon characters, to stoke racial tension by sending players to areas in which police brutality had taken place. Players were then encouraged to name their Pokémon after black victims, such as Eric Garner” who died after a NYPD officer put him in a chokehold.

To be clear, CNN is claiming that Russia tricked people into taking up a traditionally liberal cause, in alignment with Black Lives Matter (BLM), to divide America through racial tension and somehow drive voters into Donald Trump’s arms. The other logical conclusion, of course, is that said propaganda would have encouraged left-wing political activism – bringing sympathetic social justice warriors to the polls – ostensibly voting for Hillary Clinton.

CNN reports:

The campaign, titled “Don’t Shoot Us,” offers new insights into how Russian agents created a broad online ecosystem where divisive political messages were reinforced across multiple platforms, amplifying a campaign that appears to have been run from one source — the shadowy, Kremlin-linked troll farm known as the Internet Research Agency

A source familiar with the matter confirmed to CNN that the Don’t Shoot Us Facebook page was one of the 470 accounts taken down after the company determined they were linked to the IRA. CNN has separately established the links between the Facebook page and the other Don’t Shoot Us accounts.

The Don’t Shoot Us campaign — the title of which may have referenced the “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” slogan that became popular in the wake of the shooting of Michael Brown — used these platforms to highlight incidents of alleged police brutality, with what may have been the dual goal of galvanizing African Americans to protest and encouraging other Americans to view black activism as a rising threat.

The evidence…

CNN reports that the “Don’t Shoot Us” campaign Facebook page was linked to one of 470 Facebook accounts deemed to be linked to a Russian propaganda effort. The campaign’s YouTube videos lead people to donotshoot.us, which links to a Tumbler account. In July 2016, the Tumbler account announced the Pokémon Go contest to go find areas with reported police brutality

Their evidence that “Don’t Shoot Us” is Russian? A guy named Daniel Reed, who described himself as the “Chief Editor” of DoNotShoot.us, emailed interview answers for an article to student-journalist Arpita Mitra of the website IPF (International Press Foundation) in a Word document, which Mitra forwarded to CNN. Upon analyzing the document’s metadata, CNN claims the Russian word “????????” (“name”) was found in the document’s properties. 

From that, CNN says two cybersecurity experts who reviewed the document said it was likely created on a computer or program running Russian as its primary language.

Not quite a smoking gun – but CNN has decided to run with it. 

The motive…

CNN can’t really figure out why the Russians would take up primarily liberal social justice causes, writing “It’s unclear what the people behind the contest hoped to accomplish, though it may have been to remind people living near places where these incidents had taken place of what had happened and to upset or anger them.”

Who participated?

Nobody, apparently.

CNN has not found any evidence that any Pokémon Go users attempted to enter the contest, or whether any of the Amazon Gift Cards that were promised were ever awarded — or, indeed, whether the people who designed the contest ever had any intention of awarding the prizes.

There you have it – Russians influenced US politics by taking up liberal social justice activism in alignment with Black Lives Matter, their endgame being to stoke racial tensions and somehow, some way, influence the election in favor of Donald Trump.

Follow on Twitter @ZeroPointNow § Subscribe to our YouTube channel

via http://ift.tt/2i7Q6iq ZeroPointNow

      “The time to buy is when after there’s blood water in the streets.”

As 1,000’s of families along the Texas shoreline continue to struggle with putting their lives back together following the apocalyptic landfall of Hurricane Harvey roughly 6 weeks ago, vulture investors are increasingly swooping in to exploit their misery with offers to buy flooded homes for cents on the dollar.  As Bloomberg points out this morning, one such investor is Bryan Schild who has sourced capital from local “hard-money lenders” to scoop up 30 flooded homes for as little as 40 cents on the dollar.

Bryan Schild drives through the byways of Houston looking for what could be the investment opportunity of a lifetime: homes selling for as little as 40¢ on the dollar. “We Pay Cash For Flooded Homes $$$$$$$$ Don’t fix it, sell it. Quick close,” read the signs piled in the back seat of his Ford pickup.

 

Schild stops by a ranch-style house where 74-year-old Paul Matlock lives with his wife, disabled from multiple sclerosis. Matlock is desperate to leave and is considering Schild’s offer of $120,000—half the home’s value three weeks earlier. A half-dozen other investors have made offers, one as low as $55,000. “The whole thing makes me feel like there’s a bunch of vultures sitting on my back fence,” Matlock says. “They’re waiting for the dead body to fall over.”

 

It’s axiomatic on Wall Street that the time to buy is when fear overtakes greed—when blood (or, in this case, water) is in the streets. Now some are eyeing the billions of dollars in hurricane-ravaged property in Texas and Florida and deciding it may be the time to take out their checkbooks. Investors such as Schild figure they can buy low, either fix up and flip the houses or rent them out for several years, and unload them later, doubling their money or more.

And if exploiting the elderly isn’t enough to make you a little queasy, how about taking advantage of a disabled Army vet who has been forced to live out of a hotel room and eat two meals a day just to save a little cash after he lost his home to Hurricane Harvey…

One of Schild’s prospects is Joseph Hernandez, a disabled U.S. Army veteran married to a housekeeper. The couple are living in a hotel and saving money by eating only two meals a day. Schild has made them a painful offer. If they walk away from their two-bedroom house, worth $127,000 before Hurricane Harvey, Schild will pick up the mortgage payments, paying nothing else. Although he says he sympathizes with the Hernandezes’ plight, he thinks the offer is fair because he figures the home is now worth less than its $65,000 mortgage.

 

Hernandez is in a bind. He didn’t buy flood insurance because his house wasn’t in a high-risk area. He can’t afford to rebuild, and he’s been told he’s eligible for only $23,000 in federal assistance. If he turns over the deed, he’s looking at losing the entire $60,000 in equity he had before the flood. “It’s blurry, what’s coming,” he says. “We’ll probably have to sell to an investor, and that’s not good. We were forced out.”

 

Hernandez isn’t ready to take Schild’s deal. But Matlock, who rescued his disabled wife from chest-high water, is tempted by the investor’s $120,000 offer. Their home, now stripped to the beams, has flooded twice in two years. Schild says Matlock should be able to recover much of his loss on the house’s value through federal flood insurance. (In past storms, homeowners have complained the program lowballed them.) Before he leaves, he asks Matlock to spread the word. “Anybody looking to sell, tell them to call me,” he says. “I’ll give them a bid.”

But, it’s not just small-time, local investors looking to earn big profits from the misery of displaced Texans.  Nope, wall street investors, led by Bain Capital, are also getting involved.

The cycle begins with small-time investors such as Schild, who’s bought more than 30 waterlogged houses for an average $175,000 apiece. Then Wall Street swoops in. Gary Beasley, former chief executive officer of Waypoint Homes, also sees an opportunity. He’s pitching private equity firms and pension funds on the potential profit in buying flooded homes, repairing them, and renting them back to homeowners.

 

Bain Capital LP and billionaire Marc Benioff, co-founder of Salesforce.com Inc., are backing Beasley’s two-year-old company, Roofstock Inc. It runs a website where investors can buy and sell single-family rental properties. Beasley thinks owner-occupants may be interested in selling there, too, and that flooded neighborhoods are the Next Big Thing. “It’s much like the housing crisis, when the institutional guys came in to buy homes nobody wanted,” he says. Like other investors, Beasley and Schild view themselves as helping homeowners to move on and Houston to rebuild.

Of course, as Andrea Heuson, a finance professor at the University of Miami, points out, most of the people selling aren’t doing so because of a lack of financial sophistication that impairs their ability to comprehend the fact that they’re getting shafted but rather just a complete lack of alternatives.

Others take a less rosy view. “What worries me is people making pretty dramatic decisions without the education to figure out what the alternatives are and without looking at the situation rationally,” says Andrea Heuson, a finance professor at the University of Miami who specializes in mortgages. Some of those considering Beasley’s strategy don’t want to be named for fear of looking like catastrophe profiteers, Beasley says.

 

Many homeowners would be forgiven for panicking. During hurricanes Harvey and Irma, wind and water damaged almost 1.8 million homes, causing uninsured flood losses of as much as $57 billion, according to CoreLogic Inc., a real estate data firm. Homeowners without federal flood insurance are most likely to be desperate. Those with policies don’t yet know how much they’ll get for their losses, which is key to deciding whether it makes sense to sell.

On the upside, these displaced families will be able to buy their homes back from Bain at double in the price in 5 years or so…

via http://ift.tt/2xBAbzR Tyler Durden

Is Donald Trump precipitating a crisis of American democracy?

For some the answer is an emphatic “yes”. Trump’s disregard for the institutions and political norms of U.S. democracy is imperiling the Republic. The sooner his presidency collapses the sooner the healing can begin and the ship of state righted.

For others Trump is not the villain in this drama. Rather, his young presidency is the conduit, not the cause, of Americans’ deep-seated anger towards a privileged and self-dealing Washington elite. Trump’s disruption of politics as usual is what America needs to start the process of restoring democracy by the people, for the people.

Is Trump the cause or the symptom: that is the topic of today’s semi-annual Munk Debates, which start at 7pm ET in Toronto, and where arguing for the resolution will be senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and syndicated columnist with The Washington Post, E.J. Dionne, Jr. He will be joined by Andrew Sullivan, New York magazine editor and blogger.

Speaking against the resolution will be former Speaker of the United States House of Representatives, Newt Gingrich as well as Kimberley Strassel, senior editorial writer and member of the editorial board for the Wall Street Journal.

Rudyard Griffiths, director and moderator of the Munk Debates, says: “The future and fate of American democracy concerns everyone. This debate promises to bring into sharp contrast the critical issues driving a tumultuous moment in American politics.”

The Autumn 2017 Munk Debate will move the motion: be it resolved, American democracy is in its worst crisis in a generation and Donald J. Trump is to blame…

The Munk Debates are Canada’s preeminent forum for leading thinkers to discuss the pressing issues of our time. Two debates are held each year in Toronto, one in the spring and one in the autumn. Previous Munk Debate participants include former British prime minister Tony Blair, Henry Kissinger, Christopher Hitchens, Samantha Power, Paul Krugman, Fareed Zakaria, Dambisa Moyo, Mia Farrow, Malcolm Gladwell, Nigel Farage, Simon Schama, Louse Arbour and Glenn Greenwald.

Watch the debate live below (link).

via http://ift.tt/2yeV8Aa Tyler Durden

Authored by Will Ellis via Free Market Shooter blog,

Saying the situation in Mexico is bad is a gross understatement.

Since the marine-lead capture of notorious drug lord Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman in Sinaloa back in 2016 and his subsequent extradition to the US in 2017, drug-related violence has skyrocketed in his native land.

Multiple cartels have risen up to take El Chapo’s place, and the casualties have been out of control. In the first two quarters of 2017 alone, more than 12,500 people have met their demise, either at the hands of the cartels or while caught in their cross-fire. That’s at least 2,000 dead on a monthly basis.

El Chapo’s absence sparked this violence in a number of ways, not least of which is the rivalry among cartels gunning for the number one spot. Everyone wants to be the grande queso of the region. The Sinaloa cartel is the most profitable cartel in Mexico and, as Mel Brooks once said, “It’s good to be the king.”

Consequently, there is a severe Mexican standoff of sorts going on between three groups including Guzman’s past associates and the ruthless former-soldados of the Beltran Levya Cartel and the Jalisco New Generation Cartel.

As anyone who’s ever watched The Sopranos can probably tell, there is rarely an agreeable plan in place for the changing of the guard when it comes to violent organized crime organizations. The Sinaloa Cartel is hardly an exception to that rule.

The part that should alarm Americans the most is the glut of influence that El Chapo and his clan amassed near the end of his reign. At the time of his recapture (El Chapo was originally captured in 1993 but allegedly escaped from prison in a laundry basket), Guzman had taken control of the vast majority of trafficking routes leading into the US.

With all of these factions fighting for control of this multi-billion dollar empire, the violence is only escalating. And it’s going to get worse now that the old cartels El Chapo had undermined are rising back up to reclaim their stronghold.

Members of the Zeta cartel

The scariest part of all is how vicious they have become. Like feral animals cornered, they are striking back with ferocity against any and all that stand in their way, whether it is rival criminals or government security personnel. And as they have proven time and again, they’re not afraid to kill their own.

A simple Google search for “chainsaw execution” returns a long number of horrific videos. Traitors or even suspected traitors end up in ditches alongside adversaries across Mexico City and beyond.

And as with the Islamic terror movement, the splintering is becoming great with more and more criminal organizations fragmenting into independent groups, and the in-fighting is intensifying.

While all of this began to transpire, new kids on the block entered the picture, looking for their piece of the proverbial pie. JNG (Jalisco New Generation) was founded in 2009 by Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes. Cervantes isn’t battling windmills as his last name would suggest, but he’s every bit as much of a menace to the Simaloa Cartel as his first name would.

JNG fronts as if they’re a nationalistic group, even going so far as to try and curry favor with the Mexican government, but they have proven themselves to be every bit as barbaric as the other animals looking to replace El Chapo.

How barbaric? Well, how barbaric is cannibalism? That’s right, JNG force their initiates to dine on the flesh of their victims. Fitting when one considers that members of Jalisco New Generation boast nicknames like “The Vulture.”

They are said to be more brutal than the notoriously brutal Los Zetas, which is really saying something. After all, the leader of the Zetas chopped up a six-year old girl with an axe.

For those familiar with Mexico’s past, this will probably seem like history repeating itself. Which it is. Every time the Mexican government has taken down a big-time drug trafficker, it has resulted in severe bedlam with every blood-lusting drug pusher looking to take the last guy’s throne.

If you remember the US takedown of Pablo Escobar, you probably remember the subsequent splintering of the Colombian drug trade. The current situation is not much different. Except for one vital factor that hasn’t been addressed nearly as much as it should be.

Mexico’s street war is being fought with guns from other countries. Between 2009 and 2014 alone, US guns in excess of 73,000 were seized by the Mexican government. Powerful, off the shelf semi-automatic rifles like the AR-15 are being legally purchased in US border states and are then smuggled into the country, owing to their relatively low cost and lax gun laws in some border states.

Even as legislation is passed in the United States to limit or restrict the availability of firearms, another ongoing conundrum is rearing its ugly head. That is the transportation of unfinished gun parts into Mexico from the US. Taking advantage of a loophole in the US Gun Control Act, members of these sinister cartels are able to purchase all of the components of these rifles and move them into the country for the purpose of firearm assembly.

It’s a move that is ramping up the illegal gun trade and fueling the neverending battle for power among organized crime members.

But the US is not the real problem here. The mainstream media would have us believe that 90% of the firearms used to commit crimes in Mexico come from America when, in actuality, the real figure is closer to 16%.

The real problem is both a local one and a global one. On the local front, Mexicans are severely limited when it comes to legally obtaining weapons on their home turf. Since there are no private sector gun stores in Mexico, citizens must purchase them through the Defense Department’s Arms and Ammunition Marketing Division (UCAM).

The UCAM puts fastidious restrictions on certain calibers, and the laws are quite strict with the average citizen having to get government approval before they can obtain one. As a result, illegal gun sales have gone through the roof, not only among members of organized crime syndicates, but among the wealthier individuals who reside in Mexico, individuals who are dissatisfied with the lack of desired calibers.

Mexico’s booming black market sees rocket launchers coming from places like Spain and AK-47s coming from China. China has become one of the most common suppliers of military grade weapons in the region. These include fully automatic assault rifles and hand grenades.

Hezbollah and Russian organized crime groups have gotten in on the action, supplying firearms to groups in the region such as FARC. Guns are also smuggled in from South America.

Israeli Galil machine guns and European shotguns are among the other hot sellers. In addition to recent evidence suggesting that many among the cartels are doing business with an Israeli dealer or dealers, past trade in Latin America points to Belgium, the Czech Republic and Germany being involved in legal export of small arms and light weapons as well.

Many weapons, such as M60 machine gun and 40 mm grenades, arrive from the military arsenal of Guatemala (which the US government sold and/or furnished to the nation). El Chapo had quite the arsenal in his hideout before his capture; among the items on hand were a Soviet RPG, what appeared to be South Korean hand grenades, and a Barrett M82 .50BMG rifle from the Obama administration’s “Fast and Furious” program.

Weapons recovered from El Chapo’s hideout, including a Barrett M82 .50BMG provided from “Operation Fast and Furious”

Since El Chapo’s departure, things have only ramped up with exported weapons coming in from Italy, Turkey and beyond. Back in 2005, it was reported that the barbaric street gang MS-13 had most likely accrued around 100 M72 Light Antitank Weapons (LAWs) from Honduras and had passed them along to the cartels as a good faith gesture.

These are iron clad facts that aren’t often documented in mainstream news coverage, nor are they acknowledged by people like Attorney General Eric Holder and the Obama administration, who started the whole “ninety percent” myth in an effort to push stricter gun legislation in the US.

What’s even more incredible is how this yarn that Holder and company spun was used to justify the Fast and Furious debacle, a grossly failed operation by the Arizona Field Office of the United States Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) which deliberately allowed licensed firearms dealers to sell guns to illegal straw buyers in a botched attempt at tracing them to Mexican cartels.

Ultimately, this operation enabled El Chapo to build up his arsenal, an arsenal he used to attack Border Patrol and Mexican government officials before his recapture. It’s a sad, ugly fact that the weapons that are supposed to be used against the narcos end up being used by the narcos. But it’s an even sadder and uglier fact that the mainstream news would have the general public believe that the US is chiefly responsible for the glut of firearms making their way into Mexico City and other cartel strongholds.

Despite this day-to-day tug of war between various factions of the cartels, the drug trade has continued to thrive with exports to the US reaching grandiose proportions.

Every action has its consequence and the consequence of the growing number of International drug sales is more and more bloodshed. The carnage is now spilling over into other regions of the country including areas that were previously hot spots for tourists.

Places that used to be virtually drug-free are now infested with criminal activity. Acapulco, once a beach resort town, is now the murder capital of Mexico with the casualty rate reaching record highs. American tourists have even found themselves among the victims of the violence in places like Cancun.

But it’s not just America that should be concerned about the Mexican drug war. Canadians should also be alarmed about the trouble that’s facing us all. The Mexican conflict started to spill over into Canada in 2009, posing a substantial security problem, and influenced a rash of British Colombia gang murders.

As far back as 2013, the Mexican cartels were taking the lives of eager Canadian mobsters who visited places like Puerto Vallarta and Mazatlan. At least one Canadian mobster was shot in broad daylight in a Mexican Starbucks.

As evidenced by a March 2017 article in the Huffington Post, written by a Mexican doctoral student at the University of Toronto, officials from Ottawa and Mexico City can no longer depend on American leadership to bridge the gap between Canada and Mexico. Nor can Canada rely on America to set an example in terms of on-going cooperation between our countries.

For the Citizens of the NRA, the situation is no better. In August, the US State Department released updated travel warnings encompassing 23 of Mexico’s 31 states, many of them meccas for tourism.

Fortunately, some of us are stamping out the second front that our country represents to the Simaloa Cartel by keeping it green.

Legal weed is starting to seriously steal the thunder from the Mexican drug trade. While the cocaine trade may still be booming, the pot game is plummeting. As of March of 2016, Southwest border seizures of marijuana had dropped to around 1.5 million lbs compared to almost 4 million lbs in 2009.

Still, change needs to come and we all need to wise up about what we’re actually dealing with. Before you get lost in a cloud of smoke, remember the importance of protecting our borders.

via http://ift.tt/2xB0Htf Tyler Durden

When it comes to flushing valuables down the toilet, the Swiss are hardly “Austrians”, and appear to be equity-opportunity dumpers, whether it is fiat or hard money.

Last month we reported that Switzerland was gripped in a mystery, after it was discovered that someone tried to flush $120,000 in €500 bills down the toilet in a bathroom close to a UBS bank vault as well as three nearby restaurants, which in turn clogged the local toilets requiring thousands of francs in plumbing repairs to unclog the pipes.

However, it’s not just paper currency that gets flushed down the toilet in the world’s wealthiest nation, and as it turns out Switzerland’s waste water is far more precious than it smells.

According to Reuters, last year researchers from the National Eawag Water Research Institute detected 3 tonnes of silver and 43 kg of gold in sludge extracted from the country’s waste water treatment plants, totalling roughly 3 million Swiss francs, or just over $3.1 million. However, unlike the cash flushing mystery, the source of the golden effluent is far less exciting: the government study said the tiny particles were likely to be mostly from the watchmaking, pharmaceuticals and chemical industries, which use the metals in their products and processes.

Which makes sense: Switzerland is one of Europe’s biggest commodity trading hubs, as well as one of the world’s biggest gold-processing countries. Government statistics show gold accounted for more than a quarter of all exports in 2016, when Switzerland sold 298 billion francs worth of goods abroad.

“You hear stories about an angry man or woman throwing jewelry down the toilet, but we didn’t find any rings, unfortunately,” report author Bas Vriens said on Thursday. “The levels of gold or silver were very small, in the micrograms, or even nanograms, but when you add them up it’s pretty substantial.”

Higher levels of gold were found in the western Swiss region of Jura, believed to be linked to watchmakers that use the precious metal to decorate their expensive timepieces.

 

There was also a higher concentration in the southern canton of Ticino due to the gold refineries in the area. This was the only region where it might make sense to recover the metals, Vriens said.

 

Other trace elements including rare metals such as gadolinium – used in medical imaging – were also found by the scientists from the government’s institute of aquatic science and technology

So should the government go prospecting for the millions in discarded gold and silver particles floating around among the feces? While researchers have been studying whether it is worthwhile to extract the metals that end up in the sludge before usually being burnt, so far it has not found to be cost effective.

Well, there may be an exception: “In some places in the Ticino region, the gold concentration in the sludge is so high that it might be worth recycling it,” the Eawag institute said in a statement. We just hope whoever is tasked with this delightful job gets paid enough.

As for the rest of the population, which suddenly has the urge to filter the tap water in pursuit of untold riches, the report author had some bad news: the Swiss metal concentrations complied with regulations and were removed before humans drank the water again. “It wouldn’t make sense for people to boil their tap water to recover gold or silver because it has already been filtered out before it re-enters the drinking water supply,” Vriens said.

As for the original cash flushing mystery, while preliminary clues from an investigation suggest that the cash “dump” once belonged to unnamed “Spanish women who had placed the loot in a Geneva vault several years ago.”

via http://ift.tt/2ydCh8H Tyler Durden

A gunman opened fire at a market in the town of Trelleborg, Sweden, injuring at least four people, Sweden's Aftonbladet reports. Local media reported that at least four people had been taken to hospital. Some reports suggested that up to seven people might have been seriously injured across several locations.

A police spokesman confirmed to Express that police were investigating reports of a shooting, and that an area around the crime scene has been temporarily closed. At 22:30, the police received several calls about a suspected shooting in central Trelleborg, which has a population of about 40,000, according to local media reports.

"We have received several reports of a shooting in Trelleborg. We were quickly on the spot and found that, within a fairly limited area, we find more people with suspected shot injury. We are blocking certain areas and will conduct an investigation. I do not have any more information at this time. But we are at the scene and investigating."

Fyra till sjukhus efter skottlossning – stor polisinsatshttps://t.co/GDNzmouVhK http://pic.twitter.com/MnOcKi1dhp

— Svenska Dagbladet (@SvD) October 12, 2017

Police said several people were injured at different locations. The police spokesman, Fredrik Bratt, added that multiple victims suffered “suspected gunshot” wounds and that "a major operation was underway."

JUST NU: Fyra personer skadade efter skottlossning i Trelleborg.https://t.co/w8Aq5J8sXl http://pic.twitter.com/EQGF6shRTX

— Expressen (@Expressen) October 12, 2017

“There were many shots. We saw someone running outside,” an eyewitness told the Swedish publication Expressen.

BREAKING – MASS SHOOTING IN SWEDEN: 4 people shot in city of Trelleborg near Malmö. Massive police operation ongoing https://t.co/lEJsVsYCjR http://pic.twitter.com/DOSH0p9jxB

— PeterSweden (@PeterSweden7) October 12, 2017

“I was at home at the computer when I heard a loud bang,” Aron Tydén – another person in the area – told the publication, claiming that he heard people running.

Police have cordoned off the area, allowing ambulances through. The victims were reportedly rushed to hospitals in Malmö and Lund. Forensics team and a canine unit have also been dispatched to the scene of the incident.

via http://ift.tt/2z4aKn5 Tyler Durden