Tag: finance

Authored by Caitlin Johnstone via Medium.com,

Imperialist propaganda firm Bellingcat has published a response to the ever-expanding OPCW scandal, and it’s got to be seen to be believed.

Before we begin I should highlight that Bellingcat is funded by the National Endowment for Democracy, which according to its own cofounder was set up to do overtly what the CIA had previously been doing covertly, namely orchestrating narrative management geared toward the elimination of governments which refuse to comply with US interests. NED is funded directly by the US government, which means that Bellingcat is funded by the US government via an organization set up to promote imperialist regime change agendas. Bellingcat is also funded by Open Society Foundations, another imperialist narrative management operation.

Syria has been the target of what may be the most sophisticated propaganda campaign in history, and Bellingcat has been consistently rallying behind even the most transparently ridiculous tools of this campaign. This includes the notorious Bana Alabed psyop which at its height saw CNN staging a fake, scripted interview featuring a seven year-old girl assigning blame to Bashar al-Assad for an alleged sarin gas attack in Khan Shaykhun. Bellingcat’s stellar investigative work (which has been praised in fawning puff pieces by mainstream outlets like The Guardian and The New Yorker) concluded that this obvious propaganda construct was in fact nothing other than a little girl and her mother independently composing viral tweets, giving interviews and authoring books about how the Syrian government must be toppled via western interventionism.

Bellingcat’s latest phenomenal report on how you’re supposed to think about important geopolitical disputes, titled “Emails And Reading Comprehension: OPCW Douma Coverage Misses Crucial Facts”, addresses the leaked OPCW email which was recently published by WikiLeaks and various other outlets revealing that the OPCW omitted crucial information from its Douma report which indicated that a chemical weapons attack was unlikely to have occurred. I encourage you to go and check out Bellingcat’s new masterpiece for yourself. Don’t worry about giving them clicks; that’s not where they get their money.

The first thing you’ll notice about Bellingcat’s article is that at no point does it even attempt to address the actual inflammatory comments within it, such as the OPCW whistleblower’s assertion that the samples tested where a chlorine gas attack is alleged to have occurred in April 2018 contained levels of chlorinated organic compounds which were so low that it would be unreasonable to claim with any confidence that a chlorine gas attack had occurred at all. The whistleblower writes in the leaked email to the OPCW cabinet chief that the levels “were, in most cases, present only in parts per billion range, as low as 1–2 ppb, which is essentially trace quantities.”

As we discussed previously, early skeptics of the establishment Douma narrative highlighted the bizarre fact that when the OPCW published its Interim Report in July of last year its report contained no information about the levels at which the chlorinated organic chemicals occurred. Chlorinated organic chemicals occur at trace levels in any industrialized area, so they are only indicative of a chlorine gas attack when samples test at high levels. The email said they didn’t. The OPCW omitted this in both its Interim and Final Reports.

The whistleblower told journalist Jonathan Steele that the levels found “were comparable to and even lower than those given in the World Health Organisation’s guidelines on recommended permitted levels of trichlorophenol and other COCs in drinking water.”

“Had they been included, the public would have seen that the levels of COCs found were no higher than you would expect in any household environment”, the whistleblower said.

In a new Fox News interview with Tucker Carlson, Steele explained the significance of this revelation.

“The main point is that Chlorine gas degrades rapidly in the air,” Steele said.

“So coming in two weeks later, you wouldn’t find anything. What you would find is that the gas contaminates or affects other chemicals in the natural environment. So-called ‘chlorinated organic chemicals.’ The difficulty is they exist anyway in the natural environment and water. So the crucial thing is the levels, were there higher levels of chlorinated organic chemicals found after the alleged gas attack than there would have been in the normal environment?”

“When they got back to the Netherlands, to The Hague where the OPCW has its headquarters, samples were sent off to designated laboratories, then there was a weird silence developed,” Steele continued. “Nobody told the inspectors what the results of the analysis was. It was only by chance that the inspector found out through accident earlier the results would come in and there were no differences at all. There were no higher levels of Chlorinated organic chemicals in the areas where the alleged attack had happened where there is some suspicious cylinders had been found by opposition activists. So it didn’t seem possible that there could have been a gas attack because the levels were just the same as in the natural environment.”

Bellingcat simply ignores this absolutely central aspect of the email, as well as the whistleblower’s point about the symptoms of victims not matching chlorine gas poisoning.

“In this case the confidence in the identity of chlorine or any choking agent is drawn into question precisely because of the inconsistency with the reported and observed symptoms,” the whistleblower writes in the email. “The inconsistency was not only noted by the FFM team but strongly noted by three toxicologists with expertise in exposure to CW [Chemical Weapons] agents.”

Bellingcat narrative management reaches bargaining stage on road to acceptance, now emphasising that OPCW final report downgraded its conclusion to suggest merely “possible” use of chlorine.

https://t.co/NbRYPmfYuR

— Tim Hayward (@Tim_Hayward_) November 25, 2019

Bellingcat says nothing about these revelations in the email, and says nothing about the fact that the OPCW excluded them from both its Interim Report in July 2018 and its Final Report in March 2019, the latter of which actually asserted the exact opposite saying there was “reasonable grounds that the use of a toxic chemical as a weapon took place. This toxic chemical contained reactive chlorine. The toxic chemical was likely molecular chlorine.”

Bellingcat completely ignores all of these points, which are literally the only reason any of this is in the news at all, instead opting to make silly, pedantic arguments that the text of the email and the Interim and Final Reports indicate that some of the whistleblower’s concerns appear to have been partially addressed by OPCW leadership in its publications. To make this argument, Bellingcat highlights how some of the wording in the reports was changed to appear a bit less conclusive, such as changing “likely” to “possible” and changing “reactive chlorine containing chemical” to “chemical containing reactive chlorine”.

By highlighting these barely-significant changes Bellingcat attempts to spin the narrative that there was no internal OPCW coverup of its investigators’ findings at all, which is of course invalidated by the fact that its Final Report concluded that a chlorine gas attack had taken place despite the whistleblower clearly stating that there is no basis upon which to conclude this. It’s also obviously invalidated by the fact that not one but two whistleblowers have come forward, meaning they plainly do not feel as though their concerns were met.

“Ian and I wanted to have this issue investigated and hopefully resolved internally, rather than exposing the failings of the Organisation in public, so we exhausted every internal avenue possible including submission of all the evidence of irregular behaviour to the Office of Internal Oversight,” the whistleblower told Steele.

“The request for an internal investigation was refused and every other attempt to raise our concerns was stone walled. Our failed efforts to get management to listen went on over a period of nearly nine months. It was only after we realised the internal route was impossible that we decided to go public”.

“Ian” is Ian Henderson, the OPCW ballistics expert whose Engineering Assessment was leaked this past May. Henderson concluded that, contrary to what the OPCW’s Final Report strongly implies, the cylinders found at the scene in Douma were more likely to have been manually placed there, i.e. staged. The anonymous whistleblower informed Steele that all but one of the OPCW’s investigative team agreed with Henderson’s assessment. This too was left out of all OPCW reports, and Bellingcat’s piece completely ignores it, instead writing only that “Three independent analyses by experts in three different countries were carried out, and all reached complimentary conclusions: the damage at the impact sites is consistent with the cylinders having fallen from height.”

With the temerity only an NED paycheck can get you, Bellingcat argues that this vapid pedantry which has no bearing on the actual story whatsoever completely invalidates all reporting on the OPCW scandal.

“Although this letter appears to be at least superficially damaging to the OPCW, after reading the actual reports published by the OPCW it is clear that this letter is outdated and inapplicable to the final Douma report,” Bellingcat concludes.

“If the people covering this story had actually taken the time to read the letter and the FFM reports, they may well have chosen to publicize it in a very different manner.”

Google has helpfully made sure to place Bellincat’s assertive-sounding gibberish at the very top of news results which come up if you do a search for “OPCW” today:

Empire apologists have taken this ridiculous, nonsensical line of argumentation as gospel and run with it on social media, sharing Bellingcat’s embarrassing faceplant with triumphant, chest-thumping captions.

“Just so all my followers are clear, Tucker Carlson and the merry band of alt left grifter idiots trying to convince you that 1 of the 257 chemical attacks in Syria was a false flag are wrong, again, and never even bothered to read the report they say is wrong,” tweeted Newshour’s Danny Gold.

“So the letter written by the dissenting OPCW employee on Douma investigation was sent two weeks before the interim report was released and nine months before the final one. In the final one, the employee’s concerns were addressed. Where’s the cover up?” tweeted Telegraph’s Josie Ensor.

“WikiLeaks et al are lying to you in defence of the Assad regime,” tweeted odious Syria narrative manager Oz Katerji.

Just so all my followers are clear, Tucker Carlson and the merry band of alt left grifter idiots trying to convince you that 1 of the 257 chemical attacks in Syria was a false flag are wrong, again, and never even bothered to read the report they say is wrong https://t.co/IRJQzC0VaL

— Danny Gold (@DGisSERIOUS) November 26, 2019

Media Matters For America, another narrative management firm founded by troll army commander David Brock, has also picked up Bellingcat’s ridiculous arguments and run with them in an even dumber article titled “Tucker Carlson spreads disinformation about a deadly chemical attack in Syria”.

“Despite the seemingly scandalous accusation in the leak, Carlson is misrepresenting the nature of the WikiLeaks documents and their significance,” MMFA claims. “Investigative journalists at Bellingcat found that the leaked letter was in fact referring to an ‘interim report’ issued in July of 2018, before the OPCW released its final conclusions. A side-by-side comparison shows that the concerns addressed in the letter ‘are present, or else are in modified form, in the final report.’”

Which is of course false, as explained above.

MMFA’s other claims are nothing other than simple regurgitation of the very reports that are now being invalidated by the leaks that Tucker Carlson highlighted on his show. Their entire argument boils down to “This old information is in contradiction to that new information,” which is of course the entire bloody point.

Tucker Carlson spreads disinformation about a deadly chemical attack in Syria https://t.co/aFtPwpUtE8

— Eliot Higgins (@EliotHiggins) November 26, 2019

“These claims contradict and misrepresent the available evidence regarding the attack, the conclusions of multiple governments, and they are based on a Syrian and Russian misinformation campaign seeking to discredit investigators and absolve Assad of responsibility for the atrocity,” MMFA argues, linking to a 2018 BBC article saying Assad was responsible for the Douma incident, a 2018 Guardian article about the US government’s unsubstantiated claim to have secret proof of Assad’s guilt, and a 2018 Guardian article claiming that Russia is wrong about its skepticism of the western Douma narrative, respectfully.

Which is the same as saying “You’re wrong because we disagree with you. Here is evidence of our disagreeing with you last year.”

This is the best the spin masters can do, and the OPCW scandal is only going to unfold more. Should be fun.

*  *  *

Thanks for reading! The best way to get around the internet censors and make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for my website, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking me on Facebook, following my antics on Twitter, checking out my podcast on either Youtube, soundcloud, Apple podcasts or Spotify, following me on Steemit, throwing some money into my hat on Patreon or Paypal, purchasing some of my sweet merchandise, buying my new book Rogue Nation: Psychonautical Adventures With Caitlin Johnstone, or my previous book Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish or use any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge.

Bitcoin donations:1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

A big upward revision for new home sales (to 12-year highs), and a rebound in existing home sales, were both upset by the disappointing 1.7% MoM drop in pending home sales in October.

Source: Bloomberg

Year-over-year, pending home sales rose at 3.9%, well below the 6.0% expected and the 6.3% prior level.

Only the NorthEast saw sales improve:

• Northeast up 1.9%; Sept. fell 0.4%

• Midwest fell 2.7%; Sept. rose 2.9%

• South fell 1.7%; Sept. rose 2.6%

• West fell 3.4%; Sept. fell 1.3%

And all that as mortgage rates collapsed?

Most notably, pending home sales are often considered a leading indicator of existing-home purchases and a measure of the health of the residential real estate market in coming months.

 

Amid worries that the US consumer is tapped out (or maxed out), it appears that despite disappointment at no gain in income, spending rose 0.3% MoM (as expected)

Source: Bloomberg

But both income and spending growth slowed YoY (Spending growth weakest since Feb)

Source: Bloomberg

Finally, despite 30% of respondents planning to rein in their spending this holiday season, Bloomberg’s Buying Climate survey has never been higher ahead of Black Friday…

Source: Bloomberg

Of course, with credit card rates at record highs…

…all that spending what you don’t have will come at a serious cost in January.

If you’re a company that wants to change the world for the better, maybe it’s best to start at your own workplace.

An explosive new report out of Buffalo reveals that Tesla’s workplaces aren’t quite the utopia that the company has sought out to create, with a former employee telling WIVB 4 that the racial tension inside of the company’s Buffalo plant got so bad that the lunchroom and assembly line became “naturally segregated”. 

The former minority worker said: “We had to sit in the back of the cafeteria, they sat up front. It wasn’t that they said we had to, but that was the aura of the place because if we went up front it was like we was out of place, everybody looking at you like we’re the side show, we’re the clowns.”

The employee called the plant a “very racist place”. In fact, a racially charged message was found in a bathroom last year and Tesla had to “scramble” to assemble a “diversity meeting” that minority workers described as “unhelpful”. The message, scribbled on a bathroom poster, said: “get rid of all the [n-word]s and Jews.”

“It was a complete joke,” said an African-American former employee about the meeting. Another former minority employee said: “I, like other workers of color, felt that the meeting about the racist note was ineffective and barely scratched the surface about the racism at the plant.”

One African American employee said she applied for a promotion but lost the job to a white female employee who was allegedly given an advantage by being briefed by her white supervisor. Eventually, a black worker got one of the promoted positions, but it was on an undesirable overnight shift that paid $6 per hour less.

Six former minority employees at Tesla’s plant in Buffalo filed discrimination complaints with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the state Division of Human Rights, the report found. WIVB interviewed two of them.

The interviews revealed a “hostile work environment” where black workers frequently heard white employees using the n-word and where white workers were promoted over more qualified minority employees. 

Assemblyman Sean Ryan, D-Buffalo, said the complaints describe an “out-of-control workforce where racism and discrimination appears to be unfettered.”

Some former employees allege that management at the factory used the company’s global layoffs in January as a way to get rid of black and Hispanic workers who complained about racism and hostility. WIVB found that Tesla had fired all six employees who complained or were included in complaints. Of the 57 employees laid off earlier this year, about 80% were minorities, the report found. 

The complaints have prompted a “pending investigation” from the Attorney General’s Office, whose lawyers have already interviewed some workers at the plant. 

“I don’t like to pull the race card, if you will. I didn’t want to jump right to race, but all in all, I feel like that’s absolutely what it was,” one former female African-American worker said. 

All six former workers who complained said they heard white co-workers making racist comments toward African-Americans and Hispanic workers. One female worker said that she often heard co-workers refer to African Americans as “lazy”. 

“The knowledge that this sort of behavior appeared to be permitted in the factory would cause me stress and anxiety during my time working there,” one Hispanic former worker said in their complaint.

One former Hispanic male worker said that he was referred to as “the lazy Puerto Rican”. 

“During my employment, I frequently heard racial epithets and slurs. Whenever I brought concerns about racist comments to my supervisor, it appeared he would consult with the white co-workers but never with any of the affected black co-workers,” he said. 

One African-American worker said that team leaders would ask minorities to do menial tasks, like take out the trash, “while white co-workers appeared to be standing around doing nothing.”

“Months later, after white co-workers complained about the team lead’s apparent intoxication on the job, he was finally moved to a maintenance position,” one complaint said. 

“For instance, I recall myself and other black co-workers complaining about a white, female co-worker who used the n-word frequently being moved to a different division but ultimately promoted in my division to a maintenance technician,” one African American worker said. 

Another African-American male said that a black female worker told him that while showing a white co-worker a picture of her grandchild, the white co-worker referred to him as a “cute little monkey”. 

“In one incident, one of the white leads claimed in the white team lead’s defense that he’s street like that, that’s how he talks,” one former worker said.  

Recall, Tesla’s Buffalo plant was built and equipped with $959 million in state taxpayer funds. 

Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times,

Nearly 11 percent more guns were sold in the United States in October than a year ago, according to newly released data.

Roughly 1.2 million guns were sold this October, a 10.8 percent increase from Oct. 2018, according to Small Arms Analytics and Forecasting (pdf). The firm also estimated that about 1.1 million guns were sold in September, another increase of almost 11 percent from the same month last year.

The arms industry observer said it expects sales across 2019 to reach 14 million, past the 13.8 million guns sold in 2018 but below the estimates of 14.7 million sold in 2017 and 16.6 million sold in 2016.

“Sales have definitely been brisk, especially of small concealable handguns. We also saw a spike in sales of tactical rifles like AR-15s and AK-47s, for which I think we can confidently thank Beto O’Rourke,” Justin Anderson, marketing director for the North Carolina-based Hyatt Guns, told the Washington Examiner.

O’Rourke, a former U.S. representative from Texas, shouted on the debate stage over the summer “hell yes” when asked if he’d seize guns if elected president. O’Rourke later dropped out of the race, but other candidates have said they’d focus on gun control, including former Vice President Joe Biden, who has proposed banning 9-mm handguns, a popular handgun that’s used by numerous law enforcement agencies.

“It seems to me that Biden is preying upon the ignorance of his base by making such a ludicrous suggestion. Black Friday looks to be a huge day for the gun industry, building on what is already a record year for sales. In addition, with so much competition in the marketplace, retail pricing is as low as I’ve seen in over a decade. My message to consumers thinking about buying a gun: Pull the trigger!” Anderson told the Examiner.

Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg speaks with the media after touring the W.H. Bagshaw Company during an exploratory trip in a Jan. 29, 2019. (Scott Eisen/Getty Images)

Billionaire Michael Bloomberg, who just joined the race, is also known for his gun control advocacy after founding the group Everytown for Gun Safety.

Jurgen Brauer, Small Arms Analytics’ chief economist, told Fox News that he doesn’t think the rhetoric from Democratic candidates “will be the overwhelming contribution to increase sales this season,” but suggested it could boost sales next year.

“These Democratic candidates hashing it out amongst themselves, there is a bit of talk in the industry and among firearms owners for what this may augur for next year or thereafter,” he said.

Mark Oliva, director of public affairs for the National Shooting Sports Foundation, told Fox that prospective gun buyers would be aware of the looming 2020 election and the possibility a Democrat championing gun control could win.

“We’re seeing a lot of talk about people, presidential candidates or state governments wanting to severely restrict rights … Some have called for outright confiscation of guns and firearms. People are seeing that their rights are under attack … They start to make sure that they can buy the firearms that they want while they still can,” he said.

“[In] 2015, 2016 firearm sales went through the roof. It wouldn’t surprise me if we start to approach … that again if we continue to hear the rhetoric that we’re hearing.”

So far, Deutsche Bank’s efforts to offload troubled assets included in its ‘bad bank’ have been successful. The troubled German lender has already unloaded some assets to rivals including Goldman Sachs and BNP Paribas, and now Goldman is reportedly coming back for more.

Now, Goldman’s coming back for what Bloomberg described as a “$50 billion book of assets.” According to BBG, the assets are “tied to emerging market debt,” and were housed in DB’s ‘wind-down’ unit (or the ‘bad bank’, as it’s otherwise known, which was initially set up over the summer).

It’s difficult to tell whether the sale involved part of the derivatives portfolio, since BBG doesn’t include any information about the nature of the assets being sold.

But even though DB managed to offload some of its most troubled assets, the unit still managed to book a €1 billion loss for Q3 (and there will undoubtedly be more losses as more assets are sold).

Still, investors reacted positively to the news since the toxic assets are a major obstacle to DB’s return to profitability. DB shares jumped 2% in European trade, cutting their YTD loss to 3.6%.

The asset sales are part of a broader turnaround effort announced by CEO Christian Sewing over the summer. To help reduce overhead, the bank has already begun cutting some 18,000 jobs around the world, contributing to some of the industry’s worst job losses since the financial crisis.

As the above graphic shows, when it comes to the bad bank, Sewing has promised to cut the leverage exposure, a critical risk metric used by regulators, to 119 billion euros ($131 billion) at the end of the year (from 177 billion euros as of the end of Q3). The portfolio sales are an important part of this plan.

It’s difficult to say how much this latest sale, or the earlier sales, will contribute to Sewing’s goal since notional value is different from the market value included on a balance sheet. When the unit was first set up, it was said to house €74 billion in risk-weighted assets, and there have reportedly been discussions about adding more, according to CNBC.

Via SchiffGold.com,

Poland has repatriated 100 tons of gold from England. National Bank of Poland Governor Adam Glapiński announced the yellow metal’s return home on Monday.

“The gold symbolizes the strength of the country,” Glapiński told reporters.

He noted that the country could generate multi-million dollar profits if it sold its gold reserves, although there are no plans to do so.

Glapiński said the Polish central bank will continue to bring its precious metal home if the “reserve situation is favorable.”

Poland has also been aggressively increasing its gold reserves. The National Bank of Poland added 100 tons of the yellow metal to its hoard through the first half of 2019. In a statement announcing the plans earlier this year, Glapiński said he was “proud” of the moves.

We managed to increase the strategic reserves of gold and take steps to repatriate a large part of Polish gold to the country. By implementing our constitutional, statutory and simply patriotic commitment, we not only build the economic strength of the Polish state, but also create reserves that will safeguard its financial security. This is the global trend, but also the expectation of Polish society.”

Poland began accumulating gold last year when it added 7 tons of the yellow metal to its reserves in June and another 3 tons in August. At the time, it was the largest gold purchase by Poland since 1998, and it was the first EU country to add a significant amount of gold to its reserves since 1983. It bought another 15.7 tons through the final months of 2018 and 100 tons through the first half of this year. That brought the country’s total reserves to 228.6 tons, according to the NBP statement.

Gold is the ‘most reserve’ of reserve assets: it diversifies the geopolitical risk and is a kind of anchor of trust, especially in times of tension and crises.”

Poland now ranks as the 22nd-biggest holder of bullion in the world.

Poland joins a number of other Eastern European nations in buying gold. Serbia added 9 tons of gold to its reserves in October, and late last year, the Hungarian central bank announced it boosted its gold reserves 10-fold. 

A number of countries have also repatriated some or all of their gold reserves over the last several years, most recently Hungary and Romania. In the summer of 2017, Germany completed a project to bring half of its gold reserves back inside its borders. The country moved some $31 billion worth of the yellow metal back to Germany from vaults in England, France and the US. In 2015, Australia launched efforts to bring half of its reserves home. The Netherlands and Belgium also launched repatriation programs. Even the state of Texas has put a plan in place to bring its gold within state borders.

Gold repatriation underscores the importance of holding physical gold where you can easily access it. Gold-backed exchange-traded funds (ETFs) and “paper gold” have their place. But true security and stability come from physical possession of precious metals. If you can’t hold it in your hand, you don’t really possess it. That’s exactly why these countries are bringing their gold home, safe within their own vaults.

A report by Bullion Star noted that “Although the official language in the press release is diplomatic, the NBP makes it clear that there is a real risk to holding its gold in London.” According to the report, England’s “brazen” confiscation of Venezuela’s gold may have increased unease about holding gold abroad.

In a blockbuster report that has hammered Boeing’s shares just before the long holiday weekend, the Seattle Times reported that a failure of a Boeing 777 stress test that had been initially reported on in September was actually worse than those reports suggested.

The ST also published what appears to be a grainy cellphone photo of the damage:

The test plane’s fusilege “split dramatically” along the underside of the plane near where the landing wheels are stowed. The body of the plane was rent open with the force of a bomb. Workers in another hanger nearby said the ground the shook and they heard a load explosion. The Seattle Times clarified that their earlier reporting about a door flying off its hinges was mistaken: the 777’s doors close from the inside and are larger than the holes they cover, but one door was seriously damaged.

When Boeing tested the original 777 model in 1995, it kept going until the aluminum wings snapped at 1.54 times limit load. On the 787, it chose to stop at 1.5 and then ease the composite wings back down again. Breaking a pair of composite wings could result in release of unhealthy fibers in the air, so it’s likely that with the 777X also having composite wings, that was the plan again this time.

But as Boeing personnel along with six FAA observers watched from the windows of a control room, at 1.48 times limit load – 99% of ultimate load – the structure gave way. Under the center fuselage, just aft of the wing and the well where the landing gear wheels are stowed, the extreme compression load caused the plane’s aluminum skin to buckle and rupture, according to the person familiar with the details.

The resulting depressurization was explosive enough that workers in the next bay heard it clearly. One worker said he heard “a loud boom, and the ground shook.”

Then there was the secondary damage…

That then caused secondary damage: The photos show that the fuselage skin split part of the way up the side of the airplane, along with areas of bent and twisted structure that extended through the area around a passenger door.

A day after the incident, based on incomplete information, The Seattle Times and other media outlets incorrectly reported that a cargo door had blown out.

Unlike the plane’s cargo doors, which hinge outward, the passenger doors on airliners are plug-type doors that only open inward and are larger than the hole they close. But the structure around that passenger door just aft of the 777X wing was so damaged that the pressure blew the door out and it fell to the floor.

These secondary damage sites — the rip up the side of the fuselage, the door blown out — alarming as they might seem, are not a concern to air safety engineers. “The doors were not a precipitating factor,” said the person familiar with the details.

It’s the initiating failure, the weakness in that localized area of the keel, that Boeing must now fix.

As uncomfortable as it sounds, Boeing probably won’t need to do a retest: Since the rupture occurred so close to the threshold level, the FAA will likely allow Boeing to make the necessary changes independently and then show its work via analysis.

A safety engineer at the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), speaking anonymously without permission from the agency, said that because the blowout happened so close to the target load, it barely counts as a failure.

Boeing will have so much data gathered on the way to the 99% stage that it can now compare with its computer models to analyze the failure precisely, the FAA engineer said. It can then reinforce the weak area, and prove by analysis that that’s sufficient to cover the extra 1%.

One engineer said the rip actually isn’t anything to worry about.

The engineer said it’s not that unusual to find a vulnerability when taking an airplane structure to the edge of destruction.

“The good news is they found it and can address it,” the FAA engineer said. “They found a problem they can fix. They can beef up the structure based on analysis.”

Unfortunately for Boeing, traders weren’t in the mood for excuses, and sent the company’s shares lower in premarket trade…even as the broader market was set to open at record highs.

With GDP estimates for the current quarter printing below 0.5% according to the Atlanta and NY Fed, markets will probably not care much how much the BEA revised Q3 GDP, although we are confident the US president will care, and will blast it on his tweeter account shortly, after GDP in the last quarter was revised unexpectedly higher, from 1.9% to 2.1% (2.130% to be precise), and up from the 2.0% GDP print in the second quarter.

According to the BEA, the revision to GDP reflected upward revisions to inventory investment, business investment, and  consumer spending. These revisions were partly offset by a downward revision to state and local government spending.
Some more details:

• Personal Consumption was came in at 2.9% annualized, above the 2.8% expected, and contributed 1.97% of the bottom line GDP print, up from 1.93% in the first estimate.
• Fixed Investment was also revised modestly higher, up from -0.22% to a -0.18% detraction from GDP
  • Nonresidential fixed investment, or spending on equipment, structures and intellectual property fell 2.7% in 3Q after falling 1% prior quarter
• Private inventories saw the biggest revision, increasing from a negative -0.05% to a positive +0.17%.
• Net trade, while generally flat, shrank modestly, from -0.08% to -0.11%
• Government spending also dipped fractionally, declining from 0.35% to 0.28%.

And visually:

Even as the economy grew more than expected, inflation remained subdued, with the GDP price index rising 1.8% in 3Q after rising 2.4% prior quarter, and above the 1.7% expected. Meanwhile, Core PCE rose 2.1% in 3Q after rising 1.9% prior quarter; it was below the 2.2% expected print as the Fed continues to hedonically adjust anything that does not fit the narrative of non-existant inflation.

Finally, corporate profit growth ground to a halt in Q3, rising at a 0.2% quarterly rate in the third quarter after increasing 3.8% in the second quarter:

• Profits of domestic nonfinancial corporations increased 0.7% after increasing 3.2%.
• Profits of domestic financial corporations decreased 2.4% after increasing 0.6% .
• Profits from the rest of the world increased 1.2% after increasing 7.7% .

And while we have yet to see where Q4 GDP will come out, the fact that the Fed cut rates three times in a quarter in which the economy rose 2.1% will surely bring smiles to the faces of many Fed skeptics.

After unexpectedly sliding in September, Durable Goods New Orders were expected to contract further in preliminary October data but instead surprised bigly to the upside, rising 0.6% MoM (-0.9% exp) after a downward-revised 1.4% drop in September.

Notably, however, Durable Goods Orders remain down 0.9% YoY…

Source: Bloomberg

Additionally, the proxy for capital expenditures, Capital Goods Shipments Non-Defense Ex-Air, rose0.8% MoM (-0.2% exp) – the biggest jump since Jan 2019 (after 4 months of contraction)…

Source: Bloomberg

So with China’s Industrial Profits crashing by the most on record in October and US Durable Goods Orders rebounding aggressively, one might suggest ‘Trump is winning’ the trade war.