Two days before his untimely death in a Manhattan jail, Jeffrey Epstein signed a will listing over $577 million in assets – around $18 million more than stated weeks ago in court filings.
The assets were transferred to a trust as of August 8, ensuring that the details of how his fortune will be distributed are kept private.
Epstein listed his brother Mark as the lone heir and his longtime lawyer Darren Indyke and close friend Richard Kahn as executors, according to the New York Post, which obtained a copy of the will and trust filed in the US Virgin Islands.
That said, the document states that Mark only gets something if Jeffrey hadn’t created the will.
What’s more, Epstein’s heirs will have to split up whatever is left after a spate of accusers filed lawsuits against his estate.
“It’s pretty boiler-plate — it’s what we call a ‘pour-over will,” (embedded below) an estate planning lawyer told the Post, adding “It’s done that way for privacy reasons.”
“What is more unusual is the date, the fact that all of this was done just days before he died,” said the Post‘s anonymous source. “He probably knew he was going to take his own life” or may have thought “he could have been murdered in jail. He could have thought, ‘I need to get my ducks in a row.’”
Epstein’s personal property is broken down as follows (via the Daily Mail):
Once Epstein’s other assets are factored in, his estate is likely to exceed $600 million.
A few of those assets were noted in a court filing submitted by prosecutors for the Southern District of New York last month.
‘After conferring with law enforcement agents who have reviewed the materials from the safe, the Government has learned that the safe contained more than $70,000 in cash,’ read a filing by prosecutors arguing against granting Epstein bail.
‘In addition, the safe contained 48 loose diamond stones, ranging in size from approximately 1 carat to 2.38 carats, as well as a large diamond ring.’
It then noted: ‘The Government is currently unaware of whether the defendant maintains similar stashes of cash and/or jewels at his multiple properties, or in other locations. Such ready cash and loose diamonds are consistent with the capability to leave the jurisdiction at a moment’s notice.’ –Daily Mail
Epstein’s last days
According to the New York Times‘ Ali Watkins (of letting that now-fired Senate security guy bang her for scoops fame), Danielle Ivory and Christina Goldbaum – the wealthy pedophile was trying to game the system until his dying breath, which was ruled a suicide.
Jeffrey Epstein, inmate 76318-054, hated his cell at the Metropolitan Correctional Center. It was cramped, dank and infested with vermin, so Mr. Epstein, long accustomed to using his wealth to play by his own rules, devised a way out.
He paid numerous lawyers to visit the jail for as many as 12 hours a day, giving him the right to see them in a private meeting room. Mr. Epstein was there for so long that he often appeared bored, sitting in silence with his lawyers, according to people who saw the meetings. While they were there, he and his entourage regularly emptied the two vending machines of drinks and snacks.
“It was shift work, all designed by someone who had infinite resources to try and get as much comfort as possible,” said a lawyer who was often in the jail visiting clients. –New York Times
Meanwhile, Epstein bought off other inmates by depositing money in their commissary accounts, according to the report.
He also seldom bathed and remained unkempt according to the Times – except photos of Epstein from the day he died revealed a shaved mustache, so chalk that one up to fake news or a fake Epstein – take your pick.
Epstein’s photo from New York State Sex Offender Registry
The night of Epstein’s death, there were 18 workers guarding the Manhattan Metropolitan Correctional Center (MCC), which holds around 750 inmates. Ten of those workers were clocking overtime, and one post was vacant according to records.
On 9 South, the special unit where Mr. Epstein was housed, there were two guards, one of whom was a former correctional officer who had volunteered for duty.
The two guards were supposed to check on Mr. Epstein every 30 minutes, but failed to do so for about three hours. At some point, the guards fell asleep, according to two Bureau of Prisons officials.
By the next morning, Mr. Epstein, 66, was dead. At 6:30 a.m., at least one of the guards discovered him in his cell, unresponsive and tinged blue, after he had hanged himself with a jail bedsheet, a prison official and a law enforcement official said. –New York Times
Once Epstein was discovered, a worker hit an body-worn alarm. Staff cut the sheets Epstein reportedly used to hang himself and attempted to administer CPR according to prison officials, however he was pronounced dead an hour later.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2KZLIwK Tyler Durden
There is no shortage of empirical data that socialism fails every time it has been tried, and leaves the largest body count in it’s wake. Dr. Kristian Niemtietz’s “Socialism: The Failed Idea that Never Dies” documents the three distinct stages socialism goes through
The Honeymoon Phase
The What Aboutery Phase
And finally, when all that’s left is a smoking crater and a pile of bodies, “the not real socialism phase”
Niemietz documents each occurrence of socialism in the 20th century in his book to show that central planning and redistribution simply do not work.
Then there’s the Black Book of Communism, which tallies up the body count of the socialist regimes of the 20th century (over 100 million souls).
So it’s curious, why are our intellectual, cultural and sundry political and economic elites decrying capitalism and promulgating socialism as a cure for societies perceived ills?
The answer, I think, is because socialism isn’t actually meant to succeed economically. It’s successful if it keeps the population under control, and the elites in charge.
This is an adventure story in the genre of “Lost Horizons” or Jules Verne, where a group of passengers on a trans-Atlantic voyage recover “a strange manuscript in a copper cylinder”. The contents contain the tale of Adam More, a British sailor presumed lost at sea in a whaling expedition decades earlier.
His account is fantastical: he and his companion were separated from their ship after going ashore somewhere southwards of Desolation Island. They continued drifting south, past a string of volcanic islands and end up, as the narrators reading his account surmise, somewhere on the Antarctic continent. There they encounter a truly bizarre civilization.
After traversing the outer-fringes of this unknown land, populated by savages, who turn out to be the vanguard of an advanced civilization located further within the continent’s interior, Adam More (his companion unfortunately didn’t make it, having been ritually cannibilized by the natives) finds himself taken in and cared for by the Kosekin. An affable race of kind, cultured people but who are strangely averse to sunlight, and, as Adam learns more about these people, are possessed by an inexplicably deep rooted inversion of More’s traditional British values:
The Kosekin revere poverty, and they disdain wealth.
Their “highest” social class are those that live in extreme, subsistence poverty. In fact those savages they passed on the outskirts of the land were considered their highest, elite class.
They recoil from requited love. When two people discover they love each other, they separate as fast as possible in order to bestow the blessing of loss on one another.
Above all, they value death. The entire civilization is, in fact, a death cult.
Soon, Adam More meets his love interest amongst the society, Almah, another foreign born woman who holds some sort of ceremonial hostage role amongst the Kosekin. Almah shares the same values as More and is as perplexed as he by the curious inversion of this society. Together they mournfully face the realization of their impending fate (I’ll leave it to the reader to delve in if interested).
The bigger picture of Strange Manuscript for our purposes here, is that the so-called “lowest” rung of society, are what we would call “the wealthy” in our own. They endure terrible hardship for the benefit of the larger populace: palaces, servants, unimaginable riches. These unfortunates soak up the prosperity from all above them, so that all higher classes can bask in the glory of poverty and squalor.
Eventually Adam More and Almah are granted an audience to meet the top rulers of this society, and the truth emerges: like More, they too love life, fear death, and they think prosperity and riches are vastly superior to poverty. Imagine that.
Only these rulers knew the truth, but they had at their feet an entire society who was so indoctrinated with their perversely inverted zeitgeist that they had no challengers to their power and wealth, they ruled absolute, and controlled all the wealth in the land.
I haven’t been able to find much biographical material on De Mille beyond his entry in Woke-epedia so I don’t know that he wrote his novel as a parable of world socialism. But I first read this when I was a teenager who didn’t pay a lot of attention to history or geopolitics and even then remember thinking to myself “this sounds like a metaphor for the USSR”. That was around the time Leonid Brezhnev was General Secretary of the Communist Party. Brezhnev loved luxury sports cars and he collected BMWs. He liked to race them through the streets near his dacha (that’s Russian for “villa”) in the Crimea.
Hypernormalization: The Secret Sauce of Global Communism
It could be that fascism, that other totalitarian ideology which is well outside today’s Overton Window had in its secret sauce, identitarianism and nationalism. As long as you had “the other” to blame for your problems you could convince the population to accept brutal suppression of their individual rights.
Socialism, however unsuccessful, is quizzically normalized today. Politicians can even run for office proudly proclaiming their socialist ideologies and somehow it doesn’t make them untouchable and get them lumped in with their authoritarian brethren. It’s fashionable to be socialist again. It will never be acceptable, let alone hip, to be a fascist. (One down, one to go)
The secret sauce to make socialism palatable is what British documentarian Adam Curtis called “Hypernormalization”. To bastardize Voltaire’s famous quote, hypernormalization is the art of making the masses believe absurdities, so that their rulers can commit atrocities.
To be clear, Curtis believes that hypernormalization is a “fake world” created by corporations and maintained by politicians. I think the fake world was created by those in power, the State establishment, with complicity by certain factions within the corporate world and pretty well the entire mainstream media. It doesn’t really matter, it’s a chicken / egg scenario. What’s important to understand is that there is a an established cadre of those who wield power that straddles the State, the military, the media and corporatocracy.
All the absurdities we are expected to believe today, from the idea that biological men are women so long as they stipulate they are, that the Kremlin is behind any outcome that hasn’t gone according to plan, that the world will literally end if we don’t reengineer society into a top-down control structure, within (pick one) 12 years, 10 years, 1 year or (perhaps the most telling one) “before the next election”.
This is what we’re up against. If humanity doesn’t transition off fossil fuels (before the next election) the earth will heat to unsafe levels and there will be climate catastrophe. https://t.co/stutip23IY
Anybody who tries to debate these narratives, to present counterfactuals or alternative theories is fallaciously dismissed as one manner or another of “denialist”, “*phobic”, “hateful” or the catch all “racist”.
Relentlessly hammering home these absurdities softens up the public’s mind to accept increasingly hysterical climate alarmism, social justice extremism, and scapegoating of capitalism. The solution then presented, frequently delivered by multi-millionaire celebrities and/or multi-millionaire political aspirants, is socialism.
These hypernormal themes are narratives, they are not news. Yet they are incessantly repeated by corporate media and Hollywood, with guaranteed delivery of approved messaging by Silicon Valley tech giants, who also provide for concomitant attenuation of non-conforming data. It’s an effective simpatico for coordinating widespread indoctrination so that eventually we will wind up with a population clinging fervently to a completely inverted system of values:
Capitalism is evil, and Socialism is great.
Then, we become as the Kosekin. We are not there yet, but we see messaging designed to float trial balloons and soften us up for this two tier society. The majority underclass will have to forgo certain extravagances, and in this incarnation, it’s not to emancipate the proletariat, but to somehow centrally manage the climate of an entire planet.
For example, quite suddenly lately, we’ve been hearing that meat consumption will have to come down, that’s the word from on high. The best way to feed the masses in an eco-friendly way will be to steer them toward maggots and soy patties. My guess is those items will be absent from the menu at future Davos events. (Although that Twitter thread I just linked to is very illuminating about who will benefit from convincing the population to move from meat to maggots).
The way things are going now, the masses will be fine with all of this. Socialism is poised to be the overall control structure for 21st century, and it will bear an uncanny resemblance to the society depicted in A Strange Manuscript found in a Copper Cylinder: a nihilistic anti-human death cult that abhors prosperity and leaves a small cadre of elites at the pinnacle of society to languish in opulence.
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If you want to stay informed on how to survive socialism in the 21st century, make sure you’re on the GC mailing list , follow me on Mastodon (or if you’re woke, on Twitter).
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2P3fDJW Tyler Durden
A new report from the Miami Heraldsheds further light on Jeffrey Epstein’s brief stint in a Palm Beach County Jail following his 2008 guilty plea for siliciting a minor for sex.
Purchase logs reveal that the dead pedophile purchased thousands of dollars of items while in the can – including two pairs of small women’s panties, size 5.
It was just one of thousands of dollars of purchases made by the disgraced financier while in jail after pleading guilty in 2008 to soliciting a minor for sex, according to a purchase log. (His top purchase was single-serve cups of coffee, of which he bought more than 800 in 13 months.) But the panties raise questions about why a childless male inmate, accused of sexually abusing girls as young as 14, would be allowed to buy female undergarments so small that they wouldn’t fit an average-sized adult woman.
The panties were certainly too small for Epstein, who also purchased his briefs in men’s medium and sweatshirts ranging from XL to 3XL, and size-12 shoes. So what, or who, were they for, and why wouldn’t the purchase raise eyebrows under the circumstances? It’s one of many questions that arise from thousands of pages of records obtained by the Miami Herald from the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office. –Miami Herald
“The prisoner’s purchases, $2,000 worth in all, included hundreds of snacks, from large Hershey’s almond bars to Sour Cheddar Ruffles, hair gel, seven bottles of shampoo, and 22 tubes of toothpaste,” according to the report.
The new records were distributed Friday by the Palm Beach Sheriff’s Office, however notably absent is the daily log of who visited Epstein while he was on work release, as the records – which were previously tucked away in a safe – have been destroyed. According to the sheriff’s office, they were simply following legally prescribed retention schedules that allowed for the logbook’s destruction.
Epstein’s prison bitches
Friday’s records release also sheds light on the lax prison environment Epstein was afforded, the great lengths PBSO went to accommodate him, and a list of plainclothes police deputies assigned to his “security.”
Deputies, required to wear business suits, provided “security” for Epstein while he was on work release. They guarded the door to his office or home, sometimes from the outside, rather than keeping an eye directly on Epstein, while the inmate was on structured leave from the jail. Some deputies expressed relief in their daily reports that he seemed pleased with services rendered. –Miami Herald
Meanwhile, Epstein’s so-called ‘work release’ (during which he allegedly sexually abused more girls) was extended from 12 hours per day to 16, and he was allowed to pass some of the time at home vs. initially being required to remain at his Palm Beach office. That, was then expanded which “allowed Epstein to make at least 69 doctors’ visits in six months, records show. Many of the trips were to a chiropractor in Lake Worth. Epstein would go as many as three times a week. Sometimes he would have more than two medical appointments the same day. He had so many appointments that off-duty deputies monitoring him had a hard time keeping them straight, the records show.”
The second draft of Epstein’s work release agreement allowed him to work from home, and changed how the document referred to him from “inmate Epstein” to “Jeffrey Epstein.”
Bradley Edwards, an attorney for some of the women who accuse Epstein of having recruiters lure girls to his Palm Beach estate for massages that turned into sexual assaults, has alleged that Epstein used his work release hours to engage in sexual exploits behind closed doors. A release of court records earlier this month quoted a young female college student allegedly recruited by Epstein’s associates saying he required “three orgasms a day” to function. “It was biological. Like eating,” she said Epstein told her. –Miami Herald
“His financial status lends itself to his being victimized while in custody and as such, he has been placed in special management,” wrote Capt. Mark Chamberlain in an email from the day Epstein reported to jail. “He is poorly versed in jail routine and society and his adjustment to incarceration will most likely be atypical. For the time being, I am authorizing that his cell door be left unlocked and he be given liberal access to the attorney room where a TV will be installed.”
Epstein paid the sheriff’s office more than $128,000 to cover the cost of deputies’ supervising him off duty. Their rates began at $42 per hour, documents show.
In a subsequent email from Villafaña, she told PBSO that the agency’s own policies on work release barred felons, like Epstein, who had committed at least three offenses under Florida’s anti-prostitution statue from going on work release.
While Epstein’s attorneys argued that his conviction on a single count exempted him from the prohibition, Villafaña noted, “in order to be convicted of a felony violation of that statute, one must commit ‘a third or subsequent violation.’ In other words, Mr. Epstein has committed at least three violations” and is therefore ineligible for work release.
Villafaña also informed the sheriff’s office that elements of Epstein’s work release application seemed to be a sham. For instance, she wrote, Epstein had rarely worked for the West Palm Beach charity where he planned to spend his days while incarcerated, as he claimed in his application. –Miami Herald
Interestingly, Epstein’s Florida Science Foundation was incorporated right before Epstein went to jail in 2008. It’s employees were Epstein’s attorneys. In short, Epstein’s legal team created a sham corporation to justify his “work release,” and then lobbied to loosen his conditions.
According to Assistant U.S. Attorney A. Marie Villafaña, “The foundation, its offices, and Mr. Epstein’s purported job schedule were all created on the eve of Mr. Epstein’s incarceration in order to provide him with a basis for seeking work release.“
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2TKB7tH Tyler Durden
One of the arguments presented by opponents (and in some cases, supporters) of MMT is why pay any taxes if the US government can just print all the money (i.e. issue debt) it will need to balance its budget (by definition, if federal income taxes are zero, all revenues would come from the sale of debt). And while the US is still several years away (at least) from full helicopter money, i.e. MMT, which would be required to pay for such whims as, say, the Green New Deal, it wouldn’t be surprising if overtures were made by politicians to trim taxes in order to either boost the economy or their approval rating.
According to the WaPo, one such idea is currently percolating in the White House, where several senior officials have reportedly begun “discussing whether to push for a temporary payroll tax cut as a way to arrest an economic slowdown.” Citing three people familiar with the discussions said, the proposal is said to reflect the growing concerns by President Trump’s top economic aides.
As the report further details, the talks are still in their early stages, and the officials have not decided whether to formally push Congress to approve the cut. “But the White House in recent days has begun searching for proposals that could halt a slowing economy.”
As a reminder, most taxpaying Americans pay a payroll tax on their earnings, which amounts to 6.2% of their gross income, which is used to finance Social Security programs.
Where may Trump officials have gotten this idea? Trump’s predecessor comes to mind, as the payroll tax was last cut during the Obama administration to 4.2% as a way to encourage more consumer spending during the recent economic downturn. But the cut was allowed to reset back up to 6.2 percent in 2013.
The payroll tax cuts during the Obama administration reduced taxes by more than $100 billion each year, but the Obama administration directed the lost revenue to Social Security programs, so those initiatives didn’t lose money. The cuts added to the deficit, however.
Of course, since the WaPo may simply be pursuing its own agenda of representing a slowing economy in hopes of denting Trump’s approval rating which over the past two years was predicated upon Trump’s claims of the “strongest economy ever”, whether or not such a proposal is actually getting serious consideration remains in question.
And indeed, according to CNBC’s Eamon Javers, the White House publicly denied the WaPo report, saying that “cutting payroll taxes is not something under consideration at this time”, to wit:
WH official pours cold water on payroll tax cut idea floated in the Washington Post today: “As Larry Kudlow said yesterday, more tax cuts for the American people are certainly on the table, but cutting payroll taxes is not something under consideration at this time.”
WH official pours cold water on payroll tax cut idea floated in the Washington Post today: “As Larry Kudlow said yesterday, more tax cuts for the American people are certainly on the table, but cutting payroll taxes is not something under consideration at this time.”
Still, while a payroll tax cut may not be imminent, the report does bring up a thought experiment that would be especially applicable if and when US rates approach zero, or turn negative, at which point the US can effectively implement an MMT-lite, whereby it would issue as much debt as it desires (especially if Germany refuses to take advantage of negative rates), and use the proceeds to fund shortfalls that would result from aggressive Federal tax cuts at the personal income or corporate level.
Whether or not that will happen, remains to be seen, however in a world where there is a $17 trillion in negative yielding debt, and where the US has emerged as the last remaining source of IG-rated yield as we pointed out last week…
… it is likely just a matter of time before this lite version of helicopter money receives much more serious consideration, whether by the current administration or the next.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2NevbYN Tyler Durden
Some 1.7 million protesters gathered in Hong Kong’s Victoria Park Sunday afternoon to mark the 11th consecutive weekend of pro-democracy protests in a city-state that, for decades, functioned as a quasi-independent city state and financial gateway to the world’s second largest economy.
But as the backlash to the extradition bill has shown, Hong Kongers aren’t simply going to sit back and passively allow Beijing to impose China’s signature style of technocratic-autocratic rule, though the 2014 Umbrella Movement failed to stop the Communist Party from installing its preferred leadership team.
Thus, as the Chinese military masses across the border for military drills that have so far failed to cow the restive Hong Kong public (though they have rolled back the aggression, for now, at least), Nikkei Asian Review reports that Beijing has developed a plan to cut Hong Kong out of the loop entirely.
That is, the Chinese government is reportedly planning to “transform” Shenzen, the southeastern tech hub that links the mainland to HK, into ‘the new Hong Kong’ by imposing pro-business reforms and bolstering social services for workers – in short, molding the city into a model of Hong Kong that offers many of the incentives to multinational corporations in terms of broadening market access, while maintaining the restrictions on speech and political activities that exist in the mainland.
Many of the reforms were outlined in a document released Sunday by China’s State Council, the Communist Party’s equivalent of the executive branch’s cabinet.
Another benefit (that could alienate American companies): The state will back the swift development of 5G in Shenzen.
China looks to draw multinationals worldwide to the tech hub, a move that essentially would rob Hong Kong of its forte as a magnet for investment. The guidelines come as Chinese paramilitary officers train in Shenzhen amid the weeks-old protests in Hong Kong, suggesting that Beijing may apply both economic pressure and armed force to the restive territory.
Shenzhen will serve as a “demonstration area” for Chinese socialism, the document reads. This will include upgraded health-care infrastructure, coupled with a world-class education system that includes job training.
The city will accelerate the development of a fifth-generation wireless network. Talent from outside the mainland will find it easier to cross the border and reside in Shenzhen.
Shenzhen will turn into “one of the leading cities in the world in terms of economic strength and quality of development” by 2025, the guidelines say. The city will become a “national model of high-quality development” by 2035 and a “top cosmopolis” worldwide by the middle of the 21st century.
If Beijing follows through, this could create huge problems for Hong Kong and its monetary authority. As we reported over the weekend, investors are already struggling with the threat of worsening capital flight. As protests drag on, markets wobble, and Beijing grumbles, Hyman Capital’s Kyle Bass’s long-shot bet against the HKD peg to the dollar is starting to look increasingly plausible.
According to Beijing’s new paper, Shenzen will rival or surpass HK in terms of development by mid-century.
Shenzhen will turn into “one of the leading cities in the world in terms of economic strength and quality of development” by 2025, the guidelines say. The city will become a “national model of high-quality development” by 2035 and a “top cosmopolis” worldwide by the middle of the 21st century.
At the same time, Hong Kong’s government is rolling out a new stimulus package that will bolster support for education and electrical subsidies in a city that has become increasingly unaffordable for the average resident.
As Hong Kong looks increasingly unstable, the mainland’s biggest selling point – social stability imposed by President Xi’s increasingly autocratic regime – will become that much more pertinent. But can it sell Western companies on the idea? HSBC’s response could be an important bellwether, as the FT reported in Monday’s paper.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2Zj0dVy Tyler Durden
The Fed has a math problem and so do markets. Everyone from the president on down is demanding rate cuts, lots of them. “Mid-cycle” adjustment Fed Chair Jay Powell called the July rate cut and it’s bought the Fed precious little as markets sold off in the wake off more trade tensions and yields continued to plummet. And now markets demand more. Lots more. A 50b rate cut appears to be the bare minimum markets demand for September. Call it pricing it in, and the implication is clear: The Fed can’t ill afford to disappoint.
And what markets are currently pricing in is anything but a “mid-cycle” adjustment:
That’s nearly a 100bp rate cut over the next year. President Trump of course wants a 100bp now AND some QE sprinkled on top of that:
…..The Fed Rate, over a fairly short period of time, should be reduced by at least 100 basis points, with perhaps some quantitative easing as well. If that happened, our Economy would be even better, and the World Economy would be greatly and quickly enhanced-good for everyone!
Leaving a discussion about the economic wisdom of such demands at this time aside for the moment, let’s look at the implications of Mr. Trump’s demand, and, on a longer time frame, the market’s demand for 100bp in rate cuts.
See the problem is the Fed has very limited ammunition vis a vis previous cycles and that fact seems to escape everyone.
Between December 2015 and December 2018 the Fed raised rates 9 times from zero bound. Historically speaking the weakest rate hiking cycle ever. In 2018 expectations were still high for further rate hikes in 2019. In fact Goldman Sachs had projected 5 rate hikesfor 2019 as late as November of 2018.
Those days are long gone as global yields have collapsed and economic data has continued to show significant slowing. Hence the rate cut in July:
And therein lies the math problem. With one rate cut already under its belt the Fed now only has 8 rate cuts to work with before being right back at zero bound.
Cutting by 50bp in September would leave the Fed with only six 25bp rate cuts to play with. Cutting another 50bp over the next year would leave the Fed with only four 25 bp rate cuts implying the Fed would have given back nearly half of its entire rate raising cycle in just 12 months which took it 3 years to accomplish. Doesn’t sound like a “mid-cycle’ adjustment to me.
For reference: In 2001 the Fed had to embark on a rate cutting cycle of 550bp to stop the unfolding recession. In 2007 it took 500bp. This time the Fed has started its rate cutting cycle from a 225-250bp basis. See when cycles turn in earnest they get angry and demand a lot of Fed handholding.
So I must ask: With such limited ammunition to work with and so much ammunition required to actually stop a cycle turn, why would the Fed waste more rate cuts with markets still near all time highs and unemployment still at 50 year lows? Why risk a 50bp rate cut and be left with only six 25 bp rate cuts in the coffer? Recession risk after all is rising and even Pimco is acknowledging this. Unless the ultimate future is negative rates into the negative 200bp-250bp territory zone, which would imply a full out disastrous crisis, then perhaps markets are expecting way too much from Momma Fed at this stage.
And if this is the case, then markets may be setting themselves up for disappointment. The first test of this thesis will come on Friday during Jay Powell’s Jacksonhole speech. Markets are eagerly awaiting a signal to confirm more aggressive rate cuts. The Fed has a math problem and a market beast that wants to be fed. By the Fed.
Jay Powell can ill afford to disappoint. But there may be another problem lurking. If the Fed goes too aggressive, feeling beholden to markets, it may inadvertently send another signal altogether: Recession risk is real and markets may ultimately not like the sound of that either. Best of luck Jay Powell.
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via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2KHTSLh Tyler Durden
Is a murder committed more heinous than a suicide allowed? In its act, sure. In this context? NO.
An “unlucky accident” like this is the ONE THING that a non-corrupt State must prevent. It’s the non-corrupt State’s ONE JOB to keep Epstein alive for trial, and everyone knows that everyone knows this is their ONE JOB.
It is impossible to violate this common knowledge without premeditation and malice, without conspiracy and criminality aforethought. It is impossible to have an “unlucky accident” like this in a non-corrupt State.
It’s entirely fitting that the death of Jeffrey Epstein is as disturbing, shady, bizarre and seemingly inexplicable as the rest of his life. It seems as if one could research this wretched man’s time on earth for years and still come up with more questions than answers. An unfortunate reality complicated by the fact we don’t have a mass media particularly interested in asking any of the big questions, such as:
Where is Ghislaine Maxwell? Why isn’t she in custody and was she aMossad spy like her late father Robert Maxwell?
Explain the details of the relationship between Leslie Wexner and Jeffrey Epstein? Why does it seem as if Wexner helped set Epstein up with the appearance of extraordinary wealth, yet no one seems to know how Epstein actually came into all his money?
It appears sexually abusing children and accumulating associated blackmail on the rich and powerful was a full-time job for Epstein, so who was actually bankrolling/overseeing this operation? Was it Wexner, somebody else, or was it an intelligence agency as Alex Acosta claims he was told? Seems kind of important to get to the bottom of this.
I could go on and on, but then this would become a book. Rather, the purpose of this post is to highlight the outlandishness surrounding many of the details (or lack thereof) surrounding Epstein’s death a week ago in a Department of Justice operated New York City prison.
Indeed, what you’d have to believe in order to think this was a simple suicide is the actual conspiracy theory.
Let’s begin with the initial attack, which happened three weeks before his death.
Just as the administration was apparently trying to pump the market even higher with an idiotic story about possible payroll tax cuts (and during a session that was, for a brief time, focused on German fiscal stimulus, no less) a report about State AGs moving ahead on an anti-trust probe of big tech has emerged to hammer futures lower.
If accurate, the WSJ report would represent one of the most significant escalations in the push to break up the big tech companies yet. The news hit the Nasdaq, but in the context of the past week, the move wasn’t particularly significant.
The makeup of the multi-state group, which includes red and blue states, has yet to be determined, but meetings have been held to ensure that the state’s suit ‘dovetails’ with the FTC and DoJ investigations.
But the push isn’t expected to start just yet.
The effort is expected to be formally launched as soon as next month, the people said, and is likely to focus on whether a handful of dominant tech platforms use their marketplace powers to stifle competition.
As part of the probe, the state attorneys are likely to issue civil investigative demands, similar to subpoenas, to tech giants and other firms, the people said.
They said the new investigation could dovetail with plans by the U.S. Justice Department, which last month announced its own antitrust review that will focus on tech companies including Alphabet Inc. ’s Google unit and Facebook Inc.
The Wall Street Journal reported in June that a number of attorneys general were considering launching a probe into antitrust concerns surrounding Big Tech.
As that effort moves toward a formal investigation, representatives of about a dozen states attorneys general, including Republicans and Democrats, met with top Justice Department officials in Washington in July to discuss concerns about lack of competition in the tech industry, according to people familiar with the meeting.
The big tech firms mostly declined to comment to WSJ, but as the paper noted, Facebook, Apple and others have maintained that social media as an industry faces intense competition.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2NsO7Dl Tyler Durden
Just like they did with loyalists to Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro, and in other countries as well (Iran comes to mind), Twitter and Facebook have identified networks of “bots” or fake accounts purportedly set up by the mainland government with the intent to “sow discord” during the Hong Kong protests that are entering their 11th week.
Twitter said Monday in a blog post that it had suspended nearly 950 accounts, while identifying another 200,000 that it believed might be members of ‘botnets’.
This disclosure consists of 936 accounts originating from within the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Overall, these accounts were deliberately and specifically attempting to sow political discord in Hong Kong, including undermining the legitimacy and political positions of the protest movement on the ground. Based on our intensive investigations, we have reliable evidence to support that this is a coordinated state-backed operation. Specifically, we identified large clusters of accounts behaving in a coordinated manner to amplify messages related to the Hong Kong protests.
As a result, Twitter said it would be “updating our advertising policies with respect to state media. Going forward, we will not accept advertising from state-controlled news media entities.”
Separately, Facebook said that a tip from Twitter led it to remove seven pages, three groups and five accounts involved in “coordinated inauthentic behavior” targeting the Hong Kong pro-democracy movement. Some 15,500 accounts followed one or more of the now-deactivated pages, while roughly 2,200 accounts joined at least one of the groups, the company said.
“We’re taking down these Pages, Groups and accounts based on their behavior, not the content they posted,” Nathaniel Gleicher, Facebook’s head of cybersecurity policy, said in a post. “As with all of these takedowns, the people behind this activity coordinated with one another and used fake accounts to misrepresent themselves, and that was the basis for our action.”
Of course, this hardly seems like a significant level of activity, and we imagine these companies would be hard-pressed to argue that these accounts contributed to some of the more chaotic episodes during the anti-extradition bill protests.
But these companies can’t risk letting the world forget that ‘state-sponsored actors’ can easily exploit social media to send whole societies into upheaval. All it takes is a few memes like the ones pictured below (and culled from Twitter’s blog, as examples of some of the content that was removed).
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2Z0APop Tyler Durden
In the latest sign that absolutely nothing makes sense anymore, WeWork filed formal regulatory paperwork with the Securities and Exchange Commission last week, officially notifying the world that it will soon be going public.
If you haven’t heard of WeWork (or it’s parent– ‘The We Company’), it’s a real estate company that owns practically zero real estate.
Instead, they lease vast amounts of office space in commercial buildings on long-term contracts, and then sub-lease that space to individual tenants– often small businesses– with short-term contracts.
It’s essentially the same business model as Regus – which provides virtual office services, business addresses, and short-term office space, in pretty much every major city around the world.
Yet Regus is actually profitable. Its parent company, UK-based International Workspace Group, reported a profit of nearly 300 million British pounds (about $350 million USD) for the first six months of 2019. And the company consistently makes money.
WeWork, on the other hand, consistently burns cash and has no expectation of making money “in the foreseeable future” according to its own SEC filing.
In fact, WeWork lost almost $1 billion in the first six months of 2019, putting it on pace to lose even more money than the $1.9 billion it lost in 2018.
WeWork currently has around 10 million square feet of office space, and hopes to grow to 40 million in total.
But Regus already has nearly 60 million square feet of office space worldwide. And it’s still expanding.
So Regus is MUCH larger and turns a healthy profit. WeWork is smaller and loses tons of money.
You’d think that Regus would be a much more valuable company. But no. Regus is valued at less than $5 billion. While WeWork is going public at a valuation of nearly $50 billion– ten times higher.
Much of this excess is due to WeWork’s legendary silver-tongued and messianic co-founder/CEO, Adam Neumann.
Neumann has actually been able to convince people that WeWork is a technology company, as a way to justify its absurdly high valuations.
In addition to extolling their ‘culture of inclusivity’ and ‘energy of an inspired community’, the company’s SEC filing refers to their ‘extensive technology’ more than 120 times.
Of course, there’s never any description of the technology, or what it actually does.
There’s also not a SINGLE line item in WeWork’s financial statements that shows ANY research and development.
For technology companies, this is ALWAYS an important item in their financials.
Google spent $16 BILLION on research & development last year, amounting to roughly 14% of its revenue. Amazon spent $22 billion, 12% of its revenue. Facebook spent $7.8 billion, nearly 20% of its revenue.
And even stodgy old Johnson & Johnson, which doesn’t even pretend to be a tech company, spent more than $10 billion (13.8% of revenue) on research & development in 2018.
WeWork claims to be a tech company, even though all they really have is a reservation system that is slightly less impressive than what Enterprise Rent-a-Car uses.
They keep saying how important technology is to their business (as if technology isn’t important to EVERY business in 2019. Duh.)
But WeWork doesn’t even investment enough money in R&D to register a single footnote in their financial statements.
This proves, beyond all doubt, that it’s just a big, giant farce.
The biggest farce of all, though, is WeWork’s mission to “elevate the world’s consciousness.” That’s straight out of the company’s SEC filing.
Jeez I thought this was supposed to be a real estate company.
This reminds me of when Snapchat went public a few years ago; investors thought Snapchat was a sexting social media app for pedophiles teenagers.
But according to its own SEC filing, Snapchat claimed to be a camera company… which was incredibly bewildering to investors.
WeWork has totally blown Snapchat away on the absurdity scale with this nonsense about consciousness.
What does that even mean?
Business is about focusing capital, energy, and brainpower to achieve specific, tangible outcomes that support a coherent strategy.
You’re supposed to be able to measure those outcomes… otherwise it’s impossible to tell whether or not management is properly executing the plan.
How exactly does one measure ‘global consciousness’? How do you know if your plan to elevate said consciousness is working?
And most importantly, how are you supposed to make money elevating consciousness? Because that doesn’t strike me as an especially profitable venture.
But that’s exactly the point. We’re living in a world now where profits don’t matter.
I mean… there’s more than $10 TRILLION worth of bonds in the world with negative yields. Banks are even loaning money to borrowers at negativeinterest rates.
And some of the most popular (and expensive) investments in the world lose billions of dollars each year with no end in sight.
You don’t need a PhD in economics to realize that there’s something wrong with this picture.
