Tag: finance

Over 700 ‘Black Vest’ Migrants Occupy Paris Pantheon Demanding Citizenship

Approximately 700 ‘Black Vest’ protesters filled the Pantheon in central Paris on Friday to demand that they be granted citizenship, according to France 24. 

The so-called “Black Vests” is a Paris-based migrant association that takes its name from the “Yellow Vests” anti-government protest movement.

As they went inside, tourists were evacuated from the Pantheon, which is the final resting place of France‘s greatest non-military luminaries including the writers Voltaire, Victor Hugo and Emile Zola. –France 24 

“Black vests, black vests,” changed the group – alternating with “What do we want? Papers!” 

The Black Vests demanded “papers and housing for everyone” in a statement, which describes their organization as “the undocumented, the voiceless and the faceless of the French Republic.”

“We don’t want to negotiate with the interior minister and his officials any more, we want to talk to Prime Minister Édouard Philippe now!” the group added. 

“The Pantheon is a symbol of great men. Inside there are symbols representing the fight against slavery. We are fighting against modern-day slavery,” said French rights activist Laurent of Droits Devant. “Many people have been living without rights for years. We have done this to ask the prime minister for an exceptional regularisation. There has never been such a thing since [François] Mitterand took power” in 1981.

After several hours, the group eventually left when authorities escorted them out through a back entrance mid-afternoon, according to AFP. “All of the people who gained entry to the Pantheon have been evacuated,” tweeted Philippe. 

In total, 37 protesters were arrested. On Saturday, several Black Vests showed up outside of a Paris police station to “demand the immediate release of our comrades! Long live the # Black Gilets !” 

 

They stayed there for several hours until they were calmly evacuated through a back entrance mid-afternoon, AFP correspondents said.

,” Philippe tweeted early evening as a police source said 37 arrests had been made. –France 24

Conservative lawmaker Marine Le Pen, leader of the right-wing National Rally, tweeted in disgust. 

“It is UNACCEPTABLE to see protesting illegal aliens occupy, with wholesale impunity, this is the centre of the Republic,” adding “Expulsion should be the immigrants’ future — that is the LAW.” 

In June the Black Vests made headlines after briefly occupying the headquarters of Paris-based catering company Elior Group. A month prior, the group occupied a terminal at Charles De Gaulle airport to protest “Air France’s collaboration” in the deportation of illegal immigrants, per France24. 

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2LQm280 Tyler Durden

The Four Dimensions Of The Fake Money Order

Authored by EconomicPrism’s MN Gordon, annotated by Acting-Man’s Pater Tenebrarum,

A Good Story with Minor Imperfections

“If you don’t know where you are going, any road will get you there,” is a quote that’s oft misattributed to Lewis Carrol. The fact that there is ambiguity about who is behind this quote on ambiguity seems fitting. For our purposes today, the spirit of the quote is what we are after. We think it may help elucidate the strange and confusing world of fake money in which we all travel.

Consumer price index, y/y rate of change – the Fed is not satisfied with the speed at which monetary debasement raises everybody’s cost of living lately. And no, they don’t think said speed should be lowered. [PT]

For example, the monetary policy outlook immediately following last month’s FOMC meeting was as clear as a flawless (FL grade) diamond. The principal message, if you recall, was that inflation was muted and the Fed, after suffering an overt beating from President Trump, would soon be shaving basis points off the federal funds rate. You could darn near take it to the bank.

Wall Street took the news and acted upon it with conviction.  Investors piled into stocks and bonds without pausing to take a closer look for imperfections.  Why worry when fortune favors the bold?

From June 19 through Wednesday July 3, everything held up according to plan.  The S&P 500 rallied 2.5 percent to close at a new all-time high of 2,995. The yield on the 10-Year Treasury note, over this period, dropped 13 basis points, as mindless buyers positioned to front run the Fed.

But then, in the form of Friday’s job’s report, several feathers of imperfection were identified.  According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the U.S. economy added 224,000 jobs in June. This far exceeded the consensus estimates of 160,000 new jobs.  As this week began, doubt and hesitation crept into the market.  What to make of it?

Powell Stays on Point

To begin, in today’s fake money world, clear thinking and honest appraisal are handicaps for investors.  What is really important is the inverse relationship between the economy and the stock market.  Good economic reports are bad for stocks.  Conversely, bad economic reports are good for stocks.

S&P 500 Index performance vs. US macroeconomic data surprises – this is the biggest disconnect ever observed. [PT]

According to the prevailing logic, with unemployment below 4 percent, real GDP growth at an annual rate of 3.1 percent, and stocks at all-time highs, the Fed shouldn’t be cutting rates.  Instead, it should be raising rates.  But if the Fed raises rates, there will be less cheap credit to speculate on stocks with.  Therefore, stocks will go down.

So how can the Fed possibly cut rates later this month when the economy’s headline numbers appear so doggone good?  This question, and many others, greeted Fed Chairman Jay Powell this week during his two-day semiannual testimony on monetary policy to the House Financial Services Committee and the Senate Banking Committee.

Powell – that is, the post pivot dovish Powell – stayed on point. Specifically, he did what he needed to do to propel stocks to what Irving Fisher once called a “permanently high plateau.”  He told Chairman Crapo and other committee members that the economy is soft, but not too soft.  And that the Fed will use its policy tools to, somehow, boost the economy.

Of course, Wall Street was tickled pink.  First, the S&P 500 hit a new all-time high over 3,000.  Then, the Dow Jones Industrial Average eclipsed 27,000 for the first time ever. These milestones were toppled in such rapid succession that Art Cashin hardly had a chance to change hats.

Cashin did find time to don an SPX 3,000 hat – coincident with Powell’s first day of testimony. Powell reassured everyone that the rate cut was still on, regardless of the stronger than expected payrolls report. [PT]

The Four Dimensions of the Fake Money Order

The stock market is no longer about pricing anticipated future earnings or business profits.  It is merely about front running the Fed’s applications of cheap credit. That is why weak economic reports, which provide cover for more monetary stimulus, are bullish.

Fake money has taken us to this strange and confusing place.  By fake money, we mean legal tender that is conjured at will by central planners. Fake money includes the dollar, euro, yen, yuan, pound, peso, loonie, toonie, and practically all other world currencies.

Remember, if you don’t know where you are going, any road will get you there.  Alas, the fake money order has taken us to the four dimensions of debasement, distortion, disfiguration, and destruction. How each dimension progresses to the next is somewhat ambiguous.  Though it generally advances as follows…

The dollar is debased through centrally planned and coordinated applications of monetary and fiscal stimulus. These stimulus applications distort financial markets to where the S&P 500 is at 3,000, the DJIA is at 27,000, there is $13 trillion in subzero yielding debt, and shacks sell for a million bucks.

Going “parabolic” – in a stunning display of collective insanity, the amount of outstanding government debt with negative yields to maturity hits a new record high of $13 trillion in what appears to be an unseemly hurry. Buying debt securities with a negative yield is a trade that relies  100% on the greater fool theory to be profitable. So far there is evidently no shortage of greater fools, so the theory works – for now. Our wild guess is that this absurdity is not destined for a happy end. [PT]

They disfigure the economy through mass applications of concrete to the landscape, unwarranted building booms, glass skyscrapers with polished concrete floors and urban industrial pendant lighting, demolition of cars that aren’t really clunkers, and other disfigurements undertaken to support a cheap credit induced false demand.

Lastly, is the fourth dimension of destruction. This is when the books are reckoned via hyperinflation, debt deflation, wide-ranging bankruptcy, or any combination thereof.

The fourth dimension is also when government’s become extremely intolerable as they try anything and everything to hold onto their power. This week, no doubt, advanced us further toward this unpleasant end.

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2LT2AaO Tyler Durden

San Francisco Developer Bribes Homeless To Leave By Showering Them With Cash

Surrounded by half-inflated eagles, wearing a “Make Oakland Great Again” hat and dressed as an elf to “deliver Xmas in July”, San Francisco real-estate developer Gene Gorelik stood on a boom lift above a homeless encampment in Oakland on Friday and chanted into a bullhorn, “Free money! Free money!”

The scene follows Gorelik’s posting on Facebook that explained Home Depot Oakland could be forced to close (with 300 jobs at stake) because, as he notes “it is under attack by Libbyland” – a reference to Oakland’s uber-liberal mayor Libby Schaaf

“I will rent a boom lift from Home Depot and make it rain $300 in singles to show the Citizens of Libbyland I’m serious. Then I’ll offer $2000 each to move to 11 4th St. by 8PM. However, if anyone is left in Libbyland at 8PM, no one gets any money. It’s all or nothing.

Remember, half the homeless came from outside Oakland. They have been lured in by Libby’s promise of free housing. If you feel Schaafted, please come out for a day of good, clean, fun community service to save 300 Oakland Jobs from the Libbyland Attack!“

Perhaps unsurprisingly, he was shouted down by community activists and encampment residents before he was able to turn on his leaf blower full of cash as they raged at the arrogance of his free-money handout when what they appear to really want is free houses or moar money than just 2 grand!!??

“It’s just a slap in the face for the residents,” said Candice Elder, the chief executive of East Oakland Collective, a community organization that focuses on racial and economic equity.

“He’s not doing anything constructive right now but being disrespectful and classist.”

38-year-old Kay Spikes, who has lived in a tiny house in the encampment for five years, exclaimed “it really doesn’t do anything…”

“$2,000 would get me maybe a motel for two weeks, some food,” she said.

“You can’t even use that as a deposit. There’s no place in Oakland that’s $1,000. It doesn’t solve the issue and it sure doesn’t even put a cushion under it.”

So what do they want?

Simple – as this sign of the ‘new normal world of handouts and money-for-nothing’ times seems to confirm…

If only ‘the rich’ would pay just a little fairer share of their taxes, every homeless person in America can have a house (and a pony?)… because, after all, isn’t owning a house a basic human right?

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2LSvCXZ Tyler Durden

Fragile

Authored by Sven Henrich via NorthmanTrader.com,

I’m probably one of the few remaining people left raising red flags, but hey, I see what I see and some of it I share and what I see is a fragile market that is setting up for pain. Now if you’ve been reading my public analysis you know about my Sell Zone, you also know about the weakness in charts beneath.

I’ll share another oldie, but goodie. Gaps.

Here’s one of the $SPX with open gaps:

Oh yes I’m a bit cheeky here, as it is the $SPX chart from January 2018 I outlined in my warning back then suggesting volatility will make a comeback and gaps would fill.

Well, they did and quickly so:

Or have we forgotten how quickly things can change? Chasing prices higher is not a guarantee of future results.

In any event, thought I’d share the current gap situation on a couple of charts.

Here’s $NDX just since June:

Here’s $SPX since the beginning of the year:

My apparently variant perspective: Many of these gaps, if not all, will eventually fill. And, as we saw in February 2018, gap fills can occur with a vengeance with little warning. Hence my view: This rally is fragile, handle with care.

*  *  *

For the latest public analysis please visit NorthmanTrader. To subscribe to our market products please visit Services.

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2jL33jy Tyler Durden

Rich People Become Poorer For The First Time In 8 Years 

Capgemini’s World Wealth Report 2019 determined that after seven years of central banks flooding global markets with credit, the overall global high net worth individual (HNWI) wealth decreased by 3% in 2018.

Infographic: World's Millionaires

You will find more infographics at Statista

The decline in wealth was mostly due to the start of a worldwide synchronized downturn – originating in the Asia-Pacific region (specifically China); this decline has already wiped out $2 trillion in wealth.

The wealth report notes that the Asia-Pacific region has seen the most significant wealth decay, while Middle East wealth increased.

“The global HNWI population and wealth declined by 0.3% and 3% respectively, with Asia-Pacific hit the hardest. The region represented US$1 trillion of the global decline in wealth, as the HNWI population decreased by 2% and HNWI wealth by 5%. China alone was responsible for more than half (53%) of Asia-Pacific and more than 25% of global HNWI wealth loss.”

HNWI wealth fell across the world: Latin America declined by 4%, Europe by 3% and North America by 1%. There was a noticeable pick-up in wealth in the Middle East, generating 4% growth in HNWI wealth and increasing its HNWI population by 6% due to more favorable economic conditions.

The US, Japan, Germany, and China — accounted for 61% of the total global HNWI population.

“The ultra-HNWI population declined by 4%, and their wealth declined by around 6%. This accounted for 75% of the total global wealth decrease. Mid-tier millionaires (HNWIs between US$5-30 million of wealth) made up 20% of the total decline. The millionaire-next-door segment (which represents HNWIs between US$1-5 million of wealth and makes up almost 90% of the HNWI population) was affected the least in 2018, as their wealth dipped by less than 0.5%, signifying that nearly all declines in HNWI wealth and population were driven by the higher wealth (ultra-HNWI and mid-tier millionaire) segments.”

Based on responses from more than 2,500 HNWIs across the world, cash was the top asset allocation held by HNWI as many reported that they sold equities and became defensive amid fears of a worldwide trade recession.

“Asset allocations shifted significantly, as cash replaced equities to become the most held asset class in Q1 2019, representing 28% of HNWI financial wealth, while equities slipped to the second position at nearly 26% (a decline of 5 percentage points). Volatile equity market conditions spurred a slight increase in allocation towards alternative investments to 13%, a four percentage point increase from the previous year.“

And about a decade after the Federal Reserve operated alongside the European Central Bank and the Bank of Japan to save the global economy by pumping trillions of dollars into financial markets, their ability to thwart the upcoming global recession is limited. This means that the HNWI population will continue dumping equities and acquire defensive products, like cash and or bonds, due to the threat that more of their wealth could decline as the global synchronized slowdown gains momentum through 2H19.

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/32sEj0O Tyler Durden

Housing Bubble Reblown: Last Chance For A Good Price Was 7 Years Ago

Authored by Mike Shedlock via MishTalk,

Housing prices have far outstripped wage growth and rental prices. Something has to give. So it will…

Every month I am amused by the comments from NAR chief economist Lawrence Yun regarding housing fundamentals, especially job growth.

Forget about strong jobs. Toss Yun’s views in the ashcan.

Compared to wage growth, homes are nearly as unaffordable now as they were at the peak of the housing bubble.

That’s without factoring in student debt and attitude changes regarding debt, assets, and mobility.

January 1987 to January 2000

In the 13-year period between 1987 and 2000, home prices, rent and wages all rose together. Homes were home, not speculative playthings, not a retirement vehicle.

That changed in 2000.

January 2000 to July 2006​

In the 6.5 year period between January 2000 and July 2006, home prices soared 85% vs 22% for both rent and hourly earnings.

People thought homes would never stop rising. Supposedly there was a massive shortage of homes. People line up for block for the right to buy a Florida condo. In a few short weeks, after the pool of greater fools ran out, the housing crash began.

The housing crash lasted longer than the stock market bust and finally ended in late 2011. January 2012 was the last time rent, home prices, and wages were roughly in sync.

January 2012 to April 2019

Home prices are not quite as bad as they were in July of 2006, but pressure on would-be buyers is extreme.

Wages are up 19%, rent is up 23%, and housing prices are up 55%. Those are national averages. Some markets are better and some much worse.

Millennials are under sever pressure because the price of rent has outstripped wage growth. Waiting to buy has generally made matters worse.

Those who could not afford to buy a home in 2013 are much further behind today.

Worst Time to Buy Since 2012

Now is the worst time to buy since 2012. Markets vary of course, and so do strategies. Those who own a house, especially a big one in a hot area have a good chance to downsize.

But the new kid on the wanna-be block would be wise to think twice.

Deflationary Bust Coming

I am convinced another deflationary asset bubble burst is at hand.

For discussion, please see Deflation Coming: CPI Supposedly Headed Nowhere, But Let’s Dive Inside.

The bust could easily last six to eight years this time, not two. Indeed, that is my expectation.

The bubble represents asset inflation. Asset deflation will likely be accompanied with a small amount of price deflation as well.

No Crash?!

Unlike others, I am not calling for a crash. The liquidity conditions are way different. And the primary bubble this time is not housing, but junk bonds and equities coupled with very deflationary demographics.

I expect something more along the lines of -15%, +3%, -10%, +5%, -8%, -8%, +5%, -18%. The result of that is about -46% with nothing worse than -15 to -20% or so.

When I called for a deflationary bust in 2005 I was widely thought of as a fool. I was, for two years.

Maybe I am again, for even longer.

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2XV2g1J Tyler Durden

Watch Live: Barry Strengthens To Hurricane

Meteorologist Ryan Maue tweeted earlier this morning that Tropical Storm Barry could make landfall in the next couple hours as a hurricane. The storm is expected to dump as much as 25 inches of rain and trigger dangerous storm surges along the Gulf of Mexico, expected to make landfall in Vermilion Bay, located in southwestern Iberia Parish and southeastern Vermilion Parish.

As of 11 am ET, the National Hurrican Center (NHC) published new data that indicated Barry had become a Category 1 hurricane, with sustained winds of 75 mph, as it moves onto the Lousiana Coast.

Thousands have already lost power across the coastal Louisiana region. As of 5 am ET, as many as  62,305 Louisianans are without power, according to local electric providers in the state.

After landfall, weather models show the storm could move north to Arkansas with a hook-right to the Rust Belt next week.

As Barry makes landfall across Vermilion Bay, the system is moving at 5 mph, could cause “significant flooding” in the impact region, reported the National Weather Service (NWS).

President Trump declared a federal emergency for Louisiana on Thursday, allowing the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to coordinate all disaster relief missions.

NHC forecasts were right; the storm has indeed strengthened into a hurricane, expected to dump 25 inches of rain in parts of the state that could contribute to severe flooding.

The NHC warned that extreme rain would flood the coastal regions south of Baton Rouge and New Orleans.

“It’s powerful. It’s strengthening. And water is going to be a big issue,” National Hurricane Center Director Ken Graham said ahead of the storm.

This could impact operations at regional refineries.

Phillips 66 Friday completed the “orderly shutdown” of its 294,700 b/d Alliance refinery in Belle Chasse, Louisiana, because of the mandatory evacuation of Plaquemines Parish. While crude and feedstock processing has ceased at the plant, Phillips 66 said utilities at the facility “remain active for restart facilities to begin as soon as it is safe to do so.”

Shipping disruptions across the Lower Mississippi River are expected. The Port of South Louisiana’s Marine Operations Department has declared “Condition Zulu,” meaning “no movement is authorized on the Lower Mississippi River from MM 20 BHP to MM 303 AHP without permission from the COTP or designated representative.”

A spokeswoman for the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality said the Stolthaven terminal in New Orleans had shut down.

Farmers in the state could see their newly planted fields flooded. Heavy winds could damage sugar mills in the region and other agriculture infrastructure, reported Bloomberg. Meanwhile, the seafood industry in the Gulf of Mexico has shut down, and agribusiness Cargill Inc. has halted grain-loading operations.

“It’s an emotional drain, to say the least,” said fifth-generation Louisiana farmer George LaCour, who raises cotton, sugarcane, corn, wheat, rice and crawfish on 10,000 acres, some of which are in the Morganza Spillway.

Barry could be another disaster for America’s agricultural economy this year, already dealing with the hardships of record rains in the Midwest and a collapse in exports to China thanks to the trade war. Some have equated the 2019 farm crisis to the crisis of the early 1980s.

Watch a live hurricane feed from WML-TV

 

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2jITTEp Tyler Durden

“Abandon The PhD Standard” – Jim Grant Urges The Fed To “Use A Golden Rule”

As global economic policy uncertainty has skyrocketed this year, gold prices have accelerated dramatically reflecting their value, as Kyle Bass put so eloquently, as a “hedge against the idiocy of the political cycle.”

And, indeed, one look at the chart below – showing almost $13 trillion of negative-yielding debt globally – suggests the “idiocy” is as great as it has ever been as Einsteinian insanity continues to build as central bankers world-wide double-down on more of what hasn’t worked to build a recovery that is sustainable without the global liquidity spigot being wide open.

Perhaps, as Jim Grant explains to eloquently in a compelling WSJ op-ed, it is time to abandon the ‘PhD Standard’ which brought the era of government bailouts and too big to fail.

Though money can’t talk, people can’t stop talking about it. With the nomination of Judy Shelton to the Federal Reserve Board, the discussion has tilted to gold.

Gold is money, or a legacy form of money, Ms. Shelton contends, and the gold standard is a reputable, even superior, form of monetary organization. The economists can hardly believe their ears. The central bankers roll their eyes. How can this obviously intelligent woman be so ignorant? Let us see about that.

America was on one metallic standard or another from the Founding until President Richard Nixon announced the suspension of the Treasury’s standing offer to foreign governments to exchange dollars for gold, or vice versa, at the unvarying rate of $35 an ounce. The date was Aug. 15, 1971.

Ever since, the dollar has been undefined in law. Its value against other currencies rises or falls, as the market, sometimes with a nudge from this government or that, determines. The dollar isn’t unusual in this respect. With few exceptions, the values of the world’s currencies oscillate.

In the long sweep of monetary history, this is a new system. Not until relatively recently did any central bank attempt to promote full employment and what is called price stability (but is really a never-ending inflation) by issuing paper money and manipulating interest rates.

The advance of computer technology has made possible a world-wide monetary system based on the scientifically informed discretion of Ph.D. economists. The Fed alone employs 700 of them.

“Gold standard” means not one system but many. You can think of them as a Broadway hit, the roadshow version of the hit, and the high-school drama-club editions. The version Nixon scuttled didn’t have the starch, elegance, universality or populist inclusion of the classical gold standard. It was drama club.

The true-blue standard was sweet and simple. Participating nations defined their money as a fixed weight of gold. Citizens could exchange currency for gold, or gold for paper, as they chose. Gold moved freely across national borders. It went where interest rates and business opportunities beckoned. Gold was base money; over it rose the superstructure of credit.

Fixedness was one defining feature of the classical gold standard. Trust in the workings of supply and demand—in the “price mechanism”—was a second. Belief in individual responsibility for financial outcomes was a third.

A central bank’s single objective was to assure convertibility of the currency it managed at the fixed and statutory price. The exchange rate, not employment, growth or price stability, was the all in all.

The Bank of England was “very desirous not to exercise any power,” as a director of that institution testified before a committee of the House of Commons in 1832. The bank was content to allow the people to regulate the money supply by exercising their right to exchange bank notes for bullion.

A 20th-century scholar, reviewing the record of the gold standard from 1880-1914, was unabashedly admiring of it:

“Only a trifling number of countries were forced off the gold standard, once adopted, and devaluations of gold currencies were highly exceptional. Yet all this was achieved in spite of a volume of international reserves that, for many of the countries at least, was amazingly small and in spite of a minimum of international cooperation . . . on monetary matters. This remarkable performance, essentially the product of an unusually favorable combination of historical circumstances, appears all the more striking when contrasted with the turbulence of post-1914 international financial experience and remains, even today, a source of some measure of fascination and indeed of puzzlement to students of monetary affairs.”

Arthur I. Bloomfield wrote those words, and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York published them, in 1959.

The gold standard, “the fly wheel of the Industrial Revolution,” as the historian Lewis E. Lehrman puts it, was as imperfect as any other human institution. Prices were stable over the long term but variable in the short run; sometimes—even for years on end—they fell. Sometimes governments interfered with gold movements. There were panics when the bankers overissued their IOUs. And when people ran on the banks to exchange those claims for gold—when stock prices crashed and business activity stopped cold—a central bank would respond by raising its interest rate to defend the exchange rate. It was the exchange rate, one’s standing in the international monetary community, that mattered.

Gold-standard central banking concerned itself with the present. Millennial central bankers dare to take a view of the future. The moderns forecast, or attempt to forecast, economic growth, inflation, employment.

It’s no fault of theirs that they usually miss, most memorably in 2008, when the biggest event of their professional lives took most of them unawares. The economists are dealing with human beings, not raindrops.

The National Weather Service, which does deal with raindrops, and which marshals enormous computing power and truly big data, has an ordinary forecasting horizon of seven to 10 days. The central bankers inadvisedly cast their predictions into the distant future.

The ideology of the gold standard was laissez-faire; that of the Ph.D. standard (let’s call it) is statism. Gold-standard central bankers bought few, if any, government securities. Today’s central bankers stuff their balance sheets with them.

In the gold-standard era, the stockholders of a commercial bank were responsible for the solvency of the institution in which they held a fractional interest. The Ph.D. standard brought the age of the government bailout and too big to fail.

While gold-standard central bankers set short-term interest rates, they did not seek to control longer-term rates, much less drive them to zero. In today’s monetary regime, some $13 trillion of debt securities world-wide are priced to deliver a yield of less than zero. There’s been nothing like it in 4,000 years of recorded interest-rate history.

And if gold could once be brushed aside as an anachronistic form of money, that time is no more, with private companies competing to bring digital gold to the blockchain.

In 1989, Ms. Shelton published “The Coming Soviet Crash,” a brilliant and courageous analysis of the weakness of an overrated collectivist economy. She could be just the woman to remind the Fed’s doctors of economics how monetary capitalism works.

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2jN7n1N Tyler Durden

Watch Protesters Pull Down And Deface American Flag, Raise Mexican Flag At ICE Facility

A group of protesters upset with federal immigration roundups stormed the barriers near an Aurora, Colorado ICE facility Friday night, pulling down the American flag from its flagpole and replacing it with the Mexican flag. The protesters then defaced the American flag and raised it upside-down. 

Hyoung Chang, The Denver Post

According to the Denver Post, the majority of protesters on the site were demonstrating peacefully, while “another group stormed the barriers near the building and pulled down an American flag off the flag pole in front of the facility and replaced it with a Mexican flag.”

“We want to close down the detention center, and we want them to release these immigrants to their families or sponsors,” protest organizer Patty Lampman told Westword. 

Cities across the country have been preparing for anticipated federal raids aimed at detaining and deporting thousands of people who skipped out on their immigration hearings and are residing illegally within the United States. 

Immigration reform advocates said that communities around Atlanta, Baltimore, Chicago, Denver, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami, New York and San Francisco were being targeted by raids expected to start Sunday and last through at least Thursday.

“It’s almost like getting ready for a hurricane – it’s that state of alarm that people are feeling,” said Melissa Taveras of the Miami-based Florida Immigrant Coalition. “People are asking, ‘Is it OK for us to go work? Is it OK to take our kids to school?’” –USA Today

Open-border advocates say the raids are meant to terrorize communities of illegal immigrants, where approximately 2,000 families are expected to be targeted. 

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2JvTHSF Tyler Durden

Prosecutors To Drop Trump Org Investigation With No Charges

A months-long federal investigation into whether Trump organization officials violated campaign finance laws appears to be coming to a close without a single charge being filed, according to CNN, citing people familiar with the matter. 

Trump org CFO Allen Weisselberg

New York federal prosecutors have been investigating whether company executives broke the law, “including in their effort to reimburse Michael Cohen for hush-money payments he made to women alleging affairs with his former boss, President Donald Trump,” according to the report. 

In recent weeks, however, their investigation has quieted, the people familiar with the inquiry said, and prosecutors now don’t appear poised to charge any Trump Organization executives in the probe that stemmed from the case against Cohen.

 

    In January, one month after Cohen was sentenced to three years in prison, prosecutors requested interviews with executives at the company, CNN reported. But prosecutors never followed up on their initial request, people familiar with the matter said, and the interviews never took place.

    Meanwhile, there has been no contact between the Manhattan US Attorney’s office and officials at the Trump Organization in more than five months, one person familiar with the matter said. –CNN

    While the case has not been formally closed, it has gone about as cold as one can get. 

    Launched in the wake of former Trump attorney Michael Cohen’s guilty plea on eight counts, two of which included campaign-finance violations for ‘fixing’ payments to two women who alleged affairs to Trump, prosecutors said in court filings that he was reimbursed by the Trump organization. A total of $420,000 was authorized in payments to Cohen to cover the payoffs, tax liabilities and a bonus. Company executives falsely recorded those payments as legal expenses, according to prosecutors. 

    In late February, Cohen testified before Congress, implicating several Trump Organization executives whom he said knew about financial misstatements and were involved in reimbursing him for the hush-money scheme. He provided lawmakers with copies of signed checks from Donald Trump Jr., the President’s son who is now executive vice president of the company, andAllen Weisselberg, Trump Org’s chief financial officer. Weisselberg had received immunity to testify before a grand jury in the Cohen case. –CNN

    Yet despite Cohen’s testimony and several months of investigation, this story appears to be yet another failed “gotcha” from the resistance.

    via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2LTeMrN Tyler Durden