Tag: news

With former Vice President Joe Biden’s appeal fading fast amid campaign gaffes and a royal ass-kicking by Kamala Harris during last week’s debate (which was planned months in advance), there is a growing consensus that the 2020 election will come down to Harris vs. Trump.

Not only have Harris’s poll numbers been sharply accelerating while both Biden and Bernie Sanders have suffered recent hits, she’s the clear primary winner right now according to PredictIt, which allows people to bet on the outcome. 

Want to know what else puts Harris at the top of the pack? According to the Washington Examiner‘s Jerry Dunleavy, her top campaign attorney, Marc Elias, is the same guy who hired Fusion GPS for the Clinton Campaign. 

Marc Elias, who heads Perkins Coie’s political law group, became general counsel for California Sen. Kamala Harris’ presidential bid this year. Elias, who held the same position in Clinton’s campaign, is named in two pending Federal Election Commission complaints and in a recent federal lawsuit alleging that the Clinton campaign broke campaign finance laws when it used Perkins Coie to hire Fusion GPS. –Washington Examiner

Fusion GPS, in turn, hired former MI6 spy Christopher Steele to cook up a dossier full of fabrications about then-candidate Trump and his 2016 campaign, which was then shopped to media outlets and passed along to US intelligence, where it was later used to obtain a warrant to spy on Trump campaign aide Carter Page. 

Dunleavy notes that in 2017, former Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook admitted that he authorized Elias to hire Fusion GPS, saying ““I asked our lawyer and I gave him a budget allocation to investigate this, particularly the international aspect.” Mook said he received information directly from Fusion GPS or Steele about the Trump-Russia project. 

“We were getting briefings that were put together by the law firm with information,” said Mook, adding “I’m proud that we were able to assemble some of the research that has brought this to light.” 

Watchdog groups allege that Hillary for America purposely concealed the hiring of Fusion GPS and Christopher Steele by reporting all the payments that it made to Perkins Coie as “legal services” without mentioning opposition research. Perkins Coie was paid over $12 million between 2016 and 2017 for its work representing Clinton and the DNC. According to its co-founder Glenn Simpson, Fusion GPS was in turn paid $50,000 per month from Perkins Coie, and Christopher Steele was paid roughly $168,000 by Fusion GPS for his work.

Perkins Coie admitted in an October 2017 letter that it had hired Fusion GPS, claiming that “Fusion GPS approached Perkins Coie” in March 2016 with the knowledge that Perkins Coie was representing Clinton and the DNC, and that Perkins Coie then “engaged” Fusion GPS from April of that year until just prior to the November election “to perform a variety of research services during the 2016 election cycle.” –Washington Examiner

According to an October 2017 report in the Washington Post, Elias personally “retained Fusion GPS … to conduct the research” which was “on behalf of the Clinton campaign and the DNC.” 

Meanwhile, don’t discount Elias just because the Fusion/Steele/Russia gambit didn’t pay off since Trump actually won the election, the guy is a stone-cold Democratic sharp-shooter. 

“Marc is known as one of the most skilled professionals in Democratic politics, in addition to being the party’s top election lawyer,” said former national press secretary for the Clinton campaign, Brian Fallon in 2017, adding “I am damn glad he pursued this on behalf of our campaign and only regret more of this material was not verified in time for the voters to learn it before the election.” 

Which begs the question, what will Elias be doing for the Harris campaign? 

Um… the former Hillary Clinton presidential campaign lawyer who hired the controversial Fusion GPS firm is now working for the Kamala Harris campaign

Kamala Harris is the chosen one #BlackHillary https://t.co/h5na88jlhr

— Ali Alexander (@ali) July 2, 2019

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

After asking his lawyers to delay the census after the Supreme Court put on hold his plan to include a citizenship question in the survey next year, Fox News reports, without citing anyone, that the census will be printed without including controversial U.S. citizenship question.

As The New York Times proudly writes, the decision is a victory for critics who said the question was part of an administration effort to skew the census results in favor of Republicans.

Critics of the question have pointed to studies that indicate asking about citizenship will cause immigrants and non-citizens to skip the question or the census altogether, leading to an inaccurate count of the population, and an undercount of minority groups in particular.

This would seem to end Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross’ two-year-old battle to add a question on citizenship, one that federal court judges in New York, California and Maryland have struck down as illegal, unconstitutional, or both.

This is not a total surprise, as the Trump administration had said repeatedly that the issue must be resolved by July 1 to allow enough time to send out the questionnaire by April 2020, the date set by Congress for the census to go out.

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2KRy55f Tyler Durden

Authored by Michael Snyder via The End of The American Dream blog,

What if what you have been told over and over again is not really the truth?

For weeks, the mainstream media has been telling us that Iran is getting dangerously close to having nuclear weapons.  And now that the Iranians have publicly admitted that their uranium stockpile has exceeded the limit set by the nuclear deal, there is a lot of buzz that either the United States or Israel may soon strike Iran in order to prevent their nuclear program from proceeding even further.  But of course once the missiles start flying, it is going to be just about impossible to stop a major war from erupting in the Middle East. 

Before we get involved in such a war, we better make absolutely certain that Iran does not already have nuclear weapons, because a war with a nuclear-armed Iran could be absolutely cataclysmic.  If the Iranians felt that the survival of their regime was on the line, they would not hesitate to throw everything that they have at Israel and at U.S. forces in the region.  Unfortunately, very few people are talking about the well known evidence that Iran has had their hands on nukes for a long time.

In the immediate aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union, there was a mad scramble for the nuclear weapons that were being held by Kazakhstan and Ukraine.  According to former CIA spy Reza Kahlili, during that time period Iran received at least two nuclear warheads from Kazakhstan…

Kazakhstan, which had a significant portion of the Soviet arsenal and is predominately Muslim, was courted by Muslim Iran with offers of hundreds of millions of dollars for the bomb. Reports soon surfaced that three nuclear warheads were missing. This was corroborated by Russian Gen. Victor Samoilov, who handled the disarmament issues for the general staff. He admitted that the three were missing from Kazakhstan.

Meanwhile, Paul Muenstermann, then vice president of the German Federal Intelligence Service, said Iran had received two of the three nuclear warheads and medium-range nuclear delivery systems from Kazakhstan.

If Iran did get two nuclear warheads from Kazakhstan, that is definitely very troubling, but not enough to cause Armageddon.

However, the bad news doesn’t stop there.  According to Kahlili, when Ukraine finally transferred their nuclear weapons back to Russia, there “was a discrepancy of 250 nuclear weapons”…

To make matters worse, several years later, Russian officials stated that when comparing documents in transferring nuclear weapons from Ukraine to Russia, there was a discrepancy of 250 nuclear weapons.

Last week, Mathew Nasuti, a former U.S. Air Force captain who was at one point hired by the State Department as an adviser to one of its provincial reconstruction teams in Iraq, said that in March 2008, during a briefing on Iran at the State Department, the department’s Middle East expert told the group that it was “common knowledge” that Iran had acquired tactical nuclear weapons from one or more of the former Soviet republics.

This discrepancy was also reported by the media in Russia, and one Russian journal even suggested that those 250 nuclear warheads could have been sold to Iran…

On April 3 the Russian journal Novaia Gazeta reported that 250 nuclear warheads with a total yield of 20 megatons were not returned by Ukraine to Russia.

Novaia Gazeta suggested the warheads could have been sold to a third country, possibly Iran.

The 200-kiloton warheads were due to be returned to Russia in 1992 after Ukraine declared itself a nuclear-free zone following a payment by Moscow to Kiev of approximately $500 million. The missing warheads were inventoried on papers Ukraine submitted to Moscow that were officially accepted by Russia.

If Iran is sitting on 250 nuclear warheads, it would be absolutely suicidal to get into a full-blown war with Iran.

Of course the mainstream media in the U.S. has been repeating the “fact” that Iran doesn’t have nukes for so long that most of us no longer question it.

But in 2002, one Russian general unequivocally stated that “Iran does have nuclear weapons”…

Sometime a slip of the tongue is so incredible that no amount of doctoring can explain it. And sometimes a slip of the tongue is as intentional as could be. Take an appearance by Russian Deputy Chief of Staff Gen. Yuri Baluyevsky. He gave a briefing on Friday in Moscow during the Bush-Putin summit and was asked about whether Iran actually fired the Shihab-3 intermediate-range missile in a successful test earlier this month. The second question was whether Iran can threaten Israel, Russia or the United States with its nuclear and missile programs.

Then the Russian general takes a surprise turn: ‘Now, as to whether or not Iran has tested something like that. Iran does have nuclear weapons,’ Baluyevsky said. ‘Of course, these are non-strategic nuclear weapons. I mean these are not ICBMs with a range of more than 5,500 kilometers and more.”

And all the way back in 1998, two members of the U.S. House of Representatives publicly stated that the intelligence that they had been shown indicated that the Iranians already had nukes…

Representative Jim Saxton (R-NJ), chariman of the House Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare, told the Jerusalem Post  ‘I believe that Iran already has nuclear weapons and that our policy should reflect that.’ Representative Bill McCollum (R-FL), also a member of the task force, said that evidence collected by the group ‘indicates Iran possesses nuclear capability.’ He added that ‘for years, we have received reliable information that Iran has been obtaining nuclear weapons’s parts and supplies from the former Soviet republics in Central Asia. Not only have we not dismissed these reports, but over these six years there has been a growing volume of supporting evidence.’

In addition to potentially obtaining nukes from elsewhere, the Iranians also aggressively developed their own nuclear weapons program for many years prior to agreeing to Obama’s nuclear deal.  Just a couple of years ago, a former director of the CIA and several other former U.S. officials made it very clear that they believe that Iran has probably already developed their own nuclear weapons…

We assess, from U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency reports and other sources, that Iran probably already has nuclear weapons. Over 13 years ago, prior to 2003, Iran was manufacturing nuclear-weapon components, like bridge-wire detonators and neutron initiators, performing non-fissile explosive experiments of an implosion nuclear device, and working on the design of a nuclear warhead for the Shahab-III missile.

Thirteen years ago Iran was already a threshold nuclear-missile state. It is implausible that Iran suspended its program for over a decade for a nuclear deal with President Obama.

You can dismiss all of this and continue to push for war with Iran if you would like.

But what are you going to do when Iran uses their nukes and millions of people end up dead?

Iran is run by a bunch of apocalyptic nutjobs that hate us with a passion that is absolutely overwhelming.  If World War 3 breaks out in the Middle East, they would use nuclear weapons against us without even thinking twice about it.

Thankfully they do not have missiles that can reach North America, but they do have missiles that can hit U.S. targets all over the Middle East, and all of Israel is in their range.

Of course if Iran starts using nukes we will definitely nuke them back, and such a turn of events would lead to scenarios that are absolutely unthinkable to most of us right now.

Maybe it is already too late to stop a war with Iran from happening.  I certainly hope that isn’t true, because the death and destruction would be off the charts even if Iran doesn’t have nukes.

The next several months are going to be absolutely critical, and we will see what happens.  Let us pray for peace to prevail, because the alternative will be more horrible than most of us can even imagine.

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

Tesla released its Q2 delivery and production numbers after the bell on Tuesday, posting record production of 87,048 vehicles and record deliveries of approximately 95,200 vehicles.

In its release, the company also says it “made significant progress streamlining [its] global logistics and delivery operations at higher volumes, enabling cost efficiencies and improvements to [its] working capital position.”

In addition, the company also offered positive guidance for its Q3, claiming that its backlog had increased:

Orders generated during the quarter exceeded our deliveries, thus we are entering Q3 with an increase in our order backlog. We believe we are well positioned to continue growing total production and deliveries in Q3.

At least for now, it turns out that Tesla’s “leaked” emails touting the good news well in advance were both true, and not yet priced in by the market. Shares are up by more than 8% in the aftermarket session on the news.

Possibly as important as what the release included may be what it excluded, as Mark Spiegel noted on Twitter. 

The following sentence was in the $TSLA Q1 deliveries report. It’s missing from today’s Q2 report:

“We reaffirm our prior guidance of 360,000 to 400,000 vehicle deliveries in 2019.”

— Mark B. Spiegel (@markbspiegel) July 2, 2019

The company appears to have staved off its critics for now – but no sooner are these numbers released than the market will be eagerly awaiting the accompanying Q2 financials. 

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2XHbH4I Tyler Durden

Oil suffered its worst reaction to an OPEC meeting since 2014 today, plunging almost 5% prompting OPEC Secretary-General Mohammad Barkindo to tell reporters in Vienna that, “the drop in crude prices on Tuesday was an ‘anomaly’.”  Not everyone agreed.

“There are concerns that demand might slow to where it overpowers supply,” Bart Melek, head of commodity strategy at Toronto’s TD Securities, said in an interview.

The “gloomy” data, especially from China, “is very much part and parcel of what we’re seeing.”

API

• Crude -5mm (-3mm exp)

• Cushing +882k (-1.26mm exp)

• Gasoline -387k (-2.2mm exp)

• Distillates -1.7mm (=1.0mm exp)

After last week’s huge crude draw, expectations were for another decent-sized draw and API reported a bigger than expected crude draw…

 

WTI rolled over at a key trendline level…

But was unable to hold a modest rebound after the API print…

 

 

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2LyuY1A Tyler Durden

Authored by George Gilder via DailyReckoning.com,

Our monetary system is broken. It’s given us low growth, a shrinking job force, inequality beyond what a healthy economy would produce, inefficiency, and the unnatural growth of finance as a portion of the economy.

Our aging Federal Reserve System starves both small businesses and Silicon Valley of the capital needed to grow jobs and wages.

Fed policy translates into zero-interest-rate loans for the government and its cronies, and little or nothing for savers or small businesses. And it has transformed Wall Street from an engine of innovation into a servant of government power.

But I believe America can be set on the right path towards a robust and broadly shared capitalism again with just three steps. 

Step 1: Abolish Capital Gains Tax on Currencies 

This country already allows gold currency. The Treasury mints millions of one-ounce silver eagle dollars that are worth more than twenty dollars apiece and one-ounce gold eagle fifty-dollar pieces that are worth $1,150 apiece. 

Virtually all of these are hoarded. 

Though it has been legal since 1987 to use them at their metallic value, that route leads to a capital gains tax on their appreciation. 

Since the appreciation of a gold or silver piece is by reasonable definition all inflation, the tax is simple confiscation (like all capital gains taxes on spurious inflationary profits). 

The move of gold and silver coins into circulation would offer a corrective of constitutional money for any dollar debauchery by the Fed. 

Step 2: Remove Obstacles to Alternative Forms of Money

Despite imprudent governmental interference, the internet remains a bastion of American power, with U.S. companies such as Apple, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, eBay, Cisco, Qualcomm, and scores of others capturing the bulk of all internet revenues. 

The internet plays a central role in the American economy. But there is a profound flaw in its architecture, as I have explained before. It was designed for communications, not transactions.

Around the globe, transactions are shifting toward the internet. Although online purchases remain between 6-7% of all commerce, internet trade is expanding rapidly. 

But to buy something on the Internet, you often have to give the supplier sufficient information — credit card number, expiration date, address, security code, mother’s maiden name, and so on — to defraud you or even to steal your identity. 

This information therefore has to be protected at high cost in firewalled central repositories and private networks, which are irresistible targets for hackers. 

With transactional overhead dominated by offline financial infrastructure, micropayments are uneconomic, and the internet fills with fake offers, bogus contracts, and pop-up hustles. Some 36% of web pages are bogus, emitted by bots to snare information from unwary surfers. 

The internet today desperately needs a new trusted and secure payment method that conforms to the shape and reach of global networking and commerce. 

It should eliminate the constant exchanges of floating currencies, more volatile than the global economy that they supposedly measure. It should be capable of transactions of all sizes. And it should partake of the same monetary sources of stable value that characterize gold. 

The new system should be distributed as far as internet devices are distributed: a dispersed organization based on peer-to-peer links between users, rather than a centralized hierarchy based on national financial institutions. 

Fortunately such a payment system has already been invented. It is set to become a new facet of internet infrastructure. 

It is called the bitcoin blockchain. 

The bitcoin blockchain is already in place. It functions peer-to-peer without the need for outside trusted third parties. And it follows theorist Nick Szabo’s precursor, bitgold. Its value, like gold’s, is ultimately based on the scarcity of time.

Even if bitcoin proves flawed, scores of companies are developing alternatives based on the essential blockchain innovation that can serve as a successful transactions medium for digital commerce. The existence of such a system would enable sellers on the internet, such as content producers, to name their own prices and collect their funds directly. 

And the very process that validates the transaction would prohibit spam. There would be no hassle of bartering content for advertising revenues at some aggregator such as Google. Aggregators with advertising clout would merely add inefficiency to an automated system that minimize transaction costs. 

The internet would have a money system of its own.

With a low market price for goods and services — Google and other players could charge millicents for their services and still make a mint — the internet economy would transcend its current den of thieves and hustlers. 

It could attain its promise as a frictionless facilitator of human creativity rather than as a channel of chicanery. Its markets would impel the world toward new realms of knowledge and wealth. 

But the success of a new global standard of value on the internet entails a ban on taxation of internet currencies. If only government currencies escape taxation, alternative currencies such as bitcoin will always be relegated to niches.

Step 3: Fix the Dollar 

That brings us to the third step: fixing the U.S. dollar.

How do we do this? 

Monetary scholar Judy Shelton already devised a play. The chief instrument would be the creation of Treasury Trust Bonds — five-year Treasuries redeemable in either dollars or gold. They could be enacted either through legislation or as a Treasury initiative.

Legislation would specifically authorize the issuance of five-year Treasury securities that pay no interest, but provide for payment of principal at maturity in either ounces of gold or the face value of the security, at the option of the holder. 

The instrument would be an obligation of the U.S. government to redeem the nominal value (“face value”) in terms of a precise weight of gold stipulated in advance or the dollar amount established as the monetary equivalent. The rate of convertibility (in gold grams) is permanent throughout the life of the bond; it defines the gold value of the dollar.

As Alan Greenspan declared in the Wall Street Journal during the previous era of monetary turmoil, in 1981: 

“In years past a desire to return to a monetary system based on gold was perceived as nostalgia for an era when times were simpler, problems less complex and the world not threatened with nuclear annihilation. But after a decade of destabilizing inflation and economic stagnation, the restoration of a gold standard has become an issue that is clearly rising on the economic policy agenda.”

In fact, Greenspan suggested that “Shelton bonds” would pave the path to the future…

“The degree of success of restoring long-term fiscal confidence will show up clearly in the yield spreads between gold and fiat dollar obligations of the same maturities. Full convertibility would require that the yield spread for all maturities virtually disappear.”

Of course, as Fed chairman, Greenspan went on to become a major maestro of monopoly money at the Fed. And in his subsequent books he expressed many regrets and misgivings about the nature and role of central banks. 

But in an era of new monetary turmoil, Shelton bonds still have traction. In addition, as bitcoin blockchain innovations spread through the internet, borrowers could also issue bonds with a bitcoin payoff. So new systems based on gold and blockchain innovations can evolve into a new world monetary infrastructure.

These are the three steps that can restore integrity to the monetary system. 

As I explained previously, this is how we can save Main Street from the menace of monopoly money, transcend the dismal science of stagnation and decline, and restore the American mission and dream.

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2Nt9Z32 Tyler Durden

Stocks and bond yields sink on a trade truce, oil tanks on an OPEC deal, and AUD spikes on a RBA rate cut…

 

Chinese stocks went nowhere overnight…

 

European markets slipped early on the tariff headlines but recovered by their close…

 

Major decoupling between Small Caps and Trannies and the rest of the market today (the latter barely unchanged as the former tank). Nasdaq outperformed as markets rallied in the last hour mysteriously just as they did yesterday…

 

As the short-squeeze ammo appears to have run out…

 

Any equity gains were dominated by a bid for defensives…

 

Stocks and Bond yields decoupled…

 

Treasury yields tanked today leaving all but 2Y now lower since the hype of the trade-truce…

 

10Y Yields tumbled back below 2.00% again…and held there…

 

Pushing 10Y Yields to the lowest close since Nov 2016…

 

 

Market expectations for July remain at 80% for 25bps cut and 20% for 50bps cut…

 

 

 

Stocks decoupled from FX carry today…

 

Cryptos staged a big recovery today after another ugly night…

 

Bitcoin ripped back above $10,000 after toying with it for 24 hours (up $1200 from today’s lows)…

 

PMs outperformed notably as copper and crude extended their losses…

 

Gold surged back above $1400, erasing the trade-truce losses…Gold’s best day since Oct 2018 (on the heels of Lagarde as ECB head?)

 

While silver rallied on the day, it continues to underperform…

 

Stocks and oil prices decoupled today…

 

WTI dumped on the day, despite OPEC+ production cut agreements…

 

WTI tested the trendline and failed…

 

Copper and Stocks decoupled

 

Finally, the jaws of death widen further…

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