There is a prevailing wisdom that says the stereotypical American consumer can be defined by certain characteristics.
Based on what popular culture tells us, as well as years of experiences and data, we all have an idea of what the average consumer might look for in a house, car, restaurant, or shopping center.
But, as Visual Capitalist’s Jeff Desjardins notes, as circumstances change, so do consumer tastes – and according to a recent report by Deloitte, the modern consumer is becoming increasingly distinct from those of years past. For us to truly understand how these changes will affect the marketplace and our investments, we need to rethink and update our image of the modern consumer.
A Changing Consumer Base
In their analysis, Deloitte leans heavily on big picture demographic and economic factors to help in summarizing the three major ways in which consumers are changing.
Here are three ways the new consumer is different than in years past:
1. Increasingly Diverse
In terms of ethnicity, the Baby Boomers are 75% white, while the Millennial generation is 56% white. This diversity also transfers to other areas as well, such as sexual and gender identities.
Not surprisingly, future generations are expected to be even more heterogeneous – Gen Z, for example, identifies as being 49% non-white.
2. Under Greater Financial Pressure
Today’s consumers are more educated than ever before, but it’s come at a stiff price. In fact, the cost of education has increased by 65% between 2007 and 2017, and this has translated to a record-setting $1.5 trillion in student loans on the books.
Other costs have mounted as well, leaving the bottom 80% of consumers with effectively no increase in discretionary income over the last decade. To make matters worse, if you single out just the bottom 40% of earners, they actually have less discretionary income to spend than they did back in 2007.
3. Delaying Key Life Milestones
Getting married, having children, and buying a house all have one major thing in common: they can be expensive.
The average person under 35 years old has a 34% lower net worth than they would have had in the 1990s, making it harder to tackle typical adult milestones. In fact, the average couple today is marrying eight years later than they did in 1965, while the U.S. birthrate is at its lowest point in three decades. Meanwhile, homeownership for those aged 24-32 has dropped by 9% since 2005.
A New Landscape for Business?
The modern consumer base is more diverse, but also must deal with increased financial pressures and a delayed start in achieving traditional milestones of adulthood. These demographic and economic factors ultimately have a ripple effect down to businesses and investors.
How do these big picture changes impact your business or investments?
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2MDjVoy Tyler Durden
The article’s author, Josh Rogin, has been a cheerleader for US regime change interventionism in Syria since the very beginning of the conflict in that nation. It is unsurprising, then, that he reacted with orgasmic exuberance when Harris retaliated against Gabbard’s devastating attack by smearing the Hawaii congresswoman as an “Assad apologist”, since Gabbard has been arguably the most consistent and high-profile critic of Rogin’s pet war agenda. His article, titled “Tulsi Gabbard’s Syria record shows why she can’t be president”, is one of the most dishonest articles that I have ever read in a mainstream publication, and the fact that it made it through The Washington Post’s editors is enough to fully discredit that outlet.
You can read Rogin’s smear piece without giving Jeff Bezos more money by clicking here for an archive. There’s so much dishonesty packed into this one that all I can do is go through it lie-by-lie until I either finish or get tired, so let’s begin:
“Gabbard asserts that the United States (not Assad) is responsible for the death and destruction in Syria, that the Russian airstrikes on civilians are to be praised”
This is just a complete, brazen, whole-cloth lie from Rogin. If you click the hyperlink he alleges supports his claim that Gabbard asserts “Russian airstrikes on civilians are to be praised,” you come to a 2015 tweet by the congresswoman which reads, “Bad enough US has not been bombing al-Qaeda/al-Nusra in Syria. But it’s mind-boggling that we protest Russia’s bombing of these terrorists.”
Bad enough US has not been bombing al-Qaeda/al-Nusra in Syria. But it’s mind-boggling that we protest Russia’s bombing of these terrorists.
Now, you can agree or disagree with Gabbard’s position that the US should be participating in airstrikes against al-Qaeda affiliates in Syria, but there’s no way you can possibly interpret her acceptance of Russia doing so to be anywhere remotely like “praise” for “airstrikes on civilians”. There is simply no way to represent the content of her tweet that way without knowingly lying about what you think it says. The only way Rogin’s claim could be anything resembling truthful would be if “al-Qaeda” and “civilians” meant the same thing. Obviously this is not the case, so Rogin can only be knowingly lying.
“That bias, combined with her long record of defending the Assad regime and parroting its propaganda, form the basis for the assertion Gabbard has ‘embraced and been an apologist for’ Assad, as Sen. Kamala D. Harris (D-Calif.) said Wednesday post-debate on CNN.”
Gabbard has no record whatsoever of “defending the Assad regime”. This is a lie. There exist copious amounts of quotes by Gabbard opposing US regime change interventionism in Syria and voicing skepticism of the narratives used to promote said interventionism, but there are no quotes anywhere in which she claims Assad is a nice person or that he hasn’t done bad things. If such quotes existed, Rogin would have included them in his smear piece. He did not. All he can do is lie about their existence.
“To repeat: There is no quote in which Tulsi praises, supports, or otherwise ‘apologies for’ Assad,” journalist Michael Tracey recently tweeted with a link to his January article on the subject. “I checked the record a long time ago, and it doesn’t exist. This is just a smear intended to delegitimize diplomatic engagement”
“Claiming that politicians are ‘defending’ objectionable rulers they meet with, in pursuit of achieving some alternative to war, is a tired trope that has been frequently used throughout history to discredit diplomatic engagement,” Tracey wrote. “As Gabbard told me in an interview shortly after returning from Syria: ‘The reason why I decided to take this meeting on this trip was because if we profess to care about the Syrian people — if we really truly care about ending their suffering and ending this war — then we should be ready to meet with anyone if there is a chance that that meeting and that conversation could help to bring about an end to this war.’”
Gabbard has been remarkably consistent in explaining her position that she opposes US regime change interventionism in Syria because US regime change interventionism is reliably disastrous. This isn’t “defending” anyone, nor is it “parroting propaganda”. It’s an indisputable, thoroughly established fact.
To repeat: There is no quote in which Tulsi praises, supports, or otherwise “apologies for” Assad. I checked the record a long time ago, and it doesn’t exist. This is just a smear intended to delegitimize diplomatic engagement https://t.co/Iyww1C5Ew0
“Other Democratic candidates have promised to end U.S. military adventurism without making excuses for a mass murderer. It’s neither progressive nor liberal to defend Assad, a fascist, totalitarian psychopath who can never peacefully preside over Syria after what he has done.”
Again, claiming that Gabbard has done anything at all to “defend Assad” is a lie. If anything Gabbard has been too uncritical of establishment war propaganda narratives, calling Assad “a brutal dictator” who has “used chemical weapons and other weapons against his people.” Gabbard’s sole arguments on the matter have been in opposition to US military interventionism and skepticism of narratives used to support such interventionism, which only an idiot would object to in a post-Iraq invasion world.
Rogin argues that it’s possible to end US military adventurism without defending and making excuses for Assad, yet this is exactly the thing that Tulsi Gabbard has been doing since day one. Which means Rogin doesn’t actually believe it’s ever okay for any presidential candidate to want to end US military adventurism under any circumstances. Which is of course the real driving motivation behind his deceitful smear piece against Gabbard.
“Gabbard never talks about her other trip — to the Turkish-Syrian border with a group of lawmakers in June 2015, when she met with authentic opposition leaders, victims of Assad’s barrel bombs and members of the volunteer rescue brigade known as the White Helmets. Their stories, which don’t support Assad’s narrative, never make it into Gabbard’s speeches on the campaign trail.”
This one is bizarre. Rogin says this as though Gabbard’s meeting with Assad is something that she brings up “on the campaign trail” rather than something war propagandists like himself bring up and force her to respond to. The fact that those propagandists never bring up Gabbard’s meetings with the Syrian opposition is an indictment of their bias, not hers. The mental gymnastics required to make Gabbard’s meetings with all sides of the Syrian conflict feel more pro-Assad rather than less deserve an Olympic gold medal.
Obviously Gabbard having met with all sides is indicative of an absence of favoritism, not the presence of it. The fact that she didn’t come away from her meetings with empire-allied opposition forces with the opinion that the US should help storm Damascus doesn’t mean she supports any particular side.
“Gabbard’s candidacy should be taken very seriously — not because she has a significant chance of being president, but because her narrative on Syria is deeply incorrect, immoral and un-American. If it were adopted by her party and the country, it would lead the United States down a perilous moral and strategic path.”
Saying a “narrative” can be “un-American” is a fairly straightforward admission that you are authoring propaganda. Unless you believe your nation has one authorized set of narratives, a narrative can’t be “un-American”. This is as close as you’ll ever get to an admission from Rogin that US power structures work to control the dominant narratives about world events, and that he helps them do it. To such a person, opposition to your narrative control agendas would be seen as the antithesis of the group you identify with.
The US empire has an extensive and well-documented history of using lies, propaganda and false flags to initiate military conflicts which advantage it. To continue to deny this after Iraq is either willful ignorance or propaganda.
The fact that Rogin adds “strategic path” to his argument nullifies his claim that his position has anything to do with morality. If your foreign policy concern is with strategic leverage, you will naturally try to interpret anything which advances that strategic path as the moral choice.
Friendly reminder that we know for 100% certain the US and its allies plotted to create a violent uprising in Syria exactly as it unfolded in 2011.https://t.co/OOknOXMvDk
“Listening to Gabbard, one might think the United States initiated the Syrian conflict by arming terrorists for a regime-change war that has resulted in untold suffering.”
This is exactly what happened. The US armed extremist militants with the goal of effecting regime change, and before Russia intervened they almost succeeded. According to the former Prime Minister of Qatar, the US and its allies were involved in this behavior from the very beginning of the conflict in 2011. Here is a link to an article full of primary source documents showing that the US and its allies had been scheming since well before 2011 to provoke a civil war in Syria with the goal of regime change. They did exactly what they planned to do, which is exactly the thing Rogin claims they did not do.
But Gabbard never even takes her analysis this far. She simply says the US should not get involved in another US regime change war, because it shouldn’t.
“Responding to Harris, Gabbard called Assad’s atrocities ‘detractions,’[sic] before eventually saying she doesn’t dispute that he’s guilty of torture and murder. That’s a slight improvement from her previous protestations that there was not enough evidence.”
Rogin falsely implies here that Gabbard only just began accusing Assad of war crimes, and that she only did so in response to new pressure resulting from Harris’ criticism. As noted earlier, this is false; Gabbard has been harshly critical of Assad.
“Gabbard then quickly accused President Trump of aiding al-Qaeda in Idlib. ‘That does sound like a talking point of the Assad regime,’ CNN’s Anderson Cooper said. He could have just said she is wrong.”
Even the US State Department has acknowledged that Idlib is an al-Qaeda stronghold, and the Trump administration has taken aggressive moves to prevent the Assad coalition from launching a full-scale campaign to reclaim the territory. Claiming that this did not happen is a lie per even the accepted narratives of the US political/media class.
“Gabbard’s plan to overtly side with Assad and Russia while they commit crimes against humanity would be a strategic disaster, a gift to the extremists and a betrayal of decades of U.S. commitments to stand up to mass atrocities. Democratic voters who believe in liberalism and truth must reject not only her candidacy but also her attempt to disguise moral bankruptcy as a progressive value.”
Another lie; Gabbard has no such plan. Opposing US regime change interventionism isn’t “siding” with anybody, it’s just not supporting a thing that is literally always disastrous and literally never helpful.
Rogin’s closing admonishment to reject not just Gabbard but her skepticism of US war narratives is yet another admission that he’s concerned with narrative control here, not with truth and not even really with a US presidential candidate.
Whoever controls the narrative controls the world, and shameless war propagandists like Josh Rogin are the attack dogs of establishment narrative control.
* * *
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Last week, in the aftermath of the FOMC statement which to justify the “most pointless rate cut in the history of the Fed” blamed the Fed’s first rate cut cycle in 12 years not on the resilient US economy but on “global developments” we said that “The Fed is now officially the world’s central bank: any global economic instability anywhere in the world will lead to new record highs in US stocks”
The Fed is now officially the world’s central bank: any global economic instability anywhere in the world will lead to new record highs in US stocks
Of course, such global economic instability also includes trade wars, something that was certainly not lost on the president who less than 24 hours later announced that the post G-20 trade war ceasefire with China was over, and in pursuit of even more rate cuts announced that the he would impose 10% tariffs on the $300 billion of remaining Chinese imports.
The problem for Powell is that by scapegoating the global economy for the rate cut, the Fed is now trapped having certified before the world that any further escalations in Trump’s trade war are effectively a justification for more rate cuts. Whether this was Powell’s intention is unclear, although it certainly means that Trump is now de facto in charge of the Fed’s monetary policy by way of US foreign policy, and it also means that as BofA writes on Friday, “the Fed is unintentionally underwriting the trade war.”
Here, the only thing one can perhaps add is that the Fed may very well be intentionally underwriting Trump’s trade war. In either case, as Bank of America’s chief economist Michelle Meyer writes, such a circular framework is a problem for many reasons, and as the bank admits, it is worried about an adverse feedback loop where the trade war hinders economic growth, therefore prompting additional Fed easing, which in turn allows for greater trade war escalation. This is shown in the chart below.
To no surprise – we predicted just this outcome moments after the Fed statement – the market went from pricing in a roughly 60% probability (15bp) of a cut in September before President Trump’s tweet to more than 90% (24bp) in minutes…
… and as JPMorgan discussed earlier, there are now 117bp of cumulative cuts priced in by the end of 2020 (including the 25bp cut already delivered).
In any case, the market’s reaction to what Powell stated was more than appropriate, as the Fed is now trapped by US trade policy. And while there was some confusion in the press conference, one message was clear: the Fed will use its tools to “insure” against downside risks from weak global growth and trade policy uncertainty. In its post mortem, Bank of America saw three important takeaways from Powell’s press conference:
The Fed is taking weak global growth and trade uncertainty as exogenous events. This means that if global growth weakens further or the trade war escalates (which seems to be the case), it will prompt the Fed to ease further to provide an offset. In the press conference, Powell mentioned the word “global” 20 times, “trade” 30 times and “uncertainty” 9 times.
The Fed believes that the pivot in monetary policy from hikes to patience and now to cuts is part of the reason that the US economy has fared well. In other words, the Fed does not see the recent strong data as a reason not to cut but as confirmation that signaling a rate cut was the correct policy. This speaks to the idea that much of monetary policy works through forward guidance.
All else equal, the inflation shortfall would have provided cover for easier monetary policy. Wage growth has been below expectations and long-term inflation expectations have been too low. The Fed is not pleased that 2% has been the ceiling – they want it to be the average.
In sum, Bank of America is sticking with its call that the Fed will cut a cumulative 75bp in this “midcycle correction”, with the next cuts in September and October. But, as Meyer cautions, if the trade war escalates, it won’t be a midcycle correction and instead will be the start of a real easing cycle.
And while there is nothing at all wrong with BofA’s forecast, there is just one problem: the market is expecting much, much more from the Fed.
As JPMorgan showed earlier, not only did rate markets continue to price in a protracted rate cut cycle until the beginning of 2021 after this week’s FOMC meeting, but the curve flattened completely between the beginning of 2021 and the beginning of 2023, pointing to persistent flatness following Trump’s traiff tweet. This suggests that, even before this week’s tariff announcement, the Fed was seen by rate markets after this week’s FOMC meeting as less likely to deliver the 1995/1998 “mid-cycle adjustment” “insurance rate cuts” experience that both the Fed and equity markets have been looking for.
It also means that even before Trump’s shocking tariff announcement, the disconnect between rate and equity markets had worsened after the FOMC meeting! Naturally, Trump’s announcement – which was certainly timed to prompt even more rate cuts by the Fed – only made things even worse with the market now demanding even more easing from the Fed.
To put this visually, the disconnect between rates and equities has never been wider. And, as JPM’s Nikolaos Panigirtzoglou calculated, for this disconnect to persist, the Fed will need to keep cutting rates by another 100bp by the beginning of 2021 to satisfy both equity and bond markets at the same time. In other words, the only way the divergence between bonds and stocks is sustainable, is if the Fed cuts at least another 4 times.
Will the Fed do this? To paraphrase JPM, not a chance… unless Trump escalates trade war so badly he pushes China, and by implication, the world to the verge of a global depression. The risk, of course, is that knowing Trump he may find it very difficult to stop before pushing the world beyond the edge, where not even ZIRP, NIRP and QE by the Fed – or even outright monetization of equities – will have much of an impact.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2YFfMH0 Tyler Durden
President Trump’s recent tweet about Baltimore ignited a firestorm of controversy. Baltimore has since become the focal point of a very public fight between Trump and local congressman Elijah Cummings (MD-7).
People on both sides have strong views about Trump’s motives. However, on one level, Trump served to highlight the videos of a local political activist Kimberly Klacik. These videos revealed Baltimore’s systemic problems of rats, abandoned buildings, and trash. Klacik reported that many of the city’s residents feel that they have been forgotten.
Our auditors at OpenTheBooks.com investigated just how much taxpayer money flows into the Baltimore bureaucracy at every level: federal, state, and local. We found the city drowning in taxpayer dollars.
Our audit shows that $1.1 billion in grants and direct payments (subsidies and assistance) flowed into Baltimore city agencies and other city-based entities including non-profit organizations, corporations, and colleges during the last four years (FY2015-FY2018). That’s the equivalent of nearly $7,000 in federal aid per family of four living in Baltimore during this period.
Federal grants and direct payments amounted to an equivalent of $7,000 per Baltimore family of four during the years FY2015-FY2018. OPENTHEBOOKS.COM
The last time we analyzed the amount of federal grants and direct payments flowing into major U.S. cities (FY2016), Baltimore received more funding per resident ($573) than the comparable cities of Portland, OR ($274); Nashville, TN ($353); Oklahoma City, OK ($201); Detroit, MI ($372); and Milwaukee, WI ($183). However, Baltimore also lagged cities like Chicago, IL ($1,942); New York, NY ($894); and was on par with San Francisco, CA ($588).
Baltimore out-ranks most major U.S. cities in the receipt of federal grants and direct payments per resident. OPENTHEBOOKS.COM
All of this, though, only begins to tell the full story of Baltimore’s bureaucracy.
An army of 30,000 public employees at the local and federal levels are based in the City of Baltimore (pop. 620,000). State employee work locations were not disclosed by the Comptroller of Maryland in their payroll production subject to our Freedom of Information Act request. Therefore, state employees based in the city are not known.
It’s a big bureaucracy designed to deliver government aid and spans such services as education, transportation, public safety, housing, health, human services, welfare, and more.
Here’s a breakdown of the local units of government — their employee headcounts and annual cash compensation spending:
The City of Baltimore has 13,522 employees with total payroll exceeding $821 million annually. The mayor’s office alone spent $7 million last year on salaries for 111 employees; another $1 million was spent on public relations.
Milwaukee, Wisconsin and Las Vegas, Nevada are comparable in population and geographic size to Baltimore. Milwaukee has 7,871 public employees and Las Vegas has 9,569 workers on payroll – including the metro police. Even the City of Detroit has less than 7,100 employees.
The City of Baltimore employs 13,500 public workers. OPENTHEBOOKS.COM
In the city schools, there are another 10,770 employees with total salaries of $$619.3 million. The first $79.1 million is spent outside the classroom: psychologists ($11.4 million), social workers ($16.4 million), counselors ($7.4 million), bus drivers ($2.7 million), and principals/assistant principals ($41.2 million).
There are 85,602 workers employed by the federal executive agencies based in the state of Maryland. Our auditors learned that 6,472 of them work in the city and earned $521.4 million last year. The largest federal employers in the city were Social Security Administration, National Institutes of Health, and the Internal Revenue Service.
Who’s responsible for the condition of Baltimore? Everyone. Everyone has dropped the ball – all 30,000+ federal, state, and local public employees are responsible. However, everyone can also point to someone else or the system at large and shift the blame.
There are no easy answers to the intractable challenges in cities like Baltimore. But there are unsung heroes and social entrepreneurs transforming lives and leading comeback movements across the country.
Based on our audit, one fact seems clear. If more money for public employees was the answer, Baltimore’s challenges would have been solved long ago.
This picture is worth a thousand words…
It turns out that simply throwing money at a problem, doesn’t solve it.
(click image below if interactive chart above is not functioning)
Remember, it’s your money. You deserve to know how it’s being spent.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2YF9Gm3 Tyler Durden
Rapper A$AP Rocky is back in the US after a month of wallowing in a Swedish jail – much to the delight of President Trump, who had pressured the Swedish government to release the rapper, and even offered to personally guarantee the rapper’s bail.
Though the verdict in Rocky’s trial won’t be released for a couple of weeks, the rapper has been allowed to return to the US. During his trial earlier in the week, one of the key witnesses changed her testimony.
Now, as allegations of racism dog the Swedish justice system, and dozens of American celebrities demand that the charges against Rocky and his two compatriots be dropped, CNN has released A diplomatic letter warning of “negative consequences” in US-Swedish relations, if the American rapper’s hearing on assault charges was not resolved quickly.
The letter included what appeared to be a veiled threat against the Swedish government, to either release Rocky, or risk damaging the bilateral relationship.
CNN has obtained the full text of a letter written by the US Special Presidential Envoy for Hostage Affairs Robert C. O’Brien and leaked earlier on Twitter. Addressed to the Swedish Prosecution Authority on July 31 – before the rapper’s trial had concluded – the letter said the US was eager “to resolve this case as soon as possible to avoid potentially negative consequences to the US-Swedish bilateral relationship.”
Read the full text of the letter below:
Embassy of the United States of America Stockholm, Sweden July 31, 2019
Prosecution Authority of the Kingdom of Sweden:
On behalf of the US. Government, I present my compliments to the Prosecution Authority of the Kingdom of Sweden and with respect to the upcoming legal proceedings in the case of detained American citizens Rakim Mayers, David Rispers, and Bladimir Corniel, the US Government requests the following: Immediate humanitarian release from the current Kronoberg Remand Prison Supervised detention in a local Stockholm hotel pending disposition of the case I take this opportunity to remind the Prosecution Authority of the commitment by President Trump to Prime Minister Stefan Lovfen that the three Americans will remain in Sweden if granted a humanitarian release.
As Special Presidential Envoy for Hostage Affairs, I stressed to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Justice officials on July 29, 2019, the government of the United States of America wants to resolve this case as soon as possible to avoid potentially negative consequences to the U.S.~Swedish bilateral relationship.
I avail myself of this opportunity to renew to the Prosecution Authority of the Kingdom of Sweden the assurances of my highest consideration.
Very truly yours, Ambassador Robert O’Brien Special Presidential Envoy The Prosecution Authority of Sweden, Stockholm.
Sweden’s Prosecutor-General, Petra Lundh, responded in a letter on Aug. 1, 2019, defending the independence of the Swedish legal system. “No other prosecutor, not even I, may interfere with a specific case or try to affect the prosecutor responsible,” Lundh said.
“Furthermore, when a person is charged and the case is brought before a court, only the court can decide, during or after the trial, whether or not to release the person or decide on supervised detention.”
Shortly after returning to the US, Rocky published an Instagram post thanking his fans and followers for standing by him during the trial.
Back in April and then again in June 2018, when the world was stressing about rising inflation, higher interest rates, future Fed rate hikes and so on, the strategist who over the past two years has emerged as the most insightful from JPMorgan’s analyst corps, Nikolaos Panigirtzoglou, made an extremely contrarian and very unpopular prediction – especially to his permabullish JPM colleague Marko Kolanovic – when he pointed out that contrary to expectations of rising inflation and steeper yield curves, the global forward bond curve had in fact just inverted, which suggested that despite what an army of bullish analysts was predicting, a sharp market drop was upcoming.
He was, of course, right and just three months later global stocks began their biggest drop since the financial crisis, which culminated in a mini bear market for the S&P, which however lasted just a few minutes as the crash in risk assets spooked Jerome Powell and prompted the Fed to slam the breaks on further tightening, to kill the Quantiative Tightening “autopilot”, to turn dovish and to eventually launch the first rate cut cycle since 2007 last week.
Needless to say, ever since then we have been especially focused on what JPM’s Panigirtzoglou has to say, because unlike all of his penguin peers who merely paraphrase the bullish echo chamber, he actually has some very valid and actionable insight.
Which is why, as we usually do, we read Panigirtzoglou’s latest weekly “Flows and Liquidity” periodical with great interest, not only due to its aggregation of some of the best financial thoughts and observations around, but because just like in early 2018, Panigirtzogou appears to have spotted a paradigm-shifting tipping point which could have dramatic, and dire, consequences for capital markets.
As is traditional, Panigirtzoglou starts off by focusing on the most important recent macro event, in this case the unexpected re-escalation in the US-China trade war, which similar to May, is creating recession-like/risk-off market dynamics with government bonds rallying and equities and risky assets selling off, resulting in the infamous “alligator jaws” chart.
But what JPM’s Greek strategist finds most troubling in this week’s events is that rate markets were signaling a higher risk of a US recession or protracted slowdown post FOMC even before the tariff announcement came out on Thursday.
In other words, even before this week’s tariff announcement, the Fed had failed to convince the rate markets that we are in a “mid-cycle adjustment”/ “insurance rate cuts” phase like 1995/1998, as Powell repeatedly claimed we are. Instead, and far more ominously, post-FOMC rate markets priced in an “even more protracted Fed rate cut cycle which is typically seen during severe economic slowdowns or recessions.”
First of all, the reason why the market is likely convinced that the Fed made a mistake is that as we noted last Sunday before the FOMC announcement, compared to 2007, or the last time the Fed launched an easing cycle – and cut rates by 50bps more than the current 25bps – conditions currently are far worse.
In other words, in attempting to avoid taking a hard-line easing stance as a result of two hawkish dissenting votes, Powell ended up taking a bad situation and making it even worse by only confusing the market.
Meanwhile, if one extends the comparison between the current economy and the “insurance” periods envisioned by Powell, i.e. when the Fed did precautionary rate cuts in 1995 and 1998, here are the differences one we can observe:
during both 1995 and 1998 the Fed had managed to re-steepen the front end of the US curve by cutting rates by 75bp. This is because at the time the Fed had over-delivered both in terms of the speed and magnitude of rate cuts, to wit:
In 1995, a month before the first cut, rate markets were pricing around 60bp of rate cuts over 12 months and the Fed delivered 75bp over six months.
In 1998, a month before the first cut, rate markets were pricing around 40bp of rate cuts over 12 months and the Fed delivered 75bp over three months.
The re-steepening that the Fed had managed to engineer at the time is shown in Figure 1 which shows that the very front end of the US curve stopped being inverted and re-steepened sharply following 75bp of rate cuts (unlike now).
Here’s the bigger problem: unlike 1995 and 1998, rate markets are currently doubting that the Fed will do enough to re-steepen the curve in the foreseeable future. Case in point: the spread between the 1-month OIS rate 2-years forward vs the 1-month OIS rate 1-year forward had declined to -11bp post FOMC vs. -8bp before the FOMC meeting. In other words the forward curve flattened rather than steepened following this week’s FOMC meeting with rate markets effectively implying a lower likelihood of a repeat of the re-steepening experience of 1995/1998. In fact – and this is why what the Fed achieved last week is nothing short of policy failure – the front end is currently implying that even if the Fed cuts rates three more times over the next year, the curve would still be inverted at the front end!
During both 1995 and 1998 episodes the forward spread i.e. the 1-month rate 2-years forward minus 1-year forward, entered negative territory only very briefly.
However, as the JPM strategist shows, the persistent negativity of this forward spread at the moment is reminiscent more of the 2001/2007 recession episodes rather than the 1995/1998 mid-cycle Fed policy adjustment episodes.
The flattening at the front end of the US curve following this week’s FOMC meeting is also depicted in Figure 3 which shows the 1-month US OIS rate at different forward points in the future, pre-FOMC (July 30th) and post- FOMC (July 31st).
Not only did rate markets continue to price in a protracted rate cut cycle until the beginning of 2021 after this week’s FOMC meeting , but the curve flattened completely between the beginning of 2021 and the beginning of 2023, pointing to persistent flatness. This suggests that, even before this week’s tariff announcement, the Fed was seen by rate markets after this week’s FOMC meeting as less likely to deliver the 1995/1998 “mid-cycle adjustment” “insurance rate cuts” experience that both the Fed and equity markets have been looking for.
This means that even before Trump’s shocking tariff announcement, the disconnect between rate and equity markets had worsened after the FOMC meeting! Naturally, Trump’s announcement – which may well have been to prompt even more rate cuts by the Fed – only made things even worse with the market now demanding even more easing from the Fed.
Meanwhile, if one looks solely at the bond market instead of stocks, recession risk increased further after the tariff announcement on Thursday with the front end of the US curve as of August 1st squeezing in an extra rate cut by next year, effectively pointing to a deeper rate cut cycle. In turn this makes the disconnect between equity and rate markets even more striking when viewed through the lens of JPMorgan’s US recession probabilities framework shown in the next chart, which shows a simple analysis for gauging US recession risks based on the current distance of asset prices from their most recent peak, compared with the peak to trough move seen in a typical US recession.
Following this week’s UST rally, the 5yr UST yield is now pointing to an implied probability of a US recession of 70% vs. only 5%-10% probability implied by the S&P500 or US HY credit. In other words, after this week, it is becoming even more difficult to reconcile government bond markets with risky markets, i.e. equity and credit markets.
Which brings us to the $64 trillion question: will the Fed keep cutting rates by another 100bp by the beginning of 2021 to only provide insurance in a good growth environment to satisfy both equity and bond markets at the same time. In other words – and here we urge readers to once again look at the alligator jaws chart above – the only way the divergence between bonds and stocks is sustainable, is if the Fed cuts at least another 4 times.
Will the Fed do this? According to JPMorgan, “most likely not” unless of course Trump manages to transform World Trade War III into something even more dire, so as Panigirtzoglou concludes, “one of the two markets is likely to prove wrong.” It was so obvious which one, that the JPM strategist didn’t even both to point out which.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2T1Ymz7 Tyler Durden
Now approaching two decades after 9/11 and the start of the so-called “war on terror” we’ve now come full circle. With the ISIS caliphate dead, and with Pentagon officials increasingly unable to justify the US expanding Middle East footprint based on that inflated threat, we’re now being told al-Qaeda is back and stronger than ever.
This even after days ago world headlines were driven by ambiguous and unconfirmed reports that Osama bin Laden’s son and successor as head to the terror organization, Hamza bin Laden, is believed dead.
Bloomberg cites the State Department in a report this week to say al-Qaeda is “rebuilding” and appears “stronger than ever”:
Al-Qaeda and its affiliates remain as much of a threat to the U.S. as “it has ever been” after the terrorist group rebuilt itself while the U.S. and other nations focused on destroying Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, a State Department official said.
“Al-Qaeda has been strategic and patient over the past several years,” Nathan Sales, the State Department’s coordinator for counterterrorism, said on Thursday at a briefing in Washington. “It’s let ISIS absorb the brunt of the world’s counterterrorism efforts while patiently reconstituting itself. What we see today is an al-Qaeda that is as strong as it has ever been.”
And yet it’s no secret that US intelligence for years actually facilitated the growth of al-Qaeda affiliates in Syria with arms and equipment, even directly coordinating its takeover of Idlib in 2015, as some mainstream terrorism “experts” have themselves in the past admitted. From Syria to Yemen to Africa, al-Qaeda is growing, apparently, as if in a vacuum.
“We see active and deadly al-Qaeda affiliates across the globe, including in Somalia, where al-Shabab commits regular attacks inside Somalia and also has begun to attack its neighbors as well, particularly Kenya,” Sales continued in the Bloomberg report.
But not everyone with a major media platform is buying the narrative that America is somehow locked in an eternal struggle with jihadist terrorism, cast as “good vs. evil” with the USA always on the right side of history.
In places like Syria, Yemen, and in our close alliance with Saudi Arabia, “our president is supporting al-Qaeda”…
We were all lied to. We were told that Saddam had WMD, was working w/ Al Qaeda & that this posed a threat to the American people. But not only have we not gone after Al Qaeda, they are stronger than they were on 9/11 #TULSI2020#DemDebatehttps://t.co/cl7xcK02rVpic.twitter.com/ckdQvIQMp8
Trillions spent, thousands of lives lost, the Middle East more unstable than ever… and this is where we are in 2019, with threats and fresh 2003-style fear-mongering over a “newly rebuilt” al-Qaeda.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2LY3zY0 Tyler Durden
Update: Some reports claim the shooter has been caught
#Update: Just in – Police officers in El Paso, #Texas believe to have caught the alleged suspect! It is still not confirmed if it is the gunmen who opened fire at the #Walmart inside the Cielo Vista Mall.
At least eighteen people have reportedly been shot – with one killed – after an active shooter opened fire at a Walmart.
According to a police scanner the shooter was armed with an automatic weapon, possibly an AK-47, and that they began shooting in the car park before entering the business.
Shortly after 11am local time El Paso Police tweeted: “Active Shooting Stay away from Cielo Vista Mall Area. Scene is Still Active.”
Definitely stay out of I-10 near Cielo Vista Mall (Airway, Hawkins exits). Police presence, lots of ambulances leaving the area. Helicopter patrolling the area and traffic at a standstill. https://t.co/88UjLk3Vsupic.twitter.com/Z5M1iMhr8C
The Mirror reports that the shooter is reported to have opened fire in the car park before going inside the supermarket in El Paso, Texas which is on the border with Mexico and the state of New Mexico.
Shopper sends video of people inside #sams, which like other businesses are locked down. Scene still active. Police warn all to stay away. @dallasnews pic.twitter.com/Yq8ivPstEt
#Update: Just in – Video footage of police clearing out the entire Cielo Vista Mall in El Paso, #Texas. Where a gunman who is still at large shot at least 18 people and one person dead in a #Walmart and on a parking lot. pic.twitter.com/tqb0iKwNmh
The testimony of Robert Mueller should have marked the end of a national nightmare. Instead, a new legend was born…
The change came in the space of a single news cycle. Beginning before and ending after the congressional testimony of Special Counsel Robert Mueller, the depth of America’s faith-based mania was laid bare. The Russiagate press managed to turn reality all the way around.
In the moment, while the event was being broadcast live, the assessment of the ex-FBI director’s performance as a congressional witness was nearly unanimous. Mueller was a confused, vulnerable human being, not an indefatigable force.
“Very, very painful,” said longtime Democratic strategist David Axelrod.
“I don’t know what the #Dems were expecting from #RobertMueller, but this probably isn’t it,”tweeted Howard Fineman.
“Mueller is struggling,” former prosecutor and Mueller subordinate Glenn Kirchner commented during the event. “It strikes me as a health issue.”
This was a monstrous indictment of media. The Special Counsel’s inability to follow questions or remember key details (he was “not familiar” with oppo firm Fusion-GPS!) exploded two years of hype.
Mueller was sold in hundreds of articles and TV features as earth’s most competent human, a real-life superhero. His close-lipped manner and razor intellect supposedly presented a living antidote to our blabbermouth numbskull president, Donald Trump. He was as a character straight out of Team America, an ex-Marine FBI chief by way of St. Paul’s, Princeton, and a grad program at the University of Awesome. “Batman is back to save America,” his former FBI second Timothy Murphy said in a typical story from two years ago, describing Mueller as “the hero America needs.”
This myth died on television.
It happened by mistake, the kind that’s always a risk when you’re dealing with live broadcasts, as even censorious societies like the Soviet Union have found. Congressional Democrats like House Judiciary chief Jerrold Nadler and Adam Schiff of the Intelligence committee thought a TV show would bring the Mueller report “to life.”
How these two goofs didn’t know, or bother to find out, that Mueller was not up for the task of following difficult questions is hard to understand. Nadler and Schiff are both lawyers. A first-year law student wouldn’t put a witness on stand blind like that for a minute, let alone seven nationally-televised hours.
But they pressed on, convinced the Special Counsel could breathe new life into a case they believed had waned only because Mueller’s long report was a “dry, prosecutorial work product” that the public couldn’t or wouldn’t digest.
The report has been hyped plenty. It’s sold hundreds of thousands of copies and has now been on the New York Times bestseller list for thirteen weeks. In #Resistance America it’s as ubiquitous as Gideon’s Bible. What Nadler and Schiff seem to have wanted was something beyond familiarity with the work, like video of Mueller calling Trump a crook that could be used in commercials.
Instead, they revealed something no one expected. Now we understood why the Special Counsel avoided live exchanges across two years of being one of the most famous people on earth.
“If, uh, Democrats were looking for a pristine ten to fifteen second sound bite that made the point they wanted to make, uh, it probably didn’t happen,” said Lester Holt.
Chuck Todd, who along with colleague Rachel Maddow has been one of the most energetic Russigate torchbearers, offered that on the bringing-Mueller-to-life front, the testimony was “a complete failure.” He added it “didn’t do anything to help” impeachment arguments.
Within 48 hours, national consensus was completely reversed. It was breathtaking.
“Mueller didn’t fail. The country did,” wrote Jennifer Rubin of The Washington Post. Her key passage, which would become a point stressed by many, complained about the over-focus on “optics”:
The “failure” is not of a prosecutor who found the facts but might be ill equipped to make the political case, but instead, of a country that won’t read his report and a media obsessed with scoring contests rather than focusing on the damning facts at issue.
In a heartbeat this idea spread everywhere. “Robert Mueller and the tyranny of ‘optics’” blaredThe Atlantic. “Forget the theater criticism – Mueller’s conclusions are the real news,” wrote colleague David Graham. “Jeffries dismisses optics: We wanted testimony from Mueller, not Robert de Niro,” chimed inThe Hill.
It became a de rigeur media and social media observation to say the hearing wasn’t a disaster, that Mueller in fact moved the ball forward, his mighty reputation intact. He’d been in a difficult position, you see, and fighting evil, not movie acting, is his thing. The Daily Beast said so with this headline and lede:
Robert Mueller, Trump Hunter
Really, there were Democrats angry with Special Counsel Robert Mueller for being Robert Mueller Wednesday morning before the House Judiciary Committee? Are we so unaccustomed to a modest public servant speaking honestly in a measured voice that it enrages us…?
Writer Margaret Carlson insisted Mueller had been asked to deliver the impossible, tasked with “saving the big game with Hail Mary passes in the fourth quarter.” However, she said, he “was never going to throw the long ball” (metaphor production has soared in the Mueller period). The problem wasn’t with Mueller, but with us, for failing to “manage expectations.”
As such, Mueller was not merely Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter, but also “Moses on the Mount, delivering the Ten Commandments but not dramatizing them.” Moreover, in a predictable development, pundits insisted the rumors of Mueller’s disappointing testimony were vicious lies perpetrated by Republicans in league with (or “on their knees” for) Trump.
Mueller was back to being both a sacred figure and superhero (in America, the prophet is always also an ass-kicking leading man). This took two days. Three days after his testimony, Kathleen Parker was arguing in the Washington Post that Mueller’s “forbearance” on the stand made him deserving of the Medal of Honor. The following passage was actually published by someone self-identifying as a journalist:
The close-up of Mueller’s face was a portrait of rare depth, the sort one is more likely to find on a Leonardo da Vinci canvas with all its shadows, hollows and his soulful, nearly weeping eyes. I found myself thinking of paintings of the Agony in the Garden, showing Jesus’ upturned face as he prayed.
Mueller on the stand was a potted plant. Reporters saw Moses and Jesus. If you need evidence we’re in a religious mania, look no further. This was a pure exercise in restoring an idol for worship.
It was also a metaphor for the Russiagate narrative. Mueller’s legend was built without any of his hagiographers demanding to speak to the man. Virtually the whole of it was constructed on the word of confederates or anonymous sources. In the manner of priests everywhere since the beginning of time, these sources interpreted for us the secret beliefs, conclusions, and desires of the unavailable man above.
“It is instructive to hear friends and former colleagues talk about Robert Swan Mueller III,” wrote Time when giving the Mueller third place in its Person of the Year issue. Mueller was a figure of such great gravity, we were told, he does not deign to speech:
Mueller, they say, is the kind of man who flicks the lights off and on at his home to inform guests that it’s time to leave a social gathering…
Citizens were urged to find truth, justice, and integrity not in Mueller’s words, but in his hair. “Mueller’s hair is one little shining piece of sanity in a sea of madness,” a portrait artist told the AP. “So precise and sober and straightforward and without deceit…”
The same article interviewed a woman named Alicia Barrett whose son bought a Labrador puppy for Christmas:
“The strong, silent type,” Barnett observed. And then she named him Mueller, an homage to the stoic special prosecutor appointed to investigate Russian interference in the 2016 election…
Mueller’s silence turned out to be more genuinely Labrador-like than Barnett and everyone else was led to believe. A media legend of immense dimensions was built without anyone first making sure there was a there there. Sound familiar?
Fellow journalists who think they’re aiding an anti-Trump resistance by keeping the empty piñata of Russiagate raised to the rafters couldn’t be more wrong. This story is Trump’s best friend. As opposed to the Mueller probe, which was an immediate legal threat to the president and his family, Trump on some level must be dying for impeachment.
Heading into an election year, nothing would suit him more than the protracted media spectacle of Democrats trying to break down the walls of the White House with a noodle.
Instead of spending next year campaigning against a policy wonk like Elizabeth Warren or a populist like Bernie Sanders (it’s safe to say Trump would look forward to a run against verbal mistake-factory Joe Biden), he’ll be running against a parade of fourth-raters in and around the party who spent Trump’s presidency rejecting real-world concerns of voters and throwing political capital into a dead-end conspiracy theory.
Less than 1% of voters now consider “the Russia situation” the most serious issue facing the country. This isn’t a new development. Polls consistently showed this to be the case across the last few years, including earlier this winter, before Mueller’s probe ended without further indictments.
In other words, even when voters in both parties knew charges could be filed at any moment, this issue rated below the economy, immigration, civil rights, health care, and other concerns. In mid-March, just before Mueller’s probe wrapped up, CNN found a whopping zero percent of Americans identified “Russian investigation” as their primary concern heading into 2020. The network wrote (emphasis mine):
The CNN poll… asked respondents to describe one issue that would be the most important to them when deciding whom to support in next year’s presidential election. The Russia investigation didn’t register in the results.
The above was the fifteenth paragraph in CNN’s story. Talk about burying the lede! Instead of Poll: Americans Don’t Give a Shit About Russiagate, the headline read, “Americans want Mueller’s report release and approve of his work. But their minds are made up about Trump.”
The only people who really care about this story are DC politicians, Twitter, people who don’t have bills to worry about (like Hollywood actors), and the news media, which continues to put this story front and center. Ratings are one reason, but people like Jake Tapper and Chris Cuomo have probably also seen Red Sparrow too many times.*
The conspiracy tale has validated every Trump criticism about both crooked media and the deep state. The whole narrative is the brainchild of Clinton hacks, a handful of overzealous intelligence nuts, and a subset of the Democratic Party’s weakest elected minds, in particular murine ex-prosecutor Schiff, a man who should be selling Buicks back in his hometown Burbank.
Take a good look at Schiff, at our paranoid outpatient of an ex-CIA chief John Brennan, and at excuse-making Clinton campaign chief Robby Mook (a.k.a. the captain of the Democratic Titanic), and ask if you really want to be re-writing history for those people.
They’re making the press accomplices in the most imbecilic effort at political opposition in recent American history. Hence the desperate public comments and the string of wacked-out stunts, like putting Mueller under oath. Impeachment will be the next adventure in doubling down blind.
A significant portion of the original conspiracy theory vanished via a series of under-circulated news reports just in the months since the end of the Mueller probe. Remember the Southern District of New York campaign finance probe that arose in connection with Trump lawyer Michael Cohen, the one described as a “major danger” to Trump? Remember all that talk about how “Trump can’t run the Mueller playbook on the New York feds?” Experts told us that the Cohen probe posed a “significant threat” of new indictments for Trump and his family.
When that investigation closed with no new charges the same week Mueller testified, the commentariat barely noticed. Same with the Democrats v. Earth lawsuit/publicity stunt, in which the Democratic National Committee sued Trump, the Russian government, and Wikileaks under a RICO claim.
Plaintiffs charged the Trump campaign conspired to steal and release DNC emails. But a federal judge tossed the suit on the grounds that the Trump campaign “did not participate in the theft.” Moreover, the Clinton-appointed judge said published documents were “of public concern” and therefore protected like any other journalistic work product. The judge also ruled that allegations about all the non-Russian defendants (including Wikileaks) were “insufficient to hold them liable” for any illegality involved in obtaining DNC emails.
The end of this years-long gambit only drew a few brief stories in response. The same happened when Mueller in testimony dismissed a zany story about “human activity” detected between a secret server between Trump and Alfa-Bank. Over a dozen news stories covered this tale in length on the way up the news cycle, but dispositive information on the way down drew a shrug.
Russiagate should be dead. Instead, it’s gaining new life, with impeachment looking like the New Testament phase of the religion.
Until Russiagate, Robert Mueller was mainly known to the DC press corps as one of many imperious stiffs who made up George W. Bush’s War on Terror bureaucracy. At the outset of our glorious WMD hunt and in defense of the sweeping surveillance programs we likely still wouldn’t know about if not for Edward Snowden, Mueller effortlessly pushed official lies, conveying the impression of a man who wouldn’t wipe his ass with a congressional oversight committee.
Pious would have been a good word for him even pre-2017. Not many people could take two years of being portrayed as a Godhead on magazine covers and in comedy shows, but the role fit Mueller’s starchy Northeast celibate image like a glove.
The undisguised nature of the religiosity is amazing to look at now.GQ, describing Mueller as someone who embodied the “boy scout ideal” of “the absolute fairness of the lawful good,” wrote the following:
We may decide, in the end, that we do not want to know Robert Mueller; we may even take comfort in the fact that there may not be much of Robert Mueller to know.
This was the old “We’re not worthy!” routine from Wayne’s World. People did not want to find out Mueller was human in any way.
Newspapers and cable framed coverage of the investigation as a fable of coming deliverance. “Mueller knows” was one cliché. Reading “bread crumbs” or “puzzle pieces” dropped from above also became a regular fixation, as reporters sought to “read between the lines” of court filings.
By early this year, “waiting for Mueller” assumed enormous significance. The coming report was hyped as a judgment day. It was an article of faith with pundits and reporters that the verdict would contain all the expected evidence, as a fulfillment of prophecy.
Like the original Great Disappointment (Christ failing to come down to earth to dispense justice according to the Millerite prediction on October 22nd, 1844), the Mueller watch came to an abrupt cat-fart of an end.
Late on a March evening (coincidentally on the 22nd) the collusion narrative died, with news of the Mueller probe concluding without new indictments. This colossal bummer for Russiagate hopefuls forced poor Rachel Maddow to cut short her trout fishing vacation, and do a somber broadcast reassuring viewers that a concluded Mueller probe was “the start of something, not the end of something.”
There is a false narrative even about this sequence of events, as I have the misfortune to know personally. A common trope is that the death of the collusion narrative was a Trumpian falsehood, issued via hated Attorney General William Barr’s letter summarizing the Mueller report on March 24th.
As one of a handful of reporters who spoke about loony Russiagate coverage from the start, I began receiving emails or tweets on a daily or hourly basis from people accusing me of “believing Barr’s lies.” But like others who spoke out that day, I published my jeremiad about Russiagate being the next WMD on March 23rd, a day before Barr released his letter.
The end of the collusion/conspiracy narrative had nothing to do with Barr. It was officially over in the days before, as saddened media write-ups here, here, here, and here (“Russian collusion is a dead end,” conceded USA Today) attest.
The lack of charges was immediately spun by some as meaning nothing (Mueller found conspiracy but didn’t charge it because Manafort already had a prison sentence! Mueller found conspiracy but didn’t charge it because the evidence was classified! And so on). It all became a new story, about Barr lying about what those non-indictments meant.
On a more meta level, editorialists began plotting a rhetorical course that abandoned the search for conspiracy between Trump and Russia, and focused instead on obstruction of justice as the big reveal.
Legal analysts like Jeffrey Toobin were put back to work building the public case. We were reminded frequently that a charge of obstruction does not legally require an underlying offense. These arguments by themselves essentially admitted the previous two years of speculation about criminal Trump-Russia conspiracies involving blackmail, bribery, election fixing, espionage, even treason – all the theories about pee tapes and secret servers and five year cultivation plans and meetings with hackers in Prague and bribes from Rosneft — had been dead ends.
The precedent now would be impeachment of a sitting president for his response to a politically-charged investigation into crimes he didn’t commit, the same logic that rightly enraged Democrats in the Ken Starr days (articles of impeachment were filed against Bill Clinton, too, for obstruction, for coaching Monica Lewinsky and assistant Betty Currie). It wasn’t as good as a collusion case, but why not? Proponents pressed on, as if this had been their goal all along.
By the time Schiff and Nadler came up with their harebrained religious revival scheme, Russiagate had come full circle. Adherents were now back to making the same arguments editorialists were making in July and August of 2016: Donald Trump was simply too willing to be a partner to Putin. The crime was no longer any overt act of conspiracy, but in the mental state of being amenable to cooperation with the evil one.
What the report finds is not clear-cut evidence of a quid-pro-quo. Instead, what we see is a series of bungled and abortive attempts to create ties between the two sides…
Does that rise to the level of “collusion?” It’s a slippery term. But if “collusion” refers to a willingness to cooperate with Russian interference in the 2016 US election and actively taking steps to abet it, it seems to me that the Mueller report does in fact establish that it took place…
Schiff in his opening statement before Mueller’s testimony took this all a step further. He said Trump “knew a foreign power was intervening in our election and welcomed it,” a crime he described as “Disloyalty to our country.”
Noting that this offense “may not be criminal” (a fact Schiff hastened to blame on destruction of evidence and “the use of encrypted communications”), he went on to insist that, “disloyalty to country violates the very oath of citizenship,” and is therefore unconstitutional, and a “violation of law.” That this concept was originally dreamed up in the Red Scare era (McCarthy also accused members of Truman’s administration of disloyalty) seemed not to bother anyone.
Russiagate isn’t just about bad reporting. It was and is a dangerous political story about rallying the public behind authoritarian maneuvers in an effort to achieve a political outcome. Republicans who battered Mueller with questions weren’t wrong. Investigators in the Russia probe made extravagant use of informants abroad (in the less-regulated counterintelligence context), lied to the FISA court, leaked classified information for political purposes, opened the cookie jar of captured electronic communications on dubious pretexts, and generally blurred the lines between counterintelligence, criminal law enforcement, and private political research in ways that should and will frighten defense lawyers everywhere.
Proponents cheered the seizure of records from Trump’s lawyer Cohen, sending a message that attorney-client privilege is a voluntary worry if the defendant is obnoxious enough. The public likewise shrugged when prosecutors trashed Maria Butina as a prostitute, because Butina a) is Russian, and b) palled around with the NRA. This case has seen would-be liberals embracing guilt by association, guilt by nationality, guilt by accusation, entrapment, secret evidence, and other concepts that were considered an anathema to progressives as recently as the War on Terror period. In the name of preventing the “sowing of discord,” they’ve even embraced censorship.
Finally, in an effort to milk the Mueller report for maximum effect, Democrats – ostensibly the party of card-carrying ACLU members – are trying to uphold a vicious new legal concept, “not exonerated.” In a moment that provided a window into the authoritarian tendencies Mueller once expressed with more fluency, the Special Counsel declined under questioning by Ohio Republican Michael Turner to reject the idea that in our legal system, “there is not power or authority to exonerate.”
This was equivalent to no-commenting a question about whether people are innocent until proven guilty. In America, prosecutors don’t declare you exonerated, you are exonerated, until someone proves otherwise. Efforts to reverse this understanding are dangerous, Trump or no Trump. It’s appalling that Democrats are backing this idea.
All these excesses have been excused on the grounds that Trump must be stopped at all costs. But you don’t challenge someone for being racist and an enemy of immigrants, the poor, and the environment by turning the federal security apparatus into a Franz Kafka theme park. It’s fighting bad with worse.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2Klo8dC Tyler Durden
Following initial reports this week that the White House is preparing to escalate sanctions on Venezuela, an unnamed senior administration official has given new confirmation that the Trump Administration is seriously consideringimposing a naval blockade on Venezuela, as part of a continuing pressure campaign to oust socialist President Nicolas Maduro.
The senior official further indicated Maduro has “a short window” to voluntarily leave power before Trump could approve a full “quarantine” or “blockade” of the Latin American country.
On Thursday while taking reporters’ questions, Trump was asked about some of Maduro’s powerful external backers:
Asked by a reporter whether he was considering such a measure, given the amount of involvement by China and Iran in Venezuela, Trump said: “Yes, I am.” He gave no details.
The president didn’t define the extent of such a “quarantine,” but a follow-up report in Bloomberg indicated it would start with a complete blockade by sea, enforced by US Navy ships.
President Maduro pounced on the comments, and directed his ambassador to lodge a formal complaint with the UN Security Council, saying any attempt to block the Venezuelan coastline is “clearly illegal” according to international law and norms. He said in a televised broadcast on Friday:
Venezuela’s seas would remain “free and independent.”
“All of Venezuela, in a civic-military union, repudiates and rejects the statements of Donald Trump about a supposed quarantine, of a supposed blockade,” Maduro said in the speech. “A blockade, why would he announce that? It is clearly illegal.”
Trump over this summer has expressed an unwillingness for “military options” in Venezuela, even recently saying he was “bored” with meddling in such a complex geopolitical climate, according to reports; however, this could be the start of escalation ramping back up again after a failed military coup attempt early this year.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2T4yfHz Tyler Durden
