Tag: news

In a world where pesky drones are becoming an increasingly greater nuisance – see the embarrassment that was last week’s Gatwick airport shutdown– the NYPD is taking the other side and is ramping up security for the city’s annual New Year’s Eve celebration in Times Square with more than 1,200 cameras — some installed on high-flying drones — to protect the nearly 2 million expected revelers, police officials said Friday.

One of the camera-equipped drones will be tethered to the top of a building to prevent potential attacks on the party below, Police Commissioner James O’Neill said at a press conference quoted by the NY Post.

“This is the first time we’re going to be using it at a large-scale event,” he said. “It’s just going to give us an additional view of the crowd.”

Bloomberg reports that the drones are being put in place in an attempt to prevent another incident like the shooting in Las Vegas on October 1, 2017, in which 59 people who were attending an outdoor concert were killed by a sniper located in a hotel room overlooking the Vegas strip.

What about bystanders who decide to bring one of their own drones? That would be a bad idea because counter-terrorism cops will also deploy counter-drone technology to protect against attackers, or anyone else for that matter, with anyone caught flying a drone likely to be arrested.

“Don’t fly a drone that night… There’s no need to fly a drone,” O’Neill said. “And if you do fly one, there’s a good chance you’ll end up getting arrested.”

In a press briefing, Deputy Commissioner of Intelligence and Counterterrorism John Miller said that in addition to the drones, the police will be using other technology for security including the use of 1,225 portable and stationary cameras. Miller described the drones as supporting devices that will give “visual aid and flexibility” from being able to move a camera around a large crowd and being able to move quickly to any required spot.

The precautions come with the NYPD reporting that so far there have been no credible threats directed at the ball-dropping bash or toward New York City in general. But O’Neill warned, “If anyone sees something that doesn’t look right … we need to know about it.”

Thousands of New York’s 37,000-officer police force, including hundreds of rookies sworn in Friday, will flood the area. No one will be more than 10 feet away from a uniformed or undercover plain clothes officer, O’Neill said. Participants in the celebration will be cordoned off in sections, or pens, in an area from 37th Street to 59th Street and between Sixth and Eighth Avenues.

In addition to the flying cameras, police will also set up 235 vehicles to block areas where revelers gather in Times Square, while 50 canine teams will be present to sniff out explosives.

“You will see a lot of officers with a lot of gear and long guns,” said O’Neill. “There will be much security that people see and much that they don’t see.”

Officers will also install more than 200 cement blocks in addition to metal bollards that already exist, according to the station.

Entry to the party starts at 11 a.m. and the square closes at 4 a.m. As usual, no backpacks, coolers, umbrellas or alcohol are allowed.

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NBC host Chuck Todd kicked off a full hour of discussion about Climate change on Sunday by telling “Meet the Press” viewers that there would be no debate over the topic – as the “science is settled.” 

“We’re not going to debate climate change, the existence of it. The Earth is getting hotter. And human activity is a major cause, period,” said Todd. “We’re not going to give time to climate deniers. The science is settled, even if political opinion is not.”

Meanwhile, outgoing Democratic California Governor Jerry Brown was on the show to discuss global warming – calling it a serious threat akin to what Americans faced at the beginning of WWII, and that the United States is not doing enough to address the problem. 

“[N]ot even close, and not close in California, and we’re doing more than anybody else, and not close in America or the rest of the world,” said Brown, adding “We’ve got to get off this idea, ‘it’s the economy, stupid.’ No, it’s the environment.”

Brown also knocked President Trump over his skepticism regarding climate change. 

“[Trump] is very convinced of his position,” said Brown. “And his position is that there’s nothing abnormal about the fires in California or the rising sea level or all the other incidents of climate change.”

Former New York City Mayor and potential 2020 presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg echoed Brown’s sentiment, telling Todd “I will be out there demanding that anybody that’s running has a plan. And I want to hear the plan, and I want everybody to look at it and say whether it’s doable,” said the billionaire philanthropist. 

As the Daily Caller’s Chris White notes: 

congressional Democrats are wrestling with a new flock of activist lawmakers who are pushing the party further to the left on climate policies. One of the ideas comingfrom Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Democratic Rep.-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York is the Green New Deal.

Sanders, a self-avowed socialist, and Ocasio-Cortez want to move the U.S. to 100-percent green energy, federal job guarantees for workers forced out of their fossil fuel jobs, guaranteed minimum income and universal health care. Analysts warn the Green New Deal could come with a monster price tag.

Eliminating fossil fuels and transitioning to a 100-percent renewable electric grid could cost as much as $5.2 trillion over two decades, according to a 2010 study by the conservative Heritage Foundation. That’s about $218 billion to move the grid away from coal and natural gas. –Daily Caller

Last month Todd was criticized after “Meet the Press” hosted a panelist who denied the existence of climate change. 

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More auto dealers are implementing Amazon-style purchase options, allowing customers to buy their vehicles online and have them delivered to their home or business.

One of the most consistent complaints about car buying is visiting the dealership. Customers dislike the obligatory haggling over price and pushy sales tactics that can sometimes be used to close a purchase. Online selling takes away much of that aggravation, making terms clear for buyers without the hassle, although in most cases they won’t get to take their vehicles out for a test drive.

A shift to online sales could allow dealers to expand geographic reach and make it easier for customers to compare prices and shop competitively. For now, used cars are leading the charge in online sales as they don’t need to be sold through franchised car dealers, which allows for more of a free market for buyers and sellers. After customers select a vehicle they like, they can arrange to have them delivered to their home or business in “many markets across the US” according to a recent Wall Street Journal report.

One such company is Carvana, which was founded in 2012, and which delivers cars to 85 United States markets. The company is based in Phoenix and sold about 66,400 vehicles this year through the third quarter, up from about 44,000 vehicles last year.

And as customers become familiar with this type of purchasing, more dealers are jumping on board. Some deliver a car anywhere for free and others can charge by the mile for delivery. Still, statistics on how many cars are being sold online are difficult to find, because the definition of online sales hasn’t been defined across the industry and because the market is so young.

Despite the relative obscurity of the online auto market, it is increasingly finding fans: Brendan Harrington, COO of Penske Motor Group told the Wall Street Journal: “Everyone loves Amazon and it’s pushing us to do more. People now expect the same thing from the car business.”

Two years ago Harrington launched an online store that lets buyers finish most of a purchase transaction online before arranging for home delivery. The buyer then only signs the final paperwork when the car is received. Direct delivery sales, which include online purchases where the buyer never walks into a dealership, account for about 25% of the 2500 cars he sells each month. The delivery service adds on costs, he has said, but he keeps offering the service because LA traffic makes his stores difficult to reach.

But this model isn’t always a prime example of efficiency. While the Wall Street Journal article claims that Tesla has had “success” selling directly to customers, auto club forums and social media sites have been flooded with complaints by customers waiting longer than promised for delivery of their vehicles – a problem Elon Musk has referred to as “delivery hell”.

However, what Tesla has proven is that people will purchase items costing $75,000 or more online, and that has caught the eye of the industry.

For example, customer Robert Rivers was enticed by how simple it was to order online and embraced Carvana’s no questions asked return policy. He ordered a 2017 Kia Forte off of the website, which was dropped off at his home three days later. After he changed his mind and decided he wanted a higher end model, Carvana came by and swapped the car out for him.

“I didn’t have to deal with the sales guys. I filled out everything online,” he proudly proclaimed.

And the internet is familiar territory for car buyers. The average consumer spends about 13 hours researching vehicles online before making a purchase. This compares to about 3 1/2 hours that they would generally spend at a dealership. Another dealership that has implemented online car buying is Earl Stewart Toyota in North Palm Beach, Florida. The general manager has said that he introduced service because he saw that customers wanted to “maintain control throughout the entire transaction”. 

Still, going to the dealership will likely still be the primary way that cars are sold, due to the expenses associated with delivering them. But it doesn’t mean that in-roads haven’t been made into embracing this potentially new sales model. While Amazon allows people to research vehicles by models and year on its website, people can’t purchase cars directly from the retailer – yet, although it is only a matter of time before the fledgling monopoly changes that.

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Federal and state investigators are reportedly analyzing employment documents of illegal immigrants who allegedly worked at President Donald Trump’s New Jersey golf club, according to their attorney, Anibal Romero. 

Anibal Romero, a Newark attorney who represents five undocumented immigrants who say they worked at the Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, said in an interview Saturday that he met with investigators from the New Jersey state attorney general’s office and two FBI agents in November, before the workers began to go public with their stories. –SF Gate

Romero says he turned over fake green cards and Social Security numbers “that supervisors at the golf club allegedly gave one of his clients,” a 44-year-old Guatemalan national named Victorina Morales. Romero also produced pay stubs for Costa Rican native Sandra Diaz who now has legal status, but says she was undocumented during her three years of employment at the club. 

Romero says he reached out to special counsel Robert Mueller’s office since he was afraid to loop in the Justice Department – then headed by former Attorney General Jeff Sessions. 

“I wasn’t sure, one, if they’d take me seriously and, two, if this could backfire on my clients,” Romero told the NY Daily News. 

Mueller’s office, which is separately investigating Trump’s campaign for possible collusion with Russians during the 2016 election, made contact and informed Romero the matter was not within their jurisdiction. –NY Daily News

Mueller’s office referred the matter to the FBI, after which an agent in New Jersey called Romero.

“He said to me that he had received a referral from Robert Mueller’s office and that he already knew the specifics and that he wanted to meet with me in person,” Romero said, adding that he then met with two agents at a Branchburg, NJ federal office where he outlined the same evidence he had already given the New Jersey Attorney General’s office. FBI agents said they would “coordinate” with the New Jersey AG. 

“I’m confident that federal and state authorities will conduct a complete and thorough investigation,” said Romero. 

Morales and Diaz first came forward with their allegations in interviews with The New York Times earlier this month.

Both women allege management at the Trump club knew they were undocumented and set them up with fake work documents.

In Morales’ case, Romero said a supervisor compiled all of her information and then took her photo in the laundry room of the club.

A few days later, the boss — who’s not being named by The News — told Morales he had received her fake documents and said he would hold on to them.

“This was a practice and pattern,” Romero said. “My clients felt like they were trapped and they felt like the fake documents could be used against them.” –NY Daily News

According to Harry Sandick, a former assistant US attorney for the Southern District of New York, the undocumented workers may have committed immigration fraud if they knowingly used fake documents – a federal offense which carries prison time, heavy fines and deportation. 

Sandick added that the supervisor who allegedly procured the fake documents, and/or anyone else involved in the matter, are subject to being charged with the same crime. 

“Immigration crimes are hard to prosecute so the government may see something like this as a possible deterrent case,” said Sandick. “To show that even someone who works at the President’s golf club is under the microscope is very impressive and tells you that anyone can be charged.”

Romero said that while his clients have not been given any assurances, “They are the victims here.” 

“Any attempt at charging them would ignore the real problem.” 

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It is the same depressing story to which Illinoisans have grown accustomed: Population is collapsing and it’s only getting worse.

Illinois had one of the largest population busts in the nation this year according to new data published Dec. 19 from the US Census Bureau. Illinois is the sixth-largest state, with a population estimated at 12,741,080. Since 2013, the state had seen more than 100,000 residents leave, when the population was 12.9 million. 

“Illinois suffered the second-largest numeric loss (45,116) of any state, following only New York, which was down 48,510 residents but has a much larger overall population of more than 19.5 million,” said the Chicago Tribune.

The population bust was also evident in other “high tax” states such as West Virginia, Louisiana, Hawaii, Mississippi, Alaska, Connecticut, and Wyoming. No other states in the Midwest had declines like Illinois.

“I think in a way Illinois is kind of standing out in the Midwest,” William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C., a not-for-profit public policy organization, told the Chicago Tribune.

“Illinois actually has a population loss, which means immigration and fertility isn’t enough to make up for the domestic outmigration. It says something about the relative pull of the economy of other states compared to Illinois,” Frey added.

In the quarters before July 2017 dating back to the 2008 recession, Illinois experienced a job growth rate of 1.7%, in line with many other states. Data from the next twelve months that coincide to the day with census data, showed job growth in the state rapidly declined to .97%, 44th in the nation. 

The reason why residents are fleeing the state is not entirely clear, but there are many other factors, including migration patterns. Some of those factors are the state’s weather, cost-of-living, high taxes, out of control crime, and more significant economic opportunity in other regions across the country.

“Our economic recovery has been a lot more sluggish,” said Brian Harger, a research associate with Northern Illinois University’s Center for Governmental Studies.

Earlier this month, Fitch Ratings said Illinois’ population decline has accelerated since the recession, there has been a large outflow of migration that has been uninterrupted since the mid-1920s. It is only in the last decade that the state’s birthrate and immigration rates have not kept up with the increasing outflow of residents 

“The factors that have buffered this loss in the past, the birthrate and the level of foreign migration, have cooled off,” Harger said.

“The biggest concern isn’t just the loss of people, but it’s the aging population and that most of those leaving are of working age,” he said.

As a result of the population bust, Illinois is expected to lose one member of Congress after the apportionment process in 2021. This, accompanied with fewer electoral votes in presidential elections, leaves the state with a smaller voice in federal affairs.

With a population bust currently underway and an economic outlook that is stagnating, this is a perfect setup for the upcoming financial storm: America’s public pension system is at a breaking point, and the first shoe to drop will likely be Illinois, where the shortfall for the five state-run pension plans – for teachers, state workers, university employees, judges and lawmakers – in 2018 recently hit a record $134 billion despite strong markets…

… and even as Illinoisans contributed $8 billion dollars to the pension funds in 2018, $6 billion more than what they contributed in 2008.

As Wirepoints recently noted, “It just shows how unmanageable Illinois pensions have become. Billions in taxpayers contributions and above expected investment returns didn’t even make a dent in Illinois’ accumulated pension debt. In fact, the situation worsened for taxpayers and pensioners alike over the year. The pension hole is now larger by more than $4 billion.”

Addiong insult to demographic injury, Illinois’ pension funds have collapsed – putting both state workers and taxpayers at risk – during one of the longest bull markets in history. Since the end of the Great Recession, the S&P 500 index has recovered and grown by 200 percent. During that same time, Illinois’ pension shortfall worsened by 72 percent, or $56 billion. In fiscal year 2009, the unfunded liability was “just” $78 billion. Today, it’s nearly $134 billion.

 

Some of the growth in debt was due to the pension funds changing their actuarial assumptions, including SURS dropping its assumed rate of return in 2018. Regardless, the systems’ overall downward trend is clear. And the warning this trend provides is even more stark: if the state’s pension debts continue to worsen during a period of remarkable market returns, imagine how those funds will fare when the next recession inevitably hits.

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Authored by Danielle Ryan,

The co-founders of cybersecurity firm New Knowledge warned Americans in November to “remain vigilant” in the face of “Russian efforts” to meddle in US elections. This month, they have been exposed for doing just that themselves.

Ryan Fox and Jonathan Morgan, who run the New Knowledge cybersecurity company which claims to “monitor disinformation” online, penned a foreboding op-ed in the New York Times on November 6, about “the Russians” and their nefarious efforts to influence American elections.

At the time, it struck me that Fox and Morgan’s reasoning seemed a little far-fetched. For example, one of the pieces of evidence presented to prove that Russia had targeted American elections was that lots of people had posted links to RT’s content online. Hardly a smoking gun worthy of a Times oped.

Morgan and Fox, intrepid cyber sleuths that they are, claimed in the article they had detected more “overall activity” from ongoing Russian influence campaigns than social media companies like Facebook and Twitter had yet revealed — or that other researchers had been able to identify.

The New Knowledge guys even authored a Senate Intelligence Committee report on Russia’s alleged efforts to mess with American democracy. They called it a “propaganda war against American citizens.” Impressive stuff. They must be really good at their job, right?

This week, however, we learned that New Knowledge was running its own disinformation campaign (or “propaganda war against Americans,” you could say), complete with fake Russian bots designed to discredit Republican candidate Roy Moore as a Russia-preferred candidate when he was running for the US senate in Alabama in 2017.

The scheme was exposed by the New York Times — the paper that just over a month earlier published that aforementioned oped, in which Fox and Morgan pontificated about Russian interference online.

New Knowledge created a mini-army of fake Russian bots and fake Facebook groups. The accounts, which had Russian names, were made to follow Moore. An internal company memo boasted that New Knowledge had “orchestrated an elaborate ‘false flag’ operation that planted the idea that the Moore campaign was amplified on social media by a Russian botnet.”

Moore lost the race by 1.5 percent. To be fair, accusations published by the Washington Post that he pursued underage girls back in the 1980s may have had something to do with it as well, but that’s a different story.

Of course, New Knowledge and even the New York Times, which blew the lid of the operation, are trying to spin this as some kind of “small experiment” during which they “imitated Russian tactics” online to see how they worked. Just for research, of course. They have also both claimed that the scheme, dubbed ‘Project Birmingham’ had almost no effect on the outcome of the race.

The money for the so-called research project came from Reid Hoffman, the billionaire co-founder of LinkedIn, who contributed $750,000 to American Engagement Technologies (AET), which then spent $100,000 on the New Knowledge experiment. After the scheme was exposed, Hoffman offered a public apology, saying he didn’t know exactly how the money had been used and admitting that the tactics were “highly disturbing.”

If people like Fox and Morgan actually cared about so-called Russian meddling or the integrity of American elections, they would not have run the deceptive campaign against Moore, no matter how undesirable he was as a candidate. Their sneaky and deceitful methods are in total contrast to the public profile they have cultivated for themselves as a firm fighting the good fight for the public good. But is it really that much of a surprise?

You would think that a newspaper like the New York Times would have cottoned on to the fact that guys like Fox and Morgan, with their histories in the US military and intelligence agencies, have clear agendas and are not exactly squeaky clean or the most credible sources of information when it comes to anything to do with Russia. But that kind of insight or circumspection might be too much to ask for in the age of Russiagate.

Facebook removed Morgan’s account on Saturday for “engaging in coordinated inauthentic behavior” around the Alabama election. Three days after publishing its initial article on the scandal (the one in which it played down the effects of New Knowledge’s disinfo campaign), the New York Times published a follow-up piece about the Facebook removal, in which it admitted that the controversy would be a “stinging embarrassment” for the social media researcher, noting that he had been a “leading voice” against supposed Russian disinformation campaigns.

In Fox and Morgan’s original NYT oped, they warned of the ubiquitous “Russia-linked social media accounts” and estimated that “at least hundreds of thousands, and perhaps even millions” of US citizens had engaged with them online. One must now wonder, were they including their own fake Russian bots in that count, or were they leaving those ones out?

It’s nearly two years into the Trump presidency and still we have no solid evidence that the Russian “collusion” theory is anything more than a fantasy concocted by Democrats desperate to provide a more palatable reason for Hillary Clinton’s loss than the fact that she simply ran a bad campaign.

In fact, at this point, we actually have more solid and irrefutable evidence of election meddling from the likes of dodgy American and British companies like Cambridge Analytica and New Knowledge than we do of any meddling orchestrated by Russia.

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Even as the US president is inundated with a constant barrage of criticism for his efforts to halt illegal immigration, the UK is stepping up its own efforts at undoing Merkel’s 2015 “open door” policies and curbing the flow of illegal migrants shuttling across Europe.

According to EFE, the French interior minister and his United Kingdom counterpart are launching a joint effort to curb the number of migrants attempting to cross the English Channel, the sea separating southern England and Northern France.  On Friday 12 people were detained in two boats off the Dover coast: all but one, a Syrian, came from Iran. At least 220 people have attempted the 21-mile crossing in rubber dinghies and small boats. In one incident last month, a group of 17 migrants stole a fishing boat from a French port and sailed across to Dover.

As the Sunday Times notes, the number of migrants saved in the Channel by British authorities and detained since Christmas Day has reached 94, many of them Iranian and Syrian, although that figure is expected to rise with calm seas between Dover and Calais. Another group, reportedly six Iranian men, were met by Border Agency staff having been spotted by residents on the beach at Kingsdown, Kent, at about 7.30am today, according to Sky News.

Britain’s interior ministry has said it is treating an uptick in the number of migrants attempting to cross the English Channel from France as a “major incident.”

Only one of the Border Force’s fleet of five cutters — patrol boats capable of rescuing multiple vessels at once — has been deployed in the Strait of Dover to deal with the migrant crossings so far.

The operation appeared to descend into farce on Saturday afternoon as HMC Searcher sailed to Ramsgate, where it docked, leaving the world’s busiest sea route unpatrolled by a significant British vessel for at least six hours.

“Diplomatic Sunday: in connection with my British counterpart Sajid Javid, we are coordinating to strengthen our efforts to combat crossings of the channel carried out by some irregular migrants on small boats at the peril of their life,” the French Minister of the Interior, Christophe Castaner, tweeted.

Dimanche diplomatique 🇫🇷 🇬🇧
En lien avec mon homologue britannique @SajidJavid, nous nous coordonnons pour renforcer notre action pour lutter contre les traversées de la Manche effectuées par certains migrants irréguliers sur de petites embarcations au péril de leur vie. pic.twitter.com/bDLImai5QJ

— Christophe Castaner (@CCastaner) December 30, 2018

“Thank you Castaner for your partnership,” Javid replied on Twitter. “UK & France will build on our joint efforts to deter illegal migration – protecting our borders and human life,” the Home Secretary added.

Thank you @CCastaner for your partnership. UK & France will build on our joint efforts to deter illegal migration – protecting our borders and human life https://t.co/7vUc0BvHMr

— Sajid Javid (@sajidjavid) December 30, 2018

Sajid Javid was forced to abandon his family holiday at a luxury safari hideaway in South Africa’s Kruger National Park over a growing backlash over his handling of the migrant crisis. As the Sunday Times reported, the home secretary came under fire after he declared a “major incident” over the surge in Channel boat migrants while he was staying at one of the most luxurious safari lodges in sub- Saharan Africa.

Javid, his wife and children were staying over Christmas at Dulini, a lodge that charges £840 per person per night, and as the Times noted, “It offers guests private plunge pools and in-room massages to relax after game drives spotting leopards, lions and elephants by the water hole.”

Javid addressed criticism of his slow response in a statement: “After a rise in activity over Christmas I immediately stepped this up — declaring a major incident and returning to the UK to drive our continued and enhance response. I continue to keep the number of Border Force cutters in the Channel under close review, but there is no one easy answer to this complex problem.”

Javid reportedly took the decision to come home to avoid the humiliation of being told to return by Theresa May, “after initially resisting pressure to leave his holiday paradise.” The embattled prime minister has been spending the weekend in her Maidenhead constituency.

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As stocks plunged toward their harrowing, bear-market lows earlier this month, Omega Advisors CEO Leon Cooperman infamously railed against algorithmic traders and HFT for creating distortions in the market that caused the cascading selloff (though, as we joked at the time, no fingers were pointed when stocks soared off the lows following a massive pension buy order).

Has Cooperman blamed the algos for the Dow rebounding 700 points from the lows?

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) December 6, 2018

Though the Dow’s biggest one-day point gain on record was likely spurred by pension fund rebalancing (or the frontrunning of said rebalancing), the scrutiny that this month’s volatility has brought to algos and their potential to amplify selloffs and rallies (even when there’s no clear catalyst for such moves) due to their trend-following nature has been perhaps the most salient takeaway from the worst December for US stocks since the Great Depression.

With mainstream investors finally questioning the very integrity of the markets and their ability to accurately set prices – a phenomenon that we have been warning about for some time now – Bloomberg’s editors decided that now would be a good time to remind their readers of every major selloff of the 20th century as a way to nudge the market that selloffs like the one we just endured are quite “normal”, and have been happening since the days when order tickets were written up by hand (don’t tell that to any of the hedge fund managers who will be shutting down their hedge funds as a result of December’s bizarre market violence).

In any case, as Bloomberg claims, vicious selloffs like the 20% drop we just witnessed are “far from unheard of.”

While any 20 percent sell-off hurts, the one happening now is far from unheard of in terms of depth or velocity. Over the past 100 years, there are almost too many examples to count of stocks tumbling with comparable force.

“It’s an inevitable process,” Marshall Front, founder of Front Barnett Advisers, who began on Wall Street in 1963. “It goes on over and over again.”

In fact, selloffs like these are “very normal”.

“This is very normal. It unnerves people because we’re all talking about it all the time,” said Nancy Tengler, chief investment strategist at Tengler Wealth Management. “It’s in our face more. We have too much focus on the day-to-day or minute-by-minute or second-by-second movements. Historically, is this normal? Yes.”

And traders shouldn’t be so quick to blame quantitative traders, HFT and passive investors.

A fair amount of complaining has gone on in recent months about the role of high-frequency traders and quantitative funds in the drubbing that reached its peak around Christmas. Perhaps. Those groups are big, and in the search for villains, they make easy targets. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin is among the people who have made the connection.

One thing that makes it tough to lay blame for the meltdown on machine-based traders is the many past instances when markets fell just as hard without their help. The Crash of 1929 is one big example. However bad this market is, it’s a walk in the park compared with then.

In fact, the biggest, most volatile swings in the market occurred back in the 1920s and 1930s, when algos were still firmly within the realm of science fiction.

“The largest percentage changes, except for 1987, were in the ’20s and ’30s,” said Donald Selkin, chief market strategist at Newbridge Securities Corp. “You had dramatic moves then and you didn’t have electronic trading then.”

So, without further delay, here’s BBG’s roundup of 20th century market downturns that happened well before algos dominated the trading environment.

Dot-com Bust

The dot-com bubble that had been developing since the late 1990s popped in March 2000, when the S&P 500 lost 35 percent over the course of two months. It took the Nasdaq Composite Index, which peaked at 5,040.62 on March 10, about 15 years to get to its old high.

Black Monday of 1987

The S&P 500 rose 36 percent between January and August 1987 in what was set to be the best year in almost three decades. Then the October sell-off pushed the S&P into a 31 percent correction over just 15 days, much of it occurring in that one infamous session.

1974 Sell-Off

The worst year since 1937 for the S&P 500 saw the index fall 33 percent in 115 days as a weakening economy, rising unemployment and spiking inflation pushed investors to head for the exits. Stocks subsequently rebounded, surging more than 50 percent between October 1974 and July 1975.

1962 Rout

Investors of a certain age may recall 1962, when the S&P 500 Index lost a quarter of its value between March and June 1962. The rout known as the Kennedy Slide came after the S&P 500 advanced 79 percent in the prior four years. The S&P 500 was essentially flat over the next two decades.

Not So Fat ’57

A dive in car sales and slowing housing construction pushed stocks into a 20 percent correction over 99 days in 1957. This preceded a recession that saw the U.S. gross domestic product contract 10 percent in a matter of three months in 1958.

* * *

To be fair, we haven’t heard anybody argue that algos are solely responsible for the December selloff. Most arguments – at least of the arguments that are being taken seriously – are slightly more nuanced. With market liquidity at record lows, with 85% of the market on autopilot, and the Federal Reserve siphoning off $50 billion each month from the liquidity tidal wave that sent sticks higher in an almost uninterrupted rally over the past decade, the notion that algos played an important role in the selloff isn’t speculation. At this point, as we’ve been saying since 2009, it is established fact.

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By Gareth Porter

The mainstream media has attacked President Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw U.S. troops from Syria as impulsive, blindsiding his own national security team. But detailed, published accounts of the policy process over the course of the year tell a very different story. They show that senior national security officials and self-interested institutions have been playing a complicated political game for months aimed at keeping Trump from wavering on our indefinite presence on the ground in Syria.

The entire episode thus represents a new variant of a familiar pattern dating back to Vietnam in which national security advisors put pressure on reluctant presidents to go along with existing or proposed military deployments in a war zone. The difference here is that Trump, by publicly choosing a different policy, has blown up their transparent schemes and offered the country a new course, one that does not involve a permanent war state.

The relationship between Trump and his national security team has been tense since the beginning of his administration. By mid-summer 2017, Defense Secretary James Mattis and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Joseph Dunford had become so alarmed at Trump’s negative responses to their briefings justifying global U.S. military deployments that they decided to do a formal briefing in “the tank,” used by the Joint Chiefs for meetings at the Pentagon.  

But when Mattis and Dunford sang the praises of the “rules-based, international democratic order” that has “kept the peace for 70 years,” Trump simply shook his head in disbelief.

By the end of that year, however, Mattis, Dunford, and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo believed they’d succeeded in getting Trump to use U.S. troops not only to defeat Islamic State but to “stabilize” the entire northeast sector of Syria and balance Russian and Iranian-sponsored forces. Yet they ignored warning signs of Trump’s continuing displeasure with their vision of a more or less permanent American military presence in Syria.  

In a March rally in Ohio ostensibly about health care reform, Trump suddenly blurted out, “We’re coming out of Syria, like, very soon. Let the other people take care of it now. Very soon—very soon we’re coming out.” 

Then in early April 2018, Trump’s impatience with his advisors on Syria boiled over into a major confrontation at a National Security Council meeting, where he ordered them unequivocally to accept a fundamentally different Syria deployment policy.  

Trump opened the meeting with his public stance that the United States must end its intervention in Syria and the Middle East more broadly. He argued repeatedly that the U.S. had gotten “nothing” for its efforts, according to an account published by the Associated Press based on interviews with administration officials who had been briefed on the meeting. When Dunford asked him to state exactly what he wanted, Trump answered that he favored an immediate withdrawal of U.S. forces and an end to the “stabilization” program in Syria.

Mattis responded that an immediate withdrawal from Syria was impossible to carry out responsibly, would risk the return of Islamic State, and would play into the hands of Russia, Iran, and Turkey, whose interests ran counter to those of the United States.

Trump reportedly then relented and said they have could five or six months to destroy the Islamic State. But he also made it clear that he did not want them to come back to him in October and say that they had been unable to defeat ISIS and had to remain in Syria. When his advisors reiterated that they didn’t think America could withdraw responsibly, Trump told them to “just get it done.” 

Trump’s national security team had prepared carefully for the meeting in order to steer him away from an explicit timetable for withdrawal. They had brought papers that omitted any specific options for withdrawal timetables. Instead, as the detailed AP account shows, they framed the options as a binary choice—either an immediate pullout or an indefinite presence in order to ensure the complete and permanent defeat of Islamic State. The leave option was described as risking a return of ISIS and leaving a power vacuum for Russia and Iran to fill.

Such a binary strategy had worked in the past, according to administration sources. That would account for Trump’s long public silence on Syria during the early months of 2018 while then-secretary of state Rex Tillerson and Mattis were articulating detailed arguments for a long-term military commitment.

Another reason the approach had been so successful, however, was that Trump had made such a big issue out of Barack Obama giving the Pentagon a timetable for withdrawal from Afghanistan. As a result, he was hesitant to go public with a similar request for a Syria timetable. As CNN reported, a DoD official who had been briefed on the meeting “rejected that any sort of timeline was discussed.” Furthermore the official asserted that Mattis “was not asked to draw up withdrawal options….” Lieutenant General Kenneth McKenzie, the director of the Joint Chiefs, also told reporters, “the president has actually been very good in not giving us a specific timeline.”

Nevertheless, without referring to a timeline, the White House issued a short statement saying that the U.S. role in Syria was coming to a “rapid end.”

Mattis and Dunford were consciously exploiting Trump’s defensiveness about a timeline to press ahead with their own strategy unless and until Trump publicly called them on it. That is what finally happened some weeks after Trump’s six month deadline had passed. The claim by Trump advisors that they were taken by surprise was indeed disingenuous. What happened last week was that Trump followed up on the clear policy he had laid down in April.

The Syria withdrawal affair is a dramatic illustration of the fundamental quandary of the Trump presidency in regard to ending the state of permanent war that previous administrations created. Although a solid majority of Americans want to rein in U.S. military deployments in the Middle East and Africa, Trump’s national security team is committed to doing the opposite.

Trump is now well aware that it is virtually impossible to carry out the foreign policy that he wants without advisors who are committed to the same objective. That means that he must find people who have remained outside the system during the permanent war years while being highly critical of its whole ideology and culture. If he can fill key positions with truly dissident figures, the last two years of this term in office could decisively clip the wings of the bureaucrats and generals who have created the permanent war state we find ourselves in today.

Gareth Porter is an investigative reporter and regular contributor to The American Conservative. He is also the author of Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare.

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As confusion and tensions continue to mount in the Syrian Kurdish city of Manbij, located just 70 miles north of Aleppo, and as pro-Turkish forces prep for an invasion, is there a land swap in the works in northern Syria being brokered between Russia and Turkey? This is the pressing question as over the weekend US helicopters were filmed hovering above the potential battle lines, even after widespread reports of a US troop pullout from the area and following Kurdish militias quickly calling on the Syrian Army’s help to prevent a Turkish invasion and massacre of the province’s Kurdish inhabitants.

Following a high level Turkish defense delegation visit to Moscow on Saturday, which involved talks between Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and his Turkish counterpart Mevlut Cavusoglu, RT reports the future of the Syrian-Turkish border region is on the line. This as many in Washington worry that a rapid American draw down will create a power vacuum :

Moscow and Ankara are to “define certain areas of influence and understand who will control what.” There are residual groupings of Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL) fighters who are ready to exploit any no power vacuum in northern Syria…

Turkish ambitions to reinstate full control over the northern Syria may not be an option for Damascus, but “it is also important for Russia to not lose Turkey as an ally.”

Marianna Belenkaya, a Middle East expert and commentator at Russia’s Kommersant daily, noted: “There’s a possibility that some kind of a land swap will be discussed,” and explained, “What is happening around Manbij is similar to what Russia has suggested a year ago in Afrin.”

Essentially this means Moscow is pressuring Kurdish militias to disarm as an independent entity and come under Damascus’ jurisdiction; and in exchange the Turks would agree to not invade the Kurdish-populated canton. Regarding Afrin, the Kurds rejected the deal at the time and were forced out during Turkey’s ‘Operation Olive Branch’.

Though few details were given, on Saturday Russia and Turkey announced plans to coordinate ground operations in Syria following last week’s surprise announcement of a full US troop draw down from Syria, according to statements by Moscow’s top diplomat, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. When it comes to Manbij, for Erdogan this will require proof of a full withdrawal of armed Kurdish YPG fighters from the town and countryside. 

To protect #US Army Special Forces & #SDF from danger of #Turkey backed terror groups such as & Ahrar al-Sharqia, these 2 AH-64D Apache attack helicopters of 35th CAB “Task Force Trailblazers” patrolled over the #Manbij today. Op. #InherentResolve pic.twitter.com/1hrGHC5nvf

— Babak Taghvaee (@BabakTaghvaee) December 29, 2018

Lavrov said after talks with his Turkish counterpart Mevlut Cavusoglu in Moscow, “Of course we paid special attention to new circumstances which appeared in connection with the announced US military pullout.” He explained further, “An understanding was reached of how military representatives of Russia and Turkey will continue to coordinate their steps on the ground under new conditions with a view to finally rooting out terrorist threats in Syria.”

“We will continue active work (and) coordination with our Russian colleagues and colleagues from Iran to speed up the arrival of a political settlement in the Syrian Republic,” Lavrov said in remarks also confirmed by Cavusoglu, according to the AFP.

Russia had previously agreed that Turkey control a small area in the east of Idlib province, “but it’s yet to be seen if Russia would agree to a Turkish zone being extended to the entire north of Syria,” according to RT.

However, the wild card that remains is whether or not US forces will fully and truly make a complete break from the theater. Currently the Trump administration is considering whether or not to leave US weapons with the Kurds; thus it appears a full pullout is indeed happening. 

Early but unconfirmed reports suggest US troops withdrawing from Syria may be relocated to the American base in Erbil, Iraq. 

According to Iraqi Kurdistan’s Rudaw News:

The United States will carry out its planned troop withdrawal from Syria via the Harir Air Base in Kurdistan Region’s Erbil province, according to Anadolu Agency (AA).

AA correspondents quote local sources as saying that the Harir airbase has seen increasing air traffic and preparations.

But the situation remains highly fluid and dangerous for major escalation, especially as Turkish-backed jihadists which have been for days mustering at the western border of Manbij countryside, have declared their readiness to “cleanse” the region of Kurds according to Erdogan’s bidding. 

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