Tag: news

Authored by Alasdair Macleod via GoldMoney.com,

Growing evidence of an economic downturn despite unprecedented monetary inflation since Lehman means a new credit and systemic crisis is becoming increasingly certain. In an attempt to prevent a new crisis developing, this time the scale of monetary inflation by the authorities will have to be even greater. The rise in the price of gold since December 2015 and its break-out from a three-year consolidation period earlier this year confirms that the risks of a credit and systemic crisis undermining fiat currencies have been increasing for some time.

It is now likely that in future portfolio managers will increase their investment allocations in favour of gold and actively consider investing in silver and platinum as well. It is in this context that this article looks at the price relationships between the three precious metals and their relevant monetary and investment characteristics.

Introduction

Markets are playing a dangerous game of chicken with economic reality, which every passing day tells us that trade is slowing, and credit everywhere is maxed out. Key economies are beginning to reflect this in statistics, having for much of this year screamed the message at us through business surveys. Central banks know their monetary policies have failed. The ECB has already announced deeper negative deposit rates and is reviving its asset purchase programme (printing) from next month. The Fed is injecting liquidity (more printing) through repos in far larger quantities into its monetary system which, mysteriously, is short of money despite commercial banks having combined reserves of $1.44 trillion at the Fed.

We should not be surprised at its inability to join the dots between cause and effect, but warnings from the IMF about a $19 trillion corporate debt timebomb, coming from an organisation that is the deep-state of the economic system and has been consistently advocating monetary inflation, is tantamount to an official admission of global monetary failure. Where to now? Print, and print again.

Source: Bloomberg

Meanwhile, government bond yields and even some corporate ones are in negative territory. The only respectable government bonds that are not are US Treasuries and UK gilts, but in real terms arguably they are already there. Equity markets are within a whisker of all-time highs. The collective hype is a belief that a new round of increasingly aggressive printing will buy off an economic slump, but it is a rotten logic born out of economic ignorance and desperation.

It is like a game of chicken: investors riding a Vespa scooter flat out in the middle of the highway, facing the oncoming juggernaut of reality from the opposite direction. We know what the result will be, because we have seen it before. And we know who gets killed.

This article is not aimed at those riding the Vespa: being committed to do or die they are in a mental zone from which logic is excluded. It is for those who know or suspect that the monetary and economic situation is serious and getting more so by the day. It is for those who know why an accelerating debasement of fiat currencies is now inevitable.

Not only have we been warned of the economic dangers by the IMF, the Bank for International Settlements and everyone else in authority, but a global banking system with fatal weak points is plain to see. Even McKinsey, consultants favoured and listened to by governments everywhere, in their global banking annual review says it’s all late cycle. They write,

“…on balance, the global banking industry approaches the end of the cycle in less than ideal health with nearly 60% of banks printing returns below the cost of equity. A prolonged economic slowdown with low or even negative interest rates could wreak further havoc.”

We should pause to think about it. This bastion of the establishment is confirming that a systemic collapse is becoming more certain by the day.

Germany, until now by far the best-performing economy in the Eurozone, faces the prospect of having to support its major banks, one of which (Deutsche Bank) has positions in derivatives amounting to an estimated €45 trillion, nearly twelve times Germany’s GDP. Deutsche Bank has a much-reduced balance sheet of €1,350bn and a book value of total equity of €64bn, a simple leverage of 21 times, but its market capitalisation at only €14bn tells the story in a more realistic way. No doubt, in a half-decent economy a bank in this position can fiddle along for a while, but Germany is turning sour, very sour. Germany’s economic prospects amount to a count-down to Deutsche Bank’s destruction, and Commerzbank’s with it.

The short-term consequences of the realisation that Lehman was a teddy-bears’ picnic compared with an approaching feast for grown-up grizzlies are expected to be a dash for dollar cash. That will be true in the US investment community, which according to FINRA in September had outstanding margin and cash loans of $556bn. For junk-rated corporations, as well as the medium and small companies that comprise eighty per cent of any modern economy, their bankers coming under pressure and concerned for their own bottom lines will rapidly withdraw lending facilities. Those that lose their banking facilities will defer payment to their suppliers while trying to get outstanding payments in earlier. Inventory will simply accumulate and there will be widespread bankruptcies.

Nearly eight out of ten US consumers are living pay-check to pay-check, as they are in the UK. The music in the non-financials, on Main Street, must play on and government must pay the piper. Other than subsidies and welfare there will be no cash. But the banks will be caught with non-performing loans, and governments will face both a collapse in tax revenue and an escalation in welfare commitments. We are approaching an end to the fiat monetary system: monetary inflation must accelerate at an even greater pace to keep the system from imploding.

The signal a crisis is in the wings comes from alternatives to state currencies and related financial assets. Initially, it is about preserving wealth with suitable stores of value and portfolio diversification to offset failing conventional investments. So far, the one accessible safe haven which has been in the headlines is gold, but there are other precious metals, particularly silver, and platinum. Palladium’s price is so distorted by shortages that any accumulation of it on monetary grounds is ill-considered.

Investors who think the scenario outlined above is a real danger will exchange increasingly worthless fiat for a precious metal. It is never too late. The lacklustre performances of silver and platinum so far, as well as the general disinterest in mines extracting all precious metals confirms that the current phase of gold’s bull market is only in the initial stage. The initial stage of any bull market is driven by a loss of bearish momentum combining with accumulation into the safe hands of insiders and knowledgeable investors. The insiders today are not the conspiracy theorists, they are always there. The insiders in precious metal markets are the professional operators who detect a change in the market; those who are usually short and needing to cover, the central bankers who privately detect a change in long-term monetary trends, and those who have experienced and understood previous cycles of credit.

For gold, this phase commenced with the end of the bear market in December 2015. The second bull phase, marked by the price break-out only five months ago, is only just getting under way. This is illustrated in Figure 1. Now professional investors can be expected to get on board, and their interest is likely to be reflected in increasing portfolio allocations in favour of gold ETFs and mining shares. If investing history and investor psychology are a guide, silver and platinum will find now buyers as well, as these investors look for lagging alternatives to gold. Therefore, their prices should begin to reflect the monetary considerations that are already apparent in gold’s performance.

According to Dow theory, which is the guiding light for all momentum investors, the third and final stage of a bull market still lies ahead and will see increasing public participation. For stockmarkets generally, it marks a final blow-off stage, with inexperienced investors being sucked into what must seem to them a sure-fire way of making money.

Before we arrive at that point, portfolio managers and other professional investors will continue to make the mistake of thinking gold, silver and platinum are simply investments. They are not. They are the sound alternative to unbacked government currency, and so long as they measure their performance figures in a fiat currency they are bound to persist in making this error.

Demand for precious metals in physical form, and their physicality must be stressed, is primarily a reflection of a desire not to hold state-issued currencies, and depending on how monetary policies evolve, their use as money could be threatened absolutely. That is for the future. Meanwhile, the market position indicates to those at the investment coalface who follow Dow theory that we are embarking on a second stage of a wider bull market in gold, and it is therefore time to get a market perspective not just on gold, but also the two principle metallic alternatives, silver and platinum.

We must now look at all three stores of value.

Gold

Gold always has been and remains a monetary metal, with central banks recorded as owning 34,408 tonnes in their monetary reserves, an increase of 4,406 tonnes since 2008. It is sound money, with no counterparty risk, so for central banks it is an insurance against monetary failure of other currencies and against systemic failure generally.

Assessments of above-ground gold stocks in an attempt to give us a post-fiat global quantity of sound money are always incorrect, partly because the true quantity of above-ground gold stocks is unknown, and because only gold held for monetary purposes are relevant.

Since 2009, the World Gold Council’s estimates, which are commonly quoted as gospel, have been based on estimates by Thompson Reuters GFMS (GFMS). By 2011, GFMS’s figures estimated the figure to be 171,300 tonnes, which included an estimate for above-ground stocks of 12,780 tonnes in 1492, the year Columbus, as Fats Waller memorably put it, sailed the ocean blue.

James Turk of Goldmoney with assistance from Dr Juan Castañeda examined the basis of GFMS’s estimate and concluded it was too high. The reasoning can be found in Turk’s paper, here (see pages 9-13 in particular). Instead, Turk’s estimate for the 1492 stock is 297 tonnes in accordance with other research, and his estimate of subsequent production before 2011 is 3,573 tonnes less than the GFMS calculation. By end-2018, working on subsequent estimates of annual figures for mine production[ii] (though there is some variance between sources) in my opinion the 2018 estimate published by the WGC at 193,472.4 tonnes is too high by 17,206 tonnes, nearly 10% above where it should be.

One may wonder why a 10% difference in above-ground stocks matters, but it does matter hugely when we consider the only other assessed figures which are known with a degree of confidence. Going on the WGC’s figures for bars and coins held for investment and which we are entitled to assume are based on reasonably solid estimates, and adding in monetary gold declared by central banks, we have a total for gold classified as money of 75,686.5 tonnes, which we must regard as the base figure for gold’s global money supply, not 193,472.4 tonnes as commonly supposed, or even our lower modified estimate of 176,266 tonnes. But given that on Turk’s figures and subsequent mine output estimates we are left with not 117,786 for non-monetary uses but 100,579 tonnes, future supply from scrap on rising prices will be significantly tighter than commonly thought.

This particularly matters in the context of the large quantities of gold substitutes in regulated and unregulated markets. Simply adding the three major markets, the London Bullion Market, Comex and the Shanghai gold futures, gives us the paper equivalent of 9,563, 1,485 tonnes and 552 tonnes respectively as at end-June 2018 (the last date for which BIS figures are available). To these amounts of paper gold must be added an unknown quantity of unallocated gold accounts at the bullion banks, which are fractionally reserved.

These numbers represent the establishment’s bear position.

If the move out of fiat money into gold develops, not only will the financial system have to fulfil demand for sellers of fiat for gold, but it will also have to absorb the liquidation of paper substitutes. In an orderly market which has time to adjust to rising prices, it is not necessarily a problem and paper substitutes can survive. But when the origin of the new demand stems from a systemic and monetary crisis, the price effect is likely to be sudden, threatening the whole bullion banking system.

Given the scale of the risks from an increasingly likely financial crisis, the relationship between gold and fiat money is now the most urgent consideration facing everyone owning or managing fiat-denominated financial assets. Only, very few of them know it.

Silver

When silver was the backbone of coinage, its purchasing power relative to gold for centuries was in the region of 12:1 before Sir Isaac Newton, when he was Master of the Royal Mint, fixed it at 15.5:1 early in the eighteenth century. The bimetallic standard he introduced was not a successful concept, because the preference for circulating money in the economy clashed with a trade settlement preference for gold among merchants. Eventually, the European countries on a silver or bimetallic standard moved to a gold only standard in 1873, though silver still circulated in coinage, and the price of silver relative to gold fell substantially.

Since then, silver has been predominantly an industrial metal in the West, but it still circulated in the Middle East and elsewhere in the form of Maria Theresa coins as late as the early-1970s. Today, the gold-silver ratio stands at 84, a far cry from Newton’s 15.5, and from the estimated rarity in the earth relative to gold of about 18.75 times.

According to the Silver Institute, total supply in 2018 was 1,004.3 million ounces, of which 855.7Moz was mine supply and 151.3Moz was scrap. Total physical demand (including 181.2Moz for coins and bars) was estimated slightly more at 1.033.5Moz. Additionally, net investment-related flows added a net 50.1moz demand to give a total deficit of 80.1moz, or 8% of total supply.

As a mining by-product, silver’s supply is strongly influenced by mine production of base metals, particularly lead, zinc, copper and gold. Primary silver mines only account for 26% of total mine output world-wide. Consequently, the ability of mines to increase silver output to meet rising demand is very limited. Furthermore, in an economic downturn the output of base metals is likely to decline due to falling demand, reducing the supply of silver as well.

Industrial demand at 57% of total supply has been remarkably stable in recent years but obviously can be expected to fall in an economic downturn, offset to a degree by low cyclicality in photovoltaic, electrical and electronics and growing disinfection markets. The balance between declining mine supply and declining industrial demand will also be determined by their relative rates of decline. 63% of total silver supply (including scrap) is tied to base metal demand, while industrial use absorbs only 57% of total supply. Therefore, a recession can be expected to have a broadly neutral effect on the overall industrial supply/demand balance.

Annual bar and coin sales at 181.2moz are only worth $3.2bn and should be viewed in the context of Asian investment demand, where silver coin has traditionally been accepted as circulating money. In the event of monetary disruption, the potential for silver demand in these populous markets is enormous. India has been an important market, with a history of high levels of imports, even in relatively stable times. Since the start of 2010, India has imported well over a billion ounces.

The history of demand in India shows it to be strongly associated with wealth preservation, and given the high gold/silver ratio, this can only fuel increasing Indian demand for silver when the gold price is rising. China has been India’s largest supplier, and rising markets are also likely to reduce any surplus silver China may have for export, putting a squeeze on Indian supplies.

As a producer, China ranks third as a mining nation, and is also a large consumer at 166Moz annually. Since 2014 investment demand for bars has been subdued in the wake of anti-corruption measures, a factor which has put negative pressure on global prices. Annual investment demand in China by 2017 had fallen to 7.5Moz, representing only 5% of the world total.

As monetary circumstances change and the price of gold rises, so should Chinese investment interest in silver. Demand is likely to come from ordinary savers in both jewellery form as well as for bar and coin. It is the money of the masses, but it must be admitted that sophisticated millennials are likely to consider cryptocurrency alternatives as well.

As a rule of thumb, when the price of gold rises, the price of silver tends to increase between 1.5-2.0 times that of gold. Furthermore, in the early stages of a bull market for gold, silver tends to lag, catching up later. This can be explained by financial markets regarding gold as more of a monetary metal than silver, turning mainly to gold when prospects for currency debasement initially appear to increase.

Gold’s bull phase commenced in December 2015 and was only confirmed when it broke out of a long consolidation last June. So far, the dollar price of gold has risen by 42%, while the silver price has risen just 26%. This is consistent with an early phase of a continuing bull market for precious metals and suggests that an acceleration in silver’s rising price will occur on gold’s next bullish move.

Platinum

The chart for platinum in Figure 2 shows it has failed so far to convincingly exit the bear market that commenced in 2011 and today is only 15% higher than the lows recorded following both the Lehman shock and in August 2018. So long as these two lows hold, technical analysts will conclude a double bottom has been formed, in which case the platinum price has the potential to more than double.

Platinum is very rare, with only one thirtieth of gold’s occurrence. 72% of the annual production of about 190 tonnes comes from South African mines and 8% from Zimbabwe. When recycling is taken into account, total annual supply in 2018 was 8,060 million ounces, expected to rise to 8,390Moz in the current year.

Platinum prices have suffered in recent years as falling demand-trends for diesel engines, which are more platinum dependent for catalytic conversion, have been replaced by rising demand-trends for petrol, which are more palladium and rhodium dependent. The result is that analysts forecast deficits of over 700,000 ounces for palladium in 2020, a trend likely to continue, while platinum continues to have a surplus of supply over industrial demand.

It had been expected that the motor industry would switch back to using platinum more in catalytic converters than the current palladium/rhodium mix. Despite the rise in palladium prices, there is little sign of this happening. Furthermore, the downturn in vehicle demand in China and elsewhere while emission regulations continue to tighten encourages analysts to reduce their forecasts for catalytic demand for platinum group metals overall.

Consequently, platinum demand has become increasingly dependent on investment. But here, a disappointing price performance has led to persistent ETF liquidation in recent years, though this appears to be changing. Jewellery demand has been broadly flat.

In short, the platinum market currently lacks obviously positive factors, but that is discounted in the disappointing price performance and the current price level. All that is required to drive prices higher is a boost to the investment case, when the price could easily double from that double bottom, outperforming gold perhaps on the next leg up. And that will probably be as a wider understanding of monetary debasement by investment managers and the general public develops, overwhelming the physical quantities available.

Global banks are involuntarily stocking up on risky corporate loans as a result of investors beginning to cut risk in the credit markets, according to Bloomberg. 

Underwriters that could once easily offload risk associated with corporate debt are finding that coming up with new suckers investors isn’t as easy as it once was. As a result, banks like Barclays and Deutsche have been stuck with $1.5 billion in leveraged loans that they’ve struggled to sell off in recent months. 

It’s a small sum relative to the nearly $170 billion in leveraged loans outstanding in the U.S. and Europe, but it’s notable due to the “broad strength” of the credit markets of late. The strength in credit stands in contrast to late last year when a sharp selloff left the banks holding the bag on $3.6 billion in unsold debt. 

While the recent stalled deals don’t pose a major threat to the junk bond market, an uptick could constrain underwriting and signal further risk aversion going forward. 

Steven Abrahams, head of strategy at Amherst Pierpont Securities said: “The mix of loans coming to market right now is very difficult to absorb. It’s a very unusual story that leveraged loans and collateralized loan obligations are showing stress, even though the rest of the market is pretty benign, if not bullish.”

Continued concerns about a global slowdown are prompting investors to avoid riskiest issuers. 

Chunks of deals still sitting on banks’ books include debt for OSG Billing Services and ACProducts: two deals that were underwritten before last year’s sell-off and have still been unable to find buyers. Barclays, who acted as sole underwriter for both deals, is still holding about half of each deal. 

Debt deals made for Apollo’s buyout of Shutterfly and HGGC’s take-private deal for Monotype Imaging Holdings failed to be fully sold to investors as demand for riskier credit waned. Additionally, a group of banks – also led by Barclays and Deutsche – were left holding hundreds of millions of dollars in debt from Advent International’s buyout of a unit of Evonik Industries in July. 

A Deutsche spokesman said: “The amounts in question are insignificant in the context of the wider market and insignificant to Deutsche Bank’s debt-financing businesses.”

Banks have also struggled to sell a nearly $3 billion cross border debt deal for Bain Capital’s purchase of a majority stake of research firm Kantar. Underwriters were forced to add concessions on pricing and documentation to the loan and bond deal to entice investors. The deadline for the deal was extended twice. 

And banks may find it even more difficult to offload these loans in coming months. Worries about a global downturn have reduced demand for lower rated loans at risk of downgrades – especially from CLOs, which face limits as to the amount of the weakest tier CCC debt they can own. 

Jerry Cudzil, head of U.S. credit trading at TCW Group, called it “extreme bifurcation”. 

Often times when banks are stuck with unsold loans, they will work with PE sponsors to restructure the financing, generally after an injection of equity. If a solution can’t be found at that point, the bank is on the hook to provide the funds at the original terms.

Cudzil concluded: “It is late cycle and there is growing risk of credit accidents. We kill so many loans in the early stages that we are not even going to look at a cabinet maker right now.”

While it may be shocking to some investors, this news doesn’t come as much of a surprise to us.

Remember, it was just days ago that we highlighted comments from Morgan Stanley’s Srikanth Sankaran, who wrote in a note that “beneath the veneer of relative spread resilience and muted realized defaults, the weak links in the leveraged credit markets are coming under pressure.”

One notable such fault line is spread decompression, which has been a dominant theme in both leveraged loans and HY, with the B-BB basis expanding by ~24bp in HY and ~56bp in loans from the January tights.

Another indication that the loan market is starting to crack: distressed tails in both asset classes are also back on the rise, and while energy remains the dominant contributor to the HY tail, Morgan Stanley finds more sector diversity in loans trading below 90 cash price.

But the biggest tell that investors are starting to sour on what one year ago was the most desired part of the capital structure, is that – as in other, more illiquid pockets of the market – “big” price/spread moves are happening more frequently, “even outside the stressed buckets”. And while the jump pattern is more symmetric in HY, pointing to continued demand for big movers, by contrast in loans, the big price moves exhibit a strong downside skew, particularly in the case of facilities that started the year at stressed levels.

Also worth noting is that large moves are also happening more frequently outside the tails: while the increase in credits trading at stressed levels is ominous, it presents only a partial picture of underlying price dynamics, according to MS. Even outside the tails, the bank sees a growing incidence of big spread/price moves in individual credits.

Morgan Stanley counts 1,476 individual HY bonds that have seen spreads gap wider by 50bp or more over a one-month window. However, there is also a strong rebound pattern in that instances of significant spread tightening are also high. As a result, the aggregate distribution of YTD spread changes does not show much evidence of a broad-based malaise within the HY bond market.

The one explanation for these repricings: investors are anticipating declining fundamentals in the form of ratings downgrades.

As MS notes, consistent with the price discontinuity patterns, net downgrades in leveraged loans have also accelerated in recent months – up 106% YoY and tracking the highest levels since the energy crisis.

If these trends hold true, banks like Barclays and Deutsche better get used to having those leveraged loans on their books…

Authored by Alan Dershowitz via The Gatestone Institute,

The effort to find (or create) impeachable offense against President Donald Trump has now moved from the subjects of the Mueller investigation — collusion with Russia and obstruction of justice — to alleged recent political “sins”: “quid pro quo” with Ukraine and obstruction of Congress.

The goal of the impeach-at-any-cost cadre has always been the same: impeach and remove Trump, regardless of whether or not he did anything warranting removal. The means — the alleged impeachable offenses — have changed, as earlier ones have proved meritless. The search for the perfect impeachable offense against Trump is reminiscent of overzealous prosecutors who target the defendant first and then search for the crime with which to charge him. Or to paraphrase the former head of the Soviet secret police to Stalin: show me the man and I will find you the crime.

Although this is not Stalin’s Soviet Union, all civil libertarians should be concerned about an Alice in Wonderland process in which the search for an impeachable crime precedes the evidence that such a crime has actually been committed.

Before we get to the current search, a word about what constitutes an impeachable crime under the constitution, whose criteria are limited to treason, bribery or other high crimes and misdemeanors. There is a debate among students of the constitution over the intended meaning of “high crimes and misdemeanors.” Some believe that these words encompass non-criminal behavior. Others, I among them, interpret these words more literally, requiring at the least criminal-like behavior, if not the actual violation of a criminal statute.

What is not debatable is that “maladministration” is an impermissible ground for impeachment. Why is that not debatable? Because it was already debated and explicitly rejected by the framers at the constitutional convention. James Madison, the father of our Constitution, opposed such open-ended criteria, lest they make the tenure of the president subject to the political will of Congress. Such criteria would turn our republic into a parliamentary democracy in which the leader — the prime minister — is subject to removal by a simple vote of no confidence by a majority of legislators. Instead, the framers demanded the more specific criminal-like criteria ultimately adopted by the convention and the states.

Congress does not have the constitutional authority to change these criteria without amending the Constitution. To paraphrase what many Democratic legislators are now saying: members of Congress are not above the law; they take an oath to apply the Constitution, not to ignore its specific criteria. Congresswoman Maxine Waters placed herself above the law when she said:

“Impeachment is about whatever the Congress says it is. There is no law that dictates impeachment. What the Constitution says is ‘high crimes and misdemeanors,’ and we define that.”

So, the question remains: did President Trump commit impeachable offenses when he spoke on the phone to the president of Ukraine and/or when he directed members of the Executive Branch to refuse to cooperate, absent a court order, with congressional Democrats who are seeking his impeachment?

The answers are plainly no and no. There is a constitutionally significant difference between a political “sin,” on the one hand, and a crime or impeachable offenses, on the other.

Even taking the worst-case scenario regarding Ukraine — a quid pro quo exchange of foreign aid for a political favor — that might be a political sin, but not a crime or impeachable offense.

Many presidents have used their foreign policy power for political or personal advantage.

Most recently, President Barack Obama misused his power in order to take personal revenge against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. In the last days of his second term, Obama engineered a one-sided UN Security Council resolution declaring that Israel’s control over the Western Wall — Judaism’s holiest site — constitutes a “flagrant violation of international law.” Nearly every member of Congress and many in his own administration opposed this unilateral change in our policy, but Obama was determined to take revenge against Netanyahu, whom he despised. Obama committed a political sin by placing his personal pique over our national interest, but he did not commit an impeachable offense.

Nor did President George H. W. Bush commit an impeachable offense when he pardoned Caspar Weinberger and others on the eve of their trials in order to prevent them from pointing the finger at him.

This brings us to President Trump’s directive with regard to the impeachment investigation. Under our constitutional system of separation of powers, Congress may not compel the Executive Branch to cooperate with an impeachment investigation absent court orders. Conflicts between the Legislative and Executive Branches are resolved by the Judicial Branch, not by the unilateral dictate of a handful of partisan legislators. It is neither a crime nor an impeachable offense for the president to demand that Congress seek court orders to enforce their demands. Claims of executive and other privileges should be resolved by the Judicial Branch, not by calls for impeachment.

So, the search for the holy grail of a removable offense will continue, but it is unlikely to succeed. Our constitution provides a better way to decide who shall serve as president: it’s called an election.

The American Dream retail and amusement complex, located at New Jersey’s Meadowlands, is finally set to open after 16 years of “false states and multiple developers”, according to Bloomberg.

It’s arrival to the Northern New Jersey mall scene has nearby competitors scrambling to figure out ways to stand out. 

The mall’s owner, Triple Five Group, is expecting 40 million visitors per year once the full map is up and running – a number that would surely devastate some of the nine nearby malls that are already competing for traffic out of the New York metropolitan area. 

Poonam Goyal, an analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence said: 

“There are shopping centers that are underperforming, and I think those are the ones that need to worry. Some of the smaller malls that are just surviving, with American Dream opening, they may have more struggles ahead of them.”

North New Jersey’s mall scene has survived off of a pulse from New York City, as New Jersey doesn’t implement a sales tax on clothing. In the city, shoppers pay 8.875%. This has helped fuel “continued demand” for malls in New Jersey, even as brick and mortar shops across the nation buckle. Nearby Paramus, New Jersey still boasts the busiest retail ZIP code in the country, despite the fact that many retailers stay closed on Sunday as a result of the county’s “Blue Laws”. 

Whether or not the landscape will shift with the introduction of the American Dream mall remains to be seen. The mall will first see its theme part and ice skating rink open before its retail section opens up next year. The 3 million square feet complex is 45% retail and 55% entertainment, including indoor snow skiing and a DreamWorks water park. 

Rick Rizzuto, vice president at real estate research firm Transwestern in New Jersey, said:

 “I think the size alone is a pretty big draw.”

And so, other malls in the area are also looking beyond retail to try and retain business.

“All successful malls understand that you need more of a draw than just stores. And they’re adding bigger restaurants and more family friendly, approachable environments,” Rizzuto continued.

The Short Hills mall, about 30 minutes away, says it’s not worried about the new competition because it offers high end services and “experiences that enhance its appeal beyond just the merchandise itself.”

Short Hills mall General Manager Jamie Cox said: “Setting ourselves apart doesn’t necessarily have to do with the big roller coasters that American Dream is working on; it has to do with a differentiated shopping experience.”

Cox claims American Dream won’t be able to match features like the VIP lounge in its Chanel boutique and Canada Goose’s “Cold Room” where customers can test the company’s gear in temperatures as low as -13F. 

Cox continued: “Our customers might go there once or twice for entertainment purposes, but when they want to shop they’re going to come to Short Hills.”

Analyst Poonam Goyal still thinks that higher end malls may be able to offer something that American Dream can’t. She said: “You go to American Dream for the entertainment. But I think if you want to go purchase something, you may not want that bigger presence where you might get lost.”

Paramus’ Garden State Plaza, about 20 minutes away, also strives to differentiate itself by becoming a “mini city”, complete with residential spaces, public gathering spaces, restaurants and traditional retailers. Currently, it offers high end services like valet parking and a concierge. 

Karen Bednarz, a sales development coach from Hawthorne, New Jersey, says that she thinks American Dream will still draw a crowd; at least, at first. 

She said: ”It’s like the Stew Leonard’s that opened up last month. American Dream’s going to attract a lot of people because it’s brand new, but that newness will go away eventually. Unless it has something that you can’t find anywhere else, it may lose its sizzle.”

Rick Rizzuto agreed that the mall would draw people in, and even postulated that it could help other nearby malls: “It will have a large enough reach that people from Pennsylvania and Connecticut will come to see it at least once. It will draw a lot more people than the area is used to, which should result in spending at the other malls in the area.”

Hong Kong chief executive Carrie Lam said earlier this month, the city’s economy had slipped into a “technical recession” after many months of violent protests.

Bloomberg’s new report, comprised of several interviews and retail data points of the city, offers a leading view of economic turmoil in the city that could lead to a severe financial crisis. 

Kirio Zhou, a resident of mainland China, spoke with Bloomberg and said the retail business in Hong Kong is on the brink of collapse. Rooms at the most high-end hotels, like Marco Polo Hongkong in Tsim Sha Tsui, are going for $72 per night, a 75% discount versus last year. 

“I thought it was a per-person price at first,” said the 23-year-old lawyer, who saw Hong Kong’s small but expensive accommodations as a big pain point. “But now really cool places are offered at a low price. I hope this will continue.”

Paul Luciw, an internet entrepreneur, said the hotel traffic in Hong Kong has dropped. He was able, according to Bloomberg, barter a hotel room at a luxury hotel in the city for ad space on his website. 

I just left there. It was crazy riots every night, had fires under my Hilton Hotel. Go somewhere else. My biggest concern is they closed down the airport last week. They are taking the lead from Hong Kong protests. I don’t believe it will end soon pic.twitter.com/0BOZFg0B0J

— phugh (@phugh7) October 23, 2019

Hong Kong’s Aug. retail sales were awful, the worst on record., and the accounts from Zhou and Luciw — indicate just how desperate Hong Kong businesses are to survive.

“It’s absolutely life and death for us,” said Douglas Young, co-founder of Goods Of Desire, or G.O.D, a lifestyle and fashion store-chain operator in Hong Kong, in an interview with Bloomberg Television on Wednesday. “At the moment we’re calculating whether or not it’s cheaper for us to just fold or to continue, it’s that serious.”

Retail sales in Aug. plunged 23% Y/Y, worse than the 21.48% drop in Sept. 1998, as violent protests continue to cause mini-economic shocks in shopping districts and malls.

Luxury brands face a dilemma as Hong Kong retail hits the skids https://t.co/TlkbwP6KrY pic.twitter.com/kuTRziQYKp

— CNA (@ChannelNewsAsia) October 15, 2019

As a result, Prada SpA, Ralph Lauren Corp., and Levi Strauss & Co. have said store sales are quickly slipping into year-end with no end in sight on resolving the protests.

“Retail sales will likely remain in the doldrums in the near term, as the worsened economic outlook and local protests involving violence continue to weigh on consumer sentiment and inbound tourism,” a government spokesman said in Sept.

Jewelry stores are typical shops that mainland Chinese would visit, have seen sales collapse by 50% in Aug Y/Y.

We even reported that depressed jewelry sales in the city had contributed to a collapse of Israel’s diamond industry. This is an indication that the Hong Kong economic crisis is spreading throughout the world. 

Anyone who wants to travel to Hong Kong this week, departing from Washington, D.C., airports can experience at least a 50% savings on roundtrip plane tickets at the moment because air travel to Hong Kong remains depressed. 

Arrivals to Hong Kong plunged 39% to 3.56 million in Aug Y/Y. Hotel data showed occupancy levels have fallen by a third to 66% in Aug., Hong Kong Tourism Board data showed.

#HongKong #Protests just outside my hotel (just in case anyone had any doubts as to their existence). pic.twitter.com/kQnsDgmf7t

— Angela Whelan (@angela_whelan) October 20, 2019

Local businesses are cutting back on their workforce as approximately 77% of all hotel workers have just been asked to go on leave without pay. 

“Hotels were expecting things to pick up in October and November. Obviously, that has not happened,” said Luciw. “We are being approached almost daily by hotel groups looking to advertise.”

Raymond Yeung, the chief Greater China economist with Australia & New Zealand Banking Group Ltd. in Hong Kong, told Bloomberg that hotel price discounts are mostly “protest-driven.” 

“Are we going to see business travelers come to Hong Kong? Are we going to see all the exhibitions resumed?” Yeung said, adding that several major conferences in the city have been canceled.

Hong Kong’s economic sag could be a bellwether for the global economy ahead of 2020. And as we’ve mentioned, protests are erupting across the world, not just in Hong Kong. These social unrests are creating mini-economic shocks in local economies, and all of these shocks are happening at the same time as the global economy could be entering a period of vulnerability. This means the world might be one economic shock away from recession. 

Authored by Irene Luo and Jan Jekielek via The Epoch Times,

The anti-Trump “Resistance” has devastated core American institutions and broken longstanding political norms in seeking to defeat and now oust from office President Donald Trump, said Kimberley Strassel, a columnist for the Wall Street Journal and member of the Journal’s editorial board.

“And this, to me, is the irony, right? We’ve been told for three years that Donald Trump is wrecking institutions,” Strassel said in an interview with The Epoch Times for the “American Thought Leaders” program.

“But in terms of real wreckage to institutions, it’s not on Donald Trump that public faith in the FBI and the Department of Justice has precipitously fallen. That’s because of Jim Comey and Andy McCabe. It’s not on Donald Trump that the Senate confirmation process for the Supreme Court is in ashes after what happened to Brett Kavanaugh. It’s not on Donald Trump that we are turning impeachment into a partisan political tool.”

The damage inflicted by the anti-Trump Resistance is the subject of Strassel’s new book, “Resistance (At All Costs): How Trump Haters Are Breaking America.”

Strassel uses the term “haters” deliberately, to differentiate this demographic from Trump’s “critics.”

In Strassel’s view, all thoughtful critics of Trump – and she counts herself among them – would look at Trump the same way that they have examined past presidents – namely, to call him out when he does something wrong, but also laud him when he does something right.

“The ‘haters’ can’t abide nuance. To the Resistance, any praise – no matter how qualified – of Trump is tantamount to American betrayal,” Strassel writes in “Resistance (At All Costs).”

She told The Epoch Times: “Up until the point at which Donald Trump was elected, what happened when political parties lost is that they would retreat, regroup, lick their wounds, talk about what they did wrong.

“That’s not what happened this time around. Instead, you had people who essentially said we should have won.”

From the moment Trump was elected, this group believed Trump to be an illegitimate president and therefore felt they could use whatever means necessary to remove him from office, Strassel said.

‘Unprecedented Acts’

“One thing I try really hard to do in this book is enunciate what rules and regulations and standards were broken, what political boundaries were crossed, because I think that that’s where we’re seeing the damage,” Strassel said.

The “unprecedented acts” of the Resistance have caused the public to lose trust in longstanding institutions such as the FBI, the CIA, and the Department of Justice, and cheapened important political processes like impeachment, she said.

The Resistance fabricated and pushed the theory that it was Trump’s collusion with Russia that won him the presidency, not the support of the American people, and lied about the origins of the so-called evidence—the Steele dossier—that was used by the FBI to justify a counterintelligence investigation into the Trump campaign, Strassel said.

“We have never, in the history of this country, had a counterintelligence investigation into a political campaign,” she said.

In an anecdote that Strassel recounts in her book, she asked former House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) if there was anything in America’s laws that could have prohibited this situation.

Nunes, who had helped write or update many laws concerning the powers of the intelligence community, replied, “I would never have conceived of the FBI using our counterintelligence capabilities to target a political campaign.

“If it had crossed any of our minds, I can guarantee we’d have specifically written: ‘Don’t do that.’”

In Strassel’s view, the Resistance is partially fueled by deep-seated anger, or what others have termed “Trump derangement syndrome”—an inability to look rationally at a man so far outside of Washington norms.

But at the same time, in Strassel’s view, much of the Resistance is motivated by a desire to amass political power using whatever means necessary.

“That involves removing the president who won. That involves some of these other things that you hear them talking about now: packing the Supreme Court, getting rid of the electoral college, letting 16-year-olds vote,” she said.

“These are not reforms. Reforms are things that the country broadly agrees are going to help improve stuff. This is changing the rules so that you get power, and you stay in power.”

The impeachment inquiry into the president, based on his phone call with Ukraine’s president, is just another example of how the Resistance is violating political norms and relying on flimsy evidence to try to remove him from office, she said.

Testimony in the inquiry has taken place behind closed doors, led by three House committees, and Democrats have so far refused to release transcripts from the depositions of former and current State Department employees.

“[Impeachment] is one of the most serious and huge powers in the Constitution. It was meant always by the founders to be reserved for truly unusual circumstances. They debated not even putting it in because they were concerned that this is what would happen,” Strassel said.

In the impeachment inquiries against Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton, Strassel said, American leaders “understood the great importance of convincing the American public that their decision to use this tool was just and legitimate.

“So if you look back at Watergate, they had hundreds of hours of testimony broadcast over TV that people tuned into and watched. It’s one of the reasons that Richard Nixon resigned before the House ever held a final impeachment vote on him, because the public had been convinced. He knew he had to go,” she said.

But now, instead of access to the testimonies, the public is receiving only leaked snippets and dueling narratives.

“You have Democrats saying, ‘Oh, this is very bad.’ And Republicans saying, ‘Oh, it’s not so bad at all.’ What are Americans supposed to think?” Strassel said.

Bureaucratic Resistance

Within the federal bureaucracy, there is a “vast swath of unelected officials” who have “a great deal of power to slow things down, mess things up, file the whistleblower complaints, leak information, actively engage against the president’s policies,” Strassel said.

“It’s their job to implement his agenda. And yet a lot of them are part of the Resistance, too,” she said.

Data shows that in the lead-up to the 2016 presidential election, government bureaucrats overwhelmingly contributed toward the Clinton campaign over the Trump campaign.

Ninety-five percent, or about $1.9 million, of bureaucrats’ donations went to Clinton, according to The Hill’s analysis of donations from federal workers up until September 2016. In particular, employees at the Department of Justice gave 97 percent of their donations to Clinton. For the State Department, it was even higher—99 percent.

“Imagine being a CEO and showing up and knowing that 95 percent of your workforce despises you and doesn’t want you to be there,” Strassel said.

Strassel pointed to when former acting Attorney General Sally Yates, a holdover from the Obama administration, publicly questioned the constitutionality of Trump’s immigration ban and directed Justice Department employees to disobey the order.

“It was basically a call to arms,” Strassel said. “What she should’ve done is honorably resigned if she felt that she could not in any way enforce this duly issued executive order.

“It really kicked off what we have seen ever since then: The nearly daily leaks from the administration, the whistleblower complaints,” as well as “all kind of internal foot-dragging and outright obstruction to the president’s agenda.”

According to a report by the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, in Trump’s first 126 days in office, his administration “faced 125 leaked stories—one leak a day—containing information that is potentially damaging to national security under the standards laid out in a 2009 Executive Order signed by President Barack Obama.”

Activist Media

Strassel says the media has played a critical role in bolstering the anti-Trump Resistance.

“I’ve been a reporter for 25 years,” Strassel said.

“I’ve always felt that the media leaned left. That wasn’t a surprise to anyone. “But what we’ve seen over the past three years is something entirely different. This is the media actively engaging on one side of a partisan warfare. It’s overt.”

Along the way, the media have largely abandoned journalistic standards, “whether it be the use of anonymous sources, whether it be putting uncorroborated accusations into the paper, whether it’s using biased sources for information and cloaking them as neutral observers,” she said.

Among the many examples of media misinformation cited in Strassel’s book is a December 2017 CNN piece that claimed to have evidence that then-candidate Trump and his son Donald Trump Jr. had been offered early access to hacked emails from the Democratic National Committee. But it turned out the date was wrong. Trump Jr. had received an email about the WikiLeaks release one day after WikiLeaks had made the documents public.

“If it hurts Donald Trump, they’re on board,” Strassel said. And in many cases, the attacks on Trump have been contradictory.

“He’s either the dunce you claim he is every day or he’s the most sophisticated Manchurian candidate that the world has ever seen. You can’t have it both ways.

“He’s either a dictator and an autocrat who is consolidating power around himself to rule with an iron fist, or he’s the evil conservative who’s cutting regulations.”

Contrary to claims of authoritarianism, Trump has significantly decreased the size of the federal government. Notably, he reduced the Federal Register, a collection of all the national government’s rules and regulations, to the lowest it’s been since Bill Clinton’s first year in office.

“You can’t be a libertarian dictator,” Strassel said.

In addition to the barrage of attacks on Trump, the media has actively sought to “de-legitimize anybody who has a different viewpoint than they do, or who is reporting the facts and the story in a way other than they would like them to be presented.”

“They would love to make it sound as though none of us are worthy of writing about this story,” she said.

“The media is supposed to be our guardrails, right? When a political party transgresses a political boundary, they’re supposed to say ‘No, that’s beyond the pale.’”

Instead, “they indulged this behavior,” Strassel said.

“We had a media cheerleading the FBI for meddling in American politics. Can you ever imagine a time in American history where the media would have played such a role?

“In a way, I blame that for so much else that has gone wrong.”

Long-Term Consequences

Strassel says the actions taken by the Resistance will have long-term consequences for America.

“I keep warning my friends on the other side of the aisle: Think about the precedent you are setting here,” Strassel said.

For example, if Joe Biden wins the presidency in 2020 but Republicans take back the House, would the Republican-dominated House immediately launch impeachment proceedings against Biden for alleged corruption in Ukraine?

“I wouldn’t necessarily use the word [corruption], but there’s a lot of Republicans who happily would. And if they thought they’d get another shot at the White House, why not?” Strassel said.

It’s short-term thinking, she said, just like Sen. Harry Reid’s decision in 2013 to drop the number of votes needed to overcome a filibuster for lower-court judges.

“Did he really stop to think about the fact that it paved the way for Republicans to get rid of the filibuster for Supreme Court judges?” Strassel said.

If there’s any rule in Washington, “it’s that when you set the bar low, it just keeps going lower,” Strassel said.

“Donald Trump is going to be president for at most another five years. But the actions and the destruction that’s coming with some of this could be with us for a very long time,” she said.

“Should anyone allow their deep disregard for one particular man to so change the structure and the fabric of the country?”

BMO Harris is leaving a trail of defaults and lawsuits in the agriculture industry after being one of its most aggressive and prominent lenders in the 2010’s, according to Reuters. 

Ohio corn and soybean producer Greg Kruger experienced the investment bank’s lending practices firsthand. He had asked the bank for a $2 million loan to build a grain elevator in 2013 and had walked away with a $5 million loan for the elevator and another $7 million to finance crops, machinery and debt consolidation – after just one half hour phone call. 

Kruger even offered the bank supply receipts of sold grain and documentation, to which his loan officer reportedly responded: “‘Don’t worry. We’ll make the numbers work’.” 

Now about a half decade after BMO Harris “aggressively expanded” its U.S. farm loan portfolio, it has called in Kruger’s loans and is filing to seize his farm. Corn and soy prices have both collapsed and the U.S. is now engaged in a years-long trade war with China that shows no signs of an imminent resolution. 

In its wake, BMO Harris is leaving a trail of farmers just like Kruger, who have lost everything. And the bank, a subsidiary of Bank of Montreal, is struggling to recoup many of its investments through bitter legal fights. 

John Blanchfield, founder of Agricultural Banking Advisory Services said: “BMO Harris did push for growth, and they’ve had some of those deals blow up spectacularly in their faces.”

The struggles are indicative of how the farming industry has struggled overall. Farmers are now struggling to pay back loans or obtain new ones and shrinking cash flow has caused some farmers to retire early. Growing scores of farmers are also declaring bankruptcy. 

Meanwhile, BMO Harris could be set up for even more defaults. At the end of June, 13.1% of its farm loan portfolio was at least 90 days late, compared to 1.53% for all U.S. farm loans at FDIC insured banks. BMO Harris had the highest rate among the 30 largest FDIC banks.

Ray Whitacre, head of BMO Harris Bank’s U.S. diversified industries unit, said: “…the bank’s distressed loans do not represent the overwhelming majority of its borrowers’ experiences.” He noted that the bank has been in farm lending for over a century and says that the bank takes a long-term view of helping farmings through “all stages of the economic cycle”.

This includes massive, catastrophic recessions, we guess. 

The bank’s exposure to the farm sector reached $1.59 billion in 2018, while most other major banks have been scaling back their farm loan portfolios since 2015. 

One deal that went up in flames for BMO Harris was $43 million in farm operating loans made to McM, Inc., which filed for Chapter 7 in 2017. 

BMO Harris had secured $25 million of the loan with McM’s grain, cattle and farm crops, along with other assets. McM used the sale of these crops to pay the bank back. During the bankruptcy, BMO Harris said it was unable to locate the crops that were backing its loans, alleging that McM had sold some to pay off other creditors first. It was also revealed in court documents that the bank had not audited some of the farm’s financial statements. 

It was later found that McM’s accounts receivable and inventory was overstated by at least $11 million. 

Some experts and attorneys representing BMO Harris customers say the bank issued too many loans for too long. Examples like Michael and Byron Robinson are becoming ubiquitous:

Michael and Byron Robinson borrowed $2.5 million in an agricultural loan and another $2.5 million on a line of credit in 2013 through their Indiana businesses, court records show. The bank sued the Robinsons in federal court as part of its foreclosure process in 2016 and later sold the farmland at auction. The property brought far less than the value the bank had estimated the properties were worth to justify the original loans, said their bankruptcy attorney, Maurice Doll.

T.J. Mattick, the banker that lent to the Robinsons – and to Kruger – found his customers through farm magazine ads, word of mouth and church gatherings. Rural loan brokers who referred him business were paid a finder’s fee.

Mattick convinced the Robinson’s to buy two new farms, instead of one, when they were looking to expand their corn and soybean operations. BMO Harris financed 100% of the deal. 

Michael Morrison, the Robinsons’ farm bookkeeper and a former agricultural banker said: “We used to say that T.J. never saw a loan he didn’t like. I kept telling them, ‘Don’t do this. Don’t take on the debt.’ But T.J. kept telling them, ‘Don’t worry, it’ll be fine’.”

Mattick said “extensive underwriting and analysis” was performed before loans were issued. “I worked with clients to help them determine what they could afford and never would have counseled them to incur debt beyond what they could afford,” Mattick said.

Kruger concluded: “I thought I could trust him. We would talk about church and faith all the time.”

Authored by Michael Snyder via The Economic Collapse blog,

This is a very difficult article for me to write.  America is more divided today than it has ever been in my entire lifetime, and the very deep divisions that now exist are getting deeper with each passing day.  In particular, the animosity between the political left and the political right has risen to an extremely frightening level. 

Instead of learning to love those that we disagree with, we are constantly being trained to absolutely loathe them, and the pot is constantly being stirred by the mainstream media and many of our national leaders.  And as both sides go at it like cats and dogs, irreparable damage is being done to our political system.  At this point, we are not too far away from a point where this country will not be governable by anyone.  Our federal government has degenerated into a bad soap opera featuring an endless parade of insults, threats, petty stunts, scandals and investigations.  All of this drama may be entertaining at times, but it is not any way to run a country.

And now all of the political strife and discord in this country has been given a focal point.  I have repeatedly warned that Democrats should have never gone down the road of impeachment, because either way this process turns out it is going to be very bad for America.

• If Trump is impeached by the House but protected by the Republicans in the Senate, the left is going to go absolutely ballistic.

• But if Trump is impeached by the House and then removed from office by the Senate, the right is going to go absolutely ballistic.

Either way, this story is going to have a very negative end.

And even if Trump wasn’t in the White House, the seething hatred between the left and the right would still be there.  In fact, things have gotten so bad that a new survey found that 67 percent of all Americans believe that we are “on the edge of civil war”…

Partisan political division and the resulting incivility has reached a low in America, with 67% believing that the nation is nearing civil war, according to a new national survey.

“The majority of Americans believe that we are two-thirds of the way to being on the edge of civil war. That to me is a very pessimistic place,” said Mo Elleithee, the executive director of Georgetown University’s Institute of Politics and Public Service.

I was stunned to see such a high number.

Obviously most Americans don’t actually want a “civil war”, but this is what most of them see coming.

Earlier today, I came across an article about a Major League Baseball umpire named Rob Drake that is now in hot water for posting about “civil war” on Twitter…

Major League Baseball is looking into a now-deleted tweet from umpire Rob Drake warning of a civil war if president Donald Trump is impeached.

According to a copy of the tweet obtained by ESPN, Drake tweeted that he planned to buy an assault rifle “because if you impeach MY PRESIDENT this way, YOU WILL HAVE ANOTHER CIVAL WAR!!! #MAGA2020″.”

Is that really how this chapter in American history is going to end?

Are we destined to see utter chaos in the streets?

I am not saying that we should all try to find a way to agree on everything.  When it comes to our most fundamental values, there are certain things that I will never, ever, ever agree on with my political opponents.

And the fact that our nation no longer has a cohesive set of values is definitely a big part of the problem.  With various national leaders constantly touting their own value systems and trying to pull us in a whole bunch of different directions simultaneously, it is certainly not surprising that we have ended up at this point.

But nobody should want a fractured nation where we are literally fighting with one another in the streets.

Of course when you ask people about who should be blamed for this mess, Democrats point at Republicans and Republicans point at Democrats.  If you doubt this, just check out these numbers…

Among Democratic voters, 63 percent say GOP leaders are “very responsible” for the decline in civility and 86 percent say Trump is “very responsible.” Only 10 percent of Democratic voters place a large degree of blame at the feet of their party leaders.

Among Republicans, those numbers are flipped – 67 percent of GOP voters say Democratic leaders are “very responsible” for the decline in today’s politics, easily the largest culprit among those voters.

Frustration and anger have been building in this country for a very long time, and now this impeachment process threatens to be a flashpoint.  No matter what happens, tens of millions of Americans are going to be deeply, deeply upset by the result, and you don’t want to be there when their anger is unleashed.

A number of years ago I wrote a novel which envisioned absolutely massive protests in Washington D.C., but at that time I had no idea that Donald Trump would become president or that the Democrats would one day try to impeach him.  And now it looks like the Democrats want to have articles of impeachment ready by the end of this year, and that means that a Senate trial is coming soon.

And once a Senate trial starts, the eyes of the entire world will be on Washington.

Many on the right are assuming that a Senate trial will be a slam dunk for Trump, but it is not necessarily safe to make that assumption.  On Wednesday, the number two Republican in the Senate said the following about this process…

“The picture coming out of it, based on the reporting that we’ve seen, I would say is not a good one,” Senator John Thune of South Dakota, the No. 2 Republican, told CNN. “But I would say also that until we have a process that allows for everybody to see this in full transparency, it’s pretty hard to draw any hard and fast conclusions.”

That certainly doesn’t sound like someone that already has his mind made up about how he will vote.

There are going to be a lot of twists and turns to this drama in the weeks ahead, but it is becoming increasingly clear that the end result will not be a good one for America.

And as I just detailed above, a large percentage of the population shares my pessimism regarding how this chapter in American history will end.