Tag: news

Authored by Paul Joseph Watson via Summit News,

Former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon says that if Donald Trump loses the election to Joe Biden next month he will run for the presidency again in 2024.

Despite maintaining his belief that Trump “will win on election day,” Bannon told the Australian that a Biden victory wouldn’t mean the end of Trump.

“I’ll make this prediction right now: If for any reason the election is stolen from, or in some sort of way Joe Biden is declared the winner, Trump will announce he’s going to run for re-election in 2024,” said Bannon.

The political operative also said that the current presidential race is far closer than polls suggest and that its outcome “won’t be settled anytime soon” and could eventually end up before the Supreme Court.

Bannon previously stated that Trump would be able to claim victory as early as “10 o’clock or 11 o’clock” on 3 November after he wins Ohio and is up in Florida and Pennsylvania.

As we previously highlighted, Biden’s campaign is preparing voters to anticipate that Trump could be ahead on election night but then the result would later be overturned after mail-in ballots are fully counted, a process that could take weeks.

“The elites are traumatized. They do not want to go stand in line and vote. That, ladies and gentlemen, is a game-changer,” Bannon said.

It was also recently revealed that Bannon is the architect behind the roll out of Hunter Biden’s laptop contents.

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Senior editor, Ash Bennington, is joined by managing editor, Ed Harrison, to interpret how the rising COVID-19 infections in Europe and the U.S. will impact markets. Ed conducts a deep dive on best practices for containing the virus while mitigating the economic damage, reviewing protocols in Norway, Sweden, Belgium, and New Zealand, and Ash looks at how China’s remarkable GDP growth could be related to its own containment strategy. Ed gives a sneak peek of his upcoming interview with legendary value investor Joel Greenblatt while Ash tells viewers about Real Vision CEO Raoul Pal’s surprise update on Bitcoin and central bank digital currencies (CBDCs). Lastly, Ed and Ash discuss signs of stress emanating from the New York commercial real estate market. In the intro, editor Jack Farley gives a snapshot of today’s price action and looks at NASDAQ futures contracts and Royal Caribbean Cruises’ recent convertible bond deal.

Two weeks ago, we reported that Wells Fargo, Deutsche Bank and many of their rivals were re-starting job cuts following a brief six-month “pause” announced back in March.

And now that banks’ Q3 results are in, the topic of conversation in the industry is turning – as it always does around this time – the subject of bonuses. This year the dominant theme seems to be: how will the wide disparity in profitability between megabanks’ various business lines impact bonuses, particularly bonuses for high-earners like traders and dealmakers?

The answer arrived Monday in the form of an FT report.

While traders, analysts and bankers have seen their positions insulated by gangbusters IB revenue (thanks to an explosion in trading and debt & equity underwriting), many will be disappointed to learn that they won’t be seeing bonuses commensurate with the revenue explosion in these areas, as the world’s biggest lending banks shore up their loan-loss provisions should the global economy lurch into a ‘double-dip’ recession.

Instead, the message from Bank of America, JPM and Citigroup, America’s big lending banks, to their employees is clear: bankers should consider themselves lucky to still be gainfully employed after 2020. Despite exposing traders to the risk of COVID-19 infection during the early days of the crisis, and then again last month, JPM – along with Citigroup and Bank of America – has warned that bonuses likely won’t be commensurate with the outsize revenue.

JPM has seen a 54% rise in fixed-income revenues at JPM and a 42% jump in fixed-income revenues at Citigroup. But profits for all three banks were weighed down by a combined $48 billion in loan-loss charges during the first nine months of 2020, the FT reports.

Senior investment bank executives at two of the banks told the Financial Times they were trying to “manage expectations” for 2020 bonuses by reminding staff that the wider businesses have booked huge loan loss charges to prepare for a surge in defaults as the pandemic ravages global economies. At the third, a senior executive said the bonuses were a “huge issue that we are grappling with”, as the bank tries to balance paying people for results with their need to be “good citizens”. This is in an environment where regulators and politicians have curbed shareholder payouts so they will have a cushion for potential loan losses. Investment banks walk a delicate line on pay every year, as executives try to balance the expectations of some bankers and traders with investors’ demands for cost control and public outrage about millionaire bankers getting richer.

Still, the challenges are greater than usual this year. “This is the first time since the financial crisis that we’ve had such a dramatic difference between parts of the big banks,” said Alan Johnson, founder of New York-based pay consultancy Johnson & Associates, referring to the gulf in the performance of the banks’ retail business and their advisory and trading divisions. The group-wide profits of Citigroup, JPMorgan and Bank of America were weighed down by a combined $48bn of loan loss charges in the first nine months of the year, more than three times as much as they set aside for souring loans in the first nine months of 2019.

Fortunately (for them), investment bankers at Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs will likely receive a bigger piece of the bonus pie, since those banks don’t have massive lending businesses, according to one Wall Street recruiter quoted by the FT.

Mr Johnson said issues around pay would be less contentious at Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs because they did not have the same exposure to coronavirus-related loan losses as the big lending banks. Morgan Stanley and Goldman have collectively taken just $3.5bn in loan loss charges this year.

One insider reportedly familiar with JPM’s reasoning told the FT that doling out massive bonuses to traders and their colleagues would be “foolish” given the uncertainty surrounding the global economic outlook. It would be “foolish, short-term, non-disciplined thinking to pay oversized payouts when medium to longer-term expectations (about the broader economy) are still unclear,” they said.

Insiders at Citigroup and BofA insisted that their pay packages would be “in step” with the broader industry, but if profits in one business (say, fixed income trading) were up 50%, bankers in that department should expect their bonuses to rise by 25%.

A similar trend is expected to play out in Europe, where investment banks, including Barclays, DB and SocGen, are so deeply embroiled in trying to revive their flagging businesses and lure back shareholders in an age of negative interest rates that executives that weak bonuses are practically a foregone conclusion. “It seems simple to me; bonuses will be poor,” said one London-based MD.

If there is a silver lining for traders and analysts, it’s this: at the very least, they can expect larger bonuses thank their colleagues working for struggling business lines. Back in May, Johnson & Associates, the same firm quoted as the primary source in Monday’s FT story, reported that bonuses would likely vary widely between business lines, with some retail bankers could see their bonuses shrink by 30% or more.

Authored by Craig Pirrong via THe American Institute for Economic Research,

It’s more than fair to say that we are experiencing a pandemic, but not the one you hear about ad nauseum. No, the pandemic is not a virus, it is a pandemic outbreak of Munchausen’s Syndrome by Proxy which focuses its obsessions on the virus.

Munchausen’s Syndrome by Proxy is a mental illness in which the sufferer fantasizes that others–usually people in their charge, such as children–are suffering from serious illness and require drastic medical intervention.

Observe what has happened over the last 7 months, and what if anything is increasing in intensity today. The obsession with Covid-19. The monomaniacal focus on “cases” (usually the result of hypersensitive tests prone to false positives), with the belief that people who test positive are sick, and huge numbers of those who become sick will die.

Given the actual experience over the last several months, these beliefs are wildly exaggerated–imaginary, fantasized illnesses, with fantasized severity, just the kind of thing that a sufferer of MSbP does.

And there’s more to the diagnosis. MSbP sufferers subject the people whom they imagine are ill with suffocating attention and unnecessary, and often harmful, health-related interventions. You know, like lockdowns; draconian restrictions on movement, social contact, and other features of everyday life; the shutting down of schools and colleges; and strident demands to wear masks–even between bites of your meal if you are in California.

Look at so many governors and mayors, e.g., Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, Gavin Gruesome–excuse me, Newsom–in California, J. B. Pritzker in Illinois, or Tim Walz in Minnesota. (I could go on. And on. And on. Believe me.) They constantly invoke their power over you. But it’s for your own good! Trust them! Mommy is protecting you! And if you object, you will be punished! How dare you defy Mommy’s tender mercies, you ungrateful brats? If you do, you will be punished! To get your minds right and realize just what danger you are in, and why you need to listen to Mommy and do exactly as she says!

And if it were only limited to “authorities” who make Cartman look pleasant. You probably have neighbors or co-workers who have the Syndrome. Or you run into them in the grocery store. Or maybe it’s the fatso in the pharmacy checkout line. (Yeah, that’s an allusion to a personal experience, but no worries: I doubt said person can read.)

It was already bad enough before Trump was diagnosed with Covid. Then a super-virulent strain of the Syndrome appeared, through some Darwinian mechanism apparently. As soon as I saw his first remarks from the hospital–that he had learned a lot about Covid, and he was going to share that information and experience with us–I knew he would say exactly what he did say: it can be a serious illness, but the vast majority of people can beat it, and we shouldn’t let it dominate our lives.

And I knew that this would kick the MSbP crowd into apoplexy. They want a narrative of doom and gloom. They want people to be afraid. They want people to defer to them, and to depend on them, and most importantly to obey their commands. You could get really sick–ALL OF YOU! You could die–ANY OF YOU! Don’t listen to anyone who tells you otherwise! They don’t have your best interests at heart, like Mommy does. And put in your earplugs (so you don’t hear the Bad Orange Man), put on your eye shades (so you don’t read the Great Barrington Declaration), you know where to put the cork (aka the mask that makes it impossible for you to speak intelligibly).

So anything that contradicts the narrative triggers a mass attack of the Munchausens.

Is Covid like the seasonal flu, as Trump said? Well, the more data that comes in, the more it appears that yes it is a danger on the order of magnitude of a bad seasonal influenza strain–the kind we have endured multiple times in the past without draconian measures that cratered economies. And ironically, the data strongly suggest that it is less of a danger to children than the garden variety seasonal flu.

But it is beyond cavil that it is nothing remotely like the last great pandemic disease, Spanish Influenza of 1918-1919. But that doesn’t stop severe cases of MSbP like Gov. Gretchen Ratched from justifying their actions by reference to that episode, and invoking laws passed during that real pandemic to control your life today.

In normal times, most of the objects of MSbP sufferers are children, who have limited power to resist. Often medical professionals are the ones who identify a MSbP situation, and intervene to protect the object.

But today, adults are overwhelmingly the objects. And too many medical professionals enable MSbP (and may indeed be sufferers themselves–just look at the lunatic Twitter timelines of many medicos FREAKING OUT over Trump’s remarks and behavior, i.e., acting like someone suffering the flu, or a cold).

Given the coercive powers of the most important MSbP sufferers – the said governors, mayors, bureaucrats, etc. – this pandemic (the MSbP pandemic) is wreaking untold havoc. We need more people to say we aren’t going to take it. We need more people to push back. We should not be in the thrall of the mentally ill.

But alas, we are. Because there are so goddam many of them, and they infest the executive branches of government at every level.

The sado-masochistic market rose after hours, when having sold off into the close on the reality that no stimulus deal is coming before the election, it rebounded from session lows after Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin spoke at 3pm today for 53 minutes and “continued to narrow their differences” on a coronavirus relief package, Pelosi aide Drew Hammill said Monday, even as time to reach agreement on a stimulus deal by by Election Day has all but run out.

“The Speaker continues to hope that, by the end of the day Tuesday, we will have clarity on whether we will be able to pass a bill before the election,” Hammill tweeted, adding that “The two principals will speak again tomorrow and staff work will continue around the clock.”

The Speaker continues to hope that, by the end of the day Tuesday, we will have clarity on whether we will be able to pass a bill before the election. The two principals will speak again tomorrow and staff work will continue around the clock. (2/2)

— Drew Hammill (@Drew_Hammill) October 19, 2020

The change in tone came after Pelosi earlier in the day told House Democrats that “significant areas of disagreement” are standing in the way of any deal, prompting stocks to selloff into the close. Democrats have been steadfast in refusing to compromise on their non-covid related priorities for local governments, workers, schools and health care. Hammill said Democratic committee chairmen have been directed to work with their Republican counterparts on a solution.

And while Emini futures jumped about 10 points on the news…

… the odds of a deal remain virtually nil as WaPo reported, noting that “a stimulus deal with Treasury Secretary Mnuchin is not sounding imminent based on comments from Pelosi and committee chairs” citing sources on the House Democratic caucus call.

Meanwhile, according to Fox’s Chad Pergram explained, Mitch McConnell filed cloture on his new $500 billion coronavirus bill, although since it needs 60 yeas to end a filibuster it is “Likely going nowhere.”

McConnell files cloture on his new $500 billion coronavirus bill. Will ripen for procedural vote to end filibuster Wednesday. Needs 60 yeas. Likely going nowhere

— Chad Pergram (@ChadPergram) October 19, 2020

Finally Politico’s Jake Sherman said that according to a Democrat caucus call, while there has been some progress in stimulus discussions it’s not enough, with Pelosi reiterating the Tuesday deadline for a deal.

Trump, who has flip-flopped on the issue, first ending negotiations with Democrats, then saying he wants a bigger fiscal stimulus than even the Democrats are asking for, had the final say: “We’re discussing it today very solidly – we’ll see what happens,” the President told reporters in Arizona. “Nancy Pelosi at this moment does not want to do anything that’s going to affect the election, and I think it will affect the election negatively for her.”

While Trump has said he’s ready to match the $2.2 trillion spending level demanded by Democrats, or even go higher, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has consistently warned that most GOP senators will oppose any coronavirus relief package that big.

We can only hope that this farce will conclude tomorrow, although in the world of politics where it’s all about the fingerpointing, we wouldn’t be surprised if this remains a key market catalyst up until Nov 3.

Twitter’s Orwellian decision to censor the Hunter Biden laptop scandal published by the New York Post completely backfired – ‘nearly doubling’ its visibility, according to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and media intelligence firm Zignal Labs.

The poorly-thought-through ban triggered the so-called Streisand Effect and helped turn a sketchy article into a must-share blockbuster. And then on Friday, the Republican National Committee filed a Federal Election Commission complaint against Twitter, claiming that the ban “amounts to an illegal corporate in-kind political contribution to the Biden campaign.” 

…

Looking at the firehose of Twitter shares of the URL—including original tweets, retweets, and quote tweets—Zignal found a surge of shares immediately after Twitter instituted the block, jumping from about 5.5 thousand shares every 15 minutes to about 10 thousand. -MIT Technology Review

So Twitter is back to where it was 2 days ago, only now everyone knows about Hunter’s notebook. Brilliant

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) October 16, 2020

The Streisand Effect was named after Barbara Streisand’s 2003 attempt to suppress a photo of her Malibu, California residence by trying to sue a photographer for $50 million over the aerial photograph. Before Streisand’s lawsuit, the photo had only been downloaded from the photographer’s website six times – two of which were Streisand’s attorneys. Once the story went viral, however, over 420,000 people visited the site over the following month. The lawsuit was dismissed and Streisand was ordered to pay $155,567 to cover the photographer’s legal fees.

And Twitter did the same thing when they banned the Post story – blocking people from posting it or sharing it over Direct Message, deleting tweets, and suspending others who shared it. Of note, the New York Post‘s Twitter account is still locked.

Twitter cited their policy against unverified information and “hacked materials,” though they never explained how the Biden emails – obtained from a laptop which Hunter dropped off at a Delaware computer repair shop and failed to pick up – violated that policy.

After Twitter came under extreme fire for what some consider election meddling and an editorial decision, CEO Jack Dorsey expressed regret, tweeting that “[s]traight blocking of URLs was wrong, and we updated our policy and enforcement to fix. Our goal is to attempt to add context, and now we have capabilities to do that.”

For their partisan censorship, the social media giant has earned themselves a Congressional investigation spearheaded by Sens. Josh Hawkey (R-MO) and Ted Cruz (R-TX). Dorsey will testify next Wednesday via videoconference in front of the Senate Commerce Committee.

Authored by Michael Snyder via The Economic Collapse blog,

Will you be safe where you currently are if the election results cause chaos to erupt in the streets of our major cities?  A lot of Americans are becoming deeply concerned about their personal safety as we approach November 3rd, because they can see what is coming.  It is going to take a lot of extra time to count all of the votes because tens of millions of Americans are voting by mail this time around, and both sides have recruited armies of lawyers and are prepared to contest the results of the election to the bitter end.  No matter who ends up being declared the winner when it is all over, there will be millions upon millions of very angry voters out there that are likely to feel as though the election was stolen from them, and that is a recipe for widespread societal unrest. 

I truly wish that we could go back and do things differently so that we would not be facing this sort of scenario, but it is too late for that now.  More than 27 million Americans have already voted, and more are voting every day.  Any attempts to fix the process will have to wait for future elections, and without a doubt it definitely needs to be fixed.

It is still difficult for me to believe that I am actually writing about the possibility of violence after a U.S. presidential election, but this is where we are at as a society.

In fact, there is violence in the streets right now.

This should break all of our hearts, because violence is not going to solve anything.

Unfortunately, an increasing number of people are not listening to voices of reason, and we are seeing anger and frustration rise to levels that we have never seen before.

At this point, most Americans are expecting the worst.  To be more specific, one recent survey found that 55 percent of all registered voters expect a rise in violence following the election…

In the YouGov survey, about 55 percent of registered voters said they thought violence would increase in the U.S. following the Nov. 3 presidential election.

Just under 11 percent of respondents said they didn’t expect a rise in violence to occur after the election, while 33 percent of voters were unsure.

Even more alarming, a different survey found that more than 40 percent of Republicans and more than 40 percent of Democrats believe that violence would be at least “a little” justified if their party ends up losing…

In September, 44 percent of Republicans and 41 percent of Democrats said there would be at least “a little” justification for violence if the other party’s nominee wins the election.

I truly wish that those numbers were not real, but they are.

As Election Day draws near, many Americans have decided that “bugging out” is the best thing to do.  For example, one 31-year-old New York resident is going to be staying with her parents on Election day because she believes “the city will be on fire” if Trump wins…

Flatiron resident Andrea, 31, also decided to pack up before Nov. 3. “I went to my parents in New Jersey for about two weeks when the BLM protests got bad and the looting started. So I definitely want to get out of here the week of the election,” said the public-relations specialist, a Republican who asked that her last name not be used. “I’m thinking if Trump wins, it’s going to be a disaster — the city will be on fire. People are going to go nuts.”

And 42-year-old Ooana Trien is planning to spend Election Day out of the city because she is concerned that “protesters will try and burn down Trump Tower”…

The Trump supporter, who is mailing in her ballot, plans to open up her doors to others looking to escape. “I told my friends that whoever wanted to get out of the city was welcome here. One friend who lives in Washington Heights is going to vote in the morning [on Nov. 3] and come straight up to the beach,” she said. “My mother thinks that whether [Trump] wins or loses, protesters will try and burn down Trump Tower.”

Law enforcement authorities all over the nation are also deeply concerned about the potential for violence.

For example, in New Jersey officials have warned that we could potentially see “civil unrest resulting in riots, violent acts, and fatalities”…

“Election result delays and recounts could result in protests and attempts to occupy election offices,” officials with the New Jersey Department of Homeland Security and Preparedness warned in a threat assessment issued in late September.

“Incidents of civil unrest resulting in riots, violent acts, and fatalities will converge with election uncertainty, producing confrontations between protesters and counter-demonstrators challenging election outcomes,” it noted.

Yes, you read that correctly.

They actually used the word “fatalities”.

In New York, residents were rattled by a leaked NYPD memo that warned of violent protests from October 25th through the early portion of 2021…

New Yorkers are on edge after a leaked NYPD memo, obtained by The Post, revealed this week that police are preparing for protests to begin as early as Oct. 25 and grow in intensity through next year. The department decreed officers should “be prepared for deployment,” adding: “This November 3rd will be one of the most highly contested presidential elections in the modern era. There is also a strong likelihood that the winner of the presidential election may not be decided for several weeks.”

In Arizona, the information security officer for Maricopa County is encouraging people to have law enforcement authorities on speed dial just in case something happens…

“Make sure that you’re reaching out to your law enforcement and say, on and around Election Day, what is our plan?” he said. “Do you have an emergency contact list? Do you have your police department, your sheriff, whoever, on speed dial ready to get them to respond to any kind of threat?”

Election Day is now just a little over two weeks away, and emotions are running really high.

Most Democrats fully expect Joe Biden to win, and many of them are still anticipating a landslide.

Of course most Republicans believe that the national polls are completely wrong again and that President Trump will ultimately emerge victorious.

In the end, one side will be proven wrong and the disappointment that they will feel will be very, very bitter.

We all remember the rioting that we witnessed earlier this year, and many believe that what is ahead could be far, far worse.

In 2020, gun sales have soared to levels that we have never seen before, and many Americans find themselves purchasing guns for the very first time.  One of those first time buyers is a 44-year-old single mother named Andreyah Garland…

Andreyah Garland, a 44-year-old single mother of three daughters, bought a shotgun in May for protection in the quaint middle-class town of Fishkill, New York. She joined a new and fast-growing local gun club to learn how to shoot.

According to Reuters, a “potentially contested election that many fear could spark violence” played a role in her decision to purchase a firearm…

Like legions of other first-time buyers who are contributing to record sales for the U.S. gun industry this year, Garland’s decision to take up arms is driven in part by disturbing news about the coronavirus pandemic, social unrest over police killings of Black people and a potentially contested election that many fear could spark violence.

“With everything going on around us,” she said, “you see a need.”

If you could go back 50 years ago and tell Americans what conditions would be like in 2020, most of them would not believe you.

Our society is literally melting down right in front of our eyes, and I don’t think that anyone is going to be able to stop it from happening.

Of course this election will come and go, but the social instability that we are witnessing will remain, and at this point everyone should be able to see that America is heading into a very dark future.