Month: September 2016

Did Trump Support the Iraq War or Not?

screen-shot-2016-09-29-at-11-57-17-am

The way Lester Holt “corrected” Donald Trump at Monday’s debate (as he was clearly instructed to do) regarding the Iraq War, you’d think the answer to whether he supported it or not was clear-cut. The truth is, it may not really be that simple.

Joe Conhca (who has been doing some great work by the way), just wrote an excellent article at The Hill exploring the topic in detail. Here’s what he found:

Question: Did Donald Trump oppose or support the Iraq War?

Before answering, a quick note on why providing clarity around a relatively simple question: It’s rare that cooler heads can prevail in this media world we live in. Lines in the sand have never been drawn between blue and red media as vividly as they are now. And as a result, simple logic and lucidity is supplied less and less to drawing a verdict on whether a story is true or not.

Exhibit A today is the aforementioned question: Did Trump — as he insists — oppose the Iraq War?

continue reading

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Did Trump Support the Iraq War or Not?

screen-shot-2016-09-29-at-11-57-17-am

The way Lester Holt “corrected” Donald Trump at Monday’s debate (as he was clearly instructed to do) regarding the Iraq War, you’d think the answer to whether he supported it or not was clear-cut. The truth is, it may not really be that simple.

Joe Conhca (who has been doing some great work by the way), just wrote an excellent article at The Hill exploring the topic in detail. Here’s what he found:

Question: Did Donald Trump oppose or support the Iraq War?

Before answering, a quick note on why providing clarity around a relatively simple question: It’s rare that cooler heads can prevail in this media world we live in. Lines in the sand have never been drawn between blue and red media as vividly as they are now. And as a result, simple logic and lucidity is supplied less and less to drawing a verdict on whether a story is true or not.

Exhibit A today is the aforementioned question: Did Trump — as he insists — oppose the Iraq War?

continue reading

from Liberty Blitzkrieg http://ift.tt/2dpuSVN
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Wells Fargo To Be Sanctioned By DOJ For Improperly Seizing Soldiers’ Cars

And the hits just keep on coming. The full court press on Wells Fargo continues, on the heels of California’s sanctions, Bloomberg reports the bank is now facing a Justice Department sanction over improperly repossessing cars owned by members of the military, according to two people with knowledge of the investigation.


As Bloomberg details, Federal prosecutors and the bank’s regulator, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, are planning to punish the San Francisco-based lender for alleged violations of the Servicemembers Civil Relief Act, said the people, who asked not to be named because the investigation isn’t public.

A penalty of as much as $20 million is expected from the OCC, one of the people said. That’s an unusually large fine for abuse of this law, which in most cases requires that firms obtain court orders before seizing vehicles from soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines who are delinquent on their loans.

 

These enforcement actions against the bank follow a $185 million settlement in which employees of the firm opened more than two million accounts that customers may not have been aware of with the aim of meeting internal sales targets. The matter has sparked weeks of sharp criticism, congressional hearings and the forfeit of tens of millions in bonuses for top executives.

 

Shielding soldiers from financial stress has been a priority for lawmakers, and the Justice Department has recently stepped up enforcement actions against banks for taking assets illegally. Banco Santander SA’s U.S. unit agreed to pay $9 million last year over allegations that it improperly confiscated more than 1,000 vehicles from military members, the largest settlement ever obtained in a case involving repossessions of automobiles with delinquent loans.

 

Wells Fargo — which was the world’s most valuable bank before the account scandal hurt its stock price — has branches on eight U.S. military bases, include Fort Bliss in Texas, Georgia’s Fort Benning, Fort Dix in New Jersey and Hill Air Force Base in Utah. On its website, the bank says it has “a history of making banking easier for our servicemen and servicewomen.”

 

The bank has previously been accused of not adhering to the military lending law, which Congress approved decades ago to protect soldiers from legal hassles while they’re on active duty. Wells Fargo agreed to pay $28 million along with four other mortgage servicers that were fined for improper home foreclosures, according to a statement issued by the Justice Department last year. It didn’t admit or deny the allegations.

Wells Fargo 0 – 3 Elizabeth Warren.

via http://ift.tt/2dd3YDK Tyler Durden

Wells Fargo To Be Sanctioned By DOJ For Improperly Seizing Soldiers’ Cars

And the hits just keep on coming. The full court press on Wells Fargo continues, on the heels of California’s sanctions, Bloomberg reports the bank is now facing a Justice Department sanction over improperly repossessing cars owned by members of the military, according to two people with knowledge of the investigation.


As Bloomberg details, Federal prosecutors and the bank’s regulator, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, are planning to punish the San Francisco-based lender for alleged violations of the Servicemembers Civil Relief Act, said the people, who asked not to be named because the investigation isn’t public.

A penalty of as much as $20 million is expected from the OCC, one of the people said. That’s an unusually large fine for abuse of this law, which in most cases requires that firms obtain court orders before seizing vehicles from soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines who are delinquent on their loans.

 

These enforcement actions against the bank follow a $185 million settlement in which employees of the firm opened more than two million accounts that customers may not have been aware of with the aim of meeting internal sales targets. The matter has sparked weeks of sharp criticism, congressional hearings and the forfeit of tens of millions in bonuses for top executives.

 

Shielding soldiers from financial stress has been a priority for lawmakers, and the Justice Department has recently stepped up enforcement actions against banks for taking assets illegally. Banco Santander SA’s U.S. unit agreed to pay $9 million last year over allegations that it improperly confiscated more than 1,000 vehicles from military members, the largest settlement ever obtained in a case involving repossessions of automobiles with delinquent loans.

 

Wells Fargo — which was the world’s most valuable bank before the account scandal hurt its stock price — has branches on eight U.S. military bases, include Fort Bliss in Texas, Georgia’s Fort Benning, Fort Dix in New Jersey and Hill Air Force Base in Utah. On its website, the bank says it has “a history of making banking easier for our servicemen and servicewomen.”

 

The bank has previously been accused of not adhering to the military lending law, which Congress approved decades ago to protect soldiers from legal hassles while they’re on active duty. Wells Fargo agreed to pay $28 million along with four other mortgage servicers that were fined for improper home foreclosures, according to a statement issued by the Justice Department last year. It didn’t admit or deny the allegations.

Wells Fargo 0 – 3 Elizabeth Warren.

via http://ift.tt/2dd3YDK Tyler Durden

Withdrawing from the Crime-Control System

If you think there’s a good chance the police will beat you up, you’re less likely to call the cops. Sometimes, this reluctance manifests itself not just in an individual but across an entire community. Sociologists and criminologists call this phenomenon legal cynicism—a basic lack of confidence in the criminal justice system’s fairness, competence, responsiveness, and all-around legitimacy. Where legal cynicism flourishes, the theory goes, people tend to withdraw from the formal crime-control system; and in the U.S., legal cynicism is most likely to flourish in low-income minority neighborhoods.

A trio of sociologists has just found an ingenious way to measure this effect. In a new study for the American Sociological Review, Matthew Desmond of Harvard, Andrew Papachristos of Yale, and David Kirk of Oxford note that research on this subject usually relies on surveys and interviews, methods that can reveal a lot about people’s attitudes but “are less reliable when it comes to measuring interactions with the police.” So instead they selected a high-profile example of abusive police behavior—the 2004 beating of Frank Jude, a black Milwaukee man assaulted by a group of white officers—and then located and counted the city’s 911 calls after news of the beatdown broke. Controlling for various variables, they found a small, brief decline in calls in predominantly white neighborhoods and a “large and durable” decline in predominantly black neighborhoods, with the latter lasting more than a year. They then examined Milwaukee’s 911 calls following a 2007 police assault on another unarmed black man, Danyall Simpson; that too produced a decline.

The authors also wondered whether nationally reported incidents in other cities could produce the same result. Here the results were mixed. 911 calls went down in Milwaukee, especially in black neighborhoods, after the 2006 shooting of Sean Bell in Queens. But the 2009 death of Oscar Grant in Oakland did not produce the same result.

These results have interesting implications for the debate over the so-called Ferguson effect. Usually that phrase refers to the idea that increased scrutiny has made cops wary about policing proactively, leading to increases in crime. But as I noted here after the FBI released last year’s crime statistics, there is a rival theory that focuses not on the supply of policing but the demand for it. Richard Rosenfeld, a criminologist at the University of Missouri–St. Louis, thinks legal cynicism may help explain several cities’ recent spikes in homicides. “Lack of confidence in the police among African-Americans predates the recent police killings in Ferguson, Cleveland, New York and elsewhere,” he wrote earlier this year. “But it is likely to be activated by such incidents, transforming longstanding latent grievances into an acute legitimacy crisis.” When people don’t trust the police, they are less likely to cooperate with them—and more likely to turn to do-it-yourself alternatives to policing, such as the violent resolution of disputes. (It is certainly possible to think of alternatives to calling 911 that do not entail doling out rough justice. And it is wonderful when they flourish. But they require work, trust, and time to be effective, just like a police department does.)

Desmond, Papachristos, and Kirk’s work lends theoretical support to Rosenfeld’s theory, though obviously they’re not looking at the same time period. It also has implications for another question raised by 2015’s crime numbers: Why did homicides rise so much more than violent crime in general? (According to the FBI, violent crimes increased 3.1 percent last year. Homicides went up 10.8 percent.) Since murder is the most serious crime around—and since it’s easier to ignore an assault than to hide a dead body—killings are reported much more consistently than other offenses. It is entirely possible that those other crimes surged more sharply than the official statistics suggest.

It is also entirely possible that the authorities will respond to those increases by unleashing the very sort of policing that fuels legal cynicism, thus feeding the cycle.

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“You Shouldn’t Listen to Me” – Here’s What Bernie Said About Voting For Hillary

Submitted by Mike Krieger via Liberty Blitzkrieg blog,

Before he lost the rigged Democratic primary to Hillary Clinton (only to become her sad mascot in the subsequent months), Bernie Sanders was actually speaking some truth to voters.

A perfect example of that can be seen in the following clip from an MSNBC town hall where he responds to a supporter’s question about whether he should vote for Hillary if she wins the primary.

Enjoy.

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The Run Begins: Deutsche Bank Hedge Fund Clients Withdraw Excess Cash

Deutsche Bank concerns just went to '11' as Bloomberg reports a number of funds that clear derivatives trades with Deutsche Bank AG have withdrawn some excess cash and positions held at the lender, a sign of counterparties’ mounting concerns about doing business with Europe’s largest investment bank.

While the vast majority of Deutsche Bank’s more than 200 derivatives-clearing clients have made no changes, some funds that use the bank’s prime brokerage service have moved part of their listed derivatives holdings to other firms this week, according to an internal bank document seen by Bloomberg News.

Millennium Partners, Capula Investment Management and Rokos Capital Management are among about 10 hedge funds that have cut their exposure, said a person familiar with the situation who declined to be identified talking about confidential client matters.

 

The hedge funds use Deutsche Bank to clear their listed derivatives transactions because they are not members of clearinghouses. Millennium, Capula and Rokos declined to comment when contacted by phone or e-mail.

 

[which explains why short-dated CDS is soaring]

 

 

 

“Our trading clients are amongst the world’s most sophisticated investors,” Michael Golden, a spokesman for Deutsche Bank, said in an e-mailed statement.

 

“We are confident that the vast majority of them have a full understanding of our stable financial position, the current macroeconomic environment, the litigation process in the U.S. and the progress we are making with our strategy.”

Clients review their exposure to counterparties to avoid situations like the 2008 collapse of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. and MF Global’s 2011 bankruptcy when hedge funds had billions of dollars of assets frozen until the resolution of lengthy legal proceedings.

Deutsche Bank Stock in NY are sliding…

 

If the most sophisticated professionals in the world are withdrawing cash, why are German depositors leaving their life savings at risk… ahead of a long weekend in Germany (Monday is a bank holiday).

*  *  *

And for those believing that there is no contagion and this is all ring-fenced…

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US To Suspend Syria Diplomacy With Russia, Prepares “Military Options”

In the most dramatic diplomatic escalation involving the Syrian conflict in the past years, yesterday John Kerry issued an ultimatum to Russia, in which he warned his colleague Lavrov to stop bombing Aleppo or else the US would suspend all cooperation and diplomacy with Russia.

24 hours later, this appears to be precisely what is about to take place, leading to an even greater geopolitical shock in Syria. According to Retuers, the United States is expected to tell Russia on Thursday it is suspending their diplomatic engagement on Syria following the Russian-backed Syrian government’s intense attacks on Aleppo, U.S. officials said on condition of anonymity.

Why now and what happens next? According to US officials, the Obama administration is now considering tougher responses to the Russian-backed Syrian government assault on Aleppo, including military options. According to Reuters, the new discussions were being held at “staff level,” and have yet to produce any recommendations to President Barack Obama, who has resisted ordering military action against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in the country’s multi-sided civil war.

However, now that diplomacy with Russia is set to end, this will give the greenlight for Obama to send in US troops in Syria, with Putin certain to respond appropriately, in what will be the biggest military escalation in the Syrian proxy war in its five and a half year history.

via http://ift.tt/2cYS4KT Tyler Durden

US To Suspend Syria Diplomacy With Russia, Prepares “Military Options”

In the most dramatic diplomatic escalation involving the Syrian conflict in the past years, yesterday John Kerry issued an ultimatum to Russia, in which he warned his colleague Lavrov to stop bombing Aleppo or else the US would suspend all cooperation and diplomacy with Russia.

24 hours later, this appears to be precisely what is about to take place, leading to an even greater geopolitical shock in Syria. According to Retuers, the United States is expected to tell Russia on Thursday it is suspending their diplomatic engagement on Syria following the Russian-backed Syrian government’s intense attacks on Aleppo, U.S. officials said on condition of anonymity.

Why now and what happens next? According to US officials, the Obama administration is now considering tougher responses to the Russian-backed Syrian government assault on Aleppo, including military options. According to Reuters, the new discussions were being held at “staff level,” and have yet to produce any recommendations to President Barack Obama, who has resisted ordering military action against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in the country’s multi-sided civil war.

However, now that diplomacy with Russia is set to end, this will give the greenlight for Obama to send in US troops in Syria, with Putin certain to respond appropriately, in what will be the biggest military escalation in the Syrian proxy war in its five and a half year history.

via http://ift.tt/2cYS4KT Tyler Durden