Desperate? – Democrats Sue RNC Over Trump’s “Rigged Election” Comments Alleging “Minority Voter Intimidation”

In a move that wreaks of desperation, and certainly beneath a campaign that is apparently coasting toward a 12-point blowout victory in just over a week, the DNC has sued the RNC over efforts to “ensure ballot integrity” alleging “intimidation of minority voters.”  Since when did working with “secretaries of states all over the country to ensure ballot integrity” become a crime?  And, why exactly are democrats so fearful of any measure that attempts to ensure the integrity of our federal elections?  Is it because such efforts to “ensure ballot integrity” might just prevent the massive voter fraud that we all know exists?  Just a guess.  Per Politico:

In a motion filed in New Jersey federal court on Wednesday, the Democratic National Committee charges that the RNC has violated the consent decree “by supporting and enabling the efforts of the Republican candidate for President, Donald J. Trump, as well as his campaign and advisors, to intimidate and discourage minority voters from voting in the 2016 Presidential Election.”

 

The alleged coordination, the DNC says, is a violation of a 1982 consent decree in which the RNC agreed to curb its vote watching tactics — the result of a suit Democrats filed against the RNC for allegedly intimidating minority voters at the polls during New Jersey’s 1981 gubernatorial election.

 

Genova quotes Trump running mate Mike Pence as saying at a town hall that the campaign and RNC “are working very very closely with state governments and secretaries of states all over the country to ensure ballot integrity,” and quoted a reporter recounting a conversation with Trump’s campaign manager in which she said said the campaign is “actively working with the national committee, the official party, and campaign lawyers to monitor precincts around the country.”

 

“Although certain RNC officials have attempted to distance themselves from some of the Trump campaign’s more recent statements, there is now ample evidence that Trump has enjoyed the direct and tacit support of the RNC in its ‘ballot security’ endeavors, including the RNC’s collaboration on efforts to prevent this supposed ‘rigging’ and ‘voter fraud,’” the motion reads.

The RNC denied any wrongdoing in issuing a statement saying that they “strictly abide by the consent decree.”

“The RNC strictly abides by the consent decree and does not take part directly or indirectly in any efforts to prevent or remedy vote fraud.  Nor do we coordinate with the Trump campaign or any other campaign or party organization in any efforts they may make in this area,” a RNC spokesperson said in an emailed statement. “The RNC remains focused on getting out the vote.”

While Trump pointed out “software glitches” in Texas voting machines that resulted in votes being inaccurately recorded and causing Chambers County to enact “emergency paper ballots.”

 

Perhaps our friends at the DNC need to be reminded of what “actual” voter intimidation looks like.  Here is a perfect example of Black Panther members “monitoring” polling stations in Philadelphia.   Ironically, in 2012, Romney’s performance in Philadelphia drew a huge amount of suspicion when he received exactly 0 votes in 59 voting divisions within the city.  In fact, the vote count within those 59 divisions was an astonishing 19,605 to 0.  While no one would argue that many Philadelphia neighborhoods tend to skew democratic, it certainly seems incredibly unlikely that, out of nearly 20,000 voters, not a single person preferred Mitt Romney.

 

Or, perhaps this is a better example of dirty politics which we’re sure Donna Brazile is looking into as we speak.

 

Of course, while ridiculous, this move by the DNC should not surprise anyone…when caught, democrats always revert back to their standard defense…deny vehemently and then shout racism and sexism to every mainstream media outlet available.

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

Bank Jog: Deutsche Bank’s Demand Deposits Tumble By 13% In Q3

One month ago when we showed that while Deutsche Bank is seriously undercapitalized it still has access to copious amounts of liquidity, which at June 30 stood at €223 billion but according to today’s Q3 report has since dropped by some 10% to €200 billion, we pointed out one way that DB’s currently safe liquidity position could turn precarious: it has deposits, and thus there is an all too real threat depositors may get nervous and start pulling them out. To wit:

This is where Deutsche Bank is very different from Lehman, and far riskier, because if the institutional panic spreads to the depositor base, which as the table below shows amounts to some €566 billion in total, and €307 billion in retail deposits…

 

 

… then all bets are off.

 

Which is why it is so critical for Angela Merkel to halt the plunging stock price, an indicator DB’s retail clients, simplistically (and not erroneously) now equate with the bank’s viability, and the lower the price drops, the faster they will pull their deposits, the quicker DB’s liquidity hits zero, the faster the self-fulfilling prophecy of Deutsche Bank’s death is confirmed.

 

Which is why it is so critical for Angela Merkel to halt the plunging stock price, an indicator DB’s retail clients, simplistically (and not erroneously) now equate with the bank’s viability, and the lower the price drops, the faster they will pull their deposits, the quicker DB’s liquidity hits zero, the faster the self-fulfilling prophecy of Deutsche Bank’s death is confirmed.

Which is why we mostly ignored today’s better than expected headline financial data reported by the German lender, (as did most of Wall Street it appears judging by the stock’s tepid reaction), especially after the recent disclosure that DB is currently probing its derivative book for potential missmarking, something which would drastically change the bank’s reported P&L and balance sheet, and instead focused on something far simpler: its deposits.

What we found was troubling: in the just concluded quarter, Deutsche reported that its total deposit base had shrunk by a very substantial 5%, sliding from €565.645 to €540.609. But even more concering was the most liquid “sight deposit” category, which DB tracks as “interest-bearing demand deposits on its books. It was this that plunged by a whopping 13% from Q2 to Q3, sliding from €156.2 billion to €135.9 billion as of Sept. 30.

This was the biggest drop recorded since the bank reorganized its various divisions and started breaking out demand deposits as a standalone category in its quarterly presentations. It was also the lowest amount of demand deposits on DB’s books going back to Q4 2014 and perhaps further.

On its face, this data means that in the third quarter, DB’s depositors pulled a substantial amount of savings held at the bank, precisely the outcome that the bank was eager to avoid, and hints of the start of a very unpleasant bank “jog” by the bank’s depositors. And since deposits declined, assets had to be impacted as well, and sure enough, total cash and central bank balances declined from $123 billion to $108 billion.

As of this moment there was no update from DB management, whether the documented deposit flight continued into the month of October when DB’s woes became particularly acute, and whether the jog had become a run.

Source: DB

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

US Real Estate Stocks Plunge To 7 Month Lows As Rate Hike Odds Soar

Dear Janet, you have a problem…

As markets increasingly price in a hawkish Fed, so the US housing bubble is bursting fast…

 

So, the big circular question is – Will this plunge in housing stocks be the “turmoil” to delay The Fed again?

via http://ift.tt/2eQi79c Tyler Durden

Gary Johnson: ‘You Cannot Set a Life-or-Death Goal of Getting to the Top of the Mountain, or You’re Gonna Blow Your Brains out’

The loneliness of the long-distance runner. ||| Matt WelchFor each of the past 152 days, Gary Johnson has been asked what it’s like to be a “spoiler.” For the past 47, the Libertarian Party presidential nominee has been forced to revisit the deadly six-letter word “Aleppo,” with the additional twist over the previous 28 about whether he can even name a single foreign leader. It’s not particularly fun to be ridiculed on a daily basis as a “fucking idiot” (Bill Maher), “laughable” (Stephen Colbert) and “around 80 percent sure that he’s running for president” (John Oliver).

Then in recent days a particularly unpleasant new line of inquiry has been added to the mix. What does it feel like, reporters and even libertarian fellow travelers are asking in light of Johnson’s September-October polling slide from 9 percent to 6, to be a failure? The question has stung candidate and campaign staff alike. For someone who is both a fierce competitor and a cheerful loser—Johnson has played chess against a computer just about every day for the past two years without winning even once, for example—the answer can oscillate between bewilderment, defiance, and Zen. On Tuesday, when swatting around Facebook Live softballs from the publisher of his slim new book Common Sense for the Common Good: Libertarianism as the End of Two-Party Tyranny, Johnson responded to an innocuous question about climbing Mt. Everest with a pretty direct metaphor for his campaign:

What Everest says, and everything that I’ve done in my life, and everything that all of us do in our lives, is just put one foot in front of the other. I mean that’s the key to living, and in that context, you know what? Things go wrong, every single day of our lives something goes wrong. Do you crawl up in a ball, do you declare yourself a victim and give up? Or you know what, get up the next day, smile on your face, it’s part of the process….It’s about the process, it’s not about the end result; you can’t predict the end result. But what you can predict is that if you get involved in the process, and you keep after it, that’s what you should consider success. So climbing mountains, being involved as the Libertarian nominee for president….

Johnson returned to the mountain metaphor a little while later when I asked him in an interview whether he would either do anything differently in this campaign looking back, or whether there were any moments that surpassed all previous expectations. After stressing that he’s a strictly no-regrets kinda guy, he said this:

It is what it is. And you can certainly look at mistakes, but to think that you as a human being are not going to make mistakes, by that I mean little mistakes? Yes, of course. But in the context of moving forward—well, that’s the other part of the equation, too, which is, man, you’ve got to keep moving forward. How does it turn out? I have always believed that life is a process, and you cannot set a life-or-death goal of getting to the top of the mountain, or you’re gonna blow your brains out if you don’t get there. You put yourself in position to get to the top of the mountain—you’re physically fit, you’re not ill, you’re doing all the right things—and in that context using that as analogy, that’s always worked in my life. Always. And come Election Day, that’s what I did in this cycle, and everybody I was associated with.

“It is what it is” is the same formulation Johnson has used previously when asked about the surely irritating rise of independent conservative candidate Evan McMullin in the Johnson-campaign-headquartered state of Utah.

In the course of our short interview, Johnson veered from bullishness to fatalism, gratitude to near-bitterness. Here’s a selection:

Still probably not. ||| ReasonThere’s a lot of anxiety in the libertarian universe right now about the 5 percent threshold, for obvious reasons. First, are you anxious about it yourself; like, do you feel like you’re gonna clear that well, is it something that you’re worried about, how are you focused on it?

Well,…I thought we had the opportunity to be at 5 percent in 2012! Based on being on the streets right now as opposed to 2012, there’s twentyfold the response today…than there was in 2012. Will that equate to 5 percent? I don’t know, we’ll see.

If you had a choice between 5 percent or winning a state, what would it be?

…First of all, if I’m gonna win one state, I may very well win eight states. I think it’s a water-level-raises-all-boats kinda thing. So that’s the—New Mexico? You know, we’ll see. But polls, I understand polls, I got my degree in political science. I understand polls. I understand right now that the poll shift from registered voters a couple of months out to likely voters; because it shifted to likely voters, which underweigh young people and independents, that’s really where our polling has [been strongest]. That’s the factor involved in the drop in polls. […]

You were talking to me yesterday when we weren’t in an interview situation about media people and the question of “What’s it like to be a failure?”…It’s amazing to watch the different kinds of interpretations of what this campaign has been—kind of a Goldilocks thing of, “Oh, it has exceeded all expectations,” “it undershot all expectations,” “it is where it is.” How do you assess where you’re at right now compared to expectations?

My expectations—beyond my wildest dreams has this election or my candidacy gone forward. Everywhere I walk in this country now, I’m known. Everywhere!

And you’re offered weed. (Note: During his just-completed Facebook Live interview, Johnson volunteered in a humorous aside that “I get offered weed ALL the time.”)

And I’m offered weed, every single time. The guy who makes the pizza wants to put weed on the pizza, you know?

Do you feel confident that the Libertarian Party now is the third party in this country?

(Pause) Yeah, I think that, um, of course.

Now, you get back to this 5 percent, and just how much of a game-changer that is going forward—not for me, but for the party going forward….Regardless, I think that this is a game changer for the Libertarian Party. But it’s what the Libertarian Party does with this going forward. And you know, OK, Johnson’s a dismal, miserable failure. Um, I probably won’t even know that. I may not even listen to the news again for the rest of my life! So I’ll be in ignorant bliss.

Reason on Gary Johnson here. Below, here’s that Facebook Live video from Tuesday:

from Hit & Run http://ift.tt/2e0FHkm
via IFTTT

“Recession Risk Is Rising” Fast, Deutsche Bank Warns “Outlook Remains Fragile”

While ‘some’ measures of the US labor market look rosy, one indicator is flashing signs of frgaility… and, as Bloomberg notes, it’s an important one too.

The Federal Reserve’s Labor Market Conditions Index. After falling just three times from 2012 to 2015, the index has fallen every month of 2016 except for one, July. And in July the annual change in the LMCI, from July 2015, turned negative.

That’s only the eighth time in nearly 40 years the index was down on a year-over-year basis, Deutsche Bank Chief U.S. Economist Joseph LaVorgna wrote in a note to clients today. Of the seven previous occasions, LaVorgna wrote, “four were soon followed by recession.”

(In the three other cases, two were false alarms, in 1986-87 and 1995-96, and in 1981 the recession began shortly before the annual change in the LMCI turned negative.)

LaVorgna said the weakness in the LMCI indicates a rising possibility of recession.

“The upshot is that the economic outlook remains fragile despite the ostensible robustness of the labor market,” he wrote.

In September the index fell 2.2 points. The October reading will be released Nov. 7, one day before the election.

And finally while Deutsche Bank is growing concerned, they are not alone, as even the NY Fed’s recession indicator is spiking to new highs…

 

Charts: Bloomberg

via http://ift.tt/2dP8qVV Tyler Durden

Small Stocks Threaten Breakdown – Can They Hang On?

Via Dana Lyons' Tumblr,

The Russell 2000 Small-Cap Index has violated (for now) the 2 key uptrend lines that we recently identified.

A main theme recently among both our posts and our quantitative risk analysis has been the battle between weakening market internals and resilient price averages. Despite deteriorating breadth and momentum, most of the major averages had been able to hold above the key levels that we’ve identified. For example, just 9 days ago, we highlighted 2 Up trendlines on the chart of the Russell 2000 Small-Cap Index (RUT). These lines (e.g., the post-2009 and post-February Up trendlnes), we suggested, were the key in determining whether the RUT would maintain its upward trajectory (above the lines), or see an expansion in potential downside. Recently, the RUT had been able (barely) to hold the top side of of the trendlines and maintain its path of least resistance to the upside. That path may have shifted today.

As these updated charts show, the RUT closed below the 2 key trendlines today – albeit by a fairly slim margin.

Wide Angle:

image

 

Close-Up:

image

 

While the winds may have potentially shifted following today’s action, the overall message here is the same as it was 9 days ago. Thus, we will repeat what we stated in that post:

If the RUT should “Continue to hold above the trendlines, the bulls will remain in control and the intermediate-term rally in small-cap stocks can persist further. Should the level give way, however, the bears may have their chance to finally deliver a more serious blow.”

Absent a quick recovery of the broken trendlines, the bears would appear to have their chance now, especially given the elevated status of our broad market risk assessment. The question is will they finally follow through, or will the small stocks manage to narrowly hang on once again?

*  *  *

More from Dana Lyons, JLFMI and My401kPro.

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

Putin Asks: “Is America Now A Banana Republic”

Moments ago, Russian president started speaking at the final session of the Valdai International Discussion Club’s 13th annual meeting in Sochi. More than 130 experts and political analysts from Russia and other countries are taking part in this year’s three-day meeting, titled ‘The Future in Progress: Shaping the World of Tomorrow’.

While Putin’s speech can be seen below, he has already had a handful of pearls, most notably the following statement he just said in response to accusations that Russia could influence the US election:

“The number of mythical, dreamt-up problems include the hysteria – I can’t think of another word – that has broken out in the United States about the influence of Russia on the current elections for the US president. Does anyone seriously think Russia can somehow influence the choice of the US people?”

He ended that phrase as follows: “What, is America a banana republic?!”

And then, to emphasize his trolling, added the following: “correct me if I am wrong.”

He also had a handful of notable comments on the growing specter of a new cold war, starting by assuring the world that “Russia doesn’t plan to attack anyone”, and adding that “Russian militaty threat is a myth” although we are confident many in the Pentagon would be delighted to claim the opposite.

He said that NATO has outlived its usefullness as a structure and on the topic of the escalating proxy war in Syria, Putin had a simple comment: “Our agreements with the US on Syria did not work out.”

Follow Putin’s speech live below.

via http://ift.tt/2eVlh9T Tyler Durden

Bond Rout Sends Dow, S&P Into Red As USD Jumps

US equity and bond markets are under pressure as the USD index rallies this morning.

 

Cable's collapse and a plunge in SEK have pushed the USD Index back up towards 8 month highs and US equities back into the red for the day…

Pushing the USD Index back towards 99.00…

And stocks don't love it…

As risk parity unwinds accelerate.

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

Pending Home Sales Growth Disappoints As Post-Summer Slump Accelerates

Pending Home Sales are following the usual seasonal pattern, fading quickly after the summer jump. Year-over-year, pending home sales are up just 2% (NSA), less than the expected 4% rise and considerably slower than the same time last year.

 

 

As NAR’s Larry Yun notes,

“The one major predicament in the housing market is without a doubt the painfully low levels of housing inventory in much of the country,

 

“It’s leading to home prices outpacing wages, properties selling a lot quicker than a year ago and the home search for many prospective buyers being highly competitive and drawn out because of a shortage of listings at affordable prices.

via http://ift.tt/2dLIak7 Tyler Durden

Bonds Are Signaling BIG Trouble is Ahead

For anyone who wants to make money in the markets, you need to understand one thing.

Bonds are the “smart money.”

This doesn’t mean that stock investors are dumb. It means that the bond markets are much larger and much more liquid than the stock markets.

Because of this, bond markets are the FIRST to adjust to new realities.

Consider the recent market bottom.

Bonds (TLT) bottomed in November 2015. Stocks (SPY) bottomed in February 2016.

Well, right now, bonds are selling off… HARD.

Stocks are on borrowed time. Smart investors are already preparing for this. Bonds are signaling a real problem is underway.

Another Crisis is brewing… the time to prepare is now.

If you've yet to take action to prepare for this, we offer a FREE investment report called the Prepare and Profit From the Next Financial Crisis that outlines simple, easy to follow strategies you can use to not only protect your portfolio from it, but actually produce profits.

We made 1,000 copies available for FREE the general public.

As we write this, there are less than 70 left.

To pick up yours, swing by….

http://ift.tt/2ePZt1g

Best Regards

Graham Summers

Chief Market Strategist

Phoenix Capital Research

 

via http://ift.tt/2eU7pOq Phoenix Capital Research