Month: May 2017

Just three weeks after reports first emerged that the Trump administration was considering arming the Syrian Kurd militia caught in the crossfire between Turkish and Syrian army forces, NBC reported that the American military has started shipping weapons and equipment to the Kurdish fighters of the Syrian Democratic Forces, also known as YPG, a key US ally on the ground in Syria. Citing an unnamed official, NBC adds that the U.S. began providing the equipment in the last 24 hours.

Details were scarce, with no specifics about what weapons and supplies the US is sending the Syrian Democratic Forces or how those items are being delivered however when the report first emerged, the U.S. military announced it would provide the YDF with ammunition, rifles, armor, radios, bulldozers, vehicles, and engineering equipment. Earlier this month US officials said that Trump had signed off on a plan “to equip Kurdish elements of the Syrian Democratic Forces” in the fight to retake the Syrian city of Raqqa from ISIS.

“The SDF, partnered with enabling support from U.S. and coalition forces, are the only force on the ground that can successfully seize Raqqa in the near future,” Pentagon spokeswoman Dana White said in a statement.

The announcement is guaranteed to send Turkey’s president Erdogan into another fit of rage. Earlier this month Erdogan condemned Trump’s decision to arm Syrian Kurds whom Turkey considers to be terrorists and an extension of outlawed Kurdish insurgents within its borders. Three weeks ago Erdogan said: “I hope very much that this mistake will be reversed immediately,” adding that “we want to believe that our allies would prefer [to] be side by side with ourselves rather than with the terror groups.”

President Donald Trump and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan met earlier this month and discussed the administration’s plans to arm Kurdish militias in Syria. It was unclear what agreement the two leaders reached on this controverial move.

At the same time, Reuters reported that Syrian rebels say the United States and its allies “are sending them more arms to try to fend off a new push into the southeast by Iran-backed militias aiming to open an overland supply route between Iraq and Syria.”

Rebels said military aid has been boosted through two separate channels: a program backed by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), known as the MOC, and regional states including Jordan and Saudi Arabia, and one run by the Pentagon.

“There has been an increase in the support,” said Tlass Salameh, head of the Jaish Usoud al-Sharqiya, one of the FSA groups backed via the CIA-backed program. “There’s no way we can let them open the Baghdad-Damascus highway,” he said.

A senior commander of a Pentagon-backed group, Maghawir al-Thawra, told Reuters a steady flow of weapons had arrived at their base near the Iraqi border since the pro-Damascus forces began deploying this month.

 

He said efforts to recruit and train local fighters from Deir al-Zor had accelerated at their garrison at Tanf, on the highway some 20 km (12 miles) from the Iraqi border.

 

“The equipment and reinforcements come and go daily … but in the last few weeks they have brought in more heavy military vehicles, TOW (missiles), and armored vehicles,” he said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

 

Two armored vehicles newly delivered to the Tanf garrison were shown in photos sent to Reuters from a rebel source. A video showed fighters unpacking mortar bombs.

As with similar weapon deliveries under the Obama regime, it remains unclear how the US is differentiating so-called between “moderate” rebels, and ISIS and al-Qaeda groups, who on numerous occasions in the past received US arms shipments which subsequently were used against US forces.

Finally, recall that perhaps in anticipation of this round of escalation, Russia announced that its expects China to help resolve the Syrian crisis once and for all, and “Restore the country.”

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Ahh, the future…

 

Source: Townhall.com

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Authored by Michael Snyder via The Economic Collapse blog,

A stock market crash is coming, and the Democrats and the mainstream media are going to blame Donald Trump for it even though it won’t be his fault.  The truth is that we were headed for a major financial crisis no matter who won the election.  The Dow Jones Industrial Average is up a staggering 230 percent since the lows of 2009, and no stock market rally in our history has ever reached the 10 year mark without at least a 20 percent downturn.  At this point stocks are about as overvalued as they have ever been, and every other time we have seen a bubble of this magnitude a historic stock market crash has always followed.  Those that are hoping that this time will somehow be different are simply being delusional.

Since November 7th, the Dow is up by about 3,000 points.  That is an extremely impressive rally, and President Trump has been taking a great deal of credit for it.

But perhaps he should not have been so eager to take credit, because what goes up must come down.  The following is an excerpt from a recent Vanity Fair article…

According to Douglas Ramsay, chief investment officer of the Leuthold Group, Trump administration officials will come to regret gloating about the market’s performance. That’s because Trump enters the White House during one of the most richly valued stock markets in U.S. history.

 

The last president to come in at such valuations was George W. Bush, and the dot-com bubble burst soon afterward.

 

Bill Clinton began his second term in a more overvalued stock market in 1997, and exited unscathed. But if his timing were different by just a year, he would have been blamed for the early-aughts market crash.

This stock market bubble was not primarily created by Barack Obama, Donald Trump or any other politician.  Rather, the Federal Reserve was primarily responsible for creating it by pushing interest rates all the way to the floor during the Obama era and by flooding the financial system with hot money during several stages of quantitative easing.

But now the economy is slowing down.  Economic growth on an annual basis was just 0.7 percent during the first quarter, and yet the Federal Reserve is talking about raising interest rates anyway.

The Federal Reserve also raised interest rates in a slowing economy in the late 1930s, and that had the effect of significantly extending the economic problems during that decade.

As I noted in my article entitled “The Federal Reserve Must Go”, there have been 18 recessions or depressions since the Federal Reserve was created in 1913, and now we stand on the precipice of another one.

After this next crisis, hopefully Congress will finally understand that it is time to shut the Federal Reserve down for good, and I am going to do all that I can to make that happen.

Ron Paul is someone that I look up to greatly, and he also agrees that the blame for the coming crisis should be placed on the Federal Reserve instead of on Trump…

“There are some dire predictions that say in the next year, or 18 months, we have something arriving worse than 2008 and 2009, the downturn is much worse,” Paul said in a recent interview with liberty-minded anti-globalist radio host Alex Jones.

 

“They’ll say, ah, it’s all Trump’s fault. No. It wasn’t. 08 and 09 wasn’t Obama’s fault. It was the fault of the Federal Reserve, it was the fault of the Keynesian economic model, the spending too much, the deficit. So, unfortunately, there’s nothing he can do — Trump can’t do it.”

 

Paul, a medical doctor who took a keen interest in economics throughout his celebrated career as a constitutionalist in Congress, said Trump could “help” the situation by pursuing good policies. “But you can’t avoid the correction, the correction is locked in place, because the deficits are there, the malinvestment, everybody agrees interest rates have been too low too long,” he said in the late January interview.

 

“The only thing he can do is allow the recession to come, get it over with, liquidate the debt. Politically, nobody wants that, so you’re going to see runaway inflation before you see this country wake up.”

Over the past decade, the U.S. economy has grown at an average rate of just 1.33 percent, and there is no possible way to put a positive spin on that.

And now the economy appears to be entering a fresh slowdown.  A couple of months ago, banking giant UBS warned about “a sudden slowdown in new credit”…

There’s been a sudden slowdown in new credit extended to businesses over the last year, one that strategists at UBS are calling “drastic” and “highly uncommon outside of economic downturns.”

And since that time, lending has tightened up even more.  The following comes from Zero Hedge…

According to the latest Fed data [7], the all-important C&I loan growth contraction has not only continued, but over the past two months, another 50% has been chopped off, and what in early March was a 4.0% annual growth [4]is now barely positive, down to just 2.0%, and set to turn negative in just a few weeks. This was the lowest growth rate since May 2011, right around the time the Fed was about to launch QE2.

 

At the same time, total loan growth has likewise continued to decline, and as of the second week of May was down to 3.8%, the weakest overall loan creation in three years.

This is exactly what we would expect to see if we were entering a new recession.  Neil Howe, one of the authors of The Fourth Turning, recently warned that “winter is coming” and I have to admit that I agree with him.

So when the stock market finally crashes, how bad could it be?

Well, one analyst that spoke to CNBC said that other historic market crashes have averaged “about 42 percent”…

“If you look at the market historically, we have had, on average, a crash about every eight to 10 years, and essentially the average loss is about 42 percent,” said Kendrick Wakeman, CEO of financial technology and investment analytics firm FinMason.

And as I have explained many times in the past, stocks would have to fall about 40 to 50 percent from current levels just for the stock market to get back to “normal” again.  The valuations that we are seeing today are absolutely insane, and there is no possible way that they are sustainable.

When the crash happens, many people will be pointing their fingers at Trump, but it won’t be his fault.

Instead, it will be the Federal Reserve that will be at fault, and hopefully this coming crisis will convince the American people that it is time to end this insidious debt-based central bank for good.

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Less than a decade after various complex, synthetic, squared, cubed and so on securitized debt structures nearly brought down the financial system, here come “Sovereign Bond-Backed Securities.”

Moments ago, the FT reported that in a watershed event for the European – and global – bond markets, Brussels is pressing for sovereign debt from across the eurozone to be “bundled into a new financial instrument and sold to investors as part of a proposal to strengthen the single currency area.”

Call it securitized sovereign debt.

In the latest attempt by Europe to create a common bond market, a European Commission paper on the future of the euro seen by the Financial Times, advocates the launching of a market of “sovereign bond-backed securities” — packaging different countries’ national debt into a new asset.

The logic is simple: combine all the debt from strong and weak countries into one big pool, eliminating the outliers on both sides, then tranche it out, and sell it based on required yield returns.

Officials hope that the plans would boost demand for debt issued by governments with relatively weaker economies, and encourage banks to manage their risks better by diversifying their portfolios, while avoiding old political battles over whether the currency bloc should issue common bonds.

Why now? Because as has been Germany’s intention all along, Berlin has been hoping to create a fiscally intergrated Europe (with a shadow government in Berlin of course) and which is much more stable and resilient than the current iteration which is only as strong as its weakest link. Securitizing the sovereign debt resolves virtually all outstanding problems.

The commission paper is the latest in a series of efforts to kick-start integration inside the eurozone. Such integration efforts have stalled since financial markets became convinced in 2013 that the European Central Bank would not allow the eurozone to break up. The last successful integration project was the creation of an EU banking union three years ago.

There is another reason why now: over the next year, the ECB’s QE, which has been instrumental to implement Draghi’s “Whatever it takes” vow, will start hiking rates and eventually unwinding its world’s biggest balance sheet. That’s when the European bond market may have its next freak out moment. As a result, Brussles and Frankfurt are hoping to preempt this potential unwind by coming up with today’s “ingenious” solution. More from the FT:

Although the markets have warmed to eurozone debt since the height of the crisis, many analysts believe the sentiment is reliant on continued sovereign bond purchases by the ECB as part of its unprecedented economic stimulus programme, which shows no signs of letting up.

 

If the ECB were to back off on quantitative easing, some eurozone countries could again become vulnerable, and many officials have urged issuing bonds backed by all 19 eurozone countries would be the easiest way to keep borrowing costs low for underperforming economies.

Most importantly, however, Germany will be delighted that it won’t have to shoulder a disproportionate risk burden than it otherwise should. Indeed, in the past, Germany has strongly resisted any “eurobond” proposal as it would mean Berlin is using its own credit strength to support the rest of the eurozone. However, under new plan “would not pool, or interfere with, national governments’ debt issuance — a red line for Berlin.

As the FT adds, the plans, which is expected to be completed by November, will be be presented by the European Commission on Wednesday as part of a broader reflection paper on the future of the euro.

What are next steps?

Brussels’ intention is that the market for securitised bonds could be established in the shorter term while talks continue on more far-reaching possibilities for Europe to develop a security that could replicate the role that US Treasury bonds play on the global market.

 

The paper notes that these more ambitious ideas for creating a “European Safe Asset” raise “a number of complex, legal, political and institutional questions that would need to be explored in greater detail” and that the whole issue of debt mutualisation in the eurozone “is heavily debated.”

The disclosed proposal also explains the surprisingly friendly attitude by Germany’s Merkel toward Macron: after all this plan only works if Europe’s top economies support it, and since for Germany sovereign debt securitization is the best possible outcome, the last thing Merkel would want is for the French to block the proposal.

The debate over the future of the eurozone has been given renewed impetus by the election of Emmanuel Macron in France, who is pushing for a common eurozone budget and central finance minister; Paris and Berlin have agreed to look jointly at reform options.

 

In addition to new financing instruments, the paper sets out a broader reform agenda up to 2019 and another set of more ambitious options for the period leading up to 2025.

One final question: who will buy this debt? Well, there is about $8.5 trillion in shadow debt (or is that assets) in China which needs to be laundered into a new, pristeen security. We are confident that hundreds of otherwise insolvent Chinese banks will be delighted to step up and provide the funds needed to ignite Europe’s sovereign securitization market, especially if it means they will be able to park even more “hot money” in Europe in the process.

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After a terrible weekend for CEO Travis Kalanick, The New York Times reports that Uber has fired Anthony Levandowski, a vice president of technology and the star engineer leading the company’s self-driving automobile efforts (at the center of the Uber-Waymo legal battle), according to an internal email sent to employees on Tuesday.

Mr. Levandowski’s termination, effective immediately, comes as a result of his involvement in a legal battle between Uber and Waymo, the self-driving technology unit spun out of Google last year.

Waymo claims that Uber is using trade secrets stolen from Google to develop Uber’s self-driving vehicles, a plan aided by Mr. Levandowski, a former longtime Google employee.

NYTimes adds that Uber has long denied the accusations. But when Mr. Levandowski was ordered by a federal judge to hand over evidence and testimony to that end, he asserted his Fifth Amendment rights, seeking to avoid possible criminal charges, according to his lawyers. Uber has been unable to convince Mr. Levandowski to cooperate.

Uber also noted that Eric Meyhofer, who stepped in when Levandowski was removed from his role leading ATG in April, will continue to lead the team and take over Levandowski’s direct reports.

Angela Padilla, Uber’s associate general counsel for employment and litigation, wrote in an email to employees…

“Over the last few months Uber has provided significant evidence to the court to demonstrate that our self-driving technology has been built independently.

 

Over that same period, Uber has urged Anthony to fully cooperate in helping the court get to the facts and ultimately helping to prove our case.”

This is just the latest in a long string of PR disasters for the biggest unicorn in the world.. and given their cash burn, we look forward to seeing the next capital raise.

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By now everyone knows it: what is going on with a handful of tech stocks is remarkably similar to the irrationally exuberant events from the first tech bubble at the turn of the century.

Four weeks ago, Goldman pointed out that in 2017, just 10 companies are responsible for half of the entire S&P’s rally YTD with the top five, AAPL, FB, AMZN, GOOGL, and MSFT – have accounted for nearly 40% of returns.

Shortly thereafter, when looking at the latest set of 13F filings we found that virtually every prominent hedge fund has piled into the most prominent tech names: As Bloomberg noted, with an average gain of 26% , “it’s hard to overstate the influence of just six stocks on the U.S. stock market in the first quarter: Facebook Inc., Apple Inc., Amazon.com Inc., Microsoft Corp., Alphabet Inc. and Netflix Inc.”

This was shown just days later by Bank of America which showed that annualized tech inflows are now the strongest this century, running at an unprecedented 25% of AUM, which BofA dubbed a “sign of renewed exuberance.”

These dramatic inflows into tech prompted the same Bank of America to wonder, rhetorically, whether the “tech bubble was happening again.”

Fast forward to today, when in a separate report, Bank of America’s Savita Subramanian found that the active managers tracked by the bank now own the highest percentage of technology stocks on record compared to their benchmark.

As BofA writes, FANG stocks (FB, AMZN, NFLX, GOOG/GOOGL) have returned nearly 30% YTD vs. 8% for the S&P 500 (a contribution of about 1ppt or 14% of the S&P 500’s returns this year). Fund managers are now 32% overweight Information Technology + Internet & Catalog Retail (a Discretionary industry). And this is driven by a remarkable 71% overweight in FANG stocks.

Expanding the FANG universe and screening for tech stocks with sales growth of 20% or more, an expected long-term growth rate of 15% or more, and a market cap of over $65BN yields two more names: ADBE (+38% YTD) and AVGO (+36%), a group of stocks which the bank refers to as FAAANG, and says that “active managers’ disproportionate overweight to FAAANG relative to Tech sector and Internet and Catalog Retail is even more marked than the FANG stocks.” As shown in the chart above, active managers are a record 79% overweight the FAAANG stocks.

And, as we stated at the beginning of this post, this unprecedented scramble into tech names has not gone unnoticed. Bloomberg cites, Matt Maley, a strategist at Miller Tabak who wrote in a note to clients that “the tech stocks obviously continue to be the key group to keep an eye on. They are over-bought on a near-term and intermediate-term (and even long-term) basis, but that has been true every day for the past few weeks.” 

Meanwhile, the move toward growth and momentum stocks “further cements active managers’ distrust in the value trade”, which can be seen clearly on the Goldman chart below.

As Bloomberg notes, “Value had a record stretch last year that was predicated on economic expansion, the anticipation of pro-growth policies and a predicted pick up in inflation. But as those shares — and expectations — stalled, active managers are finding it hard to fight the crowd.”

As for the crowd, it also knows it: investors surveyed by Bank of America in May said that betting on the tech-heavy Nasdaq index was the most crowded trade in markets. And yet, everyone is doing it.

And while tech may be the biggest hedge fund hotel in history, so far the shift to growth and momentum from value appears to be behind an improving hit rate for active funds, and as BofA also points out, the percent of funds beating their benchmark this year stands at its highest since February 2015. Of course, the reason is simple: everyone keeps piling into the same trade, which – as Paul Singer noted – works until it doesn’t.

For now it’s working: the tech-powered rally has propelled the sector to a P/E ratio of 24.4x, 41% above the 10-year average.  According to FT calculations, excluding technology and telecoms shares, the S&P 500 is up 5.3% this year, while the tech sub-index has climbed almost 20%.

“Annualised, that would make 2017 the best year for the industry since the post-crisis 2009 rebound and comes close to the heady days in 1998-99 that preceded the dotcom bubble bursting.”

Which is an appropriate comparison, because the first crack in this particular tech bubble has now appeared. 

As Google and Amazon stretch to nearly $1,000 a share, not everyone is comfortable with the valuations, Bloomberg observed on Tuesday.

As the chart below shows, investors pulled more than $716 million from the most popular technology exchange-traded fund last week, the $17.4 billion Technology Select Sector SPDR Fund, or XLK, its largest weekly outflow in over a year.

As Miller Tabak’s Matt Maley said in his note, “everybody remembers 2000, so they might be getting a little nervous with this development. I just wonder how many people have said to themselves, ‘If AMZN gets to $1,000, I’m going to take at least some profits.’” And another question: now that the first sellers have emerged, will the herd follow…

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The Bitcoin Investment Trust is an open-ended grantor trust based in the U.S., sponsored by Grayscale Investments. Trading under the ticker GBTC, it is invested exclusively in bitcoin and derives its value solely from the price of bitcoin. According to its prospectus, the Trust's objective is for the NAV per share to track bitcoin's market price…

However, as the chart below shows, while NAV is not far off the price of Bitcoin (multiply the Trust's NAV by 10), the actual traded price of the trust has exploded… to a premium of over 100% in recent days – a record…

GBTC now has a market cap of almost $750 million and offers (for those who can find a borrow) perhaps the greatest bitcoin arbitrage of all time with GBTC trading at a stunning $2000 premium to the underlying Bitcoin it is supposed to track…

 

As Chris at Capital Exploits previously noted, in any other market on this planet, were we to have an asset priced at one level in one place and an entirely different price some other place, the price discrepancy wouldn’t last very long.

Traders would buy the asset where it is cheaper while simultaneously selling the asset where it is more expensive and pocketing the difference. Something also known as an arbitrage.

 

Arbitrage opportunities exist in public markets all the time but the discrepancies are typically extremely small and even more so with higher liquidity. It’s also pretty rare for them to last for any real length of time. Years ago I worked with traders whose sole focus was on arbitrage trading but today algorithmic trading trading has almost eliminated these opportunities and jobs.

 

Bitcoin’s market cap is now over $37 billion so it can no longer be considered “illiquid”.

We herefore humbly ask any of the Joe Sixpacks out there who’ve invested in this Bitcoin Trust to provide me a borrow as shorting it is not currently available.

Take another look at the above chart and tell me you, too, wouldn’t want to arbitrage this anomaly?

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Via The Daily Bell

A bad credit score can be quite the hardship in America. But can you imagine a bad social credit score? China is implementing social credit scores that will influence the types of schooling, jobs, and housing available to citizens.

The population will also have the chance to review and affect their neighbors’ and acquaintances’ scores. They will be ranked in order to decide who gets what privileges, and who must remain on the outer periphery of society. What citizens of China say on the internet and in relation to the Chinese government will influence the scores, creating a stratified society with the “perfect citizen” on top, decided of course by the ruling Chinese Communist Party.

The score will be contained in information found on ID cards citizens must carry. Some citizens who renew their ID’s are finding that they must submit a sample of their DNA to the central database that China is building to keep further track of their citizens. Over 44 million samples have already been collected. The Chinese government claims it is for crime fighting purposes, however, the people forced to give samples have often committed no crime.

China also strictly limits its internet, creating a firewall that blocks whatever the government does not want people to see. Facebook, Instagram, and other social media websites have been blocked for years by the Chinese government, afraid the citizens will use the social media sites to organize protests and opposition to the communist party.

China maintains control through strict laws against freedom of the press and freedom of speech which helps them revise history in the minds of its citizens. China even went so far as to make it illegal to speak out against the “heroes and martyrs” of China and the communist party. 

Already, events like the massacre at Tiananmen Square are viewed with confusion and misunderstanding by younger generations. But now you could end up legally liable for just challenging the historical narrative told by the government.

And Facebook wants in on the action.

Facebook Wants to Impress the Repressive Regime

Zuckerberg has been sucking up to the Chinese government ever since they blocked Facebook in 2009. He has learned Mandarin in order to give some of his amazingspeeches in China and even took a jog through a smog cloud last year for a photo op which included a Mao portrait in the background.

Zuckerberg has said, “You can’t have a mission to want to connect everyone in the world and leave out the biggest country.”

Zuckerberg also directly indicated his intentions by meeting with the Chinese Internet Czar and showing off his collection of Chinese propaganda and speeches by President Xi Jinping. Oh and he just happened to have JinPing’s book on his desk during the meeting, making him not just an insufferable kiss-ass but an obvious one too.

So should we really believe that Facebook made a mistake when they rejected a Hong Kong man’s controversial Facebook profile picture? (Facebook is not blocked in Hong Kong).

Facebook has apologised for “mistakenly” banning the use of a temporary profile picture frame commemorating the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre.

Facebook’s picture frame function allows users to change their profile photos in support of a cause. The frame in question carries messages calling for justice for Tiananmen protesters and an end to the “dictatorial regime” in China…

He said he received a notification within 24 hours saying that his design was rejected, on the basis that it fails to meet the company’s terms and policies. Facebook said the frame “belittles, threatens or attacks a particular person, legal entity, nationality or group.”

Fung then submitted on Saturday afternoon another frame showing a candle and the text “Don’t forget June 4,” hoping that Facebook would approve it. It was still under review at the time of publication.

Oops, Facebook later said, it was totally just a little mistake that they supported a murderous government over activists wishing to draw attention to horrible human rights abuses.

In fact, under strict censorship laws, the government does not allow any discussion of the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre in books and blocks online searches and discussions of the brutal crackdown that killed an estimated 1,000 students protesting the ruling Communist Party’s human rights abuses.

And now, the Chinese government is preparing for the 28th anniversary of the massacre on June 4th by placing many activists under house arrest and warning others not to speak out.

Facebook seems only too happy to help them in the effort of stamping out that dark mark on China’s history.

Facebook is a Dictator’s Wet Dream

People may not entirely know the extent of Facebook’s data gathering on users. It is much more than simply advertising to you based on recent Google searches, and figuring out your social circles to suggest friends. Facebook has algorithms which put together entire files on people that can be tailored to sell to an insurance company, an employer, or perhaps even the government.

It seems that China is weary of Facebook being used as a tool to organize dissent, and protest their strict Orwellian rules. But perhaps Xi Jinping is just playing hard to get. Zuckerberg will clearly have no problem altering Facebook in China to benefit the communist regime. With just a few tweaks, it will fit right into the Chinese government’s plan to turn China into an exact replica of the society depicted in 1984.

Zuckerberg is likely busy right now planning out exactly how he can help the regime implement their social credit policy–there’s no one better for the job! He can open up citizenship Facebook reviews for each profile, to streamline the process of ratting out your neighbors to the government.

He will be able to hand deliver the files on every citizen who uses Facebook to the Chinese government, revealing everything about them. It will be in Zuckerberg’s hands which Chinese citizens are oppressed and ostracized from Chinese society, and which ones are rewarded.

All the interest Zuckerberg has shown in Chinese propaganda, speeches, and leaders is simply him doing the proper research to understand how to best offer his products and services to dictatorships.

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