The recent hullabaloo among President Trump’s top monetary officials about the Administration’s “dollar policy” is just the start of what will likely be the first of many contradictory pronouncements and reversals which will take place in the coming months and years as the world’s reserve currency continues to be compromised. So far, the Greenback has had its worst start since 1987, the year of a major stock market reset.
A modern-day reenactment of the famous “our currency, your problem” play that went over so extremely well in the 1970s… [PT]
The brief firestorm was set off by Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin who said in response to the dollar’s recent slide:
“Obviously, a weaker dollar is good for us, it’s good because it has to do with trade and opportunities.”*
Mnuchin backtracked a bit as international financial leaders criticized the apparent shift in policy while Administration officials sought to clarify the Secretary’s remarks. President Trump weighted in on the matter saying:
“Ultimately, I want to see a strong dollar” and added that Mnuchin’s comments were “taken out of context.”
While President Trump sought to allay jittery currency markets that monetary policy had not changed, candidate Trump supported the Federal Reserve’s suppression of interest rates and did not want to see a rising dollar:
“I must be honest, I’m a low interest rate person. If we raise rates and if the dollar starts getting too strong, we’re going to have some very major problems”.**
Of course, the entire uproar about a strong dollar versus weak dollar is a sham. When the dollar (and for that matter all other national currencies) cannot be redeemed for either gold or silver, it is inherently “weak” and ultimately worthless.
That this obvious fact is not recognized by the Trump Administration, international monetary authorities, and the financial press demonstrates just how unstable the dollar and world currencies actually are.
The US dollar today and in 1987 – in both years the Federal Reserve had embarked on a rate hike campaign, a new and untested Fed chairman took the helm at the Fed, and the US dollar was very weak. As you can see it actually reached “oversold” levels in late January/early February in both years, and started to bounce from there in the short term (before resuming its slide in 1987 – we cannot be certain yet what will happen this time around, but the parallels are slightly worrisome). [PT]
How to Create a MAGA Dollar
If President Trump truly wants to see a strong dollar that will become a linchpin in “making America great again,” he should enact policies that will return the dollar to its original function – a warehouse receipt that can be redeemed for precious metals. Just as important, an authentic strong dollar policy would mean that no dollar can be created that did not have “an equal amount” of gold/silver in bank vaults – in essence a 100% gold dollar.
These two acts would guarantee a strong dollar and ensure that the dollar would remain the world’s reserve currency. Moreover, a fully redeemable dollar would likely lead to other nations adopting similar measures.
A gold-backed dollar would also head off China’s not too subtle attempt at replacement of the Greenback with the Yuan as the world’s reserve currency. Its “Belt & Road Initiative,” its massive accumulation of gold, and other actions are all aimed at making the Yuan the dominant world currency which, if successful, will have catastrophic financial repercussions for the US and Western Europe.
What paper dollars looked like back when they were warehouse receipts for actual money – note the various sizes these banknotes came in. Evidently, no-one was concerned about the potential for criminal shenanigans that the use of large denomination banknotes allegedly invites. One wonders how the US ever survived this! Shouldn’t it have drowned in an uncontrollable miasma of crime? [PT]
Gold-backed money will not only have positive international effects, but domestic benefits as well. Crippling price inflation that has been intentionally under reported by government statistics will be a thing of the past. Prices in a gold-backed currency will actually fall, raising living standards for everyone.
Without the ability of the Federal Reserve to create money out of thin air, the massive federal budget deficits would have to be dealt with. And without the Fed’s purchasing of US debt, the government would be forced to actually cut spending. Spending cuts would have to be deep and across the board.
Happily, under such a scenario, a reduction in spending would mean a pullback in the American Empire. The US would simply not have the resources to maintain bases abroad or involve itself in the countless conflicts and wars it is now engaged in. It is more likely that when the American Empire comes to an end, it will not be because of a military defeat, but because it can no longer be sustained financially.
Sadly, under current ideological conditions, a return to gold money is definitely not on the financial horizon. It will most likely take a collapse of the irredeemable paper monetary system before commodity money is re-established as a general medium of exchange.
Gold: the money of the free market. The fact that we are currently not allowed to use it as a general medium of exchange is quite telling with respect to how free Western economies actually are. [PT]
It is clear from the recent exchange among Trump Administration financial officers that the same dollar policy will continue, which will inevitably lead to a dollar crisis and certain political disaster for whoever is President when it arrives.
But while CNBC “Markets In Turmoil” special was all-in promoting this as nothing but a “health pullback” and lone-wolf volatility event, Europe’s largest asset manager is less optimistic.
Raphael Sobotka, who helps manage 45 billion euros ($56 billion) in invested assets at Amundi, warns that while the latest pullback should wipe off some of the recent exuberance in equity markets, investors need to let the dust settle first on this “volatility shock.”
As Bloomberg reports, Sobotka, who heads the flexible, risk premia & retirement solutions unit at Amundi, said in an interview.
“Tactically, we had been reducing our exposure to equities since December, and we further sold stocks over the past week,”
“The equity exposure of our flagship fund, Amundi Patrimoine, is now 26 percent, down from 35 percent at the market peak in late January, and 40 percent at the end of last year.”
U.S. stock valuations have fallen back, Sobotka said, but…
“…the market isn’t cheap yet, and given that rates will continue to rise, the pressure on equity valuation ratios can continue to increase from here.”
So far, US equities retraced around 50% of the losses before crashing yesterday…
The McKean County, Pennsylvania, sheriff’s office has suspended deputy Colin Meeker for taking a flag with Nazi symbols from the private property of a white supremacist group while on duty. The group says Meeker got out of his patrol car, climbed a wall, went about 15 feet onto their property and took the flag down. The state police is also investigating the case.
On January 17, Petr Pavel, a Czech army general and NATO’s military committee chairman, led meetings with his counterparts from Ukraine and Georgia, which he tweeted were “Sessions dedicated to Projecting Stability.” Yet while NATO’s collaboration with nations historically intertwined with Russia could lead to a number of possible outcomes, “stability” seems the least likely one. Like so much of what the alliance does, the purpose of these meetings is to push the alliance ever eastward.
That raises a question. Why should Americans participate in an alliance in which a general—from a minuscule military power that spends 1 percent of its GDP on defense—hosts a meeting that is more likely to provoke a catastrophic U.S.-Russia war than to prevent one? As Ted Galen Carpenter recently explained here at TAC, this is the dangerous calculus that results from interlocking the United States with so many NATO nations, including some that Moscow regards as within its sphere of influence.
Let me offer another reason to be skeptical about the long-term future of U.S. participation in the Western alliance: the West is dying. The historical and cultural legacy that animated Western civilization is atrophying. This is particularly the case in Western Europe, where elites see nothing particularly valuable in their cultural heritage, which will increasingly make them unreliable partners to the United States. How can a Western alliance be maintained when less and less remains of common, distinctly Western values and ideas?
At the end of the Cold War, the late Harvard historian Samuel Huntington pointed out that the world was reorganizing itself along civilizational lines and that cultural commonalities were replacing Cold War alliances. Western European nations signed the Maastricht treaty, Russia rebuilt its Orthodox cathedrals, Islam experienced a historic reawakening, and China rediscovered Confucius. Huntington therefore recommended that NATO serve as “the security organization of Western civilization.”
According to Huntington, the Western heritage is rooted in “Greek philosophy and rationalism, Roman law, Latin and Christianity,” a common culture with penchants for the separation of “spiritual and temporal authority,” the rule of law, representative governments, and civil liberties. In the post-Cold War world, Huntington advised that the West reanimate its principles and avoid meddling in the affairs of other civilizations that were rediscovering, and taking pride in, their own traditions.
Because Western elites, the “Davos men,” do not cherish or even particularly admire the unique Western cultural inheritance—Christianity in particular—they did not see civilizational criteria as a basis upon which the West should form post-Cold War alliances. We have thus done precisely the opposite of what Huntington recommended: we have meddled, sometimes aggressively, in other civilizations, and we have repudiated more and more of our own heritage, replacing it with a mishmash of multiculturalism, universalism, globalism, and anti-Christianity. And with our worldwide meddling and fading fondness for civil liberties has come the national security behemoth, weakening our commitment to freedom, privacy, and the rule of law. The recent FISA scandal is another reminder of the legacy that we are squandering.
Because Western elites no longer recognize and respect the unique characteristics of their own civilization—let alone those of competing civilizations—the foreign policy of the West has been marked by ineptitude. For example, as ethnic and religious aspirations came to the fore in the former Yugoslavia, NATO fought to keep the country intact, and, when that failed, essentially allied itself with Bosnian Muslims whose other friends included Iran, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and al-Qaeda. We launched a massive invasion of Iraq in the heart of Islamic civilization that provoked the entire Muslim world. We sponsored an anti-Russian coup in Ukraine, a nation so closely tied to Orthodox civilization that its capital, Kiev, has historically been described as “the mother of all Russian cities.”
This civilizational cluelessness has also marked Western mismanagement of the NATO alliance.
Had elites understood in 1990 that NATO was no longer an anti-Soviet bloc but the “security alliance of Western civilization,” huge changes would have been made at the end of the Cold War and afterward. Turkey, an increasingly authoritarian country that is aspiring to a leadership role in the Islamic world, is a sponsor of terrorism and is overtly hostile to the United States; it should hardly be a NATO member, its strategic position and large army notwithstanding. China has both a strategic position and large army, and no one would argue that it would be a constructive NATO member. Macedonia, a corrupt and unstable nation with an Orthodox majority and a Muslim minority, shouldn’t have been considered for membership either. Finally, Western leaders should never have pushed to admit Georgia and Ukraine, and they should not now be playing footsie with those countries’ generals. Any statesman with civilizational awareness would have recognized and respected the historically rooted interests and prerogatives of the leader of the great Orthodox civilization, Russia.
But nothing highlights the civilizational cluelessness of Western elites quite like the deliberate facilitation of mass Islamic migration into Europe. When a leader such as Angela Merkel defends Islamic migration on economic and multicultural grounds, she shows herself to be simply ignorant about what made Western civilization distinctive and successful and what is now threatening it. The embers of our heritage will ultimately burn out in nations like Germany, where domestic politics will trend toward ambivalence about NATO. A demographic profile with large blocs of Muslim voters will transform the geopolitical views of the political classes in a number of Western countries. (The political implications of Islamic migration for Europe are presaged in Michel Houellebecq’s controversial novel Submission.) Some Western nations, it seems obvious, will no longer support a Western alliance because they will no longer be Western. One can envision a time when certain Eastern European countries, which still cherish their heritage, will be the only reliable alliance partners. NATO, famous for scenario planning, ought to plan for that, rather than covetously eyeing Vladimir Putin’s neighbors.
Maybe they can use some of this money to pay down all of that debt…
Bloomberg is reporting that UBS Group AG’s investment bank is allocating its largest bonus payouts to its highest earners and – in an unusual deviation – its youngest employees – i.e. millennials.
Of course, these millennial employees haven’t exactly earned these bonuses – instead, the bank says they’re meant as an enticement to keep its brightest young people from fleeing to Silicon Valley. In 2016, the bank’s bonus pool shrank by 17%, to 2.9 billion francs ($3 billion) – meaning that it’s decision is virtually guaranteed to engender resentment among more senior employees, who in turn might be less willing to mentor their younger, entitled, colleagues.
Bloomberg claims the strategy is becoming an industry standard, even as bonus pools are flat or shrinking (particularly if you work on a trading desk) across the industry (though investment banking bonus pools increased slightly last year. UBS informed its staff about the payouts on Feb. 7, BBG’s sources said.. The company declined to comment.
To be sure, some banks have chosen to go a different way: Barclays told its investment bankers that it’ll sharpen divisions in bonuses, raising pay for the top earners while cutting pay for the weakest earners.
Andrea Orcel, head of UBS’s investment bank, said in an interview in December that 2017 would be a “tricky year” for compensation, but that his company had done slightly better than a year earlier. Credit Suisse, UBS’s biggest rival, said it increased pay somewhat.
Meanwhile, average performers may see no increase as investment banking pay falls across the industry, one of the people said.
To be clear: UBS is creating an environment where they’re reinforcing the “everybody deserves a gold star” mentality that many members of the youngest working generation have been raised with, something that will likely only reinforce their sense of entitlement.
On March 18th, 2014 following a popular self-determination referendum of the people of Crimea the Russian Federation declared reunification with the Crimean Peninsula which was illegitimately transfered to the Soviet Ukraine in 1954 by Soviet Communist Party leader Nikita Khrushchev.
Nevertheless, the western global corporative media, politicians and statesmen classified the act as a matter of “aggression, violation of international law and unlawful occupation of a part of territory of an internationally recognized independent state and the UN’s member”.
Russia’s authorities on this occasion issued an official statement that Crimea’s re-annexation by Russia is based on the same self-determination rights as of the people (the Albanians) of Kosovo in 2008 which self-proclaimed independence from Serbia (by Kosovo parliament without any popular referendum) is already recognized by almost all western liberal governments.
The following text is a personal contribution to better understanding of the case of Russia’s “dirty policy of occupation and annexation” of Crimea in March 2014.
Grenada is an independent state, a member of the UN, located in the southern portion of the Caribbean Sea very close to the mainland of the South America (Venezuela). The state is composed by southernmost of the Windward Islands combined with several small islands which belong to the Grenadines Archipelago, populated by almost 110,000 people of whom 82% are the blacks (2012 estimations). The state of Grenada is physically mostly forested mountains’ area (of volcanic origin) with some crater lakes and springs. In the valleys are bananas, spices and sugar cane grown. The country is out of any natural wealth significance but has relatively high geostrategic importance. Economy was and is primarily agricultural with some very limited small-scale industry of the food production nature with developing tourism sector as growing source of the national GDP. The state budget is constantly under a high level of foreign debt (a “debt slavery” phenomenon).
As the island, Grenada was discovered by the Europeans (Ch. Columbus) in 1498 and colonized by the French in 1650 becoming a possession of the French royal crown in 1674. During the Seven Years War (1756−1763) between all major European states, Grenada was occupied by the British and according to the Peace Treaty of Paris in 1763 was given to the United Kingdom being a British possession for almost two hundred years with preservation of slavery. The process of democratization of the island started in 1950 when the universal adult suffrage is granted by the United Labor Party. Being shortly a member of the West Indian Federation (1958−1962) and seeking internationally recognized independence, Grenada was granted such separate independence only in 1974 with Matthew Gairy (a leader of the United Labor Party) as the first Grenada’s PM. However, only three years later in 1979 Gairy was deposed from the post in a coup d’état lead by Maurice Bishop (1944−1983) as a leader of a Marxist political group under the official title of the New Jewel Movement. M. Bishop proclaimed a new Government under the name of the People’s Revolutionary Government that became not welcomed by the US administration like the Socialist (Marxist-democrat) Government in Chile after the 1970 elections formed by Salvador Allende (1908−1973).
The issue is in this case that Allende was the first Marxist in the world’s history who became elected by the popular vote as the President of one sovereign and independent state.
A new President of Chile was a head of the Unidad Popular that was a coalition of the Marxists (Communists) and the Socialists and therefore faced by hostility of the USA whose administration supported Chili Congress against Allende. The Congress backed by the USA heavily opposed Allende’s radical program of nationalization and agrarian reform – a program voted by the electorate in 1970. Due to such obstruction, there were inflation, capital flight and balance-payments deficit which heavily contributed to an economic crisis in Chile in 1973: exactly what the US administration wanted and needed. The crisis became the main excuse for the military coup organized and accomplished by the Chili army Commander-in-Chief general Augusto Pinochet (born in 1915) – a typical local exponent of the US global politics.
As a consequence, there were around 15,000 killed people together with President Allende and about 10% of the Chileans who left the country during the new military dictatorship (1973−1990) which replaced Chili democracy elected by the people and brutally abolished all labor unions and any opposition organizations and groups. The capitalism was fully restored with the economy and social order very depended on the US financial support as a price for transformation of the country into a classic (US) colony. Nevertheless, the 1973 military suppression of democracy in Chile was a clear message to the whole Latin America that the Monroe Doctrine of “America to the Americans” (read in fact as “Americas to the US”) is still leading framework of the US foreign policy in this part of the globe. The Monroe Doctrine was articulated in President James Monroe’s seventh annual message to the Congress on December 2nd, 1823. The European powers, according to Monroe, were obligated to respect the Western Hemisphere as the United States’ sphere of interest. Following later such doctrine, for the matter of illustration, there was the US direct military invasion of Panama causing the fall of General Noriega in December 1989: “Operation Just Cause”.
Similarly to the Allende Case in Chile, Grenada governed by the President M. Bishop turned to the left in both inner and external policy of the state. Therefore, he encouraged very closer relations with F. Castro’s Cuba and potentially to the USSR. As a result, at the island there were some Cuban military presence composed by the engineers who were repairing and expanding the local airport. This fact became the main reason that political situation in Grenada became of interest of the U.S. administration. However, due to the internal quarrel within the People’s Revolutionary Government, Bishop was overthrown from the post and murdered by another Marxist, Bernard Coard, in 1983 who took control over the Government. There were the clashes of protesters with the governmental troops and soon violence escalated. However, the army troops under the command of General Hudson Austin soon took power and established a new military regime.
This new Grenada coup was immediately followed by direct US military intervention in the island on October 23rd, under the order by the US President Ronald Reagan (the “Operation Urgent Fury”), for the very real reason to prevent a Marxist revolutionary council to take power. The US military troops left Grenada in December 1983 after the re-establishment of “democratic” (pre-revolutionary) regime and of course pro-American one transforming Grenada into one more Washington’s client state.
It is of very high concern to see what was de jure explanation by the US President Reagan for such military intervention and de facto the US military occupation of one sovereign and independent state. The President, based on the CIA reports on the threat posed to the US citizens in Grenada (the students) by the Communist regime, issued the order to the US Marines to invade the island in order to secure their lives. Here we have to remember a very fact of issue how much the CIA reports have been (and are) really accurate and reliable by only two fresh examples:
In 1999 Serbia and Montenegro were bombed by the NATO troops (the “Operation Merciful Angel”) exactly based on the CIA information about the organized (the “Operation Horse Shoe”) and well done massive ethnic cleansing of the local Kosovo Albanians (100,000 killed) committed by the Serbian regular army and police forces.
In 2003 the US and the UK troops invaded Iraq based also on the CIA reports about possession of the ABC weapon of mass destruction by the regime of Saddam Hussein (1937−2006) (the “Operation Desert Storm 2”).
However, in both mentioned cases the reports are “proved to be unproved”, i.e. very false.
Leaflet air-dropped during the US invasion of Grenada in 1983
The fact was that in the 1983 Grenada Case, there were really about 1,000 US citizens in the island, majority of them studying at the local medical school. Citing the alleged danger to the US citizens in Grenada, the President ordered around 2,000 US troops, combined by some international forces from the Regional Security System based in Barbados. The White House claimed that it received a formal request for military intervention by the PM of Barbados and Dominica (both the US clients). If it is a true, and probably it is, then any state receiving such invitation by the foreign Governments (second states) has right to invade other state (third state) in order to restore the “democratic” order (in the sense of bringing justice) or at least to protect its own citizens. For instance, following the White House logic from 1983, overthrown legal President of Ukraine V. Yanukovych by the street-mob in 2014 could call the Russian President V. Putin to restore a legal order in whole Ukraine by the Russian army. In regard to the 2014 Kyiv Coup, according to Paul Craig Roberts, Washington used its funded NGOs ($5 billion according to Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland at the National Press Club in December 2013) to begin street protests when the elected Ukrainian Government turned down the offer to join the European Union.
Similarly to the Ukrainian coup in 2014, the Guatemala coup in 1954, when democratically elected Government of Jacobo Arbenz became overthrown, was also carried out by the CIA. Following also Reagan’s logic for the military invasion of Grenada in 1983, the Russian President could send a regular army of the Russian Federation to occupy Ukraine for the security reasons of Russia’s citizens who were studying at the universities in Kyiv, Odessa or Lvov. Nevertheless, similar Reagan’s argument was used (among others) and by Adolf Hitler in April 1941 to invade and occupy the Kingdom of Yugoslavia as, according to the German intelligence service, the German minority in Yugoslavia (the Volksdeutschers) were oppressed and terrorized by the new (pro-British) Government of General Dušan Simović after the coup in Belgrade committed on March 27th, 1941.
Nonetheless, the fact was that during the intervention in Grenada, the US troops faced military opposition by the Grenadian army relying on minimal intelligence about the situation in the country. For example, the US military used in this case old tourist maps of the island. Similar “mistake” the NATO made in the 1999 Kosovo Case by bombing the Chinese embassy in the wider center of Belgrade using also outdated tourist map on which a new Chinese embassy did not exist (here we will not comment or argue on credentials of such army and its headquarters to intervene outside of its own home courtyard). In order to break the Grenadian resistance the “Hollywood” President R. Reagan sent additional 4,000 troops to the island. Finally, an “international coalition” lead by the US troops succeeded to replace the Government of Grenada by one acceptable to the USA.
Regardless to the fact that a great part of the Americans did not support the 1983 Grenada Case that it took place only several days after a very disastrous terror act on the US military post in Lebanon when over 240 US troops were killed, calling into very question the use of the US military force in order to achieve the political goals, Reagan’s administration officially proclaimed the case to be the first “rollback” of the Communist influence since the beginning of the Cold War in 1949 (as the US military interventions against the “Communist infection” in Korea and Vietnam have been unsuccessful). A justification of the military invasion was mainly framed within the idea that the US citizens (students) in Grenada could be taken hostages similar to the 1979 Teheran Hostage Crisis. However, several US Congressmen, like Louis Stoks (Ohio), denied any real danger for any American in Grenada prior to the invasion (that was confirmed and by the students themselves) followed by unsuccessful attempt by seven Democrats in the Congress, led by Ted Weiss, to introduce a resolution to impeach R. Reagan. Finally, the UN General Assembly with majority votes (108, with only 9 against and 27 abstentions) adopted Resolution 38/7 on October 28th, 1983 which clearly accused the USA for violation of international law (“deeply deplores the armed intervention in Grenada, which constitutes a flagrant violation of international law and of the independence, sovereignty and territorial integrity of that State”).
The 1983 Grenada Case is not for sure either the first or the last “Hollywood-style” violation of the international law and territorial sovereignty of some independent state by the US (or other) administration. But it is sure that it was done by the order of up today the only “Hollywood” cowboy-actor star in the office of White House in Washington as according to the US Constitution, Arnold Schwarzenegger does not have right to run for the post of the US President as he was not born on the US territory.
Finally, if you think that the 1983 Grenada Case has nothing common with the 2014 Crimean Case, you are absolutely right.
When the latest reading on the Case-Shiller 20-City Composite printed within 1% of its record highs from 2006 a little more than a week ago, we asked a question that’s seemingly on every real-estate investors’ mind: Is this a “top” or a “breakout”?
And with the effects of the Trump tax reform plan – which is expected to hammer real-estate markets, particularly in high-tax blue – having yet to take effect, already states – one early indicator that softness might be entering one of the country’s most iconic (and expensive) real estate markets was reported by Bloomberg today. To wit, the trend of landlords handing out rental concessions continued to intensify in January, as landlords are increasingly being pressured to hand out incentives like rent-free months or gift cards to entice potentially renters to sign on the dotted line. Concessions jumped to a record in January, with 49% of newly signed leases coming with some kind of incentive, according to appraiser Miller Samuel Inc. and brokerage Douglas Elliman Real Estate.
That share surpasses the previous peak of 36% set just a month earlier.
All of these concessions have caused the median rent to drop 3.6% from a year earlier to $3,141 – the biggest decline since October 2011 – interrupting six years of near-constant growth.
“Landlords have finally realized, ‘OK, we have to adjust these prices because the concessions aren’t doing as much,'” said Hal Gavzie, who oversees leasing for Douglas Elliman. “Customers are looking past the concessions being offered and just looking for the best deals they can find.”
Rents fell last month in almost every Manhattan neighborhood, including some of the borough’s priciest, Citi Habitats said in its own report. On the Upper West Side, the median was $3,450, down 2.8 percent from a year earlier. Rents in the West Village dropped 4.5 percent to $3,700, while on the Upper East Side, they declined 5.3 percent to $3,185, the brokerage said.
“The dynamic has shifted,” with Brooklyn, Queens and the New Jersey waterfront becoming viable options to many renters,” said Gary Malin, president of Citi Habitats. “Tenants are looking for value, and they’re open to suggestions.”
While these data strictly apply to the rental market, we pointed out last year, the commercial real-estate market is having problems of its own: In September, we noted that sales of commercial real-estate plunged 50%, bringing commercial property purchases to their lowest level since 2012. And that problem isn’t isolated to NYC: Sales of commercial real estate are plunging across the US, and have been since peaking at $262 billion nationally in 2015.
And of course this was before HNA announced this morning that it would be liquidating $4 billion in US commercial real estate across New York City, San Francisco and Chicago and Minneapolis.
* * *
But Manhattan isn’t the only high-end luxury market showing signs of softness. In London, according to the Financial Times, the gap between what sellers are asking and buyers offering for high-end homes is greater than it was in either 2008 or 2009.
But according to one real-estate market analyst, reality is beginning to set in for sellers.
Marcus Dixon, head of research at LonRes, said buyers were becoming more confident in demanding discounts and sellers were ore likely to accept lower offers. “People are going in with relatively cheeky offers, and sellers are accepting them,” said Mr Dixon. “There’s a bit of realism creeping in about what properties are worth.”
LonRes’s data cover London’s most exclusive districts, including Kensington and Chelsea, as well as prime parts of the capital extending from Canary wharf in the east to Richmond in the west and Hampstead in north London.
Outside the most expensive “prime central” areas, discounts to initial asking price stood at just over 9% – the highest level since 2009.
In a phenomenon that’s also manifested in some of America’s toniest zip codes – namely, Greenwich, Connecticut – some sellers are opting to take their homes off the market to wait for another day.
Many sellers have resisted dropping the prices of their properties, instead choosing to withdraw them from the market. Transaction volumes fell across central London in 2017, with the number of properties sold down 3.6% over the year as fewer homes were put to the market.
LonRes said people were still taking their homes off the market if they could not achieve their desired price. More than half the homes leaving the market in the fourth quarter of 2017 were withdrawn rather than sold.
To be sure, some sellers are still accepting lower offers – but the post-crisis boom times are over, one real estate analyst said. And, as of now, there are few signs to suggest an imminent return.
“There have been some transactions – but it’s not boom time,” said Mr. Scarisbrick. “It’s becoming obvious that you don’t set foot in the London market unless you really need a London house.”
Foreign buyers, who are attracted by favourable exchange rates between sterling and most currencies, were an exception, he said.“You can do well if you roll your sleeves up and get involved in a proper negotiation,” he added.
“But I can’t see any catalyst for a resurrection in the market.”
Some sellers are opting to cut their losses.
“Sellers are saying, ‘if I get a buyer at a reasonable level, I’ll do a deal,'” said Charles McDowell, who runs a prime London estate agency.
“There are deals being done- quite big ticket deals – but this is certainly a market where buyers perceive value.”
If there’s value to be found now – just wait another 14 months until April 2019, when the UK’s departure is expected to be complete.
And with cryptocurrency prices tanking after last year’s bubble, the great crypto-fueled property boom has seemingly fizzled before it even began.
The Washington Post recently published an article about Dr. Ben Carson, the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development. It started off mockingly, describing Carson’s theory that the movie The Purge could easily become really given a specific set of circumstances.
If you aren’t familiar with it, The Purge franchise is a series of movies that take place in a dystopian not-so-distant future. In that future world, things are pretty similar to how they are right now – there aren’t any flying cars or AI robots serving breakfast – except for one night a year.
And on that night, people can commit any crime without worry of punishment. Anything they do that night is legal, there are no first responders to save the victims, and there won’t be any court cases later.
It was Christmastime in Washington, and Ben Carson couldn’t stop talking about the apocalypse.
“Did you know,” the secretary of housing and urban development asked his acting chief of staff, Deana Bass, at a Capitol Hill holiday party, “that if North Korea detonated a nuclear weapon into our exosphere, it could take out our entire electrical grid?”
Bass shook her head.
“What’s that movie where there’s complete lawlessness and anarchy for one night a year?” Carson said, calmly resting his right hand over his left. “ ‘The Purge’! It will be like ‘The Purge’ all the time…” (source)
And honestly, he’s not wrong. There are a lot of people out there who seem like they’d salivate at the chance to off their neighbors without any repercussions. One of the movies, The Purge: Election Year, seems particularly timely after the vitriol of the last presidential race.
Crimes are becoming more shocking and brutal
We have reached an era of extreme brutality and virulent hatred that I certainly haven’t seen in my lifetime. Recently, I wrote an article based on the essay of Sir John Grubb about the end of empires and discussed unfathomable crimes.
A Hollywood fixture has been accused of assaulting and harassing dozens of women, which led thousands of other women to share their horror stories with a #MeToo hashtag on Twitter. I have seen report after report recently of teachers having sex with their high school students.
And things have become even more horrifying since then.
And those crimes are a drop in the bucket. There are awful tales of such severe animal cruelty that I can’t get the headlines out of my mind. Tales of child abuse so mindblowing that it seems like they can’t possibly be real pop up every single day.
Complete disrespect for the political beliefs of others is now not only the norm, but it’s praised. People can lose their jobs because they voted for the “wrong” candidate. Cars with certain political stickers get targeted for vandalism. People are actually killing one another over politics. This is no longer about discourse – it’s about shouting over the people with different views.
In light of this environment, if it was totally legal to do away with people who were vocal about their different political philosophies, how far of a stretch is it to think that Dr. Carson is right about the potential of a Purge? Good people love to say how they would not participate, but if someone came for you and your family, you’d have no choice but to commit acts every bit as brutal as your attackers in order to survive.
When will it end?
Certainly, no time soon if we keep lumping people together because of who they voted for and assuming that we know everything about them based on the sticker on their back bumpers. We’ve had deeply controversial elections before and we managed to get past it, but when we generalize, we take away the humanity of the people we criticize.
When all we do is group people into “evil Republicans” and “crybaby Democrats” we miss the finer qualities of these people. And there ARE good qualities in just about every person, no matter what their political beliefs are. Even if you think someone is delusional, it’s important to try to understand the position from which they developed that perspective.
One has to wonder what it will take to bring us together. Dr. Carson strikes again with a movie reference.
…“There’s never been a time in the history of the world where a society became divided like this and did well,” Carson said as a crowd — including an off-duty New York Times reporter, D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser, a slew of representatives from housing nonprofit organizations and old friends from his presidential campaign — circled him. “And we don’t really have a reason to be fighting each other. There was a movie some years ago, a Will Smith movie called ‘Independence Day’ . . .”
With his soothing, story-time cadences and heavy-lidded gaze, Carson proceeded to hold forth on how Earth’s near-annihilation laid bare the superficiality of all the world’s strife. If only, he argued, people realized that the fate of humanity hung in the balance, then Palestinians and Jews, or even the United States and Russia, could be “like best friends.” (source)
How can we help each other from a place of scorn and derision? How can we come together when we deliberately divide ourselves every single day?
Let’s hope it doesn’t take an alien invasion or epic disaster to make us mend fences. The time is coming when we’re going to need our neighbors and they’re going to need us. Hatred breeds nothing but more hatred and it’s only a matter of time before Dr. Carson is right about that whole Purge business.
Watchdog group Judicial Watch has filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the DOJ in order to obtain records from the FBI connected to former Director James Comey’s $2 million book deal, after the agency failed to respond to an August 14, 2017 FOIA request.
In particular, the FOIA request concerns communications between Comey and the FBI leading up to his controversial June 2017 testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee. The group seeks:
All records of communications between the FBI and Comey prior to and regarding Comey’s testimony before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence on June 8, 2017.
All records of communications between the FBI and Comey relating to an upcoming book to be authored by Comey and published.
All records, including but not limited to forms completed by Comey, relating to the requirement for prepublication review by the FBI of any book to be authored by Comey with the intent to be published or otherwise publicly available.
“Comey reportedly received an advance in excess of $2 million for his book, Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership, reportedly set for publication on April 17th. Former FBI agents and officials intending to write books concerning their tenure are customarily required to submit the entire transcript for pre-publication review.” – Judicial Watch
Following Comey’s firing on May 9, 2017, the former FBI director sat down with Senate Select Committee investigators for a highly controversial testimony which covered, among other things, the circumstances surrounding his dismissal.
Also covered in testimony was the ongoing investigation into alleged Russian interference in the 2016 election, as well as Comey’s handling of the Hillary Clinton email investigation.
Comey admitted to leaking his “memos” to the Senate Select Committee in order to kick off the Special Counsel headed by former FBI Director Robert Mueller III.
“Mr. Comey seems to have protected status for any misconduct and we want to know if he had a special deal for his book from his friends in the FBI,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton.
“The Deep State is in cover-up mode. The FBI, DOJ, and the Special Counsel are stonewalling our requests for Comey documents.”
Comey moved up the date of his memoir “Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership,” from May 1 to April 17, according to publisher Flatiron Books – due to the FBI coming under “intense scrutiny.”
Flatiron president Bob Miller and publisher Amy Einhorn said there was demand for Comey to be heard amid an “urgent conversation” about the FBI, just one week after Comey blasted “weasels and liars” for pushing for the release a memo which alleges that top officials in the FBI and Department of Justice (DOJ) misled a federal surveillance court in order to obtain a spy warrant against a former Trump campaign adviser. –Daily Caller
The book is said to feature “yet-unheard anecdotes from his long and distinguished career,” according to Flatiron Books, which describes the book as an exploration of, get this: “what good, ethical leadership looks like and how it drives sound decisions.”
“Throughout his career, James Comey has had to face one difficult decision after another as he has served the leaders of our country,” Flatiron Books publisher Bob Miller said, who added that the book will be an “unprecedented entry into the corridors of power, and a remarkable lesson in leadership itself.”
As the House and Senate home in on bad actors in the FBI and DOJ, and career officials peel out of the agencies left and right – we eagerly await the blind boyscout’s book…
The United States government has interfered with more elections than any other government on the face of the earth.
But suddenly, the US is grandstanding and pretending it matters that other nations use the exact same tactics.
“Ah, the peddler propaganda!” says Joe Joseph with The Daily Sheeple while reading a headline declaring that Russians penetrated U.S. voter systems. “Say it ain’t so! A clandestine operation by a foreign government here in the United States? No. Couldn’t be!” he said sarcastically.
The overly biased and left-leaning media attempted to portray this “interference” as a big deal. But as always, propaganda is easy to break down.
The U.S. official in charge of protecting American elections from hacking says the Russians successfully penetrated the voter registration rolls of several U.S. states prior to the 2016 presidential election.
In an exclusive interview with NBC News, Jeanette Manfra, the head of cybersecurity at the Department of Homeland Security, said she couldn’t talk about classified information publicly, but in 2016, “We saw a targeting of 21 statesand an exceptionally small number of them were actually successfully penetrated.” –NBC News
Reading between the lines, all this means is pretty much nothing, other than the US government blatantly displaying their hypocrisy while interfering in the elections of other countries. Of course, the media is going to make a big story out of this. “We’re going to turn back the clock a little bit,” says Joseph.
According to data gathered by the LA Times, the U.S. has a long history of attempting to influence presidential elections in other countries. The United States government has tried to manipulate as many as 81 elections between 1946 and 2000. According to a database amassed by political scientist Dov Levin of Carnegie Mellon University, that number doesn’t include military coups and regime change efforts following the election of candidates the U.S. didn’t like, notably those in Iran, Guatemala, and Chile. Nor does it include general assistance with the electoral process, such as election monitoring.
Levin defines intervention as “a costly act which is designed to determine the election results [in favor of] one of the two sides.” These acts, carried out in secret two-thirds of the time, include funding the election campaigns of specific parties, disseminating misinformation or propaganda, training locals of only one side in various campaigning, or get-out-the-vote techniques, helping one side design their campaign materials, making public pronouncements, or threats in favor of or against a candidate, and providing or withdrawing foreign aid.
“There’s plenty of history here to show that we’ve been involved in intervening in foreign elections. We did it more than anybody else! So, why should we be surprised when other countries do it to us,” says Joseph. Again, keep in mind, the election interference was incredibly menial in comparison to the US’s previous manipulations.
You need to be able to “see and understand the propaganda coming from NBC and the mainstream television media.” In case you haven’t figured it out yet, most of the mainstream media is straight up propaganda with the minds of Americans and public opinion being manipulated every second. This has been admitted by the media, yet the public continues to be largely unaware that they are being controlled. In fact, the US media tried very hard to manipulate public opinion in the 2016 election. It’s become more than obvious unless you’re one who has been manipulated.
“It’s easier to fool people than convince them that they’ve been fooled.” -Unknown, but often attributed to Mark Twain
The McKean County, Pennsylvania, sheriff’s office has suspended deputy Colin Meeker for taking a flag with Nazi symbols from the 
