Month: February 2018

Pat Buchanan: “If Americans Are Losing Faith In The FBI, Whose Fault Is That?”

Authored by Patrick Buchanan via Buchanan.org,

The memo worked up in the Intel Committee of Chairman Devin Nunes may not have sunk the Mueller investigation, but from the sound of the secondary explosions, this torpedo was no dud.

The critical charge:

To persuade a FISA court to issue a warrant to spy on Trump aide Carter Page, the FBI relied on a dossier produced by a Trump-hating British spy, who was using old Kremlin contacts, while being paid to dig up dirt on Donald Trump by Hillary Clinton’s campaign.

Not only were the Clinton campaign and DNC paying the spy, Christopher Steele, for his dirt-diving, the FBI put Steele on its own payroll, until they caught him lying about leaking to the media.

In their requests for search warrants, the FBI never told the FISA court judge their primary source was a 35-page dossier delivered by Steele that their own Director James Comey described as “salacious and unverified.”

From the Nunes memo, there was, at the highest level of the FBI, a cabal determined to derail Trump and elect Clinton. Heading the cabal was Comey, who made the call to exonerate Hillary of criminal charges for imperiling national security secrets, even before his own FBI investigation was concluded.

Assisting Comey was Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, whose wife, running for a Virginia state senate seat, received a windfall of $467,000 in contributions from Clinton bundler Terry McAuliffe.

Last week, McCabe was discharged from the FBI. Seems that in late September 2016, he learned from his New York field office that it was sitting on a trove of emails between Anthony Weiner and his wife, Clinton aide Huma Abedin, which potentially contained security secrets.

Not until late October did Comey inform Congress of what deputy McCabe had known a month earlier.

Other FBI plotters were Peter Strzok, chief investigator in both the Clinton email server scandal and Russiagate, and his FBI girlfriend, Lisa Page. Both were ousted from the Mueller investigation when their anti-Trump bias and behavior were exposed last summer.

Filling out the starting five was Bruce Ohr, associate deputy attorney general under Loretta Lynch. In 2016, Ohr’s wife was working for Fusion GPS, the oppo research arm of the Clinton campaign, and Bruce was in direct contact with Steele.

Now virtually all of this went down before Robert Mueller was named special counsel. But the poisoned roots of the Russiagate investigation and the bristling hostility of the investigators to Trump must cast a cloud of suspicion over whatever charges Mueller will bring.

Now another head may be about to fall, that of Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein.

If Mueller has given up trying to prove Trump collusion with the Kremlin and moved on to obstruction of justice charges, Rosenstein moves into the crosshairs.

For the heart of any obstruction scenario is Trump’s firing of James Comey and his boasting about why he did it.

But not only did Rosenstein discuss with Trump the firing of Comey, he went back to Justice to produce the document to justify what the president had decided to do.

How can Rosenstein oversee Mueller’s investigation into the firing of James Comey when he was a witness to and a participant in the firing of James Comey?

The Roman poet Juvenal’s question comes to mind. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Who will watch the watchmen?

Consider where we are. Mueller is investigating alleged Trump collusion with Russia, and the White House is all lawyered up.

The House intel committee is investigating Clinton-FBI collusion to defeat Trump and break his presidency. FBI Inspector General Michael Horowitz is looking into whether the fix was in to give Hillary a pass in the probe of her email server.

Comey has been fired, his deputy McCabe removed, his chief investigator Strzok ousted by Mueller for bigoted anti-Trump behavior, alongside his FBI paramour, Page. Bruce Ohr has been demoted for colluding with Steele, who was caught lying to the FBI and fired, and for his wife’s role in Fusion GPS, which was being paid to dig up dirt on Trump for Clinton’s campaign.

If Americans are losing confidence in the FBI, whose fault is that? Is there not evidence that a hubristic cadre at the apex of the FBI — Comey, McCabe, Strzok foremost among them — decided the Republic must be saved from Trump and, should Hillary fail, they would step in and move to abort the Trump presidency at birth?

To the deep state, the higher interests of the American people almost always coincide with their own.

via RSS http://ift.tt/2FTt7OJ Tyler Durden

UN Envoy Says North Korea Is Only “Months Away” From Striking US

A few weeks ago, we highlighted an interview given by CIA Director Mike Pompeo to “CBS This Morning” where he claimed that North Korea was “only a handful of months” from realizing the long-term goal of its nuclear weapons program: Developing a missile that could deliver a nuclear payload to the Continent US with a high degree of accuracy.

At the time, we cautioned that these remarks should be taken with a grain of salt, because Pompeo had repeated this same claim in the past.

NK

But today, the issue was raised again, when US disarmament ambassador Robert Wood told a UN-sponsored disarmament forum that, by all reasonable intelligence accounts, the rogue state is mere months away from building an ICBM capable of striking anywhere within the Continental US.

To the objections of North Korean representatives, Wood demanded that the committee support the total and complete de-nuclearization of the Korean peninsula.

“North Korea has accelerated its provocative pursuit of nuclear weapons and missile capabilities, and expressed explicit threats to use nuclear weapons against the United States and its allies in the region,” U.S. disarmament ambassador Robert Wood told the Geneva forum.

“North Korean officials insist that they will not give up nuclear weapons, and North Korea may now be only months away from the capability to strike the United States with nuclear-armed ballistic missiles,” he said.

A new U.S. nuclear policy review outlined last week “reaffirms that North Korea’s illicit nuclear program must be completely, verifiably, and irreversibly eliminated, resulting in a Korean Peninsula free of nuclear weapons,” he said.

Predictably, the North Korean representatives at the meeting responded angrily, blaming Washington for escalating the conflict by holding military drills involving nuclear submarines and aircraft carriers in preparation for a preemptive strike.

“In view of the nature and scale of U.S. military reinforcements, they are designed to make a pre-emptive strike against the DPRK,” North Korean diplomat Ju Yong Chol told the talks, referring to his country’s official name the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

“In view of the nature and scale of US military reinforcements, they are designed to make a pre-emptive strike against the DPRK,” North Korean diplomat Ju Yong Chol told the talks, referring to his country’s official name the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

When Woods was asked what the source was for his assessment, he said he had “no new information to share”.

Woods also accused the North of launching a deceptive “charm offensive” with their recent detente involving South Korea – including the two countries’ decision to draft an inter-Korean women’s ice hockey team.

Woods also pointed out that Russia, China and the North are all expanding their stockpiles, increasing the prominence of nuclear weapons in their security strategies.

“What I would call ‘the charm offensive’ frankly is fooling no one,” Wood told the talks.

He also said arsenals in China and Russia were expanding, drawing rebukes from their respective delegations.

“Russia, China and North Korea are growing their stockpiles, increasing the prominence of nuclear weapons in their security strategies, and – in some cases – pursuing the development of new nuclear capabilities to threaten other peaceful nations,” Wood said.

“We are not going to stick our head in the sand, we are going to respond to these growing challenges,” he later told reporters.

The US and the South have agreed to suspend their joint military exercises around the peninsula until after the Winter Games. Still, local security forces aren’t ruling out the possibility of a North-Korean sponsored cyber attack.

 

via RSS http://ift.tt/2GRdFnI Tyler Durden

China Deploys 300,000 Soldiers To N.Korean Border In “Preparation For Potential War”

While the specter of a nuclear war with North Korea has faded in recent weeks, China is not taking chances, and ahead of the Winter Olympics in South Korea, the Chinese government has deployed 300,000 troops and multiple mobile strike groups to its highly-guarded border with North Korea, a move which signals that Beijing is quietly gearing for a potential crisis between Kim Jong Un and the United States in the coming months.

According to South Korea’s Chosun Ilbo news, “China is preparing for a potential war on the Korean Peninsula by reinforcing missile defenses near the border with North Korea” citing a report from Radio Free Asia. “Military units in Yanbian were relocated from Heilongjiang Province, thus adding 300,000 troops along the border.”

RFA quoted a North Korean source in China that the Chinese military late last year deployed another missile defense battery at an armored division in Helong, west of Longjing in the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture. Now it is deploying missile defense batteries near North Korean reservoirs by the Apnok and Duman rivers.

The reason for the increased missile presence is that Chinese troops in the border area could be swept away if the North tore down the banks of the reservoirs or they were destroyed by missiles or air strikes, the source added.

On Jan. 24, Taiwan’s Central News Agency reported that the 78th Group Army, the first Chinese military unit that would cross the border into the North in the event of a war on the Korean Peninsula, has been armed with newest surface-to-air missiles against South Korean and U.S. aircraft and missiles.

The reported deployment comes just days before the start of the 2018 Winter Olympic Games in South Korea.

What is peculiar about this escalation is that it comes as Kim Jong Un’s regime has – at least optically – attempted to “thaw” relations with Seoul, wishing the South Korean government a “successful” competition and hoping to “ease military tensions” before the games begin. In a rare case of Korean unity, both North and South Korea plan to march into the Opening Ceremonies under a “united Korean flag” and will combine their female hockey teams.

Meanwhile, Trump has been busy pushing his domestic agenda to engage in twitter bickering and comparing nuclear button size with Kim Jong-Un, allowing tensions between the two nuclear-armed nations to ease in recent weeks, although if China knows something, this tentative detente will not last long.

via RSS http://ift.tt/2E7Q00t Tyler Durden

VIXplosion Sends Bill Gross’ Fund Sliding Into The Red

While we await a list of active manager casualties who blew up on yesterday’s vol explosion – we doubt this will be readily available – we highlighted some funds which, like Man and Option Solutions, suffered losses as great as 65% on the day’s moves.

Now, as Bloomberg reports, another – more unexpected – loser has emerged from the ashes of yesterday’s historic VIX move: none other than former bond king, Bill Gross himself.

According to its latest daily update, Gross’s $2.2 billion “unconstrained” fund, the Janus Henderson Global Unconstrained Bond Fund, tumbled by 0.83% as markets plunged Monday. This may not sound like a lot but keep in mind that this is largely a fixed-income platform, and the drop happened to be its biggest since Dec. 30, 2016. It was also the worst one-day performance in Morningstar Inc.’s nontraditional bond category among 64 funds with at least $20 million in assets.

Finally, the one day swing reversed the fund’s year-to-date total return to a loss of 0.63% from a gain of 0.2%.

To be sure, the one-day loss clearly paled against the record 1,175-point crash in the Dow Jones Industrial Average, the move comes at a time when Gross has correctly called the recent rout in bonds, having recently declared the onset of a “mild bond bear market” before the 10Y yield spiked to 2.80%, while highlighting his returns compared to more traditional bond funds.

While the reason for the sharp daily drop is unclear, Bloomberg notes there are several possible explanations including:

  • The volatility spike: As a source of higher returns, his fund relies on selling the equivalent of insurance against big market moves. “Higher volatility in markets present opportunity to earn higher returns by selling volatility not cash bonds,” Gross said in a Tweet posted Monday. In retrospect, he may have sold a little too much.
  • Duration, or interest-rate sensitivity, that Gross recently put at minus two years, meaning the fund is positioned to benefit from rising bond yields. Ten-year U.S. Treasuries fell almost 14 basis points on Monday, the largest decline since September. “As yields go up and bond prices go down, the fund makes money,” he said in a Feb. 1 email. Of course, yields dropped sharply on Monday amid the flight to safety, which could have resulted in the substantial underperformance.
  • Holdings tied to currencies, commodities or other assets. When the fund’s returns slid at the end of December, he attributed it in an email to “an unanticipated decline in the dollar, which led to a gold price increase. The fund was short gold at the time.”

Gross’s Janus fund, which holds a sizable portion of his own personal fortune, has returned an average of just 2.2% annually over the last three years, ranking in the bottom half of its Bloomberg and Morningstar peer groups.

 

d

 

via RSS http://ift.tt/2nOkBte Tyler Durden

Rand Paul’s Plan to Eliminate Government Shutdowns: Automatic 1 Percent Budget Cuts

Government shutdowns are all the rage in Washington right now. We just had one a few weeks ago. Now, the president is already calling for another.

But while the prospect of shutting down the federal government might sound appealing, the reality of a government shutdown is expensive, wasteful, and therefore counterproductive to fiscal responsibility. The continuous threat of a government shutdown if Congress doesn’t enact a budget (or at least a three-week-long continuing resolution) doesn’t seem to be creating incentives for better fiscal stewardship. If anything, it’s doing the opposite. Restarting the government on Jan. 23 after a three-day shutdown required Congress to authorize an additional $31 billion in borrowing.

Rather than continuing to careen from near-shutdown to actual shutdown and back again, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) wants to force Congress to pass a budget by imposing a penalty that’s sure to give most of Washington nightmares: a 1 percent budget cut.

Under the terms of Paul’s Government Shutdown Prevention Act, which he introduced last month, Congress would agree to ongoing continuing resolutions that would kick-in if a budget was not passed on time. The catch is that the automatic CR would come with an automatic, across-the-board cut of 1 percent for all government agencies. After 90 days, if there is no budget deal, funding would be reduced by another 1 percent.

“Around here, spending 1 percent less ought to be a enough of a punishment to get people to do their jobs and do appropriations on time,” Paul said Tuesday during a hearing on his bill. “We know both sides don’t want spending to go down. They’re all for more spending.”

Historically, Congress has relied heavily on continuing resolutions to keep the government operating in years when budgets are not passed. Since a full budget has been passed only four times in the past 40 years, CRs have become the rule rather than the exception. But as the January shutdown—which ended with the passage of a laughably short 6-week CR and no resolution on any of the underlying issues that caused the impasse in the first place—demonstrated, budgeting on a week-by-week basis is no way to govern.

The current CR will expire on March 5, at which point another government shutdown could occur. President Donald Trump on Tuesday encouraged Republican leaders in Congress to let the government shutdown again, rather than reaching a deal with Democrats on a pathway to citizenship for so-called “Dreamers,” illegal immigrants who came to America as children and were given special protected status during the Obama administration. “I’d love to see a shutdown,” Trump told reporters on Tuesday.

“Even if there isn’t a shutdown and there’s the possibility of a shutdown, there’s a lot of planning and time that goes into that,” said Heather Krause, director of strategic programs for the Government Accountability Office, a federal watchdog. A proposal like Paul’s could help save time and money because government agencies would not have to plan for a possible shutdown. But automatic, across-the-board spending cuts like the 1 percent reduction Paul would include in the automatic CR can be problematic because it “equally cuts good and bad programs, so you’re not shifting around to what’s effective,” she said.

Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a fiscal policy think tank, supports Paul’s proposal but suggested that some Republicans might prefer the automatic CR, with its budget cuts, instead of reaching a new budget deal.

“Would both sides dislike it enough? I think it’s important to have something that would bring everyone to the table,” she said.

But it’s clear that Congress has little incentive to clean up its fiscal mess without a sword dangling over it’s collective head. Even if a long-term CR or a budget deal is passed before the next shutdown on March 5, there seems to be no political will to tackle the really serious threats to America’s long-term fiscal health—the national debt and entitlement costs chief among them—and leaders of both parties support the removal of what few spending limitations currently exist.

“There’s like a handful of people who are for any restraints or budget caps at all anymore,” says Paul. “And you’re going to find out this week. They’re going to blow through all the budgetary caps.”

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

The Death Of The “Death Of Contagion” Central Bank Meme

Authored by Tom Luongo,

Last year now-former FOMC Chair Janet Yellen downplayed the possibility of another financial crisis.  In her hubris she believes the central banks have walled off the financial system from ‘contagion risks’ brought on by over-investment in synthetic derivative market products.

Like generals, however, central planners are always fighting the last war.

We’re experiencing a major correction in the equity markets brought on in a mean-reversion exercise thanks to central banks trying to shore up their defenses around the last battle they lost, namely off-exchange, unregulated CDOs — synthetic debt-based investment products.

Humans are clever and will always find a way around a problem. The problem is incentives.  The banks created CDO’s because there was a demand for investment returns far above what the central banks were allowing the market to pay, by setting interest rates well below the real risk profile of the investment community.

In other words, government bonds were over-priced and investors went looking for better returns.  Now that Yellen et.al. have stamped out most of that market investors still need yield.

And that’s where the equity markets and the VIX come in.

VIX-ing the Markets

The response to the 2008 financial crisis was zero-bound interest rates and trillions in liquidity created by the central banks sitting around looking for yield.  It found its way into the equity markets which over the past six plus years been on an historic rally off the October 2011 low.

During that time the VIX became more important.   What was once only discussed by the real pros was now in the hands of everyone.  Contagion risks jumped asset classes.

For the uninitiated the VIX — or volatilty index — is a bet about the behavior of the S&P 500, itself an index of stocks.  Higher VIX values equal higher implied future volatility in the S&P 500 and vice versa.

In mathematical terms the S&P 500 is the first derivative of any single stock.  Stocks in the index trade in sympathy with it regardless of their current business.  The VIX is then the 2nd derivative of any stock in your portfolio.

During a rally the VIX falls.  But, now with so many products out there, ETNs — Exchange Traded Notes — both leveraged and un-leveraged — to speculate in the VIX it became easier and more profitable to trade it than the S&P 500 or individual stocks.

Trading volumes in these products have soared.  The tail didn’t just wag the dog, it became the dog.

Now these ETN’s are another derivative of the equity markets. And if they are leveraged, i.e. the note trades with twice or three times the volatility of the VIX itself (volatility of volatility), then options on these ETNs is the fourth derivative of the underlying stock.

Volatilty of volatility of volatility.

Look, fourth derivatives are noise. These computers are trading the VIX and the hedge funds are trading the noise.   Who do you think is going to win?

And they tell me that the Bitcoin markets aren’t real.  All the complaining about Tether ain’t got nothing on the fourth-derivative VIX trades out there.

You Can’t VIX this

So, thanks to Janet Yellen, the VIX kept rising in importance.  Yield-chasing momentum monkeys kept the one-way trade buoyant because the central banks had their back, same as quantitative easing has the bond traders’ backs.

And because it was a one-way bet thanks to the central banks pushing trillions into the stock market it was easy for them to multiply gains by factors of five or ten over that of the S&P 500.

And they call Bitcoin a bubble?

Add in the dominance of computer algorithm-based high frequency trading and the story pretty much writes itself.

The markets broke over the past two days because of the VIX finally became so over-valued and so many people had piled on thinking it would continue to go down forever, that when it snapped higher on Friday they were all caught short and had to liquidate.

This is a crowded trade that is so much more important than any cryptocurrency.

animal house

This manifests then in the stock indexes selling off, which, in turn, moves the bond markets, which affects gold and currencies which saw liquidity drain out of the crypto-markets.

So much for there not being any contagion risk anymore.

Contagion, Contagion, Contagion

As I pointed out last week, the sovereign bond markets were reaching panic levels in yield for European safe-haven issues as well as U.S. treasuries.  This is expected when the stock market is galloping to all-time highs.

But, it’s deeper than that.  The dollar is beginning to firm, the euro is in danger of breaking down.  Bond yields have not been stuffed back into their long-term downtrends.

This VIX explosion is a simple short-covering rally that will take a few weeks to sort out.  It will lop a 10-15% off the Dow Jones and the S&P 500.  They needed it.  The markets also needed a reminder that the central banks will not be there to save the equity markets in the future.

Their primary focus is the currency and the bond markets.

But there is a lesson here for the central banks and the bond markets.  If they think they have everything under control now, just wait until the interest-rate swap and derivatives markets blow up like the VIX just did.

Powell isn’t going to stop raising rates.  The equity markets will absorb this correction and move higher as government stability is questioned in Europe and Trump’s opponents press on to try and take him down for not playing by their rules.

Europe is teetering on the verge of political insanity (see here and here) with Italy’s election in 26 days, Hungary’s right after and the potential for Germany’s Grand Coalition to fail muster with the Social Democrats.

This correction will make stocks look attractive, further putting pressure on sovereign bond yields suppressed by central bank policy.  And once this correction reverses without any technical damage to the indexes (possibly today), the Fed will raise rates sooner than later.

I wouldn’t be surprised if Powell raised rates in March if the data was good, the Dow was back above 25,000 and Merkel forms a government in Germany.

And then all the pressure will shift to the European Central Bank.  Oh, and the VIX will go back to the zero-bound, but for completely different reasons.

via RSS http://ift.tt/2GVjfp2 Tyler Durden

Formula One Bans Sexy Grid Girls Over SJW Objections, Grid Girls Hit Back

Amid a brave new world of sexual consent forms and rage over the “patriarchy,” Formula 1 and its FAI ruling body has decided to ban the use of promotional models, known as “grid girls,” from its events because they don’t “resonate with [the] brand values [of F1] and clearly is at odds with modern day societal norms.” 

Whose societal norms? Has anyone checked out a college campus lately?

Grid girls
College girls

Instead of Grid Girls, meet “Grid Kids!” 

Replacing the Grid Girls will be F1’s new “Grid Kids” initiative – which is designed to entice younger fans to “get involved” in the racing sport – despite the fact that the program is only available to children who are already involved in a local motorsport club. 

“The joint initiative will involve the local Grand Prix promoter working alongside ASNs – the FIA-recognised national sporting authorities – who will provide a unique opportunity to youngsters and their families to be part of one of the most exclusive and exciting moments of the whole race weekend,” F1 said in a statement.

Participants will be chosen by merit or lottery, and will be able to accompany the world’s 20 best drivers at every Grand Prix – much to the chagrin of fans who were hoping to see scantily clad adult women at the events.

Now unemployed Grid Girls

The move by F1 follows a similar move by the Professional Darts Corporation banned walk-on girls from its competitions. Because dart competitions are just as fun without the girls. 

As Brutalist reports, the girls aren’t taking this sitting down:

Rebecca Cooper, a five time F1 grid girl, said on Twitter that it is “ridiculous that women who say they are ‘fighting for women’s rights’ are saying what others should and shouldn’t do, stopping us from doing a job we love and are proud to do. [It is] political correctness gone mad.”

Cooper also implied that grid girls have been misrepresented and put together a photograph collage to highlight that women who work in her trade are not “scantily clad furniture” and that the outfits are more modest.

For Michelle Westby, working as a promotional model in motorsports led to a successful career as a stunt driver and a drift racing driver.

Westby elaborated over Facebook:

If it wasn’t for grid work / promotional modelling, I wouldn’t be where I am now in a ‘male dominated’ sport and job as a stunt driver and drift competition driver, inspiring and influencing females into this ‘intimidating male environment.’ I get girls messaging me all the time saying how I inspire them and made them want to get into racing and drifting when they didn’t think they would be accepted… What people don’t realise, is that the girls have knowledge of the products and teams they are promotion — that’s part of the job. We get a brief on the uniform but it’s up to us if we feel comfortable in it. We are more clothed than what teenagers wear down the supermarkets. I’m now retired but to think girls have lost a lot of important income because feminists think they know best, when they really haven’t got a clue, is frustrating.

Fans and Grid Girls alike took to Twitter to denounce the decision, using the hashtag #Gridgirl

 

Formula 1 begins its 2018 season on March 26. Let’s see if SJW politics have the same effect as #kneelgate did on NFL attendance. 

What’s next?

via RSS http://ift.tt/2BbU0hY Tyler Durden

Crypto-Hearing Post-Mortem: Bitcoin Gains On Regulators’ “Balanced, Not Dismissive” Approach

Cryptocurrencies surged this afternoon (after being dragged lower in the equity volatility chaos) as the much-fear regulatory-hearing today surprised many with a “thoughtful not dismissive” sentiment.

As Liberty Blitzkrieg’s Mike Krieger notes, it’s not often you’ll hear me say positive things about a U.S. government regulator, but I nearly fell out of my seat when I heard what the Chairman of the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), Christopher Giancarlo, said at today’s hearing with the Congressional Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs.

In case you missed it, here’s his opening statement:

With your permission, I’d like to begin briefly with a slightly different perspective, and that is, as a dad. I’m the father of three college age children, a senior, a junior and a freshman. During their high school years, we tried to interest them in financial markets. My wife and I set up small brokerage accounts with a few hundred dollars that they could use to buy stocks, yet other than my youngest son who owned shares in a video game company, we haven’t been able to pique their interest in the stock market. I guess they’re not much different than most kids their age.

Well something changed in the last year. Suddenly they were all talking about Bitcoin. They were asking me what I thought, and should they buy it. One of their older cousins, who owns Bitcoin, was telling them about it, and they got all excited, and I imagine that maybe members of this committee may have had similar experiences in your own families of late.

It strikes me that we owe it to this new generation to respect their enthusiasm about virtual currencies with a thoughtful and balanced response, not a dismissive one, and yet we must crack down hard on those who try to abuse their enthusiasm with fraud and manipulation.

That’s just about as good as you’re gonna get from a government regulator. Beyond the fact that he’s advocating an entirely reasonable approach, I was shocked to see how well he had his finger on the pulse of one of the most significant and often overlooked aspects fueling Bitcoin and crypto assets overall, the generational factor.

This is something I’ve touched on in the past, most specifically in the post, The Generational Wheels Are Turning:

The financial crisis of 2008/09 similarly shattered the worldview of tens, if not hundreds of millions of people across the globe. I believe that the old manner of doing things as far as organizing an economy and society died for good during that crisis and its aftermath. Sure it’s been shadily and undemocratically propped up ever since, and we haven’t yet transitioned to what’s next, but for all intents and purposes it’s dead. It’s dead because it has no credibility.

Increasing numbers of people accurately see the institutions that currently manage our lives as outdated and corrupt. More importantly, many of us don’t want to simply replace the current crop of unethical people in charge with a new bunch, we want to completely change the way things are done at a systemic level. This is precisely what lies at the heart of Bitcoin, as well as decentralized, trustless systems in general. If there’s any fundamental lesson from history it’s that human beings cannot be trusted to use power and authority altruistically and wisely. As such, it’s imperative that we distribute those things as much as possible.

If you aren’t observing what’s currently happening with regard to Bitcoin’s ascendance (and crypto assets more broadly) from a generational perspective, you’ll completely miss the big picture. The Baby Boomer generation, which has dominated so many aspects of our country for so many decades — including the overall narrative of everything — is finally heading off into the sunset.

The perspectives of an entire generation of young Americans were forged during the corruption and lawlessness of the financial crisis. They know the financial system is a rigged fraud, and they know they got ruthlessly swindled before even graduating high school. They inherently understand these things, which is why they’re attracted to Bitcoin and not equity and debt securities. This is the exact backdrop that Chairman Giancarlo described in his opening statement, and I doubt this outlook will change any time soon.

When I see old finance people sound off on Twitter, the level of condescension, arrogance and ignorance toward Bitcoin is striking. It’s as if they haven’t talked to a person under 30 in the past decade, or if they have, they just ignore everything they have to say. Who do you think is going to shape the future of this world? Dismiss younger generations and mock their worldview at your own peril.

As I noted in my prior post:

If you want to try to figure out where we’re headed, you need to get out of your own head and into the minds of younger generations. While it’s fun to mock millennials and avocado toast, this is one of the most systemically screwed over generations in a long time. Thrown into the job market in the midst of an economic collapse, they watched their parents lose their homes while Wall Street got bailed out. These are lessons and experiences that stick around for life and fundamentally shape how one sees the world. The younger generations aren’t going to be interested in tinkering around the edges of the current paradigm, they’re going to want to replace it entirely. They have no loyalty to a system they’ve witnessed do so much damage.

I didn’t expect a U.S. regulator to get this, and for that I am thankful. So thank you Mr. Giancarlo, for having an open mind and listening to your children. After all, they’re the ones who will have to live on this earth a lot longer than us.

*  *  *

If you liked this article and enjoy my work, consider becoming a monthly Patron, or visit our Support Page to show your appreciation for independent content creators.

via RSS http://ift.tt/2Bbzu0V Tyler Durden

Vatican Official Says China, Which Persecutes Christians and Murders Dissidents, Is the Country ‘Best Implementing the Social Doctrine of the Church’

Bishop Marcelo Sánchez SorondoIn his five years as head of the global Catholic Church, Pope Francis has made a number of statements that go well beyond the magisterial purview to teach on faith and morals. Frequently, he steps into the realm of “prudential judgments” on difficult political questions—judgments that involve choosing the best means to a shared end, and judgments about which good and faithful Catholics need not always agree with the pope.

It seems one of his underlings has decided he can do one better, decreeing not just his own policy prescriptions but also his own facts. According to the Catholic Herald, the chancellor of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, Bishop Marcelo Sánchez Sorondo, has told Vatican Insider that China is the nation currently “best implementing the social doctrine of the Church.”

Taken a face value, the statement is astounding in its obliviousness. We are speaking of a country where forced abortion and even infanticide are the norm—a country that executes more humans a year than any other on Earth; that harasses, detains, tortures, and disappears its critics on a regular basis; that just last year passed a law to “strangle online freedom and anonymity, and further clamped down on media outlets for reporting that departs from the party line,” according to Human Rights Watch; that believes religious activities should be controlled by the state; that broke off relations with the Vatican half a century ago to that end; and that has been appointing its own Catholic bishops without consulting the pope ever since. This is the country Sorondo, recently returned from a visit, calls “extraordinary”?

“What people don’t realise is that the central value in China is work, work, work,” he said. On climate change, he added, the Communist government is “assuming a moral leadership” in the world. Personally, I’d have preferred that the Vatican assume a bit more “moral leadership” in Communist China.

That the statement comes at a delicate moment makes it all the more frustrating. The Church and the Chinese government have been exploring a possibility of rapprochement, with a Vatican spokesman saying that a new agreement could be inked any day. The move would be a controversial one, which many conservative Catholics around the world strongly oppose.

Catholics in China have for the last five decades been split, with some attending unauthorized “underground” churches, headed by priests loyal to the pope, and others attending state-sanctioned churches where the clergy is selected (or at least approved) by the government. In an effort to bridge the gap with Beijing, the Vatican is apparently replacing some of its own bishops with men chosen by the Chinese. At The Washington Post, one writer called the pending deal—which presumably would involve more such replacements and arguably would legitimize the Communist regime—”a capitulation of spiritual authority would damage the Catholic Church in China for years to come.”

But there are arguments on both sides. The Church has long wished to mend ties with China, and doing so has been a special goal of Pope Francis over the last few years. As Crux‘s John L. Allen wrote, the world’s largest country offers an opportunity to win souls on an incomparable scale, while better relations could improve the situations of the roughly 10 million Catholics already there. And there are many reasons to support greater openness between countries in general, including that human rights abuses are easier to carry out in places that are closed off from the view of the world. During the Cold War, Pope John Paul II famously charted a middle way between isolation of and capitulation to the USSR. He is remembered for helping to bring down Communism through his dogged support of Poland’s Solidarity trade union. Trade with China has already nudged the country into economic liberalization of various sorts over the last couple of decades.

Whether the case for dealmaking is strong enough to overcome genuine fears about the Church sacrificing its autonomy is a question that is open to debate. But Bishop Sorondo’s laughable suggestion that China is a model of Catholic social teachings takes a complex, controversial political question and answers it in the stupidest possible way. An authoritarian regime guilty of “widespread human rights violations” (to quote Amnesty International) is not a model of Catholic governance. For a senior Vatican official to suggest otherwise hurts the Church’s credibility and will rightly mobilize even greater resistance to both this deal in particular and the Fracis papacy as a whole.

from Hit & Run http://ift.tt/2Er4kVl
via IFTTT

Hillary Clinton Claims Climate Change Is Sexist

Can climate change be sexist? According to failed presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, the answer to that question is an unequivocal yes.

Particularly in the developing world, climate change will force women to shoulder the responsibilities of looking for food, finding firewood and migrating livestock once all of the grass has been transformed into a desert. Unsurprisingly, the future she describes bears an uncanny resemblance to the dystopian future depicted in the “Mad Max” franchise.

It’s unclear what responsibilities men will shoulder after the climate catastrophe has arrived in the future envisioned by Clinton.

“I would say that particularly for women, you’re absolutely right, they will bear the brunt of looking for the  food, looking for the firewood, looking for the place to migrate to when all of the grass is finally gone as the desertification moves south and you have to keep moving your livestock for your crops are no longer growing, they’re burning up in the intense heat that we’re now seeing reported across North Africa, into the Middle East, and into India.”

“So yes, women once again, will be the primary…primarily burdened with the problems of climate change.”

Clinton made these remarks during a speech at Georgetown University this week, where she also griped about how endemic misogyny was responsible for her embarrassing loss to President Donald Trump – continuing with her practice of never accepting responsibly for her failures. In her book “What Happened” – a memoir that was marketed as a mea culpa – Clinton famously blamed Bernie Sanders, the classic 90s comedy “There’s Something About Mary” and myriad other factors – for her defeat.

Because as the American people already know too well, nothing is ever Clinton’s fault.

Last month, we pointed out that GOP Congressional investigators wrote a letter requesting information from Clinton and other Democrats like former DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz. The investigators were seeking information about their role in disseminating the Steele dossier. Yesterday, Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley released a heavily redacted letter that nonetheless revealed the existence of a “second dossier” that was distributed to former Mi6 Agent Christopher Steele – the author of the salacious and unverified “Trump dossier” via a Clinton crony.

But we imagine that wasn’t her fault, either.

via RSS http://ift.tt/2BdaSF2 Tyler Durden