Month: March 2019

Dangerous cracks developing across Antarctica’s Brunt Ice Shelf are due to unleash a massive iceberg twice the size of New York City, according to NASA researchers who warn when it breaks, it could destabilize the entire shelf.

NASA recently released images acquired by Landsat satellites of Antarctica’s Brunt Ice Shelf, where a rift is visibly slicing through the shelf. Researchers said the crack had been stable for more than three decades, but since, has been moving north at about 2.5 miles per year.

“The near-term future of Brunt Ice Shelf likely depends on where the existing rifts merge relative to the McDonald Ice Rumples,” said Joe MacGregor, a glaciologist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. “If they merge upstream (south) of the McDonald Ice Rumples, then it’s possible that the ice shelf will be destabilized.”

The rift is moving toward another fissure, as known as Halloween crack, that is located 3 miles away. Halloween crack was first discovered in 2016, continues to move east, and when the two rifts intersect in the very near term, an iceberg is formed measuring 660 square miles.

“We don’t have a clear picture of what drives the shelf’s periods of advance and retreat through calving,” said NASA/UMBC glaciologist Chris Shuman.

“The likely future loss of the ice on the other side of the Halloween Crack suggests that more instability is possible.”

Researchers are puzzled on what drives this process, known as calving, could mean the health of the shelf is in immediate danger.

“At worst, this calving could destabilize the remainder of the Brunt Ice Shelf leading to its complete collapse,” Dominic Hodgson, a senior scientist at the British Antarctic Survey, told NBC News Tuesday in an email.

“This would then likely be followed by an acceleration of ice in the upstream glaciers, increasing their contribution to sea level.”

Calving is a natural part of the life cycle of ice shelves, but recent rifts forming in the region are unusual. The edge of the Brunt Ice Shelf has evolved since Ernest Shackleton surveyed the coast in 1915, but in the last several years, the speed of its transformation has been accelerated.

The risk of the 660 square mile shelf breaking off has prompted safety concerns for researchers working in the area, particularly researchers at the British Antarctic Survey’s Halley Station, a major base for Earth, atmospheric, and space science research typically operates year-round, but has recently closed operations due to unpredictable changes in the ice.

If the converging cracks destabilize the ice shelf even further, a massive iceberg twice the size of New York City could soon be soon floating in the South Atlantic Ocean.

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2Ta070v Tyler Durden

Submitted by SouthFront.org

A Russian defense contractor, Kalashnikov Concern, named after one of the most famous small-arms designers of all time, is now producing kamikaze drones designed to destroy remote ground targets.

The “high-precision unmanned aerial system” KUB-BLA was for the first time showcased at the International Exhibition of Arms and Military Equipment 2019 in Abu Dhabi. The drone delivers an explosive charge on the coordinates of the target, which are set manually or can be acquired automatically by uploading image of the target into the guidance system.

The KUB-BLA has a 3-kilogram payload, a flying time of 30 minutes, and a 80-130-kilometer-per-hour speed. It measures 1210mm wide by 950mm long and 165mm high. Typically, the payload is apparently a high-explosive charge. Kalashnikov Concern says that the advantages of the system are “hidden launch, high accuracy of the shot, noiselessness and ease of handling”.

Furthermore, it seems that the KUB-BLA has already been battle-tested in Syria.

On October 19, 2015, a swarm of five mysterious suicide drones attacked a military position of the Ahrar al-Sham Movement near the town of Maar Shamarin in the Syrian province of Idlib. A few hours after the attack, the local SMART News Agency interviewed the fighters who survived the attack. They all seemed to be shocked and terrified by the “Wunderwaffe” that killed one of their comrades and destroyed most of their equipment.

Back then, nobody was able to identify these drones. Some sources suggested that these were the ZALA 421-16E. However, this drone has no offensive capabilities and the vestiges of the employed suicide UAVs showed little match with its design.

In turn, the design of the KUB-BLA appeared to be similar, even in small details, to the mysterious suicide drones, which hit the Ahrar al-Sham position. Another factor is the location of the attack. Maar Shamarin is 27km north of Morek, the stronghold of Syrian government forces back in 2015. Taking into account the declared characteristics of the KUB-BLA, the kamikaze drone should be capable of hitting  targets in the range of about 40km. This range was more than enough to reach the Ahrar al-Sham position even if the drone was launched from the area behind the frontline.

This was not the first time when the Russians Defense Ministry used Syria as a test-ground for its modern weapons and equipment. According to official data, Russia tested over 300 types of weapons and equipment, including the Su-57 fifth generation fighter jet, the Uran-9 unmanned combat ground vehicle and the Terminator-2 armored fighting vehicle, in Syrian since the start of its anti-terrorist operation in the war-torn county in 2015. However, the October 19 event is the first case ever when it is reasonable to assume with a high probability that the Russian side employed an attack drone of any kind during the conflict.

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2Uf0of8 Tyler Durden

Meet Dr. Herbert Wertheim, a South Florida optometrist and small businessman who in several decades, became a billionaire.

Wertheim, 79, is a self-made billionaire worth $2.3 billion, according to Forbes‘ The World’s Billionaires list. His fortune comes from numerous inventions and buy-and-hold investing.

Wertheim could very well be the most significant individual investor many Americans have never heard of, and he recently sat down with Forbes to prove it.

Madeline Berg, a reporter at Forbes following the money, flipped through Wertheim’s brokerage statements which showed hundreds of millions of dollars in tech stocks like Apple and Microsoft, purchased long ago at their IPOs. There are dozens of other blue-chip stocks in the portfolio, ranging from GE, Google, BP, and Bank of America.

Here is Wertheim’s interesting path into becoming a billionaire.

In the early 1960s, he attended the Southern College of Optometry and after graduation started a small practice in South Florida. At nights, Wertheim spent his time tinkering on inventions, and in 1969, he invented an eyeglass tint for plastic lenses that filtered dangerous UV rays, helping to prevent cataracts.

Demand for Wertheim’s tint erupted, and he sold the royalty for $22,000. However, because of contractual breaches, he never collected any royalty funds from the deal.

So in 1970, Wertheim formed a new company, Brain Power Inc. (BPI). He established the company as a technology consulting firm, but at the same time, he reverted to developing tints, dyes and other technologies for eyewear.

A year later he invented the world’s first neutralizers, a chemical that restored lenses to their original state. At the time, he showed his wife a can containing the new chemical and said, ‘Nicole, what’s in this can is going to make us millionaires.’ ”

Between the tints, dyes, and neutralizers, Wertheim rolled the new technology into BPI, which became one of the world’s largest manufacturers of optical tints, selling products to companies like Bausch & Lomb, Zeiss and Polaroid.

Forbes said BPI “never achieved hypergrowth,” but it allowed Wertheim more freedom to pursue a life of investing.

Similar to Warren Buffett, Wertheim believes in doubling down when he feels passionate about companies.

“If you like something at $13 a share, you should like it at $12, $11 or $10 a share,” Wertheim says. “If a stock continues to go down, and you believe in it and did your research, then you buy more. You are actually getting a better deal.” Whenever possible, he adds, dividends are useful in cushioning the pain of stocks that drift down or go sideways.

Wertheim tells Berg he bought Microsoft at its IPO in 1986. “I knew a lot about computers and had been involved in building them,” he says. BPI used Apple IIe’s, but after Microsoft released its Windows operating system in 1985, Wertheim fell in love with the company. “Only Microsoft had an operating system that could compete with Apple,” he recalls.

The Microsoft shares he owns, which has been paying him a sizeable dividend since 2003, are now worth more than $160 million.

He also owns 1.25 million shares of Apple, mostly purchased during its 1980 IPO and also at $10 in the 1990s, are worth $195 million.

“My goal is to buy and almost never sell,” he says, parroting a Buffettism.

“I let it appreciate as much as it can and use the dividends to move forward.” In this way Wertheim, like the Oracle of Omaha, seldom reinvests dividends but instead uses the cash flow from his portfolio to either fund his lifestyle or make new investments.

Wertheim’s billionaire status is not just a result of his buy-and-hold strategy, but it was his ability to buy the right stocks at the right time – during the start of four decades of easy money from the Federal Reserve.

Given that equity valuations are at levels never witnessed in the modern era, the return profile for the stock market in the next decade is rather scary: “A run-of-the-mill completion of this cycle will be a -60% loss in the S&P 500, erasing its entire total return vs T-bills since roughly 1998. What will shape that trajectory over shorter periods, but not ultimately, is the condition of market internals,” said John Hussman of Hussman Funds.

With that being said, maybe buy-and-hold investing has peaked, and a return to actively-managed portfolios is the next trend.

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2IMgk7c Tyler Durden

Authored by Eric Zuesse via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

Here are America’s recent targets for regime-change (against which have been used economic sanctions, invasion, and enormous destruction) – and all of them are nations that never invaded nor threatened to invade America: 

Iraq 2003,

Libya 2011,

Syria 2011-2018,

Yemen 2015-now, 

Ukraine 2014,

and Venezuela 2017-now. 

Because all of these were and are aggressive wars by the US against nations that never invaded nor threatened to invade the US, they all ought to be subject to mega-criminal prosecutions as was done by the US, Britain, and USSR, against Germany at the Nuremberg Tribunals after World War II. That was merely victors’ ‘justice’, applied by the US, Britain and USSR, but this would instead be actual international justice, the first instance of such in all of world history. It’s desperately needed — especially now.

America’s Government and news-media were and are remarkably unanimous in saying that these invasions and coups are and were done in order to advance democracy and human rights in the given target-nation. However, what it actually brings and has brought, in each and every case, is, instead, massive bloodshed, death, poverty, destruction, and outpourings of refugees — and an increasingly dangerous world, the current world.

Is this lying, by the US and its allies, and their ‘news’-media, mere hypocrisy, or is it something even worse — far worse? In any case, only a fair and international juridical tribunal that’s controlled by no nation and by no alliance of nations can possibly deliver a credible verdict on this. And, so, such international criminal trials must be organized and carried out, or else even worse can be expected to occur. Impunity is desirable only by and for gangsters, and no land where it exists can reasonably be called “democratic.”

America’s news-media — especially the mainstream ones — not only cover-up important truths, but they routinely lie. Both the Democratic Party’s media and the Republican Party’s media report the same lies, which are the Government’s lies, on these international matters. These are lies on which there is bipartisan unity by the nation’s press (and by both political Parties), in order to deceive the public, into support for invading and occupying, or overthrowing via a coup or otherwise, some foreign government. Their target is always a government which America’s billionaires who control international corporations want to replace, and so the US regime unanimously lies against that targeted government, as being dangerous and evil, even though the given takeover-target has never invaded, nor threatened to invade, the United States — is no real national-security threat to the American people. Only on the basis of lies can that succeed. This is the main function of the press, in such countries: deceit, on those international matters.

In other words: the US Government is fascist, like the Axis powers were in World War II. This is worse than, for example, merely wasting billions of dollars on building a border-wall against Mexico in order to protect Americans, but it receives far less press-attention (perhaps because the press is so unanimous in endorsing and supporting these atrocities — and that’s yet further evidence of the American regime’s fascism). The press is owned by, and funded by ads, and donations from, America’s billionaires, the very same people who fund our politicians and who also own controlling interests in the weapons-firms such as Lockheed Martin, which can’t survive without these weapons-sales, and which therefore demand constant conquests, in order to create new markets for their wares, new “allied nations.”

So, naturally, America’s military is mainly the enforcement-arm of the billionaires who control US-based international corporations (especially the weapons-firms and the extractive firms such as mining and fuels, which corporations crave to control foreign natural resources), and those people also control America’s Government and press, and this produces the unanimity for these regime-change operations — which likewise fits the fascist model. 

The US is clearly the world’s leading fascist nation, and there is no close second (and none of the nations that the US regime is trying to conquer is fascist at all). What Germany was under Hitler, the US is and has been at least since the time of US President Ronald Reagan. The US has been a dictatorship since at least 1981.

Coup or invasion (either form of aggression) is an international war-crime, but the deceit against America’s public usually succeeds, because the public trust especially the billionaire-controlled mainstream press, which is always leading these lies-for-conquest. 

Furthermore, almost all of the ‘alternative news’ media are likewise owned by (and funded by ads or donations from) wealthy interests that participate in and benefit from this mass-deceit — from the stenographic ‘news’ reporting, the Government’s accusations against the particular target-nation that’s about to be (or has been) regime-changed. 

For example, all of America’s ’news’-media were stenographically reporting the US Government’s many lies about ‘Saddam Hussein’s WMD’, in order to ‘justify’ America’s kicking out the UN’s weapons-inspectors and simply bombing Iraq and invading and militarily occupying, and basically destroying, that country (which had never invaded ours) in 2003. All of America’s ‘news’ media did the same, but especially all of the mainstream ones did, of both the right and the left, all the way from Fox News to the New York Times. They all were hiding the truth and lying to support an illegal invasion — an international war-crime under international law, and violation of the UN’s Charter. Did Americans stop buying those ‘news’papers and watching those ’news’ channels, and buying those ’news’ magazines, after the truth became reluctantly exposed (during 2002-2005) that those ‘WMD’ didn’t exist and no longer had existed after 1998? No, those same ‘news’-media still are successful. (They all ought to be long-since out-of-business, but such accountability doesn’t exist in the news-business. Not only does a major ‘news’-medium hide its own corruption and lying but it hides that of all other major ‘news’-media, because otherwise the entire ‘democratic’ system of control by the nation’s billionaires would simply collapse.) 

America’s ‘news’-media report just as much false ‘news’ (not merely what they call “fake news,” but actually false ‘news’) today, as they did back then, because America’s ‘news’-media cover-up not only for themselves, but also for each other, since they all lie so routinely in order to ‘justify’ their Government’s aggressions, coups, military invasions, foreign mass-murders, etc., and those invasions and coups are part of the unspoken business-plan of them all, for growth or expansion of their global control. 

These atrocities are all done for ‘national security’ reasons, and in order to ‘spread democracy’, and in order to ‘protect human rights around the world’ — and Americans continue to believe it, and to believe the regime, and to subscribe to those same mainstream (and hangers-on) ’news’-media. Accountability against lying doesn’t exist in a hyper-aggressive ‘democracy’, a would-be all-encompassing global empire, which America has certainly become.

Today, these ’news’-media hide that they’ve been lying when they report that Russia ‘hacked’ Hillary Clinton’s email and John Podesta’s computer. Just click onto that, right there, and you will immediately see the latest documentation that it’s all mere lies against Russia, which is the only nation that does actually possess the military wherewithal to stand up against the US regime (since it inherited the arsenal of the former Soviet Union when the Cold War ended in 1991 on their side — though that war secretly continued and still is continuing on the American side). 

These fabrications could have many reasons, but perhaps the likeliest is in order to increase weapons-sales by Lockheed Martin and other US weapons-makers, all of which are 100% dependent upon their sales to the US Government and to its allied governments. (There are consequently interlocking directorates between the ‘news’-businesses and the armaments-firms, and the Wall Street banks, and the think tanks, etc.; and all of this is intensified by the revolving door between Government officials and the private sector, such as generals becoming directors of ‘defense’ firms.) But this fraud that ‘Russia hacked the election’ has been exposed before, though not with the same thoroughness as it is in that latest news-report, which comes from the “Sic Semper Tyrannus” blog. You might happen to think that it must be ‘fake news’, because it’s from a non-mainstream site? It comes from Bill Binney, who is the NSA whistleblower who was the NSA’s top signals-intelligence analyst before he quit in disgust at the Government’s lying. Of course, he had tried all the mainstream ‘news’-media as prospective outlets for this news-report, but they’re not interested in exposing the truth — because that would expose themselves to be liars. Once a major lie is told, and told repeatedly, by a major ‘news’-medium, exposing that lie would be exposing itself — and none do that.

They also hide that they’ve been lying to report that America was justified to bomb Syria on 11 April 2018, justified to do it in order to punish Syria’s Government for having perpetrated a chemical weapons attack on 7 April 2018 in the town of Douma — a chemical weapons attack that was actually fabricated by the US and its allies, and which US Government lie is still being protected (hidden from the public) by the US regime’s ’news’ media, which media, for example, fail to report that the OPCW did not find any such attack to have occurred:

“OPCW Issues Fact-Finding Mission Reports on Chemical Weapons Use Allegations in Douma, Syria in 2018 and in Al-Hamadaniya and Karm Al-Tarrab in 2016”

Friday, 06 July 2018

THE HAGUE, Netherlands — 6 July 2018 — The Fact-Finding Mission (FFM) of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), issued an interim report on the FFM’s investigation to date regarding the allegations of chemical weapons use in Douma, Syria on 7 April 2018.

The FFM’s activities in Douma included on-site visits to collect environmental samples, interviews with witnesses, data collection. In a neighbouring country, the FFM team gathered or received biological and environmental samples, and conducted witness interviews.

OPCW designated labs conducted analysis of prioritised samples. The results show that no organophosphorous nerve agents or their degradation products were detected in the environmental samples or in the plasma samples taken from alleged casualties. Along with explosive residues, various chlorinated organic chemicals were found in samples from two sites, for which there is full chain of custody. Work by the team to establish the significance of these results is on-going. The FFM team will continue its work to draw final conclusions.

If those “final conclusions” are ever made public by OPCW, will you trust your ’news’-media to report them honestly? And, if the conclusions never are published, will you think that the US regime and its ’news’-media are war-criminals there, just as they were in Iraq, and Syria, and Yemen, and Ukraine, and so many other countries?

According to Russian Television, or “RT” — which all major ’news’-media in the US and its allied regimes say is ‘untrustworthy’ — “Real ‘obscene masquerade’: How BBC depicted staged hospital scenes as proof of Douma chemical attack”. That op-ed by the great British investigative journalist Vanessa Beeley, who specializes in Syria, isn’t published by the BBC, or by ABC, NBC, CBS, NPR, PBS, Fox, MSNBC, CNN, New York Times, Guardian, or Washington Post. It’s too honest, for that. Could this be part of the reason that they call RT ‘fake news’? If so, maybe RT should replace them, at least for international reporting.

And, before that, there was the claimed 21 August 2013 sarin gas attack in the town of Ghouta by Syria’s Government, which was actually done by the US Government’s allies who were trying to overthrow and replace Syria’s Government — it’s what’s called a “false flag attack” — one that’s designed to be blamed against the other side, in order to serve as an ‘excuse’ to invade. The American Government and its ‘news’-media keep making suckers out of the American public this way, and yet the American public continue to subscribe to them — to pay their good money, for such evil propaganda. Apparently, nobody is even embarassed. It simply keeps happening, again and again.

Another recent example is the ‘democratic revolution’ in Ukraine in February 2014, which was actually a US coup that destroyed that country.

And the latest example is the US-and-Canada-led effort to impose a fascist regime in Venezuela.

Furthermore, as one of the perceptive reader-commenters to that latest Binney article on ‘Russiagate’ noted:

“Craig Murray, in a very revealing but neglected interview with Scott Horton, said: ‘I should be plain that the Podesta emails and the DNC emails of course are two separate things and you shouldn’t conclude that both have the same source. But in both cases, we’re talking of a leak not a hack, in that the person who was responsible for getting the information out had legal access to that information.’” Murray, a whistleblower and former UK Ambassador, had been personally involved in that, by transferring a thumb-drive from the DNC whistleblower to Julian Assange, and he also said there, “If you are looking to the source of all this, you have to look to Americans,” and not at all to any Russians or other foreigners. 

The comprehensiveness of the deceit by the US regime is beyond what the vast majority of Americans can even imagine to be the case. It is simply beyond the comprehension of most people. And that false ‘news’-reporting then becomes basic to, and enshrined in, false but best-selling ‘history’-books, so as to deepen, yet further, the deception of the public.

On Sunday, February 24th, the “Zero Hedge” independent news-site headlined “WaPo Quietly Deletes Branson’s Venezuela Concert From Article After ‘Fake’ Attendance Figures Exposed” and reported (and documented) that the British billionaire Richard Branson’s free pop-concert on Friday February 22 at the Venezuela-Colombia border in support of Washington’s attempted coup to overthrow Venezuela’s democratically elected President had drawn less than 20,000 fans instead of what had been reported in the US regime’s Washington Post, which had reported that 200,000 attended, and that as soon as the US regime’s fraud was publicly exposed — which was done by means of a photo of the crowd which had been taken by Dan Cohen of Russia’s RT, plus careful independent calculations by the “Moon of Alabama” blogger — the US regime’s ‘news’paper retroactively removed their ‘news’-report’s crowd-size-estimate from the online version of their ‘news’-report. Of course, the ‘error’ had already been physically printed in that trashy ‘news’paper, which might (at its discretion) subsequently publish a printed correction, saying that they’d only been trying to fool their subscribers in order to assist propaganda supporting the US regime’s grab for control over Venezuela.

The problem isn’t ‘fake news’ from RT or from small online sites (such as all of the major media claim to be the case), but false ‘news’ from mainstream US (and allied) ‘news’ (propaganda) media. They’ve all got millions of victims’ blood on their hands, and they’re not even a bit ashamed of any of it — and of shifting the blame for it to the targeted nations.

*  *  *

PS: Max Blumenthal is an investigative journalist who formerly believed the lies from the (think tanks and other agencies of the) billionaires who finance the Democratic Party. He was the star journalist at one of the Democratic Party’s leading ‘alt-news’ propaganda-sites, AlterNet, until he lost his employment there after starting to expose the rot that he had previously been fooled into supporting. He increasingly moved away from liberalism to progressivism; and the Democratic National Committee doesn’t want any of that, except as window-dressing — and Blumenthal decided he could no longer do that. He became unemployed for a while and then established, along with another former AlterNet reporter “The GrayZone Project,” in order to continue being employed. Blumenthal recently issued a YouTube video in which he interviewed star Democratic Party Presidential aspirant Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and other members of Congress “Is the US Meddling in Venezuela? Max Blumenthal Asks US Congress Members.” As you can see there, all of them are either mildly or very supportive of Trump’s coup-attempt in Venezuela. Unfortunately, Blumenthal didn’t interview Tulsi Gabbard, who might possibly be an exception to the depressing rule that corruption reigns, and who recently announced her candidacy for the US Presidency. Nor did he interview Bernie Sanders, nor Sherrod Brown, nor Elizabeth Warren, all of whom likewise are competing for the progressives’ votes in the upcoming Democratic Party Presidential primaries. As for the other Democratic contenders, they’re competing to become instead the new Hillary Clinton — the American billionaires’ favorite. Instead, with Trump, we got in the 2016 Presidentials their second choice.

On February 18th, Blumenthal and a colleague, Alexander Rubinstein, headlined at one of the few sincere and honest US-based international-news sites, “Mint Press,” “Pierre Omidyar’s Funding of Pro-Regime-Change Networks and Partnerships with CIA Cutouts”, and they exposed Omidyar, the owner of a famous ‘news’ site that’s targeted at naive progressives, “The Intercept.” Whereas Mint Press is called ‘fake news’ by America’s billionaires’ ‘news’-media, The Intercept (which isn’t nearly as honest as Mint Press is) is not. The dictatorship’s aim is to crush the truth, and (like The Intercept does) they let in just enough of truth so as to keep hidden what’s most important to them to keep hidden from the public — things such as what Blumenthal and Rubinstein are now disclosing. 

Everybody except America’s 585 billionaires should be reading sites such as the ones that publish Blumenthal and Rubinstein, and other honest investigative journalists (which are banned at all of the mainstream sites). Propaganda that poses as ‘news’ has to be crushed, in order for truth itself not to be crushed. But can their exposé of Omidyar win a top national journalism award without thereby bringing down the entire rotten and corrupt superstructure of lies? And that would also bring down the enormous international crimes this superstructure has supported and continues to support, such as Iraq 2003, Libya 2011, Syria 2011-2018, Yemen 2015-now, Ukraine 2014, and Venezuela 2017-now. 

If such news-reports cannot win top journalism prizes, then what hope is there, realistically, that things will ever be able to improve?

Only by removing the blinders from the public, can the public see the light and the actual truth, about the world in which they are living. That’s what is needed in order for democracy to be able to exist. What now exists is, instead, dictatorship. That’s the current reality. It includes the European Council, which is the unelected government of the EU, which clearly is a dictatorship (and this is true even if Brexit is wrong), and it also includes every other ally of the US regime. The EU was created by the US and its allies after WW II. It “always was a CIA project.” FDR was dead, and maybe whatever there had been of US democracy died along with him. The UN that exists is not the one that he had intended and so carefully planned. We’ve been living in a charade. It didn’t start in 1981. There is this, and there also is this. It’s FDR’s vision turned upside-down and inside-out. That’s the actual world of today. It’s based on lies.

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2IK5zCf Tyler Durden

Submitted by Gordon Johnson Of Vertical Group

Earlier this evening in a widely anticipated announcement, TSLA, again, cut the prices on all existing cars – the third such cut in just two months – with the price concessions ranging from 4.8%-to-13.6% (Exhibit 1). Furthermore, TSLA announced availability of the widely anticipated $35K Model 3 (more on this below) – while this is welcome news to many, it comes 15 months after the car’s original promised timeline, which means the cost sensitive US buyer has lost $3,750 of the federal EV tax credit (and the true $35K version will only come in black, with any additional paint colors costing an extra $1.5K-$2.5K). However, TSLA also warned that 1Q19 would see its earnings go back into negative territory (after two straight quarters of profit), and announced its third round of layoffs just this year (TSLA is cutting the majority of its sales locations globally, shifting to a 100% online purchase model).

In short, there’s a lot to unload here; however, we believe tonight’s move is proof-positive TSLA has a serious demand problem (if TSLA was not experiencing tepid demand, in our view, it would not have cut the prices on all its cars three times just this year). In fact, we view this as an all-in move by TSLA to try to stay solvent (by our calculations, demand is very bad right now – we believe the Feb. sales report from InsideEVs will disappoint). With respect to the numbers, prior to today’s $2.9K price cut for the Mid-Range Model 3, TSLA cut the price by $2K on 1/2/19, then by $1.1K on 2/5/19. Moreover, when one also considers the fact that TSLA cut the price for Enhanced Auto Pilot (“EAP”) from $5K to $3K, or $2K in total, that’s another ~$1.540K in lost margin (~77% of buyers purchase EAP, so a $2K price drop is equivalent to a ~$1.540K drop in gross margin – EAP has virtually no associated costs, so it’s all margin). So, adding it all up, the ~20% margin on TSLA’s Mid-Range Model 3 alluded to in 4Q18 is now ~13% (by our calculation). Consequently, with OPEX expected to be up ~9% in 2019, that means TSLA is now firmly back in the loss-making column.

Exhibit 1: TSLA Pricing Dynamics

MODEL 3 DEMAND SET TO TAKE OFF… RIGHT? As detailed in Exhibit 2 below, with TSLA losing its Consumer Reports recommendation recently (link), as well as a number of well documented issues/problems with its Model 3 cars, for those that are saying the $35K Model 3 will unlock hundreds of thousands of incremental purchases, we are skeptical. What do we mean? Well, even with the price-cuts announced today, for the price-sensitive consumer looking to buy the $35K Model 3, the acquisition cost is still +18% higher than originally planned, and will rise even higher to a +24.8% premium 7/1/19 (when TSLA’s federal EV tax credit gets cut in half  again).

Exhibit 2: Model 3 Affordability Tracker    

WILLIAMS & CONNOLLY HEADS FOR THE EXITS: In our view, and raising yet another red flag, TSLA’s lead counsel in its case against the SEC, Williams & Connolly, seems to have quit on the company with E. Musk facing an ongoing contempt motion (Exhibit 3) – link. In short, while it’s hard to know all the specifics here, our experience suggests changing lead counsel in the middle of an ongoing case with the SEC is not a good thing.

Exhibit 3: William & Connolly Leave TSLA as Counsel

TSLA GUIDES TO A LOSS IN 1Q19: Finally, as we warned earlier this week, TSLA  is now guiding to a loss in 1Q19 vs. the current Consensus estimate for +$0.63/share in EPS.

CONCLUSION: We believe TSLA has a serious demand problem. That is, after building up backlog for two years for Model 3 cars and then burning through it in 3Q18 and 4Q18 we see TSLA’s current demand as far below its targeted production. We maintain our SELL rating and $72/shr year-end 2019 price target. We would be aggressively shorting TSLA’s shares.

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2VsCMnu Tyler Durden

Authored by John Rubino via DollarCollapse.com,

When the financial markets got, um, choppy towards the end of 2018, the Fed caved almost instantly. But only rhetorically.

Fed chair Powell promised to stop raising interest rates and shrinking the money supply, and the financial markets, trained to salivate at the sound of Fed happy talk, immediately morphed from “risk-off” to “risk-on.” Stocks are now approaching last year’s all-time highs, bond prices are way up (which is to say long-term interest rates are way down) and the financial press is back to celebrating the “Goldilocks economy.”

But remember that as far as actual monetary policy goes, nothing has changed. Last year’s Fed Funds rate increases are still in place, while the Fed’s balance sheet remains diminished (which is to say the cash drained from the economy as the bonds in the Fed’s account were retired remains out of action). So the damage has not been undone, and it’s starting to bite. Some examples:

US retail sales are falling:

source: tradingeconomics.com

Housing, which a year ago was in a mini-bubble, is rolling over. Housing starts are down…

source: tradingeconomics.com

… while existing home sales have cratered:

source: tradingeconomics.com

US manufacturing orders missed big in the most recent reporting month:

Corporate earnings, meanwhile, are so weak that analysts are talking about an “earnings recession”:

From a February Zero Hedge article:

One week ago, when looking at the dramatic collapse in consensus Q1 EPS estimates, we noted that the “profit party” is over and the days of near record earnings growth are about to end with a bang as a result of the recent barrage in profit warnings and negative preannouncements, first and foremost starting with Apple, which issued a shocking guidance cut one month ago for the first time since 2001. As a result, analysts have slashed their S&P500 earnings estimates for the first quarter, and the Q1 bottom-up EPS estimate dropped by 4.1% (to $38.55 from $40.21) during this period.

All eleven sectors recorded a decline in their bottom-up EPS estimate during the first month of the quarter, led by Energy (-22.5%) and Information Technology (-7.3%). Overall, seven sectors recorded a larger decrease in their bottom-up EPS estimate relative to their 5-year average and their 10-year average for the first month of a quarter.

And the slowdown is global. Here’s German GDP growth:

In February MarketWatch asked:

Is Germany already in a ‘technical’ recession? These economists think so

Investors are worried that a global slowdown led by China could begin to sap U.S. growth, but it’s Europe that’s looking a little sickly at the moment.

Expectations that Germany, Europe’s largest economy, could post a second consecutive quarter of falling gross domestic product were on the rise after a dismal reading on November industrial production last week, which showed a 1.9% fall, defying a forecast for a 0.3% rise.

“Industrial production data was a proper disappointment this month. Our German GDP tracker has deteriorated to minus 0.1% [quarter-on-quarter]. This would be the second consecutive [quarter-on-quarter] GDP contraction, meaning Germany could now be in a technical recession,” wrote economists Evelyn Herrmann and Gilles Moec at Bank of American Merrill Lynch, in a Monday note (see chart below).

Germany’s slowdown is attributable in part to slowing activity in China, the economists said. And concerns about China are certainly on the rise thanks to homegrown headwinds and the continued trade battle with the U.S.

What does all this mean? Mainly that despite the recent bounce in US financial asset prices, the Fed didn’t succeed in stabilizing the real economy. With the major countries pretty much all slowing down, corporate profits will likely fall this year. Falling corporate profits tend not so support record-high share prices. And the longer the slowdown continues the bigger the risk that stock investors will catch on and panic, taking us back to the flash bear market of late 2018.

Then it gets interesting. Realizing that words have failed, the Fed will be forced to stop promising and start delivering. So the second act of this play will be not just a pause but a reversal of last year’s tightening.

But this won’t work either. A modest reduction in interest rate cuts and slight increase in asset purchases will buy, at most, another two-month pop in share prices, followed by another realization that the economy is still weakening, followed by yet another, probably much bigger stock market plunge.

Eventually, we’ll settle into a permanent state of ever-increasing QE, zero-to-negative interest rates and every imaginable kind of fiscal stimulus.

A simple way to gauge our place on this path is the price of gold. When Act Two (gradually falling interest rates, modest QE) is implemented, gold should bounce back up to around $2,000/oz. Once Act Three (massive, permanent QE, NIRP, bailouts for bankrupt states and cities) is in full swing, gold should pass $5,000 on its way to infinity.

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2GWKeUL Tyler Durden

Months before Beijing abandoned its deleveraging plans and approved a gargantuan 4.64 trillion yuan credit injection (including the “shadow” credit that the government had vowed to curb) – which, as we pointed out at the time, resembled the January 2016 “Shanghai Accord” intervention (when Beijing famously intervened to stop global stock markets from careening off a cliff) – a team of S&P credit analysts warned in an October report that China’s debt burden might be much larger than previously believed.

Against a backdrop of soaring corporate defaults, the team from S&P warned that investors could safely tack on another ~40% of debt/GDP to China’s total (with even more likely hidden from view) after a careful analysis of a new source of shadow debt being tapped by local governments to further their development plans. These Local Government Financing Vehicles, or LGFVs, represented “an iceberg with titanic credit risks” as local officials had increasingly turned to these sources of shadow financing to finance development projects while bureaucrats in Beijing struggled to turn off the credit taps.

Now that Beijing has reckoned with the idea that now is not the time to try and contain the country’s massive debt load, even as the percentage of bad debt balloons, it increasingly appears that these measures might be too little, too late for investors who financed these LGFVs, as the Wall Street Journal revealed in a report about how a local government in China’s impoverished Southern had caused a stir by stiffing its creditors after racking up a debt pile – largely through these LGFVs – equivalent to roughly three times the government’s annual revenue.

When a group of wealthy investors traveled to Sanhe to confront the local government, they were swiftly rebuffed, leaving them little recourse to recover their money.

Meanwhile, many of the buildings that their money helped to finance stood half-finished.

A building splurge in this impoverished pocket of rural China ended in half-finished projects and a trail of angry investors from some of the country’s wealthiest areas.

On a recent winter workday, investors and representatives from private fund companies in Shanghai and elsewhere descended on Sandu, a county in the deep south where tens of thousands of locals live on less than a dollar a day. After taxi rides from the high-speed rail station that took them past incomplete buildings and a gigantic golden statue of a man on horseback, they sat in government offices, demanding repayment.

“We sympathize with you investors,” Jian Shiwei, deputy general manager of a Sandu government-backed investment company that borrowed hundreds of millions of yuan to develop the area. “But there’s no money right now.”

Though it might be tempting to chalk this up to the mismanagement of Sanhe’s local officials, WSJ claimed that situations like this are playing out in rural areas across China.

The standoff in Sandu is a microcosm of China’s mounting debt problem. Across the country, local governments and their more than 2,000 financing companies have run up trillions of dollars of debt to borrow and build their way to prosperity, tapping into ready financing from well-off investors chasing higher returns. Now the bills are coming due, and China’s slowing economy, curbs by Beijing on risky financing—and the massive scale of borrowing—are plaguing repayment and leaving some investors in limbo.

After the confrontation with investors and just before this month’s Lunar New Year holiday, Sandu hustled out interest payments for some overdue obligations. Still, investors and brokers estimate that the government and its companies will need to deliver two billion yuan ($297.6 million) more in payments this year, nearly three times Sandu’s annual revenue.

Many regional governments are already struggling with debt piles in excess of 100% debt-to-GDP, and that’s before factoring in the shadow financing sources.

And it’s not just wealthy Chinese fund managers who are being left in the lurch; many residents opted to invest in these vehicles after being seduced with high advertised returns – only to see their savings vanish. One investor who spoke with WSJ claimed that the shortfall wasn’t the local government’s fault, but a result of mismanagement and regulatory failures impacting the entire Chinese financial system.

“Sandu has its problems, but we can’t blame it,” said Jiang Xiaqiu, a factory owner and investor who bought 1.6 million yuan of Sandu’s debt via a private fund in Beijing, with an advertised 9% annual return. “It’s the whole financial system and how poorly regulated the private fund industry has been.”

Sandu’s government debt totaled 3.73 billion yuan in 2017, according to official figures. Deputy propaganda chief Wu Maohua declined to comment on what the sum includes; some economists, analysts and experts say it doesn’t cover recent borrowings by government-backed investment companies, including off-the-book borrowing from private funds.

In Sanhe, problems first arose after the local Communist Party chief was removed in a bribery investigation last year. The region missed its first debt payment in September, but has been struggling to make up these payments.

Mr. Wu said the county is working to resolve its debts, pointing to the overdue payments given to some investors. “You can see the government is being very diligent,” he said.

For its borrowing spree, Sandu turned to funds like the one Ms. Jiang invested in. These privately offered funds have mushroomed, with more than 74,000 of them, nearly 10 times the number five years ago. Independent brokers and wealth advisers market the funds to well-off clients. Ms. Jiang said a broker connected her with fund managers.

While putting a number on thee amount of shadow debt in the system is difficult due to the opacity of the Chinese financial system, one economist at a domestic think tank estimated that off-balance-sheet borrowings by local governments could be as much as 23.6 trillion yuan, as of the end of 2017, meaning that total is likely higher today, as governments have been forced to tap these vehicles during Beijing’s deleveraging campaign.

The proliferation of private funds and other money-raising channels for local governments makes it difficult for economists and for Beijing to track the total amount of borrowings. Official figures pegged the sum of local and central government debt at 29.95 trillion yuan ($4.457 trillion) in 2017, roughly 36% of the economy.

[…]

Off-balance-sheet borrowings by local governments are estimated to be nearly just as much, at 23.6 trillion yuan by 2017, according to Zhang Ming, an economist at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, a government think tank. When this hidden debt is factored in, he said, total government debt is about 67% of the economy. But the proportion is much higher in some places, such as less-developed areas trying to catch up, and Mr. Zhang’s estimates don’t capture all borrowings, especially those involving private funds outside banking channels.

Fortunately, Beijing’s latest reversal should at least reopen the taps for on-the-books debt, allowing governments to restart some of these projects, and potentially raise money to pay back the LGFVs. But whether this could work as a long-term solution is doubtful, as most see it as just another episode of can-kicking by Beijing, in the absence of real structural reforms.

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2IK0PwJ Tyler Durden

Authored by Tim Donner via LibertyNation.com,

Democrats are misinterpreting their mandate and dramatically overestimating the popularity of their agenda…

In an age where tribalism rules – that’s our narrative and we’re sticking to it, right or wrong – it is increasingly rare to experience the sensation of someone in the opposing tribe reinforcing our own view of things.

Richard Cohen

That’s why it was instructive, if not heartening, to see a long-prominent liberal opinion writer at The Washington Post, of all places, provide unexpected affirmation of what is becoming increasingly clear to conservatives: The Democrats are laying the seeds of their own destruction in the 2020 election.

Richard Cohen, more a conventional 20th century liberal than an AOC-inspired woke socialist, has penned a piece in WaPo entitled “Democrats are Handing Trump a Gift.” And it is quite useful in helping us understand how rank-and-file Democrats view the direction of their party. For while the resistance wing of the party receives most all of the attention these days, don’t kid yourself: There are millions of standard-issue Democrats who want their party to win, but are actually more concerned about the state of the nation than with taking down Donald Trump at any cost, or resorting to socialism to draw as sharp a contrast as possible with the president.

Cohen starts with a bang in evaluating the perilous state of the Democrats as they head for the 2020 presidential election:

“I don’t quite know what a handbasket is, but the Democratic Party is heading in one to electoral hell with its talk of socialism and reparations.”

The author has evidently not donned the blinders or rose-colored glasses so many on the left are wearing, in believing their increasingly radical brand of statism will appeal to the broader electorate.

To punctuate his point, Cohen continues:

“the party is … determined to give Donald Trump a fair shot at re-election by sabotaging itself. In fact, it’s veering so far to the left it could lose an election in 1950s Bulgaria.

Democratic socialist ideas appear to be making significant headway in the party. The Democratic part is fine, the socialism part is not. It suggests a massive government intrusion in the economy that has not worked elsewhere — post-war Great Britain or that contemporary mess called Venezuela — and that, in a cultural sense, is un-American. Time and time again, the American people have shown they want nothing to do with socialism … imprecations of socialism and endorsements of reparations are anathema to the electorate, socially and racially fragmenting a nation that urgently needs unity.”

But wait, there’s more: Cohen goes on to describe the wet-behind-the-ears socialist sensation Democrats are afraid to tame, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY):

“[AOC] is political poison, the product of a freak election in a New York City district where the past has taken root — socialism and a lot of rot about the evils of capitalism.”

Did we just witness a liberal actually defending capitalism? Yes, we did. And it drives home the point that there are millions of Democrats who want an active federal government, but still hold to an essential, if unformed, belief in free markets and free people – just like conservatives.

But with all their talk of the Democrats’ increasingly radical “base,” identity politics, and the “social justice” movement, the legacy media is putting the fear of God in the party’s traditional rank-and-file – those who see Trump as vulnerable but are watching their party’s standing increasingly threatened with each new discussion about abolishing ICE, the Green New Deal, reparations, and “free” everything.

One would ordinarily conclude that the party will come to its senses and nominate a candidate who, at a minimum, doesn’t scare the bejesus out of ordinary folk. But how many of their current or prospective candidates would meet that qualification? Joe Biden, sure, if you want to go with a white guy who crested at 1% in two previous bids for the White House. Cohen also mentions John Kerry, loser to George W. Bush 15 years ago and if nothing else a big-time beneficiary of white privilege (remember his windsurfing in Nantucket). And there’s Michael Bloomberg, former New York City mayor who is one of the very few in his newfound party to defend capitalism, euphemistically calling the Green New Deal “unrealistic.” But at this point, there is hardly a groundswell for any of that trio. Quite the opposite – Kamala Harris (D-CA), the fully intersectional supporter of the Green New Deal and reparations, and the nominal frontrunner at this point, is the new norm.

Democrats are jacked up after winning the House in the 2018 midterms, but they are misinterpreting their mandate and dramatically overestimating the popularity of their agenda. They seem to have forgotten how they tamped down and undersold their leftist vision in the days leading up to that election. Given all the socialist water that has passed under the bridge in the almost four months since, it may now be impossible to do the same for 2020.

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2EoclYS Tyler Durden

America’s top military commander traveled to Capitol Hill Tuesday to tell lawmakers there is no specific force coming from the south toward the Mexico–United States border that poses a significant threat to the homeland or Army personnel stationed along the border.

Air Force Gen. Terrence O’Shaughnessy, head of U.S. Northern Command and North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORTHCOM), told the Committee on Armed Services that “threats” coming from Mexico “are not military in nature.”

“A secure border does reduce threats to the homeland [but] … it is not a military threat,” he stated. “Border security is national security. [But] right now, there is not a specific military force from the south that we are trying to take action against.”

Based on O’Shaughnessy’s testimony, Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., said there is a gap in evidence that supports President Donald Trump’s declaration of a national emergency, which circumvented Congress to fund the construction of the wall in response to a series of Central American migrant caravans approaching from the south.

O’Shaughnessy’s comments are similar to a leaked powerpoint presentation by the Joint Force Land Component Commander Threat Working Group titled “Operation Faithful Patriot.”

The presentation is marked as “UNCLASSIFIED,” originally obtained by Newsweek, is an intelligence assessment of the of Central American migrant caravans.

The document states, “based on historic trends, it is assessed that only a small percentage of the migrants will likely reach the border.”

The assessment also said 200 armed militia members are currently operating along the southwest border, “under the guise of citizen patrols,” were a much more significant threat than the caravan.

When O’Shaughnessy was asked about the legitimacy of Trump’s national emergency declaration, he said, “I did not recommend either way,” adding that he has had “multiple conversations” with President Trump about the border, that he had provided “his best military advice,” and that he was “comfortable” with the advice he had given the president.

“You’re saying in effect that there’s a national emergency because the president has said there’s a national emergency,” said Sen. Blumenthal.

“No, sir, what I’m saying is from my perspective I get my orders from the secretary of defense and the president, and those orders are very clear to me,” responded O’Shaughnessy.

O’Shaughnessy’s testimony comes as the Pentagon prepares to increase the number of troops on the border by 1,000. The Washington Post reported last week that the total could grow to 6,000 in the weeks ahead.

Also, the House on Tuesday passed a resolution to overturn President Trump’s emergency declaration on the border wall. The vote was 245-182. The resolution will next be taken up by the Senate.

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2IIbNCA Tyler Durden

Via AntoniusAquinas.com,

One reason for the failure of the modern conservative and libertarian movements to scale back, in even a miniscule way, the now gargantuan US welfare/warfare state has been the misinterpretation of the US Constitution.  Many conservatives have a slavish devotion to the document, placing it on a par with the Ten Commandments and New Testament.

A typical misunderstanding of the Constitution’s history and content appeared in this recent op-ed:

The Constitution was intended to limit 1) the power of government over the citizenry 2) the power of each branch of government and 3) the power of political/financial elites over the government and the citizenry, as the Founders recognized the intrinsic risks of an all-powerful state, an all-powerful state dominated by one branch of government and the risks of a financial elite corrupting the state to serve the interests above those of the citizenry.

The author, like so many “Constitution enthusiasts” has also been hostile to the Medieval era, denigrating its institutions and social constructs – feudalism, aristocracy, crusading – when, in fact, the Middle Ages, in many respects, were far freer with less government than the present epoch.

When the founding fathers decided to meet in Philadelphia in 1787, they did so at first to “amend” the Articles of Confederation which had guided the young country through some perilous times.  While the Articles had some defects (some libertarians even contend that they were too statist), the delegates, at first, did not want it scrapped, however, it was the “leading lights” of the convention which connived to completely do away with it.

By superior political maneuvering, the pro-Constitution forces were able to ramrod their plan through despite being in the minority.  Not only were the majority of the delegates initially against scrapping the Articles, but most Americans were opposed to the creation of a new central government. 

Despite this, the Constitution was ruthlessly pushed through and, as its opponents feared, America would be saddled with a highly centralized national government, the loss of considerable state sovereignty, and the eventual erosion of individual liberties even with the inclusion of a Bill of Rights.

A brief examination of the document reveals that its implicit and explicit language grants wide latitude for the expansion of state power.  In its Preamble, the ambiguous clause to “promote the general welfare” can and has led to all sorts of destructive social engineering schemes.  More ominously, for anyone that is under the illusion that America is governed by a “federal” system, they should reread Article VI which in part says

This Constitution, and the Laws of the United his Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land.[emphasis added]

An all-powerful central state went against much of Western history after the fall of the Roman Empire and the idea was always feared by philosophers.  Basic political theory and practical experience showed that a multitude of sovereign states were preferable not only for the protection of personal liberty, but for economic growth.  Numerous states and jurisdictions were a far greater check on government than the much celebrated “separation of powers” concept of constitutional government.

Under the Articles of Confederation, each individual state was autonomous while the national government had to rely on the states for most of its support.  Unfortunately, it will never be known what would have happened if the country remained as a confederacy of states, it is likely however, that there would have been less bloodshed, greater economic growth, and more personal freedom under a decentralized regime.

It is curious, therefore, why so many on the Right continue to revere the Constitution as some great bulwark against state power.  Much of it probably stems from ignorance or personal bias against the political conditions which existed prior to the late 18th century. 

Much of European history was under the sway of monarchial and aristocratic rule and the integral presence of the Catholic Church in society with a diffusion of power among kings, princes, dukes and Churchmen.  While far from perfect, the social order which existed under Christendom may not have been as materially or technologically advanced as contemporary times, but in regard to morality, justice, and individual freedom, there is no comparison.  The Christian age saw nothing of the social depravity, war making with its mass murder, the trampling of individual rights, and the existence of totalitarian government as witnessed in the supposedly “enlightened” modern age.

Decentralized Europe of 1300

Until it is realized that the Constitution is an impediment to rolling back the American Leviathan, there will be little progress in the fight for individual liberty and economic progress.

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2EEvJSW Tyler Durden