Month: November 2019

California isn’t the only thing that’s burning: hedge funds invested in PG&E are slowly watching their cash go up in smoke.

Investors in the company lost roughly $4.1 billion in the four days after the current blaze in Sonoma County broke out on October 23, according to the Wall Street Journal. Shares rebounded late last week, but are still about 85% lower than their 52 week highs, poking around the mid single digits while hedge funds and equity investors try to analyze numerous bankruptcy outcomes that the company might face. 

The company’s market cap has been cut to about $3.4 billion from highs of $37 billion in 2017. Bond prices have fallen as much as 12.5%, which is the biggest decline since it was determined that PG&E equipment set off the campfire in Northern California last November. 

The volatility has made it difficult for hedge funds to profit from what is being called the “first major bankruptcy induced by climate change”. 

Stephen Byrd, head of utilities research at Morgan Stanley said: “Climate change has had a big impact on investing in California utilities, and the risk of fires is here to stay.”

Among the funds that have invested in PG&E equity or bonds are Abrams Capital Management LP, Baupost Group LLC, Elliott Management Corp. and Värde Partners.

The sell off last week was helped along by the Kincade Fire’s quick spread through the state. An increasing number of wildfire claims against PG&E could easily wipe out the company’s equity and take the company’s junior bondholders with it. 

Andrew DeVries, a bond analyst at the research firm CreditSights said: “The number one question for investors is are they on the hook for the Kincade Fire and, if so, how much will that cost. The answer is nobody knows.”

And the uncertainty is putting pressure on negotiations between PG&E’s investors, insurers and existing wildfire victims – pressure that could prevent the company’s plans for exiting bankruptcy.

Bondholders have already pledged billions to the company to pay out wildfire claims, but made the deal contingent upon a provision that the damage from the current fires doesn’t exceed 500 buildings. The Kincade Fire has already damaged 246 structures, as of mid-last week. 

An increase in claims could jeopardize the profitable plan of buying up insurers’ claims against PG&E at a discount, a plan that Baupost and other investors are betting on. 

PG&E has said that one of its power lines malfunctioned shortly before the Kincade Fire, but the exact cause and any liability associated with it are still unknown. The Kincade Fire started despite PG&E plunging the state into darkness with precautionary “safety” blackouts, which we have reported on extensively here on Zero Hedge. 

Since the Kincade Fire started, about $4.4 billion worth of the company’s bonds have traded hands. 296 million common shares have also changed hands. Holders of the bonds are on the hook for paper losses of about $1.4 billion as of the end of last week. Equity holders have taken aggregate losses of about $1.1 billion in the same time period. 

Bonds with the highest annual interest payments are experiencing the most pressure. Hedge funds like Elliot had bought into these bonds in hopes that they could recover as much as 130 cents on the dollar after accounting for past-due interest. These bonds fell as much as 18% to prices as low as 90 cents on the dollar after the Kincade Fire started. 

Davidson Kempner Capital Management, a fund that held $767 million of bonds, sold out of the position on Monday. Other fund managers hedged against their bond positions by shorting the company’s equity, one trader said.

Steadfast Capital Management LP said on Wednesday that it lost 1.47% from its investment in PG&E stock in the third quarter, calling it a “terrible decision”. 

“This is a powerful example of high-degree-of-difficulty investing and one that, in hindsight, we should have avoided,” the fund said in its letter. 

 

Authored by Mike Shedlock via MishTalk,

Here’s the 6 most recent Tory poll results: 40, 36, 34, 36, 41, 36. Is there a trend? Yes, you have to dig to find it.

It’s easy to see that Boris Johnson and the Tories have a lead. But is it 4% or 17%?

Is YouGov right or Opinium? What about Survation?

This is not the right way of looking at things. You can go mad watching these results seemingly jump all over the place.

Some of these pollsters are going to be way off the mark.

Theresa May was supposed to win in a blowout but she barely hung on.

Missing the Picture

In regards to Theresa May, nearly what everyone missed was the trend heading into election day.

While most of the polls had the Tories winning, the trends were decidedly moving towards Labour in the last couple weeks before the election.

That was a very ominous sign for the Tory party.

Had the election been a week later she may have lost. Had the election been a week earlier, she may not have needed DUP to survive.

Trends

What are the trends?

There seems to be a lot of give and take if you aimlessly follow the latest polls.

However, the trends are very clear if you plot by pollster.

Tory Party Poll Trends

Data for my charts is from Wikipedia.

The range of the most recent Tory polls is 34-41%.

All six of the pollsters have the Tory party gradually and consistently gaining strength.

Labour Party Poll Trends

The range the six most recent Labour polls is 21-29%.

Four of six polling organizations suggest support for Labour is stagnant. The other two say support for Labour is rising, but not as steeply as support for the Tories.

ComRes shows a rising trend for Labour, but it from October 10 and is thus very stale.

One bad print from ComRes will have 5 of 6 stagnant trends for Labour.

Clustering

• The six most recent polls for Labour average 24.17%
• The six most recent polls for Tories average 37.17%

That’s an average lead of 13%, easily enough for a Tory landslide.

Leave or Remain?

YouGov Poll Trends say people support Remain.

But check out another YouGov poll.

No Deal and No Corbyn

By a 48% to 35% margin, Britons would rather have No Deal and no Corbyn than Corbyn.

That poll is from August 17, 2019 and might easily be more skewed against Corbyn today.

My trend charts support that determination.

Electoral Calculus

Electoral Calculus had it this way in September.

“Our regular month-end poll of polls shows an average Conservative lead of seven per cent over Labour. This is just enough for a small majority in the House of Commons, which is the headline prediction above.”

Electoral Calculus October 30

“Prediction based on opinion polls from 01 Oct 2019 to 25 Oct 2019“

That is a stunning victory for Johnson even without a Brexit Party alliance.

National Polls

It’s important to not overemphasize support for Remain.

This is not a national election.

London would overwhelmingly vote Remain, but London business leaders certainly do not want Corbyn.

National polls don’t count in a first-past-the-post regional voting system. This is what Hillary Clinton found out in spades.

These Brexit trends can change at any time, but there is no particular reason to believe they will.

Like it or not, voters are getting more comfortable with Johnson, and Johnson has business on his side.

Signaling what will be a major uptick in US drone activity across western Africa, US African Command (AFRICOM) announced Friday its airbase Agadez, Niger has gone operational, not just flying surveillance drones as was originally expected, but also armed combat drones. 

Flights from the base, called Air Base 201, began last week and the patrols are to aid US-Nigerien military patrols in rooting out regional ISIS militants and other Islamist factions which have been threatening the area. Specifically US officials say the armed drone program is badly needed due to prior ISIS ambushes on US-Nigerien troops. 

The Air Force Times described on the biggest deadly such attack:

The move comes a little more than two years after four Army soldiers were killed on Oct. 4, 2017, in an attack on a joint U.S.-Nigerien military patrol by an ISIS offshoot known as Islamic State in the Greater Sahara.

The US Air Force, which has described the $110 million constructed airfield as among the harshest locations in the world from which the military operates, endured multiple delays in establishing the base given the difficult remote desert environment. 

“I would say that the construction of Air Base 201 will go down as one of the most Herculean efforts in the history of the United States Air Force,” Brig. Gen. Michael Rawls of the Air Force’s 435th Air Expeditionary Wing in Africa described earlier this year. 

The new airfield can reportedly allow surveillance and reconnaissance across the extensive Lake Chad Basin area, which includes Chad, Cameroon, Nigeria and Niger. 

This will no doubt further commit the Pentagon to a long-term presence in Niger amid continued broader AFRICOM expansion.

Authored by Tom Luongo via Gold, Goats, ‘n Guns blog,

Nigel Farage has thrown down the gauntlet to Boris Johnson over the election strategy. Johnson has refused.

Of course he did. Farage made an offer Johnson couldn’t accept, ditch the Withdrawal Treaty he just negotiated with the EU and truly campaign on a far harder Brexit than Johnson has ever advocated for.

If he doesn’t do that about-face, Farage’s Brexit Party standing candidates in more than 500 seats and potentially split the Leave vote.

Mike Shedlock thinks Farage’s deal is “Preposterous.” Mike is wrong. It is the only offer Farage could offer the Tories and stay in any way relevant in a time of electoral chaos and party fluidity.

It is the kind of ‘big ask’ that his friend Donald Trump would make. It may be an opening bid in a complex negotiation that ends with them making a pact towards the end of the campaign.

Frankly that only happens if the polls shift considerably from where they are.

Politics is not a game for the timid or the weak. If Farage is to be a big player in British politics he needs to act like he is a big player in British politics.

And that means sticking to his core message, a real Brexit where the U.K. regains sovereignty over itself in a timely manner. 2022 is not timely for the U.K.

It is, however, timely for the EU, given the realities of its continent-wide political uprisings against its rule.

Farage is smartly not just saying that Brexit is his party’s raison d’etre, he’s using Brexit as the means to change the post-Brexit political environment, something the Tories are absolutely dead set against.

Farage has positioned the Brexit Party on a “Change Politics for Good” platform that proposes sweeping changes to the system from proportional representation to a written constitution and reforming the House of Lords.

This is, as Monty Python would say, something completely different.

The statement itself cuts to what’s fundamentally wrong. It’s aspirational and tells the voters they still have the real power after three years of parliamentary shenanigans designed to marginalize them while being insufferably condescending.

We’ll find out in the next couple of weeks as to whether Farage et.al. can make the case to British voters that these changes go hand in hand with Brexit. Are these people not only tired of the endless Brexit wrangling but now truly awake to the depth of the betrayal of their political representatives?

If they are then Boris Johnson will have a real problem come December 12th.

Because that is a platform, beyond Brexit, that cuts across all party lines.

The Tories are rallying around their common message now that they have an election. There are serious misgivings within in the party on Johnson’s deal and the strategy. But fear of losing Brexit has motivated the strongest Brexiteers to cave to what Mike rightly points out has been the political reality.

But that was before the election was secured.

Hard core Leavers like Marc Francois and Steven Baker, prominent members of the ERG — European Research Group — are on board with the deal and have called out Farage as lying about it.

But, arguing that these guys being on board with Boris’ treaty means it’s a good deal is simply appeal to authority while missing the much larger point.

The Tories are the main mechanism by which the British Deep State and political elite maintain control over not only British policy, but also that of the U.S. and much of Europe. Don’t for a second think that these ERG guys are any less compromised in the end than the outright Remainers like Ken Clarke, Dominik Grieve or Philip Hammond.

They will always put party before country in the end. Most of them proved it during Theresa May’s multiple rounds of blackmail last spring by eventually voting for that deal because, ultimately, they are spineless.

Fear of losing Brexit is what motivates them. Fear of Farage upsetting the apple cart in Westminster is also very real.

Farage may be overstating the threats within the political declaration to the U.K.’s bargaining position during Free Trade Agreement talks, but he also knows the EU side of the ledger far better than any of the newly-promoted back-benchers in the ERG.

So, if I’m going to resort to appealing to an authority on the subject I’m going with the guy who put the world in this situation in the first place, Nigel Farage.

That said, however, Farage’s strategy is a risky one. There’s no doubt about that. With the most recently published polls putting Johnson at his peak of popularity and the Brexit Party languishing around 10% Farage has a lot of ground to gain in six weeks.

There are real worries that Farage’s support in the Labour heartland of the Midlands and the Northeast isn’t as strong as he thinks it is. But, given how fundamentally split the Remain vote is between the Liberal Democrats and Labour, I don’t see how Farage hurts Johnson unless Farage’s numbers rise.

And Johnson will absolutely try to duck any head-to-head meetings between them just like Theresa May did.

But you don’t change things by being timid. Farage doesn’t win loyalty by going up to Boris Johnson, bowl in hand, and asking for another ladle of gruel. You act like the big dog and you challenge the alpha who, to this point, doesn’t even know what he signed the U.K. up for.

I maintain that Johnson is a fake Leaver and none of his behavior has contravened that, including duping the ERG into backing a now unnecessary Withdrawal Treaty which served its purpose to get a general election to get rid of a rotten Parliament.

Johnson and the ERG know this, and yet, they will persist in putting party first, betraying Northern Ireland, keeping the U.K. as close to the failing EU as possible and all the while calling it Brexit.

Given those circumstances would you expect Nigel Farage to offer Boris Johnson anything more?

*  *  *

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Authored by Germinal G.Van via The Mises Institute,

It has been widely, vividly, but nonetheless wrongly believed that socialism is the appropriate system to improve the living standards of Africans. Worse yet, it has been misleadingly claimed that socialism is compatible with African culture because African culture is fundamentally a collectivist culture.

However, one fact remains undisputable: socialism has failed wherever it was tried, and the African countries that have experimented with socialism were not exempted from its failure.

The undeniable fact remains that Africa has the lowest living standard of all continents after Antarctica. The reason why the living standard of the majority of African countries is so low compared to the rest of the world, is because socialism has impoverished the African continent.

At the outset of the post-colonial era in the 1960s many African countries — such as Tanzania, Angola, Mali, Ethiopia, Ghana, Mozambique, Egypt, Senegal, Guinea, Congo and many more — have embraced socialism as their economic and political system. These countries that have embraced socialism became significantly worse off by the 1980s. For example, Tanzania was one of the fast-growing economies in East Africa until Julius Nyerere implemented the “Ujamaa,” which means socialism and brotherhood in the Swahili language. Before the implementation of the Ujamaa; Tanzania had a GDP similar to South Korea . Subsequently to the implementation of Ujamaa, economic growth became unsurprisingly stagnant. The policy of collectivization impoverished the Tanzanian people. Food production fell, and the country’s economy suffered . This decline in productivity has made Tanzania one of the poorest countries on the continent. In Ghana, under the rule of Kwame Nkrumah, one of the foremost African political leaders of the post-colonial era; socialism was also implemented as the economic system of the country. 

Socialism, as a domestic policy in Nkrumah’s seven-year development plan, was to be pursued toward “a complete ownership of the economy by the state.” A bewildering slate of legislative controls and regulations were imposed on imports, capital transfers, industry, minimum wages, the rights and powers of trade unions, prices, rents and interest rates. Private businesses were taken away and nationalized by the Nkrumah government. The result has also been unsurprising. Resources were mismanaged, inflation rose, and economic stagnation occurred in Ghana. Zimbabwe has also suffered from the myths of African socialism under Mugabe’s rule. Mugabe collectivized the means of production in the late 1980s when he became Zimbabwe’s strongman. 

Rampant corruption, huge budget deficits, and mismanagement of resources have dragged the economy, hyperinflation, 60 percent unemployment, and a desperate shortage of hard currency. These examples clearly demonstrate how socialism had utterly stagnated the economies of these countries until a market economy was once again reinstated.

But the question remains as to why Africans deeply believed in socialism and embraced it in the 1960s. In Africa, socialism was presented as an anti-colonial and anti-imperialist ideology while capitalism was perceived as the ideology of the oppressor, the colonizer, and of profit. Africans strongly believe in socialism because they think that socialism is compatible with African culture since African culture is a collectivist culture. African culture values the group over the individual. It values the concept of sharing, solidarity, and altruism. Of course, all these moral virtues are well-intended, but they play no substantial role in the improvement of the living standard of people. What improves the living standard of people is the ability to retain private property, to voluntarily exchange with one another what we own in order to create capital. Some African countries in the post-colonial era resisted the socialist temptation; notably countries like Côte d’Ivoire, Kenya, and South Africa.

For example, in the 1960s and 1970s, Côte d’Ivoire was the most economically advanced country in West Africa. While its neighbors were embracing socialism, Côte d’Ivoire opted for a market economy. Despite having an authoritarian political regime, like all African countries during that time; the Ivorian people were, nonetheless, economically free. They had the freedom to create businesses, and to expand private property. From 1960 to 1979, the GDP in Côte d’Ivoire grew at 8.1 percent per year, which means that in real terms capita, it increased from $595 to $1,114. Cote d’Ivoire’s economic expansion during that period was called “The Ivorian Miracle” because the country was exporting agricultural goods to the neighboring countries have had a shortage of food production due to their socialistic policies.

The Ivorian Miracle made Côte d’Ivoire the most prosperous nation in West Africa between 1960 and 1980.

What Africans have failed to grasp about capitalism and the free market is that, it is not a system intrinsic to Western culture. It is a system intrinsic to human nature regardless of race, ethnicity, or the local culture. Socialism has failed in Africa as it has failed in Eastern Europe, India, China and in South America. Even if Africa is culturally collectivist, it is important to comprehend that a group is a collectivity of individuals whereby each individual within the group is stimulated by the pursuit of his own interests. The pursuit of one’s self-interests is an intrinsic factor of human nature that no central authority can change regardless of the goal of the common good.

Despite the collectivist nature of African culture, African culture is not exempted from that natural law of human nature. Coercing human nature to do something that is not in harmony with the nature of human understanding, will result in failure. That is why socialism, wherever it is tried, will always fail.

Authored by Pepe Escobar via The Saker blog,

Compare US pillaging with Russia-Iran-Turkey’s active involvement in a political solution to normalize Syria…

What happened in Geneva this Wednesday, in terms of finally bringing peace to Syria, could not be more significant: the first session of the Syrian Constitutional Committee.

The Syrian Constitutional Committee sprang out of a resolution passed in January 2018 in Sochi, Russia, by a body called the Syrian National Dialogue Congress.

The 150-strong committee breaks down as 50 members of the Syrian opposition, 50 representing the government in Damascus and 50 representatives of civil society. Each group named 15 experts for the meetings in Geneva, held behind closed doors.

This development is a direct consequence of the laborious Astana process – articulated by Russia, Iran and Turkey. Essential initial input came from former UN Envoy for Syria Staffan de Mistura. Now UN Special Envoy for Syria Geir Pedersen is working as a sort of mediator.

The committee started its deliberations in Geneva in early 2019.

Crucially, there are no senior members of the administration in Damascus nor from the opposition – apart from Ahmed Farouk Arnus, who is a low-ranking diplomat with the Syrian Foreign Ministry.

Among the opposition, predictably, there are no former leaders of weaponized factions. And no “moderate rebels.” The delegates include several former and current parliament members, university rectors and journalists.

After this first round, significantly, the committee’s co-chair, Ahmad Kuzbari, said:

“We hope that our next meeting could take place in our native land, in our beloved Damascus, the oldest continuously inhabited capital in history.”

Even the opposition, which is part of the committee, hopes that a political deal will be clinched next year. According to co-chair Hadi al-Bahra:

“I hope that the 75th anniversary of the United Nations next year will be an opportunity to celebrate another achievement by the universal organization, namely the success of efforts under the auspices of a special envoy for political process, who will bring peace and justice to all Syrians.”

Join the patrol

The committee’s work in Geneva proceeds in parallel to ever-changing facts on the ground. These will certainly force more face-to-face negotiations between Presidents Putin and Erdogan, as Erdogan himself confirmed: “A conversation with Putin can take place any time. Everything depends on the course of events.”

“Events” seem not to be that incandescent, so far, even as Erdogan, predictably, releases the whiff of a threat in the air: “We reserve the right to resume military operation in Syria if terrorists approach at the distance of 30km to Turkey’s borders or continue attacks from any other Syrian area.”

Erdogan also said the de facto safe zone along the Turkish-Syrian border could be “expanded,” something that he would have to clear in minute detail with Moscow.

Those threats have already manifested on the ground. On Wednesday, Turkey and allied Islamist factions launched an attack against Tal Tamr, a historic Assyrian Christian enclave 50km deep inside Syrian territory – far beyond the scope of the 10km patrol zone or the 30km “safe” zone.

Poorly-armed Syrian troops pulled out under fierce attack, and with no apparent Russian cover. The Syrian military on the same day issued a public statement calling on the Syrian Democratic Forces to reintegrate under its command. The SDF has said a compromise must be reached first over semi-autonomy for the northeastern region. Thousands of residents in the meantime fled farther south to the more protected city of Hasakeh.

Two facts are absolutely crucial. The Syrian Kurds have completed their pull out ahead of schedule, as confirmed by Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu. And, this Friday, Russia and Turkey start their joint military patrols to the depth of 7km away from the border, part of the de facto safe zone in northeast Syria.

The devil in the immense details is how Ankara is going to manage the territories that it now actually controls, and to which it plans to relocate as many as 2 million Syrian refugees.

Your oil? Mine

Then there’s the nagging issue that simply won’t go away: the American drive to “secure the oil” (Trump) and “protect” Syrian oilfields (the Pentagon), for all practical purposes from Syria.

In Geneva, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov – alongside Iran’s Javad Zarif and Turkey’s Mevlut Cavusoglu – could not have been more scathing. Lavrov said Washington’s plan is “arrogant,” and violates international law. The very American presence on Syrian soil is “illegal,” he said.

All across the Global South, especially among countries in the Non-Aligned Movement, this is being interpreted, stripped to the bone, for what it is: the United States government illegally taking possession of natural resources of a third country via a military occupation.

And the Pentagon is warning that anyone attempting to contest it will be shot on sight. It remains to be seen whether the US Deep State would be willing to engage in a hot war with Russia over a few Syrian oilfields.

Under international law, the whole “securing the oil” scam is a euphemism for pillaging, pure and simple. Every single takfiri or jihadi outfit operating across the “Greater Middle East” will converge, perversely, to the same conclusion: US “efforts” across the lands of Islam are all about the oil.

Now compare that with Russia-Iran-Turkey’s active involvement in a political solution and normalization of Syria – not to mention, behind the scenes, China, which quietly donates rice and aims for widespread investment in a pacified Syria positioned as a key Eastern Mediterranean node of the New Silk Roads.

It’s long been said that millennials have the power to disrupt and reshape entire industries.

Most recently, as Visual Capitalist’s Katie Jones points out, this effect has been seen in the retail landscape, where millennial spending habits are setting the tone for the market’s future.

Not only does the millennial generation demand the convenience of making instant purchases – but they can now rent almost anything they want, anytime, and anywhere.

Visualizing the Growth of the Rental Economy

Today’s infographic from Adweek takes a deeper look at the consumer goods rental economy, and the potential long-term impact of this shift in buyer behavior.

Although the current market for rentals is still in its early stages, the sheer momentum that the industry has gained in the last year is enough to threaten even the largest retailers—forcing them to reconsider their own business models.

The data for the visualization above comes from market research company Lab 42. In a survey of 500 people, they found that 94% of the U.S. population has participated in the sharing economy in one way or another.

While the sharing economy spotlight typically shines on global behemoths like Airbnb and Uber, the research used to populate this infographic focuses on renting consumer goods for a short period of time, as a sub-segment of the sharing economy.

The Renting Revolution

Offerings within the rental sector have exploded over the last decade, with furniture being the number one category that consumers rent.

According to the infographic, reasons for renting furniture include:

• Temporary housing: 45%

• Expensive upfront costs: 43%

• Testing products before committing: 41%

• Hosting events at home: 35%

• Moving into a new home: 29%

• Redesigning a house: 27%

Other products that consumers rent include gaming systems, clothes, tools, and technology. Female renters are more likely to rent furniture, clothes, and jewelry, while male renters are more likely to rent tools and gaming systems.

Renting goods is predominantly done on an as-needed basis. The Lab 42 report states that for clothing, 77% of respondents indicate that they either rent, or would rent for a formal event.

The End of Ownership?

Despite the common misconception that millennials are driven by emotional needs, the reasons behind why they rent consumer goods are much more pragmatic.

• Test things before purchasing: 57%

• Need a temporary solution: 55%

• Need an item or a service for a short time-frame : 52%

• Less expensive than buying: 43%

• More convenient than buying: 42%

Further, only 6% said that they rent because they do not like owning things. This tells us that the rental economy does not indicate the end of ownership, but rather, provides a strategy for consumers to try before they buy.

Attitudes Towards Sustainability

According to the research, very few millennials choose to rent consumer goods because it is better for the environment. However, Nielsen claim that 73% of millennials are willing to pay more money for sustainable offerings—impacting both retail and rental industries.

As evidence of this, Ikea will test a range of subscription-based leasing offers in all 30 of its markets by 2020 in a bid to appeal to environmentally conscious consumers and boost its sustainability credentials. If Ikea’s evolving business model is a success, it could open the floodgates for others to follow suit.

A Promising Market

In the clothing rental space, brands like Rent the Runway pave the way, but there has also been an explosion of startups entering the market in the last year.

One example is the monthly subscription service Nuuly. The company offers consumers access to over 100 third-party brands and vintage items. Consumers can borrow up to six items a month for $88. Similarly, American Eagle’s Style Drop program rents out the latest collections for a flat monthly fee of $49.95.

As more companies incorporate short-term rental services into their offerings, more millennials will shift their behavior from buying to renting—disrupting the traditional retail business model as we know it. With that being said, the impact of millennials having it all, and owning none of it, is yet to be determined.

Authored by Mike Adams via NaturalNews.com,

Today we’ve published a powerful new video on Brighteon.com that explains how you are a “slave wage worker” owned by a globalist corporation known as the United States of America.

The video explains how the ability of the Federal Reserve to create new debt (i.e. print new wealth for the elite political criminals who run everything) hinges on the ability of the government to confiscate wealth from workers who are tracked with “social security” numbers.

The term “social security” doesn’t mean security for you. It means that you are being securitized as a guarantee of future confiscated income to support the creation of new debt. You are the security for the Treasury / Fed scam of creating new money, in other words.

It’s not about providing security for you; it’s about exploiting you to provide security for new debt.

That’s why the social security trust fund is already tapped out. The criminal bureaucrats who run the corrupt government have already spent the money they’ve stolen from you, and the only way you’ll ever get it back is if they continue stealing more money from the next generation of workers.

It’s all a Ponzi scheme, in other words. And like every Ponzi scheme, it will eventually run out of new victims to exploit, causing it to catastrophically implode.

Watch the full video to learn more.

Brighteon.com, by the way, has just rolled out a major upgrade, including new video categories on the home page, video channel subscribers and video like buttons. (Many glitches were just resolved today, and the full feature set is now active.)