Author: admin

Philadelphia police have launched an investigation into an assistant city attorney in connection with anti-Trump graffiti found on the side of an upscale supermarket in Chestnut Hill on November 25th, according to the Inquirer; meanwhile an angry local Republican Party wants him fired.

Surveillance footage released overnight, shows two men walking along in Chestnut Hill, around midnight on Friday by the Fresh Market located at 8200 Germantown Avenue. One wears a blue blazer, khakis and a rakishly-tied scarf, and carries a glass of wine. What at first appeared like a calm end to a night out in an upscale part of the city, changed when the second man was seen spray painting a message on the wall of a newly-constructed grocery store: “Fuck Trump.”

The damage is estimated at between $3,000 and $10,000.

While the sprayer remains unidentified, the man in the blazer turns out to be Assistant City Solicitor Duncan Lloyd. No charges have been filed and as of Wednesday evening, the city was awaiting more information before taking any administrative action.

According to Philly.com, First Deputy City Solicitor Craig Straw confirmed Lloyd, who has worked for the law department since 2011, is one of two men in the video. “We do not condone this type of behavior from our employees,” Straw said. “To my knowledge, Mr. Lloyd has already contacted the Philadelphia Police and is cooperating with them. We will decide on a course of action once we obtain more information about the investigation.”

Lloyd, 32, is a University of Pennsylvania and Temple’s Beasley School of Law graduated, according to his Linkedin page and makes $63,207 a year, representing the city mostly in federal and state discrimination lawsuits. On his Linkedin page he wrote of the job, “As a result of these responsibilities, I hear the craziest stories – ones regularly driven by the unreasonable mores of lust, anger, passion, and envy.”

This incident is hardly news: The Inquirer reports that since election day, anti-Trump graffiti has been reported throughout the city. In early November, spray-painted swastikas, racist graffiti and references to Donald Trump and Nazi Germany appeared in South Philadelphia. Anti-Trump graffiti has been reported on bus shelters and on the exterior wall of City Hall, where “Not my President,” was spray painted and removed Nov. 12. Mayor Kenney has denounced the destruction of property, which mirrors similar incidents nationwide. However, on no prior occasions was the alleged perpetrator dumb enough to be a public servant calmly drinking wine while on closed-circuit camera.

* * *

To Lloyd the graffiti incident may have seemed like a childish prank, but the chair of the Philadelphia Republican Party, Joe DeFelice, is out for blood demanding his immediate firing. In a statement released this afternoon, DeFelice said the following:

“If the image of an upper-middle class city attorney clad in a blazer and sipping wine while vandalizing an upscale grocery store with an anti-Trump message strikes you as perhaps the most bourgeois sight imaginable, that’s because it is. Nothing can better represent the hysterical pearl-clutching of the ‘progressive’ elite in response to this earth-shattering election, when residents of Chestnut Hill and similar neighborhoods across the country discovered – gasp – that other people have a voice too. The assistant city solicitor in question had ostensibly taken the law into his own hands, since a democratic election didn’t yield his preferred outcome.

 

“For somebody with extensive legal training to feel entitled to vandalize a newly opened super-market strikes us at the Philadelphia Republican Party as an astonishing feat of idiocy. Did the extra glass of Shiraz give him some sort of delusional confidence that there are no cameras on Germantown Ave? The taxpayers should be entrusting exactly none of our faith into this man. He should be fired from our city’s law department immediately.”

No arrests, or terminations, have been made so far.

via http://ift.tt/2gHUEtL Tyler Durden

via http://ift.tt/2g8LxyH williambanzai7

Industrial metals commodity prices plunged by the most since March in the last 2 days as China’s exchanges (once again) clamped down on speculation by tightening trading rules. As Bloomberg reports, for the second time this year, trading has exploded on the nation’s exchanges, pushing prices of everything from zinc to coal to multi-year highs and sending authorities scrambling to deflate the bubble before it bursts.

Metals brokers described panic earlier this month as the frenzy spread to markets in London and New York, prompting wild swings in prices that show no signs of abating.

“I can recall only two other occasions in my career where there was such panic and devastating price action in copper but this market today is far less transparent,”

 

While billions of yuan have poured in from herd-like Chinese retail investors who show little regard for market fundamentals, brokers and traders say even more is coming from an expanding army of deep-pocketed hedge funds. They’re chasing better returns in commodities as stocks and real estate fade, often using algorithms and trading late into the night, when markets in London and New York are most active.

 

“There is no doubt that the price moves and the bigger volumes worldwide are being driven by the Chinese, and by professional speculators and financial players,” said Tiger Shi, managing partner at brokerage BANDS Financial Ltd., which counts several of those funds as clients. “The western hedge funds and institutional investors don’t really know what’s going on. Often they were used to trading macro factors or Fed policy, but now they find they have fewer advantages.”

And it was never going to end well…

Zinc Futures have plunged over 10% in the last 2 days (after surging over 27% since the start of November).

 

Steel Rebar is tumbling…

 

And Iron Ore futures have collapsed more… twice…

Think it's the Trump-Trade? Think again. Fundamentally, as Bloomberg highlights, there is massive oversupply. Iron ore port inventories in China are near the highest since September 2014 and are up 19 percent this year, according to Shanghai Steelhome Information Technology Co. Top producer Vale SA reiterated its output guidance of 360 million to 380 million tons for 2017 on Tuesday and expects to produce 400 million to 420 million tons the year after.

So what is it? What had driven this panic-buying in industrial commodities? Simple – another Chinese speculative bubble…

Iron ore and steel futures trimmed their second monthly advance as bourses in Dalian and Shanghai moved to deflate a boom driven partly by speculative trading.

 

The Dalian Commodity Exchange raised margin requirements and the Shanghai Futures Exchange capped some positions. These measures have taken some speculative steam out of the market, according to Justin Smirk, a senior economist at Westpac Banking Corp.

As the Chinese commodity bubble of March/April is back and trading volumes explode relative to open interest…

NOTE: SHFE updated their Zinc "control measures" once again tonight, capping new positions at 1500 lots.

 

 

Thank to hot money flows…

“Commodities market volatility is liquidity driven, as money from commercial bank wealth management products and private banking accounts flow into the market seeking higher return,”

And an increase in algos…

The use of algorithmic trading, in which computers execute multiple orders in milliseconds, is turbo-charging volume and volatility, according to Fu Peng, a portfolio manager at Lianzhan Global Macro Fund Management Co. About a third of activity on Chinese exchanges is executed by automated commands, which generates more volume and greater momentum on global markets, Shi estimates.

 

“The machine component in the market is now so much bigger as is the onshore retail and fund involvement on the Shanghai Futures Exchange and OTC options.”

Similar to the last frenzy in April, the government-owned exchanges have stepped in to cool trading by raising fees and margins, or cutting the number of new positions allowed daily. In the latest move, the Shanghai Futures volume and turnover have since come off their highs but prices are still swinging.

So with the China Commoditty Echo Bubble now bursting, the big question is, where does the hot money flow next? As Socgen shows, Chinese 'gamblers' have chased stocks (and lost), dumped capital (Yuan loss), piled into commodities (in March/April) and lost, rotated into housing (until the government choked that off), and then sent bond yields to record lows…

As Fu at Lianzhan Global Macro Fund noted:

“The nation’s supply-side reforms had a big impact on the market balance, and that’s the fundamentals behind the trading,”

 

“But at the same time, we’ve got too much money there. There have been no returns from investment in industries. The stock market is neither dead nor alive. Investment in real estate also got curbed. So all the money is rushing into commodities.”

But now, Chinese housing is at record highs, Chinese stocks are falling, Chinese bonds are falling, and Chinese commodities are tumbling… the only thing with momentum for the hot money to chase in the currency… and we suspect (by recent liquidity withdrawals) that The PBOC has had enough of that.

“The massive and unprecedented surge in Chinese trading volume in base metals over the past month — but especially since the election — has put LME metals traders on red alert,” Tai Wong, director of commodity products trading at BMO Capital Markets in New York.

via http://ift.tt/2gzVgid Tyler Durden

Just a few days after getting caught editing user comments, the CEO of Reddit, Steve Huffman, is threatening to ban 100’s of the site’s “most toxic users,” most of whom are Trump supporters from the popular r/The_Donald subreddit thread.  Just so we’re clear, Huffman pissed off a bunch of users by edited their comments without their consent, was forced to apologize publicly, got a lot of blowback for his ridiculous behavior and is now banning users who called him out?  According to Yahoo News, that sums it up fairly accurately.

Social media website Reddit Inc, known for its commitment to free speech, will crack down on online harassment by banning or suspending users who target others, starting with those who have directed abuse at Chief Executive Steve Huffman.

 

Huffman said in an interview with Reuters that Reddit’s content policy prohibits harassment, but that it had not been adequately enforced.

 

“Personal message harassment is the most cut and dry,” he said. “Right now we are in an interesting position where my inbox is full of them, it’s easy to start with me.”

 

As well as combing through Huffman’s inbox, Reddit will monitor user reports, add greater filtering capacity, and take a more proactive role in policing its platform rather than relying on community moderators.

Of course, this all comes just a couple days after Huffman used his administrative privileges to redirect abuse he was receiving on a thread on r/The_Donald to the community’s moderators – making it look as if it was intended for them. Huffman has subsequently said it was all an innocent “prank,” though the apology he posted last week seemed to indicated it was more akin to a nervous breakdown.

Huffman offered the following apology admitting that he “messed with the “fuck u/spez” comments” and that “as the CEO, I shouldn’t play such games.”

 

 

Huffman notes that, in the past, Reddit relied on community moderators to enforce site rules but Trump supporters are apparently just too unruly.

In the past, Reddit has worked with moderators of communities to try to enforce its rules.

 

With r/The_Donald in particular, “we haven’t found that to be particularly effective. We might see flashes of success, but things kind of revert,” Huffman said.

 

Under its new strategy, Reddit will take a more active role in dealing with troublemakers, who Huffman said were an “infinitesimal” portion of Reddit’s 250 million monthly visitors.

And while he insists the move to ban certain users isn’t political, Huffman admits that the “first wave of bans will likely be skewed to the r/The_Donald community.”

He stressed that the move was not political.

 

“We don’t want to be censoring political beliefs, but then they do misbehave,” he said. “That’s why we have worked so closely with the r/The_Donald community. We tell them: don’t force us to ban you.“

 

The first wave of bans will likely be skewed to the r/The_Donald community because “that is a catalyst for a lot of this right now. That community is stirred up,” Huffman said.

 

In a draft of a blog post to be published on Wednesday, Huffman said he had been asked by many Reddit users “to ban r/The_Donald outright, but he had rejected that idea, because “if there is anything about this election that we have learned, it is that there are communities that feel alienated and just want to be heard, and Reddit has always been a place where those voices can be heard.”

Since Huffman suddenly seems quite concerned with enforcing Reddit’s harassment rules in a fair and non-partisan way, we’re curious whether Reddit also has rules against soliciting advice on how to violate the Federal Records Act and Congressional subpoenas?  If so, we’d suggest he take a look back through Paul Combetta’s history.

via http://ift.tt/2gKdwGb Tyler Durden

To our complete shock, the Government Accountability Office has released a report blasting the Education Department’s understanding of basic mathematics and accounting concepts after finding the department drastically underestimated the costs of Obama’s student loan forgiveness programs.  The 100-page report entitled “Federal Student Loans:  Education Needs to Improve Its Income Driven Repayment Plan Budget Estimates” found that taxpayers could be on the hook for $137BN of student loans to be forgiven over the coming years as a result of Obama’s executive actions on “income-driven repayment” (IDR) plans.

For the fiscal year 2017 budget, the U.S. Department of Education (Education) estimates that all federally issued Direct Loans in Income-Driven Repayment (IDR) plans will have government costs of $74 billion, higher than previous budget estimates. IDR plans are designed to help ease student debt burden by setting loan payments as a percentage of borrower income, extending repayment periods from the standard 10 years to up to 25 years, and forgiving remaining balances at the end of that period. While actual costs cannot be known until borrowers repay their loans, GAO found that current IDR plan budget estimates are more than double what was originally expected for loans made in fiscal years 2009 through 2016 (the only years for which original estimates are available). This growth is largely due to the rising volume of loans in IDR plans.

 

Education’s approach to estimating IDR plan costs and quality control practices do not ensure reliable budget estimates. Weaknesses in this approach may cause costs to be over- or understated by billions of dollars.

 

As the Wall Street Journal points out, the so-called IDR plans set caps on borrowers’ monthly student loan payments at 10% of discretionary income, which is defined as earnings above 150% of the poverty level.  Then, whatever principal balance is left over on the loans at their maturity date is simply forgiven. 

The report, to be released on Wednesday by the Government Accountability Office, shows the Obama administration’s main strategy for helping student-loan borrowers is proving far more costly than previously thought. The report also presents a scathing review of the Education Department’s accounting methods, which have understated the costs of its various debt-relief plans by tens of billions of dollars.

 

Senate Budget Committee Chairman Mike Enzi (R., Wyo.) ordered the report last year amid a sharp increase in enrollment in income-driven repayment plans, which the Obama administration has heavily promoted to help borrowers avoid default. The most generous version caps a borrower’s monthly payment at 10% of discretionary income, which is defined as any earnings above 150% of the poverty level.

 

That formula typically reduces monthly payments of borrowers by hundreds of dollars. Any remaining balance is then forgiven after 10 or 20 years, depending on whether the borrower works in the public or private sector.

 

Enrollment in the plans has more than tripled in the past three years to 5.3 million borrowers as of June, or 24% of all former students who borrowed directly from the government and are now required to be making payments. They collectively owe $355 billion.

Congress approved the IDR plans in the 1990s and 2000s, but Obama used executive actions, starting in 2010, to extend the most-generous terms to millions of borrowers.  Ironically, that is precisely when loan volumes under the program started to skyrocket.

 

While there are numerous viewpoints on how to address the student loan crisis in America, we kind of like this guy’s idea that borrowers should stop playing video games in their parents’ basements and get a job…it just might be crazy enough to work.

???????? ???? ???? ???????? “It’s Horrible!!! You don’t understand!!! America is doomed!!! Trump is the &§$@#* President!!! http://pic.twitter.com/CWfQgg3EOW

— tom alex (@rejialex7) November 29, 2016

via http://ift.tt/2fFV3x0 Tyler Durden

Via TheAntiMedia.org,

Last week, Washington State Senator Doug Ericksen announced plans to propose a bill in January that would criminalize certain protests as “economic terrorism,” to be punishable as a Class C Felony.

The proposed bill would penalize protesters who engage in “unlawful disruption of transportation and commerce,” and if passed, those found in violation of the law could face punishment of up to five years’ imprisonment, a fine of up to $10,000, or both.

The proposed bill would also go after organizations and funders backing the protests by forcing them to pay restitution at a rate of three times the calculated amount of damage. In an interview with the Seattle Times, Ericksen specifically named philanthropists George Soros and Tom Steyer, as well as the Sierra Club organization, as intended targets of the legislation.

“We are not just going after the people who commit these acts of terrorism,” Ericksen said in his press release. “We are going after the people who fund them. Wealthy donors should not feel safe in disrupting middle class jobs.”

Ericksen, who is chairman of the Senate Energy, Environment & Telecommunications Committee, has historically positioned himself as an ally to the fossil fuel industry. His proposal came just days after a group of anti-fracking protesters calling themselves “Olympia Stand” set up an encampment that blocked a rail line from the Port of Olympia. The police later forcibly disbanded the encampment and arrested 12 protesters on November 18th.

While the Washington Times reports that this bill would be unlikely to pass both in Senate and Democratically run-house, Ericksen’s proposal is just one in an increasing trend of legislation that criminalizes and limits the rights of protestors.

Ericksen’s proposal came in the same week that Iowa State Representative Bobby Kaufmann announced plans to propose legislation he calls the “Suck it up Buttercup” bill in response to anti-Trump organizing and protests. The two-part bill would withhold funding from universities that organize election-related grief counseling or sit-ins. It would also establish increased penalties for protesters who shut down highways or roads.

“I have no issue with protesting,” Representative Kaufman told the Des Moines Register. “In fact, I would go to political war for anyone who wanted to protest or dissent and they couldn’t. But you can’t exercise your constitutional right by trampling on someone else’s. When they blocked off Interstate 80, they crossed a line.”

Similarly, earlier this year, Republican Senator John Kavanagh of Arizona introduced SB1054, a bill that would make it a felony to record police without their permission and within 20 feet of the ‘law enforcement activity.’ The bill generated such public outcry that Kavanagh eventually abandoned it.

While these recent proposals have been construed as a backlash from Republican lawmakers emboldened by Trump’s presidency, one of the most contentious protest laws passed in recent memory was, in fact, a law signed by Obama in response to Occupy protests in 2011.

HR 347, also known as the Federal Restricted Buildings and Grounds Improvement Act, lowered the intent requirement of a 1971 trespass law, making it easier to criminalize someone who enters or remains in “any restricted building or grounds,” with “restricted” applying broadly to any event where the Secret Service is present. The law, which was widely seen as an attack on the First Amendment, essentially criminalized protesting in proximity to any elected official under the protection of the Secret Service, which includes President Obama himself — and now, President-elect Trump. Under the current law, violators could face a fine and up to 10 years of jail time.

In the wake of the increasingly militarized response to DAPL protests in North Dakota, this proposed legislation in Washington and Iowa is emblematic of the escalating tension between protesters and government officials. As anti-Trump protesters gear up for nationwide Inauguration Day demonstrations that may already be facing restrictions, January promises to be a crucial moment for the future of First Amendment and the criminalization of dissent in America.

via http://ift.tt/2fSJXmM Tyler Durden

Last month we noted that ESPN lost 621,000 subscribers in the month of the October (see “ESPN Loses A Record 621,000 Subscribers In One Month“).  Unfortunately, the sports media powerhouse can’t seem to make the bleeding stop as evidenced by another 555,000 subscriber losses this month as reported by Nielsen.  For those keeping track, that’s roughly 1.2mm in sub losses in just two months, which, at $7 of revenue per sub, represents about $100mm of lost annual revenue for ESPN’s parent company, Disney.

Obviously this is not welcome news for a company that is locked in to $7.3 billion in sports content deals or roughly 70% more than the second highest network, NBC.

In 2017 ESPN to spend $7.3 billion on content more than any source; then Netflix ($6bn), NBC (4.3bn), CBS ($4bn) & Amazon ($3.2bn) #snlkagan

— Brad Adgate (@badgate) October 18, 2016

 

According to Outkick The Coverage, that $7.3BN in content deals includes $1.9BN for Monday Night Football, $1.5BN for NBA content and a host of other MLB and college sports content.

Presently ESPN is on the hook for the following yearly sports rights payments: $1.9 billion a year to the NFL for Monday Night Football, $1.47 billion to the NBA, a deal I told you flat out wasn’t sustainable back in July because it meant every single cable and satellite subscriber in the country was paying an average of $30 a year for the NBA whether they watched or not, $700 million to Major League Baseball, $608 million for the College Football Playoff, $225 million to the ACC, $190 million to the Big Ten, $120 million to the Big 12, $125 million a year to the PAC 12, and hundreds of millions more to the SEC.

Meanwhile, ESPN isn’t the only cable network bleeding subs.  As we pointed out last month, Pay TV subscribers have been shrinking for years as streaming alternatives have grown in popularity.  Moreover, the pace of the decline seemingly accelerated in early 2015.

 

Of course, cheap, streaming-only services like the one just launched by AT&T’s DirecTV only serve to put even more pressure on content providers by offering more choices and smaller channel bundles to consumers.  Meanwhile, as The Verge points out, this latest offering from AT&T just adds to the other streaming services already offered by Dish’s Sling TV, Sony Playstation Vue and upcoming services from Hulu and YouTube.

 

As we’ve said before, the beginning of the end for the TV bundle is upon us and ESPN, which has extracted excess value from cable distributors for decades at the expense of consumers who had no choice but to suck-up their exorbitant fees, will be among the biggest losers.

* * *

For those who missed it, here is some additional analysis on ESPN from our post last month.

Last April, HBO effectively marked the death of the cable TV bundle when they decided to launch “HBO Now” and sell their content directly to consumers for $15 per month.  While other “over-the-top” providers have existed for years, this decision was pivotal because it was the first time that any major content provider decided to break with the traditional cable delivery model and go direct to consumer.  Within a year, HBO Now had amassed 1 million subscribers.  Meanwhile, Pay TV households collapsed around the same time as “cord cutting” accelerated.

Per the following data from Barclays’ Media and Telecom analyst, Kannan Venkateshwar, the decline of Pay TV households really accelerated in 2Q 15 around the same time that HBO Now was launched. 

 

Meanwhile, the number of broadband-only households also surged.

 

Now, the biggest beneficiary of the cable TV bundle, ESPN, which exploited it’s “must have” content for decades to negotiate ever higher rates with cable TV providers while forcing those rates down the throats of consumers by insisting its content be included in all of the channel “bundles”, finds itself in the unfamiliar territory of losing millions of subs per year amid surging contents costs.  In fact, according to Outkick The Coverage, ESPN lost over 600,000 subscribers in October alone which is worth over $50mm in annual revenue.

Yesterday Nielsen announced its subscriber numbers for November 2016 and those numbers were the worst in the history of ESPN’s existence as a cable company — the worldwide leader in sports lost 621,000 cable subscribers. That’s the most subscribers ESPN has ever lost in a month according to Nielsen estimates and it represents a terrifying and troubling trend for the company, an acceleration of subscriber loss that represents a doubling of the average losses over the past couple of years, when ESPN has been losing in the neighborhood of 300,000 subscribers a month.

 

These 621,000 lost subscribers in the past month alone lead to a drop in revenue of over $52 million and continue the alarming subscriber decline at ESPN. Couple these subscriber declines with a 24% drop in Monday Night Football ratings this fall, the crown jewel of ESPN programming, and it’s fair to call October of 2016 the worst month in ESPN’s history. But this isn’t just a story about ESPN, the rapid decline in cable subscribers is hitting every channel, sports and otherwise. It just impacts ESPN the most because ESPN costs every cable and satellite subscriber roughly $7 a month, over triple the next most expensive cable channel.

The historical cable TV game goes a little something like this…in any given market there is typically 3-4 subscription TV providers (2 satellite companies, 1 (or more) cable providers and a Telco).  Those providers sign multi-year deals to buy content from media companies (e.g. ESPN, Discovery, Time Warner, Viacom, etc. etc) and then bundle them all together and pass the costs of those contracts along to consumers. Every 3-5 years those content contracts come up for renewal and the cable providers (i.e. consumers, since the costs just get passed along) are effectively forced to pay whatever increase ESPN (and others) asks for or risk losing millions of subscribers. 

Now, there are roughly 100mm pay TV households in the U.S. and, because of the channel “bundling” scam, approximately 90% of them are forced to “buy” ESPN whether they consume sports content or not.  Moreover, because ESPN is considered “must have” content they’re able to extract the most value from the cable providers getting roughly $7 per sub per month, or more than double the next highest content provider…tack on a little extra margin for the cable provider and the average consumer is paying $120 per year for ESPN even if they never watch a single minute of sports programming…seems fair, right? 

Fortunately for consumers, and not so much for ESPN, the power in the system, courtesy of “over-the-top” content providers like HBO and Netflix, is just starting to shift from the media companies to consumers…which will be disastrous for the historical beneficiaries of the cable bundle.  Outkick The Coverage laid out the math on what pay TV sub losses means for ESPN:

A loss of 3 million subscribers would leave ESPN with 86 million subscribers in 2017. That would be down roughly 15 million subscribers in the past five years alone. Given that ESPN makes right at $7 a month from every cable and satellite subscriber a year, that means ESPN’s subscriber revenue would be $7.22 billion in 2017. Toss in an additional $1.8 billion or so in advertising revenue and ESPN’s total revenue would be $9 billion. We don’t know what the costs of running ESPN are — employees, facilities, equipment, and the like have to cost a billion or more — but it’s fair to say that ESPN is probably still making money in 2017. Just nowhere near what they used to make.

 

But those sports rights costs are going up and those subscriber revenue numbers are going down.

 

So if we’re very conservative and project that ESPN continues to lose 3 million subscribers a year — well below the rate that they are currently losing subscribers — then the household numbers would look like this over the next five years:

 

2017: 86 million subscribers

 

2018: 83 million subscribers

 

2019: 80 million subscribers

 

2020: 77 million subscribers

 

2021: 74 million subscribers

 

At 74 million subscribers — Outkick’s projection for 2021 based on the past five years of subscriber losses — ESPN would be bringing in just over $6.2 billion a year in yearly subscriber fees at $7 a month. At $8 a month, assuming the subscriber costs per month keeps climbing, that’s $7.1 billion in subscriber revenue. Both of those numbers are less than the yearly rights fees cost.

 

Uh oh.   

But that’s just the short-term incremental impacts.  The real question is how many consumers would actually purchase ESPN if the bundle truly disappeared and consumers were given the option to buy all content a la carte (which we suspect is the inevitable end game)?  If we assume that 45mm households would be willing to purchase ESPN directly, at their current cost of $7 per month, then that would equate to roughly $3.8BN in revenue per year or about half of their $7.5BN in annual content costs…which we suspect is a slight problem for Disney.

But, like it not, a la carte content purchases are the way of the future.  While cable providers used to be incentivized to protect the “channel bundle” the advent of the internet and over-the-top content providers means that their true value offering to consumers is now in their broadband and not the content.  Therefore, it’s not terribly surprising that, as Bloomberg points out, new a la carte, streaming TV services are becoming very popular.

AT&T Inc. set a price of $35 a month for a new online-streaming TV service with 100 channels or more, and the company may experiment with “a la carte” programming, giving customers choice on what channels they pay to watch.

 

DirecTV Now will be priced to compete with two leading online TV providers — Sony’s PlayStation Vue and Dish Network Corp.’s Sling TV. PlayStation Vue starts at $39.99 for 60 channels and runs as high as $54.99 for more than 100 channels. Sling TV begins at $20 for 28 channels and goes as high as $40 for a 48-channel multi-screen package.

 

The competition for cable-like online services is suddenly fierce. YouTube has been working for months on the paid live-TV streaming service, called Unplugged. Hulu LLC, which is co-owned by Fox, Disney, Comcast Corp. and Time Warner, will introduce its own service in the coming months, and Amazon.com Inc. and Apple Inc. have explored the idea.

Of course, ESPN isn’t the only content company that has benefitted from the forced charity of the American consumer.  We suspect the many other cable content providers are also about to face a very turblent transition as well.

via http://ift.tt/2gzwRJz Tyler Durden

Having claimed the job of CEO John Stumpf, the Wells Fargo cross-selling fiasco continues to reverberate within the org chart of the scandal-ridden bank. Reuters reports that James Strother, the general counsel of Wells Fargo, who had originally planned to retire at year-end, will be forced to stay on indefinitely in the position to deal with fallout from the bank’s sales scandal, according to a bank spokesman.

“In light of recent events the decision was made to have Jim Strother remain with the company and continue to serve as our general counsel,” said Peter Gilchrist, a Wells Fargo spokesman. The decision to keep Stroher on was made by the bank’s board of directors according to Gilchrist.

Strother became Wells’ top lawyer in 2003, and sat behind then-CEO John Stumpf at a bruising congressional hearing about the scandal in September. He has been at Wells Fargo and its predecessor, Norwest Corporation, for the past 30 years. Reuters explains that having turned 65 this year, Strother would ordinarily be required to retire at the end of the year, according to an internal policy at Wells Fargo affecting members of the bank’s operating committee. However, the bank occasionally makes exceptions to this rule in extraordinary situations, which the bank’s current litigation-plagued scandal clearly is. During the financial crisis, then-Chairman Dick Kovacevich postponed his retirement by slightly more than a year.

Having lost its CEO after two grueling sessions in Congress, Wells remains under fire for opening as many as 2 million accounts in customers’ names without their permission. The bank is facing lawsuits from former employees and customers, as well as increased regulatory scrutiny. Having reached a $190 million settlement in September, the largest American mortgage lender is now working to answer questions from politicians and regulators, replace a flawed compensation system that incentivized employees to open phantom accounts, and repair its reputation among customers, including municipalities that have cut business ties.

Two weeks ago the bank reported for the first time that its new account openings had plunged by 44% while credit card applications had tumbled by half in the period immediately following the scandal. It recently launched an ad campaign seeking to explain to the general public that it is “making changes to make things right.”

via http://ift.tt/2gHnURs Tyler Durden

Submitted by Charles Hugh-Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,

Perhaps the masses have (finally!) reached the point where the pain of maintaining the status quo now exceeds that of breaking it.

A remarkably diverse array of "explanations" of Donald Trump's presidential election victory have been aired, representing both the conventional political spectrum and well beyond.

Let’s start with the conventional mainstream media “explanations”:

 

#1: Trump was elected by intolerant Americans, i.e. “deplorables” who are intolerant of immigrants, Muslims, women’s rights, gays, etc. while being overly attached to firearms and the Christian religion.

This sort of broad-brush slander is emotionally appealing to those who lost the election, as it enables the losing party to claim the high moral ground. (It’s also classic propaganda, a topic Chris addressed in a recent series.) But it overlooks the many Progressives who voted for Trump but did not dare announce their choice to their hysterically intolerant Democratic loyalist friends. For example, consider this female voter’s account: Liberals Should Stop Ranting And Seek Out Silent Trump Voters Like Me.

This "explanation", though satisfying in terms of self-righteousness, has no credible explanatory value.

 

#2: Trump didn’t win the election, Hillary Clinton lost it.

This “explanation” constructs a narrative from polling data: African-American voters did not turn out for Hillary in the same high percentages as they did for President Obama, a surprising number of higher income households voted for Trump, etc.  If Hillary had drawn the expected percentages of voters, she would have won.

This “explanation” explains nothing, as it ignores the larger issues that drove voters to vote or not vote.

 

#3: The unprotected Americans (to use Peggy Noonan’s term) who have seen their incomes and security decline in the age of neoliberal globalization voted for Trump to reject globalism, unfettered immigration and free trade.

This narrative is ably dissected in this 5-part series from Spiegel.de: Inequality, Market Chaos and Angry Voters: A Turning Point for Globalization

In the U.S. media, this narrative is typically characterized as a sports event: the “losers” of neoliberal globalization struck back at the “winners.”

This explanation draws upon well-established economic trends: sharply rising inequality, the hollowing out of the Rust Belt and rural economies in “flyover” America, etc.

 

#4: Trump’s victory is another manifestation of the global revolt against elites.  

Defenders of the status quo—broadly speaking, neoliberalism’s financial “winners” and the ruling elites—are quick to equate outbreaks of populism with the dreaded scourge of fascism. In the defenders’ accounts, the rightist, nationalistic populism of the 1930s led directly to fascism.

The article titles in the December 2016 issue of Foreign Affairs summarize the conventional characterization of populism as reactionary and dangerous–never mind that populism can also be leftist (look at the anti-globalist movement) or largely apolitical:

— Populism on the March: Why the West Is In Trouble

— Trump and American Populism: Old Whine, New Bottles

— Populism Is Not Fascism, But It Could Be a Harbinger

There are few if any positive words for populist movements in these essays, and precious little recognition of populism’s potential to upend a grossly corrupt, inefficient and self-serving global elite—an elite that richly deserves to be cashiered.

While the mainstream media grudgingly admits that the ruling elites paid little attention to soaring income and wealth inequality, or to globalism’s “losers,” the answer to defenders of the status quo is the usual grab-bag of policy tweaks that leave the ruling elites and their media apologists firmly in charge.

 

#5: Trump has been set up as the fall-guy for an economy that is teetering on the edge of recession or even depression. The coming recession/depression will discredit Trump and the populist/nationalist movement, setting the stage for the neoliberal globalists to return triumphantly to power in four years.

While many of us wouldn’t put such nefarious scheming past the globalist elites, this doesn’t quite align with the reality that virtually everyone, mainstream or alternative, left or right, dismissed Trump’s presidential campaign as a media-circus sideshow staged by a narcissist.

Since virtually no one expected him to win when he entered the race, why would globalists support him when their candidate, Hillary Clinton, was a shoo-in? Rather than pick him as a fall-guy for an economic depression, the claim that he was picked by globalists as an easy target for defeat (another alternative media narrative) makes more sense.

But the reality is nobody could predict Trump’s victory, and theories based on the idea that he was set up as a fall-guy presume the globalists rigged the election for their candidate (Hillary) to lose.  Why install a “dangerous” populist when you could install your candidate?

 

#6: The Clinton campaign was a “quiet coup” of corrupt elites intent on solidifying the merger of private-sector/philanthro-capitalist pay-for-play and government functions.  A “counter-coup” staged by elements of the Deep State (i.e. the unelected permanent government that remains in power regardless of which party is in office) foiled Clinton’s quiet coup.

As farfetched as this might sound, Clinton insider Sidney Blumenthal accused the FBI of staging a “coup” by reopening the investigation into Clinton’s emails.

While I didn’t use the inflammatory word “coup,” I have outlined the possibility that more forward-looking elements of the Deep State concluded neoliberalism, neoconservative intervention (i.e. endless wars of choice) and institutionalized pay-to-play corruption threatened the security of the nation and had to be thwarted at the ballot box: Why the Deep State Is Dumping Hillary.

While there is little public evidence of this power struggle—the Deep State doesn’t operate in the public gaze—there are plenty of circumstantial clues that the Deep State is not a monolith of neocon neoliberalism.

 

Conclusion (to Part 1)

Can we summarize these narratives (some competing, some overlapping) in any instructive fashion? I think we can roughly divide them into three categories:

1. Moral claims: the neoliberal “progressives” are morally superior to the “deplorables” and so the neoliberals (the remarkably intolerant “tolerants”) deserved to win on moral grounds; alternatively, the pay-to-play Clinton camp is ethically bankrupt and its claims to the moral high ground are hypocritical.

2. Elite machinations: insiders either set up Trump as the easy-to-beat opponent or as the fall-guy for the coming depression; alternatively, the Deep State was split into two camps, the neocons who backed Hillary and the insurgents who saw Hillary as a threat to national security.

3. Structural economic/social issues: rising wealth/income inequality and the decline of the bottom 95% finally had political consequences.

 

In Part 2: Why The Ruling Elite Are Becoming Frightened, we examine a hybrid argument that synthesizes these categories into a single narrative that explains what is likely truly going on: The masses have (finally!) reached the point where the pain of maintaining the status quo now exceeds that of breaking it. A People's Coup has been set in motion, of which the election of Trump is just an early example of the unexpected and jarring surprises that lie ahead.

What will this coup look like? Will it succeed?

Click here to read Part 2 of this report (free executive summary, enrollment required for full access)

This essay was first published on peakprosperity.com, where I am a contributing writer.

via http://ift.tt/2fFBhls Tyler Durden