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Frank Serpico Explains How Police Violence is the New Graft

In
1971 Frank Serpico was shot in the face while opening a door during
a drug bust in a Brooklyn apartment, and left there to die by the
cops with him because Serpico had testified against crooked cops in
the narcotics division. An elderly man in the building, not the
other cops, called 911 to send an ambulance.

In a
piece at Politico, Serpico explains that to this day he’s
shunned by the New York Police Department (NYPD). A Medal of Honor
recipient, he’s only been invited to the annual dinner once, when

Bernard Kerik was commissioner. While the graft is, thanks to
greater accountability, not as systematic as it used to be, Serpico
writes, a lack of accountability is why police violence is such a
problem. Via Politico:

I tried to be an honest cop in a force full of bribe-takers. But
as I found out the hard way, police departments are useless at
investigating themselves—and that’s exactly the problem facing
ordinary people across the country —including perhaps, Ferguson,
Missouri, which has been a lightning rod for discontent even though
the circumstances under which an African-American youth, Michael
Brown, was shot remain unclear.

Today the combination of an excess of deadly force and
near-total lack of accountability is more dangerous than ever: Most
cops today can pull out their weapons and fire without fear that
anything will happen to them, even if they shoot someone
wrongfully. All a police officer has to say is that he believes his
life was in danger, and he’s typically absolved. What do you think
that does to their psychology as they patrol the streets—this sense
of invulnerability? The famous old saying still applies: Power
corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. (And we still
don’t know how many of these incidents occur each year; even though
Congress enacted the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act
20 years ago, requiring the Justice Department to produce an annual
report on “the use of excessive force by law enforcement officers,”
the reports were never issued.)

It wasn’t any surprise to me that, after Michael Brown was shot
dead in Ferguson, officers instinctively lined up behind Darren
Wilson, the cop who allegedly killed Brown. Officer Wilson may well
have had cause to fire if Brown was attacking him, as some reports
suggest, but it is also possible we will never know the full
truth—whether, for example, it was really necessary for Wilson to
shoot Brown at least six times, killing rather than just wounding
him. As they always do, the police unions closed ranks also behind
the officer in question. And the district attorney (who is often
totally in bed with the police and needs their votes) and city
power structure can almost always be counted on to stand behind the
unions.

Serpico goes on to write that while he understands the need for
cops to protect themselves, militarized gear isn’t necessary in
everyday situations—he says while he was off-duty he once disarmed
a suspect who had three guns using just a snub-nose Smith &
Wesson—and helped to isolate cops from the communities they’re
supposed to serve.

He also dismisses politicians who offer rhetoric but little
action, all the way to the top:

As for Barack Obama and his attorney general, Eric Holder,
they’re giving speeches now, after Ferguson. But it’s 20 years too
late. It’s the same old problem of political power talking, and it
doesn’t matter that both the president and his attorney general are
African-American. Corruption is color blind. Money and power
corrupt, and they are color blind too.

Read the whole thing, including Serpico’s policy
recommendations,
here.

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Don’t Want Nude Selfies Stolen? Don’t Let Cops See Your Phone

What do California Highway
Patrol (CHP) officers and nasty Internet trolls have in common?
Like the hackers who stole and released nude celebrity pics from
iCloud, these
Cali cops think they have a right to view private images off
women’s phones and the law be damned. A team of CHP officers is
now under investigation for a years-long “game” in which they stole
and traded private photos from the phones of women they
arrested.

None of the officers have been charged so far, but last week CHP
Officer Sean Harrington, 35, confessed to stealing nude photos of a
woman he arrested on DUI charges and admitted that he and other CHP
officers have been swapping such images for years. According to the
Contra Costa Times, the practice “stretches from (CHP’s)
Los Angeles office” to Harrington’s office up in Dublin,
California, near San Francisco. From the Times:

The five-year CHP veteran called it a “game” among officers,
according to an Oct. 14 search warrant affidavit. Harrington told
investigators he had done the same thing to female arrestees a
“half dozen times in the last several years,” according to the
court records, which included leering text messages between
Harrington and his Dublin CHP colleague, Officer Robert
Hazelwood.

(…) In the search warrant affidavit, senior Contra Costa
district attorney inspector Darryl Holcombe wrote that he found
probable cause to show both CHP officers Harrington and Hazelwood
and others engaged in a “scheme to unlawfully access the cell phone
of female arrestees by intentionally gaining access to their cell
phone and without their knowledge, stealing and retaining nude or
partially clothed photographs of them.” That behavior constitutes
felony computer theft, the affidavit said.

Not only did the cops illegally access women’s photos, they then
proceeded to be judgmental dicks about them. Here’s a sample text
conversation between Harrington and Hazelwood:

Luckily, Officer Harrington’s intelligence is also “like a 5 or
6 at best”: the ruse was discovered when the last woman whose
photos he stole noticed that the photos had been sent to an unknown
number. Harrington had deleted evidence they had been sent from the
woman’s iPhone, but the phone was synced to her iPad as
well.

CHP is of course trying to paint the situation as an isolated
incident, but Rick Madsen, the lawyer representing the woman who
discovered the activity, balked at this. “This particular instance
was only discovered by my client by chance—and it’s a reasonable
speculation to imagine how often it has occurred undetected,”

Madsen said a statement. “Who knows how many officers have
participated in this so-called ‘game,’ or how many more women have
been victimized?”

As SearchSecurity editor Rob
Wright tweeted this morning, yet another reason for
phone encryption.

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If Sikh Kids Can Bring Knives to School, Why Can’t Everyone Else?

Kirpan Late
last week, administrators at a Washington state school district
decided to let a Sikh boy carry the kirpan on school property. The
kirpan is a ceremonial knife central to the Sikh faith; all
baptized Sikhs are expected to carry one.

The decision,
according to KING 5 News, merely confirmed standard practice.
“Plenty of Sikhs, both students and staff” have worn their kirpans
at school for years, it seems. Administrators recognized that this
is an exception to state and federal zero tolerance weapons
policies, which strictly prohibit guns and knives—even pretend
ones—anywhere near a school.

Predictably,
alarmists were alarmed:

One school volunteer named Shelby, who asked her last name not
be used, said respecting religion goes too far if it compromises
student safety.

“There’s no way I’d go back until the knife was gone,” she
said.

But there’s no way that allowing Sikhs to carry the kirpan
compromises safety. What does this woman fear? Some psychopath is
plotting a mass stabbing at her school, but feels the need to wait
for permission to carry a knife? That’s obviously absurd. And since
the mere presence of knives does not cause rationale people to lose
their minds and start stabbing willy-nilly, I can’t think of a way
in which letting Sikh students exercise basic religious freedoms is
a threat to anyone.

I find it irksome, however, that school administrators are
willing to recognize a faith-based exception to zero tolerance
weapons policies while vigorously enforcing them in every other
respect, even when other students have equally valid reasons to
carry knives. Administrators routinely punish—often with criminal
charges and expulsion—Boy Scouts who brought knives to school,

student-hunters with unloaded rifles in their car trunks, kids
who
merely wrote stories about weapons, and others who broke the
rules by accident. Consider the case of
Atiya Haynes, a 17-year-old Detroit girl who was expelled after
her principal performed a random search of her purse and discovered
a pocketknife. The pocketknife was a gift from her grandfather; she
had carried it during the summer, while biking across Detroit to
her job. Haynes had long since forgotten about it.

Do the Atiyas of the world really deserve fewer freedoms than
Sikh students? It’s true that different standards apply, since Sikh
students’ beliefs arguably receive special protection under the
First Amendment and federal law.

Regardless, if administrators are capable of empathizing with
the Sikh student’s plight, they should extend this common sense
evaluation to other students. All kids deserve relief from
draconian and nonsensical restrictions of their freedoms, not
just the faithful.

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POMO Is Officially Dead… Until The Next QE

Back when QE1 ended in 2010, everyone celebrated the end of POMO, except for websites such as this one which warned it was only a matter of time before the Fed unleashes another QE program to offset the market correction. We were right.

Then, when QE2 ended, everyone celebrated the end of POMO, except for… well you get the picture.

Moments ago, the last POMO of QE3 just hit the tape when the NY Fed monetized $931 million of bonds matruing between 2036 and 2044, which was also the last ever POMO…. at least under QE3.

So feel free to rejoice, if only for a few months, but don’t be surprised when the market dumps, and Bullard, Williams et al, follow through on their promise of launching Qe4 and POMO restarts all over again.

via Zero Hedge http://ift.tt/ZU0sn6 Tyler Durden

Stocks Spike On Reuters’ “ECB Does QE” Leak Du Jour

It never gets old… Stocks have spiked – leaving all other asset classes in the dust – as Reuters unleashes their latest rumor:

ECB STIMULUS MAY LACK DESIRED SCALE, QE AN OPTION ACCORDING TO SOURCES: REUTERS

Reuters adds that the ECB plan to buy private sector assets may fall short and pressure is likely to build for bolder action early next year.

The market reacts…

As Reuters reports,

The European Central Bank's plan to buy private sector assets may fall short of its goal and pressure is likely to build for bolder action early next year, with government bond purchases an option, ECB sources said.

The euro zone's central bank started buying covered bonds last week and plans to buy asset-backed securities (ABS), or bundled loans, later this year — both with a view to fostering lending to businesses and thereby supporting the bloc's economy.

ECB President Mario Draghi has said he wants the purchase plans, together with the provision of new cheap loans to banks, to increase the ECB's balance sheet towards its levels of early 2012 — up to 1 trillion euros higher than today.

But the illiquid nature of the ABS market and the scarcity of quality paper available to buy means the ECB may struggle to achieve the stimulus effect it wants with the current programme.

The ECB's offer to banks in December of a second round of long-term loans, or TLTROs, may help it make progress towards the balance sheet target, but the paltry take-up of the first offer — just 82.6 billion euros — does not bode well.

"Some people know that this (the current purchase plan) will not work. It's too small and the problem is much, much bigger," said one source familiar with the matter.

The second source added: "We're perfectly aware these two markets are not that simple and certainly on their own will not be sufficient to expand our balance sheet as we intend."

Asked to comment for this story, an ECB spokesman said: "The targeted long term refinancing operations (TLTRO) and the purchases of ABS and covered bonds have to be seen as a package. The overall impact of these three measures on the balance sheet size of the Eurosystem will be sizeable."

* * *

So to sum up –

Reuters first leaks the possibility of Corporate bond QE….

we do the math showing it is idiotic…

and now Reuters confirms its source was enitrely wrong; we were right,

and ECB has to do what everyone though it would do anyway.

via Zero Hedge http://ift.tt/1t9tsC1 Tyler Durden

Another Deutsche Banker And Former SEC Enforcement Attorney Commits Suicide

Back on January 26, a 58-year-old former senior executive at German investment bank behemoth Deutsche Bank, William Broeksmit, was found dead after hanging himself at his London home, and with that, set off an unprecedented series of banker suicides throughout the year which included former Fed officials and numerous JPMorgan traders.

Following a brief late summer spell in which there was little if any news of bankers taking their lives, as reported previously, the banker suicides returned with a bang when none other than the hedge fund partner of infamous former IMF head Dominique Strauss-Khan, Thierry Leyne, a French-Israeli entrepreneur, was found dead after jumping off the 23rd floor of one of the Yoo towers, a prestigious residential complex in Tel Aviv.

Just a few brief hours later the WSJ reported that yet another Deutsche Bank veteran has committed suicide, and not just anyone but the bank’s associate general counsel, 41 year old Calogero “Charlie” Gambino, who was found on the morning of Oct. 20, having also hung himself by the neck from a stairway banister, which according to the New York Police Department was the cause of death. We assume that any relationship to the famous Italian family carrying that last name is purely accidental.

Here is his bio from a recent conference which he attended:

Charlie J. Gambino is a Managing Director and Associate General Counsel in the Regulatory, Litigation and Internal Investigation group for Deutsche Bank in the Americas. Mr. Gambino served as a staff attorney in the United Securities and Exchange Commission’s Division of Enforcement from 1997 to 1999. He also was associated with the law firm of Skadden, Arps, Slate Meagher & Flom from 1999 to 2003. He is a frequent speaker at securities law conferences. Mr. Gambino is a member of the American Bar Association and the Association of the Bar of the City of New York.

As a reminder, the other Deutsche Bank-er who was found dead earlier in the year, William Broeksmit, was involved in the bank’s risk function and advised the firm’s senior leadership; he was “anxious about various authorities investigating areas of the bank where he worked,” according to written evidence from his psychologist, given Tuesday at an inquest at London’s Royal Courts of Justice. And now that an almost identical suicide by hanging has taken place at Europe’s most systemically important bank, and by a person who worked in a nearly identical function – to shield the bank from regulators and prosecutors and cover up its allegedly illegal activities with settlements and fines – is surely bound to raise many questions.

The WSJ reports that Mr. Gambino had been “closely involved in negotiating legal issues for Deutsche Bank, including the prolonged probe into manipulation of the London interbank offered rate, or Libor, and ongoing investigations into manipulation of currencies markets, according to people familiar with his role at the bank.”

He previously was an associate at a private law firm and a regulatory enforcement lawyer from 1997 to 1999, according to his online LinkedIn profile and biographies for conferences where he spoke. But most notably, as his LinkedIn profile below shows, like many other Wall Street revolving door regulators, he started his career at the SEC itself where he worked from 1997 to 1999.

“Charlie was a beloved and respected colleague who we will miss. Our thoughts and sympathy are with his friends and family,” Deutsche Bank said in a statement.

Going back to the previous suicide by a DB executive, the bank said at the time of the inquest that Mr. Broeksmit “was not under suspicion of wrongdoing in any matter.” At the time of Mr. Broeksmit’s death, Deutsche Bank executives sent a memo to bank staff saying Mr. Broeksmit “was considered by many of his peers to be among the finest minds in the fields of risk and capital management.” Mr. Broeksmit had left a senior role at Deutsche Bank’s investment bank in February 2013, but he remained an adviser until the end of 2013. His most recent title was the investment bank’s head of capital and risk-optimization, which included evaluating risks related to complicated transactions.

A thread connecting Broeksmit to wrongdoing, however, was uncovered earlier this summer when Wall Street on Parade referenced his name in relation to the notorious at the time strategy provided by Deutsche Bank and others to allow hedge funds to avoid paying short-term capital gains taxes known as MAPS (see How RenTec Made More Than $34 Billion In Profits Since 1998: “Fictional Derivatives“)

From Wall Street on Parade:

Broeksmit’s name first emerged in yesterday’s Senate hearing as Senator Carl Levin, Chair of the Subcommittee, was questioning Satish Ramakrishna, the Global Head of Risk and Pricing for Global Prime Finance at Deutsche Bank Securities in New York. Ramakrishna was downplaying his knowledge of conversations about how the scheme was about changing short term gains into long term gains, denying that he had been privy to any conversations on the matter.

Levin than asked: “Did you ever have conversations with a man named Broeksmit?” Ramakrishna conceded that he had and that the fact that the scheme had a tax benefit had emerged in that conversation. Ramakrishna could hardly deny this as Levin had just released a November 7, 2008 transcript of a conversation between Ramakrishna and Broeksmit where the tax benefit had been acknowledged.

Another exhibit released by Levin was an August 25, 2009 email from William Broeksmit to Anshu Jain, with a cc to Ramakrishna, where Broeksmit went into copious detail on exactly what the scheme, internally called MAPS, made possible for the bank and for its client, the Renaissance Technologies hedge fund. (See Email from William Broeksmit to Anshu Jain, Released by the U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations.)

At one point in the two-page email, Broeksmit reveals the massive risk the bank is taking on, writing: “Size of portfolio tends to be between $8 and $12 billion long and same amount of short. Maximum allowed usage is $16 billion x $16 billion, though this has never been approached.”

Broeksmit goes on to say that most of Deutsche’s money from the scheme “is actually made by lending them specials that we have on inventory and they pay far above the regular rates for that.”

It would appear that with just months until the regulatory crackdown and Congressional kangaroo circus, Broeksmit knew what was about to pass and being deeply implicated in such a scheme, preferred to take the painless way out.

The question then is just what major regulatory revelation is just over the horizon for Deutsche Bank if yet another banker had to take his life to avoid being cross-examined by Congress under oath? For a hint we go back to another report, this time by the FT, which yesterday noted that Deutsche Bank will set aside just under €1bn towards the numerous legal and regulatory issues it faces in its third quarter results next week, the bank confirmed on Friday.

In a statement made after the close of markets, the Frankfurt-based lender said it expected to publish litigation costs of €894m when it announces its results for the July-September period on October 29.

The extra cash will add to Deutsche’s already sizeable litigation pot, where the bank has yet to be fined in connection with the London interbank rate-rigging scandal.

It is also facing fines from US authorities over alleged mortgage-backed securities misselling and sanctions violations, which have already seen rivals hit with heavy fines.

Deutsche has also warned that damage from global investigations into whether traders attempted to manipulate the foreign-exchange market could have a material impact on the bank.

The extra charge announced on Friday will bring Deutsche’s total litigation reserves to €3.1bn. The bank also has an extra €3.2bn in so-called contingent liabilities for fines that are harder to estimate.

Clearly Deutsche Bank is slowly becoming Europe’s own JPMorgan – a criminal bank whose past is finally catching up to it, and where legal fine after legal fine are only now starting to slam the banking behemoth. We will find out just what the nature of the latest litigation charge is next week when Deutsche Bank reports, but one thing is clear: in addition to mortgage, Libor and FX settlements, one should also add gold. Recall from around the time when the first DB banker hung himself: it was then that Elke Koenig, the president of Germany’s top financial regulator, Bafin, said that in addition to currency rates, manipulation of precious metals “is worse than the Libor-rigging scandal.”

It remains to be seen if Calogero’s death was also related to precious metals rigging although it certainly would not be surprising. What is surprising, is that slowly things are starting to fall apart at the one bank which as we won’t tire of highlighting, has a bigger pyramid of notional derivatives on its balance sheet than even JPMorgan, amounting to 20 times more than the GDP of Germany itself, and where if any internal investigation ever goes to the very top, then Europe itself, and thus the world, would be in jeopardy.

At this point it is probably worth reminding to what great lengths regulators would go just to make sure that Deutsche Bank would never be dragged into a major litigation scandal: recall that the chief enforcer of the SEC during the most critical period following the great crash of 2008, Robert Khuzami, worked previously from 2002 to 2009 at, drumroll, Deutsche Bank most recently as its General Counsel (see “Robert Khuzami Stands To Lose Up To $250,000 If He Pursues Action Against Deutsche Bank” and “Circle Jerk 101: The SEC’s Robert Khuzami Oversaw Deutsche Bank’s CDO, Has Recused Himself Of DB-Related Matters“). The same Khuzami who just landed a $5 million per year contract (with a 2 year guarantee) with yet another “law firm”, Kirkland and Ellis. One wonders: if and when the hammer falls on Deutsche Bank, will it perchance be defended by the same K&E and its latest prominent hire, Robert Khuzami himself?

But usually it is best to just avoid litigation altogether. Which is why perhaps sometimes it is easiest if the weakest links, those whose knowledge can implicate the people all the way at the top, quietly commit suicide in the middle of the night…

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Quantitative Easing is like “treating cancer with Aspirin”

October 27, 2014
London, England

[Editor’s note: This essay was penned by Tim Price, a London-based wealth manager and editor of Price Value International.]

Shortly before leaving the Fed this year, Ben Bernanke rather pompously declared that Quantitative Easing “works in practice, but it doesn’t work in theory.”

There is, of course, no counter-factual.

We’ll never know what might have happened if the world’s central banks had not thrown trillions of dollars at the banking system, and instead let the free market work its magic on an overleveraged financial system.

But to suggest credibly that QE has worked, we first have to agree on a definition of what “work” means, and on what problem QE was meant to solve.

If the objective of QE was to drive down longer term interest rates, given that short term rates were already at zero, then we would have to concede that in this somewhat narrow context, QE has “worked”.

But we doubt whether that objective was front and centre for those people – we could variously call them “savers”, “investors”, or “honest workers”.

As James Grant recently observed, it’s quite remarkable how, thus far, savers in particular have largely suffered in silence.

So while QE has “succeeded” in driving down interest rates, the problem isn’t that interest rates were / are too high.

Quite the reverse: interest rates are clearly too low – at least for savers.

All the way out to 3-year maturities, investors in German government bonds, for example, are now faced with negative interest rates. And still they’re buying.

This isn’t monetary policy success; this is madness.

We think the QE debate should be reframed: has QE done anything to reform an economic and monetary system urgently in need of restructuring?

We think the answer, self-evidently, is “No”.

The answer is also “No” to the question: “Can you solve a crisis of too much indebtedness by increasing debt and suppressing interest rates?”

The toxic combination of more credit creation and global financial repression will merely make the ultimate endgame that much more spectacular.

To Jim Rickards, simply printing money and gifting it to the banks through the somewhat magical money creation process of QE is like treating cancer with aspirin: the supposed “solution” does nothing to address the root cause of the problem.

The West is trapped in a secular depression, and “normal” cyclical solutions such as monetary policy measures, are not just inappropriate, but damnably expensive for the rest of us.

Only widespread economic restructuring will do. And that involves hard decisions on the part of politicians.

Thus far, politicians have shown themselves predictably not up to the task. Or in the words of Jean-Claude Juncker, “We all know what to do; we just don’t know how to get re-elected after we’ve done it.”

And let’s not forget that other notable Junckerism, “When it becomes serious, you have to lie.”

So, back to the debate:

1. Yes, QE has driven down long-term interest rates.

2. But the problem wasn’t the cost of capital. The problem was, and remains, an oversupply of debt, and the risk, now fast becoming realized, of widespread debt deflation.

To put it another way, the world appears to be turning Japanese after all, despite the best efforts of central bankers and despite the non-efforts of politicians.

3. The solution is fundamental economic restructuring. Government spending cuts will not be optional, although tax cuts might be. The expansion of credit must end – or it will end in an entirely involuntary market-driven process that will be extraordinarily messy.

This is where we start to view the world, once again, through the prism of investments – not least since we’re not policy makers.

Markets have become that much more volatile recently (and not just stocks – see the recent wild trading in the US 10 year government bond).

Moreover, inflation (other than in financial asset prices) seems weirdly dormant in certain parts of the world.

Understanding these phenomenon is best explained by both Jim Rickards and by the good folks at Incrementum through the pertinent metaphor of tug of war.

The blue team represents the markets. The markets want deflation, and they want the world’s unsustainable debt pile to be reduced.

There are three ways to reduce the debt pile. One is to engineer sufficient economic growth (no longer feasible, in our view) to service the debt.

The second is to default (which, in a debt-based monetary system, amounts to Armageddon).

The third brings us over to the red team: explicit, state-sanctioned inflationism, and financial repression.

The reason why markets have become so volatile is that from day to day, the blue and red teams of deflationary and inflationary forces duke it out, and neither side has yet been convincingly victorious.

Who ultimately wins? We think we know the answer, but the outcome will likely be a function of politics as much as markets.

While we wait for the outcome, we believe the most prudent and pragmatic course of action is to seek shelter in the least overpriced corners of the market.

For us, that means explicit, compelling value and deep value equity.

Nothing else, and certainly nothing by way of traditional government or corporate debt investments, makes any sense at all.

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The CIA Used Nazis (and Lots of Them) to Fight Commies

The New York Times has a
reminder today that our federal agencies tend to be largely amoral
when it comes to pursuing whatever it determines to be in its
interests. Fighting a cold war against those evil Communists? You
know who else hates the Russkies? Nazis! So the
CIA employed at least 1,000 known Nazis as spies and informants
during the Cold War. And the agency helped conceal their ties to
protect them from possible prosecution by the Department of Justice
as late as the 1990s. Info had been leaking out for decades, but
now we know a lot more about what happened, and as is typical, what
the government was doing secretly was much more extensive than the
public realized:

Evidence of the government’s links to Nazi spies began emerging
publicly in the 1970s. But thousands of records from declassified
files, Freedom of Information Act requests and other sources,
together with interviews with scores of current and former
government officials, show that the government’s recruitment of
Nazis ran far deeper than previously known and that officials
sought to conceal those ties for at least a half-century after the
war.

In 1980, F.B.I. officials refused to tell even the Justice
Department’s own Nazi hunters what they knew about 16 suspected
Nazis living in the United States.

The bureau balked at a request from prosecutors for internal
records on the Nazi suspects, memos show, because the 16 men had
all worked as F.B.I. informants, providing leads on Communist
“sympathizers.” Five of the men were still active informants.

Refusing to turn over the records, a bureau official in a memo
stressed the need for “protecting the confidentiality of such
sources of information to the fullest possible extent.”

The Times tells the tale of Otto von Bolschwing, a
member of the SS and an aide to Adolf Eichmann, the man behind the
“Final Solution.” The CIA hired Bolschwing in the 1950s and
relocated his family to New York City. When Eichmann was captured
in Argentina, the CIA helped protect Bolschwing’s identity and
prevented his ties from being exposed. Prosecutors didn’t figure
out who he was until the 1980s. He surrendered his American
citizenship months before he died.

In retrospect, the Nazis often didn’t prove to be that helpful
(no, really!):

[M]any Nazi spies proved inept or worse, declassified security
reviews show. Some were deemed habitual liars, confidence men or
embezzlers, and a few even turned out to be Soviet double agents,
the records show.

[Holocaust scholar Richard] Breitman said the morality of
recruiting ex-Nazis was rarely considered. “This all stemmed from a
kind of panic, a fear that the Communists were terribly powerful
and we had so few assets,” he said.

Read more
here. The effort appears to be completely disconnected from
Operation
Paperclip, which brought over German scientists and engineers
after the war to employ them and keep them out of the hands of
Germany and Russia.

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Libertarian Senate Candidate Sean Haugh Talks About Smoking Pot on the Campaign Trail, Drinking Underage in Gay Bars

No arthritis pain today! Matt Laslo of Bills and
Brews has interviewed Sean
Haugh, the Libertarian Party’s candidate to represent North
Carolina in the Senate. Haugh’s poll numbers are greater than the
margin between the two major candidates, so he’s been attracting
more coverage than most third-party candidates get.

The headline here is that Haugh tells Laslo he not only has
smoked marijuana in the past but has continued to do so during the
campaign, a question he answers with direct (and perhaps slightly
tipsy) honesty. He also talks about going to Tulsa’s gay bars
when he was 15 because he knew they’d sell him beer. And then
there’s the part where he says it’s “stupid to take” PCP. When
Laslo follows up by asking whether it’s stupid to take LSD too,
Haugh says he’s “not going to judge that.”

Ordinarily all this would be very impolitic, but if you’re
seeking the support of a niche—a boutique bloc of voters, not
unlike the craft beers that Haugh praises and drinks during the
interview—then it might be savvier than it sounds. At any rate, you
can watch the whole thing here:

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ECB Bought Just EUR1.7 Billion Covered-Bonds Last Week

According to an ECB-leaked spreadsheet (now confirmed), the impotent omnipotent central bank bought a mere EUR1.7 billion of covered bonds last week (which was largely expected) according to Bloomberg. This somewhat inglorious start to the ECB’s efforts to engorge its balance by another trillion or so is supported by precedent as it has been the sovereign purchase programs that made the big difference in the past. Under pressure to “front-load the purchases” as one analyst notes, the results from last week suggest, as we have warned, there simply is not enough quality unencumbered assets lying around in Europe to make a dent in the ECB’s efforts to greatly rotate taxpayer-backed free money on to bank balance sheets.

*ECB SAYS EU1.7 BLN OF COVERED-BOND PURCHASES SETTLED LAST WEEK

As Bloomberg reports,

The ECB’s two previous rounds of covered-bond buying started slowly and gradually increased in size. That’s in contrast to the larger acquisitions of government securities made under its now-defunct Securities Market Program, which topped out in the first week of each round.

Another component of the new stimulus plan, the buying of asset-backed securities, will also commence this quarter as the ECB seeks to fend off deflation by boosting the amount of money available for banks to lend to households and businesses.

“Given the economic situation, the ECB needs to do something and there will be pressure to buy in big amounts and front-load the purchases,” said Ruben van Leeuwen, an analyst at Rabobank in Utrecht, the Netherlands. “At the beginning it’s easier to perform well, but later it will be hard to buy bonds as there will be less around and the market will be less liquid.”

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It seems at just EUR 1.7bn, it was neither easy nor liquid to give the ECB money away.

via Zero Hedge http://ift.tt/1tZcx8x Tyler Durden