Category: MK

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Western Media Fall in Lockstep for Cheap Trump/Rubio Venezuela Aid PR Stunt (The lies and propaganda coming from the Trump admin on Venezuela is off the charts, FAIR)

Saudi Arabia and Its Coalition Partners Have Transferred American-Made Weapons to Al Qaeda-Linked Fighters (Everything the government tells you about war is a lie, CNN)

Inside the UAE’s Secret Hacking Team (Very disturbing on multiple levels, Reuters)

Hundreds of Bounty Hunters Had Access to AT&T, T-Mobile, and Sprint Customer Location Data for Years (Motherboard)

Jeff Bezos Protests the Invasion of His Privacy, as Amazon Builds a Sprawling Surveillance State for Everyone Else (The Intercept)

France’s Yellow Vest Movement Comes of Age (Excellent read, The Nation)

Yellow Vest Protester Has Hand Partially Blown off as Clashes Break out Again in Paris (The Telegraph)

Congress’s Vote To Keep War In Afghanistan Sells Out American Soldiers (The Federalist)

The Great Middle East Head-Fake (Matt Taibbi writing at Rolling Stone)

Amazon Forced to Pull Products in India as New Rules Bite (India understands the dangers of how Amazon operates, BBC)

How to Stop Facebook’s Dangerous App Integration Ploy (The New York Times)

U.S. News/Politics

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– Saturn Devouring His Son (image above) is the name given to a painting by Spanish artist Francisco Goya. It depicts the Greek myth of the Titan Cronus, who, fearing that he would be overthrown by one of his children, ate each one upon their birth. 

Deny it all you want, but the global economy appears to be headed into recession. It became clear the cycle had started to turn once the FAANG stock bubble popped and the U.S. stock market plunged 20% late last year. The optimists among us insist this is merely a growth scare or blip as we saw in 2016, but that scenario looks increasingly unlikely.

As usual, the bond market tends to give us signals before more obvious evidence emerges. As such, I received a lot of insight from the following tweet.

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America Has Spent $5.9 Trillion on Wars in the Middle East and Asia since 2001, a New Study Says (CNBC)

Venezuela Crisis: Former UN Rapporteur Says U.S. Sanctions Are Killing Citizens (You won’t hear about this from mass media, The Independent)

How Amazon’s Ring & Rekognition Set the Stage for Consumer Generated Mass Surveillance (Washington Journal of Law, Technology & Arts)

Central Bank Gold Buying Hits Highest Level in Half a Century (CNBC)

EU Launches Mechanism to Bypass U.S. Sanctions on Iran (Al Jazeera)

Facebook Pays Teens to Install VPN That Spies on Them (Disgusting, TechCrunch)

Walgreens Is Exploring New Tech That Turns Your Purchases, Your Movements, Even Your Gaze, into Data (Super creepy, The Atlantic)

One of the Biggest At-Home DNA Testing Companies Is Working With the FBI (BuzzFeed)

Anti-Maduro Coalition Grew from Secret Talks (AP)

Elliott Abrams, Trump’s Pick to Bring “Democracy” to Venezuela, Has Spent His Life Crushing Democracy (The Intercept)

U.S. News/Politics

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By now it’s no longer restricted to individual companies or even to the internet sector. It has spread across a wide range of products, services, and economic sectors, including insurance, retail, healthcare, finance, entertainment, education, transportation, and more, birthing whole new ecosystems of suppliers, producers, customers, market-makers, and market players. Nearly every product or service that begins with the word “smart” or “personalised”, every internet-enabled device, every “digital assistant”, is simply a supply-chain interface for the unobstructed flow of behavioural data on its way to predicting our futures in a surveillance economy.

– From the must read piece: ‘The Goal Is to Automate Us’: Welcome to the Age of Surveillance Capitalism

A lot of my content over the past couple of years has focused on the momentous geopolitical changes I see on the horizon, and this macro perspective reaches two significant conclusions. First, that the planet is moving away from a unipolar world dominated almost entirely by the U.S. toward a more multi-polar world. Second, that this fundamental shift in geopolitical landscape, coupled with what appears to be a forthcoming reckoning with the largest global debt bubble in human history, will lead to a once in a generation reset of the world economy and the global financial system that keeps it functioning.

As has become increasingly clear in recent months, the two primary protagonists in this major historical shift are the U.S. and China. While I’ve speculated about how increased tensions between these two economic giants will likely usher in the end of globalization as we know it (and possibly a bifurcated global economy), I’ve spent less time talking about what the internal situations will look like within individual countries themselves. This is a major oversight because what really matters to Chinese and U.S. citizens tens years from now isn’t which nation has more military bases abroad, but what will everyday life be like for regular people?

In this regard, China and the U.S. both seem to be headed in similar and very dystopian directions when it comes to the freedom-destroying marriage of overbearing government and ubiquitous surveillance technology. I read a couple of excellent articles on this topic over the past week, which forced the issue to the top of my mind. In other words, does it really matter who wins the geopolitical game of risk if “we the people” end up being controlled, surveilled and completely subjugated by the very technology we so eagerly embraced and assumed would make the world a more liberated place just a few years ago?

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‘The Goal Is to Automate Us’: Welcome to the Age of Surveillance Capitalism (Extremely important read, The Guardian)

Is Big Tech Merging with Big Brother? Kinda Looks like It (Wired)

I Tried to Block Amazon From My Life. It Was Impossible. (Gizmodo)

“It’s A Reunion For People Who Broke The World”: Author Explains Why Davos Should Be Cancelled (Zerohedge) 

Beyond BuzzFeed: The 10 Worst, Most Embarrassing U.S. Media Failures on the Trump-Russia Story (Glenn Greenwald at The Intercept)

How Trump Could Wind up Making Globalism Great Again (Wired)

Russia and Key Allies Vow to Stand by Maduro in Venezuela Crisis (The Guardian)

The ‘Adults’ in the Room Are the Problem (The Nation)

Global Debt of $244 Trillion Nears Record Despite Faster Growth (I’m sure it’ll be fine, Bloomberg)

If True, This Could Be One of the Greatest Discoveries in Human History (Article on Oumuamua, Haaretz)

A Controversial Startup That Charges $8,000 to Fill Your Veins with Young Blood Now Claims to Be up and Running in 5 Cities Across the U.S. (SF Gate)

Chris Cole: The ‘Big One’ (Vol Event) Hasn’t Happened Yet (Excellent must listen to interview, YouTube)

U.S. News/Politics

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Many people are coming to quick takes on yesterday’s extraordinary decision by the U.S. government to recognize an unelected opposition leader as interim President of Venezuela based on their view of Maduro and his government. Similar to the emotional responses to those first clips of the Covington students and Nathan Phillips, such superficial opinions feel good and confirm biases, but don’t tell you much about what’s really going on. From my seat, the move by the Trump administration to choose the leader of Venezuela by diktat is just straight up imperial geopolitics. Nothing more, nothing less.

A month ago, I reassessed my geopolitical assumptions in the post, Is U.S. Geopolitical Strategy Experiencing a Monumental Shift? In it, I detailed how U.S. foreign policy seemed to be shifting toward a focus on containing China, which would lead to a far more serious confrontation between the world’s number one and number two economies.

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You don’t need me to tell you how completely crazy and distorted the financial markets have become over the last decade. Anyone reading this already knows that, which is partly why I stopped writing on the topic several years ago. I came to the conclusion there was no point in constantly screaming at the top of my lungs about what a farce the global financial system was. Instead, I decided to step back, let things play out to their predictably tragic end, and then play closer attention as the curtains started to come down. As has been made clear in my recent commentary, I think we’re now reaching that point.

I’ve begun reflecting a little more about the lessons I’ve learned over the past several years of status quo stupidity, and one particular conversation I had a while ago with a friend who was a portfolio manager at a major hedge fund came to mind. I searched my old emails to find exactly what I had written, and the response became the inspiration for the title of today’s post.

The correspondence occurred nearly four years ago, in February 2015. His initial message highlighted a FT article about the fact that Nestlé bond yields had turned negative. This was my response to his email:

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New Documents Reveal a Covert British Military-Intelligence Smear Machine Meddling In American Politics (Must read, Grayzone Project)

I Gave a Bounty Hunter $300. Then He Located Our Phone (Telecom companies promised to stop selling our personal data, but are still doing it, MotherBoard)

Yellow Vests Knock out 60% of All Speed Cameras in France (BBC)

As Democratic Elites Reunite With Neocons, the Party’s Voters Are Becoming Far More Militaristic and Pro-War Than Republicans (The Intercept)

Veteran NBC/MSNBC Journalist Blasts the Network for Being Captive to the National Security State and Reflexively Pro-War to Stop Trump (Excellent piece, The Intercept)

William Barr Helped Build America’s Surveillance State (Trump’s AG pick is very bad, ACLU)

No Tuition, but You Pay a Percentage of Your Income (Interesting article on the innovative Lambda School, The New York Times)

Inside Facebook’s Secret Rulebook for Global Political Speech (The New York Times)

Buyer of House on the Peak in Hong Kong Walks Away from Deal – Loses U.S. $4.6 Million Deposit (Serious pain emerging in the Hong Kong housing market, South China Morning Post)

U.S. News/Politics

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If you don’t follow me on Twitter, you’ve been missing out on some good stuff. With the brith of our third daughter a couple of months ago, it’s been increasingly hard for me to find the time to sit down and write longer posts, so I’ve been putting more and more content on Twitter. Last Friday, Brent Johnson of Santiago Capital, asked me to provide additional thoughts on my recent turn to being far more bullish gold. Normally I would’ve written it in a piece, but being pressed for time I put together a Twitter thread.

1/ Earlier, my friend @SantiagoAuFund asked me to expound on gold. I was a bit surprised by the interest the tweet generated, so I've decided to compose a thread on the topic and financial markets generally. There's a lot coming, so apologies to those with no interest. https://t.co/bUjYqKCDtM

— Michael Krieger (@LibertyBlitz) January 4, 2019

There are 32 posts in there and I suggest you read the whole thing. More important than the thread itself; however, was the unprecedented and totally surprising response I received. As I explain in the tweets, I intentionally avoided talking about markets for nearly half a decade for a variety of reasons, and so I was blindsided by the enthusiastic and exceptionally positive response. It led me to do quite a bit of soul-searching, and ultimately convinced me that the time is ripe for me to start commenting about financial markets again. Not only because I think we’re at or very close to a major inflection point, but because people want to hear it.

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2018 was a slog, and the more I mention this to friends, the more I realize a lot of other people feel the same way. It wasn’t a bad or terrible year for us, but at the same time nothing came easy. Anything we tried to accomplish came with all sorts of unexpected pitfalls and hurdles, and in many cases success seemed hopeless until the very last moment when things finally came together reasonably well. Stuff that had to get done got done, but not without struggle and headache.

The highlight of the year was the birth of our third child, something that will forever color 2018 positively despite other challenges. Although I knew three kids in three years would be tough, the reality of the situation has been more difficult than I imagined.I forgot just how constantly attached to a newborn a mother is, a reality that’s left me largely in charge of the toddlers.

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