Category: zerohedge

In July (2017), John McAfee made an outrageous bet – if Bitcoin did not hit $500,000 within three years, he would "eat his own dick."

Today, he upped that bet… significantly!

When I predicted Bitcoin at $500,000 by the end of 2020, it used a model that predicted $5,000 at the end of 2017. BTC has accelerated much faster than my model assumptions. I now predict Bircoin at $1 million by the end of 2020. I will still eat my dick if wrong. http://pic.twitter.com/WVx3E71nyD

— John McAfee (@officialmcafee) November 29, 2017

And so $1,000,000 Bitcoin price by end 2020 now… this is what that would look like (on a log scale)…

 

As a reminder, McAfee's new company, MGTI, fashions itself to be North America's largest bitcoin miner — leveraging up to purchase high powered machines to mine the valuable cryptocurrency.

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Anybody who was watching the July Senate floor vote on the Republicans' bill to repeal and replace Obamacare will remember the audible gasps that John McCain elicited when he surprised his own party by voting against the plan. And now just four months later, he's gearing up to do it again.

According to the New York Times, McCain may once again decide the fate of one of the Trump administration's top legislative priorities.

The senator from Arizona has been tight-lipped about whether he will vote ‘yea’ or ‘nay’ on the bill, which was voted out of the Senate Banking Committee yesterday with the support of Bob Corker and Ron Johnson, who have both expressed reservations about the plan – Johnson had even said he wouldn’t vote for it.

As the NYT points out, McCain has staked his career on a platform of fiscal responsibility, and has bucked his party by voting against tax cuts in the past.

McCain’s skepticism of tax cuts stretches at least as far back as 1994. At that time, he was fretting about being fiscally responsible now that Republicans had seized control of Congress. “I think we would be making a terrible mistake to go back to the 80s, where we cut all of those taxes and all of a sudden now we’ve got a debt that we’ve got to pay on an annual basis that is bigger than the amount that we spend on defense,” McCain said.

“Mr. McCain has voted against big tax cuts before, including two that passed under another Republican president: George W. Bush In that case, he bucked the majority of hi party on the grounds that the 2001 and 2003 cuts overwhelmingly benefited the rich – a widespread criticism of the current Senate legislation and the bill that has already passed the House. Mr. McCain is also a deficit hawk and could find it had to swallow a tax cut that will add around $1.5 trillion to the federal debt over 10 years.”

 

…

 

“In 2001, as Republicans forged ahead with a $1.35 trillion tax cut, Mr. McCain became one of two Republican senators to vote against the bill’s passage. He said he could not accept that changes to the bill lowered the top individual tax rate to 35% and delayed tax relief for married couples.”

 

‘We had an opportunity to provide much more tax relief to millions of hard-working Americans,” Mr. McCain said in a speech on the Senate floor. ‘But I cannot in good conscience support a tax cut in which so many of the benefits go to the most fortunate among us, at the expense of middle-class Americans who most need tax relief.’

 

Two years later, Mr. McCain voted against another round of tax cuts. In his remarks in 2003, Mr. McCain again cast doubt on the need to use ‘billions of federal dollars to cut taxes for our nation’s wealthiest.’ The deal breaker that time was that his fellow lawmakers would pass such cuts while rejecting legislation that would have allowed members of the military to get tax breaks on profits from selling their homes.

Several of McCain’s associates said they wouldn’t be surprised if he voted against the senate bill, which he has criticized for being too generous with the wealthy.

“’I don’t know,’ Douglas Holtz-Eakin, policy adviser to Mr. McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign, said when asked how his former boss would vote on the tax overhaul. ‘For most people there are going to be things in there they don’t like and the question is what is preferable, the status quo or the bill.’”

During the 2000 Republican primary, when he ultimately lost out to George W Bush, McCain positioned himself as the candidate of fiscal restraint, advocating paying down the debt over tax cuts for the rich.

“We ought to pay down the debt, and we also ought to make Social Security solvent,” he said.

More recently, Mr. McCain has been toeing the party line on taxes.

In 2006, Mr. McCain supported extending the Bush tax cuts on the basis that letting them expire would represent a tax increase.

The tax plan that Mr. McCain crafted in 2008 during his presidential run against Barack Obama was even more mainstream Republican. He called for lowering the corporate tax rate to 25 percent from 35 percent, phasing out the alternative minimum tax and doubling the value of exemptions for each dependent to $7,000 from $3,500.

Anyone who was paying attention to McCain’s explanation for opposing the Republican health care plan will remember that one of his reason for opposing the bill was its lack of bipartisan support. Given the intensely partisan atmosphere that has persisted in Washington for much of the last decade, this sounds like an excuse for voting against the bill out of spite.

At the end of the day, McCain and fellow Trump opponents Bob Corker and Jeff Flake aren’t running again. They’ve already suggested that they find Trump and his agenda repugnant.

And with the Republicans’ razor-thin majority, three no votes would be enough to kill the bill, which is expected to be brought to the floor for a vote tomorrow.
 

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It's beginning to seem like every day there's a new scandal breaking out at Wellls Fargo.

Earlier this week, the Wall Street Journal dished on Wells Fargo’s latest scandal when it reported that several regulators and even one US attorney were investigating the bank for gouging clients of its foreign-exchange trading desk.

Among the many humiliating details, the public learned that Wells had tacitly encouraged this behavior with an idiosyncratic bonus structure and even embarrassed and demoted an employee who complained to management about this behavior.

The scandal marked the latest blemish on Wells Fargo’s once-pristine public image following a series of other scandals in its retail lending and banking division. Earlier this year, the public learned that Wells had forced customers in its auto-lending division to buy collision insurance they didn’t need. And when 20,000 customers refused or failed to pay the insurance, the bank had their cars repossessed.

While the bank’s CEO Tim Sloane has been making the media rounds trying to rehabilitate its image, the Comptroller of the Currency, one of the bank’s regulators, has been preparing yet another enforcement action against the bank – what would be its fifth in as many years, according to WSJ.

The paper reported that the OCC has informed Wells Fargo’s board of directors that it is considering an enforcement action known as a consent letter over the bank’s failure to remedy internal controls following its infamous cross-selling scandal – when 5,000 branch managers opened fake accounts in customers’ names that the customers themselves were often unaware of – and the auto-insurance scandal, which the bank publicly admitted over the summer. In the letter would label the bank a repeat offender and purportedly increase the penalties that could be assessed if the bank doesn't finally fix its compliance controls.

The banks also admitted to overcharging some of its mortgage customers.

In a harshly worded letter sent earlier this month, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, one of the bank’s chief regulators, said Wells Fargo had willingly harmed its customers in those two business lines and had until Nov. 24 to respond, according to people familiar with the matter. The letter said the bank repeatedly failed to correct problems in a broad range of areas, not just the auto-insurance and mortgage-lending units, the people said.

 

Wells Fargo declined to comment on the letter or its response. In a statement, the bank said there “is still work to be done,” and that it “is dedicated to making things right, fixing the problems, and building a better bank.”

 

The bank said it is making changes “across our risk management functions and line of business operations to rebuild the trust of our customers and team members.” An OCC spokesman declined to comment on an ongoing regulatory matter.

 

The OCC’s letter to the Wells Fargo directors centers on irregularities in two of the bank’s operations – auto insurance and mortgage lending – both of which have emerged this year.

Typically, notifications like this are a formality: Nine times out of ten, the regulator follows up with an enforcement action, typically a fine and a promise for the bank to take certain agreed-upon steps to strengthen its internal controls while making restitution to the customers it wronged.

The bank has also said it charged some customers improper fees to extend the interest-rate commitments they received from Wells Fargo on their mortgage applications. In October the bank said it is reaching out to around 110,000 customers who paid a total of $98 million in such fees, and expects refunds to be lower than that total because, the bank said it “believes a substantial number of those fees were appropriately charged under its policy.”

 

The enforcement action being weighed against Wells Fargo is a cease-and-desist order, the people familiar with the matter said. Also known as a consent order, it is among an array of formal enforcement proceedings the OCC can take when it determines that deficiencies in a bank’s operations are severe, uncorrected, unsafe or unsound. The issuance of a consent order typically includes steps the bank’s board or management must take to correct the deficiencies and a time period for doing so.

 

The OCC’s letter underscores the continuing challenges faced by Wells Fargo as it seeks to emerge from a widespread scandal that came to a head last year. It involved disclosures that Wells Fargo had created as many as 3.5 million accounts using fictitious or unauthorized customer information. Any new sanction by regulators could further dent the bank’s reputation and could provide ammunition for private lawsuits against the company.

 

Last year’s disclosure about the unauthorized accounts led the OCC to issue Wells Fargo a cease-and-desist order. The regulator levied penalties of $35 million in that September 2016 action, stipulating that Wells Fargo’s board “achieves and maintains an enterprisewide risk-management program designed to prevent and detect unsafe or unsound sales practices.”

While the OCC has broad power to restrict acquisitions and the bank’s other activities, it has for whatever reason been reluctant to use them. Even though there was rarely a moment over the last five years where the bank wasn’t taking advantage of its customers in some way, it has only been assessed a grand total of $55 million in fines by the OCC – a pittance compared to the $4.6 billion net profit the bank earned last quarter.

The enforcement letters, however, have at least one utility: Plaintiffs who were wronged by Wells can use it to justify a lawsuit. And we imagine many consumers will take advantage of this opportunity: After all, imagine how angry you’d be if a bank wrongly repossessed your car? Customers could lose their jobs. All because of a bank’s negligence.

For what it’s worth, the bank appears to have found its scape goat. As WSJ reports, earlier this month, the bank dismissed Franklin Codel, the head of consumer lending. Codel was purportedly responsible for cleaning up questionable practices with auto lending and mortgages in that unit of the bank. He was dismissed for reportedly making disparaging comments about the bank’s regulators, according to people familiar with the matter. Wells Fargo said it would replace Codel by the end of the year. Codel previously said in a brief interview that he was “proud of my career with Wells Fargo” but declined to comment on details of his firing, saying additional questions should be directed to the bank.  

In its consent letter to Wells, the OCC “identified irregularities” in its insurance operations and accused the bank of having “weak” compliance risk.

The report also said the bank had underestimated the amount of restitution it owed to wronged customers. Of course, if this were the bank’s first warning, this language might seem appropriate. But keep in mind: Despite the public outrage that the bank’s cross-selling scandal elicited, the organization itself came away with a slap on the risk.

Maybe – just maybe – when banks are allowed to gouge and mistreat customers with minimal repercussions, they’re never forced to adjust their assessment of just how far to push questionable behaviors.

But then again, who are we to say? Perhaps letter number six will make all the difference.

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Janet Yellen’s last semi-annual testimony before Congress as Fed Chair has just concluded, and as usual it was filled long-winded platitudes, which were enough to make the blood of anyone actually listening to her slow-motion drawl, come to an instant boil.

For one, Yellen hypocrisy hit bitcoinian levels when she had the temerity to say that she is “very disturbed” about the trend toward rising inequality, noting that the central bank only has a “blunt tool” that can’t be used to target certain groups. She’s right: the “blunt tool”, also known as a money printer, is can – and has – been repeatedly used to target a certain group: the ultra wealthy, i.e., the 0.1%, those who as Credit Suisse showed two weeks ago, have never been wealthier.

 

And just to make sure all your blood has boiled over, Yellen added that the Fed is very focused on “very disturbing long-term trends” in inequality adding that “our own focus”” is on taking those trends and studying them… and making them bigger than ever she should have also added.

Demonstrating her extensive skills of pointing out the obvious, Yellen also said that “we’re suffering from slow productivity growth,” and there should be a focus on how that can be improved. It appears that the Fed is unaware that most employees spend several hours a day on Facebook, LinkedIn and SnapChat; it also appears that the Fed is unaware that most employers are aware of this, and is why there has been so little wage growth to “reward” this collapse in productivity.

Yellen had some advice: Congress and Trump administration “have a much wider set of tools” to address these urgent issues, which are “squarely in Congress’s court.” That would have been a more useful handoff about 9 years ago, which Bernanke could have made the same point instead of unleashing what has become a $15 trillion liquidity injecting between the world’s central banks.

If that wasn’t enough, Yellen’s hypocrisy then veered off into a tangent when she said that the central bank is concerned with “growth getting out of hand” and is committed to continuing to raise rates in a gradual manner. “We don’t want to cause a boom-bust condition in the economy,” Yellen told Congress.

While Yellen did not specifically commit to a December rate hike, her comments indicated that her views have not changed with her desire for the central bank to continue normalizing policy after years of historically high accommodation.

“We are not seeing undue inflationary pressure in the labor market, so our policy remains accommodative,” Yellen said. “But we do think it’s important to gradually move our policy rate toward what I’ll call a neutral level, which would be consistent with sustainably strong labor market conditions,” she said.

Yellen said the Fed does not want to stifle growth but feels strongly about keeping consistent with a labor market that is nearing full employment. “We want to do this gradually, because if we allow the economy to overheat, we could be faced with a situation where we might have to … raise rates and throw the economy into recession,” she said. “We don’t want to cause a boom-bust condition in the economy.”

But the punchline was when Yellen said she is also, drumroll, “concerned over the surging level of public debt.“

Yellen’s timely “concern” finally emerged as Congress is debating the passage of a tax cut bill which will cost around $1.5 trillion in new debt, and comes at a time when the CBO is already projecting a deficit of more than $1 trillion in the years ahead and with the total debt level at $20.6 trillion and rising.  Yellen was asked about a proposal that would trigger tax hikes if economic goals are not met. Yellen did not specifically comment on the trigger plan but said Congress is right to be thinking about the future of the national debt.

“I would simply say that I am very worried about the sustainability of the U.S. debt trajectory,” Yellen said. “Our current debt-to-GDP ratio of about 75 percent is not frightening but it’s also not low.”

“It’s the type of thing that should keep people awake at night,” she added.

So let us get this straight: after nearly a decade of keeping rates at record low levels and directly monetizing all the deficit for Obama’s administration, Yellen is suddenly worried about the $20+ trillion in debt it has left the country with?

Apparently so. As even CNBC concedes, “the Fed has critics of its own, though, who say that the central bank helped balloon the debt through low interest rates kept in place since the financial crisis. The Fed kept its benchmark rate anchored near-zero for seven years, from December 2008 through December 2015. During that time, the national debt grew 77 percent.“

Incidentally, Yellen is referring to the following CBO forecast, which sees US federal debt rising to levels last seen around the time of World War II:

Which also begs the question: fine, people are finally being “kept up at night” over something we, and others, have long said is a catastrophe for the US (except of course for those occasional econo-idiots known as the Magic Money Tree fanatics, or MMTers). So what is the alternative? If Yellen is right and the endgame is a collapse in the US economy, it means the days of the dollar as a reserve currency are numbered, incidentally something else not just we, but Deutsche Bank has also said previously. Recall what DB’s Jim Reid warned in September:

Global central banks have facilitated these elevated asset prices. A long series of global financial problems have now been passed through all parts of the financial system with most of these problems stacked up and now resting with central banks and Governments. The buildup of debt that this has created has forced central banks to keep yields at ultra-low levels, thus raising the prices of a variety of other global assets.

 

We think the final break with precious metal currency systems from the early 1970s (after centuries of adhering to such regimes) and to a fiat currency world has encouraged budget deficits, rising debts, huge credit creation, ultra loose monetary policy, global build-up of imbalances, financial deregulation and more unstable markets.

And if that is indeed the case, it would suggest that Yellen is indirectly – and directly – recommending that her audience buy bitcoin, because it is not just the US which finds itself in a fiscal and monetary dead end, it is every other fiat economy (something DB’s Jim Reid warned about two months ago). As a result, the only viable monetary system in a world in which even central banks now warn the debt is “too damn high”, is one in which central banks themselves are disintermediated, i .e.  a world in which cryptocurrencies rule.

Which, in retrospect, is not a surprise: back in July we got an amusing, if very vivid harbinger, of what may be coming.

With bitcoin now roughly 4 times higher at $11,000 and rising exponentially, those who did as the above photo suggested, can probably retire….

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Goldman's Damien Courvalin seems to have perfecvtly summed things up – the market was pricing in an OPEC production cut extension of 6-9 months (accounting for around a $2.50 premium in the price). Today's jawboning from Russia seems to signal April discussions (so a 6-month extension) which is a disappointment – and so WTI prices are tumbling…

 

Sell the leaked, jawboned news?

As we previously wrote, in conclusion, Goldman believes that oil prices have overshot fundamentals and that price risks are skewed to the downside into Thursday’s meeting.

With prices $6/bbl above our forecasts, however, we see risks that even a mildly disappointing outcome could initially keep prices above our $58/bbl Brent forecast. Yet, if the threat of geopolitical tensions fails to materialize in new disruptions, we believe that prices will trade lower in coming months: first the estimated $3/bbl current geopolitical risk premium will not be sustainable and second, we believe that prices have already overshot the industry’s marginal cost of production. In fact, the longer prices remain at current levels in the absence of new disruptions, the greater the downside risks to our 2019 $58/bbl Brent forecast: first from higher non-OPEC supply and second from the realization by OPEC that their cuts or rhetoric have overshot, leading to a potentially more aggressive ramp up in production to not lose market share and revenues.

OPEC meeting timeline: On Wednesday, November 29, the five-country Joint Ministerial Monitoring Committee – composed of Russia, Venezuela, Algeria, Oman and chaired by Kuwait – will meet at the OPEC Secretariat, where it will assess compliance with the deal, review market conditions, and possibly draft recommendations on the future of the cut agreement. The OPEC+ meeting will take place on Thursday November 30, with a closed session of OPEC ministers and the secretary general starting at noon local time (11 GMT and 6 am ET), according to the agenda posted on OPEC's website. If the meeting lasts for three hours as currently planned, it would be followed by the combined meeting of OPEC and non-OPEC ministers and delegates at 3 pm local time (1400 GMT, 9 am ET). After that, there will be a news conference. OPEC has invited 20 additional countries beyond the current 24-country coalition to the meeting, including Norway, Brazil, Colombia, Ghana, D.R. Congo, Egypt, Indonesia, Chad, Cameroon, Republic of the Congo, Niger, Mauritania, Cote d’Ivoire, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan (Norway, Brazil and Colombia have declined the invitation).

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Via The Daily Bell

Robots are taking our jobs. We all know that by now. And it sounds scary. But it really isn’t.

It is understandably upsetting if you are one of the people who will be out of a job. There can be growing pains as the economy shifts. People who thought they were all set until retirement might have to find new jobs, and gain new skills.

But robots taking menial jobs means more time. Some people used their time to come up with robots that will save countless hours of human labor. Imagine what humans can come up with using all the new free time they created.

As challenging as that is, those people should rejoice. They are being given an opportunity to grow. Do you really want to do a job that can be done easier and cheaper by a robot? Why not use that big brain to do something really productive and fulfilling?

I don’t know about you, but I never feel like I have enough time. I’m lucky to enjoy most of the things I do with my time. I am very thankful to enjoy my time making a living. But if I was suddenly out of work, I am confident that with those free hours I could quickly think of another way to earn a living. That is what a human brain is for.

And that is how robots advance civilization. They free up human capital to do even more amazing things than the robots are doing. And it is up to individuals to figure out how to make their time worthwhile.

One study says that 30% of all current working hours will be taken over by robots by 2030. That means almost a third of the work humans do right now will still get done. And humans can instead spend that time doing something more productive and fulfilling! That is amazing.

But the media pushes helplessness and fear.

“There are few precedents in which societies have successfully retrained such large numbers of people,” the report says, and that is the key question: how do you retrain people in their 30s, 40s and 50s for entirely new professions?

This paragraph sums up the real problem with robots replacing jobs. People have the attitude that they are helpless. How do YOU retrain these people, the article asks. This is such a master-slave dynamic of thinking.

It is insulting to consider people in the 30’s-50’s utterly incapable of gaining new skills. You, me, the government, we don’t have to do anything!

It is not our job to make sure people see the opportunity in this. Yes, I want to help empower people. But giving the government this type of power to herd the workers of the world into new careers is insanity! They don’t know what the economy needs. They cannot possibly see what the future holds! They will waste tax dollars training these people for silly jobs, and they will waste these people’s time in the same fashion.

These people will be best off by taking personal responsibility for their own retraining.

• Just as they are now, wages may still not be sufficient for a middle-class standard of living. But “a healthy consumer class is essential for both economic growth and social stability,” the report says. The U.S. should therefore consider income supplement programs, to establish a bottom-line standard of living.

And there’s the real motivation. They are still pushing universal basic income.

The government wants to make ever more people dependent. Dependent people are easy to control.

It is so empowering taking control of your own life and setting the course for your future. But the government will entice people to take the “easy” way out. In the end, this will lead to personal and economic stagnation.

Ironically, a headline on one of the study’s graphics makes the counterpoint. It says: “Jobs of the future: some occupations will grow, others will decline, and new ones we cannot envision will be created.”

But not if people are pacified and robbed of their creative motivation. I’m not saying we need to watch people struggle to see if they will come up with something productive. But we cannot create an entire class of people who are content not using their brains to better themselves.

I’m not saying it will be easy. It will likely be stressful. But these conditions are what make people grow. There is no telling what people will come up with. People will find ways to serve their fellow man in order to make a living. And that will increase the overall standard of living.

The government plan creates no new wealth. They simply redistribute existing wealth through a basic income. This is an opportunity for humanity to use 30% of their productive time in exciting new endeavors. If we let the government have their way, they will destroy that opportunity.

So many people I know only achieved their full potential after being fired or laid off from comfortable jobs. Some did what they always wanted, and were successful. Others found a new job, better fit for their skill set and desires. And others started from square one, persued a new career, or created their own business.

But when the government intervenes, they cause all sorts of upsets. We should fear the government intervention far more than the robots taking our jobs.

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Is this what happens when the bagholder-of-last-resort is removed from the market?

As we detailed earlier in the year, institutions and hedge funds have been using this exuberant rally in stocks to dump their holdings to retail admirers.

So what happens when arguably the largest retail brokerage – where all the "useful idiots" reside – goes down?

As The Wall Street Journal reports, a technical error at Fidelity Investments on Wednesday blocked millions of customers from their online brokerage accounts.

 Attempts to log in were met with an error message reading: “Due to a technical error, the system is temporarily unavailable.”

 

A spokesperson said that the company is working to resolve an “internal tech issue” affecting all users of the firm’s website and mobile app.

 

He said it’s unknown when service will be restored.

And the removal of these retail accounts means institutions have no one to dump to… and so this happens…

FANG Stocks suffer their biggest drop in 21 months…

Fidelity is among the largest U.S. online brokerage firms. Its personal investing business had $1.72 trillion in client assets under administration at the end of 2016 and 17.9 million accounts, according to the firm’s most recent annual report.

That's a lot of bagholders missing from today's market!

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CNBC busily defending the utter bloodbath in semi stocks as nothing to worry about… but this is the biggest plunge for these market darlings since Brexit (June 2016)…

…and just happens to have occurred as the index finally cleared the 2000 dotcom peak…

 

The key factor is that Momentum is getting monkey-hammered…

 

For the biggest drop since the election…

 

And meanwhile – Nasdaq VIX has exploded…

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In a hearing that we imagine will provide much of the leaked fodder for CNN and MSNBC news coverage over the coming week (certainly once leaked copies of the testimony are distributed to the NSA's favorite media outlets, WaPo and NYT), CNN reports that Donald Trump Jr. has agreed to testify before the House Intelligence Committee during a closed session.

This wouldn’t be Trump Jr.’s first meeting with one of the Congressional committees that are investigating Russian meddling in last year’s election: He met with Senate Judiciary Committee staff back in September, but angered Democratic lawmakers when he declined to testify publicly. Connecticut Democrat Richard Blumenthal famously accused Trump of leaving “gaps” in his testimony, and said the only way to remedy the situation would be for the president’s son to testify publicly.

Lawmakers who will be present at the Dec. 6 meeting are reportedly hoping to ask Trump more questions about the infamous “Trump Tower meeting” with Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya and her entourage – a meeting that Trump admitted he took because he was promised dirt on Hillary Clinton. However, by all accounts, Veselnitskaya never had any intention of giving him any such information. Members of the committee recently interviewed several members of Veselnitskaya’s entourage, including Anatoli Samochornov, a translator who attended the meeting. 

According to CNN, Trump’s appearance will be one of the most anticipated events yet of the investigation, particularly following recent revelations of Twitter correspondence he had with WikiLeaks during the campaign season (as a reminder, the extent of his correspondence was exchanging three messages with whomever runs the Wikileaks twitter account.)

Furthermore, the meeting with Trump will cap off a week of hearings involving high-profile Trump associates including Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Blackwater founder (and brother to Education Secretary Betsy Devos) Erik Prince.

Prince famously met with a Russian in the Seychelles to set up a purported back-channel between Russia and the Trump White House. Prince denied that was the purpose of the meeting and has said that he was there on behalf of Trump.

Rep. Mike Conaway, the Republican who is leading the House investigation, said Tuesday night that the committee had interviews with key witnesses scheduled through mid-December. He predicted the investigation would continue into next year and even expressed skepticism that it would conclude by the beginning of the midterm primary season in early 2018.

"No," Conaway said when asked if his panel would issue a report summarizing its findings by year's end. "That would be a surprise."

Trump Jr.’s lawyer refused to confirm the report with CNN. If the committee’s previous conduct during its investigation is any guide, Democratic members hoping to discredit Trump will swiftly leak the most damaging excerpts from his testimony.

Furthermore, if Republican senators do manage to pass their tax reform bill, a well-timed Russia leak could help Democrats distract from the first Republican legislative victory of the Trump era (however, if Trump tax reform stalls, the focus on "Russia collusion" could be a welcome distraction from the complete failure of Trump's legislative agenda).

Finally, with over a year of president Trump, it is likely that viewers have gotten some Trump "burn in" by now; and yet few things can still drum up Nielsen ratings quite like a chyron with the words “Russia” and "Trump" as MSNBC knows all too well.

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Authored by Peter Tchir via Forbes.com,

We have all heard the VIX or volatility index referred to as the Fear Index or Fear Gauge.  Rising VIX was meant to signal fear in the markets.  That is how most investors have historically thought about VIX and traded it (directly or through Exchange Traded Products).

I have gone back in time and combined the total assets under management of XIV and SVXY (two short VIX products) and UVXY and VXX (the two largest long VIX products).  There are others and it doesn't account for the fact that UVXY incorporates leverage, but the point is the same.

The funds that in theory helped investors 'hedge' their portfolios went from being the dominant species to those that enable investors to sell volatility.

Short VIX Funds are Larger than Long VIX Funds (source Bloomberg)

This has rarely been the case.

Typically investors had more interest in hedging their portfolios despite the evidence that the long VIX ETFs and ETNs had to continually perform reverse splits as their share prices drifted lower (some would argue "raced" lower is a more accurate description).

While the products looking to benefit on a volatility spike still attract inflows (otherwise their assets under management would be even lower), they have lost the competition to the VIX sellers.

The only other gap of similar size and duration was in late August 2015 – AFTER the market sold off and volatility spiked.

This time, it is occurring as stock markets are near all-time highs and VIX is still close to the all-time low it set just a few weeks ago (VIX is only calculated since 1990).

Whether this has finally reached a stage of complacency is anyone's guess, but the "Golden Goose" of selling VIX that I wrote about in March of this year – is clearly not a secret.

I'm not overly concerned about complacency, it is after all, a slow and typically low vol period for domestic markets, but it is something that investors need to focus on.

A spike in volatility could be far more problematic than the market is prepared for as even a small spike could turn into a larger problem with so many people positioned the other way.

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