Category: zerohedge

Heading into last month’s 10 Year auction, there was a surprising development: the 10Y paper was trading super special in repo as a result of pervasive shortages. This time, however, this did not happen and in fact after trading tight in repo, earlier today, 10Y actually had a positive sign suggesting perhaps some weakness going into today’s auction.

 

However, all fears were laid to rest moments ago when the Treasury announced the results of today’s 10Y reopening: printing at a high yield of 1.702%, this not only stopped through the 1.708% when issued, but was the lowest yield for a 10 Year auction since December 2012. Furthermore, the Bid to Cover, rebounded from last month’s 2.68 and printed at 2.70, above the six month average of 2.65.

But once again the biggest action was in the internals, where Indirects Took down a whopping 73.6%, higher than last month’s 73.5% and the highest on record. Directs were left with 7.2%, the lowest since last August, while Dealers ended up with only 19.2% of the issue.

We can conclude that the insatiable foreign appetite for US paper, especially at auction, continues, and will continue to do so as a result of rate differentials between trillions in NIRPing foreign bonds and US paper.

Finally, the bond market was quite happy with the result, and yields have dropped to new LODs after the announcement.

Judging by the action in both stocks and bonds, it would appear that the market is positioned not for rate hikes here but for more QE.

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With the auction looming, 10Y Treasury yields appear right at the ‘line in the sand’ with aggregate net positioning in Treasury futures near record shorts…

Across the entire Treasury futures complex – from 2Y to Ultras – net aggregate speculative positioning is about as short (in 10Y equivalents) as it has been since 2010…

 

Which could be a major problem given that 10Y Yields are testing 1.70% once again – the ‘red’ line in the quicksand of Fed credibility…

What happens next? By way of interest, with the S&P back near May 2015 highs, we note that 10Y yields are 60bps lower from the same date!!

 

h/t @Not_Jim_Cramer

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By Don Quijones, Spain & Mexico, editor at Wolf Street.

 Next Banking Scandal Explodes in Spain

The last five years have been a bumper period for banking scams and scandals in crisis-ridden Spain. From Bankia’s doomed IPO in 2012 to the “misselling” of complex preferentes shares to “unsophisticated” retail bank customers, including children and Alzheimers sufferers, all of the scandals have had one thing in common: the banks have consistently and ruthlessly sacrificed the welfare and wealth of customers, investors, and taxpayers on the altar of short-term survival.

Some commentators claim that the problem of banking instability in Spain has been put to rest in recent times, thanks chiefly to a robust, debt-fueled recovery, a tepid resurgence of the real estate sector and the transfer of the most toxic assets from banks’ balance sheets to the festering balance sheets of the nation’s bad bank, Sareb. They could not be more wrong.

Despite the untold billions of euros of public funds lavished on “cleaning up” their balance sheets and the roughly €240 billion of provisions booked against bad debt since December 2007, the banks are just as weak and disaster-prone as they were four years ago.

And now, it seems a new scandal is in the works. Last month Spain’s sixth largest financial institution, Banco Popular, announced that it was urgently seeking to raise €2.5 billion in capital in a desperate bid to shore up its finances. The news triggered a sell-off that wiped out 33% of the bank’s market capitalization in just two days, before investor nerves were steadied somewhat by revelations that the bank had found 10 global mega banks as underwriters for its €2.5 billion rights issue, including Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Santander, Deutsche Bank and HSBC.

But in recent days the stock has once again begun to crumble following allegations that Popular is also doing some creative selling of its own. The Spanish investment group Blackbird claims that the bank is offering customers dirt-cheap loans or refinancing deals, at an interest rate of just 2.5%, as long as they use some of the funds to purchase the bank’s new shares.

“Popular is offering loans to its customers on the condition that they subscribe to the rights issue… and then deposit the €1.25 per share in their bank accounts,” asserts Marc Ribes, co-founder of BlackBird.

If Blackbird’s allegations are well-founded — and so far there’s been no official denial — Popular is in the process of taking the dark art of banking misdeeds to a whole new level. In the preferentes scandal, Spanish banks effectively plundered billions of euros of their customers’ savings to keep their balance sheets in tact, at least for a little while longer. That was bad enough. But now it seems that the already heavily debt-laden, loss-leading Popular is creating new debt for broke customers so that they can participate in the bank’s rights issue.

Such behavior is not just unethical; it’s illegal. Banks cannot lend customers money to buy the banks’ own shares. At least not in Spain.

The allegations against Popular have reached such a level that Elvira Rodríguez, president of Spain’s National Securities Market Commission (CNMV), was yesterday asked to comment on them. She declared that the CNMV “will be monitoring and asking for information from” Banco Popular about its forthcoming capital expansion. This should, in an ideal world, be a source of relief to investors. But this is not an ideal world and there is no source of relief — at least not from financial regulators, whose role is to guard the foxes as they eat the hens while telling the hens not to worry about the foxes.

In the last five years Spanish banks have been able to bend or break just about every rule in the book with not so much as a slap on the wrist from Spain’s two biggest financial regulators, the CNMV and Banco de España, both of whom have been accused of a raft of oversight failures in Bankia’s IPO.

The chances of the same two regulators suddenly taking an interest in the misdeeds of one of Spain’s biggest financial institutions are paper-thin. As for Spain’s caretaker government, it’s not hard to fathom where its loyalties lie, particularly in light of the fact that the governing People’s Party just received a €1.2 million loan from Banco Popular so that it could post bail for three former treasurers accused of operating a multi-decade slush fund to channel corporate kickbacks to senior party officials.

Meanwhile, Spain’s fourth biggest party, the center-right Cuidadanos financed its last election campaign with a €4 million loan from (yes, you guessed it…) Banco Popular.

With 10 of the world’s biggest and most deviant banks preparing the ground for Popular’s capital expansion while Spain’s regulators and government look the other way, it’s hard to shake the feeling that a trap is being laid. If the last five years are any indication, the chosen prey will be (in order of appearance) gullible customers, retail shareholders, and Spain’s unconsulted taxpayers. Once again, the wealth of the country will be redistributed from middle-class taxpayers, investors, savers, and pensioners to the executives and creditors of financial institutions.

As a former Barcelona-based banker told me a couple of days ago, “the banking sector — once the foundation of the economic system — is a disgrace; it has lost all sense of purpose, apart from sucking dry what little marrow remains of the productive economy.” By Don Quijones, Raging Bull-Shit

Things have gotten so bad in the Eurozone that even the staunchest eurocrats are beginning to express doubts, even European Parliament Chief Martin Schulz who’d warned over a possible “implosion of the EU.” But now, the eurocrats are not just falling into despondency and despair, they’re beginning to turn on each other.

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By EconMatters

The short of a lifetime is the Global Debt Crisis coming down the pipeline, this crisis will make all other financial disaster scenarios look like peanuts in comparison.

Japan was the model for what not to do to try and stimulate an economy for 20 plus years, and yet when faced with its own crisis the developed central banks all reacted by copying the one model everybody pointed to as the flawed economic model for stimulating economic growth.

There is a direct correlation between government and central bank debt and deflationary growth trajectories around the world. The fact that central banks believe they have no role in deciding the “New Normal” through effective policy, which in this case means less central bank involvement, is disconcerting to say the least.

It also points to the reason that every financial crisis of the last 20 years has been the direct result of the unintended consequences of central bank involvement here in the United States in the form of flawed Monetary Policy.

Excessively loose monetary policy has major side effects, which escalate with duration of loose monetary conditions, and we are already starting to see these unintended consequences right now with regard to risk taking in financial markets, irrational investment decisions, and debt choices being made by consumers and banks once again in the credit markets. 

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One of the bright spots of demand for oil in recent months has been China, where teapot refineries have been firing on all fours following the recent loosening of import restrictions, leading to a buying scramble of offshore oil (courtesy of the recent massive credit injection by the PBOC) which among other things has resulted in an unprecedented glut of gasoline.  That is no longer the case.

According to Bloomberg, oil imports by China, the world’s biggest consumer after the U.S., fell to a four-month low in part due to congestion at one of its biggest ports curbed purchases from independent refiners. Inbound shipments in May totaled 32.24 million metric tons, data from the Beijing-based General Administration of Customs showed on Wednesday. That’s equivalent to 7.62 million barrels a day , down 4.3 percent from the previous month, and the lowest since January. Net oil-product exports fell by almost one-third from April to 810,000 tons.

This validates what we noted two months ago when we looked at the unprecedented glut of full tankers lying in wait in places like the Persian Gulf and the Straits of Malacca, waiting for higher prices to make landfall. As we noted then, “It’s not just the Persian Gulf though: shocking sights can be seen in in Asia, where many ports have not been upgraded in time to deal with ravenous demand as consumers take advantage of cheap fuel. “It’s the worst I’ve seen at Qingdao,” said a tanker captain waiting to offload at the world’s seventh busiest port, adding that his crew was killing time doing maintenance work. “

This has now been confirmed.

According to Bloomberg,  “Qingdao port in Shandong province, where most teapots are based, has been congested this year from “unprecedented” tanker traffic, according to Liu Jin, general manager of Qingdao Shihua Crude Oil Terminal Co., which operates oil berths at the port.”

“The congestion at the Qingdao port is highlighting the need to slow the pace of buying,” Michal Meidan, an Asia energy analyst at Energy Aspects Ltd., said by e-mail. “Prices have gone up, so teapots will use this to take stock of their buying patterns thus far.”

It wasn’t just congestion however. As UPI notes, oil demand in China, a leading global economy, contracted for the third straight month in part because of economic slowdown, data analysis found. “Analysts with the World Bank downgraded the forecast for global economic growth for the year from 2.9 percent to 2.4 percent. India’s economy grows by 7.6 percent, while Brazil and Russia sink deeper into recession. For China, the World Bank said the economy expands this year by 6.7 percent, compared with 6.9 percent last year. “In an environment of anemic growth, the global economy faces mounting risks, including a further slowdown in major emerging markets,” the World Bank said.”

It gets worse; according to an analysis from S&P Global Platts finds China’s apparent oil demand, a measure of domestic production plus net imports, shrank 1.3 percent year-on-year in April. “China’s oil demand growth is expected to moderate significantly in 2016 as gross domestic product growth slows on the back of economic rebalancing,” the emailed report found.

Ignoring the question of macro growth and focusing on just local refineries, Bloomberg adds that China’s refineries processed a record 44.75 million tons of crude in April, while output from its domestic fields slumped to the lowest in 14 months, data from the National Bureau of Statistics showed last month. Total exports fell 4.1 percent in dollar terms in May from a year earlier, the customs administration said Wednesday.

However, as we also showed before, it may not be just port congestion.  As we showed last week, Chinese gasoline exports are also up more than 50 percent for the first four months of the year, suggesting there is nowhere near enough local demand for all the refined product.

 

As a result Reuters said that going forward China could scale back its volumes. “Maintenance in May and June, particularly at (Chinese) teapot refiners will … lower gasoline output,” analysts at BMI Research said in a note to clients this week.

What this means is that now that China is fully glutted with both raw and refined product, expect Chinese demand to suddenly drop, something which the latest import data are already showing. Unless of course, the government decides to ram refinery production, and alongside the coal and steel industry, to force the production of gasoline well above implied demand, something which as the chart above shows is already taking place.

Assuming some production rationality, however, especially if oil prices continue to rise, and should the supply disruptions get resolved (especially the ongoing situation in Nigeria where the Niger Delta Avengers continue to impair production on a daily basis virtually and mysteriously unopposed), the market is setting itself up for another rerun of the summer of 2015, when prices rose and flatlined for most of the summer, only to tumble into the end of the year.

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Submitted by Brendan Brown via The Mises Institute,

In our time, the greatest source of money chaos is now the global 2%-inflation standard. Deflation-phobic central bankers, led by the FOMC at the Fed, are defying the natural rhythm of prices in a capitalist economy. Under sound money, there would be periods of both falling and rising prices.

Since central bankers choose to steadfastly ignore this reality, the result has been the emergence of three serious global asset price inflation diseases in just three decades. Their undermining of economic prosperity has shown up as a situation marked by low investment, malinvestment, and correspondingly weak real income and productivity growth. This has been coupled with episodes of huge profits for “Wall Street,” and the resulting increased inequality has made fertile ground for populism both on the left and the right. Meanwhile, the intensified regulatory state, which populism has helped produce, has compounded the economic malaise.  

The Role of “Official” Productivity and Inflation

A principal tenet relied upon by the architects and advocates of the global 2% inflation standard has been that productivity growth is greater than is reported, while inflation is less than reported — according to the official statistics. And so, 2% inflation on the official measure might be only 0-0.5% in reality. 

Meanwhile, the central bankers claim, statisticians are not correctly measuring the improvements in our daily lives that new technology brings. Price measurements, we’re told, don’t tell us enough about how much value is added by innovative products, such as time saved, or safety gained. The effort to include these improvements within the price measures is known as hedonic price accounting. Hedonics is designed to measure the fact that automobiles technology, for example, makes cars safer and more comfortable than you think. Yes, cars are much more expensive today — the argument goes — but we have to factor increases in quality and efficiency into modern prices. If you take this into account, the central bankers claim, then inflation is actually lower than you think, because the products we buy are all of higher quality now, and we’re getting more for our money.

Thus, if a piece of medical software does more today than 20 years ago, then inflation in the price of that good is actually less than the statistics suggest.

This Is Nothing New

The same point concerning price statistics could have been raised in the gold standard years of say 1870–1914, or in the 1920s, or the 1950s and 60s.

During those periods, incidentally, there was no hedonic price accounting then at all — so stable prices as measured by the available statistics would have been equivalent to say 1–2% “deflation” under today’s measurement techniques. 

The transition from canals to railroad transportation — or from ice cupboards and salting to refrigeration — evidently had benefits which transcended crude price gathering by statistical offices.

Technological Innovation Has Both Costs and Benefits

Broader economic reflection suggests that the statisticians in the pre-hedonic price adjustment age — which began in the 1980s and was cheered on by Alan Greenspan — had it right. There are definite offsets to these quality improvements, some continuous and some discontinuous. The latter include the episodes of vast human and material destruction made possible by the new technologies.

For example, we can all recognize the ill consequences of the IT revolution which should be debited from the so-called productivity bonus. These include the cost of internet security — anti-hacking and anti-viruses in particular. While this is in fact a new burden, this new industry of security is treated by the statisticians as an addition to economic output. There is also the empowerment of big brother and the potential dangers of cyberwarfare including horrendous knock-outs to electrical infrastructure. 

There is nothing new in this. The development of the automobile went along with the need for road safety in terms of policing and infrastructure. Automobiles also brought a demand for increasingly sophisticated safety systems installed in the automobile itself. And then there is the whole deadweight cost associated with the accident insurance industry. There has always been the parallel horror of what might happen when the new technologies enter actual military warfare. 

The experimenters at the modern central banks who have been operating the global 2% inflation standard argue today is different, and technological innovation is always a net gain.

Populists, however, recognize that, in spite of new technologies popping up constantly, all is not well. Some of the populists who recognize a problem of monetary failure claim the solution is to change the party label of the central bank’s chair. Donald Trump, for example, suggests he would replace Yellen because she is not a Republican. But wasn’t Bernanke a Republican?

Others (on the left) would add racial or gender diversity to the Fed board and intensify regulation.  

Not surprisingly — given what we know about American politics — the real solution is not on offer: an exit from the 2%-inflation standard and a transition to sound money.

The Populist Threat to Sound Money Endures

There is no inevitable path from monetary chaos to any particular frightening political outcome – including Robert Kagan’s nightmare prediction that “Trumpism” is “how fascism will come to America.”

Trump is only a symptom of a far larger problem. The economic conditions that have paved the way for “Trumpism” are really a result of decades of monetary disorder brought to us by central banks.

In the 18^th century, British economist John Stuart Mill wrote “most of the time the machinery of money is unimportant but when it gets out of control it becomes the monkey wrench in all the other machinery of the economy.” There should have been a second sentence about how the dysfunction of the invisible hands attributable to the monetary disorder endangers political liberalism.

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You might have seen the latest headlines about the Winklevoss twins, Co-Founders of Gemini Trust, claiming that “bitcoin is better at being gold than gold.” These quotes are from a Bloomberg interview from June 6, 2016. “…bitcoin has been a lot more stable than gold. It has evidenced a lot less volatility.” And as evidence they cited “…the Wall Street Journal actually wrote a story in May in how it was more stable than gold over the last 28 days.” And finally ”It’s actually better at being gold than gold.”

The problem is, none of that is actually true. And it seems that nobody in the media made any effort to fact check their claims either. Because if they actually looked at the data, they would have realized that bitcoin’s price volatility is several orders of magnitude higher than that of gold over pretty much any timeframe (including the entire if rather short history of bitcoin).

So let’s start by simply plotting the daily price changes of gold vs the daily price changes of bitcoins. This gives you already a pretty good understanding which one is more volatile and should give you a hint what you probably will find if you bother to do an actual statistical analysis.

 

 

Running the numbers, we find that the standard deviation of bitcoin is much higher over any time-frame we looked at. The annualized standard deviations of daily returns over 1 week, 1 month, 3 months, a year, 3 years and since 2010 (the start of bitcoin price history in Bloomberg) are all a lot higher for bitcoin prices compared to gold. None of this data is particularly hard to get and calculating the standard deviation can be done in a few seconds either using Bloomberg’s built-in analytics or in an ordinary Excel spreadsheet.

 

 

So what about the WSJ story where the newspaper apparently reported in May that Bitcoin had been more stable than gold for 28 days? We are not really sure. There was article in the WSJ on April 19, 2016 with the title “Is Bitcoin Becoming More Stable Than Gold?” In that article, the Author (Stephanie Yang) claims that “The last 24 days mark the longest period in which bitcoin prices have been less volatile than gold prices, going back to 2010”. The article doesn’t exactly state what that means. Looking at the daily absolute price changes in percent over the given time-frame (24 business days from March 16 to April 19), one can see that the changes in bitcoin prices exceed those of gold on several occasions and vice versa. The annualized standard deviation of gold and bitcoin over that exact timeframe are both about 16%, with bitcoin’s volatility being a fraction of a percent lower which might be what has prompted the author to write that story. But then, the standard deviation of a short 24 days of daily returns is not something you typically find in a fund prospectus. Nobody will ever say, “I see the backtesting of the returns of your product shows that the 24-day standard deviation was unusually low. That is fantastic.” It is a completely arbitrary time-frame. Needless to say that the 24-day rolling annualized standard deviation of daily returns (hard to imagine this ever catches on) is now back in the high 40s.

 

 

We are not saying that bitcoin’s price volatility cannot fall below gold’s volatility at times. But we would say that it should happen first before you claim so. Calculating the standard deviation of returns is easy and thus any responsible media source should fact-check such claims before simply reporting it without comment. Price returns and volatility are pure math. It’s not like a lot of areas in economics where econometrical tools are abused to “prove” all kinds of things people want to believe are true. There is no interpretation of the results, they are what they are. To derive from a 24-day window that bitcoin is a better store of value than gold after having experienced >50% daily price swings over the past few years is nonsense. By way of comparison, gold has been used as money for 6,000 years and we have great data for daily pricing going back 600 years. Looking at that data, the maximum price swing in any given day was 32%.And that was directly linked to the US government sharply devaluing the USD. Since the official demonetization of gold in 1971, the largest daily price move was 13%. 

 

If you watch the full Bloomberg interview you also realize that the Winklevoss twins don’t seem to really understand what gold is, what a store of value is, and thus what money is. Gold is simply counter-party risk free money that maintains its purchasing power over time. What makes it so useful as money is that prices of goods that the average consumer needs have remained stable in gold over very long time periods. A BigMac costs pretty much the same in gold today as it did 30 years ago (while in USD it has gone up 300%). The same is true for the average house, car, a gallon of gasoline, etc. Despite referring to gold (and implicitly bitcoin) as money, the Winklevoss twins imply in the interview that gold and bitcoin are things INVESTORS seek in times of crisis. But gold is not an investment. Stocks and bonds are investments, where the investor takes a view on the company and the management and is hopefully rewarded with a return. Gold is simply money, and as a store of value works much better than any fiat currency ever has over a sustained period. Hence gold is not something that should be of interest only to money managers and people with a trading account who increase their gold allocation when they expect prices to go up. Gold is useful to everybody trying to save money and protect wealth over time due to its remarkably stable purchasing power. Anything proposed as money, including bitcoins, should be able to do that, but gold is the only form of money that has a proven track record in both ancient and modern times. Bitcoin’s 8-year history is but the bat of a historical eyelash, a monetary experiment rather than a monetary proof of value. 

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As former McDonald's CEO Ed Rensi so eloquently explained not long ago, raising the minimum wage would wipe out thousands of entry level jobs for those who don't have very many other options.

Washington, DC is validation of Rensi's theory. According to a report from the Employment Policies Institute, nearly half of Washington, DC employers said they have either laid off employees or reduced the hours of employees to adapt to the District of Columbia's minimum wage hikes since 2014.

The District of Columbia has seen the minimum wage increase from $8.25 an hour in 2014 to a rate of $11.50 an hour today, and just yesterday an increase to $15 an hour was approved. The Institute surveyed 100 employers in Washington, DC to understand how they would react to further minimum wage hikes, only to find that in order to cut expenses, they have already started laying off employees and reducing hours in order to accommodate the most recent hikes, let alone deal with a further increase to $15 an hour. To offset the increase to $15, the survey found that another round of price increases, layoffs, and reduction in hours would have to take place – as well as potentially moving businesses out of the District. The survey also concluded, just as Rensi said would happen, employment opportunities for younger, less educated people was disappearing. Given the newly approved increase to $15 an hour, employment opportunities will disappear even faster for this group of workers – not that politicians care a lot about that of course, just as long as the union supports during election time.

From the Washington Free Beacon

“Employers affected by the proposed increase to a $15 minimum wage were asked if they had either reduced the number of employees on their staff, or reduced the hours of current employees, to adapt to recently enacted minimum wage increases,” the report says. “Nearly half of employers surveyed had already taken one of these steps—suggesting that 2014-16 minimum wage increases haven’t been absorbed through higher prices alone.”

 

According to the report, just over half of the businesses surveyed said they planned to raise prices in order to offset the cost of a minimum wage hike. Thirty-five percent said they would likely reduce staffing levels and 37 percent said they would reduce employees’ hours or reduce the number of hours they were open for business. Thirty-one percent of businesses said they were very likely to hire more skilled workers in the future to offset the higher wage.

 

One in five businesses said they would move out of the District of Columbia and into Arlington, Virginia where the minimum wage is $7.25 per hour. Sixteen percent of businesses surveyed said they were somewhat likely to close their business if the minimum wage hike were implemented and 6 percent of businesses said they would likely close.

 

“These results are consistent with the best and most recent published research on the minimum wage, which finds that past increases (at lower proposed wage levels) have reduced employment for younger and less-educated employees,” the report states.

 

“These proposed laws have encouraged a perception that D.C. is becoming less friendly for businesses,” the report says. “Two-thirds of surveyed businesses agreed with this sentiment, with half strongly agreeing that D.C. is becoming a business-unfriendly city.”

Rensi also made an observation that he suspects the push to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour might not be that altruistic after all – perhaps it's to actually help depleted union coffers fill up with dues money. Given the fact that even officials who are signing on to minimum wage increases know that it doesn't make economic sense, it's difficult to argue with Rensi's assertion.

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From the Slope of Hope: Recently I mentioned how “don’t talk about religion or politics” is usually wise counsel. And, as with most wise counsel, I ignore it. I actually hardly ever discuss religion, actually, because to me it’s something deeply personal, and to hear others talk about their own beliefs is more than a little boring. I get a little riled when one particular religion chops off people’s heads (or burns them alive in cages, or what have you), and I’ve learned to keep my mouth shut about certain religions dominating certain industries. I pretty much leave the topic alone.

Politics, though, is a different matter. I consider it every bit as interesting as charts, because, you see, it’s not stocks or politics I find especially captivating – – – – it’s the history that’s forming around us during our lives. 

As Witchy-Poo has informed us repeatedly lately, “history has been made” with the first non-penis-having human capturing a major presidential nomination in United States history. She will be paired, it appears, with a megalomaniac whose masculinity is persistently on display (small hands notwithstanding) and has demonstrated his desire to exercise his pure “id” at every opportunity. It’s going to be very, very entertaining (although I suspect by early November people will be dancing in the streets that the slugfest is almost over).

But there’s something I’m going to be looking for when the debates start again, and I suggest you might want to do the same: I like to think of it as the Sorkin moment. I suspect Trump is going to push, and poke, and goad, and prod, and insult, and insinuate in much the way Tom Cruise’s character needles Colonel Jessup into an outburst that he will soon regret.

I mean, it could be about anything, but let’s just take one possibility:

Clinton: “You’ll find that the quantity and quality of those speaking out against me is a much smaller group than yours, Mr. Trump.”

Trump: “Maybe they’re too afraid to speak out or else they’ll wind up like Vince Foster.”

{brief moment of tense outrage as the blood vessels appear on her forehead}

Clinton: “He was murdered, you asshole!”

Now, if and when such a “did she really say that?!?!” moment takes place, the real question is whether the nation will rise to its feet as one and begin applauding or whether they’ll start to wonder about the infamous temper of this woman (whose screams, apparently, could be heard throughout the White House during her husband’s administration).

Anyway, it’ll be entertaining. Let’s see if this little “moment” I’m predicting actually transpires. Get your Coke and popcorn ready.

via http://ift.tt/1UAmksI Tim Knight from Slope of Hope

Submitted by Michael Shedlock via MishTalk.com,

The UK is not the only country with increasing doubts about the EU.

A Pew Research Center study on Euroskepticism Beyond Brexit shows a huge dip in EU favorability across the board.

France has an even lower overall favorable rating of the EU than the UK. The favorable score is 38% in France, 44% in the UK.

The British are not the only ones with doubts about the European Union. The EU’s image and stature have been on a roller coaster ride in recent years throughout Europe. In a number of nations the portion of the public with a favorable view of the Brussels-based institution fell markedly from 2012 to 2013 as the European economy cratered. It subsequently rebounded in 2014 and 2015. But the EU is again experiencing a sharp dip in public support in a number of its largest member states.

 

 

EU favorability is down in five of the six nations surveyed in both 2015 and 2016. There has been a double-digit drop in France (down 17 percentage points) and Spain (16 points), and single-digit declines in Germany (8 points), the United Kingdom (7 points) and Italy (6 points).

 

 

Young people – those ages 18 to 34 – are more favorable toward the European Union than people 50 and older in six of the 10 nations surveyed. The generation gap is most pronounced in France – 25 percentage points – with 56% of young people but only 31% of older people having a positive opinion of the EU. There are similar generation gaps of 19 points in the UK, 16 points in the Netherlands, 14 points in Poland and Germany, and 13 points in Greece.

 

Ever Closer Union – Not

Despite having an unfavorable rating of 61%, nearly as many French want more power given to the EU than taken away.

That said, there is not a single country in  support of giving the EU more power.

 

Migration Crisis

Every nation strongly disagrees with the Eu handling of migration.

 

Fed Up With the EU

Clearly the UK is not the EU’s only problem. People are fed up.

Frustration shows not only in EU polls, but in the rise of parties on the left in some countries and on the right in others.

Voters everywhere stew over the economy. We have not yet reached a flash point, but it’s coming.

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