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Submitted by Lynn Paramore via The Institute for New Economic Thinking,

Milwaukee-born short-seller Jim Chanos, founder and managing partner of New York-based Kynikos Associates, teaches University of Wisconsin and Yale business students about corporate fraud. During his life and career, he has witnessed seismic shifts in economic thinking and the relationship between labor and capital.

 

Chanos shares his thoughts on the world emerging from the election of Donald Trump and the tumultuous political events of 2016. 

Lynn Parramore: Leading up to the election of Trump, we had eight years of Obama, and before that, eight years of Bush. Before we get to the president-elect, how do you assess the records of those past presidents in terms of basic policing of markets and corporate fraud?

Jim Chanos: Bush was the MBA president who was going to be pro-business, cut taxes, and deregulate. Meanwhile, he had two recessions on his watch, less employment than when he started, and two bear markets in the stock market — probably the worst president for business since Herbert Hoover. The business guy!

 

Yet, he did tighten up the Justice Department and go after corporate crime. The Ashcroft Justice Department, as bad as it was in lots of other things, went after corporate fraud and accounting fraud, criminally. In 2002, we got Sarbanes-Oxley to curb fraud.

 

I don’t know that all this was Bush’s predilection — remember, his biggest supporter was Enron. But because of Enron and the other dot-com era scandals, he got backed into a corner to go hard on them. I’ve joked that the only person who put more corporate executives in jail than George W. Bush was his father during the Savings and Loan Crisis.

 

On these issues, I’d rather have Bush any day of the week than Obama. Both Eric Holder and Lanny Breuer of Obama’s Justice Department said in TV interviews and testimony that they factored in non-judicial aspects as to whether to mount prosecutions. I think that this had political costs to the Democrats. The crony capitalism still bothers people — the idea that Wall Street got off scot-free and they are still struggling. That lack of justice applied equally under the law was corrosive, not necessarily for Obama personally, but certainly for the party following him.

LP: How do you see a Trump presidency in this light?

JC: You and I have talked about how it has become a cost calculus for lots of corporations and financial institutions to cheat. “If I get caught,” they say, “I’m just going to pay a fine.” How does this change with new faces in Washington?  You still have this very pro-corporate group on Capitol Hill whose main bailiwick, in my opinion, is to protect the corporate class and the very wealthy. You’ve got what ostensibly is a proto-populist in the White House with a cabinet that is a mélange of different types, so who knows?

 

In my overall view, stuff happens to change people. If we go back to Bill Clinton, his “Putting People First” manifesto in ’92 was quite left-of-center, but he didn’t govern that way. If you look at things like NAFTA, Welfare reform, and cutting capital gains taxes  — well, in many ways, Ronald Reagan would have been proud of him.

 

Events conspire to derail our perceptions of presidents. When we look at their platforms, we think we know where things are headed. But in modern times, the only two presidents that I can think of who really got their ideas and platforms enacted wholesale were FDR and Reagan. Everybody else has gotten compromised, or has had events overwhelm them.

LP: What do you make of the expectations of the economy under Trump?

JC: I worry about the heightened expectations from the people who voted for him thinking that he’s their savior. That’s what scares me — unmet expectations.

 

For the swing voter in the Midwest who voted for this guy because he thinks coal-mines are coming back or the plants are going to reopen — it’s not going to happen.

LP: What about the rise in bank stocks since the election? Are banks anticipating deregulation?

JC: Almost all stocks are going up, mostly because of the belief of lower taxation. But after Obama’s election, most stocks went down and kept going down until the following March — and then they tripled! So I wouldn’t read a lot into the first month or two.

 

It could be that banks are anticipating deregulation, but so what? Deregulated to what end? They’re still going to have the capital requirements, which are international. Putting capital standards on them is the biggest way in which they were regulated.

 

In the bigger picture, if you think this is an uncertain presidency and we’re not quite sure where he’s going and how events will conspire, it’s not that important to get too worked up because things will happen and you’ll have to react. If, however, this is a once-in-a-fifty-year change in global thoughts about capitalism, then you have to pay attention.

LP: If this is a once-in-fifty-year change, what’s at stake?

JC: Part of my view is that in the 1930s, we rejected the individuality of the ’20s and before. After the crash and the Depression, we finally put the corporate class and bankers to the sidelines. Whether it was Keynesianism or the New Deal in the West, or state fascism or the advent of Stalinism, you saw more government control over the economy. This was good for workers and large governments. It was more nationalistic and led, obviously, to the next conflict. But the rise of government planning and government involvement was good for nominal GDPs. It was not good for the asset-holding classes — stocks and bonds did terribly over that period, right? You wanted to be a worker, you wanted to be labor, not capital.

 

The period from the late 1970s to 1980 changed all that. You had Thatcher and the U.K. and Reagan in the U.S. Mao died in 1976, the Solidarity movement in Poland began in 1978, and the Soviet Union peaked in power in 1979. You saw that the pendulum had gone too far and now we’re going to cut taxes on capital, we’re going to be more globalistic, and trade was going to improve. Since then, capital has risen and assets have done better than labor. Taxes have been light on financial assets and heavy on labor. Everything was reversed on its head.

 

If we look at the events of 2016 — Brexit, the Italian referendum, Trump, and the rise of nationalist China — are these the harbingers of something bigger? Or are they just a coincidence?  The ground seems to be fertile for things to change globally. If so, does this give rise to a more nationalistic, protectionist, statist scenario?  Are labor prices going to go up again? Are we going to tax capital and emphasize wages?

 

We’ll see….

LP: Going back to Trump’s promise to bring jobs back to the U.S. — can the government even do that?

JC: In the case of the ’30s, you had massive public works spending and government spending, so you created construction workers. But on that front, we’re not going to compete anymore, as the Carrier guy said. Mexican labor is $3 an hour. No amount of retraining for a lower-skilled assembly job is going to change that. The only thing that will replace that Mexican worker himself is a robot. And a robot is infinitely cheaper than even the cheapest labor.

 

Surveys show that there are jobs open in the economy, but there’s just not a skill level to fill all of them. Our problem is the displacement in things like mining, assembly, low-end manufacturing – that’s where the job losses have occurred. It is just very hard under almost any scenario no matter what your politics are to see where those jobs are going to come back.

 

To the extent that you have wholesale, large, construction-like projects, then you will put people to work at relatively high rates, but the jobs are episodic and not necessarily career paths. When I was making $14 an hour working steel in Milwaukee in the summers in college, a steel worker could basically say, “all right, as long as I understand that I’m going to work in this factory, I can have a nice living for my family.” Those jobs are gone. The plants closed. So the whole idea that someone can now say, “I can work in the Carrier plant for $20 an hour and be assured of a job for life and security and put my kids through college” — that doesn’t exist anymore.

 

That’s where the problem and discontent will come — when you’ve sold that dream and it doesn’t happen. In that scenario, Trump begins to have a pretty short honeymoon.

LP: You’ve long been linked with China. What do you make of the positions of China and the U.S. in the international economy, and how do you think they’re changing?

JC: To me, the rise of Xi Jinping is a big event still underestimated in the global political economy. He is more of a personality than either Deng Xiaoping or Mao Zedong, certainly higher in stature internally than his predecessors. He is not first among equals in the Politburo Standing Committee — he’s first. This goes along with the theory about the rise of nationalists such at Putin in Russia. Xi Jinping is also a nationalist. He talks about the China Dream, China getting back to past glories, and not exporting communism. What you would have heard Mao say.

 

He’s a member the Chinese Communist Party, but the Party exists now as a political apparatus, not an ideology. China would not have the type of capitalism it has today if this were not the case. So these are not Marxist-Leninists, but rather just a fantastic single party in control. We have to understand it in that light.

 

China is increasingly a geostrategic rival. In the past, China looked toward protecting what it had — making claims on Taiwan and Tibet and ancillary areas, but the Chinese were really content not to compete in the global Cold War between the Soviet Union and the United States. Now we have this multi-polar world, and China sees itself clearly as the prime actor in the Pacific willing to fill any vacuum that the United States begins to pull away from.

 

Xi Jinping comes in and immediately he rewrites the passport maps. He sets the air traffic and extends the air defense zones. More ominously, he begins to militarize the South China Sea, and puts military bases on the islands, which alarms pretty much everybody. (And yet if you look at a map of the Pacific, the only country that really needs to traverse the South China Sea is China itself —oil going from the Middle East to Japan goes around it. The South China Sea is symbolic more than it is geostrategic).

 

I think, however, that Trump has decided that China makes a convenient media punching bag. You can claim that China took your jobs and China is a bogeyman. It seems to me that president-elect Trump does best when he has someone to fight against. However, the broader issue will be that foreign policy and national security events have a whole different dynamic than beating up on a defense contractor for an air conditioning plant.

 

What will be the ramifications? How will China react? What do you do about countries like the Philippines that are in the middle — a country that has elected its own interesting president, someone who seems to want to embrace China after decades of being staunchly a U.S. ally? What does this do for Japan? Japan itself has a nationalist, Shinzo Abe, who wants to increase military spending and take off the yoke of the Japanese constitution block on an expanded military.

 

There are many questions, but whatever you might think, China and Japan, while big trading partners, are not the best of friends in that neighborhood. Finally you’ve got the wacky guy in North Korea. What’s he going to do?

 

This whole area just keeps quietly but relentlessly getting to be more dangerous. I think that at some point in the first four years of the Trump administration, the Pacific is going to heat up again.

 

People are talking about starting a trade war with China but they haven’t really thought it through, because if you talk to corporate execs in the United States, they’re sort of quietly terrified.  Often the supply chain, even in U.S. manufacturing, relies on parts from Mexico and China coming in. We are pretty interconnected. Lots of businesses, and workers, too, will get disrupted in ways we can’t even think of in a trade war. There’s a reason why people studied the 1930s with the tariff walls that went up and the disruptions that happened. It’s negative for growth.

 

So stay tuned, it’s going to be interesting. 

LP: To turn to Europe, you’re a Greek-American, and you have been critical of the Eurozone’s attitude toward Greece. What do you make of the situation there now?

JC: The key issues for Greece now revolve around two entities that are not Greek. First you have the EU as a whole. We continue to have these bombshells, like the Italian referendum and Brexit — and you’ve also got elections coming up elsewhere in 2017.

 

I think Greece was sort of the Spanish Civil War to what’s about to be the EU’s WWII in that it was the opening preview of all of the problems that are going to come to the fore if Catalonia wants to become independent, if Italy wants to leave, if France wants to leave. The EU is being held together by chewing gum and string right now.

 

With this rise of nationalism  — if that’s what it is and it continues — the EU is going to find itself increasingly a victim of people wanting self-determination in northern Europe. That’s the first thing. Second is something I’m much more concerned about which nobody’s paying attention to, and that’s the continued rise of Erdo?an in Turkey. He has not only consolidated his power through a series of purges —thousands and thousands of journalists and academics have been thrown in prison since the aborted coup — but increasingly he is becoming more militant and Turkey is becoming a pro-Islamic state that is part of NATO. He’s throwing wild monkey wrenches into the whole Middle Eastern situation by making claims on land that was owned by the Ottomans, pre-WWI, like modern-day Iraq, modern-day Syria, and modern-day Greece and Bulgaria. He’s warned the EU that he will open Turkey’s borders to undocumented immigrants if EU membership talks are frozen.  Like Xi Jinping, he’s putting out these old maps and saying: this is our real land. Erdo?an is yet another nationalist.

 

Poor Greece is at the crossroads of all these seismic events and Ottoman Empire II. You’ve got the possible weakening or dissolution of the EU, and Greek debt problems are about tenth on the list of issues in that region. They’re going to struggle, no doubt about it. Every time the Greek economy starts to show some green shoots, it seems to stall and fall right back down again.

LP: What do you hope might happen in this emerging world?

JC: This is the tough thing about being in the financial markets. You can have opinions on all this stuff and either get it wrong or have it not matter.

 

First, I hope our system of free trade holds up. That’s one thing I believe in fervently. The evidence seems to be that a rise of tariffs and trade walls and barriers will be bad for global growth. Given the debt overhang that’s out there, which is relentless, the ability of economies to service debts in a global trade war will be greatly curtailed, so I’m clearly watching that.

 

I also continue to be concerned, on a stand-alone basis, with the giant debt bubble occurring in China. It has done nothing but just gotten bigger since you and I last sat down. Despite all the talk of reform, there really hasn’t been any. The Chinese are more reliant on the state than ever — on state lending and state banks. The debt continues to grow at twice the rate of growth, and now the currency is depreciating.

 

We’re getting a situation where the Chinese economy is still a very important driver of global growth, but increasingly it is using the old methods that the Chinese themselves said only a few years ago that they would have to change. But they can’t, because every time they try, the economy slows too fast.

 

China continues to be half of the demand for global commodities. It basically supports Africa and countries like Australia and Brazil. Almost 40 percent of global GDP is either China or commodity-exporting countries whose prime market is China. That’s considerable. So we have to look not only at China’s role with us, but China’s role on its own because it is such a driver for global growth, Chinese growth represents 1 point of the 3 percent GDP growth, so if China were not growing at all, we’d be at 2 percent. Doesn’t sound like a lot but it is. We have to keep our eye on what’s going on there. A global trade war would probably send China into a really steep recession.

 

How would an average worker navigate a rising trade barrier globally? It’s scary. If we look back at the ’30s template, one major outlet was, of course, a giant arms race. By the late ’30s, you had the whole world realizing the threats of fascism and rearming rapidly. Keynesian government spending was what pulled up the economies; it just had some really bad repercussions from 1939-45. But if we get into any kind of global arms race with China, either conventionally or otherwise, that would be Reagan-like. I don’t know what the numbers would mean in terms of employment, but you would take a lot of manufacturing people and turn them to making other things. 

LP: How do you rate the current moment with big periods of change you’ve seen in your lifetime?

JC: I had this odd personal journey from being a union pipefitter and boilermaker as a college student — I made more money in two-and-a-half months making steel than I did my first year on Wall Street. I went from being a product of the industrial Midwest and putting myself through college by working in a steel mill, to being the beneficiary of the Reagan-Thatcher era. I saw the world change, but I didn’t really understand until years later what an important period the late ’70s/early ’80s was (and a great period for music, by the way!).

 

If we’re in one of those periods now, if 2016 is like 1932 or 1979 — then you not only have to change your portfolio, you have to change your lifestyle. That’s one of the things we’ve been telling clients. If this is a major shift to populism, nationalism, greater state involvement, and less globalism, then you really have to rethink almost everything in your life.

 

Certainly, if you were a capitalist in 1932, you might be best served to change your outlook. And if you were a union leader in 1979, it would have been good to change your outlook. The question will be, in 2016, would it be best for the Davos man and woman, the globalists, to change their outlook?

via http://ift.tt/2j8vWmW Tyler Durden

One week before Chicago is set to sale $1.2 billion in new debt, it has been revealed that Mayor Rahm Emanuel has been putting pressure on Moody’s, the only rating agency to have a junk-rating on the city’s general obligation debt, to rescind their rating.  According to a letter Emanuel sent to the CEO of Moody’s, the Chicago Mayor has grown concerned that the “Moody’s rating methodology and agenda are far from objective and independent.”  Per Bloomberg:

Mayor Rahm Emanuel, a Democrat who pushed through a record tax increase to shore up the city’s finances, asked the company to pull its junk rating on Chicago’s debt, saying it’s exaggerating the risks to bondholders and failing to recognize steps he’s taken. Chicago has already stopped hiring Moody’s to rate new bond deals, relying instead on rivals S&P Global Ratings and Fitch Ratings that continue to consider its debt investment grade.

 

“It has become increasingly clear that Moody’s rating methodology and agenda are far from objective and independent,” Emanuel said in a Dec. 8 letter to Moody’s Chief Executive Officer Raymond McDaniel that was released by the city. “Your current rating does not accurately reflect the city’s credit or our ability to pay debt service when due.”

 

Chicago became the only major U.S. city outside of Detroit with a junk rating in 2015, when Moody’s downgraded it because of the escalating pension bills triggered by years of failing to set aside enough money to cover promised benefits.

Moody’s is currently the only rating agency with a junk rating on Chicago’s G.O. debt, Fitch is only 1 notch away with a BBB- rating, while S&P remains at BBB+.

 

And while Emanuel would like for everyone to believe that Moody’s “flawed” rating methodology is the only thing pushing Chicago’s debt spreads higher…

 

…we suspect that the city’s massive budget deficits and underfunded pension liabilities may have a little more to do with it. 

And while we would never dare challenge the financial literacy of Chicago’s esteemed mayor, a $5.4 billion deficit, when the city only generates $8.9 billion of annual tax revenue, would seem, at least to us, to be a slight problem.  Of course, we acknowledge that Democrats are known for their ability to raise taxes, but somehow we suspect they may object to the 60% across-the-board increase that would be required to close that budget gap.  Per the City Of Chicago:

 

Moreover, we suspect that Moody’s may have also been concerned with this lovely chart from the City of Chicago’s Investor Presentation.  Certainly, a pension funding ratio that has declined pretty much every year for the past 15 years is not the sort of thing that inspires an investment grade rating.  And, while a mere $22.5 billion underfunding may not seem like such a big deal to Rahm, we doubt that Chicago’s 1mm households are anxious to fork over $22,500 each to fill that gap.

 

And not to beat a dead horse, but nearly $1 billion of G.O. fixed charges every year, or 11% of your annual revenue, is also not stellar. 

 

But sure, Rahm, Moody’s probably just has a personal vendetta against you.  We’re sure that the 1 resident your state is losing every 4.6 minutes also has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that your city is on the verge of bankruptcy.

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

Submitted by Gail Tverberg via Our Finite World blog,

Some people would argue that 2016 was the year that the world economy started to come apart, with the passage of Brexit and the election of Donald Trump. Whether or not the “coming apart” process started in 2016, in my opinion we are going to see many more steps in this direction in 2017. Let me explain a few of the things I see.

[1] Many economies have collapsed in the past. The world economy is very close to the turning point where collapse starts in earnest.  

The history of previous civilizations rising and eventually collapsing is well documented.(See, for example, Secular Cycles.)

To start a new cycle, a group of people would find a new way of doing things that allowed more food and energy production (for instance, they might add irrigation, or cut down trees for more land for agriculture). For a while, the economy would expand, but eventually a mismatch would arise between resources and population. Either resources would fall too low (perhaps because of erosion or salt deposits in the soil), or population would rise too high relative to resources, or both.

Even as resources per capita began falling, economies would continue to have overhead expenses, such as the need to pay high-level officials and to fund armies. These overhead costs could not easily be reduced, and might, in fact, grow as the government attempted to work around problems. Collapse occurred because, as resources per capita fell (for example, farms shrank in size), the earnings of workers tended to fall. At the same time, the need for taxes to cover what I am calling overhead expenses tended to grow. Tax rates became too high for workers to earn an adequate living, net of taxes. In some cases, workers succumbed to epidemics because of poor diets. Or governments would collapse, from lack of adequate tax revenue to support them.

Our current economy seems to be following a similar pattern. We first used fossil fuels to allow the population to expand, starting about 1800. Things went fairly well until the 1970s, when oil prices started to spike. Several workarounds (globalization, lower interest rates, and more use of debt) allowed the economy to continue to grow. The period since 1970 might be considered a period of “stagflation.” Now the world economy is growing especially slowly. At the same time, we find ourselves with “overhead” that continues to grow (for example, payments to retirees, and repayment of debt with interest). The pattern of past civilizations suggests that our civilization could also collapse.

Historically, economies have taken many years to collapse; I show a range of 20 to 50 years in Figure 1. We really don’t know if collapse would take that long now. Today, we are dependent on an international financial system, an international trade system, electricity, and the availability of oil to make our vehicles operate. It would seem as if this time collapse could come much more quickly.

With the world economy this close to collapse, some individual countries are even closer to collapse. This is why we can expect to see sharp downturns in the fortunes of some countries. If contagion is not too much of a problem, other countries may continue to do fairly well, even as individual small countries fail.

[2] Figures to be released in 2017 and future years are likely to show that the peak in world coal consumption occurred in 2014. This is important, because it means that countries that depend heavily on coal, such as China and India, can expect to see much slower economic growth, and more financial difficulties.

While reports of international coal production for 2016 are not yet available, news articles and individual country data strongly suggest that world coal production is past its peak. The IEA also reports a substantial drop in coal production for 2016.

The reason why coal production is dropping is because of low prices, low profitability for producers, and gluts indicating oversupply. Also, comparisons of coal prices with natural gas prices are inducing switching from coal to natural gas. The problem, as we will see later, is that natural gas prices are also artificially low, compared to the cost of production, So the switch is being made to a different type of fossil fuel, also with an unsustainably low price.

Prices for coal in China have recently risen again, thanks to the closing of a large number of unprofitable coal mines, and a mandatory reduction in hours for other coal mines. Even though prices have risen, production may not rise to match the new prices. One article reports:

. . . coal companies are reportedly reluctant to increase output as a majority of the country’s mines are still losing money and it will take time to recoup losses incurred in recent years.

Also, a person can imagine that it might be difficult to obtain financing, if coal prices have only “sort of” recovered.

I wrote last year about the possibility that coal production was peaking. This is one chart I showed, with data through 2015. Coal is the second most utilized fuel in the world. If its production begins declining, it will be difficult to offset the loss of its use with increased use of other types of fuels.

[3] If we assume that coal supplies will continue to shrink, and other production will grow moderately, we can expect total energy consumption to be approximately flat in 2017. 

In a way, this is an optimistic assessment, because we know that efforts are underway to reduce oil production, in order to prop up prices. We are, in effect, assuming either that (a) oil prices won’t really rise, so that oil consumption will grow at a rate similar to that in the recent past or (b) while oil prices will rise significantly to help producers, consumers won’t cut back on their consumption in response to the higher prices.

[4] Because world population is rising, the forecast in Figure 4 suggests that per capita energy consumption is likely to shrink. Shrinking energy consumption per capita puts the world (or individual countries in the world) at the risk of recession.

Figure 5 shows indicated per capita energy consumption, based on Figure 4. It is clear that energy consumption per capita has already started shrinking, and is expected to shrink further. The last time that happened was in the Great Recession of 2007-2009.

There tends to be a strong correlation between world economic growth and world energy consumption, because energy is required to transform materials into new forms, and to transport goods from one place to another.

In the recent past, the growth in GDP has tended to be a little higher than the growth in the use of energy products. One reason why GDP growth has been a percentage point or two higher than energy consumption growth is because, as economies become richer, citizens can afford to add more services to the mix of goods and services that they purchase (fancier hair cuts and more piano lessons, for example). Production of services tends to use proportionately less energy than creating goods does; as a result, a shift toward a heavier mix of services tends to lead to GDP growth rates that are somewhat higher than the growth in energy consumption.

A second reason why GDP growth has tended to be a little higher than growth in energy consumption is because devices (such as cars, trucks, air conditioners, furnaces, factory machinery) are becoming more efficient. Growth in efficiency occurs if consumers replace old inefficient devices with new more efficient devices. If consumers become less wealthy, they are likely to replace devices less frequently, leading to slower growth in efficiency. Also, as we will discuss later in this  post, recently there has been a tendency for fossil fuel prices to remain artificially low. With low prices, there is little financial incentive to replace an old inefficient device with a new, more efficient device. As a result, new purchases may be bigger, offsetting the benefit of efficiency gains (purchasing an SUV to replace a car, for example).

Thus, we cannot expect that the past pattern of GDP growing a little faster than energy consumption will continue. In fact, it is even possible that the leveraging effect will start working the “wrong” way, as low fossil fuel prices induce more fuel use, not less. Perhaps the safest assumption we can make is that GDP growth and energy consumption growth will be equal. In other words, if world energy consumption is 0% (as in Figure 4), world GDP growth will also be 0%. This is not something that world leaders would like at all.

The situation we are encountering today seems to be very similar to the falling resources per capita problem that seemed to push early economies toward collapse in [1]. Figure 5 above suggests that, on average, the paychecks of workers in 2017 will tend to purchase fewer goods and services than they did in 2016 and 2015. If governments need higher taxes to fund rising retiree costs and rising subsidies for “renewables,” the loss in the after-tax purchasing power of workers will be even greater than Figure 5 suggests.

[5] Because countries are in this precarious position of falling resources per capita, we should expect to see a rise in protectionism, and the addition of new tariffs.

Clearly, governments do not want the problem of falling wages (or rather, falling goods that wages can buy) impacting their countries. So the new game becomes, “Push the problem elsewhere.”

In economic language, the world economy is becoming a “Zero-sum” game. Any gain in the production of goods and services by one country is a loss to another country. Thus, it is in each country’s interest to look out for itself. This is a major change from the shift toward globalization we have experienced in recent years. China, as a major exporter of goods, can expect to be especially affected by this changing view.

[6] China can no longer be expected to pull the world economy forward.

China’s economic growth rate is likely to be lower, for many reasons. One reason is the financial problems of coal mines, and the tendency of coal production to continue to shrink, once it starts shrinking. This happens for many reasons, one of them being the difficulty in obtaining loans for expansion, when prices still seem to be somewhat low, and the outlook for the further increases does not appear to be very good.

Another reason why China’s economic growth rate can be expected to fall is the current overbuilt situation with respect to apartment buildings, shopping malls, factories, and coal mines. As a result, there seems to be little need for new buildings and operations of these types. Another reason for slower economic growth is the growing protectionist stance of trade partners. A fourth reason is the fact that many potential buyers of the goods that China is producing are not doing very well economically (with the US being a major exception). These buyers cannot afford to increase their purchases of imports from China.

With these growing headwinds, it is quite possible that China’s total energy consumption in 2017 will shrink. If this happens, there will downward pressure on world fossil fuel prices. Oil prices may fall, despite production cuts by OPEC and other countries.

China’s slowing economic growth is likely to make its debt problem harder to solve. We should not be too surprised if debt defaults become a more significant problem, or if the yuan falls relative to other currencies.

India, with its recent recall of high denomination currency, as well as its problems with low coal demand, is not likely to be a great deal of help aiding the world economy to grow, either. India is also a much smaller economy than China.

[7] While Item [2] talked about peak coal, there is a very significant chance that we will be hitting peak oil and peak natural gas in 2017 or 2018, as well.  

If we look at historical prices, we see that the prices of oil, coal and natural gas tend to rise and fall together.

The reason that fossil fuel prices tend to rise and fall together is because these prices are tied to “demand” for goods and services in general, such as for new homes, cars, and factories. If wages are rising rapidly, and debt is rising rapidly, it becomes easier for consumers to buy goods such as homes and cars. When this happens, there is more “demand” for the commodities used to make and operate homes and cars. Prices for commodities of many types, including fossil fuels, tend to rise, to enable more production of these items.

Of course, the reverse happens as well. If workers become poorer, or debt levels shrink, it becomes harder to buy homes and cars. In this case, commodity prices, including fossil fuel prices, tend to fall.  Thus, the problem we saw above in [2] for coal would be likely to happen for oil and natural gas, as well, because the prices of all of the fossil fuels tend to move together. In fact, we know that current oil prices are too low for oil producers. This is the reason why OPEC and other oil producers have cut back on production. Thus, the problem with overproduction for oil seems to be similar to the overproduction problem for coal, just a bit delayed in timing.

In fact, we also know that US natural gas prices have been very low for several years, suggesting another similar problem. The United States is the single largest producer of natural gas in the world. Its natural gas production hit a peak in mid 2015, and production has since begun to decline. The decline comes as a response to chronically low prices, which make it unprofitable to extract natural gas. This response sounds similar to China’s attempted solution to low coal prices.

The problem is fundamentally the fact that consumers cannot afford goods made using fossil fuels of any type, if prices actually rise to the level producers need, which tends to be at least five times the 1999 price level. (Note peak price levels compared to 1999 level on Figure 6.) Wages have not risen by a factor of five since 1999, so paying the prices that fossil fuel producers need for profitability and growing production is out of the question. No amount of added debt can hide this problem. (While this reference is to 1999 prices, the issue really goes back much farther, to prices before the price spikes of the 1970s.)

US natural gas producers also have plans to export natural gas to Europe and elsewhere, as liquefied natural gas (LNG). The hope, of course, is that a large amount of exports will raise US natural gas prices. Also, the hope is that Europeans will be able to afford the high-priced natural gas shipped to them. Unless someone can raise the wages of both Europeans and Americans, I would not count on LNG prices actually rising to the level needed for profitability, and staying at such a high level. Instead, they are likely to bounce up, and quickly drop back again.

[8] Unless oil prices rise very substantially, oil exporters will find themselves exhausting their financial reserves in a very short time (perhaps a year or two). Unfortunately, oil importers cannot withstand higher prices, without going into recession. 

We have a no win situation, no matter what happens. This is true with all fossil fuels, but especially with oil, because of its high cost and thus necessarily high price. If oil prices stay at the same level or go down, oil exporters cannot get enough tax revenue, and oil companies in general cannot obtain enough funds to finance the development of new wells and payment of dividends to shareholders. If oil prices do rise by a very large amount for very long, we are likely headed into another major recession, with many debt defaults.

[9] US interest rates are likely to rise in the next year or two, whether or not this result is intended by the Federal reserve.

This issue here is somewhat obscure. The issue has to do with whether the United States can find foreign buyers for its debt, often called US Treasuries, and the interest rates that the US needs to pay on this debt. If buyers are very plentiful, the interest rates paid by he US government can be quite low; if few buyers are available, interest rates must be higher.

Back when Saudi Arabia and other oil exporters were doing well financially, they often bought US Treasuries, as a way to retain the benefit of their new-found wealth, which they did not want to spend immediately. Similarly, when China was doing well as an exporter, it often bought US Treasuries, as a way retaining the wealth it gained from exports, but didn’t yet need for purchases.

When these countries bought US Treasuries, there were several beneficial results:

• Interest rates on US Treasuries tended to stay artificially low, because there was a ready market for its debt.
• The US could afford to import high-priced oil, because the additional debt needed to buy the oil could easily be sold (to Saudi Arabia and other oil producing nations, no less).
• The US dollar tended to stay lower relative to other currencies, making oil more affordable to other countries than it otherwise might be.
• Investment in countries outside the US was encouraged, because debt issued by these other countries tended to bear higher interest rates than US debt. Also, relatively low oil prices in these countries (because of the low level of the dollar) tended to make investment profitable in these countries.

The effect of these changes was somewhat similar to the US having its own special Quantitative Easing (QE) program, paid for by some of the counties with trade surpluses, instead of by its central bank. This QE substitute tended to encourage world economic growth, for the reasons mentioned above.

Once the fortunes of the countries that used to buy US Treasuries changes, the pattern of buying of US Treasuries tends to change to selling of US Treasuries. Even not purchasing the same quantity of US Treasuries as in the past becomes an adverse change, if the US has a need to keep issuing US Treasuries as in the past, or if it wants to keep rates low.

Unfortunately, losing this QE substitute tends to reverse the favorable effects noted above. One effect is that the dollar tends to ride higher relative to other currencies, making the US look richer, and other countries poorer. The “catch” is that as the other countries become poorer, it becomes harder for them to repay the debt that they took out earlier, which was denominated in US dollars.

Another problem, as this strange type of QE disappears, is that the interest rates that the US government needs to pay in order to issue new debt start rising. These higher rates tend to affect other rates as well, such as mortgage rates. These higher interest rates act as a drag on the economy, tending to push it toward recession.

Higher interest rates also tend to decrease the value of assets, such as homes, farms, outstanding bonds, and shares of stock. This occurs because fewer buyers can afford to buy these goods, with the new higher interest rates. As a result, stock prices can be expected to fall. Prices of homes and of commercial buildings can also be expected to fall. The value of bonds held by insurance companies and banks becomes lower, if they choose to sell these securities before maturity.

Of course, as interest rates fell after 1981, we received the benefit of falling interest rates, in the form of rising asset prices. No one ever stopped to think about how much of the gains in share prices and property values came from falling interest rates.

Now, as interest rates rise, we can expect asset prices of many types to start falling, because of lower affordability when monthly payments are based on higher interest rates. This situation presents another “drag” on the economy.

In Conclusion

The situation is indeed very concerning. Many things could set off a crisis:

• Rising energy prices of any kind (hurting energy importers), or energy prices that don’t rise (leading to financial problems or collapse of exporters)
• Rising interest rates.
• Defaulting debt, indirectly the result of slow/negative economic growth and rising interest rates.
• International organizations with less and less influence, or that fall apart completely.
• Fast changes in relativities of currencies, leading to defaults on derivatives.
• Collapsing banks, as debt defaults rise.
• Falling asset prices (homes, farms, commercial buildings, stocks and bonds) as interest rates rise, leading to many debt defaults.

Things don’t look too bad right now, but the underlying problems are sufficiently severe that we seem to be headed for a crisis far worse than 2008. The timing is not clear. Things could start falling apart badly in 2017, or alternatively, major problems may be delayed until 2018 or 2019. I hope political leaders can find ways to keep problems away as long as possible, perhaps with more rounds of QE. Our fundamental problem is the fact that neither high nor low energy prices are now able to keep the world economy operating as we would like it to operate. Increased debt can’t seem to fix the problem either.

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China is so concerned about the ongoing surge in capital outflows that its forex regulator, SAFE, has taken the unprecedented step of ordering banks to keep its instructions about curbing capital outflows secret and also to ensure that research analysts do not publish any negative views about the yuan according to Reuters.  According to bankers from local and foreign banks, both demands are seen as an attempt by the authorities to prevent alarm that could trigger further declines in the yuan. 

With the yuan devaluaing by 6% against the dollar last year as a result of hundreds of billions in official outflows (and as much as $1.1 trillion in unofficial since August of 2015 according to Goldman calculations), Beijing has unleashed a flurry of restrictive measures on capital outflows from the State Administration of Foreign Exchange (SAFE), including setting limits on banks’ currency volumes in some cities or provinces and requiring approval for ever smaller transactions. Overnight, the PBOC even unveiled probed into bitcoin exchanges, sending the digital currency plunging over 20%.

Reuters reports that SAFE, which is part of the People’s Bank of China, is insisting in oral instructions to dozens of banks that they don’t reveal its role in such restrictions, six bankers said, which was damaging their relationships with clients since they were unable to explain why they were turning away business. SAFE and the PBOC have yet to respond to requests for comment.

SAFE’s reticence began at least as far back as August, when its Shanghai branch called at least 20 of the major foreign and domestic banks operating in the city to a meeting with the regional heads of several SAFE departments.

A representative from an international bank attending the meeting said there were no written instructions, but a high-ranking SAFE official told them explicitly what was expected of them.

“You must control your forex deficit, but you can’t say that SAFE is controlling capital outflows,” the official told the bankers. The banks were told to “manage sentiment” to prevent public panic, the banker said, and the banks’ research analysts should not broadcast any negative views on the yuan.

As a reminder, while in the US, the real  Fake News is anything having to do with relations between Trump and Russia; in China fake news mostly focus on the economy and the currency (as well as virtually everything else).

“They told us not to publish bad house views – analyst house views – on the yuan”, the person said. A second banker on the forex team of an international bank said his bank had received the same instructions. 

 

Where a bank has exceeded the SAFE-set limits for forex transactions in a month, they have to turn business away, but are unable to explain the real reason why, several bankers complained. “We’re not going to tell our customers that (our forex business) has stopped; we just have to find ways to turn down the business we’re not allowed to do,” said a banker at Chinese Commercial Bank Ping An who had received SAFE instructions from seniors.

 

“It’s not good for client relationships,” he added, explaining that he had told his clients to go to other banks.

Additionally, SAFE had told banks to interview clients to make sure the forex deals were not for fake transactions, or else face punishment, according to two bankers at separate listed banks. In response to those orders, one of the banks sent an internal notice to employees, seen by Reuters, to alert them to SAFE’s requirements, explaining that the regulator’s penalties could include “cancelling business qualifications” needed for the lender to conduct forex business.

The notice passed on SAFE’s instructions that staff should not mention the regulator, i.e., it was to be kept secret. 

“Please do not reply to clients using wording such as SAFE controls, or SAFE doesn’t allow or strictly controls FX purchases,” it read. Instead, they should adhere to the line provided by SAFE, that the purpose of the changes was to “promote healthy development of outbound direct investment” and “crack down on fake deals”, the notice added.

* * *

While China’s foreign exchange reserves fell to $3.05 trillion in November from $3.3 trillion in the first 11 months of 2016, and many traders are betting there will be further outflows as U.S. interest rates rises make dollar assets more attractive, SAFE wants banks to advise clients to buy yuan and sell dollars, the international bank representative said, a play that is likely to lose clients money. “If a person doesn’t ave this need, how am I supposed to encourage it?” the banker said.

At the same time, SAFE is quietly choking programmes designed to open overseas markets to Chinese investors. Even where institutional investors have been granted quotas to invest overseas, they are finding it increasingly difficult to exchange yuan into another currency.

“SAFE would tell you that you still need to stand in the queue, and the waiting period is ‘uncertain’,” said an executive at Shanghai-based China equity fund house Greenwoods. An investment programme set up so global funds can raise Chinese cash to invest overseas has ground to a halt without explanation. “The application process seems to be in a state of suspension,” Michael Lu, managing director of Greater China Business Development of Dutch money manager Robeco told reporters in November.

* * *

In short, China has implemented full blown capital controls, without wanting its population to know it has done so, which is understandable: fear of the unknown would lead to panic, would lead to more selling, and more panic and so on. But what we find delightfully ironic is that China is cracking down on the internationalization of its currency, just months after the IMF made the Yuan a fully “respected” member of the SDR – a token of how “liberalized” the currency is. As usual, trust Christine Lagarde to get it dead wrong.

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The identity of the British intelligence officer responsible for preparing and delivering the now infamous 35 page hoax has been revealed as Christopher Steele, courtesy of the Wall St. Journal. If you want to dig into his profile, click here.

As people piece together this rapidly unfolding quagmire – which will be in the history books, it’s important to address as many facets as possible in order to avoid perpetuating #FakeNews. As Oliver Stone said, more or less, the MSM is biased – and alternative news has the real deal, so let’s discuss.

 

A friend pointed this out earlier:

——————–

It has come out that the dossier and supporting documentation were fabricated by an anonymous 4Chan user, who sent the hoax to a RINO named Rick Wilson back in the Fall of last year.  Rick Wilson is (in)famous for his description of Trump supporters as “single white males who masturbate to anime”.  The 4Chan user wanted to embarrass Rick Wilson, who apparently tried to shop the fabrication to MSM without success (cuz they couldn’t “source” it, given that the entire documentation is a fake).

The alleged origination of a British agent as the source can be considered a “trap for the unwary,” which would easily demonstrate the documentation was an obvious forgery because the UK does not use the “Confidential” designation, although US intelligence agencies do.  In the US, classified information is designated as “Confidential”, “Secret” and “Top Secret” (along with a whole host of other designations for more highly sensitive information such as nuclear weapons designs).  The British use “Official”, “Secret” and “Top Secret”.   Anyone who checked on the story would instantly recognize this defect if they knew (or discovered) anything about British classification schemes, but if someone didn’t check they’d simply assume the British uses the same classification designations as the US.

[let’s take a look]

US Designations:

UK Designations

HOAX Dossier:

Apparently, Wilson also sent the falsified documentation to the CIA and they may, or may not have, bought it. The CIA subsequently “leaked” it to various news agencies, and both CNN and Buzz Feed bought the CIA leak. The CIA also admitted to briefing both Obama & Trump on the false documentation, but now claim they only cited it as an example of “disinformation” that’s floating around out there.  Seemingly, whomever at the CIA leaked this story and its documentation to CNN and Buzz Feed didn’t identify it as “disinformation”.  For extra brownie points McCain claims he received a classified briefing on the bed wetting episode in December and asked FBI’s head Comey to investigate!  It should be obvious McCain would not have done so had the CIA had told him the information was known to be fake.

——————–

Now, it’s possible that Steele – an ex-UK intelligence officer in private practice, simply used the US designation for the convenience of US intel (or to mask the origination) – BUT, we’re also talking about the same guy who bought the #GoldenShower story that several journalists and news outlets wouldn’t touch.

So, by the transitive properties of “the guy who bought the 4chan hoax,” I think we can assume Steele would have defaulted to a career-long habit of using the UK designation on this 35 page dossier he cobbled together. 

On the other side of the pond, what are we left to assume? Let’s ignore the classification thing for a moment. For one, the CIA could have easily looked into Michael Cohen’s travel records (the Trump lawyer the dossier accuses of going to Prague to meet with Russians) and ruled that out – immediately discrediting the document. Second, Trump is apparently a bit of a germaphobe. I don’t blame him, people are filthy. Shouldn’t the CIA know something that obvious about such a well known figure?

We are left to conclude:

– The CIA figured out this was a hoax and just let McCain, CNN, and Buzzfeed make McAss. That’s an interesting conversation, if so.

– The CIA didn’t know – as in, nobody who handled this document knew or checked into why a doc from a Brit would have US classification markings, or the Prague visit, or Golden Showers. A frightening thought.

– Steele didn’t prepare the report.

What say you?

 

Content originally generated at iBankCoin.com * Follow on Twitter @ZeroPointNow

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Submitted by Joseph Jankowski via PlanetFreeWill.com,

The Open Society Foundations has vowed to continue operations inside of Hungary despite plans from the country’s ruling party to crackdown on NGOs funded by the Hungarian-born George Soros.

Hungary plans to use “all the tools at its disposal” to “sweep out” NGOs funded by Soros, which “serve global capitalists and back political correctness over national governments,” Szilard Nemeth, a vice president of the country’s ruling Fidesz party, told reporters on Tuesday.

“I feel that there is an opportunity for this, internationally,” because of Trump’s election victory, state news service MTI reported Nemeth as saying.

Hungarian lawmakers will debate legislation allowing the European Union member to audit NGOs, according to the country’s parliamentary agenda.

The Open Society Foundations responded to the planned crackdown on Wednesday, saying that the NGO will stay put and continue working inside the country.

“The Open Society Foundations will continue to work in Hungary despite government opposition to our mission of fairer, accountable societies,”’ the organization’s president, Christopher Stone, told Bloomberg News.

 

“In Hungary and around the world we are more focused than ever on working with local groups to strengthen democratic practice, rights, and justice.”

Hungry’s Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who ironically received Soros funded scholarships to study at British universities, has made public his plans to build what he calls an “illiberal state,” similar to Russia and Turkey.

“I don’t think that our European Union membership precludes us from building an illiberal new state based on national foundations,” Orban said in a 2014 speech. He listed Russia, Turkey and China as examples of “successful” nations, “none of which is liberal and some of which aren’t even democracies.”

Orban has said that civil society groups funded from abroad were covers for “paid political activists,” and accused Soros of being a prominent member of a circle of “activists” trying to undermine European nations by supporting the migrant crisis.

Soros gave nearly $10 million to Clinton super PAC Priorities USA during the presidential campaign and handed another $33 million to the group through Open Society Foundations (OSF), which he funds and controls.

The liberal billionaire has also come under fire for giving more than $33 million in grants to the Black Lives Matter movement through his foundations.

In late 2015, Russian Prosecutor General’s Office recognized Soros’s Open Society Institute and another affiliated organization as undesirable groups, banning Russian citizens and organizations from participation in any of their projects.

According to the prosecutor’s office, the activities of the Open Society Institute and the Open Society Institute Assistance Foundation were a threat to the foundations of Russia’s Constitutional order and national security.

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With this week’s most important economic data point – this Friday’s retail sales – fast approaching, economists are keen for clues if this key datapoint giving insight into the health of the US consumer will maintain the recent outsized spike in favorable and better than expected economic data, or if adversely, it may be a downward inflection point which could have significant implications on the dollar trade as RBC explained earlier. And according to BofA’s internal debit and credit card data, always released just ahead of the retail sales report, it looks like it will be the latter.

As Bank of America’s chief US economist Michelle Meyer reports, the aggregated BAC credit and debit card data showed that retail sales ex-autos declined 1.0% mom seasonally adjusted in December. “This contrasts with other indicators of consumer strength including reports of a robust holiday shopping season, a rebound in consumer confidence and strong autos sales” according to Meyer.

Actually, based on earnings reports of those companies who have recently closed their quarter, a weak December is precisely what one should expect, further corroborated by JPM’s satellite imagery at early December showing empty parking lots (recall: “Satellite Imagery Reveals Sharp Retail Spending Slowdown After The Election“) and a plunge in brick and mortar sales, which has been greater than the offsetting pick up in online sales.

This is how the bank’s adjusted retail spending data looks when charted.

As BofA notes, “the BAC aggregated card data showed that retail sales exautos declined 1.0% mom SA in December. This reversed the strong gains over the prior few months, leaving the 3- month average growth rate to slow.“

Amusingly, while in the past everyone ignored seasonal adjustments when it comes to retail sales (a reconciliation which as we have shown on various occasions, would always undermine the adjusted data), this time it is BofA which tries to justify the weakness with seasonal adjustments. This is how it “justifies” the sharp drop in data:

We think the explanation is that our BAC aggregated card data is biased lower due to our seasonal adjustment process. Note that the Census Bureau uses a similar approach, and therefore, we expect their data to be subject to a similar downward bias.

 

 

The two major holidays in December — Christmas and the New Year — are fixed in terms of the date but not in terms of the day of the week. This year, Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve both fell on Saturdays. Spending on those dates was much weaker than on a typical Saturday, presumably since people were enjoying the holidays. However, the seasonal adjustment process treated these days like any other Saturday. This suggests that the adjustment process “over-fits” the data and biases the seasonally adjusted figures lower.

 

We think the bias in December should correct in January, translating to strong growth in January. A strong gain in January would support our view that the weakness we are seeing in the data is simply “noise”. However, that means waiting until February 15th for the January data to provide confirmation.

Unless, of course, January data does not rebound, in which case that bank’s economists can simply blame the “abnormally cold weather” for the lack of spending, as they have every time over the past three years.  Even so, with that caveat in mind, BofA warns, “since the Census Bureau uses a comparable approach, we think it is prudent to prepare for a similarly negative number in Friday’s report.”

And while the December, or even January, data may surprise to the up, or downside, due to quirks in seasonal adjustments, reporting, one thing is undisputable: long-term spending trends, especially when it comes to goods and products, continue to deteriorate. Here’s BofA:

• The sector data suggests that consumers continue to spend on experiences, with airlines and lodging spending up impressively over the prior three months. Presumably, consumers are taking trips around the holidays.
• On the flipside, consumers appear to be spending less on goods, with particular weakness in electronics spending, home goods, and clothing. As we also show in Chart 6, spending at restaurants continues to weaken.

Also, as a result of surging gasoline prices, spending at gasoline stations is rebounding but only due to nominal spending increases. Which means less disposable income available to be spent on other potential purchases. 

And here is the evidence:

Restaurant spending is tumbling

Furniture and home improvement spending has flatlined

Spending on young adult clothing has tumbled.

Spending at food and beverage stores is growing at the lowest rate in 5 years.

 

And finally, luxury spending – that traditionally reserves to the upper middle and higher classes- continues to crash.

So aside from all that, the consumer is doing great.

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The identity of the British intelligence officer responsible for preparing and delivering the now infamous 35 page hoax has been revealed as Christopher Steele, courtesy of the Wall St. Journal. If you want to dig into his profile, click here.

As people piece together this rapidly unfolding quagmire – which will be in the history books, it’s important to address as many facets as possible in order to avoid perpetuating #FakeNews. As Oliver Stone said, more or less, the MSM is biased – and alternative news has the real deal, so let’s discuss.

 

A friend pointed this out earlier:

——————–

It has come out that the dossier and supporting documentation were fabricated by an anonymous 4Chan user, who sent the hoax to a RINO named Rick Wilson back in the Fall of last year.  Rick Wilson is (in)famous for his description of Trump supporters as “single white males who masturbate to anime”.  The 4Chan user wanted to embarrass Rick Wilson, who apparently tried to shop the fabrication to MSM without success (cuz they couldn’t “source” it, given that the entire documentation is a fake).

The alleged origination of a British agent as the source can be considered a “trap for the unwary,” which would easily demonstrate the documentation was an obvious forgery because the UK does not use the “Classified” designation, although US intelligence agencies do.  In the US, classified information is designated as “Classified”, “Secret” and “Top Secret” (along with a whole host of other designations for more highly sensitive information such as nuclear weapons designs).  The British use “Official”, “Secret” and “Top Secret”.   Anyone who checked on the story would instantly recognize this defect if they knew (or discovered) anything about British classification schemes, but if someone didn’t check they’d simply assume the British uses the same classification designations as the US.

[let’s take a look]

US Designations:

UK Designations

HOAX Dossier:

Apparently, Wilson also sent the falsified documentation to the CIA and they may, or may not have, bought it. The CIA subsequently “leaked” it to various news agencies, and both CNN and Buzz Feed bought the CIA leak. The CIA also admitted to briefing both Obama & Trump on the false documentation, but now claim they only cited it as an example of “disinformation” that’s floating around out there.  Seemingly, whomever at the CIA leaked this story and its documentation to CNN and Buzz Feed didn’t identify it as “disinformation”.  For extra brownie points McCain claims he received a classified briefing on the bed wetting episode in December and asked FBI’s head Comey to investigate!  It should be obvious McCain would not have done so had the CIA had told him the information was known to be fake.

——————–

Now, it’s possible that Steele – an ex-UK intelligence officer in private practice, simply used the US designation for the convenience of US intel (or to mask the origination) – BUT, we’re also talking about the same guy who bought the #GoldenShower story that several journalists and news outlets wouldn’t touch.

So, by the transitive properties of “the guy who bought the 4chan hoax,” I think we can assume Steele would have defaulted to a career-long habit of using the UK designation on this 35 page dossier he cobbled together. Therefore, is Steele really the source?

On the other side of the pond, what are we left to assume? Let’s ignore the classification thing for a moment. For one, the CIA could have easily looked into Michael Cohen’s travel records (the Trump lawyer the dossier accuses of going to Prague to meet with Russians) and ruled that out – immediately discrediting the document. Second, Trump is apparently a bit of a germaphobe. I don’t blame him, people are filthy. Shouldn’t the CIA know something that obvious about such a well known figure?

We are left to conclude:

– The CIA figured out this was a hoax and just let McCain, CNN, and Buzzfeed make McAss. That’s an interesting conversation, if so.

– The CIA didn’t know – as in, nobody who handled this document knew or checked into why a doc from a Brit would have US classification markings, or the Prague visit, or Golden Showers. A frightening thought.

– Steele didn’t prepare the report.

What say you?

 

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“Smooth” transition…

 

Source: Ben Garrison

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