iftttwall

A problem has emerged for France’s anti-immigrant, anti-Euro presidential frontrunner, Marine Le Pen, and it has little to do with being behind in the polls ahead of the 2017 presidential elections, far from it. It has, however, everything to do with something far simpler: money, as the National Front leader is suddenly struggling to raise the €20 million ($21 million) she needs to fund the French presidential and legislative campaigns in 2017 after the party’s Russian lender failed, the party treasurer said.

This past July, the Central Bank of Russia revoked the license of the National Front’s Moscow-based lender First Czech Russian Bank OOO and Le Pen’s party has still to find another backer, according to treasurer Wallerand de Saint Just. Saint Just said he’s seeking international financiers in countries including Russia because French banks have refused to fund his party.

In a phone interview with Bloomberg, Saint Just said that “the loss of the FCRB was a hard blow for us” adding that “the Russia loan was a stable resource. Now we are still searching for loans.”

And, since a Le Pen victory threatens to be the final straw that crushes the European establishment camel, it is no surprise that no existing financial organizations are willing to provide her with the funds she may need to crush them.

Last week, the French Le Parisian reported that a U.S. investment bank was preparing to lend the party $20 million in August, but pulled the plug on the deal at the last minute.

Le Pen’s ties with Russia have come under scrutiny in recent weeks amid reports that the CIA “concluded” that Putin directed hackers to buoy the candidacy of Donald Trump in the U.S. Le Pen is running second in the race to become France’s next president and is openly supportive of Putin’s military operations in Syria. The now defunct Russian bank lent the National Front €9 million in 2014. In the same year, party founder Jean-Marie Le Pen’s political fund Cotelec received another 2 million-euro loan from a Russian-backed fund based in Cyprus, news website Mediapart reported. Saint Just said Cotelec helped fund the party’s 2015 regional campaign.

Realizing which way the “Putin conspiracy theory” winds blow, Le Pen knows she wouldn’t have any problem in getting a Russian loan but, according to Bloomberg, she has decided the risks outweigh the benefits because she’d be hounded for this by the French media, said Sergei Markov, a political consultant to the Kremlin administration.  “Le Pen doesn’t want to endanger her chances,” Markov said by phone. While Russia sees the conservative candidate Francois Fillon as a strong presidential contender, it also doesn’t rule out a far-right victory, he said.

Meanwhile, Le Pen is surviving on a modest grassroots campaign, having raised some money from followers and the party has some reserves it can draw on, Saint Just said, without giving any figures. “In these funding matters you have to remain discreet,” he said. “No figures, no names.”

Of course, should Le Pen proceed to win the French election, it would be another crushing blow for the status quo, and another huge victory for the Kremlin, which would then be accused of rigging the entire world.

As Bloomberg adds, the National Front leader and her allies have made multiple trips to Moscow or Crimea in recent years. Putin this month signed a “working agreement” with Austria’s populist Freedom Party in Moscow, after the group reached the runoff for its presidential election.

Ironically, amid concern that Russia may also seek to influence European elections, the National Front has begun to play down its ties to Moscow, something which clearly neither bothered Trump, nor adversely impacted his victory in presidential race. In February Saint Just said the party was reaching out to Russian banks for 25 million euros to bankroll its presidential campaign.

Unlike other candidates, Le Pen hasn’t disclosed her campaign’s funding or spending.

Others are more open: republicans nominee Francois Fillon, who is leading in the polls, published the spending on his primary campaign on Wednesday while centrist contender Emmanuel Macron said his newly founded party En Marche! has raised 4 million euros from donors. Both disclosures were voluntary as campaign accounts don’t have be made public in France.

The two-round presidential election is scheduled for April 23 and May 7 and the French will return to the polls on June 11 and 18 to elect delegates to the National Assembly, the lower chamber.

Should Le Pen remain financially isolated, her chance of winning the election in which she is perceived as a long shot, but all too possible in light of recent stunning political upheavals, will quickly evaporate.

via http://ift.tt/2im4Kyh Tyler Durden

Submitted by Guy Milliere via The Gatestone Institute,

• Of the 1.2 million migrants who arrived in Germany in 2014 and 2015, only 34,000 found work.
• Angela Merkel went to lay white roses at the scene of the Christmas market attack in Berlin. Thousands of Germans did the same. Many brought candles and cried. But anger and the will to combat the threat remained largely absent.
• Nothing better describes the present state of Germany than the sad fate of Maria Landenburger, a 19-year-old girl, murdered at the beginning of December. A member of a refugee relief organization, Landenburger was among those who welcomed migrants in 2015. She was raped and murdered by one of the people she was helping. Her family asked anyone who wanted to pay tribute to their daughter to give money to refugee associations, so that more refugees could come to Germany.
• The law that condemns incitement to hatred, presumably intended to prevent a return to Nazi ideas, is held like a sword over whoever speaks too harshly of the growing Islamization of the country.
• The great majority of the Germans do not want to see that Germany is at war, because a merciless enemy has declared war on them. They do not want to see that war has been declared on Western civilization. They accept defeat and docilely do what jihadists want them to do: they submit.
• If Angela Merkel does not see the difference between Jews exterminated by the Nazis, and Muslims threatening to exterminate Christians, Jews and other Muslims, she is even more clueless than it seems.

The attack in Berlin on December 19, 2016 was predictable. German Chancellor Angela Merkel created the conditions that made it possible. She bears an overwhelming responsibility. Geert Wilders, a member of Parliament in the Netherlands and one of Europe's only clear-sighted political leaders, accused her of having blood on her hands. He is right.

When she decided to open the doors of Germany to hundreds of thousands of Muslims from the Middle East and more distant countries, she must have known that jihadists were hidden among the people flooding in. She also must have known that the German police had no way of controlling the mass that entered and would be quickly overwhelmed by the number of people it would have to control. She did it anyway.

When hundreds of rapes and sexual assaults took place in Cologne and other cities in Germany on last year's New Year's Eve, she said that the perpetrators should be punished "regardless of their origin", but she did not change her policy. When attacks took place in Hanover, Essen, Wurzburg, and Munich, she delayed comments, then pronounced sanitized sentences on the "need" to fight crime and terror. But she still did not change policy.

She only changed her position recently, it seems because she wants to be a candidate again in 2017, and saw her popularity declining.

The comments she made immediately after the December 19 attacks were mind-numbing. She said that "if the perpetrator is a refugee", it will be "very difficult to bear" and it will be "particularly repugnant for all Germans who help refugees on a daily basis."

Such remarks could be considered simply naïve if someone were not informed, but Angela Merkel does not have that excuse. She could not ignore warnings from German and U.S. intelligence services saying that Islamic State terrorists hiding among refugees were planning to use trucks in Christmas-related attacks. The situation endured by Germans has been extremely difficult to bear for more than a year. Crime had "skyrocketed"; diseases extinct for decades have been brought in with no vaccines — long since discontinued — to treat them; second homes are seized by the government without compensation to shelter migrants, and so on. It did not take long to discover that the main suspect in the Berlin attack was an asylum seeker living in a refugee shelter.

In another country, Merkel might have been shamed into resigning; in Germany, she is running for re-election.

The German population is aged and the birthrate is dangerously low: 1.38 children per woman. The immigrants are replacing the German population, which has been disappearing little by little. The Germans who pass away are the Christians or, more often, non-religious secularists. As everywhere in Europe, Christianity is disappearing; the immigrants replacing the Germans are Muslim.

The German economy is still strong but running out of steam. Returns on invested capital are declining. At a time when human capital is the main source of profits, German human capital is collapsing: people from underdeveloped countries cannot easily replace highly educated Germans. Most do not have marketable skills; newcomers remain long unemployed and dependent. Of the 1.2 million migrants who arrived in Germany in 2014 and 2015, only 34,000 found work. If the unemployment rate is low, it is because there is a growing shortage of labor: today 61% Germans are between 20 and 64 years old. It is expected that by mid-century, the figure will fall to 41%.

Politically correct propaganda speeches that are inexhaustibly broadcast in Germany — as in the rest of Europe — never speak of demography. Instead, they refute any evidence that the German economy is not doing well. They also say that Islam and Christianity are equivalent; they are obstinately blind to the fact that Islam is more than a religion: it is a political, economic, and moral system that encompasses all aspects of life, and has never coexisted long or peacefully in a culture different from it. These speeches almost totally ignore the rise of radical Islam and jihadist terrorism; instead, they argue that radical Islam is a marginal cult, and that jihadist terrorism only recruits lone wolves or the mentally ill. Above all, they constantly repeat that any criticism of migration or Islam is ignominious and racist.

The German population is intimidated with fear, both by the antisocial behavior of many migrants and by the speech police of their own governments. Many Germans do not even dare to speak. Those who use public transportation resign themselves to insults. They bend their head and run for refuge to their homes. Attendance in restaurants and theaters is falling sharply. Women have become resigned to wearing "modest" outfits and are careful to not go out alone. Protests organized by Pegida (Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the West) have never attracted more than a few thousand people after a photograph of its founder was released in which he was styled as Hitler.

The Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, which calls for a halt to Muslim immigration to Germany and keeps on winning more votes, nevertheless remains a minority party. The law that condemns incitement to hatred (Volksverhetzung), presumably intended to prevent a return to Nazi ideas, is held like a sword over whoever speaks too harshly of the growing Islamization of the country.

On December 20, Angela Merkel went to lay white roses at the scene of the Christmas market attack. Thousands of Germans did the same. Many brought candles and cried. But anger and the will to combat the threat remained largely absent. After a few weeks, the page will be turned — until next time.

Nothing better describes the present state of Germany than the sad fate of Maria Landenburger, a nineteen-year-old girl, murdered at the beginning of December. Maria Landenburger, a member of a refugee relief organization, was among those who welcomed migrants in 2015. She was raped and murdered by one of the people she was helping. Her family asked anyone who wanted to pay tribute to their daughter to give money to refugee associations, so that more refugees could come to Germany.

The great majority of the Germans do not want to see that Germany is at war, because a merciless enemy has declared war on them. They do not want to see that war has been declared on Western civilization.

They accept defeat and docilely do what jihadists want them to do: they submit.

In analyzing the December 19 attack on the Christmas market, German journalist Josef Joffe, editor of Die Zeit, explained Angela Merkel's decision to welcome refugees as "an act of atonement" and a way to welcome a threatened population, seven decades after the Holocaust. He also explained the passivity of many Germans by a feeling of collective guilt.

If Joffe is right, if Angela Merkel does not see the difference between Jews exterminated by the Nazis, and Muslims threatening to exterminate Christians, Jews and other Muslims, she is even more clueless than it seems.

If many Germans are filled with collective guilt to the point that they want to compensate for what Germany did to the Jews by welcoming hundreds of thousands of Muslims many of whom openly state that they want to replace Germany's Judeo-Christian culture with Islam, and who are replacing its Christian population with a Muslim one — that will include ruthless killers in its ranks — it shows that Germans today either detest themselves so much that they desire their own destruction, or that they have simply lost their will to stand up for what they care about — an act otherwise known as surrender.

via http://ift.tt/2i9F0p9 Tyler Durden

A Drexel University Political Science professor – who has a book coming out in February – and is a communist, graced the world with his Christmas wish to see an entire race of human beings exterminated. You know, like Hitler. 

 

Hilarious, right? Especially if you replace the word “white” with any other race. This warm holiday sentiment comes from the mind of George Ciccariello-Maher, a cultishly liberal academic who’s never existed outside of a university environment, having previously corrupted young minds at U.C. Berkeley and the Venezuelan School of Planning in Caracas. Ciccariello then doubles down on his Christmas Eve banter:

To review, this is what he’s talking about:

Nice guy. Now, in an attempt to backpedal during an Eichenwaldian moment of clarity liberals get after haphazardly revealing that they’re fucking idiots underneath that academic exterior, Ciccariello is lashing out by blaming everyone who was offended for not having “bothered to do their research” in preparation for his satirical tweets.

Drexel university has issued a statement:

No word on which wrist Drexel plans to slap, but 4chan anon knows what’s up: 

People like Ciccariello-Maher exist to indoctrinate adult children into a reactionary class of morons who hear a trigger word and start regurgitating information without even moderate possession of the facts. These perpetual winners are are easily manipulated by identity politics which “intellectual” losers like Ciccariello capitalize on. While undeniably atrocious, slavery in America was conducted almost entirely by rich southern democrats – a small percentage of Americans, in the 1800’s. It has been a fucked up institution for thousands of years, and is still happening today in many parts of the world. It’s also been abolished in the USA for over 130 years, and the playing field has been legally leveled for over half a century despite structural racism legislated into society. There are of course vestiges of slavery which affect minorities to this day, none of which should be used as a tool for manipulation to generate guilt or resent – or as a reason to exterminate white people. I wonder if Ciccariello-Maher would issue the same call to genocide for all brown people, since slavery is alive and well in places like Saudi Arabia?

As long as angry radicalized career academics continue peddling white guilt to impressionable snowflakes – many of whom entered into lifelong debt to fund their own brainwashing, untold millions of basement-dwelling failures to launch will have a perpetual villain to blame for their shitty lives. That is, until the last white person has been exterminated.

via http://ift.tt/2hITADj ZeroPointNow

Submitted by Mike Krieger via Liberty Blitzkrieg blog,

As longtime readers know, I believe we are at the beginning stages of what will be historical paradigm level change across the planet. We sit on the precipice of the self-destruction of almost all the dominant institutions we’ve been accustomed to throughout our lifetimes. To borrow a bit of played out and painfully clichéd Silicon Valley lingo, everything is on the table for “disruption.”

Naturally, this doesn’t necessarily mean the paradigm that follows the current one will be materially better, but I am personally optimistic about what will emerge following a period of considerable confusion, hardship and conflict. In order to tilt the scales toward a positive outcome, those of us who wish to usher in a world characterized  by human freedom, decentralization, self-government and kindness, need to recognize the most likely avenues we have to get there. Technology is obviously extremely important, as a recent move by Whisper Systems to thwart censorship demonstrates.

As Wired reported last week:

Any subversive software developer knows its app has truly caught on when repressive regimes around the world start to block it. Earlier this week the encryption app Signal, already a favorite within the security and cryptography community, unlocked that achievement. Now, it’s making its countermove in the cat-and-mouse game of online censorship.

 

On Wednesday, Open Whisper Systems, which created and maintains Signal, announced that it’s added a feature to its Android app that will allow it to sidestep censorship in Egypt and the United Arab Emirates, where it was blocked just days ago. Android users can simply update the app to gain unfettered access to the encryption tool, according to Open Whisper Systems founder Moxie Marlinspike, and an iOS version of the update is coming soon.

 

Signal’s new anti-censorship feature uses a trick called “domain fronting,” Marlinspike explains. A country like Egypt, with only a few small internet service providers tightly controlled by the government, can block any direct request to a service on its blacklist. But clever services can circumvent that censorship by hiding their traffic inside of encrypted connections to a major internet service, like the content delivery networks (CDNs) that host content closer to users to speed up their online experience—or in Signal’s case, Google’s App Engine platform, designed to host apps on Google’s servers.

It goes without saying how critical technology such as the above, combined with dedicated activists such as Moxie Marlinspike, will be to making the world a better place. Beyond that, we also need to understand what our adversaries will do. I define such adversaries as the defenders of the status quo, who will do whatever it takes to retain power and influence in the face of their increasing irrelevance. As it becomes more and more obvious to people that these legacy institutions have become so corrupt and bureaucratic that they do far more harm than good, their leaders are likely to resort to more and more authoritarian tactics in order to defend their untenable position. This is where we need to see opportunity as opposed to cowering in fear.

We are on the right side of history, while the old institutions are simply living on borrowed time. We must be smart about how we see the world and understand that Donald Trump is likely to react to such a situation quite similarly to a Barack Obama. Whoever’s in charge of the government will by definition work to preserve the power of government as opposed to the liberty of the citizenry. This goes for pretty much every political leader and government worldwide. As such, we must assume government will lash out in increasingly irrational and authoritarian ways in the coming years, as the old paradigm becomes unglued.

As I mentioned earlier, when a government reacts in an absurd and harmful way, we need to see this for the opportunity it presents as opposed to becoming overcome with fear concerning its inevitable near-term harm. A perfect example is the recent extremely destructive decision by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi to unilaterally scrap old 500 and 1,000 rupee notes, which merely represents a particularly egregious move within a broader push by elitist and status quo bureaucrats across the world to ban cash. As disruptive as this move has been, it also carries with it a significant silver lining. For example, it’s causing us to ask the really big questions we need to be asking.

As R. Jagannathan wrote earlier today in Swaraja Magazine, where he is the editorial director:

A philosophical question that economists need to answer after Lehman, zero-interest money, QEs, and demonetisation (in our case) is whether central banks ought to have that kind of monopoly over money.

 

Most free-market economists would agree that monopolies are bad, but they do not usually challenge the state’s monopoly over violence and law-making or the central banks’ monopoly over the issue and regulation of currency.

 

Leaving aside the state’s monopoly on some kinds of power, let’s ask whether a central bank’s money monopoly is worthwhile since it does not appear to have delivered the kind of benefits to the world in recent decades which can justify the conferment of a monopoly.

 

The fundamental reason why we have grown to love (or learned to live with) central banks is that we cannot remember a time when they did not exist. So the argument is better the devil you know…

 

But consider their track record…

 

The US Fed could not prevent or even moderate the 1930s depression. It took a world war to rescue the US economy from deflation.

 

The US government (and the Fed) reneged on their most important commitment – to link the dollar value to gold – in 1971. This link was crucial to getting the world to accept payment in US dollars. But once that got done, the US did not want to honour its commitment since this was costing it a bit. In short, central banks cannot always be trusted.

 

“Independent” central banks were never able to prevent governments from debasing the currency by resorting to huge fiscal deficits. So they could not maintain the exchange values of their currencies without creating hardships for their people.

 

Central banks have been particularly bad at predicting when money was too cheap or too expensive – the main job they are supposed to do – and we have seen that in bold relief post-Lehman, and with the ongoing Eurozone crisis and Japan’s never-ending stagflation.

 

In India, we were happy to assume that for Reserve Bank of India (RBI) governor Raghuram Rajan brought inflation down, but this is a story we concocted after noting that the man was talking a lot about inflation. We presumed that what he did must have helped inflation come down, but we can never be sure. But his predecessor D Subbarao spent five years chasing down both inflation and disinflation (pre-2008, post-2008, and post-2011-12) and was considered “behind the curve” on policy. As if one human being can predict the net outcomes from the individual actions of a billion-and-a-quarter people responding to inflation or deflation.

 

And now we have a new Governor, Urjit Patel, taking the flak for a decision he was only partially involved in – demonetisation.

 

But the real question to ask of Urjit Patel and the government that appointed him is not whether demonetisation was a good idea or whether it has been implemented badly, but whether either government or the central bank should have had this monopoly power at all?

 

That Patel and the Modi government are being attacked both by Left and Right for demonetisation leads us to a larger and more basic question: Could demonetisation have happened if the Indian state did not have a monopoly in central banking, and there were several money issuers vying for the citizen’s custom?

 

The answer is probably no, for it is only monopoly that assures central banks this kind of power. If India had another currency issuer, the RBI could not have demonetised the currency in one go. It would have had to announce a plan, and take the bad money out in stages.

 

But the central bank’s monopoly is really a consequence of the state’s monopoly on law-making and power. This is why states, despite being at odds with their central banks on the short-term direction of monetary policy, are equally keen to let them retain their money monopoly.

 

In the US, a private player launched a gold-based currency called e-Gold, but when it grew big enough, the powers-that-be had it wound up. Launched in 1996, e-Gold, founded by Douglas Jackson, allowed account-holders to make cash transfers to other e-Gold account-holders through its website. At its zenith, e-Gold was said to be handling more than $2 billion worth of annual transactions. (Read more about e-Gold here and here).

 

But governments can’t stand a rival who challenges their own right to mint currency, and so in 2009, e-Gold was shut down, ostensibly because it did not have a licence to transfer money. The Patriot Act, enacted after 9/11, gave the US government powers to do this.

 

The 21st century will challenge the idea of the state and its monopoly powers, but Step One in that process is whether central banks should have a monopoly on money.

 

The answer is no. Competition will be good even in the business of creating money and managing its ebbs and flows.

All of this reminds me of something I wrote recently with regard to the self-implosion of mainstream media in the post, ‘Then We Will Fight in the Shade’ – A Guide to Winning the Media Wars:

It is when you get desperate, scared and panicky that you make the biggest mistakes, and the legacy media is currently desperate, scared and panicky.  As Napoleon Bonaparte allegedly said:

 

“Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.”

 

We mustn’t get in the way of the legacy media’s inevitable self-destruction. Part of this means that we do not self-destruct in the process. We need to recognize that there’s a reason independent, alternative media is winning the battle of ideas in the first place. For all the warts, mistakes and bad actors, the emergence of the internet is indeed the historical equivalent of the invention of the printing press on steroids.

The same mindset and strategy should be applied to the state as well. One thing I’m relatively certain of, is that as economies continue to decay under the weight of the status quo way of doing things, the incredibly corrupt men and women in charge of our dominant institutions will flail from one destructive, authoritarian action to the next. We must expect this and prepare to respond.

Technology will do its part by providing the necessary tools to transition from one paradigm to the other, but equally important will be winning the narrative when it comes to the 7 billion people inhabiting the planet. This is where websites such as Liberty Blitzkrieg and others will play an increasingly significant role in pointing out and articulating the harmful, irrational and destructive nature of the status quo response to challenges that arise. In this way, we can be sure to win the battle of ideas, which will be crucial to successfully ushering in a new age of human freedom, creativity, opportunity and progress.

via http://ift.tt/2i1tUEz Tyler Durden

Less than a month ago we warned that the Chinese commodity bubble 2.0 was bursting as speculative volume had exploded relative to open interest and exchanges had begun (after unreal surges in prices) to crackdown on the speculation. The carnage continued and over the last few days has bloodbath'd even more as China warns that it will miss its growth targets.

Spot The Odd One Out…

• Zinc -22%
• Iron Ore -20%
• Steel Rebar -20%
• China Coking Coal -25%
• Copper -13%
• Bitcoin +18%

 

It appears as China housing bubble pops, commodity bubble pops, and credit-fueled growth bubble pops… there is only one place left for Chinese trend-followers to flee to – Bitcoin.

via http://ift.tt/2hskJy5 Tyler Durden

In the first 84 days of the 2017 fiscal year (October 1, 2016 – December 23, 2016), the Obama administration has accepted 25,584 refugees into the United States, according to data provided by the State Department.  Per Breitbart, compared to the same period in FY2016, that represents an 86% increase year-over-year.  And while we were expecting a large increase in refugee admittances in 2017 (see “Hillbama Administration Plans To Admit At Least 110,000 Refugees In 2017“), the ~30% increase that Secretary John Kerry estimated back in September is looking like a fairly modest increase now compared to actual numbers. 

And while the new Trump administration will likely slow the rate of the new arrivals after taking office next month, the current Obama run-rate puts us on track to blow through the 20-year record high set back in 1999.

 

As we’ve noted before, per data from the U.S. State Department, the overwhelming majority of refugees admitted into the U.S. over the past couple of months are coming from Syria, Iraq and Somalia… 

 

…and being resettled in Texas, California, Arizona and New York.

 

 

Obviously, Trump has been fairly clear about is intention to “suspend immigration from areas in the world where there is proven history of terrorism against U.S.” which likely was a stance that helped him win the presidency in November. 

Trump: Will suspend immigration from areas in the world where there is proven history of terrorism against U.S. https://t.co/rHkpUr7xiL

— The Situation Room (@CNNSitRoom) June 13, 2016

 

 

But, Obama doesn’t seem to care about any of that…nothing like completely ignoring the will of the American people to pursue your own agenda.  

via http://ift.tt/2hIIz4w Tyler Durden

Did the Russians really rig the 2016 US election? The Daily Telegraph's Tim Blair exposes 'the truth' – You bet they did!

Secret documents recently discovered in a bin behind a Kremlin-district 24-hour cabbage and tobacco store reveal for the first time the devious extent of Russian interference. These plans were decades in the making.

Read on, as never-before-seen communiques between Russian agents Sergei Potrov and Dimitri Bienko outline the wicked plot – beginning in 1947, on the day of Hillary Clinton’s birth:

Dearest Dimitri

 

I am pleased to report that phase one of Operation Cankles is total success! Soviet implantation of stupid American woman resulted in birth today of hefty girl-child destined to be unelectable candidate 70 years from now.

 

Child is basically just ankles and head, similar to sturdy and hard-working female stock from adored Ilmensky Mountains. In decadent America, nobody will ever vote for such a noble being.

 

Yours in Soviet solidarity,

Sergei

Back in Moscow, Bienko receives the news from his undercover US-based operative with communist glee:

Dearest Sergei,

 

You have done very well, comrade! Especially with the implantation. I trust the child has your eyebrow.

 

We have already begun looking at similar strategies in other western nations. When you are next on leave, ask me to show you plans for Operation Julia. Australia is next to face unforgiving Soviet wrath!

 

Yours,

Dimitri

As the years go by, our pair of dedicated spies continue to monitor Hillary’s progress and other events:

Dearest Dimitri,

 

Greetings again from Americas. Heh heh heh! Apologies for chuckles, but am watching hilarious documentary called Honeymooners. Is about domestic violence. Very good.

 

Am needing laugh because hips in pain from imitating the Elvis Presley. Will send you LP of the Presley once Russia has record players.

 

Hillary now at school and shunned by corrupt classmates in thrall of military-industrial capitalism. All proceeding exactly according to strategic project timeline.

 

Yours in everlasting revolution,

Sergei

Called away from Operation Cankles for a brief and triumphant mission to Dallas in 1963, Potrov soon returns to his main quest:

Dearest Dimitri,

 

My ‘holiday’ in Texas was wonderful, thank you for asking. Not so good for Agent Oswald, however. I will miss him. He could make a fine okroshka soup, which is very rare here. The Americans, they prefer their eggs shelled and cooked. And from birds.

 

How is this for funny? Hillary ran for president of high school and lost to braggart teen with big crazy hair and grabby hands! Is almost like a practice run or something.

 

Next step is to find university for her. Wellesley is ideal. More communists than all of Soviet Union, except parents drive Cadillacs (sort of like our ZiL, but wheels stay on).

 

Yours in earnest progress,

Sergei

Occasionally Agent Potrov would vanish from the attention of his Soviet overlords, as this urgent 1967 cable shows:

Comrade Sergei Potrov,

 

We have not heard from you since you volunteered to investigate the ‘counterculture movement’ in San Francisco three months ago. We assume that your one message, requesting ‘more bread, man’ to buy ‘reefer and doobies’, was written in a code unknown even to our finest cryptographers.

 

Also, the message was sent on paper from which several strips had been torn. Have you insufficient funds to purchase cigarettes? Please contact your superiors immediately. And stop playing Creedence on our interspy sonic network. This is not what the Soviet surveillance system is for.

 

Yours in concern,

Central Command

During the mid-70s, the Russians toast a mission-advancing coup:

It is not to be believed! Hillary is getting married – to a man! You owe me 50 rubles, Dimitri.

 

The fellow is Bill, called by friends ‘horn dog’, ‘el squeezo’ and ‘the Arkansas assman’. He is very political. All his girlfriends say so. By ‘all his girlfriends’, I mean whole female population of Little Rock. He go through them like great winter purge of traitor generals.

 

This can only assist our mission. Perhaps this Bill will even make it to the White House, if he can keep it in his pants for long enough (is phrase I pick up here).

 

Yours in jubilation,

Sergei

Even tectonic global changes could not sway Agents Potrov and Bienko from their cause:

Dearest Sergei,

 

Alas, our beloved Soviet Union is no more. Gorbachev has ruined everything. Please do not give up on Operation Cankles. It may prove to be the final major accomplishment of our great land and heroic peoples.

 

In other news, our budget has been slightly trimmed. Suggest you monitor Hillary from American streets, where lucrative sign-holding job will provide cover and help pay rent.

 

Yours in Glasnost,

Dimitri

Finally, on November 8, 2016, Sergei’s long mission comes to a victorious conclusion – on the veteran agent’s 94th birthday:

Dearest Dimitri,

 

I know you have been dead ten years already, but I write to you for fondness and memories. Great friend, it is done. All that we have worked for, all that we have planned, all that we have dreamed. Our unelectable candidate was truly unelectable. Even the other patients here in the home did not vote for her. One voted for Eisenhower.

 

My time is not long, Dimitri. Soon I shall see you again, in the heaven that is a frozen-solid Siberian grave. We will rest in honour. Our work on this earth is complete.

 

Yours in espionage,

Sergei

Satirical Source: The Daily Telegraph

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Last week, in a largely “under the radar” event, one of China’s wealthiest billionaires (if only on paper), Wu Ruilin, chairman of the Guangdong based telecom company Cosun Group, and whose personal fortune of 98.2 billion yuan ($14 billion) makes him wealthier than Baidu founder Robin Li who is ranked 8th on the Hurun Rich List 2016, shocked Chinese bond market watchers when he defaulted on a paltry 100 million yuan ($14 million) in bonds sold to retail investors through an Alibaba-backed online wealth management platform, citing “tight cash flow.”

Needless to say, many were stunned that a billionaire for whom $14 million is pocket change, blamed “tight cash flow” for defaulting on mom and pop investors. In any case, as South China Morning Post reported, despite the founder’s personal fortune, according to a notice put up by the Guangdong Equity Exchange on Tuesday, two subsidiaries of Cosun Group are each defaulting on seven batches of privately raised bonds they issued in 2014. According to the notice, “the issuer had sent over a notice on December 15, claiming not to be able to make the payments on the bonds on time, due to short-term capital crunch.”

To be sure, yet another default in a Chinese landscape suddenly littered with bankrupting debt dominoes would have been the end of it, however this morning Reuters added to the mystery when it said that the fate of the defaulted $45 million Chinese corporate bond sold through an Alibaba-backed online wealth management platform was thrown into doubt on Monday, after a bank said letters of guarantee for the bonds were counterfeit.

Quoted by Reuters, China Guangfa Bank Co Ltd (CGB) said guarantee documents, official seals and personal seals presented by the insurer of the bonds “are all fake” and that it has reported the matter to the police.

The dispute highlights challenges in China’s loosely regulated online finance industry, where retail investors often buy high-yielding bonds and other assets, expecting them to be “risk-free” due to guarantees provided by various parties.

As first reported last Wednesday, at the center of the latest dispute are up to 312 million yuan ($45 million) worth of high-yielding bonds issued by southern Chinese phone maker Cosun Group that defaulted this month. The bonds were sold through Zhao Cai Bao, an online platform run by Ant Financial Services Group, the payment affiliate of e-commerce firm Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.

Ant Financial has asked Zheshang Property and Casualty Insurance Co Ltd, which wrote insurance on the bonds, to repay investors. On Sunday, Zheshang Insurance published two documents on its website that it said were from CGB carrying the bank’s official seals, and that guaranteed Zheshang Insurance policies for the Consun bonds. The letters were issued at CGB’s Huizhou branch in December 2014, when the Cosun bonds were sold, Zheshang Insurance said.

And yet, suggesting there is a massive landmine hiding just below the surface of China’s bond market, far worse than merely the consequences rising interest rates, on Monday, CGB said the documents were fake and that it had reported the incident to police as “suspected financial fraud.”

While material misrepresentation of facts in Chinese finance is hardly new, the recent alleged violations usher in a whole new breed of fraud, one which is far less nuanced and far more simpllistic and includes outright forgeries of documents that backstop tens if not hundreds of billions in debt. The Cosun dispute follows similar instances of financial fraud this year including forged bond agreements that led to brokerage Sealand Securities sharing potential losses of up to $2.4 billion. In May, the government advised banks to be vigilant after several cases of bill fraud.

Ant Financial on Tuesday said Zheshang Insurance “hasn’t any reason to refuse repayment” which it was obliged to do “within three days” of default.

Making matters worse, the fraud has taken place in the context of a bond default that, according to an Ant Financial spokeswoman cited by Reuters, was a “a one in billions incident” on the platform.

Incidentally, Cosun’s bond issuance totals 1 billion yuan, according to Zheshang Insurance. The insurer’s total registered capital is 1.5 billion yuan.

Should more such “one in billions incidents” emerge, Chinese bond investors – already freaked out by the recent record plunge in Chinese govt bond futures, soaring overnight funding rates, and fears over Fed rate hikes – will rush for the exits just as China’s housing bubble is also popping as reported yesterday, leading to a rerun of the US 2006/2007 dual bursting of the housing/credit bubbles, only this time instead of an $8 trillion financial system, the world will have to backstop China… whose banking system at last check had over $30 trillion in liabilities.

Incidentally, we wonder if now that China’s bond insurers are also under the spotlight, if that means China’s very own MBIA/Ambac moments is imminent, as billions in bond insurance contracts are deemed “fake” by the insurers who would rather not pay up on what is set to be an avalanche of defaults.

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Finally, for those interested in what Bloomberg last week dubbed the “latest China Finance Scare”, namely outright forgeries in various debt products, mostly focusing on Entrusted Bonds, here is a useful primer courtesy of BBG:

There’s another Chinese financial practice that’s prompting high-decibel warnings. So-called entrusted bond holdings are a way for financial institutions to skirt rules on using borrowed money to invest in bonds. How? By getting a third party to buy the bonds and agreeing to purchase them at a later date. What could possibly go wrong? How about the worst rout in China’s bond market in a decade. That’s left regulators concerned about the prospect of investors failing to make good on such arrangements, estimated to involve at least $144 billion of bonds.

1. Why entrust us with this news only now?

Concerns about entrusted bond holdings have worsened the tumble in the debt market. Last week, Caixin cited market rumors when it reported a brokerage called Sealand Securities Co. had refused to take over bonds held by a counterparty. That got investors worried. Oversea-Chinese Banking Corp. then said in a note, citing media reports it didn’t identify, that the entrusted holding agreement may have been tied to alleged fraud by ex-staff. Sealand cleared the air when it said it would in fact fulfill the bond contracts that had been stamped with a forged seal. The whole incident was enough to frighten an already jittery market.

2. So why do investors use entrusted holding agreements?

Brokerages and other institutional investors ask counterparties to buy bonds from them when they need to circumvent internal rules on note holdings and leverage, according to Xu Hanfei, a bond analyst at Guotai Junan Securities Co. Or they can simply have third parties buy the notes directly from the market. The practice boosts leverage by effectively giving the financial institutions loans: As brokerages and institutional investors don’t carry the bonds on their books, they can use the funds freed up on paper to purchase more bonds, which can then be rolled into more such agreements. “Non-bank financial institutions, which emphasize returns, have more motivation to amplify leverage through entrusted holdings,” said Li Liuyang, a market analyst at Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ in Shanghai.

3. How widespread is the practice?

Outstanding entrusted holdings are “in the trillions of yuan,” according to Guotai Junan’s Xu. That estimate is based on the bond holdings of the brokerages and smaller banks that are major participants in such transactions. That means the amount of money tied up in such deals is at least 5 percent of the 21 trillion yuan ($3 trillion) of outstanding corporate notes in China, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

4. What broader risks does it pose to China’s financial markets?

A default in an entrusted holding could turn what otherwise might have been a problem with one company’s liquidity into a broader credit event, given that multiple parties may be involved, according to Li at Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ. Li says “everyone is worried about similar situations in their transactions with non-bank financial institutions.” OCBC said that things had got so bad that banks were reluctant to lend to non-bank institutions amid a breakdown in trust between investors.

5. What are regulators doing about it?

Authorities including the central bank and the China Securities Regulatory Commission are investigating some financial institutions’ entrusted bond holdings after the Sealand incident, people familiar with the matter said Tuesday. The holdings run contrary to the central bank’s push to trim investments made on borrowed money, according to China Merchants Bank Co. “It’s just a question of when Chinese regulators will clean up entrusted bond holdings,” said Liu Dongliang, a senior analyst at the bank. Tommy Xie, an economist in Singapore at OCBC, says China’s market rout may prompt regulators to strengthen rules on entrusted holdings. He describes them as “a common practice in the grey area of the bond market.”

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