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Dallas Mavericks owner and billionaire Mark Cuban recently stated that he would vote for the "devil he knows" in Hillary Clinton when faced with a choice between Clinton and Donald Trump for president.

However that would all change in a heartbeat if Clinton selects Elizabeth Warren as the VP on the Democratic ticket.

When asked in a recent interview with Fox Business whether or not Cuban would vote for Hillary if Elizabeth Warren is selected as the VP, Cuban erupted into an epic rant…

"Then there's a good chance I vote for Donald Trump"

 

"We need to be more center. This country needs solutions right, we don't need headline porn. We don't need people talking about 'playing to progressives', 'playing to conservatives'. The more we deal with labels than solutions, the bigger our problems get."

 

"Elizabeth Warren has accomplished a lot in her life but taking it that far left would be a huge mistake. Anymore than if Donald Trump went the other way, we need to come center."

Full interview below….

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The scandalous collapse of the Malaysian state wealth fund, 1MDB, which also happened to be a slush fund for president Najib, has been extensively covered on these pages (for those looking to catch up read here, here, here, here and here). And, like with every scandal involving the failure of a major financial conglomerate, Goldman Sachs was closely involved, or rather one specific Goldman banker: Tim Leissner.

Recall back in March we explained why by late January, Tim Leissner was irritated.

Irritated that Goldman wouldn’t support his move to Los Angeles to be with his famous wife Kimora Lee, irritated that the firm wouldn’t let him give an internship to the son of a shadowy, as-yet-unnamed go-between in a deal to finance a controlling stake in an Indonesian copper mine, and especially irritated that the bank seemed to be looking a lot harder at the deals he was working on in Southeast Asia in the wake of the 1MDB scandal.

And why shouldn’t he be frustrated? After all, Leissner built Goldman’s SE Asia operation. Who is the executive committee to tell him he can’t pass out internships as bribes on the way to financing Indonesian copper mines? And as far as 1MDB goes, Leissner didn’t recall anyone in New York complaining when the bank raked in hundreds of millions in underwriting fees for the deals that helped finance Najib’s slush fund.

“It’s not my fault Najib messed the whole thing up,” Leissner must have been thinking.

(Leissner and Kimora)

In any case, Goldman had seen enough by the start of 2016, and sensing that the tide was shifting, decided to pull a Fabrice Tourre and prepare Leissner for the proverbial sacrifical offering.

As we also said in March, Leissner, once the crown banker jewel in the Squid’s Asian tentacle, had become a liability. Investigations into 1MDB were underway in the U.S., Singapore, Switzerland, Hong Kong and Abu Dhabi. Someone, somewhere, was going to get to the bottom of how this disastrously indebted “development bank” got itself into dire straits and at the end of the rabbit hole there’s going to a giant Vampire Squid.

So what did Goldman do? Well, they cooked up an excuse to cut a critical loose end, and as the WSJ wrote then, “Goldman placed Tim Leissner, the firm’s Southeast Asia chairman, on leave after a review of his email found that he had allegedly sent an unauthorized reference letter on behalf of an individual to another financial firm in 2015. The letter also included statements that Goldman believes to be inaccurate.”

That review led to Leissner’s previously reported “mystery” leave. As we wrote at the time, “whether or not Leissner’s leave and decision to high tail it out of Singapore has anything to do with the 1MDB scandal is an open question, but the timing certainly looks curious.” Although no one knew it then, Leissner had already resigned by the time news of his “vacation” hit the wires.

“The email review also came as Goldman [questioned] a potentially lucrative mining deal in Indonesia being led by Mr. Leissner because of the involvement of someone in the deal who the bank believed could hurt the firm’s reputation,” WSJ goes on to detail. “Bank investigators found that Mr. Leissner had offered an internship to a child of the individual.”

Ultimately, Goldman backed out of the deal. Leissner was incensed. At $50 million, it would have been the biggest deal for Goldman in the region since the 1MDB bond offerings.  

It seems fairly obvious that Goldman saw the writing on the wall here and simply ordered the firm’s investigators to scour Leissner’s e-mail for an excuse to fire him ahead of revelations about 1MDB. Now, some possibly make-believe person of questionable repute and a possibly make-believe internship Leissner was set to give this anonymous individual’s son will be trotted out as the reason the most important banker in SE Asia just had to go.

Because clearly Goldman wouldn’t want to damage its “sterling reputation.”

The only thing that was missing in all of this was a formal probe, and that’s precisely what was unveiled today when as Bloomberg reports, Goldman has drawn scrutiny from New York’s Department of Financial Services, aka the local banking regulator, over fundraising for Malaysia’s embattled 1MDB fund.  As Bloomberg adds, the DFS has asked Goldman Sachs on Thursday to “swiftly report” on its internal review of more than $6 billion in bond sales for 1MDB.

In a letter, the New York bank regulator also asked Goldman to provide an overview, by June 14, of every investigation in the U.S. and abroad into its work for the imploded state wealth fund.

The New York bank regulator joins the U.S. Justice Department, Federal Reserve and Securities and Exchange Commission in examining Goldman’s dealings with 1MDB.

DFS has jurisdiction in the matter because it licenses banks chartered by the state of New York. Nationally chartered banks are regulated by the federal Office of the Comptroller of the Currency.

What happens next? The same thing that happens every time the noose around Goldman closes even remotely: Lloyd Blankfein sits down behind closed doors with “regulators” and cobbles out a settlement, call it $50 million, or about 20-25% of the total profits Goldman generated from its dealings with 1MDB over the years, and then throws Leissner, who according to recent reports had left Singapore and was living in Los Angeles, under the bus at which point another kangaroo court process takes place, and Leissner has to fork over a few dozen million out of his own pocket.

Naturally, nobody will go to prison.

 

 

 

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As the Euro 2016 football championship kicks off today in France, it remains to be seen how president Francois Hollande will deal with the ongoing labor strikes that have erupted throughout the country, disrupting fuel and transportation.

"France was chosen to host this big event and will live up to the scale of the task." Hollande said, adding "I will be paying close attention and if decisions need to be made, they will be made. Public services will be provided, the whole of Europe will be watching."

Transportation remains a large concern, especially as an estimated 1.5 million fans begin to arrive for the matches. Rail services have improved as a nine-day strike over work and rest time ran out of steam France 24 reports, however the SUD union was still threatening to disrupt trains on Friday carrying spectators to France's opening match against Romania – "the Euros are here and let me tell you this, it's going to be hard to take the RER D on Friday. They'll find some non-strikers to man trains, but it's going to be complicated to get there by train."

Transportation Minister Alain Vidalies said train drivers would be forced to ensure public transport for fans if needed. "If requisitioning is required, we will do it. There will be no more negotiating. There's no longer any reason to continue the strike if it's not for political reasons."

Air France said it would have to cancel up to 30% of flights as a result of a four-day walkout by pilots. Airline chief Frederic Gagey said "Of course, we'll look after the Euro tournament", adding that the dispute would cost the airline $5.66 million a day, the type of financial disruption that Finance Minister Michel Sapin said risks undermining a nascent pickup in economic growth.

"This is not the moment to throw a spanner into the works, with growth picking up" Sapin said.

In what may be a sign that tensions may be thawing a little bit, CGT union leader Philippe Martinez confirmed that Labor Minister Myriam El Khomri had invited him to talks, but not for another week. "It's what we've been demanding for months, it's far better to talk than to ignore France's main trade union" Martinez said of the development.

Although there may be slight progress with the unions, one very immediate problem is that Paris visitors have been met with is piles of trash in the streets. As a result of an ongoing trash collection strike that CGT has said would extend through June 14th, no trash has been getting cleared. French authorities are dealing with this by sending in private trash collection trucks to clear the piles of rotting garbage.

"All the rubbish will be cleared up, starting now, today. It will take a few days obviously" said Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo.

On the security side of things, France remains in a state of emergency after last November's attacks in Paris, and 90,000 police and other security officials have been assigned to patrol fan zones and stadiums.

And of course what would the Euro 2016 be without fans clashing before the matches. French police fired tear gas and released dogs after midnight in Marseilles' Old Port area Thursday night, where English fans clashed with locals. Anthony Heraud, manager of O'Malley's bar said that the French had turned up intent on provoking the visiting fans. "There were problems with the people from outside Marseilles. They came for provocation." Heraud said.

* * *

And with that, Euro 2016 is officially underway…

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For the first time since February 3rd, USDCNH traded over 6.60 as trade data suggests both capital outflows are building (see Hong Kong) and the “China is fixed” narrative is breaking. Whether the Yuan turmoil is responsible – as it has been in the past – for Europe’s weakness (and US) is unclear…

 

But the last two times the Chinese currency markets started to shudder, the ripples didn’t stop until The Fed backed right off…

 

Deja Vu all over again?

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Submitted by Elizabeth Harrington via FreeBeacon.com,

Researchers who corrected a scientific paper claiming social conservatives are associated with psychoticism – when it was in fact liberals – are calling the correction “quite minor.”

The correction came three years after the paper claimed social liberals were linked with “Social Desirability,” and conservatives with authoritarianism.

The paper “Correlation not Causation: The Relationship Between Personality Traits and Political Ideologies” was released in October 2013. The researchers admitted the results were “exactly reversed,” in a correction in January, which was first reported by Power Line Blog.

The researchers had expected conservatives to be more likely to exhibit traits of “psychoticism,” which they defined as “uncooperative, hostile, troublesome, and socially withdrawn,” as well as “manipulative.”

Their initial findings reported just that.

“In line with our expectations, [psychoticism] P (positively related to tough-mindedness and authoritarianism) is associated with social conservatism and conservative military attitudes,” the original paper stated. “Intriguingly, the strength of the relationship between P and political ideology differs across sexes. P’s link with social conservatism is stronger for females while its link with military attitudes is stronger for males.”

“We also find individuals higher in Neuroticism are more likely to be economically liberal,” the paper said. “Furthermore, Neuroticism is completely unrelated to social ideology, which has been the focus of many in the field. Finally, those higher in Social Desirability are also more likely to express socially liberal attitudes.”

However, the authors of the paper, Virginia Commonwealth University researchers Brad Verhulst and Lindon Eaves and Pennsylvania State University researcher Peter Hatemi, had to issue a correction after learning the findings were exactly the opposite.

“The authors regret that there is an error in the published version of ‘Correlation not Causation: The Relationship between Personality Traits and Political Ideologies,’” the correction reads. “The interpretation of the coding of the political attitude items in the descriptive and preliminary analyses portion of the manuscript was exactly reversed.”

 

“Thus, where we indicated that higher scores in Table 1 (page 40) reflect a more conservative response, they actually reflect a more liberal response,” the researchers said. “Specifically, in the original manuscript, the descriptive analyses report that those higher in Eysenck’s psychoticism are more conservative, but they are actually more liberal; and where the original manuscript reports those higher in neuroticism and social desirability are more liberal, they are, in fact, more conservative.”

In other words, the study actually found that liberals were more associated with being “more uncooperative, hostile, troublesome, socially withdrawn” and “manipulative.” They noted having a “high Psychoticism score is not a diagnosis of being clinically psychotic or psychopathic.”

When contacted by the Washington Free Beacon, Verhulst said the error was “quite minor.”

“The correction to the original manuscript was quite minor, and consisted of an error in the descriptives,” Verhulst said. “None of the primary conclusions were affected by the error.”

Verhulst said the paper was not about conservatives being more authoritarian, but about the relationship between personality traits and political beliefs.

“The reason that the correction is quite minor is because we were looking at whether personality traits caused people to develop political attitudes,” he said. “We found that personality traits and political attitudes were correlated, but that there was no evidence that there was a causal relationship.”

 

“Accordingly, this is a minor error because the fact that the correlation is ‘exactly reversed” does not change the fact that personality traits do not cause political attitudes,” Verhulst added. “Thus, while the descriptive statistics were incorrect, the conclusions based on the analyses do not change.”

Verhulst said researchers from Denmark first alerted his colleague Dr. Hatemi to the error. His team re-analyzed the data but did not find any mistakes.

“To be extra sure that there was no error, we then contacted the data managers from whom we obtained the data,” he said. “It was at this point that we found the inconsistency between the code book that we were using and the original code book. As soon as we found the error (which was 3 years after the publication of the original manuscript), we issued the relevant corrections.”

Verhulst added that the study was not taxpayer-funded, but relied on data collected from previously funded research by the National Institutes of Health.

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Moments ago the twitter account of the NYC Fire Wire announced that hazardous material teams and emergency service units are responding to an incident at New York City’s Federal Plaza, where two civilians have allegedly been exposed to “white powder.”

Manhattan *HazMat* Box 0152- 26 Federal Plaza. Bn-1 has a white powder incident with 2 civilians exposed. HazMat 1 & ESU responding

— NYC Fire Wire (@NYCFireWire) June 10, 2016

The Jacob K. Javits Federal Building at 26 Federal Plaza houses the offices of Department of Homeland Security, FBI’s New York City field office, the Social Security Administration and the US Citizenship and Immigration Services.

Curiously, there have no other confirmation of the incident from New York City law enforcement agencies, and the nature of the white powder is unknown. Was another twitter account hacked?

Developing

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