Tag: news

In January, when we exposed that up to 350,000 Twitter accounts could be fake, the social media world started to question its own reality. Now, a study from USC and Indiana University, that Twitter has roughly 48 million active bot accounts. That's 15% of reported active users that are not human at all…

Earlier this year, a computer scientist in London has stumbled upon massive networks of fake Twitter accounts – with the largest consisting of over 350,000 profiles – which may have been used to 'fake' numbers of followers, send spam, and boost interest in trending topics. On Twitter, bots are accounts that are run remotely by someone who automates the messages they send and activities they carry out.

Some people pay to get bots to follow their account or to dilute chatter about controversial subjects.

As The BBC reported, UK researchers accidentally uncovered the lurking networks while probing Twitter to see how people use it.

But now, as CNBC reports, a much bigger big chunk of those "likes," "retweets," and "followers" lighting up your Twitter account may not be coming from human hands.

Researchers at USC used more than one thousand features to identify bot accounts on Twitter, in categories including friends, tweet content and sentiment, and time between tweets. Using that framework, researchers wrote that "our estimates suggest that between 9% and 15% of active Twitter accounts are bots."

Since Twitter currently has 319 million monthly active users, that translates to nearly 48 million bot accounts, using USC's high-end estimate. The report goes on to say that complex bots could have shown up as humans in their model, "making even the 15% figure a conservative estimate." At 15 percent, the evaluation is far greater than Twitter's own estimates.

In a filing with the SEC last month, Twitter said that up to 8.5 percent of all active accounts contacted Twitter's servers "…without any discernable additional user-initiated action."

Since that equates to roughly 20 million more bot accounts than Twitter's own assessment, that could be an issue in light of analyst concerns about user growth. In a recent research report, Nomura Instinet analysts wrote that "Twitter's revenue growth has slowed to the mid-single digits, as the platform has struggled to attract new users over the past year…"

The research could be troubling news for Twitter, which has struggled to grow its user base in the face of growing competition from Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and others. But, of course, Twitter itself tried to spin this as a positive?

A Twitter spokesperson said that while bots often have negative connotations, "many bot accounts are extremely beneficial, like those that automatically alert people of natural disasters…or from customer service points of view."

The real concern, as Axios notes, is whether audience measurement companies should take bots into consideration as part of user traffic numbers, which affect advertising potential, if their behaviors mimic that of real human users.

via http://ift.tt/2mAH248 Tyler Durden

Via The Saker,

In all the political drama taking place in the USA as a result of the attempted color revolution against Trump, the bigger picture sometimes gets forgotten. And yet, this bigger picture is quite amazing, because if we look at it we will see irrefutable signs that the Empire in engaged in some bizarre slow motion of seppuku and the only mystery left is who, or what, will serve as the Empire’s kaishakunin (assuming there will be one).

I would even argue that the Empire is pursuing a full-spectrum policy of self-destruction on several distinct levels, with each level contributing the overall sum total suicide. And when I refer to self-destructive behavior I don’t mean long-term issues such as the non-sustainability of the capitalist economic model or the social consequences of a society which not only is unable to differentiate right from wrong, but which now decrees that deviant behavior is healthy and normal. These are what I call “long term walls” into which we will, inevitably, crash, but which are comparatively further away than some “immediate walls”. Let me list a few of these:

Political suicide: the Neocons’ refusal to accept the election of Donald Trump has resulted in a massive campaign to de-legitimize him. What the Neocons clearly fail to see, or don’t care about, is that by de-legitimizing Trump they are also de-legitimizing the entire political process which brought Trump to power and upon which the United States are built as a society. As a direct result from this campaign, not only are millions of Americans becoming disgusted with the political system they were indoctrinated to believe in, but internationally the notion of “American democracy” is becoming a sad joke.

And just to make things worse, the US corporate media is finally showing its true face and now unapologetically shows the entire world that not only is it not in any way “fair” or “objective”, but that it is a 100% prostituted propaganda machine which faithfully serves the interests of the US “deep state”.

A key element of the quasi constant brainwashing of the average American has always been the regular holding of elections. Nevermind that, at least until now, the outcome of these elections made very little difference inside the USA and non at all outside, the goal was never to consult the people – the goal has always been to give the illusion of democracy and people power. Now that the Democrats say that the Russians rigged the elections and the Republicans say that it was the Democrats and their millions of dead voters who tried stealing it, it become rather obvious that these elections were always a joke, a pseudo-democratic “liturgy”, a brainwashing ritual – you name it – but never about anything real.

The emergence of the concept of 1% can be “credited” to the Obama Administration, since it was during Obama that the entire “Occupy Wall Street” movement took off, but the ultimate unmasking of the viciously evil true face of that 1% must be credited to Hillary with her truly historical confession in which she openly declared that those who oppose her are a “basket of deplorables”. We already knew, thanks to Victoria Nuland, what the AngloZionist leaders thought of the people of Europe, now we know what they think of the people of the USA: exactly the same thing.

The bottom line is this: I don’t think that the moral authority and political credibility of the USA have ever been lower than today. Decades of propaganda by Hollywood and the official US propaganda machine have now collapsed and nobody buys that counter-factual nonsense anymore.

Foreign policy suicide: let’s see what options there are to choose from. The Neocons want a war with Russia which the Trump people don’t. The Trump people, however, want, well maybe not a war, although that option is very much on the table, but at least a very serious confrontation with China, North Korea or Iran, and about half of them would also like some kind of confrontation with Russia. There is absolutely nobody, at least at the top, who would dare to suggest that a confrontation or, even worse, a war with China, Iran, North Korea or Russia would be a disaster, a calamity for the USA. In fact, serious people with impressive credentials and a lot of gravitas are discussing these possibilities as if they were real, as it the USA could in some sense prevail. This is laughable. Well, no, it it not. But it would be if it wasn’t so frightening and depressing. The truth is very, very different.

[Sidebar: While it is probably not impossible for the United States to prevail, in purely military terms, against the DPRK in a war, the potential risks are nothing short of immense. And I don’t mean the risk posed by the North Korean nukes which, apparently, is also quite real. I mean the risk of starting a war against a country which has Seoul within conventional artillery range, an active duty army of well over one million people and 180’000 special forces operators. Let us assume for a second that the DPRK has no air force and no navy and an army composed of only 1M+ soldiers, 21k+ artillery pieces and 180k special forces. How do you propose to deal with that threat? If you have an easy, obvious solution, you have watched too many Hollywood movies. You probably also don’t understand the terrain.]

But yes, the DPRK also has major wseaknesses and I cannot exclude that the North Korean armed forces would rapidly collapse under a sustained attack by the US and the ROK. I did not say that I believe that this would happen, only that I don’t exclude it. Should that happen, the US might well prevail relatively rapidly, at least in purely military terms. However, please keep in mind that any military operation has to serve a political goal and, in that sense, I cannot imagine any scenario under which the USA would walk away from a war against the DPRK with anything remotely resembling a real “victory”. There is a paraphrase of something Ho Chi Minh allegedly told to the French in the 1940s which I really like. It goes like this:” we kill some of you, you kill a lot of us, and then we win”. That is how a war with the DPRK would probably play out. I call this the “American curse”: Americans are very good at killing people, but they are not good at winning wars. Still, in the case of the DPRK there is at least a possibility of a military victory, even if at a potentially huge cost. With Iran, Russia or China there is no such possibility at all: a war with any of them would be a guaranteed disaster (I wrote about a war in Iran here and about a war with Russia too many times to count). So why is it that even though out of the 4 possible wars, one is a potential disaster and the 3 others are a guaranteed disaster, why is it that these are discussed as if they were potential options?!

The reason for that can be found in the unique mix of crass ignorance and political cowardice of the entire US political class. First, a lot (most?) of US politicians believe in their own silly propaganda about the US armed forces being “the best” in “the world” (no evidence needed!). But even those who are smart enough to realize that this is a load of baloney which nobody outside the USA still takes seriously, they know that saying that publicly is political suicide. So they pretend, go along, and keep on repetitively spewing the patriotic mantra about “rah, rah, USA, USA, ‘Merica number one, we are the best” etc. Some figure that since the USA spends more on aggression that the rest of the planet combined, that must mean that the US armed forces must be “better” (whatever that means). To the birthplace of “bigger is better” the answer is self-evident. It is also completely wrong.

Eventually, something crazy inevitably happens. Like in Syria were the State Department had one policy, the Pentagon another and the CIA yet another one. The resulting cognitive dissonance is removed by engaging in classical doublethink: “yes, we screwed up over and over, but we are still the best”. Ironically, that kind of mindset is at the core of the American inability to learn from past mistakes. If the choice is between an honest evaluation of past operations and political expediency, the latter always prevails (at least amongst civilians, US servicemen are often far more capable of self-critical evaluation, especially in ranks up to Colonel and below, the problem here is that civilians and generals rarely listen to them).

The result is total chaos: the US foreign policy is wholly dependent on the US ability to threaten the use of military force, but the harsh reality is that every country out there which dared to defy Uncle Sam did that only after coming to the conclusion that the US did not have the means to crush it militarily. In other words, only the weak, which are already de-facto US colonies, fear the USA. Or, put differently, the only countries who dare to defy Uncle Sam are the strong ones (that was all quite predictable, but US politicians don’t know about Hegel or dialectics). And just to make it worse, there is no real US foreign policy. What there is is only the sum vector of the different foreign policies desired by various more or less covert “deep state” actors, agencies and individuals. That resulting “sum vector” is inevitably short-term, focuses on a quickfix approach, and unable to take into account any complexity.

As for the US “diplomacy” it simply doesn’t exist. You don’t need diplomats to deliver demands, bribes, ultimatums and threats. You don’t need educated people. Nor do you need people with any understanding of the “other”. All you need is one arrogant self-enamored bully and one interpreter (since US diplomats don’t speak the local languages either. And why would they?). We saw the most compelling evidence of the total rigor mortis of the US diplomatic corps when 51 US “diplomats” demanded that Obama bomb Syria. The rest of the world could just observe in amazement, sadness, bewilderment and total disgust.

The bottom line is this: there is no “US diplomacy”. The USA have simply let that entire field atrophy to the point were it ceased to exist. When so many baffled observers try to understand what the US policy in the Ukraine or Syria is, they are making a mistaken assumption – that there is a US foreign policy to being with. I would argue that the US diplomacy slowly and quietly passed away, sometime after James Baker (the last real US diplomat, and a brilliant one at that).

Military suicide: the US military was never a very impressive one, certainly not when compared to the British, Russian or German ones. But it did have a couple of very strong points including the ability to produce a lot of technical innovations which made it possible to produce new, sometimes quite revolutionary, weapons. And if the US track record on ground operations was rather modest, the US did prove to be a most capable adversary in naval and aerial warfare. I don’t think that it can be denied that for most of the years following WWII the USA had the most powerful and sophisticated navy and airforce in the world. Then, gradually, things started getting worse and worse as the costs of the very expensive ships and aircraft shot through the roof while the quality of the produced systems appeared to be gradually degrading. Weapons systems which looked nothing short of awesome in the lab and test grounds proved to be almost useless once they to to their end user on the battlefield. What happened? How did a country which produced the UH-1 Huey or the F-16 suddenly start producing Apaches and F-35s?! The explanation is painfully simple: corruption.

Not only did the US military industrial complex bloat beyond any reasonable size, it also cloaked itself in so many layers of secrecy that massive corruption became inevitable. And when I speak of “massive corruption” I am not talking about millions but billions or even trillions. How? Simple – the Pentagon claimed did not have the accounting tools needed to properly account for the missing money and that the money was therefore not really “missing”. Another trick – no bid contracts. Or contracts which cover all the private contractor’s costs, no matter how high or ridiculous. Desert Storm was a bonanza for the MIC, as was 9/11 and the GWOT. Billions of dollars got printed out of thin air, distributed (mostly under the cover of national security), hidden (secrecy) and stolen (by everybody in this entire food chain). The feeding frenzy was so extreme that one of my teachers as SAIS admitted, off the record of course, that he had never seen a weapons system he did not like or which he did not want to purchase. This man, whom I shall not name, was a former director of the US Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. Yes, you read that right. He was in charge of DIS-armament. You can imagine what the folks in charge of armament (no “dis) were thinking…

With the stratospheric rise of corruption, the kind of US general which had to be promoted went from fighting men who remembered Vietnam (where they often lost family members, relatives and friends) to ass-kissing little chickenshits” like David Petraeus. In less than half a century US generals went from combat men, to managers, to politicians. And it is against this lackluster background that a rather unimpressive personality like General James Mattis can appear, at least to some, like a good candidate for Secretary of Defense.

Bottom line: the US armed forces are fantastically expensive and yet not particularly well-trained, well-equipped or well-commanded. And while they still are much more capable than the many European militaries (which are a joke), they are most definitely not the kind of armed forces needed to impose and maintain a world hegemony. The good news for the USA is that the US armed forces are more than adequate to defend the USA against any hypothetical attack. But as the backbone of the Empire – they are close to useless.

I could list many more types of suicides including an economic suicide, a social suicide, an educational suicide, a cultural suicide and, of course, a moral suicide. But others have already done that elsewhere, and much better than I could ever do myself. So all I will add here is one form of suicide which I believe the AngloZionist Empire has in common with the EU: a

“Suicide by reality denial”: this is the mother and father of all the other forms of suicide – the stubborn refusal to look at reality and accept the fact that “the party is over”. When I see the grim determination of US politicians (very much including the people supporting Trump) to continue to pretend as if the US hegemony was here to stay forever, when I see how they see themselves as the leaders of the world and how they sincerely believe that they need to get involved in every conflict on the planet, I can only come to the conclusion that the inevitable collapse will be painful. To be fair, Trump himself clearly has moments of lucidity about this, for example when he recently declared to Congress

Free nations are the best vehicle for expressing the will of the people — and America respects the right of all nations to chart their own path. My job is not to represent the world. My job is to represent the United States of America. But we know that America is better off, when there is less conflict — not more.

These are remarkable words for which Trump truly deserves a standing ovation as they are the closest thing to a formal admission that the United States have given up on the dream of being the World Hegemon and that from now on the US President will no longer represent the interest of trans-national plutocracies but he will represent the interests of the American people. This sort of language is nothing short of revolutionary, whether Trump truly delivers on that or not. Unlike everybody else, Trump does not appear to suffer from “suicide by reality denial” syndrome, but when I look at the people around him (nevermind the prostitutes in Congress) I wonder if he will ever get to act on his personal instincts.

Trump is clearly the best man in the Trump administration, he seems to have his heart in the right place and, unlike Hillary, he is clearly aware of the fact that the US armed forces are in a terrible shape. But a good heart and common sense are not enough to deal with the Neocons and the US deep state. You also need an iron will and a total determination to crush the opposition. Alas, so far Trump has failed to show either quality. Instead, Trump is trying to show how “tough” a guy he is by declaring that he will wipe out Daesh and by giving the Pentagon 30 days to come up with a plan to do this. Alas (for Trump), there is no way to crush Daesh without working with those who already have boots on the ground: the Iranians, the Russians and the Syrians. It is really that simple. And every American general knows that. Yet everybody is merrily plowing ahead is if there was some kind of possibility for the USA to crush Daesh without establishing a partnership with Russia, Iran and Syria first (Erdogan tried that. It did him no good. Now he is working with Russia and Iran). Will the good folks at the Pentagon find the courage to tell Trump that “no, Mr President, we cannot do that alone, we need the Russians, the Iranians and the Syrians”? I very much doubt it. So, yet again, we are probably going to see a case of reality denial, maybe not a suicidal one, but a significant one nonetheless. Not good.

Who will be the Empire’s kaishakunin?

Alexander Solzhenitsyn used to say that all states can be placed on a continuum which ranges from states whose authority is based on their power to states whose power is based on their authority. I think that we can agree that the authority of the USA is pretty close to zero. As for their power, it is still very substantial, but not sufficient to maintain the Empire. It is, however, more than adequate to protect the interests of the United States as a country provided the United States accept that they simply don’t have the means to remain a world hegemon.

If the Neocons succeed in their attempt to overthrow or, failing that, at paralyzing Trump, then the Empire will have the choice between an endless horror or a horrible end. Since the Neocons don’t really need a war with the DPRK, which they don’t like, but which does not elicit the kind of blind hatred Iran does, my guess is that Iran will be their number one target. Should the AngloZionists succeed in triggering a war between Iran and the Empire, then Iran will end up being the Empire’s kaishakunin. If the crazies fail in their manic attempts at triggering a major war, then the Empire will probably collapse under the pressure of the internal contradictions of the US society. Finally, if Trump and the American patriots who do not want to sacrifice their country for the sake of the Empire succeed in “draining the DC swamp” and finally crack-down hard on the Neocons then a gradual transition from Empire to major power is still possible. But the clock is running out fast.

via http://ift.tt/2mh8gfa Tyler Durden

A young girl named Shree chimped out on the White House Press Secretary, Sean Spicer, the other day for merely existing. Lacking all of the basic rules of decorum set forth by thousands of years of evolution, this young lady tossed barbarous questions at dead Sean — asking him how it felt to work for a treasonous Russian racist fascist bastard, replete with orange tones and idiotic red hats.

It wasn’t long before Sean tucked tail and ran out of the store — likely to cower underneath his silk sheets for having to meet face to face with such barbarity.

BEHOLD THE Troglodyte!

Shree penned an explanation of sorts for her trespasses — accusing Mr. Spicer of threatening her with his racist ways.

“Such a great country that allows you to be here.”

Indeud.

My take on what happened yesterday. And my first @Medium post! https://t.co/sbLzJ1rkXC

— Shree ?????? (@shreec) March 13, 2017

 “Have you helped with the Russia stuff?” “Have you committed treason, too?” “You know you work for a fascist, right?” And, “Do you feel good about lying to the American people.”

America! Enjoy.
Content originally generated at iBankCoin.com

via http://ift.tt/2nujWvg The_Real_Fly

The world is filled with intelligent people in finance.  Unfortunately, being intelligent doesn’t
always mean you are smart.  To make sound
investments, you need to be looking forward and constantly coming to rational
conclusions.  One has to avoid sheltering
oneself in a herd of backward focused investors taking comfort in performing in
line with the masses.  Patting yourself
on the back as all markets are trending higher and wallowing in ignorant pity
as markets drop lower saying “who would have saw that coming” is shamefully
common and accepted.  I bring this up
because mainstream financial news constantly encourages the belief that markets
are void of opportunity. Investors must accept 5% expected returns on equities
in the long-run, right?  Start thinking
for yourself and you can see some broadly diversified country specific equity
markets still hold astronomical return potential.  You just have to look where most have been
conditioned to avoid.

Markets move with asymmetric skews.  Markets seem to slowly grind higher for a
protracted cycle as investors begrudgingly invest at higher highs hoping for
pullbacks that do not materialize.  This
is due to hyperactive central banks doing all they can to keep economic cycles
extending longer and high-volume traders and others front running longer
focused investors.  This is a short-sited
byproduct of political pressure to keep the good times rolling on for current
politicians.  What this means is that
when there is a downturn or recession, it will be a dozy.  Shorter economic cycles ensure the upswing and
downswing are mild as excesses have difficulty building up.  But these long protracted economic cycles lead
to many excesses being subsidized.  When
the downswing comes, the market is in for a protracted difficult period.  Therein you can find significant upside
potential when a market leaves this protracted down cycle and turns for a long
ascent higher.

When these asymmetric down cycles hit, they can be
devastating and take a long time to form a bottom.  But when those markets do find footing, the
upside is enticing.  Most developed
markets hit their downside in 2009 and stayed near those levels for a while.  But as money from central banks started to flow
and percolate in the system and the wounds from the downturn turned to scars
and finally forgotten, many of these markets have gone on to reach new highs.  If you invested in these markets at the lows,
such as the Dow Jones Industrial Average in 2009, you would have made a 300%
return.  If you talk about making a 300%
return today, you’ll be dismissed as a traveling snake oil salesman.

Now I ask you to think of a market that had a similar
downside to the Dow Jones in 2009 but has not recovered.  The conclusion is obvious: PIIGS!  Yes, that lovely acronym that so negatively
and recklessly contributed to such a deep correction represents none other than
Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece and Spain.  Lambasting such negativity with a cheeky acronym
encouraged limited liquidity and deep recessions.  Traders and investors had to evacuate those
markets or pay the price of public humiliation when simply making a value
trade.  When negative media lasts for so
long, investors figure it will last forever, forgetting the potential upside
embedded in these markets.

This is where you have to think for yourself.  Instead of avoiding a market because other
investors have no interest or being influenced by the onslaught of negative
media constantly singing the same tune of dire conditions, take a deep look.  This comes back to my point of intelligent
people.  Intelligent people can make a
deeply analytical and compelling argument why to invest in or avoid a market.  Careers have been made with articles and
speeches about the problems of these countries.  For over a decade, there has been a plethora
of negative news and a dearth of positive news.  But as these markets finally turn and overcome
the last of their economic hurdles, first a few, then many intelligent people
will come out of the woodwork expounding the positive virtues of these markets.
 And taking a deep dive into these
markets reveals abundant reasons to be ecstatic.  One glaringly compelling reason is that many
companies trade at deep discounts to book value – some as low as 20% of book
value!

Taking a look at these countries, the potential returns if
the main benchmark equity indices revert to their prior high water mark are:

Portugal 160%

Italy 250%

Ireland 160%

Greece 1,000%

Spain 160%

These countries have overcome their deepest economic hurdles
and are now positioned to begin their ascension to a long and protracted
upswing.  Even Greece seems to be less
than a month or so away from finalizing their debt financing from the Eurozone
and IMF and having their debt included in the ECB’s quantitative easing program.
 Greece is starting to experience and
expected to continue to experience what is considered robust GDP growth. The
latest Industrial production for January 2017 showed growth of 7.2%! This is
hardly the dire conditions priced into the market. Yes, the proverbial punching
bag that everyone likes to beat has turned the corner.  I’m not sure what negative news the media will
focus on next, but soon these countries will be out of vogue.  Just remember: when nurtured and cured for a
prolonged period, like making prosciutto from a pig, great price appreciation
can occur.  After curing for almost a decade
and as these indices recover and show some stellar returns that we have been
relentlessly told don’t exist, just hang in there.  Those stellar returns are just the beginning.  So keep being intelligent, smart and invest
looking forward with a PrOGRessive SPIRIT (my positive, cheeky acronym – hope
it catches on!).

 

by Michael Carino, 3/1/17

Michael Carino is the CEO of Greenwich Endeavors, a
financial service firm, and has been a fund manager and owner for more than 20
years. If you are smart, you have surmised correctly he is invested in Greek
equities.

 

Investment veteran and
published author, Michael Carino, prophetically called the timing and amplitude
of the recent move in global bond markets publishing “Global Bond Markets –
Skydiving Without a Parachute.”  Michael
has spent the last 25 years managing fixed-income hedge funds and trading of
over a trillion dollars of investments.  He
is the CEO of Greenwich Endeavors, a financial service firm.  He feels compelled to get his unique and
under-reported views on the markets out to the public.  He hopes to assist your readers’ creation of
wealth and limit your readers’ destruction of wealth.  It’s time a voice contrarian
to other self-interested, behemoth Investment Managers’ voices are heard.

via http://ift.tt/2nem9yQ Greenwich Endeavors

The question on the lips of everyone who plans to exchange his metal for dollars—widely thought to be money—is why did silver go down? The price of silver in dollar terms dropped from about 18 bucks to about 17, or about 5 percent.

The facile answer is manipulation. With no need of evidence—indeed with no evidence—one can assert this and not be questioned in the gold and silver communities. We have recently come across a term normally used to describe Leftists and Social Justice Warriors, virtue signaling. One piously declares that one supports the cause, one speaks truth to power, one sticks it to The Man, well you get the idea. The concept of virtue signaling seems equally appropriate to those who sing the chorus on every price drop, “manipulation.”

Besides, we have peeps in high places in London and New York and Beijing, and they tell us silver is manipulated…

Actually, we rather prefer to look at data than listen to whispers. What would the data show if demand for physical silver metal was robust and rising while someone sold so many futures contracts that the price of the metal was forced down just about a dollar?

The basis and cobasis are spreads between physical silver metal and futures. The scenario we just described would collapse the basis and skyrocket the cobasis.

Is that what happened this week?

Before we get that, we want to note that crude oil fell from $53.33 last week to $48.49, or -9%. Copper fell from $2.70 to $2.60, or -3.7%. Wheat fell from $4.53 to $4.40, or -2.9%. People miscall this deflation.

We don’t know whether this will affect the Fed’s seeming commitment to damn the economy, full rate hikes ahead. However, we do know that sentiment bleeds from one speculative asset to another (and in a near-zero interest rate environment, all assets are used by speculators). “If energy, industrial metal, and food are going down, then surely silver should go down too,” seems to be the logic.

At least this week.

We are much more interested in the supply and demand fundamentals. We acknowledge that speculators can temporarily move prices—sometimes a lot—but we firmly insist that eventually the market price reverts to the level called for by supply and demand.

So what happened to those fundamentals? Below, we will show the only true picture of the gold and silver supply and demand. But first, the price and ratio charts.

The Prices of Gold and Silver

Next, this is a graph of the gold price measured in silver, otherwise known as the gold to silver ratio. It moved up sharply this week.  If we were chartists, we might note that the ratio seems to be making a series of higher lows since mid-July.

The Ratio of the Gold Price to the Silver Price

For each metal, we will look at a graph of the basis and cobasis overlaid with the price of the dollar in terms of the respective metal. It will make it easier to provide brief commentary. The dollar will be represented in green, the basis in blue and cobasis in red.

Here is the gold graph.

The Gold Basis and Cobasis and the Dollar Price

As the price of the dollar rose through the week, so did the cobasis. The price of the dollar is the inverse of the price of gold in dollar terms, and allows us to see a clearer picture. It is not gold going anywhere, but the dollar going up and down. The cobasis is our indicator of scarcity.

While the dollar went up 0.5mg gold, the cobasis went up 24bps. This is the old pattern, rising gold scarcity as the dollar rises. The same happened in farther contracts, to a smaller degree.

While the market price of gold fell $24, our calculated fundamental price went down only $15. It’s more than $150 over the market price.

Now let’s look at silver.

The Silver Basis and Cobasis and the Dollar Price

The cobasis in silver actually fell. It didn’t fall a lot, but this drop came in a week when the price fell substantially. This puts the lie to the allegation of manipulation. Selling of futures would push the cobasis up.

Silver fell because owners of metal decided to sell and/or buyers of physical metal slowed their purchases. We can debate why they did that, but not the meaning of the data.

Note also the much lower absolute level of the silver cobasis. Silver is -86bps compared to gold at +8bps (a slight temporary backwardation).

The silver fundamental price also fell, about half as much as the market price. It is now $1.03 over market.

This means that, while those who need to unload their silver are unhappy, those planning to load up can now exchange the same quantity of Federal Reserve Notes for more silver than last week. With (slightly) better fundamentals too, as last week the fundamental was only $0.87 over market.

The only question on that front is the trend. For two weeks, the fundamental has become weaker.

© 2017 Monetary Metals

via http://ift.tt/2mhlIyw Monetary Metals

Authored by Gregory Clark via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

The U.S. spy community – those nice people who told us they were certain the Iraq of President Saddam Hussein was holding weapons of mass destruction – have now made it known they are certain the Russian ambassador to the United States is Moscow’s top spy. But these people, even if they do not know much about WMD, must know what a top spy does. They do it themselves.

First, there is the messy and time-consuming job of finding information-loaded officials. Then there is the problem of maintaining contacts with those officials at secret rendezvous. So a senior ambassador, and former deputy Russian foreign minister, is able to do all this while going to cocktail parties, hobnobbing with the national elite, running a large embassy and studying the politics of the nation to which he is accredited?

I suggest U.S. top spies go back to doing their real work instead of inventing fairy tales.

I have seen the spies at work, on both sides of the Iron Curtain.

On the Soviet side they were not a very attractive breed. Their idea of a hard day’s work was constant snooping on the few Russian-speaking foreigners in their midst and relentless interrogation of any Soviet citizen who spoke to a foreigner, together with the occasional attempt at blackmail or compromise.

In the process they created a generation of Western policymakers deeply prejudiced against their people and their nation. Not a bad result for their decades of hard work, especially since the Western hostility they helped generate guaranteed their continued employment till well into the future.

Almost all their successes were “walk-ins”— people who for money or ideology wanted to provide information. Those volunteers would probably have provided more if they were not disgusted by the crudity of the people they had to deal with.

Spies sent to work abroad were usually of better quality. But they always had cover, as private citizens or mid-rank embassy officials at best.

Much the same in reverse was going in the West. To some extent it is still going on. In Japan the spies are almost out of control. Even though Russia has granted Japanese diplomats there the freedoms now enjoyed by Western diplomats in Russia, the Japanese spies continue to behave as in Soviet days. Like dogs chasing a bone (according to one victim), they are so crudely persistent and obtrusive that even ordinary diplomatic work becomes impossible. And these “dogs”think this will help them get their Northern Territories back?

I once played host to a prominent Western critic of U.S. Vietnam War policies. Thuggish Japanese spies camped outside my apartment for days.

These people are not the suave, romantic James Bonds of film fantasy. For the most part they are what we used to call “second elevens”— a cricket analogy for people rejected for the top team. Failing to enter the diplomatic service they make do by joining a spy network. One result is a burning desire to get ahead by undercutting the “first eleven”diplomats and by using largely bogus information to get close to the people in power. Hence the WMD information failure and the Iraq disaster, opposed by most Western diplomats with Middle East experience.

When U.S. President Donald Trump visited the CIA headquarters in Washington he was upbraided for failing to respect a “sacred” memorial wall devoted to the 90-odd CIA officers who have died while on duty. Maybe he was looking for the wall devoted to the 900,000 or so Iraqis who died as a result of CIA failures. Even Trump had the sense to turn against that dreadful war.

I once worked for two years as a diplomat in the Soviet Union. On return to Australia I went through the usual spy-agency debriefing, partly because I had reported some KGB stunts against our embassy there. Suddenly the debriefer jumped to his feet waving a report which I had written saying that the Odessa hotel where I was staying was close to the local KGB headquarters. Leaning ominously over the table he demanded to know how I knew the KGB location. I had to educate this stalwart and grossly overpaid defender of Australian security that in Soviet Union the KGB was a public organization with a large brass plate on its buildings reading Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti, or Committee for Government Security.

Later, because I also spoke Chinese and had also opposed the Vietnam War, I was subjected to one of their stunts (our usual term for spy operations) to persuade me that a Soviet Embassy official wanted to meet me urgently. They made a bad mistake; the telephone operative they had employed spoke pre-revolutionary Russian (Australia has many White Russians, mostly people fleeing to China following the Russian Revolution). There was no way he could have been working for the Soviet Embassy. It seems that little detail passed completely over the heads of our Australian security interest defenders — the people who decide whether we can be trusted with secrets. Nor were they very happy when I was able publicly to expose the stunt.

The current anti-Russian hysteria in the U.S. media is fueled by similar ignorance. Various Trump officials and appointees are being persecuted relentlessly by leaks accusing them of talking to the Russian ambassador. But anyone who knows anything about diplomacy knows that such informal talks can be crucial to policymaking.

I admit to having joined secret talks with the premier and foreign minister of the Soviet Union in a fat-headed 1964 Australian attempt to have the Soviet Union join with the West in Vietnam to stop Chinese “aggression.” Because there were laws against revealing state secrets I sat on that important story for more than 20 years.

Today when the West is bent on equally fat-headed efforts to stop alleged Russian “aggression”(read the 2015 Minsk Two agreement if you want to know who really is the aggressor), talks with Moscow’s ambassador really are needed. And the spies who want to leak that information to embarrass their own government really should go to jail.

*  *  *

Gregory Clark served as first secretary at the Australian Embassy in Moscow, from 1963 to 1965.

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A group of environmental activists defaced one of President Trump’s premier golf courses early on Sunday morning. The group, which calls itself an “anonymous environmental activist collective” snuck into Trump National Golf Club in Rancho Palos Verdes, California and using six-foot-tall letters carved a message into the green that said: “NO MORE TIGERS. NO MORE WOODS.” The “activists” also released a 1 minute video documenting the trespassing in all its glory, a recording which also spliced footage made from a drone at the time of the event.

The 7,300-yard course, located in a peninsula just south of Los Angeles, was recently ranked the 43rd best course in California by Golf Digest.

In a statement sent to The Washington Post, the group said the vandalism was carried out in response to the Trump administration’s “blatant disregard” for the environment. “In response to the president’s recent decision to gut our existing protection policies, direct action was conceived and executed on the green of his California golf course in the form of a simple message: NO MORE TIGERS. NO MORE WOODS,” the statement said.

The message was carved into the green using gardening tools and took less than one hour to accomplish, according to a member of the group who discussed the project with The Washington Post on the condition of anonymity.

The group consisted of four people, who accessed the course by scaling a fence and “walking down a steep hill laced with cacti,” the group member told The Post. “Tearing up the golf course felt justified in many ways,” the member said.

“Repurposing what was once a beautiful stretch of land into a playground for the privileged is an environmental crime in its own right.” According to the law, it’s also criminal trespassing and explains why the “activists” were all shrouded head and toe to avoid being recognized in the video.

Neither the golf course, nor the Trump Organization’s NYC HQ respond to requests for comment.  A spokesman for the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department confirmed that the department received a call for service Sunday morning about grass being dug up around hole five at the golf club. The spokesman said the department sent a deputy to the scene to determine whether the damage constituted an act of vandalism or whether it was accidental. It was the former.

“We hope this sends a message to Trump and his corrupt administration that their actions will be met with action,” the member added. Previously farmland, Trump National Golf Club opened in November 2000. On its website, the club touts its dedication to “protecting the environmentally sensitive habitat that plays host to several protected plant species and the endangered Coastal California Gnatcatcher (a small migratory bird).”

As the WaPo renminds us, Sunday’s vandalism was merely the latest in a long series of attacks involving Trump properties; most recently, the president’s brand-new Washington hotel was spray-painted with the words “Black Lives Matter” during a demonstration.

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Authored by Jeffrey Snider via Alhambra Investment Partners,

It is surely one of the primary reasons why many if not most people have so much trouble accepting the trouble the economy is in. With record high stock prices leading to record levels of household net worth, it seems utterly inconsistent to claim those facts against a US economic depression. Weakness might be more easily believed as some overseas problem, leading to only ideas of decoupling or the US as the “cleanest dirty shirt” – the US economy has problems, but how bad can they be? Yet, despite asset price levels and even record debt, all those prove is just how disconnected those places have become from what used to be an efficient way to redistribute financial resources.

According to the Fed’s Z1 report, Household net worth climbed by $2 trillion in Q4 alone to $92.8 trillion.

That is a 69% increase from the low in Q1 2009, even though Final Sales to Domestic Purchasers have grown by just 30% in that same time.

The wealth effect is dead, or, more specifically, it never was.

From the view of net worth, the increase to record debt levels seems manageable. From the more appropriate view of income and economy, it does not, even though US debt levels have grown more slowly post-crisis. That would mean debt is partway between assets and economy, sort of splitting the difference of what monetary policy believes and what it, at best, “achieved.”

Total debt (Total Lending plus Total Securities) rose just 0.8% in Q4 2016, the slowest growth rate since Q3 2015. That deceleration was shared equally by loans as well as securities, both registering record highs but also remaining hugely inefficient toward real economic growth and therefore capacity (what is all this debt financing?).

The minimal amount of overall deleveraging after the Great “Recession” has achieved a similarly minimal amount of financial rebalancing debt to economy. Total credit levels have remained historically out of bounds with the capacity to support them. The chart above may provide a clue as to why that has been, especially in contrast to the Great Inflation. The so-called Great Moderation (which clearly wasn’t that) did not moderate the level of credit expansion to economic expansion (in nominal terms) as had been done even throughout the worst parts of the Great Inflation.

That would propose monetary expansion (via evolution) into credit expansion (including the blurring distinction between money and credit, as monetary forms became more substitutable and fungible) along the lines of Net Worth and therefore asset prices. It further suggests asset prices are hugely leveraged based on hidden factors of credit and monetary substitution (housing bubble as a predicate of the dot-com bubble, for one example). In terms of just stocks, that would appear to be the verdict of valuation measures like Tobin’s Q (and the modified Q which strips potential real estate bubble pricing from corporate net worth).

There isn’t a whole lot of additional insight provided by these statistics and ratios, just more evidence and confirmation that imbalances remain as ridiculous as ever. It really isn’t so difficult to understand why the economy of the 21st century has behaved so radically different than at almost any time in history – especially post-crisis where monetary instability contributes to great uneasiness about the distribution and redistribution of resources (stock repurchases vs. capex, for one example). From the view of the corporate board room, it would appear less risky to “invest” in one’s shares than to actually invest where the economy needs it most (liquidity preferences). And as the imbalances only grow worse, that skew becomes even more skewed (self-reinforcing).

In very simple terms, what small level of deleveraging was achieved was limited to real economic function rather than in asset prices (and truly debt levels).

So rather than rebuilding debt increasing the probability and strength of the recovery, it has done instead the opposite at least in the private economy (which wouldn’t actually be a bad thing) as opposed to the swelled public economy.

The result is the seeming paradox stated at the outset – record assets and debt during full-blown and durable depression.

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Former Goldman president, and current White House chief economic advisor – as well as the person who supposedly is engaged in a bitter fued with Peter Navarro over the shape of future US trade policy – Gary Cohn appeared on Fox News Sunday, and spoke at length to Chris Wallace about some of the key economic policy changes to be implemented.

First, he touched on Obamacare repeal, saying that the administration will do “whatever it takes” to get the bill passed, setting a high bar for expectations from Trump who is still expected to meet significant challenges from House and Senate republicans.

Cohn then touched on Trump’s vision to protect the country, saying the Obama administration under-invested in the military the past eight years. “Unfortunately, we have no alternative but to reinvest in our military and make ourselves a military power once again,” Cohn said. Cohn said Trump met over the last several weeks with generals from the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines to talk about the military’s preparedness. He said it has been disappointing to hear what these generals have had to say. Cohn conceded that if funds are used to reinvest in the military, cuts need to be made elsewhere in order ensure a balanced budget without creating a further deficit.

“It’s no different than every other family in America that has to make the tough decision,” Cohn said. “When they need to spend money somewhere, they have to cut it from somewhere else. These are tough decisions, but the president has shown he is ready, willing and able to make these tough decisions.”

Finally, touching on a topic that until recently at least appeared to be dear to Trump’s, Cohn – speaking in his best former Goldman COO voice – said that the Federal Reserve “has been doing a good job” and the Trump administration respects its independence, even if the U.S. central bank raises interest rates this week.

He said that Trump administration will keep working to reduce barriers to job creation no matter what the Fed does on interest rates.

“The Federal Reserve is an independent agency and they operate as such. They have their economic data, which they look at and they are trying to always modulate economic growth with inflation, with the work force,” Cohn said. “I think the Federal Reserve has been doing a good job in doing that. The Fed will do what they need to do. And we respect the powers of the Fed.”

It remains to be seen if he will also respect them after 2-3 rate hikes, when the market finally wakes up to the rate hike cycle and Yellen’s realization she needs to hike in order to cut once the official recession begins, in the process slamming the stock market which both Trump and Cohn have previously confirmed is a “barometer” of the administration’s policies. For now Trump has been happy to take credit for the all time highs in the S&P, but what will he say once stocks start sliding, the dollar surges crushing exports, and Trump finally realizes that he needs looser, not tighter, policies to implement his economic vision? We don’t know, but a twitter Feud between @RealDonaldTrump and the @FederalReserve was certainly among our most vocal desires of things to see in 2017. It may soon come true.

 

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