Tag: news

Submitted by JP Sottile via TheAntiMedia.org,

With each passing day the 2016 presidential campaign looks more and more like an angry subreddit moderated by a genetically engineered “double-y chromosome” man-child constructed from the DNA of David Icke and Alex Jones.

Although it’s easy to dismiss this long, strange electoral trip as a passing political malady rising from America’s fever swamps, there are plenty of good reasons to get into the tin foil millinery business.

For a start, the main contest pits a Republican “Birther” who is allegedly popular with “Truthers” running against a notorious Democratic triangulator who many inside her own party believe not only jury-rigged the primaries, but also won with help from her conniving cronies in the mainstream media.

On the other side, the indefatigable Alex Jones is Donald Trump’s loudest and most confrontational alt-media megaphone. The matchmaker behind Alex and Donald’s brash bromance is “on-again/off-again” Trump confidant and all-around dirty trickster Roger Stone. Stone is now a fixture on Jones’s Infowars. Together they form a Trumpian tag-team ever-ready to body-slam any globalist who gets in Donald’s way. And they’re selling a few t-shirts, too.

Meanwhile, a former acting CIA Director pegged Trump as an “unwitting” stooge of a power-hungry former KGB agent (codename “Putin”) who, if you believe the Cold War rebooters, runs Russia like he’s a cat-stroking Bond villain. Apparently, Putin desperately needs to place a stooge in the White House to achieve his plans for world domination.

Then again, others wonder if Putin’s stooge is, in fact, actually a Manchurian candidate surreptitiously paving the way for Hillary Clinton’s ultimate victory. That plot was supposedly triggered by the husband (codename “Bubba”) of the Manchurian Candidate’s opponent (Agent HRC) during a “friendly” phone call just weeks before Trump began his political suicide mission to blow up the GOP.

What we know for certain is that since securing the nomination Trump has self-destructed like an orange-hued Mission Impossible tape. Are his jaw-dropping “mistakes” merely the execution of a sinister plot to elect an otherwise unelectable candidate? And does this plot bring us closer to the alien lizard apocalypse?

Well, Hillary Clinton’s campaign chair has long lobbied the government to finally open its vault and reveal what it knows about extra-terrestrial visitors to planet Earth — a wish that Hillary says she’ll grant if elected. So, cue the Twilight Zone music and maybe we’ll find out.

And, in the latest plot thickening development, an actual former CIA “Operations Officer” named Evan McMullin threw his hat (and his trenchcoat) into the crowded presidential ring. Doesn’t it just stand to reason that #NeverTrumpsters would promote an unknown Mormon spook who used to pick out people for rendition or assassination and, amazingly enough, who also once worked as a Goldman “sacks of cash” collector?

Frankly, Mr. McMullin’s “stage right”— or “staged” by the right — entrance fits perfectly into an election year narrative that could be written like a ransom note with letters cut out of Hillary Clinton’s missing emails.

And if all of this doesn’t have you reaching for a shiny hat to protect your aching head, then consider how the cognitive dissonance of these narratives and counter-narratives might be making this election something more than an exercise in futility or a mere choice between two competing evils.

That’s because the real story of this election is how the media’s regurgitative approach to journalism serves up all of Trump’s poorly digested red herrings to a truth-starved population. Trump croaks out cranky tropes like an alt-right toad, and the cable newscyclers eat it up and spit it back out again.

It’s the logical outcome of their profitable fixation on a man who’s made more baseless claims than a professional auto accident insurance scammer. And the rubbernecking media obsessively obliged him while also paving his path to the nomination with an unprecedented supply of “free” media coverage.

But now that obsession is transforming this election into a referendum on sneaking suspicions, conspiracy theories, and the strange epithet of “trutherism.” The term “truther” is usually applied to anyone who refuses to buy the official story of 9/11. But “truther” is kinda strange because it turns the word “truth” into a term of derision and disdain. It’s the type of disdain that’s long been reserved for the CIA-generated phrase “Conspiracy Theory.”

“Conspiracy Theory” was the CIA’s response to growing doubts about the Warren Commission’s lone-nut, magic bullet, “move along, there’s nothing to see here” spin on the public execution of President John. F. Kennedy. Stoked by lawyer Mark Lane’s landmark book Rush to Judgment (1966) and by the increasingly high-profile investigation of New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison, the CIA desperately needed a counter-conspiracy strategy to fight the public’s growing doubts.

What they got was a masterpiece of disinformation.

The counter-narrative approach was outlined in “CIA Document #1035-960.” The stated aim of the memo was “to provide material countering and discrediting the claims of the conspiracy theorists.” And that it did. Most importantly, they married the words “theorist” and “theory” to “conspiracy.” By performing that simple semantic trick they weaponized “doubt” and turned it back on the doubters.

And it succeeded beyond Langley’s wildest dreams.

Not only did it generate doubt about the copious evidence compiled by Garrison (who the New York Times dismissively labeled a “theorist” in the headline of his 1992 obituary). And not only did it give sheepish journalists an easy way out of asking hard questions about the assassination. But it also cut off inquiry into just about anything that needed to be tidied-up with an “official story.”

From the Gulf of Tonkin Incident to the October Surprise to CIA cocaine trafficking to the public executions of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy and dozens of other evidence-laden “conspiracies,” the “conspiracy theory” label became a one-size fits all solution to the problem of public doubt about official cover-ups, illegal wars, and political corruption.

And now — in this era of mortal doubts about politics, endless war, banking hijinx, media manipulation, and even the “American Dream”— we suddenly find ourselves drowning in a sea of conspiracy theories.

As of the writing of this story, you can put “Trump Conspiracy Theory” into the Google machine and it’ll spit out “About 30,600 results.” But that’s just the tip of the iceberg (which, according to Trump, isn’t really melting because global warming is a hoax perpetrated by the wily Chinese). If you click on “More news for ‘Trump Conspiracy Theory’” you’ll get 1,930 results just in the “recent news” category!

Among the mountain of stories filed by hundreds of news sources, the GOP’s profligate nominee has inserted “conspiracy theory” directly into the headlines of stories about Orlando Massacre, the outcome of the forthcoming election, the founding of ISIS, the death of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, Syrian refugees, and dozens upon dozens more. When it comes to spouting disinformation, Trump is a psychological warrior’s dream come true.

Strangely enough, the only theory he’s avoided talking about is the Birther movement he helped to create. Then again, Trump implies that Obama’s true allegiance is to Muslim terrorists for whom, the assertion goes, he’s working for as a secret agent inside the White House. Maybe that’s where Putin got the idea?

Trump did ratchet-up the cognitive dissonance when he threw the Kennedy Assassination into the swirling mix of tropes clogging up this campaign. Amazingly, Trump not only got away with peddling the National Enquirer’s flaccid, evidence-free “conspiracy theory” about Senator Ted Cruz’s father’s alleged link to Lee Harvey Oswald, but Trump actually went to secure the nomination shortly thereafter.

It’s a truly strange outcome given the media’s near-deafening silence regarding a host of well-researched, evidence-based, and compellingly written books on the assassination. Just ask David Talbot, James Douglass, and dozens of other journalists and academicians. They will all tell you that there is a de facto blackout of their work. And they will also tell you that the “conspiracy theory” or “theorist” label is a mortal wound in the mainstream press. But Trump suffered no such problem after peddling a specious “theory” published by a paper associated with journalistic quackery.

Like so many of his bloviations, Trump firmly planted the Kennedy assassination out in loony land. He also reinforced the idea of Oswald as the assassin. And he established himself as America’s most infamous and recognizable conspiracy theorist. But, just to take a page from The Donald’s playbook, maybe he unintentionally exposed himself as America’s ultimate crisis actor.

There’s no doubt that Trump’s campaign is an ongoing crisis. And he sure seems like he’s playing a character. And he’s falsely flagging the political landscape with cranky conspiracies, specious accusations, and “yuuuge” helpings of phony baloney.

And, most importantly, his tendentious shtick threatens to “conveniently” take real investigations with real evidence about real-life criminal conspiracies down in flames with him…

The problem is not that Obama is a secret Muslim. The problem is that he’s lorded over a mostly-secret, extra-judicial program to kill military-aged Muslim males with drones.

 

The problem is not that Obama and Hillary founded ISIS. The problem is the metastasizing U.S. imperium that’s arming the world and widening the so-called “War on Terror.”

 

The problem is not Muslims’ “infiltration” of the West. The problem is that America’s War on Terror is catalyzing an unprecedented global humanitarian nightmare.

 

The problem is not that the media is lying about Trump’s imploding campaign. The problem is that the media ignored the damning conclusions of the U.K.’s Chilcot Report and the troubling details of the long-anticipated “28 Pages” on Saudi involvement in 9/11.

 

The problem is not that China and Mexico have “clever” leaders who hoodwink Americans out of their economic birthright. The problem is that the executives of American corporations used that cheap labor to pad their executive compensation packages instead of paying middle-class wages to workers at home.

 

And the biggest problem of all is that real criminal conspiracies — like the “perfectly legal” scam of the hyper-financialized boom-and-bust-and-bailout economy — get hopelessly lost in the miasma of falsely flagged blather coming out of Trump’s gold-encrusted cakehole.

To be fair, he identified and exploited the quite real crisis of the two-party system. But his wacky act is making it easier and easier to discount his valid criticism of the Iraq War, of high-priced political puppetry, of anti-Russian hysteria, and of the selling out of American workers. Even worse, the quite real grievances of his supporters may get dismissively labeled as “conspiracy theories” even as he rides off to enjoy a great life as one of the world’s biggest celebrities.

Perhaps Robert De Niro nailed it when he likened Trump to a latter-day Travis Bickle. De Niro — whose performance in Taxi Driver made Bickle a cultural icon — said that after Bickle’s crazy pronouncements and the film’s climactic bloodbath, “the irony at the end” is that Bickle “is back driving a cab.” Could that be Trump’s final act? Could Trump the crisis actor simply return to television with a bigger, more devoted audience than ever before?

Oddly enough, Travis Bickle was based on the diaries of Arthur Bremer — the man whose assassination attempt paralyzed presidential candidate George Wallace in 1972. Bremer said he was motivated by fame rather than by a political ideology … kinda like Trump, no?

Coincidentally, Trump has drawn comparisons to Wallace. And he was outraged by the recent release of another assassin —John Hinckley, Jr. Often ignored is the fact that the Hinckley family had a political relationship with the family of then-Vice President George H.W. Bush. Not ignored was Hinckley’s desire to impress Jodie Foster which, according to the official story, is why he shot Ronald Reagan. It was an obsession he got from watching — wait for it — Taxi Driver. It all still seems pretty darn spooky.

Fortunately, Trump hasn’t falsely flagged that conspiracy … yet.

via http://ift.tt/2b5m1sD Tyler Durden

The typical rosy Democrat narrative on Obamacare highlights the decline in uninsured Americans as evidence of its great "success" while conveniently ignoring the fact that most of the "newly insured" are actually coming from the expansion of Medicaid.  The fact is that Obamacare is a debacle and is on the verge of collapse (see our previous post "Obamacare On "Verge Of Collapse" As Premiums Set To Soar Again In 2017"). 

Our reasoning is quite simple and is the same reason Obamacare was doomed from the start.  As we've pointed out numerous times in the past, the true downfall of Obamacare will be in its inherent "adverse selection bias."  "Sicker/older" people have every incentive to enroll while "younger/healthier" people, the ones that were supposed to subsidize everyone else by buying policies they didn't need, are choosing to simply pay their penalties instead.  So what you're left with is a pool of "sicker/older" people who consume a massive amount of healthcare but whom don't pay "their fair share" because Obamacare specifically caps the rates that can be charged to the "sicker/older" people at 3x the rates charged to "younger/healthier" people (who cares if they consume 20x more healthcare…3x just sounded about right). 

And as a recent article from Bloomberg confirms, the negative impacts of "adverse selection bias" are playing out in insurers' financials.  Per Bloomberg, the major U.S. insurers are set to lose roughly $2BN on Obamacare in 2016.  UnitedHealth has announced they lost $850mm on Obamacare in 2016 while Aetna, Anthem and Humana are expected to lose about $300mm each.   

Obamacare advocates had hoped that big government subsidies to consumers would persuade healthy people to sign up for the ACA plans. But the policies have largely been taken out by older, less healthy people who are more expensive to insure. “What we are left with … is a highly subsidized program for relatively low-income people,” says Dan Mendelson, the CEO of consulting firm Avalere Health. “We’re not getting to the broader vision of a robust private market structure that enables a broad swath of Americans to purchase their insurance.”

In the end, the fate of Obamacare boils down to simple math.  Each person that signs up for insurance has some expected present value of future healthcare consumption…believe it or not the insurers are pretty good at calculating these values.  Insurers agree to post significant sums of capital to underwrite those future healthcare costs but expect a return on that capital.  Now, in theory, the insurers don't really care whether premium dollars come from the "sicker/older" people or the "younger/healthier" people so long as the aggregate dollars collected meet their minimum return on invested capital thresholds.  That said, with rates capped on "sicker/older" people and the absence of "younger/healthier" people signing up, there simply aren't enough dollars in aggregate being collected to provide that return to insurers.

So, insurers are left with 2 options: (1) pull out of Obamacare or (2) implement massive premium hikes.  Well, turns out they're actually doing both.

Per Bloomberg, UnitedHealth has announced plans to exit 31 of the 34 states where it currently offers ACA policies, Aetna is dropping 11 out of 15 states and Humana is reducing it's offerings to just 156 counties down from 1,351 a year ago.  Meanwhile, insurers are also hiking premiums by 24%, on average, for the remaining states in 2017 (see our previous post: "Obamacare Sticker Shock: Average 2017 Premium Surges 24%").   Despite Obama's promise that Obamacare would increase options and lower costs, it is, in practice, doing the exact opposite as Cynthia Cox of the Kaiser Family Foundation points out that "as many as a quarter of all U.S. counties, mainly in rural areas, are at risk of having just a single insurer for next year."

On Aug. 15, Aetna said it will stop selling Obamacare plans in 11 of the 15 states where it had participated in the program, reversing its plan to expand into five new state exchanges in 2017. “The exchanges are a mess as they exist today,” says Aetna Chief Executive Officer Mark Bertolini. “They’re losing a lot of money for a lot of people.”

Actually, there was also a 3rd option proposed by insurers to cut ACA losses.  Insurers also attempted mergers as a way to reduce costs and alleviate some of the profitability pressures inflicted by Obamacare but Obama's Justice Department isn't too keen on the idea.  Per Bloomberg:

Insurance companies were hoping that a wave of mergers would help them cope with ACA-related red ink. In July 2015, Aetna struck a deal to buy Humana and Anthem agreed to buy Cigna. But the U.S. Department of Justice sued to block both transactions, saying they’d harm competition. “The synergies from the two mergers would have subsidized a lot of losses,” says Ana Gupte, an analyst at Leerink Partners. “That could have helped them manage some of the pressure they’re seeing on the exchanges.”

Meanwhile, the media is now starting to spin a narrative that Aetna CEO,  Mark Bertolini, effectively attempted to blackmail antitrust officials over the approval of his proposed merger with Humana.  Per another report from Bloomberg: 

Aetna Inc. warned antitrust officials more than a month ago that it would pull out of Obamacare’s government-run markets for health insurance if the U.S. attempted to block its $37 billion merger with Humana Inc.

 

In a July 5 letter to the Justice Department from Chief Executive Officer Mark Bertolini, Aetna said that challenging the merger “would have a negative financial impact on Aetna and would impair Aetna’s ability to continue its support” of plans sold under the Affordable Care Act. That would leave the insurer “with no choice but to take actions to steward its financial health.”

 

“If the DOJ sues to enjoin the transaction, we will immediately take action to reduce our 2017 exchange footprint,” Bertolini wrote. He said that the cost of litigation and debt taken on by Aetna, the need to plan for a breakup fee it would owe Humana, as well as cost savings from a successful deal, would all factor into Aetna’s need to pull back.

 

“By contrast, if the deal proceeds without the diverted time and energy associated with litigation, we would explore how to devote a portion of the additional synergies (which are larger than we had planned for when announcing the deal) to supporting even more public exchange coverage,” Bertolini said in the letter.

Since when did corporations taking actions to make money for shareholders become a crime in this country? 

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

By Roy Sebag and Josh Crumb, founders of Goldmoney Inc. The full report can be downloaded in PDF here

 

Over the course of 6,000 years, scientists have classified 92 unique natural elements on our planet. These elements have different physical properties and relative rarity in the earth.

Extracting elements requires an input of energy, labour, time, and information (input units).

The relative abundance of the 92 natural elements to each other in the earth is immutable and enforces a relational cost ratio that is perpetual. Here the term cost ratio is not meant to signify dollars, euros, or other external measurements to the extraction process but rather input units (energy, labour, time, and information).

Gold’s natural properties made it the perfect intermediate commodity (money) given that any good or service in the real-economy is comprised of variable combinations of input units.

Gold is the rarest of mined elements on any meaningful scale. Gold has another equally important feature: immortality. It doesn’t tarnish, rot, evaporate, or decay. It doesn’t have a lifecycle and for reasons unbeknownst to us, resists entropy, one of the most important natural laws which dictates that everything made up of energy will trend towards disorder over time.

Of the 92 natural elements, there is only one which could have evolved as an intermediate commodity (money) representing any cooperative transaction between participants in a free market.

The critical point being that any transaction in the real economy (no matter what industry or geography) ultimately represents various combinations of input units as a cost: energy, labour, time, and information.

Try to think of any good or service in the real-economy. No matter how complex a service or how simple the good, you will find this axiom to be true.

Gold’s rarity means its extraction absorbs more input units than any other element or compound. Gold’s immortality means it lasts while everything else including the input units diminish over time. Therefore, gold is always time superior to input units in any transaction within the real-economy.

Bringing it all together, the total gold stock represents billions of past transactions which enforces a proportional future value in equivalent input unit.

Because gold lasts forever, all the gold ever extracted grows in size over time as an increasing physical inventory (stock) owned by hundreds of millions of people either in jewelry or bullion form. Conversely, input units diminish and have no equivalent stock or inventory to draw upon. They must always be reproduced, reconfigured, or redeveloped in the future.

This large gold stock has a cumulative running cost that grows with each additional unit of gold extracted from the earth. This cost is comprised of billions of historical transactions where various combinations of diminishing input units were exchanged for gold.

Of course this gold stock is not owned by one person. It is widely distributed amongst hundreds of millions of humans from every geography, culture, and with varying skills and natural endowments. Every weight of gold owned or adorned by someone can be traced to a past transaction where he or she decided to exchange their diminishing input units.

Each of them participate in a cooperative system that values their specialized skill, labour, time, and resources with diminishing input units. This enforces their ability to respond to the relationship between the value of their diminishing input units and gold. They can either convert their gold for diminishing input units or convert diminishing input units to gold.

This point is extremely important if one wishes to understand why the long-run price of gold even when using an external measurement will always reflect the natural relationship between the elements.

It follows then that in a free market, the future value of this total gold stock (the gold price) will be bid up or down in proportional units of energy, labour, time and information from participants in the real-economy.

 

Conclusion

In this piece, I have shown how gold evolved into money due to physics (natural law) and darwinian anthropology. Gold’s ascension had nothing to do with economics or economists.

I have also shown how the the long-run price in relation to diminishing units must clear at an equilibrium. I believe this equilibrium to be as follows:

Gold Stock = Present Value of Historically Exchanged Input Units

via http://ift.tt/2bCn6ef Gold Money

Submitted by Mike Krieger via Liberty Blitzkrieg blog,

As I demonstrated in yesterday’s article, How Bloomberg Spun its Own Poll Data to Make Hillary Clinton Seem Inevitable, the media is intentionally spinning poll results at best, and completely fabricating them at worst.

While that’s bad enough, there are also some deep, fundamental problems which plague any attempts to conduct accurate polling in 2016. Cliff Zukin, professor of public policy and political science at Rutgers University and a past president of the American Association for Public Opinion Research, wrote about many of these issues in a 2015 New York Times opinion piece titled, What’s the Matter With Polling?

Here are a few excerpts:

Over the past two years, election polling has had some spectacular disasters. Several organizations tracking the 2014 midterm elections did not catch the Republican wave that led to strong majorities in both houses; polls in Israel badly underestimated Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s strength, and pollsters in Britain predicted a close election only to see the Conservatives win easily. What’s going on here? How much can we trust the polls as we head toward the 2016 elections?

 

Election polling is in near crisis, and we pollsters know. Two trends are driving the increasing unreliability of election and other polling in the United States: the growth of cellphones and the decline in people willing to answer surveys. Coupled, they have made high-quality research much more expensive to do, so there is less of it. This has opened the door for less scientifically based, less well-tested techniques. To top it off, a perennial election polling problem, how to identify “likely voters,” has become even thornier.

 

The second unsettling trend is the rapidly declining response rate. When I first started doing telephone surveys in New Jersey in the late 1970s, we considered an 80 percent response rate acceptable, and even then we worried if the 20 percent we missed were different in attitudes and behaviors than the 80 percent we got. Enter answering machines and other technologies. By 1997, Pew’s response rate was 36 percent, and the decline has accelerated. By 2014 the response rate had fallen to 8 percent. As Nate Silver of fivethirtyeight.com recently observed, “The problem is simple but daunting. The foundation of opinion research has historically been the ability to draw a random sample of the population. That’s become much harder to do.”

So what’s the solution for election polling? There isn’t one. Our old paradigm has broken down, and we haven’t figured out how to replace it. Political polling has gotten less accurate as a result, and it’s not going to be fixed in time for 2016. We’ll have to go through a period of experimentation to see what works, and how to better hit a moving target.

 

Those paying close attention to the 2016 election should exercise caution as they read the polls. Because of the high cost, the difficulty in locating the small number of voters who will actually turn out in primaries and the increasing reliance on non-probability Internet polls, you are likely to see a lot of conflicting numbers. To make matters still worse, the cellphone problem is more acute in states than it is at the national level, because area codes and exchanges often no longer respect state or congressional boundaries. Some polling organizations will move to sampling from voter lists, which will miss recently registered voters and campaigns’ efforts to mobilize them.

 

We are less sure how to conduct good survey research now than we were four years ago, and much less than eight years ago. And don’t look for too much help in what the polling aggregation sites may be offering. They, too, have been falling further off the track of late. It’s not their fault. They are only as good as the raw material they have to work with.

 

In short, polls and pollsters are going to be less reliable. We may not even know when we’re off base. What this means for 2016 is anybody’s guess.

Combine all of the above with blatant mainstream media bias and you end up with zero confidence in polling.

It’s going to be an interesting couple of months.

via http://ift.tt/2b1YFTl Tyler Durden

On Sunday, when looking at the latest update of the Fed’s custody holdings of Treasuries, we noted something troubling: the number dropped sharply, declining by over $17 billion, bringing the total to $2.871 trillion, the lowest amount of Treasuries held by foreigners at the Fed since 2012.

 

We added that “while TIC data released this Monday will give us some much needed, if substantially delayed, data on reserve manager activity as of June, the hypothesis is that OPEC countries such as Saudi Arabia  are once again quietly selling Treasuries to raise cash in an environment of low oil prices and the consequent budgetary tightness.”

After getting the Treasury International Capital (TIC) data, we can confirm that something strange is taking place in the US Treasury market, in fact something that is the complete opposite of what one would expect by looking at the relentless Indirect bidder demand in government bond auctions. Because, based on TIC data, foreign investors – both official and private – were sellers of $32.9 billion Treasury notes and bonds in June. Narrowing the selling down to just official entities, i.e. mostly central banks, but also SWFs and reserve managers, brings the total to $33.5 billion.

 

Contrary to our expectation that the biggest sellers would be Saudi Arabia and/or other petrodollar reliant nations, the largest sellers of Treasuries in June, based on transaction data, were China, with sales of $28.0 billion, Japan, with sales of $13.2 billion and Hong Kong, with sales of $10.8 billion. Alternatively, the largest buyer in June by far was the Cayman Islands, with purchases of $28.3 billion; this is another name for hedge funds. The UK was a distant second, with purchases of $5.1 billion. As SMRA points out, the purchases of Treasuries by the Cayman Islands in June were much larger than the increase in holdings by investors there, suggesting that some of the buying was done on behalf of investors located in other countries.

It appears we have a new “Belgium” on our hands, this time one where a sovereign player is using a hedge fund to accumulate positions.

But there was a bigger surprise: using the TIC transaction data, the change in central bank holdings in the first 6 months of 2016 amount to a whopping $192 billion liquidation, more than twice larger than the $82 billion sale in the same period in 2015.  This was also the biggest 6 month selling of US debt in series history which stretches back to 1978.

Finally, the biggest surprise is when looking at the selling on an LTM basis, because adding all the central bank transactions over the past 12 months reveals a not so stealthy, make that gargantuan $335 billion in selling in the period July 2015- Jun 2015, something which as the chart below shows, is truly unprecedented.

 

Incidentally, while the much less followed transaction data showed a historic liquidation by central banks, the TIC’s holdings data revealed an increase in Treasury holdings of $78.5 billion (including Bill holdings).

Where does the $111.4 billion discrepancy come from? 

The answer is simple: the TIC holdings data are reported at market value and that often explains large discrepancies between the holdings data and the transactions data, according to SMRA. That would certainly make sense in June, when Treasuries rallied sharply after the Brexit vote. (In the TIC data, holdings are reported using month-end values.)

The impact of changes in market value is greatest on the largest holders, including China and Japan. In June, while the transactions data indicated selling by China of $32.0 billion in Treasuries in June (including bills), the holdings data showed a small reduction of $3.2 billion.

In other words, as China dumped over $30 billion in Treasuries, the market value of its holdings actually increased by $3.2 billion over the same period, giving the impression that it was actually buying. It wasn’t.

Similarly, while the transactions data showed Japan selling $14.3 billion of Treasuries in June, the holdings data showed an increase after adjusting for market values of $14.5 billion.

And the biggest surprise: based on the holdings data – which is marked to market –  foreign holdings of long-term Treasuries were up $117.8 billion in the 12 months ended in June, compared to a decline of $241.7 billion for all foreign investors, both official and private, implied by the transactions data.

In other words, far from the conventional wisdom that foreign central banks are accumulating US Treasury holdings at a feverish pace (they may be, but only at On The Run auctions while dumping illiquid Off The Run paper), they have in reality liquidated a third of a trillion in TSYs in the past year.

Who are they selling to? The answer: private demand, in other words just like in the stock market the retail investor is the final bagholder, so when it comes to US Treasuries, “private investors” are soaking up hundreds of billions in central bank holdings. We wonder if they would do that knowing who is selling to them.

Meanwhile, the yield on US 10Y paper is almost at its all time lows.

via http://ift.tt/2b04G2j Tyler Durden

Submitted by T.L.Davis via Christian Mercenary blog,

There is a war being waged in America, but only one side is fighting.  The progressives, or Marxists, or outright Communists have been waging war against middle America, using every diabolical means available, for decades, perhaps a century, but middle America is too busy just trying to survive to bother with them.  Like the day when Barack Obama declared ISIS to be the Junior Varsity team, middle America considers this war being waged on them as insignificant to their lives, too distant and too petty.  Yes, some useless and pathetic residual guilt is responsible for some of their acquiescence.

Yet, the Marxists have taken ground steadily, pushing and shoving against the pillars of traditional American culture until they have begun to rattle the foundations.  Still, middle America shrugs at these advancements, hopefully ignoring them, waiting for something to cause the Marxists to give up.  But, they will never give up.  They are not stronger than middle America, but they are more persistent and right now, they are aided by every structure of government, the media, entertainment, sports figures, or so it seems.  We will never really know the truth, because we get information from the media and they are liars.

The media covers up for crimes, preferring the lies of omission to the truth of objective reporting.  That is all really up to them, but they have become nothing other than Baghdad Bob, who proclaimed to Iraqi television that there was nothing amiss in Baghdad while American tanks rolled in the street behind him.  That is our media today and like Baghdad Bob, they are covering for their leaders: Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.  They sound as ridiculous as he did and are as transparent.

In decades hence, the media will be forced to wear the shame they should feel today, but that is another post for another day.

The crowds in the streets of Milwaukee are not their own masters at it might seem to them.  They are foot soldiers in a bigger battle.  The Marxists came for Russia and China, what reason would they have to bypass America?  How?  Through convincing the discontented that they could get satisfaction by attacking the enemies of the masters.  Time after time, place after place, it was all the same.  Barack Obama, perhaps the most notable Marxist of our time, with the background to prove it, is pulling all the strings.  It was clear when his Attorney General made it clear that the Obama Administration would stand behind Black Lives Matter no matter what.  That was the signal, in front of the whole nation that the administration was with them. 

So, this is what the Marxists want: America.  They will use Muslim jihadists; they will use discontented minorities from the inner cities; they will use IRS agents; they will use the power of the United States government; they will use the media; they will use sports figures; they will use relatives within the family. 

We are about to see the masks come off.  That is what this is all about, all of this unrest, all of these riots.  It is time for them to show middle America what progress they have made over the past century.  Of course, they have to make a serious push to get our guns, first.  They have to disarm the populace they intend to enslave.  Then they will offer the chance to live our lives as before, watching television, texting, facebooking, etc, all under the new standards and rules of communication, you understand.

There is a line where middle America figures it out and begins to fight back.  I don't know where that is, but it is there.  We saw it on 9/12, however fleeting it might have been.  Perhaps it is when they realize that their children will be beaten and killed to satisfy the bloodlust of a tyrant.  All I know is, if they do not see the line by then, it is because they are on the wrong side of it. 

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

After yesterday’s leak by CRN that Cisco would terminate some 14,000 workers, or about 20% of its 73,000 workforce, investors were looking forward to today’s earnings announcement by the tech giant not so much for whether it would beat expectations (it did not on a GAAP basis, with $0.56 in GAAP EPS, however it did beat on a non-GAAP basis, reporting $0.63, above the $0.60 expected), but whether it would indeed reduce its workforce to a level not seen in a decade.

 

 

We got the answer moments ago, when Cisco indeed announced the latest mass layoff, which however was “only” 5,500 people, a mere 7% of its workforce.

Today’s market requires Cisco and our customers to be decisive, move with greater speed and drive more innovation than we’ve seen in our history. Today, we announced a restructuring enabling us to optimize our cost base in lower growth areas of our portfolio and further invest in key priority areas such as security, IoT, collaboration, next generation data center and cloud. We expect to reinvest substantially all of the cost savings from these actions back into these businesses and will continue to aggressively invest to focus on our areas of future growth. The restructuring will eliminate up to 5,500 positions, representing approximately 7 percent of our global workforce, and we will take action under this plan beginning in the first quarter of fiscal 2017.

And, with the market hoping to see nearly three times more workers fired, despite the top and bottom line beat by CSCO, the stock is no lower in the after market, as algos punish management for not being a bunch of inconsiderate monsters.

However, don’t despair CSCO longs: as CRN reported, “Cisco is expected to announce the cuts within the next few weeks, as many early retirement package plans have already been offered to employees, said sources.” This likely means that once the initial shock of the first round of layoffs passes, the company will proceed with rounds 2 and 3, sending the stock right back up.

via http://ift.tt/2aZXi7a Tyler Durden