JFK Release Findings: Second Shooter, UK Tipoff, CIA Media Infiltration, and LBJ Fingered In Coup

While yesterday’s pre-planned release of JFK files was significantly neutered at the request of the CIA and FBI, enraging Lou Dobbs among others, the 2800+ files which were released have been poured over extensively, revealing evidence of a second shooter, a massive CIA infiltration of the MSM, a tipoff phone call received 25 minutes before the assassination, and Soviet intelligence indicating the assassination was a coup involving LBJ among other things. 

Summary of findings so far: 

Two shooters, one escaped: 

http://ift.tt/2zTAYKg [p. 3]

J. Edgar Hoover’s comments suggest Oswald wasn’t a shooter: 

The evening of the assassination, J. Edgar Hoover told Lyndon Johnson’s aide, Walter Jenkins, “The thing I am concerned about, and so is Mr. Katsenbach, is having something issued so we can convince the public that Oswald is the real assassin.

http://ift.tt/2yPuDPQ [p. 3]

Soviet belief in a well orchestrated coup:

“According to our source, officials of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union believed there was some well-organized conspiracy on the part of the “ultraright” in the United States to effect a “coup.” They seemed convinced that the assassination was not the deed of one man, but that it arose out of a carefully planned campaign in which several people played a part.”

http://ift.tt/2y8GPhz [p. 3]

https://twitter.com/williamcraddick/status/923711122926051328

The KGB allegedly had evidence LBJ was behind the coup:

According to a CIA source, “it was indicated that “now” the KGB was in possession of data purporting to indicate President Johnson was responsible for the assassination of the late President John F. Kennedy.

http://ift.tt/2y8GPhz [p. 5]

Jack Ruby claimed it was LBJ as well:

  

 

A UK Journalist was tipped off 25 minutes before the assassination

A memo written to the director of the FBI from the deputy director of the CIA notes that a UK journalist employed by Cambridge News received an anonymous phone call 25 minutes before the JFK assassination telling him to call the US Embassy for “some big news.”

http://ift.tt/2yWCRHW [p. 2, 3]

The CIA infiltrated the media and religious institutions

In a February, 1976 note, the CIA’s Office of the Director issued a memo which states “Genuine concern has recently been expressed about CIA relations with newsmen and churchmen.” As a result, the agency instituted a new policy not to enter into paid arrangements with these institutions.

http://ift.tt/2gO911P [p. 3]

http://ift.tt/2gO911P [p. 3]

Over 40 journalists ‘who doubled as undercover agents’ worked for the CIA

http://ift.tt/2gO911P [p. 17]

We then discussed the matter somewhat at more length and I gave ball park figures of various categories of journalists with whom we had contact. I said that the total free lance stringers with whom we had varying degrees of association was in the area of 40.

http://ift.tt/2gO911P [p. 16]

CIA-NBC connection

http://ift.tt/2yZx3xv [p. 2]

Lee Harvey Oswald – agent of the U.S. government? 


Jewish involvement? 

 The secret service interviewed hundreds of people deemed “threats to President Kennedy’s safety” from March – December, 1963. One of the interviewees was an anti-Castro Cuban national named Homer S. Echevarria, who – the day before the assassination – “allegedly approached informant to provide machine guns for Cuban rev.,” (revolution) and allegedly told the informant “We now have plenty of money — our new backers are Jews — as soon as ‘we’ or (they) take care of Kennedy…” The Secret Service note states Echevarria “expressed favorable attitude toward LBJ.”

Before reaching any conclusions, note that this is the only claim of Jewish involvement in the assassination outside Jack Ruby (Jacob Rubenstein), and could be misdirection or scapegoating by Echevarria.

That said, The Sun reports that Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby met each other on a trip to Cuba “to cut sugar cane” weeks before the assassination.

They were part of a group of 30 or 40 “hippie looking” people who were on their way to Cuba to cut sugar cane, airport manager George Faraldo told investigators.

This bombshell will shed new light on the truth behind JFK’s assassination and whether Oswald was to blame for the former president’s murder.

Ruby, whose real name is Jacob Rubenstein, shot dead Oswald, 24, two days after the presidential assassination in November 1963.

But just weeks before, Oswald and nightclub owner Ruby were apparently both part of a large group of “mostly young” people heading to Cuba.

Mr Faraldo told the FBI that Ruby and Oswald were dressed casually in a sport shirts and trousers.

The airport manager added that Ruby “spent most of the time not mingling with the group but standing against the doorway that led from the waiting area to the rear plane boarding area.”

At one point he saw Oswald approach Ruby and ask: “Have you heard anything from the Big Bird yet?”

Of note, LBJ reportedly had a huge penis, and Sesame Street wasn’t on the air until 1969 – well after Kennedy’s death.

Download the JFK files here: 

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Bezos Beat Batters Bears But Bonds & Bullion Bounce

Overheard on CNBC today… "today we get proof this is not a bubble…"

Nope..

h/t @Stalingrad_Poor

 

So Catalan secedes and Spain loses 22% of its GDP and still the Spanish stock market is outperforming the S&P in USD terms…

 

Before we start – let's take a quick look at today's cross-asset-class moves – Stocks Up (well durr!), VIX crashed (back below 10), Bonds Up (wait… that doesn't make sense), Gold Up (woah, why)… and the Dollar Down… (certainly doesn't sound like the epic stock market environment that the media proclaims it to be)…

 

This is the 5th weekly rise in a row for Nasdaq (best day since the election), 7th in a row for S&P and Dow… but Small Caps and Trannies ended the week red…

 

The Dow barely managed gains on the day…

 

Of course today was all about AMZN (best week since April 2015) and the big tech stocks… and as AMZN squeezed over 13% higher on the day, so Nasdaq followed…

 

VIX tumbled on the day, back below 10 – after topping 13 in the middle of the week…

 

And while Nasdaq VIX had decoupled from the index, today saw them reconnect somewhat as vol collapsed…

 

But can you spot the week's odd 'tech' out…

 

FANG Stocks best week in 3 months…

 

Given the decoupling between AMZN and its EPS expectations…

 

Perhaps you are wondering why it just hit $1100…(correlation between the level of G3 balance sheets and AMZN for the last year is well above 95%)

 

5 Tech stocks alone added a stunning $200 billion market cap today…

 

Tax hopes – "sell the news" again…

 

Financials outperformed the broad market on the week as the yield curve modestly steepened…

 

Treasury yields ended the week higher but amid today's exuberant equity market gains, bonds were bid

 

The Dollar Index rallied on the week (on yesterday's EUR tumble) but rolled back over today…

 

CAD (BoC), AUD (CPI), and EUR (ECB) weakness sent the dollar higher on the week…

 

EURUSD's worst week of 2017…

 

Bitcoin ended the week lower (yes lower) – first losing week in the last 5…

 

Despite the dollar strength, WTI Crude soared over 4% this week (Brent above $60 – highest since July 2015). Copper, Gold, and Silver slipped  (though the PMs rallied today)…

 

WTI's best week in 3 months…tagging $54 – the highest since March…

 

Finally, courtesy of Mr. 'Not' Jim Cramer…

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The Futility of Looking for Mass Murder in Stephen Paddock’s Brain

Next week Stanford neuropathologist Hannes Vogel expects to receive Las Vegas shooter Stephen Paddock’s brain, which he plans to examine for an explanation of the man’s horrifying crime. He is not optimistic.

“I think everybody is pretty doubtful that we’re going to come up with something,” Vogel told The New York Times. “The possibilities, neuropathologically, for explaining this kind of behavior are very few.”

The Times notes that “there has been speculation focused on a disease process known as fronto-temporal lobar degeneration,” which “affects areas of the brain that are vital for ‘executive functions’ like decision-making and social interaction.” The disease “often strikes in a patient’s 50s or 60s and can cause marked personality changes.” People suffering from that condition, Vogel says, “are notoriously prone to errors in judgment and unrestrained behavior.” But he points out that that Paddock’s behavior does not seem consistent with fronto-temporal lobar degeneration, since “people will say in the same breath that this guy was so meticulous in planning” his attack.

According to the Times, Vogel will “look for signs of all the standard detectable neurological entities, including strokes, blood vessel diseases, tumors, certain types of epilepsy, multiple sclerosis, degenerative disorders, physical trauma and infections.” Not that any of those conditions would explain Paddock’s actions, inasmuch as millions of other people suffer from them without committing mass murder.

Although pathologists have dug into the brains of murderers such as Richard Speck and Charles Whitman, so far they have not managed to locate anyone’s motives. Whitman reportedly had a tumor, but because of sloppy tissue handling a panel of experts “could not establish whether a block of tissue containing the mass…had come from Mr. Whitman’s brain or from someone else’s.” The Times concedes that “even if the tumor was Mr. Whitman’s, the role it might have played in the violent events was never determined.”

Vogel observes that the supposed tumor “was a very handy excuse for the fact that he went out and shot people.” He adds, “I don’t think I ever heard in my own experience of someone on a homicidal rampage because they had a brain tumor.”

Alas, the Times says, “most psychiatric illnesses…are not currently discernible by this type of examination.” Most? I will go out on a limb and suggest that no psychiatric illness is discernible by this type of examination. If it were, as the late psychiatric gadfly Thomas Szasz often observed, it would be considered a neurological disease (or injury) rather than a mental illness. Without bothering to look at Paddock’s brain, we are free to speculate that he suffered from a mental illness that caused him to fire upon a crowd of country music fans from the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino, just as people have made similar claims about previous mass shooters.

But a psychiatric diagnosis is not an explanation. No matter what label you pick for Paddock from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, it will remain true that virtually no one who shares that diagnosis does anything like what he did. Hence trying to identify future mass murderers based on that diagnosis, whether with the intent of disarming them, forcibly treating them, or preventively detaining them, would be worse than futile.

Although we may never understand Paddock’s motives, he had reasons for doing what he did. That is the troubling reality people are trying to avoid when they ascribe his actions to a brain disease or a mental illness.

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False Flag Bombings, Murder Plots, Bizarre Phone Calls: The Stunning Revelations In The JFK Assassination Files

Following last night's release of the latest set of JFK Assassination Files, the public has been busy combing through the several thousand documents. Among the more notable discoveries so far are the following: the CIA contemplated mafia hits on Cuban President Fidel Castro, involving the "false flag" staging of bombings in Miami; Someone calling the FBI threatening to kill Lee Harvey Oswald a day before Oswald’s murder; the US examined sabotaging airplane parts heading to Cuba. As a reminder, following a deadline 25 years in the making, last night the National Archives released an abridged dump of JFK Assassination files. While president Trump blocked the release of some, arguably the most controversial, documents citing national security concerns, the release still left researchers and conspiracy theorists with 52 previously unreleased full documents and thousands in part to sift through.

Here are the key highlights from the trove so far, courtesy of CBS and AP:

  • Sabotaging plane parts

A national security council document from 1962, one year before Kennedy’s murder, referenced “Operation Mongoose,” a covert attempt to topple communism in Cuba. In the minutes of a secret meeting on Operation Mongoose from September 14,1962, “General (Marshall) Carter said that the CIA would examine the possibilities of sabotaging airplane parts which are scheduled to be shipped from Canada to Cuba.”

  • CIA-mafia plot on Castro

A 1975 document from the Rockefeller Commission detailing the CIA’s role in foreign assassinations said plans to assassinate Castro were undertaken in the early days of the Kennedy administration. The report said Attorney General Robert Kennedy, the President’s brother, told the FBI he learned the CIA hired an intermediary “to approach Sam Giancana with a proposition of paying $150,000 to hire some gunman to go into Cuba and kill Castro.” The attorney general said that made it hard to prosecute Giancana, a Sicilian American mobster.  “Attorney General Kennedy stated that the CIA should never undertake the use of mafia people again without first checking with the Department of Justice because it would be difficult to prosecute such people in the future,” the report reads. The report also said the CIA was later interested in using mobsters to deliver a poison pill to Castro in order to kill him.

  • CIA plots "False Flags" Terrorist events in Miami

During Operation Mongoose in 1960, the CIA also considered staging terror events in Miami and blaming it on pro-Castro Cubans.

“We could develop a Communist Cuban terror campaign in the Miami area, in other Florida cities and even in Washington. We could sink a boatload of Cubans enroute to Florida (real or simulated). We could foster attempts on lives of Cuban refugees in the United States even to the extent of wounding in instances to be widely publicized. Exploding a few plastic bombs in carefully chosen spots, the arrest of a Cuban agent and the release of prepared documents substantiating Cuban involvement also would be helpful in projecting the idea of an irresponsible government.”

  • UK paper warned of ‘big news'

According to a memo from the CIA’s deputy director to the head of the FBI, a senior reporter in the Cambridge News in England received an anonymous phone call, saying he should contact the American Embassy in London for “some big news,” before abruptly hanging up.

  • The FBI gets a death threat on Oswald the day before his murder

A document dated November 24, 1963, showed FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover addressing the death of Oswald at the hands of Jack Ruby. “There is nothing further on the Oswald case except that he is dead,” Hoover begins.Hoover said the FBI’s Dallas office received a call “from a man talking in a calm voice,” saying he was a member of a committee to kill Oswald. He said they pressed the Dallas chief of police to protect Oswald, but Ruby was nevertheless able to kill the gunman. 

“Ruby says no one was associated with him and denies having made the telephone call to our Dallas office last night,” Hoover said. Hoover went on to say the FBI had evidence of Oswald’s guilt and intercepts of Oswald’s communications with Cuba and the Soviet Union. He said he was concerned there would be doubt in the public about Oswald’s guilt and that President Lyndon Johnson would appoint a commission to investigate the assassination.

  • Passing blame for a coup in South Vietnam

A top secret document from 1975 for the Rockefeller Commission outlines the testimony of former CIA Director Richard Helms. In the transcript, Helms said he thought former President Richard Nixon believed the CIA was responsible for the death of South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem, who died following a coup linked to the CIA.

“There is absolutely no evidence of this in the agency records and the whole thing has been, I mean rather — what is the word I want — heated by the fact that President Johnson used to go around saying that the reason President Kennedy was assassinated was that he had assassinated President Diem and this was just … justice,” Helms said. Helms added: “where he got this from, I don’t know.”

The deposition continues, with him being asked if there was any way Oswald was in some way a CIA agent or an agent,” before the document cuts off.

  • Alleged Cuban intel officer said he knew Oswald

A cable from the FBI in 1967 quoted one man quipping Oswald must have been a good shot. The alleged Cuban officer returned, “oh, he was quite good.” Asked why he said that, the officer said, “I knew him.”

  • Jack Ruby’s connections with Dallas police

An informant told the FBI that Oswald’s assassin, Jack Ruby, had close links to local police in Dallas. Ruby, whose real name was Jacob Leon Rubenstein, was said to have had a “good in” with the authorities, who were served free drinks at his nightclub. A friend of Ruby’s, Lou Lebby, described him in an FBI document as “emotional, unstable and a person who made his living primarily from ‘scalping’ tickets to sports events.”

  • Soviets said killing was an ‘organized conspiracy’

FBI Director Hoover forwarded a memo to the White House in 1963, shortly after Kennedy’s death. The memo, obtained by the Church Committee and classified top secret, detailed US sources’ sense of the reaction in the USSR to Kennedy’s death. “According to our source, officials of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union believed there was some well-organized conspiracy on the part of the ‘ultraright’ in the United States to effect a ‘coup,'” the memo said. “They seem convinced that the assassination was not the deed of one man, but that it arose out of a carefully planned campaign in which several people played a part.

The source said the Soviet officials claimed no connection between Oswald and the USSR, and described him as “a neurotic gunman.

  • CIA intercepts call from Oswald to KGB

A CIA memo from the day of Kennedy’s assassination outlined a CIA intercept of a call from Oswald, then in Mexico City, to the Russian embassy in Mexico. Oswald spoke to the consul, Valeriy Vladimirovich Kostikov, an “identified KGB officer” “in broken Russian.” The memo’s author said he was told by the FBI’s liaison officer that the bureau believed Oswald’s visit was to get help with a passport or visa.

The FBI was tracking Oswald before JFK's assassination

Oswald was being tracked by the New Orleans division of the FBI in October 1963 – the month before the assassination took place. An FBI report into the New Orleans division of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee said that, while the committee had been inactive since Oswald left the city, the bureau was planning to stay in contact “with Cuban sources for any indication of additional activity.” Copies of the report were sent to FBI divisions in New York and Dallas, the city in which Kennedy was killed.

  • Soviets Fear Assassination Would Lead To All Out War

The Soviet Union feared that the assassination of John F. Kennedy would lead to all-out war between it and the United States. A CIA source cited in the documents claimed that officials in the Communist Party believed the killing was part of a conspiracy by the “ultra-right” in the US, and were concerned that “without leadership, some irresponsible general in the US might launch a missile at the Soviet Union.” Soviet officials also described assassin Lee Harvey Oswald as “a neurotic maniac who was disloyal to his own country,” and played down the significance of his time within the Union.

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IRS Rehired Employees Previously Fired as Security Risks

Millions of Americans’ personal information may be vulnerable to hackers, thanks to the Internal Revenue Service’s carelessness.

Not only has the agency been using an outdated security system, but it has rehired hundreds of employees previously fired for wrongdoing or performance issues, according to testimony by J. Russell George, the Treasury’s inspector general for tax administration.

According to an audit published this year by George’s office, the IRS has been expanding online tools for taxpayer use without taking key steps to guarantee the safety of taxpayers’ information. One out of three Americans files their taxes online on their own.

George said the IRS has not fully implemented monitoring tools to prevent and detect computer hacks, is not monitoring its computer networks effectively for suspicious activity, and operates outmoded computer systems.

This is particularly important, George said, in light of the recent Equifax breach, which exposed the Social Security information of 143 million Americans and could vastly increase the risk of identity theft.

The IRS it relies on a 50-year-old technology, called the Individual Master File, that runs on outdated code. A replacement system—the Customer Account Data Engine 2, or CADE 2—has been plagued with delays and has no “scheduled or planned completion date,” George said.

Because of the highly sensitive nature of tax returns and the risk of identity theft, George’s office also conducted an audit of the procedures the IRS takes when it hires employees. In the 15-month period from January 1, 2015, to March 31, 2016, the IRS hired 7,500 employees—of whom 2,000 had worked for the tax agency previously. Of those rehired employees, about 200, or 10 percent, had been previously fired for conduct or performance issues, including several who had willfully failed to file their own taxes and four who were under investigation for unauthorized access to taxpayer information.

IRS officials defended themselves by saying it would be “cost prohibitive” to check the performance of former employees. When challenged, George said, the agency could not document that checking would be expensive.

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The Informant Cometh

Authored by James Howard Kunstler via Kunstler.com,

When you consider all the shadowy creatures scuttling around the backstage interstices of the Deep State, it’s a little wondrous that someone like this hasn’t stepped into the light before. Apparently now, a person whose name will soon be plastered across the pixel-verse, has been given clearance by the Justice Department to come forth and sing to the various house and senate committees about a fishy deal involving Russia and the Clinton dynasty.

The broad outlines of Uranium-Gate are already loaded like a platter of nachos grandes with piquant tidbits of suspicious detail. The informant worked for a DC Swamp lobbying firm that was hired by Tenex, a subsidiary of the Russian government-owned company Rosatom, to grease the skids for a deal to buy a Canadian company, Uranium One, which had substantial mining operations in the USA. According to The Hill website, the deal put about 20 percent of US uranium into the hands of the Russian company.

The informant recognized evidence of criminal behavior in the dealings he witnessed and voluntarily went to the FBI with it. The Hill report goes on:

     His work helped the Justice Department secure convictions against Russia’s top commercial nuclear executive in the United States, a Russian financier in New Jersey, and the head of a U.S. uranium trucking company in what prosecutors said was a long-running racketeering scheme involving bribery, kickbacks, extortion and money laundering.

Those charges, based on evidence gathered in 2009, were not taken to court until 2014. And that was supposed to be the end of it.

Now, it also happens that the deal for Tenex to buy Uranium One had to be approved by nine federal agencies and signed off on by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, which she did shortly after her husband Bill Clinton was paid $500,000 to give a speech in Moscow sponsored by a Russian bank. The Clinton Foundation also received millions of dollars in “charitable” donations from parties with an interest in the Tenex / Uranium One deal. It happened, too, that the CEO of Uranium One at the time of the Tenex sale, Frank Guistra, was one of eleven board members of the Clinton Foundation.

The informant remained undercover for the FBI for five years. None of the Clinton involvement was included in the previously mentioned federal bribery and racketeering prosecutions. Meanwhile, the informant had signed a nondisclosure agreement with the Obama Justice Department, only just lifted last week.

As of this morning, the story is absent from The New York Times, formerly the nation’s newspaper of record.

The FBI’s credibility is at stake in this case. Robert Mueller, who was Director of the agency during the Tenex /Uranium One deal, with all its Clintonian-Russian undertones is in the peculiar position now as special prosecutor for the Russian election “meddling” alleged to involve President Trump. Whatever that investigation has turned up is not known publicly yet, but the massive leaking from government employees that turned the story into roughly 80 percent of mainstream legacy news coverage the past year, has ceased – either because Mueller has imposed Draconian restraints on his own staff, or because there is nothing there.

The FBI has a lot to answer for in overlooking the Clinton connection to the Uranium One deal.

The informant, soon to be attached to a name and a face, is coming in from the cold, to the warm, wainscoted chambers of the house and senate committees. I wonder if Mr. Trump, or his lawyers, will find grounds to attempt to dismiss Special Prosecutor Mueller, given what looks like Mueller’s compromised position vis-à-vis Trump’s election opponent, HRC.

It’s hard to not see this thing going a long way – at the same time that financial markets and geopolitical matters are heading south. Keep your hats on.

via http://ift.tt/2y9R45d Tyler Durden

China’s Congress Is Over, And So Is The Period Of “Coordinated Global Growth”

It is hardly a secret that thanks to nearly $4 trillion (at least) in credit creation in 2017 – more than the rest of the developed world combined – China has been the proverbial (and debt-funded) “growth” dynamo behind the recent period of “coordinated global growth.” Unfortunately, much if not all of this was window dressing for the just concluded 19th Communist Party Congress, which in not so many words, made Xi Jinping into a de facto emperor with no apparent or otherwise heirs.

The problem is that with the Congress now over, so is the period of coordinated global growth. Here’s why.

As Citi writes, “China’s Party Congress has concluded and Xi Jinping’s position as President has been consolidated. Given there are no standing committee members in their 50s, it suggests there are no apparent heirs for Mr. Xi, opening the door for him to stay on beyond 2022. One of the key questions in the run up to the congress was that once power was consolidated, would China accelerate its economic reforms. We think this is unlikely but do expect a moderation of growth, with data momentum perhaps set to continue to slow at its current pace. Note how China’s MCI tends to lead Citi’s macro data index for China and our MCI is still tightening.”

It gets worse.

As Capital Economics writes in its China Activity Monitor note this week, the firm’s China Activity Proxy (CAP) suggests that growth in China slowed last month to the weakest pace in a year and with property sales cooling and officials continuing their efforts to rein in financial risks, Cap Econ thinks that looking ahead “the economy will slow further over the coming quarters.

Some more details from CapEco:

The CAP is our attempt to track the pace of growth in China without relying on the official GDP figures. It is based on a set of low-profile indicators chosen to reflect activity across a wide section of the economy.

  • The CAP suggests that, following a sharp rebound in 2016, the economy expanded at a pace not far short of that shown on the official GDP data in the last three quarters. On a monthly basis though, we estimate growth actually peaked in July at 6.6% y/y before slowing to 5.6% last month, the weakest pace in a year. Growth also edged down last month in seasonally adjusted 3m/3m annualised terms, to 5.9% from 6.1% in August.
  • The breakdown reveals that two of the CAP’s five components were responsible for the latest slowdown. Passenger traffic growth fell in September to 1.6% y/y from 4.0% in August, hitting a six-month low. This may be due in part to distortions caused by the shift in timing of Mid-Autumn Festival from September last year to October this year. But even in seasonally-adjusted 3m/3m annualised terms, growth slowed from 4.0% to 3.5% last month.
  • Growth in domestic freight volumes also slowed in September in both y/y and annualised 3m/3m terms, with the latter hitting a three-month low.
  • Property construction growth continued to rebound in September, reaching the fastest pace in almost three years despite the recent contraction in home sales.

CapEco’s ominous conclusion:

Looking ahead, we think growth will continue to slow over the coming quarters. The current props to growth appear shaky. With investment contracting in real terms, industrial output will probably soften over the months ahead. Property sales also look set to weaken further as the government’s purchase curbs continue to expand. This will weigh on construction before long. More generally, with tighter monetary conditions weighing on credit growth, activity looks set to weaken further.

That the past 18 months of coordinated global growth will end in China, is quite symmetric: back in January 2016, as global markets were tumbling, aborting the Fed’s plans to hike rates 4 times in 2016 and resulting in sharp economic slowdowns around the globe, it was the (still mysterious) Shanghai Accord that “saved” the world, and unleashed a burst of unprecedented, and coordinated, growth… which only cost China some $8 trillion in debt.

It will only make sense that another major Chinese event will mark the top of this economic mini cycle, and lead to the next global downturn, not to mention spike in market volatility.

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The $300 Million Contract Awarded to the Interior Secretary’s Friend’s Company Is Exempt from Government Audits

The federal government has awarded a tiny Montana company a $300 million no-bid contract to repair Puerto Rico’s hurricane-wrecked electrical grid. The company, Whitefish Energy, has close ties to Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke. A copy of that contract leaked last night, and it seems to prohibit the federal government from auditing Whitefish’s work and to shield other details of the company’s efforts from being disclosed via open records laws.

“In no event,” the contract says, will the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Comptroller General of the United States, “or any of their authorized representatives have the right to audit or review the cost and profit elements” of the deal.

The contract was posted online by Ken Klippenstein, a contributor to The Daily Beast, the first publication to report on the connections between the company and the secretary of the interior.

The leaked document seems to confirm concerns—voiced by lawmakers, pundits, and reform groups—that the Whitefish contract is a lucrative special deal for a friend of a top administration official, and that it places politics ahead of what’s in the best interest of Puerto Ricans, many of whom are still without electricity.

Andy Techmanski, owner of Whitefish Energy, is a neighbor and friend of Secretary Zinke, according to multiple news reports. The two men have publicly disclosed their acquaintance. The company has only a handful of employees and is relying almost entirely on subcontractors to do the actual work of restoring power in Peurto Rico.

Members of Congress have called for an investigation into the Whitefish contract. Yesterday members of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce sent a letter to Techmanski seeking copies of all contracts and subcontracts signed by Whitefish as part of its work in Puerto Rico. Meanwhile, members of the House Natural Resources Committee wrote to the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority (PREPA) requesting more information about how and why Whitefish was selected for this work.

Separately, Sens. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) and Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) have requested a Government Accountability Office review of the “use of public money to reimburse work completed by Whitefish Energy,” according to Reuters.

Prior to landing the contract for repair work in Puerto Rico, Whitefish’s largest project had been a $1.3 million deal to rebuild less than 5 miles of electrical lines in Arizona, The Washington Post reported this week. By comparison, there are more than 2,400 miles of transmission lines and 30,000 of distribution electrical lines in Puerto Rico.

The Trump administration and the company itself have offered only the barest of explanations for how a small electrical firm from Montana managed to land a lucrative contract for work in the Caribbean. Both have claimed that the company has experience working in mountain ranges and on rugged terrain and have denied that cronyism played a role in awarding the contract.

“There was no federal involvement,” Chris Chiames, a spokesman for Whitefish Energy, told BuzzFeed this week. “There was never any special favors asked, nor would there have been.”

The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), which is no stranger to fiscal malfeasance, said Friday that it had “significant concerns” about the Whitefish contract. According to The Hill, FEMA denied having signed off on the contract and said details of the contract suggesting as much were inaccurate.

Whether Whitefish gets the job done is supposed to be shrouded in secrecy. The copy of the contract posted by Klippenstein includes a provision prohibiting the government from auditing its work. Another part of the contract says the Puerto Rican government “waives any claim against [Whitefish Energy] related to delayed completion of work.”

Until the Trump administration can offer a better explanation for the decision to award a multi-million no-bid contract to a company with close ties to a top administration official, this whole thing smells really bad. The administration sure looks like it’s been swallowed by the very swamp it promised to drain.

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The Coming Russia Bombshells

Authored op-ed by Kimberley Strassel via The Wall Street Journal,

The confirmation this week that Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee paid an opposition-research firm for a “dossier” on Donald Trump is bombshell news. More bombshells are to come.

The Fusion GPS saga isn’t over. The Clinton-DNC funding is but a first glimpse into the shady election doings concealed within that oppo-research firm’s walls. We now know where Fusion got some of its cash, but the next question is how the firm used it. With whom did it work beyond former British spy Christopher Steele ? Whom did it pay? Who else was paying it?

The answers are in Fusion’s bank records. Fusion has doggedly refused to divulge the names of its clients for months now, despite extraordinary pressure. So why did the firm suddenly insist that middleman law firm Perkins Coie release Fusion from confidentiality agreements, and spill the beans on who hired it?

Because there’s something Fusion cares about keeping secret even more than the Clinton-DNC news – and that something is in those bank records. The release of the client names was a last-ditch effort to appease the House Intelligence Committee, which issued subpoenas to Fusion’s bank and was close to obtaining records until Fusion filed suit last week. The release was also likely aimed at currying favor with the court, given Fusion’s otherwise weak legal case. The judge could rule as early as Friday morning.

If the House wins, don’t be surprised if those records include money connected to Russians. In the past Fusion has worked with Russians, including lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya, who happened to show up last year in Donald Trump Jr.’s office.

FBI bombshells are also yet to come. The bureau has stonewalled congressional subpoenas for documents related to the dossier, but that became harder with the DNC-Clinton news. On Thursday Speaker Paul Ryan announced the FBI had finally pledged to turn over its dossier file next week.

Assuming the FBI is comprehensive in its disclosure, expect to learn that the dossier was indeed a major basis of investigating the Trump team – despite reading like “the National Enquirer,” as Rep. Trey Gowdy aptly put it. We may learn the FBI knew the dossier was a bought-and-paid-for product of Candidate Clinton, but used it anyway. Or that it didn’t know, which would be equally disturbing.

It might show the bureau was simply had. Don’t forget that it wasn’t until January the dossier became public, and the media started unearthing details. And the more ugly info that came out (Fusion, Democratic clients, intelligence-for-hire) the more former Obama officials seemed skeptical of it. In May, former Director of National Intelligence Jim Clapper said his people could never “corroborate” its “sourcing.” In June, Mr. Comey derided it as “salacious and unverified.”

Yet none of this jibes with reports that the FBI debated paying Mr. Steele to continue his work. Or that Mr. Comey was so convinced by the dossier that he pushed to have it included in the intelligence community’s January report on Russian meddling. Imagine if it turns out the FBI was duped by a politically contracted document that might have been filled up by the Kremlin.

There’s plenty yet to come with regard to the DNC and the Clinton campaign. Every senior Democrat is disclaiming knowledge of the dossier deal, leaving Perkins Coie holding the bag. But while it is not unusual for law firms to hire opposition-research outfits for political clients, it is highly unusual for a law firm to pay bills without a client’s approval. Somewhere, Perkins Coie has documents showing who signed off on those bills, and they aren’t protected by attorney-client privilege.

Those names will matter, since someone at the DNC and at the Clinton campaign will need to explain how they somehow both forgot to list Fusion as a vendor in their campaign-finance filings. Some Justice Department lawyer is presumably already looking into whether this was a willful evasion, which can carry criminal penalties. It’s one thing to forget to list that local hot-dog supplier for the campaign picnic. It’s a little fishier when two entities both fail to list the firm that supplied them the most explosive hit job in a generation.

And there are still bombshells with regard to unmasking of Americans in surveilled communications. If the Steele dossier reports (which appear to date back to June 2016) were making their way into the hands of senior DNC and Clinton political operatives, you can bet they were making their way to the Obama White House. This may explain why Obama political appointees began monitoring the Trump campaign and abusing unmasking. They were looking for a “gotcha,” something to disqualify a Trump presidency. Of course, they were doing so on the basis of “salacious and unverified” accusations made by anonymous Russians, but never mind.

No, this probe of the Democratic Party’s Russian dalliance has a long, long way to go. And, let us hope, with revelations too big for even the media to ignore.

via http://ift.tt/2iIh9l2 Tyler Durden