Calling Out Congress

Here is a man who is funding societal disruption, perhaps even inciting riots and causing personal injury and damage to property of people whom he has never seen or met. People whom he knows nothing about and who have never done him any harm.

If you truly represent your constituents--many of whom are of all races, nationalities and beliefs--prove it. Prove it. Prove you represent the people and not the rich.

Are the so-called lions in Congress that much in his employ, that cowardly not to investigate these disruption for a  George Soros link? Oh great lion hearts do you, as is commonly supposed about you, represent just the rich?

We said before the footprint of the dangerous billionaire George Soros continues to turn up in a variety of places. Here apparently is another one. If so why is he not being prosecuted or at least investigated for causing riots and civil disturbances.

In an apparent effort to "keep the media’s attention on the city and to widen the scope of the incident to focus on interrelated causes — not just the overpolicing and racial discrimination narratives that were highlighted by the news media in August," liberal billionaire George Soros donated $33million to social justice organizations which helped turn events in Ferguson from a local protest into a national flashpoint.

As The Washington Times explains,

There’s a solitary man at the financial center of the Ferguson protest movement. No, it’s not victim Michael Brown or Officer Darren Wilson. It’s not even the Rev. Al Sharpton, despite his ubiquitous campaign on TV and the streets.

Rather, it’s liberal billionaire George Soros, who has built a business empire that dominates across the ocean in Europe while forging a political machine powered by nonprofit foundations that impacts American politics and policy, not unlike what he did with MoveOn.org.

Mr. Soros spurred the Ferguson protest movement through years of funding and mobilizing groups across the U.S., according to interviews with key players and financial records reviewed by The Washington Times.

The handouts, as The Daily Mail reports, revealed in tax filings from Soros's private foundation, were given to dozens of different groups which weighed in on the crisis.

Organizers from professional groups in Washington, D.C., and New York were bussed into the Missouri town to co-ordinate messaging and lobby to news media to cover events using the billionaire's funding.

...

The cash was reportedly funneled into keeping up numbers of protesters in the community over a period of months by bringing in outside activists.

Meanwhile papers from think tanks were disseminated to bring in extra coverage of the civil unrest, also linked to the police killings of Eric Garner in Staten Island and Tamir Rice, 12, in Cleveland, Ohio.

...

The slew of organizations reportedly created their own online 'echo chamber', by using their extensive social media presences to 'like', repost and comment on articles putting across their point of view.

The director of Soros's fund said that they have no direct control over the groups they give to, and said they are all trying to improve accountability. He told the Washington Times:

"Helping groups combine policy, research [and] data collection with community organizing feels very much the way our society becomes more accountable.

The incidents, whether in Staten Island, Cleveland or Ferguson, were spontaneous protests - we don’t have the ability to control or dictate what others say or choose to say."

The Soros cash was also put to work driving buzzwords and social media campaigns to propel Ferguson into the national consciousness.

One recipient of his funding is the Organization for Black Struggle, which in turned established a group called the Hands Up Coalition, that has helped make ubiquitous the "hands up, don't shoot" slogan.

Soros also gave money to the Drug Policy Alliance, which worked on the perpetuation of the 'black lives matter' buzz phrase, which has been incorporated into speeches by political figures including Hillary Clinton.

Austerity Did It

We bring you two quotes about this stumbling, bumbling, incompetent Janet Yellen led Federal Reserve Bank.

We are now quickly reaching the area where not just the Fed but central banks in general are being gauged for what they really are and have been, unnecessary middle meddlers for the most part hurting not helping peoples' lives. And that brings up an excellent question: Have they out lived their usefulness?

This is not an issue that should be left up to a bunch of distant, indifferent elitist bureaucrats or academics or Washington think tank dwellers. Or a gaggle of deplorables from Hollywood.

 

Actually, scratch three months: just one month ago on the day of this year's Jackson Hole conference, when asked by Steve Liesman what his "judgment on asset bubbles", the Fed's biggest dove James Bullard  said that "I think we are on the high side of fairly valued, I could see the process getting away from us, maybe tech stocks, maybe others" even as he qualified that  "the Fed model has nothing about asset price bubbles, most models don't have anything about that", and as a result no Fed model ever forecasts asset bubbles, which incidentally explains why the traditional side-effect of Fed policy over the past decade has been, drumroll, asset bubbles.
* * *
Fast forward to this past week's FOMC's press conference, when in a direct question if Yellen is worried she is causing asset bubbles "because of prolonged low interest rates", suddenly all concerns - those voiced by the Fed two years ago and three months ago, as well as those of James Bullard as recently as a few weeks, magically vaporized, and were replaced by this: "we routinely monitor asset valuations... nobody can know for sure what type of valuation represents a bubble."
So, which is it: are valuation metrics "substantially stretched", and have "price to earnings ratios for equities increased to a level well above their median", a process which risks "getting away from us", with asset bubbles emerging in "tech stocks, maybe others"... or as Yellen just said, "nobody can know for sure what valuation represents a bubble"?
* * *
Whatever the answer, we are confident that once Janet Yellen is confident that valuations do represent a bubble, she will promptly advise the investing public to sell.

 twitter.com/StockBoardAsset/status/779001298595123201
  
There is no simple, painless solution. The world has to reduce debt, shrink the financial part of the economy, and change the destructive incentive structures in finance. Individuals in developed countries have to save more and spend less. Companies have to go back to real engineering. Governments have to balance their books better. Banking must become a mechanism for matching savers and borrowers, financing real things. Banks cannot be larger than nations, countries in themselves. Countries cannot rely on debt and speculation for prosperity. The world must live within its means.

~ Satyajit Das, Extreme Money: Masters of the Universe and the Cult of Risk

There is now almost $16 trillion worth of sovereign debt trading with a negative yield. Last week the credit bubble entered new territory with two euro zone issuers of corporate debt, Germany’s Henkel and France’s Sanofi, becoming the first private firms to sell negative-yielding non-financial corporate bonds in euros. This may, just may, happen to mark the top of the great bond bull run that started as far back as the early 1980s. By Friday of last week, the implications of an ugly slide across bond and stock markets may have led some fund managers and traders to soil themselves, or suffer heart problems, or both. By a happy coincidence, however, Henkel makes Persil laundry detergent, and Sanofi makes treatments for cardiovascular disease. So any affected “investors” dumb enough to have bought those guaranteed loss-makers and then suffered immediate regret don’t have to look too far for a remedy.

Doubts Emerge in Global Markets

“Taper Tantrum II” would appear to have arrived. The sell-off in bond markets last week was universal. US Treasuries, UK Gilts, German Bunds, Japanese JGBs, all declined. Japanese bonds are suffering more than most. Kevin Buckland, Wes Goodman and Shigeki Nozawa for Bloomberg report:

One of the pillars of 2016’s record-setting global bond rally is starting to buckle. Japan’s sovereign debt is suffering its worst rout in 13 years, handing investors bigger losses over the past two months than any other government bonds amid speculation the Bank of Japan plans to change its asset-purchase strategy. The reversal is spurring concern the second-largest debt market is the vanguard for a broader selloff. … “The impact of the BOJ’s stimulus is that the bond markets worldwide are becoming one market,” said Chotaro Morita, the chief rates strategist at … SMBC Nikko Securities Inc., one of the 21 primary dealers that trade directly with the central bank. “If there’s a reversal of policy, you can’t rule out that it would roil global debt.”

Central Banks’ Abuse of Trust

Yuval Harari, in his excellent history of mankind, Sapiens, points out that just about everything in the infrastructure of the modern economy is either some kind of narrative or myth. The buildings on Wall Street and in the Square Mile may be solid enough, but the rest of the fabric of our financial system is dependent on trust or collective belief rather than the material and the “real”.

zerohedge.com/news/2016-09-24/how-much-longer-will-investors-trust-central-banks 

The powers that be, many who live and regurgitate daily within the confines of places like the Financial Times, the Washington Post and others, keep blaming austerity for the current problems, pushing more for fiscal pump priming now that their silly monetary policies have proved as ineffective as a pack of condoms left unopened in one's wallet.  

What austerity?

Elites Hate Specifics Not Just You

What once most Americans thought and accepted was a partially politicized nation with recent inaction by the Fed among a host of other things has become fully politicized. The huge crybaby caterwauling you hear from the entrenched status quo elites about Trump's popularity brings it full circle.

You have to wonder when you see so many ganging up on one guy. The cognoscenti would have you believe such numbers validate their view. But there's the counter intuitive, that gut feeling warning you as a good investor that's a bet you might want to fade. Fading such unfortunately, however, is not readily available to the downtrodden, the dispossessed and the have-nots. It's a point the entrenched elites love and take for granted.

We can leave out the pathetically obvious one, MSM. On the less obvious front are politicized riots and demonstrations. Anyone ever heard of George Soros. A lame, lame duck president seeks to slip a hugely controversial trade package that is one of the central issues of this election past the populace before scurrying out of office. Who knows what surprising politically-motivated paroles, and pardons, a presidential tradition, will be issued at the last hour of this eight year miasma.

And now comes the latest: Hillary's recently recovered deleted emails won't be released until after the election. One might ask: Who made that decision--it certainly wasn't the American people--and what scares them so much to delay the release?  In a group that keeps screaming about the need for--and promising more--transparency, it appears that's now been detoured into a one-way thoroughfare.

There's an unoccupied Supreme Court seat to be filled on a court that is becoming less and less relevant to more and more Americans who recognize fixes when they see them. If climate change were any more politicized it would be a Hillary Clinton campaign manager or a Hollywood director. Hanging lower and lower is a debt ceiling that worshipers of the Paul Krugman Asinine Temple of Anachronistic Keynesianism keep telling people doesn't natter.

The politically charged Bureau of Labor and the Federal Reserve print more than worthless dollars. Try bogus job statistics. Or whatever else will keep the entrenched entrenched. Living in a nation with the word United in it thinking that you don't or won't have enemies is more fantasy than Disneyland. The elites play a zero sum game. Nothing spiritual about it. For them to win, you must lose. Or settle for what crumbs they decide to bless you with for lining up and staying there.

Now for some specifics: Just in case the Fed needed an "out" to its "hawkishly holdish" December rate hike, it got it moments ago when the NY Fed slashed its Q3 and Q4 GDP estimates, and now expects just 2.3% annualized growth in Q3 and 1.2% Q4, down 0.5% each from the previous forecasts of 2.8% and 1.7%. 

In its latest report, the NY Fed explained that "negative news since the report was last published two weeks ago pushed the Nowcast down 0.5 percentage point for both Q3 and Q4.  The largest negative contributions over the last two weeks came from manufacturing, retail sales, and housing and construction data." So, pretty much everything.

As usual, the forecast was overly optimistic, and as a result has been sharply dragged down for both Q3...

Recall the New York Fed is run by one of the most elitist of the three main elites, Yellen, Fischer and Dudley, William Dudley. 

.zerohedge.com/news/2016-09-23/ny-fed-slashes-gdp-forecast-now-sees-weakest-growth-financial-crisis




 
 
It's not just you. The elites hate specifics too.

Be Prepared Or Be Enslaved

We have written long and often about the push by elitists to shovel one world government  into your future. The cashless society movement, all the tears being shed about possible breakdowns in free trade policies and a rash of other things  like bashing the concept of sovereignty as if it were a criminal concept. 

blacklistednews.com/ObamaA_America_Must_Surrender_Sovereignty_Embrace_One_World_Government

Now you have proof positive. Here's an example.

Earlier this week Barack Obama delivered his final United Nations speech.

In addition to praising the bankster loan shark operations run out of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, Obama called for “global integration,” code for a one-world government.

“I believe that at this moment we all face a choice. We can choose to press forward with a better model of cooperation and integration. Or we can retreat into a world sharply divided, and ultimately in conflict, along age-old lines of nation and tribe and race and religion,” he said.

The Council on Foreign Relations, often referred to as the “real State Department,” prefers to call it a transition to “global governance” or multilateralism.

In 2012, as the CFR unveiled the Council of Councils and its “Challenges for Global Governance in 2013,” Nicholas West deconstructed the globalist agenda. In addition to eroding national sovereignty through the promotion of “free trade” deals and treaties, the CFR has pushed behind the scenes for economic collapse, humanitarian intervention, destabilization of the Middle East, geopolitical reorganization, and control of the internet.

“The agenda of global governance exists, and the move toward a one world government is being executed. The solutions being discussed at think tank conferences in a wide range of disciplines from geopolitics, to science, to health, to economics and communications are all beginning to coalesce into an overall agenda of centralized control. This fusion is manifesting at an accelerated pace in tandem with the rapid awakening of humanity to its condition of increasing servitude,” writes West.

The current globalism in trade—from NAFTA, CAFTA, and AFTA to the impending TPP—serve as a template for the ongoing effort to globalize nations and destroy national sovereignty, according to Richard Haass, current CFR president and the former Special Assistant to George H. W. Bush and National Security Council Senior Director for Near East and South Asian Affairs.

In 2010 Haass wrote “states must be prepared to cede some sovereignty to world bodies if the international system is to function. This is already taking place in the trade realm. Governments agree to accept the rulings of the WTO because on balance they benefit from an international trading order even if a particular decision requires that they alter a practice that is their sovereign right to carry out.”

Be prepare or be enslaved.

Overnight

Flat is the word of the Asian session today after all the concern earlier this week about the Bank of Japan and the Fed meetings.

The Nikkei 225 was down 0.12 percent, reversing some of its earlier 0.4 percent losses, while the Topix index slipped 0.26 percent in morning trade. Japanese markets were shut on Thursday for a public holiday after climbing nearly 2 percent Wednesday when the Bank of Japan (BOJ) announced an overhaul of its monetary policy framework. 

The yen climbed to as high as 100.67 against the dollar, compared to levels above 102 on Wednesday, following the BOJ's announcement and before the Fed's policy decision. At 11:41 a.m. HK/SIN, the dollar/yen traded at 101.18. 

Investors seemed to move toward risk back on as equities moved higher. The ASX 200, a Hang Seng and Kospi were up while the Nikkei and the two Chinese markets were down. Gold was off 0.2%. Brent crude, the international benchmark for oil, was down 1% in early Asian trade. Still there was some hesitation as some investors appeared to be searching for direction after a week of potential news followed by a let down of economic important data to close out the week.

Reuters reported: In the currency market, the dollar was softer on the Fed's policy outlook, with the dollar's index against a basket of six major currencies .DXY =USD slipping to its lowest level in nearly two weeks on Thursday. The index last stood at 95.530, off Thursday's low of 95.048 but down 0.5 percent on the week.

The Pulbic Trough

It is a general stampede all right, one of complete disinformation to drive you further into the anxious arms of these international bureaucrats. They need you to need them.

Here's your tip off.

If policymakers fail to mitigate the negative impacts of unchecked global market forces, then a turn to protectionism could trigger a vicious downward spiral for everyone.

These market forces weren't unchecked. They were manipulated by the powers that be for agenda-driven means, one of which is now known after a convenient name change, climate change. Beware  of anything that has UN in front of it. this is just another call for massive government spending. Massive government spending is just like massive government money prit doesn't create meaningful and lasting growth.

The third leg of the world's intractable depression is yet to come. If trade economists at the United Nations are right, the next traumatic episode may entail the greatest debt jubilee in history. It may also prove to be the definitive crisis of globalized capitalism, the demise of the liberal free-market orthodoxies promoted for almost forty years by the Bretton Woods institutions, the OECD, and the Davos fraternity.

"Alarm bells have been ringing over the explosion of corporate debt levels in emerging economies, which now exceed $25 trillion. Damaging deflationary spirals cannot be ruled out," said the annual report of the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD).

 We know already that the poisonous side-effect of zero rates and quantitative easing in the US, Europe, and Japan was to flood developing nations with cheap credit, upsetting their internal chemistry and drawing them into a snare. What is less understood is just how destructive this has been.

The UN's diagnosis is that "shareholder primacy" and the entire edifice of liberal market finance are among the key culprits, all made worse by stringent fiscal austerity that has starved the global economy of sufficient demand.

Notice the usual suspect here, stringent fiscal austerity.

It is not to everybody's taste. UNCTAD's manifesto of Left-wing proposals clashes with almost every nostrum taught in universities and business schools for the last two generations. Yet its arguments cannot be dismissed lightly, and its dissenting voice deserves to be heard.

The fallacy of the above paragraph is that nothing works to everyone's taste.That hardly means what's required is a "radical prescription" of more mindless government spending.

The report puts the advocates of globalisation (as practiced) in a quandary. They - or we, perhaps I should say -  typically argue that it has vastly raised the living standards of hundreds of millions of people across Asia.

Its prescription is radical. The world must jettison neo-liberal ideology, and launch a "global new deal" with a blitz of investment on strategic sectors. It wants a return of the "developmental state", commanding a potent industrial policy, and backed by severe controls on capital flows.

Here's their remedy, more Keynesian BS. It's just another form of can kicking. Give it a new moniker and it's once again full steam ahead to nowhere.

A much simpler solution is to dismantle these huge bureaucratic morasses that gorge themselves year after year at the public trough. A good place to start would be central banks. And so we will leave you with this quote.  Jim Rogers: ‘Central Banks Are Losing Their Power…Thank Goodness’

telegraph.co.uk/business/2016/09/21/un-fears-third-leg-of-the-global-financial-crisis-with-epic-debt

Get Informed

We've been saying for sometime that the BLS should undergo a name change. Knock out the L and then you'll have it.  A look at these charts will prove our point.

Dear Labor Department, please explain...
Initial jobless claims tumbled last week to 252k - practically its lowest level since 1973.
BUT...

US economic growth has collapsed as jobless claims have plunged to four-decade lows...

zerohedge.com/news/2016-09-22/thursday-humor-initial-jobless-claims-hit-43-year-lows



 These charts give you some idea how MSM distorts things.



Now you know why you want to keep the Internet out of the bailiwick of bureaucrats and politicians.  It doesn't belong to them.



 There is nothing to cheer about here.

 

Get informed.

Change The Past

For longer than we care to recall we've been arguing that the Democrats have been taking the African-American vote for granted since 1932. They see African-Americans as one monolithic block of voters they can count on election after election.

Our first encounter with such occurred many years ago when we did a graduate school paper about FDR's New Deal and blacks. It was an historical study right up to the then current times.Only then during the 1930s they were referred to as Negroes. So our paper had the title: "Negroes and the New Deal."

Our only mistake was to turn it into a propagandizing leftist professor. One can be fairly naive even in graduate school.  He couldn't criticize it on the merits of its content, its writing or grammar. All he could do was downgraded it on his bias. In his eyes even way back then nobody dared to question the accepted wisdom. And if you know anything about academia, you know there is no arguing or even debating with accepted wisdom.

Somewhere on the Internet today I came across a you tube message from Louis Farrakhan to Obama that said,we'll paraphrase it, but it can be found. Leave Trump alone to do what he does.You failed intercity blacks. In our view, that's way too kind. The Democrats have been failing them for years and now there are doing the same with Hispanics. And so has the Republicans; that's why we say both of these parties are stone cold bankrupt.

In Zen there is saying: The only thing you can change is the past. Lots of people struggle with that and what it means. It's really quite simple. Change the past or repeat if you don't.

Dirty Money

This what you're up against. Those banks that were too big to fail that the government bailed out with your tax dollars now are literally trying to buy this election. It an in-your-face-like-it-or-lump move.
See Buffett financialspuds.blogspot.com/2016/09/the-omaha-hypocrite.

You still have purchasing power. And until they take it away too--and they will--you still have a right to do business where and with whom you want. This is dirty money.

zerohedge.com/news/2016-09-21/wall-street-goes-all-hillary-clinton

Hedge fund moguls are pouring stunning amounts of cash into the main super-PAC supporting Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.

George Soros and Donald Sussman, liberal financiers based in New York, have now given at least $10.5 million each to Priorities USA, an outside group that has already reserved more than $150 million in advertising to help Clinton win the White House.

Pushing him over the $10 million mark, Soros sent the super-PAC an additional $2.5 million in August, according to the latest reports from the Federal Election Commission.

Sussman sent $2 million in August too, giving him an identical total donation to Soros.

Soros scaled back his political spending during the Barack Obama years. Stories later emerged suggesting he’d been unhappy with the way he’d been treated by the president.

An email released last year by the State Department showed Clinton ally Neera Tanden telling the then-secretary of State that when she spoke with Soros at a dinner, he’d told her he regretted supporting President Obama over Clinton in the 2008 Democratic primary.

Recounting her conversation with Soros, Tanden told Clinton: “He’s been impressed that he can always call/meet with you on an issue of policy and said he hasn’t met with the President ever (though I thought he had.)”

The latest injections of cash from Soros and Sussman continue a trend of Wall Street money flowing overwhelmingly to Clinton over her Republican rival Donald Trump.

It’s highly unusual — perhaps unprecedented — for a Democratic presidential candidate to out-raise a Republican among the financial sector by the margin by which Clinton is out-raising Trump. 

Citing data from the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics, the Wall Street Journal reported in July that “seven financial firms alone have generated $47.6 million for groups working on Mrs.Clinton’s behalf.”

The comparable amount raised for Trump at that time was $19,000. And though his haul from the financial industry has increased substantially by now, it still pales in comparison to Clinton’s.

Overnight

Denial is usually counter intuitive, most particularly when it comes from politicians and bureaucrats.

The Bank of Japan rolled forth what it 's calling a "new form of policy easing." That alone should trouble you. But when bank chief Kuroda says he doesn't think the bank has been cornered--meaning out of  arrows in its monetary quiver--they've been cornered. Much the same holds for the indecisive, Janet Yellen-led Fed. Here we use the term led real loosely. About as loosely as one of Al Roaker's 15 year old suits would fit him now days. There's hardly a shortage of reformed weight loss zealots today. Brave central bankers, yes! The Fed held to its steady as she goes theme. But actually threatened  all of us with the prospect of fewer cuts in 2017 and 2018,

Things never happen in a vacuum. Other central banks will now have to adjust, if for no other reason than the fear of being outliers. Remember, central bankers are not picked for their path blazing fearlessness. We're talking economists here, human behavior, not a bunch of coonskin cap-wearing Daniel Boones. These people are well trained, one of their major flaws. Most of them never saw the inside of a good bar room drunken brawl. For a lot of them their version of making love is still most likely holding hands in the last row of a darkened theater.

Another way to recognize for certain the counter intuitive is check with MSM. Specifically, Bloomberg. Late last year, October to be exact, the editorial board released this gem: "Abernomics Is Working." Sure it is. From first blush it looks as if overnight investors got what they wanted as Reuters reported:

Asian shares surged on Thursday, taking their cue from Wall Street, after the Federal Reserve left U.S. interest rates unchanged and slowed the pace of future hikes, slugging the dollar and lifting commodity prices. MSCI's broadest index of Asia-Pacific shares outside Japan .MIAPJ0000PUS advanced 0.9 percent in its sixth straight session of gains, just 1.1 percent off its one-year high touched earlier this month. Australian shares rose 0.9 percent, while South Korea's KOSPI .KS11 advanced 1 percent.

Asia's strong gains follow a surge of 1.1 percent for the S&P 500 .SPX, 0.9 percent for the Dow Jones industrial average .DJI and 1.3 percent for the Nasdaq Composite .IXIC, which closed at a record high. Thursday was a Japanese holiday. But the Nikkei closed out Wednesday up 1.2%. So the next open session could be a blazing one for Japanese equities, depending how well that meal gets digested within the next 24 hours.

CNBC reported: U.S. West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude oil futures were trading at $45.59 per barrel at 0045 GMT, up 25 cents from their previous close. The contract had already gained as much as 3 percent the day before. Prices jumped after the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) surprised the market with a 6.2 million barrel fall in crude oil inventories last week to 504.6 million barrels. Forecasters in a Reuters poll had expected a 3.4 million-barrel build. "Oil prices rose after EIA data showed U.S. crude inventories declined to the lowest level since February," ANZ bank said in a note on Thursday.