Saturation

Saturation.

How do you define it? Simple: Three letters, NFL.  And you know that bit's biting when the NFL big shots send out a memo to team owners playing down pro football's ratings decline, a prospect well overdue.

It's everywhere, cable, commercials, you name it. Erecting costly stadiums that costs taxpayers money, taxpayers who could care less about the sport and quite often are negatively impacted by its presence. Not to mention the increasing attempt to expand the game's attraction overseas suggests the growing recognition of a bloated home market. Despite NFL officials trying to play down falling television ratings, claiming it's this unusual election year, they would not be sending out memos if this were just a flash or two.

The WSJ reports: "Through the first four weeks of the season, NFL viewership had declined by 11%, and among the crucial adults 18-48 demographic that advertisers covet, ratings are down 12%."

But one can detect some late night graveyard whistling here. "In fact, one NFL wag said, "our own data shows that the perception of the NFL and it's players is actually up." We have no confirmation on this but one rumor afloat out there is the NFL gets it's data from the Federal Reserve.

This is a not so oblique reference to the national anthem debate. Not everyone, including us, agrees. As the Journal points out the NFL "continues to place more product on digital, a negative hit to broadcast partners is more likely." Still others use the big S word. And yet another might be growing competition from college football where ratings are up this season. All day Sunday and Monday and Thursday night games could be another reason. With all that  exposure the money goes to either the NFL sponsors or those dying breed shopping malls. Amazon online is already a monopoly.

These are some every clever, persistent folks who will try to figure out one way or another to get into your pocketbook.

Game Changer

 
Those IMF bureaucrats completed their weighty meeting last week in Washington and though much of the hand wringing centered on Deutsche Bank's problems, here' one of the take aways you want to note.

U.S. bankers attending the IIF meeting were far more upbeat than their European counterparts.

JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, Morgan Stanley head James Gorman and Citigroup boss Michael Corbat, did their version of the "Three Amigos," taking to the stage together to talk up the strength of the U.S. consumer and their own roles in the global economy.

In a separate session, Goldman Sachs Group President Gary Cohn said the U.S. banking system was in the "best shape it has ever, ever been by far."

Like their European rivals, many U.S. banks are struggling to get shareholder returns above their cost of capital, but they are making more progress because they wrote off larger portions of their bad loans earlier – enabling them to return to growth more quickly – and most of their crisis-era litigation costs are behind them. The U.S. economy is also improving at a faster clip than Europe.

You should note the part about they wrote off "larger portions of their bad loans earlier--enabling them to return to growth more quickly--and most of their crisis-era limitation costs are behind them."

What this really translates into is they can get back to business as usual and repeat the whole mess over again. Just remember bail-ins or bail-outs costs everybody, not just shareholders. Recall too that white collar crime always gets off easier than the blue collar stuff.

Britain's vote to exit the European Union, known as "Brexit," is another headwind facing international banks, with the UK financial industry risking a loss of up to 38 billion pounds ($48.34 billion) in revenue if the country has only limited access to the European Union's single market, according to one study.

"The big winner for Brexit will be New York; you'll see more business moving to New York," Gorman said at the IIF meeting.

The competition from technology companies in banks' traditional markets, such as lending and payments, has also ramped up the pressure to change. In the pre-crisis days, banks would have merged to cut costs, but regulators are now much less in favor of allowing the creation of big, cross-border lenders which could disrupt markets if they got into trouble.

If New York will be, as is suggested here, the big winner, why are these Wall Street bankers, including Dimon, crying so loudly about Brexit?  Voltaire suggested following bankers if you see one jumping out of a window because there's most likely a profit in it Today, anytime you a banker approaching, you need to watch your wallet closely.

The term these elitists use for game changer, and it's a premeditated pejorative, is populism.

yahoo.com/news/banks-ponder-meaning-life-deutsche-agonizes-

Beware Of Experts Not CC

 
Here's a follow up on our another-melting-iceberg article.

To begin with, there are no experts, only those whose egos claim such. Trusting so-called experts can be dangerous to your health and your pocketbook. In fact, whenever you find yourself in a weak moment about to trust the experts, think central bankers. That will save you plenty of money on anti-depressants.

Much of the global friction today centers on those elitists who want the rest of us to just shut up and do what they tell us, not too different from being a child and one's parents told us to do it because, no questions, no nothing. Just because we say so.

That's the definition of elitism.

We've stated for a long time the reason for the name-change to climate change was no accident. It's just another form of making your fishing net larger. Global warming was too specific. The climate freaks needed a more abstract term. Climate change fit the bill nicely, making man responsible for everything that happens on the planet. What better way to further control human behavior.
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Dire predictions that the Arctic would be devoid of sea ice by September this year have proven to be unfounded after latest satellite images showed there is far more now than in 2012.

Scientists such as Prof Peter Wadhams, of Cambridge University, and Prof Wieslaw Maslowski, of the Naval Postgraduate School in Moderey, California, have regularly forecast the loss of ice by 2016, which has been widely reported by the BBC and other media outlets.

Prof Wadhams, a leading expert on Arctic sea ice loss, has recently published a book entitled A Farewell To Ice in which he repeats the assertion that the polar region would free of ice in the middle of this decade.

As late as this summer, he was still predicting an ice-free September.

Yet, when figures were released for the yearly minimum on September 10, they showed that there was still 1.6 million square miles of sea ice (4.14 square kilometres), which was 21 per cent more than the lowest point in 2012.

It is the latest example of experts making alarming predictions which do not come to pass. Earlier this week environmentalists were accused of misleading the public about the "Great Pacific Garbage Patch" after aerial shots proved there was no "island of rubbish" in the middle of the ocean. Likewise, warnings that the hole in the ozone layer would never close were debunked in June.

Scientists warn that such claims risk detracting from the real issue. Losing Arctic sea ice is a major problem because ice reflects up to 70 per cent of sunlight, while open water reflects just 10 per cent, meaning the rest is absorbed by the planet, which speeds up global warming. A massive melt of freshwater could also disrupt global ocean currents and change weather systems.

       

For more than a decade, most scientists have accepted that the Arctic will be free ice-free by 2050, while the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) calculates there is a 66 per cent chance of no ice by the middle of the century if emissions continue to increase annually.
Yet in 2007, Prof Wadhams predicted that sea ice would be lost by 2013 after levels fell 27 per cent in a single year. However, by 2013, ice levels were actually 25 per cent higher than they had been six years before. In 2012, following another record low, Prof Wadhams changed his prediction to 2016.

The view was supported by Prof Maslowski, who in 2013 published a paper in the Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences also claiming that the Arctic would be ice-free by 2016, plus or minus three years.

However, far from record lows, this year the Arctic has seen the quickest refreeze ever recorded with the extent of sea ice growing 405,000 square miles (1.05 million square kilometres)  in just three weeks since the September 10 minimum.  The Danish Meteorological Institute said that refreezing is happening at the fastest rate since its daily records began in 1987.

More: 
telegraph.co.uk/science/2016/10/07/experts-said-arctic-sea-ice-would-melt-entirely-by-september-20.

There is more here and you should read it all before forming your opinion, but beware of alarming so-called experts. Recall even broken clocks can be right twice a day.       
       
       
       
       
       
       
       
       
       
       
       
       
       
       
       
       
       
       
       
       
       
       
       
       
       
       
       
       
       
       
       
       
       
       
       
       
       
       
       
       
       
       
       
       
       
       
       
       
       
       
       
       
       
       
       
       
       
   


   
       
       
       
       
       
       
       
       
       
       
       
       
       
       
       
       
       
       
       
       
       
       
       
       
       
       
       
       
       
       
       
       
       
       
       
       
       
       
       
       
       
       
       
       
       
       
       
       
       
 
       
       
       
       
       
       
       
       
       
       
       
       
       
       
       
       
       
       
       
       
       
       
   

Long Memory

The media cat is out of the bag. This is an electronic attempted lynching of the kind MSM tried several years ago. You see descriptions like "shocking revelation" and  such to foretell a 2005 event that occurred in private. Not cool wherever it occurred. But Trump's "dirty talk versus Hillary's corruption" is an action versus words deed.

Shocking in that someone whose husband did (actions) far worse to women than Trump's vile talk  and was openly and truculently defended  by a woman who has a long, proven history of calling the kettle black when it serves her cause. But what is really shocking is the massive sellout by what many once believed were honest, truthful organizations and institutions in Western society to force a person who belongs in prison on the nation.

However this ends, it will not end well. Many Americans will have a long, long memory on this one.

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Day-by-day, week-by-week, month-by-month, millions of Americans watch the political and media process unfolding around them with growing astonishment. The nation itself likely will not recover from this spectacle, nor is it supposed to in our view. No matter who wins the election, underlying elite goals have likely been accomplished.

Interestingly, as we were approaching deadline, we noticed an article in the American Thinker, entitled “Trump’s dirty talk versus Hillary’s corruption.” This report made some of the points we’ve made above. In fact, the writer observes, “I have never seen a media so in the tank. The media show every day their bias by what they report, how they report, and especially what they choose not to report. Our freedoms are in danger.”

This is a true and acute observation. We’d only re-emphasize that the destruction of freedom is a deliberate one, not meant to be hidden anymore. As a result, millions now believe neither in “America,” nor its mainstream news or political process.

Conclusion: This is part of a larger destruction of Western culture and values and it is ongoing. What’s taking place is not happenstance, not in Europe, nor in the US. Freedom is being destroyed, but in a deliberate manner, to send a message and increase polarization. Many currents are swirling beneath the surface that make this presidential campaign an epochal one.

thedailybell.com/news-analysis/mainstream-media-implodes-over-trump-sex-comments

And Pussy Too

A direct quote from Mr. Barack Obama.

See it here. This just goes to show how bias MSM is. Why not cover the Obama tape fallout. Here it is.

zerohedge.com/news/2016-10-08/another-trump-recording-emerges-paula-jones-kathleen-willey-and-juanita-broaddrick-a

Innocence Is No Excuse

If you now have your money wallowing in some active or inactive manged retirement fund, you are an innocent bystander.

Innocence is attractive as far as it goes, but these are anything but innocent times. See current presidential election campaign. With a rare exception still possible, higher interest rates are on the way. What they'll do to the market, if they happen, really nobody knows for sure.

A short-term selloff and then a big celebratory rally or who knows what. What we do know is the debt level continues to spiral upwards with no relief in sight whoever wins this carnival called an election in what is now proving to be anything but a democracy.

It's no longer what the Fed should've done. It's what they will do. And that's continually make mistakes. If the Fed were any more politicized it would be a huge Hillary campaign button. Now having said that, some wag out there will concluded we must be a Trump person. We didn't say that.
But what you want to be is a survivor.

So here an article for you. Read it and decide for yourselves.
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But, but, but… the Fed’s monetary policies for the past eight years have created the biggest credit bubble in US history, including the biggest junk bond bubble ever, a stock market bubble, housing bubbles in numerous cities around the country that exceed by far the peaks of the prior housing bubbles that imploded so spectacularly, the most gigantic commercial real estate bubble, now according to the Green Street Commercial Property Price Index, 26.5% above its totally crazy bubble peak of August 2007….

wolfstreet.com/2016/10/07/fed-fischer-fed-waiting-for-godot-fourth-mandate

Some of Fischer’s own colleagues have been loudly fretting about asset bubbles – including Boston Fed governor Eric Rosengren, a voting dove of the Federal Open Markets Committee, where monetary policy is decided, who’d zeroed in on the commercial real estate price bubble:

BOJ Will Ease To Hit Goal If

Bank of Japan Governor Haruhiko Kuroda addressed the G20 meeting yesterday, emphasizing the four points below. Some might finds his assertions a bit bewildering, especially his not detecting any strong concerns among fellow G20 members about easy monetary policy.

* No strong concerns over cost of easy policy - BOJ Kuroda

* BOJ will ease if needed to hit price goal - Kuroda

* Japan FinMin Aso warns against excessive pessimism

* Japan firms may shift out of UK due to Brexit - Aso

Here's full article from kitco.com

By Leika Kihara

WASHINGTON, Oct 7 (Reuters) - Bank of Japan Governor Haruhiko Kuroda said it was hard to achieve balanced economic growth with monetary policy alone, adding that G20 nations shared the view fiscal and structural policies must also play a key role in boosting growth.

But he shrugged off the view that global policymakers were becoming increasingly concerned about the rising cost of prolonged ultra-loose monetary policies, signalling that central banks still had the ammunition left to stimulate the economy.

"I don't think there was a strong feeling shared among (G20 nations) that monetary policy was reaching its limits or that an over-reliance on monetary policy was causing big problems," he told a news conference on Friday.

Kuroda said he told a finance leaders' meeting of Group of 20 major economies that the BOJ was ready to expand monetary stimulus if necessary to achieve its 2 percent inflation target.

Japanese Finance Minister Taro Aso also warned policymakers against being overly pessimistic about the global economy, even though various risks loomed on the outlook.

"What's important is to identify the root of the problem and take appropriate measures," Aso told the same news conference, pointing to concerns voiced by some policymakers on sluggish global trade.

"If the slowdown in trade is due to broadening protectionist sentiment, that's a cause for concern so policymakers should act to eliminate barriers against free trade," he added.

Aso said some big Japanese companies may decide to shift their European countries out from London to other cities as Britain proceeds toward exiting the European Union.

That may force smaller Japanese firms operating in Britain to follow suit, he said, adding that policymakers in Tokyo may urge domestic banks to ensure they help such firms in funding any such move.

"It's uncertain how (Brexit) will actually unfold but we can say some Japanese firms may shift their headquarters out from London," Aso said.

Traders Made Me Do It

 
"Heav'n has no Rage, like Love to Hatred turn'd, Nor Hell a Fury, like a Woman scorn'd."
                                                                                                          William Congreve

It is interesting that the Financial Times--no fan of Brexit--would twist the news suggesting that Prime Minister May's tough immigration talk triggered the nasty threats from people like Angela Merkel and others.

The FT, like much of MSM, suffers from a selective, convenient case of amnesia. The threats and nasty talk began way before the votes were counted. In what was a disgraceful attempt to derail Brexit, the President of the United States traveled to the UK and actually threatened "a long wait" to cut any trade deals if Brexit passed.

As an American we can only hope many UK citizens cultivate a long memory not just with the U.S., but those nasty, suffocating EU bullies in Brussels. Anyone who thinks the pound's crash was not orchestrated hasn't been paying attention to the U.S. presidential election.  These folks are the masters of orchestration, making many of those EU fops--the name Juncker should bubble to mind--look like
elementary school kids.

The pound recovered nearly all of it losses faster than even the FT can write the story. Merkel has her own troubles. She has been bamboozling the German citizenry for a long time. Did anyone in the UK think these arrogant, small minded EU bureaucrats were going to make it easy. The louder their screaming and threatening gets proves just how correct and necessary Brexit is.

Of course the FT and others rolled out the excuse that the pound's sudden swan song followed  a week of the earlier steady damage. The UK stock market and the pound have been separating faster from each other than Brad and Angeline. These scaremongers are long on fear and short on patience. What did they possibly think, there would not be any rough spots along the way?

One FT columnist played the scare card about two short sharp shocks to the pound, June 24 and this past week.The first one the day after the vote become a reality and this second one after earlier in the week soon after the date for Breixt was firmly established, something the naysayers were hoping would drag out and eventually lead to either another vote or a change in attitude. Could we just hear another round of Chase CEO Jamie Dimon whining:"There's still time."

This author took a page out f the late 1980s during the Asian Tiger debacle when one official blamed the traders. He pathetically criticizes them on two points: not initially calling the referendum correctly and convincing themselves and others a compromise was in the offing. Sounds like someone put a gun to his head and forced to him listen to the traders.

He then degrades them for being a fairly dispassionate bunch "who look at the data, balance the odds, and make their trade." We don't know about you, but that sounds like the perfect description of two groups of bureaucrats, politicians and central bankers.

And that as pointed out years ago is what this is all about, boys and girls and children of all ages, scorning the elitists status quo and their globalization madness. Nothing more and nothing less.

Catching On

It is interesting how all those staunch Republican conservatives and higher ups all the way to the RNC top are calling for Trump to drop out.

If politics is as dirty as we know it is, this was all known for a long time and decided to be kept secret until now. It is just as interesting that no one in the Democrat hierarchy is calling for a known liar now joined by another proven liar, to drop out. Disrespecting women is one thing, nobody sanctions that, killing people, innocent people, is another. What you have here is a person with 20-plus years of deception and lies who has now been caught in many of those lies, including purposely rigging a primary election in her own party. One could go on about murders, wars and such, but it won't matter.

This indeed is a very healthy election. The healthiest we've ever witnessed.There's a lot more at stake here than all those whinny elites worrying about the possible demise of their precious Golden Goose of globalization. The banking system is rotten, these two candidates are rotten, these two parties are rotten, MSM is rotten, the IMF, the UN, the WB, BIS, FBI, DOJ, IRS, the Supreme Court, the central banks, your grandmother's homemade apple sauce.

The only thing not rotten and the really healthy thing to come out of all this, the masses are finally catching on.Where's Al Gore when you don't need him, still counting dangling chads. He started all this when he invented the Internet. At Harvard no less. Change is coming. It's inevitable. It will not go down easy. It never does. But it will go down.

It's not about populism and never was. It's about catching on. That's the scary part.