Slider Payments Could Prove Slippery

 
Goldman Sachs Group unleashed its online consumer-lending platform yesterday. Known by the moniker Marcus, it's designed--get this terminology, to allow regular Americans for the first time, according to the Wall Street Journal, "to borrow from the Wall Street powerhouse."

Knowing what you now know about Wall Street powerhouses, why would any "regular" folks want to float a loan from them? One quick reason is some of usual, favorite sources in this downturn have dried up. Another is they smell the money online alternatives lenders are raking in for a variety of reasons not the least has been the contempt Wall Street powerhouses have for years hdd for "regular Americans." Still another is these high flying Titans of finance need you to help bail them out.
The money Goldman gets to fund the loans comes from customer deposits.

According to the WSJ, Goldman, which has been studying online lending since at least 2014, enters the market without the same handicap. The bank will fund the loans from its own $130 billion deposit base, and has no plans to sell them on to others.

Goldman Sachs manages more than $1 trillion in assets from the world’s top investors and now offers banking for the 99%. WSJ’s Justin Baer joins Lunch Break and discusses the launch of GS Bank, where Goldman offers savings accounts for as little as $1. Photo: AP (Originally published April 26, 2016) 

That funding advantage allows Goldman to take a different tack than existing online lenders in some areas.First, Goldman won’t charge borrowers any late fees for missed payments or early repayment fees. It also doesn’t charge any upfront fees, either. Existing online lenders act basically as toll-takers, selling their loans on for a few percentage points. To boost their revenue, they take a small percentage of the loan as a fee. Holding the loans to maturity, Goldman can capture all the interest income. It isn’t clear whether that means the loans will be cheaper, though. Goldman’s lowest rate of 5.99% is equivalent to LendingClub’s lowest rate including the fee, at least for some loans.

Second, Goldman is offering more customizable terms. Borrowers from Marcus will be able to choose from a slider of monthly payments, which varies the amount of the loan, payback term, and rate. The bank says this is a big advantage of using its own money to lend. 

If there's one thing people know about banks in general and Wall Street investment banks in particular it's that fees can be invoked at any time and they usually are. Beware of that term slider payments.You can almost be assured the slide won't end up in your favor.

They could prove slippery.

The Time Has Come

Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg has once again shown signs of age-related dementia as she has issued off-the-cuff remarks later to either apologize or retract. She is a liability and needs to step down.

Moreover, she has openly expressed her bias other times that clearly question her objectivity. Her shoot from the hip only to quickly retract her statements are not only dangerous but hardly fitting of one holding such a high judicial position.

She openly admits to these outbursts.

Ginsburg, the court's senior liberal justice, told Yahoo News on Monday that Kaepernick was "dumb and disrespectful" for refusing to stand during the national anthem before games.

"Barely aware of the incident or its purpose, my comments were inappropriately dismissive and harsh. I should have declined to respond," Ginsburg said in her statement on Friday.

businessinsider.com/justice-ruth-bader-ginsburg-backtracks-statement-on-colin-kaepernick-2016-10?

She has clearly shown she is not qualified to sit in judgment in certain issues that could easily come before the court. The trust of the American public in these already trying times is clearly at stake here with a justice who is clearly showing signs of possible age-induced dementia. Her vote could be a critical vote on a critical case that cannot be so easily reversed as she acted inappropriately disimissive.

What It's About

There is a you tube out there, still up there as far as we know, showing longtime Democrat mouthpiece Bob Beckel complaining about the Wikileaks and openly saying "Somebody should kill him."

The somebody Beckel is referring to is Julian Assange.

Now there are two things important about Beckel's ranting. The leaks must have some semblance of truth to them or Beckel wouldn't be mentioning it and being so angry about it. The second thing is he on national television suggested--it was really more than a suggestion, apparently got away with it--saying suck without any dressing down from MSM. We haven't heard of any apology coming forth.

It seems to us there once was a time when what's good for the goose is also good for the gander was in play. Perhaps PC has whitewashed all that. Now if Beckel can make such statements on national television, apparently free of consequences, what's to prevent someone from making similar public statements about Beckel--"someone should kill him"--without fear of legal reprisal? Not about killing him,but to the statement.

No doubt many will attempt to make excuses for Beckel owing to his bouts of addition and such, the hallmark of the Zero Tolerance and the PC crowd. But that's exactly what this election is about.

Incest The Democrat Way

 
Google, the search engine and just about everything else in their growing monopoly on tech, has been censoring bloggers for along time and even some rumors afloat that they know their users' keystroke. Still another rumor making the rounds is that Google tries jam or divert the transmissions of those who post things Google finds not politically correct.

Google is the subservient gatekeeper to parent company Alphabet. Now comes public word  that they are doing more than that to commandeer this election. People for years complained about Nixon, not one of our favorites either. But the incest in this administration makes Nixon's Watergate mess juvenile.
----
Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman John Podesta facilitated meetings between Eric Schmidt, the executive chairman of Alphabet, the parent company of Google, and key Clinton players Robby Mook and Cheryl Mills in 2014, according to hacked emails released by WikiLeaks.

Schmidt also quietly funds a data company that provides services to the Clinton campaign.
Podesta wrote to Schmidt on April 3, 2014, saying he would like him to speak with Robby Mook, now Clinton’s campaign manager, and Cheryl Mills, a longtime Clinton aide.

“Robby is in Australia. Back the 23rd. We could arrange a call before or wait and do a meeting shortly after return,” Podesta said. “Cheryl Mills is in town and I think it would be good for you two to talk. Her office is in Bethesda but probably could come down this afternoon. Up for that?”
“thank you !!! i’ll plan to see robby when he is back in dc,” Schmidt responded (sic throughout). “Cheryl would be great to see; I have a meeting with President from 11 to 1145 and free after that all afternoon any time in the afternoon that is convenient for her is good for me.” Schmidt then provided Podesta with his phone number.

Recall someone a while back claiming it's all rigged.

freebeacon.com/politics/podesta-linked-googles-executive-chairman-cheryl-mills-robby-mook.

Ever The Dove

Ever the dove. The news is out and it's dovish as usual. This re-elect Hillary stance won't end until after the election in what is one of the most politically correct Feds in our lifetime continues to show its true color--incompetence.

The Fed is long, some would say desperately long, on wanting to raise interest rates but short on courage, the hallmark of the Yellen-led Fed.
----
zerohedge.com/news/2016-10-14/jpm-responds-yellens-dovish-speech-we-continue-expect-next-hike-december.

In an amusingly, and very symbolically, titled piece "Yellen steers left of the minutes", JPM's head of economic research Michael Feroli admits that while Yellen's overall tone was dovish, the biggest bank by market cap continues to expect a December rate hike.
Here's why, from JPM:

Yellen steers left of the minutes

Today's talk by Fed Chair Yellen did not directly address the near term policy outlook, but the overall tone of the talk was dovish. Even so, we continue to expect the next hike in December. The sense conveyed by the minutes suggests that a strong majority is emerging in favor of another step before year end.

ADVERTISEMENT

x

Three themes in the talk tilted dovish. First, she listed a number of ways in which running a “high-pressure economy” could help the supply side, such as stimulating greater capex, R&D, and labor force participation. Second, she stressed the role of monetary policy in anchoring inflation expectations—a dovish theme in light of the generally low levels of most measures of this variable. Third, she stated that easy monetary policy in the US is beneficial to growth overseas, arguably a good thing in light of ongoing global growth risks to the domestic economy.

Some of these themes are contested. Most notably, the argument that monetary policy can foster supply side gains has received very little public support by others on the FOMC (and was disputed by some of the presenters at the conference at which Yellen spoke). A December move accompanied with a continued signal of a gradual pace in 2017 would likely, we believe, appease the majority of the Committee while still giving some space for Yellen's "high-pressure economy" thesis to be tested.

The Wall Street Journal

In times like these--recessions or post-recessions, depending on whom one reads--scams proliferate. Usually a warning phone call or a letter telling you something in your life is out of wack and needs urgent attention.

A business client told us the other day he got a call on his personal cell phone even though it's
supposed to be a protected number informing him the warranty on his car had expired and this was his last chance to remedy the matter. Didn't he pay attention to the recent warning letter they sent. The robot on the other end then asked if he would like to be connected to a person who could help him with his options.

Now these calls usually go to seniors or aging baby boomers, a class or category this gentlemen doesn't currently occupy. A bit irritated, he decided to go along and was connected to someone who in a dire voice informed him his warranty was kaput and this was his absolute last chance to renew it.

"Listen," he told the guy, "my car is so old if it had any warranty left it would be in the Smithsonian Institute if the PC crowd running the place there now would accept it."

We bring this up because this article from the Wall Street Journal.
----
Even the Wall Street Journal is now fed up with the biased media coverage of the 2016 Presidential election as revealed by a scathing article written by Kimberly Strassel, a member of their editorial board.  As Strassel points out, it's almost impossible to turn on the TV without hearing about Trump's "lewd" comments while coverage of Hillary "uniformly ignores the flurry of bombshells" inherent in the various WikiLeaks, FOIA releases and FBI interviews.

If average voters turned on the TV for five minutes this week, chances are they know that Donald Trump made lewd remarks a decade ago and now stands accused of groping women.

But even if average voters had the TV on 24/7, they still probably haven’t heard the news about Hillary Clinton: That the nation now has proof of pretty much everything she has been accused of.

It comes from hacked emails dumped by WikiLeaks, documents released under the Freedom of Information Act, and accounts from FBI insiders. The media has almost uniformly ignored the flurry of bombshells, preferring to devote its front pages to the Trump story. So let’s review what amounts to a devastating case against a Clinton presidency.

ADVERTISEMENT

xOf course, the list of Hillary scandals is becoming way too long to remember though one of the biggest has been her establishment of the now infamous private email server and the subsequent intentional destruction of federal records despite the existence of a Congressional subpoena.

Start with a June 2015 email to Clinton staffers from Erika Rottenberg, the former general counsel of LinkedIn. Ms. Rottenberg wrote that none of the attorneys in her circle of friends “can understand how it was viewed as ok/secure/appropriate to use a private server for secure documents AND why further Hillary took it upon herself to review them and delete documents.” She added: “It smacks of acting above the law and it smacks of the type of thing I’ve either gotten discovery sanctions for, fired people for, etc.”

A few months later, in a September 2015 email, a Clinton confidante fretted that Mrs. Clinton was too bullheaded to acknowledge she’d done wrong. “Everyone wants her to apologize,” wrote Neera Tanden, president of the liberal Center for American Progress. “And she should. Apologies are like her Achilles’ heel.”

zerohedge.com/news/2016-10-14/wall-street-journal-blasts-press-consistently-buries-hillary-clintons-sins

Clinton staffers debated how to evade a congressional subpoena of Mrs. Clinton’s emails—three weeks before a technician deleted them. The campaign later employed a focus group to see if it could fool Americans into thinking the email scandal was part of the Benghazi investigation (they are separate) and lay it all off as a Republican plot.
----
A once decent newspaper now with it coteries of double and triple chinned blowhards languishes away today on the scrapheap of total irrelevance. Now of a sudden the Journal wants to display some outrage in these final sunsets against the Hillary-Goldman Sachs bought and sold MSM. These are some really brave journalists. We use the term journalists advisedly since it's lost all meaning these last many years. Truth is, the Journal has been pillorying Trump since --way since--before Iowa. They also have in their inimitable pathetic way shilled for Hillary.

By trying to foist off insipid candidates like Cruz, Kasich and others, they forfeited their only chance of taking the wrecking ball to this giant Washington octopus with the zeal of a born-twice-over missionary, intent on controlling everything on the planet that moves including all those that don't. In short, these neurotic, self-serving worrywarts hell-driven to protect and preserve their Grand Old Party's exclusionary status quo completely misunderstood the public mood.

But there's another real truth here. The Trump haters among whom the WSJ crowd stands obvious and arrogant will get exactly what they claim they hate the most but so dearly deserve, four more years of worse than BO. That's a political smell we hope those brave elitists enjoy. They earned it.

Same Movie, Different Characters

White collar criminals don't go to jail. They wind up usually at some regional spa.

The recent Wells Fargo scandal looks to be another case in  point. No criminal wrong doing has been proposed. Yet. The bank at first did what these outfits usually do, took the low road and fired 5,300 workers. One can only imagine how many of those 5,300 knew absolutely nothing about this scam but got the axe anyway. High ranking bankers are really brave people.It's a not so subtle way to reduce overhead.

In the settlement WFC coughed up a paltry by today's standards $190 million plus some shop-worn tokenism these folks are noted for and stamped the file, "Case Closed." This is a bank with $2 trillion in assets. So, as the Financial Times, noted today, $190 million is chum change. Former CEO and chairman John Stumpf rides off into his retirement sunset no worse--minus a few stock options that he probably didn't earn via honest labor anyway--for wear.

The immediate scale of the fake accounts scandal is trivial. Goldman Sachs, for example, settled mortgage bond claims for $5bn and frequently is ensnared in uncomfortable situations. Yet, Lloyd Blankfein will probably exit 200 West Street with a parade. Unlike the misdeeds from the financial crisis or complex stock or bond machinations, the Wells scandal is simple enough for anyone who has ever walked into a bank branch to grasp. The video of Mr Stumpf being eviscerated by senator Elizabeth Warren became a social media sensation. Measures such as a forfeiture of $41m of stock by Mr Stumpf and $19m by the former consumer banking head looked lame.

We don't know what's going on but here's another mention about Goldman Sachs. Didn't we just  write about them? And forget not who one of the largest shareholders of Wells Fargo is, Mr. Warren Buffett. Which should raise some questions for Mr. Buffett: What did he know and when did he know it? Most of the folks who were scammed in the big scam were those so-called little people like Buffett, the Phony Saint of Omaha, one of his close comrades, Hillary, claim they cares so much about.

The movie never changes, just the players.

Like It Or Lump It

Anyone think these big Wall Street firms like Goldman Sachs are apolitical?

Better think again. Here's an article that should set your smeller smelling. Retribution. Scaremongering going into the Brexit vote last June reached premium levels. Not only did you have the President of the United States personally visit the UK and publicaly threaten those who favored Brexit, but the scramble about London losing financial firms and with it jobs and money raged.

Markets are manipulated. The recent plunge in the pound was no accident. Did anyone who favored Brexit if it passed think payback wouldn't happen? These are agenda-driven people who want what they want and intend to get it, you be damned. There are not enough pejorative terms in the English language to describe these elites.

Just who, for example, came up with the terms hard versus soft Brexit? Did the initial reaction of EU demagogues like Jean-Claude Juncker smack of love and well wishes. These are MSM mediated terms controlled by the masters of MSM, big money. The Fouth Estate is a fraud. The neocons on the right and left in America have the world on the doorstep of a nuclear WW III and GS is spreading currency uncertainty. Does anyone not recall after 911 the WMD manipulation? Uncertainty is as much a part of the human experience these days as manipulation. And always has been.

You have already seen the corruption and politicization that exists in the Deutsche Bank situation. This is hardly new. Goldman Sachs has been and is patently involed in the current U.S. presidential election. But it's tentacle stretch much farther into the central banking world. Show us a central bank and you'll find a GS connection.
----

As the pound resumes its post-flash-crash, post-May-Brexit-debate bounce, Goldman's Silvia Ardagna warns of much more downside pressure to come for Sterling with a cumulative depreciation of as much as 25% by year-end.

How Much More Sterling Downside? (via Goldman Sachs)

1. With the prospect of a 'hard Brexit' becoming a reality, investors who were previously expecting a 'soft' Brexit, or no Brexit at all, have updated their priors, and Sterling has depreciated about 5 percent over the space of a week against G10 currencies. GBP/$ is about 1.5 percent above 1.20, which is our 3-months forecast published on 5 July 2016. In a recent Global Markets Daily ("How Much Sterling Downside?, 6 Oct 2016), we highlighted that risks to our Sterling forecast were to the downside. In this FX Views, we quantify the magnitude of a potential further fall in the Pound. Based on our benchmark model that assesses the impact of political uncertainty on currencies, the cumulative depreciation of Cable could be as large as 25 percent by year-end, an additional 7 percent decline from its current value.

2. While this estimate is subject to the usual degree of model uncertainty (see below) and should be viewed with a degree of caution, the following additional considerations lead us to think that such a downside move in Sterling is quite likely to materialize over the next couple of months.
zerohedge.com/news/2016-10-13/goldman-warns-much-more-downside-come-pound-sterling
----
These two paragraphs should tell you all you want to know about manipulation and retribution loaded as it is with the phony disclaimer. This is pure politicalization dripping with we will show you stupid SOBs who think you can just vote and walk away. Who in the hell appointed GS to quantify anything? This goes way beyond something as simple as front running. This is in your face we will rule. What my dear old mother used to call: "Like it or lump it."

It's up to you to decide. Check the first sentence in item number three. That will tell you want you need to know, "The decision ...."

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-10-13/goldman-warns-much-more-downside-come-pound-sterling

Packaging Matters

Agenda 21 is a non-binding, voluntarily implemented action plan of the United Nations with regard to sustainable development. It is a product of the UN Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in 1992. Its purpose is an action agenda for the UN, other multilateral organizations, and individual governments around the world that can be executed at local, national, and global levels. The "21" in Agenda 21 refers to the 21st century.

It's always interesting the first time one hears about something. Depending on how outlandish it sounds usually affects its level of credibility. And a good part of that depends on the packaging, if you grasp our drift.

Governments and agenda freaks usually package their ploys quite carefully, like those who want a cashless society. They're trying to make it a moral argument, get those bad people who launder money, cheat on their taxes and such. In short, the same old nefarious tactic: punish the many to capture the few. So how many of you have ever heard of Agenda 21? If you want to know more about Agenda 21 check out the link below. If you read the description above, recall what we said about packaging. Executed is an interesting term, also.

daisyluther.com/what-exactly-is-agenda-21

Overnight

The U.S. dollar rose on Thursday apparently on a growing belief among investors that the Fed will raise interest rates before the end of the year. The stronger dollar helped send gold lower in Asia overnight as spot gold traded down 0.1% at $1,256.50 an ounce. The dollar index edged 0.1% higher to 97.613.

After opening weaker the Nikkei turned it around, moving into positive territory gaining 0.44% at 16847.35. Other up markets included the Hand Seng 0.58%, the Kospi slightly higher, 0.51%, at 2025.76 and the ASX 200 essentially flat. the Shanghai composite was off -0.53%. Friday in the U.S. brings the latest on retail sales and Fed Chair Janet Yellen is scheduled to a conference the Boston Federal Reserve Bank. n hter currencies the yen traded at 103.66 versus the dollar, closing near its last close of 103.68. The UK pound traded sightly higher, off an earlier low at $1.2250

Oil prices were mixed as U.S. futures moved up 0.34% at $50.61 a barrel while Brent remained flat at $52.-4. Reuters reported: Oil prices advanced during U.S. hours on Thursday, following data stateside that showed draw downs in diesel and gasoline, while crude inventories showed a build up. The U.S. Energy Information Administration data showed crude stocks increased 4.9 million barrels in the week ended on October 7, well above analysts' forecast of a 700,000-barrel rise, according to a Reuters report.