The Shameless Party

This is a party without shame.

What they did to one of their own, Bernie Sanders and his supporters, is disgustingly shameful. They should have one of their inbred thugs pass Bernie another $600,000 for taking a peaceful dive. C'mon, people, he's getting on in life. What's another $600,000 to you folks, a couple more Hillary Goldman Sach's speeches?
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Following yesterday's FBI headlines, James Freeman's question to Democrats "doesn't Hillary Clinton embarrass you?" seems even more appropriate:
Authored by James Freeman, originally posted at The Wall Street Journal,
Donald Trump wears his character flaws on his sleeve. Hillary Clinton seeks to prevent documentation of hers, even when the law requires it. Yet despite her best efforts, facts about Mrs. Clinton that are now public should trouble voters more than any of Mr. Trump’s remarks.
Not that it’s easy for Republicans to appear on a ballot with Mr. Trump, especially since media folk spend days after each controversial remark demanding responses from other GOP candidates. The objective is to force them to endorse or condemn Mr. Trump and suffer the consequences.

Fair enough, but reporters don’t force down-ballot Democrats to take a position on each new Clinton email revelation. The result is wall-to-wall media coverage focused on whether GOP voters can possibly support their candidate. But why should Republicans have all the fun? Democratic voters have every right to be ashamed of their nominee.

wsj.com/articles/doesnt-clinton-embarrass-democrats

Why Now, Democrats?

Why now, furious Democrats? Because this has been going on for a long, long time as the Trumpster pointed out more than a year ago. And should have been brought to light then.

Why now, furious Democrats? Because the 40 million Americans you so despise have a right to know before the election about the obvious corruption of your officially sanctioned candidate.

Why now, furious Democrats? Because you want those same 40 million Americans to placidly accept the results of an obviously rigged upcoming election when announced and take their pitiful place in line.

Why now, furious Democrats? Because decent, honest leaders are ultimately responsible for what occurs under their watch.
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zerohedge.com/news/2016-10-29/fbi-found-tens-thousands-emails-belonging-huma-abedin-weiners-laptop

Still, the biggest irony in this latest debacle is that it was largely predicted by Donald Trump himself back in August of 2015.

 Donald J. Trump ✔ @realDonaldTrump

It came out that Huma Abedin knows all about Hillary’s private illegal emails. Huma’s PR husband, Anthony Weiner, will tell the world.

8:50 AM - 3 Aug 2015

• 5,482 5,482 Retweets
• 6,806

Gold In Hand

The misguided, incompetent foreign policy of this and previous administrations is just part of this story. Forget a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. Gold in your hand is worth much more than gold in paper.

At the risk of being terribly PC, the cardinal crime of this century so far, a China man might put it this way:"Gold in hand, my son, worth much more than gold in bush."
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Since 2006, there has been a year-on-year increase that reveals a significant upward trend. The chart clearly reveals that Russia’s state policy of increasing state monetary assets, in the form of gold. Additionally, the Russian government has been converting state rubles into gold assets. From 2006 to 2015, Russia’s state holdings of gold tripled.
Within just the past year Russia has substantially increased its gold holdings
According to the Business Insider:

In July of this year, the central bank of Russia added 200,000 ounces of gold to its reserves. The one-month uptick in Russian gold reserves — 200,000 ounces — is approximately equal to the entire annual output of Barrick Gold’s Turquoise Ridge gold mine in Nevada.

At that same rate — 200,000 ounces per month — in a mere five months, Russia would add to state gold reserves the equivalent of the entire annual output of Barrick’s massive Goldstrike mine in Nevada.

 shtfplan.com/headline-news/russias-most-potent-weapon-rapidly-hoarding-gold-as-global-currency-war-is-upon-us_

Currently, Russian gold reserves rank seventh in the world. It’s clear that there is a concerted effort by Russian authorities to build up the country’s gold reserves as part of a national strategy to negate the effects of economic warfare waged by the United States.
Rickards, in his 2011 book “Currency Wars,” theorized that Russia and China could combine their gold reserves to form a global gold-backed currency to compete against the U.S. dollar. Currently, Russian reserves stand at roughly 1,500 tonnes, with Chinese reserves totaling over 1,800 tonnes (according to China — it’s likely more), which would amount to a combined total of roughly 3,300 tonnes of gold.
The U.S. is about to lose overarching control of policymaking within the International Monetary Fund (IMF), thus the U.S. lockup on global gold is about to vanish, according to Business Insider.
                     
                               

Here Comes The Truth

 
In Eugene O'Neill's "The Iceman Cometh," the protagonist, Hickey, brings to Harry Hope's bar where many of his pseudo-admirers await his arrival the one thing most of us can't stand--the truth.

Here is an article about a feminist many so-called modern-day feminists will dislike and so too many men. But there's a helluva lot of truth here, truth that needs to be heard, like it or otherwise. Truth about Hillary and truth about a Trump victory and the consequences for the two parties and the media.
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Talking to Camille Paglia is like approaching a machine gun: madness to stick your head up and ask a question, unless you want your brain blown apart by the answer, but a visceral delight to watch as she obliterates every subject in sight. Most of the time she does this for kicks. It’s only on turning to Hillary Clinton that she perpetrates an actual murder: of Clinton II’s most cherished claim, that her becoming 45th president of the United States would represent a feminist triumph
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‘In order to run for president of the United States, you have to spend two or three years of your life out on the road constantly asking for money and most women find that life too harsh, too draining,’ Paglia argues. ‘That is why we haven’t had a woman president in the United States — not because we haven’t been ready for one, for heaven’s sakes, for a very long time…’

Hillary hasn’t suffered — Paglia continues — because she is a woman. She has shamelessly exploited the fact: ‘It’s an outrage how she’s played the gender card. She is a woman without accomplishment. “I sponsored or co-sponsored 400 bills.” Oh really? These were bills to rename bridges and so forth. And the things she has accomplished have been like the destabilisation of North Africa, causing refugees to flood into Italy… The woman is a disaster!’

Not that Paglia was always opposed to the Clintons. She voted for Bill Clinton twice before becoming revolted by the treatment meted out to Monica Lewinsky: ‘One of the very first interviews I did here — the headline was “Kind of a bitch — why I like Hillary Clinton”. My jaundiced view of her is entirely the result of observing her behaviour. And last election, I voted for Jill Stein’s Green party. So I have already voted for a woman president.’

More: spectator.co.uk/2016/10/the-woman-is-a-disaster-camille-paglia-on-hillary-clinton

Do Your Job, Sir

Can it get any dirtier? And the answer is, you bet. Right-wing conspiracy, however, is a dog that will no longer hunt.

To FBI Director James Comey, do your freaking job. Don't stonewall another day. If it takes longer than to November 8 to do your job, criminal negligence charges should be filed against you since this has been a long brewing subject not new to you and your department. You are supposedly responsible to all the American people. Do your freaking job, sir. That's the only thing extraordinary about this.
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A new trove of emails that appear pertinent to the now-closed investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private email server was discovered after the F.B.I. seized at least one electronic device shared by Anthony D. Weiner and his estranged wife, Huma Abedin, a top aide to Mrs. Clinton, federal law enforcement officials said Friday.

The F.B.I. is investigating illicit text messages that Mr. Weiner, a former Democratic congressman from New York, sent to a 15-year-old girl in North Carolina. The bureau told Congress on Friday that it had uncovered new emails related to the Clinton case — one federal official said they numbered in the tens of thousands — potentially reigniting an issue that has weighed on the presidential campaign and offering a lifeline to Donald J. Trump less than two weeks before the election.

In a letter to Congress, the F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, said that emails had surfaced in an unrelated case, and that they “appear to be pertinent to the investigation.”

Mr. Comey said the F.B.I. was taking steps to “determine whether they contain classified information, as well as to assess their importance to our investigation.” He said he did not know how long it would take to review the emails, or whether the new information was significant.

nytimes.com/2016/10/29/us/politics/fbi-hillary-clinton-email. 

Inflation On The Rise

Inflation whether you have noticed is already on the rise.

Just look at the sovereign debt markets. Yields are up and bond prices down. Fed Chair Yellen and Bank of England headman Carney have said they will let inflation build. Yellen called it, high pressure economy. What would central bankers be without some catch term?

So here's the question: Will inflation be a short term or longer term affair. In short, an afternoon quickie or one more enduring? That's the question investors need to be considering now, particularly once the U.S. election is history.

As the Financial Times pointed out today:
"Global government bonds are facing their largest monthly losses in more than three years, as investors fear that the anchors of a rally that drove sovereign bond yields to record lows this summer are under threat.

Broad unease in sovereign bond markets has resulted in the largest drop in monthly total returns since May 2013, according to JPMorgan, led by a sell-off in British government debt.
While the gilt market is handicapped by the inflationary threat of a weaker currency, bond investors are also grappling with the prospect of the Federal Reserve raising interest rates in December and uncertainty over divisions at the European Central Bank over the future of its quantitative easing programme.

“What is coming into focus is the notion that QE may be going out of fashion,” said Adrian Hilton, fund manager at Columbia Threadneedle Investments."

In case yo don't recognize it, prices of bonds are receding and yields are climbing as central bankers are tossing in the towel on their best laid-monetary-easing plans that have gone awry when it comes to recovering global economies. Say hello to ECB President Mario Draghi. In a recent post, financialspuds.blogspot.com/2016/10/rigged-cpi,we mentioned TIPS, inflation protected securities. A sister article in today's same issue of the Times headlines, investors just dumped $1.1 billion into TIPS, the largest inflow since early 2015. Recall jawboning works--or at least it's tried--in both directions.

Our sense of it is inflation will be more of a long term rather than short term thing. Coming off these abnormally prolonged, artificially-held low rate, it won't much to cause serious damage to your portfolio, especially if you're in the wrong places at the right time. Look for central bank bureaucrats and regulators to do exactly the wrong thing at the right time here. Slow growth and inflation made worse by bureaucrats and politicians.

This won't be the good kind CBers hope to see.

Hawkish Yellen

Now read the rest of the story from mauldineconomics.com/the-10th-man. 

Here's an excerpt.
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I have been saying this for quite a while, but nobody is listening to me.
This is not a good Fed. They aren’t making decisions on a predictive, forward-looking basis. They are very concerned about optics, appearances—how things look. And to them, right now the optics of having Fed funds at 0.375% with unemployment at 5% are very bad.
But that isn’t how it’s supposed to work. The Fed has a few hundred PhD economists who are supposed to be doing the heavy mental lifting, trying to predict what is going to happen in the future. And the future doesn’t look so good. The data is weakening, not strengthening. And yet here we are, talking about rate hikes.

There are other considerations.

The first is politics. Everyone at the Fed down to the janitor has spent the last few months denying any political influence in monetary policy decisions, which means that, of course, there is political influence in monetary policy decisions. If the rate hike comes in the first FOMC meeting after the election, in December—it won’t be a coincidence.
But there’s more to it than that. We are beginning to learn that the Fed (much like the Bank of Canada) takes fiscal policy into account when making monetary policy decisions. And fiscal policy, up until this point, has not been all that stimulative. But it will be, soon.

The bad news is that either Trump or Clinton will become president. Bad if you’re a deficit scold, like me. Clinton wants to raise taxes and spend the money on free stuff (like college tuition and infrastructure). Trump wants to cut taxes and spend even more (on a wall, and infrastructure, and the military).

Either way, we are staring down the barrel of quite a bit of fiscal “stimulus.”
A few Fed speakers have hinted that they are taking this into account in their forecasts (you can read more details here). To the extent that you think government spending causes economic growth (a tenuous relationship, for sure), the central bank should respond by keeping monetary policy tighter than it ordinarily would. Which means that the Fed is more likely to hike rates right after the election. Maybe because of politics, but also because of projected fiscal policy.

When I mention rate hikes to people, they are very dismissive. The Federal Reserve has disappointed many investors who were betting on rate hikes for many years. It is a classic boy-who-cried-wolf scenario. Of course, I have been saying since the SIC conference that a rate hike was imminent, so we shall see.

Overnight

One shining light overnight in Asia was the Nikkei 225. It gained 0.5% in early trading as the yen softened and rising bond yields helped lift the index near a six-month high. Financials were one of the benefactors of the session with the Nikkei trading at 17,459.02. It was the second consecutive week of gains.

In the U.S. the 10-year Treasury yield hit its highest level in almost five months.The dollar hit 105 yen and it helped investors who now expect higher U.S. interest rates later this year. It was a three-month for the dollar against the yen. The WSJ reported Japan released a batch of economic data at the start of Asian trading Friday. The core consumer price index slipped 0.5% from a year earlier in September, according to data from the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications.

In other markets the Kospi was off 0.2%, the Australian ASX 200 down 0.4%. The Hang Seng Index was down 0.1% as traders continue to process Thursday’s data showing China’s industrial profit growth slowed sharply in September to 7.7% from a year earlier, according to the Journal. And oil was mostly flat despite reports that members of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries told their Russian counterparts that the group would be willing to cut production by as much as 4% from peak output. The comments were made ahead of a meeting between Russia and OPEC delegates this weekend. Crude futures wavered between positive and negative with U.S. crude up 0.04 percent, after settling up 1.1 percent at $49.72 a barrel in the U.S., while Brent futures were up 0.08 percent in Asia, after settling at $50.47 in the previous session.

In China markets also slid after opening positive, the Shanghai composite was down 0.06 percent, while Shenzhen composite fell 0.416 percent. The U.S. dollar index, which tracks the greenback against a basket of major currencies, was trading at 98.835. Reuters noted that gold prices held steady on Friday amid a flat dollar and subdued Asian stocks, with the metal staying on track for its second straight weekly gain. Spot gold was little changed at $1,268.31 per ounce at 0111 GMT. The safe-haven asset is up about 0.2 percent so far this week.

Fresh Air

For a long time we've written about the exclusive GOP Republicans. Not that we've ever been a member,donor or ever will be. It was an interesting subject about a boring, staid  group of people who always professed to know much but in the end knew very little when it came to their much desired political success.

Today's Wall Street Journal published a front page article, "Populist Waves Flood GOP," that tries to explain how the party got here from there. It's really a rather pathetic piece, long on suppositions and short on reality.

The authors bring up so-called populist thrusts from a range of people, George Wallace to Ronald Reagan to the Tea Party and Pat Buchanan. Wallace, the former Alabama racist governor who underwent a metamorphose, captured the essence of both of these political party pretenders when he declared: "There's not a dime's worth of difference"in them.

That was then, this is now. Today it's $100 because inflation's been on a rampage since Wallace's day and those lying central bankers and Washington bureaucrats have been trying to hide it from the masses like the Clinton campaign's covering up her serious illness. In the 1950s the Republican party consisted of your local country club crowd, all-white, exclusive and full of fatuous jokes. Now we're nearly one-fifth into the 21st Century and the Republican party is,well, you get the idea--nearly all white, exclusive and full of fatuous highbrow nonsense. These are folks who always point their little pinky when drinking their afternoon tea.

A good place to begin your fact checking is the editorial board these two authors labor for. They might wear the obligatory dark suit, white shirt and kaleidoscope-colored tie, but they, like their party, are bankrupt. In their view the crude Trump went from a clown to a racist to, even worse, a fiendish crude groper. In Trump's defense, at least that's not as bad as being a crude fiendish groper. But rumor has it many of the homely women who work there are just plain pissed off because the Donald hasn't tried to grope them yet. Hang in there, ladies. Dreams can come true.

Now that the rubber is about to meet the spot at the end of the campaign trail these braves souls are beginning to run stories questioning the corrupt Hillary most of them want to vote for because Trump snubbed them without the benefit of genuflecting to their status and honor and their well-worn worldly advice when he launched his quest.. A while back there was a popular saying: Go figure! With these crusty folks, it's not hard. This is the same crowd that coughed up an insipid, dull Mitch Romney.

The whole election farce is boring to begin with. So here's your choice: Watch paint dry with Mitch. Kasich or Cruz or get seriously entertained with the Donald? One thing about fresh air; it removes a lot of the past stench.

Wetting And Whining

Here are three charts you need to look at and decide what to make of it for yourself.

We can't have any sense of an economic downturn before the election. Bloomberg, CNN and the rest of  the Hillary-fronting MSM would wet the drawers. The truth is since Trump's been able to hang around this close for so long, they've already wet them a few times.

                           
zerohedge.com/news/2016-10-27/thursday-humor-jobless-claims

All those whining about the debates not discussing real issues owing to all the side issues about sex and such miss the point entirely. There is only one issue in this election--the most important one of all--corruption.

It's center stage and there's no way around it. Whine all you want.

Government corruption, pure and all too simple. Corruption from top to bottom. Government corruption that can no longer be denied, covered up or ignored. The Clintons even to someone willing to grant the benefit of doubt have a long pattern of things, many quite unsavory, to use a euphemism, following them around. The two, him and her, are inextricably bound and the Clinton Foundation is only one of the areas.

But it supersedes just them.The Obama lies,the DoJ, the Bernie Sanders political assassination, the presence of what can only be called thugs working in the Clinton campaign, the mysterious and untimely death of people associated or traveling in their sphere to name but a few. The clear attempt to cover up her medical condition. Her connections to Wall Street and big banking. The obvious MSM reluctance to do its job, not to mention the now substantiated closeness of MSM with Hillary that removes any doubt about their claims of being just objective news sources. They aren't. They are shills, accomplices, masquerading as members of anything but a free, unbiased press enjoying judicial and other exemptions they clearly don't deserve.

Look at Brazil, Argentina, Venezuela. The President of the EU publicly noted it's okay to lie at times.These are bureaucrats,elitists, greedy politicians and money changers.This is about corruption,  global government corruption. Corruption destroys confidence and trust, the wellsprings of any democracy or so-called democracy. All other issues are secondary.

For the first time the corruption that conveniently and skilfully got swept under the carpet in the past is now, and quite healthily so, in the cynosure of common people. They smell it, they see it and they've been eating it for a longtime. Irrespective of who wins next month, all that is about to change.