Overnight

Monday overnight started off down for many markets. Last week it was about two central banks, Bank of Japan and the Federal  Reserve while this week's highlight will most probably be the first Presidential debate. There are three schedules presidential and one vice presidential debates on tap all toll. So investors will have some distractions from their usual routines.

Asia markets opened lower on Monday, with sentiment this week likely to be dominated by the first U.S. presidential debate, as well as an upcoming informal meeting of OPEC producers.

In Australia, the ASX 200 was down 0.43 percent in early trade, with most sectors trading lower. The energy sector was down 0.77 percent, materials was lower by 0.6 percent and the heavily-weighted financial sector fell 0.27 percent.

Major banking stocks in the country were slightly lower, with ANZ down 0.33 percent, Commonwealth Bank of Australia off 0.16 percent,Westpac down 0.16 percent and the National Australia Bank dropping 0.25 percent. Japan's Nikkei 225 was down 0.59 percent, while across the Korean Strait, the Kospi dropped 0.18 percent."Asia Pacific investors are bracing for a sell day, after European and U.S. traders took some hard-won risk off the table," said Michael McCarthy, chief market strategist at CMC Markets.

In the currency market the dollar index traded at 95.477 against a basket of currencies off from the 96.00 it hit briefly last week before the Fed's new holding pattern announcement. The yen hit 100.75 not fat off levels reached at 100.00 last week.

Spread The Wealth

Last count we noted Big Pharma had 5,200 lobbyists in Washington. You want to know what's wrong with the country, you can start here. Both sides do it.

The news comes just a week after the announcement that Boehner will be joining the board of Reynolds American, the tobacco company responsible for brands such as Camel and Newport cigarettes. The tobacco board seat will likely earn Boehner over $400,000 a year in stock and cash. The Squire Patton Boggs salary has not been disclosed, but lawmakers of Boehner’s stature have easily obtained salaries at similar gigs in the seven-figure range.

They 're talking about John Boehner, the former Republican Speaker of the House. In case you don't know it, he is a huge smoker. That's the connection there, a $400,000 annual one.

Boehner is reportedly declining to register as a lobbyist for his new job at a lobbying firm, but that label makes little difference these days. Thousands of professionals engaged in government affairs positions work to influence policy on behalf of well-heeled special interests every day without registering under the Lobbying Disclosure Act. The law governing lobby registration is virtually unenforced.

Want to guess why that law is unenforced?
blacklistednews.com/John_Boehner_Cashes_Out_Joins_Corporate_Lobbying_Firm_That_Represents_China.

More recently we had the Mylan EpiPen scandal. It looks like a troika, momma, daddy and daughter. The difference here is all three are powerful elitists. One supposes that's how a U..S senator,  head lobbyist and a big firm CEO get characterized--a family affair.

After Gayle Manchin took over the National Association of State Boards of Education in 2012, she spearheaded an unprecedented effort that encouraged states to require schools to purchase medical devices that fight life-threatening allergic reactions.

The association’s move helped pave the way for Mylan Specialty, maker of EpiPens, to develop a near monopoly in school nurses’ offices. Eleven states drafted laws requiring epinephrine auto-injectors. Nearly every other state recommended schools stock them after what the White House called the "EpiPen Law" in 2013 gave funding preference to those that did.

The CEO of Mylan then, and now, was Heather Bresch. Gayle Manchin is Heather Bresch’s mother.

Mylan is the subject of congressional investigations related to huge price hikes the company announced last month. It also faces an antitrust probe by the New York attorney general stemming from its EpiPen sales contracts with schools.

Bresch is testifying before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee on Wednesday at a hearing called by Republican and Democratic members of the panel.

In October 2012, Mylan sponsored a morning of health presentations at the association’s annual conference. The presentations included a panel described as being on three of the biggest school health concerns, including food allergies.

The presenter at the panel, Chicago-based allergy doctor Ruchi Gupta, received more than $400,000 last year from Mylan for research on which she was the principal investigator, according to Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services records. The center began releasing drug and device makers’ payments to doctors in 2013, when Gupta got more than $17,000 from Mylan for speaking, education, food and travel.

About this time, Mylan launched its "EpiPen4Schools” program, which has provided more than 700,000 free EpiPens to 65,000 schools, about half the nation's schools. The New York attorney general's investigation centers on this program, which required schools to buy EpiPens rather than its competitors if they got discounted versions, but Mylan has since changed the policy.

In December 2012, the association announced an "epinephrine policy initiative" designed to "help state boards of education as they develop student health policies regarding anaphylaxis and epinephrine auto-injector access and use," according to a press release that month. The resulting policy “discussion guide” listed key components that school policies and state legislation should have, including protection from legal liability for the school.

It was the first time the group had addressed food allergies as policy despite its own admission that it had been a growing issue since about 2000.

Previously, the association carefully avoided corporate influence, especially when its policy guidance was involved, says Brenda Welburn, the former longtime executive director. Companies would sponsor conference meals at the most, she said.

Manchin became president-elect of the education association in late 2010 and Welburn retired at the end of 2011. Welburn recalls Manchin stopping by her office saying her "daughter's company" could donate to the group. The following year, it did.  "It just looked so bad to me," Welburn said. "She (Manchin) becomes president and all of a sudden NASBE is saying EpiPens are a good thing for schools."

Pappa Manchin is a Democrat Senator from West Virginia, a former governor there. The company was founded and first started doing business in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia in 1961.  Read more:

usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2016/09/20/family-matters-epipens-had-help-getting-schools-manchin-bresch

The Cliff At The End

"We must select the illusion that appeals to our temperament, and embrace it with passion."
                                                                                                             Cyril Connolly

Tomorrow evening the American people--those who care to tune in, perhaps giving up for the moment another American tradition, but one seemingly declining in popularity of late, Monday Night football--will be offered the first of another episode in what has become known every four years as a debate.  Choosing one's brand of nepenthe is one the few reaming freedoms of choice still left for now.

It's supposed to be about choice, the differences and the opportunity to clear things up for those who might care to express their personal opinions a few weeks later. That is to say, who might be the better choice for the nation's future. It isn't.

The illusion is there's a difference between the two participants.There isn't. One offers a future of being bitten to death socially and economically slowly by a flock of ducks, the other devoured by a hungry 500 pound African male lion. Such fanfares are usually taunt with well-worn popularized MSM themes served up with the proper hand-picked settings and moderators, another illusion, this one of probity and faux fairness.

Contrary to the opinion of many, this is not about which lives matter, race, creed or color. This is about power and control. It's about riling up and preparing the masses for the next big one, something that's much closer than most realize. In this case the powers that be, aided by their cohorts in MSM, have worked long and hard to reverse the sexes. It's part of the illusion. Skillful to be sure, but still arrogantly deceptive. The cliff at the end of this road has many names, but it's always spelled the same--One World Government.

Do You Really Want More Of Same?

If it seems like much of the long standing status quo is coming down around society today there are plenty of good reasons. Here's just one of then. This is from the Daily Bell thedailybell.com/news-analysis/loss-of-fbi-reputation-irredeemable-james-comey-must-resign. Name an institution not tainted or under suspicion of such. And here's the MSM joke: They want you to vote now for more of the same.

Fresh proof the FBI’s Hillary email probe was a joke … Yet another surprise revelation suggests strongly that the FBI’s probe of Hillary Clinton’s e-mail mess was anything but a by-the-book investigation.  House Oversight Committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) said he learned only Friday that the Justice Department gave immunity deals to Clinton’s former chief of staff, Cheryl Mills, and two other aides. That brings to five the number of Clintonistas who got a pass in exchange for testimony and/or information. -New York 

The FBI’s erosion of reputation – taking place this very day and minute as a result of the Clinton email mess – could not have happened to a more deserving operation.

For 75 years, the FBI has terrorized the American public with increasing vigor and brutality. Much of the FBI “crimes” it focuses on – insider trading and the like – weren’t even thought to be criminal a few decades ago.

It is increasingly clear that the drug-dealing prosecuted by the FBI takes place at the highest levels of America’s political office. Enough has been reported (certainly in the alternative media) about Clinton/Bush/CIA cocaine or heroin dealings to generate what may be a believable profile of these operations.

When it comes to white collar banking crime, the American public is increasingly skeptical about the engine of the industry – central banks themselves.

Generally speaking, there are lingering and expanding  questions about whom is being prosecuted (for what) in finance, banking and drug crime.

When it comes to terrorism, there is significant skepticism, especially among the alternative media, as to whether incidents are being staged to give the FBI something dramatic to do.

And now come high-profile reports in major New York newspapers calling a  major FBI investigation a “joke.”

But it is not the investigation that is a “joke” but the FBI itself. Somehow people seem to have forgotten the “hair evidence” fiasco that came to light in 2013.

Here from the Guardian:

In July 2013, the FBI admitted that the foundations of what it called “hair comparison evidence” – a technique that its agents had used in hundreds of criminal cases nationwide and spread through the training of state-based detectives potentially through tens of thousands of other cases – were scientifically invalid. A preliminary review of the FBI’s follicular flaws found that:

-Microscopic hair analysis could not scientifically distinguish one individual to the exclusion of all others.
-Statistical weight could not be given to comparisons to suggest a likelihood that the hair derived from a specific source.
-Expert witnesses should not cite the number of hair analyses they had conducted in the lab to bolster the idea that they could definitively state that a hair belonged to a specific individual.

Tens of thousands may have been put in jail mistakenly based on hair evidence that some in the FBI knew to be false. Exactly how many lives were ruined is not clear as the FBI has surely never published a definitive account.

In fact, this is part of the problem. The FBI is generally not held to account in any single aspect of its operations.

In bluntest terms, the FBI performs a function similar to that of the 20th century KGB. It creates high-profile “criminal cases” to reinforce elite memes. For instance, banking elites are currently fixated on creating a “war on terror.” The FBI is charged with finding and arresting terrorists to buttress this narrative.

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.