Archive - Aug 30, 2014

The Islamic State is nothing if not ambitious. Despite no record of current 'airplane' assets in their annual reports, ISIS has begun detaining and forcing Syrian pilots to train militant fighters to fly stolen aircraft. According to CNN Arabic, the pilots (and their planes and helicopters) were abducted when the terrorist group gained control of Tabqa military base. It appears that if beheadings, executions, and whippings are not enough to strike fear into the hearts of the locals, then (just as America is tryiung to do), an air assault will greatly demoralize. We can only imagine how this changes Obama's strategy (and just where are all the rest of Syria and Iraq's airplanes stored?)

Don’t be surprised to lose if you don’t make an effort at being competitive. And if you go out of your way to make yourself less competitive, expect to lose. If that sounds like simple common sense, that’s because it is. But it’s also exactly what the US has been doing for years...

As regular readers are well aware, when it comes to "more than arms length" equity market intervention in New Normal markets, the New York Fed's preferred "intermediary" of choice to, how should one say, boost investor sentiment aka "protect from a plunge", is none other than Chicago HFT powerhouse, Citadel. Recently we discovered that the true culprit behind the May 2010 Flash Crash was not Waddell & Reed, but quote stuffing. The most recent revelation for Citadel is that quote stuffing is not just some byproduct of some "innocuous" HFT strategy, as none other than the Nasdaq has now stated on the record, that the most leveraged hedge fund (at 9x regulatory to net assets), and the third largest after Bridgewater and Millennium, used quote stuffing as a "trading strategy." The following 2 clips give a sense of what goes on from day to day inside the firm that trades more volume than the NYSE every day...

Presented with little comment aside to suggest one scratch beneath the thinning veneer of record nominal stock prices every once in a while to take the temperature of the ugly reality that no one is talking about...

Confirming Europe's realization just how serious events are, and how far down the rabbit hole Europe's bureaucrats have gone, French President Francois Hollande, while stressing that a failure by Russia to reverse a flow of weapons and troops into eastern Ukraine would force the bloc to impose new economic measures i.e., nothing new, it is what he said just after that indicated a dramatic change in rhetoric: "Are we going to let the situation worsen, until it leads to war?" Hollande said at a news conference. "Because that's the risk today. There is no time to waste."

What a difference a year makes...

Words matter, the way they are said can matter even more, yet what is just as important is the posture, and yes – that can include even your choice of attire. Agree or not with the policies, but the decision for that suit in our opinion was anything but a faux pas, it was intentional... It was sending a visual cue to all that we are not fiercely red, white, and blue. We are taupe.

UPDATE: *POLICE, PROTESTERS CLASH IN ISLAMABAD; AT LEAST 230 HURT: AFP

Against the background we initialliy explained here, and the escalation we discussed here, Imran Khan's "Pakistan Spring" has grown dramatically. The former cricketing-legend and erstwhile opposition leader's call for people to take to the streets to demand new 'unrigged' elections has 1000s of protesters breaching the Prime Minister's residence in Islamabad. Along with anti-government cleric Tahirul Qadri, Khan urged peaceful protest but, as AP reports, an estimated 20,000 police in riot gear are blocking the procession using tear gas and rubber bullets. Local hospitals report at least 100 injuries.

The more the Status Quo pursues the same old Keynesian Cargo Cult script of central planning and free money for financiers, the more self-liquidating the system becomes.

This seems to be the biggest question in financial markets for me right now because the math just doesn`t add up any way you slice it.

I was looking at the entire history of the volatility index (the oft-cited "VIX') and found an interesting parallel.

Every way they turn, states face recurring economic problems and the need to distract or suppress the victims of exploitation; war making serves the dual purpose of (a) disguising fundamental social conflicts by refocusing attention and/or blame, and (b) providing economic gains to the state and its allies. Art of War actually states that “no country has ever profited from protracted warfare,” and cautions generals to “fight under Heaven with the paramount aim of ‘preservation.’” Yet as far back as we have historical records, these sorts of ideas have fallen on deaf ears among governments and military organizations alike.

"Government engineered false-flag terrorism is a historically established fact. With all this hype circling ISIS, I have to suggest that maybe, just maybe, we are being given the ultimate scapegoat for the ultimate false flag attack. I believe the time is in fact ripe for a large scale false-flag on American soil."

The goal will be to terrify you and those around you into seeking out a more powerful, more centralized government authority to protect your security, to provide cover for the continued planned collapse of American society into third world status, and out of these ashes, the centralization of the political and financial foundations of our world into the hands of an elite few.

Despite border closures, flight bans, cordoning off the sick (and healthy), and rubber (and live) bullets and tear gas on 'protesters'; the world's worst outbreak of Ebola just keeps spreading, now to a sixth African nation. Just day after Congo (5th nation) reported cases of Ebola, as The BBC reports, Senegal's health minister confirmed the first case of Ebola in his nation yesterday and Bloomberg confirms 20 more people are "under surveillance." Meanwhile, in Guinea a Red Cross official said riots had broken out in the nation's 2nd largest city over rumors that health workers had infected people with the virus; and Nigerians are protesting plans to build isolation units in some local clinics. "contained"

A dispassionate discussion of the technical condition of the dollar.