Archive - Jun 2015

"Americans increasingly believe that their country isn’t serving its own citizens... The same routine plays out over and again. We are told a massive bill must be passed, all the business lobbyists and leaders tell how grand it will be, but that it must be rushed through before the voters spoil the plan..  And when ordinary Americans who never asked for the plan, who don’t want the plan, who want no part of the plan, resist, they are scorned, mocked, and heaped with condescension."

The riots that left Baltimore in ashes in late April and the massacre that occurred last week at the historic Emanuel AME church in Charleston serve as vivid reminders of the extent to which American society now teeters perpetually on the edge of social upheaval. "A lot of the whites in the U.S. are starting to wake up," Robert Jones, grand dragon of the Loyal White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan in North Carolina, tells Reuters.

Some people talk about peak energy (or oil) supply. They expect high prices and more demand than supply. Other people talk about energy demand hitting a peak many years from now, perhaps when most of us have electric cars. Neither of these views is correct. The real situation is that we right now seem to be reaching peak energy demand through low commodity prices.

The Pentagon has released an 1,176-page book of instructions on the "The Law Of War" detailing acceptable ways of killing the enemy. The manual also states that journalists can be labeled "unprivileged belligerents," an obscure term that replaces the Bush era "unlawful enemy combatant." The Obama Administration’s definition of "enemy combatant" was vague enough, basically meaning any male of a military age who "happens to be there," and this shift appears to make the situation even more dangerous.

We have argued that as economic ties between China and Russia deepen Beijing could increasingly look to Moscow to meet China’s energy needs. This would of course only serve to further de-dollarize the global energy trade, dealing yet another blow to the petrodollar system. Sure enough, Russia has, for the first time in history, overtaken Saudi Arabia as China’s top oil supplier.

Look, it’s unfortunate to have to live in a world where there’s crazy people who want to do bad things. But it would be even more unfortunate to live in a world where we are regulated against being able to defend ourselves against those people... and the institution with the monopoly over ‘protecting’ us has a long-term track record of violence, intimidation, and abuse.

Markets that have been cut off from the monetary spigot often present far better opportunities...

As they say on stage, "break a leg" John...

COSTELLO: So there are two ways to bring unemployment down, and the easier of the two is to have people stop looking for work. ABBOTT: Now you’re thinking like an Economist.

COSTELLO:  I don’t even know what the hell I just said!  ABBOTT: Now you’re thinking like a Politician.

In a first, the SEC has proactively approached several businesses to investigate failures in cybersecurity that may have created a new method of insider trading. The Commission’s investigation, along with a probe by the Secret Service, is focused on a group they’re calling FIN4 which they suspect to have broken into corporate email accounts to steal confidential information about mergers and acquisitions. Naturally, the SEC declined to comment exactly how broad their investigation is, or really anything else on the matter.

Given that the Greek delegation already left, this is hardly a surprise but...

That's it for tonight. #Eurogroup will continue tomorrow at 13.00.

— Alexander Stubb (@alexstubb) June 24, 2015

The federal personnel chief said Tuesday that she does not believe “anyone is personally responsible” for the massive hack of federal employee data and security clearance files.

Translation - no one is accountable, it was a glitch.

With a DoJ probe having predictably gone nowhere, a group of pensioners and retirement funds are suing Wall Street and Markit for colluding to monopolize the CDS market. Amusingly, Citadel has been subpoenaed to discuss how it was shut out of creating a CDS trading platform by the "oligopolistic" activities of TBTF banks, even as the firm looks set to dominate the market for IR swaps.

Echoing the era of McCarthyism, Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) files obtained by Judicial Watch reveal that the dad, maternal grandpa and father-in-law of President Obama’s trusted senior advisor, Valerie Jarrett, were hardcore Communists under investigation by the U.S. government.