Archive - Aug 10, 2014 - Story

This week, President Barack Obama announced that he was authorizing American airstrikes in Iraq. He described his intervention as a “humanitarian effort to help save thousands of Iraqi civilians who are trapped on a mountain” and as an effort “to protect our American personnel.” One word that he didn’t mention is “oil,” but it lies near the center of American motives for intervention.

When it comes to ancient wonders of the world, there is the tower of Babel, and to a lesser extent, the leaning tower of Pisa. Sadly, modern wonders leave something to be desired: case in point, this 30 metres high garbage mountain at the crossroad of Huanghe avenue and Zhufeng street of Shijiazhuang, central China's Hebei province. The garbage mountain has been piled up as high as a 9-story Building in the last 30 years. The local village committee now is dealing with these wastes: best of luck. And to think all it took were several trillion in non-performing loans...

A month ago we explained that 11.7% of the world's population was at war and mapped out the key global geopolitical hotspots. However, while Israel, Palestine, Ukraine, and Iraq monopolize the headlines nowadays, they are not the only groups currently at war. Serious armed conflicts are happening all over the world - we just don't hear about them. Here's our complete list of the wars happening right now...

Our impression is that today’s near-absence of risk premiums is both unintentional and poorly appreciated. We shudder at how much risk is being delivered – knowingly or not – to investors who plan to retire even a year from now. Barron’s published an article on target-term funds last month with this gem (italics mine): “JPMorgan's 2015 target-term fund has a 42% equity allocation, below that of its peers. Its fund holds emerging-market equity and debt, junk bonds, and commodities.” We don't believe that risk has been permanently removed from risky assets. The belief that it has is itself the greatest risk that investors face here.

With Ukraine shelling having killed 52 civilians in the city of Horlikva (Donetsk region) over the last two weeks alone, Russia is growing increasingly vocal of the need for a humanitarian cease-fire (notably with Germany also "concerned about the humanitarian situation" in Ukraine). However, as AP reports, fighting raged once again today as Ukrainian forces killed 1 and injured 10 in Donetsk, ignoring calls for a cease-fire. Andriy Lysenko, a spokesman for Ukraine's National Security and Defense Council, said the only way for the rebels in Donetsk to save their lives would be to "lay down their arms and give up." Meanwhile, just as we warned, the mainstream media is starting to pick up on the 'other' border dispute that Russia is involved in as Putin mediates talks between Armenia and Azerbaijan.

“Train wreck is a pretty good term to describe what is coming.  But this train wreck isn’t simply going to hit a wall out of the blue. Actually, it has been forming and accumulating and expanding for many years now, and yet it has simply been ignored, particularly by the financial markets which have ridden this bubble to these extreme and historic heights. The only issue is, when does it hit the wall?  The answer to that question is it’s not very far down the road, and I can promise you that is when all hell is going to break loose.”

Although the US seems intent in playing the drums of war, perhaps realizing that its economic power is slowly headed for oblivion, to join the likes of Japan and the UK, American firms waving international flags don’t have the appetite for war that neocon elitists in the State Department or star-studded bellicosarians in the halls of the Pentagon have.  Not at all!  And here is where the feared industrial-military complex hopefully falls apart as globalist firms give their overall support to peace as a preferred alternative to the specter of a nuclear holocaust.  Russia doesn’t want any military confrontation, nor does China, nor do American and European corporate entities that see no future in suicide. Americans need not drink the kool-aid offered by John McCain and his ilk in the Pentagon, Congress or the State Department; nor should they listen to the sad sack windmill-mouthpiece they have enlisted in the White House: Barack Obama.

One can’t help when looking at all the geopolitical as well as threats of non-containment of the deadly Ebola virus and wonder: Who’s in control here? Here’s a hint – it’s not the people lining up to give the message via oratory salvos. One thing has now been shown in vivid detail: The more messaging put out along these same lines will only make it abundantly clear to any and all opposition that those in charge haven’t a clue.

Presented with no comment (and no hints)...

If the stated purpose of US intervention in the "country formerly known as Iraq", which saw the fourth consecutive US president launching military strikes in a nation now absolutely destroyed thanks to US involvement, was humanitarian (it isn't) and allegedly to "protect" the Yazidi ethnic minority members stuck on a mountain near Sinjar, then it needs some fine-tuning. The reason: as Reuters reports, Islamic State militants have slaughtered at least 500 Yazidis during their latest offensive in the north, with Iraq's human rights minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani adding that the ISIS jihadists also buried alive some of their victims, including women and children. Some 300 women were kidnapped as slaves, he added.

According to the recent AAII Asset Allocation Survey by retail investors, cash levels in July dropped to the lowest level since 1999 at only 15.8%. It appears that the average retail investor has once again been led astray by monetary pumping.

One can only hope the US military doesn't confuse kinetic strikes on the same Iraqi Jihadists it provides weapons and training to in Syria as seen in the clip below... with what it claims is a humanitarian air drop, as seen in the clip below.

While the biggest geopolitical news of the past week was Obama's announcement he would become only the fourth president in a row to order military action in Iraq, explicitly targeting the ISIS jihadists, the far bigger question are the developments that spurred the administration to finally act. Here are, courtesy of Vice News, the first two parts of a series looking at life in the Islamic State caliphate. Vice News reporter Medyan Dairieh spent three weeks embedded with the Islamic State, gaining access to the group in Iraq and Syria as the first and only journalist to document its inner workings.

It has not been a good summer for airplane travel, and following the latest news out of Iran, where earlier today an Iran-140 Sepahan Air passenger plane bound for Tabas in northeast Iran with 48 passengers and crew on board crashed on a road near Tehran’s Mehrabad airport on Sunday, killing at least 38 people, things just got even worse.