Archive - Nov 22, 2015 - Story

According to current and former officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity, US Central Command may have been involved in a year long effort to obscure the fact that America’s strategy to combat ISIS simply was not effective. "At the least, the prospect that senior officials intentionally skewed intelligence conclusions has raised questions about how much Mr. Obama, Congress and the public can believe the military’s assessments."  

The U.S. is, in fact, Europe’s enemy - not merely Russia’s enemy. Not merely the truth’s enemy. Not merely democracy’s enemy.

If it doesn’t start a war in the short run, it’s going to guarantee a U.S. bankruptcy in the slightly longer run. All the “hawks” running for president this year (which is to say, almost every candidate) seem oblivious to the fact that, in anything but the briefest conflict, economic power completely trumps military hardware. Simply put, whenever you see a mention of the U.S. Navy and the Spratlys in the same paragraph, you’re seeing a reminder of an open vein helping to bleed America dry. And that’s the best case.

Having recently explained how "The Fed has done everything it can to avoid surprising the market," vice-chair Stan Fischer better be right about what happens next. With all the double-edged FedSpeak and CONfidence reiteration - in the face of tsunami-like global deflationary forces only made reflexively worse by a soaring US Dollar - speculators are at extremely short bonds and short VIX (bullish stocks). The last time this happened was the end of QE1...

If the government’s official statistics are to be believed the U.S. economy is moving full steam ahead. Consumer are spending, the job market is expanding, real estate has recovered, stocks are soaring and the U.S. dollar is stronger than it has been in a decade. But if you have yet to realize it, billionaire investor Eric Sprott says "it’s all a lie." The manipulation of precious metals, coupled with the supply and demand fundamentals which Sprott says will lead to shortages over the next few years as mining companies reduce output or close up shop, will leave many investors who think their gold holdings are easily convertible to physical assets with nothing more than depreciating Yellen Bucks at exactly the moment they’ll need precious metals in their possession.

It's that time of year again...

Someone decided that the exact opening of Gold futures trading on a Sunday night - ahead of a holiday week in the US - was the perfect time to liquidate over $161 million notional of 'paper' precious metals contracts... Currencies were unmoved, stocks are leaking higher and bonds lower.

Mass surveillance at home and endless military projection abroad are the twin sides of the same coin of national security, which must simply be maximized as much as possible. Conspicuously missing from President Hollande’s decisive declaration of war however, was any mention of the biggest elephant in the room: state-sponsorship. A senior Western official familiar with a large cache of intelligence obtained this summer told the Guardian that “direct dealings between Turkish officials and ranking ISIS members was now ‘undeniable.’”

"Everything is awesome," rang out as anchor after anchor explained how the stock market's "best week of the year" - after mass murder in Paris and as hawkish a Fed as most traders have known was unleashed - was just the start... and Santa Claus was on his way. However, there are a few things they forgot to mention...

#BringBackOurIgnorance

"The global dollar standard, that is now the longest-lived of these artificial monetary systems, has developed a bunch of stress cracks and is in the process of imploding right now. There is going to be before the end of this decade, most likely, another emergency meeting of a bunch of finance ministers and economists to try and hash out another world monetary system. It is just history repeating, and it is a natural consequence of a man-made, artificial manipulation of the free market."

The Fed, in its reflexive attempt to boost confidence in the economy, is not only engaging in massive policy error, but is about to unleash a recession which will promptly force it to cut rates again (to negative) and start another episode of QE.

"Those who say the United States should have intervened in 2011 to topple Assad are left having to explain either how they could have rallied U.S. public support for an Iraq-like occupation and rebuilding of Syria, or, in the absence of that, how Syria would have avoided Libya’s fate."