Afghanistan

Friday's latest resignation of yet another former Obama administration faithful - that of White House press secretary Jay Carney - got us thinking: how many people have jumped off the USS Obamic? The answer is, in short, a lot. Below is a list (by no means complete) of the most prominent officials and advisors who have quietly exited the Obama administration stage left over the past 6 years.

Mission Accomplished... Moments ago Obama proudly announced that America's job in Afghanistan is done. Heroin users and dealers around the world agree.

This should be good - President Barack Obama is expected to announce on Tuesday that the United States plans to keep just under 10,000 troops in Afghanistan after this year, if the Afghan government signs a security agreement.

Another day, another fumble by the Obama administration (intentional or not). 11 years after former CIA operative Valerie Plame was deliberately exposed by the Bush administration as the US officials tried to apply pressure on her husband, an American diplomat criticizing the US invasion to Iraq; the Obama Administration's press service unwittingly put the real name of the CIA's top spy in Afghanistan on the 'pool report' distributed to over 6,000 journalists. The Washington Post were the first to discover the FUBAR and while the CIA and White House had 'no comment', they warned that the officer and his family could be at risk if the name were published.

On this day when we should never forget, we are sure President Obama, fresh from his surprise snubbing of Karzai in Afghanistan, will try his best to remember who was in charge (and ultimately accountable) when the VA scandal broke.

After another, even deadlier, terrorist attack in Urumqi, Beijing must reevaluate its anti-terrorism strategy.

Vladimir Putin has concluded his lengthy interview having covered everything from "the end of the unipolar model of the world" - i.e. de-dollarization - to US and Europe's responsibility for Ukraine's "full-scale civil war." The Russian leader noted that he's "trying to help Ukraine" but following the loans from the IMF asks "where's our money?" and warned that US sanctions have had little effect on the Russian economy but will have a boomerang effect. The following distills his 120 minute discussion... Putin "expects common sense to prevail."

The de-dollarization escalates. As Reuters reports, Chinese banks have halted dollar transactions with most Afghan commercial banks. Whether this is related to the terrorist operations in the muslim-dominated Uighur region is unclear... also unclear is whether the Chinese banks will accept transactions with Afghan banks in CNY?

It appears yet again that China's "strike first" anti-terrorism policy has failed as explosions have rocked Urumqi, the capital city of China's unrest-plagued Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous region, killing (and injuring) multiple (but unknown) people. Social media suggests 2 SUVs entered the crowded market in the center of the city ploughing down onlookers, throwing explosives from the cars, before a blast was heard. One witness noted that the cars were painted with "uighur" language slogans. Flames and heavy smoke were seen nearby, police are on the scene and the 2 SUVs are being removed. There is no official death or injury count as of yet.

Fiat money is at base a form of indirect wealth transfer from those forced to hold the money to those issuing the money.

They say that gold is a geopolitical metal. Gold is real money with no counterparty risk and, furthermore, an excellent wealth preserver in time and space. Like fiat currencies (dollar, euro, yen, Yuan etc.), gold’s price is also influenced by political events, especially those having an international impact. Alan Greenspan, ex-chairman of the Federal Reserve, said that gold is money “in extremis”. This is why gold is part of most central banks’ reserves. It is the only reserve that is not debt and that cannot be devalued by inflation, contrary to fiat currencies.

The US economy is a house of cards. Every aspect of it is fraudulent, and the illusion of recovery is created with fraudulent statistics. American capitalism itself is an illusion. However, Washington has unique subjects. Americans will take endless abuse and blame some outside government for their predicament – Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, China, Russia. Such an insouciant and passive people are ideal targets for looting, and their economy, hollowed-out by looting, is a house of cards.

A bunch of folks in Hedge Fund Land have this idea that they can force a bit of a squeeze in the bond markets....

“We Are No Longer a Nation Ruled By Laws”

We’ve been hearing a lot about the so-called Deep State lately. What to make of this shadowy monster? Some observers link it to the paranoid fantasy called the New World Order, a staple of political talk radio (and a hobgoblin I don’t believe in). In popular movies such as the Jason Bourne epics and Mission Impossible, the Deep State launches hyper-complex schemes that work flawlessly and never fail. That is exactly why they have such high entertainment appeal. Viewers are thrilled by the precision, by the conceit of seeming infallibility. The Deep State definitely exists; it just doesn’t work the way it is depicted in the movies. We like to say that we're allergic to conspiracy theories because human beings are generally too inept to carry out schemes at the grand scale, as well as being poor secret-keepers. Insider knowledge is almost always swapped around, even in secretive organizations, often recklessly so, because doling it out confers status, tactical advantage, and sometimes money for the doler-outer. But the Deep State isn’t a secret. It operates in plain sight.