Drug Money

For anyone who (still) believes that Canada has a diversified economy...

Banks in the US and Europe are trying to develop a cashless transactions system. The concept is to establish a comprehensive ledger for a business or a person that records everything received and spent, and all of the assets held – mortgages, investment portfolios, debts, contractual financial obligations, and anything else of market value. There would be no need for cash because the ledger would tell you and anyone you were considering a transaction with how much is available and would be transactable at any specific moment. This is not a dreamy idea. Blythe Masters is leading a new business effort to develop a universal cashless system. Not only is she gathering significant investor interest, but the Federal Reserve and various US Government agencies have become keenly interested in the potential usefulness and efficiencies of a universal cashless system

Just days after JPMorgan revealed it would fire another 5,000 by the end of the year in a "scalpel" headcount reduction, overnight the world's favorite drug money laundering bank HSBC unleashed the "machete" and announced it would cut almost 50,000 workers, or one in five bankers, a move which would shrink the investment bank division by one-third. The reason: the same why US corporations are laying off tens of thousands so they can fund record stock buybacks and enrich their shareholders - to boost profits so that more money can be channeled in the form of dividends.

What’s so shocking about the story below is not that a 20-year veteran of the Houston police force, who was previously named one of the “Officers of the Year” by the Officers Union, was trafficking weapons for drug cartels. What’s shocking is that he was actually indicted and faces life in prison. He should’ve worked for a federal agency like the DEA or TSA, in which case he might not have even been fired.

What happens when the "impartial and independent" media puts its relationship with advertisers (especially when said advertisers are admitted criminal consortiums among whose chief sources of revenue in recent decades has been facilitating tax evasion and "laundering the world's drug money") above the interests of its readers and the presentation of "imperatial and independent" facts? This: "The coverage of HSBC in Britain's Daily Telegraph is a fraud on its readers. If major newspapers allow corporations to influence their content for fear of losing advertising revenue, democracy itself is in peril."

Contrary to popular opinion, it is not “demand” from the world’s population which creates the mind destroying drug trade. Rather, it is the world financial oligarchy, looking for massive profits and the destruction of the minds of the population it is determined to dominate, which organized the drug trade. The case of HSBC underscores that point. Serving as the central bank of this global apparatus, is HSBC.

West Uses Anti-Terror Laws to Murder Farmers, Small-Time Drug Dealers and Low-Level Taliban Members

With the revelations of systemic, widespread corporate criminality of banking institutions in recent years, it is clear that global Bank CEOs are becoming the new Drug Lords.

"The DEA doesn’t want the drug war to end,” said Nelson, when asked about a possible connection between the agency’s hatred of legal pot and its buddies in Sinaloa. “If it ends, they don’t get their toys and their budgets. Once it ends, they aren’t going to have the kind of influence in foreign government. I’m not a conspiracy theorist, but where there’s smoke there’s probably fire.”

“We’ve spent 1.3 trillion since 1972 on the drug war. What have we gotten for that? Drugs are cheaper and easier to get than ever before,”

However, the Mexican drug cartels have been bailed out by America’s drug warriors who have cracked down on prescription pain killers.

“Rarely Does A Monthly Report On The United States Job Market Look So Terrific On The Surface While Being So Disappointing Underneath”

More than 100,000 protesters congregated at Democracy Monument in Bangkok yesterday to protest Thai PM Yingluck Shiniwatra’s consideration of an amnesty bill to pardon her banned brother Thaksin Shiniwatra, the former Thai PM ousted from the country in a 2006 coup.

Recent surveys and research studies by sources from the UN to streetRx.com put the size of the illegal drug market in the U.S. at anywhere from $200 to $750 billion. The market is notoriously hard to track by design, and it is constantly evolving as prices and usage fluctuates; but as ConvergEx's Nick Colas notes, there’s a plethora of data on the topic: formal surveys by the CDC and user-submitted blog posted on websites like Hightimes.com trace price, usage, and traffic stats for marijuana, powder and crack cocaine, d-methamphetamine, and heroin. Legalized dispensaries now allow us to estimate potential tax revenue from marijuana sales, while incarceration rates for drug offenders reveal the economic impact of the illegal drug trade. In short, while the illegal drug market might be hard to track – if only by virtue of its illegality – Colas points out that we can learn a lot about its size and scope by aggregating these formal and informal data. Most surprising of them all: illicit drug use is no longer the realm of just the youth.

This may become the most important article I’ve ever written. But whether it becomes that article or dwells in anonymity is up to you, the reader.

Those always on the lookout for alternative indicators of economic activity may be in luck.

We have long held the opinion that the markets, all of them, have been buoyed by what the Fed and the other central banks have done which was to pump a massive amount of money into the system. There are various ways to count this but about $16 trillion is my estimation. The economy in America has been flat-lining while the economies in Europe have been red-lining and while China has claimed growth their numbers did not add up and could not be believed. In other words, the economic fundamentals were not supporting the lofty levels of the markets which had rested upon one thing and one thing alone which was liquidity. Yesterday was the first day of the reversal. There will be more days to come.