FBI

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.

Did you hear the one about the Vegas gambler, the Pro golfer, and the Wall Street insider? Straight off the pages of some Hollywood script, the Wall Street Journal reports that Federal investigators are pursuing a major insider-trading probe involving finance, gambling and sports, examining the trading of investor Carl Icahn, golfer Phil Mickelson and Las Vegas bettor William "Billy" Walters. All three men have denied any investigations or "no comment"-ed about "well timed" stock trades in Clorox in 2011 - around the time Icahn made a $10.2bn bid for the company. Mr. Walters and Mr. Mickelson, 43, play golf together; and rather comedically, Mr. Icahn said he didn't know who Mr. Mickelson was...?

One of the many civil liberties related themes we have focused on over the past several years has to do with how emerging technologies can pose a threat, first to our basic 4th Amendment rights, and then ultimately to freedom itself. Two of the most high profile technologies in this regard, and which have extremely high potential for abuse, are license plate readers and drones.

It was all over the news last week, both mainstream and gold sites. Barclays was caught manipulating the gold price. This story is a big deal to the gold community.

All parties with a collective interest in seeing the North Dakota oil experiment succeed need to work together because, right now, the boss at the largest stakeholder in the Bakken shale says opponents are drawing a bead on the region. And it's not just exploration and production that's a concern.

After the crisis, many expected that the blameworthy would be punished or at the least be required to return their ill-gotten gains—but they weren’t, and they didn’t. Many thought that those who were injured would be made whole, but most weren’t. And many hoped that there would be a restoration of the financial safety rules to ensure that industry leaders could no longer gamble the equity of their firms to the point of ruin. This didn’t happen, but it’s not too late. It is useful, then, to identify the persistent myths about the causes of the financial crisis and the resulting Dodd-Frank reform legislation and related implementation...."Plenty of people saw it coming, and said so. The problem wasn’t seeing, it was listening."

Just one day after the FBI issues arrest warrants for 5 Chinese military officials, Caixin reports that Fang Fang - the former CEO of JPMorgan Asia - has been arrested in Hong Kong by the Independent Commission Against Corruption (or anti-graft agency). Coincidental timing we are sure; and while details are sparse, the arrest appears linked to the hiring of the children of Chinese officials. Bloomberg reports that Fang declined to comment after being released on bail (under restrictions not to leave Hong Kong).

"I am owed 28,296 Bitcoins. I do not accept United States dollars, as it is the preferred currency of criminal organizations such as the FBI, DOJ, ATF, and Federal Reserve and I do not assist criminal racketeering enterprises."

"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.

In Case You Had Any Doubt ...

"I want this to be something that somebody else can use. Or that we could parlay into some kind of political—something, you know–’Hey wake up! The banks do lie, cheat, and steal. That’s the whole goal, you know.”

When obnoxiously wealthy pricks with the ability to bribe stock exchanges to place their trading computers on the floor of the exchange and financially induce the Wall Street banks to funnel trades through their dark pools in order to know what is happening a nanosecond before everyone else, and use this information to front run unknowing investors to generate risk free profits, it’s wrong. It really is black and white. I don’t care that it is supposedly “legal”.  By complying with Regulation NMS the smart order routers of institutional investor firms like Vanguard, Fidelity and Schwab simply funneled naïve investors into various snares laid for them by the unscrupulous high frequency traders. The bad guys always win and the good guys always lose on Wall Street. And no one does anything because they are all on the take. Lewis puts it in terms the average person can understand.

Bailing out banks is not hard when a nation has a sovereign currency and the banks’ debts are denominated in that currency.

In what is becoming a weekly ritual, the German press continues to demolish the US case of "idealistic humaniatrian" Ukraine intervention. Recall, that it was a week ago that German tabloid Bild am Sonntag, hardly the most reputable source but certainly one which reaches the broadest audience, reported that dozens of CIA and FBI agents were "advising the Ukraine government." This conclusion is hardly a stretch and certainly based on facts considering the recent semi-secret jaunt by CIA head Brennan to Kiev. Fast forward one week when overnight the same Bild reported that about 400 elite mercenary commandos of the private US security firm, Academi, f/k/a Xe Services, f/k/a Blackwater "are involved in a punitive operation mounted by Ukraine's new government" against east Ukraine separatists.