Donald Trump

The Atlantic City casino industry implosion continues. Following the second, and final, bankruptcy of AC's "state of the art" Revel Casino a month ago, as well as the shuttering of Atlantic Club hotel Casino and the Showboat hotel casino, the grim corporate reaper has come for one of the most prominent boardwalk casinos of all: Trump Plaza.  "Trump Plaza Hotel & Casino will shut its doors for good in mid-September, according to state officials who were briefed Friday by lawyers for the casino."

As tensions between all parties in Eastern Europe boil over, Chris Martenson provides a brief tour through just some of the antics surrounding the US' involvement in bringing about change (you can believe in!) in Ukraine. We raise these items to counter the usual clutter and complete lack of context being provided in the US press and to illustrate that the US is already in pretty deep and therefore unlikely to back down now. Before we move on, do you not find it at all strange that the US media, usually extremely sensitive to anti-semitism, has given the McCain and Nuland support of the Svoboda party a complete pass? I find it to be like the case of "the dog that did not bark", meaning the silence reveals a very fickle moral compass at the heart of the western press. The demonization of Putin as the bad guy here is near complete in western media. But there’s plenty of mischief all around and, as usual, the US finds itself with some pretty strange bedfellows as it seeks an outcome it likes.

Bad Government and Central Bank Policy Are the MAIN CAUSE of Runaway Inequality

For the answer of which firm is responsible, and has the largest number of current and former tenants occupying the building located at 15 CPW which we profiled before, and which Bloomberg TV defines as the "world's most powerful address" - a location whose residents control nearly half a trillion in assets under management - fast forward to 3:20 in the clip below. Hint: listen for the "dog whistle."

December 23rd, 1913 is a date which will live in infamy.  That was the day when the Federal Reserve Act was pushed through Congress.  Many members of Congress were absent that day, and the general public was distracted with holiday preparations.  Now we have reached the 100th anniversary of the Federal Reserve, and most Americans still don't know what it actually is or how it functions.  But understanding the Federal Reserve is absolutely critical, because the Fed is at the very heart of our economic problems. Since the Federal Reserve was created, there have been 18 recessions or depressions, the value of the U.S. dollar has declined by 98 percent, and the U.S. national debt has gotten more than 5000 times larger.  This insidious debt-based financial system has literally made debt slaves out of all of us, and it is systematically destroying the bright future that our children and our grandchildren were supposed to have. The truth is that we do not have to have a Federal Reserve.  The greatest period of economic growth in U.S. history was when we did not have a central bank.  If we are ever going to turn this nation around economically, we are going to have to get rid of this debt-based financial system that is centered around the Federal Reserve.  On the path that we are on now, there is no hope.

Of the nine passengers aboard the small Makani Kai Air plane flight that crashed off the shore of Molokai Wednesday night, eight survived. The lone fatality was Loretta Fuddy, infamous for her "I have seen the original records" confirmation of the long-form birth certificate of the US President in 2011. Fuddy, who was 65 years old and had served as Hawaii's state health director since January 2011, is described as "selfless, utterly dedicated, and committed" is a "terrible loss for the state".

Earlier this afternoon, it was Steve Cohen's final fall from grace. Now, Bloomberg reports that Brazil's one time super billionaire, and now negativeworthaire, Eike Batista, whose sprawling petroleum empire was once valued in the tens of billions, is set to file for bankruptcy tomorrow.

• BRAZIL'S OGX SAID TO PLAN BANKRUPTCY PROTECTION FILING TOMORROW

We are confident that just like in Europe, there is no bank with any exposure to either OGX, Brazil, or whatever potential intercreditor avalanche will tear down many more Brazilian companies once this first insolvent domino finally tips over.

When on October 1, fallen billionaire Eike Batista's OGX Petroleo & Gas, missed a $45 million bond coupon payment, some were surprised but most  had seen the writing on the wall. After all, Brazil's second largest oil company after Petrobras, and the crowning jewel of Batista's EBX Group, had been under the microscope of investors and certainly creditors (and if it wasn't it certainly should have been) after oil deposits that Batista had valued at $1 trillion turned out to be commercial failures. And so the countdown to the inevitable bankruptcy filing began. Overnight, Bloomberg reports that the wait should not be long (in fact it may coincide with the default of that other insolvent mega-creditor: the United States), and will mostly certainly take place before the end of the month, following the retention of bankruptcy specialist law firm Quinn Emanuel.

Pervasive, unchecked spying on millions of Americans and NSA agents eavesdropping on exes? A war with Syria? Fed tapering? A US that has been at its debt ceiling for months? A looming spending fight? Markets halting for hours due to "glitches"? Even Donald Trump? Naaaaah. According to Google Trends, this is what keeps America "up" at night.

China may or may not be building empty cities any more, but when it comes to the buildings it does, ahem, erect, it appears that the communist regime is either running out of ideas or is taking the symbolism of the skyscraper just a little too seriously. Behold the building that will house the new Beijing offices of the People's Daily, the official paper of the China Communist Party...

There exists a super-Bernanke who proved also a super-Hollande, a gentleman who Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe cannot compete with: his name is Robert Mugabe, the president of Zimbabwe. When he took power, he seized the farmlands of one social group to give them to another social group. Afterwards, in part because the new social group did not manage the farms that well, the economy took a turn for the worse. Therefore, the state issued some bonds to finance its spending and asked the central bank to issue some money to buy this government debt. But they printed big time and turned the printing press into something of a cosmic proportion. According to Professor Steve Hanke from John Hopkins, monthly inflation was 80 billion percent, so per year it is a 65 followed by 107 zeros. This is what we call Mugabenomics, the conjunction of (i) state-forced wealth transfer between two social groups along with (ii) the monetisation of the debt. As we shall see below, Mugabenomics, or at least its mild version implemented now in the Western hemisphere, has drastic consequences on the final episode of the global financial crisis.

By now we are confident that everyone is sick to death and beyond of listening about elections, polling, conditional probabilities, permutations, (confusing) statistical sampling and heuristics, and all those other things that the vast majority of the population fail in STAT 101 yet somehow end up as experts in during cocktail hour, on TV, on Op-Ed columns and, of course, on twitter. Which is why we are delighted to bring you this comic interlude. Presenting Donald "The Hairpiece" Trump vs Mark "Avion Tequila" Cuban.

What Do the Experts Say?  Are People Actually ACCEPTING Gold As Money?

I just finished reading Octopus by Guy Lawson, and it's one of those that fit the "I Couldn't Put It Down" category, much like Den of Thieves, published in 1992. It is the tale of Sam Israel, whom you may remember in 2006 was on the lam from his failed hedge fund/Ponzi scheme. He faked his suicide, was captured, and is now hanging out for the next couple of decades (with none other than Bernie Madoff) in a state prison named, of all things, Valhalla.

Think the attempted fake suicide by Bayou Capital's Sam Israel which dominated the headlines for a few days in 2008 was strange? You ain't seen nothing yet: as the following excerpt of Octopus, The Secret Market And The World’s Wildest Con by Guy Lawson via the Daily Mail explains, that was merely the anticlimatic culmination of an amazing tale of bogus London traders, 'secret' Bond markets, frontrunning the Fed, fake CIA and MI6 spies, ponzi schemes and staged murders.