OIl futures jumped more than 5% on Monday after Russia and a bunch of other big producers agreed over the weekend to join OPEC members in cutting their output next month. …read more
Source: Oil producers agree to output cuts, prices leap
By Tyler Durden
Submitted by Jim Quinn via The Burning Platform blog,
The recent deal to keep Carrier jobs in the United States is not at all unusual. It only received so much press because Trump made it a campaign issue and saw an opportunity to record a big early PR victory before he even took office. Government and corporations cooperate, negotiate deals, scratch each others backs, kickback ill-gotten gains, and function as a career advancement funnel for corrupt politicians.
In reality, the intertwining of government and big business meets the definition of fascism. A centralized autocratic government that picks winners and losers, while suppressing un-favored companies or industries, meets the definition of fascism. Fascists let business remain in private hands, but use regulations, laws, tax benefits, and the distribution of goodies to control the economy. Big business serves politicians and government bureaucrats instead of their customers.
Our corporate fascist economic system benefits big businesses who have hundreds of lawyers, lobbyists, tax specialists, and accountants to comply with the tens of thousands of government regulations, indecipherable tax code, and ridiculous laws, while small businesses are driven into the ground. Small businesses have no political influence and no ability to influence the corrupt system. The big connected conglomerates receive the government subsidies, tax breaks, and preferential treatment. Corporate fascism at its finest.
This is the definition of the Deep State. The military industrial complex, sick care complex, and Federal Reserve puppeteers on Wall Street maintain their power by financing the Deep State through their network of political lobbyists, captured journalists, manipulated think tanks, easily controlled bureaucrat lackeys, and congressional staffers who work in the shadows to create government policy favoring their special interests. Examples of this process in action can be seen in the purposely toothless Dodd Frank legislation and an Obamacare plan benefiting insurance, drug and hospital conglomerates.
The hard line libertarian view is all markets should be totally free. The government should only insure property rights are respected, while leaving people and companies to operate free of constraints, regulations and burdensome taxation. This is a childishly simplistic view of the world. Humans are extremely flawed creatures, susceptible to greed, arrogance, hubris, over-confidence, anger, vengeance, pride, envy and wrath. Whenever humans achieve positions of power they tend to become corrupted and seek to further their power and take actions to retain that power.
This is the real world. It is not going to change. The pendulum swings from the right to the left and back again, but smaller less intrusive government is not in the cards. Tax breaks are the carrots, while laws and regulations are the sticks used to keep big business and big government working in concert and reaping the rewards of a corporate fascist system. Do you ever wonder how life long congressmen, who never earned more than $170,000 per year, “retire” from government service as multi-millionaires? Do you ever wonder how one week after “retiring” from government service they land multi-million jobs with the big businesses they were supposed to regulate?
Over the course of …read more
Source: Getting In Bed With Government
Air travelers will be able to fly from Australia to Europe without stopping after Qantas announced the first direct passenger route between the two continents. …read more
Source: Airline plans non-stop flights between Australia & Europe
By Tyler Durden
Authored by Paul Craig Roberts,
Speaking of fake news, the latest issue of the National Enquirer at the supermarket checkout is giving the mainstream presstitute media a run for the money: “Castro’s Deathbed Confession: I Killed JFK. How I framed Oswald.”
That’s almost as good as the fake news going around the presstitute media, such as the TV stations, the Washington Post, New York Times, and Guardian – yes, even the former leftwing British newspaper has joined the ranks of the press prostitutes – that the CIA has concluded that “Russian operatives covertly interfered in the election campaign in an attempt to ensure the Republican candidate’s victory.”
If the CIA is actually stupid enough to believe this, the US is without a competent intelligence agency. Of course, the CIA didn’t say and doesn’t believe any such thing. The fake news stories in the presstitute media are all sourced to unnamed officials. Former British ambassador Craig Murray described the reports accurately: “bullshit.”
So who is making the stories up, another anonomous group tied to Hillary such as PropOrNot, the secret, hidden organization that released a list of 200 websites that are Russian agents?
Fake news is the presstitute’s product. Throughout the presidential primaries and presidential campaign it was completely clear that the mainstream print and TV media were producing endless fake news designed to damage Trump and to boost Hillary. We all saw it. We all lived through it. What is this pretense that Russia is the source of fake news?
We have had nothing but fake news from the presstitutes since the Klingon regime. Fake news was used against Yugoslavia and Serbia in order to cloak the Clinton’s war crimes.
Fake news was used against Osama bin Laden, Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia in order to cloak the Bush regime’s war crimes.
Fake news was used against Libya and Syria in order to cloak the Obama regime’s war crimes.
Without fake news these three blood-drenched presidencies would have been hauled before the War Crimes Commission, tried, and convicted.
Can anyone produce any truthful statement from the presstitute media about anything of importance? MH-17? Crimea? Ukraine?
Ironic, isn’t it, that it is those who purport to be liberal and progressive who are responsible for the revival of McCarthyism in America. Moreover, the liberal progressives are institutionalizing McCarthyism in the US government. There is clearly a concerted effort being made to define truth as fake news and to define lies as truth.
Ironic, isn’t it, that it is the war criminal Hillary, responsible for the destruction of Libya and the near destruction of Syria until the Russians intervened, that the liberal progressive forces are desperate to have as president. Not only did the liberal progressive forces attempt to elect a war criminal president of the US, they are doing their best to delegitimize the president-elect who opposes the orchestrated conflict with Russia.
Ironic, isn’t it, that the liberal progressive bloc refuse to give peace a chance.
The faked news report from the imbeciles at PropOrNot, which was hyped by the fake …read more
Source: If You Are For Peace, You Are A Russian Agent!
It has been said that nothing happens by accident in politics, and it is certainly no accident that Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, members of the U.S. Senate and the mainstream media are all suddenly buzzing about “Russian hacking” and “Russian interference” in our elections. Over the past 48 hours, the Washington Post, the New York Times, and just about every other major news source in America has been breathlessly telling us that the CIA has concluded that the Russians “intervened” in the presidential election with the specific goal of helping Donald Trump win. The implication is that if the Russian interference was significant enough, it could have “unfairly” altered the outcome of the election and thus Donald Trump’s victory was not legitimate. And if his victory was not legitimate, that opens up all sorts of possibilities for the Democrats.
For those that have been wondering if the establishment was going to attempt to steal the presidency away from Donald Trump before he can be inaugurated, we now appear to have our answer.
There are several ways that this could work, and we’ll take it one step at a time.
On Friday, we were suddenly assaulted with all sorts of headlines about how the U.S. intelligence community has concluded that the Russians interfered in the election and that they did so with the intention of helping Trump win. The following example comes from CNBC…
The New York Times reported American intelligence agencies have “high confidence” that Russia intervened in the later stages of the 2016 election to help Trump win the presidency. Senior administration officials said the Russian government gave WikiLeaks emails from the Democratic National Committee, among others including Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman John Podesta. The organizations also found evidence that Russia hacked the Republican National Committee’s computer systems, but did not release the information.
More specifically, we are being told that it is the CIA that is the primary source of this “intelligence”. Of course the public is not being shown a shred of evidence that the Russians were behind any of this. Instead, we are just being told to trust the “experts” at the CIA…
The CIA has concluded that Russia intervened in the 2016 election specifically to help Donald Trump win the presidency, a U.S. official has confirmed to NPR.
“Before, there was confidence about the fact that Russia interfered,” the official says. “But there was low confidence on what the direction and intentionality of the interference was. Now they [the CIA] have come to the conclusion that Russia was trying to tip the election to Trump.”
On Sunday, four members of the U.S. Senate came forward to express their concerns about Russian interference. Two of the four were Democrats, and the other two were Republicans that have been some of the most vocal critics of Donald Trump throughout the election season. I don’t think that it is any accident that John McCain and Lindsey Graham have chosen to be part of this effort…
“Congress’s national security committees have worked diligently …read more
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By Chris at www.CapitalistExploits.at
Today we discuss the largest wholesale funding market in the world, the eurodollar market, and how its “normal” form of functioning has dramatically changed, causing all manner of problems in the global economy.
In last week’s post we discussed shadow banking at its finest: the eurodollar market. It was the precursor to this article and so if you’ve not read it then it’ll be useful to do so here before reading this article.
In that article I mentioned that the eurodollar financing market has never returned to the levels prior to the GFC. Let’s first retrace the steps to understand what exactly has happened since the central banks all “saved us” from annihilation. In doing so I hope to lay the foundation for my belief as to why it is that some 8 years on the world is still mired in lacklustre growth, rising inequality, and this prolonged recession, which never seems to want to go away.
Everyone senses that things have changed, they’re different, out of sync… wrong. But why?
Let’s dig in…
Central bank responses to the GFC were that the federal funds target was at the zero lower bound as the Fed attempted to provide stimulus through unsterilized purchases of Treasury and mortgage-backed securities (MBS), or what is popularly referred to as quantitative easing (QE).
Between 2009 and 2014, the Fed threw three rounds of QE at the global economic wall praying that at least one would stick. And so, like trying to carve a pineapple with a plastic spoon, failing, and then attacking the pineapple with yet more plastic spoons, the Fed took something NOT working to be evidence that quantity and size is the problem rather than strategy. Genius.
The third round of QE was completed in October 2014 at which point the Fed’s balance sheet was $4.5 trillion — five times its pre-crisis size. Quite some price to pay, and for what?
The Fed weren’t alone in this. Our sake drinking friends were at it too, giving new meaning to the phrase “big in Japan”, as were the Europeans and Brits. All in all, quite simply unprecedented and extremely unorthodox coordinated central bank actions.
All this intervention by central banks was designed to get the credit markets cranking again. Lower interest rates being the primary mechanism and central bank balance sheets bearing the burden.
Let me just say that for anyone who’s spent some time understanding how an economy functions, you’ll realise that shifting rates to negative is bat shit crazy. If you think about how the capitalist system operates, you realise that we need a complete overhaul of education systems in the developed world, if all it does is puke up the kind of intellect currently running central banks.
Case in point:
Ask any money manager what the risk free discount rate should be …read more
Source: The Eurodollar Market: It’s Not Working!
By Tyler Durden
Having observed the economic chaos to emerge as a result of India’s shocking Nov. 8 demonetization announcement, and perhaps confident it can do better, today president Nicolas Maduro of Venezuela, Latin America’s most distressed economy, mired in an economic crisis and facing hyperinflation, likewise shocked the nation when he announced on state TV that just like India, Venezuela would pull its highest denominated, 100-bolivar bill (which is worth about two U.S. cents on the black market), from circulation over the next 72 hours, ahead of the introduction of new, higher-value notes, as large as 20,000.
“I have decided to take out of circulation bills of 100 bolivars in the next 72 hours,” Maduro said. “We must keep beating the mafias.”
To this we would add “and cue economic chaos”, but since this is Venezuela, that’s a given.
The surprise move, announced by Maduro during an hours-long speech, is likely to worsen a cash crunch in Venezuela, and lead the largely-cash based economy to a state of paralysis. Maduro said the 100-bolivar bill will be taken out of circulation on Wednesday and Venezuelans will have 10 days after that to exchange those notes at the central bank.
Critics immediately slammed the move, which Maduro said was needed to combat contraband of the bills at the volatile Colombia-Venezuela border, as economically nonsensical, adding there would be no way to swap all the 100-bolivar bills in circulation in the time the president has allotted. Indeed, if India is any example, Venezuela – whose economy is far worse than that of India, the world’s fastest growing emerging market – may have just signed its own economic death warrant.
According to central bank data, in November there were more than six billion 100-bolivar bills in circulation, 48 percent of all bills and coins. In other words, Venezuela just eliminated half the paper cash in circulation.
Authorities on Thursday are due to start releasing six new notes and three new coins, the largest of which will be worth 20,000 bolivars, less than $5 on the streets. No official inflation data is available for 2016 though many economists see it in triple digits. Economic consultancy Ecoanalitica estimates annual inflation this year at more than 500%, close to the IMF’s estimate.
Meanwhile, assuring hyperinflation next year will be a doozy, the oil-producing nation’s bolivar currency has fallen 55% against the U.S. dollar on the black market in the last month.
Money supply, the sum of cash and checking deposits as well as savings and other “near money” deposits, was up a staggering 19% in the three weeks to Dec. 2 and the curve has been exponential since Maduro’s predecessor Hugo Chavez came to power in 1999.
Maduro previously has said that organized crime networks at the Colombia-Venezuela border buy up Venezuelan notes to in turn buy subsidized Venezuelan goods and sell them for vast profits in Colombia.
While smuggling of this sort is an issue at the border, it cannot account for nationwide shortages of the …read more
By Tyler Durden
I have watched incredulous as the CIA’s blatant lie has grown and grown as a media story – blatant because the CIA has made no attempt whatsoever to substantiate it. There is no Russian involvement in the leaks of emails showing Clinton’s corruption. Yes this rubbish has been the lead today in the Washington Post in the US and the Guardian here, and was the lead item on the BBC main news. I suspect it is leading the American broadcasts also.
A little simple logic demolishes the CIA’s claims. The CIA claim they “know the individuals” involved. Yet under Obama the USA has been absolutely ruthless in its persecution of whistleblowers, and its pursuit of foreign hackers through extradition. We are supposed to believe that in the most vital instance imaginable, an attempt by a foreign power to destabilise a US election, even though the CIA knows who the individuals are, nobody is going to be arrested or extradited, or (if in Russia) made subject to yet more banking and other restrictions against Russian individuals? Plainly it stinks. The anonymous source claims of “We know who it was, it was the Russians” are beneath contempt.
As Julian Assange has made crystal clear, the leaks did not come from the Russians. As I have explained countless times, they are not hacks, they are insider leaks – there is a major difference between the two. And it should be said again and again, that if Hillary Clinton had not connived with the DNC to fix the primary schedule to disadvantage Bernie, if she had not received advance notice of live debate questions to use against Bernie, if she had not accepted massive donations to the Clinton foundation and family members in return for foreign policy influence, if she had not failed to distance herself from some very weird and troubling people, then none of this would have happened.
The continued ability of the mainstream media to claim the leaks lost Clinton the election because of “Russia”, while still never acknowledging the truths the leaks reveal, is Kafkaesque.
I had a call from a Guardian journalist this afternoon. The astonishing result was that for three hours, an article was accessible through the Guardian front page which actually included the truth among the CIA hype:
The Kremlin has rejected the hacking accusations, while the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has previously said the DNC leaks were not linked to Russia. A second senior official cited by the Washington Post conceded that intelligence agencies did not have specific proof that the Kremlin was “directing” the hackers, who were said to be one step removed from the Russian government.
Craig Murray, the former UK ambassador to Uzbekistan, who is a close associate of Assange, called the CIA claims “bullshit”, adding: “They are absolutely making it up.”
“I know who leaked them,” Murray said. “I’ve met the person who leaked them, and they are certainly not Russian and it’s an insider. It’s a leak, not a hack; …read more
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