Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category
UK Parliamentary Report Finds US Allies Are Covertly Funding ISIS
By Tyler Durden
Authored by MiddleEastEye.net via TheAntiMedia.org,
A British parliamentary report released on Tuesday has concluded there is “historical evidence” the Islamic State (IS) group received funding from within Arab Gulf states.
In evidence submitted to the foreign affairs select committee, the Ministry of Defence said: “[There] is historical evidence of financial donations to Daesh [IS] from within Gulf states. Furthermore, it is understood that family donations are being made to Daesh, through the unregulated Alternative Value Transfer Systems (AVTS).”
AVTS include ways of globally transferring money that includes little information about the individuals involved in the transaction – examples include the open source online currency Bitcoin.
The MoD cited as evidence an incident in September 2014 when an IS official was sanctioned by the US Treasury Department after receiving a $2m donation “emanating from the Gulf”.
The MoD also said in its evidence that private donations to IS are “minimal” compared to its other revenue streams, which include oil and taxation.
The committee said in an assessment of IS finances that Britain should be able to “ask hard questions of close friends” when discussing how donations have reached the Syria-Iraq based militant group.
The report concluded that IS has been put under severe financial pressure after a sustained international campaign that has forced the group to turn to “gangsterism and protection rackets” for money.
The report argued that plunging oil prices and air strikes on IS in Syria and Iraq have reduced the group’s ability to operate, however, the most controversial part is undoubtedly the section on donations to IS.
While the government told the committee that it had no evidence any country had provided funding to IS as a “matter of policy,” concerns were raised in the report about how Gulf states responded to the group’s initial rise to prominence, before and around the time of its seizing of the Iraqi city Mosul in June 2014.
The MoD said Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Qatar have played an “important role” in the anti-IS coalition, but officials from the Foreign Office said “some governments in the region may have failed to prevent donations reaching ISIL (IS) from their citizens”.
Middle East Minister Tobias Ellwood told the committee that after IS “first caught international attention,” the group “may have been perceived as a defender of Sunni Muslims in the wars in Iraq and Syria”.
Former Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki – who was in office between 2006 and 2014 – was repeatedly accused of favouring his Shia Muslim sect and oppressing Iraqi Sunni Muslims.
In Syria, where a brutal civil war has raged since early 2011, President Bashar al-Assad has also been repeatedly accused of specifically targeting Sunni Muslims who desire his overthrow.
Ellwood said that the period of IS being viewed as a defender of Sunnis was “before 2014”. Dan Chugg, head of the Foreign Office’s ISIL Task Force, told the committee that “around two years ago” IS “may have been able to attract donations from sympathetic Sunnis, with the wealthiest states in the region – the Sunni monarchies of the Gulf …read more
Source: UK Parliamentary Report Finds US Allies Are Covertly Funding ISIS
UK Fund Managers Start Dumping Properties, Admit "Real Estate Needed Re-Pricing"
By Tyler Durden
The uncomfortable moment of truth has arrived for property funds in the UK (and their investors). Following the initial tumble of the post-Brexit dominoes – eight major funds so far either gating redemptions or forcing massive haircuts on to investors who want out – contagion concerns even woke up Britain's regulators (and central bank) as fears of Bear-Stearns-esque forced liquidations spread; and now, as The FT reports, that is what has just started.
With every UK property fund knowing every other UK property fund needs to sell assets (real physical illiquid property) to meet cash calls (in their unreal faux-liquidity funds), the game-theoretical first-mover advantage has begun with Henderson Global Investors, which has begun offloading prime assets to provide liquidity to investors… (as The FT details)
The major fund plans to sell 440 Strand, the headquarters of the private bank Coutts, by the end of 2016.
The property, bought for £175m in 2014, was valued at £220m before the Brexit vote and will be formally brought on to the market in the autumn by the suspended Henderson UK Property fund, according to two people briefed on the plans.
The sale of 440 Strand is one of a number of disposals expected to follow the suspensions of seven property funds last week after investors rushed for the exit following the UK’s vote to leave the EU. Henderson, which manages the fund through TH Real Estate — its joint venture with the US retirement provider TIAA-CREF — declined to comment.
Funds holding more than £15bn of investors’ money are preventing redemptions, including the UK’s largest property fund, M&G’s £4.3bn Property Portfolio, and funds from Standard Life, Henderson, Aviva, Columbia Threadneedle and Canada Life.
Aberdeen Asset Management, which suspended its fund for a shorter period than the others — until July 13 — has begun marketing properties including an office building at 10 Hammersmith Grove, the UK headquarters of Fox International, a division of 21st Century Fox.
Early bids on the buildings Aberdeen is marketing indicated yields 50 basis points higher than before the Brexit vote, according to people briefed on the sales.
This indicates there will be discounts, but [ZH – we note The FT's carefully scripted “do not panic” edit here] not the steep drops in price seen during the 2008 financial crisis.
But given the following chart as an example of the 'liquidity gap' between fund-level liquidations and the exuberant UK real estate market, things could get ugly very quickly…
Perhaps even more troubling is the reality that you sell what you can, not what you want to…
Property funds are expected to focus initially on disposing of “prime” assets, which will be easier to sell in uncertain markets, agents said.
Investors are more worried about properties in sectors thought to be vulnerable to Brexit, such as London offices.
Which suggests the lower-quality assets could be severely impaired, just as Richard Divall, head of cross-border capital markets at the property advisers Colliers, admitted:
“Brexit has caused short-term panic and stalling to …read more
Source: UK Fund Managers Start Dumping Properties, Admit "Real Estate Needed Re-Pricing"
100% Pure Garcinia Cambogia Extract – Appetite Suppressant – Carb Blocker Capsules – 2100 MG – 90 Caps
Looking for something special ? Find The Lowest Price HERE
Islamization Of France: Stabbing Policemen, "Slut-Shaming" & New Death Threats
By Tyler Durden
Submitted by Yves Mamou via The Gatestone Institute,
-
Muslim perpetrators rationalize their violence by convincing themselves that they live in a racist society that rejects them and their religion. And the government legitimizes them when it asks Parliament to vote for a law that favors “diversity” on public television channels.
-
Islamist terrorist Larossi Abballa, 26, stabbed to death police officer Jean-Baptiste Salvaing and his wife, police administrator Jessica Schneider, in front of their son, at their home in the Paris suburb of Magnanville. The murderer then live-streamed a video on Facebook, in which he pledged allegiance to the Islamic State (ISIS).
-
After the Islamist, anti-gay attack in Orlando, left-wing politician Jean-Luc Mélenchon wrote in his blog that he fears a possible “wave of hatred against Muslims”. For many Islamists in France, the Muslim is always the victim, even when he is the killer.
Islamization is gaining ground in the Muslim community of France. For a long time, this trend remained restricted to the cultural sphere and created strong controversies between Islamists and secular intellectuals (such as the ban on face-covering veils in schools and public places). But the debate stopped being a debate. Sometimes Islamic intolerance takes on the appearance of a civil war. The violence, which was mostly concentrated in the suburbs prior to the January 2015 terrorist attack on the satirical magazine, Charlie Hebdo, is spreading now to the heart of French cities. Murders, assaults, death threats and “slut-shaming” happens almost every day here and there.
Muslim perpetrators rationalize their violence by convincing themselves that they live in a racist society that rejects them and their religion. And the government legitimizes them when it asks Parliament to vote for a law that favors “diversity” on public television channels. What is interesting is that judiciary system seems in disarray and does not know how to treat these types of conflicts: two jihadists back from Syria are condemned to a suspended sentence of six months in prison and a Muslim who slapped a female waiter because she served alcohol during the Ramadan was sentenced to eight months in prison.
The absence of political guidelines spreads fear and aids the rise of the right-wing political party, the Front National.
One Month of Islam and Multiculturalism in France: June 2016
June 1. Karim Benzema, a French soccer star of Algerian descent, declared, in the Spanish sports newspaper Marca, that French national team's coach, Didier Deschamps “bowed to the pressure of a racist part of France” by not including him in the team. Benzema was not included in the national soccer team for the UEFA Euro 2016 championship because he is apparently involved in a sex-tape extortion scandal targeting his colleague, Mathieu Valbuena.
June 2. Patrick Kanner, Minister of Urban Affairs, Youth and Sport, said in Le Parisien that Karim Benzema plays an “unfair and dangerous” game when he implies that “ethnic reasons” might have played a role in the decision not to include him in the French soccer team.
June 2. It was reported that the Saudi …read more
Source: Islamization Of France: Stabbing Policemen, "Slut-Shaming" & New Death Threats
Germany Is About To Sell Zero-Coupon 10 Year Bonds For The First Time Ever
By Tyler Durden
When the financial media says that governments get paid to issue negative yielding debt, that is not exactly true: most sovereign issuers still pay out a cash coupon, a modest as it may be, while they pocket the negative amortization on a bond issued above par for the life of the bond resulting what ultimately ends up being a negative yield for the buyer net of all cashflows at maturity. However, the lower – or more negative – yields get, the less the need for an issuer to actually pay a cash coupon: after all with a negative yield, it is essentially superfluous.
Still, while no sovereign has issued bond with negative cash coupons yet, some are starting to issue zero-coupon ten years: bonds which pay no cash coupons at all.
This is precisely what Germany is about to do in a few hours.
According to Bloomberg, on Wednesday morning Germany will sell 10-year bonds with a zero coupon for the first time, as a rally in fixed-income securities pushes investors to forgo annual interest payments in order to hold the safest assets.
The nation is selling €5 billion of zero percent bonds due in August 2026 on Wednesday, after yields in the secondary market dropped to an all-time low of minus 0.205% last week.
Then again, with a rather vicious snapback higher in yields over the past two days now that Japanese helicopter money looks increasingly probable, Germany may not be able to continue this experiment for much longer, and may have to revert back to its 0.5% coupon issued until now.
Of course, once this latest modest spike in yields subsides and the world reverts back to its deflationary trendline (a move which will eventually prompt every other central bank, not just Japan – to proceed with helicopter money), and German yields are deeply negative, Germany can then proceed to, if only in theory, issue “negative” coupons, demanding that bond buyers pay Germany. Of course, while in practice this is impossible, it would present the world with such an interesting thought experiment as the “inverse” bankruptcy: a state in which the creditor to the debtor “defaults” because it is unable to make a payment on a bond they lent to the same debtor.
Yes, the new normal sure is interesting. If only in theory.
Source: Germany Is About To Sell Zero-Coupon 10 Year Bonds For The First Time Ever
The Dow And The S&P 500 Soar To Brand New All-Time Record Highs – How Is This Possible?
The Dow and the S&P 500 both closed at all-time record highs on Tuesday, and that is very good news. You might think that is an odd statement coming from the publisher of The Economic Collapse Blog, but the truth is that I am not at all eager to see the financial system crash and burn. We all saw what took place when it happened in 2008 – millions of people lost their jobs, millions of people lost their homes, and economic suffering was off the charts. So no, I don’t want to see that happen again any time soon. All of our lives will be a lot more comfortable if the financial markets are stable and stocks continue to go up. If the Dow and the S&P 500 can keep on soaring, that will suit me just fine. Unfortunately, I don’t think that is going to be what happens.
Of course I never imagined we would be talking about new record highs for the stock market in mid-July 2016. We have seen some crazy ups and downs for the financial markets over the last 12 months, and the downs were pretty severe. Last August, we witnessed the greatest financial shaking since the historic financial crisis of 2008, and that was followed by an even worse shaking in January and February. Then in June everyone was concerned that the surprising result of the Brexit vote would cause global markets to tank, and that did happen briefly, but since then we have seen an unprecedented rally.
So what is causing this sudden surge?
We’ll get to that in a moment, but first let’s review some of the numbers from Tuesday. The following comes from USA Today…
All three major indexes gained 0.7% apiece, as the Dow jumped 121 points to a new all-time closing high and the S&P 500 built upon its record close notched Monday. The blue chips now stand at 18,347.67, about 35 points above the previous record set May 19, 2015.
The new mark for the S&P 500 is 2,152.14, a 15-point improvement on its Monday close.
Overall, we have seen stocks shoot up more than eight percent over the last two weeks. Normally, a rise of 10 percent for an entire year is considered to be quite healthy…
Interior Minister Theresa May is set to become the U.K.’s prime minister on Wednesday. Stock markets across the globe have risen sharply, after a steep sell-off, following the United Kingdom’s decision to leave the European Union.
“In the past two weeks, post Brexit, the S&P 500 has vaulted over 8 percent,” said Adam Sarhan, CEO at Sarhan Capital. “Typically, a 10 percent move for the entire year is considered normal.”
What makes all of this even stranger is the fact that investors have been pulling money out of stocks as if it was 2008 all over again. In fact, Zero Hedge tells us that on balance investors have been taking money out of equity funds for 17 weeks in a row.
So why are stocks still going up?
If your …read more
Source: The Dow And The S&P 500 Soar To Brand New All-Time Record Highs – How Is This Possible?
The Dow And The S&P 500 Soar To Brand New All-Time Record Highs – How Is This Possible?
The Dow and the S&P 500 both closed at all-time record highs on Tuesday, and that is very good news. You might think that is an odd statement coming from the publisher of The Economic Collapse Blog, but the truth is that I am not at all eager to see the financial system crash and burn. We all saw what took place when it happened in 2008 – millions of people lost their jobs, millions of people lost their homes, and economic suffering was off the charts. So no, I don’t want to see that happen again any time soon. All of our lives will be a lot more comfortable if the financial markets are stable and stocks continue to go up. If the Dow and the S&P 500 can keep on soaring, that will suit me just fine. Unfortunately, I don’t think that is going to be what happens.
Of course I never imagined we would be talking about new record highs for the stock market in mid-July 2016. We have seen some crazy ups and downs for the financial markets over the last 12 months, and the downs were pretty severe. Last August, we witnessed the greatest financial shaking since the historic financial crisis of 2008, and that was followed by an even worse shaking in January and February. Then in June everyone was concerned that the surprising result of the Brexit vote would cause global markets to tank, and that did happen briefly, but since then we have seen an unprecedented rally.
So what is causing this sudden surge?
We’ll get to that in a moment, but first let’s review some of the numbers from Tuesday. The following comes from USA Today…
All three major indexes gained 0.7% apiece, as the Dow jumped 121 points to a new all-time closing high and the S&P 500 built upon its record close notched Monday. The blue chips now stand at 18,347.67, about 35 points above the previous record set May 19, 2015.
The new mark for the S&P 500 is 2,152.14, a 15-point improvement on its Monday close.
Overall, we have seen stocks shoot up more than eight percent over the last two weeks. Normally, a rise of 10 percent for an entire year is considered to be quite healthy…
Interior Minister Theresa May is set to become the U.K.’s prime minister on Wednesday. Stock markets across the globe have risen sharply, after a steep sell-off, following the United Kingdom’s decision to leave the European Union.
“In the past two weeks, post Brexit, the S&P 500 has vaulted over 8 percent,” said Adam Sarhan, CEO at Sarhan Capital. “Typically, a 10 percent move for the entire year is considered normal.”
What makes all of this even stranger is the fact that investors have been pulling money out of stocks as if it was 2008 all over again. In fact, Zero Hedge tells us that on balance investors have been taking money out of equity funds for 17 weeks in a row.
So why are stocks still going up?
If your …read more
Source: The Dow And The S&P 500 Soar To Brand New All-Time Record Highs – How Is This Possible?
Gretchen Carlson: Ailes’ harassment was ‘continuous’
Gretchen Carlson, the former Fox News host who has accused Roger Ailes of sexual harassment, says she had at least six interviews with her former boss in which he talked about her body and heard — but ignored — her complaints of mistreatment. …read more
Source: Gretchen Carlson: Ailes’ harassment was ‘continuous’
"Bring It On!"
By Tyler Durden
Submitted by Robert Gore via StraightLineLogic.com,
Five words are important now: failure, exposure, rejection, repression, and war. The status quo has failed on multiple fronts. Its failures and corruption are being exposed, its governance and legitimacy questioned and rejected. The response is all too predictable: repression at home, war abroad. The Clintons represent the toxic confluence, the maelstrom’s vortex, and Hillary Clinton will press the powers’ response.
Anything but free market economics is a redistributive shell game with a sell-by date. Government debt, spending, and programs, redistribution, and central bank debt monetization and interest rate suppression have passed their expiration, leaving mountains of IOUs that will never be repaid and prostrate economies in the first thralls of a deflationary contraction that will be one for the ages. Particular rancid: illusory, credit-based wealth has gone to a small, well-connected coterie who access microscopic interest rates for financial engineering and speculative fun and games. Left behind: honest producers and savers, who have seen their incomes shrink and the economy wither.
Not content to lay waste to their own countries, the powers have visited their destructive and murderous mayhem upon wide swathes of the globe. Seeking to impose order they have instead promoted chaos, failed states, refugee flows, and the spread of terrorism. Stuck in costly and inconclusive quagmires in second-tier states, the US war lobby seems intent on provoking decidedly first-tier Russia and China, with a concomitant escalation of negative consequences. You can’t get any bigger, or potentially more suicidal, than war with the second and third largest nuclear-armed powers.
Propaganda, indoctrination, a captive press, and widespread obliviousness and passivity will only take the incompetent and corrupt governing class so far. There’s too much to be swept under the rug. Eventually notice is taken of the telling details. The economy is going nowhere. The US has been in Afghanistan for fifteen years and in Iraq for thirteen. The capital is an overflowing cesspool; the Clintons being the most visible and malodorous turds floating by on that river of filth. The Internet has shone a light on failure and corruption, but even the mainstream media take note, if only in passing, before it exculpates those responsible.
Exposure and anger concern the powers—they threaten the façade of legitimacy—but outright rejection would be intolerable. Never has an aristocracy exercised such power, lived so opulently, and received such publicity, adulation, and deference. Popular discontent given full vent and expression would threaten all that, and could lead to prison, or worse.
Hillary Clinton embodies the power, wealth, and corruption of the aristocracy, which confronts the most serious threat yet to the world order it erected after World War II. It embraces her not merely because she is emblematic, but because she will implement naked repression and wage wars, its last resorts to hold on to power. She’s never met a “national security” measure or war she didn’t love. The FBI’s refusal to recommend charges despite Hillary’s obvious criminality appears to be the aristocracy’s take-off-the-kid-gloves moment.
In their folly, the rulers have isolated themselves …read more
Source: "Bring It On!"
If The Shooting Of Dallas Police Surprises You; You Haven’t Been Paying Attention
By Tyler Durden
Submitted by Dan Sanchez via The Foundation for Economic Education,
Five police officers were killed and six were injured in Dallas lasst week when reportedly a lone sniper opened fire during a protest of the recent police killings of Philando Castile and Alton Sterling. This mass shooting was a despicable act of murder.
It was also blowback.
“Blowback” is a term generally reserved for foreign policy. It refers to the reverberating ill effects of foreign interventions. Ron Paul famously and persuasively characterized the 9/11 attacks as blowback from decades of US warfare and imperialism in the Greater Middle East.
In the 1980s, American support for the anti-Soviet Mujahideen in Afghanistan helped lay the groundwork for what would become Osama bin Laden’s jihadist network, Al Qaeda. And in the 1990s, further US interventions in the Middle East spurred the jihadis to turn on their former sponsors and to wage a terrorist war on the west that culminated in the attacks on September 11, 2001.
The outrage elicited by those attacks provided cover for a massive US-led war for the Greater Middle East that rages to this day. That Long War has only served to plummet the entire region into chaos and carnage, which has caused the number of jihadis and would-be terrorists to grow exponentially. As a result, western civilians continue to suffer blowback in the form of terror attacks in San Bernardino, Orlando, Paris, Brussels, etc. These attacks are fueling Islamophobia and driving calls for further violence and repression against Muslims.
Collective Punishment
The motor of this spinning cycle of reciprocal bloodshed is collectivism. Seeing fellows attacked prompts fear and anger. Fear and anger focused by the lens of reason pinpoints individual offenders for the delivery of justice. But refracted through the lens of collectivism and primal reaction, fear and anger disperses into indiscriminate terror and hate, which scatters to cover whole populations who are ascribed collective guilt and prescribed collective punishment.
This collective punishment of innocents then prompts fear and anger among the targeted population. If they too are afflicted with collectivism, some of them will also succumb to terror and hate, which will be expressed in retaliatory indiscriminate violence: blowback. This collectivist retaliation begets further collectivist retaliation, and the cycle of violence spins out of control.
The Home Front
But this phenomenon is by no means restricted to international affairs. It can characterize civil unrest as well. Again, what we saw last week in Dallas was, if not something even more diabolical, blowback.
The American people feel under siege. Different populations feel besieged by different forces. Black Americans especially have suffered decades of persecution by the American “justice” system: police brutality and harassment, mass incarceration, being nickel-and-dimed by tickets and fines, etc. And especially since the summer of 2014, they have been seeing a litany of viral photos and videos of black Americans having been gunned down, throttled, and broken by the police.
This violence too is driven by collectivism. Law enforcement officers are granted an exceptional status in society: a …read more
Source: If The Shooting Of Dallas Police Surprises You; You Haven’t Been Paying Attention
