Businesses warn: Brexit chaos will hurt us
British voters’ decision to leave the European Union has left the U.K. economy in a fog of worry and uncertainty. …read more
Source: Businesses warn: Brexit chaos will hurt us
Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category
Why The Vast Majority Of Analysts Were Caught With Their Pants Down On Brexit
By Tyler Durden
Submitted by Brandon Smith via Alt-Market.net,
Yes, in case you have been asleep for 4 days, the UK referendum has passed and global markets are currently in a freefall we have not seen since 2008. In this case, I'm going to have to trumpet my successful call here. For all the general flak I received in emails for my predictions of a Brexit passage including in my article 'Brexit: Global Trigger Event, Fake Out Or Something Else' which was published during the height of the polling disinformation frenzy, I think it is important to explain how I was able to discern how the vote was likely to turn out when no one else did.
Also, if there were other analysts that did predict a Brexit win and I am overlooking them, please list their names and where they made those predictions in the comments below so that we can give them their due credit.
Here's why the vast majority of analysts were caught with their pants down on the UK referendum:
1) They assumed that the Brexit will hurt globalists – In the article linked above, I outlined why the Brexit actually aids international financiers and central banks by creating a scapegoat for a market crash that was ALREADY going to happen. Rather than re-explaining my position, here is a large portion of quotations from that article:
I believe the Brexit vote may be allowed to succeed, here’s why…
1) Elites including George Soros have suddenly decided to dive into the market to place bets on the negative side. Dumping large portions of their stock holdings, shorting equities and buying up gold and gold mining shares. Soros has been preparing his portfolio for a successful Brexit vote while at the same time publicly warning of the supposed dire consequences if the referendum passes. The last time Soros put this much capital into the markets was in 2007, just before the crash of 2008.
2) The IMF and the BIS have been warning since late 2015 (for six to eight months) that a global economic downturn is on the way in 2016. We saw considerable volatility at the beginning of this year, and markets are due for another shock. The last time the BIS and IMF were so adamant about an impending crash was in late 2007, just before the 2008 market plunge.
3) While the Federal Reserve has not yet implemented a second rate hike (I still believe they could use a rate hike this year to stab markets in the back if necessary), Janet Yellen pulled a maneuver which was almost as upsetting to investors. After the Fed policy meeting last week, markets were moderately exuberant and stocks were rising, then, Yellen opened her mouth and blamed the Brexit for the rate hike delay…
Here is what the Fed has done: By delaying the second hike for another month, and then blaming the Brexit vote as a primary reason, they have created a bit of a …read more
Source: Why The Vast Majority Of Analysts Were Caught With Their Pants Down On Brexit
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"Frack Master" Busted For Blowing Investor Cash On "Whore Card"
By Tyler Durden
Texas businessman Chris Faulkner charmed hundreds of investors and major media companies into believing he had extensive experience in energy markets, but, as Bloomberg reports, it turns out the self-proclaimed “frack master” had none and that at least $30 million he raised was spent on strippers, escorts, lavish vacations and other personal expenses.
Faulkner’s alleged transgressions include using money from his Breitling Energy Corp. to pay off an American Express card that he referred to as his “whore card,” the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission said in a complaint filed Friday. Faulkner and seven others, including Breitling chief operating officer Jeremy Wagers, defrauded investors out of about $80 million over the course of the past five years, the SEC said.
Faulkner, Breitling’s founder and chief executive officer, and other executives told investors their money would be used to drill oil wells, but instead spent it on cars, jewelry and gentleman’s clubs, according to the SEC. The regulator suspended trading in Breitling’s shares.
Part of his shtick, Bloomberg details, was a carefully managed profile in which he paid a public relations firm to promote him for television interviews. It worked, as he appeared on CNBC, CNN, Fox Business News and hosted a weekly radio show in Dallas, according to the SEC complaint. He has also been interviewed on Bloomberg Television.
Chris Faulkner – Behind the Scenes before a 5:20 AM Live Shot on CNBC from Chris Faulkner on Vimeo.
In June 2014, Faulkner published a book called “The Fracking Truth,” despite having limited exposure to the oil-and-gas industry.
“Chris Faulkner orchestrated a sophisticated and multilayered scheme using BECC and its affiliated entities as a conduit to access millions of investor dollars,” said Shamoil T. Shipchandler, head of SEC’s Fort Worth office.
“The financing for Faulkner’s opulent lifestyle came directly at the expense of unwitting investors across the country.”
Breitling investors are happy and got the returns they expected, said Larry Friedman, an attorney who represents Faulkner and the company.
“These allegations are not true or accurate,” Friedman said. “The personal accusations about Faulkner are out of place and uncalled for. Entertaining is part of raising investor capital from high net worth individuals.”
Here is the full SEC complaint, you decide… (we suggest page 7 (item 13) to start for fun…)
Source: "Frack Master" Busted For Blowing Investor Cash On "Whore Card"
Understanding Brexit: The Powerless Press Their Thumb In The Eye Of The Power Elite
By Tyler Durden
Submitted by Charles Hugh-Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,
The sense of having a real say, and possessing actual agency, is very empowering, and very rare, for members of the lower-middle class and the working class today.
The premier strategy for retaining power is to give the powerless a carefully managed illusion of decision-making and autonomy. Having a say over one's life and choices is called agency, and it is the illusion of agency that makes democracy such a powerful tool of control.
The second most effective means of maintaining power is to limit the choices offered the powerless. Offering the powerless false choices, i.e. the choice between two functionally equivalent options, provides the comforting illusion of agency while insuring that the status quo Power Elites remains in charge, regardless of the choice made by the powerless.
For example, give the powerless a choice between Tweedle-Dum (Republicans/Tories) and Tweedle-Dee (Democrats/Labour). Whomever they elect, the self-serving Power Elite of entrenched interests and wealth remains firmly in charge, for the Power Elite speaks with one voice through two mouths, one Establishment Democrat/Labour, the other Establishment Republican/Tory.
If the powerless get restless, make them fearful. This is easily managed via external threats and dramatic predictions of economic doom should the Power Elite be threatened.
If fear has lost its edge due to over-use, then whip up social controversies that divide and conquer the powerless. Divisive, hot-button social controversies are easily staged and media-managed; these serve to distract and fragment the powerless in endless culture wars.
The powerless get very few opportunities to express their dissatisfaction with their gradual impoverishment and powerlessness, and few opportunities to register their disapproval of the Power Elite. They know complaints go nowhere, petitions are ignored, and demonstrations accomplish nothing.
So when a rare chance to stick a thumb in the eye of the Power Elite comes along, they take it. The Brexit vote was just such an opportunity.
Though the benefits that flowed from membership in the European Union may well have been substantial, many people did not have any direct experience of those benefits, which largely flowed to a handful of privileged classes: young, well-educated workers in finance, people who bought housing in London before the huge run-up in valuations, and workers providing services to the wealthy foreigners and highly paid financial professionals.
Many households have seen their quality of life and living standards stagnate or decay during the U.K.'s membership in the E.U. The benefits touted by the Power Elite are either illusory or too modest to matter to these households, and their rage has only grown as the Power Elite tried to browbeat them into approving a membership that yielded no benefits to their households.
The Power Elite simply repeated what has worked well for 60+ years: tout the systemic benefits of E.U. membership, confident in the belief that some of these benefits have trickled down to the lower economic classes, and stoke fears of economic decline if the Powers That Be don't get their way.
Unfortunately for the Power Elite, the benefits of E.U. membership, financialization and …read more
Source: Understanding Brexit: The Powerless Press Their Thumb In The Eye Of The Power Elite
‘Game of Thrones’ finale sets stage for march to finish
The ‘Game of Thrones’ season finale was hardly a low-key exercise. …read more
Source: ‘Game of Thrones’ finale sets stage for march to finish
How The Pentagon Is Preparing For A Tank War With Russia
By Tyler Durden
Submitted by Patriuck Tucker via DefenseOne.com,
Reactive armor and cross-domain fire capabilities are just some of the items on the Army’s must-have list.
When Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster briefs, it’s like Gen. Patton giving a TED talk — a domineering physical presence with bristling intellectual intensity.
These days, the charismatic director of the Army’s Capabilities Integration Center is knee-deep in a project called The Russia New Generation Warfare study, an analysis of how Russia is re-inventing land warfare in the mud of Eastern Ukraine. Speaking recently at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C., McMaster said that the two-year-old conflict had revealed that the Russians have superior artillery firepower, better combat vehicles, and have learned sophisticated use of UAVs for tactical effect. Should U.S. forces find themselves in a land war with Russia, he said, they would be in for a rude, cold awakening.
“We spend a long time talking about winning long-range missile duels,” said McMaster. But long-range missiles only get you through the front door. The question then becomes what will you do when you get there.
“Look at the enemy countermeasures,” he said, noting Russia’s use of nominally semi-professional forces who are capable of “dispersion, concealment, intermingling with civilian populations…the ability to disrupt our network strike capability, precision navigation and timing capabilities.” All of that means “you’re probably going to have a close fight… Increasingly, close combat overmatch is an area we’ve neglected, because we’ve taken it for granted.”
So how do you restore overmatch? The recipe that’s emerging from the battlefield of Ukraine, says McMaster, is more artillery and better artillery, a mix of old and new.
Cross-Domain Fires
“We’re out-ranged by a lot of these systems and they employ improved conventional munitions, which we are going away from. There will be a 40- to 60-percent reduction in lethality in the systems that we have,” he said. “Remember that we already have fewer artillery systems. Now those fewer artillery systems will be less effective relative to the enemy. So we need to do something on that now.”
To remedy that, McMaster is looking into a new area called “cross domain fires,” which would outfit ground units to hit a much wider array of targets. “When an Army fires unit arrives somewhere, it should be able to do surface-to-air, surface-to-surface, and shore-to-ship capabilities. We are developing that now and there are some really promising capabilities,” he said.
While the full report has not been made public, “a lot of this is available open source” said McMaster, “in the work that Phil Karber has done, for example.”
Karber, the president of the Potomac Foundation, went on a fact-finding mission to Ukraine last year, and returned with the conclusion that the United States had long overemphasized precision artillery on the battlefield at the expense of mass fires. Since the 1980s, he said last October, at an Association for the United States Army event, the U.S. has given up its qualitative edge, mostly by getting rid of cluster munitions.
Munitions have …read more
Source: How The Pentagon Is Preparing For A Tank War With Russia
‘Cost-Burdened-Renters’ Surge To Historic Highs As Hillbama-nomics Fails For Low-Income Faithful
By Tyler Durden
As we have discussed many times in the past, for the Average American, owning a home is increasingly unaffordable. This has led to a dramatic surge in rents, and ultimately to a significant squeeze on the cash flow of renters across the nation.
Recall, here is RealtyTrac's Q1 2016 Home Affordability Index, which showed that 9% of the US county housing markets were less affordable than their historical levels.
The unaffordability of owning a home of course has led to a plummeting national home ownership rate, as shown by Harvard's recent State of the Nation's Housing report.
Not surprisingly, as millennials are making less and drowning in debt, home ownership rates for younger age groups has completely fallen off a cliff. As a reminder, more millennials live at home with their parents now than at any other time since the great depression. However, as the chart below shows, home ownership has fallen across the board.
The result of all of the above, is that rental prices for everyone have surged, and is putting more and more renters in a position of being significantly cost burdened as more income needs to be directed toward paying the rent. The number of cost-burdened households rose by 3.6 million from 2008 to 2014 to a stunning 21.3 million households. Even more concerning is that the number of households with severe burdens (ie: paying more than 50% of income for housing) jumped by 2.1 million to a record 11.4 million households. As the report states, cost-burdened renters are at historic highs.
From the report
The divergence between the rental and owner-occupied markets is evident in the number of cost-burdened households in each segment. On the owner side, the number of households facing cost burdens (paying more than 30 percent of income for housing) has fallen steadily as high foreclosure rates have pushed out many financially strained owners, low interest rates have allowed remaining owners to reduce their housing costs, and fewer young households have moved into homeownership. As of 2014, the number of cost-burdened owners stood at 18.5 million, down 4.4 million since 2008.
The decline has occurred across all age groups, but especially among younger homeowners. Homeowners age 75 and over, however, are among the most cost-burdened groups, with their share at 29 percent compared with 24 percent for households under age 45. With the aging baby boomers swelling the ranks of older homeowners and larger shares of households carrying mortgage debt into retirement, the problem of housing cost burdens among the elderly is likely to grow.
On the renter side, the number of cost-burdened households rose by 3.6 million from 2008 to 2014, to 21.3 million. Even more troubling, the number with severe burdens (paying more than 50 percent of income for housing) jumped by 2.1 million to a record 11.4 million. The severely burdened share among the nation’s 9.6 million lowest-income renters (earning less than $15,000) is particularly high at 72 percent. In all but …read more
Source: ‘Cost-Burdened-Renters’ Surge To Historic Highs As Hillbama-nomics Fails For Low-Income Faithful
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Is The US Locking Up Its Available Male Labor Force?
By Tyler Durden
A few years ago we noted an extremely disturbing trend, namely that there was never a lower percentage of white men over 20 working in America. The decline in labor force participation rate for males ages 25-54 has accelerated sharply since 1980, and we may have an answer as to why.
Here is the labor force participation rate for men ages 25-54. Although the downward trend is clear since it topped out out 97.9% in 1954, a notable accelerated decline takes place since 1980, which as of May 1, 2016 put the rate at 88.4%.
As the WSJ points out, there is a sharp divergence in participation rates by educational attainment.
Which one could argue is evidence of the declining middle class in America, as blue-collar jobs are disappearing.
There is one more critical chart that the WSJ provides that is notable however, and is something to consider. As the decline in labor force participation for working age males has accelerated its decline since 1980, male prisoners who have been incarcerated has accelerated in the complete opposite direction.
* * *
Is the male labor force collapsing because more and more are being sent to prison? The data certainly shows that is a possibility.
Here is a look at how the US imprisonment rate has grown since 1880 – look at the pop since 1980.
And just because it has been an insane weekend, we'll add to it by reminding readers that despite all of the above, Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR) is actively advocating that the US has an “under-incarceration problem.” Perhaps Cotton wishes to lock up the entire male labor force instead of just most of it.
Source: Is The US Locking Up Its Available Male Labor Force?
Another Sexual Assault Gets Refugees Banned From Pools In Austria
By Tyler Durden
Earlier this year we reported that a town in Germany had banned adult male asylum seekers from the public pool after receiving complaints that some women were sexually harassed. As a result, Germany created a leaflet that it handed out to “sexually frustrated” immigrants at local swimming pools to teach them proper poolside etiquette.
The leaflet shows that among other things, it is not acceptable to do the following: touch the behind of an unsuspecting female swimmer (#12), drown others (#4), push women into the pool (#3), or jump onto a screaming blonde (#7).
A similar flyer was created by Switzerland which detailed acceptable behaviors in order to prevent refugee sex attacks. The flyer was a modified version of one that was created in Austria during the initial influx of refugees.
For those that chuckle at the effort, there does appear to be a real problem with sexual assaults, and it is widespread. In the latest sexual assault case, a “dark-skinned” man assaulted a 13 year old girl at a pool in the town of Mistelbach, Austria on Wednesday. As RT reports, the man followed the girl into the women's changing room and tried to force the girl to perform oral sex. Thankfully the attacker fled after the girl began shouting.
More from RT
Authorities in the Austrian town of Mistelbach issued a temporary pool ban for refugees following a sexual assault by a “dark-skinned’ man on a 13-year-old girl.
“This news was a shock,” said the town’s mayor, Alfred Pohl, as quoted by the Heute media outlet.
According to Austrian newspaper Kronen Zeitung, the attack happened on Wednesday afternoon.
The girl was first followed by a young man into the women’s changing room. Once there, he forced her to perform oral sex. The girl however fiercely resisted and started shouting, forcing the attacker to flee.
Police are now investigating the incident and are searching for the suspect.
According to eyewitnesses and the victim herself the man was a “foreigner.”
There are currently eight facilities housing refugees around Mistelbach. Police are now checking the camps, Heute news outlet reports. There is however no confirmation on whether an asylum seeker is behind the attack.
Following the incident the mayor temporarily banned all refugees from attending the swimming pool. The authorities put a poster next the pool entrance reading “Today no entry for refugees,” and two guards were hired to patrol the premises.
“This decision was not easy, and I take responsibility for it,” the mayor said. “The ban on asylum seekers from the swimming pool is temporary, until the security is in place,” he added.
* * *
These types of occurrences are what makes the immigration issue in Europe an extremely difficult one for the politicians who have to answer for these types of things. The violence and sexual assaults are what has given rise to Germany's anti-immigrant AfD party as of late, and sadly this trend does not look like it is going to cease any time soon, despite …read more
Source: Another Sexual Assault Gets Refugees Banned From Pools In Austria
A Tale Of Two Asset Classes: Gold Miners Soar, Banks Crash
By Tyler Durden
Submitted by John Rubino via DollarCollapse.com,
The following tables illustrate one of the dilemmas of mainstream money management:
The vast majority of financial advisers and portfolio managers are big fans of bank stocks because finance is, in their minds, a crucial if not the crucial form of wealth-creating activity in the modern world. So the big names in the field — Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank, JP Morgan, etc. — are generally seen as safe places to put client capital.
Gold and silver, in contrast are fringe, primitive, atavistic concepts that are, at best, “insurance” against some kind of 100-year flood that can’t be predicted and probably won’t happen.
But some clients still like such things so what the hell, we’ll allocate 1% of the idiots’ money to it to shut them up. (1% is literally the proportion of global capital invested in precious metals.)
Unfortunately, that’s credit bubble thinking. Banks are dominant forces in an economy only when that economy is creating an unhealthy amount of credit. When the process exhausts itself the banks tank, and terrified capital flows back into “primitive” safe havens. Like Friday:
Gold is extending its rally in early trading – now the biggest 2-day surge since March 2009…
Source: A Tale Of Two Asset Classes: Gold Miners Soar, Banks Crash
