After an 18-month hiatus, Chelsea Handler returns to TV — via Netflix, in a three-night-a-week series that promises it’s “tossing the traditional talk show model out the window.” …read more
Source: Chelsea Handler on Netflix: What’s the verdict?
By Tyler Durden
Every year, the Cato Institute publishes a list of the world’s most “miserable countries” by using a simple economic formula to calculate the scores. Described as a Misery Index, the tally for each country can be found by adding the unemployment rate, inflation, and lending rate together, and then subtracting the change in real GDP per capita.
According to the think tank, countries with misery scores over 20 are “ripe for reform”. If that’s true, then socialist Venezuela is way overdue.
The troubled nation finished with a misery score of 214.9, the highest marker in 2015 by far. Unfortunately, the number is not looking better for this year, as the IMF has projected that hyperinflation will top 720% by the end of 2016. For the average Venezuelan, that means that food staples and other necessities will be doubling in price every four months.
Hyperinflation has taken its toll on citizens already. Three years ago, one US dollar could buy four Venezuelan bolivars. Today, one dollar can buy more than 1,000 bolivars on the black market. If the inflation rate keeps accelerating, the situation could approach a similar trajectory to hyperinflation in Weimar Germany, where rates eventually catapulted to one trillion percent after six years.
While hyperinflation is certainly one of Venezuela’s biggest concerns, the nation has also been short on luck lately. The Zika virus hashit the country hard, and the oil crash has created political, economic, and social tensions in a nation that depends on oil exports to balance the budget. Three in four Venezuelans have fallen into poverty, and the country’s GDP is expected to contract 8% in 2016.
Venezuelans are now facing dire shortages for many necessities, including power. Droughts have caused mayhem on the country’s hydro reservoirs, making blackouts common and widespread. Food, medical supplies, and toilet paper are in short supply, and even beer production has been shut down.
Key Stats:
Recent measures taken to dampen the crisis in Venezuela have been bold.
The government has moved entire time zones while reducing the work week of public sector workers to try and work around power deficiencies. Meanwhile, minimum wage earners have been given a 30% raise to keep up with inflation.
However, the crisis may be coming to a head. A recent survey shows that 87% of Venezuelans do not have enough money to purchase enough food to meet their needs, and people are getting restless.
In early May, the opposition party submitted a list 1.85 million signatures to the electoral commission to seek a recall referendum against President Nicolas Maduro. Days after the submission, the leader of an opposition party was found dead after being shot in the head.
Unless the country gets ruled with an iron fist, the level of misery can only reach …read more
Source: Mapping The Most Miserable Countries In The World
By Tyler Durden
Russia is moving full steam ahead with its plan to kill the petro-dollar, and is burying OPEC’s influence along with it.
As we reported earlier, Russia has taken its next step toward de-dollarization by launching its own benchmark oil futures contract that will price oil in rubles instead of USD. Now, it appears as though Russia has deemed it is time to start chipping away at OPEC and its power within the oil space.
According to Reuters, Rosneft CEO and close Putin ally Igor Sechin had some harsh words to say about the oil cartel, and effectively announced its demise.
“At the moment a number of objective factors exclude the possibility for any cartels to dictate their will to the market. As for OPEC, it has practically stopped existing as a united organization.”
As a reminder, Russia was seemingly willing to agree to a deal in Doha earlier this year that would have frozen production at certain levels among the participating countries, however last minute changes by Saudi Arabia and other OPEC countries (namely that OPEC wanted Iran to be a part of the deal) blew the deal up and pissed Russia off.
“Some OPEC countries decided to change their terms at the last moment, trying to get concessions from countries that are not here. We were insisting on trying to concentrate on the countries which are. How can Iran be the reason for the talks’ failure, when it wasn’t even here.”
Perhaps that was the final straw for Russia, as it appears that Moscow now will choose to go it alone from here on out. Sechin was quick to remind everyone that Rosneft was skeptical of the Doha deal to begin with, and is now exhibiting a little bit of “I told you so.”
“The company was skeptical from the very beginning about the possibility of reaching any sort of joint agreement with OPEC’s involvement in current conditions. Just to remind you, the only one question with which we responded to those who were interested to know our position: ‘Who should we agree with, and how?’ The development of the situation has clearly shown we were right.“
Sechin indicates that the new normal will be one in which the market – and technology – sets the prices for oil, not OPEC.
“At the moment, key factors which are influencing the market are finance, technology and regulation. We can see this with the example of shale which became a powerful tool of influence on the global market.”
Meanwhile, just in case the Kremlin’s message is not being received clearly enough by everyone, Russia is fully intent to take advantage of what it sees as impotent White House leadership, is doing everything in its power to end US dominance both politically and economically, and is flexing its military muscles, as well as its economic power over the energy market in order to establish a resurgent global leadership position in both arenas.
By Tyler Durden
Submitted by Mike Krieger via Liberty Blitzkrieg blog,
The City is a semi-offshore state, a bit like the UK’s crown dependencies and overseas territories, tax havens legitimised by the Privy Council. Britain’s financial secrecy undermines the tax base while providing a conduit into the legal economy for gangsters, kleptocrats and drug barons.
Even the more orthodox financial institutions deploy a succession of scandalous practices: pension mis-selling, endowment mortgage fraud, the payment protection insurance con, Libor rigging. A former minister in the last government, Lord Green, ran HSBC while it engaged in money laundering for drug gangs, systematic tax evasion and the provision of services to Saudi and Bangladeshi banks linked to the financing of terrorists. Sometimes the UK looks to me like an ever so civilised mafia state.
– From last year’s post: Guardian Op-Ed – The City of London Has Turned Britain Into a “Civilized Mafia State”
This is too good not to cover.
Via Yahoo News:
A black bus winds its way through some of London’s most expensive neighbourhoods for a sightseeing tour with a difference — a guided visit around luxury houses bought by shady international tycoons and officials.
The “Kleptocracy Tour” was set up by anti-corruption campaigner Roman Borisovich, who aims to expose dirty money fuelling the high-end London property market and the teams of British “enablers” who make it happen.
“The idea behind the tour is to attract public attention to the fact of massive money laundering through properties in London,” Borisovich told AFP on the tour this week, ahead of an international anti-corruption summit being hosted by Prime Minister David Cameron.
More than 36,000 properties in London are owned through offshore firms, which own a total £122 billion (154 billion euros, $176 billion) worth of property across England and Wales.
Buying properties through offshore companies can be a way of hiding the true owners and avoiding taxes.
More than £180 million worth of property in Britain was investigated as suspected proceeds of corruption between 2004 and 2014, according to Transparency International, which says this figure is just the “tip of the iceberg”.
Luke Harding, a journalist with The Guardian newspaper who helped analyse the Panama Papers, said the shock for him was the realisation of the extent of the enabling role played by British intermediaries.
“The UK has become Monaco with fog,” he said, after addressing the bus tour.
Liberty Blitzkrieg readers will be familiar with this theme as I’ve been referring to London real estate as the world’s criminal oligarch money laundering capital of the world for quite some time.
Here are a few previously published articles on the topic:
London Bubble Trouble – Visas Issued to Wealthy Foreigners Plunge 84%
The Luxury Housing Bubble Pops – Overseas Investors Struggle to Sell Overpriced Mansions
<a target=_blank rel="nofollow" href="https://libertyblitzkrieg.com/2015/09/09/guardian-op-ed-the-city-of-london-has-turned-britain-into-a-civilized-mafia-state/" rel="bookmark" title="Permanent Link to Guardian Op-Ed – The City …read more
Source: Introducing The London Kleptocracy Bus Tour
By Tyler Durden
Every year it’s the same: some legacy mainstream media mouthpiece muses on how great Obama’s recovery would be… if only it wasn’t for stingy US consumers refusing to spend like the drunken sailors of days gone by. Last June, it was the WSJ’s Jon Hilsenrath who actually wrote a letter to American consumers, confused by their unwillingness to spend and explicitly accused them of being “stingy” even as the “Federal Reserve was counting” on them to spend, spend, spend. For those who have forgotten this absolute pearl, here it is again:
Dear American Consumer,
This is The Wall Street Journal. We’re writing to ask if something is bothering you.
The sun shined in April and you didn’t spend much money. The Commerce Department here in Washington says your spending didn’t increase at all adjusted for inflation last month compared to March. You appear to have mostly stayed home and watched television in December, January and February as well. We thought you would be out of your winter doldrums by now, but we don’t see much evidence that this is the case.
You have been saving more too. You socked away 5.6% of your income in April after taxes, even more than in March. This saving is not like you. What’s up?
We know you experienced a terrible shock when Lehman Brothers collapsed in 2008 and your employer responded by firing you. We know stock prices collapsed and that was shocking too. We also know you shouldn’t have taken out that large second mortgage during the housing boom to fix up your kitchen with granite countertops. You’ve been working very hard to pay off this debt and we admire your fortitude. But these shocks seem like a long time ago to us in a newsroom. Is that still what’s holding you back?
Do you know the American economy is counting on you? We can’t count on the rest of the world to spend money on our stuff. The rest of the world is in an even worse mood than you are. You should feel lucky you’re not a Greek consumer. And China, well they’re truly struggling there just to reach the very modest goal of 7% growth.
The Federal Reserve is counting on you too. Fed officials want to start raising the cost of your borrowing because they worry they’ve been giving you a free ride for too long with zero interest rates. We listen to Fed officials all of the time here at The Wall Street Journal, and they just can’t figure you out.
Please let us know the problem. You can reach us at any of the emails below.
Sincerely,
The Wall Street Journal’s Central Bank Team
-By Jon Hilsenrath
In retrospect, we can’t help but chuckle at the part about “Fed officials want to start raising the cost of your borrowing because they worry they’ve been giving you a free ride for too long with zero interest rates.”
That …read more
Source: The Washington Post Accuses Stingy Americans Of Ruining Obama’s Recovery
By Tyler Durden
Submitted by John Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,
“Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”—C.S. Lewis
Fool me once, shame on you.
“You” in this case is the government that keeps violating the sacred trust of its citizenry.
Fool me twice, shame on me.
“Me” in this case is the collective “we the people” who should have learned early on that a government that repeatedly lies, breaks the laws, overreaches its authority and abuses its power can’t be trusted.
Fool me over and over and over again, shame on both of us.
Shame on every politician, bureaucrat and technician who is a shill for the U.S. government’s abuses and lies, and shame on every gullible American who keeps buying into the government’s propaganda, believing that it has our best interests at heart.
Unfortunately, as I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the government has seldom had our best interests at heart.
The government didn’t have our best interests at heart when it propelled us into endless oil-fueled wars and military occupations in the Middle East that wreaked havoc on our economy, stretched thin our military resources and subjected us to horrific blowback.
There is no way the government had our best interests at heart when it passed laws subjecting us to all manner of invasive searches and surveillance, censoring our speech and stifling our expression, rendering us anti-government extremists for daring to disagree with its dictates, locking us up for criticizing government policies on social media, encouraging Americans to spy and snitch on their fellow citizens, and allowing government agents to grope, strip, search, taser, shoot and kill us.
Certainly the government did not have our best interests at heart when it turned America into a battlefield, transforming law enforcement agencies into extensions of the military, conducting military drills on domestic soil, distributing “free” military equipment and weaponry to local police, and desensitizing Americans to the menace of the police state with active shooter drills, color-coded terror alerts, and randomly conducted security checkpoints at “soft” targets such as shopping malls and sports arenas.
It would be a reach to suggest that the government had our best interests at heart when it locked down the schools, installing metal detectors and surveillance cameras, adopting zero tolerance policies that punish childish behavior as harshly as criminal actions, and teaching our young people that they have no rights, that being force-fed facts is education rather than indoctrination, that they are not to question governmental authority, that they must meekly accept a life of censorship, round-the-clock surveillance, roadside blood draws, SWAT team raids and other indignities.
One would also be hard-pressed to suggest that …read more
Source: American Horror Story: The Shameful Truth About The Government’s Secret Experiments
By Tyler Durden
Despite having Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein as an investor and being Bill and Hillary Clinton’s son-in-law, Marc Mezvinsky (and two former colleagues from Goldman Sachs who manage Eaglevale Partners hedge fund) told investors in a letter last February they had been “incorrect” on Greece, generating staggering losses for the firm’s main Eaglevale Hellenic Opportunity, a/k/a the “Greek recovery” fund during most of its life. By ‘incorrect’ the Clinton heir apparent meant the $25 million Eaglevale Greek fund had lost a stunning 48% in 2014.
Which is not to say the larger fund it was part of is doing any better: as of last February, Eaglevale had spent 27 of its 34 months in operation below its high-water mark. We are confident that 13 months later the numbers are 40 out of 47, respectively.
As a reminder, 2013, Institutional Investor proclaimed Mezvinsky “a hedge fund rising star“…
In late 2011, Marc Mezvinsky co-founded New York-based, macro-focused hedge fund firm Eaglevale Partners with Bennett Grau and Mark Mallon, two Goldman Sachs Group proprietary traders whom he’d gotten to know when they all worked at the bank. Best known as the husband of Chelsea Clinton, Mezvinsky, 35, who has a BA in religious studies and philosophy from Stanford University and an MA in politics, philosophy and economics from the University of Oxford, has been quietly building his finance career. Before launching his own firm, the longtime Clinton family friend was a partner and global macro portfolio manager at New York- and Rio de Janeiro-based investment house 3G Capital. Eaglevale manages more than $400 million.
Alas, he was anything but, and instead of having a real grasp of macroeconomic events, or how to – you know – hedge, he decided to dump millions in Greece just before the country entered a death spiral that culminated with its third bailout, capital controls, insolvent banks and a terminally crippled economy.
Meanwhile, things went from terrible to abysmal for both the clueless hedge fund manager and his LPs, and as the NYT reports, Hillary Clinton’s son-in-law is finally shutting down the Greece-focused fund, after losing nearly 90% of its value. Investors were told last month that Eaglevale Hellenic Opportunity would finally be put out of its misery and would shutter.
The closure comes as the worst possible time: we are confident that Donald Trump will be quick to work it into his political attack routine.
Mr. Chelsea Clinton and his partners began raising money in 2011 from investors for the firm’s flagship fund. Since then, that portfolio has posted uneven performance. A Stanford University graduate, Mr. Mezvinsky worked at Goldman for eight years before leaving to join a private equity firm. He left that job to form Eaglevale with two longtime Goldman partners, Bennett Grau and Mark Mallon. The hedge fund firm is named after a bridge in Central Park.
As noted above, some of the firm’s earliest investors were Goldman partners, including Lloyd C. Blankfein, Goldman’s chief executive officer, who let Eaglevale use his …read more
Source: Hillary Clinton Son-In-Law’s Hedge Fund Shuts Down Greek Fund After 90% Loss
We have seen this story before, and it never ends well. From mid-March until early May 2008, a vigorous stock market rally convinced many investors that the market turmoil of late 2007 and early 2008 was over and that happy days were ahead for the U.S. economy. But of course we all know what happened. It turned out that the market downturns of late 2007 and early 2008 were just “foreshocks” of a much greater crash in late 2008. The market surge in the spring of 2008 was just a mirage, and it masked rapidly declining economic fundamentals. Well, the exact same thing is happening right now. The Dow rose another 222 points on Tuesday, but meanwhile virtually every number that we are getting is just screaming that the overall U.S. economy is steadily falling apart. So don’t be fooled by a rising stock market. Just like in the spring of 2008, all of the signs are pointing to an avalanche of bad economic news in the months ahead. The following are 11 signs that the U.S. economy is rapidly deteriorating…
#1 Total business sales have been declining for nearly two years, and they are now about 15 percent lower than they were in late 2014.
#2 The inventory to sales ratio is now back to near where it was during the depths of the last recession. This means that there is lots and lots of unsold stuff just sitting around out there, and that is a sign of a very unhealthy economy.
#3 Corporate earnings have declined for four consecutive quarters. This never happens outside of a recession.
#4 Profits for companies listed on the S&P 500 were down 7.1 percent during the first quarter of 2016 when compared to the same time period a year ago.
#5 In April, commercial bankruptcies were up 32 percent on a year over year basis, and Chapter 11 filings were up 67 percent on a year over year basis. This is exactly the kind of spike that we witnessed during the initial stages of the last major financial crisis as well.
#6 U.S. rail traffic was 11 percent lower last month than it was during the same month in 2015. Right now there are 292 Union Pacific engines sitting idle in the middle of the Arizona desert because there is literally nothing for them to do.
#7 The U.S. economy has lost an astounding 191,000 mining jobs since September 2014. For areas of the country that are heavily dependent on mining, this has been absolutely devastating.
#8 According to Challenger, Gray & Christmas, U.S. firms announced 35 percent more job cuts during April than they did in March. This indicates that our employment problems are accelerating.
#9 So far this year, job cut announcements are running 24 percent above the exact same period in 2015.
#10 U.S. GDP grew at just a 0.5 percent annual rate during the first quarter of 2016. This was the third time in a row …read more
Source: 11 Signs That The U.S. Economy Is Rapidly Deteriorating Even As The Stock Market Soars
By Tyler Durden
Einstein's defintion of insanity was “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different outcome.” It appears, judging by the world's central bankers' utter failure to ignite anything but speculative bubbles in risk assets they are all insane and, while the phenomenon of negative rates is relatively new in Europe and Japan (in other words they can decalre it too soon to judge), it has been four years since Denmark went full NIRP-tard, and inflation has done nothing but collapse.
As Bloomberg reports,
The latest data from Statistics Denmark is bad news for ECB President Mario Draghi and other central bank governors seeking to fuel inflation through ultra-low interest rates.
Denmark’s consumer price index in April was unchanged from a year ago for the second month in a row and up a less-than-expected 0.1 percent from March.
After four years of negative interest rates, it looks like the (inverse) relationship between rates and prices may be broken for good.
Because, as Charles Hugh-Smith detailed previously, what NIRP communicates is: this sucker's going down, so sell everything and hoard your cash and precious metals.
The last hurrah of central banks is the negative interest rate policy–NIRP. The basic idea of NIRP is to punish savers so severely that households and businesses will be compelled to go blow whatever money they have on something–what the money is squandered on is of no importance to central banks.
All that matters is that people and enterprises are forced to spend whatever cash they have rather than “hoard” it, i.e. preserve and conserve their capital.
That this is certifiably insane is self-evident. If an economy depends on bringing future spending into the present by destroying savings, that economy is doomed regardless of NIRP, for eventually the cash runs out and spending declines anyway.
But NIRP will fail completely and totally due to another dynamic— one I addressed last month in Another Reason Why the Middle Class and the Velocity of Money Are in Terminal Decline. As correspondent Mike Fasano noted, negative interest rates force us to save even more, not less:
“People like me who have saved all their lives realize that they their savings (no matter how much) will never throw off enough money to allow retirement, unless I live off principal. This is especially so since one can reasonably expect social security to phased out, indexed out or dropped altogether. Accordingly, I realize that when I get to the point when I can no longer work, I'll be living off capital and not interest. This is an incentive to keep working and not to spend.”
If banks start charging savers interest on their cash, savers will have to save even more income to offset the additional costs imposed by central banks on their savings.
A third dynamic dooms the insane negative interest rate policy: what does it say about the stability and health of the status quo if central banks are saying the only way to save the status quo is to force …read more
Source: NIRP’s Not Working
By Pivotfarm
Follow ZeroHedge in Real-time on FinancialJuice
War? That splendid means of conflict (armed, please) between at least two nations for a multitude of reasons. It could be because one of those countries is jealous, or in love, even with the other that doesn’t want to give up its virgin land to be raped. Perhaps war might take place for hate, because the skin of the opponents (commonly called the enemy) is not quite the same color (so the people there can’t be people, because people are always our color if they are to be called people and not subjugated into second-class ranking). Perhaps, it might take (albeit sometimes publically only) to spread our form of government in the west (we call know that the others envy our form of democracy and that they want to secretly be like us). War is waged because of all of these reasons and also because we just want to. It’s like stealing. People don’t just steal out of necessity; they do it because they feel like doing it even if they don’t need it. 25% of people will actually just steal because they get a rush from it; it’s a fix, adrenaline from the fear of being caught. War has little positive effect and even more rarely on the civilian population in the war zone.
Do we go to war because our populations have grown far greater than it is reasonably possibly for us to live together? Or do we find in that desire to wage war on our neighbors as some glowing spark of the past inside us that made us thrive on animal tendencies or sexual and territorial competition to perpetuate our species? Perhaps Marxist theories were correct, espousing the belief that man wages war only due to the attempt to gain control of resources in the imperialistic and capitalistic system in which we evolve. Thomas Malthus believed that we would also wage war because resources were being eaten away at by the poor (who incidentally, should be allowed just to die). The Youth Bulge theory in the pyramid of ages shows that when there is a large number of growingly unhappy cohort of male youths that are unable to find work due to lack of economic activity, then it is grounds for that group evolving into a pool of violence that will ultimately end in war.
Whatever the reasons we have and we will go to war for, there have been many stupid wars in the past. We don’t need to mention George W. Bush and his ridiculous invention of the reasons to wage war in the Middle East and his responsibility in the matter for most of the instability that has ensued in that region. If only those that had voted for him had voted for someone else to change the course of history. If only those that had falsified the votes, had been arrested in thrown in jail before he was declared President.
There have been wars that were ridiculously …read more
Source: War Is Stupid!
Welcome to Esh Carmel Blog.
