Fixing the Silver Fix : the Corruption Continues
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By Sprott Money
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By Sprott Money
My name is Tommy Flanagan, and I’m a member of Pathological Liars Anonymous. In fact…I’m the president of that organization. Yeah, that’s who I am.
I didn’t always lie. No, I used to tell the truth. Then one day I told a lie, and I got away with it. Yeah, I told my parents that I had a brother that they had never met…
-Jon-the-Liar Lovitz, The Johnny Carson Show, March 28, 1985
As the character Jon Lovitz explained on The Johnny Carson Show, lying is habit-forming. If perpetuated, it becomes compulsive conduct. Lying is a form of deviant behavior that (in the eyes of the liar) makes problems go away. Of course such problems never disappear permanently, because a lie can never solve anything. At some point the problem resurfaces, and because it never was addressed, often the problem has grown even larger.
The response from the liar is to tell another lie. But, because the problem is now almost inevitably larger, the new lie tends to be bigger or worse than the original. The process repeats. As the lies become larger and more numerous, eventually some of the new lies begin to openly contradict the old lies.
At this point, the proverbial “jig is up” for the liar. At least that is how things are supposed to work, as illustrated by the fable The Boy Who Cried Wolf. Which brings us to the “silver fix.”
The most obvious starting point is a question: why do we need a “silver fix”? In an era of electronic, instantaneous communication, and with (supposedly) “free and open markets,” why do we need someone to tell us what the price of silver is supposed to be at a particular moment in time? Why can’t market participants simply observe for themselves the current spot-price in our “free and open markets”?
The bankers (playing the role of Jon-the-Liar) have their answer at the ready.
We need an official “fix” of the price of silver, because the settlement of a number of a different types of contracts is based upon the prevailing price of silver, at particular times in the daily trading. If we didn’t have an official “fix,” then traders could attempt to manipulate the price at those particular times, and cheat the system. That’s right, someone else could cheat the system.
How would “fixing” the price of silver (a process which even sounds corrupt) help to prevent corruption in the marketplace? The Liars again have their answer.
We’ll get some ‘honest people’ to tell us what the price of silver should be. These ‘honest people’ will meet behind closed doors, and then tell us the honest price for silver. Yeah, that’s the ticket! Honest people, meeting behind closed doors.
And thus ‘the silver fix’ was born. Who were …read more
Source: Fixing the Silver Fix : the Corruption Continues
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Rent the Runway’s new offering lets women rent everything from work outfits to weekend wear for a flat monthly fee. Meet the woman making it possible.
Source: How to get unlimited designer duds for $139/month
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By Tyler Durden
On the last day of an extremely volatile first quarter, following the latest torrid push higher in risk assets over the past two days following Yellen’s dovish Tuesday comments, today has seen a modest pull back in risk, whether because the market is massively overbought, because someone finally looked at what record multiple expansion that has taken place in Q1 as earnings are set to collapse by nearly 10%, or simply due to fears that tomorrow’s payrolls number will show an abnormal amount of minimum wage waiters and bartenders added.
Whatever the reason, stocks slipped and have unwound some of the March rebound that had the MSCI All-Country World Index on the brink of erasing its losses for 2016. Crude oil retreated with base metals. As
As a reminder, this is where we stood as of last night: by the close of play yesterday the S&P 500 (+0.44%) had extended its winning streak to three consecutive sessions and in the process reached the highest level since December 29th. In fact yesterday’s move means the index has rallied over 14% off the intraday low midway through last month and is just 3% off the 2015 high set back in May.
S&P 500 futures fell 0.1 percent, suggesting US stocks could snap a three-day winning streak that pushed the measure to its highest level this year. Among the key events today, investors will look to today’s initial jobless claims report for indications of the health of the labor market before Friday’s key non-farm payroll data.
After beating U.S. equities last year by the most in a decade, European stocks are now trailing them by the most since 2003. This quarter, analysts have slashed profit estimates, now forecasting declines for the year. Fund managers have withdrawn money for seven straight weeks, the longest streak since 2014, according to a Bank of America Corp. note last week.
The MSCI Asia Pacific Index pared gains to 0.1 percent, and is poised for an 8.2 percent jump in March. The Topix index fell 0.7 percent in Tokyo.
As reported before, we close off the quarter with the Bloomberg Dollar Spot Index headed for its worst month since 2010 and Treasury yields were on course for their largest quarterly drop since 2012 after Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen reiterated that weaker global growth called for a gradual approach to raising rates. Copper and zinc pared their first quarterly increases since 2014, while gold headed for its biggest three-month gain since 1986.
European stocks are heading for their first monthly gain since November, although progress hasn’t been sufficient to avoid a third quarterly drop in four. Global equities are up more than 7 percent in March, their first increase since October, but are still down 0.3 percent for the first three months of 2016.
“A lot of the recent rebound has been down to the Fed back-tracking on rate hikes,” Mark Lister, head of private wealth research at Craigs Investment Partners in Wellington, which …read more
Source: On Final Day Of Extremely Volatile Quarter, Futures Trade Modestly Lower
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Three of China’s biggest banks reported big jumps in loans that have gone sour.
Source: Bad loans pile up at China’s biggest banks
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In the following instances, officials in the government which carried out the attack (or seriously proposed an attack) admit to it, either orally, in writing, or through photographs or videos:
(1) As admitted by secret Russian police files that are part of the Hoover Institution’s archives, the Russian Tsar’s secret police set off bombs and killed people in order to blame and arrest labor agitators. And see this.
(2) Japanese troops set off a small explosion on a train track in 1931, and falsely blamed it on China in order to justify an invasion of Manchuria. This is known as the “Mukden Incident” or the “Manchurian Incident”. The Tokyo International Military Tribunal found: “Several of the participators in the plan, including Hashimoto [a high-ranking Japanese army officer], have on various occasions admitted their part in the plot and have stated that the object of the ‘Incident’ was to afford an excuse for the occupation of Manchuria by the Kwantung Army ….” And see this.
(3) A major with the Nazi SS admitted at the Nuremberg trials that – under orders from the chief of the Gestapo – he and some other Nazi operatives faked attacks on their own people and resources which they blamed on the Poles, to justify the invasion of Poland.
(4) Nazi general Franz Halder also testified at the Nuremberg trials that Nazi leader Hermann Goering admitted to setting fire to the German parliament building in 1933, and then falsely blaming the communists for the arson.
(5) Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev admitted in writing that the Soviet Union’s Red Army shelled the Russian village of Mainila in 1939 – while blaming the attack on Finland – as a basis for launching the “Winter War” against Finland. Russian president Boris Yeltsin agreed that Russia had been the aggressor in the Winter War.
(6) The Russian Parliament, current Russian president Putin and former Soviet leader Gorbachev all admit that Soviet leader Joseph Stalin ordered his secret police to execute 22,000 Polish army officers and civilians in 1940, and then falsely blamed it on the Nazis.
(7) The British government admits that – between 1946 and 1948 – it bombed 5 ships carrying Jews attempting to flee the Holocaust to seek safety in Palestine, set up a fake group called “Defenders of Arab Palestine”, and then had the psuedo-group falsely claim responsibility for the bombings (and see this, this and this).
(8) Israel admits that in 1954, an Israeli terrorist cell operating in Egypt planted bombs in several buildings, including U.S. diplomatic facilities, then left behind “evidence” implicating the Arabs as the culprits (one of the bombs detonated prematurely, allowing …read more
Source: Governments Admit that Much of Modern History Has Been Manipulated By False Flag Attacks
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The number of people living in extremely poor neighborhoods has more than doubled since 2000, according to a report from the Brookings Institution.
Source: 14 million Americans live in poor neighborhoods
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In the below article, independent investigative journalist Lars Schall explores the time-honored tradition of following the money in an attempt to discover answers to yet unanswered questions regarding the terrorist attacks of 9/11 in New York City. Here is his report below.
Why Did The 9/11 Commission Not “Follow the Money”?
Lars Schall has put some material together that brings him to the question why the time-proven approach to “follow the money” was dismissed when it came the funding of the biggest terror attack on US soil.
By Lars Schall
Bill:
Howdy! I am an investigative financial journalist from Germany, who’s in the process of finishing a book trilogy on the topic of the so-called “Deep State”. Related to that project, I examined the case of a software program called the Prosecutor’s Management Information System (PROMIS), a database system developed by INSLAW Inc., a U.S. information technology company, which was founded by William A. Hamilton, a former analyst with the National Security Agency (NSA). Indeed, in mid-2012, when he became aware of my research connected to PROMIS, Mr. Hamilton contacted me to ask me for help with investigating some certain aspects of the PROMIS case.’
Here’s a recent confirmation for this fact.
Lars:
I am pleased to confirm that I contacted you for help in investigating aspects of the INSLAW Affair in which the U.S. Department of Justice secretly misappropriated the PROMIS legal case management software from INSLAW, Inc., one of its software vendors, and disseminated stolen copies beyond the U.S. Department of Justice for U.S. and Israeli intelligence database projects, including NSA’s Follow the Money Project for real-time electronic surveillance of wire transfers of money and letters of credit through the banking system; Israel’s sale of a version of PROMIS equipped with a special data retrieval capability to foreign intelligence and law enforcement agencies of both friendly and adversarial governments worldwide to facilitate the theft of their intelligence secrets while producing profits for intelligence insiders; the CIA’s deployment of PROMIS to virtually every component of the U.S intelligence community as ’compatible database software’ for the gathering and dissemination of U.S. intelligence information between and among the entities that ’produce’ the intelligence information and the entities that ’consume’ the intelligence product; the CIA’s deployment of PROMIS to the leading semi-conductor manufacturers in the world so NSA could exercise real-time electronic surveillance of the manufacturing and illicit sale of integrated circuits engineered for advanced defense and military applications; and the sale by a Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) proprietary company in Cyprus to the drug interdiction entities of Middle Eastern governments of a back-door version of PROMIS so DEA could augment its own drug trafficking intelligence information with the intelligence information stolen from these Middle Eastern governments.
Bill Hamilton
Founder and President INSLAW, Inc.
Washington, D.C.
The Prosecutor’s Management Information System (PROMIS) was originally …read more
Source: Why Did the 9/11 Commission Not "Follow the Money?", by Lars Schall
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By Tyler Durden
Submitted by John Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,
“Politicians are more likely than people in the general population to be sociopaths. I think you would find no expert in the field of sociopathy/psychopathy/antisocial personality disorder who would dispute this… That a small minority of human beings literally have no conscience was and is a bitter pill for our society to swallow — but it does explain a great many things, shamelessly deceitful political behavior being one.”—Dr. Martha Stout, clinical psychologist and former instructor at Harvard Medical School
Twenty years ago, a newspaper headline asked the question: “What’s the difference between a politician and a psychopath?”
The answer, then and now, remains the same: None.
There is no difference between psychopaths and politicians.
Nor is there much of a difference between the havoc wreaked on innocent lives by uncaring, unfeeling, selfish, irresponsible, parasitic criminals and elected officials who lie to their constituents, trade political favors for campaign contributions, turn a blind eye to the wishes of the electorate, cheat taxpayers out of hard-earned dollars, favor the corporate elite, entrench the military industrial complex, and spare little thought for the impact their thoughtless actions and hastily passed legislation might have on defenseless citizens.
Psychopaths and politicians both have a tendency to be selfish, callous, remorseless users of others, irresponsible, pathological liars, glib, con artists, lacking in remorse and shallow.
Charismatic politicians, like criminal psychopaths, exhibit a failure to accept responsibility for their actions, have a high sense of self-worth, are chronically unstable, have socially deviant lifestyle, need constant stimulation, have parasitic lifestyles and possess unrealistic goals.
It doesn’t matter whether you’re talking about Democrats or Republicans.
Political psychopaths are all largely cut from the same pathological cloth, brimming with seemingly easy charm and boasting calculating minds. Such leaders eventually create pathocracies—totalitarian societies bent on power, control, and destruction of both freedom in general and those who exercise their freedoms.
Once psychopaths gain power, the result is usually some form of totalitarian government or a pathocracy. “At that point, the government operates against the interests of its own people except for favoring certain groups,” author James G. Long notes. “We are currently witnessing deliberate polarizations of American citizens, illegal actions, and massive and needless acquisition of debt. This is typical of psychopathic systems, and very similar things happened in the Soviet Union as it overextended and collapsed.”
In other words, electing a psychopath to public office is tantamount to national hara-kiri, the ritualized act of self-annihilation, self-destruction and suicide. It signals the demise of democratic government and lays the groundwork for a totalitarian regime that is legalistic, militaristic, inflexible, intolerant and inhuman.
So why do we keep doing it over and over again?
There’s no shortage of dire warnings about the devastation that could be wrought if any one of the current crop of candidates running for the White House gets elected. Yet where the doomsayers go wrong is by ignoring …read more
Source: From Democracy To Pathocracy: The Rise Of The Political Psychopath
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By Tyler Durden
Submitted by John Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,
“Politicians are more likely than people in the general population to be sociopaths. I think you would find no expert in the field of sociopathy/psychopathy/antisocial personality disorder who would dispute this… That a small minority of human beings literally have no conscience was and is a bitter pill for our society to swallow — but it does explain a great many things, shamelessly deceitful political behavior being one.”—Dr. Martha Stout, clinical psychologist and former instructor at Harvard Medical School
Twenty years ago, a newspaper headline asked the question: “What’s the difference between a politician and a psychopath?”
The answer, then and now, remains the same: None.
There is no difference between psychopaths and politicians.
Nor is there much of a difference between the havoc wreaked on innocent lives by uncaring, unfeeling, selfish, irresponsible, parasitic criminals and elected officials who lie to their constituents, trade political favors for campaign contributions, turn a blind eye to the wishes of the electorate, cheat taxpayers out of hard-earned dollars, favor the corporate elite, entrench the military industrial complex, and spare little thought for the impact their thoughtless actions and hastily passed legislation might have on defenseless citizens.
Psychopaths and politicians both have a tendency to be selfish, callous, remorseless users of others, irresponsible, pathological liars, glib, con artists, lacking in remorse and shallow.
Charismatic politicians, like criminal psychopaths, exhibit a failure to accept responsibility for their actions, have a high sense of self-worth, are chronically unstable, have socially deviant lifestyle, need constant stimulation, have parasitic lifestyles and possess unrealistic goals.
It doesn’t matter whether you’re talking about Democrats or Republicans.
Political psychopaths are all largely cut from the same pathological cloth, brimming with seemingly easy charm and boasting calculating minds. Such leaders eventually create pathocracies—totalitarian societies bent on power, control, and destruction of both freedom in general and those who exercise their freedoms.
Once psychopaths gain power, the result is usually some form of totalitarian government or a pathocracy. “At that point, the government operates against the interests of its own people except for favoring certain groups,” author James G. Long notes. “We are currently witnessing deliberate polarizations of American citizens, illegal actions, and massive and needless acquisition of debt. This is typical of psychopathic systems, and very similar things happened in the Soviet Union as it overextended and collapsed.”
In other words, electing a psychopath to public office is tantamount to national hara-kiri, the ritualized act of self-annihilation, self-destruction and suicide. It signals the demise of democratic government and lays the groundwork for a totalitarian regime that is legalistic, militaristic, inflexible, intolerant and inhuman.
So why do we keep doing it over and over again?
There’s no shortage of dire warnings about the devastation that could be wrought if any one of the current crop of candidates running for the White House gets elected. Yet where the doomsayers go wrong is by ignoring …read more
Source: From Democracy To Pathocracy: The Rise Of The Political Psychopath
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By Tyler Durden
After The Fed jawboned the world into the largest aggregate net short position in Treasuries in Q4 since 2010, its rapid realization that all is not well in the real world – and subsequent talking (and walking) back of rate-hike expectations – has sparked the biggest short-squeeze in 6 years and sent Treasuries up by the most since 2012. With odds collapsing for any more rate-hikes in 2016, as Yellen admits their forecasts are worthless, it seems – just as in 2010 – the bonds shorts have a way to go.
The Fed should “proceed cautiously” in raising interest rates, Yellen said in New York. The chance of a move by the end of 2016 has declined to 64 percent, from 73 percent at the end of last week, futures prices compiled by Bloomberg indicate.
The 10-year note yield slumped eight basis points on Tuesday, the most in seven weeks, and fell two basis points earlier Wednesday. U.S. government securities have returned 3 percent this quarter, based on Bloomberg World Bond Indexes.
Yellen’s speech “was more dovish than I expected,” said Wontark Doh, head of overseas fixed-income investment in Seoul at Samsung Asset Management Co. Ltd., which manages $200 billion. “The upside for Treasury yields is limited.”
“Yellen came out as dovish and as forceful as she was” at the Fed meeting in March, when officials kept rates unchanged and scaled back forecasts for how high they’ll rise this year, said Barra Sheridan, a rates trader at Bank of Montreal in London. “I didn’t think April was a live meeting before Yellen spoke yesterday and I definitely don’t now — nor does the market.”
All driven by the biggest Treasury short-squeeze in 6 years (which was forced upon investors by The Fed's jawboning)…
And finally, the constant jabber from The Fed demandingthat investors short bonds continues…
Central-bank policies have pushed long-term Treasury yields to “very low” levels, San Francisco Fed Bank President John Williams said in Singapore before Yellen’s appearance. He said the threat of a “pretty big correction” in bonds supports the argument for gradual rate increases.
How's that working out for you? It appears fighting The Fed in bond-land has worked very well recently.
As The Wall Street Journal reports, bond traders are confused and concerned…
“It is confusing because the recipe keeps on changing,” said Anthony Cronin, a Treasury bond trader at Societe Generale. “I think it does create more volatility because there is just so much uncertainty over what is important to the Fed.”
Most concerning to Mr. Cronin was Ms. Yellen discussion of “potential global risks.’”
This uncertainty “can do more harm in itself and become self-fulfilling,’” he said. “Why would a company commit to investing in their business if the Fed Chair is worried about the economy slowing from overseas developments?”
The Fed’s mixed messages rippled through U.S. government bond yields, the dollar and gold over …read more
Source: Yellen-Driven Short-Squeeze Sends Bonds To Best Quarter In 4 Years
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