Is the Deep State Winning?

 

The stakes if it is.

By any reasonable standard, the presidency of Donald Trump has so far been a success. After eight years of Barack Obama’s sluggish recovery from the 2008 Great Recession, the economy is “blistering,” as MarketWatch put it, its vigorous growth creating jobs, raising incomes, and lifting the market’s “animal spirits.” Abroad, the “kick me” sign Obama and the progressives hung on America’s back is gone, with allies, rivals, and enemies alike now taking us seriously as the indispensable world power to treat with respect, rather than a daft rich uncle to bully and fleece.

Goldman’s Shocking Capitulation: The Buy-The-Dip Era Is Dead, “This Is A Genuine Regime Change”

Earlier today, we were delighted to report that after the biggest vol explosion in history, the world’s largest hedge fund Bridgewater, went from urging traders to go all in as recently as January 23, to warning that a “bigger shakeout is coming.”

It turns out that Ray Dalio wasn’t the only fund to urge its broader client universe – and anyone else who cared to listen – to do one thing, while telling a select group of clients to do the opposite. As we noted on Saturday, in his latest Weekly Kickstat published on Friday, Goldman’s chief equity strategist David Kostin essentially told clients to BTFD, suggesting that the correction was likely almost over, based on historical patterns.

“What The Hell Is It?” – 74 Cryptocurrency Questions Answered

A great article for those who are still in the dark about cryptocurrencies.

 

The price of bitcoin has rocketed more than 1,700% year-to-date.

 

With the price of the cryptocurrency soaring – and mainstream interest surging – Yahoo Finance recently invited readers to send us their top questions regarding bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. We condensed questions from nearly 3,500 respondents into the list below, and enlisted a team of Yahoo Finance reporters to answer them, including Daniel Roberts, who’s been covering bitcoin since 2012, and Jared Blikre, our authority on trading. Ethan Wolff-Mann and Julia LaRoche contributed as well. Here’s everything you want to know about bitcoin:

1. What the hell is it? In the most general sense, bitcoin is software that forms a decentralized, peer-to-peer payment system with no central authority like the Federal Reserve or U.S. Treasury. It’s fair to call it a digital currency or cryptocurrency, but at the moment, most investors aren’t really using it as currency to pay for things. Instead, they’re using it as a speculative investment to buy in the hope of turning a profit. Maybe a big profit. (And maybe a big loss).

The Fed’s Built a Financial “Maginot Line”

 

Over the coming months, I believe we could see an economic meltdown at least six times the size of the 2007 subprime mortgage meltdown. That’s right: I believe we could see an economic meltdown at least six times the size of the 2007 subprime mortgage meltdown

Circumstances lead me to believe it could play out like the meltdown I experienced in 1998 after Long Term Capital Management (LTCM) failed.

This time, however, there will be several crucial differences that will leave investors and regulators unprepared.

In the national defense community, military commanders are known for fighting the last war. They study their prior failures in preparation for the next conflict. The problem is that each war inevitably involves new tactics for which they’re completely unprepared.

Europe, China, Japan and the New World Order

KENT NISHIMURA/GETTY IMAGES, SEAN GALLUP/GETTY IMAGES, MATT CARDY/GETTY IMAGES

 

A stunning fulfillment of a specific Bible prophecy

We are witnessing a shift in the world order that happens only once in a generation. The global system of alliances is being shaken. Such turmoil usually indicates a massive shift in global power. These shifts often trigger major wars.

For most of the 19th century, Britain’s top enemy was Russia. Britain’s whole system of alliances was built to isolate and oppose Russian power. But at the turn of the century, other powers were rising, most notably Germany. This development triggered a complete shake-up. Russia veered from enemy to ally in 1907. World War i followed on the heels of this upheaval.

That shift in alliances did not cause World War i. But it was a symptom of some of the other long-term causes.

De-Dollarization & Disintermediation – Russian Mobile Phone Operator Issues First Blockchain-Backed Bond

 

For months now Russia has been moving into the blockchain space in a serious way. I’ve talked about these moves in previous articles(here, here and yes, even here)

But, the latest news is one that should have every one stand up and take notice.

Russian Mobile phone operator, Megafon, issued RUB500 million in zero-coupon blockchain-based bonds recently. This was purely a proof of concept issuance.

The world’s most powerful bank issues a major warning

 

In 1869, a 48-year old Jewish immigrant from the tiny village of Trappstadt in Germany’s Bavaria region hung a shingle outside of his small office in lower Manhattan to officially launch his new business.

His name was Marcus Goldman, and the business he started, what’s now known as Goldman Sachs, has become the preeminent investment bank in the world with nearly $1 trillion in assets.

They didn’t get there by winning any popularity contests.

Goldman Sachs has been at the heart of nearly every major banking scandal in recent history.

“It’ll Be An Avalanche”: Hedge Fund CIO Sets The Day When The Next Crash Begins

While most asset managers have been growing increasingly skeptical and gloomy in recent weeks (despite a few ideological contrarian holdouts), joining the rising chorus of bank analysts including those of Citi, JPM, BofA and Goldman all urging clients to “go to cash”, none have dared to commit the cardinal sin of actually predicting when the next crash will take place.

On Sunday a prominent hedge fund manager, One River Asset Management’s CIO Eric Peters broke with that tradition and dared to “pin a tail on the donkey” of when the next market crash – one which he agrees with us will be driven by a collapse in the global credit impulse – will take place. His prediction: Valentine’s Day 2018.

A New Financial System is Being Born

 

If Bitcoin blew you away when you first discovered it, and continues to do so to this day, Spiral Dynamics can help explain why. Bitcoin was an expression in the physical world of the newly emergent leading-edge integral level consciousness. It drew lessons from history and attempted to take the best of orange and green worldviews and incorporate them into an entirely new form of money. We see the clear presence of free markets and individualism, as well as the intentional separation of the system from dominator hierarchies (bureaucratic government meddling), which had corrupted all money before it. Its greenness is evident in the fact that by design no individual or company controls the network. Global, decentralized, revolutionary technology. This is perhaps the perfect example of integral consciousness operating on our planet at this time from an economics standpoint, and why it has captured the imagination of so many, while at the same time being violently rejected by so many others.

…
Although I had heard about it much earlier, I didn’t truly start investigating Bitcoin until the summer of 2012. The more I learned the more my mind was blown away, and for a while I couldn’t think about anything else. What truly solidified its real world usefulness to me was when I discovered it had been used by Wikileaks to accept payments in the midst of a financial services blockade against the renegade publisher. This realization inspired my first Bitcoin related post in August 2012 titled, Bitcoin: A Way to Fight Back Against the Financial Terrorists? 

Financial Weapons Of Mass Destruction: Top 25 US Banks Have 222 Trillion Dollars Derivatives Exposure

 

The recklessness of the “too big to fail” banks almost doomed them the last time around, but apparently they still haven’t learned from their past mistakes.  Today, the top 25 U.S. banks have 222 trillion dollars of exposure to derivatives.  In other words, the exposure that these banks have to derivatives contracts is approximately equivalent to the gross domestic product of the United States times twelve.  As long as stock prices continue to rise and the U.S. economy stays fairly stable, these extremely risky financial weapons of mass destruction will probably not take down our entire financial system.  But someday another major crisis will inevitably happen, and when that day arrives the devastation that these financial instruments will cause will be absolutely unprecedented.

During the great financial crisis of 2008, derivatives played a starring role, and U.S. taxpayers were forced to step in and bail out companies such as AIG that were on the verge of collapse because the risks that they took were just too great.

Jared Kushner left a lot off his financial disclosure

Getty Images

 

Jared Kushner failed to disclose his ownership of a real estate startup linked to Goldman Sachs and George Soros, according to a report Tuesday.

Kushner, President Trump’s son-in-law and top adviser, didn’t note on his government financial disclosure form that he is a part-owner of real estate finance firm Cadre, which matches investors with real estate projects, the Wall Street Journal reported.

Cadre’s other investors include Goldman Sachs, billionaire and top Democratic donor Soros and PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel.

The Truth About President Trump’s Syrian Missile Strike

FILE PHOTO: U.S. President Donald Trump delivers a statement about missile strikes on a Syrian airfield, at his Mar-a-Lago estate in West Palm Beach, Florida, U.S., April 6, 2017. REUTERS/Carlos Barria/File Photo

 

The following is an editorial from TRUNEWS host Rick Wiles

Are you curious whats behind President Trump’s surprise decision to launch missiles at Syria on Thursday?   

(VERO BEACH, FLA) President Donald Trump bombed Syria last night. John McCain went to bed last night with a big smile on his face. Little Lindsay Graham was singing Happy Days Are Here Again.

Marco Rubio is having nightmares that Syrian President Assad will gas American troops just like he gassed those Syrian children.

The news media is boasting that President Trump is now acting tough like Hillary Clinton.

Nobody’s talking today about Donald Trump being a Russian stooge. Chief of Staff Reince Preibus may be the next White House official to get booted out.

And the President got his Supreme Court nominee approved by the Senate while everybody was talking about Syria.  My, my, how things can change in less than 24 hours.

“This Is Not The Reaction The Fed Wanted”: Goldman Warns Yellen Has Lost Control Of The Market

 

With stocks soaring briskly around the globe following Yellen’s “dovish” hike, and futures set for a sharply higher open with the Nasdaq approaching 6,000, something surprising caught our attention: in a note by Goldman’s Jan Hatzius, the chief economist warns that the market is overinterpreting the Fed’s statement, and Yellen’s presser, and cautions that it was not meant to be the “dovish surprise” the market took it to be.

Specifically, he says that while the FOMC delivered the expected 25bp hike, with only minor changes to its projections. “surprisingly, financial markets took the meeting as a large dovish surprise—the third-largest at an FOMC meeting since 2000 outside the financial crisis, based on the co-movement of different asset prices.”

Even more surprisng is that according to Goldman, its financial conditions index, “eased sharply, by the equivalent of almost one full cut in the federal funds rate.”

In other words, the Fed’s 0.25% rate hike had the same effect as a 0.25% race cut!

Time Bomb In Oil Markets: Goldman Sachs Issues Warning

 

While energy traders remain focused on weekly changes in crude supply and demand, manifesting in shifts in inventory of which yesterday’s API data and today’s EIA data was a breathtaking example, a much more troubling data point was revealed by the Energy Information Administration last week when it reported implied gasoline demand.

To be sure, surging gasoline supply and inventories are hardly surprising or new: they remain a byproduct of the unprecedented global crude inventories leftover from two years of failed OPEC policy which resulted in a historic glut. Last January, overall crude runs were up 500,000 bpd as refiners shifted away from diesel and other products to gasoline to chase more attractive margins amid a mild winter and sluggish diesel demand. The move led to an overbuild of gasoline stocks that lingered into the summer, punishing margins when they should have been at their strongest. This January, crude runs are at historic levels, up by roughly 300,000 bpd over last year.

The Effort to Undermine Trump Continues

What you’re seeing from the corrupt government is a threatened corrupt government. It’s making preemptive desperate attempts to discredit, sideline, hamper and delegitimize Donald Trump before he takes office, and will continue thereafter for as long as it can. They have to strike first and do all the damage they can. They know their corrupt rein is up.

One thing you can see out of this are the corrupt people for who they really are, such as John McCain and all the Clinton/Obama-appointed intelligence agency heads.

What was done in the dark for several decades is now coming to light and heads in Washington will roll come January 20.

 

What is getting really interesting is just how desperate many in Washington seem to be about Trump. It seems they are really concerned that he will cut off the gravy train in Washington. Even the Republicans hoped they could train him, fearing that his ban on lobbying for five years could be a deathblow to their livelihood.

Trump is not a racist as the nutcases claim; they are prompted by the Democrats in the campaign. Nobody can discriminate against any class, race, or religion as president. He cannot even overrule abortion — that is the Supreme Court’s decision. So why all the hatred and exaggeration? Why are people saying he wants to stop Muslims coming from other countries? The overall nastiness of those on the left against anyone who disagrees with them is stunning.