BRUSSELS—The European Commission on Sunday authorized Italy to use government guarantees to provide liquidity support to its banks, a spokeswoman said, disclosing the first intervention by a European Union government into its banking system following the U.K. vote to leave the EU. The June 23 referendum sparked a steep sell-off in banking stocks followed by intense volatility this week. That has exacerbated already existing troubles in the Italian banking sector, which is suffering from high levels of bad loans and poor profitability amid super-low interest rates. The Italian liquidity-support program includes up to EUR150 billion in government guarantees, said an EU official. Several other European countries with weak financial systems already have similar support systems in place.
The bank investors will eat up the 160 billion in a few months.
They attempt to match along the series. The idea is the rates paid out and rates taken in should maintain float. Float is unencumbered money, rates received or due count toward unencumbered money, it is not principal.. Float becomes gain or loss for the Fed. It's a loss when the lending rate is too low or the deposit rate too high, relative to discovered inside information. Member banks monetize inside information by borrowing and depositing with the Fed. Rates, (gains and losses are only known ex post, after the members have stretched the float to the published limit.
Ben figured this out, Janet gets the hang of it. this was why Ben wanted rates on deposits. What Ben does not want, nor Janet, is that all the borrowings came from one member bank, the US Congress. Because the member banks are going to wait for an eternity until the US Congress starts to pay off the loans. The US Congress is so far off any money management equilibrium that they will force helicopter droppings sooner than we think, it has no inside information to monetize.
What are helicopter droppings (and pick up)
The Fed's function, take gains or losses when the (velocity, queuing, inflation,floast...) limit is reached. What evere black box enthuses you, that box triggers and ex post realization of rates. The is what currency bankers do. But the system is supposed to work on shorter intervals, two years is nice. The US Congress, thanks t dimwit MIT kids, because an official member bank in their theory, says the mark to market interval becomes 40 years, one generation; and the gains and losses will accumulate over the period.
That is why we have the break up of the EU, the Bexit, and the populist revolt. MIT dimwits did not understand. They should have known in 1974 when the option price theory came out. That option theory relates future price to safe rate, that should have been a clue. If DC is making 40 year promises, then the bankers are going top plan on a 40 year monetary cycle. Let's look
:
What does the ten year rate tell us?
The private sector is waiting, waiting for the Swamp to figure this mess out. They better figure it out soon because the savings and loan industry is disappearing. If Congress has no clue then we end up with a stab;le dollar, used only in a few computers on the East Copast. The rest of us will be on a variety of crypto currencies..
Abra, a fintech company, spent two years figuring our how to emulate paper cash. They think they got the solution, pure cash. So, 40 years after geeks figured out how to emulate the manila folder, they now know how to emulate the dollar bill.
Business Insider: Peer-to-peer payments are nothing new, as "Venmo me" has become colloquial when splitting a restaurant check. But one company is trying to change the P2P payments game by utilizing blockchain technology.
Abra announced today that its smartphone app is now available on Android and iPhone in the U.S. Users can download the app, fund their Abra wallets immediately with their bank accounts, and send money completely free to other users by just entering their phone number.
But what makes Abra different from Venmo and other P2P payment apps?
“We’re trying to make it possible for the first time to send money between any two phone numbers in the world,” founder and CEO Bill Barhydt told Business Insider. "Venmo, PayPal, etc. physically take possession of your money, and that's an untenable proposition at a global scale."
So Barhydt went back to the drawing board a few years ago and rethought the problem from scratch. That led to the major idea behind Abra, which is to allow a consumer to hold digital cash on a smartphone for the first time with no third party holding their funds.
Earlier this month, Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina joined a growing list of insurers suing the Department of Health and Human Services for more subsidies from the risk-corridor program. Congress set up the program to indemnify insurers who took losses in the first three years of Obamacare with funds generated from taxes on “excess profits” from some insurers. The point of the program was to allow insurers to use the first few years to grasp the utilization cycle and to scale premiums accordingly. As with most of the ACA’s plans, this soon went awry. Utilization rates went off the charts, in large part because younger and healthier consumers balked at buying comprehensive coverage with deductibles so high as to guarantee that they would see no benefit from them. The predicted large windfall from “excess profit” taxes never materialized, but the losses requiring indemnification went far beyond expectations. In response, HHS started shifting funds appropriated by Congress to the risk-corridor program, which would have resulted in an almost-unlimited bailout of the insurers. Senator Marco Rubio led a fight in Congress to bar use of any appropriated funds for risk-corridor subsidies, which the White House was forced to accept as part of a budget deal. As a result, HHS can only divvy up the revenues from taxes received through the ACA, and that leaves insurers holding the bag.
Rasmusen: The tables have turned in this week’s White House Watch. After trailing Hillary Clinton by five points for the prior two weeks, Donald Trump has now taken a four-point lead. The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey of Likely U.S. Voters finds Trump with 43% of the vote, while Clinton earns 39%. Twelve percent (12%) still like another candidate, and five percent (5%) are undecided. (To see survey question wording, click here.)
Yahoo: If you fell asleep Thursday night and did not wake up until this morning, you would assume that the UK voters elected to stay in the EU. Certainly as we look at the behavior and complexion of the market today, it’s as if nothing happened. As the S&P 500 (^GSPC) is only 2-3% below last Thursday’s close, the market has voted that Brexit is not that big a deal ... so far.
Its thoughts are automatic, a reconstruction of news, as seen digitally. The news links are organized, and connected, such that we have a stable search graph. The connections are based on what we think is important. When that happens, then the network has completed a thought. That thought is then matched against a know risk query, it asks: 'Any of these things happening?". The asking becomes a graph convolution, two spanning trees, with no loops, reach a conclusion.. Machines increasingly make investment decisions, they do it under the cover and we are in denial, we think we still have free will.
Now, there are three problems with this thought experiment Helicopter droppings] . First, transferring funds to households is what fiscal policymakers do, not central bankers. The latter issue central bank money to acquire assets.
No, Ben Milt assumed the Fwd was completely independent of the fiscal authorities, hence the use of 'helicopter'
Second, except when interest rates are at the effective lower bound (ELB), monetary policymakers today control interest rates, not the monetary base (or another monetary aggregate).
The currency bankers controls the short term deposit and loan rates, controls them always, as long people use the money for pricing. There is no Zero Lower Bound. The current short term rate is the five year rate, at 1%. It looks like lower bound because most of the monetary reserves are waiting for DC to get out of its jam, and that now looks like another five years.
The author means hyperinflation, what happens when money is mostly used to cover government obligations.
So how does the balance sheet change?
Consider the Fed simply created 300 million accounts, one for each social security nuber, and put $1000 of digits in that valid account. In its balance sheet would appear a total Fed loss of the amount so deposited, an actuarial loss and it is a debit against seigniorage. All is balanced, and the Fed owners get less draw in the future/. But, ripping off the Fed owners is not a problem, the assumption in Ben';s metaphor is that helicopter dropings and Fed losses are the normal risk, and any fool who buys shares of Fed should know that.
Cecchetti & Schoenholtz mis-construe Ben,Milt. Milt was talking about a new technology of central banking, a technology in which the Fed is completely independent, a robotic, bi-directional , simply working the velocity equation of money in a savings and loan model. The helicopter flights happen when the Fed occasionally marks to market and accepts currency gains and losses.
The ice core in Antarctica can be drilled and it gives us the atmosphere report. Red is temperature, blue is co2.
Today is zero, way over to the right. Notice how much red we have had in the last 12,000. That red, temperature, tells us qe have been hot, at the hottest part of the glacial cycle. Compare the peak red with the previous four peaks.
How did we get stuck at hot?
Something called the Younger-Dryas event happened, and the new theory is that we got hit by a comet and remained hot. How? When ;listening to the theories, remember this:
Something stropped the melting of the ice, because the previous ice has to melt before we get cold and make more. Whatever triggers the ice ages is associated with a complete melting of the ice, and we only got a partial melt.
From Business Insider, some notes on the :Leave vote by a brilliant observer.
Former Wall Street trader turned photojournalist Chris Arnade wrote in May that we ought to stop treating Trump's supporters as "complete idiots."
Arnade uses a simple options model to explain how those voting for Trump - much like those who voted to Leave - could be motivated by their circumstances.
If you're screwed in the US or UK - a union worker who has either lost their job or seen wages go nowhere in the wake of mass de-unionization, or a state employee facing certain pension reductions - Leave and Trump alike are call options on the future.
Your downside risk is that nothing changes. But the upside, if a new direction for government actually does change something, provides a chance for something better.
It is this chance that - to many - is worth voting for.
Why fear the British electorate when they regain legislative control of trade? The assumption is that the British voter is a protectionist numbskull. Based on what evidence? British workers might be better off in a trade regime more liberal than with the EU, and the British voter may have figured that out. One thing going for the British voters, they are sustainable enough to vote Brexit, and that is a lot more stable than anything happening in Italy, Greece or France.
Chicago schools have to shut down in September unless Chicago comes up with a bailout plan. The mayor proposes that the city directly buy pension debt from the school system, loan them money. Chicago city has no money so the mayor is about to raise property taxes, once again. But firms are already leaving the city and unemployment rising (see graph below).
Emanuel this past week quietly proposed a change to city investment rules that would allow the city to buy debt from so-called sister agencies, including CPS, no matter the creditworthiness of that debt. He said he was making the request on behalf of city Treasurer Kurt Summers as part of the Summers' annual investment policy update.
Aides for both Emanuel and Summers said the proposal was not designed to give the city a way to provide temporary funding to CPS as it seeks state help to right its teetering financial ship. "That's not what's happening," city spokeswoman Molly Poppe said. "This is not some contingency plan or bailout for CPS." Instead, they said, it's meant to give the treasurer the option of investing in bonds, short-term loans or other types of debt from CPS — and other agencies like the Chicago Housing Authority, Park District, CTA and City Colleges — just as the city has the option of buying its own debt. CPS carries roughly a $6.2 billion debt load, and recently borrowed $725 million through a bond issuance. In March CPS indicated it would have to tap an existing $370 million credit line with Barclays to help pay a June 30 pension obligation in the amount of $676 million. CPS already carries a junk rating by all three major rating agencies. Nonetheless, the narrative that the bailout is actually an investment is fully in play.
"This change means that our sister agencies would no longer be treated any differently from an investment perspective than the city, as is commonplace throughout the country," said Alexandra Sims, senior adviser to Summers. "The city has always had the ability to invest in municipal and state bonds. This expands and allows us to invest in the city and all sister agencies as part of the treasurer's plan to invest in Chicago."
Politico: Danuta Hübner, the head of the European Parliament’s Constitutional Affairs Committee (AFCO), warned Monday that English will not be one of the European Union’s official languages after Britain leaves the EU.
English is one of the EU’s 24 official languages because the U.K. identified it as its own official language, Hübner said. But as soon as Britain completes the process to leave the EU, English could lose its status.
English is one of the working languages in the European institutions, Hübner said, adding: “It’s actually the dominating language,” the one most frequently used by EU civil servants.
The regulation listing official languages of the EU would have to be changed unanimously by remaining countries if they want to keep English as an official language, Hübner said.
If they cannot speak English, half of them won't understand each other.
NRO: After meeting in Orlando, Fla., with law-enforcement officials investigating ISIS terrorist Omar Saddique Mateen’s June 12 massacre, Attorney General Loretta Lynch told journalists, “Our most effective response to terror and hatred is compassion, unity and love.”
Now we face transaction costs, in my estimation. This is near the lower limit. An investor could invest in private ATM machines, using vault cash and make 1.5%. 1.5% is a good benchmark for the cost of using cash, the expense of distributing bearer paper. This yield will kill cash and create the SmartCard market.
Here is a chart, courtesy Bloomberg's Brian Chappatta:
We have lower rates because we have dedicated entitlement and pension payments for about 25% of the economy. The household consumption pattern has adapted to the burden, hence the relative decline in consumer prices ex medical and housing. How low will rates go? Folks, we have a fairly accurate double entry accounting system, and it tracks the cost of price volatility, this accounting system has a pretty good idea that the Swamp is not doing any discretionary spending soon; and the three large blue have serious pension problems. The most probable path forward by far is lower discretionary spending and lower yields on Treasuries. For the dollar. But therein lies the rub, the dollar is technology replaceable in part. We could see a monetary system in which the tax dollar is suplemented by private crypto-currency issuance.
American Mirror: A new poll of San Diego, California residents finds the vast majority would support a massive tax hike to deport illegal aliens.
The survey, conducted by KGTV and the San Diego Union-Tribune, reveals 61% of respondents would pay an additional $4,000 per taxpayer “to deport America’s illegal immigrants.” Just 29% said they would not.
The poll also found 54% believe “people who have entered the United States without proper documentation” should be deported, while 34% say they should be allowed to stay. When it comes to presidential candidates, a plurality believe Donald Trump has the “better approach” to immigration. According to the poll, 47% side with Trump’s proposals, while 37% support Hillary Clinton. Breaking the results down by race, blacks and Hispanics are supporting Trump’s proposals in bigger numbers than whites.
On the same question, the poll finds 53% of blacks and 50% of Hispanics side with Trump, compared to 31% and 30% respectively for Clinton. Trump’s advantage is slightly narrower among whites, 47% to 40%. The survey finds most disagree with President Obama’s approach — 50% to 36% supporting his policies. The poll was of San Diego County residents and has a margin of error of 4.8%. Politically, San Diego County is not a conservative one. President Obama won it in 2012 over Mitt Romney, 52.6% to 45%.
The stereo typical view of California being Northern Mexico is fantasy.
Multiple people were stabbed during a rally on Sunday at the state capitol in Sacramento, California, the fire department said on Twitter. Five people were transported to area hospitals after the "mass casualty incident", some with critical trauma stab wounds, the fire department said. The Sacramento Police Department said on Twitter that it had closed some areas to traffic during a protest at the capital and in a second message said that it had a public information officer on scene at the capitol.
Mostly La Raza and Bernie Bros vs christian right wing loyalists. This is the same stuff we had just before the Civil War.
WND: The Obama-appointed U.S. attorney for Idaho has taken the highly unusual step of intervening in a local criminal case involving an alleged sexual assault by juvenile Muslim migrants and threatened the community and media with federal prosecution if they “spread false information or inflammatory statements about the perpetrators. ”
WND and other news outlets have reported on the case involving three juvenile boys, two from Sudan and one from Iraq, who allegedly sexually assaulted a 5-year-old special-needs girl in the laundry room of the Fawnbrook Apartments in Twin Falls, Idaho.
Badly parented children. They become more than any combined group of tax payers wants to deal with. They get shoved into the ghetto.
Nothing is certain until we understand what the British electorate will do with their power. The betting now is that the British parliament will screw things up, like Italy. The Brits can do well if they remember that fouling up labor or trade law immediately bounces back in term of trade, exchange rates. Brits no longer have a larger aggregation to lean on. However, there is no reason firms and households in the UK cannot follow EU rules when it suits them, with no bias against the UK government. That process is called economic freedom, The British parliament should grant enough economic freedom so that London remains the world's banking capital; and exporters or importers can easily trade. Immigration. Simple, remove labor regulations as much as possible. If the labor pool is not responsive, the trade terms get ugly very quickly; Trade is rebalanced with immigration. . I am betting with the crowd here, the British voters likely do not know what 'on your own' and 'terms of trade' mean. British voters will vote policy that makes their own lives hectic, via the trade channel; they won't make the connection.
Daily Caller: The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill issued a guide this week which instructs students that Christmas vacations and telling a woman “I love your shoes!” are “microagressions.”
The taxpayer-funded guide — entitled “Career corner: Understanding microaggressions” — also identifies golf outings and the words “boyfriend” and “girlfriend” as microagressions.
The UNC Chapel Hill guide, published on Thursday, covers a wide range of menacing microaggressions — which are everyday words that radical leftists have decided to be angry or frustrated about.
Christmas vacations are a microagression, the public university pontificates, because “academic calendars and encouraged vacations” which “are organized around major religious observances” centralize “the Christian faith” and diminish “non-Christian spiritual rituals and observances.”
The new book of grammar tells us:
In February, we brought you an article on developing critical habits of mind and practice through understanding implicit bias. While implicit bias encompasses “thoughts and feelings that occur independently of conscious intention, awareness, or control” [1]; microaggressions occur when these internal thoughts manifest during interpersonal interactions. Microaggressions are “brief and commonplace daily verbal, behavioral, and environmental indignities, whether intentional or unintentional, that communicate hostile, derogatory, or negative racial, gender, sexual orientation and religious slights and insults to the target person or group” [2]. In other words, microaggressions can be comments that unintentionally diminish the work and accomplishments of coworkers or they can include body language and nonverbal cues that appear dismissive, hostile or insensitive. We may not even be aware when we are perpetrating a microaggression, but for someone who experiences them regularly, microaggressions fit into a larger pattern of being treated like an outsider.
Like with Sotomayor, you know they picked a dufas Puerto Rican. But if I keep quiet what happens? Everyone thinks female Puerto Ricans are all Sotomayor dingbats,We create a different form of bias.
The yield goes down as the British leave vote goes up. Traders exiting stock and grabbing treasuries. The British pound is getting reset lower in value, so we get a periopd of price distortion. This is a regime change for Britain, no one knows for sure who wins and loses. Watch events, when the Swamp does its helicopter drops, we will see the same uncertainty.
That intrigues me. The five year is 1.21. Now, at the short end, the minimum transaction costs is .14, the cost of jumping one notch up the curve. That is one banker pulling the slot. So, it thus takes three bankers to pull the slot when jumping from five to ten. The ratio of depositors to borrowers has changed, fewer depositors. But, we are at a point when either technology changes and the bankers go away, or the banker cost of operating a low yields is not justified.
Read her opinion, I have only read summaries. But her alternative is that the warrant check on the perp was a result of illegal detention. OK, granted. Unlike Thomas I do not care if the officer made an intentional error or an innocent error, the officer dunnit and is subject to civil suit, to which Thomas agrees .Sotomayors problem is that she wants to exclude the warrant check, but from what? It's done on the radio, the officer likely called for back up, every officer on duty now knows the perp is a valid warrant, is at a certain location, and all pf these cops found out legally, they ;listened on their radios. It is a warrant, co[ps are duty bound to honor it. What would Sotomayor want to do? Invalidate the warrant the first time the perp is detained? Or maybe, the entire precinct closes their eyes and count to ten? If the per[p were illegally detained on Fifth and Vine, then Sotomayor would have the man free, as long as he stayed right there. I guess the perp gpo get that Roberts guy to grant the right of 'evading the law', then the perp could sue for having the warrant discovered by a cop. Sotomayor does not think this stuff though, can't we find a smarter Puerto Rican female?
(COMMONDREAMS) The Mexican government’s deadly crackdown on a teacher’s union protest has rattled the nation in recent days, as 200,000 doctors on Wednesday joined the ongoing national strike against President Enrique Peña Nieto’s neoliberal reforms. Anti-government sentiment is mounting after police forces opened fire on a teacher protest in Oaxaca on Sunday, killing at least eight.
So, La Raza thinks California, Brown's education state, wants to become Northern Mexico?
Yahoo: Next time you want to make a quick errand to a bank, you might have to travel a couple of more miles than you’re used to. This month Bank of America (BAC) said it has 23% fewer branches and 37% fewer workers than it did in 2009, according to a CNNMoney story.
Bank of America had 4,689 branches at the end of the first quarter of 2016, down from the average of 6,100 in 2009 while the workforce downsized to 68,400 from 107,900 in 2009. As more consumers get comfortable doing all manner of financial transactions online and on their phones, mobile banking has become increasingly common. In 2015, one in 10 adults in the US began using mobile banking for the very first time – amounting to 25 million new mobile bankers, according to Javelin, a research firm. And last year marked the first time weekly mobile bankers exceeded weekly branch bankers. Other major banks are experiencing similar shifts.
To replace the banker function we need distributed portfolio management. The network of card holders self manage a savings and loan arrangement, with the help of a trading web site.
If you are stopped illegally, then sue the cop. Otherwise the cop is duty bound to respect the warrant. Sotomayor's usual racist rant is irrelevant, a warrant is a warrant and a cop a cop.
The Hill: Federal Reserve Chairwoman Janet Yellen blasted Donald Trump’s suggestion that he would renegotiate on the nation’s debt if elected president, warning of “very severe” consequences. Testifying before Congress, Yellen was asked indirectly by Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.) what she made of Trump’s claims that the U.S. could load up on debt and “make a deal” with creditors if the economy soured. The presumptive Republican presidential nominee was not mentioned by name in the exchange, but Menendez asked Yellen specifically what would happen if a U.S. president pushed creditors to accept less than full payment on U.S. debt obligations.
Yellen launched a strong defense of the sterling reputation of U.S. Treasury bonds in global markets and made clear she believes the U.S. should make full payment on its debt a top priority. “U.S. Treasury securities are the safest and most liquid benchmark security in the global financial system,” she told lawmakers. “They play a critical role in our financial markets, and the consequences of such a default, while they’re uncertain, I think there can be no doubt that it would be in the long run harmful to U.S. interests. At a minimum, it would result in much higher borrowing costs.”
NAME YIELD
GB3:GOV
3 Month
0.24%
GB6:GOV
6 Month
0.37%
GB12:GOV
12 Month
0.53%
GT2:GOV
2 Year
0.63 0.76%
GT5:GOV
5 Year
1.38 1.20%
GT10:GOV
10 Year
1.63 1.70%
GT30:GOV
30 Year
2.5 2.51%
What about the natural point on the curve?
The knee of the curve is between 2 and 5 year. We can see that each term before that drops in yield by some fixed percentage. The first few terms, then. consist of a balanced, three node spanning tree of traders. When money passes up the curve, the trader charges the transaction costs and some currency risk.
Farther up, after the knee, the number of lenders shrink faster than the number off borrowers, and term risk is charged. The is a slewed set of traders, their network is not balanced.
So the natural rate of interest, for Treasuries, is the 2 year term, really, where term premium comes into play.
What is all the graph stuff? I am think of traders in buildings, with node traversal going up and down floors. That is a Huffman decoder/encoder graph. The traders are trying to find the typical portfolio, the set of deposits and loans such that the paper work does not bottle neck in its floor traversal. This is the queuing model of savings and loans, the terms are adjusted, along with rates, the minimize elevator congestion. All the traders want to be somewhere a third pf the way up the build, trades are optimally balanced and flow is maximum because, like all natural processes, we are packing a sphere, and the static solution is \imprecise, causing motion of traders as they move up and down floor, chasing paper.whihc is mpving up and down floors.
Smart contract programming in Ethereum is notoriously error-prone [1]. We've recently seen that several high-profile smart contracts, such as King of the Ether and The DAO-1.0, contained vulnerabilities caused by programming mistakes.
Smart-contract programmers have been warned about particular programming hazards that can crop up when contracts send messages to each other since March 2015, when the Ethereum Foundation commissioned a security report [6] from Least Authority about the Ethereum Virtual Machine. Multiple programming guides contain best-practice recommendations to avoid common pitfalls (in the official Ethereum docs [3], and in an independent guide from UMD [2]). While these hazards seem like they should be straightforward to recognize and to avoid, the consequences of even a single mistake are dire: money can get stuck, destroyed, or stolen.
These folks know the vulnerabilities, and are likely persons of interest in the so called hack. But the hack is a feature, not a bug:
Forbes: For the geeks among you, Phil Daian at Hacking, Distributed has anexcellent dissection of exactly how this worked. For ordinary mortals, all you need to know is that the DAO’s attacker created a “child” DAO, then drained the DAO’s funds into the child. And this is where it all becomes unintentionally funny. There is absolutely nothing new about draining corporate funds into a new company. Embezzlers the world over have been doing this for centuries. In the real world, it is illegal. But in the DAO’s case, it isn’t. The DAO’s “smart contract” allows it.
The ether coins drained in the hack are in ether limbo, awaiting a time out before completion. The drainer is offering a deal, they release 70% back to the system, but keep 30%. Sounds like a deal can be had.
Bloomberg View: The Supreme Court ruled Monday that if the police stop you illegally but then find out that there’s a traffic warrant out for you, they can search you and charge you with a crime if you're carrying something illegal. The 5-to-3 decision can be read as an implicit vindication of controversial stop-and search policies. In a blistering dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor invoked Ferguson, Missouri, to argue that the court's decision impugns the dignity of the individual. She said that the effects will be felt disproportionately by “black and brown parents” who for generations “have given their children ‘the talk’” out of “fear of how an officer with a gun will react to them.”
The issue had nothing to do with race. Race comes into play when it is used to affirmative action an ignorant female through college. Sotomayor illustrates that Obama is as dumb about the law as any Kanosian.
Reuters: Britain's largest banks are disproportionately closing branches in the lowest-income areas while expanding in wealthier ones, taking bricks-and-mortar services away from communities where they are arguably needed most, an analysis by Reuters shows.
HSBC (HSBA.L), Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS.L), Barclays (BARC.L) and Lloyds Banking Group (LLOY.L) are among banks that have cut 600 branches from April 2015 to April 2016.
More than 90 percent of the closures were in areas where the median household income is below the British average of 27,600 pounds ($39,042), according to an analysis of Office for National Statistics data on average incomes in the locations where branches were closed. By comparison, five out of the eight branches opened by these banks over the same period were in some of the wealthiest neighborhoods in Britain -- Chelsea, Canary Wharf, St Paul's, Marylebone and Clapham, all in the capital, London.
Hybrids with huge capacitors can be built such that they are primarily a constant speed combustion engine. Very efficient. OIts an all direct current design. :Let's modify the design for alternating current.
There are advantages to making the alternating current hybrid, in which the constant speed engine drives an AC generator which drives alternating current motor. However, the electro drive chain can be moderated with a huge capacitance/inductance AC circuit, which acts as an AC energy absorbing or releasing electrical current at the engine frequency. That is called an LC drive circuit, L stands for inductance) and will have to be cooled.
I haven't read it, I will read the summaries, EM fpr Dummies. My near term projection for EM is that we tap ourselves into the matrix using SmartCards, loaded with BankerBot.
Business Insider: One of these organisations is the DAO, the Decentralised Autonomous Organisation, which controls tens of millions of dollars' worth of the digital currency. ( The bitcoin news site CoinDesk has a good feature explaining more about how the DAO operates .) The DAO is sitting on 7.9 million units, known as ether, of the currency worth $132.7 million . Early Friday morning, it appears to have been hit with a devastating attack, with unidentified attackers appearing to exploit a software vulnerability and draining drain millions of ether - with a theoretical value in the tens of millions of dollars. One ether wallet identified by community members as a recipient of the apparently stolen funds holds more than 3.5 million ether. At an exchange rate of about $14 a unit, that works out at $47 million. At $21.50, the value of ether before the hack, it's significantly more - $79.6 million.
The hacker acquired a valid key, how?
If this is Smart card, there are two ways,; break open the key generator at the fab, and hack that; or reverse engineer a high rated smart card chip. But under SmrtCard rules, card allowing high transaction values are strictly limited and protected, often carried into and out of the bank safe at night, under armed guard.
And reverse engineering the chip to find the key means isolating the 95% of the digital gates that are masking noise, long and arduous task. So, like cash, SmartCards are more extremely counterfeit proof, the larger the transactions. It all works if there is a human tamper proof key masking and encryption. Add to the protected software that does honest accounting, and you have pure cash. SmatCards that run banks, they need the same security as a million dollars in cash bags, it is justmthey are smaller. Cards that transact for banks are about a shoebox, when security is added. But, make no mistake,when done right, from fab to pocket the SmartCard should be as secure as gold.
Research into a resin for passive absorption of atmospheric CO2.
Bloomberg: What about all the carbon we've already poured into the atmosphere? If only there were a device that could take some of it back out.
Researchers at Arizona State University’s Center for Negative Carbon Emissions are working on one. They discovered a commercially available resin that can grab carbon dioxide at low concentrations when the material is dry and release it when the material is moist. The CO2 it collects could be stored underground, used in greenhouses, or fed to algae for biofuel production.
But this is also a passive component of energy producing algae farms, it can deliver high concentrations of CO2 to algae farmed under sanitary conditions. The capital costs of algae energy drop, possibly by an order of magnitude. Instead of distributing the algae out tp the sun over large acres, we re-focus the sun to a central algae manufacturing cell where CO2 concentrated resin is the fast acting fuel. We get dense, rapid algae growth This is the correct direction, or at least a sufficient direction for planning purposes. We can begin to calculate the time scale over which technology will be available for global CO2 management. Which then begs the question, what is stable CO2, because the ice core says we need to drop a couple of degrees.
The curve is flat, there is not much margin for bankers to take risk, just barely enough margin to cover trader fees.And, for the past few yeas, the Fed has subsidized government loan rates, which acts as a tax on the bond industry. Then add in the additional costs from expanded compliance rules.
Fed: The velocity of money is the frequency at which one unit of currency is used to purchase domestically- produced goods and services within a given time period. In other words, it is the number of times one dollar is spent to buy goods and services per unit of time. If the velocity of money is increasing, then more transactions are occurring between individuals in an economy.
Velocity is your sample transaction rate, it will be related to the yield curve. Think of the yield curve as the probability distribution of a finite set of sample rates. Sample rates are down, the curve is flat.
Unruly protesters bused onto a political meeting. They were La Raza, waving the Mexican flag. These are the secessionists who want the SouthWest incorporated into Mexico. DailCaller reports on the police officer commenting:
The group approaches one of the police officers, who turns to them and says “we’re going to push the protesters to that side of the street, away from y’all, so they can get to their busses quietly and not cause any problems.”
“ Why do they have busses?” Biggs asks the officer, who responds, “yeah, they got bused in. Once they’re all secured on the buses — out of the picture — we’ll open [the barriers] up, and you all can go to your cars.”
So we have a foreign militia operating within the Texas and California borders. Who funds them? Zuckerberg. Who runs the plot? A sub-faction in the California legislature along with the Mexican government. Getting Texas and California out of the union is one thing, getting them to become Mexican provinces is quite another.
UK Guardian: A new justice department-funded study concludes that a version of the so-called “Ferguson Effect” is a “plausible” explanation for the spike in violent crime seen in most of the country’s largest cities in 2015, but cautions that more research is still needed. The study, released by the National Institute of Justice on Wednesday, suggests three possible drivers for the more than 16% spike in homicide from 2014 to 2015 in 56 of the nation’s largest cities. But based on the timing of the increase, University of Missouri St Louis criminologist Richard Rosenfeld concluded, there is “stronger support” for some version of the Ferguson Effect hypothesis than its alternatives. “The other explanations have a difficult time … explaining the timing and magnitude of the increase we saw in 2015 and continue to see in some cities in the current year,” Rosenfeld said. 'Ferguson effect' did not impact crime in Baltimore – but 'Gray effect' may have The new research cuts against months of statements from Obama administration officials denying that there is any evidence for a Ferguson Effect, a suggested link between protests over police killings of black Americans and an increase in crime and murder.
Obama somehow thinks we are all persuaded by political correctness. The man is delusional.
Daily Caller: Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey is now the latest state prosecutor to start investigating conservative groups with supposed ties to ExxonMobil, after she issued a subpoena for 40 years of internal company documents and communications with a handful of think tanks.
Healey’s office subpoenaed Exxon as part of a multi-state effort among liberal attorneys general to investigate Exxon for allegedly trying to cover up global warming science. Healey charges that the oil giant lied to shareholders and consumers about the risks of global warming in its communications and shareholder filings, according to a copy of the subpoena obtained by The Daily Caller News Foundation.
According to the Sotomayor rule, if it does not fit your politics, then bring charges. If we follow this rule then a whole bunch of Kanosian research over the last forty years wou;ld be illegal, a fraud. Right wing politicians could use the rule to bring down Harvard and Berkeley. Did Sotomayor think this through? No, she is not a real thinker, she affirmative actioned her way through college.
Chicago Sun Times: Property tax bills won’t start arriving in the mail until next month, but the average Chicago homeowner can expect to see an increase of 12.8 percent over last year, the Cook County Clerk’s office reported Monday.
Chicago public school pays 8.5% for their bond debt. They pay those rates by raising property taxes. But firms and households are leaving Chicago, crime and poor schools continue. This is cliff diving, Chicago will not be next year.
In this discussion by Moneyness he defines his key characteristic of digital curren, I boldfaced the key quote. JP Koning writing and quoting Ludwin: For instance, Ludwin calls his presentation Why Central Banks Will Issue Digital Currency, a title that must have got Janet Yellen scratching her head since the Fed has been issuing digital currency, or reserves, for a long time now. A system called Fedwire, one of the most important utilities in the U.S., allows some 9,000 financial institutions to transfer these digital reserves among each other.
Ludwin goes on to provide more details on the sort of blockchain-style digital currency he is promoting:
...I find it more helpful to look back to bearer instruments, like banknotes, to appreciate what this new medium enables: a digital bearer instrument... With bearer instruments the payment is also the settlement. It is one step. This is a neat property of a bearer instrument...The goal of the blockchain industry is to collapse these steps into a single step, where payment is the settlement, just like with physical notes.
Ok, Ludwin wants not just digital currency but instantly-settled digital currency. But Fedwire already achieves this. In a Fedwire payment between banks, the exchange of reserves constitutes settlement. Put differently, in the same way that a banknote or bitcoin payment involves a single step, a Fedwire payment also involves but one step. Say bank A wants to pay bank B $10,000 in reserves via Fedwire. The moment a bank hits the button to complete the payment, reserves change hands and the transaction is complete. An ensuing clearing process does not need to be initiated, nor does an underlying set of assets need to be mobilized to settle the payment. To top it off, trades cannot be undone. Fedwire payments are final. The moment reserves enter your account, you own them. No, JP, not instantly, but in sequence. Currency means the holder decides when to declare his/her reserves to the banks. Fedwire is when the bank directly intervenes in transactions between two parties. The former is currency, the latter is not. Instead of instantly, the word is anonymously, just like paper cash, otherwise it's not currency. The deal is not to change currency so that 'instant clearing; takes place, but to exactly duplicate paper cash, a bearer instrument. Why on earth would we want to do that! If crypto currency exactly duplicated paper cash then I can walk down the street to the yard sale and just do a local wireless transfer from my smartr card to his, just exactly like cash. Wait, isn't that illegal? No, paper cash has been around for quite some time, it is exactly legal for a purpose, it allows the user to spend the cash privately, and reveal his plot at a time of his choosing. That is why we call it cash, it is paper to make it easy to carry around. The smart card exactly duplicates that function, in fact you can make smart card with paper, just slip a flexible LCD in there to show the denomination. I digress. Bearer instruments mean, no central banker allowed until the bearer bears all. Here is how it works. The wealthy guy foes to his investment manager and withdraws 20 million onto a digital 20 million dollar bill. The official bank notes a cash withdrawal of 20 million, crypto cash, sure, but it still works like a paper that bear the holder 20 million. However, most holders prefer plastic to paper, and some use their smart phone wallets. It allows two parties to secretly transfer cash, and when one party returns to the bank, it can convert the crypto-cash into a deposit, with a tap. How can bankers be sure peer to peer cash transfer is honest? Because Fedwire does it, the protocol is simple so put a version of Fedwire in everyone's smartcard. The main problem is maintaining encryption within the crypto network, make it human tamper proof.
NY Times: While the precise motivation for the rampage remains unclear, it is evident that Mr. Mateen was driven by hatred toward gays and lesbians. Hate crimes don’t happen in a vacuum. They occur where bigotry is allowed to fester, where minorities are vilified and where people are scapegoated for political gain. Tragically, this is the state of American politics, driven too often by Republican politicians who see prejudice as something to exploit, not extinguish.
The LGTB community needs a better message. The NY Times just accused our gay villain of being a Republican! I mean, this is just an invitation for the Islamo-hysterics to keep on shooting.
American Interest: California’s foray into the world of regional carbon markets hasn’t been the grand success it was promised to be. As the Sacramento Bee reports, a recent auction of carbon credits brought in a paltry 2 percent of the revenues it was expected to generate.
The legislature was hoping for more co2 pollution and already spent the permit money, mostly on pet projects that increase co2 pollution.
Peter J. Wallison is a critic of the official enquiry into the crash. For some reason, the government sponsored mortgage insurers went on a loss generating debt buying binge. It was one of those 'deficits don't matter' policy pushed by unqualified borrowers. Here is his key point list:
Key Points
The report of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission (FCIC) is frequently cited as the authoritative source for the causes of the 2008 crisis, but its key findings are contradicted by documents in its own files that were never disclosed in its final report.
By 2008, most mortgages in the US were subprime or otherwise weak. Of these risky loans, 76 percent were on the books of government agencies, principally Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
The FCIC claimed that Fannie and Freddie bought these loans primarily because they were profitable, and not because of the government’s housing policies—particularly the affordable housing goals.
However, the FCIC documents discussed in this paper show that Fannie and Freddie knew these loans would be unprofitable and in some cases loss-producing.
As a government study commission, the FCIC failed in its obligation to report fairly on all the evidence it collected, not just the evidence for the story it wanted to tell.
Bloomberg: California has overtaken France as the world’s sixth-largest economy, fueled by strong growth and the U.S. dollar’s gains against foreign currencies, state data released Tuesday show. The most-populous U.S. state, with a gross domestic product of $2.5 trillion, has also eclipsed recession-plagued Brazil. “This is the result of both good growth in California and exchange-rate movements of the U.S. dollar versus other currencies,” said Irena Asmundson, chief economist in the California Department of Finance.
Governor Jerry Brown, 78, is running the state during an economic turnaround driven by technology companies including Facebook Inc. and Apple Inc., along with agricultural and manufacturing industries that lead the U.S. Since taking office in 2011, Brown steered the state away from fiscal turmoil and persistent deficits to budget surpluses.
No powdered wigs for us, out west:
The California missions are a string of 21 Spanish missions, lying along a 600-mile stretch of coast from San Diego to Sonoma (north of San Francisco). They were California's first European settlements. Built between 1769 and 1823, their adobe walls, arched doorways, tile roofs and Mediterranean gardens had a lasting influence on California architecture. Fires, earthquakes, floods and disuse caused most to fall into ruin, but nearly all have been restored. In 1769, under order of the Spanish king, sea and land expeditions embarked up the California coast. San Diego saw the establishment of the first fort and mission in the expansion effort. The king sent military troops and Franciscan missionaries to the new land to colonize the territory and convert its Indian inhabitants to Christianity. Over 54 years, four forts, or presidios, and 21 missions were founded in “upper” California. Some of these sites eventually evolved into the state's major cities, including San Diego, Santa Barbara, San Jose and San Francisco. Founding of the California missions began seven years before the American Declaration of Independence was signed in 1776, and ended 25 years before gold was discovered at Sutter's Mill, about 50 miles east of present-day Sacramento, in 1848. Mission expansion came to an end in 1823, when mission bells rang in Sonoma.
Today, the Franciscan friars of the St. Barbara Province live and minister in three of the 21 missions: Mission San Luis Rey, Mission Santa Barbara and Mission San Miguel.
The sales figures look good in the USA. But there has been a recent 20% rise in oil prices. So we should be a bit cautious until we see the revisions as unexpected 'nflation' may have crept into the numbers. . GDN-Now has GDP growth at 2.8%. That is too high based on a retail spike alone. The consumer was deflating consumer prices just the prior quarter. I doubt the consumer found new cash, especially with such low job growth.
Remember the villain from southern California. Wasn't his wife an Islamo-bride from a particular Muhamud preacher in Mecca? The spies were supposed to knife the guy and get a list of Islamo brides he has planted around the globe. Zero Hedge is suspicious.
NY Post: The ex-wife of Orlando mass killer Omar Mateen claimed Monday that she believed he was homosexual — as it was revealed that he frequented the gay nightclub where he staged the nation’s worst massacre in modern times.
Four year olds, they barely know why we have scissors and they discover the male/female differences. The castration thought passes, but in some it gets stuck. The foolish have a hysteria which can trap an idiot. His hysteria becomes paranoia and he thinks everyone is pushing him toward martyrdom. Guys who get this become useless in society, in a constant state of sexual panic. Islamponiut religion knows this, castration fear is a religious tool when competing for followers.
Business Insider: There's a lot to be nervous about in the investing world right now. Brexit. China's economy slowing. The US presidential election. Record-low bond yields. Stocks looking wobbly at record highs. And in response to all of this uncertainty, investors have ramped up their holdings of good old fashioned cash. According to Bank of America Merrill Lynch's latest fund manager survey, investors surveyed by the firm now have 5.7% of their net holdings in cash, the highest percentage since November 2001.
London’s first Muslim mayor has banned advertisements on the public transportation system that feature thin and attractive women.
Sadiq Khan stated Monday that any image with the ability to cause body positivity issues would be removed from areas throughout the city.
“No one’s confidence or body image should be undermined by ads on our transport system,” Khan said.
According to the Evening Standard, the new policy “is only expected to affect a handful of the 12,000 adverts a year which run across the network, including at bus shelters and on-street sites.”
We all have to dress in dome tents now, hide our gender, race, age and religion. Then we will all be equal, except whites, they have to wear ankle weights.
Here we see the effect of implied taxation. The middle class gets an automatic premium increase, partly to subsidize the lower income plans. The premium increases appear as consumer spending, but they really are tax increases according to the Supremes,(before Sotomayor). Hence, consumption is really down, and consumer goods have been suffering deflation.
NBC: Millions of people who pay the full cost of their health insurance will face the sting of rising premiums next year, with no financial help from government subsidies.
Renewal notices bearing the bad news will go out this fall, just as the presidential election is in the home stretch.
Pedro Rojas holds a sign directing people to an insurance company where they can sign up for the Affordable Care Act. Joe Raedle / Getty Images, file
"I don't know if I could swallow another 30 or 40 percent without severely cutting into other things I'm trying to do, like retirement savings or reducing debt," said Bob Byrnes, of Blaine, Minnesota, a Twin Cities suburb. His monthly premium of $524 is already about 50 percent more than he was paying in 2015, and he has a higher deductible.
President Barack Obama's health law provides income-based subsidies for consumers who buy individual policies on HealthCare.gov and state insurance markets. About 10 million people get assistance, helping reduce the uninsured rate to a historically low 9 percent.
But there's no subsidy for those making more than $47,520 for an individual and $97,200 for a family of four - cutoffs that represent four times the federal poverty level. Also, subsidies are not available for consumers at any income level who purchase outside of HealthCare.gov or a state marketplace. Those who remain uninsured risk fines.
Premiums are expected to climb next year in many areas because major insurers have taken significant financial losses under the health law. Enrollment has been lower than anticipated, new customers were sicker than expected and a government system to stabilize the markets had problems.
We have lower rates because we have dedicated entitlement and pension payments for about 25% of the economy. The household consumption pattern has adapted to the burden, hence the relative decline in consumer prices ex medical and housing.
