Good morning. The U.S. economy may be going gangbusters, but for those looking for a return on their savings, the picture is less pretty: Even so-called high yield savings accounts offer a pittance in interest—Goldman Sachs’ Marcus product, for instance, currently offers a measly 1.7%.For the mathematicians out there, the shadow bank operates on the lowest rung of the Markov Tree. They are up against central bankers who do not understand the triple entry accounting needed to operate a rung or two up the tree.
Those higher interest rates are possible, DeFi boosters say, because there is no bank or other middleman to profit off consumer deposits. Instead, the system relies on pairing individual borrowers and lenders who rely on automated “smart contracts” to administer loans and pay out interest.
(Reuters) - In the wee hours of Jan. 8, Tehran retaliated over the U.S. killing of Iran’s most powerful general by bombarding the al-Asad air base in Iraq. Among the 2,000 troops stationed there was U.S. Army Specialist Kimo Keltz, who recalls hearing a missile whistling through the sky as he lay on the deck of a guard tower. The explosion lifted his body - in full armor - an inch or two off the floor.Our commander in chief suddenly changing sides in the war and military brass to stupid to inform field commanders. All this so his snot nosed son-in-law can get another hotel. Pretty sick if you ask me.
Keltz says he thought he had escaped with little more than a mild headache. Initial assessments around the base found no serious injuries or deaths from the attack. U.S. President Donald Trump tweeted, “All is well!”
The next day was different.
“My head kinda felt like I got hit with a truck,” Keltz told Reuters in an interview from al-Asad air base in Iraq’s western Anbar desert. “My stomach was grinding.”
Keltz, who said he had concussion symptoms for days, is among 109 soldiers diagnosed with traumatic brain injuries in the wake of last month’s attack, a figure that has steadily risen as more troops report symptoms and get medical screening.
Acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney called out Republicans for being “a lot less interested” in deficits under President Trump than when former President Obama was in office, The Washington Post reported.Not officially, and that is regardless of who is in the White House. I have never seen any Repub president worry about the debt. I have seen a horde of traders, like Mulvaney, make a lot of dough from the Repub debt machine.
Mulvaney spoke at the Oxford Union and said that the GOP is “very interested in deficits when there is a Democrat in the White House,” according to audio from the speech obtained by the Post.
"The worse thing in the whole world is deficits when Barack Obama was the president,” he said. “Then Donald Trump became president, and we’re a lot less interested as a party.”
President Trump promised to end the reckless foreign intervention of the United States over the past two decades, and he is keeping that promise. Reports indicate that he is closer than ever to fulfilling this by bringing a satisfactory end to the longest war in American history. After years of negotiations, the Taliban appears on the verge of signing an accord that would pave the way for a reduction of hostilities, a settlement on the future of Afghanistan, and a withdrawal of American troops.
The Renew California legislation introduced yesterday would force insurance companies to renew insurance policies in wildfire zones.Insurance companies used to bail out the previous failed state actions. Insurance companies are exiting the scene, the remaining ones raising rates to unaffordable. Our failed Hispanic legislators completely clueless, and evidently remaining clueless.
The turn of the calendar didn’t leave the bad news in 2019, as the Cass Freight Index showed continued weakness in the U.S. freight market. Both the shipments and expenditures components of the Cass Freight Index worsened sequentially and showed decelerating y/y growth. According to the broader stock market levels, there is still optimism out there, but the freight trends have yet to turn. And the Covid-19 coronavirus case count continues to grow, creating uncertainty around containment and eventual impact on global supply chains. Some Chinese factories resumed operation this past week, but they are still not close to 100% production levels. Others have pushed re-opening back to March 1.Velocity is shipments per time period, and it has been dropping and still likely dropping. This also means, by the way, any Euler assumptions are out the window, we are ill sampled. It also means retail transactions are dropping, folks save up and buy in one large transaction rather than using shared inventory over multiple transactions.
New York Times reporter Katie Rogers used the wedding of White House immigration advisor Stephen Miller to Katie Waldman, press secretary to Vice President Mike Pence, to show Trump staff as purposefully isolating themselves from D.C. society in Tuesday’s “Pairing Off in Trump’s Political Bunker.”No one wants to be any where around when the Iranian kids splat Trump blubber with the Dollar Tree foam planes. Seriously, the guy is a walking bag of exploding blubber, and everyone expects it to happen, including he NSA who specifically warned him of the problem.
That strange insensitive headline begs a question Rogers doesn’t directly answer: Why are Trump staffers trapped in the “bunker” in the first place?
: to get the better of : OVERRIDE where ambition invariably trumps loyaltyEtymology will be confused for centuries.
What do you do when your state is controlled by Democrats whose laws are way too liberal for your taste? And moving out of state is not an option or a preference? Well, if you’re an Oregonian, the solution may be to remap state boundaries and join up with a neighbor who’s a bit more conservative. At least, that’s the plan underway for the group Move Oregon’s Border for a Greater Idaho.
Already, the movement has achieved initial approval from two counties. The plan is to get enough signatures to put the proposal on the November ballot. Mike McCarter, one of the main petitioners, said some Oregon residents are getting fed up with their state’s too-liberal lawmakers and policies. Democrats control both branches of the state legislature and the governor’s office, making it difficult for rural conservatives to have a say in the political arena. McCarter said in a press release:
“Rural counties have become increasingly outraged by laws coming out of the Oregon Legislature that threaten our livelihoods, our industries, our wallet, our gun rights, and our values. We tried voting those legislators out, but rural Oregon is outnumbered and our voices are now ignored. This is our last resort.”
This is a dispute between white people and the others. The white kids can study STEM on line, and let the campus 'others' can study the culture of large room populated with 'others'. Then white people can get on with their lives, the ';others' can establish the science of people in large rooms.
Numerous students at the University of Virginia recently affirmed in on-camera interviews that the school’s multicultural center, lately the site of a contentious incident in which a young woman publicly criticized white students for studying there, should largely remain a space for non-white community members.
Dallas Fed President Robert Kaplan says that he views the labor market as “likely at or past” full employment, hinting that Kaplan may see a weaker case for lowering interest rates.
In an essay published Tuesday, Kaplan wrote that he still views the current level of interest rates as “roughly appropriate” for the U.S. economy. He added that he projects no rate changes through the end of 2020.
Kaplan said he expects “solid growth” for the year and projects the headline unemployment rate ticking down from 3.6% back to 3.5%. Kaplan also pointed to a labor force participation rate of 63.4%, the highest level since June 2013.
Former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg, who has qualified for Wednesday night's debate in Las Vegas, should not be underestimated, ex-House Speaker Newt Gingrich warned Tuesday.We have a batch of sever stupid in the White House. Adding Newts support mostly subtracts from the Trump family IQ.
"He is very professional," Gingrich told Fox News' "Fox and Friends." "He is very smart. He served as mayor of New York for 12 years and people thought overall he basically bought it the last time. He spent about $200 per vote, which is, I think, the all-time American record. But, nonetheless, he served for 12 years. It was a relatively corruption-free, relatively effective period in terms of the city's prosperity."
HONG KONG/LONDON (Reuters) - HSBC Holdings PLC (HSBA.L) said on Tuesday it would shed $100 billion in assets, shrink its investment bank and revamp its U.S. and European businesses in a drastic overhaul that will mean 35,000 jobs cut over three years.The central bankers are taxing agents.
Twitter defines “sensitive content” as something that might contain “violence or nudity.” So why did a photo of a Nascar racer and the president get flagged by the platform as potentially sensitive content?My thoughts on the Daytona thing is when will the Iranians kids splatter Trump blubber across the race track with their home made drones, exactly as the NSA warned Trump, and family before the drone war.
Now attention is switching to former President of Mexico Peña Nieto.And AMLO is repeating the same corruption. Mexican voters unable to get clues.
MEXICO CITY - One morning this week, Mexico City police received a radio call about an "aggression against a woman." Arriving at the scene - an apartment in a lower-middle-class neighborhood - they discovered a horror: the body of a 25-year-old who had been stabbed to death, cut up and partially skinned.
The killing of Ingrid Escamilla last weekend has gripped the nation and ignited a fresh round of protests over Mexico's high levels of violence against women.
On Friday, demonstrators hurled paint at the entrance to the National Palace to protest Escamilla's death and other "femicides" - murders of women because of their gender. Additional protests were planned for Friday evening and Saturday.
Nor does the way monetary economics is taught help. In other subjects, the welfare theorems are taken seriously. In classes on international trade, for example, time is always spent, early on, on the implications of free trade: never mind that the world has never witnessed perfectly free trade, and probably never will; it’s understood that the consequences of tariffs and other sorts of state interference can only be properly assessed by comparing them to the free trade alternative, and no one who hasn’t studied that alternative can expect to have his or her pronouncements about the virtues of protectionism taken seriously.I can put this in sandbox terms.
In classes in monetary economics, on the other hand, the presence of a central bank—a monetary central planner, that is—is assumed from the get-go, and no serious attention is given to the implications of “free trade in money and banking." Consequently, when most monetary economists talk about the virtues of this or that central bank, they’re mostly talking through their hats, because they haven’t a clue concerning what other institutions might be present, and what they might be up to if the central bank wasn’t there.
“We passed a health care bill that does absolutely nothing to fix the big health care problems in this country. It is just a disgrace,” said Bloomberg at the Dartmouth Presidential Lecture in 2010. “The President, in all fairness, started out by pointing out what the big problems were, but then turned it over to Congress, which didn’t pay any attention to any of those big problems and just created another program that’s going to cost a lot of money.”Now Bernie's, desperate for one last go at the Godot thing wants to write off the Trillion and stick the kids with the more expensive bill.
“It’s really sad because they say they’ve insured or provided coverage for another 45 million people,” Bloomberg added in the speech. “Except there’s no doctors for 45 million more people and unless they fix immigration and let people who come here for medical education stay here, those people are just going to do the same thing. They’re going to have to go to the emergency rooms where they’ve been except that now it’s going to cost a lot more money.”
BEIRUT - Lebanon may not survive if its new government fails, the powerful Hezbollah warned on Sunday, urging the country's divided politicians not to obstruct the cabinet as it seeks to address an unprecedented economic and financial crisis.Sounds like your usual Jew hating welfare bum.
Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah also said there was no point in politicians trading blame over the causes of the crisis, after former prime minister Saad al-Hariri on Friday accused his rivals of pushing the country to near-collapse.
According to a statement from the the Housing and Urban Development website, Carson announced a $20 million investment into nine public housing agencies on Friday.As per the statement, the money will go towards helping “public housing families increase their earned income and become self-sufficient.”It follows a report issued by the Housing and Urban Development Department last year which said that the homeless population in California increased by 16.4 percent from 2018 to 2019, while 53 percent of all recorded homeless people in America lived in the state as of January 2019.Let us not fool ourselves with delusions. Let us instead celebrate the wonderful assortment of camp sites in LA.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez says the jury is still out on bail reform.
“What I would just say is that we should just give this time. It’s been five minutes,” AOC told The Post when asked if the controversial new law needed to be amended.
“Give it a shot. We’ve had almost no time since these things have passed. So I would just say, in this environment with political pressure, to maybe just say let’s just slow down a bit.”
President Trump surprisingly showed himself to be a fan of both Ralph Waldo Emerson and The New York Times on Saturday — tweeting out the 19th-century scribe’s famous quote, “When you strike at the King, you must kill him,” in yet another moment of post-impeachment-acquittal braggadocio.
We’re at the stage of the Bloomberg boomlet right now where the sheer improbability of his rise to national contender leaves one reluctant to second-guess him, even on something as outlandish as this.
Iraq’s pro-Iranian Harakat Hezbollah threatened the US. In a tweet showing a US armored vehicle at night the group claimed that “we are closer than you think.” The leader of Nujaba, Akram al-Kaabi has said that the countdown to achieve Iraq’s “sovereignty” had begun, a reference to removing US forces. He showed an image of US Reaper and Predator drone flight paths.Repubs getting US Troops killed over their stupid Saudi oil deals. Like that bonehead senator from Arkansas. The same bonehead senators that created the Vietnam fiasco.
The US sanctioned Nujaba in March of last year, part of a series of sanctions against Iran’s IRGC and pro-Iranian militias in Iraq. For instance Asaib Ahl al-Haq’s leader Qais Khazali was also sanctioned in December. These militias have tens of thousands of members and are linked to Iran. They fought ISIS and helped form the Popular Mobilization Units. They are now an official arm of the Iraqi security forces. However they have their own munitions warehouses and some are often directly loyal to Iran’s leadership. The US killed Kataib Hezbollah leader Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis and IRGC Quds Force commander Qasem Soleimani on January 3. Soleimani helped organize the militias in Iraq, and Muhandis was deputy commander of the PMU. The PMU is also called the Hashd al-Sha’abi. Most of its members are Shi’ites.
LAS VEGAS (AP) — Joe Biden, standing on a Las Vegas stage roughly 1,000 feet from the scene of the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history, took on White House rival Bernie Sanders for his past vote to exempt gun manufacturers from liability for shootings.Joe gets a gold star I will reconsider him. Note that NRA nuts deprive us of the right, guaranteed in the Second. The penalty is banishment to fentanyl camps where we await their suicide.
The former vice president devoted the majority of his Saturday night speech at a Democratic gala on the Las Vegas Strip to deliver a fiery charge against the National Rifle Association and gun manufacturers, vowing to hold gun makers accountable if elected president.
Rages at Media Ignoring Attempted Terror Attack on Trump SupportersThe odds are that Mr Trump senior will be droned into a large liquid layer of blubber by the Iranians kids with their home built UAVs, for which your fat dad has no defense.
President Donald Trump’s top energy official said he’s confident that Russia won’t be able to complete the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline in the Baltic Sea -- and signaled that the U.S. will press forward with its opposition to the project.
Asked about Russian efforts to circumvent U.S. sanctions on the pipeline by completing it on its own, U.S. Energy Secretary Dan Brouillette said “they can’t” -- and dismissed claims that project owner Gazprom PJSC will face only a short delay.
"Can you tell me his name?" Klobuchar was asked by a reporter.We call him AMLO for short. Andrés Manuel Lopez Obrador. Obrador being the Spanish term for Failed Stater.
“No,” the three-term Minnesota senator said.
Steyer, a billionaire businessman, said he “forgot.”
Buttigieg was the only one of the three participants to correctly name the Mexican leader. The Klobuchar campaign didn't immediately respond to a report the candidate left the interview before it was scheduled to end.
"If women wanted to be appreciated for their brains, they'd go to the library not Bloomingdale's."How correct. Women demonstarate they are willing o spend an hour each day working the mirror. We men know this, we know we will spend time waiting for them to get this done.
Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro’s quiet move to restore elements of free enterprise to his nation’s economy should serve as a cautionary tale for anyone listening to Sen. Bernie Sanders’ siren song of socialism in the Democratic primaries or who is still tempted by promises of socialist bliss.And we get one slightly less failed state Hispanic. Can our own failed Hispanic state get the same clue?
Critics say that the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act is unnecessary. I wish that it were. While it’s hard to imagine many Americans opposing a bill that would ensure that medical provision was administered to a struggling newborn child, many in Washington would prefer that it never be mentioned, because it would protect infants born alive after an attempted abortion.
Michael Bloomberg is leading the pack of Democratic presidential hopefuls in Florida, according to a new survey from St. Pete Polls, a sign that the former New York City mayor has picked up traction in a crucial swing state before most of his rivals have even started to campaign there.And we have a bunch of New Yorkers there who are escaping from Cuomo and BaBlowsio. Thus back to my theme, New York has spent a long time running from the local taxing agents and they want control of the White House to get a break. They deserve another four more years according to the regional rotation of the presidency which takes place.
The poll shows Bloomberg with 27.3 percent support in the Sunshine State, up 10 points from a similar poll released late last month. Biden, meanwhile, has seen his support in Florida plummet, falling from more than 41 percent in January to 25.9 percent this month.
...the end-game cometh!It is just the regularly scheduled default, it will be mild and government continues. The problem is not the default, it is the sudden turbulent overnight MMT episode, mostly engineered by the panicked economists.
The economic casualties from China’s coronavirus epidemic are mounting as Asian and European auto plants run short of parts, free-spending Chinese tourists stay home and American companies brace for unpredictable turbulence.Chinese home buyers are staying home. China trade through California will slow way down. As the stock market levels off in response, California income drops dramatically. California is barely 2% in growth, its peak for the Trump cycle has happened. The shutdowns will send the state to tipping point.
That’s just the start of a financial hangover that is expected to linger for months even if the flulike illness is soon brought under control, economists and supply chain experts say. The Chinese epidemic’s aftereffects will likely cause the global economy to shrink this quarter for the first time since the depths of the 2009 financial crisis, according to Capital Economics in London.
