US military accidently kills religious scholar

WA Post:  Yesterday a US military operation mistakenly identified a meek religious scholar and former foot baller as a terrorist. The victim was killed and President trump apologized to his family.

Libra is alive and well

Will Libra Be Stillborn?

Libra will be an exchange trade fund share based on the investment houses that back the share.  What makes Libra different is that the SECs is not prepared to regulate a liquid ETF share like Libra.

Governments have little power over Libra except the threaten the millions of users with a sheriff knock on the door.  Facebook is immune, it simply moves the servers to a supporting nation, or buries them in the arctic circle. Some government somewhere will see the advantage of hosting Libra servers.

Barry Eichengreen is not up with sandbox theory, Zuck is all on board the sandbox. Regulators are screwed until economists get a clue and it is not happening, too many priors to protect. Barry suffers the 'This time is different' syndrome.

Bitcoin is real, Libra is real, JPM Coin is real, but useless since JPM has a single trusted and bonded ledger service. Any larger bank or institution like Facebook and Google can easily assemble a digital controlled ETF share system.  Crypto nuts are not quite educated on ETF systems, but they can learn.

Like I say, until the supporting economists get clues, the technology accelerates and leaves the central bank with smaller and smaller market share.  Clueless economists inform techies do not attempt regularity conformity, they self regulate.  Progress is not waiting for a bunch of central bankers badly advised.

With Hillary gone we can have Middle East peace.

The End Of Syria’s “Pipeline War”

The Russia-Turkey deal establishes a safe zone along the Syrian-Turkish border – something Erdogan had been gunning for since 2014. There will be joint Russia-Turkey military patrols. The Kurdish YPG (People’s Protection Units), part of the rebranded, US-aligned Syrian Democratic Forces, will need to retreat and even disband, especially in the stretch between Tal Abyad and Ras al-Ayn, and they will have to abandon their much-cherished urban areas such as Kobane and Manbij. The Syrian Arab Army will be back in the whole northeast. And Syrian territorial integrity – a Putin imperative – will be preserved.

Make both a highway and a pipeline. Screw Hillary and the Saudis, do the thing that makes sense. This is all good news and we can thank Putin and common sense. If Putin managed to get Hillary dumped then Putin did the Middle East a huge favor.

Like the end of LBJ's disaster in Vietnam except Hillary only got as far as Secretary of State. Thank god we could have had another Vietnam style disaster if she were elected..

Filling in Hayek's triangle

Here they decomposed the value added net over a complete sequence. Otherwise known as filling the rows of Hayek triangle.

Take a complete sequence of oil deliveries over the natural inventory cycle. Create the equivalent generator. Feed the generator a uniform random sequence, read off the output one 'leaf' at a time.

The method is based on information theory but information is really about structured queues, generators.

Warren has a Medicare for All problem

Just to insue the 7 million uninsured who left Obamacare will require re-instating the equivalent of 3,000 per year taxes on the upper half of the income distribution. (Using 20k per year in cost). This just gets us back to pre-Trump.  There are another 27 million who will be on Medicare for all, so quadruple those taxes.

These are not all new taxes, many of those folks got medical care of some sort and the cost gets pushed onto premiums sooner or later.  Medicare for All just makes the cost visible, like Obamacare, the result being the taxpayers go into rebellion. What the voters really want is a fair chance to avoid paying the cost by selecting their own private insurer.

Tax avoidance is an American tradition. We would rather risk the government bankruptcy than pay the fees. Warren is going to get caught and lose the election.

Her other problem is market control. The system is set up to pay the market price and the market will produce infinite, but necessary, medical services under that contract. There is a straight path to bankruptcy and debt repudiation.

And, need I remind everyone, we are facing the much bigger government problem, small state extinction.  Both Bernie and Vermont may die off before the election even happens.

Cartel corruption is part of the Mexican presidency

TEGUCIGALPA (Reuters) - An alleged drug dealer with knowledge of drug shipments involving a brother of Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez convicted this month for drug trafficking, was killed on Saturday in prison, his lawyer said.
Magdaleno Meza, who had been in the El Pozo prison since June 2018 on charges of money laundering, was shot dead during a fight between inmates of the facility, the deputy director of the national penal authority, German McNiel, told reporters.
Meza’s lawyer, Carlos Chajtur, told Reuters his client was attacked by two armed men trying to stop him from talking about the information about drug deals he had in several notebooks in case he was called to testify in the United States.

Cartel bribes are also reaching deep into California politics.

Mexico's president claims he will do fewer drug deals if the US quits sending arms south.  Trump should take the deal a Coasian bargain. Otherwise Trump either has to invade as the Mexican presidency is now intimately involved chemical warfare with the USA.

And believe all the parents who got stuck, this is military grade chemical warfare. A lifetime of disability for the kids who get caught in the mess.

No Mohummering from this bearded dude.

DUBAI (Reuters) - Iran was informed by sources in Syria that Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was killed, two Iranian officials told Reuters on Sunday.
“Iran was informed about Baghdadi’s death by Syrian officials who got it from the field,” one of the officials said. The second Iranian official confirmed it.

Kevin Drum attempts a deceptive graph

He says, look, since 2001 the deficit has only gotten slightly worse as a percentage of the budget My graph show the whole sequence.








The last peak was 1999 and since then the deficits have shifted a total of 6 percent of GDP, from plus 2 to about minus 4 .

And as the debt in total got worse as the volatility has jumped to about 3% of GDP.

Finally note that deficits get worse when we do not pay for the crap we buy from government.  We still do not intend to pay for any of that crap.  Taxes are out of the question, it is not happening, not for the middle class nor for the wealthy. The obligations are too high for anyone group and they have all refused. We are in debt repudiation phase.

Drum and Dean Baker are on a push to increase debt. Few of us take them seriously. We have seen the federal government fail to pay the 3.2% ten year rate from about a year ago and we have been contracting ever since. Look at real growth, there is a reason is is dropping, government cannot afford any higher interest charges.

Just proves Texans, especially Guv Abbot are idiots

Don’t Ignore the Latest Legal Threat to Obamacare

Last year, a group of states led by Texas began this fresh attack. Their opening was a 2017 revision to the law that set the penalty for defying the “individual mandate” at zero. This arguably unmoored the ACA from its constitutional foundations, as laid down by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2012. In that ruling, the penalty for defying the mandate to obtain insurance was deemed to be a lawful exercise of Congress’s taxing power; now that the tax is zero, this argument no longer applies, according to the new challenge, so the mandate becomes impermissible under the Constitution’s commerce clause. A federal judge embraced this approach, and ruled the law invalid. The case, Texas v. U.S., is being appealed.

The answer is that the issue is moot, there is no penalty.
Since there is no longer a mandate to make impermissible the only thing left is to teach Texas lawyers how to read.

How do Texas legislatures recommend shooting our children and suing ghosts? WTF happened to Texas? Maybe NRA nuts are natural idiots?

They claim premiums are a one for one substitute for taxes

Make no mistake: Medicare for All would cut taxes for most Americans

Hence it makes no difference, Medicare for All is at least break even.

They are full of crap.  They started with priors and searched for ab assumption that makes their priors true.  The are completely fraudulent and both should be drummed our of economic science completely. They both know this is fraudulent pundicizing.

No one will bother to argue, instead we will let the dufas idiots at Naked Capitalism have their worthless delusion. One thing is certain, the more this Saez guy open his mouth the more likely Trump whomps Liz.