FEB 21 16 SIT EC y POL
FOCUS: OUR ECONOMY IS IN BIG TROUBLLE
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ZERO HEDGE
ECON0OMICS
The
Drivers Of Inflation: Rent, Obamacare And Minimum Wage Hikes. Submitted
by Tyler Durden
on 02/21/2016 : Not only don't we have economic activity driving inflation, the
reality is that any inflation today is coming from just three places: 1.
Obamacare; 2. Minimum wage hikes; 3. Real estate aka shelter.
Extracts
The Fed's Dilemma: The Wrong Kind of Inflation
- Inflation
pressure does not come from economic demand (aka Resource Utilization)
Inflation comes from: - Fed loose money policies (shelter aka real estate)
- Fiscal policies: Obamacare & minimum wage hikes
- Rate hikes can stem only part of the inflationary factors
- Fortunately, inflationary pressures continue to remain low
The Fed is Partially Right
- Oil price deflation is holding down inflation
- The effect is transitory
Oil inflation has been a major factor holding down
inflation.
..
THE FED IS MOSTLY WRONG
- Economic demand is not about to drive up consumption-related inflation
- Inflation comes from areas largely immune to interest rate changes
- Inflation will remain mild
Problem #1: Resource Utilization
is falling and set to keep falling
Per Yellen, the Fed expects resource utilization to
rise. In fact, as measured by Manufacturing Capacity Utilization,
resource consumption continues to drop: down for 15 months.
…
Problem #2: Inflation from Fed's
Real Estate-Propping Policies
The biggest source of inflation is shelter aka Real
Estate. Real Estate inflation has been surging for years thanks to
the Fed's specific policies aimed at boosted real estate property prices.
Problem #3: Obamacare Triggered
Inflation
Problem #4: Slight Labor
Inflation from Minimum Wage Hikes : Beginning in 2014, many cities and states began to hike minimum
wages. Prior to that mandated hiking, many companies began to raise
hourly wages anyway.
The stark reality of
inflation reduced the disposable income of hourly wage earners. (The
perverse irony being that we have fiscal policy in the form of minimum wage
hikes trying to counter the inflation created by monetary policy in the form of
rising rental costs thanks to surging real estate prices.)
Key point: wage
pressure is emerging but for non-economic reasons.
Add it up
An overview of the
components suggests the following for the next year
While we lose the deflationary impact of energy, we gain
some deflation in food and the likely 2H disinflation in Shelter and services.
Within Core CPI, we should see falling inflationary
pressure in the 2H if labor moderates and shelter inflation flattens.
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The
Next Shoe Just Dropped: Equity NAVs Of 348 CLOs Slide Below Zero; "Market
Changed Dramatically In 6 Weeks". Submitted by Tyler
Durden on 02/21/2016 : First it was Junk Bonds, then Investment Grade
bonds, then bank loans, and now, in just six weeks, the CLO shoe has finally
dropped.
Extracts
At the peak of the last financial crisis, as the credit
liquidation wave was jumping from one highly levered product to the next, one
of the hardest hit sectors was the Collateralized Loan Obligations (CLO) space,
where the rout and massive P&L losses across most tranches led to a
revulsion for new issuance, which effectively shut down the sector for the next
3 years.
However, as central banks pumped trillions into the market,
it ultimately found its way back into the new and improved, or 2.0, CLO market,
where the resurgent euphoria led to a record $124.1 billion in new CLO
issuance in 2014, with 2015 tailing modestly with $97.3 billion as the second
busiest year for CLO issuance in US history and surpassing the last bubble
peak.
The problem is that with much of loan issuance in recent
years going to the lately very troubled energy companies, it now appears that
the second CLO explosion in 10 years may be on deck.
Heavy energy exposure is also starting to weigh on CLO
ratings, Reuters adds. A tranche of a post-crisis CLO was downgraded last
month when S&P cut the Class E notes of Silvermine Capital Management’s ECP
2013-5 to B- from B. Analysts said that the fund had credit deterioration in the
collateral portfolio and a large exposure to the energy sector.
It has gotten so bad that Wall Street, which traditionally
has no idea what is going on until it is too late (and then rushes to blame the
rating agencies) has started asking questions: "People are definitely
trying to get their heads around what [increased CCC holdings] says about the
credit cycle,” said Chris Flanagan, head of US mortgage and structured
finance research at Bank of America Merrill Lynch in New York. “The
market has changed dramatically in just six weeks.”
And, as Morgan Stanley concludes, it is about to get much
worse:
The research approach we are taking
towards CLO equity has shifted from one that evaluates growth and upside to
one that looks into distress and potential losses. While we do not expect
this theme to change in 2016, we reiterate our view that the levels of
distress in the US market may create “option-like” payoffs in CLO equity in the
secondary market, especially in deals by managers who are better “credit pickers”.
In short, the next shoe in the credit market has just
dropped.
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The Good, The
Bad, & The Ugly. Submitted by Tyler Durden on 02/21/2016 : The OPEX
game is back in full swing and brought back hope amongst signs of bullish
capitulation everywhere.... but there is plenty of bad (and even ugly) to
consider.
Nice rally off the lows in the past week just in time for
OPEX. Yes the OPEX game is back in full swing and brought back hope amongst
signs of bullish capitulation everywhere. Market bulls had gotten so
clobbered that Morgan Stanley even felt compelled to admit their
calls had been horrendous. In addition, 2016 end
of year price targets just issued in late 2015 had to be dialed back
rather dramatically by major Wall Street firms (by 10% in some cases) only a
few weeks into the year
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Panic
Below The Surface: "Banks Are Selling Energy Loans At Cents On The Dollar
To Ensure Their Own Survival". Submitted by Tyler
Durden on 02/21/2016 : "It is estimated that ~250,000 people
have lost their jobs in the industry in the last 18 months. People who
had been saying that this is the worst downturn since the 1980’s are now
thinking that this is a return to the 1980’s. There are reports of banks
selling loans at cents on the dollar to try and ensure their own survival and
bankruptcy courts and workout specialists are seeing their best market in
decades."
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POLITICS
Hillary
Clinton’s Six Foreign-Policy Catastrophes. by Eric Zuesse, Submitted by Tyler
Durden on 02/21/2016 : Many commentators have mentioned that
Hillary Clinton left behind no major achievement as the U.S. Secretary of
State; but, actually, she did. Unfortunately, all of her major achievements
were bad, and some were catastrophic. Six countries were especially involved:
Honduras, Haiti, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, and Ukraine. The harm she did to
each country was not in the interest of the American people, and it was
disastrous for the residents there. Hillary Clinton at every campaign debate
says “I have a better track-record,” and that she’s “a progressive who gets
things done.” Here’s what she has actually done when she was Secretary of
State...
..
Extracts
..
1- HONDURAS
On 28 June 2009, the Honduran military grabbed their
nation’s popular democratically elected progressive President, Manuel
Zelaya, and flew him into exile.
The AP headlined from Tegucigalpa the next day, “World Leaders Pressure Honduras to Reverse Coup,”
and reported: “Leaders from Hugo Chavez to Barack Obama called for
reinstatement of Manuel Zelaya, who was arrested in his pajamas Sunday morning
by soldiers who stormed his residence and flew him into exile.”
Secretary Clinton, in the press conference the day after the
coup, “Remarks at the Top of the Daily Press Briefing”,
refused to commit the United States to restoration of the democratically
elected President of Honduras. She refused even to commit the U.S. to using the
enormous leverage it had over the Honduran Government to bring that about.
2- HAITI
In Haiti, the situation is similar as an example of the
U.S. backing aristocrats, so as to keep the masses in poverty and for
American aristocrats to profit from doing so. On 1 June 2011, the
Nation headlined "WikiLeaks
Haiti: Let Them Live on $3 a Day," and Dan Coughlin and Kim Ives
reported that, "Contractors for Fruit of the Loom, Hanes and Levi’s
worked in close concert with the US Embassy when they aggressively moved
to block a minimum wage increase for Haitian assembly zone workers,
the lowest-paid in the hemisphere, according to secret State Department
cables.
The factory owners refused to pay 62 cents per hour, or
$5 per day, as a measure unanimously passed by the Haitian Parliament
in June 2009 would have mandated. And they had the vigorous backing of the
US Agency for International Development and the US Embassy when
they took that stand." Hillary Clinton's State Department pushed hard
to reverse the new law. "A deputy chief of mission, David E.
Lindwall, said the $5 per day minimum 'did not take economic reality
into account' but was a populist measure aimed at appealing to 'the
unemployed and underpaid masses.'"
An "Editor's Note" from the Nation added: "In
keeping with the industry’s usual practice, the brand name US
companies kept their own hands clean, letting their contractors
do the work of making Haiti safe for the sweatshops from which
they derive their profits -- with help from US officials." Those
"officials" were ultimately Clinton and Obama. On 3 June 2011,
Ryan Chittum at Columbia Journalism Review headlined "A
Pulled Scoop Shows U.S. Fought to Keep Haitian Wages Down," and
he added some perspective to the story: “Hanesbrands CEO Richard
Noll ... could pay for the raises for those 3,200 t-shirt
makers with just one-sixth of the $10 million in salary and bonus he
raked in last year.”
And then, when the U.S. turns away "boat people,"
trying to escape the "voluntary" slavery of the Haitian masses, the
standard excuse is that it's done so as to "protect American jobs." Is
that really the way Hillary Clinton gets her campaign funds?
3-AFGHANISTAN
On 26 July 2009, Marisa Taylor bannered at McClatchy
Newspapers, “Why
Are U.S.-Allied Refugees Still Branded as ‘Terrorists?’,” and she
reported that “DHS [Department of Homeland Security] is working with other
agencies, such as the State Department, to come up with a solution” to the
routine refusal of the United States to grant U.S. visas to translators and
other local employees of the U.S. in Iraq and Afghanistan who wanted to move to
the U.S. and who had overwhelming reason to fear retaliation from
anti-Americans in their home countries after we left. The State Department did
nothing.
[Instead] .. The State Department failed to act. On 2
February 2013, the Washington Post bannered “Alleged
Terrorism Ties Foil Some Afghan Interpreters’ U.S. Visa Hopes,” and
Kevin Sieff in Kabul reported that, “As the American military draws down its
forces in Afghanistan and more than 6,000 Afghan interpreters seek U.S. visas,
the problem is threatening to obstruct the applications of Afghans who risked
their lives to serve the U.S. government.” What kind of lesson is this teaching
to interpreters and other local employees of the U.S. missions in unstable
foreign countries? Helping the U.S. could be terminally dangerous.
4- LIBYA
But what happened afterwards is even worse than people know:
as Wayne
Madsen recently reported, Hillary’s success at overthrowing Gaddafi served
brilliantly the purposes of the U.S. aristocracy and of the jihadists who are financed
by the Saud family and the other fundamentalist Sunni royal faimilies in Arabia.
Even if she doesn’t become President, she has already done enough favors for
those royals so as to be able to fill to the brim the coffers of the Clinton
Foundation.
5- SYRIA
A record drought in Syria during 2008-2010 produced results
like this: “Two years before the ‘Arab Spring’ even began:
In the past three years, 160 Syrian farming villages have
been abandoned near Aleppo as crop failures have forced over 200,000 rural
Syrians to leave for the cities. This news is distressing enough, but when put
into a long-term perspective, its implications are staggering: many of these
villages have been continuously farmed for 8000 years. That source had been
published on 16 January 2010.”
The drought continued on through 2010 and sporadically
afterwards, and it intensified in Syria the already widespread ‘Arab Spring’
demonstrations against the existing regimes.
Even before the ‘Arab Spring’ demonstrations in 2011, the
Syrian government was pleading with foreign governments for food aid, and
these pleas were reported to Secretary of State Clinton, but she ignored them.
Obama grabbed this opportunity to dust off an
old CIA 1957 plan to overthrow the Ba’athist Party that ruled Syria — the
only secular, non-sectarian, party in Syria, and the only political force there
that insisted upon separation between church and state. The Ba’athists were
allied with Russia, and the
U.S. aristocracy wanted to conquer Russia even after the end of communism there
in 1990. Replacing a secular government by a fundamentalist Sunni Sharia
law regime would end Syria’s alliance with Russia; so, Obama worked with other
fundamentalist Sunni dictatorships in the region — Saudi Arabia, Qatar, UAE,
Kuwait, and Turkey — to perpetrate
a sarin gas attack in Syria that they’d all blame on Syria’s Ba’athist
leader, Bashar al-Assad, even though the U.S. and its Arab partners had
actually perpetrated it.
On 12 November 2011, Secretary
of State Clinton said: The failure of the Assad regime, once again, to heed
the call of regional states and the international community underscores the
fact that it has lost all credibility. The United States reiterates its calls
for an immediate end to the violence, for free unfettered access for human
rights monitors and journalists to deter and document grave human rights abuses
and for Asad to step aside.
CLINTON: She is obsessed with serving the desires of the
U.S. aristocracy — even if that means the U.S. helps supply sarin gas to the
rebels in Syria to be blamed on Assad, and even if it also means that the
existing, Ba’athist, government in Syria will be replaced by a jihadist Sunni
government that serves the Saud family and the other Arabic royal families.
6- UKRAINE
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton chose as being the State
Department’s chief spokesperson Victoria Nuland who was previously the Principal
Deputy National Security Advisor to Vice President Dick Cheney from 2003 to
2005, after having been appointed by President George W. Bush as the U.S.
Deputy Permanent Representative to the anti-Russian military club NATO from
2000 until 2003.
When Hillary Clinton retired in 2013, Obama made Nuland the
Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs, and Nuland’s
first assignment (she
was already at work on it by no later than 1 March 2013, which was before
the U.S. Senate had even confirmed her appointment) was to overthrow the
democratically elected government of Ukraine because Ukraine is next door to
Russia and the
U.S. aristocracy has, since communism ended in the Soviet Union in 1990, been
trying to surround Russia by NATO missiles, most especially
in Ukraine.
Here
is the recording of Nuland on 4 February 2014, telling the U.S. Ambassador in
Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt, whom to place at the top of the Ukrainian government
when the coup will be completed, which occurred 22 days later.
Here
is the broader video of that coup.
Here
is the head of the “private CIA” firm Stratfor saying it was “the most blatant
coup in history.”
Here
is the electoral map showing the voting percentages in each region of Ukraine
for the election that had chosen the President, “Janukovych,” whom Obama
overthrew in that coup.
* * *
OTHER MATTERS
Finally, it should also be noted that Hillary’s record as
the chief administrator at the State Department was also poor. The State
Department’s own Accountability
Review Board Report on Benghazi Attack said: “In the months leading up
to September 11, 2012, security in Benghazi was not recognized and implemented
as a ‘shared responsibility’ in Washington, resulting in stove-piped
discussions and decisions on policy and security. Key decisions ... or
non-decisions in Washington, such as the failure to establish standards for
Benghazi and to meet them, or the lack of a cohesive staffing plan, essentially
set up Benghazi.” That’s failure at the very top. It’s not in Libya. It’s not
even in Africa. It’s in “Washington.”
Who, at the State Department in “Washington,” had “buck
stops here” authority and power? Hillary Clinton.
CONCLUSION
Only fools vote for
her. Her campaigns are targeting especially fools who are either female or
black or Hispanic, but she (and her financial backers) will welcome any
fool to vote for her, because clearly no non-fool (except those financial
backers) will.
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Lawsuit
Challenging Ted Cruz's Eligibility For President Officially Filed. Submitted
by Tyler Durden on 02/21/2016 : Ted Cruz’
eligibility to run for president has been put to a test of legality. On
Friday, the Circuit Court of Cook County in Chicago heard questions in a lawsuit challenging the Texas
senator’s legal qualifications to determine if his bid for the nomination can
continue.
[ This could open up a new road to deal with the issue “testing
legalities” of candidates like Hillary ]
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MIDDLE EAST &
WORLD ISSUES
Multiple
Suicide Attacks Rock Shiite Strongholds In Syria; Dozens Killed, Hundreds
Wounded. Submitted by Tyler Durden on 02/21/2016 :
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Cameron
Unleashes 'Project Fear' - UK Military Leaders Warn Against Brexit Threat To
National Security. Submitted by Tyler
Durden on 02/21/2016 : Just as the government did in the lead up to The
Scottish Referendum in 2014, it appears David Cameron is already unleashing
resorting to the so-called
Project Fear. As
The Telegraph reports, following Boris
Johnson's lack of acquiescence to Cameron's call for no Brexit, more than
a dozen of the country's most senior military leaders will argue that Britain
should vote to stay in the European Union because of its importance to national
security.
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GLOBAL RESEARCH
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Why
Russia is Serious about Fighting Terrorism and the US Isn’t. America Protects
Al Qaeda and ISIS By Maram Susli,
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Selected
Articles: Syria, Argentina, Ukraine and the Proliferation of “False Flag”
Operations By Global Research
News,
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INFORMATION CLEARING HOUSE
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New US Syria Strategy Aims to Con Russia By Stephen Lendman. . US rhetorical
support for cessation of hostilities and resumption of peace talks is pure
subterfuge
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Would Russia Use Nukes to Defend Khmeimim?.
By The Saker. Russians are not making any threats – they are preparing
for war. In fact, by now they are ready.
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Bashar
al-Assad: “80 Countries Support The Terrorists In Syria”. By David Alandete.
EL PAÍS interviews the Syrian leader at a crucial juncture in the conflict in
the country.
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The Saudi
Slaughter in Yemen. By Adil E. Shamoo. The United States bears the
moral and legal responsibility for facilitating a potential genocide in Yemen
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Pentagon
Mercenaries: Blackwater, Al-Qaeda… what’s in a name?. By Finian
Cunningham.
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Trump:
“Secret Papers” May Link 9/11 to Saudi Arabia. By 28Pages. Donald Trump this week
indirectly referred to 28 classified pages said to link the Kingdom of Saudi
Arabia to the 9/11 attacks.
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NOTICIAS IN SPANISH
Referendo en Bolivia. García Linera llama a esperar resultados
oficiales y afirma por el momento "empate técnico"
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EE.UU.. Con el sueldo mínimo las posibilidades son mínimas. En 2016 todo se deprecia. Peter Van Buren
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Opinion. La izquierda y la nación: ambigüedades no
resueltas. Immanuel Wallerstein
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PRESS
TV
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US
largest arms exporter amid rising flow CREAMOS Guerra para alimentar 6
corporaciones
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US rejected to end Korean War: Kirby
si cae Kolea cae pantalon ..
parece va a ser cierto esta vez
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