Visualizing Donald Trump's $20 Trillion Problem

via by Tyler Durden on Fri, 13 Jan 2017 09:15:00 GMT

Only a few days after Trump’s inauguration ceremony, the U.S. National Debt will creep across the important psychological barrier of $20 trillion.

It’s a problem that’s been passed down to him, but, as Visual Caitalist's Jeff Desjardins notes, it certainly puts the incoming administration in a difficult place. The debt is burdensome by pretty much any metric, and the rate of borrowing has exceeded economic growth pretty much since the late 1970s.

How Trump deals with this escalating constraint will be a deciding factor in whether his administration crashes and burns – or ends up re-positioning America for greatness.

Donald Trump’s $20 Trillion Problem

Partisans will squabble about who added what to the mounting debt, but the reality is that none of that really matters. Both parties have kicked the can down the road for the last 40 years, and that has culminated in the current situation:

Source: The Money Project

Back in 1979, the debt-to-GDP ratio was a modest 31.8%, and the federal government only had an outstanding tab of $826 billion. Fast forward to today, and the perpetual borrowing has added up.

The debt-to-GDP is now 104.2%, with the total debt burden nearing the $20 trillion mark.

Source: The Money Project

In absolute terms, the debt is the highest it has ever been. Using the common measure of debt-to-GDP, the debt is the highest it’s been in 70 years. The last time it soared past the 100% mark was during the final year of WWII.

Granted, the situation isn’t as bad as Greece, Cyprus, or Japan – but it’s getting there:

Source: The Money Project

In terms of debt-to-revenue, a measure that compares the national debt to the amount of taxes taken in by the federal government, the U.S. has the 2nd highest debt out of 34 OECD countries:

Source: The Money Project

On a “per person” basis, each person in the U.S. owes $61,300 – the second highest in the world. Per taxpayer, however, that amount balloons to $167,000.

Changing Rhetoric

So what does Trump think of all this debt business? It’s hard to say, because his rhetoric has changed.

At the start of his campaign, he made it clear that debt would be a top issue for his administration. In February 2016, Trump said that the U.S. was becoming a “large-scale version of Greece” and that tackling the debt would be “easy” with a more dynamic economy. In April 2016, he said he could pay off the debt after eight years in office.

This rhetoric aligns with the official GOP platform, which says that the national debt has “placed a significant burden on future generations”, calling for a “strong economy” and “spending restraint” to pay it down.

But since then, Trump’s views may have changed.

His most recent economic plans include $1 trillion in infrastructure and $5 trillion in tax cuts – and they could increase debt by anywhere from $5.3 to $11.5 trillion. He’s also said that the U.S. will never have to default because it can simply “print money”.

How Trump will choose to deal with the debt is a big question – and only time will tell if his actions will make America great again.

*  *  *

The Money Project aims to use intuitive visualizations to explore ideas around the very concept of money itself. Founded in 2015 by Visual Capitalist and Texas Precious Metals, the Money Project will look at the evolving nature of money, and will try to answer the difficult questions that prevent us from truly understanding the role that money plays in finance, investments, and accumulating wealth.

50 Years Of Teaching Math In 'Exceptional' America

via by Tyler Durden on Fri, 13 Jan 2017 07:45:00 GMT

How America became 'exceptional'...

Source: The Burning Platform

*  *  *

Of course, as we noted previously, our system of education is not entirely to blame.  The truth is that young Americans spend far more time consuming media than they do hitting the books, and what passes for “entertainment” these days is rapidly turning their brains to mush.

According to a report put out by Nielsen, this is how much time the average American spends consuming media on various devices each day…

Watching live television: 4 hours, 32 minutes

Watching time-shifted television: 30 minutes

Listening to the radio: 2 hours, 44 minutes

Using a smartphone: 1 hour, 33 minutes

Using Internet on a computer: 1 hour, 6 minutes

When you add it all up, the average American spends more than 10 hours a day plugged into some form of media.

And if you allow anyone to pump “programming” into your mind for 10 hours a day, it is going to have a dramatic impact.

In the end, I truly believe that we all greatly underestimate the influence that the mainstream media has on all of us.  We willingly plug into “the Matrix” for endless hours, but then somehow we still expect “to think for ourselves”.

There are very few of us that can say that we have not been exposed to thousands upon thousands of hours of conditioning.  And all of that garbage can make it very, very difficult to think clearly.

It is not because of a lack of input that we have become so stupid as a society.  The big problem is what we are putting into our minds.

If we continue to put garbage in, we are going to continue to get garbage out, and that is the cold, hard reality of the matter.

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Why Has The White House Suddenly Released A Strategy For Dealing With A Catastrophic Meteor Impact?

via by Tyler Durden on Fri, 13 Jan 2017 04:25:00 GMT

As SHTFPlan.com's Mac Slavo notes, we should take notice at the government preparations for disaster, and the possibility of a cataclysmic collision with damaging objects in space.

At the same time, we should take notice at what they are preparing for with all the billions of dollars thrown at defense and survival, it comes in secretive infrastructure for a reclusive sect of power, and in top-down plans to contain the unrest.

 

Preparations for the individual to survive, and be resilient are not being put in place in this government, though many other governments have made such an investment into the lives of individuals. Time and again, these people are told to brace for the worst, with little to show for it. A few have made their preps, and it may yet prove useful in this or some other disaster.

Why Has The White House Suddenly Released A Strategy For Dealing With The Threat Of A Catastrophic Meteor Impact?

Authored by The End Of The American Dream's Michael Snyder,

Does the White House know something that the rest of us do not? As the Obama administration draws to a close, the White House has suddenly released a major document that details a multi-pronged strategy for dealing with the threat of a catastrophic meteor impact. Most of us remember movies such as “Deep Impact” and “Armageddon” that attempted to depict what such a crisis would look like, but up until fairly recently the U.S. government has never seemed to take this kind of threat very seriously.

So what has changed?

Of all the things that the White House could be focusing on, why this?

And this new report is just the latest in a series of measures that the government has taken over the past couple of years to help prepare us for incoming meteors and asteroids. The following is an excerpt from a recent Gizmodo article…

Concern over an apocalyptic asteroid strike has risen all the way to the top: The White House released a document this week detailing a strategy for National Near Earth Object (NEO) preparedness. Morgan Freeman would no doubt be proud, although honestly, the nation might have more pressing apocalypse concerns closer to home.

 

Last year brought renewed interest in handling humanity-ending impact events. After a 2014 audit showed that NASA had a cruddy NEO preparedness system, the agency founded a new Planetary Defense Coordination Office (PDCO) last year to detect all of our potentially nasty NEO neighbors. The office quickly escalated talk to action, running preparedness drills with the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), launching spacecraft to gather asteroid information, and even drawing up plans to nuke the bad boys out of the sky if things get dicey.

NASA continues to assure us that no threat is imminent, so why spend so much time, energy and resources on a non-existent crisis?

If you want to read the 25 page document that the White House just released, it is entitled “National Near-Earth Object Preparedness Strategy” and you can read it for yourself right here.

The document was put together by the Interagency Working Group for Detecting and Mitigating the Impact of Earth-bound Near-Earth Objects, and it outlined seven key objectives that the authors believe are important…

1. Enhance NEO detection, tracking, and characterization capabilities
2. Develop methods for NEO deflection and disruption
3. Improve modelling, predictions, and information integration
4. Develop emergency procedures for NEO impact scenarios
5. Establish NEO impact response and recovery procedures
6. Leverage and support international cooperation
7. Establish coordination and communications protocols and thresholds for taking action

And without a doubt, we definitely do need to enhance our detection abilities. Just the other day, a very large asteroid barely missed us, and we had only discovered it two days earlier…

Early Monday morning, while the US East Coast was pouring coffee, dropping kids off at school, and cursing in traffic, a space rock as big as a 10-story building slipped past Earth.

 

The asteroid, dubbed 2017 AG13, was discovered only Saturday by the University of Arizona’s Catalina Sky Survey, according to an email from Slooh, a company that broadcasts live views of space.

We were very fortunate this time, but the truth is that our planet crosses paths with other giant space rocks on a very regular basis.

In fact, a near-Earth object that is being called “a cross between an asteroid and a comet” will come fairly close to our planet in February…

The latter “object”, dubbed the 2016 WF9, was detected by NASA in late November and has left scientist’s scratching their heads.

 

They have described the celestial rock as a cross between an asteroid and a comet.

 

It’s in the middle of its of.9 year orbit between Jupiter and Earth and will approach us on February 25, flying by at a distance of 32million miles from the planet.

Currently, approximately 10,000 major near-Earth objects have been identified by scientists, and about 10 percent of them are one kilometer or larger in size.

If one of those monsters directly hit our planet, we truly would be facing an extinction-level event.

For example, just imagine the kind of devastation that would happen if a large asteroid or meteor hit the Atlantic Ocean. Tsunami waves hundreds of feet tall would be sent racing toward the coasts of North America, South America, Africa and western Europe, and millions upon millions of people would die.

This is something that scientists have actually studied. According to a study conducted at the University of California at Santa Cruz, if a giant meteor did strike the Atlantic Ocean we could potentially see tsunami waves as high as 400 feet slam into the east coast of the United States…

If an asteroid crashes into the Earth, it is likely to splash down somewhere in the oceans that cover 70 percent of the planet’s surface. Huge tsunami waves, spreading out from the impact site like the ripples from a rock tossed into a pond, would inundate heavily populated coastal areas. A computer simulation of an asteroid impact tsunami developed by scientists at the University of California, Santa Cruz, shows waves as high as 400 feet sweeping onto the Atlantic Coast of the United States.

Depending on where the meteor strikes, we could potentially see New York City, Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington D.C., Charleston, Miami and countless other major coastal cities all wiped out on a single day.

Right now, 39 percent of all Americans live in a county that directly borders a shoreline.

To say that we are vulnerable to a massive tsunami caused by a meteor impact would be a massive understatement.

And scientists assure us that it will happen someday. In fact, I don’t know if you have noticed, but our area of space seems to have a lot more “traffic” in it these days. NASA tells us that there is nothing to be worried about, but others are concerned that something may be coming toward us or that we are moving toward something.

Ultimately, we need to remember that we are essentially a speck of dust hurtling through a massive galaxy at incredibly high speeds, and our galaxy is only an extremely small part of an absolutely enormous and ever changing universe.

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via Motley Fool Headlines by on Fri, 13 Jan 2017 03:43:00 GMT

The Utter Stupidity Of The New Cold War

via by Tyler Durden on Fri, 13 Jan 2017 03:35:00 GMT

Submitted by Gary Leupp via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

It seems so strange, twenty-seven years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, to be living through a new Cold War with (as it happens, capitalist) Russia.

The Russian president is attacked by the U.S. political class and media as they never attacked Soviet leaders; he is personally vilified as a corrupt, venal dictator, who arrests or assassinates political opponents and dissident journalists, and is hell-bent on the restoration of the USSR.

(The latter claim rests largely on Vladimir Putin’s comment that the dissolution of the Soviet Union was a “catastrophe” and “tragedy” — which in many respects it was. The press chooses to ignore his comment that “Anyone who does not miss the Soviet Union has no heart, while anyone who wants to restore it has no brain.” It conflicts with the simple talking-point that Putin misses the imperial Russia of the tsars if not the commissars and, burning with resentment over the west’s triumph in the Cold War, plans to exact revenge through wars of aggression and territorial expansion.)

The U.S. media following its State Department script depicts Russia as an expansionist power. That it can do so, so successfully, such that even rather progressive people—such as those appalled by Trump’s victory who feel inclined to blame it on an external force—believe it, is testimony to the lingering power and utility of the Cold War mindset.

The military brass keep reminding us: We are up against an existential threat! One wants to say that this — obviously — makes no sense! Russia is twice the size of the U.S. with half its population. Its foreign bases can be counted on two hands. The U.S. has 800 or so bases abroad.

Russia’s military budget is 14% of the U.S. figure. It does not claim to be the exceptional nation appointed by God to preserve “security” on its terms anywhere on the globe. Since the dissolution of the USSR in 1991, the U.S. has waged war (sometimes creating new client-states) in Bosnia (1994-5),  Serbia (1999), Afghanistan (2001- ), Iraq (2003- ), Libya (2011), and Syria (2014- ), while raining down drone strikes from Pakistan to Yemen to North Africa. These wars-based-on-lies have produced hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths, millions of refugees, and general ongoing catastrophe throughout the “Greater Middle East.” There is no understating their evil.

The U.S. heads an expanding military alliance formed in 1949 to confront the Soviet Union and global communism in general. Its raison d’être has been dead for many years. Yet it has expanded from 16 to 28 members since 1999, and new members Estonia and Latvia share borders with Russia.

(Imagine the Warsaw Pact expanding to include Mexico. But no, the Warsaw Pact of the USSR and six European allies was dissolved 26 years ago in the idealistic expectation that NATO would follow in a new era of cooperation and peace.)

And this NATO alliance, in theory designed to defend the North Atlantic, was only first deployed after the long (and peaceful) first Cold War, in what had been neutral Yugoslavia (never a member of either the Warsaw Pact nor NATO), Afghanistan (over 3000 miles from the North Atlantic), and the North African country of Libya. Last summer NATO held its most massive military drills since the collapse of the Soviet Union, involving 31,000 troops in Poland, rehearsing war with Russia. (The German foreign minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier actually criticized this exercise as “warmongering.”)

Alliance officials expressed outrage when Russia responded to the warmongering by placing a new S-400 surface-to-air missiles and nuclear-capable Iskander systems on its territory of Kaliningrad between Poland and Lithuania on the Baltic coast. But Russia has in fact been comparatively passive in a military sense during this period.

In 1999, as NATO was about to occupy the Serbian province of Kosovo (soon to be proclaimed an independent country, in violation of international law), nearby Russian peacekeepers raced to the airport in Pristina, Kosovo, to secure it an ensure a Russian role in the Serbiam province’s  future. It was a bold move that could have provoked a NATO-Russian clash. But the British officer on the ground wisely refused an order from Gen. Wesley Clark to block the Russian move, declaring he would not start World War III for Gen. Clark.

This, recall, was after Bill Clinton’s secretary of state, Madeleine Albright (remember, the Hillary shill who said there’s a special place in hell reserved for women who don’t vote for women) presented to the Russian and Serbian negotiators at Rambouillet a plan for NATO occupation of not just Kosovo but all Serbia. It was a ridiculous demand, rejected by the Serbs and Russians, but depicted by unofficial State Department spokesperson and warmonger Christiane Amanpour as the “will of the international community.” As though Russia was not a member of the international community!

This Pristina airport operation was largely a symbolic challenge to U.S. hegemony over the former Yugoslavia, a statement of protest that should have been taken seriously at the time.

In any case, the new Russian leader Putin was gracious after the 9/11 attacks in 2001, even offering NATO a military  transport corridor through Russia to Afghanistan (closed in 2015). He was thanked by George W. Bush with the expansion of NATO by seven more members in 2004. (The U.S. press made light of this extraordinary geopolitical development; it saw and continues to see the expansion of NATO as no more problematic than the expansion of the UN or the European Union.) Then in April 2008 NATO announced that Georgia would be among the next members accepted into the alliance.

Soon the crazy Georgian president Mikhail Saakashvili, emboldened by the promise of near-term membership, provoked a war with the breakaway republic of South Ossetia, which had never accepted inclusion of the new Georgian state established upon the dissolution of the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic in 1991. The Ossetians, fearing resurgent Georgian nationalism, had sought union with the Russian Federation. So had the people of Abkhazia.

The two “frozen conflicts,” between the Georgian state and these peoples, had been frozen due to the deployment of Russian and Georgian peacekeepers. Russia had not recognized these regions as independent states nor agreed to their inclusion in the Russian Federation. But when Russian soldiers died in the Georgian attack ion August, Russia responded with a brief punishing invasion. It then recognized of the two new states (six months after the U.S. recognized Kosovo).

(Saakashvili, in case you’re interested, was voted out of power, disgraced, accused of economic crimes, and deprived of his Georgian citizenship. After a brief stint at the Fletcher School of International Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University—of which I as a Tufts faculty member feel deeply ashamed—he was appointed as governor of Odessa in Ukraine by the pro-NATO regime empowered by the U.S.-backed coup of February 22, 2014.)

Sen. John McCain proclaimed in 2008: “We are all Georgians now,” and advocated U.S. military aid to the Georgian regime. An advocate of war as a rule, McCain then became a big proponent of regime change in Ukraine to allow for that country’s entry into NATO. Neocons in the State Department including most importantly McCain buddy Victoria Nuland, boasted of spending $ 5 billion in support of “the Ukrainian people’s European aspirations” (meaning: the desire of many Ukrainians in the western part of the country to join the European Union — risking, although they perhaps do not realize it, a reduction in their standard of living under a Greek-style austerity program — to be followed by NATO membership, tightening the military noose around Russia).

The Ukrainian president opted out in favor of a generous Russian aid package. That decision — to deny these “European aspirations” — was used to justify the coup.

But look at it from a Russian point of view. Just look at this map, of the expanding NATO alliance, and imagine it spreading to include that vast country (the largest in Europe, actually) between Russia to the east and Poland to the west, bordering the Black Sea to the south. The NATO countries at present are shown in dark blue, Ukraine and Georgia in green. Imagine those countries’ inclusion.

And imagine NATO demanding that Russia vacate its Sevastopol naval facilities, which have been Russian since 1783, turning them over to the (to repeat: anti-Russian) alliance. How can anyone understand the situation in Ukraine without grasping this basic history?

The Russians denounced the coup against President Viktor Yanukovych (democratically elected—if it matters—in 2010), which was abetted by neo-fascists and marked from the outset by an ugly Russophobic character encouraged by the U.S. State Department. The majority population in the east of the country, inhabited by Russian-speaking ethnic Russians and not even part of Ukraine until 1917, also denounced the coup and refused to accept the unconstitutional regime that assumed power after Feb. 22.

When such people rejected the new government, and declared their autonomy, the Ukrainian army was sent in to repress them but failed, embarrassingly, when the troops confronted by angry babushkas turned back. The regime since has relied on the neo-fascist Azov Battalion to harass secessionists in what has become a new “frozen conflict.”

Russia has no doubt assisted the secessionists while refusing to annex Ukrainian territory, urging a federal system for the country to be negotiated by the parties. Russian families straddle the Russian-Ukrainian border. There are many Afghan War veterans in both countries. The Soviet munitions industry integrated Russian and Ukrainian elements. One must assume there are more than enough Russians angry about such atrocities as the May 2014 killing of 42 ethnic Russian government opponents in Odessa to bolster the Donbas volunteers.

But there is little evidence (apart from a handful of reports about convoys of dozens of “unmarked military vehicles” from Russia in late 2014) for a Russian “invasion” of Ukraine. And the annexation of Crimea (meaning, its restoration to its 1954 status as Russian territory) following a credible referendum did not require any “invasion” since there were already 38,000 Russian troops stationed there. All they had to do was to secure government buildings, and give Ukrainian soldiers the option of leaving or joining the Russian military. (A lot of Ukrainian soldiers opted to stay and accept Russian citizenship.)

Still, these two incidents — the brief 2008 war in Georgia, and Moscow’s (measured) response to the Ukrainian coup since 2014 — have been presented as evidence of a general project to disrupt the world order by military expansion, requiring a firm U.S. response. The entirety of the cable news anchor class embraces this narrative.

But they are blind fools. Who has in this young century disrupted world order more than the U.S., wrecking whole countries, slaughtering hundreds of thousands of innocents, provoking more outrage through grotesquely documented torture, generating new terror groups, and flooding Europe with refugees who include some determined to sow chaos and terror in European cities? How can any rational person with any awareness of history since 1991 conclude that Russia is the aggressive party?

And yet, this is the conventional wisdom. I doubt you can get a TV anchor job if you question it. The teleprompter will refer routinely to Putin’s aggression and Russian expansion and the need for any mature presidential candidate to respect the time-honored tradition of supporting NATO no matter what. And now the anchor is expected to repeat that all 17 U.S. intelligence services have concluded that Vladimir Putin interfered in the U.S. presidential election.

Since there is zero evidence for this, one must conclude that the Democratic losers dipped into the reliable grab bag of scapegoats and posited that Russia and Putin in particular must have hacked the DNC in order to — through the revelation of primary sources of unquestionable validity, revealing the DNC’s determination to make Clinton president, while sabotaging Sanders and promoting (through their media surrogates)  Donald Trump as the Republican candidate — undermine Clinton’s legitimacy.

All kinds of liberals, including Sanders’ best surrogates like Nina Turner, are totally on board the Putin vilification campaign. It is sad and disturbing that so many progressive people are so willing to jump on the new Cold War bandwagon. It is as though they have learned nothing from history but are positively eager, in their fear and rage, to relive the McCarthy era.

But the bottom line is: U.S. Russophobia does not rest on reason, judgment, knowledge of recent history and the ability to make rational comparisons. It rests on religious-like assumptions of “American exceptionalism” and in particular the right of the U.S. to expand militarily at Russia’s expense — as an obvious good in itself, rather than a distinct, obvious evil threatening World War III.

The hawks in Congress — bipartisan, amoral, ignorant, knee-jerk Israel apologists, opportunist scum — are determined to dissuade the president-elect (bile rises in my throat as I use that term, but it’s true that he’s that, technically) from any significant rapprochement with Russia. (Heavens, they must be horrified at the possibility that Trump follows Kissinger’s reported advice and recognizes the Russian annexation of Crimea!) They want to so embarrass him with the charge of being (as Hillary accused him of being during the campaign) Putin’s “puppet” that he backs of from his vague promise to “get along” with Russia.

They don’t want to get along with Russia. They want more NATO expansion, more confrontation. They are furious with Russian-Syrian victories over U.S-backed, al-Qaeda-led forces in Syria, especially the liberation of Aleppo that the U.S. media (1) does not cover having no reporters on the ground, and little interest since events in Syria so powerfully challenge the State Department’s talking points that shape U.S. reporting, (2) misreports systematically, as the tragic triumph of the evil, Assad’s victory over an imaginary heroic opposition, and (3) sees the strengthening of the position of the Syrian stats as an indication of Russia’s reemergence as a superpower. (This they they cannot accept, as virtually a matter of religious conviction; the U.S. in official doctrine must maintain “full spectrum dominance” over the world and prohibit the emergence of any possible competitor, forever.)

* * *

The first Cold War was based on the western capitalists’ fear of socialist expansion. It was based on the understanding that the USSR had defeated the Nazis, had extraordinary prestige in the world, and was the center for a time of the expanding global communist movement. It was based on the fear that more and more countries would achieve independence from western imperialism, denying investors their rights to dominate world markets. It had an ideological content. This one does not. Russia and the U.S. are equally committed to capitalism and neoliberal ideology. Their conflict is of the same nature as the U.S. conflict with Germany in the early 20th century. The Kaiser’s Germany was at least as “democratic” as the U.S.; the system was not the issue. It was just jockeying for power, and as it happened, the U.S. intervening in World War I belatedly, after everybody else was exhausted, cleaned up. In World War II in Europe, the U.S. having hesitated to invade the continent despite repeated Soviet appeals to do so, responded to the fall of Berlin to Soviet forces by rushing token forces to the city to claim joint credit.

And then it wound up, after the war, establishing its hegemony over most of Europe — much, much more of Europe than became the Soviet-dominated zone, which has since with the Warsaw Pact evaporated.  Russia is a truncated, weakened version of its former self. It is not threatening the U.S. in any of the ways the U.S. is threatening itself. It is not expanding a military alliance. It is not holding huge military exercises on the U.S. border. It is not destroying the Middle East through regime-change efforts justified to the American people by sheer misinformation. In September 2015 Putin asked the U.S., at the United Nations: “Do you realize what you’ve done?”

Unfortunately the people of this country are not educated, by their schools, press or even their favorite websites to realize what has been done, how truly horrible it is, and how based it all is on lies. Fake news is the order of the day.

Up is down, black is white, Russia is the aggressor, the U.S. is the victim. The new president must be a team-player, and for God’s sake, understand that Putin is today’s Hitler, and if Trump wants to get along with him, he will have to become a team-player embracing this most basic of political truths in this particular imperialist country: Russia (with its nukes, which are equally matched with the U.S. stockpile) is the enemy, whose every action must be skewed to inflame anti-Russian feeling, as the normative default sentiment towards this NATO-encircled, sanction-ridden, non-threatening nation, under what seems by comparison a cautious, rational leadership?

* * *

CNN’s horrible “chief national correspondent” John King (former husband of equally horrid Dana Bash, CNN’s “chief political correspondent”) just posed the question, with an air of aggressive irritation: “Who does Donald Trump respect more, the U.S. intelligence agencies, or the guy who started Wikileaks [Assange]?”

It’s a demand for the Trump camp to buy the Russian blame game, or get smeared as a fellow-traveler with international whistle-blowers keen on exposing the multiple crimes of U.S. imperialism.

So the real question is: Will Trump play ball, and credit the “intelligence community” that generates “intelligence products” on demand, or brush aside the war hawks’ drive for a showdown with Putin’s Russia? Will the second Cold War peter out coolly, or culminate in the conflagration that “Mutually Assured Destruction” (MAD) was supposed to render impossible?

The latter would be utterly stupid. But stupid people — or wise people, cynically exploiting others’ stupidity — are shaping opinion every day, and have been since the first Cold War, based like this one on innumerable lies.

Square Inc's Best Moves in 2016

via Motley Fool Headlines by on Fri, 13 Jan 2017 03:05:00 GMT

S&P Downgrades City Of Dallas On "Continued Deterioration" Of Police Pension

via by Tyler Durden on Fri, 13 Jan 2017 02:30:00 GMT

As the City of Dallas continues to work with the Dallas Police and Fire Pension (DPFP) board on solutions to help close the pension's massive $4 billion funding hole, Standard & Poor's has finally decided that the "continued deterioration in the funded status" of the fund merits a downgrade.  As such, S&P has downgraded the city's general obligation bonds to "AA-" from "AA" and placed them on "negative watch."  Per the Dallas Business Journal:

"The downgrade reflects our view that despite the city's broad and diverse economy, which continues to grow, stable financial performance, and very strong management practices, expected continued deterioration in the funded status of the city's police and fire pension system coupled with growing carrying costs for debt, pension, and other post-employment benefit obligations is significant and negatively affects Dallas' creditworthiness," S&P Global Ratings credit analyst Andy Hobbs said in a statement.

 

The police and fire pension system could go insolvent in the next 10 years because of a funding gap. The financial troubles, along with a multi-billion-dollar lawsuit between the city and emergency works, could put Dallas on a path to bankruptcy.

The move by S&P comes over a month after Moody’s downgraded Dallas’ credit rating, for the second time in recent months, to A1, which is a notch below S&P's new rating.  Oddly, as we pointed out yesterday, S&P also seems to be somewhat delayed in their rating downgrade of the City of Chicago (see "Chicago Mayor Emanuel Pushes Moody's To Rescind Junk Rating Ahead Of $1.2 Billion New Issue").  That said, we're sure it has nothing to do with keeping the city's G.O. rating above investment grade just long enough to get that $1.2 billion bond deal done next week so that Rahm Emanuel can continue his ponzi scheme with taxpayer money. 

Of course, the downgrades have come as little surprise to Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings who, for months, has been arguing that the "run on the pension" has brought the DPFP to the "verge of collapse."  Responding to the downgrade, even Dallas CFO Elizabeth Reich implied that S&P was a little late to the ball game saying their "actions today are not a surprise" and that the "pension is a significant risk to the fiscal health of the City."

“S&P’s actions today are not a surprise," Dallas Chief Financial Officer Elizabeth Reich said in a statement. "The more the rating agencies learn about the crisis facing Dallas as a result of the police and fire pension, the more they understand what the City has been saying for some time – the pension is a significant risk to the fiscal health of the City."

As we noted last week, this most recent downgrade for Dallas comes after the City Council floated a proposal to inject $1 billion of incremental taxpayer funding into the DPFP, over the course of 30 years, if retirees would agree to a $1 billion "clawback" of what city officials referred to a ill-gotten interest guarantees (see "City Of Dallas Looks To "Clawback" Ill-Gotten Pension Gains From Police").

Unfortunately, the downgrade from S&P came a day before the pension board is (1) scheduled to meet with Bank of America about restructuring or extending roughly $130 million in outstanding debt and (2) due to decide whether to lift its ban on large, lump-sum payments to retirees. 

The pension is in danger of falling into insolvency in the next 10 years because of an estimated $3.3 billion funding gap. The problem, along with a multi-billion-dollar lawsuit over emergency worker back pay, could send the city spiraling into bankruptcy and threaten its blossoming economy. The state is launching a criminal investigation into the previous administration's handling of the pension's finances.

 

"We have been working with Bank of America on the terms of the loan and possibly restructuring and extending the term,” a spokesman for the pension board said in an email to the Dallas Business Journal. “Nothing is finalized at this point."

But we're just everything is fine, Bank Of America, so please go ahead and grant that loan extension for an extra 10 bps of yield.

* * *

For those that haven't followed this story as closely, here is a recap we posted last week.

Almost exactly one month after taking the unprecedented step of suspending withdrawals from the Dallas Police and Fire Pension (DPFP), the Dallas city council is looking to "clawback" what it views as ill-gotten interest payments made to pensioners to the tune of roughly $1 billion.

Of course, we have followed the epic meltdown of the DPFP closely over the past several months after a series of shady real estate deals brought the fund to, in the words of Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings, "the verge of collapse" and resulted in an FBI raid of one of the funds largest real estate investors (see "Dallas Cops' Pension Fund Nears Insolvency In Wake Of Shady Real Estate Deals, FBI Raid").  The discovery of the failed real estate deals led to a "run on the bank" as scared pensioners looked to withdraw as much as possible before the whole ponzi scheme collapsed (see "After A "Run On The Pension Fund" Dallas Mayor Demands Halt Of Withdrawals").  All of which culminated with the unprecedented decision last month to suspend withdrawals (see "In Unprecedented Move, Dallas Pension System Suspends Withdrawals") after nearly $500mm was removed from police accounts.

Now, according to a local ABC affiliate, the Dallas city council is frantically working with the DPFP board to close a $4 billion funding gap.  While the city has agreed to throw an incremental $1 billion of taxpayer money at the problem over the next 30 years, that additional funding comes with some strings attached, which includes a $1 billion "clawback" of what the city views as ill-gotten gains from Police DROP accounts.  The proposed "clawbacks" would come in the form of reduced future distributions for pensioners.

For those who haven't followed this story as closely, DROP, which was created in the early 90's, allowed police and firefighters in Dallas to retire while still on the job. Their monthly pension checks were then diverted into DROP accounts, which were guaranteed an 8-10% return regardless of how the overall fund performed.  Unfortunately for DPFP pensioners, the Dallas City Council now views those guaranteed returns as an effort to defraud Dallas taxpayers of billions...we would tend to agree.

The city has agreed to put in an additional billion dollars over 30 years, but they're proposing a series of bitter pills to make up the rest of the nearly $4 billion shortfall.

 

The bitterest pill: A proposal to take back all of the interest police and firefighters earned on Deferred Option Retirement accounts, or DROP. That would amount to an additional billion dollars saved.

 

The city is calling it an "equity adjustment." Retirees call it an illegal "claw back."

 

Whatever you want to call it, it's outlined in a draft legislation being hammered out by the city and pension fund leaders. Pension fund representatives and the city have been meeting almost daily to try to come to an agreement on proposed legislation that they can take to the state capital to fix the failing fund.

Of course, anyone with half a brain probably should have realized that this ponzi on steroids was doomed to fail from the start.  But, better late than never we suppose. 

To add insult to injury, for Dallas taxpayers at least, the City Council also notes that the DPFP's artificially high annual cost of living adjustments have resulted in pension checks that are 20% higher than they would have been had they been tied to actual inflation levels instead. 

News 8 obtained a copy of the legislation which says accounts would be "adjusted to zero percent of interest."

 

"It's very tough but the city wants to protect the monthly benefit," Kleinman said. "It's a restatement of their accounts."

 

The city is also seeking to "equity adjustment" on cost of living increases. The city says that pension checks are about 20 percent higher than they would have been if increases had been tied to inflation.

 

The city's proposing to freeze cost of living increases until it catches up to the inflation index.

 

DROP and the cost of living increases account for about half of the fund's liability, the city says.

 

For those retirees who have already taken the money out of DROP accounts, they'd garnish their future pension checks to recoup excess interest. Worried retirees have withdrawn in excess of $500 million from DROP accounts in recent months.

Meanwhile, all of these discussions have Dallas' police predictably upset.

"We used the rules they gave us now all of the sudden they're going to go back on the rules and say hey you don't get any of that," said Charles Hale, a retired police officer. "That's not fair."

 

Retirees promised they'd be suing if anybody tried to take back money they feel they've earned.

 

"It's acting like it was an underhanded Ponzi scheme that we pulled," said Joe Dunn, a retired police officer. "It's not fair."

Frankly, we too are shocked at the audacity of the Dallas City Council to suggest that public employees be forced to be compensated in a way somewhat more akin to private employees.  It's just outrageous.

2 Retail Stocks That Could Lose You a Lot of Money

via Motley Fool Headlines by on Fri, 13 Jan 2017 02:11:00 GMT

The Corporate Bond Market: Binge-Borrowing

via by Tyler Durden on Fri, 13 Jan 2017 01:30:00 GMT

Authored by Danielle DiMartino Booth,

Celery and raspberry? Marathon miles of Sudoku and crossword puzzles? Extra reps at the gym? Binge away.

‘Tis the season after the season, that other most wonderful time of the year when it’s a challenge to get a machine at the gym and resolutions are resolute, at least until February or a more intriguing deal comes along. What better way to make amends for that huge holiday hangover that crescendos with so many a New Year’s Eve bash?

Some of us chose to ring in 2017 in a substantially more subdued manner that nevertheless entailed binging of a decidedly different derivation. Enter Netflix. Yours truly must confess that closet claustrophobia was the culprit in keeping this one indoors coveting the control, confining the choices to richly royal romps. It all started innocently enough, with a recommendation to catch The Crown, which has just won a Golden Globe. The devolution that followed began in Italy, with Medici, stopped over in France, with Versailles, and round tripped back to England, with the epic saga that kicked off the modern day, small screen genre, The Tudors. At some point hallucinations began to give the impression that all the series’ stars had British accents. Wait, they actually did.

Thankfully, at some point, bowl games snapped the spell and reality rudely reared its redemptive head before anyone’s else’s head rolled (those royals were a bloodthirsty lot!). Sleep and sanity followed.

Sadly, the same cannot be said of borrowers of almost every stripe these days. For those tapping the fixed income markets, the borrowing bingefest is conspicuous in its constancy. Not only did global bond issuance top $6.6 trillion last year, a fresh record, sales are off to a galloping start thus far in January.

In the lead are corporate bond sales, which accounted for $3.6 trillion of last year’s super sales. To not be outdone, investors ran a full out sprint in the new year’s first trading week, “shattering,” not breaking records, in the words of New Albion Partners’ Brian Reynolds. In the first three trading days of the year alone, investors bought $56 billion of new corporate bonds. Some context in the context of what’s been one record-breaking year after another in issuance:

“An average month in recent years would see investors buy about $130 billion of corporate bonds,” noted Reynolds. “Investors just bought more than 40 percent of that monthly average in just three trading days!”

For those of you who have ever had the pleasure of a good, long visit with Reynolds, he is anything but prone to using exclamation points. (!)

In any event, waves of heavy issuance often coincide with big deals carrying ‘concessions,’ or enticements in the form of higher yields than what the issuer’s existing bonds offer. Despite 2017’s already extraordinary deal flow, a good number of issues stood precedence on its head, coming out of the gate with negative concessions. “It’s as if corporate bond buyers are rabid, as if there are not enough corporate bonds to go around, even though there is a record amount of corporate bonds!” added Reynolds.

The kicker – there always is one when fever sets in – is that issuers are earmarking proceeds as generically as they can, for “general corporate purposes.” In other words, they can use the sales proceeds for whatever they desire, including share buybacks.

But wait! (Can exclamation points be contagious?) Haven’t we just learned that buybacks took a nosedive in the latest Standard & Poor’s data release? That quarter-over-quarter share repurchases had fallen by 12 percent and tanked by a stunning 25.5 percent over 2015’s third quarter? What superb sleuthing you’ve done, Watkins!

And right you are, except this one little thing. The pre-election world is so passé.

What are the odds share repurchases reaccelerate under the new administration? In one word ‘growing,’ fed by two springs. The first is mathematically driven. Calpers, the country’s largest pension, recently announced it would be “gradually” lowering its rate of return target to 7.0 percent from 7.5 percent. In the nothing-is-free department, estimates suggest taxpayers will have to cough up an additional $2 billion per year to make up for what the pension no longer anticipates in the form of pension returns.

(Suspend reality as the pension returned 0.61 percent in its most recent fiscal year ended June 30. We could ride off on a tangent but link to this if you’d like to hear more on pensions’ prospects http://dimartinobooth.com/will-public-pensions-trumps-biggest-challenge-2/)

The funny thing is California governor Jerry Brown just announced he anticipates the state will run a $1.6 billion deficit by next summer as the tax base continues to atrophy driven by – wait for it – rising taxes. And where are a lot of those tax dollars going? You guessed right again – backfilling that yawning pension gap. Will the exodus out of the Golden State continue, leaving only the uber-wealthy and economically immobile behind? You tell me.

Promise there’s a point here. Calpers will lead the way to other pensions also lowering their rate of return targets, which will in short order trigger more in the way of rising taxes and, it follows, more actual monies pensions allocate to fresh investments to thereby generate those fairy tale returns. To stay deeply deluded and convince oneself (still) high returns are achievable, the de rigueur investment is private equity credit funds in their many high voltage varieties. At Reynolds’ last count, pensions have voted a record dollar amount into credit every single month since the stock market panic of 2015.

And the momentum just keeps building. December 2015’s record pension credit fund inflows of $7.3 billion were blown to bits by this past December’s $10.6 billion – and that’s before any leverage is put to work. As we have hopefully learned, the credit machine feeds the buyback machine, and away we go. Tack on the prospects of a Republican Congress facilitating the repatriation of all that offshore cash and you’ve got the makings of a true buyback renaissance. Oh, and by the way, a seriously overvalued bond market.

Jesse Felder, president of Felder Investment Research, recently put pen to paper to quantify the value investors get today. What sets Felder apart from the crowd, in a good way, is that he factors in the backdrop of record bond issuance feeding what had, until very recently, been a record pace of share buybacks.

“When you look at corporate valuations more comprehensively, including both debt and equity, we have now matched that prior period,” Felder wrote in a recent report, referring back to peak dotcom bubble valuations. To arrive at this conclusion, he compares the value of nonfinancial corporate debt and equity relative to gross value added, an effective gauge of enterprise value-to-sales.

How does Felder calculate such a clever metric? With the help of some Federal Reserve data, no less, he incorporates the buyback bout to create a holistic valuation methodology to capture comprehensive corporate valuations. Because one frenzy, bond sales, has fed the other, the stock market’s historic run by way of share count reduction, it’s simply disingenuous to not marry the two. You can want to try, but it’s futile to examine bond or stock valuations in a vacuum.

“This has essentially been a massive debt for equity swap that serves to reduce the value of equity outstanding while greatly expanding the amount of debt outstanding,” added Felder. “Equity-only valuation measures fail to account for this phenomenon. This measure incorporates it.”

The point, though, is not that the current rally will necessarily buckle under the weight of bloated valuations. To the contrary, pensions’ sheer buying power, their trillions upon trillions of dollars of monies to be allocated, can indeed make it appear that we are now in 1999, or better yet, 1996. But don’t be fooled – you’re still paying a dear price to play with fire.

So stop yourself the next time you hear some talking head reassuring you that the price-to-earnings ratio on a trailing 12-month basis is dirt cheap. Fight the temptation to validate your sense of security by proclaiming, “Wow, that erudite expert has some set of lobes!” Don’t just move on to the next episode, hitting BUY on that equity ETF. Stop and ask yourself just how profoundly this deep thinker has probed into the true drivers of valuations in recent years. More to the point, ask yourself whether the source is clean or compromised.

If you need inspiration, look to some of the greatest lines ever penned in Politics and the English Language by George Orwell: “The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink.” And yes, Orwell was English. You can safely read his words aloud, with a British accent.