NC Renegades

When Obama died, George Washington met him at the Pearly Gates. He slapped him across the face and yelled, “How dare you try to destroy The Nation I helped conceive?”

Patrick Henry approached, punched him in the nose and shouted, “You wanted to end our liberties, but you failed.”

James Madison followed, kicked him in the groin and said, “This is why I allowed our government to provide for the common defense!”

Thomas Jefferson was next, beat Obama with a long cane and snarled, “It was evil men like you who inspired me to write the Declaration of Independence.”

The beatings and thrashings continued as James Monroe and 66 other early Americans unleashed their anger on the radical, socialist, leader.

As Obama lay bleeding and in pain, an Angel appeared.

Obama wept and said, “This is not what you promised me.”

The Angel replied, “I told you there would be 72 VIRGINIANS waiting for you in Heaven. What did you think I said?”

h/t John P

Italian bank stocks are crashing (with BMPS down 40% year-to-date) as Reuters reports that investors are growing increasingly nervous about how the sector will cope with lower interest rates and a 200 billion euro ($218 billion) pile of loans that are unlikely to be repaid. The broad banking sector is down 4% with stocks suspended, and in light of this bloodbath, Italian regulators have decided in their wisdom, to ban short-selling of some bank stocks (which has driven hedgers into the CDS market, spking BMPS credit risk).

Italy’s banking index was down over 4 percent with shares in several lenders, including the country’s biggest retail bank Intesa Sanpaolo and the third biggest lender Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena, suspended from trading after heavy losses.

Bloodbath for Italian financials in 2016…

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Since 2012, when Mr Hollande came to power, more than 600,000 people have joined the ranks of the unemployed at a time when joblessness has decreased in most of the other large European economies.

Well for Francois Hollande, the days of hiding behing manipulated data are over and the open kimono reveals a nation whose stability is wracked by record unemployment. In a desperate-for-re-election speech today, The FT reports that socialist leader Hollande admitted his policies needed reform and that France is an economic “state of emergency.”

In a turn towards pro-business policies (sacre bleu!), Hollande prescribed new measures which involve the creation of 500,000 vocational training schemes, additional subsidies for small companies and a programme to boost apprenticeships.

With 15 months before the presidential election, the sense of urgency is also political for the socialist leader, who has tied his decision to run for a second mandate to his ability to curb unemployment significantly this year.

“We have to act so that growth becomes more robust and job creation more abundant,” Mr Hollande said in an address to unions and business leaders. “Our country has been facing structural unemployment for too long and it needs to reform.”
Under the plan, which takes effect immediately, companies with fewer than 250 workers will receive a €2,000 payout for hiring youths and unemployed people for contracts lasting more than six months at salaries below 1.3 times the minimum wage. After two years, the subsidy will become permanent in the form of a decrease in social security charges. The tax breaks previously announced will become permanent beyond 2017, he said.

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Do you have some extra space in your garage or attic? Or perhaps you own an oil tanker you aren’t currently using. Or maybe you have a storage unit that’s got a little extra room next to an old mattress and box springs.

If so, you may want to call up oil producers in North Dakota and ask if they’d care to send you some free oil, because the crude glut is now so acute that the Koch brothers are actually charging $0.50/bbl to take low grade oil at their Flint Hills Resources refining arm.

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How much longer do you think this will continue before the imminent economic collapse?

David DeGerolamo

Politicians and business leaders gathering in the Swiss Alps this week face an increasingly divided world, with the poor falling further behind the super-rich and political fissures in the United States, Europe and the Middle East running deeper than at any time in decades.

Just 62 people, 53 of them men, own as much wealth as the poorest half of the entire world population and the richest 1 percent own more than the other 99 percent put together, anti-poverty charity Oxfam said on Monday.

Significantly, the wealth gap is widening faster than anyone anticipated, with the 1 percent overtaking the rest one year earlier than Oxfam had predicted only a year ago.

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