From YouTube:
ABC host and former Bill Clinton flack George Stephanopoulos has admitted he donated $50,000 to the Clinton Foundation and did not disclose it to the network or its viewers. Last month, he aggressively interviewed the author of a book criticizing the foundation and its influence over Hillary Clinton’s State Department tenure.
Between the dramatic sell-off in German Bunds that unfolded over the course of three weeks beginning on April 21 and the erratic trading that ensued on Tuesday following the weakest JGB auction since 2009, the chickens, as they say, have come home to roost in government bond markets where thanks the ECB, the Fed, and the BoJ’s efforts to monetize anything that isn’t tied down, the market has become hopelessly thin.
As we’ve documented exhaustively — and as every pundit and Wall Street CEO is now suddenly screaming about — the secondary market for corporate credit faces a similar dearth of liquidity and at just the wrong time. Issuance is at record levels and money is pouring into IG and HY thanks to CB-induced herding (i.e. quest for yield) and record low borrowing costs (again courtesy of central planners), but thanks to the new regulatory regime which ostensibly aims to curtail systemic risk by cutting out prop trading, banks are no longer willing to warehouse corporate bonds (i.e. dealer inventories have collapsed), meaning that in a rout, investors will be selling into a thin market. The result will be a firesale.
So while policymakers are still willfully ignorant when it comes to honestly assessing the effect their actions are having on government bond markets, the entire financial universe seems to have recently become acutely aware of the potentially catastrophic conditions prevailing in corporate credit. These concerns have now officially moved beyond the realm of lip service and into the realm of disaster preparedness because as Reuters reports, some of the country’s largest ETF providers are arranging billion dollar credit lines that can be tapped to keep illiquidity from turning an ETF sell-off into a credit market meltdown:
Britain’s Royal Air Force scrambles typhoon jets to intercept Russian bombers near UK air space – Defense Ministry says – @Reuters
~~~~~
Sooner or later, an irrevocable act will be committed.
That which comes, cannot be turned aside.
WE HAVE BEEN WARNED
The U.S. is bringing in 100,000 Muslims every year through legal channels such as the United Nations refugee program and various visa programs, but new reports indicate a pipeline has been established through the southern border with the help of the federal agency whose job it is to protect the homeland.
They are coming from Somalia and other African nations, according to a Homeland Security official who was caught recently transporting a busload of Africans to a detention center near Victorville, California.
Somalia is the home base of al-Shabab, a designated foreign terrorist organization that slaughtered 147 Christians at a university in Kenya just last month. It executed another 67 at the Westgate Mall in Nairobi, Kenya, in 2013, and has put out warnings that it will target malls in Canada and the U.S. Dozens of Somali refugees in the U.S. have been arrested, charged and convicted of providing support to overseas terrorist organizations over the past few years.
Libya is also awash in Islamist terror following the death of Moammar Gadhafi in 2011. ISIS beheaded 21 Coptic Christians on a Libyan beach in February.
So when Anita Fuentes of OpenYourEyesPeople.com posted a video of a U.S. Department of Homeland Security bus pulling into a Shell station in Victorville, on the night of May 7, admitting he had a busload of Somalis and other Africans who had crossed the southern border, it raised more than a few eyebrows among those concerned with illegal immigration and national security.
In a major policy shift, the Pentagon declared Wednesday the United States will directly defend U.S. national security interests in the South China Sea against China’s expansive and illegal maritime claims.
David Shear, assistant defense secretary for Asia and Pacific affairs, told a Senate hearing that China’s claims over almost all of the Southeast Asian sea are destabilizing and risk a regional conflict with states such as Vietnam, Philippines, and Malaysia.
“DoD is taking action to protect U.S. national interests in the South China Sea: peaceful resolution of disputes, freedom of navigation and overflight and other internationally lawful uses of the sea related to these freedoms, unimpeded lawful commerce, respect for international law, and the maintenance of peace and stability,” Shear told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
A defense official, meanwhile, said Defense Secretary Ash Carter has requested options for sending additional U.S. aircraft and ships to the South China Sea and deploying them within 12 miles of disputed Spratlys islands reefs where China has been building potential military facilities.
“We are considering how to demonstrate freedom of navigation in an area that is critical to world trade,” one official told Reuters.
We will be continuing our series on the Pros and Cons of a Constitutional State Convention. Last month you all heard the Pros of a Convention and this month we are pleased to have the Cons of a State Convention and what it could mean to you if there was one.
When: May 19th, 2015
Where: Blue Bay Seafood Rest, 2050 Statesville Blvd, Salisbury, NC
Time: 6pm-till
The program will be presented by Wynne Coleman who represents the organization – NO Convention of States NC.
Wynne Coleman lives in Raleigh, North Carolina. She is the Founder and Chair of the newly-formed grassroots ad hoc committee, No Convention of States North Carolina, NoCOSNC. As the daughter of a Brigadier General in the United States Army, she traveled extensively; then lived in New York City for 19 years before settling in Raleigh. She has degrees in piano performance and in the visual arts. She is an activist and researcher in support of the U.S. Constitution. She assists her husband in teaching a free 12-week Constitution course. Since 1992, she has been exposing the dangers of Agenda 21-Sustainable Development and other issues that undermine the principles of the U.S. Constitution. . She was appointed by the Wake County Commissioners to represent the Wake County Taxpayers Association on the Wake County Sustainability Task Force in 2010-2011.
NoCOSNC Mission Statement:
No Convention of States NC is a newly formed ad hoc committee made up of individual NC citizens dedicated to preserving the U.S. Constitution by opposing a North Carolina call for an Article V Convention of States. This committee is non- partisan. It is not connected to other organizations although willing to work side-by-side with other organizations of like mind. Its purpose is to educate the people of North Carolina on the dangers of an Article V Convention of States and to enable the people to communicate directly with their legislators on this critical issue.
FaceBook site and other links:
This map by Casey Cupp is warped to show which states take on the highest number of refugees relative to their population. For example, the densely populated New Jersey takes in a far lower rate of refugees than that of the two Dakotas. What the map shows is that the distribution of refugees looks very different when considering state populations as opposed to strictly the number of people living in each state.” http://www.humanosphere.org/basics/2014/02/map-day-refugees-accepted-us-states-population-adjusted/
States which received over 1000 refugees in the last seven months (in descending order):
Texas (3,865)
California (2,974)
New York (2,008)
Michigan (1,696)
Arizona (1,667)
Ohio (1,591)
Washington (1,464)
Georgia (1,410)
Pennsylvania (1,384)
Illinois (1,383)
Florida (1,381)
Minnesota (1,250) 562 of those are new Somalis!
North Caroina (1,211)
Between the dramatic sell-off in German Bunds that unfolded over the course of three weeks beginning on April 21 and the erratic trading that ensued on Tuesday following the weakest JGB auction since 2009, the chickens, as they say, have come home to roost in government bond markets where thanks the ECB, the Fed, and the BoJ’s efforts to monetize anything that isn’t tied down, the market has become hopelessly thin.
As we’ve documented exhaustively — and as every pundit and Wall Street CEO is now suddenly screaming about — the secondary market for corporate credit faces a similar dearth of liquidity and at just the wrong time. Issuance is at record levels and money is pouring into IG and HY thanks to CB-induced herding (i.e. quest for yield) and record low borrowing costs (again courtesy of central planners), but thanks to the new regulatory regime which ostensibly aims to curtail systemic risk by cutting out prop trading, banks are no longer willing to warehouse corporate bonds (i.e. dealer inventories have collapsed), meaning that in a rout, investors will be selling into a thin market. The result will be a firesale.
So while policymakers are still willfully ignorant when it comes to honestly assessing the effect their actions are having on government bond markets, the entire financial universe seems to have recently become acutely aware of the potentially catastrophic conditions prevailing in corporate credit. These concerns have now officially moved beyond the realm of lip service and into the realm of disaster preparedness because as Reuters reports, some of the country’s largest ETF providers are arranging billion dollar credit lines that can be tapped to keep illiquidity from turning an ETF sell-off into a credit market meltdown:
(Zerohedge) Following an Illinois Supreme Court ruling that struck down a pension reform plan aimed at closing a $100 billion funding gap, Moody’s downgrades Chicago to junk, giving the city the dubious distinction of being the only major city “in recent history” to carry such a low rating other than Detroit. Chicago now faces accelerated payments to creditors of more than $2 billion.
In the end, this serves to underscore not only the pitiable plight of the country’s pension plans (which, by the way, are likely to be far worse off on the whole than meets the eye due to the fact that managers cling to optimistic assumptions about investment returns in order to avoid having to revise the present value of their liabilities sharply higher) but also a worrying trend that we discussed earlier this week — namely, that state and city governments across America are going broke.
~~~~~
This is big, folks. Because there are at least twenty other state /municipal systems with unfunded liabilities at least as large as those in Chicago. This bomb has been ticking for over 40 years, and now it is coming due – not just in Chicago, but in the budgetary behavior of every major metro in the US (and Europe, too). Once the mad rush to the door begins, there will be no stopping it.
Margin calls have a way of cutting across all asset-classes, so the implosion cannot and will not be limited to municipal/state bonds; it will tear right into the heart of the NYSE and Nasdaq…
It will create a tsunami of asset displacement and revaluation, from which nothing will remain untouched.
WE HAVE BEEN WARNED
by Brandon Smith
Sometimes in the liberty movement — with discussions of potential collapse, war, revolution, social destabilization, etc. — it is easy to get so caught up in the peripheral conflict between the elites and the citizenry that we forget what the whole thing is really about. That is to say, we tend to overlook the very core of the conflict that is shaping our epoch.
Some would say that it is a simple matter of good versus evil. I don’t necessarily disagree, but good and evil are not defined methodologies; rather, they are inherent archetypes — facts born in the minds and hearts of all men. It’s a gift of comprehension from something greater than ourselves. They are felt, rather than defined, and attempts by institutions (religious, scientific, legal or otherwise) to force morality away from intuitive reason and into a realm of artificial hierarchical and mathematical standards tend to lead only to even more imbalance, destruction, innocent deaths and general immorality.
There have been many nightmare regimes throughout history that have claimed to understand and obey moral “laws” and standards while at the same time having no personal or spiritual connection to those standards. In other words, some of the most heinous acts of immorality are often stamped with the approval of supposedly moral social and governmental institutions.
This is why a person who calls himself a moral Christian, a moral Muslim, a moral atheist, a moral legislator, a moral conservative, a moral liberal, a moral social justice warrior, etc. is not necessarily a person who ultimately acts with moral conviction. It is not enough for one to memorize and follow the code of a belief system or legal system blindly. One must also understand the tenets of inborn natural law and of the human soul that make those codes meaningful (if they have retained any meaning), or he will eventually fall prey to the vicious calamities of dogma and the collective shadow.
BY:
China has illegally diverted U.S. civilian nuclear technology to its nuclear submarine program in violation of a 1985 cooperation agreement, according to Senate testimony Tuesday.
Additionally, China appears to be violating an international Nuclear Suppliers Group commitment by exporting additional nuclear reactors, some with U.S. technology, to Pakistan, according to Republican and Democratic members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
The Chinese nuclear violations were revealed during a hearing on the 1985 U.S.-China nuclear cooperation agreement that is set to expire at the end of the year. The Obama administration is seeking a new agreement, known as a 123 agreement, after the section of the Atomic Energy Act regulating nuclear technology sharing.
The 1985 agreement was held up for 13 years over concerns China was proliferating nuclear technology to rogue states such as Iran and North Korea. It was finally approved during the administration of President Bill Clinton.
