Hillary promises jobs, but neglected to specify for who.

This is exactly what the STATIST like Clinton do to their low information constituents…SMH

Some of those visas are for six years! That to me is not really a very temporary job. Some regular jobs only last that long.
I don’t really like people pooh-poohing the idea that these jobs aren’t important to Americans because they are temporary or part-time either. When someone is job searching, anything that fills up a hole in a resume is important.
I also wish they would care more for the lower-skilled worker, as I was before retiring. We have to pay rent and feed our kids too. We would love to have the problem of not being able to afford a house on a $45K salary. To us, a $25K salary seems rich. Everyone seems fine with dumping all the illegal competition right on us. We are the ones who it hurts the most.

 The MyVisaJobs.com site shows the networks requested up to 87 H-1B workers, although that number may include some duplication and exclude some requests. TheVisaSquare.com site shows 130 requests, of which only two were denied.

That analysis suggests the network has been able to hire to hire roughly 100 foreign graduates in place of Americans.

Despite repeated requests from Breitbart News, the Clinton network declined to state how many visa workers it hired, or why it chose to not hire Americans.

The VisaSquare site shows the data in a similar fashion. 

Virgil Bierschwale, a U.S. tech-expert, has built a website showing which companies, universities and non-profit are trying to hire foreign graduates instead of Americans. Bierschwale’s website, for example, allows people to search by zip code, including theClinton foundation’s zipcode.

http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2016/03/10/clinton-foundation-hires-h-1b-guest-workers-in-place-of-american-graduates/

BK

Brian Hunt: This scary new cash tax will cause gold to soar…

From Brian Hunt, Director, Casey Research:

Have you heard of “negative interest rates?”

It’s become a phenomenon with economists and the media.

There’s a good chance you’ve read an article about it. We’ve covered it many times in the Dispatch.
I’m writing to tell you something about negative interest rates you haven’t heard. You certainly won’t hear about it in the mainstream press.
What’s coming at you is a historic event. It’s something our grandchildren will hear stories about…much like the Great Depression or the Cold War.
What’s coming could send the price of gold much higher in the coming years…and hand gold stock owners 500%+ gains.
If you know what’s coming, it could mean the difference between having lots of free cash in retirement or barely getting by.
To understand the gravity of this moment, let’s cover one of the most bizarre ideas in the world… Negative Interest Rates.
In a normal world, your bank pays you interest on your savings. It takes your money, pools it with other people’s money, and loans it out.
The bank makes money by paying out less in interest on your deposit than it earns in interest from borrowers.
For example, it might pay out 3% to depositors while earning 6% from borrowers.
This is how it has worked for decades.
Negative interest rates turn your “normal” bank account upside down.
Negative interest rates could only exist in a crazy world where idiot politicians are in control.
Unfortunately, that’s just what we’re dealing with right now.
Politicians all over the world are ordering banks to charge depositors (you) a fee for storing cash.
It’s a perversion of saving. It’s a perversion of capitalism. It’s a perversion of planning for the future.
And it’s going to result in disaster.
Politicians think that by making it unattractive for you to keep money in the bank, you’ll save less money. Instead, you’ll spend more money on things like smartphones and cars. You’ll invest in things like stocks and real estate.
This would “stimulate” the economy.
This thinking is very, very wrong. No matter what the government does, it can’t force you to spend money. It can’t force you to make investments if you don’t see good opportunities.
Forcing people to pay banks to hold their money is a tax. It is wealth confiscation for the digital age.
The government and the mainstream press won’t dare call it a tax.
But that’s exactly what it is.
A negative interest rate policy is a tax.
Any time you hear a politician, central banker, or news anchor say “negative interest rates,” just think “TAX.”
Think “TAX ON MY CASH”.
I’ll say it again: Negative interest rates are going to result in financial disaster.
The coming disaster will wipe out many people.
But you don’t have to be one of them.
I’ll explain how you can sidestep this disaster — and even make a lot of money as a result of it — in a moment.
But let’s quickly cover one more thing about negative interest rates…

The Ugly Twin Sister of Negative Interest Rates

If the government makes it unattractive for you to keep cash in the bank, you can pull cash out of the bank. You can simply store it in a safe or under the mattress.
Politicians know this.
That’s why they’ve created another dangerous policy that works hand-in-glove with negative interest rates.
That policy is banning cash.
You see, if you pull your money out of the banking system and stuff it under the mattress, you aren’t doing what the government wants you to do.
You’re not spending money or investing in stocks.
This is a major reason why governments are banning large cash transactions and large denomination bills.
They are fighting a War on Cash.
In just the past few years…

• Spain banned cash transactions over 2,500 euros
• Italy banned cash transactions over 1,000 euros
• France banned cash transactions over 1,000 euros, down from the previous limit of 3,000 euros

And just a few weeks ago, former U.S. Treasury Secretary Larry Summers called for a ban on the $100 bill!
Historians aren’t surprised by Summers’ idea. Franklin Delano Roosevelt banned $500 and $1,000 bills in the 1930s.
You can bet that Big Government types like Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump will do the same thing in a financial emergency.
By making it so difficult (or illegal) to buy and sell things with cash, the government wants to force people into the banking system. That way it can monitor us and coerce us into whatever it wants…like pay outrageous new taxes.
It’s all a dream come true for government central planners.
The governments say these new currency laws are for fighting terrorism, money laundering, and drugs.
But the ultimate goal is control of society…and to confiscate the wealth of private citizens.
As Congressman Ron Paul said, “The cashless society is the IRS’s dream: total knowledge of, and control over, the finances of every single American.”
Whether you agree with these regulations or not, the conclusion is obvious:
By driving us more and more towards trackable digital payments, the government has made it much, much easier to confiscate our wealth.
We’re like sheep that have been “herded” into a corral, ready for shearing.
And Hillary Clinton (and her Big Government cronies) is holding the clippers.
However, you don’t have to be sheared.
You can avoid the shearing by learning how to navigate what will become the largest underground currency market in history.

Hillary Doesn’t Want Your Gold. She Wants Your Cash

On April 5th, 1933, president Franklin Delano Roosevelt issued one of the most controversial orders in U.S. history.
It went by the name “Executive Order 6102.”
Not one American in 1,000 knows about this order. But to this day, many experts consider it to be one of the most destructive acts in U.S. history.
It violated sacred principles held by our founding fathers. It impoverished millions and confiscated the savings of honest, hardworking Americans.
Executive Order 6102 made it illegal for private citizens to own gold. Citizens were ordered to turn in their gold to the government.
Why would the government confiscate the wealth of private citizens?
You can fill a book on the history surrounding Executive Order 6102. But in a nutshell, it was the act of a desperate government in the midst of a financial crisis.
The government wanted the gold in order to increase the nation’s money supply. It believed an increase in the money supply would revive the struggling economy.
Please review those last two paragraphs…
An increase in the money supply…a struggling economy…a desperate government.
Sound similar to what is happening right now?
Since the answer to that question is “YES,” we have to ask another question…
Could such a confiscation happen again?
As the crisis develops, our deeply indebted government will act like a giant wounded beast, lashing out in all directions. It will grow more desperate for control. It will grow desperate for money.
And just like FDR did in the 1930s, it will confiscate the wealth of private citizens.
But Hillary Clinton (or Donald Trump, or whoever wins the election) won’t go after your gold.
Nowadays, the gold market is very small compared to the overall economy.
Going after gold would be too much work for the government.
The government is going to go after YOUR CASH.
It will regulate your cash. It will tax your cash. It will take your cash.
This has all kinds of implications for banking and the economy.
But here’s the most important thing you need to know as an investor:
Negative interest rates and their partner, the War on Cash, will create a renewed interest in gold. This could cause gold to double or even triple in value.
Even children know what the government is doing is crazy.
And people aren’t going to take this lying down.
Rather than participate in the government’s monetary farce, people will go underground.
They will pull cash out of banks and hoard it in safe places. And they will seek the safety, anonymity, and reliability of gold and silver.
Gold and silver have served as money for centuries.
Gold is the ultimate currency because it doesn’t rot or corrode…it is durable…easily divisible…portable…has intrinsic value…is consistent around the world…and it cannot be created from thin air. It cannot be debased by the government.
By enforcing negative interest rates and fighting a War on Cash, the government will create a huge underground currency market.
And the ultimate underground currency will be gold and its sister metal, silver.
Gold is trading for around $1,260 an ounce right now.
As the government blunders into a negative interest rate disaster, gold will likely rise 50%…100%…possibly even 200% higher.
There’s an underground currency market coming to your neighborhood.
If you own enough gold, you’ll be its king.
If you don’t yet own gold, buy it now.
If you own a lot of gold, buy more.
Regards,
Brian Hunt

GOLD: Warning and Lessons From Canada

 The Junius Maltby channel takes another look at the Canadian Gold Crisis, with updated news and a look at what this could mean for Canadians.

The American Way of War as a Do-Over

by Tom Engelhardt, March 11, 2016

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Originally posted at TomDispatch.
With General John Campbell’s tour of duty in Afghanistan finished, a new commander has taken over. Admittedly, things did not go well during Campbell’s year and a half heading up the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) there, but that’s par for the course. In late 2015, while he was in the saddle, the Taliban took the provincial capital of Kunduz, the first city to be (briefly) theirs since the American invasion of 2001. In response, U.S. forces devastated a Doctors Without Borders hospital. The Taliban is also now in control of more territory than at any time since the invasion and gaining an ever-firmer grip on contested Helmand Province in the heart of the country’s poppy-growing region (and so the staggering drug funds that go with it). In that same province, only about half of the “on duty” Afghan security forces the United States trained, equipped, and largely funded (to the tune of more than $65 billion over the years) were reportedly even present.
On his way into retirement, General Campbell has been vigorously urging the Obama administration to expand its operations in that country. (“I’m not going to leave,” he said, “without making sure my leadership understands that there are things we need to do.”) In this, he’s been in good company. Behind the scenes, “top U.S. military commanders” have reportedly been talking up a renewed, decades-long commitment to Afghanistan and its security forces, what one general has termed a “generational approach” to the war there.
And yes, as Campbell headed off stage, General John Nicholson, Jr., beginning his fourth tour of duty in Afghanistan, has officially taken command of ISAF. Though it wasn’t a major news item, he happens to be its 17th commander in the 14-plus years of Washington’s Afghan War. If this pattern holds, by 2030 that international force, dominated by the U.S., will have had 34 commanders and have fought, by at least a multiple of two, the longest war in our history. Talk about all-American records! (USA! USA!)
If such a scenario isn’t the essence of déjà vu all over again, what is? Imagine, for a minute, each of those 17 ISAF commanders (recently, but not always, Americans, including still resonant names like David Petraeus and Stanley McChrystal as well as those like Dan McNeill and David McKiernan already lost in the fog of time) arriving at yearly intervals, each scrambling to catch-up, get the big picture, and run the show. Imagine that process time after time, and you have the definition of what, in kid culture, might be called a do-over – a chance to get something right after doing it wrong the first time. Of course, yearly do-overs are a hell of a way to run a war, but they’re a great mechanism for ensuring that no one will need to take responsibility for a disaster of 14 years and counting.
How to Play Do-Over
For journalists, when it comes to twenty-first-century American war, do-overs are a boon. From collapsing U.S.-trained, funded, and equipped local militaries to that revolving door for commanders in Afghanistan to terror groups whose leaderships are eternally being eviscerated yet are never wiped out, do-overs ensure that your daily copy is essentially pre-written for you. In fact, when it comes to American-style war across the Greater Middle East and increasingly much of Africa, do-over is the name of the game.

In movie terms, you could think of Washington’s war policies in the post-9/11 era as pure “play it again, Sam.” If this weren’t the grimmest “game” around, involving death, destruction, failed states, spreading terror movements, and a region flooded with the uprooted – refugees, internal exiles, transient terrorists, and god knows who else – it could instantly be transmuted into a popular parlor game. We could call it “Do-Over.” The rules would be easy to grasp, though – fair warning – given the recent record of American war making, it could be a very long game.
Modest preparation would be involved, since you’d be using actual headlines from the previous weeks. Given the nature of the Bush administration’s Global War on Terror (now the Obama administration’s no-name war on terror), however, this shouldn’t be a daunting proposition. Any cursory reader of the news, aged 12 to 75, will find it easy to take part. Let me give you just a handful of examples of how Do-Over would work from a plethora of recent news stories:

• Here, for instance, is a typical, can’t-miss, Do-Over headline: “Back to Iraq: U.S. Military Contractors Return In Droves.” For Washington’s third Iraq War, with a military that now heads into any battle zone hand-in-hand with a set of warrior corporations, the private contractors are returning to Iraq in significant numbers. In the good old days, after the invasion of 2003, for every American soldier in Iraq, there was at least one private contractor. As RAND’s Molly Dunnigan wrote back in 2013, “By 2008, the U.S. Department of Defense employed 155,826 private contractors in Iraq – and 152,275 troops. This degree of privatization is unprecedented in modern warfare.” (Afghan War figures were remarkably similar: in 2010, there were 94,413 contractors and 91,600 American troops in that country.) Now, in the ongoing war against the Islamic State (IS) in Iraq, contractors, 70% American, hired by the Pentagon and other U.S. agencies outnumber the 3,700 U.S. military personnel on the ground by two to one or more and the names of the companies putting them there should ring a distinctly Do-Over bell from the previous round of war: KBR, DynCorp, and Fluor Corporation, among others. Of course, since it’s a Do-Over and we know just what happened the last time around, what could possibly go wrong?
  
• Here’s another kind of headline for the game. Think of it as a “new” Do-Over (a story that looks like a first-timer, but couldn’t be more repetitive): “U.S. Plans to Put Advisers on Front Lines of Nigeria’s War Against Boko Haram.” As the New York Times reports, a plan developed by Brigadier General Donald Bolduc, U.S. Special Operations commander for Africa, to “send dozens of Special Operations advisers to the front lines of Nigeria’s fight against the West African militant group Boko Haram” is expected to be approved by the Pentagon and the White House. Those special ops forces, “dozens” of them, are slated to advise Nigerian troops for the first time in the embattled northern part of their country. Though theirs will not officially be a combat role, they will be stationed in an area where anything might happen. At first glance, this may seem like something new under the sun in Washington’s expanding “war against the Islamic State” (to which Boko Haram has pledged its fealty), but only until you consider a remarkably similar October 2015 headline about a neighboring country: “The U.S. Is Sending 300 Military Personnel to Cameroon to Help Fight Boko Haram.” Those special ops troops were to conduct “airborne intelligence and reconnaissance operations” against that grim Nigerian terror group. Or to leap back another year, consider this headline from May 2014: “U.S. Deploys 80 Troops to Chad to Help Find Kidnapped Nigerian Schoolgirls.” (They weren’t found.) And of course, similar headlines could be multiplied across the Greater Middle East over the last decade against groups like al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and the Islamic State from Yemen to, most recently, Iraq and Syria, with similarly dismal results.
  

For your success in finding such a headline, you get a bonus question: Fourteen-plus years later, after U.S. special ops forces have repeatedly been sent to scads of countries, and the terror situation has only worsened, what exactly do they have to teach Nigerians or anyone else for that matter? What is it that Washington’s guys know about the world of terror and how to fight it that locals don’t? Given the global record over these years, call that a mystery of our moment.

• Now, here’s an even rarer form of Do-Over, a headline that calls up not one, but – count ‘em! – two repetitive themes in the American war on terror: “U.S. Captures ISIS Operative, Ushering in Tricky Phase.” The story itself is fairly straightforward. A secretive elite Special Operations team in Iraq has captured “a significant Islamic State operative,” with more such prisoners expected in the near future. The captive is presently being held and questioned “at a temporary detention facility in the city of Erbil in northern Iraq.” What no one in Washington has yet sorted out is: Where are such detainees to be kept in the future? It’s a question that, as you might imagine (and the accompanying New York Times story makes clear), instantly brings to mind Guantanamo and, in Iraq, Abu Ghraib (with its nightmarish photos), and that’s just to begin a longer list of grim places, including a string of “black sites,” and military and CIA prisons begged, borrowed, or appropriated across the planet in the Bush years. In all of them, American intelligence and military personnel (and private contractors) grossly abused, mistreated, tortured and in some cases actually killed prisoners. So in the conundrum of what to do with that single Islamic State captive lies an almost endless set of Do-Over possibilities. Lurking in that same headline, however, is another kind of Do-Over of these last years reflecting another set of repetitive war on terror practices: “U.S. drone strike kills a senior Islamic State militant in Syria,” “U.S. drone strike kills Yemen al-Qaida leader Nasir al-Wuhayshi,” “U.S. Commandos Raid Terrorist Hideouts in Libya, Somalia, Capture Senior Al-Qaeda Official.” In these and so many other headlines like them lies evidence of a deeply held Washington conviction that terror outfits can be successfully disabled and in the end dismantled, as can repressive states like Saddam Hussein’s Iraq or Muammar Gaddafi’s Libya, by taking out key leadership figures. This heavily militarized top-down approach, labeled “the kingpin strategy,” has been brought to bear time and again in America’s post-9/11 conflicts. That there is no evidence at all of its effectiveness (and significant evidence that it actually succeeds in making such groups more brutal and efficient and such states into failed ones) seems not to matter. So in any headline about a terror leader or lieutenant captured in a U.S. special ops raid, there is automatically a second classic Do-Over theme.
  
• Now, what about a Do-Over round for events that haven’t even happened and yet are already in reruns? Take this recent headline: “After Gains Against ISIS, Pentagon Focuses on Mosul.” We’re talking about a much-predicted U.S.-backed Iraqi (and Kurdish) offensive against Mosul. Small numbers of Islamic State militants took Iraq’s second largest city in June 2014 after the American-trained Iraqi army collapsed and fled, shedding quantities of American-provided equipment and their uniforms. The offensive to retake it was being touted in a somewhat similar manner a year ago by U.S. Central Command. At that time, 20,000 to 25,000 Iraqi troops were supposedly being prepared to recapture the city in a spring 2015 offensive that somehow never came to be (perhaps because those 20,000 or more troops essentially didn’t then exist). That “pivotal battle” to come was at the time being promoted by American military officials. As Reuters wrote, it was “highly unusual for the U.S. military to openly telegraph the timing of an upcoming offensive, especially to a large group of reporters.” As it turned out, they tipped those reporters off to nothing.
  

At the moment, Pentagon officials are touting such an offensive all over again for spring 2016, or if not quite now, as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Joseph Dunford put it recently, at least not in “the deep, deep future.” (Iraqi military officials, however, already beg to differ, predicting that such an offensive will be at least many months away “or longer.” Welcome to the Mosul offensive of 2017!) Of course, we already have a remarkably clear idea of what Mosul will look like in the wake of such an offensive, should it ever happen. After all, we know just how the smaller Iraqi city of Ramadi ended up after a six-month campaign by U.S.-trained and backed Iraqi troops to retake it from Islamic State militants: largely depopulated, 80% destroyed, and a landscape of rubble thanks to hundreds of U.S. air strikes, street-by-street fighting, and IS booby traps (with no rebuilding funds available). In other words, we already have a Do-Over vision of a future Mosul, should 2016 finally be the year when those Iraqi troops (and American advisers and planes) arrive in the IS-occupied city. (Perhaps the only non-Do-Over possibility is the grimmest of all – that, as the American Embassy in Baghdad has suddenly taken to warning, Mosul’s massive, compromised dam could collapse as the winter snows melt, essentially sweeping the city away and possibly killing hundreds of thousands of downstream Iraqis.)
On the positive side, since the American war on terror shows no sign of abating or succeeding, and as no one in Washington seems ready to consider anything strategically or tactically but more (or slightly less) of the same, Do-Over has a potentially glowing future as a war game. After all, based on almost 15 years of experience from Afghanistan to Nigeria, further destruction, chaos, the growth of failed states, the spread of terror groups, and monumental flows of refugees seem guaranteed, which means that there should never be a dearth of Do-Over-style headlines to draw on.
One warning, though: in the annals of such games, this one is unique. Because of the nature of the American way of war in our time, Do-Over may be the only game ever invented in which there can be no ultimate winner and, unfortunately, the tag line “Everyone’s a loser!” doesn’t seem like a selling way to go. Though the game is still in its planning stages, perhaps the ending has to be something realistic and yet thrilling like: “You’ve been Done-In!”
Tom Engelhardt is a co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of The United States of Fear as well as a history of the Cold War, The End of Victory Culture. He is a fellow of the Nation Institute and runs TomDispatch.com. His latest book is Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Book, Nick Turse’s Tomorrow’s Battlefield: U.S. Proxy Wars and Secret Ops in Africa, and Tom Engelhardt’s latest book, Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World.
Copyright 2016 Tom Engelhardt

Why Negative Rates Can’t Stop the Coming Depression

Are you ready to pay to save?

by Bill Bonner

Agora founder Bill Bonner explains why “negative interest rates” are spreading around the world…and could soon come to the U.S.
Bill founded Agora Inc. in 1978. Since then, it has grown into one of the largest independent newsletter publishing companies in the world.
He also co-wrote two New York Times bestselling books: Financial Reckoning Day and Empire of Debt. In his latest book, Hormegeddon, Bill describes what happens when you get too much of a good thing in the sphere of public policy, economics, and business.
Like Doug Casey, Bill believes the worst is yet to come.
Bill says the coming financial collapse will be worse than the market crashes in 1987, 2000, and 2008. But this time, he says, it will affect everything from your portfolio...to your bank account...to the cash in your wallet.
You’ll find the important details in his article below.
Until next time,

	Nick Giambruno Senior Editor International Man

---

by Bill Bonner

A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.

– Anonymous.

In our upcoming issue of The Bill Bonner Letter, we explore the strange territory of “NIRP” – negative-interest-rate policy.
About $7 trillion of sovereign bonds now yield less than nothing. Lenders give their money to governments…who swear up and down, no fingers crossed, that they’ll give them back less money sometime in the future.
Is that weird or what?

Into the Unknown

At least one reader didn’t think it was so odd.
“You pay someone to store your boat or even to park your car,” he declared.
“Why not pay someone to look out for your money?”
Ah…we thought he had a point. But then, we realized that the borrower isn’t looking out for your money; he’s taking it…and using it as he sees fit.
It is as though you gave a valet the keys to your car. Then he drove it to Vegas or sold it on eBay.
A borrower takes your money and uses it. He doesn’t just store it for you; that is what safe deposit boxes are for.
When you deposit your money in a bank, it’s the same thing. You are making a loan to the bank. The bank doesn’t store your money in a safe on your behalf; it uses it to balance its books.
If something goes wrong and you want your money back, you can just get in line behind the other creditors.
The future is always unknown. The bird in the bush could fly away. Or someone else could get him.
So, when you lend money, you need a little something to compensate you for the risk that the bird might get away.

A New Level of Absurdity

That’s why bonds pay income – to compensate you for that uncertainty.
Inflation, defaults, depression, war, and revolution all raise bond yields because all increase the odds that you won’t get your money back.
That’s why countries with much uncertainty – such as Venezuela – have higher interest rates than countries, such as Switzerland, where the future is probably going to be a lot like the past.
Venezuelan 10-year government bonds yield 11%. The Swiss 10-year government bond yields negative 0.3%.
The interest you earn on a bond is there to compensate you for the risk that you won’t get your money back. Or that the money you do get back when the bond matures will have less purchasing power than the money you used to buy the bond in the first place.
You never know. Maybe the company or government that issued the bond will go broke. Or maybe the Fed will cause hyperinflation. In that case, even if you get your money back, it won’t buy much.
With interest rates at zero, lenders must believe that the future carries neither risk. The bird in the bush isn’t going anywhere; they’re sure of it.
As unlikely as that is, negative interest rates take the absurdity to a new level.
A person who lends at a negative rate must believe that the future is more certain than the present.
In other words, he believes there will always be MORE birds in the bush.

Boneheaded Logic

The logic of lowering rates below zero is so boneheaded that only a PhD could believe it.
Economic growth rates are falling toward zero. And at zero, it normally doesn’t make sense for the business community – as a whole – to borrow. The growth it expects will be less than the interest it will have to pay.
That’s a big problem…
Because the Fed only has direct control over the roughly 20% of the overall money supply. This takes the form of cash in circulation and bank reserves. The other roughly 80% of the money supply comes from bank lending.
If people don’t borrow, money doesn’t appear. And if money doesn’t appear – or worse, if it disappears – people have less of it. They stop spending…the slowdown gets worse…prices fall…and pretty soon, you have a depression on your hands.
How to prevent it?
If you believe the myth that the feds can create real demand for bank lending by dropping interest below economic growth rates, then you, too, might believe in NIRP.
It’s all relative, you see. It’s like standing on a train platform. The train next to you backs up…and you feel you’re moving ahead.
Negative interest rates are like backing up. They give borrowers the illusion of forward motion…even if the economy is standing still.
Or something like that.
Regards,
Bill
Editor’s Note: Negative interest rates are a disaster story in the making. And they will only speed up the major monetary collapse we believe is coming.
Bill believes the fallout from his catastrophe will be far worse than 2008. When it hits, every service you’ve come to depend on – your bank…your grocery store…your Social Security checks – will shut down.
That’s why Bill recently made a video to warn you what’s coming and how to protect yourself. Click here to watch it now.

Clinton is in danger of seizing up in Rust Belt after Michigan result

 
Bernie Sanders for the first time won in a state where a quarter of voters are African American. Photograph: Alan Diaz/AP

It’s been a good season for candidates who can channel the anger of the electorate and we saw that again on Tuesday night, when exit polls continued to turn up in favor of Donald Trump, while Bernie Sanders pulled off a surprise victory in Michigan.
Trump’s victory in Mississippi was so decisive that he was declared the winner in that state moments after the first polling reports came in, and he was declared the winner in Michigan soon after. Ted Cruz netted a win in Idaho, keeping a firm grip on second place in the overall GOP race.

Trump’s continued winning streak – despite talk of a lull in his candidacy – wasn’t the biggest victory of the night. That belonged to Sanders, who managed to pull off something he’s been trying to prove throughout his campaign: that he can compete with Hillary Clinton in states like Michigan, where African American voters make up roughly a quarter of the electorate. Clinton won fewer than two-thirds of African American voters in the state, significantly down from the 80-90% support she’s enjoyed elsewhere.
The victories for Trump and Sanders come after a week when both men’s chances were being played down. Sanders’ campaign had been all but left for dead after he failed to make significant inroads with minority voters on Super Tuesday. Trump faced attacks from the party establishment (most notably Mitt Romney) and scorn from the media establishment for his habit of asking people to raise their hands and pledge allegiance to him at rallies, something Cruz quickly seized upon. “We’ve had seven years of a president who thinks he’s an emperor,” he quipped.
For a fleeting moment on Tuesday, it looked like Trump’s star might finally be fading. After all, on Saturday he only won by a few percentage points in Louisiana and Kentucky, while Cruz won handily in Maine and Kansas. But winning by less is still, to put it in Trump terms, #winning. And Tuesday’s results suggest the weekend was merely an ebb in the candidate’s current.
Trump’s win in Mississippi, in particular, is an embarrassment for Cruz, whose plan was to win over the south – something that, as a devout conservative from Texas, he should have been able to do. But that strategy didn’t work for Cruz last month in South Carolina, where he lost southern evangelical voters to Trump by a landslide, and it didn’t work for him on Super Tuesday, either. Mississippi was, if anything, an unwelcome reprise of what’s beginning to sound like a familiar story for Cruz.
But Trump’s win in Michigan is arguably even more significant, and not just because he squelched John Kasich’s improbable hopes for a win there and by extension Ohio. Michigan is especially valuable politically because it embodies America’s manufacturing industry and is a potential bellwether for the all-important Ohio. The state is just as valuable in a general election.
While Michigan is expected to go blue in a general, Trump’s strong performance there (and Hillary Clinton’s difficulty in running against Sanders there) suggests Trump’s talking points on trade and the perils of outsourcing jobs overseas are resonating.

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Sanders spent a lot of time campaigning in Michigan and it’s apparently paid off – he’s performed far better in the state than anyone predicted. And it’s somewhat telling that he’s focused single-mindedly on trade. After all, the negative effects of the North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta), Bill Clinton’s signature trade deal, are still felt acutely here. And Hillary Clinton was slow to come out against the Trans-Pacific Partnership and voice criticism of Nafta. Those are trade positions Sanders has long held, and Clinton’s slowness to adopt them gave him another chance to paint her as politically opportunistic.
Clinton thought she had finessed the trade issue, by focusing on other problems in Michigan, like Flint’s lead-poisoned water, and by skewering Sanders over his vote against the auto bailout (his campaign said it was part of a bigger vote against a bailout for Wall Street). But clearly she hadn’t.
And that’s a troubling finding for anyone worried about a Trump presidency: it suggests the Democrats’ likely nominee could have a problem in crucial manufacturing states.
A majority of Democrats and Republicans in Michigan have reported that recent trade deals have given people like them the shaft. On the Democratic side, six in 10 Michigan voters thought trade takes away jobs and the majority of those voters supported Sanders; on the Republican side, four in 10 thought trade costs the country jobs, and the majority of them supported Trump.
Sanders’ and Trump’s big wins in Michigan tonight, and those polling numbers in particular, should have Clinton very, very afraid.

San Francisco mulls state of emergency over homelessness. But will it help?

California city weighs following similar moves by Los Angeles, Portland and Seattle as west coast copes with crisis much worse than the national average

A San Francisco city worker tells a homeless man that the area next to him on is about to be power washed, as part of the clearing-out of a sprawling homeless encampment last month. Photograph: Eric Risberg/AP
When Jacob Riis published his photographs of late 19th-century urban poverty, he invoked French author François Rabelais’s words: “One half the world does not know how the other half lives.” That ignorance may have been understandable in the age when the poor were sequestered in tenements and slums, but in today’s gentrified cities, the two halves share the frame.
A viral photograph of a young woman in Los Angeles posing for a photograph while a homeless man sleeps on the street at her feet exemplifies the 21st-century urban reality. We see how the other half lives, but we don’t let it distract us from taking our selfies.
According to the 2015 annual homeless assessment performed by the Department of Housing and Urban Development, homelessness in the United States has been declining steadily since 2007. But conditions on the west coast are different.
In 2015, California, Oregon, Washington and Hawaii were four of the five states to see the greatest increase in their homeless populations (the fifth was New York). California alone accounts for 21% of the nation’s homeless population. And while nationwide, 31% of homeless people have some kind of shelter at night, California, Oregon and Hawaii all have unsheltered rates above 50%. In California, 63.7% of the homeless population lacks shelter.
Homelessness on the west coast is increasingly perceived by residents as an unacceptable crisis. In response, policymakers have begun declaring “states of emergency” over the manmade disaster unfolding on their streets.
On Tuesday, San Francisco supervisor David Campos introduced legislation to declare a “shelter emergency” in the city of San Francisco. The move came one week after city officials had cleared out a sprawling homeless encampment under a highway overpass where as many as 300 homeless people had been living in tents and makeshift shelters.


Campos’s legislation seeks to activate a California state law that allows cities to declare a “shelter crisis” when “a significant number of persons are without the ability to obtain shelter, resulting in a threat to their health and safety”. Such a declaration suspends certain liabilities and regulations that would “prevent, hinder, or delay” government action to address the crisis.
“This is usually reserved for natural disasters like floods and earthquakes,” Campos said. “This is not a natural disaster. It’s a manmade disaster, but it’s a disaster nonetheless.”
On the same day, another San Francisco supervisor, Jane Kim, introduced a resolution urging Governor Jerry Brown of California to declare a statewide “state of emergency on homelessness”.
“Homelessness knows no city or county boundaries but is a regional and state-wide issue and only a coordinated response will alleviate this crisis,” the resolution reads.
“We would not ask or expect southern California to deal with the aftermath of a major earthquake alone. We wouldn’t ask the Sierra foothills to address the devastation of a fire alone,” Kim said. “We should not expect any single district or city to solve the homelessness crisis by themselves.”
San Francisco’s push for an emergency declaration follows on similar moves in late 2015 by Los Angeles, Portland, Oregon, Seattle and King County, Washington, and the state of Hawaii. (According to the Los Angeles Times, Mayor Eric Garcetti of Los Angeles ultimately did not officially declare a local state of emergency, choosing instead to appeal to the state for a proclamation from the governor’s office of emergency services, which was denied.)
The cities of San Jose, Oakland, and Eugene, Oregon, have also all declared some kind of shelter crisis related to homelessness in recent months. In December, the mayors of Portland, Seattle, Eugene, San Francisco and Los Angeles convened a new alliance specifically designed to elicit more federal support for the homelessness crisis.
In declaring states of emergency on homelessness, civic leaders have generally noted the incongruity of using a government power that citizens are accustomed to applying to natural disasters.
“Emergency declarations are associated with natural disasters, but the persistent and growing phenomenon of homelessness – here and nationwide – is a human-made crisis just as devastating to thousands as a flood or fire,” said King County executive Dow Constantine.
But according to Jacob Remes, a professor of history specializing in disaster studies, the very concept of a disaster is inherently political, and was never limited to “acts of God” or natural calamities like earthquakes and fires.
“When we do disaster aid, we see people who are made homeless and jobless by a hurricane, and we decide that those people are worthy of a special type of aid. But there are homeless and jobless and poor people all the time who we decide are not worthy of that kind of aid,” Remes argues. “What the category of disaster does is sort people into worthy poor and unworthy poor.”

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By declaring states of emergency then, Remes argues that west coast politicians could “create a new population of worthy poor”.
One historical example of this political strategy succeeding is the Great Depression, a manmade disaster during which Remes says politicians deliberately “adopted the language of disaster” by casting the economic catastrophe as “an act of God”.
Declaring an emergency allows people to focus on the conditions in which people are living – universally recognized as deplorable – rather than assigning blame to the people experiencing them, since disasters are generally accepted to be blameless.
“The current situation is the product of slower social and political disasters rather than rapid geological forces,” says Gary Blasi, a UCLA professor of law and expert on homelessness, “but the result is experienced in the same way by homeless people, whatever the cause.”
California has declared emergencies over particularly human catastrophes before, according to Kelly Huston of the governor’s office of emergency services, including urban riots and the San Bernardino shootings. But Huston does not believe that such a declaration has ever been made over homelessness.
The governor’s office declined to comment on the San Francisco resolution, which has not yet been passed by its board of supervisors.
For San Francisco’s Campos, it’s at least worth making the effort. As he introduced his resolution on Tuesday, Campos related the tale of meeting an older homeless woman on the steps of the Navigation Center, a shelter in San Francisco’s trendy and increasingly expensive Mission district.
The woman’s best friend had died on the streets a few days earlier.
“She was camping out on the steps of the Navigation Center because she didn’t want to be next. She was pleading with me to get her in,” Campos said. “We have to do better. What we are doing is simply not enough.”

ECB Goes Further Into Negative Territory As Bankers Voice Concerns

The European Central Bank surprised markets today by cutting the deposit rate to -0.4%, expanding its bond-buying program and including corporate debt in purchases effectively throwing the kitchen sink at low inflation. Initially investors rushed into risk assets on the surprise measures however the enthusiasm did not last long as gains quickly reversed after ECB President Mario Draghi hinted rates might not go any lower. The quick reversal highlights investors’ concern that central banks are reaching the limits of monetary policy.
Prior to this announcement several senior bankers across Europe voiced concerns over further negative rates ECB policy actions. Some note worth quotes from this Financial Times article:

• UBS chief executive Sergio Ermotti warned that excessively low rates were prompting banks to extend too many risky loans because they “don’t know what to do” with deposits.

• Erste’s Mr Treichl, the longest-serving chief executive of a major European bank, said the ECB’s “limits have been reached” after years of ultra-loose monetary policy that has failed to lift inflation to anywhere near the ECB’s target of “close to but below” 2 per cent.

• Morgan Stanley analyst Huw van Steenis said negative rates were a “dangerous experiment” and in a report predicted that the 10-basis-point cut would knock 5 per cent off Eurozone bank earnings next year.

• Nordea's chief economist Helge Pedersen said there has been a “quite significant cost”, especially as loan creation has been low. Mr Pedersen said negative interest rates could, ironically, hinder credit creation because banks could increase lending rates to compensate for the money they are losing on deposits.

European banks have been screaming don’t cut and the ECB has continued further into negative territory, clearly they are getting desperate.

Professor to Wall Street: You're Doing Swaps Accounting Wrong

• Banks use a broken method for derivative trades, paper argues
• `If you follow the math you can’t reach any other conclusion'

The world’s largest banks are incorrectly accounting for their swaps trades, locking up money that could otherwise be paid out as dividends to their shareholders, according to a bold new academic paper.
The transactions are funded with money that’s borrowed from the bank’s treasury, and currently that lending cost is deducted from the value of the derivatives. That’s a mistake, according to Darrell Duffie, one of the report’s authors who argues banks should instead charge their trading partners more up-front for the deals, freeing up cash.
By calling out Wall Street accounting conventions, Duffie is in familiar territory. The Stanford University finance professor has already helped spur changes in how banks value credit risk and debt. This time, he’s targeted a business worth many trillions of dollars, where even tiny accounting shortcomings can add up to serious money. The financial health of banks has been a primary concern of regulators since the 2008 credit crisis forced governments around the world to bail out the world’s largest dealers.
Wall Street first revealed a switch to this accounting method for swaps -- called funding valuation adjustment, or FVA -- in 2011 when Goldman Sachs Group Inc. mentioned it in its annual report. In 2013, JPMorgan Chase & Co., the second-largest U.S. derivatives dealer, took a $1.5 billion loss on its fourth-quarter net revenue after it adopted FVA derivatives accounting.

‘Gone Wrong’

“The accounting has gone wrong,” said Duffie, a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and a former member of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s financial advisory round table. It took the report’s authors three years to understand and devise the new method, he added during an interview. “I know this sounds strange, but it’s taken people a long time to get this,” he said. “The model is irrefutable. If you follow the math you can’t reach any other conclusion.”
Duffie’s formulas boil down to this: Banks are masking the funding cost of their swaps desks by applying the cost -- in the form of a discount -- to the value of those positions that they report in their financial results every quarter. He’s not accusing the banks of any wrongdoing; he just thinks there’s a better way to book swaps activity.
To illustrate his point, Duffie points to a separate market: U.S. Treasuries. A bank holding $100 million of Treasuries wouldn’t value those securities at $99.5 million just because it had to borrow $500,000 to fund the purchase, Duffie said. Yet that’s exactly what they do in swaps.

‘No Sense’

That “clearly makes no sense,” because the Treasuries haven’t lost value, the authors said in the report. “Instead, this trade should cause an addition of $100 million to the disclosed value of the bank’s assets and a reduction of nearly $0.5 million to the value of the bank’s equity.”
Nitpicking over a $500,000 cost on a $100 million trade might seem inconsequential, but the market for interest-rate swaps, the largest in the world, is $319 trillion in size, according to the Bank for International Settlements. Even small errors matter.
To avoid this problem, banks should be pickier about what swaps they enter into and charge more for trades that require a lot of collateral or cash from the firm’s treasury, Duffie said. That would have the positive effect of lowering borrowing costs. “The banks will be worth more, so they’ll be able to issue debt at lower credit spreads,” Duffie said.
The bank switch to FVA came about for several reasons. In 2008, funding costs for bank swap deals saw “severe deviations” from the historic risk-free borrowing rate, according to the paper, which will be released publicly Friday. Also, large accounting firms “have signaled a willingness to accept FVA disclosures in dealers’ financial statement,” the authors said.
Duffie was one of several academics who near the turn of the century helped change how Wall Street banks account for credit-valuation adjustments and debt-value adjustments. The former are used to measure capital requirements on derivatives trades while the latter reflect the gains or losses a bank would take if it bought back its debt.
Duffie wrote the paper with Leif Andersen and Yang Song. Andersen is co-head of the global quantitative strategy group at Bank of America Corp. while Song is a graduate student in the Ph.D. program at Stanford’s business school.
In the new paper, the authors created a model they argue can be used by Wall Street banks to determine if a swap trade is beneficial or harmful from an equity shareholder point of view. While the issue of the FVA treatment by banks being wrong has been brought up by other researchers, this is the first time a model has been created to address it, they said.
Duffie said he hadn’t showed the paper to Wall Street executives yet.
“I imagine there’s going to be some howling by the banks because they think their accounting practices are right,” he said.

Wounded Warrior Project fires execs amid scandal

Wounded Warrior Project aims to empower wounded veterans, but a recent exposé revealed that the charity spent nearly half of its funding empowering its executives instead. The board of directors responded by beginning to clean house, starting at the top.

Wounded Warrior Project has raised more than a billion dollars in donations since 2003, according to CBS News. Donors might expect their money would be used “to honor and empower Wounded Warriors,” as the nonprofit’s mission states. However, CBS revealed the charity spends between 40 to 50 percent of their money on overhead – while other veterans’ charities spend an average of 10 to 15 percent on the same expenses.

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Wounded Warrior Project Chief Executive Officer Steven Nardizzi and Chief Operating Officer Al Giordano were both removed from the organization after accusations arose alleging that the charity’s donations were being misused. The nonprofit’s website says that Nardizzi was a founding member, who spent 10 years as an attorney representing disabled veterans for several veterans service organizations, among other charitable positions.
However, Nardizzi’s image as the COO was more in line with that of a venture capitalist than a nonprofit worker. A former employee told CBS that Nardizzi had entered conferences by “[rappelling] down the side of a building. He’s come in on a Segway. He’s come in on a horse.”
Over $26 million was spent on employee conferences in 2014, compared to $1.7 million in 2010. The events were described as being lavish and boozy, such as one annual meeting held in a luxury hotel in Colorado Springs, where 500 staff members attended a four-day conference that came with a final price tag of $3 million.

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What comes next for Wounded Warrior Project remains to be seen. However, Charity Navigator, a nonprofit that evaluates other nonprofits based on their transparency, accountability, and finances, has added Wounded Warrior to their watchlist. With more eyes on the charity now, more money might reach the 50,000 veterans that donors aim to help.

Record Federal Tax Revenue Over $1.2 Trillion FY 2016 ($8,263 Per Worker) But Still Running $353 Billion Deficit

“Government’s view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it.”

– Ronald Reagan

(CNSNews.com) – The U.S. Treasury hauled in a record of approximately $1,248,371,000,000 in tax revenues in the first five months of fiscal 2016 (Oct. 1, 2015 through Feb. 29, 2016), according to the Monthly Treasury Statement released today.
Despite these record tax revenues in the first five months of the fiscal year, the federal government nonetheless ran a deficit of approximately $353,005,000,000 during the same period.
In February alone, the Treasury ran a deficit of $192,614,000,000.
The record five-month tax haul of $1,248,371,000,000 equaled approximately $8,263 for each of the 151,074,000 people in the country who had either a full or part-time job in February.

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Millennials have it worse than any other generation, study says

Image: REUTERS/Thomas Peter

Intergenerational inequality is rising in Western economies.

Written by Joe Myers,

Inequality is rising between generations in Western economies, according to an investigation by the Guardian newspaper.

Millennials. those born between 1980 and the mid-90s, are earning significantly less than the national average, the investigation found using data from the LIS (Luxembourg Income Study): Cross-National Data Center.

“The situation is tough for young people. They were hit hard by the Great Recession, and their labour market situation has improved only little since,” Angel Gurría, Secretary-General of the OECD, told the Guardian.

Source: The Guardian

What does the data tell us?

The report highlights several key trends. Central among these is that prosperity has plummeted for young adults in the rich world.

This is largely a result of the real wage losses seen in Western countries, with the exception of Australia. For people in their early twenties, this equates to average disposable incomes some 20% lower than national averages.

Conversely, the disposable income available to pensioners has risen, most dramatically in the UK. In the US, under-30s are now less well off than retired people.

Why is this?

Rising house prices, unemployment and debt have all combined to hit millennials and their earnings.

The impact of these factors varies across countries. For example, in the UK and Australia, house prices are forcing young people out of the housing market. In the US, debt is holding millennials back – total student debt hit $1.2 trillion at the end of 2015.

The financial crisis in Europe has damaged job opportunities across the continent, with many young people forced to continue to live with their parents into their thirties. This will have a knock-on effect on birth rates and demographics.

Have you read?

Here is why Europe needs to act on unemployment
Is the US heading for a student debt crisis?
How loyal are millennial employees?

Is This The End? Draghi Fires His Bazooka And Markets Turn Away In Disgust

ECB chair Mario Draghi delivered big-time this morning by announcing lower interest rates and a new round of debt monetization. Historically, this kind of thing has sent the financial markets into Pavlovian ecstasy, with stocks soaring and the local currency falling.
Sound money people have for years been warning that such New Age monetary policies are poison and that the markets would eventually wise up and react accordingly. Today, finally, that’s what they did. European stocks popped on the news — then dropped.

The euro did the opposite, dropping then popping:

And the US dollar, which in a rational Keynesian world should soar as its main competitor is inflated away, fell hard:

US stocks, as this is written at 1 pm EST on Thursday, are down and gold is up big, which implies that markets now view negative interest rates and central banks buying corporate bonds and equities as signs of profound failure rather than innovative genius.
It is now clear that the only reason a government would resort to such things is that its previous policies haven’t worked. In which case there’s no reason to think the next batch will do any better. Which in turn implies that financial assets are a dangerous place to be while chastened monetary authorities sort out their misconceptions and rework their models.