Month: May 2017

THE US-SAUDI ARMS DEAL

THE SAUDI ARMS DEAL SUDDENLY TRIPLED IN SIZE WITH LONG TIME SCHEDULE WITHIN THE AGREEMENT… TRUMP COMPLETED THE SINGLE LARGEST ARMS DEAL IN US-HISTORY, DONE WITH SAUDI ARABIA… IT EXCEEDED THE PREVIOUS COMMITMENT FROM TWO WEEKS AGO, NOW WORTH $350 BILLION… WITNESS US-STYLE ECONOMIC STIMULUS, THE TOXIC WAY… THE USGOVT SUPPORTS THE FADING SAUDI KINGDOM, SUPPORTS THEIR VICIOUS YEMEN WAR, AND APPLAUDS THEIR SUPPORT OF ISIS TERROR… THE USGOVT IS ENCOURAGING THE FORMATION OF A GULF REGION NATO, SURELY DEDICATED TO US-ARMS SUPPLY… CURIOUS THE PAYMENT METHOD TO COME, WITH CONJECTURE.

The USMilitary-industrial complex has come to the rescue of USEconomy with the massive arms sale to the world’s biggest purchaser of weapons, namely Saudi Arabia. Beyond the glitz and royal pageantry, President Trump’s visit to Saudi Arabia in all likelihood had a main purpose to sell weapons, and to complete a gigantic $350 billion over…

Following comments from DoubleLine’s Jeff Gundlach tieing the surge in virtual currencies to the demise of China (right before that nation is downgraded), Bitcoin surged overnight, breaking above $2400 for the first time. It is now up over 150% year-to-date.

Bitcoin is up fopr the 26th day in the last 29 sessions, doubling in price in that period…

Wednesday’s gain comes after a bitcoin scaling agreement was reached by the Digital Currency Group, representing 56 companies in 21 countries, at the Consensus 2017 conference in New York, which reduced some of the fears surrounding the so-called ‘hard fork’ in Bitcoin’s code. The agreement states:

“We agree to immediately support the following parallel upgrades to the bitcoin protocol, which will be deployed simultaneously and based on the original Segwit2Mb proposal:

• “Activate Segregated Witness at an 80% threshold, signaling at bit 4

• “Activate a 2 MB hard fork within six months”…

More details of President Donald Trump’s first budget proposal were reported Monday by Bloomberg and Reuters. The leaks add to the picture of what we know about Trump’s budget, which also includes a flurry of leaks published by The Washington Post, the Associated Press and Bloomberg late Sunday, which fleshed out Trump’s plans to slash entitlement spending.

In total, the budget plans to trim $3.6 trillion in spending over 10 years across all discretionary spending and non-discretionary spending lines, in order to enable tax reductions across the board: if enacted – and remember that the president’s budget is just an initial blueprint which rarely passes in its original form – the Trump administration would implement the deepest cuts to government programs in a generation, delivering the opening salvo in a new round of budget battles in Washington.

This is key to balancing the budget by the 10th year.

It also…

05/19/2017 Friday – Jim Willie from GoldenJackass.com Saudi, Italy, business as Usual?

A stunning soundbite was captured by a Bloomberg reporter during last week’s event at the American Bankruptcy Institute. According to judges speaking at an ABI conference Thursday in Manhattan, the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York is seeing a sharp rise in cases this year, with Chapter 11 and Chapter 15 filings outpacing national averages.

“Chapter 11s and Chapter 15s have exploded” said U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Shelley Chapman, speaking at American Bankruptcy Institute event, cited by Bloomberg reporter Tiffany Kary.

The numbers for the bankruptcy court which serves Manhattan are, frankly, horrifying: Chapter 11s have tripled in the first quarter of the year, while Chapter 15s for companies seeking U.S. aid for a reorganization in a foreign court have increased sevenfold, Chapman added.

What makes New York data so dramatic is that the region’s bankruptcy filings contrast with national data, that show Chapter 11 filings…

The recklessness of the “too big to fail” banks almost doomed them the last time around, but apparently they still haven’t learned from their past mistakes.  Today, the top 25 U.S. banks have 222 trillion dollars of exposure to derivatives.  In other words, the exposure that these banks have to derivatives contracts is approximately equivalent to the gross domestic product of the United States times twelve.  As long as stock prices continue to rise and the U.S. economy stays fairly stable, these extremely risky financial weapons of mass destruction will probably not take down our entire financial system.  But someday another major crisis will inevitably happen, and when that day arrives the devastation that these financial instruments will cause will be absolutely unprecedented.

During the great financial crisis of 2008, derivatives played a starring role, and U.S. taxpayers were forced to step in and bail out companies such as…

The world has been stunned over the past few days by the advent of “Ransomware;” the use of sophisticated cyber attacks on vital systems in order to (supposedly) extort capital from target businesses and institutions. I am always highly suspicious whenever a large scale cyber incident occurs, primarily because the manner in which these events are explained to the public does not begin to cover certain important realities. For example, the mainstream media rarely if ever discusses the fact that many digital systems are deliberately designed to be vulnerable.

Software and internet corporate monoliths have long been cooperating with the NSA through programs like PRISM to provide government agencies backdoor access to computer systems worldwide. Edward Snowden vindicated numerous “conspiracy theorists” in 2013 with his comprehensive data dumps, exposing collusion between corporations and the NSA including Microsoft, Skype, Apple, Google, Facebook and Yahoo. And make no mistake, nothing has…

Clapper admits that there is no evidence of Russian collusion. The deep state is now extremely worried about how Trump is dismantling what they have setup over the last many years. There more links between the Clinton’s and Russia than there are between Trump and Russia. Larry Klayman says the intelligent agencies are more powerful than the Presidency. Venezuela is imploding on itself and Maduro time is running out. North Korea fired a missile and it is being reported that the missile could carry a nuke. Syria, Iraq put troops into position for the upcoming offensive from the deep state. The deep state is now pushing another piece of propaganda about Assad. The latest cyber attack is a warning from the deep state and if they cannot keep control of the system they will use a cyber attack against the financial system to bring it down, there version of the kill…

In recent months, I’ve toured the worst zip codes America has to offer. The rhyming factor in each zip code is deterioration post ‘American High’ (mid-1960s). This weekend, I’m bringing you a treat from West Baltimore, where the homicide rate is spiraling out of control. In some areas, it’s so bad that mobile police stations in 40 foot RV’s are patrolling the streets. Block after block, it resembles a post-apocalyptic view of America, if industry fails to return. We’ll save this story for later.

On my travels from West Baltimore, I stumbled across a 200 year old mall called ‘Old Town Mall’. Established in 1818, the mall contains 64 stores, the majority of which are abandoned. The decay of  the mall started in the post-world war era as Baltimore’s population peaked, then started to dwindle. The mall was briefly revived after the 1968 Baltimore Riots catering to a new demographic. The revival ended in the…

So another chain restaurant is “preparing” to bite the dust. Ignite Restaurant Group, which operates the Joe’s Crab Shack chain with 113 locations and the Brick House Tavern chain with 25 locations, and used to operate the Romano’s Macaroni Grill chain with 150 locations until it sold it in 2015, is preparing to file for bankruptcy, “people familiar with the matter” told Bloomberg.

In the quarter ended September 26, 2016, the last quarter for which the company bothered to release an earnings report, same-store sales fell 6.8%; total revenues plunged 10% to $120 million.

A liquidity problem turns into a solvency problem: It had $729,000 of cash and about $26 million of “available borrowing capacity under its current credit facility.” Not exactly a lot, considering that the company lost $15.2 million in Q3, up from a loss of $4 million in Q3 2015.

It had $179 million in…