“Rajoy said Catalan authorities broke the law by holding the referendum and incited street protests to give an appearance of legitimacy to the vote. He did not refer to the violence with which police cracked down on voting day but said ‘nobody can be proud of the image’ Spain projected, adding the only ones to blame were the Catalan leaders.”
“The two financial giants are now offering trades in derivatives that enable investors to bet on or against high-risk bank bonds that financial regulators can wipe out if a lender runs into trouble. Others are also planning to start making markets in the contracts, known as total-return swaps, in the coming weeks, according to Max Ruscher, the London-based director of credit indexes at IHS Markit Ltd., which administers the benchmarks that the swaps are linked to.”
“The intelligence division at the Treasury Department has repeatedly and systematically violated domestic surveillance laws by snooping on the private financial records of US citizens and companies, according to government sources. Over the past year, at least a dozen employees in another branch of the Treasury Department, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, have warned officials and Congress that US citizens’ and residents’ banking and financial data has been illegally searched and stored. And the breach, some sources said, extended to other intelligence agencies, such as the National Security Agency, whose officers used the Treasury’s intelligence division as an illegal back door to gain access to American citizens’ financial records.”
Read more: https://www.buzzfeed.com/jasonleopold/us-intelligence-unit-accused-of-illegally-spying-on
“It wasn’t always this way. We never used to get a giant, speculative bubble every 7–8 years. We really didn’t. In 2000, we had the dot-com bubble. In 2007, we had the housing bubble. In 2017, we have the everything bubble. I did not coin the term ‘the everything bubble.’ I do not know who did. Apologies (and much respect) to the person I stole it from. Why do we call it the everything bubble? Well, there is a bubble in a bunch of asset classes simultaneously. And the infographic below that my colleagues at Mauldin Economics created paints the picture best. I don’t usually predict downturns, but this time I bet my reputation that a downturn is coming. And soon.”
Read more: http://www.mauldineconomics.com/editorial/infographic-the-everything-bubble-is-ready-to-pop
“Currently, according to Ned Davis Research, stocks represent 40% of total household financial assets, much higher than the 28.2% average allocation since 1951. There’s been only one other occasion since 1951 in which stock allocation was higher than it is today — at the top of the late 1990s internet bubble, when it rose to 47.5%. Every other major stock market top of the last seven decades, in contrast, occurred when households’ equity allocation was lower than today’s level. At the 2007 stock market top, for example, the allocation peaked at 37.1%.”
Read more: http://www.marketwatch.com/story/why-your-neighbors-stock-buying-should-worry-you-2017-10-03
“In the U.S., margin debt is at more than three times the level recorded before the 2008 financial crisis began, and is even greater than its peak in 2000 before the dotcom crash, according to research released last week from the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), the Journal indicates.”
Read more: http://www.investopedia.com/news/margin-selling-biggest-threat-stocks-right-now/
“The ‘America First’ foreign policy Trump promised during the campaign is just a memory, and his baffled supporters are left to contemplate the most brazen betrayal in modern American political history.”
Read more: http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2017/08/22/mini-skirt-deception-mcmaster-got-afghan-surge/
“Wall Street brokerages have been selling billions of dollars in loans backed by stocks and bonds, a trend that yields lucrative fees for the firms but poses risks for borrowers.”
“The ugly irony is that when the Nazis rejected American law, it was often because they found it too harsh.”
Read more: http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-whitman-hitler-american-race-laws-20170222-story.html
“For many of those attacking the ACLU here, it is a staple of their worldview that the U.S. is a racist and fascist country and that those who control the government are right-wing authoritarians. There is substantial validity to that view. Why, then, would people who believe that simultaneously want to vest in these same fascism-supporting authorities the power to ban and outlaw ideas they dislike?”
