Monday, June 10, 2013
No S#^t, Sherlock! TrimTabs Says Every Asset Class Is Overpriced.
Well, welcome to the party, but we've all got hangovers since like yesterday:
"We think investors with a longer-term outlook should tread carefully in financial markets," TrimTabs said in its widely followed weekly market analysis. "The Federal Reserve and its fellow central banks have succeeded in making almost every major asset class in the world overpriced."
Adios Hombre: Republican Sen. Marco Rubio Should Join The Democrat Party
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| Adios, Hombre! |
Because that's where he belongs with his now unconditional amnesty for illegal aliens:
"In most of his public appeals for the Gang of Eight bill, Rubio has stressed its enforcement provisions, saying that border security must come before immigrants are granted legal permanent resident status. What he has not stressed so much is the fact that the bill would legalize the 11 million almost immediately, after they have passed background checks and paid some sort of fine. That would happen before any new security measures are completed, or even begun."
Obama Calls His Eavesdropping On 100 Million Americans "Modest"
Making 47 million people on food stamps just chopped liver, huh?
Here:
"And the modest encroachments on privacy that are involved in getting phone numbers or duration without a name attached and not looking at content, that on net, it was worth us doing."
This Piece Of Paper Isn't The Threat . . .
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| a partial transcription of the original Bill of Rights |
. . . but this one sure as hell is:
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| Mohamed Atta's 5-Year US Visa |
Sunday, June 9, 2013
TARP Bailout Funds To Be Used To Throw Out Vacant Michigan Homes
At a cost of about $25,000 each, the $100 million would demolish just 4,000 of Michigan's roughly 50,000 vacant properties. That doesn't make any sense.
Story here.
Author Of Patriot Act Says Obama Is Abusing It
Rep. James Sensenbrenner of Wisconsin in the UK Guardian, here:
The administration claims authority to sift through details of our private lives because the Patriot Act says that it can. I disagree. I authored the Patriot Act, and this is an abuse of that law. ... In his press conference on Friday, President Obama described the massive collection of phone and digital records as "two programs that were originally authorized by Congress, have been repeatedly authorized by Congress". But Congress has never specifically authorized these programs, and the Patriot Act was never intended to allow the daily spying the Obama administration is conducting. ... The president should immediately direct his administration to stop abusing the US constitution.
To Republicans Like Mike Rogers, These Are Just Words
"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
Republican Mike Rogers Doesn't Have A Clue How We Feel About The 4th Amendment
Republican Mike Rogers is completely alienated from the original spirit of the Fourth Amendment animating the Tea Party in Michigan and across the country, here this morning:
House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers (R-Mich.) had harsh words for the still-unnamed leaker and for the journalist who first reported the NSA’s collection of phone records, the Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald.
“He doesn’t have a clue how this thing works; ne[i]ther did the person who released just enough information to literally be dangerous,” Rogers said, adding, “I absolutely think [the leaker] should be prosecuted.”
Nolan Finley Of The Detroit News Wants To Junk The IRS, And The Income Tax
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| THIS IS NOT NOLAN FINLEY |
Here:
"[R]eplace the income tax with a national sales tax. You’d pay tax on the money you spend instead of the money you earn. That would eliminate the need for an IRS that audits tax returns, hands out non-profit status and enforces a tax code that is egregiously complex and unfair. If the national sales tax isn’t the answer, then a similar outcome might be achieved by drastically lowering current income tax rates in exchange for eliminating all deductions and credits. With no reason to examine returns, the IRS could be much smaller. Without auditing power, it’d be less intimidating."
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Why not do both? A low flat sales tax and a low flat income tax? We already have one flat tax, called Social Security. And we already pay an average state sales tax of 5+% everywhere. Just abolish the income tax and augment the current flat Payroll Tax with the new one. Business everywhere is already set up to collect that and withhold, so dovetailing that with a corporate flat tax should also be easy to do. Presto. No IRS needed for America's 151 million wage earners and the millions of businesses who employ them.
Herman Cain's more or less revenue neutral 999 plan looks better and better with every passing day of the IRS scandal targeting Obama's political enemies: a flat 9% federal sales tax, a flat 9% tax on all income, and a flat 9% corporate income tax.
A man before his time.
Food Stamp Households Up, Not Persons, Can Only Mean One Thing
Smaller households.
Food stamp recipient numbers surged up again in March 2013 to 47.727 million Americans, but this did not break the record as claimed by Drudge and Zero Hedge headlines.
The record was reached in December 2012 at 47.792 million.
Zero Hedge is making the claim based on the number of households, not the number of persons. The only thing the former statistic might prove is that as the country becomes more single it becomes more poor. Marriage and family is the economic engine of capitalism, and Obama aims to destroy them both. He's succeeding, which is why Rush Limbaugh famously hoped Obama would fail.
Persons on SNAP have been at the 47 million level since August 2012.
Data here.
Obama Biographies Deliberately Omitted That His Mentor Was A Flaming Communist
Including for the Associated Press, and both biographies by John Meacham and David Remnick.
Herbert Meyer, here:
For example, during the 2008 presidential campaign, the Associated Press ran two articles about Obama's life in Hawaii, one specifically about Frank [Marshall Davis]. The AP described him to voters desperate for insight about the Democratic candidate merely as an advocate of "civil rights amid segregation" and a crusader for the U.S. Constitution. The only Frank quote the AP offered its readers -- chosen from decades of vicious, anti-American newspaper columns Frank wrote in Hawaii -- was this: "I refuse to settle for anything less than all the rights which are due me under the Constitution."
Newsweek's John Meacham told readers only that Frank wrote about "civil rights and labor issues." David Remnick, who wrote for The Washington Post, who now is editor of The New Yorker, and who authored The Bridge, which to date is perhaps the most comprehensive biography of our president, managed to completely ignore Frank's communist ideology and told readers only that Frank "wrote fierce columns about the suppression of unions, conditions on the plantation, the power of oligarchic Hawaiian families, race relations." Somehow, this Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist failed to notice -- or chose to ignore -- Frank's incendiary, near-treasonous columns blasting Harry Truman and the Marshall Plan, accusing the U.S. of trying to re-Nazify Germany, and defending the Soviet Union at every turn.
Saturday, June 8, 2013
Top Secret FISA Order Revealed By Glenn Greenwald Was 80th THIS YEAR
According to William Binney, quoted here:
The National Security Agency’s collection of phone data from all of Verizon’s U.S. customers is just the “tip of the iceberg,” says a former NSA official who estimates the agency has data on as many as 20 trillion phone calls and emails by U.S. citizens. ...
Britain’s Guardian newspaper posted online late Wednesday a copy of the “Top Secret” FISA court order directing telecommunications giant Verizon to hand over “metadata” about every call made or received by all of its customers in the United States. Such metadata include the calling and receiving phone numbers, the time of day and length of the call, and the whereabouts of the two parties.
Mr. Binney noted the order’s serial number, which indicates it is the 80th issued by the FISA court so far this year. The court likely has approved similar orders for the other major U.S. telecom providers, he said, “and they have to be renewed every 90 days.”
NSA Copies Everything Off AT&T Fiberoptic Network In Switching Centers Nationwide
In 2003, according to sworn testimony by a former AT&T engineer, the NSA began building a special room at the company’s switching center in San Francisco and at other AT&T switching centers around the country. Equipment in the room enabled NSA to siphon off a copy of every byte of data running through AT&T’s fiber-optic cable network, according to privacy advocates.
Glenn Greenwald Channels The Utopian Edward Bellamy
From his latest in the UK Guardian, here:
"We followed Wednesday's story about the NSA's bulk telephone record-gathering with one yesterday about the agency's direct access to the servers of the world's largest internet companies. I don't have time at the moment to address all of the fallout because - to borrow someone else's phrase - I'm Looking Forward to future revelations that are coming (and coming shortly), not Looking Backward to ones that have already come."
The US Dollar Has Tanked Since Bernanke Spoke Before Congress On May 22nd
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| THE US DOLLAR BREAKOUT ABOVE 84 HAS FAILED FOR NOW. |
The dollar has fallen 3.15% since May 22nd when Bernanke opened his big yap and went off-script in front of Congress, hinting at a tapering off of QE in the near future.
The dollar closed at 84.35 on May 22nd and closed yesterday at 81.69.
When just words can tank fiat bonds and fiat dollars, isn't it time to pay our respects once again to Article 1, Section 10?
Still Think You Can Predict Bond Market Sell-Off? You're Already A Month Late.
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| NAV of total bond market is already down almost 2% in a month. |
So says James B. Stewart here in The New York Times, who notes Bill Gross of PIMCO fame manages a corporate bond/MBS fund which is already down well over 10%:
The sell-off in fixed income began slowly on May 10, an otherwise uneventful day with no obvious catalyst for any change in sentiment. It picked up steam when Fed sources didn’t step forward to calm markets. Then, in comments to Congress on May 22, Mr. Bernanke said, “We could in the next few meetings take a step down in our pace of purchases.”
That set off alarm bells, in contrast with his prepared text, which gave no suggestion that the Fed’s policy would change so soon. And then, the minutes of the Fed’s May meeting suggested that some Fed governors were prepared to start tapering off bond purchases as soon as the Fed’s next meeting, which will be June 18 and 19. Near-panic selling in some markets ensued.
. . . the simplest and safest approach [may be] simply to park funds in a low-volatility money market fund and accept near-zero returns.
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