History Repeating

The Deep State’s Bogus ‘Iranian Threat’

"It originated in the early 1990s when the neocons in the George HW Bush administration realized that with the Cold War's end, the Warfare State was in grave danger of massive demobilization like the US had done after every war until 1945. So among many other invented two-bit threats, the Iranian regime was demonized in order to keep the Imperial City in thrall to its purported national security threat and in support of the vast global armada of military forces, bases and occupations needed to contain it (including the Fifth Fleet in the Persian Gulf and US bases throughout the region)."

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Spain threatens Catalonia with five-day deadline to overturn vote

"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."

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Goldman Has a New Product to Bet on the Next Banking Crisis

"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."

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Treasury Caught Illegally Spying On Americans’ Financial Records

"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."

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Is The Everything Bubble Ready to Pop?

"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."

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U.S. household stock wealth at highest level since dotcom bubble

"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%."

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Stock Market’s New Threat Is Record Margin Debt

"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."

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