Seeking Truth in a World of Propaganda. Links do not necessarily indicate agreement with stories or perspectives.
“Those who are able to see beyond the shadows and lies of their culture will never be understood, let alone believed, by the masses.” - Plato
Saturday, July 20, 2019
It's Un-American To Be Anti-Free Speech: Protect The Right To Criticize The Government
Friday, July 19, 2019
A Bank With 49 Trillion Dollars In Exposure To Derivatives Is Melting Down Right In Front Of Our Eyes
It takes a lot to rattle Wall Street.
But Deutsche Bank managed to. The beleaguered German giant announced on July 7 that it is laying off 18,000 employees—roughly one-fifth of its global workforce—and pursuing a vast restructuring plan that most notably includes shutting down its global equities trading business.
Though Deutsche’s Bloody Sunday seemed to come out of the blue, it’s actually the culmination of a years-long—some would say decades-long—descent into unprofitability and scandal for the bank, which in the early 1990s set out to make itself into a universal banking powerhouse to rival the behemoths of Wall Street.
These moves may delay Deutsche Bank’s inexorable march into oblivion, but not by much.
And as Deutsche Bank collapses, it could take a whole lot of others down with it at the same time. According to Wall Street On Parade, the bank had 49 trillion dollars in exposure to derivatives as of the end of last year…
During 2018, the serially troubled Deutsche Bank – which still has a vast derivatives footprint in the U.S. as counterparty to some of the largest banks on Wall Street – trimmed its exposure to derivatives from a notional €48.266 trillion to a notional €43.459 trillion (49 trillion U.S. dollars) according to its 2018 annual report. A derivatives book of $49 trillion notional puts Deutsche Bank in the same league as the bank holding companies of U.S. juggernauts JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup and Goldman Sachs, which logged in at $48 trillion, $47 trillion and $42 trillion, respectively, at the end of December 2018 according to the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC). (See Table 2 in the Appendix at this link.)
Yes, the actual credit risk to Deutsche Bank is much, much lower than the notional value of its derivatives contracts, but we are still talking about an obscene amount of exposure.
And this is especially true when we consider the state of Deutsche Bank’s balance sheet. According to Nasdaq.com, as of the end of last year the bank had total assets of 1.541 trillion dollars and total liabilities of 1.469 trillion dollars.
In other words, there wasn’t much equity there at the end of December, and things have deteriorated rapidly since that time. In fact, it is being reported that a billion dollars a day is being pulled out of the bank at this point.
I know that most Americans don’t really care if Deutsche Bank lives or dies, but as the New York Post has pointed out, the failure of Deutsche Bank could quickly become a major crisis for the entire global financial system…
But the important fact to remember is that Deutsche Bank traded these derivatives with other financial firms. So, is this going to be another Lehman Brothers situation whereby one bank’s problems becomes other banks’ problems?
Pay close attention to this.
If the situation gets out of hand, the Federal Reserve and other central banks will have no choice but to cut interest rates even if it’s not the best thing for the world economies.
In particular, some of the largest “too big to fail banks” in the United States are “heavily interconnected financially” to Deutsche Bank. The following comes from Wall Street On Parade…
We know that Deutsche Bank’s derivative tentacles extend into most of the major Wall Street banks. According to a 2016 report from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Deutsche Bank is heavily interconnected financially to JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and Bank of America as well as other mega banks in Europe. The IMF concluded that Deutsche Bank posed a greater threat to global financial stability than any other bank as a result of these interconnections – and that was when its market capitalization was tens of billions of dollars larger than it is today.
Until these mega banks are broken up, until the Fed is replaced by a competent and serious regulator of bank holding companies, and until derivatives are restricted to those that trade on a transparent exchange, the next epic financial crash is just one counterparty blowup away.
As long as I have been doing this, I have been warning my readers to watch the global derivatives market. It played a starring role during the last financial crisis, and it will play a starring role in the next one too.
The fundamental structural problems that were exposed during 2008 and 2009 were never fixed. In fact, many would argue that the global financial system is even more vulnerable today than it was back during that time.
And now it appears that the next “Lehman Brothers moment” may be playing out right in front of our eyes.
Now more than ever, keep a close eye on Deutsche Bank, because it appears that they could be the first really big domino to fall.
The post A Bank With 49 Trillion Dollars In Exposure To Derivatives Is Melting Down Right In Front Of Our Eyes appeared first on The Economic Collapse.
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Bowling Alone: How Washington Has Helped Destroy American Civil Society And Family Life
Thursday, July 18, 2019
Emails show Obama officials called meeting over 'Russian matter'
Victoria Nuland
More information slowly is spilling out about the apparent weaponization of United States intelligence agencies by Obama officials worked to undermine the Trump campaign in 2016.
Government watchdog Judicial Watch on Thursday announced the release of more than 80 pages of documents showing senior Obama State Department officials advancing the now debunked Russia-collusion claim just before the 2016 presidential election.
Documents also showed then-Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and Special Coordinator for Libya Jonathan Winer coordinating with then-House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer’s national security adviser Daniel Silverberg to work on Russia dossier materials provided by Christopher Steele.
Nuland, the documents show, according to Judicial Watch, “was involved in the Obama State Department’s urgent gathering of classified Russia investigation information and disseminating it to members of Congress within hours of Donald Trump taking office.”
The dossier of wild and unsubstantiated claims about Trump, funded partly by Hillary Clinton’s campaign, was used as evidence to obtain warrants to spy on the Trump campaign.
Among the documents a September 2016 email exchange between Nuland and Winer discussing a “face-to-face” meeting on a “Russian matter.”
An op-ed Winer wrote for the Washington Post in 2018 said that in 2016, “Steele and I met in Washington and discussed the information now known as the ‘dossier.'”
Winer said he prepared a two-page summary “and shared it with Nuland, who indicated that, like me, she felt that the secretary of state needed to be made aware of this material.”
The documents, Judicial Watch noted, “also show that State Department officials continued to use unsecure BlackBerry devices for the transmission of classified material more than a year after Hillary Clinton’s use of an unsecure, non-government email system was revealed.”
Nuland responded to Winer’s email asking for a meeting to discuss “a Russian matter.”
“In ny face to face?” she asked.
“Yes that was (sic) be good,” Winer replied.
“The Obama State Department was central to the effort to target President Trump with the Russia smear,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. “These new emails further show that senior Obama State Department advanced the Russiagate hoax just before the 2016 presidential election.”
The documents also revealed Nuland “was involved in the Obama State Department’s urgent gathering of classified Russia investigation information and disseminating it to members of Congress within hours of Donald Trump taking office.”
In June, Judicial Watch revealed it was demanding insider information about fired former assistant FBI director Andrew McCabe and his new book.
He was a central figure, Judicial Watch said, in “the Deep State’s effort to spy upon and undermine President Trump. We aim to find out if McCabe’s book was properly vetted or simply rubberstamped by anti-Trump bureaucrats before being published.”
Members of the United States intelligence community, while they are allowed to write books after their service, must obtain the approval of relevant agencies to ensure ongoing work is not compromised.
The post Emails show Obama officials called meeting over 'Russian matter' appeared first on WND.
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Media Intrigue: Spying on Julian Assange
History’s scope for the absurd and tragic is infinite.
To see images of an exhausted and world-weary Julian Assange attempting to dodge the all-eye surveillance operation that he would complain about is to wade in the insensibility of it all.
But it could hardly have surprised those who have watched WikiLeaks’ battles with the Security Establishment over the years.
Assange is not merely an exceptional figure but a figure of the exception. Despite being granted asylum status by an Ecuadorean regime that would subsequently change heart with a change of brooms, he was never permitted to exercise all his freedoms associated with such a grant. There was always a sense of contingency and qualification, the impending cul-de-sac in London’s Ecuadorean embassy.
Between December 2017 and March 2018, dozens of meetings between Assange, his legal representatives, and visitors, were recorded in daily confidential reports written by an assigned security team and submitted to David Morales, formerly of special ops of the marine corps of the Spanish Navy. The very idea of legal professional privilege, a fetish in the Anglo-American legal system, was not so much deemed non-existent as ignored altogether.
The security firm tasked with this smeared-in-the-gutter mission was Spanish outfit UC Global SL, whose task became all the more urgent once Ecuador’s LenÃn Moreno came to power in May 2017. The mood had changed from the days when Rafael Correa had been accommodating, one at the crest of what was termed the Latin American Pink Tide. Under Moreno, Assange was no longer the wunderkind poking the eye of the US imperium with cheery backing. He had become, instead, a tenant of immense irritation and inconvenience, a threat to the shift in politics taking place in Ecuador. According to El PaÃs,
“The security employees at the embassy had a daily job to do: to monitor Assange’s every move, record his conversations, and take note of his moods.”
The revelations of the surveillance operation on Assange had had their natural effect on the establishment journalists who continue taking the mother’s milk of conspiracy and intrigue in libelling the publisher. CNN’s Marshall Cohen, Kay Guerrero and Arturo Torres seemed delighted in finding their éminence grise with his fingers in the pie, making the claim, with more than a whiff of patriotic self-importance, how “surveillance reports also describe how Assange turned the embassy into a command centre and orchestrated a series of damaging disclosures that rocked the 2016 presidential campaign in the United States.” Rather than seeing obsessive surveillance in breach of political asylum as a problem, they see the quarry obtained by UC Global in quite a different light. The WikiLeaks publisher had supposedly been outed.
The trio claimed to have obtained documents “exclusive” to CNN (the labours of El PaÃs, who did the lion’s share on this, are confined to the periphery) – though they have not been kind enough to share the original content with the curious. Nor do they make much of the private security materials as such, preferring to pick from the disordered larder that is the Mueller Report.
The CNN agenda is, however, clear enough. “The documents build on the possibility, raised by special counsel Robert Mueller in his report on Russian meddling, that couriers brought hacked files to Assange at the embassy.” Suggestions, without the empirical follow-up, are made to beef up the insinuated message. “While the Republican National Convention kicked off in Cleveland, an embassy security guard broke protocol by abandoning his post to receive a package outside the embassy from a man in disguise.” The individual in question “covered his face with a mask and sunglasses and was wearing a backpack, according to surveillance images obtained by CNN.” So planned; so cheeky.
Another line in the same report also serves to highlight the less than remarkable stuff in the pudding. “After the election, the private security company prepared an assessment of Assange’s allegiances. That report, which included open-source information, concluded there was ‘no doubt that there is evidence’ that Assange had ties to Russian intelligence agencies.” Not exactly one to stop the presses.
CNN, in fact, suggests a figure demanding, unaccountable, dangerous and entirely in charge of the situation. It is the psychological profile of a brattish historical agent keen to avoid detection. (Here the journalists are keen to suggest that meeting guests “inside the women’s bathroom” in the Ecuadorean embassy was a shabby enterprise initiated by Assange; the obvious point that he was being subject to surveillance by UC Global’s “feverish, obsessive vigilance”, to use the words of El PaÃs, is turned on its head.)
He is reported to have “demanded” a high-speed internet connection. He sought a working phone service, because obviously that would be unreasonable for any grantee of political asylum. He requested regular access to his professional circle and followers. Never has such a confined person been deemed a commander, an orchestrator and master of space. “Though confined to a few rooms inside the embassy, Assange was able to wield enormous authority over his situation.”
The account offered by Txema Guijarro GarcÃa, a former advisor to Ecuadorean Foreign Minister Ricardo Patiño and an important figure dealing with the logistics of granting Assange asylum in 2012, is decidedly different. In general, “relations between him and the embassy staff were better than anyone could have expected. The staff had amazing patience and, under difficult conditions, they managed to combine their diplomatic work with the task of caring for our famous guest.”
The language from the CNN report suggests the mechanics of concerted exclusion, laying the framework for an apologia that would justify Assange’s extradition to the United States to face espionage charges rather than practising journalism. It is a salient reminder about the readiness of such outlets to accommodate, rather than buck, the state narrative on publishing national security information.
It is also distinctly out of step with the defences being made in favour of publishing leaked diplomatic cables being expressed in the Tory leadership debate in Britain. While it should be construed with care, the words of Boris Johnson in the aftermath of the publication of British cables authored by the now ex-UK ambassador to Washington, Sir Kim Darroch, are pertinent. “It cannot conceivably be right that newspapers or any other media organisation publishing such material face prosecution”. Even Johnson can take the pulse of history accurately once in a while.
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Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research and Asia-Pacific Research. Email: bkampmark@gmail.com
Featured image is from 21st Century Wire
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