Author: Tyler Durden

Back in 2013, markets tumbled (if briefly) on the news that Detroit would file for bankruptcy, at the time the biggest municipal bankruptcy in US history with over $18 billion in liabilities. Yesterday, algos barely even bothered to look up when Puerto Rico’s governor announced that the US Commonwealth would submit Title III (aka bankruptcy) protection, despite a debt load of more than $70 billion, or nearly four times greater than Detroit’s. So does that mean that there are no losers or casualties (metaphorically speaking for now) from the bankruptcy filing? The answer is that in addition to the citizens … Continue reading →

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It’s a double-whammy for the U.S. taxpayer. Bloomberg notes that not only are many Americans writing yet another check to Uncle Sam this tax season, they’re also paying more to have someone handle their returns. The Labor Department’s consumer-price index for tax return preparation rose 2.4 percent, the third-biggest monthly gain ever, to a record in March. Such trends show why firms like Intuit Inc., the maker of TurboTax, and H&R Block Inc., have spent millions of dollars lobbying Congress to limit efforts to simplify the tax-filing process. Instant Access to Current Spot Prices & Interactive Charts But it gets worse, as … Continue reading →

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Prophetically foreshadowing the current crisis (and apparent action plan), leaked CIA documents from the reign of Bashar al-Assad’s father in the 1980s show a Washington Deep State plan coalescing to “bring real muscle to bear against Syria,” toppling its leader (in favor of one amenable to US demands) , severing ties with Russia (its primary arms dealer), and paving the way for an oil and gas pipeline of Washington’s choosing. Current Prices on popular forms of Gold Bullion As ActivistPost.com’s Brandon Turbeville detailed (just a day before Trump unleashed his Tomahawks), as the Syrian crisis enters its sixth year, the … Continue reading →

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Remember when Trump promised in early February that he would unveil a “phenomenal” tax plan within two to three weeks? Well, it was just scrapped, because as AP reports, Trump has scrapped the tax plan he campaigned on and is going back to the drawing board, hoping to find a plan that will have Republican consensus, something his current proposal has failed to achieve. In doing so, the president threatens the timetable of what many had seen as the primary driver behind his entire first-year agenda, which is not in peril and may not come until early 2018 if not … Continue reading →

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The Russian central bank opened its first overseas office in Beijing on March 14, marking a step forward in forging a Beijing-Moscow alliance to bypass the US dollar in the global monetary system, and to phase-in a gold-backed standard of trade. According to the South China Morning Post, the new office was part of agreements made between the two neighbours “to seek stronger economic ties” since the West brought in sanctions against Russia over the Ukraine crisis and the oil-price slump hit the Russian economy. According to Dmitry Skobelkin, the deputy governor of the Central Bank of Russia, the opening … Continue reading →

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WikiLeaks’ latest Vault 7 release contains a batch of documents, named ‘Marble’, which detail CIA hacking tactics and how they can misdirect forensic investigators from attributing viruses, trojans and hacking attacks to their agency by inserted code fragments in foreign languages.  The tool was in use as recently as 2016.  Per the WikiLeaks release: “The source code shows that Marble has test examples not just in English but also in Chinese, Russian, Korean, Arabic and Farsi. This would permit a forensic attribution double game, for example by pretending that the spoken language of the malware creator was not American English, … Continue reading →

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The Road To Serfdom (authored by F.A. Hayek, first published in 1944) Excerpts from Chapter 11 – The End of Truth Annotated via Crossroad.to/heaven, “The most effective way of making everybody serve the single system of ends toward which the social plan is directed is to make everybody believe in those ends. To make a totalitarian system function efficiently, it is not enough that everybody should be forced to work for the same ends. It is essential that the people should come to regard them as their own ends.”[p.171] Berit’s comment: Ponder that statement. It helps explain the significance of universal … Continue reading →

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The New York Teamsters Road Carriers Local 707 Pension Fund has won the unfortunate award for “First Pension to Officially Run Out of Money.”  According to the New York Daily News, and a host of angry former truck drivers who’ve had their pension benefits slashed, the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp. (PBGC) has officially been forced to step in and take over payments to retirees of the Local 707, albeit at a much lower rate. Teamsters Local 707’s pension fund is the first to officially bottom out financially — which happened this month. “I had a union job for 30 years,” … Continue reading →

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Six Russian diplomats have died in the last 60 days. As Axios notes, all but one died on foreign soil. Some were shot, while other causes of death are unknown. Note that a few deaths have been labeled “heart attacks” or “brief illnesses.” 1. You probably remember Russia’s Ambassador to Turkey, Andrei Karlov — he was assassinated by a police officer at a photo exhibit in Ankara on December 19. 2. On the same day, another diplomat, Peter Polshikov, was shot dead in his Moscow apartment. The gun was found under the bathroom sink but the circumstances of the death … Continue reading →

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Over the past year, an organization called the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) has been surveying college campuses around the country to assess how the liberal bastions of safe spaces handle reports of “hate speech” (a.k.a. “any opinion, or fact for that matter, that runs contrary to the widely accepted views of leftist professors and administrators”).  Apparently, and to our great shock no less, hundreds of college campuses all around the country have established so-called “Bias Response Teams” tasked with the crucial responsibility of scrutinizing campus speech that may be deemed “hateful.” While FIRE published a very comprehensive, … Continue reading →

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As promised two days ago on the Sean Hannity radio show, James O’Keefe and his team at Project Veritas just released covertly captured, previously unheard audio footage from within the CNN newsroom.  But unlike his usual undercover sting operations, this footage was allegedly sourced from a CNN insider who apparently grew frustrated with the perpetually biased reporting of the “fake news” media outlet. Per O’Keefe’s website, today’s release includes 119 hours of secretly recorded raw footage from an inside source at CNN with another 100 hours of footage still to be released.  Given the volume of footage to be released, … Continue reading →

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As John Rubino eloquently puts it, “when the history of these times is written, former Fed Chair Alan Greenspan will be one of the major villains, but also one of the greatest mysteries. This is so because he has, in effect, been three different people.” Greenspan started his public life brilliantly, as a libertarian thinker who said some compelling and accurate things about gold and its role in the world. An example from 1966: “This is the shabby secret of the welfare statists’ tirades against gold. Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the confiscation of wealth. Gold stands in … Continue reading →

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Authored by Kurt Schlichter via Townhall.com, The Left is getting massively out-Alinsky’d, and the hilarious thing is that this band of withered hippies, unemployable millennial safe-space cases, and unlovable and unshaven libfeminists don’t even know it. Oh, their masters sure know it. Soros is bitterly having to ramp up his infusions of blood money to keep his community-organized “grassroots” movements afloat. The less dumb ones among the lying dinosaur media are panicking as their influence fades, and Chuck Schumer is enduring such a non-stop parade of serial humiliations that if the Senate were a penitentiary, he’d be McConnell’s prison, Mitch. … Continue reading →

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Update 3: Here is the question officials are asking: can they drain the Oroville dam fast enough before the Wednesday storm? As the SacBee writes, water is flowing out of Lake Oroville’s main spillway fast enough to cause lake levels to drop by up to 30 feet before the next storm Wednesday night. Officials hope that will be enough. Lake Oroville can fill fast during a big storm. During storms from Monday of last week through Friday, lake levels increased by 50 feet. The main factor in how fast the lake drains continues to be the condition of the main … Continue reading →

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Submitted by Patrick Ceresna, Macrovoices.com “Get prepared,” warns billionaire commodity guru Jim Rogers, “because we’re going to have the worst economic problems in your lifetime and a lot of people are going to disappear.” In this wide-ranging interview with MacroVoices’ Erik Townsend, the investing legend discusses everything from whether Russia is being scapegoated (“yes, ask Victoria Nuland”), the war against cash (“governments love it… they want to control everything”), to his views on gold and the demise of freedom. Full podcast below: Key Excerpts… Are Russians the bad guys? Well I do know that during the last administration, Mr. Obama’s … Continue reading →

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