from TradKatKnight:
by Steve St. Angelo, SRSrocco:
While U.S. oil production reached a new peak of 10.25 million barrels per day, the higher it goes, the more breathtaking will be the inevitable collapse. Thus, as the mainstream media touts the glorious new record in U.S. production that has both surpassed its previous peak in 1970 and Saudi Arabia’s current oil production, it’s a bittersweet victory.
Why? There are two critical reasons the current record level of U.S. oil production won’t last and is also, a house of cards. First of all, oil production profiles tend to be somewhat symmetrical. They rise and fall in the same manner. While this doesn’t happen in every country or every oil field, we do see similar patterns. For example, this similar trend is taking place in both Argentina and Norway:
Here we can see that oil production increased, peaked and declined in a similar pattern in both Argentina and Norway. However, many countries had their domestic oil industries impacted by wars, geopolitical events, and or enhanced oil recovery techniques that have resulted in altered production profiles. Regardless, the United States experienced a symmetrical oil production profile from 1930 to 2007:
As we can see in the chart, U.S. oil production from 1930 to 2007 increased and then declined in the same fashion. On the other hand, the new Shale Oil Production trend is much different. What took 23 years for U.S. oil production to double from 5 million barrels per day (mbd) in 1947 to a peak of nearly 10 mbd in 1970, was accomplished in less than a decade with the new shale oil industry. Total U.S. oil production doubled from 5 mbd in 2009 to over 10 mbd currently.
For those Americans or delusional individuals who believe the U.S. oil industry will be able to continue producing a record amount of oil for the next several decades, you have no idea about the financial carnage taking place in the U.S. shale oil industry. This leads me to the second reason. The U.S. Shale Industry hasn’t made any money producing oil since the industry took off in 2008. And it’s even worse than that. Not only have they not made any money, but they have also spent a lot of investor money (most that will never be returned) and added a massive amount of debt to their balance sheets.
Read More @ SRSrocco.com
by Turd Ferguson, TF Metals:
After a one week hiatus due to last week’s State of The Union speech, John and Steve returned last evening to discuss the origins of “Russiagate” and how the politicians of The War Party have manufactured a crisis to serve their own ends.
Please find time to listen this week and every week.
TF
Read More @ TFMetals.com
by Dave Hodges, The Common Sense Show:
We are witnessing Civil War II unfold. The lines of battle have not clearly been drawn and thousands if not millions are not yet dying. But make no mistake about it, the country is polarized and the point of no return has been reached.
This article will summarize and provide a point of reference in order to help the reader understand how this present civil war and how it is playing out.
The plan to destroy America from the top-down was predicated on the notion that the Democrats would control the Presidency. The top-down approach is the most effective in initiating a civil war against America and her traditions (eg the Constitution).
Before the election of Donald Trump, the Deep State had grown to such a proportion that government was effectively under the control of many of the Obama appointees that had infected the White House and various cabinets for the previous 8 years. Had Hillary been elected, the government would have been controlled from the top-down. Before the end of Hillary’s first term as President, the Supreme Court would have been Democratic for decades to come. The Presidency would would have come under control of Clinton and America would have never recovered.
As President, Clinton would have come to control much of the military. She would have given the United Nations Peacekeeperss access to the country. She would have enforced her self-proclaimed “no-fly” zone in Syria that this war monger unveiled in Debate#2 that would have led to World War III. Clinton would have continued Obama’s form of socialist economics that was bankrupting the country and its middle class.
Chaos would have ensued under a Clinton Presidency. People would have predictably taken to the streets and gun confiscation laws would have been enacted. Social media would have completely shut down the Independent Media. And most importantly, dissidents would have been hauled off to re-education camps to never be heard from again.
Under a Clinton presidency, the chaos of the country would have reached such a crisis, that we would have seen the UN blue helmets going house to house to look for guns. Many of the UN soldiers would have been Chinese and Russian. Effectively, America would have been conquered and Hillary would have been installed as the puppet leader.
Under a Clinton presidency, MS-13 would have carried out their mandate and would have begun the poliical assassinations of key law enforcement and political figures which is what MS-13 already does for the drug cartels and their terrorist allies.
Under a Clinton Presidency, the chaos and the responding UN occupation of key American cities would have reached a crisis point. American soldiers would be forced to decide who they were going to serve. This is what Jade Helm 16 was about when the drill advertised for crisis actors who would play the role of disaffected former American military troops that would be playing the role of guerilla chieftains. The Jade Helm planners knew that American soldiers would one day face off against the UN. This would have been the stage for the purge of middle America, the Constitution and the viability of the American economy. This would have been the real civil war.
As I have said before, the Bilderberg decided that Obama would be the eighth inning set up man and Clinton would have been the closer as it related to taking down the country. But something happened on the way to America’s planned demise, the American voters got off the floor, just like in the movie Rocky I, and said, “Yo Adrian, we need to vote for Trump” and America’s planned execution was delayed.
In the present moment, America is living on borrowed time. However, much of the country has seen the benefits of a free-market President. Black unemployment rates are the lowest that they have ever been. Overall unemployment is at a 45 year low. Jobs are staying in America, Americans are being hired and bonuses are being given. The Deep State cannot allow these gains to continue, because Trump is winning over many of the apathetic Americans who previously could have cared less about politics.
Because America’s CEO positon, the Presidency, is controlled by an American, the top-down plan to conquer America has morphed to a bottom-up civil war based upon the use of guerilla war strategies which are employing domestic terror strategies. The strategies will stay in place until the Deep State’s political arm, the Democratic Pary, recaptures the White House.
Most of the Deep State’s bottom-up approach does not involve a major loss of life yet. The plan is progressive, and make no mistake about it, the actions fo the Deep State will turn as violent as it has to in order to regain control of the country. And if you think this article is an endorsement of the Republicans, think again. The Republicans have discovered that there is temporary political capital in being loyal to the country and its ideals. However, this new found Republican idealism is temporary and will only remain in place so long as this approach draws political donations and votes.
Although it is true that the Deep State controls all of the major media, Hollywood, various social institutions such the NFL, the schools etc., the Deep State does not enjoy a numerical population advantage when it comes to dividing the American people between the conservatives and liberals. I would estimate that 50% of the country is loyal to the cause of freedom to various degrees. And I would estimate that 10% are dedicated to the overthrow of America in its present form, with the remaining 40% not caring either way. At least they will not care until people start dying and there is not enough food to go around. It is interesting to see how a crisis makes people choose.
Who are the foot soldiers of the bottom-up approach to overthrowing America? They are the media with their incessant attacks upon Christianity, the family and our legal institutions. They are the social justice warriors, with MSM backing, that attack every aspect of the family (ie there are 97 genders and words like mankind, mom, dad, etc., are now forbidden).
Before Obama left office he signed off on using the UN as a police force in America. The bottom-up plan is to generate so much domestic chaos that the country is taken over by the UN. In this instance, the country would be made a protectorate of the United Nations. If you are wondering why I would believe in the protectorate approach, look at the CALEXIT movement, headed by Eric Holder. Their plan is to be a protectorate of the United Nations after leaving the US. Don’t forget about the Cook County Commissioners who proclaimed through the Chicago local media that they could not trust the National Guard to stem the gun violence in Chicago and they were going to bring in the United Nations to restore law and order. The Deep State has tipped their hand with their prior actions. Make no mistake about it,, this is martial law.
President Trump has been able to push back this planned take-over through the release of the memos. His popularity is rising, the American people are beginning to see through the Deep State charade.
As of now, the Deep State has not become overly violent. However, there is an intramural violence between the Deep State and American loyalists in government. The attempted assassination of Rep. Steve Scalise for daring to expose their child-sex-trafficking rings. Also, the attack upon the GOP laden train was no accident and of course the Clinton trail of bodies continues to grow.
The major goal of Deep State subversive activities is to keep the country in chaos until such time as they can recapture control of the active and public portion of the government. Then the top-down take-over of America will resume.
Read More @ TheCommonSenseShow.com
by Isabelle Z., Natural News:
Documents that have come to light recently show that Monsanto continued to make and sell polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) for eight years after they knew that they were hazardous to the environment and human health.
The firm was already exposed for this practice when internal documents were digitized and posted as part of the Poison Papers Project, but notes from a Monsanto meeting that were recently posted on Toxicdocs show just how callous they were about the matter.
Monsanto set up a meeting on August 25, 1969, to address the problem of their PCBs in the environment. During the meeting, executives set out three approaches they could use. The first was to go out of business. The second? “Sell the hell out of them [PCBs].” Yes, you read that correctly. Their third option was “Try to stay in business in controlled applications.”
The hand-written meeting notes can be viewed on the ToxicDocs database for free, along with millions of other incriminating documents showing corporate misconduct when it comes to asbestos, lead poisoning, and other toxins.
One would like to imagine that a company selling toxic wares would pull them from the market or close down altogether, but that’s not what happened here. In fact, in the year and a half that followed, Monsanto moved more PCBs than they ever had in the past, selling “the hell out of them” indeed. It wasn’t until 1977 that they finally stopped selling them.
Monsanto started manufacturing PCBs back in 1935, eventually dominating global production. The chemicals were used as lubricators in electrical equipment and as coolants. They were also found in paints, flame retardants, and refrigerators. They break down extremely slowly, and they continue to affect the environment to this day while also accumulating in the food chain.
A different internal memo that was released in the Poison Papers dated September 1969 says that Monsanto’s strategy for dealing with PCB leakages in the San Francisco Bay, Great Lakes, and Gulf Coast areas should be to “let govt prove its case on a case by case basis.”
They go on to add: “We can prove some things are ok at low concentration. Give Monsanto some defense. We can’t defend vs everything. Some animals or fish or insects will be harmed.”
The documents also show that the company admitted later that year that PCBs are highly toxic to birds.
Another document, their pollution abatement plan, stated: “The evidence proving the persistence of these compounds and their universal presence in the environment is beyond questioning.”
Their knowledge of the harms of PCBs actually goes back much further, however. In 1937, autopsies showed that three of the firm’s workers died from serious liver damage caused by handling the substance.
A document from September 1955 read: “We know Aroclors [PCBs] are toxic but the actual limit has not been precisely defined.”
Monsanto is facing PCB contamination lawsuits from authorities in Oakland, Berkeley, San Diego, Portland, San Jose, Seattle, Long Beach, and Spokane, among other places. The state of Oregon recently filed a $100 million lawsuit against Monsanto for cleaning up the damage caused to the state’s rivers and waterways, while the state of Washington is also suing the firm for PCB cleanup costs to the tune of billions of dollars.
Read More @ NaturalNews.com
by David Haggith, The Great Recession Blog:
It took sixteen months to build the exceptionally steep Trump Rally, and just one week to eliminate a quarter of it. While I wouldn’t call that jolting reversal a stock-market crash in the ordinary sense, the largest one-day point fall in the history of the market (by far) certainly marks a massive change in market conditions. From this point forward, it won’t be the same market it was.
Those who are critical of my belief that the US stock market would crash by January 2018, may try to dodge the significance of these tumbling days by saying that eleven-hundred-plus points aint what it used to be. While true, I’d point out that, even on a percentage basis, the Dow hasn’t fallen this much in one day since the belly of the Great Recession. That, being one of our greatest economic collapses in history, is a pretty low benchmark to match up to.
My detractors could crow that this was all the robo-trading algorithms’ fault, but I’d just say, “I told you so.” I have often written that one of the great perils of this present stock market is that no one really knows how those algos work if they suddenly get crammed in reverse and try to start bidding the market down, instead of bidding it up. I’ve said throughout my predictions of the coming global Epocalypse that I suspected the robo-traders would play a major role because they are a massive accelerant to any action. Hopefully, the market brains have them all unplugged now so they can put irrational people back in charge, but I’m certain they don’t.
As for my statements that I believed the stock market would likely crash in January, 2018, though (I gave myself a buffer until mid year when betting my blog on economic collapse), this great disruption, which quickly shattered the fatuous market confidence of the entire world, did begin in January. (No crash, of course, happens entirely in one day nor rarely all in one week. I’ve also said the Trump Tax Cuts do create extraordinary levity that should help lift the market back up, and that novel lift is why I gave myself a buffer until mid year. It looks, however, like my blog will be hanging around awhile longer.)
I’d also note to any crows on the wire that pretty well all commentators are agreeing that the stock market’s rocket-ride downhill in the last few days has been due primarily to bond interest rising. That, also, is exactly what I have said many, many times would precipate our economic collapse when it happens (and certainly any stock-market crash that plays into that).
I’ve not been sure whether the bond market would crash first, but my central thesis has always been that a rise in bond interest will be our undoing because the entire recovery was built over a cavern of debt that is continually caving in from the sides and falling away at the bottom. The abyss is, in other words, getting unstoppably larger at a frightening rate … if you’re paying attention and not maintaining delusions and denial by being dismissive. And that is exactly where the last week is a revelation of the coming collapse. That is its significance — not how far it the market has fallen nor even how it surprised so many, but all the reasons for which it fell and the exact timing of the fall, as I’ll lay out below.
Even one of the big Fedheads admitted today (Tuesday as I’m writing this) that this market gyration is largely due to the Fed’s movements: “Fed’s Bullard Calls Market Rout ‘Most Predicted Selloff’ Ever.” That’s both the cause and the timing part.
Now that the event has happened, there is not a lot of disagreement on the primary cause, but what I find remarkably telling is how minuscule the trigger turned out to be. There are certainly other dynamics and secondary causes involved than just the little bump in long-term bond interest, but that little bump created an avalanche that went all the way around the world for several days … and may continue to reverberate in the days ahead.
I’ve explained in my predictions of this event why bond interest, which has long been held in a narrow and low band, would break out, when it would rise (maybe late 2017 but most likely January), and why that would be such a disaster when it happened. So, when all of those things do, in fact, precisely line up … all over the world … in an event like this, maybe people should take note. Detractors could call one or two matches in how things played out a coincidence, but when everything matches, it is their criticism that seems stretched.
So, to lay out the precise details for the crows, let me note that the interest spike that has everyone riveted happened on the long-end bonds, which is where I said it would — the tens and thirties. And I’d note that the blip upward in interest that triggered this obvious panic was an even smaller blip than I thought it would take to get things sliding, which shows markets are even more rickety than I’ve indicated, in spite of the fact that many people have been claiming for years that the markets are stable and resilient. (Resilient to other shocks, maybe, but not at all to interest increases in long-term bonds. We haven’t even hit 3% on the ten-year yet! The big interest moves will come later in the year, which is why I felt safely hedged with a mid-year bet. What we see happening in global markets now is mostly speculation in anticipation of what is coming — a beginning attempt to figure it out and price it in.)
Then I’d note that the sudden rise in bond rates happened for the very reason I said it would happen — as a reaction to the Fed’s Great Unwind in that the slide began in the first week the Fed finally got serious about its balance-sheet reduction and actually unwound the amount it has been promising it would (but which it had not done until last week). Proving that this was not an anomaly, a similar interest bump happened again on shorter-term debt with today’s treasury auction where the three-year yield moved up to the highest its been since 2007 (2.28%)!
While today was volatile, the market did seem to be catching its balance. Maybe the Fed has let it fall as far as the Fed is comfortable with, and is now sending in the plunge-protection team — their fellow central banksters who buy US stocks directly (like the Swiss National Bank) as well as the members of their own cartel, whom they lead with nudges in futures. As of Tuesday evening, however, futures and foreign markets are still pointing the way to hell.
Monday was, in the very least, a game-changer for the stock market for months to come. It will be a different market when it does begin to rise again. Here’s a good summation from someone else of what happened:
“While the roots and drivers [of the selloff] are sure to be discussed for days, it looks to emanate from a perfect storm of reasons including, but not restricted to, a strong 2017 rally extending into January, low volatility, low interest rates, over-optimism and complacency, over-leverage and financial engineering, all coming to a head as investors react to the possibility of higher/faster interest rates rises with bond yields creeping higher to jeopardize the current market situation,” said Mike van Dulken, head of research at Accendo Markets, in a note. (MarketWatch)
Yes, fundamentally, a lot of flaws are built in to how the markets operate in a “financially engineered” manner, but it blew for the simple reason that interest rates nudged upward at the end of January as soon as the Federal Reserve got serious about its quantitative squeezing. That strongly supports my central thesis of this blog that this economy, built on caverns of debt and riddled with market design flaws, is too fragile to absorb any reduction in the Fed’s balance sheet. And that’s why I was able to time when the first crash would be likely to hit. It’s simple: When is the Fed scheduled to start getting serious in its Great Unwind? January. What week did they actually do it in? The last week of January. Kaboom!
The Fed cannot ever unwind. It will try because it believes it can, but kaboom! We’ll find ways to recover from this first shock over what happens to interest when they stop rolling over government debt. The government will adapt. It will find other buyers. But the cost will go up. And the kabooms will keep happening. I’ve always maintained that the failure of the recovery is baked in by design and will show when the Fed’s artificial life support is actually withdrawn. (Whether it is there by intentional design or design flaw, I’ll leave up to one’s conspiratorial imagination, as it doesn’t matter to me; both get you to the same place: kaboom!)
Some bigger voices than mine are saying the same thing:
Carl Icahn says he expects stock markets to bounce back after the massive sell-off Friday and Monday, while warning that current market volatility is a harbinger of things to come…. The volatility of recent weeks is cause for concern, Icahn said, adding thathe doesn’t remember a two-week period as turbulent as this one. He said the problem is that too much money is flowing into the index funds, where investors don’t know what they’re actually investing in. “Passive investing is the bubble right now, and that’s a great danger,” he said. Eventually, that will implode and could lead to a crisis bigger than in 2009, he added. “When you start using the market as a casino, that’s a huge mistake,” Icahn said. (“Carl Icahn Says Market Turn Is ‘Rumbling’ of Earthquake Ahead“)
The fact that the market has completed its de-evolution into a casino, rather than a place to buy ownership in a company, is part of the rickety framework I’ve described for our economy — part of what makes it easy to shove over with a nudge in interest because the entire economy has been made utterly dependent on low interest.
After witnessing Wall Street’s carnage on Monday, European stocks closed Tuesday at five-month lows. The Stoxx 600 logged its largest one-day percentage drop in twenty months. Hong Kong got a King-Kong-sized kink on the head. I write of global economic collapse, and this event certainly showed how instantaneous global contagion is across market classes and nations — bonds, stock, even some commodities, got clobbered almost everywhere.
Nevertheless, those who are starting to get it still don’t get it:
Read More @ TheGreatRecessionBlog.info
by Wolf Richter, Wolf Street:
The S&P 500 index hit an all-time high on January 26, which was a Friday. The following week, it started to fall, including a messy 2.1% selloff on Friday that brought the weekly loss to 3.8%, the worst such decline since the selloff that ended on February 7, 2016. So who were the net sellers of stocks during that week just before the 4.1% plunge on Monday? And who was buying just before the plunge?
Hedge funds were the biggest net sellers during that week, according to BofA Merrill Lynch analysts, cited by Bloomberg. The data was based on account activities by clients of BAML. During the week, four of BAML’s client categories sold a net of $3.6 billion in stocks, the most since early June 2016 as Britain’s Brexit vote had been approaching:
But one BAML client category was a net buyer just before the Monday plunge: corporations buying back their own shares. They have fueled the stock market boom over the past few years. They represent the relentless bid. Their purpose is to buy high to push share prices even higher. These BAML clients purchased about $600 million of their own shares just before the plunge.
These corporate share buybacks last week are particularly interesting in that companies are now reporting their Q4 earnings, and they enter into a pre-announcement quiet-period during which share-buybacks are also restricted. This might explain why buybacks during that week were down slightly from the four-week average.
BAML’s corporate clients were the only client category that did not dump shares over the past four weeks, and the four-week average shows net purchases of about $700 million.
Then Monday happened. And whatever hedge funds and institutional investors were doing, retail investors were trying to access their accounts in such large numbers that they ran into outages or slowdowns at a number of online brokers, mutual fund firms, and fintech robo-advisers, at least briefly. They included Charles Schwab, TD Ameritrade, Vanguard Group – whose clients might have experienced “sporadic difficulty” according to a spokeswoman – T. Rowe Price, Wealthfront, and Betterment.
And who else was selling?
Equity ETF holders. For example, they yanked a record $17.4 billion out of the largest ETF, the SPDR S&P 500 ETF, over the four-day trading days from February 1 through February 6. According to Bloomberg, this beat the prior record for a four-day period, September 25 – 28, 2007, when investors had yanked out $16 billion.
On just the day of February 6 – which was an enormously volatile day, with stocks surging, plunging, and surging again – investors removed $8 billion from the SPDR S&P 500 ETF. According to Bloomberg, that day was the third-largest single-day withdrawal since the Financial Crisis.
Read More @ WolfStreet.com
by Michael Snyder, The Economic Collapse Blog:
Our national debt is rapidly approaching 21 trillion dollars, and yet Congress wants to follow up a large tax cut bill with a massive increase in federal spending. This is absolute madness, and it is going to make our long-term financial problems as a nation far worse. After passing the tax bill, the appropriate thing to do would have been to cut federal spending. Yes, that would have not been a positive thing for the economy in the short-term, but we must start addressing our long-term priorities. If we do not do something about this exploding national debt, it could potentially destroy our republic all by itself.
Earlier today, I was absolutely horrified when I learned of a budget deal in the Senate that would increase federal spending by about 200 billion dollars in each of the next two years…
The Senate’s Republican and Democratic leaders unveiled a sweeping two-year budget agreement on Wednesday that would increase federal spending by hundreds of billions of dollars on domestic and defense programs alike.
That deal would eliminate strict budget caps, set in 2011 to reduce the federal deficit, and would allow Congress to spend about $200 billion more in the current fiscal year and in fiscal year 2019.
Seriously?
Our federal debt is going to hit 21 trillion dollars some time this year, and they want to throw hundreds of billions of dollars more spending on top of what we are already doing?
This alone is why we need true conservatives all over the nation to run for Congress. Our endless greed is literally destroying the bright future that our children and our grandchildren were supposed to have.
I don’t know if I even have the words to describe how foolish our leaders are being. If interest rates on government debt were to return to their long-term averages, the game would already be over. We should be desperately attempting to get our financial house in order, but instead we are spending money as if tomorrow will never come.
But tomorrow always arrives, and a day of reckoning is fast approaching.
Fortunately, there are some members of Congress that seem to understand that we cannot keep spending money that we do not have. The following comes from USA Today…
Rep. Mark Meadows, R-N.C., who chairs the hard-line House Freedom Caucus, wants to see what comes back from the Senate, said his spokesman Ben Williamson.
“But if the numbers are as high as we’re hearing, Rep. Meadows does not support the budget deal,” Williamson said.
Rep. Mo Brooks, R-Ala., said “this spending bill is a debt junkie’s dream… I’m not only a ‘no.’ I’m a ‘hell no.’”
As a member of Congress, I would always be a resounding “no” vote on these sorts of absurd budget deals.
Whatever happened to all of the strong fiscal conservatives that we sent to Congress during the days of the Tea Party movement? So many of them seem to have been enveloped by the swamp and are now doing whatever party leadership tells them to do.
Sadly, most Americans don’t even seem to understand that we have been adding more than a trillion dollars a year to the national debt since Barack Obama first entered the White House. The following is an extended excerpt from one of my previous articles…
When Barack Obama entered the White House, the U.S. national debt was just over 10.6 trillion dollars, and when he left the White House 8 years later it was sitting just shy of 20 trillion dollars.
So during those 8 years more than 9 trillion dollars was added to the national debt. But for purposes of this example we will round down to an even 9 trillion dollars.
When you divide 9 trillion dollars by 8, you get an average of 1.125 trillion dollars that was added to the national debt per year during the Obama era.
Dividing that figure by 365, you find that an average of $3,082,191,780 was added to the national debt every single day during the Obama administration.
And since there are 24 hours in a day, that means that an average of $128,424,657 was stolen from our children and our grandchildren every single hour of every single day while Barack Obama was president.
Under President Trump, we should be dramatically reducing federal spending and the size of the federal government.
Read More @ TheEconomicCollapseBlog.com
by Jim Hoft, The Gateway Pundit:
Earlier this week “hackers” leaked the contents of jailed Democrat Anthony Weiner’s address book online.
TGp reader S. Brown found this on line 424 :
Mary Jacoby‘s address and phone number.
So who is Mary Jacoby?
Mary Jacoby is the wife of Glenn Simpson.
In December Josh Caplan at The Gateway Pundit reported that Mary Jacoby bragged on Faceboook that her husband was behind “Russiagate.”
The wife of Fusion GPS founder Glenn Simpson, Mary Jacoby, is proud of her husband’s work that led to mass Trump-Russia hysteria. Jacoby is so proud that she felt the need to boast on Facebook about how ‘Russiagate,’ would not exist if it weren’t for her husband.
Mary Jacoby is also listed on the Obama White House visitors’ log.
Read More @ TheGatewayPundit.com