Money Flow Trading Method along with Risk Management

https://www.oftwominds.com/blog.html


Will MMT Work as Intended, Or Will It Trigger the Collapse of "Money"?

October 28, 2019

MMT is presented as the solution to the "problem" of insufficient government funding, but that's not the real problem.


Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) is presented as a means to painlessly fund the large-scale infrastructure / alternative energy spending the nation needs to rebuild and modernize.

While most people support the goal of useful fiscal stimulus (as opposed to paying people to dig holes and fill them), the question remains: Will MMT work as advertised?

Rather than dismiss it out of hand, I’m trying to approach the subject without ideological bias.

What Exactly Is MMT?

The basic idea of MMT (as I understand it) is that the economy is not running at 100% capacity–there is capital, equipment, people and resources which could be put to work to better society, and the chief impediment to making full use of our capacity is a lack of funding for projects that would benefit society.


In other words, the only thing standing in the way of broad-based, socially beneficial spending / progress is a lack of money (funding).

In the view of MMT advocates, a blindingly obvious source of funding is already available: the federal government can issue however much new currency it wants, and so the government could fund large-scale socially useful projects if the political will to do so was present.

We have to pause at this point and distinguish between borrowing money to fund projects, which is the current model, and issuing (printing) new currency.
In the current model, the federal government sells Treasury bonds and uses the proceeds to fund government spending. The Treasury pays interest on the bonds, and this mechanism — interest due on borrowed money — creates a “governor” on spending: as borrowing rises, so do interest payments, and as interest payments rise, this crimps other government spending.


The other mechanism in the current model is the central bank (Federal Reserve) can create currency out of thin air and buy Treasury bonds. This is a form of monetary stimulus, i.e. a way to inject new money into the financial system.

When the central bank creates money out of thin air to buy newly issued Treasury bonds, this is called “monetizing the debt”: in effect, the central bank creates money out of thin air and transfers it to the government by buying Treasury bonds.

The basic idea of MMT (as I understand it) bypasses both paying interest on newly issued money and the artifice of central bank monetization: instead, the Treasury issues new currency directly.

This removes the “governor” of interest payments, freeing the Treasury to issue cost-free currency in virtually unlimited quantities.


The Arguments Against MMT

Various historical studies have concluded that hyperinflation does not occur when governments must pay interest on their debt; the danger with rising interest and debt is default, not hyperinflation.


Hyperinflation arises when the supply of goods and services — the output of the economy — remains roughly the same while the supply of currency skyrockets. As money increases but the sum of goods and services available for purchase remains flat, the value of existing money declines accordingly.


If the supply of money in an economy is $1 billion, each unit of currency buys X (the purchasing power of each unit of currency). If the money supply is doubled without any expansion in the consumers’ pool of goods and services, the purchasing power of each unit of currency falls in half. This reduction in the purchasing power of each unit of currency is called inflation.


Governments facing soaring demands and limited tax revenues are naturally tempted to meet these demands with “free” new currency, since the political and financial pain caused by skyrocketing taxes leads to governments being tossed from power.

This temptation explains the regular occurrence of hyperinflation and debt default, as the temptation to over-borrow and pile up interest payments leads to governments defaulting on their debt. In both cases — hyperinflation and debt default — there’s a currency/ governance/ financial crisis that upends the status quo.


This is one common objection to MMT: the freedom to issue new currency is difficult to limit, as there will always be more demands for government spending.

Without some “governor” to limit the issuance of new currency to align with the expansion of goods and services, then governments tend to issue new currency far in excess of what the real economy is creating. This generates inflation, which impoverishes everyone using the currency.


MMT advocates claim that since MMT generates goods and services, it won’t generate inflation. But as noted earlier, rebuilding a bridge doesn’t actually create any new goods and services, or increase productivity: it generates wages and consumes materials and energy. Since it doesn’t generate more consumable goods and services, the expansion of wages and demand for materials will drive prices higher.


The core difficulty here is that the democratic political process is intrinsically skewed to short-term, politically expedient dynamics: politicians focus by necessity on winning re-election, and they will naturally approve new issuance of currency and new spending to placate the demands of constituents, lobbyists and campaign donors.


I honestly don’t see any intrinsic limit on political expediency. Politicians need to be forced to say, “I know your need is legitimate, but the money’s simply not there.”

Without some real-world limit on the issuance of new money, money will be issued in surplus because the issuance isn’t an economic process, it’s a political process.

This is a fatal flaw in MMT. Relying on politicians to impose limits on their own desire to win re-election is to deny human nature.


A second concern is the entire notion of “slack” in the economy — untapped capacity. Have you noticed the “help wanted” signs in every Home Depot and many other retail outlets and restaurants? We read about millions of people who aren’t working, but if they wanted to work, or had to work, why are there so many unfilled positions? The answers are complex: the wage being offered isn’t sufficient incentive, the unemployed don’t have the requisite skills, etc.


In other words, in some important ways, the economy appears to be very close to full capacity. New programs such as The New Green Deal will basically be poaching experienced workers from existing projects, driving up wages (good for workers) which can generate a wage-price spiral (bad for everyone who can’t demand higher incomes).


My third concern: as someone with 45 years of construction experience, I am keenly aware that the vast majority of the infrastructure and New Green Deal spending many people see as socially beneficial requires skilled labour. Rebuilding bridges, electrical grids, etc. all require highly specialized labour. Installing solar arrays also requires trained workers with physical stamina.


The process of training a large new workforce is time-consuming and expensive, and doesn’t necessarily generate new goods and services. In other words, it’s inherently inflationary as it puts new money into the economy but doesn’t increase the goods and services — at least until the newly trained workforce starts generating goods and services.


My fourth concern is related: ultimately, “wealth” (as measured in new goods and services generated by capital and labour) is generated by increasing productivity, via investment in greater efficiencies.


Much of the spending people want — repairing bridges, supplanting natural gas electrical generation with solar or wind, and so on — are not necessarily increasing productivity: the repaired bridge carries the same number of vehicles as it did before, so there is no increase in productivity.


In other words, efficiency and productivity are core dynamics, yet the MMT process is fundamentally political, and politics has little interest in efficiency or productivity. It is, as noted above, politically expedient, with a default setting to put off tough decisions into the future.


In the private sector, return on capital and the productivity of labour and processes are the core dynamics. These rationalize decisions to prioritize efficient use of capital, labour and resources. Absent this rationalization, resources can be squandered for politically expedient reasons. In other words, capital, resources and labour can be mal-invested, which brings up the opportunity cost: all the capital, labour and resources squandered on “bridges to nowhere” and other pork-barrel projects are no longer available for truly productive use.


The key question here is: How do we harness our intrinsically scarce capital, labour and resources to increase productivity and socially/ecologically beneficial investments in a sustainable way?


MMT’s diagnosis is that a lack of currency is the primary problem. The MMT solution assumes the new currency can be efficiently invested within the existing political system without disrupting the increasingly precarious existing financial system.


While the appeal of MMT is self-evident, it seems to me that both the financial and political systems are broken in ways that MMT, no matter how it’s managed, cannot fix.


The problem is we’re misallocating capital, resources and labour on a vast scale. That’s the problem. Adding more currency and capacity/”growth” doesn’t fix this problem, it actually makes it worse.


If we look around at the trillions of dollars in recently issued currency floating around the world looking for a yield, the trillions poured into asset bubbles that only benefit the few at the top, the billions of gallons of fuel wasted in traffic jams and other consequences of “endless growth on a finite planet”, the gargantuan waste of capital, resources and labour squandered in maintaining a “growth at any cost” Landfill Economy of mindless consumption, regardless of consequences, it’s hard not to see MMT as a “green” Band-Aid for a profoundly broken, wasteful, unsustainable system.


MMT leaves the existing status quo essentially untouched and adds a new layer of newly issued currency and spending, and a new layer of “growth” and consumption, consumption that no matter how socially beneficial is still an additional burden on the planet.


In effect, MMT is another attempt to preserve a dysfunctional status quo by adding another layer of newly issued currency and “growth.” More “growth,” even the sort envisioned as “Green,” is simply adding to a destructive system. What’s needed is a radical reduction in consumption and a diversion from a consumerist Landfill Economy to one driven by incentives other than “more of everything” in the name of “growth.”


As longtime readers know, I see a new system of private-sector currency, DeGrowth and decentralization and the institutionalization of a more sustainable (i.e. less perverse and destructive) set of incentives as the only set of solutions that can fix what’s broken in the current socio-economic model.


But that doesn’t mean MMT won’t be tried, as the three engines of “growth” over the past 20 years — soaring debt, financialization and globalization — all falter.


To sum up: MMT is presented as the solution to the "problem" of insufficient government funding, but that's not the real problem: the real problem is the purchasing power of the fiat currency that will be issued in the trillions of dollars.


Life Under MMT
So what will life under MMT look like?
In Part 2 — Life Under MMT: A Self-Reinforcing, Inflationary Feedback Loop, we’ll examine the repercussions of the program’s massive new money creation and fiscal stimulus.

https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitic...ToK4TmEk4KRtvc

Authored by Paul Craig Roberts,

For about 70 years the CIA has been undermining a free press. It began with Operation Mockingbird, a Cold War operation against communism. The CIA recruited journalists into a propaganda network. The CIA paid journalists to write fake stories or to publish stories written by the CIA in order to control explanations that served the agency’s agendas. Student and cultural organizations and intellectual magazines, such as Encounter, were suborned into the CIA’s propaganda network.


Thanks to the German journalist, Udo Ulfkotte, we know that every European journalist of any significance is a CIA asset. In 1977 Carl Bernstein of Watergate fame wrote in Rolling Stone that the CIA “has secretly bankrolled numerous foreign press services, periodicals and newspapers - both English and foreign language - which provided excellent cover for CIA operatives.” Like most other people, Western journalists were all too willing to sell out their integrity for money. The few who were not were blackmailed into submission.


The few honest journalists who remain have been forced out of the “mainstream” or presstitute media onto Internet websites. Wikileaks is by far the best news organization of our time. To bring this organization to heel Washington, using its Swedish, British, and Ecuadoran vassals, has persecuted Wikileaks’ founder, Julian Assange, for years. The CIA’s media vassals, including the New York Times and The Guardian, both of which published the material leaked to Wikileaks that is being used to destroy Assange, have joined wholeheartedly in the persecution of the World’s Best and Most Honest Journalist.


Currently Assange is being tortured, apparently to death, while bring held in solitary confinement in a maximum security British prison awaiting his extradition to the US on false charges. As the CIA cannot be certain it has suborned all the federal judges, Washington is just as happy if Assange dies in a British prison as there is no valid case against him under current US law. Probably the absence of a valid case doesn’t matter as the rule of law in the US is very difficult to find.


The lack of any valid case against Assange is the reason the distinguished documentary film maker John Pilger describes Assange’s persecution as a Stalinist Show Trial.


The worst moment was one of a number of ‘worst’ moments. I have sat in many courtrooms and seen judges abuse their positions, This judge, Vanessa Baraitser—actually she isn’t a judge at all; she’s a magistrate—shocked all of us who were there.

Her face was a progression of sneers and imperious indifference; she addressed Julian with an arrogance that reminded me of a magistrate presiding over apartheid South Africa’s Race Classification Board. When Julian struggled to speak, he couldn’t get words out, even stumbling over his name and date of birth.
When he spoke truth and when his barrister spoke, Baraister contrived boredom; when the prosecuting barrister spoke, she was attentive. She had nothing to do; it was demonstrably preordained. In the table in front of us were a handful of American officials, whose directions to the prosecutor were carried by his junior; back and forth this young woman went, delivering instructions.


The judge watched this outrage without a comment. It reminded me of a newsreel of a show trial in Stalin’s Moscow; the difference was that Soviet show trials were broadcast. Here, the state broadcaster, the BBC, blacked it out, as did the other mainstream channels.

Having ignored Julian’s barrister’s factual description of how the CIA had run a Spanish security firm that spied on him in the Ecuadorean embassy, she didn’t yawn, but her disinterest was as expressive. She then denied Julian’s lawyers any more time to prepare their case – even though their client was prevented in prison from receiving legal documents and other tools with which to defend himself.


Her knee in the groin was to announce that the next court hearing would be at remote Woolwich, which adjoins Belmarsh prison and has few seats for the public. This will ensure isolation and be as close to a secret trial as it’s possible to get. Did this happen in the home of the Magna Carta? Yes, but who knew?
Read more here...


What is astonishing about the CIA’s destruction of Julian Assange is the silence of American law schools and bar associations, the silence of universities, the absence of student and labor union protests, the absence of any protection of Assange’s rights from courts as the last news organization willing and capable of holding governments accountable for their crimes is destroyed openly in full view of the law schools, intellectuals, bar associations, courts, and print and TV media.
The CIA’s control over explanations is as complete as the control Big Brother has in George Orwell’s dystopian novel, 1984. And this doesn’t bother the citizens of the US, UK, Australia, Canada, Sweden, Europe. Only a few individuals speak out for Assange, and they, too, are demonized in turn.



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The Age of Tyranny has now descended upon the Western World.

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/...ops+to+zero%29

SNIPPET:

According to the Washington Examiner, discussions with the whistleblower - revealed by RealClearInvestigations as 33-year-old Eric Ciaramella have been halted, "and there is no discussion of testimony from a second whistleblower, who supported the first's claims."


Ciaramella complained that President Trump abused his office when he asked Ukraine to investigate corruption allegations against Joe Biden and his son Hunter, as well as claims related to pro-Clinton election interference and DNC hacking in 2016.

On Thursday, a top National Security Council official who was present on a July 25 phone call between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelensky testified that he saw nothing illegal about the conversation.

"I want to be clear, I was not concerned that anything illegal was discussed," said Tim Morrison, former NSC Senior Director for European Affairs who was on the July 25 call between the two leaders.
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And now, the partisan whistleblowers have cold feet;
"There is no indication that either of the original whistleblowers will be called to testify or appear before the Senate or House Intelligence committees. There is no further discussion ongoing between the legal team and the committees," said the Examiner's source.

The whistleblower is a career CIA officer with expertise in Ukraine policy who served on the White House National Security Council during the Obama administration, when 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden was "point man" for Ukraine, and during the early months of the Trump administration. -Washington Examiner


In other words, House Democrats are about to impeach President Trump over a second-hand whistleblower complaint by a partisan CIA officer, and neither he nor his source will actually testify about it (for now...).


On Thursday, the House passed a resolution establishing a framework for Trump impeachment proceedings, belatedly granting Republicans the ability to subpoena witnesses, but only if Schiff and fellow Democrats on the Intelligence Committee agree.

Mark Zaid, who along with Andrew Bakaj is an attorney for both the original whistleblower and the second whistleblower, told the Washington Examiner the legal team was willing to work with lawmakers so long as anonymity is ensured. “We remain committed to cooperating with any congressional oversight committee's requests so long as it properly protects and ensures the anonymity of our clients,” Zaid said.


On Wednesday, Zaid and Bakaj declined to confirm or deny in a statement to the Washington Examiner that Eric Ciaramella, 33, a career CIA analyst and former Ukraine director on the NSC, was the whistleblower after a report by RealClearInvestigations. -Washington Examiner

In September, House Intelligence Committee Chair Adam Schiff, who lied about contacts with Ciaramella (and hired two Ciaramella associates as staffers) said that the whistleblower "would like to speak to our committee."

Meanwhile, once the House impeaches Trump - which it most certainly will - the tables will turn in the Senate, which will hold a mandatory trial. Not only will the GOP-Senators controlling the proceedings be able to subpoena documents and other evidence, they'll be able to compel Ciaramella, the Bidens, Chalupa and any other witnesses they desire as we head into the 2020 US election.


Nancy Pelosi saw this coming and caved to her party anyway. There isn't enough popcorn in the world for what's coming.

hi Bruce, did not you get any chance to answer my previous post., or you are NOT interested to show/send me RESULTS of your LIVE trading account, at least 3-6 months, I have the investors but they need to see the results firsts before open live account so you could manage. plz advise asap. thanks

Good morning loveandpeace

I have informed you that I need to speak on the telephone with you. I can be reached at 514 247 0775.

I do not trade for people that I do not know and I do not deal with the public in certain areas other than teaching how to trade Forex. You know from my skills in teaching you how successful that I am doing this.

KYL is called "KNOW YOUR CLIENT"

Please call me if you are serious in moving forward. Showing results to strangers is not in my business model. I trade for my corporation and it's shareholders.
I teach people how to be a winning trader in Forex if they have the needed skills.

I manage money for family and friends in the equity markets. One of my largest clients is a family member and I only manage under LPOA. "Limited Power of Attorney"

I look forward to speaking with you on the telephone if you want to do things properly.

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The Fed’s Liquidity Response Is Too Little Too Late – But That Was Always The Plan…

The globalists and banking elites have been running the “order out of chaos” scam for a long time, centuries in fact. One thing that practice does is make people of otherwise average intelligence appear brilliant. One thing that organized conspiracy does is make a group of highly vulnerable criminals appear omnipotent and untouchable. Ultimately, it’s all about time. The globalists have had lots of time to tune and refine their methods for manipulating the collective psyche of the masses.

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They make mistakes often, but as long as no one confronts them directly and removes these people from the equation, they simply set up shop elsewhere under a different name using different masks and continue their insidious work. As long society is still stricken with ignorance and assumes that such conspiracies are “impossible”, the elites have a free hand to victimize the population further. As long as academic idiots misinterpret Occam’s Razor and insist that the evidence of conspiracy does not matter because it does not fit with their narrow notion of “the simplest explanation”, they prop up the banking cartel and allow it to thrive.

On the positive side, I see an awakening taking place among a subset of the population which is savvy to the games of the globalists. I believe this subtle wave of analytical samurai has the elites worried; they realize that time for them is, for once in history, starting to run out. One day soon, they may find themselves the direct targets of a revolution, and they don’t like that idea.


Hence, the globalists need a plan, a con game of epic proportions on top of one of the largest economic bubbles in recent history. The plan relies first on a tried and true weapon of the elites: Co-option of the people that oppose them. And how does one co-opt a movement? By taking over their leadership. Second, for global change the cabal needs a global distraction, or a firestorm of numerous distractions to keep the public enthralled or in fear. Third, they need to divert blame away from themselves by presenting the public with believable scapegoats.


When it’s all over, they want people dazed and shell-shocked, wondering how it happened and searching for anyone to point a finger at. The narrative will be that “it was a perfect storm of coincidences”, that it was “the evil of the political left”, or the “evil of the political right”. They want to turn public confusion into civil war, all while they sit back and enjoy the chaos from a comfortable beach chair and wait for the moment they can swoop in and act like saviors seeking to “end the madness”.


This process is happening today, and only the most blind have problems seeing that the world has gone over the edge of an ugly precipice.

Disinformation agents call it “doom and gloom”, because that is supposed to dissuade you from taking it seriously. But the facts are the facts. This is why I focus so much of my time on economics – While numbers and stats can be rigged, the effects of a financial crash cannot be hidden. It is undeniable, and all the critics of this information can do is try to trick people into not looking at it.


The reality is this: The US economy is in steep decline and this is an engineered event.
The Federal Reserve spent the better part of the past decade inflating what we now call the “Everything Bubble”, a bubble that spreads through almost every facet of the economy from equities to housing to GDP to employment to corporate debt, consumer debt and national debt. I don’t think anyone denies the existence of this bubble except the central banks and a few mainstream media outlets.


Jerome Powell, now the Fed chairman, warned back in 2012 that the markets had become addicted to Fed stimulus and that any tightening of liquidity by the central bank, including cutting the balance sheet or raising interest rates, would cause a sharp reversal or crash. As soon as Powell became chairman, he ignored his own warnings and tightened liquidity anyway.


People confused about why Powell would take such action knowing full well that it would trigger a crash should look into the history of the Bank for International Settlements and how it dictates the policy decisions of all its member banks. The BIS is the “central bank of central banks” and is the central global manager of all national central banks. Powell and the Fed board do not write policy alone, they merely carry out policy decision made by the BIS.


As Powell hinted at in 2012, the Everything Bubble was popped in 2018 by the Fed through rate hikes and balance sheet cuts. Once the avalanche is triggered there is no stopping it. The rupture in fundamentals is ongoing. Only stocks markets and certain rigged statistics remain in blissful levitation.


The plunge in stock markets in December was stalled as corporations stepped in with stock buybacks and China pumped billions in stimulus into the global system.

However, stocks are not long for this world as buybacks are set to slow down and stimulus measures from various central banks are seeing limited gains.
https://img.revcontent.com/?url=http...=true&fmt=jpeg

 

1. US manufacturing has fallen to levels not seen in 10 years and has entered recession territory.
2. US housing starts fell sharply in September and new home building declined. This indicator usually precedes a fall in overall housing sales by a few months. This would mean a return to the plunge in housing sales last seen during the summer. In other words, the recent pop in sales is a one off driven by lower mortgage rates, and is set to end.
3. US retail sales are following a similar pattern to housing markets, with a recessionary decline earlier this year, followed by a short term rebound, and now a return to negative territory as the trend reasserts itself.
4. Retail stores are closing at a record pace in 2019. Over 8500 stores are already closing this year, with a predicted 12,000 store closing by the beginning of 2020. This is often blamed on “online shopping”, but online retailer only account for around 14% of the total retail market. This hardly explains why brick and mortar stores are closing in droves. Not only that, but major online retailers like Amazon are seeing declining profits, with projected holiday profits set to fall even further.
5. Corporate profits have tumbled in 2019 and earnings growth estimates have been drastically adjusted to the downside. Only certain companies, like Apple, have come out of the fray untouched so far, but this is common during recession and depression level crisis events – a handful of corporations survive and consolidate while the rest collapse.
6. Corporate debt is at all time highs while cash holdings of most corporations are minimal; so much so that these companies are turning to the Fed’s repo overnight loans more and more to stay liquid.
7. Consumer debt is at all time highs, with American households owing a total of more than $13 trillion.
8. While there has been a recent steepening of the 3 month to 10 year yield curve as well as the 2 year to 10 year yield curve, this is actually a bad sign. A long term inversion of the yield curve is a sure signal of economic recession. When the yield curve steepens, this is the point historically in which a sharp crash in fundamentals and markets takes place.

In other words, the crash is happening now. Many analysts have wrongly assumed that that the Fed’s recent asset purchases indicate that they are seeking to “kick the can” on the crash. It’s much too late for that. If the Fed wanted to stall the crash then they would have initiated full bore QE4 around 8-10 months ago just after the December plunge. International banks and central banks have been warning about dollar liquidity issues since mid-2018. The Fed continued to tighten and did not act until the past couple of months, coincidentally, right after multiple polls showed that a majority of Americans were becoming worried about a recession.


That is to say, the Fed kept liquidity conditions as tight as possible until the public finally became aware of the crisis. The truth is, nothing has changed as far as liquidity is concerned.

The Fed launched asset purchases to make it look like they care about trying to fix the problem. However, the Fed’s repo stimulus and balance sheet increases are not enough to make any difference. Calling Fed repo actions “Not-QE” is a funny means pointing out that the Fed is not being straightforward about its intentions, but when comparing current repo loans and asset purchases to an event like TARP back in 2008, which by itself injected over $16 trillion in liquidity into the financial system (no audit of the other QE programs has yet been undertaken), the current stimulus is nothing but a drop in the ocean.


The Fed is definitely NOT being honest in its intentions, but not in the way many alternative analysts seem to think. The Fed’s not trying to hide QE4 measures, the Fed is continuing to do the bare minimum necessary to appear as though they are taking action while actually accomplishing very little.


They clearly have no intention of kicking the can any longer. The Fed WANTED a crash, and now they have it. The reason why is perfectly logical: The central bank, under the control of globalists at the BIS, needs economic chaos to provide cover for what they call the “global economic reset”. Essentially, it is the controlled demolition of the old world order to make way for their “new world order”.


As I’ve noted in previous articles, they’ve done all his before and openly admitted to causing crashes in the past, including the Great Depression. After each of these financial crisis events, globalist institutions have been formed and leaps forward in global governance have been taken. The implosion of the Everything Bubble appears to be the last intended economic crisis event before total centralization is achieved.


This is not to say that they will be successful in their agenda; I happen to think that in the long run they will fail. But the fact remains that the current recessionary collapse, soon to become far more destructive than it already is, was caused by the central bankers, and they did it knowingly. The narrative of the “bumbling Fed” desperate to save itself or the system is delusional. The evidence simply doesn’t support this claim.


Fed officials publicly acknowledged what would happen if liquidity tightening was pursued. They did it anyway, and then told the public all was well. They have lied every step of the way, keeping the public completely in the dark and unprepared for the consequences.


At the same time, we have a supposedly “populist” president that attacks the Fed regularly while at the same time taking full credit for the bubble in markets. Donald Trump boasts daily of his influence in markets, employment, GDP, etc. He does this even though he called the economic recovery ‘a bubble’ during his campaign. He now owns the health of the economy, and by extension he has given the central bankers and the globalist a perfect gift – He has set himself and his supporters up as scapegoats for the crash. As he falls, he will discredit central bank critics for generations to come.


If you were wondering why the globalists stalled for ten years on crashing the system, now you know. If they launched the crisis a few years ago, they would have been blamed for it. Today, it’s hard to say. The growing contingent of liberty activists immune to the scam (and immune to the Kabuki theater involving Donald Trump) might be able to turn the tide enough to force the hand of the elites. Maybe they will have to back off of some of their centralization efforts, or drag out the economic downturn longer than they wanted. I suspect they have already had to do this on a number of occasions because of liberty analysts.


Ultimately, the crash is about us. It is about affecting changes to the public psychology, making us more receptive to extreme globalization. If they don’t care what we think, then why spend trillions of dollars and endless hours and manpower trying to influence our perception? They need the vast majority of us to consent to the “new world order”, otherwise they will have failed.

https://www.zerohedge.com/commoditie...ops+to+zero%29


Via InvestmentResearchDynamics.com,

“By sticking to the new orthodoxy of monetary policy and pretending that we have made the banking system safe, we are sleepwalking towards that crisis.”

– Mervyn King, former head of the Bank of England in a lecture at the IMF’s recent annual meeting

The market levitates higher on phony economic data from the Government, Trump tweets, Fed money printing and hedge fund algorithms chasing headline and twitter sound bites. Currently the stock market, dulled by money printing and official interventions, could care less about economic reality and rising global systemic geopolitical and financial risk. Corporate headline earnings “beats” are considered bullish even if the earnings declined YoY or sequentially.

But for those who don’t have their head in the sand, clinging desperately to the “hope” offered by the misdirecting Orwellian propaganda, it’s difficult to ignore the message signalled by the legendary levels of insider selling.



Someone is not telling the truth – The Fed once again last week increased the size of both the overnight and “term” repo operations. Starting Thursday (Oct 24th) the overnight repos were increased from $75 billion to “at least” $120 billion and the term repos (2 week term) of “at least” $35 billion were extended to the end of November, with two “at least $45 billion” term repos thrown in for good measure. The Fed is also outright printing helicopter money for the banks at a rate of $60 billion per month (via “T-bill POMOs).
At the height of the last QE/money printing cycle, the Fed was doing $75 billion per month. So whatever the problem is behind the curtain, it’s already as large or larger than the 2008 crisis..


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That escalated quickly – When the repo operations started in September, the Fed attributed the need to “relieve funding pressures.” At the time the public was fed the fairytale that corporations were pulling funds from money market funds to pay quarter-end taxes. Well, we’re over five weeks past that event and the repo operations have escalated in size and duration three times. Someone is not telling the truth…


The rapid increase in Fed money printing in just five weeks reflects serious problems developing in the global financial system. Actually, the problem is easy to identify:

At every cohort – government, corporate and household – the level of debt has become unsustainable, with not insignificant portions of that debt in non-performing status (seriously delinquent or in default).

Thus, the Central Banks have had to resort to money printing to help the banks manage the rising level of distress on their balance sheet and to monetize the escalating rate of Treasury debt issuance.

The quote at the beginning is from the former head of the Bank of England, Mervyn King. King is warning that the global financial system is headed toward a crisis and that money printing ultimately won’t save it. While it’s pretty obvious that a disaster waits on the horizon, when the former head of a big Central Bank delivers a message like that instead of Orwellian gobbledygook, the world should pay heed. I would suggest that the Fed’s money printing signals that the risk of a crisis intensifies weekly.


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Got Gold?

https://www.theburningplatform.com/2...w/#more-206852


Submitted by CCRider

Guest Post by Caitlin Johnstone

https://i0.wp.com/caitlinjohnstone.c...20%2C448&ssl=1

“The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum — even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there’s free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.”

~ Noam Chomsky

The plutocrat-owned narrative managers of the political/media class work constantly to shrink the Overton window, the spectrum of debate that is considered socially acceptable. They do this by framing more and more debates in terms of how the oligarchic empire should be sustained and supported, steering them away from debates about whether that empire should be permitted to exist at all.

They get people debating whether there should be some moderate changes made or no meaningful changes at all, rather than the massive, sweeping changes we all know need to be made to the entire system.

They get people debating whether they should elect a crook in a red hat or a crook in a blue hat, rather than whether or not they should be forced to elect crooks.

They get people debating violations of government secrecy laws, not whether the government has any business keeping those secrets from its citizenry in the first place.

They get people debating how internet censorship should take place and whom should be censored, rather than whether any internet censorship should occur.

They get people debating how and to what extent government surveillance should occur, not whether the government has any business spying on its citizens.

They get people debating how subservient and compliant someone needs to be in order to not get shot by a police officer, rather than whether a police officer should be shooting people for those reasons at all.

They get people debating whether or not a group of protesters are sufficiently polite, rather than debating the thing those protesters are demonstrating against.

They get people debating about whether this thing or that thing is a “conspiracy theory”, rather than discussing the known fact that powerful people conspire.

They get people debating whether Tulsi Gabbard is a dangerous lunatic, a Russian asset, a Republican asset gearing up for a third party run, or just a harmless Democratic Party crackpot, rather than discussing the fact that her foreign policy would have been considered perfectly normal prior to 9/11.

They get people debating whether Bernie Sanders is electable or too radical, rather than discussing what it says about the status quo that his extremely modest proposals which every other major country already implements are treated as something outlandish in the United States.

They get people debating whether Jeremy Corbyn has done enough to address the Labour antisemitism crisis, rather than whether that “crisis” ever existed at all outside of the imaginations of establishment smear merchants.

They get people debating whether Joe Biden or Elizabeth Warren would win against Trump, rather than whether either of those establishment lackeys is a worthy nominee.

They get people debating whether politicians should have corporate sponsors, rather than whether corporations should be allowed to interfere in the electoral process at all.

They get people debating if the US should be pursuing regime change in Iran or Syria, rather than whether the US has any business overthrowing the governments of sovereign nations to begin with.

They get people debating how many US troops should be in Syria, rather than whether that illegal invasion and occupation was ever legitimate in the first place.

They get people debating whether to kill people slowly by sanctions or kill them quickly with bombs, rather than whether they should be killed at all.

They get people debating whether or not some other country’s leader is an evil dictator, rather than whether it’s any of your business.

They get people debating the extent to which Russia and Trump were involved in the Democratic Party’s 2016 email leaks, rather than the contents of those leaks.

They get people debating what the response should be to Russian interference in the election, rather than whether that interference took place at all, and whether it would really matter if it did.

They get people debating how much government support the poor should be allowed to have, rather than whether the rich should be allowed to keep what they’ve stolen from the poor.


They get people debating what kind of taxes billionaires should have to pay, rather than whether it makes sense for billionaires to exist at all.

They get people impotently debating the bad things other countries do, rather than the bad things their own country does which they can actually do something about.

They get people debating what should be done to prevent the rise of China, rather than whether a multipolar world might be beneficial.

They get people debating whether western cold war escalations against the Russian Federation are sufficient, rather than whether they want the horrors of the cold war to be resurrected in the first place.

They get people debating what extent cannabis should be decriminalized, rather than whether the government should be allowed to lock anyone up for deciding to put any substance whatsoever in their own body.

They get people debating whether or not US troops should be withdrawn from Afghanistan, rather than whether or not there should be any US troops outside of the US.

They get people debating whether or not Julian Assange is “a real journalist”, rather than whether or not they should set legal precedents that necessarily criminalize acts of journalism.

They get people debating the subtle details of bail protocol, political asylum, embassy cat hygiene and leaking rather than whether it should ever be legal to imprison a publisher for exposing government war crimes.

They get people debating what the punishment should be for whistleblowers, not what the punishment should be for those they blow the whistle on.

They get people debating whether Fox or MSNBC is the real “fake news”, rather than whether the entirety of mainstream media is oligarchic propaganda.

They get people debating about how the things everyone is freaking out over Trump doing were previously done by Obama, rather than discussing why all US presidents do the same evil things regardless of their parties or campaign platforms.

They get people debating what should be done with money, not whether the concept of money itself is in need of a complete overhaul.

They get people debating what should be done with government, not whether the concept of government itself is in need of a complete overhaul.

They get people debating whether the status quo should be reinforced or revised, rather than whether it should be flushed down the toilet where it belongs.

They get people angrily debating things they can’t change, rather than constructively working on the things that they can.

They get people shoving against each other in opposite directions, while they swiftly build a cage around us all.

https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/bl...ops+to+zero%29


Blain's Morning Porridge, submitted by Bill Blain of Shard Capital

“There are short ladders and very long snakes. That one took us back to square 1..”

Trawling through the market headlines this morning, I’m struck by the number of comments about how much better the investment environment looks. There is less likelihood of a global recession, corporate earnings aren’t as bad as expected, and jobs are growing. I am unconvinced. I see worrying connections across the wires.

From my perspective – which admittedly has been from a train in the middle of nowhere - it feels we’ve reached the end of something. Time has been called on this particular era of irrational market exuberance.

My spidey-senses are tingling due to manner in which events across markets, individual stocks, politics, geopolitics and gut-instinct are connected.

I’m not predicting sudden or massive financial collapse – just a wake up and smell the coffee correction in Bonds (which feels underway), and selective deflation in over-sold sectors of the stock markets. As always, any reversal will set off wailing and despair, yet most of the critical lessons will be missed. Fear not - we will get another chance to relearn them in a few years time! (Blain’s Market Mantra No 2: The Market has no memory.)



It’s just as well we aren’t heading for the deep prolonged global recession so many naysayers have been predicting thru 2019. Slowdown yes. Trade is going to remain a problem. But growth drivers were changing anyway. Tech will change the world’s trade roads. China’s furious growth spurt of the last 20 years is over. India might be growing, but it lacks the state momentum to drive global growth the way China did. And climate change will prove deeply significant in the future as consumers are persuaded to believe food miles and imports matter.

Long-term the relationship between the West and China will continue to dominate economies. There is more of a wall than ever before. Xi has consolidated his position as defacto emperor. He will allow his mandarins to make a show of engaging on trade, but has made clear his distrust of Trump. We’ll see that distrust and divergence drive Occidental and Oriental Technological economies apart and inevitably lead to a variation of Cold War economics.

That’s all in the long-term. The medium term is going to be even more fascinating. Expect some surprising shifts over the next few months. Taking some of the effervescence out of overhyped expectations may be positive past the short-term pain. Consider what is to come like toothache: root canal surgery without anaesthetic. Anticipating the consequences is the trick.


Let me try to connect some of the dots:
We’ve heard immediate pushback from international investors on the $2 trillion Aramco valuation Crown Prince MBS demands. Bank’s anxious for fees now say $1.7 ish. Investors say far less, pointing out the returns are less than the other oil majors for much greater political risk. MBS has staked his and his country’s future on being able to diversify the economy away from oil. He can only do that by monetizing Aramco because the Saudi Royals have squandered the massive wealth their oil once promised.


The consequences of failing to deliver diversification and jobs will be rising political dissent – which is becoming apparent. Instability in the Middle East? Never a good thing for a global economy still dependent on oil.


Saudi is heavily invested in the increasingly discredited Softbank Vision fund. No matter how many bone-saws are employed, losing $50 bln in the Vison fund will not increase MBS’ political longevity. Softbank’s London based trading head, Rajeev Misra was a genius in the market’s eye last year, but this year is pilloried for running a dysfunctional firm. The papers say his trading style is creating the same kind of losses that sank his former bank – Deutsche Bank. Softbank’s losses in its vision fund are steadily mounting – a string of losing IPOs (Uber and WeWork) spell the end of the Unicorn myth.


Who knew: companies with no discernible route to profit don’t work?
Deutsche Bank is a whole distraction in itself. That you can buy German’s leading bank for less than Malaysian Fraudster Jho Low nicked on an average day from 1MBS says it all about the lack of future proofing across the German economy – which begins to explain the structural problems Germany now faces redirecting national engineering talent and infrastructure. (And is why Europe is likely to remain mired in slowdown long after the rest of the global economy picks up.)


Meanwhile, Berkshire Hathaway – the quintessential fundamental value investor, sits on its largest ever cash pile – waiting for the right assets to buy. Timing is everything. You have to wonder what they know and expect? It’s not just the unicorns that are sinking Softbank feeling a lack of market love. The earnings season was stronger than anyone expected (after all, we were told to expect recession), but the bond market appears to have peaked meaning corporate credit quality and leverage is back in investors’ sights.


And if corporate America looks week, then what about the potential credibility of the Government? While the Democrats pursue impeachment, the world looks on in horror. If Trump was playing games with Ukraine – what has his son-in-law been promising the Saudis? Trump may or may not have committed a crime to justify impeachment – but the devil will be proving it clearly, openly and transparently. The Democrats are unlikely to get the 2/3 through the Republican dominated Senate they need to sling him. Who cares? The real issue is how American voters read the signal it sends in terms the 2020 election!


Not that the UK or Europe are any better. Political weakness is a major theme underlying global markets.

In Central banking we’ve got Christine Lagarde giving her first big speech has ECB head in Berlin later today. What’s her offer? More of the same plus an intent to bring Europe together in fiscal harmony to paper over the monetary cracks so apparent in the Euro? Good luck to her. Back in the UK – Mark Carney finishes at the end of January, but no one seems to be considering his successor during the election.

https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/fe...ops+to+zero%29


Fed's Balance Sheet Soars Above $4 Trillion: Up $250 Billion Since Repo Crisis


https://zh-prod-1cc738ca-7d3b-4a72-b...?itok=LY4e264-
by Tyler Durden


Mon, 11/04/2019 - 13:30




If it seems like it was just over a month ago that the repo market suddenly suffered its biggest cardiac arrest since the financial crisis, when overnight repo rates exploded from 2% to 10% in an instant with no observable news or catalyst on the 11th anniversary of Lehman's collapse...


https://zh-prod-1cc738ca-7d3b-4a72-b...t%20repo_0.png


... and only immediate Fed intervention prevented a full-blown financial crisis, it's because it was.

As we have already discussed, we now know that said crisis was precipitated by JPMorgan quietly and steadily withdrawing liquidity from money markets...

https://zh-prod-1cc738ca-7d3b-4a72-b...20unwind_1.jpg

Source: Monday Morning Macro... while at the same time Jamie Dimon's bank reduced the cash it has on deposit at the Federal Reserve, from which it might have lent to other banks and prevent the repo crisis, by $158 billion in the year through June, a 57% decline, as JPM faced the highest G-SIB surcharges of all US banks due to the specific composition of its balance sheet.

https://zh-prod-1cc738ca-7d3b-4a72-b...ges%20GSIB.jpg


Of course, whether this was indeed the reason behind JPM's liquidity withdrawal, or if Jamie Dimon strategically shrank the bank's available liquidity in order to incite a repo market crisis (the same way some speculate Lehman was sacrificed to launch QE1 and the global financial bailout),there is no way of knowing for sure - we can hope that Elizabeth Warren's questions to Steve Mnuchin will provide some additional insight, although we doubt it - but what we do know is that in response to September's repocalypse, not only did the NY Fed launch overnight and term repos to inject liquidity into the market, it also started "Not QE", or "Quasi QE", which is never ever to be confused with "QE 4" (as that would suggest the US economy is now in a recession and the Fed is panicking to prevent a market crash).

Why? Because whereas the narrative never touched on JPM and its explicit liquidity withdrawal, pundits were all too eager to point to the drop in Fed reserves to "only" $1.3 trillion as the culprit behind September's fireworks.


Fast forward to today, when for JPMorgan and all other US commercial banks (which happen to own the Fed), it is mission accomplished: not only did the Fed's excess reserves spike to $1.5 trillion, a level which the experts say is far more suitable for the US financial system (as a reminder, before the financial crisis the level of excess reserves was precisely $0), but as of last week, the Fed's balance sheet is now back over $4 trillion (at roughly the same time total US debt hit $23 trillion for the first time), surging over $250 billion since September, and one third of the way to regaining it's all time highs of $4.5 trillion.

https://zh-prod-1cc738ca-7d3b-4a72-b...eet%2011.4.jpg


And since the Fed's POMO will continue well into 2020, expect the previous all time highs in the Fed's balance sheet to be surpassed soon. Just don't call it QE.


Meanwhile, if one strips away the superficial debate whether the US repo market is fixed or still broken, if interbank plumbing remains clogged up, if JPM caused the September repo crisis (on purpose) or if the dollar funding crisis was due to a drop in bank reserves, and if this is QE or not QE, what is really taking place just behind the scenes is very simple: global central banks, from the ECB, to China, and now to the Fed, are once again flooding the world with liquidity. In fact, the only reason the S&P is up 23% YTD is - drumroll - a $4 trillion surge in the global money supply as shown in the chart below.



https://zh-prod-1cc738ca-7d3b-4a72-b...0liquidity.jpg


Finally, for those - who like the IMF - say central banks are tapped out, a recent report from Nomura shows that whereas some central banks - such as the ECB and BOJ - have already tried everything, there are those like the Fed and the PBOC which still have some ammo left...

https://zh-prod-1cc738ca-7d3b-4a72-b...y%20matrix.jpg


... which means that the can will be kicked at least a little bit longer before central banks use up all their available means to extend and pretend, and the market finally collapses.

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/...ops+to+zero%29

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/...ops+to+zero%29

Hunter Biden and his Ukrainian gas firm colleagues had multiple contacts with the Obama State Department during the 2016 election cycle, including one just a month before Vice President Joe Biden forced Ukraine to fire the prosecutor investigating his son’s company for corruption, newly released memos show.
During that February 2016 contact, a U.S. representative for Burisma Holdings sought a meeting with Undersecretary of State Catherine A. Novelli to discuss ending the corruption allegations against the Ukrainian firm where Hunter Biden worked as a board member, according to memos obtained under a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit. (I filed that suit this summer with the help of the public interest law firm the Southeastern Legal Foundation.)


Just three weeks before Burisma’s overture to State, Ukrainian authorities raided the home of the oligarch who owned the gas firm and employed Hunter Biden, a signal the long-running corruption probe was escalating in the middle of the U.S. presidential election.
Hunter Biden’s name, in fact, was specifically invoked by the Burisma representative as a reason the State Department should help, according to a series of email exchanges among U.S. officials trying to arrange the meeting. The subject line for the email exchanges read simply “Burisma.”
“Per our conversation, Karen Tramontano of Blue Star Strategies requested a meeting to discuss with U/S Novelli USG remarks alleging Burisma (Ukrainian energy company) of corruption,” a Feb. 24, 2016, email between State officials read. “She noted that two high profile U.S. citizens are affiliated with the company (including Hunter Biden as a board member).


“Tramontano would like to talk with U/S Novelli about getting a better understanding of how the U.S. came to the determination that the company is corrupt,” the email added. “According to Tramontano there is no evidence of corruption, has been no hearing or process, and evidence to the contrary has not been considered.”
At the time, Novelli was the most senior official overseeing international energy issues for State. The undersecretary position, of which there are several, is the third-highest-ranking job at State, behind the secretary and deputy secretary. And Tramontano was a lawyer working for Blue Star Strategies, a Washington firm that was hired by Burisma to help end a long-running corruption investigation against the gas firm in Ukraine.


Tramontano and another Blue Star official, Sally Painter, both alumni of Bill Clinton’s administration, worked with New York-based criminal defense attorney John Buretta to settle the Ukraine cases in late 2016 and 2017. I wrote about their efforts previously here.

Burisma Holdings records obtained by Ukrainian prosecutors state the gas firm made a $60,000 payment to Blue Star in November 2015.


The emails show Tramontano was scheduled to meet Novelli on March 1, 2016, and that State Department officials were scrambling to get answers ahead of time from the U.S. embassy in Kiev.

The records don’t show whether the meeting actually took place. The FOIA lawsuit is ongoing and State officials are slated to produce additional records in the months ahead.

But the records do indicate that Hunter Biden’s fellow American board member at Burisma, Devon Archer, secured a meeting on March 2, 2016 with Secretary of State John Kerry. In addition to serving on the Burisma board, Archer and Hunter Biden were partners at an American firm known as Rosemont Seneca.
“Devon Archer coming to see S today at 3pm – need someone to meet/greet him at C Street,” an email from Kerry’s office manager reads. “S” is a shorthand frequently used in State emails to describe the Secretary of State. The memos don’t state the reason for the meeting.


Tramontano, a lawyer for Hunter Biden, Archer and Joe Biden’s campaign did not return messages seeking comment on Monday.
In an interview with ABC News last month, Hunter Biden said he believed he had done “nothing wrong at all” while working with Burisma but “was it poor judgment to be in the middle of something that is…a swamp in — in — in many ways? Yeah.”


Whatever the subject of the Archer-Kerry meeting, its existence is certain to spark interest. That’s because Secretary Kerry’s stepson, Christopher Heinz, had been a business partner with both Archer and Hunter Biden at the Rosemont Seneca investment firm in the United States.
Heinz, however, chose not to participate in the Burisma dealings. In fact, he wrote an email to his stepfather’s top aides in May 2014, pointedly distancing himself from the decision by Hunter Biden and Devon Archer to join Burisma’s board.

Heinz’s spokesman recently told The Washington Post that Heinz ended his relationship with Archer and Hunter Biden partly over the Burisma matter. “The lack of judgment in this matter was a major catalyst for Mr. Heinz ending his business relationships with Mr. Archer and Mr. Biden,” Heinz spokesman Chris Bastardi told the newspaper

A person who assisted Blue Star and Buretta in settling the Burisma matters in Ukraine told me in an interview that the late February 2016 overture to State was prompted by a dramatic series of events in Ukraine that included when that country’s top prosecutor escalated a two-year probe into Burisma and its founder, the oligarch Mykola Zlochevsky.


Zlochevsky’s gas firm hired Hunter Biden and Archer as board members for Burisma Holdings in spring 2014, around the time that British officials opened corruption investigations into Zlochevsky’s gas firm for actions dating to 2010 before Hunter Biden and Archer joined the firm. Ukraine officials opened their own corruption probe in August 2014.

A firm called Rosemont Seneca Bohai began receiving monthly payments totaling more than $166,000 from Burisma Holdings in May 2014, bank records show. The records show Devon Archer was listed as a custodian for the Rosemont Seneca Bohai firm and that Hunter Biden received payments from it. You can read those bank records here.

In September 2015, then-U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt gave a speech imploring Ukrainian prosecutors to do more to bring Zlochevsky to justice, according to published reports at the time.

By early 2016 the Ukrainian investigation had advanced enough that then-Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin authorized a court-ordered seizure of Zlochevsky’s home and other valuables, including a luxury car. That seizure occurred on Feb. 2, 2016, according to published reports in Ukraine.

The same day that the Zlochevsky seizure was announced in Ukraine, Hunter Biden used his Twitter account to start following Deputy Secretary of State Tony Blinken, a longtime national security adviser to Vice President Joe Biden who was promoted to the No. 2 job at State under Secretary John Kerry.

The Feb. 4, 2016 Twitter notification from Hunter Biden to Blinken was captured by State email servers and turned over to me as part of the FOIA release.
Within a few weeks of Tramontano’s overture to Novelli and of Archer’s overture to Kerry, Vice President Joe Biden took a stunning action, one that has enveloped his 2020 campaign for president in controversy.

By his own admission in a 2018 speech, Joe Biden used the threat of withholding $1 billion in U.S. aid to strong-arm Ukraine into firing Shokin, a prosecutor that he and his office knew was investigating Burisma.

Biden has said he forced Shokin’s firing because he and Western allies believed the prosecutor wasn’t aggressive enough in fighting corruption.
Shokin disputes that account, telling both me and ABC News that he was fired specifically because he would not stand down from investigating Burisma. In fact, Shokin alleges, he was making plans to interview Hunter Biden about his Burisma work and payments when he got the axe.
Ukraine prosecutors have said they do not believe the Bidens did anything wrong under Ukraine law. But some of the country’s prosecutors made an effort in 2018 to get information about Burisma to the U.S. Justice Department because they believed American prosecutors might be interested in some activities under U.S. law. You can read about that effort here.

Some experts and officials have been quoted in reports saying Joe Biden’s actions created the appearance of a conflict of interest, something all U.S. government officials are supposed to avoid. The questions about conflicts were previously raised in a 2015 article by the New York Times and the 2018 book Secret Empires by author Peter Schweizer.

The new evidence of contacts between Burisma, Hunter Biden and Archer at State are certain to add a new layer of intrigue to the debate. Those contacts span back to at least spring 2015, the new memos show.

On May 22, 2015, Hunter Biden emailed his father’s longtime trusted aide, Blinken, with the following message: “Have a few minutes next week to grab a cup of coffee? I know you are impossibly busy, but would like to get your advice on a couple of things, Best, Hunter.”
Blinken responded the same day with an “absolutely” and added, “Look forward to seeing you.”

The records indicate the two men were scheduled to meet the afternoon of May 27, 2015.

The State Department records also indicate Hunter Biden met Blinken in person for lunch on July 22, 2015, when State officials gave the name of a person to meet to help him enter the building. “He has the VIP pin and can escort you upstairs for your lunch with Tony,” the email said.

The emails don’t indicate whether the meeting had to do with Burisma or one of Hunter Biden’s other interests.

But they clearly show that Hunter Biden, his business partner and Burisma’s legal team were able to secure contacts inside the State Department, including to one of his father’s most trusted aides, to Secretary Kerry and to the agency’s top energy official.

The question now is: Did any of those contacts prompt further action or have anything to do with Joe Biden’s conduct in Ukraine in March 2016 when he forced Shokin’s firing?