OriZ

DING DONG THE WITCH IS DEAD! Congrats to the Smart BRITS! To the losers go paint a pretty tree.

Remember this? http://www.visajourney.com/forums/topic/577938-one-year-to-nowhere/?p=7959343
At the time belief was 4 hikes in 2016. Calling BS on that was seriously easy.

Under the guise of “fact-checking” Donald Trump’s Wednesday speech, Alesci and Frankel purported to verify whether “Clinton’s State Department approved the transfer of 20% of America’s uranium holdings to Russia while nine investors in the deal funneled $145 million to the Clinton Foundation.”
Why Alesci and Frankel couldn’t confirm the $145 million in Clinton Foundation donations for themselves is curious. Indeed, in a 4,000-word front page story written over a year ago, the New York Times ’ Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Jo Becker and Mike McIntire verified the Clinton Cash uranium revelation in stunning detail, including charts and graphs laying out the flow of millions of dollars from the nine investors in the uranium deal who flowed $145 million to Hillary’s family foundation. Since Alesci and Frankel appear unable to perform basic journalistic research, here are the names and amounts they are still waiting on the Clinton Foundation to get back to them on: Frank Giustra, Canadian mining magnate who created a company that later merged with UraniumOne, gave $31.3 million and a pledge for $100 million to the Clinton Foundation Frank Holmes , a shareholder in the deal who donated between $250,000 and $500,000 (the Clinton Foundation doesn’t report exact amounts, only in ranges) and is a Clinton Foundation adviser Neil Woodyer , Frank Giustra’s colleague who founded Endeavor Financial and pledged $500,000 as well as promises of “ongoing financial support” Robert Disbrow , a Haywood Securities broker, the firm that provided “$58 million in capital to float shares of UrAsia’s private placement,” gave the Clinton’s family foundation between $1 and $5 million, according to Clinton Cash Paul Reynolds , a Canaccord Capital Inc., executive who donated between $1 million and $5 million. “The UrAsia deal was the largest in Canaccord’s history,” reports Schweizer Robert Cross , a major shareholder who serves as UrAsia Energy Director who pledged portions of his future income to the Clinton Foundation Egizio Blanchini , “the Capital Markets vice chair and Global cohead of BMO’s Global Metals and Mining group, had also been an underwriter on the mining deals. BMO paid $600,000 for two tables at the CGS-GI’s March 2008 benefit” Sergei Kurzin , the Russian rainmaker involved in the Kazakhstan uranium deal and a shareholder in UrAsia Energy, also pledged $1 million to the Foundation Uranium One chairman Ian Telfer committed $2.35 million
Nor did CNN’s crack “fact-checkers” mention that the Clinton Foundation received $2.35 million in hidden, undisclosed donations from Ian Telfer , the former head of the Russian government’s uranium company—another fact that multiple liberal news outlets have confirmed.
Indeed, as Bloomberg, Washington Post, New Yorker, ABC News, New York Times , and myriad other Establishment media have all confirmed, Clinton Cash’s most explosive revelations are accurate.
http://www.youngcons.com/cnn-fails-miserably-trying-to-fact-check-accusation-against-clinton-foundation/

Imagine.
Imagine the collapse of an extended speculative tech bubble, resulting in a broad economic recession. Imagine if the Federal Reserve had persistently slashed short-term interest rates during the downturn, to no avail, leaving rates at just 1% by the time the S&P 500 had lost half of its value and the Nasdaq 100 collapsed by 83%. Imagine that the Fed kept rates suppressed, in the initially well-meaning hope of encouraging lending, growth and employment. Imagine that the depressed level of interest rates made investors feel starved for yield, and drove them to look for safe alternatives to Treasury bills.

Imagine that investors found the higher yields they sought in mortgage securities, which had historically always been safe, and that Fed policy inadvertently created voracious demand for more of that debt. Imagine Wall Street had weak enough requirements on capital and underwriting standards that financial institutions had an incentive to create more “product” by lending to borrowers with lower and lower creditworthiness. Imagine that by the magic of “financial engineering” and lax oversight of credit ratings, Wall Street could pass these mortgages off to investors either directly by bundling, slicing and dicing them into mortgage-backed securities or by piggy-backing on the good faith and credit of the government by transferring them to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in return for funds obtained from investors in these “agency” securities.

Imagine that this Fed-induced yield-seeking speculation changed the dynamics of the housing market, and produced a bubble in home prices, coupled with overbuilding and malinvestment. Imagine that the Federal Reserve, focused exclusively on exploiting the very weak links between monetary policy and its “mandates” of employment and price stability, ignored the phrase “long-run” in those mandates, and wholly disregarded the speculative effects of its actions, which any thoughtful central banker should have viewed as a significant risk to the long-run economic health of the nation. Imagine that the then-head of the San Francisco Federal Reserve, Janet Yellen, answered questions about 1) whether speculative risks existed, 2) whether the Fed had any role in addressing them, and 3) whether there was any doubt that the Fed could halt a resulting economic downturn if it occurred, responding with a dismissive “No, No, and No.”

Imagine that this second speculative bubble collapsed anyway, producing the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, and that persistent easing by the Fed failed to stop any of it, just as it failed to do so during the preceding collapse. Imagine that the Fed violated the existing provisions of section 13.3 of the Federal Reserve Act (later rewritten by Congress to spell it out like a children’s book) and created off-balance sheet shell companies called “Maiden Lane” to take bad assets off of the ledgers of certain financial institutions, in order to protect the bondholders of those companies and facilitate their acquisition by purchasers.

Imagine that the crisis continued, and that what actually ended the crisis was a change in FASB accounting rules in the second week of March 2009, which relieved the need for financial institutions to mark their distressed assets to market value, and instead allowed them “significant judgment” in valuing those assets, instantly removing the specter of widespread financial insolvencies with the stroke of a pen. Imagine that legislation following the crisis was heavy on paper regulation, signed assurances, and living-wills, but was light on capital requirements, and contained provisionsthat essentially tied the hands of the FDIC and instead gave veto power to the Treasury and the best friend of the banking system, the Federal Reserve Board itself, in deciding whether a “too-big-to-fail” bank would actually go into receivership (where bondholders often lose money, but depositors are protected) if it was to become insolvent.

Imagine that in response to the collapse of a yield-seeking mortgage bubble, a resulting global financial crisis, and a 55% collapse in the S&P 500, the Federal Reserve insisted on pursuing more of what created the bubble in the first place; refusing to admit the weak cause-and-effect relationship between monetary easing and the real economy, pushing interest rates to zero, and expanding the monetary base to the point where $4 trillion of zero-interest hot potatoes constantly had to be held by someone in the financial markets. Imagine that despite pursuing this experimentation for years, the response of the real economy was no different than could have been predicted using prior values of non-monetary variables alone. Imagine that the main effect of this unprecedented intervention was to drive the most reliable measures of stock market valuation (those best correlated across history with actual subsequent 10-12 year market returns) well beyond double their historical norms, and that it prompted massive issuance of low-grade, “covenant lite” debt, in much the same way yield-seeking speculation encouraged the issuance of low-grade mortgage debt in the preceding bubble.

Imagine that the Fed not only refused to take serious account of the distorting impact of yield-seeking speculation on the financial markets, but actually welcomed it, citing it as an example of the “effectiveness” of quantitative easing, in the appallingly misguided belief that “wealth” is inherent in the price you pay for a security, rather than in the long-term stream of cash flows that the security will deliver over time. Imagine that investors adopted the same overconfidence in a Fed “put option” that they held before the 2000-2002 and 2007-2009 market collapses. Imagine the Fed failed to take any steps at all to reduce the size of its balance sheet at historically low interest rates, and painted itself into a corner because despite the weak relationship between short-term interest rates and the real economy, any normalization of policy threatened to burst a bubble that was already at a precipice.

Imagine that as a result of a massive combined deficit in the government and household sectors after the housing collapse, corporate profit margins temporarily soared to the highest level in history (an implication of the saving-investment identity under assumptions that typically hold in U.S. data). Imagine that because of this temporary elevation of profit margins, many of the borrowers that issued debt most heavily during this yield-seeking bubble were companies with elevated short-term profitability, but more fragile prospects over the full economic cycle. Imagine that energy and mining companies were among these, but were only the tip of the iceberg, exposed sooner than the rest because of early weakness in commodity prices.

Imagine if central banks took the position that when the relationship between their policy instruments and the real economy proves to be weak, the only option is to push those instruments beyond even the most extremist, historically unprecedented, and wholly experimental limits. Imagine that after years of persistent yield-seeking speculation, valuations were driven so high that the prospective 12-year return on a conventional 60% stocks, 30% bonds, 10% Treasury bills investment portfolio was compressed to just 1.6%. Imagine that corporate, state, and municipal pension funds were still assuming a 7% annual return on their investments, and that as a result of this mismatch, pension funds were becoming both massively underfunded, and vulnerable to severe capital losses over the completion of the market cycle.

Imagine that despite the delusion that low interest rates made stocks “cheap relative to bonds,” years of speculation had already created a situation where stocks were actuallylikely to underperform even the depressed yield on 10-year Treasury securities in the decade ahead, making the majority of corporate stock repurchases (which are typically financed by debt issuance), negative contributors to shareholder value. Imagine that the latest stick-save by central banks, in response to initial weakness following the 2015 peak of the bubble in global equity markets, had brought the median price/revenue ratio of the S&P 500 to the highest level in history, far exceeding even the 2000 peak (which was more focused on large-capitalization stocks, particularly in technology).

Imagine that all of this could be demonstrated with a century of reliable evidence, but that hardly anyone, particularly in the investment profession, gave it any more attention than the empty lip-service they offered during the tech and housing bubbles. Imagine that central bankers were focused instead on toy models that had weak theoretical and empirical foundations, inadequate transmission mechanisms, and an inability to explain more than a tiny fraction of economic variation over-and-above what could be explained in the absence of their deranged monetary activism. Imagine that they ignored real data in preference for the comfort and bizarre allegiance to a “Phillips Curve” that does not exist (Phillips’ work actually demonstrated a relationship between unemployment and wageinflation - and real wage inflation at that, given that he studied a century of British data when the U.K. was under the gold standard).

Imagine that a divided Congress, incapable of agreeing on fiscal policies to encourage productive investment in the public and private sectors, instead allowed a handful of unelected bankers and college professors to become the untethered de-facto overlords of the financial markets, repeatedly promoting destructive speculative bubbles. Imagine that nobody cared to recognize the role of financial speculation and malinvestment as the primary source of repeated economic dislocations and crises, because they were, nearly to a person, too lazy, uninformed, or dogmatic to actually get their hands dirty by questioning their assumptions or carefully examining the historical data.
Imagine that years of speculative recklessness had driven the S&P 500 to the second most extreme level of equity market overvaluation in postwar U.S. history (the third highest if one includes the 1929 peak), and to the single most extreme point of overvaluation for the median stock. Imagine that market internals and momentum had already deteriorated, and that the market had traced out an extended top-formation, as it had in late-2000 and again in late-2007.

Now imagine what might happen next.

http://www.hussmanfunds.com/wmc/wmc160620.htm

Who needs brexit when you have the FED.

I hope they vote to leave and if I were in England still it would be my vote. The kumbaya let's all hold hands rubbish touted by the progressive political class has gone crazy in recent years and hopefully this would be a step away from that for England, while as in the past the rest of Europe burns. That is, however, assuming that leaving will actually be a step toward a stronger border. But at least it will give the elected officials more direct power.
Enough experts think it would be bad for the economy at least short term that I'm inclined to believe them (though "disaster" as some predict seems hyperbolic). I would be willing personally to suffer some financial loss for a stronger sovereignty, though, and I would move in a similar direction in the US. I really believe borders have meaning.
But, to be honest, I've not paid much attention to Brexit and can't say anything more than the two paragraphs ahead

Yup he is in the MDL now

my choice

Very few real middle of the road guys like me. A few far right guys in here but most are Muddy ditch left.
You would be mostly middle road material but your gun views need to evolve

hillary on the left, trump on the right

Hate to break it to ya, America would be doomed if almost any of the 25 or so that started between the parties would have ended up pres. They almost all suck.

Another rubbish stat; muslims make up a tiny percent of americans. Here's a fun stat. Why don't you compare the number of people in the US who are muslim (1%) to the number of people killed in America by muslim terrorists in the past couple of decades.
Have fun explaining why muslims are wildly overrepresented in terror killings in the US without admitting the premise of the first post is nonsense. The first post's premise is akin to saying more people die in swimming polls than those who die playing russian roulette; ergo, russian roulette is safer than swimming polls.

That's terrible about the small child. What an awful end.
---
In hopes of lightening the moment, and pursuant also to the recent gorilla story:
A Harley biker is riding by the zoo in Washington, DC, when he sees a little girl leaning into the lion's cage. Suddenly, the lion grabs her by the collar of her jacket and tries to pull her inside to slaughter her, right in front of her screaming parents.
The biker jumps off his Harley, runs to the cage, and hits the lion flush on the nose with a powerful punch. Whimpering from the pain, the lion jumps back, letting go of the girl, and the biker brings the girl to her terrified parents, who thank him incessantly. A reporter has watched the whole event. The reporter, addressing the Harley rider, says, "Sir, this was the most gallant and brave thing that I've seen a man do in my whole life." The Harley rider replies, "Why, it was nothing, really. The lion was behind bars. I just saw this little kid in danger, and acted as I thought was right." The reporter says, "Well, I'll make sure that this won't go unnoticed. I'm a journalist, you know, and tomorrow's paper will have this story on the front page. So, what do you do for a living?"
The biker says, "I'm a U.S. Marine." The journalist leaves.
The next morning, the biker buys the paper to see if it indeed brings news of his actions, and he reads on the front page:
“U.S. MARINE ASSAULTS AFRICAN IMMIGRANT AND STEALS HIS LUNCH."

Quite shameful what a thread about 49 innocent victims has turned into...

Quite shameful what a thread about 49 innocent victims has turned into...

Wrong. And a disservice to the truth. But expected.

Gee talk about paranoid. I show ya a video of me blowing up a zombie with a shotgun and ya wanna talk viruses? The site is safe.

Sorry
I thought that the thread was about the latest RoP atrocity.

perhaps better to look at registered democratic gun owners.....

The MDL will be along shortly to post a link to some anti gay crime , committed by some Non Muslim somewhere at some point in time , and to point out a few Catholic priests molested a child.
They will claim this is solid proof there is no world wide problem with radical Islam that is the biggest threat facing mankind today.
If you don't like Hillary you fear strong women.

Yup. Smart man.

Anyone that does not like Hillary is sexist. Got it

Hillary is so fake, if she didn't exist someone would have to invent her. Sometimes when I watch her I swear I feel like I'm watching some kind of animated character. I don't feel like the person I'm watching is even real. The way she laughs, the way she talks(which you can tell are usually not even her own words), it's all just so obviously fake. It's like watching a real bad, uncomfortable actress try to play a role she's got nothing to do with.

Hillary is so fake, if she didn't exist someone would have to invent her. Sometimes when I watch her I swear I feel like I'm watching some kind of animated character. I don't feel like the person I'm watching is even real. The way she laughs, the way she talks(which you can tell are usually not even her own words), it's all just so obviously fake. It's like watching a real bad, uncomfortable actress try to play a role she's got nothing to do with.

There is nothing classy about her...