Steve Bull's Blog, page 1281
October 19, 2017
Hartford Could Default On Its Debt As Soon As Next Month, Moody’s Says
Moody’s latest warning about Hartford Connecticut is its most dire yet.
In a report issued Thursday, the ratings agency’s analysts said Hartford, Connecticut’s once-proud capital city, could default on its debt as soon as next month, forcing the capital of the country’s wealthiest state (on a per capita basis) into bankruptcy.
If the city doesn’t change course (and given its shrinking tax base and the departure last year of Aetna, a major insurance company that was founded in Hartford and had located its headquarters in the city for more than 150 years, reforms appear unlikely), receive a state bailout or strike some kind of deal with its creditors, Moody’s says lenders can expect it to run up annual deficits in excess of $60 million through the next 20 years.
Moody’s (along with its rivals Fitch and Standard & Poor’s) downgraded Hartford’s credit rating on Sept. 26 to Caa3 from Caa1, reflecting a view that creditors would only manage to recoup between 60% and 80% of their principal should Hartford default.
Of course, there’s no guarantee that the state government will be there to support troubled Hartford. Four months into the fiscal year, Connecticut is the only state in the country that hasn’t passed a budget as lawmakers the state’s lame-duck Democratic Gov. Dannel Malloy joust over how to close a $3.5 billion two-year budget deficit. In a reflection of the state’s broader fiscal crisis (as is the case in many US states), Moody’s says Hartford’s public employee unions represent a “significant constraint” to cutting the city’s deficit, as the Hartford Courant points out.
Moody’s called Hartford’s unions “a constraint” to trimming the city’s deficit. “Contractual salary increases and employee benefits are significant contributors to the city’s long term structural imbalance,” the report read. Unions would have to make “significant concessions” for Hartford to narrow those deficits, it said.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Donald Trump didn’t create danger of presidential dictatorship, he inherited it
Sen. Warren says Trump is losing to the Constitution — but is he?
Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren tweeted the president’s “illegal Muslim ban is now 0 for 3 vs the Constitution.” Video provided by Newsy Newslook
Those who denounce Trump’s constitutional depredations and anti-democratic pronouncements are clueless about the real threat.
Americans nowadays have a bad attitude towards presidents. Many people are denouncing Donald Trump as a dictator. But the real problem in this nation is the dictatorial illiteracy that has allowed modern presidents to commandeer far too much power.
Trump’s saber rattling, rude outbursts and rancorous tweets have spooked folks far and wide. But most Americans are not sufficiently informed on recent history to recognize where Trump poses dire threats beyond the usual Washington machinations. Most citizens are unaware that both political parties have perennially championed bureaucratic aggrandizement over civil liberties.
Many of the experts who have condemned Trump are also clueless about how far federal control has stretched. Yale professor Samuel Moyn and Oxford professor David Priestland recently declared in a New York Times op-ed that “there is no real evidence that Mr. Trump wants to seize power unconstitutionally, and there is no reason to think he could succeed.”
But violating the Constitution is practically the job description for modern presidents. It was George W. Bush’s White House, not Trump, that asserted a “commander-in-chief override” entitling presidents to ignore the law and the Bill of Rights. Congress utterly failed to thwart that outrageous claim.
Presidents have amassed vast authority because they are judged on their rhetoric and purported goals, not on their constitutional fidelity. Former president Barack Obama’s drone assassinations of U.S. citizens were non-issues because observers think he “meant well.”
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Bank Run Imminent: Catalan Separatists Urge Supporters To Pull Cash From Bank
As tension escalate in Spain, Catalan Separatists are potentially about to do some real damage and hit Spain where it really hurts.
In a tweeted message to their 270,000 followers, Assemblea Nacional urged supporters to pull cash from CaixaBank and Banco Sabadell branches between 8 am and 9am Friday to protest at their decision to shift their legal domiciles out of the region…
Follow
Assemblea Nacional ✔@assemblea
Demà, prioritàriament de 8 a 9 h, ves a un dels 5 principals bancs i retira la quantitat que vulguis en efectiu. Són els teus diners!
4:05 PM – Oct 19, 2017
As the video begins…
“1. Go to 1 of the 5 main banks and take out as much cash as you want. Don’t forget, it’s your money”.
As a reminder, both Banco Sabadell and Caxabank – the two largest banks of the Catalan region – moved their corporate headquarters out of Catalonia (with the help of the Spanish government) shortly after the referendum.
A Stock Market Panic Like 1987 Could Happen Again
Frenzied traders on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange on Oct. 19, 1987. CreditJim Wilson/The New York Times A Stock Market Panic Like 1987 Could Happen Again
Oct. 19, 1987, was one of the worst days in stock market history. Thirty years later, it would be comforting to believe it couldn’t happen again.
Yet that’s true only in the narrowest sense: Regulatory and technological change has made an exact repeat of that terrible day impossible. We are still at risk, however, because fundamentally, that market crash was a mass stampede set off through viral contagion.
That kind of panic can certainly happen again.
I base this sobering conclusion on my own research. (I won a Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2013, partly for my work on the market impact of social psychology.) I sent out thousands of questionnaires to investors within four days of the 1987 crash, motivated by the belief that we will never understand such events unless we ask people for the reasons for their actions, and for the thoughts and emotions associated with them.
From this perspective, I believe a rough analogy for that 1987 market collapse can be found in another event — the panic of Aug. 28, 2016, at Los Angeles International Airport, when people believed erroneously that they were in grave danger. False reports of gunfire at the airport — in an era in which shootings in large crowds had already occurred — set some people running for the exits. Once the panic began, others ran, too.
That is essentially what I found to have happened 30 years ago in the stock market. By late in the afternoon of Oct. 19, the momentous nature of that day was already clear: The stock market had fallen more than 20 percent. It was the biggest one-day drop, in percentage terms, in the annals of the modern American market.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
October 18, 2017
Catalan Leader Vows To Declare Independence If Spain Triggers “Nuclear Option”
The Spanish government crackdown on Catalan separatists has intensified this week, with a judge jailing two of the movements leaders and the country’s constitutional court officially declaring the region’s Oct. 1 referendum to be illegal. However, after confusing the Spanish government with his independence (non) declaration, regional leader Carles Puigdemont is refusing to back down ahead of tomorrow’s second, and final, Spanish ultimatum.
According to Reuters, Puigdemont told a meeting of his party on Wednesday he would formally declare independence Thursday morning if Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy follows through with his threat to invoke the so-called “nuclear option” of Article 155 of the Spanish Constitution, and suspend Catalonia’s regional autonomy – a decision that would likely lead to the arrest of Puigdemont and his government, followed by another violent crackdown on separatists.
Madrid has set a second and final deadline of 10 am local time Thursday for the Catalonian government to recant and officially revoke its symbolic declaration of independence, which Puigdemont suspended last week while hoping to negotiate with the Spanish government, Reuters reported.
Puigdemont has urged the European Union to mediate between Barcelona and Madrid, but EU member states have so far been reluctant to intervene, while Madrid has refused to even engage in any diplomatic contact. In what some interpreted as an attempt to stall until international concern intensified, Puigdemont delivered a confusing speech in which he neglected to clearly explain his government’s planned course of action, and also refused to clarify whether his government had in fact declared independence, a strategy he employed again on Monday when Barcelona blew through Madrid’s original deadline for withdrawing its independence bid.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Recent Production: Colombia, Mexico and Brazil
Colombia
Colombia production is holding a plateau over the past year after a large decline in the last part of 2015 and first half of 2016. August value was 858 kbpd (down 0.04% y-o-y).
Colombia oil reserves at the end of 2016 were 1.66 Gb (down 16.8% from 2 Gb in 2015 which followed a drop from 2.31 Gb in 2014). At the average 2016 production rate of 885 kbpd this gave an R/P of 5.1 years, the lowest for any significant producing country. Most of their production is heavy oil. Ecoptrol, which accounts for more than three quarters of Colombia’s crude and natural gas reserves and output, estimated about 45% of their decline was due to the “pronounced fall in oil prices”.
Individual field production is reported through the Colombian hydrocarbon agency (ANH), but data is only available to June. The previous decline mainly seems to have come from the many smaller fields (there are almost 500 total producing fields listed for 2017) and the largest one, Rubales. A few smaller fields were added in 2015, but the main cause of the plateau seems to be an arrest of the previous declines in the mature fields. Some of that may have been to do with the cessation of insurgent sabotage on pipelines.
It’s unlikely they will be able to maintain a plateau without new discoveries. Exploration has dropped significantly in the last couple of years; Anadarko has been one of the few companies to maintain some activity but they only found gas and the latest news from them would appear to indicate they are going to use money for share buybacks rather than expansion. Even EcoPetrol look more interested in opportunities abroad (e.g. offshore Mexico).
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
How to Cope with Inevitable Chaos
And that’s okay. You don’t need to. And neither does governments.
Is it me or does it seem like current times are more chaotic than ever?
The world seems to be constantly threatened by mass shootings, terrorism, war in the Middle East, nuclear proliferation, and lack of international diplomacy. Turn on the news and you’re bound to find a new threat that purports to destabilize the order of the world.
Right here at home, the national debt continues to soar to new heights, and the student-debt bubble seems more concerning as each day passes. Congress is failing to repeal and replace Obamacare, even with a Republican majority. News circulates about Trump’s administration constantly changing, while he still has over 1,000 top-level positions to fill. It seems like the people in charge of our domestic order can’t even seem to accomplish the very thing we elected them to do.
It makes one question just what is going on in our modern society? Are we seeing the social fabric unravel before our eyes? Why have things gotten so disorderly?
The Struggle Against Chaos
These are the questions posed, but something is missing. A certain historical context is left out. The real question we should be asking is, are current times truly more chaotic than ever before, or have things always been this way?
The history of humanity has been a struggle between order and disorder. Mankind has always been walking that fine line, struggling to find a balance.
This story goes all the way back to the Garden of Eden. A land of harmony and order, but man descends into chaos when a snake is let in and convinces Eve to eat the apple. Ever since, mankind has been subject to a world of disorder, struggling to keep a grasp on a life that seems random, and chaotic.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Looming Catastrophe Hanging Over Our Heads
Former Assistant Treasury Secretary in the Reagan Administration, Dr. Paul Craig Roberts, says the record highs you see in the stock markets are based on “phony profits” that come from global central banks “propping up” the financial system. Roberts says, “Any of these central banks are really only there for a handful of big banks. That’s all they are concerned with. All the Federal Reserve has been concerned with for the last decade is the welfare of a handful of mega banks. Of course, the banks are too large. They should have never been allowed to get that large. When you have a bank too big to fail, then your policy has failed. You’ve allowed too much concentration. Where is anti-trust? Where is the Sherman Act? Everything that was legislated in the past to prevent the kind of looming catastrophe that is hanging over our heads, this looming catastrophe is produced by central banks. They are perpetuating it because they don’t know how to get out of it.”
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has just warned on the profitability of nine huge global banks. Some say they equal nine possible Lehman Brothers, which was the financial institution that started the 2008 meltdown. Is the IMF terrified of the slightest correction in the markets? Dr. Roberts says, “I think so, yes, because it’s not based on reality. It’s based on massive liquidity. So, it’s full of all kinds of dangers.”
The biggest danger to Dr. Roberts, who has a PhD in economics, is the U.S. dollar. Dr. Roberts contends, “It seems to me that the only thing that would cause the Federal Reserve to stop the liquidity would be if the U.S. dollar fell under attack.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
A Field Guide to Thoughtstoppers
It occurred to me a while back that one very simple issue is responsible for much of the crisis of our age. No question, that crisis has plenty of causes, some of them recent, some of them much less so; to get a clear understanding of the way that modern industrial civilization has backed itself into a corner from which the only exit leads straight down, it’s necessary to trace patterns of belief and action that go back to the early days of the industrial revolution, to the rise of mechanistic philosophy at the end of the Renaissance, or all the way back to the rejection of the Pagan gods and goddesses of Nature by newly minted prophetic religions obsessed by the glittering dream of a perfect otherworld on the far side of death.
All these are relevant, and indeed important. Yet it’s not always necessary to understand a problem in all its intricacies to come up with a viable solution. People were breeding plants and animals to get inheritable characteristics they wanted millennia before anybody had the least idea what DNA is, and Isaac Newton in his Principia Mathematica famously refused to discuss the reasons why gravity worked the way it did. “I frame no hypotheses,” he wrote, and that act of self-limitation was essential to his triumph, allowing him to focus entirely on the mathematics of how gravity functions without being distracted by the then-insoluble question of why.
In the same way, plenty of things that could have been done to head off the coming of our present planetary crisis required no particular grasp of the historical complexities that got us into the mess we’re in.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Fossil Fuel Misinformation Helps Quash Community Effort to Ban Fracking in Youngstown, Ohio
For the first time since 2013, a group of activists in Youngstown, Ohio, has been told it cannot place an anti-fracking initiative on local ballots, due in part to a misinformation campaign from the fossil fuel industry.
On October 6, the Ohio Supreme Court ruled that two proposed ballot initiatives — one to outlaw fracking and fracking waste injections and another to regulate political campaign contributions within city limits — would not be up for a vote this November. In previous years, voters weighed in on similar initiatives, which were ultimately defeated.
The recent ruling came despite both initiatives receiving the required number of signatures to get on the ballot.
“We’ve become experts at collecting signatures!” said Susie Beiersdorfer of the Youngstown Community Bill of Rights Committee.
The initiatives were in large part a response to earthquakes caused by fracking waste injections, illegal dumping of fracking waste in a local river, and the expansion of fracking in this area of eastern Ohio.
Anti-fracking Initiatives in Youngstown
Starting in 2013, the Youngstown Community Bill of Rights Committee has successfully placed a “Community Bills of Rights” to outlaw fracking and fracking waste injections on six separate ballots.
Each election, the group has been vastly outspent and its initiatives voted down. But it has made gains. In November 2016, its community bill of rights initiative lost by only 2,279 votes.
“Citizens are realizing that our government system is fixed,” Beiersdorfer told DeSmog.
In response to being vastly outspent on past campaigns, this year the group also proposed a second initiative, the “People’s Bill of Rights for Fair Elections and Access to Local Government.” In addition to challenging corporations’ protections under the U.S.Constitution, the bill would ban outside private interests from contributing to local campaigns and limit campaign contributions to $100 for local elections.
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