Canadian Finance Minister Admits Selling Stock but Denies It Was Because He Knew Tax Hikes were Bearish


The Canadian Finance Minister Bill Morneau is refusing to say whether he sold millions of dollars worth of company stock just days before introducing tax changes that may have caused share prices to drop. This type of insider-trading is what politicians always manage to get away with no matter what the country. This dispute is rather interesting. Here the opposition is accusing him of selling the stock because he knew that raising taxes would cause the stock to drop. This is showing that the politicians were well aware of raising taxes would be bearish for the Canadian economy. That’s just OK as long as they get theirs.

Morneau has admitted selling the shares. What he is disputing is why he sold them. “I’m hearing that shares that I sold after I got into office, around the time I got into office, was somehow something inappropriate.

Société Générale Announces Major Reduction in Staff & Branches


 

COMMENT: Mr. Armstrong; Your warning about the European Banks has come to a head today. Société Générale has announced it is closing 300 branches and firing 3450 staff. Everything you have been saying is proving to be correct when nobody else seems to even discuss the matter.

I hope you come back to Paris. A conference here would be very well attended.

PGS

REPLY: Yes, the French bank Société Générale announced a massive staff reduction jobs. The chairman of the board Frederic Oudea, said that the entire banking industry in Europe is facing serious cuts and the withdrawal of Société Générale is preparing for turbulent times that await us beginning in 2018. It is closing about 15% of its branches. It is also selling off individual business units. He was quoted by the London Financial Times:

“I am convinced that the European banking sector is going through a kind of new industrial revolution that is likely to extend over the next decade.”

What we are being called in about by major banks is far more than simply consulting/forecasting. We are dealing with LEGAL issues that will be unfolding with the coming monetary crisis. More and more major concerns need us to address the restructuring of the monetary system they can see is coming.

The tide is turning and it is a hard turn. There is now appearing a German documentary making its debut concerning the mysterious death David Rossi back on March 6th, 2013, who was the communications chief of the Monte dei Paschi di Siena bank. He fell out of his office window and died. His death has never been truly explained whether it was a suicide or a murder. This film exposes his death within the context of the tense situation within the bank and financial system in Europe.

Politicians have been finagling banks for a long time trying to hide the truth about the failed Euro. The filmmakers were interviewed by Deutsche Wirtschafts Nachrichten in which they report that the 2009 takeover of Banca Antonveneta by Monte dei Paschi at an insane price was under the supervision of the Banca d’Italia. The state they have a document with the signature of Mario Draghi at the time approving the deal at an extremely high price. The argument is basically that the absorption of  Banca Antonveneta was similar to the bailout of a failed bank which started the 1931 Banking Crisis.

What you must understand is that to sustain the Euro, which is all about keeping the power in Brussels, there have been massive transfers from the north to the south of Europe. This includes Greece, Italy, and Spain. The entire crisis has been the conversions of their previous national debts to Euro. Then the Euro doubled in values. Southern Europe has paid a vast price that has decimated their economies and driven the unemployment of the youth to as high as 60% in regions. This is the LOST GENERATION all to support the power base in Brussels.

The EU and the ECB have completely failed. This is the entire issue. The bailouts of Southern Europe have created a permanent Euro rescue scheme that has completely failed to help anyone. Greece is the poster-child of the Euro. It is impossible for Greece to ever repay the debts. Italy is still in crisis and Spain is on the verge of watching its budget blow-up starting in 2018.

Europe has entered a phase where it is no longer about trying to create jobs and a sustainable economic growth. This is now all about holding on to power in Brussels. Nobody will address the issues in advance. Thus, we are being called in by banks who see the handwriting on the wall and want to survive the chaos. This is more of a LEGAL restructuring than just consulting.

Zarrab has Flipped – Is Erdogan the real Target?


The New York Justice System is what it is. They have “flipped” the Turkish-Iranian businessman Reza Zarrab into a prosecuting witness offering him a reduced sentence if he testifies. That means the deputy chief of the Turkish Halkbank, Mehmet Hakan Atilla, is now the only defendant in the process to stand trial. According to the New York Times, Zarrab is now listed as a “suspected accomplice” on a list of potential witnesses and other stakeholders handed over to members of the jury on Monday. This is now really political for his testimony could have serious consequences for the Turkish government. Zarrab had close contacts with the family of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Erdogan must expect to be in the sights of the US investigators themselves. The question is now, are they targeting Erdogan to discredit him internationally?

 

Illinois Supreme Court Rules Against Pensions


The Illinois Supreme Court has used STRICT CONSTRUCTION to defend the State against State Employee pensions that have been bankrupting the State. Previously, back in 2014, the  Supreme Court ruled that health care benefits provided to state employees were a “permanent benefit” guaranteed by the state constitution. That has led to a complete disaster as healthcare costs have risen out of control thanks to Obamacare, which handed insurance companies more money and a monopoly status that everyone had to have insurance even the y7outh who never used it.

Those health care costs are destroying the fabric of the entire economy pushing pension costs over the top. The Supreme Court is mindful of the disaster he caused with its 2014 ruling and they have been obvious under political pressure to reverse it. They figured a way to do this using STRICT CONSTRUCTION. Therefore, the benefit cannot be greater than what was expressed in the statute. Consequently, they now delivered a six-word ruling on Thanksgiving eve refusing to hear the retirees’ appeal of a state Appellate Court ruling that essentially upheld Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s now-completed, three-year phase-out of retiree health care coverage.

The Supreme Court magically taketh away with one hand what the previous hand gave.“For the city, this is a huge benefit. The amount in government pensions for health care is dropping from $137 million a year to between $7 million and $8 million. Effectively, The courts have now held that you cannot rely on anything the city tells you unless you can prove that person had authority to bind the city.

In December 2015, the court ruled that the city employee pension funds have an obligation to provide and subsidize retiree health care with funds provided by the city, but only at levels outlined in 1983 and 1985 amendments to the state’s pension code. That is the key. The statue only guaranteed subsidy amounts to $55-a-month for police and fire retirees not eligible for Medicare and $21 for those who are. For retirees covered by the Municipal Employees and Laborers pension funds, the guaranteed monthly subsidy amounts to just $25. The explosion in health care insurance which Congress has done nothing about is undermining the pensions and will explode in crisis resulting in civil unrest over the next 5 years.

Courts are put in place by politicians. When ruling will go against the government, judges are word-smiths. They know how to ignore the law when they must. This is all part of how the system collapses. Once the Rule of Law fails, nothing will SURVIVE. It is time to turn out the lights.

Renminbi v the Dollar


The dollar haters have been touting that the Chinese yuan, or otherwise known as the renminbi, would kill the dollar and gold will soar. I have warned that China will take the spotlight as the Financial Capital of the World once again but only after 2032. A real assessment of international capital flows reveals the truth. The Chinese renminbi accounts for only a share of 1.85% share of the international cash flows. In fact, the renminbi’s global share has declined from nearly 2.5% of total global capital flows in 2015, for that was its peak in September 2015 actually on target with the Economic Confidence Model. So despite all the fanfare, China has entered a decline since 2015 – not a rally to kill the dollar.

gold-natl-debt-quantity-of-money

The Beijing government has opened foreign capital markets in recent years. Since 2016, China’s currency has officially been the fifth world currency of the International Monetary Fund alongside the dollar, euro, yen and British pound. That was supposed to kill the dollar. That had zero impact contrary to the dollar haters who concoct endless scenarios to paint the picture of the end of the dollar. One has to wonder why people continue to read these people. They have NEVER been right. They have used the scare-tactics that increasing the money supply would devastate the dollar and create hyperinflation. Another failed scenario. They there was the one about China was going to trade “real” gold, not paper futures as in New York COMEX. That one was supposed to kill the COMEX and everyone would rush to China. Well, that did not happen either. They lack any comprehension of how the world functions and were blind to the fact that by starting with gold trading in yuan, it was a tiny test market for the floating of the yuan itself. It would allow arbitrage between New York and China yielding the next difference being the yuan. Buy gold in China and sell it in New York, and the difference is the currency. So they got that one wrong and the both the COMEX and the dollar managed to survive.

There continues to be a willingness of Chinese policymakers and business leaders to help shape the currency, which is the world’s second-largest economy. For example, the Chinese will soon offer oil contracts in yuan as well and all of this is an indirect way of floating the currency. This willingness on the part of the Chineses government is why it will take time, but their economy will become the biggest in the world after 2032. What makes the US economy the biggest? The American consumer and lower taxes than Europe. When you leave more money in the hands of the people, they spend it creating jobs for everyone. Europe is following Marx. They think the government is better equipped to spend other people’s money. That produces corruption, not economic growth.

As long as China keeps its tax rate low and allows the people to spend the benefits of their labour, then it will continue to rise to displace the West and they are blinded by power and pursue this Hunt forever more Taxes.

UNICEF’s Endangered Children


By Tabitha Korol

A mission statement is defined on the Internet as “a written declaration of an organization’s core purpose and focus that normally remain unchanged over time.”  UNICEF’s mission, mandated by the UN General Assembly in December 1946, is to advocate for the protection of children’s rights, to help meet their basic needs, and to expand their opportunities to reach their full potential.  UNICEF’s website states, “Every day children face violence, disease and hunger. They are battered by the chaos of war and disaster and forced to flee their homes. They are denied an education . . . we have saved millions of children’s lives.”

A noble pledge, indeed, and UNICEF has remained faithful to some of its core purposes, yet our attention is drawn to the burgeoning globalist agenda, revealed through their literature and political involvements.  Neither the UN nor UNICEF was established for political advocacy, a particularly volatile issue in the Middle East, yet the following will show how UNICEF has abandoned its morality, betrayed the integrity of the organization, and deceived the generous countries who believed this was humanitarian aid for needy Palestinians.  Most importantly, it has forsaken a member state, seeking to undermine and marginalize the only homeland for the Jewish people, even in the most inhumane ways.

In 2013, the UN pledged its solidarity with Palestinians, and in 2015, when $380 million of US tax money was earmarked to UNWRA for Palestinian education, health, and social services, UNWRA workers were disseminating hate propaganda and Holocaust-denying literature to its schools, and inciting terrorism.   This year, the UN agreed to fund eight of its agencies, including UNICEF, with a $65 million grant to be used in lawsuits against Israel for alleged war crimes, apartheid, crimes against humanity, and to continue anti-Israel BDS campaigns.  This was then followed by an agreement signed by the UN and UNICEF with the Palestinian Authority, for $1.3 billion to “Palestine’s Path to independence.”  In an astonishing and unprecedented display of partiality in UN history, they will fund, train, and advise one side of a conflict to pursue legal advocacy against another within the UN!  The UN has essentially joined the Palestinian Authority in its delegitimization war against the sovereign state of Israel

Another website declaration reads: “UNICEF keeps children safe by providing vaccines against deadly diseases” and insists that “the survival, protection and development of children are universal development imperatives that are integral to human progress.”  In conformance, UNICEF and the World Health Organization (WHO), with the support of Bill Gates’s GAVI organizations, have promoted the highly controversial Pentavalent (5-in-1) vaccine, which combines hepatitis-B, diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis, and Hib (haemophilus influenzae type-b) into one.  Although the Pentavalent was banned or not used by Japan, the UK, Canada and the US, several developing countries have been sites for clinical trials by large pharmaceutical companies, raising many human rights concerns about unprincipled experimentation, uninformed consent, and forced medical procedures.

The head of pediatrics at St. Stephens Hospital in New Delhi, Dr. Jacob Puliyel, wrote in the Indian Journal of Medical Ethics regarding children’s deaths in Bhutan, Sri Lanka, Vietnam and India following WHO’s administration of the Pentavalent vaccine: “At best, vaccinating 25 million babies might save only about 350 children from Hib meningitis and Hib pneumonia, but that “3,125 children will die from the vaccine’s adverse effects.”  Meanwhile, UNICEF continues to try to smother concerns about the experimental treatments at Auschwitz, and California’s laws of vaccinating children without parental consent.

The Gates Foundation-supported Polio Global Eradication Initiative may have resulted in more than 47,500 cases of vaccine-induced paralysis in Indian children in 2011 alone – twice as deadly as the wild-type polio it claimed to have ended on January 11, 2012.  According to a 2010 BBC News report stated, “Children often survived better outside the UN scheme.”  It appears that UNICEF is evolving from a life-affirming, child-saving, Nobel peace prize-winning foundation to a contraceptive-distributing, abortion-performing, and sterilization-providing partner of notorious family-planning organizations.  Child mortality has increased in some parts of the world, among them sub-Saharan Africa.

UNICEF professes to be guided by the Convention on the Rights of the Child and promote ethical principles and international standards of behavior towards children – a daunting, if not impossible, task as long as its Board members represent the Islamic culture and a major source of its funding.  Today Arab children lead lives of desperation due to their cultural practices.  Early childhood rituals at home and in schools inhibit friendships and bonding, and severely restrict expression through music, art, song and dance.  They focus on stringent religious doctrine, hatred and war play, decapitation, explosives, and other jihadi activities.

Muslim girls learn of their comparative worthlessness immediately, living under the absolute power of the male over as many as four wives and his numerous children who cannot help but experience distrust and jealousy in this unhealthy, competitive household.   Sexualized and devalued as human beings, girls are candidates for Female Genital Mutilation from infancy on, another assault on their femininity.  Two hundred million around the world have undergone FGM as children, and 507,000 are at risk or already victimized in the US.

The girls are doomed to wearing a burqa that serves to defeminize as well as impose on them a sense of insignificance, anonymity, a nothingness that they are only to serve the man and bear responsibility for his honor in a shame/honor culture.  They are deemed unworthy of an education, banned from socializing with peers, entered into a loveless marriage where she will suffer psychological trauma from submission and rape, often bleeding to death from sexual intercourse or pregnancy.  The World Health Organization estimates that 100 million girls will marry before their 18th birthday over the next ten years.

Young boys, barely out of toddlerhood, may be kidnapped from their homes and used as camel jockeys, and for the sheikhs’ pleasure. “Bacha bazi” (boys for play), as young as age 11 (but photos show younger) may be bought from poor families for prostitution and sexual slavery. They are dressed and adorned as girls and forced to dance and sing at parties before they are taken by the men – unsurprising that this practice exists, given the culture’s extreme repression and gender apartheid.  The boys are conditioned to homosexuality through humiliation, and subject to being killed for being homosexuals.

UNICEF boasts of working for children’s rights to “survive, thrive and fulfill their potential” in 193 countries.  Yet benefactor Saudi Arabia is the go-to country for kidnapping, forced labor ad debt bondage, withholding wages and passports, forced prostitution, physical and sexual abuse, restrictions on movement, child sex tourism with “temporary marriages” and wife selling.

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres revealed that UN members, Saudi Arabia and Iran, caused the death of 350 Houthi children in Yemen (2016), 333 injured, and 28 schools destroyed. Iran executed a gay teenager without benefit of legal representation and 48 inmates remain in death row since their youth.  With Iranian support, Syrian forces released 13,000 deadly barrel bombs, killing 166 of their own children in 2016.  Iranian children of the Baha’i faith are denied the right to higher education.  Assad’s chlorine gas attacks caused torturous deaths, also to children.   We need answers as to how UNICEF cannot only tolerate Board Members from countries with such heinous practices, but also receive financial donations via the parent, UN.

From a cursory reading of UNICEF’s website introduction, it is clear that the organization is accelerating its long-time pursuit of the globalist scheme that is now concealed behind the dismal euphemism, Agenda 21.  Using the “sustainable development” slogan, UNICEF is identifying itself with the creed that echoes a strategy for world development – the importance of the environment and earth conservation above the value of human beings.

UNICEF claims to strive for “For every child hope, a safe home, laughter, a future,” but Agenda 21 mandates that the world population be severely diminished, land masses seized, and humans confined to designated island areas.  Some hope. Some future.  It is time for America to leave the UN – gettheUSoutoftheUN.org – inhibit its progress and retake our sovereignty.

Middle East Heating Up


An attack on a Mosque in Egypt has left 235 dead. The assault even opened fired on ambulances taking the wounded to the hospital. Meanwhile, the war of words between Saudi Arabia and Iran are heating up. Saudi Prince Mohammad bin Salman compared Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei to Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler. In return, Tehran has responded saying that with regard to the Crown Prince:  “No one in the world and in the international arena gives credit to him because of his immature and weak-minded behavior and remarks.”

Tensions in the Middle East continue to expand.

US v Europe Bank Analysis


COMMENT: Mr. Armstrong; It is becoming obvious which banks are following your model and putting a spin on it fundamentally and they seem to be outside the USA. Swiss banks are calling for a rally and Goldman Sachs calls for a decline. This is very curious indeed given that your enemy has been Goldman Sachs.

JH

ANSWER: Obviously, I am not at liberty to discuss such matters. With MIFID II, it is more curious as to how American banks will be able to put out such forecasts contrary to MIFID. I cannot reveal the plot just yet going on in Washington to deal with MIFID. Trust me, there is a very sinister plot afoot and when I reveal the scope you will be very surprised how the Trump Administration is being manipulated as has every Administration since Clinton.

ECM Turning Point this Weekend


 

The Turning Point on the ECM is this weekend. We do happen to have a Directional Change next week in the Dow with the next turning point due the week of 12/04 and that is followed by the week of 12/18. What is most curious, is the fact that the Dow, Euro, Gold, and Oil all have the same timing targets, with oil showing the week of 12/04 is the strongest.

We are witnessing the global markets beginning to align. This is implying that international expectations are starting to dominate domestic or isolated market fundamentals.

We do not expect this turning point to be a monumental one. What this reflects is the markets are starting to align preparing for 2018 and the beginning of a new round of fun and games.

EU Concern Rising About Italian Debt


The EU Commission is deeply concerned that Italy is under pressure to spend frivolously because of the upcoming elections. The EU is apply more scrutiny for Italy’s huge sovereign debt. Because of the vast size of the Italian economy, the high level of total debt is a major cause for the Eurozone as a whole. The EU Commission sent a letter to the Italian government warning them not to deviate from the course of fiscal consolidation before the parliamentary elections in the spring.

Instead of creating simply a trade union, the idea that a single currency would save the day has seriously distorted reality. This idea of surrendering sovereignty by each member state to maintain a single currency if the worst possible design. Had the EU consolidated the debts and thereby created a federal EU debt, then each member state would have been responsible for themselves. In the USA, we have 50 states issuing debt in dollars, yet they have no part in the dollar. Had Europe consolidated the debts and drew the line in the sand at that moment, then states would be able to issue whatever debt the market would accept. This way, Brussels imposes austerity upon member states simply because they failed completely to comprehend the nation of the system they were creating.