Eurozone, Lehman Crisis, Mario Draghi, Target 2 Settlement System
Zero Hedge: Financial writer, market analyst and precious metals expert Craig Hemke says the Fed has all but said it was going to delay the so-called “taper” of easy money policies–forever. This is why gold and silver spiked as the dollar tanked on Friday.
“Do not harm the oil and wine” Rev. 6:6
Hemke contends, “The Chinese, four months in a row, have been net sellers of Treasuries…They’re not buying them. Well, somebody has got to buy…”
“Congress just announced this week that they came to a deal where they are going to spend $4.1 trillion on what is allegedly called infrastructure. . . . The money has got to come from somewhere. There is this notion that they are just going to raise taxes on rich people. Rich people are just going to change how they spend and do their taxes. Who is going to loan us money? It’s not going to be the Chinese or other foreign countries because they don’t have confidence in us anymore.
So, the money is going to come from somewhere. Of course, the Fed is going to keep monetizing the debt because if they don’t, interest rates have got to rise to a point people are willing to loan it to the U.S. If interest rates go to 3% or 5%, the whole thing blows up.”
Hemke points out, “All we can do is prepare for a time when this finally implodes because it will…” Read More
Arutz Sheva: One of the known points of contention between Israel and the United States is around the establishment of an American consulate for the Palestinian Arabs to be located in Jerusalem, a problematic step for Israel, which sees this as an expression of readiness for a future division of Jerusalem.
“Remember what Amalek did to you on the way when you came out of Egypt” Deut. 25:17
Currently, the plan is to build the consulate on Agron Street where the American consulate stood until the establishment of the embassy in Jerusalem by the Trump Administration.
Then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced in 2018 that contact with the Palestinian Authority population would take place through the “Palestinian Affairs” section of the United States Embassy in Israel and not as a separate diplomatic mission.
The Biden Administration has expressed its desire to establish a separate consulate in Jerusalem for the PA since taking office in January. Arutz Sheva asked a political source in Prime Minister Naftali Bennett’s entourage whether the issue of the consulate came up in talks with representatives of the Biden Administration and the president himself during his visit to the United States.
The source clarified to us that the issue did come up, but stressed that this is an issue on which both parties disagree. “This is an open issue,” Read More
(Refection of old Bagram Airfield Bunkers. US Army Photo by SGT James Dansie, 2019. DoD photo)
PJ Media: Gen. George Custer was in such a hurry to catch Sitting Bull and the Sioux warriors that he ignored orders to wait for reinforcements and instead charged headlong into an attack that ultimately led to his death and that of every one of his men at the Battle of the Little Big Horn.
Gen. Robert E. Lee massed nine Confederate brigades to charge into the center of the Union line in the doomed Pickett’s Charge on the third day at the Battle of Gettysburg.
Lee had too much confidence in his troops, failed to commit enough of them to the action to have a realistic chance of success, and sent them across a wide open field that turned into an extended shooting gallery for Union soldiers and artillery. The Confederacy never recovered.
“Go from the presence of a foolish man, When you do not perceive in him the lips of knowledge.” Proverbs 14:7
Add now to the list of men responsible for the worst military blunders in American history President Joe Biden’s decisions to abandon Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan and to commence the U.S. withdrawal during the fighting season for that perpetually war-ravaged region of Central Asia.
The Bagram abandonment — done in the dead of night without forewarning to the Afghan national government that we supported and without the prior removal of valuable equipment — is so obvious and colossal a blunder as to defy rational explanation.
Biden claimed Thursday that he asked his military advisers — primarily the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Secretary of Defense — about the advisability of pulling out of Bagram and they told him not to worry.
If that is true — and I pray to God that Biden was either lying to cover his posterior or simply misunderstood what they said — then every one of those men should be fired from their posts and discharged from the U.S. military. Read More
Adolf Hitler, Afghanistan, hyperinflation, kinsman redeemer, Nero, Paul von Hindenberg, Revelation, Satan
Daily Wire: Republican lawmakers introduced two articles of impeachment on Friday for Secretary of State Antony Blinken following the Biden administration’s disastrous pullout from Afghanistan.
Rep. Ralph Norman (SC) introduced the articles of impeachment, saying that Blinken “played a vital role in this foreign policy failure and his dereliction of duty deserves nothing less than impeachment.”
Joining Norman in introducing the articles of impeachment was Rep. Andy Harris (MD), who said that the “unmitigated catastrophe” was a “preventable tragedy” and that “Blinken’s complete and utter failure of managing this avoidable catastrophe makes him unfit for leadership.”
The first article of impeachment outlines the case for alleging that Blinken ignored “critical intelligence received from the embassy in Kabul and United States intelligence agencies” which “left American property, military equipment, and weapons in the hands of enemies of the United States [and] left American citizens stranded in life-threatening situations in dereliction of his duties as Secretary of State (22 U.S.C. 2715; 22 U.S.C. 4802).”
The second article of impeachment accuses Blinken of failing to “advise and counsel the President” about “the intelligence and advice provided by his own diplomats and the intelligence community” on the rapidly deteriorating conditions in Afghanistan as the Taliban took over. Read More
Zero Hedge: With the Federal Reserve’s annual Jackson Hole symposium there’s been much talk about when the central bank might allow interest rates to rise, presumably through the process of “tapering.” Tapering would mean easing monthly bond purchases, which would “effectively increase interest rates.“
“When He opened the third seal, I heard the third living creature say, “Come and see.” So I looked, and behold, a black horse, and he who sat on it had a pair of scales” Rev. 6:5
Much of the discussion over the Fed’s policies on interest rates tends to focus on how interest rate policy fits within the Fed’s so-called dual mandate. That is, it is assumed that the Fed’s policy on interest rates is guided by concerns over either “stable prices” or “maximizing sustainable employment.”
This naïve view of Fed policy tends to ignore the political realities of interest rates as a key factor in the federal government’s rapidly growing deficit spending.
While it is no doubt very neat and tidy to think the Fed makes its policies based primarily on economic science, it’s more likely that what actually concerns the Fed in 2021 is facilitating deficit spending for Congress and the White House.
The politics of the situation—not to be confused with the economics of the situation—dictate that interest rates be kept low, and this suggests that the Fed will work to keep interest rates low even as price inflation rises and even if it looks like the economy is “overheating.” If we seek to understand the Fed’s interest rate policy, it thus may be most fruitful to look at spending policy on Capitol Hill rather than the arcane theories of Fed economists.
Federal spending has reached multigenerational highs in the United States, both in raw numbers and proportional to GDP. Read More
Algemeiner: President Joe Biden and Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett searched for common ground on Iran at their first White House meeting on Friday, even as the US leader grappled with the aftermath of a deadly suicide bombing in Kabul during a chaotic US evacuation from Afghanistan.
:I will bless those who bless you,
And I will curse him who curses you;
And in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.” Genesis 12:3
After a one-day delay due to the Islamic State attack that killed 13 US soldiers and 72 Afghans, Biden and Bennett met to reset the tone of US-Israeli relations and narrow sharp differences over how to deal with Iran’s nuclear program.
Tensions complicated relations between Bennett’s predecessor, Benjamin Netanyahu, who was close to former President Donald Trump, and the last Democratic administration led by Barack Obama with Biden as his vice president.
But the meeting, the first since the two men took office this year, was eclipsed by Thursday’s attack outside Kabul airport during a US withdrawal that has posed the worst crisis of Biden’s young presidency. Read More
Daily Wire: Democrat President Joe Biden authorized a strike that killed one ISIS terrorist on Friday in response to ISIS murdering 13 U.S. service members in a terror attack yesterday at the airport in Kabul, Afghanistan.
“U.S. Central Command said the U.S. conducted a drone strike against an Islamic State member in Nangahar believed to be involved in planning attacks against the U.S. in Kabul,” the Associated Press reported. “The strike killed one individual, and spokesman Navy Capt. William Urban said they knew of no civilian casualties.”
“But know this, that in the last days perilous times will come” 2 timothy 3:1
The news comes after an ISIS terrorist wearing a suicide vest with 25 pounds of explosives detonated the vest at the Kabul airport yesterday amid evacuation flights out of the country. The bombing killed roughly 200 people and wounded countless others.
During a press conference on Friday, the Biden administration admitted that thousands of ISIS terrorists were freed from Bagram by the Taliban after U.S. forces pulled back from the area.
“How many ISIS-K prisoners were left at Bagram and are believed to have been released from the prison there, and why weren’t they removed before the U.S. pulled out, to some place like GITMO?” a reporter asked Pentagon spokesman John Kirby. Read More
New York Post:
ISIS-K is also known as the Islamic State Khorasan, which is named for a historical region in Central Asia that includes part of Afghanistan.
It was established in 2015 after the late ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi chose Pakistani national Hafiz Saeed Khan, a veteran commander of the Terik-e Taliban Pakistan, as the group’s first “emir,” or chief, according to a 2018 report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
“Because the Lord has sworn: the Lord will have war with Amalek from generation to generation.” Exodus 17:16
Khan brought along many TTP members, including spokesman Sheikh Maqbool and several district chiefs, when he pledged allegiance to al-Baghdadi in October 2014 and many of them were part of its first leadership council, known as the Khorasan Shura.
Former Taliban commander Abdul Rauf Kadim was appointed as Khan’s deputy and ISIS-K’s first fighters included a contingent of Pakistanis from the TTP and Lashkar-e Islam terror groups.
Other terrorists from Lashkar-e-Taiba, Jamaat-ud-Dawa, the Haqqani Network, and the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan also defected to ISIS-K.
ISIS-K’s ranks swelled to an all-time high of between 3,000 and 4,000 in 2016, amid the widespread capture of terrorism in Syria and Iraq by ISIS and a rash of international attacks, including the killing of eight people who were mowed down by a truck — allegedly driven by an ISIS sympathizer — on Manhattan’s West Side bike path in October 2017.
But ISIS-K suffered “successive military setbacks that began in Jowzjan,” a province in northern Afghanistan, in the summer of 2018, according to a June report to the United Nations Security Council by its Analytical Support and Sanctions Monitoring Team. Read More
Zero Hedge: In the typical “headfake” kneejerk reaction to any Fed comment, stocks initially dropped on the headline that “tapering is on the way”, but immediately rebounded with spoos rising to a a new record high of 4500, suggesting the market anticipated Powell’s comments and that Powell was indeed more dovish than expected.
“and do not harm the oil and the wine.” Rev. 6:6
Overall, Powell’s remarks were just what the market wanted – nothing too hawkish, or too dovish. Indeed, with stocks hitting all time high, they were just right. Or, as Renaissance Macro summarizes…