Year: 2016

Deconstructing the Bitcoin Market Cap by Vinny Lingham

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A little over two years ago, I came across a fascinating piece by serial entrepreneur Vinny Lingham which predicted a flat-to-down bitcoin price in the medium term. I highlighted the piece in the post, Why is the Bitcoin Price So Weak? The reason I found the article so compelling was not just the well thought out thesis, but also because he remained a bitcoin bull. As someone who spent 10 years professionally observing the financial markets on Wall Street, I know how difficult it is to be bullish and at the same time admit the price won’t be going anywhere for a while.

Ever since that post was published, I waited anxiously for a followup signaling that the weakness was over. I had to wait two years, but in early May 2016 he publicly turned very bullish. I highlighted this shift in the piece, Vinny Lingham on the Bitcoin Price – Prepare for the “Mother of All Short Squeezes”. One month later, the price is +25%.

Seemingly inspired by the recent action, Vinny has been writing more frequently as of late and he just published another piece titled, Deconstructing the Bitcoin Market Cap.

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Vox Editor Tweets – “If Trump Comes to Your Town, Start a Riot”

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Two tweets last night by Vox editor, Emmett Rensin, have started a social media riot.

Here they are:

Shortly thereafter, he pens another tweet. Apparently attempting to justify/explain away his prior tweet.

True, except for the fact that Trump would have to provably be Hitler. In other words, he would need to do a lot more than say offensive things. He would need to start doing them. 

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Violent California Protesters Play Right Into Donald Trump’s Hand

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When it gets down to having to use violence, then you are playing the system’s game. The establishment will irritate you – pull your beard, flick your face – to make you fight. Because once they’ve got you violent, then they know how to handle you. The only thing they don’t know how to handle is non-violence and humor.

– John Lennon

Punches and eggs.

Those are the two words that keep repeating over and over in the numerous articles I’ve read describing the mindless violence inflicted upon Trump supporters in San Jose, California last night. What’s worse, these protesters have undoubtably given Trump a huge boost in public perception.

The violence exhibited by some Trump protesters yesterday evening was so barbaric and so obviously unnecessary and indecent, my first thought was that it had to be Trump operatives who arranged the whole thing. That’s how senselessly counterproductive their actions were.

Ultimately, public perception matters a lot, which is why politicians spend virtually all of their energy managing it. Despite the twisted and corrupt nature of our political system, the fact of the matter remains that there will be an election in November 2016, and Donald Trump will be on the top of the Republican ticket. If your goal is to deal with this reality and defeat him, the last thing you want to do is make him and his supporters look good in front of the entire planet. Yet that’s exactly what these mindless imbeciles did. For the first time in this election cycle, they made Trump and his supporters look decent and upstanding, particularly compared to some of their opponents.

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Just How Shady is Hillary Clinton? This Shady…

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The American people are sick and tired of hearing about your damn emails.

– Bernie Sanders, during the October 13, 2015 Democratic debate

Boy was Bernie Sanders wrong about that. It turns out the Hillary Clinton email scandal is way more damaging and dishonest than even her harshest critics could have imagined.

I’m sure that by now most of you are intimately aware of the scathing report issued by the State Department inspector general regarding Hillary Clinton’s unconscionable use of a private server for all her official government emails. It’s now clear that this was no honest mistake, but rather a deliberate attempt to shield her correspondence from the American people.

Judge Andrew Napolitano has penned a must read piece about the whole affair at Reason titled, Inspector General’s Report Refutes All of Hillary Clinton’s Defenses For Using Private Email Server. Here are a few choice excerpts:

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Shameless Healthcare Cronyism Exposed in the State of Connecticut

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People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices. It is impossible indeed to prevent such meetings, by any law which either could be executed, or would be consistent with liberty or justice. But though the law cannot hinder people of the same trade from sometimes assembling together, it ought to do nothing to facilitate such assemblies; much less to render them necessary.

– Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations

The best way to describe Obama’s entire sleazy reign is to liken it to a Potemkin village. Everything he’s done was designed for appearances as opposed to results. Actually, that’s not really true. Everything was done to help further enrich a handful of crony insiders while appearing to be working in the public interest.

One of the best examples of this is Obamacare. Superficially, more people have coverage, which sounds great in soundbites for propaganda purposes. Unfortunately, as I pointed out in the post,  The Health Insurance Scam – “Coverage” Doesn’t Mean Affordability or Access:

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Mafia Expert Calls Great Britain the “Most Corrupt Place on Earth”

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The City is a semi-offshore state, a bit like the UK’s crown dependencies and overseas territories, tax havens legitimized by the Privy Council. Britain’s financial secrecy undermines the tax base while providing a conduit into the legal economy for gangsters, kleptocrats and drug barons.

Even the more orthodox financial institutions deploy a succession of scandalous practices: pension mis-selling, endowment mortgage fraud, the payment protection insurance con, Libor rigging. A former minister in the last government, Lord Green, ran HSBC while it engaged in money laundering for drug gangs, systematic tax evasion and the provision of services to Saudi and Bangladeshi banks linked to the financing of terrorists. Sometimes the UK looks to me like an ever so civilised mafia state.

– From last year’s post: Guardian Op-Ed – The City of London Has Turned Britain Into a “Civilized Mafia State”

This shouldn’t come as any surprise to Liberty Blitzkrieg readers, but it’s a provocative statement nonetheless.

From The Independent:

Britain is the most corrupt country in the world, according to journalist Roberto Saviano, who spent more than a decade exposing the criminal dealings of the Italian Mafia.

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Meet Ability Inc – The Israeli Company That Wants to Hack Your Cellphone

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When you first go on duty at CIA headquarters, you raise your hand and swear an oath — not to government, not to the agency, not to secrecy. You swear an oath to the Constitution. So there’s this friction, this emerging contest between the obligations and values that the government asks you to uphold, and the actual activities that you’re asked to participate in.

By preying on the modern necessity to stay connected, governments can reduce our dignity to something like that of tagged animals, the primary difference being that we paid for the tags and they’re in our pockets. It sounds like fantasist paranoia, but on the technical level it’s so trivial to implement that I cannot imagine a future in which it won’t be attempted. It will be limited to the war zones at first, in accordance with our customs, but surveillance technology has a tendency to follow us home.

– From the post: A Whistleblower Manifesto by Edward Snowden

Yesterday, Forbes published an interesting and disturbing article profiling a company called Ability Inc in the post: For $20M, These Israeli Hackers Will Spy On Any Phone On The Planet.

First, the good news. As the article notes, the company has been struggling as of late with lawsuits and it seems obvious to me that the reason Ability agreed to talk to Forbes is for some free advertising. If the company was performing particularly well, there’d be no need to agree to this interview and executives would try to keep their business practices as clandestine as possible. That’s the good news.

The bad news is that a global “industry” like this exists in the first place. While virtually all countries in the world have harsh penalties for individuals who decide to do drugs on their own time and to their own bodies, governments appear to have no problem with corporations that exist solely to violate people’s privacy. Probably because these same governments as the main clients of such companies. The fact that we put up with this and pretend it’s a legitimate business practice is an embarrassment to us as a species.

Now, without further ado, here are some excerpts from the Forbes piece:

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American Serfdom – Companies Are Offering Loans for Living Expenses to Their Destitute Employees

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Bernanke and the Federal Reserve are nothing but criminal butlers for the oligarchy. The proof is undeniable at this point. While this unaccountable banking cartel promised us that 0% rates would help the economy, America’s growing underclasses are paying 100% rates for loans to buy sofas and pay for food, more than five years into this so-called “recovery. Meanwhile, the only segment of society with access to low interest rates are the very wealthy financial oligarchs who leverage this cheap money to speculate on financial assets and real estate. So yes, the Fed (Central Banking in general) is completely to blame for the world’s growing inequality, as are their submissive, compliant defenders in academia, “journalism” and within the halls of power in Washington D.C.

From the post: Another Tale from the Oligarch Recovery – How a $1,500 Sofa Costs $4,150 When You’re Poor

There is no recovery. The only thing we’ve experienced over the past eight years of Obama is a historic plundering and strip mining of the U.S. economy by a handful of oligarchs and their political and bureaucratic minions.

The evidence has been clear for years. Fully employed Americans have been borrowing from payday lenders at egregious rates in order to pay for normal everyday living expenses, while a small group of executives grab as much as possible for themselves. You can see this in corporate profits margins at historically high levels and in the use of cash to buyback shares as opposed to paying employees a living wage. To see just how grotesquely out of whack the economy has become under the crony policies of Obama and the Federal Reserve, let’s revisit what I like to call the “Serfdom Chart.”

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The Federal Reserve Has Created an Unprecedented Disaster for Pension Funds

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When it comes to the Fed, Congress is mired in hypocrisy. The anti-regulation, de-regulation crowd on Capitol Hill shuts its mouth when it comes to the most powerful regulators of all – you and the Federal Reserve. Meanwhile, Congress goes along with the out-of-control, private government of the Fed—unaccountable to the national legislature. Moreover, your massive monetary injections scarcely led to any jobs on the ground, other than stock and bond processors.

– From the post: Ralph Nader Destroys the Federal Reserve in Open Letter – Calls it “Out of Control, Private Government”

If I had to choose one single institution and one single individual most responsible for the weak, putrid and unbelievably corrupt oligarch-controlled U.S. economy, I would choose the Federal Reserve and Ben Bernanke.

The central planners at the Fed have systematically funneled trillions of dollars into the pockets of those who needed and deserved it least, and in the process served to further enrich and entrench a criminal oligarchy while pounding the middle class into oblivion. What’s worse, the financial armageddon faced thus far by the 99.99% is just getting started.

Thanks to the 0% rate targeted by the Federal Reserve, pensions simply can’t get a decent return without moving further and further out on the asset management risk spectrum, and even then, it’s still not sufficient.

Today’s Wall Street Journal article on the topic shines a much needed light on just how dangerous this whole charade has become. Here are a few excerpts:

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Turkish Court Convicts Former Miss Turkey of “Insulting the President”

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Hundreds of Turkish academics are waiting to find out whether they will be prosecuted or sacked for spreading “terrorist propaganda”, after they signed a petition calling for violence to end in Turkey’s southeast, where government forces have been fighting Kurdish separatists.

After the petition provoked a furious response from Turkey’s president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, several universities in the country have begun investigations into signatories among their faculty — which could lead to their dismissal if accusations of unlawful political agitation hold up. On 15 January, police arrested and later released 27 academics, according to local media reports, including economists, physicians and scientists.

– From the post: U.S. Ally Turkey Arrests Academics for the Crime of Signing a Peace Petition

In the latest example of petty tyranny from NATO member and U.S. government “ally” Turkey, a former Miss Turkey has been convicted of sharing a satirical poem that insulted thin-skined President Tayyip Erdoğan.

Reuters reports:

A court has convicted a former Miss Turkey of insulting the president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, through social media postings and handed her a 14-month suspended sentence.

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