Bloody Cricket Bat Found in the Home of Olympian Oscar Pistorius

“Police in South Africa are reportedly investigating the discovery of a bloodied cricket bat at the home of Paralympic athlete Oscar Pistorius.

Local reports stated police believe he may have used the bat to attack girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp before shooting her dead on St Valentine’s Day morning, according to a local report.

Detectives are working on two other theories concerning the bat: that it was either used to break down the door of the bathroom where she hid, or that she used it to defend herself against Mr Pistorius, South Africa’s City Press reported.

One bullet cartridge was found in the champion sprinter’s bedroom and police are looking at whether he “chased” his girlfriend and fired the first shot before she locked herself in the bathroom and he fired three more through the door, the paper said.

It cited three sources “close to the high-profile investigation” who said the police had a “rock solid” case against South Africa’s former golden boy.

A post-mortem examination on the body of the 29-year-old model revealed that as well as bullet wounds to the head, arm, hand and hip, she suffered a fractured skull, it reported.

“There was lots of blood on the bat. Forensic tests will show whose blood it was,” one source was quoted as saying….”

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“Victims of sexual abuse by Catholic priests have accused the pope, the Vatican secretary of state and two other high-ranking Holy See officials of crimes against humanity, in a formal complaint to the international criminal court (ICC).

The submission, lodged at The Hague on Tuesday, accuses the four men not only of failing to prevent or punish perpetrators of rape and sexual violence but also of engaging in the “systematic and widespread” practice of concealing sexual crimes around the world.

It includes individual cases of abuse where letters and documents between Vatican officials and others show a refusal to co-operate with law enforcement agencies seeking to pursue suspects, according to the Centre for Constitutional Rights (CCR), a US-based organisation that represents the claimants.

Pam Spees, human rights attorney with CCR, said: “The point of this is to look at it from a higher altitude. You zoom out and the practices are identical: whistleblowers are punished, the refusal of the Vatican to co-operate with law enforcement agencies. You see the protection of priests and leaving them in the ministry and because of these decisions otherchildren are raped and sexually assaulted.”

She said: “It’s not only the facts of the abuse but the way that the church deepened the harm in sometimes irreparable ways.”

According to the document filed by CCR, the pope, as head of the Catholic church, is ultimately responsible for the sexual abuse of children by priests and for the cover-ups of that abuse. The group argues that he and others have “direct and superior responsibility” for the crimes of those ranked below them, similar to a military chain of command.

The others named in the complaint are Angelo Sodano, dean of the College of Cardinals and former Vatican secretary of state; Cardinal Tarcissio Bertone, now secretary of state, who previously served at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), the organisation tasked with handling sexual abuse cases under the pope when he was Cardinal Ratzinger; and Cardinal William Lavada, head of the CDF, whose handling of previous sexual abuse cases has been criticised in the past….”

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Nearly one in four males in the U.S. Marine Corps said they would leave the service if women were involuntarily posted in combat positions, according to the executive summary of a little-known survey commissioned by Marine Corps leaders and obtained by the Free Beacon.

A similar number of Marines of both sexes said they would not have enlisted in the corps if this had been policy at the time.

Twenty-three percent of both male and female Marines “said that they would not have joined” if women were involuntarily placed onto the front lines of combat, such as in the infantry, according to a summary of the surveyprovided to the Free Beacon.

Retention rates also could be affected at a time when the Marines areshrinking the force to cope with budgetary constraints.

Twenty-two percent of males who were surveyed said they “likely would leave the corps at their next opportunity” if women were involuntarily placed into primary combat roles.

Full Article Here

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OMG…. it is real….

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“Amazon is at the centre of a deepening scandal in Germany as the online shopping giant faced claims that it employed security guards with neo-Nazi connections to intimidate its foreign workers.

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“U.S. commodities regulators are examining sharp price swings in the natural-gas market during the past year that came just before the public announcement of weekly gas-inventory data, a person familiar with the situation said.

Officials in the Commodity Futures Trading Commission’s market-oversight division have intensified since late last year their customary review of market data in an effort to detect suspicious trading strategies around the reports by the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

The expanded scrutiny of the natural-gas market is “more than just the routine oversight and surveillance,” the person said. Regulators are examining trading activity by specific firms, and the CFTC’s commissioners have been briefed on the matter, this person added….”

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” “It’s not going away, it’s going to get worse,” is how PIMCO’s Mohamed El-Erian warns Yahoo’s Lauren Lyster about central bank policy and the currency wars that are so much in discussion currently. Central banks have been compelled to undertake unconventional measures, things they haven’t done before, because other policymakers are not stepping up to take responsibility on the fiscal side. These implicit devaluations and beggar-thy-neighbor policies force a lot of liquidity into the system and by pushing up asset prices, central banks believe, create a ‘weath effect’. It can also trigger “animal spirits” – we get all excited and invest more.

The hitch, El-Erian says, is that in the process, central banks may “break” something. A currency war would fall into this camp. So it’s “high-risk, high-reward and no one can tell for sure which way it’s going to tip,” he says.

In terms of equity markets, El-Erian says investors are split into two camps….”

Full article and video interview 

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Source

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“Group of 20 finance chiefs shifted toward a tougher stance on exchange rates as they sought to tame speculation of a global currency war without singling out Japan for criticism.

After all-night negotiations in Moscow, the club of the biggest developed and emerging economies agreed not to “target our exchange rates for competitive purposes,” according to an official who saw a draft of a statement to be released today and asked not to be identified because the document isn’t public yet. That marks a strengthening of language from previous drafts and runs closer to what the Group of Seven rich nations said earlier this week.

“It was quite clear last night that everyone around the table wants to avoid any sort of currency disputes,” Canadian Finance Minister Jim Flaherty told reporters today. U.K. Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne said countries must avoid their past mistake of using currencies “as a tool of economic warfare.”

Policy makers are attempting to soothe concern that governments are increasingly trying to weaken exchange rates to spur growth through exports. The risk is a 1930s-style spiral of devaluations and protectionism if other countries retaliate to safeguard their own economies.

Yen Decline…”

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Washington, D.C., Feb. 15, 2013 — The Securities and Exchange Commission today obtained an emergency court order to freeze assets in a Zurich, Switzerland-based trading account that was used to reap more than $1.7 million from trading in advance of yesterday’s public announcement about the acquisition of H.J. Heinz Company.

The SEC’s immediate action ensures that potentially illegal profits cannot be siphoned out of this account while the agency’s investigation of the suspicious trading continues.

In a complaint filed in federal court in Manhattan, the SEC alleges that prior to any public awareness that Berkshire Hathaway and 3G Capital had agreed to acquire H.J. Heinz Company in a deal valued at $28 billion, unknown traders took risky bets that Heinz’s stock price would increase. The traders purchased call options the very day before the public announcement. After the announcement, Heinz’s stock rose nearly 20 percent and trading volume increased more than 1,700 percent from the prior day, placing these traders in a position to profit substantially.

“Irregular and highly suspicious options trading immediately in front of a merger or acquisition announcement is a serious red flag that traders may be improperly acting on confidential nonpublic information,” said Daniel M. Hawke, Chief of the Division of Enforcement’s Market Abuse Unit.

Sanjay Wadhwa, Senior Associate Director of the SEC’s New York Regional Office, added, “Despite the obvious logistical challenges of investigating trades involving offshore accounts, we moved swiftly to locate and freeze the assets of these suspicious traders, who now have to make an appearance in court to explain their trading if they want their assets unfrozen.”

The SEC alleges that the unknown traders were in possession of material nonpublic information about the impending acquisition when they purchased out-of-the-money Heinz call options the day before the announcement. The timing and size of the trades were highly suspicious because the account through which the traders purchased the options had no history of trading Heinz securities in the last six months. Overall trading activity in Heinz call options several days before the announcement had been minimal.

The emergency court order obtained by the SEC freezes the traders’ assets and prohibits them from destroying any evidence. The SEC’s complaint charges the unknown traders with violating Section 10(b) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 and Rule 10b-5. In addition to the emergency relief, the SEC is seeking a final judgment ordering the traders to disgorge their ill-gotten gains with interest, pay financial penalties, and be permanently barred from future violations.

The SEC’s expedited investigation is being conducted by Market Abuse Unit members Megan Bergstrom, David S. Brown, and Diana Tani in the Los Angeles Regional Office with substantial assistance from Charles Riely, Market Abuse Unit member in the New York Regional Office who will handle the SEC’s litigation. The SEC appreciates the assistance of the Options Regulatory Surveillance Authority (ORSA).

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This documentary is interesting from the perspective of money and banking.

I find it amazing that this documentary tries to erase over a 100+ years of history in a short 45 minutes. The crazy thing is that the argument is not far fetched or totally unbelievable.

If you have watched the last few documentaries i have posted, you will once again be able to connect dots and find similarities that leads one to see a picture that simply is not taught or talked about.

Cheers on you holiday weekend!

[youtube://http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hfEBupAeo4 450 300]

Link for iPhone users: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hfEBupAeo4

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“Recently I was asked to give a presentation on the current state of the global economy to a local group of concerned citizens here in Northwest Montana.  I was happy to oblige but when composing my bullet points I realized that, in truth, there were no legitimate economic numbers to examine anymore.  You see, financial analysts have traditionally used multiple indicators of employment, profit, savings, credit, supply, and demand in their efforts to divine the often obscured facts of our financial system.  The problem is, nearly every index we used in the past, every measure of capital flow and industry, is absolutely useless today.

We now live in an entirely fabricated fiscal environment.  Every aspect of it is filtered, muddled, molded, and manipulated before our eyes ever get to study the stats.  The metaphor may be overused, but our economic system has become an absolute “matrix”.  All that we see and hear has been homogenized and all truth has been sterilized away.  There is nothing to investigate anymore.  It is like awaking in the middle of a vast and hallucinatory live action theater production, complete with performers, props, and sound effects, all designed to confuse us and do us harm.  In the end, trying to make sense of the illusion is a waste of time.  All we can do is look for the exits…

There is some tangible reality out there, but it is difficult to find, and there are few if any mainstream numbers to verify.  One has to remember always that the fundamental world of money and trade revolves around real people and real circumstances.  No matter how corrupt our economic system is, as long as there are human beings, there will always be supply and demand that cannot be hidden.  We have to look past the “official numbers” and look at the roots of trade.  Where has demand fallen?  Where has supply diminished?  Where are the tangible goods and needs and how have they changed?

Let’s first start with the mainstream version of our system, looking at each aspect of the economy that no longer represents the truth of our situation…

Employment, Savings, And Debt

Much of this information is old news to those of us in the Liberty Movement, who tracked the progress of the global collapse long before the general public even knew of its existence.  However, it is useful to take a step back and look at the basic picture every once in a while.

According to numbers issued by the Department of Labor, weekly unemployment reports have dropped to a five year low, and the overall employment rate is holding at 7.9%.  This would seem to be a vast improvement over the dreadful bloodletting in the system only a few years ago.  Has the private Federal Reserve and the Obama Administration really done it?  Have they turned back the tide on the greatest fiscal crisis the U.S. has seen since the Depression?

No.  They haven’t. ….”

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“The 2008 financial crisis cost the U.S. economy more than $22 trillion, a study by the Government Accountability Office published Thursday said. The financial reform law that aims to prevent another crisis, by contrast, will cost a fraction of that.

“The 2007-2009 financial crisis, like past financial crises, was associated with not only a steep decline in output but also the most severe economic downturn since the Great Depression of the 1930s,” the GAO wrote in the report. The agency said the financial crisis toll on economic output may be as much as $13 trillion — an entire year’s gross domestic product. The office said paper wealth lost by U.S. homeowners totalled $9.1 billion. Additionally, the GAO noted, economic losses associated with increased mortgage foreclosures and higher unemployment since 2008 need to be considered as additional costs.

The report, five years after the collapse of mortgage-focused hedge funds in late-2007 set off a yearlong banking panic and a deep recession, was published as part of a cost-benefit analysis of the Dodd-Frank financial reform law of 2010. The GAO tried to determine if the benefits of preventing a future economic meltdown exceeded the costs of implementing that law.

“If the cost of a future crisis is expected to be in the trillions of dollars, then the act likely would need to reduce the probability of a future financial crisis by only a small percent for its expected benefit to equal the act’s expected cost,” the GAO concluded.

Federal agencies have spent some $1.1 billion in implementing the law, the report found. Financial companies, and therefore the wider economy, will shoulder some costs, although the GAO noted “no comprehensive data are readily available on the costs that the financial services industry is incurring to comply with the Dodd-Frank Act.”

It’s unclear whether the report will mollify critics of the Dodd-Frank law….”

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“The collapse of the USSR in 1991 was seen as the triumph of capitalism over communism. The 40-year cold war was over and the West had won. That perception, however, was as premature as it was misleading. The struggle of world powers wasn’t over. Today, the struggle continues in a far more fundamental venue; on capitalism’s home court in the arena of paper money.

The West, as Mao Tse-Tung once claimed, is not a paper tiger; unless, of course, you’re referring to its paper money. 

In 1991, communism was, in fact, collapsing. But capitalism, unbeknownst to itself and others, was bankrupt after its costly decades-long struggle with communism. Today, the former communist super-powers, Russia and China, have re-emerged and are playing the high-hand of gold against England, the US and the West and their now vulnerable paper currencies.

England’s debt-based paper banknotes were the reason for the West’s three hundred year global hegemony. Because of its ability to wage war on credit and pass off its debt-based paper banknotes as money, England in the 18^th and 19^th centuries and, later, the US in the 20^th achieved a level of world power not seen since the Roman Empire.

In the 1900s, Russia and China escaped the West’s capitalist dominion by adopting communism, an alternate economic paradigm, based on the theories of Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels and Vladimir Lenin. Communism was, in fact, a potent and dysfunctional amalgam of untested theories, unfounded hopes and totalitarian state oppression.

Ostensibly offering a more equitable distribution of wealth than the banker’s paradigm of credit and debt, Marxism/Leninism was, in fact, a bloody and costly trap into which Russia and China would both fall in their attempts to escape the West’s economic and political domination.

The West’s attempts to subjugate Russia and China would, however, ultimately cost the West its foundation of economic and political power, i.e. the ability to pass off debt-based paper banknotes as money.

In capitalist economies, debt-based paper money possessed intrinsic value because it was convertible to gold upon demand. Gold, in fact, was capitalism’s ‘secret sauce’, the essential ingredient that transformed the bankers’ debt-based banknotes into something other than government-issued IOUs.

Since 1971, however, the West’s paper banknotes are no longer convertible to gold. This is because after WWII, the US, in its attempts to militarily subjugate Russia and China overspent its massive gold reserves, forcing it to end the gold-convertibility of the US dollar. As a result, all currencies in the world formerly tied to the US dollar and hence to gold became fiat, i.e. currencies who have value only because of government fiat, i.e. command.

After 1971, it was only a matter of time until the bankers’ debt-based paper banknotes—without the convertibility to gold—would become increasingly unstable and ultimately worthless; and, today, in 2013, the former has happened and the latter is underway.

The value of today’s paper money is determined solely by currency speculators placing leveraged bets in the hopes of achieving short-term gains. Once the gold-convertibility of paper money ended, modern currencies became paper coupons with expiration dates written in invisible ink.

Today, the West and its bankers are desperately hoping that no one will notice, hoping thereby to prevent a hyperinflationary collapse of paper money should confidence in fiat paper money evaporate.

Russia and China, however, are preparing for that very day. Russia and China are stockpiling gold as fast as they can in anticipation of a coming currency crisis triggered by the West’s increasingly suspect paper money.

For the former communist powers, Russia and China, it’s payback time; but for England and the US, it’s blowback time

Blowback, an unforeseen and unwanted effect, result, or set of repercussions

    Merriam-Webster dictionary

THE EAST IS GOLD WITH A RED TINGE

On February 6, 2013, in China Gold Imports from Hong Kong Climb to record on Wealth, Bloomberg New reported:

Exports of gold to Hong Kong from China more than tripled to 310,861 kilograms in 2012 from about 95,529 kilograms a year earlier, according to Bloomberg calculations. Shipments were 29,718 kilograms in December, up from 28,978 kilograms in November.

In the article, Bloomberg News also noted the growing relationship between China’s wealth and the ownership of gold:

China’s urban per capita disposable income rose 12.6 percent in nominal terms in 2012 to 24,565 yuan, the National Bureau of Statistics said on Jan. 18. Per capital rural net income increased 13.5 percent in nominal terms, and 10.7 percent in real terms…

Not only is China buying record amounts of gold, Russia is buying even more. On February 11^th  in Putin Turns Black Gold Into Bullion as Russia Outbuys World, Bloomberg News reported that Russia’s President Putin is investing Russian’s oil income in gold bullion at a record rate:…”

Full article

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“In its quarterly report on estimated e-commerce retail sales released today, the U.S. Census Bureau said that adjusted online sales jumped 15.6% year-over-year in the fourth quarter of 2012. On an unadjusted basis, sales rose 15.8%.

Adjusted e-commerce sales of $59.5 billion comprised 5.4% of total retail sales of $1.1 trillion. That is the highest percentage since the Census Bureau started keeping track of online sales in the fourth quarter of 1999, when e-commerce retail sales were just 0.6% of total retail sales. The fourth-quarter total is also the highest since 1999.

For the full year, e-commerce sales totaled $225.5 billion, up 15.8% from 2011. Total retail sales rose 5% year-over-year….”

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“Here’s an interesting bit of correlation (and causation?) for you.  Have a look at the chart I formulated below showing NYSE Margin Debt and the S&P 500.  The two data sets show a correlation over 85%.

Now, this is really interesting in that it melds with our work on Monetary Realism and monetary theory quite nicely.  Using Werner’s concept of disaggregation of credit we can clearly formulate how credit is being used at various times to benefit from improvement in the stock market.  If you’re not familiar with the concept of disaggregation of credit please see here.  But, in short, it is based on the understanding that our monetary system is almost entirely built around credit and how banks issue credit to perform various functions.  These functions can be both good and bad.

Full article and chart

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“DETROIT (AP) — BMW is recalling more than 30,000 SUVs to fix an oil leak that can knock out the power-assisted braking.

The German automaker says the recall covers X5 SUVs in the U.S. from the 2007 through 2010 model years. The vehicles were made between Sept. 12, 2006, and March 18, 2010. They have eight-cylinder engines….”

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“Shares of Xoom (XOOM) soared more than 40 percent in their first day as a publicly traded company.

“The online money-transfer company gained $6.41, or 40.1 percent, to $22.41 in midday trading on Friday. It opened at $21.

Xoom raised $101.2 million from selling 6.3 million shares at $16 each. It had predicted selling 5.8 million shares for $13 to $15 each in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing earlier this month. That Xoom sold more stock, for a higher price, suggests healthy demand from investors.

The banks managing the deal may buy nearly 950,000 additional shares to sell if there’s demand, increasing Xoom’s proceeds from the initial public offering.

Xoom, an upstart Internet competitor to Western Union (WU),….”

Full article

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“Japanese stocks are off to a nice start this year. The iShares MSCI Japan ETF (EWJ), a popular option among investors for getting access to Japan’s biggest traded companies, is up 4% for the year and 14% over the past month. Enjoy it while it lasts.

Japan’s recent surge is due to its new quantitative easing program — its largest in years — and the stated intentions of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe to weaken the value of the yen and boot Japan out of the deflationary slump it’s been in for the better part of two decades.

But Abe should be very careful what he wishes for. Deflation is what keeps Japan’s borrowing costs as low as they are. As of Feb. 12, Japan’s 10-year government bonds yield a pitiful 0.75%.

According to financial writer John Mauldin, an increase of just 100 basis points in borrowing costs would devour 10% of tax revenues.

Writing for Bloomberg, Gary Shilling notes that debt service now accounts for 43% of Japanese government revenue and quarter of all spending. Furthermore, more than half of all Japanese government spending is financed by new borrowing.

This means that half of every yen borrowed is used to service existing debts. It’s a debtor’s nightmare that gets worse every year with budget deficits that are consistently higher than 7% of GDP.

All of this has been made possible by Japan’s seemingly inexhaustible supply of domestic borrowers. But those days are now over….”

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“A recent study by Ernst & Young has revealed that euro-land banks in the aggregate now hold € 918 billion ($1.23 trn.) in non-performing loans (7.6% of all loans outstanding). E&Y sees about 15.5% of all loans in Spain and 10.2% of all loans in Italy as likely to be in NPL status (this exceeds the most recent official numbers somewhat).

In light of such staggering numbers, the idea to use the ESM for direct bank recapitalization seems somewhat ambitious. This is especially so as the idea to employ the ESM to take over the costs of already bailed out banks is being pushed by a number of euro area members. No doubt Ireland and Spain would be happy to see that (in fact, Spain is already the ‘exception’ as the ESM is potentially on the hook for € 100 billion for its banks – but this is structured as a loan to Spain’s government, not a direct bank bailout)….”

Full article and graph 

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