Hundreds Of Billions In Gold And Cash Are Quietly Disappearing

Something strange is going on: at the same time that central banks are injecting $100 billion each month in electronic money to crush volatility and ramp markets, a similar amount in hard physical currency and precious metals is literally disappearing.

Take gold: as we reported last week, it was none other than Goldman Sachs which recently laid out the case for gold, saying "gold's strategic case still strong." One reason for this is that the same central banks that are "full tilt" printing cash, they have also been splurging on gold, and as a result of "geopolitical uncertainty" there has been a record surge in gold demand by central banks themselves. As Goldman notes, "CBs globally have been buying gold at a very strong pace" and "2019 looks to be a record year for CB gold purchases with our target of 750 tonnes combined purchases likely to be met."

https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/hundreds-billions-gold-and-cash-are-quietly-disappearing

IG Report Reveals Previously Unknown FBI Investigation Of Alleged Dossier Source

An updated version of the Justice Department inspector general’s report revealed the FBI opened a counterintelligence investigation in October 2016 on an alleged source for the Steele dossier.

The IG faulted the FBI for failing to disclose details about the source, who Christopher Steele said unwittingly provided information that ended up in the dossier.

Steele also told the FBI that he believed the source to be a “boaster” and “embellisher.”

The FBI opened up a counterintelligence investigation in October 2016 against a Belarusian-American businessman who Christopher Steele said was an unwitting source for his infamous anti-Trump dossier, according to a newly unredacted version of a Justice Department inspector general’s report.

The FBI failed to disclose the investigation against the alleged source — called Person 1 in the report — to Justice Department attorney and in applications submitted to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) surveillance warrants against former Trump campaign aide Carter Page.

The report also said the FBI failed to tell the surveillance court that Steele told investigators during a meeting on Oct. 3, 2016 that he considered Person 1 to be a “boaster” and “embellisher” who “may engage in some embellishment.”

Despite those red flags, the FBI relied on information that Steele attributed to Person 1 to represent in Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) applications that there was probable cause to believe that Page was a Russian agent.

Investigators also failed to tell the FISC in applications to renew surveillance against Page that Steele’s primary source disputed some of the information in the dossier that was attributed to Person 1.

Steele’s main source, who is called “Primary Sub-Source” in the report, told FBI agents in January 2017 that he shared unverified “rumors” and bar-room talk with Steele, who in turn reported the information as confirmed.

The sub-source said he spoke by phone once to someone he believed to be Person 1. Steele has disputed his chief source’s claims and said in a statement Tuesday that he “meticulously” documented and recorded conversations with the person.

Sergei Millian, who is Person 1, has vehemently denied being a source for Steele’s dossier ever since news outlets reported him as such on Jan. 24, 2017, two weeks after BuzzFeed News published the salacious dossier.

https://dailycaller.com/2019/12/14/fbi-counterintelligence-dossier-source/

Edward Snowden Speaks Out for Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning

Julian Assange of WikiLeaks has been silenced. Assange was prevented from communicating with the outside world in his final 13 months at the Ecuador embassy in London, where he had obtained sanctuary from extradition to the United States. The silencing has continued in a British prison where Assange has been detained pending extradition to the US since British police forcibly removed him from the embassy in April.

Similarly, communication by Chelsea Manning has been much curtailed after Manning reveled United States military secrets. First, Manning served seven years in United States military prison after being convicted for the leak. Released from prison in 2017, Manning has been condemned to jail for most of the time since March of this year for refusing to testify for a grand jury involved in the US government’s effort to prosecute Assange.

Manning, a whistleblower, and Assange, a publisher who through WikiLeaks helped make public revelations of government activities provided by Manning and other whistleblowers, are prevented by the US and British governments, respectively, from speaking up on their own behalf. But that does not mean that other individuals cannot speak up for them. In fact, with Assange and Manning’s ability to communicate limited, it is more important than ever that advocates for their freedom speak up on their behalf.

Last week, Edward Snowden, a whistleblower who has since 2013 escaped similar silencing via retaining sanctuary in Russia, spoke up in strong advocacy for Assange and Manning’s freedom. He did so in an interview with Democracy Now host Amy Goodman.

Snowden points out in the interview that the US cases against Assange, Manning, and himself all derive from the Espionage Act, the same Espionage Act that he notes was used against Daniel Ellsberg in the 1970s after Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers to media. Pointing as an example to Ellsberg being prevented from even telling a jury at trial why he leaked the Pentagon Papers that revealed the hidden truth about US actions in the Vietnam War, Snowden emphasizes that the Espionage Act “is a special law that absolutely rules out any kind of fair trial.”

Continuing, Snowden discusses in the interview Manning’s revelations of “torture and war crimes, indefinite detention on the part of the United States government in places like Iraq and Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay in Cuba” and Snowden’s own “involvement in the revelation of global mass surveillance” as being part of activities by a “new generation” of whistleblowers.

https://youtu.be/3xD33J2z6KM

http://www.ronpaulinstitute.org/archives/peace-and-prosperity/2019/december/12/edward-snowden-speaks-out-for-julian-assange-and-chelsea-manning/

China's "Moment Of Reckoning" Arrives: $38BN State-Owned Giant Announces Largest Dollar Bond Default In Two Decades

Two weeks ago we previewed what we said would soon be a D-Day for China's bond market, as a massive commodities trader and Global 500 state-owned enterprise was set for an "unprecedented" bond default.

As of last week, this historic default is now in the history books after Tewoo, the closely watched Chinese commodities trader, became the biggest dollar bond defaulter among the nation’s state-owned companies in two decades, in what Bloomberg called a "moment of reckoning" for Beijing as China struggles to contain credit risk in a weakening economy, as bond defaults hit an all time high and are set to keep rising in the coming years.

Last Wednesday, Tewoo Group announced results of its "unprecedented" debt restructuring, which saw a majority of its investors accepting heavy losses, and which according to rating agencies qualifies as an event of default. As a result of the default, until recently seen as virtually impossible for a state-owned company, investors’ perceptions are undergoing a dramatic U-turn about government-owned borrowers whose state-ownership had for years offered an ironclad sense of security.

No more: The fact that a state-owned enterprise such as Tewoo has now defaulted on repaying its dollar bonds in full, confirms that Beijing will no longer bail out troubled SOEs, let alone private firms, perhaps due to the strains imposed by the economy which while growing at just below 6%, is slowing the most in three decades. It also raises concerns over the Chinese province of Tianjin, where Tewoo is based, following a series of rating downgrades and financing difficulties suffered by some of the city’s state-run firms. The metropolis near Beijing also has the highest ratio of local government financing vehicle bonds to GDP in China.

As a reminder, Tewoo ranked 132 in 2018’s Fortune Global 500 list, higher than many other conglomerates including service carrier China Telecommunications Corp. and financial titan Citic Group Corp. It had an annual revenue of $66.6 billion, profits of about $122 million, assets worth $38.3 billion, and more than 17,000 employees as of 2017, according to Fortune’s website. Tewoo is owned by the Tianjin government and operates in a number of industries including infrastructure, logistics, mining, autos and ports, according to its website. It also has footprints in countries including the U.S., Germany, Japan and Singapore.

Putting last week's "unprecedented" event in context, since the first SOE bond default emerged in China’s domestic market four years ago, 22 such firms have failed to make good on a combined 48.4 billion yuan ($6.9 billion) onshore bonds as of the end of October, according to Guosheng Securities. However, despite periodic scares such as late repayment, Chinese SOEs had yet to suffer any high-profile default in the dollar bond market since the collapse of Guangdong International Trust and Investment Corp. in 1998.

Tewoo is precisely that default.

Furthermore, Tewoo's exchange offer, which has bondholders accepting a major haircut on their bonds, is seen as a road-map for resolving similar debt crises in the future as the prospect of more failures by state-backed firms looms. 2019 has already seen over 20 billion in SOE bond defaults, nearly triple 2018's total and the highest on record.

More

https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/chinas-moment-reckoning-arrives-38bn-state-owned-giant-announces-largest-dollar-bond

>>7509567

yeah rapidly converting their 10c to produce 100 $ bills into the only real asset

cunts

REPORT: 17,000 Brazilian Migrants Cross Border in Single Texas City in FY2019

The Associated Press reports that 17,000 Brazilian migrants entered the United States through the city of El Paso during Fiscal Year 2019. Approximately 18,000 crossed into the U.S. along the entire southwest border with Mexico — a 600 percent increase over the previous high during FY2016.

“The quiet migration of around 17,000 Brazilians through a single U.S. city in the past year reveals a new frontier in the Trump administration’s effort to shut down the legal immigration pathway for people claiming fear of persecution,” the AP reported. “Brazilian families are not held indefinitely in detention but instead released to Annunciation House, a network of shelters, where they can stay for a few days while they arrange flights to other cities in the U.S.”

The apprehension of about 17,000 Brazilian migrants accounts for just over nine percent of the 182,143 total migrants apprehended by Border Patrol agents during the fiscal year that ended on September 30, according to the CBP Southwest Border Migration Report.

The AP reported that many of the Brazilian migrants are seeking asylum but the article’s interviews with migrants make it appear to be more of an economic migration.

“Things are in pretty bad shape in Brazil right now. The only way to have a better life in Brazil is to go to college, but college is very expensive,” Helison Alvarenga, a 26-year-old Brazilian migrant who crossed the border into El Paso in August with his wife and young son, told the AP through a translator. He said he began working shortly after arriving in Brocton, Massachusetts, in August. He told the reporter he is now making three times as much as what he made working as a mechanic in Brazil.

Brazil is currently in its third year of approximately one percent economic growth — its worst-ever recession, the AP stated.

While the apprehension of most migrants has fallen during the past six months due to new policies put in place by the Trump administration, cartel-connected human smugglers changed their own tactics and began recruiting migrants from countries not impacted by the new policies, acting CBP Commissioner Mark Morgan told reporters during a Monday press conference.

Morgan told the reporters his agency and the Trump administration are working quickly to respond to the surge in migrants from extracontinental nations and plan to implement similar protocols now being successfully applied to Central American migrants.

“We’re confident that the kind of same approach and same initiatives that we are applying with Northern Triangle countries’ families, specifically, that we’re going to be able to apply those same initiatives with other demographics as well,” Morgan explained during the press conference.

CBP officials also reported an increase in migrants from African countries, Breitbart Texas reported earlier this week.

“During last summer, Del Rio Sector experienced an increase in arrests of people from countries in Africa,” Del Rio Sector Chief Patrol Agent Raul L. Ortiz said in a written statement. “These arrests decreased beginning in about August, but starting this fiscal year we have seen a resurgence in this demographic.”

Del Rio Sector agents apprehended 56 migrants last week from the continent, officials stated. The countries include migrants from Angola, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Congo, Guinea, and Sierra Leone.

So far this fiscal year, which began on October 1, Del Rio Sector agents apprehended about 300 migrants from 11 countries from Africa. During all of FY 2019, agents in this sector apprehended 1,211 from 19 different countries.

In July, Del Rio Sector officials reported the apprehension of more than 1,100 migrants from the African continent in just over two months, Breitbart Texas reported. The migrants present unique problems for Border Patrol agents who must care for their health and safety.

“The apprehension of people from African countries illegally crossing our borders continues to increase,” Chief Ortiz said at the time. “Our agents this year have encountered people from 51 countries other than Mexico including 19 countries from the continent of Africa.”

https://www.breitbart.com/border/2019/12/14/report-17000-brazilian-migrants-cross-in-single-texas-city-in-fy2019/

>>7509608

kek

Good to have back here with us Q, thanks for the clean up on isle 6 earlier so many got suckered by that slide!

Battle fatigue is returning can we stomp some DS assholes asap please?

>>7509706

funny if it is her as I told her to free the nips kek