SOURCE: CHARLES HUGH SMITH
Normalizing and institutionalizing fraud undermines the foundations of the economy and the financial system.

I am indebted to Manoj Samanta (twitter: @flation_debate) for the insightful concept the commoditization of fraud. The first step in the commoditization of fraud is to normalize fraud as Business as Usual (BAU) to the point that it's no longer viewed as "wrong," destructive or an aberration of evil-doers but as an accepted way to maximize gain and offload risk onto others.

The last step in the process is to institutionalize fraud within central banking and government policies.

How is selling shares in a money-losing corporation at outlandish valuations not the commoditization of fraud? The fraud has been normalized into a game of hoping that greater fools will be so enamored of the normalized fraud that they'll take the IPO shares off your hands at ever-higher valuations until the fraud breaks down.

A major oil development project could soon unfold in the Yenisey River delta, where vast oil reserves lie beneath permafrost near the area where the great Russian river runs into the Kara Sea.

Russia’s state mineral extraction agency Rosnedra now confirms that the resource estimates of the Paykha fields amount to as much as 1.2 billion tons, the newspaper Kommersant reports. That’s one of the biggest estimates ever made for a Russian oil field.

Source: Matt Agorist @ The Free Thought Project

(Support Free Thought) - For the last several decades, the US government has openly funded, supported, and armed various terrorist networks throughout the world to forward an agenda of destabilization and proxy war. It is not a secret, nor a conspiracy theory—America arms bad guys. The situation has gotten so overtly corrupt that the government just admitted the Pentagon asked Congress for funding to reimburse terrorists for their transportation and other expenses. Seriously.

“The Defense Department requested fiscal 2020 funding to support certain reconciliation activities, including logistic support for members of the Taliban and, in March 2019, they sent a notification letter to the Committee on using fiscal year 2019 funds for similar activities,” a spokesman for House Appropriations subcommittee on Defense Chairman Peter J. Visclosky (D-Ind.) told Roll Call.

Source: deepstateblog.org

In the growing confrontation between the United States and Iran, the Iranian special forces, known as the Qods Force, will play a leading role in defending Iran.

[For more on the Qods Force and the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence and Security, click here.]

While the U.S. officials have claimed knowledge of specific and credible threats against American interests, the Iranians do not have a record of attack Americans, at least not recently.

A 2017 Congressional Research Service report lists all known Iranian attacks or planned attacks on Western targets. Only three of them took place in the 21st century. Only one took place in America and none resulted in the death or injury to any American.

Source: Anti Media

(ANTIWAR.COM) — Iraq has spent the better share of the last 16 years under US military occupation. Despite this, time and again US-Iraqi relations have come to be defined by US hostility toward neighboring Iran, and Iraq’s desire to not get mixed up in that.

So while Iraq’s parliament was already bristling under Pentagon talk of staying in Iraq, and Trump saying that the US was staying in Iraq to “keep an eye on Iran,” the recent escalation of US rhetoric about a war against Iran has sparked action within parliament.

On Saturday, Iraq will be voting on a bill that would aim to expel all foreign troops from Iraqi soil, and singles out US troops in particular as needing to leave. The bill is endorsed by Iraq’s top two Shi’ite blocs, and is expected to pass fairly easily.

TransDigm Group Inc. sold the Pentagon "drive pins" for $4,361 each - should only cost $46, a 9,400% gain in excess profits, according to the Inspector General US Department of Defense's audit labeled "For Official Use Only" obtained by Bloomberg.

The inspector general's audit shows 98 of 100 parts inspected were overinflated in value and concluded the Pentagon is paying the Ohio-based defense manufacturing firm $91 million more in the next several years for parts valued at $28 million, with excess profit per part of 95% to the 9,400%.

That’s the only way to describe this stock market. It won’t end well for the hedge funds whose algos are chasing price momentum nor for the retail daytraders playing the game of “greater fool.” Apparently CSCO and WMT’s “beat” triggered a multi-hundred point spike in the Dow on Thursday. Funny thing about that. CSCO’s one-cent “beat” has been routine since the late 1990’s.

SOURCE: MATT AGORIST @ THE FREE THOUGHT PROJECT
(Support Free Thought) - In 2017, the state of Arizona went after the federal government’s attack on gold and silver by eliminating the capital gains taxes on precious metals. This paved the way to deal a massive blow to the Federal Reserve and end their monopoly on money. While the precious metals move was certainly noteworthy, legislation passed last year by the Arizona Senate was nothing short of revolutionary as it officially recognized cryptocurrencies as money by allowing residents to pay their taxes in it. But when you challenge the Federal Reserve, they fight back.

GERMAN Chancellor Angela Merkel has provocatively listed the USA under President Trump along with China and Russia as countries that Europe needs to unite to contain.

A federal count shows the number of homeless people increased by double-digit percentages in three San Francisco Bay Area counties over two years as the region struggled to tackle the growing problem, including 17% in San Francisco and 43% in the county that includes Oakland.

More than 25,000 people were counted as homeless during an overnight tally conducted in San Francisco, Alameda and Silicon Valley’s Santa Clara counties in January. Detailed reports are expected later this year.

U.S. policy through the Bush and Obama administrations was to soft-pedal questionable Chinese trade practices, pirating technology and theft of intellectual property in return for cheap manufactured goods and China’s willingness to finance trillions of dollars of U.S. government debt.

Now Trump has changed the rules of the game. He’s said lost jobs in the U.S. are not worth the cheap goods and cheap financing. He bet that China had no alternative but to keep producing those goods and keep buying our debt, even if the U.S. imposes tariffs to help create manufacturing jobs here.

President Trump and President Xi had been on a collision course involving issues of trade, tariffs, and currency manipulation, which are coming to a head.

It’s not enough to want untold thousands to die and the country destroyed, now neocons in Congress want to steal more than a billion and a half dollars from Iran as compensation for something somebody else did or didn’t do.

From the Daily Caller:

A bipartisan group of lawmakers introduced legislation Thursday to make $1.68 billion worth of Iranian funds available to the families of 241 American servicemen killed in the 1983 suicide bombing on a Marine base in Beirut, Lebanon.

In Trump Bizarro World, as in the Obama and Bush versions of the same, reality and facts are only applicable when they serve the agenda.

With Trump shutting down Huawei and China's entire telecom industry, it was only logical that China would at least try to retaliate, which it has done by formally breaching the US embargo on Iran oil exports. According to ship tracking data on Refinitiv Eikon (i.e. the old Reuters terminal), a tanker carrying Iranian fuel oil in violation of U.S. sanctions has unloaded the cargo into storage tanks near the Chinese city of Zhoushan.

A representative of the oil storage terminal confirmed that the tanker, Marshal Z, discharged nearly 130,000 tonnes of Iranian fuel oil; that marked the end of an odyssey for the cargo that began four months ago.

As Reuters reported on March 20, some Iranian fuel oil had managed to evade the United States’ sanctions on petroleum exports "by using ship-to-ship transfers involving four different ships, including the Marshal Z, and by using forged documents that masked the cargoes as originating from Iraq."

Russia has developed its own system for financial transfers that would protect it from a potential shutout of the SWIFT global transfer system in the event of harsher U.S. sanctions, its central bank governor said Wednesday at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum.

The Central Bank of Russia reports that foreign exchange reserves saw a significant boost of nearly $3.3 billion in April as the country pursues a policy of increasing its forex funds and diversifying them away from the US dollar.

The latest growth of 0.7 percent brought Russian international reserve funds to nearly $492 billion against $487.8 billion seen at the end of March, the latest data published by the regulator shows.

The state international reserves are highly liquid foreign assets comprising stocks of monetary gold, foreign currencies and Special Drawing Right (SDR) assets, which are at the disposal of the Central Bank of Russia and the government.

Having been well-managed all week, amid various headlines (and extreme hopium in US equities), something just snapped in the Chinese yuan...

As we just detailed, from Deutsche Bank, who worry that USD/CNY will break through 7...

Asia is the region we expect to suffer most from the renewed global headwinds. We argue that policymakers in China are now going to be more accepting of USD/CNY appreciation through 7: years of regulatory measures should make outflows more manageable, easier monetary policy will add upside pressure and a weakening FX is the natural means of offsetting tariffs.

The scare mongering about an attack on Iran continues. Bolton must be laughing his ass off how easy he can play the issue based on nothing. He simply counters any debunking of the alleged 'thread from Iran' by upping the ante. Yesterday a British general denied that any such threat exists in the area of his responsibility:

“No – there’s been no increased threat from Iranian-backed forces in Iraq and Syria,” Maj. Gen. Christopher Ghika, deputy commander of Operation Inherent Resolve (OIR), the coalition responsible for counter-terrorist operations against ISIS in Iraq and Syria, said in a video briefing, according to the Guardian.

Today Bolton countered that by again raising the noise level around the imaginary threat:

The U.S. Embassy in Iraq says the State Department has ordered all non-essential, non-emergency government staff to leave the country right away amid escalating tensions with Iran.

The United States has all but threatened the European Union with war – albeit a trade war – over E.U. plans to boost cooperation between member states on military spending.

First reported by Germany’s Der Spiegel and later confirmed by Reuters, the Financial Times and AFP (among others) – although sadly unpublished in full – Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics Ellen Lord (previously the CEO of U.S. defense contractor Textron Systems) and Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and International Security Andrea Thompson on May 1 sent a letter to the E.U.’s chief diplomat, the High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Federica Mogherini outlining U.S. concerns about access to E.U. funds for American corporations.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez brought more light and heat to a Congressional Oversight Committee hearing on Wednesday.

And more importantly, she connected the issue at hand with why those who wonder "how can we pay for" The Green New Deal and Medicare for All when there is plenty of money in excess profits for defense contractors.

AOC pointed out one example: non-vehicular clutch discs, which cost $32.00 to manufacture and for which the Pentagon pays $1443.00. That's a 4436% profit.

AOC asked the Pentagon contractor, TransDigm CEO Kevin Stein, "Are you aware how many doses of insulin we could get for that?"

"...for the cost of your price-gouging of the public on a non-vehicular clutch disk alone I could have sent 21 kids to college. I could have sent 18 toddlers to free preschool for a year, in the most expensive city in America."

There is “no chance” President Donald Trump will back down in the U.S. trade war with China, former Trump advisor Steve Bannon told CNBC on Wednesday.

“China has been running an economic war against the industrial democracies for now 20 years,” said the hardline ex-White House chief strategist, who helped craft Trump’s nationalist message.