banksters researching the "politics of rage"- no irony

One may never know why Banks do stuff, cuz it seems
as if they would only operate in their own interest, if
their robbing is any hint.

So, banks can and should research markets, but it gets
a bit close to home when banks study the politics of
rage. That is because the banks have consistently been
the main cause of that rage.
They have ripped off most western countries in a way
that only a cabal of international thieves can do. The
public of those countries have, as their present for
keeping calm, austerity and cuts to the services that
actual people need, like education and health.

But you have to laugh when the bankster researchers
write tart statements like this:

"change in the confidence in government since 2007"

That same bank is responsible for the theft of trillions
that has caused governments to stomp on people.
Hence the rage, isn't it?

For their next trick, banks are studying how to
make laws that benefit them. The answer:
They write the laws themselves, and guess what=
governments say "thanks, I just didn't have the time"

to wit: http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-10-25/rise-politics-rage
The Rise Of The Politics Of Rage

by Tyler Durden
Oct 25, 2016 6:20 PM

Rage is all the rage these days, but as Barclays notes, what appears less well understood is that this voter rebellion, “the Politics of Rage”, spans nearly all advanced economies, has been taking place for more than a decade, is unparalleled in modern history, and is deeply entrenched.

This is not just about Brexit or the US election; it is about a global political movement.

More troubling, from a market perspective, is that its roots may be misunderstood. Misperceptions in politics tend to lead to volatile surprises, such as Brexit, or to misdiagnoses and to policy mis-prescriptions that imply even worse outcomes for asset prices.

Policymakers have focused on income inequality as the primary driver of the Politics of Rage. Although we cannot reject the thesis, we find little support for it in the data. Others have focused on anti-globalisation movements as the main driver. Our analysis agrees, but in results that may surprise some; we find that it is neither the most important source of rage nor as economically irrational as some have suggested.

We find that a deeper cause is a perception among “ordinary citizens” that political and institutional “elites” do not accurately represent their preferences amid a growing cultural and economic divide. These frustrations appear to be validated, with many caveats, by the data: median earners in advanced economies seem to have been the relative losers of globalisation, both within their own countries and relative to their emerging market peers.

Voter anger may be analogous to the Greek hero Achilles’ terrible rage, not for having received less than King Agamemnon, but for the perceived injustice in the manner in which Agamemnon distributed the spoils of battle. Achilles’ wrath cost the Greeks – and ultimately Achilles – dearly, as the Politics of Rage may cost global output. But it was not because Achilles’ sense of justice was in error.

Our findings have mostly strategic implications for asset markets, but they are not happy. Our research seems to support the late Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington’s forecast of continued political upheaval and highlights the trilemma of incompatibility among democracy, sovereignty and globalisation postulated by the economist Dani Rodrik. The Politics of Rage has been around longer than many realise and likely will remain for the foreseeable future. Despite this long arc, our findings also are highly relevant to near-term event risks.

The report is robust and detailed, but the issues and conclusions are framed in brief in the Executive Summary and on “Rage in a page”, below.

Prospects for the Politics of Rage

• Its roots run deeply through and across countries; Brexit was no exception

• Technology likely will nourish the roots of Rage by inflaming some of the key proximate causes

• Governments are ill equipped to fight Rage with already overextended fiscal positions and low levels of popular trust
The Policies of Rage

• Sovereignty: Reclaiming sovereignty delegated to supranational and intergovernmental organizations

• Representative reform: More direct democracy and a greater voice for “ordinary citizens” • Immigration: Greater sovereign control over immigration

• Trade: Restrictions on the free movement of goods and services

• Redistribution of income: More progressive taxation and income support

• Anti-corporatism: More sovereign assertion of tax and regulatory authority for multinationals
Effects of the Policies of Rage

• Direct de-globalisation: Restrictions on the free movement of goods and services, labour and capital

• Indirect de-globalization: Greater difficulty achieving harmonisation of international rules, standards and taxation Supranational entities like the EU and intergovernmental agreements like the Basel Accords and WTO likely will be at greater risk of dissolution

• Redistribution of income: Even without explicit policies to redistribute, de-globalisation likely will lead to a greater labour share of aggregate income
Implications of the Politics of Rage
Economic

• A slower pace of trend economic growth is likely with EM growth disproportionately affected

• We expect steeper advanced economy Phillips curves; but EM may see even more disinflation

• Fiscal policy likely is ambiguous for advanced economies, but more expansionary for EM

• Global savings should fall, and precipitating a rise in real interest rates to equate investment, but the pattern should shift, ironically, to decrease advanced economy current account balances relative to EM
Financial market

• Global nominal interest rates should rise, but more so in core economies; dispersion should increase

• G10 FX should outperform EM FX, but dispersion within each group should increase; JPY is a clear outperformer, EM and Europe are clear underperformers

• Slower global demand should dominate the outlook for commodity prices

• Equities and credit likely face a poor outlook in aggregate due to slower revenue growth and margin compression, but wide sectoral and country dispersion is likely

• “Fat tails” are likely as markets learn about the Politics of Rage, but a long-run increase in volatility is unlikely

Apple's money is under your noses

There are some stories in this the Great Bank Wars
(as they will be known) that are too hard to believe
because they imply that overlords are colluding
to rip us off and make their friends rich.

So, in the UK, when someone declares themselves
a "Non-dom" his foreign income is not taxed in
the UK and nor is his UK income, because he is
not-domiciled. There is a limit to the number of
days a non-dom can stay in the UK, but I'm sure
that this is never checked.
These people live, work, earn in the UK without
paying tax for all their wonderful life in what
is a publicly-paid-for road system and government
and police, for when they get mugged by somebody
who has been disadvantaged by the same system.
They are in plain sight, but cannot be taxed due to
signing a document that says "hi, taxman. you may
be setting your eyes on me, but for tax purposes,
I am actually not here."
I hope I am doing this expensive charade justice.

There is yet another boondoggle that I was not
expecting. It has to do with Apple's vaunted
$250Billion overseas. The US tax system promotes
the storing of money offshore for the purpose of
saving tax.
So, Apple is not the first company to offshore, But,
listen to this. Apple's money is not all actually
outside the country. It's not like it's a stack of
money you can chase and find. It is notional
money that flows down phone lines and around
the world. That money can flow in and out of
shell companies, but somehow people can still
find the owner of that money. It's just that the
taxman cannot.
Apple's money is invested in the US, but can
still dodge a taxman that is living in the stage-coach
19th century. While we pay for all the public
goods that rich people use,  their billions are
being invested right under our noses.

to wit: naked capitalism

Wolf Richter: Come on Moody’s, Spare Us These Falsehoods: That $1.3 Trillion “Overseas Cash” Is Already in the US
Posted on November 6, 2016 by Yves Smith

Yves here. Wolf addresses a pet peeve, and even better, in long form.

By Wolf Richter, a San Francisco based executive, entrepreneur, start up specialist, and author, with extensive international work experience. Originally published at Wolf Street

Some falsehoods simply refuse to die. No matter how many times they get stabbed in the heart, and no matter who stabs them, they rise again in their full glory.

The falsehood that a vast amount of US corporate cash, including much of Apple’s $250 billion, is “locked away overseas” is one of them. We’ve known since May 2013 from the Senate subcommittee investigation and hearings into Apple’s tax-dodge practices that a big part of corporate “overseas cash” is actually invested in the US.

Now Moody’s Investor Services repeats the same falsehood and explicitly lobbies Congress to give our poor, multinational Corporate Titans with their hardscrabble businesses another tax break.

The biggest US non-financial companies that pay Moody’s to rate their credit worthiness “will increase their cash holdings to $1.77 trillion by the end of the year, from $1.68 trillion at the end of 2015,” Moody’s writes. And it goes on:

Most of the cash that companies have is generated and being held overseas. Moody’s estimates that the amount of overseas cash will reach about $1.3 trillion, or 74% of total cash, in 2016. That’s up from an estimated $1.2 trillion, or 72% of total cash a year earlier.

For US tax purposes, these funds are classified as “permanently invested overseas” and thus are exempt from federal corporate income tax until they’re “returned” to the US. These overseas cash holdings have “more than double in the last ten years,” Moody’s reports.

By contrast, US individuals have to pay federal income taxes on all their income, even income they earn from overseas sources while living overseas. The US is one of only a few countries that mistreats its citizens that way. But the largest corporations are coddled and get very special treatment.

On the forefront are our Tech Titans, which have on their books “almost half” of all cash “held by US non-financial companies. These are the top five “cash holders”:

And this is what Moody’s has to say about Apple’s wondrous cash hoard, much of it overseas:

Based on Apple’s reported results for its fiscal year that ended in September, Moody’s projects the company’s cash will exceed $250 billion by the end of calendar 2016, representing over 14% of total non-financial corporate cash.

And then it dives straight into tax lobbying, in behalf of its clients, directed straight at Congress:

“Without tax reform that reduces the negative financial consequences of repatriating money to the US, we expect offshore cash levels to continue increasing,” said Richard Lane, a Senior Vice President at Moody’s.

The financial media jumped on the bandwagon and quoted this falsehood for mass consumption in order to pressure Congress to give our multinational corporate heroes another opportunity to dodge taxes, on top of the countless opportunities already written into the tax code for them that small businesses don’t have access to.

But here’s the thing. In May 2013, Apple got into a pickle because it had decided to fund its stock-buy-back and dividend program by taking on a record $17 billion in debt rather than “repatriating” part of its “offshore” cash and paying income taxes on it.

The Senate subcommittee investigation and hearings, chaired by Senator John McCain, showed that Apple had sheltered at least $74 billion from US income taxes between 2009 and 2012 by using a “complex web” of offshore mailbox companies. The investigation found untaxed “offshore” profits of $102 billion held by Irish subsidiaries – which Apple refused to “repatriate” in order to keep that income from being taxed in the US.

But according to the Senate report, Apple doesn’t have to repatriate that moolah because it’s already in the US. The Irish mailbox subsidiaries, on whose books this money is for tax purposes, transferred it to Apple’s bank accounts in New York. The money is managed by an Apple subsidiary in Reno, Nevada, and is invested in all kinds of assets in the US. Apple’s accountants in Austin, Texas, keep the books,

Money doesn’t stop at borders. Tax accounting does.

These revelations explained another corporate mystery that had long baffled economists. In 2004, after heavy lobbying by our Corporate Titans, Congress declared a “repatriation holiday” to encourage the “return” of $300 billion in overseas cash to be invested in the US. This would cause a burst of investment and hiring in the US, it was said. This was similar to what Moody’s is now clamoring for on behalf of its clients, except this time, they want permanent tax reform rather than a one-time “repatriation holiday.”

So in 2004, our heroes made some adjustments on their books to “repatriate” these profits that were then taxed at the special and minuscule rate of 5.25%, less than the payroll taxes withheld from their US working stiffs.

And then nothing happened. There were no investments and no hiring and no benefits for the economy because the money had already been deployed in the US, as we now know. In May 2013, as a result of the Senate hearings, the New York Times summarized the 2004 phenomenon this way:

On the contrary, some of the companies that brought back the most money laid off thousands of workers, and a study by the National Bureau of Economic Research later concluded that 92 cents on every dollar was used for dividends, stock buybacks or executive bonuses.

This sort of “repatriation holiday” or tax reform would simply be a handout benefitting our Corporate Titans, but not the millions of smaller companies that don’t have the resources to lobby Congress, make special deals with foreign governments, and create that “complex web” of offshore mailbox companies. They’re too busy struggling on a daily basis in their dog-eat-dog world.

Subcommittee Chairman John McCain thundered in his opening statement of the hearings that it was “unacceptable that corporations like Apple are able to exploit tax loopholes to avoid paying billions in taxes.” Since then, nothing happened in Congress. The loophole wasn’t closed. And the falsehoods that had been stabbed many times during the hearings have once again risen to shine in even greater glory, with Moody’s adding some additional sparkle.

 

De-nuding political leaders

[Union Square Manhattan]

For those of you who think that humans have culture,
and scientific research, and complex spirituality means that
humans are not animals. Well, modern politics has
conspired to bring us right back to our base animal
instincts.
The most important instinct is survival and for
that reason, there will be instability as austerity
and robots and CETA start to bite the same
working/middle class butts at the same time.

If you recognise the physical implications
of all our major English insults, they deal
with the body:
asshole, jerk off, pussy, dick

This harks back to our baser days as butt-sniffing
wife-stealing cave dwellers, with the drapes
being picked by said stolen wife.

Today, though, we seem to be too smart for our
own good. We have this thing called polite society
wherein we have a polite democracy of one
vote per person and then the oligarchs distract the
government with bribes and we all lose our rights.
We can start with the bank crisis that governments
allowed to happen and go on from there. The 2008
Banker Coup was the start of the Slide into Austerity
that will followed by e-cash and the Rise of the
Machines which will be busted up by unemployed
men all around the world.

So, we are not allowed to assault anybody, and yet
politicians and their banker friends rob us on a daily
basis. That is not polite, but nobody's nose is broken
so we get to claim that we are a polite society.

Our politicians are beyond reproach. We are supposed
to respect them and give them space, while that space
creates room for them to make secret deals behind
closed doors. In the same way, their fancy expensive
clothing makes us instinctively sit up and take notice
of their refinement, when actually they're fat and
disgusting underneath. If we are polite and see
only the exterior, they get to hide their truly selves.

The only way to bring these politicians down is to
go back to our animal ways and look at them
naked, in public. That way we can laugh at their fat
and warped bodies and what stress has done to their
health. We can examine how much they stink. We
can laugh at their droopey and tiny
genitalia and boobs sagging around their knees.

 
It will allow us to have a good laugh that
those politicians should be allowed to hear. If they
are then cool enough to

not want to run away or

to not order us all shot, 

then they are good material

for public office.

Of course, the point is kind of lost if your
politicians are regularly naked, both on
video and in person, like the former sex
bomb Cicciolina (the MP) of Italy who found a
scumbag husband who liked sending
around fotos of her and himself naked
and frolicking, and even statues: