December 2024 - cypherpunks - lists.cpunks.org

A CEO Assassination; a Billionaire Heiress/NYPD Commissioner; a Secret Wall Street Spy Center – Here’s How They’re Connected
by Gunnar Larson 17 Dec '24

17 Dec '24

https://wallstreetonparade.com/2024/12/a-ceo-assassination-a-billionaire-he… By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: December 9, 2024 ~ Indicted New York City Mayor Eric Adams Announcing the Appointment of Billionaire Heiress Jessica Tisch as NYPD Commissioner on November 20, 2024. On Friday, this headline appeared in The Guardian newspaper: “Trump Assembling US Cabinet of Billionaires Worth Combined $340 Billion.” Receiving much less attention is the fact that the indicted Mayor of New York City, Eric Adams, named a billionaire heiress, Jessica Tisch, as the new Commissioner of the New York City Police Department on November 20. Tisch has never been a police officer – of any rank. Nonetheless, she will now oversee 36,000 police officers and 19,000 civilian employees at the NYPD. Tisch took her office on November 25. Nine days later, an unprecedented assassination of the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, Brian Thompson, took place on a Manhattan sidewalk outside of the New York Hilton Midtown hotel on December 4. The UnitedHealth Group, Inc., the parent of Thompson’s employer, is a stock component of the Dow Jones Industrial Average with a half-trillion-dollar market cap. Thompson was on his way to a UnitedHealth investors’ conference at the Hilton at the time he was gunned down. It is now Day 5 since the assassination and the assassin has yet to be captured. The NYPD has released a series of photos of their main suspect, taken by some of the thousands of private and government-owned surveillance cameras located throughout Manhattan that feed their images 24/7 into a massive spy center called the Lower Manhattan Security Coordination Center. In addition to live video feeds, the NYPD surveillance operation uses facial recognition technology, license plate readers, radiation detectors, mobile X-ray vans, and surveillance drones. Despite all this, a young assassin of a Fortune 500 company CEO remains on the loose. In 2011, the CBS News program, 60 Minutes, interviewed Tisch when it did a fawning story on the Lower Manhattan Security Coordination Center. The program reported that “Jessica Tisch helps run this $150 million surveillance system that monitors the cameras and all those radiation detectors. A powerful computer, using artificial intelligence actually watches all of the cameras at once….” The narrative of the 60 Minutes program was the fine job of counter terrorism being done by the NYPD and its Commissioner at the time, Raymond Kelly. It was a triumph in public relations for a police department about to launch brutal physical assaults on citizen activists: pepper spraying and punching peaceful protestors; kicking, ramming and arresting journalists who were attempting to cover the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations in lower Manhattan. What 60 Minutes chose not to report to the public, despite being aware of the facts, was that the center was jointly staffed and operated by the NYPD along with the largest Wall Street banks and trading houses – the same firms under investigation in 50 states for mortgage and foreclosure fraud and widely credited with causing the worst economic collapse since the Great Depression. The same Wall Street firms that were involuntarily bailed out by the 99% were now policing the 99%. JPMorgan Chase, which has been charged with five criminal felony counts by the U.S. Department of Justice, was one of the firms with a workstation in the center, sitting elbow to elbow with the NYPD, with the ability to surveil the comings and goings of their own employees in the streets of Manhattan – ostensibly giving it the ability to detect whistleblowers heading to the doorsteps of the SEC or FBI. The co-producer of the 60 Minutes program, Robert Anderson, conceded to us in a phone interview that he was aware of the presence of the Wall Street firms in the center. It would have been hard to miss them. The facility was designed with three long rows of computer workstations. The outside of each cubicle bears a brass plaque with the names of the occupants: Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, the New York Fed, etc. We obtained this information from a foreign news service that posted images of the workstations on its public website. The photos were taken during a press briefing at the center. During the 60 Minutes program, the following exchange took place between the 60 Minutes reporter Scott Pelley and Tisch, who was, at the time, the NYPD Director of Counterterrorism Policy and Planning. Pelley: “Tisch showed us how the system can search for a suspicious person based on a description – a red shirt for example.” Tisch: “And I can call up in real time all instances where a camera caught someone wearing a red shirt.” Pelley: “So the computer looks essentially through all the video, finds all of the red shirts and puts it together for you.” Tisch: “Video canvasses that used to take days and weeks to do, you’ll now be able to do with the snap of a finger.” Tisch snaps her fingers for added emphasis. Tisch was in her early thirties at the time of this 60 Minutes program. She is the granddaughter and one of the heirs to the fortune of now-deceased billionaire Laurence Tisch, who built the Loews Corporation, a conglomerate with holdings in insurance, hotels, and energy. Her father, James Tisch, is the CEO of the Loews Corporation and was previously elected by Wall Street banks to sit on the Board of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, representing the public’s interest. The NYPD acknowledges on its website that it has the ability to use its facial recognition technology to compare images of unidentified suspects to other government photo databases – for example, driver license photo databases. All of this raises two critical questions for Americans: Is the U.S. being colonized by billionaires and has the blowback begun? FacebookTwitterWhatsAppLinkedInEmail

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$663 Billion in Cash Assets Have Gone Poof at the Largest U.S. Banks
by Gunnar Larson 17 Dec '24

17 Dec '24

https://wallstreetonparade.com/2024/12/663-billion-in-cash-assets-have-gone… By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: December 16, 2024 ~ According to the December 6 release of Federal Reserve H.8 data, cash assets at the 25 largest U.S. banks have dropped by a stunning $663 billion from their peak levels on December 15, 2021. (See chart above, taken from the St. Louis Fed’s FRED graph, which is updated on an ongoing basis. Put your cursor on the FRED chart line here to get the weekly dollar figures.) Notice also on the chart that cash levels at the largest U.S. banks were a sea of calm for more than two decades prior to the financial crash of 2008, but since that time cash assets have displayed wild gyrations, rising sharply then precipitously plunging. It should provide no comfort to Americans that the wild gyrations on the chart above are a product of the central bank of the United States (the “Fed”) inserting itself, time and again since December 2007, into bailing out the trading houses on Wall Street – which since the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999 are in drag as federally-insured banks. The Fed’s first giant money funnel began secretly in December 2007 and lasted through at least July 2010. The Fed battled in court for more than two years to keep the names of the banks and the $16 trillion they borrowed a secret from the American people. (See chart below from the GAO audit.) If you add in the dollar swap lines that the Fed made available to foreign central banks during the financial crisis, the Fed’s money funnel comes to an even more staggering $29 trillion. On July 21, 2011 the investigative arm of Congress, the Government Accountability Office (GAO), released the first-ever government audit of the Federal Reserve. The audit came about as a result of the determined efforts of Senator Bernie Sanders, who was successful in adding an amendment to the Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation of 2010 that mandated a top-to-bottom audit of how much the Fed had spent on bailing out the megabanks on Wall Street. Sanders issued a statement saying this on the day the findings were released: “The first top-to-bottom audit of the Federal Reserve uncovered eye-popping new details about how the U.S. provided a whopping $16 trillion in secret loans to bail out American and foreign banks and businesses during the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression…The Fed outsourced virtually all of the operations of their emergency lending programs to private contractors like JP Morgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, and Wells Fargo. The same firms also received trillions of dollars in Fed loans at near-zero interest rates. Altogether, some two-thirds of the contracts that the Fed awarded to manage its emergency lending programs were no-bid contracts. Morgan Stanley was given the largest no-bid contract worth $108.4 million to help manage the Fed bailout of AIG.” The Fed’s bailout of the giant insurance company, AIG, was, in effect, a thinly disguised bailout of the Wall Street megabanks, which received 100 cents on the dollar from AIG for the derivative trades (credit default swaps) that AIG owed the banks and would not otherwise have been able to pay. The reality is that the Federal Reserve’s 2007-2010 bailout was conceived by Wall Street, run by Wall Street for its own benefit, and controlled behind a dark curtain at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York – which is, literally, owned by the megabanks on Wall Street. (See These Are the Banks that Own the New York Fed and Its Money Button.) A very similar scenario played out during the repo crisis in the last quarter of 2019 when the Fed pumped more trillions of dollars into Wall Street megabanks. That crisis transitioned into the COVID-19 pandemic crisis of 2020 and beyond, which resurrected the emergency loan programs of 2008 by the Fed plus a bunch of new ones. Then there was the Fed’s emergency response to the 2023 spring banking panic that saw the second, third and fourth largest bank failures in U.S. history plus a run on uninsured deposits across the banking landscape. (See Former New York Fed Pres Bill Dudley Calls This the First Banking Crisis Since 2008; Charts Show It’s the Third.) The Fed defines cash assets as “vault cash, cash items in process of collection, balances due from depository institutions, and balances due from Federal Reserve Banks.” As the chart above shows, cash assets at the 25 largest banks have plummeted from $2.163 trillion on December 15, 2021 to $1.5 trillion on December 4 of this year – a plunge of $663 billion. Where is all of this cash going? Since a major part of what these federally-insured megabanks do today is trading, we suspect – but can’t say for sure – that the cash is being used in part to post cash collateral on the tens of trillions of dollars in derivative trades held by a handful of these megabanks. Let’s look at another strange era of cash assets going poof at the megabanks. On April 8, 2015, cash assets stood at $1.398 trillion at the 25 largest U.S. banks according to Fed data at that time. By September 18, 2019, cash assets had plunged to $759 billion – a decline of 45.7 percent. This next chart shows how the Fed responded to this cash crisis in the fall of 2019, making trillions of dollars in emergency revolving repo loans to U.S. and foreign banks. Fed's Repo Loans to Largest Borrowers, Q4 2019, Adjusted for Term of Loan When the names of the banks that received these trillions of dollars in cheap loans from the Fed were finally revealed by the Fed two years later, there was a complete mainstream media news blackout. (Read our report: There’s a News Blackout on the Fed’s Naming of the Banks that Got Its Emergency Repo Loans; Some Journalists Appear to Be Under Gag Orders.) The 2008 financial collapse was the worst economic crisis in the U.S. since the Great Depression of the 1930s. It took six years for jobs to recover; more than 10 million Americans fell into poverty; and more than 6 million families lost their homes to foreclosure. And yet, Congress has failed to reform the Fed under both Democrat and Republican leadership in the White House.

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The New York Fed Has Extended Its Half Trillion Dollar Bailout Facility to a Sprawling Japanese Bank You’ve Never Heard Of
by Gunnar Larson 17 Dec '24

17 Dec '24

https://wallstreetonparade.com/2023/12/the-new-york-fed-has-extended-its-ha… By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: December 14, 2023 ~ Kazuto Oku, CEO of Norinchukin Bank Kazuto Oku, CEO of Norinchukin Bank Quietly, on December 1, the New York Fed published the following statement on its website: “The Norinchukin Bank, New York Branch, has been added to the list of Standing Repo Facility Counterparties, effective December 1, 2023.” The Standing Repo Facility (SRF) is a permanent $500 billion bailout facility created by the Federal Reserve and operated by the New York Fed – the private regional Fed bank where multi-trillion dollar Wall Street bank bailouts have become a regular feature of its operations. Without any action from the U.S. legislative branch (otherwise known as Congress), the Fed has unilaterally decided to become lender of last resort to Wall Street trading houses (whom the Fed prefers to call its “primary dealers”) and deposit-taking banks, including the uninsured New York branches of foreign banks like Norinchukin Bank. If you have never heard of Norinchukin Bank, don’t feel badly. Neither have we and we’ve been monitoring global banks for decades. According to Norinchukin Bank’s financial statement for its fiscal year ending March 31, 2023, it had $708 billion in assets. If it were a U.S. bank, it would be the fifth largest by assets, just behind JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo and Citibank. The notice from the New York Fed about adding Norinchukin Bank to its bailout facility grabbed our attention for two reasons. First, it came out on a Friday, which is typically when financial entities dump bad news they hope will disappear over the weekend. And also because the Standing Repo Facility was the successor to the trillions of dollars in still unexplained emergency repo loans the Fed had to pump into Wall Street in the fourth quarter of 2019. As indicated on the chart below, a unit of another Japanese bank, Nomura, was the largest recipient of Fed bailout largesse in the last quarter of 2019. Nomura borrowed $3.7 trillion cumulatively under the Fed’s emergency repo loan program, topping the amount borrowed by JPMorgan Chase by $1.11 trillion. The loan amounts on the chart come directly from the emergency repo loan data released quarterly by the New York Fed, adjusted for the term of the loan. (Reverse repo amounts have to be deleted from the data released by the Fed.) Fed's Repo Loans to Largest Borrowers, Q4 2019, Adjusted for Term of Loan The Fed swung into emergency mode on September 17, 2019 when the rate on overnight repo loans suddenly spiked from around 2.25 percent to as high as 10 percent at one point, strongly suggesting that Wall Street banks were backing away from questionable borrowers. The Fed set up its own repo facility to make tens of billions of dollars in loans available to trading houses on Wall Street on a daily basis, and at very cheap interest rates that did not reflect the credit risk of the individual trading houses. (Repos, short for Repurchase Agreements, are a short-term form of borrowing where corporations, banks, brokerage firms and hedge funds secure loans, typically for one day, by providing safe forms of collateral such as Treasury notes.) The Fed hadn’t made these emergency repo loans since the financial crisis of 2008. Instead of making just the typical overnight repo loans in 2019, the New York Fed extended some of these repo loans to 14-day, 28-day, and 42-day term loans, further suggesting some banks were in dire need of long-term liquidity. The distress being experienced by Nomura likely came from its large derivatives exposure. The fact that JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs were, from the get-go, also borrowing heavily from the Fed, suggests that the three firms were counterparties to each other’s derivatives. (See 14-day chart below beginning when the Fed first launched its emergency repo loan bailouts in September 2019.) Repo Loans Made by the Fed, Sept 17 through Sept 30, 2019 -- Adjusted for Term of Loan Celebrating 100 years of existence this year, Norinchukin Bank describes itself as a wholesome outfit on its website: “It is a cooperative private financial institution with a clear mission to ‘contribute to the development of the nation’s economy by supporting the advancement of Japan’s agriculture, fishery and forestry industries by providing financial services for the members of the agricultural, fishery and forestry cooperative system.’ ” Helping the agricultural, fishery and forestry industries in Japan, unfortunately, has somehow morphed into this: “Under the policy of reinforcing our asset management business, we transferred our credit and alternative investment functions to Norinchukin Zenkyoren Asset Management (NZAM), an affiliated company of the Bank, in fiscal 2021. In addition, we newly established Norinchukin Capital (NCCAP), for private equity investment and Nochu-JAML Investment Advisors (NJIA), for managing domestic real estate private REITs. “NZAM now offers a full lineup of products according to economic cycles and launched its credit flagship fund in August 2022. NJIA has begun managing a domestic real estate private REIT, in which the Bank also has a stake, offering prime yen-denominated investment opportunities. We will continue to ensure the effective use of our management experience to meet diversified customer needs (including ESG investment products).” This sounds like some serious mission creep to us. Instead of its “clear mission” to support the “advancement of Japan’s agriculture, fishery and forestry industries,” Norinchukin Bank sounds like it is attempting to remake itself into a cross between Blackstone and Blackrock. According to its most recent financial statement, Norinchukin Bank does not appear to be heavily involved in derivatives. However, it has been heavily involved in CLOs – Collateralized Loan Obligations, which frequently include high risk debt. In February of 2020, Reuters reported this: “Norinchukin, the world’s largest CLO investor, ceased its buying in the second half of 2019. Its December holdings were ¥8trn (US$72bn), the same level as in June last year, according to the bank’s latest result released early this month.” The Fed may have another particular interest in making sure Norinchukin Bank has ample access to liquidity. The bank has typically been a large buyer of U.S. Treasury securities. In a NikkeiAsia.com interview in March of this year, Norinchukin Bank’s Chief Investment Officer, Hiroshi Yuda, said this: “We were hit with unrealized losses, largely in U.S. government bonds. We actually started reshuffling our bond holdings in 2021 to prepare for rates to rise, but we rushed to unload in response to the jump in 2022. We sold around 12 trillion yen in securities, mainly U.S. government bonds, in the April-September half. We have continued to sell since October.” At today’s conversion rate, dumping 12 trillion yen in U.S. government bonds amounts to dumping $84.6 billion. When U.S. government bonds are sold in large quantities, it puts downward pressure on the price of the bond in the secondary trading market, resulting in higher yields. Higher yields, in turn, raise the debt service cost to the U.S. government. Like mega banks in the U.S., Norinchukin Bank is also grappling with heavy unrealized losses on the government debt securities it has not dumped into the market but is maintaining on its balance sheet. According to its fiscal year-end financial statement linked above, at fiscal year-end (March 31, 2023) it had unrealized losses on investment securities of $20 billion, which netted out to a loss of $10.76 billion after adjustments for reclassification and tax effects. The bottom line is this: what kind of a Faustian bargain has the Fed ensnarled itself in by becoming the lender of last resort to sprawling trading operations around the globe? And how long will Americans continue to allow the privately-owned New York Fed to usurp power from the elected members of the legislative branch of the United States? Related Articles: Economist Michael Hudson Says the Fed “Broke the Law” with its Repo Loans to Wall Street Trading Houses Former New York Fed Pres Bill Dudley Calls This the First Banking Crisis Since 2008; Charts Show It’s the Third

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NYC Mayor Eric Adams Takes Victory Lap: 'Remember Y'All Laughed When I First Got My Bitcoin? Who's Laughing Now?'
by Gunnar Larson 17 Dec '24

17 Dec '24

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/nyc-mayor-eric-adams-takes-225014417.html New York City Mayor Eric Adams is seizing the moment as Bitcoin's (CRYPTO: BTC) value edges closer to the $100,000 mark, up 129% this year. At a press conference on Tuesday, Adams had a pointed message for his skeptics: "Remember y'all laughed at me when I first got my Bitcoin? Who's laughing now?"

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Fwd: MSNBC -->
by Gunnar Larson 17 Dec '24

17 Dec '24

---------- Forwarded message --------- From: News Alert <info(a)dscc.org> Date: Tue, Dec 17, 2024, 11:22 AM Subject: re: MSNBC --> To: <g(a)xny.io> ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ *BREAKING:** MSNBC viewership drops as Fox News SOARS* *We need to know if you're tuning in:**Do you watch MSNBC?* Yes <http://go.dscc.org/go/20753?ask=5&t=5&firstname=&lastname=&email=g%40xny.io…> No <http://go.dscc.org/go/20753?ask=5&t=6&firstname=&lastname=&email=g%40xny.io…> Team, ever since Donald Trump won the presidency, Fox News' viewership has SOARED as MSNBC's has dropped! *The very LAST thing America needs right now is even more right-wing propaganda on our TV screens -- so we need to make sure Democrats are still keeping up with critical news developments!* With Trump just weeks away from returning to power, *we need to know your answer now:* [image: Live Poll] <http://go.dscc.org/go/20753?ask=5&t=7&firstname=&lastname=&email=g%40xny.io…> *Do you watch MSNBC?* Yes <http://go.dscc.org/go/20753?ask=5&t=8&firstname=&lastname=&email=g%40xny.io…> No <http://go.dscc.org/go/20753?ask=5&t=9&firstname=&lastname=&email=g%40xny.io…> Thanks, Team DSCC * If you've recently responded or done so with a different email address, thank you! Online records may not be up to date, but don't worry -- your responses have been recorded. [image: Chip in $5 monthly to flip the Senate] <https://secure.actblue.com/donate/support-senate-democrats-2024-q4-recurrin…> ------------------------------ The DSCC is the only committee solely dedicated to supporting Democrats in the U.S. Senate, and our work relies on grassroots supporters like you. If you'd like to make a contribution to support us, please *click here <https://secure.actblue.com/donate/support-senate-democrats-2024-q4?refcode=…>*. *Click here <https://go.dscc.org/signup/receive-fewer-emails/?t=3&akid=19184%2E26297126%…>* to receive fewer emails. *Click here <https://go.dscc.org/unsubscribe/unsubscribe/?t=4&akid=19184%2E26297126%2EFc…>* to unsubscribe. Paid for by the DSCC | PO Box 96047, Washington, DC 20090 | *dscc.org <https://www.dscc.org/>* | Not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee. Contributions or gifts to the DSCC are not tax deductible.

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The Head of Fixed Income at T. Rowe Price Makes the Scary Case for the 10-Year Treasury to Spike to 6 Percent
by Gunnar Larson 17 Dec '24

17 Dec '24

https://wallstreetonparade.com/2024/12/the-head-of-fixed-income-at-t-rowe-p… By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: December 17, 2024 ~ Arif Husain, Chief Investment Officer, Fixed Income, T. Rowe Price Arif Husain, Chief Investment Officer, Fixed Income, T. Rowe Price Arif Husain is the head of Global Fixed Income and Chief Investment Officer (CIO) of the Fixed Income Division of T. Rowe Price. He is also a member of the firm’s Management Committee. Husain holds a B.Sc. (honors) in banking and international finance from the City University London, Cass Business School. When Husain speaks, Wall Street listens. What Husain has been saying since October is that the U.S. is on a collision course with higher interest rates. In October, Husain released his interest rate outlook for the next six months, writing the following about the benchmark 10-year U.S. Treasury note, whose yield impacts mortgage rates and a wide swath of debt instruments: “I think that the 10-year Treasury yield will test the 5.0% threshold in the next six months, steepening the yield curve. There are three dynamics at play: 1. Fed rate cuts could limit yield increases on short-maturity Treasury bills. 2. Ongoing issuance by the Treasury to fund the government’s deficit spending is flooding the market with new supply. 3. The Fed’s quantitative tightening has taken a large, reliable buyer of Treasuries out of the market, further skewing the balance of supply and demand in favor of higher yields.” Husain’s analysis in October had yet to factor in the outcome of the U.S. presidential election. Now that there is no longer any doubt that President-elect Donald Trump and his promised tariffs and tax cuts must be factored into any interest rate forecast, Husain had this to say on a November 22 Global Market Webinar at T. Rowe Price when queried by his colleague, Investment Specialist Ritu Vohora: Vohora: So coming to you now, Arif. You know, Blerina talked there about one of the key risks is around fiscal policy. The U.S. deficit is on track to be 7% of GDP at the end of the year. I think the interest expense alone is going to be higher than the defense budget, which is mind-boggling. When should we start worrying about the debt burden? I feel like we talk about it, but when do we actually start worrying? Husain: You should be worried right now. I think, certainly, the initial reaction in the bond market post-the-election was to go after some of the fiscal laggards. So, the European peripheral market got hit. The UK bond market got hit, and so did the U.S. Now there’s been plenty of volatility. So I think you got to be worried about the bond market. I’m on record of saying I think the U.S. 10-year will get to 5%. I said that before the election. There’s only more evidence, new information, to think, to believe that and frankly, I said 5%, because 5% you need to go through 5 to get to 6. So for me, what will create fiscal austerity? What will create a little bit more discipline around the deficit? Can’t see it. I really can’t see it. And really, I think the real thing that most people miss when they’re just looking at the U.S. fiscal deficit is a really simple point, which is the U.S. are not the only people who need to sell a lot of debt. A huge, huge amount of debt. You know, Justin was talking about Chinese stimulus a moment ago. Guess what that is: debt issuance. And every country with the exception of Germany, actually, the German debt break is one of their structural, one of the structural issues holding them back a little bit, but from a bond holder’s perspective it’s a positive, right, but other than that, everyone is selling lots and lots and lots of debt in a time when central banks are no longer buying it. And so from a global perspective, I think we really need to worry about deficits and the lack of plan to address them. And the U.S. is at the front of the queue there. You know, every week, every second week, they’ve got to, they come with massive bond issuance and really to my mind, bond yields need to be a lot higher to be competitive. And you’ve got to see a much steeper yield curve to make that longer duration debt a lot more attractive. At this point in the webinar, another colleague asks Husain, “Arif, did you, did you just call for 6% U.S. 10-year as a possibility?” Husain responds: “I think we’ll see 5 before 6, that’s for sure.” This morning, Husain’s outlook for rising interest rates in the U.S. is getting a lot more attention. Bloomberg News has put excerpts from a new report by Husain in a headlined article on its digital front page. The article is apparently syndicated, because it is being picked up by other news outlets, including Yahoo! Finance. If Husain is correct and the 10-year Treasury yield blows past 5 percent on its way to 6 percent, there are going to be a lot more than bond holders licking their wounds. (As yields on bonds rise in the secondary market, their market price declines in order to bring their yield to the going rate on new bonds of the same maturity.) Because the yield on the benchmark 10-year Treasury impacts mortgage interest rates, a rise in its yield could price more home buyers out of the market because they would be unable to afford the higher monthly mortgage cost. This could lead to a slump in home prices and potentially negatively impact consumer sentiment. A yield of 5 percent or higher on the 10-year Treasury note could also lure money out of stocks and into Treasuries. Should a stock exodus become a stampede, a handful of tech stocks trading at nosebleed valuations might plunge, leading to more selloffs. Since Donald Trump’s ego is bound up in the stock market only rising when he’s in the driver’s seat, this could lead to Trump making imprudent demands on the Fed Chair, Jerome Powell, or firing him as a scapegoat. Since Powell has said he will serve out his term as Fed Chair, irrespective of Trump’s threats to fire him, a Trump-Powell debacle could unnerve foreign investors, leading to capital flight out of the U.S. In fact, we’re shocked we haven’t seen that already, given the chaos Trump has outlined for his first 100 days in office.

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Anchorage Digital Awarded BitLicense From NY Regulator
by Gunnar Larson 17 Dec '24

17 Dec '24

Anchorage Digital Awarded BitLicense From NY Regulator <https://www.law360.com/compliance/articles/2274343?nl_pk=ab5ce197-c1fb-4d8e…> By Katryna Perera Anchorage Digital said Monday it has received a BitLicense from the New York State Department of Financial Services, allowing the cryptocurrency platform to offer regulated crypto trading to New York-based clients and giving it the ability to custody and settle trades through chartered custodian Anchorage Digital Bank. Read full article » <https://www.law360.com/compliance/articles/2274343?nl_pk=ab5ce197-c1fb-4d8e…> | Save to favorites » <https://www.law360.com/compliance/articles/2274343?nl_pk=ab5ce197-c1fb-4d8e…>

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NYC Mayor Eric Adams Calls for an End to the BitLicense Scheme
by Gunnar Larson 17 Dec '24

17 Dec '24

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/nyc-mayor-eric-adams-calls-052130588.html Yahoo Finance Yahoo Finance Sign in Search query Search for news or symbols SURPRISE OF THE YEAR Why General Motors is Yahoo Finance's 2024 winner FX Empire NYC Mayor Eric Adams Calls for an End to the BitLicense Scheme Bob Mason April 28, 2022 4 min read Buying Nvidia in 2024? Wall Street Legend Issues Urgent A.I. Stock Warning The Chaikin Report Ad Key Insights: On Wednesday, New York City Mayor Eric Adams called for an end to the BitLicense scheme. Crypto-related firms avoid New York due to the need to obtain a BitLicense. NewYorkCoin (NYC) holders cannot trade NYC due to BitLicense requirements. It is a busy week for New York lawmakers, who have placed greater attention on digital assets. Amidst rising government and regulatory scrutiny, New York lawmakers are looking to address the impact of Proof-of-Work mining on the environment and curb a rise in illicit activity. The recent legislative maneuvers could impact New York’s hope of becoming a digital hub. One issue that New York City continues to face is the need for crypto firms to obtain a BitLicense. The issue has become significant enough for New York City Mayor Eric Adams to raise the subject publicly. New York City Mayor Adams Calls to End to the BitLicense Scheme This week, New York City Mayor Adams was one of the key speakers at the Financial Times Crypto and Digital Assets Summit. On Wednesday, Mayor Adams discussed the BitLicensing regime, highlighting its impact on economic growth and innovation. Mayor Adams reportedly added, “It’s about thinking not only outside the box, but on this one, we may have to destroy the box.” In March, FX Empire reported a snag with NewYorkCoin (NYC). According to the report, crypto exchanges that have procured a BitLicense have not listed NYC, which prevents citizens from trading in NYC. The report states that “New York’s BitLicense regulatory regime is the most demanding in the United States. Digital currency firms in New York currently have to apply for a BitLicense, which can take years to process.” Powered by Stacks (STX), CityCoins is “a protocol that enables smart contracts on the Bitcoin network.” Miners can forward STX into the Stacks protocol. CityCoins miners receive 70% of all stacked STX tokens in NewYorkCoin. Miners can then mine the rewarded NYC to earn BTC rewards. The requirement for a BitLicense has led to crypto-related firms moving or establishing elsewhere. It is not the first time Mayor Adams has shared his view on Bitcoin. In February, Mayor Adams voiced his opposition to crypto mining at a local government budget hearing. For Bitcoin (BTC) and the broader crypto market, the opposition to crypto mining came despite Adams taking a Bitcoin salary and supporting the introduction of NewYorkCoin (NYC). The comments from Mayor Adams follow New York lawmakers presenting new crypto-related bills. New York Lawmaker Bills Question Digital Hub Aspirations This week, lawmakers have presented two crypto-related bills. On Wednesday, FX Empire reported on a new Proof-of-Work mining bill, Assembly bill A7389C. Currently awaiting a Senate vote, the bill, “establishes a moratorium on cryptocurrency mining operations that use proof-of-work authentication methods to validate blockchain transactions; provides that such operations shall be subject to a full generic environmental impact statement review.” The bill went on further to say that, for a period of two years, the Department of Public Service will not approve a new application or issue a new permit for “an electric generating facility that utilizes carbon-based fuel and that provides, in whole or in part, behind-the-meter electric energy consumed or utilized by cryptocurrency mining operations that use proof-of-work authentication methods to validate blockchain transactions.” In addition, the Department of Public Service may not approve an application to renew an existing permit during the two-year period. The second bill, Senate Bill S8839, relates to illegal activity and has yet to be debated. New York lawmaker Kevin Thomas introduced a bill to criminalize illicit activity across the digital asset space. The bill, “Establishes the offenses of virtual token fraud, illegal rug pulls, private key fraud, and fraudulent failure to disclose interest in virtual tokens.” Proposed penalties include, “a civil fine of not more than five million dollars or imprisoned not more than twenty years, or both, except where such a person is a person other than a natural person, a fine not exceeding twenty-five million dollars.” For New York to not lose out to the likes of Florida and other crypto-friendly states, lawmakers may need to consider the Mayor’s comments.

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Minn. Panel Revives $1.5M Fire Loss Row Against State Farm
by Gunnar Larson 17 Dec '24

17 Dec '24

Minn. Panel Revives $1.5M Fire Loss Row Against State Farm <https://www.law360.com/insurance/articles/2274615?nl_pk=59612751-8689-4b1e-…> By Ganesh Setty A Minnesota state appeals court revived a property owner's $1.5 million bid for additional coverage over a building fire, finding Monday that while state law and the owner's State Farm policy required it to sue within two years of the loss, that requirement didn't extend to the owner's appraisal demand. Opinion attached | Read full article » <https://www.law360.com/insurance/articles/2274615?nl_pk=59612751-8689-4b1e-…> | Save to favorites » <https://www.law360.com/insurance/articles/2274615?nl_pk=59612751-8689-4b1e-…>

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Right-Wing Pair Can Be Charged For False Election Robocalls
by Gunnar Larson 17 Dec '24

17 Dec '24

Right-Wing Pair Can Be Charged For False Election Robocalls <https://www.law360.com/cybersecurity-privacy/articles/2274367?nl_pk=3dfd2fd…> By Danielle Ferguson A Michigan appellate panel has upheld, for the second time, criminal charges against two right-wing conspiracy theorists who led a misinformation campaign that targeted Black voters, finding that even under a narrowed test from the state's top court, the pair likely knew the robocalls shared false information and were related to voting procedures. 2 documents attached | Read full article » <https://www.law360.com/cybersecurity-privacy/articles/2274367?nl_pk=3dfd2fd…> | Save to favorites » <https://www.law360.com/cybersecurity-privacy/articles/2274367?nl_pk=3dfd2fd…>

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