In a 2011 memo, an aide to Bill Clinton laid out the unethical relationship between the Clinton Foundation and Bill’s sudden wealth. Bill’s personal interests were linked as was Hillary selling influence. The memo details how some foundation donors paid Clinton to speak and provide consulting services.

Hillary has said that the Foundation will continue to operate when she is president. Meanwhile, Chelsea is on record saying she will remain running the Foundation if Hillary is elected. Bill says he will leave the Foundation, obviously he will be busy having coffee with world leaders wives. Not sure if that is letter a kid run a candy store. This is a real scandal. We will have a President running a pay-for-play deal for access to the President of the United States. This level of corruption is really just beyond contemplation.

The U.S. polls are clearly being rigged just as they were for BREXIT. Here is a Podesta email revealing how it is done. They take samples from specific regions and markets and pretend it is the national poll. They then feed this information to the media to create what they hope will be a discouraging atmosphere that deters Trump supporters from voting. If Trump’s supporters assume they will lose, what is the point in voting?

The Italian Prime Minister is calling for immediate help with the refugees. The EU refugee crisis is becoming a huge nightmare and Brussels refuses to simply admit it has made a bad decision. Italy is overwhelmed by the influx of refugees and is now calling for a fresh review. Italy cannot cope with a similar number of incoming refugees this year. Prime Minister Matteo Renzi has said he would resign if the upcoming Constitutional Amendment is rejected on December 4. He realizes the vastly unpopular influx of refugees must be stopped or he may have to resign. The Italian coastguard rescued more than 6,000 people from the sea, and this year alone about 155,000 refugees have arrived by sea in Italy. They are pouring in from Libya where operating traffickers send refugees to make large sums to get them to Italy.

Renzi has now threatened that if other EU member states refuse to accept refugees he will veto the EU budget. Renzi pointed out that Italy pays the EU 20 billion euros and gets back only 12 billion. He has come out and stated that this system “does not work.”

QUESTION:
Mr. Armstrong:

I hope you are well. I ask you:

1. What were the contributions to the economy and international trade, of the great bankers of the modern history, such as, Medici, Fugger, Welser, Berenberg, Rothschild and Morgan?

I look forward to hearing from you as soon as possible.

Sincerely,

J.E.M.V.

ANSWER:The contribution was to facilitate the advancement of society by enabling the free movement of capital and thus the integration of commerce. Of course, people will immediately disagree with me by citing the Rothschilds who did lend to the governments of Europe. They were more of the exception rather than the rule.

The Medici were different. Raymond de Roover, who became a Professor of history at Brooklyn College, wrote “The Rise and Decline of the Medici Bank,” which was first published in 1966. It remains the seminal work on this period. He had access to contracts and internal documents. A special clause was entered into the core contract of the Medici bank “to deal as little as possible with the court of the Duke of Burgundy and of other princes and lords, especially in granting credit and accommodating them with money, because it involves more risk than profit.” (id/ p 343)

Obviously, Raymond de Roover makes it clear that the Medici did not wish to lend to the princes of Europe, for there was no way to collect a debt from a sovereign. The contract continued by warning that “many merchants in this way fared badly…our fathers have always been wary of such involvements and stayed aloof, unless it was a matter of a small sum lent to make or to keep friends.” The Medici policy was “to preserve their wealth and credit rather than enrich themselves by risky ventures.”

Indeed, later generations ignored this command, and once they lent to government, that was the end of the Medici. The Fugger’s were the German bankers wiped out by the default of Spain, which was rather stupid since they had previously defaulted after wiping out the Italian bankers.

Banking has always furthered the economy and raised the standard of living for all. When the bankers get in bed with government, society is placed in a dangerous position.Goldman Sachs is not a true banker and was rescued transforming them into a bank so they could be part of TARP. They are wheeler & dealers, not true bankers. They are in a class by themselves and should not be looked upon as even with the same stature as the Medici.

Merkel wants to regulate real estate loans in Germany. The Federal Government is planning to implement extensive regulations on real estate loans. Among other things, debtors will be required under certain circumstances to repay their loans within a given period. The Federal Government said on Monday that the draft law should be followed by recommendations from the German Committee on Financial Stability.

While there is no real estate bubble right now, it appears they are concerned about further capital inflows, perhaps caused by the failed euro. The new hurdles to be imposed for new loans may have the negative impact of making sales of property in Germany far more difficult as a whole. Such schemes have tended to have a negative impact upon price.

Yes, the Hang Seng lost 1% and Shanghai was lower by 0.5% but the volatility was in the Nikkei that managed to reverse the opening trend with a healthy bounce. Many traders tell us they feel something is hovering in the wings and are therefore taking very few overnight positions! However, the day was generally heavy and so we saw Europe open with a negative bias.

European stocks opened marginally weaker, on the back of oil’s price decline but it was the credit markets that most influenced stocks as government started to slip. Recent fixed-income issuance is starting to have an impact outside its own market as central bank figures warn they would rather not have interest rates so low for so long. This didn’t help matters for bonds obviously, but it also weighs heavy on the stock markets too. In the UK the FTSE could not find the enthuses needed to turn things around and so we closed around 0.9% lower on the day. The DAX and CAC both closed around 0.35% lower. IBEX actually managed a small positive close at +0.4%.

US stocks had a heavy opening following Europe’s weak morning session but managed a healthy recovery upon economic data when we saw PMI jump from 52.3 to 54.8 and New Home Sales were up 3.1%. However, the action was very much in the bond market where we saw possibly the start of sell-off begin. the US curve steepened after 2’s gained 1.5bp to close 0.87% while 10’s gained 4bp closing at 1.79% (2/10 curve at +92bp). Germany started the selling as dealers started the hedge into supply. 10yr Bunds gained 5.5bp to close 0.085%; closing the US/Germany 10yr spread at +170.5bp (2.5bp tighter than yesterday). Italy 10’s closed 1.46% (+7.5bp), Greece 8.09% (-11bp), Turkey 9.7%, Portugal 3.17% (+2bp) and Gilts 1.15% (+6bp).

The Wall Street Journal broke the story on Sunday night about the connections surfacing between the Democrats and Jill Mcabe’s run for the Senate who is the wife of one of the top FBI investigators into the Hillary emails. According to the Journal, the finance records show Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe’s PAC gave $467,500 to Jill McCabe’s 2015 state Senate campaign. Then the Virginia Democratic Party itself spent an additional $207,788 on her campaign. McCabe, who ended up losing to the Republican incumbent, is married to Andrew McCabe, the FBI’s deputy director.

On top of all that, now an email from 2015 reveals Hillary’s top aide and lawyer Cheryl Mills wrote to Podesta, “we need to clean this up,” referencing the communications between President Obama and Hillary Clinton where she was clearly using her private server. “He has emails from her – they do not say state.gov,” Mills wrote.

In a CBS interview in March 2015, Obama was bluntly asked when he first learned about Clinton’s private server that she used as Secretary of State. He answered: “The same time everybody else learned it through news reports.”

However, Obama clearly signed this memorandum to which Hillary would have been a party. Her claiming it was allowed is plain out right a lie. There are emails from Obama to Hillary’s private server, proving he knew what she was doing. Clinton keeps trying to dodge the criticism and distort the degree to which the rules have changed since previous secretaries of state were in office. On August 24, 2012, Obama signed a directive to the heads of the executive departments, which would have included Hillary (Directive to Hillary 2012 m-12-18). Hillary was Secretary of State between 2009 and 2013. Therefore, Obama knew she had a private email server and sent this directive, which she IGNORED. This latest email from Mills to Podesta shows Hillary was outside of the rules and law.

Podesta wrote in return to use Executive Privilege to cover-up the issue just like Richard Nixon. “Think we should hold emails to and from potus? That’s the heart of his exec privilege. We could get them to ask for that. They may not care, but I(t) seems like they will.” 

Indeed, the New York Post exposed that Obama used a fake name to communicate with Hillary on her private server obviously because he KNEW what she was doing.

Unquestionably. Trump is right. We have to “drain the swamp” in Washington, DC.

Bob Woodard, the journalist who broke the Watergate scandal that forced Nixon to resign, has come out to say that Hillary’s Clinton Foundation is “corrupt” and “a scandal.” Hillary said she will continue the Clinton Foundation if president, meaning she would continue taking money from foreign governments, no doubt.

While the IRS documents show Hillary took in $500 million tax-free, she only paid out $75 million in charity and $25 million was spent traveling chartered jets. As long as she claims she went somewhere to talk to someone, all of her expenses are tax-free. I travel the world and have not spent even a half-million on travel. Of course, I am not hiring private jets.

Over 17,000 asylum seekers in Germany have filed lawsuits, clogging the courts, that are aimed at getting their families to join them in Germany. This is the same strategy that people were screaming about in the United States where families would first send their children to the States and then seek to be reunited. Under the Geneva Convention, refugees (at least the ones from Syria) are now believed to be legally in a position where the courts must grant them relief. That means the state will have to provide full benefits that amount to healthcare and pay as if they were working. This is not going to go down well with the German people.