Authored by Wayne Madsen via The Strategic Culture Foundation,
Retired National Security Agency (NSA) chief technology officer William Binney is being branded as a "conspiracy theorist" by corporate media outlets, most notably, the Comcast-owned National Broadcasting Corporation, for co-authoring a controversial memo issued this past summer by a group of former intelligence officers – Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.
Whatever you do - remember "all is well"
Dow ended higher (with MMM and HD the biggest drivers) as Trannies, Small Caps (ugly into the close), and the Nasdaq red with S&P clinging to unchanged...until the very last minute...
While many have repeatedly warned over the past year that the record gains in credit are simply too good to stay - especially in Europe where yields and spreads have collapsed largely thanks to the ECB's relentless purchases of corporate debt, with the central bank announcing on Monday it held a record €127.7bn in bonds under its CSPP program - few are as bearish on credit as Morgan Stanley, which today issued ots 2018 US Credit Outlook which is, in a word, "dire."
In the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, countries all over the world suffered dire consequences. The irresponsibility of the globe’s biggest banking institutions, institutional investors, regulators, and consumers plunged economies in the United States, Europe, and Asia into a panic. The blame lies with those who exercised poor judgment in their creation and sale of shoddy derivative assets, but also with regulators for perpetuating a broken system of opacity.
As part of the macro forecast in his just released 2018 Credit Outlook (more on that in a subsequent post), DB's Jim Reid first looks back at the almost concluded 2017 and muses that "whichever way you cut it, it’s likely that 2017 will go down as one of, if not the least, volatile year ever for the vast majority of asset classes. The recent sell-off in early/mid November has been a bit of a wake-up call but overall this remains a blip." In fact, it makes him wonder if 2017 was "the most boring year ever?"