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Luis Miguel
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RE: ARE WE NOW IN THE END TIMES?
1/13/2016 5:37:53 PM

Gartman Now Says Crude Has Bottomed Hours After Warning Of "Egregiously Lower" Prices And "Panic Selling" To $15

Tyler Durden's picture
Submitted by Tyler Durden on 01/13/2016 08:16 -0500


It was less than a day ago when Gartman, in his latest appearance on the nepotism-challenged CNBC, said that not only is the bottom for oil not in yet, but that a selling "panic" could push it down as low as $15: after all with Standard Chartered coming out with a $10 forecast, it was suddenly cool to have dire predictions about the black gold's downside risk.

This is what he said:

"The dollar is the predominant deciding factor at this point, and as long as the dollar continues to go higher, and it does, the pressure will remain on the crude oil market. I really thought that $32 might hold. I actually thought that would be the furthest that we could extend it down to, but we're getting a panic situation. And in panic you can get an egregiously lower price," he said.

According to Gartman, the bottom is not in for oil: It could fall much further."Egregiously lower — $15, $16, $17, $18 per barrel on the front month for a day or two but it won't last long down there," he said.

Watch video

Perhaps because the video was record around lunch time, before oil dipped below $30 and then rebounded, and perhaps because just a few hours later Jeff Gundlach said oil has bottomed, the halflife on this particular Gartman call was record short.

This is what he said in his latest overnight letter:

CRUDE OIL PRICES, FINALLY, HAVE STABILISED and we shall go our far upon a limb here this morning suggesting very strongly that when nearby February WTI traded to $29.93 at its low yesterday amidst a great deal of very vocal consternation on the national business television channels that crude had “TRADED BELOW $30 PER BARRELL” that that was what we in the past had referred to as the “obscene number” and may well have been the low.

This, of course, comes from the world-renowned commodities expert who trades oil as follows:


So while oil may have much more downside once again, the other question is what happens to stocks? After all in yesterday's comment in which Gartman said he was preparing to "short this bear market" more, we warned "shorters may want to take today off" ahead of the late day spike. What does Gartman think now?

Our International Index has risen 89 “points” in the past twenty four hours, taking it 1% higher in the process and reviving hopes on the part of the equity market bulls that the weakness has run its course. It has not and we wish to be quite clear about that. For the year-to-date, our International Index is down nearly 750 “points and from its high last May it is down nearly 2350 “points” or 7.8% and 21.0% respectively. These are not insignificant numbers. Indeed they are manifestly bearish numbers and we must needs trade bearishly as a result, and for now we await the rise toward 1985 for the S&P as noted just above into which we have every intention of becoming rather aggressively net short of the market. We have the ability… and the opportunity… at this point to be patient, awaiting our target and waiting for the proper time.

His conclusion:

Victory usually goes to the patient.

By patient we suppose he means to those who now flipflop twice in less than 24 hours?


(ZeroHedge)

"Choose a job you love and you will not have to work a day in your life" (Confucius)
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Luis Miguel
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RE: ARE WE NOW IN THE END TIMES?
1/13/2016 6:04:12 PM

The Bursting of the Bond Bubble Has Begun

Phoenix Capital Research's picture
Submitted by Phoenix Capital Research on 01/13/2016 08:50 -0500


As I’ve outlined previously the primary concern for Central Banks is the bond bubble. CNBC and other financial media focus on stocks because the asset class is more volatile and so makes for better content, but the foundation of the financial system is bonds. And bonds are THE focus for Central Banks.

In the simplest of terms, the world is awash in too much debt. The bond bubble was close to $80 trillion in size going into 2008. The Central Banks had a choice to either let the defaults hit and clear out the garbage debt from the financial system or attempt to inflate the debts away.

They chose to attempt to inflate the debts away. Put differently, all of their policies were aimed at containing debt deflation… or the process through which debt becomes less and less serviceable leading to eventual insolvency and default.

To whit:

1) Central Banks cut interest rates to zero to make bond payments smaller.

2) Central Banks launched QE and other programs to put a floor beneath bond prices (when bond prices rise, bond yields fall and debt payments become smaller and easier to service).

3) Central Banks provided verbal intervention promising to do “more” or “whatever it takes” whenever bonds came close to ending their bull market.


As a result of this, the financial system has become even more leveraged than it was in 2007 at the beginning of the last debt crisis.

Globally the bond bubble has grown by more than $20 trillion since 2008. Today it is north of $100 trillion, with an additional $555+ trillion in derivatives trading based on it.

Yes, $555 TRILLION, more than seven times global GDP, and more than 10 times the Credit Default Swap market ($50 trillion), which triggered the 2008 Crisis.

By not allowing the bad debts to clear in 2008, the Central Banks conditioned everyone from consumers to corporations to believe that business cycles could be contained and that the bond bubble/ bull market had not ended.

As a result of this, TRILLIONS of dollars of capital have been misallocated. The evidence is everywhere you look. Corporates around the globe have been issuing record amounts of debt, much of it in US Dollars.

Few of these bonds were high quality. Indeed, globally over 50% of all corporate bonds are now “junk.”

Chinese firms might be the most out of control when it comes to bond issuance, but they are hardly unique. As the below chart reveals, the pace of corporate debt issuance in Emerging Markets worldwide has been extraordinary relative to economic growth.

Today, the Emerging Market corporate bond market is equal to nearly 75% of total Emerging Market GDP. It was at just 50% in 2007 during the last peak!



This has also been the case in the US where corporates have posted four straight years of record bond issuance.

Moreover, most of US corporate bond issuance is going towards stock buybacks and financial engineering (massaging results to look better than they are) NOT legitimate expansion.

As a result of this, the financial system today is even more leveraged with more garbage debt than it was going into 2008.

Another Crisis is coming. Smart investors are preparing now.

We just published a 21-page investment report titled Stock Market Crash Survival Guide.

In it, we outline precisely how the crash will unfold as well as which investments will perform best during a stock market crash.

We are giving away just 1,000 copies for FREE to the public.

To pick up yours, swing by:

https://www.phoenixcapitalmarketing.com/stockmarketcrash.html

Best Regards

Graham Summers

Chief Market Strategist

Phoenix Capital Research


(ZeroHedge)

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Luis Miguel
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RE: ARE WE NOW IN THE END TIMES?
1/14/2016 12:30:29 AM
Human-Animal Chimeras Are Gestating on U.S. Research Farms

A radical new approach to generating human organs is to grow them inside pigs or sheep.

By Antonio Regalado on January 6, 2016


Braving a funding ban put in place by America’s top health agency, some U.S. research centers are moving ahead with attempts to grow human tissue inside pigs and sheep with the goal of creating hearts, livers, or other organs needed for transplants.

The effort to incubate organs in farm animals is ethically charged because it involves adding human cells to animal embryos in ways that could blur the line between species.

Last September, in a reversal of earlier policy, the National Institutes of Health announced it would not support studies involving such “human-animal chimeras” until it had reviewed the scientific and social implications more closely.

Hiromitsu Nakauchi
The agency, in a statement, said it was worried about the chance that animals’ “cognitive state” could be altered if they ended up with human brain cells.

The NIH action was triggered after it learned that scientists had begun such experiments with support from other funding sources, including from California’s state stem-cell agency. The human-animal mixtures are being created by injecting human stem cells into days-old animal embryos, then gestating these in female livestock.

Based on interviews with three teams, two in California and one in Minnesota, MIT Technology Review estimates that about 20 pregnancies of pig-human or sheep-human chimeras have been established during the last 12 months in the U.S., though so far no scientific paper describing the work has been published, and none of the animals were brought to term.

The extent of the research was disclosed in part during presentations made at the NIH’s Maryland campus in November at the agency’s request. One researcher, Juan Carlos Izpisua Belmonte of the Salk Institute, showed unpublished data on more than a dozen pig embryo containing human cells. Another, from the University of Minnesota, provided photographs of a 62-day-old pig fetus in which the addition of human cells appeared to have reversed a congenital eye defect.

The experiments rely on a cutting-edge fusion of technologies, including recent breakthroughs in stem-cell biology and gene-editing techniques. By modifying genes, scientists can now easily change the DNA in pig or sheep embryos so that they are genetically incapable of forming a specific tissue. Then, by adding stem cells from a person, they hope the human cells will take over the job of forming the missing organ, which could then be harvested from the animal for use in a transplant operation.

“We can make an animal without a heart. We have engineered pigs that lack skeletal muscles and blood vessels,” says Daniel Garry, a cardiologist who leads a chimera project at the University of Minnesota. While such pigs aren’t viable, they can develop properly if a few cells are added from a normal pig embryo. Garry says he’s already melded two pigs in this way and recently won a $1.4 million grant from the U.S. Army, which funds some biomedical research, to try to grow human hearts in swine.

“The specter of an intelligent mouse stuck in a laboratory somewhere screaming ‘I want to get out’ would be very troubling to people.”

Because chimeras could provide a new supply of organs for needy patients and also lead to basic discoveries, researchers including Garry say they intend to press forward despite the NIH position. In November, he was one of 11 authors who published a letter criticizing the agency for creating “a threat to progress” that “casts a shadow of negativity” on their work.

The worry is that the animals might turn out to be a little too human for comfort, say ending up with human reproductive cells, patches of people hair, or just higher intelligence. “We are not near the island of Dr. Moreau, but science moves fast,” NIH ethicist David Resnik said during the agency’s November meeting. “The specter of an intelligent mouse stuck in a laboratory somewhere screaming ‘I want to get out’ would be very troubling to people.”

The chance of an animal gaining human consciousness is probably slim; their brains are just too different, and much smaller. Even so, as a precaution, researchers working with farm-animal chimeras haven’t yet permitted any to be born, but instead are collecting fetuses in order to gather preliminary information about how great the contribution of human cells is to the animals’ bodies.



Injecting cells from one species into the embryo of another creates mixtures called chimeras. From left to right: an ordinary mouse, a mouse that’s partly rat, a rat that’s partly mouse, a white rat.


Hiromitsu Nakauchi, a stem-cell biologist at Stanford University, began trying to make human-sheep chimeras this year. He says that so far the contribution by human cells to the animals’ bodies appears to be relatively small. “If the extent of human cells is 0.5 percent, it’s very unlikely to get thinking pigs or standing sheep,” he says. “But if it’s large, like 40 percent, then we’d have to do something about that.”

Other kinds of human-animal chimeras are already widely used in scientific research, including “humanized” mice endowed with a human immune system. Such animals are created by adding bits of liver and thymus from a human fetus (collected after an abortion) to a mouse after it is born.

The new line of research goes further because it involves placing human cells into an animal embryo at the very earliest stage, when it is a sphere of just a dozen cells in a laboratory dish. This process, called “embryo complementation,” is significant because the human cells can multiply, specialize, and potentially contribute to any part of the animal’s body as it develops.

In 2010, while working in Japan, Nakauchi used the embryo complementation method to show he could generate mice with a pancreas made entirely of rat cells. “If it works as it does in rodents,” he says, “we should be able have a pig with a human organ.”

“What if the embryo that develops is mostly human? It’s something that we don’t expect, but no one has done this experiment, so we can’t rule it out.”

Although Nakauchi was a star scientist, Japanese regulators were slow to approve his idea for chimeras—a “pig man” as critics put it—and by 2013 Nakauchi decided to move to the U.S., where no federal law restricts the creation of chimeras. Stanford was able to recruit him with the help of a $6 million grant from the California Institute of Regenerative Medicine, a state agency set up a decade ago to bypass political interference from Washington.

While the NIH funding ban doesn’t affect Nakauchi, it has put researchers under pressure to explain the purpose of their work. “I want to show you some chimeras,” Nakauchi said when I visited his laboratory at Stanford last month. He opened the door to a small room containing incubators where the chimeric embryos are stored. Because an early embryo is almost invisible to the human eye, the room houses special microscopes equipped with micro-needles used to inject the human cells into them.

The type of human cells being added are called iPS cells, made from skin or blood chemically reprogrammed into more versatile stem cells using a Nobel Prize-winning formula developed by one of Nakauchi’s Japanese colleagues. Nakauchi says that as a matter of convenience, most of the iPS cells his team has been placing into animal embryos are made from his own blood, since recruiting volunteers involves too much paperwork.

“We need a special consent if we’re injecting into animals,” he says sheepishly. “So I try to use my own.”



A pig at the swine unit of the University of California, Davis. Scientists hope to grow human organs in such animals.

The word chimera comes from the creature of Greek myth, part lion, part goat, and part snake. Nakauchi says most people at first imagine his chimeras are monsters, too. But he says attitudes change if he can explain his proposal. One reason is that if his iPS cells develop inside an animal, the resulting tissue will actually be his, a kind of perfectly matched replacement part. Desperately ill people on organ waiting lists might someday order a chimera and wait less than a year for their own custom organ to be ready. “I really don’t see much risk to society,” he says.

Before that can happen, scientists will have to prove that human cells can really multiply and contribute effectively to the bodies of farm animals. That could be challenging since, unlike rats and mice, which are fairly close genetically, humans and pigs last shared an ancestor nearly 90 million years ago.

To find out, researchers in 2014 decided to begin impregnating farm animals with human-animal embryos, says Pablo Ross, a veterinarian and developmental biologist at the University of California, Davis, where some of the animals are being housed. Ross says at Davis he has transferred about six sets of pig-human embryos into sows in collaboration with the Salk Institute and established another eight or 10 pregnancies of sheep-human embryos with Nakauchi. Another three dozen pig transfers have taken place outside the U.S., he says.

These early efforts aren’t yet to make organs, says Ross, but more “to determine the ideal conditions for generating human-animal chimeras.” The studies at Davis began only after a review by three different ethics committees, and even then, he says, the university decided to be cautious and limit the time the animals would be allowed to develop to just 28 days (a pig is born in 114 days).

By then, the embryonic pig is only half an inch long, though that’s developed enough to check if human cells are contributing to its rudimentary organs.

“We don’t want to grow them to stages we don’t need to, since that would be more controversial,” says Ross. “My view is that the contribution of human cells is going to be minimal, maybe 3 percent, maybe 5 percent. But what if they contributed to 100 percent of the brain? What if the embryo that develops is mostly human? It’s something that we don’t expect, but no one has done this experiment, so we can’t rule it out.”


(technologyreview.com)

"Choose a job you love and you will not have to work a day in your life" (Confucius)
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Luis Miguel
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RE: ARE WE NOW IN THE END TIMES?
1/14/2016 1:21:47 AM

Hillary’s Emails Show Ulterior Motives For The Intervention Of Libya

Galactic Free Press's picture

by Matt James, Collective Evolution

When Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State, she received an email on April 2, 2011 from Sidney Blumenthal, Hillary’s unofficial intelligence operative, which focused on France’s motivations for joining the war against Gaddafi in Libya. In the email, she writes how Gaddafi had “nearly bottomless financial resources” to continue his campaign against the rebels, and although the freezing of Libya’s bank accounts presented challenges for him, he had managed to circumvent this by having up to 143 tons of gold and similar amount in silver, amounting to $7 billion, that was kept outside the Libyan Central Bank.

It then states that he acquired the gold prior to the rebellion “to establish a pan-African currency based on the Libyan golden Dinar.” His plan was to offer a competing currency in the African region to rival the French Franc, which was the currency predominately used in the area. Blumenthal then writes, “French intelligence officers discovered this plan shortly after the current rebellion began, and this was one of the factors that influenced President Nicolas Sarkozy’s decision to commit France to the attack on Libya.”

So there you have it. What was once dismissed as just another “conspiracy theory” for the reason to take out Gaddafi is supported by an intelligence brief emailed to the United States’ Secretary of State.

gold


Also important to note, mentioned in the email are the other reasons given for France’s involvement in the Libyan war (and no, liberating the Libyan people is not one of them):

libya


Here is Sarkozy’s speech at the UN’s “Meeting On Libya” on September 20th, 2011:

speech

Sources

https://www.foia.state.gov/searchapp/DOCUMENTS/HRCEmail_DecWebClearedMeta/31-C1/DOC_0C05779612/C05779612.pdf

http://www.ambafrance-uk.org/President-Sarkozy-has-faith-in

Matt James

@cosmicsource

http://www.collective-evolution.com/2016/01/12/hillarys-emails-show-that-us-nato-invaded-destroyed-because-of-gaddafis-gold-reserves/


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Collective Evolution

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Luis Miguel
Luis Miguel Goitizolo

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RE: ARE WE NOW IN THE END TIMES?
1/14/2016 1:48:04 AM

The EPA Finally Admitted That the World’s Most Popular Pesticide Kills Bees—20 Years Too Late


—By | Thu Jan. 7, 2016 2:08 PM EST


Armando Frazao/Shutterstock


Bees are dying in record numbers—and now the government admits that an extremely common pesticide is at least partially to blame.

For more than a decade, the Environmental Protection Agency has been under pressure from environmentalists and beekeepers to reconsider its approval of a class of insecticides called neonicotinoids, based on a mounting body of researchsuggesting they harm bees and other pollinators at tiny doses. In a report released Wednesday, the EPA basically conceded the case.

The report card was so dire that the EPA "could potentially take action" to "restrict or limit the use" of the chemical by the end of this year.

Marketed by European chemical giants Syngenta and Bayer, neonics are the most widely used insecticidesboth in the United States and globally. In 2009, the agency commenced a long, slow process of reassessing them—not as a class, but rather one by one (there are five altogether). Meanwhile, tens of millions of acres of farmland are treated with neonics each year, and the health of US honeybee hives continues to be dismal.

The EPA's long-awaited assessment focused on how one of the most prominent neonics—Bayer's imidacloprid—affects bees. The report card was so dire that the EPA "could potentially take action" to "restrict or limit the use" of the chemical by the end of this year, an agency spokesperson wrote in an emailed statement.

Reviewing dozens of studies from independent and industry-funded researchers, the EPA's risk-assessment team established that when bees encounter imidacloprid at levels above 25 parts per billion—a common level for neonics in farm fields—they suffer harm. "These effects include decreases in pollinators as well as less honey produced," the EPA's press release states.

The crops most likely to expose honeybees to harmful levels of imidacloprid are cotton and citrus, while "corn and leafy vegetables either do not produce nectar or have residues below the EPA identified level." Note in the below USGS chart that a substantial amount of imidacloprid goes into the US cotton crop.

Imidacloprid use has surged in recent years. Uh-oh. US Geological Survey

Meanwhile, the fact that the EPA says imidacloprid-treated corn likely doesn't harm bees sounds comforting, but as the same USGS chart shows, corn gets little or no imidacloprid. (It gets huge amounts of another neonic, clothianidin, whose EPA risk assessment hasn't been released yet.)

Soybeans could expose bees to dangerous levels of imidacloprid, but data on how much of the pesticide shows up in soybeans' pollen and nectar are "unavailable."

The biggest imidacloprid-treated crop of all is soybeans, and soy remains an information black hole. The EPA assessment notes that soybeans are "attractive to bees via pollen and nectar," meaning they could expose bees to dangerous levels of imidacloprid, but data on how much of the pesticide shows up in soybeans' pollen and nectar are "unavailable," both from Bayer and from independent researchers. Oops. Mind you, imidacloprid has been registered for use by the EPA since the 1990s.

The agency still has to consider public comments on the bee assessment it just released, and it also has to complete a risk assessment of imidacloprid's effect on other species. In addition to their impact on bees, neonic pesticides may also harm birds, butterflies, and water-borne invertebrates, recent studies suggest. Then there are the assessments of the other four neonic products that need to be done. Meanwhile, a coalition of beekeepers and environmental groups filed a lawsuit in federal court Wednesday pointing out that the agency has never properly assessed neonics in their most widely used form: as seed coatings, which are then taken up by crops.

TOM PHILPOTT

Food and Ag Correspondent

Tom Philpott is the food and ag correspondent for Mother Jones. For more of his stories, clickhere. To follow him on Twitter, click here. RSS |




"Choose a job you love and you will not have to work a day in your life" (Confucius)
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