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Yea, they are having to push major money back and forth, more than the usual monopoly #s through for controlling now. I think they are going to lose control at some point. At least to some extent, it's going to be quite the battle for some time I'm afraid. Supports are turning into resistances and there is so many multiple bubbles that are going to have to get dealt with. We've pushed these cans for too long and the end of the road is coming, there's going to be some broken toes that's for sure.
Ready and willing. LOL This thing once it hit the first bottom turned into a regular
Slinky (do they have those anymore?). Been real good to me today.
Yes they will manipulate short/intermediate rises and falls, but the manipulation is reaching it's manipulative power, the "take" has to make too many to lose and it's effects will show itself in time, no doubt. Just have profit on the demise that I will keep doing the best I can, it's the only hands to be played right now, but long term view really sucks for more than it doesn't.
We may see the bottom in the U shortly for a play there today (again).
This was posted on another board, there are many other articles and reports on it, but just scratches the surface of what is just one factor in the big picture in global economics. (including the US).
None of the factors, and there are many creating "bubbles" and problems that break when ignored and continued to fester, are not created in just the last yr but glossed over and manipulated to the masses and will have a total effect that is not shown with comparing past dips and crashes on the chart which were created basically and mainly by singular large events or causes.
This correction just starting now is caused by many problems coming home to roost that will happen over the next months and yrs and will start to show on charts and will be unmatched by previous singular issues. Nothing happens overnight or even over a yr or two, but is planned, nourished and taken action on over greater periods of time. Numbers never lie, just a whole lot of lying about numbers.
Anyway, this is what the main driver of Putin is
If you walk the streets of Moscow, you will eventually smell the faint odor of gasoline.
I’m a former Moscow correspondent. Don’t let Vladimir Putin fool you: Russia’s war in Ukraine is only about one thing.
© MarketWatch photo illustration/iStockphoto
I’m a former Moscow correspondent. Don’t let Vladimir Putin fool you: Russia’s war in Ukraine is only about one thing.
Video: Putin's 'not going to be punished' for creating a crisis, analyst says (Yahoo! Finance)
It’s as ever-present in the air around Russia’s capital as it is central to the country’s economy, infrastructure and geopolitical posture.
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Russian President Vladimir Putin has spelled out a nationalist rationale for his country’s military incursion into two restive provinces in eastern Ukraine largely controlled by Kremlin-backed separatists, but it is primarily about protecting Moscow’s energy interests.
That was true in 2014, when Russia seized Crimea and I was a Moscow correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, for which I wrote dozens of stories about the insurgency in Donetsk and Luhansk that Russia helped foment. And it remains true now.
See: Putin calls for international recognition of Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimean Peninsula in Ukraine
From the archives (March 2021): G-7 rebukes Russia over annexation of Crimea
To understand the Kremlin’s motivations in regard to its smaller, and relatively impoverished, neighbor, the key fact to know is that Russia supplies 40% of Europe’s heating-fuel supplies — namely, natural gas.
Any crimp on Russia’s ability to access the European market is a threat to its economic security.
To get it there, Russia relies mostly on two aging pipeline networks, one of which runs through Belarus and the other through Ukraine. For this, Russia pays Ukraine around $2 billion a year in transit fees.
Russia is a petrostate and relies on oil and natural-gas sales for about 60% of its export revenue and 40% of its total budget expenditures. Any crimp on Russia’s ability to access the European market is a threat to its economic security.
See: Chancellor Olaf Scholz suspends German certification of Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline from Russia
In the Kremlin’s view, a switch of allegiance by Kiev, or Kyiv by Ukrainian preference, to the West — be it an economic association agreement with the European Union like Ukraine was on the verge of signing in 2014, or even the hint of joining NATO — is close to an act of war.
In my three years covering Russia, I watched as the country slowly withdrew into itself after Putin returned to office for what was then his third term as president.
MarketWatch First Take (March 2012): Oil elixir losing its magic for Russia’s Putin
Gone were prior efforts to intertwine Russia’s economy and the global system and encourage foreign investment. As towering skyscrapers rose in Moscow atop a pile of oil cash, Putin’s government became more backward-looking and more isolated.
In Ukraine, meanwhile, many were growing increasingly ill at ease with the impoverished state of their country.
In Ukraine, meanwhile, many were growing increasingly ill at ease with the impoverished state of their country and highly corrupt political system as it languished, locked in a kind of Soviet-era limbo under Russian domination.
As Ukrainians looked to rising living standards in places like Poland and Latvia that had joined NATO and the European Union, many wondered why they couldn’t have the same for themselves.
This is where Putin’s nationalistic impulses kick in. He views the fall of the Soviet Union as the “greatest geopolitical tragedy” of the past century and the rush of former Eastern bloc countries into the embrace of the European Union, and even NATO, as a great humiliation.
He has drawn a line in the sand with countries that border Russia, invading Georgia in 2008 when it hinted at joining NATO, and moving to destabilize Ukraine when it moved to establish closer economic ties with Europe.
Domestically, Putin has sold the incursions into Ukraine on purely nationalistic grounds — even going so far this weekend as to dismiss Ukraine’s history as an independent country as a falsehood.
See: Biden targets Russian banks, sovereign debt in ‘first tranche’ of sanctions over Ukraine invasion
While Ukrainians and Russians share religions and ethnicities, they speak different, albeit similar, languages, even as there are pockets of native Russian speakers in some Ukrainian regions, as there are in other former Soviet republics. And while Russians have seen their quality of life improve awash in petro-rubles in the decades under Putin’s rule, Ukrainians have been mired in poverty and bogged down by misrule.
While it is no wonder many Ukrainians yearn to be unmoored from their bigger, imperialist neighbor, for Putin and his cohort of oligarchs Ukrainian self-determination is not really on the table.
Not when it puts at risk the flow of money that has kept them in power.
I'm not sure it's time to back up any truck to anything, not quite dart throwing time IMO.
Looks like SPY broke, unless it's one heck of a fake. 380-400 projected. If it falls further than that, well sh will really hit the big fan.
Always liked this chart. It feels we've got a bit to go before Despair.
Didn't have wait for long, out again of U 17.59. SPY making mud. LOL Padded a little of my entries of KRBN I made yesterday. It jumped up about 4% today. Projecting high single digit, maybe double digit % gains on the swing. Its slow and don't need to watch every second, just set some alerts and stops, but something to do.
That's about all we can do at this point. LOL
SPY testing its' support level. Break, bounce, or fake? Maybe just roll around in the mud.
That was a pretty level look. Almost everyone is looking at that classic formation, a bit too controlled and defined IMO. Set up both ways for a fake out either if it bounces or support fails.
Putin has probably shorted his own market, and definitely has imported billions of foreign money (including petro dollars) and other assets readying for this event. He has already succeeded in this type of a take over before and he's upped this game quite a bit, not going to give any olive leaf (not any real one anyway), fully believing in his success this time. I'm sure he's playing it all from all sides and taking advantage of anything he can take advantage of.
Then there will be forces against all that. I'm not talking military, although it might end up that way, but the dueling sides that's taking advantage of anything that can be taken advantage on our side.
Of course there will be plenty of lives lost and destroyed over in Ukraine with military and lives will be effected over here with the financial robbery portrayed on the charts.
The games that have been played in the past has created a situation that the games to be played in the future and presently will be intensified by very nature.
The power struggles are just who takes control of what others have control of and who has it to take from. That's us, and all the people that fall under the power mongers hold and that nicely defined bounce or break on the chart is signaling ways to do that no matter which way it goes.
Don't see all of this ending well or even ending at all, at least for sometime. The struggle might just create a sidewards channel for a bit, who knows. Hard game to play for us pawns, but good luck to all.
Can we get a big U dip again for another good run? Or is the SPY just going to bleed more.
We have billions upon billions of our resources and assets ($$) just being stashed and wasted and collected for a few MFs. Crime pays and pays big.
Revealed: Credit Suisse leak unmasks criminals, fraudsters and corrupt politicians
Massive leak reveals secret owners of £80bn held in Swiss bank
Whistleblower leaked bank’s data to expose ‘immoral’ secrecy laws
Clients included human trafficker and billionaire who ordered girlfriend’s murder
Vatican-owned account used to spend €350m in allegedly fraudulent investment
Scandal-hit Credit Suisse rejects allegations it may be ‘rogue bank’
credit-suisse-secrets-leak-unmasks-criminals-fraudsters-corrupt-politicians
Amassive leak from one of the world’s biggest private banks, Credit Suisse, has exposed the hidden wealth of clients involved in torture, drug trafficking, money laundering, corruption and other serious crimes.
Details of accounts linked to 30,000 Credit Suisse clients all over the world are contained in the leak, which unmasks the beneficiaries of more than 100bn Swiss francs (£80bn)* held in one of Switzerland’s best-known financial institutions.
The leak points to widespread failures of due diligence by Credit Suisse, despite repeated pledges over decades to weed out dubious clients and illicit funds. The Guardian is part of a consortium of media outlets given exclusive access to the data.
We can reveal how Credit Suisse repeatedly either opened or maintained bank accounts for a panoramic array of high-risk clients across the world.
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They include a human trafficker in the Philippines, a Hong Kong stock exchange boss jailed for bribery, a billionaire who ordered the murder of his Lebanese pop star girlfriend and executives who looted Venezuela’s state oil company, as well as corrupt politicians from Egypt to Ukraine.
One Vatican-owned account in the data was used to spend €350m (£290m) in an allegedly fraudulent investment in London property that is at the centre of an ongoing criminal trial of several defendants, including a cardinal.
The huge trove of banking data was leaked by an anonymous whistleblower to the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung. “I believe that Swiss banking secrecy laws are immoral,” the whistleblower source said in a statement. “The pretext of protecting financial privacy is merely a fig leaf covering the shameful role of Swiss banks as collaborators of tax evaders.”
Suisse secrets graphic
The revelations may fuel questions over whether Credit Suisse’s challenges over the past few years are indicative of a deep malaise at the bank. Composite: Guardian/David Levene
Credit Suisse said that Switzerland’s strict banking secrecy laws prevented it from commenting on claims relating to individual clients.
“Credit Suisse strongly rejects the allegations and inferences about the bank’s purported business practices,” the bank said in a statement, arguing that the matters uncovered by reporters are based on “selective information taken out of context, resulting in tendentious interpretations of the bank’s business conduct.”
The bank also said the allegations were largely historical, in some instances dating back to a time when “laws, practices and expectations of financial institutions were very different from where they are now”.
While some accounts in the data were open as far back as the 1940s, more than two-thirds were opened since 2000. Many of those were still open well into the last decade, and a portion remain open today.
Zurich
Switzerland
Ukraine
Ukraine
1,000+ accounts
1,000+ accounts
Thailand
Thailand
1,000+ accounts
1,000+ accounts
Venezuela
Venezuela
2,000+ accounts
2,000+ accounts
Egypt
Egypt
2,000+ accounts
2,000+ accounts
Credit Suisse has more than 1.6tn CHF (£1.3tn) in assets under management and is one of Switzerland’s largest lenders, second only to UBS. It has almost 50,000 employees, including a significant workforce in Zurich, where the bank is headquartered.
However, many of its 3,500 ‘relationship managers’, who find and serve wealthy clients, are spread across the world. The leaked accounts are linked to Credit Suisse clients living in more than 120 jurisdictions, with a concentration of clients in the developing world.
Countries with some of the largest number of clients in the data, such as Venezuela, Egypt, Ukraine and Thailand, have long struggled with political and financial elites hiding their fortunes offshore.
Guardian graphic. By Niels de Hoog, Ashley Kirk and Paul Scruton.
The timing of the leak could hardly be worse for Credit Suisse, which has recently been beset by major scandals. Last month, it lost its chairman, António Horta-Osório, after he twice broke Covid-19 regulations.
That capped an unprecedented year of controversies in which the bank became embroiled in the collapse of the supply chain finance firm Greensill Capital and the US hedge fund Archegos Capital, and was fined £350m over its role in a loan scandal in Mozambique.
This month, Credit Suisse became the first major Swiss bank in the country’s history to face criminal charges – which it denies – relating to allegation it helped launder money from the cocaine trade on behalf of the Bulgarian mafia.
However, the repercussions of the leak could be much broader than one bank, threatening a crisis for Switzerland, which retains one of the world’s most secretive banking laws. Swiss financial institutions manage about 7.9tn CHF (£6.3tn) in assets, nearly half of which belongs to foreign clients.
The Suisse secrets project sheds a rare light on one of the world’s largest financial centres, which has grown used to operating in the shadows. It identifies the convicts and money launderers who were able to open bank accounts, or keep them open for years after their crimes emerged. And it reveals how Switzerland’s famed banking secrecy laws helped facilitate the looting of countries in the developing world.
Disgraced executives, fraudsters, traffickers – clients
When Ronald Li Fook-shiu approached a banker to open an account in 2000, he is unlikely to have been viewed as a run-of-the-mill client. A former chairman of the Hong Kong stock exchange, he was one of the wealthiest people in the city, where he was known as the “godfather of the stock market”. But he was perhaps better known for the time he spent in a maximum security prison.
Li’s career had ended in disgrace in 1990, when he was convicted of taking bribes in exchange for listing companies on the stock exchange. However, a decade later Li was nonetheless able to open an account that later held 59m CHF (£26.3m), according to the leak.
He has since died, but his case is one of dozens discovered by reporters appearing to show Credit Suisse opened or maintained accounts for clients who had serious convictions that might be expected to show up in due diligence checks. There are other instances in which Credit Suisse may have taken quick action after red flags emerged, but the case nonetheless shows that dubious clients have been attracted to the bank.
Ronald Li Fook-shiu
Ronald Li Fook-shiu was known as the ‘godfather of the stock market’. Composite: Guardian/Alamy
Like every other bank in the world, Credit Suisse professes to have stringent control mechanisms to carry out extensive due diligence on its customers to “ensure that the highest standards of conduct are upheld”. In banking parlance, such controls are called know-your-client or KYC checks.
A 2017 leaked report commissioned by Switzerland’s financial regulator shed some light on the bank’s internal procedures at that time. Clients would face intensified scrutiny when flagged as a politically exposed person from a high-risk country, or a person involved in a high-risk activity such as gambling, weapons trading, financial services or mining, the report said.
Relationship managers were expected to use external sources to verify customers and their risk levels, according to the leak, including news articles or databases such as the Thomson Reuters World-Check platform, which is used widely in the financial services sector to flag when people are arrested, charged, investigated or convicted of a serious crime.
Rodoljub Radulovic
Rodoljub Radulovic.
Such controls might be expected to prevent a bank from opening accounts for clients such as Rodoljub Radulovic, a Serbian securities fraudster indicted in 2001 by the US Securities and Exchange Commission. However, the leaked data identifies him as the co-signatory of two Credit Suisse company accounts. The first was opened in 2005, the year after the SEC had secured a default judgment against Radulovic for running a pump-and-dump scheme.
One of Radulovic’s company accounts held 3.4m CHF (£2.2m) before they closed in 2010. He was recently given a 10-year prison sentence by a court in Belgrade for his role trafficking cocaine from South America for the organised crime boss Darko Šaric. Radulovic’s lawyer did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Due diligence is not only for new clients. Banks are required to continually reassess existing customers. The 2017 report said Credit Suisse screened customers at least every three years and as often as once a year for the riskiest clients. Lawyers for Credit Suisse told the Guardian these periodic reviews were introduced “more than 15 years ago”, meaning it was continually running due diligence on existing clients from 2007.
The bank might, therefore, have been expected to have discovered that its German client Eduard Seidel was convicted of bribery in 2008. Seidel was an employee of Siemens. As the multinational’s lead in Nigeria, he oversaw a campaign of industrial-scale bribery to secure lucrative contracts for his employer by funnelling cash to corrupt Nigerian politicians.
Eduard Seidel
Eduard Seidel, convicted of bribery in 2008. Composite: Handout
After German authorities raided the Munich headquarters of Siemens in 2006, Seidel immediately confessed his role in the bribery scheme, though he said he had never stolen from the company or appropriated its slush funds. His involvement in the corruption led to his name being entered into the Thomson Reuters World-Check database in 2007.
However, the leaked Credit Suisse data shows his accounts were left open until at least well into the last decade. At one point after he left Siemens, one account was worth 54m CHF (£24m). Seidel’s lawyer declined to say whether the accounts were his. He said his client had addressed all outstanding matters relating to his bribery offences and wished to move on with his life.
The lawyer did not respond to repeated invitations to explain the source of the 54m CHF. Siemens said it did not know about the money and that its review of its own cashflows shed no light on the account.
While Credit Suisse said in its statement it could not comment on any specific clients, the bank said “actions have been taken in line with applicable policies and regulatory requirements at the relevant times, and that related issues have already been addressed”.
In some instances, Credit Suisse is understood to have frozen accounts belonging to problematic clients. Yet questions remain about how quickly the bank moved to close them.
One client, Stefan Sederholm, a Swedish computer technician who opened an account with Credit Suisse in 2008, was able to keep it open for two-and-a-half years after his widely reported conviction for human trafficking in the Philippines, for which he was given a life sentence.
Stefan Sederholm.
Stefan Sederholm. Composite: AFP
Sederholm’s crime first came to light in 2009, when police in Manila raided a storefront purporting to be the local chapter of the Mindanao Peoples’ Peace Movement, and discovered about 17 women in cubicles with webcams performing sex shows for foreign customers. He was convicted in 2011.
A representative for Sederholm said Credit Suisse never froze his accounts and did not close them until 2013 when he was unable to provide due diligence material. Asked why Sederholm needed a Swiss account, they said that he was living in Thailand when it was opened, adding: “Can you please tell me if you would prefer to put your money in a Thai or Swiss bank?”
Ferdinand and Imelda pillage the Philippines
Swiss banks have cultivated their trusted reputation since as far back as 1713, when the Great Council of Geneva prohibited bankers from revealing details about the fortunes being deposited by European aristocrats. Switzerland soon became a tax haven for many of the world’s elites and its bankers nurtured a “duty of absolute silence” about their clients affairs.
The custom was enshrined in statute in 1934 with the introduction of Switzerland’s banking secrecy law, which criminalised the disclosure of client banking information to foreign authorities. Within decades, wealthy clients from all over the world were flocking to Swiss banks. Sometimes, that meant clients with something to hide.
One of the most notorious cases in Credit Suisse’s history involved the corrupt Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos and his wife, Imelda. The couple are estimated to have siphoned as much as $10bn from the Philippines during the three terms Ferdinand was president, which ended in 1986.
The Marcoses
Credit Suisse helped Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos open Swiss accounts under fake names. Composite: Guardian
It has long been known that Credit Suisse was one of the first banks to help the Marcoses ravage their own country and in one infamous episode even helped them open Swiss accounts under the fake names “William Saunders” and “Jane Ryan”. In 1995, a Zurich court ordered Credit Suisse and another bank to return $500m of stolen funds to the Philippines.
The leaked data contains an account that belonged to Helen Rivilla, an attorney convicted in 1992 for helping launder money on behalf of Ferdinand Marcos. Despite this, she was able to open a Swiss account in 2000, as was her husband, Antonio, who faced similar charges that were subsequently dropped.
It is hard to know how Credit Suisse could have missed the money-laundering case linking the couple to the corrupt Philippine leader, which was reported by the Associated Press. The couple, who could not be reached for comment, were able to hold about 8m CHF (£3.6m) with the bank before their accounts were closed in 2006.
One former Credit Suisse employee at the time alleges there was a deeply ingrained culture in Swiss banking of looking the other way when it came to problematic clients. “The bank’s compliance departments [were] masters of plausible deniability,” they told a reporter from the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, one of the coordinators of the Suisse secrets project. “Never write anything down that could expose an account that is non-compliant and never ask a question you do not want to know the answer to.”
The 2000s was also a decade in which foreign regulators and tax authorities became increasingly frustrated at their inability to penetrate the Swiss financial system. That changed in 2007, when the UBS banker Bradley Birkenfeld voluntarily approached US authorities with information about how the bank was helping thousands of wealthy Americans evade tax with secret accounts.
We are transparent, there is nothing to hide in Switzerland.
Swiss Bankers Association
Birkenfeld was viewed as a traitor in Switzerland, where banking whistleblowers are often held in contempt. However, a wide-ranging US Senate investigation later uncovered the aggressive tactics used by UBS and Credit Suisse, the latter of which was found to have sent bankers to high-end events to recruit clients, courted a potential customer with free gold, and in one case even delivered sensitive bank statements hidden in the pages of a Sports Illustrated magazine.
The revelations sent shock waves through Switzerland’s financial sector and enraged the US, which pressured Switzerland into unilaterally disclosing which of its taxpayers had secret Swiss accounts from 2014. That same year, Switzerland reluctantly signed up to the international convention on the automatic exchange of banking Information.
By adopting the so-called common reporting standard (CRS) for sharing tax data, Switzerland in effect agreed that its banks would in the future exchange information about their clients with tax authorities in foreign countries. They started doing so in 2018.
Membership of the global exchange system is often cited by Switzerland’s banking industry as a turning point. “There is no longer Swiss bank client confidentiality for clients abroad,” the Swiss Bankers Association told the Guardian. “We are transparent, there is nothing to hide in Switzerland.”
Switzerland’s almost 90-year-old banking secrecy law, however, remains in force – and was recently broadened. The Tax Justice Network estimates that countries around the world collectively lose $21bn (£15.4bn) each year in tax revenues because of Switzerland. Many of those countries will be poorer nations that have not signed up to the CRS data exchange.
Suisse secrets graphic
Banks that enable kleptocrats to launder their money are complicit in a particularly far-reaching crime. Composite: Guardian Design
More than 90 countries, most of which are in the developing world, remain in the dark when their wealthy taxpayers hide their money in Swiss accounts.
This inequity in the system was cited by the whistleblower behind the leaked data, who said the CRS system “imposes a disproportionate financial and infrastructural burden on developing nations, perpetuating their exclusion from the system in the foreseeable future”.
“This situation enables corruption and starves developing countries of much-needed tax revenue. These countries are the ones that therefore suffer most from Switzerland’s reverse-Robin-Hood stunt,” they said.
The whistleblower acknowledged that the leak would contain accounts that were legitimate and declared by the client to their tax authority.
“I am aware that having an offshore Swiss bank account does not necessarily imply tax evasion or any other financial crime,” they said. “However, it is likely that a significant number of these accounts were opened with the sole purpose of hiding their holder’s wealth from fiscal institutions and/or avoiding the payment of taxes on capital gains.”
It was not possible for journalists in the Suisse secrets project to establish how many of the more than 18,000 accounts in the leak were declared to relevant tax authorities.
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Media partners in the consortium wrote to more than 100 Credit Suisse clients in the data, asking whether they had disclosed their Swiss accounts to tax authorities. Five confirmed they had done so. Six said they were not required to declare their Swiss accounts. No others replied.
Links to another dictator … and another
Ferdinand Marcos may have been Credit Suisse’s most notorious client. He is arguably rivalled only by relatives of the brutal Nigerian dictator Sani Abacha, who is believed to have stolen as much as $5bn from his people in just six years. It has long been known that Credit Suisse provided services to Abacha’s sons, opening Swiss accounts in which they deposited $214m.
Credit Suisse was publicly contrite after being kicked off a sustainable investment index over the affair. “We understand that the index was not really happy with us being involved with Abacha – we were not happy ourselves,” a spokesperson said in 1999. “But we have addressed those problems and for several years we have taken internal measures to make sure nothing similar happens in the future.”
Banks that enable kleptocrats to launder their money are complicit in a particularly far-reaching crime. The consequences for already impoverished populations can be devastating, as state coffers are siphoned, basic standards are eroded and trust in democracy plummets.
Politicians and state officials are among the riskiest customers for banks because of their access to public funds, particularly in developing nations with fewer legal safeguards against corruption. Banks and other financial institutions are required to subject politically exposed persons, or PEPs, to the most stringent checks, known as “enhanced due diligence”.
The leaked Credit Suisse data is peppered with politicians and their allies who have been linked to corruption before, during or after they had their accounts. None are as well known as the Marcoses or the Abachas, but several wielded great power in countries from Syria to Madagascar, where they amassed personal fortunes.
They include Pavlo Lazarenko, who served a corrupt single year as prime minister of Ukraine between 1997 and 1998 before applying for an account at Credit Suisse. One month after pressure from rivals forced Lazarenko to announce his resignation, he opened his first of two Credit Suisse accounts. One was later valued at almost 8m CHF (£3.6m).
Pavlo Lazarenko, former Ukrainian prime minister
Pavlo Lazarenko, former Ukrainian prime minister. Composite: Guardian/Alamy
Lazarenko was later estimated by Transparency International to have looted $200m from the Ukrainian government, allegedly by threatening to harm businesses unless they paid him 50% of their profits. He pleaded guilty to money laundering in Switzerland in 2000, and was later indicted in the US for corruption and sentenced to nine years in prison in 2006 in relation to bribes received from a Ukrainian businessman.
His lawyer said those convictions did not relate to the theft of any money from the people of Ukraine. Lazarenko, who reportedly lives in California, has resisted returning to the country, where he still faces accusations he stole $17m. His lawyer said his Credit Suisse accounts had not been accessed for two decades and were frozen in connection with court proceedings against him.
It remains unclear why Credit Suisse allowed Lazarenko to open an account and deposit such huge sums in the first place, given his background; before entering politics, Lazarenko was a functionary in charge of a collective farm.
Monika Roth, an expert on money laundering and a professor at Lucerne University, said Swiss banks had for a long time struggled to properly challenge politicians and public officials who, after stints in public office on relatively modest salaries, turned up with huge sums to deposit. She said: “Nobody wants to have asked the question: how is that possible?”
Around the time it was doing business with Lazarenko, Credit Suisse appears to have also made inroads into the Egyptian political establishment under the dictator Hosni Mubarak, who was president for three decades until 2011. The bank’s clients included Mubarak’s sons, Alaa and Gamal, who established business empires in Egypt.
Alaa and Gamal Mubarak
Alaa and Gamal Mubarak. Composite: Guardian
The brothers’ relationship with the bank spanned decades, with the earliest joint account opened by the brothers in 1993. By 2010 – the year before the popular revolt that ousted their father – an account belonging to Alaa held 232m CHF (£138m).
After the Arab spring uprisings their fortunes changed, and in 2015 the brothers and their father were sentenced to three years in jail by an Egyptian court for embezzlement and corruption. They say the case was politically motivated, but after an unsuccessful appeal Alaa and Gamal paid an estimated $17.6m to the Egyptian government in a settlement agreement that made no admissions of guilt.
Lawyers for the brothers reject any suggestion they were corrupt, saying their rights were violated during the Egyptian case, and 10 years of wide-ranging and intrusive investigations into their global assets by foreign authorities has not uncovered any legal violations. They added that their Swiss accounts had been frozen for over a decade, pending the resolution of investigations by the Swiss authorities.
Other Credit Suisse clients linked to Hosni Mubarak were the late tycoon Hussein Salem – who acted as a financial consigliere for the dictator for nearly three decades, amassed a fortune through preferred tender deals and died in exile after facing money-laundering charges – and Hisham Talaat Moustafa, a billionaire politician in Mubarak’s party.
Hisham Talaat Mustafa and Hussein Salem
Hisham Talaat Mustafa (left) and Hussein Salem. Composite: AP/EPA
Moustafa, who could not be reached for comment, was convicted in 2009 of hiring a hitman to murder his ex-girlfriend, the Lebanese pop star Suzanne Tamim – but his account was not closed until 2014.
Another Mubarak henchman linked to Credit Suisse’s banking services was his former spy chief Omar Suleiman. His associates are listed in the data as beneficial owners of an account that held 63m CHF (£26m) in 2007. Suleiman was a feared figure in Egypt, where he oversaw widespread torture and human rights abuses.
Omar Suleiman
Omar Suleiman. Composite: Alamy
The data reveals Credit Suisse accounts held by several more intelligence and military figures and their family members, including in Pakistan, Jordan, Yemen and Iraq. One Algerian client was Khaled Nezzar, who served as minister of defence until 1993 and participated in a coup that precipitated a brutal civil war in which the military junta he was part of was accused of disappearances, mass detentions, torture and execution of detainees.
Nezzar’s alleged role in human rights abuses had been widely documented by 2004, when his account was opened. It contained a maximum balance of 2m CHF (£900,000) and remained open until 2013, two years after he was arrested in Switzerland for suspected war crimes. He denies wrongdoing and the investigation is ongoing.
If ordinary Algerians, Egyptians and Ukrainians have reason to complain that Credit Suisse may have aided nefarious leaders, their grievances pale in comparison with Venezuelans.
Khaled Nezzar
Khaled Nezzar. Composite: Guardian
Reporters working on the Suisse secrets project identified Credit Suisse accounts linked to almost two dozen business people, officials and politicians implicated in corrupt schemes in Venezuela, most of which revolved around the state oil company, Petróleos de Venezuela (PDVSA).
“Corruption has always been around in PDVSA, in varying degrees and levels,” said César Mata-Garcia, an academic at the University of Dundee specialising in international petroleum law. “The words ‘Venezuela’, ‘PDVSA’ and ‘oil’ are an alarm bell for banks.”
If so, that does not appear to have stopped Credit Suisse acquiring clients later revealed to be involved in numerous US investigations and prosecutions linked to PDVSA and the looting of the Venezuelan economy.
One case involves two US-based businessmen with Venezuelan connections, Roberto Rincón Fernández and Abraham Shiera Bastidas, who in 2009 set about bribing officials in exchange for lucrative PDVSA contracts with the help of an associate, Fernando Ardila Rueda. Among those who allegedly received bungs were the energy vice-minister, Nervis Villalobos Cárdenas, and a senior PDVSA official, Luis De Léon Perez.
Nervis Villalobos Cárdenas, Roberto Rincón Fernandez, Abraham Shiera Bastidas and Luis De Léon Perez
From left: Nervis Villalobos Cárdenas, Roberto Rincón Fernández, Abraham Shiera Bastidas and Luis De Léon Perez. Composite: Guardian
In 2015, US prosecutors began indicting the participants; court papers make repeated reference to payments into accounts in an unnamed Swiss bank. However, the leaked data reveals all five men had Credit Suisse accounts active at the time of the offences. Of the five, four have pleaded guilty. The exception, Villalobos, is resisting extradition to the US from Spain.
Some of the Venezuela-linked Credit Suisse accounts contained enormous sums; Villalobos had as much as 9.5m CHF (£6.3m) in his account and De Léon had as much as 22m (£15.5m). Rincón, the businessman paying their bribes, had more than 68m CHF (£44.2m) in his account as of November 2015, the month prior to his arrest.
‘How many rogue bankers before you become a rogue bank?’
When Credit Suisse’s ornate headquarters were constructed in the 1870s in Zurich, they were designed to symbolise “Switzerland as a financial centre”. More than 150 years later, Credit Suisse occupies the same grand premises and Switzerland remains a global offshore centre, much as it has done for the last 300 years.
It is only in recent decades that Credit Suisse, one of Switzerland’s oldest and most cherished banks, acquired its reputation for calamity. As one commentator observed earlier this week: “The bank boasts that its purpose is to serve its wealthy clients ‘with care and entrepreneurial spirit’, but at this stage most of them would probably be happy if it could just avoid yet another major scandal.”
Horta-Osório lasted less than a year before resigning last month. Shortly after Credit Suisse appointed its new chairman, Axel Lehmann, the bank reported a loss of 1.6bn CHF (£1.3bn) in the fourth quarter, in part because it had put aside more than 400m CHF (£320m) to deal with unspecified “legacy litigation matters”.
And there is no shortage of those. The scandals involving Greensill, Archegos and Mozambique bonds have dogged the bank over the past year.
Over the past three decades, Credit Suisse has faced at least a dozen penalties and sanctions for offences involving tax evasion, money laundering, the deliberate violation of US sanctions and frauds carried out against its own customers that span multiple decades and jurisdictions. In total, it has racked up more than $4.2bn in fines or settlements.
Cash graphic
Some of the accounts in the leak remain open today. Composite: Guardian
That includes the $2.6bn the Swiss bank agreed to pay US authorities after pleading guilty to conspiring to aid tax evasion in 2014; the $536m it was fined by the US five years before for deliberately circumventing US sanctions against countries including Iran and Sudan in 2009, and other payouts to Germany and Italy over tax evasion allegations.
Against this backdrop, the Suisse secrets revelations may fuel questions over whether Credit Suisse’s challenges are indicative of a deep malaise at the bank.
Jeff Neiman, a Florida-based attorney who represents a number of Credit Suisse whistleblowers, believes the sheer number of scandals involving the bank indicates a deeper problem.
“The bank likes to say it’s just rogue bankers. But how many rogue bankers do you need to have before you start having a rogue bank?” he said. Neiman alleges there has been a culture at the bank “which encourages its bankers probably from the top down to hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil, bury their heads in the sand on a good day, and on many days, actively assist folks to skirt whatever the law may be in order to best protect assets under management”.”
Such allegations are strongly rejected by Credit Suisse. “In line with financial reforms across the sector and in Switzerland, Credit Suisse has taken a series of significant additional measures over the last decade, including considerable further investments in combating financial crime,” the bank said in its statement, adding that it upheld “the highest standards of conduct”.
Its lawyers said it had fully cooperated with many of the investigations cited by the Guardian and that any past individual failings by the bank did not reflect its current business policies, practices or culture. In November, it announced it would put “risk management at the very core of the bank”.
The bank said its “preliminary review” of the accounts flagged by the Suisse secrets reporting project had established that more than 90% of those reviewed were now closed or “were in the process of closure prior to receipt of the press inquiries”. Of the remaining accounts, which remain active, the bank said it was “comfortable that appropriate due diligence, reviews and other control-related steps were taken, including pending account closures”.
The Credit Suisse statement added: “These media allegations appear to be a concerted effort to discredit the bank and the Swiss financial marketplace, which has undergone significant changes over the last several years.”
The debate over whether Switzerland’s banking industry has undergone sufficient reforms is likely to be renewed in light of the leak. The whistleblower who shared the data suggested that banks alone should not be blamed for the state of affairs, as they are “simply being good capitalists by maximising profits within the legal framework they operate in”.
“Simply put, Swiss legislators are responsible for enabling financial crimes and – by virtue of their direct democracy – the Swiss people have the power to do something about it. While I am aware that banking secrecy laws are partly responsible for the Swiss economic success story, it is my strong opinion that such a wealthy country should be able to afford a conscience.”
* Currency conversions are based on historical rates.
Taking a starter for a little swinging in KRBN. Also as shown yesterday,
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=167956463
FANG has been better performer than XLE (follows the $SP500#10). Might be a dip there that can be taken advantage of, but I suspect the overall trend will continue for a bit anyways.
In times like these where we go with news by the minute, these are a little old from about 10 days ago. But might give a few nuggets of info for some watch or trades.
'ETF investors are the ones buying the dips,' says Dave Nadig
Hello there! Got volatility? We bet you do as the Federal Reserve signaled on Wednesday that interest rate increases in 2022 are its main priority. There is nothing new there, as investors had expected as many as four rate hikes this year, but the message is being fine-tuned. Fed boss Jerome Powell wanted to emphasize that policy is tightening but it isn't on a preset course, to borrow phrasing from current Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen , a former Fed chief, which could be interpreted a number of ways. Inflation could get worse and the Fed might need to adjust policy or price pressures might recede in due time.
Is the Fed behind the curve? Is it too hawkish? Those are all questions that might take time to play out, but the key thing for investors to suss out is how and where they should be positioned. And we've got some reads on that to share.
Send tips, or feedback, and find me on Twitter at @mdecambre or LinkedIn, as some of you are wont to do, to tell me what we need to be covering.
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Read: What is an ETF? We'll explain.
The good Top 5 gainers of the past week
%Performance VanEck Oil Services ETF OIH
3.6 KraneShares Global Carbon Strategy ETF KRBN
2.7 iShares MSCI Hong Kong ETF EWH
1.8 iShares MSCI Brazil ETF EWZ
1.7 Energy Select Sector SPDR Fund XLE
1.6 Source: FactSet, through Wednesday, Jan. 26 , excluding ETNs and leveraged products. Includes NYSE, Nasdaq and Cboe traded ETFs of $500 million or greater
...and the bad
Top 5 decliners of the past week %Performance Amplify Transformational Data Sharing ETF BLOK -9.7 AdvisorShares Pure US Cannabis ETF MSOS -9.4 NorthShore Global Uranium Mining ETF URNM -8.7 ARK Next Generation Internet ETF ARKW -8.5 First Trust Nasdaq Clean Edge Green Index Fund QCLN -8.4 Source: FactSet
Visual of the week
Wednesday's post- Federal Reserve decision action was notably bad for these ETFs, according to Instinet's Frank Cappelleri : "While some of the ETFs and indices we track logged noticeably bad one-day declines, the intra-day sell-offs tell the full story. 22 dropped more than 4% from their highs" on Wednesday, he wrote.
Go abroad?
Some strategists have been pointing to the benefits of venturing outside of the U.S. for returns during this fallow period in domestic assets and the performance of international ETFs point to areas that are, indeed, outperforming handily so far in 2022.
That includes the country-specific iShares MSCI Chile ETF (ECH), which is up 10.5% in the year to date, ahead of the Global X MSCI Colombia ETF (GXG), up 10.3%, while the iShares MSCI Brazil ETF (EWZ) is up nearly 10%. Latin America broadly, via the iShares Latin America 40 ETF (ILF), is up 7.1%, and the Greek fund, the Global X MSCI Greece ETF (GREK) has gained 4.3% so far in January (see attached table):
Meanwhile, the SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust (SPY) is near the back of the pack, down 8.75% year to date.
Where to buy?
We caught up with Zoe Barry , who founded nascent trading platform Zingeroo, and she had some interested insights about younger investors. Zingeroo, is a growing trading platform that caters to investors in their 20s and 30s, but also has a range of users, and allows traders to benchmark their performance, not against the S&P 500 or the Russell 2000 but against one another.
Barry says that younger investors aren't panicking amid this market downtrend and note that investors had been loading up on ETFs that are short big technology stocks, which they rightly believed would suffer as bond yields rose, putting pressure on interest rate-sensitive areas of the market.
She said two of the more popular trades were ProShares UltraPro Short QQQ , which is up 46.4% so far this year, compared with the Invesco QQQ Trust , which is down 12.8% so far in 2022.
"They realize that the market is shifting," Barry said of younger investors.
She said, however, that it isn't clear that these investors are operating with tactical efficiency in the way that so- called pros might.
According to Peng Cheng , a markets strategist at JPMorgan, retail investors aggressively dumped stocks at the beginning of Monday. And by noon, there was a retail order imbalance of $1.36 billion , dumping companies such as chip makers Nvidia Corp. (NVDA) and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), as well as tech conglomerates like Microsoft Corp. (MSFT). Meanwhile, hedge funds and mutual funds--were net buyers of $5.8 billion .
The report showed that retail investors did re-enter the market in big numbers that same day as things improved.
Barry said that the differences in the younger investor is that they tend to operate more as a collective and crowdsource ideas via social-media communities, including on Zingeroo, and sites like Reddit and Discord.
"They're actively talking about what to do and no longer shooting from the hip," Barry said.
Todd Rosenbluth , head of mutual fund and ETF research at CFRA, told ETF Wrap that investors are also loading up on value-oriented sectors, which we touched on last week.
The CFRA analyst said investors are buying ETFs such as the Financial Select Sector SPDR Fund (XLF), which is down 0.3% year to date, but up 34% over the past 12 months, the Energy Select Sector SPDR Fund (XLE), which has gained 19% so far in 2022 and is up over 64% over the past year. The consumer(XLP) staples SPDR ETF also is drawing flows, and is down 1.8% so far this year but up over 16% within the past 12-month period.
What are folks avoiding?
Rosenbluth said he is seeing a "rotation away from higher risk fixed-income ETFs." Those include longer duration iShares 20+ Year Treasury Bond ETF (TLT), the iShares iBoxx $ Investment Grade Corporate Bond ETF (LQD), iShares iBoxx $ High Yield Corporate Bond ETF (HYG) and iShares JP Morgan USD Emerging Markets Bond ETF(EMB).
He said he has also seen a shift away from growth funds like the QQQs, referring to the popular Invesco fund and the iShares Russell 1000 Growth ETF (IWF).
He said long-term investors willing to ride this wave of volatility also "have continued to turn to low-cost diversified options such as Vanguard Total Stock Market ETF (VTI) and SPDR Gold Shares (GLD). VTI, referring to the Vanguard ticker symbol, is down 5.2% on the year but up 1.7% over the past 12 months, while the gold ETF is down 1.9% in 2022 thus far and off 2.8% over the past year period.
VTI carries an expense ratio of 0.03%, which translates to an annual cost of 30 cents for every $1,000 invested, while GLD carries a 0.40% expense ratio.
Buy the ETF dip?
Dave Nadig , director of research and CIO at ETF Trends, ETF Database, told ETF Wrap that ETFs may be keeping on a floor on this market based on the trading action he has seen. "ETF investors are the ones buying the dips," he said.
He said that the volume in any given ETFs has tended to rise on the upticks, which is one sign that ETF investors are serving as buyers.
Popular ETF reads
- Mark DeCambre
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
01-29-22 0953ET
Copyright (c) 2022 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
2/12/22 12:06:00: MW Investors swing toward value stocks in 2022. But are surprised by what's inside your value ETF?
For example, the iShares S&P 500 Value ETF (IVE) holds stakes in Visa Inc. (V) and Mastercard Inc. (MA), increasing its exposure to the information technology sector relative to the iShares Russell 1000 Value ETF (IWD), which does not share those holdings, according to his note.
"Technology tends to be considered a growth sector," Rosenbluth told MarketWatch. "It's just making sure you know what you're getting."
Nothing's "wrong" with seeking bets on "value-oriented" technology stocks, he said but explained that some investors may be aiming to reduce tech sector exposure in their portfolios. Or, investors keen on financials may want to compare the sector's weightings among value ETFs, according to Rosenbluth.
The iShares S&P 500 Value ETF recently had a smaller position in financials compared to the iShares Russell 1000 Value ETF, but larger stakes in the consumer discretionary, consumer staples and tech sectors, the CFRA note shows.
The iShares Russell 1000 Value ETF is more than twice the size of its iShares S&P 500 Value ETF based on assets under management and has nearly double the number of holdings, according to Rosenbluth's note.
As for performance this year, shares of the iShares Russell 1000 Value ETF were little changed through Wednesday, while iShares S&P 500 Value ETF was up 0.4% over the same period, according to FactSet data.
By contrast, the iShares S&P 500 Growth ETF (IVW), SPDR Portfolio S&P 500 Growth ETF (SPYG) and Vanguard S&P 500 Growth ETF (VOOG) were all down 7.2% this year through Wednesday, FactSet data show.
Here's how fund flows for those growth ETFs have stacked up this year against asset flows for the iShares S&P 500 Value ETF, SPDR Portfolio S&P 500 Value ETF and Vanguard S&P 500 Value ETF (VOOV), according to the emailed note this week from Rosenbluth.
The S&P 500 value ETFs were outperforming the S&P 500 growth ETFs in Thursday afternoon trading, though both groups were down as investors assessed fresh consumer-price index data showing another rise in U.S. inflation.
Check out:Value stocks have pulled ahead of growth in recent weeks. Is it a head-fake?
"It was a bad year over the past 12 months for high-growth, innovative companies," Mark Yusko , chief executive officer and chief investment officer of Morgan Creek Capital Management , said by phone. "The valuations got to really crazy levels a year ago and they've come down."
As evidence, he pointed to the performance of Cathie Wood's ARK funds and Morgan Creek's ETF that holds companies that used SPACs to go public. That fund, the Morgan Creek -- Exos SPAC Originated ETF (SPXZ), is down around 48% over the past 12 months, according to FactSet data including Thursday afternoon trading.
Morgan Creek's cash alternative
Now Morgan Creek has a new ETF that invests in SPACs, or the special purpose acquisition companies that are "vehicles" to take companies public, according to Yusko. He said the Morgan Creek -- Exos Active SPAC Arbitrage ETF, which began trading this month under the ticker CSH, invests in SPACs and then redeems their shares instead of participating in the deals they aim to strike within two years to take a company public.
"A SPAC is literally a trust filled with Treasurys," said Yusko. "Our worst outcome is that we get our money back plus interest."
The Morgan Creek -- Exos Active SPAC Arbitrage ETF collects interest from Treasuries but also has potential upside from warrants received from investing in the SPAC structure, according to Yusko. "We've run this strategy in a hedge fund for multiple years," he said. "In the hedge fund we use leverage, in this fund we don't."
Yusko said Morgan Creek -- Exos Active SPAC Arbitrage ETF was designed for investors who want an alternative to cash amid the challenges of low rates and high inflation. "We're not trying to beat" the S&P 500 , he said. "All we're trying to do is say we can do better than cash," a money market fund or a certificate of deposit.
What about the cost of the new ETF? The fund has an expense ratio of 1.25%, according to Morgan Creek's announcement on it at the beginning of this month.
Innovator ETFs
In other new ETFs, Innovator Capital Management announced this week the launch of the Innovator Laddered Allocation Buffer ETF (BUFB). The fund will equally allocate to each of the firm's 12 monthly U.S. Equity Buffer ETFs, which "seek to provide a buffer against the first 9% of losses in the SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust ," as well as "upside performance to a cap over a one-year outcome period."
Innovator has meanwhile filed plans for an ETF that seeks to profit from exposure to electric car company Tesla Inc. (TSLA) The Innovator Hedged Tesla ETF, which plans to trade under the ticker TSLH, will invest about 20% of its assets in options tied to Tesla and the remainder in Treasury bills, according to a document filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission at the end of January.
Popular ETF Reads
- Christine Idzelis
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
02-12-22 1406ET
Copyright (c) 2022 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
I'm sure there are perpetrators here in the US helping them and supporting them for profit (or profiteering), at least supplying the start up costs. Easy to give over a small cut to disadvantaged incomes. Putin is a master at this and has been very much involved in our division for years and certain orchestrators have just followed his lead, magnifying and taking advantage of it. Back doors being the ATM.
Disinformation for profit: scammers cash in on conspiracy theories
Some accounts claiming to support the Canada trucker protests are run by con artists abroad
One hand holds a gold-colored credit card while the other types on a laptop.
For-profit disinformation networks are capitalizing on the thirst for conspiracy content on Facebook. Photograph: Artur Widak/NurPhoto/REX/Shutterstock
Nick Robins-Early
Mon 21 Feb 2022 01.00 EST
When Facebook removed dozens of groups dedicated to Canada’s anti-government “Freedom Convoy” protests earlier this month, it didn’t do so because of extremism or conspiracies rife within the protests. It was because the groups were being run by scam artists.
Networks of spammers and profiteers, some based as far afield as Vietnam or Romania, had set up the groups using fake or hacked Facebook accounts in an attempt to make money off of the political turmoil.
That foreign networks of social media scammers had seized on a divisive political issue may feel like somewhat of a throwback. Before investigations into Russian troll factories’ operations during the US presidential election and culture war conflicts over content moderation, one of the biggest challenges facing social media platforms was profiteers pushing fake news articles and spam for easy money. Hundreds of websites mimicking US news outlets pushed their content on social media, reaping ad revenue from the traffic they generated.
Platforms like Facebook have cracked down on such “inauthentic activity” since 2016, but the global misinformation industry remains. In recent years, these for-profit disinformation networks have seized on the popularity of conspiracy movements and far-right groups online, creating content aimed at anti-vaccine protesters and QAnon followers.
“It can be an extremely lucrative industry for people in other parts of the world to very closely monitor US and Canadian political climates, then capitalize on moment-to-moment trends,” Emerson Brooking, a senior fellow at the Digital Forensic Research Lab of the Atlantic Council, told the Guardian. “If you’re out for money, and measure success not by sowing discord in a country but by maximizing ad revenue, there’s still a lot of benefit to these operations.”
A photo illustration shows a Facebook logo on a smartphone screen, with a medical syringe being held in front of it.
Scammers use fake or compromised accounts to generate ad revenue by pushing anti-vaccine or QAnon content. Photograph: Pavlo Gonchar/SOPA Images/Rex/Shutterstock
Disinformation for profit
It is hard to know the exact scale of the for-profit misinformation industry, researchers say, since it functions as part of an underground economy and comes in various forms. In addition to content mills and ad revenue schemes, there are also private firms across the globe that are hired to create fake engagement or push political propaganda. In 2021 alone, Facebook said it removed 52 coordinated influence networks across 32 countries that attempted to direct or corrupt the public debate for strategic goals, according to a company report on inauthentic behavior.
In addition, small networks can have an outsized impact if they effectively use online groups to mass organize and fundraise. In the case of the Freedom Convoy accounts, many of the largest Facebook groups involved appeared to be run by fake accounts or content mills hailing from numerous countries. Facebook took down the groups this month, but not before supporters of the convoy raised over $7m in crowdfunding and generated mass mainstream attention. (GoFundMe later disabled the campaign).
A Bangladeshi digital marketing firm ran two of Facebook’s largest anti-vaccine trucker groups, according to Grid News, which had over 170,000 members combined before the platform removed them. The hacked Facebook account of a Missouri woman set up a network of several other pro-demonstration groups, collectively gaining more than 340,000 members in weeks. Other groups promoting American spinoffs of the Canadian protests were from Facebook accounts and networks based in Vietnam, Romania and other nations, Facebook officials told NBC News.
But recent research has shed light on how some of these for-profit misinformation operations work. A series of case studies from the Institute For Strategic Dialogue, a London-based think tank, detailed what it takes to run a money-making online news scam. One example was a cobbled-together website called The U.S. Military News.
The headlines on The U.S. Military News look much like those you might find on any number of far-right media outlets, with titles like “Trump Wrecks Pence In Awesome Statement” and articles praising the Canadian trucker protests. A shop on the site markets Trump-related merchandise including free American flags and Trump 2024 “Revenge Tour” commemorative coins. There are repeated pleas for donations all over the front page and attached to every article.
But despite the name and wall-to-wall American branding, the site has no connection to the US military, or the United States for that matter. Its domain is registered in Vietnam, and it’s unclear if it employs any writers or if the products it advertises even exist. The articles themselves consist solely of stock footage videos, with an automated voice reading plagiarized content.
Police on horseback and an armored police vehicle are positioned in front of protesters during protests in Ottawa on Friday.
Police on horseback and an armored police vehicle are positioned in front of protesters during protests in Ottawa on Friday. Photograph: Justin Tang/AP
A number of the articles and headlines posted on sites linked to the network veer into outright QAnon conspiracy content, featuring falsehoods about military tribunals and Biden officials being sentenced to death. One site’s front page prominently features a range of anti-vaccine and pro-Trump conspiracy content, while also promoting an Amazon affiliate link to Trump’s Art Of The Deal book.
The Guardian contacted the email address that The U.S. Military News is registered under, but did not receive a reply. The U.S. Military News is just one of a number of sites that appear linked to the same Vietnam-based network, according to ISD.
In another of ISD’s reports, researcher Elise Thomas found a network of dozens of Facebook groups and pages – which also appear to be linked to a small group of people in Vietnam – that shared plagiarized pro-Trump content aimed at conservative social media users. Taking articles from far-right conspiracy sites like The Gateway Pundit, the network created Facebook groups with names like “Conservative Voices” and built up large numbers of followers – sometimes in the tens of thousands of users.
Although for-profit misinformation networks often monetize their audiences through running ads on their websites, the network ISD found appeared to be building up their Facebook group members in order to potentially resell the groups themselves.
“This was the original threat that platforms were worried about,” Brooking said. “It wasn’t disinformation, you would characterize it as sort of ad fraud or ad farming.”
The Facebook logo
Facebook admits site appears hardwired for misinformation, memo reveals
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The original ‘fake news’
In many cases, including ISD’s case studies, there isn’t vast amounts of money being made from inauthentic Facebook groups and conspiracy sites. But to many of the operators based in countries with low per capita income relative to the US, making a few hundred dollars a month from pushing conspiratorial content means significant gain. One of the more lucrative sites linked to Vietnam that ISD analyzed brought in around $1800 each month through advertising alone – around 10 times the monthly per capita income in the country.
These scams have strong echoes of the surge in online commercial misinformation in 2016. Many of the people behind posts with false claims such as “Pope Francis Endorses Donald Trump” also came from outside the US, often from a single small town in North Macedonia called Veles which was responsible for over 140 imitation news websites.
These original “fake news” websites capitalized on salacious headlines and social media algorithms that promoted posts with high engagement regardless of their content, leading creators to choose contentious political issues involving race, religion and culture war flashpoints to drive the most attention to their sites and social media accounts. Although the strategies to evade content moderators have evolved, that playbook of monetizing conspiracies and misinformation appears to have stayed largely the same.
“This is what the misinformation threat looked like before we were even talking about state actions,” Brooking said. “It’s interesting that this sort of older threat is now back in center stage.”
gm all. Yeh, it's kind of like that one episode of Steinfeld where he has the one girl he's dating that cries up a river for everything from dropping her food to an untied shoe, but then when something really happens and one of her family dies or something, she just shrugs her shoulders.
Or maybe because there's been so much sh thrown up on the wall, everybody just gets numb to it and it's going to take bigger and bigger turds to excite things. I'm sure they will figure out something to keep their hands sticky and the suckers going. Just keep printing up more debt, or rile up some more hate, that always works, right.
Anyway, got to be something today to play. LOL
Just one small intricate part of the big long term con game. Let the attentions be directed to the front windows with war, economic, and reactionary games (Civil, Covid, International, Class Warfare, Economy, Cyber, misinformation and misdirection to only name a few), while the money and financial worth (individual power) gets pick pocketed out the back and both sides. All the while, erroneously blaming some other source(s) as the problems to havoc created.
This process has reached a fevered pitch to a point that it will be damaging and too costly to too many. We can all argue (and do) the causes, to many only looking towards mis directions, but the results & consequences are not arguable or debatable once they happen, nor avoidable before they happen no matter who's right on the cause. How one addresses these things is ones only defense. Ignoring, or being led by the orchestrators, and not seeing the big picture will only blow up accounts, both in trading/stocks/etc and in general life. We WILL see many blown up accounts.
Many ways to chart this and observe the divergences and convergences. One example was given recently by Mannarino with the TNX and comparing to a stock index. Although it was a very valid comparison and touched on certain points in certain ways, but in the short time constraints it didn't/couldn't go into all the other comparisons and intricacies that play a part here. But it did show the core of convergence/divergence factors. And there are many comparisons, some better than others for each individual situation, but again most will show the extremes or the forming of an extreme.
Most know about the realities of convergence/divergence in a myriad of technical indicators. Divergence does not go indefinitely, and the longer it does the more dramatic the convergence can or will be (and vice versa). And depending on which indicators your using, it can go into opposite sides (convergence crossing turning into negative divergence). One doesn't even really need to know all the factors in the equations of how those indicators are calculated, but can be assured that the indications are absolute. Timing is the only focus.
Along with other factors (political & environmental forces for example and the Covid War losses I was incurring) I simply looked at the divergence between RE prices and average real income and my own projections to that indication. Sold 95% of all my RE the first quarter of last yr. Some of the same indicators I looked at when most of that prop was created back in 07-09 and when most were totally ignoring the big bubble being created (that is until the bubble popped which was an absolute result and consequence of divergence in reality). We now have a bigger housing bubble than then, along with multiple other bubbles compounding effect in magnitude that is rearing it's ugly head even now. But we haven't seen nothing yet.
Now I've had a few conversations & thoughts about the timing of all that (selling, not buying) given the increase in RE value the last yr, but I remember that I've learned over time that DO NOT try to get the very top or worry about getting the very bottom. A little bit below or above works out better for me anyway. Watch out for catching a fast moving train in any direction. It can really mess one up.
Guess they couldn't get him to a Russian window.
Almost made a $1, I'll call it good enough.
Went in kind of heavy at 16.40. Was a bit concerned for a minute, feeling good now.
You and me both. Wait was a little longer than I expected, but no matter, it's here now.
These days shorting and hedging are in style. Timing is the only thing. Wish I had shorted PLTR a while back, not sure on it now.
Done 3 double round trips today in FCEL. Long then heavy short at 5.60, cover at 5.31, and it's sort of bounced down for a couple of more. Last cover at 5.24 (didn't go back in long though, attention was directed elsewhere). Total % profit over double in few hrs.
U not doing too bad either. Going to be on the sixth one here. We don't deal the cards, only the ability to play the hand that's given.
Not the first money either. Half a bil last summer into Nubank.
$1 bil in Nubank, digital bank based in Brazil.
That's a good thing. Congrats, played it well. Kudos.
Here's hope that our society straightens up soon, and focus on real problems at hand. I'm afraid though, that we will go further into the gutter before we can have any chance of recovery, a recovery that's going to be somewhat very challenging.
How's your NVDA puts doing, should be doing pretty good. Probably better than all my work yesterday did, although I'm not complaining, I'm ok with my profits taken.
There's plenty of satellite feeds, it's pretty massive. I'm positive that there is plenty that's in secret also.
www.militarytimes.com
www.google.com/search?q=satellite+feeds+of+russian+troops
Call it war mongering, gun boat diplomacy (Russians this time, US has been doing it for how many decades, how many wars). No matter what you call it or what local team your on, this shit can get out of hand and be a detriment and cost to us all. It already has been and the cost is accruing even if actual war never happens. It's still a power play no matter if it's with world leaders war mongering or local leaders with civil war mongering. It's all just a struggle for control of power (and money) for the few at top at the cost of everyone else.
I have a grandson in the Marines (getting ready for some major shit, information on lockdown), sisters both retired recently, one a teacher with tenure, one an RN that was in charge of division in major medical group (working in a literal war zone, seen dozens of her piers and health workers just in her sub group die a miserable death around her, not to mention the thousands of patients deaths that were recorded in the past couple of yrs under her watch), a offspring that's a higher up for major financial institution, a wife that has worked for another major financial institution for over 25yrs, a brother law that's been a trucker for most of his life (not part of the shit show mongering group and just trying to make a living that's being made harder by all of this bs.) I've had thousands of tenants over the years, regular people from all sides, larger part of the masses income levels, some just living month to month struggling to get their piece of pie out of it all, a finite pie that has already been 90% eaten by a few. So my views are pretty realistically given.
The enemies are not each other, but the ones who create and fester the wars using snowflake differences for their own gain (divide and conquer) instead of solutions for the whole.
Anyway, already made two decent trades, on my third on the U. Might see an active day.
These things never end well. Most everybody loses, and lose for a long time. Except for the ones at the top who support, use, and instigate these people for their own power purposes (at the cost of everyone else's expense). So many resources and energy are just getting wasted for political and power control, when they are so needed for a more positive direction. I think as a whole we're probably the most self destructive species of life on this planet, maybe universe.
Canadian truck drivers distance themselves from ‘Freedom Convoy’ protests
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/02/16/canada-trucker-distancing-protests/
By Claire Parker
Today at 7:51 a.m. EST
In just a matter of weeks, Canadian truck drivers protesting coronavirus vaccine mandates became the unexpected darlings of the global right wing.
Republican politicians showered the truckers, who descended on the Canadian capital, with praise. Copycat convoys gathered from New Zealand to France.
The protests against U.S. and Canadian regulations barring unvaccinated truck drivers from crossing the border began Jan. 28 — and soon attracted a range of anti-government activists, far-right figures and opponents of pandemic restrictions more broadly
But even as the vocal group of truckers, known as the “Freedom Convoy,” grabbed the world’s attention, many of Canada’s truck drivers were scrambling to distance themselves from the movement, which they view as radical and fringe.
In their view, the protesters’ actions — including shutting down cross-border trade and laying siege to the capital — have hurt rather than helped drivers in the industry, and failed to advance the labor issues most truckers care about. They point out that only a small percentage of Canadian truckers have joined the demonstrations, and the vast majority of drivers are already vaccinated, according to trucking associations and Canadian authorities.
“There is a vocal minority, which is trying to steal the headlines, but a silent majority has actually been working day and night,” said Manan Gupta, publisher of Road Today, a Canadian magazine for South Asian truckers. About a third of Canada’s roughly 180,000 tractor-trailer drivers are immigrants, according to the most recent survey, in 2016.
The protests have caused long delays at the border and forced drivers to take lengthy detours. Such disruptions are “not received well” by truckers who are not participating in the convoy, Gupta said, adding that “they are the ones keeping our supply chain intact and running.”
What is the Emergencies Act, which Canada invoked in response to Canada’s trucker protests?
“These illegal blockades have had a detrimental impact on our members and customers’ businesses. These have also had a very significant negative impact upon our professional driving community,” the president of the Canadian Trucking Alliance, Stephen Laskowski, said in a statement Monday.
The roadblocks hampered trade with the United States and forced American auto companies to scale back production, prompting the White House to call last week for the swift reopening of transportation routes.
Canadian police cleared the blockade of the Ambassador Bridge, a vital border crossing linking Detroit to Windsor, Ontario, on Sunday night. And on Monday, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau invoked the country’s Emergencies Act, which grants the government sweeping powers to respond to national emergencies. The Canadian Trucking Alliance came out in support of the move.
Some of the convoy’s most visible leaders aren’t even truckers. And at the demonstrations, Confederate flags and pro-Trump signs have mingled alongside the Canadian maple leaf emblem. Money has also poured in from donors in the United States.
James Bauder is one prominent figure and leader of the fringe group Canada Unity, which is well known for peddling conspiracy theories. Action4Canada, which sent vehicles and members to join the convoy, also promotes on its website the unfounded claim that Bill Gates wants to use the vaccine to implant microchips in humans.
“They are using our name in the wrong place and the wrong time,” said Ajay Singh Toor, spokesman for Canada’s West Coast Trucking Association. “It’s not a trucker convoy anymore.”
As a result, the convoy’s demands run the gamut from the removal of all public health measures to Trudeau’s ouster. Teamsters Canada, a union that represents 15,000 long-haul truck drivers, called the convoy a “despicable display of hate lead by the political Right and shamefully encouraged by elected conservative politicians.”
The movement “does not reflect the values of Teamsters Canada, nor the vast majority of our members, and in fact has served to delegitimize the real concerns of most truck drivers today,” the union said in a statement last week.
Issues such as wage theft, bad roads and a lack of restrooms are far more pressing issues for most truckers than vaccine mandates, trucking associations say. But convoy protesters haven’t raised them.
Manbir Bharj drives a crane truck in Ontario and says that the vaccine mandates imposed by the U.S. and Canadian governments on truckers were “fair” because they helped mitigate the spread of the virus.
“This is why the virus is spreading and mutating into different variants — because people don’t know how to follow” rules, Bharj said.
Some worry that the damage to the industry may be hard to reverse. The convoy threatens to exacerbate a labor shortage that already plagued Canadian trucking before the coronavirus hit, Gupta said. About 23,000 truck driver jobs need to be filled, according to a January report by Trucking HR Canada.
“These protests, these blockages, they’re not creating a positive workplace for anybody who wants to embrace trucking,” Gupta said.
Matthew Marchand is a tanker-trailer driver from Ottawa who transports liquid bulk chemicals between Canada and the United States. He is vaccinated but wasn’t fully supportive of the mandate, which he said didn’t really give truckers a “true choice.”
“But how [the protesters] are going about it, to me, is not acceptable,” he said. “The negative reputation that they’ve created for us isn’t going to do us any favors with the public’s perception of our industry. We already have a hard enough time as it is.”
Driver Ted McNeill told CityNews Toronto last week that he had to take a five-hour detour to deliver a truckload of food into Canada.
He had a similar message for the protesting truckers: “Stop it. You’re making us look bad.”
Miriam Berger and Amanda Coletta in Ottawa contributed to this report.
He had a similar message for the protesting truckers: “Stop it. You’re making us look bad.”
Miriam Berger and Amanda Coletta
went out at 268 limit, prob go to 300 now, going kind of wild ah. Doubled down on the reenters so came out pretty good.
went back in NVDA, less a buck, looks like good earnings coming.
Earnings preview: Strong data-center results from Intel, AMD suggest we are about to see some good numbers from Nvidia, analyst says
Nvidia Corp.'s acquisition of Arm Ltd. has been scuttled, but that isn't expected to stop the chip maker's charge into the data center.
Nvidia (NVDA) is scheduled to report fourth-quarter results after the closing bell on Wednesday, giving executives their first chance to directly address Wall Street since its $40 billion deal with SoftBank Group Corp. officially fell apart on Feb. 8 The deal was meant to help Nvidia push farther into the data center, including developing its own central processing units, or CPUs, a field that is currently owned by Intel Corp. (INTC) and Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD)
Nvidia, AMD and Intel are battling to supply hyperscale data centers, massive buildings full of servers that serve as the backbone for the cloud and the internet. Nvidia has built a big business supplying "hyperscalers" with its signature graphics processing units, or GPUs, and analysts believe that the end of the Arm deal will not preclude the company from moving into CPUs with its "Grace" chip.
Read: Wall Street's reaction to death of Nvidia-Arm deal: No duh
Without the Arm deal to point to, Nvidia's data-center growth will be even more important to Wall Street in the report. Analysts surveyed by FactSet expect Nvidia's data-center sales to come in at $3.18 billion , a 67% gain from the year-ago quarter, which would be in between the growth rates and total dollars Intel and AMD put up in their recent reports.
Intel's data-center revenue for the fourth quarter grew 20% to $7.3 billion , while sales from AMD's enterprise, embedded and semi-custom chips unit -- which includes data-center and gaming-console revenue -- surged 75% to $2.24 billion from a year ago, with data-center sales accounting for about 25% of revenue for the quarter, or about $1.2 billion .
For more: Look back at earnings results from Intel as well as AMD
Susquehanna Financial analyst Christopher Rolland said he sees Intel's and AMD's data center results as a good sign for Nvidia, which will be "driven by continued GPU demand and a robust [data center] environment." He also doesn't expect Nvidia to suffer too much from the supply-chain difficulties that have hampered semiconductor production during the pandemic.
"Intel in particular noted strength in enterprise and government, the same markets where Nvidia has recently seen growing A100 traction," Rolland said, while predicting a beat-and-raise quarter from Nvidia. "Of note, AMD also doubled Epyc revenue YoY, signaling a robust hyperscale DC environment."
"As for supply, we continue to note Nvidia's dual-manufacturing strategy (TSMC and Samsung) serves as a distinct advantage in a time of industrywide supply constraints," Rolland, who has a positive rating and a $360 price target, said. "Interestingly, 2022 could be the year that datacenter top-line surpasses gaming's, though tight and we give the edge to gaming."
What to expect
Earnings: Of 34 analysts surveyed by FactSet, Nvidia on average is expected to post adjusted earnings of $1.23 a share, up from 78 cents a share reported a year ago and $1.09 a share expected at the beginning of the quarter. All figures are adjusted for last year's 4-for-1 stock split.
Revenue: Wall Street expects revenue of $7.42 billion from Nvidia, according to 34 analysts polled by FactSet. That's up from the $5 billion Nvidia reported in the year-ago quarter and $6.84 billion forecast at the beginning of the quarter. In its last earnings report, Nvidia forecast $7.25 billion to $7.55 billion On top of data-center sales, analysts also expect gaming sales of $3.36 billion .
Stock movement: Over Nvidia's fourth, or January-ending, quarter, shares declined 4%, while the PHLX Semiconductor Index fell 4.3% over that period. Meanwhile, the S&P 500 index shed 3.8%, while the Nasdaq Composite Index dropped 11.1%. On Nov. 29 , Nvidia's stock closed at an all-time high of $333.76 , and has since dropped more than 20% while still bumping past Facebook parent Meta Platforms Inc. (FB) for the seventh largest publicly traded U.S. company by market cap.
Nvidia has topped analyst estimates for earnings consistently over the past five years and has beaten Street revenue estimates for 11 consecutive quarters. While shares gained 8.2% the day after last quarter's report, the stock's movement has been mixed amid those beats.
What analysts are saying
Cowen analyst Matthew Ramsay , who has an outperform rating and a $350 price target, expects "multi-quarter momentum to sustain."
Ramsay said Nvidia is "well positioned to capitalize on multiple open-ended secular growth trends given its technological leadership across accelerated computing hardware (GPU, DPU, and now CPU), mature programming environment, and vertical-specific software."
In fact, Ramsay boosted his fiscal 2023 and fiscal 2024 estimates for Nvidia "almost exclusively in datacenter," expecting "a continuation of recent fundamentals to drive another beat/raise from Nvidia with demand still exceeding supply."
Read:Chips may be sold out for 2022 thanks to shortage, but investors are worried about the end of the party
B. of A. Securities analyst Vivek Arya , who counts Nvidia as a top pick in chips, said the chip maker is the "No. 1 GPU vendor benefiting from slowing of Moore's Law creating need for accelerators and their unique software/developer ecosystem."
"Nvidia's unique combination of highly leverageable graphics silicon, software, scale, and systems expertise position it at the forefront of some the largest and fastest growth markets in tech including cloud computing/AI, gaming, edge processing, metaverse, and autonomous & electric vehicles," Arya said.
Stacy Rasgon , who has an outperform rating and a $360 price target, said that the collapse of the Arm deal gives Nvidia a lot of dry powder to play with going forward.
"Without a deal, Nvidia has $19B+ in cash and is likely generating $10B+ annually going forward, leaving room for further actions such as buybacks, or further (hopefully less controversial?) M&A," Rasgon said. "The $1.25B breakup is paid. And the stock remains well above where it was at announcement ( $120 split adjusted). So they seemingly have options from here."
Read:Nvidia seeks to lead gold rush into the metaverse with new AI tools
Citi analyst Atif Malik sees upside for Nvidia and expects data-center sales to beat and gaming revenue to meet the consensus.
"We expect data center trends to remain solid in 2022 as AI/ML adoption remains in early innings at 10-15% of IT cloud spend, training models complexity continues to grow exponentially with GPT-3, and new data center (Hopper) 5nm products launch," Malik wrote, while maintaining a buy rating and $350 target price. "While some investors worry about a crypto- driven gaming pullback as Ethereum is supposed to go to proof of stake in 2022, we see low cannibalization risk.
Production issues could still limit Nvidia as it has other chip makers, warned Rosenblatt Securities Hans Mosesmann .
"We believe constraints in supply, broadly speaking, will be a factor that limits near-term upside," wrote Mosesmann, who has a buy rating and $400 price target. "Key points to look for during the earnings call include comments on the supply chain and the Omniverse, as well as the implications of the Arm breakup."
Of the 43 analysts who cover Nvidia, 34 have buy ratings, seven have hold ratings, and two have sell ratings, with an average price target of $345.87 , which is about 26% above the stock's current price, according to FactSet.
MarketWatch staff writer Jeremy C. Owens contributed to this article.
- Wallace Witkowski
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
02-16-22 1317ET
Copyright (c) 2022 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
Exit NVDA 263.5. May get back in, see how it goes. Went in U 14.15, maybe a scalp, might be scalped, never know. LOL
In again NVDA 257 and change. Took another scalp of U.
out of NVDA at 262.5 for about 1.25% to the good. We'll see what happens if enter again.
Got stopped out of NVDA. Came back in 256 for bounce, maybe come out even. lol Two scalps in U so far.
Yea, I saw that Roblox action, that was too bad. I was thinking on getting some, but just didn't. Was busy with other stuff, and didn't want to take the time to divulge into it, no other reason.
Sometimes it just the landing on red, when you bet on black. What can you say. I only put a small bet on NVDA at this point, we'll see how the sentiment goes today for any more (or less as the case may be). Market looks pretty flat today, everybody recovering from all that exuberance and robo trading yesterday I guess. lol
What do you think we'll see there. NVDA has been beating the est regularly and has seen at least some pos action around earnings, sometimes quite a bit. Just went in for few just for the heck of it. It's been beat down from the high, but lot's of things have, so who knows.
I see it. Sometimes I feel that we're getting run into a gauntlet, manipulation to take a big cut as the numbers get distributed from one pocket to the other pocket.
I feel there's a lot of bear traps forming around this morning. Lot of gap ups, to many, I'll be using a lot of caution, myself. Manipulation at it's finest. Why I don't hold the U overnight (or many things lately), no matter how good it looks (which it didn't yesterday for the U anyway). Just too chaotic right now.
Problem I'm having is figuring out good long term holds, value that will even match the inflation rates. Maybe I'll just go back to hard money lending again, but will have to wait till the RE crashes a bit, might be next yr, but I can't see the cost that people are paying for being in a home not overcoming the income for massif number of the population. Credit criteria is going to tighten like a noose. An issue now that's being somewhat ignored.