Showing posts with label Jamie Dimon. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Jamie Dimon. Show all posts

Thursday, January 11, 2018

Jamie Dimon: ‘Cryptocurrencies Will Soon Be Under Government Control’

jamie-dimon-CFR


In the ‘not so shocking’ news of the day, governments want to regulate and control cryptocurrencies. Even Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JP Morgan Chase is saying that very soon, governments will have complete control of all cryptocurrencies.


The cryptocurrency “won’t end well,” Dimon told an investor conference in New York last year, as Bloomberg noted, predicting it will eventually blow up. “It’s a fraud” and “worse than tulip bulbs.” Dimon became the laughing stock of the crypto world when he came out raging against bitcoin and the blockchain.


According to The Free Thought Project, Dimon’s dislike of cryptocurrencies is well known, but he seems to waver a bit here and there on how much he loathes digital currency. On Tuesday, however, he seemed to have changed his mind. During an interview with Fox Business, he left viewers with an ominously cryptic message (pun intended) on how the government will control bitcoin, and said he “regretted” calling bitcoin a “fraud.”


“The blockchain is real. You can have crypto yen and dollars and stuff like that. ICO’s you have to look at individually,” Dimon said in the exclusive interview with FOX Business. However, after he somewhat apologized for slamming bitcoin, Dimon not so subtly hinted that he knows something about the government and how they can grab control of bitcoin. “The bitcoin to me was always what the governments are gonna feel about bitcoin as it gets really big, and I just have a different opinion than other people. I’m not interested that much in the subject at all.”


When asked what he thought about the future of bitcoin during an interview with Fortune, Dimon said, “It doesn’t matter, it’s just not gonna happen,” before claiming that the government will make it illegal and begin jailing people for it. “When the DoJ calls someone up and says that’s an illegal currency and it’s against the laws of the United States and if you do it again—we’re gonna throw you in jail.”


Dimon went on to predict that cryptocurrencies will all be government controlled and if someone uses a currency the government has banned, they will be punished.


“This is troubling. For many reasons,” says Joe Joseph of The Daily Sheeple. “But there’s one in particular that I’m keying in on. And it’s one that you may not have thought about.”



 “I gotta tell you,” Joeseph continues. “Cryptocurrency scares me. Not so much the little guys, but the biggies. The Bitcoin. The Ethereum and whatnot. Because once they get too big, they become targets for the government. Not just because it undermines national currency, which thereby…by default, undermines national security, but because it is an untapped form of revenue, that I believe, the government is gonna come out and seize.”


Maybe that seems unlikely, but in the realm of government, nothing is impossible anymore and we have very few actual human rights left at this point.


The good news is that even if governments try to control one currency, others will rise in its place and as long as this widescale collaboration and coordination among blockchain users exist, decentralized money will win. The money changing bankers have had their go at the helm—and we’ve seen the massive death and destruction facilitated by it—now, it’s time for the rest of humanity to have their turn. –The Free Thought Project


 But in the shadows, lurks the government.  It’s happened before, and it could happen again: the government had the power to take from you what they want, and they can wipe you out!


 

Tuesday, January 2, 2018

Elite Globalists Will Engineer Financial Collapse And Blame Bitcoin

jeffberwick


Every single financial collapse has been engineered by elitists and governments as a method of gaining the public’s support for more control over their money supply. Now one YouTuber has the guts to say it and boldly declares that those same globalists will blame bitcoin for a biblical level financial collapse.


The Dollar Vigilante YouTube channel isn’t walking on eggshells in their video titled “The Globalist Plan To Blame Bitcoin For Biblical Level Collapse.” The video starts off with a harsh dose of reality that many won’t like:



They won’t teach you in your government schools but every major economic and financial collapse is planned. It doesn’t happen by accident.  – Jeff Berwick, The Dollar Vigilante




Berwick doesn’t mince words later either, and he says that the government and other globalists already have plans to collapse the economy and blame Bitcoin. Mike Adams, the Health Ranger has also stated that the elitists need to control Bitcoin in order to control humanity, so look for a false flag terror attack allegedly funded by the now infamous decentralized cryptocurrency.


“By any measure, we are not at the most extreme time in history in money, finance, banking, equities, bonds, real estate and other sectors,” says Berwick. “We’ve never seen money printing across the board like we’ve seen in the last decade. Interest rates are at record lows and even at ludicrous negative rates in some countries. They’ve never been lower in 5000 years. By any measure, the US stock market is at or past extremes.” Along with the US government’s debt doubling in the last 8 years to a whopping $21 trillion, Berwick says that this is just the symptom of a government and globalist manufactured economic collapse that will all have to “come crashing down.”


“As always, I look for the clues directly from those who currently control the world, for the answers,” says Berwick. He then points to a Rothschild owned economic magazine that foretells in its 1988 cover image that 2018 will be the year of the global currency. “How could the globalist bankers plan 30 years ahead for a massive change in the monetary system?” Berwick asks. “Well, look no further than Bilderberg.”


Why? “Because most of the power in the hands of the elites now rests in their control over the issuance of currency which they cannot control with Bitcoin,” Berwick continues. “Instead, what their game plan might be, is to put trillions of dollars into Bitcoin to blow it up to massive extremes.” Berwick then goes on to quote other financial an market experts, such as Jamie Dimon of JP Morgan, who all say Bitcoin will cross the $60,000 -$100,000  threshold before the collapse.


But Bewick also says that one the state gets control of the cryptocurrency, no other cryptocurrency will be allowed to coexist. The game plan is for Bitcoin to crash, either by design or under its own weight so that the global elitists and governments can implement their own cryptocurrency, and again control the supply of currency. 



Some crackpots on the internet believe Bitcoin is globalist invention. They clearly don’t understand power, control, or what Bitcoin is. If they did, they’d know that Bitcoin is the antidote to the new world order, not the gateway. -Jeff Berwick


Thursday, December 14, 2017

Financial Times Survey: Banks" Brexit Relocations By March 2019 Much Lower Than Feared

In the run-up to the recent agreement on phase I of Brexit, there was mixed news on the extent to which jobs in the City of London would be relocated to other European hubs, primarily Frankfurt. On one hand, we discussed the meeting between US Commerce Secretary, Wilbur Ross, and executives of JPM, Goldman, HSBC and other banks at Wilton’s restaurant during his trip to London in early November. The banks warned that they were close to a “point of no return” on moving jobs.


A group of large financial institutions with big London operations, led by Wall Street’s pre-eminent banks, have told the US commerce secretary that Britain’s unstable government and slow progress in Brexit planning may force them to start moving thousands of jobs out of City in the near future. The warnings came on Friday during a closed-door meeting between executives from the banks, which included JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs and HSBC, and Wilbur Ross during the US commerce secretary’s visit to London, according to people briefed on the discussions.




A week earlier, we reported the head of Swiss bank, UBS, saying that the possibility that a fifth of its 5,000-strong UK workforce would be shifted was now unlikely to materialise following some “regulatory and political clarification about what we need to do”.
 
We can now, thanks to a survey by the Financial Times, get a better idea of the likely London exodus by March 2019 after the newspaper reviewed public statements by fifteen of the UK’s biggest financial institutions and conducted interviews with more than a dozen executives about Brexit plans. According to the newspaper, the number is…


The UK’s biggest international banks are set to move fewer than 4,600 jobs from London in preparation for Brexit — just 6 per cent of their total workforce in the financial centre — according to Financial Times research.


 


The FT analysis contrasts with consultants’ original claims that tens of thousands of jobs could move from London after Brexit — including an EY study this week that claimed 10,500 could leave on “day one”.



Some bankers say the lower estimates emerged as they thought through how many jobs and operations would need to move to the EU if the UK loses access to the bloc’s single market. “Every city wants thousands of people, but what are they going to do?” said one senior executive at a large US institution, adding that the thousands of people sitting in his London office “cover clients” who will mostly be remaining in the UK.



Two banks in particular, Deutsche Bank (not surprisingly) and JPMorgan Chase, had stated that several thousand jobs could move, although the FT estimates that the number is likely to be only several hundred. It’s the same with Goldman, despite Lloyds Blankfein’s famous tweet about spending “a lot more time” in Frankfurt.


In the case of Deutsche Bank, where Sylvie Matherat, head of regulation, publicly said up to 4,000 jobs could move, the FT estimates that just 350 jobs may leave by April 2019. The figure amounts to 5 per cent of Deutsche’s London headcount, a proportion broadly in line with other big banks. At JPMorgan, where chief executive Jamie Dimon warned before the Brexit vote of up to 4,000 London job losses, the number leaving before April 2019 is set to be closer to 700. Goldman Sachs, which has taken a new office in Frankfurt that could accommodate 1,000 people, expects to move fewer than 500 from London. HSBC is still planning to move “up to 1000 people”, although its chief financial officer recently said the figure could fall.




So the initial London exodus by March 2019 will be fairly modest and the banks have the prized transition period of two years. However, some banks are leaving the door open for further relocations in the aftermath of Brexit. According to Rob Rooney, CEO of Morgan Stanley International the real Brexit story will only be apparent “three to five years out”. As the FT explains.


Several banks say they are planning to move relatively few people in the immediate aftermath of Brexit because it will take time for their EU operations to build up. They expect to have very small balance sheets when the EU entities begin handling client business on April 1, 2019, and to be able to run some of the risk and support functions for those small EU entities from London.



Next year, banks are likely to begin “repapering” some clients to their new EU entities. The FT noted that one bank EMEA CEO said that he expected the ECB to push for more “market risk to be run onshore”.


However, a key question will be, where do the clients want to do business? We could be wrong, but our guess is that the majority will opt for the status quo if at all possible. The EU has already inflicted the nightmare of MiFID II on them.
 









Jamie Dimon Says Corporations Will Fund Buybacks With Tax Cuts And That"s "Not A Bad Thing"

For at least half a decade now (How The Fed"s Visible Hand Is Forcing Corporate Cash Mismanagement) we have warned about how the Fed’s flawed approach to monetary policy incentivizes corporations to fund share buybacks with massive amounts of debt...



…While the corporate sector has spent record sums on share buybacks...



Capex has experienced an unprecedented decline...


 



Of course, some Democrats have argued that the Trump tax plan will perpetuate essentially the same incentives as corporate tax rates are slashed and money brought back from overseas is spent on still more buybacks, instead of creating jobs and capital expenditures, like the Republicans argue it will be.


The flimsiness of the GOP’s argument was exposed a few weeks ago during a memorable gaffe involving NEC Chief (and former No. 2 at Goldman Sachs) Gary Cohn, one of two officials managing the tax bill on behalf of the White House – the other being Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, also a former Goldmanite.


During an event for the Wall Street Journal"s CEO Council, an editor at The Wall Street Journal asked the room: "If the tax reform bill goes through, do you plan to increase investment - your company"s investment, capital investment?"


 


He asked for a show of hands.


 


Alas, as the camera revealed, virtually nobody raised their hand.


 


Responding to this "unexpected" lack of enthusiasm to invest in growth, Cohn had one question: "Why aren"t the other hands up?



While Cohn’s dismay at the lack of enthusiasm for his tax plan was obvious and embarrassing (the clip was in heavy rotation on CNBC for much of the next day), the fact that corporations will spend the windfall created by the tax bill isn’t necessarily a bad thing, according to JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon.



Of course it wouldn’t be “a bad thing” – for Jamie.


When it comes to the rest of us…well…maybe not so much.


Dimon, who was speaking at a conference in Ann Arbor, Michigan hosted by Axios, according to CNBC.


According to Dimon’s logic, repatriations enabled by the tax plan could swiftly lead to more than $1 trillion being brought back from overseas. It doesn’t matter where that money goes, the point is there will be more capital sloshing around the domestic economy…and that will eventually manifest itself in the form of capex, job creation and higher wages…


"You need a competitive tax system ... companies will retain more capital and start to use it over time," Dimon said Wednesday in response to a moderator question at the Axios Smarter Faster Revolution event in Ann Arbor, Michigan.


 


"Some will raise wages. Some will buy companies. Some may do dividends and buybacks. Don"t act like that is a bad thing. That is their money. Think of it as a QE4. That money gets recirculated in the American system."



Dimon said tax reform "simply needs to be done," and should have happened 15 years ago. And while the benefits aren’t “going to be immediate”, they will accelerate growth “cumulatively over time."



JPMorgan"s Jamie Dimon: Tax reform bill will result in more jobs from CNBC.


 


After the bill passes "probably a trillion dollars will come back from overseas," he added. "Cumulatively over time that will accelerate growth in the American economy." That effect will resemble something like QE4, though we’re not sure that’s the best comparison...


The real question is: Will the tax bill somehow prevent the Federal Reserve from needing to launch QE4 before the end of Trump’s first term. If you believe a recent Treasury Department analysis of the Senate tax plan released earlier this week.


That plan calcuated that the tax cuts would bolster US economic growth to an average rate of 2.9% real growth over the next 10 years...



...which would make the current economic expansion the longest in modern history...


...But then again, if you believe that, then we have some condos for you to buy.









Thursday, December 7, 2017

Blackmailing German Bomber Demands 10 Million Euros In Bitcoin From DHL

As we reported earlier, Bitcoin brushed off the weekend sell-off and blasted above the $14,000 level as the Asian trading session got underway. There was no news to catalyse the move higher, although excitement and debate over the upcoming launch of Bitcoin futures on 10 December continues. One Bitcoin-related story did peak our interest, however.


It might be a sign that Bitcoin is becoming mainstream when blackmailers are prepared to accept the cryptocurrency as payment.


German tabloid, Bild, is reporting that this has befallen logistics company, Deutsche Post DHL. However, the recipients of two deliveries containing explosive devices had a lucky escape, as Bloomberg explains.


A criminal blackmailing Deutsche Post’s DHL parcel service demands EU10m in the digital currency Bitcoin, German newspaper Bild reports, not saying where it got the information. Blackmailer placed two bombs in parcels delivered by DHL; bombs didn’t detonate because of technical problems



Parcels included QR codes with links to extortion letter to DHL



Threatened to send further bombs



German Parcel Bomb Is Part of Extortion Plan Against DHL: Police



Handelsblatt provided more details of one of the bombs found in the eastern German city of Potsdam.


Authorities confirmed Sunday the apparent bomb found near the Potsdam Christmas market on Friday was unrelated to terrorism but an attempt to blackmail delivery company DHL. The package resulted in a large-scale evacuation of the market in Potsdam, near Berlin.



“The good news is that we can say, with all likelihood, the package was not aimed at the Christmas market,” Karl-Heinz Schröter, Brandenburg’s state interior minister, told reporters. “The bad news is that it was a blackmail attempt targeting DHL.”



The Potsdam package, containing nails, an unidentified powder substance and a metal cylinder, was sent to a nearby pharmacy as a special delivery. The store’s owner informed authorities after noticing unusual wires and hearing a hissing noise while opening the package. Police initially believed the package to be a fake bomb but, after forensic teams examined it, determined it was “capable of activation.”




The other bomb was found in a similar package in another eastern city, Frankfurt/Oder,last month. German officials warned that the blackmailers would “likely” send more explosive devices in the run-up to Christmas.


Of course, Bitcoin naysayers are likely to pounce on stories like this to dismiss Bitcoin as merely a mechanism for facilitating criminal activity. Indeed, Larry Finck of Blackrock dismissed it as a index to gauge worldwide money laundering, our old friend Neil Dwane, of Allianz Global Investors, described it as a “scam for money laundering around the world” and Jamie Dimon famously described it as a “fraud”.


In the meantime, the merits of Bitcoin as a means of payment and as investment continues. Yesterday, the CEO of ICE, which owns the NYSE, lamented that his organisation was “beaten to the punch” in trading Bitcoin futures by the CME and CBOE. As we noted, Jeff Sprecher told a Goldman investor conference on Tuesday that that “we may be stupid for not being first on that" adding that “I don’t have the answers, I wish I knew” how the investments will evolve, he said. “I don’t know what to make of cryptocurrencies.”









Tuesday, December 5, 2017

The War On Gold Intensifies: It Betrays The Elitists" Panic And Coming Defeat - Part 1

Authored by Stewart Dougherty via InvestmentResearchDynamics.com,


Dictatorship (noun):  Definition #3:   absolute power or authority (Websters);
Def. #2:   absolute, imperious or overbearing power or control (Random House);
Def. #3:   Absolute or despotic control or power (American Heritage);
Def. #3:  Absolute or supreme power or authority (Collins English Dictionary);
Def. #1:  A type of government where absolute sovereignty is allotted
to an individual or small clique (Wikipedia).


“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained, you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.” Sun Tzu, The Art of War



In recent weeks, the War on Gold, which is a subset of the broader War on Human Freedom, has sharply intensified, with massive, multi-billion dollar naked short price raids now being launched on a weekly and even daily basis by the criminal, state-sponsored price manipulators. This escalation proves the supreme importance to the Deep State financial elite of the maintenance of their gold price dictatorship, which is a vital component of their long term, systemic campaign of financial plunder.



The elitists have no problems whatsoever with stratospheric stock and bond prices; 5,000 year low interest rates; $450 million Da Vinci’s; $250 million private homes; $50,000,000 annual salaries for circus masters, whose role in keeping the masses distracted and dumb is vital; $1.9 million Aston Martins; $100,000 Air Jordan sneakers, or any of the other prices that have now gone into outer space.


But there is one thing they will not accept: an honest, free market price for gold. Because while all debauchery under the sun is permitted and encouraged in the Castle of Fraud and Corruption they have constructed and in which they revel, one thing is strictly prohibited: the utterance of truth. Being monetary truth when free to speak, gold is their deadliest enemy. Therefore, it is silenced, in the same way truth tellers are silenced in all dictatorships.


The vast majority of people, aside from a small, enlightened minority who refuse to poison their minds by ingesting mainstream media (MSM) fake news, propaganda and brainwashing, do not yet realize what they are up against in the wars that have been declared against them, and are therefore at serious risk. For those who wish to survive the wars, there has never been a greater need to know the enemy and know yourself.


As the gold price war becomes manic, so has the MSM’s anti-gold propaganda campaign, with their attempts to smear gold now a clinical obsession.


In a prime example of their over-the-top anti-gold propaganda, on 10 November 2017, the Financial Times, a long-time Deep State bullhorn and puppet, ran an article entitled, “Gold is the new cocaine for money launderers.” In this screed, the author beat the dead horse of the NTR Metals gold import scheme. This operation, whose total dollar yield was an infinitesimal fraction of the massive sums stolen by the financial Deep Statists in their forty year gold price manipulation crime, was already the subject of an over-dramatized Bloomberg Businessweek propaganda piece published on 9 March 2017, entitled “How to Become an International Gold Smuggler.” Apparently, the MSM is running so short of new material with which to try to demonize gold, that it is now forced to recycle old, stale non-stories to keep the smear machine going.


In the article, the MSM propagandist states such things as: 2017 has seen, according to his one time Goldman Sachs source, a “dramatic crash in [physical gold coin] demand,” that interest in gold coins is linked to “political conservatism, or anarcho-libertarianism” and “end of the world right wing sentiments,” that gold has been implicated in a “conspiracy to commit money laundering,” that gold is “financed by people in the narcotics trade,” that it comes from “illegal mines and drug dealers in Peru, Bolivia and Ecuador,” that “the federal authorities assume the NTR Metals [case] represented only a fraction of illegally sourced and financed gold,” that therefore the US attorney is broadly investigating the gold industry, that gold is “produced by exploited workers,” that “crude [gold] extraction techniques create serious and lasting environmental damage,” that gold plays an important part in “tax evasion,” that it is related to American gun sales, which the author abhors; that “drug dealers [use] gold imports as a way of laundering their proceeds,” and that “they came to realize that illegal gold [is] an intrinsically better business” than drug dealing; to name but a few of the aspersions cast against gold in the short article. As we can see, when it comes to their smear jobs, the MSM flings at the wall all the mud it can fit in its hands, hoping that some of it might stick.


As is always the case with the MSM’s consistently negative, biased and dishonest reporting on gold, no mention was made in the article of the Deep State financial elite’s criminal gold price manipulation fraud that has been perpetrated non-stop for nearly forty years and that has resulted in a massive, $1,000,000,000,000.00+ theft from its victims. This is because the MSM is the Deep State’s in-house public relations agency, whose job is to whitewash the elitists’ crimes, no matter how egregious they are.


But buried in the article was an important clue that the Deep Statists are concerned they are losing the War on Gold, which we will further explore later in the article. It turns out that the Deep Statists’ paranoia about and rage toward gold might be entirely justified, because more than ever in the past 37 years, gold is poised to tell the world what it knows, and this will absolutely annihilate them.


Many people are completely baffled as to why, with so many serious fiscal, financial, monetary, economic, social, and geopolitical problems in the world, the Deep Statists remain so mono-maniacally fixated on demagogically denigrating gold and controlling its price.


The answer is that the Deep Statists cannot, under any circumstances, allow the price of gold to replicate the surging price of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. If the gold price genie were to get out of the bottle, becoming international news in the process no matter how much the MSM might try to suppress it, it would spur a gold buying stampede that would cause a flood of money to pour out of bank accounts and into physical precious metals. $325+ billion worldwide now resides in cryptocurrencies, a highly specialized and complex product class. In the right set of circumstances, many multiples of that amount could incrementally flow into gold, a simple product that has been innately understood for millennia by human beings all over the globe.


Already fragile, the banking system cannot withstand a large scale withdrawal of funds. Being finite and in short supply, incremental demand for physical gold would result in immediate and sustained price gains, creating a positive feedback loop in the market place. As people watched the price go up, more and more of them would want to jump on the band wagon and participate in the gains, which is exactly what has happened in the cryptocurrency market.


If interest in gold goes mainstream, then basic supply fundamentals indicate the price would have to rise by thousands of dollars per ounce to even approach what might be considered overbought and/or bubble territory. Which is exactly what has happened to Bitcoin, whose price has exploded to over $10,500 as of today, 29 November 2017.


In the United States, the latest Federal Reserve Board tally of Household and Non-profit Organization (much of which is private) wealth totals $96.2 trillion. If a miniature, 1% sliver of this amount, $962 billion, attempted to find its way into the physical gold market, it would represent incremental demand, at $1,300 per ounce, of 740 million ounces. Not even a small fraction of this incremental demand would be available in the physical gold market at this time, given that it already operates at a supply / demand equilibrium. The gold price would have to surge in order to flush out supplies from current gold owners, whose hands have proven to be, and are likely to remain strong. We believe it would take years for incremental demand of this magnitude to be filled, even at much higher prices. Please keep in mind that this example relates to the United States, alone; there are additional, vast stores of private wealth all over the world, all of which would almost certainly be activated in unison by a run to gold.


With the right spark, the same viral, Social Media-enhanced demand that has come to cryptocurrencies could come to gold. The Deep Statists know it, and the ghostly whites of their eyes now glow eerily and blinkingly across the dark battlefield of Liberty, in the senseless war they provoked and are going to lose.


While there are now hundreds of cryptocurrencies, physical gold is physical gold, and cannot be replicated or conjured out of nothing. There will be no endless stream of new ICOs for genuine, physical gold, because gold is what it is and always will be. This means that funds flowing into gold will be forced into the one and only physical gold market that already exhibits tight, inflexible supply. This further means that the upward price pressure on gold could become volcanic if a run starts.


A steadily increasing number of people will want to get in on the “new Bitcoin,” a bizarre paradox given that gold is as old as time, and will soon realize that gold possesses virtues Bitcoin does not, given that it is real, not digital and abstract; that owners can personally possess and store it in physical form; that it will survive any kind of electric grid or Internet disruption that might occur; that it cannot ever be hacked; that it is the epitome of private, quiet wealth; that it is actually quite beautiful to behold; and that it was not and cannot be made by man, only by God, who does not appear to have any interest in making any more of it.


To date, in order to prevent a surge in physical gold demand from happening, the Deep Statists have created various forms of transparently fake gold, such as electronic gold futures, options and non-auditable ETFs and EFPs. These fake gold products have siphoned funds away from real, physical gold, which cannot be created out of the nothing the way the imposter electronic gold products can be. Increasingly, people are learning that there are no substitutes for physical gold.


More, we find it interesting that while there have been certain highly publicized condemnations of cryptocurrencies, such as J. P. Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon’s comment that Bitcoin is a “fraud,” the financial authorities in the west have done little to nothing to shut down the crypto market. They seem to be just fine with $10,500 Bitcoin, but will stop at nothing to prevent $1,300 gold. Today’s (29 November) market action is a case in point.


The reason is that monetary elitists fully approve of cryptocurrencies, because this the new form of fiat currency the western banks intend to issue. Mass adoption of cryptocurrencies is the necessary forerunner to the elimination of cash, a well-known and important agenda for the financial elite. By issuing their own cryptocurrencies, and/or co-opting Bitcoin and other private cryptos via regulation and edict, central bankers can continue their tradition of controlling the money supply. A population that has learned the value of owning and become adept at trading physical gold would prevent central banks from continuing to use fiat currencies as economic, political and societal control mechanisms. It should be no surprise that they loathe gold so much; in its honesty and integrity, it is the exact antithesis of everything they stand for, are, and do.


Some people argue, “Even if people run to gold, their funds will still remain within the banking system, so the bankers aren’t worried about this happening.” In our opinion, this is wrong.


Fiat currency used to buy precious metals will move from personal and business bank accounts, to gold dealer accounts, to gold wholesaler accounts; and then to a variety of sovereign mint, gold precious metals refiner, gold miner and other gold supplier accounts, a large percentage of which are international.


A bank that hosts a deposit account used to purchase physical gold has no assurance whatsoever that the buyer’s funds will transfer into another personal or business account managed by it. In all likelihood, the funds will disappear from the host bank and not return. Ultimately, the likelihood is also high that a portion of the funds, potentially significant, will disappear from the country’s banking system altogether, given the global nature of gold mining, refining, minting and fabrication. Therefore, bankers regard a run to gold as a severe, direct threat to them, which is why they do everything in their power to discredit it and crush its price. They are attempting to prevent a run on their banks.


Over the past several years, the Deep Statists have gone to extraordinary lengths to internationally legalize bank “bail-ins.” They did not do this casually, by accident, or for fun; they did it because they know that when the system fails, a time-bomb guaranteed to detonate given the system’s very design, they will be able to make an unprecedented fortune by expropriating customers’ deposits via the elaborate bail-in mechanism they have engineered. They will use the phony pretext of “rescuing” and “resetting” the financial system for the public good to justify this action. If, before they spring the bail-in trap, depositors have already withdrawn their funds to purchase physical precious metals held outside the banking system, those funds will no longer be available for bail-in looting. The bankers cannot steal bank balances that have disappeared.


The cryptocurrency phenomenon, now an international sensation, has stunned them into the awareness that people all over the world have a deep, abiding, instinctive desire to own honest money of limited supply that will serve as a reliable store of value, and that cannot be hyper-inflated into oblivion for the private gain of plunderers and profiteers, the chief problem with corrupt, endlessly counterfeited fiat currencies controlled by self-interested, opportunistic, predatory central bankers and their controllers, the Deep State financial elite.


*  *  *


Due to the length of this article, we have divided it into two parts. This ends Part 1. In Part 2, which is already written and will be released in a few days, we will share with you important clues indicating the Deep State’s concerns about losing the War on Gold, despite the unprecedented intensification of their attacks. We will also discuss how the United States Federal Reserve is outright warning that new threats to financial and economic stability are on the horizon.









Sunday, December 3, 2017

Signs Of A Market Top? This Pole Dancing Instructor Is Now A Bitcoin Guru

Pole dancing instructor Dee Heath built a successful fitness business in western Sydney teaching “stripper fitness” classes that seem to be in vogue among millennial women.


But recently, Heath has discovered a new passion: Investing in digital currencies.


Heath has spent $5,800 on Bitcoin since July and has more than tripled her investment.


"Look, I love pole dancing but lately my passion has definitely been Bitcoin," she told SBS News.



   Heath is spending less time on the pole and more time advising would-be bitcoin investors about navigating the world of digital currencies, even starting a website to explain the digital currency to novices.  


"It comes with any investing, it"s volatile at times, especially cryptocurrencies," she said.


 


"The good thing is when it goes down, you can buy some more, and you know it"s going to go up at some point."




Dee Heath


"As long as you"re calm and you don"t let emotions run you when you"re dealing with any sort of cryptocurrency, particularly Bitcoin, then you"re safe."



Still, there are plenty of skeptics in her native Australia, where digital currencies are still largely associated with the black-market economy thriving on the dark web.


"Australia in particular has been involved in buying and selling drugs on the dark web using cryptocurrencies," said Professor David Glance from the Centre for Software Practice at The University of Western Australia.


 


"Many are comparing the buzz around Bitcoin to tulip mania that hit the Netherlands in the 17th century."



Professor Glance said with such a volatile currency, investors should only buy what they can afford to lose.


But with the digital currency recently peaking above $11,000 – a valuation that represents a 950% return since the beginning of the year in US dollar terms – mom and pop investors who had previously never heard of bitcoin are trying to get a piece of the action. Recently, the CME Group and other exchanges around the world have launched – or announced they’re planning to launch – new bitcoin derivatives that will make it easier for institutional investors like hedge funds to play in that market. Though many new funds have been established already this year to get in on the action.


Earlier this week, pioneering cryptocurrency investor Mike Novogratz, whose digital-currency focused fund has recorded astronomical returns this year thanks to the performance of bitcoin, Ethereum and many other digital currency copycats. After accurately predicting that bitcoin would reach $10,000 this year, Novogratz now says he sees it going to $40,000 by the end of next year.


Other financial luminaries like Warren Buffett and – most famously – JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon have said they believe bitcoin is a bubble. Dimon famously opined that the digital currency could get somebody killed.


And while bitcoin has given investors no reason in recent months to believe the rally is slowing down, the idea that strippers are starting to pour their cash earnings into bitcoin is eerily reminiscent of a scene from the movie “The Big Short” where two of the film’s protagonists interview a stripper who took out subprime mortgages to buy nearly half a dozen properties.


Should investors pay attention to this “stripper indicator”?









Friday, November 24, 2017

French Asset Manager Launches World"s First Bitcoin Mutual Fund

Since bitcoin first entered mainstream consciousness in 2013, regulators have been wary of authorizing the creation of bitcoin-linked financial products that would create a patina of legitimacy for a product that was all-too-recently associated with dark-web bazaars like the Silk Road. So far, the only bitcoin-linked financial product is the Nasdaq Stockholm-traded ETN that JP Morgan Securities famously purchased – purportedly for its clients’ accounts - after Jamie Dimon called the digital currency a “fraud” and said he would fire any JPM traders caught trading it.


Back in March, the SEC rejected not one, but two proposed bitcoin ETFs. Recently, CME Group announced it would launch bitcoin-linked derivatives by the end of the year. Their prices will be set using a daily reference rate designed by the exchange that some critics have pointed out could strengthen the case for the SEC to approve a bitcoin-linked ETF in the US.


Well, one French asset manager just created a newfound sense of urgency for its rivals in the US by introducing the first bitcoin-linked mutual fund.


Announced today, Tobam"s alternative investment fund perhaps represents the latest bid to attract institutional investors to cryptocurrencies (though, as in the case with similar financial instruments, investors wouldn"t be holding bitcoin directly).


 


…the mutual fund"s launch follows approval from the Autorité des Marchés Financiers, one of the country"s top financial regulators. Per the report, PwC will perform auditing services while Caceis, the asset servicing banking group of France-based Crédit Agricole, will hold custody of the bitcoins tied to the fund.


 


"This first move in the world of cryptocurrencies showcases our dedication to remaining ahead of the curve and to provide our clients with innovative products in the context of efficient (i.e. unpredictable) markets," Yves Choueifaty, Tobam"s president, said in a statement.



Choueifaty said he expects the fund to swell to an AUM of $400 million over the next several years.


Investors are already expressed interest, he said.


"We found some investors to launch the fund and we have had a lot of interest from an intellectual point of view," he told the publication.



As CoinDesk pointed out, the idea that institutional investors want to gain access to bitcoin is unsurprising, given recent reports from the traditional hedge fund world. Whether products like Tobam"s will further stoke interest remains to be seen.



The announcement coincides with another all-time high for the digital currency, which has climbed more than 700% this year despite a crackdown in China, a hard fork, the collapse of several high-profile ICOs, declarations by Dimon and others that bitcoin is a bubble, a hoax or is outright dangerous (“It’s going to get somebody killed”)…the list goes on.


However, bitcoin has benefited in part from the fact that there’s no easy way for retail traders to bet against it. That will soon change, now that a Swiss company has introduced futures contracts that will make it easier for retail investors to short bitcoin.



Of course, that would mean the investors buying into this mutual fund would be getting in right at the market top…
 









Friday, November 17, 2017

JPMorgan Busted Laundering Money After Calling Bitcoin a Money Laundering Tool

(ZHEScore one for the poetic irony pages.


Two months after JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon lashed out at bitcoin, calling it a “fraud” which is “worse than tulip bulbs, warning it won’t end well,” will “blow up” and “someone is going to get killed” and threatened that “any trader trading bitcoin” will be “fired for being stupid” as it was merely a tool for money-laundering, today Swiss daily Handelszeitung reported that the Swiss subsidiary of JPMorgan was sanctioned by the Swiss regulator, FINMA, over money laundering and “seriously violating supervision laws.”


As the newspaper adds, the Swiss sanctions relate to breaches of due diligence in connection with money laundering standards. In other words, JPMorgan was actively aiding and abetting criminal money laundering.


The report further notes the Finma decision was issued on June 30 and should have been published the following week but JPMorgan tried to prevent the publication of the judgment. More recently, the Federal Administrative Court dismissed the appeal.


In response to the money-laundering violation, JPM said that in support of safety and soundness of global monetary system, “we have made and continue to make significant enhancements to the firm’s AML program to ensure we are meeting regulatory expectations,” according to an emailed statement sent to Bloomberg.


Unfortunately, JPMorgan also said that it can’t, or rather won’t, provide further details since the Finma resolution from June 2017 isn’t public.


This means that anyone wondering if Jamie Dimon’s bank was using (and thus trading) bitcoin to circumvent Swiss anti-money laundering regulations, will just have to ask Jamie Dimon in person during his next public appearance.


By Tyler Durden / Republished with permission / Zero Hedge / Report a typo


This article was chosen for republication based on the interest of our readers. Anti-Media republishes stories from a number of other independent news sources. The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not reflect Anti-Media editorial policy.

After Slamming Bitcoin As A Money Laundering Tool, JPMorgan Busted For Money Laundering

Score one for the poetic irony pages.


Two months after JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon lashed out at bitcoin, calling it a "fraud" which is "worse than tulip bulbs, warning it won"t end well", will "blow up" and "someone is going to get killed" and threatened that "any trader trading bitcoin" will be "fired for being stupid" as it was merely a tool for money-laundering, today Swiss daily Handelszeitung reported that the Swiss subsidiary of JPMorgan was sanctioned by the Swiss regulator, FINMA, over money laundering and "seriously violating supervision laws."


As the newspaper adds, the Swiss sanctions relate to breaches of due diligence in connection with money laundering standards. In other words, JPMorgan was actively aiding and abeting criminal money laundering.


The report further notes, the Finma decision was issued on June 30 and should have been published the following week but JPMorganm tried to prevent the publication of the judgment. More recently, the Federal Administrative Court dismissed the appeal.


In response to money-laundering violation, JPM said that in support of safety and soundness of global monetary system, “we have made and continue to make significant enhancements to the firm’s AML program to ensure we are meeting regulatory expectations,” according to an emailed statement sent to Bloomberg.


Unfortunately, JPMorgan also said that it can’t, or rather won"t, provide further details since the Finma resolution from June 2017 isn’t public.


This means that anyone wondering if Jamie Dimon"s bank was using (and thus trading) bitcoin to circumvent Swiss anti-money laundering regulations, will just have to ask Jamie Dimon in person during his next public appearance.  









Sunday, November 12, 2017

Ethereum"s Creator Mulls Limiting Supply In Novel Ways

While the ICO craze has got out of control in 2017, the two leading cryptocurrencies – Bitcoin and Ethereum – have gone from strength to strength. We’ve seen frequent gut-wrenching (for bulls) drawdowns, wallet freezings (Ethereum several days ago – see here), exchange closures (China) and high-profile criticism from speakers engaging forked-tongues (Jamie Dimon"s famous fraud comments, etc).  Nonetheless, like fledglings learning to leave the nest, a broad swathe of opinion senses that there is progress. Like the early days of the internet, investors will suffer losses on those ICOs which were poorly planned and/or poorly executed – which might be most of them. As this process unfolds, however, the better cryptocurrencies will be tweaked, refined and sometimes “forked” to make them better suited to a range of decentralised applications which are, themselves in state of flux.



Talking of tweaks, the co-founder of Ethereum, Vitalik Buterin, is mulling one for Ethereum which might happen before the end of 2017. Watching the firehose of ICOs, Buterin has been asking himself whether, with Ethereum (ether), he’s creating too much of a good thing. According to Bloomberg.


The 23-year-old helped sell one of the first digital currencies in 2014 when he introduced ether to the public. Three years later he’s witnessed scads of other digital currencies raise more than $3 billion in 2017 via so-called initial coin offerings. The sheer number of coins now being created has made him ponder the previously imponderable: limiting the supply of ether.


 


“I’m concerned a lot of these token models aren’t going to be sustainable,” Buterin said in a rare interview last week at the Ethereum Developers Conference in Cancun, Mexico. So what’s the problem? There’s a hard limit -- 21 million coins -- on the supply of bitcoin, the first successful cryptocurrency, that helps underpin its value. Buterin isn’t mulling a cap like that, but he’s intrigued by the idea of imposing fees on applications built atop ethereum. Those fees would destroy -- or burn, in Buterin’s parlance -- ether tokens over time.



Finite supply is hardly a new concept, but it’s certainly entered the consciousness of Bitcoin investors. There’s been much debate on Ethereum supply and while there isn’t a hard limit, the inflation in Ethereum supply is set to decline exponentially, with the maximum amount somewhere in the region of 100 million. There is a quote on Reddit that is attributed to Buterin on this subject.



During the interview at the Ethereum conference, Buterin pondered – at times in slightly less than coherent fashion - the need to limit Ethereum supply in order to differentiate it from fiat currencies.


“If the token is being burned, then you have an economic model that says the value of the token is the net present value of basically all future burnings,” he said.


 


Otherwise, “it’s just a currency that goes up and down. It feels kind of like voodoo economics and the price of the token isn’t really backed by anything,” Buterin added.


 


“That’s a very spooky thing.” Reminded that he created such a coin himself, he said going forward that could change. “It’s a fact that’s definitely informing a lot of design choices,” Buterin said. “Introducing some kind of sinks into ethereum is definitely something we’re looking at,” he said. “By sinks, I mean fees that lead to the token actually being destroyed.”



If he decides against “burning”, another possibility is essentially warehousing some of the supply, eliminating it from circulation.


Another way to limit supply, at least temporarily, is through locking up some of the ether currently in circulation. That’s the plan as ethereum moves to a new way of verifying transactions on its network. Known as proof-of-stake, it requires users who want to be rewarded for validating transactions to deposit ether for a set amount of time. The more ether they set aside, the bigger the reward for verifying the network. Buterin said the ethereum community may transition to proof-of-stake as early as the end of the year.



While Bloomberg notes that Ethereum’s abundance has obviously not adversely affected its price this year, our question is what impact would limiting supply have on Ethereum? Especially when  cryptocurrency prices are so sensitive to newsflow, even when it’s ill-informed, in Dimon’s case, for example. Talking of limiting supply, Buterin had some cautionary words on the ICO boom although, given the nature of financial market regulation, nothing will be done until something really bad happens, which is sadly inevitable.


Buterin said ICOs had both good and bad attributes. The way they’re currently structured skews the incentives of the startups that have raised over $3 billion this year. In nearly all ICOs, groups have pitched tokens to fund projects still in development, leaving open the question of what happens if they fail to deliver on promises. “The token models we have right now are lopsided and give skewed incentives,” Buterin said. “The worst part is the front-loading. Basically getting $140 million before you have a product. The right way to do that is to come up with a mechanism that either splits the ICO up across rounds or has a mechanism where if it doesn’t go well people can get refunds or anything similar.” ICOs have solved a key problem, making it easier for developers to raise money to fund their work, he said. But that doesn’t mean that every project should start with an offering, Buterin said. “It’s definitely a complicated balance,” he said.



The ICO boom is definitely not balanced.
 









Friday, November 10, 2017

More New Normal - Buy Bloomberg"s "Bubblicious" Index Of Bubbles - Make Out Like A Bandit

If only every year was this “easy”.


Unfortunately, the old adage of the trend being your friend becomes harder to adhere to as a guidepost as one asset market after another goes into bubble territory. As we discussed here, Alberto Gallo of Algebris Investments has ranked (see here) the top 14 bubbles worldwide, according to characteristics such as duration, appreciation, valuation and the degree of irrational behaviour.


When we started in this industry, we were taught by those with the gray hair of experience that betting against the herd was the key to success. Turning up on January 1, imagine the look on their faces if you’d told them you’d bought a portfolio of everything that had gone parabolic (or almost) the previous year. Luckily for them, markets were relatively free and absent $15 trillion of price insenstive asset purchases by central banks. Fundamentals counted for somethiing – and will again (we hope) – there’s just the small matter of getting to the other side of the current bubble, sorry bubble(ssssssssssssssssssssssssssss).


In 2017, the strategy of buying bubbles has obviously worked almost perfectly or, as Bloomberg notes,“Investors can either buy bubbles or be left far behind”. Indeed, it’s gone to the trouble (see here) of creating ts own “Bubblicious” index, which includes an equal weighting of a host of the “usual suspects”. These include:


  • Sunac China Holdings Ltd.: perhaps the poster child of the real-estate frenzy in the world’s second-largest economy, this company’s aggressive acquisition strategy has been met with raised eyebrows among regulators at a time when China is trying to rein in the country’s financial risk.

  • Tencent Holdings Ltd.: A 2,600 percent rise in the past decade? Tencent is the leader of the pack when it comes to Asian tech stocks that have made the sector the biggest component of the MSCI Asia Pacific Index for the first time since the internet bubble.

  • Tesla Inc. and Netflix Inc.: two U.S. tech companies that have both been branded with the b-word by hedge fund manager Einhorn.

  • VelocityShares Daily Inverse VIX Short-Term ETN, ticker XIV: this exchange-traded note is a proxy for the presumed “short volatility” bubble that’s seen investors bet billions of dollars on the prospect of not much happening in markets.

  • Bitcoin Investment Trust, ticker GBTC: the cryptocurrency fund that typically trades at a substantial premium to its net asset value. Bitcoin itself has been called a bubble by bank CEOs including JP Morgan Chase & Co.’s Jamie Dimon, ethereum co-founder Joseph Lubin and many more.

  • ETF Industry Exposure & Financial Services ETF, ticker TETF: this meta exchange-traded product holds a basket of firms poised to benefit the most from the explosion in ETFs -- a proxy for the “passive bubble.”

  • Lots of long bonds: The iShares 20+ Year Treasury Bond ETF has enjoyed $1.8 billion worth of inflows in a year that saw former Federal Reserve Chair Alan Greenspan warn of a massive bubble in the space. Meanwhile yields on German sovereign debt maturing in 2048 and Japanese bonds maturing in 2050 have dipped ever lower, sealing the latter’s reputation as a ‘widow maker’ for frustrated shorts. The portfolio also includes the infamous Argentinian century bond.


Bloomberg observes that its broad range of choices mean that its Bubblicious portfolio is “fairly well diversified” across the many bubbles. Actually, it could have been more diversified. While we don’t disagree with the inclusion of any of Bloomberg’s picks, it’s worth noting that compared with Gallo’s list, the Bubblicious portfolio does not include European high yield, EM high yield or any of the obvious property bubbles outside China. London, for example, and Australian cities, such as Sydney and Melbourne. Unlike Gallo, we might have chosen New Zealand property instead of London property (where prices have started falling) and, while Bloomberg has chosen Sunac as its “poster child” for Chinese real estate, China Evergrande and others would be equally valid.


Anyway, as Bloomberg explains, the “Bubblicious” index has risen by well more than 120% so far this year.


The best way to crush the crowd in 2017? Buy the things everyone insisted would never keep going up. A portfolio stuffed with allegedly over-inflated assets would have returned more than 120 percent so far in 2017, trouncing the S&P 500 Index and underscoring the challenge for investors facing a plethora of pricey securities.



As the chart shows, if you’d gone “Bubblicious” on 1 January 2017, you’d have smashed the S&P 500 "out of sight" by more than 100%.



As Bloomberg laments.


The hypothetical ‘Bubblicious’ portfolio includes Chinese real estate and internet names, a pair of U.S. tech behemoths, a cryptocurrency fund, the ETF industry, bonds that mature decades from now, and a dash of short volatility bets just to make things more interesting.


 


The out-performance is a testament to the momentum mania prevalent in today’s markets, a dynamic which has prompted the likes of Greenlight Capital’s David Einhorn, Goldman Sachs Group Inc., and Sanford C Bernstein & Co. LLC to mull whether value investing is in the midst of an existential crisis given ultra-low interest rates and abundant liquidity.



Of course it is, but the nature of markets is that they move in cycles. This cycle happens to be the most unpleasant cycle for value investors, active managers and contrarian thinkers, but it’s still a cycle.









Sunday, October 29, 2017

Jamie Dimon Should Learn About Lemons

By Chris at www.CapitalistExploits.at


A tale of two James".


What does this guy:



Captain James Cook


...have in common with this guy:





Two things:


  1. Same first name, and

  2. similar opportunities.


Let me explain.


Captain James was probably just another ruffian salty with poor hygiene and bad teeth. But you know what the catalyst to his fame was? And by extension what turned muddy old Britain into an empire?



These:



You see, the thing holding back Captain Jamie from extended ocean going voyaging was a nasty disease called scurvy. We know now that Jamie was dead eager to get out there and bring nasty European diseases to natives in faraway lands and upon arrival announce, "By George it"s nice and lush here, we"ll take it."



And so when Scottish physician James Lind figured out via controlled experiments that, in fact, a diet including vitamin C rich foods cured this pesky disease, the advantage presented to sailors was enormous. After all, those poor sods used to routinely lose up to 60% of their crews to scurvy on voyages.



Imagine setting out knowing such odds.


Da Gama, for instance, lost 116 if his 170 crew, and Magellan 208 of his 230. You"d have better odds skulling a bottle of Absolut and then playing chicken with Mack trucks on a freeway.


It took the Brits about 40 years to put this knowledge to good use, but it has been argued by historians to have been a catalyst to the founding of the British Empire. At the time, there were plenty other countries who could quite easily have stacked up some lemon juice in the hull, set sail, and begun planting flags. But they didn"t.



Isn"t that amazing? The bloody British Empire owes its fortunes to the humble lemon. And, by golly, old Jamie Cook took advantage of that didn"t he? And the rest, as they say, is now history.



And this brings me to the other Jamie.


You see, Jamie (the old Brit Jamie), used something quite revolutionary at the time to alter the course of history and become a major player in it.


And Jamie (the not so old yank), Captain of the JPM ship has a similar opportunity today.



It"s why he should learn about lemons.



It seems he knows little about modern day "lemons" and their properties. Here"s some major ignorance points he shared with us all on his views just recently.




I think Alex Gurevich said it best:




I was mentioning this all to my lovely wife the other night, and you know what she said?



She said that if he was a she (Jamie that is), he probably wouldn"t be so arrogant and may look at the manual. Which in this case is, of course, Satoshi"s white paper.


And, as usual, she"s right. When we got our last DVD thingy player she immediately pulled out the manual to learn about how it all works so that when she wants to, she"ll be able to play exactly what she wants without delay and mess and fuss.


Me? I stabbed away at the buttons, safe in the knowledge that even if I"m trying to get the Blu-ray to play, I"ll probably get the USB figured out, and who knows what excellent films are on the thumb drive I"ve shoved in there.


I console myself with the fact I"m male, and as such, reading the manual is against my religion. But I tend to make up for it by diving in and learning by doing.



Jamie, bless him, isn"t even prepared to do either, and that"s fine.



It just means that when Bitcoin hits another all time high and history books are written (by the robots, of course), he won"t even make the pages. He"ll simply be like all those other sailors in Portugal, Spain, France, and the Netherlands who, in the 1800s, were sailing around at the same time Captain James Cook was.



And you know what? We don"t know anything about them, and neither will future generations know anything about the present Captain of the USS enterprise JPMorgan"s Jamie "I don"t know isht about Bitcoin" Dimon.



And that"s probably how it should be.



- Chris



"Do just once what others say you cannot do, and you will never pay attention to their limitations again." — Captain James Cook


--------------------------------------


Liked this article? Then you"ll probably like my other missives on


this topic as well. Go here to access them (free, of course).


--------------------------------------

Friday, October 27, 2017

Billionaire Peter Thiel: "Bitcoin"s Harder To Mine Than Gold... Has Great Potential"

Outspoken billionaire investor Peter Thiel told attendees at the Future Investment Initiative in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, that people are "underestimating" bitcoin and that it has "great potential left," comparing the cryptocurrency bitcoin to gold.


Watch the latest video at video.foxbusiness.com

In his remarks, Thiel said that while he is "skeptical of most [cryptocurrencies]," he believes bitcoin has a promising future depending on the trajectory it takes...


"I"m skeptical of most of them (cryptocurrencies), I do think people who criticize are a little bit... underestimating bitcoin especially because... it"s like a reserve form of money, it"s like gold, and it"s just a store of value. You don"t need to use it to make payments," Thiel said.



The PayPal founder and venture capitalist compared some of bitcoin"s features to gold.


“If bitcoin ends up being the cyber equivalent of gold and it has a great potential left and it’s a very different kind of thing from what people in Silicon Valley focus on - companies, not algorithms not protocols, but this might be maybe one exception that is very underestimated,” the Silicon Valley elite said.



Even so, in Thiel’s opinion, like gold, it’s difficult to mine, making it more worthwhile...


“You can ask the same questions about gold. What is gold based on? Why is gold valuable?...


 


It’s a tangible asset but it’s also hard to mine. So if it was easy to mine then it wouldn’t be that valuable and we would just have way more gold.


 


So bitcoin is also, it’s mineable, like gold it’s hard to mine, it’s actually harder to mine than gold and so in that sense it’s more constrained,” he said.



In September, JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon famously called bitcoin a “fraud” and said it will eventually blow up.


"The currency isn"t going to work. You can"t have a business where people can invent a currency out of thin air and think that people who are buying it are really smart," Dimon said while speaking at an investor conference.



However, Thiel proposed a different take:


“The argument it’s based on is the security of the math which tells you it can never be diluted by government… it can’t be hacked and it’s a form of money that’s… secure in an absolute way.”










Wednesday, October 25, 2017

These Five Cognitive Biases Hurt Investors The Most

There is no shortage of cognitive biases out there that can trip up our brains.


By the last count, Visual Capitalist"s Jeff Desjardins notes there are 188 types of these fallible mental shortcuts in existence, and they constantly impede our ability to make the best decisions about our careers, our relationships, and for building wealth over time.


BIASES THAT PLAGUE INVESTORS


In today’s infographic from StocksToTrade, we dive deeper into five of these cognitive biases – specifically the ones that really seem to throw investors and traders for a loop.


Next time you are about to make a major investing decision, make sure you double-check this list!



Courtesy of: Visual Capitalist

The moves that may seem instinctual for the average investor may actually be pre-loaded with cognitive biases.


These problems can even plague the most prominent investors in the world – just look at JPMorgan’s Jamie Dimon!


BIASES TO AVOID


Here are descriptions and examples of the five cognitive biases that can impact investors the most:


Anchoring Bias
The first piece of information you see or hear often ends up being an “anchor” for others that follow.


As an example, if you heard that a new stock was trading at $5.00 – that is the piece of information you may reference whenever thinking about that stock in the future. To avoid this mental mistake: analyze historical data, but don’t hold historical conclusions.


Recency Bias
Recency bias is a tendency to overvalue the latest information available.


If you heard that a CEO is resigning from a company you own shares of, your impulse may be to overvalue this recent news and sell the stock. However, you should be careful, and instead focus on long-term trends and experience to come up with a more measured course of action.


Loss Aversion Bias
No one wants to lose money, but small losses happen all the time even for the best investors – especially on paper.


Loss aversion bias is a tendency to feel the effects of these losses more than wins of equal magnitude, and it can often result in a sub-optimal shift in investing strategy. Investors that are focused only on avoiding losses will miss out on big opportunities for gains.


Confirmation Bias
Taking in information only that confirms your beliefs can be disastrous. It’s tempting, because it is satisfying to see your previous conviction in a positive light – however, it also makes it possible to miss important findings that may help to change your conviction.


Bandwagon Bias
No one wants to get left out, but being the last one to pile onto an opportunity can also be cataclysmic. If you’re going to be a bandwagon jumper, make sure you’re doing it for the right reasons.









Thursday, October 19, 2017

A Look Inside The Secret Swiss Bunker Where The Ultra Rich Hide Their Bitcoins

Somewhere in the mountains near Switzerland’s Lake Lucerne lies a hidden underground vault containing a vast fortune.


It’s no ordinary vault, according to Quartz. Built inside a decommissioned Swiss military bunker dug into a granite mountain, it’s precise location is a closely guarded secret, and access is limited by myriad security precautions.


But instead of gold bars, the bunker contains hard drives on which customers’ bitcoins are being kept in what’s call “cold storage” – i.e. the owners’ private keys are protected by an air-gapped hard drive. The vault is one of many operated by Xapo, an early bitcoin company known for its cold storage wallet products and a debit card that pays for transactions in digital currencies.



The company won’t disclose how much bitcoin is stored in the vault, but one employee who spoke with Quartz said he sometimes takes customers with millions of dollars in bitcoin on tours of the vaults where their fortune is stored. Xapo was founded by Argentinian entrepreneur and current CEO Wences Casares, whom Quartz describes as “patient zero” of bitcoin among Silicon Valley’s elite. Cesares reportedly gave Bill Gates and Reed Hoffman their first bitcoins.



As Quartz explains, the bitcoin vault doesn’t store actual bitcoin units. Instead, what’s being stored are the owners’ private cryptographic keys that allow the owner to access and transfer his or her bitcoins by matching the key with a public key that’s used to identify the coin on the blockchain. Gaining unauthorized access to someone’s private keys is akin to making off with a gold bar.



The inexorable rise in bitcoin’s valuation has been marred by notable hacking incidents like the collapse of Mt. Gox, which ushered in the longest bear market in bitcoin’s history. Security fears appear to have subsided as bitcoin’s price has soared to all-time highs, but incidents like the collapse of the DAO have inspired investors with substantial bitcoin wealth to look into protecting it.



To store the coins, Xapos contracts Deltalis, the company that technically operates the 10,000-square-foot data-center that now inhabits the decommissioned bunker.





Server racks for banks, and any client who needs secure data processing, fill a cavity dug over 320 meters deep in the granite mountain. The Swiss military built the facility in 1947, and it served as the army’s secret headquarters during the Cold War, Agence-France Presse has reported. Inside, walls covered with detailed maps and ancient radio electronics serve as vestiges of its military past.



To enter Xapo’s private vault in the Deltalis data center, visitors must endure an exhausting series of security procedures.





Streiff leads us to a concrete facade jutting out of the mountainside, the bunker’s entrance. We step through about a foot of concrete and enter the lobby. I sign in as I would at any office building, except I also have to present my fingerprints and be photographed. After that I step through a “man-trap”—a phone booth-sized cylinder made of bullet-proof glass that shuts me in until an operator opens the door on the opposite side.



Once through the man-trap, we touch our ID cards and pass through a set of steel revolving doors, then walk down a 100-meter long passageway through the granite. At the end of the passageway are two red steel doors that I’m told can survive a nuclear blast. Streiff invites me to try to close one—my 90 kg (198 pound) frame can’t budge it. “They’re closed every night,” he tells me, showing me how to hang off the handle and use his body’s momentum to gradually swing it shut.



Streiff and Kon are taking me to see Xapo’s “private suite,” an ultra-secure, customized, portion of the data center. We pass through a second man-trap and then end up in front of a nondescript white door. “This is further than anyone outside Xapo has been,” Streiff tells me, as he unlocks it. Inside is a space about the size of a walk-in closet containing a cooling unit, and yet another door. But that’s as far as they’ll let me go, and I’m not allowed to take photographs.



Security is similarly tight inside the vault. Nobody is allowed the enter the “cold room” where the bitcoins are stored on air-gapped hard drives. To protect against an electromagnetic pulse attack, the cold room is equipped with a Faraday cage, a type of barrier meant to block electromagnetic fields.





Beyond that door, I rely on what Carlos Rienzi, Xapo’s head of security, tells me later, when I’m back in London. Rienzi chose the vault for Xapo, and he designed the private suite and its security protocols. His “threat model,” as computer security jargon goes, is to protect against attacks from “well-funded terrorist groups or hackers.”



There are two more portals inside the suite: the first leads to an operators’ room, and the second to a “cold room.” The cold room is encircled with steel slabs to form a Faraday cage: a barrier that protects against a possible electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attack that could wipe out the data—and thus the keys to the bitcoin—stored in the room. For digital assets like bitcoin, thick walls and a secret location are not enough. A shield against invisible modes of attack like an EMP bomb must be provided for.



No one, not even the operator, enters the cold room. Its door is sealed with tape—like a crime scene—to ensure it’s not tampered with. The cold room contains hardware, which is never connected to the internet, used to sign bitcoin transactions. Signing a transaction can be performed offline. The operator accesses that hardware using “special cabling,” sending encrypted data to the hardware for signing. Finally, before a transaction can be approved, two more sign-offs, in two other vaults located on separate continents, must be performed.



I ask Rienzi if he feels pretty confident about the security measures he has in place in Switzerland. “We are under attack 24/7,” he tells me, referring to the terrorists and hackers he designed the vault to guard against. “This is not a race. It is a chess game. You have to think about the opponent’s next movement. You can never relax.”



Of course, all the security measures in the world can’t protect investors from a sudden plunge in the bitcoin price. However, the digital currency’s indomitable - for now - performance has silenced at least one of its most prominent critics. Then said, unlike precious metal specie, one carefully targeted EMP would be all it takes to sever the ownership chain for a long, long time.


Still, with the digital currency recently reaching yet another record high, despite relentless jawboning and rhetoric by everyone from Jamie Dimon to central bankers to China, we can only imagine the business of protecting bitcoin fortunes is set to boom.