Free Republic

By now it is common knowledge that when it comes to massive, taxpayer-backed hedge funds, few are quite as big as the Swiss National Bank, whose roughly $100 billion in equity holdings have been extensively profiled on these pages, including its woefully investments in Valeant and the spike in its buying of AAPL stock at its all time high. But while the SNB's stock holdings are updated every quarter courtesy of its informative SEC-filed 13F (we wish the Fed would also disclose the equities it holds courtesy of its Citadel proxy), getting a gllimpse of the flow is more...

With countless settlements documenting the rigging of every single asset class, it was only a matter of time before the regulators - some 10 years behind the curve as usual - finally cracked down on gold manipulation as well, even though as we have shown in the past, central banks in general and the Fed in particular are among the biggest gold manipulators. That said, we are confident by now nobody will be surprised that there was manipulation going on in the gold casino. In fact, ever since Germany's Bafin launched a probe into Deutsche Bank for gold and silver...

Ted Cruz's presidential campaign is using psychological data based on research spanning tens of millions of Facebook users, harvested largely without their permission, to boost his surging White House run and gain an edge over Donald Trump and other Republican rivals, the Guardian can reveal. A little-known data company, now embedded within Cruz's campaign and indirectly financed by his primary billionaire benefactor, paid researchers at Cambridge University to gather detailed psychological profiles about the US electorate using a massive pool of mainly unwitting US Facebook users built with an online survey.

Last week, Fox News and the Daily Beast followed-up on a September report in which dozens of US intelligence professionals accused their superiors of "cooking" intelligence assessments related to the threat posed by ISIS. There was a "persistent effort... to downplay or even change reports that that questioned how much progress a U.S.-led coalition is making in the Obama administration's stated goal to degrade, destroy, and defeat ISIS. Draft reports that contained a more pessimistic view, or that questioned the efficacy of hitting certain targets, were sent back to the analysts for more extensive rewriting," the Daily Beast reported.  Who gave these orders...

Prepare to be “nudged” by Obama's new “behavioral science” squads — for your own good, of course. Under the guise of better “serving” the American people through government, Obama signed an executive order this week calling for federal agencies and departments to deploy emerging “behavioral science” techniques against the public.Among other goals, the expansion of federal mind manipulation is supposed to help more Americans access government welfare programs, take their “recommended” vaccines, supply more information about themselves to the federal government, and accelerate the transition toward what Obama called “a low-carbon economy.” The controversial decree, signed on September 15, explicitly...

Tyler Durden 10/15/2015 The economic numbers released yesterday can best be described with a reference to wheels falling off the bus. And it wasn’t just retail sales and PPI in the U.S. but numbers from around the world, including China. So, of course, when I woke up this morning the obvious first question to ask was, how much are equities up? It remains a reality for trading that the biggest news overnight wasn’t the Bank of Korea rate decision nor the continued deterioration of East West relations but an article written by Jon Hilsenrath in the WSJ on the rapidly...

http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2015/10/cnn-alters-photo-of-umpqua-killer-chris-harper-mercer-to-make-him-look-white/

This is something odd about the case that occurred to me earlier in the day. How often do you see minors who have been suddenly catapulted from ordinary anonymous life into national and international fame by some incident, and they are apparently routinely interviewed by the media by themselves? No parents or other family with them during the interviews, and no attorneys either. I've seen two videotaped interviews of him, one with the Dallas Morning News, and the other on Al Jazeera, and read other interviews, and so far it seems like he does the interviews alone. I do remember...

Sophie Cruz's encounter with the pope during a parade in Washington this week looked to be one of those spontaneous, once-in-a-lifetime-moments Francis has become known for. But for 5-year-old Sophie, the chance to wrap her arm around the pope's neck as he offered a hug, kiss and a blessing unfolded as perfectly as it was scripted by members of a coalition of Los Angeles-based immigration rights groups. For nearly a year the group had been preparing the young girl from suburban Los Angeles to make a dash for the popemobile to deliver a message about the plight of immigrant parents...

Curious why few if any traders can actually execute any trades, whether buys or sells? The reason is that despite the relative calmness of the index prints, what is going on beneath the surface is an unprecedented wave of constant halt and unhalts as all stop levels were taken out, many in circuit breaker territory, making it virtually impossible for any matching enginge to, well, match buyers and sellers. Here is a sample:

The election of Obama was one more triumph of illusion over substance. It was a skillful manipulation and betrayal of the public by a corporate power elite. We mistook style and ethnicity - an advertising tactic pioneered by Calvin Klein and Benetton - for progressive politics and genuine change. See Chris Hedges interview on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RokDpEtuwyM

More than two dozen companies in China are postponing initial public offerings and security companies are pledging more than $19 billion for a fund to stabilize the country’s free-falling stock market. The 28 companies, which had obtained permission from China’s securities watchdog for IPOs planned in Shanghai and Shenzhen, said they would postpone them due to recent market fluctuations and refund money already paid, the official Xinhua News agency announced late Saturday. That followed reports that regulators were asking companies to postpone the IPOs. […] The Chinese stock market has been in free-fall for three weeks, losing 28 percent of...

If you are a woman and are speaking when a man butts in, you have not been interrupted. Instead, according to Time, you have been “manterrupted” because men disproportionately interrupt females and women rarely interrupt males. According to an article published this week, titled “How Not to Be ‘Manterrupted’ In Meetings” and written by Jessica Bennett, there is an epidemic of sexism in which men do not respect the opinions of women. Bennett’s first example is the infamous VMA award ceremony in which Kanye West interrupted Taylor Swift. Yet this was not an aberration, according to Bennett, who sees it...

In a recent Politico Magazine article titled, “Let’s Talk About Death Panels,” Harold Pollack urges reviving one of the most notorious proposals that did not make it into the Obama Health Car Law – “advance planning consultations.”During the debate over Obamacare’s enactment, there was considerable controversy over a provision in an early version under which health care providers would have been paid by Medicare to discuss with their patients whether they would want life-saving medical treatment.After former Alaska governor and vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin dubbed the planning sessions “death panels,” the provision was dropped from the law ultimately enacted.As Pollack...

As Dave Weigel reports in a tart blog post today, conservative author and filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza recently managed to pull off an impressive marketing feat. D’Souza and his lawyers claimed that despite the hit status of his new book and movie, “America,” Google was deliberately downgrading the project in its search results and Costco had removed the book from shelves for politically motivated reasons. The result? Google bumped “America” up in the rankings and Costco restocked the book. Of course, as Weigel explains, “D’Souza’s book, like his movie [which made $2.75 million in its first weekend], is no runaway hit....

My colleague Kashmir Hill just reported that Facebook conducted their news feed manipulation four months before the term “research” was added to their data use policy, she writes: However, we were all relying on what Facebook’s data policy says now. In January 2012, the policy did not say anything about users potentially being guinea pigs made to have a crappy day for science, nor that “research” is something that might happen on the platform. Four months after this study happened, in May 2012, Facebook made changes to its data use policy, and that’s when it introduced this line about how...

How in the world does the government expect us to trust the economic numbers that they give us anymore? For a long time, many have suspected that they were being manipulated, and as you will see below we now have stone cold proof that this is indeed the case. But first, let's talk about the revised GDP number for the first quarter of 2014 that was just released. Initially, they told us that the U.S. economy only shrank by 0.1 percent in Q1. Then that was revised down to a 1.0 percent contraction, and now we are being informed that...

Robert Petzel resigned last week as the top health official for the Department of Veterans Affairs, just one day after testifying before a Senate committee that he knew VA health clinics were using inappropriate scheduling practices as early as 2010. Whistleblowers claim the schemes continued until this year, leading to a recent wave of outrage that sent the VA and White House scrambling to correct the alleged problems and restore confidence in the department. Petzel admitted that he knew of the issue after Sen. Johnny Isakson (R-Ga.) questioned him about the memo below, in which a top VA executive warned...

Heat broadcaster Eric Reid and Tony Fiorentino will be hosting their annual "Call of the Game" dinner...the Jim Mandich Courage and Commitment Award will be presented to Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, with an acceptance speech from congresswoman Debbie Wasserman-Schultz.

The crisis in Crimea has been many years in the making, and made it ripe for the taking. To paint Russian leadership as reactionary, ham-fisted hardliners is to ignore a decade of methodical deployment of soft power techniques, patient construction of fifth columns, and the massive incentives Russia has not to blow the place up. Focus on Russia’s military is misdirection; it is absolutely important, but the real benefit to brinkmanship is to make other outcomes seem downright reasonable. In light of recent setbacks, two potential outcomes are both reasonable (when compared to the extremes of military conflict and secession)...