Major tax filing services, including H&R Block, TaxAct and TaxSlayer, have been covertly sending Facebook sensitive financial information when Americans file their taxes online, according to The Markup.

The data includes names, email addresses, income, filing status, refund amounts and college scholarship information – which is sent to Facebook regardless of whether a person even has a Facebook account – or with other platforms owned by Meta. The company can then be used to fine tune advertising algorithms.

It is sent through widely used code called the Meta Pixel.

Of note, Intuit-owned TurboTax does use Meta Pixel, however the company did not send financial information – just usernames and the last time a device signed in. Beyond that, they have kept Pixel entirely off pages beyond sign in.

Each year, the Internal Revenue Service processes about 150 million individual returns filed electronically, and some of the most widely used e-filing services employ the pixel, The Markup found. 

When users sign up to file their taxes with the popular service TaxAct, for example, they’re asked to provide personal information to calculate their returns, including how much money they make and their investments. A pixel on TaxAct’s website then sent some of that data to Facebook, including users’ filing status, their adjusted gross income, and the amount of their refund, according to a review by The Markup. Income was rounded to the nearest thousand and refund to the nearest hundred. The pixel also sent the names of dependents in an obfuscated, but generally reversible, format. -The Markup

TaxAct, which services around three million “consumer and professional users,” also sends data to Google via the company’s analytics tool, however names are not included in the information.

“We take the privacy of our customers’ data very seriously,” said TaxAct spokeswoman Nicole Coburn. “TaxAct, at all times, endeavors to comply with all IRS regulations.”

H&R Block embedded a pixel on its site that included information on filers’ health savings account usage, dependents’ college tuition grants and expenses. The company similarly claimed in a very boilerplate statement that they “regularly evaluate[s] our practices as part of our ongoing commitment to privacy, and will review the information.”

While TaxSlayer – which says it completed 10 million federal and state returns last year – provided Facebook information on filers as part of the social media giant’s “advanced matching” system which attempts to link information from people browsing the web to Facebook accounts. The information sent includes phone numbers and the name of the user filling out the form, as well as the names of any dependents added to the return. Specific demographic information was also obscured, but Facebook was still able to link them to existing profiles.

Another tax filing service, Ramsey Solutions, told The Markup that the company “implemented the Meta Pixel to deliver a more personalized customer experience,” but that they “did NOT know and were never notified that personal tax information was being collected by Facebook from the Pixel.”

“As soon as we found out, we immediately informed TaxSlayer to deactivate the Pixel from Ramsey SmartTax.”

Harvard Law School lecturer and tax law specialist Mandi Matlock said the findings showed that taxpayers have been “providing some of the most sensitive information that they own, and it’s being exploited.”

“This is appalling,” she added. “It truly is.”

Read more here…

Authored by Conor Ryder via Kaiko.com,

The FTX collapse was perhaps the single biggest risk management failure in the history of finance. Today, we provide a crash course in basic risk and liquidity metrics which should be required reading for anyone managing crypto investments.

We’ve seen enough incidents over the last few months, let alone years, to conclude there is a complete lack of adequate risk management in crypto. Throughout the Terra collapse, crypto credit crisis, and spectacular implosion of FTX we have collectively witnessed the industry’s largest (and most opaque) firms become insolvent in an instant.

This begs the question: where were the basic financial risk controls that are mandatory in any other industry?

A neglect of proper risk and liquidity management in a market as volatile as crypto has proven to be a death sentence for any business or investor. Today, we will demonstrate why risk metrics such as VaR and expected shortfall, alongside CeFi and DeFi liquidity metrics, are an absolute necessity for any crypto firm in a post-FTX world.

Part 1: Risk Metrics

While commonplace (and required by law) in traditional finance, risk metrics have been neglected in crypto largely because most crypto businesses have been extremely profitable up until lately. When numbers go up, risk management gets swept under the carpet. But the industry’s inherent lack of transparency and regulation has also contributed to a culture of negligence that eschewed basic controls.

Below, we explore three basic risk metrics: Value at Risk, expected shortfall, and implied volatility. 

Value at Risk

VaR is a risk indicator to quantify the extent and probability of potential losses in a portfolio. It is particularly useful in risk management as it can essentially assign a cash value to a confidence level. These confidence levels usually range from 90% – 99%. For example, if the 95% daily VaR of my portfolio is $30k, it means that:

– My portfolio has a 95% chance of losing less than $30k over the next one day period.

– On average I will lose more than $30k one day out of 20 (5 days out of 100 = 5%).

VaR can be viewed as an acceptable loss, given a confidence level, which makes it a particularly useful metric for compliance purposes as well as capital requirement planning. Since the VaR for different confidence levels exhaustively describes the investment profitability, it can be used for investment management, allowing us to define limit-order levels to crystallize profits or cut losses. 

Kaiko’s VaR estimator can be applied to any cryptocurrency portfolio to accurately track VaR over time. Below, we have charted the Daily VaR of an equally weighted $200k portfolio of BTC and ETH.

Suppose I’m setting my risk budget for my portfolio, and I want a 95% probability of not losing more than $30k (-15%) each day. I would set my VaR confidence level to 95%, charted below, and monitor when my portfolio exceeds that $30k level. When the portfolio VaR exceeds that level I would look to de-risk my portfolio so that my Value-at-Risk is under that $30k threshold. We can see that in November as the FTX fallout began, VaR tripled in a matter of days to surpass the $30k max loss which would tell me to de-risk.

For a more conservative risk budget, perhaps for an exchange or lender, VaR at a 99% confidence level would be more appropriate. 99% VaR will impose stricter risk measures as the max loss is higher, due to the degree of certainty that it requires. We can see in the chart below that in times of higher volatility or returns, such as this time last year when the bull market came crashing to a halt, the max loss using 99% VaR was nearly double that using 95% VaR. This results in more stringent liquidity management being put in place, which will give businesses a better chance to remain solvent in volatile markets.

Expected Shortfall

Expected shortfall (ES) is another useful metric, and particularly relevant for a volatile asset class like crypto where investors want to try and quantify their losses in the worst of cases. While VaR estimates a max loss 95% of the time, expected shortfall quantifies the average loss in the 5% of times. ES answers the question: If VaR is exceeded, how bad will our losses be?

Distribution of returns in a crypto portfolio have historically had what are known as fat left tails, or black swan events, that alter the makeup of the return distributions. As we can see below, crypto markets exhibit more of the characteristics of chart 2. Both charts have the same VaR but result in different expected shortfalls: chart 2 losses are more extreme in the worst case scenario.

Charting the expected shortfall, or the average loss in the worst 5% of scenarios, for the same $200k portfolio above, we observe a decline in the average loss this year as crypto volatility generally eased. However, we can see expected shortfall spike during the recent FTX collapse, doubling in a matter of days. ES compliments VaR and gives risk managers a sense of how bad things may get in the worst of scenarios. This allows business to determine a risk budget, ensuring solvency during market crashes. 

Implied Volatility

Risk managers can also turn to the options market to get a better idea of how much risk is being priced into markets. Volatility is one of the criteria that makes up an option price, and by calculating how much volatility the market is pricing into an option, it is possible to come to a conclusion as to how much volatility to expect until the option expiration date. Using the December 2nd expiry date as an example, the market is pricing in implied volatility of 81% for ETH options until the end of the month, decreasing from 98% since mid-November. Implied volatility can be one of the most useful metrics risk managers monitor when looking to adjust the risk of the portfolio.

Part 2: Liquidity Metrics

Market Depth on Centralized Exchanges

Two of the black swan events this year, the collapse of Celsius and FTX, were directly related to liquidity issues surrounding stETH and FTT, respectively. Holders of either tokens could have seen that there was little to no liquidity available on spot markets and if everyone rushes to the exit at the same time, the price of the token crashes.

We saw this happen with stETH, which hit a discount of +6% as liquidity dried up on exchanges as Celsius rushed to liquidate their holdings amid record redemption requests for ETH.

FTT didn’t have many buyers apart from FTX themselves, and the bid side liquidity was not enough to support immense selling pressure of the token throughout the FTX scandal, despite Alameda’s best efforts to defend the price. Bid side liquidity within 2% of the mid price for FTT was only $6m pre-collapse. A fund engaging in adequate liquidity management would have flagged this and likely reduced exposure to FTT on the off-chance a rush to the exit happened.

Looking at some other tokens which could be relevant from a liquidity management perspective, DOT, the token of the Polkadot ecosystem, had very similar bid depth to FTT pre-crash. Post-crash, DOT only has about $4m of bid side support within 2% of the mid-price across 12 exchanges it trades on, meaning a wave of sell orders could quickly crash prices.

KCS is the native token of the Hong-Kong based exchange Kucoin. Kucoin is ranked 32 out of 42 exchanges in the latest Kaiko Exchange Ranking, largely thanks to a 42/100 score for Governance. According to recent proof of reserves releases from exchanges, the Block claims Kucoin holds nearly 20% of its reserves in its own token, KCS. Looking at 2% bid depth for KCS we can see there is only about $60k of bid side support for the token. A rush for the exit could see the KCS price crash and Kucoin taking a significant hit to their reserves.

Understanding liquidity is thus a vital component in a robust risk management framework. The valuation of a fund’s balance sheet is only as strong as its ability to efficiently liquidate their holdings.

DeFi Liquidity Data 

As centralized and decentralized markets become increasingly integrated, CEX market depth is no longer enough to fully understand a cryptocurrency’s liquidity

As mentioned earlier, staked Ether (stETH) played a large role in the liquidity issues faced by Celsius and Three Arrows Capital this summer. This caused market wide contagion at the time as investors scrambled to cash out of stETH and move into the more liquid ETH. In this case, the majority of liquidity for stETH wasn’t on centralized exchanges; rather, it was in DEX liquidity pools.

Diligent monitoring of the Curve stETH/ETH pool would have flagged a drop in the total value locked in real time as stETH made up over 80% of the pool at the height of the rush for liquidity. That allocation has improved slightly since, but remains quite imbalanced as stETH now makes up 67% of the pool.

Going forward, crypto firms will need to understand liquidity on both centralized and decentralized markets to be able to simulate large liquidations and price impact. 

Part 3: Exchange Due Diligence

The importance of exchange due diligence has never been more relevant than it is today. FTX was one of the most trusted names in all of crypto, but after Coindesk did a bit of digging the whole charade unraveled and FTX ended up insolvent. Not only did customers lose money, but many sophisticated hedge funds and trading desks had their funds stored on FTX and now have to explain that decision to investors.

It is vital that going forward, as part of a robust risk management process, that businesses do their due diligence on exchanges, monitoring everything from liquidity to governance. Kaiko is aiming to assist investors in this vetting process for exchanges with our Exchange Ranking, which is structured around six criteria with a proprietary scoring methodology internally developed and maintained by Kaiko’s Indices team. Over the next few months, we will incorporate proof of reserves and other transparency metrics into this ranking.

Conclusion

When liquidity is plentiful, risk management is less of a concern as most companies’ balance sheets look healthy and liquid. However, when a bear market hits, the tide goes out and we see who was swimming naked. Those with significant positions in illiquid tokens, such as FTT or stETH, have paid the price for not monitoring the liquidity of those positions and not accurately assessing the outsized risk of their positions should prices go down.

Risk management and crypto are two words that up until lately have rarely been mentioned in the same sentence. To quote the new CEO of FTX, John Ray III, he had never seen “such a complete failure of corporate controls and such a complete absence of trustworthy financial information.”

If businesses investing in crypto are to survive going forward, risk management must play a central role in the investment process. Liquidity metrics, combined with traditional risk metrics such as VaR or Expected Shortfall will allow investors to survive bear markets like these and reap the rewards of survival come the next bull market.

*  * *

Learn more about Kaiko’s Value at Risk, Implied Volatility, and liquidity data.

California’s Air Resources Board has laid out a plan to ban all diesel-powered trucks that would cause inflationary ripples throughout the entire economy.

The plan would mandate that all new trucks operating around busy railways and ports be zero emission vehicles by 2024 – while all diesel trucks would be phased out by 2035, and eventually, banishing every truck and bus fleet from California roads by 2045, where feasible, according to SFGATE.

The proposed Advance Clean Fleets regulation first targets the busiest trucking areas in the state — around warehouses, sea ports and railways. The board says the pollution in these areas affects communities disproportionately.

“Many California neighborhoods, especially Black and Brown, low-income and vulnerable communities, live, work, play and attend schools adjacent to the ports, railyards, distribution centers, and freight corridors and experience the heaviest truck traffic,” wrote the board, which asserts that this type of pollution creates health risks for those communities.

Representatives from the trucking and construction industries were livid at a recent hearing on the issue – where over 150 public commenters voiced their opinions ranging from the state’s woefully inadequate grid, to a general lack of charging capacity to handle a massive shift to zero-emission vehicles so quickly (whose electricity would in part be generated by coal).

“The infrastructure cannot be established in the timeframe given,” said American Trucking Association representative Mike Tunnell. “Fleets will have to deploy trucks that cannot do the same job as their current trucks.”

Another speaker, construction company CEO Jamie Angus, pointed to logistical issues involved with charging electric vehicles.

“This will do damage to us. We don’t really understand how to charge these vehicles,” he said, adding “Those pieces of equipment go home with those men every day, so they’ll need to be charged from home? How do you compensate that person for that?“

On the other side of the fence, environmentalists – including the Sierra Club, argued in favor of an expedited timeline to rid California roads of internal combustion engines as quickly as possible.

Maybe they can also figure out how to solve the massive logistical and economic issues that would surely ensue, as well as what to do with all that lithium when the batteries eventually go bad?

Authored by Gavin O’Reilly via The Ron Paul Institute For Peace & Prosperity,

In the lead up to the 2022 Qatar World Cup, the hosting of the tournament by the conservative Muslim state has been the source of much controversy in Western media.

On Thursday, less than 48 hours before the opening match between the host country and Ecuador, it was announced that alcohol would be prohibited from being sold in any of Qatar’s football stadiums. Controversy also arose on Monday afternoon when a plan for England captain Harry Kane to wear the rainbow-themed “OneLove” armband in his country’s match against Iran, was cancelled at the last minute due to an intervention from FIFA.

What has received virtually zero-coverage or criticism in the run up to Qatar’s hosting of the World Cup however, has been Doha’s instrumental role in fueling the 11-year long proxy war on Syria, a conflict that has led to thousands of deaths, an exacerbated refugee crisis, and the rise of ISIS.

In 2009, plans for the construction of a pipeline that would begin in the Qatari-managed North Dome gas field in the Persian Gulf, and which would then pass through Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria and Turkey on its way to Europe, were halted by the refusal of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to take part, his close relationship with Russia being a deciding factor.

With the Arab Republic being a long-time opponent of the US-NATO hegemony, in which the Gulf States behind the pipeline play a key role, this refusal would act as a final straw for the regime-change lobby. A plan was quickly put in place to remove Assad from power.

To this end, the United States and a host of other countries would authorize a plan to provide arms, funding and training to Salafist militants in the hope that a sectarian conflict would topple Syria’s secular government, thus allowing a Western-friendly regime to be put in place.

Timber Sycamore, the official codename for this regime change operation, would officially erupt in March 2011, when protests in Damascus and Aleppo calling for government reform would rapidly escalate into violence that soon swept the entire country.

By 2013, the “Syrian Revolution” had seen vast swathes of the Arab Republic come under terrorist control, with Salafist groups from neighboring Iraq, itself having been destabilized following the 2003 US-led invasion, crossing over to form the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) in April of that year.

In order to counter this onslaught and avoid the same fate that had befell Libya following a similar regime change operation, a common defence agreement between Syria and key-ally Iran was enacted and the Islamic Republic and Hezbollah would launch a military intervention in June 2013, with Tehran being acutely aware that had Damascus fell, Iran would have been next in line for the regime-change lobby. 

Though this Iranian intervention would play a key role in repelling the Western-backed terrorists, what would perhaps be the most decisive factor in turning the conflict in Damascus’ favour would come in September 2015, when a Russian air campaign was launched in defense of the Arab Republic, allowing it to retake territories that had come under the control of the militants, such as the key city of Aleppo, liberated in December 2016.

Sensing that their regime change operation wasn’t going to plan, Washington’s Neocons would soon resort to desperate measures. In April 2017, a likely false flag chemical attack in the town of Khan Shaykhun was blamed on the Syrian government in the hope of triggering a US-led military intervention, something that almost came to fruition several days later when the then-Trump administration launched cruise missiles at a Syrian airbase.

Just stopping short of the full-scale intervention that had been hoped for, the same strategy would be carried out almost a year to the day later in the Syrian city of Douma, this time resulting in the United States, Britain and France launching airstrikes against government targets, again just stopping short of a military intervention that would have triggered a wider conflict between Russia and NATO.

We told you & told you again.

“Al-Qaeda is on our side in #Syria.” – email from policy advisor to Sec. of State Hillary Clinton (Feb 2012). pic.twitter.com/EcYlpdeAgm

— H. Sumeri (@IraqiSecurity) April 14, 2017

Despite Qatar being a key player in the geopolitical impact of the Syrian war via its arming and funding of the terrorists who carried it out, a situation that almost led to a third world war, Doha has come in for little to no criticism from the Western media for its involvement amidst the 2022 World Cup coverage, Qatar’s banning of alcohol, and rainbow armbands, being a seemingly more pressing issue.

Although today was the deadline for EU diplomats to determine the specifics of the Russian oil price cap, we pointed out earlier just how “great” discussions were going with Poland rejecting a proposed cap of $65 per barrel as being too soft, while Greece refusing to consider anything below $70.

EU oil price cap discussions going great: Poland rejected proposed price of $65 per barrel as being too soft, while Greece doesn’t want to go below $70.

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) November 25, 2022

Meanwhile, amid the growing discord, in typical European fashion – where nobody has even looked at the math ahead of time – the entire concept of a price cap was clearly meaningless as explained in “The Ridiculous Reality Of The Russian Oil Price Cap Debate In One Picture.”

Which is why it wasn’t at all surprising that on Friday, European Union diplomats suspended talks on capping Russian oil prices, as Poland and the Baltic states objected to a proposal they consider too generous to Moscow.

Confirming none planned over weekend. Nonetheless a variety of EU sources still think a deal will come in the coming days.

— laurence norman (@laurnorman) November 25, 2022

As Bloomberg reports, diplomats had expected a deal to be done on Friday night but positions remained entrenched and the talks were postponed to Monday.

*EU DIPLOMATS POSTPONE OIL PRICE-CAP TALKS TILL AFTER WEEKEND

they need 48 hours to learn math

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) November 25, 2022

As previewed earlier this week, the bloc has been locked in a fight over how strict the Group of Seven-led price cap should be. Poland and the Baltic nations are outraged at a proposal to cap Russian oil prices at $65 per barrel limit, as the level is above the rates Moscow sells crude now, making the entire price cap discussion completely meaningless and purely an exercise in virtue signaling.

Poland is demanding additional sanctions, a review mechanism, and a price below the market level, according to a senior diplomat.

And as always happens when Europe has to reach a unanimous decision, with Poland and the Baltic states digging their heels in, the spat has laid bare the fundamental tension at the heart of the price cap idea. Countries are being forced to choose between two priorities that are almost impossible to resolve: trying to choke off revenue to Russia and avoiding potentially painful spikes in the oil price that could damage the global economy.

“If you put the price cap too high, it doesn’t really bite,” European Commission Vice President Valdis Dombrovskis said in an interview on Bloomberg TV. “Oil is the biggest source of revenue for Russian budget, so it’s very important get this right so it really has an impact on Russia’s ability to finance this war.”

On the other end of the spectrum from Poland are shipping nations like Greece, which favor a higher level that will help keep trade flowing, and boosting state revenues derived from quietly helping Russia break the oil embargo by turning a blind eye to an entire industry of ship-to-ship transfers that has taken Greece by storm.

The talks have been fraught because at $65, the cap is above the prices that Russia is already accepting for its crude from ravenous buyers such as China and India – a level which is heavily discounted to global benchmarks.

Such a “cap” would allow Moscow to argue that it’s business as usual; at the same time, the Kremlin had said it would refuse to sell oil to anyone signing up to the cap – but on Thursday appeared to hint it could soften its stance.

Still, Europe can only kick the can so long: the Dec. 5 deadline is looming, at which point EU sanctions on Russian oil are set to kick, and the disruption to the market will likely be greater if the price cap isn’t in place as all Russian oil exports would be suspended, unless of course Europe stops being a vassal state of the US State Department and decides to do away with the Russian sanctions entirely (for an objective assessment of who holds the upper hand in Europe, read Ambrose Evans-Pritchard with “Putin has another gas shock for us: the deindustrialisation of Europe “.

The EU sanctions would bar access to insurance and services for any ship transporting Russian oil. The cap allows access to those services, but only if the crude is purchased below a certain price. The US proposed the price cap earlier this year as an alternative to EU sanctions that were so strict they risked shutting down swaths of production.

The US argued that a spike in prices caused by EU sanctions could eventually help Putin — as well as being ruinous for the global economy.

Oil prices have fallen in recent days, partly on signs a deal could keep Russian oil flowing, easing the pressure on the global market. Then again this is Europe, and anything that is seen as a consensus outcome will never happen…

Authored by Jackson Elliott via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

In one meeting, Deon Jackson went from South Carolina’s Berkeley County school superintendent to unemployed.

His firing came at the hand of a newly-elected school board, which appears to have declared a judgment day for woke practices in its district.

In its first meeting after the Nov. 8 election, the board fired superintendent Jackson and school counsel Tiffany Richardson. Then it hired Anthony Dixon as superintendent and retained Brandon Gaskins as counsel. And before the day was over, the board banned teaching critical race theory and created a board to review library books for pornographic content.

Moms for Liberty, an activist group that supports parental rights in education, endorsed six of the board’s nine members. Many Moms for Liberty candidates won school board elections this November, as reported previously. The group’s leaders say more aggressive school management decisions may soon be in order.

In Berkeley, the candidates’ aggressive approach was a response to student discipline policies and slow learning post-COVID-19, said Christi Dixon, the Moms for Liberty chapter chair for Berkeley.

“Parents were seeing that their children weren’t achieving at the levels that they had been previously. And there were a lot of changes,” Dixon said.

Fire and Firings

When Jackson left the board meeting at which he was fired, it appeared that not everyone supported the board’s decision.

Some parents watching walked out with him in protest, video from local network Live 5 WCSC News shows. Others cheered.

Former school board chair David Barrow called the firings a “travesty” and a “political witch hunt,” according to NBC.

So far, the board has yet to explain its rationale for firing Jackson and Richardson.

Board members Yvonne Bradley and Crystal Wigfall walked out of the room in protest after Jackson departed.

Moms for Liberty co-founder Tiffany Justice said the board might be newly-elected but that it knows exactly what it’s doing.

“These are people that have watched the former board. They interacted and watched the former superintendent. They have watched and interacted with the staff attorney,” she said. “The newly elected school board members have been keeping a list and checking it twice.”

According to Dixon, Jackson changed school discipline policies in ways that caused problems and usurped parental authority.

Schools under his authority told parents that school staff should be able to discipline students for behavior outside the school, she said.

“The example that they gave was that if a child and another student in their neighborhood got into some type of disagreement and it was going to spill over into the school environment, then they should be able to insert themselves into that situation,” Dixon said.

Jackson also supported “restorative practices,” she said.

According to the University of Florida, a “restorative” school justice system replaces suspensions and detentions with “restorative meeting circles” where offenders and victims practice “Restitution Planning.”

The previous school board wanted to spend $1 million to hire five district-level administrators, said Dixon.

“We don’t have teachers’ aides. Could that money not be better served to get down into the schools and into the classrooms to help the teacher than to hire more top-heavy district-level administrators?” she asked.

Finally, the school district’s library included the book “Looking for Alaska,” which has sexually graphic language, Dixon said.

Dixon added that she didn’t know exactly why the board moved so fast to fire Jackson and Richardson but that she trusted they had good reason.

“I’m not a board member, and they have protected information that they can’t share,” she said. “I just have to trust that they made the best decision with the information that only they had.”

Read more here…

Federal legislators seeking to free state-legal cannabis businesses to use the country’s banking system have high hopes of finally pushing legislation across the finish line during the upcoming lame duck session. 

After November’s latest batch of state referendums, recreational marijuana is now legal in 21 states — but remains illegal under federal law. As a result, current federal rules force even legal marijuana businesses to use cash instead of normal banking services. 

That makes them prime targets for criminals, exposing owners, employees and customers to violent crimes and necessitating expensive security measures. 

Ben Koltun, director of research at Beacon Policy Advisors, told MarketWatch that the Secure and Fair Enforcement (SAFE) Banking Act has about a 70% chance of passing by year end: “There’s a lot of positive momentum. It’s just can they come to agreement over some of the details that are outstanding?”  

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has struck his own optimistic tone last week:

“I’m still holding productive talks with Democratic and Republican colleagues in the House and the Senate on moving additional bipartisan cannabis legislation in the lame duck. We are going to try very, very hard to get it done.”

The SAFE Act would bar federal regulators from punishing banks for serving legitimate cannabis related businesses.

It also stipulates that proceeds from a transaction involving activities of a legitimate cannabis-related business are not considered proceeds from unlawful activity — thus removing legit cannabis revenue from the scope of anti-money-laundering laws. 

The SAFE Act has 180 cosponsors, including 26 Republicans. Despite the measure of bipartisan support, the looming Republican takeover of the House of Representatives is sparking urgency among the SAFE Act’s backers. 

The House of Representatives has passed some form of the SAFE Act seven times, only for it to repeatedly die in the Senate. This key to finally enacting it is twofold, says Politico: 

They must find a pairing of financial services and criminal justice reform-centered cannabis legislation that progressive Democrats and conservative Republicans can all accept. And then they must receive signoff from the leaders of the Senate Banking Committee, House Financial Services Committee, and the four corners of party leadership in both chambers.

Demands for accompanying criminal justice measures have included grants for state expungement programs, various forms of help for communities damaged by marijuana prohibition.  

“The parameters of a deal are pretty easy to imagine, but I am getting the sense that Republicans feel like Democrats are asking for too much in terms of concessions,” Tobin Marcus, senior U.S. policy and politics strategist at Evercore ISI, told MarketWatch. 

Liberals have been making the perfect (in their eyes) the enemy of the good. Even the Drug Policy Alliance, which has backed cannabis reform, has opposed the SAFE Act, on the head-scratching premise that it “prioritizes marijuana profits over people.” 

As Jacob Sullom wrote at Reason: 

The bizarre implication was that marijuana merchants, who face an ongoing danger aggravated by the failure to approve banking reform, do not qualify as “people.” Michael Arthur, the 44-year-old Portland budtender killed in the 2020 robbery that Willamette Week mentioned, was a person. So was Jordan Brown, the 29-year-old employee who was killed last March during an armed robbery at World of Weed, a dispensary in Tacoma, Washington.

If liberals keep their demands within the bounds of reason and the SAFE Act passes, it would still leave state-legal cannabis businesses with plenty of financial headaches courtesy of the federal government. For example, they can’t even claim business deductions on federal income tax returns, to say nothing of the fact that their every transaction is a federal drug felony.

Of course, the federal government has no constitutional basis for criminalizing marijuana or any other intoxicant…but here’s hoping this particular chunk of the destructive prohibition regime get peeled back before New Year’s Day. 

Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,

What all the entrenched insiders in America’s parasitic, predatory elites and institutions don’t dare admit is that to protect themselves from consequence, we’ve had to sacrifice everything else.

Thanks to the FTX swindle, we now know the cost of a get out of jail free card in America: $40 million, paid to political elites. It seems even get out of jail free cards have suffered from inflation.

With hefty “donations” (heh) to elites, all wrong-doing is swept under a very capacious carpet. Jeffrey Epstein sprinkled a few million on the elites of Harvard, and he was ushered into this elite circle as an intimate pal. The fact that he was a rapacious predator of children was of no concern. A few million showered on the right people and causes makes evil and criminality disappear.

If a financier looter showers $40 million on “the right people,” mouths the “correct” phrases and issues empty promises to give away his looted billions, he becomes an instant golden boy of the right elites who have the power to protect him from consequences.

This is how America works now: in-your-face corruption is not just accepted, it’s glorified. Let’s score America’s wealth and power elites, regardless of party or political persuasion:

Integrity: zero.

Austerity: zero.

Restraint: zero.

Humility: zero.

Responsibility: zero.

Accountability: zero.

Sacrifice for the common good: zero.

Thrift: zero.

A society whose elites are so self-serving, corrupt, unaccountable and devoid of any sense of good and evil is doomed. Consider the bleatings of America’s power elite on the FTX swindle. Let’s have congressional hearings on this remarkable “financial event” that caught everyone by surprise, etc.

Translation: let’s stage some political theater to cloak the fact that the looters are being protected from consequences. We all know what happens if you’re caught selling a nickel bag on the street: you get a tenner in a hellhole prison.

But if you bribed the right people, you can swindle billions of dollars and walk free as an insincerely apologetic victim of your own success. Golly gee, I don’t understand what happened to all that money, even though I’m not exactly shy about declaring my own genius.

For reasons lost on the rest of us, investigations by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) always come up empty. Gee, the looting was complicated and we can’t figure out who might have broken the laws against fraud, collusion, embezzlement, malfeasance, etc., so we’re letting everyone off the hook.

Or some sleazy, unaccountable intelligence agency is referenced in whispers that the looters are “assets” and therefore untouchable. Where exactly is the rule of law in a society where bribes, political pressure and having knowledge of elites’ skeletons in the closet melt away accountability and consequences?

The rule of law in America is an illusion, a useful myth promoted by PR hacks to cover the tracks of their employers. Corporate wrong-doing–swindles, collusion, fraud, embezzlement, malfeasance–is off the charts, but nobody is responsible. The criminal corporations are duly fined, a tiny clawback of their looting that’s written off as a cost of doing business.

Consider this data base of 6,300 major corporate fines and settlements from the early 1990s to 2015 compiled by Jon Morse. Nobody paid any personal fines or served any prison time for any of these thousands of violations.

There are two systems of “justice” in America: one which grants elites freedom from consequences of their toxic criminality and another one for the rest of us that imprisons hundreds of thousands in the War on Drugs Gulag.

What all the entrenched insiders in America’s parasitic, predatory elites and institutions don’t dare admit is that to protect themselves from consequence, we’ve had to sacrifice everything else. Having stripped the nation of the essential foundation of a just, enduring social order–accountability, consequence, rule of law and a grasp of the difference between good and evil–there’s nothing left but sound and fury, as if they’re hoping the endless political circuses and trails of bread crumbs will forever distract us from their plunder and the injustices of the irredeemably corrupt America they’ve fashioned to protect their wealth and power.

To paraphrase Lao Tzu, if one insists on an extreme of corruption and injustice, that extreme will not dwell long.

*  *  *

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Amid a holiday-shortened week of low liquidity, bonds and stocks rallied as the dollar drifted lower on the heels of dovish Fed ‘pause’ hopes which sent terminal rate expectations slightly lower and subsequent rate-cut expectations higher…

Source: Bloomberg

Bonds were bid with the long-end of the curve outperforming significantly, inverting the yield curve even deeper…

Source: Bloomberg

While yields fell on the week, the longest-duration stocks actually underperformed thanks to selling pressure today with The Dow leading on the week..

The early weakness of the week gave way on Tuesday and Wednesday to a big short squeeze back to unchanged for the “most shorted” stocks

The dollar fell for the 5th week of the last 6 to its lowest weekly close in 3 months…

Source: Bloomberg

Cryptos were unusually quiet this week (relatively speaking) with Bitcoin and Ethereum ending the week down around 1-2%. Solana outperformed…

Source: Bloomberg

Commodities were mixed on the week with crude sliding amid Russian price cap scheme headlines and China COVID cases soaring. Silver outperformed (with gold flat) amid the dovish title to market expectations…

Source: Bloomberg

Finally, the Fed balance sheet contracted on a year-over-year basis last week for the first time since Dec 2019…

Source: Bloomberg

Worth considering since, as Goldman’s Tony P noted this week: “…for every one dollar of US GDP, there are still 34 cents on the Fed balance sheet… just before COVID hit, that number was 22 cents. in the third quarter of 2008, it was just 6 cents. even at the end of WWII, it was just 11 cents.”

In other words – there’s a lot more shrinkage to come…

Come on England!!!!

Authored by Techno Fog via The Reactionary (emphasis ours),

There’s a remarkable concession appearing in The Washington Post today:

“a majority of Americans dying from the coronavirus received at least the primary series of the vaccine.”

The latest data shows that 58% of COVID-19 deaths in August 2022 were from people who were vaccinated or boosted. Based on past figures and the current trends, we can reasonably estimate that the number of vaccinated/boosted COVID-19 deaths will only rise. (In September 2021, the vaccinated accounted for 23% of COVID-19 deaths; in January/February 2022, the vaccinated were 42%.)

This is what happens when you rush ineffective and dangerous vaccines.

The FDA’s promises of efficacy – 91% for the Pfizer vaccine and 93% for the Moderna vaccine – were always based on hope, not data. So too were the promises of safety. At the time of the official approvals, both Pfizer and Moderna hadn’t submitted any type of long-term numbers on effectiveness. Their trials were polluted with the unblinding of participants and their safety studies are “ongoing.”

Now, we’re seeing efficacy numbers plummet within months of vaccination. The pandemic is of the vaccinated. The boosters? They’re to the benefit of the medical establishment and the pharmaceutical companies, as they mask the true problems with the two-shot vaccines.

Even with these numbers, the outgoing Anthony Fauci continues to vouch for the jab, stating the data “overwhelmingly show the effectiveness of vaccines.”

Fauci: “If you look at the striking data, overwhelmingly show the effectiveness of vaccines…” pic.twitter.com/NNqzMmi8ia

— The Post Millennial (@TPostMillennial) November 22, 2022

This is the same man who demanded school closures, inserted himself into the 2020 election by criticizing Trump’s COVID-19 response while complimenting China, and criticized Governor Ron DeSantis for reopening Florida’s schools.

All the while, Fauci was lying to the public about COVID-19 origins. In May of 2020, he told National Geographic that COVID-19 “could not have been artificially or deliberately manipulated.”

What he didn’t tell us was that he and US government clients were sabotaging and shutting down research and fact finding into the lab leak theory. What he didn’t say was that internal communications among himself and Francis Collins and Jeremy Farrar, revealed through a FOIA request by Jimmy Tobias, discussed “accidental lab passage in animals” and how the Wuhan lab was the “Wild West” and why the lab leak was a serious possibility.

Maybe we’ll get the truth once Republicans take power. Fauci has promised cooperation but be assured he’ll continue to be the slippery little doctor. Then there’s the lawsuit against the Biden Administration where Fauci is being deposed today. It’s a bit more difficult to evade questions from seasoned attorneys who have you for eight hours.

In any event, tomorrow at the dinner table, as you contemplate your blessings and eye the turkey, give an especially heartfelt thanks that this little megalomaniac will no longer curse the public with his presence.

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