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Post by mhbruin on Jan 27, 2023 10:15:18 GMT -8
Handicapping the Fed
The U.S. central bank is seen delivering two more quarter-point interest-rate increases before ending its current round of rate hikes in March, after a government report showed inflation continued to slow last month.
The Fed's preferred gauge for inflation, the personal consumption expenditures (PCE) price index, rose 5.0% last month from a year earlier, slower than the 5.5% 12-month gain as of November, the Commerce Department reported.
That cooling has traders betting the Fed will soon wind down its most aggressive policy-tightening in 40 years. Futures tied to the Fed's policy rate are pricing in near certainty for the Fed to raise its benchmark rate to 4.5%-4.75% at its Jan. 31-Feb. 1 meeting, from 4.25%-4.5% now, with another quarter-point hike priced in for March.
Traders see just a one-in-three chance of a further quarter-point increase after that, and after the report firmed up their bets on rate cuts starting as soon as September.
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Post by mhbruin on Jan 27, 2023 12:17:12 GMT -8
Timothy Snyder Connects the Dots. Manafort, McGonigal, and Deripaska, Oh My! It's All Connected.On 23 January, we learned that a former FBI special agent, Charles McGonigal, was arrested on charges involving taking money to serve foreign interests. One accusation is that in 2017 he took $225,000 from a foreign actor while in charge of counterintelligence at the FBI's New York office. Another charge is that McGonigal took money from Oleg Deripaska, a sanctioned Russian oligarch, after McGonigal’s 2018 retirement from the FBI. Deripaska, a hugely wealthy metals tycoon close to the Kremlin, "Putin's favorite industrialist," was a figure in a Russian influence operation that McGonigal had investigated in 2016. Deripaska has been under American sanctions since 2018. Deripaska is also the former employer, and the creditor, of Trump's 2016 campaign manager, Paul Manafort. The reporting on this so far seems to miss the larger implications. One of them is that Trump’s historical position looks far cloudier. In 2016, Trump's campaign manager (Manafort) was a former employee of a Russian oligarch (Deripaska), and owed money to that same Russian oligarch. And the FBI special agent (McGonigal) who was charged with investigating the Trump campaign's Russian connections then went to work (according to the indictment) for that very same Russian oligarch (Deripaska). This is obviously very bad for Trump personally. But it is also very bad for FBI New York, for the FBI generally, and for the United States of America. Another is that we must revisit the Russian influence operation on Trump’s behalf in 2016, and the strangely weak American response. Moscow’s goal was to move minds and institutions such that Hillary Clinton would lose and Donald Trump would win. We might like to think that any FBI special agent would resist, oppose, or at least be immune to such an operation. Now we are reliably informed that a trusted FBI actor, one who was responsible for dealing with just this sort of operation, was corrupt. And again, the issue is not just the particular person. If someone as important as McGonigal could take money from foreigners while on the job at FBI New York, and then go to work for a sanctioned Russian oligarch he was once investigating, what is at stake, at a bare minimum, is the culture of the FBI's New York office. The larger issue is the health of our national discussions of politics and the integrity of our election process. The Whole Article is Worth Reading.The Specter of 2016 In 2016, McGonigal was section chief of the FBI's Cyber-Counterintelligence Coordination Section. That October, he was put in charge of the Counterintelligence Division of the FBI's New York office. And it was just then, in October 2016, that matters began to spin out of control. There were two moments, late in the presidential campaign, that decided the matter for Donald Trump. The first was when Russian rescued him from the Access Hollywood scandal (7 October). The second was FBI director James Comey's public announcement that he was reopening the investigation of Hillary Clinton's emails (28 October). The reason Comey made that public announcement at that highly sensitive time, ten days before the election, was not that he believed the public needed to know, nor that the matter was likely of great consequence. On his account, it was that he believed that FBI New York office was going to leak it anyway. Rudolph Giuliani had apparently already been the beneficiary of leaks; claimed to know in advance of what he called a "surprise" that would help Donald Trump, namely Comey's public announcement of the email investigation. It looked at the time like Comey had been played by people in FBI New York who wanted Trump to win. Comey has now confirmed this, although his word choice might be different. And I did wonder, back then, if those special agents in New York, in turn, were being played. It was no secret at the time that FBI special agents in New York did not like Hillary Clinton. Making emotional commitments public is asking to be exploited. For people working in counterintelligence, this is a particularly unwise thing to do. The nature of working in counterintelligence is that, if you are not very good, you will find yourself in the vortex of someone else's active measure. Someone else will take advantage of your known vulnerabilities - your misogyny, perhaps, or your hatred of a specific female politician, or your entirely unjustified belief that a male politician is a patriotic messiah -- and get you to do something that feels like your own decision. Now that we are informed that a central figure in the New York FBI office was willing to take money from foreign actors while on the job, this line of analysis bears some reconsideration. Objectively, FBI New York was acting in concert with Russia, ignoring or defining narrowly Russia's actions, and helping deliver the one-two punch to Clinton in October that very likely saved Trump. |
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hasben
Resident Member
Posts: 1,047
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Post by hasben on Jan 27, 2023 14:44:58 GMT -8
 This Is Almost Too Much BearFunny. I've had lots of animals including deer, raccoons, wild hogs all walk up to my trail cam, sniff it, then pose in front of it. One 10 point buck laid down right in front of the camera and stayed there for a long time. |
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Post by mhbruin on Jan 28, 2023 15:28:48 GMT -8
View AttachmentThis Is Almost Too Much BearFunny. I've had lots of animals including deer, raccoons, wild hogs all walk up to my trail cam, sniff it, then pose in front of it. One 10 point buck laid down right in front of the camera and stayed there for a long time. Are they Millenials? |
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