THE STRANGE STORY OF A MURDERED BANKER IN PUERTO RICO

On the day Maurice Spagnoletti was murdered, his black Lexus sedan was full of balloons. It was June 15, 2011, the day before his wife’s birthday, and he was planning a celebration.

Spagnoletti, 57, was the No. 2 executive at Doral Bank in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Once flush, the bank had been almost ruined by a fraud scandal, and in 2007 it was rescued by Bear Stearns, Goldman Sachs, and a group of hedge funds. The Wall Street investors had put up $610 million, but Doral continued to lose money, and they were losing patience. In late 2010, Doral hired Spagnoletti, a New Jerseyan experienced in managing large banks, with orders to reduce costs and get Puerto Rican operations under control.

When the banker arrived on the island, he made a good first impression. At 6 feet 2 inches and about 250 pounds, with a strong Jersey accent and hands that he used to punctuate his sentences, Spagnoletti reminded his new colleagues of Tony Soprano without the menace. He’d walk through the Doral office, stopping at underlings’ desks to get up to speed on who ran what and how.

The sun was setting on another muggy San Juan day as Spagnoletti pulled out of Doral’s bland office park downtown. His wife was waiting at home with their 6-year-old daughter. He’d flown his sister-in-law in for the party, too. The drive to his condo on palm-tree-lined Condado Beach took just 15 minutes when there wasn’t traffic. But a few minutes after Spagnoletti got onto the highway, he slowed for a backup on a bridge over a canal. Another car pulled up alongside his. Someone fired at least nine shots from a .40-caliber handgun, shattering his windows, and four bullets hit him in the head. Spagnoletti’s momentum sent his car veering off the highway, and it came to a stop in a thicket of tropical brush. The police arrived, and at 7:21 p.m. they pronounced him dead.

The identities of Spagnoletti’s killers are still a mystery, and the bank overhaul that he was hired to lead didn’t work without him. Doral collapsed in 2015, the biggest U.S. bank failure since 2010, done in by bad loans and Puerto Rico’s decade-long economic spiral. The Wall Street investors who hadn’t already sold were wiped out, and the U.S. government spent $700 million to cover depositors’ losses.

Today, almost everyone in San Juan banking circles has a theory about the murder. Some believe only Colombian hit men could pull off such an assassination. Others say Spagnoletti had enemies in the U.S. who caught up with him. His widow, Marisa, revealed her own theory in a 2013 lawsuit: She said he was killed because he uncovered fraud at the bank and fired an executive he suspected of embezzlement. Doral’s lawyers called her claims ridiculous, and after Marisa admitted in a deposition that she had no evidence, she withdrew the suit.

Since then, new details of the killing have emerged. And according to former Doral executives and people working on the criminal investigation, the widow was onto something. “Let’s use our common sense for a second,” says María Domínguez, who was in charge of an investigation into Doral as first assistant U.S. attorney in San Juan until she retired last year. “This guy was brought by the bank to put the house in order. He starts uncovering certain things that are irregular at the bank. He starts to take corrective action. These circumstances strongly suggest a financial motive to get this guy out of the way.”

But this wasn’t the usual Puerto Rican corruption. The real story of Maurice Spagnoletti’s murder may be more bizarre than anyone knew.

Doral Bank’s founder was Salomon Levis, whose Jewish father fled Poland to escape the Nazis. The family settled in Cuba, where Salomon was born, then moved to Puerto Rico. In 1972, Levis and his siblings started a mortgage company that would become Doral. The bank took off as the island prospered, and by 2001 it was originating almost half the home loans in Puerto Rico. Its profits peaked at almost $490 million in 2004. Around then, the Levis family’s 8 percent stake in the bank was valued at $355 million, making them among the island’s richest people. Salomon Levis, who had become a corpulent playboy, was a fixture at high society events, and the gossip pages chronicled his divorce and remarriage to a much younger blond lawyer.

Then it all unraveled. In 2005 the bank revealed it had inflated its earnings by about $1 billion, prompting investigations. Levis wasn’t charged, but his nephew went to prison for fraud, and the Levis family was forced out of the bank.

“We had a real mess,” says John Ward, who was appointed interim chief executive officer in 2005. The bank didn’t have enough money to pay off $625 million of debt coming due. The board wanted a CEO from outside Puerto Rico to clean house and attract new investors. In 2006 they found Glen Wakeman, who was running GE Capital’s consumer credit business in Mexico and the rest of Latin America.

Wakeman, then 46, had graduated from the University of Scranton and spent more than 20 years working for General Electric around the world. In Mexico he’d taken a stagnant business and more than doubled its size, according to Mark Begor, his boss at the time, who calls Wakeman an “energizing and passionate leader.” To lure him to Puerto Rico, Doral offered a minimum of $5 million in pay over the first two years, plus $1.5 million in stock and $6 million to make up for his GE pension.

Wakeman believed fervently in the GE management philosophy. He liked to talk about Six Sigma, the quality mantra popularized by former GE CEO Jack Welch. He hired bankers from Bear Stearns to find new investors, shuttled to New York to meet with hedge funds, and replaced most of Levis’s deputies.

Lesbia Blanco, then 59 and a human resource director at Johnson & Johnson, was one of the new executives. As Doral’s new chief talent and administrative officer, Blanco was part of Wakeman’s inner circle, with an office near his on the ninth floor of headquarters. She soon realized something strange was going on at Doral. One Saturday in 2006 or 2007, she says, when she was working overtime to help prepare the bank to court Wall Street investors, a security guard came by her office. He told her there was someone in Wakeman’s office he didn’t recognize and showed her a security-camera picture of a man wearing a beaded necklace and clothes that were unusually casual for the executive floor.

Blanco walked over to investigate. Wakeman’s secretary was there with the stranger. She told Blanco that the man was her Santeria godfather and that he was helping the bank with its recapitalization.

The religion known as Santeria emerged in the 16th century among people from West Africa, called Yoruba, who were enslaved and brought to the Caribbean. Co-opting the Catholicism that their captors tried to impose, they picked saints to represent their deities and continued to worship them in secret, with drum circles and animal sacrifices in the woods. The religion now has about 70,000 followers in Puerto Rico, according to Joaquín “Kimmy” Solis, president of the island’s Yoruba association.

The man Blanco saw in the CEO’s office was Rolando Rivera Solis. Kimmy Solis says Rivera, a distant cousin, is a babalawo, or Santeria high priest. As a babalawo, Rivera can initiate others into the religion, conduct sacrifices, and divine the destinies of his followers by tossing coconut rinds on the ground.

Blanco started seeing Rivera on the executive floor more and more. “He had access to Glen’s office directly,” she says. She says her secretary once had to clean Wakeman’s clothes – it’s not clear of what – after a ritual at the Santeria priest’s house.

Blanco wondered why the American CEO was dabbling in the local religion, but kept her questions to herself. Wakeman was close with his secretary, Nancy Vélez. Other than his driver, who doubled as a bodyguard, she was the only person allowed to ride in the executive elevator with him. She would walk him out of the building, carrying his briefcase, then kiss him goodbye on the cheek as he got into his chauffeured car, according to two people who saw them. Such embraces aren’t uncommon in Puerto Rican culture.

Other Doral employees started to notice unusual things. Juan de la Cruz, the bank’s vice president for security, says someone told him Vélez and Rivera were conducting Santeria rituals in the boardroom. There was no security camera there, but de la Cruz checked the footage from one in the hallway. “I looked in the camera and saw Rolando,” he says, “walking with the luggage and some bottles in his hand.” De la Cruz says he dropped his inquiry after another employee who practiced Santeria told him that the rituals were sanctioned by Wakeman.

A former administrative assistant, who asked for anonymity because she’s afraid of the babalawo, says Vélez told her about one ritual involving a caiman, an alligator-like reptile native to Puerto Rico. Rivera, Vélez, and another Doral employee drove the caiman to the parking lot early one Sunday, the former assistant says, and used Vélez’s access to the executive elevator to bypass security. Dressed all in white, they took the caiman into the conference room and invoked the names of each board member, the former assistant says she was told. She adds that she thinks the creature wasn’t killed, because she didn’t see any blood the next day.

Lizzie Rosso, Doral’s general manager for consumer banking at the time, says someone who was at the caiman ritual told her about it the following Monday. Other former Doral employees declined to discuss the subject. “Maybe they are afraid of the Santeria and the consequences,” Rosso says, laughing nervously. “I don’t want to be killed.”

Solis, the Yoruba association president, is skeptical that a caiman would have been involved. “We sacrifice rams, goats, chickens, roosters — all this is part of the ancient religions,” he says. “I don’t believe that the caiman has the power to do anything.”

If Rivera did perform a ritual, it was apparently successful. In May 2007, Doral announced it had sold 90 percent of its stock for $610 million to a group of investors including Bear Stearns, Goldman Sachs, Marathon Asset Management, D.E. Shaw, and Perry Capital. Eleven months later, Rivera was given a contract to clean Doral’s headquarters and branch offices. The head of the previous janitorial service says she’d never heard of Rivera in her 17 years in the local cleaning business. Rivera’s company, SJ Tropical Maintenance Services, wasn’t registered until the month he won the contract. And while the old cleaners charged $23,000 a month, SJ Tropical was given $27,350.

Blanco says the contract was sanctioned by Wakeman. “It was a reward for helping Glen [keep] the bank afloat,” she says.

Wakeman, who’s been working as a consultant in Miami since Doral failed, denies any allegations he’d been involved with Rivera, practiced Santeria, or rewarded the high priest. “This is both shocking and untrue,” he says. Wakeman’s lawyer declined to comment further.

Rivera’s lawyer, Melanie Carrillo-Jiménez, says that while her client is a high priest, he didn’t perform any ritual for the bank. “He wasn’t getting paid for any Santeria whatsoever,” she says. “Where the hell did this come from?”

Doral’s vice president for property and facilities, Annelise Figueroa, oversaw the new, more expensive maintenance contract. She says the contract included additional services and was approved by Wakeman, who, Figueroa says, did practice Santeria. “Wakeman used Rolando,” she says. “When I found out, obviously I thought it was weird, but then again you can’t mess with people’s religions.”

Figueroa and Blanco, her boss, didn’t make an issue of the janitorial contract. But in 2009 and 2010, they accused each other of inflating the costs of other services. Blanco says she investigated her subordinate and told Wakeman that the bank should fire Figueroa. Wakeman overruled Blanco, without saying why, she says, and began to freeze her out. “Since that day, my life was miserable there,” Blanco says. “He didn’t involve me in any meetings. I was just there like a piece of paper that you move from one side to another.”

Blanco left Doral in October 2010. By then, Wakeman had already given some of her responsibilities to a new executive: Spagnoletti. “He had access to all the information in my computer,” Blanco says. “All the details on what had happened to that investigation. Perhaps he got suspicious and started digging.”

Blanco says she feels lucky she escaped with her life. “I thank my Lord every day,” she says. “That person didn’t go there to be killed, but to work. It’s bad.”

Marisa Spagnoletti now runs a handbag boutique in Morristown, N.J., called Lucy’s Gift, named after her daughter. The handbags are displayed by color — blue and pink on the left, orange and white on the right. A photo of Maurice with his arms around Marisa and their daughter sits on a mantel, surrounded by pink cloth roses and Christmas lights. All the profits go to charities to honor Spagnoletti’s memory.

“When Maurice was killed, it took so long to get on my feet,” Marisa says on an April morning, her eyes filling with tears. “Do you know what it’s like for a girl to cry every day, ‘Who killed my daddy?’ ”

Two women walk into the shop to browse. Marisa has never met them but tells them a little about Maurice’s murder. She says she still cries herself to sleep every night. With a reporter, Marisa won’t discuss her lawsuit against Doral, other than to say the bank hasn’t given her any money. When she withdrew the suit, she did so in a way that allows her to refile it later. When the truth comes out, she says, it will show that Maurice was a hero. “My husband would die with honor rather than live a life of dishonesty,” she says.

Spagnoletti started working as a bank teller in New Jersey as a teenager, according to his widow. He got a business degree at night and worked his way up in the course of 20 years, eventually becoming president of Summit Bank’s Pennsylvania division. He raised two children with his first wife. Then, in 1999, Maurice reconnected with Marisa. They’d worked together at a Summit predecessor but didn’t know each other well and had been called to testify in a court case about the bank. Maurice and Marisa were both Italian and Catholic. He’d grown up in Jersey City, and she was from Bayonne, just a few miles away. Spagnoletti was 11 years older. On the last night of the trial, he asked her out. They were married the next year.

Marisa says Maurice would cheer her up when she had problems at work. “Go look outside,” he would say. “The sun’s out, the sun’s going to always come out. Everything can be solved.”

In 2000, Spagnoletti joined Fifth Third Bank. He became head of its central Indiana affiliate, presiding over branch openings and organizing field trips for schoolchildren. He won over his new colleagues with jokes but held them accountable for meeting the goals they set. Spagnoletti would invite them and their spouses to his home for bocce and pasta. He said the word “great” so incessantly that it became a running joke at the office.

After a few years at another bank in South Carolina, the Spagnolettis moved back to New Jersey around 2008 because Marisa’s father was dying. Maurice used the free time to dote on his daughter, who was then 3. Bruce Balmas, who worked with him at Fifth Third and Doral, says his friend would call him from the park and say, “I never could have done this before.”

Two years later, recruiters contacted Maurice, asking if he’d consider moving to Puerto Rico. The package at Doral included, in addition to a $400,000 salary, a $300,000 target bonus, making him among the highest-paid people at the bank. Spagnoletti was hired as executive vice president for mortgage and banking operations, responsible for what happened in Puerto Rico day to day.

When Spagnoletti arrived in September 2010, Wakeman was battling the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. The CEO was saddled with billions in loans the bank had made under its previous owners; as Puerto Rico tipped into recession, Doral had to keep marking the loans down, eroding its capital. The FDIC blocked Wakeman’s plan to buy assets from Doral’s rivals, and without a clear plan for growth, some of the bank’s Wall Street investors bolted. Goldman Sachs lost at least $30 million, and the hedge funds Marathon, D.E. Shaw, and Perry lost about $50 million each, filings show.

After the killing, Marisa was hysterical. The bank sent armed guards to walk executives home.
Spagnoletti admired Wakeman as a CEO and believed the bank could be turned around. “I’m working harder than ever, but I must say I love it,” Spagnoletti wrote in an e-mail to a friend on April 22, 2011. “I make significant contributions and feel very appreciated. One problem is the lack of talent. I need to check everyone’s answer twice. Otherwise, this is a GE type of environment. Sigma Six black belts running around.”

Initially, Spagnoletti commuted from New Jersey. He and Marisa never stayed apart for more than three days. They lived in a Marriott hotel for a while, and then a condo on Condado Beach. In the spring of 2011, Spagnoletti hired Balmas as a consultant; they had dinners at an Italian restaurant by the beach and spent some nights gambling at casinos on the Condado strip. Spagnoletti loved to swim and take his daughter to look for seashells.

But that same spring, Spagnoletti clashed with Figueroa, the facilities vice president who handled the Santeria priest’s maintenance contract. They fought about purchases as small as a table, according to a lawsuit she filed against the bank in 2012 alleging gender discrimination. On March 8, Spagnoletti e-mailed Figueroa asking whether she understood that she was supposed to follow his orders. “Do you understand that as a Vice President of this company, you are also expected to always exercise good judgment in the performance of your duties?” he wrote. “YES, ALWAYS HAVE AND ALWAYS WILL,” she replied, according to her lawsuit, which was settled confidentially.

Marisa alleged in her lawsuit that her husband uncovered fraud at Doral, in the form of Figueroa paying vendors for services they didn’t perform and making unauthorized transfers of $30,000 a week to someone. If Spagnoletti knew about Doral’s Santeria circle or the idea that the payments might have been not fraud but a reward for supernaturally assisting the bank, he kept it from his wife. Figueroa, who was fired on May 25, 2011, says she did nothing wrong and doesn’t know anything about the murder. “I’m more anxious than anyone to find out who did it to clean up my name,” she says.

Three weeks after Figueroa’s termination, on the day he was killed, Spagnoletti left work on the early side. Balmas departed later and got stuck in traffic by the bridge. He didn’t think anything of the shattered Lexus on the side of the road.

Around 2 a.m., a colleague called to tell him what had happened. Balmas went to the Spagnolettis’ apartment and found Marisa hysterical, talking about how her husband had been kidnapped. Wakeman had been there, along with other colleagues, and the bank sent armed guards to walk them home. Doral assigned security guards to other top executives, and Wakeman brought guards with him to Spagnoletti’s New Jersey funeral.

As investigations into Spagnoletti’s murder began, Doral struggled. The Puerto Rican economy only got worse, and more of the bank’s loans became worthless. The FDIC wouldn’t give Doral’s balance sheet its seal of approval, and without it, Doral couldn’t get the money it needed to operate. Wakeman tried expanding in the U.S. He moved Doral’s headquarters to Miami in 2013. U.S. operations showed a profit that year, but it wasn’t enough to make up for the deteriorating Puerto Rican portfolio.

In 2014, Puerto Rico created a major crimes unit, headed by Captain Ferdinand Acosta, and he took up the Spagnoletti murder. There weren’t many leads. None of the 911 callers got a good look at the shooter or his vehicle, Acosta says. The murder was definitely not random, but the shooter exhibited poor aim, so he may not have been a professional gunman. Acosta says he started interviewing Doral employees but got word from the FBI to back off. “They prefer to do it alone,” he says.

The FBI’s murder investigation, begun shortly after the 2011 shooting, had expanded to include fraud — just as the widow Spagnoletti had charged. In December 2014 the FBI raided Doral, seizing computers from Wakeman, his secretary, and other executives. In February 2015, Rivera and Figueroa were arrested and charged with fraud. The federal indictment said that Figueroa changed the cleaning company’s contract so that it was getting $24,288.27 every week instead of every month. In all, according to prosecutors, the pair wrongfully took about $2.4 million.

Two days later, on Feb. 25, the FDIC closed Doral’s doors for good. The agency spent $698.4 million making Doral’s depositors whole. Many of the branches, along with the headquarters, were sold to Popular, another Puerto Rican bank. The headquarters building is empty now. A rusty outline remains where the Doral sign used to hang.

Motombo grabbed a woman as a shield. “Don’t do this,” she cried. He started shooting.
Days after the bank failed, Santeria stories surfaced in local newspapers. El Nuevo Día wrote that there had been a ritual with a caiman at the bank. Levis, the founder, went on the radio to joke about it. The failure of Doral is like a “detective novel,” he said. “Not even the caiman could save them at the end.”

When Rivera came to court to plead not guilty to fraud, the proceedings revealed that police had found 10 guns in his home. All were legally registered to him or his wife. Prosecutors said Rivera had been charged with murder once before, in 1983, and was acquitted. He was put under house arrest, with an electronic monitoring bracelet. Figueroa also pleaded not guilty.

Eight months later, in October 2015, the agents looking into Spagnoletti’s murder caught a break: A man on Puerto Rico’s most-wanted list was arrested at San Juan’s airport. He’d worked for Rivera at his janitorial company, according to two people with knowledge of the investigation.

His name is Yadiel Serrano-Canales, aka Motombo, and, according to prosecutors, he was a member of a gang that dealt cocaine and heroin in San Juan’s Villa Esperanza housing projects. In a court filing, an FBI agent described a June 2012 incident that got Motombo on the most-wanted list. Just after 1 a.m., he and a friend approached three off-duty police officers who were hanging out at a bar across from the projects. After words were exchanged, Motombo left and returned with a gun. “Put down the phone, d---sucker,” Motombo said to one of the officers. The cops pulled out their own guns; Motombo grabbed a nearby woman by her hair, using her as a human shield. “Motombo, don’t do this!” she cried. He fled, firing four times at the police officers, and escaped the island. In 2015 he arranged to return to Puerto Rico and turn himself in.

FBI agents interrogated Motombo for about an hour in a windowless room on the second floor of San Juan’s police headquarters. A person with knowledge of the FBI’s investigation and one of the Puerto Rican police officers say Motombo is suspected of driving Spagnoletti’s shooter. Motombo has not been charged in connection with that. He is in federal custody, facing attempted murder charges for the police shootout. He pleaded not guilty, and his lawyer declined to comment.

In November, Wakeman’s secretary, Vélez, was arrested and charged with perjury for telling the grand jury she didn’t know about the payments to the Santeria priest. Prosecutors say she instructed two Doral employees to pay Rivera weekly rather than monthly. Vélez pleaded not guilty. Her lawyer, Mariela Maestre Cordero, declined to comment.

In April the Doral case took yet another turn. U.S. prosecutors moved to drop the charges against Rivera and Figueroa. They withdrew the indictment “without prejudice,” meaning that they can file new charges with more information if they choose to.

A day after the about-face, I drive to a gated community in a suburb of San Juan to meet Rivera, the person I’d heard so much about. I find a chubby man with a neatly trimmed gray chinstrap beard standing on the porch of a two-story gray stucco house. The Santeria priest is wearing gold bracelets on his wrists and an electronic bracelet on his ankle. Rivera shakes my hand and offers my translator a light. He cuts off my halting attempt to introduce myself in Spanish. “I speak English,” he says, without an accent. Then he tells me to call his lawyer.

His attorney, Carrillo-Jiménez, says her client had nothing to do with Spagnoletti’s murder and that the payments he received were for janitorial services he performed. “People are speculating,” she says. “There is no evidence whatsoever.”

Douglas Leff, the FBI special agent in charge of the San Juan division, held a news conference on June 15, the fifth anniversary of the shooting. He announced a $20,000 reward for information leading to an arrest, and Marisa offered $10,000 of her own. The authorities are in the final stages of their investigation, he said, and have a great deal of information about the culprits. In an interview, Leff declines to comment on potential suspects. The fraud and murder investigations, he emphasizes, are proceeding on independent tracks. “We’ve been working it very diligently, and we have a lot of momentum,” he says about the murder. “The more digging we do, the more potential avenues we find to work. There may be different people with different levels of culpability.”

When I visit Marisa, she says she has complete faith that the FBI will solve the case. “You need to understand,” she says, “that justice is coming.”

– With Alexander Lopez and Katia Porzecanski

Editors: Nick Summers, Robert Friedman
Development: James Singleton

http://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-doral-bank-murder/

This post sponsored by Fortress Capital Forex

EES: How to make fireworks in your account

While most of the US population drowns in a prolonged semi-conscious state for several days, with moments of alertness (they'll know they are alive when they see the fireworks) - the remaining force of human intelligence on the planet, spends time trying to figure out ways to break through this vast blanket of social control that's been thrown over the population like a sticky net, which is slowly eating away at the global standard of living, overall quality, lowering human genetic value.  Each day, our money is worth less and less.  Why?  We explain this in Splitting Pennies - Understanding Forex.

The problem with much discussion on Zero Hedge and alternative media in general, is that it lacks a conclusion and proposed solution.  So, we mostly agree that the USD is toast, there's an insurmountable debt that cannot be paid back (because in a debt-based money system, if the debt is paid off, money will cease to exist).  Gold is the go to alternative to stocks & bonds which are mostly overrated - but then what?  So let's say Gold hit's $50,000 USD per ounce.  Then what?  Well for one, be sure that you have some good security because in a crisis, the only real currency is accelerated lead, as elaborated here eloquently.

So what is an investor to do?  Fundamental analysis of markets is impossible, because of reasons outlined well on this site:

1) Market data is manipulated heavily.  By the time any investor receives market information (unless he's paying for a front running service) one can assume it's been seen by leading market controllers, HFTs, directors of various unsundry government organizations, and George Soros.

2) The world changes too rapidly for any fundamental strategy to play out.  Too many wildcard events can derail strategies such as value investing.  Brexit is a great example - and there will be many more "Brexits."

3) Even if the above 1 & 2 didn't exist, an investor would need a carrying broker that was fair and honest, and would provide decent execution, and not go out of business.  With investing strategies such as some which are discussed on this site, this is a big issue.  For example, if Gold is $50,000 let's say that GLD goes bust, and starts a chain reaction on exchange listed ETFs and ETNs, which can't possibly fullfill their underlying liquidity obligations even in currenct conditions, not in extreme conditions.  Could it bring down some BDs with them?  SIPC is limited (..and if it were a TD Ameritrade, no insurance in the world can cover it).  So with such extreme strategies, counterparty risk is very large - especially in such climates that would make extreme strategies flourish.  Florida residents know very well how this works, when a big Hurricane strikes, the majority of underwriters for flood & Hurricane insurance go bust (FL law or mortgage policy sometimes require residents carry "Hurricane" insurance which doesn't cover "flood" damage).  If the markets melt down, as many claim - how many brokers would go bust?  How many leveraged banks?  Some big banks are not looking good (such as DB - $54 - $75 Trillion derivative bomb), even in this ideal banking climate.

Hoarding a 6 month supply of food, and living in an underground bunker, is not a real solution.  Having a bug out bag, ammo, gold bars & silver coins, and other paraphernalia, it's just survival.  It's not a strategy.  Keeping Gold is the investing equivalent of being a prepper.  And as we've explained in a previous detailed article, preppers have it all wrong.

Algorithmic Trading - The New Asset Class

This is one solution - and likely will soon be an entire asset class by itself.  Robo-Advisors are becoming popular in securities, but on the surface it seems they are only SAS solutions that are replacing human office workers.  They are just doing the job that the office worker RIA used to do; meet with clients and build a vanilla portfolio with 20% Utilities and 50% Technology and 20% "Growth" (whatever that ever meant) and 10% Dividend stocks.  Currently, HFT is dominated by large institutional players that frankly, the public knows very little about.  See one example Jump Trading.  The problem is their inaccessability - investors will need many millions to start (consider $50 Million, for a good start).  Also, having the $50 Million doesn't qualify you for anything.  Now you'll have to develop your own algorithms, or hire another firm to do it.  But this is the equivalent of hiring a consultant to tell you what business you are in (Consultants, and lawyers, will do this for a fee).

Then there's the world of retail algorithmic Forex, not allowed for US investors (or at least, so highly restricted and regulated it makes any normally profitable strategy, barely profitable).  As this chart shows, it really is "Magic:"

The above is a real live trading account over a period of 3 years.  Not likely that an investor can find such performance in stocks, or 'robo advisors.'  

The point is that an algorithm can trade any market, and if the strategy is stable, and consistent, it can deliver investment returns above and beyond the average, that are not correlated to the market - and most importantly - NOT DEPENDENT ON HUMAN BEINGS.  An algorithm isn't perfect, but it solves the basic fundamental problems of human traders.  And there are thousands of them.  You can even evaluate FX algorithms for free, without investing a penny.  Checkout www.getfxliquidity.com as one example - there are many.  To learn more about investing in Forex checkout Fortress Capital Forex here. 

Algorithms give developers many abilities that simply wouldn't be possible with human traders.  Most importantly, in a sterile development environment, it's possible to test, analyze, and optimize any trading idea relatively quickly, and then develop a robust strategy based on this process.  It's necessary to invest heavily in computing to do this, but many who have done this will offer their strategies for investors use.  What's good about this approach is that it's an investment in a methodology, not in an asset class. 

This is a fundamental mistake made by modern investors.  Gold is great.  But then what?  During Brexit for example, it was possible to buy and sell the Great British Pound by more than 10 signficant moves, during a 10 hour period.  That's activity that an algo can capture.  Just 'investing' in the US Dollar, or Great British Pound - is risky.  If an algo is built with a robust risk management module, it's the safest way to trade the markets.  And one doesn't need to become an expert in mathematics and algorithm development to do so - there are hundreds of algos available for use by any investor, big or small.  But if one does want to take on a challenge and build his own investing system, there are literally thousands of free resources online to support that development.  There's companies that have built a business out of algorithm development.  And certainly, this is only the beginning of a new blue ocean market.  The reason algos are the future?  Because they work.  That's all.

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-07-02/how-make-fireworks-your-account

EES: Splitting Pennies now available at Barnes & Noble

Splitting Pennies now available at Barnes and Noble!  Click here to order Splitting Pennies on Barnes and Noble.  

And this comes at a time when B&N is losing money - big money.  They're trying all different things to try to stop this, even selling beer and wine in their stores:

Barnes & Noble is a 130-year-old company with 33,000 employees and a market capitalization of almost $800 million. Yet, it's newest, best shot at regaining a little mojo against Amazon is something just about any college student or stay-at-home mom could have come up with.Short version? They're going to start serving booze.(Bonus content: Speaking of bookstores, check out The Big Free Book of Success, which you can download here.)

So checkout Splitting Pennies at Barnes and Noble today, or visit www.splittingpennies.com for other editions and places to purchase the book.

There Is Now A Staggering $11.7 Trillion In Negative Yielding Debt

It was not even a month ago when we last looked at the total amount of negative yielding debt around the globe, and were shocked to find that according to Fitch, for the first time in history (obviously), there was over $10 trillion in negative yielding debt. Fast forward 4 weeks later, and the grand total is now $1.3 trillion higher, or $11.7 trillion.

The split between positive and negative yielding debt is shown in the chart below:

In a report released earlier, Fitch updates on the "investors' flight to safe assets following the UK's EU referendum on June 23" and finds that the global total of sovereign debt with negative yields was a staggering $11.7 trillion as of June 27, up $1.3 trillion from the end-May total. Brexit-related concerns drove more long-dated bond yields negative, with particularly big shifts in German, French and Japanese yield curves during June.

As Fitch notes, worries over the global growth outlook, further fueled by Brexit, have continued to support demand for higher-quality sovereign paper in June. Widespread adoption of unconventional monetary policies, including large-scale bond-buying programs and negative deposit rates, have driven the large increases in negative-yielding debt seen this year.

The chart below highlights the monthly changes in the outstanding par amount of negative-yielding sovereign debt by maturity bucket. The biggest drivers of the total increase during June were seen in longer-dated bonds. For example, German 10-year bund yields swung into negative territory and sub-zero yields moved further out on the curve for Japan -- now out to 17 years. Also, in Switzerland, virtually all sovereign debt carried a negative yield on June 27.

As DB's Jim Reid writes, yesterday we saw the Swiss yield curve actually trade negative the whole way out the curve. The longest dated Swiss government bond due in 2064 (so 48 years) touched -0.0082% at one stage before settling at +0.011% by the close. The chart below shows the Swiss yield curve to show how remarkable this is. We’ve also added the JGB curve where the longest dated bond due in 2056 (40 year) is trading at a minuscule 6bps and the Bund curve where the longest dated 30y bond is trading at 42bps.

Japanese government bonds (JGBs) continue to represent about two-thirds of the global total ($7.9 trillion), while Germany and France each now have over $1 trillion in sovereign debt with sub-zero yields. Japan's negative-yielding debt total grew by about 18% during the month, while Germany and France's total grew by 8% and 13%, respectively. European negative-yielding debt increases were offset in part by an approximately $0.2 trillion reduction in the Italian total since May 31. This likely reflected investor risk aversion related to Italy leading up to and following the Brexit referendum.

The spread of negative yields into longer-dated paper was particularly evident in June. A total of $2.6 trillion in sovereign bonds with maturities of seven years or more now trade at a negative yield. This compares with the end-April total of $1.4 trillion.

The increasing amount of long-term negative-yielding debt underscores the challenges faced by large bond investors such as insurance companies that need to match long-term liabilities with similar maturity assets. As more of the global universe of safe assets drops into negative-yielding territory, income for these investors continues to fall.

UK sovereign bonds continue to trade at positive yields across the curve, but the Brexit vote has had a dramatic effect on the UK yield curve. Following the June 23 referendum, 10-year gilt yields dropped by 44 bps to 0.93% as of June 27, according to Bloomberg. 

The $11.7 trillion total, which includes $3.2 trillion of short-term and $8.5 trillion of long-term sovereign debt, is influenced by the dollar's exchange rate with the yen and euro. During June, the dollar rose slightly against the euro, but weakened significantly (approximately 9%) versus the yen. This had a major impact on the dollar value of yen-denominated negative-yielding debt in our latest analysis, pushing the JGB total up by approximately $0.6 trillion beyond increases that would have occurred on an FX-neutral basis.

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-06-29/there-now-staggering-117-trillion-negative-yielding-debt

Brexit To Ripple Through Markets For Weeks

Summary

Brexit was a surprise high impact, low probability event.

Although stock markets got crushed, Brexit had an easy hedge.

Brexit signals a new epoch of markets, with new currencies, new rules.

Other countries can follow Britain, splintering the EU into pieces.

Britain will leave the European Union. The European Union (EU) - a noble idea hatched in the smoke of burning rubble after World War 2, now has an existential threat. The very question of the existence of the EU itself, and of the Euro, now is open for debate. Before Brexit, it wasn't a question. Unlike most EU countries, Britain maintained their own currency, the Great British Pound GBP traded on the stock market as iPath GBP/USD Exchange Rate ETN (NYSEARCA:GBB). Other countries however, do not have such luxury. Spain, for example, that uses the Euro, has no other currency. So for other countries to leave the EU, it's not so easy. Brexit is not only bearish for the Pound and UK in general it's a sign of a splintering of the European Union itself.

Read the full article at Seeking Alpha by clicking here.

This post sponsored by Liquid Claims - Securities Settlement Services

EES: Brexit GBP collapse a great FX example

Brexit doesn't happen so often - but it does happen.  Many will remember the days when Maltese Lira, Cyprus Pound, and others joined the fledging Euro.  During that time it was possible to have a 400% return in your account in 1 day due to planned exchange rates on the conversion day.  Now probably a flood of copy cat referendums will sweep the EU, certainly by those already in the works in breakaway regions.  As we've been saying for years, the Euro finally will be shattered into regional Euros, and mixed with a return to national currencies such as the French Franc, Spanish Peseta, Italian Lira, and so on.  Probably, the Euro will always exist as accounting currency, and probably will always be accepted by merchants for payment in Europe.  In many countries such as Russia for example, a 3 currency system already exists.  Countries that don't have strong domestic currencies often use foreign currencies as a benchmark, or a place to keep their savings in times of currency crisis.  In most cases, this is primarily the US Dollar and secondly the Euro.  Finally - to please all these conspiracy nuts; they are right - there is a plan to create a one world currency - but it's not SDRs and it's not the Amero, it's the US Dollar.  Last night, as results came in indicating a "Brexit" - the GBP collapsed.  Forex involves a pair trading system - it's not possible to just 'sell' the Great British Pound (GBP) - it must be 'bought' against another currency.  That means, while the GBP was collapsing - other currencies were rising.  So this event was net positive for most other currencies, most notably the US Dollar.  See the below hourly chart of GBP/USD:

What this means is the GBP (Great British Pound) went down and the US Dollar (USD) went up.  The USD is a net benefactor of many foreign market volatilities - not only in FX.  Probably you've heard about 'flight to safety' - well since the CIA killed off the safety of this little canton north of Italy we call today "Switzerland" - the US is effectively the only 'safe haven' left.  By eliminating offshore locations on a number of levels, it sucks money back into the USD which is a natural support of the USD - both domestically and USD accounts held overseas.  The US has effectively an unsaid policy supporting the USD through foreign policy, including but not limited to military intervention, gunboat diplomacy, and a number of other techniques.

Hats off to all GBP FX providers that maintained superb trading conditions in a difficult volatile environment.  Brexit trade was an excellent 'stress test' of what happens to when such existential events take place.  FX markets functioned, and functioned well.  

Day traders had many opportunities to profit, from an obvious one way trade down.  Also this is an excellent example of why any investor should include FX in their portfolio.  While it was easy for day traders to book huge profits last night, it could simply have offset other losses.  Let's take the following trade example:

Some of the trades:

These trades were poorly placed and captured only about 5% - 10% of the opportunity, but it also proves that last night was such a one directional move - that took many hours - anybody could have made money from this move.  It didn't happen all at once, it took hours - and often retraced.  

From a hedging perspective, let's say the profit on this account balanced out other Brexit related losses.  Most investors aren't pure FX speculators, so this is a solid example of why FX should be in any portfolio.  Because this was an FX event - the GBP moved against most other currencies that it trades against.  See in the above example GBPNZD, GBPMXN, GBPCHF, GBPCAD, GBPSGD, and GBPUSD.  

Finally - this FX event is a strong indication that more events like this will soon come to fruition, that FX is going to be the new focus of international markets, especially in Europe.  The Euro itself is in question - if countries such as Spain leave the Euro, it can start a trend that shatters the fundamental threads holding the Euro together.  This will be net positive for FX and net positive for countries who leave the EU - but it will create massive volatility on all global markets, as assets are repriced and money is moved around.  The good news, FX provides a plethora of methods for profiting, hedging, and investing.  

Now is the perfect time to learn more about this important market - a great place to start is by reading Splitting Pennies - Understanding Forex.  If you are in the United States or are a US Citizen, you can open an account with Oanda through Fortress Capital with only $10 by clicking here.  If you are outside of the US - open an account here at LMAX exchange.  Also, Fortress Capital offers Forex managed accounts for QEP (Qualified Eligible Persons) - visit Fortress Capital Forex to learn more.

While FX has received a lot of bad press recently (and for good reason) today's Brexit trade is a great example of what's possible in FX in a good way, how investors can benefit from it as speculators or hedgers to protect themselves.  

Also - it's a sign of things to come - buckle up!  Markets are going to experience turbulence!

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-06-24/brexit-gbp-collapse-great-fx-example

Who Is The "European Movement" And Why The Answer May Change How You Vote On "Brexit"

Submitted by Professor Richard A. Werner, D.Phil. (Oxon)

EU Basics – Your Guide to the Referendum

The British people should be clear about just what they will be voting on at the EU referendum this Thursday. What does it actually mean to stay in the EU? What does it mean to exit?

Concerning the second question, the dominant issue in the debate has been the question whether there will be a significant negative economic impact on the UK from exiting the EU. Prime Minister David Cameron, together with the heads of the IMF, the OECD and various EU agencies have given dire warnings that economic growth will drop, the fiscal position will deteriorate, the currency will weaken and UK exports will decline precipitously. George Osborne, the chancellor of the exchequer has threatened to cut pensions if pensioners dare to vote for exit. But what are the facts?

I have been trained in international and monetary economics at the London School of Economics and have a doctorate from the University of Oxford in economics. I have studied such issues for several decades. I have also recently tested, using advanced quantitative techniques, the question of the size of impact on GDP from entry to or exit from the EU or the eurozone. The conclusion is that this makes no difference to economic growth, and everyone who claims the opposite is not guided by the facts. The reason is that economic growth and national income are almost entirely determined by a factor that is decided at home, namely the amount of bank credit created for productive purposes. This has sadly been very small in the UK in recent decades, thus much greater economic growth is possible as soon as steps are taken to boost bank credit for productive purposes – irrespective of whether the UK stays in the EU or not (although Brexit will make it much easier to take such policy steps). We should also remember that a much smaller economy like Norway – thought more dependent on international trade – fared extremely well after its people rejected EU membership in a referendum in 1995 (which happened against the dire warnings and threats from its cross-party elites, most of its media and the united chorus of the heads of international organisations). Besides, Japan, Korea, Taiwan and China never needed EU membership to move from developing economy status to top industrialised nations within about half a century. The argument of dire economic consequences of Brexit is bogus.

As for the first question, namely what it means to stay inside the EU, we should consult the EU itself. Happily, the EU released a major official report about its key policies and what it plans to achieve in the near future in October 2015. This report was issued in the names of the “Five Presidents“ of the EU. In case you had not been aware that there was even a single, let alone five presidents of the EU, these are: The unelected president of the European Central Bank, Goldman Sachs alumnus Mario Draghi, the unelected president of the European Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker, the unelected Brussels Commissar and “president of the Eurogroup“, Jeroen Dijsselbloem, the “president of the Euro Summit“, Donald Tusk, and the president of the European Parliament, Martin Schulz. What is the message of this not negligible number of EU presidents concerning the question of where the EU is going? The title of their joint report is a give-away: “The Five President’s (sic) Report: Completing Europe’s Economic and Monetary Union“. https://ec.europa.eu/priorities/publications/five-presidents-report-completing-europes-economic-and-monetary-union_en

The report starts with the frank admission that “with 18 million unemployed in the euro area, a lot more needs to be done to improve economic policies” in the EU. Well said. But what exactly needs to be done?

“Europe’s Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) today is like a house that was built over decades but only partially finished. When the storm hit, its walls and roof had to be stabilised quickly. It is now high time to reinforce its foundations and turn it into what EMU was meant to be…“

“ we will need to take further steps to complete EMU.”

The central planners in Brussels and at the ECB in Frankfurt are not unaware that under their command, a historically unprecedented economic dislocation has taken place in the EU during the past ten years, including massive asset and property bubbles, banking crises and large-scale unemployment in all the periphery countries – with over 50% youth unemployment in Greece, Spain and Portugal, as well as the lack of any serious controls of the EU external borders to prevent an influx of unparalleled numbers of illegal immigrants and economic migrants.

However, the EU central planners are in denial about the fact that these problems have been caused entirely by their own misguided and disastrous policies. As a result, they argue that the solution to such problems can only be further concentration of powers into their hands: “We need more Europe“, as Mrs Merkel put it (source: please read these Merkel claims about the EU http://www.euractiv.com/section/eu-priorities-2020/news/merkel-calls-for-political-union-to-save-the-euro/) This is what they propose to implement in the coming years, by turning all EU members into one single country.

So the Five Presidents‘ Report makes clear that the EU is not simply a free trade area. That project had been left behind with the 1992 Maastricht Treaty and a very different kind of Europe has become enshrined with the 2007 European Constitution (called ‘Lisbon Treaty‘, since the people of Europe in several referenda rejected it. Source: please read what the author of the rejected European Constitution says: http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/commentators/valeacutery-giscard-destaing-the-eu-treaty-is-the-same-as-the-constitution-398286.html ). Instead, the EU is the project to abandon all national sovereignty and borders within and melt away all European nations that don’t succeed in exiting in time, into a merged, joint new single country, with one central European government, centralised European monetary policy, centralised European fiscal policy, centralised European foreign policy, and centralised European regulation, including of financial markets and banking. This United States of Europe, an undemocratic leviathan that the European peoples never wanted, is the culmination of the much repeated mantra of “ever closer union“.

This project has been implemented steadily and stealthily over several decades, despite major and consistent policy blunders and scandals involving the central planners (e.g. in 1999 the entire European Commission – the unelected government and cabinet of the European superstate – resigned in disgrace, as it was found to have taken bribes and engaged in fraud, while the EU’s own Court of Auditors has repeatedly refused to sign off the EU’s official books).

The economics is clear: there is no need to be a member of the EU to thrive economically, and exiting does not have to impact UK economic growth at all. The UK can remain in the European Economic Area, as Norway has done, or simply agree on a trade deal, as Switzerland did, and enjoy free trade – the main intention of European agreements in the eyes of the public. The politics is also clear: the European superstate that has already been formed is not democratic. The so-called ‘European Parliament‘, unique among parliaments, cannot propose any legislation at all – laws are all formulated and proposed by the unelected European Commission! As a Russian observer has commented, the European Parliament is a rubber-stamping sham, just like the Soviet parliament during the days of the Soviet Union, while the unelected government is the European Commission – the Politibureau replete with its Commissars.

Big business and big banks, as well as central bankers and the IMF, constitute the financial elite that is behind this purposeful concentration of power – giving ever more power into the hands of ever fewer people. The undemocratic nature of EU institutions has reached such an extent that I have heard a recently retired member of the ECB governing council in private confessing that his biggest worry is the undemocratic nature and extent of the ECB’s powers, which have increasingly been abused for political ends. These facts have been drowned out by the constant drip of propaganda emanating from the powerful elites behind the creation of the United States of Europe.

During these years and decades of steady transfers of powers and sovereignty from nation states and their democratically elected assemblies to the unelected Brussels bureaucracy, I had always been puzzled by the apparent strong US support for all this. Whenever the ‘process‘ of ‘ever closer union‘ seemed to have hit an obstacle, a US president – no matter the post holder’s name or party affiliation – would intervene and in no uncertain terms tell the troublesome Europeans to get their act together and speed up unification of Europe into one state. In the naivety of my youth this had struck me as surprising. Likewise, the British public has recently been told by US president Obama that dropping out of the EU was not a good idea and they had better vote to stay in.

While it is not surprising that the global elite that has benefitted from the trend towards concentration of power is getting increasingly hysterical in their attempts to cajole the British public into voting to stay inside the EU, it is less clear why the US president and his government should be so keen on the EU project. We had been told in the past by the European media that the concentration of economic and political decision-making in Europe was being engineered in order to create a counter-weight against the US dominance. This seemed to motivate some pro-EU voices. Surely the US president must have heard about that?

There is another mystery. Only yesterday, an impressive-looking leaflet was dropped into the letterbox of my Winchester home, entitled “EU Basics – Your Guide to the Referendum“. It was issued by an organisation called the “European Movement“. The 16-page colour and high gloss booklet argues for Britain to stay in the EU. Who is this “European Movement“, and who is funding it? This little-known organisation seems financially powerful enough to drop a high-quality print booklet into every household in the entire UK.

The declassification of formerly secret records has solved both mysteries. For as it turns out, they are connected. In the words of Nottingham University academic Richard Aldrich:

“The use of covert operations for the specific promotion of European unity has attracted little scholarly attention and remains poorly understood. … the discreet injection of over three million dollars between 1949 and 1960, mostly from US government sources, was central to efforts to drum up mass support for the Schuman Plan, the European Defence Community and a European Assembly with sovereign powers. This covert contribution never formed less than half the European Movement’s budget and, after 1952, probably two-thirds. Simultaneously they sought to undermine the staunch resistance of the British Labour government to federalist ideas…. It is also particularly striking that the same small band of senior officials, many of them from the Western [note: this means US] intelligence community, were central in supporting the three most important transnational elite groups emerging in the 1950s: the European Movement, the Bilderberg Group and Jean Monnet’s Action Committee for a United States of Europe [ACUE]. Finally, at a time when some British antifederalists saw a continued ’special relationship‘ with the United States as an alternative to (perhaps even a refuge from) European federalism, it is ironic that some European federalist initiatives should have been sustained with American support.“

There is much more to read in this explosive piece of scholarly research (Richard J. Aldrich (1997), OSS, CIA and European unity: The American committee on United Europe, 1948-60, Diplomacy & Statecraft,8(1), pp. 184-227, online athttp://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09592299708406035#.V2exrU36voo )

UK journalist and former Brussels correspondent Ambrose Evans-Pritchard was the only journalist to report on such academic research findings, in two articles in 2000 and 2007:

“DECLASSIFIED American government documents show that the US intelligence community ran a campaign in the Fifties and Sixties to build momentum for a united Europe. … US intelligence secretly funded the European Movement, paying over half its budget. Some of Europe’s founding fathers were on the US payroll….

“The documents confirm suspicions voiced at the time that America was working aggressively behind the scenes to push Britain into a European state. Lest we forget, the French had to be dragged kicking and screaming to the federalist signing table in the early 1950s. Eisenhower threatened to cut off Marshall aid unless Paris agreed to kiss and make up with Berlin. France’s Jean Monnet, the EU’s mastermind, was viewed as an American agent – as indeed, he was. Monnet served as Roosevelt’s fixer in Europe during the war and orchestrated the failed US effort to stop de Gaulle taking power.

“One memorandum, dated July 26, 1950, gives instructions for a campaign to promote a fully fledged European parliament. It is signed by Gen William J Donovan, head of the American wartime Office of Strategic Services, precursor of the CIA. … Washington’s main tool for shaping the European agenda was the American Committee for a United Europe, created in 1948. The chairman was Donovan, ostensibly a private lawyer by then. The vice-chairman was Allen Dulles, the CIA director in the Fifties. The board included Walter Bedell Smith, the CIA’s first director, and a roster of ex-OSS figures and officials who moved in and out of the CIA. The documents show that ACUE financed the European Movement, the most important federalist organisation in the post-war years. In 1958, for example, it provided 53.5 per cent of the movement’s funds. The European Youth Campaign, an arm of the European Movement, was wholly funded and controlled by Washington.

“The leaders of the European Movement – Retinger, the visionary Robert Schuman and the former Belgian prime minister Paul-Henri Spaak – were all treated as hired hands by their American sponsors. The US role was handled as a covert operation. ACUE’s funding came from the Ford and Rockefeller foundations as well as business groups with close ties to the US government.

“The head of the Ford Foundation, ex-OSS officer Paul Hoffman, doubled as head of ACUE in the late Fifties. The State Department also played a role. A memo from the European section, dated June 11, 1965, advises the vice-president of the European Economic Community, Robert Marjolin, to pursue monetary union by stealth.

“It recommends suppressing debate until the point at which “adoption of such proposals would become virtually inescapable“.

“Fifty years after the Treaty of Rome, the architects of post-war US policy would be quite pleased, I think, if they were alive today. …

(excerpted from: Ambrose Evans-Pritchard (2000), Euro-federalists financed by US spy chiefs, The Daily Telegraph, 19 September 2000; http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/1356047/Euro-federalists-financed-by-US-spy-chiefs.html and Ambrose Evans-Pritchard (2007), The scare of a superstate has passed, but do we want to lose the EU altogether? The Daily Telegraph, 7 April 2007)

No wonder Mr Evans-Pritchard has now concluded that he will vote for Brexit:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2016/06/12/brexit-vote-is-about-the-supremacy-of-parliament-and-nothing-els/

The revelation that the EU is the result of a major US secret service operation – effectively just yet another secret creature of deception launched by the CIA (taking seat of honour in the hall of infamy that includes false flag operations, invasions, coup-detats, and the establishment of organisations such as Al Qaida and ISIS) solves the third mystery, namely how on earth the allegedly democratic European nations could design such an undemocratic, virtually dictatorial structure. With the EU/United States of Europe the US not only achieves its geo-strategic goals in Europe, but it has also eliminated the role of pesky national parliaments that could on occasion get in the way of US or CIA foreign policy. And another puzzle is solved, namely why the EU had so readily agreed to a US request a few years back that US spy agencies get access to all European emails and telephone calls….

A vote to stay in the EU thus is a vote to abolish the United Kingdom as a sovereign state and merge it into the undemocratic United States of Europe which the European elites are building under US tutelage. That the European public – and, it seems, even European politicians – have little or no input in key European decisions can be seen from the increasingly aggressive NATO stance against Russia (Brussels-based NATO being the military arm of the EU, which is overtly under direct US control), and the one-sided sanctions against Russia that the US could simply order the Europeans to implement (causing significant losses in incomes and jobs in Europe, while boosting US business interests). Immigration policies are another case in point. If the US had in the past considered the largely homogeneous European populations a source of potential European resistance against its plans for Europe, then the policy to replace them with balkanised failed ‘melting pots‘ also makes sense.

Norway voted in 1995 on EU membership. Leading parties were all in favour. Big business and central banks, major media outlets and the talking heads on TV were frantically bullying and cajoling the Norwegian public to vote ‘in‘. The people remained steadfast and voted ‘out‘. Norway did splendidly. And so much more will the UK.

Professor Werner is Director of the Centre for Banking, Finance and Sustainable Development at the University of Southampton. He is known for proposing the concept of ‘Quantitative Easing‘ in Japan. His 2003 book Princes of the Yen warned of the dangers of excessive central bank independence and predicted that the ECB was likely to create credit bubbles, banking crises and recessions in the eurozone.

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-06-22/who-european-movement-and-why-answer-may-change-how-you-vote-brexit

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