INTEREST RATES SOAR TO 8.3% ON CORPORATE BONDS - Credit Investors Bolt Party as Economy Fears Trump Low Rates.  Debt investors are a nervous lot these days, and new signs that global turmoil is weighing on the U.S. economic outlook are only adding to their angst.  Measures of corporate credit risk spiked immediately after a Labor Department report showed that payrolls rose less than projected last month, wages stagnated and the jobless rate was unchanged. Investors are now demanding more than they have in three years to own junk bonds, which are on track to cap off their worst week this year.  Frustration is growing that even after seven years of easy-money policies, economic growth remains sluggish. While the Federal Reserve is signaling that it’s in no hurry to normalize interest rates, investors are increasingly worried about what the data will mean for earnings at companies that have sold $9.3 trillion of corporate bonds since the start of 2009.

Average borrowing costs for junk-rated companies have surged by 0.4 percentage point this week, to 8.3 percent, Bank of America Merrill Lynch Index data show... There is a RISK OF UP TO 100% LOSS on all stocks and every single stock prospectus out there clearly tells you exactly that.  Anyone who has any funds in stocks who can't afford to lose it all has no business having any funds in stocks.  The party on Wall Street is just about over - The rise in stocks that began in March 2009 is one of the longest stretches without a bear market in quite a few years.  Not only that, but October was the best month for stocks in four years. As you might have expected, this has driven the market’s price-earnings ratio well above average. The current ratio for the Standard & Poor’s 500 stocks is a tad over 22; the average P/E ratio for these stocks since the 1870s is 16.6.  Investors should enjoy the good times while they are still around, for there are increasing signs that the party may soon be over.

 

In speeches and interviews, Juncker has always claimed that Luxembourg has in no way enriched itself "at the expense of its neighboring countries," and especially not by encouraging tax avoidance. In everyday political life, however, Juncker's people fought for precisely the kinds of corporate advantages their boss used such rich language to denounce. In order to attract as much corporate money as possible into the country, his officials played around with tax models like "hybrid financial instruments" and, especially, so-called "patent boxes." Introduced in order to spur technological advancement, finance policy experts in Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg led the pack in transforming tax advantages into an instrument allowing corporations to steer proceeds from patents or licenses to their Benelux subsidiaries in order to pay lower taxes there. Under the system, national subsidiaries of large corporations in countries with higher corporate tax rates would pay large patent and licensing fees to subsidiaries in lower tax countries. The system ensured that money got pumped into the government coffers of the Benelux countries, but it also put other EU countries at a disadvantage, in addition to the majority of small- and middle-sized businesses for whom such preferential treatment wouldn't even be considered.  Representatives of the other EU member states knew very well what was going on. The German representative in the Working Group on Tax Questions, for example, filed a cable to Berlin in March 2013 in which he noted there had been repeated "doubts about the harmlessness" of a few of the tax models, "mostly having to do with the license box rules of LUX and NDL," the abbreviations being references to Luxembourg and the Netherlands.  But nothing was done about it for years. Each time the Working Group on Tax Questions proposed changes, Luxembourg, Belgium and the Netherlands warded them off successfully. It's no wonder, either, given that representatives of the Benelux countries regularly coordinated their decisions in advance at their own meetings... It's not just European Commission President Juncker whose past as the leader of the tax-haven Luxembourg is catching up to him. Another important man at the top of an EU institution also now has some uncomfortable questions to answer: Dutch Finance Minister Jeroen Dijsselbloem. Even after ascending to his current position as head of the Euro Group, his country continued to block every call for change.  Sven Giegold, 45, has spent years trying to shed light on the darkness of EU corporate taxation arrangements. A member of the European Parliament with the Green Party, he's used to resistance. But what he experienced when he requested access to meeting transcripts from the secretive tax groups was an altogether new experience.  First, the European Council stonewalled and then the European Commission delivered documents in which important sections had been redacted. Despite all the blacked out passages, Giegold was forbidden from bringing his mobile phone into the room in one of the Commission's buildings in Brussels where he was allowed to view a few of the documents. Officials allowed him to take notes using a pencil and paper, but they didn't let him take his notes with him when he left the building.   The documents seen by SPIEGEL reveal that what EU agencies have long been denying, is in fact mass-scale cheating with the help of the tax law. Internal EU documents show how companies took advantage of patent boxes to simply sign their licenses, copyrights, patents or marketing rights over to their subsidiaries in Luxembourg or The Hague, allowing them to cash in on sweetheart corporate tax deals in those countries. It didn't matter whether the research had actually taken place in those nations, either. 

The successor of Traian Băsescu in the presidential seat has nominated Dacian Cioloş, as the former president had repeatedly announced over the last few days.  That can mean several things: first of all, that Traian Băsescu and Klaus Iohannis think alike (at least in that regard); the second, that Traian Băsescu continues to be very well informed, and third, that president Klaus Iohannis obeys Traian Băsescu.  You can pick any option you want or you can combine all three.  "Tim Budget", like the press nicknamed Liviu Voinea, has been saved from being sacrificed. Meaning that, instead of having the ephemeral glory of serving as prime-minister for two months, he has stayed to share his wisdom with the National Bank of Romania, as deputy governor.   Dacian Cioloş was a European Commissioner for Agriculture between 2010 and 2014, achieving the first reform of the Common Agricultural Policy.  Dacian Cioloş was the minister of Agriculture in Romania between October 2007 and December 2008, in the Tăriceanu government, and has maintained a technocrat reputation. Between 2005 and 2007, Cioloş was an advisor to the Minister of Agriculture, while also representing Romania on the special commission of the Council of the European Union on the issue of agriculture. Previously, between 2002 and 2003, Dacian Cioloş worked for the Delegation of the European Commission in Romania, preparing the SAPARD implementation in Romania. At the time of his appointment as prime-minister of Romania, Dacian Cioloş was one of the personal advisors of the president of the European Commission, Jean Claude Juncker, a position which he was awarded this year. Juncker is considered a grey eminence of the Euro currency system. THE PROPOSED  ROMANIAN GOVERNMENT IS : (note : please  use the translation button on the right side of this page)

 Premierul desemnat Dacian Cioloş a anunţat, astăzi, echipa de miniştri, într-o conferință de presă, la Camera Deputaților.
     Astfel, lista membrilor Guvernului propusă de Dacian Cioloş este:
     Vicepremier şi Ministrul Economiei: Costin Grigore Borc
     Vicepremier şi Ministrul Dezvoltării: Vasile Dâncu
     Ministrul Afacerilor Externe: Lazăr Comănescu
     Ministrul Afacerilor Interne: Petre Tobă
     Ministrul Agriculturii: Achim Irimescu
     Ministrul Apărării Naţionale: Mihnea Motoc
     Ministrul Culturii: Vlad Alexandrescu
     Ministrul Energiei: Victor Vlad Grigorescu
     Ministrul Educaţiei: Adrian Curaj
     Ministrul Finanţelor Publice: Anca Paliu Dragu
     Ministrul Fondurilor Europene: Aura Carmen Răducu
     Ministrul Justiţiei: Cristina Guseth
     Ministrul Mediului, Apelor și Pădurilor: Cristiana Paşca Palmer
     Ministrul Muncii: Claudia Anca Moarcăş
     Ministrul pentru Societatea Informaţională: Marius Raul Bostan
     Ministrul Sănătăţii: Andrei Baciu
     Ministrul Tineretului și Sportului: Elisabeta Lipă
     Ministrul Transporturilor: Marian Costescu
     Ministrul pentru Dialog Social: Violeta Alexandru
     Şeful Cancelariei Primului Ministru: Ioan Dragoş Tudorache
     Ministrul delegat pentru Relaţiile cu Românii de Preturindeni: Dan Stoenescu
     Ministrul delegat pentru Relaţia cu Parlamentul şi Societatea Civilă: Cristian Ciprian Bucur.

The Russian president, Vladimir Putin, has suspended flights to Egypt, a Kremlin spokesman has said.  The move came after the head of the Russian federal security service suggested it would be “expedient” to suspend flights until the conclusion of the investigation into what brought down a Russian-operated airliner over the Sinai peninsula on Saturday, killing all 224 people on board.  Russia had previously suggested the UK was pre-judging the outcome of the investigation when it and Ireland suspended flights on Wednesday to and from the Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh. The UK prime minister, David Cameron, has said it was “more likely than not” a bomb brought down the Metrojet Airbus A321-200.  “I think it will be reasonable to suspend all Russian flights to Egypt until we determine the real reasons of what happened,” Russian intelligence chief Alexander Bortnikov said in televised comments shortly before the Kremlin announced the suspension. “It concerns tourist flights most of all.”  Dmitry Peskov, the Kremin spokesman, said Putin was not suspending flights until the end of the crash investigation, but only until flight safety could be guaranteed, state news agency Tass reported.  “We need to make a clarification here: The president meant a suspension of air travel with Egypt until it is possible to establish the necessary safety level for air travel,” Peskov said.  Putin also ordered the Russian government to establish mechanisms to bring its citizens home, Peskov said. Around 45,000 Russians are currently on holiday in Egypt, Oleg Safonov, the head of Russia’s state tourism agency, Rostourism, told Tass.

Paris terror attacks an alarm bell for a borderless Europe - adio Shengen !

What to do - a few things that the European countries should do :

1. Leave EU. It serves no useful purpose.
2. Profile. Close borders to anyone who will not quickly and easily assimilate into British society.
3.Intern. Extreme threat calls for extreme counter measures .
4. Expel. (See 2 above.)
5. Never again allow those stupide idiot politicians who allowed my precious country to be so defiled , the oxygen to repeat their multi-cultural enrichment lies...

How do you close the barn door? The enemy is both within and without and it's all because of the EU. You, Europens need to get out of the EU before you're totally Merkelized...Above all, we must realise that although this atrocity will change things in France quite profoundly, it is an alarm call to the rest of Europe, to us, and to the whole of Western civilization.

Now in Paris ....watch...live

The United Kingdom, and its free-born citizens are NOT JUST ECONOMIC UNITS. We are a history, a culture, a democracy, a monarchist, christian country - whose citizens should HAVE THE RIGHT TO DETERMINE THEIR FUTURE - AND THAT OF THEIR COUNTRY.  It is NOT for those companies with vested interests in the eu (NOTE the eu) to have ANY voice whatsoever about the Future FREEDOM AND DEMOCRACY of citizens of the United Kingdom.  We were NEVER EVER consulted about the federal monster that the common market has become. We were LIED TO by a Traitor - Heath, and by useless subsequent useful idiots in the civil service and government.  The FREE citizens of the United Kingdom will vote on whether we wish to be an independent, democratic country or whether to join the increasingly undemocratic, statist, federalist, socialist slave republic of the Coudenhove-Kalergi plan.  But it is WE who will decide - WE - who are MORE than economic units - WE - with our history and culture AT RISK - will make the choice. Not any b---y investment bankers who caused the financial crash.  NOT those b---y companies who make a fortune out of paying cheap labour with no moral responsibility to the ethnic people of the UK - who don't care that the ordinary people are being increasingly made poor, with more stress on our housing, energy, food and water supplies simply because it suits THEM to treat US as 'economic units'.  THE PEOPLE OF THE UK ARE MORE THAN ECONOMIC UNITS...First, this is the very opposite of the message that was being sent to business across the UK before the Scottish referendum when enormous pressure was being put on UK business to champion the Unionist cause. To argue that UK business should keep quiet now is totally inconsistent with that. Second, not a word is mentioned in this article about those businesses that have argued against EU membership like the hypocritical Lord Bamford who does not mind the UK leaving the EU (but his company, JCB,is building a brand new HQ and massive factory in Germany, inside the EU and the single market just in case). Perhaps the reason for this is that Allister Heath knows that his views are at odds with those of most of UK business. Third, any listed company is obliged to publish to shareholders any foreseeable risks to the success of the business. Even the uncertainty surrounding the referendum is enough to cause an element of risk, let alone departure from the EU. Since no one really knows what departure from the EU would look like (and no one has put forward any kind of blue print whatsoever), the uncertainty faced by business would be massive.

OK, there would probably be a free trade agreement (but even this is not guaranteed), but free trade is a very pale imitation of membership of a true single market and customs union with common technical standards across an entire Continent and a home market of 500 million people as currently enjoyed. That risk in itself should be enough to trigger every PLC and AIM listed company to publish details of the threats that an EU exit could cause to their business.  Fourth, membership of the EU is not party political so it is not like a company supporting a given political party at all. it goes to the heart of how this country will structure its development, not for 5 short years but for the foreseeable future. Fifth, EU membership is a bit of a package, and some to the right of the Tory party and in the Telegraph may campaign for example for an end to "social Europe" but that is not a universally held belief across all business. My firm offers all staff a minimum of four weeks paid holiday every year. Because of EU laws, so must our competitors. If that power were to be repatriated, and the UK Parliament with a majority Government elected by just 33% of the voting public were to repeal that, competitors may cut costs not be raising their efficiency (which would be legitimate) but by slashing social standards and maybe cutting holidays. If my firm does the right thing and maintains 4 weeks paid holiday, we are put at an unfair competitive disadvantage, not due to greater efficiency elsewhere, but by companies cutting costs by reducing social protection. In a race to the bottom of that kind, UK productivity will never rise, and of course we will always lose against cheap labour in Asia and Latin America.  Finally, the opinions offered are often those of the CEO or senior management. They are entitled to express their personal views just as much as any journalist or member of the public and frankly will know more about the real consequences of leaving the EU than most of us, including most journalists. And if they perceive a threat to jobs and investment in the UK they not only have the right to express it but a duty to do so.