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  2. Hey Catherine, will you tell us here which fast food joint is the money laundering chain? Ds says it’s Burger King, I thought it was Long John Silver’s but I doubt they are as ubiquitous as you described.Btw, ds said that bars are really good for money laundering because liquor has good margins and the sales volume being high isn’t a tell.

      1. There are a lot of gas stations like Mr. Lord describes. Sofia, Bulgaria used to (may still) have many high-end clothing stores that hardly ever sold anything. It was explained to me that they were money laundering operations (clothing, laundry, must have had a sense of humor) for organized crime.

  3. John, if you want to know what the official story is about a futures traded commodity, go to the press that covers the futures markets. A lot of it is baloney because daily price movements generally don’t have fundamental causes. But you’ll get a sense of what they say is going on.

    For cocoa on friday, for example see here: https://www.barchart.com/story/news/28647195/cocoa-prices-weighed-down-by-strength-in-the-dollar-and-british-pound

    I think the best way to determine what is going on is to find out what ending stocks (commodity in storage, I think you could say) are and what they have been in the past. Are ending stocks high or low, trending up or down? The point is because there are only two things in any market, supply and amount of money going into that market are key.

    Sometimes you can figure out the supply is being constrained artificially to raise prices and then possible to crash the price suddenly. Wall street firms will decide to buy up a bunch of a commodity and store it to drive prices up, for example. Or Brazilian farmers or exporters (I don’t know which) will store coffee in Brazil rather than ship to the US for storage to limit visible supply driving the price up. Or they’ll predict a freeze for the orange crop and everybody panics buying. Then the freeze never happens. You can glean some of this at times by reading the financial press.

    Any time the futures markets are involve, so are a lot of shenanigans. Futures trading in crypto convinced me beyond doubt that tptb were behind it and control the supply.

    (I’m sure there are more experience peops here who could add something, or correct my erros.)

  4. So true Miss Catherine, very few realize war is coming to the USA. A few days ago a huge ammo storage depot was hit. It was claimed to be a drone??? All the vids posted were of the initial explosion, all vids clipped out the time right before the explosion, which would have shown the missile streak. Then yesterday big hits in a number of other places deep into Russia. Folks better get ready war is coming. Will it be EMP or Conventual or Nuke or all? Just watch the first few mins of this. The hit on the first a few das ago and at least one of these were hardened buildings. I am pretty sure a drone can not do enough damage to cause the explosions in the fist hit or those in this vid. to hardened storage buildings https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYhopjM8tbo

  5. I have said it here before and will say it again, pray dear people pray. Until the bombs start falling and the lights go out we can send up prayers to stop the killing. It serves no good moral purpose to pour millions of peoples blood into the ground. Steiner warned us 100 years ago “wars get more and more bloody”. Pray dear people pray.

  6. Its important for folks to know that state guaranty funds back your insurance when an insurance company becomes insolvent. All types, p&c, workers comp, health, and life

    1. Yes. Problem is if enough firms drained by PE drain those funds (you as a taxpayer still have to pay through the state) then there is a greater problem as well.

      1. In Calif., all admitted insurance companies who sell insurance in the State contribute to the California Fair Plan our State’s insurer of last resort for those who have had their property insurance cancelled. Many insurance companies have pulled out of Calif for many reasons, one being they don’t want to continue to contribute to the Fair Plan as the “Plan” has grown to unhealthy proportions and is in danger of becoming insolvent should more claims occur, due to a disaster such as a wild fire, than the Fair Plan has reserves to reimburse for.
        The State of Calif has a process by which the Calif. Dept of Insurance can allow insurance companies who remain contributing to the Fair Plan to be assessed in order to keep the Fair Plan afloat. In addition, the Dept of Insurance has a mechanism by which it can then grant the remaining contributing insurance companies the right to INCREASE their insurance rates to their California customers to cover that assessment. The State Guaranty Fund is also contributed to by the sales if insurance, so, the fewer the insurance companies selling in the state, the less the contributions. Catherine, you are exactly right in your response above. Just as a side note, the California Insurance Commissioner, Ricardo Lara, has just this month sent all of us licensed insurance agents a memo describing the assessment process. Not a good omen…..

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