#Trump Reelection #Campaign #Ads Is "A Supercar Racing A Little VW Bug." Guess Who's The Volkswagen...

PhotoCredit: Brian Stauffer

Great article from The NY Times on how Democrats don't seem to have gotten the memo on online advertising. 

As a prime example, upon an onslaught of targeted online ads ("Learn the truth. Watch Now!") about former VP and Ukraine, Biden campaign proceeded to slash its online advertising budget in favor of more television ads.!!!  

Talk about clueless!!  

Trump Campaign Floods Web With Ads, Raking In Cash as Democrats Struggle

By Matthew Rosenberg and Kevin Roose

"That campaigns are now being fought largely online is hardly a revelation, yet only one political party seems to have gotten the message."

Democratic establishment is "too focused on winning over imagined moderates"

Read the whole article online here: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/20/us/elections/trump-campaign-ads-democrats.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage

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With #Putin Propping Up #Maduro, Evading #Oil #Sanctions, and Moving Troops Into #Venezuela, #Russia Is Gearing Up for Conflict With #US in #Caribbean

Russia Is Gearing Up for a Conflict With the United States in the Caribbean

With Moscow propping up Maduro, evading oil sanctions, and moving its troops around the coast, Washington needs to rethink its own strategies.

By Ryan C. Berg  October 9, 2019, 2:56 PM (10-13 minute Read) 

Russian President Vladimir Putin and Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro shake hands at the Kremlin in Moscow on July 2, 2013.  Maxim Shemetov/AFP/Getty Images

New conflicts in the rest of the world may be looming large, but one in the United States' own backyard is about to get more dangerous. Despite U.S.-led sanctions on Venezuela's state-owned oil company, Petróleos de Venezuela (PDVSA), oil from the country is still flowing onto world markets. A central facilitator of the exports is Rosneft, Russia's state-owned oil company, which has been accepting Venezuelan crude as a form of loan repayment. In this way, Russian President Vladimir Putin is playing a leading role in keeping Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro afloat. As long as he does, current U.S. sanctions policy will do little to force a change in Venezuela, which is why Washington needs to rethink its strategy for dislodging the Venezuelan leader—and soon.

As PDVSA's list of clients has shrunk, Rosneft has quickly surpassed all other companies to become the top trader of Venezuelan oil. Whereas the company handled 40 percent of PDVSA's oil exports in July, by August, it was handling 66 percent. Recently, PDVSA even established an office in Moscow to facilitate payments to its Russian client, which has helped reduce its outstanding debt to Rosneft to $1.1 billion. At this pace, outstanding loans to Rosneft could be repaid in full sometime around the end of this year or in early 2020.

Once that happens, Putin's stated excuse for continued engagement with Venezuela will be moot, but this won't bring about the grand geopolitical shift in Venezuela that it otherwise could. That's because, for now, supporting Maduro is a low-cost strategy that allows Putin to burnish his image as a defender of embattled regimes everywhere. Russia's presence in Venezuela—its most significant in the Western Hemisphere since the Cuban missile crisis—will continue long after the excuse of collecting on Venezuela's debts has run its course.

Indeed, recent moves indicate that Putin is eyeing even deeper intervention in Venezuela, both military and financial.

#SoftBank's plans for second mega #VisionFund hit by #WeWork, #Uber debacles

SoftBank's cash flow problems compound plans for second mega-fund hit by WeWork, Uber debacles

(Reuters) - SoftBank Group founder and CEO Masayoshi Son is struggling to raise money for a second massive technology investment fund in the wake of the failed public offering of office-rental company WeWork and sliding valuations of other major investments, according to two people familiar with the situation.

Son is still determined to go ahead with Vision Fund 2 even though some lieutenants have urged a delay... 

The worsening turmoil at WeWork will continue to be a strain on SoftBank and the first [Vision] fund. 

The price of WeWork bonds has sunk...without further investment from Son or his entities, it will be difficult to stabilize given the size of its future financial commitments.

That is just one of the calls on SoftBank's money. Some of the investors in the first Vision Fund receive interest payments of 7% annually on their stakes, an unusual structure that creates an ongoing need for cash. Some of that has come from sale of stakes...but SoftBank has also borrowed money to fund payouts to investors.

SoftBank also faces the risk that a deal to merge its money-losing U.S. telecom carrier Sprint Corp with T-Mobile US Inc could be blocked by an antitrust lawsuit from U.S. states. If that happens, it will leave SoftBank with an expensive liability, analysts say.

SoftBank's stock has fallen 13% over the past month and is now trading at its lowest level since January. SoftBank's operating cash flow also turned negative last quarter and it could struggle to raise tens of billions of dollars in cash, a Reuters analysis of its balance sheet shows.

SoftBank does not have significant cash on hand to finance the new fund. As of June 30, it had $27.41 billion of cash and cash equivalents on its balance sheet. However, this and other current assets was more than matched by near-term liabilities.

Read the whole article online here: https://premium.kitco.com/news/2019-10-04/SoftBank-s-plans-for-second-mega-fund-hit-by-WeWork-debacle.html

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#SocialMedia being used to manipulate public opinion in more than 70 countries says New report from Oxford Internet Institute

"social networking technologies – algorithms, automation and big data – vastly changes the scale, scope, and precision of how [mis]information is transmitted in the digital age."

• Organized social media manipulation has more than doubled since 2017
•  70 countries using computational propaganda to manipulate public opinion.
• In 45 democracies, politicians and political parties have used computational propaganda tools by amassing fake followers or spreading manipulated media to garner voter support.
• In 26 authoritarian states, government entities have used computational propaganda as a tool of information control to suppress public opinion and press freedom, discredit criticism and oppositional voices, and drown out political dissent.
• Foreign influence operations, primarily over Facebook and Twitter, have been attributed to cyber troop activities in seven countries: China, India, Iran, Pakistan, Russia, Saudi Arabia and Venezuela.

"The manipulation of public opinion over social media remains a critical threat to democracy, as computational propaganda becomes a pervasive part of everyday life. Government agencies and political parties around the world are using social media to spread disinformation and other forms of manipulated media. Although propaganda has always been a part of politics, the wide-ranging scope of these campaigns raises critical concerns for modern democracy."

Read the excerpt for the report, 'The Global Disinformation Order: 2019 Global Inventory of Organised Social Media Manipulation', here: https://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/news/releases/use-of-social-media-to-manipulate-public-opinion-now-a-global-problem-says-new-report/

Download the Full Report here.

#SoftBank & its #VisionFund accounted for +10.5% of known #VC worldwide deal volume so far in 2019.

SoftBank, its nearly $100 billion Vision Fund, and its related investing entities have dealt in over 10.5% of known Venture Capital dollar volume, worldwide, so far in 2019.

https://news.crunchbase.com/news/softbank-dealt-in-tenth-of-worldwide-vc-dollar-volume-so-far-in-2019/

Western #Europeans will never forgive #Israel for the Holocaust, aka, “Guilt-Defensiveness” #AntiSemitism. Book review:

Bari Weiss's book, Antisemitism and the return of history, touches on the classical types of antisemitism with which we are all too familiar. Yet it is the new "Guilt-Defensiveness" AntiSemitism that is most dangerous in the west, especially given the (shady) alliances they have chosen to make. 

 Neo-Nazis, in a way, are easy. We know they wish us dead.

Anti-Semites with PhDs, the ones who defend their bigotry as enlightened thinking, are harder to fight.

On the new Guilt-Defensiveness Anti-Semitism:

The Israeli psychoanalyst Zvi Rex famously remarked, with biting sarcasm, that "The Germans will never forgive the Jews for Auschwitz."

…Rex's formulation about German society punishing Jews because of the memory of the Shoah, which infuses pathological guilt into many Germans, needs to be updated.

In a modernized version of Rex, one might say that "Western Europeans will never forgive Israel for the Holocaust." 

In short, that Western European countries such as France, Sweden, Austrian, Italy and others that were complicit in the Shoah are intensely focused on imposing discipline and punishment on Israel because of their guilt associated with Holocaust. 

This is also terrifying: 

A 2017 German government study revealed that nearly 33 million Germans, out of a total population of 82 million, are infected with contemporary antisemitism–that is hatred of the Jewish state.

The report said, in a section titled "Agreement with Israel-related antisemitism," that 40% of Germans who were polled approved of the following statement: "Based on Israel's policies, I can understand people having something against the Jews."

See the whole review on the Jerusalem Post here: https://www.jpost.com/Diaspora/Book-review-Antisemitism-and-the-return-of-history-603483

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#NYC: #Manhattan Home Prices Drop Most Since 2011

NYC home sales down 8% from a year earlier

First decline in the past 10 quarters and the biggest since the third quarter of 2012.

"It's just more signs that the sellers are capitulating"

In the three months through September, 93.6% of all purchases were at or below the last asking price, the second-highest share since the end of 2011. 

prices are settling at a level anywhere between 10% and 20% below their 2015 highs. 

The homes that sold in the third quarter spent an average of 192 days on the market. 

29% of Manhattan's inventory is priced over $3 million -- yet in the quarter, only 9.7% of closings were in that range.

See the whole piece on Bloomberg here: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-10-02/manhattan-resale-home-prices-drop-most-since-11-as-sellers-cave

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#WeWork: At What Point Does #Malfeasance Become #Fraud? Neumann fired? My God, he got on the last helicopter out of Saigon…

Great interview with @ProfessorGalloway in the New Yorker on #WeWork's « triage » 

« This is a distressed asset in free fall that is inarguably worth less than zero. Because all we have here is an entity burning $700 million a quarter. »

« The market is going to have to decide how thin the lines are between vision, bullshit, and fraud. »

« Adam Neumann fired? He was liberated. This guy just played this perfectly. Could you imagine what his life would be like right now? If he was still CEO? Showing up every day to an office where he had sold $750 million and everybody else was trying to figure out how they were going to pay the rent on the new apartment they had moved into because they thought they had $7 million in We stock? »

« Adam Neumann came in, smoked his own supply, and walked out with three-quarters of a billion dollars about the time that people in hazmat suits showed up. …So he and his family will literally have to go into hiding. There will be threats against his life. There's going to be so much anger here.»

What about « JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs? These guys were about to collect $130 million in fees and then prop up some equity analysts to tell their private-wealth managers in the marketplace that this thing was $40 billion to $60 billion. And according to Goldman, it was worth $60 billion to $90 billion! What does that say about them? »

« What happens to the New York and Chicago commercial-real-estate markets where WeWork was the biggest and the second-biggest tenants? »

« The real toll is that there's somewhere between 5,000 and 15,000 WeWork employees who took a job and a big part of their compensation — the reason they took these jobs was because of equity value. And it's impossible not to count your money 30 days out from an IPO…

« We're probably talking about several thousand people who were going to be millionaires. Now most of them are probably thinking that in the next 30 days there's a one-in-two chance I don't have health insurance. »

« Adam Neumann fired? My God, he got on the last helicopter out of Saigon. »

Read the whole article in the New Yorker Magazine: 

'At What Point Does Malfeasance Become Fraud?': NYU Biz-School Professor Scott Galloway on WeWork

James D. WalshOct. 1, 2019

http://nymag.com/intelligencer/amp/2019/10/marketing-expert-scott-galloway-on-wework-and-adam-neumann.html?__twitter_impression=true

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