Most of Hillary's emails won't be released until after election

Most of Hillary Clinton’s emails recovered during a Federal Bureau of Investigation probe into practices from her time as secretary of state won’t be made public until after Election Day, according to a new timetable set Friday by a federal judge.
Judge James Boasberg on Friday ordered the State Department to finish processing 1,050 pages of material for release by Nov. 4—just a fraction of what could be as much as 10,000 pages of material....
After the judge’s order, Judicial Watch president Tom Fitton said that “the American people could be deprived of this information at this essential time.”
“This is an absolutely corrupt process the State Department has come up with,” he said, blaming the department for the continuing delays.

FYI: Robert Rubin is part of Hillary's Team

In a 20-page letter to the Inspector General of the Department of Justice, Michael E. Horowitz, Senator Warren asked for an investigation into why the DOJ had failed to indict any of the Wall Street executives that had been referred to it for potential criminal prosecution by the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission (FCIC). In a separate letter, Warren asked FBI Director James Comey for his related files.

The FCIC released thousands of documents in March of this year, showing that it had made multiple criminal referrals to the DOJ. Warren wrote in her letter:

“A review of these documents conducted by my staff has identified 11 separate FCIC referrals of individuals or corporations to DOJ in cases where the FCIC found ‘serious indications of violations[s]’ of federal securities or other laws. Nine individuals were implicated in these referrals (two were implicated twice). The DOJ has not filed any criminal prosecutions against any of the nine individuals. Not one of the nine has gone to prison or been convicted of a criminal offense. Not a single one has even been indicted or brought to trial. Only one individual was fined, in the amount of $100,000, and that was to settle a civil case brought by the SEC.”

This particular paragraph is a Pandora’s Box by a factor of $2.5 trillion. The two individuals Warren refers to who were “implicated twice” in the FCIC’s criminal referrals are Robert Rubin, the former Treasury Secretary in the administration of Bill Clinton, who in the lead up to the crash of Citigroup in 2008 served as Executive Committee Chair of Citigroup’s Board of Directors. (After advocating for the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, which allowed Citigroup to own both an insured depository bank, an investment bank and brokerage firm, Rubin went straight from his post as Treasury Secretary to the Board of Citigroup, where he collected $126 million in compensation over the next decade.)

Scary Putin #386

Capping off a summer in which a substantial part of the Democratic Party’s campaign for president has been accusing Russia of plotting to get the Republican nominee elected, a pair of Democrats who are ranking members on their respective intelligence committees, Rep. Adam Schiff (D – CA) and Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D – CA), are once again, despite any publicly available evidence to support the allegations, presenting claims Russia is hacking the US election as an unquestionable fact.
They went on in the statement to claim that the only “the very senior levels” could’ve ordered such a plot, which again isn’t proven to exist, and followed it up with a demand that Russian President Vladimir Putin immediately stop all efforts to try to hack and/or influence the US elections.

Scary Obamacare

As concerns about the survival of the Affordable Care Act’s markets intensify, the role of nonprofit “co-op” health insurers -- meant to broaden choices under the law -- has gained prominence. Most of the original 23 co-ops have failed, dumping more than 800,000 members back onto the ACA markets over the last two years.
Many of those thousands of people were sicker and more expensive than the remaining insurers expected -- and they’re hurting results. With more of the nonprofits on the brink of folding, the situation for the remaining providers looks dire. Anthem Inc., for example, is facing an estimated $300 million in losses on its exchange business for individual plans this year, after turning a profit in 2014 and almost breaking even on the program in 2015, according to the company.
“These co-ops have attracted, we think, disproportionately high health-care utilizers,” Gary Taylor, an analyst with JPMorgan who follows the industry, said in a telephone interview. Their former members “are now enrolled in these for-profit health plans. That’s been a factor driving the deterioration in their profitability.”

“Are we in an Obamacare ‘death spiral?’” health insurance consultant Robert Laszewski asked in a Sept. 9 bulletin to clients, where he described the grim scenario. In a death spiral, as options for coverage shrink, insurers attract increasingly sick patients and suffer losses. That forces them to raise rates, driving away healthy, profitable customers. Facing more losses, they raise rates again, causing more healthy people to leave, and so on -- until all that’s left are high premiums and a small pool of the unwell.

Small business in crisis

The companies in question may be small, but they represent an outsized share of the U.S. economy. According to the Small Business and Entrepreneurship Council, they account for roughly 50 percent of gross domestic product and more than 50 percent of new job creation — a metric that's closely watched by the Fed in determining whether the economy can withstand a constriction in financing conditions. Yet even though they're contributing a great deal to the economy there remains ignorance about their financial health, Farrell added.
On average, the companies surveyed have just 27 days worth of cash reserves — or money to cover expenses if inflows suddenly stopped — according to the JPMorgan study, which analyzed 470 million transactions by 570,000 small business last year. Restaurants typically hold the smallest cash buffers, with just 16 days of reserves, while the real-estate sector boasts the biggest, at 47 days.
Small businesses attempting to expand (or just keep their head above water) may find it difficult to build up reserves, with daily income outpacing expenditure by just $7, according to JPMorgan's study.

small business and middle class

The CEO of Gallup.com, perhaps the nation’s oldest and most trusted polling company, wrote an op-ed, drawing from fresh polling data, that should give every American pause.
According to Jim Clifton:

The percentage of Americans who say they are in the middle or upper-middle class has fallen 10 percentage points, from a 61% average between 2000 and 2008 to 51% today.

According to the U.S. Small Business Administration, 65% of all new jobs are created by small businesses, not large ones.

Here’s the crisis: The deaths of small businesses recently outnumbered the births of small businesses. The U.S. Census Bureau reports that the total number of business startups and business closures per year crossed for the first time in 2008.

China is still a big problem

A warning indicator for banking stress rose to a record in China in the first quarter, underscoring risks to the nation and the world from a rapid build-up of Chinese corporate debt.
China’s credit-to-gross domestic product “gap” stood at 30.1 percent, the highest for the nation in data stretching back to 1995, according to the Basel-based Bank for International Settlements. Readings above 10 percent signal elevated risks of banking strains, according to the BIS, which released the latest data on Sunday.
The gap is the difference between the credit-to-GDP ratio and its long-term trend. A blow-out in the number can signal that credit growth is excessive and a financial bust may be looming.

Put another way

The Bank for International Settlements warned in its quarterly report that China’s "credit to GDP gap" has reached 30.1, the highest to date and in a different league altogether from any other major country tracked by the institution. It is also significantly higher than the scores in East Asia's speculative boom on 1997 or in the US subprime bubble before the Lehman crisis.
China’s total credit reached 255pc of GDP at the end of last year, a jump of 107 percentage points over eight years. This is an extremely high level for a developing economy and is still rising fast .
Outstanding loans have reached $28 trillion, as much as the commercial banking systems of the US and Japan combined. The scale is enough to threaten a worldwide shock if China ever loses control. Corporate debt alone has reached 171pc of GDP, and it is this that is keeping global regulators awake at night.

Real Estate: How China keeps the party going

Average new home prices in China's 70 major cities rose 9.2 percent in August from a year earlier, accelerating from a 7.9 percent increase in July, an official survey from the National Bureau of Statistics showed Monday. Home prices rose 1.5 percent from July.

But according to Donna Kwok, senior China economist at UBS, the importance of the property sector to China's overall economic health, posed a challenge. It contributes up to one-third of GDP as its effects filter through to related businesses such as heavy industries and raw materials.

"On the one hand, they need to temper the signs of froth that we are seeing in the higher-tier cities. On the other hand, they are still having to rely on the (market's) contribution to headline GDP growth that property investment as the whole—which is still reliant on the lower-tier city recovery—generates…so that 6.5 to 7 percent annual growth target is still met for this year," Kwok told CNBC's "Street Signs."