I don`t think that the US government or FED has the goal to keep thrillions of US dollars outside the USA,this would be stupid.

BEIJING — The money came from all over China — its wealthy southern and eastern coasts as well as the arid northwest — as thousands of people scrambled to circumvent the country’s strict controls on wealth.

In the end, more than 10,000 people had used an underground bank to effectively funnel $3 billion out of the country before the authorities put a stop to it, Xinhua, China’s state-run news agency, reported on Thursday.

The discovery of the underground bank in Shaoguan, in the southern province of Guangdong, demonstrates the furtive lengths that Chinese citizens go to in order to skirt government limits and get more of their money out of the country.

The sums involved are enormous, large enough to not only affect China’s economy but resonate around the world. Two years ago, a loss of confidence in China’s outlook led many of its people to send their money abroad — a flow that helped drive a $1 trillion drop in China’s stash of surplus foreign money. The exodus was enough to darken the country’s long-held image as a major global economic growth engine.

China appears to have since stemmed the surge of money abroad, thanks to an improved economic outlook and tough new efforts to keep the money at home. But the underground bank bust announced Thursday showed the lengths that the authorities will pursue to enforce limits on money leaving the country.

The Chinese police have detained seven people believed to be involved in the bank, according to the Thursday reports. The authorities discovered 148 “illegal and fraudulent accounts” from the bank, involving more than 10,000 people, the Xinhua report said.

Underground banks are illegal but common in China. According to China’s Ministry of Public Security, underground banks handled more than $137 billion in transactions last year. There are also lawful ways of moving princely sums out of China without surpassing government limits: directing money to casinos in Macau — the only Chinese territory where gambling is legal — as well as using credit cards to buy luxury goods abroad and purchasing insurance policies that can be cashed out overseas.

China imposes strict limits on how much money can leave the country. Those limits help the government keep a firm hand on the value of its currency, and the Chinese authorities credit the limits with helping keep its financial system steady during emergencies like the 1997 Asian financial crisis and the global crisis that began in 2008.

The government sets a $50,000 limit on the money Chinese citizens can move out of the country in a year, though businesses and those making strategic investments can send out much more.

But growing numbers of people began dodging the limits two years ago, when a stock market crash, a surprise government-led currency devaluation and prospects of slowing economic growth led many to seek safer havens for their money.

President Xi Jinping has made it a top priority to keep more money in China. His government has shut down platforms that trade cryptocurrencies; announced controls on outbound investment in property, entertainment and soccer; and imposed curbs on payments overseas.

Much of China’s underground banking activity is centered in cities that border Hong Kong and Macau, special administrative regions of China that are governed by their own laws.

In Shaoguan, the police were alerted to a suspicious bank account that was opened in 2011 in the city by a Mr. Zhong, a resident from the southern city of Zhuhai that borders Macau, according to Guangzhou Daily, an official newspaper. It did not further identify Mr. Zhong. After almost no activity for years, there were 121 transactions involving $15 million in 2016, prompting the authorities to look more closely at who was involved.

Ultimately, the Xinhua report said, the authorities discovered that the people running the underground bank had illegally bought and stole the identity documents of more than 200 people to open the fake accounts that underpinned the enterprise. News reports did not disclose detailed information about how the underground bank worked.

The Shaoguan government and the police did not respond to requests for comment.

The trail appeared to lead to Macau, according to the news reports. The suspicious bank account that prompted the investigation was opened specifically for a gambler in Macau called Mr. Peng to transfer money, Xinhua said. “Several members of the criminal gang” then converted the renminbi into Hong Kong dollars for Mr. Peng, according to the report. Hong Kong has its own currency, which tracks the value of the United States dollar.

The Xinhua report did not offer details about Mr. Peng.

Macau is under pressure to keep a tight rein on capital outflows. Most recently, it installed automated teller machines with facial recognition software to monitor transactions for people using Chinese bank cards, according to Macau Daily Times.

The Xinhua report acknowledged that underground banks are “seductive,” especially for people who struggle to get financing, but warned that “the people will suffer tremendous loss” if the banks abscond or cheat their clients.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/23/business/china-underground-bank-3-billion.html

PayPal CEO Dan Schulman on the war against cash

"I think what we came to the realization of is that the war is really against cash and against waste," Schulman said, speaking from the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. "There's tremendous leakage in the system."

After previously contesting three events in Macau (a Special administrative region of China) since 2012, the event will mark the first that the promotion will hold on Mainland China.[1]

A middleweight bout between former UFC Middleweight Champion Anderson Silva and The Ultimate Fighter: Team Jones vs. Team Sonnen middleweight winner Kelvin Gastelum was expected to serve as the main event.[2]  The pairing was previously scheduled to meet in June 2017 at UFC 212. However, Gastelum was pulled from the bout after he tested positive for Carboxy-Tetrahydrocannabinol (Carboxy-THC) which is a metabolite of marijuana or hashish above the 180 ng/mL allowance by the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) standard.[3] In turn, despite having two months to secure an opponent, Silva and promotion officials confirmed on May 11 that he would not compete at that event.[4][5]

On November 10, it was announced that Silva had failed an out of competition drug test stemming from a sample collected on October 26 and as a result had been pulled from the card.[6] A day later, former middleweight champion and The Ultimate Fighter 3 light heavyweight winner Michael Bisping was secured as a replacement opponent for Gastelum.[7] Bisping had fought 21 days prior to this event at UFC 217, where he lost the championship to former two-time UFC Welterweight Champion Georges St-Pierre.[8] Bisping was serving a medical suspension issued by NYSAC, but as China isn't under the purview of the Association of Boxing Commissions, he was allowed to fight.[9]

On November 18, it was announced that James Mulheron had failed an out-of-competition drug test stemming from sampled collected on November 10 and as a result he was pulled from the card.[10] His scheduled opponent, Cyril Asker, remains on the card and is expected to face promotional newcomer Yaozong Hu.[11]

A pair of promotional newcomers, Liu Pingyuan and Bharat Khandare were expected to face each other at the event. However, Pingyuan pulled out in November and was replaced by fellow newcomer Yadong Song.[12]

The richest 1% now owns more than half of all the world’s household wealth, according to analysts at Credit Suisse. And they say inequality is only going to get worse over the coming years, with millennials having a particularly tough time.

The Swiss bank released its latest Global Wealth Report on Tuesday, together with a statement that contained the immortal phrase, “The outlook for the millionaire segment is more optimistic than for the bottom of the wealth pyramid.”

The research showed that there are increasing numbers of dollar millionaires. This is partly because the strength of the euro has created 620,000 more of them in Germany, France, Italy and Spain (conversely, depreciating currencies in the U.K. and Japan have seen 34,000 and over 300,000 people in those countries respectively lose the status).

But almost half of the new dollar millionaires are in the U.S. itself. “So far, the Trump Presidency has seen businesses flourish and employment grow, though the ongoing supportive role played by the Federal Reserve has undoubtedly played a part here as well, and wealth inequality remains a prominent issue,” said Michael O’Sullivan, CIO for International Wealth Management at Credit Suisse.

Credit Suisse expects to see a 22% rise in dollar millionaires by 2022, from 36 million to 44 million. The problem is, the numbers of adults who have less than $10,000 are expected to shrink by only 4%.

The bank’s researchers see wealth inequality as largely being a result of the financial crisis— it rose across the world between 2007 and 2016, because financial assets were growing faster than non-financial assets. The top 1% started the millennium owning 45.5% of all wealth, and now they have 50.1%.

As for what’s been happening since mid-2016, Credit Suisse described a mixed picture. Non-financial wealth has been increasing “substantially,” but inequality is still rising.

“Despite higher mean wealth per adult, median wealth fell again this year in Africa, Asia-Pacific and Latin America. Our projections for 2022 suggest more pessimistic scenarios for the immediate years ahead,” the researchers said.

“Looking at the bottom of the wealth distribution, 3.5 billion people—corresponding to 70% of all adults in the world—own less than $10,000. Those with low wealth tend to be disproportionately found among the younger age groups, who have had little chance to accumulate assets, but we find that millennials face particularly challenging circumstances compared to other generations,” they wrote.

Essentially, millennials are more likely to be unemployed or earning less, priced out of the housing market, and unable to get a pension. Baby boomers have most of the wealth and the housing, so “millennials are doing less well than their parents at the same age.”

Millennials may be better educated than earlier generations, but Credit Suisse’s researchers said they expected only a “minority of high achievers and those in high-demand sectors such as technology or finance to effectively overcome the ‘millennial disadvantage.'”

http://fortune.com/2017/11/14/credit-suisse-millionaires-millennials-inequality/

That being said, we are not in 2014 and the price is relatively high at a 129 billions $ total valuation of BTC in circulation. Remember when it was in the 200s for a while ? It was a valuation of a few billions, it went up 35 fold.

Also, you must think about that this company has done to the administration that has the authority to stop this merger, the Trump Adminsistration can strike this down and they've been ridiculed by all of the news organizations owned by Time Warner.

I expect this to fail, and fail heavy it will.

Later, the DOJ said AT&T and Time Warner had offered to sell CNN if that would cause DOJ to drop its opposition to the deal.

Novogratz Slams Dimon: Buy Bitcoin Because "We No Longer Trust Financial Institutions"

It must be a sign that cryptocurrencies are becoming mainstream when Bloomberg TV launches the first of a six-part series on this comparatively recent innovation. Setting the scene, Bloomberg replayed comments made in interviews from what it described as “Wall Street sceptics”, including (not surprisingly) JPMorgan Chase’s Jamie Dimon, Neil Dwane of Allianz Global Investors and Severin Cabannes, SocGen’s Deputy CEO. The vignettes were peppered with sound bites like “index of money laundering” and references to tulipmania, as well as the standard establishment narrative of “blockchain over Bitcoin”.

In the studio was high-profile crypto advocate, Mike Novogratz, of Galaxy Investment Partners, who is setting up a crypto investment fund (believed to be in the region of $500 million).

The Bloomberg reporters asked why he’s so bullish on the space when some of his peers, like Dimon et al, are the opposite.


We know Dwane and that’s a bit harsh. However, this was Novogratz’s take on why Bitcoin has value.


Probably the most insightful part of the interview was Novogratz’s explanation about the rationale behind the crypto revolution – which was the perfect retort to the likes of Jamie Dimon and SocGen’s Deputy CEO.


The number of people calling out Dimon for his Bitcoin view is growing. Morgan Stanley's CEO, James Gorman, said that Dimon was wrong about Bitcoin while our favourite pushback (before Novogratz) was Macquarie's head of AsiaPac equity strategy, Viktor Shvets. In "Macquarie Lashes Out At Dimon: "Modern Finance", Not Bitcoin, Is The Real Fraud", we quoted Shvets.


Back to the Novogratz interview and the Bloomberg reporter asked “Is it an investment, or is it a trade?”, citing the theft of Tether tokens overnight and the knock-on effect on Bitcoin volatility.


This didn’t satisfy the Bloomberg anchor who pressed Novogratz “People lost millions of dollars they’re not going to get back. How does that not put the whole model into question?”


After the Tether hack, the Bitcoin price rebounded to a new alltime high.



The Bloomberg reporter noted that Etheruem reached about 35% of crypto market cap earlier this year, before drifting back to less than 20%, while Bitcoin is almost 60%. Novogratz sees Ethereum making a new high shortly.

While Ethereum really had an amazing run, from a dollar two years ago, up to $400 and Bitcoin stayed on the sidelines, then Bitcoin had a big move. I think right now, for first timers entering this market, I think Bitcoin is the name they’ve heard of and that’s really kind of driving that move. Just in the last few days, Ethereum has started to move, I think it’s going to put in a new high soon. There’s a lot of positive things happening in the Ethereum eco system.

Asked about his price projections for the two leading cryptos.


Novogratz would not be drawn on the size of his crypto fund.



People have been interested and receptive.

Bloomberg asked him whether he’d made any bets on the recent plethora of ICOs?


This was too much for one of the Bloomberg reporters which, given Novogratz’s wry smile as he was saying it, was probably the point. He continued.

How about this. There are more people that buy and sell digital clothing than there are that buy and sell Bitcoin and the rest of the cryptocurrencies combined.

And to cries of “What?” from the Bloomberg reporters.

It is a giant market.

Still discombobulated by the size of the skins market, the Bloomberg anchors seemed satisfied that Novogratz had given them some punchy price forecasts. However, they should have pressed him a bit harder as he told Reuters TV a week ago that Bitcoin would hit $10,000 in 3-6 months and $20,000 by the end of 2018, when the crypto market in aggregate would be worth $1 trillion. So, apart from bringing forward his $10,000 forecast slightly, the price projections weren't that punchy.

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-11-21/bitcoin-novogratz-destroys-jamie-dimonbecause-we-no-longer-trust-financial-instituti

Several states have changed laws to allow the technology to be used in property transactions

The real-estate industry is taking its first steps in adopting cryptocurrencies and the technology that backs them in what could eventually produce important changes in the way property is bought and sold.

While noticeable differences might be years or even decades away, several U.S. states already have changed laws to allow the technology to be used in property deals.

Most of the focus in the real-estate industry is on how “blockchain” technology could affect the way property titles are recorded and transferred in the sales process. Blockchain acts as a ledger for who owns a particular bitcoin or other cryptocurrency. Proponents say it can be applied to the process for recording and transferring property titles, providing an efficient and secure way to track who owns a piece of land, an office building or a home.

“If you were to design a [title] system today, it would look a lot more like what people are talking about in terms of recording electronically and through something like the blockchain than the system we have in place now,” said Michael Pieciak, commissioner of financial regulations for Vermont, one of the most aggressive U.S. states in adopting the technology.

Some real-estate companies also are beginning to experiment with using cryptocurrencies for such things as rental payments or even to buy property.

ManageGo, a New York-based company that provides technology to residential property managers, plans to begin enabling people to pay rents with virtual money early next year, according to Chaim Lowenstein, a ManageGo vice president. The apartment-building managers who use ManageGo will be able to offer their tenants the ability to use bitcoin or two other cryptocurrencies, ethereum and litecoin, to pay rent.
“This is just another amenity for this crowd that fits the demographics of people that have dabbled in bitcoin,” said Mr. Lowenstein.
Like other new technologies, blockchain has the potential to be enormously disruptive in real estate. The impact could be biggest in the multibillion-dollar industry that provides title insurance and plays an integral role in most real-estate sales.

As a precaution, many title-insurance companies are studying the use of blockchain to ensure they are “in the drivers’ seat versus being in the passenger’s seat” if these changes take place, said Steven Gottheim, senior counsel of the American Land Title Association, a trade group. “The lesson you can see in the industries that have been disrupted” is that the greatest danger is to companies that “don’t realize new technology is coming,” he said.

Mr. Gottheim said initial tests of the use of blockchain technology for title recording by IBM and startups like R3 CEV look promising. But he pointed out that enormous hurdles face the use of blockchain technology and businesses are in the “really early stages of trying to figure out if this is hype or reality.”

The traditional system of recording property ownership has been centuries in the making. In the U.S., property titles are public documents recorded with roughly 3,600 counties, towns and other jurisdictions. In some cases, the record is available only in writing and can be viewed only by visiting a town clerk’s office.

Title-insurance companies essentially guarantee property owners that their ownership claim to a property is solid. If it isn’t the insurers cover the loss.

Blockchain potentially could do this much more efficiently. “That would be a great thing if we could have all records digitized and available online and available in a low-cost and speedy way of finding them, searching and analyzing them,” Mr. Gottheim said.

A number of startups have jumped into this arena. For example, last year, Amsterdam-based Bitfury Group said it had an agreement with the Republic of Georgia to develop a land-titling registry using blockchain technology.

Several state governments in the U.S. also are paving the way for the use of the new technology. Earlier this year, Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey signed legislation that enables local municipalities to substitute blockchain technology for the conventional method of recording property ownership and sales. “It establishes blockchain as a usable format for smart contracts,” said Patrick Ptak, a spokesman for the governor.
Last year, Vermont enacted a law that said that transactions recorded with blockchain technology “have the presumption of admissibility from an evidentiary perspective,” said Mr. Pieciak. It would allow people to “authenticate a blockchain real-estate transaction whether it’s over a title dispute or divorce proceeding,” he said.

Mr. Pieciak said the legislation is part of an effort by Vermont to encourage financial technology companies to base themselves in the state or to boost their businesses through the use of blockchain technology in a wide range of industries. “We’re looking at ways Vermont could do anything to make our regulatory environment more hospitable,” he said.

Mr. Pierciak said a number of questions remain, such as how mortgages would be incorporated and how title insurance world work. But technically local municipalities in Vermont now have the legal framework to switch to recording deeds using blockchain technology, although none has made that move so far.

Proponents of the new technologies envision a day when crytpocurrencies will be used to buy real estate and blockchain technology will be used to record the transfers. A San Francisco-based startup named Propy in September said a digital currency named “ether” had been used to buy an apartment in Ukraine.

“I think it’s going to happen much faster than everyone anticipated,” said Alex Voloshyn, Propy’s chief technology officer.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/bitcoin-is-creeping-into-real-estate-deals-1511265600

Individual content creators on YouTube may now earn cryptocurrency using the Brave Payment System integrated into the Android web browser. Since the app blocks third-party advertisements and tracking by default, an attention-based reward system was developed so that publishers are still compensated for their content. Brave’s system uses Basic Attention Tokens based on Ethereum and rewards websites based on how often did people access a particular page and how much time was spent viewing the site’s content per session. The contribution is determined by a computer algorithm and is given to publishers on a monthly basis. While the team behind the browser already collaborated with publishers in order to take advantage of its reward system, the new update now allows users to identify specific YouTube content creators that will benefit from their contributions, and they will be paid even if the video is embedded on another website.

In order for publishers to start earning money, their emails should first be verified as Brave authenticates the ownership of a YouTube channel using a straightforward procedure. Publishers will be notified once the contributions from the browser’s users reach an equivalent of $100 in tokens and they can collect the contributions by creating an account on Uphold, a financial service platform that converts cryptocurrency to fiat currency. Brave takes five percent from the contributions made by the users, which is then used to cover infrastructure costs of the service.

Even though the amount of contributions is determined by an algorithm, Brave allows its users to prevent certain websites from getting paid. This can be done by going to the Payments Preference page and toggling a switch located in the publisher browsing history section of the interface. Right now, only the desktop version of the browser can take advantage of the feature, although the firm promised a future update that will integrate mobile browsers into the equation, claiming that another later upgrade will synchronize contributions across multiple devices. To ensure that the contributions are secure and anonymous, Brave utilizes the ANONIZE open source protocol to protect data transmitted over a network, while on-device statistical voting is used to prevent any third party from divulging someone’s viewing habits based on their contributions.



https://www.androidheadlines.com/2017/11/brave-browser-now-allows-youtubers-to-earn-cryptocurrency.html

As a clarification, Buffett went on to say that cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin are “a very effective way of transmitting money, and you can do it anonymously and all that”, but it doesn’t mean much in the grand scheme of things: “A check is a way of transmitting money, too.

Are checks worth a whole lot of money just because they can transmit money?”. He finished his statement with a harsher criticism of Bitcoin, saying that the “idea that [it] has some huge intrinsic value is just a joke, in my view”.