HERE WE GO AGAIN? New U.S. Subprime Boom, Same Old Sins: Auto Defaults Are Soaring.

Subprime car loans have been around for ages, and no one is suggesting they’ll unleash the next crisis. But since the Great Recession, business has exploded. In 2009, $2.5 billion of new subprime auto bonds were sold. In 2016, $26 billion were, topping average pre-crisis levels, according to Wells Fargo & Co.

Few things capture this phenomenon like the partnership between Fiat Chrysler Automobiles NV and Banco Santander SA. Since 2013, as U.S. car sales soared, the two have built one of the industry’s most powerful subprime machines.

Details of that relationship, pieced together from court documents, regulatory filings and interviews with industry insiders, lay bare some of the excesses of today’s subprime auto boom. Wall Street has rewarded lax lending standards that let people get loans without anyone verifying incomes or job histories. For instance, Santander recently vetted incomes on fewer than one out of every 10 loans packaged into $1 billion of bonds, according to Moody’s Investors Service. The largest portion were for Chrysler vehicles.

Some of their dealers, meantime, gamed the loan application process so low-income borrowers could drive off in new cars, state prosecutors said in court documents.

Through it all, Wall Street’s appetite for high-yield investments has kept the loans — and the bonds — coming. Santander says it has cut ties with hundreds of dealerships that were pushing unsound loans, some of which defaulted as soon as the first payment.

This never ends well for the borrowers or for the lenders, although a glut of barely-used cars would be a boon for anyone looking for a great deal.

KEEP CLIMBING: Delta offers Ann Coulter $30 refund after she slams airline for giving her seat to another passenger.

ALLIES: Turkey Begins Bombing US-Backed YPG Positions In Syria.

Tensions between Turkish forces and the YPG have been mounting in the Afrin region in recent weeks: Turkey’s military, which launched an incursion last August into part of northern Syria which lies between Afrin and a larger Kurdish-controlled area further east, has said that it has returned fire against members of YPG militia near Afrin several times in the last few weeks.

Furthermore, last month the Turkish defence ministry slammed the Pentagon decision to arm theYPF, and mocking Washington’s assurances that it would retrieve weapons provided to the YPG after Islamic State fighters were defeated: “There has never been an incident where a group in the Middle East has been armed, and they returned the weapons,” Kurtulmus said. The United States “have formed more than a terrorist organisation there, they formed a small-scale army.”

Then overnight, Ilnur Cevik, a senior adviser to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, spoke to Bloomberg and said that while Turkey has no immediate plans for an operation in the Syrian Kurdish-run region of Afrin, its army is preparing for action and the military buildup on the border is “serious.”

Independent Kurdistan should have been the price for Ankara’s intransigence in 2003. That certainly would have been messy, but not nearly as messy as the current situation.

SARAH HOYT: Teach Your Children Well Part 3: Teach Your Children Quietly.

IT ISN’T AN AUTOPILOT; STOP CALLING IT THAT: Tesla’s autopilot feature blamed for crash.

RAND PAUL: Retaining instead of repealing Obamacare will be Republicans’ undoing.

If we are to subsidize health insurance, why not food? Or water? Or housing? You may respond, yes, but we already do that. You are right we have subsidized, for the poor, food and housing, but we didn’t, until now, attempt to subsidize a market item for all.

With this bill, Senate Republicans declare they have overcome Hayek’s protestations about the pretense of knowledge — the idea that no central planner can know enough to engineer an economy successfully.

With this bill, Senate Republicans declare they have the knowledge to determine and correct prices for millions of Americans who purchase health insurance. Pretense? You bet it is.

Markets are incredibly complex interactions between millions of people in a nearly simultaneous bazaar of trading. No one man or woman possesses that knowledge, so anyone who sets or attempts to set prices for health insurance is doomed to fail.

And mark my words, this Senate Healthcare bill will fail just as its twin Obamacare has, for they suffer from the same pretense of knowledge. No one is smart enough to plan even the simplest of marketplace prices — no matter how much data is available.

Entitlements are just as addicting for politicians of either party as they are for their beneficiaries — a fact Democrats have been counting on for generations.

WILL COLLIER: Jacob Rees-Mogg Is Finally Having His Moment.. “For years, the Tory backbencher was mocked for his old-fashioned mannerisms and stuffy pedigree. Now, with Brexit triumphant and Theresa May struggling, his future looks bright.”

The time was January of 1991, the place the ramshackle debate chamber of the Oxford Union Society. The Union was debating an updated version of the infamous 1933 King and Country motion — “this House will in no circumstances fight for its Queen and Country” — on the eve of the first Gulf War.

My seatmate in the hall was referring to Jacob Rees-Mogg, then a gangly 22-year-old from Trinity College, who rose to speak against the resolution amid considerable cheers — and jeers — from the standing-room-only House. “You won’t believe this kid,” my new friend had told me before the debate. “He looks like Ichabod Crane, but he speaks like Churchill crossed with James Earl Jones.”

The details of the long debate that followed are now, sadly, lost to my memory, but the impression left by Rees-Mogg’s turn in the well is as sharp as it was on that cold and tense evening. While his delivery was every bit as stentorian as promised, the quality of Rees-Mogg’s rhetoric and sly humor far outstripped that of the others on his own side as well as his opponents.

I was struck at the time by the familiar themes at the core of his arguments. Several speakers on the Oppose side rose with arguments based on everything from the moral duty to oppose Saddam Hussein’s brutality (somewhat effective) to exhortations that supporting the war was a patriotic obligation (much less so).

Rees-Mogg, meanwhile, attacked the issue with arguments that could have come from a Reagan or Buckley, citing the need to defend the West’s national interests and giving short shrift to the vapid “no blood for oil” bleating that ignored the realities of trade, economics, and statecraft alike.

To an American conservative in a high bastion of Western left-wing academia, listening to his statement and his sharp responses to would-be gotcha questions from the floor was a delight. As we filed out on the Oppose side (which lost, Oxford being Oxford, despite Rees-Mogg’s best efforts), I told my fellow academic expatriate, “25 years from now, that guy is going to be prime minister.”

Missed it by that much? Maybe, we’ll see.

In the meantime, read the whole thing.

INDEED: Dem Pitches Manufacturing as a ‘Cool’ Career Path. “We have to stop telling every young person that they’re going to go to college.”

JOHN BOLTON: Trump must withdraw from Iran nuclear deal — now.

President Trump has repeatedly made clear his view that the Iran deal was a diplomatic debacle. It is not renegotiable, as some argue, because there is no chance that Iran, designated by Ronald Reagan as a state sponsor of terrorism in January 1984, will agree to any serious changes. Why should it? President Obama gave them unimaginably favorable terms, and there is no reason to think China and Russia will do us any favors revising them.

Accordingly, withdrawing from the JCPOA as soon as possible should be the highest priority. The administration should stop reviewing and start deciding. Even assuming, contrary to fact, that Iran is complying with the JCPOA, it remains palpably harmful to American national interests. It should not have taken six months to reach this conclusion. Well before Jan. 20, we saw 18 months of Iranian noncompliance and other hostile behavior as evidence. The Trump transition team should have identified abrogating the deal as one of the incoming administration’s highest policy priorities.

Within the Trump administration, JCPOA supporters contend that rejecting the deal would harm the United States by calling into question our commitment to international agreements generally. There is ominous talk of America “not living up to its word.”

How convenient that only one side in the Iran deal is expected to do so.

FASTER, PLEASE: US and Australia finish a key round of hypersonic missile tests. “One step closer to a weapon that can strike anywhere within minutes.”

Both the US and Australia have confirmed that they recently completed a series of mysterious hypersonic missile tests. All the countries will say is that the flights were successful, and that they represented “significant milestones” in testing everything from the design assembly to the control mechanisms. They won’t even say which vehicles were used or how quickly they traveled, although past tests have usually relied on Terrier Orion rockets (above) and have reached speeds as high as Mach 8.

The tests are part of the long-running HIFiRE (Hypersonic International Flight Research Experimentation) program, whose first launch took place way back in 2009. They should help bring hypersonic flight to a “range of applications,” according to HIFiRE partner BAE. That could easily include ultra-fast aircraft, but it’s widely believed the focus here is on missiles and similar unmanned weapons. A hypersonic missile would fulfill the US military’s goal of building a conventional weapon that can strike anywhere within an hour, and it would be virtually impossible to stop using existing missile defenses.

Well, this is the 21st Century, you know.

“SEXISM” IS THE LAST REFUGE OF SCOUNDRELS: Jane Sanders cries sexism in bank-fraud accusations as GOP hits back.

Sen. Bernie Sanders’ wife, Jane Sanders, is crying sexism against the man responsible for an FBI investigation into the allegations she fraudulently obtained a loan for the Vermont college she once oversaw.

“I find it incredibly sexist that basically he’s going after my husband by destroying my reputation, and that’s not OK,” Jane Sanders told The Boston Globe.

The FBI investigation began in early 2016 after Brady Toensing, a former official for Donald Trump’s presidential campaign in Vermont and now a candidate for U.S. attorney in the state, filed a complaint alleging Jane Sanders committed bank fraud.

Toensing, according to the Washington Examiner, started researching Jane Sanders in 2014, years before her husband Sen. Sanders, I-Vt., would run for president.

And the kicker: “‘Jane Sanders must think Hillary Clinton’s campaign was sexist for viewing the alleged bank fraud as a major issue, too,’ said Michael Ahrens, Rapid Response Director for the RNC.”

If you strike at Queen Hillary…

CAN THEY DO THAT? Shock: Snopes Factchecks MSM’s Fake News.

WINNING: U.S. Oil Producers Find a Surprise New Market: China.

China, one of the world’s largest oil importers, bought nearly 100,000 barrels of oil a day from the U.S. in the first five months of 2017—10 times the average in 2016. Imports in April and May surged to more than 180,000 barrels a day on average, China customs data show.

The shift has been greeted with enthusiasm by American producers, who have been trying to pull the sector out of a three-year price slump that has sapped profits and jobs. Industry executives and local officials are now scrambling to retool ports in the Gulf of Mexico to accommodate the large vessels needed to ship vast quantities of crude around the globe.

While still far below the figure China pays its top suppliers—Russia, Saudi Arabia and Angola—the bill for U.S. oil could come in well above $1 billion this year, up from $150 million last year, according to customs data.

Looks like we really are on our way to becoming a top 10 oil exporter in the next couple of years.

THE HILL: Break-in reported at GOP Senator’s office.

Sen. Dean Heller’s Nevada office was broken into on Saturday, according to 8 News Now.

A threatening note was left the GOP senator, the station reported, though Las Vegas Metropolitan Police would not confirm the presence of a note.

More to come?

LATE-STAGE SOCIALISM: 1 Person Has Been Killed and 4 Wounded During Voting in Venezuela.

More than 7 million Venezuelans cast symbolic votes rejecting President Nicolas Maduro’s plan to retool the constitution in a strong but not overwhelming showing that left the opposition facing tough choices two weeks before the socialist leader seeks to reshape the country’s political system.

Sunday’s vote was marred by violence when a 61-year-old woman was killed and four people wounded by gunfire after government supporters on motorcycles swarmed an opposition polling site in a church in western Caracas.

Analysts said the 7,186,170 votes for the opposition across Venezuela and the country’s diaspora around the world was an impressive show of support. However, it fell short of the opposition’s 7.7 million-vote showing in 2015 legislative elections and the 7.5 million votes that brought Maduro to power in 2013. Opposition leaders said that was because it was only able to set up 2,000 polling places in a symbolic exercise the government labeled as illegitimate.

It’s impressive that the opposition was able to do this at all, much less come close to Maduro’s inflated total from 2013.

A RETURN TO NORMALCY AT EDUCATION, A RETURN TO CHAOS IN THE SENATE, AND A “RETURN TO SENDER” FROM SOME DOCTOR WHO FANS: All that and more in Liz Sheld’s morning brief.

SCENES FROM RAHM EMANUEL’S CHICAGO: 30 people shot, 3 fatally, in 18 hours in Chicago.

SUSTAINABILITY: Budget Deficit Revised Upward by $100 Billion.

Rick Moran:

The good news is that if the GOP can pass a health care reform bill, the deficit will be a little less, which is better than nothing.

The bad news is that we still have a Congress — and since the president proposed the budget, he’s no better — that refuses to make the hard choices to bring the budget under control.

Yes, it’s hard to reform entitlements, which are only going to add substantially to the budget deficit and national debt over the next decade as Social Security and Medicare run out of money and are forced to draw cash from general revenues.

Democrats are running around the country claiming that “all is well” with entitlements and the GOP only wants to cut them so more people will die. Their irresponsible behavior will only make it that much harder to rein in entitlements when they are already bankrupting the country.

Anything that can’t go on forever, won’t.

OH: Haiti Official Who Exposed The Clinton Foundation Is Found Dead.

The circumstances surrounding [Klaus] Eberwein’s death are also nothing less than unpalatable. According to Miami-Dade’s medical examiner records supervisor, the official cause of death is “gunshot to the head.“ Eberwein’s death has been registered as “suicide” by the government. But not long before his death, he acknowledged that his life was in danger because he was outspoken on the criminal activities of the Clinton Foundation.

Eberwein was a fierce critic of the Clinton Foundation’s activities in the Caribbean island, where he served as director general of the government’s economic development agency, Fonds d’assistance économique et social, for three years. “The Clinton Foundation, they are criminals, they are thieves, they are liars, they are a disgrace,” Eberwein said at a protest outside the Clinton Foundation headquarters in Manhattan last year. Eberwein was due to appear on Tuesday before the Haitian Senate Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission where he was widely expected to testify that the Clinton Foundation misappropriated Haiti earthquake donations from international donors. But this “suicide” gets even more disturbing…

Eberwein was only 50-years-old and reportedly told acquaintances he feared for his life because of his fierce criticism of the Clinton Foundation. His close friends and business partners were taken aback by the idea he may have committed suicide. “It’s really shocking,” said friend Gilbert Bailly. “We grew up together; he was like family.”

Given his connections, his former position, and the whistle he was blowing, Eberwein’s death seems like a big enough story that you’d find it somewhere other than alt-news sites, but as I’m writing this post, the major news outlets have yet to touch it.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: Everything You Think You Know About An Active Shooter Situation Is Wrong.

BRAVO: US kills leader of ISIS in Afghanistan.

Russia’s Only Aircraft Carrier Has a Big Problem.

The Russian Navy will repair its sole aircraft carrier Admiral Kuznetsov, but the massive vessel will not be upgraded or modernized in any meaningful way. Instead, Russia will focus on getting the carrier back into the fleet as soon as possible when the ship goes into overhaul next year in 2018.

“It is a ship repair with replacement of some equipment.” Sergei Vlasov, director general of Nevsky PKB told the TASS news agency.

“Essentially, there is no modernization.”

It will take the shipyard between two to three years to repair Kuznetsov depending on the scope of the work.

Vlasov noted that while the shipyard has completed technical plans to perform the repairs, there is no timeline in place to implement those fixes because a contract has yet to be signed with the Russian Defense Ministry.

One of the reasons that the Kremlin is not authorizing a much more extensive modernization of Russia’s sole aircraft carrier is because the ship needs to be back in the fleet quickly. A deep modernization might drag on for more than ten years given the state of Russian shipyards.

Russia has aspired to serious maritime power since Peter the Great, but geography and poverty have conspired against it.

IRAQI GENERAL: ‘No Army Can Achieve What We Achieved’ in Mosul.

Boasts aside, the real lead is that “about 80 percent of the male and female suicide bombers unleashed by ISIS in the last wave of the successful offensive to retake Mosul were foreign fighters.”

You have to wonder how many of those foreign fighters were Western-born converts, because native Iraqis seem to be tiring of sectarian violence.

BLUE ON BLUE: Black Activists Criticize Gore for Comparing Climate Change Advocacy to Fight Against Slavery.

FLASHBACK: Deroy Murdoch advises, “Dems Need to Houseclean.”

The Saturday before the 2000 election, then-Vice President Al Gore addressed a Pittsburgh church audience. “When my opponent, Governor Bush, says he’ll appoint strict constructionists to the Supreme Court,” Gore said, “I often think of the strictly constructed meaning that was applied when the Constitution was written, how some people [slaves] were considered three-fifths of a human being.”

Perhaps Gore believed the Three-Fifths Compromise was hidden in the 2000 Republican Platform.

I’ve never been able to tell whether Gore is mendacious or merely misinformed.

CULTURAL APPROPRIATION: Acid becoming weapon of choice among teens in London amid growing attacks.

(Absolutely horrible reference in the headline.)