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Debt Rattle July 25 2025

Jul 252025
 
 July 25, 2025  Posted by at 9:53 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,  52 Responses »


Henri Matisse Harmony in red 1908

 

• Trump Sends So-Called Experts Reeling After Historic First 6 Months (VDH)
• DOJ Forms “Strike Force to Assess ODNI Evidence” (CTH)
• Russiagate Was America’s Other Pearl Harbor – Ted Cruz (RT)
• Epstein vs. Russiagate (J. Peder Zane)
• Kirk To Tucker: Trump Only Has A Short Window To “Smash The Deep State” (MN)
• We’re Close To The War Nobody Wants But Everyone’s Preparing For (Timofeev)
• James Carville Slams Democrats’ ‘Cracked-Out Clown Car’ (Margolis)
• DNI Tulsi Gabbard Holds a Press Conference (CTH)
• Could Obama Be Prosecuted Over the Russian Hoax? A Look at the Law (Spakovsky)
• ‘Russiagate’, Revenge, and The Rotten Core Of US Power (Amar)
• Deputy AG Blanche To Meet With Ghislaine Maxwell On Thursday (JTN)
• “I Want Elon To THRIVE” Trump Says (ZH)
• Candace Owens Responds To Macrons’ Lawsuit Over Transgender Allegations (RT)
• Germany’s €450 Billion EU Tribute: Brussels Demands, Berlin Pays (Kolbe)
• Europe Is Stuck in a Disastrous, Failing Marxist Trap (GI)

 

 

Jesse Tulsi

Powell

Steele

Sydney Powell
https://twitter.com/Real_RobN/status/1948201594287472751

CNN

Subpoena
https://twitter.com/bennyjohnson/status/1948175505586315652

 

 

 

 

For some reason, a lot of longer overviews and assessments today. Let’s follow them. And start positive:

Victor Davis Hanson. Promises made. And more then kept.

• Trump Sends So-Called Experts Reeling After Historic First 6 Months (VDH)

In this first six months of the Trump administration, we’ve entered unknown territory. I guess the best way to term it is there are a lot of known unknowns. We’re doing things we’ve never done before. And our experts think they can predict it, but they’ve been wrong. Let’s take some examples. Usually, tariffs are not a source of revenue because traditional economic orthodoxy says that whatever revenue they generate, they decrease gross domestic product by inflicting attacks on goods. But yet, we don’t know what the profit margin is in these countries. And perhaps the tariffs are not resulting in rising prices. At least they haven’t in May and June. Which suggests, again, that the Germans or the South Koreans or the Chinese were making so much money by exporting to the United States, while protecting their own industry and piling up surpluses, that they could pay tariffs and still remain in our market at a cost-competitive profit.

The result is that we’re getting $26 billion a month and higher. No one anticipated that. Scott Bessent, the treasury secretary, said, “In theory, the year could end with a third of a trillion dollars—$330 billion.” That’s almost 5% of our revenue is coming from tariffs, which we’d thought would be impossible. Another impossibility is usually we’re running a $2 trillion debt. That’s what we were usually told by people. But in the month of May, there were more federal revenues than there were debits. And that was a result of the Department of Government Efficiency cuts and the tariffs and the seasonal increase in federal revenues that come through taxation and other charges against the private sector.

Everybody said, “Well, May’s always a good month. It’s the one good month of the year.” But we haven’t had a surplus since 2017 in any month, which is kind of strange if we’re going to run this huge $2 trillion budget deficit. And while we’re discussing it, more money is coming in than going out. And we have this known unknown about tariffs. Then something’s up. And that something’s up is amplified. When we look at the foreign investment, we were told, $4 trillion, $6 trillion, $8 trillion. That’s a phenomenal number. Nobody has ever had $8 trillion of foreign investment in the United States in one year. The secretary of interior, Doug Burgum, says to us now that the actual income or amount or capital investment from foreign sources of various statuses could be $15 trillion. Economists have ratios for each billion dollars in foreign investment, depending on the nature of the foreign investment, the jobs created. If this were true, it’s a phenomenal number.

He also said something that was quite striking. That the value of U.S. assets that have been untapped—natural gas, coal, oil, timber, rare earth minerals—is somewhere between $100 trillion and $200 trillion. Now, we don’t want to exploit and plunder our countryside, but it’s something to think about, that if we were not buying rare earth minerals from China—and we probably may not be—or we had a mechanism to tap our coal and use it cleanly to help generate the electricity for artificial intelligence. This is unusual. This is crazy: $15 trillion of foreign investment, $200 trillion of unrealized assets. And remember that the $15 trillion is coming from people who were not willing to do that prior to President Donald Trump. They’re doing it in fear of tariffs.

There’s a couple of other things, and that is the military was short anywhere—depending on who you talked to—45,000 to 65,000 recruits. They could only get 50% of their benchmarks. A year ago, at this time, about 50%, only about half of the people were enlisting. But when they changed the ad campaigns, and they said they were no longer going to prejudice recruits for tenure promotion, enlistment, advancement, etc. by their race or gender, and they were going to stress battle efficacy, all of a sudden, recruitment soared.

Nobody thought you could do it in six months. But in less than six months, the military went from, “We’re short 50%. We don’t know what to do. Maybe it’s gangs. Maybe it’s tattoos. Maybe it’s drug use. Maybe it’s obesity. Maybe we’re competing—” to, “I don’t know what happened but all these people have enlisted.” And we all know what happened. They stress what the military is for in their ads and communications. And they got what they wanted. And there’s one other final thing that’s inexplicable. We were letting in up to 10,000 illegal immigrants a day for over a four-year period. It’s controversial how many in total came. But it could be from 8 million to 12 million.

So when Donald Trump said he was going to offer a self-deportation, you get a thousand dollars, you get your way paid for, and you can apply for legal immigration at some future date—if you don’t do this, you’re disqualified for 10 years. And then the “Big, Beautiful Bill” will continue the wall. He put pressure on Mexico to enforce its own borders, to stop this trek northward. We could go through all the things he has done. But we all thought that maybe he could reduce it from 10,000 to 2,000, maybe to 1,000. I thought maybe, “Wow. If he does all this, if he actually forces people and he creates a new deterrence, he might get only 500.” Some months, there’s nobody; 126 people I think it was in May. This is phenomenal. There is no illegal immigration right now, as we speak. That frees the Border Patrol and the new agents that’ll come online and the new Big, Beautiful Bill to round up the 10 million, starting with the 500,000 criminals that former President Joe Biden let in.

Add it all up and the orthodoxy, the conventional wisdom about tariffs, about foreign investment, about our assets that are unrealized, about military recruitment, about illegal immigration, they’ve all gone with the wind. We’re in new territory. All the perceived wisdom is ignorance. And nobody knows what is what, except we’re in a very exciting period. If $9 trillion represents the market capitalization of all of Silicon Valley, you can imagine what $10 trillion to $15 trillion would do to this country. It’s like bringing a new Silicon Valley—in total, one and a half of them—and plopping them down. And when you add in robotics and AI and the efficiency in government regulation, through these cuts and fast-tracking permits, we don’t know where we are, but we might be on the verge of an economic boom.

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“The DC intel silos are built so their lack of sharing creates a natural defense mechanism; there is no cross-reference capability..”

• DOJ Forms “Strike Force to Assess ODNI Evidence” (CTH)

Main Justice has announced the formation of a DOJ strike force to assemble and assess the evidence provided by Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, against former intelligence and government officials. This will require the DOJ to take a new approach, extracting information from multiple silos and then overlaying context to the content therein. That’s essentially the new approach that DNI Gabbard has taken to break down the silo defenses, and this is the first time since I’ve been outlining how they self-protect that someone (DNI) has actually done the extracting and cross-referencing.

– Dept of Justice – WASHINGTON – “Today, the Department of Justice announced the formation of a Strike Force to assess the evidence publicized by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and investigate potential next legal steps which might stem from DNI Gabbard’s disclosures. This Department takes alleged weaponization of the intelligence community with the utmost seriousness. Upon the formation of the Strike Force, Attorney General Pamela Bondi stated: “The Department of Justice is proud to work with my friend Director Gabbard and we are grateful for her partnership in delivering accountability for the American people. We will investigate these troubling disclosures fully and leave no stone unturned to deliver justice.” Don’t underestimate how radical and challenging this type of an approach is going to be.

https://twitter.com/JesseBWatters/status/1948200092365992336

OIG Michael Horowitz never could attempt it (not authorized), SC John Durham was not permitted to do it (not authorized); the House Select Sub-Committee on Govt Weaponization ran away with hair on fire at even the suggestion of doing it (ask me how I know), and no modern internal investigative unit has ever been allowed to extract national security information from multiple IC institutions, and review it in context.

The DC intel silos are built so their lack of sharing creates a natural defense mechanism; there is no cross-reference capability. DNI Tulsi Gabbard has the unique ability -due to her position- of reaching into each IC silo regardless of their effort to stop her. That’s what has led to this point. If the DOJ is successful, things could change; but that’s a very big ‘if’. The entire mechanism of the USIC, led by defenses from the Senate Intel Committee (Cotton), will do everything to stop any internal extraction and review of their silo information. “National security” claims will run rampant. This will be a heavy lift requiring Executive Office support and coordination at every level.

https://twitter.com/nicksortor/status/1948198774779568451

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“..a moment of “infamy” in American political history..”

• Russiagate Was America’s Other Pearl Harbor – Ted Cruz (RT)

US Senator Ted Cruz has compared the launch of the Trump-Russia investigation to the 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, calling it a moment of “infamy” in American political history. The Texas Republican made the remark on Fox News on Wednesday, accusing former President Barack Obama’s administration of lying to the public and using federal agencies to undermine Donald Trump’s presidency. ”December 9 should be a day that lives in infamy,” Cruz said, referencing the date in 2016 when the FBI opened its inquiry and the famous wording Franklin D. Roosevelt used in a speech following a surprise Japanese attack on the US naval base in Hawaii. “That’s a moment when senior members of our government decided to lie to the American people and sabotage President Donald Trump.”

During a meeting on December 9, 2016, then President Obama ordered National Security Council officials to discard intelligence assessments that found no Russian involvement in Trump’s campaign and replace them with claims blaming Moscow based on fabricated data, according to declassified documents released by US National Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard last week. Trump had defeated Democratic rival Hillary Clinton in the presidential election that November.

The scandal led to the years-long Trump-Russia probe known as ‘Russiagate’. It severely damaged relations between Moscow and Washington, leading to sanctions, asset seizures, and a breakdown in normal diplomacy. Russia has not yet commented on Gabbard’s revelations. It has however consistently denied allegations that it interfered in the 2016 US election. The Kremlin has described the Russiagate affair as a politically motivated smear campaign intended to justify sanctions and worsen relations with Moscow.

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I’ve mentioned this a few times: the MSM have revived Epstein -after a 4-year silence- so they have a counterweight to Tulsi’s accusations. When will we start calling it Epsteingate?

• Epstein vs. Russiagate (J. Peder Zane)

It’s a tale of two stories. The first concerns President Trump’s back-peddling on pledges to release government files connected to the long-dead pervert Jeffrey Epstein. The second involves the growing evidence that President Obama and his top officials spread the false narrative casting Trump as a treasonous agent of Russia, one that hobbled his first term. While the Epstein saga is a tawdry kerfuffle with no larger significance, the new revelations about the Russia hoax provide scorching detail on one of the biggest political scandals in American history. Guess which one the legacy media is running with? Which one is it trying to bury? The answer is obvious. If only stating that was enough, and we could just laugh away the legacy media’s predictable and partisan coverage.

They are not serious people. Unfortunately, they are deadly serious in their continuing efforts to malign Trump while covering up their own malfeasance. The contrasting coverage of the Epstein and Russiagate stories is just the latest example of a media that has lost its way. First, Epstein. During the last few weeks the legacy media has covered that story as if it were Watergate. The New York Times, for example, published more than 50 articles and opinion pieces on Epstein and Trump between July 16 and July 23. Much of the rest of the legacy media has followed suit. Except for a salacious, if inconsequential, story spoon-fed to the Wall Street Journal – that Trump may have contributed a bawdy letter to a birthday book for Epstein 23 years ago – none of them broke news or advanced the story.

The last blockbuster article written about Epstein was Lee Fang’s May 21 piece for RealClearInvestigations revealing how officials in the U.S. Virgin Islands – including Democratic Rep. Stacey Plaskett – appear to have benefitted from and shielded Epstein, who brought young girls to a private island he owned there. Yes, the Epstein saga is a legitimate story. Despite legacy media claims to the contrary, there was a cabal of wealthy and influential men who cavorted with Epstein – and almost certainly some of them had sex with young girls. But it is unlikely that proof of such criminal acts is detailed in material in the government’s possession. Nevertheless, the Trump administration should release what it has and let the chips fall where they may for these amoral folks who tied themselves to a disgusting person.

Or Trump should forthrightly explain why that is a bad idea. A full account may be hard, given a Florida federal judge’s ruling yesterday that the law “does not permit” the release of secret Epstein grand jury testimony as requested by the DOJ. It is telling that the recent wall-to-wall coverage focuses so much on Trump. The irony is that he appears to be one of the few stand-up guys in the Epstein story. The two men were apparently friends at one time, – though probably not all that close given the lack of articles linking the two men before Trump ran for office. We do know that Trump was one of the few people who distanced himself from Epstein long before the financier pleaded guilty to sex crimes in 2008. Trump barred Epstein from Mar-a-Lago before his arrest, supposedly because of his creepy behavior toward a minor.

There are also reports that Trump may have been the one who alerted the authorities to Epstein’s predations – not, perhaps, out of conscience but because of a real estate dispute. While the legacy news organizations pile on to the Epstein story, they are downplaying the recent revelations detailing the Obama administration’s efforts to push the Trump/Russia hoax. In their telling, his administration declassified a batch of new documents to distract from the Epstein scandal and to seek retribution against his perceived enemies. Whatever Trump’s motivations, the newly disclosed documents are significant. As Aaron Maté reported this week for RealClearInvestigations, they show that the official “confirmation” of the Russiagate hoax – the Intelligence Community Assessment completed in the January 2017 and reports by Special Counsel Robert Mueller and the Senate committee investigating the issue – “all excluded the intelligence community’s own secretly identified doubts and evidentiary gaps on the core allegation of Russian meddling.”

The intricate timeline of events Maté details makes this point abundantly clear: Suspicions that Russia interfered in the 2016 election were repackaged as purported facts after Trump’s stunning win. We do know that emails stolen from the Democratic National Committee were published in the summer and fall of 2016 by Wikileaks. But, Maté notes, a September 2016 intelligence assessment reportedly “had no hard evidence that Putin ordered the theft of Democratic Party material as part of an influence campaign to help Trump.” Maté’s previous reporting for RCI has also shown that there is still no proof that Russia removed any emails from the DNC servers or passed them along to anyone else. That assessment was ignored after Trump’s victory in November. It is also clear that President Obama was a key player in advancing the false narrative of Russian interference.

Obama – who had been briefed that summer about Hillary Clinton’s plans to falsely cast Trump as a Kremlin stooge to deflect from her email scandal – requested a new intelligence assessment in December 2016. It was to be a rush job he wanted to get out before leaving office. That report, crafted largely by CIA Director John Brennan, suppressed FBI and NSA doubts about Russian interference. Obama went further. On Jan. 5, 2017, he held an Oval Office meeting with various figures, including FBI Director James Comey. Two days later, Comey briefed President-elect Trump about the Steele dossier – a phony and sloppy bit of opposition research paid for by Clinton’s campaign that suggested Trump and his associates had been compromised by the Russians. That briefing became the news hook anti-Trump media needed to quickly report on the bogus dossier, launching the Russiagate probes.

Two points: First, Russia probably did try to interfere in the 2016 election. But the actual facts we know – that they purchased a handful of ads on social media, and that they probably hacked into the DNC servers, albeit without proof that they removed emails published by Wikileaks – do not support the Mueller Report’s famous claim regarding a “sweeping and systematic” effort. More importantly, Democrats and the legacy media are trying to pretend that we spent three years debating Russian meddling. In fact, their efforts were aimed at painting Trump and his associates as treasonous allies of a foreign enemy. It was never about interference, but collusion.

I believe this was the worst scandal in American history because unlike Watergate – where wrongdoing was largely confined to the White House – Russiagate’s cancer metastasized from the White House to the CIA, the FBI, and the legacy media. The lack of accountability for these actions gave Democrats and their media allies a sense of impunity. It is why they felt free to lie so brazenly about other things, including Hunter Biden’s laptop and Joe Biden’s mental acuity. Those forces are so invested in hiding their own duplicity that they can never admit the truth. While the Russiagate and Epstein stories are clearly of different orders, Democrats and the legacy media insistently push a mirror image of the news, claiming the new revelations about corruption at the highest reaches of the government are simply Trump’s effort to “deflect” from Epstein. You can’t make this up – except they can.

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“I know what the grassroots want. I know what President Trump wants. We need perp walks. We need arrests..”

• Kirk To Tucker: Trump Only Has A Short Window To “Smash The Deep State” (MN)

Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk believes that President Trump only has a short timeframe to take decisive action and score a meaningful victory over the Deep State before it’s too late.Kirk told Tucker Carlson that the clock is ticking and “We need accountability. If we do not smash the administrative state and the deep state in the coming six to 12 months, then we’re actually not going to.” “I know what the grassroots want. I know what President Trump wants. We need perp walks. We need arrests,” Kirk further urged.

Referring to the bombshell documents on Obama’s role in the Russia hoax dropped by Tulsi Gabbard last week, Kirk noted “I believe that all roads lead back to the intel agencies on all this stuff. And so Tulsi is now getting under the hood.”“This revelation of Russiagate is massive. It’s huge. God bless her for doing this,” Kirk contiuned, adding “I know the president cares about it personally, as he should, because how much of his life and his energy was just spent defending against a fabrication? Not a fabrication of the Chinese Communist Party, by the way. Not a fabrication of our adversaries, [but] a fabrication of our own government.”

“That’s what makes this so sinister, is that our own government was turned against the duly elected president. So here we are now in the year of our Lord 2025. Who’s running the United States government?” Kirk continued adding “President Trump, he is now the hunter. He was the hunted back in the first term.” However, Kirk warned that if progress is not rapidly made then “We’re not going to bring this entire intelligence apparatus to heel,” asserting “We have to lance the boil because it’s gone so out of control.”

“I can tell you, they are deeply fearful of this movement. They know that we are aware. They notice that they know that we are noticing things, that we’re seeing patterns, that we know how powerful the intelligence agencies have become,” Kirk further urged. “So that’s why I think Russiagate really matters, is that it’s a way to hold them accountable to see how dark and honestly demonic their activities have become,” he emphasised. Kirk described the remaining months of 2025 as “Hopefully an opportunity to fulfill a mandate that President Trump ran on I still know [he] believes to this day, which is to bring the deep state to hopefully smash it or, [at] the very least, bring it back into balance.”

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A one-on-one result of Russiagate.

• We’re Close To The War Nobody Wants But Everyone’s Preparing For (Timofeev)

US President Donald Trump’s recent push for peace in Ukraine highlights a troubling reality: the options for resolving the conflict are narrowing. Kiev continues to rely on NATO military support, while member states are ramping up defense spending and bolstering their arms industries. The Ukraine war may yet spark a broader confrontation between Russia and NATO. For now, the chances remain low – thanks, in large part, to nuclear deterrence. But how strong is that deterrent today? It’s difficult to gauge the role of nuclear weapons in modern warfare. Their only combat use – the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 – occurred under vastly different political and technological conditions. Nonetheless, most international relations experts agree that nuclear weapons serve as powerful deterrents.

Even a small nuclear arsenal is seen as a shield against invasion: the cost of aggression becomes unthinkable. By this logic, Russia, as a nuclear superpower, should be nearly immune to external military threats. The use of nuclear weapons has become a political and moral taboo – though military planners still quietly game out scenarios. The dominant belief holds that nuclear weapons are unusable – and that no rational actor would challenge a nuclear-armed state. But is that belief grounded in reality? For Russia, this is becoming an increasingly urgent question as the risk of direct confrontation with NATO – or individual NATO members – grows, especially in the context of Ukraine. There are political flashpoints aplenty. Both Russia and NATO have made their grievances known.

Whether these tensions erupt into conflict will depend not just on intent, but on military-industrial capacity and force readiness. And these are changing fast. Russia has expanded defense production since 2022. NATO countries, too, are rearming – and their collective industrial base may soon surpass Russia’s conventional strength. With that shift could come a more assertive posture – military pressure backed by material power. Several pathways could lead to a NATO–Russia war. One scenario involves direct NATO intervention in Ukraine. Another could stem from a crisis in the Baltics or elsewhere along NATO’s eastern flank. Such crises can escalate rapidly. Drone strikes, missile attacks, and cross-border incursions are now routine. In time, NATO regulars – not just volunteers – could be drawn in.

Could nuclear deterrence stop that? At first glance, yes. In a direct clash, Russia would likely begin with conventional strikes. But the war in Ukraine has shown that conventional weapons, even when effective, rarely force capitulation. NATO possesses Ukraine’s defensive tools – but at greater scale. Its societies are less prepared to endure casualties, but that could change with sufficient political mobilization and media messaging. Russia has amassed significant military experience – especially in defensive operations – but NATO remains a formidable opponent.

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“Constipated. Leaderless. Confused. A cracked-out clown car. Divided. These are the words I hear my fellow Democrats using to describe our party as of late. The truth is they’re not wrong..”

• James Carville Slams Democrats’ ‘Cracked-Out Clown Car’ (Margolis)

Let’s be honest here: The Democratic Party is a train wreck, and famed party strategist James Carville is screaming it from the rooftops. I’ve given him a lot of flak for torching his credibility by confidently predicting a Kamala Harris victory—but credit where it’s due; this time, he’s not wrong. In a scathing New York Times op-ed, Carville called his party a “cracked-out clown car”—and let’s face it, he hit the nail on the head. The Democrats are bleeding voters, hemorrhaging credibility, and spiraling into irrelevance with no clear leader or message. Carville’s attempt to patch this sinking ship is bold but delusional, and it’s a perfect snapshot of a party too broken to fix itself. Buckle up, because this is a masterclass in liberal denial.

Carville’s diagnosis is spot-on: “Constipated. Leaderless. Confused. A cracked-out clown car. Divided. These are the words I hear my fellow Democrats using to describe our party as of late. The truth is they’re not wrong: The Democratic Party is in shambles.” His evidence? Well, he points to the shocking nomination of Zohran Mamdani, a far-left socialist, for New York City mayor as proof of the party’s problems. Mamdani’s win isn’t just a fluke; it’s a symptom of a deeper rot—generational and ideological divides that have Democrats eating their own. Older and more pragmatic party members like Carville see pie-in-the-sky promises of economic utopias as undeliverable, while the younger, radical wing demands fealty to woke causes like defunding Israel over Gaza. Good luck uniting that mess.

But here’s where Carville’s plan goes off the rails. He thinks the Democrats need a “savior” to swoop in and save the day, like Barack Obama in 2008 or Bill Clinton in 1992. The Democratic Party is steamrolling toward a civilized civil war. It’s necessary to have it. It’s even more necessary to delay it. The only thing that can save us now is an actual savior, because a new party can be delivered only by a person — see Barack Obama in 2008 and Bill Clinton in 1992. No matter how many podcasts or influencer streams our candidates go on, our new leader won’t arrive until the day after the midterms in November 2026, which marks the unofficial-yet-official beginning of the 2028 presidential primary contest. No new party or candidate has a chance for a breakthrough until that day.

Really? A knight in shining armor to rescue a party that’s alienated half the country with open borders, skyrocketing prices, and identity politics on steroids? Carville’s banking on a mythical figure to emerge after the 2026 midterms. That’s not a strategy; that’s wishful thinking combined with the admission that he believes nobody on the theoretical Democrat Party bench for 2028 has a prayer of winning. So yes, he’s right about one thing: The party’s in shambles. But his solution—waiting for a political unicorn—isn’t just delusional, it’s an insult to voters who are fed up with Democrat overreach. While they wait for a fairy tale comeback, President Trump is getting real results—securing the border, growing the economy, and leading with strength.

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I’ve hinted at Trump apologizing to Putin over Russiagate.

“The timing does not appear to be accidental. President Trump gives Russia 50 days to come to the negotiation table and end the conflict in Ukraine. A few days later, DNI Tulsi Gabbard begins releasing information that shows both President Trump and President Putin being framed by the U.S. Intelligence Community.”

• DNI Tulsi Gabbard Holds a Press Conference (CTH)

Today, Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Tulsi Gabbard declassified and released the 2020 House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence report (HPSCI), that outlines their investigation into the Intelligence Community Joint Analysis Report (JAR) of 2016 and the Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) that followed. I know that’s a lot of acronyms, however, the key element of Director Tulsi Gabbard’s release today is to underscore just how fraudulent the JAR/ICA created in 2016 and 2017 was. The JAR/ICA report was fabricated by the CIA and Intelligence Community to give the appearance of Russia interfering in the election. The declassified HPSCI report takes that fraudulent intelligence analysis apart, step by step.

The JAR/ICA was also used to justify President Obama expelling Russian diplomats, confiscating Russian property, targeting Russian officials for sanctions, and imposing a series of sanctions against various Russian entities, individuals, groups and organizations. All of the Obama’s Russian targeting effort was part of an enhanced IC op to give additional patina of credibility to the fraudulent premise. In many ways, Russia was collateral damage created by a domestic USA political intelligence operation run by Obama allies in order to attempt to destabilize the incoming administration of President Donald Trump. The framing of both Donald Trump and Russia is going to be a key facet to accept as time moves forward on this story. Tulsi Gabbard gives a press conference. WATCH:

I will have more on the Tulsi release of the HPSCI report shortly. In the interim… The timing does not appear to be accidental. President Trump gives Russia 50 days to come to the negotiation table and end the conflict in Ukraine. A few days later, DNI Tulsi Gabbard begins releasing information that shows both President Trump and President Putin being framed by the U.S. Intelligence Community. It would appear that President Trump is setting a new baseline for a relationship with Russia. However, first the tables need to be cleared of the historic manipulation and targeting that structurally, and fraudulently, set the course of conflict and antagonism in U.S-Russia relations.

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It’s not so easy. Presidents are well protected. Since the recent Supreme Court involvements in Trump cases, probably more than ever.

• Could Obama Be Prosecuted Over the Russian Hoax? A Look at the Law (Spakovsky)

Can former federal officials be prosecuted in the Russia-Trump collusion hoax? That is the question arising from the recent actions of Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard. Gabbard has released declassified documents over what she says was a “treasonous conspiracy” that was “directed by President [Barack] Obama” to provide “manufactured intelligence” that “Russia had helped Donald Trump get elected.” This was in the face of contradictory intelligence analyses that said the exact opposite: that “Russia had neither the intent nor the capability to try to ‘hack the United States election.’” Gabbard says she is sending these documents to both the FBI and the Justice Department with the hope that they will criminally prosecute those involved in this hoax. That includes, in addition to Obama, former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, former CIA Director John Brennan, former FBI Director James Comey, and former national security adviser Susan Rice.

If we assume, just for the sake of argument, that what Gabbard is saying is correct and that the internal, formerly classified communications and perhaps other evidence support those claims, what federal criminal statutes might cover what is alleged to have occurred? Two things should be kept in mind. First, a very thorough, intensive investigation is required to ensure that all the relevant facts and possible evidence pertaining to this claim are uncovered. Second, there is no point in federal prosecutors going forward with a prosecution unless they are confident they have a reasonable chance of obtaining a conviction. Despite Gabbard’s understandable language about a “treasonous conspiracy,” the federal treason statute, 18 U.S.C. § 2381, seems like a pretty far stretch.

As bad as the allegations are—the misuse of federal power to target a political opponent and eventual president—the statute only applies to someone who “levies war against” the country or “adheres to [its] enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere.” What about the sedition statute, 18 U.S.C. § 2384? That criminal statute applies to “two or more persons” who “conspire to overthrow, put down, or to destroy by force the Government of the United States … or to oppose by force the authority thereof, or by force to prevent, hinder, or delay the execution of any law of the United States.” Again, even if we assume the truth of these allegations, there was no force involved in what happened. On the other hand, what are the statutes that former special counsel Jack Smith attempted to use against Trump?

He indicted Trump under 18 U.S.C. § 371 (Conspiracy to Defraud the United States); 18 U.S.C. § 1512(k) (Conspiracy to Obstruct an Official Proceeding); 18 U.S.C. § 1512(c)(2) (Obstruction of and Attempt to Obstruct an Official Proceeding); and 18 U.S.C. § 241 (Conspiracy Against Rights). The description Smith gives in the original grand jury indictment to justify using these particular federal criminal statutes seems to fit Gabbard’s description very aptly. Here is that description—just substitute Clapper, Brennan, and company for Trump as the defendants (changes are in brackets): So for more than two months following election day on November [8, 2016], the Defendant[s] spread lies that there had been outcome-determinative fraud in the election [by the Russian government in conspiracy with the Trump campaign] and that [Hillary Clinton] had actually won.

Those claims were false, and Defendant[s] knew that they were false. But the Defendant[s] repeated and widely disseminated them anyway—to make [their] knowingly false claims appear legitimate, create an intense national atmosphere of mistrust and anger, and erode public faith in the administration of the election [and the legitimacy of the Trump presidency]. Remarkable resemblance to Gabbard’s allegations, isn’t it? Were the alleged conspirators obstructing an official proceeding? Last year in Fisher v. U.S., the Supreme Court held that prosecution under that statute requires showing that a defendant impaired the availability or integrity of documents used in an official proceeding, which includes creating false evidence. That could apply here if official intelligence reports were falsified as is alleged and that became part of the official investigation.

The federal fraud statute Smith was using is very general and applies to those conspiring to defraud the United States “in any manner or for any purpose.” But the use of this fraud statute by Smith was very questionable. As my colleague John Malcolm has pointed out, in recent cases “the Supreme Court has taken a dim view of more amorphous theories of what constitutes fraud against the United States.” In a unanimous opinion in 2023 in Ciminelli v. U.S., the court held that “Federal fraud statutes criminalize only schemes to deprive people of traditional property rights,” like money or property. They don’t “vest a general power” in the federal government to enforce its view of “integrity in broad swaths of state and local policymaking.” The serious misbehavior here doesn’t seem to meet that requirement.

And a “Conspiracy Against Rights?” That statute covers conspirators who “injure, oppress, threaten, or intimidate any person … in the free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege secured to him by the Constitution or laws of the United States, or because of his having so exercised the same.” This statute was part of the Enforcement Act of 1871, also known as the Ku Klux Klan Act, and was designed to stop the violence against newly freed blacks in the South. Applying it to Trump for merely questioning the outcome of the 2020 election was a gross misuse of the statute. Could it be applied to the actions of Brennan, Clapper, and other alleged conspirators? Perhaps. But the statute had never been applied in this manner before Smith tried to misuse it.

Finally, to the extent any of these alleged conspirators lied about what they did when they were testifying before Congress, that is a potential violation of 18 U.S.C. § 1621. This federal statute makes it a crime for an individual under oath to “testify, declare, depose, or certify truly … any material matter which he does not believe to be true.” The biggest problem any investigation conducted by the Justice Department faces is the federal statute of limitations. All of this is alleged to have happened at the end of 2016 and in 2017, more than five years ago. That is significant because the general federal statute of limitations for most crimes, 18 U.S.C. § 3282, is five years.

There are exceptions. There is no statute of limitations on treason, espionage, or capital crimes such as murder, but that is not the situation here. Additionally, for those hoping that the evidence would be sufficient to prosecute Obama, that also is highly unlikely to happen. Recall that last year, the Supreme Court held in Trump v. U.S. that presidents have absolute immunity from federal criminal prosecutions for actions taken within the scope of their official duties while president. If all the facts alleged are true, was Obama acting within the scope of his constitutional authority as president? Maybe not but trying to prove that in a court of law in order to overcome the Supreme Court’s holding of his presumptive immunity would be an almost impossible task.

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“Just ask that crackhead, porn addict, and shady “businessman” from an infamous clan, who is currently not in prison but giving expletive-laden interviews instead.”

• ‘Russiagate’, Revenge, and The Rotten Core Of US Power (Amar)

Be real: It is not hard to see that America – as it really exists, not the ‘dream’ version – is neither a democracy nor a country with genuine rule of law. That’s because democracy worth the label is impossible, for starters, with elections awash in private money and a bizarre Electoral College making sure that Americans do not, actually, have votes of even numerically equal weight when electing their single most powerful official, the president. The rule of law can only exist where citizens are equal before laws that apply to everyone in the same, just manner. This is a challenge everywhere, but the US is an almost comically egregious case of legal bias, obscurantism (masquerading as limitlessly re-interpretable case law), and inequality by status, wealth, ethnicity, and skin color. Just ask that crackhead, porn addict, and shady “businessman” from an infamous clan, who is currently not in prison but giving expletive-laden interviews instead.

The US, simply put, does not operate the way it claims to operate. It takes an extraordinary amount of naivete – on the scale of believing in Santa Claus or an honest Vladimir Zelensky – not to notice that much. What is more difficult to figure out is how politics and power actually do work in America and, most of all, who is really in charge. We have, for example, recently witnessed a presidency in which a severely senescent Joe Biden claimed to be but clearly could not be in command. So, who was? And who is in general? That, ultimately, is perhaps the single most disturbing question raised by recent developments around the rotting corpse of “Russiagate” (aka Russia Rage). In its heyday – between 2016 and about 2020 – “Russiagate” was the shorthand for a conspiracy theory that dominated US politics and mainstream media, causing mass hysteria.

Its details were exceedingly complicated but its core was extremely simple: the claims that Russia had manipulated the American presidential elections of 2016, that it had done so to facilitate the first victory of Donald Trump, and finally that Donald Trump’s team had colluded with Russia. The power of this preponderantly factually false and entirely misleading narrative was such that it overshadowed much of Donald Trump’s first presidency and contributed greatly to a catastrophic and very dangerous decline in the always challenging relationship with Russia. Indeed, there even is a plausible connection to be made between the mass madness of “Russiagate” and the reckless policy of provoking and waging a proxy war against Russia in Ukraine. Now, Trump is back for a second term and bent on revenge against his detractors not only but especially over “Russiagate.”

In his usual refreshingly candid style, he has announced that “it is time to go after people,” fingered former president Barrack Obama for “treason,” and gleefully shared an AI-generated video showing Obama being arrested in the White House. Just before that typical Trump outburst, his Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, released a freshly declassified report – produced in early 2017 by the intelligence committee of the House of Representatives – that addresses what really happened in 2016 when “Russiagate” was initially invented. This release was clearly meant to be a sensation: Gabbard accompanied it with press statements and a detailed thread of X posts bringing out its most explosive aspects. Among them, the key finding is that Russia did not work to make Trump president. Boom: the basis of “Russiagate” gone, just like that.

And who was to blame? Gabbard made clear that “Russiagate” was not a cluster-fiasco born of mere incompetence but a monster intentionally produced and carefully nurtured. She accused “top national security officials,” including FBI Director James Comey, CIA Director John Brennan, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper as well as Obama himself of deliberately creating and spreading the impression of Russian election meddling in favor of Trump by manipulating the actual, contradictory findings of the intelligence agencies. Gabbard used strong language: a “coup” against Trump, the “weaponization of intelligence,” a “treasonous conspiracy,” and a “betrayal concerning every American.” Those mainstream media, such as the New York Times, that are among the worst offenders in spreading the “Russiagate” hoax have already pounced on this language to, in essence, pooh-pooing Gabbard’s charges as hyperbolical.

Don’t fall for that deflection. Gabbard’s way of presenting her case does have a political edge. Of course it does. Duh. And if they wish, the old “Russiagaters” can nitpick over her terms to their heart’s content. But that makes no difference to the fact that what has happened is an enormous blight on US politics, implicating the intelligence services as well as other state agencies, the media, and, indeed, former President Obama. Gabbard may be laying it on a little thick (or not, actually), but even without any embellishment, the fabrication of “Russiagate” was the real, humungous scandal. And it must be dealt with at long last.

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Another meeting today. After that he’ll talk to the press I’m sure.

• Deputy AG Blanche To Meet With Ghislaine Maxwell On Thursday (JTN)

Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche is set to meet Thursday with Jeffrey Epstein accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell, according to a news report. Blanche will meet Maxwell in Tallahassee, Fla., where she is serving a 20-year sentence for child sex trafficking and related offenses, anonymous sources told ABC News. The reported meeting comes amid bipartisan furor over the Trump Justice Department effectively shutting down any further investigations related to Epstein, a financier and convicted sex offender who died in prison amid more charges related to additional sex crimes. Among the lingering questions who were Epstein’s close, powerful friends and-or on his purported “client list.” President Trump was friends with Epstein before he was convicted in 2005 in Florida of sex crimes.

Maxwell helped find women, some of them minors, for Epstein. “I anticipate meeting with Ms. Maxwell in the coming days,” Blanche said Tuesday. “Until now, no administration on behalf of the department had inquired about her willingness to meet with the government. “President Trump has told us to release all credible evidence. If Ghislane Maxwell has information about anyone who has committed crimes against victims, the FBI and the DOJ will hear what she has to say,” the deputy attorney general explained.

Maxwell’s lawyer, David Oscar Markus, said Tuesday, “I can confirm that we are in discussions with the government and that Ghislaine will always testify truthfully. We are grateful to President Trump for his commitment to uncovering the truth in this case.” House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer on Wednesday subpoenaed Maxwell to sit for a deposition at the Federal Correctional Institution Tallahassee on Aug. 11.

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Of course he does. Elon went off the rails, and his rocker, but he’s still a unique asset. It’s just that Trump has an entire country to run, and that’s too large of a picture for Musk.

• “I Want Elon To THRIVE” Trump Says (ZH)

Today former President Donald Trump denied accusations that he plans to harm Elon Musk’s companies, such as Tesla and SpaceX, by cutting off federal support. Responding to recent speculation, Trump posted on Truth Social: “Everyone is stating that I will destroy Elon’s companies by taking away some, if not all, of the large scale subsidies he receives from the U.S. Government. This is not so!” He added, “I want Elon, and all businesses within our Country, to THRIVE, in fact, THRIVE like never before! The better they do, the better the USA does, and that’s good for all of us.” “We are setting records every day and I want to keep it that way” Trump added.Though Trump had previously threatened to revoke billions in government subsidies to Musk’s ventures, his recent statements mark a softer stance.

The two have had a turbulent relationship in recent weeks, with tensions rising after Musk’s departure from the Department of Government Efficiency. Despite their past alliance, Trump emphasized his broader commitment to American business success. It was reported over the past week that President Trump had expressed a willingness to harm Musk’s companies by targeting their federal funding and contracts. Following a public feud between the two men—intensified after Musk left his government advisory role—Trump reportedly suggested he could retaliate by canceling contracts with Musk’s businesses, including SpaceX.WSJ reported that after tensions between President Trump and Elon Musk escalated in early June 2025, the Trump administration began reviewing SpaceX’s multibillion-dollar government contracts to assess potential waste and whether any could be canceled.

This move followed Trump’s public suggestion that terminating Musk’s federal deals would be an effective cost-cutting measure. The General Services Administration asked several agencies, including the Defense Department and NASA, to compile detailed spreadsheets—known as “scorecards”—on SpaceX’s active contracts, evaluating their financial value and whether any competitors could fulfill the same roles. However, after reviewing the data, officials concluded that most of the contracts were essential to national security and space exploration, making them difficult to terminate.

SpaceX’s dominance in the launch and satellite sectors left the government with few viable alternatives. Despite ongoing frustrations and scrutiny, the company continued securing major contracts, including a $5.9 billion Pentagon deal for 28 national-security launches. SpaceX’s proven track record, reusable rocket technology, and critical role in programs like Crew Dragon and Starlink have solidified its position as a cornerstone of U.S. space and defense operations—even amid political friction. Most recently, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said she did not believe Trump supported federal agencies contracting with Musk’s AI company, xAI, which had just secured a $200 million deal with the Department of Defense.

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The Fench president can’t win in a French court, but thinks he can in a US court?

• Candace Owens Responds To Macrons’ Lawsuit Over Transgender Allegations (RT)

American commentator Candace Owens has vowed to fight a defamation lawsuit filed by French President Emmanuel Macron and his wife Brigitte, after the conservative Youtuber repeatedly claimed the first lady was transgender. The lawsuit, filed earlier this week in a US court, accuses Owens of spreading “false and defamatory claims” – including that Brigitte Macron was born male, that the couple are blood relatives, and that Emmanuel Macron is a product of a CIA mind control program. According to the filing, the allegations were made “to promote her independent platform, gain notoriety, and make money,” and amounted to “relentless bullying on a worldwide scale.”

In a video posted to her YouTube channel on Wednesday, Owens shared a message intended for Brigitte Macron with her 4.5 million subscribers: “You were born a man and you’ll die a man,” adding that she is “fully prepared to take on this battle on behalf of the entire world” and that she will see the French president’s spouse in court. The Macrons filed a 219-page lawsuit in the US state of Delaware earlier in the day, alleging 22 counts of defamation against Owens. The complaint includes 99 pages of factual claims and evidence such as Brigitte Macron’s childhood photos, birth records, and documentation of her three children with her first husband. The document says Owens has turned the couple’s life “into fodder for profit-driven lies.”

Suing the podcaster was “the last resort,” as she ignored all requests to stop her activities, Macron’s lead counsel Tom Clare told CNN. Owens has repeatedly attacked Mrs. Macron on social media. In 2024, she posted a video titled “Is France’s First Lady a Man?” Earlier this year, she shared an investigation called “Becoming Brigitte.” The rumors about Brigitte date back to 2021, when Amandine Roy and Natacha Rey posted a four-hour video alleging she was born a man. However, this July, the Paris Appeals Court overturned the fines put on the bloggers following Mrs. Macron’s 2022 lawsuit. The court ruled out the women acted in “good faith” and that their allegations were an expression of belief.

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Europe will be much poorer than anyone today can imagine. Simply because of their politics. Totally preventable.

• Germany’s €450 Billion EU Tribute: Brussels Demands, Berlin Pays (Kolbe)

Political centralism doesn’t come free of charge. On the path toward the United States of Europe, Brussels is entangling itself in a web of overreach, control mania, and interventionism. The invoice for this arrogance is being handed down to the outposts of Eurocracy. Celebration in Berlin. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz proudly presented what he called a comeback for Germany’s depression-plagued economy this Monday. Under the deeply original (read: painfully clichéd) slogan “Made for Germany”, 60 of the country’s top corporations showcased their already planned investments as a kind of aggregated act of economic liberation. “Germany is back,” Merz posted on X – grandiose, juvenile, and more cringe-inducing than inspiring. The reality of the German economy paints a different picture.

The labor market has already tipped into decline, with more than 100,000 industrial jobs set to be eliminated this year. A record wave of bankruptcies and a dramatic capital flight round out the portrait of an economic policy in freefall. How far Merz’s corporate pep rally strays from the economic facts is made clear by the country’s net direct investment figures: In 2024, Germany saw €64.5 billion in net capital leave the country. In 2023, it was €67.3 billion; in 2022, a staggering €112.2 billion. Germany is bleeding. And the real scandal is this: the country’s political leadership and, for practical purposes, let’s call them its “economic elite,” refuse to speak about the true causes of this collapse. A summit truly “Made for Germany” would call for an exit from the suicidal green policy agenda.

It would advocate a drastic reduction in bureaucracy and regulatory coercion, a return to affordable Russian gas, and the revival of nuclear power – the pillars of any serious industrial policy. Contrast this PR stunt with the hard numbers, and it becomes obvious why the event faded into oblivion – uninspired, flat, and quickly archived as another placebo moment of postmodern politics. Merz, for his part, was likely already preoccupied with another headache. While he toasted in Berlin, half of Europe was reacting to the ballooning budget proposal by his party colleague, EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen. She had just introduced her draft for the EU’s Multiannual Financial Framework (MFF) for 2028 to 2034: a whopping €1.82 trillion.

No one can accuse Brussels of lacking ambition. €100 billion is earmarked to keep the proxy war in Ukraine afloat, while another €650 billion is slated for the EU’s green subsidy machine – a lifeline for its artificial eco-economy. The proposed budget would increase by €750 billion, or nearly 50%. Unlike China’s five-year plans, the EU dreams in seven-year cycles. A true central planner’s paradise. If enacted, this mega-budget would trigger a massive increase in member-state contributions – with Germany, as usual, stuck with the lion’s share. Based on its economic size, Germany would be expected to contribute around 25% of the total, or approximately €450 billion.For comparison: Germany currently pays around €30 billion annually into the EU budget and receives €14 billion in return – a net loss of €16 billion per year.

Under the new framework, Berlin’s net contribution could rise to as much as €50 billion per year – more than triple today’s level. Cynics might argue that Germany could absorb the extra debt without much fuss. After all, Berlin is planning to borrow €90 billion next year anyway – what’s another €26 billion? Relative to GDP, it’s just a 0.6% bump in spending. A small price to pay for stabilizing Europe’s central authority. In the lingo of German politics: a Democracy Tax.And since no one in Brussels or Berlin seems to care about the Maastricht debt rules anymore, the path is clear for another round of debt-financed Euro-socialism.Merz, together with von der Leyen and French President Emmanuel Macron, is united in the belief that consolidating power within Brussels is the only way to keep Europe geopolitically relevant.

Merz is increasingly revealing himself as a committed central planner. With him, there will be no market-based reset – no return to constitutional economics. The German government’s current budget plan shows that Berlin is on board. The crisis will be “managed” through massive borrowing and state-directed investment of fictitious capital. To resolve Brussels’ budget dilemma, we can expect a two-pronged solution: new EU taxes and increased national contributions. I’ll go ahead and predict what’s coming: in the next few months, we will see a coordinated push to eliminate the veto rights of individual EU member states in budget negotiations.

Let Viktor Orbán stomp his feet in Budapest all he wants – the advance of European-style socialism won’t be stopped by ox or donkey. One imagines CDU members quietly humming The Internationale under their breath. Once that veto hurdle is cleared, national debts could be pooled under the umbrella of the EU Commission, monetized via the European Central Bank, and camouflaged by a digital Euro – all in an effort to halt the economic hemorrhaging of the Eurozone. The Ukraine conflict serves as the ideal justification for this massive wave of public credit creation.

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“..seem destined to diverge ever more sharply. By 2023, US GDP per capita had climbed to $82,770, exactly double the EU’s $41,420..”

• Europe Is Stuck in a Disastrous, Failing Marxist Trap (GI)

In a world where shifting economic forces are redrawing the global balance of power, the trajectories of the United States and the European Union over the coming decade (2025-2035) seem destined to diverge ever more sharply. By 2023, US GDP per capita had climbed to $82,770, exactly double the EU’s $41,420. America’s lead rested on average annual real GDP growth of 2.2% between 2010 and 2023; productivity gains of roughly 14%, and research-and-development spending equal to 3.4% of GDP. Add to that a remarkably flexible labor market, modest demographic growth (0.5% per year) and, since 2019, energy self-sufficiency. The EU tells a different story: average annual real GDP growth of barely 1.3%, a mere 7% rise in hourly productivity, a working-age population that shrinks by about one million a year, and an energy-dependence rate still hovering around 58%.

“Ah, but….” retort the socialists of every political hue — and in Europe they exist in every political party — “you cite average income, not median income.” Median income, the point at which 50% earn less and 50% earn more, is indeed lower than the mean in the United States. Inequality is more pronounced in the US than in Europe. Yet their reply, presented as though it settled the debate, is itself part of Europe’s predicament. In Europe, inequality is generally treated as an evil, a moral abomination; therefore material equality, even if it means, as in the former Soviet Union, that no one (except senior party members) has anything, is elevated to the status of an ideal good. At 17, as first-year law student, I had the opportunity to interview André Molitor, former chief of staff to King Baudouin of Belgium. Molitor, a gracious left-wing Catholic, confided that the single thing he truly despised was inequality; his dream was for “fewer rich and fewer poor.”

True material equality is a myth. The “real equality” championed by communists and socialists of every stripe has simply never existed. Hand every European €100,000 today, and by tomorrow there would already be a handful of tycoons — perhaps even an Elon Musk or two — alongside those who squandered everything, with the vast majority scattered somewhere in between. Equality, as a moral value, has served largely as a pretext for socialism — take from Peter and give to Paul — all while funding a sprawling, parasitic apparatus of “redistribution” that provides little opportunity or incentive to succeed or to keep what one has earned. Europe’s elevation of material equality may well be its most disastrous bequest to itself. With ironclad consistency, the continent advances toward greater equality — in increasing misery and squalor.

The baseline projection for 2035 at current growth rates shows that if current trajectories persist — 2% annual growth in the United States versus 1% in Europe — the average American income will exceed $100,000 by 2035, while Europe’s will remain around $50,000. Carriage drivers in New York’s Central Park or dog-walkers in Beverly Hills will soon earn more than French physicians and German engineers — not metaphorically, but in cold cash. Even taking into account the differences in inflation and purchasing power between Europe and the US — the cost of living is lower in Europe — the transatlantic gap is immense and growing.

Under alternative scenarios — a European technological renaissance, or conversely a severe geopolitical shock for the United States, the ratio rarely falls below 2:1. America’s productivity growth, energy production and R&D investment remain decisive. Plainly stated: absent a political sea-change, Europe is on a path of swift decline, notwithstanding genuine strengths such as longer life expectancy. Per-capita GDP — imperfect yet inescapable — crystallizes a transatlantic chasm. Europe is becoming to the USA what Greece was to Rome: a charming open-air museum. Is it inevitable? Hauling Europe out of the mire of socialism, in all its guises, would demand two transformations so radical they verge on the unimaginable.

Read more …

 

 

 

 

Power bill


Optimus

Scott

Bean
https://twitter.com/HJB_News__/status/1948384161107972544

Balance impossibile

 

 

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Live it Up and Love it Up

Apr 282018
 
 April 28, 2018  Posted by at 12:20 pm Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , ,  14 Responses »


Alberto Giacometti Tête Noire 1957

 

Trump Can Come. But Let Him Know Britain Won’t Stand For His Bigotry, is the headline of an article for the Guardian by Owen Jones. It’s just one of many articles, and one of many ways, I could use to point out what’s wrong in our world. In a TV appearance on ITV he apparently added:

“At the end of the day, if he comes – no one is saying he should be barred from the country by legal means – we’re saying we will take to the streets and say we reject racism, bigotry and will stand for the values most people in this country believe in.” Jones went on to insist “most” of the United Kingdom are against President Trump so it was in the country’s best interest to stand up for their beliefs.

That got him a lot of flack from right wing viewers, who see him as ‘far left’. But it doesn’t matter if he’s left or right, he’s just terribly wrong. Because his own country, Britain, is as we speak exposing itself ever more as the racism and bigotry capital of the world. Who then are Britons to protest perceived racism and bigotry in someone who’s not British?

Jones should focus on cleaning up his own pig sty before speaking out about Trump, because if he doesn’t, he himself is a bigot. As are all his fellow countrymen and women who are planning to protest with him on Friday July 13 when Trump visits. You really think you don’t have enough to do at home? Or are you just trying to divert attention away from that?

 

I don’t want to read Jones’s article, because I already know what’s in it. Jones is part of the echo chamber that feeds off itself on a 24/7 basis with every word Trump speaks and every move he makes. Why read any of it anymore? The problem of course is that the chamber has made any and all constructive discussion impossible about all things Trump that badly do need such discussion.

And not only do they increasingly lose the fake discussion they try to energize all the time, they are giving birth to a whole new development that expresses a deep fatigue with the echo chamber and its machinery. Not based on left vs right, but on echoes vs thinking.

We find that the Democrats routinely rig their own primaries, and Nancy Pelosi isn’t even trying to deny it. Upcoming lawsuits, discovery and investigations will reveal ever more not-so-fine details about the Dems. And then they will end up in the same position as Owen Jones: clean up after your own pigs first, and then perhaps you can speak.

 

So what do we -predictably- get on the heels of this? We get people who are ‘supposed’ to be in the echo chamber, but escape from it. Too deafening, too blinding to think for one’s own. We get Candace Owens and Kanye West, who only have to cast a sliver of doubt on their supposed roles of “every black person must vote for Hillary, and denounce Trump”. Or else.

We get writers like Caitlin Johnstone and Jim Kunstler, themselves miles removed from anything right-wing, expressing the hope they derive from Kanye et al. Simply because what he says doesn’t emanate from the NYT-WaPo-CNN cacophony. People who like me would much rather address where Trump goes wrong, but find that as soon as they do, their words are sucked up by, and lost within, that same cacophony.

Which has monopolized the discussion, and thereby made it impossible. There is no space for our voices, no space for nuance, no space for questions. They’ll come after Kanye with all they got, but they must be careful. If the Dems lose the black vote, they’re done and toast, and going after Kanye will look a lot like going after all blacks. They can try and channel Obama, but would he dare go after Kanye?

Whose message, in no more than few handfuls of words, is simple: love conquers all. Or in old Jamaican: Live it Up and Love it Up. How do you credibly attack that? Even if he uses those words to support Trump? It won’t be easy. And then they will see more prominent black voices sound sympathetic to Kanye, and thereby to Trump. Ain’t life a bitch?

Caitlin Johnstone really got stung by the happy fever:

 

Happy New Universe Day

Could something big be in the works? Something which transcends all our little echo chamber walls and ideological boundaries, which comes not from the repetitive thought loops in our minds but from our deep evolutionary drive to survive? I hope so. And call me naive and deluded if you like, but right now I’m seeing plenty of reasons to hope.

 

And Kunstler is not that far behind:

 

Counter-#Resistance?

Speaking as a white cis-hetero mammal, I’m not quite as dazzled by the president, but it’s a relief to see, at last, some small rebellion against the American Stasi who have turned the public arena into a giant holding pen for identity offenders — though it is but one corner of the triad-of-hysteria that also includes the Hate Russia campaign and the crusade against men.

This nonsense has been going on long enough, while the country hurtles heedlessly into a long emergency of economic disarray. Next in line after Kanye and Candace, a popular Twitter critter name of Chance the Rapper endorsed Kanye endorsing Candace, more or less, by tweeting “black people don’t have to be Democrats.”

[..] Of course, the whole Kanye / Candace dust-up may be forgotten by the middle of next week, and the country can go back to gaslighting itself into either a new civil war or world war three. Candace seems to have drive, guts, and stamina and there’s no sign that she’s going to shut up. Won’t some Ivy League university please invite her to speak, just to see what happens?

 

That’s right, resistance against the resistance, and not from some right-wing bunch of nuts. But from people who are fed up with being told what to think and do and write. Kanye and Candace have now become the voices for everyone who’s not completely deaf yet. And it’s in the nick of time.

Did Trump start WWIII? No, the US bombed a few sheds in the desert. Did Trump bring Kim and Moon around the table? He certainly played a major role in that. Should he get a Nobel Peace Prize for that? Hell, why not, they gave one to Henry Kissinger, and Barack Obama. So why not Trump and Xi and Kim Jong-Un?

A new world, a new universe even? Do we need those? But it won’t be “forgotten by the middle of next week” either. There are far too many people who don’t want any steenking echo chamber to tell them what to think anymore. Who see them for the pig sties they are, trampling in their own filth.

 

For Britain to hit the streets to protest Trump’s alleged bigotry, racism, misogyny is so completely nuts it’s hard to find what to say, in view of their own government’s treatment of their own fellow citizens, let alone ‘foreigners’ like the Yemeni’s bombed to shreds with weaponry that same government sells to Saudi Arabia.

If you live in that kind of climate and you think protesting Trump is the thing to do, you probably deserve the government you got. But yes, Britain has a long history of longing to be held superior to other people(s), and the more than longing is shattered, the more they seem to want it. The US is not much different, if at all. The French suffer from it too. A superiority complex born of fear.

That’s what a ‘journalist’ like Owen Jones should be writing about. About how his own people can solve their own problems. Until then, not another word about Trump.

As for America? They have Kanye and Candace and Scott Adams now. That should suffice to help them along on the path to smashing up the echo chambers that cause so much physical and mental damage. Think for yourself. Don’t let a newspaper or TV channel think for you.

As for Trump, you can’t read or watch any story that’s negative about him anymore and think it has credibility. And they did that to themselves, the overpaid NYT/CNN/MSNBC crews. They didn’t need any help.

Meanwhile, all politicians on all sides in both the UK and US are the very people you should least want in their positions. It’s what our political systems determine: sh*t floats to the top. And until we separate politics from money altogether, that’s not going to change.

I’ve always steered clear of that whole Kardashian clan, they make me shiver, and all they stand for. But wouldn’t it be simple logic for them to wind up in the White House? First a game-show host, then a Facebook family? When it comes to that, Britain is far behind.

 

 

Debt Rattle April 28 2018

Apr 282018
 
 April 28, 2018  Posted by at 8:21 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , , ,  4 Responses »


Edgar Degas At the Milliner’s 1905-10

 

• Happy New Universe Day (Caitlin Johnstone)
• Counter-#Resistance? (Jim Kunstler)
• North Korea Says Historic Summit Opens ‘New Era For Peace’ (AFP)
• Jumping The Great White Shark Of Bubble Finance (David Stockman)
• Structural Racism At Heart Of British Society, UN Human Rights Panel Says (G.)
• Brexit Failure Looks More Likely Every Day (Ritholtz)
• Mayday on May Day? Trump Steel Tariff Deadline Looms (R.)
• Donald Trump and the Next Crash (Nomi Prins)
• US Issues New Warning To China On Its Handling Of Intellectual Property (BBG)
• China Is Bolstering Lenders Before A New Assault On Shadow Banking (BBG)
• World’s Central Banks Just Can’t Quit on Currency Intervention (BBG)
• Hawaii Takes Historic First Step Toward Creating ‘Utility of the Future’ (RE)
• Fukushima is Now Officially Worse Than Chernobyl (CP)
• EU Votes To Ban Bee-Killing Pesticides (AFP)
• The Hills Are Alive With The Signs Of Plastic (G.)

 

 

Kanye brings hope.

• Happy New Universe Day (Caitlin Johnstone)

I’m not sure what this is, but it’s definitely different. A bunch of tweets and videos by Mike Cernovich, Scott Adams and Kanye West have been dancing in an unexpected way that has conservatives now talking about a shift in consciousness transforming the way humanity functions in the near future. Liberals and leftists are scoffing at it of course, but it’s definitely a thing, and in my opinion it’s downright fascinating. The MAGA crowd has always impressed me with its ability to energetically and spontaneously unify behind a single theme as a group, like a flock of birds or school of fish changing direction together on a dime. There are certainly worse things they could pour their collaboration into than manifesting a spiritual revolution.

And who the hell am I to say they’re wrong about that? It’s not like we’ve got a choice anyway; either our species will change the way it functions or we’ll wipe ourselves out via nuclear holocaust or climate catastrophe within a few decades, no matter how loudly and smugly we scoff at the guys in MAGA hats. If humanity is going to take a last-ditch, evolve-or-die leap into the unknown and unprecedented, now would surely be the time to do it. If a bunch of right-wingers get it into their heads that humanity is undergoing a spiritual transformation, that certainty could be all it takes to tip us into the shift we all know we need to make anyway.

Could something big be in the works? Something which transcends all our little echo chamber walls and ideological boundaries, which comes not from the repetitive thought loops in our minds but from our deep evolutionary drive to survive? I hope so. And call me naive and deluded if you like, but right now I’m seeing plenty of reasons to hope.

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“Candace seems to have drive, guts, and stamina and there’s no sign that she’s going to shut up. Won’t some Ivy League university please invite her to speak, just to see what happens?”

• Counter-#Resistance? (Jim Kunstler)

Who hit Kanye with that white privilege stick? The rapper / fashion maven / theologian / Kardashian arm candyman sent chills through the Twitterverse when he declared himself, somewhat elliptically, off-the-bus of the Progressive #Resistance movement and an admirer of the Golden One in the Oval Office. This came in his endorsement of YouTube blogger Candace Owen, who happens to not be down with the cause of the national victim lottery. Both Kanye and Candace have apparently crossed some boundary into a Twilight Zone of independent thought. Many probably wonder how they are able to get out of bed in the morning without instructions from Don Lemon.

Speaking as a white cis-hetero mammal, I’m not quite as dazzled by the president, but it’s a relief to see, at last, some small rebellion against the American Stasi who have turned the public arena into a giant holding pen for identity offenders — though it is but one corner of the triad-of-hysteria that also includes the Hate Russia campaign and the crusade against men. This nonsense has been going on long enough, while the country hurtles heedlessly into a long emergency of economic disarray. Next in line after Kanye and Candace, a popular Twitter critter name of Chance the Rapper endorsed Kanye endorsing Candace, more or less, by tweeting “black people don’t have to be Democrats.”

The horror this thought aroused! Slavery, these days, it turns out, has a lot of appeal — maybe not so much for laboring in the canefields under the noonday sun as for serving juleps in the DNC plantation house. It happened that Kanye’s mom was a college professor, Chance’s dad was an aide to Chicago Mayor Daley (Jr.), and later worked in Mr. Obama’s Department of Labor. Candace describes her childhood home in Stamford, CT, as “very poor,” but she rose far-and-fast out of college to become an executive on Wall Street in her twenties. What they seem to have in common is being tainted with bourgeois values, horror again!

[..] I dunno about the perpetually scowling Kanye, with his periodic mood problems and spotlight-stealing antics on stage, or Chance the Rapper’s artificial hood raptures, but Candace makes the argument for the value of a common culture that might bind us together as a nation of individuals, not hostile tribes, starting with a language that everybody can understand. Of course, the whole Kanye / Candace dust-up may be forgotten by the middle of next week, and the country can go back to gaslighting itself into either a new civil war or world war three. Candace seems to have drive, guts, and stamina and there’s no sign that she’s going to shut up. Won’t some Ivy League university please invite her to speak, just to see what happens?

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Yeah, we’ll have to wait and see. But Kim does what his people want, and more importantly what his father wanted.

• North Korea Says Historic Summit Opens ‘New Era For Peace’ (AFP)

North Korea on Saturday hailed its summit with the South as a “historic meeting” that paved the way for the start of a new era, after the two leaders pledged to pursue denuclearisation and a permanent peace. The official KCNA news agency carried the text of the leaders’ Panmunjom Declaration in full and said the encounter opened the way “for national reconciliation and unity, peace and prosperity”. In the document, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and the South’s President Moon Jae-in “confirmed the common goal of realising, through complete denuclearisation, a nuclear-free Korean Peninsula”. But the phrase is a diplomatic euphemism open to interpretation on both sides.

Pyongyang has long wanted to see an end to the US military presence and nuclear umbrella over the South, but it invaded its neighbour in 1950 and is the only one of the two Koreas to possess nuclear weapons. Analysts warn that previous displays of inter-Korean affection and pledges by the North ultimately came to naught. For years, Pyongyang insisted it would never give up the “treasured sword” of its nuclear arsenal, which it says it needs to defend itself against a possible US invasion. But it has offered to put it up for negotiation in exchange for security guarantees, according to Seoul – although Kim made no public reference to doing so at Friday’s spectacular summit. In a separate report, KCNA said the two leaders had a “candid and open-hearted exchange of views” on issues including “ensuring peace on the Korean Peninsula and the denuclearisation of the peninsula”.

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“..Fully 96% of Amazon’s $5.0 billion of LTM operating income was accounted for by its cloud services business..”

• Jumping The Great White Shark Of Bubble Finance (David Stockman)

Wall Street has now truly jumped the shark – the one jockeyed by Jeff Bezos. Last night Amazon reported a whopping 41% plunge in free cash flow for the March 2018 LTM period compared to prior year. Yet it was promptly rewarded by a $50 billion surge in market cap – with $10 billion of that going to the guy riding topside on the Great White Shark of Bubble Finance. That’s right. Amazon’s relatively meager operating free cash flow for the March 2017 LTM period had printed at $9.0 billion, but in the most recent 12 months the number has slithered all the way down to just $5.3 billion. And that’s where the real insanity begins. A year ago Amazon’s market cap towered at $425 billion – meaning that it was being valued at a downright frisky 47X free cash flow.

But fast forward a year and we get $780 billion in the market cap column this morning and 146X for the free cash flow multiple. Folks, a company selling distilled water from the Fountain of Youth can’t be worth 146X free cash flow, but don’t tell the giddy lunatics on Wall Street because they are apparently just getting started. Already at the crack of dawn SunTrust was out with a $1900 price target – meaning an implied market cap of $970 billion and 180X on the free cash flow multiple. At this point, of course, you could say who’s counting and be done with it. But actually it’s worse – and for both Amazon and the US economy.

That’s because Amazon is both the leading edge of the most fantastic ever bubble on Wall Street and also a poster boy for the manner in which Bubble Finance is hammering growth, jobs, incomes and economic vitality on main street. Moreover, soon enough a collapsing Wall Street bubble will bring the already deeply impaired main street economy to its knees. So Amazon is a double-destroyer. [..] Fully 96% of Amazon’s $5.0 billion of LTM operating income was accounted for by its cloud services business (AWS). The e-Commerce juggernaut, by contrast, posted just $188 million of LTM operating income, which amounts to, well, 0.1% of sales on a computational basis. But we’d round that to zero – especially because Amazon’s e-Commerce business was already almost there in the year ago period when its margin on sales came in a tad higher at 0.6%!

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No kidding.

• Structural Racism At Heart Of British Society, UN Human Rights Panel Says (G.)

The disproportionate number of deaths of black and brown people in incidents with the police shows that structural racism remains rooted in the fabric of British society, a panel of UN human rights experts has said. The panel cited data from the Metropolitan police showing a disproportionate number of minority ethnic people – particularly those of African or Caribbean descent – dying due to excessive use of force by the state. Noting that there had never been a successful prosecution of a police officer for a death in police custody, the panel said: “This points to the lack of accountability and the impunity with which law enforcement and state agencies operate.”

The warning from members of the UN human rights council comes before a 12-day visit to the UK by E Tendayi Achiume, the special rapporteur on racism, beginning on Monday. “The deaths reinforce the experiences of structural racism, over-policing and criminalisation of people of African descent and other minorities in the UK,” they said. “Failure to properly investigate and prosecute such deaths results in a lack of accountability for those individuals and state agencies responsible, as well as in the denial of adequate remedies and reparation for the families of the victims.” The panel pointed particularly to the disproportionate use of stun guns. People from black and minority ethnic backgrounds were three times more likely to be subjected to the use of such weapons by police, they said.

The members added: “People of African descent with psychosocial disabilities and those experiencing severe mental or emotional distress reportedly face multiple forms of discrimination and are particularly affected by excessive use of force.” A report last year by David Lammy, the Labour MP for Tottenham, found racial disparities across the criminal justice system. He has consistently said that young black men feel as though they are living in a police state and that a different standard of policing is applied to black youths, compared with whites.

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Me, I predict a giant mess.

• Brexit Failure Looks More Likely Every Day (Ritholtz)

Today, I will violate one of my favorite principles, and hereby make this prediction: No Brexit! In other words, the U.K. will not exit the European Union. By 2023, we will look back at the entire ridiculous affair as if it were a rediscovered lost episode of “Fawlty Towers.” Soon after the referendum in which Brits unwisely voted to leave the EU, I suggested there was a 33% chance that Brexit wouldn’t occur. Now, I raise that to 75%, and with each passing day of incompetence shown by Prime Minister Theresa May’s administration, the probabilities move higher.

With that disclosure out of the way, I’d like to explain the thinking behind this not-so-bold forecast. From the very beginning, I have been a skeptic that a full Brexit would occur. The concept was simply so foolish and self-destructive that the reasonable expectation was cooler heads would prevail. But that was a modest assumption and didn’t anticipate the feckless May government making a bad situation even worse. There seem to be several ways this can, and probably will, fall apart. In order of likelihood (recognizing a combination of any and all of these is possible):

1) Doing nothing
2) Snap parliamentary election leading to a May loss
3) New referendum
4) Ireland/Scotland make it too complicated
5) Europe makes it impossible

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The EU is ready for a fight.

• Mayday on May Day? Trump Steel Tariff Deadline Looms (R.)

While more than 100 countries take a day off for May Day, U.S. President Donald Trump will spend next Tuesday deciding whether to extend a largely U.S.-China trade standoff into a more global dispute. In a week featuring a Federal Reserve monetary policy meeting, U.S. monthly jobs data and first estimates on euro zone inflation and economic growth, Trump’s decision on metal tariffs may prove to the be biggest market mover. The United States set import tariffs of 25% on steel and 10% on aluminum a month ago, but granted temporary exemptions to the European Union, NAFTA partners Canada and Mexico, as well as Argentina, Brazil, Australia and South Korea. Those exemptions expire on May 1.

Korea secured a permanent exemption for steel within days of agreeing to a revision of its trade pact with the United States. Canada and Mexico may rely on advances in talks on North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) for an extension. Continued exemptions for the other countries, and notably the European Union, remain in doubt. French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel were meeting Trump in Washington as part of EU lobbying effort in the past week, but German officials played down the chances of a breakthrough before Merkel’s Friday visit. “From today’s point of view, we must reckon that the tariffs will come on May 1,” one official said.

The European Commission, which oversees trade policy for the 28-member bloc, has insisted the United States grant it a permanent exemption without conditions. White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow said on Thursday that Trump wanted concessions on automobiles, for which import duties are higher into Europe than into the United States.

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The Fed as a cult.

• Donald Trump and the Next Crash (Nomi Prins)

We have entered a landmark moment: no president since Woodrow Wilson (during whose administration the Federal Reserve was established) will have appointed as many board members to the Fed as Donald Trump. His fingerprints will, in other words, not just be on Supreme Court decisions, but no less significantly Fed policy-making for years to come — even though, like that court, it occupies a mandated position of political independence. The president’s latest two nominees to that institution’s Board of Governors exemplify this. He has nominated Richard Clarida, a former Treasury Department official from the days of President George W. Bush who later became a strategic adviser to investment goliath Pimco, to the Fed’s second most important slot, while giving the nod to Michelle Bowman, a Kansas bank commissioner, to represent community banks on that same board.

Like many other entities in Washington, the Fed’s Board of Governors has been operating with less than a full staff. If Clarida is approved, he will join Trump-appointed Fed Chairman Jerome Powell and incoming New York Federal Reserve Bank head John C. Williams — the New York Fed generally exists in a mind meld with Wall Street — as part of the most powerful trio at that institution. Williams served as president of the San Francisco Fed. Under his watch, the third largest U.S. bank, Wells Fargo, created about 3.5 million fake accounts, gave its CEO a whopping raise, and copped to a $1 billion fine for bilking its customers on auto and mortgage insurance contracts.

Not surprisingly, Wall Street has embraced Trump’s new Fed line-up because its members are so favorably disposed to loosening restrictions on financial institutions of every sort. Initially, the financial markets reflected concern that Chairman Powell might turn out to be a hawk on interest rates, meaning he’d raise them too quickly, but he’s proved to be anything but. As Trump stacks the deck in his favor, count on an economic impact that will be felt for years to come and could leave the world devastated. But rest assured, if the Fed can help Trump keep the stock market buoyant for a while by letting money stay cheap for Wall Street speculation and the dollar competitive for a trade war, it will.

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And Canada?!

• US Issues New Warning To China On Its Handling Of Intellectual Property (BBG)

The U.S. issued a new warning to China on its handling of intellectual property as President Donald Trump prepares to dispatch senior advisers to the Asian nation to head off a trade dispute. The U.S. Trade Representative’s office kept China on its “priority watch list” of countries whose IP practices require monitoring. China has an “urgent need” to fix a range of IP-related concerns, including trade-secret theft, online piracy, and forced technology transfer, USTR said in its annual report on IP protection and enforcement. Escalating trade tensions between the world’s two-biggest economies have rattled markets and sparked fears of a trade war. Trump has proposed tariffs on as much as $150 billion of Chinese imports on the grounds of alleged IP theft, while Beijing has vowed to retaliate on everything from American soybeans to airplanes.

The annual list, which carries no immediate penalties, is supposed draw attention to the need for nations to address everything from copyright infringement to online piracy. Trump said this week Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and other senior officials will visit China within days, adding that there’s a “very good chance” the two countries can reach a deal. U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer and White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow will also be part of the delegation. Kudlow said he expects serious negotiations on a range of trade irritants, including technology-related issues, and the U.S. will be looking for specific actions from China. Officials in Beijing in recent weeks have been announcing steps to further open up the economy, such as gradually scrapping foreign ownership caps on local vehicle companies.

The administration added Canada and Colombia to the highest priority watch list for IP challenges, and it dropped Thailand from the regular watch list. Canada is the only Group of Seven country on the monitoring list. The USTR said the country has failed to resolve “key longstanding deficiencies,” including poor border and law enforcement with respect to counterfeit and pirated goods, weak patent protection and pricing for pharmaceuticals, and inadequate copyright protection.

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It’s the shadow banks that have financed that 6.8% growth they miraculously achieve every single month and year.

• China Is Bolstering Lenders Before A New Assault On Shadow Banking (BBG)

Investors who pushed up Chinese bank shares last week on news of lower reserve requirements may have been celebrating too soon. The subtext to Tuesday’s move is an effort to prepare the banks for a painful new phase in China’s campaign to reduce financial-sector risks, as regulators free up deposit rates and accelerate their crackdown on the nation’s $16 trillion shadow banking sector. “China is gearing up to crack a hard nut with deleveraging and financial reforms, and the central bank is offering some coordinated policies to ensure it will be a smooth transition,” said Xia Le, chief Asia economist at Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria in Hong Kong.

The People’s Bank of China’s decision to free up more liquidity for banks by slashing reserve ratio requirements, at a time when funding conditions are plentiful, shows the central bank is trying to insulate lenders for the next phase of reform, said Ming Ming, head of fixed-income research at Citic Securities. A key element of that reform process is a plan to give banks greater freedom to set interest rates, flagged by PBOC Governor Yi Gang at the Boao forum earlier this month. That will help banks better compete for deposits from Chinese savers and hasten the shift away from shadow instruments such as wealth management products.

Already, China Construction Bank, Bank of China and other large lenders have started trying to attract funding by rolling out certificates of deposit with sharply higher interest rates. But the move away from off balance sheet WMPs to on-balance sheet deposit funding is likely to be painful. Guosen Securities analyst Wang Jian described interest rate liberalization as like “throwing a bomb at banks” in an April 11 note, saying the need to offer higher deposit rates to attract funds could push them into riskier lending, to real estate for example, in order to protect profits.

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What are the little ones going to do?

• World’s Central Banks Just Can’t Quit on Currency Intervention (BBG)

History shows that central banks rarely stem a currency’s long-term decline simply by spending foreign-exchange reserves. Yet not stepping in at all can prove far worse. That’s the argument used by authorities in Brazil, Indonesia and most recently Argentina to explain why it makes sense to shower billions of dollars on what looks like a losing bet. This week alone, Argentina spent about $3 billion, or 5% of its reserves, to bolster the peso after it plunged to a record low. Then, wielding another monetary cudgel, it unexpectedly goosed interest rates. In Buenos Aires, the combination worked – at least for today. The peso ended just a blip or two in the green after sliding 1.8% earlier. It’s still this year’s worst-performing major currency, nosing out Russia’s ruble and the Turkish lira.

“It was a success in the sense that it gave two signals to the market,” said Daniel Chodos, a strategist at Credit Suisse based in the Argentine capital. “One is that it can and will use all available instruments to conduct monetary policy, that is, interest-rate and FX interventions. The second signal is that because of the tool kit it has, it can intervene and cause some pain to markets.” Indonesia is a more cautionary tale. The southeast Asian nation’s central bank drained $6 billion of foreign reserves in February and March partly to stabilize the rupiah, and may have further eroded the $126 billion pile as it stepped up intervention this month. But the moves, coupled with a threat to hike rates, didn’t calm volatility. That led the central bank to say it’s preparing a second line of defense to ensure liquidity.

Brazil’s interventions in the foreign-exchange market, using currency swaps, became so regular between 2013 and 2015 that traders started likening them to “ração diária,” the moment each day set aside to feed your pets.

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“..for the first time they are going to charge based on factors including affordability, reliability, transparency, renewable energy integration, efficiency..”

• Hawaii Takes Historic First Step Toward Creating ‘Utility of the Future’ (RE)

In what could be the beginning of the new way forward to utilities, on Tuesday, Hawaiian Gov. David Ige signed the Ratepayer Protection Act, a new law that directs utilities in Hawaii to change their business models and fully decouple revenue and capital expenditures. “This is the first jurisdiction that is doing this. It’s a concept that’s been discussed at some length among scholars and experts in the field but no one has actually implemented this so this was definitely a moonshot bill,” said State Sen. Stanley Chang in an interview. “Instead of charging what the market can bear or letting utilities charge on a cost-plus basis to recoup their costs, for the first time they are going to charge based on factors including affordability, reliability, transparency, renewable energy integration, efficiency,” he added.

“That’s a total change to the business model of these utilities.” Today, one of the only ways that utilities all across the world can generate revenue is by rate-basing capital expenditures. What that means in plain English is that the more utilities spend on infrastructure, such as upgrading transmission and distribution equipment (and building new generation plants in some territories), the more money they make because they are allowed to add those capital expenditures to their electric rates plus a healthy margin and recover their costs through ratepayer dollars.

As of July 1, 2020, this model will cease to exist in Hawaii. Under the new law Hawaiian utilities and the public utility commission (PUC) will need to come up with “performance incentives and penalty mechanisms that directly tie an electric utility revenues to that utility’s achievement on performance metrics and break the direct link between allowed revenues and investment levels,” according to the new law.

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“Contamination of soil, vegetation and water is so widespread in Japan that evacuating all the at-risk populations could collapse the economy..”

• Fukushima is Now Officially Worse Than Chernobyl (CP)

The radiation dispersed into the environment by the three reactor meltdowns at Fukushima-Daiichi in Japan has exceeded that of the April 26, 1986 Chernobyl catastrophe, so we may stop calling it the “second worst” nuclear power disaster in history. Total atmospheric releases from Fukushima are estimated to be between 5.6 and 8.1 times that of Chernobyl, according to the 2013 World Nuclear Industry Status Report. Professor Komei Hosokawa, who wrote the report’s Fukushima section, told London’s Channel 4 News then, “Almost every day new things happen, and there is no sign that they will control the situation in the next few months or years.”

Tokyo Electric Power Co. has estimated that about 900 peta-becquerels have spewed from Fukushima, and the updated 2016 TORCH Report estimates that Chernobyl dispersed 110 peta-becquerels.[1](A Becquerel is one atomic disintegration per second. The “peta-becquerel” is a quadrillion, or a thousand trillion Becquerels.) Chernobyl’s reactor No. 4 in Ukraine suffered several explosions, blew apart and burned for 40 days, sending clouds of radioactive materials high into the atmosphere, and spreading fallout across the whole of the Northern Hemisphere — depositing cesium-137 in Minnesota’s milk.[2]

The likelihood of similar or worse reactor disasters was estimated by James Asselstine of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), who testified to Congress in 1986: “We can expect to see a core meltdown accident within the next 20 years, and it … could result in off-site releases of radiation … as large as or larger than the releases … at Chernobyl.[3] Fukushima-Daiichi came 25 years later. Contamination of soil, vegetation and water is so widespread in Japan that evacuating all the at-risk populations could collapse the economy, much as Chernobyl did to the former Soviet Union. For this reason, the Japanese government standard for decontaminating soil there is far less stringent than the standard used in Ukraine after Chernobyl.

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75% of insects are gone in France and Germany and they make this only about the bees?

• EU Votes To Ban Bee-Killing Pesticides (AFP)

European Union countries voted on Friday in favour of a near-total ban on neonicotinoid insecticides which are blamed for an alarming collapse in bee populations. The move comes after the European food safety agency said in February that most uses of the chemicals posed a risk to bees, prompting environmentalists to push the 28-nation EU to immediately outlaw them. Bees help pollinate 90% of the world’s major crops, but in recent years have been dying off from “colony collapse disorder,” a mysterious scourge blamed on mites, pesticides, virus, fungus, or a combination of these factors.

Campaigners dressed in black and yellow bee suits rallied outside the headquarters of the European Commission in Brussels ahead of the vote for a ban on three key pesticide chemicals. EU Environment Commissioner Vytenis Andriukaitis said he was “happy that member states voted in favour of our proposal” to restrict the chemicals and tweeted a picture of the activists.

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Time for a very large and thorough study into plastics in humans.

• The Hills Are Alive With The Signs Of Plastic (G.)

Microplastic pollution contaminates soil across Switzerland, even in remote mountains, new research reveals. The scientists said the problem could be worse in other nations with poorer waste management and that research was urgently needed to see if microplastics get into food. In the first major study of microplastics in soil, the researchers analysed soil samples from 29 river flood plains in nature reserves across Switzerland. They found microplastics, fragments under 5mm in size, in 90% of the soils. The scientists believe the particles are carried across the country by the wind. Research on microplastic pollution to date has largely concentrated on the oceans, in which it is found across the globe, including the Arctic. The particles have been shown to harm marine life and can absorb toxins from the water.

Record levels of microplastics were revealed in rivers by research released in March and last year tap water around the world was found to contain plastic fibres. Other studies have found microplastics in bottled water, which prompted the World Health Organization to launch a review, as well as in beer, honey and salt. However, almost no research has yet been done on whether the particles end up being widely consumed by people and whether they are harmful. Michael Scheurer and Moritz Bigalke at the Geographical Institute of the University of Bern, conducted the new research, which is published in the journal Environmental Science and Technology. “These findings are alarming,” Scheurer said. “For example, new studies indicate that microplastics in the soil can be harmful to and even kill earthworms in the soil.”

Microplastics were found even in remote mountain regions that can only be reached by foot. “We were really surprised,” said Bigalke. “All the areas were in national parks. We thought we might find one or two plastic particles, but we found a lot.” [..] One of the very few studies into microplastics in food examined backyard chickens in Mexico. The researchers found 57 particles per gramme in the gizzards of the chickens. “Chicken gizzard is a specialty in the Mexican kitchen and the intake of the present plastics form a strong risk for human health,” the scientists said.

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