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Debt Rattle February 12 2026

Feb 122026
 
 February 12, 2026  Posted by at 11:30 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,  47 Responses »


Camille Pissarro The Boulevard Montmartre at Night 1897


• Elon Musk Vows To Establish A MOON CITY Within 10 Years (MN)
• Economy Adds 130,000 Jobs in January, Unemployment Rate Falls to 4.3% (CTH)
• Trump Orders CIA To Give 2020 Election Intel To ‘Stop The Steal’ Lawyer (ZH)
• 30 Years Later Massie Discovers Les Wexner Was Associate of Epstein (CTH)
• Steve Bannon Messages About Trump Included in the Epstein File Release (CTH)
• The Trump Admin Just Won the Mask Decision . . . Now it Should Appeal (Turley)
• Jordan Opens Bondi Hearing By Railing Against Sanctuary Cities (JTN)
• Lawmaker Probing J6 Worried US Capitol Police Intel Politicized vs GOP (JTN)
• Munich 2007: Putin’s Warning To The West (RT)
• Russia Will Stick To Nuclear Arms Limits If US Does The Same (ZH)
• All the Media’s Men: When Journalism Became the Story -Part II of II (Wilson)
• Texas Judges Strategize Ways to Block DHS From Enforcing Immigration Laws (CTH)
• ‘No Privacy’ CBDCs Will Come, Warns Billionaire Ray Dalio (CT)

 


 

 


 


Musk ponders his own mortality. He won’t make it to Mars in time to be the first settler.

“Priority Of SpaceX becomes a self-sustaining lunar metropolis to safeguard humanity’s future..”

• Elon Musk Vows To Establish A MOON CITY Within 10 Years (MN)

Elon Musk and SpaceX are charting a bold new course for American space dominance, prioritizing a thriving city on the Moon to shield civilization from earthly perils like natural disasters or geopolitical chaos. With frequent launches and rapid iteration cycles, the Moon offers a practical launchpad for multi-planetary life, free from the constraints of overregulated space agencies that have stalled progress for decades. SpaceX’s announcement comes amid a renewed push for lunar exploration, where private enterprise is outpacing sluggish international efforts.


According to reports, the company aims to establish a “self-growing city” on the Moon within a decade, leveraging the proximity for hundreds of test cycles that Mars’ distant orbit simply can’t match. Musk elaborated on X, stating, “SpaceX has already shifted focus to building a self-growing city on the Moon, as we can potentially achieve that in less than 10 years, whereas Mars would take 20+ years.” He emphasized the logistical edge: launches to the Moon every 10 days with a two-day trip, versus Mars’ 26-month windows and six-month journeys.

This allows for swift advancements in life support, construction, and energy systems—key to breaking free from Earth’s vulnerabilities.

The shift doesn’t abandon Mars entirely. Musk noted that SpaceX will still pursue a long term plan for a Red Planet city, but the Moon takes precedence as a faster safeguard for civilization.

“The overriding priority is securing the future of civilization and the Moon is faster,” Musk posted.

This pragmatic approach exposes the folly of pie-in-the-sky promises that have dominated space policy, often mired in wasteful spending and political gamesmanship. Musk also teased democratized space travel:

This development echoes broader frustrations with establishment space programs. NASA’s Artemis missions, while ambitious, are bogged down by delays and ballooning costs. SpaceX, unencumbered by such bureaucracy, is poised to deliver tangible wins, potentially including lunar data centers powered by constant solar energy, boosting U.S. tech supremacy. By prioritizing the lunar city, SpaceX advances an independent, resilient humanity—free from reliance on fragile international alliances that often prioritize control over innovation.

Read more …

In a time of large scale revisions, OK numbers.

• Economy Adds 130,000 Jobs in January, Unemployment Rate Falls to 4.3% (CTH)

The Bureau of Labor and Statistics releases the employment figures for January today [BLS DATA HERE]. Overall, in the establishment survey, 130,000 jobs were added and the unemployment rate fell to 4.3%. This is much stronger than anticipated and there are indications of significant movement back to work as the exfiltration of illegal alien workers continues.


Via WSJ – “The U.S. added 130,000 jobs in January, surging past expectations and marking a strong start to the year following a weak year of job growth. The January numbers from the Labor Department were above the seasonally adjusted 48,000 jobs added in December, which were revised slightly lower. Economists polled by The Wall Street Journal were expecting 55,000 jobs in January.The unemployment rate, which is based on a separate survey from the jobs figures, fell to 4.3% from 4.4%.” (more)

What I find interesting in the Household ‘Employment’ Survey is the number of people going back into the workforce. I am left to wonder if the ICE removals are starting to create employer driven incentives, increased wages etc. that seem to be pulling sidelined workers back to the labor market.


528,000 more people employed. The unemployed dropped by 141,000, and the number of people not in the labor force dropped by 221,000.

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“The administration last year hired Kurt Olsen, who more than five years ago took part in the “Stop the Steal” campaign that promoted baseless claims of widespread voter fraud, to investigate the 2020 election.”

• Trump Orders CIA To Give 2020 Election Intel To ‘Stop The Steal’ Lawyer (ZH)

President Donald Trump has instructed the CIA and other spy agencies to hand over intelligence related to the 2020 election, a bunch of (presumably panicked) US intelligence officials told Politico and NBC News. The records are to be handed over to Kurt Olsen – now a temporary government employee in the White House – who four years ago was involved in the “Stop the Steal” campaign to determine whether Joe Biden won the 2020 election via cheating. And you know they’re freaking out by the way they tell us this… “The administration last year hired Kurt Olsen, who more than five years ago took part in the “Stop the Steal” campaign that promoted baseless claims of widespread voter fraud, to investigate the 2020 election.” -NBC News


… President Donald Trump has directed top U.S. spy agencies to share sensitive intelligence about the 2020 election with his former campaign lawyer, known for pushing debunked theories of electoral fraud, according to four people with knowledge of the effort. -Politico. Indeed:

“The president has asked Mr. Olsen to look at intelligence related to the 2020 election and the agency is ensuring that he has the access necessary to do his work,” a CIA official told NBC in an emailed statement (probably right after hanging up with the reporter). When asked about Olsen’s role, the White House told the outlet “President Trump has the authority to provide access to classified material to individuals as he deems necessary. The entire Trump administration is working together to ensure the integrity of U.S. elections.”

The admin did not specifically respond to questions about whether Olsen was focusing only on the 2020 election, or possible security threats to future elections. The freakout comes after the FBI’s recent search of an elections center in Fulton County, Georgia – where they seized ballots from the 2020 election. Now check out the tone over at Politico: “The decision to provide some of the government’s most sensitive spy material to Olsen is unusual, given that he has no known experience working with the U.S. spy community and only joined the Trump administration as a short-term special government employee in October 2025. Special government employees are supposed to work no more than 130 days during any period of 365 days, suggesting his time at the White House could end soon.”


The first person said that Olsen has passed a background check and a polygraph exam. It is not clear how close Olsen is to completing his report on the 2020 elections. Intelligence analysis is supposed to be nonpartisan, and it appears Olsen’s views on electoral fraud in prior U.S. elections are so deeply held that even some people close to the president question his ability to evaluate the material shared with him. “This guy has no background” in intelligence, said the second person, a close Trump ally. Olsen “will find some super classified report, say it’s evidence of fraud, but really it’s just completely out of context.”

… Olsen rose to prominence by working closely with Trump to undermine the results of the 2020 election under the slogan “Stop the Steal.” He urged several DOJ officials that year to file a complaint to the Supreme Court scrutinizing Trump’s loss, and even called the president multiple times during the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. Wow! As we noted earlier Tuesday, an affidavit filed by FBI Special Agent Hugh Raymond Evans last month, which was unsealed Tuesday, lays out five categories of confirmed problems in Fulton County’s handling of ballots, raising questions that have simmered for over five years since Trump and his allies raised questions about the election in Georgia and other states where irregularities were alleged.

According to a report from Just the News, Evans filed the affidavit last month to establish probable cause for a raid that seized around 700 boxes of ballots from an Atlanta-area storage warehouse. The investigation stemmed from a referral by Kurt Olsen, President Trump’s election integrity czar. Evans interviewed roughly a dozen unnamed witnesses about allegations tied to the contested Georgia race, where Joe Biden edged out Trump by less than 12,000 votes in the official results. “This warrant application is part of an FBI criminal investigation into whether any of the improprieties were intentional acts that violated federal criminal laws.”

Fulton County admitted it lacks scanned images of all 528,777 ballots counted during the initial count and of the 527,925 ballots tallied during the state’s first recount. County officials also confirmed that during the recount, some ballots were scanned multiple times. Ballot images obtained through public records requests show identical markings appearing on duplicated images.During the Risk Limiting Audit, hand counters reported vote totals for batches that didn’t match the actual votes inside those batches. According to the affidavit, “The State’s Performance Review Board reported that Secretary of State investigators confirmed inaccurate batch tallies from the Risk Limiting Audit.

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“Wexner’s money was the originating capital for what would later become Epstein’s influence empire…”

• 30 Years Later Massie Discovers Les Wexner Was Associate of Epstein (CTH)

I said Monday on Twitter: “Seriously. Correct me if I’m wrong. For more than a decade we have known that billionaire Les Wexner from Victoria’s Secret was the originating money man behind Jeffrey Epstein. This should not be some kind of revelation, as it was widely discussed by those who researched Epstein over a decade ago. Wexner’s money was the originating capital for what would later become Epstein’s influence empire. Additionally, and again, stop me if this old news is incorrect, well over a decade ago it became openly known that the “PINK” brand of Victoria’s Secret was specifically created due to the sexuality of young girls becoming part of the marketing influence of Epstein. Wexner created the original VS girls, and the influence of Epstein (underage sexual perversions) then led to the adding of the VS “PINK” sub-brand.


Are we supposed to understand this is all new information? Honest question. No snark. I’m just confused by this sudden newness of it. We been knew.”The above VH1 segment was from 2007; however, even ten years prior to that it was commonly known that Les Wexner from Victoria’s Secret was the source of most of Jeffrey Epstein’s start-up finances. The resulting social network was fraught with sexual weirdos, and the VS brand alignment just fit with the club. Suddenly, Representative Thomas Massie, a Sea Island asset if ever there was one, is proclaiming the Epstein file information outlining the relationship with Wexner is new information, stunning in scope and worthy of extraordinary time to explore. It’s all weird.

VIA NBC – […] The newly released version of the 2019 document shows eight people are listed as co-conspirators, including four whose names are not redacted: Wexner, the former CEO of Victoria’s Secret, Lesley Groff, Epstein’s longtime secretary, the late modeling agent Jean-Luc Brunel, and Ghislaine Maxwell, the only person who was charged in connection with Epstein. She was convicted of sex trafficking charges and is serving a 20-year prison sentence. Four other names on the document are still redacted. It’s unclear who those people are but prosecutors have said that Epstein used women he preyed on as recruiters. A separate document dated August 2019 indicated that some of the others were victims as well, and had been cooperating with investigators.

A Wexner legal representative said in a statement to NBC News Tuesday that “The Assistant U.S. Attorney told Mr. Wexner’s legal counsel in 2019 that Mr. Wexner was neither a co-conspirator nor target in any respect. Mr. Wexner cooperated fully by providing background information on Epstein and was never contacted again.” Wexner had a long relationship with Epstein that dated back to the 1980s, and hired him to manage his personal finances. He’s said he cut ties to Epstein after he was accused of sexually abusing minors in Florida. It was after that Wexner said he “discovered that he had misappropriated vast sums of money from me and my family.”

Wexner’s name was also mentioned in a July 2019 FBI email about possible co-conspirators that was made public as part of the DOJ release. Another August 2019 FBI email said there was “limited evidence regarding his involvement.” He is scheduled to be deposed by the House Oversight Committee next week. (more)The first time I heard the information about Wexner and Epstein was sometime in the mid 1990’s. It was well known. There is a lot of horrible, creepy and perverted stuff in the Epstein file releases that is factually new information. However, the relationship between Jeffrey Epstein and Les Wexner is not new. Perverse, yes -as it was even then; but not new. There were even documentaries about it, one of them I think was called “Angels and Demons“. Maybe it wasn’t as widely known as I thought?

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“Trust your instincts folks, and always remember…. It’s ALWAYS about the money”

• Steve Bannon Messages About Trump Included in the Epstein File Release (CTH)

Apparently, Steve Bannon and Jeffrey Epstein had a considerable relationship together. Bannon is cited frequently in the 3 million+ Epstein files that were released by the DOJ. Unfortunately, part of the document production includes text messages between Steve Bannon and an unknown individual. Within a segment of the text messages Bannon calls Jared Kusher “the idiot son-in-law,” and frames himself as more important that President Donald Trump who Bannon sees as “transitory.”


STEVE BANNON (SB) – “To do that shows that [Trump] is center of gravity of this movement and not me — will never do — they are transitory figures — the dc game is to succumb to that — it’s why I never did before joining campaign — I could have been the trump whisperer years ago — avoided on purpose” This rather elevated sense of self-importance likely explains why Bannon was the source for Michael Wolf via leaks, and why President Trump seems to have kept distance from Mr. Bannon. However, people who walk the deep weeds of U.S. politics will also remember when Steve Bannon was the editor of Breitbart and together with financial owner Robert Mercer in 2015/2016 was backing Ted Cruz in the run-up to the 2016 election.


Both Steve Bannon and Kellyanne Conway were original political consultants and financial beneficiaries connected to the failed Ted Cruz presidential effort, before they abandoned the Cruz Crew and jumped aboard the MAGA movement. The Cruz Crew has essentially morphed into the Ron DeSantis coalition and this superiority attitude expressed by Bannon is one of the key characteristics of the group we affectionately call the “alligator emojis. Perhaps the best two words to describe the brilliant political strategies of Steve Bannon are ‘Roy – Moore’. I digress.

Trust your instincts folks, and always remember…. It’s ALWAYS about the money!

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“Judge Synder came to the right conclusion for the wrong reason.”

• The Trump Admin Just Won the Mask Decision . . . Now it Should Appeal (Turley)

California Gov. Gavin Newsom has become increasingly Orwellian in his declarations of success. Last week, Newsom was proclaiming the great success of his high-speed train to nowhere – a project delayed by decades, reduced to a fraction of the original plan, and set to cost tens of billions over budget. This week, he is proclaiming victory after a court struck down his signature law requiring federal agents to unmask. The preliminary injunction issued Monday by Senior status Judge Christine Snyder against California’s No Secret Police Act was a victory for the Trump Administration. However, it should still appeal Judge Snyder’s flawed decision. In other words, the Administration won for the wrong reason.


Snyder, an Obama appointee, faced two laws passed in September 2025 with great fanfare in California: the Secret Police Act and the No Vigilante Act. As their titles indicate, they are not serious efforts at legislating but unconstitutional acts designed to pander to the politics of the moment. In the oral argument, some of us were concerned over the curious position staked out by Judge Synder. DOJ counsel Tiberius Davis tried to explain how such state laws usurp federal authority and violate the Supremacy Clause. He drove that point home by asking “Why couldn’t California say every immigration officer needs to wear pink, so it’s super obvious who they are? The idea that all 50 states can regulate the conduct and uniforms of officers … flips the Constitution on its head.”

That would seem an unassailable point, but not to Judge Synder. She asked, “Why can’t they perform their duties without a mask? They did that until 2025, did they not? How in the world do those who don’t mask manage to operate?” I remarked at the time that the court seemed to miss the central point. The question is not whether the federal government can continue to function under limitations imposed by various states, but whether those states have the authority to impose such conditions. I do not believe that they do. Nevertheless, Judge Synder came to the right conclusion for the wrong reason. She enjoined the mask requirement, but did so on the basis that California exempted its own officers.

“Even though the United States has failed to demonstrate that the facial covering prohibition of the No Secret Police Act unduly interferes with federal functions, the court acknowledges that it is nonetheless an incidental regulation on law enforcement officers. The intergovernmental immunity doctrine prohibits imposing such a regulatory burden, albeit minimal and incidental to operations, in a discriminatory manner against the federal government.” By adopting this narrow basis, the court was able to enjoin the No Secret Police Act while rejecting an injunction against the No Vigilantes Act and certain other provisions of the No Secret Police Act. I think the court is wrong and should be reversed.

Snyder rejected the rationale of the federal government that these masks are being used to protect ICE agents from “doxing,” even though various agents have been targeted and threatened. Synder waved off the concern and said that the government had not shown by such masking is essential to carrying out such functions. Her opinion relies on broad, unsupported assumptions. Because officers are facing these security concerns, she concludes that they will continue regardless: “Security concerns exist for federal law enforcement officers with or without masks. If anything, the court finds that the presence of masked and unidentifiable individuals, including law enforcement, is more likely to heighten the sense of insecurity for all.”

It is a bizarre rationalization. The court is simply imposing its judgment on what will make officers safer, rather than emphasizing whether these agencies have the discretion to make such judgments in the execution of federal law. Yet the court still enjoins the law because it discriminates between federal and state officers. (Not surprisingly, Democratic state Sen. Scott Wiener, the author of the mask ban, immediately declared that they would amend the law to add state law enforcement).

The Court then upheld a state requirement that federal officers cannot conceal their identities in a discussion more befitting a legislative committee than a court: “The Court finds that these Acts serve the public interest by promoting transparency, which is essential for accountability and public trust. Moreover, the Court finds no cognizable justification for law enforcement officers to conceal their identities during their performance of routine, non-exempted law enforcement functions and interactions with the general public.” In my view, Judge Snyder twists the analysis into knots to try to preserve as much of these laws as possible while giving the Administration the minimum level of deference.

Under the intergovernmental immunity doctrine, the Supreme Court has mandated in cases such as McCulloch v. Maryland, 17 U.S. 316, 317 (1819), that “the states have no power, by taxation or otherwise, to retard, impede, burden, or in any manner control, the operations of the constitutional law enacted by congress to carrying into execution the powers vested in the general government.” A state cannot intrude into this authority absent a “clear and unambiguous” authorization from Congress, Goodyear Atomic Corp. v. Miller, 486, U.S. 174, 180 (1988).

Snyder finds that the California laws discriminate but do not constitute direct regulation of the federal government. She does so through a “functionalist” approach that avoids bright lines of supremacy. She simply dismisses the objections, saying the federal government has not shown that wearing masks is “essential” to carrying out these functions. Consider that approach for a second. A wide range of state regulations on federal officers could be deemed permissible, since federal officers can still functionally carry out arrests. States could dictate everything from uniform requirements, such as masks, to vehicle conditions to verbal commands or warnings.

The opinion is spotty in its analysis and sweeping in its implications. It is, in my view, ripe for reversal either before the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit or the Supreme Court.

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“..almost 1/3 of the American people live in a city, county or state where the left wing leadership tells local law enforcement not to work with federal law enforcement..”

• Jordan Opens Bondi Hearing By Railing Against Sanctuary Cities (JTN)

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, on Wednesday opened a hearing with Attorney General Pam Bondi by railing against sanctuary cities and their impact on Americans.”The chairs now recognize 18 cities, 11 states, excuse me, three counties and the District of Columbia are sanctuary jurisdictions, accounting for 31% of the population in this country, 31% of the American people, almost 1/3 of the American people live in a city, county or state where the left wing leadership tells local law enforcement not to work with federal law enforcement,” he said.


Jordan then turned to the case of Abraham Gonzalez, an illegal alien whom Colorado authorities released from prison after ignoring a detainer from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) who later assaulted an officer. He then highlighted the voluminous instances of ICE detainers issued in sanctuary jurisdictions for violent offenders said that such policies were “helping create the environment that results in the tragic deaths.” Jordan made the remarks as part of his opening statement.

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“Now, why would you need these intelligence guys, these plain clothes guys, to just show up? It just stinks to high heaven, but I believe I was a target,”Now, why would you need these intelligence guys, these plain clothes guys, to just show up? It just stinks to high heaven, but I believe I was a target..”

• Lawmaker Probing J6 Worried US Capitol Police Intel Politicized vs GOP (JTN)

The House chairman tasked with investigating law enforcement and intelligence failures related to the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot says he is probing whether U.S. Capitol Police intelligence gathering was weaponized by House Democratic leadership against their Republican colleagues in the aftermath of the Capitol riot. Rep. Barry Loudermilk, R-Ga., who is the Chairman of the Select Subcommittee on January 6, said he suspects that Democrats used the department to gather information on Republican lawmakers concurrent with the Justice Department’s wider Arctic Frost probe into alleged efforts by President Donald Trump and his followers to contest the 2020 election results. Loudermilk told Just the News that what former Capitol Police Chief Steven Sund and others told his committee raises questions about how the department’s intelligence arm might have been used to further what he says was “weaponization against members of Congress.”


“Political weaponization against members of Congress”
“There may be some evidence out there that this [Arctic Frost] extended all the way into Congress, that there was investigation and political weaponization against members of Congress that may even have ties with the Select Committee on January 6,” Loudermilk told the Just the News, No Noise TV show on Tuesday, referring to the Democrat-led committee that probed the Trump administration alongside the Justice Department. “There’s others who have spoken to us about efforts within the political element of Congress, within the Democrat Party, who were actively seeking access to the Capitol Police database and their intelligence, and they were using that intelligence against sitting members of Congress,” Loudermilk added.

The probe into Trump and his allies in the aftermath of Jan. 6, code named “Arctic Frost,” was led by an openly anti-Trump FBI supervisor, and was eventually taken over by Special Prosecutor Jack Smith. The probe treated the effort by Trump’s allies to submit alternate electors to Congress to sway the certification of the 2020 election as a criminal conspiracy, even though two prior episodes in American history were not prosecuted as crimes. Experts told Just the News last year the FBI memo that officially launched the investigation, around the time that Trump announced he would run for president again, was thin on evidence and legal justifications.

Snooping and snapping
The House Judiciary Committee, the parent of Loudermilk’s subcommittee, released FBI records last year showing that the Arctic Frost investigators targeted more than 160 Republicans in Donald Trump’s orbit, including members of the president’s staff and Republican officials from the House and Senate. Loudermilk pointed to the case of Rep. Troy Nehls, R-Texas, a member of his subcommittee, who claims that Capitol Police searched his office. Nehls alleged in a lawsuit last year that an officer improperly entered his office during the 2021 Thanksgiving break and snapped a photograph of his office whiteboard. Later, plainclothes officers returned to the office and questioned a staffer about the whiteboard without the congressman’s permission, the court documents allege.

“That is totally outside the realm of anything acceptable here,” Loudermilk said of the Nehls search. “He was investigated as a member of Congress by the US Capitol Police, and I know he has litigation regarding that going right now, but I think this is just the tip of the iceberg of what may have been happening, not only in the Wray FBI, but under the Pelosi House of Representatives as well.” “It just stinks to high heaven, but I believe I was a target,” Nehls say Nehls also told Just the News that he believes the Capitol Police spied on him because of his outspoken criticism of the department in the wake of Jan. 6. “I think that the Capitol Police, they found a few weaklings in there to go out there and spy – I will say ‘spy’ – and look into members of Congress that were very, very outspoken and critical of January 6,” Nehls told the John Solomon Reports podcast.

“We found out that these employees worked for the intelligence division of the U.S. Capitol Police. Now, why would you need these intelligence guys, these plain clothes guys, to just show up? It just stinks to high heaven, but I believe I was a target,” Nehls added. Former Capitol Police Chief Sund confirmed that even before Jan. 6 he faced increasing pressure from Democratic leadership for access to the Capitol Police intelligence unit, which he called “very concerning.” Sund told Just the News that “it was an ongoing process where we had, you know, people, senior staffers, like from [Senator Chuck] Schumer’s staff that wanted to be involved in intelligence briefing, wanted to have access into the Capitol Police Headquarters, specifically to be able to access into the intelligence unit.”

Though he pushed back on those efforts, Sund told the John Solomon Reports podcast that he does not know what happened after he resigned on Jan. 16, 2021, just ten days after the riot during which hundreds of protesters entered the secured Capitol building. “My concern is, what happened after January 6? You know, did these people then all of a sudden, now get involved? They’re now on the intelligence calls, intelligence briefings, things like that. Now, are they using that for any political benefit?” Sund questioned. Loudermilk has doggedly investigated the Jan. 6 security failures and politicization related to the Democrat-led Jan. 6 Select Committee for years. He exposed a key witness who changed her story that was damaging to Trump and documented failures to secure key entry points at the U.S. Capitol before protesters entered.

Pipe bomb mystery solved by Patel’s FBI
He also relentlessly pursued accountability for what was the biggest unsolved mystery of that day, how the FBI had failed to identify a suspect in the planting of two pipe bombs at the Democratic and Republican Party headquarters. That case was blown open last year when the new FBI Director, Kash Patel, and his then-Deputy Director, Dan Bongino, brought a new team and a fresh perspective to the mountains of data collected by investigators. The new approach led to the arrest of suspect Brian Cole Jr. of Virginia. Earlier this month, Loudermilk subpoenaed T-Mobile for the phone records that it had turned over to the FBI and had languished in its possession until last year.

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19 years ago he spelled it out. Who listened?

• Munich 2007: Putin’s Warning To The West (RT)

Exactly 19 years ago on Tuesday, Russian President Vladimir Putin took the podium at the Munich Security Conference and demolished the myths and falsehoods underpinning the American-led world order. Did anyone heed his warning? To Russia, the “rules-based international order” has always been shorthand for a system in which the US makes the rules and issues the orders. “However one might embellish this term, at the end of the day it refers to one type of situation, namely one center of authority, one center of force, one center of decision-making,” Putin told the audience in Munich. “It is a world in which there is one master, one sovereign. And at the end of the day this is pernicious not only for all those within this system, but also for the sovereign itself because it destroys itself from within.”


Under the auspices of protecting this order, the US carried out “unilateral and frequently illegitimate actions,” in “disdain for the basic principles of international law,” he declared.In the decade before Putin’s speech, the US invaded Afghanistan, invaded Iraq, and led a NATO bombing campaign against Yugoslavia on behalf of Kosovo separatists. Four years after his speech, NATO forces dropped more than 7,000 bombs on Libya, ending Muammar Gaddafi’s rule and handing the keys of the country to jihadists and slave traders. “No one feels safe,” Putin stated in 2007, “because no one can feel that international law is like a stone wall that will protect them.”

Putin warned that NATO’s broken promises to halt its eastward expansion after the Cold War represented “a serious provocation that reduces the level of mutual trust.” The Russian president noted that the US-led bloc had already placed its “frontline forces on our borders,” and asked “against whom is this expansion intended?” The following year, NATO published its infamous Bucharest declaration, assuring Ukraine and Georgia that they “will become members” at an unspecified future date. The consequences of this declaration – which flew in the face of warnings from Putin and American strategists – are playing out in Ukraine today.

No, the Atlanticist neoliberal establishment roundly ignored Putin’s layered and impassioned warning. But Russia kept trying. Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov echoed Putin’s complaints when he spoke at the conference in 2018, pointing out that “NATO troops and military infrastructure are accumulating on our borders,” and that “the European theatre of war is being systematically developed.” By that stage several thousand people had been killed in Donbass. Lavrov urged European leaders to abide by the Minsk agreements, which were ostensibly aimed at ending hostilities in Donetsk and Lugansk and granting autonomy to the two predominantly Russian-speaking regions.

Following the collapse of the accords, and the escalation of the conflict in 2022, European and Ukrainian leaders admitted that the agreements were a ruse to enable Ukraine to buy time to prepare for a war with Russia.The organizers of the Munich Security Conference have not so much as attempted any introspection over the last 18 years. Instead, in their latest report, they blame US President Donald Trump for taking a “wrecking ball” to the so-called “rules-based international order.”

All the Europeans could do was cry. Literally, conference Chairman Christoph Heusgen broke down in tears during his closing comments, sobbing as he lamented the decline of the “rules-based international order” and proclaiming that “our common value base is not that common anymore.”nVance’s speech “illustrated just how different the current administration’s perspective on key issues is from the bipartisan liberal-internationalist consensus that has long guided US grand strategy,” Munich Security Conference Foundation President Wolfgang Ischinger wrote in a report ahead of this year’s conference, which kicks off on Friday. As such, discussion in Munich this year will focus almost entirely on “the United States’ evolving view of the international order,” he wrote.

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” For the first time since 1972, Russia (the former USSR) and the US have no treaty limiting strategic nuclear forces..”

• Russia Will Stick To Nuclear Arms Limits If US Does The Same (ZH)


One of the globe’s biggest developing stories this month, but which has been largely underreported in mainstream TV networks and other press, is the collapse of New START – the last major nuclear arms control treaty between Russia and the United States. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Wednesday that Moscow will in good faith stick to the nuclear limits outlined in the now-expired arms control treaty, provided Washington does the same. It expired earlier this month after Washington declined to respond to President Vladimir Putin’s proposal for a one-year extension capping both sides’ nuclear arsenals.

The Trump admin has long wanted a more comprehensive agreement which brings China’s arsenal into the scope; however, there’s been no formal process on this front with Beijing or Moscow. Lavrov said Russia has no intention of rapidly expanding or deploying additional weapons, clarifying remarks from his ministry last week that suggested Moscow no longer considered itself bound by the treaty. “We proceed from the fact that this moratorium, which was announced by our president, remains in effect, but only while the United States does not exceed the outlined limits,” Lavrov told Russia’s parliament.

Some key aspects to the treaty have gone unobserved for some time, especially the regimen of mutual nuclear site inspections.President Trump has in the recent past called New START “badly negotiated” and said it “is being grossly violated. He has in mind Russia having blocked inspections of its nuclear facilities under the treaty framework in 2023, as tensions with Washington escalated over the proxy war in Ukraine. Moscow has in turn complained that Washington is the chief violator, and that it now refuses to respond to Putin’s overture to extend it by one year, while a more comprehensive and extended deal is negotiated.

That’s it. For the first time since 1972, Russia (the former USSR) and the US have no treaty limiting strategic nuclear forces. SALT 1, SALT 2, START I, START II, SORT, New START – all in the past. pic.twitter.com/D3TBZM9ffC — Dmitry Medvedev (@MedvedevRussiaE) February 4, 2026


Last week, Secretary of State Marco Rubio gave insight into why the White House has let New START expire: “Obviously, the president’s been clear in the past that in order to have true arms control in the 21st century, it’s impossible to do something that doesn’t include China because of their vast and rapidly growing stockpile,” he explained.

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Did the Internet make journalism worse?

• All the Media’s Men: When Journalism Became the Story -Part II of II (Wilson)

There was once a professional rule in American journalism that functioned as a real constraint: report the story; do not become the story. It was not a claim of purity. Ego, ambition, and moral certainty were known dangers, and the rule existed to keep them from overwhelming the work. Journalism was never perfect. Nothing is. But it was once constrained by this rule and by rivalry among competing papers, by scarcity of publishing platforms, by reputational risk, and by audiences willing to walk away. Those constraints mattered more than ideology.mThe first visible crack came with Nellie Bly, fairly described as a stunt reporter. Her work was brave and effective, exposing abuses that would otherwise have remained hidden.


But it also introduced a dangerous precedent: the journalist as protagonist. Readers followed the reporter as much as the facts. The tool proved powerful and reusable. The profession corrected itself for a time. Through the 1940s and 1950s, likely learning from war reporting norms, American journalism emphasized impersonality and restraint. Authority came from distance. Reporters were meant to be interchangeable. Credibility rested on institutional voice rather than personality. Television eroded that equilibrium. Once news had faces, voices, and time slots, personality became unavoidable. The anchor was no longer merely delivering information but performing steadiness and judgment.

Journalism did not yet see itself as entertainment, but it had begun using entertainment tools: lighting, camera angles, makeup, vocal intonation, even on-scene reporting.The decisive rupture came with Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. What they uncovered mattered. Watergate took advantage of a nascent mythic template: the journalist as lone truth-seeker standing between power and the people. Reporting, fed by classic Hollywood movies that romanticized the crusading reporter, became an identity rather than a function.mFrom that point forward, becoming the story was no longer a lapse. It was aspirational.

Hollywood, Myth, and Moral Authority
Watergate supplied the moment. Hollywood, already primed to heroize the reporter, crafted the meaning. Films like All the President’s Men dramatized and then sanctified the Heroic Journalist. The journalist was patient, tenacious, hard-working, incorruptible, and uniquely qualified to Bring Truth to the public — a pattern that perfectly follows the Hero’s Journey. Opposition was framed not as disagreement but as ignorance or corruption. Journalism absorbed that image. It began to see itself as a secular clerisy: interpreters of reality rather than accountable informers. A clerisy assumes its authority by right of wisdom and superior knowledge. Questions are permitted only within bounds. Dissent is treated as moral failure rather than feedback.

Skepticism became asymmetrical. Journalists remained suspicious of every institution except one: their own. Tone displaced argument. Moral urgency crowded out evidentiary discipline. Entertainment tools such as emotion, narrative compression, repetition ceased to be aids and became substitutes for reasoning. And any pushback became grounds to cast the questioner out as a heretic.The pattern is familiar enough to be lampooned, as in my favorite satirical novel The Narrative, which captures how story replaces fact once the reporter becomes the hero and the audience becomes a problem to manage.

How Journalists Rise on the Left Today
Once journalism adopted that heroic clerical self-image, advancement followed a different logic. Status stopped coming from readers and started coming from institutions adjacent to power.Journalists rise by demonstrating narrative reliability, not truthfulness or factuality. Their stories must follow the Approved Narrative. Editors and other gatekeepers learn who can be trusted to frame events without destabilizing the approved story. This is rarely enforced explicitly. It works through selection. Those who create friction are sidelined; those who anticipate expectations are rewarded.

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“.. openly strategizing ways to work around that higher court ruling and keep giving bond releases to illegal aliens under the guise of “liberty interest.”

• Texas Judges Strategize Ways to Block DHS From Enforcing Immigration Laws (CTH)

This is one step further than simple Lawfare, this story is about lower court judges openly strategizing ways to stop the enforcement of laws they are supposed to uphold. Last week the Fifth Circuit Cout of Appeals ruled that detaining illegal aliens during the deportation proceedings is entirely following current immigration law. Now, according to Politico, federal judges in Texas are openly strategizing ways to work around that higher court ruling and keep giving bond releases to illegal aliens under the guise of “liberty interest.”

POLITICO – […] two federal district court judges in Texas, who are bound by the New Orleans-based 5th Circuit’s ruling, said the 2-1 decision left an opening for them to continue granting immigrants’ release on other grounds, primarily constitutional arguments against detaining people who have established roots in the U.S. without due process. Those roots amount, in legal parlance, to a “liberty interest” that the Constitution says cannot be taken away without at least a hearing before a neutral judge. “This conclusion is not changed by the Fifth Circuit’s recent decision,” Judge Kathleen Cardone, an El Paso based appointee of George W. Bush, ruled late Monday in at least five cases, concluding that the circuit’s decision “has no bearing on this Court’s determination of whether [the petitioner] is being detained in violation of his constitutional right to procedural due process.”


Judge David Briones, an El Paso-based Clinton appointee, reached a similar conclusion. “The Court reiterates its original holding that noncitizens who have ‘established connections’ in the United States by virtue of living in the country for a substantial period acquire a liberty interest in being free from government detention without due process of law,” Briones wrote. The decisions from the Texas-based judges are notable in part because the administration has often rushed detainees there after their arrests in other states such as Minnesota.

A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to a request for comment.n A Justice Department official, granted anonymity to speak candidly, said the rulings were in keeping with the view that there are rogue judges who continue to make results-oriented decisions to suit their personal policy preferences.The 5th Circuit’s ruling has yet to percolate through federal courts across Texas and Louisiana, where detained immigrants have been filing so-called “habeas” petitions in extraordinary numbers to seek freedom from what they say is illegal detention without the opportunity for bond. The losing parties in Friday’s ruling may still appeal the decision to the full bench of the 5th Circuit or the Supreme Court. (more)”

Lower courts trying to circumvent higher court rulings, even before any plaintiff brings them a case or argument. This is judicial activism in the extremes.
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Hedge fund manager Ray Dalio warns that CBDCs will eliminate financial privacy and enable governments to tax, seize funds and cut off political opponents.

• ‘No Privacy’ CBDCs Will Come, Warns Billionaire Ray Dalio (CT)

American billionaire and hedge fund manager Ray Dalio has warned that central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) are coming, offering benefits but also potentially allowing governments to exert more control over people’s finances. “I think it will be done,” said Dalio on CBDCs in a wide-ranging interview on the Tucker Carlson Show on Monday, which also included topics on the US debt crisis, gold prices, and even a potential civil war. Ray Dalio is a billionaire hedge fund manager who has been co-chief investment officer of Bridgewater Associates since 1985, after founding the firm in 1975.


During the interview, Dalio said CBDCs could be appealing due to the ease of transactions, likening them to money market funds in terms of functionality, but he also cautioned about their downsides. He said there will be a debate, but CBDCs “probably won’t” offer interest, so they will not be “an effective vehicle to hold because you’ll have the depreciation [of the dollar].” Dalio also cautioned that all CBDC transactions will be known to the government, which is good for controlling illegal activity, but also provides a great deal of control in other areas. “There will be no privacy, and it’s a very effective controlling mechanism by the government.”

A programmable digital currency will enable the government to tax directly, “they can take your money,” and establish foreign exchange controls, he said. mThat will be an “increasing issue,” particularly for international holders of that currency, as the government can seize funds from nationals of sanctioned countries. mDalio also said that you could be “shut off” from a CBDC if you were “politically disfavored.” An American CBDC is unlikely to be deployed in the near future, as US President Donald Trump has been vocally opposed to them.

Soon after taking office in January 2025, Trump signed an executive order prohibiting “the establishment, issuance, circulation, and use” of a US CBDC. According to the Atlantic Council’s CBDC tracker, only three countries have officially launched a CBDC: Nigeria, Jamaica, and The Bahamas. Another 49 countries are testing CBDCs, including China, Russia, India and Brazil. Twenty nations have a CBDC in development, and 36 are still researching central bank digital currencies. India’s central bank reportedly proposed an initiative in January linking BRICS CBDCs to facilitate cross-border trade and tourism payments.

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Debt Rattle September 13 2021

Sep 132021
 
 September 13, 2021  Posted by at 8:46 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , ,  40 Responses »


Pablo Picasso The actor 1904

 

• High Death Rate Among Vaccinated Brings Vaccine Dystopia Into View (Hirschhorn)
• Singapore 80% Double-Vaxxed But Life Is Not Returning To Normal (ABC.au)
• Laboratories in US Can’t Find COVID-19 in One of 1,500 Positive Tests (Xander)
• Grotesque Conflicts Of Interest On NIH Ivermectin Non-Recommendation (TSN)
• Damnit, Not Again (Denninger)
• One In Five Americans Say Employer Requires Vaccination (ZH)
• Unvaxxed Kentucky Health Care Workers Force Hospital to Fire Them (GP)
• Spectrum Health Workers Can Use Natural Immunity As Vaccine Mandate Exemption
• Jobs Without Jabs Australia (Sky)
• England Vaccine Passport Plans Ditched (BBC)
• The Polio Pandemic of 1949-52: No Closures, No Restrictions (Tucker)
• The Eurozone Is Going Down The Japan Way (Lacalle)

 

 

 

 

Myocarditis

 

 

 

 

Ducky

 

 

“..a death rate of .86 percent among the vaccinated and .17 percent among the unvaccinated..”

• High Death Rate Among Vaccinated Brings Vaccine Dystopia Into View (Hirschhorn)

A new report with detailed data from Public Health England provides some startling numbers. For the period of February 1 through August 2 there were COVID Delta variant cases for 47,000 people who had received 2 vaccine doses, and for 151,054 people who were unvaccinated. In the first group of vaccinated people, there were a total of 402 deaths. In the second much larger group with more than three times unvaccinated people, there were just 253 deaths. In other words, of the total COVID deaths 61 percent were in fully vaccinated people.

To get the death rate you divide the number of deaths by the total number of infection cases. That gives a death rate of .86 percent among the vaccinated and .17 percent among the unvaccinated. That is an amazing difference. The death rate among vaccinated was just over five times greater than that for the unvaccinated. Five times greater! In other words, unvaccinated people who got infected were enormously safer from death. Proving that COVID vaccines are not safe. It should also be noted that it was determined that the measured viral load in both groups was the same. So, why are vaccinated people dying more frequently than the unvaccinated? Here are some plausible explanations.

First, there is something very dangerous and unsafe in the COVID vaccines associated with spike proteins that are causing people to die at a higher rate. For example, as discussed elsewhere, all current vaccines have been associated with serious blood problems, notably both large and microscopic blood clots. Many people have died from brain bleeds and strokes, for example. There are also many, many other types of adverse side effects causing a host of medical problems. Two famous virologists warned against using the current vaccines because they are fundamentally unsafe and could be killing people. They envisioned a vaccine dystopia and loudly proclaimed that the mass vaccination program should be halted. Instead, they advocated the use of treatments using generic medicines like ivermectin, as detailed in Pandemic Blunder.

Second, it is reasonable to believe that most unvaccinated people have acquired natural immunity from some prior COVID infection. And that natural immunity is far more protective than the artificial or vaccine immunity obtained from jabs. Their natural immunity translates to fewer deaths. Yet the US like many other countries does not give credit for natural immunity on a par with vaccine immunity when it comes to COVID passports and mandates. Though a few nations do the right thing by honestly following the science. Third, vaccinated people are susceptible to breakthrough infections, which means that they are not protected against infection after they have been originally infected. Phony and dangerous COVID vaccines do not destroy the virus, nor prevent transmitting it to others. Some breakthrough infections are lethal.

[..] The new data from England involving very large numbers of people should be headline news. But the biased and dishonest big media suppress this kind of critical data. Why? Clearly, if vaccinated people die at a much higher rate than unvaccinated people, then why should people be enthusiastic about being vaccinated for initial shots or later booster ones? They should not. This is especially true for the millions of people who have natural immunity. The data from England show that people need to question CDC data because CDC has converted some vaccinated deaths to unvaccinated ones. Hospitals are often not testing vaccinated people for COVID, so breakthrough cases that can result in deaths go unreported. People should question the safety of all the COVID vaccines even if they get fully approved by FDA.

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Singapore, the shining city on the hill…

“..its highest daily COVID-19 infections in more than a year..”

• Singapore 80% Double-Vaxxed But Life Is Not Returning To Normal (ABC.au)

Having passed the 80 per cent double-vaccination mark last month, the example of Singapore suggests that achieving a milestone coveted by Australia is not a guarantee of returning to anything like pre-pandemic life. The island state reluctantly delayed reopening measures and re-imposed some restrictions last week after seeing its highest daily COVID-19 infections in more than a year. On Sunday, the nation of 5.7 million people reported 555 new local COVID-19 cases, the most since August 2020. A day earlier, it recorded its 58th death, a partially vaccinated 80-year-old man with a history of diabetes, hypertension and heart problems.


Singapore’s Ministry of Health last week banned social gatherings at workplaces after recent clusters in staff canteens and pantries, believed to have been caused by employees removing their masks in common areas. With Singaporeans told to limit social gatherings to one per day, Gan Kim Yong — co-chair of the multi-ministry task force — said the “worrying” spike in infections would “probably get to 2,000 new cases a day”, describing the next two to four weeks as “crucial”. Alex Cook, an infectious diseases modelling expert at the National University of Singapore, said life had not improved “by as much as we might have hoped”, despite Singapore being one of the world’s most vaccinated countries.

Infinite vaccines

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“..he and colleagues from 7 universities are suing the CDC for massive fraud..”

• Laboratories in US Can’t Find COVID-19 in One of 1,500 Positive Tests (Xander)

A clinical scientist and immunologist-virologist at a southern California laboratory says he and colleagues from 7 universities are suing the CDC for massive fraud. The reason: not one of 1500 samples of people tested “positive” could find Covid-19. ALL people were simply found to have Influenza A, and to a lesser extent Influenza B. This is consistent with the previous findings of other scientists, which we have reported on several times. Dr. Derek Knauss: “When my lab team and I subjected the 1500 supposedly positive Covid-19 samples to Koch’s postulates and put them under an SEM (electron microscope), we found NO Covid in all 1500 samples. We found that all 1500 samples were primarily Influenza A, and some Influenza B, but no cases of Covid. We did not use the bulls*** PCR test.’

‘When we sent the rest of the samples to Stanford, Cornell, and a couple of the labs at the University of California, they came up with the same result: NO COVID. They found Influenza A and B. Then we all asked the CDC for viable samples of Covid. The CDC said they can’t give them, because they don’t have those samples.’ ‘So we came to the hard conclusion through all our research and lab work that Covid-19 was imaginary and fictitious. The flu was only called ‘Covid,’ and most of the 225,000 deaths were from co-morbidities such as heart disease, cancer, diabetes, pulmonary emphysema, etc.. They got the flu which further weakened their immune systems, and they died.’ ‘I still need to find one viable sample with Covid-19 to work with. We who conducted the lab test with these 1500 samples at the 7 universities are now suing the CDC for Covid-19 fraud.

‘The CDC still has not sent us a viable, isolated and purified sample of Covid-19. If they can’t or won’t, then I say there is no Covid-19. It’s fictional.’ ‘The four research papers describing the genome extracts of the Covid-19 virus never managed to isolate and purify the samples. All four papers describe only small pieces of RNA that are only 37 to 40 base pairs long. That is NOT a VIRUS. A viral genome normally has 30,000 to 40,000 base pairs.’ ‘Now that Covid-19 is supposedly so bad everywhere, how come not one lab in the world has completely isolated and purified this virus? That’s because they never really found the virus. All they ever discovered were small pieces of RNA that were not identified as the virus anyway. So what we’re dealing with is just another flu strain, just like every year. Covid-19 does not exist and is fictitious.’

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Merck.

• Grotesque Conflicts Of Interest On NIH Ivermectin Non-Recommendation (TSN)

The National Institutes of Health provided a non-recommendation for the use of ivermectin in COVID-19, stating that there was: “insufficient evidence … to recommend either for or against the use of ivermectin for the treatment of COVID-19.”The process for reaching that non-recommendation, however, is opaque. The Panel members responsible for therapy recommendations are disclosed and also that: “… working groups propose updates to the Guidelines based on the latest published research findings and evolving clinical information.” However, NIH has gone to extreme efforts to avoid stating whether a vote was held to endorse the ivermectin non-recommendation. This includes fighting a Freedom of Information Act request in federal court.

A deceptive non-vote would constitute an atrocity. NIH has also been secretive about the composition of the working group that proposed the ivermectin non-recommendation. The names of those individuals were redacted by the NIH from a document obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request for the agenda of a meeting considering ivermectin. However, the group responsible for the ivermectin non-recommendation has been discovered through a FOIA request to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention. The FOIA response shows that the working group has nine members. Three members of the working group, Adaora Adimora, Roger Bedimo, and David V. Glidden, have disclosed a financial relationship with Merck. Merck has campaigned against the use of ivermectin in COVID-19.

A fourth member, Susanna Naggie, had an extraordinary potential conflict of interest. She received a $155 million grant for the study of ivermectin following the non-recommendation. Funding for the study would have been difficult to justify if the drug was recommended for use in COVID-19. It is not known, however, if the panelist was aware of that opportunity or was planning to apply for that grant at the time of the deliberations on ivermectin. The deception and secrecy surrounding the NIH ivermectin non-recommendation should have raised serious doubts about its integrity. The grotesque conflicts of interest of Panel members should make it clear that the NIH, as the FDA with its slandering of ivermectin as a “horse dewormer,” should not be taken seriously.

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“..this is so wildly improbable that I find it impossible to believe unless something really, really ugly is going on with these jabs.”

• Damnit, Not Again (Denninger)

There are times that the “F” word is absolutely appropriate. For example on August 6th, 1945, by the Mayor of Hiroshima: What the **** was that? This is one of those and so I’ll use it without reservation: ****. “A drive-by parade outside of Methodist Mansfield Medical Center last April was supposed to be Corey Ripe’s happy ending. The 47-year-old was headed home after a week on a ventilator battling COVID-19.” Ok, he got Covid, he got it bad in March/April 2020 before we knew what we were doing — but he lived. Then, January. “Three days later, they got confirmation that, in addition to pneumonia, Ripe had once again contracted the virus that had already nearly claimed his life.”

Really? What was the Ct on that test? You see, I read that linked article and it describes symptoms that don’t make a lot of sense for Covid-19. Certainly anything’s possible but the article does make sense for a whole bunch of other infections particularly if he had secondary bacterial pneumonia. What did the hospital give him? Nobody has said. There wasn’t an antibiotic in there by chance, was there? He then gets vaccinated post-recovery. Remember, the vaccine prevents severe disease and death, we’re currently told. We were previously told it prevented getting the virus (that was a lie), that it prevented symptoms (that was a lie), that it prevented giving the virus to others (that was a wild-eyed, entirely-unscientific claim with zero evidence and proved to be a crazy-faced lie as is now showing up everywhere including at all-vaccinated colleges) and now it’s “you won’t go to the hospital or die.”

OH REALLY? WHERE IS THIS GUY RIGHT NOW? “Still, Saturday night, though he’d shown no prior symptoms, Parris knew it had to be COVID-19 again when she heard the fluid in his lungs. She rushed him to the ER. And an hour later, Parris got a familiar call. Ripe was intubated and waiting for an available ICU bed.” I see. So here are my questions, since this is so wildly improbable that I find it impossible to believe unless something really, really ugly is going on with these jabs.

At his second alleged infection did the hospital check for both “S” and “N” antibodies at admission? They should have been present. You know they didn’t look. But let’s assume, for the sake of argument, the first infection really was Covid (it’s entirely plausible) and not the flu with a secondary bacterial infection that got him. I’m not sold on this because H1N1 was going around at that time, I got what I presume was that in January 2020, it did get into my lungs and it flattened me for a week with serious hanging-on symptoms, notably a nasty non-productive cough, that kept hanging on for a month and material cardio impairment for several more (it was worse than Covid-19 which I got first days of August of this year.) It was bad and I thought, after Covid-19 became known to be a “thing”, I might have had it. But it was not Covid-19; I know scientifically it was not because a few months later I sourced IgG antibody tests and I was negative.

After the second alleged infection but before he got vaccinated did anyone check for both “S” and “N” antibodies? You know the answer to that one too. Of course not. “If you’re recovered you should still get vaccinated” is what every ******* in the medical and political field has said even though there is zero evidence you get any benefit from doing so and, post-infection, the data is that your protection is many times (13x or more, to be exact) better than getting jabbed. In any event being an alleged “two-time winner” of the Covid-19 sweepstakes, a statistically unlikely thing to the extreme unless one of the two wasn’t actually Covid, he takes the (bad) advice and gets vaccinated. Ok, so now he should have both “N” antibodies (from previous infection) and a bunch of “S” ones.

Now a few months later he gets hammered. Again they say “Covid-19.” Did they look at admission time for those antibodies this time? You know damn well they did not and, much worse, this time was extremely rapid onset which strongly implies that VEI may be in the game here. Yet I’ll bet $1,000 they did not pull antibody titers for both “S” and “N” proteins on admission and given the history I’ll argue that’s not only personal malpractice it’s public-health malpractice and gross negligence.

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Moderna has still not been “approved”.

• One In Five Americans Say Employer Requires Vaccination (ZH)

The share of Americans who are required by their employer to get vaccinated against COVID-19 took a jump up in August to 19 percent, according to a Gallup poll. As Statista’s Katharina Buchholz notes, the number had been as low as 9 percent in July and 6 percent in June. Over the past couple of months, many major companies and government branches have released vaccination requirements and the type of employer issuing requirements goes beyond obvious ones like healthcare providers and the military. The full approval of the Pfizer vaccine on August 23 helped make the legal footing of employer-mandated vaccinations sounder.

According to Fortune, companies that require vaccinations for employees in order to work from their premises include Bank of America, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Netflix and Uber. Three federal departments – those for defense, veteran affairs and health and human services – also require them without alternatives for frontline workers. Six states – Colorado, Maine, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, and Washington – have released mandates for healthcare workers to get vaccinated or be terminated, while the more common mandates for state and local government employees normally leave the option of regular testing and sometimes masking for the unvaccinated.


The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, an independent federal government agency, has said that it is legal for employers to require all employees who physically enter a workplace to be vaccinated against COVID-19, as long as the employers also comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act in order to accommodate those who cannot be vaccinated for medical reasons.

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“practical matter, this policy may result in exacerbating the severe workforce shortage problems that currently exist.”

• Unvaxxed Kentucky Health Care Workers Force Hospital to Fire Them (GP)

Health care workers at Kentucky’s Med Center in Bowling Green refused to comply with the vaccine mandate or turn in their resignation. Instead, two workers showed up and refused to leave until someone told them that they are fired. The Med Center was the target of protests last month when they became one of the largest hospitals in the country to impose a vaccine mandate on their employees. On August 18, over 100 community members and health care workers demonstrated outside the campus holding signs with slogans such as, “my body my choice” and “medical freedom.” Leadership at the hospital had until August 9 to get vaccinated and all other employees had until September 1.

A healthcare worker named Ale Minnicks posted a video of herself two days after the mandate went into effect on TikTok and Facebook. Her and a coworker, who identified herself as Ashley Rich, were refusing the jab. They arrived at work and were unable to clock in — but the hospital refused to say that they were being fired. “The Medical Center in BG, KY was trying to quietly put over 350 out of a job without resignation or termination for not getting the vaccine,” Minnicks wrote, along with the hashtag “stop the mandate.” As they were told to leave the building, Minnicks kept reiterating that “I did not quit and I was not fired.” “You’re going to have to leave. We need your badge and we need you to leave,” a woman can be heard telling Minnicks. Still, they were initially careful with their wording and did not say the women were fired.

“There was a choice, you chose not to take the vaccine,” a man, who identifies himself as head of security, is heard saying. “So then fire us,” the women demand, asking for a termination letter in exchange for her badge. Eventually, they are told that they have been fired and both agree to leave. By refusing to quit and showing up for work, the women will have more options available when it comes to potential lawsuits and unemployment. There are currently massive staff shortages at hospitals across the country, leading the American Hospital Association to express concerns about the impending federal requirement for all healthcare staff to get the COVID-19 vaccine. AHA CEO Rick Pollack said in a statement that a “practical matter, this policy may result in exacerbating the severe workforce shortage problems that currently exist.”

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Natural immunity has come to mean that after having been infected. Curious.

• Spectrum Health Workers Can Use Natural Immunity As Vaccine Mandate Exemption

Spectrum Health will grant temporary exemptions from its employee vaccine mandate to individuals who can prove they have naturally acquired immunity to COVID-19. The west Michigan hospital system, which is in the process of merging with Southfield-based Beaumont Health, will grant an exemption to those who have a positive PCR or antigen test for COVID-19 plus a positive antibody test from within the past three months, the health system said in a statement Thursday. The exemption, the first for a major health system in Michigan, was developed “as new research has emerged” on natural immunity.

“While we still recommend vaccination for people with prior COVID-19 infection, according to this new research, there is increasing evidence that natural infection affords protection from COVID-19 reinfection and severe symptoms for a period of time,” the statement said. “Current studies are not clear on how long natural immunity protects from reinfection.” The policy could be updated if future evidence shows naturally acquired protection is waning or longer lasting, or if there is a validated antibody test result showing immunity, the statement said. Spectrum announced in late July that it would require the COVID-19 vaccine within eight weeks of the Food and Drug Administration approving a vaccine, but noted it would consider some exemptions.

Those exemptions include religious exemptions and medical exemptions determined by a medical exemption committee. The hospital system’s medial exemption committee recommended the health system allow for a temporary exemption for naturally acquired immunity based on available research, the statement said.

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“This is a job board for employers who are in favour of informed consent with regard to medical procedures, as per our constitution..”

• Jobs Without Jabs Australia (Sky)

Social media websites have begun to see an influx of groups dedicated to opposing mandatory vaccines for work, as Australia prepares for life beyond lockdown upon meeting the government’s 80 per cent target. Those who remain sceptical of the vaccine, or reject the push for employers to be given power to dismiss them over health issues, have been encouraged to share information about their particular industry’s stance on mandatory jabs for staff. The group “Jobs Without Jabs Australia” has attracted over 20,000 members, with employers regularly posting their intention to hire workers “with or without a jab”. “Freedom of choice without medical coercion. A free Australia for all, not a two tiered society. This is a job noticeboard to connect employers and employees,” the group’s description reads.

The public group features a number of posts from young workers in food chains worried about losing their financial stability, insisting they are “definitely not going to get the vaccination”. “We’ve just received a video from the founder of our company saying that everyone that visits our restaurant will have to have the jab which means all co-workers will also have to have it by early October. I can’t afford to lose my job as I’m under a lot of financial pressure right now, but I know I’m definitely not going to get the vaccination. Thank you,” one post read. “In 3 months I will be looking for marketing, sales, IT, finance, bookkeeping, admin, customer service, hospitality, events & various construction team members! No jab welcomed with open arms. (Melbourne Based),” another post read, collecting 260 reactions and 28 comments.

Several other posts encouraged anti-vaxxers considering leaving their industry due to vaccine mandates to simply “work for themselves”. “Get an ABN, do dump runs, start a delivery service, buy /sell second hand furniture, clean, busk, make products, sell online. Do whatever you have to to make it work,” one read. The group has already braced for its potential removal, setting up an alternative Telegram group. “If you’re on Telegram, join the group there also in case this gets taken down,” the group’s administrator posted. “This is a job board for employers who are in favour of informed consent with regard to medical procedures, as per our constitution, and for employees who have elected not to be vaccinated, to be able to find employment.”

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What scared them?

• England Vaccine Passport Plans Ditched (BBC)

Plans to introduce vaccine passports for access into nightclubs and large events in England will not go ahead, the health secretary has said. Sajid Javid told the BBC: “We shouldn’t be doing things for the sake of it.” It was thought the plan, which came under criticism from venues and some MPs, would be introduced at the end of this month. Just a week ago, the vaccines minister had defended the scheme as the “best way” to keep the night industry open. No 10 stressed the plan – which had been set to be introduced at the end of this month – would be kept “in reserve” should it be needed over autumn or winter. Under the scheme, people would have been required to show proof – whether of double vaccination, a negative Covid test or finishing self-isolating after a positive PCR test – in order to gain entry to clubs and other crowded events.

The Night Time Industries Association had said the plans could have crippled the industry and led to nightclubs facing discrimination cases. The industry body welcomed Sunday’s announcement, saying it hoped businesses could now plan with some certainty and start to rebuild the sector. The Music Venue Trust, which aims to protect grassroots venues, also said it was glad vaccine passports would not be going ahead, describing them as “problematic”. There had been opposition from Tory MPs on the Covid Recovery Group as well as the Liberal Democrats, whose leader Ed Davey called vaccine passports “divisive, unworkable and expensive”. Speaking on The Andrew Marr Show, Mr Javid said: “We just shouldn’t be doing things for the sake of it or because others are doing, and we should look at every possible intervention properly.”

He said he had “never liked the idea of saying to people you must show your papers” to “do what is just an everyday activity”. “We’ve looked at it properly and, whilst we should keep it in reserve as a potential option, I’m pleased to say that we will not be going ahead with plans for vaccine passports,” he added. Mr Javid denied the government was “running scared” on the policy after criticism from its own backbenchers. He said the passports were not needed because of other things in the “wall of defence” including high vaccine uptake, testing, surveillance and new treatments. The move to scrap vaccine passports appears to be a sharp U-turn by the government. On the same TV programme last week, Vaccines Minister Nadhim Zahawi said the end of September was the right time to start the vaccine passport scheme for sites with large crowds because all over-18s would have been offered two jabs by then and it was the “best way” to keep the night industry open.

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A lesson.

• The Polio Pandemic of 1949-52: No Closures, No Restrictions (Tucker)

World War II had ended four years earlier and the U.S. was trying to return to peace and prosperity. Price controls and rationing were ended. Trade was opening. People were returning to normal life. The economy started humming again. Optimism for the future was growing. Harry Truman became the symbol of a new normacy. From Depression and war, society was on the mend. As if to serve as a reminder that there were still threats to life and liberty present, an old enemy made its appearance: polio. It’s a disease with ancient origins, with its most terrifying effect, the paralysis of the lower extremities. It maimed children, killed adults, and struck enormous fear into everyone. Polio is also a paradigmatic case that targeted and localized policy mitigations have worked in the past, but society-wide lockdowns have never been used before. They weren’t even considered as an option.

Polio was not an unknown disease: its reputation for cruelty was well earned. In the 1916 outbreak, there were 27,000 cases and more than 6,000 deaths due to polio in the United States, 2,000 of which were in New York City. After the war, people had living memories of this horror. People were also used to adjusting their behavior. In 1918, people left cities for resorts, movie theaters were closed for lack of customers, groups cancelled meetings, and public gatherings dwindled. Children avoided swimming pools and public water fountains, fearing that it was transmitted through water. Whatever the therapeutic merit of this, these actions required no force; it happened because people do their best to adapt to risk and be cautious.

In 1949, the new polio epidemic appeared and swept through selective population centers, leaving its most tragic sign: children with wheelchairs, crutches, leg braces, and deformed limbs. For children with polio in the late 1940s, the disease caused paralysis in 1 in 1,000 cases of children aged 5 to 9. The rest had only mild symptoms and developed immunities. In the 1952 season, of the 57,628 cases reported, 3,145 died and a shocking 21,269 experienced paralysis. So while the infection, death, and paralysis rates seem “low” by comparison to the 1918 flu, the psychological impact of this disease became its most prescient feature. The “iron lung” that became widely available in the 1930s stopped asphyxiation of polio victims, and it was a triumph of innovation; it allowed a dramatic reduction in the death rate.

Finally, by 1954, a vaccine was developed (by private labs with very little government support subsidies) and the disease was largely eradicated in the U.S. twenty years later. It became a signature achievement of the medical industry and the promise of vaccines. Throughout the country, the quarantining of the sick was deployed in a limited way as one medical response. There were some shutdowns. The CDC reports that “travel and commerce between affected cities were sometimes restricted [by local officials]. Public health officials imposed quarantines (used to separate and restrict the movement of well people who may have been exposed to a contagious disease to see if they become ill) on homes and towns where polio cases were diagnosed.”

Read more …

It’s not a strategy, it’s just a very deep hole.

• The Eurozone Is Going Down The Japan Way (Lacalle)

The European Central Bank announced a tapering of the repurchase program on September the 9th. One would imagine that this is a sensible idea given the recent rise in inflation in the eurozone to the highest level in a decade and the allegedly strong recovery of the economy. However, there is a big problem. The announcement is not really tapering, but simply adjusting to a lower net supply of bonds from sovereign issuers. In fact, considering the pace announced by the central bank, the ECB will continue to purchase 100% of all net issuance from sovereigns. There are several problems in this strategy. The first one is that the ECB is unwillingly acknowledging that there is no real secondary market demand for eurozone countries’ sovereign debt at these yields. One would have to think of twice or three times the current yield for investors to accept many eurozone bonds if the ECB does not repurchase them. This is obviously a dangerous bubble.

The second problem is that the ECB acknowledges that monetary policy has gone from being a tool to help implement structural reforms to a tool to avoid them. Even with the strong GDP bounce that the ECB predicts, few governments are willing to reduce spending and curb deficits in a meaningful way. The ECB estimates show that after the massive deficit spending of 2020, eurozone government spending will rise again by 3.4% in 2021 only to fall modestly by 1.2% in 2022. This means that eurozone government spending will consolidate the covid pandemic increase with little improvement in the fiscal position of most countries. Indeed, countries like Spain and Italy have increased the structural deficit.

The third problem is that negative rates and high liquidity injections combined with elevated government spending have generated no real multiplier effect in the eurozone. We must remember that the main economies were in stagnation already in the fourth quarter of 2019, before the pandemic and despite large stimulus plans like the Juncker Plan, which mobilized hundreds of billions of euros in investments. The fourth challenge for the ECB is that it acknowledges being trapped by its own policy, it cannot stop it and normalize because governments and markets would suffer, and it cannot keep the current pace because inflation is putting even more pressure on growth.

The final challenge for the eurozone and the ECB is that they continue to implement policies that ignore demographics and structural burdens to growth. The eurozone has an aging population and monetary and fiscal policies seem to ignore the evidence of changing consumption patterns when citizens reach a certain age or retire. If we add to demographics a taxation system that increasingly hurts middle classes, businesses, and investment, we face an economy that seems to be following all the wrong policies that Japan implemented at the beginning of the 90s.

Read more …

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Debt Rattle June 25 2020

Jun 252020
 
 June 25, 2020  Posted by at 11:39 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , ,  32 Responses »


Thomas Eakins Walt Whitman 1891

 

• Strzok’s Newly Discovered FBI Notes Deliver Jolt To ‘Obamagate’ Evidence (JTN)
• Flynn Dismissal Order ‘Thoroughly Demolishes’ Dissenting Judge’s Opinion (ZH)
• Julian Assange Accused In US Indictment Of Conspiracy (Fox)
• State, Local Gov’ts Need Billions More In Aid To Avert 4 Million Layoffs (MW)

 

 

Ever since I began reporting on the new coronavirus, I have pointed to trendlines as the reason to publish graphs and numbers on a daily basis. They make it possible to see how things develop. And what I see lately scares the heebees out of me. The trendlines tell us that things are getting worse, fast, while at the same time everyone pretends that they’re ready to re-open their societies.

I’ve said from the start that lockdowns can only be temporary, because we are social beings, but also that you need to use a lockdown wisely. Very few societies have, though.

In a few days’ time we will cross 10 million global confirmed cases, and 500,000 deaths. There is a lot wrong with the way these numbers are tallied, but they’re the best we have. And yes, these two “milestones” indicate a case fatality rate of 5%. Now, I can hear the protests all the way over here, and I don’t think a 5% rate is real, but even just one tenth of that, an 0.5% rate, is pretty terrible.

Yes, there are many more infections than those 10 million, no doubt, but there are also a lot more deaths than half a million. And by the way, that is a lot of lives lost, we should never forget that. Moreover, both the cases and the deaths just keep on coming, and there is no end in sight to that.

If things continue along current trendlines, we will in all likelihood observe how the end to the lockdowns does a lot more economic damage than the lockdowns ever did. Several US states already ring alarm bells over their healthcare facilities threatening to be overwhelmed.

And what about Brazil, Mexico, India and more? What will happen in Europe now all countries there are opening up, claiming that they have it all solved? There are many many millions of jobs in the west that are gone forever, and I can’t see countries being prepared to deal with that.

Be careful out there!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Worldometer reports new cases for June 24 (midnight to midnight GMT+0) at + 172,383.

 

 

New cases past 24 hours in:

• US + 38,621
• Brazil + 40,021
• Russia + 7,790
• India + 23,229

 

 

 

From Worldometer yesterday evening -before their day’s close-:

 

 

From Worldometer:

 

 

From COVID19Info.live:

 

 

 

 

A lot is being said about the “newfound” Peter Strzok notes from the Jan 4 2017 meeting with Rise, Yates, Biden, Comey, Obama. I think this part has more meaning than any other.

• Strzok’s Newly Discovered FBI Notes Deliver Jolt To ‘Obamagate’ Evidence (JTN)

The real impact of the notes may be on the Justice Department’s ongoing investigation of the Russia investigators, where U.S. Attorneys John Durham and Jeff Jensen are determining whether the FBI or others committed crimes in deceiving the courts or Congress about the evidence in the now-discredited Russia collusion allegations. A former senior FBI official told Just the News that Strzok’s notes about the White House meeting are a red flag that the Comey-led bureau may have been involving itself illegitimately in a political dispute between the outgoing Obama administration and incoming Trump administration. “It was a political meeting about a policy dispute, and the bureau had no business being involved,” Former Assistant Director for Intelligence Kevin Brock said. “No other FBI director would ever have attended such a meeting.

“Comey is quoted in the notes as saying the Kislyak call appeared legit. At that point he should have gotten up and left the room,” Brock added. “The FBI had no business being represented in that meeting. It did not have a counterintelligence interest any longer.”

A second impact of the notes could be on the campaign trail. A few months ago, Biden claimed he was unaware of the Flynn probe as he was leaving the VP’s office. I know nothing about those moves to investigate Michael Flynn,” he said. He then clarified his denial. “I was aware that … they asked for an investigation,” Biden said. “But that’s all I know about it, and I don’t think anything else.” If Powell’s interpretation of the notes is correct, Biden was knowledgeable enough to suggest a possible pretext for continued investigation, the Logan Act. And he eventually unmasked one of Flynn’s intercepted phone calls a week later.

https://twitter.com/Techno_Fog/status/1275803339738021890

Read more …

Is this a deliberate mess?

• Flynn Dismissal Order ‘Thoroughly Demolishes’ Dissenting Judge’s Opinion (ZH)

Missouri appellate attorney John Reeves has weighed in on today’s decision by the US Court of Appeals for DC ordering Judge Emmett Sullivan to grant a DOJ request to drop the case against Michael Flynn. The opinion, authored by one of the three judges on the panel, Neomi J. Rao, “thoroughly demolishes” a dissenting opinion by Judge Robert Wilkins – who Reeves thinks was so off-base that he “shot himself in the foot” when it comes to any chance of an ‘en-banc review’ in which the Flynn decision would be kicked back for a full review by the DC appellate court.

[..] In all my years of appellate practice, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a non-US Supreme Court appellate opinion that so thoroughly demolishes a dissenting opinion as this one. Judge Rao could not have done better in writing the opinion, and it should be required law school rdg. In addition, Judge Wilkins’ dissenting opinion is so off-the-mark that I believe he has shot himself in the foot for purposes of en banc review–in other words, he has ensured that otherwise-sympathetic judges on the DC Circuit will vote against en banc review. Judge Rao comes out swinging by holding that its earlier opinion in Fokker “foreclose[s] the district court’s proposed scrutiny of the government’s motion to dismiss the Flynn prosecution.” p. 7.

In relying on Fokker, Judge Rao explicitly rejects Judge Wilkinson’s argument that Fokker’s holding is dicta (that is, non-binding). She holds Fokker “is directly controlling here.” p. 14. Keep in mind that Fokker was written by Chief Judge Srinivasan, an OBAMA appointee. Judge Srinivasan does NOT want Fokker’s legitimacy undermined, no matter his politics. Judge Wilkins’ dissent implies that Fokker was wrongly decided, and that it conflicts with other federal appellate courts. See p. 23 of 28. Judge Srinivasan will NOT be impressed by this argument in deciding whether to grant en banc rehearing. Fokker does not create a split. Judge Rao goes on to emphasize that while judicial inquiry MAY be justified in some circumstances, Flynn’s situation “is plainly not the rare case where further judicial inquiry is warranted.” p. 6.

Rao notes that Flynn agrees with the Govt.’s dismissal motion, so there’s no risk of his rights being violated. In addition, the Government has stated insufficient evidence exists to convict Flynn. p. 6. Rao also holds that “a hearing cannot be used as an occasion to superintend the prosecution’s charging decisions.” p. 7. But by appointing amicus and attempting to hold a hearing on these matters, the district court is inflicting irreparable harm on the Govt. because it is subjecting its prosecutorial decisions to outside inquiry. p. 8 Thus, Judge Rao holds, it is NOT true that the district court has “yet to act” in this matter, contrary to Judge Wilkins’ assertions. p. 16. “[T]he district court HAS acted here….[by appointing] one private citizen to argue that another citizen should be deprived of his liberty regardless of whether the Executive Branch is willing to pursue the charges.” p. 16. This justified mandamus being issued NOW.

Read more …

https://twitter.com/MrsC_Assange/status/1276031301036896256

• Julian Assange Accused In US Indictment Of Conspiracy (Fox)

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange sought to recruit hackers at conferences in Europe and Asia who could provide his anti-secrecy website with classified information, and conspired with members of hacking organizations, according to a new Justice Department indictment announced Wednesday. The superseding indictment does not contain additional charges beyond the 18 counts the Justice Department unsealed last year. But prosecutors say it underscores Assange’s efforts to procure and release classified information, allegations that form the basis of criminal charges he already faces.

Beyond recruiting hackers at conferences, the indictment accuses Assange of conspiring with members of hacking groups known as LulzSec and Anonymous. He also worked with a 17-year-old hacker who gave him information stolen from a bank and directed the teenager to steal additional material, including audio recordings of high-ranking government officials, prosecutors say.

Assange’s lawyer, Barry Pollack, said in a statement that “the government’s relentless pursuit of Julian Assange poses a grave threat to journalists everywhere and to the public’s right to know.” “While today’s superseding indictment is yet another chapter in the U.S. Government’s effort to persuade the public that its pursuit of Julian Assange is based on something other than his publication of newsworthy truthful information,” he added, “the indictment continues to charge him with violating the Espionage Act based on WikiLeaks publications exposing war crimes committed by the U.S. Government.”

https://twitter.com/SomersetBean/status/1276063923641282560

Read more …

What’s going to happen to all the people who end up without jobs?

• State, Local Gov’ts Need Billions More In Aid To Avert 4 Million Layoffs (MW)

A new private sector report is warning anew of continuing damage to the economy if Washington doesn’t deliver several hundred billion dollars in budget relief to states and local governments amid the coronavirus pandemic. But Wednesday’s report by Moody’s Analytics, a private sector economic research firm, could also help illustrate a path for bipartisan agreement in Congress on next month’s fifth, and possibly final, COVID-19 response bill. The study warns that doing nothing to address the economic perils of state layoffs and cutbacks could cost 4 million jobs. But it also says that significantly less money is needed than what’s being called for by House Democrats, who passed almost $1 trillion in help for cash-poor states and local governments as part of a sweeping $3.5 trillion rescue package last month.


The Democratic bill combines $500 billion for state governments — as requested by the nation’s governors — and $375 billion for local governments, many of whom were left out of earlier relief efforts. The Moody study says that level of spending — rejected out of hand by Republicans — is likely beyond what’s needed. “The scope of aid being requested is certainly unprecedented in size and warrants significant scrutiny,” Moody’s says. “For example, the $1 trillion in aid recently approved as part of the house’s HEROES Act would be enough to raise the eyebrows of even the most aggressive advocates of fiscal stimulus.”

Read more …

 

 

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Frederick Douglass about Abaham Lincoln:

 

 

 

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Debt Rattle May 9 2020

May 092020
 
 May 9, 2020  Posted by at 11:15 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , , ,  21 Responses »


Tomb of the diver, Paestum c480 BCE

 

• Ugly US Jobs Data Hides As Much As It Reveals (R.)
• How Australia Got On Top Of COVID19 (SMH)
• South Korea’s COVID19 Exceptionalism (Atl.)
• South Korea Backtracks On Reopening After COVID19 Cases Jump (NW)
• Enough With the Phoney ‘Lockdown’ Debate (Kay)
• UK To Place All Incoming Travellers Under 14-Day Quarantine (R.)
• COVID19 Death Rate Sinking? Data Reveals A Complex Reality (DW)
• Want To Be More Like Sweden? What If We Already Are? (Mish)
• Velociraptors Still On The Loose? No Reason Not To Reopen Jurassic Park (McS)
• The Bailout Miscalculation That Could Crash the Economy (Taibbi)
• Wall Street-Friendly Lawmakers Sought Bailout For Shady Lenders (HuffPo)
• Auto Production Collapses By 99% In Mexico and Brazil (R.)
• Our Utter Incompetence Actually Helps Us (Kunstler)
• What Did Joe Biden Know About Michael Flynn? (York)
• Andrew McCabe’s Bizarre CNN Interview (Turley)

 

 

•The US recorded 1,635 #coronavirus deaths in the past 24 hours, bringing the total to 77,178, with a confirmed total of 1,283,829 cases

 

 

• Brazil today now 10,199, total near 150k
• Mexico 23% jump to 1,982, new high
• India today 3,362, small decrease after large increase
• Pakistan 1,791 new high
• Iran recent increasing trend continues 1,556
• Kuwait 641, Qatar 1,311 both new highs

 

 

 

• Cases 4,032,763 (+ 98,052 from yesterday’s 3,934,711)

• Deaths 276,677 (+ 5,582 from yesterday’s 271,095)

 

 

 

From Worldometer yesterday evening -before their day’s close-

 

 

From Worldometer Deaths among Closed cases is down to 17%. That still needs to come down much more.

 

 

From SCMP:

 

 

From COVID19Info.live:

 

 

 

 

Total nonfarm payroll employment fell by 20.5 million in April, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, bringing the unemployment rate to 14.7%.

That is the highest rate and largest month-over-month increase since the report began in its current form in 1948.

• Ugly US Jobs Data Hides As Much As It Reveals (R.)

April really was the cruelest month. Over 20 million Americans lost their jobs, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, bringing the unemployment rate to an eye-popping 14.7% – the highest since at least the 1940s. But the headline number leaves out much of the Covid-19 economic story. The report makes for grisly – if unsurprising – reading. The economy shed roughly a decade of job gains. The figure dwarfs the 8.7 million jobs lost in the Great Recession that lasted from December 2007 to June 2009 and suggests an annualized second-quarter GDP contraction north of 30% is possible. It represents the highest recorded losses in the report’s seven-decade history, and includes the wipeout of almost half of the country’s leisure and hospitality jobs.

Comparing this to previous crises and slumps is of limited use, because the United States has never intentionally shut off almost 30% of its economy before. But other things are different too. For one, Friday’s figure doesn’t necessarily paint an accurate income picture. Federal stimulus has added $600 a week to jobless benefits, making them, on average, actually higher than normal salaries in a majority of states, according to the New York Times. This is only temporary and the levels vary by state, but it’s still a huge difference from previous crises. The $1,200 one-off payments made to many Americans also mean households, overall, might not see income decline as much as the depressing statistics would suggest.

Just as the record lows in unemployment before Covid-19 didn’t give a full picture, the highs present a similar problem. The headline unemployment figure leaves out workers who aren’t looking for jobs. And it classifies over 18 million workers as being on temporary layoff – but it’s impossible to know whether they will be rehired. After the lockdown, demand may remain depressed because people are scared to, say, go to restaurants or spend much at all. Jobless figures during the decade-plus expansion didn’t account for the low quality of jobs, limited benefits, and low labor-force participation rate. Unfortunately, Friday’s statistics mostly make clear what was already known – that the U.S. economy is in an induced coma – without giving clues on how or when it will wake up.

Read more …

In a nutshell: by ignoring the WHO.

• How Australia Got On Top Of COVID19 (SMH)

It got really serious for Greg Hunt while he was at the cricket. It was a Saturday morning, February 1, while Australia’s Health Minister was watching his 10-year-old son play that he got the message. In between phone calls and text messages, Hunt was cheering his boy on as he walked laps around the Balnarring cricket oval on his home turf of Victoria’s Mornington Peninsula. “We now have sustained human-to-human transmission outside Wuhan,” read the message from Australia’s Chief Medical Officer, Brendan Murphy, as Hunt recalls it. “I think we are going to have to close the border to China.” It’s a morning that Hunt says he remembers clearly. The government was already on high alert.

It had been 12 days since Murphy had informed Hunt he was invoking the Biosecurity Act to list the novel coronavirus as a disease of pandemic potential. Behind closed doors, Prime Minister Scott Morrison had already told the national security committee of the cabinet that he’d resolved to “respect the medical advice” as the guiding principle in any response to the epidemic that was spreading in China. Now it was time to act. Hunt immediately connected with Morrison and Murphy on a three-way phone call. Murphy set out the facts and advised: “There’s a very strong risk of this spreading to Australia.” “Are you recommending that we close the border to China?” the Prime Minister asked. Yes, came Murphy’s answer. It was announced at 5pm that same day. It was to be, in Hunt’s words, “almost the biggest, one-day decision a government had made in 50 years”.

Beijing, predictably, put on a show of anger. The Chinese embassy gave Canberra a stern lecture, called Australia “xenophobic” and demanded compensation for Chinese students who were inconvenienced. The Australian government realised that something was badly wrong with the World Health Organisation, or WHO, around this time. The Geneva-based UN organisation kept insisting that there was no cause for countries to ban travel from China. Many nations, Britain and Canada among them, were trusting enough to take its advice. Australia wasn’t the first to shut down arrivals from China. The US and Singapore had done it a day earlier. Taiwan had barred tourists from China’s mainland earlier still, on January 26.

Australian officials since have reflected privately that, if Canberra had been watching China as closely as Taiwan does – and with as much scepticism of its official announcements – Australia would have acted at the same time. Taiwan is the standout global success story in managing COVID-19 to date. It’s an island with roughly the same population as Australia but only six deaths. Australia’s death toll is approaching 100. Taiwan’s restrictions on movement weren’t much more drastic than Australia’s but it moved sooner. Taiwan also was smart enough to put no faith in the WHO. Indeed, Beijing has barred Taiwan from membership of the WHO. Which, in this case, hasn’t done Taiwan any harm whatsoever.

Canberra announced other border closures in short order – Iran, Italy, South Korea. But then it paused before finally banning all foreign arrivals after March 19. Was it a mistake to wait so long? Should Australia have followed its China ban with a global ban sooner?

Read more …

What comes before the fall?

• South Korea’s COVID19 Exceptionalism (Atl.)

By the end of February, South Korea had the most COVID-19 patients of any country outside China. New confirmed cases were doubling every few days, and pharmacies were running out of face masks. More than a dozen countries imposed travel restrictions to protect their citizens from the Korean outbreak, including the U.S., which had, at the time, recorded an official COVID-19 death toll low enough to count on one hand. But just as South Korea appeared to be descending into catastrophe, the country stopped the virus in its tracks. The government demanded that the Shincheonji Church turn over its full membership list, through which the Ministry of Health identified thousands of worshippers. All were ordered to self-isolate.

Within days, thousands of people in Daegu were tested for the virus. Individuals with the most serious cases were sent to hospitals, while those with milder cases checked into isolation units at converted corporate training facilities. The government used a combination of interviews and cellphone surveillance to track down the recent contacts of new patients and ordered those contacts to self-isolate as well. Within a month, the Korean outbreak was effectively contained. In the first two weeks of March, new daily cases fell from 800 to fewer than 100. (This morning, the nation of 51 million reported zero new domestic infections for the third straight day.) On April 15, the country successfully held a national parliamentary election with the highest turnout in three decades, without triggering another wave.

South Korea is not unique in its ability to bend the curve of daily cases; New Zealand, Australia, and Norway have done so, as well. But it is perhaps the largest democracy to reduce new daily cases by more than 90 percent from peak, and its density and proximity to China make the achievement particularly noteworthy. [..] In mid-March, the U.S. and South Korea had the same number of coronavirus-caused fatalities—approximately 90. In April, South Korea lost a total of 85 souls to COVID-19, while the U.S. lost 62,000—an average of 85 deaths every hour. That the U.S. population is approximately six times larger than South Korea’s does little to soften the horror of the comparison.

Read more …

Uh-oh….

• South Korea Backtracks On Reopening After COVID19 Cases Jump (NW)

Despite recently reopening businesses amid an impressive decline in new coronavirus case, the South Korean government has issued a nationwide health advisory for bars and nightclubs to close down for 30 more days after health officials tracked 13 new cases to a single person who attended five nightclubs and bars in the country’s capital city of Seoul. “We believe we will have another community infection,” said Vice Health Minister Kim Gang-lip at a Friday press briefing. “The spread took place in enclosed and crowded spaces. Transmission with no known source of infection can lead to a widespread cluster infection and that is why the government is not letting its guard down.”

The man in question had no symptoms when he visited the nightspots. He eventually tested positive on Wednesday and gained admittance to a hospital in Suwon, a city south of Seoul, according to the UPI wire service. Officials think he may have come in contact with over 1,500 people during his night out. City officials are now using CCTV and credit card records to help identify visitors and are encouraging them to self-isolate and immediately report any coronavirus symptoms to local hospitals. With a decline in new cases, South Korea has allowed places of worship, museums venues, recreational facilities and nightclubs to recently resume business. The country’s high schools begin reopening next week and its lower schools will gradually reopen throughout May.

However, similar to the reopening plans of many U.S. states, South Korea has said it will pull back on and reverse reopenings if new cases emerge. While the number of coronavirus cases in South Korea originally exploded in late February and early March, the country’s Ministry of Health worked hard to conduct rigorous contact tracing, contacting anyone who had attended venues where patients with confirmed cases of coronavirus had gone. Using a combination of interviews and cellphone surveillance, anyone in proximity to these patients and their neighbors were widely tested and all encouraged to self-quarantine.

Read more …

People lock themselves down.

• Enough With the Phoney ‘Lockdown’ Debate (Kay)

The skeptics who argue that lockdowns “don’t work” usually will support this claim by ticking off nations that have succeeded in fighting COVID-19 without imposing harsh government restrictions. But when you parse the actual data, what you find is that these tend to be high-trust, high-education, high-information societies—such as in Scandinavia and East Asia—where official lockdowns haven’t been necessary precisely because a critical mass of people have effectively locked themselves down on their own. If, say, spring-breakers in Miami were as conscientious and disciplined as, say, most office workers in Stockholm or Tokyo, the state’s governor wouldn’t have had to clear the beaches. But they’re not, so he did. Such spectacles tell us a lot about college students, but not much about lockdowns.


The crowdsourced aspect of lockdowns is bad news and good news. It’s bad news because getting all of society’s actors on the same page will take many months. And so we won’t be able to get our economies up and running on anything like the speedy timeline that most self-styled lockdown opponents are seeking. But it’s good news because a slower, crowdsourced form of lockdown lifting will be subject to a whole slew of negative feedback mechanisms whereby outbreaks naturally lead to corrections. And so we can avoid the problem, depicted in Ferguson’s graphs, by which sudden quantum shifts in centralized policy yield behavioural spikes whose catastrophic effects set off an endless wave of epidemiological boom and bust.

Read more …

This should have been a January headline. Now all the clusters are in place.

• UK To Place All Incoming Travellers Under 14-Day Quarantine (R.)

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson will announce on Sunday that all travellers coming to the United Kingdom will be quarantined for a fortnight, The Times reported. “Passengers arriving at airports and ports including Britons returning from abroad, will have to self-isolate for 14 days,” the newspaper said, adding that travellers will have to provide the address sat which they will self-isolate on arrival. Travellers from Ireland, the Channel Islands and the Isle of Man will be exempt, as will lorry drivers bringing crucial supplies, the report added.


The authorities will carry out spot checks and those found to be breaking the rules are to face fines of up to 1,000 pounds or even deportation, the report added. According to The Times, travellers will have to fill in a digital form with details of where they plan to self-isolate themselves for the duration of the quarantine. The measures will help reduce the “transmission of the virus as we move into the next phase of our response,” the report said, citing a government source. The measures are expected to come into force in early June.

Read more …

The all-cause death number. Hot potato.

• COVID19 Death Rate Sinking? Data Reveals A Complex Reality (DW)

When is a COVID-19 death counted as a COVID-19 death? The answer is not as straightforward as one might think, because different countries have different methods for determining a COVID-19 case or declaring COVID-19 as a deceased person’s cause of death. Some countries, like Spain, carry out post-mortem COVID-19 tests, while in others like Germany, the UK, or Turkey it not a common practice. Belgium, for example, counts all coronavirus deaths outside hospitals in its daily statistics: This means the country includes people suspected of having died of coronavirus, without a confirmed positive test result, whereas countries like Italy only count deaths in hospitals. Spain only recently started to count non-hospitalized, coronavirus-related deaths from some regions.

Why is the all-cause death number relevant? There are a few essential lessons we can learn from all-cause death data. According to many scientific experts, it is the only unbiased information we can trust to measure the real impact of the pandemic, and create policies to minimize its effects. The number of people dying of COVID-19 is huge, but it still is not the leading cause of death in many countries. People are more reluctant to go to hospitals because they fear contagion, or simply do not want to burden the health system further. However, a scenario in which the leading causes of death, such as heart disease or cancer, increase by even 5% could translate into hundreds of thousands of people.


David Spiegelhalter, Professor of Public Understanding of Risk from the University of Cambridge, notes the differences in each country: “I would say the all-cause death number is the really unbiased measure of the impact of this epidemic. And it’s the one I look up far more closely,” he told DW. Data collected by DW both on all-cause deaths and COVID-19 deaths shows: Thousands more people are dying directly or indirectly due to COVID-19 than the official numbers suggest. DW’s data analysis focused on Spain, England and Wales, but indicates a pattern present in other countries too.

Read more …

Success breeds success.

• Want To Be More Like Sweden? What If We Already Are? (Mish)

Unlike most of the rest of the world, Sweden did not mandate coronavirus lockdowns. Instead, most measures were voluntary, but it did cutoff access to nursing homes after a surge in deaths. It has been an experiment worth monitoring. And for weeks, many in the US have been clamoring for the US to be “more like Sweden”. But what do the results really show and what is Sweden saying now? Please note the head of Sweden’s no-lockdown coronavirus plan said the country’s Heavy Death Toll ‘Came as a Surprise’ “We never really calculated with a high death toll initially, I must say,” said epidemiologist Anders Tegnell. “We calculated on more people being sick, but the death toll really came as a surprise to us.”

The deniers will point out that about half of Sweden’s deaths came from nursing homes as if those deaths don’t matter. When it comes to per-capita counts, the US is remarkably like Sweden. This can be portrayed two ways. • See, the lockdowns didn’t help. • Based on population density, Sweden is a total disaster. You should not compare a tiny Nordic country to the US but there it is anyway, for those clamoring to be more like Sweden. On a fatality rate basis, we better hope the US does not become more like Sweden. Clearly Sweden is not the success story widely claimed. Unfortunately, people will look at these charts, continue to make inane flu comparisons and continue to tout Sweden’s success. The one area of attack left open is whether or not the US approach was economically justified. I will not address that question because I will not change anyone’s mind.

Read more …

“And will some of the employees returning to work have their limbs torn off and tossed into the air like a juggler tossing bowling pins? Undoubtedly.”

• Velociraptors Still On The Loose? No Reason Not To Reopen Jurassic Park (McS)

Hello, Peter Ludlow here, CEO of InGen, the company behind the wildly successful dinosaur-themed amusement park, Jurassic Park. As you’re all aware, after an unprecedented storm hit the park, we lost power and the velociraptors escaped their enclosure and killed hundreds of park visitors, prompting a two-month shutdown of the park. Well, I’m pleased to announce that, even though the velociraptors are still on the loose, we will be opening Jurassic Park back up to the public!

Now, I understand why some people might be skeptical about reopening an amusement park when there are still blindingly fast, 180-pound predators roaming around. But the fact of the matter is, velociraptors are intelligent, shifty creatures that are not going to be contained any time soon, so we might as well just start getting used to them killing a few people every now and then. Some might argue that we should follow the example of other parks that have successfully dealt with velociraptor escapes. But here at Jurassic Park, we’ve never been ones to listen to the recommendations of scientists, or safety experts, or bioethicists, so why would we start now?

As some of you know, Dr. Ian Malcolm, our lead safety consultant, had recommended that we wait until the velociraptors have been located and contained before reopening the park, so he wasn’t thrilled when we told him the news. I believe his exact words were “you were so preoccupied with whether you could reopen the park, you didn’t stop to think whether you should.” Talk about a guy on a high horse.

That said, you’ll be pleased to know that, rather than double down on our containment efforts, we’ve decided to dissolve the velociraptor containment task force altogether, and focus instead on how we can get people back into the park as quickly as possible. So rather than concentrating on so-called life-saving measures like “staying in designated safe areas” or “masking your scent,” we’ll be focusing on the details that will get our customers really excited, like a wider selection of fun hats, a pterodactyl-shaped gondola ride to the top of the island, and a brand new Gordon Ramsay designed menu at the Cretaceous Cafe.

In addition to satisfying our customers, the decision to reopen the park is also about allowing the furloughed employees of Jurassic Park to get back to the work they love. Could we have continued to pay their salaries for several months until we got the velociraptor situation under control? Definitely. We’re the wealthiest nature preserve on the planet after all. And will some of the employees returning to work have their limbs torn off and tossed into the air like a juggler tossing bowling pins? Undoubtedly. But we’re confident that with a few safety precautions put in place, we’ll be able to keep the level of workplace injuries and deaths just below levels that would elicit widespread public outrage.

Read more …

Do these people really not understand securitization? To skip a few steps, US housing would collapse without these “miscalculations”. There’s now talk of a federal agency to take over for the “servicers”. Another bottomless pit.

• The Bailout Miscalculation That Could Crash the Economy (Taibbi)

When Donald Trump signed the $2 trillion CARES Act rescue on March 27, there was immediate praise across the political spectrum for section 4022, concerning homeowners in distress. Under the rule, anyone with a federally-backed mortgage could now receive instant relief. Forbearance, the law said: “…shall be granted for up to 180 days, and shall be extended for an additional period of up to 180 days at the request of the borrower.” Essentially, anyone with a federally-backed mortgage was now eligible for a six-month break from home payments. Really it was a year, given that a 180-day extension could be granted “at the request of the borrower.” It made sense. The burden of having to continue to make home payments during the coronavirus crisis would be crushing for the millions of people put out of work.

If anything, the measure didn’t go far enough, only covering homeowners with federally-backed (a.k.a. “agency”) mortgages. Still, six months or a year of relief from mortgage payments was arguably the most valuable up-front benefit of the entire bailout for ordinary people. Unfortunately, this portion of the CARES Act was conceived so badly that it birthed a potentially disastrous new issue that could have severe systemic ramifications. “Whoever wrote this bill didn’t have the faintest fucking clue how mortgages work,” is how one financial analyst put it to me. When homeowners take out mortgages, loans are bundled into pools and turned into securities, which are then sold off to investors, often big institutional players like pension funds.

Once loans are pooled and sold off as securities, the job of collecting home payments from actual people and delivering them to investors in mortgage bonds goes to companies called mortgage servicers. Many of these firms are not banks, and have familiar names like Quicken Loans or Freedom Mortgage. The mortgage servicing business is relatively uncomplicated – companies are collecting money from one group of people and handing it to another, for a fee – but these quasi-infamous firms still regularly manage to screw it up. “An industry that is just… not very good,” is the generous description of Richard Cordray, former head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Because margins in the mortgage service business are relatively small, these firms try to automate as much as possible. Many use outdated computers and have threadbare staffing policies.

Read more …

Fully bipartisan.

• Wall Street-Friendly Lawmakers Sought Bailout For Shady Lenders (HuffPo)

A bipartisan group of House Financial Services Committee members asked the Federal Reserve in an April letter to extend an emergency loan program to a host of controversial financial firms that offer high-interest loans to low-income Americans. In other words, firms that offer Americans high-interest loans want a low-cost loan from the government. All 14 signatories of the April letter are recipients of campaign contributions this election cycle from the political action committee of the American Financial Services Association, or AFSA, which represents subprime lenders’ interests in Washington.

“It’s bad on the substance to have the Federal Reserve be lending to subprime consumer and small business lenders,” Graham Steele, a former Democratic counsel on the Senate Banking Committee, who now runs Stanford School of Business’ Corporations and Society Initiative. “It doesn’t look good when the members asking for that kind of bailout for these companies are also funded by those predatory lenders.” Writing to Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell, the lawmakers encouraged the Fed to expand eligibility for loans from its Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility, or TALF, for “non-bank lenders and fintech platforms.” “Non-bank lenders” issue loans that are less regulated than loans made by traditional banks, but they are also willing to take greater risks. And “fintech platforms” are a kind of non-bank lender that operate online and through mobile apps.

The House members – seven Democrats and seven Republicans – were responding to a letter that the AFSA sent to Congress appealing for its members to become eligible for the program. In late March, the Fed reinitiated TALF, a program it created to shore up consumer lenders after the 2008 financial crisis, to address the economic fallout from the public health response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The Fed has said that every financial institution is eligible for the emergency loans, but it will not bail out some riskier forms of credit. In the letter, the House members make clear that they specifically want TALF to include loans issued by “installment” lending firms that the program currently excludes. Those firms offer high-interest loans for low-income borrowers to pay off in installments.

Read more …

My first reaction is: that’s great, half a million fewer cars! Than I realize of course I’m not supposed to think that. “Bad, bad” for the economy!

• Auto Production Collapses By 99% In Mexico and Brazil (R.)

Auto production in Mexico and Brazil, Latin America’s top producers, plunged by an unprecedented 99% in April as a result of the coronavirus crisis, with the two countries building a total of just 5,569 vehicles. In normal times, Mexico and Brazil produce over half a million cars a month combined. The industry accounts for hundreds of thousands of jobs and several percentage points of their respective countries’ gross domestic products. “The situation is difficult and dramatic,” Luiz Carlos Moraes, president of Brazil’s automakers association, told reporters.


The statements on production, made on Friday by Mexico’s Inegi statistics association and Brazil’s Anfavea automakers association, are the first available window into the sheer extent of the crisis for automakers in Latin America. The coronavirus pandemic is putting jobs in peril and raising questions about the sustainability of the industry’s international supply chains, much of which go back to China. The poor results may also be used by auto executives to obtain government aid. Both countries have so far avoided layoffs but much hinges on when production can restart and whether there will be any demand for cars once that happens. Mexico could tentatively restart production on May 18, while Brazil’s top automakers are eyeing a June restart.

Read more …

Jim quoted Comey in his headline -“I sent them”-, I changed that to a Strzok quote.

• Our Utter Incompetence Actually Helps Us (Kunstler)

“Our utter incompetence actually helps us,” declared Deputy Assistant Director of the FBI Peter Strzok to his confidante (10,000 text messages) and paramour, FBI attorney Lisa Page, when he discovered on January 4, 2017, that the agency had omitted to close the barren Crossfire Razor case against General Michael Flynn. There you have a perfect summary of the fantastic hubris at work in the agency-gone-rogue under then-FBI Director Jim “I sent them” Comey days before the swearing-in of a president somehow mistakenly elected by bamboozled voters — or so the thinking apparently went at the highest level there. Or what passed for thinking.

General Flynn, you see, having been anathematized by Barack Obama, and black-spotted by the so-called Interagency (i.e. the giant hairball of competing spy shops set up after the 9/11 fiasco), was about to assume the pivotal job of White House National Security Advisor, and it was known that he was fixing to change things up with all that. He had been director of one such shop, the Defense Intelligence Agency, for a few years and he had a fair idea just how lawlessly debauched the Intel Community had grown under CIA Director John Brennan and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, not to mention Mr. Comey, and they all knew that.

So, General Flynn had to go, and then get squeezed hard to somehow rat-out his boss, the incoming President Trump, against whom the Interagency had nothing but a dossier of already discredited oppo research baloney courtesy of the Clinton campaign. The pretext was some conversations General Flynn had with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak a few weeks before the inauguration. The FBI cooked up a “narrative” that it was criminal misbehavior for a duly appointed incoming NSA to confab with foreign diplomats – a completely specious notion, of course. The Interagency’s errand boys in the press ran with that preposterous story, and the inconsolable cohort of Hillary voters herding up to form “the Resistance” went along with the gag out of sheer, crazed bitterness.

Attorney General William Barr neatly disposed of that yarn Thursday in his remarkable chat with Catherine Herridge of CBS News (transcript here), saying: “[H]e [General Flynn] was the designated national security adviser for President-Elect Trump, and was part of the transition, which is recognized by the government and funded by the government as an important function to bring in a new administration. And it is very typical, very common, for the national security team of the incoming president to communicate with foreign leaders.”

Read more …

Obama will be implicated.

• What Did Joe Biden Know About Michael Flynn? (York)

It takes a little digging, but there’s a Joe Biden connection deep inside the documents released as part of the Justice Department’s decision to drop charges against former national security adviser Michael Flynn. It is this: Sally Yates was Barack Obama’s Deputy Attorney General, and as such she played a key role in the Flynn investigation. She told special counsel Robert Mueller’s prosecutors in September 2017 that she did not know about the transition phone call between Flynn and Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak until she was told about it by…President Barack Obama.

It happened on January 5, 2017. Yates was in a group that went to the Oval Office to brief Obama on the findings of the Intelligence Community investigation into Russian campaign meddling. The meeting had all the administration’s top national security officials: FBI Director James Comey, CIA Director John Brennan, National Intelligence chief James Clapper, national security adviser Susan Rice, and other National Security Council officials. “After the briefing, Obama dismissed the group but asked Yates and Comey to stay behind,” a memo of Yates’ interview read. “Obama started by saying he had ‘learned of the information about Flynn’ and his conversation with Kislyak about sanctions.” Yates was totally blindsided. “At that point, Yates had no idea what the president was talking about,” the interview write-up said.

What does that have to do with Biden? The interview notes made no mention of the vice president. But think back to one of the stranger moments in the Trump-Russia investigation: Rice, on January 20, 2017, at almost the exact minute the Obama administration left office, sent an email to herself documenting the January 5 meeting. This is how it began: “On January 5, following a briefing by IC leadership on Russian hacking during the 2016 presidential election, President Obama had a brief follow-on conversation with FBI Director Jim Comey and Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates in the Oval Office. Vice President Biden and I were also present.”

Oh — so Biden was there, too. The Rice memo-to-self always appeared to be an oddly-timed effort to cover for Obama. “President Obama began the conversation by stressing his continued commitment to ensuring that every aspect of this issue is handled by the intelligence and law enforcement communities ‘by the book,’ Rice wrote. “The president stressed that he is not asking about, initiating or instructing anything from a law enforcement perspective. He reiterated that our law enforcement team needs to proceed as it normally would by the book.” Got that? By the book.

Read more …

” In this story, McCabe is not a news analyst. He is news. Instead of pressing him on these conflicts and allegations, he was allowed to rage against Trump, Barr, and Flynn. It is a new twist on echo journalism. McCabe the CNN analyst was echoing his own false account and calling it news analysis.”

• Andrew McCabe’s Bizarre CNN Interview (Turley)

CNN host John Berman interviewed McCabe. CNN has long used McCabe to give analysis on a host of Trump-related stories despite being fired by Trump, ridiculed for his prior bias, and referred (by career officials) for possible criminal charges. This interview, however, was even more remarkable. The documents released in the Flynn case referred to McCabe and his alleged misconduct. He was not asked about any of the specific allegations against him. Instead, he gave a revisionist history that quickly crossed into fantasy. McCabe told Berman that, in December 2016, they were considering the closure of the investigation involving Flynn but that it was a “close question.” We have previously discussed this history.

On January 4, 2017, the FBI’s Washington Field Office issued a “Closing Communication” indicating that the bureau was terminating “CROSSFIRE RAZOR” — the newly disclosed codename for the investigation of Flynn. CROSSFIRE RAZOR was formed to determine whether Flynn “was directed and controlled by” or “coordinated activities with the Russian Federation in a manner which is a threat to the national security” of the United States or a violation of federal foreign agent laws. The FBI investigated Flynn and various databases and determined that “no derogatory information was identified in FBI holdings.” Due to this conclusion, the Washington Field Office concluded that Flynn “was no longer a viable candidate as part of the larger CROSSFIRE HURRICANE umbrella case.”

After Strzok intervened to stop the closure of the investigation, he texted FBI lawyer Lisa Page “Razor still open. :@ but serendipitously good, I guess. You want those chips and Oreos?” Page replied “Phew. But yeah that’s amazing that he is still open. Good, I guess.” Strzok replied “Yeah, our utter incompetence actually helps us. 20% of the time, I’m guessing :)” So McCabe was left unchallenged in saying that at that time there was a close question as to whether to close Crossfire Razor when his investigators found nothing. Nothing. That made it a close question for McCabe whether to continue to investigate the incoming Trump National Security Adviser.

What McCabe stated next was truly incredible. He told Berman that he then learned that Flynn has arranged “surreptitious meetings” with the Russians. He explained that this was akin to investigating someone for drug dealing and then learning about his meeting with drug dealers. The problem is that there was no evidence of a crime of any kind against Flynn. Moreover, this was not a “surreptitious” meeting. There was no reason for McCabe to know about the communications of the incoming National Security Adviser with foreign officials. It was not “surreptitious.” Flynn reportedly told the transition team about the call and that the Russians wanted to talk after the newly imposed sanctions against them. It is not “surreptitious” just because McCabe did not know about it and he did not reach out to the Transition Team.

Read more …

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“Yesterday, upon the stair,
I met a man who wasn’t there!
He wasn’t there again today,
Oh how I wish he’d go away

Last night I saw upon the stair,
A little man who wasn’t there,
He wasn’t there again today
I think he’s from the CIA.

– Hughes Mearns et al

 

 

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Small Business Firings to Start

Apr 222020
 
 April 22, 2020  Posted by at 3:28 pm Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , ,  12 Responses »


Saul Leiter Man in straw hat 1955

 

 

 

The following was written by Bruce Wilds, who runs the Advancing Time blog. Bruce is a small business owner in the Midwest.

I get lots of articles sent to me, but hardly ever publish any (sorry I can’t send everyone a reply) because they’re not what I think this site should be. But with this article it’s different. I think what Bruce describes is interesting, important even. The US has been losing small businesses for a long time, and the virus response is set to greatly accelerate the process. The huge stimulus plans will bypass most small businesses, because they are too small for governments to know what to do with.

The article was written before the latest round of handouts, but there’s very little reason to believe it will change much of anything. It’s not so much a grand plan or conspiracy, it just that the system has come to recognize only that bigger is better. America doesn’t like small. This is as true for banks as it is for various levels of government. But small businnesses have not only built the country, and are crucial for the faces of Main Streets and small towns, they also employ enormous amounts of Americans.

 

 

Bruce Wilds: The Paycheck Protection Program or PPP was funded with $350 billion in the last stimulus bill, this money is now gone. Of the thirty million small businesses in America, only 1.7 million received money from the 2.3 trillion dollar aid package passed to help sustain America during this difficult time. If the government blew through this money and was only was able to help only around 5% of small businesses. it is difficult to think another 250 billion dollars will set things straight. Clearly, because when the government made promises it delayed the wave of firing while companies waited for help.

The government has failed to keep its promise so now we should expect unemployment to soar as reality sets in. One of the largest problems facing small companies is they are often underfunded and have difficulty getting financing at reasonable rates. Banks find larger companies much more profitable. The sector of the economy most damaged by the covid-19 shutdown is small business. When this is over America will find many small businesses have been decimated and are not able to reopen. Others will never recover and be forced to close within months. Since small businesses employ over 54 million people in America and their importance in the economy should not be underestimated.

• Small businesses contribute 44 percent of all sales in the country.
• Small businesses employ 54.4 million people, about 57.3 percent of the private workforce.

Rest assured government employees and bureaucrats will still continue to get paid but small business, the most productive part of the economy has a knife to its throat. As a landlord and small business owner, I can tell you the program was structured in a way that will be of little help to most small businesses. The government slammed expensive legislation through with no idea of the damage they were doing and how it will cause hundreds of thousands of businesses to close their doors forever. Washington has become so attuned to dealing with lobbyists from mega-companies it has lost sight of the fact small is small, and when this comes to business, this means usually under twenty employees, not hundreds.

 

 

The government’s answer to keeping people employed was to promise small businesses an easy to get, rapid maximum loan amount of two and a half times a company’s average monthly payroll expense over the past 12 months. This loan would turn into a grant and be forgiven if a company did not fire its employees. Sadly, legislators failed to take into consideration that not all small businesses are labor or payroll intense. Some businesses with large or expensive showrooms are getting hammered by rent, others by inventory, or things like taxes, utilities, or even by having to toss products due to spoilage.

The PPP also failed to address the issue of what these employees are going to do while the company has no customers and business barely trickling. In the past, these employees were expected to pursue activities that earned revenue and garnered profits for the business but with no costumers, this is difficult to do. The PPP also ignored the fact that by keeping these employees on the payroll a generous employer is left open to the harsh mandates laid out in the government’s previous bill. The hastily drawn up 110-page federal covid-19 economic rescue package, which Trump fully supported dealt a hard blow to small business. For a small business this is a disaster, the bill requires;

• Employers with fewer than 500 employees and government employers offer two weeks of paid sick leave through 2020.
• Those same employers must now provide up to 3 months of paid family and medical leave for people forced to quarantine due to the virus or care for family because of the outbreak

As expected, this measure, named “Families First Coronavirus Response Act.” resulted in millions of workers suddenly losing their jobs. Ironically, it was held before the voters as proof lawmakers could work together during a crisis. By framing the poorly crafted pork-packed bill this way promoters positioned themselves to demonize those unwilling to support it. Remember, this bill is was in addition to the $8.3 billion emergency spending bill first approved to curb the spread of covid-19.

 

 

As government has grown larger it seems to have become totally oblivious to the fragility of many small businesses and how much it can cost a community when they close. By framing these pork-packed bills as bipartisan their promoters imply they are fair and balanced. This is not true, small business is the big loser and hundreds of thousands will soon have to close. With so many tenants looking at foregoing rent small landlords that don’t have deep pockets also face huge problems. We have our heads in the sand if we think companies that exist on events where people gather will overnight regain their luster. It is not like someone can simply flick a switch and things will return to normal.

Reality undercuts the idea of the “V-shaped recovery” theory and the idea after the economy has come to a dead stop it can quickly reboot and be back at full speed in a few months. The government has presented us with an extension of crony capitalism structured to throw just enough to the masses to silence their outrage but in the coming weeks, we will see it failed. Large businesses with access to cheap capital are the winners and the big losers are the middle-class, small businesses, and social mobility. All those people that want a higher minimum wage can forget that ever happening if we don’t have jobs.

As for just how much small business owners make, according to figures from 2015 from the Small Business Administration the median income for self-employed individuals at an incorporated business was $49,804 and $22,424 for unincorporated firms. According to PayScale’s 2017 data, the average small business owner’s income is $73,000 per year. But, total earnings can range from $30,000 – $182,000 per year. This means it varies greatly depending on where and just how big the business is. However, it is important to remember these people have “skin in the game” and most risk losing everything if their business fails.

 

It is important to recognize that starting your own business has always been about the opportunity to design and build your own future. It is a symbol of freedom not a guarantee of wealth. Many people choose this path proudly, not to make more money but as a way to express their individuality. For these competent and talented people, a job in government or at a large company often offers more security and benefits but far less freedom. Do not underestimate the value of small business and what it contributes to our society. Companies such as Amazon are the anti-thesis of small business making their workers a cog in a machine and stealing their soul.

Based on the government’s promise to small businesses a great many held off on letting employees go but with each passing day in order to survive they are now in the process of letting hundreds of thousands of employees go. This is a ticking time-bomb. By telling these businesses to close and then through its failure to carry out its promise of helping them the government has created a situation with massive negative economic ramifications. To make matters worse, people going on unemployment look to get almost as much as those that do work. Why will anyone want to work, especially government workers when they can get paid to stay home? This is not about wanting more money for small business, it is about the reality that the firings are just beginning.

 

 

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Debt Rattle October 6 2018

Oct 062018
 
 October 6, 2018  Posted by at 9:26 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,  10 Responses »


M. C. Escher Day and Night 1938

 

• Collins, Manchin Vote “Yes”, Ensuring Kavanaugh Confirmation (ZH)
• US Unemployment Rate Falls To Lowest Level Since 1969 (G.)
• Mueller Moves For Forfeiture Order To Seize Manafort Assets (Hill)
• Storm Clouds on Robert Mueller’s Horizon (LaRouche)
• May Secretly Woos Labour MP’s To Back Her Brexit Deal (G.)
• Juncker: Brexit Deal Could Be Reached Within Weeks (Sky)
• UK House Prices Fall Sharply In September (G.)
• Fishtailing into the Future (Jim Kunstler)
• Russia Announces Plan To Disentangle Its Economy From US Dollar (RT)
• Banksy Artwork Shreds Itself After £1m Sale At Sotheby’s (BBC)

 

 

This ain’t over.

• Collins, Manchin Vote “Yes”, Ensuring Kavanaugh Confirmation (ZH)

Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh now has the 50 votes required to be confirmed to the Supreme Court, after both GOP Sen. Susan Collins of Maine and Democrat Joe Manchin of West Virginia announced that they would be voting yes. GOP holdout Jeff Flake of Arizona also said that he would vote to confirm Kavanaugh “unless something big changed.” Earlier in the day, the Senate completed a cloture vote to advance Kavanaugh to final confirmation, which Manchin broke ranks and voted in favor of.

“Most senators sat at their desk as the dramatic roll call unfolded, with major suspense over where Murkowski, Manchin and Flake would land. Collins was the first swing vote to support Kavanaugh on the procedural roll call, quickly followed by Flake. Murkowski then inaudibly voted no, a jarring defection that left Republicans with no room for error. After it was clear that Kavanaugh had the 50 votes needed to advance, Manchin became Kavanaugh’s only Democratic supporter. Manchin, who left the chamber when the clerk called his name, came back into the chamber and voted in favor of Kavanaugh. His phone could be seen ringing and Manchin stared at it as the vote continued.” -Politico

“This is a difficult decision for everybody,” Flake said to reporters, who added that he thinks Kavanaugh will be confirmed on Saturday. Meanwhile, Sen. Steve Daines (R-MT) is set to fly to Montana to attend his daughter’s Saturday wedding. If the vote is too close without Daines, he will be forced to fly back to Washington D.C. to cast the deciding vote. “We’ll wait and see how this all unfolds,” Daines said. “We have transportation arranged and we’ll wait and see what happens.” He added that Rep. Greg Gianforte (R-MT) offered him the use of his private plane. President Trump has taken a largely hands-off approach to Kavanaugh’s confirmation – instead communicating in private with his political allies, such as Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), according to Politico, which adds that the White House is “cautiously opimistic” that Kavanaugh will be confirmed.

Read more …

How many Americans have multiple jobs?

• US Unemployment Rate Falls To Lowest Level Since 1969 (G.)

US figures have shown the lowest jobless rate since the year of the first moon landings, keeping the world’s largest economy on course for further interest rate rises. Eagerly awaited figures for jobs and wages showed less inflationary pressure in the world’s biggest economy than had been feared, but still pointed to more hikes by the Federal Reserve. Financial markets had been braced for a sharp sell off had the latest monthly payroll numbers indicated faster employment growth and pay increases in September, which could have paved the way for faster-than-expected monetary tightening by the US central bank. As a result of the figures undershooting the most optimistic expectations, losses were smaller than feared in early trading in New York but all the major US markets ended down with the biggest losses on the tech heavy Nasdaq exchange.

Data from the Bureau for Labour Statistics (BLS) reported an increase in non-farm payrolls of 134,000 in September, well below the 180,000 predicted by Wall Street analysts. A 0.3% in pay left annual earnings 2.8% higher than a year earlier, a slightly weaker rate of increase than the 2.9% posted the previous month. Most economists said the jobs market remained strong, pointing to the drop in unemployment from 3.9% to 3.7% – its lowest since 1969 – and upward revisions to employment in July and August. Last month, the Fed raised short-term interest rates for the eighth time since 2015, to a range of 2%-2.25%, and indicated that there would be further increases “consistent with sustained expansion of economic activity”.

Read more …

Don’t have a collusion to investigate?

• Mueller Moves For Forfeiture Order To Seize Manafort Assets (Hill)

Attorneys for special counsel Robert Mueller moved on Friday for an order to seize assets that former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort purchased with funds he hid from U.S. authorities in foreign bank accounts. Mueller’s attorneys submitted a court document as part of Manafort’s plea agreement asking Judge Amy Berman Jackson to grant a request to seize five properties in New York owned by Manafort as well as a life insurance policy and three bank accounts. Forfeiture of the assets identified as part of Manafort’s scheme to hide millions of dollars made lobbying for pro-Russia parties in Ukraine was agreed upon in a plea agreement Manafort signed with Mueller’s team last month.

Manafort signed the deal and agreed to cooperate with Mueller’s team to avoid a second trial in Washington, D.C., after a jury found him guilty on eight counts in a separate trial in northern Virginia in August. “[T]he defendant admitted to the forfeiture allegations in the Information and agreed that the following property constitutes or is derived from proceeds traceable to the offense alleged in Count One,” the court document states, while noting that two of the New York properties were substitutes for assets unable to be seized by the government.

Read more …

“..the entire Russiagate investigation was a ginned up operation research/information warfare campaign..”

• Storm Clouds on Robert Mueller’s Horizon (LaRouche)

On October 3rd, the House Committees investigating the Department of Justice Russiagate insurrection against Donald Trump took testimony from behind closed doors from former FBI General Counsel James Baker, a close confidant of fired FBI Director James Comey. According to widespread leaks Thursday, October 4th, Baker’s testimony included the fact that he, Baker, met directly with Perkins, Coie, the lawyers for the DNC and Hillary Clinton, receiving directly materials which went into the FBI’s FISA warrant against Carter Page and characterized this process has “highly abnormal.” The Perkins, Coie, lawyer involved, Michael Sussman, is also the guy who orchestrated the fake information warfare story that the Russians hacked the DNC on behalf of Donald Trump.

Coming out of the testimony, one of the sources for the story spoke plainly: Baker’s testimony shows that the entire Russiagate investigation was a ginned up operation research/information warfare campaign, involving the FBI and Hillary’s Clinton’s campaign rather than any “conspiracy” involving the Trump Campaign and Russia. October 4th was the deadline for Andrew McCabe’s memos about meetings occurring in the wake of James Comey’s firing May, 2017, in which Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and others discussed wearing wires and recording the President and also invoking the 25th Amendment to remove the President.

In a discussion with Hill TV on Wednesday, Congressman Mark Meadows, who is leading this investigation, said that he has seen evidence that “confidential human sources” used by the FBI “actually taped members within the Trump campaign.” “There is strong suggestions in that some of the text messages, emails, and so forth who was involved, that extraordinary measures were used to surveil,” Meadows said. There is now a major national outcry for the President to declassify all of the relevant documents concerning Russiagate. Speculation on his failure, thus far, to do so, centers on both the Kavanaugh nomination fight and forcing his hand on Rosenstein before the Midterm elections.

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Looking for Blairite traitors.

• May Secretly Woos Labour MP’s To Back Her Brexit Deal (G.)

Theresa May has drawn up plans for a secret charm offensive aimed at persuading dozens of Labour MPs to back her Brexit deal even if it costs Jeremy Corbyn the chance to be prime minister, the Guardian has learned. Senior Conservatives say they have already been in private contact with a number of Labour MPs over a period of several months, making the case that the national interest in avoiding a no-deal outcome is more important than forcing a general election by defeating the government on May’s Brexit deal. Now, with talks in Brussels entering their frantic final phase, the prime minister and her party whips are stepping up efforts to win backing for a compromise deal that one minister described as a “British blancmange”.

They are convinced they will need Labour votes to win, after a fractious Tory conference in Birmingham, at which determined opponents of the prime minister’s approach, including Jacob Rees-Mogg, won plaudits for saying they would vote against it. One Tory source compared the challenge of striking a deal with the EU27 that would satisfy both sides of his own party to “landing a jumbo jet on the penalty spot”. Labour MPs will thus be the focus of intense lobbying, in the period between May returning from Brussels with a Brexit deal and the meaningful vote, which is expected to come about a fortnight later.

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If May gives enough, yes…

• Juncker: Brexit Deal Could Be Reached Within Weeks (Sky)

The president of the European Commission has said he is sure a Brexit agreement could be reached in November, if not sooner. Jean-Claude Juncker told three Austrian newspapers that Brexit without a deal “would not be good for the UK, as it is for the rest of the union”. He added: “I assume that we will reach agreement on the terms of the withdrawal agreement. “We also need to agree on a political statement that accompanies this withdrawal agreement – we are not that far yet.” He said: “I have reason to think that the rapprochement potential between both sides has increased in recent days, but it can not be foreseen whether we will finish in October. “If not, we’ll do it in November.”

Britain and the EU are trying to agree a divorce deal as well as one for a post-Brexit relationship in time for leaders’ summits scheduled for 17-18 October and 17-18 November. Mr Juncker insisted that the EU’s “will is unbroken to reach agreement” with Britain but spoke of his regret that the European Commission had not been involved in the 2016 referendum campaign. He said that the then-government of David Cameron had asked him “not to interfere”. “If the commission intervened, perhaps the right questions would have entered the debate,” he added. “Now you discover new problems almost daily, on both sides. “At that time it was already clear to us to what trials and tribulations this pitiful vote of the British would lead.”

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They’re bloated.

• UK House Prices Fall Sharply In September (G.)

UK house prices unexpectedly dropped at the fastest pace for almost six months in September, according to Halifax, as the number of homes for sale in 2018 fell to a decade low. Britain’s biggest mortgage lender said the average price of a home in Britain dropped to £225,995 last month, down 1.4% from the level recorded in August. The price of a home remained 2.5% higher than a year ago. City economists had forecast month-on-month growth of 0.2% in September. The latest snapshot of the housing market a little more than six months before Britain leaves the EU suggests sluggish levels of demand for home buying amid the political uncertainty of Brexit.

Economists said the national picture painted by Halifax obscured some regional differences. London house prices are falling for the first time since 2009, yet prices elsewhere are rising. They also cautioned that the Halifax house price index can be more changeable than other industry barometers of residential property because it is on a monthly basis. Earlier this week Theresa May announced the government would lift a cap on the amount councils can borrow to build housing, potentially helping to increase the number of homes built by local authorities.

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“..I’ve never seen a political fiasco as demented as the Kavanaugh confirmation process..”

• Fishtailing into the Future (Jim Kunstler)

[..] at the macro level, this system and its subsystems are out-of-control and shaking themselves loose. Government has attempted to prop them up by schemes that amount to racketeering of one kind or another — the dishonest manipulation and representation of money — and now money itself is in revolt, as can be seen in the sudden rise of interest rates, especially the ten-year US Treasury Bond above 3.2 percent just before today’s market open

The US government can’t handle interest rates at this level, after decades of debt accumulation. Other nations can’t pay back their dollar-denominated loans either, and that has produced havoc at the so-called margins of the global economy — as currencies crash, and companies go under, and sovereign debt instruments melt down. You can be sure that this disorder will eventually spread from the margins to the center, which is the USA. It’s already up-and-running in our politics, which might be considered the early warning system of the larger picture. In my long life of three-score and ten, I’ve never seen a political fiasco as demented as the Kavanaugh confirmation process, with its harking back to Medieval social hysterias and stunning exercises in bad faith.

This riveting horror show has also distracted the nation — and a media fully invested in compounding the psychodrama — from the momentous tectonic movements in the world’s money system, now shaking apart. Among other things, it will blow up the fantasy that Mr. Trump has magically orchestrated a new miracle economy. But it will also bring to an abrupt close the pornographic machinations of his adversaries in Swamptown. And then we will get on in earnest with the true business of the long emergency — making new arrangements, however difficult — to escape the deadly clutter of our own constructed hyper-complex hyper-reality.

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The US will fight back.

• Russia Announces Plan To Disentangle Its Economy From US Dollar (RT)

The Russian Finance Ministry has announced a plan to wean the country of dollar dependence. It is expected to be a long and painful process. RT has asked analysts to explain how this could be done. According to the plan published this week, Russia seeks to de-dollarize the economy by 2024. The program is long and complicated, but its key point is that Russian exporters who use rubles instead of dollars would get huge taxation benefits including quicker VAT returns and other stimulus to ditch the greenback. But there are also other ways to strengthen the role of the ruble in Russia.

“It is necessary to gradually switch to such a system of international payments, which implies payment in rubles for Russia’s best and most popular goods on the world market like oil, gas and arms exclusively,” Andrey Perekalsky, analyst at insurance brokerage FinIst, told RT. Russia should also unite with China and the European Union in creating a payment channel that can’t be controlled by the United States. The alternative to the SWIFT interbank settlement network that could bypass Iranian sanctions could be seen as a first step in that direction, the analyst notes. Petr Pushkarev, chief analyst at TeleTrade, says that Russia with its almost $500 billion in foreign reserves, could keep the ruble stable despite US sanctions pressure. The current period of high oil prices could also help.

However, Russia should diversify not only into rubles, but also use the Chinese yuan, Vietnamese dong, Indian rupee, and even the euro, the analyst says. “The euro shouldn’t be feared. The dollar is pretty much overvalued against the euro; the IMF forecasts a gradual devaluation of the dollar by 10-15 percent,” Pushkarev said. “American policy is disliked not only in Russia. EU officials have already openly announced that they are starting to create their own system of settlements with Iran, in which transactions will not be transparent to the US authorities and therefore will not be subject to sanctions,” he added.

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Funny.

• Banksy Artwork Shreds Itself After £1m Sale At Sotheby’s (BBC)

A stencil spray painting by elusive artist Banksy shredded itself after it was sold for more than £1m. Girl With Balloon, one of Banksy’s most widely recognised works, was auctioned by Sotheby’s in London. The framed piece shows a girl reaching towards a heart-shaped balloon and was the final work sold at the auction. However, in a twist to be expected from street art’s most subversive character, the canvas suddenly passed through a shredder installed in the frame. Posting a picture of the moment on Instagram, Banksy wrote: “Going, going, gone…”

The 2006 piece was shown dangling in pieces from the bottom of the frame, after it sold for £1.042m on Friday night. “It appears we just got Banksy-ed,” said Alex Branczik, Sotheby’s senior director and head of contemporary art in Europe. Banksy is a Bristol-born artist whose true identity – despite rampant speculation – has never been officially revealed. He came to prominence through a series of graffiti pieces that appeared on buildings across the country, marked by deeply satirical undertones. Friday’s self-destruction was the latest in a long history of anti-establishment statements by the street artist.

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Debt Rattle August 4 2018

Aug 042018
 
 August 4, 2018  Posted by at 8:38 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , , ,  3 Responses »


John French Sloan Spring rain 1912

 

• The Everything Bubble Has Found Its Pin. The Pin’s Name is Jerome Powell. (PC)
• The Fed Accelerates its QE Unwind (WS)
• US Gains Only 157,000 Jobs In July As Unemployment Falls To 3.9% (MW)
• US Government Has No Idea How Many Gig Workers There Are (MW)
• Mark Carney Says Risk Of A No-Deal Brexit Is ‘Uncomfortably High’ (G.)
• The Conservatives Are In Crisis Over Austerity, Not Just Brexit (NS)
• US Secret Service And The Guardian Face Off Over ‘Russian Spy’ (RT)
• Russia Seeks US Help To Rebuild Syria (R.)
• Judge Calls US Efforts To Reunite Deported Parents ‘Unacceptable’ (R.)
• US Court Orders Trump Administration To Fully Reinstate DACA Program (R.)
• Trump Administration Lifts GMO Crop Ban For US Wildlife Refuges (R.)

 

 

Error? Powell obviously wants a strong dollar. And yes, that has consequences.

• The Everything Bubble Has Found Its Pin. The Pin’s Name is Jerome Powell. (PC)

The Powell Fed is playing with matches next to over $60 trillion in $USD-denominated debt. The $USD is the reserve currency of the world. As such it is the currency of choice if you are going to issue debt. As a result of this, entities around the globe, whether they be corporations or countries, will often choose to issue debt denominated in the $USD, even if the $USD is not a currency used in their economy. When you borrow money in the $USD… you are effectively SHORTING the $USD. You are betting/hopingthat the $USD will weaken, making your debt servicing/ future debt repayment, cheaper on a relative basis. In this environment, when the $USD strengthens, it becomes MORE DIFFICULT to service your debt.

This is true even for the US itself. The $20 trillion we owe in public debt is effectively one gigantic $20 trillion $USD short. Enter Jerome Powell. For whatever reason, the Powell Fed has decided to embark on the most aggressively hawkish monetary policy in Fed history. And the currency markets have taken note. The $USD is breaking out of downtrends in Every. Single. Currency. Pair. The day Jerome Powell became Fed chair is annotated buy the vertical blue line. Assuming Jerome Powell DOESN’T want to blow up the $60 trillion $USD-denominated debt bubble… the above chart SCREAMS “policy error.”

I’m not being dramatic here… the last time the $USD rallied like this against every major currency was in 2014. At that time the entire commodity complex imploded by over 60% and the Emerging Market came within a hair’s breadth of systemic collapse. Again, I’m not being dramatic here… within six months of the $USD’s rally in 2014, Brazil’s stock market was down nearly 70%. China’s was down nearly 50%. Emerging Markets across the board dropped over 30%. Oil fell from $105 to $30 and change. Etc. I don’t see any indication Powell is aware of this… which means… BUCKLE UP. THE EVERYTHING BUBBLE HAS FOUND ITS PIN. AND THE PIN’S NAME IS JEROME POWELL.

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And Powell is very clear on “balance sheet normalization” too.

• The Fed Accelerates its QE Unwind (WS)

The Fed’s QE Unwind – “balance sheet normalization,” as it calls this – is accelerating toward cruising speed. The first 12 months of the QE unwind, which started in October 2017, are the ramp-up period – just like there was the “Taper” during the final 12 months of QE. The plan calls for shedding up to $420 billion in securities in 2018 and up to $600 billion a year in each of the following years until the balance sheet is sufficiently “normalized” – or until something big breaks. In July, the QE Unwind accelerated sharply. According to the plan, the Fed was supposed to shed up to $24 billion in Treasury Securities in July, up from $18 billion a month in the prior three months. And? The Fed released its weekly balance sheet Thursday afternoon. Over the four weeks ending August 1, the balance of Treasury securities fell by $23.5 billion to $2,337 billion, the lowest since April 16, 2014.

Since the beginning of the QE-Unwind, the Fed has shed $129 billion in Treasuries. The step-pattern in the chart is a result of how the Fed sheds Treasury securities. It doesn’t sell them outright but allows them to “roll off” when they mature. Treasuries only mature mid-month or at the end of the month. Hence the stair-steps. In mid-July, no Treasuries matured. But on July 31, $28.4 billion matured. The Fed replaced about $4 billion of them with new Treasury securities directly via its arrangement with the Treasury Department that cuts out Walls Street (its “primary dealers”) with which the Fed normally does business. Those $4 billion in securities, to use the jargon, were “rolled over.” But it did not replace about $24 billion of maturing Treasuries. They “rolled off.”

Total assets on the Fed’s balance sheet for the four weeks ending August 1 dropped by $34.1 billion. This brought the drop since October, when the QE unwind began, to $205 billion. At $4,256 billion, total assets are now at the lowest level since April 9, 2014, during the middle of the “taper.” It took the Fed about six years to pile on these securities, and now it’s going to take years to shed them:

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Trend is towards lower paid jobs.

• US Gains Only 157,000 Jobs In July As Unemployment Falls To 3.9% (MW)

The U.S. posted another solid spurt in hiring in July, showing that companies are still able to find enough workers to meet the growing needs of a rapidly expanding U.S. economy. Some 157,000 new jobs were created last month despite widespread complaints among businesses about a shortage of skilled labor, the Labor Department said Friday. The increase in hiring fell below the 195,000 MarketWatch forecast, but job gains in May and June was stronger than previously reported. The smaller gain in employment was also a result of governments cutting jobs in education during the summer break and the closure of Toys R Us. Otherwise hiring may have topped 200,000.

Unemployment, meanwhile, slipped below 4% again, to 3.9%, as more people found work.The jobless rate is at a nearly two-decade low. Far-flung complaints about how hard it is to find good workers still aren’t inducing companies to jack up salaries and wages, however. Hourly pay rose 7 cents in July to $25.07, but the 12-month rate of wage gains was unchanged at 2.7%. And even those increases have been largely eaten up by rising inflation. Wages usually rise 3% to 4% a year when the labor market is as tight as it is now.

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Much more interesting than the jobs report. 75 million gig workers? And they’re all counted as ’employed’?

• US Government Has No Idea How Many Gig Workers There Are (MW)

The BLS does not have an explicit definition for a gig worker, or a formal way of tracking them. It comes closest in a survey called the Contingent Worker Supplement, which studies “contingent workers” in temporary working arrangements that they don’t expect to last more than a year. But prior to last month, the BLS had not released the Contingent Worker Supplement since 2005 due in large part to a lack of funding. The most recent report found that 5.9 million people or 3.8% of all workers are contingent workers. “It’s not that the BLS doesn’t care about secondary work, they do,” said Demetra Nightingale at the Urban Institute, a think tank. But without adequate funding it is difficult for the BLS to study those workers, she said.

These workers come in many forms. They include side hustlers with regular jobs and freelancers who take on extra clients on their off-hours, according to Freelancing in America, a 2017 survey conducted in part by Freelancers Union. That survey estimated that 57.3 million Americans are freelancing, or 36% of the workforce. Other estimates say the gig economy is even larger than that. The Federal Reserve has a very broad definition of people working in the gig economy. The Fed says gig workers could be anyone from a babysitter to an Uber driver. According to that definition, there are as many as 75 million gig workers.

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My first thought when reading this: he’s trying to get himself fired. Brexit Britain doesn’t need some Canadian opinion.

• Mark Carney Says Risk Of A No-Deal Brexit Is ‘Uncomfortably High’ (G.)

Mark Carney has warned that the possibility of a no-deal Brexit is “uncomfortably high” and will lead to higher prices, as Theresa May prepares to meet the French president, Emmanuel Macron, for talks. The Bank of England governor said both the UK and EU should “do all things to avoid” a no-deal scenario. He added that the banks had done the “stockpiling” and the country’s financial system was in a position to be able to withstand a shock that could result from the UK leaving the EU without an agreement. His remarks led to sterling falling sharply to just under $1.30. Carney told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “I think the possibility of a no-deal is uncomfortably high at this point.” Asked if no deal would be a disaster, he said: “It is highly undesirable. Parties should do all things to avoid it.”

Pushed on what no deal would mean, he said “disruption to trade as we know it”, before adding: “As a consequence of that, a disruption to the level of economic activity, higher prices for a period of time. “Our job at the Bank of England is to make sure those issues don’t happen in the financial system, so that people will have things to worry about in a no-deal Brexit, which is still a relatively unlikely possibility but it is a possibility, but what we don’t want to have is people worrying about their money in the bank, whether or not they can get a loan from the bank – whether for a mortgage or for a business idea – and we have put the banks through the wringer well in advance of this to make sure they have the capital.”

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An already completely gutted society. More to come. Local councils are being cut to the bone.

• The Conservatives Are In Crisis Over Austerity, Not Just Brexit (NS)

The Conservative party is engaged in the bloodiest incarnation yet of its 30-year Europe war. After Theresa May’s Chequers deal succeeded in alienating almost everyone, Remainers are backing a “people’s vote”, while Leavers are embracing no deal. There is no obvious means by which the parliamentary deadlock can be broken. But the Brexit crisis is masking another one: over austerity. The Leave vote in 2016 and the loss of the Tories’ majority in 2017 were symptoms of voter discontent over spending cuts (a new study published this week suggested that austerity may have directly caused Brexit). As the New Statesman’s Crumbling Britain series has charted, eight years of austerity have enfeebled the public realm.

Rough sleeping, which fell by three-quarters under the last Labour government, has risen by 169 per cent since 2010. The NHS has been forced to cancel operations and even urgent surgery as it struggles to meet ever greater demand. Relative child poverty has increased for three consecutive years and now stands at 4.1 million, or 30 per cent of children. Nearly 1,000 Sure Start children’s centres and 478 libraries are estimated to have closed since 2010. Potholed roads and uncollected bins are evidence of the scale of austerity borne by councils (real-terms funding for local authorities has been cut by 49 per cent since David Cameron took office as prime minister). Northamptonshire Council, a Conservative flagship, has declared itself effectively bankrupt – and others may follow.

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The Guardian is up to some strange things.

• US Secret Service And The Guardian Face Off Over ‘Russian Spy’ (RT)

US Secret Service has scolded the Guardian for “irresponsible and inaccurate” reporting on an alleged Russian spy at the US embassy in Moscow. Unfazed, the newspaper continued to spin the story calling it the ‘tip of the iceberg.’ The British newspaper, never one to pass up a good Russia scare story, published a fresh one on Friday, citing multiple intelligence analysts to reinforce the idea that its own anonymously-sourced revelations of a suspected spy with high-level security clearance having been embedded for a decade in the US embassy in Moscow,”could be just the tip of the iceberg.” The Secret Service, meanwhile, has been issuing repeated rebuttals to the Guardian’s reporting.

The security officials were quite emphatic in bashing the article as “wrought with irresponsible and inaccurate reporting based on the claims of “anonymous sources’.” In its press release on Thursday, the Secret Service specifically points out that before the publication came out, it had provided the Guardian with background to the story “clearly refuting unfounded information” in its statement to the editor. The Guardian did mention the agency’s response, bundling it in the middle of its article, while citing its unnamed “intelligence source” profusely, claiming that the Russian woman, the suspected mole, “had access to the most damaging database, which is the US Secret Service official mail system.”

This allegedly included “schedules of the president – current and past, vice-president and their spouses, including Hillary Clinton.” According to the Secret Service, the allegations that a mysterious foreign ‘femme fatale’ could have access to such sensitive information, are unfounded. “FSNs [Foreign Service Nationals] working under the direction of the U.S. Secret Service have never been provided or placed in a position to obtain, secret or classified information as erroneously reported.”

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You break it, you bought it.

• Russia Seeks US Help To Rebuild Syria (R.)

Russia has used a closely guarded communications channel with America’s top general to propose the two former Cold War foes cooperate to rebuild Syria and repatriate refugees to the war-torn country, according to a U.S. government memo. The proposal was sent in a July 19 letter by Valery Gerasimov, the chief of the Russian military’s General Staff, to U.S. Marine General Joseph Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, according to the memo which was seen by Reuters. The Russian plan, which has not been previously reported, has received an icy reception in Washington. The memo said the U.S. policy was only to support such efforts if there were a political solution to end Syria’s seven-year-old civil war, including steps like U.N.-supervised elections.

The proposal illustrates how Russia, having helped turn the tide of the war in favor of President Bashar al-Assad, is now pressing Washington and others to aid the reconstruction of areas under his control. Such an effort would likely further cement Assad’s hold on power. “The proposal argues that the Syrian regime lacks the equipment, fuel, other material, and funding needed to rebuild the country in order to accept refugee returns,” according to the memo, which specified that the proposal related to Syrian government-held areas of the country. The United States in 2011 adopted a policy that Assad must leave power but then watched as his forces, backed by Iran and then Russia, clawed back territory and secure Assad’s position. The United States has drawn a line on reconstruction assistance, saying it should be tied to a process that includes U.N.-supervised elections and a political transition in Syria. It blames Assad for Syria’s devastation.

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But what can Sabraw do?

• Judge Calls US Efforts To Reunite Deported Parents ‘Unacceptable’ (R.)

A federal judge on Friday described as “unacceptable” the U.S. government’s progress in reuniting immigrant children in the United States with deported parents and ordered the government to appoint a person to take charge of its efforts. “This is going to be a significant undertaking and it’s clear there has to be one person in charge,” said U.S. District Judge Dana Sabraw at a hearing in San Diego. Sabraw in June ordered the government to begin reuniting some 2,500 children that officials separated from their parents after they crossed the U.S.-Mexican border. The families were separated as part of a “zero tolerance” U.S. government policy toward illegal immigration that began in early May.

Many of them had crossed the border illegally, while others had sought asylum. About 1,900 children have since been reconnected with their parents or a sponsor. On Thursday, the government proposed that non-profit groups should take the lead in locating as many as 500 parents deported or removed from the United States without their children. At Friday’s hearing, Sabraw said it was it was “100 percent the responsibility of the administration” to reunite those families. Sabraw also noted that as few as 12 of the 500 parents in question have been located. “That is just unacceptable at this point,” he said. “The reality is that for every parent who is not located there will be a permanently orphaned child.”

The government’s lawyer, Scott Stewart, said that the agencies involved would consider appointing a point person or persons. Stewart said the government had proposed a plan with non-profit groups in a prominent role because it believed that was the quickest way to locate parents.

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Different judge. Legal opinions are sorely need in the US.

• US Court Orders Trump Administration To Fully Reinstate DACA Program (R.)

A federal judge on Friday ruled that the Trump administration must fully restore a program that protects from deportation some young immigrants who were brought to the United States illegally as children, including accepting new applications for the program. U.S. District Judge John Bates in Washington, D.C., said he would stay Friday’s order, however, until August 23 to give the administration time to decide whether to appeal. Bates first issued a ruling in April ordering the federal government to continue the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, program, including taking applications. He stayed that ruling for 90 days to give the government time to better explain why the program should be ended.

On Friday Bates, who was appointed by former President George W. Bush, a Republican, said he would not revise his previous ruling because the arguments of President Donald Trump’s administration did not override his concerns. Under DACA, roughly 700,000 young adults, often referred to as “Dreamers”, were protected from deportation and given work permits for two-year periods, after which they must re-apply to the program.

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Better put this before a judge as well. But no surprise that Monsanto is powerful stateside.

• Trump Administration Lifts GMO Crop Ban For US Wildlife Refuges (R.)

The Trump administration has rescinded an Obama-era ban on the use of pesticides linked to declining bee populations and the cultivation of genetically modified crops in dozens of national wildlife refuges where farming is permitted. Environmentalists, who had sued to bring about the 2-year-old ban, said on Friday that lifting the restriction poses a grave threat to pollinating insects and other sensitive creatures relying on toxic-free habitats afforded by wildlife refuges. “Industrial agriculture has no place on refuges dedicated to wildlife conservation and protection of some of the most vital and vulnerable species,” said Jenny Keating, federal lands policy analyst for the group Defenders of Wildlife.

Limited agricultural activity is authorized on some refuges by law, including cooperative agreements in which farmers are permitted to grow certain crops to produce more food or improve habitat for the wildlife there. The rollback, spelled out in a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service memo, ends a policy that had prohibited farmers on refuges from planting biotech crops – such as soybeans and corn – engineered to resist insect pests and weed-controlling herbicides. That policy also had barred the use on wildlife refuges of neonicotinoid pesticides, or neonics, in conjunction with GMO crops. Neonics are a class of insecticides tied by research to declining populations of wild bees and other pollinating insects around the world.

Rather than continuing to impose a blanket ban on GMO crops and neonics on refuges, Fish and Wildlife Service Deputy Director Greg Sheehan said in Thursday’s memo that decisions about their use would be made on a case-by-case basis.

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Debt Rattle July 7 2018

Jul 072018
 
 July 7, 2018  Posted by at 9:10 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,  4 Responses »


Claude Monet Water lilies 1904

 

• Fed Discards Flattening Yield Curve as Recession Indicator (WS)
• Theresa May Secures Approval From Cabinet To Negotiate Soft Brexit (G.)
• Boris Johnson’s Gang Outgunned By Theresa May At Chequers (G.)
• UK Government Has No Clue How To Execute Brexit Without Harm – Airbus CEO (G.)
• Despite 213K Jobs Gain, Unemployment Up by 499K (Mish)
• Russia Hikes Duties On US Imports, Pledges More Retaliation (R.)
• US Border Agents Stop Canadian Fishermen In Disputed Waters Off Maine (G.)
• More Ways Your Phone Is Spying On You (ZH)
• Summer of Tough Love (Jim Kunstler)
• Twitter Suspends Over 70 Million Accounts In Two Months (R.)
• Tax Arbitrage Is An Issue (Setser)
• Mainstream Politicians Short-Sighted, Don’t See World Changing – Grillo (RT)
• Number Of Planes In The Sky To More Than Double In Next 20 Years (Ind.)
• Pope Warns Earth Turning Into Vast Pile Of ‘Rubble, Deserts And Refuse’ (AP)

 

 

Seems like a risky gamble.

• Fed Discards Flattening Yield Curve as Recession Indicator (WS)

In the minutes of the FOMC meeting on June 12 and 13, released this afternoon, there was a doozie, obscured somewhat by the dynamics of the rate hike plus the indication that there would be two more rate hikes this year, for a total of four, up from three at the prior meeting, with more hikes to come in 2019, along with other changes [..] But the doozie in the minutes was about the flattening “yield curve.” The yield curve is formed by Treasury yields of different maturities: normally, the two-year yield is quite a bit lower than the 10-year yield. Over the last several decades, each time the yield curve “inverted” – when the two-year yield ended up higher than the 10-year yield – a recession followed. The last time, the Financial Crisis followed.

So this has become a popular recession indicator that has cropped up a lot in the discussions of various Fed governors since last year. Today, the two-year yield closed at 2.55% and the 10-year yield at 2.84%. The spread between them was just 29 basis points, the lowest since before the Financial Crisis. The chart below shows the yield curves on December 14, 2016, when the Fed got serious about raising rates (black line); and today (red line). Note how the red line has “flattened” between the two-year and the 10-year markers, and how the spread has narrowed to just 29 basis points:

The chart below shows the two-year yield (black) and the 10-year yield (red) going back to 1992. Note how the spread has been narrowing in recent months.

The chart below tracks this spread for every day back to 2008. Today, the spread, at just 29 basis points, is the lowest since before the Financial Crisis:

There has been a lot of handwringing about this being an indicator that the next recession is nearing and that the Fed should back off with its rate hikes. But this Fed is getting seriously hawkish: In the minutes today, it revealed that instead of thinking about backing off with its rate hikes, it’s throwing out the flattening yield curve.

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She’s threatened to fire them. But Brexit looks less likely to happen by the day.

• Theresa May Secures Approval From Cabinet To Negotiate Soft Brexit (G.)

Theresa May has secured approval to negotiate a soft Brexit deal with the European Union, signing up her fractious cabinet at a Chequers awayday to a controversial plan to match EU standards on food and goods. The prime minister released a statement following the critical afternoon session of the long-awaited summit that alarmed Tory hard Brexiters, in which she confirmed she had won over the cabinet to new customs arrangements ending political deadlock on the issue. May said the cabinet had “agreed our collective position for the future of our negotiations with the EU”. That included a proposal to “create a UK-EU free trade area which establishes a common rule book for industrial goods and agricultural products” after Brexit.

Tory Brexiters voiced concern at the agreement, while soft Brexiters expressed relief. Andrea Jenkyns, a hardline MP, complained that “British businesses will continue to be a rule taker from the EU” and said she would “pray” that the detail was not as bad as she feared. Heidi Allen, a moderate, said she was “pleased to report Theresa May has secured cabinet agreement for a sensible, soft Brexit”. On Thursday, when the common rule book proposal was first leaked, hardline Brexiter cabinet ministers and Conservative MPs voiced alarm that it could prevent the UK striking a trade deal with the US, which has different standards in goods and foods, such as allowing chickens to be washed in chlorine.

But May was able to release the text of a three-page agreed statement before cabinet, following a relatively undramatic day of discussions, sat down for dinner to listen to No 10 communications chiefs make a presentation on how to sell the new proposals. Michel Barnier, the EU’s chief Brexit negotiator, appeared to react warmly to the proposals, noting in a tweet that the “Chequers discussion on future to be welcomed. I look forward to white paper. We will assess proposals to see if they are workable and realistic”. The prime minister made clear that she expected ministers would be sacked if they did not remain in line with her soft Brexit blueprint.

She wrote to Tory MPs to explain her plans and included a clear warning about discipline: “As we developed our policy on Brexit, I have allowed cabinet colleagues to express their individual views. Agreement on this proposal marks the point where that is no longer the case and collective responsibility is now fully restored.”

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It doesn’t matter one bit unless the EU agrees.

• Boris Johnson’s Gang Outgunned By Theresa May At Chequers (G.)

Theresa May has won the battle with her Brexiter rebels in the cabinet, but the war will be a long one. She gambled that the Brexit purists – those who gathered on the eve of the Chequers summit at the Foreign Office with Boris Johnson – would be outgunned at Chequers when the full cabinet was assembled. The choreography was impressive – May locked her ministers inside the Buckinghamshire retreat without their phones or special advisers. The final agreement – sent out on behalf of “HM government” came to journalists an hour before advisers had even seen it – and before they could get in contact with their ministers to know what concessions had been made. Within the hour, out came a letter to Conservative MPs warning the days of debate over the government’s Brexit position were over.

“Collective responsibility is now fully restored,” May warned. The deal clinched with her most difficult members of her cabinet, architects of the leave campaign such as Johnson and Michael Gove, gave May the leverage to demand similarly hardline MPs get in line. Downing Street has been briefing in a strident tone, practically daring hard Brexiter ministers to give it all up to walk down the Chequers drive. The numbers that will matter now are those in her parliamentary party. Some will express predictable fury, though in the hours since the deal was reached, Jacob Rees-Mogg was telling MPs to keep their powder dry. Key will be whether this is a deal that can win over mainstream backbenchers.

In recent weeks, a number of Conservative MPs had begun to express frustration that the prime minister was not prepared to face down one side of her party and lead. [..] On Monday, the prime minister will address the 1922 committee of backbenchers, though the timing of the summit means angry MPs will have the weekend to either cool off or come to the boil. “I’ll wait to see if this collective responsibility lasts the weekend,” another MP said. Perhaps just as crucially there are still some concerns about the future deal for UK services, around 80% of the UK economy. The agreement states the UK would “strike different arrangements for services, where it is in our interests to have regulatory flexibility, recognising the UK and the EU will not have current levels of access to each other’s markets”.

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And that’s the whole point.

• UK Government Has No Clue How To Execute Brexit Without Harm – Airbus CEO (G.)

The chief executive of Airbus has accused the government of having “no clue” on how to leave the EU without harming the economy, as the prime minister aimed at uniting the cabinet behind a Brexit plan. The criticism from the aerospace firm, which employs 14,000 people in the UK, is the strongest intervention yet from the business community on the risk of a hard Brexit and came in the same week that Jaguar Land Rover, Britain’s largest carmaker, warned its were under threat. Speaking at a briefing in London before the Farnborough air show later this month, the Airbus chief executive, Tom Enders, said: “The sun is shining brightly on the UK, the English team is progressing towards the [World Cup] final, the RAF is preparing to celebrate its centenary and Her Majesty’s government still has no clue, no consensus on how to execute Brexit without severe harm.”

Enders said Airbus, a Franco-German group that supports a further 100,000 UK jobs in its supply chain, was wary of all types of Brexit, including a worst-case no-deal scenario. “Rest assured that we are taking first preparations as we speak in order to mitigate consequences from whatever Brexit scenario may follow,” he said. “Brexit in whatever form, soft or hard, light or clean, whatever you call it, will be damaging for industry, for our industry and damaging for the UK, whatever the outcome will be.”

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600,000 more looking for a job. Out of 95 million not in labor force. All new jobs are part-time. Full-time jobs fell.

• Despite 213K Jobs Gain, Unemployment Up by 499K (Mish)

Today’s establishment survey shows jobs rose by 213,000. Revisions were positive. The unemployment rate rose from 3.8% to 4.0% as the labor force rose by 601,000. More people are starting to look for jobs but employment only rose by 102,000. Nonfarm wage growth was +0.2% vs an Econoday consensus of +0.3%. The Phillips’ curve is a joke, but it’s still widely believed. The change in total nonfarm payroll employment for April was revised up from +159,000 to +175,000, and the change for May was revised up from +223,000 to +244,000. With these revisions, employment gains in April and May combined were 37,000 more than previously reported

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Putin meets Trump in 9 days.

• Russia Hikes Duties On US Imports, Pledges More Retaliation (R.)

Russia said on Friday it was imposing additional import duties on some U.S. industrial goods after the United States slapped tariffs on steel and aluminum imports, and warned that more retaliatory steps could be in the pipeline. The economy ministry said Russia would impose extra tariffs on some goods from the United States for which there are Russian-made substitutes.The extra duties of 25 to 40 percent will apply to imports of fiber optics and equipment for road construction, the oil and gas industries and metal processing and mining.

The ministry said the measures, signed by Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, were intended to compensate for $87.6 million of damage suffered by Russian export-focused companies as a result of the U.S. metals tariffs. The U.S. tariff hike will cost an overall $537.6 million and Russia has the right to impose more compensatory measures in the future, the economy ministry said.

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Feels like Python.

• US Border Agents Stop Canadian Fishermen In Disputed Waters Off Maine (G.)

Canada’s government is investigating reports that US border patrol officers have intercepted and questioned crew members on more than 20 Canadian vessels in disputed waters off the coast of Maine. The reports have thrust a longstanding territorial dispute between the two countries into the spotlight; since the late 1700s tensions have simmered over a pair of tiny, treeless islands that sit between Maine and the Canadian province of New Brunswick. Primarily inhabited by nesting puffins, the islands of North Rock and Machias Seal remain the only disputed lands between US and Canada, with both claiming sovereign jurisdiction over the islands and their surrounding waters.

As a result, the area has long hosted lobster fisherman from both sides of the border. The question of jurisdiction flared up recently after the Grand Manan Fishermen’s Association said a Canadian vessel had been stopped by US border patrol while fishing in the waters near Machias Seal Island in late June. “He informed them he was a Canadian vessel legally fishing in Canadian waters,” wrote Laurence Cook of the association on Facebook. He said he was “not surprised to see the Americans trying to push people around”, describing them as “typical American bullies.”

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In ways we didn’t yet know.

• More Ways Your Phone Is Spying On You (ZH)

For years, conspiracy theories about smart phones listening to users without their permission to show them advertisements have abounded. While some researchers have shown this could happen, a first of its kind study just found something far more insidious. Academics at Northeastern University have just proven that your phone is recording your screen – as in taking video – and uploading it to third parties. For the last year, Elleen Pan, Jingjing Ren, Martina Lindorfer, Christo Wilson, and David Choffnes ran an experiment involving more than 17,000 of the most popular Android apps using ten different phones. Their findings were alarming, to say the least.

As Gizmodo points out, during the study, the researchers started to see that screenshots and video recordings of what people were doing in apps were being sent to third-party domains. For example, when one of the phones used an app from GoPuff, a delivery start-up for people who have sudden cravings for junk food, the interaction with the app was recorded and sent to a domain affiliated with Appsee, a mobile analytics company. The video included a screen where you could enter personal information – in this case, their zip code.

GoPuff did not disclose in its terms of use that its app was recording users screens and uploading this data to a third party. What’s more, when they were contacted by the researchers GoPuff merely added a disclosure to their policy acknowledging that “ApSee” might receive users PII. The fact that these apps can record your screen without you knowing and use this data is chilling. It illustrates how easy it would be for a malicious actor to be able to look at your private messages, personal information, passwords, photos, and videos. None of this is stopped by your phone’s security either as it is a function built into the apps and you don’t have an option to disallow it.

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“Mr. Mueller will come up with someone to indict on something, even if it’s ninety-seven ham sandwiches.”

• Summer of Tough Love (Jim Kunstler)

The blowup of the bond and stock markets later this year will put to a gloomy rest the ludicrous notion that America has been enjoying a great economic boom. It’s actually been an engineered hallucination, thanks to the global monetary authorities applying the magic of limitless credit to a bad habit of credulous speculation. The central banks have launched a program of so-called “quantitative tightening (QT)” — an idiotic phrase meant to counterpoise the equally fatuous “quantitative easing (QE),” PhD economist-speak for grotesque interference in the bond markets — that will choke down the credit supply at exactly the moment that governments and giant corporations need new loans to pay the interest on old loans. The trajectory there is obvious.

The big question, of course — hardly ever asked in the public arena — is what that will do to currencies, i.e., money. It can really only go two ways: either make money very scarce, in which case a lot of people and enterprises go broke, or, if the monetary authorities respond to the predicament by enabling a return to bottomless credit issuance, the money will become worthless — they’ll be plenty of it, but it won’t buy much. Such a turn of events will make an already-unhinged nation fly apart. [..] Oh, yes, there is also that Hieronymus Bosch Garden of Earthly Delights known as the Mueller Investigation, with its dreary outposts in the executive suite of the FBI, and all the tangled mysteries entailed there.

Mr. Mueller will come up with someone to indict on something, even if it’s ninety-seven ham sandwiches. I suspect Mr. Trump will manage to dump Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Deputy AG Rod Rosenstein. And then the pardons will fly, like so many winged demons flapping from the mouth of Hades. Constitutional crisis may be too mild a word for what ensues. By holiday time in early winter, much will clarified about the actual direction of the country. By then, the “Walk Away” movement may even include the obdurate shills at CNN and The New York Times, and the Intellectual-Yet-Idiots on the college campuses. And the Golden Golem of Greatness will lie upended in the swamp that he just didn’t try hard enough to drain.

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How many fake accounts do they have?

• Twitter Suspends Over 70 Million Accounts In Two Months (R.)

Twitter Inc suspended more than one million accounts a day in recent months to reduce the flow of misinformation on the platform, the Washington Post reported. Twitter and other social media platforms such as Facebook Inc have been under scrutiny by U.S. lawmakers and international regulators for doing too little to prevent the spread of false content. The companies have been taking steps such as deleting user accounts, introducing updates and actively monitoring content to help users avoid being a victim to fake content. Twitter suspended more than 70 million accounts in May and June, and the pace has continued in July, the Post reported on Friday, citing data it obtained.

“It’s hard to believe that 70 million accounts were affected when Twitter has only 336 million monthly active users (MAU),” Wedbush analyst Michael Pachter said. Twitter’s MAU is expected to grow nearly 3 percent to 337.06 in the second quarter, according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S. “My guess is that a large number of these suspended accounts were dormant … it should have little impact on the company,” Pachter told Reuters. If the 70 million were mostly active accounts, the affected accounts would have been “screaming bloody murder”, added the analyst.

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Tax havens.

• Tax Arbitrage Is An Issue (Setser)

The impact of the U.S. tax reform on the U.S. trade balance was a hot item of debate last December. There was an argument that reducing the headline tax rate—and creating an even lower tax for the export of intangibles—would reduce the incentive for firms to book profits abroad in offshore tax centers. Booking those profits at home would raise U.S. services exports—while the service “exports” of countries like Ireland and Luxembourg (really re-exports of intellectual property created in the U.S) would fall. This would have no overall effect on the balance of payments. The rise in the recorded exports of intellectual property from the U.S. would be offset by a fall in the offshore income of U.S. firms.

For example, Google (U.S.) would show a bigger profit as offshore sales would be booked as exports of IP held in the U.S. (a service export) while Google (Bermuda) would show a smaller profit —and that would translate both into a smaller trade deficit and a smaller surplus on foreign direct investment income.* But shifting paper profits around would bring down the measured trade deficit—a potential win for Trump. It is obviously too soon to assess the full impact of the tax reform. But it isn’t too soon to start looking for some clues. The q1 balance of payments data doesn’t suggest that firms have lost their appetite for booking profits abroad, or their appetite for booking the bulk of their offshore profits in low tax jurisdictions. This shouldn’t be a surprise—the lowest rate in the new U.S. tax code is the new global minimum rate on intangibles.

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The existing “ideologies have outlived their usefulness,” Grillo said. “There are just good and bad ideas..”

• Mainstream Politicians Short-Sighted, Don’t See World Changing – Grillo (RT)

Mainstream political parties have outlived their purpose as they cannot adapt to the changes in the political system and are out of step with the voters, Beppe Grillo, the founder of the Italian Five Star Movement (M5S), said. “The world of the old politics and old political parties,” which expect the people to trust them with defending the public interests, is “slowly dying out,” Grillo, a former Italian satirist and activist, told Ex-Ecuador President Rafael Correa during the “Conversations with Correa” show on RT Spanish. People are no more willing to just blindly follow some political forces, they are much more informed now, they seek for information in the internet and want to form their own opinions, he explained.

“The world is changing at a fantastic speed. However, the current generation of politicians does not feel these changes. They just do not see it,” Grillo said, adding that the politicians are oriented “on a short-term horizon.” Meanwhile, the society, particularly the young people, is no longer attracted by the ideas propagated by the mainstream parties. The existing “ideologies have outlived their usefulness,” Grillo said. “There are just good and bad ideas,” he added, explaining that “they are not divided into ‘right’ and ‘left’ anymore.” The self-described anti-establishment activist then criticized the mainstream politicians for hiding their own inability to adapt behind the warnings about the perceived threat of populism.

As for the populism, I am proud to be a populist, if the word ‘populus’ (the people) is still of some importance,” Grillo told Correa. “Our goal is to reach out to people, to encourage them to think for themselves, to give them instruments to fulfill their own ideas,” he added. He agreed with Correa’s statement that the so-called “anti-populism” is what really poses a threat to the modern society as it seeks to keep the system unchanged. He particularly agreed that “anti-populism” is in fact a “means of attack” as it sees everything that challenges the system as populism and seeks to clamp it down.

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It’s going to be so annoying people will stop flying.

• Number Of Planes In The Sky To More Than Double In Next 20 Years (Ind.)

The number of aircraft in the skies will more than double by 2037, according to the latest Global Market Forecast by Airbus. The Toulouse-based plane maker says half the present 21,450 aircraft flying will still be aloft in 20 years. With 37,390 new planes predicted to take off, the world’s total will increase by 123 per cent to 47,990. The expected total number of aircraft is 11.3 per cent higher than it was in the last big forecast by Airbus, a year ago. The vast majority of the new planes will be smaller, narrow-bodied jets. More than three-quarters of deliveries will be from the Airbus A320 and Boeing 737 families, or aircraft of a similar scale from other manufacturers.

Assuming the 737 is still being made in 2037, it will be the most enduring aircraft in aviation history, having first flown 70-years earlier. Of the 28,550 predicted new narrow-bodied planes, one of Airbus’s leading hopes is the A321 NEO, a re-engined version of an aircraft that attracted little attention when it was launched as a stretched A320 in the early 1990s. The latest version can hold up to 244 passengers, and the long-range variant can fly 4,600 miles – the distance from Manchester to Seattle. The economics of the A321 are very tempting to 21st-century airlines, particularly for “long, thin” routes.

[..] Last month, Eamonn Brennan, director general of the air-traffic provider, Eurocontrol, warned: “On our most likely scenario, there won’t be enough capacity for approximately 1.5 million flights or 160 million passengers in 2040. “Many airports will become much busier, with higher delays. By 2040, 16 airports will be highly congested operating at close to capacity for much of the day, up from six airports today. “As a result of this congestion the number of passengers delayed by between one and two hours will grow from around 50,000 each day now to around 470,000 a day in 2040.”

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You’re going to need a lot tougher words than that.

• Pope Warns Earth Turning Into Vast Pile Of ‘Rubble, Deserts And Refuse’ (AP)

Pope Francis urged governments on Friday to make good on their commitments to curb global warming, warning that climate change, continued unsustainable development and rampant consumption threatens to turn the Earth into a vast pile of “rubble, deserts and refuse”. Francis made the appeal at a Vatican conference marking the third anniversary of his landmark environmental encyclical “Praise Be.” The document, meant to spur action at the 2015 Paris climate conference, called for a paradigm shift in humanity’s relationship with Mother Nature. In his remarks, Francis urged governments to honor their Paris commitments and said institutions such as the IMF and World Bank had important roles to play in encouraging reforms promoting sustainable development.

“There is a real danger that we will leave future generations only rubble, deserts and refuse,” he warned. The Paris accord, reached by 195 countries, seeks to avoid some of the worst effects of climate change by curbing global greenhouse gas emissions via individual, non-binding national plans. President Donald Trump has said the US will pull out of the accord negotiated by his predecessor unless he can get a better deal. Friday’s conference was the latest in a series of Vatican initiatives meant to impress a sense of urgency about global warming and the threat it poses in particular to the world’s poorest and most marginalised people. Recently, Francis invited oil executives and investors to the Vatican for a closed-door conference where he urged them to find alternatives to fossil fuels. He warned climate change was a challenge of “epochal proportions”.

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Debt Rattle July 6 2018

Jul 062018
 
 July 6, 2018  Posted by at 8:55 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , , ,  16 Responses »


Henri Matisse Reading woman in violet dress 1898

 

• China Imposes Tariffs, Says US Launching ‘Largest Trade War In History’ (CNBC)
• Trump Says China Could Face More Than $500 Billion In US Tariffs (CNBC)
• Merkel Open To Reducing EU Tariffs On American Cars (NC5)
• US Labor Shortage Is Reaching A Critical Point (CNBC)
• Theresa May’s New Customs Plan ‘Dead On Arrival’ In EU (Ind.)
• Theresa May Battles To See Off Revolt Ahead Of Key Brexit Summit (G.)
• The Dark Cloud Of Global Debt (GT)
• “People Assume That Stocks Always Rise Over Time. They’re Wrong” (Eric Peters)
• Most Dangerous Market Ever – Michael Pento (USAW)
• Moscow Using UK As Dumping Ground For Poison, Says Sajid Javid (G.)
• If The Novichok Was Planted By Russia, Where’s The Evidence? (G.)
• Seehofer Tells Merkel, Italy And Greece To Solve Migration Row (EUO)
• European Parliament Rejects Controversial Copyright Rules (Ind.)

 

 

Act like grown-ups.

• China Imposes Tariffs, Says US Launching ‘Largest Trade War In History’ (CNBC)

China implemented retaliatory tariffs on some imports from the U.S. Friday, state media reported, immediately after new U.S. duties had taken effect. The move signals the start of a full-blown trade war between the world’s two largest economies, after President Donald Trump’s administration had initially made good on threats to impose steep tariffs on Chinese goods. At midnight Washington time, the U.S. imposed new tariffs on $34 billion of annual imports from China. This prompted Beijing to respond in kind with levy tariffs on 545 items of U.S. imports — also worth $34 billion, state-run newspaper The China Daily reported Friday.

A spokesperson at China’s ministry of commerce said that while the Asian giant had refused to “fire the first shot,” it was being forced to respond after the U.S. had “launched the largest trade war in economic history.” “This act is typical trade bullying,” the spokesperson said, before adding: “It seriously jeopardizes the global industrial chain … Hinders the pace of global economic recovery, triggers global market turmoil and will affect more innocent multinational companies, general companies and consumers.”

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China has already retaliated.

• Trump Says China Could Face More Than $500 Billion In US Tariffs (CNBC)

President Donald Trump said on Thursday he would consider imposing additional tariffs on $500 billion in Chinese goods, should Beijing retaliate. U.S. tariffs on $34 billion worth of Chinese goods kicked in on Friday. Another $16 billion are expected to go into effect in two weeks and potentially another $500 billion, Trump told reports aboard Air Force One on his way to a rally in Montana before the tariffs kicked in. China implemented retaliatory tariffs on some imports from the U.S., state media reported about two hours later, after new U.S. duties had taken effect.

First “34, and then you have another 16 in two weeks and then as you know we have 200 billion in abeyance and then after the 200 billion we have 300 billion in abeyance. Ok? So we have 50 plus 200 plus almost 300,” Trump said. “It’s only on China,” he added. Trump’s statements reinforce earlier threats that he would escalate the trade conflict. The dispute with China has roiled financial markets worldwide, including stocks, currencies and the global trade of commodities from soybeans to coal.

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Was that so hard?

• Merkel Open To Reducing EU Tariffs On American Cars (NC5)

In the midst of trade tension between the European Union and the U.S., German Chancellor Angela Merkel said she’s open to lowering tariffs on American car imports. According to Reuters, Merkel said Europe would have to first agree upon a reduction in tariffs. In addition, she cited World Trade Organization rules that state lowering U.S. auto tariffs would mean doing the same for other countries as well. Merkel’s comments come after President Donald Trump imposed steel and aluminum tariffs on U.S. allies, including the EU, and threatened to put a 20 percent tax on European car imports.

The German chancellor warned Trump on Wednesday not to implement auto tariffs to avoid inciting an all-out trade war. Auto industry experts have suggested that if the Trump administration follows through on that threat, the move would negatively affect American autoworkers’ jobs and raise car prices. Trump is scheduled to travel to Brussels next week for the NATO summit, his first big meeting with European leaders together since last month’s G-7 summit.

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With 95 million still out of the labor force.

• US Labor Shortage Is Reaching A Critical Point (CNBC)

America’s labor shortage is approaching epidemic proportions, and it could be employers who end up paying. A report Thursday from ADP and Moody’s Analytics cast an even brighter light on what is becoming one of the most important economic stories of 2018: the difficulty employers are having in finding qualified employees to fill a record 6.7 million job openings. Truck drivers are in perilously low supply, Silicon Valley continues to struggle to fill vacancies, and employers across the grid are coping with a skills mismatch as the economy edges ever closer to full employment. “Business’ number one problem is finding qualified workers. At the current pace of job growth, if sustained, this problem is set to get much worse,” Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, said in a statement.

“These labor shortages will only intensify across all industries and company sizes.” Private payrolls grew by 177,000 in June, a respectable number but below market expectations. It was the fourth month in a row that the ADP/Moody’s count fell short of 200,000 after four months at or above that level. The reason for the tick down in hiring certainly isn’t because there aren’t enough jobs. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that April closed with 6.7 million job openings. May ended with just over 6 million people the BLS classifies as unemployed, continuing a trend this year that has seen openings eclipse the labor pool for the first time. At some point that gap will have to close. Economists expect that employers are going to have to start doing more to entice workers, likely through pay raises, training and other incentives.

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“We have been telling the UK for two years that we would not accept a single market a la carte. “What do they come with? – A single market a la carte.”

• Theresa May’s New Customs Plan ‘Dead On Arrival’ In EU (Ind.)

Theresa May’s new plan for future relations with the EU will be “dead on arrival”, senior figures in Brussels have told The Independent. EU officials said any hint that the UK wants to be part of the single market on goods, but not services will be rejected. It is a blow for the prime minister who has spent the last week in meetings with EU leaders, including Angela Merkel, in a bid to prevent Europe dismissing her plans out of hand when they are published next week. Ms May is expected to push her cabinet to agree to a plan at Chequers on Friday, which would see Britain remaining in full regulatory alignment with the EU on goods, but not on services.

The meeting has also been preceded by threats and warnings from the Brexiteer wing of the Conservatives that the proposals mooted by the prime minister will not be accepted by them in the UK because they keep Britain too closely tied to the EU’s rules and regulations. But before her ministers have even agreed to the deal, EU officials told The Independent the white paper would be “dead on arrival” in Brussels if, as expected, it proposes that the UK remain in the EU’s single market for goods, but not services. They claimed they had repeatedly warned UK negotiators that this option would not work. They said it had been widely discussed among EU ministers and rejected – including, crucially, by the EU’s two most powerful players, France and Germany.

One Brussels source said: “We have been telling the UK for two years that we would not accept a single market a la carte. “What do they come with? – A single market a la carte.”

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Who will be left standing by Saturday?

• Theresa May Battles To See Off Revolt Ahead Of Key Brexit Summit (G.)

Theresa May was battling to see off a revolt on the eve of a critical cabinet summit, as Boris Johnson convened a meeting of pro-Brexit ministers to discuss their options amid an atmosphere of tension and recrimination. The government was forced to deny “selective leaks” that appeared to suggest that the UK could struggle to strike a trade deal with the US in the future. No 10 insisted that paperwork released to ministers ahead of Friday’s crunch Brexit meeting at Chequers said just the opposite – as a caucus of seven cabinet members including Johnson, Michael Gove, Liam Fox and David Davis met at the Foreign Office to discuss their concerns.

An early leak suggested that the UK should “maintain a common rulebook” with the European Union on food and farming standards and that could make striking a trade deal with the more free market-oriented US more difficult as a result. That prompted a series of complaints from backbench Tory MPs and led to the Thursday evening meeting at the Foreign Office hosted by Johnson, the foreign secretary. Sources at No 10 said there had been selective leaks from the paperwork and the controversial passage appeared on page 15 out of 50 from one of several documents sent to all members of the cabinet.

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It’s corporations this time around.

• The Dark Cloud Of Global Debt (GT)

While everyone is debating the effects of possible trade sanctions on the global economy, few are paying attention to a far more serious issue. Enormous global debt, combined with low-interest rates, have set the stage for a global recession that has the potential for economic chaos. The combination of enormous debt and artificially low-interest rates were at the center of the 2008 credit bubble. One would expect central banks to be aware of this and show more concern. However, the overall silence has been astonishing. An exception to this is the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), which has been making loud noises about the toxic level of global debt and the anticipated bubble.

It recently reported that the global debt of 2008 was $60 trillion, small when compared to the current debt of $170 trillion. To make matters worse, today’s global debt is 40 percent higher in relation to GDP than it was in 2008, just prior to the Lehman Bros. downfall. To add to the current headache are the rising debt levels of emerging markets and corporate debts. According to McKinsey & Company, a global consulting firm, two-thirds of U.S. corporate debt are from corporations that pose a high default risk. Countries such as Brazil, India, and China have been busy issuing questionable credit. This dubious credit being issued in many emerging markets has come with extremely low-interest rates.

If the borrowers’ default, the lenders won’t be looking at enough compensation to recoup their loses. Low-interest rates have become an overall global problem, including the rates in the U.S. high-yield bond market. Central banks around the world have been keeping interest rates artificially low while printing money with abandon. The current global debt is the direct result of this policy. $2 trillion in corporate debt will be maturing annually through 2022. A considerable amount of this debt may default and cause debt repricing. The damage caused by central banks and their policy of easy credit has been done, and there is little that can be done at this point to stem the tide. It can only be hoped that they are more aware now than they were in 2008.

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Central banks don’t really matter anymore.

• “People Assume That Stocks Always Rise Over Time. They’re Wrong” (Eric Peters)

We’ve all looked at the stats, and we’re now at an unemployment rate in the US of sub-4% – 3.8%–3.7%. I think what a lot of people focus on is if the participation rate were back where it was pre-2008 you’d end up with an unemployment rate that had an 8 handle or something like that. So that’s what people are referring to. But making comparisons like that is difficult because a lot of things are changing. The US labor force is shrinking because people are getting older. There is the opioid issue. And this disability issue. Which are difficult to really handicap in terms of how big an impact that’s having on the US labor force.

If the central banks have been the ones who have gotten us here, they just – by definition – they’re not the ones that are going to get us out of here. So I think – look, we’re always going to look at what central banks are doing, they will be important. But I think that they’re no longer going to be dominant. What’s going to be dominant are the politicians. You’re seeing that in the US right now. I know that everyone loves to hang on every word that Powell speaks. And they look at the Fed statement. And people are still trained to look at the Fed dot plots (which are probably going to go away). People are trained to look at all of these things because that’s what they’ve done their whole careers.

But they just are not going to matter that much anymore. Whether the Fed’s terminal rate is 2.25 or 2.5 or 2.75 – we’re not talking about much. What are we going to do in terms of immigration policy? What are we going to do in terms of trade policy? How is that going to impact all of the major corporations’ global supply chains? These are the things that are really going to matter.

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“It is a confluence of events coming in October ..”

• Most Dangerous Market Ever – Michael Pento (USAW)

Money manager Michael Pento is sounding the alarm because we are getting very close to something called a “yield curve inversion.” Pento explains, “Why do I care if the yield curve inverts? Because 9 out of the last 10 times the yield curve inverted, we had a recession. . . . The spread with the yield curve is the narrowest it has been since outside of the start of the Great Recession that commenced in December of 2007. . . . The last two times the yield curve inverted, we had a stock market drop of 50%. The market dropped, and the S&P 500 lost 50% of its value.” Can we keep partying in the markets like it’s 1999 or is there an expiration date for the good times?

Pento says, “Well, I have put a check on the calendar for October because of the fact the rate of quantitative easing goes to $15 billion per year, because the trade war will reach a crescendo, then because I believe, unfortunately because I am conservative, the Republicans lose the House of Representatives, because the Chinese credit boom will be in full reverse by October. It is a confluence of events coming in October . . . we’ve already entered into the beginnings of a bear market around the world. The top 22 banks in the world are in a bear market. There are many, many examples of banks around the world that are in a bear market. You have a bear market in Chinese shares. 20% of the S&P 500 is in a bear market. This is an incipient bear market that is already beginning. I believe it manifests clearly to even the people on CNBC by October.”

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None of this makes any sense.

• Moscow Using UK As Dumping Ground For Poison, Says Sajid Javid (G.)

Britain will consult its allies about a possible response to Russia over the latest poisonings in Wiltshire as it emerged that the couple taken critically ill had handled an item contaminated with the nerve agent novichok. The home secretary, Sajid Javid, accused Moscow of using the UK as a “dumping ground” for poison and urged Russia to explain “exactly what has gone on”. In Salisbury, public health and council chiefs warned people not to pick up unidentified objects but dismissed the idea of making a general sweep of the city for novichok, although they said they could not rule out the possibility that more of the nerve agent was present.

The Guardian understands that the novichok that harmed them may have been in a sealed container left following the attack on the former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia, in March. Sources close to the investigation dropped a hint that they may now know the identity of the would-be killers who targeted the Skripals. The Metropolitan police confirmed on Thursday evening that the couple taken ill, Dawn Sturgess, 44, from Salisbury, and Charlie Rowley, 45, of Amesbury, collapsed after picking up a contaminated item.

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Even the Guardian allows itself to publish out right criticism. Putin has a really successful World Cup going. Brexit splits Britain. 1+1=2

• If The Novichok Was Planted By Russia, Where’s The Evidence? (G.)

I seem to be the only person alive with no clue as to who has poisoned four people in Wiltshire. I am told that only Russians have access to the poison, known as novichok – though the British research station of Porton Down, located ominously nearby, clearly knows a lot about it. Otherwise, I repeat, I have no clue. I suppose I can see why the Kremlin might want to kill an ex-spy such as Sergei Skripal and his daughter, so as to deter others from defecting. But why wait so long after he has fled, and why during the build-up to so highly politicised an event as a World Cup in Russia? Four months on from the crime, the Skripals have been incommunicado in a “secure location”. Barely a word has been heard from them.

Theresa May has persistently blamed Russia. She has called the incident “brazen and despicable”, and MI5 condemned “flagrant breaches of international rules”. But I cannot see the diplomatic or other purchase in prejudging the case, when no one can offer a clue. As to why the same person or persons should want to kill a couple, unconnected to the Skripals, on an Amesbury housing development, the questions are even more baffling. It seems a funny sort of carelessness. Did the couple pick up the infecting agent nearer the original site, eight miles away? Might the new poisoning be an attempt to divert attention from the earlier one? Could it be a devious plot, to make it seem that novichok is available on every street corner, from your friendly neighbourhood drug dealer?

Or perhaps one of the victims, Charlie Rowley, has mates in Porton Down? Perhaps someone is showing off, or panicking, or behaving like a complete idiot. Who knows? Since I have not a smidgen of an answer to any of these questions, I feel no need to capitulate to the politics of terror and fear. I can open my front door without cleaning my hand. I can visit Wiltshire in peace and safety and marvel at the spire of Salisbury Cathedral. I can revel in the remains of the bronze age Amesbury archer – whose death from bone disease has finally been resolved by the scientists. Where knowledge is nonexistent, ignorance is bliss.

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NIMBY on steroids.

• Seehofer Tells Merkel, Italy And Greece To Solve Migration Row (EUO)

German interior minister Horst Seehofer defused tensions with Austria on Thursday (5 July) but increased political pressure on his boss, chancellor Angela Merkel, as well as on Italy and Greece, to find a way how Germany can reject asylum seekers without closing its border with Austria. “There will be no measures taken by Germany at the expense of Austria,” Austrian chancellor Sebastian Kurz said after meeting Seehofer in Vienna. Under a plan agreed on Monday between Merkel’s centre-right CDU party and Seehofer’s CSU, its Bavarian conservative sister party, asylum seekers would be sent back to the EU country where they were first registered, or to Austria.

Kurz had warned that in reaction, Austria would consider closing its own border with Italy and Slovenia in order to prevent migrants from coming in. This, Vienna had warned, would lead to a “domino effect” of closing borders and imperil the free-movement Schengen area. But Seehofer assured Kurz that Austria would have to take no specific measures, and that it would be up to Italy and Greece, where three-quarters of asylum seekers come from, to take them back. The Bavarian politician has been trying for almost a month to impose his plan on Merkel, who first refused to unilaterally reject asylum seekers. She advocated instead a “European solution” to be agreed with other member states, who would accept taking refugees from Germany.

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It’s not defeated yet.

• European Parliament Rejects Controversial Copyright Rules (Ind.)

The European Parliament has voted against an incredibly controversial new set of copyright rules that campaigners claim could “ban memes”. The law will now be sent for a full reconsideration and debate inside the parliament, during which activists will try and remove the controversial Article 11 and 13. Article 11 has been referred to by campaigners as instituting a “link tax”, by forcing tech companies like Google and Facebook to pay to use snippets of content on their own sites. Article 13 adds rules that make tech companies responsible for ensuring any copyrighted material is not spread over their platforms. Those rules could force technology companies to scan through everything their users post and check it doesn’t include copyrighted material.

If it is found, the post will be forced to be removed, which campaigners claim could destroy the kind of memes and remixes that spread across the internet. The revamp has triggered strong criticism from Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee, net neutrality expert Tim Wu, internet pioneer Vint Cerf and others. Copyright campaigners claim that the rules are necessary to ensure that material isn’t illegally spread across the internet. Europe’s broadcasters, publishers and artists including Paul McCartney backed the rules, arguing the controversial Article 13 would protect the music industry.

A total of 318 law makers voted against opening talks with EU countries based on the committee’s proposal while 278 voted in favour, and 31 abstained. In practice, the vote only delays the final decision on the rules and gives the European Parliament more time to deliberate on them. Another decision will be taken in September.

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Debt Rattle April 7 2018

Apr 072018
 
 April 7, 2018  Posted by at 10:24 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , ,  2 Responses »


Arthur Rothstein Grain elevators, Great Falls, Montana 1939

 

• US Jobs: One Big Miss (CNBC)
• Everything Has Changed In Macroeconomics, But.. (Murphy)
• Income From UK Savings Accounts Dropped 16% In A Year (Ind.)
• Social Media Users Treated As ‘Experimental Rats’ – EU Watchdog (CNBC)
• Facebook Users Have To Pay To Opt Out Of Their Data Being Used (CNBC)
• AI: An ‘Immortal Dictator From Which We Can Never Escape’ (CNBC)
• 960,000 Households In Australia Will Face ‘Mortgage Stress’ (IBT)
• Another Mighty Conundrum (Kunstler)
• Provocations (Dmitry Orlov)
• Shipping Is a Big Part of the Climate Problem (BBG)
• Chinese Man Caught Smuggling Five Rhino Horns Is Jailed By Dutch Court (G.)

 

 

93 million not in the labor force.

• US Jobs: One Big Miss (CNBC)

Nonfarm payrolls rose 103,000 in March while the unemployment rate was 4.1%, falling well short of Wall Street expectations during a month where weather caused havoc on the jobs market, according to a Bureau of Labor Statistics report Friday. Economists had been expecting a payrolls gain of 193,000 and the unemployment rate to decline one-tenth of a point to 4%. The monthly reading was a huge slip from the 326,000 reported in February. A broader measure of unemployment that includes discouraged workers and those holding part-time positions for economic reasons — the underemployed — fell two-tenths of a point to 8%, its lowest reading in 11 years.

“If one were to only focus on this single month, the March employment report is on the disappointing side,” said Mark Hamrick, senior economic analyst at Bankrate.com. “Broader context is appropriate, however. The job market is widely regarded to be close to full employment. So, hiring gains should be slowing at this point in the expansion.” In addition to the payrolls news, the closely watched average hourly earnings figure rose 0.3%, against estimates of 0.2%. The number equates to a healthy but not worrisome 2.7% rate on an annualized basis. The average work week was unchanged at 34.5 hours.

Stock market reaction to the report was muted, with major indexes lower largely on renewed worries over a U.S. trade war with China. “Wage growth continues to inch higher but not enough to worry markets at this point,” said Quincy Krosby, chief market strategist at Prudential Financial. “As we move closer and closer towards full employment expectations are that headline employment should slow. This number reflects a continued reversion to the mean.” Professional and business services led with 33,000 new jobs while manufacturing and health care added 22,000 new jobs apiece. Mining rose 9,000 while construction lost 15,000 positions and retail fell 4,000.

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Never again…

• Everything Has Changed In Macroeconomics, But.. (Murphy)

I spend a lot of time writing about the Global Financial Crisis. Not much of it is published yet: academia is desperately slow. The crash of 2008 and its aftermath is, however, an ever-present reality both in my work life, and to be candid, the world beyond it. But I still do not think we appreciate how much everything has changed. A blog from John Lewis who works for the Bank of England gave some hint of the scale of this change this week. Lewis looked at real interest rates for three centuries i.e. those adjusted for inflation. When considering real bank rate, mortgage rates, and 10-year government bond yields over time this is what he found. As he notes: ‘the lines show the five-year moving averages of the ex-post real interest rate. The dots show the values over the years 2012 to 2016’:

As he notes: “The 5-year average of real bank rate rarely goes below zero – previous instances were mainly during the 1970s inflation and around world wars. The decline in real bond yields since the 1980s leaves them about 300bps below their all time average.” Now there may be good reason for that: broader markets, real reduced risk because of better information, and so on. The absence of world war helps too. But it also means that if we were to return to ‘normal’ or the mean then the change in rates would be massive:

The most useful contrast is with 1997 – 2007, of course. We’re talking adjustments of 4% or more. That is not going to happen. There are good reasons. Most mortgage holders would fail to make their payments. Most banks would then collapse. and government debt costs would increase and may politicians would panic at that whether appropriately or not. I will be blunt. Everything has changed. Those rates are history. This though has massive implications. If this is the case then monetary policy as a mechanism for controlling inflation and economic activity has died: rates that let it work cannot be recreated. And yet almost the whole of macroeconomic thinking is premised on its use, as is the role of central banks in our economies.

The reality is that everything has changed. And yet there is, so far, almost no reaction. Fiscal policy – spend and tax – is the only tool left to the government now and yet no one is saying so. No wonder I spend half my time wondering why we feel so out of control. We are.

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We’ll get you into the casino yet.

• Income From UK Savings Accounts Dropped 16% In A Year (Ind.)

UK savers’ income from bank accounts fell 16 per cent in a year, according to new research, due to low interest rates from banks and building societies. According to easyMoney, the investment platform launched by easyJet founder Stelios Haji-Ioannou, the drop in savings income is worse in real terms due to rising inflation. The decline in income is based on numbers from the 2015/2016 financial year (the latest available data from HMRC) when savers made £5.7bn compared with £6.8bn in 2014/2015. At the end of the 2014/2015 fiscal year, inflation was -0.1 per cent; by January this year it had risen to 3 per cent.

With savers seeing less benefit from stashing their money in bank accounts and cash ISAs, easyMoney said, people are increasingly turning towards alternatives, with many inclined to “take on a sensible increase in risk”. Andrew de Candole, CEO of easyMoney, said: “Savers are increasingly fed up with seeing their money just sitting doing nothing in bank accounts. “It’s easy to see why: these figures show that savings accounts’ and cash ISAs’ performance has been getting worse. With inflation eating away at values, the reality is there’s very little incentive to save through these traditional routes. “For many people the time has come to take action. Investors need products that offer real returns, and many are prepared to accept a sensible, calculated increase in risk in order to achieve this.”

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So act.

• Social Media Users Treated As ‘Experimental Rats’ – EU Watchdog (CNBC)

Facebook needs to make sure the new tools it has introduced to help safeguard user data in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal is done in “practice and not only on paper,” the European Union’s top data watchdog told CNBC. The social network has unveiled a raft of new tools since news of the fiasco broke, with the aim of helping users understand and control how their data are used. Giovanni Buttarelli, the European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS), said Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg needs to ensure these changes are done in practice. “I take note of what Zuckerberg has said recently, he said that he takes care of the privacy right. The question is they should do it in practice and not only on paper,” Buttarelli told CNBC in a phone interview on Thursday.

[..] Buttarelli criticized social media firms’ data collection practices. “There are days when you have the impression people are treated as battery animals or experimental rats. We are treated as a farm for data. We are in within a walled garden and every single action is monitored,” Buttarelli said. The EDPS is in charge of making sure that data are being handled correctly within EU institutions like the Commission. But it is also part of a working group made up of the data protection authorities from various member states.

[..] Buttarelli said there are likely to be far-reaching consequences which could include punishments for companies. “I’m expecting far-reaching consequences on the broader scale. There is a need of a change of culture,” he told CNBC. Last month, European Parliament President Antonio Tajani invited Zuckerberg to testify in front of lawmakers and give reassurances that EU citizens’ data were not used to “manipulate democracy.” Buttarelli said it would be “wise” for Zuckerberg to honor the invitation from Tajani.

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If you ask me, the highest tree ain’t high enough. But that’s just me. And it’s not those that do it, it’s those that let them.

• Facebook Users Have To Pay To Opt Out Of Their Data Being Used (CNBC)

Facebook users could have to pay to completely opt out of their data being used to target them with advertising, the company’s Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg told NBC News on Thursday. NBC asked if Facebook could come up with a tool to let people have a button that allows them to restrict the social network from using their profile data to stop targeted ads. Sandberg said that the company has “different forms of opt out” but not one button for everything. “We don’t have an opt-out at the highest level. That would be a paid product,” Sandberg told NBC. The comments come in the wake of the scandal in which 87 million Facebook profiles were scraped with the data being sent to political consultancy Cambridge Analytica.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has apologized for the company’s role in the data scandal and is now set to testify in front of Congress on April 11. Zuckerberg has also been summoned to appear in front of lawmakers in the U.K. and European Union. The data issue arose from a quiz app that collected data of Facebook users and their friends. This data was then passed on to Cambridge Analytica. Facebook banned the app in 2015, and said it got “assurances” from Cambridge Analytica and the app maker that the data was deleted. However, reports suggested this wasn’t the case. Facebook has been criticized for not checking the data had been erased, a mistake that Sandberg acknowledged.

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Even Musk makes sense once in a blue moon.

• AI: An ‘Immortal Dictator From Which We Can Never Escape’ (CNBC)

Superintelligence — a form of artificial intelligence (AI) smarter than humans — could create an “immortal dictator,” billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk warned. In a documentary by American filmmaker Chris Paine, Musk said that the development of superintelligence by a company or other organization of people could result in a form of AI that governs the world. “The least scary future I can think of is one where we have at least democratized AI because if one company or small group of people manages to develop godlike digital superintelligence, they could take over the world,” Musk said. “At least when there’s an evil dictator, that human is going to die. But for an AI, there would be no death. It would live forever. And then you’d have an immortal dictator from which we can never escape.”

The documentary by Paine examines a number of examples of AI, including autonomous weapons, Wall Street technology and algorithms driving fake news. It also draws from cultural examples of AI, such as the 1999 film “The Matrix” and 2016 film “Ex Machina.” [..] “If AI has a goal and humanity just happens to be in the way, it will destroy humanity as a matter of course without even thinking about it. No hard feelings,” Musk said. “It’s just like, if we’re building a road and an anthill just happens to be in the way, we don’t hate ants, we’re just building a road, and so, goodbye anthill.”

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Lowballing.

• 960,000 Households In Australia Will Face ‘Mortgage Stress’ (IBT)

The number of Australian households facing “mortgage stress” will likely reach 960,000, according to a new data. Slow wage growth is blamed for the trend as it does not keep up with the rising cost of living. Digital Finance Analytics (DFA) has recently released data which suggests that the number of households facing mortgage stress will likely reach about one million. Mortgage stress is a term used to refer to households spending 30% or above of its pre-tax income on home loan repayments. Households are defined as “stressed” when cash flow does not cover ongoing costs.

As for access to other available assets, that is something that they may or may not have. Some households have paid ahead, but those in mild stress have little leeway in their net income while those in severe stress could not meet repayments from current income. The new data also shows that the figure was a climb of 30,000 in the last month, encapsulating low and high-income-earning households, according to 9 News. For DFA spokesperson Martin North, it was an indication of how dire the country’s housing situation is getting.

“Things will get more severe, especially as household debt continues to climb to new record levels, mortgage lending is still growing at two to three times income,” Daily Mail Australia reported him as saying. North added that those numbers were not sustainable. It was estimated that over 55,000 households risk 30-day default in the next 12 months. Bank portfolio losses were expected to be about 2.8 basis points. Aside from flat wages growth and rising costs of living, higher real mortgage rates are perceived to be a burden. Mortgage lending continues to grow at two to three times income. The latest household debt to income ratio is currently at a record 188.6.

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Pot and sanctuary.

• Another Mighty Conundrum (Kunstler)

The sanctuary city movement seems to me the most mendacious element of the story, a nakedly emotional appeal against the rule of law. The attorney general of California, Xavier Becerra, lately threatened to fine corporations there that share employee information with federal agents. There has not been such arrant flouting of federal law by state officials since Governor George Wallace stood in the doorway of the University of Alabama crying “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever” in June, 1963 — and we all know how that ended. I’m among those who would like to see the immigration laws honestly enforced. In fact, I would also like to see the 1965 immigration law reformed to admit far fewer people from any land into this country. We have economic and cultural interests to protect, and they would seem to be self-evident.

So why has there been no move by the federal authorities to impose sovereign federal law over figures like Mr. Becerra, or Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf, who went through the barrio there Paul Revere style warning that the ICE agents were coming? Well, one big reason is the marijuana situation. Nine states have legalized cannabis for recreational use (i.e. for getting high), and 29 have legalized it for medical purposes. This includes all of the states on the “Left Coast.” All of them are flouting federal law in doing that. But imagine the political uproar if the feds tried to step in at this point and quash the cannabis trade. In the early adapters, like Colorado, California, and Washington State, the trade has blossomed into multi-million dollar corporate enterprise, with significant tax revenue.

So, much as I object to the dishonest practices around immigration, I don’t see how the federal government can take principled action against them without first addressing its attitude to the marijuana situation. Of course, that could be easily disposed of by congress adopting a simple law to the effect that the cultivation and sale of cannabis shall be regulated by the states. The craven members of congress apparently don’t even dare to raise the issue of resolving this conundrum, and the thought may have never even entered the mighty golden brain-pan of our president — not to mention The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, Fox-News, or any of the other media organs of public debate. Well, maybe the time has come for that discussion.

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An absolutely fantastic story by Dmitry. Don’t miss this.

• Provocations (Dmitry Orlov)

First, I will present just the facts. Next, I will indicate some huge, gaping holes in the plot which we must, perforce, fill using our imaginations (for lack of detailed factual information), but relying on real world knowledge as much as possible to build a plausible scenario (or two). In the end, the most plausible scenario wins. On February 22, 2018, the Argentine newspaper El Clarin has reported that a major shipment of drugs from Buenos Aires to Moscow—389 kg of pure cocaine, valued at over 60 million USD, and bearing the markings of the Sinaloa drug cartel of Northern Mexico—was prevented from taking place thanks to the efforts of Russia’s FSB and the Argentine authorities. Several people, including a member of the Argentine police and someone involved in charity work, have been detained.

Victor Coronelli, Russia’s ambassador to Argentina, related how all the way back in 2016 the embassy received information that possessions belonging to some third party had been found in a storage space at a children’s school operated by the embassy and located several blocks away from it. Suspicions arose and a thorough examination had uncovered 12 colorful suitcases filled with 389 “keys” (1-kilo blocks) of cocaine bearing the little star that is the symbol of the Sinaloa cartel of Northern Mexico. Shortly after the cocaine was discovered, Russia’s FSB, working together with the Argentine police, hatched an ingenious plan for a sting operation, to find out who is behind this shipment. To this end, they carefully replaced the cocaine with flour and placed the 12 colorful suitcases back in storage.

And there they sat for over a year. What has been done with the cocaine that was extracted isn’t known. Apparently, it took a great deal of effort to get anyone to take possession of these suitcases. Eventually, two people were found who agreed to take delivery of them in Moscow: Vladimir Kalmykov and Ishtimir Hudzhamov. They are currently in pretrial detention in Russia. A third suspect, Andrei Kovalchuk, is under arrest in Germany, awaiting extradition to Russia, but his extradition is conditional on whether the Russian side can offer evidence of his complicity or guilt in organizing the shipment.

Kovalchuk used to work for Russia’s Foreign Ministry, but most recently he has used his old ministerial connections to arrange for some small-scale contraband to be shipped to Russia via diplomatic mail: cigars, coffee, cognac, etc. Such trade had been common during the 1990s, when Russian diplomats had fallen on hard times and did whatever they could to make ends meet, but it has become unnecessary in recent years, now that they are very well provided for once again. Still, cigars, coffee and cognac is what Kovalchuk—an apparent throwback to this earlier, meager era—maintains was in the suitcases he had stashed at the school in Buenos Aires: he has kept all of the receipts. He plans to travel to Russia of his own free will once he has gathered all the evidence he needs to exonerate himself.

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Bloomberg editors are clueless, but the issue is real.

• Shipping Is a Big Part of the Climate Problem (BBG)

When almost all the world’s governments agreed in Paris more than two years ago to address climate change, they sidestepped an important issue: carbon emissions from international shipping. Next week in London, they have a chance to put this right. Shipping is by far the most energy-efficient mode of transport, and it moves some 80% of world trade by volume. However, the fuel it uses is hard on the environment and human health — and ships last a long time, so deploying cleaner fleets takes time. Already, international shipping accounts for about as much carbon dioxide each year as Germany’s whole economy. On current trends, its share of the total will rise quickly. It could account for roughly 15% of the global carbon budget set by the Paris accord for 2050.

Next week, the International Maritime Organization is expected to announce a strategy for reducing these emissions. The plan is unlikely to be bold. Countries including Argentina, Brazil, India, Panama and Saudi Arabia are resisting carbon dioxide targets for shipping. Unsurprisingly, the industry itself is also opposed. Despite this resistance, the IMO needs to be ambitious. Ultimately, the most cost-effective approach would be to put a tax on carbon, and let that guide investment and innovation. But devising and implementing an international carbon-price system won’t be done overnight. In the short run, the IMO ought to propose a variety of useful course corrections.

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The problem in a nutshell: 1 year in jail (5 months with good conduct?!) for 5 rhinos. He’ll do it again as soon as he’s freed. $600,000. Another issue where the tallest tree isn’t high enough.

And we’re not even trying.

• Chinese Man Caught Smuggling Five Rhino Horns Is Jailed By Dutch Court (G.)

A Dutch court has sentenced a Chinese man to a year in jail for smuggling five rhino horns and four other horn objects worth about €500,000 ($613,000) in his luggage. The man was caught by customs officials at Schiphol airport in December as he traveled through Amsterdam on his way from South Africa to the Chinese city of Shanghai. It recalled that trading in endangered species is banned under the CITES convention prohibiting sales of protected animals and plants. South Africa is battling a scourge of rhino poaching fuelled by insatiable demand for their horn in Asia.

The country’s ministry of environmental affairs said earlier this year that 1,028 rhinos were slaughtered in 2017. In the last eight years alone, roughly a quarter of the world population of rhinos has been killed in South Africa, home to 80% of the remaining animals. Most of the demand comes from China and Vietnam, where the horn is coveted as a traditional medicine, an aphrodisiac or as a status symbol.

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