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Debt Rattle April 15 2025

Apr 152025
 
 April 15, 2025  Posted by at 9:32 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , , ,  28 Responses »


Mathew Brady Abe Lincoln 1864

 

• Lincoln Was a ‘Threat to Democracy’ (Al Perrotta)
• Trump’s Life’s Work Culminates in Confronting Communist China (Josh Hammer)
• Living on the Edge (Martin Armstrong)
• Temporary Tariff Terror Examined (Steve McKee)
• Zelensky Started The War Then Begged For Missiles – Trump (RT)
• Trump Slams Biden, Zelensky & Putin For Ukraine War: ‘Everybody Is To Blame’ (ZH)
• West Seeks To Partition Ukraine – Senior Russian Diplomat (RT)
• Zelensky Urges Trump To Visit Ukraine Before Pressing Negotiations (ZH)
• Trump Slams ‘Dishonest’ CBS After Zelensky Interview (RT)
• We Have Proof Sumy Strike Targeted Ukrainian Troops and Foreign Mercs – Lavrov (Sp.)
• The Sumy Missile Strike: War, Propaganda, and Hypocrisy (Amar)
• Medvedev Brands Incoming German Chancellor ‘Nazi’ (RT)
• Meta’s Monopoly Trial Kicks Off (ET)
• Now We Know Why Democrats Are Losing the Messaging War (Margolis)
• El Salvador’s Bukele Won’t Return MS-13 Gang Member Mistakenly Deported (JTN)
• Why the Beatified MS-13 ‘Father’ Was ‘Mistakenly’ Deported (Victoria Taft)
• Systemic Considerations (James Howard Kunstler)

 

 


Holy Week at the White House

 

 

Tea

5,000 years

Speaker

Left

Homeless

Titan

Tariffs
https://twitter.com/ImMeme0/status/1911513456249127332

Cop

 

 

 

 

Exactly 160 years ago, the US lost a major part of its innocence. That reveberates to this day, and the attempts at Trump’s life.

• Lincoln Was a ‘Threat to Democracy’ (Al Perrotta)

One hundred sixty years ago tonight, at Ford’s Theater, John Wilkes Booth put a bullet in the head of President Abraham Lincoln. What motivated the 26-year-old actor? Fame? No, he had plenty of that. His photos were outsold only by Honest Abe himself. Acclaim? No, contrary to tales told in school that he was jealous of the critical raves afforded his father Junius and brother Edwin, Booth earned reviews any young actor would die for. He even refused to perform under his real name until he earned reviews worthy of the name. To avenge the Confederacy’s defeat? You’re getting closer. Booth raged and despaired over the suffering incurred by the South. Actually, John Wilkes Booth told us his motivation. After shooting Lincoln and making his dramatic leap to the stage, Booth shouted “Sic Semper Tyrannis!” (“Thus always to tyrants.”) Or to put it another way, “Lincoln was a threat to democracy.”

Twice last summer, amid a daily drumbeat from former President Joe Biden, Democrats, and the media that Donald Trump was a “threat to democracy,” a budding tyrant, two would-be assassins came very close to killing him. Ryan Routh was charged Thursday in Florida for his attempt. A recent study indicates 55% of self-described leftists think the assassination of Trump would be “justifiable.” Given the rhetoric, given the vast numbers with a similar heart, it’s no wonder Routh thought he was doing the world a favor. “Everyone across the globe from the youngest to the oldest know [sic] that Trump is unfit to be anything, much less a U.S. president,” Routh wrote in a letter found after his arrest. “U.S. presidents must at bare minimum embody the moral fabric that is America and be kind, caring and selfless and always stand for humanity.”

So did Booth, who wrote while on the run: “Our country owed all her troubles to him, and God simply made me the instrument of his punishment. A country that groaned beneath this tyranny, and prayed for this end, and yet now behold the cold hands they extend to me. ” Booth grew increasingly dismayed at being vilified and rejected. “I am here in despair. And why? For doing what Brutus was honored for. What made Tell a hero? And yet I, for striking down a greater tyrant than they ever knew, am looked upon as a common cutthroat.” In a letter attempting to justify his actions, Booth wrote: “When Caesar had conquered the enemies of Rome and the power that was his menaced the liberties of the people, Brutus arose and slew him. The stroke of his dagger was guided by his love of Rome. It was the spirit and ambition of Caesar that Brutus struck at.”
“Oh, that we could come by Caesar’s spirit,
And not dismember Caesar.
But, alas!
Ceasar must bleed for it.”

Booth, a man steeped since birth in Shakespearean drama, sought the death of Lincoln as Shakespeare’s Brutus did Caesar’s. This fear stemmed not from what the president had done, but from the belief that with his enemies conquered, Lincoln would keep his war powers and reign as a tyrant. This gets to one of the most tragic elements of Lincoln’s assassination, positively Shakespearean in its awfulness. John Wilkes Booth failed to realize that with the war over, Lincoln was the best friend the South had. And Booth had a role to play. The greatest of his life. Lincoln wanted a gentle reconciliation between North and South, “with malice toward none, and charity for all.” Many powerful forces around him had plenty of malice toward the Confederacy, and no mood for charity. Those in the South whose towns had been laid waste and their sons laid to rest by the hundreds of thousands, would also have trouble with reconciliation.

Lincoln’s mission of unifying the country in peace looked to be as difficult as winning the war. He would need all the help he could get. Author Michael Kauffman discovered an intriguing tidbit when researching his book “American Brutus.” A worker at Ford’s Theater saw Booth hand an attendant a card, and the attendant bring the card into the Presidential Box. What happened next is not known. But is it not possible that Lincoln received Booth’s card, and knowing Booth’s fame, his oratory gifts and his sympathies, realized the actor could prove very valuable in helping “bind the nation’s wounds”? Who better than America’s First Family of Theater to help bring the nation together? Perhaps the theater-loving president even knew the three acting Booth brothers would be sharing the stage at a benefit the following week.

With the war over and the comedy romp “Our American Cousin” playing out beneath him, did Lincoln see in Booth’s card a golden opportunity? Is it not likely an excited Lincoln told the attendant, “Yes, send Mr. Booth in”? Rather than summon a potential partner, Lincoln summoned his own executioner. Booth killed not only the president, but all hope for a gentle reconciliation. How much better for his beloved South had Booth pulled up a chair instead of a pistol? How much better for our nation and their own dreams if liberals sought Trump’s cooperation rather than destruction? The future is in their hands. The 55% who believe Trump’s assassination would be justified would heed well the lesson of John Wilkes Booth. After being cornered in a barn in Port Royal, Virginia and shot, Booth looked down at his hands and uttered his final words: “Useless. Useless.”

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Much of what happens with regards to the tariffs surprises people, and they think it’s -largely- new. Donald Trump has been preoccupied with the issues for 40 years. In this 1988 video he says he doesn’t want to be president. But he would probably have been a strong candidate even then. Reagan at that point had just slapped a 100% tariff on a lot of Japanese imports.

• Trump’s Life’s Work Culminates in Confronting Communist China (Josh Hammer)

On Wednesday, President Donald Trump abruptly announced a 90-day pause on most of his planned country-specific “reciprocal” tariffs—with the notable exception of China. In so strikingly singling out China as the focus of America’s economic and geopolitical ire, Trump was not merely clarifying that the United States views China and its regnant Communist Party as our leading 21st-century threat—he was also taking yet another notable step toward fulfilling his own lifelong goal of fundamentally resetting the terms of the U.S.-China bilateral relationship. As an “outer-borough” native New Yorker from Queens, Trump has long seen things differently than most of his white-shoe brethren and fellow one-percenters living across the (literal and proverbial) river in Manhattan.

Throughout virtually his entire career, Trump has served as a “class traitor” archetype—someone who, as I wrote in an essay last year, “may hold ‘elite’ ruling class credentials, but whose hearts, minds, concerns, and general sensibilities are decidedly with the country class.” That is the essence of Trump’s nationalist-populist MAGA political coalition. But it’s also who Trump has been since his earliest interviews with the New York City tabloids and TV hosts all those decades ago. There is no better example than trade, Trump’s most consistently held political position. In the 1980s, he was alarmed at the rise of Japan as an economic superpower, arguing that America’s trade deficit with Japan was problematic and that the U.S. should respond with crippling tariffs. (It seems that Ronald Reagan, who in 1987 slapped a 100% tariff on many Japanese goods, was listening.)

In recent decades, Trump has applied the same logic to the newer threat of China. In 2011, for instance, four years before he launched his successful presidential run, Trump railed against widely practiced Chinese currency manipulation: “They have manipulated their currency so violently towards this country, it is almost impossible for our companies to compete with Chinese companies.” During the first year of his first presidential term, Trump directed his Office of the U.S. Trade Representative to investigate Chinese trade practices. The subsequent report was damning, and Trump implemented numerous tariffs on Chinese goods—tariffs that, to his rare credit, former President Joe Biden largely kept in place and even built upon. In addition to his first-term tariffs, Trump also filed a formal World Trade Organization case against China, alleging deceptive trade practices and intellectual property theft.

As Trump put it at the time in a tweet: “Today I directed the U.S. Trade Representative to take action so that countries stop CHEATING the system at the expense of the USA!” Trump’s tariff escalation this week against Communist China—even as he paused many other tariffs to allow for bilateral trade negotiations and give jittery bond markets some relief—is a natural culmination of the work to reset the U.S.-China economic relationship that he commenced during his first term. For that matter, it is also the natural culmination of his short-lived third-party presidential run in 2000 with the trade protectionist Reform Party, as well as his 1988 “Oprah Winfrey Show” interview, where he teased a future presidential run that would focus on trade. Immigration may be the issue most readily associated with Trump’s MAGA movement, but there is no issue that has been nearer and dearer to Trump’s heart over the decades than trade—first with Japan and then with China. Most important, Trump has not just been outspoken on the issue of trade with China—he has been proven correct.

Ever since Richard Nixon’s fateful trip to visit Mao Zedong in Beijing in 1972, American elites of all political stripes promised that welcoming China into the global economy would be good for all parties involved. American consumers, we were reliably informed, would get cheaper and more abundant goods; American exporters would get a massive and exciting new market to peddle their wares; and the Chinese people themselves would soon reap the rewards of the “political liberalization” that could only come about through “economic liberalization.” This was the dominant thinking when Nixon visited China over a half-century ago, when the George W. Bush administration welcomed China into the World Trade Organization in 2001, and when Barack Obama hosted and toasted Chinese leader Xi Jinping at the White House in 2015.

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Martin Armstrong highlights the “lose face” angle, “don’t do it in public”. But China has done very little since Trump’s first term, when he’s certain to have brought it up, though not in public, so why would Trump wait now?

• Living on the Edge (Martin Armstrong)

The U.S.-China trade war is an ongoing economic conflict that began in January 2018, characterized by the imposition of tariffs and trade barriers by both countries. Recently, tensions escalated as the U.S. raised tariffs on Chinese goods to 145%, prompting China to retaliate with tariffs of 125% on U.S. imports, affecting global supply chains and market stability. Trump’s decision not to grant China the same reprieve as other nations explained: “China wants to make a deal, they just don’t know how quite to go about it.” I disagree. If I were China, I would do a full embargo, and the Achilles’ heel in this trade war is more than just the manufacture of values for municipalities – the big ones, steel and aluminum, but also medicines. Personally, I would put a full embargo on everything, and without the medicines, people would be screaming, and their lives would be put in danger. I have dealt with Asia for some 40 years. You do not do this sort of thing publicly. It is an insult and a loss of face that forces China not to yield.

The developing U.S.-China trade war keeps ratcheting up. China has suspended exports of rare earth minerals. Meanwhile, Commerce Secretary Lutnick said that the electronics the Trump administration exempted from reciprocal tariffs could be subject to different levies in the future. This is not good. You do not air your dirty laundry in public.

Beijing’s perspective is dramatically different. Xi Jinping has taken the view that his country would lose face if it simply capitulated to what it calls America’s “unilateral bullying.” The danger with this trade war is that publicly, it only supports fervent nationalism, and that feeds into what will become World War III. China has been quietly preparing for a trade war for quite some time. Trump’s actions may spark negotiation in Western circles, but in Asian circles, they create the image that the US doesn’t want to negotiate. My concern is that Xi is brilliant. This trade war is playing into his domestic approval of anti-Americanism. Like the Russian sanctions that boosted Putin’s approval rating calculation, sources say, China is also seeing a rise in popular support to strengthen its position by preparing not just to fight back. Trump’s trade war with China is definitely strengthening Xi’s own position.

All of my sources have said that Xi fully understands that China has entered a period of protracted struggle in both trade and geopolitics with the United States and Europe. This became painfully obvious, and Europe and the Biden Administration confronted Russia. Xi has taken the position that China needs to prepare for these confrontations ever since the Biden Administration put sanctions on Russia and then threatened China if it dared to help Russia. The Neocon Antony Blinken expressed “serious concern” about China’s support for Russia’s defense industry. He went as far as to threaten Xi that he would impose sanctions if China helped Russia.

The Neocon Antony Blinken threw down the gauntlet and views the world only in his desire for imperial power. He never understood the economy, and this insanity of threatening China and removing Russia from Swift undermined the economy and split it in half, with the formation of BRICS for geopolitical security. I don’t believe Trump understands the damage that the Biden Administration inflicted upon the entire world. Now, go after China with a trade war to bring back manufacturing to America; this is pushing China over the edge.

China previously owned 10% of the US national debt. This is what Trump has not considered. Before this trade war began, in January, foreigners sold a net $13.3 billion of U.S. notes and bonds that had more than one year to maturity. As we approach sovereign debt defaults, I have warned that it may start with Japan and be followed by Europe. We saw almost $50 billion was sold in December 2024 in anticipation of a Trump trade war. Last November saw almost $35 billion dumped following the election.

Canada was the largest net seller in January. The UK needed the cash and was the biggest seller last December. I know some have made the outrageous claim that Japan sold US debt, and that made Trump pause the tariffs for 90 days. These people have ZERO understanding of the markets and even less about Trump. The tariffs over 10% are political, and it is part of his art of the deal. Japan is in economic trouble with its own debt crisis, and selling US debt had nothing to do with the tariffs – this is about creating a real debt crisis. That said, China has the capacity to dump US debt in a big way, and that would send US rates higher on the long-end. U.S. stocks rallied with Trump pausing the tariffs, yet this was cyclically on point, which our computer had forecast months in advance. People just try to come up with some fundamentals to explain each move in a market, whether true or false. Our computer is projecting that 2025 will be the low in Chinese interest rates both on the 2-year and 30-year.

While stocks rallied, Treasury yields rose so much that lower rates benefited stocks. China has been quietly selling U.S. debt, which began over a year ago. This was not something new out of the blue in response to new tariffs. Bond markets were flashing warning signs based on the hidden risks behind the entire dynamics of trade and geopolitics. Behind the scenes, U.S. Treasury yields have been rising during the overnight sessions, indicating foreign market selling. Nevertheless, the prospects of war in Europe are reflected in our models, for they do not support a collapse in the bond markets, implying that war will bring still capital inflows. When we look at the Baltic Freight Index, 2025 was a Double Directional Change, indicating that we would have this trade war. We have a Directional Change in 2026 and a Panic Cycle in 2027, with the culmination of this war extending into 2028. This might also be influenced by the war starting in Europe.

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“No one knows the extent to which he will succeed. But if conventional thinking could solve our existential issues, it would have by now.”

• Temporary Tariff Terror Examined (Steve McKee)

When President Donald Trump made his Liberation Day announcements, his harshest critics immediately declared him an economic arsonist playing with fire he didn’t understand, while his strongest acolytes insisted he was 10 moves ahead, playing 4D chess with geopolitical mastery. Both camps jumped the gun. His was the opening salvo in a high-stakes game. Sometimes, the most effective strategy isn’t conventional. Sometimes it breaks the mold. Trump’s tariff gambit had the same disruptive effect. He was never under the illusion that his first offer would be the last word. That’s not how negotiation works. It’s not even how business works.

Trump’s not playing chess. It’s more akin to Go His announcement was surprising, yes. But that doesn’t necessarily make it wrong. In fact, it was reminiscent of a similarly shocking moment in another high-stakes arena: the legendary 2016 Go match between world champion Lee Sedol and DeepMind’s AlphaGo computer program. In move 37 of Game Two of the board game, AlphaGo played an unexpected, unconventional move. At first, it looked like a mistake. But as the game unfolded, it became clear that move 37 wasn’t just valid; it was, literally, game changing. It altered the way top players—and AI developers—understood the game and, to some extent, AI itself. That’s why chess is the wrong analogy in this tariff situation. No president can be expected to know the implications of every move like chess masters do. But they can know there will be implications from their move and as those implications unfold they will have a window to adjust their next move.

Trump understands negotiation This president, in particular, understands the rhyme and rhythm of negotiation. He knew this negotiation, being played out in full public view, would draw out the critics and opportunists and have real world impacts. That was baked into the cake, and it’s why, I surmise, he waited until just hours after the special House elections were decided to do it. This isn’t a private boardroom deal behind closed doors. It’s an unfolding negotiation taking place on the world stage, with millions of spectators and infinite scrutiny. That complicates things. But Trump, being Trump, accounted for that. He knew pushback would be inevitable. He couldn’t know the exact shape or timing, but he knew the opportunity to respond would come. And when it did, he took it.

Whether you agree with his tactics or not, he’s not capitulating or backtracking, he’s managing an unfolding negotiation. What makes Trump different—and maddening to many—is that he’s not cut from traditional presidential cloth. He’s a developer, a dealmaker, someone for whom negotiation is second nature. His presidency brought that skill set into a realm where every feint and pivot is broadcast and critiqued in real time. It’s a high-wire act, sure. But not one he has entered blindly.

The dynamics of the game needed to change The real takeaway here isn’t about trade policy. It’s about process. About resisting the impulse to rush to judgment based on ideology or tribal loyalty. These are dynamic, complex negotiations with layers most commentators either don’t understand or refuse to acknowledge. Yes, last week was a terrifying ride, but so is our future if something doesn’t change. Lest we forget, we’re going bankrupt. Something needs to happen. The U.S.—and by extension, much of the global economy—is hurtling down an unsustainable path. Somebody had to start changing the dynamics of a game which everybody is about to lose. Trump has done so. You don’t have to like him to see that he understands the stakes.

So sure, scratch your head. Raise your eyebrows. Ask hard questions. That’s part of the process. But don’t assume you’re watching 4D chess, and don’t call the man a fool. Instead, hold back the full ire of your fire. Accept that you may not be seeing the whole game board—none of us are. Call balls and strikes as you see them, but don’t call it “game over” when it has only just begun. There are many moves yet to come, and I don’t pretend to know how it’s all going to turn out. But as events continue to unfold, it’s unhelpful—and frankly unfair—to reduce Trump to either a genius or a fool. He is a man with a unique set of skills, forged in a different fire than most politicians, who is doing his best to deploy them in service of long-term trends in dire need of fixing. And he’s doing it none too soon. No one knows the extent to which he will succeed. But if conventional thinking could solve our existential issues, it would have by now.

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CBS turns on Trump again.

• Zelensky Started The War Then Begged For Missiles – Trump (RT)

Ukraine’s Vladimir Zelensky should never have started a war with Russia, US President Donald Trump has said. In a press conference alongside El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele in the Oval Office on Monday, Trump commented on Zelensky’s recent offer to finance $15 billion worth of Patriot air defense batteries with the aid of Kiev’s European backers. “He’s always looking to purchase missiles,” the US presided noted. “When you start a war, you got to know that you can win the war,” he said of Zelensky. “You don’t start a war against somebody that’s 20 times your size and then hope that people give you some missiles.” Trump added that he gave Kiev American-made Javelin man-portable anti-tank missiles during his first presidency.

In an interview with CBS News on Sunday, Zelensky called on the US to supply Ukraine with more air defenses. Kiev is ready to buy or lease up to ten Patriot air defense systems, and some European backers have offered to help with the money, he claimed. During the interview, the network suggested that Trump tried to cut Kiev out of peace talks with Russia, and that he lied in his statements about the conflict. Trump allegedly “rewrote history, saying, falsely, that Ukraine had started the war and calling… Zelensky ‘a dictator without elections’,” according to CBS. The US president lashed out at the news network on Truth Social on Monday, calling the interview inaccurate and fraudulent.

Trump has repeatedly claimed that the Ukraine conflict would never have escalated had he been in the White House, rather than his predecessor Joe Biden. According to the US president, the previous administration invested more than $300 billion into supporting Kiev. Trump has promised to “get back” the money, entering talks with Ukraine about jointly exploiting its mineral resources. He also suggested taking over Ukrainian nuclear power plants. The Kremlin has hailed the Trump administration’s peace efforts, but cautioned that resolving long-standing issues will take time and “painstaking work.”

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Keeping Zelensky around is counterproductive.

• Trump Slams Biden, Zelensky & Putin For Ukraine War: ‘Everybody Is To Blame’ (ZH)

President Donald Trump while speaking with the press in the Oval Office on Monday once again blasted President Biden for the start of the Russia-Ukraine war, a war which Trump has repeatedly stressed should have never happened. “That’s a war that should have never been allowed to start and Biden could have stopped it and Zelensky could have stopped it and Putin should have never started it,” Trump said. “Everybody is to blame.” Trump added: “If Biden were competent and if Zelenskyy were competent, and I don’t know that he is, we had a rough session with this guy — he just kept asking for more and more.” But he seemed to reserve his most aggressive criticisms for Zelensky, once again blasting him for asking for more and more weapons and money, while knowing full well Ukraine can’t defeat Russia, which is “twenty times your size” – as Trump said. Watch:

Clearly last month’s Oval Office showdown involving J.D. Vance and Zelensky going at it still looms large in Trump’s mind. Trump had separately in a Monday Truth Social post also lamented that Biden and Zelensky “did an absolutely horrible job in allowing this travesty to begin.” Here’s what he said in the post: “The war between Russia and Ukraine is Biden’s war, not mine. I just got here, and for four years during my term, had no problem in preventing it from happening,” Trump wrote, adding that he “had nothing to do with this war” but is working “diligently to get the death and destruction to stop.” “If the 2020 presidential election was not rigged, and it was, in so many ways, that horrible war would never have happened,” he continued. “President [Volodymyr] Zelenskyy and Crooked Joe Biden did an absolutely horrible job in allowing this travesty to begin. There were so many ways of preventing it from ever starting. But that is the past. Now we have to get it to stop, and fast. So sad!”

Much of this seems in reaction to the Zelensky “60 Minutes” interview from Sunday, wherein the Ukrainian leader claimed that “Russian narratives are prevailing” in the US, while singling out Vance in particular. Zelensky had said, “It’s a shift in tone, a shift in reality, really yes, a shift in reality, and I don’t want to engage in the altered reality that is being presented to me,” And on Vance, he described: “First and foremost, we did not launch an attack [to start the war]. It seems to me that the Vice President is somehow justifying Putin’s actions. I tried to explain, ‘You can’t look for something in the middle. There is an aggressor and there is a victim. The Russians are the aggressor, and we are the victim’.”

Despite Trump’s newest attack on Zelensky, it remains that the United States is still supplying weaponry to Kiev, though reportedly in lesser quantities that previously, and is still providing limited intelligence. Zelensky has likely had to restrain some of the criticisms he wishes to hurl back, give Kiev is deeply fearful the US could once again cut off the flow of arms and ammo, as it did briefly soon after Trump took office.

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“We intended to partition Russia. Since we couldn’t pull that off, let’s divide Ukraine instead.”

• West Seeks To Partition Ukraine – Senior Russian Diplomat (RT)

European nations hostile towards Moscow are advocating for the partitioning of Ukraine, according to Rodion Miroshnik, the Russian Foreign Ministry’s ambassador-at-large overseeing war crime investigations. Last week, The Times of London reported an alleged US proposal to divide the country, reminiscent of Germany’s division following World War II. Keith Kellogg, the US presidential envoy for Ukraine cited by the newspaper, later stated that his remarks had been misinterpreted by the British outlet. Miroshnik criticized the approach on Saturday as an embodiment of what he called the UK’s colonial mindset. “Europe has a habit of slicing up other continents and nations and parceling them out,” he stated in an interview.

He read the underlying message as the West saying: “We intended to partition Russia. Since we couldn’t pull that off, let’s divide Ukraine instead.” The diplomat drew parallels between the proposal in The Times and the aftermath of World War I, noting that turning Arab regions of the former Ottoman Empire into mandate territories governed by the UK and France did not ultimately bode well for the Middle East. Moscow opposes the presence of any NATO member states’ troops in Ukraine, including the post-ceasefire security force suggested by the UK and France. Miroshnik insisted that an “occupation” by those nations would merely confirm Ukraine’s status as a de facto “mandate territory” with a puppet government, primarily handled by the British. He added that Russia would not accept such a “toxic” neighbor.

“The time Kiev needs to lick its wounds may be alarmingly brief,” he cautioned. “It needs to reflect on its experiences, prepare, and train tens of thousands more militants via Britain before going to war again.” Certain European NATO members have advocated for a “resilience force” to be stationed in Ukraine, presenting them as a deterrent. Kellogg said he did not propose dividing the country but rather discussed with the Times the idea of “zones of responsibility,” controlled by Russia, a British-French contingent, and Kiev itself, respectively. Moscow views the Ukraine conflict as a NATO proxy war. Russian officials have argued that a lasting peace can only be achieved by addressing the fundamental issues, including the expansion of the US-led military bloc in Europe since the 1990s and the “neo-Nazi” character of the current Ukrainian government, which discriminates against ethnic Russians.

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Not a word about peace.

• Zelensky Urges Trump To Visit Ukraine Before Pressing Negotiations (ZH)

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is urging for President Donald Trump to visit Ukraine and see the war’s devastation first-hand before pressing for peace negotiations with Russia. “We want you to come,” the Ukrainian president pleaded in reference to Trump while speaking with CBS’ “60 Minutes” on Sunday. Zelensky hit out at what he strongly hinted was Trump’s lack of understanding of the conflict and Russian brutality. “You think you understand what’s going on here. Okay, we respect your position. You understand. But, please, before any kind of decisions, any kind of forms of negotiations, come to see people, civilians, warriors, “Come, look, and then let’s — let’s move with a plan how to finish the war,” he added. He further suggested that with such a trip, Trump will finally grasp Putin’s true nature.

“You will understand with whom you have a deal. You will understand what Putin did,” the Ukrainian leader said. This comes as the US and Russia are seeking diplomatic normalization through a series of bilateral meetings which have cut out any Ukrainian or EU representation. “We will not prepare anything. It will not be theater, with preparing actors in the streets and the [city] center. We don’t do this. We don’t need it,” he continued. “You can go exactly where you want, in any city which been under attacks, just to come and to understand.” The CBS interview aired the same day that Russian ballistic missiles pummeled the Ukrainian city of Sumy, resulting in a mass casualty event which was quickly condemned by the United States and European Union. Ukrainian emergency authorities said the Sumy attack killed at least 34 people and wounded more than a hundred.

Trump’s special envoy to Ukraine, retired lieutenant general Keith Kellogg, reacted by saying it “crosses any line of decency”. He suggested the strikes intentionally targeted civilians. “As a former military leader, I understand targeting and this is wrong,” Kellogg posted on X. He said there are “scores of civilian dead and wounded.” However, Trump’s reaction was one in which the Russians were less singled out and condemned, instead the US president highlighted that this “horrible war” shows the urgency of ending the war before more people die… But the White House has strongly complained over the past months that Zelensky has appeared unwilling to genuinely engage in peace talks with Moscow, also at a moment more hawkish European allies are seeking to fill the gap of waning Washington support. Zelensky knows he’ll have to make serious concessions for peace.

It is especially the tense February meeting in the Oval Office which still stings and looms large. Zelensky in the CBS interview took the opportunity to once again slam Vice President J.D. Vance. “It’s a shift in tone, a shift in reality, really yes, a shift in reality, and I don’t want to engage in the altered reality that is being presented to me,” Zelensky said. “First and foremost, we did not launch an attack [to start the war]. It seems to me that the Vice President is somehow justifying Putin’s actions. I tried to explain, ‘You can’t look for something in the middle. There is an aggressor and there is a victim. The Russians are the aggressor, and we are the victim’.” Below: RT’s Editor-in-Chief responded sarcastically to Zelensky once again complaining that Russian ‘propaganda’ is winning in America…

Meanwhile, Trump has since made clear where he stands concerning 60 Minutes’ repeat efforts to make him look bad.”Almost every week, 60 Minutes … mentions the name ‘TRUMP’ in a derogatory and defamatory way, but this Weekend’s ‘BROADCAST’ tops them all,” the president complained on Truth Social, in apparent reference to both the Ukraine report and another on Greenland. “CBS is out of control, at levels never seen before, and they should pay a big price for this. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”

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“..that he “rewrote history, saying, falsely, that Ukraine had started the war and calling… Zelensky ‘a dictator without elections.’”

• Trump Slams ‘Dishonest’ CBS After Zelensky Interview (RT)

CBS News must have its broadcasting license revoked, US President Donald Trump has said. He has accused the network of spreading politically biased misinformation in its coverage of the Ukraine conflict and Washington’s push to acquire Greenland. In a Truth Social post on Monday, Trump lashed out at the broadcaster after it aired an interview with Ukraine’s Vladimir Zelensky and a segment revisiting the US president’s controversial idea to purchase Greenland. In the Zelensky interview, the network suggested that Trump had sought to exclude Kiev from peace talks with Russia and that he “rewrote history, saying, falsely, that Ukraine had started the war and calling… Zelensky ‘a dictator without elections.’”

The US president’s “dictator” comment in February was referring to the fact that Zelensky’s presidential term expired last year and that he has refused to call a new vote, citing martial law. Trump has since softened his rhetoric about the Ukrainian leader. The CBS report on Greenland focused on the island’s residents’ purported reluctance to become part of the US. “Almost every week, 60 Minutes… mentions the name ‘TRUMP’ in a derogatory and defamatory way, but this Weekend’s ‘BROADCAST’ tops them all,” Trump wrote. “They did not one, but TWO, major stories on ‘TRUMP,’ one having to do with Ukraine, which I say is a War that would never have happened if the 2020 Election had not been RIGGED… and, the other story was having to do with Greenland, casting our Country, as led by me, falsely, inaccurately, and fraudulently,” he added.

“They are not a ‘News Show,’ but a dishonest Political Operative simply disguised as ‘News,’ and must be responsible for what they have done, and are doing,” Trump suggested. “They should lose their license!” The US leader stressed that CBS “should pay a big price” for being “out of control,” recalling his previous stand-off with the network over a heavily edited interview with Kamala Harris, his main Democratic rival prior to the November election. The controversy over the Harris interview erupted in October when CBS aired two versions of an interview with the then-vice president. In one, she gave a long and convoluted answer about the Middle East conflict, but in the other, she gave a much clearer and more concise answer. Trump subsequently lodged a $10 billion lawsuit against CBS, calling the interview “word salad” and accusing the network of “deceitful, deceptive manipulation of news” and favoritism to the Democratic Party. CBS has admitted to editing the interview but rejected allegations that it attempted to doctor it.

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The Sumy narrative (Russia targets civilians!) carried the international airwaves for a whole weekend.

• We Have Proof Sumy Strike Targeted Ukrainian Troops and Foreign Mercs – Lavrov (Sp.)

Russia possesses information that Ukrainian troops met with their foreign counterparts at the facility targeted by Russian forces in the strike on Sumy, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Monday. On Sunday, Russian forces carried out a missile strike on the Ukrainian city of Sumy, targeting a site of a meeting of the Seversk tactical and operational command’s leadership. Earlier on Monday, the Russian Defense Ministry said that the strike killed over 60 Ukrainian servicepeople. “International humanitarian law categorically prohibits the placement of military facilities and weapons around civilian objects. Since the first days of the [Ukraine] crisis, and earlier, even during the Minsk agreements … there have been a million cases of artillery and air defense systems being placed in city blocks near kindergartens.

How many videos are posted online of Ukrainian women shouting for the military to get away from stores and playgrounds? But this practice continues. We have facts about who was at the facility that was hit in Sumy. There was another ‘gathering’ of Ukrainian military commanders with their Western colleagues, who were disguised either as mercenaries or I do not know who,” Lavrov told Russian newspaper Kommersant. It is widely known that NATO forces are present in Ukraine, the minister added. “The New York Times recently reported that Americans have been playing a leading role in strikes on Russia. Without this part, the majority of [Ukrainian] long-range missiles would never have taken off at their deployment sites,” he said.

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“Macron, Merz, Starmer, Kellogg, the New York Times, The Telegraph – to name only a few examples – all follow Zelensky’s and Kiev’s lie that this was a deliberate attack on civilians..”

• The Sumy Missile Strike: War, Propaganda, and Hypocrisy (Amar)

On April 13, Russia launched an attack on a target in the eastern Ukrainian city of Sumy. All reports –Western, Ukrainian, and Russian – agree on some basic facts: The attack consisted of two ballistic missiles; substantial numbers of people were killed (over 60, according to the Russian Defense Ministry; over 20 in Western and Ukrainian reports) and injured (over 80, per Ukrainian reports). Beyond that, however, a thick fog of war has descended. Or rather, a fog of propaganda. Western media and politicians have denounced the Russian strike as, in essence, an atrocity or war crime. The New York Times, for instance, presented it as slamming “into a bustling city center […] on Sunday morning, […] killing at least 34 people in what appeared to be the deadliest attack against civilians this year.” Incoming German chancellor Friedrich Merz (to be sworn in at the beginning of May), speaking on one of his country’s most popular TV shows, condemned what he called a “perfidious act” and “serious war crime.”

In the US, President Donald Trump’s special – if largely sidelined – envoy for Russia and Ukraine, Keith Kellogg, has invoked his experience as a “former military leader” who “understand[s] targeting” to denounce the Russian strike as “wrong,” adding that the attack “on civilian targets in Sumy crosses any line of decency.” Britain’s prime minister, Keir Starmer, is “appalled at Russia’s horrific attacks on civilians in Sumy.” Both Starmer and French President Emmanuel Macron saw an opportunity to call for “imposing” a ceasefire on Russia. Merz, for his part, felt the need to talk, once more, about providing Kiev with German Taurus missiles. The fact that Ukraine has made a point of not complying with the partial ceasefire officially already in place seems to make no difference. Neither, clearly, does the fact that neither France nor Britain has the means to compel Moscow. That the use of the German Taurus to strike at, for instance, the Kerch Bridge may well invite – perfectly justifiable – Russian retaliation against German targets, whether in Germany or elsewhere, seems to appear equally irrelevant to Merz.

More examples could be added, but the trend should be clear: In the West, almost everyone agrees that the Russian attack on Sumy was an atrocity and in the EU there is talk – if we are lucky, it will remain just that – of exploiting it as a pretext to escalate further the proxy war in which Ukraine is being used up against Russia. Yet there are two major problems with this escalatory approach: Most importantly, it is not based on facts but on disinformation originating with the Kiev regime, taken over uncritically and spread enthusiastically by Western mainstream media and many political leaders. Though not, actually, all of them. That is the second, as it were, practical problem for the escalation brigade: The single most powerful Western figure is not playing along. Trump has not condemned Russia. He did call the attack “terrible” and “horrible” and claimed that he was told that “they [presumably meaning Russia] made a mistake.”

Whatever basis (US signal intelligence? Hearsay?) he has – or not – for this statement, politically, the key point of Trump’s first reaction was that he demonstratively refrained from joining the rest of the West in escalating, while stressing that the war as such is the issue and ending it the solution. A similar approach in a statement on X by US Secretary of State Marco Rubio confirms that this is not a fluke but Trump’s and therefore Washington’s policy, at least for now. America’s president has clearly – and unsurprisingly – decided that his halting and open-ended yet still at least ongoing attempt to achieve a normalization with Moscow is more important than joining the latest propaganda campaign against Russia. Trump – so criminally wrong in the Middle East – is right on this one, even if he is pursuing extremely pragmatic purposes. He is also, as it happens, right here in a more fundamental sense, which brings us back to problem number one with the Western mainstream treatment of the Sumy attack:

Despite Kiev’s endless record of deception, the Western claim that the Russian attack was a crime is once again based on that very murky source alone. Ukraine’s past-due-date president Vladmir Zelensky, for instance, has decried a “horrific” attack hitting “an ordinary city street, ordinary life.” Macron, Merz, Starmer, Kellogg the New York Times, The Telegraph – to name only a few examples – all follow Zelensky’s and Kiev’s lie that this was a deliberate attack on civilians. Yet, in reality, Russia struck at a gathering of Ukrainian soldiers. Soldiers, yes, even on Sunday and also on Palm Sunday, are legitimate targets in armed conflict. It is not criminal to attack them. That is an elementary legal reality, rooted in the Law of Armed Conflict. And, when the boot is on the other foot, the West knows this well: No one there decried a Ukrainian “war crime,” when Kiev’s Western-supplied artillery wiped out almost 100 Russian troops sleeping in their quarters behind the front line in January 2023.

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“..after he allegedly suggested that Kiev should destroy the Crimean Bridge..”

• Medvedev Brands Incoming German Chancellor ‘Nazi’ (RT)

Former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has branded incoming German chancellor Friedrich Merz a Nazi after he allegedly suggested that Kiev should destroy the Crimean Bridge. In an interview with state broadcaster ARD, Merz, the leader of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party and the likely future leader of Germany, stated that Berlin could supply long-range Taurus missiles to Ukraine, but only if it is done in coordination with other EU nations. Kiev should in the future use Western-supplied missiles to go on the offensive and destroy, for example, “the most important land connection between Russia and Crimea,” Merz said. Merz did not clarify if he meant the Crimean bridge, which stretches from Russia’s Krasnodar Region to Crimea, or the ‘land bridge’ that Russian forces established with the peninsula when the former Ukrainian region off Kherson joined Russia.

However, many critics have interpreted Merz’s words to mean the Crimean bridge, especially given that Kiev has already conducted a number of attacks on it since the escalation of the Ukraine conflict in 2022. In a post on X on Monday, Medvedev, who currently serves as the deputy chairman of Russia’s Security Council, suggested that Merz was following in the footsteps of his Nazi father. “Chancellor candidate Fritz Merz is haunted by the memory of his father, who served in Hitler’s Wehrmacht. Now Merz has suggested a strike on the Crimean Bridge. Think twice, Nazi,” Medvedev wrote. According to media reports, Merz’s father Joachim was conscripted into the Wehrmacht – the unified armed forces of Nazi Germany – around 1941. His grandfather, Josef Paul Sauvigny, had also been a member of the Nazi party since 1933.

Russia’s ambassador to Germany, Sergey Nechaev, warned that delivering Taurus missiles to Ukraine would not alter the battlefield situation but could escalate the conflict, as the missiles would be guided by German specialists. He suggested this might provoke Moscow to take retaliatory measures. Germany is Kiev’s second-largest military donor, after the US. Earlier this month, Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock announced that Berlin would provide the country with an additional $12 billion worth of military aid over the next four years and would continue to support it regardless of the upcoming change of government in Germany. Russia has repeatedly slammed continued foreign assistance to Ukraine, arguing that it only serves to prolong hostilities and cause more bloodshed without affecting the ultimate outcome of the conflict.

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Guess who the judge is? Boasberg.

• Meta’s Monopoly Trial Kicks Off (ET)

The fate of social media giant Meta, billionaire Mark Zuckerberg’s primary company, is on the line as a trial begins in Washington on Monday to determine whether the tech giant is violating antitrust laws. The Federal Trade Commission, which has spent the past six years investigating Meta, is expected to argue before U.S. District Judge James Boasberg that Meta’s acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp created an illegal monopoly over social networking. In the worst-case scenario for Meta, the company could be forced to divest both subsidiaries in a breakup on a scale not seen since the dismantling of AT&T’s telephone empire more than 40 years ago. Here’s what to know about the most important trial in Meta’s history.

Trial The case is being held at the E. Barrett Prettyman U.S. Courthouse, just a few hundred yards from the U.S. Capitol. It’s a bench trial, meaning Boasberg alone will decide the outcome, not a jury. That gives the judge extraordinary influence over the future of one of the most powerful companies in the world.

FTC Claims The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) investigation into the company began during President Donald Trump’s first term and was aggressively pursued under President Joe Biden . The FTC has taken issue with the company’s 2012 purchase of the image-based app Instagram and 2014 purchase of WhatsApp, a messaging platform that’s particularly popular outside of the United States. During the trial, the FTC is expected to argue that Meta’s purchase of the two platforms was part of a calculated effort to “buy or bury” any potential rivals to Facebook. In a 2008 email presented by the FTC in a past federal court filing, Zuckerberg wrote, “It is better to buy than compete.” FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson has said that his agency is “raring to go” against Meta but also that he’ll follow lawful orders from the president to close the case.

Meta’s Response Meta has consistently denied the allegations of operating an illegal monopoly and has argued that the FTC’s case is both outdated and out of step with current market realities. A spokesperson for Meta said in a statement to The Epoch Times that the acquisitions were approved by regulators at the time and that the company has always operated competitively. He cited the presence of competitors such as TikTok, YouTube, X, iMessage, and others. The spokesperson said the lawsuit “defies reality” and that it would send a message that “no deal is ever truly final” if Boasberg sides with the FTC. The company has also suggested that dismantling its integrated platforms would harm users, who’ve come to rely on interconnected services and shared back-end systems. Since Trump was elected to a second term, Zuckerberg has visited Mar-a-Lago, ended the company’s controversial fact-checking efforts, rolled back diversity and inclusion programs, and staffed the company with GOP-friendly executives.

‘Creaking Antitrust Precedents ’Boasberg has heard years of pretrial motions in this case and has made clear he isn’t fully sold on the government’s argument He threw out the FTC’s original filing in 2021, citing a lack of clear market definitions. While he allowed the revised case to proceed, he’s continued to express skepticism, warning in recent months that the FTC’s claims “strain this country’s creaking antitrust precedents.” Antitrust statutory law and litigation are among the most labyrinthine areas of the federal code. Boasberg has given both sides a chance to make their case in court. Witness lists include Zuckerberg himself, former Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg, and executives from rival platforms such as TikTok and Snapchat. The trial is expected to last through the summer, with a decision potentially arriving by July.

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A curious contortion.

• Now We Know Why Democrats Are Losing the Messaging War (Margolis)

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) just reminded everyone why Democrats are losing the messaging war. In what might be the most awkward attempt at political wit this year, Jeffries recorded himself delivering what he apparently thought was a clever takedown of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. Spoiler alert: It wasn’t. Picture a middle schooler trying to land an insult at the lunch table—that’s basically what happened when Jeffries attempted to rebrand “DEI” as “dumb effing individuals” in his attack on Hegseth. That’s right, the House Minority Leader, one of the most powerful Democrats in Congress, thought his comment was the kind of zinger that would go viral. Instead, it went cringey. “The DEI hires in the Trump administration, like Pete Hegseth, the so-called secretary of Defense, dumb effing individuals, continue to try to test our resolve and cancel our history,” Jeffries said in a video shared to X.

The irony is rich. Here we have the leader of a party that lives and dies by the DEI religion suddenly using “DEI hires” as a slur. The same Democrats who spent years insisting that DEI is the highest moral good are now tossing around the term like it’s a smear when it suits their narrative. So which is it? Is DEI a noble pursuit, or is it code for incompetence when someone like Hegseth is in the crosshairs? If you needed more proof that the left’s commitment to its pet causes is purely performative, Jeffries just handed it to you. Making matters worse, Jeffries built his entire rant on a foundation of misinformation about the Naval Academy’s book relocation policy. He breathlessly claimed the Academy was banning books about slavery, civil rights, and the Holocaust while keeping Hitler’s works. That’s cute, but it’s also completely false.

The reality? The books were simply moved to a different location in response to President Trump’s executive orders on DEI policies. They weren’t banned, burned, or whatever other dramatic scenario Jeffries conjured up for his social media performance. Hegseth’s response on “Sunday Morning Futures” was the coup de grâce. “It’s astonishing, not surprising,” he said. “Of course, they don’t like the fact that we’re ripping DEI out of the military and making it colorblind and merit-based. If their whole strategy is, I don’t even know how long the video was, didn’t see it, minute-long videos on TikTok to call us names while we secure the southern border, kick out Chinese influence, provide the warrior culture inside our military, that’s why they lost in a historic fashion to President Trump last time, and their future looks bleak as well.”

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It’s easy to feel sorry for the guy. Maybe don’t.

• El Salvador’s Bukele Won’t Return MS-13 Gang Member Mistakenly Deported (JTN)

President Donald Trump on Monday declined to ask El Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele to return an El Salvadoran citizen whom authorities mistakenly deported. Bukele, for his part, suggested that to return the man to the U.S. would be to smuggle a terrorist into the United States and that he would not do so. Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a citizen of El Salvador, was deported by the Trump administration by mistake, though the Supreme Court ruled that the administration must facilitate his return. During an Oval Office meeting between Trump and Bukele, neither leader committed to returning the man. “Well, I’m supposed to have suggested that I smuggle a terrorist into the United States, right?” Buekele retorted when pressed on returning the man to the U.S. “Return him to the United States. I smuggle him into the United States. I’m not going to do it.”

“How can I smuggle a terror[ist] to the United States? I don’t have the power to return him to the United States,” Buekele said. Trump also asked White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller to weigh in. “So it’s very arrogant, even for American media to suggest that we would even tell El Salvador how to handle their own citizens. As a starting point, as two immigration courts found that he was a member of MS-13,” Miller said. “When President Trump declared MS-13 to be a foreign terrorist organization, that meant that he was no longer eligible under federal law… for any form of immigration relief in the United States.”

“So he had a deportation order that was valid, which meant that, under our law, he’s not even allowed to be present in the United States and had to be returned because of the foreign terrorist designation,” he added. “This issue was then by a district court judge completely inverted, and a district court judge tried to tell the administration that they had to kidnap a citizen of El Salvador and flying back here. That issue was raised to the Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court said the district court order was unlawful and its main components were reversed.”

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“..in 2019, two judges refused to grant him bond because he was a verified member of the MS-13 gang..”

• Why the Beatified MS-13 ‘Father’ Was ‘Mistakenly’ Deported (Victoria Taft)

It’s worth reminding readers of the reasons the man being described as the innocent “Maryland father” was “mistakenly” deported from Los Estados Unidos. Kilmar Abrego Garcia is now cooling his heels in the most famous El Salvadoran prison in the world. He’s gotten more love from America’s left than, say, the 14-year-old girl MS-13 hacked up with machetes in 2019 in Maryland. It’s strange, isn’t it? Ariana Funes-Diaz was hacked with a machete and hit with a baseball bat, and her lifeless and bloodied body was left in a ditch, but nobody seems to remember or care. Now, I’m not suggesting that Abrego Garcia had anything to do with the gang murdering that girl; no one has ever suggested or proven any connection whatsoever. It’s just that MS-13 is tied, if you will, with Tren de Aragua for brutality. They intentionally shock the conscience to stay in power like the Third World knuckle draggers they are.

Rachel Morin was murdered by a man illegally in the country from El Salvador. He was found guilty of her murder by a Maryland jury after one hour of deliberation on Monday evening, after a two-week-long trial. We contend that the United States stop importing violent criminals from other countries. But the left would have us believe that Señor Abrego Garcia is just a normal family man who’s done nothing wrong and has never put a toe out of line and that he’s sorta kinda quasi-legally here. In 2019, his Holiness, St. Abrego, was rolled up by the feds while hanging around in a Home Depot parking lot, allegedly looking for work. Sounds normal. Lots of illegal aliens do this. But don’t ask him why he hadn’t found more than day jobs since he’d illegally come into the country years before because that’s racist. His attorney says he had a job in construction.

Anyway, the truth is, the local Maryland cops didn’t actually believe he was just looking for a day gig. Indeed, he showed up to work in his Chicago Bulls gear. MS-13 shares its affinity with the Bulls’ colors and gear with the Bloods and the Latin Kings. MS-13 also likes to use devil horn symbology in hand signals, and some members carry their tell-tale machetes. And of course, there are always the MS-13 tattoos. There are reports that he has one, but authorities have offered no photos of the granddaddy of all symbols proving unmistakably that he’s an MS-13 gang member. But in 2019, two judges refused to grant him bond because he was a verified member of the MS-13 gang and a “danger to the community.” The conundrum for most is that a guy who came into the U.S. illegally in 2011 and was identified by Maryland police and U.S. immigration officials as an MS-13 member by 2019 isn’t a benign presence in Los Estados Unidos. Capice?

And now in 2025, President Trump has issued a directive that all members of MS-13 and Tren de Aragua are members of designated terrorist organizations. El Salvador President Nayib Armando Bukele Ortez was asked by reporters in the White House Oval Office today if he would bring Abrego Garcia back to the U.S. “How can I smuggle a terrorist into the United States?” was his reply. So here’s the issue. St. Abrego was put on a deportation list as an alternate without anyone noticing that he should not be sent back to El Salvador. He was bumped up the list of deportees and was indeed sent to the El Salvadoran prison by mistake.

The “mistake” the feds made in sending this guy out of the country was that they sent him back to El Salvador, where a rival gang threatened him and his family years back. His parents moved to other Central American countries, but he moved to the U.S. at the age of 16. If DOJ officials had sent him to another country, such as Guatemala with which we have a third-party agreement, we likely wouldn’t be having this issue right now, and St. Abrego would have disappeared into the ether — maybe even with his family in tow. Issues involving due process are serious. We should demand that people receive theirs. Attorney General Pam Bondi in the above video said Abrego received two court hearings when he was designated an MS-13 member. Thanks to President Trump, illegal immigration into our great country has virtually stopped. Despite the radical left’s lies, new legislation wasn’t needed to secure our border, just a new president.

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“The vast bottom of humanity already has plenty of nothing, and their abundance will abide…”

• Systemic Considerations (James Howard Kunstler)

Whatever else you think is happening in our world, contraction is the reality-based order-of-the-day, and everything else is downstream of that. The world has to get by with less. Nothing is going to fix this for everybody, though any number of schemes for redistributing what’s left will preoccupy the political mojo. Right now, it’s tariffs, which are an attempt to restore industry ceded to the formerly left-behind people elsewhere in the world — taking back what we used to do. You are correct to wonder if this is even possible. The wish is surely understandable, if a bit fuzzy and over-simplified: to be again a nation of people occupied purposefully in the service of a bright future. Redemption stories are deeply appealing.

Many of us are aware that the hour for this is late. We’ve already lived through our decades of pumping cheap oil out of American ground, extracting the ores, fashioning the metal into I-beams and rails, raising the skyscrapers, laying the asphalt ribbons of highway, and strewing the landscape with split-level houses and strip-malls. Let’s not try a re-run of that. What have we got to work with? An overly-complex matrix of systems and subsidiary systems operating on the verge of failure at excessive scale. For example, our cities and their asteroid belts of suburbs. The rot is already well-advanced in many of them from their centers outward, and we can see the process underway of strip-mining the remaining assets on-the-ground. Detroit, Cleveland, Baltimore. . . all occupy important geographically strategic sites. All are populated by dwindling societies of the cope-less, floundering their way out of existence. The geographies will abide without them. Others will come along and make something of these places’ virtues.

Agri-business is a method for strip-mining the value from what remains of our fruited plains. Everything about it is on an arc of failure, mortgaged to a futureless giantism. It seemed like a good idea at the time, and now that time has passed. The remaining soil itself can probably be rescued with heroic ant-like peasant labor over generations, which is to say a long and rather desperate project with no quick resolution. Even if Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., hadn’t come along to read America the riot act on food, anyone can see that the age of Froot Loops is drawing to a close. Town and country, what human society at its best was composed of, has got to be rearranged. This is something that MAGA is not talking about. MAGA looks like it is seeking a reenactment of the years 1950 to 1964. That isn’t going to happen. What then? The tech broz propose something that looks like an A-I printed robotic future. They are drunk on their own Stanford University brand Kool-Aid, hallucinating a future that is little more than math dressed in spandex.

It is nearly impossible to grok the size of their vast fortunes, their billions. Thousands upon thousands of millions. From what? From marshaling squadrons of lawyers to draw up ownership documents for this and that venture enabling idiots with nose-rings to lecture each other about sexual etiquette on cell-phone screens? Warning: don’t become infatuated with singularities, journeys beyond biology and the ecology of planet earth. That’s a story for saps, cargo-cultists, the mentally ill. Speaking of all that money, one thing you can surely depend on is a violent unwinding of global finance. The vast bottom of humanity already has plenty of nothing, and their abundance will abide. The hedge fund broz and related broz in the shared hallucinations of capital can make some provision for wealth preservation if they have half-a-brain. It’s the great wad in the middle that has the worst problem: they get wiped out and then they discover they have no Plan B. That’s when the fun really kicks off in America (and other sovereign lands, of course.)

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Hep B

 

 

Vax

 

 

Bhattacharya

 

 

https://twitter.com/mamboitaliano__/status/1911367206371275242

 

 

AI Jesus

 

 

Amur

 

 

Orangutan

 

 

 

 

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The Gerontocracy Strikes Back

Aug 142020
 
 August 14, 2020  Posted by at 12:35 pm Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,  11 Responses »


Egon Schiele Self-Portrait with Lowered Head 1912

 

 

Regular Automatic Earth guest writer Alexander Aston this time comes not from Zimbabwe, Cambridge or Greece, but from South Carolina, where he is on family business. And that’s where he’s venting his anger about. I’m pretty sure we would all benefit from doing more of that, get it all off our chests. I think maybe the main issue with it in the present day circumstances is you have to make sure it’s your anger, and not somebody else’s that you’re merely parroting.

I personally like Alexander’s notion of: “America, a Country For Old Men”.

 

 

 

Alexander Aston: Is there any more perfect metaphor for a society in terminal decline than the senescent Joe Biden? The U.S. election has boiled down to a choice between the authoritarian versions of Mr. Magoo and P.T. Barnum. Truly, “there’s a sucker born every minute” is a far more apropos motto for the country than E. Pluribus Unum. The Republicans have adopted a Christian Nationalism that identifies with a New York shyster that says all the shitty things they’ve been feeling for decades while blaming the least powerful. It’s always easier to kick down than punch up and moral courage is not a common trait.

Likewise, the Democrats smug self-satisfied conviction of ethical superiority and sense of entitlement to the votes of every women, brown person and leftist makes them not only insufferable but delusional. The DNC managed to crush the momentum and energy of one of the most significant left- wing grassroots movements in US history. They have demoralised a huge swath of the under-45 crowd and subverted an actual political vision (regardless of whether you agree with it or not) in favour of a man with an abysmal record and signs of growing cognitive impairment. The DNC platform offers zero substantive policy other than “not Trump” (a policy that’s going to have a very short honeymoon in the face of cascading systems failure).

The Democrats have made no concessions on even one important progressive/left issue. Now they have picked a morally bankrupt prosecutor who’s deeply entangled with the prison industrial complex at a time in which “defund the police” has coalesced into a key feature of American discourse. Yet, liberals seem completely shocked and aghast by the fact that there are large numbers of young folks, minorities and women that are unwilling to shut up and put up. The level of enthusiasm beyond the party faithful, for those still willing to vote Democrat, amounts to the ever inspiring “I’ll grit my teeth.”

 

Meanwhile, I know middle aged folks that have never voted in their lives who have signed up just to support Trump. In other words, they are motivated. Like it or lump it, that’s some of the real political complexity behind the vacuous narrative management of the MSM. On a national level, the American sense of reality is becoming more unhinged than a schizophrenic dropping acid after a weeklong meth binge. George Soros funded Antifa and Putin’s army of trolls are all monsters of the same fevered social imagination. On its current trajectory, the American Right will soon believe anyone to the left of Attila the Hun is a “far-left radical.”

Likewise, U.S. liberals will be left haunted and terrified by the spectre of Russian agents stealing their precious bodily fluids. Meanwhile, the virus will continue to rage, and corporate feudalism will further entrench itself as the benefits of imperial citizenship rapidly fade. The only thing that’s certain is that huge swaths of Americans still won’t actually understand what is happening to them and continue to blame the opposing factions of management, figments of their propaganda, the dispossessed and the marginalised. I don’t believe the specific outcome of the American election is all that relevant anymore.

The sad truth is that the United States is collapsing under the weight of a microscopic entity and its own systemic contradictions. The various narratives of what is happening and what it means to be an American have become so wildly divergent that there are multiple parallel realities operating in the United States. What’s frightening is how few realise the diversity and complexity of these various perspectives, fears and aspirations. Regardless of who wins the election, trust in the political legitimacy of the American system is being fatally undermined. If the margin of the election is close, it is guaranteed that one side will not accept the results.

 

If the election is swept, then the winning party will be saddled with a crisis of unparalleled proportions in the history of the country. Furthermore, neither party has the political vision nor competence to actually address the challenges that beset them. The U.S. would need leadership on par with a Lincoln or Aurelius to rescue the political system. Whoever is in power will rapidly face multiple and intersecting forms of systemic breakdown, resistance and noncompliance as the extent of the economic devastation becomes truly apparent.

The first part of the 2020’s will consist of material deprivation, civil unrest and increasingly robust challenges to the United States’ geostrategic position. The more that authoritarians try to exert control in a high entropy environment (robbing Peter to pay Paul), the faster the system will fall apart. Ultimately, I believe that the break-up of the United States is all but inevitable at present. What I hope is that it will be a relatively peaceful dissolution and reorganisation. What should terrify us all is the prospect of real violence as the various factions and coalitions jockey for power in the new reality. A few truly smooth brained idiots think that they just need to tool up and go mow down a few “liberal snowflakes” so that they can return to the 1950’s by Christmas.

 

A conflict in North America would be a clusterfuck that would make Syria’s civil war look like a game of checkers. Forget electoralism and eschew romantic notions of purification through violence. Build solidarity networks, figure out how to make your communities economically, socially and psychologically resilient. My suggestion would be that Mutualism, Libertarian Municipalism and Democratic Confederalism offer some good starting points for thinking about these things. I would recommend setting up a micro- factory in your community so that you can start manufacturing necessary tools and goods on a local level. Here are some freely available schematics: Civilization Starter Kit.

Try to appreciate the limitations of your own understanding so that you might be more compassionate towards others. Don’t blame people for having problems they don’t know how to fix, try helping them instead. Some things, once broken, cannot be mended. This is very true for societies. I sincerely wish you all the best of luck. Please be good to one another and defend those less powerful and fortunate than yourself.

P.S. If you are in a swing state you should follow your conscience, but it should be beneath any person’s dignity to vote for either party in their safe states. If you don’t understand how the American electoral system works at this point then shame on you, stop berating people for voting Green in Montana or Libertarian in California, they’re actually displaying some political acumen.

 

 

 

 

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Debt Rattle January 2 2020

Jan 022020
 
 January 2, 2020  Posted by at 10:14 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , , ,  7 Responses »


VIncent van Gogh Weeping woman seated on a basket 1883

 

• Military Moves In To Help Mass Evacuation From Australian Bushfires (R.)
• House Democrats Would Have Impeached Lincoln (Blagojevich)
• Obama’s NSC Holdovers Finally Booted After Three Years Of Non-Stop Leaks (ZH)
• Trump Calls Pelosi The ‘Most Overrated Person I Know’ (Hill)
• The Syrian Conflict Is Awash With Chemical Warfare Propaganda (Fisk)
• Epstein ‘Madam’ Ghislaine Maxwell ‘Is A Foreign Spy Hiding In Israel’ (DM)
• Prince Andrew and Ghislaine Maxwell Are Still Chums And Still Talk (MN)
• EU Nationals Face Humiliation Of Applying To Stay In The UK Post-Brexit (NBC)
• Airbus Deliveries Soar To Record High As Boeing’s Crash (ZH)
• UN Special Rapporteur Melzer Accuses US Of Torturing Chelsea Manning (G.)
• Why Can’t We Find The Vast Majority Of Ocean Plastic? (G.)

 

 

I wondered here the other day where the military was. If this were the US the National Guard would have been sent in weeks ago. So this was a hopeful headline. Was, because it’s actually just about a few boats and helicopters. That’s not “the military”.

What I read these days about the fires is always about the same things: PM Scott Morrison is a fool. But Australia has a political class made up entirely of fools, far as I can see, so nothing special there. Blaming him means evading the real problems.

The second issue is everyone blames climate change. That is also evasive. The earth is such a complex system that we should be careful with claiming that A automatically means B; it takes years of intensive study to link the two.

Moreover, it’s not just a temperature change. Australia’s landscape has been drastically changed since Europeans arrived and forced it to look like England, with rolling lawns etc., something Australia was never made for.

The Aboriginees lived in harmoney with the land for 10s of 1000s of years. It’s the white man who made the land prone to large scale disaster.

• Military Moves In To Help Mass Evacuation From Australian Bushfires (R.)

Tens of thousands of holiday makers raced to evacuate popular seaside towns on Australia’s east coast on Wednesday, fleeing ahead of advancing bushfires, as military ships and helicopters planned missions to rescue thousands more trapped by the blazes. Long queues formed outside supermarkets and petrol stations near high-danger areas as both residents and tourists sought supplies to either bunker down or escape, but many shops and fuel stations had already run out of supplies. Major roads were closed due to fire risks, leaving motorists only a handful of escape routes causing lengthy traffic jams.

More than 50,000 people were without power and some towns had no access to drinking water, after catastrophic fires ripped through the region on Dec. 31 sending the sky blood red and destroying towns. Authorities have urged a mass exodus from several towns on Australia’s southeast coast, an area that is hugely popular in the current summer peak holiday season, warning that extreme heat forecast for the weekend will further stoke raging fires. “It is vital, critical,” NSW Transport Minister Andrew Constance said on Australian Broadcasting Corp television. “We need everybody to leave. We are going to face a worse day on Saturday than what we have been through.”

[..] Five military helicopters and two naval ships were en-route to the south coast to back up firefighters, bring in supplies like water and diesel and to evacuate people, the Australian Defense Force said. One ship was headed for the coastal town of Mallacoota in Victoria, where around 4,000 people have been stranded on the beach front since New Year’s Eve when they watched much of the town burn down. The navy rescue team will include 1.6 tonnes of water and paramedics, officials said. The only road in and out of Mallacoota was expected to remain blocked for several weeks.

Read more …

Rod Blagojevic was the the 40th governor of Illinois. He has time to think in prison. Nice angle.

• House Democrats Would Have Impeached Lincoln (Blagojevich)

I, like most people from my home state of Illinois, am a great admirer of Abraham Lincoln. Recently I’ve wondered what would have happened had Nancy Pelosi been the Speaker of the House when Abraham Lincoln was president. Would Speaker Pelosi’s House Democrats use the same flimsy impeachment standard they are currently using to impeach Honest Abe, one of the greatest presidents in the history of our country? In 1998 I was a member of the U.S. House of Representatives during the Clinton impeachment, and in 2009, as the 40th governor of Illinois, I had the unhappy experience of being impeached and removed from office. Nevertheless, I offer this interesting and unique perspective about impeachment as I sit here in prison.

Consider the possibilities. First, today’s Democrats would have impeached Lincoln for obstruction of Congress and abuse of power when he unilaterally issued his Emancipation Proclamation. Lincoln didn’t ask Congress for permission when he declared an end to nearly 250 years of slavery and offered freedom to millions of slaves in the American South. He neither consulted Congress nor sought its consent before he acted. In fact, at the time Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, the Democrats of that day opposed it. And then there’s the matter of the job offer to Robert E. Lee. Shortly after the firing on Fort Sumter by secessionists in South Carolina, and one day after Virginia seceded from the Union, President Lincoln sent an emissary to Robert E. Lee to offer him command of the Northern armies.

General Lee declined the offer. When his native state of Virginia left the Union, General Lee left with it, eventually going on to become the commanding general of the Army of Northern Virginia and the greatest military leader of the Civil War. Can’t you see how a Speaker Pelosi and many of today’s House Democrats would call for the appointment of a Special Counsel to investigate Lincoln for “Confederate Collusion” and bring impeachment charges for abuse of power for offering the top military command to a guy who would go on to become the top military commander of the other side? And surely, articles of impeachment would be brought against Lincoln by today’s House Democrats for suspending the writ of habeas corpus across the Union as it related to traitors, spies, prisoners of war and Union soldiers.

Read more …

I’ll never understand why it took so long.

• Obama’s NSC Holdovers Finally Booted After Three Years Of Non-Stop Leaks (ZH)

The White House National Security Council is sharply downsizing ‘in a bid to improve efficiency’ by consolidating positions and cutting staff, according to the Washington Times – which adds that a secondary, unspoken objective (i.e. the entire reason) for the cuts is to address nonstop leaks that have plagued the Trump administration for nearly three years. “Leaks of President Trump’s conversations with foreign leaders and other damaging disclosures likely originated with anti-Trump officials in the White House who stayed over from the Obama administration, according to several current and former White House officials.” -Washington Times The reform is being led by National Security Adviser Robert C. O’Brien, who told the Times that 40-45 NSC staff officials had been sent back to their home-agencies, and more are likely to be moved out.

“We remain on track to meeting the right-sizing goal Ambassador O’Brien outlined in October, and in fact may exceed that target by drawing down even more positions,” said NSC spokesman John Ullyot. Under Obama, the NSC ballooned to as many as 450 people – and officials wielded ‘enormous power’ according to the report, directly telephoning commanders in Afghanistan and other locations in the Middle East to give them direct orders in violation of the military’s strict chain of command. Meanwhile, the so-called second-hand ‘whistleblower’ at the heart of President Trump’s impeachment was widely reported to be a NSC staffer on detail from the CIA, Eric Ciaramella, who took umbrage with Trump asking Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelensky to investigate former VP Joe Biden – who Ciaramella worked with.

After O’Brien is done, less than 120 policy officials will remain after the next several months. The downsizing will be carried out by consolidating positions and returning officials to agencies and departments such as the CIA, the State and Defense departments and the military. “Mr. O’Brien noted that the NSC had a policymaking staff of 12 in 1962 when President Kennedy faced down the Soviet Union during the Cuban missile crisis. During the 2000s and the George W. Bush administration, the number of NSC staff members increased sharply to support the three-front conflict in Iraq, Afghanistan and the war on terrorism. However, it was during the Obama administration that the NSC was transformed into a major policymaking agency seeking to duplicate the functions of the State and Defense departments within the White House.” -Washington Times

Read more …

‘T is the season to be jolly.

• Trump Calls Pelosi The ‘Most Overrated Person I Know’ (Hill)

President Trump on Tuesday ripped Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) as the “most overrated person I know” as he fumed over the uncertainty surrounding his impeachment trial in the Senate. Trump has spent a chunk of his December vacation at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida complaining about Pelosi’s decision to withhold the two articles of impeachment from the Senate until after lawmakers return from recess. “They produced no case so now she doesn’t want to go to the Senate. She’s all lies. Most overrated person I know!” Trump tweeted Tuesday.


“Remember when Pelosi was screaming that President Trump is a danger to our nation and we must move quickly. They didn’t get one Republican House vote, and lost 3 Dems. They produced no case so now she doesn’t want to go to the Senate. She’s all lies. Most overrated person I know!” [..] The Speaker’s decision to hold onto the articles has proven to be a sticking point for Trump, who has tweeted more than a dozen times about Pelosi since arriving at his West Palm Beach property. Trump tweeted Tuesday morning that Democrats “will do anything to avoid a trial in the Senate” in an effort to protect former Vice President Joe Biden. The president has called for Biden, his son Hunter Biden and the anonymous whistleblower who triggered the impeachment inquiry to testify.

Read more …

Robert Fisk has a better understanding than most, but can’t refrain from blaming, among others, Russia while he’s at it. That really drags him down. Pity. The story here is Bellingcat,OPCW, White Helmets as propaganda channels for US intelligence and western media. Not unsubstantiated accusations.

• The Syrian Conflict Is Awash With Chemical Warfare Propaganda (Fisk)

The most recent information – published on WikiLeaks, in a report from Hitchens again and from Jonathan Steele, a former senior foreign correspondent for The Guardian – suggests that the OPCW suppressed or failed to publish, or simply preferred to ignore, the conclusions of up to 20 other members of its staff who became so upset at what they regarded as the misleading conclusions of the final report that they officially sought to have it changed in order to represent the truth. (The OPCW has said in a number of statements that it stands by its final report.) At first, senior OPCW officials contented themselves by merely acknowledging the Henderson report’s existence a few days after it appeared without making any comment on its contents.

When the far more damaging later reports emerged in early November, Fernando Arias, the OPCW’s director general, said that it was in “the nature of any thorough enquiry for individuals in a team to express subjective views. While some of the views continue to circulate in some public discussion forums, I would like to reiterate that I stand by the independent, professional conclusion [of the investigation].” The OPCW declined to respond to questions from Hitchens or Steele. But the new details suggest that other evidence could have been left unpublished by the OPCW. These were not just from leaked emails, but given by an OPCW inspector – a colleague of Henderson – who was one of a team of eight to visit Douma and who appeared at a briefing in Brussels last month to explain his original findings to a group of disarmament, legal, medical and intelligence personnel.

[..] This weekend, for example, WikiLeaks sent to The Independent an apparent account of a meeting held by OPCW toxicologists and pharmacists “all specialists in CW (Chemical Warfare)”, according to the document. The meeting is dated 6 June 2018 and says that “the experts were conclusive in their statements that there is no correlation between symptoms [of the victims] and chlorine exposure.” In particular, they stated that “the onset of excessive frothing, as a result of pulmonary edema observed in photos and reported by witnesses would not occur in the short time period between the reported occurrence of the alleged incident and the time the videos were recorded”.

[..] The deep concerns among some of the OPCW staff and the deletion of their evidence does not mean that gas has not been used in Syria by the government or even by the Russians or by Isis and its fellow Islamists. All stand guilty of war crimes in the Syrian conflict. The OPCW’s response to the evidence should not let war criminals off the hook. But it certainly helps them.

Read more …

Daily Mail, so perhaps a few pounds of salt.

• Epstein ‘Madam’ Ghislaine Maxwell ‘Is A Foreign Spy Hiding In Israel’ (DM)

An explosive new report has asserted that deceased sex criminal Jeffery Epstein and his alleged ‘madame’ Ghislaine Maxwell were foreign intelligence ‘assets’, and that she is currently hiding in a safehouse in Israel. ‘Ghislaine is protected. She and Jeffrey were assets of sorts for multiple foreign governments. They would trade information about the powerful people caught in his net — caught at Epstein’s house,’ a unnamed source told Page Six. Maxwell, 58, has been accused in lawsuits of procuring underage girls for Epstein to sexually traffick among his wealthy and powerful friends, and is reportedly the subject of an ongoing FBI probe.m She has always denied any wrongdoing.

After Epstein’s re-arrest last year and death behind bars in August, Maxwell has remained out of sight and her whereabouts unknown. Now the Page Six source claims she is being protected by powerful foreign interests. ‘She is not in the US, she moves around. She is sometimes in the UK, but most often in other countries, such as Israel, where her powerful contacts have provided her with safe houses and protection,’ the source said. Maxwell is being ‘protected because of the information she has on the world’s most powerful people,’ the source said. The source also claimed that Prince Andrew begged Maxwell to come forward and clear his name, after Virginia Roberts Giuffre claimed Epstein forced her to have sex with the royal when she was 17.

Prince Andrew, 59, strenuously denies having sex with Roberts and claims he can’t remember meeting her despite a photograph of him with his arm around her. ‘Andrew pleaded with Ghislaine to publicly defend him. She carefully considered it, but decided no good would come of it (if she came forward). It isn’t in her best interests,’ the source told Page Six.

Read more …

MI6 can accommodate Andrew.

• Prince Andrew and Ghislaine Maxwell Are Still Chums And Still Talk (MN)

For Prince Andrew, it appears that some old habits die hard — even if those habits led to his international downfall and ejection from his official role in the British royal family. The Duke of York’s habit of being friends and staying in contact with Ghislaine Maxwell reportedly continues, even though the one-time U.K. socialite is under FBI investigation for her alleged role in Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking operation. Laura Goldman, a longtime friend of Maxwell’s, revealed to The Sun that the socialite, while in hiding and protected by “wealthy connections,” continues to text and call her friends.

Maxwell, 57, also is confident that she has enough “dirt” on enough powerful people that she’ll be able to evade prosecution and eventually clear her family name and return to her high-society life, Goldman said. As for Andrew, Maxwell still “adores” him, Goldman said. After all, Maxwell credits the 59-year-old duke with helping her to return to high-society after the controversial 1991 death of her father, publishing magnate Robert Maxwell. Maxwell also reportedly introduced Andrew to Epstein, whom she dated for several years in the 1990s.

However, Goldman said that Maxwell is not about to come out of hiding right now and offer up any information that could clear Andrew’s name, which has been tarnished by allegations that he had sex with Virginia Roberts Giuffre, one of Epstein’s alleged underaged “sex slaves.” Goldman said: “(Maxwell) adores Prince Andrew, they’re still in touch now, but she won’t come out of hiding, even for him. “She’d only reveal herself if it was in her best interest, which it isn’t yet,” Goldman continued. “So she’ll be staying out of the limelight for now and leaving him to fend for himself, despite her huge affection for him and the fact that she could have taken some of the heat off him recently.”

[..] The Sun reported in early December that Andrew had a secret meeting with Maxwell at Buckingham Palace in June and has kept in constant contact with her by phone and email — even as the scandal escalated. “They talk regularly.” a source told The Sun. “If he wasn’t in the spotlight at the moment he would have found a way to meet up with her.”

Read more …

The EU will have to respond in kind.

• EU Nationals Face Humiliation Of Applying To Stay In The UK Post-Brexit (NBC)

Over the course of years and in some cases decades, millions of Europeans have built their careers and families in the U.K. – a place they call home. But with Britain set to leave the European Union at the end of January, European citizens living in the U.K. have been forced to apply for permission to stay in the country after it pulls out of the 28 nation bloc. Some 2.6 million of the more than 3 million E.U. citizens who live in the U.K. have already applied to remain as part of a settlement scheme introduced by the British government this year. For some, having to apply to stay in the country they call home has been a humiliating experience.

Richard Bertinet, a baker, has lived in the U.K. for 31 years after moving from France. He was granted the right to remain, but getting it wasn’t easy. To his surprise, he initially qualified only for “pre-settled status,” intended for people who have lived in the U.K. for less than five years and one step before the full “settled status.” “I spent more of my life in the U.K. than in France,” Bertinet, 53, told NBC News, as he took a break from teaching a baking class at his cooking school in the picturesque city of Bath in southwest England where he lives with his British wife and three children. “To have to prove 31 years of your life here? It’s a joke,” he said. “They can go to my Wikipedia page and see who I am.”

Frustrated, he shared his ordeal on Instagram, where it went viral. Bertinet appealed the decision and can now stay in the U.K. indefinitely. But he said he was worried about more vulnerable people — the elderly, those with fewer resources, insufficient language skills or simply confused about the application process. “If this happened to me, it will happen to other people,” Bertinet said. [..] “I really can’t get over the fact that I am made to apply to stay in my own home,” said Corinne Byron, 47. Born in Belgium and raised in Switzerland, Byron moved to the U.K. in 2004 after marrying a British soldier. “I was a rather proud army wife, as I even sang with the military wives choirs,” she said. “I guess you could say that I was the proudest non-British British person you could imagine.”

Read more …

And CEO Muilenburg, the man responsible for it all, walks away with $100 million or so. If that’s not crazy, I must be.

• Airbus Deliveries Soar To Record High As Boeing’s Crash (ZH)

A new report from Reuters specifies how Airbus locked in a record number of aircraft deliveries in Dec. to exceed full-year delivery targets while outshining troubled Boeing in becoming the world’s top planemaker. By midnight on New Year’s Eve, Airbus delivered 863 aircraft for the year, up 7.9% from 800 in 2018, sources told Reuters. The sources said the numbers aren’t official and must be audited before officially published. Shown in The Seattle Times chart below (updated on Dec. 29), the grounding of the Boeing 737 Max and now suspension of its production had more than halved deliveries from 806 in 2018 to 370 in 2019. With Max sales stalled, deliveries tanking, and production halted, Airbus is now soaring ahead as Boeing is facing its biggest crisis in 100 years with no word on a timeline of an ungrounding.

Read more …

Happy 2020 for Chelsea too, as for Julian. Stop this.

• UN Special Rapporteur Melzer Accuses US Of Torturing Chelsea Manning (G.)

A top United Nations official has accused the US government of using torture against Chelsea Manning, the former army intelligence analyst currently jailed in the US over her refusal to testify against WikiLeaks. Nils Melzer, the UN special rapporteur on torture, made the charge in a letter sent in November but only released on Tuesday. In the missive, Melzer says Manning is being subjected to “an open-ended, progressively severe measure of coercion fulfilling all the constitutive elements of torture or other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment”. Manning, who was detained on 16 May after refusing to testify before a grand jury, is currently being held at the Alexandria detention center in Virginia until she agrees to give evidence or until the grand jury’s term expires in November next year.

She also faces fines currently running at $1,000 a day. In the letter, Melzer writes: “The practise of coercive deprivation of liberty for civil contempt … involves the intentional infliction of progressively severe mental and emotional suffering for the purposes of coercion and intimidation at the order of judicial authorities.” Warning that “victims of prolonged coercive confinement have demonstrated post-traumatic symptoms and other severe and persistent mental and physical health consequences”, Melzer said Manning’s detention “is not a lawful sanction but an open-ended, progressively severe coercive measure amounting to torture & should be discontinued & abolished without delay”.

Mannings’ lawyers have argued that her detention is “for refusing to comply with a grand jury is pointless, punitive, and cruel” and warned that she is not likely to change her mind. In a letter released in March when Manning was first sent back to jail, her lawyers warned: “Chelsea has clearly stated her moral objection to the secretive and oppressive grand jury process. We are Chelsea’s friends and fellow organizers, and we know her as a person who is fully committed to her principles. They warned US authorities that if they “believe that subjecting Chelsea to more punishment will change her mind, they are gravely mistaken”.

Read more …

Lemme guess: because it sinks?!

• Why Can’t We Find The Vast Majority Of Ocean Plastic? (G.)

Every year, 8m tons of plastic enters the ocean. Images of common household waste swirling in vast garbage patches in the open sea, or tangled up with whales and seabirds, have turned plastic pollution into one of the most popular environmental issues in the world. But for at least a decade, the biggest question among scientists who study marine plastic hasn’t been why plastic in the ocean is so abundant, but why it isn’t. What scientists can see and measure, in the garbage patches and on beaches, accounts for only a tiny fraction of the total plastic entering the water. So where is the other 99% of ocean plastic? Unsettling answers have recently begun to emerge. What we commonly see accumulating at the sea surface is “less than the tip of the iceberg, maybe a half of 1% of the total,” says Erik Van Sebille, an oceanographer at Utrecht University in the Netherlands.


“I often joke that being an ocean plastic scientist should be an easy job, because you can always find a bit wherever you look,” says Van Sebille. But, he adds, the reality is that our maps of the ocean essentially end at the surface, and solid numbers on how much plastic is in any one location are lacking. It is becoming apparent that plastic ends up in huge quantities in the deepest parts of the ocean, buried in sediment on the seafloor, and caught like clouds of dust deep in the water column. Perhaps most frighteningly, says Helge Niemann, a biogeochemist at the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research, it could fragment into such small pieces that it can barely be detected. At this point it becomes, Niemann says, “more like a chemical dissolved in the water than floating in it”.

Read more …

 

Ghislaine Maxwell in 1999 photoshoot for Sotheby’s

 

 

 

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Debt Rattle January 20 2019

Jan 202019
 
 January 20, 2019  Posted by at 11:09 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , , ,  7 Responses »


Pablo Picasso Woman in an armchair (Olga) 1922

 

• Pelosi Rejects Trump Shutdown Deal Before President Announces It (O.)
• Battle Royale (Jim Kunstler)
• No President Since Lincoln Treated Worse Than Me – Trump (RT)
• Theresa May Wants Irish Treaty To Break Brexit Impasse (R.)
• One Thing To Be Grateful To Brexit For: Britons Are Buying Less On Credit (G.)
• ‘The Gilets Jaunes Are Unstoppable’ (Guilluy)
• Yellow Vests Defy Macron ‘National Debate’ In 10th Saturday Of Protests (F24)
• Fannie Mae And Freddie Mac Regulator Has Plan To End Conservatorship (MW)
• ‘The Goal Is To Automate Us’: The Age Of Surveillance Capitalism (O.)

 

 

Pelosi and her ilk act as if they won the elections. They must be smart enough to know Trump does what he says he will?!

• Pelosi Rejects Trump Shutdown Deal Before President Announces It (O.)

Donald Trump forged ahead on Saturday and proposed a deal to end the US government shutdown, despite Democrats having rejected it before he began to speak. If its timing was striking, the rejection was no surprise. In exchange for temporary concessions on the status of threatened migrant groups, the president doubled down on his demand for a border wall. A senior House Democratic aide told the Guardian the party, which has vowed not to give Trump funding for any wall, was not consulted. Speaking from the White House, the president outlined a plan that would extend protections for young undocumented migrants brought to the US as children, known as Dreamers, and individuals from some Central American and African nations, in exchange for $5.7bn for a wall on the US-Mexico border.

“A wall is not immoral,” he said, adding: “The radical left can never control our borders. I will never let that happen.” “As a candidate for president,” he said, “I promised I would fix this crisis, and I intend to keep that promise one way or the other.” Trump spoke as the partial shutdown of the federal government, the longest in US history, rolled through its 29th day. Prompted on 22 December over Trump’s demand for a wall, the partial closure of departments and services has left around 800,000 federal workers without pay. Hundreds of thousands of contractors are also going without a check.

Before the president took the podium, House speaker Nancy Pelosi panned his proposal. “Democrats were hopeful that the president was finally willing to re-open government and proceed with a much-need discussion to protect the border,” she said in a statement. “Unfortunately … his proposal is a compilation of several previously rejected initiatives, each of which is unacceptable and in total do not represent a good faith effort to restore certainty to people’s lives. It is unlikely that any one of these provisions alone would pass the House, and taken together, they are a non-starter.”

Read more …

“..a little dust-up in the meadows and cornfields known as the Civil War..”

• Battle Royale (Jim Kunstler)

The effrontery of Ms. Pelosi, Speaker of the House, in cancelling Mr. Trump’s State of the Union address in the chamber she controls is perhaps the worst insult to institutional protocol since the spring day in 1856 when Congressman Preston Brooks (D-SC) skulked into the senate chamber and smashed Senator Charles Sumner (R-Mass) about the head within an inch of his life with a gold-headed walking stick. Brooks’s attack was launched after Sen. Sumner gave his “Bleeding Kansas” speech, arguing that the territory be let into the union as a “free” state, and denouncing “the harlot slavery,” whom he imputed was Rep. Brooks’s dearest consort.

Many of us — except perhaps students immersed in intersectional gender studies — know how that worked out: a little dust-up in the meadows and cornfields known as the Civil War. We’re about at that level of animosity today in the two federal houses of legislature, though it is very hard to imagine how Civil War Two might play out on the ground. Perhaps opposing mobs (not even armies) meet in the Walmart parking lots of Pennsylvania and go at it demolition derby style, with monster trucks bashing their enemies’ Teslas and Beemers. Throw in clown suits instead of blue and gray uniforms and we’ll really capture the spirit of the age.

Not to be outdone, days after the SOTU cancellation, the Golden Golem of Greatness cancelled a Democratic Party grandstanding junket to the Middle East, led by Ms. Pelosi. A US Air Force bus has just departed for Andrews Air Force Base, where an Air Force jet waited for the junketeers. But then, with impeccable timing, Mr. Trump cancelled the junket — denying the use of military aircraft as Commander-in-Chief — and forcing the bus back to town with its load of elected dignitaries and their luggage — making the reasonable suggestion that they fly a commercial airline instead.

Read more …

Trump trolling America.

• No President Since Lincoln Treated Worse Than Me – Trump (RT)

Not since Abraham Lincoln has a US president been treated so badly by the media, Donald Trump lamented in a series of Twitter rants before going to Delaware to honor the four Americans killed in Syria. “Will be leaving for Dover to be with the families of four very special people who lost their lives in service to our Country,” Trump wrote on Twitter on Saturday. Two US troops, a civilian and a contractor were killed in a suicide bombing in the Kurdish-controlled northern Syrian city of Manbij on Wednesday. But the president had no intention to focus on his surprise visit to Dower Airforce Base in Delaware for too long.

His next Twitter post was dedicated to a completely different subject, as Trump cited former House Speaker, Newt Gingrich, who – according to him – said: “There has been no president since Abraham Lincoln who has been treated worse or more unfairly by the media than your favorite President, me!” At the same time, he insisted that “there has been no president who has accomplished more in his first two years in office!” Trump’s invocation of Lincoln prompted reactions from his supporters and opponents.

Read more …

May cannot have a bilateral treaty with Irleand that would essentially be designed to bypass the EU, as long as Ireland is part of the EU.

• Theresa May Wants Irish Treaty To Break Brexit Impasse (R.)

British Prime Minister Theresa May plans to seek a bilateral treaty with the Irish government as a way to remove the contentious backstop arrangement from Britain’s divorce deal with the European Union, a newspaper reported. The Sunday Times said aides to May thought a deal with Ireland would remove the opposition to her Brexit plan from the Democratic Unionist Party that supports May’s minority government and from pro-Brexit rebels in her Conservative Party. However the Irish edition of the same newspaper quoted a senior Irish government source as saying the bilateral treaty proposal was “not something we would entertain” and a second senior political source as saying it would not work with the European Commission.

May suffered a heavy defeat in parliament on Tuesday when Conservative lawmakers and members of other parties rejected her Brexit plan by an overwhelming majority. That left Britain facing the prospect of no deal to smooth its exit from the EU in little more than two months’ time. May is due to announce on Monday how she plans to proceed. Many Conservatives and the DUP oppose the backstop that the EU insists on as a guarantee to avoid a hard border between the Irish Republic and Northern Ireland. Earlier on Saturday, Ireland’s foreign minister Simon Coveney said Dublin’s commitment to the Brexit divorce deal struck with the British government was “absolute,” including the border backstop arrangement. The Sunday Times also said a group of lawmakers in Britain’s parliament would meet on Sunday to consider ways they could suspend the Brexit process, wresting control away from May’s government.

Read more …

There’s that question again: a sign of confidence or despair?

• One Thing To Be Grateful To Brexit For: Britons Are Buying Less On Credit (G.)

A sharp decline in household spending on the never-never, and especially spending on credit cards, is a trend that must surely be welcomed. The Bank of England said last week in its quarterly credit health check that high street banks were about to witness the biggest decline in such borrowing since records began 12 years ago. Threadneedle Street said its index of demand for credit card lending over the three months to the end of March had dropped to -20.7 from -7.2. That is a far cry from the summer of 2017, when consumer borrowing soared above £200bn and MPs across the political spectrum became alarmed at the return of binge buying on plastic.

At that time, with wages flat or at least not rising by more than inflation, policymakers feared that households were supplementing their incomes with borrowing to the degree that they had in the run-up to the 2008 financial crash. Regulators reacted to the rise by telling banks to tighten up their lending criteria. Most institutions obeyed, as anyone tracking the trend for borrowing across 2018 can see. So far, so good. That, after all, was supposed to be how the regulators looked after the interests of the country and its economy, and kept individual households from borrowing more than they could afford to repay.

However, it also seems clear that another force was at play – the Brexit effect, which began to have an impact once it became clear that Theresa May’s government was struggling to find a formula that could win over a majority in the House of Commons. The fall in sentiment since last summer has proved to be dramatic – far sharper than the banks would ever have expected from a few little tweaks to their lending rules. And the lack of consumer borrowing has been felt in few places more than it has in the car industry. Since 2010, cars have increasingly been sold through complex lease deals that fall under the credit figures. By 2017, nine out of 10 cars were being sold this way. Then came the diesel emissions scandal and a confused government reaction, which discouraged sales.

Brexit made the situation worse. Consumers were already reluctant to make major purchases such as a new home, or big-ticket household items like furniture. Next on the list of things not to buy was a car. Figures from the industry show that car sales in the UK declined by almost 7% in 2018. With a major slice of credit no longer in demand, the borrowing figures were bound to tumble. The shocking element of the story is how much harm a fall in personal lending can cause to the British economy, which has already suffered a lopsided expansion since the financial crash.

Read more …

Excellent essay on what the Yellow Vests actually are.

• ‘The Gilets Jaunes Are Unstoppable’ (Guilluy)

‘Paris creates enough wealth for the whole of France, and London does the same in Britain. But you cannot build a society around this. The gilets jaunes is a revolt of the working classes who live in these places. ‘They tend to be people in work, but who don’t earn very much, between 1000€ and 2000€ per month. Some of them are very poor if they are unemployed. Others were once middle-class. What they all have in common is that they live in areas where there is hardly any work left. They know that even if they have a job today, they could lose it tomorrow and they won’t find anything else. ‘Not only does peripheral France fare badly in the modern economy, it is also culturally misunderstood by the elite. …

One illustration of this cultural divide is that most modern, progressive social movements and protests are quickly endorsed by celebrities, actors, the media and the intellectuals. But none of them approve of the gilets jaunes. Their emergence has caused a kind of psychological shock to the cultural establishment. It is exactly the same shock that the British elites experienced with the Brexit vote and that they are still experiencing now, three years later. ‘The Brexit vote had a lot to do with culture, too, I think. It was more than just the question of leaving the EU. Many voters wanted to remind the political class that they exist. That’s what French people are using the gilets jaunes for – to say we exist. We are seeing the same phenomenon in populist revolts across the world. [ … ]

‘The Parisian economy needs executives and qualified professionals. It also needs workers, predominantly immigrants, for the construction industry and catering et cetera. Business relies on this very specific demographic mix. The problem is that ‘the people’ outside of this still exist. In fact, ‘Peripheral France’ actually encompasses the majority of French people. [ … ] Think of the ‘deplorables’ evoked by Hillary Clinton. There is a similar view of the working class in France and Britain. They are looked upon as if they are some kind of Amazonian tribe. The problem for the elites is that it is a very big tribe.

Read more …

Really, you think Macron can have his national debate? “..98 cases of serious injuries, including 15 cases of people losing an eye..”

• Yellow Vests Defy Macron ‘National Debate’ In 10th Saturday Of Protests (F24)

Around 84,000 “Yellow Vest” demonstrators marched all around France on Saturday, marking a 10th straight weekend of anti-government protests, defying attempts by President Emmanuel Macron to channel their anger into a series of town hall debates. In Paris, Protesters assembled by the Invalides plaza near the National Assembly and marched through the city’s Left Bank in freezing temperatures. These demonstrations were largely peaceful but, according to reporters, clashes broke out late in the afternoon between police and demonstrators, some wearing masks, in Paris’ central Invalides district. Protesters threw firecrackers, bottles and stones at the police who responded with water cannon and tear gas to push them back.

Authorities said there were around 7,000 protesters in Paris, some of whom gathered near the world-famous Champs Elysees, while there were similar demonstrations in major cities across France. Rallies took place in Toulouse, Lyon, Rouen and other cities. According to the French Interior Ministry, some 84,000 people marched across France on Saturday, as many as last week. In the French capital though, there were fewer protestors on this 10th consecutive weekend than on the previous Saturday, when there were 8,000.

[..] the protesters behind the biggest crisis in Macron’s presidency remain fully mobilised. The centrist leader is hoping that the launch this week of a “grand national debate” on policy will mark a turning point. [..] many yellow vests have announced plans to boycott the discussions scheduled in dozens of towns and villages, seeing them as an attempt to drain support from a movement that erupted in mid-November over fuel taxes and quickly broadened into a campaign of weekly protests that have regularly ended in clashes with police and destruction of property. The growing number of demonstrators to suffer serious injuries at the hands of the police has compounded their anger towards the state. The “Disarm” collective, a local group that campaigns against police violence, has counted 98 cases of serious injuries, including 15 cases of people losing an eye, mostly after being hit by rubber bullets.

Read more …

Probably means they see a huge plunge come in housing.

• Fannie Mae And Freddie Mac Regulator Has Plan To End Conservatorship (MW)

The acting director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency has told the agency’s employees that the regulator will announce a plan within weeks to take the government-sponsored enterprises out of conservatorship. Joseph Otting, who is leading the FHFA as Mark Calabria awaits Senate confirmation, said at an all-hands meeting on Thursday that a plan to lift Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac out of the conservatorship that has permeated the institutions since the financial crisis will soon be announced, according to an attendee of that gathering. A spokesperson for the agency confirmed there was discussion about ending Fannie and Freddie conservatorship but denied there was any talk of timing or details.

“Acting Director Otting held the internal meeting to meet FHFA staff and establish open lines of communication,” the FHFA said. “He mentioned, as he previously has, that Treasury and the White House are expected to release a plan for housing that will include details about reform and will likely include a recommendation for ending Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac conservatorships. [Treasury] Secretary Mnuchin has said that the goal of the [Trump] administration is to take the GSEs out of conservatorship. Acting Director Otting said that he and FHFA will work to advance that plan.” Fannie and Freddie were rushed into government control at the height of the financial crisis. Then, in 2012, the terms of the 2008 bailout were amended to steer the quarterly profits of both enterprises to Treasury. That wiped out holders of the companies’ stock, and they’ve fought the federal government in court ever since.

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Shoshana Zuboff’s new book The Age of Surveillance Capital sounds like a treat.

• ‘The Goal Is To Automate Us’: The Age Of Surveillance Capitalism (O.)

Surveillance capitalism is a human creation. It lives in history, not in technological inevitability. It was pioneered and elaborated through trial and error at Google in much the same way that the Ford Motor Company discovered the new economics of mass production or General Motors discovered the logic of managerial capitalism. Surveillance capitalism was invented around 2001 as the solution to financial emergency in the teeth of the dotcom bust when the fledgling company faced the loss of investor confidence. As investor pressure mounted, Google’s leaders abandoned their declared antipathy toward advertising. Instead they decided to boost ad revenue by using their exclusive access to user data logs (once known as “data exhaust”) in combination with their already substantial analytical capabilities and computational power, to generate predictions of user click-through rates, taken as a signal of an ad’s relevance.

Operationally this meant that Google would both repurpose its growing cache of behavioural data, now put to work as a behavioural data surplus, and develop methods to aggressively seek new sources of this surplus. The company developed new methods of secret surplus capture that could uncover data that users intentionally opted to keep private, as well as to infer extensive personal information that users did not or would not provide. And this surplus would then be analysed for hidden meanings that could predict click-through behaviour. The surplus data became the basis for new predictions markets called targeted advertising.

Here was the origin of surveillance capitalism in an unprecedented and lucrative brew: behavioural surplus, data science, material infrastructure, computational power, algorithmic systems, and automated platforms. As click-through rates skyrocketed, advertising quickly became as important as search. Eventually it became the cornerstone of a new kind of commerce that depended upon online surveillance at scale. The success of these new mechanisms only became visible when Google went public in 2004. That’s when it finally revealed that between 2001 and its 2004 IPO, revenues increased by 3,590%.

[..] Google began by unilaterally declaring that the world wide web was its to take for its search engine. Surveillance capitalism originated in a second declaration that claimed our private experience for its revenues that flow from telling and selling our fortunes to other businesses. In both cases, it took without asking. Page [Larry, Google co-founder] foresaw that surplus operations would move beyond the online milieu to the real world, where data on human experience would be free for the taking. As it turns out his vision perfectly reflected the history of capitalism, marked by taking things that live outside the market sphere and declaring their new life as market commodities.

We were caught off guard by surveillance capitalism because there was no way that we could have imagined its action, any more than the early peoples of the Caribbean could have foreseen the rivers of blood that would flow from their hospitality toward the sailors who appeared out of thin air waving the banner of the Spanish monarchs. Like the Caribbean people, we faced something truly unprecedented. Once we searched Google, but now Google searches us. Once we thought of digital services as free, but now surveillance capitalists think of us as free.

Bowie in 1999. He was a long way ahead.

Read more …

A Guide to American Political Ironies

May 042018
 
 May 4, 2018  Posted by at 12:38 pm Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,  5 Responses »


Gutzon Borglum Mount Rushmore, Repairing Lincoln’s nose 1962

 

 

Dr. D figured his last missive was a bit heavy handed. So he went for something lighter this time. A penance, a doctor’s guide: “It’s hard enough to find a candidate that will even promise to do something right so it doesn’t help that they do the opposite 90% of the time.”

 

 

Dr. D:

Who wrote “We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal”? Jefferson, a slave owner.

Who was one of the most ardent Abolitionists? Alexander Hamilton.

Was he a slave owner? Yes.

Who won the election of 1824? No one, it was decided by the House of Representatives.

So which party lost? None: all four candidates were Democratic-Republicans.

In response, Andrew Jackson, a slave owner, created the Democratic Party.

Jackson created the Democratic Party as an anti-bank, anti-oligarch, states-rights platform the Tea Party would recognize.

Martin Van Buren, a Democrat, created the first concentration camp for Cherokee Indians in 1838.

Those 17,000 Cherokees owned 2,000 slaves.

Did Lincoln create the Republican Party? No, it was an amalgamation of failed parties: Lincoln was their 1st candidate.

What was the Lincoln campaign of 1860? Non-interference in state slavery.

Why? The decision of Dred Scott in 1857, a slave owned by abolitionists in a state he did not reside. Overturning 250 years of history, the case determined that no slave could ever become a citizen, i.e. freed.

Who was the best known Confederate General? Stonewall Jackson.

What did he do when he sided with the Southern cause? Freed his slaves.

Who else was a top Confederate General? William Mahone.

What did he do? He was the creator of the most successful interracial alliance in the post-war South. His name was purged first by Southern Democrats (for integration), then by modern Democrats (for being a Confederate).

 

Woodrow Wilson (D) ran an anti-collectivism, limited government, anti-monopoly, anti-bank campaign in 1912. He created the Federal Reserve and is known for founding the modern welfare state.

Wilson was re-elected on the slogan “He Kept Us Out of War.” He immediately forced the reluctant nation into WWI.

Herbert Hoover, as Secretary of Commerce under Calvin Coolidge during the Crash of ’21, demanded economic aid and bailouts, but Coolidge, “the great refrainer,” refused. The market immediately recovered.

Hoover was President during the Crash of ’29. He gave unprecedented bailouts to help the economy recover. It never did.

Roosevelt campaigned against Hoover for being “ the greatest spending Administration in peacetime in all our history.” He outspent Hoover tenfold.

Did Roosevelt’s “New Deal,” the greatest stimulus and spending program up to that time, end the Great Depression? No. It was going strong in 1939.

What did Roosevelt campaign on? He promised to keep us out of war in Europe.

Who was Time’s Man of the Year in 1938? Adolf Hitler.

Who was Man of the Year in 1939? Joseph Stalin.

1942? Joseph Stalin.

 

Wars under “anti-war” Democratic Party: 93 years, 46.5%. 625K deaths since 1864.

Wars under “pro-war” “Republican” Party: 107 Years 53.5%. 12K deaths since 1864.

Who voted for the 1964 Civil Rights Act? Republicans 80% vs. Democrats 69%.

Who filibustered it? Southern Democrat Strom Thurmond.

Who signed it? Lyndon Johnson, a southern Democrat.

Where did Thurmond go? The GOP, who had voted against him and against southern segregation.

What did Richard Nixon campaign on? “Law and Order” and a “secret plan” to exit Vietnam. He immediately bombed Cambodia and was later impeached for a burglary.

Who said “the soundest way to raise revenues in the long run is to cut rates now” and “Every dollar released from taxation that is spent or invested will help create a new job and a new salary” ? John F. Kennedy.

Who gave the greatest modern tax cut? John F. Kennedy (income and capital gains, signed by Johnson).

Who most increased the postwar Federal deficit? Ronald Reagan 186%.

Who most increased taxes? Ronald Reagan, 1982 (as % of GDP, excluding Obamacare and Johnson’s one-year tax).

 

Who called young blacks “Superpredators”? Hillary Clinton, 1996.

Who put the most black men in jail? Bill Clinton, under the 1994 Violent Crime Control Act.

Who cut welfare most? Bill Clinton, 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Act.

Who was called the first “Black President”? Bill Clinton (“white skin notwithstanding, this is our first black President. Blacker than any actual black person who could ever be elected in our children’s lifetime.” –Toni Morrison, 1998. I swear this is true).

What was George W. Bush’s platform? Smaller, less-invasive government, lower taxes, and no foreign wars.

Who are the Neoconservatives? “Liberal hawks who became disenchanted with the pacifist foreign policy of the Democratic Party”.

Where did these Liberal Democrats finally prosper? Under G.W. Bush and on Fox News, e.g. Bill Kristol.

 

Which President won the Nobel Peace Prize? Barack Obama. (As did Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson and Jimmy Carter)

What was his legacy? War every day of all eight years, with +50,000 official strikes in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, Yemen, Somalia, Iraq, and Syria and unofficial attacks in Ukraine, Sudan, Niger, Cameroon, Uganda, and elsewhere, as well as 3,000 drone deaths.

Wow, anything else? Due to his intervention, Obama, the first black president, caused the creation of an open-air black slave market in Libya.

Who campaigned advocating a Syrian no-fly zone expected to cause WWIII with Russia? Hillary Clinton (D).

Who campaigned for peace talks and de-escalation with Russia? Donald Trump (R).

Who sent 164 missiles into Russian ally Syria? Donald Trump (R).

Who advocated against the recent attacks? “Far-right” speakers Rand Paul and Tucker Carlson of Fox News.

Who advocated for the attacks? “Left” speakers Fareed Zakaria, and Rachel Maddow with left media Slate and Mother Jones.

What was the actual breakdown? 22% of GOP supported Syrian airstrikes in 2013 vs 86% for the same strikes in 2017.

And on and on. Got it? Know which side you’re on? History, party platforms, personal beliefs, economy, all clear?

 

“It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”

P.S. Mark Twain never said this.

 

 

Hot War and Cold Markets

Apr 122018
 
 April 12, 2018  Posted by at 1:09 pm Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,  7 Responses »


Pieter Bruegel the Elder The Triumph of Death c1562

 

This is turning into a comedy. A black comedy, for sure, but still. As both the Skripal novichok ‘poisoning’ case in Britain and the ‘chemical attack’ in Douma, Syria fall flat on their faces on a total and absolute lack of evidence, it’s becoming clear that western ‘authorities’ are not at all planning to let go of the privilege that in times gone by allowed them to claim whatever they wanted and demand to be believed.

And despite the insane amounts of spying that underlies their business models and will lead to their demise(s), here is where social media do play a decisive role. See, if you’re an ‘authority’, there’s nothing you would rather do than to close down those social media that let people spread news that contradicts and/or doubts what you just said, and undermines that privilege. But that also would mean you can’t spy on them anymore through social media. A toss-up?!

Whatever the outcome will be, it’s obvious that Donald Trump is having war talks with his military and closest advisers. And they can basically tell him anything, he’s not a military man. Which is fine, Lincoln wasn’t either. But it does mean he’s vulnerable to narratives and briefings that are simply not true. Lincoln went to great lengths to surround himself with people who could trust.

What about Trump? Does he know that, as Paul Craig Roberts said on Twitter yesterday ..

The Russians know that they can, at will within a few minutes, sink the entire US fleet, destroy every US airplane & ship in the ME & within range of the ME, completely destroy all of Israel’s military capability & wipe out the military of the two-bit punk state of Saudi Arabia.

.. or do they keep that from him? Because if he did know, why have this entire circus going on? Why did the King of Twitter yesterday threaten with his new and shiny toys and then today switch to:

Never said when an attack on Syria would take place. Could be very soon or not so soon at all! In any event, the United States, under my Administration, has done a great job of ridding the region of ISIS. Where is our “Thank you America?”

We already knew that US military won’t be ready for another 10 days or so for an attack on Syrian targets. So that makes sense. It takes the surprise factor out of the game, but nobody seems to want to surprise anyone much anyway. Syrian and Russian military are already way out of the way, and left the most decrepit infrastructure behind for the coalition of the willing (no Germany, Canada) to waste their firepower on.

But does Trump really want to start shooting anything? Certainly only if he knows he will win. And that, he doesn’t. And there’s something else. he’s not only talking to his military people, he’s got a financial/economic team as well. What will the financial effects of a military action be? That might give him some pause. And his military guys can’t fill him in on that.

Can Trump risk imploding the ‘markets’? They’re not actually markets anymore, and that makes them much less predictable.

As Bill Holter says talking to Greg Hunter:

 

It’s Pure Math – We’re Headed for a Train Wreck

Holter also points out the explosion of global debt. Holter charges, “It’s now $237 trillion. The amount of debt grew by $21 trillion globally over the last 12 months. That’s roughly 10 %. How much did global GDP grow? 2% or 3%, I mean that is totally unsustainable.” The biggest worry for Holter right now is escalating military action in Syria. Holter warns, “This is so, so dangerous. Obviously, you worry about a hot war because with the weapons you have today, you could have WWIII start in a heartbeat. But look at the market today. It’s up 400 or 500 points. You have talk of trade wars. You have talk of hot wars. It’s amazing the markets can hold together and ignore potential annihilation.”

David Stockman has something very similar:

 

The Deep State Closes In On The Donald, Part 1

Yes, maybe Wall Street has figured out that the Donald is more bluster than bite. Yet when you consider the broader context and what the Russian side is now saying, it is just plain idiotic to own the S&P 500 at 24X. After all, earnings that have been going nowhere for the past three years (earnings per share have inched-up from $106 in September 2014 to $109 in December 2017), and now could be ambushed by a hot war accident in Syria that would rapidly escalate.

Indeed, did the robo-machines and boys and girls down in the casino not ponder the meaning of this message from the Kremlin? It does not leave much to the imagination: #Russian ambassador in Beirut : “If there is a strike by the Americans on #Syria , then… the missiles will be downed and even the sources from which the missiles were fired..”

Trump would be much more likely to fire away if he thought he would win. And even then. Even if he could win, the whole situation is replete with unknown unknowns. If god forbid the thing escalates and the US and Russia end up facing each other, what will China do? Don’t forget that Beijing and the PBOC play an instrumental part in propping up the world economy, and the S&P 500.

It wouldn’t be hard for Xi to pull that carpet out from under Trump’s feet; it would be costly for China too, but if war were the reality, the rules and priorities change. And you can bet Xi and his people have run through the kinds of scenarios many many times. They’re prepared to “withdraw upon themselves”.

As for the US, the ‘markets are holding on to crazy levels so far despite the threat that hangs in the air, but once the first rockets fly, and gold and bitcoin -oil?- are still available, why hold on to stocks?

It’s the insanity of the so-called markets that makes them so vulnerable and unpredictable. And starting a war on very shaky grounds increases that unpredictability by a factor of 10 or so. And the MSM may -well, there’s no doubt- still fill their role as cheerleaders the way they used to, but social media are a different story.

And besides, which investors are going to say, hell, I feel so patriotic, I’m going to hold on to stocks that have been onvervalued for years already, just to support Bolton and McCain and Tony Blair and Boris Johnson’s fantasies? Who would do that who understands that it is at least quite possible that Russia has the better weapons today? Or that perhaps this kind of conflict is simply not winnable anymore?!

I don’t think there’ll be many. Nor do I think Trump wants to be known as the man who collapsed the S&P 500. So, abandoned buildings in the desert it is. And lots of CNN. Anderson Cooper’s your MC.

 

 

Debt Rattle May 16 2016

May 162016
 
 May 16, 2016  Posted by at 9:28 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , ,  Comments Off on Debt Rattle May 16 2016


Harris&Ewing Ford Motor Co. New medical center parking garage, Washington, DC 1938

• Goldman: The Median Stock Has NEVER Been More Overvalued (ZH)
• The Business Of Corporate America Is No Longer Business – It Is Finance (FT)
• Stockman: Trump Will Scare The Hell Out Of The Markets, But That’s OK (CNBC)
• Trump’s ‘Print the Money’ Proposal Echoes Franklin and Lincoln (E. Brown)
• India’s Central Bank Governor Warns On Stimulus Overuse (FT)
• Average Asking Price For UK First-Time Buyer Home Jumps 6.2% In A Month (G.)
• CERN Discovers New Particle Called The FERIR (Steve Keen)
• Isn’t it Time to Stop Calling it “The National Debt”? (Steve Roth)
• Forget the Saudis, Nigeria’s the Big Oil Worry (BBG)
• China Housing Revival Props Up Economy (WSJ)
• China’s Record $26 Billion Buyout Deals at Risk of Unraveling (BBG)
• China Private Sector Investment Is Declining (R.)
• China’s Record Daily Steel Output Bodes Ill for Global Industry (BBG)
• How Investors Are Duped Each Earnings Season (MW)
• Battle Brews in Spain, Portugal Over Negative Mortgage Rates (WSJ)
• Refugee Numbers Returned To Turkey Fall Short Of EU ‘Expectations’ (FT)

In some places, this would be called a bubble.

• Goldman: The Median Stock Has NEVER Been More Overvalued (ZH)

When Goldman warned on Friday that a “big drop” in the market is possible before the S&P hits the firm’s year end price target of 2,100, one of the bearish reasons brought up by the firm’s chief strategist David Kostin is that stocks are now massively overvalued. In fact, according to Goldman , while the aggregate market is more overvalued than 86% of all recorded instances, the median stocks has never been more overvalued, i.e., is in the 100% valuation percentile, according to some key metrics such as Price-to-Earnings growth and EV/sales.

This is what Goldman said: “Valuation is a necessary starting point of any drawdown risk analysis. At 16.7x the forward P/E multiple of the S&P 500 index ranks in the 86th percentile relative to the last 40 years. Most other metrics paint a similar picture of extended valuation. The median stock in the index trades at the 99th percentile of historical valuation on most metrics (see Exhibit 3).” Goldman’s conclusion: “The most likely future path of US equities involves a lower valuation.”

Read more …

America no longer makes much of anything anymore.

• The Business Of Corporate America Is No Longer Business – It Is Finance (FT)

One of the great ironies of business today is that the richest and most powerful companies in the world are more involved than ever before in the capital markets at a time when they do not actually need any capital. Take Apple, which has around $200bn sitting in the bank, yet has borrowed billions of dollars in recent years to buy back shares in order to bolster its stock price, which has lagged recently. Why borrow? Because it is cheaper than repatriating cash and paying US taxes, of course. The financial engineering helped boost the California company’s share price for a while. But it did not stop activist investor Carl Icahn — who had manically advocated borrowing and buybacks — from dumping the stock the minute revenue growth took a turn for the worse in late April. Apple is not alone in eschewing real engineering for the financial kind.

Top-tier US businesses have never enjoyed greater financial resources. They have $2tn in cash on their balance sheets – enough money combined to make them the tenth largest economy in the world. Yet they are also taking on record amounts of debt to buy back their own stock, creating a corporate debt bubble that has already begun to burst (witness Exxon’s recent downgrade). The buyback bubble is only one part of a larger trend, which is that the business of corporate America is no longer business – it is finance. American firms today make more money than ever before by simply moving money around, getting about five times the revenue from purely financial activities, such as trading, hedging, tax optimisation and selling financial services, than they did in the immediate postwar period. No wonder share buybacks and corporate investment into research and development have moved inversely in recent years.

It is easier for chief executives with a shelf life of three years to try to please investors by jacking up short-term share prices than to invest in things that will grow a company over the long haul. It is telling that private firms invest twice as much in things like new technology, worker training, factory upgrades and R&D as public firms of similar size — they simply do not have to deal with market pressure not to. Indeed, the financialisation of business has grown in tandem with the rise of the capital markets and the financial industry itself, which has roughly doubled in size as a percentage of gross domestic product over the past 40 years (even the financial crisis did not keep finance down; the industry itself shrank only marginally and the largest institutions that remained became even bigger). As finance grew, so did its profits — the industry creates only 4% of US jobs yet takes around 25% of the corporate profit share.

Read more …

“..Why would you hang in a boiling pot where the upside is 2% and the downside is 40?”

• Stockman: Trump Will Scare The Hell Out Of The Markets, But That’s OK (CNBC)

Former Reagan administration aide David Stockman has a message for the next president: The markets are going down for the count and you can’t do anything about it! President Ronald Reagan’s director of the Office of Management and Budget said in a recent CNBC interview it doesn’t matter if Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump gets elected in November — neither will be able to stop the economic meltdown that’s looming. Wall Street seems to have its mind made up about which candidate it prefers. More than 70% of respondents to a recent Citigroup poll of institutional clients said the former secretary of state, first lady and New York senator would likely become the U.S.’s 45th president. Just over 10% gave Trump the nod, and small business owners appear to be divided between the GOP and Democratic standard bearers.

Stockman, however, doesn’t believe either one can prevent what may be on the horizon. “There’s no way the next president can stop a recession that’s already baked into the cake,” Stockman said Thursday in the “Futures Now” interview. Stockman has been calling for a major market downturn and global recession for some time, but he is more certain than ever that it could happen during this political cycle. He pointed to depleting earnings, peaked auto sales, inventory ratios and issues in the freight and rail space as some key indicators that the U.S. economy is more unstable than people would like to believe. “The idea that this economy is somehow going to get stronger in the second half, or that the next president can stall a recession I think is wrong,” he said.

According to Stockman, there is “plenty of evidence” that the U.S. will slip into a recession by year-end or shortly after. And as he sees it, that could send the S&P 500 spiraling to levels not seen since 2012. “The market can easily drop to 1,300,” Stockman warned. That represents a nearly 40% fall from where the large-cap S&P 500 Index is currently trading. “We have been trading in a range for the last 600 days plus or minus days 2,060 on the S&P 500. … Why would you hang in a boiling pot where the upside is 2% and the downside is 40?” Stockman noted that if given a choice between Trump and Clinton, he certainly would not want another Clinton in the White House. Instead, he said America needs a disruptor like Trump to “break the chains of the status quo” and manage the country in a different way than what has been done in the last decade.

Read more …

It’s time this becomes a serious discussion.

• Trump’s ‘Print the Money’ Proposal Echoes Franklin and Lincoln (E. Brown)

“Print the money” has been called crazy talk, but it may be the only sane solution to a $19 trillion federal debt that has doubled in the last 10 years. The solution of Abraham Lincoln and the American colonists can still work today.
“Reckless,” “alarming,” “disastrous,” “swashbuckling,” “playing with fire,” “crazy talk,” “lost in a forest of nonsense”: these are a few of the labels applied by media commentators to Donald Trump’s latest proposal for dealing with the federal debt. On Monday, May 9th, the presumptive Republican presidential candidate said on CNN, “You print the money.”

The remark was in response to a firestorm created the previous week, when Trump was asked if the US should pay its debt in full or possibly negotiate partial repayment. He replied, “I would borrow, knowing that if the economy crashed, you could make a deal.” Commentators took this to mean a default. On May 9, Trump countered that he was misquoted:

People said I want to go and buy debt and default on debt – these people are crazy. This is the United States government. First of all, you never have to default because you print the money, I hate to tell you, okay? So there’s never a default.

That remark wasn’t exactly crazy. It echoed one by former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, who said in 2011:

The United States can pay any debt it has because we can always print money to do that. So there is zero probability of default.

Paying the government’s debts by just issuing the money is as American as apple pie – if you go back far enough. Benjamin Franklin attributed the remarkable growth of the American colonies to this innovative funding solution. Abraham Lincoln revived the colonial system of government-issued money when he endorsed the printing of $450 million in US Notes or “greenbacks” during the Civil War. The greenbacks not only helped the Union win the war but triggered a period of robust national growth and saved the taxpayers about $14 billion in interest payments. But back to Trump. He went on to explain:

I said if we can buy back government debt at a discount – in other words, if interest rates go up and we can buy bonds back at a discount – if we are liquid enough as a country we should do that.

Apparently he was referring to the fact that when interest rates go up, long-term bonds at the lower rate become available on the secondary market at a discount. Anyone who holds the bonds to maturity still gets full value, but many investors want to cash out early and are willing to take less. As explained on MorningStar.com:

If a bond with a 5% coupon and a ten-year maturity is sold on the secondary market today while newly issued ten-year bonds have a 6% coupon, then the 5% bond will sell for $92.56 (par value $100).

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“..central banks “cannot claim to be out of ammunition because immediately that would create the wrong kind of expectations..”

• India’s Central Bank Governor Warns On Stimulus Overuse (FT)

Central banks and governments of rich countries are running out of ammunition for stimulating their economies, says Raghuram Rajan, the head of the Indian central bank — but they can never admit as much. Speaking to the Financial Times at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business in London, Mr Rajan criticised efforts to use fiscal and monetary policy and infrastructure programmes to boost growth rates in advanced economies. Long a critic of low interest rates in rich countries that can drive hot-money flows to poorer parts of the world, the governor of the Reserve Bank of India suggested that loose policies were also weakening the underlying performance of advanced economies.

Although Mr Rajan said there were limits on stimulus, he said central banks “cannot claim to be out of ammunition because immediately that would create the wrong kind of expectations, so there’s always something up their sleeves”. Mr Rajan said he was a supporter of stimulus policies to “balance things out” over short periods when households or companies were proving excessively cautious with their spending. But eight years after the financial crisis, we “have to ask ourselves is that the real problem?”. “I have this image of stimulus as a bridge,” he said. “As the economy goes down, there is an expectation it will come up. Stimulus is a bridge which smoothes over the growth rate of the economy and prevents damaging expectations from building up.”

If stimulus went on for a long time, if it did not work, he said, the adjustment would be sharp, indicating there was little room for further stimulus. Mr Rajan warned governments not to rely too much on fiscal stimulus through cutting taxes or increasing public spending. “If your debt to GDP is over 100%, [and you] do more fiscal stimulus, you’d better have a pretty high rate of return in mind, otherwise your younger and middle-aged generations are thinking ‘This thing is not going to return enough, but I’m going to have to pay for it’.”

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Want to know how to bankrupt a society?

• Average Asking Price For UK First-Time Buyer Home Jumps 6.2% In A Month (G.)

The average asking price of a typical first-time buyer home leapt by 6.2% in a month after buy-to-let investors rushed to buy properties before last month’s stamp duty increase, according to figures on Monday. The average for properties coming on to the market in England and Wales with two bedrooms or fewer was £11,298 higher in May than in April, at £194,224, according to data from the property website Rightmove. The figures, based on properties listed during the month, showed that across the UK the average price of a first-time buyer property had risen by 11.4% since May 2015. In hotspots such as Croydon, Dartford and Luton – all towns within easy commuting distance of central London – asking prices were up by more than 18% over the year.

The figures do not include inner-London homes. The website said strong demand from investors keen to buy before the introduction of the surcharge on second homes had caused a “property drought” at the lower end of the market, putting upwards pressure on prices for those homes that were being made available. However, Rightmove’s director, Miles Shipside, said: “It remains to be seen if these prices can be achieved and there may be some over pricing in the market. It is also a reflection of better quality property coming to market in this sector which is now targeting owner-occupiers rather than landlords.”

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Brilliantly hilarious must read.

• CERN Discovers New Particle Called The FERIR (Steve Keen)

CERN has just announced the discovery of a new particle, called the “FERIR”. This is not a fundamental particle of matter like the Higgs Boson, but an invention of economists. CERN in this instance stands not for the famous particle accelerator straddling the French and Swiss borders, but for an economic research lab at MIT—whose initials are coincidentally the same as those of its far more famous cousin. Despite its relative anonymity, MIT’s CERN is far more important than its physical namesake. The latter merely informs us about the fundamental nature of the universe. MIT’s CERN, on the other hand, shapes our lives today, because the discoveries it makes dramatically affect economic policy.

CERN, which in this case stands for “Crazy Economic Rationalizations for aNomalies”, has discovered many important sub-economic particles in the past, with its most famous discovery to date being the NAIRU, or “Non-Accelerating Inflation Rate of Unemployment”. Today’s newly discovered particle, the FERIR, or “Full Employment Real Interest Rate”, is the anti-particle of the NAIRU. Its existence was first mooted some 30 months ago by Professor Larry Summers at the 2013 IMF Research Conference. The existence of the FERIR was confirmed just this week by CERN’s particle equilibrator, the DSGEin. Asked why the discovery had occurred now, Professor Krugman explained that ever since the GFC (“Global Financial Crisis”), economists had been attempting to understand not only how the GFC happened, but also why its aftermath has been what Professor Summers characterized as “Secular Stagnation”.

Their attempts to understand the GFC continued to fail, until Professor Summers suggested that perhaps the GFC had destroyed the NAIRU, leaving the ZLB (“Zero Lower Bound”) in its place. This could have happened only if there was a mysterious second particle, which was generated when a NAIRU equilibrated with a GFC. Rather than remaining in equilibrium, as sub-economic particles do in DSGEin, NAIRU apparently vanished instantly when the GFC appeared. Something else must have taken its place. DSGEin was unable to help here, since it rapidly returned to equilibrium—while the real world that it was supposed to simulate clearly had not. CERN’s attempts to model this phenomenon in DSGEin were frustrated by the fact that a GFC does not exist inside a DSGEin—in fact, the construction of the DSGEin was predicated on the non-existence of GFCs.

The ever-practical Professor Krugman recently suggested a way to overcome this problem. Why not turn to the real world, where GFCs exist in abundance, and feed one of those into the DSGEin? Unfortunately, the experiment destroyed the DSGEin, since the very existence of a GFC within it put it through an existential crisis. However, before it broke down (while mysteriously singing the first verse of “Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer do”), the value for the NAIRU in DSGEin suddenly turned negative. This led Professor Summers to the conjecture that perhaps there was a negative anti-particle to the NAIRU, which he dubbed the FERIR.

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It’s all in the eye of the beholder.

• Isn’t it Time to Stop Calling it “The National Debt”? (Steve Roth)

Fourteen. Trillion. Dollars. That’s how much the U.S. government “owes.” You hear that massive number all the time, right? And people are forever telling you that you and your family are on the hook to pay off that scary huge number. There are 125 million U.S. households. You do the arithmetic. The horror. What those scare-mongers don’t tell you, and generally don’t even understand: it actually makes almost no sense to call that figure “the national debt.” And no, you’re not on the hook to pay it back. Imagine this: you’re the queen or king of a sovereign country. You decide to mint and issue a bunch of tin coins that your people will find useful. You use those coins to buy stuff from people in the private sector, and pay them to do work. Voilà, the people have money.

Is your government now in “debt” as a result of that “deficit spending”? Does it have to “pay” something to somebody at some point in the future? Do you have to redeem those coins for wheat or pigs or anything else? Obviously not. There’s just a bunch of money out there that people can use. You’ve made no promise that your treasury will ever redeem those coins for anything. They just circulate. Those government-issued assets, held by the private sector, are only “liabilities” to the government in the most pettifogging accounting sense. If you “owed” some money that you would never, ever have to pay, would you put that on your balance sheet as a liability? Would it be anything beyond a pro forma entry designed to satisfy some obsessive impulse for accounting closure? A debt that will never be paid off is a very questionable “liability.”

That’s essentially the situation with the U.S. national “debt.” The U.S. issues money by deficit spending. It puts more money into private accounts than it takes out via taxes. The private sector has more balance-sheet assets (but no more liabilities, so it has more “net worth,” the balancing item on the righthand side of its balance sheet). The treasury has made no promises to redeem that new money for…anything (except maybe…different government-issued assets). It’s just out there. Now it’s true that the U.S. et al operate under an arguably archaic and purely self-imposed rule: their treasuries are required to issue bonds equal to that deficit spending. This is a straightforward asset swap: the private sector gives checking-account deposits (back) to the government, and the government gives bonds in return.

Private sector assets and net worth are unaffected by that accounting swap; it just changes the private-sector portfolio mix — more bonds, less “cash.” (Treasury “forces” the private sector to make that collective portfolio-adjusting swap through the simple expedient of selling bonds at an attractive price — a point or two below similar deals in the private sector.) The same kind of asset swap happens when the Fed “prints money” for quantitative easing. The private sector gives bonds (back) to the government, and the Fed gives “reserves” in return — deposits in banks’ Fed accounts. Sure, the Fed creates those reserves ab nihilo, but they’re not a money injection into the private sector, like deficit spending. They’re just swapped for bonds. That accounting event doesn’t increase private-sector assets or net worth. It just changes the private-sector portfolio mix (more reserves, less bonds).

In any case, the private sector is holding government-issued assets. Whether they consist of bonds, “cash,” or reserves, is it realistic to call that money originally spent into private accounts a “debt” for the government? Is it in any real sense a government “liability” if it will never be redeemed for anything?

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Big Oil’s decades of criminal activity come home to roost.

• Forget the Saudis, Nigeria’s the Big Oil Worry (BBG)

Drag your attention away from the Middle East for a moment. While policymakers have been focused on Saudi Arabia’s oil market machinations, what really matters right now is happening 3,000 miles away in the Niger River delta. The country that was, until recently, Africa’s biggest crude producer is slipping back into chaos. A wave of attacks and accidents have hit infrastructure, taking Nigeria’s output down to 20-year lows. Oil prices are responding, rising to their highest in more than six months. Part of this is explained by the IEA lifting demand estimates this week. But taking both things together, it’s easy to doubt whether current oil surpluses are sustainable. With no solution in sight to the problems that beset the delta’s creeks and mangrove swamps, production from onshore and shallow-water oil fields looks vulnerable.

If the latest group of freedom fighters seeks to outdo its predecessors, then deepwater facilities may be at risk too.The Niger Delta Avengers have certainly been busy, forcing Shell’s Forcados terminal to shut in about 250,000 barrels of daily exports; and breaching an offshore Chevron facility in the 160,000 barrels per day Escravos system. In April, ENI had to declare force majeure – letting it stop shipments without breaching contracts – on exports of its Brass River grade after a pipeline fire. It’s hard to see any long-term let-up given Nigeria’s record on fixing this problem. The previous wave of discontent, which hit a peak in 2009, only came to an end when President Yar’Adua offered amnesty, training programs and monthly cash payments to nearly 30,000 militants, at a yearly cost of about $500 million.

Some leaders of the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND), the militant group, got lucrative security contracts. But the failure to properly address local grievances means it was only a matter of time before another wave of angry young men took up the fight for a better deal for southern Nigeria. The crisis has been hastened by new president Muhammadu Buhari’s termination of the ex-militants’ security contracts and his seeking the arrest of former MEND leaders. The Avengers now say they want independence for the Niger River delta. And it’s not as if Nigeria’s oil woes are limited to the militants. Exxon had to declare force majeure on Qua Iboe exports after a drilling platform ran aground and ruptured a pipeline, while Shell did similar with Bonny Light exports after a leak from a pipeline feeding the terminal.

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Beijing will flood in enough money to ‘reach its targets’ while talking about clamping down.

• China Housing Revival Props Up Economy (WSJ)

China’s housing market is showing nascent signs of recovery after a two-year downturn, helping to counter a slowdown in the broader economy but prompting fresh warnings about a buildup of debt. Property prices and sales have risen in recent months, driven by looser lending policies, accompanied by a sustained advance in new construction. That occurred even though China is weighed down by unsold homes with enough square footage to fill seven Manhattan islands. “Property developers’ appetite has returned,” said Xia Qiang, a senior partner at Yi He Capital, which provides loans to property firms. “Just two weeks ago four developers from Fujian and Zhejiang asked if there were any projects they could invest in in Shanghai.”

From January to April, housing sales rose 61.4% to 2.41 trillion yuan ($369 billion) from a year ago, the National Bureau of Statistics said on Saturday. Property investment in the first four months of this year rose 7.2% to 2.54 trillion yuan. Construction starts gained 21.4% to 434.3 million square meters. But the rosy statistics present a quandary for Chinese officials. After engineering a credit-fueled property upturn, Beijing has started tapping the brakes amid concern that it has overshot, economists say. Among the fixes Beijing has imposed are a decrease in bank lending and more purchase restrictions on some of the hottest property markets, including Shanghai and Shenzhen. A column in the official People’s Daily recently criticized debt-fueled growth policies, warning that China faces a “property bubble.”

The zigzag policy reflects China’s tough balancing act in a nation where empty apartment towers ring many smaller cities. It wants to boost the property sector enough to hit its 6.5%-plus growth target for 2016 without making its overcapacity and debt problems too much worse, economists said. “New loans are pouring into the real-estate sector,” said Alicia Garcia-Herrero, economist with investment bank Natixis, part of France’s Groupe BPCE. “But the elephant in the room is credit risk.”

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This is about money that doesn’t at all want to move back home, no matter how lucrative that may seem.

• China’s Record $26 Billion Buyout Deals at Risk of Unraveling (BBG)

The great retreat of Chinese companies from the U.S. stock market is hitting a snag. Concern last week that Chinese regulators may restrict overseas-traded companies from returning home helped erase more than $5 billion in the market value of firms seeking to do so. Shares of companies from Momo to 21Vianet have plunged at least 20% since May 6 amid speculation that the management-led investor groups may back away from the buyout deals or lower their purchase prices. The selloff marks another twist in the saga of U.S.-listed Chinese companies seeking to go private, lured by the prospect of relisting at higher valuations in Shanghai or Shenzhen. More than 40 have received buyout offers worth at least $35 billion since the beginning of 2015.

About three quarters of the deals are still pending, including Qihoo 360, whose $9.3 billion offer is the largest. The unraveling started on May 6 when the China Securities Regulatory Commission said that it’s studying the impact of companies seeking to relist domestically after withdrawing from overseas. The regulators are concerned the valuations estimated for some domestic backdoor listings are too high and could affect the stability of the stock market, according to the people familiar with matter. Policy makers also want to avoid encouraging more buyouts that could prompt capital outflows, the people said.

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The one sector Beijing cannot control is the biggest there is. “Pushing on a string” comes to mind. “Interest rates are low, but investment is declining, which shows that the overall market – domestic and overseas market – is not good,” he said.”

• China Private Sector Investment Is Declining (R.)

Xia Xiaokang and Bruno Chen, who both run private-sector companies, are the sort of businessmen that Chinese leaders are increasingly concerned about as economic growth slows. Beijing is counting on the private sector to invest more in the economy and take up the slack as the government tries to engineer a shift away from largely state-run heavy industry to more entrepreneurial and services-led growth. Unfortunately, just when China needs the private sector to step up, they look to be stepping back. “We plan to downsize our business rather than expand,” said Chen, who runs Ningbo Tengsheng Garments Co in the coastal export hub of Zhejiang province in eastern China. “We cannot feel any improvement in the economy,” he said.

Xia, general manager of Wenzhou Kingsdom Sanitary Ware, some 400 km from Shanghai, similarly lacks confidence in the economy. “We have hardly made any fixed-asset investment since last year and we now plan to rent out part of our factory building because it’s too big,” he said. After March data suggested that economic activity was finally picking up after a long slowdown, April figures released at the weekend suggested otherwise. Overall investment, factory output and retail sales all grew more slowly than expected. Private-sector investment for January to April grew just 5.2%, its weakest pace since the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) started recording the data in 2012. More worrying, private-sector investment is decelerating sharply from rates near 25% in 2013, to just 10% last year and now just over 5%.

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Damn the torpedoes!

• China’s Record Daily Steel Output Bodes Ill for Global Industry (BBG)

China’s record daily steel output in April bodes ill for an embattled global steel industry already reeling from a deluge of exports from the world’s top producer. Crude steel output over the month rose 0.5% to 69.42 million metric tons from a year earlier, the National Bureau of Statistics said on Saturday. The gains came after mills ramped up production to take advantage of a spurt higher in prices that has given them the best profits this decade. While below March’s record monthly figure of 70.65 million tons, the daily rate of 2.314 million tons was higher due to fewer producing days and surpassed the previous best set in June 2014. “Given how high margins went, we’ve been expecting to see a supply response like this,” Ian Roper at Macquarie said in a WeChat message. “Chinese mills will likely look back to the export market as domestic oversupply reappears.”

China’s overseas sales in the first four months were already running 7.6% higher than a year earlier, piling on the pressure after the nation shipped a record 112 million tons in 2015. Output remaining at such elevated levels “definitely adds to oversupply risks and exports may continue to rise,” said Helen Lau, Hong Kong-based analyst at Argonaut Securities. In a sign that China is recommitting to the reform of its bloated state sector, its top producer, Hebei Iron & Steel, said Friday it’ll cut 5.02 million tons of capacity. That still leaves a way to go. Japan’s biggest mill, Nippon Steel & Sumitomo Metal, also said Friday that it would take control of a smaller domestic steelmaker in a bid to weather a “rapid deterioration of the business environment” caused in part by overcapacity in China of some 400 million tons.

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It’s all so sad it’s funny.

• How Investors Are Duped Each Earnings Season (MW)

A year ago, we explained the many ways companies make reading their quarterly earnings reports a miserable task. We weren’t just whining. We wanted to remind companies that our readers regularly tell us they struggle to understand earnings announcements, and our job is to decode them for investors. Making that difficult isn’t helping anyone. We noted that some of their tactics – inventing or manipulating numbers, using meaningless jargon, distributing lame executive quotes, and more — can be outright damaging, eroding investor trust and creating skepticism. We hoped they’d change their ways. We’re sorry to say that today, as another earnings season draws to a close, things are even worse.

“Companies are definitely less transparent than they used to be,” said Leigh Drogen, founder and chief executive of Estimize, which crowdsources earnings estimates. They are “using accounting schemes that are more specific to … how they want investors to perceive their results.” Earnings are a crucial quarterly update for investors, as they provide the “best unbiased” view of what’s going on with companies, sectors and the economy, said Karyn Cavanaugh, senior market strategist at Voya Investment Management. “Earnings discount all the noise,” she said. But today, according to FactSet, more than 90% of S&P 500 companies use their own metrics in an attempt to make their numbers look better. Some conceal revenue and other key numbers in hard-to-access tables.

And a recent NYSE rule change has led some companies to report very early in the morning and pushed others to join the posse reporting after the closing bell, creating bottlenecks. While all this has meant more stress for reporters and analysts, it’s also made things harder for everyday investors trying to do due diligence on the companies they own. Experts say more companies seem to be breaking the most fundamental pact they have with their co-owners: to keep them informed of the true state of their business. “It’s a holographic presentation bubble distorting underlying operational reality,” said analyst Nicholas Heymann at William Blair. “Companies are working all the angles.”

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What you get when decision makers don’t understand their fields.

• Battle Brews in Spain, Portugal Over Negative Mortgage Rates (WSJ)

As interest rates in Europe fall near or below zero, lawmakers and consumer advocates in Spain and Portugal are attacking an ancient tenet of finance by insisting that lenders can owe money to borrowers. Banks in the two countries, struggling to recover from recessions that shook their financial systems, are fighting back, with billions of dollars in mortgage interest payments potentially at stake. Portugal’s central-bank governor, in a reversal, has rushed to defend the banks against a proposed law that would require them to pay borrowers when interest rates turn negative. Banks in both countries are rewriting new mortgage contracts to warn homeowners that they could never profit from subzero rates.

In Spain and Portugal, banks typically tie interest rates on mortgages to the euro interbank offered rate, or Euribor, a fluctuating rate banks pay to borrow from each other. In addition, interest rates in both countries include a fixed percentage of the loan, called the spread. In much of Europe, by contrast, fixed mortgage rates are common. Euribor began turning negative last year after the ECB cut interest rates below zero—charging lenders to hold deposits—to stimulate the Continent’s economies. That has pulled mortgage rates into negative territory in a few isolated cases in Portugal.

The vast majority of Spanish and Portuguese mortgage holders still pay interest, because Euribor hasn’t dropped enough to wipe out the spreads. But while lenders consider further steep drops unlikely, they are taking steps to protect themselves just in case. Europe already has a precedent: Banks in Denmark are paying thousands of borrowers interest on their home loans, nearly four years after the central bank introduced negative interest rates. Danish banks have increased some fees to compensate but never mounted serious legal objections. In Spain and Portugal, bank executives said they would pay borrowers when pigs fly.

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Europeans have established the ultimate NIMBY.

Another EU plan that goes predictably off track. “Brussels wants to see group returns but Greece is looking at applications for asylum on a case-by-case basis.”

• Refugee Numbers Returned To Turkey Fall Short Of EU Expectations (FT)

The number of migrants being sent back to Turkey from Greece has fallen well short of EU expectations, prompting fears that a fresh wave of arrivals could overwhelm the Aegean Islands during this summer. Fewer than 400 of the 8,500 people who have arrived on the Greek islands since the March 20 EU deal with Ankara — aimed at reducing migrant flows — have been returned to Turkey, according to figures from the Greek government’s migration co-ordination unit. Instead, Athens has approved more than 30% of the 600 asylum applications from Syrians that have been assessed since March 20, a significantly higher percentage than anticipated, according to European officials and aid workers. While the slow pace of returns will irk many in Brussels, Greek officials say it reflects their own policy on asylum requests.

They dismiss fears that the deal between the EU and Turkey could collapse if the trend continues – leading to a fresh influx – and stress that Greece’s migration laws do not recognise Turkey as a safe third country for refugees. Maria Stavropoulou, a former UN official who heads the Greek asylum service, said: “We fully understand the [EU] concerns but if you look at it from the perspective of the rule of law, it is going exactly as it should. “We have many vulnerable people on the islands … a lot of very sick people. By law they are exempt from the return process.” Epaminondas Farmakis of Solidarity Now, a refugee charity funded by the billionaire investor George Soros, said: “Brussels wants to see group returns but Greece is looking at applications for asylum on a case-by-case basis.”

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