• Flag-Switching On Russian Ships Hits Record Amid Sanctions  
  Flag-Switching On Russian Ships Hits Record Amid Sanctions  

  The latest sign that Western sanctions on Russia over the invasion of Ukraine are beginning to take a massive economic toll is a surge in the number of Russia-flagged vessels switching their country of registration (or ship’s flag) to evade trade restrictions. 

  Bloomberg, citing maritime consultancy Windward Ltd, reports that 18 vessels, including 11 cargo ships, changed their flags to non-Russian ones last month. That’s a 300% jump compared to monthly averages of Russian ships. 

  

  Five of the 18 vessels were directly connected to Russian owners. Eleven vessels were owned by a UAE company and changed their flags to the Marshall Islands.

  “Foreign companies have different motivations for moving from the Russian flag, they want their vessels to be able to operate everywhere without restrictions and, in some cases for moral reasons,” said Windward product manager Gur Sender.

  Sender said ship registration changes aren’t unusual and happen all the time, though the sudden increase in flag changes for Russia’s 3,300-strong commercial fleet has never exceeded nine in any month. 

  “What makes flag changes interesting is when they are taking place in correlation with trade restrictions against a specific country, especially when one of the management or ownership companies is in fact registered in that same restricted country,” Sender said. 

  

  Flag switching comes as some Russian vessels have switched off their automatic identification system, or AIS, to evade sanctions and conduct ship-to-ship cargo transfers in or around Russia’s exclusive economic zone. 

  “It’s all a clear attempt by Russian ship owners and operators to try to obscure the identities of the vessels,” he said. “They want to avoid detection.”

  What to expect moving forward is more Russian vessels switching their ship registration to other countries to evade Western sanctions—plus ghosting AIS to conduct ship-to-ship transfers. 

  This news also follows reports of Russian oligarchs switching off AIS on their superyachts, hiding private jets, and other trophy assets from Western sanctions. 

  Switching registrations reminds us of the scene in the action war/drama “Lord of War,” where gun smuggler Nicolas Cage had to falsify a ship’s name and origin to evade authorities. 

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 04/05/2022 – 02:45

• Zelensky Rejected German Security Proposal Before Russian Invasion
  Zelensky Rejected German Security Proposal Before Russian Invasion

  Authored by Kyle Anzalone via AntiWar.com,

  Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky rejected a proposal from German Chancellor Olaf Scholz just days before the Russian invasion. The February 19 offer called on Kyiv to renounce its NATO aspirations and declare neutrality.

  At the time, Zelensky rejected the security plan saying Russian President Vladimir Putin could not be trusted to uphold the agreement. Under Berlin’s plan, Putin and American President Joe Biden would sign the deal and jointly guarantee Ukraine’s security.

  

  The Wall Street Journal, which initially reported the proposal, said that Zelensky rejecting the offer “left German officials worried that the chances of peace were fading.”

  The day after the meeting, French President Emmanuel Macron appealed to Biden in a call between world leaders to make another push for diplomacy.

  “I think the last person who could still do something is you, Joe. Are you ready to meet Putin?” Macron said to Biden. However, Washington appeared uninterested in a push for diplomacy.

  Here’s how The Wall Street Journal relates Macron’s last ditch efforts to keep both sides talking:

  Mr. Macron spent the night of Feb. 20 alternately on the phone with Mr. Putin and Mr. Biden.

  The Frenchman was still talking with Mr. Putin at 3 a.m. Moscow time, negotiating the wording of a press release announcing the plan for a U.S.-Russian summit. But the next day, Mr. Putin called Mr. Macron back. The summit was off.

  Mr. Putin said he had decided to recognize the independence of separatist enclaves in eastern Ukraine. He said fascists had seized power in Kyiv, while NATO hadn’t responded to his security concerns and was planning to deploy nuclear missiles in Ukraine.

  While the full details of the German offer are unknown, it appears similar to proposals Zelensky has outlined in recent weeks. Ukraine’s top negotiator David Arakhamia said Russia had “verbally” agreed to several of Kyiv’s positions.

  Why would they want him to publicly pretend NATO membership is an option but say not a chance behind closed doors. This is what literally caused the invasion. pic.twitter.com/LVJvHty398

  — Grimmstyle (@Grimmstyle1) March 21, 2022

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  On Sunday, Russia’s top negotiator Vladimir Medinsky said the two sides are not close enough to an agreement for a meeting between Putin and Zelensky. “The draft agreement is not ready for submission to a meeting at the top,” the Russian chief negotiator said.

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 04/05/2022 – 02:00

• Victor Davis Hanson: The Nihilism Of The Left
  Victor Davis Hanson: The Nihilism Of The Left

  Authored by Victor Davis Hanson via AmGreatness.com,

  In pursuit of its utopian omelet, the Left cares little about the millions of middle-class Americans it must break to make it…

  

  The last 14 months have offered one of the rare occasions in recent American history when the hard Left has operated all the levers of federal government. The presidency, the House of Representatives, the Senate, and the permanent bureaucratic state are all in progressive hands. And the result is a disaster that is uniting Americans in their revulsion of elitists whose crazy ideas are tearing apart the fabric of the country. 

  For understandable reasons, socialists and leftists are usually kept out of the inner circles of the Democratic Party, and especially kept away from control of the country. A now resuscitated Bernie Sanders for most of his political career was an inert outlier. The brief flirtations with old-style hardcore liberals such as George McGovern in 1972 and Mike Dukakis in 1988 imploded the Democratic Party. Their crash-and-burn campaigns were followed by corrective nominees who actually won the presidency: Southern governors Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton. 

  Such was the nation’s innate distrust of the Left, and in particular the East Coast elite liberal. For nearly half a century between the elections of John F. Kennedy and Barack Obama, it was assumed that no Democratic presidential candidate could win the popular vote unless he had a reassuring Southern accent. 

  How did the extreme Left manage its rare takeover of the country between 2018 and 2020? Certainly, Obama’s election helped accelerate the woke movement and energized identity politics. One could also argue over the political opportunities in 2020 following the devastation of COVID-19. 

  In the long term, the medicine of lockdowns and quarantines probably proved more calamitous than the disease, and this crisis mode made doable what had once been unimaginable.

  State governors such as Gavin Newsom, Gretchen Whitmer, and Andrew Cuomo did not let the pandemic crisis go to waste. It was a rare occasion to leverage agendas that otherwise had no public support in ordinary times.

  In the chaos of 2020, both laws and customs were altered or scrapped—changing the very way we vote.

  Over 102 million ballots were either mailed in or cast during so-called “early voting”—strangely resulting in far lower rejection rates in most states than in past “normal” years of predominantly in-person voting on Election Day. Indeed, in just one year, Election Day went from an American institution to an afterthought.

  The hatred of Donald Trump prompted an influx of hundreds of millions of dark dollars from Silicon Valley to supplant the responsibilities of registrars in key precincts with armies of paid activists.

  A non compos mentis, basement-bound Joe Biden was cynically given an “Ol’ Joe from Scranton” moderate veneer to pursue a calibrated hard-Left agenda. 

  So Americans ended up with a neo-socialist government.

  It is proving as disastrous as it is bitterly instructive—reminding this generation of Americans what the Left does when it grasps power. As all restraints came off, the hard and now unbridled Left went to work to turn America into something like a looney, one-party California. A wide-open border followed. We may see 3 million illegal aliens cross at the southern border during the first 18 months of the Biden Administration. Hundreds of millions of dollars have been allotted to reward those illegally entering America, who can expect free legal support from the U.S. government to ensure they are not subject to the laws of the United States. 

  In a sane world, Biden would have been impeached for deliberately destroying the very federal laws he swore to uphold. On the prompt of his hard Left controllers, he was eager to alter the electoral demography of the nation rather than ensure immigrants came in reasonable numbers, legally, with audit and background checks, and safely in a time of a pandemic. The former illegal arrivals were seen as needed constituents, the latter legal immigrants too politically unpredictable.

  The Left in about a year has negated American gas and oil independence. Biden, who promised to end America’s use of fossil fuels on his watch, cast adrift millions of his fellow citizens to choose between driving and eating. Much of what the Left had traditionally demonized and wanted gone from American life—from gasoline to beefsteak to new pickup trucks—became so inflated in price as to be nearly unattainable. 

  The electrician now pays five times more for his wire, the carpenter eight times more for his plywood, the plumber six times more for his pipe—as all three have to pay off-the-books cash for rare workers who prefer to get checks from the Biden Administration. The Biden printing press has destroyed both the idea that all citizens will work if there are just good-paying jobs, and that affordable necessities for life—food, fuel, and shelter—form the basis for a middle-class life.

  If the Left did all that in 14 months, imagine what it can still do before losing the Congress in 2022.

  The Biden Administration’s profligate multitrillion-dollar budget, inflation of the currency, de facto zero interest rates, destructive subsidies that undermined labor participation, and incompetence at addressing the supply-chain and clogged port crises will all by midyear likely achieve a 10 percent annualized inflation rate. Carter-era stagflation is on the near horizon. 

  When an American president predicts a food shortage in what used to be the breadbasket of the world, then we see the wages of socialism in all their unapologetic cruelty. When the Left can scarcely hide its glee that diesel fuel hit $7 a gallon in California, the public is finally seeing that the Bidens, Newsoms, and AOCs of the world care nothing for the real-life consequences of their elite utopian green fantasies. How did America ever stoop to begging communist Venezuela, theocratic Iran, and dictatorial Russia to pump oil for us that we have in abundance but will not produce? Which insane person thought up the idea of using Vladimir Putin’s Russia as our mediator to restart the Iran Deal?

  The now unfettered woke revolution seeks to Trotskyize American history and its heroes. A disastrous foreign policy of appeasement has ended U.S. deterrence. After the worst military humiliation in 50 years in Afghanistan, Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea all seek to capitalize on a rare American Phaethon moment. The world’s superpower has turned over the reins of its deterrence chariot to a ninny and his gurus. And before crashing the country, they aimlessly rebound from one self-created crisis to the next self-induced disaster. 

  The Clerks Come Out

  Aside from the dismal left-wing political record, the public has also witnessed an unapologetically leftwing federal bureaucracy now completely unbound. Our top echelon of the administrative state is defiant in its weaponized assumption of legislative, executive, and judicial powers. 

  We are learning that the likes of Anthony Fauci have all but destroyed the reputation of once time-honored federal health agencies. In their contradictions, about-faces, and deceit, they focused mostly on controlling their multibillion-dollar public fiefdoms, hounding critics, rewarding sycophants, politicizing “science,” hiding culpability about routing money to lunatic gain-of-function research in China, and marginalizing outspoken voices of audit.

  The military apparat after Afghanistan – defined as woke Pentagon functionaries, revolving door and politically weaponized corporate generals, and outspoken politicos – managed the impossible: a once revered military now cannot even win a 50 percent vote of confidence from the American public. 

  The intelligence agencies are worse. Former kingpins such as John Brennan and James Clapper, both pundits for hire on leftwing cable networks, lied under oath before Congress without consequences. When 50 retired intelligence officials during the Biden 2020 campaign claimed publicly that Hunter’s laptop was likely a Russian plot, what then is left of any semblance of nonpartisan professionalism and integrity? 

  James Comey, Andrew McCabe, and Christopher Wray have all eroded the reputation of the FBI by fueling the Russian collusion hoax, the Alfa Bank hoax, and the Hunter laptop disinformation hoax. Since when does the FBI go after journalists in their underwear or moms and dads at school board meetings, as if it is now an extension of the teacher union or DNC?

  Along with Robert Mueller—who claimed no knowledge of either the Steele dossier or Fusion GPS—the Washington FBI hierarchy did to the agency what Lois Lerner infamously did to the IRS. Just as Lerner became an extension of the Obama 2012 reelection effort and corrupted tax law, so the FBI descended into becoming the wayward Biden family’s retrieval service—eager to keep quiet Hunter’s incriminating laptop and to rescue Ashley Biden’s lurid diary.

  When the evidence becomes overwhelming that the collusionary media lied about the laptop or the origins of COVID-19, there is never a retraction, only a Soviet-style silence about past untruth. And then it is on to the next false narrative. 

  Add in the conduct of FBI luminaries such as the forger Kevin Clinesmith, Lisa Page, and Peter Strzok, who preferred to investigate conservatives rather than enemies of the nation. What characterizes, then, our once revered intelligence agencies is not just institutionalized mediocracy. Rather it is a dangerous zeal to enact by fiat politicized agendas that cannot otherwise be ratified by a legislative vote—all with the expectation that these sanctified agents of political change are above the law and will be rewarded accordingly.

  Our Ill Institutions

  Americans had tuned out many of our major institutions that are now openly hostile to American exceptionalism.

  In their nihilism, leftists seek to destroy the very organizations they absorbed. 

  Professional sports?

  Multimillionaire basketball players are more likely to refuse to salute their own flag than to say a word of dissent to their autocratic and often ethnocentric Chinese paymasters.

  Higher education?

  A Yale law school dean contextualizes the loud disruption of free speech by leftist law students at a conference. Only that way can she ensure that rules about open expression remain theoretical, and not real for the woke. 

  Entertainment?

  Hiring, promotions, and awards are now based as much on race, gender, and sexual identity as on merit. 

  Forty years ago, face slapper Will Smith would likely have been removed from the Oscar ceremonies for rudely shouting and interrupting the worldwide show. Twenty years ago, he might still have been rebuked for profanity and yelling the F-word in a live televised event. Now he is neither arrested nor even removed for physically assaulting comedian Chris Rock. His belated contrition is belied by his refusal to leave the ceremony and to go dancing and partying into the post-assault wee hours. Will there be open brawling on stage next year?

  The Left got what it wanted and now controls academia, the media, the internet, K-12 education, corporate boardrooms, the Pentagon, Wall Street, and Hollywood. And they more or less have turned each of these into versions of Pravda.

  The sermons, arrogance, and narcissism of these woke cultural imperialists now explain why they are disliked as much abroad as they are at home. 

  In sum, we are watching a rare laboratory experiment in which the traditional American fringe is now in control of the government. In pursuit of its utopian omelet, the Left cares little about the millions of middle-class Americans it must break to make it. The result is an unmitigated disaster that not only has tarred the Democratic Party, corrupted once-revered agencies, and alienated half the country from our cultural institutions, but now endangers the very health and security of the United States.

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 04/04/2022 – 23:40

• Eerie Drone Footage Shows Deserted Shanghai Downtown As Lockdown Extended 
  Eerie Drone Footage Shows Deserted Shanghai Downtown As Lockdown Extended 

  CCP bureaucrats in charge of China’s largest city, Shanghai, extended COVID-19 lockdowns for all 26 million residents, according to Reuters. The city began a multi-stage lockdown on March 28, initially covering Shanghai’s eastern districts, and has since expanded citywide. New drone footage shows the extent of the lockdowns, transforming it into a post-apocalyptic ghost town. 

  Shanghai has failed to suppress the omicron-driven outbreak. CCP officials favored the zero-COVID policy by locking down the entire city, upending daily life, and shuttering business operations in the financial hub. The military and thousands of healthcare workers have been called in for mass testing. 

  Drone footage captures the latest round of quarantining, one of the largest efforts since the outbreak in Wuhan more than two years ago. Video shows what are usually bustling city streets completely empty. 

  Drone shot from today. A bit of Suzhou River and Jing’an Temple. Deserted except a few delivery worker. #Shanghai #Covid_19 pic.twitter.com/R5CKAKRjxq

  — Thomas Yau (@Tominmedill) April 1, 2022

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  Another video provides an eerie sight of the downtown district. There are no people nor cars in the streets — the local economy has come to a screeching halt. 

  In Shanghai, China, an empty streets were filmed from a drone due to the current quarantine associated with another outbreak of coronavirus. Citizens were forbidden to go outside their apartments. pic.twitter.com/w8gMQSwPua

  — Be Curious Ⓜ️ (@BeCuriousarabi) April 4, 2022

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  The final drone video shows empty streets and highways and an outdoor COVID testing center. 

  WATCH VIDEO：DRONE- #Shanghai starts testing all its 25 million residents for #COVID curb pic.twitter.com/Pa10ywlYVP

  — ShanghaiEye🚀official (@ShanghaiEye) April 4, 2022

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  The interconnectedness of Shanghai and the global economy is a deep one that may suggest more supply chain turmoil is ahead and could exacerbate the risk of stagflation for Western economies. 

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 04/04/2022 – 23:20

• China's Legal System Steps Up Use Of Secret Detentions
  China’s Legal System Steps Up Use Of Secret Detentions

  Authored by Peter Dahlin via The Epoch Times,

  On the eve of Jan. 11, former lawyer and human rights defender Xie Yang was on a video call with Lyndon Li, a Chinese law student in England, when police suddenly appeared at his home, and the call ended abruptly.

  The news leaked out within a few days that Chinese authorities had taken Xie away—this was not the first time.

  

  Xie shot to fame after spending six months inside China’s system for secret jails or Residential Surveillance at a Designated Location (RSDL). He described in detail to his lawyers the prolonged, severe physical and psychological torture he had experienced inside the system.

  As Xie’s testimony made headlines worldwide, China’s RSDL was not widely known until that point. Many other lawyers, alongside Xie, who were also placed into the RSDL system around the same time, have helped to slowly expose it as more victims came forth willing to speak about the reality behind those four letters.

  The Dual Rise of Xi Jinping and RSDL

  The RSDL system was put into place as Xi Jinping took power, and it has expanded in scope and size alongside the leader’s growing control over Chinese society.

  RSDL allows the police to take any target(s) off the street, place them inside solitary confinement at secret locations, hold them incommunicado, and deny their family or anyone else knowledge of their whereabouts. It is essentially legalized kidnapping, and the United Nations has stated as much, if in more diplomatic language.

  

  Around the time of the Winter Olympics in Beijing this year, court data (some of which are available online in a database hosted by China’s Supreme Court) revealed that RSDL remains extensively used. During the pandemic, against all odds, its use increased even more. The RSDL may now have claimed as many as 100,000 victims, the equivalent of 150 Guantanamo Bays.

  The first known victim, Zhu Chengzhi, was put in the RSDL on Jan. 4, 2013, within the first three days the system was first put into use. Zhu happens to be from the same province as Mao Zedong, a man to whom Xi is often compared. Zhu would later claim another distinction; in mid-2018, he became the first known victim to be placed into the system a second time.

  It wasn’t always like that. In the same year that Zhu became RSDL’s first victim, there were close to 1,000 victims nationwide. At the time, RSDL was primarily used in exceptional circumstances; for example, when an individual couldn’t be arrested due to illness or detention made it challenging to carry out an investigation. But gradually, the lack of oversight allowed the Chinese police to abuse the RSDL system.

  By the time the “709” crackdown started in 2015, a nationwide campaign that targeted human rights lawyers, the use of RSDL had grown significantly. A year or two later, sources showed that local police started using the system indiscriminately against those charged with minor and regular crimes.

  

  With RSDL, the Chinese police have expanded their power significantly and in a way that undermines more or less every basic rights one has come to expect. Those placed into RSDL cannot be held in detention centers, police stations, or anything deemed a “case-handling area.” Instead, police can use either custom-built facilities, for example, secret jails and renovated rooms in controlled facilities such as guest houses, training centers, etc.

  Once taken into RSDL, one simply disappears.

  To make matters worse, a victim can be held under the system for six months. Once inside the RSDL, the law states that individuals must be kept in solitary confinement and in facilities designed to protect them from self-harm. In short, suicide-padded, solitary confinement cells.

  

  This absolute power that RSDL affords police over its victims has not been lost on local police forces, who have taken up the use of RSDL with enthusiasm, which would explain its rapidly expanding deployment in recent years.

  How One Man’s Testimony Exposed the Realities of RSDL

  Xie’s testimony was the first detailed account of what goes on inside RSDL and revealed why it had become the preferred tool of the Chinese authorities. Why detain (bound by supervision and regulation) an individual when they can instead disappear (and act with impunity)?

  For Xie, it began like many other days. One morning, he had left to travel out of town to represent a group of farmers over a land dispute.

  

  “There was nothing different about this time. Like before, he left for work,” his wife, Chen Guiqiu, told this author.

  Two days later, while he stayed at a hotel out of town, he was awoken before daybreak by a large group of both plain-clothed and uniformed officers who took him away. Within 24 hours, Xie was officially placed under RSDL, and authorities told him: “Your only right is to obey,” according to author Michael Caster.

  In reality, the police can do anything under RSDL, short of killing a person, as they have six months of total control over their victim.

  A doctor attending to those who disappeared under RSDL put it plainly once: “Don’t let them die. A dead person would create big problems. Someone who is only injured doesn’t matter,” according to a report by Human Rights Watch.

  Six months of torture would follow. Through it all, interrogations, which often occurred while the victim was shackled to a tiger chair, would happen frequently. At some point, Xie thought some 40 different people had interrogated him. He was deprived of sleep and spent up to 20 hours a day on the “dangling stool.” It is a small, narrow, high stool where the victim’s legs cannot reach the floor. Slowly, over hours, blood gets cut off from the legs, causing intense, crippling pain. This would be alternated with being kicked, kneed, punched, or hung from the ceiling and beaten unconscious.

  Death threats were common. According to Caster, one person, a middle-class, white-collar IT engineer, was threatened before even arriving at the custom-built RSDL facility in southern Beijing. He was told: “We are crossing the mountains. If you want to come back alive, you should think well about what you tell us.”

  Of course, not everyone suffers the same abuses. A young man from northeastern Dongbei—China’s rust belt—said he was stripped naked in his cold cell, with extra guards brought into the room, and then told to stand on one leg and sing the Chinese national anthem.

  Xie might have avoided the same fate as Zhu, who was taken into RSDL a second time, but that is precisely what happened to fellow lawyer Chang Weiping not long before the police took Xie away.

  Chang spent nearly half a year inside RSDL before being arrested; he is now awaiting trial. So far, no one knows what Chang has had to go through.

  

  Raising Awareness of RSDL

  Many lawyers, journalists, non-governmental organization (NGO) workers, and others who work in sensitive fields and are often targeted by authorities were oblivious to the system for quite some time. Those who heard about RSDL often thought it was a mild form of detention, something less severe.

  When co-workers of Wang Quanzhang, another well-known rights lawyer, learned that he had been placed into RSDL instead of being arrested, they felt relief and thought it was a good sign. I was one of those colleagues with that very same thought.

  For better or worse, those days are long gone within China’s rights defense community. RSDL has become as feared a tool as they come. As what goes on inside leaks out, the community has been given a wake-up call. The worse the stories that leak out, the more RSDL terrifies the larger community. It has, in effect, become a tool of political terror.

  Wang Yu, a lawyer, didn’t know much about RSDL until she was held in a secret jail for six months. Her husband, Bao, a local activist, went through the same ordeal. But torture wasn’t enough to break them.

  Police went further and threatened to arrest the couple’s then-teenage son, Bao Mengmeng. He made headlines worldwide when he was captured by Chinese police inside Burma (commonly known as Myanmar), alongside two activists trying to smuggle him out of China after his parents had been disappeared. Those two activists were taken back to China and likely placed into RSDL, while Mengmeng spent about two years under police custody until 2018.

  The True Scope of China’s Use of Disappearances via RSDL

  In 2018, the United Nations Human Rights Council condemned China’s RSDL system and called for its complete abolishment. However, until early 2020, there had been no attempts to figure out the extent to which the system was used. That changed with a small report, a data analysis from the NGO Safeguard Defenders, which showed how it is possible to track the use of the system—by using China’s public database on verdicts.

  Now, some two years later and after a new round of research from the database China Judgments Online, more information on the scope and scale of the system can be presented—and it is grim reading. As with any statistics in China, the data is flawed at best. In addition, thousands of verdicts mentioning RSDL use have been removed from the database, and more are disappearing almost every day as the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) tries to hide such information.

  Despite that, and using knowledge derived from detailed studies on how RSDL cases are published, or not published, even such studies carried out by pro-CCP legal scholars in China, one can get a strong idea of how the RSDL system has developed.

  

  As clearly indicated by the U.N. in its condemnation of the RSDL system, its use often constitutes enforced disappearances, as the location of the victim is kept secret. Torture is rampant, and in addition, using solitary confinement for prolonged periods for interrogation purposes is in itself an act of torture.

  This qualifies China’s use of RSDL as a crime against humanity on at least two points, if proven to be systematic or widespread, according to the aforementioned author Michael Caster, who is also an international law analyst and co-founder of Safeguard Defenders.

  Furthermore, the consistent year-by-year data available on RSDL use, Safeguard Defenders spokesperson Laura Harth says, shows beyond doubt that it is both systematic and widespread.

  For 2020, the last year for which more complete data exists, the RSDL system reached new heights, with some 15,000 new victims that year alone. For 2021, the figure remains high, at over 10,000, yet it may be too early to properly assess the data. By now, the system is likely to have seen anywhere from 85,000 to 115,000 victims.

  The real problem with the aforementioned data is that they only scratch the surface. Many of those named in this article did not go on trial and were released often “under bail.” Such cases simply won’t show up in the database or anywhere else. It is impossible to know how much of the iceberg we are seeing in the data above, but most likely a big part is underwater.

  RSDL Is Here to Stay, May Expand Beyond China’s Borders

  The growing awareness of the CCP’s use of “hostage diplomacy” has centered on RSDL. Just like families are denied knowledge of victims’ whereabouts, so are foreign governments when their citizens are placed into the system. Whether it is British Lee Bo who was kidnapped in Hong Kong, Swede Gui Minhai who was kidnapped in Thailand, Canadians Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor, or American basketball player Jeff Harper, among others, they were all quickly placed into the RSDL system.

  With a more aggressive communist China—more willing to detain foreign citizens to get what it wants—every indicator points toward foreigners becoming a more common target for RSDL.

  

  Worse yet, according to Harth, is “the deafening silence from Western governments about the system and its rapid expansion. … The complete lack of any political cost imposed on the Chinese Communist Party for engaging in what is clearly yet another crime against humanity sends a clear-cut message to other authoritarian governments, especially in Southeast and Central Asia” and “who study China’s methods to silence dissent,” that may adopt similar “legalized” forms of disappearances.

  Even though disappearances never went away, since its heyday in the 1960s and 1970s, it has become an anomaly and was used mostly on an ad-hoc basis, as it had become a crime, like torture, considered so heinous that even the worst dictatorships at least pretended to not engage in it.

  With China’s “legalization” of disappearances and normalizing it by expanding its use to mass scale, the international human rights system stands before yet another challenge: how to fight back against such normalization.

  “How many other countries can adopt similar systems until the norm is broken?” said Caster. “Will we see it spreading to other parts of the world, moving from authoritarian to authoritarian-leaning or ‘illiberal democracies’”?

  There is far more at stake here than “merely” the abusive treatment of Chinese human rights activists.

  With stronger pressure from the central government to maintain stability, lawyer Wang Quanzhang believes local governments are encouraged to use any means necessary, and RSDL is an easy, yet very powerful tool for just that purpose. It took a long time and ever-mounting criticism to get the CCP to abolish the reeducation through labor system. But it may take a lot more to get the CCP to abolish the RSDL system.

  Until then, RSDL will continue to expand. It will be used to destroy Chinese civil society and, sooner or later, start spreading beyond China’s own borders.

  *  *  *

  Peter Dahlin is the founder of the NGO Safeguard Defenders and the co-founder of the Beijing-based Chinese NGO China Action (2007–2016). He is the author of “Trial By Media,” and contributor to “The People’s Republic of the Disappeared.” He lived in Beijing from 2007, until detained and placed in a secret jail in 2016, subsequently deported and banned.

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 04/04/2022 – 23:00

• Charging Tesla May Have Caused Australian House Fire, Killed Family Cat
  Charging Tesla May Have Caused Australian House Fire, Killed Family Cat

  Stop us if you’ve heard this story before: a Tesla spontaneously combusts and causes tons of collateral damage in destroying surrounding property. While we don’t know about you, the story sure sounds familiar to us – it feels like we’ve written it dozens of times over the last few years.

  The latest example comes from Australia, where a home was “partially destroyed” and a “family cat left dead” after it caught fire. The incident took place in Sydney and the blaze “could have been started by a charging Tesla”, according to News.au.

  

  The fire first started in the attached garage to a house in Southwest Sydney, police said. 

  A firefighter at the scene told News.au: “The fire destroyed the garage and two vehicles inside. The fire has travelled through to the house and destroyed the kitchen.”

  

  Forensic examination of the premises is set to begin this week. 

  “Early reports” are suggesting that a charging Tesla may have started the blaze, News.au wrote. “A family cat has been killed and a home destroyed,” they wrote.

  We’ll monitor developments in this story this week…

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 04/04/2022 – 22:40

• Fed Just Getting Started As Economy About To Slow
  Fed Just Getting Started As Economy About To Slow

  By Simon White, Bloomberg Markets Live commentator and analyst

  The minutes from the Fed’s meeting in March, released on Wednesday, is likely to be the most tradeable event in a week fairly light on data. More FOMC members are advocating for 50bps hikes, with Mary Daly, President of the San Francisco Fed, in an interview on Sunday recommending a 50bps hike in May. The minutes will give further information on the likelihood this happens, and also more colour on the projected path for balance-sheet contraction. There is currently ~80% chance the Fed does lift rates by 50bps in May, and there are now over eight 25bps hikes priced in over the remaining six meetings of 2022.

  It seems, though, that the Fed is just gearing up its tightening as the economy is about to slow. Friday saw the release of the ISM manufacturing survey. The ratio of the new orders and inventory subcomponents of the survey slipped lower, closer to the critical value of one. This ratio gives a good lead on U.S. industrial production and indicates growth in the U.S. is set to slow quite sharply through the rest of the year. Unemployment will follow suit and begin rising, posing a problem for the Fed later in year. Suffice to say their zeal for tightening may fade somewhat when growth is looking shaky, and political pressure on dealing with inflation eases after the mid-terms in November.

  

  In Europe, we also get the minutes from the ECB’s March meeting. The ECB is in a bigger quandary than the Fed where the economy and inflation are more sensitive to energy prices. Last week saw another big rise in Europe’s inflation rate, to 7.5% y/y, driven by a huge 12.5% m/m rise in energy prices. Growth in Europe is set to slow faster than in the U.S., especially as China struggles to get on top of its Covid situation. The weakening of the yen will also be an unwelcome development, and may prompt a more significant easing from China.

  The Fed and the ECB are likely to underdeliver on rate-hike expectations as growth concerns resurface and inflation begins to slow. However, that will only fan the flames for a resurgence in inflation, possibly larger than the current spike. Then, they will have no choice but to deliver the sort of rate hikes that make the pips squeeze. No-one would envy being a central banker in the coming months and years.

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 04/04/2022 – 22:20

• White House Won't Rule Out Pardon For Hunter, James Biden
  White House Won’t Rule Out Pardon For Hunter, James Biden

  The White House won’t rule out granting pardons to Hunter Biden or James Biden, the son and brother of President Joe Biden, as investigations over their international dealings heat up.

  

  “That’s not a hypothetical I’m going to entertain,” White House communications director Kate Bedingfield told reporters last week when asked during the daily press briefing. “I don’t have anything to add from this podium.”

  Bedingfield was reluctant to address any aspect of the Hunter Biden story, after CNN, The Washington Post, and the New York Times recently published stories about the federal tax probe into Hunter Biden and his foreign business deals.

  When asked additional questions about Hunter Biden and the president’s brother James Biden, Bedingfield would only reply, “I don’t have anything further to add from this podium.” –Breitbart

  A reporter asks Kate Bedingfield if Biden “might use his pardon or commutation power” for Hunter Biden:

  “That’s not a hypothetical I’m going to entertain.” pic.twitter.com/cS9vMe53he

  — The Post Millennial (@TPostMillennial) March 31, 2022

  https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

  Two weeks ago, the New York Times confirmed Hunter Biden’s controversial laptop exists, and is legit – and confirmed several previously reported aspects of the story, including correspondence between Hunter and his business partner Devon Archer, both of whom served on the board Ukrainian energy giant Burisma.

  Contained on the laptop were a trove of emails, text messages, photographs and financial documents.

  Last week, the Washington Post and CNN piled on – with the post reporting on Hunter’s “multimillion-dollar deals with a Chinese energy company,” and CNN running a blistering segment and reporting that the federal investigation into Hunter is ‘heating up.’

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 04/04/2022 – 22:00

• Exxon Says Q1 2022 Profits Could Be $2 Billion More Than Q4 2021
  Exxon Says Q1 2022 Profits Could Be $2 Billion More Than Q4 2021

  After the bell on Monday, Exxon told investors in a filing that its first quarter profits could wind up exceeding $9 billion, mainly helped along by the rising price of oil. 

  The company said that between $1.9 billion and $2.3 billion in fourth quarter profit was due to the change in the price of crude. It also estimated about $400 million in additional profit as a result of gas-price changes. 

  The company said its filing was to offer “perspective” about market and other “planned factors” about its upcoming quarterly report, expected toward the end of the month. It warned that these figures were not an estimate, MarketWatch pointed out. 

  The company noted that Q1 results could have been as much as $2 billion higher than Q4 2021, when the company posted earnings of $8.8 billion. 

  But the company’s massive earnings don’t come without potential risks, as Bloomberg noted Monday. Those risks include Democrats in the House who are looking for oil companies to “immediately halt dividends and share buybacks until the war’s conclusion” in Ukraine. 

  

  Politicians have been scolding oil and gas companies for a number of things that the industry had no hand in, including prices rising due to the war, prices rising due to the U.S.’s constrained supply of oil and alleged “profit gouging” that is simply margin expansion as a result of higher output pricing. 

  The same politicians that fail to understand the basic economics behind the industry are also in the midst of trying to figure out a way to bring oil prices lower. President Biden warned last week of “of punishing financial penalties for companies slow-walking projects involving federally owned oil prospects,” Bloomberg wrote. 

  Democrats took out their ire on Exxon and three other explorers for spending $44 billion on buybacks and dividends last year. We guess politicians won’t be happy until the companies go back to running at massive losses, like they did after the government shut down the economy at the onset of Covid. 

  House Oversight Committee Chair Carolyn B. Maloney and Environment Subcommittee Chair Ro Khanna are leading the charge against the oil industry. 

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 04/04/2022 – 21:40

• Is Ford's Truck Sales' Slump The Start Of The "Buyer's Strike" In Autos?
  Is Ford’s Truck Sales’ Slump The Start Of The “Buyer’s Strike” In Autos?

  We couldn’t help but notice that Ford Motor’s sales of gas-guzzling vehicles plunged in the first quarter compared with last year. This could be the start of demand destruction as consumers gravitate to more fuel-efficient cars or sit on the sidelines. Low inventory from semiconductor shortages, soaring fuel costs, and higher interest rates could be creating the perfect storm of a ‘buyer’s strike.’ 

  Ford Motor’s first-quarter sales of new US vehicles tumbled 17.1% from a year ago to 432,132 vehicles. Auto website Edmunds.com said sales were in line with expectations. In March, the Detroit-based auto manufacturer sold 159,328 vehicles across all brands, a 26% plunge from a year ago, which coincided with record-high gas and diesel prices at the pump following the invasion of Ukraine. 

  

  Compared with industry peers, Ford’s quarterly sales were worse on a percentage basis than Stellantis and Toyota but not as bad as General Motors. 

  Ford continued to blame semiconductor chip shortages on the sales woes for the quarter. 

  “I think the global semiconductor chip shortage continues to create some challenges for Ford and the industry. But keep in mind the industry wasn’t experiencing quite the same chip challenges last year as it’s having this year,” Erich Merkle, head of US sales analysis.

  By model, sales of SUVs, trucks, cargo vans, and sports cars in the quarter took a hit. 

  • F-Series down 31% to 140,701
  • Ranger down 27% to 17,639
  • Transit down 37.3% to 17,211
  • Ford Mustang down 19% to 13,986
  • Explorer down 34.5% to 42,736
  • Expedition down 56.3% to 9,718

  The Bronco Sport, Ford Edge, and all-electric Mustang Mach-E recorded growth. 

  • Bronco Sport saw a 24.5% growth to 29,089 vehicles
  • Ford Edge saw 19.2% growth to 26,412 vehicles
  • All-electric Mustang Mach-E saw 1.8% growth to 6,734 vehicles

  Record high fuel prices at the pump could be swaying consumer behavior on future car purchases. Remember when fuel prices spiked ahead of the 2008 crash, and people gravitated away from their Suburbans and H2 Hummers to more economical hybrid electric vehicles, such as the Toyota Prius. 

  Morgan Stanley analyst Adam Jonas points out what could be the emergence of a “buyer’s strike” in autos. He said the US car market is “not a car market at all. It’s a truck market.”  

  Jonas penned a note Friday that, per his conversation with auto dealers, initial signs of demand destruction could materialize in lower-income customers buying “gas-guzzling vehicles.” He said rising fuel prices and low inventory at dealerships might sideline consumers. 

  Jonas also believes that inflation and rising gas prices would help spur a buyer’s strike. 

  So is this the point where consumers give up on purchasing trucks and SUVs because they can’t afford to pay for record-high fuel? If so, what do people buy? Well, for one thing, they can’t afford Teslas because they’re too expensive, and prices are being consistently hiked due to rising industrial metal prices for batteries. 

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 04/04/2022 – 21:20

• Clinton Campaign, DNC Are Paying FEC Fines In Effort To Bury Story: Kash Patel
  Clinton Campaign, DNC Are Paying FEC Fines In Effort To Bury Story: Kash Patel

  Authored by Masooma Haq and Jan Jekielek via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

  The lead investigator for the House Intelligence Committee’s 2018 probe into the FBI’s investigation of alleged Trump–Russia collusion, Kash Patel, said the fact that the Hillary Clinton campaign is paying a penalty to Federal Election Commission (FEC) is an admittance of guilt.

  Clinton and DNC are doing so to bury the narrative and prevent more media coverage of these illegal activities, said Patel.

  “I think the public sees what that is. It’s their way of burying the narrative, because if they contested what happens, more media coverage, more people start looking into these things,” Patel said.

  “So the Hillary Clinton campaign is not contesting it, they’re paying the fine. It’s basically admitting that they did this and they’re out is: ‘we just don’t want a protracted legal deal, as if the Hillary Clinton campaign and DNC ever shied away from taking something or someone to court,” Patel added.

  

  Clinton’s campaign and the DNC agreed to pay a combined $113,000 to the FEC, according to documents made public on March 30, after the commission found probable cause that the entities violated federal law by describing payments that ultimately went to the Fusion GPS research group as going toward legal services and consulting.

  “It shows them how wrong they were to violate the law and spend political campaign dollars on hit job, opposition research pieces for then-candidate Trump, all of which, [to] remind the audience, was then used intentionally by the FBI—even though they knew it was false—to go to a federal secret court and surveil a presidential candidate and later a president of the United States.”

  The FEC, which is responsible for overseeing federal elections, including the presidential election, found that the Hillary Clinton campaign broke FEC rules about how donations can be used.

  “What we knew when we ran the Russiagate investigation, Chairman Nunes and I, we exposed that the Hillary Clinton campaign paid for the Steele dossier, an opposition research hit job. We had proven that some years ago,” said Patel.

  “What the Coolidge Reagan Foundation did … based on our investigation, said ‘wait a second FEC, you as a political campaign cannot spend political dollars launching opposition research, false or otherwise,’” said Patel.

  Dan Backer, an attorney who lodged the complaint with the election commission against the Clinton campaign and the DNC, told The Epoch Times that it’s the first time Clinton “has actually been held accountable for misconduct,” calling the fines “a great step for accountability.”

  “So they fined them, that’s the FEC’s job. And the Hillary Clinton campaign could have said: ‘We disagree with your finding. We’re going to go to court.’ What did the Hillary Clinton campaign do? … They agreed to the finding of probable cause by the FEC, which means they’re basically agreeing that it happened. … Like we’ve always said, ‘follow the money.’”

  Patel said while the FEC fine is an important step toward holding the Clinton campaign and other key players involved in the Russia disinformation campaign accountable, the true victory, he hopes, will be indictments made by U.S. special counsel John Durham.

  In October 2020, Durham was appointed by the Dept. of Justice as special counsel to investigate the FBI’s handling of Russiagate. His recent filings revealed that internet traffic at Trump Tower and the White House was accessed to fabricate ties between Trump and Russia.

  The filing, which was submitted late on Feb. 11 in connection with the indictment of Michael Sussmann, a former attorney to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign, reveals that Rodney Joffe, a tech executive who was working with Sussmann, had exploited access to domain name system (DNS) internet traffic pertaining to the Executive Office of the President of the United States (EOP) as well as Trump Tower and Donald Trump’s Central Park West apartment building.

  “This FEC fine is another step towards accountability. But [for] me as a former federal prosecutor, maybe I’m biased, but the ultimate step of accountability which the American public is waiting for,comes in the form of indictments, especially to those people who violated their oath of office,” Patel said.

  The Epoch Times reached out to the Clinton campaign for comment.

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 04/04/2022 – 21:00

• Retail, Freight And Now Semis All On The Verge Of Recession
  Retail, Freight And Now Semis All On The Verge Of Recession

  One week ago, RH (the stock-buyback/short-squeeze mogul formerly known as Restoration Hardware) reported dismal earnings which sent its stock plunging, but it was the company’s earnings call that shocked Wall Street: in a nutshell, the company disclosed that it had seen a sharp deceleration in customer activity over just the last several days, prompting CEO Gary Friedman to give an ominous assessment of the overall macro situation.

  While first quarter sales and margin strand to remain healthy due to the ongoing relief of our backlog, we have experienced softening demand in the first quarter that coincided with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in late February and the market volatility that followed. We believe it is prudent to remain conservative until demand trends return to normal and — we are providing the following outlook for the first quarter of 2022.”

  What was remarkable about Friedman’s admission is that whereas until now, management commentary had mostly lamented soaring commodity prices and supply-chain weakness, which management had then successfully passed on to consumers, this was a direct admission of tangible weakness in consumer end-demand. What was more ominous is that, unlike the Biden admin, Friedman did not blame the soaring inflation and the sudden bout of economic weakness on Putin. In fact, as the following excerpt from his earnings call commentary revealed, the CEO saw broad-based weakness in virtually every aspect of the economy.

  … It’s probably one of the most difficult guides since 2008 and ’09, because we — we’re right in the middle of this disruption from Ukraine and Russia, which I think — I don’t think it’s all Ukraine and Russia. I think it’s triggered a greater awareness. It’s like someone rang the bell, and everybody paid attention, and then all of a sudden, everybody started talking. All of a sudden, the Fed’s off to the races and that creates concern. You’ve got housing prices at all-time highs. I mean, is it sustainable? I don’t know for how long; doesn’t make sense on what’s happening in the housing sector and other places. And you’ve got inflation like I’ve never seen.

  Now I was telling people, when Yellen said, we’re going back to 2%, we were just signing our new freight contracts, ocean freight contracts. I just wonder if the Fed has picked up the phone and called a business person and said, hi, what do you think is happening with inflation? How is ocean rates? How is this? How is that?

  I mean I don’t think anybody really understands what’s coming from an inflation point of view, because either businesses are going to make a lot less money or they’re going to raise their prices. And I don’t think anybody really understands how high prices are going to go everywhere. In restaurants, in cars and everything. And I think it’s going to outrun the consumer. And I think we’re going to be in some tricky space. So everything is kind of happening at once. And I think you got to prepare for war. I mean if you’re going into a very difficult, unpredictable time, you just got to be super flexible, you’ve got to be able to improvise, adapt, overcome and kind of be ready for anything.

  And I don’t mean that by playing defense. I mean it’s by playing offense, but it’s — I wouldn’t call it happy days right now. I’d call it pensive days. Be ready. And when we play like that, we usually have our best outcome. When we get overly optimistic, we have a higher likelihood to wind up in the ditch and get ahead of ourselves. So — but if everything, if the war in Ukraine ends and inflation slows down some miraculous way, I don’t know, everybody can sign new freight contracts because, I mean, most of the world all signed new freight contracts. Two years ago, price of the container for us went from 2,400 to 4,800? I’m not going to tell you what it just went to. But just let’s say that looked like a nice increase.

  So either people are going to do stupid things like take quality down to make their goods look like it’s better value or they’re going to have to take prices up and where they won’t take prices up and they’ll hurt — their margin profile is going to change. But it’s not just us, it’s everybody I know in every industry. And I just don’t think it’s like — again, I don’t want to scare everybody. But I talk about them, like there’s the scene in The Big Short, where everybody is in that ballroom and the guy from Bear Stearns or someone is up there, and he’s saying how they are going to buy back $1 billion of their stock, and then one guy on his BlackBerry, goes, can I ask the question, sir? In the 20 minutes that you’ve been talking, your stock is down like 55%. And everybody ran out of the room.

  The call, which took place after the close on Wednesday, sent RH stock crashing and unleashed a pall over the broader retail sector. However, the recession blues quickly spread just 48 hours later when Craig Fuller, the CEO of Freight Waves, a supply-chain logistics expert and hardly the hyperbolic type, warned that a “freight recession is imminent“, commentary which sent the transports index plummeting on Friday and which continued to depress the space on Monday as well. 

  … I wish the answers were different. I would prefer to say the U.S. trucking market was robust and the expansion will continue throughout 2022. But I can’t. Since I wrote the piece about the bloodbath, FreightWaves SONAR’s tender data continues to reinforce the perspective of a declining freight market.  

  Tender rejections are the best indicator into real-time supply/demand in the truckload sector. The data comes from actual electronic load requests – “tenders” in the truckload contract market.

  A high rejection rate means that trucking companies have more options to choose from. A low rejection rate means carriers have fewer options in freight to pick from. Since this measures actual load activity and not load board posts or searches, it tells us what the market is actually doing.

  And since it measures the willingness of carriers that are contracted to accept or to reject a load they have a contracted rate for, if the rejection rate declines, it suggests capacity is loosening.

  And so, the yield curve inverts and we immediately get management chatter about recession hitting retail and freight (i.e., transports), two of the most critical sectors propping up the US economy. Well, we can now add the beating heart of the tech sector – semiconductors – to the list too.

  Last week, the chairman of Taiwan Semiconductor said that consumer electronics demand is showing signs of slowing amid geopolitical uncertainties and COVID-related lockdowns in China,  The slowdown is emerging in areas “such as smartphones, PCs, and TVs, especially in China, the biggest consumer market,” TSMC Chairman Mark Liu said.

  Liu also warned that the cost of components and materials are rising sharply, pushing up production costs for tech and chip companies.

  “Such pressure could eventually be passed on to consumers,” Liu said on the sidelines of an industry event where he was speaking in his capacity as chair of the Taiwan Semiconductor Industry Association.

  When TSMC speaks, or worse warns, everyone pays attention: a key Apple supplier, TSMC is the world’s biggest contract chipmaker and a barometer of global electronics demand. Taiwan’s semiconductor industry is the world’s second-largest chip economy by revenue, behind only the U.S.

  “Everyone in the industry is worried about rising costs across the overall supply chain… The semiconductor industry already and directly experienced that cost increase,” Liu said, adding that the industry is also concerned about macroeconomic uncertainties this year.

  And yet, despite the dire warning of slowing end-demand, TSMC – like so many of its peers – refused to accept what the new reality means for its top line, and instead has chosen to assume that the chip fab giant can just keep passing on all the soaring costs to a consumer that has already been tapped out: Liu said that TSMC is not likely to change its growth target and capital expenditure this year.

  “Despite the slowdown in some areas, we still see robust demand in automotive applications and high-performance computing as well as internet of things-related devices,” he said. “We still cannot meet our customers’ demand with our current capacity. We will reorganize and prioritize orders for those areas that still see healthy demand.” At least until those areas fall into the pre-recessionary void too.

  Why does all of this matter? Because with stocks still just shy of all time highs – following the recent torrid rally – we get retail, freight and semis all issuing very loud, and very troubling warnings that what is dead ahead is something, in the parlance of the RH CEO, straight our of The Big Short, a movie which we are confident he picked for obvious reasons. More importantly, it all happens within hours of the 2s10s yield curve inverting…

  

  … which is also why Wall Street has spent so much in the past few days trying to convince anyone who still bothers to listen that a recession is not imminent… why would be lovely, if the companies themselves weren’t telling us otherwise.

   

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 04/04/2022 – 20:40

• Death Of Denial – Part II
  Death Of Denial – Part II

  By Russell Clark of Capital Flows and Asset Markets, part II of a three-part series. (Part 1 here)

  My investing career started in the 1990s, and after seeing the Asian Financial Crisis, the dot-com bust, the GFC, the Euro-crisis, and various emerging market crises, I paid very careful attention to capital flows and asset markets (hence the title of this substack). Since 2016, I have felt markets have changed. And I have tried to understand this change, so I could judge how much risk I was taking. I came up with two reasons for why markets were trading so differently. The first reason was the prolonged period of commodity deflation had allowed central banks to do whatever they wanted. The second was that moving from banks pricing market risk to clearinghouses pricing risk had profoundly changed markets. Both seemed to be good reasons to me, but the Russian invasion of Ukraine were ideal circumstances to test these theories. If correct, they should have led to severe weakness in equities. That did not happen so we need to look elsewhere.

  Long time readers will know I believe that Japan occupies a special role in the financial world. Uniquely among all nations, the Japanese government, households and corporates are all net lenders to the world. What is far more typical is for most countries to have only one or none of the sectors being a lender to the world. So as the previous post showed, the US private and public sector are net borrowers from the world.

  

  In contrast, Japan has run a very large surplus NIIP in both private and public NIIP. And these flows have accelerated as its bubble economy deflated during the 1990s and 2000s. So this would argue that Japan is the main provider of capital globally.

  

  I had assumed that a spike in food price would cause financial distress, as the move higher in 1996, 2007 and 2011 had preceded the Asian Financial Crisis, the GFC and the Eurocrisis respectively.

  

  The big difference between now and the previous spikes in commodity prices is that BOJ was trying to normalize interest rates to some degree. So in 1997, 3 month TIBOR rates touched 1% up form 0.6%, before the Asian Financial Crisis. The BOJ also kept 3m TIBOR rates above 0% until 2016, when markets have become more distorted in my view. One nice feature of this analysis is that BOJ also tried to raise interest rates in 2000, when the Dot Com bust occurred but was a period of falling commodity prices.

  

  Finally, the weakness of Asian currencies can be explained away by looking at the performance of Asian currencies in Yen terms. “Risk off” can be seen when ADXY is falling, such as in 1998, 2002, 2008 and 2016. Recent moves of ADXY in Yen terms are clearly “risk on”.

  

  Moving from looking at the Federal Reserve policy as driving markets, which is increasingly hawkish, to the BOJ, which remains resolutely dovish, clears up much of the mystery of recent market moves in my view. The big question is when does the BOJ get hawkish?

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 04/04/2022 – 20:20

• "It's Time For Me To Go" – Hong Kong Leader Carrie Lam Won't Seek Another Term
  “It’s Time For Me To Go” – Hong Kong Leader Carrie Lam Won’t Seek Another Term

  After presiding over one of the most tumultuous periods in Hong Kong’s modern history – during which Beijing reasserted its control over the city following a massive pro-democracy protest movement (in defiance of international law) before its COVID mortality rate skyrocketed to one of the highest in the world – Hong Kong President Carrie Lam announced Monday that she would not be seeking re-election following her five-year tenure at the city’s helm.

  

  According to the SCMP, Lam – derided by detractors as the “piglet” to President Xi’s “Winnie the Pooh” – cited family reasons for her reason to step down as she announced her decision during her daily press conference on Monday.

  “They think it is time for me to go home,” she said. “Family is the most important part of me.”

  She thanked her loved ones, her team, her Executive Council, lawmakers and the central government for their support during her tenure…

  “I will complete my five-year term as chief executive on June 30, and officially conclude my 42-year career in government,” Lam told reporters at the 11am conference, usually meant for updates on the city’s pandemic management.

  …while insisting that her decision to step down had “nothing” to do with her performance on the job.

  “It’s not a question of evaluating my performance or the performance of the Hong Kong government in this term,” she added. “This is a question of my personal wish and aspirations. My personal wish and aspirations are entirely based on my family’s consideration.”

  Lam’s retirement has been a long time coming. It has been reported that she had informed Beijing of her wish to step down as far back as a year ago, during March of 2021, before that year’s annual session of the National People’s Congress. Unfortunately for her, she was apparently ordered to hold off until now.

  Monday’s announcement left No 2 government official Chief Secretary John Lee Ka-chiu has the clear front-runner.

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 04/04/2022 – 20:00

• Media 'Caught In A Cover-Up' Of Hunter Biden’s Laptop Story: Sen. Johnson
  Media ‘Caught In A Cover-Up’ Of Hunter Biden’s Laptop Story: Sen. Johnson

  Authored by Katabella Roberts via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

  Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) on April 3 claimed that some major media outlets have been “caught in a cover-up” regarding the Hunter Biden laptop story.

  

  Johnson’s remarks come shortly after The Washington Post and The New York Times published articles verifying and acknowledging the authenticity of Hunter Biden’s laptop, nearly two years after it was first reported by the New York Post shortly before the 2020 election.

  However, the New York Post’s reporting of the scandal was promptly suppressed by social media sites including Facebook and Twitter, the latter of which also locked the NY Post’s account for more than two weeks, citing the outlet’s alleged publication of “hacked material” as its justification.

  In an editorial titled “The Hunter Biden story is an opportunity for a reckoning,” The Washington Post blamed the reluctance among some media to publish the story on the possibility of it being one of the “unwitting tools of a Russian influence campaign in 2016” among other things.

  The Post’s editorial board also stressed that President Joe Biden himself had not “acted corruptly.”

  Johnson told Fox News Channel’s “Sunday Morning Futures” that the recent admissions by both The New York Times and The Washington Post prove “how complicit the media was” in concealing Hunter Biden’s laptop before the 2020 presidential election.

  “I really think what the New York Times and Washington Post stories prove is how complicit they have been and continue to be in the cover-up,” Johnson said. “And, you know, quite honestly, they’re not impartial. They are the defenders of the Democratic Party of the radical left. You know, The Washington Post learned a lot from their coverage of Nixon. When you get caught up in a cover-up—and that’s what happened, the media get caught up in a cover-up. They are caught with their lies.”

  Johnson said that some outlets had participated in “what they call a limited hangout or in [President Richard] Nixon’s case, a modified limited hangout. You’ve let out just enough information, just enough truth to try and get you by the moment.”

  A modified limited hangout is a public relations or propaganda technique in which the individual or official involved releases some information that was previously hidden, albeit still retaining important key facts, in an effort to prevent more important details from being exposed.

  According to former Central Intelligence Agency official Victor Marchetti, the technique results in the public being “so intrigued by the new information that it never thinks to pursue the matter further.”

  “We can’t allow our intelligence agencies, the Department of Justice, the FBI, or the media to get away with this,” Johnson said on Sunday. “This is serious business. This is incredible corruption at the highest levels of government and within our media.”

  “We are all being snookered by them. This has been a—from my standpoint—a massive diversionary operation to, you know, to try and take the American public’s attention away from their wrongdoing, their lies, their cover-ups.”

  The GOP senator added that “now, we have actual bank records that verify what we reported” and that Hunter Biden’s “laptop is obviously a treasure-trove of additional corroborating evidence as well.”

  According to a recent article for The Washington Post, which hired two security experts to authenticate what is purportedly Hunter Biden’s laptop, documents, and messages on the device, Biden pursued a deal with a Chinese Communist Party-linked emergency firm, CEFC China Energy, and its executives “paid $4.8 million to entities controlled by Hunter Biden and his uncle [James Biden].”

  Further emails related to his work for the Ukrainian gas company Burisma Holdings, for which he was a board member.

  Former President Donald Trump previously claimed that Joe Biden, while still vice president, threatened to withhold $1 billion from Ukraine unless a prosecutor investigating Burisma Holdings was ousted.

  White House chief of staff Ron Klain told ABC News’ “This Week” in an interview on Sunday that Biden believes his son didn’t break the law with regards to his overseas business ties in China, Ukraine, and other countries.

  “Of course, the president is confident that his son didn’t break the law,” Klain said.

  Biden himself has also stated that his son “did nothing wrong at Burisma.”

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 04/04/2022 – 19:40

• Beijing Dispatches Military To Shanghai As Expanded Lockdown Triggers More Unrest
  Beijing Dispatches Military To Shanghai As Expanded Lockdown Triggers More Unrest

  As local authorities expand what was supposed to be a staggered, nine-day lockdown in Shanghai (China’s most populous city and also its financial hub), the CCP has decided to send in the military as the backlash worsens in a city that has become a critical battleground in the government’s fight to legitimize its “Zero COVID” policy.

  After the city reported a record 9,000 COVID cases, the CCP announced the deployment of thousands of soldiers and military personnel to Shanghai in order for them to assist in the mandatory screening of all 25 million inhabitants (the latest in a seemingly interminable policy of mandatory testing). The next round of nucleic acid tests will begin Monday. The reinforcements include more than 2,000 military personnel and another 30,000 “medical workers”, per CNN.

  

  The BBC pointed out that the latest lockdown will be “particularly costly” for China’s economy – and for western companies like Tesla and Disney which have major bases of operations in the city (including Tesla’s Shanghai gigafactory).

  On top of this, Shanghai is a hub for semiconductor, electronics, car manufacturing and China’s financial services industry. It is also the world’s busiest shipping port.

  The CCP has struggled to meet the needs of the local population, which has grown restive in the face of shortages of essential goods like food and medicine. Cases of locals dying after being turned away from local hospitals for non-COVID-related illnesses have also rattled them.

  Xu Tianchen, China economist for the Economist Intelligence Unit, warned that short-term supply chain disruptions tied to the city’s lockdown could have a serious impact on China’s economy.

  “There will also be ripple effects elsewhere because of the interconnectedness between Shanghai and other regions of China, especially the manufacturing hub of the Yangtze River Delta,” he said.

  What’s more, consumer spending in a city known for its luxury storefronts has also fallen precipitously. Lost business at retailers, hotels, and restaurants could directly cost Shanghai 3.7% of its annual GDP.

  All of this threatens to undermine China’s target for the country’s GDP: the CCP has promised growth of 5.5% this year, but a growing number of analysts doubt that the government will achieve this goal (unless its resorts to even larger-than-normal distortions in its official economic data).

  Shanghai isn’t the only Chinese city to face mass lockdowns. Shenzhen, known as China’s technology hub, and the Province of Jilin, situated in China’s industrial heartland, have also faced lockdowns earlier in the year.

  But as President Xi has called for increasingly “targeted” COVID restrictions to minimize the blowback for residents, some have taken to the country’s heavily censored social media platforms to address the growing chorus of concerns, and to accuse the CCP of breaking its ‘social compact’ to take care of the population. Locals have been particularly incensed by the CCP’s decision to separate COVID positive children from their parents, triggering a wave of outrage that swept across China’s social media.

  Political pressure has been mounting on Shanghai authorities to both quell the outbreak and address the growing chorus of concerns from residents grappling with the costs and inconveniences of the stringent measures.

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 04/04/2022 – 19:20

• Mask-Wearing Has Left A Generation Of Toddlers Struggling With Speech And Social Skills
  Mask-Wearing Has Left A Generation Of Toddlers Struggling With Speech And Social Skills

  Authored by Paul Joseph Watson via Summit News,

  Lockdown restrictions, including adults wearing face masks, has left a generation of babies and toddlers struggling with speech and social skills, according to an official report.

  

  Inspectors working for Ofsted found that infants being surrounded by adults wearing face masks for significant periods of time over the last two years has damaged their learning and communication abilities.

  Those turning two “will have been surrounded by adults wearing masks for their whole lives and have therefore been unable to see lip movements or mouth shapes as regularly,” the report found.

  “Some providers have reported that delays to children’s speech and language development have led to them not socialising with other children as readily as they would have expected previously,” it added.

  The restrictions also left toddlers struggling with crawling, using the toilet independently and making friends.

  Delays in learning had also regressed some children to the stage where they needed help with basic tasks such as putting on their coats and blowing their noses.

  “I’m particularly worried about younger children’s development which, if left unaddressed, could potentially cause problems for primary schools down the line,” said chief inspector Amanda Spielman.

  We previously highlighted another study out of Germany which found that the reading ability of children has plummeted compared to pre-COVID times thanks to lockdown policies that led to the closure of schools.

  Speech therapist Jaclyn Theek said that mask wearing during the pandemic has caused a 364% increase in patient referrals of babies and toddlers.

  “They’re not making any word attempts and not communicating at all with their family,” she said, adding that symptoms of autism are also skyrocketing.

  A speech therapist says her clinic has seen a “364% increase in patient referrals of babies and toddlers”.

  “It’s very important kids do see your face to learn, so they’re watching your mouth.”

  What the hell have we done?!

  End this cruel insanity. pic.twitter.com/DN6J4yQfju

  — Darren Grimes (@darrengrimes_) January 26, 2022

  https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

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  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 04/04/2022 – 19:00

• Commodity Crucible: US Coal Hits Record High As French Power Prices Go Limit Up
  Commodity Crucible: US Coal Hits Record High As French Power Prices Go Limit Up

  If one pretends hard enough that the Ukraine war isn’t sending already record high commodity prices even higher, do commodity prices really rise? Unfortunately for much of the western world, the answer is yes, and not just oil and gasoline, but diesel. electricity, coal and even jet fuel.

  At a time when Europe is desperately trying to come up with some brilliant scheme to wean itself away from Russian energy supplies (spoiler alert: there is none), French supermarkets have joined a national effort to curb the country’s electricity consumption, as cold weather and nuclear reactor outages pushed domestic power prices to a 13-year high.

  The country’s largest retailer, Carrefour, said it was cutting power consumption Monday morning, heeding calls from France’s grid operator RTE to households and industries to reduce usage in order to tackle a surge in demand coupled with nuclear outages and colder weather. Carrefour told Bloomberg that it is using methods like “reducing heating in offices, and dimming lighting in the group’s 400 stores across the country.” Adding insult to injury, in a stunning twist, one which nobody can blame on Putin (but they can sure blame on Greta), Bloomberg writes that as many as 25 of state-run utility Electricite de France SA’s 56 nuclear reactors are offline, just as overnight temperatures in most of the country are set to fall below freezing.

  With a collapse in electricity production, power deliveries between 8 a.m. and 9 a.m. Paris time surged to as much as 2,987.89 euros ($3,286) per megawatt-hour, while the average price for the entire day settled at 551.43 euros on the Epex Spot SE’s day-ahead auction, the most since a record set in October 2009. It was also high enough to trigger an increase of the maximum upper price limit on power exchanges across Europe. 

  

  To be sure, France has an alternative to draconian power conservation: freezing. Households turned up electrical heating amid freezing temperatures across the country on Sunday night, which was the coldest for that period of the year since 1947, according to Meteo France. A return to warmer weather is expected Tuesday, with close to average temperatures seen, at least until the next cold snap.

  Meanwhile, as French power prices were trading limit up, the commodity crucible also hit the US where while oil was trading around $100 thanks to Biden’s desperate political gamble to dump a third of the US SPR ahead of the midterms in hopes of keeping gas prices low, U.S. coal prices topped $100 a ton for the first time in 13 years.

  While prices for coal from Central Appalachia surged 9% to $106.15 a ton last week, the highest since late 2008, prices in the Illinois Basin rose to $109.55, topping $100 for the first time in records dating to 2005. The surge matches increases around the world as the Ukraine war prompts users to seek alternatives to Russian coal, which accounted for almost 18% of global exports in 2020. That’s exacerbating a surge in demand that began last year as a global economic recovery from pandemic drove up electricity consumption.

  

  Prices in Central Appalachia and the Illinois basin are rising more than in other U.S. coal-producing regions because they have easier access to international markets. U.S. exports climbed 23% last year and are expected to increase another 3.3% this year as miners take advantage of record international prices.

  In its recent discussion of the record surge in coal prices, Bank of America writes that Newcastle coal prices surged to record highs, $440/t, in early March as chaos swept through global commodity markets in the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. While Russia is the world’s largest exporter of natural gas, it is also the world’s third-largest exporter of thermal coal, trailing only Indonesia and Australia. Last year Russia accounted for roughly 15% of the seaborne thermal coal market and shipped nearly 150 mn tons of thermal coal around the globe and made up roughly half of Europe’s coal imports. The disruption of Russian coal supply is just the latest in a wave of supply issues that have hounded the market since early last year.

  And yet, despite record prices last year, major thermal coal suppliers struggled to boost output due to a litany of issues including weather events, rail disruptions, Covid outbreaks, and equipment shortages. Then, for most of January, Indonesia, the world’s largest coal exporter, banned coal exports to combat low domestic stockpiles, sending Newcastle prices to over $220/t and leaving the seaborne market with little room to maneuver. Then, Russia invaded Ukraine at the end of February, which threatened further disruption to global coal supplies, launching Newcastle prices to well over $400/t before retreating some in recent weeks. Adding further flames to the coal fire, record-high European natural gas prices have incentivized near maximum coal generation in Europe. Despite the rally, thermal coal remains one of the cheapest MMBtu’s on the planet, with a gas equivalent cost of around $15/MMBtu, significantly cheaper than crude at $25/MMBtu or global natural gas near $35/MMBtu.

  Adding to the supply issues, Russia accounted for over 25% of the world’s high calorific value (CV) coal exports, which has driven high CV coal to record premiums over low quality coal. While an increase in Indonesian exports could help offset the lost tonnage from Russia, it won’t make up for the quality difference. With supply issues abounding, the market will have to balance through demand destruction. India, one of the world’s largest importers, has historically been a very price-sensitive buyer, and BofA expects imports to eventually decline this year to the lowest level since 2013.

  

  “The energy fallout from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine could last for a while,” Michelle Bloodworth, CEO of coal-power trade group America’s Power, told Bloomberg in an interview. “Coal is going to be needed for the foreseeable future.”

  Which is odd considering the past 4 years were spent by the environmentalists and their teenage god to wean the world away from coal. Almost as if all of that was one giant spectacle, and meanwhile reliance on coal only grew!

  

  But wait, the absurdity gets better: while U.S. power producers have reportedly been quote unquote shifting away from coal, consumption actually jumped last year – as in before the Ukraine war- as prices also increased for natural gas.

  The bottom line is that American consumers, already facing the highest inflation in four decades and paying higher utility bills, as food prices are surging and housing costs are up, are about to pay up even more and Biden will be scrambling to find even more creative ways to blame it all on Putin (which almost explains why the US appears so perplexingly interested in perpetuating the Ukraine war).

  The hilarious conclusion to this tragic story, however, comes from Bloomberg which notes that the rebound in coal comes as a United Nations-backed panel of climate scientists warned Monday that the world may be on track to warm at a pace that would painfully remake societies and life on the planet. In other words, the Ukraine war crisis is already being put to use by the same crony capitalists who will now be pushing very hard to greenlight the $150 trillion in spending (and QE) needed to usher in the “green” agenda (as described in “Here is The Hidden $150 Trillion Agenda Behind The “Crusade” Against Climate Change“). All they need is a strong enough deflationary crisis that transitions the current inflation-fighting posture to a world permitting nearly $5 trillion in annual QE. We are confident they will find it.

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 04/04/2022 – 18:40

• Florida Voter Registration: Republicans Overtake Democrats By 100,000
  Florida Voter Registration: Republicans Overtake Democrats By 100,000

  Authored by Patricia Tolson via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

  As the Aug. 23 Florida primary draws near, data released by the office of Gov. Ron DeSantis shows there are 100,000 more registered Republicans than Democrats in the Sunshine State.

  

  In November 2021, DeSantis announced that Florida—where Democrats held an advantage over Republicans of well over 260,000 voters when he took office in 2019—saw a net gain of over 300,000 new Republican voters.

  On Feb. 28, 2022, the Florida Department of State reported there were 5,135,377 registered Republicans and 5,045,849 registered Democrats, a difference of 89,528.

  But according to the new data released by the governor’s office, there are now 5,145,878 registered Republicans and 5,044,802 registered Democrats, a staggering difference of 101,076. More startling is the revelation that the historically blue stronghold of Miami-Dade County is losing Democratic voters. As of April 1, 2022, there were 585,882 registered Democrats in Miami-Dade, compared to 427,000 Republicans. At the end of 2021, Miami-Dade had 594,924 registered Democrats, a loss of more than 9,000 voters in three months.

  That’s a tumble of nearly 41,000 from the 635,842 registered Democrats in Miami-Dade at the end of 2020.

  In Hernando County, where Republicans have traditionally held a majority, the number of registered Democrats (40,262) has fallen to third place below Republicans (64,488) and “others” (41,595) for the first time in its nearly 180-year history.

  Florida was the No. 1 relocation destination for Americans in 2020, as The Epoch Times reported June 9, 2021. New York and California, both heavily Democratic, took first and second place in the contest for which states had the most people choosing to leave. In 2021, Florida fell to second place as the most popular relocation state behind Texas, according to data released by the U.S. Census Bureau.

  A number of factors have been cited by DeSantis to account for the influx of new residents.

  Florida has no state income tax and does not assess an estate tax, or an inheritance tax. It also has property taxes below the national average. However, the governor insists that what’s attracting people to Florida is his refusal to allow the rights of Florida’s residents—particularly parents—to be restricted by liberal ideologies and policies.

  DeSantis refused to allow extended lockdowns on schools and businesses in the wake of the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus, commonly known as the novel coronavirus, and he banned forced masking and critical race theory from public schools. In May 2021, he signed Senate Bill 2006, effectively banning vaccine passports. In July 2021, DeSantis signed the Parents’ Bill of Rights into law, providing parents with control of their child’s education, upbringing, and health care. And on Dec. 15, 2021, DeSantis announced the Stop the Wrongs to Our Kids and Employees (W.O.K.E.) Act, “a legislative proposal that will give businesses, employees, children, and families tools to fight back against woke indoctrination.”

  On June 15, 2021, The Epoch Times reported on the advice offered by Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd to those moving to Florida from blue states: “Do me a favor,” and “don’t vote the way the majority of the people voted from where you came, or you’ll have here what you had there. Guaranteed.”

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 04/04/2022 – 18:20

Digest powered by RSS Digest

• Which Nations Are On Russia's "Unfriendly" List?
  Which Nations Are On Russia’s “Unfriendly” List?

  On May 13, 2021, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed into law the List of Unfriendly Nations, which included the United States and the Czech Republic.

  On March 5, 2022, as Russia’s military operation in Ukraine progressed, the list was updated to include 45 more nations and jurisdictions.

  The countries and territories mentioned in the list have imposed or joined the sanctions against Russia.

  

  Source

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 04/04/2022 – 02:45

• European Union Unveils New Strategy To Become A Global Power
  European Union Unveils New Strategy To Become A Global Power

  Authored by Soeren Kern via The Gatestone Institute,

  • The goal is “strategic autonomy” — the ability for the EU to act independently of, and as a counterweight to, the United States and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization — in matters of defense and security.

  • The key component of the Strategic Compass is the development of a so-called EU Rapid Deployment Capacity (RDC), a military force able to intervene in “non-permissive environments” anywhere in the world.

  • The RDC is to become fully operational by 2025 and commanded by an institution called the “EU Military Planning and Conduct Capability.” (The term “capability” is a politically correct substitute for “headquarters,” as in “military headquarters.”)

  • The push for Europe to achieve strategic autonomy from the United States is being spearheaded by Macron, who, as part of his reelection campaign, apparently hopes to replace former German Chancellor Angela Merkel as the de facto leader of Europe.

  • The danger is that many of the pie-in-the-sky policy proposals in the Strategic Compass will divert and drain resources and finances from where they are actually needed: NATO.

  • A logical course of action would be for EU member states to honor past pledges to increase defense spending as part of their contribution to the transatlantic alliance. That, however, would fly in the face of the folie de grandeur — the delusions of grandeur — of European federalists who dream of transforming the EU into a geopolitical “great power.”

  The European Union has published a new strategy aimed at transforming the 27-member bloc into an independent geopolitical actor on the world stage.

  

  The long-awaited “Strategic Compass” lays out an ambitious ten-year plan for the EU to develop an autonomous European security architecture. The goal is “strategic autonomy” — the ability for the EU to act independently of, and as a counterweight to, the United States and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization — in matters of defense and security.

  The greatest advocate of strategic autonomy, French President Emmanuel Macron, said the objective is to make Europe “powerful in the world, fully sovereign, free in its choices and master of its destiny.”

  In fact, dreams of strategic autonomy have been waylaid by reality. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has underscored the indispensability of the United States and NATO for European defense and security. In the face of Russian revanchism, most EU member states can be expected to oppose efforts to develop an independent European military capacity that undermines the transatlantic alliance.

  The 64-page policy blueprint — “A Strategic Compass for Security and Defense” — was originally commissioned in June 2020 by the government of former German Chancellor Angela Merkel. An initial draft of the document, presented in November 2021, was significantly revised after EU member states were given the opportunity to submit requests for changes. The document was then hastily rewritten after Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022.

  The 2022 Strategic Compass — which builds on the 2003 European Security Strategy, the 2016 Global Strategy, the 2020 EU Security Union Strategy and the 2022 Versailles Declaration — aims to “translate” the “common ambition” of European strategic autonomy “into actionable proposals.”

  The document, which has been described as “a master military strategy document” and “the closest thing the EU could have to a military doctrine,” seeks to “build a common strategic culture” to “contribute to the EU’s credibility as a strategic actor.”

  The Strategic Compass, also described as “an expression of Franco-German cooperation,” is loaded with lofty rhetoric: “Europe’s geopolitical awakening,” “permanent strategic posture,” “instruments of power,” “weaponization of interdependence,” “the return to power politics,” “full spectrum of threats,” “strategic convergence,” “common strategic culture,” “learning to speak the language of power,” “quantum leap forward on security and defense,” and “shape the global future,” among many others.

  The key component of the Strategic Compass is the development of a so-called EU Rapid Deployment Capacity (RDC), a military force able to intervene in “non-permissive environments” anywhere in the world. (The term “capacity” is a politically correct substitute for the word “force,” apparently to avoid giving the impression that the EU is seeking to build an army.)

  The document calls for the EU to be able to quickly deploy up to 5,000 troops — including land, air, and maritime components — for “crisis management missions” outside the bloc. The RDC is to become fully operational by 2025 and commanded by an institution called the “EU Military Planning and Conduct Capability.” (The term “capability” is a politically correct substitute for “headquarters,” as in “military headquarters.”)

  On March 21, the day the Strategic Compass was published, Germany’s hapless defense minister, Christine Lambrecht, announced that Germany would provide the entire 5,000-strong force plus heavy equipment for the RDC’s first year. She was forced to backtrack after learning that the German military is so understaffed and underequipped that it is incapable of delivering that amount of personnel and equipment. The German Defense Ministry later clarified that Germany would supply a “core” of between 1,500 and 2,000 troops.

  The RDC concept — widely viewed as the foundation of a future supranational EU Army — replaces the existing EU Battlegroup concept. Created in 2007, EU battlegroups, battalion-sized formations consisting of 1,500 troops each, are paper tigers. They have never been deployed due to disputes over when and where they should be used, and over funding. The Strategic Concept does not explain why the EU thinks the RDC will succeed where the EU Battlegroup concept has failed.

  Another key element of the Strategic Compass involves implementation of Article 44 of the Lisbon Treaty (aka the European Constitution) which allows the EU to circumvent the unanimous consent principle during crises. The Strategic Compass states that the EU will “decide on practical modalities” for implementing Article 44, which has never been used.

  In practical terms, Article 44 would allow the EU to launch EU-flagged missions and operations without the consent of all 27 EU member states. In effect, such “coalitions of the willing” would be a back-door way for EU member states, such as France and Germany, to move ahead with military integration regardless of opposition from other EU members, such as those from Eastern Europe. Implementation of Article 44 will probably move forward during the French EU Presidency in the first half of 2022.

  The Strategic Compass also calls for:

  • Creating an “EU Hybrid Toolbox” to respond to “a broad range of hybrid threats.” A “Hybrid Fusion Cell” aims to provide “foresight and situational awareness” while a “dedicated toolbox” will “address foreign information manipulation and interference.”

  • Further developing the “EU Cyber Defense Policy” to be “better prepared for and respond to cyberattacks.” A new “Cyber Resilience Act” aims to “increase our common approach to cyber infrastructure.”

  • Expanding the “Coordinated Maritime Presences” to the Indo-Pacific.

  • Developing an “EU Space Strategy” for security and defense.

  • Implementing a “Climate Change and Defense Roadmap.”

  • Creating a “Defense Innovation Hub” within the European Defense Agency.

  The document further seeks to: “fill strategic gaps,” “reduce technological and industrial dependencies,” “promote rapid and more flexible decision-making processes,” “strengthen command and control structures,” “increase readiness and cooperation,” “ensure greater financial solidarity,” “spend more and better in defense,” “develop cutting-edge military capabilities,” and “invest in technological innovation for defense.”

  In all, the Strategic Compass includes more than 40 goals in four “work strands” — “Act,” “Secure,” “Invest,” and “Partner” — that are to be implemented by 2030.

  The EU’s foreign policy chief, Josep Borrell, described the Strategic Compass as “a turning point for the European Union as a security provider and an important step for the European security and defense policy.” He added: “This is only the beginning.”

  Impact on NATO

  A key unanswered question is how the Strategic Compass will impact NATO, the only credible guarantor of European security. The EU’s foreign policy chief, Josep Borrell, in a forward to the report, pledged that a stronger EU will “strengthen NATO” and be a “stronger transatlantic partner.” Indeed, the document stresses the complementarity between the EU and NATO.

  The aim of EU strategic autonomy, however, is evidently to push the United States out of Europe so that the EU can assume its role as a “strategic power” and an independent pole in a “contested multipolar world.”

  The push for Europe to achieve strategic autonomy from the United States is being spearheaded by Macron, who, as part of his reelection campaign, apparently hopes to replace former German Chancellor Angela Merkel as the de facto leader of Europe.

  Macron, who claims that NATO is “brain dead,” argues that Europe needs its own military because, according to him, the United States is no longer a reliable ally. He cites as examples: U.S. President Joe Biden’s precipitous withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan; the growing pressure on Europe to take sides with the United States on China; and France’s exclusion from a new security alliance in the Indo-Pacific region.

  Even before Russia invaded Ukraine, many EU member states disagreed with Macron. Eastern European countries know that neither the EU nor France can match the military capabilities offered by NATO and the United States. Other countries are concerned about a panoply of issues ranging from financial costs to national sovereignty. Still others are opposed to creating a parallel structure to NATO that could undermine the transatlantic alliance.

  Many EU countries insist on respecting former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s famous “three Ds“: no decoupling of European security from the United States and NATO; no duplicating capabilities and structures that already exist within NATO; and no discriminating against NATO members that are not members of the EU.

  The danger is that many of the pie-in-the-sky policy proposals in the Strategic Compass will divert and drain resources and finances from where they are actually needed: NATO.

  Case in point: NATO already has a rapid reaction force. The so-called NATO Response Force can deploy 40,000 troops (eight times more than the EU’s proposed rapid reaction force) that are drawn from the same European militaries that the EU wants to use (21 EU member states are also members of NATO). If the EU’s real concern is about security, why would it be trying to duplicate existing NATO capabilities?

  A logical course of action would be for EU member states to honor past pledges to increase defense spending as part of their contribution to the transatlantic alliance. That, however, would fly in the face of the folie de grandeur — the delusions of grandeur — of European federalists who dream of transforming the EU into a geopolitical “great power.”

  Evaluating the Strategic Concept

  In an analysis — “The EU’s Strategic Compass: Brand New, Already Obsolete” — Nick Witney, a senior policy fellow with the pro-EU European Council on Foreign Relations, wrote:

  “The product of many months of debate in Brussels, this effort to align the strategic thinking of 27 member states, each with its own foreign and defense policies, was meant to be a foundational document for a geopolitical EU. But, as a strategy conceived and largely drafted in the days before Russian President Vladimir Putin changed the world, the Strategic Compass has simply been overtaken by events….

  “The Compass itself is full of the usual process-heavy gradualism, to be implemented over a decade and wrapped in conventional reflections on the dangerous world we live in and the ever-popular bromides about the EU’s need to ‘partner’ with all and sundry….

  “What really dooms the operational side of the Compass’s agenda is, of course, the same thing that has crimped the EU’s military aspirations from the beginning — the reluctance of top brass across Europe to take the enterprise seriously. NATO has always been where ‘serious’ military business is done, where they rub shoulders with (and are told what to do by) the mighty United States. The notion of EU intervention operations seems, by contrast, both amateurish and risky without the US to back them up. Now that NATO is rejuvenated and overhauling its whole defensive posture against Russia, no one will rush to stand up a new EU force.”

  In an interview with Euronews, Isabella Antinozzi, an analyst with the European Council on Foreign Relations, noted:

  “The document devotes barely a line to outlining cooperation with the UK — which is striking considering how much of a key partner the UK is on matters of security and defense. This is, to me, a clear sign that relations between London and Brussels are completely strained.”

  In an essay — “Grand Illusions: Partnerships in the EU’s Strategic Compass” — Antinozzi added:

  “It is important for the EU to recognize that excluding the UK from European defense is likely to be both unrealistic and counterproductive. As such, any mixed feelings and wider political tensions associated with Brexit should now give way to constructive defense dialogue between the sides….

  “Security and defence are versatile policy areas with the potential to help rebuild trust between London and Brussels. And ad hoc cooperation in these realms could provide a foundation for a better political relationship in the future.”

  In an analysis — “Does the Strategic Compass Herald a Stronger EU in Security and Defense?” — Luigi Scazzieri, an analyst with the Center for European Reform, wrote:

  “The Strategic Compass is unlikely to end transatlantic and European debates about the EU’s role in European security…. The EU’s ambitions to be a military player endure and could create friction between EU member-states and the U.S., and within Europe, if they lead to competition for resources and personnel with NATO. There may also be disagreements if the EU expands its investments in defense capabilities, as funds would almost certainly be tied to strengthening the EU defense industry and therefore buying European rather than US equipment.”

  The Brussels-based Center for European Policy Studies published an 11-page report — “The EU’s Strategic Compass: A Guide to Reverse Strategic Shrinkage?” — which concluded:

  “The text has been substantially rewritten in the last month to emphasize the impact of Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine, revealing a newfound consensus on the danger Russia poses but also a lack of strategic foresight. This raises the question of whether the final document might contain shortcomings that could prove to be fatal. As it stands, the Strategic Compass may now be lopsided, downplaying the threat posed by China to the multilateral rules-based order vouched for by the EU and, despite being the talk of Brussels in 2021, the relevance to Europe of what will surely be the center of gravity in the 21st century: the Indo-Pacific. As such, the document essentially characterizes the EU’s security and defense ambitions as that of regional — not a global — power.”

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 04/04/2022 – 02:00

• Pollsters Humiliated As 2 Pro-Putin Parties Win Avalanche Victories In European Elections
  Pollsters Humiliated As 2 Pro-Putin Parties Win Avalanche Victories In European Elections

  In a one-two knockout punch for pro-Russia governments in Europe, on Sunday the government of Serbia’s pro-Russia president Aleksandar Vučić was headed for an avalanche victory in the country’s presidential election with nearly 60% of the vote, a big improvement to this 2017 election result…

  Serbia (Presidential Election), CeSID/Ipsos parallel count:

  Vučić (SNS+-EPP): 59% (+4)
  Ponoš (US-S&D): 17%
  Jovanović (NADA-*): 6%
  …

  +/- vs. 2017 election result

  ➤ https://t.co/eWnraQ39P8#Izbori2022 #Vučić #Ponoš #Srbija #Serbia #SerbiaElections pic.twitter.com/f7qFMB5SwT

  — Europe Elects (@EuropeElects) April 3, 2022

  https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

  …. while Hungary’s Pro-Russia prime minister, Viktor Orban, was on track to clinch a fourth consecutive term, leveraging a message against being dragged into the war in neighboring Ukraine, to reassert himself as the European Union’s longest-serving premier.

  With roughly half of the vote counted, Orban’s Fidesz party led United for Hungary, a six-member opposition alliance, 57% to 32% in the party list contest, according to the National Election Office, with 63% of the votes counted. That would be sufficient for Fidesz to keep its two-thirds parliamentary majority.

  Despite opinion polls forecasting a tighter race, Orban’s Fidesz party won comfortably across much of the country. Opposition leader Peter Marki-Zay even failed to win in his own district, where he had served as mayor. The far-right extremist Mi Hazank party won 6.3%, and was set to enter parliament, further diluting the power of the anti-Orban alliance.

  “We have such a victory it can be seen from the moon, but it’s sure that it can be seen from Brussels,” Orban said in his speech on Sunday night, making light of his government’s long-running tensions with EU leaders.

  Hungary, 48% counted (list votes):

  Fidesz/KDNP-NI|EPP: 56.7% (+7.4)
  EM-S&D|RE|G/EFA|NI: 31.7% (-14.8)
  MH~NI: 6.5%
  MKKP-*: 2.8% (+1.1)
  …

  +/- vs. 2018 election

  Threshold: 5%

  ➤ https://t.co/nONdLs4JDG#Hungary #hungaryelections pic.twitter.com/0zF2x7XPbv

  — Europe Elects (@EuropeElects) April 3, 2022

  https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

  “We will remember this victory until the end of our lives because we had to fight against a huge amount of opponents,” Orban said, citing a number of his political enemies including the Hungarian left, “bureaucrats” in Brussels, the international media, “and the Ukrainian president too — we never had so many opponents at the same time.”

  The election campaign was dominated by Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine, which put Orban’s lengthy association with Russian President Vladimir Putin under scrutiny. In his victory speech, Orban called Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky one of the “opponents” he had to overcome during the campaign.

  Orban’s unexpectedly strong victory defied polls ahead of the vote that had predicted Orban would face the toughest challenge to re-election in his 12 years in power, according to a report from the anti-Orban Bloomberg News. It almost makes one wonder why anyone – besides liberals of course – still uses polling, which obviously can’t forecast the future and also fails at mere propaganda and influencing election turnouts.

  Until recently, a new term would have been a defining moment for the 58-year-old Orban, who over the past decade consolidated power and challenged the EU’s so-called “democratic foundations”, raising questions about Hungary’s allegiance to so-called “western values.”

  As Bloomberg adds, “after forging closer ties with Russian President Vladimir Putin while needling his EU counterparts over everything from controlling courts to LGBTQ rights, Orban risks deeper isolation as Europe confronts Moscow over the invasion of Ukraine.” Perhaps so, but the people have spoken and the people clearly want a person in charge who forges closer ties with Putin while needling EU counterparts. Or maybe it’s time for the deep state Biden to suggest some more regime change, this time in Hungary?

  Amid the war in Hungary’s eastern neighbor, Orban refused to fold to western pressure and offered limited support for Ukraine, refusing to let weapons shipments cross Hungary and rejecting a ban of Russian oil and gas imports.

  His message was that joining a rush by fellow EU and NATO members to aid Ukraine with weapons would drag Hungary into the war. That resonated with voters against an opposition campaign suggesting that Orban is Putin’s pawn and the ballot a choice between East and West.

  In the end, being close to Putin served as a powerful force behind Orban’s avalanche victory.

  That said, Obran has an uphill battle in containing the fallout from the Ukraine war – record pre-election spending which prompted the government to cut the economic growth outlook, will require Orban to almost immediately address budget concerns. Phasing out price caps on basic food items and especially fuel, imposed in the run-up to the vote, will test his enduring popularity. Household energy subsidies, in place since 2013 and a reliable vote-getter, may also have to go.

  The political challenges could be equally daunting. While the cost of financing Hungarian debt has soared as the central bank hiked interest rates to the highest in the EU, Hungary’s access to billions of euros of crucial EU funding has been delayed due to concerns over corruption in Hungary, a standard trick in Brussels which ruthlessly and anti-democratically determines who can and can not rule in Europe by limiting access to funds.

  Meanwhile, Orban’s political narrative – centering on the decline of the West and the rise of authoritarian regimes – remains his strong suit. As a result of the Ukraine war, about half a million refugees have arrived in Hungary, and in one of the starkest U-turns, the anti-immigration Orban welcomed them and even posted pictures of himself hugging Ukrainians.

  He will also need to navigate a new EU mechanism that links funding to adherence to rule of law. It was approved in 2020 after the Hungarian premier outmaneuvered the bloc’s concerns about the rollback of democratic norms for the better part of the decade. Should it be activated this year, it threatens to deprive Hungary of as much as $40 billion. Of course, should it be activated, many peripheral states may simply decide to seek a better fate in the orbit of other nations – such as China or Russia – which would be a catastrophic blow to the future of the EU.

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 04/04/2022 – 01:00

• NIH Admits It "Suppressed" Wuhan Lab Genetic Data, But Disputes Watchdog's "Deleted" Label
  NIH Admits It “Suppressed” Wuhan Lab Genetic Data, But Disputes Watchdog’s “Deleted” Label

  Authored by Mark Tapscott via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

  A National Institutes for Health (NIH) spokesperson is disputing a non-profit watchdog group’s claim that the agency “deleted” genetic sequencing data on Covid-19 from a Chinese lab, but the same official acknowledged the data was “suppressed.”

  

  “The headline says the sequences were deleted which is inaccurate. They were not deleted. This is a really important point, and I’ve highlighted what did happen from what we provided to you earlier this week,” NIH Media Branch Chief Amanda Fine told The Epoch Times in a March 31 email.

  Fine was referring to a March 29 Epoch Times story headlined “NIH Deleted Info Received From Wuhan Lab on Covid-19 Genetic Sequencing, Watchdog’s FOIA Finds.” The information Fine referenced as having been provided to The Epoch Times by NIH earlier in the week was included in the published story:

  “’In June 2020, in response to a request by the same [Wuhan] researcher, National Center for Biotechnology [NCBI] gave the sequence data the status of ‘withdrawn,’ which removes sequencing data from all public means of access but does not delete them.

  “NCBI subsequently reassigned the status of the sequence data to ‘suppressed,’ which means that sequence data are removed from the search process but can be directly found by accession number. This action to reassign the data was identified as part of NLM’s ongoing review into the matter. We are working to make more information available,” the spokesperson said.

  The biotechnology center, which is part of the institute’s National Library of Medicine (NLM), is the U.S. component of the International Nucleotide Sequence Database Collaboration.

  The Epoch Times story was prompted by a report published on March 29 by Empower Oversight Whistleblowers and Research (EO) that was based on Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) responses the group received from the institute.

  The non-profit reported that “on June 5, 2020, a Wuhan University researcher requested that NIH retract the researcher’s submission of BioProject ID PRJNA637497 because of error. The Wuhan researcher explained ‘I’m sorry for my wrong submitting,’” Empower Oversight said in a statement (pdf) on March 29.

  “BioProject ID PRJNA637497 is also referred to as Submission-ID SUB7554642. Three days later, on June 8th, the NIH declined the researcher’s request, advising that it prefers to edit or replace, as opposed to delete, sequences submitted to the SRA,” EO reported. SRA refers to the Sequence Read Archive (SRA) data resource made available by NCBI, and it “stores raw sequencing data.”

  “But then, on June 16, 2020, NIH officials reversed themselves and deleted the genetic sequencing data, as requested by the Wuhan researcher. That researcher was quoted by EO as explaining to NIH: ‘Recently, I found that it’s hard to visit my submitted SRA data, and it would also be very difficult for me to update the data. I have submitted an updated version of this SRA data to another website, so I want to withdraw the old one at NCBI in order to avoid the data version issue.’

  “After some discussion about what would be deleted, the NIH concluded the discussion by reassuring the Wuhan researcher that it ‘had withdrawn everything.’”

  Asked for a response to Fine’s claim the information was not deleted, EO Founder and President Jason Foster told The Epoch Times that NIH’s actions ensure the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus genetic sequencing info is only available to the few individuals possessing its “accession number,” which effectively deletes the data from open access and research.

  “NIH documents released with Empower Oversight’s report demonstrate that the sequencing data was deleted from public view by the NIH at the request of the Wuhan researcher,” Foster said.

  “Our report also details emails between Professor Jesse Bloom and the NIH’s Steve Sherry from October 2021 that clearly indicate NIH retained copies ‘for archival purposes.’ Yet, the emails demonstrate that NIH refused to share that data in an open, transparent scientific process sought by Professor Bloom,” Foster continued.

  “The NIH should make more information available about each and every time it reassigned the status of sequence data and any information potentially relevant to the origins of COVID-19 should be made available for scientific inquiry,” he said.

  Fine did not respond when The Epoch Times asked who “has access to all of the genetic sequencing information provided by the Wuhan researcher and which was requested by that researcher to be removed.”

  The Epoch Times also asked that because “NIH must know who in fact has accessed the data … who did so and when since the Wuhan researcher requested the information’s removal?”

  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 04/03/2022 – 23:30

• "I Have No Idea What's Going On" – Shanghai Officials Separate COVID-Positive Children From Parents As Outbreak Worsens
  “I Have No Idea What’s Going On” – Shanghai Officials Separate COVID-Positive Children From Parents As Outbreak Worsens

  Local authorities’ initial plans for a nine-day staggered lockdown in Shanghai have already been dashed, as we reported earlier that the entire city is now under some level of lockdown, despite authorities’ promises that the eastern half of the city would see restrictions eased on Friday. And while the CCP scrambles to bring more hospital capacity online to treat the desperately ill (including primarily those who are suffering from non-COVID maladies), locals are complaining that authorities have resorted to separating sick children from their parents in the name of the lockdown.

  

  Parents who brought their children in for treatment have seen them taken by authorities and moved to official quarantine facilities, often leaving families in the dark about their childrens’ condition. When both parent and child have tested positive, doctors have used threats to browbeat families into compliance. in some cases, children as young as 3 months old have reportedly been separated from their breast-feeding mothers.

  Reuters shared the story of Esther Zhao, a woman who was separated from her 2.5-year-old daughter in Shanghai after the girl came down with a fever.

  Esther Zhao thought she was doing the right thing when she brought her 2-1/2-year-old daughter to a Shanghai hospital with a fever on March 26.

  Three days later, Zhao was begging health authorities not to separate them after she and the little girl both tested positive for Covid, saying her daughter was too young to be taken away to a quarantine centre for children.

  Doctors then threatened Zhao that her daughter would be left at the hospital, while she was sent to the centre, if she did not agree to transfer the girl to the Shanghai Public Health Clinical Center in the city’s Jinshan district.

  Despite pleading with doctors for information, parents are often left in the dark, offered few – if any – updates about their child’s status.

  Since then she has had only one brief message that her daughter was fine, sent through a group chat with doctors, despite repeated pleas for information from Zhao and her husband, who is in a separate quarantine site after also testing positive.

  “There have been no photos at all…I’m so anxious, I have no idea what situation my daughter is in,” she said on Saturday through tears, while still stuck at the hospital she went to last week. The doctor said Shanghai rules is that children must be sent to designated points, adults to quarantine centres and you’re not allowed to accompany the children.

  Making matters worse, images of crying children who had been separated from their parents went viral on Chinese social media, filling Zhao with feelings of dread. The photos and videos posted on China’s Weibo and Douyin (the Chinese version of TikTok) social media platforms depicted wailing babies, crowded three to a cot. In one video, a clearly distressed toddler crawled out of a room with four child-sized beds pushed to one side of the wall. Few adults could be seen. While Reuters wasn’t able to independently verify the videos, a sources familiar with the facility confirmed their authenticity, and also confirmed that the facility is situated in at the Jinshan District of Shanghai.

  While most of these posts had been deleted by the authorities by Saturday, thousands of comments and complaints remained on the sites.

  Some of the videos have survived on American social media.

  上海人的孩子们也被反人类的强制隔离，惨绝人寰pic.twitter.com/YoxYEWOLoP

  — Inty (@__Inty__) April 2, 2022

  https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

  The separation policy is the latest controversy to elicit widespread outrage across Shanghai. It comes after authorities were caught lying about the number of deaths in the city’s nursing homes.

  The big question now: will this be enough to derail the political career of Li Qiang, the Communist Party secretary of Shanghai and an important ally of President Xi? Li is (or rather, was) expected to be elevated to the Politburo Standing Committee, China’s most powerful policy-setting body during the National Party Congress later this year.

  But considering the number of local officials who have been sacked for their failure to contain local outbreaks, it’s not outside the realm of possibility that Li could be next.

  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 04/03/2022 – 23:00

• Doomsday 'Preppers' Warn Of Hard Times Ahead As Preparedness Goes Mainstream
  Doomsday ‘Preppers’ Warn Of Hard Times Ahead As Preparedness Goes Mainstream

  Authored by Allan Stein via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

  Food scarcity. Food vouchers. Food riots and flash mobs.

  All of that’s coming – and soon, says Texas-based food scientist and “Health Ranger” podcaster Mike Adams, who sees dire events unfolding in America in the short term.

  

  His advice: people need to get prepared now.

  “The thing to really watch for is the food inflation,” Adams said.

  “My position is we’re going to see food riots in America before the end of this year. We’re going to see flash mobs in grocery stores—especially for meat products.

  “Grocery stores are going to respond with increased security and checkpoints. At some point, we’re probably going to see an attempt at price controls and rationing. 

  “And not on everything—certain types of things. It’s almost certain that the rationing they will attempt to enforce with a vaccine passport app that becomes a food rationing app,” Adams told The Epoch Times.

  Adams is not alone in his predictions of hard times coming to America—and the world.

  With food production buckling under the weight of runaway inflation, skyrocketing fuel costs, and fertilizer shortages, much of what’s in store is already “built-in.”

  Unfertile Ground

  In North America two years ago, it cost around $200 an acre to fertilize a 1,000-acre commercial farm, Adams said. Right now, with spring planting, farmers can expect to pay $1,200 to $2,000 an acre.

  And consumers will pay for it in higher prices for basic necessities. 

  “Many farmers are deciding not to plant. In addition, the diesel fuel prices and diesel fuel scarcity is going into their equation whether they should plant,” Adams said.

  The upshot, he said, is that fewer farmers are planting, which means less food to go around.

  As a food scientist Adams is a big proponent of clean, organically grown food free of heavy metals, which he makes available through the online sale of “Ranger Buckets.” The demand for his products has seen extremely high since the COVID-19 lockdown began in 2020. 

  Adams said it takes on average six to eight weeks to produce 2,000 buckets, which typically sell out within 30 minutes to three hours.

  

  Even before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the demand for survival food in the United States has been on the increase among a number of national suppliers. 

  “The supply chain in the United States continues to crumble. More Americans are realizing it takes four trips to different home improvement stores for parts to make home repairs, instead of all their needs being in one store,” said Lori Hunt at Practical Preppers in South Carolina. 

  “That is making folks realize this extends to everything: food, books, solar equipment—and considering Ukraine is a source for critical raw materials in the solar industry, this is going to get much worse in the coming months,” she told The Epoch Times. 

  “Many of our customers are moving toward energy independence, and this is making a greater demand and diminishing supply situation. We are urging our customers to be prepared for a 2–4 month wait to amass all parts needed for their systems. Many installers around the United States are telling us they are experiencing the same.”

  Byron Walker, Founder and CEO of Survival Frog in Denver, told the Epoch Times, “We have struggled with supply chain issues and things only appear to be getting worse.”

  Allied Marketing Research (AMR) reported that the global incident and emergency market, valued at $75.5 billion in 2017, is projected to reach $423 billion by 2025.

  “Factors such as rise in need for safety and security solutions, owing to increase in natural calamities and terrorist attacks, implementation of regulatory policies for public safety, and the necessity for emergency preparedness drive the growth of the global incident and emergency management market,” AMR said on its website.

  “In addition, the surge in smart cities is expected to drive the adoption of intelligent evacuation systems and surveillance systems, thereby fueling the incident and emergency management market growth.”

  Price Hikes ‘Here to Stay’

  In recent weeks YouTube survival “preppers” such as City Prepping and Alaska Prepper have been sounding the alarm that hard times are just ahead. 

  Matt the “Magic Prepper,” in North Dakota, said being prepared continues to go mainstream as a “financial and scarcity genre” in view of current global events.

  “With food production issues, supply chain problems, a slow economic recovery from the pandemic, and the cascading effects of an overseas conflict, it seems rather clear that shortages, disruptions, and price hikes are here to stay,” Matt told The Epoch Times. 

  He said the situation in Ukraine has revived interest in preparedness in case of a nuclear, biological, or chemical attack. 

  “With the conflict creating volatile rhetoric from multiple global superpowers, we find ourselves closer to such an event than any point in recent history,” Matt said. “I operate under the assumption that there is and will likely always be more time to prepare.”

  Still, the state of being prepared is “exponentially limited” by the length of time it takes to get prepared, and other factors, he said. 

  “Every dollar spent today is worth less in value toward preparations than a dollar you would have spent three years ago. Therefore, by waiting to begin, you’ll inherently be able to prepare less and less. 

  

  “This is most obviously apparent when you relate it to items such as ammunition. Stocking up on it now provides you with anywhere from 50 percent [to] 75 percent less ammunition for the same amount spent on it three years ago.

  “Even if we find ourselves in the midst of a full-on economic collapse or hot conflict, training and learning skills will likely still be accessible,” he said.

  Preparedness also requires the ability to network and communication, having supplies in sufficient quantity, a “hardened” location, and knowledge on how to survive an economic collapse. 

  “I have suggested to keep moving forward regardless of the events unfolding currently. If things finally fall apart to the point of relying on our preparedness efforts, we will have prepared as best as we could up to that point.

  “I am making phone calls, appointments, and plans every day to try and enhance my own personal preparedness,” Matt said. 

  Given the economic protectionism of halting food exports from countries like Hungary, Ukraine, Russia, and Belarus, the world supply of grain is going to be severely limited, Adams said.

  This, he said, will result in the “most extreme food shortages we’ve seen in our lifetime.”

  Better Now Than Never

  “It will begin about August and continue until the end of the year. A lot of this depends on [President Joe] Biden’s economic decisions on whether he allows U.S. oil companies to finish pipelines and do more drilling. If he does not we are going to see even more shortages throughout 2023.”

  Out of chaos, however, Adams foresees a reawakening of freedom and self-reliance in the way we grow and produce food.

  “I think this is a red pill moment for the people of the world that they need to be more self-reliant. We need decentralization of food production. I’m a big proponent of decentralization—food grown locally.”

  The bad news is that only about 5 percent of people in the United State are prepared. But “the more people prepare, the less they panic when shortages appear,” Adams said.

  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 04/03/2022 – 22:30

• The Pain Trade Remains Higher As Hedge Funds Sell Every Rally
  The Pain Trade Remains Higher As Hedge Funds Sell Every Rally

  After suffering tremendous losses in January and February, March was a very confusing month for hedge funds: as JPMorgan’s Prime Brokerage writes in its monthly note, the start of March was characterized by one of the largest de-grossing episodes among Equity L/S funds in N. America, along with quite significant net selling globally (especially in APAC), and resulted in some marquee names such as Tiger Global suffering massive losses.

  So as markets closed out the month and quarter with a very sharp rebound in equities, most funds were again caught by surprise, while few are willing to embrace the recent move higher in risk as a persisting trend.

  Commenting on the recent failure of hedge funds to embrace the rally, JPM writes that there are still many concerns to deal with, but the “net selling we’ve seen from HFs into this rebound (4wk global net flows at -2 to -3z) is quite consistent with other market lows (post  Dec 2018 and Mar 2020) and may suggest, from a contrarian perspective, that equity markets could continue to grind higher.”

  Looking back to the prior episodes, JPM’s John Schlegel writes that while net flows did turn more positive starting about a month after the market lows, “it wasn’t until net flows reached a significantly positive level (i.e. about +2z), the market was back to highs, and average net positioning levels were back above average that the market saw a more meaningful pullback.”

  Well, as of this week, the average positioning level was still around -0.7z and gross/net leverage were still below the 20th %-tiles vs. the past year. Thus, from a positioning/flows perspective, the prime desk believes that the “pain trade” is still higher for now and the rally could persist for a bit longer, given the bias to STR (sell-the-rally), positioning still low, and possibly a lack of incrementally negative news (i.e. we “know” Fed is very hawkish, Russia/Ukraine conflict isn’t new, and expectations are that inflation will remain high).

  We’ll do a deeper dive of these points shortly, but before we do a quick tangent: according to JPM, one of the recent areas of focus during the 2H Mar rebound has been the outperformance of High short interest stocks. About 6 months ago (in October) the desk outlined 5 reasons why shorts could continue to work in the medium term. Looking back, that trade indeed worked and we’ve seen quite large underperformance of High SI stocks in the past 6 months — the JPM High SI basket has underperformed the SPX by ~35% since the start of Oct 2021, including the recent rebound.

  So looking back at the 5 reasons JPM gave 6 months ago, do they still hold today? The short answer is “somewhat.” I.e., the set up doesn’t appear particularly bad for shorts per se, but it also doesn’t look as clear as it did 6 months ago.

  • Reasons why shorts could still work, i.e. underperform: ETFs still a high % of the short book, limited recent shorting of High SI stocks, still relatively few stocks with High SI % float (although this has increased from 6 months ago)
  • Reasons why shorts might not work as well going forward: Most of the recent covering has been in ETFs (i.e. potential to cover single-names if funds were to continue to cover shorts), short leverage still low, but net leverage also low (i.e. limited need to hedge directional risk), “risky” factors have already underperformed significantly and might not continue to do so going forward.

  With that in mind, let’s go back to some of JPM’s core observations starting with…

  1. Selling The Rally… Not as Unusual as One Might Think

  As markets have rallied over the past couple weeks, the biggest driver seems to be a reduction of hedges. When looking at the components of the bank’s Tactical Positioning Monitor (TPM) and comparing current levels to those as of mid- March, volatility related metrics (e.g. call/put ratios), HF ETF shorts/covers, and US Asset Manager Futures positioning have seen the biggest positive change in the 4wk scores (all were about -1z to -2z vs. positive levels most recently).

  

  From a HF flow perspective, however, there’s been a fairly strong bias to sell-the-rally (STR) as JPM Prime has seen net selling in 8 of the past 9 days, during which stocks have staged a torrid rally. That said, this is not that unusual, as markets saw similar biases in the flows post the low in Dec 2018 and Mar 2020.

  

  Looking at these periods more closely, if we were to follow the prior pattern then we should see net flows turn to moderate buying if markets grind higher/sideways starting in a couple weeks (e.g. 4wk net flows were positive in Feb 2019 and May 2020, about 2 months after the low). However, HF net flows didn’t reach a significantly positive level (i.e. around 2z) until 4-5 months after the low. Coincidentally, by this time the market was back near ATHs and positioning levels were above average (nearly +0.5-1z), potentially why those peaks in flows/higher positioning proved to be a good time to tactically short the market. In other words, the moment hedge funds finally rush in, that will be the time to short.

  Then again, with positioning levels still quite low vs. the past year (i.e. around -0.7z currently), perhaps it’s too early to expect a sharp pullback. Similarly gross and net leverage for HFs remains relatively low vs. the past year (around 20th %-tile across All Strategies and <10th %-tile for Eq. L/S on a 12M lookback). If these conditions change and we see a stronger impulse to chase the rally, then we’d generally be more concerned.

  

  

  Providing a bit more perspective on HF leverage, for the typical fund across strategies, hedge fund net leverage recently fell back to its median levels and gross is below historical median historical levels. This is down quite a bit from where things stood ~6 months ago, indicative of the fairly broad decline in risk levels. That said, exposures are not necessarily at extreme lows on a longer time frame (i.e. past 3-5 years).

  As for what is driving the net and gross flows across strategies and regions, the net selling over the past 1-2 weeks is mostly in N. America and EMEA and strongest among Multi-Strats and Quants. L/S funds have been net buyers of N. Am. recently (although sellers of EMEA). From a gross flows perspective, the recent de-grossing is strongest in EMEA and broad-based across strategies, while the opposite is true in APAC. However, on a 20-day basis, the de-grossing among Eq L/S and Quants in N. Am. is largest.

  

  2. Will Shorts Continue to Rip Higher?

  One feature of the market bounce since Mar 14 is the outperformance of High Short Interest stocks in N. America, and generally “riskier” stocks / prior laggards. For context, the JPM High SI basket, JPTASHTE, is up 22% since 3/14 (just over 2x the SPX’s gain) and the top 25 most crowded net shorts in N. Am. are up about 20% over the period vs. a gain of only ~11% for the top 25 most crowded net longs. Additionally, the High Vol basket (JP1HVO) is up 31% and the Momentum shorts (JP1SMO & JP16SMO), i.e. laggards over the past 12M or 6M, are up 28-29% over the period.

  In early October last year, JPM wrote a note that outlined why shorts could continue to perform well over the medium term (i.e. 6 months). Looking back at what’s transpired, this has played out fairly well, as evidenced by large underperformance of High SI stocks in the past 6 months—the JPM High SI basket, JPTASHTE, has underperformed the SPX by ~35% since the start of Oct  2021.

  As a refresher, in early Oct last year, there was concern as to whether the shorts would continue to work since they had performed quite well since the middle of Feb of last year. Generally speaking, there were still concerns about whether retail investors and so-called meme stocks might cause significant pain to shorts. While that was (and still is) a potential risk to specific shorts, it seemed that there was still ample room for shorts to continue to perform relatively well, which they did. So looking back at the 5 reasons JPM gave 6 months ago, do they still hold today? The short answer is “somewhat.” I.e., the set up doesn’t appear particularly bad for shorts per se, but it also doesn’t look as clear as it did 6 months ago.

  

  

  

  One last note on the “risky” factors. One of the main reasons why we thought the “risky” factors weren’t set up to outperform was because the broader market had not yet seen a meaningful drawdown. Given the drawdown we saw this quarter, it’s harder to make the case that these types of stocks won’t start to perform a bit better, but the speed of the rebound has varied quite a lot in the past and we’re not coming off a larger drawdown like post 2000-2002, 2008-2009, or Mar 2020 that triggered the most violent snapbacks.

  

  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 04/03/2022 – 22:00

• Trump Budget Official Calls Biden Spending Proposal "Atrocious"
  Trump Budget Official Calls Biden Spending Proposal “Atrocious”

  Authored by Nathan Worcester via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

  Russ Vought, a critical race theory (CRT) opponent who led the White House Office of Management and Budget under Trump, told The Epoch Times on Thursday that the amount of spending in President Joe Biden’s proposed 2023 budget is “atrocious.”

  

  Vought, who currently heads the anti-CRT organization Center for Renewing America, made the comments at an emergency foreign policy conference, “Up from Chaos: Conserving American Security,” organized by American Moment and The American Conservative.

  Vought also spoke about the disconnect between the views that got Trump elected and decision-making in the Trump White House as part of a conference panel, “Rotten Branches: How Congress, The Military, and Executive Bureaucracy Fail Our Foreign Policy.”

  He said the policy process was “completely disconnected from the views of the President,” prioritizing defenders of the status quo and avoiding what he described as “paradigm-shifting questions,” including on decades of U.S. military spending:

  “Why are we still in Afghanistan? Why are we on a collision course with Russia? Why haven’t you brought our troops home from Europe? Shouldn’t we prioritize a China fight above all else? Are Japan and Taiwan ready to defend themselves? Why is it the Army, the Navy, and the Air Force just so happen to have the same share of the budget?”

  Vought told The Epoch Times that today’s raging inflation cannot be an excuse for indefinite budget expansion.

  “You’ve got to have an ability to stop spending,” he said. “We should increase defense spending. I definitely think we should increase the Navy’s budget. But this notion that the bar has to be 8 percent when inflation is 8 percent is just nonsense.”

  “We all know that there’s an extensive network of foreign policy elites that have a unified view of the world, and America’s role in it, that is essentially imperialist,” Vought said during his panel talk. He later added that policy officials deferred to the network of insiders in part to avoid looking stupid, and that national security agencies capitalized on secrecy and their ability to over-classify information to shut out people who ask inconvenient questions.

  Like others at “Up From Chaos,” Vought invoked George Washington’s Farewell Address, in which the founding father warned his countrymen to steer clear of foreign entanglements or permanent alliances.

  Another lodestar was America’s sixth president, John Quincy Adams, who said that the nation “goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy.”

  Vought told the audience that D.C.’s current foreign policy elites see Washington’s and Adams’ counsel as “quaint advice”—the thinking of a bygone era, before the United States became “a big country,” often dictating the terms of the world order established after World War II.

  In Vought’s view, a foreign policy that does not take the aspirations of other nations seriously could make it harder to understand the factors that spark conflicts overseas.

  “I think we have suffered from that with Russia—never thinking through, ‘What are their interests?’ vs. ‘What are our interests?’” he said.

  Vought believes that tackling D.C.’s entrenched opposition to Trump-style foreign policy will require a new expert class, capable of steering pliable officials in a different direction.

  “We need new institutions to credential people, to allow people to think through the pros and cons of different policies,” he told The Epoch Times.

  He thinks such institutions offer an important foundation for practical politics, including on the sort of budgeting he oversaw as OMB director.

  “It’s time we engage them on the battlefield of ideas,” Vought said. “Once you’ve got that, then you can go to battle and win funding fights and turf war battles.”

  He told The Epoch Times he does not worry about any labels that may be applied to him because of his participation in ‘Up From Chaos.’

  Words like “appeaser” or “stooge,” he said, may be losing their sting from overuse.

  “As we’ve seen in the woke area, where they call you a racist, Islamophobe, bigot, that comes at a cost where people stop caring anymore, and you learn to have these conversations, come what may,” he said.

  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 04/03/2022 – 21:30

• "General Average" Declared On Massive Container Ship Stranded In Chesapeake Bay 
  “General Average” Declared On Massive Container Ship Stranded In Chesapeake Bay 

  Evergreen Marine, the owner of the massive container ship, Ever Forward, stuck in the Chesapeake Bay, declared “General Average” after multiple unsuccessful refloating attempts, according to maritime news website gCaptain

  The latest refloating attempt took place last Wednesday and was unsuccessful even though tides in the Chesapeake Bay, just outside of Baltimore, were about a foot higher than average. 

  “Evergreen Line has been making every effort to refloat the stranded ship on behalf of the common interests of cargo owners and the safety of all involved,” Evergreen Marine said in a statement on Thursday.

  It added: “In light of the increasing costs arising from the continued attempts to refloat the vessel, Evergreen declared General Average today.”

  

  Declarations of General Average require all parties, including the shipowner and cargo owners, to bear some responsibility in the refloating process. If readers remember, Evergreen also declared General Average about a year ago when another of its vessels, the Ever Given, ran aground in the Suez Canal. 

  Ever Forward ran aground on March 13 after it veered off the course of a shipping channel outside the Port of Baltimore and came to a dead stop in about 25 feet of water. The vessel’s draft is 42.6 feet, outlining that the ship is seriously stuck. 

  

  It’s unclear what the next steps Evergreen will take after two refloating attempts have failed. There could be moves to remove fuel and cargo, but nothing has been publicly discussed.

  Concerns are mounting the ship, buried in 20 feet of mud, could be experiencing stress on the hull due to the weight of containers and may lead to a fuel leak disaster. 

  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 04/03/2022 – 21:00

• "The Illegality…Was Obvious": An Analysis Of The Carter Opinion On Jan. 6th
  “The Illegality…Was Obvious”: An Analysis Of The Carter Opinion On Jan. 6th

  Authored by Jonathan Turley,

  “The illegality of the plan was obvious.”

  Those words of Judge David O. Carter in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California this week have electrified commentators across the networks and the Internet.

  Judge Carter was praised for his “simple clarity” in declaring that “it is more likely than not that President Trump corruptly attempted to obstruct the Joint Session of Congress on January 6, 2021.”  The declarations by the court have led to a frenzy in the media and renewed calls for the prosecution of the former president.

  However, there are elements to the decision that are deeply concerning on issues ranging from free speech to attorney-client privilege.

  

  The Washington Post was quick to breathlessly declare that the time had finally come . . . again. Given the Posts long record of running professed slam dunk criminal charges against Trump that amounted to nothing, that is hardly a surprise. However, Carter’s opinion was immediately portrayed as ending all speculation. It seems now like little more than an administrative matter before Trump is marched off to the slammer.

  Post columnist Jennifer Rubin declared “Carter has issued a clear invitation — almost a plea — for the Justice Department to pursue charges against both Eastman and Trump . . . [Attorney General Merrick] Garland will have an exceptionally hard time justifying a decision not to prosecute.”

  If you read such columns, it is difficult to see why Trump has not been charged after two years. After all, the media heralded the statements of D.C. Attorney General Racine that he was pursuing possible charges. Yet, neither Racine nor the Biden Administration have charged Trump. Why?

  The reason that hasn’t happened is that Judge Carter’s “invitation” is strikingly short of clear evidence of such criminal conduct.

  Judge Carter was ruling on the disclosure of material claimed as privileged by Eastman, who advised Trump after he spoke at the Jan. 6, 2021, rally near the White House. Eastman believed Vice President Mike Pence could refuse to certify the election and send the electoral votes back to the states. Carter ruled that such legal advice failed under the “crime/fraud exception” because the president knew there was no basis for such a challenge.

  As legal experts celebrate Carter’s decision as a great victory against Trump, it is important to consider the implications for both free speech and attorney-client privilege. That is not because I agree with Eastman’s claims; to the contrary, I criticized Trump’s speech as he gave it and later called for Congress to censure him. I also supported Vice President Pence’s interpretation of federal law and disagreed with Eastman’s interpretation.

  Moreover, as I have repeated stated, Congress has a legitimate interest in getting a full record of what occurred on Jan. 6th.  However, none of that should blind us to the dangerous elements of this decision.

  Judge Carter notes that Eastman still believes that the statute is unconstitutional as written. The court simply brushes that aside and states the “ignorance of the law is no excuse” and “believing the Electoral Count Act was unconstitutional did not give President Trump license to violate it.”

  More importantly, the court simply declares that Trump knew that the election was not stolen and thus “the illegality of the plan was obvious.”

  Putting aside the court’s assumption of what Trump secretly concluded on the election, a sizable number of Americans still do not view Biden as legitimately elected. The court is not simply saying that they are wrong in that view but, because they are wrong, legislative challenges amounted to criminal obstruction of Congress.

  In 2005, it was Democrats who alleged that a presidential election was stolen and challenged the certification in Congress of the votes in Ohio. The claim was equally frivolous but Democratic leadership praised the effort, including Speaker Nancy Pelosi who praised Sen. Barbara Boxer’s challenge and insisted that “this debate is fundamental to our democracy.”

  The Democrats did not, however, demand that Vice President Dick Cheney refuse to certify, an important distinction to be sure. Jan. 6th was a desecration of our constitutional process and one of the most disgraceful days in our history.

  However, the lack of factual foundation for the challenge (cited repeatedly by Judge Carter in the Trump challenge) did not make this a criminal or fraudulent effort.

  Some attorneys believed (and still believe) that it was possible for Pence to refuse to certify. Holding such a legal view is not a crime and sharing that view with the White House is not a conspiracy. Indeed, Eastman and others were publicly stating essentially the same thing. That is what triggered the debate as many of us who challenged their interpretation.

  Yet, Carter is conclusory and dismissive on this critical point in declaring “President Trump and Dr. Eastman justified the plan with allegations of election fraud — but President Trump likely knew the justification was baseless, and therefore that the entire plan was unlawful.” Trump is still insisting that he believes the opposite. The question is why arguing that point with Pence and others amounted to a criminal act. In the end, wiser minds prevailed and the theory was not used by Pence.

  There were crimes that day, of course. Some of those at the rally rioted and were charged largely with trespass and unlawful entry. A handful have been charged with seditious conspiracy. The court does not cite any evidence that Trump directly advocated violence while noting that Trump told the crowd to peacefully go to the Hill.

  Consider the implications of Carter’s opinion. There was rioting when President Trump was elected while various Democratic leaders continued to claim that he was not the legitimately elected president, a view echoed by Hillary Clinton. While they did not riot in Congress, they committed other crimes.

  Under Carter’s theory, the baseless claims that Trump was not legitimately elected have been used by the Trump Administration to seize confidential legal material given to the 2005 leaders. After all, there was not a solid factual basis for these claims and they knew it. They further fueled the mob but making these claims in public.

  What is particularly concerning is that none of this was necessary. The Congress has every right, indeed it has a duty, to investigate if there was a criminal conspiracy.  Yet, it already knows the legal advice given by Eastman and other witnesses have testified as to what he said in critical meetings.

  In the Post column, Rubin reminds readers “this is a federal court, not a pundit or politician.” Yet, at points it was hard to tell the difference. Judge Carter seemed intent on rendering judgment on what he described as a “coup” rather than a riot: “Dr. Eastman and President Trump launched a campaign to overturn a democratic election . . . Their campaign was not confined to the ivory tower — it was a coup in search of a legal theory.”

  That last comment was particularly interesting because it suggests that Eastman, who was dean and on the faculty of Chapman Law School, could have made the same articles as a professor. However, when he took his academic views and applied them as counsel, it somehow became part of a criminal conspiracy and attempted coup.

  That is what is so disturbing about Carter’s opinion. While I agree with many aspects of Judge Carter’s decision, there is no clear limiting principle of when a legal opinion becomes a criminal conspiracy beyond the court’s predisposition of the meaning of these facts.

  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 04/03/2022 – 20:30

• Cathie Wood Says The Fed Is "Playing With Fire" And That Raising Rates Would "Be A Mistake"
  Cathie Wood Says The Fed Is “Playing With Fire” And That Raising Rates Would “Be A Mistake”

  Apparently, real rates approaching -10% doesn’t necessarily mean it’s time to hike interest rates. That is, of course, according to “visionary” Cathie Wood, who spewed what can only be described as this incredibly hot take on Saturday.

  Better yet, Wood said the Fed raising rates while the yield curve is inverted would be a “mistake”, according to Bloomberg. It certainly would be for Wood’s flagship ARK Innovation Fund (ARKK), that’s for certain. 

  On Friday, after a strong jobs report, the two year bond yield rose above that of the 30 year for the first time since 2007, while other parts of the curve have already been inverting over the last several trading sessions. 

  Cathie Wood offered up a take that was…well…commensurate with her investing style. The portfolio manager, who never met a cash burning “innovative” tech company she didn’t appear to instantly love, Tweeted out on Saturday: “Yesterday, the yield curve – as measured by the difference between the 10 year Treasury and 2 year Treasury yields – inverted, suggesting that the Fed is going to raise interest rates as growth and/or inflation surprise on the low side of expectations…which will be a mistake.”

  Yesterday, the yield curve – as measured by the difference between the 10 year Treasury and 2 year Treasury yields – inverted, suggesting that the Fed is going to raise interest rates as growth and/or inflation surprise on the low side of expectations…which will be a mistake. https://t.co/5QNZeDWTn4

  — Cathie Wood (@CathieDWood) April 2, 2022

  https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

  In a thread that followed, Wood wrote that “Economists have learned over many cycles that the 10-2 year measure of the yield curve leads another one: the difference between the 10 year Treasury yield and the 3 month Treasury rate. I have no idea why many strategists and economists are reverting to the latter one now.”

  “The 10-year to 3 month yield curve is steep because the Fed is telegraphing aggressive interest rate hikes in the face of inflation that has been stoked by supply shocks. Inflation is a highly aggressive tax that is killing purchasing power and consumer sentiment,” she continued.

  Then, she made the astute argument that consumer sentiment is waning, which is correct. Unfortunately, Wood doesn’t seem to realize that the Fed has its hands tied behind its back and has officially run out of options for dealing with the inflation she is referencing. She wrote: “US consumer sentiment, as measured by the University of Michigan, is lower today than it was at the depths of the coronavirus crisis. It has entered 2008-09 territory and is not far from the all time lows in the 80’s when inflation and interest rates hit double digits.”

  “The economy succumbed to recession in each of those periods. Europe and China also are in difficult straits. The Fed seems to be playing with fire,” she concluded. 

  Wood’s flagship ARKK fund is down -28.6% this year so far. Its benchmark NASDAQ ETF, the QQQ, is down -9%. 

   

  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 04/03/2022 – 20:00

• Bear Traps: "This Is Not About The 2s10s, There Is Far, Far More Going On… We See 20-30% Near-Term Downside"
  Bear Traps: “This Is Not About The 2s10s, There Is Far, Far More Going On… We See 20-30% Near-Term Downside”

  By Larry McDonald, author of the Bear Traps report

  When we think about the hard assets vs. financial assets debate — clearly, we can see a “first-second inning” shift in play — but what takes the trade to the next level? We still have not seen even the slightest indication of real financial asset selling. What will give the hard asset value equity thesis real, sustainable legs? It all comes down to the dollar. As we stressed in our March 10th note —“a Secular C change for the Greenback” – for much of the last 20 years the U.S. political leadership has been weaponizing its currency. One could say they have –“gone to this well” too many times, indeed. Keep in mind, today ´s sanctions roulette has a far different gene pool.

  BEFORE the war in Ukraine — inflation in the U.S. was already running near 8%. Now the United States has chosen to bring out its sanction’s sword yet again — but this time up against a country that has regional control — influence over 10-15% of the global commodity complex.

  We are NOT sure the risk-reward has been meticulously thought through here. The risks of a self-inflicted wound are sky high and complacency around these risks is even higher. At the very end of the day, U.S. sanctions and counter attacks from Putin – push inflation’s roots much deeper below the surface and make higher price pressures far more sustainable than any time in recent memory. This mess gives “unintended consequences” a whole new meaning.

  As we stressed in the summer of 2020 the “Cobra Effect” coming from a fiscal and monetary policy overdose delivers many surprises wrapped in inflationary pressures. But sanction games raise these stakes to a whole new level. “Our currency your problem” becomes “our commodities your problem” (to paraphrase Zoltan Pozsar).

  Globally, the lights on the “USD weaponization” stage have NEVER been brighter. Even one of the U.S.’s most trusted allies – The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia – is looking at ways to lay off dollar risks and possibly trade their dark crude in red China yuan (CNH). We are NOT saying the U.S. dollar will lose its world’s reserve currency status this decade – that is absurd – but make NO MISTAKE a near term diversification away from the greenback is certain – all coming with HIGH impact on rates, inflation and hard assets.

  * * *

  There are times when developments pile up so fast late in the week that the street doesn’t have time to process the significance of the data. The Wall Street research community has always been “slow on the draw” – but we believe strategists and analysts will be confronted with a “come to Jesus” moment in the weeks ahead.

  What is the state of play you ask? We have a U.S. equity market that has been led by Utilities (XLU up 15% since late November vs. 3% for the S&P 500 over the same period) and Consumer Staples XLP for nearly five months now.

  

  In the U.S., ISM Manufacturing fell in March to 57.1 vs. 59 est. and 58.6 in prior month lowest since September 2020. Above all, new orders light blue above) plunged from 61.7 to 53.8 At the same time, the Dow Jones Transports had one of the sharpest one day declines in years on Friday following a warning from FreightWaves CEO that a freight recession looms. Classic economic bellwethers like Union Pacific UNP dropped 8% day over day at one point; US banks (Citi) and consumer plays (GM and Home Depot) are 30-35% off their highs with the U.S. Treasury curve moving deeper into inversion territory.

  CLEARLY this is NOT all about 2s-10s and the rates curve. There is FAR FAR FAR more going on.  AND the divergence between UMichigan and the Conference Board consumer data is screaming “stagflationary recession” as well. We see 20 30% near term downside for the Nasdaq.

   

  * * *

  The Fed Has to Convince the Market of What?

  In essence, the Federal Reserve has convinced the market of two things: 1) rate raises will be higher than formerly believed; 2) such raises will do little to cure inflation, at least over the near term. Breakevens (the yield of an inflation-protected bond minus the yield of a non-inflation-protected bond of the same maturity) were at 3.42% at the start of the Fed’s March meeting. On Friday, that got to 3.57%.

  So, traders decided that inflation was actually worse after the Fed meeting than before the Fed meeting. It is now at a record high, in fact.

  Furthermore, the bear market rally shows that the stock traders do not believe they are fighting the Fed. Ultimately, stocks believe that for all the clamor around higher rates, net-net monetary policy is and will continue to be loose, just less loose than it was. Loose money means Fed Funds after inflation are negative. Since inflation is running near 8%, no reasonable person thinks Powell will make Fed Funds actually positive after inflation.

  This explains the rise in yields on the 10 year: traders are trying to get more vig given ongoing inflation. It also explains the rise in gold, which in addition to its safe have bid is also an inflation hedge. So yes, the markets were surprised by a more hawkish Fed, but no, the markets don’t believe inflation is going away.

  We still think that aggressive tightening will lead to recession, assuming one hasn’t already gotten underway. We still believe we are either in or about to enter stagflation (depending on one’s definition of the term). So faster hikes but inflation still rages – in our view – the S&P 500 will be 20 30% lower in this world.

  Dollar Ceiling and Cash at the Treasury

  

  Cash Balances at the Treasury are relatively high at the Treasury vs. prior pre Covid years, and well off the lows of a few months ago. Dollar seems to be near a congestion zone of potential supply.

  If Treasury cash balances decline, the dollar may soften up a bit … With the HIGHEST conviction we believe we are in the middle of a secular change for the U.S. dollar. U.S. sanctions are FAR more of a dollar threat then most realize and they make sustained inflation FAR FAR FAR more certain.

  UMich – Conference Board Consumer Sentiment Spread

  

  Look at this spread and then look at the dates and events around it historically. The UMich survey is more ‘inflation-sensitive’. There is a higher weighting towards durable goods, whereas job conditions is more important in the Conference Board survey. The  Conference Board survey (correlated with unemployment rate) tends to stay optimistic for much longer than the U Michigan survey, which is more about affordability and people’s perceptions of job security. So, the U of Mich survey is more of a leading indicator and the Conference Board survey is more of a real time coincident indicator. The UMich survey usually leads the Conference Board survey down into recession.

  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 04/03/2022 – 19:30

• Price Controls Will Likely Make A Comeback – Even Though They Don't Work
  Price Controls Will Likely Make A Comeback – Even Though They Don’t Work

  As anybody who lived through the oil crisis of the 1970s (and the stagflation that resulted) will likely tell you, using price controls to try and alleviate Americans’ pain at the pump (and with their heating bills, and their grocery bills and, well, all their other bills) is, at best, a band-aid on a bullet wound, and at worst, a hair-brained policy response that does nothing to solve the underlying problem (in fact, it only exacerbates the problem).

  

  While America’s left-leaning millennials weren’t around for the 1970s, some of the people who served in government during the 1970s are still around, and one of them is Philip Verleger, president of PKVerleger and an analyst who specializes in commodity markets. Over the years, Verleger has authored more than 100 articles and books about commodities. He also worked on energy policy during the Ford and Carter Administrations after getting his PhD in 1971.

  It’s this first-hand experience that gives him special insight into why price controls don’t work, and also why it’s only a matter of time before the Biden Administration brain trust moves to bring them back.

  The problem with price controls, as Verleger explained during a recent MacroVoices interview with Erik Townsend, is that they create “distortions” in the market which feed through and influence producers’ willingness to ramp up production, effectively exacerbating the underlying cause of high prices in the first place.

  Here’s more on that in an excerpt from their interview:

  Erik: Now, there are a lot of people that are beginning to talk about price controls. I personally have a pretty strong bias that that’s never the right way to solve a problem. But a lot of people think it is. Are price controls potentially a good idea and regardless of whether they’re a good idea, are they likely coming or not?

  Philip: Oh, God. Oh, God. So when I had color in my hair. It is very gray now. I went to work in the Ford administration at the Council of Economic Advisers. And the focus and the reason I went there was to get us out of price controls. I stayed at the US Treasury in the Carter administration because I got asked by the Secretary of Treasury to help get rid of crude oil price controls and I managed to help lead the effort to get us out of price controls. The Energy Department’s didn’t. And as for getting us out of it, I was rewarded by being asked to draft and think of a windfall profit tax. These are not good ideas. Matter of fact, they’re terribly bad ideas. The distortions they caused if you go back and look at the World War Two experience and and I got into this business because my grandfather’s good friend had been a senior official in the Roosevelt administration had in fact run the price control programs for well had been ahead of the descent of St. Louis Federal Reserve.

  And he, you know, told me all when I was in high school, all the problems with price controls. I cannot I can’t screen but I don’t, you don’t want them. Now, so that is a terrible idea. There are some controls that might help. One of the things and there’s the report I sent you. I sent for Notes at the Margin. I’ve been following very closely how hedging of call options on crude and on crude oil has exacerbated the volatility of oil prices. One of the steps that one could take is to require people who write calls on these say $300 call on oil be fully covered. That is if a firm writes a calls on 100 contracts, it must be long 100 contracts under all our modern derivatives models. If I write a call today on $300 oil for 100 contracts, I only have to have about a third of a contract. 1/3 of a contract I need to cover that to hedge it.

  And if price goes up, I have to buy more. S, and Javier Blas wrote a great piece for Bloomberg in January 18 saying Wall Street was about to take the oil market on a wild ride. And it has because as I do the numbers, the number of calls out there are so large that every time somebody says well, oil prices might maybe should go up about 50 cents or something like that, it gets magnified to $5. So you don’t want price controls. The financial markets are out of control. And as Blas said, people are buying lottery tickets on oil. It’s you know, it’s the odds are better buying call options on oil right now or call options on natural gas in Europe than they are on betting on a sporting event. You know, you just look at the handle in the sporting events and how much it goes back to the better versus what oil is and oils earning much better returns. That needs to change. That could change. But you don’t want to tax and you don’t want just sudden taxes on oil and you don’t want price controls.

  So, why are policy makers and academics still kicking around a revival of price controls? At the risk of sounding excessively cynical, Townsend and Verleger put it succinctly enough: It’s the policy corollary to Murphy’s Law. The best policy ideas are impossible to push through. And the worst ideas…will inevitably be put into practice.

  Erik: I couldn’t possibly agree more Phil that we don’t want price controls. But the very fact that it’s such a bad idea almost tells my cynical mind that it’s more likely to happen if government’s in charge. You’ve been through this once before in the 1970s event for some of us that are a little bit younger than you are. Tell us a little bit more about maybe what people have forgotten about price controls. How that went and why it’s such a bad idea but also for fatalists like me who think it’s probably coming even though it’s a bad idea. What do we need to be thinking about as investors in terms of getting ready for it?

  Philip: We agree 100%. You know, it’s an economic policy. If there’s a really great idea, it’s almost impossible to get it through and if it’s a bad idea, it almost always happens. That seems to be Murphy’s Law or move Murphy’s corollary. The problem with price controls essentially is that… Let me rephrase that the problem with price controls are… this is plural. The Myraid, of details that you have to get into to make them work. When we went into this in 1971 50 years ago. 50 years ago plus six months, they froze them for 90 days. For 90 days okay you can just freeze prices and most things will be fine. But if you go much further, then you start to say well we have a problem here. We’ve lost some capacity here or something else and we start having to make adjustments. And it means you have to start building a bureaucracy. And we built a bureaucracy called the Cost of Living Council in the 70s. And they were looking into everything, and everybody had to file all this information. And then you had to, you know, if you had a problem, then you can apply to get a special exemption. We had special courts, temporary court, emergency Court of Appeals which was not very temporary. You know, it’s a rabbit hole once you go down it. There’s so many details that you have to start looking at, that’s a problem.

  Perhaps another clue lies in the analysis of Credit Suisse’s Zoltan Pozsar, who has in a series of notes published this year theorized about the birth of a new commodities-focused monetary regime which he has christened “Bretton Woods III”. While contemporary central bankers are accustomed to controlling the money supply via balance-sheet expansion and NIRP, they’re mostly powerless to counter soaring commodity prices (short of engineering a brutal recession that succeeds in crushing the ‘demand’ side of the supply vs. demand equation).

  Once President Biden’s latest attempt at countering sky-high oil prices proves to be a failure, the only options left will be 1) gas stimmies, followed inexorably by 2) price controls.

  Readers can listen to the full MacroVoices interview with Verleger below:

  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 04/03/2022 – 19:00

• Countdown To US Government Default
  Countdown To US Government Default

  Authored by MN Gordon via EconomicPrism.com,

  Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDC) are coming.  And they’re coming much faster than most people care to think about.  Are you ready?

  At the moment, roughly 90 central banks – including the European Central Banks and the Federal Reserve – are either experimenting with, or are in varying stages of CBDC implementation.  Moreover, these CBDC friendly central banks include all G20 economies.  And together, represent more than 90 percent of global GDP.

  What’s important to understand is the adoption of a CBDC in your country of residence would accompany the abolition of cash.  This would be for your own good, of course.  To eliminate nefarious transactions and black markets.

  If you value financial privacy and the liberty to spend your money as you please, then the rapidly approaching rollout of CBDCs is a major red flag.  Compulsory use of a CBDC, like a digital dollar for example, would give central planners complete oversight and control over your finances.

  You see, under a CBDC regime – free of cash – all of your transactions would be subject to government surveillance.  All remnants of financial freedom, privacy, and anonymity would be destroyed.  But that’s not all…

  CBDCs would allow control freak, power mad central planners to do much more than spy and surveil your financial transactions.  CBDCs would allow them to control how and when you spend your money.

  This may sound crazy to a sane person, who operates with a modicum of modesty and integrity.  But, in truth, this is one of the main intents of CBDCs.  In fact, several years ago Bank for International Settlements General Manager Agustin Carstens outlined the extraordinary powers CBDCs would afford central planners.  Here are the particulars from Carstens himself:

  “There is a huge difference [between CBDC and cash].  For example, with cash we don’t know who’s using a 100 dollar bill today.  We don’t know who’s using a 1,000 peso bill today.  A key difference with the CBDC is the central bank will have absolute control under rules and regulations that will determine the use of that expression of central bank liability, and we will have the technology to enforce that.”

  Do you get it?  The central planners want absolute control over how you spend your money.  This includes the U.S. government too…

  

  Traceable And Programmable

  On March 9, the Biden administration released an executive order (EO) requiring several federal agencies to study digital currencies and to identify ways to regulate them.  A big part of the EO is focused on blockchain based cryptocurrencies like bitcoin and ethereum.

  However, within the EO, Biden also directs the federal government and Federal Reserve to lay the foundation for a potential new U.S. currency, a CBDC – perhaps, a digital dollar.

  Specifically, the EO directs the U.S. Treasury, and other federal agencies, to study the development of the new CBDC and report back within 180 days of the potential risks and benefits of a digital dollar.  The EO also directs the Treasury Department, Office of the Attorney General and Federal Reserve to produce a ‘legislative proposal’ to create a digital currency within 210 days, about seven months.

  The digital dollar is coming, and it’s coming quick.

  To be clear, the adoption of a digital dollar by the U.S. government, as Biden intends, would be one of the greatest expansions of federal power ever made.  The digital dollar would be much different than a digital version of the existing U.S. dollar.  It would also be much different than cryptocurrencies like bitcoin and ethereum, which are decentralized.

  Digital dollars would be traceable and programmable. The Federal Reserve, or some other government agency, would have the ability to create digital dollars at whim.  Moreover, the digital dollars could be programmed to have various rules and restrictions governing how and when they are spent.

  Earlier this year, in Federal Reserve published report about the development of a CBDC, the Fed provided examples of possible ‘design choices’ for a digital dollar, including that “a central bank might limit the amount of CBDC an end user could hold.”

  Biden’s EO plan for a digital dollar also includes design choices that will give the federal government total control over financial freedom and the economy.  The EO even states the CBDC and other policies governing digital assets must mitigate “climate change and pollution” and promote “financial inclusion and equity.”  This is a major focus.

  From this, we can speculate that financial inclusion and equity means wealth redistribution.  And climate change mitigation means restrictions to fossil-fuel use.  These, and other government dictates, like the direct subtraction of taxes and fees from your account, would be programmed into the digital dollar.

  Why now…

  Blowback

  U.S. and European Union sanctions against Russia, including cutting Russian financial institutions off from SWIFT and preventing the Russian Central Banks from using its foreign currency reserves, may prove to be a strategic blunder.  The blowback potential is real, and is already happening.

  Europe, which depends on Russia for 40 percent of its natural gas, is now reaping the whirlwind.  According to Bloomberg, Putin has signed a decree demanding payment in rubles for Russian gas supplies starting April 1 (today).  Will Europe submit?

  There are rumors European nations are already covertly buying rubles.  The ruble’s increase on the foreign exchange market to pre-invasion levels certainly hints something is in the works.

  Regardless, the U.S. is losing control over the international financial and payment system.  By freezing Russia out SWIFT, Putin is being forced to look for other alternatives.  Specifically, China has been developing its own Cross-Border Interbank Payment System (CIPS) as an alternative to SWIFT.

  Sanctions against Russia may further accelerate the use and adoption of CIPS by nations that are opposed to western influence.  Cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology also offer banks and individuals ways to move payments without using dollars or SWIFT.

  The very success of the weaponization of the legacy financial system by the U.S. and Europe is driving Russia and others into such alternatives.  Hence, fewer international transactions in dollars could undermine the dollar’s reserve currency status.  This would have serious implications for the U.S. economy, as the dollar would likely suffer a significant devaluation.

  In the U.S. consumer price inflation (official) is already at a 40 year high.  Unofficially, it’s higher than it has been in over 100 years.

  Between the financial war being waged, raging consumer price inflation, a $30 trillion national debt, trillion dollar deficits, and unfunded liabilities running into the hundreds of trillions, something’s got to give…

  …namely, the U.S. dollar.

  Countdown to U.S. Government Default

  The popular American myth is that the U.S. government has never defaulted on its debt. 

  Quite frankly, that’s unadulterated hogwash. 

  The U.S. government has (unofficially) defaulted on its debt twice within the last hundred years.

  Executive Order 6102 of 1933, which forced all American citizens to turn in gold coins and bars, was, in fact, a default.  Gold ownership in the United States, with some small limitations, was illegal for the next 40 years.

  Under EO 6102, Americans were compensated $20.67 per troy ounce of gold.  They were paid with paper dollars.  Immediately following the government’s gold confiscation, the price of gold was raised by the Gold Reserve Act of 1934 to $35 per ounce.  Just like that, American citizens were robbed of over 40 percent of their wealth.

  The second default occurred in 1971, when President Nixon “temporarily” suspended the convertibility of the dollar into gold.

  Prior to 1971, as determined by the Bretton Woods international monetary system, which was agreed to in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, in July 1944, a foreign bank could exchange $35 with the U.S. Treasury for one troy ounce of gold.  After the U.S. reneged on this established exchange rate, when foreign banks handed the U.S. Treasury $35, they received $35 in exchange.

  In both instances, the U.S. government didn’t overtly default on the debt.  Instead, it changed the fundamentals – the terms and conditions – of the dollar.  By all honest accounts, these are defaults.

  Similarly, the issuance of a digital dollar (a Fed issued CBDC), which is traceable and programmable, changes the terms and conditions of the cash dollar.

  Make no mistake.  This is a default…and you won’t like it.

  Moreover, per Biden’s EO, this default could happen as soon as T-minus 210 days from March 9 – or as soon as October 4th.

  If that doesn’t give you a warm and fuzzy, we don’t know what will.

  *  *  *

  The window to protect your wealth and financial privacy is closing.  And it’s closing quick.  I don’t like it one bit.  But I’m not going to stand around powerless as Washington’s control freak sociopaths destroy everything I’ve worked so hard for.  For this reason, I’ve dedicated the past 6-months to researching and identifying simple, practical steps everyday Americans can take to protect their wealth and financial privacy.  The findings of my work are documented in the Financial First Aid Kit.  If you’d like to find out more about this important and unique publication, and how to acquire a copy, stop by here today!]

  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 04/03/2022 – 18:30

• World's Largest Oil Trader Warns Energy Markets Are Under-Pricing Supply Risks
  World’s Largest Oil Trader Warns Energy Markets Are Under-Pricing Supply Risks

  Thanks to a lucky confluence of circumstances, President Joe Biden has so far been able to delude the American people into believing that his latest feeble attempt to drive energy prices lower (without abandoning the green agenda that has led to structural deficiencies in the American oil and gas industry that will require concentrated investment over time to correct) has actually helped to drive prices lower at the pump.

  

  Unfortunately for him, a growing chorus of energy-market analysts are warning the public that the SPR release is essentially a band-aid on a bullet wound. Just the other day, Goldman Sachs warned that the unprecedented SPR release of 180 mb over the next six months to fight the “Putin price hike at the pump” has, in reality, done nothing to resolve structural issues, prompting the bank’s energy analysts to raise their near-term forecast for 2H22 Brent to $115/bbl from $110/bbl.

  Fresh off making a record $4 billion profit in 2021 (per Reuters), analysts at Vitol, the world’s largest energy trader, are warning of more imminent upside ahead in oil prices.

  Their reasoning? Lockdowns in Shanghai and Washington’s efforts to lead a ‘Marshall plan for energy’ to try and wean Europe off their dependence on Russian oil doesn’t change the fact that flows of Russian crude and oil products may be down by between 1 and 3 million barrels a day through the third quarter, while OPEC+ has refused to bolster its output.

  “Oil feels cheaper than most would’ve predicted,” Mike Muller, Vitol Group’s head of Asia, said Sunday on a podcast produced by Dubai-based consultant and publisher Gulf Intelligence. “Oil prices could be higher given the risk of disruption of supplies from Russia. But people are still lost figuring out those numbers.”

  Other factors that have weighed on energy prices this past month include (according to Bloomberg)…

  The Lockdown in Shanghai

  Muller suspects the CCP will double down on its repressive strategy for quashing the latest COVID outbreak, even as locals become increasingly outraged and accuse the Party of violating its compact with the Chinese public, as the NYT recently pointed out.

  “I happen to be in the camp that thinks China will continue to suppress this,” Muller said. “The Chinese are certainly making a good fist of arresting it.”

  Beijing will probably announce more economic stimulus measures before the Communist Party Congress later this year, Muller said. Such a move would likely bolster demand for oil in the world’s biggest importer.

  “China will throw the kitchen sink at making sure the economy delivers,” he said. “We are going to see China put a massive effort into infrastructure spending and propping up the economy. You’re going to see a big outlay.”

  The Iran Deal

  Another bullish risk factor for oil prices is the unraveling talks with Iran about reviving the JCPOA. Muller believes the market is overestimating the odds of a deal, noting that vast differences in the two sides’ negotiating positions remains.

  American officials said late last month that a pact wasn’t “imminent,” while Iran has made similar comments. Envoys are yet to say when they’ll return to Vienna for negotiations and many U.S. allies in the Middle East – including Israel and Saudi Arabia – are wary that a revival of the deal would hand Iran an oil windfall and allow it to continue arming proxy groups in the region.

  “Everyone was expecting a return of Iranian supplies,” Muller said. Now “nobody believes that’s going to happen in the second quarter. It looks much less likely than it did a few weeks back.”

  Of course, commodity traders like Vitol have plenty of incentive to brace for higher energy prices. As we pointed out last month, many commodity traders have just endured a brutal series of market ructions that some likened to a “doom loop”.

  In fact, just last month, the CFO of Vitol rival and commodity trading giant Trafigura predicted that that chaotic moves in global energy and commodity markets would likely trigger a wave of “consolidation” as smaller players are driven into insolvency.

  With this in mind, it’s worth asking: how much longer until the “doom loop” is finally triggered and the price of energy (and other commodities) surges to levels beyond the forecasts of even the most bullish investment banks/commodity traders?

  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 04/03/2022 – 18:05

• Busting The Myth That The Fed Can Control Or Predict The Economy
  Busting The Myth That The Fed Can Control Or Predict The Economy

  Submitted by Jon Wolfenbarger, Founder and CEO of Bull And Bear Profits, an investment website.

  The Federal Reserve states that it “conducts the nation’s monetary policy to promote maximum employment, stable prices, and moderate long-term interest rates in the U.S. economy.”

  Let’s look at how well the Fed has done that job since its founding in 1913.

  Economy And Long-Term Interest Rates

  Since 1913, the US unemployment rate has ranged from 2.5% in the early 1950s to 25% during the Great Depression. Inflation has ranged from positive 24% to negative 16%. Inflation is currently 7.9%, well above the Fed’s 2% target. While the Fed has some influence over money supply, they have no control over money demand or how money is spent, which has a significant impact on employment and inflation.

  The Fed’s goal to “moderate long-term interest rates” below free market levels is a form of price fixing. Since price fixing never works for long, it is no wonder the Fed has been unsuccessful in this goal. Since 1913, 10-Year Treasury rates have ranged from 0.5% in 2020 to 16% in 1981. Interest rates have been much more volatile than before the Fed, as shown below.

  

  Money Supply And Short-Term Interest Rates

  Maybe the Fed can’t control the economy, but at least they can control the money supply and short-term interest rates, right? Wrong.

  The Fed controls the Monetary Base, which is currency plus bank deposits at the Fed. But the popular M2 money supply measure is 3.6 times larger than the Monetary Base. The broader money supply is driven by the desire of commercial banks to lend and people to borrow from them. The Fed has no control over that.

  The Fed also controls the Federal Funds Rate, which is the interest rate at which commercial banks borrow and lend to each other overnight. But as shown below, the Fed follows market driven interest rates, such as the 2-Year Treasury rate (red line), when setting the Federal Funds Rate (black line), since they have no way of knowing where rates should be.

  

  The Fed’s Real Purpose

  The Fed’s real purpose is to enable banks to make loans by creating money out of thin air and then bail them out when their loans go bad. It has been successful in that goal, as we saw with the bank bailouts during the Great Recession.

  As Murray N. Rothbard explained: “Banks can only expand comfortably in unison when a Central Bank exists, essentially a governmental bank, enjoying a monopoly of government business, and a privileged position imposed by government over the entire banking system.”

  The Fed’s other main purpose is to help the US government borrow. They have been very successful at this, as the government debt to GDP ratio has more than tripled in the past 40 years to over 120%.

  The Fed Succeeds In Lowering Living Standards

  Two of the main negative consequences of Fed money creation is inflation and the boom and bust business cycle, both of which lower living standards significantly. Inflation raises living costs and erodes savings, while the business cycle wastes  scarce resources allocated to bad investments.

  Since the Fed’s founding in 1913, the US dollar has lots 97% of its purchasing power.

  The Fed helped engineer the Great Depression of the 1930s and the Great Recession of 2008-2009. Austrian Business Cycle Theory explains how the business cycle is caused by banks creating money out of thin air, which leads to an unsustainable boom that eventually turns into a bust, since newly created money does not create the scarce resources (land, labor and capital) needed to complete all the projects businesses have undertaken with the newly created money.

  As Ludwig von Mises explained: “The wavelike movement effecting the economic system, the recurrence of periods of boom which are followed by periods of depression is the unavoidable outcome of the attempts, repeated again and again, to lower the gross market rate of interest by means of credit expansion.”

  Fed Predictions

  Now that we’ve reviewed the Fed’s failures, let’s see how successful Fed leaders have been at predicting the economy.

  Alan Greenspan was Fed Chairman from 1987 to 2006. He presided over the 1987 stock market crash, the S&L crisis, the early 1990s recession, the late 1990s tech bubble, the early 2000s recession and the early/mid 2000s housing bubble. Naturally, the press called him “maestro” for his work at the Fed.

  Near the peak of the tech bubble in January 2000, Greenspan bragged about engineering a long economic expansion that he saw no signs of ending. As he said shortly before the NASDAQ stock index collapsed 80% and the early 2000s recession started: “[T]here remain few evident signs of geriatric strain that typically presage an imminent economic downturn.”

  In response to the recession he did not see coming, Greenspan slashed the Fed Funds rate from 6.5% in 2000 to 1% in 2003, which helped fuel the housing bubble. Then Greenspan encouraged homeowners to take out adjustable-rate mortgages in early 2004, just before he raised the Fed Funds rate to 5.25% over the next two years, which triggered the housing bust.

  In 2007, Greenspan said this about banks lending to subprime borrowers: “While I was aware a lot of these practices were going on, I had no notion of how significant they had become until very late…I really didn’t get it until very late in 2005 and 2006.”

  At least Greenspan has been honest about the Fed’s inability to forecast the economy: “People don’t realize that we cannot forecast the future. The number of mistakes I have made are just awesome.” Greenspan also admitted that the market is much larger and more powerful than the Fed: “[T]he market value of global long-term securities is approaching $100 trillion [so these markets] now swamp the resources of central banks.”

  Ben Bernanke was Fed Chairman from 2006 to 2014, so he presided over the Great Recession, the worst economic downturn since the 1930s up to that time.

  In 2002, in a speech titled “Deflation: Making Sure ‘It’ Doesn’t Happen Here”, Bernanke bragged that the Fed’s legal right to create money out of thin air would prevent deflation: “The US government has a technology, called a printing press, that allows it to produce as many dollars as it wishes at essentially no cost…under a paper-money system, a determined government can always generate higher spending and, hence, positive inflation.” Naturally, given the Fed’s ability to control the economy, “it” did happen in 2009, with prices falling 2% in the wake of the Great Recession.

  In 2006, Bernanke dismissed the inverted yield curve, which is known by virtually all economists to be one of the best predictors of a recession: “I would not interpret the currently very flat yield curve as indicating a significant economic slowdown to come.” In June 2008, seven months into the Great Recession, Bernanke said: “The risk that the economy has entered a substantial downturn appears to have diminished over the past month or so.”

  Janet Yellen was Fed Chair from 2014 to 2018, so she had less time to cause major damage. But true to form, she stated she had no idea the housing bust would lead to a major recession: “I didn’t see any of that coming until it happened.”

  Jerome “Jay” Powell has been Fed Chairman since 2018. He helped invert the yield curve in 2019 and has presided over the Covid crash and recession, as well as the highest inflation rates in 40 years.

  In early November 2021, when inflation was over 6%, Powell and the Fed were still calling inflation “transitory” and caused by Covid and not the 40% increase in the money supply.

  By March 2022, with inflation rising 7.9%, Powell finally raised the Fed Funds rate by 0.25%, with plans to raise rates up to 2.75% by the end of 2023. Ominously, given his forecasting track record, Powell thinks he can raise rates that aggressively and achieve the elusive “soft landing” of slowing inflation without driving the economy into a recession, despite the already flattening yield curve.

  Conclusion

  The Federal Reserve cannot control the economy or even the money supply and interest rates. And Fed leaders clearly cannot predict the economy, even though the media and Wall Street hang on their every word. But the Fed can lower living standards by destroying the value of the dollar and causing the boom and business cycle. Economic theory and history has proven that government central planning does not work in creating stability or prosperity. That includes centrally planned monetary policy.

  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 04/03/2022 – 17:40

• Russian Space Head To Halt ISS Cooperation Citing "Illegal Sanctions" 
  Russian Space Head To Halt ISS Cooperation Citing “Illegal Sanctions” 

  Tensions between Russia and the US on Earth have had broader implications for the two nations’ partnership in low Earth orbit aboard the International Space Station (ISS). 

  Dmitry Rogozin, head of Russian space agency Roscosmos, tweeted Saturday morning that he would suspend cooperation on the ISS and partnerships with NASA, the European Space Agency (ESA), and the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) as he criticized Western sanctions designed to severely damage the Russian economy (already appear to be working as recession imminent). 

  “The purpose of the sanctions is to kill the Russian economy, plunge our people into despair and hunger, and bring our country to its knees. It is clear that they will not be able to do this, but the intentions are clear,” Rogozin said.

  “That’s why I believe that the restoration of normal relations between the partners at the International Space Station (ISS) and other projects is possible only with full and unconditional removal of illegal sanctions,” he continued.

  Rogozin added “specific proposals” on when to end the “cooperation within the framework of the ISS with the space agencies of the United States, Canada, the European Union, and Japan” will be discussed with Moscow “in the near future.” 

  Rogozin sent letters to NASA, the ESA, and the CSA to lift sanctions on Russian space and rocket companies. He posted the responses of all major agencies, which gave generic answers and appeared not to budge on sanctions. 

  NASA’s response 

  Глава НАСА сенатор Нельсон, руководитель Европейского космического агентства Йозеф Ашбахер и глава Канадского космического агентства Лиза Кэмпбелл ответили на моё к ним обращение с требованием отмены санкций против ряда предприятий российской ракетно-космической отрасли. pic.twitter.com/rnMYiK9wal

  — РОГОЗИН (@Rogozin) April 2, 2022

  https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

  ESA’s response 

  Что касается ответа Европейского космического агентства, то Йозеф Ашбахер выступил в роли почтальона, подтвердив, что он такие вопросы не решает, а потому перенаправил моё обращение странам-членам ЕС. То есть нам предлагается подождать, пока бюрократии всех 28 стран Евросоюза pic.twitter.com/D3uzV6vVO9

  — РОГОЗИН (@Rogozin) April 2, 2022

  https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

  CSA’s response

  Американский и канадский ответ написаны практически под копирку. В частности, в письме Билла Нельсона говорится, что “НАСА продолжит взаимодействовать с соответствующими федеральными ведомствами и агентствами США в целях содействия дальнейшему сотрудничеству в рамках МКС и ее pic.twitter.com/db7IZIAsZx

  — РОГОЗИН (@Rogozin) April 2, 2022

  https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

  Rogozin is known for provocative statements and threatened to end Russian cooperation on the ISS last month. He also said one disastrous result of Russia pulling out of the ISS would be an “uncontrolled de-orbit” of the 500-ton space station. That’s because Russia is responsible for ISS’ propulsion systems. 

  Last week, Rogozin suspended all European launches of satellites. Meanwhile, British satellite venture OneWeb has contracted Elon Musk’s SpaceX to launch satellites instead of Russia. 

  Russia has already said it will pull out of the ISS by 2025, though Moscow’s special military operation” in Ukraine and following sanctions by Western countries has expedited their departure. Roscosmos has already begun work on a new space station. 

  Even in space, global superpowers who once worked together for decades are quickly unwinding relations as here on Earth, a new world order is emerging, one that is multi-polar. BlackRock CEO Larry Fink’s annual shareholder recently warned about that. 

  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 04/03/2022 – 17:15

• 'The House That Davos Built' Quakes As PM Orban Claims "Great Victory" In Hungary Election
  ‘The House That Davos Built’ Quakes As PM Orban Claims “Great Victory” In Hungary Election

  Update (1700ET): AFP reports that Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban claimed a “great victory” in Sunday’s general election, as partial results gave his Fidesz party the lead.

  Addressing a jubilant crowd chanting his name, Orban said:

  “We have won a great victory — a victory so great you can perhaps see it from the moon and certainly from Brussels”.

  This will be Orban’s fourth consecutive term in office.

  “Hungarians decided that they back peace and security,” Orban’s foreign minister, Peter Szijjarto, told TV2 Sunday night. 

  

  As Bloomberg reports, the unexpectedly clear victory (Orban’s Fidesz party leads United for Hungary, a six-member opposition alliance, 55% to 33% in the party list contest, according to the National Election Office, with 63% of the votes counted) defied polls ahead of the vote that had predicted Orban would face the toughest challenge to re-election in his 12 years in power, even as changes to the electoral process under his rule gave Fidesz an advantage.

  *  *  *

  Update (1600ET): Much to the chagrin of the elites – as detailed below – Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s party took a commanding lead in Hungarian elections, according to an early count that appeared to dim the chances of a six-party opposition alliance to block him from a fourth consecutive term.

  With 36% of the votes counted, mostly from rural districts that are the core of Orban’s support base, his Fidesz party was leading a six-party opposition alliance 58% to 30% on Sunday in the party list vote.

  It was also tipped to win a large majority of the electoral districts that may give it close to a two-thirds parliamentary majority.

  “We expect a clear victory,” Cabinet Minister Gergely Gulyas told reporters.

  A far-right party, Mi Hazank, may also clear the parliamentary threshold.

  *  *  *

  As Tom Luongo detailed earlier via his Gold, Goats, ‘n Guns blog, today Hungarians went to the polls to decide their future.

  

  What they may not have realized is that they also are deciding on the future of most of the European continent in the process.

  Sitting Prime Minister Viktor Orban is vying for his fourth term in office, having been in power for 12 years and he is under intense opposition from within and without. It’s an open secret that Orban is reviled in Brussels.

  And because of his basic sense of common decency and nationalism that means he must be removed from office in order to ensure the full consolidation of power with the European Commission and European Council.

  That only happens with his removal and a Brussels-centric puppet controlled by George Soros and the Davos Crowd put in his place. There is a real sense of desperation surrounding this bid to remove Orban.

  The formation of a ridiculous Not-Orban coalition of no less than six parties, none of whom would piss in each other’s mouths if their throats were on fire, is pure desperation. It is the apotheosis of the Davos strategy to put in power weak coalitions that can be torn apart at the seams but whose members are also so enamored with being in power they won’t collapse the government as popular opinion turns against them.

  This is how Davos engineered Mario Draghi’s takeover in Italy. Five Star Movement cut a deal with the Democrats to oust Lega despite the polls being completely against the idea of such a government after Matteo Salvini pulled out of his coalition with Five Star back in 2019.

  Germany’s ‘Traffic Light’ coalition members have almost nothing in common but in no way will you see the FDP, for example, pull out of it with their sinking poll numbers, now just 8%, even though they could. Instead, we see Finance Minister and FDP leader Christian Lindner doing exactly what he was put in power to do, gum up the financial works and prep the stage for the transference of Germany’s power within the EU to the EU.

  But all of that unravels if Orban is free for another four years to veto every stupid and belligerent idea that comes out of the European Council. Hungary is already under financing sanctions from the EU over their anti-LGBT laws, threatening to block distributions from the EU budget.

  The EU have already gotten the Poles to knuckle under because the Poles are dependent on Germany for gas flows thanks to their own intransigence in cutting deals with Russia for energy.

  Hungary, on the other hand, has energy independence from Brussels by having contracted directly with Gazprom for natural gas via Turkstream’s train that goes into Serbia and Hungary. This should give you some context as to why the EU is trying to sanction Serbia and cut off the flows of that pipeline where it crosses EU territory in Bulgaria.

  

  With a fiscally, monetarily (they are not on the euro) and energy independent Hungary there is little argument for them staying in the EU if Brussels is going to treat them as second class members. Orban and his government have been resolute in their refusal to get involved in the Russia/Ukraine conflict even though there has been serious pressure applied by NATO.

  This helped Orban in recent polls along with the war itself. The natural tendency is to not change leadership during a time of crisis. So, I don’t anticipate Orban having much trouble winning the election, if the election is anything close to ‘fair.’

  And that’s the crux of the conflict.

  To ask why the election wouldn’t be ‘fair,’ let’s think through the consequences of an Orban victory.

  Hungarians would have a strong incentive to reverse their support of EU membership. It is the one thing that really hamstrings Orban politically within the EU’s power structures.

  Orban needs to get past this election to begin making the case that Hungary is not better off in the EU rather than outside it. Then he can then fully express his power within the EU to slow down, if not grind to a halt, any further expansion of EU aggression against Russia.

  What Davos has tried to do in response is ratchet up the fear of Russia expanding west and stir up memories of life under the Warsaw Pact, which is the main source of basic support for the EU among many Europeans in the first place.

  Putin has made his intentions very clear. The dividing line for him are the republics of the former USSR, not the Warsaw Pact countries. In fact, as Dexter White has pointed out in multiple podcasts (this one in particular), which I and others like The Saker agree with, Russia doesn’t have the force projection capability or desire to do so even if they wanted to much past the Dnieper River in Ukraine no less Poland or Hungary.

  So, that narrative is pure fear porn for electioneering purposes.

  It reeks of existential fear over what an Orban administration looks like free for four years from further meddling by external forces. And since the EU is already refusing to give Hungary the money they are owed under EU rules, this is an easy argument for Orban to make to the people, post-election.

  Hungary standing tall against further European integration while Russia holds serve on its territorial gains in Ukraine would make a powerful argument to most of the Visegrads that there’s an opportunity for life without either Russia or the EU controlling their futures.

  The opportunity exists here for a new bloc to emerge which frees many of these landlocked countries to gain access to the Baltic, Black and Mediterranean seas if they overcome their fear of Russia and look West to the threats coming from Brussels.

  That would also mark the limit of their war against populism and sets up the possibility of a political earthquake in France later this month when Emmanuel Macron faces off against a surging Marine LePen in the second round of Presidential elections there.

  Look for a lot of post-election shenanigans in Hungary if Orban wins the initial vote. The OSCE will use their typical game of using biased ‘exit polls’ to throw shade on the results citing differences between their polls and the official results to gin up anti-Orban sentiment on the ground in Budapest.

  We should see a replay of 2020’s riots in Minsk over the results in Belarus. Now, I’m not suggesting that Orban is going to stuff the ballot box like Lukashenko likely did (who didn’t need to), but that will be the narrative constructed all across the western press.

  We will be subjected to the worst kind of disinformation campaign against Orban. It will be an order of magnitude worse than anything he’s experienced in the past. I hope for his part that he’s aware of these threats and has contingency plans in place.

  We’ll find out this week.

  Because the future of the EU hangs in the balance here against a backdrop of forces pulling at it on which the whole of Davos’ grand plans to make the world safe for Eurotrash technocrats possible.

  And if that’s not enough of an incentive for everyone to cheat, lie and steal this election I don’t know what is.

  *  *  *

  Join my Patreon if populism isn’t a dirty word to you.

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  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 04/03/2022 – 17:06

• Lessons From A Trading Great: Stanley Druckenmiller
  Lessons From A Trading Great: Stanley Druckenmiller

  By Macro Ops

  The “greatest money making machine in history”, a man with “Jim Roger’s analytical ability, George Soros’ trading ability, and the stomach of a riverboat gambler” is how fund manager Scott Bessent describes Stanley Druckenmiller. That’s high praise, but if you look at Druckenmiller’s track record, you’ll find it’s well deserved.

  Druck averaged over 30% returns the last three decades — impressive. But what’s even more astonishing is the lack of volatility… the guy almost never loses.

  He never had a single down year and only had five losing quarters out of 120 altogether! That’s absolutely unheard of. And he did all of this in size. At his peak, Druck was running more than $20 billion and he was still managing to knock it out the park.

  When you study Druckenmiller you get the sense that he was built in a laboratory, deep in a jungle somewhere, where he was put together piece by piece to create the perfect trader. Every character trait that makes up a good speculator, Druck possesses in spades… things like:

  • Mental flexibility

  • Independent thinking

  • Extreme competitiveness

  • Tireless inquisitiveness

  • Deep self-awareness

  Maybe he’s a freak of nature or perhaps a secret Jesse Livermore / George Soros lovechild… or maybe he’s just a relentlessly determined trader who’s been on a lifelong path of mastery. Either way, it behooves us to study the thoughts and actions of one of the game’s greatest. And with that, let’s begin.

  On what moves stocks

  In Jack Schwager’s book The New Market Wizards, Druckenmiller said this in response to the question of how he evaluates stocks (emphasis is mine):

  When I first started out, I did very thorough papers covering every aspect of a stock or industry. Before I could make the presentation to the stock selection committee, I first had to submit the paper to the research director. I particularly remember the time I gave him my paper on the banking industry. I felt very proud of my work. However, he read through it and said, “This is useless. What makes the stock go up and down?” That comment acted as a spur. Thereafter, I focused my analysis on seeking to identify the factors that were strongly correlated to a stock’s price movement as opposed to looking at all the fundamentals. Frankly, even today, many analysts still don’t know what makes their particular stocks go up and down.

  The financial world is chock full of noise and nonsense. It’s filled with smart people who don’t know a damn thing about how the world really works. The financial system’s incentive structure is set up so that as long as analysts sound smart and pretend like they know why stock xyz is going up, they get rewarded. This holds true for all the talking heads and “experts” except for those who actually trade real money. They either learn the game or get competed out.

  Being one of those who compete in the arena, Druckenmiller was forced to learn early on what actually drives prices. This is what he found:

  Earnings don’t move the overall market; it’s the Federal Reserve Board… focus on the central banks and focus on the movement of liquidity… most people in the market are looking for earnings and conventional measures. It’s liquidity that moves markets.

  Liquidity is the expansion and contraction of money, specifically credit. It’s the biggest variable that drives demand in an economy. It’s something our team at Macro Ops follows closely.

  The federal reserve has the biggest lever on liquidity. This is why a trader needs to keep a constant eye on what the Fed is doing.

  This is not to say that things like sales and earning don’t matter. They are still very important at the singular stock level. Here’s Druckenmiller again (emphasis mine):

  Very often the key factor is related to earnings. This is particularly true of the bank stocks. Chemical stocks, however, behave quite differently. In this industry, the key factor seems to be capacity. The ideal time to buy the chemical stocks is after a lot of capacity has left the industry and there’s a catalyst that you believe will trigger an increase in demand. Conversely, the ideal time to sell these stocks is when there are lots of announcements for new plants, not when the earnings turn down. The reason for this behavioral pattern is that expansion plans mean that earnings will go down in two to three years, and the stock market tends to anticipate such developments.

  The market is a future discounting machine; meaning earnings matter for a stock, but more so in the future than in the past.

  Most market participants take recent earnings and just extrapolate them into the future. They fail to really look at the mechanism that drives the bottom line for a particular company or sector. The key to being a good trader is to identify the factor(s) that will drive earnings going forward, not what drove them in the past.  

  Druckenmiller said in a recent interview that his “job for 30 years was to anticipate changes in the economic trends that were not expected by others, and, therefore not yet reflected in security prices.” Focus on the future, not the past.

  Another thing that sets Druck apart is his willingness to use anything that works; as in any style or tool to find good trades and manage them.

  Another discipline I learned that helped me determine whether a stock would go up or down is technical analysis. Drelles was very technically oriented, and I was probably more receptive to technical analysis than anyone else in the department. Even though Drelles was the boss, a lot of people thought he was a kook because of all the chart books he kept. However, I found that technical analysis could be very effective.

  I never use valuation to time the market. I use liquidity considerations and technical analysis for timing. Valuation only tells me how far the market can go once a catalyst enters the picture to change the market direction.

  Druckenmiller employs a confluence of approaches (fundamental, macro, technical and sentiment) to broaden his view of the battlefield. This is a practice we follow at Macro Ops. It doesn’t make sense to pigeonhole yourself into a single rigid scope of analysis… simply use what works and discard what doesn’t.

  How to make outsized returns

  Druckenmiller throws conventional wisdom out the window. Instead of placing a lot of small diversified bets, he practices what we call the “Big Bet” philosophy, which consists of deploying a few large concentrated bets.

  Here’s Druckenmiller on using the big bet philosophy (emphasis mine):

  The first thing I heard when I got in the business, not from my mentor, was bulls make money, bears make money, and pigs get slaughtered. I’m here to tell you I was a pig. And I strongly believe the only way to make long-term returns in our business that are superior is by being a pig. I think diversification and all the stuff they’re teaching at business school today is probably the most misguided concept everywhere. And if you look at all the great investors that are as different as Warren Buffett, Carl Icahn, Ken Langone, they tend to be very, very concentrated bets. They see something, they bet it, and they bet the ranch on it. And that’s kind of the way my philosophy evolved, which was if you see – only maybe one or two times a year do you see something that really, really excites you… The mistake I’d say 98% of money managers and individuals make is they feel like they got to be playing in a bunch of stuff. And if you really see it, put all your eggs in one basket and then watch the basket very carefully.

  A lot of wisdom in that paragraph. To earn superior long-term returns you have to be willing to bet big when your conviction is high. And the corollary is that you need to protect your capital by not wasting it on a “bunch of stuff” you don’t have much conviction on.

  This reminds me of what Seth Klarman wrote in his book Margin of Safety:

  Avoiding loss should be the primary goal of every investor. This does not mean that investors should never incur the risk of any loss at all. Rather “don’t lose money” means that over several years an investment portfolio should not be exposed to appreciable loss of capital. While no one wishes to incur losses, you couldn’t prove it from an examination of the behavior of most investors and speculators. The speculative urge that lies within most of us is strong; the prospect of free lunch can be compelling, especially when others have already seemingly partaken. It can be hard to concentrate on losses when others are greedily reaching for gains and your broker is on the phone offering shares in the latest “hot” initial public offering. Yet the avoidance of loss is the surest way to ensure a profitable outcome.

  You need to keep your powder dry so that when the stars align you can go for the jugular and turkey neck that son of a gun.

  The importance of striking when the iron is hot is something Druckenmiller learned while trading for George Soros.

  I’ve learned many things from [George Soros], but perhaps the most significant is that it’s not whether you’re right or wrong that’s important, but how much money you make when you’re right and how much you lose when you’re wrong. The few times that Soros has ever criticized me was when I was really right on a market and didn’t maximize the opportunity.

  An intense focus on capital preservation coupled with a big bet approach is the barbell philosophy used by many of the greats.

  Keeping your losses small and pushing your winners hard is the name of the game in profitable speculation.

  The fund washout we’re seeing today is not just because of the glut of mediocrity in the money management space, but also because even decent managers are scared to take the necessary risks to have big return years. They manage too much to the benchmark and are too short-term focused. That’s a recipe for average performance. Here’s Druck on how it should be done:

  Many managers, once they’re up 30 or 40 percent, will book their year [i.e., trade very cautiously for the remainder of the year so as not to jeopardize the very good return that has already been realized]. The way to attain truly superior long-term returns is to grind it out until you’re up 30 or 40 percent, and then if you have the conviction, go for a 100 percent year. If you can put together a few near-100 percent years and avoid down years, then you can achieve really outstanding long-term returns.

  Once you’ve earned the right to be aggressive and can bet with the house’s money (profits), you should plunge hard when that high conviction trade arises and push for outsized returns.

  The trader’s mindset and handling losses

  According to Druck, to be a winning trader you need to be “decisive, open-minded, flexible and competitive”.

  The day before the crash in 1987, Druckenmiller switched from net short to 130% long because he thought the selloff was done. He saw the market bumping up against significant support. But through the course of the day he realized that he made a terrible mistake. The next day he flipped his book and got short the market and actually made money. You see this type of mental flexibility in all the greatest traders. And Druckenmiller is one trader that epitomizes it perhaps better than anybody else.

  The practice of having “strong opinions, weakly held” is difficult but paramount to success.

  In order to attain that level of mental flexibility, you need to learn to detach ego from your immediate trade outcomes. If you allow losses to affect your judgement, you’ll inevitably make bigger mistakes. Druckenmiller learned this lesson early on from Soros.

  Soros is the best loss taker I’ve ever seen. He doesn’t care whether he wins or loses on a trade. If a trade doesn’t work, he’s confident enough about his ability to win on other trades that he can easily walk away from the position. There are a lot of shoes on the shelf; wear only the ones that fit. If you’re extremely confident, taking a loss doesn’t bother you.

  One of the best parts about this game is that as long as you stay alive (protect your capital) you can always make another trade. Druckenmiller said the “wonderful thing about our business is that it’s liquid, and you can wipe the slate clean on any day. As long as I’m in control of the situation — that is, as long as I can cover my positions — there’s no reason to be nervous.”

  I remember watching Charlie Rose interview Druckenmiller a few years ago. Charlie asked him why, after all these years, and with all the money he’s made, does he still put in 60-hour weeks trading? Druck responded (and I’m paraphrasing here) “because I have to… I love the game and I love winning, the money isn’t even important.”

  To get to Druck’s level, you have to trade because that’s just what you do. It’s what you live for.

  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 04/03/2022 – 16:50

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• What Is The "Great Reset" And What Do The Globalists Actually Want?
  What Is The “Great Reset” And What Do The Globalists Actually Want?

  Authored by Brandon Smith via Alt-Market.us,

  I first heard the phrase “Great Reset” way back in 2014. Christine Lagarde, who was head of the IMF at the time, was suddenly becoming very vocal about global centralization. It was an agenda that was generally only whispered about in the dark corners of institutional white papers and the secretive meetings of banking elites, but now these people were becoming rather loud about it.

  

  Lagarde was doing a Q&A at the World Economic Forum and the notion of the “Reset” was very deliberately brought up; what the project entailed was vague, but the basic root of it was a dramatic shift away from the current economic, social and political models of the world into a globally centralized and integrated system – A “New World Order,” if you will…

  It’s important to remember that we had just jumped through the fires of an international credit collapse which started in 2008 and had continued to cause uncertainty in markets for years. The central banks had dumped tens of trillions of dollars worth of stimulus into the system just to keep it on life support. Some of us in the alternative media believed that these actions were not meant to save the economy, only zombify the economy through currency devaluation and inflation. Not long down the road, this zombie creation would turn on us and try to eat us alive, and only the central bankers new exactly when this would occur.

  Think of the crash of 2008 as Stage 1 of the Reset agenda; the globalists were getting cocky and were ready to unveil their plans to the public.

  Lagarde’s discussion at the WEF was also held around the time that Klaus Schwab was introducing his 4th Industrial Revolution concept, which is a little more forward with what the globalists really want. He talks excitedly of a true “global society” and a world in which people turn to Artificial Intelligence (AI) as a better means of governance. He even suggests that laws would eventually be dictated by AI and that courts would be run by robots.

  Of course, he admits that this cannot happen without a period of economic deconstruction in which people and governments will have to choose between sacrifice for the sake of stability or continued pain in the name of holding on to the “old ways.” Look at it this way: The Great Reset is the action or the chaos, and the 4th Industrial Revolution is the intended result or planned “order.” That is to say, it’s a new order created out of engineered chaos.

  Yeah, it sounds like bad science fiction, but remember these are the people that enjoy the undivided attention of many of our political leaders and they rub elbows with the central bankers at the Federal Reserve. I’ll say it again: The proponents of the Great Reset and the 4th Industrial Revolution, who want to completely undermine and reconstitute our society and way of life, are close partners with our national leaders and the very bankers that could force such a reset to happen through a deliberate collapse.

  The globalists have been trying to rebrand and repackage their New World Order agenda for many years, and the Reset was what they came up with. Rather than being innocuous sounding, the term threatens systemic upheaval and an erasure of the past. When you “reset” something it usually goes back to zero – A blank slate that the engineers can use to rewrite the code and the functions. But what does this really mean?

  What do the globalists REALLY WANT? Here are the details, so far as I can prove or support with evidence, of what the “Great Reset” actually is and what programs they hope to enforce:

  Total Global Economic Centralization

  Some people might claim that we already have global economic centralization, but they don’t understand what this really means. While national central banks are all members of the IMF and the Bank for International Settlements and take their marching orders from these institutions, what the globalists want is open global governance of finance, probably through the IMF.

  In other words, it’s not enough that they manipulate economies secretly by using national central banks as proxies; what they want is to stop hiding and to come out into the light as the magnanimous rulers they think they are.

  The ultimate goal of full centralization is to erase the very idea of free markets and to allow a handful of people to micromanage every aspect of trade and business. It’s not just about influence, it’s about economic empire. But in order to achieve a global central bank they must first implement a one world currency plan.

  A One World Digital Currency System

  The IMF has been talking about using their Special Drawing Rights basket as the foundation for a global currency for years (since at least the year 2000). Around a decade ago China started taking on trillions of dollars in debt just to qualify as a member of the SDR system, and the IMF has hinted that when all is said and done that system will go digital. All that is needed is the right kind of crisis to shock the public into compliance.

  This was evident at the height of the covid pandemic lockdowns and the threat of economic disaster when globalist institutions began to suggest that the IMF’s SDR could be used as a safety net for nations, with strings attached, of course. But beyond the stresses of the pandemic there is a much bigger crisis; namely the stagflationary crisis now on our doorstep. With multiple national currencies in decline and the dollar’s world reserve status increasingly in question, I have no doubt that the globalists will take the opportunity to offer the public their digital currency as a solution.

  The new system would be more like a phantom currency for a time. The SDR would be the glue or the backing while national currencies remain in circulation until the digital framework becomes pervasive. The IMF and the people behind it would become the defacto world central bank, with the power to steer the course of all national economies through a single currency mechanism.

  On the micro-economic side, each and every individual would now be dependent on a digital currency or cryptocurrency which removes all privacy in trade. All transactions would be tracked, and by the very nature of blockchain technology and the digital ledger this would be required. The money elites wouldn’t have to explain the tracking, all they would have to say is “That’s how the technology functions; without the ledger it doesn’t work.”

  A Global Social Credit System

  The evil inherent in globalism was readily apparent during the recent lockdowns and the violent push for medical tyranny. Despite the fact that covid only had a median Infection Fatality Rate of only 0.27% according to dozens of official studies, the WEF contingent of politicians and world leaders were frothing at the mouth, proclaiming that the existence of covid gave them the right to take total control of people’s lives.

  Klaus Schwab and the WEF happily announced that the pandemic was the beginning of the “Great Reset” and the 4th Industrial Revolution, stating that the covid crisis presented a perfect “opportunity” for change.

  The vaccine passports were thankfully defeated by numerous conservative red states in the US, leading to the complete reversal of such policies across most of the western world. We were free for years while many blue states and other countries were facing authoritarianism and this caused a lot of problems for the globalists. It’s hard to institute a global medical dystopia when people around the world can look at the conservatives in the US and see that we are living just fine without the controls.

  The vax passports need to be understood as a first step towards something else – The beginning of a massive social credit system much like the one being used in China right now. If you think cancel culture is a nightmare today, just think what would happen if the collectivist mob had the power to drop a review bomb on your social credit account and declare you to be untouchable? Imagine if they had the power to simply shut down your ability to get a job, to shop in grocery stores and even shut down access to your money? Without your compliance to the collective, access to normal survival necessities would be impossible.

  This is what the globalists want, as they openly admitted at the start of the pandemic, and the vax passports would have been an introduction to that technocratic horror had we conservatives not stood our ground.

  You Will Own Nothing And Be Happy By 2030

  The “Sharing Economy” (also sometimes referenced in parallel with “Stakeholder Capitalism”) is a concept that has been making the rounds in the WEF for a few years now. The media has attempted at every turn to spread lies and disinformation claiming that the plan does not exist; but again, it is openly admitted.

  The sharing economy is essentially a communistic economy, but distilled down to a bizarre minimalism even people who lived in the Soviet Union did not have to experience. The structure is described as a kind of commune based society in which people live in Section 8-style housing, with shared kitchens, shared bathrooms, and barely any privacy. All property is rented, or borrowed. All cars are borrowed and shared, most transit is mass transit, basic personal items such as computers, phones, and even cooking utensils might be shared or borrowed items. As the WEF says, you will own nothing.

  Being happy about it is another matter.

  The argument for this kind of society is of course that “climate change” and the frailties of consumer economics demand that we reduce our living standards to near zero and abandon the sacred ideal of property ownership for the sake of the planet.

  Set aside the fact that carbon based global warming is a farce. The world’s temperatures have only risen by 1 DEGREE CELSIUS in the span of a century, according to the NOAA. This was data that climate scientists had attempted to hide or gloss over for years, but now it is out there for everyone to see. There is no proof of man made global warming. None.

  The globalists have been scheming to use environmentalism as an excuse for centralization since at least 1972, when the Club Of Rome published a treatise titled ‘The Limits To Growth’. Twenty years later they would publish a book titled ‘The First Global Revolution.’ In that document they specifically recommend using global warming as a vehicle:

  “In searching for a common enemy against whom we can unite, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like, would fit the bill. In their totality and their interactions these phenomena do constitute a common threat which must be confronted by everyone together. But in designating these dangers as the enemy, we fall into the trap, which we have already warned readers about, namely mistaking symptoms for causes. All these dangers are caused by human intervention in natural processes, and it is only through changed attitudes and behaviour that they can be overcome. The real enemy then is humanity itself.”

  The statement comes from Chapter 5 – The Vacuum, which covers their position on the need for global government. The quote is relatively clear; a common enemy must be conjured in order to trick humanity into uniting under a single banner, and the elites see environmental catastrophe, caused by mankind itself, as the best possible motivator.

  They present the solution of the shared economy concept as if it is a new and bold idea. What the globalists ultimately want for their Great Reset, however, is a tidal wave reversal from freedom and individual prosperity back to a very old manner of doing things, similar to ancient feudalism. You become a peasant working on land owned by the elites, or by the state, and you will never be allowed to own that land.

  The only difference would be that in a feudal empire of the past peasants could not own land because of the class system. This time around, you won’t be allowed to own anything, including land, because wanting to own anything is “selfish” and destructive to the planet.

  Total Information Control

  The truth is a rare commodity these days, but nowhere near as rare as it will be if these elitists get what they want. The globalists are far more open about their agenda today than they have ever been before, and I suspect this is because they believe they will be able to rewrite the history of today’s events with impunity after the Reset unfolds. They think they will own the world of information and will be able to edit our cultural memory as they go.

  The mainstream media calls all of this “conspiracy theory.” I call it conspiracy reality. It’s hard to deny openly spoken admissions by the globalists themselves, all they can do is try to spin the information as much as possible to keep the public on the fence in terms of what needs to be done, which is a purge of the globalists from our country and perhaps the entire world.

  If we do not do this, there will come a time when nothing I say here is remembered and no evidence of the Reset plan will exist. The establishment will have eliminated all notions of it from written history, leaving only a fantasy tale of how the world collapsed and a small organization of “visionary” globalists saved it from oblivion through a new religion of centralization.

  *  *  *

  If you would like to support the work that Alt-Market does while also receiving content on advanced tactics for defeating the globalist agenda, subscribe to our exclusive newsletter The Wild Bunch Dispatch.  Learn more about it HERE.

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 04/02/2022 – 23:30

• These Are The Richest People In The World In 2022
  These Are The Richest People In The World In 2022

  Today, the 10 richest people in the world control $1.3 trillion in wealth.

  As Visual Capitalist’s Dorothy Neufeld details below, this scale of wealth is equal to approximately 1.4% of the world economy, Amazon’s entire market cap, or spending $1 million a day for 3,000 years. In fact, it’s double the amount seen just two years ago ($663 billion).

  As billionaire wealth accumulates at a remarkable speed, we feature a snapshot of the world’s richest in 2022, based on data from the Forbes Real-Time Billionaires List.

  

  Top 10 Richest People in the World

  Elon Musk, with a fortune of $212 billion, is the richest person on the planet.

  Tesla delivered nearly one million vehicles globally in 2021. Despite facing a computer chip shortage, Tesla deliveries rose 87% year-over-year. Musk, who is also CEO and chief engineer of SpaceX, plans to send the largest rocket ever built into orbit in 2022. It spans 119 meters tall.

  Here are the richest people in the world, based on data as of March 14, 2022:

  

  With a net worth of $168 billion, Jeff Bezos falls in second place. Bezos is the only billionaire in the top 10 to see a decline in wealth (-$9 billion) over the year. Since last March, Amazon shares have risen just 3% in light of weaker earnings and lagging retail performance.

  Most notably, Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta (formerly Facebook) fell off the top 10 for the first time since 2016. Meta shares plunged after reporting the first-ever drop in global daily active users since 2004.

  Growth Rates of the Top 10 Overall

  Among the 10 richest people in the world, here’s who saw their wealth rise the fastest:

  

  Musk saw his fortune rise more than any other in this top 10 list. In 2021, Tesla became a trillion-dollar company for the first time, and Musk’s wealth jumped by 29% over the past year.

  Crypto Billionaires in 2022

  At least 10 people worldwide have seen their wealth climb into the billions thanks to the stratospheric rise of cryptocurrencies.

  Sam Bankman-Fried, founder of the FTX crypto derivatives exchange, is at the top, with a jaw-dropping $24 billion net worth. Bankman-Fried launched the exchange in 2019 when he was 27.

  FTX now has one million users and a $32 billion valuation.

  

   

  Following Bankman-Fried is Brian Armstrong, the co-founder of cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase. It is the second-largest cryptocurrency exchange globally after Binance.

   

  Also on the list are co-founders of Gemini cryptocurrency exchange Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, each with a net worth of $4 billion. Like their rival, Mark Zuckerberg, they have their sights on building a metaverse.

  Larger Shifts

  Will billionaire wealth continue to accumulate at record rates? If the invasion of Ukraine presses on, it will likely have broader structural outcomes.

  Some argue that war is a great leveler, a force that has reduced wealth inequality, as seen in the aftermath of WWII. Others suggest that it increases wealth divergence, especially when the war is financed by public debt. Often, costs have become inflated due to war, putting pressure on low and middle-income households.

  Whether or not the war will have lasting effects on wealth distribution is an open question, however, if the pandemic serves as any precedent, the effects will be far from predictable.

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 04/02/2022 – 23:00

• "A Paradigm Shift Western Media Hasn't Grasped Yet" – Russian Ruble Relaunched, Linked To Gold & Commodities
  “A Paradigm Shift Western Media Hasn’t Grasped Yet” – Russian Ruble Relaunched, Linked To Gold & Commodities

  By Ronan Manly of Bullionstar.com

  With Russia’s central bank having just profoundly altered the international trade and monetary system by linking the Russian ruble to both gold and commodities, journalists in Moscow asked me to write a Q and A article on what these developments mean, and the ramifications of these changes on the Russian ruble, the US dollar, the gold price and the global system of currencies. This article has been published on the RT.com website here. 

  Since RT.com is now blocked and censored in many Western locations such as the EU, UK, US and Canada, and since many readers may not be able to access the RT.com website (unless using a VPN), my Questions and Answers that are in the new RT.com article are now published here in their entirety.

  Who would have thought that citizens of ‘free speech’ Western countries would need a VPN to read a Russian news site?

  Why is setting a Fixed Price for Gold in Rubles significant?

  By offering to buy gold from Russian banks at a fixed price of 5000 rubles per gram, the Bank of Russia has both linked the ruble to gold and, since gold trades in US dollars, set a floor price for the ruble in terms of the US dollar.

  We can see this linkage in action since Friday 25 March when the Bank of Russia made the fixed price announcement. The ruble was trading at around 100 to the US dollar at that time, but has since strengthened and is nearing 80 to the US dollar. Why? Because gold has been trading on international markets at about US$ 62 per gram which is equivalent to (5000 / 62) = about 80.5, and markets and arbitrage traders have now taken note, driving the RUB / USD exchange rate higher.

  So the ruble now has a floor to the US dollars, in terms of gold. But gold also has a floor, so to speak, because 5000 rubles per gram is 155,500 rubles per troy ounce of gold, and with a RUB / USD floor of about 80, that’s a gold price of around $1940. And if the Western paper gold markets of LBMA / COMEX try to drive the US dollar gold price lower, they will have to try to weaken the ruble as well or else the paper manipulations will be out in the open.

  Additionally, with the new gold to ruble linkage, if the ruble continues to strengthen (for example due to demand created by obligatory energy payments in rubles), this will also be reflected in a stronger gold price.

  

  What does this mean for Oil?

  Russia is the world’s largest natural gas exporter and the world’s third largest oil exporter. We are seeing right now that Putin is demanding that foreign buyers (importers of Russian gas) must pay for this natural gas using rubles. This immediately links the price of natural gas to rubles and (because of the fixed link to gold) to the gold price. So Russian natural gas is now linked via the ruble to gold.

  The same can now be done with Russian oil. If Russia begins to demand payment for oil exports with rubles, there will be an immediate indirect peg to gold (via the fixed price ruble – gold connection). Then Russia could begin accepting gold directly in payment for its oil exports. In fact, this can be applied to any commodities, not just oil and natural gas.

  What does this mean for the Price of Gold?

  By playing both sides of the equation, i.e. linking the ruble to gold and then linking energy payments to the ruble, the Bank of Russia and the Kremlin are fundamentally altering the entire working assumptions of the global trade system while accelerating change in the global monetary system. This wall of buyers in search of physical gold to pay for real commodities could certainly torpedo and blow up the paper gold markets of the LBMA and COMEX.         

  The fixed peg between the ruble and gold puts a floor on the RUB / USD rate but also a quasi-floor on the US dollar gold price. But beyond this, the linking of gold to energy payments is the main event. While increased demand for rubles should continue to strengthen the RUB / USD rate and show up as a higher gold price, due to the fixed ruble – gold linkage, if Russia begins to accept gold directly as a payment for oil, then this would be a new paradigm shift for the gold price as it would link the oil price directly to the gold price.  

  For example, Russia could start by specifying that it will now accept 1 gram of gold per barrel of oil. It doesn’t have to be 1 gram but would have to be a discounted offer to the current crude benchmark price so as to promote take up, e.g. 1.2 grams per barrel. Buyers would then scramble to buy physical gold to pay for Russian oil exports, which in turn would create huge strains in the paper gold markets of London and New York where the entire ‘gold price’ discovery is based on synthetic and fractionally-backed cash-settled unallocated ‘gold’ and gold price ‘derivatives.

  

  What does this mean for the Ruble?

  Linking the ruble to gold via the Bank of Russia’s fixed price has now put a floor under the RUB/ USD rate, and thereby stabilized and strengthened the ruble. Demanding that natural gas exports are paid for in rubles (and possibly oil and other commodities down the line) will again act as stabilization and support. If a majority of the international trading system begins accepting these rubles for commodity payments arrangements, this could propel the Russian ruble to becoming a major global currency. At the same time, any move by Russia to accept direct gold for oil payments will cause more international gold to flow into Russian reserves, which would also strengthen the balance sheet of the Bank of Russia and in turn strengthen the ruble.

  Talk of a formal gold standard for the ruble might be premature, but a gold-backed ruble must be something the Bank of Russia has considered.     

  What does this mean for Other Currencies?

  The global monetary landscape is changing rapidly and central banks around the world are obviously taking note. Western sanctions such as the freezing of the majority of Russia’s foreign exchange reserves while trying to sanction Russian gold have now made it obvious that property rights on FX reserves held abroad may not be respected, and likewise, that foreign central bank gold held in vault locations such as at the Bank of England and the New York Fed, is not beyond confiscation.      

  Other non-Western governments and central banks will therefore be taking a keen interest in Russia linking the ruble to gold and linking commodity export payments to the ruble. In other words, if Russia begins to accept payment for oil in gold, then other countries may feel the need to follow suit.

  Look at who, apart from the US, are the world’s largest oil and natural gas producers – Iran, China, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Qatar. Obviously, all of the BRICS countries and Eurasian countries are also following all of this very closely. If the demise of the US dollar is nearing, all of these countries will want their currencies to be beneficiaries of a new multi-lateral monetary order.  

  

  What does this mean for the US Dollar?

  Since 1971, the global reserve status of the US dollar has been underpinned by oil, and the petrodollar era has only been possible due to both the world’s continued use of US dollars to trade oil and the USA’s ability to prevent any competitor to the US dollar.

  But what we are seeing right now looks like the beginning of the end of that 50-year system and the birth of a new gold and commodity backed multi-lateral monetary system. The freezing of Russia’s foreign exchange reserves has been the trigger. The giant commodity strong countries of the world such as China and the oil exporting nations may now feel that now is the time to move to a new more equitable monetary system. It’s not a surprise, they have been discussing it for years.  

  While it’s still too early to say how the US dollar will be affected, it will come out of this period weaker and less influential than before.      

  What are the Consequences of these Developments?

  The Bank of Russia’s move to link the ruble to gold and link commodity payments to the ruble is a paradigm shift that the western media has not really yet been grasped. As the dominos fall, these events could reverberate in different ways. Increased demand for physical gold. Blowups in the paper gold markets. A revalued gold price. A shift away from the US dollar. Increased bilateral trade in commodities among non-Western counties in currencies other than the US dollar.

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 04/02/2022 – 22:30

• Kamala Harris Contradicts Biden's Putin Remarks: "We Are Not Into Regime Change"
  Kamala Harris Contradicts Biden’s Putin Remarks: “We Are Not Into Regime Change”

  Vice President Kamala Harris was asked during a Friday appearance on MSNBC by show host Joy Reid her view on President Biden’s regime change comments directed at Russia’s Vladimir Putin the prior Saturday in Warsaw. In line with White House efforts in the days following Biden’s speech, she too sought to walk back any suggestion that Washington is actively seeking Putin’s overthrow, saying “we are not into regime change.” 

  “Let me be very clear. We are not into regime change. And that is not our policy. Period,” Harris told Reid. She said this after rambling on for a couple of minutes in response to what was initially a simple yes or no question of “whether he [Putin] should remain” in power. The segment started with Reid asking “President Biden said Vladimir Putin should no longer be leader of Russia, do you agree?“

  Kamala Harris was asked if she backs regime change in Russia. Harris the US will support the Ukrainian whilst making sure Putin faces consequences. pic.twitter.com/NXftPM6tC5

  — Apex World News (@apexworldnews) April 2, 2022

  https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

  She explained further in reaction to Biden’s prior “For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power” remarks…  

  “Our policy from the beginning has been about ensuring that there are going to be real costs exacted against Russia in the form of severe sanctions, which we know are having a real impact and an immediate impact, not to mention the longer-term impact, which is about saying there’s going to be consequence and accountability when you commit the kinds of atrocities that he is committing,” VP Harris said.

  And here’s the moment she dubiously stated that the US doesn’t do regime change…

  JOE BIDEN: “For God’s sake, [Putin] cannot remain in power.”

  KAMALA HARRIS: “We are not into regime change, and that is not our policy. Period. Yeah.”

  So… which is it? pic.twitter.com/syH1EJ6jeh

  — RNC Research (@RNCResearch) April 2, 2022

  https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

  We should immediately point out the obvious concerning her assertion… given the glaring examples of Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria – or even going back to the 1953 Iranian coup d’état, or the 1980’s CIA role in Central America – one could argue that in recent history that regime change has in fact been US policy across various parts of the globe.

  

  The Sunday after Biden’s controversial Warsaw speech, which the Kremlin rejected and condemned – but also said wouldn’t match in terms of escalatory rhetoric – Antony Blinken became the highest US official to try and downplay the president’s words. 

  “I think the president, the White House, made the point last night that, quite simply, President Putin cannot be empowered to wage war or engage in aggression against Ukraine or anyone else,” the top US diplomat told the Sunday news shows.

  To recall, here are Biden’s words from the prior Saturday in Warsaw, where he said the quiet part out loud…

  Biden said the quiet part out loud “[Putin] cannot remain in power” & now everyone knows the real intention is “Regime Change” in Russia. No amount of spin can change that now. U.S. is run by warmongering psychos pic.twitter.com/Z5NOfcG88E https://t.co/ZnZeOu1fB9

  — Jimmy Dore (@jimmy_dore) March 26, 2022

  https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 04/02/2022 – 22:00

• Justice Department Charges 12 People For Arming Gang Members In Chicago
  Justice Department Charges 12 People For Arming Gang Members In Chicago

  By Naveen Athrappully of The Epoch Times

  The U.S. Justice Department has announced a 21-count superseding indictment that charged 12 individuals with conspiring to violate federal firearms statutes after they trafficked over 90 guns from Tennessee and Kentucky areas into Chicago.

  

  Among those charged, three were enlisted members of the U.S. Army at the time of the crime. Stationed at the Fort Campbell military installation in Clarksville, Tennessee, they were involved in the purchase and transfer of “dozens of firearms to the streets of Chicago,” an April 1 press release from the department said. The three individuals—Demarcus Adams, Brandon Miller, and Jarius Brunson—were arrested in May last year by agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, & Explosives.

  Nine of the remaining 12 individuals are members of the Gangster Disciples street gang based in the neighborhood of Pocket Town, Chicago.

  According to the Justice Department, the nine “conspired to purchase and deliver over 90 illegally obtained firearms” to the Chicago area between December 2020 and April 2021.

  Their actions facilitated the “ongoing violent disputes” between Gangster Disciples and rival gangs. To secure firearms from federally licensed dealers, the defendants provided false information on firearms purchase application forms.

  The multiple counts charged against the defendants include engaging in dealing firearms without a license, making false statements to a federally-licensed firearms dealer, conspiring to commit money laundering, transporting and receiving firearms into another state, and so on. The defendants face a prison term of up to 20 years on one or more of the charged counts.

  “The Justice Department recognizes that fighting violent crime requires approaches tailored to the needs of individual communities,” Attorney General Merrick B. Garland said.

  “But gun violence can be a problem that is too big for any one community, any one city, or any one agency to solve. That is why our approach to disrupting gun violence and keeping guns out of the hands of criminals rests on the kind of coordination you see here today.”

  According to the feds, the guns trafficked as part of the crime have been used in several shootings across Chicago. This includes a mass shooting in March 2021 at the 2500 block of West 79th Street, which left seven people wounded and one dead. The incident had led authorities to investigate and uncover the interstate gun trafficking network.

  Gun violence in Chicago has seen a massive surge in recent years. In Cook County, which includes Chicago and surrounding suburbs, 1,002 gun-related homicides were reported in 2021, the county medical examiner’s office said in early January. This is almost double the number reported in 2019 and 121 more incidents than what was recorded in 2020.

  In total, Chicago saw 3,561 shooting incidents last year, according to the police department. This is 1,415 more shootings than in 2019.

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 04/02/2022 – 21:30

• Shanghai Lockdown Expanded To Cover Entire City As China's Worst Outbreak In 2 Years Drags On
  Shanghai Lockdown Expanded To Cover Entire City As China’s Worst Outbreak In 2 Years Drags On

  Unfortunately for the CCP bureaucrats in charge of China’s largest city, the punishing 9-day staggered lockdown imposed late last month on Shanghai has failed to suppress the omicron driven outbreak in the city. Instead,  cases have continued to rise, prompting authorities to expand the scope of what was supposed to be a short-lived staggered freeze to cover the city’s entire population.

  

  The eastern half of Shanghai remains under tight movement restrictions even after a four-day lockdown was supposed to have ended Friday morning. This means the entire city of roughly 26 million is currently under some form of restrictions as the lockdown in the western half of the city begins, Bloomberg reports.

  While the lockdown of Shanghai’s east officially ended at 5 a.m. local time Friday, most residents were not able to leave their homes immediately under what the local government described as a tiered quarantine regime.

  People with mild or no symptoms are required to be put under compulsory central quarantine for treatment or monitoring at mostly makeshift facilities built in massive gymnasiums or exhibition centers around the city. If parents with young kids are sent to central quarantine, authorities will try to help find volunteers or staff to look after the children left behind, Zeng Qun, deputy head of Shanghai Civil Affairs Bureau said at a briefing.

  The rules also required anyone living in a building where a Covid case has been reported to stay confined in their home for two weeks. Residents of other buildings in the same compound as the block where a positive patient was reported will be subject to seven-day home quarantine.

  Thanks to these “targeted” restrictions, nearly all of the nearly 9 million residents living in the eastern half of Shanghai were still subject to some form of COVID restrictions. Nearly 40% of Saturday’s newly reported infections in the city came from Pudong, the eastern part.

  Now that the outbreak in Jilin Province has subsided (a punishing multi-week lockdown in that province has finally been lifted), Shanghai has emerged as the epicenter of China’s worst virus outbreak since the early days of the pandemic. The financial center’s daily case count has surged from less than five at the beginning of March to a peak of more than 6,300 on Friday.

  “At present, the epidemic situation is severe and complex, and the task of prevention and control is extremely arduous,” Wu Qianyu, an official at the Shanghai municipal health commission, said at a media briefing.

  To be sure, it’s likely that the increase in new cases is a result of further screening. Authorities tested more than 14 million people in the western half of the city Friday as part of two-round tests.

  Last month, President Xi Jinping instructed local authorities to take a more nuanced approach to combating COVID. While preserving human life must remainthe priority, the president urged policy makers to embrace more “targeted” measures – including an increase in testing and locally-focused lockdowns on residential complexes where cases had been confirmed.

  But the continuing spread of the virus in Shanghai is the biggest test yet of Xi’s plan to preserve economic growth without sacrificing lives. Amid reports of deaths of old folks homes and a surge in medical emergencies, local public health authorities have ordered hospitals and clinics across the city to reopen emergency wards amid reports that people were being denied access to treatment during the lockdown. There has even been a case of one individual dying after being turned away from a hospital due to COVID protocols, according to the SCMP.

  Meanwhile, authorities have employed robot emissaries like this robot dog to bark instructions at local residents as the citywide testing campaign continues.

  ¿Alguien sabe si éste video es verdad? Dónde lo encontré mencionaba que son perros robot vigilando las calles de Shanghai para que la gente no salga después de el confinamiento que se les impuso. pic.twitter.com/Zf9qMvUFk8

  — Diego (@Diego_da18) April 2, 2022

  https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

  While millions of Chinese will likely suffer as the government scrambles to provide enough food, medicine and other emergency supplies to the increasingly desperate population, there’s one individual who stands to benefit: President Joe Biden. Assuming news of the tighter lockdown sends crude oil prices lower, Biden might be able to take credit, given the timing of the SPR release announcement earlier this week (although few sell-side analysts expect the decision to have a meaningful impact on prices long term).

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 04/02/2022 – 21:00

• Biden Admin Reverses Trump Fuel Efficiency Rules, New Vehicles Must Average 49 Miles Per Gallon By 2026
  Biden Admin Reverses Trump Fuel Efficiency Rules, New Vehicles Must Average 49 Miles Per Gallon By 2026

  Authored by Mimi Nguyen Ly via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

  The Biden administration announced on April 1 it is raising requirements for fuel efficiency, reversing a rollback by the Trump administration.

  

  New vehicles sold in the United States will have to travel an average of at least 49 miles per gallon of gasoline in 2026 under the new federal rules. The requirement would have been at 32 mpg if going by rules under the Trump administration.

  Specifically, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) said fuel efficiency requirements will increase by 8 percent annually for 2024 and 2025 model years, and 10 percent annually for model year 2026.

  The Trump administration had in March 2020 rolled back fuel efficiency requirements to 1.5 percent annual increases through 2026. The Obama administration had required 5 percent annual increases.

  The new regulation (pdf) marks a slightly bigger increase than the proposal outlined in August 2021 by the NHTSA in a joint rule-making process with the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), as part of efforts to improve gas mileage and reduce tailpipe pollution.

  The EPA announced similar rules (pdf) in December 2021.

  Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said the new rule “means that American families will be able to drive further before they have to fill up, saving hundreds of dollars per year.”

  NHTSA estimates (pdf) that under the rule, consumers could save $1,387 in fuel costs over the life of a vehicle. but the average cost of a new vehicle would also increase by almost that much—$1,087.

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 04/02/2022 – 20:30

• Vacation Home Demand Slows As Mortgage Rates Soar 
  Vacation Home Demand Slows As Mortgage Rates Soar 

  Vacation home purchases are cooling as US mortgage rates continued their near-vertical ascent, soaring to levels not seen since late 2018. 

  A new Redfin Corp. report, cited by Bloomberg, says the rush by affluent Americans, mainly white-collar, to purchase second homes dropped in February to the lowest level since May 2020. Though demand is still up 35% above pre-pandemic levels, the vacation housing market will cool as rates rise. 

  Before the pandemic, demand for second and primary homes grew at similar rates. But pandemic lockdowns and the Federal Reserve’s easiest monetary policies on record, coupled with FOMO and low inventory, unleashed a surge in buying panic in beach towns and mountain areas. 

  Redfin Chief Economist Daryl Fairweather said soaring mortgage rates and rising home prices amid low inventory had slowed the boom. He said the second-home market is being impacted “much harder than the primary-home market, largely because vacation homes are optional. People don’t need a second home.” 

  

  Redfin data showed secondary home demand peaked in March 2021 when the average 30-year mortgage tagged a record low of 2.65%. Rates have since jumped over the last year, hitting as high as 4.89%, sending ‘affordability’ spiraling lower. 

  

  For some context, the Fed’s move to quell inflationary forces by embarking on a super aggressive hiking cycle has driven mortgage rates on one of the fastest three-month rises since 1994.

  

  The rapid rise in rates has also sent primary-home buyers to the sidelines as housing affordability becomes a significant challenge. 

  

  Secondary home buyers also face another hurdle, including a fee of an additional 1% to 4% for loans backed by Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac. 

  Given extraordinary supply challenges, housing prices are likely to remain elevated this year despite plunging housing affordability. This means 2022 could be the hurrah for the housing market as the cracks are beginning to appear as vacation home markets cool. 

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 04/02/2022 – 20:00

• Long-Term Oil Prices Beginning To Reflect The Coming Oil Shortage, Part 1
  Long-Term Oil Prices Beginning To Reflect The Coming Oil Shortage, Part 1

  Via GoldMoney Insights,

  Brent crude oil prices rallied $100/bbl since the lows in 2020. This reflects very tight fundamentals, where petroleum inventories are at extremely low levels relative to consumption and supply is struggling.

  The war in the Ukraine has worsened the near-term supply outlook further.

  The current conditions in the oil market are critical and we could see real oil shortages by this summer if the disruptions to Russian oil supplies persist or even worsen. This would put even more upward pressure on current prices and overall inflation. However, we think an even bigger and more permanent issue has been brewing in oil markets for years and it is finally filtering through to the back end of the forward curve.

  Longer dated prices have broken out of their 5-year range and have been moving up relentlessly.

  We think the oil markets finally begin to understand that a lack of investments in large oil projects over the past years is threatening supply over the entire next decade, at a time when demand will still be growing as the electrification of the transportation sector will not impact demand meaningfully for years to come.

  The sharp upward moves in oil prices amidst a broader commodity prices rally have pushed realized inflation and near-term (0-2y) inflation expectations up strongly. But inflation expectations beyond that time horizon have proven to be resilient. So far the back end of the oil curve moved up only $15/bbl. However, we think that once back end prices are moving in a similar fashion to what we currently witness in the front, longer term inflation expectations will likely begin to move up too.

  In this two part report, we look first at how we got to the current price environment and in the upcoming second part we do a deep dive into the long term outlook for crude oil markets.

  

  Oil prices have reached the highest levels since the all-time highs in 2008. The most obvious explanation for the sharp rally is the military conflict in Ukraine and the threat of a loss of Russian oil supplies. However, oil prices are only up $20 since the war started a month ago. In fact, Brent crude oil prices have been rising relentlessly ever since the lows of around $20/bbl we saw during first lockdowns in spring 2020, to $95/bbl just before the invasion (see Exhibit 1).

  Exhibit 1: Oil priced rallied close to $80/bbl from their lows before the Ukraine invasion started

  $/bbl

  

  Source: Goldmoney Research

  While everybody points to the Ukrainian conflict to explain high prices, just a month ago there was a vigorous debate among analysts, media, and politicians about what was behind the fact that oil had broken out of the $60-80 range it has mostly been trading in for the past years (except the quick lockdown crash in early 2020) and started to rally relentlessly. Was it exceptional demand, reflective of a strong economy coming out of the pandemic as some claimed? Or rather supply bottlenecks, similar to the supply issues that plagued many other industries at the moment. Was it OPEC? Or just broad based inflation filtering into oil, given that almost any other commodity has shown similar or even higher price increases over the past two years.

  First, it wasn’t (and still isn’t) exceptionally strong demand. While global oil demand has significantly recovered from the lows in spring 2020, for 2022 it is still slightly below where it was before the pandemic (see Exhibit 2).

  Exhibit 2: Global oil demand has strongly recovered but remains below pre-pandemic levels so far

  Mb/d, 12 month moving average, change vs 2019

  

  Source: Goldmoney Research

  This means it is lagging overall economic activity, which, according to the World Bank and the IMF, is roughly 7% higher in 2022 than it was in 2019 (see Exhibit 3). A rule of thumb is that global oil demand grows roughly at the rate of GDP -2% efficiency gain per annum. In this case, a 7% GDP growth over two years plus 2% compounded efficiency gains would suggest that oil demand – if it wasn’t for the remnants of the pandemic – should be roughly 1 million b/d above 2019 levels.

  Exhibit 3: cumulative changes to real GDP vs 2019

  %

  

  Source: IMF

  The reason why oil demand is lagging is mostly due to the lack of jet fuel demand. Jet fuel accounts for about 10% of global oil demand and air traffic is still quite a bit lower than it was before the pandemic. Globally commercial air traffic is still down 20% vs. pre-pandemic levels according to Flightradar24, a site tracking commercial air traffic (see Exhibit 4).

  Exhibit 4: Commercial flight activity is still 20% below pre-pandemic levels

  

  Source: Flightradar24.com

  During the first wave of the Covid19 pandemic, oil demand crashed like it never had before. At it’s lowest point, oil demand was down 20%. As a comparison, during the great recession of 2008-2009, oil demand was down just about 3.5% at any point in time (see Exhibit 5).

  Exhibit 5: The demand destruction from the lockdowns dwarfed the demand destruction from the recession that followed the 2008-2009 credit crisis

  Kb/d year-over-year

  

  Source: Goldmoney research

  This demand destruction in early 2020 lead to a massive build in global inventories. Global total petroleum stocks rose at the fastest rate and reached their highest levels in history as producers didn’t curb production fast enough (see Exhibit 6).

  Exhibit 6: Total commercial petroleum’s stocks, including floating storage, reached their highest levels in history in 2020

  Kb

  

  Source: Goldmoney Research

  Which is where OPEC+ comes in. After taking a very different direction during the February meeting (Saudi Arabia, upset about Russia’s refusal to agree to production cuts, ramped up production to all-time highs and flooded the market with crude, promptly crashing prices), OPEC+ swiftly decided to act when it became clear what the global lockdowns did to demand. The group cut oil production by around 10 million b/d (see Exhibit 7). And surprisingly, all group members stuck to their quotas since that decision was made.

  Exhibit 7: OPEC swiftly cut production by a record amount when the effects of the lockdowns on demand became clear

  Kb/d (OPEC crude oil only, auxiliary states in OPEC+ not included)

  

  Source: Goldmoney Research

  Subsequently, the group provided a roadmap for the return of these barrels. For the first couple months of this oil production recovery, OPEC+ was careful that the oil market remained in deficit. As a result, oil inventories kept falling until they reached their 5-year average in mid-summer 2021 (se Exhibit 8).

  Exhibit 8: Global petroleum stocks were back to 5-year averages by mid-summer 2021

  Kb, levels vs 5-year average

  

  Source: Goldmoney Research

  However, actual OPEC+ production is lagging the quotas for many months now, and the gap between actual and target becomes increasingly wider. The reason is that some of the smaller OPEC members struggle to produce as much as they would be allowed under the plan (see exhibit 9). These are not voluntary cuts. It has become obvious that the capacity of many OPEC members simply isn’t there as these countries are plagued with domestic issues that prevent full production. On top of that, the non-OPEC members of OPEC+ are also producing about 200kb/d below their quotas, and that was before the war in Ukraine reduced Russian exports.

  Exhibit 9: Many OPEC members keep producing below their quotas

  Kb/d

  

  Source: OPEC

  Interestingly, the core OPEC members Saudi Arabia, UAE, and Kuwait are for once not stepping in to fill the gap. In our view, this may be partially politically driven due to some tensions between the US and some OPEC members, but more likely it is also due to their own capacity constraints. In April 2020, Saudi Arabia briefly ramped up production to 12mb/d as the Kingdom reacted to Russia’s’ refusal to commit to a production cut (see Exhibit 10). This strategy backfired as it meant raising output right into the largest demand crash in history. However, it does give some insights to what Saudis production capacity is. We think Saudi Arabia went beyond their sustainable production capacity at that time. It is unlikely that they could sustain this output level for an extended period. Their production capacity for the medium term is likely closer to 11-11.5mb/d. Any capacity increase would require substantial investments in our view, and it would take years to achieve.

  Exhibit 10: Saudi Arabia demonstrated that they can push production to 12mb/d over a very brief period, but sustainable production capacity is likely significantly lower

  

  Source: Goldmoney Research, OPEC

  While Saudi Arabia is still producing below their sustainable capacity, the country can’t really step in and fill the production gaps left by the less stable OPEC producers, as it would mean it could not increase production anymore when it is supposed to according to the OPEC+ roadmap. The country has no choice but to stick to their own predetermined production path. The same is true for other core-OPEC members. As a result, demand continued to exceed production in 1Q22 at a time when in theory, we should have already shifted to an oversupply in the first two months of the year.

  This has pushed global inventories lower and lower. As we have explained in earlier reports, there is a very strong relationship between the level of inventories and crude oil time-spreads, the difference between the prompt prices and longer-dated prices on the forward curve (see Exhibit 11). In a nutshell, when inventories are low, consumers of a commodity – in this case petroleum products – are willing to pay a premium for immediate delivery. It is preferable to pay this premium than to face the risk of having to shut down the business because they run out of oil (jet fuel, diesel etc.). In such a situation, prompt prices trade over future prices which is called “backwardation”. When inventories are high, consumers have no preference for immediate delivery. Instead, storage, insurance, and financing costs mean that consumers rather not sit on inventories, but would prefer delivery in the future. In that situation, prompt prices will trade below forward prices and the curve is in “contango”.

  Exhibit 11: Crude oil time-spreads are inversely correlated to inventories

  % time-spread 1-60 months, prediction based on inventory levels

  

  Source: Goldmoney Research

  The extent to which a forward curve is in backwardation or contango is strongly correlated to the level scarcity or abundance of inventories relative to demand. At the moment, we see an extreme level of backwardation in the front of the curve. The market signals extreme scarcity of oil stocks and the risk of further supply shortages. This is the result of the persisting undersupply discussed above that led to a situation of very low inventories, but also due to concerns over potentially even larger shortages due to missing Russian crude oil supplies.

  To what extent the Ukraine conflict has exacerbated this issue from a fundamental perspective is difficult to assess at the moment. So far the US is the only nation that has outright banned imports of Russian oil and products. While this might create challenges for some refiners that rely on specific grades of imported Russian crude, it doesn’t alter the global supply and demand picture. US refiners will be forced to switch to an alternative grade but the Russian crude that used to go to the US (only about 670kb/d in 2021, of which 200kb/d was crude and the rest products, mostly fuel oil and VGO that was used in the US refinery system) will find its way to Asia (see Exhibit 12).

  Exhibit 12: US import volumes of Russian petroleum are relatively small

  Kb/d

  

  Source: Goldmoney Research, EIA

  The EU has imposed some sanctions on Russia that impact the commodity sector overall, but it has so far refrained from banning energy imports. However, over the past weeks it has become apparent that the voluntary sanctioning by Western companies – sometimes as a result of public outcries – is having an impact on Russia ability to export crude to the West regardless. There have been several reports that international commodity trading giants were forced to offer Urals (a Russian crude oil grade) at discounts of up to $30/bbl as they could not find a willing buyer. Russian crude exports are dependent on pipeline flows to Europe. These flows can’t be entirely substituted by seaborne exports at the moment. Hence the reluctance of Western oil firms, merchants, banks, shippers, seaports, and insurance companies to refrain to deal with Russian entities or outright stop dealing with anything that could be related to Russia can still lead to substantial reduction of Russian exports even as there is no legal ban. At the moment this probably affects around 1mb/d of Russian crude supplies. On top of that, Russia just announced that the CPC pipeline – a Kazakh-Russian Caspian Pipeline Consortium – is undergoing unplanned maintenance of up to two months, reducing global supplies by a further 0.5mb/d.

  Exhibit 13: Russian oil and gas exports are dependent on pipeline flows to Europe

  

  Source: National Geographic https://www.nationalgeographic.org/photo/europe-map/

  On the flip side, IEA member states agreed to release 60mb of petroleum from their strategic reserves to alleviate the current shortages. Most of it will come from the US, and 29 other countries have committed to smaller volumes. However, that covers the current losses from Russia by just one to two months. The US had already orchestrated a coordinated SPR release last November to deal with high prices prior to the Ukraine war. The reaction was a short sell-off and an immediate recovery with prices pushing much higher.

  There is no easy way to predict how this picture changes over the coming months.

  • It’s certainly key how the Ukrainian conflict progresses. On one hand, Europe is unlikely to ban oil and gas imports unless the conflict escalates in a dramatic way. On the other hand, while European sanctions are unlikely to be eased in the short term even if Ukraine and Russia come to some sort of agreement, such a scenario would likely ease the pressure on Western firms to maintain their voluntary sanctions.

  • Core-OPEC members do have spare capacity, and they will bring it back as planned and not faster. But they run out of spare capacity in 2H2022.

  • US production is also growing again, but not unlike OPEC, the shale oil producers made clear that they are also sticking to their production targets and are undeterred by higher prices, Non-OPEC (non-shale) production is growing as well, but it is recovering from the declines over the past 2 years rather than incrementally growing. This means it’s a one off and most of the increase have already happened.

  • Finally, there is a significant chance that the Iranian nuclear deal will be reactivated, allowing for about 1 million b/d of crude production to come back online relatively quickly.

  • This uncertain supply picture is facing a rapid improvement in global demand on the back of what seems to be the rapid abandonment of Covid19 mandates worldwide, which would allow air travel to rebound strongly over the coming months.

  We think the near-term risks are skewed to the upside as demand keeps exceeding supply despite the OPEC ramp up, and Russia supply issues only exacerbate this situation. This would lead to even stronger backwardation until prices start to impact demand enough to balance the market. The current conditions in the oil market are critical and we could see real oil shortages by this summer if the disruptions to Russian oil supplies persist or even worsen.

  So it appears that the strong crude oil prices are mainly the result of a very backwardated curve because supply is struggling over the short term. While this adds to the overall inflation pressure coming from generally higher commodity prices, breakeven inflation expectations suggest that the market is expecting these pressures to remain only over the near term. In other words, the market thinks the supply issues will be transitory. However, we think an even bigger and more permanent issue has been brewing in oil markets for years and it is finally filtering through to the back end of the forward curve. Longer dated prices have broken out of their 5-year range and have been moving up relentlessly. We think the oil markets have finally begun to understand that a lack of investments in large oil projects over the past years is threatening supply over the entire next decade, at a time when demand will still be growing as the electrification of the transportation sector will not impact demand meaningfully for years to come. The sharp upward moves in oil prices amidst a broader commodity prices rally have pushed realized inflation and near-term (0-2y) inflation expectations up strongly. But inflation expectations beyond that time horizon have proven to be resilient.

  So far the back end of the oil curve moved up only $15/bbl. However, we think that once back end prices are moving in a similar fashion to what we are currently witnessing in the front, longer term inflation expectations will likely begin to move up too.

  We will do a deep dive into the strong move at the back end of the oil curve in an upcoming report

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 04/02/2022 – 19:30

• "Life Is Short": US Hotel Prices Soar To Record Highs On Consumer Driven-Demand 
  “Life Is Short”: US Hotel Prices Soar To Record Highs On Consumer Driven-Demand 

  Despite rising airline tickets, rental cars, food, and fuel prices, Americans are splurging on hotels as the mantra ‘life is short’ is driving up demand. 

  Lodging analytics company STR reports that the average daily hotel rate (ADR) increased to $149.38 last week, the third-highest ever, besides March 19 and the week after Christmas. 

  

  Demand appears to be coming from consumers who are booking on weekends, which has made up for the lack of corporate travelers. 

  Jan Freitag, senior vice president at STR, told Bloomberg, “the pandemic has reminded people that life is short.” 

  “They want to splurge, and they have a lot of pent-up savings. If a market has a leisure appeal, then the hotels in that market are doing well,” Freitag said. 

  All pandemics end eventually, and the latest signs of sustained declines in COVID-19 infections and deaths, and a large percentage of people are estimated to have some form of immunity, are promising signs people want to see before returning to hotels and resorts. 

  The CDC recently released a new framework that says most Americans can drop their masks indoors is another belief to some that the pandemic is subsiding. 

  CDC Eases Mask Guidelines for Indoor Public Spaces *Including Schools –WSJ

  — zerohedge (@zerohedge) February 25, 2022

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  What will dictate if the pandemic is over isn’t ‘science’ or the government but rather society. This was the same after the 1918 pandemic, when people stopped paying attention and moved on after infections and deaths declined. 

  Amber Asher, the CEO of Standard International (parent company of Standard Hotels), said, “We’re not raising rates because of labor costs. “It’s really just demand-driven.” 

  Americans appear to be going to big cities and staying at hotels — for whatever reason — if it’s a staycation or vacation, it is a welcoming sign and perhaps a proxy that some in society are ready to take the next giant leap in their lives and move on after losing two years of their lives due to pandemic-related lockdowns enforced by the government.

  Being cooped up in a house or condo for two years has reminded everyone that life is short. Get out there and spend, which is the current mood of the consumer, though the 2-year to 10-year spread, the most closely watched part of the yield curve, inverted this week, and sends an ominous sign that the bond market sees economic turmoil ahead. 

  So is 2022 the last hurrah for consumers?  

   

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 04/02/2022 – 19:00

• Iowa House Passes Bill Requiring Schools To Post Curriculum Materials Online For Parent Review
  Iowa House Passes Bill Requiring Schools To Post Curriculum Materials Online For Parent Review

  Authored by Katabella Roberts via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

  The Iowa House on March 29 voted to pass a bill that would require public schools in the state to publish their curriculum materials and library books online for parents to view, and give them the power to request that certain books be removed from classrooms.

  

  The House voted 60–36 to pass HF2577, which would introduce a string of changes for both parents and teachers, as well as students and the school districts.

  Every Republican member of the House voted in favor of the measure except Rep. Chad Ingels, while all Democrats except Reps. Bruce Hunter and Charlie McConkey voted against it.

  The bill comes amid a push from GOP lawmakers in the state to create more transparency and parental involvement in what children are being taught in schools.

  It is also a modified version of a previous proposal from Gov. Kim Reynolds that would require schools to publish their curriculum materials and lists of library book titles online.

  Specifically, HF2577 would require teachers to give parents access to all “instructional materials”—printed or electronic textbooks and related core materials—that are to be taught in classrooms and allow them to opt out of certain content.

  Teachers would need to provide parents with a course syllabus or written summary of the material that will be taught and also explain how the student’s class meets or exceeds the educational standards established in the Iowa Code.

  If passed, the policy should be “prominently displayed” on the school’s website and the board of directors should, at least annually, provide a written or electronic copy of the policy to the parents of each student, according to the bill.

  If any changes to the materials are made during the school year, the teacher must update the information for the parents to view before the end of the school week in which the changes occurred.

  By 2024, teachers will have to use classroom software systems to provide parents with view-only access to the material.

  Schools would also be required publish a list of all books that are available in their library and provide parents with a link to access the library and request a book be reviewed or removed, although school years beginning prior to July 1, 2025 that do not have such an electronic library catalog can apply for a waiver.

  School districts that violate the rules could face fines of $500 to $5,000 if they do not correct the violations within 14 days.

  The nonpartisan Legislative Services Agency estimates the bill would cost Iowa school districts $16.4 million annually to hire classroom cover so that teachers can prepare the materials that need to be reported.

  Democrats fear the bill would leave teachers feeling micromanaged and having to spend more time focusing on providing parents with the specific set of information as opposed to spending more time helping children.

  “Teachers will be spending all their time trying to enter this information and then reenter what they didn’t do or what they changed,” Democratic Rep. Sharon Sue Steckman said. “[They’ll] be [so] worried about being attacked for what they’re doing that they won’t have any time to show their allegiance to our children.”

  However, Republicans have championed the move for creating more transparency among parents and teachers.

  “I welcome a change like this that will encourage parents to engage,” said GOP Rep. Garrett Gobble. “Transparency will strengthen trust … and rightfully turn down the temperature and rhetoric surrounding education discussions. I believe this will begin a great new period for parents and teachers to work together for the benefit of our students.”

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 04/02/2022 – 18:30

• "Today's The Last Day" – BuzzFeed Disaster Worsens As News App Shuts Down
  “Today’s The Last Day” – BuzzFeed Disaster Worsens As News App Shuts Down

  Buzzfeed is being forced to tighten its belt (again) by axing its BuzzFeed News app, which comes a little more than a week after reports indicated the money-losing news organization would shut down its newsroom.  

  On Friday evening, the BuzzFeed News app posted its final notification: 

  “Well, folks, today’s the last day of the BuzzFeed News app. Thanks for the memories and see y’all out there.” 

  

  The app’s demise comes after the company released abysmal first-quarter results. CNBC noted several large investors urged BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti to shutter the company’s newsroom — what a novel idea to reduce expenses as the company loses more than $10 million a year. 

  In February, a hiring freeze was reported as investors were furious with the media company’s lack of profitability, ill-advised shopping spree of other media firms, and crashing stock price post-SPAC debut.  

  Investor redemptions have occurred concurrently as the share price has been halved since the SPAC debut in December. 

  

  BuzzFeed’s downward spiral is particularly troubling for Peretti’s buying spree of media companies without a robust valuation. The firm recently bought out Complex and the Huffington Post, two deals that have yet to pay off in terms of revenue.

  

  And as management claimed in a recent presentation to investors, it has grandiose ambitions of expanding its commerce business and its advertising and content businesses.

  Troublingly, the abysmal performance of the company’s stock price has placed this post-SPAC growth strategy – hoovering up other failing digital brands – further out of reach (since Buzzeed’s stock is the currency it was supposed to depend on).

  The death of BuzzFeed’s News app and newsroom, along with a hiring freeze, may only suggest the money-losing media company is in dire straits. 

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 04/02/2022 – 18:00

• Chicago Fed's Woke Enemy Of Free Speech Heading For Promotion To Federal Reserve Board
  Chicago Fed’s Woke Enemy Of Free Speech Heading For Promotion To Federal Reserve Board

  By Mark Glennon of Wirepoints

  The United States Senate on Tuesday voted to advance Lisa Cook’s nomination by President Biden to the Federal Reserve Board after a committee deadlocked on her nomination earlier this month. Cook is currently an Executive Committee member of the regional Chicago Federal Reserve Bank Board of Directors. As a member of the national Federal Reserve Board, she would have key influence on the Fed’s monetary policy, which is supposed to be about price stability, i.e., controlling inflation.

  In 2020, you may recall that the Chicago Fed bowed to the cancel mob in a particularly egregious manner by cutting ties with a prominent University of Chicago economics professor, Harald Uhlig. We wrote about it here.

  What was Uhilg’s sin? He wrote a series of tweets criticizing Black Lives Matters’ call to defund police departments. That’s all.

  Cook was one of the leaders in the resulting character assassination that led to firing Uhlig. She said free speech “should have its limits” and accused Uhlig of using it to “spread hatred and violate the dignity of other people.”

  Nationally recognized legal scholar Jonathan Turley called the Chicago Fed affair “one of the most notorious cancel campaigns” he has covered in his work defending free speech. Uhlig himself described the matter in the Wall Street Journal, listing it among other reasons why she should not be promoted to the Fed.

  Senators opposed to Cook’s nomination are furious about not only the Chicago Fed affair but the rest of Cook’s record on free speech, race and political activism. Sen. Pat Toomey (R-PA), the ranking member of the Senate Banking Committee, said this about Cook on the Senate Floor:

  Professor Cook’s history of extreme left-wing political advocacy and hostility to opposing viewpoints also makes her unfit to serve on the Fed….

  Professor Cook’s record indicates that she is likely to inject further political bias into the Fed’s work—at a time when hyper-focus on inflation and adherence to the Fed’s dual mandate is at its most critical.

  In over 30,000 public tweets and retweets, Professor Cook has supported race-based reparations, promoted conspiracies about Georgia voter laws, and sought to cancel those who disagree with her views, such as publicly calling for the firing of an economist who dared to tweet that he opposed defunding the Chicago police.

  After Banking Committee Republican staff highlighted these tweets for the public’s attention, Professor Cook blocked the Banking Committee Republican Twitter account—one day before her nomination hearing. Apparently Prof. Cook not only realizes how inflammatory her own tweets are, but also has no regard for the Senate’s constitutional responsibility to vet her public statements.

  Cook indeed has no background or work history in monetary affairs. That concentration is increasingly displaced by woke politics at the national Fed board and the Chicago Fed. Here’s how the Chicago Fed describes itself in its About web page:

  The Bank takes a holistic approach to its varied responsibilities, seeking to connect its internal and external practices with key initiatives that include:

  • • • • Overview [enirely about social justice goals]
        • Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
        • Environmentalism
        • Money Smart Week
        • Supplier Diversity

  Inflation is now at a 40-year high, thanks in large part to the Fed’s creation, out of thin air, of some $5 trillion dollars just in the last three years. Would it be asking too much for Fed nominees to be expert in monetary policy — or at least have some common sense — instead of a record opposing free speech and promoting racial division? Apparently, it is. The Senate appears likely to approve Cook’s nomination, voting on party lines.

  Uhlig recently asked these more specific questions about Cook, the answers to which should be obvious:

  Should these activist stances be a cause of concern, before appointing someone to one of the highest offices in the country? I do think so. Might she use her then considerable power to shut down speech and disagreement in the Federal Reserve and elsewhere? Is it reasonable to appoint a person as Fed Governor, who so forcefully spoke up against someone critical of defunding the police, when some police protection might occasionally be welcome to, say, help guard the gold reserves and cash delivery trucks, protect bank employees and assure the safety of buildings?

  What, then, will happen, when she is appointed Governor? Will Fed researchers continue to speak freely about their findings concerning racial disparities or the importance of policing, or will speech by sullied, for fear of taking a wrong step and seeing a career come to an end? To the degree that these issues matter for monetary policy at all, will the Board be provided with a balanced and reasoned assessment by its researchers, or will only an activist voice be welcome?

  *Mark Glennon is founder of Wirepoints.

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 04/02/2022 – 17:30

• Ghislaine Maxwell Pedo Conviction Upheld Despite Juror's Post-Verdict Admission
  Ghislaine Maxwell Pedo Conviction Upheld Despite Juror’s Post-Verdict Admission

  Jeffrey Epstein’s “partner in crime” won’t get a new sex trafficking trial, despite one of the jurors – a Carlyle Group staffer – admitting he may have influenced the jury with a tale of his own childhood sexual abuse that materialized during deliberations despite checking “no” on the juror questionnaire.

  

  The juror told news interviews that he had talked about this during jury deliberations to show why the memories of Maxwell’s accusers may not have been perfect.

  He told the Reuters news agency that he did not remember being asked about his experiences with sexual abuse when he filled in the juror questionnaire, insisting he would have answered honestly. –Sky News

  Maxwell had requested a retrial after she was convicted of helping late financier and convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein abuse underage girls.

  During a March hearing, the juror said he had ‘rushed’ through the questionnaire, and made a mistake when he claimed he hadn’t been the victim of sexual abuse or assault.

  

  Maxwell’s attorneys argued that the juror would have been excluded from the trial had he answered correctly, and that the false statement tainted the trial. Prosecutors said there was no proof that the juror was biased – which US Circuit Judge Alison Nathon agreed with. 

  According to Nathan, ‘Juror 50’ had testified “credibly and truthfully” at a March hearing to address the matter.

  “His failure to disclose his prior sexual abuse during the jury selection process was highly unfortunate, but not deliberate,” wrote Nathan on Friday. “The court further concludes that Juror 50 harboured no bias toward the defendant and could serve as a fair and impartial juror.”

  Maxwell’s attorneys have not addressed Friday’s decision, but have previously said they will appeal the conviction.

  If the verdict sticks, Maxwell faces as many as 65 years in prison after being convicted on five of six counts related to the sex-trafficking scheme.

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 04/02/2022 – 17:00

• Pentagon Clarifies There's No "Offensive" Bioweapons At US-Linked Ukraine Labs
  Pentagon Clarifies There’s No “Offensive” Bioweapons At US-Linked Ukraine Labs

  Authored by Dave DeCamp via AntiWar.com, 

  A Pentagon official told Congress on Friday that there are no “offensive” biological weapons in any of the dozens of US-linked labs in Ukraine.

  “I can say to you unequivocally there are no offensive biologic weapons in the Ukraine laboratories that the United States has been involved with,” Deborah Rosenbaum, the assistant secretary of defense for nuclear, chemical, and biological defense programs, told the House Armed Services subcommittee.

  

  The Pentagon funds labs in Ukraine through its Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA). According to a Pentagon fact sheet released last month, since 2005, the US has “invested” $200 million in “supporting 46 Ukrainian laboratories, health facilities, and diagnostic sites.”

  Moscow has accused Ukraine of conducting an emergency clean-up of a secret Pentagon-funded biological weapons program when Russia invaded. The World Health Organization said it advised Ukraine to destroy “high-threat pathogens” around the time of the invasion.

  For their part, the US maintains that the program in Ukraine and other former Soviet states is meant to reduce the threat of biological weapons left over from the Soviet Union. While downplaying the threat of the labs, Pentagon officials have also warned that they could still contain Soviet-era bioweapons.

  Robert Pope, the director of the DTRA’s Cooperative Threat Reduction Program, told the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists in February that the labs might contain Soviet bioweapons and warned that the fighting in Ukraine could lead to the release of a dangerous pathogen.

  Ukraine has “biological research facilities,” says Undersecretary of State Victoria Nuland, when asked by Sen Rubio if Ukraine has biological or chemical weapons, and says she’s worried Russia may get them. But she says she’s 100% sure if there’s a biological attack, it’s Russia. pic.twitter.com/uo3dHDMfAS

  — Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) March 8, 2022

  https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

  The Biden administration has tried to portray any concerns about the labs as “Russian propaganda.” When the issue gained more media attention, Biden officials started accusing Moscow of plotting to use chemical or biological weapons, but the US hasn’t presented any evidence to back up its claims.

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 04/02/2022 – 16:30

• Tech Rout Leads To Record 34% Loss At Tiger Global's Hedge Fund
  Tech Rout Leads To Record 34% Loss At Tiger Global’s Hedge Fund

  Back in December, when stocks were still trading at all time highs and few traders were concerned about selling, we waved goodbye to liquidity and wrote that “one of the main reasons sophisticated, wealthy investors would pick hedge funds over private equity firms to manage their wealth – despite variances in fee schedules of course – is access to near immediate liquidity: unlike PE funds which lock up capital for years, hedge funds provide clients with the option to cash out just days or weeks after sending in their redemption request – after all, the money is in “public” equities which can be sold with the flick of a switch. However, as a result of the unprecedented bifurcation of the hedge fund market, where the vast majority of hedge funds continue to underperform their benchmarks and are bleeding AUM while a handful of giant multi-strat funds are swimming in profits, have long lines of willing investors and can therefore change the rules at will without fear of losing clients, access to liquidity at the best performing hedge funds is about to become a thing of the past.”

  We were referencing the recent quiet transitions taking place among some of the world’s best performing, and most levered hedge funds…

  

  … such as Millennium and Citadel, which are gradually transitioning away from a conventional redemption schedule toward draconian, PE-like lock ups as long as 5 years. That means that if you send in your redemption notice now, you may get your money some time in 2027, if you are lucky.

  Millennium and Citadel were not the only ones that can impose whatever terms they want on their naive clients, who are willing to accept never again seeing their money because if there is a crash and either of these funds is impaired or worse, has an LTCM moment, the probability that the money will be there in 5 years is nil. According to Bloomberg, at least four other large multi-manager funds have changed their terms or started new share classes this year, all extending the time it takes for investors to get out.

  But while it is obvious why funds would seek such long lock ups, why are clients agreeing to this format? Well, as Bloomberg explained at the time, investors are complying because, in an industry where many funds have underperformed, these managers produce the steadiest returns and to the winner go the spoils.

  “Part of it is just because they can,” said Rishabh Bhandari, a senior portfolio manager at Capstone Investment Advisors, which runs multi-strategy funds as part of its $9.4 billion portfolio. Bhandari added that investments on average have become riskier and less liquid.

  * * *

  Well, just four months later, following the most brutal bear market in tech names since the covid crash, it has become all too clear why hedge funds are seeking to lock clients in for as long as possible: take one of the world’s most prominent tech investors, Chase Coleman’s Tiger Global, where things have gone from bad to worse very, very fast.

  According to Bloomberg, Tiger’s flagship hedge fund fell nearly 34% in the first quarter, due to poor-performing stocks and markdowns of private holdings. But mostly due to poor-performing stocks, i.e., the tech crash.

  The hedge fund tumbled more than 13% in March, according to a person familiar with the matter, capping three straight losing months and a tough 2021. The decline was 7% last year, its first annual drop since 2016.  

  Tiger Global’s long-only fund sank about 36% in the first quarter, while its Crossover fund, which invests in public and private companies, fell about 21%, according to the letter.

  “Stock declines in our focus areas have been steeper, faster, and longer lasting than in prior drawdowns,” the firm said in Friday’s letter, signed by the investing team. While Tiger Global’s shorts generated gains, “they have not kept pace with the decline in our longs.”

  Considering that the hedge funds held more than $50 billion in tech names, the dismal Q1 performance is actually surprisingly good.  A quick look at Tiger’s 13F shows why a 34% drop is actually surprisingly low for a hedge funds who only holdings are some of the highest beta names, both in the US and in China.

  

  All of Tiger Global’s biggest stock holdings at year-end, including JD.com and Microsoft, have declined this year and most fell by double digits, with many sliding into a bear market if not far worse.

  In addition to the public mauling, Tiger also “adjusted valuations down” for its private investments to account for pressure on their public-market peers, the firm said in the letter, although it is unlikely that the firm applied nearly the right haircuts on its private investments. The hedge fund owns shares of private companies including ByteDance, Stripe, Checkout, and Databricks.

  “In hindsight, we should have sold more shares across our portfolio in 2021 than we did,” the firm said. “We are reassessing and refining our models using all the inputs available to us.”

  Yes, Tiger, in hindsight you should have been selling more shares starting as far back as July when we first reported that Goldman had been doing just that as it was quietly liquidating a quarter of its prop equity investments, or a net of $4 billion…

  

  … a number which more than doubled by year-end, at which point Goldman indicated a net $11 billion in “dispositions.”

  

  But nobody cared, and the party continued. Then everything crashed, and suddenly everyone cares, and the fingerpointing begins.

  “In this moment, we are humbled, but steady in our conviction and confident about the go-forward opportunity,” the firm wrote.

  The question is whether the firm’s clients share this view and whether Tiger’s latest catastrophic performance will lead to a reassessment of capital allocations. The good news is that the firm manages $35 billion across its hedge, long-only and crossover funds, while the rest of the assets are in its rapidly expanding venture-capital unit. Tiger also said it recently closed its PIP 15 venture fund with $12.7 billion. The bad news is that after losing more than third of their assets in one quarter, LPs won’t be happy and many of them will see to redeem what money they have left especially with the Fed facing down at least 9 more rate hikes which will crippled tech stocks.

  Luckily for Tiger, we are confident that it, along with Millennium and Citadel, has locked its clients in for a long time. If not, however, brace for impact as the waterfall of redemptions will lead to relentless selling among the formerly best performing tech stocks for the foreseeable future, leading to a feedback loop where more redemptions lead to more selling, leading to more redemptions and so on.

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 04/02/2022 – 16:00

• The 19 Millionth Bitcoin Has Been Mined: Why It Matters
  The 19 Millionth Bitcoin Has Been Mined: Why It Matters

  Authored by ‘NAMCIOS’ via BitcoinMagazine.com,

  With less than two million bitcoin left to be mined, Bitcoin’s limited supply has just gotten even more limited…

  

  The 19 millionth bitcoin has just been mined, data from Bitbo shows, leaving less than two million BTC remaining for miners to put in circulation as the Bitcoin network tick-tocks its way through a fixed issuance schedule until it reaches the 21 million supply limit and doesn’t create any new bitcoin ever again.

  The milestone demonstrates how Bitcoin’s creator, Satoshi Nakamoto, was able to join together decades of research in different areas of computer science to achieve scarcity in the digital realm, a unique feature central to Bitcoin’s value proposition.

  Before Bitcoin, digital cash suffered from the flaw of double spending. Until its creation, the only way to ensure a party wouldn’t spend money twice was through a central authority that had to keep track of coins being sent and received thereby updating users’ balances – much like the traditional financial system. However, Nakamoto’s invention, through the usage of the Proof-of-Work (PoW) mechanism in a distributed ledger, enabled computers running a piece of software to enforce strict spending conditions that prevented a digital representation of value to be spent twice for the first time – or at least made it prohibitively expensive to do so.

  While miners and nodes together work through the issuance and enforcement of bitcoin, investors interested in acquiring ever-more scarce BTC have to bid their way through the limited supply of the asset. Historically, miners used to offload their freshly minted bitcoin on the market to cover operating expenses in U.S. dollars, however, nowadays it has become commonplace to see mining companies add their produced coins to their balance sheet and issue bitcoin-backed loans as needed. As a result, Bitcoin has gotten even more scarce as a larger percentage of the total bitcoin supply gets locked up long term.

  Currently, a miner earns 6.25 BTC per block mined. The block reward, as it is called, has been cut in half every 210,000 blocks – roughly every four years – ever since Nakamoto mined the first one which yielded a 50 BTC reward. Now, ever less new bitcoin are distributed each epoch, further increasing the scarcity of the asset. Therefore, even though it has taken roughly a dozen years to mine 19 million bitcoin, the remaining 2 million won’t be minted until 2140 if the protocol remains as is today.

  Curiously, the 21 million supply cap of the Bitcoin protocol isn’t written in its white paper or its code. Rather, it is the ever-decreasing number of bitcoin rewarded by each block in conjunction with the decentralized network of computers enforcing that reward that allows the network to implicitly prevent the issuance of bitcoin above the limit.

  “Bitcoin implementations control new issuance by checking that each new block does not create more than the allowed block subsidy,” cypherpunk and Casa co-founder and CTO, Jameson Lopp, wrote in a blog post.

  By ensuring that bitcoin cannot be spent twice and that the block reward does not yield more than it should at any given time, the distributed network of Bitcoin nodes can indirectly enforce the supply limit as the block reward trends towards zero over the next century.

  In addition to bringing scarcity to the digital realm, Bitcoin therefore also enables a predictable monetary policy scheduled ahead of time, which breaks away from the current monetary system where governments and policymakers can increase the issuance of money as we’ve tangibly experienced over the past couple of years. As a result, currency debasement is not possible in Bitcoin and its users’ purchasing power is protected.

  

  This image plots the trajectory of Bitcoin’s total supply (blue) against its rate of monetary inflation (yellow). Notably, Bitcoin’s inflation rate is known ahead of time through a software protocol enforced by thousands of computers scattered around the globe. As the block reward trends to zero until the next century, new bitcoins will not be issued and miners would reap only the fees of transactions on the Bitcoin blockchain. Image source: BashCo.

  In addition to protecting people’s purchasing power, with its predictable policy Bitcoin enables planning for the future as users can rest assured that nobody will debase their money. Important developments in society are arguably enabled by a strong commitment to long-term work and investment, rather than short-term bets.

  But given the paramount scarcity of BTC, why has its price been trading in a range between $30,000 and $60,000 over the past year?

  The Bitcoin price in U.S. dollars can be thought of as a lagging indicator of humanity’s understanding of the technology and its innovative value proposition. Currently, only a small percentage of the world’s population truly grasp the unique concepts of programmatically decentralized and scarce money, so while the Bitcoin price might trend to infinity over the long term, that won’t likely become a reality until most of the global population – or most of the world’s capital – starts understanding that. When they do, a sharp supply shock might ensue as an unlimited amount of money flows into a limited amount of bitcoin.

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 04/02/2022 – 15:30

• Tesla Reports 310,048 Deliveries For Q1 2022, Model 3 Deliveries Slip Sequentially
  Tesla Reports 310,048 Deliveries For Q1 2022, Model 3 Deliveries Slip Sequentially

  Tesla reported Q1 2022 delivery figures this weekend, posting a record 310,048 deliveries for the first quarter. The results were posted on Saturday and slightly exceeded expectations, which stood at an average of 309,158 deliveries, according to Bloomberg.

  Tesla said the record was “despite ongoing supply chain challenges and factory shutdowns”. 

  

  The share of Model S/X of total global vehicles continues to wane at 14,724 deliveries for the quarter. This represented 4.7% of all total deliveries.

  

  Model 3 deliveries dropped slightly from the prior quarter, as Model S/X took up slightly more of the company’s total deliveries.

  

  

  Recall, to end 2021, Tesla reported a record quarter of over 308,000 vehicles. 

  For 2021, the automaker delivered “over 936,000” vehicles. Those numbers were up about 87% from the year prior, according to Bloomberg. The report also reminded that Tesla has said “repeatedly it expects 50% annual increases in deliveries over a multi-year period”.

  For Q1 2022 – that was not yet the case. Deliveries were up less than 50% from Q1 2021’s total of 182,780.

  Recall, in March we noted that GLJ Research analyst Gordon Johnson had said that Tesla’s Q1 2022 delivery estimates “may need to be revised lower”. Earlier in the month, we reported that Tesla officially sold 56,515 Chinese made vehicles in February, according to data from the China Passenger Car Association (CPCA). 

  Jonson had called into question the distribution of how the China-made vehicles were sold in a note to clients in early March: 

  “In short, in the opposite of what many TSLA pundits expected to occur, an increasingly larger portion of TSLA’s made-in-China cars are being exported to global markets, calling into question both: (a) the viability of TSLA’s demand inside of China, and (b) TSLA’s gross margins later this year given Germany is the most expensive place in the World to mass produce automobiles.”

  

  He also noted the impact of rising nickel prices on the auto manufacturer, stating that based on his analysis and checks with traders and EV experts in London/Shanghai, that current nickel prices “equate to ~$998.97/car in added costs for TSLA”.

  But the nickel theory has apparently been debunked, thanks to a little known “secret deal” that Tesla reportedly has with miner Vale for supply of nickel that we wrote about just days ago. 

  But Johnson’s assertions of Tesla’s Q1 2022 numbers were pretty close. He stated in March that he expected a material revision lower in first quarter 2022 production estimates. Johnson said that estimates were too high by “at least 12k to 20k vehicles”, and he put Tesla’s Q1 2022 delivery number at an estimate of 304k to 312k.

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 04/02/2022 – 15:00

• Edging Towards A Gold Standard
  Edging Towards A Gold Standard

  Authored by Alasdair Macleod via GoldMoney.com,

  Commentators are trying to make sense of Russian moves… However, there is a back story which differs from much of the speculation, which this article addresses.

  The Russians have not put the rouble on some sort of gold standard. Instead, they have repeated the Nixon/Kissinger strategy which created the petrodollar in 1973 by getting the Saudis to agree to accept only dollars for oil. This time, nations deemed by Russia to be unfriendly will be forced to buy roubles – roughly 2 trillion by the EU alone based on last year’s natural gas and oil imports from Russia — driving up the exchange rate. The rouble has now doubled against the dollar from its low point of RUB 150 to RUB 75 yesterday in just over three weeks. The Russian Central Bank will soon be able to normalise the domestic economy by reducing interest rates and removing exchange controls.

  The Russians and Chinese will be acutely aware that Western currencies, particularly the yen and euro, are likely to be undermined by recent developments. The financial war, which has always been in the background, is emerging into plain sight and becoming a battlefield between fiat currencies, and it is full on.

  The winner by default is almost certainly gold, now the only reliable reserve asset for those not aligned with Russia’s “unfriendlies”. But it is still a long way from backing any currency.

  

  Putin is losing the battle for Ukraine

  President Putin is embattled. His army as let him down — it turns out that his generals lack the necessary leadership qualities, the squaddies are suffering from lack of food, fuel, and are suffering from frostbite. It is reported that one brigade commander, Colonel Yuri Medvedev, was deliberately run down by one of his own men in a tank, a measure of the chaos at the front line. And Putin is not the first national leader to have misplaced his confidence in military forces.

  Conventional wisdom (from Carl von Clausewitz, no less) suggested Putin might win the battle for Ukraine but would be unable to hold the territory. That requires the willingness of the population to accept defeat, and a lesson the Soviets had learned in Afghanistan, with the same experience repeated by America and the UK. But Putin has not even won the battle and word from the Kremlin is of accepting a face-saving fall-back position, perhaps taking Donetsk and the coast of the Sea of Azov to join it up with Crimea.

  There was little doubt that if Putin came under pressure militarily, he would probably step up the commodity and financial war. This he has now done by insisting on payments in roubles. The mistake made in the West was to believe that Russia must sell commodities, and even though sanctions harm the West greatly, the strategy is to put maximum pressure on the Russian economy for a quick resolution. It is obviously flawed because Russia can still trade with China, India, and other significant economies. And thanks to rising commodity prices the Russian economy is not in the bad place the West believed either.

  Besides nations representing 84% of the world’s population standing aside from the Western alliance’s sanctions and with some like India sorely tempted to buy discounted Russian oil, we would profit from paying attention to some very basic factors. Russia can certainly afford to sell oil at significant discounts to market prices, and there are buyers willing to break the American-led embargoes. The non-Western world is no longer automatically on-side with American hegemony; that is a rotting hulk which the Americans are desperately trying to keep afloat. Observing this, the Kremlin seems relaxed and has said that it is willing to accept currencies from its friends, but Western enemies (the “unfriendlies”) would have to pay for oil in roubles or, it has also been suggested, in gold.

  On 23 March the Kremlin drew up a list of these unfriendly countries, which includes the 27 EU members, Switzerland, Norway, the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, and South Korea.

  Payment in roubles is easy to understand. We can assume that all oil and natural gas long-term supply contracts with the unfriendlies have force majeure clauses, because that is normal practice. In the light of sanctions, the Russians are entitled to claim different payment terms. And it is this that the Russians are relying upon for insisting on payment in roubles.

  Germany, for example, would have to buy roubles on the foreign exchanges to pay for her gas. Buying roubles supports the currency, and this was the tactic that created the petrodollar in 1973 when Nixon and Kissinger persuaded the Saudis to take nothing else but dollars for oil. It was that single move which more than anything confirmed the dollar as the world’s international and reserve currency in the aftermath of the temporary suspension of the Bretton Woods Agreement. That’s not quite the objective here; it is to not only underwrite the rouble, but to drive it higher relative to other currencies. The immediate effect has been clear, as the chart from Bloomberg below shows.

  

  Having halved in value against the dollar on 7 March, all the rouble’s fall has been recovered. And that’s even before Germany et al buy roubles on the foreign exchanges to pay for Russian energy.

  The gold issue is more complex. The West has banned not only Russian transactions settling in their currencies but also from settling in gold. The assumption is that gold is the only liquid asset Russia has left to trade with. But just as ahead of the end of the cold war Western intelligence completely misread the Soviet economy, it could be making a mistake again. This time, intel seems to be misled by full-on Keynesian macro analysis, suggesting the Russian economy is vulnerable when it is inherently stronger in a currency shoot-out than even the dollar. There is no need for Russia to sell any gold at all.

  The Russian economy has a broadly non-interventionist government, a flat rate of income tax of 13%, and a government debt of 20% of GDP. There are flaws in the Russian economy, particularly in the lack of respect for property rights and the pervasive problem of the Russian Mafia. But in many respects, Russia’s economy is like that of the US before 1916, when the highest income tax rate was 15%.

  An important difference is that the Russian government gets substantial revenues from energy and commodity exports, taking its income up to over 40% of GDP. While export volumes of energy and other commodities are being hit by sanctions, their prices have risen substantially. But it remains to be seen what form of money or currency for future payments will be used for over $550bn equivalent of exports, while $297bn of imports will be substantially reduced by sanctions, widening Russia’s trade surplus considerably. Euros, yen, dollars, and sterling are ruled out, worthless in the hands of the Central Bank. That leaves Chinese renminbi, Indian rupees, weakening Turkish lira and that’s about it. It’s hardly surprising that Russia is prepared to accept gold. Putin’s view on the subject is shown in Figure 1 of stills taken from a Tik Tok video released last weekend.

  

  Furthermore, Russia’s official reserves are only a small part of the story. Simon Hunt of Simon Hunt Strategic Services, who I have found to be consistently well informed in these matters, is convinced based on his information that Russia’s gold reserves are significantly higher than reported — he thinks 12,000 tonnes is closer to the mark.

  The payment choice for those on Russia’s unfriendly list, if we rule out gold, is effectively of only one — buy roubles to pay for Russian energy. By sanctioning the world’s largest energy exporter, the effect on energy prices in dollars is likely to drive them far higher yet. Additionally, market liquidity for roubles is likely to be restricted, and the likelihood of a bear squeeze on any shorts is therefore high. The question is how high?

  Last year, the EU imported 155 billion cubic meters of natural gas from Russia, valued at about $180bn at current volatile prices. Oil exports from Russia to the EU were about 2.3 million barrels per day, worth an additional $105bn for a combined total of $285bn, which at the current exchange rate of RUB 75.5 is RUB 2.15 trillion. EU Gas consumption is likely to fall as spring approaches, but payments in roubles will still drive the exchange rate significantly higher. And attempts to obtain alternative sources of LNG will take time, be insufficient, and serve to drive natural gas prices from other suppliers even higher.

  For now, we should dismiss ideas over payments to the Russians in gold. The Russian gold story, initially at least, is a domestic issue. Though it might spill over into international markets.

  On 25 March, Russia’s central bank announced it will buy gold from credit institutions at a fixed rate of 5,000 roubles per gramme starting this week and through to 30 June. The press release stated that it will enable “a stable supply of gold and smooth functioning of the gold mining industry.” In other words, it allows banks to continue to lend money to gold mining and related activities, particularly for financing new gold mining developments. Meanwhile, the state will continue to accumulate bullion which, as discussed above, it has no need to spend on imports.

  When the RCB’s announcement was made the rouble was considerably weaker and the price offered by the central bank was about 20% below the market price. But that has now changed. Based on last night’s exchange rate of 75.5 roubles to the dollar (30 March) and with gold at $1935, the price offered by the central bank is at a premium of 7.2% to the market. Whether this opens the situation up to arbitrage from overseas bullion markets is an intriguing question. And we can assume that Russian banks will find ways of acquiring and deploying the dollars to do so through their offshore facilities, until, under the cover of a strong rouble, the RCB removes exchange controls.

  There is nothing in the RCB’s statement to prevent a Russian bank sourcing gold from, say, Dubai, to sell to the central bank. Guidance notes to which we cannot be privy may address this issue but let us assume this arbitrage will be permitted, because it might be difficult to stop. And if Russia does have undeclared bullion reserves more than those allegedly held by the US Treasury, then given that the real war is essentially financial, it is in Russia’s interest to see the gold price rise in dollars.

  Not only would Eurozone banks be scrambling to obtain roubles, but the entire Western banking system, which takes the short side of derivative transactions in gold will find itself in increasing difficulties. Normally, bullion banks rely on central banks and the Bank for International Settlements to backstop the market with physical liquidity through leases and swaps. But the unfortunate message from the West to every central bank not on Russia’s unfriendly list is that London’s or New York’s respect for ownership rights to their nation’s gold cannot be relied upon. Not only will lease and swap liquidity dry up, but it is likely that requests will be made for earmarked gold in these centres to be repatriated.

  In short, Russia appears to be initiating a squeeze on gold derivatives in Western capital markets by exploiting diminishing faith in Western institutions and their cavalier treatment of foreign property rights. By forcing the unfriendlies into buying roubles, the RCB will shortly be able to reduce interest rates back to previous policy levels and remove exchange controls. At the same time, the inflation problems faced by the West will be ameliorated by a strong rouble.

  It ties in with the politics for Putin’s survival. Together with the economic benefits of an improving exchange rate for the rouble and the relatively minor inconvenience of not being able to buy imports from the West (alternatives from China and India will still be available) Putin can retreat from his disastrous Ukrainian campaign. Senior figures in the Russian army will be disciplined, imprisoned, or disappear accused of incompetence and misleading Putin into thinking his “special operation” would be quickly achieved. Putin will absolve himself of any blame and dissenters can expect even greater clampdowns on protests.

  Russia’s moves are likely to have been thought out in advance. The move to support the rouble is evidence it is so, giving the central bank the opportunity to reverse the interest rate hike to 20% to protect the rouble. Foreign exchange controls on Russians can shortly be lifted. Almost certainly the consequences for Western currencies were discussed. The conclusion would surely have been that higher energy and other Russian commodity prices would persist, driving Western price inflation higher and for longer than discounted in financial markets. Western economies face soaring interest rates and a slump. And depending on their central bank’s actions, Japan and the Eurozone with negative interest rates are almost certainly most vulnerable to a financial, currency, and economic crisis.

  The impact of Russia’s new policy of only accepting roubles was, perhaps, the inevitable consequence of the West’s policies of self-immolation. From Russia’s failure in Ukraine, Putin appears to have had little option but to go on the offensive and escalate the financial, or commodity-currency war to cover his retreat. We can only speculate about the effect of a strong rouble on the international gold price, but if Russian banks can indeed buy bullion from non-Russian sources to sell to the RCB, it would mark a very aggressive move in the ongoing financial war.

  China’s position

  China will be learning unpalatable lessens about its ambition to invade Taiwan, and Taiwan will be encouraged mightily by Ukraine’s success at repelling an unwelcome invader. A 100-mile channel is an enormous obstacle for a Chinese invasion that Russia didn’t have to navigate before Ukrainian locals exploited defensive tactics to repel the invader. There can now be little doubt of the outcome if China tried the same tactics against Taiwan. President Xi would be sensible not to make the same mistake as Putin and tone down the anti-Taiwan rhetoric and try the softer approach of friendly relations and economic integration to reunite Chinese interests.

  That has been a costless lesson for China, but another consideration is the continuing relationship with Russia. The earlier Chinese description of it made sense: “We are not allies, but we are partners”. What this means is that China would abstain rather than support Russia in the various supranational forums where the world’s leaders gather. But she would continue to trade with Russia as normal, even engaging in currency swaps to facilitate it.

  More recently, a small crack has appeared in this relationship, with China concerned that US and EU sanctions might be extended to Chinese entities in joint ventures with Russian businesses linked to sanctioned oligarchs and Putin supporters. The highest profile example has been the suspension of a joint project to build a petrochemical plant in Russia involving Sinopec, because of the involvement of Gennady Timchenko, a close ally of Putin. But according to a report from Nikkei Asia, Sinopec has confirmed it will continue to buy Russian crude oil and gas.

  As always with its geopolitics, we can expect China to play its hand with great care. China was prepared for the consequences of US monetary policy in March 2020 when the Fed reduced its funds rate to zero and instituted quantitative easing of $120bn every month. By its actions it judged these moves to be very inflationary, and began stockpiling commodities ahead of dollar price rises, including energy and grains to project its own people. The yuan has risen against the dollar by about 11%, which with moderate credit policies has kept annualised domestic price inflation subdued to about 1% currently, while consumer price inflation in the West is soaring out of control.

  China is not therefore in the weak financial position of Russia’s “unfriendlies”; the highly indebted governments whose finances and economies are likely to be destabilised by rising energy prices and interest rates. But it does have a potential economic crisis on its hands in the form of a collapsing property market. In February, its response was to ease the credit restrictions imposed following the initial pandemic recovery in 2021, which had included attempts to deleverage the property sector.

  Property aside, we can assume that China will not want to destabilise the West by her own actions. The West is doing that very effectively without China’s assistance. But having demonstrated an understanding of why the West is sliding into an inflation crisis of its own making China will be keen not to make the same mistakes. Her partnership with Russia, as joint leaders in the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, is central to detaching herself from what its Maoist economists forecast as the inevitable collapse of imperial capitalism. Having set itself up in the image of that imperialism, it must now become independent from it to avoid the same fate.

  Gold’s wider role in China, Russia, and the SCO

  Gold has always been central to China’s fallback position. I estimated that before permitting its own people to buy gold in 2002, the state had acquired as much as 20,000 tonnes. Subsequently, through the Shanghai Gold Exchange the Chinese public has taken delivery of a further 20,000 tonnes, mainly through imports from outside China. No gold escapes China, and the Chinese government is likely to have added to its hoard over the last twenty years. The government maintains a monopoly on refining and has stimulated the mining industry to become the largest national producer. Together with its understanding of the West’s inflationary policies the evidence is clear: China is prepared for a world of sound money with gold replacing the dollar’s hegemony, and it now dominates the world’s physical market with that in mind.

  These plans are shared with Russia, and the members, dialog partners and associates of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation — almost all of which have been accumulating gold reserves. Mine output from these countries is estimated by the US Geological Survey at 830 tonnes, 27% of the global total.

  The move away from pure fiat was confirmed recently by some half-baked plans for the Eurasian Economic Union and China to escape from Western fiat by setting up a new currency for cross-border trade backed partly by commodities, including gold.

  The extent of “off balance sheet” bullion is a critical issue, because at some stage they are likely to be declared. In this context, the Russian position is important, because if Simon Hunt, quoted above, is correct Russia could have more gold than the US’s 8,130 tonnes, which it is widely thought to overstate the latter’s true position. Furthermore, Western central banks routinely lease and swap their gold reserves, leading to double counting, which almost certainly reduces their actual position in aggregate. And if fiat currencies continue to decline we could find that the two ringmasters for the SCO have more monetary gold than all the other central banks put together — something like 30,000-40,000 tonnes for Chinese and Russian governments, compared with perhaps less than 20,000 tonnes for Russia’s adversaries (officially ,the unfriendlies own about 24,000 tonnes, but we can assume that at least 5,000 of that is double counted or does not exist due to leasing and swaps).

  The endgame for the yen and the euro

  Without doubt, the terrible twins in the major fiat currencies are the yen and the euro. They share much in common: negative interest rates, major commercial banks highly leveraged with asset to equity ratios averaging over twenty times, and central bank balance sheets overloaded with bonds which are collapsing in value. They now face rising interest rates spiralling beyond their control, the consequences of the ECB and Bank of Japan being trapped under the zero bound and being in denial over falling purchasing power for their currencies.

  Consequently, we are seeing capital flight, which has accelerated dramatically this month for the yen, but in truth follows on from relative weakness for both currencies since the middle of 2021 when global bond yields began rising. Statistically, we can therefore link the collapse of both currencies on the foreign exchanges with rising bond yields. And given that rising interest rates and bond yields are in their early stages, there is considerable currency weakness yet to come.

  Japan and its yen

  The Bank of Japan has publicly stated it would buy an unlimited amount of 10-year Japanese Government Bonds at a 0.25% yield to contain the bond sell-off. A higher yield would be more than embarrassing for the BOJ, already requiring a recapitalisation, presumably with its heavily indebted government stumping up the money. Figure 2 shows that the 10-year JGB yield is already testing the 0.25% yield level (charts from Bloomberg).

  Fig 2. JGB yields hits BoJ Limit and Yen collapsing

  

  As avid Keynesians, the BOJ is following similar policies to that of John Law in 1720’s France. Law issued fresh livres which he used to prop up the Mississippi venture by buying shares in the market. The bubble popped, the venture survived, but the livre was destroyed.

  Today, the BOJ is issuing yen to prop up the Japanese government bond market. As the issuer of the currency, the BOJ is by any yardstick bankrupt and in desperate need of new capital. Since it commenced QE in 2000, it has accumulated so much government and corporate debt, and even equities bundled into ETFs, that the falling value of the BOJ’s holdings makes its liabilities significantly greater than its assets, currently to the tune of about ¥4 trillion ($3.3bn).

  Ignoring the cynic’s definition of madness, the BOJ is doubling down on its commitment, announcing on Monday further unlimited purchases of 10-year JGBs at a fixed yield of 0.25%. In other words, it is supporting bond prices from falling further, echoing Mario Draghi’s “whatever it takes” and confirming its John Law policy. Last Tuesday’s Summary of Opinions at the Monetary Policy Meeting on March 17 and 18 had this gem:

  “Heightened geopolitical risks due to the situation surrounding Ukraine have caused price rises of energy and other items, and this will push down domestic demand while raising the CPI. Under the circumstances, it is necessary to improve labour market conditions and provide stronger support for wage increases, and therefore it is increasingly important that the bank persistently continue with the current monetary easing.”

  No, this is not satire. In other words, the BOJ’s deposit rate will remain negative. And the following was added from Government Representatives at the same meeting:

  “The budget for fiscal 2022 aims to realise a new form of capitalism through a virtual circle of growth and distribution and the government has been making efforts to swiftly obtain the Diet’s approval.”

  A virtuous circle of growth? It seems like intensified intervention. Meanwhile, Japan’s major banks with asset to equity ratios of over twenty times are too highly geared to survive rising interest rates without a bank credit crisis threatening to take them down. It is hardly surprising that international capital is fleeing the yen, realising that it will be sacrificed by the BOJ in the vain hope that it can continue to maintain bond prices far above where they should be.

  The euro system and its euro

  The euro system and the euro share similar characteristics to the BOJ and the yen: interest rates trapped under the zero bound, Eurozone G-SIBs with asset to equity ratios of over 20 times and market realities forcing interest rates and bond yields higher, as Figure 3 shows. Furthermore, Eurozone banks are heavily exposed to Russian and Ukrainian debt due to their geographic proximity.

  Fig 3: Euro declining as bond yields soar

  

  There are two additional problems for the Eurosystem not faced by the BOJ and the yen. The ECB’s shareholders are the national central banks in the euro system, which in turn have balance sheet liabilities more than their assets. The structure of the euro system means that in recapitalising itself the ECB does not have a government to which it can issue credit and receive equity capital in return, the normal way in which a central bank would refinance its balance sheet by turning credit into equity. Instead, it will have to refinance itself through the national central banks which being insolvent themselves in turn would have to refinance themselves through their governments.

  The second problem is a further complication. The euro system’s TARGET2 settlement system reflects enormous imbalances which complicates resolving a funding crisis. For example, on the last figures (end-February), Germany’s Bundesbank was owed €1,150 billion through TARGET2, while Italy owed €568 billion. It would be in the interests of a recapitalisation for the Italian government to want its central bank to write off this amount, while the Bundesbank is already in negative equity without writing off TARGET2 balances. Germany’s politicians might demand the balances owed to the Bundesbank be secured. This problem is not insoluble perhaps, but one can see that political and public wrangling over these imbalances will only serve to draw attention to the fragility of the whole system and undermine public trust in the currency.

  With Germany’s CPI now rising at 7.6% and Spain’s at 9.8%, negative deposit rates are wildly inappropriate. When the system breaks it can be expected to be sudden, violent and a shock to those in thrall to the euro system.

  Conclusion

  For decades, a showdown between an Asian partnership and hegemonic America has been building. We can date this back to 1983, when China began to accumulate physical gold having appointed the Peoples’ Bank for the purpose. That act was the first indication that China felt the need to protect itself from others as it ventured into capitalism. China has navigated itself through increasing American assertion of its hegemony and attempts to destabilise Hong Kong. It has faced obstacles to its lucrative export trade through tariffs. It has been cut off from Western markets for its advanced technology. China has resented having to use the dollar.

  After Russia’s ill-advised invasion of Ukraine, it now appears that the invisible war over global financial resources and control is intensifying. The fuse has been lit and events are taking over. The destabilisation of the yen and the euro are now as certain as can be. While the yen is the victim of John Law-like market-rigging policies and likely to go the same way as France’s livre, perhaps the greater danger is for the euro. The contradictions in its set-up, and the destruction of Germany’s sound money principals in favour of the inflationism of the PIGS was always going to be finite. The ECB has got itself into a ridiculous position, and no amount of conjuring and cajoling of financial institutions can resolve the ECB’s own insolvency and that of all its shareholders.

  History shows that there are two groups involved in a currency collapse. International holders take fright and sell for other currencies and assets they believe to be more secure. They drive the exchange rate lower. The second group is the public in a nation, those who use the currency for transactions. If they lose confidence in it, the currency can rapidly descend into worthlessness as ordinary people accelerate its disposal for anything tangible in a final crack-up boom.

  In the past, an alternative currency was always the sounder one, one backed by and exchangeable for gold coin. That is so long ago that we in the West have mostly forgotten the difference between money, that is gold and silver, and unbacked fiat currencies. The great unknown has been how much abuse of money and credit it would take for the public to relearn the difference. Cryptocurrencies have alerted us, but they are not a widely accepted medium of exchange and don’t have the legal standing of gold and gold substitutes.

  War is to be our wake-up call — financial rather than physical in character. Western central banks and their governments have been fiddling the books, telling us that currency debasement is good for us. That debasement has accelerated in recent years. But by upping the anti against Russia with sanctions that end up undermining the purchasing power of all the West’s major currencies, our leaders have called an end to the reign of fiat.

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 04/02/2022 – 14:30

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• The Necro-Neologism Of Lethal Legal Experts
  The Necro-Neologism Of Lethal Legal Experts

  Authored by Laurie Calhoun via The Libertarian Institute,

  The power of language is magical to behold. Through the mere pronouncement of words, people can be persuaded to do what they would never have thought to do, left to their own devices. The playbook with the most success in this regard is that of war. When people are “informed” that they and their families are in mortal danger, they can and often will acquiesce to any and all policies which government authorities claim to be necessary in order to protect them.

  Young people can be coaxed into killing complete strangers who never did anything personally to them. Citizens can be brainwashed to believe that suitably labeled persons can and indeed must be denied any and all human rights. When the stakes are claimed to be life and death, even apparently intelligent people can be goaded to accept that the mere possession of a divergent opinion is evil, and the expression of dissent a crime. The use of military weapons to execute obviously innocent, entirely innocuous civilians, including children, suddenly becomes permissible, so long as the victims have been labeled collateral damage. All any of this takes is to identify “the enemy” as evil.

  

  In centuries past, “the laws of war” were said to require the humane treatment of enemy soldiers. They were diagnosed as suffering from “invincible ignorance,” misled and mistaken about the dispute said to necessitate recourse to war, but still acknowledged as persons capable of being courageous combatants who found themselves through historical fortuity on the wrong side. An enemy soldier was to be provided with the opportunity to lay down his weapon and surrender in order to save his own life. Disarmed or incapacitated soldiers were not to be executed by their captors, for they had already been neutralized and posed no more danger than unarmed civilians. Prisoners of war were to be treated as human beings, and when they were tortured or summarily executed, this constituted a war crime. Such “laws of war,” which form the basis of international agreements, including the Geneva Conventions, have needless to say often been flouted, but, in theory, they were to be upheld by civilized people.

  After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, political leaders and government officials proclaimed that “everything changed.” The Bush administration legal team deployed linguistic innovation to issue in an entirely new era of warfare, wherein the “laws of war” would still be said to obtain, but they would be inapplicable to entire classes of human beings. Jihadist soldiers for radical Islamist causes were labeled unlawful enemy combatants, whose “unlawful” status was said to imply that they were protected by neither international norms such as the Geneva Conventions nor the laws of civil society.

  Under this pretext, terrorist suspects were tortured while held captive at prisons in Guantánamo Bay, Abu Ghraib and Baghram, in addition to many black sites around the world. Ever keen to cover their tracks, the CIA (Central Intelligence Agency) also flatly denied that they ever tortured anyone, by redefining as enhanced interrogation techniques the abusive practices inflicted on hundreds, if not thousands, of men in an effort to extract from them actionable intelligence. And just in case any of this “logic” was called into question by pesky human rights advocates, Bush administration officials also derided the Geneva Conventions as “quaint.”

  Imminent vs. Immediate in the Global War on Terror

  The “peace candidate” Barack Obama was elected in 2008 on the promise to rein in the excesses of the Bush administration, including what Obama characterized as the “dumb” war on Iraq. The new president publicly denounced “enhanced interrogation techniques” as torture but then proceeded to take linguistic neologism to an entirely new level by not only redefining assassination as targeted killing but also labeling any suspect eliminated through the use of lethal drones as an Enemy Killed in Action (EKIA).

  The slaughtered “soldiers” were assumed to be guilty of possible complicity in future possible crimes, a preposterous position never fully grasped by Obama’s devotees, who somehow failed to recognize that the specific implement used to kill does not distinguish various types of homicide from one another, morally speaking. The extrajudicial execution of individual human beings in civil society is illegal, but the Obama administration effectively maintained that the targeting of suspicious persons and their associates in lands far away was perfectly permissible, so long as the victims were killed by missiles launched from drones, thereby rendering them “acts of war.”

  The entire drone program, whether within or far from areas of active hostilities (i.e., war zones), was portrayed by Obama and his administration as just another facet of “just war.” Blinded to the moral atrocity of this new lethal-centric approach to dealing with suspected enemies, whereby they would be executed rather than taken prisoner, Obama’s loyal supporters blithely embraced the propaganda according to which he was a smart warrior. After demonstrating his death creds to the satisfaction of hawks, by killing not only Osama bin Laden, but also U.S. citizen Anwar al-Awlaki, suspected of complicity in factional terrorism, Obama was reelected for a second term in 2012, despite having summarily executed thousands of men—mostly brown-skinned, unnamed, and unarmed—located in their own civil societies, far from any U.S. citizen, and in clear violation of the Geneva Conventions.

  The deft deployment of two simple words, immediate and imminent, played a key role in allowing Obama to get away with murder, even of U.S. citizens such as Anwar al-Awlaki and his sixteen-year-old son, Abdulrahman al-Awlaki. Guided by drone-killing czar John Brennan, Obama’s lawyers calmly explained in public addresses and official documents that suspects who posed imminent threats to the United States could be targeted by lethal drones because an imminent threat did not imply immediacy. In other words, they could be killed even when they were currently unarmed and living in their own civil society, surrounded by family members and friends, and even when the future crime of which they were vaguely suspected was merely hypothetical and therefore had no specific date.

  When targets were “nominated” for execution, the administration operated under the assumption that they were guilty unless specific information was brought forth to demonstrate their innocence. The victims themselves obviously could not do this, initially, because they were not informed that they were being targeted and, later, because they were dead. Meanwhile, local residents and journalists on the ground who knew these people’s names and dared to assert that the victims were not terrorists were either denounced as propagandists or cast as misguided persons hoodwinked by the rhetoric of jihadists.

  As the death toll mounted, outspoken critics in the vicinity of the missile strikes became progressively more terrified of being themselves eliminated for seeming to support terrorist groups. Their concerns were not unfounded, for they risked being affixed with the lethal label associate and added to hit lists for execution if they dared to question the drone warriors’ narrative. This oppressive climate needless to say served actively to suppress dissent from the U.S. government’s official story of what they had done, even among locals who witnessed the grisly scenes where entirely innocent community members were incinerated by missiles launched from drones.

  Imminent vs. Immediate in the Opioid Crisis

  Improbably enough, the very same two words, imminent and immediate, used by the Obama legal team to invert the presumption of innocence to a presumption of guilt in the case of terrorist suspects located abroad, proved to be deadly in an entirely different context during the twenty-first century as well.

  The causes of the sudden and shocking increase in the number of narcotics addicts and overdose deaths all over the United States are manifold, but a tidal wave of diversion was made possible by drug-dealer doctors and the notorious “pain clinics” where they plied their trade. Manufacturers produced and pharmacies dispensed billions of pills as demand multiplied in tandem with the creation of more and more new addicts, who could no longer function without narcotics.

  Purdue Pharma and the Sackler family are widely regarded as the prime movers of the opioid crisis, having undertaken a highly successful campaign to coax doctors into believing that their patented time-release prescription narcotic Oxycontin was nonaddictive and could be safely provided to patients even for moderate pain. This marketing feat was achieved by influencing key players at the FDA (Food and Drug Administration), who not only approved the medication but permitted it to be sold along with a package insert falsely suggesting that it was less prone to abuse than other narcotics.

  In its quest to sell as many pills as possible, the pharmaceutical industry repeatedly pivoted to neologize in lethal ways over the two decades following the launch of Oxycontin in 1996. When it emerged that the pills sometimes wore off before the twelve-hour time release period, marketers and sales representatives claimed that those patients were suffering from breakthrough pain, the remedy for which was (surprise!) to double their dose. The narcotics marketers indulged in flat-out sophistry when they insisted that patients who appeared to be addicted to their painkillers were in fact suffering from pseudoaddiction, the remedy for which was (surprise!) even higher doses of their drugs. As farcical as these arguments may seem in retrospect, with the benefit of hindsight and in the light of the overdose epidemic now running rampant, many doctors appear to have been persuaded to believe that their patients’ miserable condition was not indicative of addiction but a manifestation of their ongoing and unbearable pain, the solution to which was to ply them with yet more powerful narcotics.

  Pharma-coopted lawmakers were notified of the proliferating addiction problem early on but refused to stop the runaway train by demanding that the FDA cease playing along with Purdue’s insane pro-narcotics marketing campaign. Other companies needless to say contributed as well, through promulgating the “pain epidemic” propaganda so as to expand the market niche of such products, which had previously been reserved for terminally ill patients. Johnson & Johnson played a causal role in what became the opioid crisis by growing tons of poppies (in Tasmania) to meet the enormous increased industry need for raw opium, without which the billions of pills prescribed could not and would never have been produced.

  As the opioid crisis began to become recognized for what it was, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) sought to issue “Immediate Suspension Orders” (ISOs) against the three major drug wholesale distributors to pharmacies, Cardinal Health, McKesson, and Amerisource Bergen. Through issuing such orders, Joe Rannazzisi, the deputy director of the Office of Diversion Control, hoped to halt the ongoing mass shipments of opioids to retailers such as CVS in cases where the sheer volume of prescriptions could not be explained by ordinary medical practice and so was a clear indication that widespread diversion of narcotics was underway.

  Rannazzisi ended up being hobbled by a team of corporate lawyers and lobbyists who managed to cobble together a new law in 2014 which, despite its beneficent-sounding name, “The Ensuring Patient Access and Effective Drug Enforcement Act” (HR4709), served to protect, above all, drug manufacturers and distributors. The Act rewrote the law already on the books through redefining the imminent danger required to issue an ISO to mean “a substantial likelihood of an immediate threat.” One of the new Act’s enthusiastic promoters, Linden Barber (a former DEA officer and lawyer who had left his government position to represent the drug distributors), persuasively explained on the floor of Congress that “having a clear legal standard is always better.” The measure passed unanimously, without a roll call vote, for the simple reason that it sounded like a policy to which no decent person could object. But rather than stemming the tide of the opioid crisis, the Act severely hampered the DEA’s ability to issue ISOs, for it was prohibitively difficult for officials to meet the newly stipulated legal standard of imminence as requiring immediacy.

  President Obama signed the Ensuring Patient Access and Effective Drug Enforcement Act of 2014 into law, and the marketing campaign used to promote the use of highly addictive time-release narcotics barreled ahead. The DEA’s sudden inability to call a halt to the shipment of tons of narcotics to retailers effectively guaranteed that the number of dependent persons would multiply, as potent prescription pills continued to be diverted for recreational uses and thereby create more addicts. But more addicts meant more overdoses, not only from the potent pills themselves, but also because the street supplies of heroin to which many users eventually turned were often cut with extremely dangerous fentanyl.

  Unfazed by the death tolls, which had already soared to many thousands by 2014, the pharmaceutical giants insisted that the sorry situation of addicts was no argument against helping patients genuinely in pain, who would in fact be wronged if their access to narcotics were curbed. The addicts dropping like flies were painted as solely responsible for their plight, despite ample evidence that many of the overdose victims began as legitimate pain patients, who became aware of their dependency only upon reaching the bottom of their amber vials.

  The Role of Obamacare in Propelling and Augmenting the Opioid Crisis

  “Everything changed” in the twenty-first century, not only with the war on terror, the rebranding of torture, and the normalization of assassination, but also in the pharma-friendly approach to healthcare ushered in by President Barack Obama. By pushing through his signature legislation, the Affordable Care Act (ACA) of 2010, which leftists were led to believe would create a system of socialized medicine (referred to by many as Obamacare), the president notoriously bowed to drug makers and the insurance industry, extending to those sectors the very form of crony corporate welfare already enjoyed by companies in the military industry.

  Obama’s collaboration with pharmaceutical and insurance company executives in crafting the ACA allowed them to secure advantageous pricing arrangements to ensure the maximization of their profits, while at the same time massively increasing the sheer volume of sales. The pharmaceutical industry was greatly enriched through the provision of virtually limitless free psychiatric medications to low-income patients through government programs such as Medicaid and Medicare, and to veterans through the VA (Veterans Administration). Mental health-based disability claims soared, and the sales of SSRIs (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors), anti-anxiety, atypical anti-psychotic medications and other psychotropes, including narcotics, increased accordingly. The millions of new prescription medications dispensed to formerly uninsured Americans ended up being paid for by the middle class, who were mandated by law to sign up for Obamacare or else face a hefty tax penalty, should they decline to comply.

  Despite what may have been Obama’s initial good intention, to make healthcare available to uninsured persons, Obamacare ultimately made medical treatment in the United States prohibitively expensive for many middle class families, whose copays, premiums and deductibles increased dramatically. The new mandatory healthcare program skyrocketed the salaries of health industry executives while pricing drugs and procedures out of reach for many persons who had previously been able to afford them. Millions of people in the United States have filed medical bankruptcy in recent years. In cases where prescription narcotics addicts became uninsured because they lost their jobs, they turned to the streets for their needed drugs, given the impossibility of paying out of pocket for extraordinarily expensive prescription pills.

  Given the story of Obamacare, perhaps no one should be surprised that when the Obama administration finally took action to address the opioid epidemic, most of the allocated $1.1 billion was for the alternative medication of already existing addicts. The pharma-friendly approach prevailed once again, encouraging the sale of more and more drugs (such as Suboxone) to help addicts to wean themselves off their narcotics. Obama’s dilatory and pro-pill approach to the opioid crisis ultimately generated even more people who, in order to kick their narcotics habit, would need to avail themselves of further pharmaceutical means, effectively trading one drug for another. In other words, both the problem of opioid overprescription, facilitated through Obamacare by providing easy access to narcotics to formerly uninsured persons, and the measures implemented by the Obama administration in response to the overdose epidemic, served to increase pharmaceutical industry profits.

  The Death Connection

  Whether or not one wishes to connect any further dots in the cases of drone assassination and the opioid epidemic, it does seem worth pointing out that Obama’s own attorney general, Eric Holder (2009-2015), was a former legal counselor to Purdue Pharma, who in fact defended the company in a 2004 lawsuit alleging deceptive marketing of Oxycontin. This is noteworthy because it was none other than Eric Holder who, in an infamous White Paper and various public addresses, so adamantly defended the creative interpretation of imminence as not implying immediacy, the crucial linguistic maneuver used to defend and promote Obama’s drone killing spree.

  The normalization of assassination achieved by the Obama administration expanded the domain of what was said to be legitimate state killing by inverting the burden of proof on suspects while simultaneously claiming (illogically enough) that “areas outside active hostilities” were in fact war zones. Together, all of these linguistic tricks generated a veritable killing machine, opening up vast new market niches and dramatically increasing the profit potential for companies in the shockingly lucrative business of state-inflicted homicide. Not only weapons manufacturers but also logistics and analytics companies were able to reap hefty profits through eliminating as many people pegged as “terrorist suspects” as possible.

  The imminent vs. immediate dichotomy was inverted and redeployed, but in the opposite direction, by pharmaceutical company legal teams and collaborating lawmakers in 2014 to permit the promiscuous sale of narcotics to continue on despite the opioid overdose epidemic on display throughout the United States. The Ensuring Patient Access and Effective Drug Enforcement Act of 2014 ironically “ensured” only profits for drug companies, as millions of new addicts would be created during the second decade of the twenty-first century, accelerating and multiplying the domino effect of diversion and overdoses already ravaging communities all across the United States. It matters not that pharmaceutical company executives sought not to kill people but to sell pills. They aggressively pushed narcotics without regard for the likely future consequences of their drive for profit. Indeed, they persisted in pushing narcotics even as drug overdose deaths reached record levels.

  Under Obama, more than two thousand suspects outside areas of active hostilities were premeditatedly and intentionally incinerated by missiles launched from drones. The tally of overdose deaths in the United States exceeded 100K for the single year ending in April 2021. The long-range effects of the normalization of assassination, however, are likely to be more deadly than the opioid crisis, given that many other governments have followed suit in acquiring lethal drones for their own use, having been persuaded by the precedent set by the U.S. government that this form of state-inflicted homicide is perfectly permissible. In contrast, the promiscuous opioid prescription practices of doctors in the United States has been curtailed and was not emulated in the UK or in Europe, although the pharmaceutical giants do appear to have continued their morally dubious marketing practices in other countries abroad, especially in less-developed lands.

  As both the drone program and the opioid prescription debacle illustrate, when government agencies such as the Pentagon and the FDA have been captured by industry forces focused above all on maximizing profits, they will simply look the other way as the corpses pile up, denying responsibility for any and all “collateral damage.” This tendency of bureaucrats and corporate leaders to shirk responsibility for the negative consequences of their policies helps to explain the ease with which lawmakers are coopted by lobbyists from not only the military but also the pharmaceutical industry. The recent deployment of imminent and immediate by lethal legal “experts” serves to underscore why the censorship of language by government officials themselves is inherently dangerous, given that their policies in recent years have multiplied, not prevented, the deaths of human beings.

  In a representative democracy, the lawmakers promote the interests of the voters who elected them. What kind of government sacrifices the lives of human beings in order to maximize the profits of corporate leaders?

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 04/01/2022 – 23:40

• The Frozen Russian Superyachts (And Those That Got Away)
  The Frozen Russian Superyachts (And Those That Got Away)

  Reports about the superyachts of sanctioned Russian billionaires being frozen or detained came a dime a dozen in the aftermath of the invasion of Ukraine by the country at the end of February. But are these floating displays of obscene wealth now closely watched over in European harbors and marinas big or little fish when considering the most valuable superyachts owned by Russian billionaires?

  

  The answer to this question is: they kind of are.

  As Statista’s Katharina Buchholz details below, among the megalomaniac yachts detained in Europe are some of the biggest known to be owned by now sanctioned Russians. This is according to information by the Russian Asset Tracker and several media reports by Forbes and others.

  The Crescent, currently being held in Tarragona on the Spanish Mediterranean coast, is linked to sanctioned Rosneft CEO Igor Sechin. At an approximate value of $600 million and a length of 443 feet, it is one of the largest yachts in the world and is said to feature a large glass-bottom pool, a helicopter hangar and a two-story glass atrium.

  Another enormous vessel – nabbed by authorities while undergoing repairs in Hamburg, Germany – is the Dilbar, owned by Metalloinvest’s Alisher Usmanov. It is the world’s largest yacht measured by interior volume and has a staggering length of 511 feet. The yacht is believed to have been even more expensive upon delivery in 2016 than the Crescent, which was finished in 2019. Finally, the world’s largest sailing yacht, three-master SY A, was detained in Trieste, Italy. It is owned by Andrey Melnichenko of EuroChem and coal company SUEK.

  But several more of the biggest boats owned by sanctioned Russian oligarchs are currently out of reach of Western authorities.

  

  You will find more infographics at Statista

  These vessels have been sighted in the Maldives, Dubai or Turkey – all countries that haven’t imposed sanctions on Russian individuals and have no extradition agreements with the West. The latter nation is currently hosting two boats of yacht afficionado and soon-to-be former Chelsea F.C. owner Roman Abramovich.

  Compared to the value of these massive boats, some other superyachts that European countries detained seem rather modest despite their luxurious furnishings. The only ones valued at more than 100 million dollars were Sergei Chemezov’s Valerie, which was frozen by Spanish authorities, and another one of Igor Sechin’s yachts, Amore Vero, which was detained in France. Only the price at the time of delivery was available for the two boats, meaning the current value of the boats built in 2013 and 2011, respectively, would be lower now.

  Other highly publicized detainments of superyachts included Alexey Mordaschov’s Lady M and Gennady Timchenko’s Lena, both held up in Italy. The vessels are valued at comparably low $27 million and $8 million, considering loss of value after delivery. The only other yacht of a value of more than $50 million belonging to a sanctioned Russian billionaire was detained in the islands of Mallorca – Victor Vekselberg’s Tango. The latest catch was a $38 million superyacht belonging to an unnamed Russian businessman, which was frozen by British authorities in London’s Canary Wharf in connection with sanctions, The Guardian reported Tuesday.

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 04/01/2022 – 23:20

• This Is Why Your 'Locally Butchered' Beef Might Actually Come From China
  This Is Why Your ‘Locally Butchered’ Beef Might Actually Come From China

  Authored by Wesley Shank via The Epoch Times,

  Misleading label claims are everywhere…

  

  They bombard you while walking down the grocery store aisles.

  They creep up on you while scanning a slick marketer’s website.

  They shock you when even your best friend recommends an industrial organic brand… “Hey, it’s a lot cheaper and they say it’s just as good!”

  “Well… how do I know?”

  I admit this is the hard part because the big guys don’t want you to know! They spend tens of thousands of dollars to design the label and marketing claims to subtly deceive you without you knowing.

  And they’ve done a good job… many people are fooled.

  It’s time to pull back the shroud to expose the industrial reality that lies behind.

  Deceptive Label Claims to Be Aware of:

  1. Cage-Free, Free-Range, and even Pastured

  The big guys describe their chickens flawlessly. Their websites show lovely pictures of birds walking in lush grass with sunshine streaming around them.

  Yes, they do look… almost pastured… until you notice the sprawling industrial “CAFO barn” at the edge of one picture (in the video link).

  That barn could be holding 10,000+ birds. Maybe 5% of them will venture outside during their short lives—but probably not.

  

  Truly no comparison…

  There is so much more to share and explain… I’ll devote an entire email to this as soon as possible.

  And I didn’t even start on the same problem with CAFO Industrial Organic Dairy farms. More on that next week…

  2. “Grass-fed,” Beef

  Some “grass-fed” beef is actually fed a corn and soy based diet for the last 3-5 months of its life in a feedlot.

  Sure doesn’t sound like grass-fed to me!

  But like so many of these label claims, they have a kernel of truth mixed in to make a very tricky logic.

  Most cattle are raised on grass for the first half of their lives before being grain-finished in a CAFO feedlot. So the industrial guys say…

  “Of course I can label my beef as ‘grass-fed’!”

  These cattle eat grass for part of their lives and the regulations don’t say how much grass they need to eat before I sell this as ‘grass-fed beef.’

  Too bad for the customers if they don’t know what my ‘grass-fed’ means!”

  I’m not making this up.

  This is the logic that gets cheap “grass-fed” beef into supermarkets.

  If you want truly grass-fed beef, you must ask for 100% grass-fed & grass-finished. And make sure it’s chemical-free too! Even grasses are commonly sprayed in the industrial world.

  

  3. Product of the USA Meat

  Beef and Pork can be raised and slaughtered in Australia, New Zealand, Uruguay, Brazil, China, etc…

  It’s then shipped over here to be cut into your supermarket steaks, roasts and burgers…

  And legally labeled as “Product of the USA!”

  Sad, but true.

  Those cattle and pigs didn’t breath a single breath of United States air to merit this status. But shoppers will never know the difference.

  A Stone Barns Center report says 75-80% of all “USA” grass-fed beef sold online or in grocery stores is imported from overseas.

  It is shocking that United States label regulations allow this.

  But in some ways, the next one is even crazier!

  4. “Fresh,” and “Never-been-frozen,” Poultry

  According to the USDA, poultry can be sold as “fresh” if it has never been below 26° F.

  Excuse me, but isn’t 32° usually considered the freezing point?

  And there’s another misleading claim. This one is especially important with turkey season here.

  Poultry can be sold as “never been frozen” as long as it hasn’t been stored below 0° F. Read it in the USDA’s own words.

  This. is. crazy.

  “Never been frozen” says quite clearly that it, well… has never been frozen. I know from experience that chickens and turkeys at 10° are quite solidly frozen!

  But not to the industrial guys. As long as last year’s turkey didn’t go below 0° they can thaw it out and sell it to unsuspecting families as a beautiful “never-been-frozen” Thanksgiving Turkey.

  That’s the level of integrity you get with the Industrial Organic food system.

  Industrial Organics are not all bad. They help cut down on our nation’s chemical and antibiotic use.

  BUT.

  The deceptive marketing claims are wrong. We need to pull back the Industrial Curtain layer by layer so everyone in this country can see what lies behind.

  Please help spread the word.

  It’s time more people wake up and start supporting small farms across the country again. Those farms are where the real, truly pastured organics all began.

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 04/01/2022 – 23:00

• US Army Set To Order 30,000 Next Generation Squad Weapons
  US Army Set To Order 30,000 Next Generation Squad Weapons

  Buried deep within the DoD FY23 budget request by weapon system, the US Army has officially chosen the contractor(s) for the Next Generation Squad Weapons (NGSW) program. 

  NGSW is a prototyping effort by the Army that consists of a new rifle (NGSW-R) and automatic rifle (NGSW-AR), chambered in a new high tech 6.8mm cartridge, set to replace the aging M16, M4A1 Carbines and the M249 Squad Automatic Weapon, chambered in a 5.56 NATO round. 

  The NGSW has been in competitive prototyping testing with three defense firms, including SIG Sauer, General Dynamics – OTS, and Textron Systems. 

  

  On page 53/106 of the budget request, the Army expects to procure 29,046 NGSWs in 2023.

  “Starts funding for the procurement and fielding of 1,704 NGSW-AR, which is the planned replacement for the M249 Squad Automatic Weapon (SAW) within the Close Combat Force; Procurement and fielding of 15,348 NGSW-R which is the planned replacement for the M4A1 Carbine within the Close Combat Force; and procurement and fielding of 11,994 Next Generation Squad Weapons Fire Controls,” the document read. 

  

  The document didn’t mention the prime contractor(s), though that should be announced later this year. 

  The Army will be fielding these new main battle rifles and machine guns next year — just as tensions with Russia heat up.

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 04/01/2022 – 22:40

• War, Disease, Economic Agony (And Surging Gas Prices) Will Probably Not Deter Hospitality Sector
  War, Disease, Economic Agony (And Surging Gas Prices) Will Probably Not Deter Hospitality Sector

  By Dees Stribling of Bisnow

  Already grappling with long-term pandemic-fueled troubles, the travel and hospitality industry finds itself confronting yet another adversary: surging fuel prices.

  The sector had managed to claw its way back to a tolerable recovery in 2021 — and 2022 was shaping to look a little more like the days before the coronavirus. Summer vacations to the beach and further afield were anticipated. Business travel was ticking back up with conferences and in-person meetings on the rise.

  For a while, things were looking up.

  Then Russia invaded Ukraine. 

  Oil prices are now spiking beyond $100 a barrel, driving sharp increases for gas at the pump and for pricy jet fuel — which, if conventional wisdom holds true, will inevitably mean higher costs for U.S. travelers this spring and summer.

  So, less travel and another big knock on the hospitality industry? Maybe not.

  Travel and hospitality experts told Bisnow this week that they remain optimistic for 2022, citing the fact that bookings are still strong — apparently because last year didn’t satisfy Americans’ demand for travel. Travelers might adjust their plans a bit this year, but mass cancellations don’t seem to be in the cards — yet.

  

  “As concerns around omicron subside, we see very strong demand for leisure travel in the second quarter this year and beyond, and are expecting the travel market to continue to recover,” said Hayley Berg, head of price intelligence at Hopper, a booking service for airlines and hotels.

  Bookings are still strong now despite gas prices that are about 70 cents higher than in mid-February, at an average of $4.26 a gallon, according to AAA, and $1.37 higher per gallon than a year ago.

  The price of airline tickets is up as well, with Berg expecting airfare to climb to an average of $360 per round-trip through May, a 10% increase from current prices, though rates will taper off some by the end of the summer, as they do every year.

  The spike in gas prices has certainly caused pain for many millions of people. That was already the case late last year when gas prices crept up slowly but steadily. Low-income Americans or those on fixed incomes, as well as small businesses that use a lot of transport, are all suffering.

  Yet for that large portion of the population with steady incomes, leisure travel is still very much on the table. Spring break travel helped boost U.S. hotel performance for the week of March 19, STR reports, with some industry metrics showing improvements compared with 2019, though occupancy is still down from that period.

  For the week, occupancy stood at 66.9%, off 3.7 percentage points off 2019, while the average daily rate was up 13.6% and revenue per available room increased 9.5%, STR reports. The weekly occupancy level, though down compared with before the pandemic, was nevertheless the highest since the week ending Aug. 7, 2021.

  More pertinent for the outlook for summer travel, a number of organizations are reporting a sharp increase in bookings for planned travel in the next few months.

  “There’s still a lot of demand for travel this year now that vaccines have been widely distributed and restrictions are easing,” Berg said.

  Pent-up demand for travel had already been in evidence early this year, Berg said. Hopper’s bookings in Q1 2022 were up about 50% compared with the fourth quarter of 2021 and up a whopping 300% or so over Q1 2021.

  Travelers are booking trips to warmer destinations in record numbers, according to booking data from AAA that the organization reported in early March. For March, April and May, bookings to places such as Florida, Mexico and Hawaii were all up more than 200% compared with 2021 and up 10% over 2019.

  In mid-February, a AAA survey found that 52% of Americans plan to take a vacation this summer. That was before the war-inspired spike in gas prices, though prices had been creeping upward for some time. In any case, among those planning a trip early this year, 42% said they would not consider changing their travel plans regardless of the price of gas.

  Pent-up demand isn’t the only factor that stands to keep travel strong during the summer in the face of high gasoline and jet fuel prices, AAA spokesperson Ellen Edmonds told Bisnow. Despite inflation and supply chain woes, other metrics point to a strong economy with a lot of job creation, higher wages and higher savings.

  “As a result, people have more discretionary income to spend from not traveling for two years, though they are dealing with high gas prices,” Edmonds said.

  For this summer, AirDNA, which tracks peer-to-peer short-term rents, is seeing higher demand than last year, which was a record-breaking year for U.S. short-term rentals. The main difference this year, according to the company was in the locations chosen: urban areas are losing out to coastal and mountain destinations, as guests looked for nature experiences. 

  “As we look towards the summer, we see similar booking trends as 2021, though with 46% more nights booked compared to last year,” AirDNA Vice President of Research Jamie Lane said.

  Bookings this summer may be also boosted by the return of international travel, though rising fuel prices could keep Americans traveling a little closer to home as well, Lane said — but still traveling. 

  “It remains to be seen what effect fuel prices will have on U.S. vacation rental bookings this summer, but at the moment we aren’t seeing any decrease in demand, while supply is increasing to keep up,” Lane said.

  

  “We continue to be optimistic that there’s still a significant tailwind for leisure demand,” Marriott International CEO Tony Capuano said during the company’s most recent earnings call in February, just ahead of the gas price spike.

  “We already have more leisure on the books for months further out than we did in the same months last year,” Capuano said, adding that he believes that working from anywhere has been an accelerant for leisure demand. 

  “And as more and more borders open, we think that influx of international leisure travel will also serve to accelerate the pace of leisure demand growth,” Capuano said.

  That optimism in the hotel industry extends to the point that new hotel development is still underway, despite the rough time the industry had during 2020.

  “There’s a lot of enthusiasm in the industry, particularly around new hotel development, because cap rates have been so compressed and it’s so expensive to acquire existing hotels,” Reveille Hospitality CEO Marco Roca Sr. said.

  Roca adds that the wider pattern of inflation is actually a net positive for hotel owners. 

  “Hard-asset businesses such as hotels do well in an inflationary environment, especially because they can adjust their rates as needed,” he said. 

  Driving destinations reported strong business in 2021, and expect this year to be similar, and for a similar reason — people want to hit the road. 

  “People were really sick at being cooped up last year and hit the road,” Wall Drug Inc. Chairman Rick Hustead said. “For us, last year was a record-breaker.”

  Wall Drug is a storied tourist attraction in South Dakota, near I-90 and Badlands National Park, with cowboy-themed and other stores, a number of restaurants, an art gallery and an 80-foot brontosaurus sculpture.

  As for this year, March has seen about as many visitors as last year, which was a good month, Hustead said, and he’s optimistic about the summer, even though gas is more expensive.

  Another reason not to overestimate the impact of higher gas prices on summer travel is that the U.S. has been through this situation before.

  Back in the summer of 2008, ahead of the recession, gas prices were at record levels. People traveled anyway, even without the spur of two previous years when travel was more difficult or impossible.

  “After a reasonably good start to 2008, the industry fell into an extremely negative pattern during the last four months of the year,” STR President Mark Lomanno said in a statement at the end of that year.

  That is, despite high gas prices that year — actually higher than now, adjusted for inflation — travel and hospitality didn’t particularly suffer until the bottom dropped out of the economy with the global financial panic in September. That summer, Americans might have grumbled about the price of gas, but they continued to take summer vacations. 

  Data at the time did show that people started to drive less as a result of high gas prices, and use less gas, a pattern that seems to be reasserting itself in 2022. In 2008, the Federal Highway Agency reported, the number of miles Americans drove dropped 3.5% during the first 10 months of the year in response to high gas prices, while the gas consumed has declined by about 4%. 

  There is a short-term response to high gas prices: drive less. And there’s also a longer-term one: buy more efficient cars, the government reported, a trend that doesn’t impact leisure travel as much.

  “In the long run, there is general agreement in the literature that about two-thirds of this (fuel consumption decline) results from the purchase of more fuel-efficient vehicles and only about a third results from reduced travel,” the FHA reported.

  Much of that reduced travel seems to be in day-to-day living, rather than leisure travel, which people tend to plan well in advance and save for, Placer.ai says in a report on the impact of gas prices on retailers.

  Rising gas prices tend to cause consumers to consolidate their shopping trips, and as consumers try to limit their gas expenditures, they don’t drive as far as they used to for everyday purchases, according to Placer.ai.

  “People still feel cooped up even after last year,” Wall Drug’s Hustead said. “Travel is still worth it to them, even if driving is more expensive this year.”

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 04/01/2022 – 22:20

• Tone-Deaf Fed President Jokes About "Whopping" Golf Membership Fees 
  Tone-Deaf Fed President Jokes About “Whopping” Golf Membership Fees 

  An ominous sign about today’s high inflation environment, and quite clearly the Federal Reserve is behind the hiking curve, is a contact close with the Fed complaining about out-of-control golf membership prices. 

  Yes, you heard that correctly. Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia President Patrick Harker’s speech cited “one of our contacts,” presumably a Wall Street banker or corporate elite, complained about the “whopping membership fee increases at his golf club.”

  

  Harker said the contact even “suggested it may be a good time to play at your local muni instead” of a private course. 

  As Matt Taibbi of TK News notes,

  “I know I’m a little out of practice, because just as I was about to begin speaking, I made sure my mute button wasn’t on,” he cracked. “In all seriousness…”

  Shifting to a graver theme, he mentioned the old saw about being cursed to live in “interesting times.” The novel coronavirus, he said, “has tragically killed at least 6 million people globally and around 1 million here in the United States,” adding, “That’s the equivalent of a city larger than San Francisco or Seattle.” Russia has also invaded Ukraine, he said, “fomenting death and destruction and spurring a humanitarian crisis in the heart of Europe.”

  Next in this parade of calamities: the scourge of inflation, a problem so serious that it touched him and his colleagues personally.

  “One of our contacts, for instance, mentioned whopping membership fee increases at his golf club,” Harker said, “suggesting this summer may be a good time to play at your local muni instead.”

  *  *  *

  The Fed member continued to say “generous fiscal policies, supply chain disruptions, and accommodative monetary policy have pushed inflation” to a four-decade high. 

  Notice Harker’s listing of inflation’s culprits and how “accommodative monetary policy” is last. In our view, that should be first, though the Fed will never admit creating money out of thin air is the root of all inflation. 

  The voting Fed member is onboard for “methodical hikes as the year continues and the data evolve.” He also anticipated that the Fed’s balance sheet of Treasury securities, agency debt, and mortgage-backed securities would be reduced. 

  He said he agrees with the current Fed view of seven rate hikes, estimating the Fed to move quickly toward a neutral federal-funds rate target of approximately 2.5% later this year. 

  Harker’s speech comes hours after the 2s10s Treasury curve inverted, the most-monitored, the most-studied, and the most accurate predictor of recession the market offers.

  Last week, Fed Governor Christopher Waller told an audience that his home searching in Washington, D.C., ran into a brick wall due to low inventory and high prices. 

  For two top Fed members to point out inflationary woes at the highest levels, even affecting themselves or other elites, suggests they’re way behind the hiking curve. 

  For a sense of just how far behind, the Taylor Rule suggests given the current inflation rate and unemployment rate, the Fed needs to hike by an absurd-sounding 1155bps to get back to ‘normal’…

  

  Today’s ongoing phenomenon of high inflation is not fading and has been exacerbated by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which might call for aggressive rate hikes in upcoming FOMC meetings. Happy hiking Powell, the bond market sees danger ahead, and a soft-landing has never been achieved.

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 04/01/2022 – 22:00

• Fauci Says China Was "Extremely Secretive" But "Didn't Necessarily" Cover-Up Pandemic
  Fauci Says China Was “Extremely Secretive” But “Didn’t Necessarily” Cover-Up Pandemic

  Authored by Michael Washburn via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

  

  White House chief medical advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci said that Chinese officials were “extremely secretive” about the possible origins of the COVID-19 pandemic, though he stopped short of accusing Beijing of deliberately covering it up.

  The director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease was asked on BBC’s “Sunday Morning” program on March 27 what his response was to claims by World Health Organization (WHO) investigators that China prevented them from “seeing key details and from speaking to key people” when they were probing the pandemic origins in Wuhan in early 2021.

  “You know, I don’t want to create any or mention any disparaging remarks about that,” Fauci responded.

  “But the Chinese are very closed, in a way of being very reluctant, particularly when you have a disease that evolves in their country, they become extremely secretive, even though there’s no reason to be secretive,” he continued.

  Fauci then suggested that embarrassment over global reactions may have driven the Chinese regime to be less than totally forthcoming on the origins and spread of COVID-19.

  “I think they were very concerned and maybe embarrassed that the virus evolved from their country but there’s nothing wrong with that,” he said.

  “So when they see something evolving in their own country, they tend to have a natural reflex of not necessarily covering things up, but not being very open and transparent.”

  U.S. officials and others have repeatedly decried Beijing’s denying access to key data and facilities amid ongoing investigations to find out the source of the pandemic.

  In addition, the Chinese regime in the early stages of the initial outbreak in Wuhan suppressed information about the severity and spread of the disease, allowing the virus to transmit around the world that was still unaware of the dangers of the new coronavirus.

  Many lawmakers and experts have accused the communist regime of covering up both the origins of the pandemic and the initial spread of the outbreak.

  At the heart of the debate on the source of the outbreak is whether it leaked from a laboratory in Wuhan or if the virus was transmitted naturally before jumping to humans. While there are proponents for both theories, the Chinese regime’s refusal to allow independent scrutiny of the lab makes it extremely difficult to fully investigate the matter.

  Admitting that he was “never certain” in the early days about when and where COVID-19 might have originated, Fauci said that the similarities he observed between Covid-19 and such earlier diseases as SARS CoV-1 in the early years of the millennium suggested a possible origin for the current pandemic.

  “I said, as did many other virologists, that the most likely etiology was a jumping species from the animal to the human,” Fauci commented.

  Fauci added that he does not see anything suspicious about the existence of a research laboratory in Wuhan and this fact does not influence his view of the Chinese regime’s conduct in the matter.

  “It’s not at all surprising that there is a research lab there. The Chinese were trying to figure out, and did figure out, what the original etiology was of SARS CoV-1,” he said, referring to the SARS virus that spread from China from 2002 to 2003. Scientists ultimately traced that virus to horseshoe bats in China’s Yunnan, which jumped to the intermediary of Asian civets before spreading to humans.

  “[The SARS outbreak] made it very very clear there would be a possibility we would have another pandemic outbreak from the animal-human interface, so it makes sense that the Chinese would be studying this to find out how you could prevent another outbreak,” Fauci said.

  Emails disclosed earlier this year suggested that Fauci not only initiated efforts to cover up evidence pointing to a lab origin of COVID-19 but actively shaped a highly influential academic paper that excluded the possibility of a laboratory leak.

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 04/01/2022 – 21:40

• California Man Arrested After Two "Expended" Rocket-Launchers Found In Trash-Can Near School 
  California Man Arrested After Two “Expended” Rocket-Launchers Found In Trash-Can Near School 

  Police in California arrested a man after discovering two “expended” rocket launchers and a practice grenade in a dumpster near a school. 

  “Today, two AT-4 launchers and an MK69 practice grenade were found by construction crews in the county area of Winchester. While all items were expended, these items do not go into dumpsters,” Riverside County Sheriff’s Bomb Squad said in a Facebook post. 

  The bomb squad’s statement includes pictures of the Swedish AT4s, a single-shot, disposable, recoilless smoothbore anti-tank weapon, and was deemed “expended” – meaning they were either fired or could no longer be fired. 

  

  “These items are “generally” NOT legal to possess (there are some limited exceptions),” the agency said, adding that people in possession of these weapons should “dispose of them legally” or “return them to the military.” 

  

   

  Through video footage and fingerprint evidence, the sheriff’s office was able to track and trace Christopher Whetstone, 41, back to the weapons. 

  “During the service of a search warrant, evidence of the original crime was located, along with narcotics, and a bazooka,” said Riverside County Sgt. Edward Soto.

  Soto said, “Although there is a school located directly behind the concerned residence, a school was not directly involved in the incident.” 

  Whetstone has been charged with tampering with a motor vehicle, possession of tear gas, and grand theft. He has yet to face federal charges for what the National Firearms Act calls grenades and bazookas “destructive devices.” Perhaps because the AT4s were already spent and are single-shot, though considering California, there could be other legal ramifications he may face on a state level. 

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 04/01/2022 – 21:20

• Humans Infected With 'Mind-Altering' Parasite Seen As More Attractive
  Humans Infected With ‘Mind-Altering’ Parasite Seen As More Attractive

  Authored by Ross Pomeroy via RealClear Science,

  The single-celled protozoan Toxoplasma gondii is a fascinating parasite. Replicating only in cat intestines, it is excreted in feces and subsequently spreads to many other organisms, not just felines. Inside these critters, it winds its way to the brain and transforms into numerous cysts, patiently waiting to return to its desired nine-lived host. But, though dormant, it is not entirely inert. T. gondii actually alters its host’s behavior. Mice, for example, grow less fearful of cats, making them easier prey. Just like T. gondii wanted…

  

  Humans are also affected by T. gondii. About one in ten Americans and a third of people globally host the parasite. And yes, it seems to sneakily mess with our minds, too. Studies suggest that infested humans have ever-so-slightly impaired motor skills, undertake additional risks, and get into more automotive accidents. The parasite’s presence is also linked to an elevated risk of schizophrenia.

  Curiously, as as new study published in PeerJ finds, T. gondii may also change humans’ physical appearance. An international team turned up a link between a latent infection and facial attractiveness. The researchers recruited 213 healthy college students at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, all of whom had previously been tested for T. gondii. Thirty-five subjects (22 men and 13 women) had the parasite, while 178 (86 men and 92 women) did not. The researchers then asked the subjects various questions and took pictures of their faces.

  Next, another 205 participants each viewed a random collection of twenty of these pictures, ten of Toxoplasma-positive subjects and ten of Toxoplasma-negative subjects, rating each pictured participant for facial attractiveness and perceived health on a 10-point scale. (Raters were not told of participants’ Toxoplasma status.) Overall, raters judged Toxoplasma-positive subjects to be significantly more attractive and healthy-looking than Toxoplasma-negative subjects.

  

  “T. gondii infection may produce changes in facial symmetry of its hosts through changes in endocrinological variables such as testosterone levels,” the researchers wrote. “These changes, both in the endocrinology system and in facial symmetry, would ultimately benefit the spread of the parasite by increasing the attractiveness of its hosts.”

  Indeed, as the researchers measured, participants with T. gondii tended to have more symmetrical faces. Facial symmetry is commonly associated with beauty.

  Other parasites are known to affect the physicial characteristics of their animal hosts. Moreover, previous studies showed that men infected with T. gondii have higher testosterone levels. However, a simpler explanation for the association is that attractive people are more likely to contract T. gondii as they might engage in more sexual activity. (T. gondii can be transmitted sexually.) The researchers did find that Toxoplasma-positive subjects reported having more sexual partners.

  More research is needed to confirm the study’s intriguing finding, so don’t go seeking out cat feces just yet in the hopes of making your face more alluring.

  Source: Borráz-León JI, Rantala MJ, Krams IA, Cerda-Molina AL, Contreras-Garduño J. 2022. Are Toxoplasma-infected subjects more attractive, symmetrical, or healthier than non-infected ones? Evidence from subjective and objective measurements. PeerJ 10:e13122 https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj.13122 

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 04/01/2022 – 21:00

• These Are The Most Downloaded Apps In Russia In March
  These Are The Most Downloaded Apps In Russia In March

  In early February, the most downloaded app from the App Store in Russia was ‘Persona’, a makeup filter app, followed by video conferencing provider Zoom and the online retailer AliExpress (according to a review of app data sources by The Economist).

  However, as Statista’s Martin Armstrong details below, since the invasion of Ukraine and the ensuing sanctions, pull outs and censorship, people in the country have been far more focused on finding a VPN or internet privacy app, as shown by this infographic based on analysis by Sensor Tower and Quartz.

  

  You will find more infographics at Statista

  On March 15, the internet privacy app 1.1.1.1. was the most downloaded app in Russia when taking into account the numbers from Apple’s App Store and Google’s Play Store.

  The top 8 list is dominated by VPN providers, with the encrypted messaging service Telegram making an appearance, too.

  Looking for solutions to problems of a far more serious nature, Quartz reports that the most downloaded app in Ukraine on this day was ‘Air Alarm‘, which as described by the developer “generates a loud alert warning of an airstrike, chemical attack, technological catastrophe or other types of civil defence alerts.”

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 04/01/2022 – 20:40

• Election Watchdog Finds 137,500 Ballots Unlawfully Trafficked In Wisconsin
  Election Watchdog Finds 137,500 Ballots Unlawfully Trafficked In Wisconsin

  Authored by Steven Kovac via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

  At least 137,500 absentee ballots were cast through unlawful vote trafficking throughout several of Wisconsin’s largest cities in the 2020 election, according to research presented last week to the state Assembly’s Committee on Campaigns and Elections by the public interest organization True the Vote (TTV).

  

  Ballot trafficking is an activity in which absentee ballots and votes are solicited, sometimes in exchange for money or other valuables. They are then collected through a process called “harvesting” and delivered to drop boxes by intermediaries (someone other than the voter), who are often paid a per-ballot fee by partisan actors.

  “An organized crime against Americans” is how TTV cyber expert Gregg Phillips described to the committee what happened in Wisconsin and elsewhere during the 2020 election.

  

  Based on his 15-month study of election practices in Georgia, Arizona, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Michigan, Phillips estimates that at least 4.8 million votes were trafficked nationally.

  4.8 MILLION ballots trafficked in the 2020 Election

  7% of mail-in ballots were trafficked in every Swing State True the Vote has looked in

  “It’s an organized crime that was perpetrated on Americans” pic.twitter.com/cseftCWhB7

  — Liz Harrington (@realLizUSA) March 31, 2022

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  According to the True the Vote report, 242 intermediaries in metro Atlanta made 5,668 stops at drop boxes during elections in late 2020. In its report, TTV said it obtained 4 million minutes of drop box video surveillance tape that helped to document its Georgia findings.

  “Many of the traffickers we spoke with do not recognize what they are doing as being a problem,” TTV spokesperson Catherine Engelbrecht said.

  The study found that in Arizona, 202 intermediaries made 4,282 separate visits to ballot boxes in Maricopa County.

  Several Arizonans have since been indicted for election law violations, with at least one conviction, according to Phillips.

  

  Phillips told the committee that, in the states studied, TTV purchased from commercial brokers 10 trillion unique cell phone identity signals called “pings.”

  Human rights organization First Freedoms funded the time-consuming and costly project.

  Using a technique called geospatial mobile device signal analysis, Phillips said researchers are able to reconstruct a four-dimensional “pattern of life” of cell phone holders.

  “From these pings, it can be determined where you work, where you sleep, and even what floor you are on within inches,” he said.

  The Wisconsin study focused primarily on the Milwaukee County area, with some partial initial data coming from Racine and Green Bay, where the study will soon be further expanded, Phillips said.

  In those three areas, TTV’s cell phone ping research found that in the two weeks from Oct. 20 through Nov. 3, 2020, 138 individuals each visited the location of a nongovernmental organization at least five times and made a combined total of 3,588 trips to absentee ballot drop boxes.

  “That’s an average of 26 trips per person to drop boxes in the Milwaukee area,” Phillips said.

  “Is this evidence of fraud?” committee member Lisa Subeck, a Democrat, asked.

  “Vote trafficking is being done through the process. It is illegal,” replied Engelbrecht, who stated that every vote cast illegally cancels the vote of a legitimate voter.

  Wisconsin Statute 6.87 (4)(b)1 provides that an absentee ballot envelope, in which the cast absentee ballot is placed, must be “mailed by the elector, or delivered in person, to the municipal clerk issuing the ballot or ballots.” The Circuit Court in Waukesha County in Teigen v. Wisconsin Elections Commission, has agreed, holding that use of drop boxes for absentee voting violates Wisconsin law.

  Drop boxes, if unattended by a municipal clerk or in an unauthorized location, are illegal under Wisconsin law. The law is currently being challenged in the Wisconsin Supreme Court.

  In her testimony, Engelbrecht stressed that the TTV report was focused on the process and wasn’t attempting to prove the 137,551 votes were illegal votes.

  State Rep. Dave Murphy, a Republican member of the committee, stated: “If you vote in an illegal way, it is an illegal vote. If the process is illegal, the vote is illegal.”

  Earlier in March, the report of special counsel Michael Gabelman on voter fraud revealed that some personnel of nongovernmental organizations are suspected of coordinating the 2020 ballot harvesting operations in Wisconsin’s five largest heavily Democrat-run cities—Milwaukee, Kenosha, Green Bay, Madison, and Racine.

  When asked by Rep. Donna Rozar, a Republican, to name the NGOs in the study that were repeatedly visited by intermediaries, Phillips declined.

  A spokesperson for Micah Inc., a leading Milwaukee nonprofit philanthropic organization, told The Epoch Times that Micah does conduct “voter engagement efforts,” but declined to say more.

  Phillips and Engelbrecht testified that enormous nonprofits, such as National Vote at Home, are promoting voting from home and favor doing away with in-person voting on Election Day entirely.

  “Most countries around the world vote in person on election day, including Ukraine,” Phillips said.

  Engelbrecht argued that some countries have perfected secure blockchain electronic voting and said she thinks U.S. technology is advanced enough to at least ensure accurate election data.

  She said that some U.S. election jurisdictions view inaccurate voting rolls as a “feature rather than a bug.”

  “Our rolls are abysmal. Bad records are the gateway to fraud,” Engelbrecht said.

  “If you can’t verify identity, you can’t do anything else,” Phillips said.

  Rep. Ron Tusler, a Republican, asked if TTV could identify the 138 alleged ballot harvesters (also known as “mules”).

  “We know the names but are not disclosing them,” Phillips said. “Anyone can buy them commercially. However, law enforcement would need a warrant.”

  In the other states studied, government-made video surveillance tapes of ballot drop boxes obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests were used as part of the process of estimating how many ballots were trafficked, along with personal interviews with intermediaries and other tipsters and cell phone ping data.

  Engelbrecht told the committee that in Wisconsin, in September of 2020, her organization set up a hotline to receive tips from informants.

  Unlike other states where video surveillance footage of the drop boxes was made available to TTV investigators, Engelbrecht said that only one of the 17 Wisconsin localities studied provided TTV with video.

  Engelbrecht stated that in the summer of 2020, the Wisconsin Election Commission (WEC) announced it approved of video surveillance of the state’s drop boxes, as recommended by the federal Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA).

  “WEC did not follow through,” she said.

  Neither did WEC provide to localities written guidelines based on CISA’s recommendations for the locations where the drop boxes were to be placed, according to Engelbrecht.

  She testified that across the country, the majority of the ballot drops surveilled typically happened between 8 p.m. and 5 a.m.

  

  She told the committee that the removal of 234,000 problem names from Wisconsin’s registered voter rolls, as recommended by the Electronic Registration Information Center, was stopped by a lawsuit.

  Forty-nine-year veteran elections attorney James Bopp Jr. came before the committee to provide a legal perspective to the facts presented in the TTV report.

  Bopp has litigated 200 election lawsuits and is currently legal counsel to TTV. He is also representing special counsel Gabelman in several lawsuits against him stemming from his investigation.

  Bopp testified that filing an avalanche of lawsuits was part of a years-long effort by Democrats “to make the whole system more susceptible to fraud and abuse.”

  He said 425 lawsuits were filed across America by Democratic Party operatives or front organizations in the runup to the 2020 election.

  Bopp asserted the suits were designed to ensure ineligible people were maintained on voting rolls; to expand voting to every voter on the rolls, whether active or inactive; and “to tear down every other anti-fraud protection, such as prohibiting signature verification and striking down witness requirements for absentee voting.”

  Turning to Wisconsin, Bopp pointed the committee to what he called “the corrupt and illegal activity and administration of election laws for partisan ends engaged in by your Wisconsin state government and municipalities designed to maximize the number of Democrat votes.”

  Addressing the alleged embedding of partisan get-out-the-vote efforts within local governments in Wisconsin’s largest cities, Bopp said the practice evades federal and state campaign contribution limits of just a few thousand dollars, and gives real-time, hour-by-hour, cost-free access to voter rolls to partisan actors.

  Bopp said the practice disguises its partisan nature, disguises the identity of out-of-state billionaire donors contributing millions, thereby violating the principle of transparency and exceeding contribution limits.

  “Despite clear and unequivocal state law, drop boxes created the infrastructure to accomplish all of this,” he said. “Drop boxes left unstaffed and located anywhere clearly violated state statutes.”

  He criticized what he said was the “grossly partisan, corruptly political, and blatantly illegal” actions of the people administering Wisconsin election laws.

  Bopp asserted that the actions in Wisconsin gave significant partisan political advantage to Democrats, exactly the people the plan was designed to help.

  “Ruthlessly exploited by large-scale organized and illegal ballot harvesting operations, involving not-for-profits and the people working with them, (the scheme) could very well have influenced the outcome of the 2020 election,” he said.

  “What has been disclosed—and, in my view, proven—is that there were sufficient irregularities in the 2020 election that a court, at the time, could have reached the conclusion that the true result cannot be determined. But that time has passed.

  “It’s not about overturning the 2020 election. It’s about the future. The situation is crying for reform.”

  Rozar reminded the audience that numerous election reforms passed by the legislature have been vetoed by Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat.

  Neither Evers nor state Attorney General Josh Kaul, also a Democrat, responded by press time to requests for comment.

  *  *  *

  [ZH: and for more on this from Liz Harrington]

  In Milwaukee on one day 4 ballot traffickers went to 20 drop boxes pic.twitter.com/gOBCjvYRIT

  — Liz Harrington (@realLizUSA) March 31, 2022

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  Organized ballot trafficking caught in San Luis, AZ

  Ballots collected from elderly, gathered in one location to be paid, one trafficker drops off stacks and stacks of ballots pic.twitter.com/4vqnogPYQv

  — Liz Harrington (@realLizUSA) March 31, 2022

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  Remember TIME Magazine let that cat out of the bag pic.twitter.com/rBUTBl3D30

  — Liz Harrington (@realLizUSA) March 31, 2022

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  “It was not the most secure election ever. It was, quite possibly, one of the least…

  “It was planned.” pic.twitter.com/t4c00vBCCj

  — Liz Harrington (@realLizUSA) March 31, 2022

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  Widespread. pic.twitter.com/dTiEp7FrWK

  — Liz Harrington (@realLizUSA) March 31, 2022

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  “My Democrat colleagues started their testimony talking about situations in which votes were cast illegally…[and] tried to [say] if a vote came from a voter that was registered…somehow that makes it all right.

  “If a vote is cast in an illegal process, it’s an illegal vote!” pic.twitter.com/SdttteWZQQ

  — Liz Harrington (@realLizUSA) March 31, 2022

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  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 04/01/2022 – 20:20

• Miami Beach Mayor Says No Curfew This Weekend As Spring Break Chaos Subsides 
  Miami Beach Mayor Says No Curfew This Weekend As Spring Break Chaos Subsides 

  As Spring Break winds down, Miami Beach has decided not to implement a curfew this weekend following last week’s chaos, according to NBC Miami. 

  Mayor Dan Gelber said, “It won’t happen this weekend unless there’s some metric or something happens that changes our mind. We’re not viewing it as the first resort, I think we had this as the last resort.” 

  “Hopefully it will be tamer, there are fewer colleges on break, typically April is better than March,” Gelber added. 

  Miami Beach’s midnight curfew went into effect last Thursday morning and expired on Monday morning after a series of shootings, street fights, and stampedes. 

  “I know from a PR point of view it’s not terrific to have an emergency declaration but honestly, if there was another route, we would have taken it but I just don’t know that there was one.

  “I’m never happy with Spring Break because it just doesn’t seem to flow easily, and I don’t like having to worry every evening when I fall to sleep and I’m wondering who’s gonna wake me up in the middle of the night to tell me about something that happened,” Gelber said. 

  Here are some of the chaotic scenes from last week. 

  Things got HEATED on the streets of Miami Beach as spring breakers caused chaos, leading to injuries and the implementation of a curfew.

  RELATED: https://t.co/XZLh1BdA7U pic.twitter.com/vH2hBjB94G

  — Washington Examiner (@dcexaminer) March 29, 2022

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  It is a tricky business to maintain the hot nightlife of Miami Beach mixed with the explosiveness of chaotic college students. 

  “We have wrangled with spring break for a long time, other cities have wrangled with spring break. I think the challenge is always gonna be when your city is a venue for a rite of passage for young people you get conduct that is very hard and inconsistent with a residential community,” Gelber said.

  The curfew left a sour taste in everyone’s mouths. Tourists complained they couldn’t party on national television, and businesses reported steep weekly financial losses as they shuttered operations for several nights. 

  Again, the mayor is on a tightrope to ensure law and order but not discourage tourists. 

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 04/01/2022 – 20:00

• Judge Ousts Five School Board Members After Pennsylvania Parent Petition
  Judge Ousts Five School Board Members After Pennsylvania Parent Petition

  Authored by Beth Brelje via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

  A Pennsylvania judge on Tuesday ordered five elected school directors be immediately kicked off the nine-member West Chester Area School board.

  

  On Wednesday the same judge, William P. Mahon in the Chester County Court of Common Pleas, vacated Tuesday’s order and scheduled an argument for Friday.

  It is all in response to a February petition filed by West Chester Area School District parent Beth Ann Rosica. In the petition, Rosica calls for the removal of five school board members, Sue Tiernan, Joyce Chester, Karen Herman, Kate Shaw, and Daryl Durnell.

  Students returning to in-person classes after two years of remote learning in response to the COVID-19 pandemic were required to wear masks over their mouth and nose. When Pennsylvania ended mandatory school masking, the West Chester Area School District was among a handful of schools that kept masking in place.

  “When that was lifted, all of us parents started emailing, calling, showing up at school board meetings, asking our school board to amend their health and safety plan and allow for optional masking,” Rosica told The Epoch Times.

  “They didn’t lift it for the West Chester School District, so we began to work on a petition to remove school board members because we believed that their actions were illegal and unconstitutional.”

  Eventually, the district did lift the mask mandate, but the petition request remained relevant because, in August, the board passed a new health and safety plan which allows the board to impose future mandatory masking at various levels of COVID-19 transmission.

  “For high levels of transmission, our current approved health and safety plan still requires masking, and we believe that that is illegal. We want this answered because we don’t want them to impose it come next fall, or any point in time when cases start growing up again,” Rosica said.

  The petition was based on a seldom-used Pennsylvania education statute that allows for the removal of school directors for “failure to organize or neglect of duty.”

  The statute says any ten resident taxpayers in the district may present a petition to the court to have them removed. But that argument was not addressed in Tuesday’s decision.

  The court favored for Rosica, citing West Chester Area School District’s failure to respond. It also ordered Rosica and the four remaining board members to each submit a list of five proposed replacements for the board, to be appointed by the court to fill out the exiting board members’ terms.

  Attorney Kenneth Roos of the Wisler Pearlstine law firm in Bule Bell, Penn. represents the school board. He told The Epoch Times in a phone call that he filed a motion for reconsideration of Tuesday’s decision, late Tuesday night. He had no other comment on behalf of the school board.

  The motion disputes the time frame that the school had to respond, arguing it should have had until April 4 to answer. The judge agreed and allowed the board members to stay in place while the petition is argued on Friday.

  Rosica is more than a mother of two students in the district. She is executive director of Back to School PA, a political action committee that advocated for reopening schools closed by COVID-19 mitigation measures. It aims to get pro-parent and pro-student candidates elected to school boards.

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 04/01/2022 – 19:40

• Bunker Contamination Crisis Hits Singapore As Ships Hit With "Blackouts" 
  Bunker Contamination Crisis Hits Singapore As Ships Hit With “Blackouts” 

  A major bunker fuel contamination has been reported in Singapore, the world’s largest bunkering hub, with dozens of ships receiving tainted high sulfur fuel oil (HSFO) that has led to dangerous power blackouts, according to Bloomberg. 

  Fuel testing firm Veritas Petroleum Services (VPS) reports 34 vessels were identified to have received HSFO from two unidentified Singapore suppliers between February and March. The marine fuel contained up to 2,000 parts per million (ppm) of chlorinated hydrocarbons.

  “These bunker fuel contaminations have affected 14 vessels so far and the impact has been failure of the fuel system to the auxiliary engine resulting in loss of power and propulsion creating a blackout. 

  “Fuel system failure arose from seizure of the fuel pumps and plunger and barrel corrosion, caused by the bunker fuel contaminants,” VPS said in the statement.

  Out of the 34 vessels, almost half experienced power blackouts with the loss of propulsion systems, creating a hazardous situation if the ships were underway.  

  

  Such incidents could dent demand for bunker fuel in Singapore which is at the crossroads of a centuries-old trade route that links Asia to Europe and the Middle East to the US. 

  Maritime news website Splash 247 reported in early March that the contaminated fuel contains “abrasive particles that could cause accelerated wear of diesel engine components.” 

  This is just another wrench thrown into the snarled global supply chain as one can only imagine the affected ships would need to go down for maintenance and repairs. 

  For some color on the state of the current global supply chain, Goldman Sachs’ Jordan Alliger notes this week, “we are past peak bottlenecks.” Even though congestion remains elevated, supply chains around the world are normalizing. 

  

  As for the vessels affected by contaminated marine fuel, no information was given on what type of ships were affected nor size or maintenance and repair timelines. 

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 04/01/2022 – 19:20

• John Ioannidis: 'Public Health Officials Need To Declare The End Of The Pandemic'
  John Ioannidis: ‘Public Health Officials Need To Declare The End Of The Pandemic’

  Authored by Ross Pomeroy via RealClear Science,

  John Ioannidis, a Professor of Medicine, of Epidemiology and Population Health and by courtesy, of Statistics and of Biomedical Data Science at Stanford University, lauded for championing evidence-based medicine, has been harshly criticized over the past two years. Like many highly-credentialed health experts, Ioannidis made some predictions during the pandemic that eventually proved to be incorrect. During a once-in-a-century pandemic replete with unknowns, that’s to be expected. But perhaps the greatest reason he has come under fire is for questioning the orthodoxy of strict lockdowns, divisive vaccine mandates, and other restrictive measures to manage the pandemic. Ioannidis is sure to court more controversy with a new commentary published to the European Journal of Clinicial Investigation in which he argues that it’s time to declare the end of the COVID-19 pandemic.

  “This does not mean that the problem is inappropriately minimized or forgotten, but that our communities move on with life,” he writes.

  “Pandemic preparedness should be carefully thought and pre-organized, but should not disrupt life.”

  

  While Ioannidis recognizes that there are no quantitative definitions for the end of a pandemic like COVID-19, he contends that the amount of immunity now present worldwide exceeds the threshold needed to declare SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, endemic – constantly present but not a public health emergency.

  “By end 2021, probably 73-81% of the global population had been vaccinated, infected or both,” he says. Pockets of low immunity, such as in places that pursued zero-COVID policies and/or with limited access to effective vaccines, may persist, causing regional outbreaks, but we will likely never see COVID-19 again trigger a global emergency.

  Declaring the pandemic phase of COVID-19 to be concluded means understanding and accepting a new “normal”.

  “A decrease of COVID-19 deaths back to typical seasonal influenza levels may not necessarily happen in 2022 or even beyond,” Ioannidis cautions. “With an increasingly aging global population, “normal” may still correspond to higher death counts… This should not be mistaken as a continued pandemic phase.”

  Easing out of the pandemic requires a widespread mental shift, as well. This means focusing more on indicators like hospital intensive care admissions to guide policy rather than just infections.

  “If perception of risk focuses on number of documented cases, the spurious perception of emergency situations may be difficult to quell,” Ioannidis writes.

  Exiting the pandemic also means reducing fearmongering coverage of COVID-19 in the popular media, the propagation of which undoubtedly contributed to the public’s warped perception of COVID’s risks throughout the pandemic. On average, Americans believed in early 2021 that 8% of deaths had occurred in people under the age of 24. The actual percentage as of today is 0.3%. Moreover, a third of the population has consistently believed that COVID leads to hospitalization in over half of infections. During the most recent Omicron wave, the proportion was 3% or lower.

  Declaring an end to the pandemic phase of COVID-19 has benefits, Ioannidis says. For example, it could allow public health organizations to refocus their time and money on more pressing global health issues, like poor nutrition and hunger, which collectively claim the lives of 9 million people each year, including 3.1 million children. For comparison, at least 6.2 million people have died from COVID-19 over the past two years, the vast majority over age 65. Accepting endemicity and reducing societal restrictions and disruptions would also permit economies to stabilize more rapidly, alleviating hardship, easing inflation, and reducing global inequality. Lastly, moving on from the pandemic could ease some of the political divisions that have fractured societies across the globe.

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 04/01/2022 – 19:00

• Number Of US Workers Testing Positive For Marijuana Reaches 2-Decade High
  Number Of US Workers Testing Positive For Marijuana Reaches 2-Decade High

  Thanks in part to the widespread legalization of marijuana, so many American workers are testing positive for marijuana (and other drugs) that business owners in the US are being forced to relax and reassess their policies on pre-employment drug screens in order to accommodate workers who, just a few years ago, wouldn’t have been welcome in the labor pool.

  

  According to WSJ, of the more than six million urine screens processed through Quest Diagnostics (one of the country’s largest drug-testing laboratories), 3.9% came back positive for marijuana, the highest level in two decades. That represents an 8% increase over the number of positive tests from 2020, and a 50% increase since 2017.

  During that time, the number of states where marijuana has been legalized for recreational has increased to18 from eight (plus Washington DC).

  Surging rates of marijuana positivity are prompting fewer companies to even bother testing their employees for THC (for those who are unfamiliar, THC is the active ingredient in marijuana that’s primarily responsible for its effects) in the first place. And in some states, employers have been legally barred from factoring in marijuana test results into their hiring decisions.

  But in states that haven’t embraced legal marijuana, this trend is becoming a significant barrier to entry that’s having a cascading effect across the labor pool, as one ‘expert’ quoted by WSJ pointed out.

  “We certainly heard from some of our employer customers that they were having difficulty finding qualified workers to pass the drug test…”

  Unfortunately, marijuana isn’t the only drug that’s showing up more frequently in urine screens.

  Over the past year, the share of American workers who have tested positive for other drugs has risen 4.6% to the highest level since 2001 (the heyday of the American prescription painkiller crisis), according to Quest.

  One employment agency said it has tried to convince some of its clients to ease its policies on positive drug tests for THC (except for jobs where federal regulations require negative drug tests). But this lax attitude has sometimes had unintended consequences.

  For example, more workers have become comfortable with showing up to work high, or reeking of marijuana smoke. One recruiter shared a story about one employee being fired after openly hitting their marijuana vape pen at work.

  But as the number of job openings continues to outpace the number of workers available to fill them, how much longer until pre-employment drug screens become a thing of the past for most workers.

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 04/01/2022 – 18:40

• What's Going On With Joe Biden?
  What’s Going On With Joe Biden?

  Authored by Sheldon Richman via The Libertarian Institute,

  What’s going on with Joe Biden? Is he oblivious to the fact that Russia has about as many strategic nuclear weapons as the United States has? Is he taking advice from the neocons, who apparently believe that we should not fear a nuclear holocaust because that’s exactly what Vladimir Putin wants us to do? (I presume Putin also wants us to believe that the earth is round. Should we give that up too?)

  How else to explain Biden’s astounding statements in recent days, particularly while meeting with NATO representatives in Brussels and with U.S. troops in Poland? That’s right: 9,000 U.S. troops are now in southeast Poland, not far from the Ukrainian border. Poland of course is a member of NATO, which means that if Poland clashes with Russia, the U.S. government has treaty obligations to its ally.

  

  To be clear, here’s Article 5, which embodies the principle that NATO describes as being “at the very heart” of the treaty:

  The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all and consequently they agree that, if such an armed attack occurs, each of them, in exercise of the right of individual or collective self-defence recognized by Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations, will assist the Party or Parties so attacked by taking forthwith, individually and in concert with the other Parties, such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area. [Emphasis added to indicate ambiguity in the provision that isn’t often acknowledged.]

  Are Biden’s off-the-cuff-and-wall remarks signs of dementia? Or are they just the Bidenesque “Kinsley gaffes” we’ve become accustomed to? (A Kinsley gaffe occurs when someone important speaks his mind when he or his handlers know he shouldn’t.)

  By now, Biden’s irresponsibly provocative remarks have made the rounds. He has said that Russia’s use of chemical weapons in Ukraine would bring a NATO response, but left the nature of the response vague. His administration seems to be shying away from explicitly declaring “red lines.”

  And yet, when ABC News asked Biden, “If chemical weapons were used in Ukraine could that trigger a military response from NATO?” Biden responded, “It would trigger a response in kind. Whether or not — you’re asking whether NATO would cross — we’d make that decision at the time.” (Emphasis added.)

  Say what? Response in kind? Does that mean he might order a chemical-weapons counterattack?

  As others have pointed out, even a de facto red line is an invitation for a false-flag attack in which a Ukrainian group, hoping to bring NATO into the fight, would use chemical weapons while making the perpetrator appear to be Russian. This sort of thing seems likely to have happened in Syria.

  Meanwhile, Ukrainian President Vlodomyr Zelensky is still lobbying for even more NATO intervention (in addition to arms and sanctions) in the form of a no-fly zone, which is now called “close the sky.” The shameless public appeal includes this video, with the lyric “If you don’t close the sky/I will die.” The lyricist neglected to point out that if the sky is closed and the U.S. Air Force shoots down a Russian jet, we all could die in a nuclear exchange.

  This degraded society asking for an apocalypse! https://t.co/Xuex2dRNLz

  — Sabina 🏔 (@Sabina_91521) March 29, 2022

  https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

  Biden still says no to closing the sky, but if he started saying the opposite, who’d be surprised?

  As everyone knows, while abroad Biden also seemed to call for regime change in Russia with this ad-lib: “For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power.” History teaches that implied policies such as that do not facilitate ceasefires and peace. The Gaffer-in-Chief and his people tried to walk it back, but the attempts were lame. “I was expressing the moral outrage that I feel,” he said while insisting he wasn’t walking back his statement, “and I make no apologies for it.” (American presidents are always morally outraged whenever countries they don’t like do what the U.S. government regularly does.)

  A White House official dutifully insisted that what his boss meant “was that Putin cannot be allowed to exercise power over his neighbors or the region. He was not discussing Putin’s power in Russia, or regime change.” If you buy that, they have a bridge you might be interested in.

  Biden also appeared to tell U.S. troops stationed near the Ukrainian border in Poland that they would soon be in the war zone and that in fact some have already been on the other side of the border: “You’re going to see when you’re there, and some of you have been there, you’re gonna see — you’re gonna see women, young people standing in the middle — in front of a damned tank just saying, ‘I’m not leaving, I’m holding my ground.’”

  In clarification mode, Biden explained that the words when you’re there referred to the training of Ukrainian forces in Poland. Oh really? They’re going to see women and young people blocking Russian tanks in Poland? What’s he trying to tell us now? The Deputy Assistant White House Gaffe-Follow-Upper quickly clarified, “The president has been clear we are not sending US troops to Ukraine and there is no change in that position.”

  Yeah, yeah. So that means the guy’s head is full of cotton.

  Finally, Biden amazingly said two important things about the sanctions he’s imposed on the Russians: first, that he never said the sanctions would force the Russian government to alter its Ukraine policy because he knew they wouldn’t have that effect, and second, that sanctions will create food shortages (and so higher prices) for Americans and by implication, other non-Russians the world over.

  As to the first, that was an outright lie or a case of senility. A long list of administration officials did indeed say the sanctions would work. As to the second, how can Biden — father of noted entrepreneur Hunter Biden — justify making innocent people go hungry?

  Given the two things Biden has admitted, what is the point of the sanctions? Does it make him feel better?

  Joe Biden, what the hell?

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 04/01/2022 – 18:20

• Russian Central Bank Eases Capital Controls As Ruble Erases Losses
  Russian Central Bank Eases Capital Controls As Ruble Erases Losses

  Now that the Russian ruble has erased all of its post-incursion losses…

  

  …the Russian Central Bank decided on Friday that it would loosen restrictions on the transfer of funds abroad, much to the relief of ordinary Russians (particularly the wealthy, as well as the Middle class, who have increasingly been turning to the UAE, Israel and other locales as havens for their capital and assets).

  

  CBR said it would allow Russians and non-residents from countries that don’t support sanctions to transfer up to $10,000, or its equivalent in another currency, each month.

  Shortly after Russia’s “special military operation” began last month, Russia’s central bank tightened restrictions on money flowing abroad, barring non-Russians from transferring more than $5,000 a month out of the country.

  Transfer limits will be determined using the CBR’s official exchange rates for the ruble against other currencies, the bank said.

  Still, Russia will retain a tight grip on its currency market even with the easing of these capital controls. Russian brokerages still aren’t allowed to let foreign clients sell securities, one of a retinue of policies intended to support the ruble.

  CBR has also restricted the amount of dollars that Russians can withdraw from bank accounts denominated in foreign currencies. Russian banks have been barred from selling foreign currencies to Russians until early September as the Russian banking system continues to face the repercussions of the seizure by the West of hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of foreign-currency reserves held in accounts abroad.

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 04/01/2022 – 18:00

• Ethereum Founder Defends Bitcoin Maximalism In A World Of 'Honest' Vs 'Grifter' Cryptos
  Ethereum Founder Defends Bitcoin Maximalism In A World Of ‘Honest’ Vs ‘Grifter’ Cryptos

  Authored by Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum,

  In Defense of Bitcoin Maximalism

  We’ve been hearing for years that the future is blockchain, not Bitcoin. The future of the world won’t be one major cryptocurrency, or even a few, but many cryptocurrencies – and the winning ones will have strong leadership under one central roof to adapt rapidly to users’ needs for scale. Bitcoin is a boomer coin, and Ethereum is soon to follow; it will be newer and more energetic assets that attract the new waves of mass users who don’t care about weird libertarian ideology or “self-sovereign verification”, are turned off by toxicity and anti-government mentality, and just want blockchain defi and games that are fast and work.

  But what if this narrative is all wrong, and the ideas, habits and practices of Bitcoin maximalism are in fact pretty close to correct? What if Bitcoin is far more than an outdated pet rock tied to a network effect? What if Bitcoin maximalists actually deeply understand that they are operating in a very hostile and uncertain world where there are things that need to be fought for, and their actions, personalities and opinions on protocol design deeply reflect that fact? What if we live in a world of honest cryptocurrencies (of which there are very few) and grifter cryptocurrencies (of which there are very many), and a healthy dose of intolerance is in fact necessary to prevent the former from sliding into the latter? That is the argument that this post will make.

  We live in a dangerous world, and protecting freedom is serious business

  Hopefully, this is much more obvious now than it was six weeks ago, when many people still seriously thought that Vladimir Putin is a misunderstood and kindly character who is merely trying to protect Russia and save Western Civilization from the gaypocalypse. But it’s still worth repeating. We live in a dangerous world, where there are plenty of bad-faith actors who do not listen to compassion and reason.

  A blockchain is at its core a security technology – a technology that is fundamentally all about protecting people and helping them survive in such an unfriendly world. It is, like the Phial of Galadriel, “a light to you in dark places, when all other lights go out”. It is not a low-cost light, or a fluorescent hippie energy-efficient light, or a high-performance light. It is a light that sacrifices on all of those dimensions to optimize for one thing and one thing only: to be a light that does when it needs to do when you’re facing the toughest challenge of your life and there is a friggin twenty foot spider staring at you in the face.

  

  Source: https://www.blackgate.com/2014/12/23/frodo-baggins-lady-galadriel-and-the-games-of-the-mighty/

  Blockchains are being used every day by unbanked and underbanked people, by activists, by sex workers, by refugees, and by many other groups either who are uninteresting for profit-seeking centralized financial institutions to serve, or who have enemies that don’t want them to be served. They are used as a primary lifeline by many people to make their payments and store their savings.

  And to that end, public blockchains sacrifice a lot for security:

  • Blockchains require each transaction to be independently verified thousands of times to be accepted.

  • Unlike centralized systems that confirm transactions in a few hundred milliseconds, blockchains require users to wait anywhere from 10 seconds to 10 minutes to get a confirmation.

  • Blockchains require users to be fully in charge of authenticating themselves: if you lose your key, you lose your coins.

  • Blockchains sacrifice privacy, requiring even crazier and more expensive technology to get that privacy back.

  What are all of these sacrifices for? To create a system that can survive in an unfriendly world, and actually do the job of being “a light in dark places, when all other lights go out”.

  Excellent at that task requires two key ingredients: (i) a robust and defensible technology stack and (ii) a robust and defensible culture. The key property to have in a robust and defensible technology stack is a focus on simplicity and deep mathematical purity: a 1 MB block size, a 21 million coin limit, and a simple Nakamoto consensus proof of work mechanism that even a high school student can understand. The protocol design must be easy to justify decades and centuries down the line; the technology and parameter choices must be a work of art.

  The second ingredient is the culture of uncompromising, steadfast minimalism. This must be a culture that can stand unyieldingly in defending itself against corporate and government actors trying to co-opt the ecosystem from outside, as well as bad actors inside the crypto space trying to exploit it for personal profit, of which there are many.

  Now, what do Bitcoin and Ethereum culture actually look like? Well, let’s ask Kevin Pham:

  

  Don’t believe this is representative? Well, let’s ask Kevin Pham again:

  

  Now, you might say, this is just Ethereum people having fun, and at the end of the day they understand what they have to do and what they are dealing with. But do they? Let’s look at the kinds of people that Vitalik Buterin, the founder of Ethereum, hangs out with:

  

  Vitalik hangs out with elite tech CEOs in Beijing, China.

  

  Vitalik meets Vladimir Putin in Russia.

  

  Vitalik meets Nir Bakrat, mayor of Jerusalem.

  

  Vitalik shakes hands with Argentinian former president Mauricio Macri.

  

  Vitalik gives a friendly hello to Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google and advisor to US Department of Defense.

  

  Vitalik has his first of many meetings with Audrey Tang, digital minister of Taiwan.

  And this is only a small selection. The immediate question that anyone looking at this should ask is: what the hell is the point of publicly meeting with all these people? Some of these people are very decent entrepreneurs and politicians, but others are actively involved in serious human rights abuses that Vitalik certainly does not support. Does Vitalik not realize just how much some of these people are geopolitically at each other’s throats?

  Now, maybe he is just an idealistic person who believes in talking to people to help bring about world peace, and a follower of Frederick Douglass’s dictum to “unite with anybody to do right and with nobody to do wrong”. But there’s also a simpler hypothesis: Vitalik is a hippy-happy globetrotting pleasure and status-seeker, and he deeply enjoys meeting and feeling respected by people who are important. And it’s not just Vitalik; companies like Consensys are totally happy to partner with Saudi Arabia, and the ecosystem as a whole keeps trying to look to mainstream figures for validation.

  Now ask yourself the question: when the time comes, actually important things are happening on the blockchain – actually important things that offend people who are powerful – which ecosystem would be more willing to put its foot down and refuse to censor them no matter how much pressure is applied on them to do so? The ecosystem with globe-trotting nomads who really really care about being everyone’s friend, or the ecosystem with people who take pictures of themslves with an AR15 and an axe as a side hobby?

  Currency is not “just the first app”. It’s by far the most successful one.

  Many people of the “blockchain, not Bitcoin” persuasion argue that cryptocurrency is the first application of blockchains, but it’s a very boring one, and the true potential of blockchains lies in bigger and more exciting things. Let’s go through the list of applications in the Ethereum whitepaper:

  • Issuing tokens

  • Financial derivatives

  • Stablecoins

  • Identity and reputation systems

  • Decentralized file storage

  • Decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs)

  • Peer-to-peer gambling

  • Prediction markets

  Many of these categories have applications that have launched and that have at least some users. That said, cryptocurrency people really value empowering under-banked people in the “Global South”. Which of these applications actually have lots of users in the Global South?

  As it turns out, by far the most successful one is storing wealth and payments. 3% of Argentinians own cryptocurrency, as do 6% of Nigerians and 12% of people in Ukraine. By far the biggest instance of a government using blockchains to accomplish something useful today is cryptocurrency donations to the government of Ukraine, which have raised more than $100 million if you include donations to non-governmental Ukraine-related efforts.

  

  What other application has anywhere close to that level of actual, real adoption today? Perhaps the closest is ENS. DAOs are real and growing, but today far too many of them are appealing to wealthy rich-country people whose main interest is having fun and using cartoon-character profiles to satisfy their first-world need for self-expression, and not build schools and hospitals and solve other real world problems.

  Thus, we can see the two sides pretty clearly: team “blockchain”, privileged people in wealthy countries who love to virtue-signal about “moving beyond money and capitalism” and can’t help being excited about “decentralized governance experimentation” as a hobby, and team “Bitcoin”, a highly diverse group of both rich and poor people in many countries around the world including the Global South, who are actually using the capitalist tool of free self-sovereign money to provide real value to human beings today.

  Focusing exclusively on being money makes for better money

  A common misconception about why Bitcoin does not support “richly stateful” smart contracts goes as follows. Bitcoin really really values being simple, and particularly having low technical complexity, to reduce the chance that something will go wrong. As a result, it doesn’t want to add the more complicated features and opcodes that are necessary to be able to support more complicated smart contracts in Ethereum.

  This misconception is, of course, wrong. In fact, there are plenty of ways to add rich statefulness into Bitcoin; search for the word “covenants” in Bitcoin chat archives to see many proposals being discussed. And many of these proposals are surprisingly simple. The reason why covenants have not been added is not that Bitcoin developers see the value in rich statefulness but find even a little bit more protocol complexity intolerable. Rather, it’s because Bitcoin developers are worried about the risks of the systemic complexity that rich statefulness being possible would introduce into the ecosystem!

  

  A recent paper by Bitcoin researchers describes some ways to introduce covenants to add some degree of rich statefulness to Bitcoin.

  Ethereum’s battle with miner-extractable value (MEV) is an excellent example of this problem appearing in practice. It’s very easy in Ethereum to build applications where the next person to interact with some contract gets a substantial reward, causing transactors and miners to fight over it, and contributing greatly to network centralization risk and requiring complicated workarounds. In Bitcoin, building such systemically risky applications is hard, in large part because Bitcoin lacks rich statefulness and focuses on the simple (and MEV-free) use case of just being money.

  Systemic contagion can happen in non-technical ways too. Bitcoin just being money means that Bitcoin requires relatively few developers, helping to reduce the risk that developers will start demanding to print themselves free money to build new protocol features. Bitcoin just being money reduces pressure for core developers to keep adding features to “keep up with the competition” and “serve developers’ needs”.

  In so many ways, systemic effects are real, and it’s just not possible for a currency to “enable” an ecosystem of highly complex and risky decentralized applications without that complexity biting it back somehow. Bitcoin makes the safe choice. If Ethereum continues its layer-2-centric approach, ETH-the-currency may gain some distance from the application ecosystem that it’s enabling and thereby get some protection. So-called high-performance layer-1 platforms, on the other hand, stand no chance.

  In general, the earliest projects in an industry are the most “genuine”

  Many industries and fields follow a similar pattern. First, some new exciting technology either gets invented, or gets a big leap of improvement to the point where it’s actually usable for something. At the beginning, the technology is still clunky, it is too risky for almost anyone to touch as an investment, and there is no “social proof” that people can use it to become successful. As a result, the first people involved are going to be the idealists, tech geeks and others who are genuinely excited about the technology and its potential to improve society.

  Once the technology proves itself enough, however, the normies come in – an event that in internet culture is often called Eternal September. And these are not just regular kindly normies who want to feel part of something exciting, but business normies, wearing suits, who start scouring the ecosystem wolf-eyed for ways to make money – with armies of venture capitalists just as eager to make their own money supporting them from the sidelines. In the extreme cases, outright grifters come in, creating blockchains with no redeeming social or technical value which are basically borderline scams. But the reality is that the line from “altruistic idealist” and “grifter” is really a spectrum. And the longer an ecosystem keeps going, the harder it is for any new project on the altruistic side of the spectrum to get going.

  One noisy proxy for the blockchain industry’s slow replacement of philosophical and idealistic values with short-term profit-seeking values is the larger and larger size of premines: the allocations that developers of a cryptocurrency give to themselves.

  

  Source for insider allocations: Messari.

  Which blockchain communities deeply value self-sovereignty, privacy and decentralization, and are making to get big sacrifices to get it? And which blockchain communities are just trying to pump up their market caps and make money for founders and investors? The above chart should make it pretty clear.

  Intolerance is good

  The above makes it clear why Bitcoin’s status as the first cryptocurrency gives it unique advantages that are extremely difficult for any cryptocurrency created within the last five years to replicate. But now we get to the biggest objection against Bitcoin maximalist culture: why is it so toxic?

  The case for Bitcoin toxicity stems from Conquest’s second law. In Robert Conquest’s original formulation, the law says that “any organization not explicitly and constitutionally right-wing will sooner or later become left-wing“. But really, this is just a special case of a much more general pattern, and one that in the modern age of relentlessly homogenizing and conformist social media is more relevant than ever:

  If you want to retain an identity that is different from the mainstream, then you need a really strong culture that actively resists and fights assimilation into the mainstream every time it tries to assert its hegemony.

  Blockchains are, as I mentioned above, very fundamentally and explicitly a counterculture movement that is trying to create and preserve something different from the mainstream. At a time when the world is splitting up into great power blocs that actively suppress social and economic interaction between them, blockchains are one of the very few things that can remain global. At a time when more and more people are reaching for censorship to defeat their short-term enemies, blockchains steadfastly continue to censor nothing.

  

  The only correct way to respond to “reasonable adults” trying to tell you that to “become mainstream” you have to compromise on your “extreme” values. Because once you compromise once, you can’t stop.

  Blockchain communities also have to fight bad actors on the inside. Bad actors include:

  • Scammers, who make and sell projects that are ultimately valueless (or worse, actively harmful) but cling to the “crypto” and “decentralization” brand (as well as highly abstract ideas of humanism and friendship) for legitimacy.

  • Collaborationists, who publicly and loudly virtue-signal about working together with governments and actively try to convince governments to use coercive force against their competitors.

  • Corporatists, who try to use their resources to take over the development of blockchains, and often push for protocol changes that enable centralization.

  One could stand against all of these actors with a smiling face, politely telling the world why they “disagree with their priorities”. But this is unrealistic: the bad actors will try hard to embed themselves into your community, and at that point it becomes psychologically hard to criticize them with the sufficient level of scorn that they truly require: the people you’re criticizing are friends of your friends. And so any culture that values agreeableness will simply fold before the challenge, and let scammers roam freely through the wallets of innocent newbies.

  What kind of culture won’t fold? A culture that is willing and eager to tell both scammers on the inside and powerful opponents on the outside to go the way of the Russian warship.

  Weird crusades against seed oils are good

  One powerful bonding tool to help a community maintain internal cohesion around its distinctive values, and avoid falling into the morass that is the mainstream, is weird beliefs and crusades that are in a similar spirit, even if not directly related, to the core mission. Ideally, these crusades should be at least partially correct, poking at a genuine blind spot or inconsistency of mainstream values.

  The Bitcoin community is good at this. Their most recent crusade is a war against seed oils, oils derived from vegetable seeds high in omega-6 fatty acids that are harmful to human health.

  

  This Bitcoiner crusade gets treated skeptically when reviewed in the media, but the media treats the topic much more favorably when “respectable” tech firms are tackling it. The crusade helps to remind Bitcoiners that the mainstream media is fundamentally tribal and hypocritical, and so the media’s shrill attempts to slander cryptocurrency as being primarily for money laundering and terrorism should be treated with the same level of scorn.

  Be a maximalist

  Maximalism is often derided in the media as both a dangerous toxic right-wing cult, and as a paper tiger that will disappear as soon as some other cryptocurrency comes in and takes over Bitcoin’s supreme network effect. But the reality is that none of the arguments for maximalism that I describe above depend at all on network effects. Network effects really are logarithmic, not quadratic: once a cryptocurrency is “big enough”, it has enough liquidity to function and multi-cryptocurrency payment processors will easily add it to their collection. But the claim that Bitcoin is an outdated pet rock and its value derives entirely from a walking-zombie network effect that just needs a little push to collapse is similarly completely wrong.

  Crypto-assets like Bitcoin have real cultural and structural advantages that make them powerful assets worth holding and using. Bitcoin is an excellent example of the category, though it’s certainly not the only one; other honorable cryptocurrencies do exist, and maximalists have been willing to support and use them. Maximalism is not just Bitcoin-for-the-sake-of-Bitcoin; rather, it’s a very genuine realization that most other cryptoassets are scams, and a culture of intolerance is unavoidable and necessary to protect newbies and make sure at least one corner of that space continues to be a corner worth living in.

  It’s better to mislead ten newbies into avoiding an investment that turns out good than it is to allow a single newbie to get bankrupted by a grifter.

  It’s better to make your protocol too simple and fail to serve ten low-value short-attention-span gambling applications than it is to make it too complex and fail to serve the central sound money use case that underpins everything else.

  And it’s better to offend millions by standing aggressively for what you believe in than it is to try to keep everyone happy and end up standing for nothing.

  Be brave. Fight for your values. Be a maximalist.

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 04/01/2022 – 17:40

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• UK Sleepwalking Into Food Crisis As Fresh Produce Set To Vanish From Supermarkets 
  UK Sleepwalking Into Food Crisis As Fresh Produce Set To Vanish From Supermarkets 

  The National Farmers’ Union has warned the UK is sleepwalking into a food security crisis. Soaring energy and fertilizer costs have led to an unprecedented situation where growers’ margins have collapsed, forcing many to halt growing operations. 

  Reuters says because of the inclement weather in the UK. Farmers grow cumbers, plant peppers, aubergines, and tomatoes in vast greenhouses. Greenhouses use natural gas for heat, but after last year’s surge in gas prices exacerbated by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last month, the crops have become uneconomical to produce. 

  

  Trade body British Growers said the average cost to produce a cucumber in Britain before the energy crisis was around 25 pence, which is now more than doubled and set to hit 70 pence when higher energy prices fully kick in. 

  “Gas prices being so sky-high, it’s a worrying time,” grower Tony Montalbano said. 

  “All the years of us working hard to get to where we are, and then one year it could just all finish,” Montalbano said.

  He noted his 30,000 square meters of glasshouses at Green Acre Salads business, which supplies major supermarkets such as Tesco, Sainsbury’s, and Morrisons, are shuttered because costs outpace market prices. In fact, the farmer would be losing money if he were to grow. 

  Compared with this time last year, European gas prices are up a mindboggling 500%. 

  

  Fertilizer prices have tripled since last year, along with soaring prices for packaging, diesel, freight, labor, and everything related to running a grow operation. 

  “We are now in an unprecedented situation where the cost increases have far outstripped a grower’s ability to do anything about them,” said Jack Ward, head of British Growers.

  With many greenhouses offline, this will inevitably push down the output of produce for supermarkets and result in persistent and or even higher food inflation when overall inflation is at historic levels. 

  To give an idea of just how bad the situation is, the Valley Growers Association, whose members produce about 75% of Britain’s cucumber and sweet pepper crop, said 90% of farmers didn’t plant in January. Others said they would not grow with elevated gas prices. 

  “There’s definitely going to be a lack of British produce in the supermarkets,” association secretary Lee Stiles said. “Whether there’s a lack of produce overall depends on where and how far away the retailers are prepared to source it from.“

  The UK could increase imports of produce, but countries worldwide are implementing protectionism measures to keep farm goods domestically to mitigate shortages due to the Ukraine conflict disrupting the global food supply. 

  Like many other countries worldwide, the UK is sleepwalking into a food crisis.

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 04/01/2022 – 02:45

• Ukraine Demands Removal Of Slovenian Flag Because It Looks A Bit Russian
  Ukraine Demands Removal Of Slovenian Flag Because It Looks A Bit Russian

  Authored by Paul Joseph Watson via Summit News,

  Ukrainian authorities demanded the removal of a Slovenian flag from an embassy in Kiev, despite Slovenia supporting Ukraine, because it looked a bit similar to the Russian flag.

  

  No, this isn’t the Babylon Bee.

  Russophobia has spread to colors. Anything that looks a bit Russian is now prone to cancellation.

  “When we arrived in Kiev, it was quite windy, and when we proudly raised the Slovenian and European flags back, they fluttered in the wind,” Slovenian Chargé d’Affaires Bostjan Lesjak said in an interview with TV Slovenia.

  However, a couple of days later after the wind died down and the flag slumped on the pole, it looked a bit too Russian for the liking of members of the Ukrainian National Guard.

  They asked if the embassy could “temporarily remove the Slovenian flag because it is too similar to the Russian one,” and it was duly removed.

  The flag was cancelled despite Slovenian Prime Minister Janez Jansa having expressed support for Ukraine on numerous occasions and calling for the country to be allowed to join the EU.

  The removal of the flag occurred after Ukrainian officials demanded the global “criminalization” of use of the letter Z in the context of supporting Russia.

  Yes, Z is also cancelled.

  Both Zurich Insurance Group and Samsung have distanced themselves from ‘Z’ in brand names and advertising.

  As we previously highlighted, Siberian cats were banned from competing in international cat competitions, while a tree was also robbed of its ‘tree of the year’ victory because it was Russian.

  One wonders how Ukrainian authorities are going to see off the Russian war machine if they are too precious to tolerate the existence of cats, trees, letters of the alphabet and flags of other countries.

  *  *  *

  Brand new merch now available! Get it at https://www.pjwshop.com/

  In the age of mass Silicon Valley censorship It is crucial that we stay in touch. I need you to sign up for my free newsletter here. Support my sponsor – Turbo Force – a supercharged boost of clean energy without the comedown. Get early access, exclusive content and behinds the scenes stuff by following me on Locals.

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 04/01/2022 – 02:00

• Is Russia The Real Target Of Western Sanctions?
  Is Russia The Real Target Of Western Sanctions?

  Authored by Kit Knightly via Off-Guardian.org,

  Soaring oil prices, energy and food crises on the horizon…is it possible the REAL target of this economic war is us?

  

  The first tweet I saw when I checked my timeline this morning was from foreign policy analyst Clint Ehlirch, pointing out that the Russian ruble has already started recovering from the dip created by Western sanctions, and is almost at pre-war levels:

  The Russian Ruble is nearing its pre-invasion value.

  Sanctions were designed to collapse its value. They failed. pic.twitter.com/OLmVIsS34E

  — Clint Ehrlich (@ClintEhrlich) March 29, 2022

  https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

  Ehrlich states, “sanctions were designed to collapse the value of the Ruble, they have failed”.

  …to which I can only respond, well “were they?”

  …and perhaps more importantly, “have they?”

  Because it doesn’t really look like it, does it?

  If anything, the sanctions seem to be at best rather impotent, and at worst amazingly counterproductive.

  It’s not like the US/EU/NATO don’t know how to cripple economies. They have had years of practice starving the people of Cuba, Iraq, Venezuela and too many others to list.

  Now, you could argue that Russia is a larger, more developed economy than those countries, and that’s true, but the US and its allies have previously managed to hurt the Russian economy quite drastically.

  As recently as 2014, following the “annexation” of Crimea, Western sanctions were tame compared to the recent unprecedented measures, but crucially the US massively increased its own oil production, then later that year (following a visit by US Secretary of State John Kerry) Saudi Arabia did the same.

  Despite objections from other members of OPEC – Venezuela and Iran chiefly – the Saudis flooded the market with oil.

  The result of these moves was the biggest fall in oil prices for decades – collapsing from $109 a barrel, in June 2014, to $44 by January 2015.

  This kicked Russia into a full recession and saw Russia’s GDP shrink for the first time under Putin’s leadership.

  Again, just two years ago, allegedly as part of competing with Russia for a share of the oil market, Saudi Arabia once more flooded the market with cheap oil.

  So, the West does know how to hurt Russia if it really wants to – by increasing oil production, flooding the market and tanking the price.

  But has the US increased its oil production this time round? Have they lent on their Gulf allies to do the same?

  Not at all.

  In fact, in a point of beautiful narrative synchronicity, the US claims it’s “unable” to increase its oil production due to “staff shortages” caused by that gift that keeps on giving – Covid.

  Similarly, Saudi Arabia is not tanking the oil market, but deliberately increasing prices.

  Yes, right now, with the Western allies locked in an alleged economic war with Russia the price of oil is soaring, and may continue to do so.

  This is good news for the Russian economy, to the point it may even make up for the damage done by the brutal sanctions.

  The high price of oil and need “not to rely on Putin’s gas” or “de-Russify” our energy supply will doubtless result in millions being poured into “green” technology.

  Those Western sanctions are targeting other Russian exports too, including grains and food in general.

  Russia is a net exporter of food, meaning they export more food than they import. Conversely, many countries in Western Europe rely on imported food, including the UK which imports over 48% of its food supply.

  If Europe refuses to buy Russian food, the net effect is that Russia has food…and the West doesn’t.

  And, just as with oil, increasing food prices will help rather than hinder the Russian economy.

  Take wheat for example, of which Russia is the biggest exporter in the world. The vast majority of this wheat is not even sold to Western countries – but instead to China, Kazakhstan, Egypt, Nigeria and Pakistan – and so is not even subject to sanctions.

  Nevertheless, the sanctions, and the war, have actually driven the price of wheat up almost 30%.

  This is good for the Russian economy.

  Meanwhile, according to CNN, the US is likely to enter a full-blown recession by 2023, France is considering food vouchers and countries all over the world are expected to begin rationing fuel.

  So, the sweeping sanctions imposed against Russia by the West, allegedly in response to the invasion of Ukraine, are not having their stated aim – tanking the Russian economy – but they are driving up the price of oil, creating potential energy and food shortages in the West and exacerbating the “cost of living” crisis created by the “pandemic”.

  You should always be wary of anybody – individual or institution – whose actions accidentally achieve the exact opposite of their stated aim. That’s a simple rule to live by.

  Remember how Orwell described the evolution of the concept of war in 1984:

  War, it will be seen, is now a purely internal affair. In the past, the ruling groups of all countries, although they might recognize their common interest and therefore limit the destructiveness of war, did fight against one another, and the victor always plundered the vanquished. In our own day they are not fighting against one another at all. The war is waged by each ruling group against its own subjects, and the object of the war is not to make or prevent conquests of territory, but to keep the structure of society intact.

  Recall that “the worst food shortages for fifty years” were predicted as a result of Covid. But they never materialised.

  Likewise, we were due to experience Covid-related energy disruptions and power cuts. Short of the UK’s damp squib of a “petrol crisis”, they never really arrived.

  But now they are heading our way after all – because war and sanctions

  Increased food prices, decreased use of fossil fuels, lowering standards of living, public money poured into “renewables”. This is all part of a very familiar agenda, isn’t it?

  Regardless of what you feel about Putin, Zelensky, the war in general or Ukrainian Nazis, it’s time to confront the elephant in room.

  We need to be asking: What exactly is the real aim of these sanctions? And how come they align so perfectly with the great reset?

  Tyler Durden
  Thu, 03/31/2022 – 23:40

• ​​​​​​​Silencer Shop Reports ATF Approving Suppressors In Record Time
  ​​​​​​​Silencer Shop Reports ATF Approving Suppressors In Record Time

  The ATF recently allowed Form 4s or “Application for Tax Paid Transfer and Registration of Firearm” to be submitted via eForms to reduce the time it takes for a law-abiding citizen to obtain a suppressor for a gun. Anyone who has bought a suppressor over the years has painfully understood it takes the ATF a mindnumbing 6 to 9 months for approval until now.  

  According to the Firearm Blog, citing Silencer Shop, a company specializing in suppressors and submitting Form 4’s on behalf of customers, the ATF’s eForm process has seen approvals in as little as six days.

  

  The new eForm process, launched in December of 2021, expedites the process for a law-abiding citizen to receive a silencer within 90 days. There have been many instances, according to Silencer Shop, where eForms are approved in 30 days and, as noted above, less than a week. 

  “Numerous Silencer Shop customers have already received their eForm 4 approvals. Per the ATF, the timeline was an expected 90 days, and some customers have been approved much sooner. Silencer Shop dealers have been a resource for the community by submitting eForm 4s since the middle of January 2022. We’ve seen applications submitted on Jan 17, 2022 approved on February 11, 2022, which is less 30 days and we’ve even seen a 6 day approval!” said Dave Matheny, CEO of Silencer Shop. 

  “Customers have reacted enthusiastically to the Silencer Shop Full Auto software; it’s been great seeing such positive outcomes for gun owners getting their suppressors or other NFA items so quickly,” Matheny continued. 

  The eForm system is running smoothly and could set a new precedent for law-abiding citizens to obtain suppressors much quicker than the old benchmark of 6-9 months. 

  Tyler Durden
  Thu, 03/31/2022 – 23:20

• California Reparations Panel Struggles To Decide Which Black Americans Should Receive Handouts
  California Reparations Panel Struggles To Decide Which Black Americans Should Receive Handouts

  Autho9red by Eric Lendrum via AmGreatness.com,

  In California, the first reparations panel in the nation has spent two years trying to decide which African-Americans are eligible for reparations.

  

  According to the Associated Press, the state’s panel on reparations, which was first created following a law signed by Governor Gavin Newsom (D-Calif.) in 2020, has been plagued with internal divisions over how many black Americans should receive financial compensation for alleged “racism.”

  Since it was first formed in June, some of the panel’s nine members have argued that only direct descendants of actual slaves prior to the Civil War should receive handouts, while others call for a more liberal distribution of funds to every black American. The warring factions led to the panel delaying its originally-planned vote last month.

  Despite having existed for two years, the panel has no concrete plan yet for what their reparations would look like. Supporters say that compensation would account for various historical instances of discrimination such as slavery, segregation, and alleged racism in incarceration rates. Some of the proposals for compensation include free college, grants to churches and community organizations, and financial handouts in buying homes and starting up businesses.

  Kamilah Moore, the committee’s chairwoman, has voiced her support for only giving reparations to direct descendants of slaves, having pointed out that broader reparations based simply on race are far more likely to be struck down in court.

  If the plan focused solely on race, then it would surely face “hyper-aggressive challenges that could have very negative implications for other states looking to do something similar, or even for the federal government,” Moore explained. “Everyone’s looking to what we’re going to do.”

  But another committee member, Lisa Holder, argues that lineage does not matter in modern America, and that all black Americans are discriminated against.

  “No one asked me if my ancestors were enslaved in the United States or if they were enslaved in Jamaica or if they were enslaved in Barbados,” said Holder.

  “We have to embrace this concept that black lives matter, not just a sliver of those Black lives, because black lives are in danger, especially today.”

  A full report by the committee is due by June of this year, and a detailed reparations proposal is due by July of next year, at which point the state legislature will consider a vote to pass it into law.

  Tyler Durden
  Thu, 03/31/2022 – 23:00

• The Yield Curve Inverts: What Happens Next
  The Yield Curve Inverts: What Happens Next

  Shortly before the close on Thursday, the closely-watched 2s10s yield curve, better known as the recession harbinger, inverted again for the second time in three days, and this time it will likely fail to bounce as the US slides ever closer to its recession D-Day.

  

  To be sure, the Fed and most of permabullish sellside strategists have spent most of their time in recent days to “explain away” why the yield curve doesn’t actually matter, with the Fed going so far as penning an absolutely idiotic paper titled “(Don’t Fear) The Yield Curve, Reprise“, in which the authors who have never had a real job in their lives reference FDR in making the point that the 2s10s is only notable in that “it can only make things worse if investors not only fear the prospect of a recession, but at the same time, are spooked by that fear itself, which is mirrored in inverted term spreads.” Instead of addressing a level of stupidity that once upon a time was prohibited at the Fed, we will merely show a chart comparing the 2s10s and superimpose the Consumer Optimism Gap (as defined by the spread between the Conference Board Expectations and Current situation), to show the clear correlation and that a plunge in the 2s10s coincides with a collapse in optimism… and the start of a recession.

  

  Not convinced? That’s ok, because thanks to DB’s Jim Reid we have a full presentation (available to professional subs) which shows exactly what happens after every single inversion. Below we excerpt some of the key findings:

  1. Every recession in the last 70 years has only happened AFTER the 2s10s has inverted. We have now seen an inversion on March 29th intra-day and again on March 31. History would say US recession risks now elevated 12-24 months out.

  

  2. Bulls will point out that while all yield curves between 2Y and 10Y have inverted, anything involving 3M money is still historically steep, and that there is a record directional divergence between any yield curve measure including 3m money and those not. This argument is disingenuous as it only reflects that the Fed is so far behind the curve and anchoring the 3M. This, naturally, won’t last as Fed hikes aggressive over next 12 months…

  

  3. While the steep 3M curve will invert soon enough once the Fed hikes a handful of times, which also means it only has “noise” value, it also means that it’s only the 2s10s matters as it’s inverted before EVERY recession going back 70 years (3 month money ones didn’t invert pre-50s/60s recessions). Also, it goes without saying, an inversion for 3 months is a stronger signal than a brief inversion.

  

  4. Furthermore, while bulls will argue that a 2s10s inversion means there is still a long time before the recession (roughly 18 months), the reality is that recessions after 1st Fed hike in a cycle occur sooner when 2s10s inversion happens during hiking cycle… Well, this inversion occurred in record time post the start of the hiking cycle.

  

  5. Another remarkable datapoint: on average it takes around 2 years after the Fed starts hiking for the 2s10s to invert…. This time around it took just 2 weeks.

  

  * * *

  Now let’s take a look at how some assets perform after inversions.

  For S&P the supercycle matters: pre-1980 inversions almost always led to a sell-off. Post 1980, inversion and recessions have been relatively inconsequential hiccups in structural 40-year bull market.

  

  … so as Jim Reid notes, the average performance following inversions is misleading as it’s a period of two dramatically different halves.

  

  Yields still tend to go up for in the months after inversion starts with only one example of mildly lower yields around the 4 month point…

  

  In any case, the 2s10s indicates that odds of a recession in the next 24 months are a solid 60%+ and rising by the day.

  

  Meanwhile, in a humorous counter to the 3M polyannas, the reason why the 3M 3M18M is still steep is that with the Fed behind the curve,18m3m-3m is the steepest point on the yield curve, with cuts priced shortly after. Yes: in just over a year, the US will be in recession! The market likely will stop pricing additional hikes if they believe a recession is imminent. As Reit notes, “18m3m-3m should flatten soon as hikes are delivered, upgrading its implied recession signal over time.”

  

  * * *

  Two other observations why the inverted yield curve is a guaranteed signal of imminent recession: just before the 2008, Bernanke said this time was different, and to ignore the flat yield curve…

  “I would not interpret the currently very flat yield curve as indicating a significant economic slowdown to come, for several reasons. First, in previous episodes when an inverted yield curve was followed by recession, the level of interest rates was quite high, consistent with considerable financial restraint. This time, both short- and long-term interest rates–in nominal and real terms–are relatively low by historical standards. Second, as I have already discussed, to the extent that the flattening or inversion of the yield curve is the result of a smaller term premium, the implications for future economic activity are positive rather than negative. Finally, the yield curve is only one of the financial indicators that researchers have found useful in predicting swings in economic activity. Other indicators that have had empirical success in the past, including corporate risk spreads, would seem to be consistent with continuing solid economic growth. In that regard, the fact that actual and implied volatilities of most financial prices remain subdued suggests that market participants do not harbor significant reservations about the economic outlook.”

  … and also right before the bursting of the dot com bubble, William McDonough said the same in Feb 2000.

  “Typically, the inverted yield curve is seen as a sign of a coming recession, McDonough said. ”I don’t see that as the explanation,” he said. He said an expected drop in supply of long-term debt, as a result of reduced U.S. government debt sales and announced buybacks, is more likely the reason. Without those conditions, the inverted yield curve probably wouldn’t exist, he said.”

  Just a few days later, the dot com bubble burst.

  There is much more in the full DB presentation available to pro subs.

  Tyler Durden
  Thu, 03/31/2022 – 22:40

• New Hearing In Sussman-Russiagate Case Reveals Why Clinton Emails Will Likely Come Out
  New Hearing In Sussman-Russiagate Case Reveals Why Clinton Emails Will Likely Come Out

  Authored by Techno Fog via The Reactionary,

  Today, there was a hearing in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia in the matter of the United States v. Michael Sussmann, the former DNC/Clinton/Perkins Coie lawyer accused of providing false statements relating to the Alfa Bank/Trump Organization hoax to then-FBI general counsel James Baker in the fall of 2016. Here is more background on his indictment and how Sussmann and his allies passed Trump transition data to the CIA.

  

  About the hearing – we have the transcript (link at the bottom). The hearing related to Sussmann’s efforts to dismiss the indictment, with the defense alleging that Sussmann’s alleged lies were not material.

  The Court looked on that argument with skepticism. And rightly so, as the issue of materiality is typically a question for the jury. Sussmann’s lawyers did him no favors by admitting it was a “closer call” on whether the government’s arguments of materiality should be presented to the jury.

  

  The Special Counsel’s argument on materiality was more more effective, explaining what Sussmann did and why his lies mattered:

  

  Interestingly, the Court also asked if the underlying information – the Alfa Bank/Trump Organization data that Sussmann provided the FBI – was “false”. On that question the Special Counsel declined to show their hand.

  

  Why does this matter? Because it has been long-suspected that the the Alfa/Trump data was manipulated, if not outright invented. Recall this discussion in the Sussmann indictment, where the researchers discussed the inability “to defend against the criticism that this is not spoofed traffic”:

  

  Now we get to the juicy parts of the hearing. The Special Counsel is in possession of a number of documents from the Clinton Campaign, Rodney Joffe (more about him here), and Hillary for America. And there is a fight over whether some of those documents are privileged.

  

  The Special Counsel provided one example, stating that the Clinton Campaign is putting out bogus claims of privilege over the communications of Rodney Joffe. These are likely to fail. The Clinton Campaign was not copied on the e-mails, there might very well be a crime-fraud exception to any assertion of privilege, and because Joffe wasn’t providing legal advice to Hillary.

  

  Fusion GPS is making similar claims of privilege to keep their documents secret.

  

  They’ve tried these types of abuses of “privilege” in a civil case, and we previously discussed why those efforts were bound to fail, perhaps most notably because Fusion GPS has admitted they were doing political work not subject to privilege. Fusion GPS cannot now claim they were performing legal or litigation-focused work.

  

  Moreover, even if this were legal work, Fusion GPS waived privilege when leaking their research to the media, government officials, and other third parties. Oops.

  

  Finally – here is the transcript. Happy reading.

  -Techno

  Tyler Durden
  Thu, 03/31/2022 – 22:20

• "They're In Desperate Need Of Capital" – SoftBank Halts Investments As It Scrambles To Raise Cash
  “They’re In Desperate Need Of Capital” – SoftBank Halts Investments As It Scrambles To Raise Cash

  2021 was a difficult year for Softbank, and so far, 2022 is shaping up to be even more punishing. The Japanese telecoms giant/VC firm/conductor of the “AI Revolution” booked massive losses on its investment portfolio as massive bets on Didi and Grab soured (among other holdings), saddling the firm with tens of billions of dollars in losses for 2021 (this according to the firm’s most recent earnings report). And as shares of Alibaba and other prominent SoftBank holdings continued to tumble during Q1, dragging SoftBank shares lower in tandem, the situation has only continued to deteriorate.

  As SoftBank shares have tumbled, founder Masayoshi Son has seen roughly $25 billion of his net worth evaporate.

  

  The firm’s investment losses  – spurred by a crackdown in Beijing (which has sheered $9 billion off the firm’s Didi holdings, and that’s just one stock), the war in Ukraine, and other factors outside SoftBank’s control – could represent an existential threat, since SoftBank borrows heavily against its own shares to finance investments in early-stage companies. Because of this heavily leveraged structure, if the company’s financial position deteriorates too aggressively, it could trigger a brutal margin call “doom loop” that could force it to sell even more of its holdings. Masa Son lost his first fortune during the dot-com blowup. The last thing he wants is to be financially ruined a second time.

  To try and guard against this eventuality, Masa Son has reportedly ordered his lieutenants to halt investments in new firms as the company seeks to conserve cash as the value of its portfolio continues to deteriorate.

  Here’s more from the FT:

  SoftBank founder Masayoshi Son has told his top executives to slow down investments, as the world’s largest tech investor seeks to raise cash amid falling tech stocks and a regulatory crackdown in China.

  The Japanese billionaire made the remarks to his leadership team at a recent meeting, according to people briefed on the discussions, as the group responds to the massive hit to the value of its holdings in recent months. The previously unreported discussions offer a rare glimpse into the growing tension within SoftBank, which has disrupted the tech investing landscape since launching its first Vision Fund in 2017.

  Instead of looking for new innovative tech companies to pump money into (or soliciting backers for a third iteration of its ‘Vision Fund’), SoftBank is evaluating its portfolio to decide which holdings might be best suited for liquidation. One insider said the firm doesn’t expect valuations of its Chinese holdings to rebound any time soon.

  “Valuations for Chinese companies listed overseas have collapsed,” said one person close to SoftBank’s China team. “We don’t expect a turnround anytime soon.” One person familiar with the company’s plans added that SoftBank is pushing to raise cash and is evaluating assets that could be liquidated.

  As the firm pointed out in its latest quarterly report, its loan-to-value ratio (a key metric in the eyes of financial analysts) is getting dangerously close to the red line separating a sustainable from an unsustainable debt burden.

  

  The company’s shares have shed 40% of their value over the past year, and during Q1, its portfolio shed another $20 billion and $30 billion.

  

  Back in October 2019, we speculated that SoftBank might be the tech bubble era’s “short of the century”. Aside from a few short-lived rallies, our timing on that call could not have been better.

  SoftBank’s present difficulties follow one of the busiest years for dealmaking in the firm’s history: it closed investments in 195 private companies last year, the most in recent memory.

  Now, in a bid to raise cash, SB is scrambling to borrow against its stake in British chipmaker Arm Holdings (which is headed or an IPO spinoff following the collapse of a deal to sell it to Nvidia) and other holdings. Still, to many on Wall Street, this strategy reeks of desperation.

  In a bid to raise cash, SoftBank has also used stock in Coupang and other large holdings in the Vision Fund as collateral for loans. The Japanese tech group is also finalising loans worth as much as $10bn tied to the IPO of UK chip designer Arm Holdings, following the collapse of its $66bn sale to US rival Nvidia last month. “If you look at all the action, it’s very clear that they are in desperate need of capital,” said Amir Anvarzadeh, a strategist for Japan equity at Asymmetric Advisors who has recommended shorting SoftBank.

  The firm’s long-term solution focuses on its Vision Fund. Executives at SoftBank’s second Vision Fund, which manages $40 billion of SoftBank’s own money, say they’re hoping to make fewer investments of a higher quality. The big question now, as Alibaba shares continue to struggle in the face of a crackdown by Beijing: how much longer can SoftBank hold out without being forced to sell more shares of its ‘golden goose’?

  Tyler Durden
  Thu, 03/31/2022 – 22:00

• Biden Administration Actively Seeks 'Realignment' Of US-China Trade Relationship: US Trade Chief
  Biden Administration Actively Seeks ‘Realignment’ Of US-China Trade Relationship: US Trade Chief

  Authored by Michael Washburn via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

  One of the highest priorities of the Biden administration’s trade agenda is resetting the U.S.-China trade relationship with a view to putting American farmers and exporters on a level playing field with their Chinese counterparts, U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai said on March 30.

  

  In a prepared statement before a House Ways & Means Committee hearing, Tai criticized the prominent role of state-owned enterprises in China’s imports and exports as well as “labor rights suppression, a weak environmental regime, [and] other distortions that put market-oriented participants out of business.”

  She also noted Beijing’s failure to meet purchase commitments under the “phase one” trade agreement signed in January 2020. Those purchase agreements stipulated that China would import at least $200 million more of U.S. goods and products in 2020-2021 than the country bought in 2017.

  “We absolutely need to enforce all our agreements, phase one included, and that’s why we’ve spent the last several months fighting for our farmers who have a lot at stake in the purchase agreements,” Tai said during the hearing.

  U.S. concerns about Beijing’s abusive trade practices led Tai and her team in October 2021 to initiate a dialogue with the Chinese regime, emphasizing the importance of meeting phase one obligations, she said in the statement.

  But it became clear to Washington that Beijing did not consider the agreement to be binding and met only those commitments that the regime felt served its own interests, the statement said. Tai called this cherry-picking when it comes to meeting obligations a “familiar pattern” that U.S. officials encounter when dealing with Chinese regime officials, whether in the context of the World Trade Organization or bilateral talks.

  While these experiences have not completely turned Washington off to the possibility of dialogue with Beijing, she said, it is clear that the old approach by itself is insufficient.

  To that end, Tai urged Congress to pass the America COMPETES Act, a bill aimed at expanding semiconductor manufacturing in the United States and curbing reliance on Chinese products and know-how.

  The trade official also emphasized that the Biden administration has forcefully demonstrated to the Chinese regime the resolve of the United States to enforce the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, which banned the importation of all products from China’s Xinjiang over Uyghur forced labor concerns.

  “The challenge that we face from China is significant and it goes to how we as the U.S. continue to be able to compete and have thriving industries,” Tai told the lawmakers.

  Tyler Durden
  Thu, 03/31/2022 – 21:40

• March Payrolls Preview: Can Wage Growth Slow Enough To Dent The Fed's 50bps Rate Hike
  March Payrolls Preview: Can Wage Growth Slow Enough To Dent The Fed’s 50bps Rate Hike

  With the Fed’s rates “lift off” already a done deal, traders will frame Friday’s March jobs data (which comes just hours after the month of March is in the actual history books) in the context of monetary policy, where money markets are assigning a 76% probability that the Federal Reserve will lift interest rates by a 50bps increment in May. Accordingly, as Newsquawk writes in its NFP preview, there will be much attention on the average hourly wages measures in the jobs report for signs about how the recent surge in inflation is affecting Americans’ real incomes, and for any evidence of the so-called second-round effects of inflation. The consensus looks for wages to rise in the month, lifting the annual measure, but some desks argue that the pressure is easing in the labor market, which should see wage growth ease in the months ahead. Meanwhile, proxies in the month continue to suggest a healthy labor market (initial jobless claims fell in the payrolls survey week, while business surveys suggest firms are ramping up hiring). While the data will likely cause the typical stock price volatility over the release, analysts have said that it would take a significant miss, accompanied by weakness in other economic data, for the Fed to waiver from its seeming intent to raise rates by 50bps in May.

  Wall Street Expectations:

  • Consensus is for 490k nonfarm payrolls to be added to the US economy in March, with the rate of job creation easing to below recent trend rates (12-month average 556k, 6-month average 583k, 3-month average 582k).

  • Jobless rate is expected to fall by 0.1ppts to 3.7% (the Fed sees the jobless rate ending this year at 3.5%).

  • Wage metrics will attract a lot of attention amid the recent surge in inflation and inflation expectations; policymakers have been attentive to the possibility of both a wage-price spiral and second round effects; average earnings are expected to rise 0.4% M/M (vs unchanged in February), pushing the annual measure up to 5.5% Y/Y (from 5.2% in February).

  POLICY DEBATE: Fed Chair Powell recently said that the central bank would move to a more restrictive policy if that was needed to restore price stability (translation: the Fed can and will create a recession to contain inflation, something markets refuse to believe) . UBS said that Powell was referring to a deliberate policy of pushing growth below trend; “it is important to note that this policy option was presented in a conditional way–if that is what is required– deliberately pushing policy to generate growth below trend would only be required if there were evidence of a wage-cost spiral developing, and there is not really evidence of that at the moment.” Other analysts point out that average hourly earnings have outperformed other indicators, and accordingly, some relative underperformance could be seen ahead. Either way, the consensus remains that the Fed will raise interest rates by a 50bps increment in May (money markets assign a probability of around 76% of that happening), and it would therefore take a dreadful labor market report combined with other weak data metrics for the Fed to back away from that course.

  

  WAGES: Anecdotally, the compensation software provider Payscale, citing its data, said US firms were planning to give the highest pay increases in years, but these would still not match inflation. But Capital Economics says that the easing in job postings on Indeed.com suggests that there has been a softening in labor demand. While it notes that the relationship isn’t perfect, it would be consistent with employment growth easing too, and would match the slowdown in GDP. “The apparent drop-back in job openings also implies that there is now less excess demand for workers, consistent with broader evidence that labour shortages are starting to ease,” and it argues that the “unemployment rate, which is still above its pre-pandemic low, hasn’t proved a useful gauge of labour market slack over the past year”; while it expects this rate will fall in March other indicators suggest that conditions are no longer tightening. “After rising to their highest levels on record last year, the share of small firms struggling to fill job vacancies and the net share of consumers saying jobs are easy to find have both edged lower in recent months,” and “that suggests that the upward pressure on wages will also ease.” The consultancy sees the rate easing back to 5.0% Y/Y in the months ahead.

  JOB ADDITIONS: Weekly initial jobless claims and continuing claims that coincide with the BLS’ employment report survey period both declined (initial claims eased to 215k from 249k into the February jobs report, while continuing claims eased to 1.35mln from 1.47mln). The ADP’s gauge of private payrolls was more-or-less in line with market expectations (455k vs expected 450k), while the February data was revised up a little (to 486k from 475k). The ISM business surveys have not been released ahead of the March jobs data– these usually offer us some insight about hiring activity. The comparable Markit PMI data, however, noted that companies were stepping up hiring, with the rate of overall jobs creation the highest since April 2021; “manufacturers and service providers alike recorded steeper upturns in employment,” the report said, “numerous firms noted that investment in recruitment campaigns was starting to show gains.” Goldman estimates that payrolls rose by an above-consensus 575k in March as “dining activity rebounded further in March, and most Big Data indicators are consistent with strong job gains.” Additionally, the bank believes that “fierce competition for workers incentivized firms to pull forward recruiting activities earlier in the spring hiring season.”

  CONSUMER CONFIDENCE: Within the Conference Board’s gauge of consumer confidence, the number of consumers saying that jobs were “plentiful” rose to 57.2% from 53.5%, a new record high; the number of consumers who said jobs were “hard to get” fell to 9.8% from 12%, taking the differential to 47.4 from 41.5, boding well for those expecting the unemployment rate to decline. However, the survey also revealed that consumers were mixed in their views about the short-term outlook for the labour market, where the number expecting more jobs in the months ahead falling, even though those who anticipate fewer jobs also fell. Consumers were also mixed about their short-term financial prospects. “Confidence continues to be supported by strong employment growth and thus has been holding up remarkably well despite geopolitical uncertainties and expectations for inflation over the next 12 months reaching 7.9%—an all-time high,” the Conference Board said, adding that “these headwinds are expected to persist in the short term and may potentially dampen confidence as well as cool spending further in the months ahead.”

  ARGUING FOR A STRONGER-THAN-EXPECTED REPORT:

  • Public health. After reaching new highs in December and early January, covid infections fell sharply in February and March, returning to last summer’s relatively low levels. Dining activity also rebounded sharply over the last two months. Coupled with the rise in ADP’s estimate of leisure and hospitality jobs, Goldman expects a significant contribution from leisure-sector payrolls in tomorrow’s report (our estimates embed a rise of 150k, mom sa).

  

  • Big Data. High-frequency data on the labor market also generally indicate strong growth in March employment. While Homebase is an outlier to the downside, that signal was overly pessimistic in five of the last six reports.

  

  • Seasonality. Some firms frontloaded spring hiring because of what Goldman believes was fierce competition for workers. In past tight labor markets, job growth tends to be stronger in the first quarter than in the second quarter. That being said, the March pace often slows relative to February’s. 

  • Employer surveys. The employment components of business surveys generally increased in March. Goldman’s services survey  employment tracker increased 1.8pt to 55.7 and our manufacturing survey employment tracker increased 0.5pt to 57.9. This resilience in domestic business surveys also argues against a meaningful employment drag from the Russia-Ukraine war.

  • Job availability. The Conference Board labor differential—the difference between the percent of respondents saying jobs are plentiful and those saying jobs are hard to get—increased by 5.4pt to an all-time high of +47.4. JOLTS job openings edged down by 17k in February to 11.3mn but remained above the pre-pandemic peak. Jobless claims. Initial jobless claims decreased during the March payroll month, averaging 209k per week vs. 231k in February. Continuing claims in regular state programs decreased 132k from survey week to survey week.

  ARGUING FOR A WEAKER-THAN-EXPECTED REPORT

  • Job cuts. Announced layoffs reported by Challenger, Gray & Christmas increased by 4% month-over-month in March, after decreasing by 8% in February (SA by GS).

  NEUTRAL/MIXED FACTORS

  • ADP. Private sector employment in the ADP report increased by 455k in March, in line with expectations but somewhat below tomorrow’s consensus for private payrolls (+496k mom sa).

  Tyler Durden
  Thu, 03/31/2022 – 21:20

• Mauled Treasuries To Get Some Respite, Fed Priced-In
  Mauled Treasuries To Get Some Respite, Fed Priced-In

  Authored by Ven Ram, currency & rates strategist at Bloomberg,

  As brutal as the bond-market backdrop has been, losses in Treasuries may abate in the second quarter even as the Federal Reserve takes aim at quelling inflation that is running at a breakneck pace.

  The odds of a repeat of the first-quarter selloff are approximately 1-in-30,000…

  The Bloomberg Treasury Index incurred a loss of 5.91% since the start of the year through Tuesday, the worst in data going back nearly 50 years.

  That represented a 2.5 standard-deviation move to the left — in itself an extreme probability in a normal distribution of returns that is confirmed by running the Kolmogorov-Smirnov test.

  

  Fundamentals also suggest that losses may moderate.

  Two-year yields surged about 160 basis points this quarter, the most since 1984. That increase came on top of a 46-basis point move in the last quarter of 2021, suggesting the market has priced in the bulk of the Fed’s likely tightening.

  

  The possibility of a de-escalation of conflict in Ukraine sent breakeven rates lower across the curve, with the markets heaving a sigh of relief on what that would mean for inflation.

  

  The inversion of the two- and 10-year part of the yield curve may also alter investor behavior.

  While there are more authentic markers of a true curve inversion, the negative spread may become a self-fulfilling prophecy: if economic agents in sufficient number believe a slowdown is in the offing and modify their decisions accordingly, we could get a veritable speed-bump.

  

  Notice how the curve inverted well after news of Ukraine broke on Tuesday, suggesting that there is already a bid to mop up the yields currently available on the longer maturity.

  That is classic investor behavior ahead of typical slowdowns.

  The confluence of the de-escalation of conflict and fears of a slowdown — whether well-founded or otherwise — may therefore offer a tactical long bias for bonds.

  While Fed speakers including Chair Jerome Powell have remarked that they are open to raising rates by 50 basis points if need be, they have stopped short of suggesting that such a scenario would be their base case.

  Even though headline inflation is already running around 8%, the Fed seems reluctant to deploy outsized increases for fearing of creating an adverse feedback loop in the economy.

  What could go wrong with this outlook?

  Possibly, double-digit inflation. A monster print of that magnitude may force the Fed to raise rates by 50 basis points in May and keep volatility on the front burner.

  That scenario apart, the current backdrop of markets having priced in an aggressive Fed trajectory and a possible de-escalation in Ukraine hostilities taken together suggests that the denouement for Treasuries may be less sordid in the months ahead.

  Tyler Durden
  Thu, 03/31/2022 – 21:00

• Putin Signs Decree Ordering Gas Exports To Be Halted If Buyers Don't Pay In Rubles
  Putin Signs Decree Ordering Gas Exports To Be Halted If Buyers Don’t Pay In Rubles

  Contrary to expectations that Vladimir Putin was bluffing about collecting rubles in exchange for Russian energy exports, moments ago a decree signed by the Russian president confirmed that that was not the case.

  According to Bloomberg, Putin said he had signed a decree demanding payment in rubles for Russian gas supplies, which is set to begin April 1 as previously reported. According to the decree, while Russia will continue to supply gas at set volumes and prices, it will demand that buyers of gas open accounts in Russian banks, and warned that Moscow can halt gas contracts if buyers don’t pay in rubles; additionally, new proceedings in EUR or USD could be blocked. Pushing what many viewed as a bluff to the edge, Putin said that active contracts will be halted if demands are not met, and explained that the move is meant to increase settlements in national currencies.

  Putin’s decree follows an earlier report in the Russian press that Gazprom was studying options of halting gas supplies to Europe amid RUB payment issues. It also follows comments from the Kremlin which suggested that it would look into the idea from lawmakers to ask other nations to pay for a wider range of Russia exports in rubles.

  Indicating Russia’s operational readiness to follow through with the plan, Interfax adds that Putin has ordered for special accounts for gas payments to be opened at Gazprombank which will sell gas FX on a Moscow exchange.

  In kneejerk response to the news, US nat gas prices spiked – perhaps in anticipation that much of US output will now be LNG-ed over to Europe, potentially creating a US shortage in due course…

  

  … while oil also rose from session lows following the latest SPR release jawboning which has yet to be confirmed by the White House.

  

  Finally, now that it appears the ruble will have to be purchased by western powers, the currency has completed its roundtrip to pre-invasion levels.

  

  Tyler Durden
  Thu, 03/31/2022 – 20:31

• NIH Deleted Info From Wuhan Lab On Covid-19 Genetic Sequencing, Watchdog FOIA Finds
  NIH Deleted Info From Wuhan Lab On Covid-19 Genetic Sequencing, Watchdog FOIA Finds

  Authored by Mark Tapscott via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

  National Institutes of Health (NIH) documents obtained by a nonprofit watchdog in a federal court suit reveal that the agency deleted Covid-19 genetic sequencing information from the Wuhan Institute of Virology at the Chinese lab’s request.

  

  The Arlington, Virginia-based Empower Oversight Whistleblowers and Researchers (EO) obtained, as a result of a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request and lawsuit, more than 230 pages of documents dating from 2020 that include emails, memoranda, and other correspondence among and between the lab and multiple NIH officials.

  Covid-19 was first detected in China in late 2019, before it spread worldwide. Since the first death from the virus in the United States was reported in January 2020, an estimated 1 million Americans and 6 million globally have reportedly succumbed to the virus.

  Controversy has raged in the United States over whether the virus originated in an animal-to-human transfer in a Wuhan-area wet market, as Chinese officials have insisted, or if it escaped from the Wuhan lab where research was being done on such viruses, some of which was being supported with NIH funds through the New York-based nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance.

  Among the NIH officials prominently mentioned in the documents are then-NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins and National Institute for Allergies and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) Director Dr. Anthony Fauci, who actively participated in the discussions and decision-making described in the materials obtained by EO.

  “On June 5, 2020, a Wuhan University researcher requested that NIH retract the researcher’s submission of BioProject ID PRJNA637497 because of error. The Wuhan researcher explained ‘I’m sorry for my wrong submitting,’” EO said in a statement on March 29.

  “BioProject ID PRJNA637497 is also referred to as Submission ID SUB7554642. Three days later, on June 8th, the NIH declined the researcher’s request, advising that it prefers to edit or replace, as opposed to delete, sequences submitted to the SRA,” EO reported.

  But then, on June 16, 2020, NIH officials reversed themselves and deleted the genetic sequencing data, as requested by the Wuhan researcher.

  That researcher was quoted by EO as explaining to NIH: “Recently, I found that it’s hard to visit my submitted SRA data, and it would also be very difficult for me to update the data. I have submitted an updated version of this SRA data to another website, so I want to withdraw the old one at NCBI in order to avoid the data version issue.”

  After some discussion about what would be deleted, the NIH concluded the discussion by reassuring the Wuhan researcher that it “had withdrawn everything.”

  The documents also indicate, according to EO, that after researcher Jesse Bloom, a virologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, “alerted NIH about the deleted sequences, [Collins] and [Fauci] hosted a Sunday afternoon Zoom meeting. The invitation Collins sent out for the meeting asks invitees to read Bloom’s [June 22, 2021] preprint paper closely and provide their ‘advice on the interpretation and significance of’ it.”

  According to EO, the documents show that “Professor Trevor Bedford of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center later sent the group an email stating that the deleted data seemed to support the idea that the pandemic began outside the Huanan market in Wuhan and that the matter must be analyzed properly.”

  If the virus’s spread began outside of the market, it would undermine the official Chinese government claim, and thus reinforce claims of experts in the United States and elsewhere that the pandemic likely escaped from the Wuhan lab.

  The EO report also claims that NIH communications staff members were using off-the-record emails to advise “reporters toward more favorable coverage concerning termination of public access to the sequences by The Washington Post, and away from coverage by The New York Times, whose ‘tone’ had been criticized in communications among NIH officials.”

  In addition, EO said NIH claims to have retained copies of the deleted data “for preservation purposes,” although the federal agency has refused to conduct a transparent examination of it.

  An NIH spokesperson told The Epoch Times in an email that the sequences in question were submitted in March 2020 by a researcher at a China-based institution for posting in SRA, which it said it managed by NIH’s National Center for Biotechnology (NCBI).

  “In June 2020, in response to a request by the same researcher, NCBI gave the sequence data the status of ‘withdrawn,’ which removes sequencing data from all public means of access but does not delete them. NCBI subsequently reassigned the status of the sequence data to ‘suppressed,’ which means that sequence data are removed from the search process but can be directly found by accession number. This action to reassign the data was identified as part of NLM’s ongoing review into the matter. We are working to make more information available,” the spokesperson said.

  Collins, Fauci, and the NIAID did not respond to requests for comment.

  The EO document release is likely to strengthen congressional efforts to get all the facts concerning the NIH’s role in funding the Wuhan lab research that may be at the center of the CCP virus’s creation and spread around the world.

  Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kan.), a physician who is a member of the Senate Committee on Health, Employment, Labor and Pensions (HELP), told The Epoch Times that “the NIH deleting key data at the onset of the pandemic has only caused more questions regarding its involvement on the emergence of” the virus.

  “The American people deserve to know the truth behind the origins of COVID-19, as well as how we can best prepare for, prevent, and recover from future global pandemics,” Marshall said. “As a physician, I think we always need to know the what, where, how, and why when giving a diagnosis. For this reason, it couldn’t be more important that we get to the bottom of this deleted data and ensure that NIH operates at the interest of our national security.”

  The HELP panel on March 15 approved legislation—the PREVENT Pandemics Act—that requires the establishment of a government task force to investigate the origins of the CCP virus. That legislation includes eight provisions authored by Marshall.

  “This legislation is in response to the congressional inquiries and various media investigations–including The Epoch Times–revealing national security issues with federal agencies authorizing dangerous research with certain foreign entities that may have contributed to the COVID-19 pandemic,” Marshall’s office told The Epoch Times.

  “Dr. Marshall secured his bipartisan 9/11-style COVID Task Force to investigate the origins of COVID-19, as well as find out how we can prepare for, prevent, and recover from future global pandemics,” his office said, adding that he seeks “to ensure that American organizations would never be allowed to conduct dangerous research capable of pandemic proportions with organizations in countries that threaten our national security.”

  Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) told The Epoch Times via email that “the radical left has systematically worked to cover the Chinese Communist Party’s tracks and hide the truth of COVID origins.”

  “Dr. Fauci, the NIH, and liberal media giants weaponized the COVID-19 pandemic to shut down schools, businesses, and life for hardworking Americans. The report from Empower Oversight exposes what we’ve always known about COVID-19—it’s all about big government control,” she added.

  Another Republican senator, Joni Ernst of Iowa, proposed last November to ban all federal funding of EcoHealth Alliance and the “gain-of-function” virus research it supported with federal funds at the Wuhan lab. Other congressional Republicans have also called for a federal investigation of the nonprofit.

  Zachary Stieber contributed to this report.

  Tyler Durden
  Thu, 03/31/2022 – 20:20

• Sri Lanka Turns Off Street Lights As Energy Crisis Worsens; Fishermen Unable To Sail For Lack Of Fuel
  Sri Lanka Turns Off Street Lights As Energy Crisis Worsens; Fishermen Unable To Sail For Lack Of Fuel

  Tiny Sri Lanka is struggling through an economic crisis that is having terrible repercussions for its economy, as a brutal energy crisis threatens to blossom into shortages of food and other essential goods.

  Thanks to an energy crisis (and China’s reluctance to allow the country to restructure its debts), Sri Lanka is resorting to turning off its street lights to save electricity as its worst economic crisis in decades bites, forcing – among other cutbacks – the temporary closure of the local stock market as the impact of the crisis is felt (the Colombo Stock Exchange reduced daily trading to two hours from the usual four-and-a-half because of the power cuts for the rest of this week at the request of brokers).

  

  The island nation of 22 million people is struggling with rolling power cuts for up to 13 hours a day as the government is unable to make payments for fuel imports because of a lack of foreign exchange.

  According to Reuters, the energy-drained country expects a diesel shipment paid for under a $500 million line of credit from neighboring India is expected to arrive on Saturday, but the situation isn’t expected to improve any time soon, as power restriction will need to continue, according to the country’s power minister.

  “We have already instructed officials to shut off street lights around the country to help conserve power,” Power Minister Pavithra Wanniarachchi told reporters.

  …

  “Once that arrives we will be able to reduce load shedding hours but until we receive rains, probably some time in May, power cuts will have to continue,” Wanniarachchi told reporters, referring to the rolling power cuts.

  “There’s nothing else we can do.”

  Another reason for the power crisis (and a lesson for all nations that are aiming to ramp up ‘green’ energy sources): Water levels at reservoirs feeding hydro-electric projects had fallen to record lows, while demand had also hit record levels during the hot, dry season, she said.

  As Reuters explains, the crisis in Sri Lanka is the result of a confluence of factors that have drained the country’s foreign exchange reserves.

  The crisis is a result of badly timed tax cuts and the impact of the coronavirus pandemic coupled with historically weak government finances, leading to foreign exchange reserves dropping by 70% in the last two years.

  Sri Lanka was left with reserves of $2.31 billion as of February, forcing the government to seek help from the International Monetary Fund and other countries, including India and China.

  And if the situation doesn’t improve soon, the small country’s energy crisis could metastasize into a food crisis. Because, as the AFP explains, without fuel, the country’s fishermen have been stranded on shore, unable to reel in the day’s catch. And the ramifications are being felt by families across the country.

  “If we queue up by five in the morning, then we will get fuel by three in the afternoon, on good days,” Arulanandan, a seasoned member of Negombo’s close-knit fishing community, tells AFP.

  “But for some, even that is not possible, because by the time they get to the end of the queue, the kerosene is gone.”

  As they look for somebody to blame, the locals have settled on one key culprit: Beijing, and its ‘debt diplomacy’, which seems to have caught Colombo in its trap.

  One of the reasons behind economic crisis in Sri Lanka is its huge debt to China.

  Sri Lanka asked China to restructure debt repayments.

  China will implement its debt trap diplomacy in Sri Lanka

  Instead of claiming Indian territory, Nepal should learn from the Sri Lankan crisis

  — Anshul Saxena (@AskAnshul) March 31, 2022

  https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

  Tyler Durden
  Thu, 03/31/2022 – 20:00

• Death Of Denial: Part 1 (With Apologies To Agatha Christie)
  Death Of Denial: Part 1 (With Apologies To Agatha Christie)

  By Russell Clark of Capital Flows and Asset Markets Substack

  One of the reasons I left the money management game was that many of the theories that I had used to manage money stopped working. Some of them were original, some I taken from others, and some I had modified. I knew I need to take time off and have a think. I also knew that I needed to read different books to get my mind thinking differently. As it happens, I have just finished reading Agatha Christies “Death on the Nile” (excellent book), and I particularly enjoyed how he looked at all the clues, organized them, and then slowly but surely eliminate suspects until only the murderer, however unlikely, was left.

  

  For me, recent market action has eliminated the final suspect for what has caused the extremely long lived bull market in US equities. I had speculated that robustness of the US stock market was a feature of extremely loose credit conditions. These loose credit conditions were only possible due to a long drawn out commodity bear market, and hence if we had a spike in commodity prices which led to rising bond yields, then were likely to see a much weaker equity market.

  Commodity prices, and particularly food prices have spiked. Food prices had spiked in 1996 before the Asian Financial Crisis, again in 2007 before the GFC and in 2011 during the Eurocrisis. My working assumption was that another spike would also signal problems. But with the exception of Chinese equities, major equity market returns over last 12 months have been robust. MSCI World is barely 5% from highs. I have used food, but energy price spikes have also led to weaker equity markets historically too.

  

  I have also learnt to be cautious on equities when the Asian Dollar Index is going sideways or falling. Even after the Asian Financial Crisis, Asian currencies strengthened during the dot com bubble. Since a beak in 2010, they have been generally poor, even as U S equities have powered on.

  

  I have also used net international investment position data to inform whether to be bearish on a currency or equity market. This worked well on pointing out danger in the dot-com bubble, and the top in the US dollar in the early 2000s. It also worked well for the Japanese bubble economy, the Asian Financial Crisis and the Eurocrisis. But this model has had me bearish on the US dollar and US equities since 2016, so very wrong indeed (see Spotting Property Bubbles in East Asia in my Archive for more details).

  

  On a much shorter term basis, the S&P 500 has seemingly broken out of its relationship with HYG US (High Yield ETF). A similar chart can be drawn using mortgage rates, which have spiked. I would include – but Substack says I am at the limit already in this post!

  

  I realized that I needed to look at all this clues again, and have a think about why they worked before, but did not work this time. And, by eliminating suspects, and having a long think, I think I have the answer. The murderer of all possible bear markets in the US dollar and US equity is….. (to be continued).

  Tyler Durden
  Thu, 03/31/2022 – 19:40

• Shanghai Officials Conceal COVID Deaths At City Nursing Homes Amid Punishing Lockdown
  Shanghai Officials Conceal COVID Deaths At City Nursing Homes Amid Punishing Lockdown

  As local authorities in Shanghai prepare to start the second phase of the Shanghai lockdown, the western press has seized on reports that the death toll from the omicron-driven outbreak in China’s most populous city (and its financial capital) has been even larger than authorities have let on – the latest indication that the numbers being released by China’s public-health authorities have been sanitized, and that the true scope of the outbreak is even larger than believed.

  An outbreak at a Shanghai home for the elderly has killed a handful of residents in recent days, deaths that haven’t been reflected in authorities’ official numbers, which haven’t reported any deaths in the hundreds of homes for the elderly in the city.

  

  Citing a group of orderlies who had been sent to one of China’s quarantine facilities, WSJ reported that an unknown number of bodies had been removed from the facility, where at least 100 positive cases have been confirmed among its residents.

  Of course, concealing deaths in the city’s nursing homes might strike a chord with Americans, who remember all too well former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s deliberate under-reporting of the number of deaths at nursing homes in the Empire State during the first months of the pandemic.

  In Shanghai, one of the orderlies who spoke with WSJ said they were tasked with dressing the body of one dead patient, an order that made the orderly fear for their safety.

  “I was scared to death. I said, ‘Look, look, those are for dead bodies,'” another orderly said, recalling the sight of half a dozen hearses parked at the hospital gate at night.

  But the orderlies weren’t the only sources who spoke with WSJ (speaking with members of the foreign press is, of course, discouraged by the CCP, and these individuals spoke out at great personal risk). Separately, the son of a patient at the hospital said that his father had died within the past week, a friend of the son told the Journal, adding that others who had visited the hospital reported seeing the bodies of at least a dozen deceased patients.

  More than half a dozen users on several of China’s major social-media platforms have also posted messages alleging unreported deaths at the hospital in recent days.

  Another orderly told WSJ that a surprising number of providers and staffers at the facility had been infected.

  “Orderlies, nurses and doctors, we’re all infected,” she said.

  The facility, Shanghai Donghai, has been around for 20 years, and is run by a state-owned food conglomerate with 1,800 beds and an orthopedics ward that also treats younger patients. It’s the city’s biggest elder-care facility by capacity, and it reported zero COVID infections in 2021.

  But why would local authorities want to hide the number of infections and deaths if they’re ordering lockdowns anyway?

  Well, as Nikkei noted on Thursday, the reputations of prominent local bureaucrats are being threatened, so they’re doing anything they can to mask the severity of the situation to try and salvage their reputations. With the National Party Congress set for later this year, Li Qiang, the Communist Party secretary of Shanghai, is hoping to be elevated to the Politburo Standing Committee, China’s most powerful policy-setting body. He’s seen as one of President Xi’s closest allies, and before the lockdown, he had been expected to move to Beijing and become a vice premier in charge of the economy. Unfortunately for him, the lockdown looks to have disrupted such plans.

  Now, those within the party who oppose President Xi’s power grab (the party’s paramount leader is expected to clinch a third term as leader during the party Congress this fall, making him the first leader since Chairman Mao to break the limit of two five-year terms) are hoping to use the situation in Shanghai to block Li’s promotion, depriving Xi of an important ally in the Politburo.

  Reflecting the outpouring of  public anger stoked by the Shanghai lockdown (as supplies of food and medicine have grown increasingly strained), one local official told ABC News that the city’s leadership failed to adequately prepare.

  Ma Chunlei, a senior Shanghai official, acknowledged shortcomings in the city’s response. Authorities have rushed to bolster food deliveries to the city after panic buying stripped store shelves of necessities.

  “We didn’t prepare sufficiently enough,” Ma said. “We sincerely accept the criticisms from the public and are making efforts to improve it.”

  Meanwhile, city of Shanghai was preparing to reopen the eastern half of the city, and shut its western half, as the staggered 9-day lockdown continues. While Shanghai’s lockdown has slowed factory output (a byproduct of lockdowns across China), authorities have decided to lift a lockdown in Jilin Province (the epicenter of China’s worst outbreak since Wuhan). Starting tomorrow, locals will be able to move about freely, although they will be required to wear masks and, when indoors, stay 1 meter (3 feet) apart. Public gatherings in parks and squares are prohibited.

  Tyler Durden
  Thu, 03/31/2022 – 19:20

• Russian Palladium And Platinum – Too Important To Sanction
  Russian Palladium And Platinum – Too Important To Sanction

  Submitted by Ronan Manly, BullionStar.com

  When on 7 March, the London Bullion Market Association (LBMA) suspended 6 Russian precious metals refiners from the London Good Delivery Lists for Gold and Silver, and in the process blocked from the London market any new gold and silver bars produced by these refiners, one unanswered question was whether the London Platinum and Palladium Market (LPPM) was going to follow suit and also suspend Russian precious metals refiners from its Good Delivery Lists for Palladium and Platinum.

  This was more than a theoretical question because two of the refiners excluded from the gold and silver Good Delivery Lists by the LBMA were JSC Krastsvetmet (located in Krasnoyarsk) and Prioksky Plant of Non-Ferrous Metals, and both Krastsvetmet and Prioksky were also accredited refiners on the LPPM’s Good Delivery List for both Platinum and Palladium .

  For anyone reading BullionStar Blogs, this LBMA – LPPM conundrum was not a surprise since we highlighted it on 28 February, saying that:

  “Note too that the LBMA also administers the London Platinum and Palladium Market (LPPM), and there are two Russian refineries on both the current LPPM Good Delivery List for Platinum and the LPPM Good Delivery List for Palladium, namely “The Gulidov Krasnoyarsk Non-Ferrous Metals Plant” and the “Prioksky Plant of Non-Ferrous Metals” (a.k.a. Krastsvetmet and Prioksky).

  To make matters worse, since the CME Group (operator of the COMEX) more or less clones the LBMA Good Delivery Lists and had the 6 Russian refiners on the COMEX “Approved Brands” lists, this forced the COMEX to follow the LBMA’s lead on 7 March and exclude the same 6 Russian precious metals refiners from these ‘Approved Brands’ lists for gold and silver, while leaving the Krastsvetmet and Prioksky refiners on the COMEX Approved List for Platinum and leaving Krastsvetmet on the COMEX Approved List for Palladium.   

  For how could the LBMA in London, as it said in its press release on 7 March, suspend the 6 Russian refiners “with immediate effect” and “in light of UK/EU/US sanctions”, while its sister organization, the LPPM in London, did nothing about Krastsvetmet and Prioksky?

  And how could the Commodity Exchange (COMEX) also on 7 March “effective immediately“ and “until further notice”, suspend “the approved status for warranting and delivery” of the 6 Russian refiners for their gold and silver brands, while leaving Krastsvetmet and Prioksky on its Platinum/Palladium approved brands lists?  

  The answer is of course about money, and the fact that sanctions are a political weapon which can be ignored in hypocritical closed doors meetings in the City of London and Chicago/New York when it affects the bottom line too much.

  LBMA and LPPM – Same People, Different Hats

  As Reuters’ Peter Hobson pointed out in a 8 March article titled “London market green-lights Russia’s palladium while blocking its gold”:

  “The London Platinum and Palladium Market (LPPM), an industry association, said it would keep the two Russian refiners it accredits on its “good delivery” list of firms whose material is eligible to trade in London.

  “Traders and analysts said removal of the palladium refiners from London trading would have worsened worries over Russian supply that have sent prices to record highs.”

  On 8 March, the LPPM also – with a straight face – added a hypocritical press release to its website, which said:

  LPPM GOOD DELIVERY PLATINUM AND PALLADIUM UPDATE

  Due to the terrible events taking place in Ukraine, the LPPM has reviewed its Good Delivery list and the US, EU and UK sanctions. Following that review it has decided to make no changes to the Good Delivery list.

  We will however continue to monitor and review the situation.”

  In other words, due to, in the words of the LPPM, “terrible events” in Ukraine, the LPPM decided to do nothing, all because Russian palladium and platinum are too important to sanction.

  On the same day, Reuters published another version of its 8 March article  – which is now only available on the NASDQ website and is titled ”Russian refiners still OK to trade, says London Platinum and Palladium Market”, in which Peter Hobson wrote that:

  “Following a meeting of the Management Committee of the LPPM…, there will be no changes to our Good Delivery list,” the LPPM’s Chief Administrative Officer, Jane-Anne Wardley, said.

  So now we know that it was the LPPM Management Committee which made the decision to ‘make no changes’ to the LPPM Good Delivery Lists, despite what they called the ‘terrible events’ in Ukraine.

  

   

  It’s A Big Club & You Ain’t In It!

  And what or who is this LPPM Management Committee?

  From the LPPM website management committee page we see that the LPPM Management Committee comprises individuals representing 9 heavy weight entities which are involved in the global platinum and palladium market, four of which are bank entities. These 9 entities and their representatives are:    

  • Chairman – John Cullen, Johnson Matthey Plc (US/UK refinery)
  • Members – Vincent Domien, HSBC (bank)
  • Thomas Kendall, ICBC Standard Bank (bank)
  • Anton Down, Royal Bank of Canada (bank)
  • Vikas Chamaria, T D Securities (bank)
  • John Metcalf, BASF Metals Limited (trader – note BASF which took over the old Engelhard)
  • Andy Daniel, Heraeus Metals Germany GmbH (German refinery)
  • Joe Stefans, MKS Pamp SA (Swiss refinery)
  • David Jollie, Anglo Platinum Marketing Ltd (part of Anglo American Platinum, miner)

  Note – Vincent Domien, now of HSBC, was a SocGen director of the London Gold Market Fixing Limited (the old London Gold Fixing) until 30 August 2019.

  Seven of these Management Committee members are Full Members of the LPPM, namely HSBC, ICBC Standard, Toronto Dominion (TD), Johnson Matthey, Heraeus, MKS PAMP, and  BASF Metals. The other two, Royal Bank of Canada and Anglo Platinum, are associate members of the LPPM.

  As there are only 14 Full Members of the LPPM, the other 7 full members of the LPPM which are not on the LPPM Management Committee are 4 banks – Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, UBS, and Standard Chartered Bank, and 3 precious metals refiners – Metalor (Swiss), Valcambi (Swiss) and Tanaka Kikinzoku Kogyo (Japanese).

  In addition, the ‘Market Making’ members of the LPPM (whose trading desks make two-way markets in palladium and platinum) are Goldman Sachs, HSBC, ICBC Standard Bank, JP Morgan Chase, Standard Chartered Bank, Toronto-Dominion Bank, and UBS.

  And there’s more. Each business day in London, a group comprising Goldman Sachs, HSBC, ICBC Standard, Johnson Matthey, BASF Metals, along with StoneX, take part in the daily LBMA platinum and palladium auctions so as to ‘establish’ benchmark prices for the daily LBMA Platinum Price and the LBMA Palladium Price (price data which by the way is intellectually owned by Precious Metals Prices Limited – which is a subsidiary of the LBMA).

  And finally, these LBMA Platinum and Palladium auctions, which are run for the benefit of the LPPM’s ‘market’ (a market which is behind the scenes administered by the LBMA), are run on a daily basis by the London Metal Exchange (LME).

  As George Carlin once said “It’s A BIG Club & You Ain’t In It!”

  Shockingly, the LPPM’s decision to keep the Russian refiners Krastsvetmet and Prioksky on the LPPM Good Delivery Lists for Palladium and Platinum comes despite the fact that the LPPM’s own ‘Responsible Sourcing program” which is overseen by the LPPM Management Committee, has a “Sanctions Policy” which says:

  “SANCTIONS POLICY

  Failure to meet the standards required could have serious implications for LPPM Good Delivery refiners. Sanctions could include suspension subject to resolution or being transferred to the Former List with immediate effect.”

  However, on this occasion, the LPPM Management Committee seems to have thrown its sanctions policy out of the window, hoping that no one would notice.

  

  In Russia, mined palladium is a by-product of nickel mining, with nearly all Russian palladium supply being mined by the mammoth MMC Norilsk Nickel The next biggest palladium producer is the South African-US combine Sibanye-Stillwater.

  According to the latest Heraeus “Palladium Standard” report from September 2021 (produced by SFA Oxford), Russian palladium production in 2021 was forecast to be 2350 koz out of a global total of 6,770 koz (or 35% of global palladium mine supply).

  However, in 2021, Russian palladium supply was less than normal due to mine flooding and a concentrator accident, which reduced supply by about 365 koz. So in a normal year, Russian palladium supply is about 2800 koz, or about 40% of global annual supply of 7000 koz. See the Heraeus ‘Palladium Standard’ report here. 

  On the demand side, palladium is critical for the global automobile industry (along with platinum), where both metals are used in auto-catalytic converters that reduce exhaust emissions – as both palladium and platinum are excellent catalysts and are somewhat substitutable. Both palladium and platinum are also used widely in industry, e,g. in computer chips and electronic devices.

  Furthermore, both metals have a large demand driver in the form of jewelry and importantly, platinum and palladium are both investment precious metals, with both metals are held in physically backed Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs), and both metals are fabricated into investment platinum and investment palladium bars and coins.

  Conclusion

  So now you can see how important Russian palladium is to the LPPM trade group, and to the banks, traders, and refiners of the LPPM.

  If Russian palladium stopped flowing to market, there would be serious problems, especially for the global auto and computer chip industries. And the same, to a lesser extent, goes for Russian platinum supplies.

  And since the LPPM could hardly sanction Russian platinum without sanctioning palladium as this would draw even more attention to the double standards and political nature of the sanctions, hence the LPPM put its head in the sand and sanctioned neither, hoping that it would all blow over.

  Which is also why the US/UK/EU sanctions have avoided sanctioning the ‘final boss’, the giant Norilsk Nickel. Because Norilsk Nickel, the world’s largest palladium producer and a major producer of platinum is, as the Wall Street Journal put it recently, ‘Too Big to Sanction’.

  So now you can see why the LPPM Management Committee threw its sanctions book out the window when confronted with having to sanction the Russian palladium and platinum refiners Krastsvetmet and Prioksky, despite what the LPPM called the ‘terrible events” in Ukraine. Because, in the world of the bullion bank controlled palladium and platinum markets in the City of London and on COMEX, money talks while everything else walks.

  And the bullion banks couldn’t have the palladium and platinum prices spiking in London in the same way as the nickel price debacles. What if it spilled over into silver? Or gold?

  And which is why on 24 March, when UK prime minister Boris Johnson, ahead of the NATO-G7-EU meetings in Brussels, talked about “tightening the economic vice” on Vladimir Putin, and “looking at what we can do to stop Putin using his gold reserves”, while not surprisingly failing to mention the LPPM and the double standards of the City of London when it comes to palladium and platinum.

  Because “tightening the economic vice” on Russian palladium and platinum, would seize up the global auto industry and could find Boris having to ride his bike to work each day instead of being chauffeured in a 2022 emissions-friendly Bentley.

  This article was originally published on the BullionStar website under the same title “Russian Palladium and Platinum – Too Important to Sanction”.

  Tyler Durden
  Thu, 03/31/2022 – 19:00

• US Army Proposes To Cut Troop Levels Under 1 Million For The First Time In 20 Years
  US Army Proposes To Cut Troop Levels Under 1 Million For The First Time In 20 Years

  What better time for the U.S. Army to considering cutting its numbers than right now, with tensions between the U.S. and both Russia and China likely at multi-decade highs? But that’s exactly what a new budget proposal suggests, according to a new report by Bloomberg. 

  The Army would fall under 1 million soldiers for the first time in 20 years under the new proposal, with active duty Army falling from 485,000 soldiers to 473,000. That number, combined with National Guard and Reserve forces, puts the U.S. total at 998,500 soldiers. 

  National Guard and Reserve numbers are expected to stay at 336,000 and 189,500 for fiscal 2023, the report says. Gabe Camarillo, the undersecretary of the Army, commented: “We did not want, as we looked ahead at recruiting projections, to take any decrease in our quality.”

  

  He told Bloomberg that the move was “pro-active” and said that the decision to make the cuts was catalyzed by “a focus on recruiting high-quality soldiers without lowering standards” and not to free up cash in the budget. 

  He also said he still expects the Army’s numbers to rise within the next five years. 

  Then, he attributed some of the “pro-active” decision to a “tight labor market”, stating: “All employers, to include the Army, are facing significant challenges just as a result of a tight labor market that we see across our economy. That creates a lot of the conditions that we are responding to.”

  The Army is asking for $178 billion in funding for 2023, up $2.8 billion from 2022. The additional funds are being used for “real growth” and “inflation”, the Army’s Director of Budget, Maj. Gen. Mark Bennett, said. 

  “We are able to maintain our momentum. We did not need to look at our modernization accounts as sources of major reductions of any kind,” Camarillo concluded. 

  Tyler Durden
  Thu, 03/31/2022 – 18:40

• Illinois' Pritzker Ranks 4th-Worst Governor For Economic Freedom
  Illinois’ Pritzker Ranks 4th-Worst Governor For Economic Freedom

  Authored by Dylan Sharkey bv IllinoisPolicy.org,

  In a new report on America’s 50 governors, Gov. J.B Pritzker was ranked 47th because of the harm he’s done to the state economy. Voters saved him from a lower rank by rejecting his ‘fair tax.’

  

  Gov. J.B Pritzker finds himself near the bottom of a new report on how America’s governors are guiding their state economies.

  The American Legislative Exchange Council’s rankings are in the 2021 report on Economic Freedom: Grading America’s 50 Governors. The report ranked Pritzker overall at No. 47 – fourth from the bottom – by using a combination of Pritzker’s policies and the state’s economic performance under his leadership to form a list of 12 criteria.

  One measure was Illinois’ 2021 economic performance: 48th in the nation, the third worst. Economic performance was mainly held back by Illinoisans moving out of the state. Illinois lost population during 2021 in 81 of 102 counties.

  Voters prevented Pritzker from ranking even lower by defeating his state income tax hike, said Jonathan Williams, chief economist for ALEC.

  “Voters in Illinois saved him from becoming 50th if they would have passed the progressive income tax that was on the ballot recently that I know he advocated very strongly in favor of,” Williams said.

  Pritzker invested $58 million of his own dollars in the campaign to pass the “fair tax,” which would have allowed Illinois to start taxing retirement income and allowed state lawmakers to gradually increase taxes on different income brackets. Voters soundly rejected the tax in 2020, 55% to 45%.

  Williams also pointed to pension debt as a major issue for Illinois.

  “Whether it’s the massive amount of debt with Illinois’ public pension liabilities, whether we look at the income taxes on corporate income, personal income, down the line of all the things that we measure,” Williams said.

  ALEC’s rankings feature a new metric for 2021: how states spent their federal pandemic relief funds. Illinois still has an outstanding balance of unemployment debt that could be paid down using federal relief. A proposal to use $2.7 billion in federal funds falls short of the $4.5 billion debt and would trigger job-killing payroll taxesmandated by federal law to refill the unemployment trust fund.

  State leaders have also given Illinois’ economy another potential hit by pushing Amendment 1. If voters pass the constitutional change Nov. 8, public union bosses will be empowered to demand and strike over a virtually limitless array of issues guaranteed to drive up taxation in a state already suffering under the nation’s highest tax burden.

  Tyler Durden
  Thu, 03/31/2022 – 18:20

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• Canary Wharf Landlord To Build Giant Biolab In Former Financial Hub
  Canary Wharf Landlord To Build Giant Biolab In Former Financial Hub

  This seems like a strange place for a giant biolab.

  As East London’s famed Canary Wharf financial district struggles to rebound from the COVID pandemic that inspired the ‘work-from-home revolution’ (leaving many of the district’s skyscrapers disappointingly vacant) the local landlord, Canary Wharf Group, has devised a ‘novel’ solution.

  

  And that plan is: develop a 22-storey, 750,000 square foot block split between ‘wet labs’ and office space. The landlord hopes this new setup will ultimately provide the anchor for a thriving life-sciences cluster in East London (where the entire local economy has started to collapse due to a shortage of office workers to patronize local shops and other business). The project is expected to cost roughly $660 million.

  Here’s more from the FT:

  The company is partnering with Kadans Science Partner, a specialist Dutch developer, on the project, which is expected to cost at least £500mn to build according to people with knowledge of the matter.

  The project, due to complete in 2026, is a key part of CWG chief executive Shobi Khan’s vision to transform the area and attract a wider array of tenants. The Wharf had changed from “what the old guard knew it as”, said Khan.

  The financial district envisaged 30 years ago as a rival to the City of London was giving way to a mixed use neighbourhood with more leisure activities and homes, he added.

  Even before the pandemic, as more banking jobs moved to the Continent and elsewhere in the wake of Brexit, it’s pretty clear that the financial services industry isn’t coming to the rescue.

  “We’re down to 50 per cent financial services [tenants] and we’re broadening out to health and life sciences now. This is a city within a city,” he said.

  But while the pandemic has undermined demand for commercial office space (just ask Blackstone), it has inspired a revolution in the life sciences.

  About 120,000 people regularly worked at Canary Wharf before the pandemic, which stemmed the flow of workers to the area and starved local businesses of income. Khan said the number of people currently commuting in was at a pandemic high, but he would not give a figure. A number of landlords and institutions are investing in life sciences, confident that a focus on healthcare and scientific research – intensified by the pandemic – will keep demand for lab space rising.

  Canary Wharf will still need to compete against other ‘life sciences hubs’ in London, as they’re not the only ones who see opportunity in biolabs. Oxford, Cambridge and the area around King’s Cross in north London already have acres of lab space and are anchored by top universities and research facilities. Those areas, nicknamed the “golden triangle”, have attracted the bulk of recent investment into life sciences property in the UK.

  In other Canary Wharf news, staff at Citi’s Canary Wharf office are being forced to working from home after a major power failure across East London persisted into Wednesday, having knocked out computer networks and led to the activation of emergency electricity supplies, according to Bloomberg. HSBC, meanwhile, was forced to activate auxiliary generators at its headquarters in the district, per BBG.

  Tyler Durden
  Thu, 03/31/2022 – 02:45

• Escobar: How Mariupol Will Become A Key Hub Of Eurasian Integration
  Escobar: How Mariupol Will Become A Key Hub Of Eurasian Integration

  Authored by Pepe Escobar via The Cradle,

  Mariupol was battered by Ukraine’s right-wing Azov battalion well before Moscow launched its military ops. In Russian hands, this strategic steelworks port can transform into a hub of Eurasian connectivity…

  

  Mariupol, the strategic Sea of Azov port, remains in the eye of the storm in Ukraine.

  The NATO narrative is that Azovstal – one of Europe’s biggest iron and steel works – was nearly destroyed by the Russian Army and its allied Donetsk forces who “lay siege” to Mariupol.

  The true story is that the neo-Nazi Azov batallion took scores of Mariupol civilians as human shields since the start of the Russian military operation in Ukraine, and retreated to Azovstal as a last stand. After an ultimatum delivered last week, they are now being completely exterminated by the Russian and Donetsk forces and Chechen Spetsnaz.

  Azovstal, part of the Metinvest group controlled by Ukraine’s wealthiest oligarch, Rinat Akhmetov, is indeed one of the biggest metallurgic plants in Europe, self-described as a “high-performance integrated metallurgical enterprise that produces coke and sinter, steel as well as high-quality rolled products, bars and shapes.”

  Amidst a flurry of testimonials detailing the horrors inflicted by the Azov neo-Nazis on Mariupol’s civilian population, a way more auspicious, invisible story bodes well for the immediate future.

  Russia is the world’s fifth largest steel producer, apart from holding huge iron and coal deposits. Mariupol – a steel Mecca – used to source coal from Donbass, but under de facto neo-Nazi rule since the 2014 Maidan events, was turned into an importer. Iron, for instance, started to be supplied from Krivbas in Ukraine, over 200 kilometers away.

  After Donetsk solidifies itself as an independent republic or, via referendum, chooses to become part of the Russian Federation, this situation is bound to change.

  Azovstal is invested in a broad product line of very useful stuff: structural steel, rail for railroads, hardened steel for chains, mining equipment, rolled steel used in factory apparatus, trucks and railroad cars. Parts of the factory complex are quite modern while some, decades old, are badly in need of upgrading, which Russian industry can certainly provide.

  Strategically, this is a huge complex, right at the Sea of Azov, which is now, for all practical purposes, incorporated into the Donetsk People’s Republic, and close to the Black Sea. That implies a short trip to the Eastern Mediterranean, including many potential customers in West Asia. And crossing Suez and reaching the Indian Ocean, are customers all across South and Southeast Asia.

  So the Donetsk People’s Republic, possibly part of the future Novorossiya, and even part of Russia, will be in control of a lot of steel-making capacity for southern Europe, West Asia, and beyond.

  One of the inevitable consequences is that it will be able to supply a real freight railroad construction boom in Russia, China and the Central Asian ‘stans.’ Railroad construction happens to be the privileged connectivity mode for Beijing’s ambitious Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). And, crucially, of the increasingly turbo-charged International North South Transportation Corridor (INSTC).

  So, mid-term, Mariupol should expect to become one of the key hubs of a boom in north-south routes – INSTC across Russia and linking with the ‘stans’ – as well as major BRI upgrades east-west and sub-BRI corridors.

  Interlocked Eurasia

  The INSTC’s main players are Russia, Iran and India – which are now, post-NATO sanctions, in advanced interconnection mode, complete with devising mechanisms to bypass the US dollar in their trade. Azerbaijan is another important INSTC player, yet more volatile because it privileges Turkey’s connectivity designs in the Caucasus.

  The INSTC network will also be progressively interconnecting with Pakistan – and that means the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), a key BRI hub, which is slowly but surely expanding to Afghanistan. Foreign Minister Wang Yi’s impromptu visit to Kabul late last week was to advance the incorporation of Afghanistan to the New Silk Roads.

  All that is happening as Moscow – extremely close to New Delhi – is simultaneously expanding trade relations with Islamabad. All three, crucially, are Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) members.

  So the grand North-South design spells out fluent connectivity from the Russian mainland to the Caucasus (Azerbaijan), to West Asia (Iran) all the way to South Asia (India and Pakistan). None of these key players have demonized or sanctioned Russia despite ongoing US pressures to do so.

  Strategically, that represents the Russian multipolar concept of Greater Eurasian Partnership in action in terms of trade and connectivity – in parallel and complimentary with BRI because India, eager to install a rupee-ruble mechanism to buy energy, in this case is an absolutely crucial Russia partner, matching China’s reported $400 billion strategic deal with Iran. In practice, the Greater Eurasia Partnership will facilitate smoother connectivity between Russia, Iran, Pakistan and India.

  The NATO universe, meanwhile, is congenitally incapable of even recognizing the complexity of the alignment, not to mention analyze its implications. What we have is the interlocking of BRI, INTSC and the Greater Eurasia Partnership on the ground – all notions that are regarded as anathema in the Washington Beltway.

  All that of course is being designed amidst a game-changing geoeconomic moment, as Russia, starting this Thursday, will only accept payment for its gas in rubles from “unfriendly” nations.

  Parallel to the Greater Eurasia Partnership, BRI, since it was launched in 2013, is also progressively weaving a complex, integrated Eurasian network of partnerships: financial/economic, connectivity, physical infrastructure building, economic/trade corridors. BRI’s role as a co-shaper of institutions of global governance, including normative foundations, has also been crucial, much to the despair of the NATO alliance.

  Time to de-westernize

  Yet only now the Global South, especially, will start to observe the full spectrum of the China-Russia play across the Eurasian sphere. Moscow and Beijing are deeply involved in a joint drive to de-westernize globalist governance, if not shatter it altogether.

  Russia from now on will be even more meticulous in its institution-building, coalescing the Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU), the SCO and the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) – a Eurasian military alliance of select post-Soviet states – in a geopolitical context of irreversible institutional and normative divide between Russia and the West.

  At the same time, the Greater Eurasia Partnership will be solidifying Russia as the ultimate Eurasian bridge, creating a common space across Eurasia which could even ignore vassalized Europe.

  Meanwhile in real life, BRI, as much as the INSTC, will be increasingly plugged into the Black Sea (hello, Mariupol). And BRI itself may even be prone to re-evaluation in its emphasis of linking western China to western Europe’s shrinking industrial base.

  There will be no point in privileging the northern BRI corridors – China-Mongolia-Russia via the Trans-Siberian, and the Eurasian land bridge via Kazakhstan – when you have Europe descending into medieval dementia.

  BRI’s renewed focus will be on gaining access to irreplaceable commodities – and that means Russia – as well as securing essential supplies for Chinese production. Commodity-rich nations, such as Kazakhstan and many players in Africa, shall become the top future markets for China.

  In a pre-Covid loop across Central Asia, one constantly heard that China builds plants and high-speed railways while Europe at best writes white papers. It can always get worse.

  The EU as occupied American territory is now descending, fast, from center of global power to the status of inconsequential peripheral player, a mere struggling market in the far periphery of China’s “community of shared destiny.”

  Tyler Durden
  Thu, 03/31/2022 – 02:00

• Brandon Smith: Leftists Are Angry About The Florida Anti-Grooming Law Because They Want Your Children
  Brandon Smith: Leftists Are Angry About The Florida Anti-Grooming Law Because They Want Your Children

  Authored by Brandon Smith via Alt-Market.us,

  Why would someone be enraged by a law that prevents teachers from exposing children to sexual indoctrination and demands parents are kept in the loop on classroom lessons? It’s obvious; they’re mad because they like the idea of grooming kids and they don’t want the process interfered with in any way.

  

  First, however, I think we need to understand what grooming really is, and it’s not only about sex. One of the most pervasive cancers within our society today is social justice based communism. In every way the ideology is predicated on lies and disinformation, but this deceit is merely a tool to achieve an end goal – The reeducation or brainwashing of future generations into the leftist fold.

  Leftists often talk about notions of “community,” but community is a voluntary structure. When they say they want “community” what they really mean is that they want collectivism, and collectivism is by definition NOT voluntary but forced through violence or coercion or propaganda. To these ends, leftists seem to have gravitated like sharks into the public school system, specifically to prey on the easiest targets in the ocean; your children.

  I’ve recently heard the argument that the Florida bill should not be called an Anti-Grooming bill because “not all gay people are groomers.” I don’t think anyone made that claim anyway. What we are saying, though, is that all SJWs are indeed groomers and this is the root problem.

  They have been doing this in subtle ways for many years, but in the past 5 years their methods have become rather careless and obscene. The grooming of children in today’s public schools is not only relegated to sexualization, it also involves ideological molding and cultism. When leftists refer to Florida Bill 1557 they call it the “Don’t Say Gay Bill,” but this has nothing to do with the basic notion of homosexuality, this is about the political weaponization of homosexuality and transexuality (among other things). This is about using sexual orientation to propagandize children and create new little soldiers for communist social justice.

  Just as I have said many times in the past when it comes to pop culture and movies, the existence of gay people or “diversity” is not the problem, it’s the communism that’s the problem. We don’t want your communism infecting our entertainment and we certainly don’t want it around our children. Set aside the fact that there is no science whatsoever to support the concepts of gender fluidity that are usually addressed in these lessons.

  Some Florida teachers and SJWs are up in arms this week as Governor Ron DeSantis signs the dreaded 1557 bill into law. The claim? That this bill is somehow a violation of their free speech rights. Watch the news report below for an example:

  First, I think this needs to be said – Public school teachers are not important. I’m sure there are many good ones out there and this is not an attack on them. What I am saying is, the glorification and worship of teachers is out of place in our society and completely overblown. At some point along the line leftists in particular decided that teachers are the emissaries of moral order and equity and their jobs should be treated as sacrosanct. This is nonsense.

  Teachers are mere employees of the district they work in, that is all. Parents pay the taxes that pay their salaries. The parents are the employers, the parents are the boss and what they say goes. Teachers need to understand this; the parents own you, so get used to the idea. You are not special.

  Furthermore, the views expressed in the interview with the gay Florida teacher above showcase some unhinged misconceptions and assumptions. First, the new law does not say that a teacher is not allowed to mention they are gay, but frankly, NO teacher should be discussing their private lives with their students anyway. At no point in my childhood did I ever hear a teacher talk about their home lives or who they were sleeping with; this is a new trend within the past decade. Not long ago teachers specifically avoided such idiocy in order to prevent rumors from circulating through the school halls about them.

  And yes, we did have at least one gay teacher, and he never discussed it in the classroom, ever. His job was not under threat for doing so, he was just a professional.

  This kind of professionalism is not acceptable to leftists because they view the classroom as more than just a place of academia, they view it as a place for engineering conformity, as well as a personal therapy bubble for themselves. I can’t count how many videos I have seen in the past few years of teachers “coming out” to their students in a desperate play for attention and applause. The narcissism inherent in this behavior is stunning. Teachers have turned theirs classrooms into environmental extensions of their own mental deformities and insecurities and now lay these problems in the hands students.

  The invasion of trans and gender fluid rhetoric, along with critical race theory, is at times about the ego of the teacher, but it is also at times a game meant to inspire submission in the group. When a teacher walks into a classroom and starts bloviating about their sexual identity and pronouns looking for approval from the children, how often are those children allowed to disagree with the concepts? When they do disagree, how often do these teachers use their position of authority to hound these students into silence or submission? How often do teachers inspire mob mentality in other students and encourage them to go on the attack against any kids who don’t conform?

  This is a major threat to the psychological health and development of children. Florida leftists are complaining that they must now walk on eggshells in terms of what they say in the classroom, but they have never had a problem making students walk on eggshells when it comes to what they are allowed to disagree with in the classroom.

  The interesting thing about all this is the SJW response to being called out, or being caught. Even after years of bragging about how they are indoctrinating children in their classes all over social media, they will inevitably claim that laws like those implemented in the Florida bill are pointless because the agenda “doesn’t exist.” That’s right, all that excited blabbering on twitter and Tiktok about luring kids into gender bending and the religion of pronouns, and suddenly conservatives are just “overreacting” or “paranoid?” In countries like Canada, LGBT indoctrination is the norm in some schools and has been for several years, yet we are supposed to believe that there is no plan to do the same in the US?

  LGBT activists have declared in the past that they are “coming for our children.” The typical M.O. of leftist activists is to openly admit their agenda and then when they get blowback they didn’t expect they claim it was all “satire.” You remember this little gem of a video?

  Leftists say this is all little more than a joke, but their actions say otherwise. Monty Python is satire. Blazing Saddles is satire. The above video is definitely not satire. Leftists in our modern era have no understanding of satire so the argument rings pretty hollow. They do understand gaslighting though, and when all else fails SJWs exploit this common fallback. It’s in their nature to lie while doubling down.

  At bottom, if there is no need for the Florida law to exist because there is no indoctrination going on in classrooms, then these teachers have nothing to worry about and should not be complaining. Why complain if there is no agenda?

  It is here that I think we need to address a bigger issue which SJWs often screech about, and that’s the idea of “Gatekeeping.” I’m going to say it right here and now: GATEKEEPING IS GOOD. It always has been and it always will be. The idea that we must be accepting of everyone all the time is foolish and insane. Some people are not compatible with truth or with reason, and they need to be kept away from vulnerable institutions such as schools and away from innocent children that make up the lifeblood of our future.

  The conservative argument has always been that not all change is good, and not all change is progress. Some changes are regressive rather than progressive. Some changes are simply designed to do harm, and some people are simply evil. Discrimination in some respects is absolutely necessary in order for our core values and principles to survive. There are times when discrimination is necessary for our very nation and culture to survive.

  Leftists always turn to the old standby argument when they are faced with the prospect that the culture at large does not want them around; they cry that “We live in a democracy” and inclusion is somehow a prerequisite. In other words, if you go against them you are going against your own values of freedom. This is nonsense.

  We are not a democracy, of course, we are a democratic republic and there is a big difference, but that is a discussion for another article. According to the non-aggression principle, freedom does not apply to the people that are trying to destroy it. Leftists do not get to target freedom for destruction and then cry victim and proclaim their love of freedom when people get in their way. Gatekeeping is good because certain pillars of our society need to be kept inoculated against the destructive methods of the political left. These people do not belong here. They do not deserve freedom, and they do not deserve to live among people that actually love freedom.

  The debate on anti-grooming is really a debate on the necessity of gatekeeping. Leftists support it when they think they are in control and they attack it when they think it’s going to be used against them. I can’t imagine any area of our culture more vital to protect than our children; and this is where gatekeeping must be employed with full force and without mercy. Florida is doing it right, let’s hope the rest of the country follows their example.

  *  *  *

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  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 03/30/2022 – 23:40

• Half Of Russia's 20 Richest Men Haven't Been Targeted By Western Sanctions
  Half Of Russia’s 20 Richest Men Haven’t Been Targeted By Western Sanctions

  Since the Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014, 20 Russian billionaires have been sanctioned by the EU, US, UK, Switzerland, or Canada. But for every Russian oligarch who has been targeted by Western sanctions, there’s another who has slipped under the radar, and who is still free to largely go about their business abroad without any constraints.

  Half of Russia’s 20 richest people have not been sanctioned over its war in Ukraine, leaving a group of super-rich, powerful billionaires free to operate around the world without legal restriction.

  As we have previously reported, Russian oligarchs with a combined net worth of about $200 billion have been sanctioned. But according to Bloomberg, the patchwork pattern of cross-border penalties that has spared many Russians with “business interests in key global markets.” The UK has sanctioned 10 of the richest billionaires and the EU nine. By contrast, the US has sanctioned just four. And while three men feature on all three lists, four of Russia’s five richest men haven’t been sanctioned anywhere.

  Energy executive Leonid Mikhelson, steel tycoon Vladimir Lisin and Vagit Alekperov, chairman of oil giant Lukoil are among the other richest Russians who have not been sanctioned. All own significant holdings of publicly traded companies operating in Russia’s highly politicized business environment, according to Bloomberg.

  The most notable member of this group is Russia’s richest man, Vladimir Potanin. A metals magnate who was worth $30 billion on Feb. 18, the final day from which data are available.

  

  Source: Bloomberg

  Moving beyond Russia, western sanctions impact hundreds of people worldwide, with the UK leading the US and EU in terms of the number of sanctioned individuals. Meanwhile, fewer than 300 people face sanctions from the US, UK and Europe.

  

  Source: Bloomberg

  And here’s a rundown of the richest unsanctioned Russians ranked in terms of net worth.

  

  Source: Bloomberg

  While Russia’s incursion into Ukraine inspired the west to “supercharge” their sanctions regimes, the fact is that most of those targeted were already facing some level of sanctions before the war began.

  

  Source: Bloomberg

  That means most of those who have been sanctioned in recent weeks have already had years to develop strategies to blunt the impact of sanctions. For example, after being targeted by sanctions, steel baron Alexey Mordashov transferred his majority stake in gold miner Nordgold to his wife, Marina. Most oligarchs have real estate ownership in relatives’ names or have assets registered in tax havens like the British Virgin Islands or the Isle of Man. It’s a strategy that has also purportedly been used by President Putin himself.

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 03/30/2022 – 23:20

• For The First Time Ever, Over 20% Of Post-Lockdown Americans Are "Not Too Happy"
  For The First Time Ever, Over 20% Of Post-Lockdown Americans Are “Not Too Happy”

  Authored by Paul Joseph Watson via Summit News,

  The long-running General Social Survey has found that more than 20 per cent of post-lockdown Americans describe themselves as “not too happy” for the first time since the survey began in 1972.

  

  Respondents to the survey were asked, “Taken all together, how would you say things are these days—would you say that you are very happy, pretty happy, or not too happy?”

  “The percentage of Americans saying “not too happy” has been consistently below 20% since the question was first posed in 1972,” writes Noah Carl.

  “But in the latest survey, something rather concerning happened: there was a dramatic rise in the percentage saying “not too happy” – from less than 15% in 2018 to more than 22% in 2021.”

  In addition, in 2018, the percentage of Americans who described themselves as “very happy” stood at 30 per cent. Four years later, post-lockdown, it’s below 20 per cent.

  “Changes of this magnitude in social surveys are extremely rare, especially when it comes to questions like the one about happiness,” points out Carl, suggesting that the dramatic drop in happiness could have been caused by lockdown measures.

  He points to a 2021 Gallup survey which found that 12 per cent of Americans said they were “very dissatisfied” with their quality of life, up from just 4 per cent the year before.

  Carl explains how loss of life due to COVID isn’t likely to explain the increase in depression.

  “Well, we know that the fall in life expectancy in the U.S. in 2020 was ‘only’ about 1.8 years, and part of that fall was due to the massive increase in homicide. Now, 1.8 years sounds big, and it is a large year-on-year change. But it only takes the country back 18 years in terms of rising life expectancy.”

  “In other words, U.S. life expectancy was lower in 2001, 2000, 1999 and every year before that. Yet, as we can see in the chart above, happiness was substantially higher back then. In fact, it was substantially higher in the 1970s – when life expectancy was up to six years lower than in 2020.”

  “This suggests that the response to the pandemic – including lockdowns, mandates and the spreading of fear by the media – is a more plausible explanation for the drop in happiness than the pandemic itself,” he concludes.

  As we previously highlighted, COVID-19 lockdowns were found to have been a major contributing factor to a doubling in attempted suicides of those aged between 5-25 in Australia.

  A study released last month by the renowned Johns Hopkins University concluded that global lockdowns have had a much more detrimental impact on society than they have produced any benefit, with researchers urging that they “are ill-founded and should be rejected as a pandemic policy instrument.”

  *  *  *

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  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 03/30/2022 – 23:00

• NYC Office Glut Hit Highs Not Seen Since Dot-Com Bust
  NYC Office Glut Hit Highs Not Seen Since Dot-Com Bust

  Since the virus pandemic, Manhattan landlords have been struggling with a glut of commercial real estate properties as companies shrink corporate footprints and implement hybrid work models that allow white-collar workers to work remotely. 

  Demand for office space in NYC was dismal in the first quarter. Space available hit another record high as the availability rate across the metro area hit 19%, the highest since the dark days of the Dot Com bust (2000), according to Bloomberg, citing a new report from Savills Research.

  A quarter of all offices were dormant in the Financial District, compared with 17% a year ago. Savills attributes the jump to a pair of redevelopment projects, including the former Deutsche Bank headquarters building.

  

  Firms searching for space focus on “new top-tier space,” said Sarah Dreyer, senior vice president of research and data services at Savills. Asking rents for new buildings in the quarter were up 1.7% to $77.34 a square foot. Average rents in the Financial District were $57.60 a square foot, compared to $83.70 in Midtown.

  There will be no recovery in the city’s office sector unless workers return to the office. 

  Keycard swipes tracked by security company Kastle Systems show NYC offices are about 36% occupied, far below pre-COVID levels. Even as companies announced return-to-office dates, many implemented a hybrid work model that allows white-collar workers to work remotely part of the time. Some companies have entirely reduced their corporate footprint and enforced remote working for some employees. 

  

  Without white-collar workers, economic recovery will be slow to materialize in the city as the 7.6% unemployment rate is shockingly high compared with the rest of the country (nationwide average of 3.8%). The ripple effect of reduced officer workers damns the local economy. 

  The Partnership for New York City business group published a recent survey showing that only 16% of top NYC firms say daily attendance in their Manhattan office was above 50%. The poll showed that about 75% of employers delayed return-to-office plans due to a spike in COVID infections year, and 22% said they don’t have a timeline on when offices will be full again. 

  The news of the world’s largest owner of commercial real estate, Blackstone, giving up on one of its Midtown Manhattan office buildings is an ominous sign for the city’s office sector. 

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 03/30/2022 – 22:40

• Biden's "New World Order"
  Biden’s “New World Order”

  Submitted by Pete Hoekstra of Gatestone Institute.

  • Clearly, America is not leading the “green” new world order, and Biden seems to have no meaningful plan for how to get us there other than radical disruptions to our lifestyle and a heightened reliance on China.

  • When it comes to oil and gas, it seems Biden’s new world order would continue his policy of decreasing American energy independence and increasing U.S. reliance on bad-faith state actors — thereby ironically funding their efforts to undermine America in the global order.

  • What does Biden’s record in the Middle East suggest that the new world order will resemble there? Well, the president is pushing to sign an agreement brokered by Russia, and backed by China, reportedly to remove sanctions on Iran, delist Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as the terrorist organization it is, and allow Russia to purchase Iran’s “excess” enriched uranium — perhaps to use against its next “Ukraine”?

  • Finally, what is Biden’s vision for this new world order with China? The message could not be more mixed. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) continues its genocide against the Uyghurs in Xinjiang, suppressing freedoms in Hong Kong, militarizing at least three of the artificial islands it built in the South China Sea, perfecting hypersonic missiles and “satellite crushers”, threatening Taiwan, and signing new friendship agreements with Russia. Meanwhile the Biden administration was sharing intelligence about Russia with China. Apparently, the administration had some quixotic hope that China would join the U.S. in discouraging Russia from attacking. At the same time, it turns out, China was sharing its intelligence information from the U.S. with Russia. One can only wonder who came up with the crazy idea that the CCP would join with the U.S. in maintaining order and stability in Europe.

  • Apparently, the administration had some quixotic hope that China would join the U.S. in discouraging Russia from attacking. One can only wonder who came up with the crazy idea that the CCP would join with the U.S. in maintaining order and stability in Europe.

  • Indeed, Biden’s vision of a new world order led by America looks more and more like a new world of disorder.

  • So, while it is not clear what Biden meant when he referenced America leading a new world order, his record over the last 15 months suggests it consists of a weakened U.S. economy hamstrung by inflation, war in Europe, unraveling alliances in the Middle East and growing uncertainty in Asia.

  • If this is the unintended consequence of Biden’s new world order, it is time for him to go back to the drawing board. The world has suffered enough. The time has come for him to recalibrate the global nightmare that his policies have created.

  

  U.S. President Joe Biden recently closed his remarks to the Business Roundtable with a confusing reference to a “new world order.” He stated, according to the White House transcript of his speech:

  “It occurs every three or four generations. … [A] time when things are shifting. We’re going to — there’s going to be a new world order out there, and we’ve got to lead it. And we’ve got to unite the rest of the free world in doing it.”

  What was the president talking about? It came at the end of his speech; he did not elaborate on what he meant. Presumably he was referring to the ongoing shifts in the post-World War II global power structures, but does Biden have a plan for America’s role in what this new world order would look like, as Europe finds itself potentially engulfed in a major war?

  The American people are left to find the clues and try to figure out what Biden might have meant. The best we can do is turn to the policies he has implemented during his first 15 months in office to see if any elements of his plan for America in this “new world order” can be discerned.

  The central animating policy push for Biden and the Democrats has been the “Green New Deal.” Given America’s vast energy reserves and technological know-how, will the U.S. lead in “greening” the planet and providing safe, stable energy supplies to the West and its allies and partners? The short answer seems to be no. China dominates in the production of rare earth materials, solar panels and windmills; six of the top 10 manufacturers are based in Communist China. Clearly, America is not leading the “green” new world order, and Biden seems to have no meaningful plan for how to get us there other than radical disruptions to our lifestyle and a heightened reliance on China.

  Other Biden energy decisions are just as baffling. When he took office, Biden killed the Keystone XL pipeline in America, but greenlit Russia’s Nord Stream 2 pipeline that would lock in Europe’s dependence on Russia for gas. He also opposed congressional efforts to sanction the pipeline in the run-up to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. As U.S. Ambassador to the Netherlands, I was a vocal proponent of the Trump administration’s policy to oppose Nord Stream 2. Along the same lines, Biden, on his first day in office, unequivocally accepted the Paris Agreement on climate, reentering America into this deeply flawed pact.

  Rather than support America’s energy independence and oil and gas production, Biden has left American consumers holding the bag as gasoline prices in the U.S. have spiked to anywhere from $4 to $7 per gallon of gas. The energy crisis is so bad that the Biden administration is talking about purchasing oil from Iran and Venezuela. When it comes to oil and gas, it seems Biden’s new world order would continue his policy of decreasing American energy independence and increasing U.S. reliance on bad-faith state actors — thereby ironically funding their efforts to undermine America in the global order.

  Is the Europe of today, a continent consumed by the fear of war with Russia, part of Biden’s vision for a new world order? His backing for Nord Stream 2 only seemed to embolden Russia, and his the undermining of U.S. production left America buying a half million barrels of oil per day from Russia. At $110 per barrel, American taxpayers are therefore funding Russia’s war machine by more than $20 billion a year. Since the administration’s gifts to Russia — the Nord Stream 2 pipeline and extending the New START Treaty for another five years — have not worked out for the U.S., the people of Ukraine, or Europe, is Biden modifying or reconsidering his plan for a new world order? In an interview aired the day Russia invaded Ukraine, Biden administration “climate czar” John Kerry showed that the administration was still consumed by its “Green New Deal” fantasies, lamenting:

  “But equally importantly, you’re going to lose people’s focus… I hope President Putin will help us to stay on track with respect to what we need to do for the climate.”

  We are left to wonder if any number of decisions made by the administration prior to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine would have changed Russian President Vladimir Putin’s calculus for the war. What if Biden had not signed off on Nord Stream 2 and had, instead, kept the Trump administration’s policy in place? What if Biden had heeded calls by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and members of Congress to enact sanctions prior to Putin’s invasion? What if Biden had decided to lead instead of follow Europe? Apparently, in Biden’s new world order, America does not lead, it only follows or reacts to others.

  What does Biden’s record in the Middle East suggest that the new world order will resemble there? Well, the president is pushing to sign an agreement brokered by Russia, and backed by China, reportedly to remove sanctions on Iran, delist Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as the terrorist organization it is, and allow Russia to purchase Iran’s “excess” enriched uranium — perhaps to use against its next “Ukraine”?

  The president’s confusing desperation to reenter the bad Obama-era nuclear deal with Iran is driving U.S. allies such as Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates to question their relationship with the U.S., and evidently moving them at least to consider strengthening their ties with Russia and China. Israel has tried to balance the U.S. and Russia on Ukraine. Saudi and UAE leaders have declined to take calls from Biden but did take calls from Putin. It also cannot be missed that just prior to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Russia, China and Iran conducted joint military drills.

  Finally, what is Biden’s vision for this new world order with China? The message could not be more mixed. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) continues its genocide against the Uyghurs in Xinjiang, suppressing freedoms in Hong Kong, militarizing at least three of the artificial islands it built in the South China Sea, perfecting hypersonic missiles and “satellite crushers“, threatening Taiwan, and signing new friendship agreements with Russia. Meanwhile the Biden administration was sharing intelligence about Russia with China. Apparently, the administration had some quixotic hope that China would join the U.S. in discouraging Russia from attacking. At the same time, it turns out, China was sharing its intelligence information from the U.S. with Russia. One can only wonder who came up with the crazy idea that the CCP would join with the U.S. in maintaining order and stability in Europe.

  Indeed, Biden’s vision of a new world order led by America looks more and more like a new world of disorder. Instead of articulating a clear vision of American leadership, our actions on the world stage have been directed by Russia, Iran, China, and even Europe. The situation has undermined America’s ties to its traditional allies; they seem to be having difficulty understanding the president’s global vision, and seeing the new world order evolving to one where America leads, but only from behind, in reaction to the whims of others.

  So, while it is not clear what Biden meant when he referenced America leading a new world order, his record over the last 15 months suggests it consists of a weakened U.S. economy hamstrung by inflation, war in Europe, unraveling alliances in the Middle East and growing uncertainty in Asia.

  If this is the unintended consequence of Biden’s new world order, it is time for him to go back to the drawing board. The world has suffered enough. The time has come for him to recalibrate the global nightmare that his policies have created.

  *  *  *

  Peter Hoekstra was US Ambassador to the Netherlands during the Trump administration. He served 18 years in the U.S. House of Representatives representing the second district of Michigan and served as Chairman and Ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee.

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 03/30/2022 – 22:20

• Tesla Signed A "Secret Deal" To Sidestep The Spike In Nickel Prices
  Tesla Signed A “Secret Deal” To Sidestep The Spike In Nickel Prices

  As the aftershocks of unprecedented volatility in the nickel market continue to play out, one area of collateral damage that has been in focus has been the electric vehicle market.

  Nickel prices, despite falling from highs, still remain at roughly double what they were just months ago and the metal is a key component for electric vehicle manufacturers, as it is used in EV batteries.

  But it Looks as though the world’s most well-known EV manufacturer, Tesla, has been able to sidestep the volatility in the market through a “secret” deal it has made with mining company Vale. 

  

  Bloomberg reported this morning that a multiyear supply deal for nickel has been in place and covers nickel from Canada. “Unlike most of its peer automakers, Tesla has spent years focusing on how to secure its own nickel supplies,” the report says. 

  Gene Munster of Loup Ventures said: “What Tesla has done with nickel is a hidden competitive advantage. Tesla continues to be a couple of steps ahead of the rest.”

  And Munster is right, in that Musk has “repeatedly” flagged nickel as a concern for the company amidst broader sector demand that is expected to more than triple by 2030. 

  On an earnings call two years ago, CEO Elon Musk urged: “Please mine more nickel. Tesla will give you a giant contract for a long period of time if you mine nickel efficiently and in an environmentally sensitive way.”

  Meanwhile, other EV manufacturers are left scrambling. “The nickel price surge and the implications from the Russia-Ukraine invasion are likely to push battery manufacturers, particularly in the U.S., to secure alternate supply chains,” Bloomberg wrote.

  

  Tesla’s “secret deal” is one of many it has put in place over the last year, the report says. 

  Todd Malan of Talon Metals, who Tesla also buys from, said: “People don’t realize how far ahead Tesla is when it comes to securing the supply chain for raw materials and an integrated approach to battery materials.”

  Vale, meanwhile, has said it plans on increasing its sales to the EV market between 30% and 40%, from 5%. 

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 03/30/2022 – 22:00

• Fifth COVID-19 Vaccine Shot May Be Needed In Fall: FDA Official
  Fifth COVID-19 Vaccine Shot May Be Needed In Fall: FDA Official

  Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

  Hours after the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) authorized a fourth shot of the Moderna and Pfizer COVID-19 vaccines for all Americans 50 and older, an FDA official said a fifth shot may be needed in the fall.

  “I don’t want to shock anyone but there may be a need for people to get an additional booster in the fall, along with a more general booster campaign if that takes place, because we may need to shift over to a different variant coverage,” Dr. Peter Marks, head of the FDA center that regulates vaccines, told reporters on a call on March 29.

  

  The fresh emergency use authorization is for a fourth shot for Americans 50 and up and a fifth shot for people as young as 12 with weakened immune systems. The boosters from Moderna and Pfizer target the strain of SARS-CoV-2, or the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus, that was circulating in early 2021. Multiple strains have since emerged and become dominant in the United States. Omicron is the latest.

  Moderna and Pfizer are testing vaccine formulations that specifically target Omicron.

  “It may be that a decision is made that rather than what we currently have, the vaccines we currently have—which are called vaccines against the prototype virus—that we will move to a vaccine that is either against one of the variants—whether it’s Omicron, Beta, or Delta, or something else, I can’t say right now that’s for discussion—or whether it’s some mix of different ones,” Marks said. “But it’s possible that people will need to get another vaccine.”

  The FDA authorized the outdated boosters because regulators felt doing so could save lives and because it will likely take several months to discern whether an Omicron-specific booster works, he added.

  “And it’s not actually clear yet what the optimal booster should be,” Marks said.

  The matter will be discussed during an April 6 meeting with the FDA’s expert advisory committee.

  Some experts have raised concerns about repeatedly injecting people with COVID-19 vaccines. The worries stem in part from the main vaccines being built on a technology, messenger RNA, that had never been cleared for use before the pandemic, with others noting that other vaccines provide sufficient protection through shots administered annually, or at less frequent intervals.

  If repeated boosters are administered, “we will end up potentially having problems with immune response and immune response may end up not being as good as we would like it to be, so we should be careful in not overloading the immune system with repeated immunization,” Marco Cavaleri, the European Medicines Agency’s (EMA) head of vaccines strategy, told a briefing in January.

  Dr. Robert Malone, who helped invent the mRNA technology, said research he’s reviewed indicates the vaccines can lead to immune suppression, a condition where the body’s natural immune system is weakened against all kinds of infection and disease.

  “This is the risk associated with this strategy of reboosting,” he told The Epoch Times.

  Presented with Marks’ remarks, Malone said they were “pure speculation and unfounded.”

  “That’s a forward looking statement. There’s no scientific basis for evaluating it. And it’s inappropriate for the FDA to be speculating like that, in my opinion,” he said.

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 03/30/2022 – 21:40

• Shanghai Authorities Extend COVID Lockdown As Cases Continue To Surge
  Shanghai Authorities Extend COVID Lockdown As Cases Continue To Surge

  As Shanghaiers struggle with shortages of food and medicine, while workers (both blue-collar factory workers and highly remunerated bankers and traders) are forced to bed down at work for what could be a lengthy stay, local authorities have provided the first hint that the staggered Shanghai lockdown could last longer than the 9 days it was originally slated for.

  

  Reuters reports that local authorities have begun locking down some western parts of Shanghai two days ahead of schedule as the number of new cases detected in China’s most populous city increased by one-third despite stringent measures already in place to try to stop the virus spreading. The city’s lockdown is only in its third day.

  While residents in the eastern part of the city have been locked down since Monday, those in the west were previously scheduled to start their four-day lockdown on Friday. Now, they’re being told to prepare for the lockdown to begin immediately.

  Several residents living in western districts on Tuesday received notice from their housing committees that they would be stopped from leaving their compounds for the next seven days.

  “We will resume normal life soon, but in the next period of time we ask everyone to adhere closely to pandemic control measures, do not gather, and reduce movements,” said one housing committee notice seen by Reuters.

  Meanwhile the city’s southwestern district of Minhang, home to more than 2.5 million people, said it would suspend public bus services until April 5.

  It’s widely expected that locking down Shanghai could have a serious impact on China’s economic growth. According to economists at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, locking down Shanghai full-scale could result in a 4% reduction in the national real gross domestic product, economists at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Tsinghua University and other institutes estimated in mid-March.

  On Wednesday, Shanghai reported a record 5,656 asymptomatic COVID cases and 326 symptomatic cases, up from 4,381 new asymptomatic cases and 96 symptomatic cases during the prior day.

  

  Source: Reuters

  Shanghai authorities said Wednesday that they had conducted 9.1 million nucleic acid tests. They also said they planned to disinfect office buildings, construction sites, wet markets and schools in a month-long campaign to try and stamp out the virus.

  China’s “dynamic clearance” approach means it aims to clear all cases, and all people who test positive are sent to central quarantine centers or hospitals. Close contacts and neighbors must quarantine at home.

  Many across the city have taken to social media to vent their frustrations in lockdown, posting videos and images of crowded quarantine centers and issuing cries for help for food and medical supplies, while grotesque robots bark orders at them.

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 03/30/2022 – 21:20

• Oil Slides As Biden Admin Mulls Huge SPR Release (Again)
  Oil Slides As Biden Admin Mulls Huge SPR Release (Again)

  Tell us if you’ve heard this one before…

  For those keeping score, we believe this is the third time in the last month that the Biden administration has tried to jawbone crude oil prices lower with an ever-increasing ‘threat’ of releases from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve.

  This time is different though as Bloomberg reports that, according to people familiar with the matter, the Biden administration is weighing a plan to release roughly one million barrels of oil a day for several months. The total release may be as much as 180 million barrels, the people said, which is quite a step up from the 30mm barrel release ‘mulled’ on March 25th (yes 5 days ago).

  The instant reaction from the algos was to sell, knocking WTI down around 4%…

  

  However… as much as we want lower gas prices, these actions by the administration are bordering on the insane.

  Of course, just like last year’s SPR release, which actually sent oil prices higher as the strategy backfired spectacularly, another shot of supplies from the reserve would probably be futile.

  To further illustrate this point, the chart below shows that a release of 180M barrels from the reserve (which is supposed to be reserved for emergencies) would take the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to its lowest since 1984…and so far has done absolutely nothing to slow the surge in prices…

  

  In fact, this time around, it’s possible – even likely – that the backlash could be even more punishing, since, when adjusted for the present level of implied demand, SPR levels are already at their lowest levels since 2002, with just 33 days of supply.

  

  But like the old saying goes: if at first you don’t succeed, then try, try again. In all likelihood, President Biden and his team probably aren’t all that concerned with the short-term market impact, since political decisions like these are all about optics anyway.

  Of course, Einstein seems to have been right: “insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”

  And when this SPR release (should it ever actually happen) fails to do much of anything to drive prices lower, how much longer until the administration resorts to the next logical steps, being 1) gas stimmies (like our European allies) before 2) price controls?

  Bear in mind that OPEC+ is still shunning any demands from Biden to increase production ‘for the sake of global democracy….or his approval ratings or some such…’ and the cartel is widely expected to ratify a production increase of 432,000 barrels a day for May.

  Simply put, as old saying goes, the cure for high oil (gas) prices, is high oil (gas prices), and notably, there is some evidence of demand destruction starting to happen as gas prices soar to record highs.

  And as we noted earlier today, the decline in implied gasoline demand is fairly concrete proof that record high prices are dampening consumption across the country.

  

  On a four-week moving average basis, demand appeared to have stalled out around 8.8 million barrels a day as levels fell behind seasonal trends. Now, it appears to have fully turned around, falling 61,000 barrels a day week on week.

  However, of course there is government intervention to consider, consumer subsidies may actually worsen the situation by limiting demand destruction, with California, France, Brazil and Mexico being the latest to enact policies to cut prices at the pump.

  We give the last words to @RufusXavierSar2 who succinctly summed up the real farce of all this desperation…

  That’s great until the SPR is empty and we have a real oil shock

  — RufusXavierSarsaparilla (@RufusXavierSar2) March 31, 2022

  https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

  And don’t expect any short-term help from this modest drop in oil…

  

  Sadly for Biden’s approval rating (and drivers across the country), the recent resurgence in crude prices suggest pump prices will soon be on the rise again.

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 03/30/2022 – 20:59

• White House Cites Intel Claiming Putin Being "Misled" By His Own Generals On War's Progress
  White House Cites Intel Claiming Putin Being “Misled” By His Own Generals On War’s Progress

  Update(1640ET): The White House has made the unexpected and unusual claim Wednesday that Russia’s military is currently misleading its commander-in-chief Vladimir Putin about the true state of the battlefield and Russian forces’ advance inside Ukraine. A White House spokesperson said the US has information that points to Putin being “misled” by his generals. 

  “We believe that Putin is being misinformed by his advisors about how badly the Russian military is performing, and how the Russian economy is being crippled by sanctions because his senior advisors are too afraid to tell him the truth,” White House Communications Director Kate Bedingfield told a press briefing.

  “We have information that Putin felt misled by the Russian military. There is now persistent tension between Putin and the (Ministry of Defence), stemming from Putin’s mistrust in MOD leadership,” the US official asserted further. An earlier in the day CNN report coupled the ‘misinformation’ that Putin may be getting also with the extent of sanctions impact on the Russian economy. The report said:

  The US believes that Russian President Vladimir Putin is being “misinformed” by his advisers about how badly the Russian military is performing in Ukraine and the impact of sanctions on Russia’s economy, a US official tells CNN.

  …The official said the assessment is based on declassified US intelligence findings.

  WH Comms. Director Kate Bedingfield asked about releasing the report on Putin’s tension with advisers:

  Reporter: “I’m wondering if this is partially just an effort to embarrass Vladimir Putin?”

  Bedingfield: “Our aim is to show that this has been a strategic blunder.” pic.twitter.com/u0sCnsqYbE

  — The Recount (@therecount) March 30, 2022

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  This has reportedly led to a rift between Putin and his top defense staff – who feel “afraid”. CNN added this almost hard to believe line as well:

  The official said Putin did not know his military was “using and losing conscripts in Ukraine, showing a clear breakdown in the flow of accurate information to the Russian president.”

  MORE: US intel finds “#Putin didn’t even know his military was using & losing conscripts in #Ukraine” per a US official

  US sees “a clear breakdown in the flow of accurate information to the Russian President” per the official

  — Jeff Seldin (@jseldin) March 30, 2022

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  The Pentagon backed the White House assessment, saying the following in its afternoon briefing:

  Russian President Vladimir Putin has “not been fully informed by his Ministry of Defense at every turn” throughout the course of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Pentagon spokesperson John Kirby said during a briefing at the Pentagon on Wednesday.  

  Kirby did not offer any details that led to this assessment.

  Kirby said the US does not have “access to every bit of information that” Putin has been given or “every conversation that he’s had,” but he said he concurs with the “basic finding” of press reporting that Putin has not been fully informed by his Defense Ministry of the situation in Ukraine. 

  The Pentagon statement by Kirby seemed more in the realm of guesswork based on ‘open source’ intel and the media. Recent Western media reporting has alleged Russian casualty figures which are far more than what the Kremlin has publicly reported. For example a Daily Mail headline this week said 17,000 Russian troop deaths – but crucially the figure appears sourced entirely to Ukrainian officials.

  Speculation abounds as to how the Kremlin arrived at the decision to apparently limit the scope of operations to focus on liberating the Donbas…

  Major shift (or rift?) in Russian goals.
  Instead of “denazification” of UKRAINE (as was declared by Putin), Shoigu says that the main goal is “liberation” of DONBAS.
  pic.twitter.com/7kyC4vLGJI

  — Denis Kazakiewicz (@Den_2042) March 29, 2022

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  It’s entirely possible that this latest White House claim of a “rift” within Kremlin command could also be based on Ukrainian sourcing, making it dubious at best. Given the wartime situation and what would obviously be secretive communications between Putin and his staff that this would entail, it would seem next to impossible to gain a real picture of what’s going on in terms of daily interactions and internal Kremlin reports and assessments of just how things are going with the “special operation” in Ukraine.

  Perhaps it’s but a self-serving White House narrative to explain why sanctions and international isolation have yet to deter Russia’s operations? It’s important to remember that this is not the first time claims of a “rift” have been weaponized for propaganda purposes…

  If US is saying this, my guess is it’s disinformation designed to drive a rift between Putin and one of his top generals. Taking one of his top people out, or creating a level of paranoia that eventually leads to a real coup. https://t.co/P3f9Ihkwsj

  — Steve Faktor (@ideafaktory) March 6, 2022

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  Meanwhile, there’s ample evidence to suggest that Putin is indeed fully aware of the nature of the economic war against his country, and the extent of potential damage – but also the coming blowback on the West and Washington itself…

  This is the real war. pic.twitter.com/TG8JCD1MyQ

  — banthebbc (@banthebbc) March 27, 2022

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  * * *

  Update(0943): State media is reporting that Russia’s lead negotiator after coming off Tuesday’s “constructive” talks in Istanbul is saying that “Kiev has essentially agreed” to Moscow’s key demands of not joining NATO or allowing foreign bases and troops on its soil. 

  “Ukrainian negotiators have essentially agreed to Russia’s principle security demands of rejecting NATO membership and regarding the presence of foreign military bases on its territory,” the Kremlin’s chief negotiator Vladimir Medinsky has said. In the statement he noted further that Ukraine has “stated willingness to meet core Russian demands.” He said further while speaking to Rossiya-24 broadcaster on Wednesday:

  “Yesterday, for the first time…the authorities in Kiev have declared their readiness to negotiate with Russia. They handed us on paper the principles of a possible future agreement, which provides for: a rejection of entry into NATO, fixing Ukraine’s bloc-free status, a renunciation of nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction.”

  At the same time on Wednesday there appears to be more positive signals coming from the Ukrainian side, with its negotiator Mykhailo Podolyak saying that while a peace deal with Russia is in the works, it would only be put up for a national referendum after Russia withdraws all troops to their pre-invasion Feb.23rd positions. But this is a huge if – given it’s impossible to predict anything in terms of the on-the-ground battle or the Russian military’s intent.

  “We have seen the Russians begin to draw away from Kyiv. But we have little confidence at this stage that it marks some significant shift or a meaningful retreat,” a US official told us. https://t.co/eoP9ayDm3u

  — James Politi (@JamesPoliti) March 29, 2022

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  But for now, there indeed appears a long road ahead before a full and final ceasefire can be realized, given the continuing battlefield situation:

  • UKRAINE DEFENCE MINISTRY SPOKESPERSON SAYS RUSSIAN FORCES ARE PREPARING TO RESUME OFFENSIVE OPERATIONS
  • UKRAINE DEFENCE MINISTRY SPOKESPERSON – RUSSIA’S MAIN EFFORTS ARE FOCUSED ON ENCIRCLING UKRAINIAN TROOPS IN THE EAST OF UKRAINE

  * * *

  Russian attacks and shelling have reportedly continued near Kiev and the Chernihiv, following Tuesday’s Kremlin declaration that it would draw down some units in these areas coming off negotiations with Ukraine in Istanbul, something met with skepticism by NATO and the Pentagon.

  The Kremlin further cited “no breakthroughs” from the talks after a draft ceasefire deal was said to be on the table, and amid generally positive international headlines and market reaction. A statement said additionally that “much work remains”. The US had called observed troop removals near Kiev a tactical redeployment and not in truth de-escalation. 

  According to Bloomberg citing a Russian source: “De-escalation does not mean a cease-fire or complete withdrawal of troops from around Kyiv, said a person close to the Kremlin.” The report says further, “Moscow’s likely war goals now are to take two eastern provinces, together with a land corridor from the Russian border to the Crimean peninsula, which Russia annexed in 2014, the person said.”

  

  Speaking of Crimea, the Ukrainian delegation for the first time offered to speak about this in negotiations, but in a further complication for any final ceasefire, the Russians have shut the door on this as a key bargaining element.

  “Crimea is part of the Russian Federation. And in line with our constitution we cannot discuss the future of the territory of the Russian Federation, the future of Russian regions. This is out of the question,” Kremlin spokesman Peskov clarified Wednesday.

  “It is positive that the Ukrainian side has at least begun to formulate concretely and put down on paper what it proposes,” Peskov described of Tuesday’s Turkey-sponsored negotiations. “As for the rest, we cannot yet state anything promising, no breakthroughs. Lots of work ahead.”

  Meanwhile, on the ground it doesn’t appear any major changes in Russian military posture have been effected, with the major northern city of Chernihiv coming under “colossal attack” overnight and into Wednesday, according to the words of the mayor, as CNN details:

  His words came as it emerged that the city was “under fire” from Russian airstrikes while shelling continued through the night, according to Viacheslav Chaus, head of the Chernihiv regional administration. 

  In an interview with New Day’s John Berman, the city’s mayor Vladyslav Atroshenko hit out at Russia’s claim on Tuesday that it planned to “drastically reduce” its military assault on Chernihiv and the Ukrainian capital Kyiv.

  The General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine has also confirmed that it’s witnessing what it called a “regrouping” and not a withdrawal.

  Russian UAV footage showing Russian strikes on Ukrainian tanks and artillery, presumably with Krasnopol rounds. https://t.co/m3WFVsDScm pic.twitter.com/1BS71Q2emU

  — Rob Lee (@RALee85) March 29, 2022

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  “According to some indications, the Russian enemy is regrouping units to focus its main efforts on the east. At the same time, the so-called ‘withdrawal of troops’ is probably a rotation of individual units and aims to mislead” the military said in a Facebook post.

  And more, pertaining to ongoing fighting around Kiev:

  “After their statements yesterday nothing has changed at all,” Maryan Zablotskyy, a member of the Ukrainian parliament who got his wife and child out of Kyiv, told Fox News Digital. “Fighting [continued] all through the night around Kyiv.”

  “They are forced to retreat from different areas around Kyiv,” Zablotskyy noted, “but only if they are successfully pushed back.”

  1/ Big Arrow War—a primer. For all those scratching their heads in confusion, or dusting off their dress uniforms for the Ukrainian victory parade in Kiev, over the news about Russia’s “strategic shift”, you might want to re-familiarize yourself with basic military concepts.

  — Scott Ritter (@RealScottRitter) March 29, 2022

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  Additionally Bloomberg has cited a Moscow-based military analyst and consultant, Evgeny Minchenko, who points out, “I think there was very serious misunderstanding of what both sides said in Istanbul after the talks.” He added: “So far I just heard is that there will be less action near Kyiv and Chernihiv, because the Russian army is concentrating its resources against the Ukrainian army in Donbas.”

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 03/30/2022 – 20:44

• Saudi Op-Ed Warns America "Dismantling Pillars Of Own Empire"
  Saudi Op-Ed Warns America “Dismantling Pillars Of Own Empire”

  Part of the increasing and closer Gulf state-Israel alliance, which blossomed during the covert war to oust Assad in Syria over the past decade and became formalized with the Abraham Accords of 2020, apparently involves media coordination when it comes to enemy #1 in the region of both sides. 

  An almost unprecedented op-ed in The Jerusalem Post lashed out at both America and Iran, while implicitly praising Israel’s steadfastness against Tehran, and it was authored by a Saudi… more precisely the former editor of the kingdom’s Al Arabiya English, Mohammed Alyahya. The op-ed blasts Washington efforts to restore the Iran nuclear deal by the Biden administration, questioning: If the Americans won’t side with Israel against Iran, what’s the chance they will side with us?

  

  In the scathing critique perhaps signaling just how close the Vienna talks are to restoring the JCPOA, the author writes in the Israeli newspaper, “Sold disingenuously to the American public as an arms control agreement, the deal is an assault on the regional order that the United States established in the aftermath of World War II. Explicitly hostile to Saudi Arabia, to say nothing of America’s other greatest ally in the region, Israel, the deal replaces the former American-led regional security structure with a concert system in which Iran, backed by Russia and China, becomes America’s new subcontractor while America’s former allies—the Gulf States and Israel— are demoted to second-tier status.”

  Further it points out that the Iranians have actually ramped up terror attacks in the region, even as great progress has been reported on the nuclear deal front…

  “Last Friday, as Blinken prepared for his trip to David Ben Gurion’s old kibbutz of Sde Boker, the Iranian-backed Houthi militia launched a rocket attack against Aramco in Jeddah. This attack was only the latest in a long series of brazen attacks that Iran has conducted, either directly from its own soil or indirectly through proxies,” the op-ed states.

  And more selections from the Saudi authored op-ed as follows…

  “Human shields for Iran”

  “Instead of friendship, America seems more inclined to use its old friends as human shields for Iran. Earlier this month, when Iran conducted a ballistic missile strike near the US consulate in Erbil, Iraq, it falsely claimed to be targeting an Israeli facility. A senior Biden official then confirmed the Iranian claim. While other officials later denied it, the damage was done. An American official had assisted Iran in getting the most out of its propaganda by action.”

  “Seemingly nothing will deflect the White House from its goal. During the negotiations in Vienna, attacks from Iran have grown ever more brazen. Not even an attack by Iranian proxies on American forces in the Tanf region of Syria and repeated attacks on the American embassy in Iraq have deflected Biden from his goal of delivering hundreds of billions of dollars to the IRGC.”

  Absent? What are these people talking about?

  US is occupying a third of Syria, has troops in Iraq, has surrounded Iran with military bases, sells/gives Saudi/UAE/Israel all the arms they want & has maintained support Yemen invasion despite talking pts. https://t.co/cubufFvoi7

  — Ali Ahmadi (@AliAhmadi_Iran) March 23, 2022

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  Obama & Russia’s rise in Middle East to the benefit of Iran

  “In Riyadh, it is not forgotten that the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2014 was followed swiftly by the rise of a Russian-Iranian alliance in Syria that leveled most of the major cities of that country and awarded Moscow with a military base on the Eastern Mediterranean – cementing Russia’s first foothold in the Middle East since the collapse of the Soviet Union.”

  “When the Saudis protested  Obama’s passivity, he told them they must learn to share the region with Iran. And it is not lost on America’s regional allies now that, even as Biden asks Saudi Arabia to raise oil production to help support the campaign against Russia over Ukraine, he is granting sanctions waivers to Russia so that it can continue to guarantee the nuclear deal with Iran that it helped broker — in part by husbanding Iran’s uranium reserves and protecting its underground nuclear facilities filled with illegal centrifuges spinning material for weapons.”

  The State of Israel expresses its sorrow to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia after the horrific attack by the Iranian-backed Houthis.

  This attack is further proof that Iran’s regional aggression knows no bounds & reinforces the concern of Iran’s IRGC being removed from the FTO list.

  — Naftali Bennett בנט (@naftalibennett) March 26, 2022

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  “Chinese policy is simple & straightforward”

  “While American policy is beset by baffling contradictions, Chinese policy is simple and straightforward. Beijing is offering Riyadh a simple deal: Sell us your oil and choose whatever military equipment you want from our catalogue; in return, help us to stabilize global energy markets. In other words, the Chinese are offering what increasingly appears modeled on the American-Saudi deal that stabilized the Middle East for 70 years.”

  “What is not yet clear is whether the Chinese can be helpful in deterring Iran, or whether they share the American belief in ‘balance.’ But Xi Jinping will visit Riyadh in May. It is a certainty that Saudi leaders will ask him if Iran’s rocketing of the oil facilities of the world’s most reliable oil producer is in the interest of China and, if not, can Beijing make it stop?”

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 03/30/2022 – 20:40

• Waging War On Fossil Fuels Enflames Inflation
  Waging War On Fossil Fuels Enflames Inflation

  Authored by Thomas McArdle via The Epoch Times,

  When you pull aside the curtain of its moral pretensions, the green movement of global warming fanatics is just another socialist scheme to replace the free enterprise’s real-world judgment of how to navigate the economic long term with coerced, illegitimately law-enforced faith in government control.

  

  There is one preeminent tool that players in the economy—meaning all of us—use to transact honestly and productively with one another: price. And today we face a price crisis.

  The global price of oil has skyrocketed thanks to the massive government spending of one-party rule by Democrats for more than a year now, cowardice on the part of the Federal Reserve, and all of this exacerbated in recent weeks by Russian aggression in the Ukraine induced by President Joe Biden’s weakness in failing to project American power, especially the debacle of the Afghanistan pullout.

  But oil equals transportation, and the fact that everything else that is bought and sold—whether consumed, worn, slept or sat on, washed with, worked with, played with, or used as a means of transportation itself—must be delivered from producer to seller to buyer, means no escaping a widely dispersed ripple effect. When the cost of moving people and things rises, ineludibly the price of everything rises.

  “There’s nowhere to hide,” Bankrate chief financial analyst Greg McBride told CNBC regarding the 7.9 percent, worst-in-40-years inflation hurting Americans today. “This is hitting everybody.”

  Rents are currently rising at nearly 5 percent, the worst in over 30 years. Meat, appliances, furniture, buying or renting cars, and staying at a hotel were all up by double digits over 12 months toward the close of last year, months before the oil shock from the war on Ukraine. That 12-month period saw gas go up by over 50 percent.

  The higher gas prices reach, the better, according to the left. Clinton administration economist Jeffrey Frankel wrote last year, “On one hand, the effect of high oil, gas, and coal prices on consumers is good for the environment, because they discourage demand for fossil fuels.” He added that, on the other hand, high fossil fuel prices also encourage fossil fuel supply—though he noted that the consequent private investment in the sector has proved to be weaker than expected.

  In 2019, energy research firm Wood Mackenzie analyzed the objectives of the left’s war on oil. The various high-minded schemes for weaning America off fossil fuels have been estimated to cost between $1.7 trillion for the Biden plan seeking zero emissions, $5 trillion for Texas Democrat gubernatorial candidate Beto O’Rourke’s proposal, and $10 trillion for Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal.

  This extreme political agenda is a war on the freedom to set prices. It is the equivalent of stormtroopers marching into your supermarket and removing from the shelves the offerings they don’t want you to be free to buy, based on ideological criteria. Maybe it’s Bayer aspirin they hate, or Tropicana orange juice. That less choice will mean higher prices because consumers are captive to a reduction of competitive alternatives.

  Energy is the same. When the market is deprived of the full range of competitive options, sellers can get more than they rightfully should. It amounts to government-sanctioned price gouging. Optimum competition, on the other hand, reduces price. Domestic oil from the Permian Basin or Alaska, which has fewer miles to travel to the refinery and pump and thus ends up costing much less, can compete seriously with oil originating in the Middle East; the purchaser of a car today is likely to choose a gasoline-powered Toyota RAV-4 or Honda CR-V for under $30,000 rather than an electric Tesla costing over $60,000. But when the government abolishes fossil fuel vehicles altogether, cars themselves may no longer be within reach, which is what the left has long desired: a populace forced to use and love communal public transport, happy sardines stuffed into buses and subways.

  As grossly underappreciated as it is by all too many consumers, price is the indispensable means through which a free economy operates. In a sense, the freedom to set prices is economic freedom. It is the manner in which shortages of essential commodities are averted. It is the way that the value of resources is communicated accurately to the public at large. It is how buyers differentiate between what they need versus the purchases that can wait, depending on changing economic conditions. Anything less than freedom in pricing attaches artificial, inaccurate value to goods and services.

  Prices freely agreed upon by buyer and seller is the only way that resources can be allocated efficiently, a task beyond the ability of any central planner. And far from merely being the difference between comfort and hardship, price in the course of history has meant the difference between life and death, on a massive scale.

  Remember the famine in Ethiopia that saw the world force fed with the moral outrage of our leading rock stars? Was that the world’s rich starving the world’s poor? Far from it. As Oklahoma State University political science professor Theodore M. Vestal wrote in July, 1985—the month of the Live Aid concert to raise money for relief of the Ethiopian famine—Ethiopia’s government under its military junta “made farmers accept artificially low prices for the main grains: teff, sorghum, barley, millet, wheat and maize.” Coffee was “so heavily taxed that peasants do not bother to expand its production. These policies destroyed the incentive of millions of peasants to grow surplus food, and productivity has declined notably.”

  How about Stalin’s engineered famine of the early 1930s in Ukraine, one of Europe’s most fertile agricultural regions? As documented by Anne Applebaum in her 2017 book “Red Famine,” that genocide—a precursor to Russia’s current deliberate slaughter of innocent Ukrainian civilians—came after coerced collectivization in which Ukrainian farmers were forced to sell to the Soviet government at non-negotiable, extremely low artificial prices. In other words, stealing.

  No doubt voters will hold Democrats responsible for today’s sky-high inflation in the November midterm elections this year. What too few realize, however, is that dramatically higher prices are not the unintentional result of mismanagement and incompetence; they are the expected, desired results of the Democrats’ game plan. And if they get the green revolution they want, the inflation of today will be dwarfed by what is to come in the years ahead.

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 03/30/2022 – 20:20

• Lavrov: Russia, China Moving Towards Multipolar 'Fair World Order'
  Lavrov: Russia, China Moving Towards Multipolar ‘Fair World Order’

  Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov met with his Chinese counterpart on Wednesday, where he said the two are carving a path towards a ‘fairer world order.’

  

  The meeting between Lavrov and Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi, marks the first visit to a key ally since Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine on February 24, according to The Economic Times.

  The two countries will work to achieve “a multipolar, fair, and democratic world order,” Lavrov said, speaking from the Chinese city of Tunxi located in the eastern inland Anhui Province.

  In a video released by the Russian foreign ministry ahead of a meeting with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi, Lavrov said the world was “living through a very serious stage in the history of international relations”.

  At the end of this reshaping of global relations “we, together with you, and with our sympathisers will move towards a multipolar, just, democratic world order“, Lavrov said. -Economic Times

  Lavrov and Yi were seen on Chinese state TV in face masks bumping elbows in front of their national flags shortly before the meetings – which Lavrov will attend – to discuss ways to help Afghanistan.

  It is a good thing that China-Russia ties are so close. Russia adopted an attitude of proactively negotiating with Ukraine, and clearly said that it would not resort to nuclear weapons, how can Washington think that there is no China’s friendly influence in it? https://t.co/z4RhJ0VNHz

  — Hu Xijin 胡锡进 (@HuXijin_GT) March 30, 2022

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  Both the US and the Taliban are expected to be in attendance.

  US officials have grown frustrated with Beijing’s refusal to condemn the invasion of Ukraine, and have accused China of signalling a “willingness” to provide both economic and military aid to Russia.

  According to Russia’s state-owned TASS news agency, Wang said that despite “new challenges” to relations between China and Russia, “the will of both sides to develop bilateral relations has become even stronger.”

  Earlier this month Wang said that China’s relationship with Russia is “one of the most crucial bilateral relationships in the world,” and is “ironclad.”

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 03/30/2022 – 20:00

• Pandemic Lessons Learned: CDC Versus Natural Immunity
  Pandemic Lessons Learned: CDC Versus Natural Immunity

  Op-ed authored by Joe Wang via The Epoch Times,

  The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is one of the U.S. government’s major operating components, an agency under the Department of Health and Human Services.

  The CDC’s mission statement reads, “CDC increases the health security of our nation. … CDC saves lives and protects people from health threats.”

  The agency also pledges to the American people that it will “base all public health decisions on the highest quality scientific data that is derived openly and objectively.”

  

  Well, COVID-19 has been the nation’s largest health threat for the past two years. It has had a huge impact on the lives of every American. During those two years, thousands of scientists and health-care researchers have studied COVID and accumulated a huge amount of information on the disease.

  We’ve now gradually come to realize that the most effective force that would eventually end the pandemic is natural immunity. Even Bill Gates has admitted that “the virus itself, particularly the variant called Omicron, is a type of vaccine.” With the rapid spread of Omicron and with many asymptomatic infections, millions of people have developed natural immunity, which is driving COVID-19 out of its pandemic stage and into endemicity.

  With its $15.4 billion annual budget, one would think the CDC would have done a good job providing taxpayers with data on COVID-19. If cutting edge research is too challenging for the CDC, they at least should have provided the public with basic surveillance data, such as:

  • Who was infected with SARS-CoV-2, when, which variant, and what were the symptoms?

  • Who was vaccinated, with which vaccine, when, and were there any side effects?

  • Who was vaccinated, got infected, when, and recovered?

  • Who was never vaccinated, and never infected (never tested, or never tested positive)?

  The CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR) published on Jan. 28 presented some very interesting information from California and New York comparing immunity against COVID-19 from four groups of people, indicating natural immunity alone provides the best protection.

  Since then, I have been anxiously waiting for more data, as there are 48 other states, and even for California and New York, important data like this should be updated monthly, if not weekly.

  To my surprise and disappointment, I have not been able to find any more data on natural immunity from the MMWR since Jan. 28. I am sure they have the data—they just don’t want to share it with us.

  I’m beginning to wonder if CDC stands for Center for Data Control.

  Those Recovered From COVID Are Best Protected

  On March 1, the scientific journal Clinical Infectious Diseases published a peer-reviewed article titled “Risk of reinfection after seroconversion to SARS-CoV-2: A population-based propensity-score matched cohort study.” This Swiss study “observed a 94% reduction in the hazard of being infected among SARS-CoV-2 seropositive participants, when compared to seronegative controls, >8 months after serology assessment.”

  This level of protection (natural immunity) from SARS-CoV-2 infection (94 percent) is comparable to that of the Pfizer vaccine but lasts longer (eight months and counting).

  In a peer-reviewed article published in the journal Science Immunology on Jan. 25, scientists from Oregon Health & Science University showed in raw data that antibodies derived from previous COVID-19 infection are at least 10 times more potent than that generated by vaccination alone. They still concluded, however, that “Vaccination is highly effective at preventing the most severe outcomes from COVID-19 and should be provided regardless of previous infection status and age.” I’m confused by their conclusion, but happy to see the raw data.

  Similarly, in my Feb. 5 article “Pandemic Lessons Learned: Scientific Debate Silenced, With Deadly Consequences,” I wrote: “Now, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control admits in a report released on Jan. 28 that natural immunity against COVID-19 is superior to any of the available vaccine regimens.”

  A reader commented that she “looked all over the CDC site and could find no such info. … Now who’s being ‘subjective’?”

  The reader was right. I should have explained in my article that the conclusion I drew was not a direct quote but rather my own summary based on the CDC’s raw data.

  The CDC’s Jan. 28 report included the following chart but neglected to provide a summary comparing protection between vaccinated people without natural immunity and unvaccinated people who recovered from COVID and now have natural immunity.

  It seems that it’s necessary to dive a little deeper into the data to elaborate my point, as the authors of the report did not conclude the very obvious. Please bear with me.

  

  The above CDC chart shows data from California on protection against COVID-19 collected from four groups of people between May 30, 2021, and Nov. 20, 2021:

  1) The unvaccinated, with no previous COVID-19 diagnosis (top solid line)
  2) The vaccinated, with no previous COVID-19 diagnosis (broken line below the solid line)
  3) The unvaccinated, with previous diagnosis
  4) The vaccinated, with previous diagnosis

  It is obvious that the lines representing 3) and 4) are superimposing on one another, indicating that vaccination had virtually no impact on protection when a person has recovered from COVID-19 infection, meaning natural immunity dominates protection over vaccination to a level that made vaccination irrelevant.

  Although the biggest difference lies between the unvaccinated with no previous infection and everyone else, the second biggest difference, however, is between the “Vaccinated, no previous COVID-19 diagnosis” line (vaccine immunity) and the “Unvaccinated, previous COVID-19 diagnosis” line (natural immunity), with the natural immunity line having a much lower “hazard rate,” meaning better protection.

  The report also revealed similar findings for New York state.

  Is CDC Censoring Data on Natural Immunity?

  The CDC’s MMWR is a weekly report. The chart above is part of the report for the last week of January, and it was for only two of the 50 states, California and New York. When I was writing my Feb. 5 article, I thought that maybe it was a benign omission that the CDC did not conclude the obvious. For sure, more data would be coming from the CDC in February and March, I thought, as it would teach us so much more about natural immunity.

  However, it hasn’t materialized. Since Jan. 28, there have been 10 MMWR reports published on the CDC website, totaling 29 articles in all. They cover topics ranging from vaccination by geographic locations, to vaccine confidence by sexual orientation, to isolation strategy for fully vaccinated NFL players, and so on. So far, the Jan. 28 report was the only one that included “unvaccinated, with previous diagnosis” in the data, and that’s unfortunate. All the other reports were to re-enforce the conclusion that vaccines are effective, with almost nothing about natural immunity. Here is a screenshot of the MMWR website:

  

  For example, one of CDC’s latest reports, published on March 18, includes the following chart:

  

  Here, hospitalization data was plotted against 1) unvaccinated people, 2) vaccinated without a booster, 3) vaccinated with a booster. There is no information about people who had recovered from COVID-19. In other words, information on natural immunity is censored.

  According to the CDC’s own information, the United States has had about 80 million COVID-19 cases. The vast majority of patients recovered from the disease. This huge part of the U.S. population now enjoys natural immunity. This is also true for Canada and many other parts of the world.

  It seems that the CDC is avoiding anything and everything related to natural immunity. But why?

  Maybe the CDC is like Bill Gates, who said at the Munich Security Conference last month: “Sadly, the virus itself, particularly the variant called Omicron, is a type of vaccine. That is, it creates both B-cell and T-cell immunity.” What he meant was it would be a sad thing if it is natural immunity, not Big Pharma’s vaccines, that defeat COVID-19.

  Let the CDC and Mr. Gates feel sad. The rest of us are ready to move on with our lives.

  Read Dr. Joe Wang’s series on Pandemic Lessons Learned here. 

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 03/30/2022 – 19:40

• Crypto Expert Ambushed, Shot 5 Times At NYC Hotel, In Attempted Robbery Of His $450,000 Richard Mille Watch
  Crypto Expert Ambushed, Shot 5 Times At NYC Hotel, In Attempted Robbery Of His $450,000 Richard Mille Watch

  Today in “reasons to get out of U.S. cities” news…

  A robber who was after a $450,000 Richard Mille watch shot a 33-year-old French cryptocurrency expert at point blank range in Manhattan this month. The victim told the Daily Mail that he believed he was followed “for hours or days” prior to the attack.

  The victim, Pierrick Jamaux, was ambushed outside of his Manhattan hotel. He said that he was “shocked” by how dangerous New York City had become and said he “would never have visited” if he knew how much it had changed in the last 10 years, since he lived there.

  He was visiting from Hong Kong and was getting out of an Uber at the Fifty Hotel and Suites in Midtown when the incident took place. 

  “Given the fact he was waiting there when we arrived and also the violence of the crime, I believe he followed me,” Jamaux said. “I believe they found me somewhere, then they tracked me for a few hours or days to figure out what I do, where I go. I think it was organized.”

  He continued, telling the Daily Mail: “It cannot be a coincidence because it happened between the Uber and the door of the hotel – there is two meters of distance. The guy was waiting for me there is no doubt about it.”

  

  “He started shooting me even before I understood he wanted my watch and from then I was just pushing the gun down and he kept shooting my legs, it was crazy,” he said. “I know he shot five times but I think some of them went through both legs. Three of them are point-blank shooting. I have a lot of bullet holes.”

  Jamaux was helped when a female friend of him and his wife jumped on the robber’s back and began to choke him. 

  “She is one of my really good friends, she is fiery. She jumped on his back and she did a triangle-like choke like in MMA,” Jamaux said.   

  Jamaux quickly passed out after being shot and started to bleed out on the street, the report says. Meanwhile, the robber was unable to get his watch off because of a “bracelet security mechanism” it had. The robber escaped in a black four door BMW. 

  Jamaux has had six surgeries so far. “They hit my femoral artery – it’s something where you usually die in 5 minutes – it was a major surgery to save my life.”

  “I was surprised when I talked to one of the doctors here. I said ‘does it happen often?’ and he was like ‘yes’ without hesitation,” Jamaux concluded. “If I knew New York had changed like that, I would never have come here. I probably would have diverted my business trip and stayed in Europe. You don’t need to be a genius to realize New York is very very dangerous right now. I don’t think it’s safe for anyone. There are too many people who have nothing to lose.”

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 03/30/2022 – 19:20

• "Sounding The Alarm": A $3 Trillion Problem Emerges As The Fed Prepares To Launch QT
  “Sounding The Alarm”: A $3 Trillion Problem Emerges As The Fed Prepares To Launch QT

  Three weeks ago, roughly around the time we would point out virtually every single day that equity market liquidity was at all time lows…

  Liquidity pic.twitter.com/FNdKJ4uR6k

  — zerohedge (@zerohedge) March 3, 2022

  https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

  … a similar, if far more more ominous liquidity problem was gripping the $23 trillion world of US Treasury debt.

  As BofA’s resident bond plumbing expert and former NY Fed staffer Mark Cabana wrote on March 8 in a report whose title couldn’t be clearer (and which is available to pro subs in the usual place)… 

  

  … the recent elevated market volatility driven by the Russian invasion and ongoing conflict in Ukraine caused many to de-risk simultaneously, prompting a surge in market fragility in not only equities but also bonds. As a result, traders observed a wash out of popular rates trades: short front-end duration, flatteners, richer TU-OIS, and short belly TIPS.

  This de-risking behavior – which comes just as the Fed ends its QE and is set to announce the launch of even more liquidity draining balance sheet reduction in just a few weeks – “leaves behind a market highly susceptible to liquidity issues” according to Cabana who warns that without a ceasefire or sharp moderation in tensions we expect UST illiquidity will persist, and more problematically, “Fed or Treasury actions may be needed to sustain UST market functioning.”

  While most traders have already experienced it on their own, the degree of near-term uncertainty is clearly reflected in rates volatility by higher implied vols, exceeding levels reached at the peak of the covid uncertainty in 1Q20  and a deep inversion of the term structure of volatility.

  

  The latter is particularly significant as fading these inversions (selling rich gamma vs buying intermediate vol) is quite attractive from a carry perspective (short theta), and indeed the right chart above shows that these inversions generally dissipate relatively quickly. The magnitude of the current inversion (35bp currently between 1m10y and 1y10y) as well as its length (the inversion has persisted and exacerbated since 10 Feb) expresses a significant degree of uncertainty in the market, of a similar degree to that seen over 1Q20.

  It’s not just chaos over the Ukraine war however: the dynamic of TSYs in the recent risk-off context also reflects uncertainty around the utility of Treasuries for portfolios (a recent Bloomberg article was titled “Strategy With Crypto Beats 60/40 Portfolio During Russian War“). As a risk-off asset, USTs generally tend to overweight the tail scenarios relative to other assets, but recently we have seen some stickiness in the recent risk-off dynamic.

  One of the likely drivers for this increased uncertainty relates to the current inflation context. The risk off dynamic has led to the pricing out of more aggressive 50bp hike scenarios for the Fed, but liftoff is likely to stay on track near-term. The first 100bp are justified & almost mechanical in the current inflation context but beyond that, the policy path may be more contingent on geopolitical scenarios, reflecting a Fed reaction function that may start to show concern for slower growth scenarios versus an inflation backdrop that is expected to ease over the year. It’s also why the rates market is now pricing in 3 rate cuts in 2023 and 2024 following the burst of rate hikes this year and next.

  

  The Fed, however, is hell bent on raising rates until the low/mid 3’s, which creates scope for higher structural inflation and constrains the potential response of the nominal UST curve in a risk-off dynamic.

  One would expect this change in Treasury utility (driven by a higher inflation context) to be more significant at the backend of the UST curve (which also matters more for tail-risk hedging). However, it does extend also to the front-end of the curve, likely compounded by liquidity concerns. Contrary to the historical pattern, we have seen a collapse of 2y spreads (2yT cheapening) as Libor/OIS spreads spiked wider in the geopolitical crisis.

  

  Whatever the reason behind the shrinking liquidity, evidence of poor market functioning can be observed everywhere across the treasury curve, and is most thorny in sectors that typically demonstrate a liquidity discount.

  Twenty-year notes have cheapened on the fly to some of their weakest levels since their reintroduction in May 2020.

  

  TIPS have seen some of the largest intraday swings over the last 5-years and off-the-run issues have cheapened versus on-the runs.

  

  At the same time, elevated volatility has also led to a decline in liquidity measures, including through wider bid-ask spreads & spline error. There are also signs of thinning market depth as seen through the CME Liquidity Tool, which now shows some of the thinnest book depth (i.e., number of buy & sell orders at each price level) since 2020 across Treasury futures contracts

  bid ask spreads have widened out and spline pricing error is also elevated.

  

  Realized & implied UST vol have both spiked. The UST intraday range is the highest since Mar ’20 & registers at the 90th+ percentile for realized volatility over the past 5Y. Implied vol has also spiked as 1y10y now exceeds March 2020 levels and are at levels last seen in 2013. The surface is also deeply inverted with 1m10y vs 1y10y implied vols seeing the deepest inversion since March 2020.

  

  Besides growing fears of a secular shift in inflation, the very shifts in UST market structure are now amplifying volatility and illiquiduity. In a near and dear topic to this website which first cracked the scam that is High Frequency Trading back in 2009 long before Michael Lewis wrote FlashBoys, over recent years, high-frequency trading firms (aka principal trading firms or PTFs) have become larger not only in equities but also in the Treasury market while dealer activity has not grown with the UST market. The official sector defines PTFs as principals who trade for their own account, almost exclusively use automated trading strategies, and end each day with little to no directional exposure thus making them thinly capitalized. Dealers, by contrast, have historically been able to buy and sell from customers in large amounts, hold a portion of these positions across days, and maintain a large balance sheet to support positions.

  Over recent years, PTF activity has increased in the Treasury market while dealer balances sheets & trading volume have been relatively stable. PTFs comprise the majority of electronic activity on interdealer broker platforms while dealers are still most active in voice & cash market activity.

  

  Dealer trading volume & UST holdings have remained relatively stable but dealer balance sheets have materially declined as a percentage of total Treasury market size.

  

  The increased role of HFTs and smaller relative dealer role vs UST market size can and will result in more limited UST liquidity during times of elevated volatility or stress. The official sector Interagency Working Group (UST, Fed, SEC, CFTC) has noted the risk of market making can be particularly relevant for PTFs “whose lower capitalization relative to dealers may leave them with less capacity to absorb adverse shocks.” This was true in March 2020 and we suspect it may be a factor with increased volatility today. The SEC has also recently announced greater PTF oversight by requiring them to become dealers.

  Meanwhile, in another feedback loop, elevated UST volatility and thin market liquidity have likely caused a number of end investors to de-risk or reduce risk appetite,  exacerbating current moves.

  * * *

  So what does all this mean going forward? Well, all else equal, treasury market functioning is expected to return as realized volatility declines… but all else is not equal, and a huge problem facing the Fed is that according to Cabana – who along with Pozsar was in charge of the Fed’s POMO/QE implementation – treasury functioning will be increasingly challenged by an accumulation of Treasury supply held in private hands, i.e., Quantitative Tightening.

  To wit, BofA projects that Treasury supply will increase around US$3 trillion in the next 2Y due to large government deficits and aggressive Fed balance-sheet reduction. UST supply normalized for GDP is projected to increase back to mid ’20 levels by end ’23.

  

  This means that already fragile TSY liquidity today may be exacerbated by the supply shift in coming months, especially after the Fed starts quantitative tightening (QT). And although short-dated USTs are rich today, Cabana thinks that investors should position for a cheapening starting mid-year with the supply shift and potential challenging liquidity: “Cheapening USTs are likely to
  support tighter financial conditions that may ultimately require official action to contain.”

  * * *

  Putting it all together, in case it was not obvious yet, Cabana warns that Treasury liquidity is a concern ahead of supply shift”, i.e., the upcoming $3 trillion in Quantitative Tightening.

  Some math: BofA projects that Treasury supply will increase around US$3tn in the next 2Y due to government deficits & aggressive Fed balance-sheet reduction. At the same time, Fed QT is expected to add nearly US$550-700BN to UST debt outstanding in each of next thee years. UST supply normalized for GDP is projected to increase back to mid ’20 levels by end ’23. Even assuming lower deficits in coming years as modeled by the CBO – which we truly doubt – these will at best limit coupon financing need but total UST supply growth vs GDP will still accumulate in private hands.

  The bottom line: the already Fragile Treasury market functioning will only exacerbate the coming UST supply shift, especially given concerns about end-user demand. According to Cabana, bank buying has slowed with uncertainty around deposit & balance sheet growth, pension / insurance demand has been moderate despite their strong funded status, and  hedged pickup of USTs to foreign
  equivalents is set to decline.

  To be sure, modest Japanese demand may pick up in April with the new fiscal year and that asset managers will find USTs increasingly attractive as a risk-off hedge (at some point). However, end-user demand is needed.

  During the last QT episode, a similar supply accumulation increased cheapening pressure on USTs, especially at the front-end, leading to increased UST-leveraged demand. BofA’s measure of marketable debt ex Fed-to-GDP increased 6ppt during the prior QT episode, while 2Y USTs to FF OIS cheapened around 30bp. Treasury cheapening incentivized hedge funds to materially increase their UST holdings by US$585bn from QT start (4Q ’17) to finish (3Q ’19). 

  

  Cabana expects hedge funds to provide a similar source of demand but only if USTs are sufficiently cheap (read – yields are high enough) to encourage their leveraged participation.

  The BofA strategist also expects a similar cheapening of Treasuries at the front-end during this QT episode, which could be exacerbated by thin UST liquidity. In other words, the official launch of QT in less than two month, could lead to a rapid bond market liquidity vacuum and subsequent crash, forcing the Fed to quickly find a justification to reverse its balance sheet shrinkage as the alternative is a complete lockup in the world’s most important market.

  While this could be viewed as an exaggerated take, Cabana himself concedes that cheapening TSYs would support a broader tightening of financial conditions that could require official action to contain, and “The Fed, Treasury, and regulators could all act to support UST liquidity but debt managers are likely best positioned to act today.” Detail below:

  Fed action: UST market functioning support over recent years has largely been done by the Fed. The Fed now has limited flexibility due to its inflation problem. “The Fed could delay QT in hopes of limiting UST market functioning challenges” Cabana writes, adding that “Powell said the Fed will be mindful of financial stability & the Fed wants to avoid adding uncertainty to an already very uncertain geopolitical backdrop.” However, the Fed likely wants to get moving on QT to tightening financial conditions & restrain inflation. And worst case, the Fed can just halt QT early on if it sees that the lock up across the bond market is too severe.

  UST debt management: Treasury can play a more meaningful role in the support of market functioning after years of abdicating this responsibility to the Fed. There are a number of actions Treasury could take:

  • (1) Large & decisive cuts at troubled parts of the UST curve. This would signal help to improve market functioning, especially in the troubled 20Y. Large cuts will not fix oversupplied parts of the market but it would support deeper liquidity in current issues.
  • (2) Buybacks for liquidity management purposes. UST could start liquidity providing buyback operations across the curve, which would help unclog dealer balance sheets & limit RV dislocations. Treasury could fund buybacks by issuing in the most liquid (2, 5, 10, 30Y) points or target the richest points (bills) if willing to tolerate WAM reduction.
  • (3) Improved communication. Treasury only sporadically communicates with the market via the quarterly refunding meetings. Improved communication could help guide expectations on key areas of market concern such as oversupply & challenging liquidity.

  The bottom line, according to Cabana is that Treasury market functioning has deteriorated with elevated realized volatility stemming from Fed re-pricing & geopolitical tensions. Decreased liquidity has likely been exacerbated by market structure shifts and regulatory changes that have reduced UST resilience: the BofA strategist is “concerned about the accumulation of increased Treasury supply into a fragile market place, which will likely support a cheapening of USTs & tightening of financial conditions. The official sector can still act to smooth this process though the US Treasury may need to take a more active role to promote Treasury market resilience.”

  TL/DR: QT will lead to unintended bond market freezes/lockdowns and only “official sector” intervention will prevent QT from leading to a bond market crash. So far, neither the Fed nor the Treasury are even contemplating this possibility. Meanwhile the clock until the launch of Quantitative Tightening is ticking…

  There is much more in the full notes, available to pro subscribers.

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 03/30/2022 – 19:00

• CNN's New Streaming Service Already Headed For Layoffs Amid Dismal Sales
  CNN’s New Streaming Service Already Headed For Layoffs Amid Dismal Sales

  CNN’s ill-fated attempt to launch its own ‘Fox Nation’-style streaming service (which it christened – rather unoriginally – CNN+) is already hitting the skids.

  According to a Fox Business report, the streaming service, which recently hired former Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace to host his own show, and only just launched on Tuesday, is already bracing for layoffs as soon as May due to “lackluster” sales projections.

  Breaking: @CNNplus employees bracing for layoffs possibly as soon as May amid projections of lackluster sales of new streaming channel; CNN employees say new streaming channel could be merged into larger @discoveryplus as early as May unless subscriptions pick up 130 @FoxBusiness

  — Charles Gasparino (@CGasparino) March 30, 2022

  https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

  The streaming service was supposed to be the flailing cable news channel’s answer to declining ratings. And according to the Washington Post, it represented the largest investment in new programming since Ted Turner launched CNN in 1980.

  The network has been working on the launch since the summer of 2021 and has invested nearly $100 million in the venture. CNN owner WarnerMedia is asking viewers to fork over $5.99 a month for the service.

  In addition to Wallace, who will host an interview show entitled “Who’s Talking To Chris Wallace?” four days a week, the network also poached several other big names, including Kasie Hunt from MSNBC, author and chef Alison Roman, and actress Eva Longoria, who will host a travel show dedicated to Mexican cuisine. Former “All Things Considered” co-host Audie Cornish, a veteran of NPR, will also host a weekly interview show.

  As WaPo explained, the streaming platform was intended to compensate for the fact that most cable-news superfans are in their 60s, which isn’t a particularly attractive age bracket or advertisers (who typically prefer to market to younger consumers who can build product loyalties that can persist over a lifetime). As of May 2021, the median age of a CNN viewer was 64 (which is still lower than the average age for Fox, at 68). 

  CNN’s ratings have continued their dramatic descent recently, prompting upheaval in the channel’s upper ranks, most notably the firing of former network President Jeff Zucker, who conceived of the network.

  With CNN is also about to change owners, and Fox Business reports that its new owner, Discovery, might opt to “consolidate” its streaming services, essentially folding CNN+ into its own streaming service.

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 03/30/2022 – 18:40

Digest powered by RSS Digest

• BoE Gov Warns Of "Historic Shock" To Real Incomes As Stagflation Slams British Economy
  BoE Gov Warns Of “Historic Shock” To Real Incomes As Stagflation Slams British Economy

  As the Bank of England scrambles to try and tame inflation with aggressive rate hikes, Bank of England Gov. Andrew Bailey warned during a speech this week that the British economy is sliding into stagflationary hell as the energy price crunch spurs inflation that’s hotter than at any point during the 1970s.

  

  While HMG has sought to alleviate the impact of higher energy prices with direct fiscal transfers to millions of British families (perhaps they should ask the San Francisco Fed how that might turn out), Bailey warned that the British economy is already on the cusp of slipping into stagflation.

  According to Bailey, surging energy costs have forced the BoE’s Monetary Policy Committee to confront the biggest challenge in its short history (it was former in 1997): how can a central bank tackle inflation without driving the economy into recession?

  Assuming the war in Ukraine drags on (the latest headlines point to a breakthrough in peace talks, but whether progress actually materializes remains to be seen),  Bailey expects the UK’s consumer-price inflation to top 8% during the second quarter (it’s already higher than 6%, more than 3x the central bank’s inflationary target).

  These inflationary pressure represent a “historic shock” to incomes.

  Bailey said Britons were facing a “very large shock to aggregate real income and spending” from rising prices of energy and imported goods. He told an event organised by Bruegel, the think-tank, in Brussels: “This is really an historic shock to real incomes.”

  One of the main differences between today and the 1970s is that the oil shock back then lingered for years, while Bailey said he and his fellow policymakers hope that this latest bout of inflation will start to ease before the end of the year.

  “The shock from energy prices this year will be larger than any single year in the 1970s. The caveat is that the 1970s had a succession of years and we very much hope that would not be the case now. But as a single year, this is a very, very big shock.”

  To further underscore the difficulty of the situation, the British Office for Budget Responsibility predicted that UK household real income this year would contract at the sharpest rate since records began in the 1950s. Meanwhile, the OBR cut its UK growth forecast for 2022 from 6% to 3.8%.

  Bailey said: “We expect it to cause growth and demand to slow. We’re beginning to see the evidence of that in both consumer and business surveys.”

  With its inflation and growth forecasts pulling the central bank in different directions, Bailey suggested that the BoE is now caught between a rock and a hard place.

  “This is a big trade-off,” he added. “I think it’s the biggest trade-off the Monetary Policy Committee has faced in its now approaching 25 years life.”

  The prescription, of course, is QT and rate hikes. And with the conservative government reluctant to embrace the level of fiscal expansion seen abroad (most notably in the US), Britons should probably brace for hard times ahead, as the only cure for runaway inflation is demand destruction.

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 03/30/2022 – 02:45

• EU Seeks End To 'Golden Passport' Schemes, Urges Revoking Visas To Russians
  EU Seeks End To ‘Golden Passport’ Schemes, Urges Revoking Visas To Russians

  Authored by Nicholas Delinger via The Epoch Times,

  The European Commission has called for EU members to cease the practice of selling citizenship to investors and to suspend the sale of immigration visas to citizens of Russia and Belarus.

  

  On Monday, the European Commission issued a recommendation to member states of the European Union, urging these nations to limit access to such so-called “golden passport” programs to individuals connected with the Russian and Belarusian governments, in response to the former nation’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine.

  “Some Russian or Belarusian nationals who are subject to sanctions or are significantly supporting the war in Ukraine might have acquired EU citizenship or privileged access to the EU, including to travel freely in the Schengen area, under these schemes,” the European Commission said.

  For years, the sale of EU visas has been a multi-billion dollar industry and a valuable source of income for the nations participating. However, this practice has been the bane of regulators in the European Parliament, many of whom consider such programs a security risk for the visa-free zone of the Schengen Area, which encompasses most the the EU.

  Presently, only three EU states have programs for the direct sale of passports: Bulgaria, Cyprus, and Malta, all of which have committed to ending such programs.

  However, golden visa schemes remain somewhat more widespread. Like golden passport programs, these schemes allow for investors to receive immigration benefits from significant investment in the country sponsoring them, with little or no expectation that they must reside in the country.

  The new push may be interpreted as the EU’s latest effort to undermine Putin’s grip on power by punishing the Russian oligarchs, many of whom enjoy time spent abroad in Western Europe with their lavish fortunes.

  Previously, European officials have targeted the Russian oligarchy with measures such as freezing Russian assets, impounding the private jets, and seizing the summer homes of the nation’s wealthiest expatriates. In so doing, policymakers hope to stir discontent among the keys to power in the Russian Federation, placing pressure on Putin to walk back the war in Ukraine.

  However, with the suspension of golden passport programs, there is an additional benefit: such a policy would close the door to potential security risks, as oligarchs sympathetic to Putin’s Russia could possibly use their security as citizens of European countries to undermine the EU.

  The European Commission urged members to review carefully Russian and Belarussian beneficiaries of such program, cautioning nations to withdraw the naturalization of any individual blacklisted by EU members or who “supports by any means the war in Ukraine or other related activities of the Russian government or Lukashenko regime breaching international law.”

  It said some Russians or Belarusians are among 877 individuals listed for asset freezes and travel bans imposed since 2014 who might have acquired EU citizenship and had access to the Schengen area.

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 03/30/2022 – 02:00

• Humilitainment: How To Control The Citizenry Through Reality TV Distractions
  Humilitainment: How To Control The Citizenry Through Reality TV Distractions

  Authored by John W. Whitehead & Nisha Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,

  “Big Brother does not watch us, by his choice. We watch him, by ours…. When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience, and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; culture-death is a clear possibility.”

  – Professor Neil Postman

  Once again, the programming has changed.

  Like clockwork, the wall-to-wall news coverage of the latest crisis has shifted gears.

  We have gone from COVID-19 lockdowns to Trump-Biden election drama to the Russia-Ukraine crisis to the Ketanji Brown Jackson confirmation hearings to Will Smith’s on-camera assault of comedian Chris Rock at the Academy Awards Ceremony.

  The distractions, distortions, and political theater just keep coming.

  

  The ongoing reality show that is life in the American police state feeds the citizenry’s voracious appetite for titillating, soap opera drama.

  Much like the fabricated universe in Peter Weir’s 1998 film The Truman Show, in which a man’s life is the basis for an elaborately staged television show aimed at selling products and procuring ratings, the political scene in the United States has devolved over the years into a carefully calibrated exercise in how to manipulate, polarize, propagandize and control a population.

  This is the magic of the reality TV programming that passes for politics today: as long as we are distracted, entertained, occasionally outraged, always polarized but largely uninvolved and content to remain in the viewer’s seat, we’ll never manage to present a unified front against tyranny (or government corruption and ineptitude) in any form.

  The more that is beamed at us, the more inclined we are to settle back in our comfy recliners and become passive viewers rather than active participants as unsettling, frightening events unfold.

  We don’t even have to change the channel when the subject matter becomes too monotonous. That’s taken care of for us by the programmers (the corporate media).

  “Living is easy with eyes closed,” observed John Lennon, and that’s exactly what reality TV that masquerades as American politics programs the citizenry to do: navigate the world with their eyes shut.

  As long as we’re viewers, we’ll never be doers.

  Studies suggest that the more reality TV people watch—and I would posit that it’s all reality TV, entertainment news included—the more difficult it becomes to distinguish between what is real and what is carefully crafted farce.

  “We the people” are watching a lot of TV.

  On average, Americans spend five hours a day watching television. By the time we reach age 65, we’re watching more than 50 hours of television a week, and that number increases as we get older. And reality TV programming consistently captures the largest percentage of TV watchers every season by an almost 2-1 ratio.

  This doesn’t bode well for a citizenry able to sift through masterfully-produced propaganda in order to think critically about the issues of the day, whether it’s fake news peddled by government agencies or foreign entities.

  Those who watch reality shows tend to view what they see as the “norm.” Thus, those who watch shows characterized by lying, aggression and meanness not only come to see such behavior as acceptable and entertaining but also mimic the medium.

  This holds true whether the reality programming is about the antics of celebrities in the White House, in the board room, or in the bedroom.

  It’s a phenomenon called “humilitainment.”

  A term coined by media scholars Brad Waite and Sara Booker, “humilitainment” refers to the tendency for viewers to take pleasure in someone else’s humiliation, suffering and pain.

  “Humilitainment” largely explains not only why American TV watchers are so fixated on reality TV programming but how American citizens, largely insulated from what is really happening in the world around them by layers of technology, entertainment, and other distractions, are being programmed to accept the government’s brutality, surveillance and dehumanizing treatment as things happening to other people.

  The ramifications for the future of civic engagement, political discourse and self-government are incredibly depressing and demoralizing.

  This explains how we keep getting saddled with leaders in government who are clueless about the Constitution and out-of-touch with the needs of the people they were appointed to represent.

  This is also what happens when an entire nation—bombarded by reality TV programming, government propaganda and entertainment news—becomes systematically desensitized and acclimated to the trappings of a government that operates by fiat and speaks in a language of force.

  Ultimately, the reality shows, the entertainment news, the surveillance society, the militarized police, and the political spectacles have one common objective: to keep us divided, distracted, imprisoned, and incapable of taking an active role in the business of self-government.

  Look behind the political spectacles, the reality TV theatrics, the sleight-of-hand distractions and diversions, and the stomach-churning, nail-biting drama, and you will find there is a method to the madness.

  We have become guinea pigs in a ruthlessly calculated, carefully orchestrated, chillingly cold-blooded experiment in how to control a population and advance a political agenda without much opposition from the citizenry.

  This is mind-control in its most sinister form.

  How do you change the way people think? You start by changing the words they use.

  In totalitarian regimes where conformity and compliance are enforced at the end of a loaded gun, the government dictates what words can and cannot be used.

  In countries where tyranny hides behind a benevolent mask and disguises itself as tolerance, the citizens censor themselves, policing their words and thoughts to conform to the dictates of the mass mind.

  Even when the motives behind this rigidly calibrated reorientation of societal language appear well-intentioned—discouraging racism, condemning violence, denouncing discrimination and hatred—inevitably, the end result is the same: intolerance, indoctrination, infantilism, the chilling of free speech and the demonizing of viewpoints that run counter to the cultural elite.

  As George Orwell recognized, “In times of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”

  Orwell understood only too well the power of language to manipulate the masses.

  In Orwell’s 1984, Big Brother does away with all undesirable and unnecessary words and meanings, even going so far as to routinely rewrite history and punish “thoughtcrimes.” In this dystopian vision of the future, the Thought Police serve as the eyes and ears of Big Brother, while the Ministry of Peace deals with war and defense, the Ministry of Plenty deals with economic affairs (rationing and starvation), the Ministry of Love deals with law and order (torture and brainwashing), and the Ministry of Truth deals with news, entertainment, education and art (propaganda). The mottos of Oceania: WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY, and IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.

  Orwell’s Big Brother relied on Newspeak to eliminate undesirable words, strip such words as remained of unorthodox meanings and make independent, non-government-approved thought altogether unnecessary.

  Where we stand now is at the juncture of Oldspeak (where words have meanings, and ideas can be dangerous) and Newspeak (where only that which is “safe” and “accepted” by the majority is permitted).

  Truth is often lost when we fail to distinguish between opinion and fact, and that is the danger we now face as a society. Anyone who relies exclusively on television/cable news hosts and political commentators for actual knowledge of the world is making a serious mistake.

  Unfortunately, since Americans have by and large become non-readers, television has become their prime source of so-called “news.” This reliance on TV news has given rise to such popular news personalities who draw in vast audiences that virtually hang on their every word.

  In our media age, these are the new powers-that-be.

  Yet while these personalities often dispense the news like preachers used to dispense religion, with power and certainty, they are little more than conduits for propaganda and advertisements delivered in the guise of entertainment and news.

  Given the preponderance of news-as-entertainment programming, it’s no wonder that viewers have largely lost the ability to think critically and analytically and differentiate between truth and propaganda, especially when delivered by way of fake news criers and politicians.

  While television news cannot—and should not—be completely avoided, the following suggestions will help you better understand the nature of TV news.

  1. TV news is not what happened. Rather, it is what someone thinks is worth reporting. Although there are still some good TV journalists, the old art of investigative reporting has largely been lost. While viewers are often inclined to take what is reported by television “news” hosts at face value, it is your responsibility to judge and analyze what is reported.

  2. TV news is entertainment. There is a reason why the programs you watch are called news “shows.” It’s a signal that the so-called news is being delivered as a form of entertainment. “In the case of most news shows,” write Neil Postman and Steve Powers in their insightful book, How to Watch TV News (1992), “the package includes attractive anchors, an exciting musical theme, comic relief, stories placed to hold the audience, the creation of the illusion of intimacy, and so on.”

  Of course, the point of all this glitz and glamour is to keep you glued to the set so that a product can be sold to you. (Even the TV news hosts get in on the action by peddling their own products, everything from their latest books to mugs and bathrobes.) Although the news items spoon-fed to you may have some value, they are primarily a commodity to gather an audience, which will in turn be sold to advertisers.

  3. Never underestimate the power of commercials, especially to news audiences. In an average household, the television set is on over seven hours a day. Most people, believing themselves to be in control of their media consumption, are not really bothered by this. But TV is a two-way attack: it not only delivers programming to your home, it also delivers you (the consumer) to a sponsor.

  People who watch the news tend to be more attentive, educated and have more money to spend. They are, thus, a prime market for advertisers. And sponsors spend millions on well-produced commercials. Such commercials are often longer in length than most news stories and cost more to produce than the news stories themselves. Moreover, the content of many commercials, which often contradicts the messages of the news stories, cannot be ignored. Most commercials are aimed at prurient interests in advocating sex, overindulgence, drugs, etc., which has a demoralizing effect on viewers, especially children.

  4. It is vitally important to learn about the economic and political interests of those who own the “corporate” media.

  There are few independent news sources anymore. The major news outlets are owned by corporate empires.

  5. Pay special attention to the language of newscasts. Because film footage and other visual imagery are so engaging on TV news shows, viewers are apt to allow language—what the reporter is saying about the images—to go unexamined. A TV news host’s language frames the pictures, and, therefore, the meaning we derive from the picture is often determined by the host’s commentary. TV by its very nature manipulates viewers. One must never forget that every television minute has been edited. The viewer does not see the actual event but the edited form of the event. For example, presenting a one- to two-minute segment from a two-hour political speech and having a TV talk show host critique may be disingenuous, but such edited footage is a regular staple on news shows. Add to that the fact that the reporters editing the film have a subjective view—sometimes determined by their corporate bosses—that enters in.

  6. Reduce by at least one-half the amount of TV news you watch. TV news generally consists of “bad” news—wars, torture, murders, scandals and so forth. It cannot possibly do you any harm to excuse yourself each week from much of the mayhem projected at you on the news. Do not form your concept of reality based on television. TV news, it must be remembered, does not reflect normal everyday life. Studies indicate that a heavy viewing of TV news makes people think the world is much more dangerous than it actually is.

  7. One of the reasons many people are addicted to watching TV news is that they feel they must have an opinion on almost everything, which gives the illusion of participation in American life. But an “opinion” is all that we can gain from TV news because it only presents the most rudimentary and fragmented information on anything. Thus, on most issues we don’t really know much about what is actually going on. And, of course, we are expected to take what the TV news host says on an issue as gospel truth. But isn’t it better to think for yourself? Add to this that we need to realize that we often don’t have enough information from the “news” source to form a true opinion. How can that be done? Study a broad variety of sources, carefully analyze issues in order to be better informed, and question everything.

  The bottom line is simply this: Americans should beware of letting others—whether they be television news hosts, political commentators or media corporations—do their thinking for them.

  As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, a populace that cannot think for themselves is a populace with its backs to the walls: mute in the face of elected officials who refuse to represent us, helpless in the face of police brutality, powerless in the face of militarized tactics and technology that treat us like enemy combatants on a battlefield, and naked in the face of government surveillance that sees and hears all.

  It’s time to change the channel, tune out the reality TV show, and push back against the real menace of the police state.

  If not, if we continue to sit back and lose ourselves in political programming, we will remain a captive audience to a farce that grows more absurd by the minute.

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 03/30/2022 – 00:05

• Visualizing All Crude Oil Pipelines & Refineries Across US & Canada
  Visualizing All Crude Oil Pipelines & Refineries Across US & Canada

  Pipelines are the primary method of transporting crude oil around the world, delivering oil and its derivative products swiftly to refineries and empowering reliant businesses.

  And, as Visual Capitalist’s Christina Kostandi and Niccolo Conte detail below, North America is a major oil hub, with the U.S. and Canada alone are home to more than 90,000 miles of crude oil and petroleum product pipelines, along with more than 140 refineries that can process around 20 million barrels of oil every day.

  This interactive graphic uses data from Rextag to map out crude oil pipelines and refineries across the U.S. and Canada, showcasing individual pipeline diameter and daily refinery throughput.

  

  <!–

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  The Longest Crude Oil Pipeline Networks in North America

  Since 2010, U.S. crude oil production has more than doubled from 5.4 million barrels a day to more than 11.5 million. Meanwhile, the pipeline networks needed to transport this newly produced oil have only expanded by roughly 56%.

  Today, the largest pipeline network across the U.S. and Canada (with a diameter of at least 10 inches) is the 14,919 mile network managed by Plains, which spans from the northwestern tip of Alberta all the way down to the southern coasts of Texas and Louisiana.

  

  Enbridge owns the next largest crude oil pipeline network, with 12,974 miles of crude oil pipelines that are at least 10 inches in diameter. The Canadian company, one of the world’s largest oil companies, transports about 30% of the crude oil produced in North America.

  Following the networks of Plains and Enbridge, there’s a steep drop off in the length of pipeline networks, with Sunoco’s crude oil pipeline network spanning about half the length of Enbridge’s at 6,409 miles.

  The Largest Crude Oil Refineries in North America

  These various sprawling pipeline networks initially carry crude oil to refineries, where it is processed into gasoline, diesel fuel, and other petroleum products.

  The refineries with the largest throughput in North America are all located in the Gulf Coast (PADD 3), with the five refineries that process more than 500,000 barrels per day all located in the states of Louisiana and Texas.

  

  While Texas and Louisiana have six refineries that process more than 400,000 barrels per day, there are only two other facilities outside of these states with the same kind of throughput, located in Whiting, Indiana (435,000 barrels per day) and Fort McMurray, Alberta (465,000 barrels per day).

  Fort McMurray’s facility is an upgrader, which differs from refineries as it upgrades heavy oils like bitumen into lighter synthetic crude oil which flows through pipelines more easily. Many oil refineries aren’t able to directly convert bitumen, which is extracted from oil sands like those found in Alberta, making upgraders a necessary part in the production and processing of crude oil from oil sands.

  The Uncertain Future of New Pipelines in North America

  The development of new pipelines remains a contentious issue in Canada and the U.S., with the cancellation of the Keystone XL pipeline emblematic of growing anti-pipeline sentiment. In 2021, only 14 petroleum liquids pipeline projects were completed in the U.S., which was the lowest amount of new pipelines and expansions since 2013.

  But domestic energy production is once again in the spotlight due to the U.S. ban on Russian oil imports and Russia’s impending export ban on raw materials. North American consumers are now facing surging gasoline and energy prices as foreign oil is proving to be far less reliable in times of geopolitical turmoil.

  It’s important to note that pipelines are not a perfect solution, as leaks and spills in just the last decade have resulted in billions of dollars of damages. From 2010 to 2020, the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration recorded 983 incidents that resulted in 149,000 spilled and unrecovered barrels of oil, five fatalities, 27 injuries, and more than $2.5B in damages.

  But over the past five years, liquid pipeline incidents have fallen by 21% while pipeline mileage and barrels delivered have increased by more than 27%. Along with these infrastructure improvements, pipeline developers and operators emphasize the lack of better alternatives, as freight and seaborne transportation are both far less efficient and result in more carbon emissions.

  Currently, pipelines remain key components of energy consumption across the U.S. and Canada, and as global energy markets face supply squeezes, international sanctions, and geopolitical turbulence, the focus on them has grown.

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 03/29/2022 – 23:45

• Saudi Arabia May Raise Its Oil Prices For Asia To Record Premiums
  Saudi Arabia May Raise Its Oil Prices For Asia To Record Premiums

  By Tsvetana Paraskova of OilPrice.com

  

  Asian refiners and traders expect top crude exporter Saudi Arabia to once again hike significantly the prices of its crude going to Asia in May to a record premium over the Middle Eastern benchmarks, a Bloomberg survey showed on Tuesday.

  The soaring oil prices and the “buyers’ strike” over purchasing Russian crude could be an opportunity for Russia’s key ally in the OPEC+ pact, OPEC’s de facto leader Saudi Arabia, to hike its official selling prices (OSPs) to another all-time high over the Oman/Dubai benchmark, off which Middle Eastern crude is priced in Asia.

  Per the Bloomberg survey of five traders and refiners, Saudi Arabia’s oil giant Aramco could increase its OSP for May for Asia for Arab Light—the Kingdom’s flagship grade—by a massive $5 per barrel to a premium of nearly $10 a barrel over the Oman/Dubai benchmark.

  Earlier in March, Saudi Aramco lifted its April price to Asia for its flagship grade to $4.95 a barrel premium over Oman/Dubai, which was the largest ever premium of Arab Light to the Middle East benchmark.

  If in early April Saudi Aramco raises the price of Arab Light for May by as much as traders and refiners in the Bloomberg poll expect, Arab Light will be sold in Asia in May at a premium of $9.95 per barrel over the Oman-Dubai benchmark. This would be a new record differential for the Saudi crude prices to Asia.

  Saudi Arabia generally sets the pricing trends of the other major Middle Eastern oil producers, and it usually sets the OSPs of its crude for the following month around the fifth of each month, typically after the monthly OPEC+ meeting.

  The meeting of the OPEC+ group is scheduled for March 31, and producers have signaled they would keep the production plan as-is, that is, raising the OPEC+ collective production quota by 400,000 barrels per day (bpd) for May.  

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 03/29/2022 – 23:25

• German States Outlaw Letter "Z" Displays As Ukraine Asks World To Criminalize
  German States Outlaw Letter “Z” Displays As Ukraine Asks World To Criminalize

  Public displays of the letter “Z” have been outlawed in two German states, after authorities in Bavaria and Lower Saxony announced over the weekend that anyone who displays the letter – which has become synonymous with support for Russia’s war in Ukraine – will be subject to a fine or three years in jail, according to The Local.

  

  “The Russian war of aggression on the Ukraine is a criminal act, and whoever publicly approves of this war of aggression can also make himself liable to prosecution,” said an Interior Ministry spokesperson in a Monday press statement.

  The letter became a hot-button issue after tanks amassed at the Ukrainian border displayed it – possibly to distinguish them from Ukraine’s tanks.

  Chapter 140 of Germany’s criminal code recognizes “incitement to crime of aggression” as an offense, according to Ukrainian state news agency Ukrinform. The Local reports that there have been displays of “Z” in both Lower Saxony and Bavaria. -NPR

  Russia’s war of aggression against #Ukraine is a criminal offense. Anyone publicly approving the war may be liable to prosecution in Germany. This applies to using the “Z” symbol, too. German security authorities are keeping an eye on the use of the symbol. – Ministry of Interior https://t.co/diQEgGwR7a

  — German Embassy (@GermanyinUSA) March 28, 2022

  https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

  Meanwhile, Ukraine is asking the entire world to criminalize the usage of “Z” – with Foreign Affairs Minister Dmytro Kuleba tweeting on Tuesday: “I call on all states to criminalize the use of the ‘Z’ symbol as a way to publicly support Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine.”

  “‘Z’ means Russian war crimes, bombed out cities, thousands of murdered Ukrainians. Public support of this barbarism must be forbidden.”

  I call on all states to criminalize the use of the ‘Z’ symbol as a way to publicly support Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine. ’Z’ means Russian war crimes, bombed out cities, thousands of murdered Ukrainians. Public support of this barbarism must be forbidden.

  — Dmytro Kuleba (@DmytroKuleba) March 29, 2022

  The actual meaning of the letter has never been confirmed, however Russia’s Defense Ministry said in a series of tweets earlier this month that the “Z” stands for “Victory,” “for the truth,” “for peace,” as well as “denazification” and demilitarization.”

  pic.twitter.com/kNVJ3gFi3O

  — Минобороны России (@mod_russia) March 4, 2022

  Summing up the situation is Paul Joseph Watson: 

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 03/29/2022 – 23:05

• Weaker Yen Becoming A Double-Edged Sword For Japanese Stocks
  Weaker Yen Becoming A Double-Edged Sword For Japanese Stocks

  By Hideyuki Sano, Bloomberg Taking Stock markets commentator and analyst

  The yen’s weakness has helped fuel a world-beating rally in Japanese stocks. But its impact appears less pronounced this time and may even risk backfiring in an era of rising oil prices and U.S. interest rates.

  The broad Topix index has gained 5.6% this month, outperforming most of its major global peers. While the yen’s slide to a more than six-year low has aided some exporters, the main drivers behind the market’s gains were banks and energy trading firms, which have benefited from higher borrowing costs and oil prices, respectively.

  The diminishing correlation between a cheaper yen and higher stocks not only costs Japanese shares a historically reliable catalyst but also reflects an economy increasingly dependent on offshore manufacturing. That has made Japanese businesses benefit less from a competitive currency and more vulnerable to imported inflation.

  

  “In recent years, Japanese corporate earnings have become less responsive to the yen’s moves,” said Hiroshi Watanabe, senior economist at Sony Financial Group Inc. That’s because a strong currency more than a decade ago prompted many firms to shift a large part of their production outside Japan.

  12-month forward earnings per share of firms listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange’s main board closely tracked the dollar-yen exchange rate until 2016, when the link started becoming much more tenuous.

  

  In a sign that a weaker yen is now more of a damper than boost to foreign investors, the latter were net sellers of local shares in the first three weeks of March, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. To these overseas investors, who account for more than two-thirds of brokerage trading in Japan, the yen’s rapid depreciation may lead to huge currency losses.

  “Prices of imported food and resources are rising, which will surely slow the Japanese economy because wages remain stagnant,” said Tetsuro Ii, chief executive at Commons Asset Management in Tokyo. “If the yen keeps falling, that may become a net negative.”

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 03/29/2022 – 22:45

• Mayor Lightfoot Assigned 70 Chicago Cops To Personal Security Detail Created In 2020
  Mayor Lightfoot Assigned 70 Chicago Cops To Personal Security Detail Created In 2020

  The Democratic rulers of ultra-liberal cities love to pay lip service to their voters’ calls to ‘defund the police’ – except, of course, when it comes to their own protection.

  In the latest example of this disturbing trend, Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot has, for the past two years, enjoyed a security detail consisting of some 71 Chicago PD officers, despite proposing to cut the department’s budget by $80 million back in 2020 as a sop to the “defund” movement (while the city’s murder rate continues to spiral out of control).

  

  The detail, known as Unit 544, started with a handful of officers, but has since grown into a group that includes 65 officers, five sergeants, and a lieutenant, according to a Chicago Sun Times report.

  As if this weren’t already excessive enough, Lightfoot has an additional personal bodyguard detail made up of approximately 20 officers. The department sent a memo to its officers in the summer of 2020 (at the height of the defund movement) inviting them to apply to join the mayor’s detail.

  “The unit’s mission will be to provide physical security for City Hall, the mayor’s residence and the mayor’s detail command post,” the memo read. “Through the coordination of intelligence and resources, officers will respond to all threats related to the mayor’s physical properties to ensure its protection.”

  Around the time the unit was established, city residents who lived near the mayor’s house were complaining that the precinct’s limited resources were too often being dedicated to the mayor’s residence, where protesters repeatedly gathered.

  Lightfoot told the Sun-Times that the unit was created to ensure proper coordination between officers who provided security at her residence, and those who provided security at city hall.

  “…[Y]ou know, if there was some kind of emergency at City Hall, for example, the right hand wouldn’t necessarily know what the left hand was doing because they all reported to different chains of command.”

  […]

  “…[I]n 2020 in particular, there were a significant amount of protests all over the city, and some of them targeted at my house. All the more reason why having a unified command to understand and share intelligence and be ready to respond if there was any kind of threat was very important.”

  Lightfoot also tried to play down the proposed PD budget cut as the result of a ‘pandemic-related budget shortfall’, not an example of her bowing to the “defund” movement.

  She also blamed President Trump for threatening her security: “When the president of the United States uses the world’s largest megaphone and platform to target you personally, terrible things happen…And he not only blew a dog whistle, he pointed really evil and dangerous people right at my doorstep.”

  Of course, the political winds have shifted dramatically since 2020 – so much so that President Biden recently included additional funding for federal and local law enforcement in his 2023 budget proposal, which he unveiled yesterday.

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 03/29/2022 – 22:25

• Biden Budgets Billions For Climate, "Environmental Justice", & Global Gender Equity
  Biden Budgets Billions For Climate, “Environmental Justice”, & Global Gender Equity

  Authored by Nathan Worcester via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

  President Joe Biden’s proposed fiscal year 2023 budget would involve billions of dollars in climate-related spending, including $11 billion for international climate finance, as well as multibillion-dollar investments said to “advance equity and equality globally.”

  

  Submitted on March 28—more than a month after it was legally due on the first Monday of February—the budget would total $5.8 trillion.

  With energy prices up from 2021 and an economically disruptive war raging in Eastern Europe, the president didn’t highlight climate or environmental concerns in a brief, pre-prepared statement on the budget request. However, he did claim that his budget would “continue our equitable growth.”

  Yet, according to a fact sheet from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), as well as a 156-page summary from that same agency, a significant proportion of prospective spending would be in the name of climate and what the fact sheet describes as “environmental justice.”

  The Ecological Society of America, a large organization of ecological scientists, states that “environmental justice is understood in many ways” on its webpage defining the term.

  It first lists the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA’s) definition, which appeared as early as 1998 in a Clinton administration report, where it was attributed to the EPA Office of Environmental Justice as “the fair treatment and meaningful involvement of all people regardless of race, color, national origin, or income, with respect to the development, implementation, and enforcement of environmental laws and regulations.”

  The webpage then notes that “a broader definition views [environmental justice] ‘both as a field of study and a social movement that seeks to address the unequal distribution of environmental benefits and harms, and asks whether procedures and impacts of environmental decision-making are fair to the people they affect,’” referencing a definition from University of Michigan professor Bunyan Bryant.

  Bryant, professor emeritus for Environmental Justice, has elsewhere written that “the destructive power of market forces” has led humans “to wreak destruction upon the Earth and upon each other.”

  A search of Federal Election Commission filings from Jan. 1, 2018, through Dec. 31, 2020, shows that all donations from people who listed “Ecological Society of America” or “The Ecological Society of America” as their employer went to Democratic candidates and causes, such as the Biden Victory Fund, Biden for President, and the online fundraising platform ActBlue.

  Climate and Equity

  Environmental spending in Biden’s proposed budget would include $3.3 billion on new energy programs, with $500,000 for weatherizing and retrofitting low-income homes.

  In addition, Biden would allocate $80 million to a Grid Deployment Office, which would aim to modernize the U.S. electrical grid.

  The EPA’s discretionary funding would be boosted to $11.9 billion, a rise of 29 percent from the enacted level for 2021. Biden seeks to enlarge EPA’s staff by 1,900 full-time equivalents, reversing a trend of staffing reductions under the Trump administration.

  More than $18 billion would go to climate resilience and adaptation, a major winner in the recently passed omnibus legislation.

  “These critical investments will reduce the risk of damages from floods and storms, restore the Nation’s aquatic ecosystems, and make HUD-assisted multifamily homes more climate-resilient,” the OMB fact sheet reads.

  An additional $1.45 billion goes to what are described as the EPA’s “environmental justice efforts,” which the fact sheet claims will “advance racial equity.”

  The budget would also provide $47 million in environmental justice-related funding to the Department of Energy and $1.4 million to establish a new Office of Environmental Justice within the Department of Justice.

  Biden’s budget would also devote $11 billion to international climate finance, including $1.6 billion for a Green Climate Fund, a program said to fund climate adaptation and mitigation in the developing world.

  Equity is a dominant theme both in the climate-related funding and elsewhere in the spending proposal. The OMB’s full, 156-page proposal uses the word “equity,” or close variations thereof, at least 75 times. “Equitable,” or close variations thereof, shows up 38 times.

  Months after the Taliban took control in Afghanistan and halted U.S. gender-related programs in that nation, Biden’s FY 2023 budget aims for “equity” not just in the United States, but around the world.

  The Biden administration had previously published the first National Strategy on Gender Equity and Equality in 2021.

  The OMB’s budget fact sheet highlights $2.6 billion in spending said to “advance gender equity and equality across a broad range of sectors.”

  As part of that effort, Biden’s FY 2023 budget would allocate $200 million to the Gender Equity and Equality Action Fund, which already received $200 million in the FY 2022 funding that was finalized through the recent omnibus.

  OMB Director Shalanda Young will testify about Biden’s proposed budget to the House Committee on the Budget on March 29.

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 03/29/2022 – 22:05

• Cathay Pacific Airways Secures World's Longest Flight As It Now Avoids Russian Airspace
  Cathay Pacific Airways Secures World’s Longest Flight As It Now Avoids Russian Airspace

  The international community is increasingly isolating Russia for its invasion of Ukraine. The latest example is Cathay Pacific Airways Ltd. rerouting its New York-Hong Kong flight away from Russian airspace, making it the world’s longest commercial passenger flight by distance. 

  According to a Cathay memo sent to flight staff and seen by Bloomberg, the New York-Hong Kong flight, using Airbus SE’s A350-1000, will be rerouted to avoid Russian airspace altogether. The new distance will total 10,326 miles for a 16-17 hour flight versus the old route across Russia that totaled 8,071 miles and take about 15 hours. 

  

  Cathay’s new flight will supersede Singapore Airlines Ltd.’s Singapore-New York JFK flight, which was once considered the longest flight in terms of distance. 

  

  “Such flight changes are likely to only be temporary given the costs carriers face from high oil prices and uncertainty over the accessibility of Russian airspace,” Bloomberg said, adding that other airlines are also rerouting flights away from Russian airspace. 

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 03/29/2022 – 21:45

• Profiles In Courage: The Canadian Truckers
  Profiles In Courage: The Canadian Truckers

  Authored by Margaret Anna Alice via ‘Alice Through The Looking Glass’ Substack,

  Celebrating the Winter of Love & the Worldwide Freedom Convoy Movement

  

  “The importance of the event [the storming of the Bastille] lay simply in the psychological fact that for the first time the people received an obvious proof of the weakness of an authority which had lately been formidable.

  “When the principle of authority is injured in the public mind it dissolves very rapidly. What might not one demand of a king who could not defend his principal fortress against popular attacks? The master regarded as all-powerful had ceased to be so.

  “The taking of the Bastille was the beginning of one of those phenomena of mental contagion which abound in the history of the Revolution. The foreign mercenary troops, although they could scarcely be interested in the movement, began to show symptoms of mutiny.”

  —Gustave Le Bon, The Psychology of Revolution (paperback, Kindle, audiobook)

  This profile may seem like old news. The Canadian Truckers Freedom Convoy is so February. The hypnotizing bauble is now yo-yoing over the Ukraine. That’s what we’re supposed to be fixated on now.

  Forget about the contagious burst of freedom that broke out in Canada—and especially forget about the emergency powers seized by Tyrant Trudeau without ever deigning to engage in diplomatic talks with the truckers, physicians, veterans, business owners, or ordinary citizens who gathered to support them.

  Ottawa residents Alycia @plantbasedb and @SounguiFitness who live in centertown curious about the protests went to check them out and found only love and kindness. Songui brought his mother to the protests. She had only seen the mainstream coverage and she changed her mind. pic.twitter.com/T9UB1DgJkN

  — Rupa Subramanya (@rupasubramanya) February 10, 2022

  But I cannot forget. And I will not forget. Because what the Canadian truckers achieved in that courageous act of peaceful mass noncompliance is one of the most beautiful expressions of what I described as the secret to capsizing tyranny in my second essay, COVID IS OVER! … If You Want It, courtesy of Étienne de La Boétie’s The Politics of Obedience: The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude:

  “You can deliver yourselves if you try, not by taking action, but merely by willing to be free. Resolve to serve no more, and you are at once freed. I do not ask that you place hands upon the tyrant to topple him over, but simply that you support him no longer; then you will behold him, like a great Colossus whose pedestal has been pulled away, fall of his own weight and break into pieces.”

  This video from Dr. Roger Hodkinson conveys the euphoria that erupted around the world as we witnessed the Canadian truckers—after two cruel years of escalating tyranny and breaches of rights—stand up and say, “NO! NO MORE.”

  The truckers did not do this for themselves. Indeed, they risked everything—their income, their licenses, their rigs, their assets, even their freedom. The State threatened to take their children away and said that if they were arrested, their dogs would be seized and considered “relinquished” after eight days. They fearlessly put everything on the line to fight for the freedom of not only Canadians but all of humanity.

  And what happened next was magic.

  I call it the Winter of Love. When I saw this jubilant photo1 of a Canadian couple kissing while holding the Canadian flag aloft, I immediately thought of Alfred Eisenstaedt’s “The Kiss”:

  

  Both of these epic images capture the elation of liberation following years of terror, repressions, and fatalities wrought by totalitarian regimes. The first was a physical war, the latter psychological. Each teaches us the “only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”

  During the most exuberant three-and-a-half weeks in Canadian history, tens of thousands of citizens converged on Ottawa. Canadians like Sirka Sie—a reader, friend, and chef who sent me the opening video her daughter filmed of her—leapt up and down on the side of the road, cheering on the Freedom Convoy as it rolled through their neighborhoods.

  Once the convoy reached Ottawa, kids frolicked in bouncy castles (much to the chagrin of grinch politicians); grandmothers batch-baked muffins; Sikhs danced and practiced seva by serving up free food; and protesters broke into snowball fights, played street hockey, soaked in hot tubs, thawed out in saunas, roasted marshmallows, whipped up batches of cotton candy, threw pancake parties, set off fireworks, danced, and sung “O Canada” while hugging police officers and “Lean on Me” when cops arrived to arrest them in Milk River, Alberta.

  This woman, a program director at a Calgary radio station, traveled to Ottawa to see the protest for herself, and an irrepressible smile bubbles up as she finds herself awash in an ocean of love:

  The last living signatory of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, Brian Peckford2 delivered an electrifying speech in which he announced the filing of a lawsuit against the government for violating this sacred charter:

  Naturally, Trudeau; WEF-penetrated Cabinet members3; and the complicitous, state-funded media fabricated an ersatz narrative so incongruous with the thousands of hours of live-streamed joy that only the most brainwashed failed to recognize the uproarious dissonance.

  In yet another demonstration of how closely the establishment left has aligned itself with authoritarianism, public figures like Noam Chomsky, Amy Goodman, and Michael Moore unironically bashed the working-class dissenters; counter-protesters labeled them “terrorists”; and so-called “anarchists” vehemently opposed them.

  I proudly drew ire from Montréal-based “anarcho-syndicalists” Liberté Ouvrière for “support[ing] the truckers and talk[ing] of the Great Reset, a conspiracy theory” in my Letter to Justin Trudeau, LOL.

  And then, of course, you have tyranny apologists/propagandists like The Guardian mocking the idea of “standing up for freedom” and equating the concept of freedom with right-wing extremism as part of their “War Is Peace, Freedom Is Slavery, Ignorance Is Strength” campaign.

  The media spray-painted these magnanimous, loving, responsible folks as Nazis, racists, misogynists, and transphobes (you know, the usual repertoire of slurs slung when they can’t supply any substantive criticisms)—all while the Naziesque blackface leader behaved like a petulant tyrant, first tucking tail and hiding while feigning COVID, then slandering the peaceful protesters, then hysterically overreacting by pole-vaulting to a last resort that was only to be invoked after all other avenues had been exhausted (none of which had been attempted)—thus earning the well-deserved descriptors as “a disgrace to any democracy” by German Member of the European Parliament (MEP) Christine Anderson and “exactly like a tyrant, like a dictator” by Romanian MEP Cristian Terhes, all while presiding over “a dictatorship of the worst kind,” according to Croatian MEP Mislav Kolakusic.

  Contrary to the media narrative, the protesters represented a cross-section of every conceivable demographic (minus pro-tyranny Covidians), prompting some to express their disgust and others to wear signs asking, “Am I Racist?” and “Do I Look Like a White Supremacist?”

  

  One protester humorously thanked Justin Trudeau for “bringing everybody together” in unity against him for his divisive rhetoric.

  Real People’s Media covered the Freedom Convoy with an emphasis on the indigenous community. In this video, Audrey Redman (Dakota-Cree from Saskatchewan) and Neecha (Ojibway Nation of Saugeen) share their experiences of the demonstrations, which they witnessed from the outset.

  Audrey says:

  “It was such an event of unity that brought everyone together.… I’ve never been anywhere … other than a powwow, where people were so united and happy to be together.”

  In this message from the Mohawk women from Grand River, the speaker notes:

  “We send love and gratitude to all of the brave men and women who are holding the line, uniting together with kindness and compassion in their hearts for freedom so that truth and justice may prevail.”

  My contact at Real People’s Media shared the following statement by owner and cofounder Kanenhariyo:

  “Real People’s Media has been on the ground in Ottawa for several days, and our teams did not see or film any swastika or Confederate flags. We have filmed for several days and we have not heard any hate- or race-based speeches.

  “This movement has attracted many different groups and cultures. But Real People’s Media correspondents have not observed any obvious hate, racism, or violence.”

  In what appears to have been a literal false flag event, a highly suspicious character held a Confederate flag with a semi truck printed on it. An eyewitness who was present confided in me:

  “I saw the Confederate flag guy up close that first weekend. Pretty much the only person out of thousands I saw wearing a mask, and he was masked and wearing very cop-like sunglasses.”

  “I remember looking at him many times as he was a sore thumb in a sea of smiling faces.”

  “A very odd flag. I thought to myself where on earth would you get a Confederate flag with a truck superimposed in the middle? In all my time visiting in the Southern states, I had never seen anything like it.”

  “From this photo, it looks like he must have been there starting early! I was on the hill by noon at latest, and there were hundreds more people.”

  Additionally, there are reports that Justin Trudeau’s photographer, Adam Scotti, was present taking photos with the guy who “just happens to have a brand new confederate flag that still has wrinkles on it.”

  Whether or not the “Nazi flag guy” was legitimate, the protesters denounced and attempted to identify him, and this infinitesimal drop in the ocean by no means represented the overall movement.

  In at least one instance where a swastika appeared on a protest sign, it was being used to convey the fascistic policies of the Canadian government. The sign is clearly not advocating for Naziism but rather condemning today’s medical tyranny for its similarities to the Third Reich’s discriminatory and genocidal laws. That said, use of the swastika makes for horrific optics that can and will be exploited by the propagandists, so it is prudent for protesters to avoid inadvertently baiting the media with such symbols of hatred.

  Fortunately, the awake among us observed ample evidence of the reality on the ground, thanks to innumerable round-the-clock live-streamers, including Mr. Sunshine Baby, Viva Frei, Press for Truth, Ottawalks, and ZOT. The footage shot by the myriad participants in this historic event is now being woven into the forthcoming documentary, Trucking for Freedom:

  Heather Heying4 covered the Canadian truckers with her usual lucidity and passion at her Substack, from Truckers for Freedom to “Proud to Be Canadian Again” to We Leave When We Are Free to Get Ready for the Biggest Game of Whack-A-Mole the World Has Ever Seen.

  I found this letter Heather shared from a Canadian particularly moving and am grateful to powerhouse Steve Kirsch for exponentially multiplying its views at my request (thanks, yet again, for amplifying love and truth, Superhero Steve! 🤗):

  In Faces of Protest, Heather shared these radiant, heart-swelling portraits of protesters by photographer Dan Aponte:

  

  Through gentle resistance and brilliant tactical maneuvers such as blockades at Ambassador Bridge and border shutdowns at Coutts and Surrey, the Canadian truckers and protesters inflicted an injury to the principle of authority that awakened the world to the realization that totalitarianism hinges on compliance, showing that We the People must stand up and take back our freedoms from the self-proclaimed “elites” to end our enslavement.

  As Michael Malice observes, “The victory here is that their machinations are made public.”

  Badass tyranny resister Pastor Artur Pawlowski urged Canadian truckers to hold the line, and pilot Greg Hill explained why summoning courage was so pivotal at this moment in history:

  And summon courage they did, becoming a catalyst that would spark Freedom Convoys around the globe—most notably in Australia, where the Canberra convoy rose from the ashes of the Australians’ despondency and reinvigorated a downtrodden people. In Paris, the police joined the protesters in denouncing Macronian authoritarianism. These demonstrators would not have been so emboldened without the Canadian truckers’ example.

  Arguably the most essential workers, truckers possess an unparalleled power to stop entire countries and make the honking cry for freedom heard.

  As polymath Dr. Jessica Rose (a.k.a. “Unacceptable Jessica”) writes:

  “When they stop flowing on the roads of the world, the human societal network stops flowing in turn: the truckers are the red blood cells in the circulatory system of human society as we know it.”

  The Canadian truckers gallantly used that power to enact Thomas Jefferson’s dictum, “When tyranny becomes law, rebellion becomes duty.”

  In a galvanizing speech at a People’s Convoy USA event, attorney Tricia Lindsay outlines the responsibility of citizens to defend themselves against a tyrannical government:

  After nearly a month of peaceful civil disobedience in Canada, the festive atmosphere transformed from Christmas to Krystallnacht as fascism lashed back.

  

  Instead of listening to the concerns of its citizens, the Canadian government and its colluders:

  • banned honking;

  • brutally arrested those who violated this injunction;

  • illegally stole GoFundMe donations;

  • froze GiveSendGo donations;

  • shut down the Freedom Convoy Facebook page;

  • seized fuel and then returned it contaminated;

  • tried to entrap protesters with agent provocateurs;

  • attempted to set fire to an apartment building (foiled by the truckers and later confirmed to be a hoax);

  • declared a “state of emergency” and invoked the Emergencies Act without meeting the necessary threshold, setting the stage for future violations of Canadians’ inalienable rights;

  • rifle-whipped protesters;

  • mowed down and tear-gassed protestors;

  • trampled an elderly disabled Mohawk woman just after she’d said they were doing this so their children and grandchildren could have “peace and love and happiness”;

  • said “time for the protesters to hear our jackboots on the ground” and called the horse trampling video “awesome!!!” in a Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) group chat;

  • clubbed and tear-gassed reporter Alexa Lavoie in the face;

  • staged an arrest;

  • beat and faux-arrested demonstrators;

  • froze and seized donor bank accounts and crypto wallets (although the latter has proven more challenging);

  • threatened to “actively look to identify you and follow up with financial sanctions and criminal charges” in the coming months;

  • arrested politicians for openly supporting the Freedom Convoy; and

  • laid the asphalt for digital IDs and a future surveillance state where similar outbursts of freedom become impossible.

  They weren’t all bad cops, though. One was giving out hugs until a colleague admonished him to stop fraternizing with the enemy, and numerous police officers spoke out against enforcing tyranny.

  The first Canadian cop to publicly condemn the mandates—a noble act that earned his suspension—former Calgary Police Officer Brian Denison called on his fellow officers to disobey unlawful orders.

  Retired Ontario Provincial Police Officer Ed Grenier also urged his fellow officers to heed their conscience and not take action against peaceful citizens.

  Calgary Police Officer Nick Motycka relays the devastation he felt when witnessing “police doing politicians’ dirty work like hired goons.”

  Ontario Police Constable Erin Howard is under investigation for calling the truckers “true heroes” who are “fighting for our rights and freedoms,” while Edmonton Police Service Constable Elena Golysheva was placed on leave after posting this tearful video lamenting the loss of the very freedoms she fled to Canada to enjoy.

  There was even a sizable number of standup politicians.

  Leader of the Opposition Candice Bergen consecutively kicked derrière on February 8, February 9, and February 10. MP Raquel Dancho also gave Trudeau a terrific walloping.

  MP Pierre Poilievre said “freedom is on the march,” and delivered an impassioned lesson on the true emergencies facing Canadians.

  MP Melissa Lantsman reproved Trudeau for “fan[ning] the flames of an unjustified national emergency,” and he responded by accusing the descendent of Holocaust survivors of standing with “swastika wavers.”

  Just after Parliament was suspended, MP Andrew James Bernard Scheer described Trudeau’s “massive power grab.”

  MP Joël Lightbound expressed empathy for the protesters; reprimanded his party for normalizing restrictions and failing to adjust policies based on the latest scientific data; and critiqued their divisive “politicization of the pandemic.”

  In a speech that may have been responsible for spurring Trudeau to end the Emergencies Act out of fear the Senate was about to vote it down, Senator Donald Neil Plett eloquently eviscerated Trudeau for his historically unprecedented actions and behavior toward Canadian citizens, noting:

  “For three weeks, the prime minister did little more than hurl insults. He actually left town and let the crisis fester and worsen. He is supposed to be the prime minister for all Canadians, even those he may disagree with, but he clearly does not see things that way, and the result is that his policies are seriously dividing Canadians.

  “Then after three weeks of inaction, Justin Trudeau came out and used the ultimate tool in his toolbox. The nuclear option, the Emergencies Act. It is hard to refute the accusation that this is a Prime Minister who is at war with many of his fellow citizens. Instead of trying to understand their concerns and the impact of his government measures on them, he is now using all the power he can muster to crush them. He has taken the sweeping powers of the Emergencies Act and turned it on the very people who were just asking to be heard.

  “This is a prime minister who does not like opposition. He admires the basic dictatorship of China. He does not listen. He preaches. He does not debate, he insults. He does not convince, he imposes.”

  Although it was a melancholy day when Trucker Convoy organizer Tom Marazzo announced the decision to peacefully withdraw at a February 19 press conference, that same day saw one of the most inspiring speeches of the entire protest when a naturalized Canadian who had grown up under the Romanian dictatorship and witnessed the fall of Ceaușescu reminded the crowd:

  “They have the force; we have the power!”

  “Violence is the last resort of a dictator, but I assure you that his days are numbered.”

  “We are not asking you any more to give us our freedom back. We are taking it back!”

  Also on February 19, the scintillating Neil Oliver cannonaded Trudeau in this blistering diatribe:

  “The increasingly puffy and pasty prime minister Justin Trudeau—looking more and more like a waxwork dummy left too close to a radiator—has clutched, desperately, drowning man that he surely is, at emergency powers.

  “He evidently fears the truckers, and their wives and their little ones, and their freedom protest, and so feels as vulnerable as a desiccated sandcastle facing the incoming tide.”

  He closes with these triumphant lines:

  “People ought not to fear the power of governments. Governments ought to fear the power, the righteous power of their people.

  Lest anyone think the Canadian truckers’ movement ended in defeat, this prolonged act of civil disobedience achieved significant tangible as well as intangible victories.

  As early as January 31, the number of Canadians saying they wanted restrictions to end had tipped by a striking 15 percentage points since early January, making the pro-freedom contingency the majority at 54 percent. Two weeks later, that was up to a remarkable two thirds of Canadians. So much for a “small fringe minority.”

  The protesters not only bent the needle of public opinion, but they exerted direct pressure on the premiers, who undoubtedly had upcoming elections in mind as they recalibrated their positions to the will of the people. One by one, the premiers began lifting COVID restrictions—Scott Moe in Saskatchewan, Jason Kenney in Alberta, Heather Stefanson in Manitoba, Doug Ford in Ontario, Francois Legault of Quebec, Tim Houston in Nova Scotia, Dennis King in Prince Edward Island, Blaine Higgs in New Brunswick, and Andrew Furey in Newfoundland and Labrador—until all of the provinces had eventually been liberated.

  As mentioned above, the Canadian truckers ignited a worldwide Freedom Convoy movement. In the United States, that took the form of the People’s Convoy.

  Radio show host and writer March Twisdale joined the US convoy and blogged about her cross-country journey and the dazzling people she met along the way.

  Dr. Paul Alexander chronicled his participation in both the Canadian and US convoys, the latter of which culminated in meetings with Senators Ron Johnson and Ted Cruz—a dialogue with legislators that symbolized the stark contrast with Trudeau’s contemptuous refusal to talk with the truckers. Dr. Alexander wound his way back to Toronto, where he delivered a rousing speech at the Toronto World Wide Trucker Rally on March 19.

  Demanding accountability for oppressive and lethal policies, Dr. Alexander echoed the cries of those who have been suffering under the boot of authoritarianism worldwide and are thirsting for freedom and justice.

  One of my readers, retired British military officer and retired Canadian Armed Forces Reserve officer Stew Staudinger of Real Canadian Liberal, was kind enough to share this video in which he cogently explains how Justin Trudeau is guilty of crimes against humanity under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and why Canadians must take responsibility for seeing that justice is served.

  That process may already be underway. On March 14, a joint committee of Canada’s Parliament launched an “unprecedented” official “inquiry into the Trudeau government’s actions against the Freedom Convoy civil liberties protesters.” Once again, the eyes of the world will be on Canada as they see whether a tyrant gets away with criminal malfeasance.

  As Frederick Douglass warns:

  “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.”

  This is the moment in history when we must prescribe those limits, and the Canadian truckers have modeled the courage necessary to do so.

  *  *  *

  If you feel the work I am doing is worthwhile and want to make it possible for me to spend more time writing and researching in my aim to unmask totalitarianism and awaken the sleeping before tyranny triumphs, please consider supporting me, whether it be by subscribing, donating, buying me a coffee, or sharing my posts. I thank you for reading, thinking, sharing, and supporting my work in whichever ways you choose. Prefer to donate crypto? You can send Bitcoin using the following code: bc1ql706rr7vj7c7nzxnqfp9rldw8ddfc20f492jk0

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  Remember, a subscription to Margaret Anna Alice Through the Looking Glass makes for an intellectually adventurous gift down the rabbit-hole!

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 03/29/2022 – 21:25

• Avocado Prices Rocket To Decade High As Mexican Production Set To Plunge 
  Avocado Prices Rocket To Decade High As Mexican Production Set To Plunge 

  Even before the war in Ukraine, a majority of American households were under pressure from record-high food inflation and consumer prices at a four-decade high. The conflict and following sanction inflation have made everything worse. One food unrelated to Ukraine and found mainly in Mexico is avocados. Prices of the fruit are now at a decade high as supplies tighten (in terms of USD). 

  Ahead of Super Bowl 56, on Feb. 13, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) suspended U.S. imports of Mexican avocados due to one of its inspectors being threatened by drug cartel members. At the time, we pointed out avocados prices had never been higher for the big football game. 

  Even though U.S. imports of avocados have been restored, prices have continued to rocket higher since Super Bowl 56. For a 20-pound box of avocados from the state of Michoacan, Mexico (the central hub of Mexican avocado production), prices soared 40% to around $38, a new decade high. 

  

  Two decades of data show prices for avocados have never been higher for this time of year. 

  

  The cause of the price surge is not as much related to trade disruption but instead tightening supplies. 

  “Lower availability and supply-side inflationary pressures are the main suspects,” David Magana, an analyst at Rabobank International, wrote in a note. 

  Keep in mind that 80% of all U.S. avocados originate from Mexico, and the rest are from the U.S. 

  USDA expects Mexican avocado output to plunge 8% in the 2021-22 crop year from a record high harvest in the prior growing season. 

  Bloomberg notes, “American importers of the fruit are still catching up from a temporary ban on shipments from Michoacan last month stemming from threats against U.S. inspectors.”

  Mission Produce Inc, the largest U.S. avocado wholesaler, has marked up prices by more than 50%. 

  “Partially offsetting price gains was an 18% decrease in avocado volume sold, which was primarily driven by lower supply, but exacerbated by price sensitivity in select international markets that competed for lower-cost sources of fruit,” CEO Steve Barnard told Bloomberg in a statement. 

  Factor in soaring costs of fertilizer, diesel, and freight, avocado prices are likely to remain elevated and or keep rising until millennials can no longer afford the yummy fruit, otherwise known as demand destruction. 

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 03/29/2022 – 21:05

• Taibbi: Meet The Censored – Chris Hedges
  Taibbi: Meet The Censored – Chris Hedges

  Authored by Matt Taibbi via TK News,

  This past weekend, celebrated journalist and author Chris Hedges woke up to find six years of episodes of his Russia Today show On Contact vanished from the show’s account on YouTube. Though almost none of the shows referenced Russia or Vladimir Putin directly, and the few that did tended to be unflattering, his association with Russian state media was enough to erase hundreds of interviews about topics ranging from Julian Assange’s imprisonment to censorship to police brutality to American war crimes in the Middle East.

  

  Now on Substack, Hedges has a long and uncomfortably colorful history of being muffled. The former New York Times correspondent covered wars from the Balkans to the Middle East to the Falkland Islands, and authored books like War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, American Fascists, and The Death of the Liberal Class, and through 2002, when he won the Pulitzer Prize as part of a team for Exploratory Reporting, he defined mainstream respectability and excellence in journalism. He might have had it easy, spending the latter part of his career on the Thomas Friedman/David Brooks Memorial Gravy Train of overpaid lectures, University trusteeships, and fellowships at obscure think-tanks, if he’d just kept his mouth shut.

  He didn’t. One of the few frontline American reporters who spoke Arabic, Hedges knew instantly the Iraq war would be a disaster and said so at every opportunity. He was booed offstage at a commencement address at Rockford College in 2003 by a crowd chanting “U-S-A! U-S-A!,” and hustled off campus so fast that the school wouldn’t let him grab his jacket on the way out. For those who haven’t seen it, the video of that scene is a remarkable museum piece of Bush-era war mania:

  Episodes like this accelerated his departure from the New York Times and into the wilds of independent media, where paying options for dissident voices had been shrinking. As he points out below, someone like him in the past would have parachuted out of a big commercial enterprise like the Times into a life at NPR — broadcasting shows “at like one in the morning, or something,” he chuckles — but NPR, too, had by then been begun its purging of unorthodox and especially antiwar voices.

  By the 2010s, one of the last places where media figures pushed off the traditional career track could pick up a paycheck was Russia Today. In an arrangement Hedges plainly describes as a cynical marriage of convenience, the Russian state was happy to give voice to figures covering structural problems in American society, and those quasi-banned voices were glad for the opportunity to broadcast what they felt is the truth, even understanding the editorial motivation. Hedges ended up working at RT for six years hosting On Contact, where he interviewed authors and thinkers resting outside the cultural mainstream, from Nathaniel Philbrick to Cornel West to Nils Melzer to Noam Chomsky to many others (disclosure: I’ve also been a guest).

  As Hedges points out in the wide-ranging, unnerving interview below, the speech-control one-two he’s just experienced — first herded out of the mainstream for ideological offenses into a shrinking space of “allowable” dissent, then forced to watch as that space is demonized out of existence — is part of an effective pattern. “It’s how this works,” he sighs. He points to the Intelligence Community Assessment of January 6th, 2017, ostensibly intended to make a case for Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, which actually spent much of its time complaining about RT, especially its coverage of real but unflattering domestic issues.

  “They showed their hand,” he says, referring to the intelligence community’s complaints over reporting on everything from the pursuit of Assange to Occupy Wall Street to corporate overreach. From the Assessment:

  RT’s reports often characterize the United States as a “surveillance state” and allege widespread infringements of civil liberties, police brutality, and drone use…

  Hedges denounced Putin’s invasion of Ukraine as a “criminal act of aggression” after it began, and believes that if RT had been allowed to stay on YouTube, he — along with similarly critical former RT contributors like Jesse Ventura — wouldn’t have been permitted by the Kremlin to stay on air. On the other hand, seeing an American company vaporize six years of interviews having nothing to do with Russia shows space for voices like his continues to shrink in the West. In this sense he represents a kind of person we’ll be seeing more of in the future, caught between a censorship rock and a hard place, an outcast in domestic and foreign media systems.

  You can find Chris’s work on Substack now at the Chris Hedges Report, and some of the On Contact shows that were re-posted by independent accounts remain up. The launch of the new site has gone very well, but he warns that no place in media is safe now. “They’ll shut down Substack, I absolutely know. Either that, or they’ll create a way that sites like yours and mine won’t be on it,” he says.

  More from Chris on censorship, RT, Ukraine, and other issues:

  MT: What happened with YouTube?

  Chris Hedges: My entire archive of shows from On Contact was taken down. I was in London last week for Julian Assange — I was supposed to be a guest at the wedding, but then, the prison didn’t let me in of course. When I came back, I got a text from a friend of mine, with whom I’d done a half hour show, about a girlfriend who’d overdosed on fentanyl. And because I knew him, my interview with him is quite a powerful segment. And he said, the show doesn’t exist anymore. Then I checked, and nothing exists.

  The RT On Contact website is still up, but everything on YouTube is gone, and people watched it on YouTube. Some of that stuff had hundreds of thousands of views.

  MT: This two-step process feels like a backdoor way of getting rid of unorthodox voices. In other words, weren’t you on RT in the first place because you’d been bounced out for opposing the war in Iraq? Now, because of your association with RT, you’re off YouTube. Is this a way to get at, not just people connected with Russians, but people with unpopular views generally?

  Chris Hedges: Yeah. That’s how it works. They push you to the margins and then, they demonize those spaces on the margins. This has long been the habit of the dominant ruling elites. So for instance, Robert Scheer, whose website I write for, Scheerpost — and of course, we were all fired from Truthdig, this is just a never ending saga — but he ran Ramparts. I think it was Spiro Agnew said, “It’s a magazine with a bomb in every issue.” We could never get advertisers.

  So they push you into a space that they then demonize, and then use it as an excuse to shut you down. But they’ve already in essence created the space in which you exist.

  I have a couple strikes against me. One, I was pushed out of the New York Times, because I spent so many years in the Middle East, and many years in Gaza. And of course, I was the Middle East Bureau Chief for the New York Times. I’m very outspoken about Israel, and I’m a very strong supporter of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement. Which alone is enough — I just saw my friend, Cornel West, denied tenure at Harvard over this. And I’m also a fierce critic, as you are, of the Democratic party. Those are all flags that will get you locked out of even the quote- unquote “liberal media” like MSNBC.

  MT: This freeze-out led to your tenure at RT?

  Chris Hedges: I’d been marginalized for a long time because of those issues. RT gave me space, and I took it. But it wasn’t a show about Russia. We never did a show on Russia. The irony is that, in fact, the very few times Putin was mentioned, he was not described in flattering terms — it was as an autocrat. There was one show where Syria came up, and Russian war crimes. So there was nothing on the show, ever, that was in any way flattering to the Putin regime.

  But the point of the show was, of course, critiquing and looking at our own society, and that was the problem.

  TK News subscribers can click here to read the rest

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 03/29/2022 – 20:45

• Shanghai Lockdowns Force Bankers And Traders To Sleep In The Office
  Shanghai Lockdowns Force Bankers And Traders To Sleep In The Office

  As it turns out, China’s factory laborers aren’t the only ones who are being forced to quarantine at work (with many sleeping on factory floors with only a piece of cardboard as a mattress) during the latest round of “targeted” CCP lockdowns.

  Bankers, traders and other white-collar workers on China’s Wall Street are also finding they have no choice but to ride out the lockdown at the office, as management demands that workers bed down for a long stretch without going home.

  

  According to Reuters, “more than 20,000 bankers, traders and other workers are bedding down in office towers in Shanghai’s Lujiazui district as they bid to keep China’s giant financial hub ticking” during the first round of the city’s two-part staggered lockdown.

  As the section of Shanghai east of the Huangpu River closes for a total of five days, finance workers are scrambling to make sure they can continue to work throughout the nine-day shutdown (which could be extended if case numbers fail to decrease). Teams have reportedly adopted 12-hour split-shift rotations in a financial hub that handled more than 2,500 trillion yuan ($292 trillion) of financial transactions last year.

  A handful of local firms have confirmed the strategy, according to Reuters:

  • Amundi BOC Wealth Management said its senior executives, as well as key investment, trading and risk-management staff are all working and sleeping in their offices. And they’re far from the only ones.
  • Haitong Securities said Chairman Zhou Jie arranged emergency on-site duty shifts at its subsidiaries in Pudong on Sunday night before leading more than 150 key staff to work in offices starting Monday. The brokerage has also resorted to two-team rotation shifts between its two office areas, it announced.
  • HFT Investment Management, BNP Paribas’ Chinese fund joint venture, has placed 52 workers in offices to work around the clock during the lockdown period.
  • Sinolink Securities issued a notice on Sunday night calling on staff to rush back to its headquarters in Pudong before midnight, so as to “ensure continuity of system operation and trading”.

  The number of new confirmed community transmitted cases in the major financial hub of Shanghai reached 4,477 on Tuesday. Although this number was a record high, only 2.1% of cases showed symptoms.

  Restive Shanghai residents have at times pushed back aggressively against the government’s heavy handed measures, even before the broad-based lockdowns were announced (previously, the local authorities had implemented “targeted” lockdowns on housing complexes and other areas where outbreaks had been discovered). Some residents lashed out as they were unable to receive vital services like kidney dialysis or other urgent treatment. In one high-profile case highlighted by the NYT, a nurse who suffered an asthma attack died after she was denied care by a hospital, which cited COVID prevention protocols in its decision to turn her away.

  As frustration builds, the CCP is once again resorting to baseless conspiracy theories – including telling its citizens that the US is to blame for the rise of COVID – to try and deflect public anger away from the government.

  Chinese media is telling their citizens America made COVID-19, again—this time using #Moderna as the scapegoat. #China’s COVID-19 cases are rising, and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is blaming the United States for it.

  🔥WATCH HERE 👉https://t.co/g50cMPnt6E pic.twitter.com/fBbVVAJeuA

  — David Zhang (@DavidZhangEET) March 29, 2022

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  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 03/29/2022 – 20:25

• CIA Officer Who Signed Hunter Biden Laptop Letter Claims Credit For Trump Loss
  CIA Officer Who Signed Hunter Biden Laptop Letter Claims Credit For Trump Loss

  Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

  One of the former CIA officers who signed a letter claiming stories about a laptop allegedly belonging to Hunter Biden were disinformation says he helped swing the 2020 election from former President Donald Trump.

  “I take special pride in personally swinging the election away from Trump,” John Sipher, who served for decades as a senior operations officer at the CIA, wrote in a recent post on Twitter.

  “I lost the election for Trump? Well then I fell [sic] pretty good about my influence,” he also wrote.

  

  Sipher and 50 other former U.S. intelligence officials signed the letter on Oct. 19, 2020, alleging that the effort to distribute its contents “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation,” despite not knowing whether the laptop was legitimate.

  The letter was the core of a story from Politico that claimed the New York Post story on the laptop was “Russian disinformation.”

  The Post was the first to report on emails on the laptop, which was dropped off at a computer repair store and never picked up by then-candidate Joe Biden’s son, according to the store’s owner.

  While the FBI picked up the computer and a hard drive from the owner, the bureau’s apparent inaction in probing the matter prompted him to pass on a copy of the hard drive to a lawyer representing former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who in turn passed it on to the Post.

  The Oct. 14, 2020, story about the emails came as some voters were still deciding whether to vote for Biden or Trump. The story was widely questioned by legacy news outlets, suppressed by social media platforms, and claimed to be part of a Russian effort, despite top officials like Director of National Intelligence (DNI) John Ratcliffe saying there was no evidence that was the case.

  Sipher is one of the few former officials who signed the letter to respond to fresh questions about its contents, after more legacy outlets, including Politico, said they’ve confirmed it is legitimate.

  Sipher got into arguments with former acting DNI Richard Grenell and others on Twitter, where he later said his claims of helping Trump lose were sarcasm.

  He also write that “the letter didn’t say the laptop was disinformation” but in May 2021 posted a link to the Politico story that did say that.

  Nick Shapiro, once a top aide to former CIA Director John Brennan—both Shapiro and Brennan signed the missive—and who provided it to Politico, has not responded to requests for comment from The Epoch Times.

  Most other signers didn’t respond to requests for comment or declined the requests, the Post reported.

  James Clapper, a former DNI, told the paper that he stands by the statement “made AT THE TIME,” adding that, “I think sounding such a cautionary note AT THE TIME was appropriate.”

  “The letter explicitly stated that we didn’t know if the emails were genuine, but that we were concerned about Russian disinformation efforts,” added Russ Travers, former acting director of the National Counterterrorism Center. “I spent 25 years as a Soviet/Russian analyst. Given the context of what the Russians were doing at the time (and continue to do—Ukraine being just the latest example), I considered the cautionary warning to be prudent.”

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 03/29/2022 – 20:05

• US Top Commander In Europe Forced To Rebut Latest Biden Remarks
  US Top Commander In Europe Forced To Rebut Latest Biden Remarks

  In yet another awkward contradiction out of this US administration concerning Ukraine, which at this point seems to come almost daily, the head of US European Command was forced to issue a contrary explanation after Biden on Monday said multiple times that US forces are “helping train” Ukrainian troops in Poland. 

  This triggered a rebuttal of the US Commander-in-Chief from Gen. Tod Wolters, who also serves as NATO’s supreme allied commander in Europe. On Tuesday Gen. Wolters denied that the US is currently training Ukraine forces in Poland. 

  “I do not believe that we are in the process of currently training military forces from Ukraine in Poland,” the top general told a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing. 

  

  He said further according to The Hill when pressed on Biden’s series of statements, which the White House had later sought to downplay as gaffes and merely lacking in nuance:

  “There are liaisons that are there that are being given advice,” Wolters told Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), without elaborating further. “And that’s different than [what] I think you’re referring to with respect training.”

  But again, as we detailed earlier, Biden had actually asserted that American forces were training Ukrainians in Poland multiple times, strongly suggesting this was anything but “confusion” or a mere gaffe on the president’s part…

  Today Biden said the U.S. is “helping train the Ukrainian troops that are in Poland.”

  Biden’s staff has already walked this back, admitting he was confused. pic.twitter.com/Xj59bsPdMe

  — RNC Research (@RNCResearch) March 29, 2022

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  National security adviser Jake Sullivan previously stated that the US currently has 10,500 troops in Poland, some of which the president visited over the weekend. Across Europe, Washington has bolstered its presence to the tune of 100,000 total troops. The U.S. has 10,500 troops in Poland as part of the 100,000 total that it has stationed across Europe, told reporters.

  When initially asked Monday about this “training the Ukrainian troops” remark, Biden offered the dubious explanation that he was actually referencing he himself “being with and talking with the Ukrainian troops who are in Poland.”

  But it remains that not only his own advisers have had to offer repeat corrections, but now even the US head of European Command in Senate testimony. This goes beyond an awkward situation, but even into the realm of dangerous, given many of these walked-back remarks serve as a huge provocation to Russia (especially Saturday’s regime change statement fiasco from Warsaw).

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 03/29/2022 – 19:45

• Buchanan: Asia's Autocrats Are Calling, Mr. Biden
  Buchanan: Asia’s Autocrats Are Calling, Mr. Biden

  Authored by Pat Buchanan,

  While President Joe Biden was in Brussels and Warsaw showing U.S. solidarity with Ukraine, the 38-year-old autocrat who rules North Korea made a bold bid for the president’s attention.

  

  For the first time since 2017, Kim Jong Un test-fired an intercontinental ballistic missile, the Hwasong-17, the largest road-mobile missile ever launched.

  While it flew 600 miles from Pyongyang into the Sea of Japan, the mammoth missile flew for 71 minutes, reaching an altitude of 3,852 miles.

  Had it been fired in a normal trajectory, its missile warheads could have reached Washington, D.C., and every city in the USA.

  As any first strike on the United States with such a weapon would ensure the destruction of Kim’s dynasty, regime and country, clearly, this ICBM test is a bid to demand new negotiations with the U.S.

  Kim’s goals are to have the U.S. lift sanctions, recognize his regime, remove U.S. bases and troops from South Korea, and start up trade while he steadily expands his arsenal of missiles and nuclear warheads as both an insurance policy and an instrument of extortion.

  The U.S. and South Korea have both expressed skepticism about the launch, believing Pyongyang may have test-fired an upgraded and older Hwasong-15 that carries a single warhead.

  But Kim is not the only Asian autocrat on the move.

  China’s President Xi Jinping and Russia’s President Vladimir Putin lately sent a flotilla of 10 warships — destroyers, frigates, corvettes — five Chinese and five Russian — through the Tsugaru Strait between Japan’s home islands of Honshu and Hokkaido and then back again through the Osumi Strait off the Japanese island of Kyushu.

  This is believed to be the first joint Chinese-Russian naval patrol ever conducted in the Western Pacific.

  Beijing has also begun anew flying fleets of dozens of jet fighters and bombers into Taiwan’s Air Defense Identification Zone, to test the island’s defenses and send a message to Taipei as to whom it is that the island truly belongs.

  China also continues to press its claim to Japan’s Senkaku Islands in the East China Sea, even as it completes the militarization of Mischief Reef, Subi Reef and Fiery Cross Reef in the South China Sea.

  Last week, the New York Post reported:

  “China has equipped at least three islands it has built in a disputed area of the South China Sea with anti-aircraft missile systems, fighter jets and laser and jamming equipment — a buildup that threatens all other nations in the region, a top US military commander said.”

  Adm. John Aquilino, who heads the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, is quoted as telling the Associated Press that China’s activity in East Asia is part of “the largest military buildup since World War II.”

  To what end?

  China’s Navy now has 355 warships if all vessels from corvettes to carriers are counted. That is 50 more vessels than the U.S. Navy, though the U.S. Navy has many more missile tubes for firing weapons and Beijing has no warship of the size or firepower of a U.S. aircraft carrier.

  Yet, again, China seems on the move far beyond what it claims as its territorial waters in the South and East China Seas.

  Last week, in what Australia’s former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd called “one of the most significant security developments … in decades,” the Solomon Islands revealed that it was signing a security pact with Beijing that would permit the establishment of Chinese bases there.

  Among the Solomons chain is Guadalcanal, familiar to U.S. Marines from the first days of fighting in the Pacific in World War II.

  The Solomon Islands are 1,400 miles from Australia, and the alarm in Canberra at the prospect of a Solomons-China security treaty is shared by New Zealand.

  Again, what would be the purpose of Chinese security ties to unthreatened islands so far from China but so close to Australia?

  Beijing appears to be playing a long game, the goal of which is domination of East Asia and the Western pacific, severance of the U.S. alliances there and the expulsion of American power back to Guam and Hawaii.

  Consider the state of play:

  China’s partners in East Asia, North Korea and Russia possess nuclear weapons. But none of America’s allies — Japan, South Korea, Australia, the Philippines — has ever tested a nuclear weapon.

  Nor has Taiwan, which spends a piddling 2% of GDP on defense, despite the growing menace of Beijing. In the final analysis, all of our allies and partners on the far side of the Pacific depend for their defense on America.

  Yet of all those Asian nations allied with the United States, every one is more economically dependent on their trade with China than they are with their trade with the United States.

  Before the Ukraine crisis exploded with the invasion ordered by Putin’s Russia, the foreign policy consensus was that America would be making a historic “pivot to Asia.” For that is where the challenges of the future to America’s global primacy would appear to come.

  That may still be true.

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 03/29/2022 – 19:25

• Top Biden Economist Says Farmers To Increase Crop Production On "Price Signals" To Avert Food Shortage
  Top Biden Economist Says Farmers To Increase Crop Production On “Price Signals” To Avert Food Shortage

  The White House’s chief economist told reporters at a daily press briefing on Monday that American farmers will respond to “price signals” to increase crop production to mitigate food shortages worldwide following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. 

  A reporter asked Cecilia Rouse, the chair of President Joe Biden’s Council of Economic Advisers, about the White House’s plan to deal with food shortages when it comes to wheat. 

  Rouse said, “well, first we are a net exporter of many food commodities, and farmers respond to price signals, and so with the price of food rising, they will be responding by making additional plantings and try to take advantage of increase pricing.” 

  She added: “The market will work as the market will work.” 

  Council of Economic Advisers Chair Cecilia Rouse is asked how the White House is planning on dealing with food shortages. pic.twitter.com/MpJUghx63R

  — The Post Millennial (@TPostMillennial) March 28, 2022

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  The war in Ukraine has disrupted the global food supply. Russia and Ukraine account for more than a quarter of the international wheat trade, about a fifth of corn, and 12% of all calories traded globally. 

  

  We’ve outlined the emerging market countries that will first feel the brunt of food price shocks and shortages. Bloomberg data shows the most reliant countries on Ukraine wheat, including Egypt, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Turkey. 

  

  The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization forecasts that global food prices could soar another 8%-20%. 

  

  The issue with Rouse’s response is that the costs of plantings have skyrocketed. Fertilizer and diesel prices are at record highs, and this may deter some farmers from additional plantings or even switching crops that require less fertilizer. The farmers who decide to plant wheat may spread less fertilizer on fields, which could impact harvest yields later this year. 

  Bread, cooking oils, and meat prices have surged. Countries are now adopting food protectionism (see: Argentina) by limiting or ceasing exports of farm goods to mitigate domestic shortages. 

  Last week, President Biden warned that there could be global food shortages: 

  “We did talk about food shortages. And it’s going to be real. The price of these sanctions is not just imposed upon Russia, it’s imposed upon an awful lot of countries as well, including European countries and our country as well,” Biden said at a presser in Brussels. 

  As we’ve previously noted, the “”Media Isn’t Warning You” That US Careening Towards Food Crisis,” maybe the White House should refocus its efforts on securing domestic supplies first before exporting farm goods abroad. The last thing Biden needs before midterms this fall are food riots. 

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 03/29/2022 – 19:05

• NFL Orders Teams To Hire Minority Or Female Offensive Assistant Coaches For 2022 Season
  NFL Orders Teams To Hire Minority Or Female Offensive Assistant Coaches For 2022 Season

  Authored by Katabella Roberts via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

  The NFL will require every team to hire a minority or female offensive assistant coach for the 2022 season in an effort to ensure more opportunities for diverse candidates.

  

  The policy was adopted by NFL owners during their annual meeting on March 28 and requires all 32 NFL teams to hire an offensive assistant coach who is “a female or a member of an ethnic or racial minority,” regardless of whether or not the team already has a coach who satisfies those requirements among their staff.

  It is unclear exactly when the policy goes into effect.

  According to the NFL, the individual hired will “receive a one-year contract and work closely with the head coach and offensive staff to gain experience.”

  Teams will receive funding toward the coach’s salary for up to two years from a league-wide fund.

  “In recent years, head coaches have predominantly had offensive backgrounds. We believe this resolution will assist greatly in continuing to source and identify diverse candidates earlier in their career, providing pipeline depth and furthering developing the diverse offensive pipeline,” the updated NFL policy reads.

  The policy adopted Monday is an adjustment to the Rooney Rule adopted by the National Football League in 2003 which requires league teams to interview ethnic-minority candidates for head coaching and senior football operation vacancies.

  That rule was adopted based on recommendations by the league’s Workplace Diversity Committee in an attempt to “develop a deep, sustainable talent pool at all levels of the organization” and “increase the number of minorities hired in head coach, general manager, and executive positions,” according to the NFL.

  The Rooney Rule has regularly been updated and expanded since it went into effect.

  However, there were just five minority head coaches in the NFL last season: Ron Rivera, Mike Tomlin, Brian Flores, David Culler, and Robert Saleh.

  Over 60 percent of the NFL players in 2021 identified as non-white, according to Market Watch, citing data from Statista.

  In February, former Dolphins coach Brian Flores filed a lawsuit in federal court against the NFL and three football teams accusing them of discrimination after he was fired as head coach at the end of the season.

  “However, well-intentioned or not, what is clear is that the Rooney Rule is not working,” Flores said in a legal complaint.

  Elsewhere on Monday, the NFL announced a number of other policy changes, which included ownership diversity, to encourage and attract a diverse range of prospective ownership groups.

  “Accordingly, when evaluating a prospective ownership group of a member club pursuant to League policies, the membership will regard it as a positive and meaningful factor if the group includes diverse individuals who would have a significant equity stake in and involvement with the club, including serving as the controlling owner of the club,” the policy reads.

  Officials also announced a Diversity Advisory Committee which is being set up to examine how diverse hiring practices are among the league and its teams.

  Outside experts on the committee include former Houston Texans general manager Rick Smith and former New Jersey Attorney General Peter Harvey, as well as Pamela Carlton, the founder and president of Springboard, ESPN reported.

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 03/29/2022 – 18:45