- Escobar: Shedding Light On The Limits Of Chinese Power
Escobar: Shedding Light On The Limits Of Chinese Power
Tyler Durden
Fri, 10/09/2020 – 23:40Authored by Pepe Escobar via The Asia Times,
Academic Lanxin Xiang is no fan of Trump’s China policies but also sees where Beijing has miscalculated and overreached…
Everything about US-China hinges on the result of the upcoming US presidential election.
Trump 2.0 essentially would turbo-charge its bet on decoupling, aiming to squeeze “malign” China on a multiple Hybrid War front, undermine the Chinese trade surplus, co-opt large swathes of Asia, while always insisting on characterizing China as evil incarnate.
Team Biden, even as it professes no desire to fall into the trap of a new Cold War, according to the Dem official platform, would be only slightly less confrontational, ostensibly “saving” the “rules-based order” while keeping Trump-enacted sanctions.
Very few Chinese analysts are better positioned to survey the geopolitical and geoeconomic chessboard than Lanxin Xiang: expert on relations between China, US and Europe, professor of History and International Relations at the IHEID in Geneva and director of the Center for One Belt, One Road Studies in Shanghai.
Xiang got his PhD at SAIS at Johns Hopkins, and is as well respected in the US as in China. During a recent webinar he laid out the lineaments of an analysis the West ignores at its own peril.
Xiang has been focusing on the Trump administration’s push to “redefine an external target”: a process he brands, “risky, dangerous, and highly ideological”. Not because of Trump – who is “not interested in ideological issues” – but due to the fact that the “China policy was hijacked by the real Cold Warriors”. The objective: “regime change. But that was not Trump’s original plan.”
Xiang blasts the rationale behind these Cold Warriors:
“We made a huge mistake in the past 40 years”. That is, he insists, “absurd – reading back into History, and denying the entire history of US-China relations since Nixon.”
And Xiang fears the “lack of overall strategy. That creates enormous strategic uncertainty – and leads to miscalculations.”
Compounding the problem, “China is not really sure what the US wants to do.” Because it goes way beyond containment – which Xiang defines as a “very well thought of strategy by George Kennan, the father of the Cold War.” Xiang only detects a pattern of “Western civilization versus a non-Caucasian culture. That language is very dangerous. It’s a direct rehash of Samuel Huntington, and shows very little room for compromise.”
In a nutshell, that’s the “American way of stumbling into a Cold War.”
An October Surprise?
All of the above directly connects with Xiang’s great concern about a possible October Surprise: “It could probably be over Taiwan. Or a limited engagement in the South China Sea.” He stresses, “Chinese military people are terribly worried. October Surprise as a military engagement is not unthinkable, because Trump may want to re-establish a war presidency.”
For Xiang, “if Biden wins, the danger of a Cold War turning Hot War will be reduced dramatically.” He is very much aware of shifts in the bipartisan consensus in Washington:
“Historically, Republicans don’t care about human rights and ideology. Chinese always preferred to deal with Republicans. They can’t deal with Democrats – human rights, values issues. Now the situation is reversed.”
Xiang, incidentally, “invited a top Biden adviser to Beijing. Very pragmatic. Not too ideological.” But in case of a possible Trump 2.0 administration, everything could change:
“My hunch is he will be totally relaxed, may even reverse China policy 180 degrees. I would not be surprised. He would turn back to being Xi Jinping’s best friend.”
As it stands, the problem is “a chief diplomat that behaves as a chief propagandist, taking advantage of an erratic president.”
And that’s why Xiang never rules out even an invasion of Taiwan by Chinese troops. He games the scenario of a Taiwanese government announcing, “We are independent” coupled with a visit by the Secretary of State:
“That would provoke a limited military action, and could turn into an escalation. Think about Sarajevo. That worries me. If Taiwan declares independence, Chinese invade in less than 24 hours. “
How Beijing miscalculates
Unlike most Chinese scholars, Xiang is refreshingly frank about Beijing’s own shortcomings: “Several things should have been better controlled. Like abandoning Deng Xiaoping’s original advice that China should bide its time and keep a low profile. Deng, in his last will, had set a timeline for that, at least 50 years.”
The problem is “the speed of China’s economic development led to hot headed, and premature, calculations. And a not well thought of strategy. ‘Wolf warrior’ diplomacy is an extremely assertive posture – and language. China began to upset the US – and even the Europeans. That was a geostrategic miscalculation.”
And that brings us to what Xiang characterizes as “the overextension of Chinese power: geopolitical and geoconomic.” He’s fond of quoting Paul Kennedy: “Any great superpower, if overstretched, becomes vulnerable.”
Xiang goes as far as stating that the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) – whose concept he enthusiastically praises – may be overstretched: “They thought it was a purely economic project. But with such wide global reach?”
So is BRI a case of overstretching or a source of destabilization? Xiang notes how, “Chinese are never really interested in other countries’ domestic policies. Not interested in exporting a model. Chinese have no real model. A model has to be mature – with a structure. Unless you’re talking about export of traditional Chinese culture.”
The problem, once again, is that China thought it was possible to “sneak into geographical areas that the US never paid too much attention to, Africa, Central Asia, without necessarily provoking a geopolitical setback. But that is naiveté.”
Xiang is fond of reminding Western analysts that, “the infrastructure investment model was invented by Europeans. Railways. The Trans-Siberian. Canals, like in Panama. Behind these projects there was always a colonial competition. We pursue similar projects – minus colonialism.”
Still, “Chinese planners buried their head in the sand. They never use that word – geopolitics.” Thus his constant jokes with Chinese policy makers: “You may not like geopolitics, but geopolitics likes you.”
Ask Confucius
The crucial aspect of the “post-pandemic situation”, according to Xiang, is to forget about “that wolf warrior stuff. China may be able to re-start the economy before anyone else. Develop a really working vaccine. China should not politicize it. It should show a universal value about it, pursue multilateralism to help the world, and improve its image.”
On domestic politics, Xiang is adamant that “during the last decade the atmosphere at home, on minority issues, freedom of speech, has been tightening to the extent that it does not help China’s image as a global power.”
Compare it, for instance, with “unfavorable views of China” in a survey of nations in the industrialized West that includes only two Asians: Japan and South Korea.
And that brings us to Xiang’s The Quest for Legitimacy in Chinese Politics – arguably the most important contemporary study by a Chinese scholar capable of explaining and bridging the East-West political divide.
This book is such a major breakthrough that its main conceptual analyses will be the subject of a follow-up column.
Xiang’s main thesis is that “legitimacy in Chinese tradition political philosophy is a dynamic question. To transplant Western political values to the Chinese system does not work.”
Yet even as the Chinese concept of legitimacy is dynamic, Xiang stresses, “the Chinese government is facing a legitimacy crisis.” He refers to the anti-corruption campaign of the past four years: “Widespread official corruption, that is a side-effect of economic development, bringing out the bad side of the system. Credit to Xi Jinping, who understood that if we allow this to continue, the CCP will lose all legitimacy.”
Xiang stresses how, in China, “legitimacy is based on the concept of morality – since Confucius. The communists can’t escape the logic.
Nobody before Xi dared to tackle corruption. He had the guts to root it out, arrested hundreds of corrupt generals. Some even attempted two or three coups d’état.”
At the same time, Xiang is adamantly against the “tightening of the atmosphere” in China in terms of freedom of speech. He mentions the example of Singapore under Lee Kuan Yew, an “enlightened authoritarian system”. The problem is” China has no rule of law. There are a lot of legal aspects though. Singapore is a little city-state. Like Hong Kong. They just took over the British legal system. It’s working very well for that size.”
And that brings Xiang to quote Aristotle: “Democracy can never work in bigger countries. In city-states, it does.” And armed with Aristotle, we step into Hong Kong: “Hong Kong had rule of law – but never a democracy. The government was directly appointed by London. That’s how Hong Kong actually worked – as an economic dynamo. Neoliberal economists consider Hong Kong as a model. It’s a unique political arrangement. Tycoon politics. No democracy – even as the colonial government did not rule like an authoritarian figure. Market economy was unleashed. Hong Kong was ruled by the Jockey Club, HSBC, Jardine Matheson, with the colonial government as coordinator. They never cared about people in the bottom.”
Xiang notes how, “the richest man in Hong Kong only pays 15% of income tax. China wanted to keep that pattern, with a colonial government appointed by Beijing. Still tycoon politics. But now there’s a new generation. People born after the handover – who know nothing about the colonial history. Chinese elite ruling since 1997 did not pay attention to the grassroots and neglected younger generation sentiment. For a whole year the Chinese didn’t do anything. Law and order collapsed. This is the reason why mainland Chinese decided to step in. That’s what the new security law is all about.”
And what about that other favorite “malign” actor across the Beltway – Russia? “Putin would love to have a Trump win. The Chinese as well, up to three months ago. The Cold War was a great strategic triangle. After Nixon went to China, the US sat in the middle manipulating Moscow and Beijing. Now everything has changed.”
- Life Is Unfair…
Life Is Unfair…
Tyler Durden
Fri, 10/09/2020 – 23:20At a time when the constant narrative from Washington is one of ‘inequality‘ (of outcomes, not opportunities) and just how much redistribution is required to “fix” that, the following words from JFK seem worth a re-listen:
“…there is always inequity in life.
Some men are killed in a war and some men are wounded, and some men never leave the country, and some men are stationed in the Antarctic and some are stationed in San Francisco.
It’s very hard in the military or personal life to assure complete equality. Life is unfair.”
Of course, when your life is predicated on raging against the machine (and projecting that rage on various social media feeds), no amount of facts or common sense will change one’s mind about self-responsibility…
- Thousands Of Mathematicians Call For Boycotting Predictive Crime A.I. From Police
Thousands Of Mathematicians Call For Boycotting Predictive Crime A.I. From Police
Tyler Durden
Fri, 10/09/2020 – 23:00Authored by Aaron Kesel via ActivistPost.com,
After a flurry of police brutality cases this year and protests swarming the U.S. streets, thousands of mathematicians have joined scientists and engineers in calling for boycotting artificial intelligence from being used by law enforcement.
Over 2,000 mathematicians have signed a letter calling to boycott all collaboration with police and telling their colleagues to do the same in a future publication of the American Mathematical Society, Shadowproof reported.
The call to action for the mathematicians was the police killings of George Floyd, Tony McDade, Breonna Taylor, and many more just this year.
“At some point, we all reach a breaking point, where what is right in front of our eyes becomes more obvious,” says Jayadev Athreya, a participant in the boycott and Associate Professor of Mathematics at the University of Washington. “Fundamentally, it’s a matter of justice.”
The mathematicians wrote an open letter, collecting thousands of signatures for a widespread boycott of police using algorithms for policing. Every mathematician within the group’s network pledges to refuse any and all collaboration with law enforcement.
The group is organizing a wide base of mathematicians in the hopes of cutting off police from using such technologies. The letter’s authors cite “deep concerns over the use of machine learning, AI, and facial recognition technologies to justify and perpetuate oppression.”
Predictive policing is one key area where some mathematicians and scientists have enabled the racist algorithms, which tell cops to treat specific areas as “hotspots” for potential crime. Activists and organizations have long criticized the bias in these practices. Algorithms trained on data produced by racist policing will reproduce that prejudice to “predict” where crime will be committed and who is potentially a criminal.
“The data does not speak for itself, it’s not neutral,” explains Brendan McQuade, author of Pacifying the Homeland: Intelligence Fusion and Mass Supervision. Police data is “dirty data,” because it does not represent crime, but policing and arrests.
“So what are its predictions going to find? That police should deploy their resources in the same place police have traditionally deployed their resources.”
Several, if not all, U.S. states and major cities are thought to use some type of predictive policing or pre-crime software with known users including — Chicago, Atlanta, Tacoma, New York, and LA, though not without protesting its use. As Activist Post previously reported, many of these states are using Palantir software for their predictive crime algorithms and have been exposed for doing so, like Florida, whose police terrorized and monitored residents of Pasco County.
These police organizations across the U.S. have been using what is known as “heat lists” or pre-crime databases for years. What is a “heat list,” you may ask?
Well, “heat lists” are basically databases compiled by algorithms of people that police suspect may commit a crime. Yes, you read that right — a person who might commit a crime. How these lists are generated and what factors determine an individual “may commit a crime” is unknown.
Activists and journalists sued the Chicago Police Department in 2017 for failing to disclose how these programs operate, as Activist Post reported.
Chicago wasn’t the only major police department exposed using predictive crime algorithms. The Los Angeles Police Department was also caught one year later in 2018 by activists from the Stop LA Spying Coalition, as Activist Post reported.
This heat list idea in local law enforcement actually originated in Miami then was rolled out in Chicago in 2013. However, Activist Post may have missed other cities that gained less media attention; and as this writer will discuss shortly, the idea comes from a federal database.
A paper released last year by MIT entitled “Technical Flaws of Pretrial Risk Assessments Raise Grave Concerns” has been signed by some of the highest level university experts in the field of A.I. and law who warn about the “technical flaws” of these pre-crime based systems, Activist Post reported.
Fortunately for us, as Nicholas West noted, the pushback has already started in several cities, and a few police departments have dropped their programs after becoming aware of the inaccuracies. In 2018, for example, New Orleans suspended its 6-year running pre-crime program after its secret predictive policing software was exposed.
The scariest part of all this is that the New Orleans and LA police departments were actually both linked to Palantir Technologies, which directly works with the CIA and is suspected of being the current fork of PROMIS Main Core software. PROMIS pre-dates all of these local police heat lists, with algorithms that put suspected “domestic terrorists” into their own round-up lists and highly scrutinized tracked purchases, created at first by Oliver North for President Ronald Reagan and Vice President George H.W. Bush under FEMA’s Readiness Exercise — 1984 (REX-1984.)
The use of Palantir’s pre-crime algorithm software posits that other police departments may be utilizing the same software for their own pre-crime programs. Palantir is also the same company working with the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency on its own lists to catch illegal immigrants, as Activist Post and investigative journalist Barrett Brown originally reported.
You may remember Palantir from journalist Barrett Brown, Anonymous’ hack of HBGary, or accusations that the company provided the technology that enables NSA’s mass surveillance PRISM which is the successor to PROMIS. Palantir’s software in many ways is similar to the Prosecutor’s Management Information System (PROMIS) stolen software Main Core and may be the next evolution in that code, which allegedly predated PRISM. In 2008, Salon.com published details about a top-secret government database that might have been at the heart of the Bush administration’s domestic spying operations. The database known as “Main Core” reportedly collected and stored vast amounts of personal and financial data about millions of Americans in the event of an emergency like Martial Law.
PROMIS was forked into many reported use-cases for the U.S. government, including an intelligence application onboard nuclear submarines of the United States and Great Britain, and the use by both the U.S. government and certain allied governments for inventory tracking of nuclear materials and long-range ballistic missiles. But the most bizarre and frightening use was to keep track of dissident Americans under Main Core.
The Main Core database isn’t just a rumor or conspiracy theory; PROMIS software was used by Iran-Contra fall guy then-National Security Council, Lt. Col. Oliver North to create the dissidents list for Rex-84 that would later evolve to Main Core. North used PROMIS software in 1982 in the Department of Justice, and at the White House, to compile a list of American dissidents to invoke if the government ever needed to do so under Ronald Reagan’s Continuity of Government (COG) program as a liaison to FEMA.
In 1993, Wired described North’s use of PROMIS in compiling the Main Core database:
Using PROMIS, sources point out, North could have drawn up lists of anyone ever arrested for a political protest, for example, or anyone who had ever refused to pay their taxes. Compared to PROMIS, Richard Nixon’s enemies list or Sen. Joe McCarthy’s blacklist look downright crude.
This Main Core database of individuals was given to a handful of individuals, meaning most government officials had no knowledge of the program ever existing. The database was passed off from administration to administration through National Security channels, according to sources.
This writer wrote extensively on Main Core and PROMIS in an investigation on the cover-up of stolen Inslaw software and murders of journalists Danny Casolaro and Anson NG Yonc, CIA intelligence operative Ian Spiro and NSA employee Alan Standorf. See: “Octopus PROMIS: The Conspiracy Against INSLAW Software, And The Murders To Cover Up A Scandal Bigger Than Watergate.”
Palantir was founded with early investment from the CIA and heavily used by the military, and Palantir is a subcontracting company in its own right. The company has even been featured in the Senate’s grilling of Facebook, when Washington State Senator Maria Cantwell asked CEO Mark Zuckerberg, “Do you know who Palantir is?” due to Peter Thiel sitting on Facebook’s board.
Palantir’s Gotham software allows Fusion Center police to track citizens beyond social media and online web accounts with people record searches, vehicle record searches, a Histogram tool, a Map tool, and an Object Explorer tool.
According to DHS, “Fusion centers operate as state and major urban area focal points for the receipt, analysis, gathering, and sharing of threat-related information between federal; state, local, tribal, territorial (SLTT); and private sector partners” like Palantir. Further, Fusion Centers are locally owned and operated, arms of the “intelligence community,” i.e. the 17 intelligence agencies coordinated by the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC). However, sometimes the buildings are staffed by trained NSA personnel like what happened in Mexico City, according to a 2010 Defense Department (DOD) memorandum.
Tarik Aougab, an Assistant Professor of Mathematics at Haverford College, one of the many mathematicians who saw recent protests against police as a an opportunity to take action against these practices said. “If there is already disproportionately large amounts of time and energy being spent criminalizing Black and brown people,” Aougab continues, “the predictions the algorithm puts forth are just going to reflect that. It’s a way to perpetuate that over-criminalization.”
The mathematicians question if predictive policing is just a self-fulfilling prophecy.
“There’s a big question here: is predictive policing really getting ahead of events, or is it just a self-fulfilling prophecy?” McQuade explains that “crime statistics” are more accurately referred to as “arrest statistics.”
They measure police behavior, which is not directly correlated with crime and violence. These arrests justify and perpetuate more arrests.
Athreya explains the boycotters will accomplish their goals by collaborating with criminal justice organizations.
We want to work through issues of how various algorithms are used in the criminal justice system, for things from facial recognition to DNA matching algorithms, where community groups and mathematicians can have a say.
In fact, one study conducted by the AI Institute last year investigated predictive policing systems and determined “in numerous jurisdictions, these systems are built on data produced during documented periods of flawed, racially-biased, and sometimes unlawful practices and policies.”
Another subsequent 2019 audit on predictive A.I. use in Los Angeles found a serious lack of oversight or procedures around the tools, rendering them utterly useless. Researchers have also noticed police tend to pursue their own “hotspots” rather than follow the technology making the tech become an enabler to police labeling and categorizing individuals without reason, Science Mag reported.
This is only the beginning of the fight, and it’s going to be a drawn-out battle to prevent the use of this technology, not just here in the U.S. but worldwide as well. There’s no telling how long these projects have been active, and trusting the police to honestly tell us is like trusting the wolf guarding the henhouse. However, with mathematicians as well as scientists and engineers on our side we have a fighting chance.
* * *
Become an Activist Post Patron for $1 per month at Patreon.
- 59 Million Americans Expect Income Losses Ahead Of Presidential Election
59 Million Americans Expect Income Losses Ahead Of Presidential Election
Tyler Durden
Fri, 10/09/2020 – 22:40The Census Bureau’s latest Household Pulse Survey speaks volume to the “K-shaped” recovery, where high-income Americans saw their jobs immediately return and “V-shaped” recoveries for stock and other asset prices, while middle- and lower-class people continue to experience job loss, food insecurity, unable to pay bills, and eviction or foreclosure.
The survey, conducted from Sept. 16-28, shows 59.2 million Americans expect someone in their household to have a loss in employment or take a pay cut ahead of the presidential elections. Bloomberg points out that the working poor, more specifically, minority households continue to struggle the most economically from the coronavirus pandemic.
The survey found 32% of Americans were “somewhat” or “very” concerned about their ability to cover basic household expenses. These figures were alarmingly high for Hispanic and Black households.
Minneapolis Fed President (as well as former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Financial Stability under the Bush and Obama administrations, former PIMCO and former Goldman Sachs employee) Neel Kashkari was out this week addressing the dire need for more stimulus to support the economic recovery.
“Whatever Congress can do with the executive branch — come together aggressively to put money in the hands of people who have lost their jobs and to support small businesses so that we don’t have this continuing wave of bankruptcies across the economy — it’s just vital that they move quickly,” Kashkari told CNBC.
On Thursday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi signaled there wouldn’t be any more financial support for airlines without a much larger stimulus package. Meanwhile, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said many Republican senators believe the economy has already seen enough stimulus.
With stimulus talks stalled, how is it that poor people and minority households continue to suffer while millionaires and billionaires are getting richer and richer?
Well, it has to do with the flawed economic system, as what the virus exposed for all the world to see, where monetary and fiscal stimulus flows directly to the wealthiest people, thus creating the “K” recovery. The “K” is the result of socialism and central planning – so far its been disastrous for the bottom tier of society.
- Space Helmet Muzzle Launched Just-In-Time For 'New Normal' Travel
Space Helmet Muzzle Launched Just-In-Time For 'New Normal' Travel
Tyler Durden
Fri, 10/09/2020 – 22:20If the constant onslaught of calls for more PPE weren’t enough, there’s now a burgeoning industry of ‘pandemic’ gear hitting the market with a mission to make all the ‘New Normals’ feel safer while traveling.
The “AIR” is a space helmet looking muzzle meant for savvy ‘New Normal’ travelers. (Image via Microclimate)
The new line of ‘Microclimate’ muzzles are being pushed out by Hall Labs, a Utah-based firm. They are retailing online for pre-order at $199 and will begin shipping in just a few weeks time.
Keep your AIR space helmet on all the way to your final destination. (Image via Microclimate)
Hall Labs markets the Covid-inspired helmet as a mask alternative for “safer and more comfortable travel,” equipped with an internal ventilation system so you will not leave to chance the possibility of directly breathing in any of the fresh air around you.
There is one major design flaw the company is still working out – the ventilation system’s fans muffle your hearing while you’re muzzled.
According to an article in Fast Company, other future plans for the product include “adding a straw port so you can drink from your personal bubble.”
Yes, these are troubling times indeed.
- Mainstream EV Adoption: 5 Speedbumps To Overcome
Mainstream EV Adoption: 5 Speedbumps To Overcome
Tyler Durden
Fri, 10/09/2020 – 22:00Many would agree that a global shift to electric vehicles (EV) is an important step in achieving a carbon-free future. However, as Visual Capitalist’s Marcus Lu details below, for various reasons, EVs have so far struggled to break into the mainstream, accounting for just 2.5% of global auto sales in 2019.
To understand why, this infographic from Castrol identifies the five critical challenges that EVs will need to overcome. All findings are based on a 2020 survey of 10,000 consumers, fleet managers, and industry specialists across eight significant EV markets.
The Five Challenges to EV Adoption
Cars have relied on the internal combustion engine (ICE) since the early 1900s, and as a result, the ownership experience of an EV can be much more nuanced. This results in the five critical challenges we examine below.
Challenge #1: Price
The top challenge is price, with 63% of consumers believing that EVs are beyond their current budget. Though many cheaper EV models are being introduced, ICE vehicles still have the upper hand in terms of initial affordability. Note the emphasis on “initial”, because over the long term, EVs may actually be cheaper to maintain.
Taking into account all of the running and maintenance costs of [an EV], we have already reached relative cost parity in terms of ownership.
– President, EV consultancy, U.S.
For starters, an EV drivetrain has significantly fewer moving parts than an ICE equivalent, which could result in lower repair costs. Government subsidies and the cost of electricity are other aspects to consider.
So what is the tipping price that would convince most consumers to buy an EV? According to Castrol, it differs around the world.
Many budget-conscious buyers also rely on the used market, in which EVs have little presence. The rapid speed of innovation is another concern, with 57% of survey respondents citing possible depreciation as a factor that prevented them from buying an EV.
Challenge #2: Charge Time
Most ICE vehicles can be refueled in a matter of minutes, but there is much more uncertainty when it comes to charging an EV.
Using a standard home charger, it takes 10-20 hours to charge a typical EV to 80%. Even with an upgraded fast charger (3-22kW power), this could still take up to 4 hours. The good news? Next-gen charging systems capable of fully charging an EV in 20 minutes are slowly becoming available around the world.
Similar to the EV adoption tipping price, Castrol has also identified a charge time tipping point—the charge time required for mainstream EV adoption.
If the industry can achieve an average 31 minute charge time, EVs could reach $224 billion in annual revenues across these eight markets alone.
Challenge #3: Range
Over 70% of consumers rank the total range of an EV as being important to them. However, today’s affordable EV models (below the average tipping price of $35,947) all have ranges that fall under 200 miles.
Traditional gas-powered vehicles, on the other hand, typically have a range between 310-620 miles. While Tesla offers several models boasting a 300+ mile range, their purchase prices are well above the average tipping price.
For the majority of consumers to consider an EV, the following range requirements will need to be met by vehicle manufacturers.
Fleet managers, those who oversee vehicles for services such as deliveries, reported a higher average EV tipping range of 341 miles.
Challenge #4: Charging Infrastructure
Charging infrastructure is the fourth most critical challenge, with 64% of consumers saying they would consider an EV if charging was convenient.
Similar to charge times, there is much uncertainty surrounding infrastructure. For example, 65% of consumers living in urban areas have a charging point within 5 miles of their home, compared to just 26% for those in rural areas.
Significant investment in public charging infrastructure will be necessary to avoid bottlenecks as more people adopt EVs. China is a leader in this regard, with billions spent on EV infrastructure projects. The result is a network of over one million charging stations, providing 82% of Chinese consumers with convenient access.
Challenge #5: Vehicle Choice
The least important challenge is increasing the variety of EV models available. This issue is unlikely to persist for long, as industry experts believe 488 unique models will exist by 2025.
Despite variety being less influential than charge times or range, designing models that appeal to various consumer niches will likely help to accelerate EV adoption. Market research will be required, however, because attitudes towards EVs vary by country.
A majority of Chinese and Indian consumers view EVs more favorably than traditional ICE vehicles. This could be the result of a lower familiarity with cars in general—in 2000, for example, China had just four million cars spread across its population of over one billion.
EVs are the least alluring in the U.S. and Norway, which coincidentally have the highest GDP per capita among the eight countries surveyed. These consumers may be accustomed to a higher standard of quality as a result of their greater relative wealth.
So When Do EVs Become Mainstream?
As prices fall and capabilities improve, Castrol predicts a majority of consumers will consider buying an EV by 2024. Global mainstream adoption could take slightly longer, arriving in 2030.
Caution should be exhibited, as these estimates rely on the five critical challenges being solved in the short-term future. This hinges on a number of factors, including technological change, infrastructure investment, and a shift in consumer attitudes.
New challenges could also arise further down the road. EVs require a significant amount of minerals such as copper and lithium, and a global increase in production could put strain on the planet’s limited supply.
- Has Our Luck Finally Run Out?
Has Our Luck Finally Run Out?
Tyler Durden
Fri, 10/09/2020 – 21:40Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,
We are woefully unprepared for a long run of bad luck.
Long-term cycles escape our notice because they play out over many years or even decades; few noticed the decreasing rainfall in the Mediterranean region in 150 A.D. but this gradual decline in rainfall slowly but surely reduced the grain harvests of the Roman Empire, which coupled with rising populations resulted in a reduced caloric intake for many people.
This weakened their immune systems in subtle ways, leaving them more vulnerable to the Antonine Plague of 165 AD.
The decline of temperatures in Northern Europe in the early 1300s led to “years without summer” and failed grain harvests which reduced the caloric intake of most people, leaving them weakened and more vulnerable to the Black Plague which swept Europe in 1347.
I’ve mentioned the book The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire a number of times as a source for understanding the impact of natural cycles on human civilization.
It’s important to note that the natural cycles and pandemics of 200 AD didn’t just cripple the Roman Empire; this same era saw the collapse of the mighty Parthian Empire of Persia, the kingdoms of India and the Han Dynasty in China.
In addition to natural cycles, there are human socio-economic cycles of debt and decay of civic values and the social contract: a proliferation of parasitic elites, a weakening of state finances and a decline in the purchasing power of wages/labor.
The rising dependence on debt and its eventual collapse is a cycle noted by Kondratieff and others, and Peter Turchin listed these three dynamics as the key drivers of decisive discord of the kind that brings down empires and nations.
All three are playing out globally in the present.
In this context, the election of Donald Trump in 2016 was a political expression of long-brewing discontent with precisely these issues: the rise of self-serving parasitic elites, the decay/corruption of the social contract and state finances and the decades-long decline in the purchasing power of wages/labor.
Which brings us to karma, a topic of some confusion in Western cultures more familiar with Divine Retribution than with actions having consequences even without Divine Intervention, which is the essence of karma.
Broadly speaking, the U.S. squandered the opportunities presented by the end of the Cold War 30 years ago on hubristic Exceptionalism, wars of choice, parasitic elites and an unprecedented waste of resources on unproductive consumption.
Now the plan–for lack of any real plan–is to borrow trillions of dollars to fund an even more spectacular orgy of unproductive consumption, on the bizarre belief that “money” can be conjured out of thin air in essentially infinite quantities and squandered, and there will magically be no consequences of this trickery in the real world.
Actions have consequences, and after 30 years of waste, fraud and corruption being normalized by the parasitic elites while the purchasing power of labor decayed, the karmic consequences can no longer be delayed by doing more of what’s hollowed out the economy and society.
Which brings us to luck. As a general rule, historians seek explanations which leave luck out of the equation. This gives us a false confidence in the predictability and power of human will and action and cycles. Yes, cycles and human action influence outcomes, but we do a great disservice by shunting luck into the shadows as a non-factor.
If Emperor Pius had chosen someone other than Marcus Aurelius as his successor, someone weak, vain and self-absorbed like so many of Rome’s late-stage emperors, then Rome would have fallen by 170 AD as the Antonine Plague crippled finances and the army, and the invading hordes would have swept the empire into the dustbin of history.
It can be argued that only Marcus Aurelius had the experience and character to sell off the Imperial treasure to raise the money needed to pay the soldiers and spend virtually his entire term in power in the front lines of battle, preserving Rome from complete collapse.
That was good judgement by Pius but also good luck.
As we ponder luck, consider the estimate that had the meteorite that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago struck the Earth 30 minutes earlier or later, it would not have generated the Nuclear Winter that destroyed the dinosaurs. (A direct hit in deep water would have spawned a monstrous tsunami, but no dust cloud. A direct hit on land would have raised a dust cloud but without the water vapor / steam generated by the vaporization of millions of gallons of sea water, the cloud wouldn’t have risen high enough to encircle the planet.)
That was bad luck for the dinosaurs, and good luck for the mammals who replaced them.
The global economy has been extraordinarily lucky for 75 years. Food and energy have been cheap and abundant. (If you think food and energy are expensive now, think about prices doubling or tripling, and then doubling again.)
In our complacency and hubris, we attribute this to our wonderful technologies, which we assume guarantee us permanent surpluses of energy and food. The idea that technology has reached hard limits or that it could fail doesn’t occur to us.
We’ve taken good luck to be our birthright because it’s all we’ve known. We attribute this good fortune to things within our control–technology, wise investments and policies, etc. The possibility that all these powers that we consider so godlike are insignificant doesn’t occur to us because we’ve enjoyed the favorable winds of luck without even being aware of it.
We are woefully unprepared for a long run of bad luck. My sense is the cycles have turned and the good luck has drained from the hour-glass. Energy and food will no longer be cheap and abundant, our luck in leadership will vanish, and our vaunted technologies will fail to maintain an abundance so vast that we can squander the finite wealth of soil, water, resources and energy on mindless consumption.
I’m reminded of a line from an Albert King song, Born Under a Bad Sign (composed by Booker T. Jones and William Bell): “If it wasn’t for bad luck, I wouldn’t have no luck at all.”
The next five years might have us singing this line with feeling.
* * *
My recent books:
A Hacker’s Teleology: Sharing the Wealth of Our Shrinking Planet (Kindle $8.95, print $20, audiobook coming soon) Read the first section for free (PDF).
Will You Be Richer or Poorer?: Profit, Power, and AI in a Traumatized World
(Kindle $5, print $10, audiobook) Read the first section for free (PDF).Pathfinding our Destiny: Preventing the Final Fall of Our Democratic Republic ($5 (Kindle), $10 (print), ( audiobook): Read the first section for free (PDF).
The Adventures of the Consulting Philosopher: The Disappearance of Drake $1.29 (Kindle), $8.95 (print); read the first chapters for free (PDF)
Money and Work Unchained $6.95 (Kindle), $15 (print) Read the first section for free (PDF).
* * *
If you found value in this content, please join me in seeking solutions by becoming a $1/month patron of my work via patreon.com.
- Virgin Hyperloop To Test High-Speed Rail System In Abandoned West Virginia Coal Mine
Virgin Hyperloop To Test High-Speed Rail System In Abandoned West Virginia Coal Mine
Tyler Durden
Fri, 10/09/2020 – 21:20According to Reuters, a former coal mine in West Virginia is the new location for Virgin Hyperloop’s new Hyperloop Certification Center and test track for billionaire Richard Branson’s high-speed rail system.
Hyperloop’s new testing-ground will begin construction in 2022 on a former coal mine site in Tucker and Grant Counties, West Virginia, with safety certification by 2025 and commercial operations by 2030.
… so much for President Trump reviving this coal mine.
The center will be the first U.S. regulatory proving ground for a hyperloop system to test floating travel pods, eventually meant for passengers, traveling through vacuum tubes at 600 mph.
Reuters said Hyperloop and the Transportation Department Secretary Elaine Chao, Branson, and U.S. Senators from West Virginia Shelley Moore Capito, a Republican, and Joe Manchin will host a press conference unveiling the new $500 million certification center and six-mile test track.
WATCH: The Hyperloop Certification Center in Tucker & Grant counties will create thousands of #jobs. I advocated for this partnership with @virginhyperloop since last year because I know #WV & our strong workforce can lead our nation & the world forward with Hyperloop technology. pic.twitter.com/e7SRYSFAZZ
— Senator Joe Manchin (@Sen_JoeManchin) October 8, 2020
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
Today’s announcement comes three months after the Transportation Department published new rules for hyperloop systems across the country.
Today is one of the most exciting days in @VirginHyperloop’s history. The Hyperloop Certification Center is the start of the hyperloop journey for West Virginia, for the United States, and for the world. https://t.co/DeT8YjXY0c pic.twitter.com/NzOFP0QGle
— Richard Branson (@richardbranson) October 8, 2020
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
“Today is one of the most exciting days in Virgin Hyperloop’s history,” said Branson. “The Hyperloop Certification Center is the start of the hyperloop journey for West Virginia, for the United States, and for the world. We’re one step closer to making hyperloop travel a reality for people everywhere.”
By 2030, if all goes well, and commercialization is seen, the hyperloop system could allow commuters to travel between New York City and Washington, D.C., in just 30 minutes.
As for the coal industry, Trump promised to save – well – maybe Hyperloop is offering job opportunities for miners?
- Report Shows Where Gen Z Spends Their Money
Report Shows Where Gen Z Spends Their Money
Tyler Durden
Fri, 10/09/2020 – 21:00Submitted by Market Crumbs
Generation Z is typically described as those born between the mid-to-late 1990s and the early 2010s. A Bloomberg analysis of United Nations data found that Gen Z represents nearly one-third of the world’s population.
As Gen Z teenagers move towards adulthood and represent a larger portion of consumer spending, a lot of attention is paid to their habits and preferences when it comes to spending.
Piper Sandler released its 40th biannual “Taking Stock with Teens” report, which showed teenagers’ “self-reported” spending hit at an all-time survey low of $2,150, marking a drop of 9% from last fall’s survey. Annual self reported spending hit an all-time high of $3,023 in the spring of 2006.
Piper Sandler surveyed 9,800 teens with an average age of 15.8 years old across 48 states online between August 19 and September 22. 48% of the respondents believe the economy is getting worse compared to 47% in the spring and just 32% last fall. 33% of those surveyed said they are currently part-time employed, while 23% of those not working said Covid-19 affected their ability to work.
Regardless, teens still did spend and Piper Sandler’s report provides some interesting insight into their spending habits. 54% of respondents chose Amazon as their favorite e-commerce website, followed by SHEIN and Nike with 5% each. 90% of those surveyed said they’ve shopped online during the fall, while just 33% of teens said they’ve shopped in a department store or specialty retail store.
Nike is the favorite footwear brand by a mile as 52% of teens named it their favorite, followed by Vans and Adidas with 17% and 11%, respectively. Nike’s clothing continues to rank high among teens with more than a quarter of respondents ranking it their favorite brand. Teens in the survey have now ranked Nike as their favorite clothing brand for a decade straight.
Teens overwhelmingly prefer Chick-fil-a as 21% of teens selected it as their favorite restaurant. 10% of respondents chose Starbucks, while 9% picked Chipotle as their favorite. The report found that 47% of teens either consume or are open to consuming plant-based meat and even prompted the firm to raise its price target on shares of Beyond Meat from $130.00 per share to $178.00.
“This suggests plant-based eating is more on-trend with younger consumers, which could drive growth over time as consumers age. Our teen survey results suggest Impossible and Beyond are the early leaders in plant-based meat brand awareness, as they had the most mentions among brands tried by teens,” Piper Sandler senior research analyst Michael Lavery wrote.
As Gen Z gets older it will be interesting to see if they remain loyal to these companies and if their spending habits change.
- Michigan Homeowner Under Fire For 'Boobytrapping' Trump Yard Sign That Kept Getting Stolen
Michigan Homeowner Under Fire For 'Boobytrapping' Trump Yard Sign That Kept Getting Stolen
Tyler Durden
Fri, 10/09/2020 – 20:40A family at a Michigan residence say they grew tired of people stealing Trump campaign signs from their private property, likely often under cover of night, so it appears they decided to make sure the thieves would pay a price.
A homeowner in Commerce Township decided to tape sharp razor blades to the bottom of the next sign they put out. The blades lined the bottom of the Trump-Pence 2020 sign, so that the next vandal would be in for a surprise.
Trump sign with razor blades lining the bottom, via Oakland County Sheriff’s Office A 52-year-old man later did approach the property to remove the sign, getting his fingers sliced open in the process, but it turns out the man was a civic worker who had been ordered by Township Supervisor David Scott to remove the sign for violating town ordinances.
The ordinance specifies how close a political sign can be to a public roadway, and the sign on private property was deemed ten feet too close.
The bizarre incident is now subject of intense controversy, making national news. CNN reports that the town employee had first thought he was being electrocuted when he reached down to pull out the sign:
Scott said his employee thought he was being “shocked electrically” when he went to touch the sign. Instead, three fingers on his left hand were sliced open by a line of razor blades taped to the campaign sign. The man began “aggressively bleeding” and drove himself to a nearby hospital, Scott said.
Although there was no damage to any nerves or tendons in his fingers, the man required a tourniquet on one of his fingers to stop the bleeding and still only has limited use of his hand at this point, Scott said.
A statement by the city alleged that the homeowner had “boobytrapped” the yard sign.
Via Oakland County Sheriff’s Office “You can’t boobytrap them with the intent to hurt, harm or maim someone,” the township supervisor said. “For whatever reason, (someone felt the need to) protect this like it’s the Crown Jewels.”
The local county sheriff’s office is currently investigating the incident. The homeowner has since issued ambiguous statements as why the sign was lined with razors, denying they were behind it. Police later found at least two signs with razors protruding from them:
Two campaign signs on were found with razor blades taped to them, according to the Oakland County Sheriff’s Office.
The homeowner, who was also not identified by authorities, said the signs had previously been stolen from their property and when they returned from out of town the signs were back in their yard, according to the Sheriff’s Office.
Local media reports indicated upon being questioned by police, “The homeowner said she didn’t know anything about the razor blades. Some of her signs supporting President Trump had been stolen, she said, then were returned and put back in the yard.”
The township said that civic workers routinely pull up yard signs deemed in violation of ordinances and typically leave them beside trash bins.
Last month the AP reported on a Trump sign in Massachusetts being protected by an electric fence:
Via AP: Last month a sign in Bedford, Mass. had been rigged with an electric fence protecting it. Local media called it an example of “politics getting bloody”:
However, it doesn’t appear there was any attempt to contact and notify the homeowner of the supposed “violation” – which many would argue should be protected free speech in the first place.
Instead, it remains that the worker entered private property with the intent to dispose of someone’s personal possession, getting injured in the process. The final legal outcome of this episode will be interesting, but we don’t expect either the town or police to come down on the side of property rights.
Local media also reports that the homeowner may be facing charges related to endangerment.
- Confidence In Accuracy Of U.S. Election Is At Record Low: Gallup
Confidence In Accuracy Of U.S. Election Is At Record Low: Gallup
Tyler Durden
Fri, 10/09/2020 – 20:20By Justin McCarthy at Gallup,
Fifty-nine percent of Americans say they are “very” (19%) or “somewhat confident” (40%) that votes in the upcoming presidential election will be accurately cast and counted throughout the country, matching the low Gallup recorded in 2008.
The latest figure, collected in Gallup’s Sept. 14-28 poll, comes at a time when President Donald Trump has repeatedly questioned the validity of voting this year, which will include widespread mail voting amid the coronavirus pandemic. As in 2008, the country is grappling with a global economic crisis, and Americans’ satisfaction with the way things are going in the U.S. is near its historical low point.
As would be expected given Trump’s view, Republicans and Republican-leaning independents (44%) are expressing far less confidence than Democrats and Democratic leaners (74%) in the accuracy of the election.
The 11-percentage-point drop since 2018 in the national figure on confidence in election accuracy is largely driven by a 34-point drop among Republicans and Republican-leaning independents. The GOP’s current 44% level of confidence is the lowest Gallup has recorded for identifiers/leaners of either major political party in its trend dating back to 2004.
Democrats, on the other hand, have become slightly more confident in election accuracy since 2018, though this falls short of this group’s high of 83% in 2016.
Americans More Confident in Local Vote-Counting
Americans are more likely to express confidence in the accuracy of voting counts where they personally vote. About four in five say they are “very” (47%) or “somewhat confident” (32%) that votes will be accurately cast and counted locally. The percentage of Americans who are “very” confident in local vote counting is more than double the level for votes counted nationally.
The combined percentage of Americans who are at least somewhat confident in accurate local vote counting has waned over time, however, from a high of 91% in 2006 to a new low of 79% today.
Postal Service Delays, Fraudulent Means of Casting Votes Seen as Biggest Problems
Of four possible complications that could occur in the election, absentee ballots not being counted because they arrive late is the one that Americans see as the most problematic, with 55% predicting it will be a “major problem.” Nearly as many, 53%, say people casting fraudulent votes is a major problem.
Forty-seven percent of U.S. adults say that eligible voters not being allowed to cast a vote is a big problem for the election — much higher than the 25% to 34% range Gallup recorded between 2004 and 2016. Forty-five percent say that ineligible voters casting votes is a major problem, similar to the previous high of 44% in 2008.
Late-arriving absentee ballots are the only voting issue that majorities of both major political parties see as a major problem: 51% of Republicans and 63% of Democrats.
Republicans are more than twice as likely as Democrats to express concern about fraudulent means of casting votes and ineligible voters casting votes, while Democrats are about twice as likely as Republicans to anticipate that eligible voters not being allowed to cast a vote will be a major problem.
Bottom Line
Though most Americans have confidence in the accuracy of vote counting nationwide in the upcoming presidential election, the latest figure is lower than it has been in most prior elections. Confidence is particularly low among Republicans, likely reflecting the repeated warnings of their party’s standard-bearer to be on the lookout for fraud. As is often seen in public attitudes, Americans are much more confident about vote-counting in their local area than they are about the national situation, but even this is down in the past decade.
Sizable percentages of U.S. adults see major problems with voting in the coming elections, but these views vary: Republicans are more concerned about issues of voter fraud, and Democrats are more concerned about eligible voters being kept out of the voting process. The one uniting issue is late deliveries of ballots from the U.S. Postal Service, which is something the Postal Service itself has raised concerns about.
Even before the challenges posed by COVID-19 and Trump’s open skepticism of the process, the Gallup World Poll in 2019 found that the U.S. had “one of the worst ratings across the world’s wealthiest democracies” when it came to confidence in the honesty of elections.
- Organizers Cancel Next Week's Trump-Biden Debate
Organizers Cancel Next Week's Trump-Biden Debate
Tyler Durden
Fri, 10/09/2020 – 20:05Update (2000ET): Trump’s camp has responded to the news of the cancellation by insisting that President Trump is still willing to participate in three debates.
- TRUMP CAMPAIGN: WOULD BE GLAD TO DO 1-ON-1 DEBATE W/NO MEDDLING
- TRUMP CAMPAIGN: NO REASON NOT TO HAVE 3 DEBATES AS PLANNED
There’s no reason not to do three debates…Trump can only theoretically remain contagious for a few more days, tops.
* * *
When the Commission on Presidential Debates announced last night that it had rejected the Trump Campaign and Biden Campaign’s compromise plan to simply push back the debate schedule by a week (moving the second debate to Oct. 22, and the third and final debate until Oct. 29), we figured that was all she wrote for the second presidential debate.
And as it turns out, we were correct.
JUST IN: The next debate between President Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden has been officially cancelled, a person with direct knowledge of the plans tells me.
— Ed O’Keefe (@edokeefe) October 9, 2020
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
The @debates Commission didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment, but officials with the nonpartisan entity responsible for organizing every televised debate between presidential contenders since 1988 began informing campaign officials Friday afternoon.
— Ed O’Keefe (@edokeefe) October 9, 2020
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
WSJ got the scoop, but it wasn’t long before the “nonpartisan” Commission, which has organized every presidential debate since 1988, issued a statement confirming that the second debate would not move forward.
UPDATE 6:36pm ET: @debates issues a statement saying: “It is now apparent there will be no debate on October 15, and the CPD will turn its attention to preparations for the final presidential debate scheduled for October 22.” pic.twitter.com/7PNJCoKE2W
— Ed O’Keefe (@edokeefe) October 9, 2020
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
Instead, the CPD will shift its focus to the third presidential debate, set for Oct. 22 in Nashville at Belmont University. That debate will be divided into six 15-minute segments.
It’s notable that the cancellation follows last night’s mini-scandal set in motion when Steve Scully, the chosen debate moderator, sent a tweet to Anthony Scaramucci that many suspect should have been a DM.
— CSPAN (@cspan) October 9, 2020
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
When press for an explanation, he said his account was hacked.
Needless to say, while most Americans are probably relieved that they won’t need to sit through another chaotic spectacle like the first debate, conservatives are lashing out at the commission.
Abolish the Commission on Presidential Debates! https://t.co/93PThTTSiP
— Ben Domenech (@bdomenech) October 9, 2020
- The Circle Is Complete: BOJ Joins Fed And ECB In Preparing Rollout Of Digital Currency
The Circle Is Complete: BOJ Joins Fed And ECB In Preparing Rollout Of Digital Currency
Tyler Durden
Fri, 10/09/2020 – 20:00First it was the Fed, then the ECB, and now the BOJ: the world’s central banks are quietly preparing to unleash digital currencies on an unsuspecting population in one final last-ditch attempt to spark inflation and do away with the current monetary orthodoxy which has failed to push living conditions for the masses higher (but most importantly, has failed to inflate away a growing mountain of insurmountable global debt).
On Friday, the Bank of Japan joined the Fed and ECB when it said it would begin experimenting on how to operate its own digital currency, rather than confining itself to conceptual research as it has to date.
Digitalization has advanced in various areas at home and abroad on the back of rapid development of information communication technology. There is a possibility of a surge in public demand for central bank digital currency (CBDC) going forward, considering the rapid development of technological innovation. While the Bank of Japan currently has no plan to issue CBDC, from the viewpoint of ensuring the stability and efficiency of the overall payment and settlement systems, the Bank considers it important to prepare thoroughly to respond to changes in circumstances in an appropriate manner.
The bank explained that it might provide general purpose CBDC if cash in circulation drops “significantly” and private digital money is not sufficient to substitute the functions of cash, while promising to supply physical cash as long as there is public demand for it
The move, as Reuters reports, came in tandem with an announcement by a group of seven major central banks, including the BOJ, on what they see as core features of a central bank digital currency (CBDC) such as resilience and a clear legal framework. It also falls in line with new Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga’s focus on promoting digitalization and administrative reform to boost the country’s competitiveness.
In a report laying out its approach on CBDC, the BOJ said it will conduct a first phase of experiments on basic functions core to CBDCs, such as issuance and distribution, early in the fiscal year beginning in April 2021. The experiments will be part of the BOJ’s efforts to look more closely into how it can issue general-purpose CBDCs, intended to be used widely among the general public including companies and households.
Naturally, to avoid sparking a panic that paper money is on its way out – and thus prompt the population to hoard it – the BOJ said that CBDCs “will complement, not replace, cash and focus on making payment and settlement systems more convenient.” However, how exactly it is “more convenient” for the central bank to be able to remotely extinguish any amount of money in one’s digital wallet without notice, remains a mystery.
Unlike the Fed, the BOJ plans to have financial institutions and other private entities serve as intermediaries between the central bank and end users, rather than have companies and households hold deposits directly with the BOJ.
“While the BOJ currently has no plan to issue CBDC … it’s important to prepare thoroughly to respond to changes in circumstances,” the report said.
In the second phase of experiments, the BOJ will look at the potential design of CBDCs such as whether it should set a limit on the amount issued and pay a remuneration on deposits.
In the final step before issuance, the BOJ will launch a pilot program involving private firms and households, it said.
The BOJ added it would be desirable for the CBDC to be used not only for domestic but cross-border payments, in short don’t worry, this is just an experiment… but once operational it will take over the entire existing monetary system.
To be sure, having complete control over the entire monetary transmission mechanism, all the way to each quantum of currency in circulation has been a central banker dream. A key reasons for negative rates was for banks to force consumers to pull their money out of the bank and spend it, thus lifting the velocity of money. Alas, as we showed previously, the lowest interest rates in history merely prompted even more savings and less spending, resulting in catastrophic consequences for the financial sectors wherever negative rates were adopted, such as Japan and Europe.
Until now, Japan had been cautious about moving too quickly on digital currencies given the social disruptions it could cause in a country that has the world’s most cash-loving population. But China’s steady progress toward issuing digital currency has prompted the government to reconsider, especially if China takes the lead in sparking a new reflationary tide once it converts its entire population to digital currency, and pledged in this year’s policy platform to look more closely at the idea.
Of course, the real reason behind central bank urgency to implement digital currencies is simple and has nothing to do with serving the population, increasing facility of transfers, or enhancing stability and efficiency of payment and settlement systems. It has everything to do with having discrete control over inflation, and enabling worldwide “helicopter money.” This is how DoubleLine fixed income portolio manager Bill Campbell described it in his latest must-read note “The Pandora’s Box of Central Bank Digital Currencies.”
With QE, central banks have printed excess reserves that have benefited only the very wealthy and large institutions. The innovation of a digital currency system as described by Mastercard could deliver stimulus directly to consumers. Such a mechanism could open veritable floodgates of liquidity into the consumer economy and accelerate the rate of inflation. While central banks have been trying without success to increase inflation for the past decade, the temptation to put CBDCs into effect might be very strong among policymakers. However, CBDCs would not only inject liquidity into the economy but also could accelerate the velocity of money. That one-two punch could bring about far more inflation than central bankers bargain for.
When first implementing QE, central banks promised that this measure would be temporary and would be unwound after the crisis ended, a pledge that I have doubted for a while. Central banks as we know have perpetuated QE as part of their updated toolbox of monetary policies. The first use of digital currencies in monetary policy might start small as policymakers, out of caution, seek to calibrate this experiment in quasi-fiscal stimulus. However, such initial restraint could give way to growing complacency and greater use of the tool – just as we saw with QE. The temptations of CBDCs are not limited to excesses in monetary policy. CBDCs also appear to be an effective mechanism for bypassing the taxation, debt issuance and spending prerogatives of government to implement a quasi-fiscal policy. Imagine, for example, the ease of enacting Modern Monetary Theory via CBDCs. With CBDCs, the central banks would possess the necessary plumbing to directly deliver a digital currency to individuals’ bank accounts, ready to be spent via debit cards.
Let me quote again from Charles I. Plosser’s warning in 2012: “Once a central bank ventures into fiscal policy, it is likely to find itself under increasing pressure from the private sector, financial markets, or the government to use its balance sheet to substitute for other fiscal decisions.” With a flick of the digital switch, CBDCs can enable policymakers to meet, or cave in to, those demands – at the risk of igniting an inflation conflagration, abandoning what little still survives of sovereign fiscal discipline and who knows what else. I hope the leaders of the world’s central banks will approach this new financial technology with extreme caution, guarding against its overuse or outright abuse. It’s hard to be optimistic. Soon our monetary Pandoras will possess their own box full of new powers, perhaps too enticing to resist.
Here is another reason why it is hard to be optimistic: without virtually any public discourse or debate, central banks are now so far down along in the process that they are just steps away from rolling out a private-sector venture with one of the largest digital payments processors in the world. Below is a press release that virtually nobody noticed in early September from none other than electronic payment giant MasterCard, in which it revealed that it had launched “Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) Testing Platform, Enabling Central Banks to Assess and Explore National Digital Currencies“
With the global economy racing to embrace digital payments, central banks also are looking to the future and investigating how to support innovation while maintaining monetary policy and financial stability as they issue and distribute currency. In fact, 80 percent of central banks surveyed are engaging in some form of Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) work, and about 40 percent of central banks have progressed from conceptual research to experimenting with concept and design, according to a recent survey by the Bank for International Settlements.
Today, Mastercard announced a proprietary virtual testing environment for central banks to evaluate CBDC use cases. The platform enables the simulation of issuance, distribution and exchange of CBDCs between banks, financial service providers and consumers. Central banks, commercial banks, and tech and advisory firms are invited to partner with Mastercard to assess CBDC tech designs, validate use cases and evaluate interoperability with existing payment rails available for consumers and businesses today.
Mastercard is a leader in operating multiple payment rails and convening partners to ensure a level playing field for everyone – from banks to businesses to mobile network operators – in order to bring the most people possible into the digital economy. Mastercard wants to harness its expertise to enable the practical, safe and secure development of digital currencies.
“Central banks have accelerated their exploration of digital currencies with a variety of objectives, from fostering financial inclusion to modernizing the payments ecosystem,” said Raj Dhamodharan, Executive Vice President, Digital Asset and Blockchain Products and Partnerships, Mastercard. “Mastercard is driving innovation with the public sector, banks, fintechs, and advisory firms in the exploration of CBDCs, working with partners that are aligned to our core values and principles. This new platform supports central banks as they make decisions now and in the future about the path forward for local and regional economies,” Dhamodharan added.
Sheila Warren, Head of Blockchain, Digital Assets and Data Policy at the World Economic Forum, said: “Collaborations between the public and private sectors in the exploration of Central Bank Digital Currencies can help central banks better understand the range of technology possibilities and capabilities available with respect to CBDCs. Central banks can benefit from support in exploring the option set available to them with respect to CBDCs, as well as gaining insight into what opportunities may be forthcoming.”
Finally, why are central banks using blockchain as the backbone for all digital currency efforts? It has nothing to do with their fascination with bitcoin, or their fear that cryptocurrencies can become dominant (although there certainly is an element of that). The real reason is that blockchain allows every single discrete currency unit, whether it is the digital dollar, digital euro, digital yen or digital yuan, to be tracked from its digital inception, through every single transaction, and to which wallet it can be found in at any given moment. In short, blockchain-based digital currencies will allow central banks to have a real-time map of absolutely every monetary unit in circulation, and every single economic transaction, something they can’t do with trillions in anonymous paper money still sloshing around (the inverse process was launched by the ECB when it did away with the notorious €500 banknote which allowed European to easily circumvent Europe’s negative interest rates). And, of course, when push comes to shove, central banks will also be able to “warn” the public the digital money in their digital wallets may soon expire, sparking an inflationary flood of spending with the flick of a switch.
- Rosenberg: We Are In A Depression
Rosenberg: We Are In A Depression
Tyler Durden
Fri, 10/09/2020 – 19:40Authored by John Mauldin via MauldinEconomics.com,
Disney is laying off 28,000 workers. American Airlines and United Airlines plan to cut 31,000 workers. Last week’s disappointing unemployment report shows that we have a long way to go. Perhaps a lot longer than we think.
I’m going to quote at length from my friend David Rosenberg, who I believe is absolutely spot on:
“You tally up these sectors and before the crisis, they supported 32 million jobs, or about a third of the private sector workforce, and it looks to me as though half of them are not going back to their old jobs.
“And I’m not sure many people understand that amusement parks, airlines, hoteliers and restaurants cannot stay in business at 50% capacity (or even 75% in the case of restaurants).
“… As it stands, the US Chamber of Commerce said that 25% of small businesses have already shut down. Another survey by Ipsos concluded that two-thirds are still nervous about leaving their homes; 59% say they intend to remain locked down on their own until signs emerge that the virus is ‘fully contained.’ A YouGov/CBS poll concludes that 85% of American households say they wouldn’t get on an airplane even if they could. That’s why the industry needs a bailout!
“A Washington Post/University of Maryland poll shows that only 56% of consumers across the nation intend to shop at the supermarket, which I suppose is a continuous bullish data point for delivery services but that’s about it. Just 33% say they are comfortable entering a retail store. And a mere 22% say they are willing to dine in a sit-in restaurant.
“All these polls say basically the same thing – it will not be ‘business as usual,’ as the bulls will try and convince you, and the best we can hope for is a partial recovery. I mean, at best. What we had on our hands was a vertical down economic decline with job losses an order of magnitude higher than anything we have witnessed since the Great Depression. So, even as the stock market is telling you it has it all figured out, I can assure you that what we face at this very moment is a very uncertain economic future. And unfortunately, most of the longer-term risks are to the downside.
“We are in a depression – not a recession, but a depression. And I think the dynamics of a depression are different than they are in a recession because depressions invoke a secular change in behavior. Classic business cycle recessions are forgotten about within a year after they end – the scars from this one will take years to heal.”
Even though the unemployment rate went down to 7.9%, that was largely due to a drop of almost 700,000 in the labor force. We have regained just over half the jobs lost between February and April. The pace of gains, both total and private, slowed for the third-consecutive month and looks to get slower.
There will be a recovery. Those hundreds of thousands of entrepreneurs who have closed their businesses? They’ll open new ones.
But not in six months. Where will they get capital?
It’s one thing to bail out airlines with multiple billions of dollars. What about the local bakery with 15 employees? Where do they get the capital to reopen when the time is right?
You can repeat that story a million (or more) times.
Know this: That which can’t go on, won’t. We can’t keep piling on debt at this rate forever, and we can’t repay what we have.
* * *
I predict an unprecedented crisis that will lead to the biggest wipeout of wealth in history. And most investors are completely unaware of the pressure building right now. Learn more here.
- Goldman Offers Workers Free On-Site COVID-19 Testing After Latest Trading-Floor Outbreak
Goldman Offers Workers Free On-Site COVID-19 Testing After Latest Trading-Floor Outbreak
Tyler Durden
Fri, 10/09/2020 – 19:20In September, Goldman Sachs employees in New York became the latest to suffer a trading floor outbreak as Wall Street banks called their investment banking workers back into the office before pretty much every other white-collar industry. But now that Microsoft is claiming that it plans to allow some employees to work from home permanently (well, at least some of the time), Goldman is touting its plans to offer all US-based employees antibody tests and saliva-based PCR tests and other on-sight screening for staff at 200 West Street, according to Financial News.
The report cited a memo sent to staff dated Oct. 8, which was Thursday.
Goldman is considering rolling the program out to other officers around the world, but it hasn’t made any final plans yet.
In New York, the tests will be available to workers first returning to the office, while those remaining at home can be reimbursed for any costs they incur related to their private health care programs and COVID-19 testing.
CEO David Solomon is also introducing internal daily screenings and a “tracking and tracing” program to help prevent any future outbreaks.
“As high-quality testing has become more available, we have engaged vendor partners to offer off-site COVID-19 tests to eligible people in the US at no cost,” reads the memo sent out to staff on Thursday. “Testing is one part of a comprehensive prevention strategy that includes wearing masks, following general hygiene and handwashing best practices, and practicing social distancing.”
The New York Post reports that Solomon is also imposing a new program that will allow employees to return to work on a rotational basis.
“The future remains uncertain, requiring us to stay nimble and pivot as needed.”
Maybe Jamie Dimon and JPM could learn a thing or two from Goldman’s approach? That is, if they’re still insisting on bringing their employees back to the office sooner rather than later.
- Bitcoin, The Great Reset, And Systemic Failure
Bitcoin, The Great Reset, And Systemic Failure
Tyler Durden
Fri, 10/09/2020 – 19:00Authored by Tom Luongo via Gold, Goats, ‘n Guns blog,
It’s been a whirlwind week in the cryptocurrency world. There have been a rash of news items all pointing towards the same thing – attempts to rein in alternatives to the future of central bank digital currencies (CBDC) that are quickly creeping up over the horizon.
It started with the CFTC’s indictment of the owners of crypto-exchange BitMex after more than a year of investigation last week.
Even if its founders are not convicted, this might still spell the end of the embattled BitMEX. In tandem with the criminal indictments, the CFTC also launched a civil action against the BitMEX network of companies and its founders.
The formal counts on which the CFTC seeks relief are:
-
Executing futures transactions without registering with the CFTC
-
Offering illegal off-exchange commodity options
-
Failure to register as a futures commission merchant
-
Failure to register as a designated contract market/swap execution facility
-
Failure to supervise in relation to its lack of KYC and AML procedures and failing to ensure that its partners and employees lawfully handled BitMEX accounts
-
Failure to implement KYC and AML procedures as required under the CEA
That put a lid on a nascent rally in Bitcoin which was beginning to challenge $11,000. The net result was a $500 move down and killing any potential short-term bullish momentum. It should have seen a breakdown below support at $9800 (orange line, see chart) but that didn’t happen.
Since then Bitcoin has been bouncing around between $10,400 and $10,900 without any real direction, continuing to coil and consolidate.
But despite the violent intra-day reaction Bitcoin weathered that news item well, with last week’s volatility dropping off to next to nothing.
You Can’t Win
Today the market shrugged off two major pieces of news from officialdom. The first was the U.K.’ Financial Conduct Authority banning the sale of all products that move with the price of crypto-assets.
The Financial Conduct Authority said there is “no reliable basis for valuing cryptoassets” that act as the underlying for derivatives and exchange-traded notes.
The FCA had already alluded to the idea in a public consultation on the industry last year and the regulator claims it the ban will save retail investors $69 million. The ban is scheduled to take effect on January 6, 2021.
The FCA further claimed there is a, “lack of legitimate need to invest” in products like Bitcoin.
What I want to know who determines where the legitimate needs of investors lie? I thought that was supposed to be up to investors to assess the risks and make their bets.
I guess they are now only allowed to invest in openly rigged markets like U.K. Gilts because that serves the legitimate needs of a U.K. government in serious financial trouble.
What’s clear from this move by the FCA is that the U.K. and City of London are far more worried about further leakage of funds out of their nigh-criminal Ponzi schemes and into the world of cryptocurrencies they have little to no control over.
This is another tell, just like the Fed intervening deeply into the TIPS markets at the end of Q3 to mask that real interest rates have been rising, that there is groundwork being laid for a seismic shift in the monetary system due to the continued deterioration of asset price supports post-Coronapocalypse.
Martin Armstrong has been warning crypto-enthusiasts, like myself, for a long time that governments would move to make them illegal to own and/or transact in.
And I don’t disagree with Martin. Here is an open example by a major government regulator to stymie competition to not only the existing failing monetary system but also to the one they have planned to replace it with.
The ECB is obviously accelerating their digital euro plans with the latest move to trademark it.
The European Commission recently published a comprehensive 168-pages draft proposal on how the digital assets can be integrated into the European legal framework. The document covers various aspects of the new financial tool and touches upon the benefits of the central bank-issued digital currencies (CDBC) over the fiat money.
Notice how that new ECB report talks about the benefits of a central bank digital currency, but never the downside, because the benefits are all to them.
You Can’t Break Even
It’s the same shuck and jive Attorney General William Barr is doing by having the U.S. Attorney’s Office issue its guidelines on digital currencies called Cryptocurrency: An Enforcement Framework (full text at the link above).
I skimmed the rules and the justifications for this legal framework and all it does is list the reasons why private cryptocurrencies are bad. We all know the drill — money laundering, financing terrorism, tax evasion, sanctions evasion etc.
Given that we can’t seem to go more than a week without another major bank getting a slap on the wrist and a fine for laundering hundreds of billions of dollars, usually for some intelligence agency, again I have to wonder why should the private crypto-world be any different than the supposedly legitimate one.
The problem with all of this is that when government intervenes in any market it creates both the incentive and the profit opportunity to evade that intervention.
The mere existence of Bitcoin and the muti-hundred billion dollar equivalent cryptocurrency market is damning evidence of government malfeasance as a steward of our money.
But we’re the criminals in wanting to avoid the worst of their bad policy?
Of course, the real criminals are the ones that lie, cheat and steal by managing the monetary system badly but for their benefit. Which is why their enforcers, like Barr and the FCA, have to step in and tell us how they will prosecute us for wanting something better or outright make it illegal to make a market in them via futures and options.
These rules are an open admission that the current system is failing and the Bitcoin and the tokenization of assets collectively known as DeFi — Decentralized Finance — are real threats to the ultimate power of the their state apparatuses.
These rule systems are designed not to protect investors and consumers but to protect the existing beneficiaries of the existing system and whatever they are planning next.
And what they are planning is their version of Bitcoin, but with none of the trust, privacy, or lack of counterfeiting and counter-party risk that Bitcoin and other private cryptos offer.
In fact, they will be the exact opposite of this with absolute chain-of-custody, zero-privacy, and ability to be seized from a holder’s account for whatever reason they deem appropriate.
You Can’t Get out of the Game
In a time when politics is so divisive people are literally cheering the unpersoning and deplatforming of people they disagree with does anyone really think those drunk with power in D.C., Westminster, Beijing or Brussels wouldn’t use the new power afforded by a non-convertible digital cash for the most extreme political leverage?
Every day that passes as we approach this election in the U.S. brings the story of the Great Reset more sharply into focus. And that future looks a lot like the world depicted in Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report but without the three precogs.
That film’s future was designed in consultation with ‘all the best experts on where we were headed’ in terms of surveillance, technology, robotics, everything. And who do you think Spielberg, a Davos man if there ever was one in Hollywood, consulted?
It surely wasn’t the underground cryptography enthusiasts guys like Neal Stephenson was hanging around with when he wrote Cryptonomicon and The Baroque Cycle (highly recommended as the last decent things Stephenson wrote before he too was infected with the shitlib virus after spending too much time in Seattle).
That was a future in which a person became an unperson in the time it took for one person to issue a command and press a button. It also was a world envisioned before the advent of private, trustless digital currencies like Bitcoin.
And therein lies the difference in how we move through this next period of history.
There is no doubt in my mind today that the Great Reset of the World Economic Forum is in process and that nothing — not Brexit, Bitcoin or the re-election of Donald Trump — will stop the attempt to pull it off.
Because the System of the World (as Stephenson called it) is failing. The cost of maintaining the illusion of prosperity dwarfs the return on the investment in it. This is why we are drowning in debt and why the system has, for all intents and purposes, stalled.
Regaining the Reactionary Gap
What is happening is happening in real time, right in front of us as the powerful move to protect themselves and work through their plans to set up their neo-feudal Utopia.
I don’t know that they’ll pull it off and I sincerely hope they don’t because that’s a world too terrible to contemplate. But what I do know is that the harder they push the harder the push back will be.
Because while they can manipulate the Overton Window and the rules of engagement the laws of physics they can’t repeal. You know the one I’m talking about, Newton’s Third Law – for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.
And while Newton may have been the most famous Master of the British Mint who re-established the legitimacy of Britain’s coinage the irony is his doing so allowed the Bank of England to get established and touch off the Era of Central Banking.
Today Bitcoin is the natural reaction to the end of that era, where Central Banks have been exposed as running immense Ponzi schemes which have created the conditions which have the world teetering on the edge of systemic collapse.
Will it and those that are building its parallel infrastructure be the ones who ultimately reboot the System of the World when this latest attempt to retain control fails?
Or will we muddle along for another generational cycle under the boot heel of venal men?
* * *
Join My Patreon to keep up to date with how the Great Reset unfolds. Install the Brave Browser to regain a little control over the flow of your information in a world without privacy.
-
- Amherst's Largest Hotel Is For Sale: Top Bid Comes At Only 18% Of Securitized Value
Amherst's Largest Hotel Is For Sale: Top Bid Comes At Only 18% Of Securitized Value
Tyler Durden
Fri, 10/09/2020 – 18:40Over the past seven months we have repeatedly discussed the plight of commercial real estate which unlike most other financial assets, failed to benefit from a Fed bailout or backstop (but that may soon change). It culminated in June when we wrote that the “Unprecedented Surge In New CMBS Delinquencies Heralds Commercial Real Estate Disaster.” The ongoing crisis in structured debt backed by commercial real estate in general and hotel properties in particular, prompted Wall Street to launch the “Big Short 3.0“ trade: betting against hotel-backed loans, which had the broadest representation in the CMBX 9 index, whose fulcrum BBB- series has continued to slide even as the broader market rebounded.
Underscoring the plight of the hotel industry are two recent developments, which suggest that shorting CMBX 9 may well be the trade that keeps on giving.
First, Reuters reported that Manhattan’s iconic Roosevelt Hotel, which strangely enough is owned by Pakistan International Airlines (PIA), will shut down for good by the end of this month. With more than $4 billion in accumulated losses, PIA was already struggling financially when flights were grounded in March because of the pandemic. Just as it resumed operations in May, a domestic PIA flight crash in Karachi killed 97 of 99 people on board.
“Due to the current economic impacts, after almost 100 years of welcoming guests to The Grand Dame of New York, The Roosevelt Hotel, is regretfully closing its doors permanently as of Oct. 31, 2020,” the hotel said on its website.
The Roosevelt Hotel will close just shy of a century after its opening in Sept. 23, 1924, when it was built by Niagara Falls businessman Frank A. Dudley and operated by the United Hotels Company.
However, away from iconic Manhattan hotels whose downfall is more a reflection of the owner’s bad management practices, in a more ominous development commercial real estate experts Trepp points us to the Marriott Buffalo Niagara hotel – which Amherst’s tallest and largest hotel – which received a top bid of only $10.5 million during an auction held by Ten-X. That price – which was not accepted – was 82% lower than the value of the hotel in 2011.
And while we wish the hotel well with subsequent sale attempts, we fail to see how, or who, emerges as the greater fool outside of the auction which began Oct. 5 at $6.5 million and closed on Oct 7 just $4 million higher, and far below what the owner had hoped to secured. Instead, owner Procaccianti Cos. of Cranston, R.I., will privately market the 356-room, 10-story hotel.
Hospitality and commercial real estate insiders blame the soft hotel market — a direct byproduct of the Covid-19 pandemic that has gutted the tourism marketplace.
“Look at that hotel and where it is located,” said A.J. Baynes, Amherst Chamber of Commerce president and CEO. “The clientele it is serving still is not traveling. We’re seeing it with airlines and airports. We’re seeing it with hotels.”
Procaccianti bought the hotel 13 years ago, paying $31 million for the property which according to Trepp was appraised at $58 million in 2011. TPG Hotels & Resorts — a Procaccianti Cos. affiliate — still owes $21.9 million on a $25 million loan it took on the property nine years ago. The loan is due next year, according to Trepp LLC, and since the hotel is itself cash flow negative, we fail to see a happy ending here.
Pre-Covid, the hotel was operating at a 66.5% occupancy rate and had a net operating income of $2.5 million, and so it hopes that travel and tourism returns back to normal very soon. Unfortunately, with every passing day the hotel continues to burn money and soon – absent a miraculous cure that is made cheaply available to all – it will hit a point where the only optimal outcome is to follow the Roosevelt into the void.
But whether or not hotel defaults today or 6 months from now, its current “market-test” valuation is nothing short of devastating for the securitization market: if hotel values are indeed 80% below securitized valuations, if the current economic malaise and covid shutdowns continue for the next year, the hit to the CMBS market will be nothing short of biblical once cash reserve buffers are depleted in a few months and the scramble to offload properties begins in earnest.
- Only Trump Can Keep America Together
Only Trump Can Keep America Together
Tyler Durden
Fri, 10/09/2020 – 18:20Authored by Raul Ilargi Meijer via The Automatic Earth blog,
Nothing partisan today, sorry, and thank you very much, just an observation. Which is that Trump keeps an unparralledly (can I buy a vowel?) divided America together simply because the entire nation focuses on him.
One half out of support, the other out of “hatred”, but still.
Anyone who saw even part of yesterday’s VP debate knows exactly what I mean. Boring! And that’s one thing Trump is not.
There was this headline that said: “Joe Biden will be a president who brings our country together”, and I thought: does anyone believe that, anywhere on the political spectrum? The purpose of Biden is to give the Democrats the power, not to unite the nation, that’s just rubbish. But yeah, they dragged him all the way out to Gettysburg, to claim some sort of link to Abraham Lincoln. Hoping nobody remembers that Lincoln was a member of the Republican party. Joe even quoted the Republican Lincoln verbatim:
‘Again We Are A House Divided’: Biden Calls For Unity In Gettysburg Speech
Joe Biden delivered a forceful appeal for national unity from the battleground state of Pennsylvania on Tuesday, as the nation lurched from crisis to crisis and the president continued to downplay the severity of the coronavirus after being hospitalized for Covid-19. From the storied civil war battlefield of Gettysburg, a symbol of the divisions that nearly tore the nation in two, Biden cast the election as a “battle for the soul of the nation” and emphasized the stakes this November. “Today, once again we are a house divided,” Biden said, framed by a row of American flags with the rolling hills of Gettysburg behind him.
“But that, my friend, can no longer be. We are facing too many crises. We have too much work to do. We have too bright a future to leave it shipwrecked on the shoals of anger and hate and division.” In a sweeping speech – one that drew on Abraham Lincoln’s address at the same spot, the site of one of the war’s bloodiest battles, and Lyndon Johnson’s remarks from there one hundred years later – Biden warned of the “cost of division” and his fears that partisanship threatened to undermine the central pillars of American democracy. Biden vowed to govern as an “American president”, one who would seek bipartisan solutions to the nation’s most consequential problems, including the coronavirus pandemic, racial injustice and economic turmoil.
Joe Biden is a non-entity. Same for Kamala Harris and Michael Pence. They don’t count in a universe that is also home to Donald Trump. Nothing to do with their opinions or politics or plans or whatever, it’s about attention value. If you ask someone who they think people will pay more attention to, Donald Trump or Kim Kardashian, it’s maybe a toss-up, and it depends on age groups. Ask the same for Joe Biden vs Kim Kardashian, and they’re going to say: what the fcuk are you talking about?
Hillary, the press could spin into something, but she lost to Trump once already. It’s all, all of it, about clickbait. Trump generates more of it than anyone, and none of the other protagonists seem to have any clue as to why that is. But the press do.
It’s the anti-Trump media that focuses on him even more than the pro-Trump one. Because they know that’s where the money is. Write about Trump, anything, even anything that is not true, and the money will be flowing in. Call him a rapist, racist, misogynist, fascist, anything’s fair game. I saw the term “Little Mussolini” float by when Trump stood on the White House balcony post-Walter Reed and thought again: you guys have no idea about memes. Trump is 6’3, Mussolini was 5’7, and you’re going with “Little Mussolini”? That’s your best shot?
A few days ago, before the VP debate, a commenter here on the Automatic Earth said:
It doesn’t seem Trump will croak from covid, but this image…
…seems more relevant than this one…
And I said:
“As long as Trump is part of the game, there’s nothing more relevant than Trump. That’s not an opinion. His presence has driven everything for 4+ years. It’s kept the NYT and CNN/MSNBC alive; they would be gone without him. The Dems’ only message 4+ years in is they are not Trump. That’s it, no other message. If he would be voted out, the MSM would be too. Politics would stop attracting viewers and readers by 50-80%.
Trump generates clickbait; Pence and Biden do not. Pence will never win anything. People detest Kamala more than they did Hillary. I’m afraid that even prior to the election, why wait?, there will be the first instances of a civil war in America. The only thing that still ties the nation together is Trump. Love him or hate him.”
The very same people who most “hate” Trump are the ones whose income most depends on him “Being There”. CNN head Jerry Zucker made it very clear to his staff during the so-called impeachment hearings that the only thing he wanted them to report on was impeachment. Not because he hates Trump, but because he knew that’s where the money is in present-day America: Yes, Trump.
CNN, WaPo, NYT, they’re altogether being busy killing their golden goose. You think these outlets, saved from bankruptcy by the appearance of Trump on the scene, don’t understand the dynamics? Of course they do. But they’re too far gone into their anti-Trump game to turn around. They know they themselves potentially initiated their own downfall by going all-out against Trump and for Joe Biden. But they have nowhere left to turn anymore.
If Biden wins, they’re done, nobody cares about him, nobody would read or watch a single thing about him, or about Kamala if she would take over, even if that switcheroo would give them a short attention “span”.
Trump said, coming out of Walter Reed: don’t let COVID19 dominate your life. Which the so-called left wing MSM turned into: “Don’t let tRump DOMINATE your life”. Bit late for that, guys and gals. You volunteered to let him dominate your lives for 4+ years now.
There doesn’t appear to be much of a plan in the Democratic party, and what plans there are differ hugely from each other. The gaps between Biden, Sanders and AOC are huge, on fracking, health care, you name it. They just find themselves together in the same party, for no obvious reason, other than, you guessed it, Trump. They stand for nothing together, there’s just one thing they agree on: Trump. Orange Man Bad: “I’m the one who ran against the socialists” Joe Biden said when asked about whether a vote for him is a vote for the radical left, despite the fact that Bernie campaigned for him in Michigan today”.
You can only keep that sort of thing together with a common enemy. Trump not only keeps the nation together, he literally keeps the Democratic Party together.
* * *
- Daily Briefing – October 9, 2020
Daily Briefing – October 9, 2020
Tyler Durden
Fri, 10/09/2020 – 18:10Real Vision CEO Raoul Pal is joined by senior editor Ash Bennington to look back at market action and make sense of several secular trends. Raoul shares several of the lessons from his interview with “The Bond King” Jeffrey Gundlach, which leads into a discussion about changes to risk appetite and time horizon within the hedge fund industry. Raoul and Ash then discuss the latest banning of crypto derivatives for amateur investors. They close by discussing wage deflation and software’s ever-tightening grip on the economy.
Digest powered by RSS Digest
Saving...![<!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>](/s3/files/inline-images/signrazorblades.jpg?itok=jymwk5-w){kind=link}
![<!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>](/s3/files/inline-images/Trumpsign.jpg?itok=j6_l_P6w){kind=link}
![<!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>](/s3/files/inline-images/trumpsignrazors.jpeg?itok=JbT8_-Zw){kind=link}