- Russia Releases Never Before Seen Video Of Advanced Arctic Base
The Russian military has released the first video detailing the complete modernization of a top secret military base in the Arctic. The video shows the technologically-advanced Northern Clover facility in Yakutia, reported RT News.
The base opened in 2015 and is home to more than 250 troops, supporting military operations on Kotelny Island, one of the New Siberian archipelagos off the northern coast of Russia. The base has a landing strip, high-power radar station, missile defense shields, and an array of high-tech weapons to defend the region from approaching threats.
Northern Clover can operate autonomously for 365 days without any additional supplies.
The base is part of Russia’s northern shield, protecting the nation from external threats and economic interest in the Arctic.
Last year, President Vladimir Putin said that Moscow had “re-established itself firmly” in the Arctic, adding that the region is “extremely important” to Russia’s economy.
Russia is not the only superpower trying to position itself in the region, as shrinking polar ice opens up new resource exploration capacities and shipping lanes across the Arctic Ocean.
The U.S., China, Canada, Denmark, and Norway have all shown interest in the Arctic.
Last year, China released a white paper outlining its plans for a “Polar Silk Road.”
The Trump administration made its first attempt to tap the Arctic and Atlantic oceans for natural resources, but a federal judge in Alaska last month blocked the sale of drilling rights.
Pentagon spokesman Johnny Michael said the Department of Defense (DOD) “can best defend the U.S. national interests and support security and stability in the Arctic,” in a “great-power competition” with Russia and China.
“The Arctic is changing faster than anywhere else in the world, losing older, long-term sea ice at a rapid rate. These changing environmental conditions are creating new access routes and new geostrategic opportunities,” Sherri Goodman, a senior fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center, told Fox News. “Russia’s aggressive actions in Ukraine and the Baltics are now occurring in the High North, against our Nordic allies. Russia is upgrading its military infrastructure in the Arctic. China is building a spider web of Polar Silk Road across the Arctic, strategically deploying its scientists across the region.”
Russia has made reaffirming its presence in the Arctic a top goal, where it controls 25% of the Earth’s undiscovered oil and gas.
Putin has made several claims that the value of Arctic minerals could be north of $30 trillion.
The race for natural resources in the Arctic has started. With trillions of dollars of untapped resources in the Arctic, it makes sense why Russia has constructed a secret base to guard the region against American imperialist.
Video: Russian MoD reveals Arctic military base ‘Northern Clover’
- The Betrayal Of Brexit Is A Mix Of Social Engineering And Mock Elections
Authored by Andrew Korybko via Oriental Review,
The UK’s so-called “powers that be” are betraying Brexit through a mix of social engineering and mock elections in order craft the false narrative that it’s actually the “people’s will” to remain in the EU.
By now it’s obvious enough that PM May represents the vested interests of the UK’s so-called “powers that be” by betraying Brexit and doing all that she can to prevent her country’s exit from the EU. Her failed attempts to seal a deal with the bloc for a so-called “soft Brexit” were never anything more than a ruse because her people vote for a clean split from the EU that was later deceptively described as a so-called “hard Brexit” in order to invent the idea of its foil that she was then tasked with implementing as a “publicly plausible” time-buying measure. In reaction to the expected opposition that she’s encountered in parliament after humiliating her country on the world stage and over-complicating what would otherwise have been a manageable divorce, she’s now dangerously flirting with the idea of second referendum on whether to honor the spirit of Brexit or not.
While the public at large is being led to believe that this is just the latest chaotic outcome of her bungled Brexit, it’s very likely that this was planned long ago for official introduction into the discourse at large at this pivotal moment after the UK has already passed the original deadline for leaving the EU. The only reason why the masses aren’t actively revolting is because they’ve been slowly preconditioned to accept this scenario through the extensive social engineering techniques that the state has been experimenting on them with over over nearly the past three years. Not only was Brexit “delegitimized” before the vote as the “fringe fantasy” of “racists, fascists, and white supremacists”, but this narrative was repeated ad infinitum after the referendum in order to instill doubts about the “morality” of this outcome. When that didn’t succeed, active efforts were undertaken to sabotage it from the very top levels of the state, ergo the antics of PM May.
The state has engaged in so much incessant fearmongering about the socio-economic consequences of Brexit that some polls suggest that the majority of voters would nowadays prefer to “Bremain” if another election were to be held, a scenario that had originally been presented as a “fringe fantasy” but is actually becoming a reality given the latest developments. The electorate wouldn’t have reached this “conclusion” on their own unless they were guided to it through the social engineering that they were subject to since the referendum, though opinion polls don’t hold political weight in a self-professed “democracy” unless they tangibly translate into votes during an official election, which is why a second referendum might be held to “legitimize” the efforts to betray Brexit once and for all. It doesn’t matter to the “masterminds” behind this plot what the domestic consequences of going against the people’s original will might be since all that they care about is the immediate objective of stopping Brexit.
Prime Minister Theresa May leaves Downing Street on March 23, 2017 in London, England
That said, the only foreseeable way to offset this scenario is if responsible members of the UK’s permanent military, intelligence, and diplomatic bureaucracies (“deep state”) intensively work behind the scenes to ensure that Brexit does indeed happen like the majority of voters originally wanted. It can only be speculated how this might occur in practice, but there’s evidently a possibility that it could succeed seeing as how visibly divided the British government is over this issue. The globalist forces aligned with the financial interests of the City of London clearly don’t want Brexit to happen, but the nationalist ones representing much of England understand the need to let democracy run its course regardless of socially engineered “voters’ regret”, though the country is now so divided along geopolitical lines (especially with respect to Scotland’s “Bremainers”) over this issue that its very unity is now in question no matter what ultimately happens, which might have been the globalists’ goal all along.
- Turkey Threatens To Buy Even More Russian S-400s If US Doesn't Cooperate
The US-Turkey showdown over Ankara’s deal with Russia for the S-400 anti-air defense system continues and could even escalate further considering Turkish foreign minister Mevlut Cavusoglu this week issued a return ultimatum after continued Washington pledges to halt sale of Lockheed’s F-35 stealth fighters.
Not only did FM Cavusoglu say on Wednesday that Turkey will not bow to mounting US pressure, but said if Washington blacklists Turkey on either sales of the US-made Patriot systems, or blocks F-35s already purchased, then Ankara may pursue even more S-400 systems and would further look for alternatives to the F-35 jets.
Russian S-400 air defense missile systems at Red Square in Moscow, via the AP. This comes after Turkey’s leaders voiced deep frustration over NATO leadership giving the cold shoulder to a Turkish proposal last week to overcome the standoff by forming a technical group in order to address the alliance’s concerns over the S-400 purchase.
“If the United States is willing to sell, then we’ll buy Patriots. However, if the United States doesn’t want to sell, we may buy more S-400s or other systems,” Cavusoglu told Turkish broadcaster NTV, as cited by Reuters.
“If the F-35s don’t work out, I will again have to procure the jets I need from elsewhere …There are (Russian) SU-34, SU-57 and others.” And continuing the threat, he said, “I will absolutely meet my needs from somewhere until I can produce it myself.”
The US has tried a carrot-and-stick approach by dangling its US Army Patriot systems in front of Turkey, hoping it would be a desirable alternative to the S-400 altogether.
The advanced Russian-made S-400 air defense system purchased by Turkey has been seen as a threat by the United States, given the potential for compromising the F-35 advanced radar evading and electronics capabilities. The fear is that Turkey possessing the S-400s and the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter stealth aircraft together would potentially enabling Moscow to detect and exploit its vulnerabilities, meaning Russia could ultimately learn how the S-400 could take out an F-35.
Interestingly, during his comments Wednesday, the Turkish foreign minister invoked Syria, in an observation that probably won’t sit well with Pentagon planners. “The U.S. F-35s fly over Syria every day and there are S-400 systems there.”
He followed this provocative reference by concluding, “They pose no threats despite being systems that are completely under Russian control, so will they pose a risk when the are in Turkey’s control?” he said.
Meanwhile Kremlin officials responded to Cavusoglu’s comments by noting Russia and Turkey were seeking closer military and technical ties — this after Presidents Putin and Erdogan met in Moscow earlier this week.
- Unaccountable Media Faced With Dilemma In Next Phase Of Deep-State-Gate
Authored by Ray McGovern via ConsortiumNews.com,
Now that the media has been exposed for wrongly siding with the intelligence agencies, how will it handle Devin Nunes’s criminal referrals in Deep State-gate?
Readers of The Washington Post on Monday were treated to more of the same from editorial page chief Fred Hiatt. Hiatt, who won his spurs by promoting misleading “intelligence” about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and suffered no consequences, is at it again.
This time he is trying to adjust to the fading prospect of a Deus ex Mueller to lessen Hiatt’s disgrace for being among the most shameless in promoting the Trump-Russia collusion narrative.
He is not giving up. When you are confident you will not lose your job so long as you adhere to the agenda of the growing Military-Industrial-Congressional-Intelligence-Media-Academia-Think-Tank complex (MICIMATT if you will), you need not worry about being a vanguard for the corporate media. It is almost as though Hiatt is a tenured professor in an endowed chair honoring Judith Miller, the New York Times reporter who perhaps did most to bring us Iraqi WMD.
In his Monday column Hiatt warned: “Trump was elected with the assistance of Russian spies and trolls, which he openly sought and celebrated. But he did not (or so we are told) secretly conspire with them.” In effect, Hiatt is saying, soto voce: “Fie on former (now-de-canonized) Saint Robert of Mueller; we at the Post and our colleagues at The New York Times, CNN et al. know better, just because we’ve been saying so for more than two years.”
Hiatt: Never held to account. (Wikipedia)
Times executive editor Dean Baquet said, about the backlash to the Times‘ “collusion” coverage: “I have no regrets. It’s not our job to determine whether or not there was illegality.” CNN President Jeff Zucker said: “We are not investigators. We are journalists.” (One wonders what investigative journalist Bob Parry, who uncovered much of Iran-Contra and founded this site, would have thought of that last one.)
Going in Circles
Hiatt’s circular reasoning is all too familiar. It is the kind a former director of national intelligence excels at when he’s not lying, sometimes under oath. For instance, James Clapper was hawking his memoir at the Carnegie Endowment last year when he was confronted by unexpectedly direct questions from the audience.
Asked about the misleadingly labeled, rump “Intelligence Community Assessment” (ICA) of Jan. 6, 2017, which he orchestrated, and which blamed Russia for interfering in the 2016 election, Clapper gavean ipse dixit response: The ICA simply had to be correct because that’s what he had told President Barack Obama and President-elect Donald Trump.
In fact, that “Intelligence Community Assessment” stands out as the most irresponsible, evidence-free and at the same time consequential crock of intelligence analysis since the National Intelligence Estimate of Oct. 2001 claimed there was WMD in Iraq. Recall that that one was shaped by out-and-out fraudulent intelligence to “justify” an attack on Iraq six months later.
Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-WV), as chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, described the main thrust of the committee’s five-year bipartisan report, stating, “In making the case for war, the [Bush] Administration repeatedly presented intelligence as fact when in reality it was unsubstantiated, contradicted, or even non-existent.”
Hiatt was one of the media’s major offenders, feeding on what the Cheney/Bush folks told him. When no “weapons of mass destruction” were found in Iraq, Hiatt conceded during an interview withThe Columbia Journalism Review that, “If you look at the editorials we write running up [to the war], we state as flat fact that he [Saddam Hussein] has weapons of mass destruction … If that’s not true, it would have been better not to say it.” [CJR, March/April 2004] As Parry wryly observed at the time in a piece calling for Hiatt’s dismissal, “Yes, that is a common principle of journalism, that if something isn’t real, we’re not supposed to confidently declare that it is.”
The Morning After
Clapper: After WMD failure, promoted by Obama. (White House Photo/ Pete Souza)
The media set the prevailing tone the day after the ICA was published. The banner headline atop page one of theTimes read: “Putin Led Scheme to Aid Trump, Report Says.” That put in motion more than two years of Dick Cheney-like chicanery in the media.
Buried inside the Times that same day was a cautionary paragraph written by staff reporter Scott Shane who noted, “What is missing from the public report is what many Americans most eagerly anticipated: hard evidence to back up the [three] agencies’ claims that the Russian government engineered the election attack. That is a significant omission.” Indeed it was; and remains so.
(Sadly, Shane was then given his marching orders and fell in line with many other formerly reputable journalists in what has been the most miserable performance by the mainstream media since they helped pave the way for war on Iraq.)
Clapper and Hiatt are kindred souls when it comes to the “profound effect” of Russian election interference. In his column, Hiatt asserted as flat fact that: “Trump was elected with the assistance of Russian spies and trolls …” At the Carnegie event in November, Clapper opined:
“As a private citizen, understanding the magnitude of what the Russians did and the number of citizens in our country they reached and the different mechanisms that, by which they reached them, to me it stretches credulity to think they didn’t have a profound impact on election on the outcome of the election.”
Hiatt: Captain of Cheerleaders
Hiatt emulated peppy, preppy cheerleader George W. Bush in leading Americans to believe that war on Iraq was necessary. Appointed Washington Post editorial page editor in 2000, he still runs the page — having not been held accountable for gross misfeasance, if not malfeasance, on Iraq. Shades of Clapper, whom President Obama allowed to stay on as director of national intelligence for three and a half years after Clapper lied under oath to the Senate Intelligence Committee about NSA surveillance of U.S. persons.
That Obama appointed Clapper to lead the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election speaks volumes. Clapper claims to have expertise on Russia and has made no effort to disguise his views on “the Russians.” Two years ago, he told Chuck Todd on Meet the Press:
“… in context with everything else we knew the Russians were doing to interfere with the election, and just the historical practices of the Russians, who are typically, almost genetically driven to co-opt, penetrate, gain favor, whatever, which is a typical Russian technique … we were concerned.”
It beggars belief that Obama could have been unaware of Clapper’s bizarre views on “the Russians.” Clearly, Obama was bowing yet again to pressure from powerful Deep State actors arguing that Clapper was the ideal man for the job.
And there is now documentary evidence that, from the Deep State point of view, indeed he was. In the text exchanges between discredited FBI sleuth Peter Strzok and his girlfriend, Lisa Page, a lawyer working for the FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, it seems clear that Obama wanted to be kept apprised of the FBI’s behind-the-scenes machinations. In a Sept. 2, 2016 text to Strzok, Page writes that she was preparing talking points because the president “wants to know everything we’re doing.”
A Sweaty Pate?
Clapper is aware now that he is going to have to sweat it out. He may believe he can ignore White House press secretary Sarah Sanders, who has said that he and other former intelligence officials should be investigated after special counsel Mueller did not establish collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.
Strzok: Will he be on Nunes’s list? (Wikipedia)
But recent statements by members of the House and Senate intelligence committees cannot be dismissed so easily. In his media appearances, the supremely confident, hero-of-many-liberals Clapper has been replaced by a squirming (but-Obama-made-me-do-it) massager of facts. He may find it harder this time to avoid being held accountable.
Devin Nunes (R-CA), the House Intelligence Committee ranking member, has gone on the offensive, writing Friday that committee Republicans “will soon be submitting criminal referrals on numerous individuals involved … in the abuse of intelligence for political purposes. These people must be held to account to prevent similar abuses from occurring in the future.”
On Sunday, Nunes told Fox News he’s preparing to send eight criminal referrals to the Department of Justice this week concerning alleged misconduct during the Trump-Russia investigation. This will include leaks of “highly classified material” and conspiracies to lie to Congress and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court. It’s no-holds-barred for Nunes, who has begun to talk publicly about prison for those whom DOJ might indict and bring to trial.
Nunes’s full-speed-ahead offensive is being widely ignored in “mainstream” media (with the exception of Fox), giving the media the quality of “The Dog That Did Not Bark in the Night.” The media has put its ducks in a row, such as they are, to try to rip Attorney General William Barr apart this coming week when he releases the redacted text of the Mueller report that so disappointed the Democratic Party/media coalition.
But how will they cover criminal referrals of the “heroes” who have leaked so much to them, providing grist for their Russia-gate mill? They will likely find a way, eventually, but the media silence about Nunes is depriving oxygen to the story.
On Sunday, Nunes said,
“They [the Democrats] have lied multiple times to the American people. All you have to do is look at their phony memos. They have had the full support of the media, 90 percent of the media in this country. They all have egg on their face. And so the fact of the matter remains, is there going to be — is justice going to be served or is justice going to be denied? And that’s why we’re sending over these criminal referrals.”
Nunes is, of course, trying to project an image of confidence, but he knows he is fighting uphill. There is no more formidable foe than the MICIMATT, with the media playing the crucial role in these circumstances. How will the American people be able to see egg on anyone’s face if the “mainstream media” find ways to wipe it off and turn the tables on Nunes, as they have successfully done in the past?
Though the Democrats now control the House, they have lost some key inside-the-Deep-State allies.
By all appearances, House Democrats still seem to be banking on help from the usual suspects still on duty in the FBI, CIA, and the Justice Department. Lacking that they seem ready to go down with the Schiff—Rep. Adam Schiff of California, perhaps the most virulent Russia-gater that there’s been.
Clapper is no long in position to help from the inside, and there’s no knowing how his sleepy replacement, Dan Coates, will react, if and when he wakes up long enough to learn chapter and verse about the machinations and dramatic personae of 2016.
Of course, there is a new sheriff in town running the Department of Justice. Attorney General William Barr, for better or ill, is a far cry from Jeff Sessions, who let himself be diddled into recusing himself. He’s not Rod Rosenstein either, whose involvement in this affair may have already earned him a prominent place on Nunes’s list of referrals.
What Did Obama Know, and When Did He Know It?
BREAKING: A high-level source tells me it was Brennan who insisted that the unverified and fake Steele dossier be included in the Intelligence Report… Brennan should be asked to testify under oath in Congress ASAP.
— Senator Rand Paul (@RandPaul) March 27, 2019
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On top of this, Sen. Rand Paul (R, KY) has called for an investigation into the origins of Mueller’s probe, including on the dicey question of how witting President Obama was of the Deep State chicanery during the last months of his administration. Page did tell Strzok in that Sept. 2, 2016 text that the president “wants to know everything we’re doing.”
Sen. Paul has also tweeted information from “a high-level source” that it was former CIA Director John Brennan who “insisted that the unverified and fake Steele dossier be included in the Intelligence Report… Brennan should be asked to testify under oath in Congress ASAP.”
Vying for Media Attention
If, as expected, Nunes discloses the names of those being criminally referred to DOJ, and Barr releases a redacted text of the Mueller report, the “mainstream” media will have a fresh challenge on their hands. The odds would seem to favor the media covering the Democrats’ predictable criticism of Barr — and perhaps even of Mueller, now that he has been defrocked.
The Post’s Hiatt should be counted on, as always, to play a leading role.
At the same time, there are signs the America people are tired of this. It would be difficult though for the media to avoid reporting on criminal referrals of very senior law enforcement and intelligence officials. Given the media’s obvious preference for siding with the intelligence agencies and reporting on Russia-gate rather than Deep-State-gate, it would be even harder for the media to explain why these officials would be in trouble.
Things appear to be unraveling but, as always, much will depend on whether the media opts to remain the “dog that didn’t bark,” and succeeds again in hoodwinking too many people.
- Don't Worry, It's Different This Time: Home Flipping Frenzy Matches Pre-Crisis Highs
For our latest installment of “it’s different this time”, where we examine the revival of financial products or market trends that contributed to the crises of yesteryear, we bring you a report from the Wall Street Journal about how house flipping – the practice of buying a home for speculative purposes, with the hope of turning a short-term profit – is officially back in vogue, thanks to mortgage rates that have been mired near cycle lows (and, thanks to Trump’s lobbying for a rate cut, could move lower in the not-too-distant future).
Those who were around during the run-up to the great financial crisis (or have at least seen the movie/read the book “The Big Short”) should recall that a flipping frenzy helped fuel the destabilizing speculative bubble in the American housing market, as cocktail waitresses, strippers and gardeners all rushed to take out ‘liar loan’ mortgages to buy homes in Nevada, Florida and other particularly hard-hit markets, with the hope of turning around and selling them at a profit because housing prices could only rise.
That turned out to be a terrible miscalculation with serious consequences not just for the borrowers who succumbed to their adjustable-rate mortgages, but for the global economy that suffered the consequences of the gold rush to securitize them.
Google searches for ‘how to flip a house’ have soared in recent years.
But according to CoreLogic, the analytics firm that provided the data for the WSJ story, the odds of another crash are slim, even as speculative transactions presently comprise the largest share of the market since 2006, just as US home sales have become mired in a serious slump.
But a new analysis from CoreLogic Inc. suggests most of the current flips are less risky than the ones more than a decade ago, making today’s flippers less likely to cause market volatility if prices decline in the next few years.
Some 10.6% of homes sold in the U.S. in the fourth quarter of 2018 were flips, defined as having been owned for less than two years, according to CoreLogic. That is near the level of the first quarter of 2006, when 11.3% of homes sold were flips, and the highest fourth-quarter level in the two decades since CoreLogic started tracking the data.
One reason why CoreLogic is confident about the risks is that home-flipping today is more profitable than it was during the Bush era (though, as other data providers have recently noted, home-flipping profits have been sliding over the past few months).
The study, however, shows that flippers today have much larger profit margins than flippers at the peak of the previous housing cycle. By one measure, the trades are more than twice as profitable as the flips made in 2006. That offers current flippers more of a cushion if home prices begin to flatten or fall.
And it’s also dominated by professionals who have a better understanding of the market, are mostly looking to buy older homes in need of renovation. Also, companies like Redfin have started business lines where they buy homes from people who don’t want to wait for a private buyer to come along, hoping to flip them later.
This time, the market is dominated by professionals who are purchasing older homes that likely need work, appealing to buyers’ desire for a move-in ready home rather than one needing months of renovations. At 39 years old, the median age of a home flipped is the oldest it has been since CoreLogic has been tracking. Flipped homes today are about a decade older than they were in 2006.
“Flippers are very different today than they were in the past,” said CoreLogic Deputy Chief Economist Ralph McLaughlin. “Even though we see hype and hysteria in popular culture, this isn’t necessarily something to worry about.”
But the caveat is that a serious drop in home prices would likely leave flippers in a difficult position, possibly even at risk of default, since most need the recoup their capital in the short term to pay off bridge loans.
Plus, buying older homes often comes with unforseeable risks.
Rachel Street, a real-estate agent with a home-flipping company, said there are significant financial risks to buying older properties.
“Every house I’m just going to do a cosmetic rehab. Then you open the wall and you find that every joist is rotted. That is never fun,” she said.
And the business is getting more difficult, as deals in urban markets like New York City and Philadelphia (one of the hottest markets for the latest wave of flippers) become harder to find. “A year or two ago I could have walked out and found deals all over the place,” said a former opera singer who has a home-flipping business. Today “there are six other people waiting.”
But we’re sure WSJ is right and there’s nothing to worry about. After all, there’s a whole new crop of millennials who are getting ready to settle down and start families. They’ll all want homes, right?
- Same People Behind Iraq War Lies Pushed Russian Collusion
Authored by Julie Kelly via American Greatness,
For more than two years they misled us.
Exploiting fear and confusion after a shocking event, they warned that our country was in imminent danger at the hands of a mad man. They insisted that legitimate intelligence, including a CIA report issued a month before a national election and a dossier produced by reliable sources in the United Kingdom, proved the threat was real. The subject monopolized discussions on Capitol Hill, in the White House, and in the press.
They argued that the situation was so dire that it was straining our relationship with strategic allies. Any evidence to the contrary was readily dismissed. And anyone who questioned their agenda was ridiculed as a coward, a dupe, or a conspiracy theorist. The news media dedicated endless air time and column inches to anyone who wanted to repeat the falsehood.
But an investigative report released two years after the propaganda campaign began found no evidence to support their central claim. The CIA report was highly flawed. The official dossier, some concluded, was deceptive and “sexed-up.”
No, I’m not referring here to the Trump-Russia collusion hoax, although the similarities are nearly identical. I’m talking about the period between 2002 and 2004 when many of the very same people who recently peddled collusion fiction also insisted that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction—including material to produce nuclear bombs. On the heels of the horrors of 9/11, the United States and our allies waged war against Iraq in 2003 based primarily on that assurance.\
But in 2004, a special advisor to the CIA concluded Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction. There were no stockpiles of biological or chemical agents; no plans to develop a nuclear bomb. The main argument for the war had been wholly discredited. But it was too late: The conflict officially raged on for another seven years, including a “surge” of 20,000 more U.S. troops in 2007 at the behest of the late Senator John McCain (R-Ariz.). We still have a troop presence in Iraq to this day.
In between the two scandals was more than a decade of recriminations against once-trusted experts on the Right who led our nation into battle. The Iraq war cost the lives of more than 4,400 U.S. troops, maimed tens of thousands more and resulted in an unquantifiable amount of emotional, mental, and physical pain for untold numbers of American military families. Suicide rates for servicemen and veterans have exploded leaving thousands more dead and their families devastated. And it has costtaxpayers more than $2 trillion and counting.
So, these discredited outcasts thought they found in the Trump-Russia collusion farce a way to redeem themselves in the news media and recover their lost prestige, power, and paychecks. After all, it cannot be a mere coincidence that a group of influencers on the Right who convinced Americans 16 years ago that we must invade Iraq based on false pretenses are nearly the identical group of people who tried to convince Americans that Donald Trump conspired with the Russians to rig the 2016 election, an allegation also based on hearsay and specious evidence.
It cannot be an innocent mistake. It cannot be explained away as an example of ignorance in the defense of national security or democracy or human decency. It cannot be justified as a mere miscalculation based on the “best available information at the time” nor should we buy any of the numerous excuses that they offered up to rationalize the war.
In fact, one can draw a straight line between the approach of neoconservative propagandists from the Iraq War travesty and the Trump-Russia collusion hoax. The certainty with which they pronounced their dubious claims, their hyperbolic warnings about pending doom—all eerily similar:
Bill Kristol in 2003: “We look forward to the liberation of our own country and others from the threat of Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction, and to the liberation of the Iraqi people from a brutal and sadistic tyrant.”
Bill Kristol in 2018: “It seems to me likely Mueller will find there was collusion between Trump associates and Putin operatives; that Trump knew about it; and that Trump sought to cover it up and obstruct its investigation. What then? Good question.”
John McCain in 2003: “I believe that, obviously, we will remove a threat to America’s national security because we will find there are still massive amounts of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.”
John McCain in 2017: “There’s a lot of aspects with this whole relationship with Russia and Vladimir Putin that requires further scrutiny. In fact, I think there’s a lot of shoes to drop from this centipede. This whole issue of the relationship with the Russians and who communicated with them and under what circumstances clearly cries out for an investigation.”
David Frum in 2002 (writing for President George W. Bush): “States like these and their terrorist allies constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world.“
David Frum in 2016: “I never envisioned an Axis of Evil of which one of the members was the US National Security Adviser.”
Max Boot in 2003: “I hate to disappoint all the conspiracy-mongers out there, but I think we are going into Iraq for precisely the reasons stated by President Bush: to destroy weapons of mass destruction, to bring down an evil dictator with links to terrorism, and to enforce international law.”
Max Boot in 2019: “If this is what it appears to be, it is the biggest scandal in American history—an assault on the very foundations of our democracy in which the president’s own campaign is deeply complicit. There is no longer any question whether collusion occurred. The only questions that remain are: What did the president know? And when did he know it?”
Those are just a handful of examples from a deep trove of comparisons. Other accomplices on the Right involved in both scandals include former NSA Director Michael Hayden; former Weekly Standardeditor Stephen Hayes; MSNBC host and former U.S. Representative Joe Scarborough; neoconservative think tankers Robert Kagan and Eliot Cohen; and former Bush aides Michael Gerson and Peter Wehner.
Even George W. Bush questioned aloud last year whether alleged Russian meddling “affected the outcome of the election.”
And let’s not forget who was in charge of the FBI before, during, and after the Iraq War: Robert Mueller, the Special Counsel hired in May 2017 to find evidence of Russian collusion. In his February 2003 Senate testimony, Mueller confirmed reports that Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and expressed concern that Hussein “may supply terrorists with biological, chemical or radiological material.” James Comey, Mueller’s close friend and successor at the FBI, served as George W. Bush’s deputy attorney general from 2003 to 2005. Comey, of course, is the man who opened an investigation into the Trump campaign in July 2016 and signed the FISA application in October 2016 to spy on Trump campaign aide, Carter Page. Both, we’ve been assured repeatedly, were Republicans.
A Deficit of Humility and Introspection
So why did they do it? Why did Kristol, McCain, Frum, Boot, et. al., dive headlong and without shame into a domestic political war with just as much thoughtless braggadocio as they brought to the disastrous Iraq war? Clearly, this war did not have the same deadly results as the war in Iraq but, nonetheless, it fueled an unprecedented degree of anger and division among our countrymen and toward our new president. It ensnared innocent people who suffered real-life consequences, their fate grotesquely cheered by these mendacious fraudsters.
Why?
If you had the blood of so many young Americans and more than 100,000 Iraqis on your hands because you peddled a lie, wouldn’t you be a tad more cautious before repeating that kind of mistake? If you assured Americans that the Iraq war would last just a few months, as Bill Kristol said in 2002, but instead it ended up lasting eight years, wouldn’t you be chastened about making more predictions? If your actions led directly to the election of a Democratic president who launched his winning campaign based on your egregious failures, wouldn’t you hesitate before inserting yourself in another scandal that gave fodder to your political opponents at your expense?
The answer, apparently, is “no.”
It’s unlikely any of these collusion propagandists on the Right truly believed the contents of the Steele dossier. One reason they played along was to exact revenge against the man who won the White House over their objections and called their bluff on the Iraq War: Donald Trump.
When Trump stood on a debate stage in February 2016 and said the Iraq war was a “big, fat mistake,” he didn’t just say it to a random Republican opponent. He said it directly to Jeb Bush, the brother of the president who launched the war. “George Bush made a mistake, we should never have been in Iraq,” Trump seethed. “They lied. They said there were weapons of mass destruction. There were none. And they knew there were none.”
The crowd mostly booed. But Trump didn’t back down. In a post-debate interview on Fox News, Trump reiterated his criticism. “The Iraq war was a disaster. We spent $2 trillion, thousands of lives. What do we have?” he asked Tucker Carlson. “We have nothing, absolutely nothing.” Nothing except a massive bill in blood and treasure borne mostly by the middle and working class.
At the time, Trump’s view was well outside the mainstream of conservative orthodoxy. Republicans were not inclined to admit failure on the battlefield, let alone to doubt the motives of intelligence, military, and political leadership we had trusted and were taught not to question. “Challenging the assumption that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction would draw scorn and mockery,” Adam Mill reminded us in an excellent piece for American Greatness. Further, with near-unanimous consent, House and Senate Republicans voted in 2002 to authorize military force against Iraq.
But Trump laid bare the culpability of the failed war’s Republican architects. He exposed the lingering guilt many rank-and-file Republicans felt about their unflinching support for a war that ultimately was based on a docket of falsehoods and empty promises. A war its promoters were eager to get into but had no plan to win.
Crossing a Red Line
Further, Trump intended to halt the Republican Party’s fealty to the Bush Doctrine. The post-9/11 foreign policy of the neoconservatives running the Bush Administration centered around preemptive war, regime change, and the spread of democracy in the Middle East.
But 15 years later, Trump called out the doctrine’s failures and faulted those who authored it:
“That’s why I have to look for talented experts with approaches and practical ideas, rather than surrounding myself with those who have perfect résumés but very little to brag about except responsibility for a long history of failed policies and continued losses at war,” Trump said in a foreign policy speech in April 2016. “We have to look to new people because many of the old people frankly don’t know what they’re doing.”
At a campaign rally in May 2016, Trump specifically mocked Kristol. “All the guy [Kristol] wants to do is kill people even though he knows it’s not working although he doesn’t know because he’s not smart enough.”
A red line, so to speak, had been crossed. The candidate likely to win the Republican presidential nomination was taking direct aim at the elite Republican establishment so they responded in kind. Dozens of Republican national security and intelligence experts denounced Trump in an August 2016 public letter, insisting he would be a “dangerous president and put at risk our country’s national security and well-being.” Kristol enlisted an independent candidate to run against Trump.
At the very same time, the Obama White House and top Democratic officials in his administration were circulating the Steele dossier and investigating the Trump campaign for possible collusion with the Russians. (After the election, McCain and one of his advisors distributed the phony Steele dossier to the FBI, lawmakers, and reporters.)
The symmetry is impossible to ignore or dismiss as coincidence. The Trump-Russia collusion hoax was a chance for these jilted influencers to get revenge against a president and a party that no longer had any use for them. Trump threatened their long-held grasp of centralized power, so they did everything they could to hold on to it, including siding with the Left to sabotage him. It was a craven act of self-restoration. Excommunicated by the Right, they sought to redeem themselves by sucking up to the Left, which not so long ago accused Iraq war promoters of being criminals.
Utterly Shameless and Undeterred
The question now is, will the Left shun these useful idiots once and for all? Now that their role in pushing the collusion narrative from the anti-Trump Right is over, will they stop booking Kristol on CNN? Will the Washington Post stop publishing Boot and Wehner and Hayden? Will Jake Tapper ask them any hard question, such as, “how can you be so wrong twice in 15 years?” Will the anti-war Left remember the human destruction for which they are responsible?
Further, they viewed Robert Mueller as the man who could destroy Trump. Much like their objective in the aftermath of the Iraq war, their end goal was to be proven right that Donald Trump was unfit to lead, not actually to do what was right for the country. It was pure ego.
Unfortunately, that probably isn’t where the similarities between Russian collusion and the Iraq War will end. The collusion propagandists on the Right will never apologize for supporting the hoax—just like most have not yet apologized for leading the country into a deadly, destructive, and arguably unnecessary war. Even now, after both the Mueller investigation and the House Intelligence committee have found no evidence of collusion, they won’t let up. Kristol is still tweeting Trump-Russian conspiracy theories and both Kristol and Frum are creating new conspiracies about the Mueller report. They know no shame.
In another ironic twist, authors David Corn and Michael Isikoff wrote a book, Hubris, that lamented the lack of accountability for the neoconservative pushers of the Iraq war. “If you look at the media cheerleaders from that time . . . David Brooks, Bill Kristol . . . did they lose one speaking engagement? Did they lose the fee for one column?” Corn asked during a 2013 MSNBC interview. “There was no price to be paid.”
Corn and Isikoff were the two reporters who published Steele dossier-sourced articles prior to the 2016 presidential election. Isikoff’s article was cited extensively in the October 2016 FISA application on Trump campaign aide Carter Page. Of course, they won’t pay a price, either.
So, there may not be a short-term price for the Iraq War/Trump-Russia propagandists on the Right to pay. The only consolation, if there is one, is that these con men are unlikely to ever to have a home again in the Republican Party. They will not have any influence; they’ll be political poison for any candidate dumb enough to seek their endorsement.
They can never again initiate a foreign war that costs thousands of American lives and trillions of dollars. Yes, they’ll be played for fools at CNN, MSNBC and in the Washington Post—trotted out as “conservatives” to condemn Republicans who are actually advancing policies that help the country. But they will never be taken seriously by anyone on the Right; to the contrary, they’ll be a collective cautionary tale for future generations of Republican leaders and influencers.
While they are not directly responsible for enormous bloodshed in this instance, like they are for the Iraq War, their deception about Trump-Russia collusion did result in actual harm to hundreds of people victimized by the farce. Every Trump family member and associate has been under a shadow of manufactured suspicion since the election; ditto for every White House aide, cabinet member, and former campaign worker. The amount of money and time wasted on this travesty will never fully be known.
Carter Page, a former U.S. Navy officer, was stalked relentlessly by the media and congressional investigators—and was a recipient of numerous death threats—not to mention spied on by his own government for a year in a fruitless attempt to find collusion between the campaign and the Kremlin. Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, still not sentenced more than 18 months after his plea deal for one count of lying to federal officials, is bankrupt. The home of Roger Stone was raided by the FBI at dawn; he, too, is going bankrupt. The civil libertarians and so-called freedom-loving conservatives all have been silent on these political persecutions.
Will the Fraudsters Get Away With It Again?
The country has been divided by hate and rage and unjustified distrust. Legitimate problems—such as illegal immigration, sustained job growth for the middle class, faulty trade agreements, the opioid crisis—have been completely ignored by our ruling class with the exception of President Trump. Calls to retaliate against Russia have been far and wide, while real international threats, such as China, North Korea, and ISIS have been overlooked by the collusion propagandists. This has been their intention all along; with no solutions to offer for any of these issues, the vanquished neoconservatives cling to relevance by spinning fabulist tales all in service of destroying a Republican president.
The goal of the intersectional Iraq War and Trump-Russia collusion fraudsters was clear: Regime change. The playbook is nearly identical—produce flawed intelligence, rally support from the media, portray any opponent as a bad actor, keep creating new crimes. However this time, instead of seeking to depose an Iraqi tyrant, the collusion propagandists within the conservative establishment sought to remove a duly elected U.S. president.
This is unconscionable and likely illegal. It’s the reason why Representative Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) this week is expected to make at least eight criminal referrals to the Justice Department related to the real scandal: The weaponization of the world’s most powerful law enforcement and intelligence apparatus to sabotage a rival presidential campaign and derail an incoming administration.
That’s a necessary start. But those who did not engage in specifically illegal activity but nonetheless bolstered those venal efforts also must be held responsible. They escaped justice and accountability once—they can’t get away with it again. They must be shamed into political oblivion.
- Boeing Is Building A New Jet To Cater To Beijing's 'One Belt, One Road'
Even after China led the global grounding of Boeing’s 737 MAX 8 following the March 10 crash of ET302 – the second deadly crash under similar circumstances within five months – and even with Boeing’s planes becoming a top target for Beijing in the ongoing trade spat with the US, it’s possible that the aerospace company might lead the ranks of American firms seeking to cater to President Xi’s “One Belt, One Road” initiative – much to Washington’s consternation, we imagine.
According to the South China Morning Post, Boeing sees potential for an aircraft that would make more routes viable between nations involved in the BRI – something that could fly on medium range routes where the 737 is too small to accommodate airlines’ needs and the larger 787 are too big and costly to fly.
But with Boeing still grappling with the fallout from the 737’s grounding, a decision on the new model – which has been dubbed the 797 within Boeing – likely won’t come until next year.
Last month, Italy became the first G-7 nation to officially join what has been derided as Xi’s “neocolonial project”. The sweeping plan to create new economic and infrastructure links between Europe, Asia and Africa is one of the signature projects of Xi’s rule.
“China is a little bit unique in that it has misused a lot of wide-body planes,” Tinseth said on the sidelines of an aviation conference on the trade initiative. “A middle-of-the-market airplane would better allow them to optimise that process, so it’s an opportunity in China, no question.”
In Boeng’s battle with Airbus over supremacy in the global aviation market, China is a key prize. Expected to become the world’s largest aviation market by the mid-2020s, the world’s second-largest economy is expected to buy some 7,690 planes.
According to Boeing marketing chief Randy Tinseth, the new plane would be a boon for China, which he says has “misused” wide-body planes on these types of medium-length routes.
“China is a little bit unique in that it has misused a lot of wide-body planes,” Tinseth said on the sidelines of an aviation conference on the trade initiative. “A middle-of-the-market airplane would better allow them to optimise that process, so it’s an opportunity in China, no question.”
“For a middle-of-the-market airplane, 40 per cent of the market in general is in Asia, and 40 per cent of the demand for a new mid-sized aircraft would be here as well. There is no mystery there,” Tinseth said.
Tinseth added that Boeing’s timeline would involve getting the new plane in the air some time during the middle of the next decade. Then again, it’s also possible that China’s home-grown rival Comac could dominate this market as it seeks to become a “third option” challenging both Boeing and Airbus. Though involving Comac in the production of such a plane could give Boeing an edge.
Another challenge for Boeing is the trade war. Despite opening a delivery center at Zhoushan in Zhejiang province to focus on assembling the 737, Boeing hasn’t secured an order from China since late 2017, before trade tensions between the US and China flared. Meanwhile, Airbus last month secured a $33 billion order for 300 planes.
Cathay Pacific Airways, one of Asia’s biggest carriers and Hong Kong’s flagship airline, said a medium-haul plane might not be necessary due to limited appetite for new flights along belt and road routes, but this was in part because many governments in Central Asia have been stingy about handing out flying rights to foreign airlines. And as economic growth increases, that demand would likely rise.
But if Boeing can’t convince the world that its planes are safe, or if the Trump administration fails to secure a trade deal with China, the 797 could be dead before it ever begins.
- On Ray Dalio's Hollow Lament
Authored by Jeff Deist via The Mises Institute,
Hedge fund titan Ray Dalio is just the latest billionaire to call for government to save us from guys like him.
It’s not pretty. Dalio’s recent article titled “Why and How Capitalism Needs to be Reformed” is a mess, though to be clear it’s a thoroughly well-intentioned and heartfelt mess. It’s a mix of self-effacement (I’m just a lucky guy with good parents who went to good public schools!), dubious statistics concerning the non-problems of wealth and income inequality, and utterly unoriginal, counterproductive proposals for government action. But approving journalists can’t get enough of it, or him, because nothing beats a billionaire’s mea culpa for capitalism. So Dalio, fantastically rich and successful at age 69, finds himself a media darling on financial talk shows after a recent kickoff appearance on CBS’s 60 Minutes.
The article, in two parts, is fairly long. It spends several pages discussing the author’s own background, wage and income inequality, bad schools, lack of child care, lack of health care, and a host of other standard left-liberal complaints. But we can summarize Dalio’s bottom line, as he does in a section called “What I Think Should be Done.” It’s an exercise in bland, meaningless jargon and lack of specifics:
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Leadership from the top. People with their “hands on the levers of power” (yikes!) need to make inequality a priority. Obviously he means politicians and corporate leaders, and does not intend to lessen the “power” of either. But if bad politicians and greedy corporate types got us into this mess, how will they get us out? More importantly, and left unaddressed, is any suggestion of their incentives to do so. After all, the present system made them rich, powerful, and unaccountable.
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Bipartisan policy makers working together to “divide and increase the economic pie better.” More politics, which doesn’t work and can’t work. Whose policy? What makes a policy good? Why hasn’t this supposed policy consensus already emerged on its own?
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Clear metrics and accountability for the “people in charge.” This doesn’t work, and can’t work, in politics. We have centuries of “data” to show how the worst rise to the top of the political world. Government by definition acts outsider the market, and is unaccountable by its very nature as a monopoly. Politicians don’t have a P& L; private businesses do. Again, why does Dalio seem so oblivious to incentives?
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Redistribution of resources. This doesn’t work and can’t work, except by market processes. Taxes. regulations, economic intervention, and state ownership of industry always reduce total wealth in society. A total nonstarter of a tired and thoroughly debunked idea, especially considering we already have a heavily interventionist economy. We also have the entire history of 20th century collectivism to demonstrate why “third way” interventionism can lead to outright socialism.
Many billionaires—Mr. Dalio, Warren Buffett, and Bill Gates among them— like to call for higher taxes on people such as themselves. But this raises a compelling question: would they have become rich in the first place under the kind of tax system they now advocate? Would they have accumulated a critical mass of investment capital if taxes had consumed more of their profits along the the way? Would they have been able to maintain sufficient capital expenditures in their respective businesses to stay dynamic? Or would revenue, capital, and personal wealth lost to the IRS have relegated these super achievers to the status of merely successful?
Well-heeled tax hikers never mention the diminishing marginal utility of money. A billionaire could lose 90% of his/her wealth to the state and remain an elite centimillionaire. Higher taxes for billionaires are simply a cost of doing business, like paying 20% more for an acquisition. But for a “rich” American family making $200,000, or even $40,000 by global standards, a 20% higher tax bill might prevent them from ever reaching their own critical mass of savings and wealth. Just as dominant corporations welcome new regulations, financial elites welcome new taxes as a form of protecting their status from upstarts.
Furthermore, there is no indication Mr. Dalio or other wealthy advocates for wealth redistribution ever practiced this idea in their own businesses. Dalio voluntarily could have paid higher taxes, much higher taxes, both to the federal government and his home state of Connecticut. He could have argued for higher capital gains tax rates, and refused to accept “carried interest” treatment of his firm’s income for management services. After all, to paraphrase Warren Buffett, why should Dalio’s secretary pay a higher tax rate than him?
He also could have equalized pay and ownership among his employees, and hired low-income and low skilled victims of the bad public schools he identifies. He could have run his hedge fund as an employee-owned cooperative. He could have opened his funds to ordinary people with $500 or $1000 to invest.
Perhaps most of all, he could have called for the Federal Reserve to end its practice of keeping interest rates artificially low. Cheap money and credit are the lifeblood of hedge funds, making it possible to buy companies with less equity and more debt—less skin in the game. Leveraged acquisitions allow for fewer shareholders receiving (nondeductible) dividends, along with the tax benefits of deductible interest payments. Cheap leverage made Mr. Dalio billionaire he is today.
But low interest rates cause tremendous harm to average people who simply want to save money in simple, low-risk vehicles, and they distort the entire economy by producing malinvestment, encouraging consumption over saving, and rewarding high time preference. While Dalio admits the Fed favors rich guys by crafting policy that inflates asset prices instead of wages, he remains blind to the central bank’s role as the primary driver of the wealth inequality he laments.
Mr. Dalio is by all accounts a brilliant and hard-nosed businessman. Hedge funds, at least successful hedge funds, make money by ruthlessly identifying untapped value in organizations, replacing board members and management with fund executives, and selling when the selling is good. So why on earth would he pledge to donate $100 million to Connecticut public schools, a system he admits is failing? Would he invest in a company with a similar track record of spending more and more each year for worse results? A company where he would have no say in management, board governance, operations, or how it spends his investment? Will he maximize, or even measure, the “return” on his investment in Connecticut public schools? Will he seek to minimize risk, in the form of his $100 million being irretrievably wasted?
The answer to these question is “No”, because he’s not buying a company or making a financial investment. He’s buying goodwill, a form of insurance for billionaires against the growing tide of populist resentment. The infamous Reverend Bacon from Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities comes to mind: Dalio is buying “steam control,” and he’s getting “value for money” as Bacon puts it. He’s buying relief, an indulgence for his sin of getting too rich.
Dalio played the game, by the rules of the game. Now he appears to say, “I’ve got mine, let’s change the rules.”
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- Americans' Expectations For Home Prices Appreciation Drops To Lowest On Record
Today, the NY Fed released its March 2019 Survey of Consumer Expectations, which showed no change in the short-term inflation expectations and a slight increase in medium-term inflation expectations. And while expected earnings and household income expectations improved slightly, in keeping with various consumer confidence surveys, a red flashing alert was noted in regard to home price change expectations which remain at their lowest level on record, suggesting that most Americans do not anticipate any increase in the price of their homes – an asset which has traditionally been an equity piggy bank for America’s middle class – for a long time.
Here are the main findings from the March 2019 survey:
Inflation
- Median inflation expectations at the one-year horizon remained stable at 2.8% in March, while increasing by 0.1 percentage point to 2.9% at the three-year horizon.
- The median expected change in the cost of gas increased from 4.3% to 4.7% in March, the highest reading since June 2018. The median one-year ahead expected changes in the cost of food, medical care, college education, and rent changed little in March, all staying within 0.1 percentage points of the previous month’s expectations.
And while the median home price change expectations remained steady at 3.0% for the fourth consecutive month, this was the lowest reading of the series, driven mostly by a continued drop in appreciation expectations by those earning over $100,000.
There were notable improvement in the labor market where median one-year ahead earnings growth expectations increased from 2.5% in February to 2.6% in March, the highest reading since September 2018. These expectations, however, varied substantially across demographic groups. In particular, median earnings growth expectations reported by respondents over the age of 60 and respondents with a high school diploma or less actually decreased in March.
Separately, the mean perceived probability of losing one’s job in the next 12 months decreased 0.3 percentage points to 14.3% in March, equal to its 12-month trailing average. This decrease was driven mostly by respondents under the age of 40. Adding to the labor market optimism, the probability of leaving one’s job voluntarily in the next 12 months increased from 21.2% to 21.8%.
A modest cloud on the otherwise blemishless labor market horizon, was the perceived probability of finding a job (if one’s current job was lost) which decreased 0.7 percentage points to 58.6%. And although this is the lowest level since August 2018, it remains close to the series’ high of 60.1% reached in November 2017.
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Finally, the survey found a somewhat mixed picture when it comes to the state of household finance. After declining for three consecutive months, the median expected household income growth rebounded to 2.8%. In contrast, median household spending growth expectations stayed unchanged at 3.1%. At the same time, perceptions of credit access compared to a year ago improved slightly despite the recent contraction in credit availability according to the most recent SLOOS survey.
The proportion of respondents who reported experiencing more difficulties accessing credit declined from 29.8% to 28.9%, while the proportion of those reporting easier access increased from 22.6% to 23.7%. Expectations for year-ahead credit availability also improved slightly in March. The proportion expecting improving conditions in credit access increased from 19.0% to 19.2%, while the proportion expecting worsening conditions in credit access declined from 32.5% to 32.3%.
The next question revealed a concerning development in the economy, as slightly over one in ten Americans believe they will be unable to make their minimum debt payment in the immediate future. Specifically, the percentage of consumers who expect to not be able to make minimum debt payment over the next three months increased 0.7 percentage points to 11.6% in March (however, it remains below its 12-month trailing average of 12.0%).
More concerning is that the fiscal tailwind from the tax cut stimulus is now a distant memory, and the median expected year-ahead change in taxes (at current income level) increased from 2.5% in February to 2.8%, the highest reading since October 2016. The series has been trending upwards since reaching a low of 1.5% in February 2018.
And so, with the average consumer seeing little room for improvement in their personal finances, or any home price appreciation, with many challenged by rising rates, it was no surprise that one-year ahead expectations as well as perceptions about households’ current financial situations deteriorated in March, with slightly lower proportions of respondents expecting to be and feeling better off financially.
Finally, looking at Donald Trump’s favorite indicator, the survey-implied probability that U.S. stock prices will be higher 12 months from now than they are today decreased slightly from 42.0% in February to 41.4% in March, perhaps as a result of stocks approaching their Sept 2018 all time highs.
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