- Denmark To Re-Impose CCP Virus Restrictions After Ditching All Rules 2 Months Ago: Prime Minister
Denmark To Re-Impose CCP Virus Restrictions After Ditching All Rules 2 Months Ago: Prime Minister
Authored by Jack Phillips via The Epoch Times,
Denmark will re-introduce COVID-19-related restrictions after a rise in cases, said Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen on Monday, coming less than two months after ditching the rules.
Frederiksen cited the Danish Epidemic Commission’s recommendation that the government classifies COVID-19 as a “socially threatening disease” for reimplementing restrictions, telling journalists: “The government will follow this recommendation.”
About 86 percent of people aged 12 or older are fully vaccinated in Denmark. Despite that, authorities said last week hospitals are at risk of being overwhelmed due to COVID-19 and other infectious diseases. Critics of vaccine mandates have said that because COVID-19 vaccines cannot entirely prevent the transmission of the virus to others, such requirements are not necessary and will create unnecessary economic and social hardship.
In a Sunday Facebook post, Frederiksen claimed that COVID-19 is spreading from unvaccinated people to elderly people and at-risk people who have been vaccinated, although she did not provide evidence for her assertion. Health authorities will “soon” advise the Danish government on new measures, she added.
“The health authorities were expecting more people to be infected (by COVID) and hospitalized, but the things have gone faster than expected,” Frederiksen also told reporters Monday.
Among those restrictions, the government may mandate that certain businesses require customers to show proof of COVID-19 vaccination before entering, she said.
“You can live with the corona-pass,” Frederiksen said, referring to the vaccine passport. It will be re-imposed on bars, nightclubs, restaurants, and similar venues.
The pass shows whether an individual has been vaccinated, has recently recovered from the virus, or has had a recent negative test. Opposition parties include the Conservative Party, the Danish People’s Party, and Venstre oppose the passport, but the governing left-wing coalition is in favor of it.
And Eskild Petersen, a prominent infectious diseases professor at Aarhus University, said during public remarks that the country needs to reimpose a mask mandate.
“If we are to avoid closures of schools and the rest of society, we need to get ahead of things, and it is proven that both corona-pass and face masks work against infection spread,” he said last week.
The number of new coronavirus cases was higher than 2,000 again Monday, for the fifth day running. Medical staff members are treating 26 people in intensive care.
Out of a population of about 5.8 million, some 2,745 people have died of COVID-19 to date, according to health officials.
Tyler Durden
Thu, 11/11/2021 – 02:00 - Elon Musk & His Brother Have Sold Over $5 Billion Of Tesla Shares In The Past Week
Elon Musk & His Brother Have Sold Over $5 Billion Of Tesla Shares In The Past Week
Update (2200ET): Just hours after the world’s richest person filed to show a 934,000 ($1.1 billion) share sale (on Monday) to cover tax liabilities on the exercise of over 2 million options, a second set of filings (here, here, and here) showed an ever more massive sale of another 3.6 million shares for an average price of about $1,070 in the following two days (or around $3.9 billion).
The interesting thing about the price action this week is that when the sale occurred (Monday and Wednesday), TSLA shares miraculously surged as the wave of Musk selling hit. And yet collapsed on Tuesday – which as far as the filings are concerned saw no Musk sales…
Combined, the transactions this week represent about $5 billion, or 3%, of Musk’s overall stake.
Elon still owns roughly 167 million Tesla shares.
This is only the third time Musk has sold Tesla stock since the company went public on the Nasdaq exchange in 2010—and it’s easily his biggest transaction. In July 2010, Musk sold slightly more than 1.4 million shares for $24 million, and in 2016, he sold another 2.7 million shares for about $593 million.
Elon’s huge sales of TSLA shares this week follow his brother Kimbal Musk – a Tesla board member – sold 15% of his stake on November 5th. That sale of 88,500 shares totalled $109 million.
This sale came days before Elon’s now infamous tweet about whether he should sell 10% of his own stake.
* * *
As we detailed earlier, having somewhat hinted at his actions over the weekend – given the tweet poll’s comments:
“much is made lately of unrealized gains being a means of tax avoidance, so I propose selling 10% of my Tesla stock.”
And almost 58% of the 3.5 million votes were cast in favor of a sale.
It is now clear that Elon Musk was indeed selling (though not 10% of his holdings) and was thus responsible for Tesla’s big tumble early this week after exercising his options and dumping some of the shares to cover his tax liability.
In fact, on Monday, Musk exercised his options which were struck at the extraordinarily low price of $6.24, receiving 2,154,572 shares…
The last time TSLA traded at $6.24 was Nov 2012…
He then sold a large number of them to cover his tax liability.
“The shares of common stock were sold solely to satisfy the reporting person’s tax withholding obligations related to the exercise of stock options to purchase 2,154,572 shares”
And as the following table shows, Musk was left with 1,220,481 shares from that options exercise.
Therefore he sold 934,081 shares (or 43.4% of the exercised options) – or around $1.1 billion.
Given the price levels from Form 4, the following chart shows when the sells were made. Thanks perhaps to the magic of ‘gamma’ manipulation, TSLA shares exploded higher during the first hour of trading as Musk’s 934k shares were dumped on ‘diamond hands’…
…and in the end, the selling pressure took TSLA stock down 16% in two days (one has to wonder just who or what was holding the stock up all day on Monday, only to let it all come crashing down on Tuesday after the sale was complete)…
It’s the billionaire’s first sale since 2016, when he last exercised stock options and liquidated some of his newly acquired shares to cover about $590 million of income taxes.
However, there is one awkward thing. It appears the whole premise of the poll was a lie since Musk has pre-arranged this sale on September 14th:
“AUTOMATICALLY EFFECTED PURSUANT TO A RULE 10B5-1 TRADING PLAN PREVIOUSLY ADOPTED ON SEPTEMBER 14, 2021”
The problem that TSLA shareholders have is two-fold – if a 934k lot sparks such a significant drop in the stock… and Musk has 170 million shares left…
What happens every year when Elizabeth Warren’s wealth tax comes due?
Tyler Durden
Thu, 11/11/2021 – 00:25 - National Firearm Registry? Might Be Closer Than You Think
National Firearm Registry? Might Be Closer Than You Think
Submitted by The Machine Gun Nest (TMGN).
Recently, an internal ATF document was released showing some very interesting statistics. The most significant statistic is that in 2021, the ATF processed 54.7 million Out-of-Business records. The records they are referring to, of course, is Form 4473.
The 4473 is the physical form that records the firearm information; make, model, serial number, type, caliber, and information for those unfamiliar with firearm paperwork. It essentially ties a name to the firearm as it was transferred to an individual from a licensed dealer, sometimes referred to as an FFL.
The 4473 also has personal information on it. It has name, birthdate, current address, birthplace, height, weight, and driver’s license number. Some even opt to give their social security number so that their NICS check goes faster. Speaking of NICS checks, let us clear up another misconception. The firearm information does not get entered during the NICS check. No system associates specific firearms with individuals… yet.
For those familiar with ATF paperwork, a pattern might be forming. We had our first taste of it back in November of 2020. Of course, the hyperbolic media was more focused at the time on the fact that the ATF added a gender box for “non-binary” but completely ignored the fact that all the pertinent information had been consolidated to the first page of the form.
For those unfamiliar, before November of 2020, page one of the 4473 form asked for personal information but no information on the firearm associated. Prior to 2020, the firearm information was located on page 3. Why would the ATF move the firearm information and the personal information onto the same page?
To a person, the answer is obvious—data collection. There is absolutely no way the ATF is not preparing for the eventual digitization of their systems and then a fight for a searchable database that they are prohibited by law from having. Furthermore, if one is familiar with how the Federal Government operates, the moves they make now are setting up the push five or even ten years down the road.
This step towards tyranny is why gun owners must stay vigilant. When your personal friends that own firearms tell you that they “do not see an issue with universal background checks,” let them know that legitimate gun violence is not stopped by overregulation and government control.
What makes the problem even more egregious is that in 2021, Joe Biden directed the ATF to make a few more regulations to current firearms law. One of those regulations is that FFLs (Firearms Dealers) cannot ever destroy the 4473 Forms that they keep on-site. Current law says that after 20 years, the records can be destroyed.
If this regulation goes through, the Biden administration will have just set the first chess piece in a very, very long game of death by attrition. If gun shops close or go out of business, they will be required to turn over every 4473 ever filled out at their shop.
Of course, this massive amount of collected paperwork will lead to the push for a digital database. It is a well-known fact that the ATF’s West Virginia office is filled to the brim with paperwork. It has been reported that the floor collapsed due to the large amounts of paperwork stored. What would make life easier for digitizing all those forms? If the information that was pertinent to the database was all on the first page. Sounding familiar?
Right now, the ATF is prohibited by law from having a searchable registry of gun ownership. However, if you do not believe that the steps are being taken right now to push for that in 20 years, you are just not paying attention. For example, the stated top priority of the anti-gun lobby is universal background checks. It is supposedly an idea supported by gun owners (fudds maybe, other than that, I doubt it), but the question that people should be asking is, “How would that work?” Unfortunately, in reality, universal background checks would not work without a gun registry.
The historical fact is that gun registries lead right to government confiscation. If you’ve ever seen the Alex Jones interview with Piers Morgan, you know exactly what I’m talking about.
So, gun owners need to stay vigilant and realize that right now, the ATF is prohibited from collecting this information for a good reason. Furthermore, if we want to keep our right to defend our liberty and freedom, we need to make sure that we continue to fight for it.
Tyler Durden
Thu, 11/11/2021 – 00:05 - White House Unveils Program To Get Conflict Zones Around The World Vaxxed
White House Unveils Program To Get Conflict Zones Around The World Vaxxed
The Biden administration says it’s now prioritizing US delivery of Covid vaccines to conflict zones around the world, in a policy that perhaps too few are seeing the irony of…
Proper mask etiquette but terrible trigger discipline pic.twitter.com/aTfgq9oQqe
— zerohedge (@zerohedge) October 14, 2021
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
On Wednesday a senior White House official said, “The Biden administration is set to announce today that it has brokered a deal to get more doses of the Johnson & Johnson COVID vaccine into conflict zones around the world,” according to Axios.
The initiative is being framed as part of efforts to “save lives” amid the global pandemic, though it begs the question of whether the “priority” should actually be to diplomatically push to end the particular conflicts in question. In places like Syria or Venezuela, for example, far-reaching US sanctions have actually made it extremely difficult for people to access Covid vaccines as well as vital medicines in general.
The program will have Johnson & Johnson at the forefront, working to distribute its Covid-19 vaccine through NGOs on the ground in war-torn regions, for example in Iraq, Yemen, or disputed regions like Nagorno-Karabakh.
Axios outlines some of the early details of the new program which will fast-track delivery of vaccines into the conflict-prone regions as follows:
- …in many humanitarian settings and conflict zones, there’s no government entity to administer the doses and accept that liability.
- The U.S., J&J, and the global COVAX initiative built a “novel legal approach” in which J&J agreed to waive the legal liability it normally requires from a country for donated doses.
- J&J is essentially saying, “we’re going to let an NGO give them to people who are most vulnerable because the situation demands it,” the official said. They said they expect it could be a model for donations from other vaccine makers.
Below: map of conflict zones and geopolitical hotspots around the world…
You will find more infographics at Statista
Early in the pandemic, UN Secretary-General António Guterres made a global appeal for a ceasefire in all conflicts, citing the “common enemy” of the pandemic: “Our world faces a common enemy: COVID-19. The virus does not care about nationality or ethnicity, faction or faith. It attacks all, relentlessly. Meanwhile, armed conflict rages on around the world,” according to March 2020 statements.
Tyler Durden
Wed, 11/10/2021 – 23:45 - Six Degrees From Brookings: How A Liberal Think-Tank Keeps Coming Up In The Russian Collusion Investigation
Six Degrees From Brookings: How A Liberal Think-Tank Keeps Coming Up In The Russian Collusion Investigation
The latest indictment by Special Counsel John Durham has created a stir in Washington as the investigation into the Russian collusion scandal exposed new connections to the Clinton campaign. The indictment of Igor Danchenko exposes additional close advisers to Hillary Clinton who allegedly pushed discredited and salacious allegations in the Steele dossier.
However, one of the most interesting new elements was the role of a liberal think tank, the Brookings Institution, in the alleged effort to create a false scandal of collusion.
Indeed, Brookings appears so often in accounts related to the Russian collusion scandal that it could be Washington’s alternative to the Kevin Bacon parlor game. It appears that many of these figures are within six degrees of Brookings.
The fact is that Washington remains a small town for the ruling elite where degrees of separation can be quite small as figures move in and out of government. Moreover, think tanks are often the parking lots for party loyalists as they wait (and work) for new Administrations. The Federalist Society and Heritage Foundation play a similar role for conservative figures.
However, even in Washington’s inbred environment, the layers of connections to Brookings is remarkable in the Durham indictments and accounts of the effort to create a Russian collusion scandal. The effort was hardly a secret before anyone knew the name of the former British spy Christopher Steele. On July 28, former CIA Director John Brennan briefed then President Obama on Hillary Clinton’s alleged “plan” to tie Donald Trump to Russia as “a means of distracting the public from her use of a private email server.” Notes from the meeting state the plan to invent a collusion narrative was “allegedly approved by Hillary Clinton a proposal from one of her foreign policy advisers to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by the Russian security service.” That was three days before the Russian investigation was initiated.
Durham is detailing how this plan was carried out and many of those referenced are within not six but two degrees of separation from Brookings.
Brookings played a large role in pushing the Russian collusion narrative, hiring a variety of experts who then populated media outlets like MSNBC and CNN stating confidently that Trump was clearly incriminated in a series of dubious criminal acts. While no such crimes were ever charged, let alone prosecuted, Brookings maintained a deep bench of enabling experts like Susan Hennessey (now a national security adviser in the Biden Administration), Ben Wittes (who defended James Comey in his leaking of FBI memos) and Norm Eisen (who then become counsel in the Trump impeachment effort). This included the Brookings site, LawFare, which ran a steady stream of columns on how Trump could be charged for crimes ranging from obstruction to bribery.
However, that type of media cross-pollination is common. What is most surprising is how the indictment seems to map out roads that keep leading back to Brookings:
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The latest indicted figure, Danchenko, worked at Brookings. He proved to be the key unnamed source for Christopher Steele and later admitted to the FBI that the information attributed to him was not just “unsubstantiated” but, after being reworked by Steele, was unrecognizable from the original gossip or speculation. Steele himself was introduced to Danchenko
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It appears that Danchenko was introduced to former British spy Christopher Steele by Brookings employee Fiona Hill. If that name seems familiar, Hill secured a position on President Trump’s National Security Council and later became a key witness against him in the first Trump impeachment over the Ukraine scandal.
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Steele also testified in London that his friend and then Brookings President Strobe Talbott was involved in briefings and inquiries on the development of the dossier. Talbott is also a former Clinton administration diplomat and Clinton friend who served in a high-ranking position under Hillary Clinton. (Another figure, Cody Shearer, who has been mentioned in accounts developing and spreading his own collusion claims, was the brother of Talbott’s late wife).
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When Steele was called to the State Department for a briefing on his dossier, Talbot sat next to Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, who is currently at Brookings. The role of figures at Brookings in the dossier is still developing but all roads seem to lead back to the think tank.
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Even when it became clear that false statements made in the secret FISA applications targeted Trump associate Carter Page, the secret court selected David Kris, who wrote for Brookings’ LawFare despite his prior denial that the FBI misled the court and criticism of Trump).
Brookings has long been viewed as effectively the research arm for Democratic figures and liberal causes. Yet, even in the Baconesque world of Washington insiders, it is rare to see a think tank connected on so many levels to a criminal investigation. Like much in our politics, these connections will mean different things to different people. For conservatives, Brookings looks like the mothership for this scandal with associates coordinating meetings and roles in the metastasization of the scandal. For liberals, the connections simply show the influence of the liberal think tank and any highlighting of the think tank is gaslighting a new “Trilateral Commission” narrative.
With the exception of Danchenko, there is no evidence that any of these Brookings-related individuals have committed criminal acts or are suspected of such acts by Durham. However, these connections have already factored in the investigation and are likely to be addressed in any final Special Counsel report. Brookings Institution’s influence on the Russian collusion scandal will likely remain central to Durham’s unravelling of how the FBI was duped into the Russian investigation and the role of Clinton operatives in that effort.
Notably, on September 9, 2015, Hillary Clinton appeared at Brookings and stressed there are “a lot of long-time friends and colleagues who perch here at Brookings including Strobe.”
The question is whether that perch will become increasing precarious as Durham continues his investigation.
Tyler Durden
Wed, 11/10/2021 – 23:25 -
- New York Preps To Avoid Repeat Of Texas' Grid Mayhem As Winter Looms
New York Preps To Avoid Repeat Of Texas’ Grid Mayhem As Winter Looms
New York’s grid operator modeled a scenario that was equivalent or greater than the Texas cold snap earlier this year that nearly collapsed the entire power grid and left millions in the dark, according to Bloomberg.
Wes Yeomans, vice president of operations for the New York Independent System Operator (NYISO), said electricity demand would soar to record highs under such a scenario. At the same time, deliveries of natural gas to power plants would be disrupted, he added.
The disruption would cause power reserves to plummet by 90% to 526 megawatts, the model revealed. Yeomans said that NYISO had identified electrical circuits required to keep gas flowing through pipelines to prevent a grid collapse. Notice most of the fossil fuel generation is downstate.
One of the critical failures of the Texas power grid, besides declining renewable energy power, was outages at gas wells and processing plants that led to fuel shortages at power plants and ultimately left millions of Texans in the dark for nearly a week in February.
Modeling has helped NYISO better prepare its grid and protect customers against periods of colder weather that could boost demand for energy and strain grid operations. The grid operator doesn’t want to repeat what happened in Texas earlier this year.
NYISO’s modeling and grid preparations come as a ‘double-dip La Niña‘ has formed. So what does this mean for the Northeast’s climate this winter?
Explaining more on the subject is Bob Larson, expert senior meteorologist for Accuweather, recently told Daily Mail, “the snowfall forecast for New York City is, on average, 29.8 inches, but our predictions up to 32 inches.”
So it comes as no surprise that NYISO is preparing for what could be a brutal winter.
Tyler Durden
Wed, 11/10/2021 – 23:05 - Bitcoin Adoption Is The Start Of A Digital Revolution
Bitcoin Adoption Is The Start Of A Digital Revolution
Authored by Emeka Ugbah via BitcoinMagazine.com,
The global adoption of bitcoin is only beginning as the world evolves toward a society based upon cryptographically secured money…
It’s remarkable how far we’ve come in only a little more than a decade. Since its launch in 2009 by the pseudonymous creator Satoshi Nakamoto, bitcoin, the world’s first and largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization and dominance, has seen astonishing rises in value. Taking a look back at when the digital asset saw its first significant price increase, going from trading at a few fractions of a cent to 0.08 cents and then to $1, no one could have predicted with absolute certainty that we would one day live in a world where the asset would have gained over 6 million percent. Well, it happened in only 12 years.
This astronomical growth gave birth to a whole new industry that has altered our perception of the financial world. It has also, just as expected, piqued the interest of millions of users worldwide. From nation-states to individuals, both private and publicly-owned companies and global financial institutions, these entities are either already invested and therefore now beneficiaries of this new monetary revolution, they are still on the sidelines thinking about how best to get involved, or just outrightly against the idea of this disruptive innovation, playing a blind eye to what it stands for, or just sadly oblivious of it.
THE PANDEMIC VERSUS THE GLOBAL ECONOMY
Image by Gerad Altmann from Pixabay
2020 was an inflection point for the entire global financial market. The pandemic, as well as efforts by different countries to contain it, resulted in an unprecedented collapse of the global economy. In an attempt to salvage the situation, central banks lept into action, printing so much money that it further skewed the already unbalanced supply and demand relationship. That action laid bare what was already known, the fact that the monetary policies of most developed nations, and by extension the less developed ones, are tethered to a flawed system. After the markets crashed, it became clear that adverse measures had to be adopted if the world isn’t to end up in yet another recession. These measures had to be adopted at all levels, from the individual to the national, as well as at the corporate and institutional levels.
The cryptocurrency market wasn’t spared during the crash, of course. Devastating declines were experienced across the board. Bitcoin itself lost over 50% of its value in March 2021. But as a result of its intrinsically scarce nature, its recovery was unlike anything seen in modern times within the financial world. Over the space of eight months, Bitcoin was able to crawl and claw its way back up, breaking its previous all-time high of $20,000 reached at the peak of its 2017 bull run. And since then the price of the digital asset has been on an absolute tear, bulldozing its way through psychological levels of resistance, printing new all-time highs and defying all the fear, uncertainty and doubt thrown its way.
As expected, this parabolic rise in the value of the asset didn’t happen under the radar. Right before its steady climb, rumors and whispers of institutional interest in bitcoin began flooding the space, a lot of which was later confirmed by the institutions themselves. One such institution was MicroStrategy.
THE CORPORATIONS JUMP IN
New York City skyline view. Image by Manuel Romero from Pixabay
In August 2020, MicroStrategy — the largest independent, Nasdaq-listed, publicly-traded cloud-based business intelligence provider — announced the purchase of 21,454 bitcoin for a total purchase price of $250 million, including fees and expenses. The company deliberated for months before deciding on a capital allocation approach. CEO Michael J. Saylor, went ahead to state that some macro factors — along with the public health crisis caused by the pandemic — forced governments around the world to adopt financial stimulus measures like quantitative easing to mitigate the crisis. Despite their best intentions, these measures may well depreciate the long-term real value of fiat currencies and many other various asset classes, along with many of those traditionally held by corporate treasury operations.
The company’s bitcoin acquisitions didn’t stop at 21,454 bitcoin. Overall, MicroStrategy is said to hold a total of 114,042 bitcoin worth $6,966,574,887 based on the current price of the asset at the time of writing. Their total acquisition was purchased for $3.16 billion at an average price of $27,713 per bitcoin.
Following the announcement of MicroStrategy’s acquisitions, news broke that Ruffer, a UK-based wealth management firm, had followed suit. The financial firm invested 2.5 percent of its $27 billion portfolio into bitcoin in November 2020. But unlike MicroStrategy who still holds bitcoin to date, purchasing a few thousands more now and again, Ruffer’s game plan was different. They opted to take out their initial investment of $650 million in profit, and subsequently, when the price of bitcoin began showing signs of weakness just before the May 2020 crash, they sold their entire position, turning a $650 million investment into $1.1 billion in the process.
If that isn’t evidence of the market’s potential, it’d be difficult then to think of anything else that could be. The wealth management firm wasn’t the only non-crypto or blockchain-native company to demonstrate this. The Tesla case, despite having a different twist, still pushed that narrative. The American electric vehicle and renewable energy company revealed in February that it had purchased 42,902 bitcoin worth $1.5 billion. They also announced that “according to relevant regulations and initially on a limited basis,” they have begun making arrangements to accept bitcoin payments in return for their products. This news, as predicted, had a tremendous impact on the price of the digital asset, driving investors into a buying frenzy that drove the price up by more than 20% in just a few days that followed.
As the months ticked by and the price of bitcoin verged into the unsteady waters that marred the second quarter of 2021, the air was saturated with fear, uncertainty and doubt. Different countries had begun yet again putting up measures to stifle the growth of the bitcoin and the entire cryptocurrency market, pushing out exaggerated data and false narratives about the Bitcoin network’s energy consumption, claiming that Bitcoin miningis not good for the environment. In the midst of all that, it was reported that Tesla had sold its bitcoin position and would no longer accept the asset as payment for their products. However, Tesla CEO Elon Musk, tweeted in response to the heat he had been receiving from the cryptocurrency community, saying that “Tesla only sold ~10% of holdings to confirm BTC could be liquidated easily without moving the market. When there’s confirmation of reasonable (~50%) clean energy usage by miners with a positive future trend, Tesla will resume allowing bitcoin transactions.”
To date, the company still holds 42,000 bitcoin and is said to have no plans of selling.
THE CHANGE OF AN INSTITUTIONAL VIEWPOINT
It is interesting to think about how things have changed though. A few years ago, a number of these corporations and institutions that are now hovering around bitcoin and some of the major altcoins, had a completely different opinion.
In 2017, analysts at Morgan Stanley, the American multinational investment bank, stated that “Bitcoin’s real value could be zero.” Fast-forward to 2021, Morgan Stanley became “the first big U.S. bank to offer its wealthy clients access to bitcoin funds.”
Also in 2017, Jamie Dimon, a long time to-date opponent of bitcoin and CEO of JPMorgan Chase & Co., another investment bank, was quoted as saying, “Bitcoin is a fraud that will blow up;” furthermore that, “cryptocurrency is only fit for use by drug dealers, murderers and people living in North Korea.” Fast forward yet again to 2021, two of the investment bank’s strategists Amy Ho and Joyce Chang wrote; “In a multi-asset portfolio, investors can likely add up to 1% of their allocation to cryptocurrencies in order to achieve any efficiency gain in the overall risk-adjusted returns of the portfolio.” Jamie Dimon himself, still unchanged in his view, recently stated that he still sees bitcoin as “worthless,” but “our clients are adults. They disagree. If they want to have access to buy or sell bitcoin, we can’t custody it — but we can give them legitimate, as clean as possible access.”
Goldman Sachs, yet another multinational investment bank, reopened their cryptocurrency trading desk, a little over a year after they listed five reasons “why bitcoin is ‘not an asset class’, nor ‘a suitable investment.’”
PayPal and Visa, the payment processing behemoths who have also in the past expressed their stances against bitcoin, calling it “ridiculous as a store of value” and “unacceptable as a payment system,” now both have completely different stands. PayPal now allows users to buy and sell bitcoin as well as a few other cryptocurrencies on their platform, while Visa is working on enabling bitcoin purchasing on theirs. A complete 180-degree turn from where they both were years ago. An interesting turn of events by all standards, no?
There are currently a few arguments floating around on this topic: Some schools of thought will argue that without the corporations and institutions, the entire bitcoin and cryptocurrency network won’t reach its full potential, and that mainstream adoption is vital for its continued growth, seeing as the corporations have the ability inject so much capital into the networks.
Data has it that the Global Asset Management industry holds $103 trillion as AUM (assets under management). Retail portfolios, representing 41% of global assets at $42 trillion and institutional investments amounting to $61 trillion, or 59%.
From the data gathered, if the global institutions were to adopt the 1% portfolio allocation model to bitcoin as suggested by JPMorgan Chase & Co., this would mean an additional $1.03 trillion would flow into bitcoin, which already has a $1.15 trillion market capitalization. That would probably see the price of the digital asset shoot towards the $120,000 range. So is there a valid point in that argument?
Another argument is that these corporations and institutions are only getting into bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies — not because they support the growth of the networks nor have beliefs in the blockchain technology, decentralization and its impact on the future — but that they are all capitalists who will sell as soon as they make a profit, much like Ruffer did. If we are being completely honest, who isn’t in it for the profit? Though most of the participants in the cryptocurrency space can boldly say that they are in it for a whole lot more. However, there’s no doubt that wealth creation and preservation remains an underlying incentive. The increase in institutional interest and involvement within the space will inherently bring some form of stability reducing the wild price volatility that the digital asset market has been known for. The market will certainly have a whole lot more liquidity. It all makes for a bit of a conundrum because the lack of liquidity in the market is one of the reasons why institutions aren’t jumping in mass just yet.
“The crypto asset class is relatively still too small, illiquid and lacking depth to absorb large pension funds like institutional investments that would otherwise move the markets,”
– Amber Ghaddar, cofounder of decentralized capital marketplace AllianceBlock.
The third argument is that for the institutions to be committed fully to allocating portions of their portfolio into bitcoin or other digital assets, regulatory clarity has to be achieved within the space. Institutions operate within certain regulatory frameworks, that’s a known fact. Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are largely unregulated. The philosophy behind the creation of bitcoin in the first place has decentralization at its core, which makes it a bit of a nightmare for regulators.
MY THOUGHTS
It is as clear as a bright, sunny day that regulators worldwide have bitcoin and the entire cryptocurrency market in their crosshairs. Why has it now become a thing after over a decade of being in existence? Is it because the entire space has now garnered so much popularity that it can no longer be ignored? Or is it because the regulators are only just starting to figure out how to peek through the multiple complex layers of this otherwise nascent financial innovation? Of these two scenarios, the first can certainly be considered valid to some extent. But the second scenario, if the regulators only just started scrambling to try and regulate the space because they think they have figured it out, then it probably means they haven’t.
Bitcoin was designed to self-regulate and preserve. Embedded within the codes of the protocol are set rules and mechanisms put in place to enforce any and all needed regulations, from supply schedules to security. Its adherence to these rules is pertinent to the network’s existence, buttressing the earlier mentioned self-regulatory and preservative point. There is a reason why it is considered a “trustless” payment network after alI, no?
Now the argument that institutional adoption is required for bitcoin to attain its status as the hardest, most sound form of money, as well as a store of value is false, to say the least. The Bitcoin network was meticulously designed to be self-sustaining and its native currency transacted peer-to-peer by individuals who freely opted into its usage. As the number of users grows, so will its security, and as a result its value. With all that said, for lack of a better way to put these next few words, it’s a “if you can’t beat them, join them, or just leave them alone” thing.
Tyler Durden
Wed, 11/10/2021 – 22:45 - Satellite Imagery Reveals China's Third Aircraft Carrier Nears Launch
Satellite Imagery Reveals China’s Third Aircraft Carrier Nears Launch
China could be months away from launching its newest aircraft carrier, according to a new analysis by a Washington-based think tank.
The Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) published commercial satellite imagery of China’s third aircraft carrier, commonly known as the Type 003, which will launch in three to six months. The images from Jiangnan Shipyard (captured on October 23) shows tremendous progress has been on the vessel:
The last several weeks witnessed a significant shift in the visual appearance of the Type 003. Sometime between September 18 and October 23, the two large openings in the vessel’s deck were sealed shut. These gaps allowed for large internal components, such as the engines and powerplants, to be inserted into the hull. Their closure suggests that the initial installation of major internal components has been completed. It is worth noting that the rear opening is not yet fully flush with the rest of the deck.
Other major components of the carrier are nearing completion, including the vessel’s catapults, which will assist with launching aircraft. One of the bow catapults remains covered by environmental shelters, indicating that workers are still installing and testing the system. The second bow catapult is not yet covered by environmental shelters, but it will be once installation and testing begin. Behind the two bow catapults, work is underway (underneath environmental shelters) on a third catapult on the ship’s port side.
The People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN), the world’s largest naval force, has only two aircraft carriers, the Liaoning and Shandong. The Liaoning was created using the hull of an older Soviet vessel, and the Shandong is a copy of the Liaoning with some improvements.
Type 003 is the most modern aircraft carrier China has designed to date. Offering a new Catapult Assisted Take-Off But Arrested Recovery (CATOBAR) will allow heavier aircraft with more payload and fuel to be launched. This could prove critical in defending its militarized islands in the South China Sea. When the new vessel enters service, CSIS said it would be a major addition for PLAN to project power in the Indo-Pacific region.
Naval domination is on the list for President Xi Jinping, who could be delivered a third presidential term next year, and likely remain in power for life. Xi has spent the better part of the last decade modernizing its military forces. The new carrier would give PLAN’s reach beyond the First Island Chain, including Taiwan, the Philippines, and Japan.
A 2020 Pentagon report estimated the carrier could enter service around 2023-2024. PLAN has an impressive force of approximately 355 ships and submarines, according to the DoD. The US Navy is smaller but has eleven nuclear-powered aircraft carriers and fielding stealth fighters. However, China is way ahead of the US in developing hypersonic weapons that could become aircraft carrier killers.
The great power competition between Bejing and Washington continues to heat up as Xi flexes his military might in the Indo-Pacific region. Both superpowers are falling into Thucydides Trap, a term used to explain when an emerging power threatens to displace an existing great power that usually result in war.
Tyler Durden
Wed, 11/10/2021 – 22:25 - America's Woke Colleges Can't Be Salvaged. We Need New Ones
America’s Woke Colleges Can’t Be Salvaged. We Need New Ones
Authored by Niall Ferguson, op-ed via Bloomberg.com,
I’m Helping to Start a New College Because Higher Ed Is Broken
If you enjoyed Netflix’s “The Chair” – a lighthearted depiction of a crisis-prone English Department at an imaginary Ivy League college – you are clearly not in higher education. Something is rotten in the state of academia and it’s no laughing matter.
Grade inflation. Spiraling costs. Corruption and racial discrimination in admissions. Junk content (“Grievance Studies”) published in risible journals.
Above all, the erosion of academic freedom and the ascendancy of an illiberal “successor ideology” known to its critics as wokeism, which manifests itself as career-ending “cancelations” and speaker disinvitations, but less visibly generates a pervasive climate of anxiety and self-censorship.
Some say that universities are so rotten that the institution itself should simply be abandoned and replaced with an online alternative — a metaversity perhaps, to go with the metaverse. I disagree. I have long been skeptical that online courses and content can be anything other than supplementary to the traditional real-time, real-space college experience.
However, having taught at several, including Cambridge, Oxford, New York University and Harvard, I have also come to doubt that the existing universities can be swiftly cured of their current pathologies. That is why this week I am one of a group of people announcing the founding of a new university — indeed, a new kind of university: the University of Austin.
The founders of this university are a diverse group in terms of our backgrounds and our experiences (though doubtless not diverse enough for some). Our political views also differ. To quote our founding president, Pano Kanelos, “What unites us is a common dismay at the state of modern academia and a belief that it is time for something new.”
There is no need to imagine a mythical golden age. The original universities were religious institutions, as committed to orthodoxy and as hostile to heresy as today’s woke seminaries. In the wake of the Reformation and the Scientific Revolution, scholars gradually became less like clergymen; but until the 20th century their students were essentially gentlemen, who owed their admission as much to inherited status as to intellectual ability. Many of the great intellectual breakthroughs of the Enlightenment were achieved off campus.
Only from the 19th century did academia become truly secularized and professional, with the decline of religious requirements, the rise to pre-eminence of the natural sciences, the spread of the German system of academic promotion (from doctorate up in steps to full professorship), and the proliferation of scholarly journals based on peer-review. Yet the same German universities that led the world in so many fields around 1900 became enthusiastic helpmeets of the Nazis in ways that revealed the perils of an amoral scholarship decoupled from Christian ethics and too closely connected to the state.
Even the institutions with the most sustained records of excellence — Oxford and Cambridge — have had prolonged periods of torpor. F.M. Cornford could mock the inherent conservatism of Oxbridge politics in his “Microcosmographia Academica” in 1908. When Malcolm Bradbury wrote his satirical novel “The History Man” in 1975, universities everywhere were still predominantly white, male and middle class. The process whereby a college education became more widely available — to women, to the working class, to racial minorities — has been slow and remains incomplete. Meanwhile, there have been complaints about the adverse consequences of this process in American universities since Allan Bloom’s “Closing of the American Mind,” which was published back in 1987.
Nevertheless, much had been achieved by the later years of the 20th century. There was a general agreement that the central purpose of a university was the pursuit of truth — think only of Harvard’s stark Latin motto: Veritas — and that the crucial means to that end were freedom of conscience, thought, speech and publication. There was supposed to be no discrimination in admissions, examinations and academic appointments, other than on the basis of intellectual merit. That was crucial to enabling Jews and other minority groups to take full advantage of their intellectual potential. It was understood that professors were awarded tenure principally to preserve academic freedom so that they might “dare to think” — Immanuel Kant’s other great imperative, Sapere aude! — without fear of being fired.
The benefits of all this defy quantification. A huge proportion of the major scientific breakthroughs of the past century were made by men and women whose academic jobs gave them economic security and a supportive community in which to do their best work. Would the democracies have won the world wars and the Cold War without the contributions of their universities? It seems doubtful. Think only of Bletchley Park and the Manhattan Project. Sure, the Ivy League’s best and brightest also gave us the Vietnam War. But remember, too, that there were more university-based computers on the Arpanet — the original internet — than any other kind. No Stanford, no Silicon Valley.
Those of us who were fortunate to be undergraduates in the 1980s remember the exhilarating combination of intellectual freedom and ambition to which all this gave rise. Yet, in the past decade, exhilaration has been replaced by suffocation, to the point that I feel genuinely sorry for today’s undergraduates.
In Heterodox Academy’s 2020 Campus Expression Survey, 62% of sampled college students agreed that the climate on their campus prevented them from saying things they believed, up from 55% in 2019, while 41% were reluctant to discuss politics in a classroom, up from 32% in 2019. Some 60% of students said they were reluctant to speak up in class because they were concerned other students would criticize their views as being offensive.
Such anxieties are far from groundless. According to a nationwide survey of a thousand undergraduates by the Challey Institute for Global Innovation, 85% of self-described liberal students would report a professor to the university if the professor said something that they found offensive, while 76% would report another student.
In a study published in March entitled “Academic Freedom in Crisis: Punishment, Political Discrimination and Self-Censorship,” the Centre for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology showed that academic freedom is under attack not only in the U.S., but also in the U.K. and Canada. Three-quarters of conservative American and British academics in the social sciences and humanities said there is a hostile climate for their beliefs in their department. This compares to just 5% among left-wing faculty in the U.S.
Again, one can understand why. Younger academics are especially likely to support dismissal of a colleague who has made some heretical utterance, with 40% of American social sciences and humanities professors under the age of 40 supporting at least one of four hypothetical dismissal campaigns. Ph.D. students are even more intolerant than other young academics: 55% of American Ph.D. students under 40 supported at least one hypothetical dismissal campaign. “High-profile deplatformings and dismissals” get the attention, the authors of the report conclude, but “far more pervasive threats to academic freedom stem … from fears of a) cancellation — threats to one’s job or reputation — and b) political discrimination.”
These are not unfounded fears. The number of scholars targeted for their speech has risen dramatically since 2015, according to research by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. FIRE has logged 426 incidents since 2015. Just under three-quarters of them resulted in some kind of sanction — including an investigation alone or voluntary resignation — against the scholar. Such efforts to restrict free speech usually originate with “progressive” student groups, but often find support from left-leaning faculty members and are encouraged by college administrators, who tend (as Sam Abrams of Sarah Lawrence College demonstrated, and as his own subsequent experience confirmed) to be even further to the left than professors. There are also attacks on academic freedom from the right, which FIRE challenges. With a growing number of Republicans calling for bans on critical race theory, I fear the illiberalism is metastasizing.
Trigger warnings. Safe spaces. Preferred pronouns. Checked privileges. Microaggressions. Antiracism. All these terms are routinely deployed on campuses throughout the English-speaking world as part of a sustained campaign to impose ideological conformity in the name of diversity. As a result, it often feels as if there is less free speech and free thought in the American university today than in almost any other institution in the U.S.
To the historian’s eyes, there is something unpleasantly familiar about the patterns of behavior that have, in a matter of a few years, become normal on many campuses. The chanting of slogans. The brandishing of placards. The letters informing on colleagues and classmates. The denunciations of professors to the authorities. The lack of due process. The cancelations. The rehabilitations following abject confessions. The officiousness of unaccountable bureaucrats. Any student of the totalitarian regimes of the mid-20th century recognizes all this with astonishment. It turns out that it can happen in a free society, too, if institutions and individuals who claim to be liberal choose to behave in an entirely illiberal fashion.
How to explain this rapid descent of academia from a culture of free inquiry and debate into a kind of Totalitarianism Lite? In their book “The Coddling of the American Mind,” the social psychiatrist Jonathan Haidt and FIRE president Greg Lukianoff lay much of the blame on a culture of parenting and early education that encourages students to believe that “what doesn’t kill you makes you weaker,” that you should “always trust your feelings,” and that “life is a battle between good people and evil people.”
However, I believe the core problems are the pathological structures and perverse incentives of the modern university. It is not the case, as many Americans believe, that U.S. colleges have always been left-leaning and that today’s are no different from those of the 1960s. As Stanley Rothman, Robert Lichter and Neil Nevitte showed in a 2005 study, while 39% of the professoriate on average described themselves as left-wing in 1984, the proportion had risen to 72% by 1999, by which time being a conservative had become a measurable career handicap.
Mitchell Langbert’s analysis of tenure-track, Ph.D.-holding professors from 51 of the 66 top-ranked liberal arts colleges in 2017 found that those with known political affiliations were overwhelmingly Democratic. Nearly two-fifths of the colleges in Langbert’s sample were Republican-free. The mean Democratic-to-Republican ratio across the sample was 10.4:1, or 12.7:1 if the two military academies, West Point and Annapolis, were excluded. For history departments, the ratio was 17.4:1; for English 48.3:1. No ratio is calculable for anthropology, as the number of Republican professors was zero. In 2020, Langbert and Sean Stevens found an even bigger skew to the left when they considered political donations to parties by professors. The ratio of dollars contributed to Democratic versus Republican candidates and committees was 21:1.
Commentators who argue that the pendulum will magically swing back betray a lack of understanding about the academic hiring and promotion process. With political discrimination against conservatives now overt, most departments are likely to move further to the left over time as the last remaining conservatives retire.
Yet the leftward march of the professoriate is only one of the structural flaws that characterize today’s university. If you think the faculty are politically skewed, take a look at academic administrators. A shocking insight into the way some activist-administrators seek to bully students into ideological conformity was provided by Trent Colbert, a Yale Law School student who invited his fellow members of the Native American Law Students Association to “a Constitution Day bash” at the “NALSA Trap House,” a term that used to mean a crack den but now is just a mildly risque way of describing a party. Diversity director Yaseen Eldik’s thinly veiled threats to Colbert if he didn’t sign a groveling apology — “I worry about this leaning over your reputation as a person, not just here but when you leave” — were too much even for an editorial board member at the Washington Post. Democracy may die in darkness; academic freedom dies in wokeness.
Moreover, the sheer number of the administrators is a problem in itself. In 1970, U.S. colleges employed more professors than administrators. Between then and 2010, however, the number of full-time professors or “full-time equivalents” increased by slightly more than 50%, in line with student enrollments. The number of administrators and administrative staffers rose by 85% and 240%, respectively. The ever-growing army of coordinators for Title IX — the federal law prohibiting sex-based discrimination — is one manifestation of the bureaucratic bloat, which since the 1990s has helped propel tuition costs far ahead of inflation.
The third structural problem is weak leadership. Time and again — most recently at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where a lecture by the University of Chicago geophysicist Dorian Abbot was abruptly canceled because he had been critical of affirmative action — academic leaders have yielded to noisy mobs baying for disinvitations. There are notable exceptions, such as Robert Zimmer, who as president of the University of Chicago between 2006 and 2021 made a stand for academic freedom. But the number of other colleges to have adopted the Chicago statement, a pledge crafted by the school’s Committee on Freedom of Expression, remains just 55, out of nearly 2,500 institutions offering four-year undergraduate programs.
Finally, there is the problem of the donors — most but not all alumni — and trustees, many of whom have been astonishingly oblivious of the problems described above. In 2019, donors gave nearly $50 billion to colleges. Eight donors gave $100 million or more. People generally do not make that kind of money without being hard-nosed in their business dealings. Yet the capitalist class appears strangely unaware of the anticapitalist uses to which its money is often put. A phenomenon I find deeply puzzling is the lack of due diligence associated with much academic philanthropy, despite numerous cases when the intentions of benefactors have deliberately been subverted.
All this would be bad enough if it meant only that U.S. universities are no longer conducive to free inquiry and promotion based on merit, without which scientific advances are certain to be impeded and educational standards to fall. But academic illiberalism is not confined to college campuses. As students collect their degrees and enter the workforce, they inevitably carry some of what they have learned at college with them. Multiple manifestations of “woke” thinking and behavior at newspapers, publishing houses, technology companies and other corporations have confirmed Andrew Sullivan’s 2018 observation, “We all live on campus now.”
When a problem becomes this widespread, the traditional American solution is to create new institutions. As we have seen, universities are relatively long-lived compared to companies and even nations. But not all great universities are ancient. Of today’s top 25 universities, according to the global rankings compiled by the London Times Higher Education Supplement, four were founded in the 20th century. Fully 14 were 19th-century foundations; four date back to the 18th century. Only Oxford (which can trace its origins to 1096) and Cambridge (1209) are medieval in origin.
As might be inferred from the large number (10) of today’s leading institutions founded in the U.S. between 1855 and 1900, new universities tend to be established when wealthy elites grow impatient with the existing ones and see no way of reforming them. The puzzle is why, despite the resurgence of inequality in the U.S. since the 1990s and the more or less simultaneous decline in standards at the existing universities, so few new ones have been created. Only a handful have been set up this century: University of California Merced (2005), Ave Maria University (2003) and Soka University of America (2001). Just five U.S. colleges founded in the past 50 years make it into the Times’s top 25 “Young Universities”: University of Alabama at Birmingham (founded 1969), University of Texas at Dallas (1969), George Mason (1957), University of Texas at San Antonio (1969) and Florida International (1969). Each is (or originated as) part of a state university system.
In short, the beneficiaries of today’s gilded age seem altogether more tolerant of academic degeneration than their 19th-century predecessors. For whatever reason, many prefer to give their money to established universities, no matter how antithetical those institutions’ values have become to their own. This makes no sense, even if the principal motivation is to buy Ivy League spots for their offspring. Why would you pay to have your children indoctrinated with ideas you despise?
So what should the university of the future look like? Clearly, there is no point in simply copying and pasting Harvard, Yale or Princeton and expecting a different outcome. Even if such an approach were affordable, it would be the wrong one.
To begin with, a new institution can’t compete with the established brands when it comes to undergraduate programs. Young Americans and their counterparts elsewhere go to college as much for the high-prestige credentials and the peer networks as for the education. That’s why a new university can’t start by offering bachelors’ degrees.
The University of Austin will therefore begin modestly, with a summer school offering “Forbidden Courses” — the kind of content and instruction no longer available at most established campuses, addressing the kind of provocative questions that often lead to cancelation or self-censorship.
The next step will be a one-year master’s program in Entrepreneurship and Leadership. The primary purpose of conventional business programs is to credential large cohorts of passive learners with a lowest-common-denominator curriculum. The University of Austin’s program will aim to teach students classical principles of the market economy and then embed them in a network of successful technologists, entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and public-policy reformers. It will offer an introduction to the world of American technology similar to the introduction to the Chinese economy offered by the highly successful Schwarzman Scholars program, combining both academic pedagogy and practical experience. Later, there will be parallel programs in Politics and Applied History and in Education and Public Service.
Only after these initial programs have been set up will we start offering a four-year liberal arts degree. The first two years of study will consist of an intensive liberal arts curriculum, including the study of philosophy, literature, history, politics, economics, mathematics, the sciences and the fine arts. There will be Oxbridge-style instruction, with small tutorials and college-wide lectures, providing an in-depth and personalized learning experience with interdisciplinary breadth.
After two years of a comprehensive and rigorous liberal arts education, undergraduates will join one of four academic centers as junior fellows, pursuing disciplinary coursework, conducting hands-on research and gaining experience as interns. The initial centers will include one for entrepreneurship and leadership, one for politics and applied history, one for education and public service, and one for technology, engineering and mathematics.
To those who argue that we could more easily do all this with some kind of internet platform, I would say that online learning is no substitute for learning on a campus, for reasons rooted in evolutionary psychology. We simply learn much better in relatively small groups in real time and space, not least because a good deal of what students learn in a well-functioning university comes from their informal discussions in the absence of professors. This explains the persistence of the university over a millennium, despite successive revolutions in information technology.
To those who wonder how a new institution can avoid being captured by the illiberal-liberal establishment that now dominates higher education, I would answer that the governance structure of the institution will be designed to prevent that. The Chicago principles of freedom of expression will be enshrined in the founding charter. The founders will form a corporation or board of trustees that will be sovereign. Not only will the corporation appoint the president of the college; it will also have a final say over all appointments or promotions. There will be one unusual obligation on faculty members, besides the standard ones to teach and carry out research: to conduct the admissions process by means of an examination that they will set and grade. Admission will be based primarily on performance on the exam. That will avoid the corrupt rackets run by so many elite admissions offices today.
As for our choice of location in the Texas capital, I would say that proximity to a highly regarded public university — albeit one where even the idea of establishing an institute to study liberty is now controversial — will ensure that the University of Austin has to compete at the highest level from the outset.
My fellow founders and I have no illusions about the difficulty of the task ahead. We fully expect condemnation from the educational establishment and its media apologists. We shall regard all such attacks as vindication — the flak will be a sign that we are above the target.
In our minds, there can be no more urgent task for a society than to ensure the health of its system of higher education. The American system today is broken in ways that pose a profound threat to the future strength and stability of the U.S. It is time to start fixing it. But the opportunity to do so in the classic American way — by creating something new, actually building rather than “building back” — is an inspiring and exciting one.
To quote Haidt and Lukianoff: “A school that makes freedom of inquiry an essential part of its identity, selects students who show special promise as seekers of truth, orients and prepares those students for productive disagreement … would be inspiring to join, a joy to attend, and a blessing to society.”
That is not the kind of institution satirized in “The Chair.” It is precisely the kind of institution we need today.
* * *
Niall Ferguson is the Milbank Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. He was previously a professor of history at Harvard, New York University and Oxford. He is the founder and managing director of Greenmantle LLC, a New York-based advisory firm. His latest book is “Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe.”
Tyler Durden
Wed, 11/10/2021 – 22:05 - China Gets Half A Million Barrels Of Iranian Oil Every Day, Violating US Sanctions As Biden Looks The Other Way
China Gets Half A Million Barrels Of Iranian Oil Every Day, Violating US Sanctions As Biden Looks The Other Way
For the past several years, Iran has been subject to “crippling” oil-export sanctions, but that is news to China whose imports of Iranian oil have held above half a million barrels per day on average for the last three months, traders and ship-tracking firms told Reuters as Chinese buyers judge that getting crude at cheap prices outweighs any risks from busting U.S. sanctions, especially when the US president is unlikely to wake up from his afternoon nap and do anything to punish China for violating the terms of the “draconian” embargo.
Indeed, as Reuters notes, Chinese purchases of Iranian crude have continued this year despite the sanctions that, if enforced, would allow Washington to cut off those who violate them from the U.S. economy.
While normally it would be odd that a nation would so flagrantly flaunt terms of sanctions imposed by the world’s “superpower”, in this case virtually nobody bats an eyelid that Joe “10% for the big guy” Biden, whose son has long been a conduit for unofficial Chinese backchanneling to Joe; and having purchased tens of millions in family favors the White House has no choice but to look the other way and has chosen not to enforce the sanctions against Chinese individuals and companies amid negotiations that could revive a 2015 nuclear deal that would allow Iran to sell its oil openly again.
After a dip in June and July from a record high in May as buyers ran low on import permits, Chinese independent refiners embraced Iran’s cheaper crude again as the government released fresh quotas, the traders and ship-tracking sources said.
“Deep discounts of Iranian oil and the new import quotas supported demand from Chinese independent refiners,” said Emma Li, tanker tracker Vortexa Analytics’ China market analyst, adding that strong Chinese refining margins also lent support.Li also said that about 13 million barrels of Iranian oil stored in vessels off China and Singapore arrived in Shandong last month.
Prohibited Iranian oil shipments are now worth some $1.3 billion a month and the bulk of which go to China, providing key revenue for Tehran. Iran and world powers are set to resume talks on Nov. 29 to restore the nuclear deal and lift U.S. sanctions on the sales. Iranian arrivals into China hit 660,000 bpd in August and 545,000 bpd in September, before dropping back to 470,000 bpd in October, according to data from Vortexa Analytics.
That put the three-month average at 560,000 bpd, up from a 478,000 bpd average for June and July, according to Vortexa data. The shipments hit a peak of 730,000 bpd in May, while the year’s average to end-October was 562,000 bpd.
China’s June and July Iran shipments dipped as Beijing clamped down on irregular quota trading and independent refiners’ import permits dried up. In the quota interim, about 7 million barrels were moved into bonded storage between July and September, according to Vortexa and the China-based trading executive, to await Beijing’s October quota release.
These barrels were subsequently trans-shipped in October to Shandong province, China’s independent refining hub.
“Any significant improvement in the nuclear talks will lead to higher imports from Iran, although much of the volumes will first be discharged from bonded tanks,” said Michal Meidan, director of the China programme at Oxford Institute for Energy Studies. “Renewed flows from Iran are more likely next year.”
Other tanker trackers said Vortexa’s volumes for the three months are similar to their own estimates.
Daniel Gerber, Chief Executive of Petro-Logistics, said that while volumes are down from earlier in the year “going forward, if China is able to control the recent surge in COVID infections, I would not be surprised to see stronger imports from Iran, given high oil prices, OPEC discipline and the discounts that are available on sanctioned oil.”
Of course, officially China has not imported any oil from Iran since the start of 2021, according to its customs data, as state-owned refiners remain sidelined by the U.S. sanctions.
To bypass triggering US red lines, Iranian crude, which accounts for about 6% of China’s crude oil imports, is currently exported to China as oil from Oman, the United Arab Emirates and Malaysia, squeezing out supplies from Brazil and West Africa. Iranian oil was last transacted at a $4-$5 per barrel discount to Brent crude on a delivered basis, about $6-$7 below Middle East benchmark Oman, traders said.
Beijing’s acquiescence over these transactions has also emboldened traders and buyers.
“The government does not wish to intervene as it sees little downside risks allowing in these imports,” said a China-based trading executive involved in the business. In other words, China has precisely zero fear of any a forceful (or any) retaliation from Joe
BrandonBiden.China’s foreign ministry told Reuters normal business dealings between China and Iran should be respected, without going into details on shipments. “China urges the U.S. to lift the illegitimate unilateral sanctions as soon as possible,” the ministry said.
Meanwhile, making a further mockery of the feeble old man in the White House, a senior U.S. official told Reuters that Washington is aware of China’s Iranian oil purchases, and has chosen diplomacy as a “more effective path forward to address our concerns”.
Said otherwise, the US will punish countries who violate its sanctions, but it won’t dare touch China as it itself is too afraid of what an escalation could look like.
Tyler Durden
Wed, 11/10/2021 – 21:45 - A Fat, Comfortable Military Is A "Woke" Military
A Fat, Comfortable Military Is A “Woke” Military
Authored by Ryan McMaken via The Mises Institute,
Over the past decade federal military and intelligence agencies have increasingly embraced so-called woke campaigns and policy positions. Specifically, these government agencies have taken explicitly ideological positions in promoting “pride month” and more recruitment of larger numbers of gay and transgender personnel explicitly for purposes of increasing “diversity.” Actual military concerns appear to be receding into the background even as the US military establishment has recently lost yet another war and blown trillions of taxpayer dollars.
For example, as early as 2014, the CIA was bragging that it “has participated in the DC Capital Pride Festival for the past three years … and is active in advancing LGBT diversity and inclusion efforts throughout the Intelligence Community.” More recently, the CIA in May 2021 released a series of recruitment videos clearly focused on recruiting personnel which would allow the agency to check certain diversity boxes.
Also, in May of this year, the US Army released a recruitment video celebrating a lesbian wedding and a pride march. In November, the navy launched the USNS Harvey Milk, named after the famed gay rights activist and icon.
For more astute observers of government institutions, of course, none of this will be surprising. Military and intelligence agencies are fundamentally nothing more than tax-funded bureaucratic agencies, and as such are political organizations. They will identify which way the political winds are blowing in Washington and then pander to the groups most likely to increase their budgets and privileges.
The latest effort at “woke” politics is simply public relations designed to maximize budgets and increase influence. Moreover, because the US military establishment so rarely faces any real political scrutiny or fiscal discipline, it need not concern itself with efficiency or serving customers, as a private firm must. Instead, military and intelligence bureaucracies are free to spend time on political and ideological concerns instead.
Left versus Right on the Embrace of “Woke”
Interestingly, it has been the Left that has offered the most insightful criticism of the drive for embracing diversity in Langley and at the Pentagon.
Glenn Greenwald, for instance, identified the CIA diversity drive for what it is: a cynical ploy designed to appeal to a corporate center-left elite that fancies itself the defender of “tolerance” while it bombs children with drones. Similarly, Alan Macleod scoffs about Pentagon claims that LGBT women are “’shattering stereotypes’ by joining the world’s largest killing machine.”
When it comes to the military, at least some elements on the left knows a con when they see one.
On the right, the preferred critique centers on whether or not the woke PR campaign has anything to do with providing military defense services. For example, Robert Berg at National Review writes that the new emphasis on diversity is pursued “at the cost of mission readiness.” That’s true in the sense that the woke campaigns contribute nothing to securing the lives and property of the taxpayers. But none of the Right’s milquetoast protests will amount to any meaningful reform because the Right is never willing to use the Congress’s number one tool for reining in the Pentagon and the intelligence agencies: the federal budget.
Yes, the Heritage Foundation may whine on occasion about Pride Month at the Pentagon, but we all know that in the end, the Heritage Foundation will call loudly for ever-larger budgets for the US’s military establishment, no matter what. They may even use their alleged outrage about wokeness to push the lie that the Pentagon endured “damaging cuts” during the Obama years.
So, by pushing wokeism, the Pentagon and the CIA win either way. The conservatives will never actually endanger the military and intelligence budgets, and the Left will embrace the new “tolerant” military-industrial complex all the more.
This, however, is exactly what we should expect from military defense agencies that are inherently more concerned with political goals than geostrategic ones.
This isn’t peculiar to modern times or to the United States, of course. Any military establishment that enjoys big budgets and a high amount of public approval—as is clearly the case in the United States—will feel little need to focus on military readiness or economic efficiency. This is further compounded when a regime is—as is also the case in the United States—fundamentally secure and faces no credible existential threats.
Politics, Not Economics, Drives Military Policy
Because military spending is allocated politically rather than through the marketplace—there really is no way to calculate the value provided by military forces. When market demand plays so little of a role in the allocation of resources, “value” becomes a function of the ability of military personnel to cater to the whims of policymakers who make budget decisions.
Moreover, the more the military establishment is insulated from the consumers and taxpayers, the more military and intelligence agencies are likely to engage in ideological flights of fancy unconnected to military defense. Military expertise is not what lies behind most decisions from military and intelligence personnel. Rather, military bureaucrats are incentivized to make decisions that bring political benefit.
In his essay “Secession and the Production of Defense,” Jörg Guido Hülsmann explains how in a functional marketplace the people paying the bills—i.e., the taxpayers—are able to guide the allocation of resources in the market through the use of their dollars. This is apparent in all relatively free markets like real estate, insurance, or shoes. In military and intelligence “markets,” on the other hand, the money extracted from the end user—“the people”—is used by policymakers for political purposes. So, the real “clients” of military and intelligence bureaucrats are politicians, not taxpayers. Hülsmann writes:
The possibility to ignore the needs of the consumers gives the producers [i.e., the Pentagon and the CIA] the opportunity to produce goods that only they consider important.
Ultimately,
Freed from the need to serve consumers as efficiently as possible, the producers of defense services now have a bigger margin for wasteful behavior…. The effects of compulsory funding are similarly devastating. It reduces the necessity for the military agencies to satisfy customer needs. As a consequence, as we have seen, the various military executives can start satisfying their own needs, both in respect to the services they produce and in respect to the selection of personnel.
The end result is that military and intelligence personnel seek out “experts” who are really just experts in having the correct opinions:
Moreover, rather than hiring the most capable personnel, they start hiring the fellows who know the best jokes, or the children of their schoolmates, or people who share their political, sexual, religious, and other preferences. Or they might hire particularly ruthless individuals, who despise common morality. Also, rather than organizing the defense units in the most militarily efficient way, they acquiesce to other considerations. For example, the recent admission to the U.S. military of females and homosexual males does not seem to be based on military, but political, expediency.
Restoring Some Control to the Taxpayers
What is the answer to this?
The first of course, would be to restore some fiscal discipline at the federal level. Washington’s knee-jerk habit of relentlessly increasing military and intelligence budgets must end. For example, when the CIA (and also the FBI, among others) failed spectacularly on 9/11, the Pentagon and intelligence agencies received only more power and larger budgets. In Afghanistan, after twenty years of Pentagon generals insisting that victory was right around the corner, they face no blowback. There is absolutely no incentive for these bureaucratic agencies to actually improve their wasteful use of resources.
At a bare minimum, federal military spending ought to be cut by $1 trillion (in 2022 dollars) over ten years, as recently contemplated by the Congressional Budget Office. But more radical changes must be pursued as well.
As Angelo Codevilla has shown, the CIA is a dysfunctional and partisan organization, incapable of achieving its stated goals. Codevilla concludes: “[A]s regards strategic intelligence, CIA is usually worse than useless.” The CIA is actually an impediment to the effective use and sharing of intelligence information. It should simply be abolished.
As far as the Pentagon goes, one key move to reining in federal power, waste, and social policy antics is decentralizing military power. A first step in this direction is winning the passage of the “Defend the Guard” legislation now being contemplated in numerous state legislatures. This movement restores to state governments some control over the use of the National Guard, providing a limited veto on deployments and federal military adventurism. Yet far more power must be shifted toward American decisionmakers—both public and private—outside Washington, DC, and closer to the taxpayers if the US’s military establishment is to face any real accountability. Otherwise, the usual tiny number of reliable Washington insiders will ensure the Pentagon and the intelligence “community” remains fat, comfortable, and insulated from any public discontent. In itself, the military move to wokeness is actually a minor affair, and only one example of how little the military does that is critical to military defense. Rather, the woke movement is part of the larger problem of a military that is overfunded and thus disconnected from all fiscal discipline and what might be loosely termed “customer service.”
Tyler Durden
Wed, 11/10/2021 – 21:25 - "We Must Learn To Live With It" – WHO's EU Chief Admits COVID Isn't Going Anywhere
“We Must Learn To Live With It” – WHO’s EU Chief Admits COVID Isn’t Going Anywhere
Speaking in an interview with Spain’s La Vanguardia newspaper, WHO’s European Director Hans Kluge warned that the COVID pandemic, which has been raging for nearly two years now, won’t end until nations “learn to live with the virus”, and build health-care systems that are strong enough so that they are not overwhelmed by infections and deaths if newly infectious variants ever emerge.
Kluge warned that the international health body is not able to declare an end to the pandemic while there is still a risk that health systems may be unable to cope with a spike in case numbers. But the problem is, the likelihood that every health system in the world can verifiably achieve such goals is pretty close to nil.
“We have to learn to live with the virus. As soon as our health system is not overwhelmed by hospitalizations and deaths from Covid, that is, it can provide the services it provided before, the pandemic will possibly become an endemic,” Kluge said.
The comments from the WHO’s Europe boss come as he addresses concerns about the situation on the Continent ahead of what’s expected to be a cold, dark winter.
Responding to a question about whether “Europe is once again the epicenter of the pandemic,” Kluge flagged that the WHO is expecting “half a million deaths” from the virus before February. Kluge blamed a combination of “fake news” and the “relaxation of public health and social measures,” for this projection. Kluge was clear that countries have to refute opposition to the COVID vaccine and safety protocols, and proposed a “working group in Europe” to challenge critics.
Despite these concerns Kluge said the situation would have been “very difficult” without the, so far, effective vaccine rollout. However, for vaccinations to be fully effective, Kluge stressed that countries must “leave no one behind” and focus on booster shots and inoculating children to maximize the coverage provided and to reduce the spread of the virus.
To be sure, Kluge’s view on vaccinations – particularly when it comes to children – is far from indisputable science. In fact, anybody who’s interested in learning more about the opposing view can attend a virtual debate being held by a top NIH scientist named Dr. Matthew Memoli.
Tyler Durden
Wed, 11/10/2021 – 21:05 - Biden DoJ Launches Crackdown On Corporate Misbehavior As President's Approval Numbers Sag
Biden DoJ Launches Crackdown On Corporate Misbehavior As President’s Approval Numbers Sag
As President Biden’s approval rating slumps and inflation surges to the highest level in 30 years, the White House needs a new boogeyman to try and distract the people from the terrible job the Dems are doing managing the country. And since the DoJ has already launched crackdowns on Big Tech and Big Pharma (well, sort of), it looks like Attorney General Merrick Garland is preparing to take corporate America – specifically, banks – to the woodshed, with an emphasis on repeat offenders.
In an interview with the FT, John Carlin, a senior DoJ official who will be leading the crackdown, issued the following warning to corporations: “you’ll see cases in the weeks to come” involving “some of the largest corporations” in the US.
Specifically, the Biden DoJ will be going after companies that have violated the terms of deferred prosecution agreements, which dismiss or delay criminal charges for a period of time to allow a given corporate offender to prove that it has “reformed” its behavior.
Across the corporate space, we can think of one industry in particular that has benefited from these types of agreements…Wall Street.
Whether it’s Goldman Sachs helping Malaysia’s then-leader steal billions from his own people to create a political slush fund, along with a bevy of ultra-luxury items – yachts, jewelry, the film “The Wolf of Wall Street” etc – or Deutsche Bank racking up billions in fines for its recidivist behavior (it got to the point to where the SEC finally decided to make DB’s CEO personally liable for the bank’s future bad behavior, which is extremely uncommon in the US), banks have shown time and time again that when they break US laws, the response from regulators is rarely more than a slap on the wrist.
Carlin, who is Garland’s principal associate deputy AG, said the crackdown is part of Biden’s Admin’s pledge to take a tougher line on “corporate malfeasance” compared with the “laissez-faire” stance of the Trump Administration.
According to the FT, corporate crime prosecutions brought by the DoJ dropped to its lowest level in 25 years in 2020, according to research from Syracuse University.
White-collar criminals be warned, Carlin said. There’s a new sheriff in town.
“There are going to be serious consequences,” Carlin warned. “You should expect in the days, months, years to come an unprecedented focus by this attorney-general on corporate accountability,” he said, referring to Merrick Garland, the US government’s top lawyer. He added: “Now is the time to get the house in order, focus on compliance, because there [are] going to be tough enforcement actions coming out of the department if you do not do so.”
Last month, Carlin’s boss at the DoJ said prosecutors would work to hold individuals accountable for “corporate malfeasance”.
Last month Lisa Monaco, deputy attorney-general and Carlin’s superior, announced sweeping changes to the justice department’s corporate enforcement policies, such as taking into account historical misconduct during company investigations. Monaco also signalled that the DoJ would encourage the appointment of independent monitors – outside individuals appointed by the authorities to ensure that companies were adhering to deferred prosecution agreements. During the Trump administration, monitors were deemed unnecessary in many instances where DPAs were imposed. The deputy attorney-general said businesses seeking leniency in exchange for co-operating with authorities must also identify all individuals linked to misconduct – irrespective of their seniority.
We’re certainly curious to see who Biden’s first corporate scapegoat will be. The trick is to find someone powerful enough to impress the NYT editorial board…but not a Jamie or Larry – you know, one of the CEOs who’s actually responsible for running the country.
Tyler Durden
Wed, 11/10/2021 – 20:45 - "Grave Constitutional Violation": Rittenhouse Defense Asks For Mistrial After Insane Day At Court
“Grave Constitutional Violation”: Rittenhouse Defense Asks For Mistrial After Insane Day At Court
Attorneys for Kyle Rittenhouse have asked Judge Bruce Schroeder to declare a mistrial in the case, accusing lead prosecutor Thomas Binger of “what amounts to prosecutorial overreach” when he questioned the teenager’s right to remain silent after his fatal shootings of two men who chased an attacked him during demonstrations in Kenosha, WI last year.
With the jury out of the room, Schroeder warned Binger after he asked Rittenhouse why he chose to remain silent about the incident until now.
“The problem is this is a grave constitutional violation for you to talk about the defendant’s silence,” Schroder told Binger. “You’re right on the borderline, and you may be over it. But it better stop.”
Judge Scolding The Prosecution In The Rittenhouse Case
“The problem is this is a grave constitutional violation for you to talk about the Defendant’s silence.”
“You are right on the borderline, you may be over. It better stop.” pic.twitter.com/OVK9eYOSSm
— The Columbia Bugle 🇺🇸 (@ColumbiaBugle) November 10, 2021
Schroeder again admonished Binger for bringing a matter before the jury which Schroeder had explicitly disallowed – causing defense attorney Mark Richards (and others) to accuse the prosecution of trying to provoke a mistrial.
“I was astonished when you began your examination by commenting on the defendant’s post-arrest silence,” said Schroeder, adding “That’s basic law. It’s been basic law in this country for 40 years, 50 years. I have no idea why you would do something like that.“
NOW – Judge in Rittenhouse trial screams at the prosecutor. pic.twitter.com/UBxDTwVIoT
— Disclose.tv (@disclosetv) November 10, 2021
…The judge just said that he is also concerned with a mistrial given the prosecutor’s comments on pre-trial silence which was outrageous.
— Jonathan Turley (@JonathanTurley) November 10, 2021
When Binger tried to slick talk his way out of trouble for introducing prohibited topics, Judge Schroeder said “I don’t believe you.“
Judge CALLS OUT prosecution for their perceived attempt at a mistrial earlier by introducing excluded evidence. Prosecution claims he did so in good faith. Judge says “I don’t believe you!” Amazing pic.twitter.com/gTK5pXt99e
— Nuance Bro (@NuanceBro) November 10, 2021
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
Asking for the mistrial:
“Both elements for mistrial with prejudice have been met.”
The Defense Attorneys for Kyle Rittenhouse call for a mistrial in their client’s homicide case due to the statements of lead prosecutor Thomas Binger. pic.twitter.com/PYHj5JEbrG
— Newsmax (@newsmax) November 10, 2021
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
Did the prosecutor in the Rittenhouse case deliberately attempt to cause a mistrial because he knew acquittal was coming given how horribly the case was going for the prosecution?
— Sean Davis (@seanmdav) November 10, 2021
I never commented on the Rittenhouse case until I started watching large chunks of the trial, and all I can say is that anyone who has done the same and denies that there’s a huge gap between the media narrative about this and what actually happened is not telling the truth.
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) November 10, 2021
Tyler Durden
Wed, 11/10/2021 – 20:45 - Fabulist MSNBC Anchor Brian Williams Is Finally Retiring
Fabulist MSNBC Anchor Brian Williams Is Finally Retiring
Longtime NBC and MSNBC Anchor Brian Williams is finally quietly retiring from NBC and MSNBC, where he served as an anchorman and reporter for nearly 3 full decades. His departure is expected at the end of the year.
Williams’ credibility was permanently blemished when he was exposed as a repeated fabulist, who frequently shared different versions of a story where a helicopter he was riding in while embedded with the US military was allegedly struck down by an enemy projectile.
In case you aren’t familiar/don’t remember the fracas that forced Williams into hiding for months before he quietly slunk back to the anchor desk, here’s the short version, courtesy of Politico: “over the years, Williams has told a shifting story about the day he flew aboard a U.S. Army helicopter during the 2003 invasion of Iraq. In later versions, he has said his helicopter was hit and forced down by enemy fire, the version he told last Friday. Called out for his fabrication, Williams came clean, calling the recollections a ‘mistake’ and acknowledging that it was a helicopter flying well ahead of his helicopter that got hit. “I don’t know what screwed up in my mind that caused me to conflate one aircraft with another,” Williams later told Stars and Stripes.
Of course, any journalist – or amateur storyteller – could probably empathize: why should the truth stand in the way of a good story?
The only problem is that while Williams’ career never recovered after that incident (which occurred back in 2015), he did often criticize President Trump, using the excuse that the then-President’s speeches weren’t “based in reality” as justification for cutting away.
Here’s more on Williams’ departure, news of which was clearly and conveniently leaked to Williams’ CNN pal Brian Stelter.
For the past five years, Williams has anchored “The 11th Hour,” an end-of-the-day newscast and political talk program. CNN Business reported in August that his contract was expiring in the next six months and that he wanted to move off the late-night hour.
Now he is doing it. But he added in Tuesday’s statement, “I ask all those who are a part of our loyal viewing audience to remain loyal. The 11th Hour will remain in good hands, produced by the best team in cable news.”
Williams’ exit from NBC has an end-of-an-era feel. He was a key player in the launch of the MSNBC news channel in 1996, manning breaking news coverage and a prime time recap of the day. Then he became one of America’s best-known newsmen during his decade at the helm of the “NBC Nightly News,” one of the most-watched news programs in the US.
Stelter added that Williams’ “comeback” was remarkable.
“Most broadcasters would have been cooked if they had undergone the sort of scandal that Williams faced in 2015,” Vanity Fair said in 2017. “But a slow-and-steady revival — a mixture of dutiful penance, clever planning, and a dramatic change in the media — has Williams turning 11 p.m. into the new primetime.”
Well, that’s one way to put it. Maybe on his last day at 30 Rock, NBC can fly Williams out via helicopter.
Tyler Durden
Wed, 11/10/2021 – 20:25 - The Two Real Reasons Democrats Lost Virginia: A Woke Post-Mortem
The Two Real Reasons Democrats Lost Virginia: A Woke Post-Mortem
Submitted by QTR’s Fringe Finance
It has been nothing short of hilarious over the last couple of days watching news pundits try to dissect why the governor’s race in Virginia swung so wildly in favor of Republican Glenn Youngkin after the state voted so overwhelmingly for President Biden in the 2020 general election.
Source: FT Once again, I am left to pick up the “common sense” pieces for the Democratic mainstream pundits whose jaws are on the floor because of a political victory that, in their eyes, not only shouldn’t have happened, but was near-impossible.
I thought about this for the last couple of days and arrived at the conclusion that there were two main reasons that Virginia swung: government overreach from a party that claims to be advocating for middle class freedom, and willful ignorance (i.e. government under-reach) about the state of the economy, and inflation, in our country.
There’s no doubt that a tone of government overreach has grown to a fever pitch since President Biden took office. Whether it is forcing children to wear masks at school, counter-intuitive vaccine mandates which have resulted in the loss of thousands of jobs, or the idea of indoctrinating children too small to even read or write properly with elements of critical race theory, my guess would be that Virginians have simply had enough government in their lives for the time being. And another guess is that the swing state is likely a barometer for a large portion of the rest of the country.
Source: NPR Nearly everything that the Biden administration has done since he has taken office has likely appeared to centrist voters to be counterintuitive: he turned our country’s exit from Afghanistan into a humanitarian and economic travesty, he has pushed a Soviet-style propaganda campaign for vaccination mandates and most recently introduced the bizarre idea of paying $450,000 to the families of illegal immigrants separated at our border.
Source: Forbes “It is bizarre,” a family member who voted for Biden said to me this weekend, while discussing Biden’s proposed $450,000 payments.
And therein lies a key axiom: there comes a point where even the most fervent Democrats realize that they have to side with common sense, even if it means disagreeing with the candidate they voted for. I am guessing that this is the principle that helped drive so many anti-Donald Trump voters in Virginia back to the sensibility of conservative government.
On top of this toxic track record, President Biden has simply done a poor job of communicating with the public. His press conferences are often abbreviated and don’t include a question and answer session. At Town Hall events, Biden has constantly stumbled and mumbled over his own words, while his posture and narrative on key issues do little to give the impression that he is acting with any confidence.
All of this can add to an ethos that makes citizens wonder why government would have the gall to intrude on their lives and tell him what to do in the first place.
My guess is that, in Virginia, common sense simply won out.
The second part of explaining Virginia has to do with government under-reach, believe it or not.
While President Biden has been bragging about the number of jobs he has “created” (which, of course, are really jobs coming back after Covid), inflation in the country has been running rampant and the administration doesn’t look like they are serious in trying to address the situation. Meanwhile, analysts like Lawrence Lepard believe the market is on the cliff and is ready to crash.
Just yesterday, it was reported that Lael Brainard was meeting with the White House and may potentially be the next pick to replace Jerome Powell as Fed Chair. Brainard is widely seen as being more dovish than the already-dovish Powell in terms of her stance on monetary policy. This type of think is exactly what I’m talking about when I say the White House is out of touch, economically, with the middle class.
Some analysts and fund managers are predicting that commodities will “never” return to their 2020 lows again, mostly due to inflation. The country needs a Paul Volcker to rope in inflation right now. Brainard would be every last bit of Volcker’s complete and total foil when it comes to policy decisions.
As inflation and supply chain shortages that there’s “no quick fix” for ravage a country that hasn’t seen anything like it in decades, all the administration – and its mainstream media counterparts – are doing is trying to assure the American public that everything is OK, when it clearly isn’t.
Take, for example an editorial that the Washington Post wrote a couple weeks ago urging Americans to lower their expectations when it comes to supply chain shortages. I swiftly rebutted this editorial in a piece that argued that the left was trying to steal your quality of life by asking you to ignore that something is obviously amiss.
At the same time, the country is dealing with unprecedented inflation that, to the middle class, looks as though it has spun completely out of control. No matter how many times the government or the Federal Reserve claim that inflation is transitory, it doesn’t change the fact that prices for the American middle-class – like many people in Virginia – are rising faster than wages.
Source: Fox News And instead of addressing this and taking it seriously, as these cost burdens significantly affect the well-being of American citizens, the government has continued to drag its feet and try to assure the American public that the pain is only temporary and that we are imagining things.
Another pathetic example was when MSNBC put out a tweet yesterday trying to urge the American public that the inflation that they are seeing is a good thing. The tweet, archived by Zerohedge, looked like this:
“Not surprisingly, after getting ratio’ed in a furious backlash, MSNBC did the only thing it could and deleted its tweet, as its latest attempt at mass gaslighting propaganda went terribly wrong,” Zerohedge wrote.
Fox News wrote about the content of the linked article:
An MSNBC opinion columnist is attempting to spin the current inflation crisis as a “good thing,” calling the coronavirus pandemic an “unlikely hero” in a new piece published Monday.
James Surowiecki began his column by suggesting the media has been fearmongering over the consequences of inflation Americans have been facing, calling out an “odd” CNN segment that highlighted the impact of rising milk costs for a family of nine who buys 12 gallons a week rather than a normal-sized family, writing “the segment succumbed to one of the media’s worst tendencies: taking a real issue and overhyping it beyond recognition,” accusing the network of “frightening” viewers instead of “enlightening” them.
The point of noting this idiocy from both the Washington Post and MSNBC in relation to Virginia is to make the argument that there are some problems you can’t explain away in the spin room.
The in the issues of inflation and supply chain logistics are very real and hit the American consumer head-on. Even President Biden‘s proposed solutions for supply chain issues – to micromanage the economy even more and print more money – are far off base. The Biden administration knows nothing about economics and has completely lost touch with the middle class, which I believe is the second reason they lost Virginia.
As I said earlier, the Democratic Party is going to have to get back in touch with the middle class that it claims to represent before midterms and the 2024 general election. You can’t run on a base of defending the worker while paying people not to work – it’s spitting in the face of those who get up every morning and earn. You can’t advocate for empowering the middle class and then burst through their front door to try to tell them when and how their children should be vaccinated, while at the same time ignoring that the price of basic goods and groceries has gone up double digit percentages over the last year in a lot of households.
No matter how long people have sworn their allegiance to the Democratic Party, there is always going to be a “fault line” where common sense usurps political affiliation.
For some people, this fault line is further left than President Biden has taken us so far, but for many people – like the ones in Virginia – it has already been crossed. To continue reading…
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Tyler Durden
Wed, 11/10/2021 – 20:05 - China Blinks: As Contagion From Property Sector Crash Spreads, Regulators Set To Ease Bond Rules
China Blinks: As Contagion From Property Sector Crash Spreads, Regulators Set To Ease Bond Rules
Two months ago Wall Street was quick to conveniently ignore China’s property crisis, repeating that not only was the sudden hit to Chinese housing – the world’s largest asset class according to Goldman…
… not a “Lehman moment”, but that any contagion would be limited at best; at the same time central bankers – not just in China but around the globe – were quick to assure investors that a collapse by China Evergrande Group wouldn’t lead to a crash. As usual, Wall Street consensus (especially when coupled with soothing lies from central
plannersbankers) was dead wrong because now that the bond selloff has spread to China’s entire real estate sector and beyond, including healthy government-backstopped investment grade companies, concern is growing about the potential risk to the global financial system.On Monday, the Federal Reserve made that link explicit in its semi-annual report on financial stability, warning that what happens in China’s property industry could impact financial markets and threaten world economic growth. Underscoring the risks of a potential spillover, the Hong Kong Monetary Authority asked banks to disclose their exposure to Chinese real estate, according to a local media report.
As Bloomberg reported, at the heart of the bond market rout is concern that developers may have far more debt than disclosed on their balance sheets. That emerged after companies suddenly struggling to pay public and hidden debt despite representing that they have sufficient capital. Making matters worse is developers’ inability to roll over maturing debt due to surging borrowing costs that effectively shut them out of the dollar bond market. China’s 10 largest developers by sales owe a combined $1.65 trillion in liabilities.
Commenting on the latest events in China, overnight Rabobank’s Michael Every wrote that the “contained” Evergrande crisis – which even the Fed has noticed – is seeing contagion:
“Junk bond yields are soaring and the trend is spreading to better quality credits and large banks, with investment grade yields up 8-10bp yesterday. As developers who have not crossed any debt redlines ‘mysteriously’ see their bonds plunge, Bloomberg reports the 10 largest developers carry debts of $1.7 trillion…on book. Off book and contingent liabilities are likely *far* higher. Worse, Chinese cities are now tightening the use of proceeds from pre-sold properties, effectively forcing developers to use this cashflow to finish construction rather to repay debts. Can you guess what happens next?”
Yes we can, but for the sake of suspense let’s assume it won’t happen: instead let’s give the mic to Larry Hu, head of China economics at Macquarie Group, who said that “China appears to be stress-testing its financial system,” adding that “only under stress do you know how much off-balance sheet debt there is and how much pressure the system is able to handle. But the danger is that China decides to ease off too late.”
Alas, one look at bond yields and it may already be too late as the cash crunch is worsening by the day. The yield on a Bloomberg index of Chinese junk dollar bonds – which is dominated by property firms – has surged to a record 24%. Kaisa Group Holdings Ltd., which said last week it missed payments on wealth products, was downgraded further into junk by Fitch Ratings on Tuesday.
In the latest flashing red light the selloff – which so far had been contained mostly to property names – spread to higher-grade issuers such as Country Garden Holdings while even an investment grade company controlled by China’s government, Sino Ocean Land (not to be confused with Sino Forest) has seen its bonds slump. Spreads on the nation’s investment-grade bonds over Treasuries widened the most since April on Tuesday.
And with bonds freefalling, it’s hardly a surprise that shares are also plunging. A Bloomberg index of Chinese developers is at the lowest level in more than four years after losing 33% in 2021. Shareholders of companies such as Evergrande, China Fortune Land Development, China Aoyuan Group and Yuzhou Group Holdings are sitting on losses exceeding 70%. The gauge is valued at just 0.3 times book value, showing traders are assigning a significant discount to developers’ reported assets
Among the chief reasons behind the collapse in property assets has been the government’s insistence on not intervening, and forcing companies to prioritize completion of existing projects over repayment of creditors while forcing companies to liquidate non-core assets. Cities including Beijing and Tianjin have tightened supervision over the use of proceeds from property pre-sales to ensure projects are completed, China Business News reported. That will worsen the cash shortage for developers, making it harder for them to repay their debts.
To be sure, the stakes are high. According to Bloomberg, Chinese banks had more than 51.4 trillion yuan ($8 trillion) of outstanding loans to the real estate sector as of September, an increase of 7.6% from a year earlier. The exposure was more than any other industry, and accounted for about 27% of the nation’s total lending, according to official data (for more statistics on China’s property sector, please see “Catastrophic” Property Sales Mean China’s Worst Case Scenario Is Now In Play“).
About 41% of China’s banking system assets were either directly or indirectly associated with the property sector at the end of last year.
“We expect most of Beijing’s property curbs will remain in place for a while, with the worst likely yet to come for both China’s property sector and macro-economy,” Nomura International HK’s economists Ting Lu and Jing Wang wrote in a note published Monday. “Beijing’s policy makers may opt to ramp up support to prevent worsening defaults in coming months.”
And while banks like Goldman see the ongoing selloff the selloff as an opportunity, telling clients to add a “modest amount of risk” through high-yield dollar bonds issued by China property developers and claiming that the market is overestimating the contagion risk, as Goldman portfolio management team member Angus Bell said in an interview last week, even central bankers are starting to sound the alarm: Hong Kong banks will be required to disclose their loans and credit issued to mainland developers, treasury units’ securities holdings as well as the proportion of their exposed assets, the Hong Kong Economic Journal reported.
Meanwhile, in its twice-yearly Financial Stability Report released Monday, the Fed said that “financial stresses in China could strain global financial markets through a deterioration of risk sentiment, pose risks to global economic growth, and affect the United States.”
For now, contagion in mainland financial markets remains limited giving Chinese authorities room to maintain their curbs on the property industry, meaning the likelihood of some of kind of Lehman moment remains remote. But that could very rapidly change as the entire world heads into a stagflationary episode in 2022 as a result of soaring inflation and shrinking growth.
As a result, how Beijing manages its crackdown on the nation’s real estate industry may have far-reaching consequences beyond its borders: “Even if systemic risk remains low for now, the contagion risk is very real,” Macquarie’s Hu said. “I would say China needs to act if onshore markets panic and the economic risk grows so big they can’t defend 5% growth next year.”
Perhaps it’s the rising frequency of concerns such as this one that something must be done, or maybe it was the Fed’s warning that finally shook Beijing out of its complacent stupor, but overnight China’s Securities Times reported that rules for real estate developers to issue domestic bonds may be loosened.
Picking up on the story this afternoon, the WSJ reported that Chinese regulators, wary of financial risks spreading as a result of their crackdown on property lending, are considering easing the rules to let struggling developers sell off assets to avoid defaults and hits to the broader economy.
Currently, rules put in place late last year to restrict how much property firms can borrow, dubbed the “three red lines” on leverage ratios and which we previewed last year (in an Oct 2020 article which we correctly titled that “China Crackdown On Property Developer Debt Sparks Fears About Systemic Crisis”) are so strict that they have hurt the ability of developers like China Evergrande Group to sell assets to repay debts.
Citing people with knowledge of the discussions, the WSJ reported that the PBOC is considering opening a pathway for financially strained property firms to unload projects by allowing the buyers, likely state-owned firms, to take over the assets without having the projects’ associated debt affect their own debt ratios.
The potential easing of the borrowing rules highlights a deepening dilemma for Beijing as it tackles the oversize real-estate sector, which, together with related industries such as construction, accounts for nearly a third of China’s economic output. Rising default risks in the country’s real-estate sector have rattled global markets and threatened a sharp slowdown in the Chinese economy.
According to the WSJ, the potential move would represent a calibration – rather than a capitulation – of the broader policy aimed at reining in real estate speculation and reducing the economy’s reliance on the sector, the people said, adding that the property lending restrictions likely would be in place for up to four years.
For the central bank, which has publicly called risks from developer defaults controllable, the challenge is to stand firm on its goal of breaking the vicious cycle of builders’ binge borrowing leading to rising property prices, while preventing any kind of widespread defaults that could destabilize the entire financial system—its other major mandate. In the end, this will be an epic failure as we have said many times previously, as China simply can not grow at its current breakneck pace without the debt-fueled ponzi scheme that is its housing sector.
Sure enough, as pains from the clampdown spill over from private developers to their state-owned peers as well as to investors and local governments, calls for easing are coming from many corners of Chinese society.
As the WSJ reports, on Monday, when senior officials affiliated with China’s State Council, the top government decision-making body, held a discussion with a dozen or so real estate and banking executives in the southern boomtown of Shenzhen to size up their concerns, many spoke up about the dire conditions of the industry and its knock-on effects on other parts of the economy, according to a summary of the gathering reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.
Li Haiming, executive director of Kaisa Group Holdings Ltd. , a private builder that missed a payment to investors last week, said at the meeting that developers like his are facing a severe liquidity crunch and could be saddled with unfinished so-called zombie projects.
Li’s suggestion to the officials present, who are from the Development Research Center—the State Council’s think tank which compiles recommendations to policy makers—was simple: undo the restrictive deleveraging policies that China has ushered in over the past year and let things go back to normal, or as he put it, allow banks to continue to lend and extend loans. He also said state-owned firms should be encouraged to acquire projects from troubled developers to help them replenish their cash flow and build market confidence, according to the meeting summary.
But right now, state firms are unwilling to pounce mainly because such acquisitions would add any acquired projects’ associated debts to their balance sheets, potentially hurting their ability to borrow. That has hampered the attempts by many strained developers to unload assets and repay their creditors.
So in response, the People’s Bank of China is considering loosening the borrowing limits by enabling such acquisitions, WSJ sources said. To that end, the central bank might choose not to take into account the amount of debts the acquirers assume upon taking over the assets when measuring their ability to borrow based on their leverage ratios. That would then open up a channel for some developers to survive the current cash squeeze. In effect the “three red lines” framework would be quietly undone.
“It would be a way to let you live,” one of the people said. “Not just die.”
Already, financial regulators have started easing some rules on the margin to try to stabilize the market, including measures to allow some developers to sell medium-term bonds in China and steps to make it easier for them to repay dollar debt owed to foreign investors. The country’s top securities regulator is also considering renewing the application process for developers who plan to sell asset-backed securities to raise money, according to the people.
In response to the news that Beijing may be about to blink, the market was euphoria, and shares of Chinese real estate developers soared after the Securities Times report hit: Shimao Group surged by 17% in Hong Kong, China Aoyuan +16%, Sunac China Holdings +15%, CIFI Holdings +12%, Agile Group +11%, KWG Group +11%, Seazen Group +10%, Greentown China +9%, Logan Group +8.7%, Guangzhou R&F Properties +7.7%; in mainland trading, Poly Developments jumped +7.6%, Gemdale +6.4%, China Merchants Shekou +4.9%, China Vanke +4.2% and so on.
There is another reason why Beijing may have decided to fold: according to an article published by the China Finance 40 Forum, a Beijing-based think tank, titled “How to Prevent Hard-Landing Risks of the Real Estate Market,” a 15% plunge in property investment and sales could reduce the country’s economic growth rate by 1.5 percentage points. This is hardly a tradeoff that China’s leaders, always terrified of rising social unrest in case of an economic crisis, are willing to take.
And if indeed Beijing has agreed to once again backstop the sector, expect this meltup to be one for the history books.
Tyler Durden
Wed, 11/10/2021 – 19:45 - Do Antiviral Pills Negate The Need For Vaccine Mandates?
Do Antiviral Pills Negate The Need For Vaccine Mandates?
Authored by Red Jahncke via RealClearPolicy.com,
The Biden Administration’s generals are fighting the last war. Last Thursday, they mandated that large businesses and health care facilities require that their workers get vaccinated for COVID-19. On Friday, Pfizer announced an antiviral pill to treat the virus. Pfizer’s pill is 89% effective. A Merck antiviral pill for COVID-19 (with only about 50% effectiveness) is already in use in Britain.
COVID-19 treatment pills destroy any vestige of logic or justification for the new mandates.
No matter how someone contracts the virus, these pills prevent serious illness — hospitalization and death. With double lines of defense against the coronavirus — vaccination, and, now, these new antiviral treatment pills — mandates have become unnecessary.
On Saturday, the Fifth U.S. Court of Appeals issued an emergency stay of the Biden business mandate, saying it raises “grave statutory and constitutional issues.”
Quite apart for the legal issues, the mandates ignore science and logic.
The logic of a vaccine mandate has always been weak and self-contradictory insofar as their implied purpose of protecting vaccinated people from unvaccinated people. If vaccines are effective (95% effective in Pfizer’s case), then, vaccinated people face little risk from unvaccinated people.
If the vaccines are ineffective, then why should anyone get them?
Naturally, there are minor exceptions to this logic.
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First, a vaccine that is 95% effective is 5% ineffective.
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Second, there have been “breakthrough cases” of largely unknown number and origin. They could represent the 5% ineffectiveness factor, and they could demonstrate that the vaccines are less effective against variants of the virus.
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Third, studies suggest that the efficacy of vaccines diminish over time.
All three of these minor exceptions are addressed by booster shots — in the same fashion as annual vaccines protect against the seasonal flu. Flu shots are in effect boosters, after the effectiveness of the prior season’s flu shot has waned. Each year flu shots are recalibrated for recurring and potential new variants, and, each year, they are less than 100% effective. There is always some risk.
There is a critical difference between flu shots and COVID-19 vaccines. The flu shots have no back-up. There is no flu pill.
The new antiviral treatment pills for COVID-19 dramatize further the original illogic of mandates: If vaccines and boosters and treatment pills are even more effective — as science and logic say they are, then unvaccinated people pose virtually no threat to vaccinated people. Now add the new corollary: Unvaccinated people do not even endanger themselves, because they can take the Merck or Pfizer pill (once approved) if they do contract COVID-19. They don’t even burden the healthcare system — remember “bending the curve” — since the pills are intended for home use.
Now, most Americans got vaccinated as soon as they could. Most consider the vaccines a virtual godsend, an amazing demonstration of American scientific and pharmaceutical prowess. Most don’t really understand why someone would not get vaccinated.
But we live in a country where people can do what they want if they aren’t threatening anyone else, don’t we? Without pretending to litigate the legal issues, vaccine mandates appear to be an unnecessary violation of personal liberty. What could be more invasive than the government dictating what you must do with your own body — your life and your life only?
Parsing the issue further, there is a vast difference between government dictating vaccine policy and a business — or any organization — establishing an organizational vaccine policy. If an organization adopts a vaccine mandate, an anti-vaccine employee can quit and find another job.
Beyond these observations, let’s leave the Fifth Circuit to begin the process of sorting out the legal and constitutional issues. The Court has ordered the Biden Administration to file its arguments to lift the stay by yesterday afternoon.
Yet, science and basic logic would seem to be enough to decide the issue. No one who gets vaccinated, gets a booster shot and has available antiviral pills is at appreciable risk from exposure to unvaccinated people.
That is not to say that vaccinated people will not contract the virus, nor to say that some vaccinated people will not get seriously ill and die. Until there is a life-long vaccine, such as the polio vaccine, COVID-19 will be a part of our lives.
In the meantime, the real danger comes from a frustrated Biden Administration misusing urgent emergency powers under existing occupational health and safety law to exercise extraordinary powers. For Biden & Co., the already dissipating 20-month-old pandemic is not receding fast enough. That is neither urgent nor an emergency. It manifests that the Administration is fighting yesterday’s COVID-19 battle, without realizing that the antiviral pills have radically altered the war.
Like it or not, COVID-19 has taken hold and is here to stay, but not as the threat to which we were originally defenseless. Biden’s COVID-19 vaccine mandates would set a dangerous precedent. They should never take hold. Who’s to say what the next “emergency” would be that government might use as a pretext to exercise such overriding power.
Tyler Durden
Wed, 11/10/2021 – 19:25 -
- Citadel's Ken Griffin Sees Ethereum Surpassing And Replacing Bitcoin
Citadel’s Ken Griffin Sees Ethereum Surpassing And Replacing Bitcoin
Back in May, when Goldman Sachs initiated coverage of crypto, it was mostly favorably inclined toward bitcoin which it nonetheless called a “one trick pony” and saw limited upside, but it was ethereum that stole Goldman’s heart. The reason: while Goldman said that bitcoin is mostly a store of value and nothing else, it said that over time, “the decentralized nature of the network will diminish concerns about storing personal data on the blockchain.” As a result, “a blockchain platform like Ethereum could potentially become a large market for vendors of trusted information, like Amazon is for consumer goods today.” And just to clarify what it means, the bank explained:
Ethereum can also be used to store almost any information securely and privately on a decentralized ledger. And this information can be tokenized and traded. This means that the Ethereum platform has the potential to become a large market for trusted information. We are seeing glimpses of that today with the sale of digital art and collectibles online through the use of NFTs. But this is a tiny peek at its actual practical uses. For example, individuals can store and sell their medical data through Ethereum to pharma research companies. A digital profile on Ethereum could contain personal data including asset ownership, medical history and even IP rights. Ethereum also has the benefit of running on a decentralized global server base rather than a centralized one like Amazon or Microsoft, possibly providing a solution to concerns about sharing personal data.
No surprise then that last weekend, the bank forecast that ether could hit $8,000 by year end, as a result of the token’s remarkable correlation with 2 year inflation swaps which, as everyone knows, are only going up and to the right.
It’s not just Goldman that has a preference for ethereum over bitcoin. Earlier today, comments from one of the most powerful people in all of finance, Citadel CEO Ken Griffin, about Ethereum’s dominance over Bitcoin are attracting even more attention to the second-largest cryptocurrency, which is outperforming many others this year by wide margins.
Griffin, who like Jamie Dimon was a noted crypto skeptic in the past, said Wednesday at a conference that the crypto space could be disrupted by Ethereum’s blockchain.
“We’re going to see Bitcoin be replaced conceptually by the Ethereum’s blockchain”, he said at the DealBook conference. “Replaced conceptually by the next generation of cryptocurrencies that will have the benefits of higher transaction speeds, lower cost per transaction. Perhaps people will start to think about how to deal with security and fraud prevention better.”
In the coming year, Ethereum is set for a historic transformation to Ehtereum 2.0, shifting from a Proof-of-work concept to a Proof-of-stake, whose energy consumption transaction speeds and costs will be a fraction of the current ones, while also getting the blessings of the ESG community in the process. Heading into the Ethereum 2.0 transition, pundits expect the price of the token to soar.
Griffin added he isn’t worried he missed out on crypto. “The train is, in some sense, still in the station,” he said.
A year-long rally in Ether, which sent the coin up more than 550% for 2021, trouncing Bitcoin’s performance by more than 400 percentage points, gathered momentum toward the end of the summer after a major protocol upgrade which reduced supply increases.
“People are moving money into other cryptos now — not just Bitcoin,” said FTX US President Brett Harrison. “That is definitely following this trend of thinking about the future application development happening using crypto.”
Meanwhile, on Tuesday the largest U.S. cryptocurrency exchange, Coinbase, said that during the third quarter, Ether constituted 22% of transaction revenue, outstripping Bitcoin for the first time in trading volumes as well.
“We’re definitely seeing a lot of bullish Ethereum flows,” Juthica Chou, head of OTC options trading at Kraken, said on Bloomberg’s “QuickTake Stock” broadcast. “Ethereum captures the tailwinds of Bitcoin — on top of that, they had the protocol upgrade in August, which burns Ether.”
At the conference, Griffin commented further on cryptocurrencies, saying his firm doesn’t trade crypto because of regulatory uncertainties.
“I wish all this passion and energy that went to crypto was directed towards making the United States stronger,” said Griffin. “Let’s face it — it’s a Jihadist call that we don’t believe in the dollar. I mean, what a crazy concept that is,” he said, reiterating similar comments he had made about crypto just a few weeks back.“When you have to value cryptocurrencies, what is the basis that you use for valuation?” Griffin asked. “It really comes down to: Will someone pay me more for it tomorrow?”
Actually that’s not only simplistic, it’s wrong: what it really comes down to is will central banks print more fiat tomorrow than today. The answer is clearly yes, and until that changes – and it won’t – someone will always pay more for cryptos tomorrow than they are worth today.
Some other things Griffin discussed:
- Griffin said inflation and rising prices were no longer something that could be ignored. “The theory that this is transitory is starting to get long in the tooth,” he said. That is also affecting the stock markets, which by Mr. Griffin’s reckoning have become “frothy,” primed to overreact, particularly in stocks like Tesla that have experienced high volatility.
- The financier defended payment for order flow, in which market makers — such as Citadel Securities — pay online brokerages like Robinhood for the right to process their customers’ trades. While the practice has been criticized for potentially leading to conflicts of interest, Griffin said that it had helped lead to lower trading costs for individual traders and that he opposed potential new regulations. “Are we going to go back to re-regulated markets and taking back the competition that has allowed Americans to save so much money when trading?” Doing so, he argued, would be “a tragedy.”
- Griffin, a billionaire, opposed raising taxes, saying it would discourage innovation in America, citing Tesla’s Elon Musk as an example. “We don’t want tax policy to drive great entrepreneurs like Elon out of their seats,” he said.
The hedge fund manager said his remarks likely would lead to hate mail in his inbox and on Twitter.
Tyler Durden
Wed, 11/10/2021 – 19:22
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