Aug 12

Today’s News 12th August 2022

  • Trump Demands 'Immediate Release' Of FBI Raid Documents
    Trump Demands ‘Immediate Release’ Of FBI Raid Documents

    Update (0032ET): President Trump has effectively dared the Department of Justice to release the documents related to the Monday raid on Mar-a-Lago.

    “Not only will I not oppose the release of documents related to the unAmerican, unwarranted, and unnecessary raid and break-in of my home in Palm Beach, Florida, Mar-a-Lago, I am going a step further by ENCOURAGING the immediate release of those documents, even though they have been drawn up by radical left Democrats and possible future political opponents, who have a strong and powerful vested interest in attacking me, much as they have done for the last 6 years…” Trump said in a Thursday night post on Truth Social.

    “This unprecedented political weaponization of law enforcement is inappropriate and highly unethical. The world is watching as our Country is being brought to a new low, not only on our border, crime, economy, energy, national security, and so much more, but also with respect to our sacred elections!” he said in a subsequent post.

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    The FBI was looking for ‘classified documents relating to nuclear weapons,’ among other things, during its Monday raid at former President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence, WaPo reports, citing ‘people familiar with the investigation.’

    So – we’re to believe that the FBI took several boxes from Trump in June, told him to put a bigger lock, and then two months later realized ‘oh — he might have nuclear secrets‘ – justifying the raid.

    The leakers did not offer additional details.

    Material about nuclear weapons is especially sensitive and usually restricted to a small number of government officials, experts said. Publicizing details about U.S. weapons could provide an intelligence road map to adversaries seeking to build ways of countering those systems. And other countries might view exposing their nuclear secrets as a threat, experts said.

    One former Justice Department official, who in the past oversaw investigations of leaks of classified information, said the type of top-secret information described by the people familiar with the probe would probably cause authorities to try to move as quickly as possible to recover sensitive documents that could cause grave harm to U.S. security. -Washington Post

    “If the FBI and the Department of Justice believed there were top secret materials still at Mar-a-Lago, that would lend itself to greater ‘hair-on-fire’ motivation to recover that material as quickly as possible,” said David Laufman, the former chief of the Justice Department’s counterintelligence section.

    So we assume the narrative will now be that Trump leaked, or could have leaked, nuclear secrets to Putin – which justified “authorities to try to move as quickly as possible to recover sensitive documents” in the name of national security.

    Right…

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    Attorney General Merrick Garland revealed during a brief Thursday speech that he personally approved the search warrant at Mar-a-Lago, and that the DOJ has asked a federal court to unseal the document.

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    “Just now, the Justice Department has filed a motion in the Southern District of Florida to unseal a search warrant and property receipt relating to a court approved search that the FBI conducted earlier this week,” Garland said.

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    Trump allies have suggested that the warrant was politically motivated, while Trump himself said on Truth Social on Wednesday that the FBI may have planted evidence.

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    The search is connected to an investigation on whether Trump unlawfully retained presidential records – including classified materials, following his departure from office in January 2021.

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    According to US Attorney Juan Antonio Gonzalez from the Southern District of Florida, “The public’s clear and powerful interest in understanding what occurred under these circumstances weighs heavily in favor of unsealing” the warrant.

    Jay I. Bratt, the Justice Department’s chief for Counterintelligence and Export Control Section National Security Division, co-signed the document.

    According to the four-page motion, a judge signed and approved of the search warrant on Aug. 5, the Friday before the search was executed. The Justice Department also seeks to reveal the property receipt listing the seized items and filed today with the court.

    Shortly after the government’s filing, U.S. Magistrate Judge Bruce Reinhart set a speedy pace to determine whether Trump opposes unsealing. -Law & Crime

    “On or before 3:00 p.m. Eastern time on August 12, 2022, the United States shall file a certificate of conferral advising whether former President Trump opposes the Government’s motion to unseal,” Reinhart wrote.

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    US Attorney General Merrick Garland will make a statement to the media at 2:30 pm ET on Thursday, following the FBI’s Monday raid on Mar-a-Lago.

    Garland has found himself in the crosshairs of conservatives, who claim that the establishment has once again ‘weaponized’ the DOJ against Donald Trump.

    Watch live:

    Sen. Rand Paul and other conservatives have called for an investigation.

    “And if it warrants it, there’s going to have to be a look at whether or not the attorney general has misused his office for political purposes. Have they gone after a political opponent? I mean, this is beyond the pale,” he told Fox News on Wednesady. “No one would have ever imagined before that we would be using or one political party would be using the FBI to attack their political opponents.”

    Tyler Durden
    Fri, 08/12/2022 – 00:34

  • The Madness Of Groupthink
    The Madness Of Groupthink

    Authored by Robert Malone via Brownstone Institute,

    “Madness is the exception in individuals but the rule in groups.”

    ~ Fredrich Nietzsche

    We all seek to understand the root causes of the COVIDcrisis. We crave an answer, and hope is that we can find some sort of rationale for the harm that has been done, something that will help make sense out of one of the most profound policy fiascos in the history of the United States.

    In tracing the various threads which seem to lead towards comprehension of the larger issues and processes, there has been a tendency to focus on external actors and forces. Examples include the Medical-Pharmaceutical Industrial complex, the World Health Organization, the World Economic Forum, the Chinese Central Communist Party, the central banking system/Federal Reserve, the large “hedge funds” (Blackrock, State Street, Vanguard), the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Corporate/social media and Big Technology, the Trusted News Initiative, and the United Nations.

    In terms of the inexplicable behavior of the general population in response to the information which bombards all of us, the denialism and seeming hypnosis of colleagues, friends and family, Mattias Desmet’s 21st century update of the work of Hannah Arendt, Joost Meerloo, and so many others is often cited as the most important text for comprehending the large scale psychological processes which have driven much of the COVIDcrisis madness. Dr. Desmet, a professor of clinical psychology at Ghent University (Belgium) and a practicing psychoanalytic psychotherapist, has provided the world with guide to the Mass Formation process (Mass formation Psychosis, Mass Hypnosis) which seems to have influenced so much of the madness that has gripped both the United States as well as much of the rest of the world.

    But what about the internal psychological processes at play within the United States HHS policy making group? The group which has been directly responsible for the amazingly unscientific and counterproductive decisions concerning bypassing normal bioethical, regulatory and clinical development norms to expedite genetic vaccine products (“Operation Warp Speed”), suppressing early treatment with repurposed drugs, mask and vaccine mandates, lockdowns, school closures, social devision, defamation and intentional character assassination of critics, and a wide range of massively disruptive and devastating economic policies.

    All have lived through these events, and have become aware of the many lies and misrepresentations (subsequently contradicted by data) which have been walked back or historically revised by Drs. Fauci, Collins, Birx, Walensky, Redfield, and even Mr. Biden. Is there a body of scholarship and academic literature which can help make sense of the group dynamics and clearly dysfunctional decision making which first characterized the “coronavirus taskforce” under Vice President Pence, and then continued in a slightly altered form through the Biden administration?

    During the early 1970s, as the (tragically escalated) Viet Nam War foreign policy fiasco was starting to wind down, an academic psychologist focusing on group dynamics and decision making was struck by parallels between his own research findings and the group behaviors involved in the Bay of Pigs foreign policy fiasco documented in A thousand days: John F. Kennedy in the White House by Arthur Schlesinger.

    Intrigued, he began to further investigate the decision making involved in this case study, as well as the policy debacles of the Korean War, Pearl Harbor, and the escalation of the Viet Nam War. He also examined and developed case studies involving what he saw as major United States Government policy triumphs. These included the management of the Cuban missile crisis, and development of the Marshall Plan. On the basis of these case studies, examined in light of current group dynamic psychology research, he developed what a seminal book which became a cautionary core text for most students of Political Science.

    The result was Victims of Groupthink: A psychological study of foreign-policy decisions and fiascoes by Author Irving Janis (Houghton Mifflin Company July 1, 1972).

    Biographical Context:

    Irving Janis (1918-1990) was a 20th century social psychologist who identified the phenomenon of groupthink. Between 1943 and 1945, Janis served in the Research Branch of the Army, studying the morale of military personnel. In 1947 he joined the faculty of Yale University and remained in the Psychology Department there until his retirement four decades later. He was also an adjunct professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley.

    Janis focused much of his career on studying decision making, particularly in the area of challenging habitual acts such as smoking and dieting. He researched group dynamics, specializing in an area he termed “groupthink,” which describes how groups of people are able to reach a compromise or consensus through conformity, without thoroughly analyzing ideas or concepts. He revealed the relationship peer pressure has to conformity and how this dynamic limits the confines of the collective cognitive ability of the group, resulting in stagnant, unoriginal, and at times, damaging ideas.

    Throughout his career, Janis authored a number of articles and governmental reports and several books including Groupthink: Psychological Studies of Policy Decisions and Fiascoes and Crucial Decisions: Leadership in Policy Making and Crisis Management. 

    Irving Janis developed the concept of groupthink to explain the disordered decision-making process that occurs in groups whose members work together over an extended period of time. His research into groupthink led to the wide acceptance of the power of peer pressure. According to Janis, there are several key elements to groupthink, including:

    He observed that:

    • The group develops an illusion of invulnerability that causes them to be excessively optimistic about the potential outcomes of their actions.
    • Group members believe in the inherent accuracy of the group’s beliefs or the inherent goodness of the group itself. Such an example can be seen when people make decisions based on patriotism. The group tends to develop negative or stereotyped views of people not in the group. 
    • The group exerts pressure on people who disagree with the group’s decisions.
    • The group creates the illusion that everyone agrees with the group by censoring dissenting beliefs. Some members of the group take it upon themselves to become “mindguards” and correct dissenting beliefs. 

    This process can cause a group to make risky or immoral decisions. 

    This book was one of my assigned textbooks during undergraduate studies in the early 1980s, and it has deeply influenced my entire career as a scientist, physician, academic, entrepreneur, and consultant. It has been widely read, often as required reading during undergraduate political science coursework, and A Review of General Psychology survey (published in 2002) ranked Janis as the 79th most cited psychologist of the 20th century.

    As I have considered the revelations provided by the recent books from Dr. Scott Atlas (A Plague Upon Our House: My Fight at the Trump White House to Stop COVID from Destroying America) and Dr. Deborah Birx (Silent Invasion: The Untold Story of the Trump Administration, Covid-19, and Preventing the Next Pandemic Before It’s Too Late), I realized that the prescient insights of Dr. Janis were directly applicable to the group dynamics, behaviors and faulty decision making observed within the core HHS leadership “insider group” responsible for much of the grossly dysfunctional decision making which has characterized the COVIDcrisis.

    Janis’ insights into the process of groupthink in the context of dysfunctional public policy decision making profoundly foreshadowed the behaviors observed within the HHS COVID leadership team.

    A high degree of group cohesiveness is conductive to a high frequency of symptoms of groupthink, which in turn are conductive to a high frequency of defects in decision-making.  Two conditions that may play an important role in determining whether or not group cohesiveness will lead to groupthink have been mentioned – insulation of the policy-making group and promotional leadership practices.

    Rather than paraphrasing his ideas, below I provide key quotes from his seminal work which help shed light on the parallels between the foreign policy decision making fiascos which he examined and current COVIDcrisis mismanagement.

    I use the term “groupthink” as a quick and easy way to refer to a mode of thinking that peole engage in when they are deeply involved in a cohesive in-group, when the member’s strivings for unanimity override their motivation to realistically appraise alternative courses of action.  “Groupthink” is a term of the same order as the words in the newspeak vocabulary George Orwell presents in his dismaying 1984– a vocabulary with terms such as “doublethink” and “crimethink”.  By putting groupthink with those Orwellian words, I realize that groupthink takes on an invidious connotation.  The invidiousness is intentional.  Groupthink refers to a deterioration of mental efficiency, reality testing, and moral judgment that results from in-group pressures.

    Hardhearted actions by softheaded groups

    At first I was surprised by the extent to which the groups in the fiascoes I have examined adhered to group norms and pressures toward uniformity.  Just as in groups of ordinary citizens, a dominant characteristic appears to be remaining loyal to the group by sticking with the decisions to which the group has committed itself, even when the policy is working badly and has unintended consequences that disturb the conscience of the members.  In a sense, members consider loyalty to the group the highest form of morality. That loyalty requires each member to avoid raising controversial issues, questioning weak arguments, or calling a halt to softheaded thinking. 

    Paradoxically, softheaded groups are likely to be extremely hardhearted toward out-groups and enemies.  In dealing with a rival nation, policymakers comprising an amiable group find it relatively easy to authorize dehumanizing solutions such as large-scale bombings.  An affable group of government officials is unlikely to pursue the difficult and controversial issues that arise when alternatives to a harsh military solution come up for discussion.  Nor are members inclined to raise ethical issues that imply that this “fine group of ours, with its humanitarianism and its high-minded principles, might be capable of adopting a course of action that is inhumane and immoral.”

    The more amiability and esprit de corps among the members of a policy-making in-group, the greater is the danger that independent critical thinking will be replaced by groupthink, which is likely to result in irrational and dehumanizing actions directed against out groups.

    Janis defined eight symptoms of groupthink:

    1)    An illusion of invulnerability, shared by most or all of the members, which creates excessive optimism and encourages taking extreme risks.

    2)    Collective efforts to rationalize in order to discount warnings which might lead the members to reconsider their assumptions before they recommit themselves to their past policy decisions.

    3)    An unquestioned belief in the group’s inherent morality, inclining the members to ignore the ethical or moral consequences of their decisions.

    4)    Stereotyped views of enemy leaders as too evil to warrant genuine attempts to negotiate, or as too weak and stupid to counter whatever risky attempts are made to defeat their purposes.

    5)    Direct pressure on any member who expresses strong arguments against any of the group’s stereotypes, illusions, or commitments, making clear that this type of dissent is contrary to what is expected of all loyal members.

    6)    Self-censorship of deviations from the apparent group consensus, reflecting each member’s inclination to minimize to himself the importance of his doubts and counterarguments.

    7)    A shared illusion of unanimity concerning judgements conforming to the majority view (partly resulting from self-censorship of deviations, augmented by the false assumption that silence means consent).

    8)    The emergence of self-appointed mindguards- members who protect the group from adverse information that might shatter their shared complacency about the effectiveness and morality of their decisions.

    It is relatively easy to identify errors of thought, process, and decision making in retrospect. Much harder is to devise recommendations that will help to avoid repeating history. Fortunately, Dr. Janis’ provides a set of prescriptions which I have found useful throughout my career, and which can be readily and effectively applied in almost any group decision making environment.  He provides the following context for his treatment plan:

    My two main conclusions are that along with other sources of error in decision-making, groupthink is likely to occur within cohesive small groups of decision-makers and that the most corrosive effects of groupthink can be counteracted by eliminating group insulation, overly directive leadership practices, and other conditions that foster premature consensus.  Those who take these conclusions seriously will probably find that the little knowledge they have about groupthink increases their understanding of the causes of erroneous group decisions and sometimes even has some practical value in preventing fiascoes.

    Perhaps one step that might be taken to avoid further repeats of the public health policy “fiascoes” which characterize the domestic and global response to the COVIDcrisis is to mandate leadership training of the Senior Executive Service (much as mandated within DoD), and particularly within the leadership of the US Department of Health and Human Services. Whether or not this ever becomes the governmental policy, below are the nine key points which any of us can apply when seeking to avoid groupthink in groups that we participate in.

    Nine action items for avoiding groupthink

    1)    The leader of a policy-forming group should assign the role of critical evaluator to each member, encouraging the group to give high priority to airing objections an doubts.  This practice needs to be reinforced by the leader’s acceptance of criticism of his own judgements in order to discourage the members from soft-pedaling their disagreements.2)    The leaders in an organizations hierarchy, when assigning a policy planning mission to a group, should be impartial instead of stating preferences and expectations out the outset.  This practice requires each leader to limit his briefings to unbiased statements about the scope of the problem and the limitations of available resources, without advocating specific proposals he would like to see adopted.  This allows the conferees the opportunity to develop and atmosphere of open inquiry and to explore impartially a wide range of policy alternatives.

    3)    The organization should routinely follow the administrative practice of setting up several independent policy-planning and evaluation groups to work on the same policy question, each carrying out its deliberations under a different leader.

    4)    Throughout the period when the feasibility and effectiveness of policy alternatives are being surveyed, the policy-making group should from time to time divide into two or more subgroups to meet separately, under different chairmen, and then come together to hammer out their differences.

    5)    Each member of the policy-making group should discuss periodically the group’s deliberations with trusted associates in his own unit of the organization and report back their reactions.

    6)    One or more outside experts or qualified colleagues within the organization who are not core members of the policy-making group should be invited to each meeting on a staggered basis and should be encouraged to challenge the views of the core members.

    7)    At every meeting devoted to evaluating policy alternatives, at least one member should be assigned the role of devil’s advocate.

    8)    Whenever the policy issue involves relations with a rival nation or organization, a sizable bloc of time (perhaps an entire session) should be spent surveying all warning signals from the rivals and constructing alternative scenarios of the rivals’ intentions.

    9)    After reaching a preliminary consensus about what seems to be the best policy alternative, the policy-making group should hold a “second chance” meeting at which every member is expected to express as vividly as he can all his residual doubts and to rethink the entire issue before making a definitive choice.

     

    Robert W. Malone is a physician and biochemist. His work focuses on mRNA technology, pharmaceuticals, and drug repurposing research. You can find him at Substack and Gettr

     

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 08/11/2022 – 23:40

  • What's Trading Most On Capitol Hill?
    What’s Trading Most On Capitol Hill?

    On August 9, after more than a year of preparation, President Biden signed the CHIPS for America Act into law. Congress passed the policy to strengthen U.S.-based semiconductor manufacturers in January 2021 but didn’t allocate it any budget until now. The bill comes at a time of increased dependency by U.S. companies like Apple, Qualcomm or NVIDIA on Taiwanese chip manufacturers.

    As Statista’s Florian Zandt notes, the latter company made headlines at the end of July when the spouse of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi sold 25,000 of the corporation’s shares from their portfolio, one day before CHIPS Act passed Congress a second time.

    As Statista’s chart based on data from Capitol Trades shows, NVIDIA is not the only stock drawing increased attention from U.S. lawmakers in the past year.

    Infographic: What's Trading on Capitol Hill? | Statista

    You will find more infographics at Statista

    Topping the list are Big Tech stocks like Microsoft, Apple and Alphabet, whose trade volume amounted to $129.6 million, $8.3 million and $7.0 million in the last twelve months, respectively. With Antero Midstream Corp and Shell Midstream Partners, the top 8 traded stocks include two listings that could be categorized as left-field if not for the ongoing war in Ukraine. Shell Midstream partners, according to company statements, “owns, operates, develops and acquires pipelines”, while Antero Midstream focuses on “natural gas and NGL production in the Appalachian basin”. Interestingly, both stocks were only traded by Republicans in the past year, with the majority of trade activity coming from House Republican Mark Green from Tennessee, a notable opponent of the theory of human-made climate change.

    Politicians using their knowledge of upcoming bills in conjunction with stock trading activities could, in theory, constitute insider trading. Discussing its perceived legality or illegality has long been a staple of the stock market. Still, the practice flies under the radar in day-to-day trading activities. While the so-called STOCK Act which prohibits trading commodities based on nonpublic information was signed into law in 2012, the fines tied to a violation are often minuscule. This could change soon though: Business Insider and other media outlets have identified 67 politicians not complying with the law in a recent report, and Congress is open to debating measures that would ban all federal lawmakers from trading stocks.

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 08/11/2022 – 23:20

  • Modern American Policy: Stupid Or Sinister?
    Modern American Policy: Stupid Or Sinister?

    Authored by Matthew Piepenburg via GoldSwitzerland.com,

    American policy has been acting in ways which suggest either a desperate ignorance or a sinister restructuring of the national narrative.

    Surveying the Senseless

    The USA is now staring down the barrel of four-decade high inflation, an inverted yield curve and the highest debt levels in its history as Wall Street recently enjoyed the strongest relief rally since 2020 on the bad news of yet another Fed rate hike (75bp) into a percolating liquidity crisis.

    Huh?

    In a Fed-led dystopia marked by years of printed rather than earned liquidity, bad news is now good news to markets who nervously seek pretexts for central bank stimulus rather than actual earnings or GDP.

    In such distorted landscapes, positive jobs data creates sell offs and crippling rate hikes induce rising stocks.

    For almost 2 years, while we and other candid market observers were warning of crippling inflation, our central bankers were describing it as “transitory” with a dishonesty similar to the current recession is not a recession meme.

    Huh?

    Meanwhile in DC, we see growing signs of a political culture less about public service and more about self-service.

    Wealth disparity in the home of the brave has passed the highest levels ever recorded and points directly to the slow and empirical death of the American middle class.

    The suburbs around DC are growing richer with lobbyist and polo-playing defense contractors buying concessions and second homes from politicians who openly sell votes for reelection in a democracy that more resembles an auction house than a house of representation.

    A former tobacco tsar at the FDA, for example, recently took an executive role at Phillip Morris while an executive at Raytheon (America’s second largest defense contractor) just took a key post at the Department of Defense.

    Alas, the foxes not only guard the hen house, they run it.

    The Land of the Free?

    If fascism is defined as “the perfect merger of the state and corporate powers” (See Mussolini circa 1936), then the USA may still be the land of the brave, but it no longer resembles the land of the free.

    JP Morgan, led by a $35M/year Jamie Dimon, just paid a $96M “fine” for a $20B profit garnered from openly manipulating the gold market.

    Huh?

    At the same time, once great (and now police-defunded) cities like Chicago, NYC, and San Francisco are seeing tumbleweeds blowing past office vacancy rates as high as 40% following an historically disastrous COVID lockdown policy which did far more psychological, criminal and financial damage ($7T and counting) to America than a flu with less than a 1% Case Fatality Rate.

    Huh?

    Turning to foreign policies, having failed to deliver “freedom and democracy” to Vietnam, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Afghanistan at the cost of America’s best sons and daughters, one wonders why the US has spent another $60B to bring “freedom” to the Ukraine when millions of US children live in poverty.

    All Americans hate to see civilians suffer in needless wars. But many who blindly wave Ukrainian flags in moments of ad-water, instant-virtue signaling from a government-led media can’t place Ukraine on a map nor bother to examine the complex history of its Russian tensions which date back to the 1750s.

    Furthermore, sending an IQ, history and geography challenged Kamila Harris to pre-war Ukraine with a NATO narrative only accelerated the February drums of war (and the financially disastrous sanctions that followed) in the same way that Pelosi’s recent trip to Taiwan seems to be more about flaming rather than cooling the war hawks.

    Does the US, with over 800 military bases in 70 countries actively seek war, or does it seek peace? Thousands are dying in the East for what many professional US statesmen believe was an easily avoidable war.

    Has the military industrial complex, against which Eisenhower (no stranger to war) warned in January of 1961, hi-jacked American politics?

    Meanwhile, as American monetary and fiscal policy reached new levels of open insanity in the seemingly deliberate fear-campaign led by “experts” like Fauci in the dramatically-described “war against COVID,” the latest boogieman out of DC is an equally unaffordable war against an equally-hyped climate change.

    If passed, “The Inflation Adjustment Act of 2022,” now sitting on Biden’s desk (or pillow), seeks further dollars that America does not earn yet which the White House assures won’t be inflationary.

    Huh?

    Do the foregoing samples of questionable policy failures evidence open stupidity, or is there something more systemic at play?

    The Fed: “Advancing the Few at the Expense of the Many”

    My take on the Fed is only that: My take. It is based upon the premise (and bias) that the Fed is driven, as Andrew Jackson warned, to serve the few and not the many.

    This presumption comes not only from personal observations, but a careful study of the Fed’s illegitimate practices and origins, far too complex to unpack here but detailed in Gold Matters.

    The Ongoing Inflation Lie

    As I’ve been writing and saying for months, the Fed’s current inflation narrative as well as “solution” is as openly bogus as a 42nd Street Rolex.

    There is little about the current inflation narrative that compares to the 1970’s, and hence little about Powell’s current policies which remotely compare to the so-called Volcker era of 1980, which ended, by the way, in a recession.

    Nevertheless, I am fascinated by the extensive time, brain-power and pundit attention given to explaining current inflation.

    Fancy concepts from “demand-pull” to “supply shocks,” or “extraneous shocks” and “accelerants” to even “black swans” are used to explain a 9.1% CPI inflation scale (which, if DC truly wishes to be “Volcker-like,” is closer to 18% using the metrics of his era…).

    The Simple Inflation Truth

    Inflation, which was already steadily rising pre-Putin and percolating pre-COVID, is nothing more than the direct consequence of USD debasement driven by: 1) years of openly addictive mouse-click money (>10X since 2008) from the Eccles Building and, 2) fatal fiscal spending from the White House, be it red or blue.

    In just the last 24 months, the Fed created 50% more mouse-click money than all the money that ever existed in the 256 years of its national existence.

    Such numbers are a tad “inflationary,” no? Alas, costs are rising because our grotesquely inflated/de-valued dollar is tanking.

    Between 1776 and the un-immaculate conception of the Fed in 1913, a USD was once a USD.

    Since 1913, however, a USD is really (worth) nothing more than a Nickle.

    Why?

    Broken Faith vs. Store of Value

    Because when a central bank creates trillions of those dollars out of thin air with no link to an underlying real asset or an equivalent exchange for a good or service (as Germans like Alfred Lansburgh, Austrians like von Mises and Americans like Andrew Dickson White argued), that dollar is nothing more than a symbol of broken faith rather than a store of genuine value.

    Like a glass of wine filled with a swimming pool of water, the dollar is diluted; it’s flavor, color and value ruined. Since 1971, and when measured against a single milligram of gold, the USD, like all other fiat currencies, has lost greater than 95% of its value.

    The Fed: Blaming vs. Accountability

    Rather than confess the toxic reality (and complicity) of the fatal and inflationary expansion of the broad money supply, the DC elites first tried to call it “transitory,” and when that failed, they tried to call it “Putin’s inflation.”

    Really?

    There’s no doubt that the sanctions against Putin sent gas prices and the CPI higher—especially in Europe. And there’s also no doubt that the trillions of fiscal and monetary dollars used to “fight” COVID were CPI tailwinds.

    But a tailwind does not mean a cause.

    Take the “war on COVID” and the $7T+ in combined fiscal and monetary dollars used to combat it.

    I’m not here to end the COVID debate with medicine or science, of which I’m clearly no expert. But many of us (including Rand Paul or Christine Anderson) would agree that neither was Fauci, the CDC, the WHO or the NIH.

    Almost everyone (vaxed or un-vaxed, masked or un-masked) has already caught the virus; it’s fairly clear that locking the country down for well over a year did nothing but cost money and freedoms while destroying businesses who deserved to choose for themselves whether to stay open or shut.

    There will be others who disagree, but in my legally, historically and financially educated mind, not since the oxy-moronic Patriot Act have I seen a greater crime (or psy op) against a nation’s own citizens and their once inalienable rights and civil liberties as that which was embodied by the 2020 lockdowns.

    As Ben Franklin warned, a nation which surrenders its freedoms in the name of security deserves neither.

    Critical Thinking Locked Down

    As a kid who won athletic scholarships to some of the finest schools (from Choate to Harvard) in America, I learned the trade of critical thinking, which any of us can acquire, with or without a shiny diploma.

    What particularly sickened me, however, was that the very schools (prep to grad level) who taught me the history, laws and methods of thinking critically, independently and openly, were the same knee-bending schools who collectively insulted those same principals by shutting their doors to the un-vaxed and censoring alternative views from professors and students who thought differently.

    Were these lockdowns proof of humanitarian concern or were they test-drives for increasingly centralized control over national and international markets, currencies and populations?

    From the very beginning of the pandemic, expert virologists, physicians and even vaccine creators (as evidenced by the meetings at the AIER in Great Barrington) with equal if not far superior credentials than Dr. Fauci, were openly censored, gas-lighted and criminalized by the media as flat-earth “conspiracy theorists”—the now favorite term of art for anyone who disagrees with DC’s often comically official narrative on anything from WMD to the current definition of a recession.

    Thus, when considering the current inflation narrative and its causes, was the US merely stupid in imposing financially crippling lockdowns or were there sinister forces engineering fear as a means of pushing the masses into dependency while the Fed printed more dollars for the repo and bond markets (a hidden “bailout’) than for Main Street?

    Saudi Did It?

    Others may want to blame the Saudis and the high oil prices for the inflation we see today.

    It’s worth reminding, however, that today’s oil price is roughly the same as it was in April of 2020.

    The Solution Narrative

    As far as combatting inflation, that too creates a great deal of space for debate, error and comedy.

    Many, including the Fed’s James Bullard, Lael Brainard or Neel Kashkari have been arguing for aggressive rate hikes to kill inflation.

    But with inflation already at 9.1%, such “above-neutral” would require the Fed to follow the IMF’s recommendation that interest rates be at least 1% above inflation rates. In an honest world, that would require a 10.1% interest rate policy, which would immediately bankrupt Uncle Sam.

    Instead, Powell is boasting of an “aggressive” 2.25-50% Fed Fund Rates to fight 9.1% inflation, the policy equivalent of storming the beaches of Normandy with squirt-guns.

    Meanwhile, the Cleveland Fed, as per my recent articles, is using dishonest math to publicly claim positive 1% real rates despite the fact that when measuring even a 3% yield on the 10Y UST against a 9.1% inflation rate, the USA is in fact living in a world of at least -6% rather than +1% real rates.

    Like the CPI scale itself, the Fed is openly lying about negative real rates.

    Sadly, such clever math is now the new DC normal. The Fed won’t say what the rest of us know, namely: The only tool to fight Fed-made inflation is a Fed-made recession, which they will deny in plain sight.

    The Recession Narrative

    The latest lie from on high, of course, is the valiant attempt by Powell, Biden and Yellen to downplay 2 consecutive quarters of negative GDP as a non-recessionary “transition” despite such data effectively confirming the very definition of a recession.

    Instead, DC would now have us believe that positive labor and unemployment data is non-recessionary.

    In particular, the BLS is boasting 528,000 newly created jobs in July (and 2M year-to-date), which places US unemployment at an admirable 3.5%, the lowest level seen in 50 years.

    Unfortunately, a little bit of honest math indicates that those “new jobs” don’t represent new folks finding work, but sadly, just folks already-employed who are taking on second or third jobs to survive rising inflation costs.

    The July labor force participation rate actually went down, which means there are less not more people in the work force.

    In April of 2019, I did a more extensive report on the DC math used to artificially puff US labor data (U3 and U6) which is far worse than officially reported.

    But who needs real math or honest data when DC’s comforting words feel so much better?

    Such consistent trends of sanctioned dishonesty, however, force us to question the intelligence and desperation of our so-called “leadership.”

    From Fake Math to Real Wars

    I’ve written and spoken extensively about the avoid-ability of the war in Ukraine as well as the foreseeable stupidity of the Western sanctions against Putin, all of which have empirically backfired at every level– from the slow collapse of the petrodollar (and hence USD) to the slow rise of a stronger, Eastern-lead trading block among the BRICS.

    The petrodollar is no laughing matter. Since de-coupling from the gold standard, the US relies on the forced global purchase of oil in US Dollars to prevent this already debased currency from losing even more demand, and hence value and power.

    Only two global leaders have since tried to stand up to the petrodollar power in the past. Saddam Hussein wanted to buy oil in euros and Khaddaffi wanted to buy oil in gold; and just look what happened to them…

    Unfortunately for the US, both China and Russia have nuclear weapons. Hence, the US playbook of fighting wars or indirectly eliminating leaders to keep its financial interests secure got a little bit messier this February when poking at Putin.

    The Dollar Fairytale: Another Open Lie from On High

    Despite openly objective evidence of an increasingly unloved USD, DC continues to boast of the relative strength of the USD on the DXY.

    What DC won’t say, however, is that this “strength” is only measured against a tanking yen and euro, two debt-soaked currencies who don’t have enough reserve currency clout to afford a currency-boosting rate hike.

    Against the Chinese Yuan, however, the US has less of which to boast…

    In short, the USD is anything but strong.

    As discussed above, its inherent purchasing power has been neutered by over a century of devaluation and is little more than the best horse in the Western glue factory.

    Profitable War Drums

    Given the failings and open lies above, from inflation realism and recessionary word-smithing to dying currencies and rising, unpayable debts, why on earth would the US now be saber rattling over the Ukraine or pinching the Chinese bear over Taiwan?

    Is it to spread democracy and freedom by helping the underdog, whatever the sacrifice?

    Well, one of our most famous underdogs, military generals and presidents, George Washington, warned over 2 centuries ago to precisely avoid such foreign entanglements. “Truly enlightened and independent patriots,” he argued, focused on prosperity within their borders not peripheral wars outside them.

    Despite such warnings, the US has spent a lot of time fighting outside its borders rather building unity within them.

    Why?

    One sad but empirically proven argument is that war is historically good for tanking GDP and struggling stock markets.

    In March of 2018, I penned an eerily prescient analysis of how US stocks love global war, and warned of escalations against Russia and China.

    In particular, I addressed the historical data of the “war dividend,” which tracked US markets reacting favorably to de-stabilization outside its borders.

    Thus, even if Generals Washington and Eisenhower warned against such conflicts, Wall Street and the defense contractors who lobby DC love a good war.

    Why?

    Because war feeds US markets. Conflicts overseas create massive capital flows into the relative safety of the US.

    During the Iraq War, hundreds of billions in Middle Eastern assets rushed into US markets while NATO bombs landed in Iraq. Between 2003 and 2008, the Dow rose steadily upwards.

    During the Vietnam War (which killed 58,000 Americans and 1.2 million Vietnamese), the Dow gained 53%. When the war ended, the markets promptly fell, and fell hard.

    During the Great War of 1914-1918, the Dow nearly doubled. As for WW2, the Dow rose by 164% between Pearl Harbor in 1941 and VJ day in 1945.

    Given such numbers, was the recent idea of sending a kindergarten-level intellect like Kamila Harris to negotiate peace (?) with Putin in early 2022 deliberately set up to fail?

    Was Pelosi’s recent flight to Taiwan a commitment to ensure freedom? Or is there a more sinister, yet hidden, motive to push for war in a time of economic disaster at home?

    Is America Heading in the Opposite Direction of Its Founding Fathers?

    History confirms that every debt crisis leads to a financial crisis, a market crisis, a currency crisis, social unrest, a political crisis, and ultimately extreme authoritarian and centralized control from the far political left of right.

    Given how increasingly centralized our openly broken yet centrally controlled markets, economies and politics have become, and given the acceleration and scope of the open lies, backfiring polices and unpayable costs and debts which have emerged in the post-COVID and post-sanction new normal, is it possible that the USA is headed toward a similarly authoritarian fate?

    Is it possible that the by ignoring the clear warnings of figures like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Benjamin Franklin and Dwight Eisenhower, that America is heading in the opposite direction of its founding principles?

    Is it possible that the openly failing inflation, recessionary, domestic and foreign polices listed above are more than just a list of stupid mistakes, but indicators of a set-up for something more sinister?

    Are our markets, economies, currencies and individual freedoms being sacrificed to the altar of order, control, safety and security?

    Is DC creating an intentional class of American lords and serfs, in which the former hand out stimulus checks to prevent the later from reaching for pitch forks?

    As we learned in the Europe of the 1930’s or the lockdowns of the 2020’s, fear (be it viral, militant or economic) is a potent tool of control—it turns revolutionary anger into malleable subservience.

    Just a thought.

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 08/11/2022 – 23:00

  • Hurricane-Stoking La Nina To Persist Through Peak Season
    Hurricane-Stoking La Nina To Persist Through Peak Season

    As peak hurricane season is underway, the odds of La Nina sticking around for at least a few months are rising, potentially leading to more hurricanes and tropical storms. 

    According to the US Climate Prediction Center’s latest data, there’s an 80% chance of cool waters across the equatorial Pacific Ocean through October. Last month the agency estimated 62% odds of La Nina for the same period, a noticeable increase over the previous month. 

    The weather phenomenon known as La Nina helps to fuel tropical development by cutting down on the amount of wind shear across the western Atlantic. High wind shear can disorganize the structure of tropical systems by weakening them or destroying them.

    We pointed out earlier this month that the first two months of hurricane season have been relatively quiet, but that is all expected to change as peak hurricane season has arrived. 

    Increased tropical storm activity usually begins in August and lasts through early October. 

    The concern with entering the most active part of hurricane season, plus a possible boost in the severity of storms due to lingering La Nina, is that more areas of the US are prone to possible landfall. 

    The National Hurrican Center has identified one disturbance in the Atlantic, though formation odds in the next 48% hours are extremely low. 

    And here’s what La Nina means for the weather conditions across the country this fall. 

    Another problem is if a hurricane or tropical storm were to make landfall on US soil and damage infrastructure, a critical supply shortage of transformers, distribution lines, and poles could prolong power outages. Then there’s the risk of a tropical system slamming into the Gulf Coast of the US, where major oil/gas refinery operations exist — any disruption due to storm-related damage could reverse the steepest declines in fuel prices since GFC. 

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 08/11/2022 – 22:40

  • It's Not Hypocrisy, You're Just Powerless
    It’s Not Hypocrisy, You’re Just Powerless

    Authored by N.S. Lyons via The Upheaval (emphasis ours),

    Hello Friend,

    I saw your post on the interweb the other day about that nasty thing Team A did, even though they always completely lose their collective mind with moralistic outrage if Team B (which I understand is your team) even thoughtcrimes about doing something similar. In fact Team A seems to blatantly do things all the time that no one on Team B could ever get away with doing without being universally condemned as the absolute worst sort of immoral criminal/being openly threatened with mob violence/losing their livelihood/having their assets frozen/being rounded up by the state and shipped to a black site somewhere for some extended TLC.

    Maybe the latest thing was breaking some very important public health rules, or pillaging and burning down government buildings for fun, or mean tweets, or polluting the planet with a private jet, or using allegedly neutral public institutions against political opponents, or just engaging in a little tax-dodging or corruption while doing, like, a ton of blow in a hotel room with some capital city hookers – I forget the specifics. In fact I forget what country you’re even living in now days.

    But I did see that slick video you posted on how just pointing out “imagine if someone on Team B did this!” is all it takes to blow the lid off this glaring hypocrisy, thus totally destroying Team A with facts and logic. I’ve noticed you posting a lot of things like this, which is nice, since they are very witty and produce a pleasant buzz of smug superiority, even though this feeling never lasts very long.

    However, I suddenly realized that you may not be in on the joke, so to speak, so I figured I’d write this short PSA to help explain what “hypocrisy” in politics actually is, just in case you didn’t know and had been fooled into seriously trying to benefit Team B with your comparative memes.

    You see, it’s possible you are under the misapprehension that you are not supposed to notice what you described as the “double-standard” in acceptable behavior between Team A and Team B. And that you think if you point out this double-standard, you are foiling the other team’s plot and holding them accountable. This might be because, in your mind, you are still in high school debate club, where if you finger your opponent for having violated the evenly-applied rules a neutral arbiter of acceptable behavior will recognize this unfairness and penalize them with demerits.

    Except in reality you are not holding Team A accountable, and in fact are notably never able to hold them accountable for anything at all. Even though Team A gets to hold you accountable for everything and anything whenever they want. This is because unfortunately there is no neutral arbiter listening to your whining. In fact, currently the only arbiter is Team A, because Team A has consolidated all the power to decide the rules, and to enforce or not enforce those rules as they see fit.

    As some dead American white male once said, “The essence of Government is power; and power, lodged as it must be in human hands, will ever be liable to abuse.” And if you remember there once being a more equal, neutral standard for both teams in the past, that probably wasn’t because either team was nicer back then, or was more constrained by some higher power within or above the system – there was just a more equal balance of power between them, and therefore they could both hold each other accountable by punishing the other if it strayed too far from “the rules” written down on a scrap of paper somewhere.

    Today, however, Team A is not operating on remotely the same level as Team B. And your biggest misunderstanding may be that you think Team A doesn’t want Team B to recognize this fact and point it out for the whole world to see. Yes there is a separate-and-not-equal standard for Team A, and this is no accident. Yes there are two different tiers of acceptable behavior; two tiers of justice; two tiers of citizen.

    In fact, there is no “Team A” or “Team B,” only Class A and Class B.

    And Class A really wants everyone, especially Class B, to understand this, because they think Class B seriously needs to get the message and accept its place in the order of things. Class B is on the bottom, where it belongs. Class A is on top, and a more lenient standard is a privilege reserved for them, by virtue of their natural moral/educational/economic/aesthetic superiority and consequent rightful dominance. If Class B does not enjoy this discipline, they should strive to clean up their dirty, stupid, wicked ways and someday become part of Class A.

    Friend, you are not in high school debate club anymore. You are a peasant in feudal Japan, and every day the Samurai get to denigrate, abuse, and rough up your kind as much as they want. But if you ever talk back to a samurai, let alone try to do a little roughing up of your own, you will be beheaded on the spot. And far from being punished for this, the samurai who does it will be praised for doing his duty, since uppity peasants are dangerous and immoral and need to be dealt with at once, before they threaten the established social hierarchy. That samurai is just protecting democracy the Shogunate. Pointing out the hierarchy of the social order as a peasant will be met only with a nod of approval: “yes, that is how it is, it’s good that now you finally understand.”

    “Hypocrisy,” I hope you now see, is simply a display of power, so the more blatant it is the better. Hypocrisy is a concrete demonstration of living without having to fear consequences. And Class A loves it when Class B notices this and whines about it, because complaining about hypocrisy is just another way of saying “Class A is higher status than me,” and “I am the loser.” That’s the joke.

    Much like the Great Khan, Class A has decided the greatest happiness in life is to crush its class enemies, see them driven before it, and hear the lamentations of their pundits.

    Fundamentally, Class A believes the purpose of power is to reward its friends and punish its enemies. Which is what it does. That way it can keep its enemies down at the same time as it attracts more friends by offering great perks for class membership. And as a controversial Arab thought-leader once said: everyone prefers a strong horse to a weak horse.

    If you, Class B serf, do not enjoy this arrangement, your lamentations about hypocrisy will not change it, no matter how loud and shrill. Only taking back control of the levers of power and then using that power to strike the fear of accountability into the hearts of your ruling class will ever be able to do that.

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 08/11/2022 – 22:20

  • Trump 'Shattering' All Fundraising Records After FBI Mar-a-Lago Raid
    Trump ‘Shattering’ All Fundraising Records After FBI Mar-a-Lago Raid

    Authored by Jack Phillips via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

    Former President Donald Trump shattered fundraising efforts following the FBI Mar-a-Lago raid, according to his son Eric.

    “Breaking: DonaldJTrump.com is shattering all fundraising records and I’m told has raised more money in the past 24 hours than ever before in recent history! The American people are [angry]!” Eric Trump wrote on Truth Social.

    Former U.S. President Donald Trump applauds upon arrival at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) at the Hilton Anatole in Dallas, Texas, on Aug. 6, 2022. (Brandon Bell/Getty Images)

    The former president’s second-oldest son did not say how much was raised in the past two days.

    After Trump confirmed the raid occurred at his Palm Beach, Florida, on Monday, he has sent out numerous emails and text messages that include links to donate.

    Trump and other top Republicans say the FBI and Department of Justice are acting in a blatantly political manner, with members of Congress promising investigations. Further, they’ve accused the Biden administration of weaponizing federal law enforcement to harm Trump’s and Republicans’ chances during the midterm elections, which are only about 90 days away.

    “They are trying to stop the Republican Party and me once more,” Trump said in a fundraising email Tuesday, which was seen by The Epoch Times. “The lawlessness, political persecution, and Witch Hunt, must be exposed and stopped.”

    Trump on Tuesday also released a political ad describing the United States as a “nation in decline” and makes reference to what is described as numerous failures on behalf of the Biden administration including the fall of Afghanistan, inflation, high energy prices, and more.

    “We are a nation that allowed Russia to devastate a country, Ukraine, killing hundreds of thousands of people, and it will only get worse,” Trump says in the clip. “We are a nation that has weaponized its law enforcement against the opposing political party like never before.”

    More Details

    Both the Justice Department and FBI have declined to comment or even confirm the raid to numerous news outlets. The Epoch Times has contacted the two agencies for comment.

    Secret Service personnel are seen in front of the home of former President Donald Trump at Mar-A-Lago in Palm Beach, Fla. on August 8, 2022. The FBI raided the home reportedly to retrieve classified White House documents. (Eva Marie Uzcategui/Getty Images)

    Stark images of FBI agents holding rifles during the Mar-a-Lago raid have since been uploaded online as Trump spokeswoman Christina Bobb confirmed about two dozen agents descended on the property Monday. She told news outlets that Trump’s team members were denied the ability to watch the agents, who took boxes of documents.

    On Truth Social Wednesday, Trump warned that the FBI may have planted evidence.

    Read more here…

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 08/11/2022 – 21:40

  • Flying Taxi Company Doubles DoD Deal For eVTOLs
    Flying Taxi Company Doubles DoD Deal For eVTOLs

    Bloomberg reported that Californian venture-backed aerospace company Joby Aviation doubled the size of its US Defense Department (DoD) contract to produce electric-powered, vertical takeoff and landing vehicles, or eVTOLs, for the military. 

    The new agreement was announced Wednesday and had more than doubled the size of the prior contract from a $30 million value to $75 million, including eVTOLs for the US Marine Corps.

    “Continued momentum with government customers has always been an important part of how we go to market,” said Joby Executive Chairman Paul Sciarra. 

    Sciarra said additional military users testing eVTOLs would allow Joby to improve manufacturing, flight operations, and other functions before a public taxi service is launched in 2024. 

    “As we work toward our goal of launching a passenger ridesharing service, we’re grateful for the support of our defense partners. This extension provides valuable support for our ongoing development efforts and allows our partners to see first-hand the potential for this aircraft in their future concept of operations,” JoeBen Bevirt, founder and CEO of Joby, stated in a corporate press release. 

    Joby has already tested eVTOLs with the Air Force for two years. The aircraft can transport four passengers at speeds up to 200 mph and fly 150 miles on a single charge.  

    Sciarra said that the Army and Navy had labeled eVTOLs as a “critical area of interest,” though both services aren’t part of the expanded contract. 

    DoD doesn’t expect to mount Hellfire or Sidewinder missiles on the eVTOLs. Instead, the aircraft will be primarily for military logistics, such as transporting supplies and medical emergencies.  

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 08/11/2022 – 21:20

  • Did Lockdowns Turn Americans Into Lazy Bums?
    Did Lockdowns Turn Americans Into Lazy Bums?

    Authored by Jeffrey A. Tucker via Brownstone Institute,

    It looks as if we can add another line to the long list of lockdown harms. Sloth. 

    This explains so much actually. For months, we’ve been watching working/population ratios and labor participation rates and have been stunned by how they both continue to plummet. We search for explanations. Early retirement. Women driven out due to childcare shortages. Unemployment payments. 

    All these factors contribute but there is still more to explain. 

    In the midst of the astonishing hullabaloo over the raid of Donald Trump’s home – and the confiscation of a pro-freedom Republican Congressman’s smartphone – the Bureau of Labor Statistics dropped a remarkable report on labor productivity. Here we see something we’ve never seen before. 

    It’s low and falling. Lower than it has been than in the entire postwar period. It breaks all records. This chart is from 1948 to the present. It adjusts for all factors including participation, population, retirement, and so on. It only looks at hours over output. Here is what we see. 

    What does this mean?

    The immediate response might be that Americans have gotten lazy. They got used to their Zoom lifestyles and pretending to work. They want to hang around on apps, Tweet, chat it up with their friends on Facebook or Slack, and otherwise fake out the boss who can’t fire them anyway for fear of lawsuits. They aren’t doing much anymore, at least not those in high-end employment in professional office suits. 

    I resisted that conclusion and looked more deeply into how this number is calculated. It looks at total economic output compared to the number of labor hours from wage and salary employees involved in making that output. The result is a figure that estimates productivity per hour. And yes, it is probably widely inaccurate as these sorts of macroeconomic magnitudes tend to be. We use them anyway because they are consistently inaccurate: the same method used to calculate in one quarter is used to calculate in all. It thereby becomes useful. 

    And what it reveals is probably what we might expect. American workers have dealt with lockdowns and shutdowns, plus vaccine mandate demoralization, plus inflation eating away at real wages, plus an existing or impending recession, and you have the result. A nation of goof-offs. 

    It might be more than that. Lockdowns kicked off a national substance-abuse crisis: liquor, drugs, weed, you name it. And depression too. Even today, one cannot help but notice the smell of weed in large cities. This is not the smell of ambition and productivity. 

    We can combine this with the sheer number of people who have left the workforce completely and you paint a grim picture. 

    Economist and Brownstone Senior Fellow David Stockman has an interesting take on this. Rather than just fire people outright, companies are keeping unproductive employees on the payroll just in case. He writes:

    Today’s Q2 productivity report…came in at -4.7%, on top of the -7.7% decline posted in Q1. Together they amount to the worst back-to-back productivity declines ever reported.

    Our point is that this development puts a whole new angle on the so-called “strong” labor market. To wit, owing to the labor market turmoil and disruptions of the Covid-Lockdowns and massive stimmy injections since 2020, employers are apparently hiring on a just-in-case basis like rarely before. This is otherwise known as top-of-the-cycle labor hoarding.

    As shown below, since Q4 2021 economic output, which is a close derivative of real GDP, has shrunk by –1.2%. By contrast, the US nonfarm payroll has increased by 2.77 million jobs or nearly +2.0%.

    Needless to say, with far more labor spread over contracting output, labor productivity took it on the chin. That is to say, bad Washington policies including $6 trillion of stimmies, massive money-pumping and the brutal Lockdowns of the Virus Patrol have apparently left employers dazed and confused.

    At length, however, employers will wake-up to the fact that bloated payrolls against declining sales will result in a severe profit margin squeeze. Then the labor-shedding and layoffs will commence big time, even as the Keynesians in the Eccles Building are reduced to babbling about the “strong” labor market which suddenly vanished.

    What he is getting at is what I’ve called (after Keynes) the coming euthanasia of the overclass. It won’t be the people actually doing real stuff who will face layoffs but the Zoom workers who stayed home because government said they could and their employers could not object. Employees gradually discovered that they could be anywhere – at the pool, in bed, on the road, climbing mountains – and so long as they had a Slack app running, no one could tell. 

    Lockdowns acculturated an entire generation to believe that work is fake, productivity is a ruse, money comes for nothing, the boss is an idiot, and many workers are privileged to be wealthy forever due to papers handed out for $200,000 by colleges and universities. Who needs productivity, much less ambition? 

    In the old days, in an ethos formed from bourgeois experience over hundreds of years, the idea of working and doing one’s part was ingrained as a moral habit, part of the liturgy of life itself. When the government told everyone to stop in the name of virus control, something went haywire in people’s brains. If governments say that the work ethic amounts to nothing but pathogenic spread, and we can all contribute more by staying home and doing less, it’s hard to go back. It wrecked a generation. We are paying the price now. 

    The good news for the productive few is that this means higher wages and job opportunities galore, especially if you have actual skill and a desire to work. The bad news for everyone else is that many companies will soon discover that you are useless. That’s when the unemployment numbers will start ticking up, making this recession look more like ones in the past except for the relentless decline in real wages. 

    To answer the question about whether Americans have become lazy bums, the answer is many but not all. It’s sector specific. And individual specific. 

    Strange times. Sad times. 

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 08/11/2022 – 21:00

  • Like In Taiwan, US Is "Main Instigator" Of Ukraine Crisis, China Says
    Like In Taiwan, US Is “Main Instigator” Of Ukraine Crisis, China Says

    In the wake of Nancy Pelosi’s Taiwan visit this month, which sparked more than a week of Chinese military ‘live fire’ drills surrounding and threatening the self-ruled island, Beijing has grown bolder in its rhetoric on the war in Ukraine.

    In Wednesday remarks China’s ambassador to Moscow, Zhang Hanhui, told Russian media that it is fundamentally the United States which started the crisis in Ukraine. He named the US as the “main instigator” of the conflict in an interview with TASS. 

    “As the initiator and main instigator of the Ukrainian crisis, Washington, while imposing unprecedented comprehensive sanctions on Russia, continues to supply arms and military equipment to Ukraine,” Zhang was quoted as saying.

    Chinese Ambassador to Russia Zhang Hanhui. Image: Xinhua

    “Their ultimate goal is to exhaust and crush Russia with a protracted war and the cudgel of sanctions,” he added.

    The provocative accusation comes months after the Biden administration first charged that Beijing was helping the Kremlin evade Western sanctions, and was even quietly supplying its military – allegations which were never backed by evidence. 

    Interestingly the Chinese ambassador drew on Taiwan parallels, where Beijing has also denounced the expansion of Washington influence and ‘illegal’ intervention via weapons shipments and high level Congressional delegations to Taipei which violate the One China principle:

    He railed against U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit last week to self-governing Taiwan, which China claims as its own, and said the United States was trying to apply the same tactics in Ukraine and Taiwan to “revive a Cold War mentality, contain China and Russia, and provoke major power rivalry and confrontation”.

    “Non-intervention in internal affairs is the most fundamental principle of maintaining peace and stability in our world,” Zhang said, applying the principle to criticize Washington’s Taiwan policy but not Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

    On Sino-Russian relations, Zhang stressed that the two powerful countries had entered “the best period in history, characterised by the highest level of mutual trust, the highest degree of interaction, and the greatest strategic importance”.

    Zhang’s commentary on the ongoing Ukraine war is in line with the perspective of Russian state media, which has recently emphasized that US coup planners were behind the 2014 overthrow of Russia-backed Viktor Yanukovych, and further exacerbated a proxy war for the Donbas along the border. 

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 08/11/2022 – 20:40

  • The Inflation Reduction Act Deserves Our Condemnation
    The Inflation Reduction Act Deserves Our Condemnation

    Authored by Bruce Wilds via Advancing Time blog,

    Anyone pleased about the type of legislation Washington has come to see as normal does not understand what it means to be responsible.

    Huge bills containing hundreds or even thousands of pages of print where the devil in the details can be hidden from the minions are far too common. Bills joining and including several unrelated issues seldom make sense. It seems more like a wish list of things that would never get through the process on their own suddenly become more reasonable when coupled with other unimpressive ideas. Most of the large spending bills being passed in Washington deserve our condemnation.

    Mainstream Media Hails The Victory!

    While the news put out by mainstream media is busy saluting Biden and the Democrats for passing the latest “groundbreaking and historic” monstrosity they mention but fail to highlight the fact it was totally partisan. Not one Republican Senator voted for it. In short, this implies it is the type of legislation that only half the country or voters would support.

    Its supporters claim this bill aims to curb inflation by reducing the deficit, lowering prescription drug prices, and investing in domestic energy production while promoting clean energy solutions. Sadly, the cost for this monster is also skewed and not evenly shouldered by all. Not only is there some dispute as to who will get stuck paying for it when all is said and done, but do not be surprised if it cost more than planned and is far less effective at meeting its goals than promised. 

    Even the name of this legislation has drawn criticism for being misleading. The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 is not so much about reducing inflation as it is about, other things. Some people are calling it a landmark climate, health care, and tax package. In truth, it does a lot of things at great cost that many Americans don’t necessarily agree with. The Senate Democrats put out a one-page summary of the bill touting all the support it received. If it was overwhelmingly supported, why did it not get one Republican vote in the Senate?

    The Democrats Are Thrilled

    As for actual inflation reduction, the Tax Foundation estimates that the Inflation Reduction Act would reduce long-run economic output by about 0.1 percent and eliminate about 30,000 full-time equivalent jobs in the United States. It would also reduce average after-tax incomes for taxpayers over the long run. In fact, the Tax Foundation claims this bill may actually worsen inflation by constraining the productive capacity of the economy.

    One glaring problem is that it pushes Americans into electric cars whether they want them or not. The biggest issue with this is the whole premise that electric cars will solve the world’s environmental problems may be fundamentally flawed. A great deal could be done to improve the MPG we get on gasoline-fueled vehicles and the way we use them. Regardless of what many voters think, through subsidies, it seems those in charge are hellbent on pushing electric vehicles down consumers’ throats under the idea it is for the greater good.

    The idea Washington will utilize this law to bargain down prescription prices for all Americans is also hogwash. This legislation simply caps seniors’ out-of-pocket prescription drug expenses to $2,000 per year, and in four years will enable Medicare to negotiate the prices on 10 medications. As for all those people in America with diabetes, the final version of this bill that was passed by the Senate caps insulin prices at $35 a month for Medicare patients only.

    Those unimpressed with how Obamacare has performed will be annoyed to find this legislation also pushes back for three years the massive increase in Obamacare premiums that were set to move higher in January. This means the enhanced federal tax credits to save millions of people an average of $800 a year on health insurance premiums on the Affordable Care Act will remain in effect. This highlights the fact this does not reduce inflation it merely kicks the can down the road by masking the true cost of services by transferring wealth to subsidize their cost.

    This Is The Reality We Face

    This bill is another case of a slight majority shaping society and  transferring wealth through subsidies and edicts from high. The best thing about The Inflation Reduction Act is that its creators cannot praise it as being passed with broad bipartisan support. Again, I point to the fact not one Senate Republican voted for this 430 billion dollar bill. In some ways, its passage personifies Washington at its worse.  

    The icing on the cake for many taxpayers that already feel their freedom is slipping away as they wither under thousands upon thousands of archaic tax laws. The bill will also give $80 billion to the IRS to expand its audit capabilities, as well as a bevy of technology upgrades. The big issue is while Democrats hail the passage of this bill as a big win it is in all honestly, no way to run a country.

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 08/11/2022 – 20:20

  • Kim Jong Un Was 'Seriously Ill' With COVID, Blames S.Korea For Sending Tainted Objects Across Border
    Kim Jong Un Was ‘Seriously Ill’ With COVID, Blames S.Korea For Sending Tainted Objects Across Border

    In a rare public admission, North Korea’s government has confirmed that dictator Kim Jong Un became seriously ill during a recent Covid-19 outbreak in the country, though without specifically naming the virus.

    In Thursday statements by his sister Kim Yo Jong, it was revealed he had a “high fever” but as she described it, continued to work out of greater concern for the people amid the outbreak. Bloomberg writes of the statement from KCNA: 

    Still, she added in a quivering voice that her brother “could not lie down for even a moment because of his concerns for the people,” with state TV showing audience members in tears as she delivered her remarks. She didn’t say whether the elder Kim was among what North Korea calls “fever cases” or specify the date of his illness.

    Via The Independent

    Kim has emerged apparently healthy after spending most of last month away from public appearances, and was recently seen at a public event declaring “victory” in the “great quarantine war.” Pyongyang says it has at this point defeated the virus, which was slow to emerge in the country likely due to its extreme isolation.

    Kim Yo Jong in her address took the opportunity to lash out further at South Korea, which Pyongyang blames for spreading the outbreak, bizarrely charging that the south’s propaganda leaflets which routinely come across the border carried the virus in.

    According to more of her statements via Bloomberg: 

    Repeating dubious claims that the pamphlets caused the recent Covid outbreak in the north, Kim Yo Jong blamed “South Korean puppets” for sending “dirty objects” across the border in leaflets carried by balloons, the official Korean Central News Agency reported Thursday.

    The revelation of her brother’s illness marked an unusual admission for a regime that rarely comments on the leader’s health — and then only to show that he shares the struggles of the people.

    In a May speech she had warned Seoul directly, saying “If the enemy continues to do such a dangerous thing that can introduce virus into our republic, we will respond by eradicating not only the virus but also the South Korean authorities.”

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    While North Korean authorities have acknowledged hundreds of thousands of what it has called “fever cases” over the last months, it hasn’t specifically name it as Covid per se – perhaps in part as the country lacks enough testing kits, and also has consistently rejected foreign Covid vaccines. 

    Kim Jong Un, who is a smoker and has in prior years been overweight, is subject of frequent speculation about his health, given also he’s recently gone through rapid weight loss. It’s widely perceived that if anything were to happen to him that power would immediately be in the hands of his influential sister, who over the past half-decade has consistently been seen by his side.

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 08/11/2022 – 20:00

  • DOJ Charges Iranian Over Alleged Plot To Assassinate John Bolton
    DOJ Charges Iranian Over Alleged Plot To Assassinate John Bolton

    Authored by Kenny Stancil via Common Dreams,

    The United States Department of Justice has charged an Iranian citizen who it says is a member of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps with attempting to hire an assassin to murder John Bolton, an ex-national security adviser in the Trump administration, multiple outlets reported Wednesday.

    According to the Justice Department, Shahram Poursafi, also known as Mehdi Rezayi, offered to pay unnamed individuals $300,000 in November 2021 to “eliminate” Bolton in Washington, D.C. or Maryland.

    LightRocket via Getty Images

    Federal officials said the assassination of Bolton would have been in retaliation for the U.S. military’s January 2020 drone strike killing of Qasem Soleimani—a top commander in the IRGC, which is a branch of Iran’s military—in Iraq.

    “Poursafi is alleged to have said that after Bolton was killed, there would be another job, for which the hitman would be paid $1 million,” The Guardian reported. “The person offered the money became an FBI confidential informant, and continued to exchange texts on an encrypted communications app with Poursafi.” The 45-year-old suspect, who the DOJ believes tried to orchestrate the plot from Tehran, remains at large abroad.

    “If found and convicted, he would face up to 10 years’ imprisonment and a fine of up to $250,000 for the use of interstate commerce facilities in the commission of murder-for-hire, and up to 15 years’ imprisonment and a fine of up to $250,000 for providing and attempting to provide material support to a transnational murder plot,” the Washington Post reported.

    As The Guardian noted:

    Bolton was no longer national security adviser when the drone strike against Soleimani was carried out as the Iranian general was visiting Baghdad on January 3, 2020, but he is a longtime advocate of military action against Iran and a staunch opponent of the 2015 multilateral nuclear deal with Tehran. Secret Service cars have been reported to have been parked across the road from Bolton’s house in the Washington area at least since early 2022.

    In the immediate wake of Soleimani’s assassination, Bolton tweeted, “Hope this is the first step to regime change in Tehran.” Bolton, who admitted on CNN last month that he has “helped plan coups d’état” in foreign countries, served as a national security adviser to former President Donald Trump for 17 months, resigning in 2019 over reported disagreements about whether to lift some sanctions against Iran as a negotiating tactic.

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    “Bolton, who did not want the sanctions lifted, was a main architect of the Trump administration’s ‘maximum pressure’ campaign of escalating economic sanctions and threats of retaliation for Iran’s alleged support of terrorism,” the Post noted. “The idea was to cripple Iran’s economy to the point that its leaders felt they must bargain away any nuclear ambitions and missile technology.”

    News of the FBI’s search for Poursafi comes just two days after negotiators in Vienna said they’re close to reviving the Iran nuclear accord that the Trump administration, with no small part played by Bolton, unilaterally tanked.

    Before his stint in the Trump White House, Bolton, whom critics have called a “bloodthirsty warmonger,” was a major cheerleader for the 2003 invasion of Iraq. He served in senior arms control roles and eventually became ambassador to the United Nations under President George W. Bush. Between the Bush and Trump presidencies, Bolton spent time working at right-wing think tanks, a private equity firm, and as a Fox News contributor.

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 08/11/2022 – 19:40

  • "Be Willing To Use Deadly Force": IRS Sparks Uproar Over Job Posting
    “Be Willing To Use Deadly Force”: IRS Sparks Uproar Over Job Posting

    Only two things in life are certain – death and taxes, and the IRS can take care of both.

    As the agency prepares to add 87,000 new positions over 10 years, pending the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act that will give the agency $80 billion (half of which will be earmarked to help crack down on tax evasion), an online job posting for “Criminal Investigation Special Agents” has sparked outrage over a “key requirement” that applicants be “legally allowed to carry a firearm.”

    “Major duties” of the job include “Carry a firearm and be willing to use deadly force, if necessary,” and “Be willing and able to participate in arrests, execution of search warrants, and other dangerous assignments.”

    While Democrats say the IRS’s enhanced collections will raise an additional $124 billion in federal revenue from tax cheats over the next decade, Republicans warn that an army of IRS agents will do nothing but harass small business owners and lower-income workers. According to an analysis by House Republicans, Americans earning less than 75,000 per year will receive 60% of the additional tax audits.

    The analysis, which is a conservative estimate based upon recent audit rates and tax filing data, shows that individuals with an annual income of $75,000 or less would be subject to 710,863 additional IRS audits, while those making more than $1 million would receive 52,295 more audits under the bill.

    Overall, the IRS would conduct more than 1.2 million more annual audits of Americans’ tax returns, according to the analysis. Another 236,685 of the estimated additional audits would target individuals with an annual income between $75,000 and $200,000.

    Democrats insist Americans making less than $400,000 will not be targeted by agents hired due to the spending bill. -NY Post

    IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig, however, insists that “audit rates” won’t increase relative to recent years. 

    In a related piece of legislation reported by the Epoch Times, Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) introduced a bill last month which would bar the IRS from acquiring ammunition. Known as the “Disarm the IRS Act,” the bill (pdf) stipulates that the IRS is “prohibited from acquiring ammunition” and “notwithstanding any other provision of law.” Reps. Marjorie Taylor Green (R-Ga.), Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.), and Jeff Duncan (R-S.C.) are co-sponsors of the measure, according to his office.

    It came after Gaetz, in interviews with Fox News and other outlets, expressed concern after he discovered that the IRS purchased more than $700,000 in ammunition over a span of several days days. The congressman suggested that it’s part of a broader White House plan to disarm Americans.

    “Here’s the Biden plan: Disarm Americans, open the border, empty the prisons–but rest assured, they’ll still collect your taxes, and they need $725,000 worth of ammunition, apparently, to get the job done,” he told Fox News last week.

    The bill, he said, would put a “total moratorium on the IRS buying ammo. When we used to talk about the IRS being weaponized, we were talking about political discrimination, not actual weapons for the IRS.”

    “Undeniably, part of the strategy is that with one hand, the Biden regime is doing everything they can to suppress access to ammunition for regular Americans, while with the other hand, they are scooping up all the ammo that they can possibly find,” Gaetz alleged.

    5 Million Rounds

    According to a report released by the Government Accountability Office in 2018, the IRS has been stockpiling ammunition and weapons for years. As of 2018, the agency had 4,487 firearms and 5,062,006 rounds of ammunition in its inventory, the report said.

    A 2018 report from Forbes noted that the IRS buys guns and ammunition for its Criminal Investigation Division. Agents in that division are the only employees in the IRS that carry firearms, according to its website.

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    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 08/11/2022 – 19:20

  • Michigan Town Votes To Defund Library Over Books With Graphic Sexual Content
    Michigan Town Votes To Defund Library Over Books With Graphic Sexual Content

    Authored by Bill Pan via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

    Residents of a town in western Michigan have overwhelmingly voted to not renew a property tax millage that has helped fund their public library following a battle over LGBT-themed books with explicit illustrations.

    A file image of a school library. (John Moore/Getty Images)

    More than 60 percent of Jamestown Township voters voted “no” on Aug. 2 to a 10-year millage renewal and a tax increase for the local library. Roughly 3,000 people, representing a third of the township’s population, participated in the election.

    The bulk of the library’s $245,000 annual budget comes from the now-defeated millage, which means that the Patmos Library will run out of money in early 2023, according to library board President Larry Walton. It also means that residents won’t have their property taxes raised by $24.

    Walton told Bridge Michigan that he “wasn’t expecting” the battle over graphic LGBT-themed books to end the way it did, saying it was “very disappointing” for people to be “short-sighted” in closing the library over those materials.

    “We’re all for the library. I use it,” Jamestown resident Sarah Johnson told the media outlet after voting to defund the library. “We want to make a statement that we want some say in the books.”

    According to Bridge Michigan, a parent complained earlier this year about the library’s inclusion of Maia Kobabe’s “Gender Queer: A Memoir.” The book depicts a variety of sexual acts, including the self-described nonbinary author’s sexual experiences. When asked to take “Gender Queer” out of circulation, the library board instead put it behind the counter so that children wouldn’t be able to access it.

    Jamestown residents also reportedly took issue with some other titles, including “Spinning,” a graphic novel about a teenage lesbian skater, and “Kiss Number 8,” a graphic novel with similar homosexual themes. Despite popular demand for their removal, the board insisted on keeping those books in the young adult section.

    Patmos Library officials couldn’t be reached for comment.

    Nathan Triplett, president of the Michigan chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), praised Patmos for refusing to “give in to the demand” of the people whose tax dollars support the library’s operation.

    “It’s a credit to the staff and board leadership of the Patmos Library that they have steadfastly refused to give in to demand that they purge their collection of LGBTQ materials. We need more of that courage and resolve today,” Triplett wrote on Twitter, in response to a post by the national ACLU regarding what it called “censorship” in school and public libraries.

    Progressive activists have decried “censorship” when concerned parents seek transparency in what their children are being exposed to and challenge sexually explicit books in classrooms or libraries.

    Read more here…

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 08/11/2022 – 19:00

  • A Defense Sector Tailwind Helped By US-China Tensions Isn't Immune To Supply Chain Hangups
    A Defense Sector Tailwind Helped By US-China Tensions Isn’t Immune To Supply Chain Hangups

    “It’s all a god damn fake, man. It’s like Lenin said: you look for the person who will benefit, and, uh, uh, you know…” – The Dude, The Big Lebowski

    When looking for those who will benefit from rising tensions between the U.S. and China, look no further than defense contractors like Lockheed, Boeing and Raytheon. They will continued to stand to benefit…that is, assuming they can get the parts they need to manufacture. 

    According to a new report from Nikkei, the firms are scrambling to try and meet demand from a slew of new orders that are arising due to the heightened tensions.

    For example, Japan purchased 150 air-to-air missiles that can be loaded on its F-35 fighters from Raytheon Technologies, the report notes. The deal totalled $293 million. 

    Singapore bought laser-guided bombs and other munitions from the U.S. for $630 million on the very same day, the report notes.

    Australia was also given the approval to buy 80 air-to-surface missiles from Lockheed Martin just days prior. That deal totaled $235 million, the report says.

    Finally, South Korea is spending $130 million on 31 lightweight torpedoes to use with its MH-60R helicopters, the report says.

    The Defense Security Cooperation Agency, which oversees foreign military sales, has had a “busy few months”, facilitating 44 deals that included an $8.4 billion potential sale of F-35’s to Germany. 

    And like everyone else in the world, these orders have been mired in supply chain hell. Lockheed, Raytheon, Boeing, Northrop Grumman and General Dynamics have all discussed that they are having difficulty securing both parts and labor during their most recent respective earnings calls. 

    China could (purposefully or incidentally) wind up adding complexities to the supply chain drama, should they move to infringe further on Taiwan. 

    Bradley Martin, director of the RAND National Security Supply Chain Institute, told Nikkei: “When disruptions don’t occur, this practice benefits producers and consumers alike. When they do occur, whether the reason is a pandemic or a natural disaster or an international conflict, there’s wide impact, sometimes in unexpected ways.”

    “The Pacific is on higher alert because of the statements and actions of China recently, not to mention North Korea. The value of deterrence has never been greater,” he added. 

    And while Lockheed’s sales were lower than expected last quarter, the blame has been place on supply chain challenges. In fact, the firm lowered its 2022 outlook to reflect such challenges. 

    Brian West, Boeing’s chief financial officer, had similar concerns: “We continue to experience real constraints.”

    “To stabilize production and support our supply chain, we’re increasing our on-site presence at suppliers, creating teams of experts to address industrywide shortages, utilizing internal fabrication for search capacity and managing inventory safety stock levels,” he continued. 

    Gregory Hayes, the chairman and CEO of Raytheon, followed suit: “We’re seeing lead times double and sometimes triple.”

    Kathy Warden, CEO of Northrop, concluded, noting that the recent events could act as a tailwind for defense going forward: “We’ve seen a fundamental shift in global commitment of resources for defense and national security, particularly in Europe.”

    “The geopolitical environment has highlighted an increased requirement for defense and deterrent. In the U.S., this has also resulted in strong bipartisan support for defense spending.” 

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 08/11/2022 – 18:40

  • Outgoing Whole Foods CEO: "I Feel Like Socialists Are Taking Over"
    Outgoing Whole Foods CEO: “I Feel Like Socialists Are Taking Over”

    Authored by Nick Gillespie via Reason (emphasis ours),

    “My concern is that I feel like socialists are taking over,” Whole Foods CEO John Mackey tells me on today’s show. “They’re marching through the institutions. They’re…taking over education. It looks like they’ve taken over a lot of the corporations. It looks like they’ve taken over the military. And it’s just continuing. You know, I’m a capitalist at heart, and I believe in liberty and capitalism. Those are my twin values. And I feel like, you know, with the way freedom of speech is today, the movement on gun control, a lot of the liberties that I’ve taken for granted most of my life, I think, are under threat.”

    If you’re as old as I am (I just turned 59), you will remember how dreary food shopping was before Whole Foods exploded the concept since it came on the scene in 1978. When I was a kid, you were lucky to find two or three types of potatoes in the produce aisle, one type of eggplant, maybe a green bell pepper, and a sad jalapeno or two (jalapenos were almost always sold pickled and in cans). Even in big cities, you had to roam around all over town to find oddball spices that you can now pick up in 7-11s and gas station convenience stores. 

    At the end of August, Mackey, born in 1953, is retiring from Whole Foods. Throughout his career, John has developed and evangelized for what he calls “conscious capitalism,” or businesses that seek to “create financial, intellectual, social, cultural, emotional, spiritual, physical, and ecological wealth for all of their stakeholders.” That may sound a bit hippy-dippy to you, but John is one of the most hardcore capitalists I’ve ever met, yet also an incredibly spiritual and thoughtful guy who wants to help all of us live better, more interesting lives.

    That comes through loud and clear in his epic 2005 debate with Nobel laureate Milton Freidman and former Cypress Semiconductor CEO T.J. Rodgers about rethinking the social responsibility of business. “I believe that the enlightened corporation should try to create value for all of its constituencies,” wrote John. “From an investor’s perspective, the purpose of the business is to maximize profits. But that’s not the purpose for other stakeholders—for customers, employees, suppliers, and the community. Each of those groups will define the purpose of the business in terms of its own needs and desires, and each perspective is valid and legitimate.” In many profound ways, John’s vision is now widely accepted, partly because he’s speaking to a post-industrial world that is rich enough that more and more of us are starting to bump our snouts further up Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Even in the developing world, more and more of us are trying to figure out how we can flourish rather than just subsist.

    I caught up with John at FreedomFest, the annual gathering in Las Vegas, and we talked about his time at Whole Foods, how his company did an exceptional job of staying open and serving people during COVID, what he thought about the government’s response to the pandemic, and a whole lot more. We also, of course, talked about what he’s going to do once he’s retired.

    In terms of business ventures, he’s planning to open a series of wellness centers and cafes. Of greater interest to me, John said that he felt muzzled in his position as CEO of Whole Foods. For many reasons, he says he couldn’t speak his mind on various issues, especially what he sees as a dangerous drift toward more and more control of everyday life, commerce, and speech. That all changes in September, he said, and we should expect him to be even more outspoken in his celebration of capitalism, which he considers the greatest anti-poverty program ever created, and many other issues.

    * * * 

    Previous Reason interviews with John Mackey:

    “Can ‘Conscious Capitalism’ Make Business a Heroic Enterprise? John Mackey Is Betting Yes: Podcast,” August 14, 2018

    “John Mackey’s Merger Made in Heaven,” July 1, 2018

    “‘They’re More Conscious and More Awake than My Generation Was,'” March 31, 2018

    “Whole Foods’ John Mackey on Amazon Merger: ‘A Meeting of the Souls,'” March 30, 2018

    “Whole Foods’ John Mackey on Veganism, Gary Johnson, and How Regulation Is Stunting Innovation,” August 16, 2016

    “Whole Foods’ John Mackey: Why Intellectuals Hate Capitalism,” August 12, 2015

    “John Mackey on Whole Foods, Conscious Capitalism, and Life Beyond the Profit Motive,” March 21, 2013

    “Whole Foods CEO John Mackey on the Moral Case for Capitalism,” August 10, 2012

    “Whole Foods Health Care,” December 15, 2009

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 08/11/2022 – 18:20

  • Manhattan Rents Hit New Record High As Peak Season Could Lead To Cooling In Fall
    Manhattan Rents Hit New Record High As Peak Season Could Lead To Cooling In Fall

    Manhattan apartment rents jumped again in July into uncharted territory as a combination of low supply, soaring interest rates, and increasing demand suggests leasing activity will stay strong through summer. 

    Let’s revisit our housing note from mid-April, “Not A Peak” – Manhattan Apartment Rents Hit Another Record High that correctly pointed out how prices would soar this summer. 

    Bloomberg reported, citing new data from appraiser Miller Samuel Inc. and brokerage Douglas Elliman Real Estate, that the median rent on new leases last month was a whopping $4,150, up 2.5% from June and 29% from a year earlier.  

    Median rents have smashed records in the past six months, even as listing inventory increased by 3.7% from June. The vacancy rate rose above 2% for the first time in seven months to 2.08%. Even as supply returns, about 20% of all new leases signed in the borough involved bidding wars, with some renters locking in contracts 13% over the asking price in July. 

    “New York apartment costs began rising more than a year ago as the city, and Manhattan, in particular, rebounded from the depths of the pandemic. July’s prices were stoked by a pullback in homebuying and typical renting patterns that always make the summer an expensive time of year for Manhattan renters,” Bloomberg said. 

    Jonathan Miller, president of Miller Samuel, said elevated mortgage rates push more people into rental markets during the peak rental season. He expects rent prices to reach another record high this month before possibly topping in fall when seasonal demand plateaus.

    Even though both headline and core CPI inflation were softer than expected in July, Shelter costs continued to rise (+0.5% MoM). On the year, the shelter index rose 5.7%. 

    And there is some good news. As we recently outlined, Apartment List data shows CPI shelter data should peak sometime in September or October. 

    If you’re in the market for a new rental, perhaps wait until the fall when cooling should begin to get a better deal. 

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 08/11/2022 – 18:00

  • Sorry White House, Gasoline Prices Are About To Surge: Here's Why
    Sorry White House, Gasoline Prices Are About To Surge: Here’s Why

    There was celebration in the White House overnight when the AAA reported that the average retail gasoline prices fell below $4 a gallon to the lowest level since early March.

    It wasn’t just the Biden admin (which eagerly awaits the plunge in gas prices to translate in sharply higher approval ratings) however, which was enthused by the drop in gasoline: so was the broader market, expecting this drop in gas prices would allow the Fed to ease its tightening pace and accelerate the stock market bounce.

    Alas, the recent drop in gas prices is unlikely to last, and not just because after dropping to pre-Ukraine war levels, oil has resumed its move higher, with Brent just shy of $100 and expected to move briskly higher…

    …  now that fears of collapsing gasoline demand have been shelved.

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    The more actionable reason why gas prices – especially in the tri-state area – are set to move much higher, is because the wholesale cost of gasoline in New York surged more than 40% against futures after regional supplies sank to the lowest level in a decade, raising the risk of shortages.

    Reminding market watchers just how vast the chasm between financial and physical commodities has become, gasoline stockpiles in the central East Coast region are at the lowest absolute level since November 2012, the EIA reported yesterday. Seasonally, supplies are near an all-time low in records going back to 1993…

    … and as a result, the premium for New York gasoline on the spot market, jumped by 10 cents Wednesday. Only San Francisco has more expensive wholesale gasoline.

    Stockpiles have slumped as a result of tighter supply amid a rebound in demand, a drop in European gasoline imports and continued cargo diversions away from the region. This offset production efforts from East Coast refiners – all of them in the Central Atlantic region – which operated at 100.4% of nameplate capacity last week, the highest on record.

    But so what? A New York shortage will hardly crippled the rest of the country? Well, not so fast: as Bloomberg notes, low gasoline supplies in region can have an outsized global impact because New York Harbor is home to physical deliveries of futures contracts that underpin trade flows around the world. A fuel tanker moving from India to Brazil, for example, is likely priced against the New York futures benchmark. So shortages in this key region that cause prices to spike would also impact prices elsewhere.

    Meanwhile, gas station fuel sales have been rising over the past few weeks, according to data from price reporting agency Opis and retail tracker Gasbuddy. The implied demand figure from the EIA has been far more volatile than usual in recent weeks (and prompted allegations of manipulation by the Biden DOE), but the latest weekly jump should help further bolster retail volumes.

    Commenting on the recent absurd gasoline demand reports, Rabobank’s Michael Every wrote the following:

    You could hear the champagne corks fly wherever you were yesterday. After all, there was “zero US inflation” in July, as some put it. And that came after zero US recession, as some also put it, despite two consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth. And after a red-hot labour market report. And EIA energy data showing gasoline usage apparently well below 2020 levels despite all this non-recession and jobs boom, and even as refineries are working at incredibly high capacity levels, diesel stocks are low, and exports are also down. These are all numbers/claims worthy of champagne. Yet they make little sense taken together.

    And speaking of diesel, supply there remains dire as well, with seasonal distillates stockpiles languishing at the lowest level ever since March in records going back to 1993. The tightness will start to be felt when the weather turns in two months. The US northeast is the only region in the country where the majority of home and commercial heating comes from burning fuel, and while it won’t be hit as hard as Europe where a monthly electricity bill will hit 4 digits, it will still be hit very hard.

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 08/11/2022 – 17:40

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