- EU Threatens To Sue After Germany Questions Legality Of ECB Bond Buying Program
EU Threatens To Sue After Germany Questions Legality Of ECB Bond Buying Program
Germany and the EU are in the midst of an escalating legal struggle that could wreak havoc for the Eurozone.
The struggle came to a head on Sunday when the EU threatened to sue Germany after the country’s top court questioned the ECB’s bond buying program. The program was approved by a 15 judge EU panel in December 2018.
The question is one of which court holds the power: under EU treaties, the EU Court of Justice should rank higher. That was the court that cleared the central bank’s bond purchases, which have totaled $2.9 trillion since 2015. But German judges said the country could “deviate because the bloc’s top judges overstepped their powers when they backed the ECB’s policy in a previous ruling,” according to Bloomberg.
Naturally, this drew criticism from European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, who commented on Sunday: “The final word on EU law is always spoken by the European court. Nowhere else.”
In a case where a member country doesn’t follow its rules, the EU issues a warning and then moves to file a court case. But having such a powerful nation defy the EU leaves the commission in a tough spot.
Miguel Maduro, a former advocate general at the EU Court of Justice, said: “The commission cannot simply ignore this challenge to EU law. Otherwise, such national challenges might be replicated by other states. What would the commission do if the Hungarian constitutional court or the Polish constitutional court, or others, do something like this.”
It would almost be like they were actual countries again…
“Making this statement that they’re considering opening an infringement procedure without actually opening it is a smart, prudent approach,” Maduro said.
In the event that the EU does sue, it would be heard by the EU’s top court – the same ones that Germany is currently having a dispute with.
Meanwhile, ECB President Christine Lagarde has said that the central bank doesn’t plan on taking action and argued that the ECB is not under the purview of the EU Court of Justice, but rather is accountable to European Parliament.
Germany’s hand remains to be seen. The country’s court, which is held in high favor by its citizens, has championed civil liberties and has high approval rates. Bloomberg even speculated that Chancellor Angela Merkel may want to lose the case on purpose, so Germany’s leaders could still say it protected Germany’s constitution, while ultimately caving to the EU.
Germany has repeatedly challenged the ECB’s bond buying program and Eurozone bailouts.
Soon, we predict, other countries could follow suit. The jig for the EU appears to be close to up. Central Banks could be next…
Tyler Durden
Wed, 05/13/2020 – 02:45 - Who Controls The British Government Response To COVID-19, Part 2
Who Controls The British Government Response To COVID-19, Part 2
Authored by Vanessa Beeley via Off-Guardian.org,
“To achieve world government, it is necessary to remove from the minds of men their individualism, loyalty to family tradition, national patriotism, and religious dogmas.”
– Dr George Brock Chisholm, who served as the first Director-General of the World Health Organisation (WHO) from 1948 to 1953
In Part One of Who controls the British Government response to Covid–19?, I began an investigation into the individuals and entities that are, effectively, driving the UK Government response to Covid–19.
In Part Two, I will expand upon the Big Pharma and Artificial Intelligence (AI) links already identified and will introduce new connections that appear to have considerable bearing upon the UK Government’s Covid–19 strategy. I will expand upon the Bill Gates connections to the various organisations that are advocating global immunisation.
The UK Government chief medical adviser and Chief Medical Officer for England, Chris Whitty, is saying that a return to “normal” in the short-term is “wholly unrealistic”. Whitty is telling us that the “highly disruptive” social distancing policy will be in place “for really quite a long period of time”.
“Highly disruptive” is a euphemism for the devastation of the world economy and the horrifying knock-on effect — an estimated 50% of the world workforce are at risk of losing their livelihood.
April 16th headline in Business Insider. Chris Whitty with UK Health Secretary, Matt Hancock.
The UK Government has been promoting the concept of “immunity passports” as a means of loosening the draconian lockdown measures. It is very possible that facial recognition technology may dictate who can exit lockdown and return to work. To get a passport, individuals must upload an image of their face to the app along with their ID (passport or driving licence).
They are then tested to ascertain if they have had the virus and developed immunity. The app will then generate a QR code, which the employer will use to verify ID and immunity before allowing the employee back to work.
Onfido’s track and trace app, under serious consideration by the government
The UK health service’s innovation agency NHSx has called for businesses and technology experts to submit their ideas for providing immunity passports. Companies currently making proposals to the UK Government include Onfido, Yoti, IDnow, OCL, and iDenfy.
These UK Government “track and trace” plans still face various obstacles — including the questionable accuracy of some of the antibody tests — but the spectre of increased surveillance and government control over the workforce, and many other aspects of civil liberty, looms undeniably on the horizon.
As I pointed out in Part One, it is no coincidence that the Oxford University start-up, Microsoft-funded facial recognition firm Onfido “has recently raised $100 million (now $200m) to boost its ID technology” to enable the creation of immunity passports.
According to an interview with Onfido’s CEO, Husayn Kassai, the firm had previously offered a service that “automates background checks on prospective employees before they are accepted for work”; it would appear that immunity passports are a logical extension to what is, effectively, private sector spying on the workforce.
A more recent article proclaims: “Onfido in talks with government about systems to help Britons return to work”.
Onfido, already at “pilot stage” in other countries, is claiming that its proposals could be executed within months and that the “health certificate through app technology” is “gaining traction”. Onfido claims this technology could be the linchpin of the new “normality” and key to stimulating the economy — as backed by Bill Gates/Microsoft and undeniably in lock-step with ID2020’s manifesto.
Many analysts have highlighted the danger of ID2020 being introduced under cover of the Covid–19 “crisis”:
We may indeed be just at the beginning of the implementation of ID2020 — which includes forced vaccination, population reduction and total digital control of everybody, on the way to One World Order; and global financial hegemony — Full Spectrum Dominance, as the PNAC (Plan for a New American Century) likes to call it.
Peter KoenigTHE TEAM BEHIND THE UK GOVERNMENT COVID–19 RESPONSE
[click to enlarge]
My focus in Part One was largely on the role of Imperial College and Prof. Neil Ferguson in “modelling” the virus infection trajectory and influencing the UK Government response, as he has done previously, with a 100% failure rate on the accuracy of his virtual predictions.
My focus in Part Two is to put the spotlight on other members of the UK Government advisory committee and to reveal their connections to Big Pharma and the for-profit sector linked to the Covid–19 response.
NEIL FERGUSON DEFENDS LOCKDOWN POLICY WHILE CONVENIENTLY FORGETTING THE FAILURE RECORD OF HIS “MODEL”
In a recent interview, Neil Ferguson defended his Covid–19 predictions, which now appear to have been greatly exaggerated.
Ferguson reinforced the message that Britons [emphasis added]:
cannot go completely back to normal, until we have a vaccine there will be a degree of social distancing in place.”
Ferguson also confirmed the UK Government’s track-and-trace policy [emphasis added]:
Longer-term social distancing will be required, not at the levels we have today, if we have contact tracing in place.”
With numbers not adding up to Ferguson’s alarmist projections, the subsequent lockdown of the economy, and now the UK Government’s potential roll-out of mandatory vaccinations and biometric surveillance of the workforce, we could be forgiven for suspecting that the overarching agenda was always the increased surveillance and control of the majority of the population.
FERGUSON H1N1 CASE STUDY — PATRICK VALLANCE — GLAXOSMITHKLINE
At this point, I would like to go back in time to 2009 and Ferguson/Imperial College’s analysis of swine flu, H1N1: they claimed this virus would take the lives of 65,000 people in the UK. In the end, 457 people died from the virus.
In response to the threat of swine flu, Big Pharma giant GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) developed the Pandemrix vaccine, with disastrous consequences.
An alleged sixty patients who suffered brain damage as a result of the vaccine were allocated £60 million in compensation by the UK Government. Most of the victims were children.
As one report has it:
It was subsequently revealed that the vaccine, Pandemrix, can cause narcolepsy and cataplexy in about one in 16,000 people, and many more are expected to come forward with the symptoms.”
A later British Medical Journal (BMJ) report deemed that GSK and health authorities had failed to warn the public of the vaccine’s alarming “safety signal”.
The vaccine was developed by GSK and patented in September 2006. Pandemrix contained a flu strain recommended by the WHO. After reports of brain damage began to emerge, the WHO revised their advice to urge “restricted use” for people under the age of 20. Pandemrix is no longer licensed for use, but at the time, the Gordon Brown-led Labour government had granted GSK indemnity. Details of that agreement have never been made public.
From 2012 to March 2018, Sir Patrick Vallance was president of research and development at GSK. He went directly from GSK to his post as the UK Government chief scientific adviser.
While Vallance and the UK Government are favouring AstraZeneca — in partnership with Oxford University — to fast-track vaccine development, GSK is also in the race.
GSK is working in collaboration with the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI), “aimed at helping the global effort to develop a vaccine” for Covid–19.
The UK Government has invested £50 million in CEPI to support the rapid vaccine and immunoprophylactic development against “unknown pathogens” (also referred to as Disease X). Bill Gates was one of the original and most influential sponsors of CEPI; more details later in this article.
So, the UK Government appears to favour AstraZeneca, but Vallance and the government also appear to be subtly supporting Vallance’s former employer, GSK, despite their Pandemrix fiasco.
While Vallance was in charge of research and development at GSK, collaboration with the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation was increased. In 2013, a new partnership between GSK and the Gates Foundation was announced: to “accelerate research into vaccines for global health needs”.
What we start to see here is the very definition of a revolving-door policy between philanthrocapitalism, Big Pharma and government agencies, all effectively working in lock-step to promote the global immunisation agenda, with massive projected profit for the Big Pharma complex and in particular for the members closely associated with Gates, the WHO, UNICEF, and world governments, as already discussed in Part One.
SCIENTISTS, EPIDEMIOLOGISTS AND ANALYSTS ARE NOT SPEAKING AS ONE VOICE ON COVID–19
Going back to the Ferguson interview I mentioned earlier, my observation is that Ferguson was ill at ease, appearing to defend a script rather than opening up the discussion to include other models and expert opinions that vehemently disagree with his assessment.
Eminent epidemiologist and bio-statistician Prof. Knut Wittkowski has been an outspoken critic of lockdown and social distancing from the outset. In a recent interview, Perspectives on the Pandemic, he spoke about the Ferguson model:
It does not make any sense. I have no clue [what inspired Ferguson to make his estimates]. I don’t like to engage in conspiracy theories, so, if you have a model that give results that contradict everything else, then you contact your colleagues, you say, ‘Send me your model, let me try it, let us compare what we have, where are we in agreement and what is it that makes my model different from yours?’. This is how science works. We all make mistakes — but we don’t present the results without first double-checking.
Even Dr Anthony Fauci, Ferguson’s counterpart in the US, has also cast doubt on the efficacy of these models to determine government response to any given virus:
I’ve never seen a model of the diseases I’ve dealt with where the worst case actually came out […] they always overshoot.
The fact that Ferguson ploughs on regardless — and without any reference to his appalling record and disastrous consequences for the British public — suggests that he functions largely as an outreach agent for actors with vested interests who are exploiting him to keep the Government on track with their own profit-driven Covid–19 campaigns.
THE BIG PHARMA MONOPOLY DICTATING THE “NEW NORMAL” IN GLOBAL HEALTHCARE
Who are CEPI? CEPI is the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations. CEPI was launched at Davos in 2017 by the governments of Norway and India, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the British-based Wellcome Trust global health “charity”, and the World Economic Forum.
CEPI is described as an “innovative partnership between public, private, philanthropic and civil organisations”, to which I would add governments: the coalition has received investment from the governments of Germany, Japan, Australia, the UK, Belgium and Canada. Their primary role in relation to Covid–19 is the “development of platforms that can be used for rapid vaccine development against unknown pathogens” (2018).
Historian and author Prof. Michel Chossudovsky is convinced that CEPI is “seeking a monopoly role in the vaccination business, the objective of which is a global vaccine project”.
As I have previously reported, CEPI is key to the success of the Gates “vaccine decade” project, which reaches its conclusion in 2020 — coinciding with the outbreak of Covid–19. CEPI brings together the main players in biotechnology, Big Pharma and associated global health charities, governmental agencies, and university R&D to drive us towards global immunisation.
CEPI’s euphemistically named “wider community” is represented by five non-voting members or observers; these include the World Bank, which is the principal financial institution holding CEPI funds, and a representative from the WHO.
Every governing body or complex that is promoting global immunisation registers the same entities as influencers and sponsors. Again and again, the conflict of interest question must be raised in relation to the Covid–19 response.
Just as Sir Patrick Vallance was linked to GSK, so Chris Whitty, the UK Government’s Chief Medical Advisor, was on the interim board of CEPI until the permanent board was announced in 2018. Should we be surprised that the UK Government has invested £50 million in CEPI while being advised by Whitty?
Whitty with Matt Hancock. “The expert we need in the coronavirus crisis.”
Whitty also received Gates funding in 2008: $40m for malaria research in Africa. The fact that Whitty was involved in the kick-start of CEPI, Gates’ immunisation monopoly project, should therefore not come as a huge surprise.
CEPI AND IMPERIAL COLLEGE PARTNERSHIP
Ferguson’s model was generated under the auspices of the Vaccine Modelling Impact Consortium, hosted by Imperial College — both effectively funded by Bill Gates and Britain’s Wellcome Trust (primarily).
In December 2018, CEPI went into partnership with Imperial College, London.
CEPI provided funding of US$8.4 million for Imperial College to work on a vaccine platform that can be used to “rapidly develop vaccines against pathogens — even unknown ones”.
The platform was appropriately named RapidVac and was focused on producing vaccines for H1N1, rabies and Marburg virus as “proof of concept”. The next step would be to develop vaccines rapidly in responses to “new and unknown pathogens, known as ‘Disease X’”.
So, one year before the Covid–19 outbreak, Imperial College was working on a vaccine for “Disease X”.
An Imperial College statement claimed that the partnership of CEPI and IC aimed to develop vaccines “against new and unknown pathogens within 16 weeks from identification of antigen to product release for trials” (emphasis added).
This is an extraordinary claim, when vaccines have a typical R&D gestation period of up to fifteen years before being safely approved for public consumption. In addition, we must also always consider that there is a very strong argument against the use of vaccines altogether; perhaps a subject for another article.
DEVELOPMENT OF COVID–19 VACCINES
The genome sequence of Covid–19 was published online in mid-January and researchers reportedly sprang into action. The global quest for a vaccine excompasses some ten to fifteen serious programmes. CEPI is reportedly funding six of these programmes: CureVac, Inovio Pharmaceuticals, Moderna, and the Universities of Oxford, Imperial College and Queensland in Australia. We can also now add GSK to the list of participants partnered with the UK Government-assisted CEPI.
GAVI AND CEPI PARTNERSHIP, DECEMBER 2018
In Part One, I discussed GAVI, the self-proclaimed vaccine alliance. GAVI was established twenty years ago and incorporates the members of the Gates Foundation “Global Health Leaders Launch Decade of Vaccines Collaboration” consortium: those include, once again, the WHO, the World Bank, UNICEF and governments.
The UK Government is GAVI’s top sponsor. In turn, GAVI sponsors the VIMC, where Ferguson models his response to Covid–19 — hosted by Imperial College.
In December 2018, the same month that CEPI went into partnership with Imperial College, the board of GAVI approved a proposal for the Kingdom of Norway to support CEPI through a bond scheme backed by a new Norwegian “pledge to the International Finance Facility for Immunisation” (IFFIm).
Utilising the bond scheme, Norway funded CEPI to the sum of US$58.1 million. Gates-funded, Gates-established GAVI was the broker for this sponsorship deal, which funnelled money to the Gates-funded, Gates-established CEPI.
Other sponsors are clearly involved, but I am just making the point of the revolving-door policy in relation to these consortiums that bring together private, public and global health sectors to further vaccine promotion globally. As Gavi’s website proudly states, the alliance now vaccinates almost half of the world’s children.
The UK Government blurring the lines between private and public sector when it comes to vaccines
UK Column infograph — from the news programme.
The UK Government not only funds Gates-generated projects indirectly through CEPI and GAVI; there is also a direct collaboration that is off the radar of most reporting on the government’s response to Covid–19. If you enter the search term “Bill Gates” as an implementing partner into the UKAID development tracker, a number of vaccine-related projects are revealed.
This week, the Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, co-hosted the virtual Coronavirus Global Response International Pledging Conference — to “drive forward the global race for coronavirus vaccines, treatments and tests” (emphasis added).
According to information published, the UK has already provided £744 million of UKAID for the global response to Covid–19. That includes £388 million in support for new vaccines, tests and treatments. The UK has pledged £250 million to CEPI (the biggest contribution of any country).
£40 million has gone to support rapid development of Covid–19 treatments; £23 million to develop rapid tests for the virus; and £75 million to the WHO critical health systems response. The UK has also pledged the equivalent of £330 million per year for five years to GAVI, the self-proclaimed vaccine alliance.
The UK Government is effectively focusing on the market sector it has most heavily invested in — global immunisation — at a time when the British domestic economy is being forced to its knees by the government response to Covid–19.
Perhaps at this stage, one might still argue that the UK Government has the welfare of its citizens at the forefront of its agenda; but delving a little deeper makes it much harder to draw that conclusion.
THE UK VACCINE NETWORK
Not only was Chris Whitty previously sponsored by Bill Gates and on the interim board of CEPI; he now chairs the UK Vaccine Network (UK VN). The UK VN brings together “industry, academia and relevant funding bodies to make targeted investments in specific vaccines and vaccine technology for infectious diseases with the potential to cause an epidemic”.
The UK Vaccine Network provides funding for vaccine development programmes. Projects supported by the DHSC through the UK Vaccine Network are listed here.
One of the projects from the DHSC funding document.
Under Chris Whitty’s administration — Whitty is co-lead for the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) — the NIHR and UK Research and Innovation are giving another £20 million to CEPI for Covid–19 vaccine development. This is in addition to the £50 million already given by the UK Government to CEPI.
“IT’S HUMANITY VERSUS THE VIRUS” FOLLOWS WORLD IMMUNISATION WEEK (APRIL 26TH–30TH)
The timing of Boris Johnson’s “humanity versus virus” conference is unlikely to be coincidental, following as it does hot on the heels of World Immunisation Week.
A WHO advertisement for vaccines featured at the World Immunisation Week.
A document produced by Public Health England (PHE) provides a greater insight into how hard the UK Government is promoting vaccines during the Covid–19 “crisis”. The 2020 theme is “Vaccines work for all” — coinciding with the last year of the Gates “vaccine decade” of the 2010s.
Hashtags like #CarryOnVaccinating are being deployed, and the “vaccines work for all” campaign will focus on “how vaccines — and the people who develop, deliver and receive them — are heroes by working to protect the health of everyone, everywhere”.
The WHO has designated 2020 the International Year of the Nurse and the Midwife. Why? Because of those professions’ “crucial role as early vaccine champions for new parents and parents-to-be and life course vaccination, making sure older adults have their routine protection”. What a clever way to harness the genuinely dedicated nursing staff to promote vaccines to a huge market sector.
The outsourcing of vaccine promotion continues. There are social media memes prepared earlier that can be uploaded and shared to Facebook, Instagram and Twitter by an unsuspecting public, who will thus advertise global immunity for free.
The language of the report is sinister in its behavioural nudging: “Last year, WHO declared vaccine hesitancy among the top ten threats to global health”.
A civilian population in lockdown — desperate to stimulate the economy, to return to work and to avoid being infected with “Pandemic 1” — will be easily gaslighted by such a lexicon into accepting anything that will address the concerns that have been imprinted into their subconscious.
The document details the need to “counter the infodemic”, i.e. expert opinion that does not comply with the Big Pharma/WHO diktats:
If you are looking for information about vaccines, be sure to consult trusted and credible sources, like your health worker, local health authorities, health institutions like NHS.UK, Public Health England, WHO or the members of the Vaccine Safety Net.
We are, of course, already seeing this infodemic warfare in action: the YouTube CEO recently announced that YouTube would remove any video deemed to be in contravention of advice being given by the WHO. A recent statement from the Secretary-General of the UN, Antonio Guterres, reinforces the WHO recommendations.
Guterres condemns what he claims to be “a dangerous epidemic of misinformation”. Journalist and researcher Michael Swifte described the vaccine agenda as follows:
The loving embrace of a vaccine administered by the biggest public-private partnership in history. This is what the Secretary General of the UN is promoting.
The Keep Calm meme taken from the PHE document.
Reading through this PHE document is a veritable exercise in Behavioural Insights methodology: again, no coincidence, when one considers British expertise in “nudging” the public towards any given pre-determined agendas or decisions that benefit the ruling classes. This excellent article at UK Column provides a comprehensive analysis of the role played in the Covid–19 response by Behavioural Insights.
PUBLIC HEALTH ENGLAND — WHO ARE THEY, AND HOW ARE THEY LINKED TO PORTON BIOPHARMA?
According to one report, PHE exists to “protect and improve the nation’s health and wellbeing, and reduce health inequalities”. PHE is an “operationally autonomous executive agency, sponsored by the Department for Health and Social Care (DHSC)”.
In June 2018, PHE transferred its drug development to a new state-owned company, Porton Biopharma Ltd (PBL), which is wholly owned by Her Majesty’s Secretary of State for Health (currently Matt Hancock).
Perhaps unsurprisingly, PBL has the only UK-licensed anthrax vaccine among its portfolio. We are told that “the future success and revenue growth of PBL will provide PHE with an income dividend which will be ploughed back into the delivery of its priorities”. Once again, we see the revolving door between government agencies and private, for-profit sectors with a focus on vaccines.
MATT HANCOCK AND UK GOVERNMENT COMMERCIAL INTERESTS IN COVID–19
The Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, Matt Hancock, is also owner of Porton Biopharma during his tenure; but that is not the only tie that Hancock appears to have to for-profit entities that stand to benefit from Covid–19 response strategies.
A recent report in the Byline Times detailed “highly controversial contracts” which will enable British ministers and senior health officials to “mine confidential data from tens of thousands of Covid–19 hospital patients”.
These contracts have allegedly been awarded to technology companies “without being put out to competitive tender, NHS has disclosed”. Microsoft is included in those companies; that is, Bill Gates is present.
BABYLON HEALTH — THE NHS IS NOT FOR SALE (!)
Matt Hancock accused of breaking ministerial code by endorsing a private healthcare company.
Both Hancock and Dominic Cummings, chief adviser to the Prime Minister, have questionable ties to Babylon Health, a prominent health tech firm implementing AI. Cummings held an undisclosed consultancy job at this healthcare venture: a firm endorsed by the government and at the top of the list to receive a National Health Service (NHS) Fund cash injection of £250 million.
According to an article in The Bureau Investigates, during 2018, Cummings “advised Babylon Health on its communications strategy and senior recruitment just months before its GP at Hand app was publicly backed by Matt Hancock.”
Jonathan Ashworth, the shadow health secretary (British opposition spokesman on health), condemned the Cummings/Hancock
The links between Dominic Cummings in the heart of Downing Street, the health secretary and this AI health firm are increasingly murky and highly irresponsible.
In case anyone is in doubt over Hancock’s enthusiasm for the Babylon GP at Hand app, it is highly advisable to read this article published at the British Medical Journal (BMJ), written by Rachel Clark, a doctor specialising in palliative medicine:
Matt Hancock loves Babylon so much he doesn’t merely use its smartphone app, GP at Hand, he gushes enthusiasm for the product at every opportunity. First, at Expo, he name-checked Babylon, among others, as one of the “world’s best HealthTech companies.”
Then he gave a speech eulogising the company while literally standing beneath its logos inside its London HQ. Then in comments to The Telegraph he declared a breathless vision for the “revolutionary” app to be “available for all”.
And, last week he featured in a double-page, Babylon-sponsored puff piece in the Evening Standard entitled “Technology can be a great fixer for the NHS.”
Its centrepiece was an interview proclaiming Hancock’s ringing endorsement of Babylon: he declared GP at Hand to be “a force for good within the NHS”.
Although this detail may appear to be an excursus away from the involvement of the UK Government Covid–19 health advisory board in the promotion of global vaccine programmes, it serves as a further demonstration of the blurring of lines between commercial interests and the welfare of citizens.
This relationship is highlighted in legendary journalist John Pilger’s latest documentary The Dirty War on the NHS, a film I cannot recommend highly enough for its stark portrayal of the stealth privatisation of the NHS.
Babylon Health was founded by former Goldman Sachs banker Ali Parsa, who also co-founded and acted as CEO of a private healthcare company, Circle — the first private business to operate an NHS hospital. That hospital was Hinchingbrooke, which proved to be a disastrous enterprise.
BABYLON AND BILL GATES
Yes, Bill Gates has a connection to Babylon, too. In March 2020, Babylon’s Rwanda-focused virtual care subsidiary, Babyl, signed a ten-year partnership with the Rwandan government giving every citizen over the age of 12 access to digital health consultations.
The project is heavily subsidised by the Rwandan government and the Bill Gates Foundation and promises (!) to “make health care affordable” for even the poorest communities. Again, we must ask to what degree these apps are serving as surveillance instruments for government agencies.
The alleged war criminal and President of Rwanda, Paul Kagame, and Bill Gates proclaim: “Every vaccine is a shot of adrenaline into the heart of the African economy.”
Cue the Babylon Covid–19 Care Assistant app. The app provides a four step care programme to subscribers: information, symptom checker and live chat with healthcare experts, a care plan, and video consultation with a healthcare professional.
We are informed:
“The app is free to download. Using the service is free in Birmingham and London through the NHS. However, users located elsewhere will have to sign up for pay-as-you-go or annual subscriptions to the service. Annual plans start from £149. One-off consultations can cost as much as £49 each time.”
CUMMINGS AND HANCOCK — TAG TEAM THAT PUSHED FOR LOCKDOWN WHILE PROMOTING VACCINES
Dominic Cummings (Image: Radical Larry 1 / CC BY-SA 4.0)
Cummings is accused of pressuring Boris Johnson’s advisers to adopt a draconian lockdown policy to combat Covid–19. If this is true, it must raise the question, yet again, of how much the UK Government’s policy is influenced by genuine medical expert opinion and how much by commercial, Big Pharma, interests and agendas — interests and agendas which are demonstrably also those of the UK Government.
Certainly, members of the scientific advisory committee “were shocked, concerned and worried for the impartiality of advice” after Cummings effectively gatecrashed the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergency (SAGE) meetings.
Just this week, Hancock warned that there has been “no greater demonstration in modern history” of a need for a vaccine.
Previously, in September 2019, Hancock had stated that the government was looking seriously at mandatory vaccines for state school pupils. Falling vaccination rates for children in the UK prompted Hancock to consider prohibiting self-determination among parents who do not agree with vaccination regimes.
The fact that Cummings used his influence to politicise the SAGE meetings, and that Hancock is not averse to using his influence to promote private sector businesses with links to the NHS, should alert us to the possibility that both individuals are exploiting Covid–19 to further the aims of those whom they are connected to and potentially profit from.
Bill Gates takes pride of place at the heart of the advisory network that has introduced and maintained lockdown in the UK — a lockdown not to be relaxed “until a vaccine is available”.
COVID–19 IS PUSHING US TOWARDS GLOBAL HEALTH FASCISM
One of the questions I get asked the most these days is when the world will be able to go back to the way things were in December before the coronavirus pandemic. My answer is always the same: when we have an almost perfect drug to treat COVID–19, or when almost every person on the planet has been vaccinated against coronavirus.
– Bill Gates — Gates Notes
Covid–19 threatens an imminent “new normal” of global health tyranny and unprecedented government control and surveillance. The SAGE team was very likely derailed by Cummings’ political agenda and undue influence that he brought to bear upon the committee, which should have remained impartial and science-focused.
The most influential members of the UK Government advisory team have demonstrated a blatant conflict of interest through their connections to the Bill Gates empire, but the British Government itself has invested heavily in the global immunisation concept that Gates is engineering through all manner of public and private sector initiatives.
The WHO is the global health governing body and is heavily influenced and financed by Bill Gates. In January 2020, the WHO published its R&D blueprint prioritising novel Coronavirus vaccine clinical trials.
The WHO’s Working Group for Vaccine Prioritisation aimed in that blueprint to provide guidance and recommendations to vaccine developers and to identify candidates who could be considered for further development and evaluation.
The WHO is effectively a self-regulatory entity in charge of world health but with little public accountability, particularly where vaccines are concerned. The Global Advisory Committee on Vaccine Safety (GACVS) was established by the WHO in 1999 to respond to vaccine safety issues of “potential global importance”.
Bill Gates is demanding indemnity against lawsuits before he agrees to distribute vaccines. We are all being fast-tracked into a future where our medical self-determination is in serious jeopardy and where those who decide for us will, potentially, not be held accountable for any health-endangering side effects.
We have already seen the devastating consequences of mass immunisation during the H1N1 epidemic, with questionable Big Pharma transparency regarding risk, as found by those who were given a vaccination that left them brain damaged for life.
Experts in the field have warned against rushing through a Covid–19 vaccine, bearing in mind it can usually take up to fifteen years of rigorous testing prior to approval. Any attempt to compress this process must carry risks.
Dr Peter Hotez, Dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine, told Reuters:
I understand the importance of accelerating timelines for vaccines in general […] there is a risk of immune enhancement.
In 2009, Dr Wolfgang Wodarg initiated the Committee of Inquiry into the WHO’s role in H1N1 (‘swine flu’) held by the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe in Strasbourg.
In this recent interview, Wodarg describes Bill Gates as “crazy” to be attempting to shortcut research and development. Wodarg also talks about the “secret contracts” between states and Big Pharma that perhaps determine the trajectory of vaccine development.
The H1N1 vaccine travesty must serve as a warning against precipitous vaccine development motivated by lockdown cabin fever, when the lockdown itself is looking more and more likely to be orchestrated to achieve precisely this outcome.
At the same time, as the possibility of compulsory vaccination is under discussion, the government intends to roll out a surveillance apparatus that will ensure forever-control over an already politically weakened workforce pushed ever deeper into financial insecurity, first by austerity measures and now by Covid–19.
It is very important to push back against the emotional triggering that is being generated by the state-aligned media and agencies. The behavioural insight experts are working hard to nudge us towards dependency on the state — but we must not surrender our individual and collective independence.
We must determine the drivers behind this “crisis”, identify the causes, and deal with the symptoms without succumbing to fear or panic. It is not easy; but our futures depend upon our ability to see what is really going on and to respond accordingly.
Tyler Durden
Wed, 05/13/2020 – 02:00 - Pentagon Has An Obsession With This Robot Minesweeping Stealth Boat
Pentagon Has An Obsession With This Robot Minesweeping Stealth Boat
The Pentagon has agreed to allocate an additional $20.7 million in funding to AAI Corp., a unit of Textron Systems, for engineering and technical services to develop more robot stealth boats that probe for underwater mines and can attack enemy forces with its machine gun.
AAI’s stealth boat is badass, and made right here in the USA, at several production facilities on the East Coast. The deal is valued at $20,720,170 and is a modification to a previously awarded contract from 2014 for the Navy’s Unmanned Influence Sweep System (UISS) and Unmanned Surface Vehicle program.
About 70% of the vessel will be constructed at AAI’s Hunt Valley, Maryland facility, with the remaining 30% at the company’s Slidell, Louisiana plant.
UISS is the Navy’s program for “a rapid wide-area coverage mine clearance capability which are required to neutralize magnetic/acoustic influence mines,” reported Navy Recognition. The vessel also packs firepower where it can remotely engage enemy forces.
The robot vessel is designed to perform mine countermeasures and capabilities by employing mine-hunting and mine-sweeping systems and work alongside Littoral Combat Ships (LCS) and other vessels. It is small enough to launch from an LCS or another vessel.
It has high endurance and can conduct up to 20 hours of operation with countermine mine technology payload. For defensive and offensive operations, the vessel houses a machine gun that remotely fires on enemy targets.
The Pentagon awarded the contract to AAI in 2014 for the vessels with a completion date of September 2020, with a total value amount of $122.1 million. The work was pushed out one year to September 2021, with contract value increased to $142.8 to $165.2 million.
It appears to the Navy wants more and more of these robot stealth boats. It’s like Skynet on water…
Tyler Durden
Wed, 05/13/2020 – 01:00 - On The Battleground Of The Virus, The Fox Laughs Last
On The Battleground Of The Virus, The Fox Laughs Last
Authored by Alastair Crooke via The Strategic Culture Foundation,
U.S. professor of history at John Hopkins University, Mike Vlahos, in a series of short interviews with John Batchelor, tells us how Coronavirus has become a fiery pivot, pushing different leaders in the U.S. to take existential stands on how to deal with this virus. With various separate American states insisting to pursue directly polarised paths: Mandated ‘sheltering’ (the U.S. term for distancing) versus economic opening; States versus the Federal government; Blue versus Red; Dems versus GOP; ‘authoritarianism’ versus Laissez Faire and traditional American liberties – and now, internal state, Blue-Red conflicts (i.e. Ventura County versus California’s Governor, on the burning issue of open or closed beaches); and even, counties versus states.
Vlahos notes the point is that that the battleground, thanks to the virus, has turned existential. No more is Blue/Red just a crafted rhetorical flourish – It is embodied; it is of biological flesh; it cuts into flesh – even as the virus’ future is unknown. In fact, the unknown deepens fears. The choice: ‘food on the table’ in a re-opened the economy (even at the real risk of those ‘doctors of death’ returning), or to play safe, passively, with distancing. The collective psyche is split; passions are raised; weapons are flourished, and militia parade. This is not theater: Its fervor is suffused into daily life: masks or not; socialie or not; work or not.
“The U.S. constitutional order is fissuring before our eyes: That we have skirted constitutional crisis for the past quarter century, is no reassurance: [as] each new test is yet more bitterly contested, and still less resolved”, Vlahos explains:
“Today, two irreconcilable visions of American life believe that they can continue only if they own the whole order”, Vlahos argues. “Yet, ours has been a shared constitutional order … The single-minded drive toward this goal – especially now by Blue state Democrats — has embrittled our constitutional order, and is creating the basis for a full-scale legitimacy crackup”.
The Executive – initially claiming sole authority over Covid practice – has backed down, in the face of governors asserting (correctly) that they enjoy co-sovereignty with the Federal government. The Blue and the Red governors – both – are at entirely cross-purposes, yet both are exercising their respective sovereignties – flagrantly.
Trump, meanwhile, is astride both horses: He cheers on the Second Amendment libertarian rebels, whilst at the same time, putting in place a wholly authoritarian, Federalised, bail-out economy, at the apex of which he will preside – having completed his ‘coup’ through merging the Treasury and Fed together, as a single (dollar) printing press – and atop a cascading monetary cornucopia.
Today, there are two irreconcilable visions of American life. After 1992, the two parties alternated presidents every eight years. Yet, with each succeeding administration, the political milieu has grown yet more rancorous and divided. There is no relationship between parties now — save as sworn enemies, Vlahos observes.
Via Reuters On the one side, we have ‘Unionists’, who expect public deference towards the judgements and authority of the élite technocracy (whether financial or medical), and on the other, a tradition of state sovereignty, dating back to the 1871 (the Articles of Confederacy), which grant no deference towards the Federal authorities – but rather is suffused with disdain for them. Hence the culture of (often armed) militia, ready to fight ‘the Feds’ for their ‘liberties’.
This latter touches a deep skein of emotion: the ancient fight against the tentacles of the British Imperial Octopus to secure America’s ‘liberties’. Thus, lockdown, and the medical world’s dire predictions necessitating economic shut-down, smack of ‘another agenda’ (the octopus agenda) – a backdoor, by which the globalists can complete their (imagined) project to feudalize an otherwise free people. One consequence of this is that, post-virus, the lockdown and the epidemiologists will be widely blamed for the coming depression – and the risky bubbles in the economy that were already inflated before virus, will be forgotten.
Vlahos is a tad coy on whether, or how, some reconciliation of these estranged parties can come about. The New Yorker opines in a similar vein: “The pandemic has dangerously deepened divisions across America—a nation already riven in recent years by race, class, religion, and trash-talking politics. The concept of ‘one nation, indivisible’ seems ever more elusive, even unattainable, in these anxious days of deadly pathogens, soaring joblessness, and food shortages. For many, the future seems so uncertain. So does survival, a privilege taken as a virtual right by the majority of Americans courtesy of economic and medical achievements since the Second World War.”
In this context of a ‘nation fissured’, the U.S. military have issued some catchy posters, urging national unity and the wearing of face-masks. (They can be seen here). And they all crib a notably nostalgic WW2 style: “It’s a woman’s war too”; “Fight the spread of coronavirus”, and “Let’s all fight” (as a GI lunges forward, in attack mode, his gleaming bayonet fixed).
Ok, Ok, everyone today is employing the military meme. That’s not the point. Ask historian, Professor Vlahos. He will tell you the salient point is that the American Civil War never really ended, and is still there, latent, today – except …
Except … during FDR’s term in office, when America fought WW2 – that’s the point. Only then was America a unitive state: ‘one nation, undivided’. That is, when it was fighting a war. So how to reconcile America’s split psyche? How to win re-election? Well … Blame China. Hot or cold? Who knows? It’s going to be a long, fraught six months ‘til November.
At one level, the targeting of China, might be viewed as a defensive change-the-narrative ploy, when blame for any U.S. poor handling of the Coronavirus contagion inevitably will be exploited electorally. But at another level, the danger is that the White House and Pentagon seem to be pivoting towards giving substance to the rhetoric. In this election year, someone must be blamed (that is the standard practice in politics), but in so doing, we are rapidly moving in the direction of the unknown.
What we suspect is that this is likely to become a ‘war’ of system-fragilities. This is China – no small fry. Nassim Taleb makes the point that it is easy to detect system-fragility: Fragility (and its opposite) can almost always be detected, using a simple test of asymmetry: Anything that sustains itself through sudden change (or shock), is resilient; the reverse is fragile. Washington, by its own liberal market metrics, believes the Chinese economy to be extremely fragile. We know however, that China has been long preparing for just such an (expected) moment.
Will China prove the more fragile? Both have undoubted fragilities to their economies; and yet, a political system that is “fissuring before our eyes”, is that not an obvious fragility? Will a sudden ‘shock’ fragment it into parts? Or, will escalation against China bring about another FDR ‘moment’ of healing for its split psyche? China, on the other hand, enjoys a certain popular solidarity, and the experience of regimentation. The Party remains a formidable ‘machine’, reaching into all spheres of life. Are these not the signs of resilience? Many unknowns.
Via FT Europeans will have no call to be smug about these U.S. fissures – for they have their own. Did not the 2016 Presidential election prefigure today’s rise of states-sovereignty-ism in the U.S.? Did not 2016 and Brexit prefigure today’s ‘populism’ in Europe? Will the virus bring these ‘fissured’ European visions to an open assault on an EU ‘octopus’ already found wanting in the face of Covid-19?
In the U.S., the Virus has spun-off ancient, irreconcilable differences about the nature of the State and the nature of power in the wake of their civil war. European thinking, between the two world wars, fell into relativism, nihilism, and the brooding existentialism of an Albert Camus. It also witnessed massive, blood-stained, governmental intrusions into every facet of civil society – with the rise of national-socialism, Trotskyism and Stalinism. Europe consequently finds itself today immobilized with its own (apparently) irreconcilable polarities – but lacks the means to lean inwards, toward some transcending framework that might make intelligible these conflicts, and allow them to be surpassed.
The attempt to develop some impersonal philosophical standard by which to adjudicate has failed, precisely because the attempt to free ethics from history, with its stress on personal autonomy, obstructs any answer to the questions: by whose justice; by which rationality; by whose narrative are we to decide.
So the story of the Coronavirus in the West, is also the story of Nassim Taleb’s tale of that extraneous event and ‘sudden shock’, exposing our hidden fragility of presuming upon life to be both secure – and predictable. Modern Man takes himself after Prometheus: the latter is celebrated as winning Man his freedom from ‘the tyranny of the gods’. What Prometheus did however was to teach man to regard himself as autonomous; to regard nothing as sacred; to ‘strike wounds in the divine environment’; to relegate nature to a heap of raw materials; to regard technology as the highest achievement; to probe nature’s deepest secrets, and not hesitate to play with fire.
WB Yeats once said ‘God save me from thoughts men think in the mind alone. If thought were a matter of mind only, man would be a windowless monad, an ego-bound monstrosity’. Yes. Just as polar-opposites never unite at their own level, a supra-ordinate ‘third’ is always required, through which the two, artificially warring, parts to the psyche can come together in synthesis. And since Nature derives as much from the unconscious as the conscious, perhaps the unexpected intrusion from Nature, underscoring our human precarity, and the shocking reality that constitutes Life, may be able to unite the severed spheres.
Ted Hughes, the celebrated poet and student of Shakespeare, tells his own story of escape from arid intellectual anomie in academia through The Burnt Fox, in which he remembers struggling as an undergraduate at Cambridge University with a tutorial essay. Abandoning the task in despair at two in the morning, young Ted goes to bed, and dreams that he is visited by a strange figure, half-man and half-fox, ‘just now stepped out of a furnace’ and in terrible agony from the burns that cover its body from head to foot. This enigmatic creature moves towards the desk and places its paw on the sheets on which Hughes is forlornly attempting to concoct an essay, leaving a bloody print behind, and says:
‘Stop this – you are destroying us’. Hughes wakes up a sadder and a wiser man.
And with the advent of the Coronavirus, maybe the burnt fox it is who laughs last?
Tyler Durden
Wed, 05/13/2020 – 00:05 - Arkansas Prof Arrested For Concealing 'Close' Ties To China; Accused Of 'Scheme To Defraud' While Receiving Millions In Grants
Arkansas Prof Arrested For Concealing ‘Close’ Ties To China; Accused Of ‘Scheme To Defraud’ While Receiving Millions In Grants
A professor at the University of Arkansas who received millions of dollars in research grants, including $500,000 from NASA, was arrested on Friday and charged with one count of wire fraud, according to a criminal affidavit unsealed Monday.
63-year-old Simon Saw-Teong Ang is the director of the school’s High Density Electronics Center, which received funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF), Department of Energy (DOE), Department of Defense (DOD) and NASA. Since 2013, Ang has been the primary investigator or co-investigator on US government-funded grants totaling over $5 million, according to the Washington Examiner‘s Jerry Dunleavy.
According to the FBI, Ang failed to disclose that he was getting paid by a Chinese university and Chinese companies in violation of university policy. He is accused of making false statements while failing to disclose his extensive ties to China as a member of the “Thousand Talents Scholars” program.
“Ang intentionally made materially false representations to the University of Arkansas and NASA which caused with transmission to be sent and received in the form of grant applications and grant funding that he would not otherwise have been entitled to receive,” wrote FBI special agent Jonathan Willett in the affidavit.
“The complaint charges that Ang had close ties with the Chinese government and Chinese companies, and failed to disclose those ties when required to do so in order to receive grant money from NASA,” said the Justice Department. “These materially false representations to NASA and the University of Arkansas resulted in numerous wires to be sent and received that facilitated Ang’s scheme to defraud.”
The FBI was tipped off to Ang’s activities after a hard drive was turned into the university’s lost and found. In an attempt to determine who it belonged to, a staff member discovered an email exchanges between the professor and a visiting researcher from Xidian University in Xi’an China in a file conspicuously labeled “Ang_Confidential.pdf.”
In one email from September 15, 2018, Ang writes:
“Dear [RESEARCHER 1], I want you to understand that I will do my best to support your stay here in Arkansas, there are things that are becoming very difficult for me recently because of the political climate. You can search the Chiense website regarding what the US will do to Thousand Talent Scholars. Not many people here know I am one of them but if this leaks out, my job here will be in deep troubles. I have to be very careful or else I may be out of a job from this university. I hope you understand my deep concerns…Please keep this to yourself as I trust you.”
In November, the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations chaired by Sen. Rob Portman (R-OH) released a 109-page bipartisan report which concluded that foreign nations “seek to exploit America’s openness to advance their own national interests,” the most ambitious of which “has been China,” according to the Examiner. According to the report, Chinese academics involved in their so-called ‘Thousand Talents’ program have been exploiting access to US research labs.
Ang applied for and was awarded a NASA grant for a November 2016 proposal titled “500° Celsius Capable Weather-Resistant Electronics Packaging for Extreme Environment Exploration.” The government funding was worth $512,904 between 2017 and 2020, and he got it despite NASA’s “China Funding Restriction.” The NASA contracting officer overseeing the $500,000 grant said it never would have been awarded to Ang if they had known about his vast China connections. –Washington Examiner
According to the FBI, Ang did disclose his participation in the “Thousand Talents Scholars” in 2014, but not his participation in other programs from 2012 – 2018, which the FBI suggested demonstrated ‘his intent to execute a scheme do defraud the University of Arkansas and NASA” since he “obviously knew about the requirement to disclosure such conflicts of interest and deliberately kept all such conflicts of interest” from them.
In addition to his participation in the Thousand Talents program, Ang concealed his role at Binzhou Maotong Electronic Technology Company from 2011 – 2018 while acting as their principal investigator for a research project concerning hydrogen fuel cell research. He also failed to mention that he was the CTO at Binzhou Gande Electronic Technology from 2011 – 2018, as well as his stake in Jiangsu Xuanzhi New Materials and Technology Company – which he claimed to own between 7 – 9% of in an email.
The Justice Department’s China Initiative, launched in 2018, aims to combat both Chinese malign influence (ranging from cyberespionage to technology theft) and its Thousand Talents Program, which is aimed at stealing research. The department charged Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei in a global racketeering scheme earlier this year.
On Friday, Dr. Xiao-Jiang Li, a former Emory University professor and Chinese Thousand Talents Program participant, pleaded guilty to filing false tax returns after he worked overseas at Chinese universities and did not report any of his foreign income on his federal tax returns.
The Department of Education’s Foreign Gift and Contract Report website shows $15.76 billion in foreign funding on U.S. campuses between 2014 and 2019, including $1.17 billion from China. Both the Education Department and Justice Department prosecutors have gone after universities for concealing their foreign funding. –Washington Examiner
Read the complaint below:
Tyler Durden
Tue, 05/12/2020 – 23:45 - "Eat A Waffle, Go To Jail…" – Authoritarians Using COVID-19 Fear To Destroy America
“Eat A Waffle, Go To Jail…” – Authoritarians Using COVID-19 Fear To Destroy America
Authored by Ron Paul via The Ron Paul Institute for Peace & Prosperity,
A Fresno, California waffle restaurant dared to open its doors for business this weekend to the delight of a long line of customers, who waited up to two hours for the “privilege” of willingly spending their money in a business happy to serve them breakfast on Mother’s Day. This freedom of voluntary transaction is the core of what we used to call our free society. But in an America paralyzed by fear – ramped up by a mainstream media that churns out propaganda at a level unparalleled in history – no one is allowed to enjoy themselves.
Thankfully everyone carries a smartphone these days and can record and upload the frequent violations of our Constitutional liberties. In the case of the waffle restaurant, thanks to a cell phone video we saw the police show up in force and try to push through the crowd waiting outside. An elderly man who was next in line to enter was indignant, complaining that he had been waiting two hours to eat at the restaurant and was not about to step aside while the police shut down the place. The police proceeded to violently handcuff and arrest the man, dragging him off while his wife followed sadly behind him to the police car.
It is hard not to be disgusted by government enforcers who would brutally drag an elderly man away from a restaurant for the “crime” of wanting to take his wife out for breakfast on Mother’s Day. A virus far more deadly than the coronavirus is spreading from Washington down to the local city hall. Tin pot dictators are ruling by decree while federal, state, and local legislators largely stand by and watch as the US Constitution they swore to protect goes up in smoke.
Politicians with perfect haircuts issue “executive orders” that anyone cutting hair for mere private citizens must be arrested. In Texas a brave salon owner willingly went to jail for the “crime” of re-opening her business in defiance of “executive orders.” To add insult to injury, Governor Greg Abbott very quickly condemned the one week jail sentence of salon owner Shelley Luther – but the officers who arrested her were only carrying out Abbott’s own orders!
First we were told we had to shut down the country to “flatten the curve” so that hospitals were not overwhelmed by coronavirus patients. When most hospitals were nowhere near overwhelmed, and in fact were laying off thousands of healthcare workers because there were no patients, they moved the goalposts and said we cannot have our freedom back until a vaccine was available to force on us or the virus completely disappeared – neither of which is likely to happen anytime soon.
Many politicians clearly see the creeping totalitarianism but lack the courage to speak out. Thankfully, patriots like Shelley Luther are demonstrating the courage our political leaders lack.
When Patrick Henry famously said “give me liberty or give me death” in 1775, he didn’t add under his breath “unless a virus shows up.” If we wish to reclaim our freedoms we will have to fight – peacefully – for them. As Thomas Paine wrote in 1776, “These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.”
Tyler Durden
Tue, 05/12/2020 – 23:25 - "Shocking & Regretful": UN Security Council Becomes US-China Battleground Over WHO
“Shocking & Regretful”: UN Security Council Becomes US-China Battleground Over WHO
At this point China is grasping at whatever it can to use as leverage to “embarrass” Washington — so to no one’s surprise Chinese officials are expressing outrage at the US blocking a draft United Nations Security Council resolution backing UN chief Antonio Guterres’ call for a global ceasefire in order to concentrate the world’s resources on fighting the coronavirus pandemic.
A Chinese diplomat was cited in Reuters as saying it was “shocking and regretful” that Washington withdrew its support for the draft resolution Friday.
“The United States had agreed to the compromise text and it’s shocking and regretful that the U.S. changed its position,” the diplomat said. However, a US official shot back, saying there was never any agreement about the text.
UN Secretary General with Director General of the WHO, via Xinhuanet Front and center to the debate is the World Health Organization, currently source of deep controversy and growing tensions between China and the US, especially after German intelligence just revealed that Chinese President Xi Jinping asked World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General Tedros Adhanom Thebreyesus to cover up the severity of the coronavirus pandemic in January, according to a bombshell Der Spiegel report.
As related to the UN’s draft ‘global ceasefire’ Reuters explains that “talks have been stymied by a stand-off between China and the United States over whether to mention the World Health Organization.”
It remains that “The United States does not want a reference, China has insisted it be included, while some other members see the mention – or not – of WHO as a marginal issue, diplomats said.”
The US ultimately rejected any reference to the WHO, even when the text was changed to merely denote “specialized health agencies” instead of a direct reference. US diplomats also reportedly vowed to veto anything with such language in it.
President Trump cut off funding for the WHO, which is a UN agency, after it not only severely downplayed the coming threat of a global pandemic (by only belatedly identifying it as such), but after the administration charged the organization with being “China-centric” and allowing itself to be Beijing’s “disinformation” puppet as communist officials attempted to do PR damage control after the disease ripped through Wuhan and then spread far outside China’s borders.
Tyler Durden
Tue, 05/12/2020 – 23:05 - Scarred & Scared: The Reshaping Of The American Consumer Begins
Scarred & Scared: The Reshaping Of The American Consumer Begins
Authored by Christopher Condon via BloombergQuint.com,
David Wright, 62, stood at the door of his Replay Arcade last week, trying to look at the bright side of things. The sole owner, he’s a tenant at the Mall of Georgia, which shut for a month but re-opened on May 4.
“Traffic is about 10% of normal, but that’s 10% better than zero,” he chuckled in a phone interview from his business just outside Atlanta.
Even with the rosy assumption that the Covid-19 virus will be contained in the coming weeks, the U.S. economy is in for a slow and painful struggle back from this devastating public health crisis.
Entrance to the Mall of Georgia.
Consumers drive 70% of U.S. gross domestic product and they’ve been dealt multiple blows. For some it’s a direct hit to their bank account. For others it’s a shot to their psyches as earners, spenders and social animals.
“We can’t just flip the switch,” said Claudia Sahm, director of macroeconomic policy at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth.
“Just because you can go to the store and buy things again, doesn’t mean you will.”
Spending Ability
There will doubtlessly be cheerleading from elected officials and business leaders as restrictions are slowly lifted. Already there’s talk of pent-up demand as consumers dream about getting out of the house for more than groceries and prescriptions.
That may be true in some areas, like health care services, where important but non-urgent physician visits and medical procedures were postponed. More broadly, the reality is likely to be disappointing.In Week Two of the Big Reopen, Half-Empty Bar Feels Like a Win
For starters, more than 33 million Americans have lost their jobs in the seven weeks since wide swaths of the U.S. economy shuttered to stem the outbreak. Many may end up being out of work for the long-term, outlasting unemployment benefits that will typically end after 39 weeks, and far past the federal government’s $600 weekly supplement that’s set to expire on July 31.
“There’s willingness to spend and there’s ability to spend,” said Jack Kleinhenz, chief economist for the National Federation of Retailers.
“For many people, their ability to spend has been negated.”
Younger Generation
Severe economic shocks can even scar those who hang on to their jobs but are rattled watching friends, neighbors or relatives lose their work. Economists said it’s also worth noting this is the second recession in the space of 12 years that Americans have been told is the worst since the Great Depression.
Richard Curtin, director of the University of Michigan’s Survey of Consumers, worries the cumulative effect, especially on younger generations, could compare to the devastating impact in the 1930s had on the psychology of Americans.
“The Great Depression affected people their whole lives, and that could be true now for millennials,” he said.
There’s also an additional layer this time. This crash was triggered by a virus that, itself, can kill. How that will affect consumption is unclear. Early signs from economies that are already re-opening, and from surveys of consumer attitudes, don’t look promising.
Psychological Impact
Data from China, where the virus appeared first and where many restrictions have been relaxed, point to a slow recovery of consumer spending, according to a note from economists at HSBC Bank in London. And in Sweden, though bars and restaurants have remained open throughout the contagion, patrons have largely stayed away.
Polling by YouGov showed 57% of Americans were “very” or “somewhat” scared they might contract the virus. Among 26 countries surveyed since April 24, the average was 62%, with only Finland below 40%.
“The psychological impact of risk aversion setting in cannot be understated,” HSBC’s James Pomeroy and Fabio Balboni wrote in their May 1 note.
“Until people feel safe returning to places where large crowds are prevalent — such as public transport, bars, restaurants and many recreational venues — consumer spending in this part of the economy is likely to remain subdued.”
In the U.S., industry groups are making a big effort to help boost confidence. Groups like the National Restaurant Association are offering extensive guidelines, often in conjunction with government agencies like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, on how businesses should go about re-opening.
At Wright’s arcade in the Atlanta-area mall, he’s made every effort to keep his operation safe and reassure customers. The pinball machines and other games are spaced farther apart. Staff wear masks and gloves and add their own constant cleaning efforts. But he’s resigned to a slow return of his clientele.
“This might take a long, long time for people to feel comfortable again,” he laments.
Curtin, who conducts monthly surveys on consumer behavior, expects companies will have a hard time reassuring people because risks trigger an emotional response.
“However much you enjoyed flying, or going on vacation or to a restaurant, you’ll be a little more hesitant,” he said.
“The cognitive system we can turn on and off almost immediately, but emotions we can’t turn on and off.”
Tyler Durden
Tue, 05/12/2020 – 22:45 - Florida Beach Steps Up Enforcement As Visitors Leave 13,000 Pounds Of Trash During Busy Weekend
Florida Beach Steps Up Enforcement As Visitors Leave 13,000 Pounds Of Trash During Busy Weekend
Amazingly, local officials in Florida decided to reopen a beach to the public, and the biggest scandal to arise from the occasion had less to do with the coronavirus, and more to do with more prosaic problems of selfish, sh*tty people.
As thousands traveled to the beach – which has been open for weeks – over the weekend, municipal crews collected more than 13,000 pounds of garbage last weekend that was left behind by visitors at Cocoa Beach as the state continues to relax coronavirus restrictions, according to the Hill.
The Cocoa Beach Police Department warned it would dramatically step up enforcement and write tickets for outsize sums for anybody caught littering from here on out.
“As restrictions are becoming more relaxed during this pandemic, the City of Cocoa Beach is beginning to see an influx of day-trippers to our beaches, along with piles of unlawfully discarded trash in their wake,” Cocoa Beach Police Department wrote in a notice.
“This will not be tolerated.”
Read the full warning below:
As coronavirus restrictions begin to ease, people and their trash have been inundating beaches in Brevard County.
The beach actually reopened on April 21, but the nice weather over the weekend brought thousands to the beach as the spring and summer beachgoing season in the state begins.
According to the Hill, littering in Cocoa Beach can now fetch offenders a $250 fine.
Tyler Durden
Tue, 05/12/2020 – 22:25 - Soros Has "Faith That Trump Will Destroy Himself", Fears "Weakened" Xi, Sees "Existential Risk" For EU
Soros Has “Faith That Trump Will Destroy Himself”, Fears “Weakened” Xi, Sees “Existential Risk” For EU
Gregor Peter Schmitz interviews George Soros for Project Syndicate,
The Crisis Of A Lifetime
Only one thing is certain about the post-pandemic world: there is no way back to the globalized economy that preceded it. Everything else is up for grabs, including the rise of China, the fate of the United States, and the survival of the European Union.
Gregor Peter Schmitz: You have seen many crises. Is the COVID-19 pandemic comparable to any previous one?
George Soros: No. This is the crisis of my lifetime. Even before the pandemic hit, I realized that we were in a revolutionary moment where what would be impossible or even inconceivable in normal times had become not only possible, but probably absolutely necessary. And then came COVID-19, which has totally disrupted people’s lives and required very different behavior. It is an unprecedented event that probably has never occurred in this combination. And it really endangers the survival of our civilization.
GPS: Could this crisis have been prevented if governments had been better prepared?
SOROS: We have had infectious disease pandemics ever since the bubonic plague. They were quite frequent in the nineteenth century, and then we had the Spanish flu at the end of World War I, which actually occurred in three waves, with the second wave being the deadliest. Millions of people died. And we have had other serious outbreaks, such as the swine flu just a decade ago. So it’s amazing how unprepared countries were for something like this.
GPS: Is that the biggest problem of the current situation — this lack of certainty about how to deal with this virus and how to proceed in the coming months or years?
SOROS: It is certainly a very big one. We are learning very fast, and we now know a lot more about the virus than we did when it emerged, but we are shooting at a moving target because the virus itself changes rapidly. It will take a long time to develop a vaccine. And even after we have developed one, we will have to learn how to change it every year, because the virus will most likely change. That’s what we do with the flu shot every year.
GPS: Will this crisis change the nature of capitalism? Even before COVID-19 led to the current catastrophic recession, the downsides of globalization and free trade were attracting greater attention.
SOROS: We will not go back to where we were when the pandemic started. That is pretty certain. But that is the only thing that is certain. Everything else is up for grabs. I do not think anybody knows how capitalism will evolve.
GPS: Could this crisis bring people — and nation-states — closer together?
SOROS: In the long run, yes. At the present time, people are dominated by fear. And fear very often makes people hurt themselves. That is true of individuals as well as institutions, nations, and humanity itself.
GPS: Are we witnessing that in the current blame game between the United States and China over the origins of the virus?
SOROS: The continuing conflict between the US and China complicates matters, because we ought to work together on climate change and on developing a vaccine against COVID-19. But, apparently, we cannot work together because we are already competing over who will develop — and use — the vaccine. The fact that we have got two very different systems of government, democratic and …
GPS: Autocratic?
SOROS: Right. That makes everything much harder. There are a lot of people who say that we should be working very closely with China, but I am not in favor of doing that. We must protect our democratic open society. At the same time, we must find a way to cooperate on fighting climate change and the novel coronavirus. That won’t be easy. I sympathize with the Chinese people, because they are under the domination of a dictator, President Xi Jinping. I think a lot of educated Chinese are very resentful of that, and the general public is still very angry with him for keeping COVID-19 a secret until after the Chinese New Year.
GPS: Could Xi’s grip on power weaken as the Chinese come to recognize that the handling of the crisis was sub-optimal?
SOROS: Very much so. When Xi abolished term limits and named himself, in essence, president for life, he destroyed the political future of the most important and ambitious men in a very narrow and competitive elite. It was a big mistake on his part. So, yes, he is very strong in a way, but at the same time extremely weak, and now perhaps vulnerable.
The struggle within the Chinese leadership is something that I follow very closely because I am on the side of those who believe in an open society. And there are many people in China who are very much in favor of an open society, too.
GPS: Then again, the current U.S. president does not really represent the values of an open and free society…
SOROS: Well, that is a weakness that I hope will not last very long. Donald Trump would like to be a dictator. But he cannot be one because there is a constitution in the United States that people still respect. And it will prevent him from doing certain things. That does not mean that he will not try, because he is literally fighting for his life. I will also say that I have put my faith in Trump to destroy himself, and he has exceeded my wildest expectations.
GPS: What role does the European Union — your home that you care about so much — play in this power struggle?
SOROS: I am particularly concerned about the survival of the EU because it is an incomplete union. It was in the process of being created. But the process was never completed and that makes Europe exceptionally vulnerable — more vulnerable than the U.S. not just because it is an incomplete union but also because it is based on the rule of law. And the wheels of justice move very slowly, while threats such as the COVID-19 virus move very fast. That creates a particular problem for the European Union.
GPS: Germany’s Federal Constitutional Court exploded a bombshell last week with its latest ruling on the European Central Bank. How seriously do you take it?
SOROS: I take it extremely seriously. The ruling poses a threat that could destroy the European Union as an institution based on the rule of law, precisely because it was delivered by the German constitutional court, which is the most highly respected institution in Germany. Before it delivered its verdict, it had consulted with the European Court of Justice and then decided to challenge it. So you now have a conflict between the German Constitutional Court and the European Court of Justice. Which court has precedence?
GPS: Technically, the European Treaties give the ECJ supremacy in this area. That is very clear.
SOROS: Right. When Germany joined the EU, it committed itself to abide by European law. But the ruling raises an even bigger issue: if the German court can question the decisions of the European Court of Justice, can other countries follow its example? Can Hungary and Poland decide whether they follow European law or their own courts — whose legitimacy the EU has questioned? That question goes to the very heart of the EU, which is built on the rule of law.
Poland has immediately risen to the occasion and asserted the supremacy of its government-controlled courts over European law. In Hungary, Viktor Orbán has already used the COVID-19 emergency and a captured parliament to appoint himself dictator. The parliament is kept in session to rubber-stamp his decrees, which clearly violate European law. If the German court’s verdict prevents the EU from resisting these developments, it will be the end of the EU as we know it.
GPS: Will the ECB need to change its policies after this ruling?
SOROS: Not necessarily. This ruling only requires the ECB to justify its current monetary policies. It has been given three months to justify the actions it has taken. That will consume a lot of the ECB’s attention when it is the only really functioning institution in Europe that can provide the financial resources needed to combat the pandemic. Therefore, it should focus its attention on helping Europe to establish a Recovery Fund.
GPS: Do you have any suggestions where these resources could come from?
SOROS: I have proposed that the EU should issue perpetual bonds, although I now think that they should be called “Consols,” because perpetual bonds have been successfully used under that name by Britain since 1751 and the United States since the 1870s.
Perpetual bonds have become confused with “Coronabonds,” which have been rejected by the European Council — and with good reason, because they imply a mutualization of accumulated debts that the member states are unwilling to accept. That has poisoned the debate about perpetual bonds.
I believe that the current predicament strengthens my case for Consols. The German court said that the ECB’s actions were legal because they adhered to the requirement that its bond purchases were proportional to the member states’ shareholding in the ECB. But the clear implication was that any ECB purchases that were not proportional to the ECB “capital key” could be challenged and deemed ultra vires by the court.
The kind of bonds that I have proposed would sidestep this problem, because they would be issued by the EU as a whole, would automatically be proportional, and would remain so eternally. The member states would have to pay only the annual interest, which is so minimal — at, say, 0.5% — that the bonds could be easily subscribed by the member states, either unanimously or by a coalition of the willing.
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen says that Europe needs about 1 trillion euros ($1.1 trillion) to fight this pandemic, and she should have added another 1 trillion euros for climate change. Consols could provide those amounts if the EU’s member states authorized them.
Unfortunately, Germany and the “Hanseatic League” states led by the Netherlands are adamantly opposed. They should think again. The EU is now considering doubling its budget, which would provide only about 100 billion euros and yield only one-tenth of the benefit that perpetual bonds could provide. Those who want to keep their EU budget contribution to a minimum ought to support Consols. They would have to authorize certain taxes, like a financial-transaction tax, that would provide the EU with its own resources, assuring its AAA rating, but the taxes would not have to be imposed — their place would be taken by Consols. Both these parties and the rest of Europe would be much better off. Annual payments of 5 billion euros, whose present value would continuously decline, would give the EU 1 trillion euros that the continent urgently needs — an amazing cost-benefit ratio.
GPS: When the EU relaxed its rules against state aid, Germany submitted more than half of the requests. Some people argue that this undermines the principles of a single market because it gives Germany an unfair advantage. What do you think?
SOROS: I agree with their argument. It is particularly unfair to Italy, which was already the sick man of Europe and then the hardest hit by COVID-19. Lega party leader Matteo Salvini is agitating for Italy to leave the euro and also the European Union. Fortunately, his personal popularity has declined since he left the government, but his advocacy is gaining followers.
This is another existential threat for the EU. What would be left of Europe without Italy, which used to be the most pro-European country? Italians trusted Europe more than their own governments. But they were badly treated during the refugee crisis of 2015. That’s when they turned to Salvini’s far-right Lega and the populist Five Star Movement.
GPS: You sound very pessimistic.
SOROS: Far from it. I recognize that Europe is facing several existential dangers. That is not a figure of speech; it is the reality. The verdict of Germany’s Federal Constitutional Court is only the most recent challenge. Once we recognize this, we may be able to rise the occasion. We can take exceptional measures that are appropriate to the exceptional circumstances we’re in. That certainly applies to Consols, which should never be issued in normal times, but are ideal right now. As long as I can propose measures like issuing Consols, I won’t give up hope.
Tyler Durden
Tue, 05/12/2020 – 22:05 - Twitter Takes Its COVID-19 Censorship Into Overdrive
Twitter Takes Its COVID-19 Censorship Into Overdrive
It feels like it was just yesterday we pointed out that the Twitter censor machine had gone into overdrive, concerning itself with policing mean comments and curse words. Now, the censorship machine is sliding even further down the slippery slope.
In a blog post published yesterday, Twitter said it would be “introducing new labels and warning messages that will provide additional context and information on some Tweets containing disputed or misleading information related to COVID-19.”
In other words, the site’s efforts to police coronavirus discussion using the WHO as a truth rubric – which resulted in Zero Hedge’s permanent ban from the site for accurately predicting that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was likely at the middle of the ongoing global pandemic – hasn’t been enough.
The site is taking its coronavirus censorship into “Phase II”.
The site says it is now going to append labels to Tweets “containing potentially harmful, misleading information related to COVID-19” and that the change is going to be retrofit to all previous Tweets.
The labels will link to a “Twitter-curated page or external trusted source containing additional information on the claims made within the Tweet.”
Warnings could also be applied to Tweets, the site said. The warnings “will inform people that the information in the Tweet conflicts with public health experts’ guidance before they view it.”
Twitter said it will take action based on three broad categories:
- Misleading information — statements or assertions that have been confirmed to be false or misleading by subject-matter experts, such as public health authorities.
- Disputed claims — statements or assertions in which the accuracy, truthfulness, or credibility of the claim is contested or unknown.
- Unverified claims — information (which could be true or false) that is unconfirmed at the time it is shared.
It then posted this vague chart, which does very little to clear up anything:
Recall, our original post about the Wuhan Institute of Virology that resulted in our ban from Twitter did not include misleading information, disputed claims or unverified claims. We wonder where we would fall on that nebulous-looking chart.
Twitter also says that the site will identify Tweets that “could cause harm by using and improving on internal systems to proactively monitor content related to COVID-19.”
Finally, the site said it won’t “amplify” Tweets with warnings or labels, essentially giving the site carte blanche to shadowban its own users as it deems necessary.
Meanwhile, while Zero Hedge remains permanently banned, comedienne Jena Friedman, who falsely Tweeted out yesterday that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell “has tested positive for Covid-19”, still has an account up and running despite the Tweet being deleted.
We look forward to continued equal application of the law from the fine Silicon Valley left-wing police at Twitter HQ.
Tyler Durden
Tue, 05/12/2020 – 21:45 - Druckenmiller Turns Apocalyptic: "Risk-Reward For Equities Is As Bad As I've Seen It In My Career"
Druckenmiller Turns Apocalyptic: “Risk-Reward For Equities Is As Bad As I’ve Seen It In My Career”
Investing legend Stan Druckenmiller unleashed a firehose of cold water on market bulls today during an interview with the Economic Club of NY (the same venue that will interview Jerome Powell tomorrow on the topic of negative interest rates), when he said the “The risk-reward for equity is maybe as bad as I’ve seen it in my career,” (although “the wild card here is the Fed can always step up their purchases”), that the government stimulus programs won’t be enough to overcome the economic problems, that it makes no sense for the market to jump so much when optimism emerges around certain drugs like remdesivir (“I don’t see why anybody would change their behavior because there’s a viral drug out there”) and, most concerning, that “there’s a good chance that we just cracked the credit bubble that’s the result of free money.”
Looking for a V-shaped economic recovery? Not so fast, Druckenmiller warns. pic.twitter.com/DyFbjxmbvZ
— The Economic Club NY (@EconClubNY) May 12, 2020
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“The consensus out there seems to be: ‘Don’t worry, the Fed has your back’,” Druckenmiller said during Tuesday’s webcast before adding “there’s only one problem with that: our analysis says it’s not true.”
With markets, “the consensus seems to be don’t worry, the Fed has your back,” Druckenmiller said. “There’s one problem with that, our analysis says it’s not true.” #ECNYDruckenmiller pic.twitter.com/VWH6m3fALs
— The Economic Club NY (@EconClubNY) May 12, 2020
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Furthermore, while traders think there is “massive” liquidity and that the stimulus programs are big enough to solve the problems facing the U.S., resulting in stratospheric P/E multiples, the economic effects of the coronavirus are likely to be long lasting and will lead to a “slew” of bankruptcies, Druck said, agreeing with our observations from last week that the underlying problems are shifting from illiquidity to insolvency, as a “biblical” wave of defaults is coming:
“I pray I’m wrong on this, but I just think that the V-out is a fantasy,” the trading legend said, crushing hopes for a V-shaped recovery, assuming anyone still harbored those, and added that the recent increase in unemployment in the U.S. stunning. The official U.S. unemployment rate is at 14.7%, the highest level since the Great Depression.
As Bloomberg summarizes, “Druckenmiller’s remarks are among the strongest comments yet by a Wall Street heavyweight on the bleak outlook facing the U.S.” Druck’s apocalyptic outlooks also sharply contrasts to the optimism that has pushed the S&P 500 Index to rally 30% since its March low even as the pandemic has brought the economy to a standstill, seized up credit markets and ended the longest bull market in history, all thanks to the now ubiquitous Fed backstop and moral hazard.
And speaking of the Fed, Druckenmiller said that the Fed’s $2.3 trillion move to shore up markets in March, was “somewhat puzzling and aggressive” adding that the Fed “may not have had to take such extreme measures to shore up the U.S. economy in March had they acted earlier to normalize interest rates”, which it of course can’t as the stock market has been in one giant post-financial crisis bubble, and why the Fed’s modest attempt to normalize rates ended in catastrophe in 2018.
Worse, Drucknemiller said that the Fed’s $3 trillion in stimulus programs aren’t likely to spur future economic growth: “It was basically a combination of transfer payments to individuals, basically paying them more not to work than to work. And in addition to that, it was a bunch of payments to zombie companies to keep them alive.”
“I’m not a scientist. I’m a common sense guy,” Druckenmiller tells us. “I just don’t think you can take massive amounts of money … allocate capital to zombie companies. It just doesn’t make any sense to me.” #ECNYDruckenmiller pic.twitter.com/8LT3rsCguz
— The Economic Club NY (@EconClubNY) May 12, 2020
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And with the US set to introduce negative rates over the next 6-12 months much to Donald Trump’s delight, discussing negative rates Drucknemiller said that “I don’t understand even what the argument is.”
Touching on another source of stimulus – which it now appears is indispenable for the US economy not to collapse in cardiac shock – Druck then discussed the “record low” unemployment headed into the Covid-19 crisis, Druckenmiller said that unemployment may have been at a record low going into Covid-19, but to me it was a result of reckless fiscal spending and huge leveraging on the government side.”
Which also explains why the Fed and Treasury effectively merged to unleash helicopter money, as the economic and market performance before the covid-crisis were already the result of one giant monetary and fiscal bubble, so the only possible resolution would have been an even more gigantic monetary and fiscal bubble. And that’s precisely what we got.
That said, Druckenmiller did agree with David Zervos that “liquidity is going to move markets more than earnings during this period”, which means that for better or worse, fundamentals are indeed dead. The silver lining is that the former Soros chief strategist said he thinks that the current liquidity will soon shrink as US Treasury borrowing crowds out the private economy and even overwhelms Fed purchases. Indicatively, Deutsche Bank believes the US will issue over $5 trillion in debt this year.
Commenting on the coronavrisis response, Druckenmiller said that neither Taiwan or Hong Kong had to lockdown their economies to fight Covid-19, while in the US “this is one of the most bizarre decision making processes I’ve ever seen” elaborating that the economically cripplling shutdown is a bad idea, and adding that “I can guarantee you poverty kills.”
“I can guarantee you poverty kills,” Stanley Druckenmiller said on today’s member call. #ECNYDruckenmiller pic.twitter.com/nnULWvAccX
— The Economic Club NY (@EconClubNY) May 12, 2020
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The investing legend spared no words for his criticism of the Trump administration’s response to the coronavirus outbreak, saying he would not be surprised if it becomes the “poster child for the worst public policy decisions ever made from a cost-benefit analysis.”
Probably so, but when the money helicopters are now in the air paradropping cash who cares? Incidentally, that may explain why Druck was quick to point out that gold is now 28% higher than it was a year ago. Separately, Drucknemiller, said that on a relative basis, he’s as bullish on long-short strategies as he’s been in 10 years. “That’s partly because I’m worried about everything else.”
Finally, Druckenmiller is also bullish on Amazon.com, saying people should be thankful that the company exists right now given the number of jobs created and that it has “made all of lives better. I think it’s an amazing company. I get a little emotional when politicians attack it.”
Tyler Durden
Tue, 05/12/2020 – 21:24 - China Auto Sales Fall 5.6% YOY In April Despite Sizeable Bounce Back From March
China Auto Sales Fall 5.6% YOY In April Despite Sizeable Bounce Back From March
The auto market in China is a widely watched economic gauge and leading indicator for the rest of the world, not only because the country is the number one seller of vehicles worldwide, but now also as a litmus test as to how the country’s coronavirus re-opening is faring.
For now, despite a
questionablemiraculous-looking rebound, sales are still falling.April’s auto sales numbers came in down 5.6% compared to last year, despite rising 37% from March numbers, according to data released Sunday by the China Passenger Car Association and MarketWatch.
The CAAM claims that declines are moderating although we have a tough time believing (pardon our skepticism of China) that such a V-shaped recovery is possible in the country where the outbreak first began.
According to China’s data, the YOY growth rebound is pronounced and April’s drop pales in comparison to a 40% YOY drop in March and a 79% YOY drop in February.
The Chinese government is going to attempt to spur demand with new policies aimed at enticing buyers, according to Bloomberg, citing an unnamed automotive industry group in China.
Recall, we have recently noted that U.S. auto manufacturers are teeing up sizeable incentives to get buyers back into showrooms. Europe is following suit, with Volkswagen starting a sales initiative to revive demand, including improved leasing and financing terms.
Meanwhile, optimism for May in China is already muted.
Not only is the country still struggling with lockdowns, but the first five days in May were a labor holiday that could have a negative impact on sales.
Outlook for the year is also less-than-optimistic. The CAAM predicts that sales will drop 15% to 25% for the year, depending on whether or not the country is able to further slow the spread of the virus.
Tyler Durden
Tue, 05/12/2020 – 21:05 - Indian Cops Use Metal Tool To Grab Social Distancing Dissidents
Indian Cops Use Metal Tool To Grab Social Distancing Dissidents
Authored by Paul Joseph Watson via Summit News,
A video out of India shows police officers using a bizarre metal contraption to grab dissidents who violate coronavirus social distancing rules.
“Hands up!” barks a police officer at a man during a demonstration of the tool, which looks like a kind of cattle prod but presumably isn’t electrified (yet).
The dissenter is then entrapped by the mechanism, which closes around his body like some kind of venus fly trap for humans.
VIP Security wing of Chandigarh Police has devised this unique way of tackling non-cooperating corona suspects and curfew breakers.
Great equipment, great drill !!!
Way to go @ssptfcchd and Insp Manjit, HCt Gurdeep, HCt Pawan and Ct Usha pic.twitter.com/oTLsGoe6yt— DGP Chandigarh Police (@DgpChdPolice) April 25, 2020
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It could also be described as a sort of handcuff for the entire body.
The officer then uses the tool to push the man towards the back of a van.
“Thanks to this over-sized pick-up reacher, the police can now arrest Covid dissidents without risking infection,” writes Toby Young.
While Singapore’s robot dog is a significantly more high tech way of enforcing social distancing, India seems to prefer going old school.
Robot dogs barking government orders at us. Can’t wait until they’re fitted with tasers for non-compliance. pic.twitter.com/j5uUb0zQ01
— Paul Joseph Watson (@PrisonPlanet) May 9, 2020
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Tyler Durden
Tue, 05/12/2020 – 20:45 - Futures Slide After Senators Propose Legislation To Sanction China If No "Full Accounting" For Coronavirus Outbreak
Futures Slide After Senators Propose Legislation To Sanction China If No “Full Accounting” For Coronavirus Outbreak
Just hours after futures tumbled following a report that Republican Senator Graham and GOP Senators have introduced a bill sanctioning China for human rights abuses and over its treatment of Uighurs, moments ago futures took another leg lower on the back of an AFP report that Republican senators proposed legislation that would empower President Donald Trump to slap sanctions on China if Beijing does not give a “full accounting” for the coronavirus outbreak.
In other words, unless there was something lost in translation, Trump will have a carte blanche to sanction China on two account: the Uighurs and Beijing’s secrecy over the origin of the coronavirus pandemic.
“The Chinese Communist Party must be held accountable for the detrimental role they played in this pandemic,” said Senator Jim Inhofe, one of the sponsors of the “COVID-19 Accountability Act”, adding that China’s “outright deception of the origin and spread of the virus cost the world valuable time and lives as it began to spread.”
The legislation will give Trump 60 days to certify to Congress that China has provided a full accounting on the COVID-19 outbreak to an investigation that could be led by the United States and its allies, or a United Nations body like the World Health Organization. Of course, China has repeatedly refused to allow any such “accounting” to the WHO; one can imagine how it will respond when a US body demands similar “accounting.”
As a reminder, yesterday Beijing banned roughly 35% of Australian beef imports due to the country’s demand a probe into the coronavirus origins be launched.
But wait, it gets better: In an act that China would see as violating its sovereignty, Trump must also certify that China has closed its highest-risk wet markets and released Hong Kong activists arrested in post-COVID-19 crackdowns. Without certification, Trump would be authorized under the legislation to impose sanctions like asset freezes, travel bans and visa revocations, as well as restricting Chinese businesses’ access to US bank financing and capital markets.
“China refuses to allow the international community to go into the Wuhan lab to investigate,” said Senator Lindsey Graham, another sponsor of the bill.
“They refuse to allow investigators to study how this outbreak started. I’m convinced China will never cooperate with a serious investigation unless they are made to do so.”
Following the report, futures whic had already legged sharply lower on Tuesday afternoon, tumbled to session lows, as traders now await China’s less than diginified response and as it becomes all too clear that launching a full on assault on China will be a core aspect of Trump’s re-election campaign.
Tyler Durden
Tue, 05/12/2020 – 20:25 - In Unprecedented Move, Two Fund Giants Liquidate CLO Warehouses
In Unprecedented Move, Two Fund Giants Liquidate CLO Warehouses
Yesterday we laid out how the magic of modern monetary alchemy (not to be confused with the blunt brain trauma that is the magic money tree of helicopter money) works, by showing how a CLO takes 96% junk rates loans and by repackaging this portfolio, or “warehousing” it into a CLO, the product were tranched bonds of which 87% were rated investment grade.
And while in theory this works by “diversifying” away individual credit risk, in practice the whole exercise is nothing but smoke and mirrors which crumbles the moment an adverse systemic event – such as a global viral pandemic – reveals that the investment grade emperor is really wearing junk-rated clothes.
Of course, it is the very process of warehousing that made all this possible and resulted in record demand for leveraged loans for the past few years, with CLOs becoming the biggest source of demand for the $1 trillion leveraged loan market, because as we concluded in our article, this CLO sleight of hand “worked splendidly as long as nobody questioned the “alchemy” behind the biggest magic trick Wall Street pulled in the past decade. Alas, alchemy does not exist, and just like all those buying “gold” from carnival charlatans eventually realized they were holding on to lead, so all those who naively believed they had purchased investment grade securities are about to learn the hard way that what they really owned was, aptly-named, junk.”
Fast forward to today, when investors finally appear to be asking what good are CLOs, and what is the point of tranching cash flows, if virtually all underlying junk loans will soon end up – true to their name – in default, with no cash flows left to tranche.
Bloomberg reports that two funds that aimed to bundle leveraged loans into bonds decided instead to liquidate the loans they had bought, a rare step reflecting just how the pandemic has cooled the market for securities known as collateralized loan obligations.
At a time of massive downgrades of both underlying loans and resulting CLO bonds, Steele Creek Investment Management and AXA Investment Managers both sold off loans they had planned to package into CLOs, according to Bloomberg citing people familiar with the matter. The funds had paid for the loans using temporary lines of credit known as warehouses.
With leveraged loan prices plunged to their lowest level in more than a decade in March, CLOs have been left scrambling to find buyers for their securities, and as a result Steele Creek and AXA Investment Managers decided to instead liquidate their warehouses, a move that some investors fear may become increasingly common, and could push loan prices even lower.
Steele Creek, a Moelis Asset Management company, put a $177 million warehouse loan portfolio up for sale on May 4, the people said. A spokesperson for Steele Creek declined to comment. AXA’s asset management arm sold a warehouse for a CLO it was arranging with Citigroup, said the people, asking not to be identified discussing a private matter.
As Bloomberg notes, selling loans held in warehouses may make more sense now after prices have recovered somewhat from their March levels amid growing Federal Reserve support for credit markets, making potential losses relatively manageable, investors said.
In keeping with the intricacies of structured credit, a CLO warehouse is often funded in part by outside investors who bear the initial pain if the loans go bad, known as the first loss, similar to the equity tranche of the final CLO itself. They usually choose to roll their investment into the riskiest securities of a CLO when the deal is ready to close, known as the equity portion. AXA Investment Management’s decision was made in conjunction with, and in the best interests of the first loss provider, according to Yannick Le Serviget, the firm’s global head of leveraged loans and private debt. AXA IM declined to comment on specifics of the transaction.
“Given the large repricing of the loan market, specifically good quality portfolios, it did make sense to take advantage of the upward pricing,” Le Serviget said.
While such liquidations are extremely rare, fears of CLO warehouse unwinds emerged in March once pandemic fears started hammering corporate debt markets broadly. The, as we reported last month, ratings firms downgraded a wave of loans as the pandemic weighed on companies’ sales. The average loan price plummeted to around 76 cents on the dollar in late March, before rebounding to around 87 cents.
What makes the liquidation scenario especially concerning is that most CLO warehouses aren’t forced to sell loans if prices fall below particular levels, and since the facilities usually mature in 12 to 18 months, fund managers and investors have breathing room to decide whether to liquidate or go through with the CLO. Unwinding a facility at depressed prices could force some CLO investors to bear losses, making them less inclined to push for an unwind.
But investors in the CLO who are among the first to take losses might become more inclined to liquidate a warehouse if i) the loans become impaired, or if ii) they see little scope for price recovery over the medium term. In some cases it may also make more economic sense not to proceed with a transaction if there is a buyer for the loans in the warehouse, investors say. Banks may also pressure CLO managers to end deals if assets are sitting in a warehouse for too long.
The concern is that if despite the recent rebound in both loan prices and various CLO tranches, as per the Palmer Square index, two fund giants decided to unwind warehouses, then the signal is clear: this is as good as it will get for the leveraged loan market – i.e., this is the apex of the dead cat bounce – and what is coming will be much uglier.
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The stunning move by Axa and Steele Creek may explain why on Tuesday, the Fed revised its Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility to allow CLOs that hold a broader range of leveraged loans to be used as collateral. According to a Fed statement, the central bank will now accept new AAA CLOs with leveraged loans, including refinanced loans, that priced as far back as January 2019, compared to the previous term sheet where eligible CLO could only hold newly-originated loans.
Still, the Fed’s involvement is largely superficial to the CLO market which until now had not benefited much from the central bank’s effort to boost credit liquidity: as Bloomberg notes, the terms still require eligible CLOs be static vehicles wherein managers can’t actively trade the loans underpinning the deals, a structure that makes up only a small portion of the market. “It’s not going to open up the floodgates, but it can have some measured effects,” said Gregg Jubin, a partner at Cadwalader. “This looks certainly better than the first iteration.”
It is hardly a coincidence that the Fed announcement comes just as a warehouse was liquidated. According to Jubin, the changes may benefit existing CLO warehouses that hold qualifying loans. On the other hand, some pointed out to the prohibitive interest rate demanded by the Fed under TALF , which will be 150 bps over 30-day average SOFR, making the facility quite expensive .
It’s “a positive sign for the market that the look back for eligible collateral extends back to the beginning of 2019 and also includes refinancings since that time, as is the fact that the Fed appears to have taken into consideration certain detailed aspects of how the CLO market operates,” said Nick Robinson, a partner at Allen & Overy LLP. And while this may be good news for investors in recent AAA CLOs tranches – mostly Japanese retirees – everyone else, i.e., all those who hold to AA and lower rated tranches, remain in the cold and will have to wait for the next crash in hopes the Fed expands the scope of TALF again, or else have no choice but to sell now that the AXAs of the world have suggested this is as good as it will get.
Tyler Durden
Tue, 05/12/2020 – 20:07 - The Billion-Dollar Buyer Of Cohiba, Romeo y Julieta, And Montecristo Cigar Brands Remains A Smoky Mystery
The Billion-Dollar Buyer Of Cohiba, Romeo y Julieta, And Montecristo Cigar Brands Remains A Smoky Mystery
The consortium of buyers of Imperial Brands’ cigar business, who will be acquiring the world renowned Cohiba brand, have mostly remained under the radar. The deal itself has also been “shrouded in a smoky veil of secrecy”, according to Bloomberg.
However, one group of investors is being led by an Asian Gambling Executive who helps run operations in Macau, it is now being reported. Imperial has continued to decline comment on who is buying the business, simply calling them “the right long-term owners” for the brands.
Imperial decided last month to sell its premium cigar business for $1.1 billion to Allied Cigar Corporation. Imperial’s brand portfolio also includes Romeo y Julieta and Montecristo.
Allied Cigar is a private firm that was incorporated in Hong Kong on March 10, according to registry filings. Chiu King-yan, who is the CFO of Macau’s biggest junket operator, SunCity Group Holdings Ltd., was listed as a board member.
Chiu is also a director of Summit Ascent Holdings Ltd., the Hong Kong-listed firm behind a hotel and casino complex near Vladivostok, Russia.
SunCity owns a majority stake in Summit Ascent and has been expanding outside of Macau in recent years. It has opened a resort project in Vietnam and is currently looking for projects in places like Cambodia and Japan.
Other board members include Chiu Ping-shun and Joyce Lam. There is little information available on them in the public domain and there has been no additional evidence to suggest that SunCity is involved directly in the acquisition.
It’s unusual for an acquisition this large to go off without transparency on who the acquirer is.
This is complicated by the fact that the deal includes Imperial’s 50/50 joint venture in Cuba, which distributes and sells the Cohiba, Romeo y Julieta and Montecristo brands. Cuba has been isolated by U.S. sanctions for decades, making it tough for the two countries to do business, Bloomberg concludes.
We’ll continue to keep a close eye on this story as it develops.
Tyler Durden
Tue, 05/12/2020 – 19:45 - Is This A Bear Market Rally Or A New Bull? BofA Has The Answer… And What Happens Next
Is This A Bear Market Rally Or A New Bull? BofA Has The Answer… And What Happens Next
With the S&P trading nearly 800 points – or a whopping 30% – above its March 23 lows, the divergence in opinions whether this is a new bull market or merely a massive – and the fastest ever – bear market rally ever, propped up by trillions in central bank liquidity and fiscal stimulus, has never been greater.
We won’t go into details covering the key arguments of either camp (we have done that on numerous occasions in the past, and urge readers to read the latest reports by the chief equity strategists of Goldman, David Kostin, and Morgan Stanley, Michael Wilson to compare just how stark the variance in outlooks is among the two most widely followed Wall Street strategists) and instead we will go straight to what may be a remarkably accurate answer to this dilemma that is keeping Wall Street up at night.
In determining whether March marked the beginning of a real bull market (like March of 2009, March of 2003 and Jan of 1991) or a bear market rally (Nov 1989, June 2000 and Dec 2008), BofA’s quant team conveniently notes that factors can help. Consider that during the early stages of each of the prior real bull markets, the bank’s Low Price factor – read “dollar stocks”, or “distressed equities” – was the best performing factor, but did not lead in bear market rallies.
Alternatively, prior bear market rallies saw mixed leadership, and “Low Price” traditionally was outperformed by such factors as Value, Momentum and Growth.
How about the current rally?
Since 23 March lows, Value (Price/Book and Fwd P/E) and Risk (Estimate Dispersion and Beta) have led. But it is the mediocre performance of Low Price stocks, i.e. distressed equities from the bottom, which to BofA suggests that this is, indeed, just another bear market rally.
BofA’s conclusion is validated by a recent report from SocGen’s Solomon Tadesse, who notes that “after a record low in March, the market has surged in a short order, registering a stunning 31% gain in a matter of a month. Given the overall negative undertone from the economic challenges ahead, the dramatic reversal of global markets after the pandemic lows is more puzzling, as it also implies an all clear victory against the silent enemy and a return back to the pre-pandemic normality.”
And while moves of such magnitude have been observed in the past, furious overshoots such as the current one tend to be – almost entirely – bear market rallies, because as Tadesse notes, a look through the annals of market history and a study of bear markets in the last 150 years…
… reveals that “a return to recovery from a bear market bottom, both cyclical downturns and sudden market crashes, has often been gradual, with frequent adjustments along the way, reflecting the weight of uncertainty surrounding economic recovery out of the ashes of crises.“
In that respect, the ongoing surge in global markets strikes as an oddity (chart below) even after factoring in the massive bridges of support from monetary and fiscal stimulus.
As Tadesse then points out, “based on an exhaustive analysis of bear markets of the last century and half, under the most conservative scenario – that the market has indeed reached cyclical bottom in the March sell-off – the S&P 500 would finish at about 2715 by year-end, a 7-8% cumulative correction from the current level of 2,939.”
But wait, there’s more, because as Tadesse concludes, “the above analysis assumes critically that the 23 March bottom indeed reflects the cyclical bottom and assesses only the market’s speed of ascent during the eventual recovery. Yet, history is also replete with many instances of flimsy bear rallies that eventually succumbed to yet another, lower bottom” and reminds us of the “classic case” of the staggering 47% rally over the four months immediately after the bear bottom of the 1929 market crash. After peaking, the market then reversed its ascent in April 1930, and went through a harrowing tailspin of decline for the next two years until it hit its ultimate bottom in June of 1932 during the Great Depression, wiping out 83% of its value at the peak in April 1930.
His parting warning: “With the current fallout from the complete shutdown of economic life in terms of disruptions in supply chains and collapse of aggregate demand, as well as the uncertainty on the post-lockdown path to recovery, new market bottoms are possible, although the unprecedented massive policy response could provide the backstop to a worsening case of deflationary spiral.”
Tyler Durden
Tue, 05/12/2020 – 19:35 - China: Coexistence Or Cold War II?
China: Coexistence Or Cold War II?
Authored by Patrick Buchanan via Buchanan.org,
Under fire for his handling of the coronavirus pandemic, President Donald Trump, his campaign and his party are moving to lay blame for the 80,000 U.S. dead at the feet of the Communist Party of China and, by extension, its longtime General Secretary, President Xi Jinping.
“There is a significant amount of evidence” that the virus originated in a Wuhan lab, said Secretary of State Mike Pompeo last week.
Trump himself seemed to subscribe to the charge:
“This is worse than Pearl Harbor. This is worse than the World Trade Center. There’s never been an attack like this… It could have been stopped in China. It should have been stopped right at the source.”
There is talk on Capitol Hill of suspending sovereign immunity so China may be sued for the damages done by the virus that produced a U.S. shutdown and a second Great Depression where unemployment is projected to reach near the 25% of 1933.
The Trump campaign has begun to target the Democratic nominee as “Beijing Biden” for his past collusion with China and his attack on Trump for “hysterical xenophobia” when Trump ended flights from China.
What is the historical truth?
On China, Trump is the first realist we have had in the Oval Office in decades. But both parties colluded in the buildup of China as she vaulted over Italy, France, Britain, Germany and Japan to become the world’s second power in the 21st century.
Both parties also dismissed Chinese trade surpluses with the U.S., which began at a few billion dollars a year in the early 1990s and have grown to almost $500 billion a year. Neither party took notice until lately of our growing dependency on Beijing for products critical to our defense and for drugs and medicines crucial to the health and survival of Americans.
The mighty malevolent China we face today was made in the USA.
But what do we do now? Can we coexist with this rising and expansionist power? Or must we conduct a new decades-long Cold War like the one we waged to defeat the Soviet Empire and Soviet Union?
The U.S. prevailed in that Cold War because of advantages we do not possess with the China of 2020.
From 1949-1989, a NATO alliance backed by 300,000 U.S. troops in Europe “contained” the Soviet Union. No Soviet ruler attempted to cross the dividing line laid down at Yalta in 1945. Nor did we cross it.
East of the Elbe, the Soviet bloc visibly failed to offer the freedoms and prosperity the U.S., Western Europe and Japan had on offer after World War II. America won the battle for hearts and minds.
Moreover, ethnic nationalism, the idea that separate and unique peoples have a right to determine their own political and cultural identity and destiny, never died in the captive nations of Europe and the USSR.
China today does not suffer from these deficiencies to the same degree. Unlike the USSR, China has four times our population. Where the USSR could not compete economically and technologically, China is a capable and dynamic rival of the U.S.
Moreover, if we begin a Cold War II with China, we would not be starting with the advantages Truman’s America, undamaged at home in World War II, had over Stalin’s pillaged and plundered land in 1945.
Where ethnic nationalism tore the USSR apart into 15 nations, today’s China is more of an ethno-nationalist state with Han Chinese constituting 1 billion of China’s 1.4 billion people.
There are millions of Tibetans, Uighurs, Kazakhs in southwest and west China, and tens of millions of Buddhists, Christians, Muslims, Falun Gong and other religious minorities. But China is unlike the multiracial, multiethnic, multicultural, multilingual Moscow-centered and Russian-controlled Soviet Empire and USSR that shattered after 1989.
China’s weaknesses?
She is feared and distrusted by her neighbors. She sits on India’s lands from the war of the early 1960s. She claims the whole South China Sea, whose waters and resources are also claimed by Vietnam, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, the Philippines and Taiwan.
The peoples of Hong Kong and Taiwan fear that Beijing intends to overrun and rule them.
Even Vladimir Putin has reason to be suspicious as Beijing looks at the barren but resource-rich lands of Siberia and the Russian Far East, some of which once belonged to China.
China is thus a greater rival than the USSR of Stalin and Khrushchev and Brezhnev, but the U.S. is not today the nation of Ronald Reagan, with its surging economy and ideological conviction we would one day see the ideology of Marx and Lenin buried.
Three decades of post-Cold War foolish and failed democracy-crusading have left this generation not with the conviction and certitude of Cold War America, but with ashes in their mouths and no stomach to spend blood and treasure converting China to our way of life.
Tyler Durden
Tue, 05/12/2020 – 19:25
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