- Norway Remains World's Largest Sovereign Wealth Fund
Norway Remains World’s Largest Sovereign Wealth Fund
Authored by Katharina Buchholz via Statista.com,
Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF), which has made a lot of headlines recently due to its significant investments in golf and football, released its 2022 annual report on Sunday, providing the public with a glimpse into the operations of one of the world’s largest sovereign wealth funds. At the end of 2022, the PIF’s assets under management amounted to roughly $600 billion – a figure that has since grown to $700 billion according to Global SWF, a company tracking sovereign wealth funds.
While gaining more international attention due to its investments in sports, the PIF actually reduced its international strategic investments last year, with their share of total assets under management dropping from 20 to 10 percent, while domestic investments accounted for 77 percent of AuM at the end of the year.
Often accused of “sportswashing”, the PIF is very clear about the purpose of its international investments in its annual report. Among other things, the fund’s strategic international investments are meant to “establish strategic relationships and partnerships with innovative companies, investment managers, and influential investors to allow Saudi Arabia to extend its global reach and influence”, to “bolster Saudi Arabia’s position on the world stage as a leader and enabler of the future global economy” and to “support government-to-government relationships.”
Serving a totally different purpose, the Norwegian Government Pension Fund is still the largest sovereign wealth fund in the world. According to data from Global SFW, the fund’s assets under management amount to $1.38 trillion, narrowly exceeding the $1.35 trillion in assets under management from the Chinese Investment Corporation. As our chart shows, most of the world’s largest sovereign wealth funds are located in Asia and the Arab world, with Norway the only, albeit notable exception.
The unique Norwegian fund was set up to invest government revenues from its vast oil and natural gas reserves into sectors deemed more sustainable in order to provide for a future when the country can no longer rely on its income from fossil fuels. The Norwegian government is free to use up to three percent of the fund’s volume annually for social purposes – that number currently amounts to roughly $40 billion.
Tyler Durden
Mon, 08/14/2023 – 02:45 - Türkiye Quietly Renounces NATO Links, But Not NATO Benefits
Türkiye Quietly Renounces NATO Links, But Not NATO Benefits
Authored by Gregory Copley via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),
NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg (R) greets Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan for a NATO summit at the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) headquarters in Brussels, on June 14, 2021. (Francois Mori/AFP via Getty Images) Türkiye on Aug. 3, made its most pointed renunciation of its ties to NATO.
President Reçep Tayyip Erdoğan, who was sworn into office again on June 2, re-structured his Armed Forces leadership, removing all leaders who had held NATO appointments.
Türkiye, as a result, has stopped attempting to balance its NATO membership off against its commitments to Russia. It has, de facto, now thrown in its lot with Eurasia.
The new appointments come amidst a crisis in the Turkish Armed Forces which have seen, in recent years, a marked decline in the professionalism of key officers. President Erdoğan has favored political loyalty to him over operational experience, often replacing professional military leaders with Gendarmerie (Jendarma) generals.
The Turkish Supreme Military Council (Yüksek Askerî Şûra: YAŞ) met on Aug. 3, at the Presidential Palace under the chairmanship of President Erdoğan, with the main focus on the annual reviews of the senior officers of the Turkish Armed Forces (Türk Silahlı Kuvvetleri: TSK). Before the meeting, and in accordance with protocol, the president accompanied members of the YAŞ to the mausoleum of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, where he laid a wreath and signed the Official Book, in which, after praising the rôle of the Armed Forces, referred to the new strategic goal of the country as the “Century of Turkey,” promising “an increase in the strength of the army.”
The “Century of Turkey” plan, which includes the “Blue Homeland” doctrine, specifically targets the interests of Greece. Senior officers were promoted who were known for their anti-Western profile and who were involved in the contrived 2017 “Ergenekon” and 2013 “Varioupoula” purge scandals.
A new Chief of General Staff was appointed, along with a new Chief of Land Forces (GH) and a new Chief of Air Force (THK), while the Chief of Naval Forces (TDK) remained in his position. The new Chief of the General Staff was the former 2nd Army Commander, Gen. Metin Gürak, who replaced Gen. Yasar Güler, who was appointed Defense Minister in the new Government in June 2023.
Deputy Chief of General Staff Gen. Selçuk Bayraktaroğlu was named as commander of land forces. Chief of Air Force and Anti-Aircraft Missile Defence Gen. Ziya Cemal Kadoığlu was named commander of the Air Force (Türk Hava Kuvvetleri: THK). Adm. E. Tatlioğlu, the chief of the South-Western Command, remained in his position.
During the meeting, 32 senior officers were promoted and 63 officers of the rank of colonel or equivalent became senior officers. It was decided to increase the number of senior officers by 20 to reach 286, to fill administrative positions, as many new Brigade and especially commando-level formations had been created.
Gen. Gürak became the first Chief of General Staff to be appointed without prior service as a chief of a service branch. This requirement had been dropped by President Erdoğan to give him more flexibility in appointing loyalists to the top posts. None of the newly appointed chiefs have served in NATO or other Western countries’ posts or schools, despite the fact that, in the TSK, officers with NATO experience had been highly regarded.
The Chief of General Staff, Gen. Gürak, does have operational experience. From his service with the 2nd Armored Brigade of the 1st Army (Istanbul) and as Commander of the Army Air Force and the 4th Army Corps (Ankara), he is familiar with the operational plans concerning the Ægean and Thrace. He served as an adviser in Libya when Turkey established military bases and supported Islamist forces against Cairo-backed Gen. Khalifa Haftar.
Gen. Gürak speaks Arabic, considered important at a time when Erdoğan is investing in relations with the rich Arab countries of the Gulf. He took a controversial stance on the night of the July 15, 2016, “coup attempt” as commander of the 4th Army Corps and Ankara Fortress, and was appreciated by Erdoğan for the assistance of the 2nd Army units in the earthquakes of February 2023, since the affected regions were in his area of responsibility.
The new Air Force Chief has neither NATO nor any particular operational experience. He is, however, considered an extreme nationalist. He was also involved on the night of the “coup attempt,” at the Air Operations Center (in Eskişehir).
President Erdoğan also conducted another purge of the Police-Security Directorate in early August 2023, again favoring political loyalists over professional and operationally-experienced officers: 52 out of a total of 81 prefectural directors, who were considered loyal to former Interior Minister Süleyman Soylu, were removed.
Tyler Durden
Mon, 08/14/2023 – 02:00 - The Evidence That Convicts The CIA Of The JFK Assassination
The Evidence That Convicts The CIA Of The JFK Assassination
Authored by Jacob G. Hornberger via fff.org,
Abraham Zapruder’s camera. Longtime readers of my work on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy know that I point to the evidence establishing the fraudulent autopsy that was conducted on JFK’s body to convict the U.S. military establishment of criminal complicity in the assassination itself. That’s because there is no innocent explanation for a fraudulent autopsy. Once one concludes that the autopsy that the military conducted on JFK’s body was fraudulent, one has automatically concluded that the military establishment was criminally complicit in the assassination itself. There is no way around that.
The evidence of autopsy fraud is set forth in my books The Kennedy Autopsy, The Kennedy Autopsy 2, and An Encounter with Evil: The Abraham Zapruder Story. It is detailed to a much greater extent in Douglas Horne’s watershed five-volume book on the Kennedy assassination Inside the Assassination Records Review Board.
But what about the CIA? Is there evidence that convicts the CIA beyond a reasonable doubt of criminal complicity in the JFK assassination? Yes, there is. That evidence consists of the altered, fraudulent copy of the famous Zapruder film that the CIA secretly produced at its top-secret Hawkeyeworks photographic operation in Rochester, New York, on the weekend of the assassination.
Just as there is no innocent explanation for a fraudulent autopsy, there is also no innocent explanation for an altered, fraudulent copy of the film of the assassination. Once one concludes that the famous Zapruder film is an altered, fraudulent copy of the original Zapruder film, one has automatically concluded that the CIA was criminally complicit in the assassination of President Kennedy. There is no way around that.
Yes, I am thoroughly familiar with the CIA’s standard response: “Conspiracy theory, Jacob! Conspiracy theory!”
Some readers may not know that I began my professional career as a civil and criminal trial attorney in Texas. I was trained to think like a lawyer. During the twelve years of my law career, I tried both jury and non-jury cases, in both state and federal courts. Given such, I naturally think in terms of evidence, not theories. No prosecutor or criminal-defense trial lawyer goes into court and tells a jury that he has a theory of the case. He tells the jury how the evidence will establish or fail to establish the defendant’s guilt.
I detail the evidence of what the CIA did to produce a fraudulent, altered copy of the original Zapruder film in my book An Encounter with Evil: The Abraham Zapruder Story.
Essentially, what the CIA did was secretly transport the original Zapruder film on November 23, 1963 (the day after the assassination) to the CIA’s National Photographic Interpretation Center (NPIC) in Washington, D.C.
The next day, November 24, it then transported the original film to its top-secret photographic operation called Hawkeyeworks, which was secretly located within Kodak’s research and development section of its corporate headquarters in Rochester, where it was copied and altered.
The altered, fraudulent copy of the Zapruder film was then shipped back to NPIC in Washington, where it was presented as the original film. (Note: While Kodak had secretly partnered with the CIA to establish Hawkeyeworks within its Rochester facility, there is no evidence that Kodak was part of the CIA’s criminal activity with respect to the Zapruder film.)
Among the things that the CIA did with its altered copy was to delete frames that tended to establish the criminal culpability of the national-security establishment, including elements of the Secret Service, in the assassination.
For example, consider the route of the presidential limousine as it approached Dealey Plaza. The presidential motorcade comes down Main Street in downtown Dallas, proceeding in a westerly direction. It then turns right onto Houston Street. It then makes an extremely wide turn onto Elm Street — so wide, in fact, that it violated Secret Service protocols on making turns. Some witnesses said that the limousine had so much difficulty making the turn that it actually went onto the sidewalk or almost onto the sidewalk to navigate the turn.
Obviously, such a turn would slow JFK’s limousine to a crawl, which would make it easier for an assassin to shoot the president. Thus, that wide turn onto Elm Street is naturally something that the CIA would want to eliminate in its altered, fraudulent copy of the Zapruder film.
The extant film (that is, the film that purports to be an original) shows something highly unusual. It show motorcycle cops making the turn onto Elm Street but then suddenly jumps to show JFK’s limousine already coming down Elm Street. In other words, it doesn’t show the presidential limousine making that extremely wide turn onto Elm Street.
In her book Twenty-Six Seconds: A Personal History of the Zapruder Film, Abraham Zapruder’s granddaughter Alexandria Zapruder wrote that Zapruder didn’t film the president’s turn onto Elm Street because, she said, Zapruder wanted to be sure that he didn’t run out of film before the president was approaching where Zapruder was standing.
But how logical is that? Zapruder was about as professional a home movie-maker as an amateur could be. He had been taking home movies for many years. He knew exactly what he was doing.
If he had decided to wait until the presidential limousine was near him on Elm Street, then why would he have filmed the motorcycle cops making the turn onto Elm Street? If he was concerned about running out of film, why waste film on the motorcycle cops?
Moreover, Dealey Plaza was the end of the motorcade. Zapruder’s partner Irwin Schwartz had told him that the motorcade would likely be exiting Dealey Plaza at a high rate of speed. Given such, how likely is it that Zapruder would have waited until the president was already on Elm Street to begin filming, rather than begin filming the motorcade as it made the turn onto Elm Street and then continue filming as the limousine approached him until he ran out of film? After all, Zapruder would have had little interest in filming the back of the president after he had already passed him by.
But that’s all logic and common sense. I can already hear the “Conspiracy theory, Jacob!” crowd crying, “Where is the evidence, Jacob, to establish beyond a reasonable doubt that the CIA produced an altered, fraudulent copy of the original Zapruder film?”
Fair enough. I detail that evidence in my book An Encounter with Evil. But let’s examine just a small part of that evidence in this article.
1. Consider, first, this short film of television news reporter Dan Rather. Rather saw Zapruder’s copy of the original Zapruder film on Monday morning, November 25, in Zapruder’s office. He immediately left Zapruder’s office and rushed out to make this filmed report about what he had just seen a few minutes before. In this film, Rather states: “The film shows President Kennedy’s open black limousine making a left turn off Houston Street onto Elm Street on the fringe of downtown Dallas.”
2. Consider, second, this film of LIFE magazine reporter Richard Stolley, who viewed the original film multiple times on the weekend of the assassination. In fact, it was Stolley who negotiated the sale of the Zapruder film to LIFE magazine. Go to 6:40 of the film, where Stolley describes what the original Zapruder film showed: “And you see the motorcade snaking around Dealey Plaza….”
The extant Zapruder film shows the presidential limousine coming down Elm Street in a straight line — that is, there is no “snaking around.” Stolley’s statement establishes that the original film included the wide turn onto Elm Street because that is the only way that the presidential limousine could be described as “snaking around.”
3. Consider, third, this filmed interview of Marilyn Sitzman, Zapruder’s trusted assistant, who was with him when he filmed the assassination.
Go to 3:40.
The interviewer states: “When … there is part of something that’s been uncovered that he tried out a little bit of the film ahead of time to be sure the camera was working all right and caught some of the motorcycle policemen. Do you remember — do you recall that — kind of testing the first few feet of film?”
Sitzman responds: “No. I know he took a picture of me as I walked up. Then we stood up there. He may have taken the shots to see what his view was. I only remember that when they started to make their first turn, turning into the street, and he says ‘Okay, here we go’ or something to that effect. That’s when I remember we started actually doing the filming.”
4. Consider, fourth, this other filmed interview with Sitzman. Go to 27:25. Sitzman states: “And he started filming about, oh, just before they came around the corner….”
5. Consider, fifth, another interview that Sitzman gave to an interviewer named Wes Wise, where she stated, “I only remember when they started to make their first turn … turning into the street, he said, ‘OK, here we go.…’ or something to that effect. That’s when I remember he started actually doing the filming.”
6. Consider, sixth, this filmed interview of Abraham Zapruder himself shortly after the assassination. Go to 00:30, where Zapruder states, “As I was shooting, as the President was coming down from Houston Street making his turn, it was about a half-way down there, I heard a shot….”
7. Consider, seventh, an interview that Zapruder gave to an interviewer named Marvin Scott, where Zapruder stated, “And then I watched for the arrival of the, uh, cars, I saw the motorcycles, and then the car approached. As they turned I started shooting the pictures, that turned from Houston Street to Elm Street, and I was shooting as they were coming along….”
8. Consider, eighth, the sworn testimony that Zapruder gave at the Clay Shaw trial in 1969, where he stated under oath, “I started shooting — when the motorcade started coming in, I believe I started and wanted to get it coming in from Houston Street.”
What does the CIA say about all this evidence that unquestionably proves beyond a reasonable doubt that the CIA secretly produced an altered, fraudulent copy of the Zapruder film on the weekend of the assassination at its top-secret Hawkeye facility at Kodak’s headquarters in Rochester, New York?
We all know what the CIA’s response is. It’s their standard response. “Conspiracy theory, Jacob! Conspiracy theory!”
I rest my case. The CIA’s production of an altered, fraudulent copy of the famous Zapruder film establishes beyond a reasonable doubt the CIA’s criminal culpability in the assassination of President Kennedy.
You can purchase my book, which is receiving overwhelming positive reviews at Amazon, here: An Encounter with Evil: The Abraham Zapruder Story by Jacob Hornberger.
NOTE: Special thanks for FFF reader E.C. for inspiring me to write this article.
Tyler Durden
Sun, 08/13/2023 – 23:45 - The Rise (And Fall) Of Hip-Hop's Fortunes
The Rise (And Fall) Of Hip-Hop’s Fortunes
Authored by Katharina Buchholz via statista.com,
50 years ago today, on Aug. 11, 1973, a teenage DJ Kool Herc and his sister Cindy threw a party in the rec room of a Bronx apartment building during which Herc debuted his spinning and sampling technique – an event that is today considered the birth of hip-hop.
From humble and DIY roots, hip-hop has turned into big business in the decades since and has minted three billionaire rappers. Out of these, two – Jay-Z and Sean “Diddy” Combs – have current net worths of $1 billion or more – based on information on the Substack blog of former Forbes writer Zack O’Malley Greenburg, who has chronicled the fortunes of hip-hop‘s wealthiest since 2011. While Jay-Z branched out into other markets with his clothing line Rocawear as early as 1999 and today has a wide-ranging business portfolio, Sean “Diddy” Combs draws his wealth and considerable cash flow from spirit deals and media company Revolt.
Getting rich has been almost as central to hip-hop’s message as keeping it real. Yet, some of hip-hop’s biggest names have seen their fortunes dwindle. Dr. Dre, born Andre Young, might have been the first self-proclaimed hip-hop billionaire, but according to O’Malley Greenburg, his fortune – boosted in 2014 by the sale of headphones brand Beats to Apple – peaked at $800 million in 2019, when the last list of hip-hop’s richest was published on Forbes. Since then, Young’s spending has surpassed his income according to the report and divorce proceedings showed a net worth of only $400 million in 2022 (with another $50 million payment still due at the time).
A bigger rise and fall was that of Kanye West, who first appeared among hip-hop’s richest at a net worth of just $240 million estimated by Forbes in 2019 – the same year the list declared Jay-Z hip-hop’s first actual billionaire. This might have enticed West to finally open his books to Forbes reporters, which subsequently estimated his net worth at $1.3 billion in 2020. Yet, O’Malley Greenburg reports in 2022 that, due to the “premature end” of West’s deal with Adidas in the throws of an antisemitism scandal, his net worth had decreased to $500 million.
Tyler Durden
Sun, 08/13/2023 – 23:15 - Global Elites' Secret Plot Against Food
Global Elites’ Secret Plot Against Food
Authored by Milan Adams via preppgroup.home.blog,
We live in perplexing times. It’s almost inconceivable to think that there’s a war being waged against food, an absolute and undeniable necessity of life. Yet, here we stand, on the precipice of what looks like a catastrophic agenda against global sustenance.
So, what’s this newfound hostility against the thing that keeps us alive?
Take a deep breath. Farming uses nitrogen, and suddenly, nitrogen is the new antagonist in the tale of global warming. The narrative is simple: eliminate nitrogen, save the world. Yet, in the name of “preservation,” entire segments of our food production are under siege.
Consider rice – a staple for half the world’s population. Renowned agencies claim, “Rice accounts for roughly 10% of global methane emissions,” emphasizing the urgent need to curtail its production. But the ramifications? Starvation for billions.
Look to the Netherlands for further evidence. Dutch farmers, the backbone of a nation that is a leading exporter of meat and agricultural products, are being chased off their lands. A staggering number, 3,000 farms, are forecasted to be confiscated in the coming years. The tragic fallout is evident, with a reported 20 to 30 farmers tragically ending their lives annually.
Our friends in Europe are no strangers to these baffling decisions either. The European Commission greenlit a strategy to compensate livestock farmers for halting their operations in certain areas – with a stipulation that they never resume their animal breeding activities. The implications are clear: a drop in global food availability and an inevitable spike in prices.
Remember Sri Lanka’s ill-fated venture into 100% organic farming? The island nation faced a humanitarian nightmare with a staggering 90% of its population on the brink of starvation.
And the Western leaders’ stance on agriculture? Eric Utter encapsulates it perfectly in American Thinker, “The attack on farming by Western leaders is shockingly negligent. It’s criminal.” Especially when such views ignore the glaring fact that while agriculture may account for 33% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, it simultaneously sustains every single human being on this planet.
Organizations like the World Economic Forum tout visions of a “farm-free future,” dreaming of a world where food is crafted in sterile labs and humans are herded into congested urban centers. Toss digital currency into this dystopian mix, and you have the ultimate formula for absolute dominance.
In our modern era, the recipe is simple: concoct a crisis, even if none existed.
- Incite racial tension among children.
- Reverse the progress women achieved over decades.
- Worsen shortages and tamper with the money supply.
- Tackle borders haphazardly.
- Condemn specific foods, close farms, or incite wars to create famine.
- Muzzle voices of dissent by labeling truth as “misinformation.”
A tactic reminiscent of Cloward and Piven: create a crisis, then implement severe measures to address that very crisis.
Our global food supply is now in peril, thanks to overblown reactions to this so-called “nitrogen issue“. But why this apathy? Sri Lanka, for instance, is an alarming testament to this flawed approach.
The truth remains that nitrogen is pivotal for plant metabolism. Without commercial nitrogen fertilizers, hunger was a dire reality in many corners of the world. If we shun these fertilizers, we voluntarily invite famine back into our lives. The idea of bug diets, ‘rewilding,‘ and organic farming might sound avant-garde, but they certainly won’t satisfy the global hunger.
It’s glaringly evident that this isn’t just about combating climate change. At its core, it’s an insidious bid for control.
In the profound words of Ayn Rand, “We can ignore reality, but we cannot ignore the consequences of ignoring reality.“
Tyler Durden
Sun, 08/13/2023 – 22:45 - China's Crashing Loans Show Risk of Beijing Acting Too Late
China’s Crashing Loans Show Risk of Beijing Acting Too Late
By Charlie Zhu and Helen Sun, Bloomberg markets live reporters and strategists
Three things we learned last week:
1. China’s economy weakened further in July but Beijing was slow to arrest the decline. The nation’s banks extended the smallest amount of monthly loans since 2009, and aggregate financing was less than half the level forecast by economists.
Worse, loans to the real economy plummeted to RMB 36.4BN, the lowest since 2006. As Goldman notes, “last week’s print underscores the weak demand in the economy and the need for the government to implement more easing measures.”
In addition, both consumer and producer prices fell in July from a year ago, the first time since 2020 that both sets of prices registered a decline. This is taking place as companies are slashing prices to jumpstart consumption, underscoring the deflationary pressure that’s building in China.
The trade outlook is looking similarly dire. Overseas shipments dropped in July by the most in more than three years, and imports contracted for a fifth consecutive month. While it’s not surprising to see the former shrinking due to slowing global growth, sustained weakness in the latter is worrying as it suggests that domestic demand is also faltering.
“The credit demand is very subdued,” said Lu Ting, chief China economist at Nomura Holdings Inc. “The key remains to send clear policy signals regarding the private sector, foreign companies and the real estate industry, so that people become willing to borrow money and invest, including in housing.”
Meanwhile, Country Garden Holdings Co.’s troubles reflect the impact of a delay in rolling out forceful housing market policies: once the country’s top builder, the developer has become a penny stock as it was said to be considering a move to extend some of its notes that will fall due soon. This is adding to the overall gloom surrounding Chinese assets.
Country Garden’s liquidity situation may deteriorate as sentiment weakens, and Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Kristy Hung warns that a default would impact the housing market more than China Evergrande Group’s collapse as the former has four times as many projects as the latter.
It’s a vicious cycle. As builders struggle to deliver homes, buyers will refrain from purchasing, which will crimp sales further. The crisis of confidence shows no signs of abating with home sales down the most in a year in July. The securities regulator held a meeting with developers on Friday, after the central bank organized a similar session. Is help on the way?
* * *
2. Elsewhere, an anti-corruption campaign aimed at the pharmaceutical industry is invoking memories of previous government crackdowns. Local media reported that as of July 26, the number of hospital executives being probed for allegedly violating laws and regulations was double the tally registered in the whole of last year. The CSI 300 Health Care Index dropped to the lowest since September, reflecting growing jitters about the crackdown.
In another discouraging sign, a central bank adviser’s call to treat the private sector and state-owned firms equally was deleted from a top think tank’s social media account, a sign of how sensitive the issue is even as the ruling Communist Party vows to support private enterprise.* * *
3. Given that things are looking so glum, authorities are taking incremental steps to bolster economic growth and contain the risks. The finance ministry was said to be looking to allow provincial-level governments to raise about 1 trillion yuan ($138 billion) via bond sales to repay the debt of local-government financing vehicles and other off-balance sheet issuers.
In another bit of good news, the nation has also lifted a ban on group tours to a slew of countries including the US, UK, Australia, South Korea and Japan, setting the stage for a rebound in domestic and global tourism.
“Without sugar-coating economic developments in China, digging beneath the surface, things are probably slightly less bad than they appear at first glance,” Paul Danis, head of asset allocation at RBC Brewin Dolphin, wrote in a note Thursday before the credit data was released. It seems unlikely that China will fall into a balance-sheet recession like Japan, but the main risk is that Chinese authorities may make a number of bad policy choices, he wrote.
Tyler Durden
Sun, 08/13/2023 – 22:15 - Rufo: Bring On The Counter-Revolution
Rufo: Bring On The Counter-Revolution
Authored by Christopher F. Rufo via City Journal,
America is trapped in the loop of 1968. The politics of that fateful year have set the patterns and bounds of our national life for decades.
It’s as though we have lived an endless recurrence: the Black Panther Party reappears as the Black Lives Matter movement; the Weather Underground pamphlets launder themselves into academic papers; the Marxist-Leninist guerrillas trade in their bandoliers and become managers of an elite-led revolution in manners and mores. The ideology, narrative, and aesthetics of the left-wing social movements of that earlier time, though now often degraded through cynicism and repetition, have maintained the position of a jealous hegemon.
The cultural revolution that began a half-century ago, now reflected in a deadening sequence of acronyms—CRT, DEI, ESG, and more—has increasingly become our new official morality. Many conservatives have made an uneasy peace with this transformation of values, even as the culture around them has, in many places, collapsed.
This attitude no longer suffices. It is time to break the loop of 1968. We need a counterrevolution.
This is the word that haunts the revolutionary mind. The French Revolution fell to the forces of Thermidor; the Revolution of 1848 fell to the empire of the bourgeoisie; the Bolshevik Revolution fell to the democratic-capitalists, the imperialist-backed juntas, and the forces of global capitalism. Marx himself viewed counterrevolution as an overwhelming threat. “Every important part of the revolutionary annals from 1848 to 1849 bears the heading: Defeat of the revolution!” he lamented.
The urgent task for the political Right today is to comprehend the dynamics of revolution and counterrevolution and to create a strategy for dislodging the New Left ideology of 1968, which has solidified control over the most fundamental structures of American society. The challenge must be met not solely in the realm of policy debate but on the deepest political and philosophical grounds.
Today’s counterrevolution is not one of class against class but takes place along a new axis between the citizen and an ideologically driven state. Its ultimate ambition is not to replace the new “universal class”—the heirs of the 1960s cultural revolution, who have worked to professionalize it and install it in elite institutions—or to capture the bureaucratic apparatus that the universal class currently controls; instead, it seeks to restore the nation’s founding principle of citizen rule over the state.
The next conservative president should use federal tools to punish universities that pursue racial preferences. (TOM CROKE/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO) The current moment can be symbolized as a conflict between the Revolution of 1968 and the Revolution of 1776. And despite the seemingly overwhelming power of their opponents, the partisans of 1776 have some significant advantages. The 1968ers promise liberation through the destruction of old forms of order; they appeal to the romantic spirit of the revolutionary. But their campaigns inevitably collapse into nihilism. They tear away the supposed masks, denounce the great ideals, humiliate the old heroes—and leave nothing but an immense void in their place.
The counterrevolution must take its bearings from the common citizen and offer to restore his dignity and mastery over his own life. It must reverse the process of institutional capture, break up centralized ideological powers, and return influence to local communities. The strategy has been described as “right-wing Leninism,” but this misunderstands a key point: while the revolution seeks to demolish America’s founding principles, the counterrevolution seeks to restore them; while the revolution proceeds by a long march through the institutions, the counterrevolution works to remove power from institutions that have lost or betrayed the public trust.
The architects of the counterrevolution—intellectuals, activists, and political leaders—must develop a new political vocabulary that can break through the Left’s identitarian and bureaucratic narratives, tap into the reservoir of popular sentiment that will provide the basis for mass support, and design policies to sever the connection between the radical ideologies and administrative power.
Given current circumstances, with the Left’s seemingly wholesale capture of major institutions—public education, the universities, private-sector leadership, culture, and, increasingly, even the sciences—the current battlefield can appear overwhelming. But today’s Left has an Achilles heel: its power is, to a significant degree, a creature of the state, subsidized by patronage, loan schemes, bureaucratic employment, and civil rights regulations. These structures often appear permanent, but they can be reformed, redirected, or abolished through the democratic process.
With a presidential election looming, conservatives need to develop a national counterrevolutionary agenda. For some ideas for what that might look like, they can turn to a surprising guide: Richard Nixon.
The movement against the Revolution of 1968 had already begun to take form in the closing stretch of that year. As the radical left-wing factions asserted themselves in the universities and in the streets, voters cast their presidential ballots for former vice president Richard Milhous Nixon, who promised to restore “law and order” on behalf of the “silent majority.” Nixon is held in contempt these days, even by many conservatives, but parts of his legacy deserve reappraisal. He acutely understood the threat of ideological revolution and anticipated the dynamics of bureaucratic capture.
In his presidential nomination speech of 1968, as the forces of the New Left’s cultural revolution were rapidly ascending, Nixon set the stakes for the American public and established themes that still dominate American politics today. “My friends, we live in an age of revolution in America and in the world,” Nixon said. “We see cities enveloped in smoke and flame. We hear sirens in the night. We see Americans dying on distant battlefields abroad. We see Americans hating each other; fighting each other; killing each other at home.”
Through the chaos and tumult of the cultural revolution, Nixon called to the “great majority of Americans, the forgotten Americans, the non-shouters, the non-demonstrators.” He defended this silent majority against attacks that have since become ubiquitous. “They’re not racists or sick; they’re not guilty of the crime that plagues the land; they are black, they are white; they’re native-born and foreign-born,” he told the convention audience in Miami Beach. “And this I say, this I say to you tonight, is the real voice of America.”
Nixon appealed to the Revolution of 1776 as the antidote to the Revolution of 1968. “To find the answers to our problems, let us turn to a revolution—a revolution that will never grow old, the world’s greatest continuing revolution, the American Revolution,” he said. “The American Revolution was and is dedicated to progress. But our founders recognized that the first requisite of progress is order. Now there is no quarrel between progress and order because neither can exist without the other. . . . And to those who say that law and order is the code word for racism, here is a reply: Our goal is justice—justice for every American.”
An early priority in Nixon’s counterrevolution was to tame the national bureaucracy. Between 1969 and 1971, Nixon unveiled a series of proposals under the concept of the “New Federalism,” designed to consolidate federal agencies under tighter presidential authority, convert entire federal programs into direct block grants to states and municipalities, eliminate specific expenditures through the budget impoundment process, and replace the Great Society’s antipoverty initiatives, which sought to reengineer human behavior, with a simple guaranteed income program for the poor.
Nixon believed that the federal government should provide a financial backstop for the American people, but he wanted to curb the power of the government’s experts, managers, and bureaucrats, who, he recognized, wanted to remake organic social institutions in the service of left-wing ideology. Nixon once asked his domestic policy advisor Daniel Patrick Moynihan if his proposed basic-income program would “get rid of social workers.” Moynihan responded: “It would wipe them out.”
The second element of Nixon’s counterrevolution—the most successful during his presidency—was the campaign to reestablish “law and order.” The late 1960s were marked by mass rioting, looting, and arson in America’s urban areas. The promise of the civil rights movement, which established full formal equality for black Americans in 1964 and 1965, had turned to disillusion. Members of the New Left’s coalition of white middle-class students and black urban agitators took to the streets in a cataclysm of political violence, promising to wage guerrilla war against the government and to establish a Marxist-Leninist state. Radicals planted thousands of bombs and assassinated police officers in major cities.
Nixon responded with an appeal to the middle class. “When the nation with the greatest tradition of the rule of law is plagued by unprecedented lawlessness; when a nation that has been known for a century for equality of opportunity is torn by unprecedented racial violence,” Nixon said, “then it’s time for new leadership for the United States of America.”
As president, Nixon ruthlessly dismantled the radical organizations, such as the Black Panther Party, Black Liberation Army, Weather Underground, and Communist Party USA, that threatened violent revolution against the state. His FBI director, J. Edgar Hoover, launched a sophisticated campaign to infiltrate, disrupt, and disperse their networks, with devastatingly effective results. Of course, some of what Hoover’s FBI did ran the gamut from questionable to flatly illegal, and these practices not only violated the rights of numerous American citizens but also undermined the authority by which the U.S. government rightly engages in containment of lawless individuals or groups. Still, by the end of Nixon’s first term, most of the subversive organizations had imploded, and many of their leaders were on the run, in prison, or in the ground.
And the New Left’s intellectual leaders believed that Nixon’s drive against radical groups was succeeding. “The Nixon Administration has strengthened the counterrevolutionary organization of society in all directions,” wrote the neo-Marxist philosopher Herbert Marcuse in 1972. “The Black Panther party has been systematically chased down before it disintegrated in internal conflicts. A vast army of undercover agents is spread over the entire country and through all branches of society.” The revolution, he believed, was finished.
The third element of Nixon’s counterrevolution was the formation of a counter-elite. Nixon felt besieged by the post–New Deal liberal establishment and the New Left counterculture that had captured the sympathies of the press. The bureaucracy, he believed—whether in the Communist Soviet Union or capitalist United States—would inevitably be controlled by a ruling elite that, with the advent of mass communications and administration, could wield unprecedented powers. He feared that the new elites would undermine older middle-class values, and his notorious “enemies list” was a crude proxy for the kind of individuals who would make that happen.
“The leadership class is made up of highly educated and influential people in the arts, the media, the academic community, the government bureaucracies, and even business,” Nixon maintained. “They are characterized by intellectual arrogance, an obsession with style, fashion, and class, and a permissive attitude,” he wrote, a profile that has not changed much in the half-century since. Nixon was blunt: “The press is the enemy. The establishment is the enemy. The professors are the enemy,” he told advisor Henry Kissinger in the Oval Office.
In their place, Nixon hoped, his administration could help “create a new establishment” to counterbalance the elite universities and the media, which, Nixon estimated, was “90–10” against him. In meetings with his chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman, Nixon shared his desire to freeze out liberal reporters, to adopt a harder line against his foes, and to “go out into the heartland” to recruit a conservative counter-elite uncorrupted by the Ivy Leagues. He believed that a resounding reelection victory could establish the conditions for a deeper shift in the nation’s power structure. “What [liberal presidential candidate George] McGovern stands for, the eastern liberal media stands for, the eastern intellectuals stand for . . . must be crushed,” he told aides in October 1972. “It cannot come back and have an opportunity to have much influence in American life for a while.”
By the end of his first term, frustrated by the permanent administration in Washington, Nixon had conceived of his most important task as leading a counterrevolution against the state bureaucracy—or, as he put it in his 1971 State of the Union Address, a “New American Revolution,” in which the federal government would be put back into check and power returned to the common citizen. As Nixon aide Richard Nathan explained in his book The Plot That Failed: Nixon and the Administrative Presidency, the president increasingly saw himself as a champion of the “general interest,” caught at the center of a system arrayed against it.
In November 1972, Nixon got his resounding reelection, winning with the largest popular vote margin of any candidate in the postwar era, defeating McGovern in 49 out of 50 states, including McGovern’s home state of South Dakota. The press immediately noted the significance of Nixon’s ambitions. The New York Times published a postelection editorial titled “Nixon Counterrevolution,” warning that the reelected president wanted to “advance an ideological grand design” that would reverse the progression of the New Deal and the Great Society, abolishing federal programs that imposed elite-approved views on local communities and administered society from above. “Mr. Nixon seeks to accomplish a retrogressive counterrevolution in the guise of an administrative reorganization,” the editorial cautioned.
As his second term began, Nixon proceeded to abolish entire federal offices and programs that promoted left-wing social theories; suspend federal housing programs, pending review; and restrict the methods and ideological scope of federally funded social-services initiatives. He also proposed a truly ambitious system of “revenue sharing,” which would send billions in federal funding directly to states and municipalities, which, he believed, could administer social programs in greater alignment with local communities. The only way to avoid the slide into bureaucratic tyranny, Nixon believed, was to centralize control over the executive branch in the White House and to decentralize financing and administration of social programs, ensuring that they operated with minimal bureaucracy and as close to the people as possible.
To be sure, not all of Nixon’s domestic policy proposals were wise or successful. He enacted wage and price controls, expanded the reach of government through the creation of the EPA and other departments, and strengthened President Lyndon Johnson’s affirmative-action policy. His guaranteed income and block-grant proposals, if adopted, might have yielded unintended consequences, disincentivizing work and enabling ideological capture at the local level, respectively. But Nixon, whatever his flaws, thought seriously about how to reshape America’s institutions and had a vision for policy that was commensurate with the problem.
In the end, Nixon was subverted by the very forces he feared most. His enemies in the bureaucracy and the press were able to use the Watergate scandal to oust him and stop his plans for realignment. The tragedy of Nixon is that he accomplished his dream of winning a “new majority” but was unable to transform it into a “new establishment.” His closest aides described the experience as working in “the White House surrounded”—in a position of constitutional power, vitiated by the rise of the permanent bureaucracy.
With Nixon’s counterrevolution long since halted, the process of institutional capture has only intensified. Today, the federal government spends billions of dollars yearly supporting left-wing ideology and administration. The institutional Left, both within and without government, has built a vast network of departments, programs, contracts, grants, nonprofits, and service providers that circulate money throughout the system. Further, the federal government has financed and guaranteed more than $1.6 trillion in student loans, which help subsidize left-wing academic departments and “diversity and inclusion” bureaucracies at universities across the United States. Indeed, the entire federal bureaucracy, with more than 2 million civilian employees, is now under orders to advance “diversity, equity, and inclusion”—that is, to conform all its programs to racial ideology—across every department of government. It is not just social workers, then, but doctors, scientists, law-enforcement agents, and military commanders who have been recruited, willing or not, into the Left’s ongoing cultural capture.
Herbert Marcuse was premature in declaring the death of the revolution. Left-wing activists have today resurrected the militancy and tactics of the 1960s radical movements, organizing demonstrations and using the threat of violence to achieve political aims. During the summer of 2020, the Black Lives Matter movement led protests in 140 cities. Many of these demonstrations became violent—the largest eruption of left-wing race rioting since the late 1960s. Members of BLM, Antifa, and other so-called antifascist groups rampaged through neighborhoods, established street dominance in certain areas, and even launched a short-lived “autonomous zone” in Seattle. Protesters in Portland, Oregon, laid siege to a federal courthouse and rioted for more than 100 consecutive nights.
The intellectual descendants of the so-called New Left have warped the national narrative in dramatic ways. Today’s master-signifiers, their grounding first developed during the earlier period—“systemic racism,” “white supremacy,” “white privilege,” “antiracism”—have pushed the Right into a posture of seemingly permanent defense. The Black Lives Matter movement has recast the country’s “greatest heroes as the arch-villains,” as one old-time activist put it. And the managers of America’s institutions have ensured that schools, universities, nonprofits, and corporations repeat these themes ad nauseam, transmitting them to the next generation.
Conservatives today rarely appeal to Richard Nixon for inspiration, allowing the Watergate narrative and Nixon’s own ideological and policy inconsistencies to obscure the potential of his vision for resisting the Left’s cultural revolution. This is a mistake—but what would Nixon’s blueprint for counterrevolution look like today?
The starting point is correctly to perceive the current state of play in America. The bitter irony of the Revolution of 1968 is that it has attained power but hasn’t opened up new possibilities. Instead, it has locked major institutions of society within a suffocating orthodoxy. Though it has amassed significant administrative advantages, it has failed to deliver positive results to the broad public. It has thus not gained the trust of the common citizen. Its hold remains tenuous; it can be overcome.
The Oval Office can help drive the counterrevolution. Following the Nixon centralization-decentralization model, the next conservative president should establish ideological authority over the federal bureaucracy in the White House and, in partnership with Congress, decentralize as much of the federal government as possible, with an eye toward gutting the power of the social engineers. For decades, conservatives in Congress have effectively written a blank check to captured institutions, experienced dismay at the subsequent behavior of those institutions, and then continued to fund them. These are all policy choices—and they can be changed.
On the first day in office, the new president could prepare executive orders targeting the concepts and formulations that have traveled from the fringes of the 1960s Left to the center of American power. At the head of this list would be a ban on the government promotion of left-wing racialist ideology, or critical race theory, and to abolish the “diversity, equity, and inclusion” bureaucracy that serves as its administrative vehicle. The order would replace all this with a system of strict color-blind equality, prioritizing the values of equal treatment, individual excellence, and race-neutral decision-making. As part of this policy, the president could also rescind Lyndon Johnson’s Executive Order 11246, which established the legal basis for “affirmative action”—a euphemism for state-sanctioned racial discrimination in the interest of favored identity groups—and forbid the use of identity-based quotas, preferences, and “disparate impact” analysis as an acceptable basis for any federal decision-making, to the fullest extent of the law.
To start reshaping the culture inside federal agencies, the president should order an executive supplement to the Hatch Act, which prohibits civil service employees from engaging in partisan political activity, that would bar all social and political activism unrelated to such workers’ official duties. The policy would restrict federal employees from promoting the messages or displaying the symbols of political causes, such as Black Lives Matter or radical gender activism, while using federal resources and facilities. In principle, the restriction would apply equally to the Left and Right; in practice, it would almost exclusively restrict left-wing activism, given the left-dominated composition of the federal workforce and culture of the federal bureaucracy.
Following this, as Nixon demonstrated using the budget impoundment process, the next president should aggressively “defund the Left” and assert, unequivocally, that all federal programs, contracts, grants, and projects must reflect the values of the voters who elected him or her, unless specifically required by statute to do otherwise. Existing grants and contracts that violate these principles should be canceled, litigated, and strangled with red tape. Over time, this impoundment effort could deprive the Left’s public and private networks of hundreds of billions of dollars, which are laundered through universities, schools, nonprofits, and other entities. With a willing majority in Congress, this order could be codified into law, blocking federal funding of partisan left-wing ideological programs, much as the Hyde Amendment bans federal funding for abortion.
Next, reprising Nixon’s great theme of “law and order,” the next president should create a federal task force for disrupting violent left-wing activist groups. As Nixon did with the Black Panther Party and the Weather Underground, the next president should, using entirely legal means, pursue action against violent or lawless left-wing groups such as Antifa. The threat of political violence cannot be allowed to shape life in America’s cities, nor can it be used to put pressure on the electoral process—both of which occurred in 2020. With a relatively modest budgetary commitment, federal law enforcement could infiltrate groups, disrupt their financial networks, and prosecute their criminal behavior.
President Richard Nixon saw how the Left was capturing America’s prestige institutions. Watergate disrupted his ambitious plans to prevent that takeover. (BRIDGEMAN IMAGES) The new president could also work toward the objective that Nixon envisioned but never accomplished: the restructuring of American institutions more broadly. This can be attained through both content and form.
The federal government could use the tools of the 1968 revolution—above all, civil rights law—to advance the counterrevolution. The next administration can instruct the attorney general to set up a new civil rights enforcement office within the Department of Justice and then recruit hundreds of conservative lawyers to staff it. This new office, adhering to a conservative interpretation of civil rights law, would investigate corporations, universities, schools, and other institutions that engage in racial preferences, hostile diversity and inclusion programming, and critical race theory–style scapegoating and discrimination. These practices would all be deemed violations of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act and prosecuted with the full force of the Justice Department.
The president can instruct the Secretary of Education to employ a similar method to strike at the origin point of the revolution: the universities. On the first day of the new administration, the Department of Education should announce a new unit within its civil rights division, tasked with investigating universities—beginning with the Ivy Leagues—for racial discrimination in admissions, identity-based preferences in hiring, and activist-style DEI programs. As a complement to these enforcement provisions, the DOE should also require all federally supported universities to submit race, sex, grade-point average, and standardized test data for each incoming class and tie federal student loan programs—accepted at virtually every university in the country—to specific metrics on academic merit, open debate, and civil discourse. Universities that tolerate mobs and enforce left-wing orthodoxy will be punished; universities that encourage equal treatment and academic excellence will be rewarded. As incentives change, so will the institutions.
Finally, reviving the spirit of Nixon’s early New Federalism, the president, working with Congress, should decentralize the government’s colossal “health, education, and welfare” bureaucracy, block-granting large portions of federal expenditures to state governments, which are, at least in theory, less vulnerable to ideological capture. In addition, the president should pursue, in Nixon’s phrasing, an “income strategy,” similar in function to Social Security, which prioritizes direct financial assistance, rather than a “service strategy,” which seeks to manipulate values and behavior. Families, not bureaucrats and social workers, should be in charge; bonds of affection, not coercion, should be the primary shaper of human life. The cultural revolution has gained ground by imposing its values through centralized administrative structures; the counterrevolution must fight not only to overturn that system on intellectual grounds but also to provide families with the freedom and resources to build a new, decentralized system that respects their deepest rights of conscience and belief.
Would this battle be winnable? Nixon himself felt a sense of urgency, writing in his diary shortly after reelection that his second-term agenda was “the only way, and probably the last time, that we can get government under control before it gets so big that it submerges the individual completely and destroys the dynamism which makes the American system what it is.” Of course, for the battle to be winnable requires that it first be waged—and that requires winning elections, a formidable task.
We need to rediscover and revitalize the principles, language, and sentiments of an older revolution—that of 1776, the one that most Americans still believe in. (BRIDGEMAN IMAGES) Yet, we have some reason for optimism. For the past half-century, the left-wing revolution has relied on a high-low coalition—the “new proletariat” of the white intelligentsia and the black underclass—but its reach is inherently limited. The counterrevolution has an opportunity to build a broad, multiracial, middle-out coalition that seeks to overthrow the synthetic institutions of the Left and protect the organic institutions of the common citizen. Nixon’s “silent majority” has diversified: Latinos and Asians are beginning to revolt against left-wing ideology, including critical race theory and gender radicalism; parents of all racial backgrounds have flooded local school boards to express opposition to their ideological corruption. With a national leader drawing on the great themes of the counterrevolution, conservatives can reconstitute Nixon’s majority and wield democratic power to bring the cultural revolution to heel.
The question that troubled Nixon during his presidency was the basic one of politics: Who rules? He saw that the deepest conflict in the United States was not along lines of class, race, or identity but between the bureaucracy and the people. And the Revolution of 1968, which sought to connect ideology to institutional power and to shape human society through elite guidance, was ultimately antidemocratic. Nixon understood that bureaucratic rule meant the end of our constitutional order.
The telos of the counterrevolution is the restoration of political rule—rule of, by, and for the people. From the summer of 1968 through the summer of George Floyd, the common citizen has found himself continuously shamed, cowed, and degraded. But despite this, he has retained the power of his instincts, which orient him toward justice, and of his own memory, which makes possible the retrieval of the symbols and principles that once animated the republic. Indeed, most Americans still believe in the promise of the Declaration and the Constitution. The statues of America’s Founders might have been toppled, spray-painted, and hidden away; their principles might have been deconstructed, denigrated, and forgotten in the country’s elite institutions. But the vision of the Founders strikes at something eternal. The common citizen understands this intuitively.
To this end, the counterrevolution’s guiding purpose must be to reanimate the instinct for self-government and to mobilize an organic movement of citizens who will reassert their influence in the institutions that matter: the school, the municipality, the workplace, the statehouse, the Congress. The antidemocratic structures—the DEI departments and the intrusive bureaucracies—must be dismantled. The rule of experts must be replaced by the rule of the people; the threat of violence must be met with the power of justice.
The United States under counterrevolution will be a pluralist republic: local communities will have the autonomy to pursue their own vision of the good, within the binding principles of the Constitution. The common citizen will have the space for living and passing down his own virtues, sentiments, and beliefs, free from the imposition of values from above. The government will protect the basic dignity and political rights of the citizen, while refraining from the utopian task of remaking society in its image. The principles of the society under counterrevolution are not oriented toward sweeping reversals and absolutes but toward the protection of the humble values and institutions of the common citizen: family, faith, work, community, country. The promise of this regime lies in the particular, rather than the abstract; the humble, rather than the grandiose; the limited, rather than the limitless.
The great vulnerability of the cultural revolution is that it undermines the morality and stability of the common citizen. And as it corrodes the institutions of family, faith, and community, it causes an emptiness in the human heart that cannot be filled with its one-dimensional ideology. The counterrevolution must begin at that exact point. If the culmination of America’s cultural revolution is nihilism, the counterrevolution must begin with hope. This means rediscovering and revitalizing the principles, language, and sentiments of the Revolution of 1776.
“The idea that a bureaucratic elite in Washington knows best what is best for people everywhere . . . is a notion completely foreign to the American experience,” Nixon observed. “The time has now come in America to reverse the flow of power and resources from the States and communities to Washington and start power and resources flowing back from Washington to the States and communities and, more important, to the people all across America.”
It is a project against cynicism. Rather than simply present itself as a force of opposition, the counterrevolution must offer the population a competing set of values, in language that clarifies our choices: excellence over diversity, equality over equity, dignity over inclusion, order over chaos.
Tyler Durden
Sun, 08/13/2023 – 21:45 - Bill Gross Is Bearish On Both Bonds And Stocks, Sees Inflation Stabilizing At 3%
Bill Gross Is Bearish On Both Bonds And Stocks, Sees Inflation Stabilizing At 3%
Emerging briefly from retirement, former bond king Bill Gross appeared on Bloomberg TV on Friday for an 18 minute interview, in which said stock and bond bulls are wrong, as both markets are overvalued; he also discussed inflation’s impact on investments, suggesting a case for around 3% inflation going forward (as ever more pundits agree with us that the Fed will eventually raise its inflation target from 2% to 3%), adding that the Fed might consider stopping or lowering rates if this level is reached.
The former PIMCO co-founder said the fair value of the 10-year Treasury yield is about 4.5%, compared with the current level of around 4.16%, and pointed out that 10-year yields historically traded about 135 basis points above the Federal Reserve’s policy rate. Of course, the current market – where the 2s10s curve has been inverted for over a year – is anything but comply with historical precedent; still according to Gross even if the Fed lowers interest rates to about 3%, the current 10-year yield remains too low, given the historical relationship.
Gross also believes that the skyrocketing government deficit will add supply pressure on the bond market, and push yields higher.
Siding with Bill Ackman, Gross said that “all of the bulls on Treasuries… I’d think their arguments are a little misplaced. We are going back to proper valuation on longer-term notes and bonds.”
Gross also delved into the significance of higher rates as a sign of a healthy economy and discussed real yields’ implications for economic growth and inflation control; he pointed to a potential slowdown in consumption due to rising real rates and the impact of past fiscal programs. Incidentally, the divergence between real rates and Fwd PE multiples has never been greater.
Turning to stocks, Gross was bearish here too and echoed Mike Wilson’s favorite regurgitated soundbite saying that the equity risk premium (ERP) – the difference between the earnings yields and bond yields – is at two decade lows, indicating that stocks are too expensive.
Gross also said that he has sold out his holdings of regional banks, after the recent rally and pointing to the changing market conditions. Looking ahead, the former bond king believes that the asset with the “best value” is energy pipeline partnerships, for their attractive high yields and tax-deferred returns.
Full interview below:
Tyler Durden
Sun, 08/13/2023 – 21:15 - Rising Crime Sinks All Boats
Rising Crime Sinks All Boats
Authored by Marc Little via RealClear Politics,
The immediate victims of crime are not the only ones who suffer. Rising crime rates devastate entire communities, reversing progress that in many cases has been decades in the making.
While the nation’s attention is understandably gripped by the latest indictment of former President Donald Trump, cities all over the country remain mired in an epidemic of crime that has a far greater impact on most people’s daily lives.
In Chicago, robberies are up 38% over the past two years, burglaries are up 33%, and theft in general has increased 87%. Just recently, a convenience store was looted by a mob in Chicago’s South Loop neighborhood, resulting in 40 arrests. The perpetrators acted as though they had nothing to fear from law enforcement while reveling in the destruction and mayhem they caused.
Meanwhile, in New York City, both misdemeanor “petit larceny” (115,658 offenses) and felony “grand larceny” (51,565 offenses) are at 20-year highs, with significant spikes in the past few years.
This epidemic is being fueled by the proliferation of soft-on-crime policies that seemingly side with criminals over their victims. Notably, the spike in thefts in New York City coincided precisely with the tenure of Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, who issued a memo on his very first day in office directing prosecutors to avoid prosecuting what he deemed “minor offenses.”
Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx, whose jurisdiction includes the City of Chicago, has also openly avoided prosecuting “low-level offenses” in the belief that prosecuting these crimes is somehow racist.
The truth is, though, that this misguided approach has done tremendous damage to black and brown communities, depriving them of both economic opportunity and basic safety. Reducing, or in some cases outright eliminating, consequences for aberrant behavior such as shoplifting, so-called “petty” theft, and other misdemeanors emboldens criminals and lowers the bar for what is considered normal or acceptable behavior.
Soft-on-crime prosecutors such as Alvin Bragg have even taken to downgrading many felony charges to misdemeanors – and when these prosecutors do actually take felony charges to court, abysmal conviction rates indicate that their hearts really aren’t in it.
The result has been an explosion in crimes such as shoplifting, which is increasingly being perpetrated by organized criminal groups that re-sell stolen merchandise. In 2021, the National Retail Federation estimated that losses due to shoplifting amounted to nearly $100 billion (about $310 per person in the U.S.) nationwide. That translates to higher prices at the checkout counter for consumers who have already been battered by two years of unusually high inflation.
It can be tempting to view crimes like shoplifting as “victimless” or “nonviolent” crimes, making it easier to justify non-prosecution. But any time a person deliberately violates someone else’s rights and knowingly violates the law, they chip away at the social contract that enables us to live together in relative harmony.
Consider the case of New York City CVS clerk Scotty Enoe. While stocking shelves one night, Enoe was attacked for no apparent reason by Charles Brito, a local homeless man who had been arrested more than a dozen times for shoplifting from CVS and other local stores. Enoe defended himself with the knife he used for opening boxes at the store, sadly resulting in Brito’s death.
With Alvin Bragg as prosecutor, Brito repeatedly walked free without bail after stealing from local merchants. Enoe, on the other hand, was sent to the notorious Rikers Island penitentiary. Only after one of his employers posted a $100,000 bond was Enoe allowed to leave prison, and now he must wear an ankle monitor and is only allowed to leave the house for work.
Whose side is Alvin Bragg on? He and other soft-on-crime prosecutors have made it an official policy to look the other way when career criminals victimize innocent citizens and shopkeepers, but when those victims try to defend themselves and their property, they are aggressively prosecuted and face the full fury of the criminal justice system.
This backwards approach to law enforcement has devastating consequences, especially for black and brown communities. Major retailers such as Walmart, Target, and Walgreens have all begun shutting down stores due to rampant shoplifting in cities whose prosecutors consider shoplifting a “minor” offense unworthy of their attention. Countless small businesses are similarly affected, and while their closures might not make headlines, they are just as damaging to the communities they served.
When stores close – be they chain stores or mom-and-pop operations – communities lose jobs. Residents also lose access to goods and services, including necessities like food and medicine.
Everybody in a community suffers from rising crime, not just the direct victims. If prosecutors really want to help black and brown Americans, they need to take crime seriously and go after the people who are victimizing those communities.
Tyler Durden
Sun, 08/13/2023 – 20:45 - Will America's Anti-Obesity Craze Lead To A Food Revolution
Will America’s Anti-Obesity Craze Lead To A Food Revolution
It’s hardly a secret that the US – the fattest nation on earth excluding a handful of islands in the Pacific – has an obesity problem. That, and the adverse health consequences of all this pervasive fatness, is the bad news which has ballooned US medicare/medicaid payments, one of the key factors behind the explosion in US shadow (off-balance sheet) debt into the $100+ trillion ballpark. The good news is that a handful of revolutionary new GLP-1 based weight-loss drugs courtesy of Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly – which lead to dramatic cutting of excess pounds by way of substantial appetite reduction- may result in a dramatic reversal in this dismal trend (at least for those Americans who can afford the expensive drugs, which come with a steep price of ~$1,000 per month).
Of course, with the US food industry having itself turned fat and lazy, comfortable in assuming that nothing will ever change with America’s infatuation with fast food, greasy burgers and fatty and carby junk food, even the smallest deviation could have devastating consequences for a food market that us valued at a little under $1 trillion per year in 2022.
One attempt to quantify the impact of this new weight-loss revolution on the food industry, and weed out winner from losers, comes from Morgan Stanley, which on Friday published a 60-page report titled “Food Meets Pharma: Downsizing Demand: Obesity Medications’ Impact on the Food Ecosystem” (available to pro subs), and which finds that over the long-term the US may see a substantial decline in calorie consumption (vs baseline) leading to steep losses for those companies that seek to profit from US obesity trends.
Below we excerpt the key highlights from the report, starting with the catalyst: the dramatic weight loss resulting from a consistent regime of GLP-1 drugs like Wegovy, Ozempic, Mounjaro and – coming soon – Retatrutide.
These drugs bring about meaningful weight loss through a 20-30% reduction in daily calorie intake.
One problem is that for many (obese) Americans, these drugs remain unaffordable, with just half of patients fully covered by health insurance.
Morgan Stanley then forecasts the big picture impact on the US population an finds a reduction of up to 1.7% (vs baseline) in calories consumed in the bull case.
Not surprisingly, MS found a more pronounced impact on certain food categories among those on the weight-loss drugs.
Also not surprising, the biggest losers appear to be fast food and pizza restaurants…
… confections, cookies and salty snacks…
… as well as makers of sugary drinks and snacks.
The bank then summarizes the impact of the weight-loss craze in the following matrix which look at the winners and losers across every category, from Packaged foods and restaurants, to beverages and food retail.
More in the full report available to professional subs in the usual place.
Tyler Durden
Sun, 08/13/2023 – 20:15 - Sometimes, Only Satire Does The Job…
Sometimes, Only Satire Does The Job…
Authored by Ramesh Thakur via The Brownstone Institute,
Here is my review of Oisín MacAmadáin, Busting Anti-Vax Myths! Seriously EXPERT Arguments for the Covid-Deniers in Your Life (2022), with a Foreword by Dr. Anthony Faucet.
This is a slim, wickedly funny satire of 126 pages organised into ten chapters of rollicking hilarity. It’s a hugely enjoyable book for all those who were critical of lockdowns, masks, and vaccines. As the Brits say, it takes the piss out of all the self-proclaimed Covid experts, the public health clerisy, the media, and people with blind faith in the experts.
Thus the fictitious professor Oisín MacAmadáin informs us of “a good friend in Dublin whose fully vaccinated father died from Covid. He also told me how much worse he knew it could have been.” And all the grannies going merrily about their way in Stockholm “must be brainwashed. A perfect example of state propaganda.” The true believers are likely to be offended.
The book is successful in skewering the many Covidian dogmas because MacAmadáin closely tracks the many gaslighting tropes used by the experts and the authorities to attack critics, dissenters, Florida, and Sweden. The last, for example, is dismissed as irrelevant because its vast empty spaces make it very difficult to encounter the virus and anyway, we all know the Swedes are so reserved they rarely hug.
It’s been many a long year since I laughed so much while reading a seriously serious book. The greater your familiarity with the lies, obfuscations, and gaslighting by health experts and governments in the last three years, and with the range of scientific literature and controversies, including the leading names, the more you will be entertained by this book.
American readers will especially enjoy the chapter on Florida and the attempted puncturing of Robert Malone and Peter McCullough as anti-vaxxer ringleaders. That they were removed from Twitter is proof they were spouting anti-scientific drivel. Their knowledge is so shallow that they can be shown up even by the likes of Neil Young and Meghan Markle.
MacAmadáin is inventive with names in the mould of JK Rowling, referencing the CDLWQ (CatDogLynxWolfQuestioning) + community for those who self-ID as catgender etc. The encomia on the back cover are from eminent world experts like President Macaroni who adores the book because it will “really ‘piss off’ the anti-vaxxers;” Santa Klaus who is incredulous that the author “was never a WEF young leader;” the CEO of Pfizzle; and Gubnet O’Foole, the correspondent in residence of the Oirish Times. The final encomium is signed off “The author.”
We meet Prof. Nadir Jibjab and Dr. Smärtz Aleks. Austria has a Mr. Hündbisket and a Prof. Ann Schlüss who has written a treatise on The Jab as Moral Good. She holds firmly to the view that the government decisions tick all ethical boxes, “even those of Kant whose ethical boxes are notoriously hard to tick.” A German schoolteacher named Gretel Voopingkoff praises Oisín’s “awesome work in exterminating anti-vaxxer propaganda.” She informs him that her multi-jabbed kids “play the geese marching game” from which the unvaxxed are, of course, excluded.
One of the authors of the famous 2020 Danish mask study was Henning Bundgaard. He gets misnamed as Herring Bumgaard in a letter to the British Medical Journal (a riff on the many people who reported studies for retraction), then successively as Dr. Bumgås, Bümflüff, and Bumfårt. In the letter, he asks of their flawed study:
how do we know that up to 100% of those infected in the unmasked group didn’t end up ultimately dying due to greater viral exposure? Were they only asked about whether they were infected and not whether that infection had killed them?
The Termonfeckin Institute of Expertise (TIE), one of the world’s leading institutes, has just one Faculty, Prof. MacAmadáin who is the Provost, Head of Department, and Lecturer: “a real Trinity of wisdom and education,” says Dr. Faucet in his gushing Foreword. He breezily dismisses the IFR calculations of Prof. Ioannidis (“never heard of him”) of 0.27 percent in favour of the TIE calculation of 34 percent.
MacAmadáin is an expert on expertise, with a “long and incredibly distinguished career.” The opening sentence of the book declares “I am an expert.” This gives him the unique ability to become an instant expert on any topic. He is vainglorious and breathlessly boasting, with any errors in the book the responsibility of the editor, TIE’s “sole and perennial graduate student.”
He sat down to write this book after getting his eighth shot and predicts by 2030 we will be into jabs in the fifties, fantasises about a movie to be called The Amazing Mr. Spike, extends the slogan “No one is safe until everyone is safe” to animals, and holds mass vaccination in the middle of a pandemic to be probably the best idea in the world, so there, Dr. Geert Van Der Dishwasher. If this fuels new variants, the obvious solution is to create new vaccines.
Wearing a mask when driving alone in a car is advisable because viral droplets can come in through the air filter. Besides, masks make you drop-dead, gorgeously sexy. A study from Cardiff University “demonstrably proved that face masks make people more attractive and … I will always follow the science.” Wearing them in combination with pantyhose will not only make you even sexier but will protect you amazingly against Covid, and so “I always wear protection.”
As for “the mad idea that the Covid vaccines are not even vaccines:” “The scientists call them vaccines, the governments call them vaccines, it says ‘vaccine’ on the label.” The vaccine is definitely a vaccine because it self-identifies as one and it’s frankly vaccine-phobic to suggest otherwise. A supposed scientific study alleging that the vaccine is actually gene therapy is debunked with the killer argument that it’s from Sweden and the Swedes all love ABBA, “so case closed.”
An Irishman who is fiercely proud of Ireland’s stringent Covid protection measures, he is a bit troubled by Australia and Canada’s more authoritarian enforcement actions. The Irish in him is somewhat embarrassed at channelling the Brit Churchill’s wartime fighting on the beaches speech. Melbourne’s “police efficiency” was “a joy to witness.” Four triple-masked and visored-up police officers wielding sterilised batons arrested an unjabbed woman with one officer striking her down, another tasering her, and a crew disinfecting her before she is winched up by a helicopter and flown to a Covid internment camp.
Canadian kids parrot Trudeau-like lines about the unvaccinated being racists. But, enamoured as Oisín is of Australia and Canada, he concedes that Austria had all others beat. It is a “Covidopia,” the Utopia of Covid. The public was enthusiastically supportive, “bordering on euphoria,” of the authorities’ tough crackdown on dissent.
The Great Barrington Declaration is dismissed as “The Declaration of Great Baloney” written by fringe scientists, one of whom probably works at Stanford Polytech rather than University. Oisín writes to his mate Tony Faucet urging him to publish a “devastating takedown.” Because “there is no ‘no risk’ group,” “focussed protection” is condemned as “discriminatory and ageist” that would “destroy the principles we hold dear.” Oisín commits to organising “The Great Termonfeckin Ejaculation” (spelt put in the final chapter on The Great Reset) as a counter to the GBD.
He is also besties with Canada’s PM Trudy-wudy and rushes to Ottawa to help quell the truckers’ rebellion by “black-faced up” racists. The resulting encounter with the protestors is a nice little dig at asking us to trust the experts over our own lying eyes.
There is a hilarious chapter with advice on fact-checking: point out that “EXPERTS” disagree, that the person making the false claim is a crackpot, and that “even if the misinformation is correct, it still isn’t true.” For example, the claim to the protective benefits of natural immunity can be shown to be false by noting that “many who have died from Covid also had immune systems.” In another example:
The reports of over 29,000 deaths in the VAERS database do not prove that the Covid vaccines are dangerous: they merely show that 29,000 people happened to die shortly after their vaccination. Death is a statistically common phenomenon which experts have found to occur in most populations.
At the end of the chapter, however, Oisín berates himself for having wasted his time as the media everywhere have already been following these practices all along anyway.
He pays homage to all the brave soldiers who gave their lives in the world war so we can all be safe now. The expert’s unvaccinated Romanian housekeeper rebels at being reminded of Ceausescu’s reign: “Let me tell you, Ceausescu is turning in his f**king grave that he didn’t think of this! What genius to control everyone with the f**king flu!”
The book perfectly captures the epidemic of cognitive dissonance that still reigns. A doctor talks a woman out of her hesitancy and when she is rushed to emergency after a stroke, notes with smug satisfaction that “at least it wasn’t the Covid that landed her there.” Because the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh claimed success for Ivermectin prophylactic treatment, it must be the state of “UTT-ar RUBB-esh.” The myth about the protective benefits of Vitamin D is dismissed with the Trumpian label “Vitamin Death.” Mandating it for everyone would be a gross violation of bodily integrity. Compliance with government orders shows how compassionate we all are and this proof, that society is for real, must be enough to make Margaret Thatcher turn in her grave.
The fanatic faith of many vaccine enthusiasts is skewered in this woman’s comment on a radio program in Ireland, voicing support for Austria’s “jab or jail” program:
I was delighted the day I got vaccinated knowing I was then fully protected but the thought that any one of these loons could still kill me just like that….so I’m all for doing what the Austrians are doing just so as to keep us all safe.
This is followed by the sentence: “Meanwhile an Oirish Times poll has indicated that 82% of respondents would support jail time for the unvaccinated, 13% aren’t sure and the remaining 5% are currently being investigated by the Gardaí.”
A bit like George Castanza’s epiphany in Seinfeld, about doing the opposite of his first instinct, just invert everything you read and you will be fine with your reading comprehension.
Tyler Durden
Sun, 08/13/2023 – 19:45 - COVID Victims' Families Sue EcoHealth Alliance For 'Funding, Releasing' Virus
COVID Victims’ Families Sue EcoHealth Alliance For ‘Funding, Releasing’ Virus
The families of four people who died from COVID-19 are suing EcoHealth alliance, the New York-based nonprofit that was conducting gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses in Wuhan, China, before COVID-19 broke out across town.
According to the Aug. 2 lawsuit filed before the New York Supreme Court in Manhattan, EcoHealth and its president, Peter Daszak, knew the virus was “capable of causing a worldwide pandemic.”
Not only did EcoHealth help to create a ‘genetically manipulated virus,’ the lawsuit claims, it worked to cover up the origins of the outbreak.
“If we had known the source or origin of this virus and had not been misled that it was from a pangolin in a wet market, and rather we knew that it was a genetically manipulated virus, and that the scientists involved were concealing that from our clients, the outcome could have been very different,” victims’ attorney Patricia Finn told the NY Post.
The families of Mary Conroy, of Pennsylvania; Emma D. Holley, of Rochester, NY; Larry Carr, of Crossville, Tennessee; and Raul Osuna, of Bennington, Nebraska, are seeking unspecified damages.
“[The families of the deceased] are definitely in mourning, but moreover they’re enraged because the truth of what really happened appears to be coming forward,” Finn added.
Paul Rinker, of Pennsylvania, is also suing Midtown-based EcoHealth and Daszak over the “serious injuries” he suffered from his bout with the bug.
Finn is also suing EcoHealth and Daszak in Nassau and Rockland Counties on behalf of the families of other victims killed by the virus, as well as two who survived.
“This particular case is highly offensive because it appears they knew and concealed the origin of the virus,” said Finn, adding “The treatment or approach taken in dealing with the virus could have been radically different than it was.”
Fauci is simply lying here. Zheng-Li Shi’s lab at the WIV and EcoHealth Alliance (which administered NIH subawards to Zheng-Li Shi’s lab) were absolutely manipulating viruses (using NIAID funds) in order to see which mutations would make them more dangerous to humans. https://t.co/2MD0oM4sWh
— Justin B. Kinney (@jbkinney) August 12, 2023
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EcoHealth notably received a re-activated grant from the NIH for over $576,000 in May to study how outbreaks of deadly viruses like SARS, MERS, and now COVID-19 originate from wildlife and transfers to humans, despite failing to meet the NIH’s conditions for reinstatement.
As the Epoch Times noted;
The grant, titled “Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence,” was originally awarded in 2014 by Dr. Anthony Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). Under the terms of the grant, EcoHealth Alliance, a government-funded nonprofit that purportedly engages in research to prevent pandemics, was awarded $3.8 million over five years to assess the spillover potential of bat viruses “using reverse genetics, pseudovirus and receptor binding assays, and virus infection experiments in cell culture and humanized mice.” Put in simple terms, NIAID was paying EcoHealth to genetically engineer and manipulate bat viruses in labs.
In May 2016, the grant was suspended after Erik Stemmy, a NIAID program officer, noticed that federal government funds may have been used for prohibited gain-of-function experiments at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) in China. At the time, the Obama administration had put in place a moratorium on gain-of-function experiments. However, for reasons that remain unclear, the suspension was lifted in July 2016. At the time, EcoHealth’s president, Peter Daszak, thanked NIAID in an email for lifting the gain-of-function funding pause.
As part of the conditions of the grant, EcoHealth had to file regular activity reports. However, starting in 2018, EcoHealth stopped submitting these reports. EcoHealth would later blame technical difficulties for their failure to submit. The missing reports comprised the critical 2018–2019 timeframe right before the outbreak of COVID-19 in Wuhan.
* * *
More:
In 2014, the Obama administration temporarily suspended federal funding for gain-of-function research into manipulating bat COVID to be more transmissible to humans. Four months prior to that decision, the NIH effectively shifted this research to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) to EcoHealth, headed by Peter Daszak.
Notably, the WIV “had openly participated in gain-of-function research in partnership with U.S. universities and institutions” for years under the leadership of Dr. Shi ‘Batwoman’ Zhengli, according to the Washington Post‘s Josh Rogin.
Yet, after Sars-CoV-2 broke out in the same town where Daszak was manipulating Bat Covid, The Lancet published a screed by Daszak (signed by over two-dozen scientists), which insisted the virus could have only come from a natural spillover event, likely from a wet market, and that the scientists “stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin.” The Lancet only later noted Daszak’s conflicts of interest.
Meanwhile, as we noted late last year, a Senate Committee on Health Education, Labor and Pensions interim report from October 27, 2022 titled “An Analysis of the Origins of the COVID19 Pandemic” concluded that the origins of Covid were more likely based in a lab as part of a “research related incident” and not zoonotic.
The report was the result of a “bipartisan Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee oversight effort into the origins of SARS-CoV-2”. It provides a lengthy analysis that reviews “publicly available, open-source information to examine the two prevailing theories of origin of the SARS-CoV-2 virus”.
Insanity…
Tyler Durden
Sun, 08/13/2023 – 19:15 - "This Country Has Already Become A Banana Republic" – Holter Warns 'Mad Max' Scenario Imminent
“This Country Has Already Become A Banana Republic” – Holter Warns ‘Mad Max’ Scenario Imminent
Via Greg Hunter’s USAWatchdog.com,
Precious metals expert and financial writer Bill Holter says there is a long list of financial trouble coming to America sooner than later.
There is the commercial real estate implosion, rising interest rates, an exploding federal budget, banana republic political problems, but the at the top of the list is the monster unpayable debt problem and the soon-to-be failing U.S. dollar. Holter says, “You can’t have a third of the federal taxes paid out in interest, and that number is only going to grow over time…”
“If the markets would not collapse ahead of time, which they certainly will, but if they did not, we would get to the point where the interest would eat up all the tax receipts. That is a mathematical impossibility. We’re broke…
On the other side of it, we have two rules of law. We have one rule of law if you are a liar from the left and another rule of law if you are a conservative and you don’t support the bull crap rules they are putting out there…
This is an illustration that this country has already become a banana republic. The problem with that is the dollar issued by this country is the world’s reserve currency. It’s a huge problem.”
Holter says the dollar is going to take a big hit in the next financial crisis that has already started. When it hits, Holter predicts,
“The actual bottom line is dollars are just pieces of paper backed by our government.
The dollar is backed by the full faith and credit of a bankrupt insolvent government, and people will figure that out very quickly.
When it comes to survival, people are not going to give up something real for nothing…
We are in the weeds right now because of interest rates . . . look at mortgage rates, they are well over 7% for a 30-year mortgage. So, that’s going to hurt housing. Commercial real estate has already been destroyed…
I think we are in the weeds because interest rates are at a point that nothing can be refinanced and rolled over.”
In closing, Holter says, “This is not my opinion, it’s a mathematical equation…”
” The debt cannot be paid back. It’s not possible. We will default one way or another. We will print the crap out of the dollar and devalue it, or outright nonpayment.”
Holter predicted years ago we would end up in a “Mad Max” scenario when credit dries up and store shelves empty. Holter contends that credit is drying up with the money supply shrinking for eight straight months. The “Mad Max” world Holter is still predicting is now looking like it’s going to come true sooner than later.
There is much more in the 42-minute interview.
Join Greg Hunter as he goes One-on-One with financial writer and precious metals expert Bill Holter for 8.12.23.
To Donate to USAWatchdog.com Click Here
Bill Holter’s new website is growing by leaps and bounds. It’s called BillHolter.com.
Tyler Durden
Sun, 08/13/2023 – 18:45 - The US Is Still Vexed By High Inflation
The US Is Still Vexed By High Inflation
Authored by Jeffrey Tucker via The Epoch Times,
The inflationary mess is lasting even longer than I or anyone thought. Even the headlines couldn’t spin this one. The Consumer Price Index came out this morning and it showed no improvement over last month. It is still rocking at 3.2 percent with new strength in food and medicine.
The sticky index is frustratingly high too at 5.4 percent.
(Data: Federal Reserve Economic Data [FRED], St. Louis Fed; Chart: Jeffrey A. Tucker)
Instead of following the script and reporting this as continued easing, the headlines were reduced to merely reporting the news: inflation is not improving. It’s the new normal.
It’s fascinating because this is now the 31st month after this “transitory” inflation began and nearly just as long since the Federal Reserve began its war on inflation by raising rates higher and faster than in the whole history of the institution. That said, in real terms, federal funds rates are still barely above zero. That’s because inflation is still rocking and eating away the dollar’s purchasing power.
The best you can say is that the dollar’s purchasing power is declining less rapidly than it was a year ago. But it is still declining, and missing the Fed’s target. Prices are nowhere near going back to 2019 levels but instead it all keeps getting worse. We have now lost 16 cents from its value at the start of Trump’s last year of his presidency. The mad money printing has taken a terrible toll. All of the value of the transfer payments from 2020 and 2021 have completely vanished.
(Data: Federal Reserve Economic Data [FRED], St. Louis Fed; Chart: Jeffrey A. Tucker)
This is all very interesting because the Fed has done everything it knows to do in order to bring this under control. Not that the Fed has ever admitted to having caused the problem in the first place by enabling an insane bout of Congressionally authorized spending. The Fed stood ready to sop up as much newly created debt as it could. In so doing, it triggered a complete mess.
The Fed’s clean-up operation has been fascinating to watch, like creating a fire in the kitchen and then demanding credit for one’s great clean-up skills. Worse, the clean-up has not really worked well. The money stock has indeed declined by 5.4 percent since the war on inflation commenced. But not even that has worked to tame the beast.
Let’s seek out an answer. There is always a lag between money and prices but it is 12 to 18 months, and we are really over that. We should be seeing a bigger impact. We should already have hit the target. But think about the old “equation of exchange” as pushed by monetary theorists for centuries. The impact of money on prices is mitigated by a concept called velocity.
Velocity is a measure of the pace at which money is spent. When people demand high dollar balances, the measure of velocity falls. This has always happened in a crisis. People get scared and hold on to cash. It happened at the start of the Great Depression. It happened in 2008. And it happened in 2020 but to the greatest extent we’ve ever seen. People were flush with cash and nothing on which to spend it, so we entered into a stage of negative velocity. The money truly ended up in metaphorical mattresses.
A decline in velocity provides room for the Fed to expand its open-market operations and expand credit through the banking system. A decline in velocity also allows the central bank to avoid the inflationary consequences of its policies.
The Fed, however, cannot control velocity. It is merely a measure of public psychology over risk and expectations. It neither causes high or low money-transmission rates but those rates profoundly affect the value of money.
As time has gone on, people and institutions have moved more money from cash balances into purchases. Velocity is on the move, exactly as one would expect. It’s inevitable.
The problem from the Fed’s point of view is that this pace at which money is spent is fueling price increases. And that change is blunting the impact of the pullback on money stocks.
(Data: Federal Reserve Economic Data [FRED], St. Louis Fed; Chart: Jeffrey A. Tucker)
There are of course a million other considerations to this big picture. But using a reductionist approach of a simple equation (in which money multiplied by velocity equals prices multiplied by output), you can see that there is plenty of room remaining for prices to go up and up.
In fact, if velocity continues to increase like this, we are looking at years of price increases at 3 percent and higher. And that is presuming no sudden surprises.
At the current pace of decline, we can expect the 2020 dollar to keep falling in value, so that it will be worth half its value by the time we reach the 2030s. Keep in mind that this is a tax that wrecks the standard of living of the middle class and the poor while enriching the people and institutions that can afford to endure the storm.
How used to all of this are you? Probably more than you should be. For example, are high gas prices making you as crazy now as they did two years ago? Probably not. That’s because you have been treated to the military concept of shock and awe. The idea is for the government to devastate you in one fell swoop and then let off a bit in order to make you grateful for the lessening of pain.
This is exactly what has happened to gas prices. In the long sweep, it has only increased in price but right now it feels not so bad. This is entirely in your head. The reality is that you are being pillaged.
Gas prices could eventually reach their old highs but by this time, you will have been so bruised and bloodied that you will be no longer screaming in pain. In short, our masters are trying to acculturate us to suffering so that we will no longer have the strength to protest.
This is how “transitory” became permanent and why an entire generation has already forgotten what it is like to live with falling prices in many sectors while incomes are steadily rising.
Those days seem to be gone. Our income is falling even as the thieves who took away our prosperity continue to masquerade as people we can trust to solve the problems that they created. It’s called monetary policy but it is an ancient ruse that still works in the 21st century.
Tyler Durden
Sun, 08/13/2023 – 17:45 - Big Tech Should Pay Its "Fair Share"… The Best Way Is To Leave California
Big Tech Should Pay Its “Fair Share”… The Best Way Is To Leave California
Authored by Mike Shedlock via MishTalk.com,
My hoot of the day is a Bloomberg Tweet praising San Francisco while asking big technology firms to pay their fair share.
Hoot of the Day
San Francisco lifer @garrytan weighs in on the city’s controversies with @emilychangtv and how tech should pay its “fair share.”
“This is the shining jewel.”
San Francisco lifer @garrytan weighs in on the city’s controversies with @emilychangtv and how tech should pay its “fair share.”
Watch the full episode here: https://t.co/i9oa08FxDf pic.twitter.com/SmZyyYR0Xm
— Bloomberg (@business) August 12, 2023
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Fair Share
And who is it that gets to decide the definition of “Fair Share”?
If anything, I suspect big tech is paying more than its fair share.
How so? Let’s total it up starting with salaries.
Google Salary Estimates
Google pays its employees well. The median salary is $140,000 a year.
Every Google employee pays taxes at California’s exorbitant rate.
Talent.Com notes “If you make $140,000 a year living in the region of California, USA, you will be taxed $47,111. That means that your net pay will be $92,889 per year, or $7,741 per month. Your average tax rate is 33.7% and your marginal tax rate is 40.6%.”
Government takes over a third right off the top for someone making $140,000. The state itself takes 8% plus 9.3% of everything over $66,296 up to $338,640 when even higher rates kick in.
Those employees buy homes at absurd prices compared to elsewhere and government takes its pound of flesh from property taxes.
The employees eat at local businesses and buy merchandise from local merchants. The minimum state sales tax rate is 7.5 percent.
Factor in capital gains taxes. Factor in health benefits paid by Google. Factor in Federal payroll taxes.
Let’s discuss corporate taxes.
The California corporate tax rate is 8.84%. This tax rate applies to C corporations and LLCs that report a net profit. Otherwise, they pay a flat alternative minimum tax (AMT) of 6.65%.
Only a handful of states have a higher top corporate tax rate.
If Google did not exist or was not located in California, none of that would happen.
Google Contributes More Than Its Fair Share
Google contributes mightily towards California and would do so even if it paid no corporate taxes at all.
Nonetheless, we have ingrates pissing and moaning about how these companies do not pay their fair share.
Add it all up, and Google contributes too much.
To pay its fair share, Google needs to relocate to a lower tax state.
* * *
Tyler Durden
Sun, 08/13/2023 – 16:45 - Greenwald: It's Not Left Vs Right Anymore, "It's Anti-Establishment Versus Pro-Establishment"
Greenwald: It’s Not Left Vs Right Anymore, “It’s Anti-Establishment Versus Pro-Establishment”
“No matter how you slice it… the polls show that there’s only one person who’s likely to challenge Joe Biden and defeat him for reelection, and that’s the person whom Biden’s DOJ happens to be prosecuting in multiple cases…”
Glenn Greenwald lays out the hypocrisy, and tyranny, of the ‘establishment’ in a brief but all-encompassing discussion with Russell Brand. He continues:
“Not just cases that have been brought but ones that rely on highly dubious interpretations of the law.
It’s not like these are murder cases, rape cases, bribery cases, or things people traditionally think about when they hear of criminal accusations.
They’re very distant and vague accusations that depend a lot on free speech rights, and they will only worsen perceptions that the DOJ can’t be trusted…”
Brand questions the ‘banana republic’ nature of what is occurring in the US, reflecting on the fact that occurred in South America, it would prompt rebukes from the ‘western’ establishment.
In fact, it has happened in the US before, as Greenwald explains…
“The first book I wrote in 2005 was an argument that the Bush and Cheney administration had committed obvious war crimes like torture, rendition, and warrantless spying on Americans…
The entire DC class agreed with Obama saying only banana republics prosecute their political opposition, and that was for real crimes like torture, kidnapping, killing people, and spying without warrants. Not these kinds of attenuated theories of criminality on which the Biden DOJ is now relying on to prosecute Trump, their primary political opposition…
At exactly the same time the Biden administration is prosecuting Donald Trump, they are also shielding Hunter Biden, who is guilty of far more blatant and obvious criminality, just blatant political corruption, tax evasion, and hiding assets in a way that most people go to jail for many years.
And Hunter Biden gets this incredibly generous deal that was so shocking to the judge because she couldn’t believe that the DOJ was really offering him full-scale immunity, given how many other crimes are pending.
And given how he was allowed to plead guilty to misdemeanors for what she has seen treated as serious felonies…”
Having opened listeners’ eyes and ears to the ugly reality of the ‘two-sided’ system in America today. But it’s not as clear-cut as it used to be, as Greenwald concludes:
“The relevant metric now isn’t left versus right. It’s anti-establishment versus pro-establishment.
Namely, do you think the loss of trust that these institutions of authority have suffered is valid or not? Do you think that they deserve the contempt in which they are held by a large portion of the population? I believe it’s absolutely justified to hold them in contempt…
That’s the fundamental distinction that defines our political spectrum more than old definitions of left versus right.“
Watch the full discussion below:
Glenn Greenwald: “No matter how you slice it… the polls show that there’s only one person who’s likely to challenge Joe Biden and defeat him for reelection, and that’s the person whom Biden’s DOJ happens to be prosecuting in multiple cases…
Not just cases that have been… pic.twitter.com/lK24fLLWVM
— KanekoaTheGreat (@KanekoaTheGreat) August 11, 2023
Tyler Durden
Sun, 08/13/2023 – 16:15 - A Weird Little August Week: "Who Keeps Selling The Nasdaq Into the Close"
A Weird Little August Week: “Who Keeps Selling The Nasdaq Into the Close”
By Peter Tchir of Academy Securities
A Weird Little August Week
Let’s ignore, for the moment, that I haven’t been this afraid of sharks since Jaws was released. Seriously, I cannot remember a time when sharks come up so often in conversation, but it doesn’t have anything to do with the macro outlook, so let’s move on.
Equities
I should start with fixed income, but the equity story is simple and fast, so let’s get it out of the way.
Who Keeps Selling the Nasdaq Into the Close?
Since the start of August, we seem to get selling into the close on stocks, led by the Nasdaq 100. No matter what news comes out, how the market performs during the overnight session, or in the morning, there seems to be selling pressure into the close. That is definitely helping build the bear case.
Having said that, I want to highlight the performance of several indices last week:
- Nasdaq 100 -1.6%
- S&P 500 -0.3%
- S&P 500 equal weight -0.07%
- REIT Index +0.2%
I like the outperformance of the equal weight indices and the REIT index. That happens to fit our view on the Rotation out of the Magnificent Seven quite well.
Commercial Real Estate
Since REITs did well, It is a good time to mention the other “scary” conversation I’m having with many people. While sharks might be scary, they are easy to avoid. What is “scaring” many people, and may prove difficult to avoid, is work from office.
I understand there are a lot of issues facing commercial real estate (many buildings traded hands at high prices, many were completed at extremely high costs, vacancy rates are on the rise, financing rates have risen substantially, etc.), I think that as a whole, too much is priced in and the push to “work from office” in some form, is gaining traction. JAWS the summer blockbuster of 1975 could be replaced by WFO as the horror show of 2024! Maybe news reports will shift from asking “It’s 11 pm, do you know where your kids are?” to “It’s 8am, do you know where your office is? Because you’re #$&%#* late!”
Anyways, real estate will remain local. There are regional themes at work. The trends of people and companies leaving certain areas of the country for others, is real which create some losers and winners.
In any case, I do understand that betting on REITS and CRE in the short term, based on being contrarian and some vague view that WFO chatter gains traction, may be simplistic, if not naïve, but that’s where I still am. From Bloomberg TV a couple of weeks ago Commercial Real Estate to Squeeze Higher.
It is something we took some issue with as well, on the day that several U.S. banks were downgraded.
CRE is an issue, and we may not have seen the lows, but it is a process and I’m looking for the rebounds we’ve seen to continue, for now.
Rates
Yields ticked higher, again, by the end of the week. 10s closed the week at their highest yields of the week (4.16%) which was lower than the 4.18% they reached last week. What was slightly strange, is that both 10s and 30s did reasonably well into their respective auctions. You would have expected, given so many bearish takes, that yields would have shot higher ahead of the auction, to help absorb the issuance, but that didn’t really happen. The 3-year auction was great, the 10-year was good, and the 30-year was weaker than those, but not horrible, but that seemed to finally trigger bond market selling. All just weird, except, that maybe so many bought thinking that we rally post auction, that there were a lot of week longs?
I guess you could blame a stronger than expected PPI, but I think we are going back to the “good old days” where everyone admitted they had no idea how PPI translates into future CPI, so we just ignored it. I want to point to one thing the Fed looks at, that was very good. The University of Michigan inflation expectations, where the longer term inflation outlook dropped back below 3%.
Speaking of “scary” the WSJ posted an article titled The Scary Math Behind the World’s Safest Assets (link may be blocked by paywall). While I think it is a bit on the alarmist side, it seems to touch on some points made last weekend on why the downgrade made sense in U.S. Credit Ratings.
It is also a good reminder, that I need to keep an eye out on the bear case, especially since I do think inflation, largely due to “Geopolitical Inflation” will run above the 2% target for several years.
While I think the piece is a bit alarmist, it seems like a good time for me (and you) to revisit Academy’s Financial Bubbles piece from 2020! On “commonality” we have had with recent financial bubbles (going back to the 1980’s) is they can all be directly attributed to “a safe asset going bad”. Financial bubbles all start with “safe assets” becoming “unsafe”. Government debt becoming “unsafe” would create the mother of all bubbles. I don’t see that as a risk, but I’d also hate to be the person who has focused for years on how bubbles start with safe assets, only to miss this giant bubble.
Still bullish rates here, but having to rethink my longer term views.
Credit
Credit outperformed (CDX 2 bps tighter, Bloomberg Corp Bond Index spreads unchanged) even with over $38 billion of new issue priced last week! Not bad with big supply and a backdrop of equity weakness. I do have to mention that Academy was joint bookrunner on two transactions on one day for the first time ever (McDonald’s and Toyota) and was a co-manager on several other deals.
China
Economic weakness continues. It is something we’ve been writing about and I think current weakness makes it even more important, from China’s perspective to shift a “Made in China” to a “Made by China” policy, which is a risk not being priced into U.S. markets at all. Maybe the risk is too remote, but I think we need to be examining carefully, companies that sell a lot to emerging market nations to see if their products are susceptible to competition from Chinese brands?
We got to discuss this and some other subject on Bloomberg TV on Thursday (starts at the 1:43:50 mark) and I think Tom Keene did a better job highlighting some of Academy’s unique strengths than I ever could.
Bottom Line
It’s a weird time for markets, so enjoy the summer (I’m getting so many OOO replies, that advice seems to be well taken). Don’t take on too much risk and watch out for sharks! (in the water and markets).
Tyler Durden
Sun, 08/13/2023 – 15:45 - Sen. Ron Johnson Says Pandemic "Preplanned By An Elite Group Of People" Who Conducted "Event 201"
Sen. Ron Johnson Says Pandemic “Preplanned By An Elite Group Of People” Who Conducted “Event 201”
And now, better late than never, a US politician recognizes that all may not have been what it seemed with the pandemic – and its tyrannical response.
Senator Ron Johnson on Friday told Fox Business’ Maria Bartiromo that Covid-19, and its response, were “preplanned by an elite group of people” who conducted “Event 201” – a joint exercise conducted by John Hopkins, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the World Economic Forum – which envisioned the spread of a coronavirus pandemic in South America which included over 65 million deaths worldwide.
The simulation concluded that national governments are nowhere near ready for a pandemic.
“We are going down a very dangerous path, but it is a path that is being laid out and planned by an elite group of people that want to take total control over our lives, and that’s what they are doing, bit by bit,” said Johnson, who sits on the Senate Homeland Security Committee and is a ranking member of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations.
To which Bartiromo responded: “It is just extraordinary to me that the government was working with social media to amplify lies and suppress truth and has been doing so repeatedly. We just saw the Facebook story, the Twitter files, all of the all the way, government officials from the CDC, FBI, you know CIA, a thousand people according to the reporters working on the Twitter files, worked with social media to amplify lies and suppress truth.
Why couldn’t the American people know that, you know, there were other alternatives to treat Covid why can’t American people know there were side effects with the vaccine?
Johnson then said: “This is all preplanned by an elite group of people, that is what I am talking about, Event 201 occurred in late 2019, prior to the rest of us knowing about the pandemic. Again — this is very concerning in terms of what is happening, what continues to be planned for our loss of freedom,” adding “ It needs to be exposed but unfortunately, very few people even in Congress are willing to take a look at this. They all pushed the vaccine, they don’t want to be made aware of the fact that vaccines might have caused injuries or death, so many people simply just don’t want to admit they were wrong and they’re going to do everything they can to make sure they’re not proven wrong.”
“We are up against a very powerful group of people here, Maria.“
Watch:
SEN. RON JOHNSON ON COVID: “This was all pre-planned by an elite group of people. Event 201… This is very concerning in terms of what continues to be planned for our loss of freedom. We’re up against a very powerful group of people.” pic.twitter.com/JcYlO6DwxE
— Ben Kew 🏌️♂️ (@ben_kew) August 11, 2023
Tyler Durden
Sun, 08/13/2023 – 15:15 - "Illusion Of Influence": The Media Moves The Goalpost Again On Biden Corruption Coverage
“Illusion Of Influence”: The Media Moves The Goalpost Again On Biden Corruption Coverage
With the new disclosures in the Biden corruption scandal, the media has, again, pivoted to avoid acknowledging the obvious. It now has a new demand before it will fully recognize or report on the scandal. Of course, after long repeating denials of Joe Biden that he ever knew about his son’s foreign business deals, the media must now recognize that Hunter was selling influence and access.
So they have added yet another task: show Joe Biden actually accepting money.
It is what in literature is called the “impossible task” demand like the Slavic tale of a Tsar ordering a suitor “to go there he does not know where” and to “get that he does not know what.”
A direct bribe given to Joe Biden in an envelope or a direct deposit is obviously not impossible. Call it the “highly improbable task,” After all, former Rep. William Jefferson was found with cold-hard cash in his freezer. However, among professional influence peddlers, a direct payment to the principal would be viewed as sacrilegious — enough for a lifetime ban from the major corruption league.
Jefferson was an amateur. The Bidens have been in the influence peddling business for decades and Hunter told his Chinese contacts that they are “the best” at what these foreign figures wanted from them.
Only a certifiable moron today would deposit any of the $20 million documented by the House committees in an actual account of Joe or Jill Biden. Those accounts are subject to continual monitoring and potential subpoenas.
Instead, the Congress has found dozens of shell companies and accounts used by the Bidens to help conceal the transfer of millions to Biden family members, including grandchildren. This includes references to bills of Joe Biden being paid out of joint accounts and benefits from deals that might include free offices. At the same time, these foreign sources sent direct money to the Biden Family Fund, a financial legacy that Joe Biden would leave in the form of millions of foreign contributions. At 80 with millions in wealth, Joe Biden is likely more motivated by moving wealth to his descendants than himself.
There were also alleged deliverables. Recently, Devon Archer confirmed that Hunter’s Ukrainian clients wanted the help of the Bidens in removing Ukrainian prosecutor Viktor Shokin. Biden would later insist on his being fired as a condition for a billion dollars in U.S. aid.
For years, the media insisted that there was no evidence of influence peddling or evidence contradicting the President. While most of these reporters required little to push false accounts of Russian collusion or Russian disinformation (including the dismissal of the Hunter Biden laptop), they are now demanding a virtual confession from the President or an actual deposit slip to his bank account.
When confronted with the transfer of millions and what Devon Archer now calls “categorically false” denials by the President, the media seems positively exasperated like the Queen in Alice in Wonderland. It is insisting that the public should not assume that the influence sold was influence realized. They just need to believe in the Bidens and the “illusion of influence.” When Alice says that she “cannot believe impossible things,” the Queen snaps back “I daresay you haven’t had much practice. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast!”
The media has shown that it is possible to believe six impossible things to avoid the reality of the Biden scandal. Accordingly, the media now will accept that there was influence peddling but will treat it as “an illusion” until a direct payment is shown to President Biden himself rather than his family.
In this final demand, the media is relying entirely on the skill of the Bidens in hiding payments and avoiding such incriminating deposits. Biden himself has laughingly taunted reporters and asked “where’s the money?”
When confronted on his calling Hunter and his business partners roughly 20 times, he and the White House have pointed out that he merely discussed the weather and pleasantries. The media has largely ignored that only a moron would conduct “business” on a speakerphone at a dinner at the popular Cafe Milano. The point of the calls was to prove the bona fides of Hunter selling influence and access to his father.
The Bidens have perfected what Uncle Earl Long said was the key to maintaining corruption:
“Don’t write anything you can phone. Don’t phone anything you can talk.
Don’t talk anything you can whisper. Don’t whisper anything you can smile.
Don’t smile anything you can nod. Don’t nod anything you can wink.”
The true illusion was the Bidens in getting this scandal to disappear in front of millions. As I wrote years ago, the key to this Houdinesque trick was to get the media to invest in the deception like audience members called to the stage. The reporters have to back the illusion or admit that they were part of the deception. Even with millions funneled to the Biden family and acknowledgments that they were “selling the [Biden] brand,” it cannot be enough.
Even the use of a ridiculously complex array of two dozen entities to transfer money without any known purpose, it cannot be enough.
It is far easier to demand to see something no self-respecting Beltway bandit would commit: that after creating this labyrinth of shell companies and accounts, the Bidens went ahead and just did the equivalent to a Venmo payment directly to Joe and Jill Biden.
It may not be impossible but it is as improbable as Hunter Biden being an energy expert.
Tyler Durden
Sun, 08/13/2023 – 14:45
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