Today’s News 20th June 2020

• Lies, Damned Lies, & COVID-19
  Lies, Damned Lies, & COVID-19
  
  Tyler Durden
  
  Fri, 06/19/2020 – 23:40

  Authored by Michael Lesher via Off-Guardian.org,

  Growing up as I did in the Cold War, I still experience a special kind of shudder whenever I come across an anecdote like that of Katya Soldak, whose Soviet nursery school teacher once showed her class a photograph clipped from a Western newspaper, “depicting skinny [Russian] children in striped robes walking in a straight line.”

  The capitalists who printed that picture wanted people to think Soviet children were “treated like prisoners,” the teacher declared angrily, “when in reality the kids were on their way to a swimming pool in their bathrobes.”

  Which was a nice story (thought little Katya) — except that “I had never even seen a pool…. [T]hey existed in my mind as does an exotic animal or an unvisited city.”

  A time capsule from a remote dystopia? Think again.

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  Staring at me right now from the latest quarterly newsletter of my alma mater, the University of Virginia, is an identical piece of bad-is-good fakery: a photograph of an involuntarily isolated graduate student named Kalea Obermeyer, accompanied by a caption blandly informing the reader that the woman seated alone on a trunk in the confines of a cramped dormitory room, clumsily swathed in a surgical mask, “shelters in place” in “her most secure housing during the pandemic.”

  Welcome to Pravda, COVID19 style.

  Being an honest sort, I have considered whether I ought to write to the editors of my old university’s magazine, accusing them of playing toady to democracy-destroying propagandists.

  Should I remind these so-called educators of the young that the term “shelter in place” is properly applied to air raids, not to “pandemics,” and is a cruel hoax when pressed into service to describe what is actually an illegal quarantine?

  That the young woman in the photograph is not “sheltered” but confined? That pandemics have occurred many times before, and that what’s new this time around is not the flu but the police state? That the governor’s order placing this student (and the rest of the citizenry) under virtual house arrest is probably unconstitutional?

  And that while she’s stuck in her room — for no good reason I can discern — a whole host of local bus drivers, contract workers and university employees, including dining hall service workers who’ve labored there for decades, are all out of jobs?

  I’d like to write all that, and more, to the purveyors of this bit of fake news. But I suspect I’d be wasting my time.

  Mainstream media have recycled so many lies about COVID19 that by now every respectable editor with enough sense to come in out of the rain knows perfectly well what he or she is supposed to make the rest of us believe. And heaven help the dissenters!

  Thus the once-respectable Atlantic, after months of promoting coronavirus hysteria, has published a kind of palinode that admits virtually every charge made by critics of lockdown policies — but still winds up gloomily insisting on the freedom-haters’ moral supremacy, facts or no facts.

  The authors (Alexis Madrigal and Robinson Meyer) grudgingly concede the growing evidence that going outdoors, instead of being cooped up for months at a time per lockdown fiats, actually reduces the risk of infection.

  They also admit that those who enforce our confinement clearly don’t believe their own hype about “social distancing”: police are “crowding protesters together, blasting them with lung and eye irritants, and cramming them into paddy wagons and jails.”

  They even point out that the police themselves rarely bother separating from one another. But ultimately none of that matters to the liberal Atlantic: it’s “obvious” — evidence be damned — that just “standing in a crowd for long periods raises the risk of increased transmission of SARS-CoV-2.” Who says so? Why, Anthony Fauci does.

  And what about all the evidence that COVID19, never anywhere near as deadly as officials originally assured us it was, is on the way out?

  Here, too, the Atlantic’s paladins admit the facts but refuse to draw the obvious conclusion. They note that “the outbreak has eased in the Northeast,” the hardest-hit section of the US; that new cases have leveled off or declined in the great majority of states; and that “hundreds of public-health professionals signed a letter this week declining to oppose the protests [against police brutality] ‘as risky for COVID19 transmission.’”

  They even admit that in Georgia and Florida, two states that enforced lockdowns least and opened up earliest, the numbers of new infections have been “relatively flat.”

  In the face of so much good news, what are right-thinking police-state enthusiasts to do?

  “[T]he US is not going to beat the coronavirus,” Madrigal and Meyer groan in unison in the article’s key paragraph. “Collectively, we slowly seem to be giving up.” Now there’s a specimen of doublethink even Orwell missed: victory is surrender; lockdown is safety; hysteria is virtue.

  So I’m not planning to write to the editors at my alma mater — at least, not about that propagandists’ playground known as COVID19. When rights-trampling, economy-busting general incarceration is the fashion in the Land of the Free, when lying is good sense and wrecking lives is “health care,” my old ideas of rational persuasion start to look like a parasol in a monsoon.

  Instead, I am going to do a bit of ranting about words — the elements that lies are made of. I do this because I am sure the twisting of language to cloak political and economic skullduggery — which I take to be the worst evils of the coronavirus outbreak — will be glossed over in future mainstream accounts.

  And I do it because the politicians who tore up the Bill of Rights and thrust the US and much of the world to the brink of another Great Depression are not likely to change their spots — and unless we insist on calling their actions by their right names, we will be defenseless against their future machinations. “Political language,” Orwell reminded us, “is designed to make lies sound truthful…and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”

  Well, here are some choice examples of “pure wind” that made “lies sound truthful” over the past three months:

  Shelter in place. 

  The fraudulent use of this term stands in synecdoche to all the rest. “Shelter in place” originated in US Civil Defense regulations in the context of a possible nuclear attack; over the following decades, the term evolved to mean any emergency order to “take cover until the coast is clear on order of officials.” But it has never had the slightest connection with disease control.

  An order that restricts the movement of someone who is not ill, but who is suspected of contact with someone who is, is called a “quarantine.” But there are laws that regulate slapping quarantine orders on people — to say nothing of an entire population — and the governors and mayors who were bent on lockdowns clearly didn’t intend to be constrained by anything as pedestrian as the law.

  So they dug up this irrelevant phrase and plastered it over their arbitrary confinements of huge numbers of citizens — in violation of quarantine statutes, without a court order, and without even a semblance of public debate — hoping nobody would notice the compounding of official malfeasance with verbal fakery.

  It’s worth taking a moment to imagine how this trick must have been hatched in the bowels of some executive mansion.

  I can picture someone like New Jersey governor Phil Murphy (last seen claiming that the constraints of the Bill of Rights weren’t part of his job description) barking at his aides, “Damn it, there’s got to be something to justify locking up the whole state without going through those pesky quarantine procedures!”

  And I can see a harried assistant, having rummaged for hours in the archives, jogging into an office with the term “shelter in place” and a rather sheepish explanation that, well, it’s not about infection control, and doesn’t really have anything to do with the present situation, but it does say “in place” and, um, “shelter” and, you know…and anyway, for God’s sake, there isn’t anything else!

  And then it’s not hard to imagine the boss (who knows the media better than his subordinates do) triumphantly working the words “shelter in place” into his next public address, confident that few mainstream reporters will ask him where the phrase came from.

  The imagined details are less important than the obvious fact that “shelter in place” could not have been sprung on us by way of an innocent error. The term had to be found, and the officials who found it would necessarily have known what it meant, and therefore that its use in the context of a viral epidemic would constitute a fraud.

  Thus, anyone — and I mean anyone — who has employed the phrase “shelter in place” over the last three months has been repeating a lie. It’s as simple as that. Every public health care official who has used the phrase is a scoundrel; every “journalist” who has used it is a shameless propagandist; every politician who has used it is an imposter who, in my view, deserves to be impeached or voted out of office forthwith.

  Social distancing. 

  This one runs “shelter in place” a close second. The phrase was nonexistent, or at best obscure, until rather recently; when officials of the Center for Disease Control and Prevention used it in a 2007 advisory memorandum, they felt obliged to explain the term in a footnote:

  Social distancing refers to methods for reducing frequency and closeness of contact between people in order to decrease the risk of transmission of disease. Examples of social distancing include cancellation of public events such as concerts, sports events, or movies, closure of office buildings, schools, and other public places, and restriction of access to public places such as shopping malls or other places where people gather.

  Note that this definition does not include keeping people six feet apart, stifling them with surgical masks, or barring them from inviting family members to their apartments. Evidently, not even the germophobes at the CDC were prepared to contemplate so brutal a disruption of human life just thirteen years ago.

  In fact, the same memorandum stressed the importance of “[r]espect for individual autonomy” and “each individual’s general right to noninterference,” adding that even in the event the government did close office buildings or restrict access to shopping malls, “[a] process should be in place for objections to be heard, restrictions appealed, and for new procedures to be considered prior to implementation” — something never even remotely attempted during the last three months.

  In other words, “social distancing” really means whatever the changing whims of our governors would like it to mean, as they continue to exercise “emergency” powers in what is clearly not an emergency. Meanwhile, the use of the term gives a false patina of scientific legitimacy to unprecedented government intrusions into the most basic interactions of human life.

  The timing of the successive redefinitions of the phrase is itself instructive. In my own state of New Jersey, masks were not required as a component of “social distancing” until mid-April, by which time it was clear that the number of new cases in the region was already leveling off. (Masks remain mandatory in public as of this writing, even though the infection rate has fallen almost to pre-outbreak levels.)

  Allow that point to sink in for a moment: “social distancing” took on a more extreme and divisive definition at just the moment that, by any rational calculation, restrictions should have been reduced, if not removed altogether! And the most recent fiats from the governor suggest that nothing like ordinary companionship is going to be permitted any time soon — regardless of the facts.

  This implies that, at bottom, “social distancing” is not intended to serve any genuine medical purpose. It’s much better understood as an instrument of political repression — a way of keeping people apart and preventing any sort of public organizing.

  I don’t consider it an accident that the “phased reopening plan” being peddled by nearly all media “experts,” and routinely attributed to Johns Hopkins University, was in fact produced under the leadership of Scott Gottlieb, a resident fellow of the American Enterprise Institute — the right-wing think tank that served as a major cheerleader for the Iraq invasion of 2003 and whose recent initiatives include efforts to sharply reduce federal spending on health care.

  (Dr. Gottlieb, who until recently was Trump’s Commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, now sits on the boards of pharma heavyweights Pfizer, Illumina and Tempus — so it’s not hard to see where his interests lie.)

  That AEI is in no hurry to help small businesses reopen or to keep working people from losing their jobs will come as no surprise. What needs emphasis is that if such an outfit couldn’t hide its agenda behind the medical-sounding phrase “social distancing,” it would stand little chance of slipping its initiatives past the general public and into practice. But while we’re all creeping around with our faces wrapped like mummies, turned away from each other whenever possible, staying at least six feet apart, and speaking only when spoken to, how are we supposed to mount effective political opposition as the high rollers play their favorite games?

  Emergency. 

  Though it’s not often reported this way, the United States largely suspended democratic government back in March, when some 40 state executives declared “health emergencies,” granting themselves quasi-dictatorial powers to act without legislative approval or legal process.

  They did this by invoking each state’s version of the Emergency Health Powers Act, a controversial piece of legislation crafted in the nervous aftermath of the September 2001 attacks and supposedly designed for a coordinated response to a massive act of bioterrorism. The American Civil Liberties Union was not alone back then in condemning the bill as “replete with civil liberties problems” and “a throwback to a time before the legal system recognized basic protections for fairness.”

  Nevertheless, liberal media didn’t utter a peep when governors across the nation effectively scuppered democracy in the face of what, however threatening, didn’t even arguably resemble a catastrophic bioterror attack.

  If that strikes you as a flagrant abuse of the word “emergency” for questionable political purposes — and it should — you ain’t seen nothing yet.

  On June 4, New Jersey’s Governor Murphy issued his third consecutive extension of what was supposed to be a thirty-day “state of emergency” he had originally declared — unilaterally — on March 9.

  What was the “emergency” this time around? In the governor’s own words: “there has now been a decrease in the rate of reported new cases of COVID19 in New Jersey, in the total number of individuals being admitted to hospitals for COVID19, and in the rate of reproduction for COVID19 infections in New Jersey.”

  Got that? New cases, hospitalizations, even the “rate of reproduction” for the virus are all on the wane throughout Murphy’s jurisdiction. (And have been for months.) Yet in today’s Newspeak, that’s an “emergency” — enough to justify another month of democracy-free rule by executive fiat.

  And I’m the Maharaja of Mysore…

  I won’t even bother writing about that most buffoonish of phrases, “flattening the curve.” If that ever meant anything (which I doubt), it means literally nothing, or more accurately less than nothing, when applied (as it is now) to an outbreak that is demonstrably almost over.

  I’ll only note that if the lockdown enthusiasts had been able to specify an actual goal, in intelligible language, they would have done so from the start. They couldn’t — because their true objectives were political, not medical — so they offered us a magical-thinking cartoon image instead. They must be hoping we still haven’t noticed.

  As always, fraudulent language goes hand in hand with fraudulent political posturing, of which the Atlantic article I’ve already mentioned — oozing crocodile tears over the excesses of the cops while oblivious to the Constitution-defying antics of Governors Cuomo, Murphy, Whitmer et al. — is a rather rank example.

  In a similar vein, Ross Douthat’s recent op-ed in the New York Times is an interesting confession of liberal dishonesty in the service of a slightly different form of liberal dishonesty.

  Douthat correctly complains about members of the “public health establishment” who condemned anti-lockdown protesters just weeks ago as a dangerous death cult, but are now bowing and scraping before the parallel behavior of Black Lives Matter, “tying themselves in ideological knots” in the process.

  Douthat’s indictment of highbrow hypocrisy on this score is so accurate that it is worth quoting at length:

  [T]he original theory behind a stern public health response — that the danger to life and health justified suspending even the most righteous pursuits, including not just normal economic life but the practices and institutions that protect children, comfort the dying, serve the poor — has been abandoned or subverted by every faction in our national debate…. There is no First Amendment warrant to break up Hasidic funerals while blessing Black Lives Matter protests, and there is no moral warrant to claim that only anti-racism, however pressing its goals, deserves a sweeping exception from rules that have forbidden so many morally important activities for the last few months.

  All this is perfectly true. But with a pinch more honesty, Douthat might have concluded that “the original theory” was a sham to begin with. If the Right Thinkers had been telling the truth when they herded us all into captivity back in March, they’d still be yelling “obey or die!” at every crowd that defies lockdown orders.

  Douthat interprets their inconsistency as a surrender to the virus; he can’t admit that the Right Thinkers’ real battle was never against COVID19. It was against us.

  The same conclusion stares us in the face from the Right Thinkers’ eulogizing of protests against police brutality — or, rather, from what their encomiums to those protests consistently omit.

  The demonstrations spearheaded by Black Lives Matter focus on police-state tactics employed by uniformed enforcers of the will of the State; the much-maligned anti-lockdown protesters have been objecting to police-state tactics employed by political officials of the State itself.

  The connection between the two sets of protests should be obvious. But have you heard any of the high-profile liberals who are paying homage to Black Lives Matter breathe a single word to the effect that these different groups of protesters ought to combine their efforts, or at least to coordinate their campaigns in order to increase their political effectiveness?

  Of course not — and in my view, that’s the real reason behind the hypocritical nonsense being spouted in support of BLM by establishmentarians who merely sneered when the protesters were white working people.

  As long as Black Lives Matter continues to observe the double limitation that has so far marked its demonstrations — protesting only along racial lines, and only against the police — the ruling class’s left-wing will go on blessing it, because it won’t constitute too large a threat to established order.

  If the demonstrations start to talk about the rights of all people to be free of arbitrary confinement as well as violence, of all ordinary Americans to be able to work for a living as well as staying out of prison, the evils of all officials who stand in their way…well, that will be a horse of a different color.

  Remember the snapshot of congressional Democrats kneeling in pious rows with those silly kente stoles around their necks?

  That was styled as a “protest,” but don’t kid yourselves: if Pelosi & Co. were genuinely horrified about police racism, they would have done something about it years ago. I think those Democratic heavyweights knelt to pray that BLM doesn’t realize it’s confronting a broader issue than racist police violence.

  As I write this, the US is teetering simultaneously on the edge of its worst financial collapse since the 1930s and on the brink of a descent into quasi-dictatorial rule. Sectarian protests, however justified, won’t halt that descent. General political resistance just might. And liberal pundits are scared to death that protesters, black and white, progressive and conservative, might figure out that they’re really fighting the same enemy.

  Of course, nothing I can write is going to penetrate the minds of people who have drunk the lockdown Kool-Aid and will hear, in my dissection of the fraudulent language used by “public servants” to foment poverty and to shred the Bill of Rights, only some sort of “coronavirus denial.”

  So let me say it clearly: the coronavirus epidemic is real. Okay? It exists — but saying it exists is a mere truism. Iraq exists too, and it was once ruled by a particularly vicious dictator — though the fact that his worst atrocities were committed with extensive US support is mentioned far less often than it should be.

  But it is still true that the American and British publics were tricked into endorsing a criminal invasion of that country on the strength of false claims. And no assortment of after-the-fact apologetics can turn those lies into truths.

  The same holds for COVID19 and its flagrantly deceitful handling by nearly everyone involved: politicians, reporters, pundits, public health “experts.” (The US leadership of my own Orthodox Jewish community has been just as bad.) Yes, this is a highly contagious respiratory infection that can have serious effects on unusually vulnerable people. But beyond that, just about everything we were told about COVID19 has turned out to be false.

  • We were told the virus would kill millions in the US alone, and that was false.

  • We were told lockdowns would make it go away, and that was false.

  • We were told we would only be confined until the rate of new cases leveled off, and that was false.

  • We were told that while the outbreak lasted no state government would tolerate any sort of public gathering for any reason, and that was false.

  • We were told that anyone who questioned the wisdom of the draconian restrictions foisted on us by our governments was a crypto-Nazi whose real goal was to kill off the weak — and that was false, not to mention slanderous.

  • Most unforgivably of all, we were told — and told, and told — that morality was entirely on the side of the democracy-destroyers. That was a lie of breathtaking proportions.

  Not only did the lockdowns violate state laws and make a mockery of the US Constitution; not only did they deprive at least tens of millions of Americans of their basic liberties; not only have they cost millions of people their jobs and thrust the country into its worst economic straits since the 1930s — on top of all that, they have sown untold misery around the world, as mushrooming numbers of poor people experience acute food shortages and millions of children face the interruption of vital medical supplies.

  And even as mainstream media begin to admit these facts, they still subvert reality by pretending that all this suffering is a result “of the coronavirus.”

  That’s simply another lie. It would be as true to say that millions died in Nazi gas chambers as a result of the rise of Soviet communism. (The putative threat of “the Bolsheviks” was a crucial theme in the anti-Semitism that underpinned the Nazi “Final Solution.”)

  The truth, of course, is that the coronavirus didn’t cause these hardships, at least not by itself. Politicians chose to inflict them. And unless we keep that knowledge alive, we will never be able to hold those responsible to account — nor prevent a repetition of such behavior in the future.

  “The beginning of wisdom,” said Confucius, “is to call things by their proper name.”

  Katya Soldak and her nursery school classmates could not dismantle their country’s ruling Communist Party, but they could refuse to call a prison camp a health resort. Surely we can refuse to cooperate in the use of language whose sole purpose is to swindle us. At present our civil liberties are under serious assault, as is the very principle of democracy. Can’t we call those ugly things the names they deserve?

  I know what I am proposing is more difficult than it sounds. The enemies of honesty in politics have vast resources at their disposal, and they are not shy about abusing them. Already the UN’s euphemistically-named Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Opinion and Expression, David Kaye, has openly applauded censorship of lockdown critics, even acknowledging that social media “platforms are serving as stand-ins for government authorities” in an effort to curb unwanted political protest.

  The dishonesty infects even small details: the Washington Post, like most US media outlets with paywalls, makes an exception for COVID19, “providing this important information about the coronavirus for free”; but the Post’s only story on the Wisconsin Supreme Court’s reversal of the governor’s mass-confinement order that contains the court’s explanation of its ruling is behind the same paywall as every ordinary article.

  Evidently, stories that promote coronavirus hysteria constitute “important information,” while stories that lend support to dissenters do not — not even when they concern the reasoning of the highest court of a major state.

  So yes, the COVID19 game is rigged — as games run by our rulers usually are. But false depictions of reality have power only to the extent honest people allow themselves to be deceived.

  Powerful politicians, and their tame pundits, are plainly betting that the public can be manipulated by the fear of a novel virus. But the thing we should fear the most is irrational submissiveness, what Max Weber called “the cowardly will to impotence.”

  The moral of the Emperor’s new clothes is as relevant as ever: a single honest voice can unravel the most elaborately designed fakery. People who demand the truth may be outnumbered. They cannot easily be overcome.

  

• In Friday Night Drama, US Attorney Geoffrey Berman Refuses To 'Step Down' After Barr Asks For Resignation
  In Friday Night Drama, US Attorney Geoffrey Berman Refuses To ‘Step Down’ After Barr Asks For Resignation
  
  Tyler Durden
  
  Fri, 06/19/2020 – 23:20

  Geffrey Berman is refusing to step down as US Attorney for the Southern District of New York after Attorney General William Barr asked him to resign, according to Bloomberg.

  “I learned in a press release from the Attorney General tonight that I was ‘stepping down’ as United States Attorney,” said Berman, adding “I have not resigned, and have no intention of resigning, my position, to which I was appointed by the judges of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York.

  “I will step down when a presidentially appointed nominee is confirmed by the Senate… …Until then, our investigations will move forward without delay or interruption.“

  Reacting to the news, Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said “This late Friday night dismissal reeks of potential corruption of the legal process.“

  SDNY was pursuing several probes of the president’s business and his inaugural committee. It was also investigating Rudy Giuliani, an outspoken Trump supporter, and charged two of Giuliani’s associates. In his congressional testimony, Trump’s former lawyer Michael Cohen, whose conviction on campaign finance violations and other charges was secured by SDNY prosecutors, said he was cooperating with them on matters he couldn’t discuss. -Bloomberg

  According to a NYT anonymous source that cannot be verified, President Trump has been unhappy with Berman since he went after Cohen, and has been discussing Berman’s removal with a small group of advisers for some time.

  *  *  *

  In a surprising move that inevitably will be denounced by President Trump’s political opponents as another “Friday Night Massacre”, the DoJ just announced that Geoffrey Berman, the US attorney for the southern district of New York, will soon depart.

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  Geoffrey Berman

  A Republican who contributed to Trump’s campaign, Berman was considered a highly qualified pick to succeed Preet Bharara, the previous occupant of his Berman’s soon-to-be-former office, which also features heavily in the TV show “Billions” (it’s the position held by the show’s antagonist, a corrupt federal prosecutor).

  AG Barr didn’t offer much in the way of an explanation, and Berman hasn’t said much either. Then again, we’re only just finding out about this, and it’s 10pmET on a holiday Friday.

  But even more surprising than the news of Berman’s sudden departure is the news of who will take his place. Following a brief interlude, SEC Chairman Jay Clayton will become the next US Attorney for the Southern District of New York.

  For those who aren’t familiar, Clayton is the same man who almost allowed Hertz and its creditors to sell hundreds of millions of dollars of stock to unsuspecting Robinhood day traders trying to flip their stimulus checks for quick cash with nary a word from the SEC.

  But even more extraordinary than his handling of the Hertz situation is Clayton’s decision to allow Tesla CEO Elon Musk walk away from a dispute with the SEC in which the CEO flagrantly and blithely violated basic securities regulations involving disclosures of material information to the public (remember “funding secured?” and the tedious legal melodrama that ensued in which Musk, in full blown tantrum mode, was repeatedly appeased by government regulators seemingly robbed of all willingness to hold him accountable).

  Indeed, the news elicited some late-breaking chuckles on twitter.

  has @elonmusk approved this? @SEC_Enforcement $tsla $tslaq

  “… Jay has been an extraordinarily successful SEC Chairman.” pic.twitter.com/Dn6Kg1gON0

  — andykat (@hilinetrail) June 20, 2020

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  We imagine we’ll be hearing more about this tomorrow.

  

• North Korea Sends Troops & Ships To Border As More Attention-Grabbing 'Explosive Displays' Loom
  North Korea Sends Troops & Ships To Border As More Attention-Grabbing ‘Explosive Displays’ Loom
  
  Tyler Durden
  
  Fri, 06/19/2020 – 23:15

  While the world awaits more of North Korea’s attempt at attention-grabbing “explosive displays” following the dramatic televised explosion of the inter-Korean liaison office Tuesday, there’s been a reported build-up of NK troops along the the demilitarized zone (DMZ), according to new reports. Ships have also been observed entering areas along the disputed maritime border.

  Pyongyang’s recent threats to mobilize extra forces have been made good on, apparently: “North Korea’s military appeared to be moving to the front lines near the South as a U.S. reconnaissance plane flew over the peninsula, following days of threats and provocations from Pyongyang,” UPI reports.

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  South Korean media and military sources report that “North Korean troops were stationed on the North’s side of the Korean demilitarized zones, at vacated guard posts of the tense border.”

  Pyongyang’s latest saber-rattling is ostensibly related to an ongoing campaign of defectors spreading propaganda leaflets into the north via the border. Apparently in some cases activists are using balloons to transport messages into the north encouraging people to defect.

  “On Wednesday North Korea had said it would retake vacated guard posts and take military action if North Korean defectors in the South continued to send anti-Pyongyang leaflets by helium balloon,” the UPI report adds.

  Thus it appears Pyongyang’s troop movements, including what it says are elite units, are an attempt to make good on the prior threats.

  North Korea releases pics of the destruction of the inter-Korean liason office.

  via Yonhap News. pic.twitter.com/Ge9dzFaqZe

  — Raphael Rashid (@koryodynasty) June 16, 2020

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  It also comes amid disappointment at stalled – and what now appears to be completely failed – nuclear talks with Washington, which Seoul had previously touted as something it would help achieve.

  South Korean diplomats have reportedly reached out to restore communications with the north but have been rebuffed. It’s widely believed that Kim John Un and his increasingly visible sister Kim Yo-jong, who has lately emerged as an outspoken military ‘enforcer’ of sorts, are seeking new leverage with the Trump administration, at a time sanctions are still in place with little openings forward.

  

• Daytrading Icon Portnoy Now Using Random Scrabble Letters To Pick A Stock
  Daytrading Icon Portnoy Now Using Random Scrabble Letters To Pick A Stock
  
  Tyler Durden
  
  Fri, 06/19/2020 – 23:00

  As much as BarStool’s Dave Portnoy has become a punching bag for the commission-rakers (or sellers of quote traffic to HFTs) and asset-gatherers across America of all that is unholy about the speculative excess in the stock market, he has also done more than anyone before him to expose the real absurdity of the Fed-fueled farce that CNBC still likes to call a ‘market’ while helping retail investors crush both hedge funds the and the S&P500.

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  Today’s ‘performance’ pushed him to ’11’ on the amplifier of daytrading largesse when, in response to derogatory comments by former CNBC anchor and former hedge fund manager (or something like that) Ron Insana on CNBC this afternoon, Portnoy rage-tweeted:

  “Imagine a talking head who tried to start his own hedge fund only to go bust instantly and then he runs back to Tv acting like an expert? Ron Insana is a punchline. Google him. He is a documented failure. Why even put him on Tv @CNBC ? Is he teaching classes on how to fail?”

  And then proceeded to choose his next trading target through the CAPM recommended optimal asset selection process of picking Scrabble letters from a bag.

  $RTX comes out of the scrabble bag. Smush letters and buy it. Give it a try Ron, you might not bankrupt your clients. #DDTG pic.twitter.com/semLRi6yBF

  — Dave Portnoy (@stoolpresidente) June 19, 2020

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  He picked out R-T-X… Raytheon.

  I think me and @RaytheonTech are gonna get along just fine pic.twitter.com/tosJCRTqce

  — Dave Portnoy (@stoolpresidente) June 19, 2020

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  We’ll see how the stock does, although we fully expect it to soar premarket on Monday just because.

  For now, we are sending this along to relevant parties to ensure they are fully aware of what they have done in the name of “saving” us all.

  cc: @federalreserve @richardclarida @neelkashkari https://t.co/LcUAsWg5zj

  — zerohedge (@zerohedge) June 19, 2020

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  Joking aside, and with the recent suicide of one such speculatively-challenged young man, the fact of the matter is that the dollars being levered into worthless stocks (and options) are real to many people and when this devil ether-chugging casino finally ends, there will be hell to pay, only this time everyone will know The Fed is responsible for enabling it and who knows: maybe one day street protests will finally appear before the Marriner Eccles building.

  

• The Crisis Goes Up A Gear: Is This The Beginning Of The End For The Dollar?
  The Crisis Goes Up A Gear: Is This The Beginning Of The End For The Dollar?
  
  Tyler Durden
  
  Fri, 06/19/2020 – 22:50

  Authored by Alasdair Macleod via GoldMoney.com,

  Dollar-denominated financial markets appeared to suffer a dramatic change on or about the 23 March. This article examines the possibility that it marks the beginning of the end for the Fed’s dollar.

  At this stage of an evolving economic and financial crisis, such thoughts are necessarily speculative. But an imminent banking crisis is now a near certainty, with most global systemically important banks in a weaker position than at the time of the Lehman crisis. US markets appear oblivious to this risk, though the ratings of G-SIBs in other jurisdictions do reflect specific banking risks rather than a systemic one at this stage.

  A banking collapse will be a game-changer for financial markets, and we should then worry that the Fed has bound the dollar’s future to their fortunes.

  The dollar could fail completely by the end of this year. Against that possibility a reset might be implemented, perhaps by reintroducing the greenback, which is not the same as the Fed’s dollar. Any reset is likely to fail unless the US Government desists from inflationary financing, which requires a radically changed mindset, even harder to imagine in a presidential election year.

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  Introduction

  The most important mistake economists and financial watchers make is to assume events and prices tomorrow are simply projections of those of today. It is the basis of all economic and financial modelling. Yet despite the hard lessons of experience economic forecasters persist with their misleading models.

  Nowhere is the failure of linear projection from the past more important than in the lifeblood common to everything. While knowing that state-issued currencies change in their utility over time, almost no one expects their demise, other perhaps at some point in the far distant future. But what if this generally linear expectation is as wrong as all other forecasting models? What if the response to the current economic crisis is a more rapid depreciation of currencies? And what happens if they die altogether? And what are the consequences for the ordinary person?

  This article explores these what-ifs. It examines the conditions that could lead to this outcome. History gives us a guide, not through extrapolation, but by telling us that every recorded currency collapse has occurred to fiat currencies unbacked by gold or silver. So, we know it will happen — eventually. Less understood is that the pattern is always the same: a prolonged period of falling purchasing power, followed by a sudden collapse when a currency’s users finally reject it. In terms of time the latter phase usually lasts approximately six months.

  Assessing the turning point

  The early morning of Monday, 23 March was a significant time, marking the top of the dollar’s trade-weighted index. At the same time, gold, silver and copper prices, having fallen in the weeks before turned sharply higher. And while oil initially followed, it was a month before it resumed its uptrend — delayed by the delivery hiatus in the futures markets which briefly drove the price negative. The S&P 500 rallied the following day, ending a near 30% decline before recovering all of it, and then some.

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  Something had changed. Either markets decided that economic growth, both in the US and the rest of the world was going to continue following lockdowns, and growing demand for key commodities was going to be resumed. Or, as the decline in the dollar’s TWI indicated, the purchasing power of the dollar was going to decline, and commodity prices were reflecting an accelerating downtrend for the dollar’s purchasing power.

  The performance of the S&P 500 since 23 March, being unhinged from any business conditions, gives us a clue: the flood of money emanating from the Fed is fuelling stock prices. It is also fuelling prices of all other financial assets.

  The turnaround in silver is a more subtle story, shown in the chart as the reciprocal of the more usual gold/silver ratio. Silver had been ignored, classed solely as an industrial metal. Gold was seen by the financial community as the only metallic hedge against uncertainty in the financial system. That changed on 23 March when the gold/silver ratio peaked at 125 on the previous business day. It is now beginning to outperform gold with the gold/silver ratio currently down to 98. We might look back and pinpoint this time as marking the beginning of a return to some moneyness in silver.

  The weeks before had seen the Fed ease monetary policy. On 3 March, the Fed cut its funds rate from 1 ½% to 1%. In the accompanying announcement the Fed said that the fundamentals of the economy remained strong, but the coronavirus posed evolving risks to the economy.

  On 15 March, the Fed cut its funds rate again, this time to zero, but the statement now said the coronavirus had harmed communities and disrupted economic activity in many countries, including the US. On a twelve-month basis, overall price inflation and price increases for other than food and energy were running at below 2%. The Fed announced renewed quantitative easing of at least $500bn of Treasury purchases and $200bn of mortgage-backed securities “in the coming months”.  It was “prepared to use its full range of tools to support the flow of credit to households and businesses and thereby promote its maximum employment and price stability goals.”

  That day the Fed made two other announcements. The first detailed arrangements for the encouragement of credit expansion to support both consumers and businesses, including the reduction of reserve ratios for all banks to zero. The second concerned the reduction of costs in drawing down USD swap lines at the other major central banks. They were followed over the course of the week by a series of announcements facilitating the availability of credit.

  Clearly, the Fed was engaging the ultimate in aggressive monetary policies. And taking a phrase from the last head of the ECB, the Fed had signalled it was prepared to do whatever it takes without limitation. But the response in the markets took a week to develop into an inflection point, a normal pause before a new direction is found.

  Central bank inflation and bank credit difficulties

  Since the Fed is one step removed from the non-financial economy it relies on commercial banks to implement its monetary policy. But commercial banks will only act as the Fed’s agents if they are confident the rewards are greater than the risks involved. If the current crisis is simply a matter of the coronavirus being contained before everything returns to normal, then bankers might be prepared to take a punt on an increase of bank lending.

  But as time passes, the losses mount. Business and consumer defaults are increasing, and the prospects for a rapid recovery appear to be receding. Furthermore, liquidity strains in the banking system are resurfacing, despite the massive injections of QE by the Fed. After subsiding from the panicky days of last September, overnight repos are on the increase again totalling anything between $20—$100bn daily.

  It has been generally forgotten that the global economy was already facing a recession before the virus lockdowns. Trade wars between America and China and bank credit expansion having run for a decade were a repeat of the conditions that led to the Wall Street Crash in 1929, when the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act following the roaring twenties was enacted, bank credit imploded, and the 1930s depression followed. Similarly, banks are now highly leveraged on their balance sheets and fear of bad debts has taken over from lending greed. The global banking cohort is increasingly desperate to reduce balance sheet commitments at the same time as the Fed and other central banks are frantic to see them expanded.

  It is no wonder that the Fed’s expansion has remained bottled up in financial markets, driving financial assets even further into dangerous overvaluation territory. Consequently, without liquidity flowing more freely into the non-financial economy, bad debts can only deteriorate further, with loan risk rapidly increasing for commercial banks.

  Systemic issues are being ignored

  When the coronavirus first became an economic issue, there were mounting concerns over payment failures in supply chains. In the US, these payments are effectively the equivalent of gross output, which at the end of last year was running at $38 trillion. While we regard gross output as the value of products as they flow through their production stages, the payments flow the other way, back down the chains. Therefore, the $38 trillion figure can be taken as proxy for the sum of all supply chain payments in the US, to which must be added the dollar equivalents of supply chain payments outside the US for semi-manufactured imports.

  Not all supply chains have been completely disrupted, so the good news is payment disruptions onshore should be significantly less than $38 trillion but could easily be half that. But there is likely to be additional disruption from abroad, a point addressed by the Fed when it increased the number of central banks (but not China) having access to its swap lines.

  The risks to commercial banks are not so much from the largest corporations, likely to be bailed out if in trouble, but from lower tiers of borrowers. This affects banks with exposure to collateralised loan obligations, which are bundled loans to companies often unable to raise funds any other way — today’s version of the collateralised debt obligations that blew up the banking system in 2008. Additionally, banks have direct loans and revolving capital exposure on their balance sheets with all businesses in the $38 trillion of onshore supply chains.

  The market capitalisation of the US’s G-SIBs — global systemically important banks — is less than a trillion dollars. Yet the supply chain failures that they are expected to backstop are many trillions — multiple times their market capitalisation, and even of their balance sheet equity.

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  It seems hardly possible that the US banking system will survive the current supply chain disruption without help. The added bad news is that the US G-SIBs are rated much more highly in stock markets than their Chinese, Japanese, Eurozone, Swiss and UK competitors, shown in Figure 1 above. It indicates that a systemic failure in dollar-denominated financial markets is not widely expected, given the generally higher market ratings afforded to US G-SIBs than for those in other jurisdictions. This probably explains why this topic is not yet a significant issue for dollar investors, though individual bank failures are more obviously an issue in other jurisdictions, where some G-SIB price to book ratios are below 30% while those of US G-SIBs average 93%.

  The next significant event therefore will almost certainly be the failure of a G-SIB, if not in America, then elsewhere. Given the sheer scale of the problems in supply chains in all currencies and the accumulating bad debts attributable to lockdowns it could happen in a matter of weeks. Presumably, failing banks will be taken into public ownership with the Fed backstopping it with yet more inflationary finance. The impact on the Fed’s balance sheet, which has already grown to over $7 trillion will probably be several times its current size. But that, on its own, may not be enough to destroy the dollar.

  A more direct danger is posed from monetary policies aimed at supporting financial asset values. In common with other major central banks the Fed has become reliant on a policy of ultra-low interest rates to fund its government’s deficit. At the same time, there has been a longstanding belief, particularly in America, that rising prices for financial assets, chiefly stocks, have been vital to generate a wealth effect and therefore maintain public confidence in the economic outlook. In current markets, this overvaluation policy has been taken to extremes with even teenagers reportedly buying fractionalised stocks through aggregating platforms, such as Robinhood, as if it is a just another computer game.

  The dollar’s inevitable descent

  In more normal times the excessive speculation in the markets seen today would encourage the Fed to inject some caution into monetary policy; but the Fed cannot backtrack for fear of triggering a catastrophic collapse. Consequently, the future of the dollar has become firmly tied to that of confidence in financial markets.

  With a rapidly escalating budget deficit the US Government has a growing funding requirement, the cost of which already absorbs $400bn in interest charges annually. The Trump administration had increased its deficit to record levels in the good times when tax revenue was buoyant. And now the crisis has hit, higher interest rates will expose the US Government to a debt trap. This is a weapon the Fed cannot use.

  As noted above, the next market shock is likely to be a systemic failure in the banking system. It matters not where that occurs, but when it does it makes bank depositors autarkic. Not only do they withdraw funds from banks they deem to be at risk thereby increasing their problems, but they also reduce cross-border currency exposure. The dollar is most exposed of all currencies to the latter risk: on last known figures foreigners owned about $25 trillion in securities, short-term paper and bank deposits, while Americans held roughly half that invested mainly in illiquid production facilities abroad, limited portfolio exposure to listed securities and with very little liquid foreign currency exposure.

  In our headline chart we noted that the dollar’s turning point was 23 March and its subsequent downturn was part of a bigger commodity picture with gold, silver, copper and — belatedly — oil prices rising. In March, US TIC data showed that foreigners reduced their dollar exposure by $227.9bn, only offset by US residents’ net sales of foreign securities of $133.3bn.[ii] Here is the evidence that in troubled times money heads for home. Additionally, that month saw a trade deficit of $44.4bn suggesting total foreign-related dollar selling amounted to $177.7bn. This is only part of a bigger dollar picture, but it does appear foreigners were reducing their dollar exposure at the time that the dollar’s TWI peaked on 23 March.

  This is important, because there are two market factors that have always led to a fiat currency collapse. The first is selling by foreigners, which appears to have commenced, and in this respect the dollar is particularly exposed. With some $25 trillion invested in US securities etc., the potential destruction to the dollar’s purchasing power from this source is significant. As global trade shrinks further, not only will foreigners be driven by the need to redeploy dollars into their currencies of origin, but they will stop funding the US Government, choosing to sell down their US Treasury holdings, a process which has already started. If the Fed is to successfully fund the growing budget deficit it must absorb foreign sales of US Treasuries as well as maintain sufficient levels of QE to fund a rapidly increasing budget deficit.

  Just imagine the consequences of a systemic failure. The spell cast over financial assets will be broken. First, investors and speculators are likely to turn their attention to equities, being obviously the most overvalued financial assets at a time of intensifying crisis. Foreign investors will join, selling down their portfolio exposure, repatriating some, if not all of the proceeds by selling dollars as well. Next, with a falling dollar and a growing sensitivity to the political aspect of the crisis, market participants will reassess the US Government’s funding requirements and question the yield suppression policy of the Fed. Dollar selling seems bound to intensify.

  It will then become obvious to everyone that the Fed is sacrificing the dollar in order to fund the government, keep the banking system going and to support the economy by attempting to provide the liquidity to defray supply chain failures. It will already be demonstrably failing to support financial asset prices, which has become the visible manifestation of a successful monetary policy. It would be a miracle if this failure, in Trump’s election year with a socialistic president being lined up by the Democrats, does not lead to a full-blown financial and dollar crisis.

  Unless the Fed can raise interest rates to the point where it is too expensive for speculators to short the dollar (which we can rule out), it will enter the second phase of its collapse, driven by US residents realising the dollar is losing purchasing power, rather than prices rising. The purchasing power of any money depends on the balance between money and goods maintained by its users. If they collectively reject the money in favour of goods, then money’s purchasing power declines, potentially to zero. Following foreign selling, this is the second phase of the destruction of a fiat currency, which in past examples have taken roughly six months for it to become worthless.

  There are three factors that could shorten this timescale even further: the replacement of cash and cheques by digital payments, modern communications leading to the rapid spread of information, and as a consequence of the development of cryptocurrencies, wider public foreknowledge of the weaknesses of unbacked fiat currencies.

  The case for fiat currency survival beyond 2020

  The circumstantial evidence that the dollar will collapse before the year-end is mounting. Cassandra opened her casket, the evils escaped, and only hope remains trapped.

  Or so it seems. We cannot divine the future. We can only sift the evidence, be aware of common fallacies and avoid the temptation to wrongly extrapolate from yesterday into the future. While our method may be better than the macroeconomic forecasting beloved of the establishment, a predicted outcome is never reality. And it is possible the US Treasury might attempt a reset, perhaps using Treasury dollars, otherwise known as greenbacks, which were last issued in 1971. But without axing government welfare commitments to the American public, returning to balanced budgets and abandoning Fed dollar denominated debt this sort of legerdemain is unconvincing. Furthermore, the dollar’s reserve role for other currencies would have to be abandoned because of the monetary inflation involved in Triffin’s dilemma. And other currencies tied to the Fed’s dollar held in their reserves would still face their own collapse.

  A reset abandoning the Fed’s dollar in favour of greenbacks is possible. But history has shown that the introduction of a replacement currency for one that has collapsed fails unless government financing by monetary expansion is demonstrably abandoned. Only time will tell whether in a presidential election year the US Government musters the clarity of purpose to implement a new lasting dollar regime.

  The US Treasury says it still has over 8,000 tonnes of gold. If it is willing to drop its neo-Keynesian economics and its long-standing denial of gold’s monetary function, America could reintroduce gold convertibility for the greenbacks. This would probably be a last resort. It reneges on the Fed’s balance sheet note — which in these conditions would be its only significant asset, involves the abandonment of the welfare state and America’s longstanding geopolitical aims, and it allows China to gain potential advantage by displacing the dollar with a more convincing gold convertibility of its own.

  China has deliberately cornered the gold bullion market in plans that go back to the time of Deng. Almost certainly, following the introduction of its Regulations on the Control of Gold and Silver (1983), the Chinese state accumulated sufficient gold for its strategic purposes by the time it then permitted its citizens to buy gold with the opening of the Shanghai Gold Exchange in 2002. The gold acquired by the state at that time is not declared as monetary gold and the quantity is unknown, but after examining inward investment flows net of trade deficits in the 1980s and growing export surpluses subsequently, a ten per cent allocation of foreign exchange gained into gold at contemporary prices suggests a position of some 20,000 tonnes of bullion was likely to have been accumulated by 2002.

  There is no way of establishing the facts, and therefore statements about the Chinese state’s ownership of bullion are necessarily speculative. But additional evidence is compelling:

  • China is now the largest gold mining nation by far, extracting an estimated 4,200 tonnes since 2010, more than any other nation. This has been driven by government policy.

  • The state controls all Chinese gold and silver refining, taking in doré from abroad to add to Chinese stocks. At the same time, virtually no Chinese refined gold kilo bars are permitted to leave the country.

  • In 2002, when the Shanghai Gold Exchange was set up by the Peoples’ Bank of China the Chinese government encouraged its nationals to acquire physical gold, even advertising its attractions in state media. Since 2010 alone, 17,200 tonnes have been delivered into public hands by the SGE. These figures were achieved by importing bullion from the West in enormous quantities.

  • Its allies in Asia, principally members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, have also been acquiring gold. Russia has been particularly aggressive in dumping dollars for gold.

  • China now dominates physical gold markets and can be said to control them.

  Given all these verifiable facts, it seems unlikely that a state which centrally plans would not have acquired for its own use substantial quantities of bullion ahead of the establishment of the SGE. America knows it and continues to resist gold having a monetary role. If America’s anti-gold policy changed, it would restrict the dollar’s circulation abroad. It would mark the end of dollar hegemony and a gold-backed yuan would become the foreign currency of choice throughout Asia, eastern Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

  Conclusions and consequences

  A banking crisis in the coming weeks is an increasingly likely event, given the scale of disruption to supply chains. The escalation of bankruptcies and of non-performing loans worldwide will almost certainly take the banking system down. It will be a watershed, a wake-up call to all those who expect a return to normality after the coronavirus passes.

  For the moment, central banks are throwing money at the problem; money which remains stuck in financial assets, inflating them even further, and not being transmitted to the non-financial economy by banks already over-leveraged to failing borrowers.

  We can be certain central bankers and government treasury departments are only now grasping the enormity of these problems, but they are still behaving as if chucking money at them is a viable solution. They will only destroy their unbacked fiat currencies, and that destruction, starting with the dollar, is already in progress. The clock is ticking from 23 March. While there may be attempts at a fiat money reset, without clear legal commitments from central banks and treasury departments to end inflationary financing, any reset will only delay currency destruction by a matter of months.

  The consequences of such an outcome are always devastating, the more so because all major westernised central banks are committed to the same inflationary policies at the same time. The political consequences do not bear thinking about.

  At some stage, hopefully sooner rather than later, metallic money will regain circulation. And when prices are set in gold or silver, perhaps through fully backed substitutes, the stability they bring will end the trappings of fiat currencies. All this destruction is measured in current terms, nearly all from statistics collected by the Bank for International Settlements.

  Gone will be worldwide fiat currency debt, amounting to some $250—$300 trillion. Gone will be all OTC derivatives which settle in fiat, amounting to a further $560 trillion. Gone will be listed derivatives, a further $33 trillion. Gone will be options, a further $65 trillion. All these, totalling over $900 trillion, are only part of the destruction.

  Global deposits held as bank balances totalling $60 trillion will evaporate. Worldwide equity markets denominated in fiat are a further $70 trillion; anything that does not migrate from fiat pricing disappears, including most, if not all ETFs. Goodbye to hedge funds. Goodbye to offshore financial centres. Goodbye to onshore financial centres. Goodbye to $100 trillion of fiat money.

  Life will be very different, and those not prepared for it, principally by retaining a store of non-fiat, sound money, which can only be physical gold and silver until credible substitutes arise, will face impoverishment. Measured in real money, the value of non-financial physical assets will collapse due to the preponderance of desperate sellers to whom survival is most important, even though priced in worthless fiat their prices will have risen. The experience of inflationary collapses in Germany and Austria in the early 1920s showed the way, when country estates went for almost nothing in gold-back dollars and $100 would buy a mansion in Berlin.

  None of this is expected. It may not happen, but the chances of it happening  appear to have increased significantly from 23 March.

  

• Trump Admin To Name Most Recipients Of Bailout Loans
  Trump Admin To Name Most Recipients Of Bailout Loans
  
  Tyler Durden
  
  Fri, 06/19/2020 – 22:23

  When the government said it would give out thousands of dollars in bailout loans grants under the Paycheck Protection Program, every eligible business – which was most small and medium businesses (that had no access to capital markets) with up to 500 employees, signed up. And why not: it was free money from a government that had launched helicopter money, and was seeking to ram the newly created money into the economy. There was no downside – the grants would be forgiven if used to pay wages or rent, and – at least according to widespread speculation – the loans would remain a secret. Which is why it was so surprising when it emerged that some “asset managers” such as Ritholtz Asset Management, led by Josh Brown and Barry Ritholtz, had also accepted bailout grants to stay in business. In retrospect, Ritholtz is the author of Bailout Nation so it probably should not have been a surprise.

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  What should have been a surprise is that an asset manager – i.e., a professional collecting generous fees to predict the future and entrusted with billions in capital not only failed to do that, but himself needed a bailout. It just goes to show how important it is to pick very calm and patient clients.

  Of course, we can’t blame them: like most other recipients, Ritholtz probably expected that his name would never see the light of day, even though technically he used taxpayer money to prop up his company. And since it is taxpayer money, everyone has a right to know how it would be used.

  Only in the case of just over half a trillion dollars in PPP grants that wasn’t the case, because for nearly 3 months after the PPP program was launched, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin persisted in keeping the names of all recipients secret, much to the growing anger of those who effectively funded the loans.

  That all changed late on Friday, when Bloomberg reported that the Trump administration said it would disclose details about companies that received loans of $150,000 or more from a coronavirus relief program for small businesses, following a backlash against its earlier refusal to release data about which firms got billions of dollars in government aid. Eleven news organizations had sued to make details about PPP loan recipients public.

  Which is bad news for all those “financial advisors” like Ritholtz who will soon be revealed as getting paid to “predict” the future, yet not having the sense to even budget for a short-term crisis, let along have hedges in place for a downside scenario. As for the rest, it’s unclear how willing most small businesses would have been had they known that the very act of requesting a bailout would open them up to eventual public shaming.

  The company names, addresses, demographic data and other information will be disclosed in five ranges starting with $150,000 to $350,000 and going up to between $5 million and $10 million, the Treasury Department and Small Business Administration said in a joint statement.

  For loans below $150,000, only totals will be released aggregated by zip code, by industry, by business type, and by various demographic categories, the agencies said. The loans above $150,000 account for almost 75% of the total loan dollars approved, they said. It wasn not clear when the data would be released.

  According to the latest SBA data, loans had been approved for almost 4.7 million small businesses totaling $514.5 billion. As of June 12, there were 3.9 million loans of less than $150,000 totaling $136.7 billion and almost 650,000 larger loans worth $375.6 billion.

  * * *

  Lawmakers had been demanding the disclosure of details about Paycheck Protection Program loans after Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said at a Senate committee hearing on June 10 that the names of companies that received forgivable loans and the amounts were proprietary or confidential – even though as Bloomberg notes, the administration had previously said the details would be disclosed, and the PPP application says such data will “automatically” be released.

  Officials had expressed concerns about releasing the details because a company’s payroll is used to determine the loan amount, and some independent contractors and small businesses use their home addresses that would be disclosed.

  “I am pleased that we have been able to reach a bipartisan agreement on disclosure which will strike the appropriate balance of providing public transparency, while protecting the payroll and personal income information of small businesses, sole proprietors, and independent contractors,” Mnuchin said in a statement.

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  Critics said the public has a right to know how taxpayer dollars were used and that more detail was needed to know whether PPP was serving businesses that need help.

  “The administration’s decision to hide basic PPP loan data is a disturbing sign of its lack of concern for who gets this funding, how much they receive or why,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said in a June 12 statement. “The administration must immediately reverse this decision and uphold its obligation to release this data.”

  Republican Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, chairman of the Small Business & Entrepreneurship Committee, said the public deserves to know how effective the PPP has been, but that there are legitimate concerns about disclosing information about small firms. “Today’s announcement strikes a balance between those concerns and the need for transparency,” Rubio said in a statement.

  Lawmakers have also called on Treasury and the SBA to provide details about its coronavirus relief loans to the Government Accountability Office, which is preparing a report about how relief dollars were spent.

  

• Prepping: 15 Things That Will Happen When The Economy Finally Collapses
  Prepping: 15 Things That Will Happen When The Economy Finally Collapses
  
  Tyler Durden
  
  Fri, 06/19/2020 – 22:00

  Authored by Mac Slavo via SHTFplan.com,

  We should all be prepared for what’s coming next.  In order to prepare effectively, we need to know what will happen when the economy finally collapses under its own weight.  The creation of money out of thin air could only go on for so long, and we are approaching the end.

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  Epic Economist put together a great video detailing the 15 things (and yes, some are a little scary) that will happen when the economy collapses.  At this point in time and history, it is no surprise that an economic collapse is coming for us. When the world’s largest economy is deep down in a recession, many other countries will not be late to follow the same path.

  The financial breakdown the world is about to face over the next few years will be an unprecedented catastrophe, especially considering that the underlying problems from previous crashes were never fixed, only mended together. A real repair would require a complete restructuration in the system, and the elites were never interested in fixing the system that they set up to screw the rest of us.

  These are the 15 things that will happen that you should be prepared for:

  1 -Fuel Shortages, or rationing of fuel

  2 -Carjackings rise

  3- Interstate Trucking is compromised, limiting the supply of essential goods

  4-Defaults in garbage disposal and urban sanitation

  5- Food scarcity, a disruption in food supply chains

  6-Water quality drops

  7-The population gets on survival mode, one example of this could be the slaughtering of zoo animals for food.

  8-Pets go missing

  9-Civil agitation leads to turbulence in the streets

  10-Attacks become more frequent

  11-Kidnappings Increase

  12-Gang Activity Increases

  13-Banks Close

  14-Hospitals become Overloaded

  15-Martial Law Enacted

  Knowing that these things are likely to happen when the economy collapses should help give you an idea of what you’re going to need to be prepared.  Make sure you know how to defend yourself and your family. Make sure you have a way to filter water.  You will need to be able to avoid crowds and live on your own, potentially off the grid. Become self-reliant and do not put your faith in the system.  Most people are still desperately fighting to keep the system intact in spite of the awareness that it’s rigged and corrupt.  Instead, leave the system, put your faith in yourself, improve critical thinking skills, and create your back up plans.

  

• Majority Of Americans Oppose Renaming Military Bases & Reparations: ABC/Ipsos Poll
  Majority Of Americans Oppose Renaming Military Bases & Reparations: ABC/Ipsos Poll
  
  Tyler Durden
  
  Fri, 06/19/2020 – 21:35

  The recent George Floyd protests and riots have triggered broader debates of everything ranging from removal of Confederate monuments and statues, to renaming Confederate military bases and even memorials to American founding fathers, especially ones that had connections to slavery.

  In the latest controvery, for examples, New York City council members are pushing to remove a long-standing Thomas Jeffeson statue from city hall. As statues across the country continue to be subject to vandalism and in some cases toppling, there’s yet to be little public debate or surveying of the American people.

  One new poll conducted by ABC News and Ipos released Friday, however, suggests the wave of removals and ‘renamings’ remains unpopular on a national level. At a moment iconic base names like Fort Bragg and Fort Hood could be on the chopping block with enough political momentum gained, a majority of Americans oppose the renaming initiative. The Pentagon is said to actually be considering it.

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  “While 56% are opposed to changing U.S. military bases named for Confederate leaders, which stand as a reminder of the nation’s complicated history with race, 42% of Americans support the move,” ABC reports of the poll conducted among 727 adults from June 17 to 18.

  The survey further asked about reparations for slavery: “Nearly three-fourths of Americans believe that the federal government should not provide payments to black Americans whose ancestors were slaves to compensate for the toll of slavery. Only 26% of Americans are in favor of reparations,” the poll found.

  Here are the highlights of ABC News/Ipsos survey via Newsmax:

  • 56% are against renaming military bases that currently bear the name of Confederate leaders. Party-wise, 71% of Democrats support changing the names, while 13% of Republicans and 40% of independents do.
  • 73% said they oppose the federal government paying black Americans whose ancestors were slaves. 54% of Democrats are in favor of reparations, while 94% of Republicans and 82% of independents are against the practice.
  • 63% said they support a ban on police officers using chokeholds.

  The poll further found that among black Americans, 67% surveyed want to see the bases renamed.

  The broader unpopularity of things like base name changes could be why in many instances Black Lives Matter protesters are taking matters in their own hands and defacing and toppling statues linked to the Confederacy.

  16 Statues And Memorials Were Damaged During Sunday’s Protests, Including One Dedicated To African American Soldiers https://t.co/oSlN9cZ1WO via @wburartery

  — Andrea Shea (@asheaarts) June 3, 2020

  https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

  However, as we’ve recently noted, any colonial era or even 19th century historical figures are being attacked, even well-known abolitionists in a few cases.

  

• Buchanan: Can We Coexist With Asia's Communists?
  Buchanan: Can We Coexist With Asia’s Communists?
  
  Tyler Durden
  
  Fri, 06/19/2020 – 21:10

  Authored by Patrick Buchanan via Buchanan.org,

  Wednesday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo met for seven hours at Hickam Air Force Base in Hawaii with the chief architect of China’s foreign policy, Yang Jiechi.

  The two had much to talk about.

  As The Washington Post reports, the “bitterly contentious relationship” between our two countries has “reached the lowest point in almost half a century.”

  Not since Nixon went to China have relations been so bad.

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  Early this week, Chinese and Indian soldiers fought with rocks, sticks and clubs along the Himalayan truce line that dates back to their 1962 war. Twenty Indian soldiers died, some pushed over a cliff into a freezing river in the highest-casualty battle between the Asian giants in decades.

  Among the issues surely raised with Pompeo by the Chinese is the growing bipartisan vilification of China and its ruling Communist Party by U.S. politicians the closer we come to November.

  The U.S. has been putting China in the dock for concealing information on the coronavirus virus until it had spread, lying about it, and then letting Wuhan residents travel to the outside world while quarantining them inside China.

  In America, it has become good politics to be tough on China.

  The reasons are many.

  • High among them are the huge trade deficits with China that led to an historic deindustrialization of America, China’s emergence as the world’s first industrial power, and a U.S. dependency on Chinese imports for the vital necessities of our national life.

  • Then there is the systematic theft of intellectual property from U.S. companies in China and Beijing’s deployment of thousands of student-spies into U.S. colleges and universities to steal security secrets.

  • Then there is the suppression of Christianity, the denial of rights to the people of Tibet and the discovery of an archipelago of concentration camps in western China to “reeducate” Muslim Uighurs and Kazakhs to turn them into more loyal and obedient subjects.

  • Among the strategic concerns of Pompeo: China’s fortification of islets, rocks and reefs in the South China Sea and use of its warships to drive Vietnamese, Malaysian, Indonesian and Philippine fishing vessels out of their own territorial waters that China now claims.

  • Another worry for Pompeo: China’s buildup of medium- and intermediate-range ballistic missiles, a nuclear arsenal not contained or covered by the Cold War arms agreements between Russia and the United States.

  • Then there were those provocative voyages by a Chinese aircraft carrier through the Taiwan Strait to intimidate Taipei and show Beijing’s hostility toward the recently reelected pro-U.S. government on the island.

  • Finally, there are China’s growing restrictions on the freedoms the people of Hong Kong have enjoyed under the Basic Law negotiated with the United Kingdom when the territory was ceded back to Beijing in 1997.

  Also on the menu at Hickam was almost surely the new bellicosity out of Pyongyang. This week, the building in Kaesong, just inside North Korea, where bilateral peace talks have been held between the two Koreas, was blown up by the North. With the explosion came threats from the North to send combat troops back into positions they had vacated along the DMZ.

  The rhetoric out of the North against South Korean President Moon Jae-in, coming from the 32-year-old sister of North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, the rising star of the regime, Kim Yo Jong, has been scalding.

  In a statement this week, Kim Yo Jong derided Moon as a flunky of the Americans:

  “It is our fixed judgment that it is no longer possible to discuss the North-South ties with such a servile partner engaging only in disgrace and self-ruin, being soaked by deep-rooted flunkyism.”

  North Korea’s state media published photos of the destruction of the joint liaison office. Pyongyang is shutting off communications with Seoul, and a frustrated South looks to be ginning up and reciprocating.

  The North-South detente appears dead, and President Trump’s special relationship with Kim Jong Un may not be far behind.

  There are rumors of a renewal of nuclear weapons and long-range missile tests by the North, suspension of which was one of the diplomatic achievements of Trump.

  Whether Trump’s cherished trade deal with China can survive the growing iciness between the two nations remains to be seen.

  What the Chinese seem to be saying with their actions — against India, Vietnam, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Taiwan, Australia, Hong Kong and Japan — is this: Your American friends and allies are yesterday. We are tomorrow. The future of Asia belongs to us. Deal with it!

  No one should want a hot war, or a new cold war, with China or North Korea.

  But if Trump was relying on his special relationships with Kim Jong Un and Xi Jinping, his trade deal with China and his commitment by Kim to give up nuclear weapons for recognition, trade and aid, he will have to think again.

  For the foreseeable future, Communist bellicosity out of Beijing and Pyongyang seem in the cards, if not worse.

  

• Wealthy Homeowners In 'Mad Rush' To Flee San Francisco
  Wealthy Homeowners In ‘Mad Rush’ To Flee San Francisco
  
  Tyler Durden
  
  Fri, 06/19/2020 – 20:45

  “There’s a mad rush to get out of the city,” said Ginger Martin, a real estate agent with Sotheby’s who concentrates on high-end properties in the San Francisco Bay Area. “What I’m really doing well with right now is anything that’s turnkey.”

  The virus pandemic, economic crash, and social unrest has resulted in wealthy folks in the Bay Area ditching the city for suburbs. 

  Bloomberg notes demand for real estate is soaring in the rural communities of the Bay Area, from Marin County to Napa wine country and south to Monterey’s Carmel Valley, brokers are reporting wealthy folks are leaving the downtown area. 

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  “I’ve never seen the demand higher for Marin County real estate than when Covid-19 hit,” said Josh Burn, a real estate agent with Sotheby’s. 

  Relocation, at the moment, is only by wealthy folks, who still have the financial mobility to move as the real economy implodes and paralyzes the bottom 90% of Americans. Even with a good credit score, lenders are not preapproving folks like they once were. Many people over the years flooded into San Francisco as the economy boomed, and tech flourished. Now with an economic downturn, social unrest, and pandemic — the city is becoming too dangerous to raise a family. 

  “This is an example of another way the most advantaged, the most affluent have isolated themselves from this latest crisis,” said Patrick Sharkey, a sociology professor at Princeton University who focuses on urban inequality. “It’s a very small segment of the population that has another home that they can go take off to.”

  Sharkey is implying that smart money is exiting Bay Area real estate as the social fabric in the downtown district begins to unstitch. 

  Wealthy folks from San Francisco are dumping real estate and are quickly moving to these locations:

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  For instance, Martin said one wealthy client left the Bay Area and purchased a $10.85 million Napa property with one acre of land, situated around a winery. 

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  It’s unclear if the exodus from city life for country living is short term to escape the chaos in San Francisco, or if this trend is only in the beginning stages. 

  Ed Glaeser, an urban economist at Harvard University, said the latest events playing out in American cities suggests “a large suburban home is going to become very attractive relative to having urban space.” 

  A combination of the virus pandemic and social unrest could “delay a recovery in the appeal of urban areas,” said Deniz Kahramaner, the founder of data-focused real estate brokerage Atlasa.

  Not too long ago, we noted how demand for rural and suburban properties increased since the start of the pandemic.

  Smart money is quietly leaving big cities — and, by the way, they’re also leaving many other metro areas across the country. 

  

• Are We On The Cusp Of A New Progressive Era?
  Are We On The Cusp Of A New Progressive Era?
  
  Tyler Durden
  
  Fri, 06/19/2020 – 20:20

  Authored by Patrick Newman via The Mises Institute,

  The 2020s started off horrendously. Thanks to an exaggerated coronavirus pandemic, government lockdowns sunk the economy into the most serious recession since the Great Depression. From February to April 2020, industrial production collapsed by 15.2 percent and official unemployment figures skyrocketed from 3.5 percent to 14.7 percent. To put these numbers in perspective, during the Great Recession industrial production fell by a similar amount (17.3 percent) from December 2007 to June 2009 and unemployment “only” peaked at 10 percent in October 2009. In other words, the current recession is breaking all of the wrong records.

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  In order to prevent the economy from completely imploding, the US government engaged in massive expansionary monetary and fiscal policy. From February to April the Federal Reserve exploded its assets by $2.5 trillion and pumped up the money supply (M2) by 14.6 percent. On the fiscal side, in late March Congress passed a belt-busting $2 trillion stimulus bill, and in mid-May the House passed another stimulus bill of $3 trillion. Then in early June Fed chairman Jerome Powell declared that low interest rates were here to stay indefinitely.

  If current political and economic trends continue, the 2020s will usher in a new period of drastically increased government activity and regulation of the economy. Despite justification on the grounds of public interest and cutting-edge modern “science,” these interventions promise to be thoroughly crony: they will enrich favored businesses, politicians, bureaucrats, intellectuals, and labor groups at the expense of the overall public. In short, the 2020 recession will usher in a new “Progressive Era” of the early 1900s, or, more accurately, another “Regressive Era.”

  Murray Rothbard brilliantly showed that during the Progressive Era, which mainstream academics and other proponents of intervention laud as the nation’s first step into modernity, big business, big government, big intellectuals, and big labor succeeded in securing cronyism that made it easier for corporations and trade associations to cartelize, for politicians to increase their power, for technocrats to exert influence over planning the economy, and for unions to exclude cheaper immigrant workers. These groups had failed to achieve their goals until the Panic of 1893 allowed William Jennings Bryan’s Populist Democrats to supplant Grover Cleveland’s laissez-faire Democrats, which ushered in political dominance by the moderate corporatist Republican Party. It unfortunately seems far too likely that the federal government will now pass similar legislation in the 2020s, such as corporate and safety regulation, environmental laws, welfare and other entitlements, and more taxation.

  In the name of weakening the trusts, eliminating “unsafe” products, and cleaning up “subpar” working conditions, the Progressives passed a flurry of business regulations that restricted entry, reduced production, and raised prices. Notable examples include the rejuvenation of the 1890 Sherman Antitrust Act, the creation of the Department of Commerce and Labor in 1903 (split into two departments in 1913), the Meat Inspection and Pure Food and Drug Acts of 1906, and establishment of the Federal Trade Commission in 1914. These new crony laws and agencies blocked hostile socialist legislation and also stymied free market pressures by raising compliance costs on newer, usually smaller, businesses and crippling price and product competition.

  The 2020s will most likely see similar business regulations. Even before the crisis, big tech welcomed new federal red tape over the internet in order to consolidate their market positions and stave off hostile antitrust suits from radical socialists and competing businesses. The current recession has already ushered in calls for formal coronavirus safety regulations in the workplace—a new “modern” age of federal, state, and local intrusiveness in the employer-employee relationship and how businesses cater to consumer desires. All of these laws, far from encouraging competition or protecting consumers, will just cartelize industries and raise relative compliance costs on smaller businesses that cannot afford to retool their facilities to meet new technology and safety restrictions.

  The Progressive Era also witnessed the enactment of conservationist laws and agencies. These interventions, such as the Reclamation Act of 1902 and the Public Lands and Inland Waterways Commissions (established in 1903 and 1907, respectively), funneled taxpayer funds into the research and development of certain methods of resource production, particularly irrigation, while restricting the use of various raw materials, such as timber. Although environmentalists advocated for these laws in order to preserve nature and encourage “ecofriendly” production processes, the legislation raised the prices of restricted lumber (benefitting the land speculators and railroads that owned competing reserves) and encouraged the uneconomic development of irrigation in the West.

  Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has led the modern environmentalist movement for a Green New Deal that would totally overhaul American society and enormously reduce well-being. This economic program—estimated by some to potentially cost a truly earth-shattering $93 trillion over the next decade—would “save the planet” by drastically restricting the usage of fossil fuels (which most of the world relies upon to maintain modern living standards) and encourage the production of ecofriendly energy sources that will supposedly make up the shortfall. After the recent crisis, supporters have argued that the population is already numb to drastic changes in living standards and will correspondingly be more receptive to the Green New Deal. If such a program is enacted, the government will pick winners and losers in the energy market like never before and open up a Pandora’s box of widespread cronyism and special interest subsidies.

  In the early 1900s, the wise stewards of the government did not stop at corporate and conservationist cronyism—they also looked out for the labor interests. In the 1910s the Progressives enacted compulsory workmen’s compensation laws on the state level that forced businesses and taxpayers to cough up funds for worker welfare. The federal government followed this up with the Federal Employees’ Compensation Act of 1916 (also known as the Kern-McGillicuddy Act), which provided workmen’s compensation to federal employees. Taxpayer funds socialized the costs of disability insurance, and the regulations raised compliance costs on businesses. The enactment of workmen’s compensation laws served as the opening wedge to the infamous Social Security Act of 1935.

  Andrew Yang gained notoriety during the presidential Democratic primary by advocating a “universal basic income” (UBI) of $1000 each month. Fortunately for Yang, the crisis has already led to a UBI of sorts through stimulus checks and generous unemployment benefits given to displaced workers. Now advocates are arguing for $2000 a month until the government decides that the coronavirus crisis is over. The results of these policies are already disastrous for the labor market’s recovery: a significant portion of the workforce is dependent on the US government (i.e., the taxpayer) and many smaller businesses cannot rehire workers, because they would actually take a pay cut. A new age of welfare and artificially high labor costs has dawned upon the nation.

  To pay for the cronyism of the Progressive Era—legislation diligently administered by job-seeking bureaucrats, scientists, and technocrats—the Progressives “reformed” government revenue with the Sixteenth Amendment of 1913, which legalized the income tax. The federal government could now extract from taxpayers funds far greater than what was possible with tariffs and excise taxes. Initially, the income tax applied only to the contemporary “1 percent,” but World War I extended the government’s depredations to the rest of the public. This ensured that the cost of government was shifted to up-and-coming entrepreneurs and the middle class.

  A similar situation could appear during the present recession or later in the decade. The cost of the current stimulus programs and projected future legislation simply cannot be financed under the current revenue system. One “solution” is to monetize the deficits, a disastrous option that would lead to runaway inflation. Another option is to embark upon wealth taxes—the siren song for advocates of redistribution—on the wealthiest members of society. Although advocates argue that they will only apply to the most “privileged” strata, the government net will inevitably extend to the rest of the population. This is because big businesses will use their political influence to spread the burden upon the less wealthy (Social Security, after all, is still a regressive tax) and governments will use the newfound source of revenue to spend beyond their initial estimates and will subsequently clamor for more money. The result of widespread wealth taxes will be a harsh disincentive to work, save, and innovate, all to the detriment of society.

  The results of the Progressive Era were not pretty, and this leads to ominous predictions for the 2020s. Corrupt politicians will always use recessions, crises, and changing political landscapes as justifications for special interest policies that provide benefits to their benefactors and constituents at the expense of society overall. The year 2020 has already provided all three excuses, which means we may be headed for another Regressive Era—a disaster for the economic recovery and Americans’ freedoms.

  

• "Putin Wanted It": Dems Introduce Bill To Block Trump's Germany Troop Draw Down
  “Putin Wanted It”: Dems Introduce Bill To Block Trump’s Germany Troop Draw Down
  
  Tyler Durden
  
  Fri, 06/19/2020 – 19:55

  Earlier this month the White House controversially ordered a significant troop draw down from Germany after a decades-long build up as part of Cold War era deals. On June 5th President Trump directed the Pentagon to withdraw 9,500 US troops from Germany by September, following years of the administration severely criticizing lack of enough military spending from its NATO ally.

  A number of reports suggested a broader US troop pullout from Germany was popular among the German public, and some say that even within the ranks of the US military it is seen as a good thing – or rather Trump making good on prior ‘America first’ promises involving not being a global policeman. However, a number of retired generals have spoken out against it.

  But now Congressional Democrats are seeking to block the Germany drawdown. The bill introduced this week by Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ) and Rep. Eliot Engel (D-NY) imposes a number of severe conditions which most likely preclude such a troop exit.

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  “The current U.S. troop presence in Germany is in the U.S. national security interest. Full stop,” Menendez said in a statement, according The Hill.

  Amazingly, the senator pulled the ‘Putin wanted it’ card, again suggesting that somehow Trump’s major foreign policy decisions are ultimately at the bidding of the Kremlin:

  “The administration has made no effort to explain how our country is stronger because of this drawdown decision. Because we’re not. This drawdown weakens America and Europe. And Vladimir Putin understands and appreciates that better than anyone.”

  The Democratic leaders say they have bi-partisan support for blocking a Germany troop reduction.

  Meanwhile Engel also played the Russia card, given the initial decades-long build-up of forces at multiple major bases in Germany were during the Cold War and aimed at the Soviets.

  Engel said “rather than heeding the overwhelming bipartisan rebuke from Congress about this scheme and its catastrophic consequences, President Trump has once again made foreign policy decisions based solely on his absurd affection for Vladimir Putin, a murderous dictator who has attacked America and our allies.”

  Given the number of anti-Russia hawks among Congressional Republicans, the Dems are indeed likely to gain bipartisan support in their efforts to stymie a troop reduction.

  Trump’s proposed reduction would result in a new “cap” of 25,000 maximum troop levels in the country. The WSJ had previously noted that “Under current practice, overall troop levels can rise to as high as 52,000 as units rotate in and out or take part in training exercises.”

  It’s commonly estimated that about 34,500 US troops are permanently assigned to Germany.

  

• Why Washington, D.C. Is In Trouble: 7,780 Public Employees With $100,000+ Salaries Cost Taxpayers $1 Billion
  Why Washington, D.C. Is In Trouble: 7,780 Public Employees With $100,000+ Salaries Cost Taxpayers $1 Billion
  
  Tyler Durden
  
  Fri, 06/19/2020 – 19:30

  Authored by Adam Andrzejewski via Forbes.com,

  Local politicians in Washington, D.C. claim a $1.5 billion budget deficit due to the coronavirus pandemic. So, they’re lobbying Congress for a two-year $3.15 billion bailout.

  But the city’s financial woes aren’t stopping nearly 8,000 city government employees – including the mayor and city council – from bringing home six-figure salaries and higher.

  Washington’s leaders try and fail each year in their application for statehood, but they’re already out-earning their state counterparts.

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  Our auditors at OpenTheBooks.com found that Mayor Muriel Bowser earned $220,000 last year – an amount exceeding every governor of the 50 states ($202,000).

  What’s more, DC city councilmembers ($141,282) out-earned members of every state legislature – including New York ($130,000). DC city council chairman Philip Mendelson ($210,000) out-earned all members of Congress except for Speaker Nancy Pelosi ($223,500).

  We found school crossing guards routinely making $67,324; the abandoned vehicle program manager earning $97,913; a director of alcoholic beverages making $192,000; the city librarian earning $223,863; city psychiatrists billing up to $260,000; and the city administrator making $307,000.

  Our interactive mapping tool allows users to quickly review every public employee in Washington, D.C. making more than $100,000 (by ZIP code). Just click a pin and scroll down to see the results in your neighborhood rendered in the chart beneath the map.

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  Public employees in Washington, D.C. are some of the most highly compensated in the nation. 

  OPENTHEBOOKS.COM

  Every major agency in Washington, D.C., supports employees making more than $100,000 per year.

  Metropolitan Police Department (MPD): Police chief Peter Newsham ($273,156) out-earned every four-star general in the U.S. military ($268,332).

  Other MPD administrative positions out-earned the secretary of U.S. Department of Homeland Security ($179,700), one of the nation’s top law enforcement officials. Even the director of Police Complaints made $214,273 last year.

  MPD Executive director Michael Tobin ($214,273); assistant chiefs Robert Contee and Lamar Greene ($207,454); supervisory attorney Advisor Terrence Ryan ($191,201); and commanders Willie Dandridge and Ralph Ennis ($188,112) also out-earned the DHS secretary.

  Public Schools: Chancellor Lewis Ferebee made $280,000 and out-earned U.S. Education Secretary Betsy Devos ($199,700). Nearly 2,250 educators with the K-12 schools made more than $100,000 last year.

  Four education deputies to the chancellor earned $228,363. Eleven chiefs received salaries up to $189,891 – including “chief of talent and culture” ($184,518) and “senior deputy chief of school culture” ($175,023). Another 19 “deputy chief” positions earned up to $155,798.

  Compared to the latest available national statistics, the DC schools have more than twice the number of administrators per student. Principals made up to $199,000, and 96 six-figure assistant principals earned up to $141,688.

  So, how are the students doing in the classroom? Proficiency on standardized tests ranged from an average of 30-percent in math to 35-percent in reading.

  Public Library: Executive Director Richard Reyes-Gavilan ($223,863) out-earned everyone employed at the National Archive and the Smithsonian Institution ($201,400). For additional context, the commissioner of the Chicago Public Library earned $167,004 last year.

  Other six-figure staffers included the General Counsel Grace Perry Gaiter ($188,113); Human Resources Director Barbara Ford-Kirven ($180,544); and Chief of Staff Joilette Mecks ($180,253). Those staffers joined another 50 library employees whose pay exceeded six-figures.

  Parks and recreation: The chief of staff (Jason Yuckenburg $180,000) out-earned the secretary at the U.S. Department of Interior ($175,700) – a cabinet level position whose agency manages one-fifth of all land in the USA.

  Other high earners in the DC parks department included the director (Delano Hunter $161,614) and deputy director (Ella Faulkner $150,000).

  Mayor’s office and administration: In addition to the mayor ($220,000), six other employees in the mayor’s office out-earned every U.S. governor.

  High earners included the city administrator (Rashad Young $307,000) and “deputy mayor(s)” include Health and Human Services (Wayne Turnage $225,915); Greater Economic Opportunity (Lucinda Babers $211,770); and Education (Paul Kihn $211,770). The mayor’s legal counsel (Ronald Ross $211,000) and the chief of staff (John Falcicchio $211,000) also received high pay.

  Our auditors found other interesting positions that paid well:

  School traffic control officers: In the DC public schools, there were 74 “officers of traffic control” that made between $60,000 and $70,000 last year. Management did even better: “traffic control” directors earned up to $156,840 and supervisors cleared $136,011.

  What do these crossing guards and officers do when school is out of session?

  Attorney Advisors: DC residents are likely unaware that they employ 232 legal advisors – their real job description is lawyer – who made up to $191,201. In fact, the Public Service Commission paid four “attorney advisor” positions $182,204. The DC attorney general has six advisory positions that paid $174,520.

  Supervisors of the attorney advisors earned even more money – up to $191,201 at the agencies of employment/disability and police/fire. The position at energy/environment paid $185,483.

  Public affairs officers: David Umansky handled the public relations for the city CFO and made $169,545 last year. Across city agencies, there were 77 PR officers employed and their average pay was six-figures.

  With the vast expansion of federal government during the last decade, the nation’s beltway is booming. It’s quite an economic subsidy when you’re the capitol seat.

  DC is flush with cash and rakes in more than enough money to pay its bills. It boasts assets of $5.8 billion compared to $4.9 billion in liabilities, according to watchdog group Truth In Accounting.

  Nevertheless, last month, The Heroes Act passed the U.S. House and would provide $3 billion over a two-year period earmarked for DC as a coronavirus bailout. The bill is stuck in the Senate.

  As city politicians continue to push their bailout and statehood agenda, it’s important to note that most would take a substantial pay cut if they actually mirrored the salary scale from the states.

  *  *  *

  Follow me on Twitter. Check out my website. 

  

• Daily Briefing – June 19, 2020
  Daily Briefing – June 19, 2020

  
  Tyler Durden
  
  Fri, 06/19/2020 – 19:25

  Real Vision CEO Raoul Pal joins senior editor Ash Bennington to reflect on a week of muted volatility amid a “quadruple witching” and unprecedented interventions from the world’s major central banks. Raoul and Ash analyze the ECB’s recent meeting around fiscal policy, and whether the Bank of Japan (BOJ), European Central Bank (ECB), and Bank of England (BOE) will follow the Fed and go into “hyperdrive,” as Raoul puts it. The pair also discusses Apple’s decision to close stores in the U.S. as the coronavirus continues to spread. Lastly, the pair looks forward to the upcoming “Crypto Gathering” on Real Vision. In the intro, Jack Farley discusses the recent Wirecard scandal and gives an overview of new action in the burgeoning corporate debt market.

  

• Bolton Might Miss Out On All Profits From His Tell-All Book
  Bolton Might Miss Out On All Profits From His Tell-All Book
  
  Tyler Durden
  
  Fri, 06/19/2020 – 19:05

  As the White House’s challenge to the publication of John Bolton’s book on National Security grounds winds its way through the federal courts, the judge overseeing the case said during a hearing on Friday that neither side may walk away with a clear victory.

  At this point, the judge conceded, there’s nothing to be done to suppress the information in the book. Its most salacious claims have already been made public thanks to a series of coordinated leaks.

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  But the courts can still strip Bolton of the right to profit from sales of the book, since he walked away from a final review.

  Here’s more from Bloomberg:

  Former National Security Advisor John Bolton likely jumped the gun in submitting his tell-all memoir on President Donald Trump for publication, but it’s probably too late to stop the sales of the book, a federal judge said.

  “The horse seems to be out of the barn” with hundreds of thousands of copies already circulating, U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth in Washington said at a hearing over the government’s request to block the book’s release on June 23.

  Lamberth didn’t rule on the request but his comments indicate neither side in the dispute is set for a clear victory. While Bolton may succeed in getting the book out to the public, he may not get any profits from it as Lamberth said that Bolton walked away from a pre-publication review without getting the final sign-off as required.

  Bolton’s lawyer Chuck Cooper said Bolton followed his contract “not just in spirit, but to the letter.” But Lamberth jumped in and disagreed, saying that’s not true. Bolton “went out on his own,” the judge said. “I don’t really understand why he decided to take that risk.”

  Lamberth said he’ll hold another hearing on the dispute, in private.

  The judge also castigated Bolton’s legal team over their client’s penchant for stirring up drama by “going out on his own” during the middle of a high stakes review with the country’s national security interests at stake.

  It’s almost as if Secretary of State Mike Pompeo might have a point.

  But even if the book does make it to shelves without any issues, Bolton’s sales might not be as high as he and his publisher probably hope.

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• Why Changing CHAZ To CHOP Is Actually A Very Big Deal
  Why Changing CHAZ To CHOP Is Actually A Very Big Deal
  
  Tyler Durden
  
  Fri, 06/19/2020 – 18:40

  Authored by Toby Cowern via The Organic Prepper blog,

  I just wanted to share with you a couple of thoughts that have been on my mind lately and see how it resonates with you out there. It has been very interesting for me in tracking the rioting that’s predominately been going on in the US. It’s obviously happening in other countries as well in support of the Black Lives Matter movement and other organizations emerging around their concerns of systemic racism in the US.

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  One thing for those reading from the US: I don’t know if you’re aware of how widespread the support for that movement and this message actually is? Even here in Sweden, we’ve seen protests occurring in different areas, as well as clashes with the police under these slogans and banners.

  Protesters have taken over several blocks in Seattle.

  In the US on June 8th, a group of protesters took over a 6 block area in the Capitol Hill neighborhood of Seattle, Washington. A Black Lives Matter protest escalated and the police were driven out of the local precinct.  The group set up blockades barring law enforcement from entering the area and set up camp under the acronym CHAZ.

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  Photo Credit: Derek Simeone – Welcome to CHAZ

  Within the zone, they set up a display dedicated to people who died at the hands of police and Black Lives Matter. Many buildings now bear BLM graffiti

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  Photo Credit: Jzesbaugh

  There’s also a large street mural.

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  Photo Credit: By Kyle Kotajarvi

  Descriptions of the area vary from it being a dangerous warzone to a utopian street fair. Politico says that Fox News is completely misleading readers and viewers and that Black Lives Matters organizers are running it, although other groups are also involved.

  But it’s Fox that has been all over the story of the so-called Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone or CHAZ (which its Black Lives Matter organizers on Saturday renamed the Capitol Hill Organized Protest, CHOP): four-plus blocks of street and sidewalk in Seattle’s traditional gay and bohemian nightlife district, surrounding a boarded-up police precinct headquarters that the mayor ordered vacated last Monday to dampen a week-and-a-half of escalating confrontations between police and protesters. From there, the fluid protests, spearheaded by BLM but involving a wide spectrum of activists and ordinary citizens, coalesced with surprising rapidity into something like a provisional government. (source)

  They have a list of demands, which you can read here.

  The first thing that has my attention is the name change.

  One thing that really stuck out in my mind happened just a few days ago. The Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, known as the CHAZ, changed its name to the Capitol Hill Occupy Protests. So it’s now CHOP. It’s very easy to dismiss that as something very small and insignificant. I see a lot of people when they’re writing, still calling it the CHAZ, and even to the extent of some mocking the name change: with “See? They can’t even decide what they are called’ type of commentary…

  Why is this important to me? Why does this get my attention?

  A couple of things really.

  One, it’s about seeing if people are ‘on-script’. So if people are supporting that cause specifically, how quickly do they change the vocabulary? How quickly do they adopt new terminology? How “onboard” are they with the message?

  That’s important for tribal identity reasons. Tribal identity is a very important factor in the strength of the movement going forwards. The second reason it’s important is that they were losing some ground under the title of CHAZ. These occupiers were losing some PR ground. They were getting mocked, basically, because people were saying, “Well, you’re not autonomous, you know. You’ve declared this an independent state. You’re saying you’re not part of America. Autonomous should mean self-sufficient and you’re clearly not. You’re constantly asking for help. You’re constantly asking for handouts. You’re constantly asking for donations. You’re constantly asking for support, so you’re not autonomous.”

  So switching to CHOP, or as another “occupy” protest, basically mutes out that public relations problem because they no longer claim autonomy.

  Now that’s very slick. That’s very savvy. That’s very smart, actually.

  And that goes to a deeper part of the problem.

  It’s very easy to look at this as just a scraggly, ragtag bunch of people just sort of wandering around with this Utopian vision. But this small thing really shows a much deeper commitment, leadership, structure, and ability. An order has come down from somewhere and is very quickly spread throughout the key people, and then down to the ‘foot soldiers’, “This is what we will now be called and this is why.”

  Now we can look at it as a kind of PR swing, which in and of itself would be quite worrisome that they can be so on-message. But in addition to this, we should note how quickly the change was implemented, communicated, and adopted.

  But then what’s really captured me is the name: Capitol Hill Occupied Protest.

  Do you remember Occupy Wall Street?

  The Occupy Movement gained strength from the back of the financial crisis in the last decade, and notably from 2009, swelled. You may remember, the political slogan was, “We are the 99%.” It peaked in 2011 with the Occupy Wall Street movement. So the Occupy movement is much much, much bigger enabler and tribal identity. In fact, there were Occupy movement protests through 2010 onwards in 31 different countries, and most of those were major Western countries.

  So this is now basically allowing, tempting, and goading those people who identified with the Occupy movement to join and rally around this cause. There may have been a small sort of core key group, perhaps Antifa-type in the beginning, getting the boots on the ground, actually, performing the occupation, and now they can broaden out and become more widespread.

  I think we’re going to see a very sharp consolidation of the power base of this movement and you’re going to see a massive increase in the ranks.

  This is notable for me in two different ways.

  One is timing. As of publication, it’s June the 19th. So you’re just two weeks short of July the fourth, or America’s Independence Day, which is obviously a massively iconic date and not only in the US. It’s interesting again, that a lot of Western countries have sort of adopted their own July 4th variation. It’s not exactly a worldwide holiday, but certainly a day of note. In two weeks, a lot can happen. We’ve seen that often this year. It’s enough time for major additional plans to be put in place and so this 4th of July could be very eventful.

  Then there’s the second point that’s gotten my attention.

  Think back to 2009-2011 – this was the real peak of the Occupy movement. We’re now in 2020. We’re nine years on.

  So those young, idyllic people that were the main rank and file of that movement are 10 years older now. Those who were quite high profile students from good universities were getting behind this, what positions are they in nowadays? They’re going to be sitting at mid, or high-level management in major corporations. They’re going to have a whole other sphere of influence.

  Or they might be on the city council.

  A Seattle City Council member, Kshama Sawant, was part of the original Occupy Wall Street protests and is also part of this one.

  While the protest does have some loose leadership, there are few formal structures. Sawant compares the space to the “Night of 500 tents” during the Occupy Wall Street movement in Seattle in October 2011, of which she was a part. Back then, Occupy protesters were able to drive police from their space before police returned and cleared out the area where the protests took place.

  Already, said Sawant, CHOP has outlasted what they were able to achieve with that Occupy action, which only lasted three days. But she said she expects police to clear the area sometime in the near future. “I don’t think that we can in any way assume that the police will not come back and specifically attack this space,” she said. “I think we should expect that that could happen at any moment, because that’s exactly what happened in Occupy.” (source)

  No longer is this about wearing a funny t-shirt and waving a flag on the street and feeling the reward of being ‘part of the crowd’ anymore. These people have progressed into places that they have major corporate clout.

  And that leads to funding.

  In the last week, there is something that has been notable in a way that I can’t say I’ve seen before with any of the previous campaigns. And that is how many major companies are openly pledging their support, either specifically for Black Lives Matter, or for affiliate organizations.

  I’m not getting into the rights and wrongs of tackling racism. That’s not what this post is about. This is about identifying and really highlighting to you how keeping an eye on the big circle is worth it. These kinds of moments should get your attention.

  Now we’re looking at major corporate identification, either through genuine backing of the cause, societal pressure, or the perception of societal pressure. I imagine that people in boardrooms are saying, “If we don’t get on board with this campaign, we really risk running a loss here or hurting our bottom line or affecting our sales base,” whichever the case may be.

  Virtue signaling now begins to transform into more tangible corporate action. The key thing I’m seeing in the emails that I receive is donations. Big companies are saying. “We support this cause and we’re actively putting money into it.”

  And it’s significant sums, like $50,000 a week, $100,000 a month, a one-time donation of $250,000. So not only are we seeing an increase in the number of participants, we’re seeing a massive increase in funding. And I do believe there was already significant funding for these organizations anyway.

  This is all piled onto a situation that clearly has concise and controlling leadership behind it.

  We’re trending toward a perfect storm.

  I read a huge amount of news on a daily basis just to kind of track everything from China to America, and everything in between, locally, upscale, and downscale. When something really gets my attention, it is leaping out of a massive information maelstrom.

  What I’m trying to highlight here is more of a thought process. You need to consume the news but not be consumed by it. But allowing yourself to absorb a wide stream of information from broad and varying sources gives you the chance, every now and then, too see how certain ‘key things’ fit together and gives the possibility of better trend assessment and therefore, a prediction.

  I’m not going to say this is perfect storm territory yet, but it’s definitely trending in that direction. It’s something that I’m keeping my eye on more and more.  I just wanted to share with you a little bit of what was going through my thoughts in the last two or three days.

  What I’d love on this particular issue is for you to please comment below if you’re seeing the same things? Are you getting those emails from companies pledging support? Are you hearing from work colleagues or friends or family that this is a movement they’re increasingly getting behind and they feel that they need to do something? Where is everybody else out with this?

  And this isn’t just an American question. Again, go right back to the beginning. These movements are occurring in different countries at various levels of tenacity. And we’re definitely seeing the spread.

  So wherever you’re based, please do share your observations, if you care to, in the comments below. Thank you so much.

  

• "Frugal Four" Block Deal On Coronavirus Rescue Package Over Grants To Worst-Hit Countries
  “Frugal Four” Block Deal On Coronavirus Rescue Package Over Grants To Worst-Hit Countries
  
  Tyler Durden
  
  Fri, 06/19/2020 – 18:20

  The abrupt EU virtual summit held this week to try to break an impasse on a deal to finance the EU’s coronavirus rescue package before the continent slides into what many fear will be a punishing recession – perhaps even brutal enough to finally break up the eurozone – has ended in failure, with the “frugal four” – as they’re called in the European press – having garnered enough support to block the EU recovery plan, which must be approved by the entire EU27.

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  Yesterday, German Chancellor Angela Merkel ruled out the possibility of a deal being stuck during the hastily scheduled summit. With this in mind, she urged her colleagues again on Friday to try and come up with a deal before the summer break, acknowledging that the starting position isn’t an easy one.

  “The pandemic shows us how vulnerable Europe is,” she told MPs…”Therefore I want to stress to you that cohesion and solidarity in Europe were never as important as they are today,” according to comments  shared with the press Friday morning.

  Another anonymous EU official told another reporter that if a planned July summit can’t be held in person, an agreement likely wouldn’t arrive until the fall, when the worst hit countries like Spain and Italy may already be in the throes of a serious financial crisis as blown out budget deficits bump up against EU budgetary rules.

  On Friday, EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, Michel Barnier, the chief Brexit negotiator, and the president of Croatia, Andrej Plenković, held a joint press briefing to discuss the outcome of the snap summit.

  #EUCO press conference with President @vonderleyen@eucopresident Michel and @AndrejPlenkovic https://t.co/h2gsSqTyBt

  — European Commission 🇪🇺 #UnitedAgainstCoronavirus (@EU_Commission) June 19, 2020

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  During the briefing, journalists from mostly European media outlets peppered the unelected bureaucrats with questions about the nature of the impasse, what, if anything, had been accomplished during the brief summit, and why the Commission believes a deal before the summer break is still possible.

  For those who aren’t familiar with Brussels, the city essentially shuts down for a month beginning Aug. 1.

  While Angela Merkel joined with French President Emmanuel Macron to back the compromise plan at the outset of the meeting, a group of northern European nations that once mostly relied on Germany to champion their interests in Brussels has turned against Berlin, and instead it has dug in its heels and refused to support any kind of compromise.

  On Friday, Dutch PM Mark Rutte, known as the leader of the so-called “frugal four”, told reporters that the chances of a deal by the end of July actually aren’t all that high.

  • RUTTE NOT SURE EU WILL REACH DEAL ON #RECOVERY FUND IN JULY – BBG
  • RUTTE SAYS NOTHING WILL GO TERRIBLY WRONG IF NO DEAL IN JULY
  • RUTTE SAYS ONLY SOLUTION TO EU BUDGET ISSUES IS REBATES

  In the FT on Tuesday, Rutte and the leaders of Austria, Denmark and Sweden called for a “realistic level of spending”, and demanded that all of the money doled out in the recovery program eventually be paid back – the so-called “rebates” (thinly disguised sovereign debt). Brussels, meanwhile, insists that at least some of the aid take the form of grants, since the European economy is potentially facing its most terrifying recession in modern times. But on Friday, the frugal four picked up enough support in the Baltic states and eastern member states in criticizing the recovery fund compromise to block a deal from being reached during the summit.

  Those tempted to label Rutte and his partners as heartless and ungrateful should keep in mind that Rutte is at the helm of his third government after a decade in power, and although he’s still tremendously popular – he’s widely considered the greatest Dutch leader of the postwar era – at home, euroskeptic forces in the Dutch Parliament recently cost his ruling four-party coalition the outright majority in the Dutch Parliament. The PM must now be extremely careful not to appear to be handing over Dutch taxpayer’s money to the profligate Southern Europeans.

  As the urgency intensifies and the negotiations descend into acrimony, ECB chief Christine Lagarde has been pleading desperately with EU states to just strike a deal and get it over with, while each new batch of economic projections grows increasingly dire.

  Meanwhile, the Trump White House has lashed out at the EU over its “digital tax” plans and other tax measures that would supposedly help finance the plan, which would effectively force American tech giants, which are being hit by antitrust lawsuits in the EU left and right, to help finance the EU coronavirus bailout. Two days ago, the Trump administration abruptly suspended fraught international tax negotiations with EU countries and warned that the bloc should expect retaliation if it moves ahead with plans to impose the new tax, which it is currently still planning to do. The Commission also wants to introduce new EU taxes, including a level on single-use plastics, a digital tax or a tax on multinationals, to help foot the bill. This will likely only further complicate the situation once Washington really starts throwing around its political heft.

  If no agreement is reached, pretty soon, that Continental “worry list” might be growing even longer as millions of Europeans wonder what the point of it all even is?

  

• Liberal Media Has 'Completely Ignored' Biden Cognitive Decline: Rogan
  Liberal Media Has ‘Completely Ignored’ Biden Cognitive Decline: Rogan
  
  Tyler Durden
  
  Fri, 06/19/2020 – 17:40

  Bernie Sanders fan Joe Rogan – who admitted in April that he’d rather vote for President Trump Trump over former Vice President Joe Biden – says the left-wing media is ignoring Biden’s cognitive decline.

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  In a conversation highlighted by Breitbart‘s Josh Caplan, Rogan tells evolutionary biologist Bret Weinstein:

  JOE ROGAN: I’m seeing this one thing that I keep hearing over and over again from people of the left that really disturbs me is this concession that what you’re voting for is the Cabinet, you’re voting for the Supreme Court, you’re voting for someone who’s not going to reverse Roe vs. Wade. That’s what I keep hearing from my friends on the left. They’ve basically made this concession in their head like, “Hey, you know, this is what I’m voting for now.” And the news media on the left has completely ignored all of these Biden speeches that clearly show some kind of cognitive decline.

  Like David Pakman, who I respect a lot, he was kind of arguing against it, that it didn’t show his decline. I was trying to look at it in a way that made sense, I was trying to be rational about it, like maybe, “Okay, maybe he’s just exhausted, maybe this, and maybe it’s pressure.” Sometimes people get really tongue-tied and panic under pressure, and words come out all fucked up. That is possible. But there’s a trend. If you go back to when he was a younger man that trend didn’t exist. You’re seeing a change. The idea that as you get older you become less comfortable with the media, less comfortable with speaking publically, that doesn’t jive with me. That doesn’t make any sense.

  BRET WEINSTEIN: I agree with you. I see a decline. But irrespective of what that is, Joe Biden is an influence peddler. He’s not an idea guy, right? He’s the same idea as Hillary Clinton in a different morphology.

  In April, Rogan told Weinstein’s brother and Thiel Capital MP Eric Weinstein that Democrats are “making us all look dumb over Biden,” adding that he “could not” vote for the former Vice PResident.

  Joe Rogan:

  The Democratic Party “has made us all morons with this Joe Biden thing… I would rather vote for Trump than him. I don’t think he can handle anything.”
  pic.twitter.com/IDYJCwRX2F

  — Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) April 4, 2020

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  As The Epoch Times’ Katabella Roberts noted, Rogan, who previously endorsed Biden’s primary rival, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), went on to speak about Trump’s ability to handle the pressure that comes with being president of the United States, noting that the role appeared to take a visible toll on previous Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama.

  “The pressure of being the president of the United States is something that no one has ever prepared for. The only one who seems to be fine with it is Trump, oddly enough. He doesn’t seem to be aging at all, or in any sort of decline. Obama, almost immediately, started looking older. George W, almost immediately, started looking older,” Rogan added.

  Speaking of Biden, Rogan also noted that the former vice president can “barely talk,” and “forgets what he is saying halfway in the conversation.”

  Meanwhile, Biden’s latest senior moment:

  Joe Biden doesn’t know what Juneteenth is:

  “He’s going down to Texas on Juneteenth, right? The first major massacre … of the Black Wall Street, right?”

  1. President Trump is going to Texas today, not June 19
  2. Juneteenth is about emancipation
  3. The massacre was in Oklahoma pic.twitter.com/vpNDQLwqBj

  — Trump War Room – Text TRUMP to 88022 & get the APP (@TrumpWarRoom) June 11, 2020

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• BofA: There Is Just One Bull Market To Short … And The Fed Won’t Let You
  BofA: There Is Just One Bull Market To Short … And The Fed Won’t Let You
  
  Tyler Durden
  
  Fri, 06/19/2020 – 17:18

  Is it time to go short?

  With the Fed’s balance sheet posting its biggest weekly drop in 11 years, and hitting a plateau of sorts (at least until the next major QE push)…

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  … coupled with an ominous reversal on today’s quad-witch expiration, which saw stocks slump despite opening sharply higher, investors are starting to ask if it is once again time to start shorting (especially with Robin Hood realizing it is time to pull in the reins on its teenage trading army).

  Well, at least according to Bank of America’s CIO Michael Hartnett the answer is, for now at least, no.

  Writing in his latest Flows and Liquidity report titled “Only bull to short is credit…and Fed won’t let you”, Hartnett proposes that according to the Fed, it is still too early for Big Short: “Fed is “all-in” and will remain in that stance until US unemployment rate falls to acceptable level i.e. <5% (or claims <400k)."

  Hartnett also warns that Fed rhetoric has been bigger than wallet thus far, which means Powell can easily crush shorts. Here’s why – the Fed’s facilities are operating at just a fraction of potential, and as Table 1 below shows, the Fed has spent just $173bn out of its potential $495bn in firepower (and it can always add more).

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  It’s not just the Fed: there is also the 2020 fiscal bazooka which has a way to go.

  As Hartnett adds, the fiscal stimulus is taking 3 forms in 2020… spending, credit guarantees, loans & equity. BIS data shows US & Australia lead spending (>10% GDP), Europe is using aggressive credit guarantees (e.g. Italy 32% GDP), while Japan/Korea are stimulating via government loans/equity injections.

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  And while Hartnett echoes what we said last month, that it is “notable how Emerging Markets lagging in terms of fiscal ability to address pandemic/recession”, recall that last night we reported that China has now vowed to inject global credit amounting to 30% of GDP in the economy this year.

  So does that mean don’t short under any conditions? Not exactly. As Hartnett summarizes, the tactical risk remains to the upside: 

  positioning, policy, credit markets all still point to potential for or above 30Y TSY above 2%, IG CDX 60, SPX 3250, while credit markets are still too strong (see LQD, PFF, CWB)…

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  … to short stocks, even if like stocks, junk has only retraced partially versus quality bonds (see relative performance of CCC HY bonds vs 30-year Treasury – Chart 9); summer risk remains to upside driven by central bank repression of credit spreads (positive for “growth”…see world’s best performing market, Chinese Nasdaq (ChiNext), threatening to breakout to new highs – Chart 10), or via big RoW macro surprise to upside via fiscal stimulus (see soaring Baltic Freight Index); barbell of credit/tech and EU/US small cap value & banks.

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  But the structural risk is to the downside: Fall 2020 risks will be 1. Fear of double-dip recession & default risk, 2. Debasement of US dollar & disorderly bond markets, 3. Politics threatening 2021 EPS;

  His parting advice for a tipping point back into shorts: watch the yield curve: a failure of the curve to steepen >80bps in June/July would signal “peak policy stimulus” and reinvigorate shorts.

  

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