Today’s News 22nd April 2022

• Are Soaring Food Inflation And Rolling Blackouts The Start Of Next Emerging Market Meltdown?
  Are Soaring Food Inflation And Rolling Blackouts The Start Of Next Emerging Market Meltdown?

  A combination of shocks is rippling through emerging market economies and has sparked soaring food and energy inflation, power blackouts, and social unrest. Countries with the weakest balance sheets and high debt loads appear to be sliding first into turmoil. This could be the beginning innings of an emerging market crisis last seen in the 1990s when socio-economic distress toppled governments, according to Bloomberg. 

  Already, skyrocketing food and energy prices have caused turmoil in Sri Lanka, Peru, Egypt, and Tunisia. The chaos could broaden as some emerging market countries, heavily saturated with debt, could be shocked by higher debt-servicing costs as the Federal Reserve embarks on an aggressive tightening campaign. This couldn’t have come at the worst time for these developing nations, as many had large capital outflows and borrowed vast amounts of money during COVID. Now they’re being hit by food and energy shock due to the Ukraine conflict. 

  An example of this toxic cocktail that could easily topple a country is Sri Lanka has already been pushed to the brink of default. The South Asian island nation’s foreign exchange reserves have collapsed, and food and fuel shortages, plus high inflation, have sparked unrest. 

  Bloomberg Economics shows a handful of other emerging economies at risk of crisis because of high debt and soaring yields. Notably, Ethiopia, El Salvador, Tunisia, Pakistan, and Ghana rank are the most at-risk because surging bond yields create higher default risk. 

  

  The Washington-based lender, International Monetary Fund, raised concerns in a recent report titled “Emerging-Market Banks’ Government Debt Holdings Pose Financial Stability Risks,” which warned government defaults like what happened to Russia in 1998 and Argentina in 2001-02 could be imminent across emerging market economies. 

  The report warned of a possible return of a “doom loop”: 

  A sharp tightening of global financial conditions—resulting in higher interest rates and weaker currencies on the back of monetary policy normalization in advanced economies and intensifying geopolitical tensions caused by the war in Ukraine—could undermine investor confidence in the ability of emerging-market governments to repay debts. A domestic shock, such as an unexpected economic slowdown, could have the same effect.

  Bloomberg provides a set of gauges that shows emerging market risks are rising. 

  

  Bloomberg Economics created a list of the countries most exposed to the fallout from the Ukraine conflict. Turkey, Egypt, Vietnam, the Philippines, and Poland are ranked some of the highest at-risk. 

  

  Ziad Daoud, Bloomberg Economics’ chief EM economist, said if an emerging market crisis were to develop, it might spread well beyond its origin. 

  “In a cascade of emerging-market credit events, the negative impact of the whole could be larger than the sum of the parts,” Daoud said. 

  The former Goldman Sachs economist who coined the term BRICs, Jim O’Neill, said the current economic climate is the most uncertain since the early 1980s. 

  “If we get the inflation risk persisting and central banks have to tighten policy, for certain emerging markets it will be a disaster,” O’Neill warned.

  So far, turmoil is brewing in places where investors don’t pay too much attention. However, the crisis could broaden as the Fed hikes and pandemic debts become unpayable as soaring inflation triggers social unrest. If the dominos fall, then investors will care. 

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 04/22/2022 – 02:45

• French Presidential Election Preview: Macron Vs Le Pen… Again
  French Presidential Election Preview: Macron Vs Le Pen… Again

  Authored by Yves Mamou via The Gatestone Institute,

  • While Macron appears well on his way to being re-elected, it is appropriate first to draw a balance sheet of his actions as president. For five years, his term has been marked by political scandals that all had the same origin: the desire of this president, with his background in investment banking, to make the state work like a start-up — that is to say, to make the state work without the state’s services.

  • Macron has tried to create a private militia that works around the security organization of the presidency of the Republic… also in the name of efficiency, he has asked consulting firms (such as McKinsey; Boston Consulting Group, Accenture), in place of the large state institutions and ministries, to formulate polices on the environment, health, security, labor and retirement.

  • Distrust and contempt sparked the Gilets Jaunes (“Yellow Vests”) protest movement in 2019, when an increase in fuel prices provoked months of demonstrations by France’s working class — those whom globalization has relegated to the outskirts of large cities and who need their cars to go to work. This protest movement, despised and misunderstood, was repressed by the police with extreme violence.

  • Macron did not, however, despise everyone. He has given the greatest consideration to Islam and Muslim immigration. During his five-year term, immigration from Africa, North Africa and Asia was not considered a danger, but an “opportunity” for France.

  • Despite this catastrophic record, it is likely that Macron will be re-elected on April 24. By whom? Who are his voters? First of all, let us specify that one out of four voters did not even vote. Yet it is precisely Le Pen’s electorate who are suffering from this situation: namely, young people and the working classes.

  • Macron’s voters are mainly retired people, executives, and inhabitants of big cities. Executives benefit from globalization, and the elderly and retired people do not like what appears to a revolution; they are afraid of the radical changes proposed by candidates such as Zemmour or Le Pen.

  • The elderly are not the majority, but they vote.

  Marine Le Pen and the incumbent French President Emmanuel Macron will face each other in the second round of the French presidential election on April 24. The results of yesterday’s first round, with 97% of the votes tallied, show Macron coming out ahead with 27.6% of the vote, followed by Le Pen at 23.4%.

  

  (Photo by Lionel Bonaventure /AFP via Getty Images)

  The result is a kind of surprise. Four months ago, the journalist Éric Zemmour made a lightning breakthrough in the polls by forcing all his opponents to take up his favorite theme: the fight against mass immigration. Zemmour even appeared to be in a position to supplant Le Pen and to compete with Macron in the second round of presidential elections.

  Russian President Vladimir Putin, however, upset all forecasts. When Russia invaded Ukraine at the end of February, Zemmour, apparently taken aback, was slow to condemn the Russian assault. The media then recalled that in 2013, Zemmour had named Putin “man of the year” and that the same Zemmour had dreamed in 2018 of a “French Putin” for France. Regarding Ukrainian refugees, Zemmour estimated that they would be better off in Poland than in France, a sentiment that was widely viewed as lacking in compassion. As the Christian Science Monitor wrote, “Europe’s far-right parties admired Putin. Now they’re stranded.”

  The war in Ukraine has led to another drawback: inflation. Increased prices for energy and food product have made purchasing power a major campaign theme, overshadowing the issue of Muslim immigration, which, until March, was at the heart of the debate.

  While Macron appears well on his way to being re-elected, it is appropriate first to draw a balance sheet of his actions as president. For five years, his term has been marked by political scandals that all had the same origin: the desire of this president, with his background in investment banking, to make the state work like a start-up — that is to say, to make the state work without the state’s services.

  For five years, Macron has tried, at the expense of the taxpayer, to build a parallel system that marginalizes intermediary bodies such as parliament, the mayors and the regions. In the name of “efficiency”, Macron has tried to create a private militia that works around the security organization of the presidency of the Republic (the Benalla Affair); also in the name of efficiency, he has asked consulting firms (such as McKinsey; Boston Consulting Group, Accenture), in place of the large state institutions and ministries, to formulate polices on the environment, health, security, labor and retirement.

  The Covid-19 crisis was the height of this functioning of the “State without the State”. Although France is one of the most organized countries in terms of healthcare, Macron chose to manage the pandemic directly with the firm of McKinsey. “[T]o manage this crisis (of covid), the political power, notably because of a lack of confidence in the institutions of the Republic, preferred to ignore the existing mechanisms and competences and entrust strategic missions to consulting firms,” explains François Alla, a professor of public health and deputy director of the Institute of Public Health, Epidemiology and Development.

  Barbara Stiegler, an associate professor of political philosophy and the director of the Soin, éthique et santé (“Care, Ethics, and Health”) master’s program at the University of Bordeaux Montaigne, also said:

  “[T]his recourse to consulting betrays the deep mistrust of these new leaders, who come from the world of business and enterprise, towards the State and academic knowledge. By locking himself up in his Defense Council, Macron has chosen to decide, both without the state and without researchers, all the major orientations of the health crisis.

  Macron’s distrust of the state also seems coupled with a distrust of the French people. Macron is a man who has regularly insulted the French. Before becoming president, while he was still Minister of the Economy, Macron called female workers at the Gad slaughterhouse in Finistère “illiterate.” Additionally:

  • In Lunel, on May 27, 2016, in the Hérault district, he insulted two striking workers, saying, “The best way to afford a suit is to work.”

  • In Hénin Beaumont (North), in 2017, he looked down on the working class people, saying, “in this mining basin (…) there is a lot of smoking and alcoholism.”

  • In 2017, in Athens, Greece, Macron judged that “France is not a country that reforms itself.”

  • In Denmark, he criticized the French, these “Gauls refractory to change…”

  Distrust and contempt sparked the Gilets Jaunes (“Yellow Vests”) protest movement in 2019, when an increase in fuel prices provoked months of demonstrations by France’s working class — those whom globalization has relegated to the outskirts of large cities and who need their cars to go to work. This protest movement, despised and misunderstood, was repressed by the police with extreme violence.

  Macron did not, however, despise everyone. He has given the greatest consideration to Islam and Muslim immigration. During his five-year term, immigration from Africa, North Africa and Asia was not considered a danger, but an “opportunity” for France. Seine-Saint-Denis, the closest district to Paris and probably also the most Islamized in France, is not perceived by Macron as a nerve center for arms and drug trafficking. Macron “has compared Seine-Saint-Denis to Silicon Valley.” During Macron’s five-year term, two million more Muslim migrants have settled in France, and the country has experienced a permanent debate about Islam and veiled women.

  During this same five-year period, insecurity has affected all strata of the country: in France, an assault occurs every 44 seconds and the police are confronted with a refusal to comply every 30 minutes. In France, the political left and the media are waging war on the police, while in the suburbs police patrols are violently attacked on a daily basis.

  According to figures from the Ministry of the Interior, assaults on police officers increased by 40% between 2009 and 2019, from 26,721 to 37,431. In 2020, Minister of the Interior Gerald Darmanin told the public that “more than 20 assaults per day of police officers” were recorded in France.

  Under Macron, the national debt has increased from 100% of GDP to 113% of GDP.

  Despite this catastrophic record, it is likely that Macron will be re-elected on April 24. By whom? Who are his voters?

  First of all, let us specify that one out of four voters did not even vote.

  Yet it is precisely Le Pen’s electorate who are suffering from this situation: namely, young people and the working classes.

  “Age and ‘social’ isolation actually feed abstention very significantly. Clearly, the social categories that benefit little from the current economic and social system — the poorest, the least educated — abstain,” according to polling specialist Paul Cebille.

  Finally, Macron’s voters are mainly retired people, executives, and inhabitants of big cities. Executives benefit from globalization, and the elderly and retired people do not like what appears to a revolution; they are afraid of the radical changes proposed by candidates such as Zemmour or Le Pen. So “it turns out that (the retired) seem to follow… the French as a whole, who intend… to vote as a majority for Macron.”

  The elderly are not the majority, but they vote.

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 04/22/2022 – 02:00

• New World Disorder: What The UN Vote On Russia Really Reveals About Global Politics
  New World Disorder: What The UN Vote On Russia Really Reveals About Global Politics

  Authored by Ahmed Charai via The Gatestone Institute,

  • Fear and food are more important to many developing nations than democratic ideals.

  • In Latin America, a form of anti-Americanism among the educated classes has translated into a reluctance to openly criticize Putin. This is amplified by messages vocally propagated by Cuba and Venezuela.

  • China sees no reason to anger Russia, a major supplier of oil, gas, and coal, especially since Western nations are discouraging the production of the very fossil fuels that China needs. Policy-making circles in Beijing are not crowded with idealists, and its decisions are invariably self-interested and pragmatic.

  • Arab leaders are unhappy with the Biden administration for its precipitous withdrawal from Afghanistan last year, its ongoing negotiations with the threatening regime in Iran, and its laxity in the face of the Yemen-based Houthi terrorist and rocket attacks. For the first time, Arab leaders are asking questions, publicly, about the sustainability of the American political system and the coherence of American foreign policy.

  • On the Iranian nuclear dossier, Israel, one of the firmest allies of the US in the region, fears that the Biden administration wants at all costs to conclude an agreement with the Iranian regime without taking into account the possible impact on the regional aggression of Tehran.

  • What has been eroding for some years now is the commitment of American leaders to defend, maintain, and advance an international order in which states observe common rules and standards, embrace liberal economic systems, renounce territorial conquests, respect the sovereignty of national governments, and adopt democratic reforms.

  • In today’s increasingly complex global environment, the US can only achieve its goals by leveraging its strength through a cohesive foreign policy that responds to the challenges posed by Russia and China. To do this, the US must deliberately strengthen and cultivate productive relationships with its allies, partners, and other nations with common interests.

  • The US must offer attractive political, economic, and security alternatives to China’s influence in the Indo-Pacific, Africa, and beyond.

  • Rather than condemn the nations that abstained from voting against Russia at the United Nations, America must seek to understand why they thought sitting out the vote was their best option. Next, America must make clear that it still supports the rule of law and the ideal of democracy and put steel behind its ideals.

  The latest battle zone in the Russia-Ukraine war was in the quiet, mostly mannerly halls of the United Nations. There, in the UN’s iconic New York headquarters, the world voted on Russia’s largest invasion since World War II — revealing fractures and fissures in global support for democracy.

  

  Pictured: The results of the vote to expel Russia from the UN Human Rights Council, at the UN General Assembly in New York City, on April 7, 2022. (Photo by Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images)

  Suspending Russia from the UN Human Rights Council was technically the issue put before the delegates. But every diplomat knew it was really a vote on Russia’s assault on Ukraine. The consensus for democracy and self-determination was fragile: only 93 states (out of 193) voted for removing Russia from the UNHRC, and therefore condemning its actions against its smaller, weaker neighbor. Another 24 nations (including China) voted with Russia. Most worrisome, 58 countries abstained, refusing to take sides in what many see as a duel between the great powers. Others feared that energy, food, and fertilizer prices might continue to climb if the conflict escalates. (Both Russia and Ukraine are major producers of oil, gas, wheat, and fertilizing petrochemicals — all of which are a matter of life and death for developing nations.) Fear and food are more important to many developing nations than democratic ideals.

  American and European policy makers will have to face a hard truth: while Russia is diplomatically isolated, it is not entirely alone, and many countries do not side with Ukraine and its democratic hopes.

  The view from the rubble of Kyiv’s suburbs isn’t hopeful. Ukraine’s democratically elected leaders know that they could be captured, wounded, or killed. And they also know that the history of sanctions, the weapon of choice of the Western coalition, shows that they almost always fail to tame invaders. All of these facts were known to the UN delegates. Indeed, they would have heard them directly from Ukrainian diplomats. But high ideals and real desperation didn’t move them.

  Let’s look more closely at why 100 nations decided not to support Ukraine in the UN vote.

  In Africa, Russia has forged long-standing relations with Libya, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Mali, and often deploys a postcolonial pattern, which suggests that Russia supports the independent, emerging nations over their former colonial masters. This line of rhetoric is a continuation of the theme first promoted in the days of the Soviet Union, particularly from the 1950s onwards.

  In Latin America, a form of anti-Americanism among the educated classes has translated into a reluctance to openly criticize Putin. This is amplified by messages vocally propagated by Cuba and Venezuela.

  China‘s initial abstention is seen more as a sign of embarrassment in the face of the belligerent aims of its Russian partner, than as a show of their interest in a rapprochement with the West. In Western capitals, many want to believe that Beijing has an interest in an early ceasefire, so as not to hinder its economic growth. In reality, China sees no reason to anger Russia, a major supplier of oil, gas, and coal, especially since Western nations are discouraging the production of the very fossil fuels that China needs. Policy-making circles in Beijing are not crowded with idealists, and its decisions are invariably self-interested and pragmatic.

  India, for its part, is a long-standing ally of Russia, one of its major arms suppliers. New Delhi believes that it will need those weapons in the face of the Chinese military build-up in the region, as well as in the face of unresolved issues with Pakistan.

  Arab nations do not intend to abandon their relations with Russia, which has established itself as a force to be reckoned with when it saved Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad through its military intervention; nor with China, the largest buyer of oil and gas from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

  Indeed, Arab leaders are unhappy with the Biden administration for its precipitous withdrawal from Afghanistan last year, its ongoing negotiations with the threatening regime in Iran, and its laxity in the face of the Yemen-based Houthi terrorist and rocket attacks. For the first time, Arab leaders are asking questions, publicly, about the sustainability of the American political system and the coherence of American foreign policy.

  On the Iranian nuclear dossier, Israel, one of the firmest allies of the US in the region, fears that the Biden administration wants at all costs to conclude an agreement with the Iranian regime without taking into account the possible impact on the regional aggression of Tehran. The Israeli minister of defense even called for the implementation of a “solid plan B” to deal with the Iranian nuclear program. As a result, neither the Arabs nor the Israelis were enthusiastic about supporting the US at the UN — although they did line up in the end.

  What has been eroding for some years now is the commitment of American leaders to defend, maintain, and advance an international order in which states observe common rules and standards, embrace liberal economic systems, renounce territorial conquests, respect the sovereignty of national governments, and adopt democratic reforms.

  In today’s increasingly complex global environment, the US can only achieve its goals by leveraging its strength through a cohesive foreign policy that responds to the challenges posed by Russia and China. To do this, the US must deliberately strengthen and cultivate productive relationships with its allies, partners, and other nations with common interests.

  The US must offer attractive political, economic, and security alternatives to China’s influence in the Indo-Pacific, Africa, and beyond.

  At the same time, the US must maintain a productive strategic dialogue with China that will clearly communicate US concerns and strive to understand Chinese interests and objectives.

  Universal principles must be combined with the reality of other regions’ outlooks. Western leaders must recognize that non-Western leaders aren’t just living in another place, but rather, they are coming from another place intellectually. Henry Kissinger put it best in 2014: “The celebration of universal principles must go hand in hand with the recognition of the reality of other regions’ histories, cultures, and points of view on their security.”

  The UN vote showed that universal principles aren’t quite universal yet. Rather than condemn the nations that abstained from voting against Russia, America must seek to understand why they thought sitting out the vote was their best option. Next, America must make clear that it still supports the rule of law and the ideal of democracy and put steel behind its ideals.

  Tyler Durden
  Thu, 04/21/2022 – 23:40

• More Studies Highlight Medical Benefits Of 'Magic Mushrooms' Active Ingredient
  More Studies Highlight Medical Benefits Of ‘Magic Mushrooms’ Active Ingredient

  As we have reported numerous times in the past, psychedelic mushrooms are becoming increasingly popular in the US as a possible treatment for psychiatric disorders, with their main active ingredient, psilocybin, moving from the fringes of medicine, to become increasingly mainstream.

  

  Roland Griffiths, a professor who studies the neuropsychopharmacology of consciousness at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, received approval in 2000 to carry out the first experiments on psilocybin since the 1960s. He found in a survey of early study participants that more than half regarded it as one of the most meaningful experiences of their life.

  “The mystical experience itself does seem to be really important for therapeutic effects, but we published survey data to suggest it’s not actually the mystical experience itself, but the personal insights you can encounter or gain during that mystical experience that actually lead to therapeutic change,” Barrett said.

  “The idea here is that mystical experience can create the opportunity for personal insights.”

  Since then, for example, studies in recent years have shown promise in using psilocybin-assisted therapy to treat psychiatric disorders like depression. Some have been used to identify their usefulness in smoking cessation (alongside talk therapy). They have also shown some usefulness in alleviating anxiety in people with terminal cancer.

  But the big question for researchers now is: how can they show conclusively that hallucinating leads to alleviating symptoms in people suffering depression or other chronic ailments.

  Frederick Barrett, Associate Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, explained how depression works and how mushrooms help to disrupt these pathways.

  “One common feature of depression is something you can think of as cognitive or psychological inflexibility,” Barrett said.

  “You get stuck in a rut of rumination. You get stuck in negative self-attribution, negative self-thoughts, and this is a kind of characteristic of depression that helps people develop and maintain their depression,” he said.

  “It all boils down to a reduced capacity to think creatively or to think openly, and to think differently about yourself and your condition, situation and behavior. If it can increase our cognitive flexibility, if it can increase our neural flexibility, we think that essentially it gives people back the capacity to think broadly about how they fit into the world and reassess or reappraise things that might happen to them.” 

  A separate paper published just last week in Nature Medicine by researchers from the University of California, San Francisco and Imperial College London echoed similar findings, although Barrett notes there are several caveats associated with the study’s findings.

  “What we’re seeing in these data after psychedelics is that there’s an increase in the connectivity between systems, such that they are becoming less segregated from each other,” Robin Carhart-Harris, former head of the Imperial Center for Psychedelic Research who is now based at the University of California, San Francisco, told Changing America. 

  Meanwhile, Oregon became the first state to effectively legalize shrooms back in 2020.

  With more psychologists and psychiatrists suspecting that mushrooms do have a medical benefit, consumers should expect to see more cities/states legalize the drug for medical and/or recreational use.

  Tyler Durden
  Thu, 04/21/2022 – 23:20

• Bitcoin And A World Of Rules Without Rulers
  Bitcoin And A World Of Rules Without Rulers

  Authored by Hermann Vivier via Bitcoin Magazine,

  Bitcoin offers an opportunity for society to move toward systems of clear, easy-to-understand rules instead of our current system of rulers…

  

  Human beings, for the most part, all know what fairness means. Of course, we don’t agree with one another: Who’s to say what is and isn’t fair? We don’t even agree on whether we should strive for a fairer world or just accept that it isn’t fair and get on with it.

  But the vast majority of people have their understanding of the concept, even if it differs from everyone else’s. It’s the basis of what we generally refer to as our conscience and it forms part of our human nature.

  It gives us a sense of right and wrong and can serve as a strong motivating force, sometimes even overcoming the drive for self-preservation, despite the fact that it’s often impossible to explain conscientious conclusions in rational terms.

  

  (Source)

  Now, more than ever before, my conscience is telling me (with escalating urgency) that something is seriously wrong. And this thought isn’t new. It’s what led me to buy into bitcoin in the first place. Both financially and ideologically, perhaps before I even grasped the basics of the network. Some would call that irresponsible and perhaps it is, but it wasn’t the first time I made a decision based on conscience and it won’t be the last. More importantly, conscience is also what led me to dedicate myself to spreading the adoption of Bitcoin.

  There are more red flags than ever before, all over the place. Recent developments only serve to heighten the urgency of the feeling I almost started growing accustomed to, until it was ratcheted up by several notches in early 2020 and again early 2022. I’m reminded: “Do not become complacent. Stay focused on what you’ve come to understand about the problem.” That’s my conscience talking to me. And what it’s saying is summed up by what’s written between the lines of a recent article shared by the Bitcoin rock star president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, in his tweet. His questioning attitude toward the article’s conclusion that Bitcoin is “making the world that bit harder to police” is on point.

  

  (Source)

  The purpose of this article is to really try to elucidate and simplify that point, which is what I’ve come to understand about the problem we face. Because without an understanding of the problem, we’re just running around in circles.

  The problem is one of governance and the fact that, in its current form, it isn’t fair, but it’s not inherently so. The problem is a result of the dynamics of global players occupying untenable positions. And while we may not all agree on the specific meaning of that term “fairness,” including all its subtleties, I do believe there are some basic principles that are hard-coded into us.

  

  (Source)

  

  (Source)

  

  (Source)

  Now, take a deep breath and put your personal opinions on WikiLeaks aside. The problem (and solution) is neither WikiLeaks, nor the U.S. Government. In this context, it serves merely as an example to try and point at the problem, which is the dynamic at play: The people who have been put in the position of policing the planet also want to be a player in the game. And, if there’s one thing we can all agree on it’s this: When the referee starts kicking the ball around, the game has lost all meaning. Particularly if the referee is the strongest player on the field and, by virtue of being human, addicted to the most powerful drug of all, power itself.

  

  (Source)

  Clearly, the solution is not to replace that power with another different version of itself. Should the U.S. continue its decline on the world stage, China seems poised to take its place. As Lyn Alden pointed out on a recent “What Bitcoin Did” podcast, China is the only country that really stands to benefit from this current war. But no one wants to live in a world dominated by Communist China and its complete disregard for individual freedom and human rights.

  Instead, the solution can only be to adopt systems without rulers. “Wait. What?! You mean anarchy?!”

  Now again, take a deep breath and put aside what you think you understand about the idea of a ruler-less world. I am not suggesting any particular solution here. I am merely trying to frame the possibilities.

  Consider Bitcoin.

  I am not suggesting that Bitcoin fixes everything. And I am not suggesting that the technology used in Bitcoin is in any way applicable to any other system. I am not even suggesting that there is a solution to the problem of governance because I don’t think there is one. Not yet.

  What I’m suggesting is that the perceived need for rulers is the problem, and not the solution, as so many people seem to believe. Clearly the rulers can’t stick to the rules, and instead, they end up ruling according to their own best interest and not in the interest of keeping the game fair.

  While the solution may not be obvious, the direction we need to move in is clear. We have to move toward systems of rules instead of rulers. Thanks to Bitcoin such a system is no longer impossible to conceive of.

  Bitcoin is just a computer protocol designed to account for sending and receiving payments. Nothing more. But seen from a more abstract perspective, it should be clear that it’s also an example of the kind of systems that must be built if we want to survive and thrive.

  I don’t know what those systems are because they haven’t been built, not at scale anyway. But thanks to Bitcoin, I can hazard a guess at what they’ll look like when they are built. Their structures will be fair. It’ll be transparent. The rules will be clear, easy to understand but not easily changed. Participation will be voluntary. There will be enforceable rules, but those rules will not be enforced by individuals or small groups susceptible to the shortcomings of human nature.

  I truly hope we can build those systems, because the alternatives clearly don’t work. If anything is clear it’s this: Human nature cannot be trusted with the power to police.

  Tyler Durden
  Thu, 04/21/2022 – 23:00

• FAA Confirms YouTuber Purposely Crashed Plane Into California Mountain 
  FAA Confirms YouTuber Purposely Crashed Plane Into California Mountain 

  The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has terminated the private pilot license of former Olympic snowboarder turned YouTube influencer Trevor Jacob after determining he deliberately crashed his small plane into a mountain in Southern California, NYTimes reports. 

  Jacob’s received a letter from the FAA on April 11, indicating he violated the agency’s regulations and operated his small plane in a “careless or reckless manner so as to endanger the life or property of another.” 

  FAA said Jacob’s private pilot certificate would be revoked, ending his ability to operate any aircraft. 

  The letter went on to say:

  “You demonstrated a lack of care, judgment and responsibility by choosing to jump out of an aircraft solely so you could record the footage of the crash. 

  “Your egregious and intentional actions on these dates indicate that you presently lack the degree of care, judgment and responsibility required of a certificate holder.”

  The incident occurred in Los Padres National Forest near Cuyama, California, in November. It wasn’t until December 24 that Jacob uploaded the video onto YouTube titled “I Crashed My Plane,” which has more than 1.7 million views and 19k up likes versus 117k down likes. 

  

  We questioned in early January: What stands out to us is why did Jacob strap on a parachute before taking off? That’s unusual among private pilots.

  

  And it appears the FAA agreed with our question. As per NYT:

  The FAA agreed about the parachute in its letter, which it released in response to a request from The New York Times, and pointed out other revealing details that officials had uncovered during an investigation.

  “During this flight, you opened the left side pilot door before you claimed the engine had failed,” the FAA wrote.

  Before jumping out of the plane, the agency said, Mr. Jacob made no attempt to contact air traffic control on the emergency frequency, did not try to restart the engine by increasing airflow over the propeller and failed to look for a place to safely land, “even though there were multiple areas within gliding range in which you could have made a safe landing.”

  Last week, Jacob released a video that addressed the plane crash controversy, saying, “I can’t talk about it, per my attorney.”

  “But the truth of that situation will come out with time,” he added, “and I’ll leave that at that.”

  Tyler Durden
  Thu, 04/21/2022 – 22:40

• America's Fatal Dependency
  America’s Fatal Dependency

  Authored by David Goldman via AmericanMind.org,

  America’s increasing reliance on foreigners to lend us money could crater the dollar…

  

  The United States has borrowed $18 trillion from foreigners since the Great Financial Crisis of 2008, a staggering sum that is nearly equal to America’s annual Gross Domestic Product. The notion that the dollar’s dominance in world finance might come to an end was a fringe view only five years ago, when America’s net foreign investment position was a mere negative $8 trillion. Notably, the net international investment position fell by $6 trillion between 2019 and 2022, roughly the amount of federal stimulus spent in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

  In a December 2021 report for the Claremont Institute’s Center for the American Way of Life, I warned about the likely consequences of mounting U.S. deficits:

  The United States stock market now trades at nearly thirty times earnings, a multiple not seen since 2000, before a long and painful correction. The lofty valuation of the U.S. equity market is driven by the longest period of negative real interest rates in U.S. history. If the dollar’s reserve status is compromised, the United States will no longer be able to borrow at negative real rates, and rising bond yields will put pressure on equity markets, depressing the value of the U.S. stock market and reducing the value of pension and retirement funds.

  Dollar Dominance

  One used to read about the demise of dollar dominance in the newsletters of coin dealers and monetary cranks; now we read such forecasts in research reports by Credit Suisse. The research department of Goldman Sachs, possibly the most conventional of all commentators, warns that the dollar will go the way of the British pound, as “unsustainable current account deficits” lead to “high U.S. inflation” and “substitution into other reserve currencies.” Economists Cristina Tessari and Zach Pandl wrote on March 30:

  The Dollar today faces many of the same challenges as the British Pound in the early 20th century: a small share of global trade volumes relative to the currency’s dominance in international payments, a deteriorating net foreign asset position, and potentially adverse geopolitical developments. At the same time, there are important differences—especially less-severe domestic economic conditions in the U.S. today than in the UK in the aftermath of WWII. If foreign investors were to become more reluctant to hold U.S. liabilities—e.g. because of structural changes in world commodity trade—the result could be Dollar depreciation and/or higher real interest rates in order to prevent or slow Dollar depreciation. Alternatively, U.S. policymakers could take other steps to stabilize net foreign liabilities, including tightening fiscal policy. The bottom line is that whether the dollar retains its dominant reserve currency status depends, first and foremost, on U.S.’s own policies. Policies that allow unsustainable current account deficits to persist, lead to the accumulation of large external debts, and/or result in high U.S. inflation, could contribute to substitution into other reserve currencies.

  Credit Suisse analyst Zoltan Pozsar wrote on March 7:

  We are witnessing the birth of Bretton Woods III – a new world (monetary) order centered around commodity-based currencies in the East that will likely weaken the Eurodollar system and also contribute to inflationary forces in the West. A crisis is unfolding. A crisis of commodities. Commodities are collateral, and collateral is money, and this crisis is about the rising allure of outside money over inside money. Bretton Woods II was built on inside money, and its foundations crumbled a week ago when the G7 seized Russia’s FX reserves…

  Washington’s seizure of Russian foreign exchange reserves seems risky given America’s enormous and accelerating dependency on foreign borrowing. Paradoxically, America’s strength lies in its weakness: A sudden end to the dollar’s leading role in world finance would have devastating consequences for the U.S. economy, as well as the economies of its trading partners.

  In addition to the $18 trillion of net foreign investment in the U.S., foreigners keep about $16 trillion in U.S.D in overseas bank deposits to finance international transactions. That’s $34 trillion of foreign financing against a U.S. GDP of not quite $23 trillion. Foreigners also have enormous exposure to the U.S. stock and real estate markets.

  No one—least of all China with its $3 trillion in reserves—wants a run against the dollar and dollar assets. But the world’s central banks are reducing dollar exposure, cautiously but steadily. The trickle of diversification out of dollars could turn into a flood. What the International Monetary Fund March 22 called “the stealth erosion of dollar dominance” presages a not-so-stealthy exit from the dollar. Unlike Nebuchadnezzars’ handwriting on the wall, the king’s soothsayers can read the message as plain as day.

  New Solutions

  Notably, Russia’s central bank cut the share of U.S. dollar in its reserves from 21 percent a year ago to just 11 percent in January, while increasing its holdings in Chinese remimbi to 17 percent from 13 percent a year ago. Russia’s central bank has also bought more gold than any other institution in recent years.

  With just 8 percent of world export volume vs. China’s 15 percent, the reserve role of the U.S. dollar no longer reflects American economic strength. It derives, perversely, from the rest of the world’s desire to save. The people of the world’s high-income countries are aging rapidly. In 2001, 28 percent of their population was aged 50 years or older; by 2040 the proportion will reach 2045 percent. Aging populations save for retirement. The Germans and Japanese save nearly 30 percent of GDP, and the Chinese save 44 percent; America saves just 18 percent of GDP.

  For the past fifteen years, American consumers have bought roughly a trillion dollars more of goods each year than America exports. The import-led consumption boom, and the availability of cheap electronics from China and other Asian exporters, fed a digital entertainment boom that inflated the stock prices of Apple, Microsoft, Google, Meta and other U.S. software companies. Foreigners then invested their earnings from exports in U.S. tech stocks, as well as government bonds, real estate, and other assets. The tech boom harmed the U.S. economy far more than it helped it, turning American teenagers into risk-averse recluses addicted to smartphones and social media, while generating stock market valuations never before seen outside of classic economic histories of bubbles.

  The increase in American imports from China is shocking. Seasonally adjusted, Chinese exports to the U.S., as reported by China’s Statistics Bureau, have risen from an annual rate of about $409 billion in August 2019, when the U.S. imposed tariffs on a wide range of Chinese goods, to $674 billion in March 2022. The Chinese data are more reliable than U.S. import data, according to a study by the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, because the U.S. data fail to distinguish between direct Chinese exports to the U.S. and exports “washed” through third countries to evade tariffs

  Big, Big Bubble

  The result is the biggest bubble in world financial history. When the COVID-19 pandemic threatened to collapse the bubble, the U.S. government added $6 trillion in stimulus to the economy. That shot of adrenaline reinflated the tech bubble, which explains why the U.S. net foreign investment position fell by another $6 trillion between 2019 and 2022, to today’s negative $18 trillion level.

  Overall, net imports of manufactured goods rose from about $60 billion a month prior to the COVID pandemic, to $100 billion a month as of February 2022.

  The bubble is so enormous that the entire world has a stake in it, and none of the world’s major economies can extract themselves from it without significant damage. China finds itself suffering from punitive American tariffs and sanctions on technology imports, while shipping more than $600 billion of manufactured goods to the U.S. each year—nearly a third more than it did before the Trump Administration imposed tariffs in 2019. China’s leaders want to encourage more domestic consumption and less net savings, but can’t persuade the Chinese to consume. China therefore continues to export to the U.S. and bank the proceeds.

  The world can easily get along without the dollar to finance trade. India and Russia can settle trade in their own currencies, with their respective central banks providing rupees and rubles as required through swap lines. Russia’s surplus with India will be invested in the Indian corporate bond market, according to news reports. India reportedly is gearing up to increase exports to Russia by $2 billion a year, a 50 percent increase from current levels.

  China meanwhile is paying for oil imports both from Russia and Saudi Arabia in its own currency. The RMB has appreciated against the U.S. dollar by more than 12 percent since September 2019, and continues to offer higher real yields than the dollar, as well as a range of investment opportunities, despite China’s exchange controls.

  Nothing prevents the 76 percent of the world’s population whose governments refused to join the sanctions regime against Russia from financing trade in local currency. Asian countries now have $380 billion of swap lines in place, more than enough to accommodate the whole of intra-Asian trade.

  All That Glitters

  To the extent that long-term imbalances emerge in trade, central banks can settle up by transferring gold. Several misleading media reports have claimed that the U.S. can prevent Russia from using its gold reserves. That is inaccurate; the U.S. can keep Russia out of public gold markets, but it can’t step Russia from trading gold with the central banks of India or China.

  By no coincidence, the same central banks who are bypassing the dollar financing system have bought the most gold over the past twenty years, according to the World Gold Council’s data. China and Russia were the biggest buyers of gold, followed by Turkey, India and Kazakhstan.

  Gold’s value relative to competing U.S. dollar assets stands at an all-time record high. In normal times investors get the same sort of protection from inflation-indexed U.S. government bonds, or Treasury Inflation-Protected Securities (TIPS) as they do from gold. In case of a sudden fall in the value of the dollar and a corresponding rise in the U.S. price level, TIPS will pay a bonus to investors in proportion to the rise in the U.S. Consumer Price Index. During the past 15 years, the co-movement of gold and TIPS yields has been remarkably steady 85 percent.

  But TIPS and gold diverged on three occasions. The first was the Lehman bankruptcy of 2008, which touched off the global financial crisis. The second was the near bankruptcy of Italy in 2011. And the third, and most extreme, occurred in the aftermath of the Ukraine war.

  At about $1970 an ounce, gold is now $437 “rich” to TIPS, as the above chart shows. The sharp rise in U.S. yields during the past two months would have toppled the gold price under normal circumstances. But the seizure of central bank assets by executive fiat is far from normal. Gold is trading right around its all-time high point despite the rise in interest rates.

  Another way to view the same data is in the form of a scatter chart of gold vs the 5-year TIPS yield. Today’s gold price, as noted, is $437 above the regression line.

  Gold’s premium against TIPS reflects a wide variety of risks. One risk is that the U.S. government’s measure of inflation may not keep up with actual inflation. For example, the rent component of the Consumer Price Index rose by 4.5 percent during the year through March 31, 2022, while the private-sector Zillow Index of rents rose by 17 percent. Another risk is that the dollar may depreciate against other currencies faster than the payout in TIPS. And for some investors, the threat of confiscation, as in the case of Russian Central Bank reserves and the personal assets of wealthy Russians, is a discouragement.

  Gold also represents an option on “Bretton Woods III,” a local-currency regime of trade financing in which some imbalances may be settled in gold. The value of the nearly 32,000 tonnes of gold now held by central banks is a bit over U.S.$2 trillion at the April 13, 2022 price of $1,980 an ounce. That represents about one-sixth of world central bank reserves of $12 trillion. If gold were to substitute for the dollar as a reserve instrument, the proportion of gold in central bank reserves would have to increase, which in turn implies a substantial increase in the gold price. Persistently high inflation in the U.S. and the Euozone, moreover, would lead to an increase in the gold price as well.

  If the United States finds itself unable to run large current account deficits financed by sales of assets, the outcome will be a sharp decrease in consumption. The indicated solution is aggressive preemptive action to restore U.S. manufacturing capacity and reduce America’s crippling dependency on imports. Unfortunately, current economic policies have led the U.S. into greater dependency. Without a policy change, this will not end well for the United States.

  Tyler Durden
  Thu, 04/21/2022 – 22:20

• World's Biggest Carnival Kicks Off In Rio After Two Years Of COVID Crackdown
  World’s Biggest Carnival Kicks Off In Rio After Two Years Of COVID Crackdown

  After two years of cancelations due to COVID-19, Rio de Janeiro held its famed carnival on Wednesday night, offering guests a glittering spectacle with parades filled with floats, dancers, musicians, and partygoers.

  “I proudly announce the greatest show on Earth is back – Long live, carnival,” Rio de Janeiro’s Mayor Eduardo Paes told a massive crowd at City Hall. 

  

  The Rio de Janeiro Carnival is considered one of the largest in the world. Before the pandemic, more than seven million people were partying in the streets, according to AP’s numbers. The festival is held every year before Lent and first began in 1723. However, this year, the carnival was postponed from Feb. 24 to this week due to the spread of the Omicron variant. 

  Canceled for two years because of surging COVID infections and deaths in Brazil, the massive carnival was only canceled for two other periods, between 1915–18 and 1940–45. 

  Here are some of the scenes from the Sambadrome, a stadium built for the carnival. 

  

  Here’s what’s happening on Sambadrome’s ground floor. 

  

  

  A lot of dancing…  

  

  

  AP quoted Mayor Paes as saying City Hall did not authorize street parties, but he’ll refrain from deploying the police. 

  “City Hall won’t impede people from being in public spaces, from celebrating, but it’s impossible that it happen at such (large) size,” he said. 

  Rio hotels are at 85% occupancy this week as a lot of post-pandemic partying is underway. The biggest party on Earth is expected to last through the end of the month. 

  Tyler Durden
  Thu, 04/21/2022 – 22:00

• 'Al Qaeda Is On Our Side': How Obama/Biden Team Empowered Terrorist Networks In Syria
  ‘Al Qaeda Is On Our Side’: How Obama/Biden Team Empowered Terrorist Networks In Syria

  Authored by Aaron Maté via RealClear Investigations,

  Hours after the Feb. 3 U.S. military raid in northern Syria that left the leader of ISIS and multiple family members dead, President Biden delivered a triumphant White House address. 

  The late-night Special Forces operation in Syria’s Idlib province, Biden proclaimed, was a “testament to America’s reach and capability to take out terrorist threats no matter where they hide around the world.”

  

  Unmentioned by the president, and virtually all media accounts of the assassination, was the critical role that top members of his administration played during the Obama years in creating the Al Qaeda-controlled hideout where ISIS head Abu Ibrahim al-Qurayshi, as well as his slain predecessor, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, found their final refuge.

  In waging a multi-billion dollar covert war in support of the insurgency against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, top Obama officials who now serve under Biden made it American policy to enable and arm terrorist groups that attracted jihadi fighters from across the globe. This regime change campaign, undertaken one decade after Al Qaeda attacked the U.S. on 9/11, helped a sworn U.S. enemy establish the Idlib safe haven that it still controls today. 

  A concise articulation came from Jake Sullivan to his then-State Department boss Hillary Clinton in a February 2012 email: “AQ [Al Qaeda] is on our side in Syria.” 

  Sullivan, the current national security adviser, is one of many officials who oversaw the Syria proxy war under Obama to now occupy a senior post under Biden. This group includes Secretary of State Antony Blinken, climate envoy John Kerry, USAID Administrator Samantha Power, Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman, NSC Middle East coordinator Brett McGurk, and State Department Counselor Derek Chollet. 

  Their efforts to remake the Middle East via regime change, not just in Syria but earlier in Libya, led to the deaths of Americans – including Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other U.S. officials in Benghazi in 2012; the slaughter of countless civilians; the creation of millions of refugees; and ultimately, Russia’s entry into the Syrian battlefield. 

  Contacted through their current U.S. government agencies, none of the Obama-Biden principals offered comment on their policy of supporting an Al Qaeda-dominated insurgency in Syria.

  The Obama-Biden team’s record in Syria resonates today as many of its members handle the unfolding crisis in Ukraine. As in Syria, the U.S. is flooding a chaotic war zone with weapons in a dangerous proxy conflict with Russia, with long-term ramifications that are impossible to foresee. “I deeply worry that what’s going to happen next is that we will see Ukraine turn into Syria,” Democratic Senator Chris Coons told CBS News on April 17.

  Based on declassified documents, news reports, and scattered admissions of U.S. officials, this overlooked history of how the Obama-Biden team’s effort to oust the Assad regime – in concert with allies including Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Turkey – details the series of discrete decisions that ultimately led the U.S. to empower terror networks bent on its destruction. 

  Seizing Momentum – and Munitions – From Libya to Pursue Regime Change in Syria

  

  The road to Al Qaeda’s control of the Syrian province of Idlib actually started hundreds of miles across the Mediterranean in Libya.

  In March 2011, after heavy lobbying from senior officials including Secretary Hillary Clinton, President Obama authorized a bombing campaign in support of the jihadist insurgency fighting the government of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi. Backed by NATO firepower, the rebels toppled Gaddafi and gruesomely murdered him in October. 

  Buoyed by their quick success in Libya, the Obama administration set their sights on Damascus, by then a top regime change target in Washington. According to former NATO commander Wesley Clark, the Assad regime – a key ally of U.S. foes Iran, Hezbollah, and Russia – was marked for overthrow alongside Iraq in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. A leaked 2006 U.S. Embassy in Damascus cable assessed that Assad’s “vulnerabilities” included “the potential threat to the regime from the increasing presence of transiting Islamist extremists,” and detailed how the U.S. could “improve the likelihood of such opportunities arising.”

  The outbreak of the Syrian insurgency in March 2011, coupled with the fall of Gaddafi, offered the U.S. a historic opportunity to exploit Syria’s vulnerabilities. While the Arab Spring sparked peaceful Syrian protests against the ruling Ba’ath party’s cronyism and repression, it also triggered a largely Sunni, rural-based revolt that took a sectarian and violent turn. The U.S. and its allies, namely Qatar and Turkey, capitalized by tapping the massive arsenal of the newly ousted Libyan government.

  “During the immediate aftermath of, and following the uncertainty caused by, the downfall of the [Gaddafi] regime in October 2011,” the Defense Intelligence Agency reported the following year, “…weapons from the former Libya military stockpiles located in Benghazi, Libya were shipped from the port of Benghazi, Libya, to the ports of Banias and the Port of Borj Islam, Syria.”

  The redacted DIA document, obtained by the group Judicial Watch, does not specify whether the U.S. was directly involved in these shipments. But it contains significant clues. With remarkable specificity, it detailed the size and contents of one such shipment in August 2012: 500 sniper rifles, 100 rocket-propelled grenade launchers with 300 rounds, and 400 howitzer missiles.

  Most tellingly, the document noted that the weapons shipments were halted “in early September 2012.” This was a clear reference to the killing by militants that month of four Americans – Ambassador Christopher Stevens, another State Department official, and two CIA contractors – in Benghazi, the port city where the weapons to Syria were coming from. The Benghazi annex “was at its heart a CIA operation,” U.S. officials told the Wall Street Journal. At least two dozen CIA employees worked in Benghazi under diplomatic cover.

  Although top intelligence officials obscured the Benghazi operation in sworn testimony before the House Intelligence Committee, a Senate investigation eventually confirmed a direct CIA role in the movement of weapons from Libya to Syria. A classified version of a 2014 Senate report, not publicly released, documented an agreement between President Obama and Turkey to funnel weapons from Libya to insurgents in Syria. The operation, established in early 2012, was run by then-CIA Director David Petraeus.

  “The [Benghazi] consulate’s only mission was to provide cover for the moving of arms” to Syria, a former U.S. intelligence official told journalist Seymour Hersh in the London Review of Books. “It had no real political role.”

  The Death of a U.S. Ambassador

  

  Under diplomatic cover, Stevens appears to have been a significant figure in the CIA program. More than one year before he became ambassador in June 2012, Stevens was appointed the U.S. liaison to the Libyan opposition. In this role, he worked with the Al Qaeda-tied Libyan Islamic Fighting Group and its leader, Abdelhakim Belhadj, a warlord who fought alongside Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan. After Gaddafi’s ouster, Belhadj was named head of the Tripoli Military Council, which controlled security in the country’s capital.

  Belhadj’s portfolio was not limited to post-coup Libya. In November 2011, the Al Qaeda ally traveled to Turkey to meet with leaders of the Free Syrian Army, the CIA-backed opposition military coalition. Belhadj’s trip came as part of the new Libyan government’s effort to provide “money and weapons to the growing insurgency against Bashar al-Assad,” the London Telegraph reported at the time. On September 14, 2012 – just three days after Stevens and his American colleagues were killed – the London Times revealed that a Libyan vessel “carrying the largest consignment of weapons for Syria since the uprising began,” had recently docked in the Turkish port of Iskenderun. Once unloaded, “most of its cargo is making its way to rebels on the front lines.”

  The known details of Stevens’ last hours on September 11 suggest that shipping weapons was at the top of his agenda.  Although based in Tripoli and facing violent threats, he nonetheless made the dangerous trek to Benghazi around the fraught anniversary of 9/11. According to a 2016 report from the House Intelligence Committee, one of Stevens’ last scheduled meetings was with the head of al-Marfa Shipping and Maritime Services Company, a Libyan firm involved in ferrying weapons to Syria. His final meeting of the day was with Consul General Ali Sait Akin of Turkey, where the weapons were shipped. Fox News later reported that “Stevens was in Benghazi to negotiate a weapons transfer.”

  With the Libyan channel shut down by Stevens’ murder, the U.S. and its allies turned to other sources. One was Croatia, where Saudi Arabia financed a major weapons purchase in late 2012 that was arranged by the CIA. The CIA’s use of the Saudi kingdom’s vast coffers continued an arrangement from prior covert proxy wars, including the arming of the mujahideen in Afghanistan and of the Contras in Nicaragua.

  Although the Obama administration claimed that the weapons funneled to Syria were intended for “moderate rebels,” they ultimately ended up in the hands of a jihadi-dominated insurgency. Just one month after the Benghazi attack, the New York Times reported that “hard-line Islamic jihadists,” including groups “with ties or affiliations with Al Qaeda,” have received “the lion’s share of the arms shipped to the Syrian opposition.”

  Covertly Arming An Al Qaeda-Dominated Insurgency

  The Obama administration did not need media accounts to learn that jihadists dominated the Syrian insurgency on the receiving end of a CIA supply chain.

  One month before the Benghazi attack, Pentagon intelligence analysts gave the White House a blunt appraisal. An August 2012 Defense Intelligence Agency report, disseminated widely among U.S. officials, noted that “Salafi[s], the Muslim Brotherhood, and AQI [Al Qaeda in Iraq] are the major forces driving the insurgency.” Al Qaeda, the report stressed, “supported the Syrian opposition from the beginning.” Their aim was to create a “Salafist principality in eastern Syria” – an early warning of the ISIS caliphate that would be established two years later.

  General Michael Flynn, who headed the DIA at the time, later recalled that his staff “got enormous pushback” from the Obama White House. “I felt that they did not want to hear the truth,” Flynn said. In 2015, one year after Flynn was forced out, dozens of Pentagon intelligence analysts signed on to a complaint alleging that top Pentagon intelligence officials were “cooking the books” to paint a rosier picture of the jihadi presence in Syria. (The Pentagon later cleared CENTCOM commanders of wrongdoing.)

  The Free Syrian Army (FSA), the main CIA-backed insurgent force, also informed Obama officials of the jihadi dominance in their ranks. “From the reports we get from the doctors,” FSA officials told the State Department in November 2012, “most of the injured and dead FSA are Jabhat al-Nusra, due to their courage and [the fact they are] always at the front line.”

  Jabhat al-Nusra (Al-Nusra Front) is Al Qaeda’s franchise in Syria. It emerged as a splinter group of Al Qaeda in Iraq after a falling out between AQI leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, and his then-deputy, Mohammed al-Jolani. In 2013, Baghdadi relaunched his organization under the name of Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). Jolani led his Syria-based Al Qaeda faction under the black flag of al-Nusra.

  “[W]hile rarely acknowledged explicitly in public,” Charles Lister, a Gulf state-funded analyst in close contact with Syrian insurgent groups wrote in March 2015, “the vast majority of the Syrian insurgency has coordinated closely with Al-Qaeda since mid-2012 – and to great effect on the battlefield.”  As one Free Syrian Army leader told the New York Times: “No FSA faction in the north can operate without al-Nusra’s approval.”

  According to David McCloskey, a former CIA analyst who covered Syria in the war’s early years, U.S. officials knew that “al-Qaeda affiliated groups and Salafi jihadist groups were the primary engine of the insurgency.” This, McCloskey says, was “a tremendously problematic aspect of the conflict.”

  In his memoir, senior Obama aide Ben Rhodes acknowledged that al-Nusra “was probably the strongest fighting force within the opposition.” It was also clear, he wrote, that U.S.-backed insurgent groups were “fighting side by side with al-Nusra.” For this reason, Rhodes recalled, he argued against the State Department’s December 2012 designation of al-Nusra as a foreign terrorist organization. This move “would alienate the same people we want to help.” (Asked about wanting to help an Al Qaeda-dominated insurgency, Rhodes did not respond).

  In fact, designating al-Nusra as a terror organization allowed the Obama administration to publicly claim that it opposed Al Qaeda’s Syria branch while continuing to covertly arm the insurgency that it dominated. Three months after adding al-Nusra to the terrorism list, the U.S. and its allies “dramatically stepped up weapons supplies to Syrian rebels” to help “rebels to try and seize Damascus,” the Associated Press reported in March 2013.

  ‘There Was No Moderate Middle’

  Harvard 2014: Biden goes off-script, revealing the truth of U.S. support for jihadists in Syria.

  Despite being privately aware of Nusra’s dominance, Obama administration officials continued to publicly insist that the U.S. was only supporting Syria’s “moderate opposition,” as then-Deputy National Security Adviser Antony Blinken described it in September 2014.

  But speaking to a Harvard audience days later, then-Vice President Biden blurted out the concealed reality. In the Syrian insurgency, “there was no moderate middle,” Biden admitted. Instead, U.S. “allies” in Syria “poured hundreds of millions of dollars and thousands of tons of weapons into anyone who would fight against Assad.” Those weapons were supplied, Biden said, to “al-Nusra, and Al-Qaeda and the extremist elements of jihadis coming from other parts of the world.”

  Biden quickly apologized for his comments, which appeared to fit the classic definition of the Kinsley gaffe: a politician inadvertently telling the truth. Biden’s only error was omitting his administration’s critical role in helping its allies arm the jihadis.

  Rather than shut down a CIA program that was aiding the Al Qaeda-dominated insurgency, Obama expanded it. In April 2013, the president signed an order that amended the CIA’s covert war, codenamed Timber Sycamore, to allow direct U.S. arming and training. After tapping Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Qatar to fund its arms pipeline for insurgents inside Syria, Obama’s order allowed the CIA to directly furnish U.S.-made weapons. Just as with the regime change campaign in Libya, a key architect of this operation was Hillary Clinton.

  Obama’s upgraded proxy war in Syria proved to be “one of the costliest covert action programs in the history of the C.I.A.,” the New York Times reported in 2017. Documents leaked by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed a budget of nearly $1 billion per year, or around $1 of every $15 in CIA spending. The CIA armed and trained nearly 10,000 insurgents, spending “roughly $100,000 per year for every anti-Assad rebel who has gone through the program,” U.S. officials told the Washington Post in 2015. Two years later, one U.S. official estimated that CIA-funded militias “may have killed or wounded 100,000 Syrian soldiers and their allies over the past four years.”

  But these militias were not just killing pro-Syrian government forces. As the New York Times reported in April 2017, US-backed insurgents carried out “sectarian mass murder.”

  One such act of mass murder came in August 2013, when the U.S.-backed Free Syrian Army joined an al-Nusra and ISIS offensive on Alawite areas of Latakia. A Human Rights Investigation found that the insurgents engaged in “the systematic killing of entire families,” slaughtering a documented 190 civilians, including 57 women, 18 children, and 14 elderly men. In a video from the field, former Syrian army general Salim Idriss, head of the U.S.-backed Supreme Military Council (SMC), bragged that “we are cooperating to a great extent in this operation.”

  The Latakia massacres came four months after the U.S. ambassador to Syria, Robert Ford, hailed Idriss and his fighters as “the moderate and responsible elements of the armed opposition.” The role of Idriss’s forces in the slaughter did not cancel the administration’s endorsement. In October, the Washington Post revealed that the “CIA is expanding a clandestine effort … aimed at shoring up the fighting power of units aligned with the Supreme Military Council, an umbrella organization led by [Idriss] that is the main recipient of U.S. support.”

  Officially, the upgraded CIA program barred direct support to al-Nusra or its allies in Syria. But once U.S. weapons arrived in Syria, the Obama administration recognized that it had no way of controlling their use – an apparent motive for waging the program covertly. “We needed plausible deniability in case the arms got into the hands of al-Nusra,” a former senior administration official told the New York Times in 2013.

  One area where U.S. arms got into al-Nusra’s hands was the northwestern Syrian province of Idlib. Al Qaeda leaders would ultimately control and – though the group disputes it – provide ISIS leaders sanctuary there.  

  ‘Al-Qaeda’s Largest Safe Haven Since 9/11’

  

  In May 2015, an array of insurgent groups, dubbed the Jaish al-Fatah (“Army of Conquest”) coalition, captured Idlib province from the Syrian government. The fight was led by al-Nusra, and showcased what Charles Lister, the D.C.-based analyst with contacts to insurgents in Syria, dubbed “a far improved level of coordination” between rival militants, including the U.S.-backed FSA and multiple “jihadist factions.”

  For Lister, the conquest of Idlib also revealed that the U.S. and its allies “changed their tune regarding coordination with Islamists.” Citing multiple battlefield commanders, Lister reported that “the U.S.-led operations room in southern Turkey,” which coordinated support to U.S.-backed insurgent groups, “was instrumental in facilitating their involvement in the operation” led by al-Nusra. While the insurgents’ U.S.-led command had previously opposed “any direct coordination” with jihadist groups, the Idlib offensive “demonstrated something different,” Lister concluded: To capture the province, U.S. officials “specifically encouraged a closer cooperation with Islamists commanding frontline operations.”

  The U.S.-approved battlefield cooperation in Idlib allowed al-Nusra fighters to directly benefit from U.S. weapons. Despite occasional flare-ups between them, al-Nusra was able to use U.S.-backed insurgent groups “as force multipliers,” the Institute for the Study of War, a prominent D.C. think tank, observed when the battle began. Insurgent military gains, Foreign Policy reported in April 2015, were achieved “thanks in large part to suicide bombers and American anti-tank TOW missiles.”

  The jihadist-led victory in Idlib quickly subjected its residents to sectarian terror. In June 2015, al-Nusra fighters massacred at least 20 members of the Druze faith. Hundreds of villagers spared in the attack were forced to convert to Sunni Islam. Facing the same threats, nearly all of Idlib’s remaining 1,200 Christians fled the province, leaving a Christian population that reportedly totals just three people today.

  In a 2017 post-mortem on the Obama administration’s covert war in Syria, the New York Times described the insurgents’ conquest of Idlib as among the CIA program’s “periods of success.” This was certainly the case for Al Qaeda.

  “Idlib Province,” Brett McGurk, the anti-ISIS envoy under Obama and Trump, and now Biden’s top White House official for the Middle East, said in 2017, “is the largest Al Qaeda safe haven since 9/11.”

  U.S. Allows ISIS Takeover

  

  Al Qaeda is not the only sectarian death squad that managed to establish a safe haven in the chaos of the Syria proxy war. Starting in 2013, al-Nusra’s sister-turned-rival group, ISIS, seized considerable territory of its own. As with Al Qaeda, ISIS’ land-grab in Syria received a significant backdoor assist from Washington.

  Before Al Qaeda captured Idlib, the first ISIS stronghold in Syria, Raqqa, grew out of a similar alliance between U.S.-backed “moderate rebels” and jihadis. After this coalition seized the city from the Syrian government in March 2013, ISIS took full control in November.

  When ISIS declared its caliphate in parts of Syria and Iraq in June 2014, the U.S. launched an air campaign against the group’s strongholds. But the Obama administration’s anti-ISIS offensive contained a significant exception. In key areas where ISIS’s advance could threaten the Assad regime, the U.S. watched it happen.

  In April 2015, just as al-Nusra was conquering Idlib, ISIS seized major parts of the Yarmouk refugee camp on the outskirts of Damascus, marking what the New York Times called the group’s “greatest inroads yet” into the Syrian capital.

  In the ancient city of Palmyra, the U.S. allowed an outright ISIS takeover. “[A]s Islamic State closed in on Palmyra, the U.S.-led aerial coalition that has been pummeling Islamic State in Syria for the past 18 months took no action to prevent the extremists’ advance toward the historic town – which, until then, had remained in the hands of the sorely overstretched Syrian security forces,” the Los Angeles Times reported in March 2016.

  In a leaked conversation with Syrian opposition activists months later, then-Secretary of State John Kerry explained the U.S. rationale for letting ISIS advance.

  “Daesh [ISIS] was threatening the possibility of going to Damascus and so forth,” Kerry explained. “And we know that this was growing. We were watching. We saw that Daesh was growing in strength, and we thought Assad was threatened. We thought, however, we could probably manage, that Assad would then negotiate” his way out of power.

  In short, the U.S. was leveraging ISIS’s growth to impose regime change on Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

  The U.S. strategy of “watching” ISIS’s advance in Syria, Kerry also admitted, directly caused Russia’s 2015 entry into the conflict. The threat of an ISIS takeover, Kerry said, is “why Russia went in. Because they didn’t want a Daesh government.”

  Russia’s military intervention in Syria prevented the ISIS government in Damascus that Kerry and fellow Obama administration principals had been willing to risk. Pulverizing Russian airstrikes also dealt a fatal blow to the Al Qaeda-dominated insurgency that the Obama team had spent billions of dollars to support.

  From U.S. Enemy to ‘Asset’ in Syria

  With U.S.-backed fighters vanquished and one of their main champions, Hillary Clinton, defeated in the November 2016 election, the CIA operation in Syria met what the New York Times called a “sudden death.” After criticizing the proxy war in Syria on the campaign trail, President Trump shut down the Timber Sycamore program for good in July 2017.

  “It turns out it’s – a lot of al-Qaeda we’re giving these weapons to,” Trump told the Wall Street Journal that month.

  With the exit of the Obama-Biden team, the U.S. was no longer fighting on Al Qaeda’s side. But that did not mean that the U.S. was prepared to confront the enemy that it had helped install in Idlib.

  While Trump put an end to the CIA proxy war, his efforts to further extricate the U.S. from Syria by withdrawing troops were thwarted by senior officials who shared the preceding administration’s regime change goals.

  “When President Trump said ‘I want everybody out of Syria,’ the top brass at Pentagon and State had aneurysms,” Christopher Miller, the Acting Secretary of Defense during Trump’s last months in office, recalls.

  Jim Jeffrey, Trump’s envoy for Syria, admitted to deceiving the president in order to keep in place “a lot more than” the 200 U.S. troops that Trump had reluctantly agreed to. “We were always playing shell games to not make clear to our leadership how many troops we had there,” Jeffrey told Defense One. Those “shell games” have put U.S. soldiers in harm’s way, including four servicemembers recently wounded in a rocket attack on their base in northeastern Syria.

  While thwarting a full U.S. troop withdrawal, Jeffrey and other senior officials have also preserved the U.S. government’s tacit alliance with Idlib’s Al-Qaeda rulers. Officially, al-Nusra remains on the U.S. terrorism list. Despite several name changes, the State Department has dismissed its rebranding efforts as a “vehicle to advance its position in the Syrian uprising and to further its own goals as an al-Qa’ida affiliate.”

  But in practice, as Jeffrey explained last year, the U.S. has treated Al-Nusra as “an asset” to U.S. strategy in Syria. “They are the least bad option of the various options on Idlib, and Idlib is one of the most important places in Syria, which is one of the most important places right now in the Middle East,” he said. Jeffrey also revealed that he had communicated with al-Nusra leader Mohammed al-Jolani via “indirect channels.”

  Jeffrey’s comments underscore a profound shift in the U.S. government’s Middle East strategy as a result of the Syria proxy war: The Syrian branch of Al Qaeda, the terror group that attacked the U.S. on 9/11, and which then became the target of a global war on terror aimed at destroying it, is no longer seen by powerful officials in Washington as an enemy, but an “asset.”

  Since retaking office under Biden, the Obama veterans who targeted Syria with one of the most expensive covert wars in history have deprioritized the war-torn nation. While pledging to maintain crippling sanctions and keep U.S. troops at multiple bases, as well as announcing sporadic airstrikes, the White House has otherwise said little publicly about its Syria policy. The U.S. military raid that ended ISIS leader al-Qurayshi’s life in February prompted the only Syria-focused speech of Biden’s presidency.

  While Biden trumpeted the lethal operation, the fact that it occurred in Idlib underscores a contradiction that his administration has yet to address. By taking out an ISIS leader in Al Qaeda’s Syria stronghold, the president and his top officials are now confronting threats from a terror safe haven that they helped create.

  Tyler Durden
  Thu, 04/21/2022 – 21:40

• 62% Of Gen Z Says They Used Alcohol Before Their First Sexual Experience, New Survey Finds
  62% Of Gen Z Says They Used Alcohol Before Their First Sexual Experience, New Survey Finds

  Further proving that humans are constantly being anesthetized from actual feelings by the media, the internet and the company of other similarly situated individuals, a new study has shown that alcohol seems to be key to Gen Z’s sexual life. 

  A new study performed by EduBirdie found that sexual experience often ran concurrent with alcohol use for Gen Z. 

  “EduBirdie surveyed 1,511 participants from Generation Z. The analyzed sample was 52% female, 47% male with 44% ethnic/racial minority (15% non-Hispanic Black, 16% Hispanic, 13% other or multiple races) and an average age of 18.9,” the study reads. 

  

  The site’s findings were as follows:

  • 89% of Gen Z students felt stressed before their first sexual experience.

  • Reported average age of the first sexual interaction is 16.1

  • 68% used alcohol drinks at least 1 hour before their first sexual experience.

  • 42% said their first sexual experience was worse than expected.

  • 52% stated they never had a first sexual contact with a new partner without alcohol.

  • 31% believes that strong alcohol allows to build a more intimate and trusting approach to the first sexual interaction.

  • 8% reported drinking alcohol every time before every they have sex.

  • 14% find alcohol to be an essential part of the active sexual life.

  Avery Morgan, Chief Communications Officer at EduBirdie, commented: “In our earlier research, we found that nearly half of Gen Z students were victims of ghosting. After a bad experience, teens and young adults may be less open to building a trusting sexual relationship, which is why they turn to alcohol as a means of coping with their own fears. Such high rates of alcohol use in sexual life show the unpreparedness and insecurity of students in their sexual experience, despite all the available educational materials of the 21st century.”

  “We learned that more than half of our respondents had never talked to their partners about how satisfied they were with their overall sex life. Issues like these may cause generation Z to resort more to alcohol in their relationship with their partner,” Morgan continued.

  “At the same time, there are some promising results. So, almost every third student said that they can openly discuss sex with their parents. It’s impressive. It is an open discussion of sex, both in adolescence with parents and later with future partners, that helps to build a healthy sex life.”

  Tyler Durden
  Thu, 04/21/2022 – 21:20

• Los Angeles County Fears RV Encampments May "Spill Over" Into Unincorporated Areas
  Los Angeles County Fears RV Encampments May “Spill Over” Into Unincorporated Areas

  Authored by Jamie Joseph via The Epoch Times,

  The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors is concerned that homeless people from vehicle encampments in the City of Los Angeles will spill over into unincorporated county areas after the city resumed its parking enforcement policies earlier this month.

  

  During a board meeting on April 19, the supervisors passed a motion that will require the Los Angeles County Department of Public Works (DPW) in collaboration with the CEO Homeless Initiative to report back within two weeks “with recommendations to mitigate any potential spillover effects of the City of Los Angeles’s RV enforcement for unincorporated areas,” according to the motion.

  On April 6, the Los Angeles City Council, which operates separately from the county supervisors, directed the department of transportation to resume enforcement of parked vehicles that were suspended during the pandemic.

  The enforcement directive identified five categories of vehicles that would be subject to immediate removal: if they present a traffic safety hazard, environmental or public health threat, interfere with public works projects or special events, or if they are inoperable or unregistered.

  Enforcement for all other vehicles not following parking restrictions will begin May 15.

  “This is a very responsible and I think much needed motion about hopefully some coordination with some additional housing resources,” Supervisor Sheila Kuehl said during the meeting.

  “But it’s likely to [cause] an abrupt increase for us in RV encampments in our surrounding areas.”

  Kuehl said the board has been clear regarding past motions to address RV encampments that they don’t want to “see an increased criminalization of folks who simply have nowhere else to go.”

  The board attempted to address the RV encampments in 2018 and offer RV dwellers housing and resources, and those efforts were revisited in January to implement strategic outreach.

  Supervisor Kathryn Barger said she’s walked by some of the parked RVs that are not running and seen them dump waste into the street’s gutters.

  “I saw it firsthand, so if you look at it from an environmental impact standpoint, it is real,” Barger said.

  “I highly encourage the department’s report back to develop community outreach strategy for the counties unincorporated areas that are most likely to be impacted by the effects of this policy change.”

  Meanwhile, resident Lucy Han and founder of Friends of the Jungle—a local environmental advocacy nonprofit—has been sounding the alarm on the RV encampment in the Ballona Wetlands Ecological Reserve, the city’s largest wetland in Playa del Rey.

  The unincorporated wetlands fall under the city’s authority. She told The Epoch Times that “the county is wiping their hands of the wetlands and marsh because it is the city’s jurisdiction.”

  “The city and county should work together to find spots and prioritize high category tows; they should work together but they’re not,” she said.

  The county’s move, she says, does not affect the city’s decision to enforce parking violations since the two authorities don’t work together.

  “Which is unfortunate because the wetlands are Indian burial grounds, and they are … dumping their propane tanks in this environmentally sensitive wetland,” Han said.

  Tyler Durden
  Thu, 04/21/2022 – 21:00

• David Einhorn: We Have War, Pestilence, Famine, And Plague
  David Einhorn: We Have War, Pestilence, Famine, And Plague

  There is a lot in the latest investor letter from Greenlights Capital (as usual available to professional subscribers) – which ended Q1 up 4.4%, a solid performance in a quarter when most of his peers, the S&P included, were deep in the red – including the usual updates on the hedge fund’s latest position changes, but what we found most notable was David Einhorn’s latest thoughts on the Federal Reserve.

  We excerpt these below:

  * * *

  To start with a quote for a change, Vladimir Lenin said: “There are decades where nothing happens, and there are weeks where decades happen.”

  A lot happened this quarter, culminating in an unexpected bout of violence, which frankly, we thought society had evolved beyond and we would not witness again in our lifetimes. Millions are focused on analyzing what Will Smith did.

  We joke, of course. But if you look at everything happening in the world, it would just be pure tears without a little humor. Russia invaded Ukraine and we have war, pestilence, famine and plague. There is a decent risk that Pax Americana has come to an end, along with the 13-year-old bull market.

  The common refrain about COVID was that it sped up changes and trends that were already happening. We believe the same is true of the war. Inflation, supply chain problems, and shortages of energy, food, raw materials and labor were already issues that the war has now accelerated. Stocks had already begun to decline as well.

  There is some evidence that inflation is destroying demand, which is slowing the economy. For many, paying higher prices for food, gas and rent means fewer resources for discretionary purchases. The question isn’t whether the Federal Reserve will cause demand destruction and a recession; inflation is likely to do that all by itself. And while government policy is not responsible for every supply chain disruption, extremely aggressive monetary and fiscal policies have facilitated embedded inflation.

  Yes, the Fed now realizes it has an inflation problem. And it sounds serious about fighting it. But talk is one thing and actions are another. If the Fed was SERIOUS about stopping the inflation problem, it would be as aggressive and creative in tightening as it was when it was easing.

  In a 2018 speech, Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell highlighted that “doing too little comes with higher costs than doing too much” when “inflation expectations threaten to become unanchored. If expectations were to begin to drift, the reality or expectation of a weak initial response could exacerbate the problem. I am confident that the FOMC would resolutely ‘do whatever it takes’ should inflation expectations drift materially up or down or should crisis again threaten.”

  But is the Fed doing whatever it takes or is it just talking tough, while in reality implementing a weak initial response that could exacerbate the problem?

  We think it is clearly the latter. In the Fed’s Monetary Policy Report to Congress from February 2021, it highlighted something called the “balanced-approach (shortfalls) rule” that is designed to calculate what an appropriate Fed Funds rate would be given various inputs including unemployment and inflation. Currently, this would indicate an appropriate rate of about 7%.

  There is endless debate about raising interest rates by a quarter percent or a half percent. With the Federal Funds Target Rate still at 0.25%-0.5%, this feels like trying to figure out whether it’s best to clear a foot of snow from your driveway with a soup ladle vs. an ice cream scooper. This certainly isn’t doing whatever it takes.

  The market is beginning to price in its doubts about the Fed’s resolve and likely failure to return inflation to its 2% target. Even as the Fed resets the market’s expectation to a faster tightening cycle, inflation expectations are increasing and long-term bond prices are falling.

  The good news, to the extent there is any, is that year-over-year inflation will likely fall for a bit from the current 8.5% rate. Some goods that saw prices spike rather dramatically, like used cars, are already declining. At the end of the quarter, the inflation swap market projected 5.3% inflation over the next year followed by 3.3% the year after. However, this is up from year-end expectations of 3.6% and 3.0%, respectively.

  We believe the policy response to high energy prices is likely to lead to even higher energy prices. The U.S. government has chosen to subsidize demand by granting gas tax holidays and releasing strategic oil reserves, while continuing to thwart supply by demonizing producers, criticizing windfall profits, stifling investment in energy infrastructure and threatening extra taxes. Notably, energy prices feed into food prices.

  Agriculture is quite energy intensive and natural gas – which is at elevated prices and in short supply – is a key input into fertilizer. So, we remain bullish on future upside surprises to inflation.

  * * *

  Much more in the full note available to pro subscribers.

  Tyler Durden
  Thu, 04/21/2022 – 20:40

• Chinese Military Tests New Hypersonic Missile Ahead Of Talks Between US–China Defense Leaders
  Chinese Military Tests New Hypersonic Missile Ahead Of Talks Between US–China Defense Leaders

  By Andrew Thornebrooke of The Epoch Times

  China’s navy has revealed a previously unknown test of a new hypersonic missile, footage of which emerged on Chinese social media just days ahead of the 73rd anniversary of the Chinese navy, and just before talks between U.S. and Chinese defense leaders.

  

  The missile depicted in the video is likely China’s YJ-21, also called the Eagle Strike 21, which is believed to have a maximum range of some 620 miles.

  While the characteristics of the missile are unknown, as no official launches have been documented, analysis by NavalNews suggested that the missile is a cold-launched ballistic anti-ship missile with a hypersonic glide vehicle.

  The test footage appears at a time of increased anxiety in the United States over the lack of a robust domestic hypersonics program. U.S. defense officials have said that the military will need to quickly develop new capabilities in order to counter China’s hypersonic weapons, which they warn could be used as a nuclear first-strike weapon.

  The missile was launched from a Type 055 cruiser, which is China’s most formidable surface warfare vessel and likely to be a key asset in China’s burgeoning aircraft carrier groups.

  The vessel, launched in 2017, also is the world’s largest surface combatant, boasting a displacement of around 13,000 tons, compared to the U.S. Navy’s 9,800-ton Ticonderoga-class cruisers.

  “If this missile turns out to be the hypersonic YJ-21, the Type 055 cruisers would arguably become the most heavily armed warships worldwide,” NavalNews said.

  The release of the video preceded a reportedly tense phone call between U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin and his Chinese counterpart, Gen. Wei Fenghe, on April 20, the first such call in Austin’s 15 months in the role.

  Following that call, the Pentagon released a short readout saying that the officials had discussed “regional security issues.”

  The Chinese regime, meanwhile, released a statement saying that Sino–American relations would be damaged if the United States undermined the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) claim that Taiwan is part of China.

  The CCP maintains that Taiwan, which has been self-governed since 1949, is a breakaway province of China, although the regime has never controlled Taiwan. CCP General Secretary Xi Jinping has vowed to unite Taiwan and the mainland, and hasn’t ruled out the use of force.

  The continued de facto independence of Taiwan, a democratic nation and the world’s largest supplier of semiconductors, is thus a sticking point in U.S. and CCP foreign policy.

  As such, the Type 055 ship and missiles such as the YJ-21 are fast becoming a key part of Chinese military strategy, insofar as the CCP hopes that the new capabilities will intimidate the United States away from defending Taiwan in the event of an invasion.

  To that end, Hu Xijin, the former editor of hawkish CCP-controlled media outlet Global Times, used the Austin–Wei call on April 20 as a pretext to demand that China “strengthen its military buildup” and use nuclear weapons to frighten the United States away from supporting Taiwan.

  “It is useless to reason with America,” Hu wrote in a lengthy post on the Chinese social media platform WeChat.

  “I have said this many times, but I will repeat it again: Don’t worry about how Western public opinion reacts and what other effects there will be. We must build more nuclear warheads and put them on advanced missiles like the DF-41 and JL-3,” he wrote.

  Similarly, Hu recently issued a series of threats against Taiwan and the United States on Twitter, vowing that the Chinese military would “smash the Taiwan army” with “thousands of missiles” in the event of an invasion.

  China is currently reported to have about 350 warheads, but a recent Pentagon report warned that the CCP was drastically increasing production and modernization of its nuclear arsenal, and might have 1,000 nuclear weapons by 2030.

  Tyler Durden
  Thu, 04/21/2022 – 20:20

• Shanghai Authorities Promise Better Oversight Of Emergency Supplies Amid Reports Of Rotten Food
  Shanghai Authorities Promise Better Oversight Of Emergency Supplies Amid Reports Of Rotten Food

  Now that local authorities have started to lift the lockdown on Shanghai, releasing 4 million people from being locked away inside their apartments yesterday, the true scope of the suffering is just starting to become apparent. 

  Following myriad complaints about shortages of food and other medicine, Shanghai’s market watchdog (which has mostly been focused on mitigating the impact of the shutdown on Shanghai’s factories and its all-important port) has reportedly pledged to investigate.

  

  Shanghai’s market watchdog has pledged to tighten oversight of pandemic supplies after residents complained that rotten food was being delivered by authorities, leaving them with little, or nothing, to eat. 

  The announcement comes as residents struggle to secure daily necessities as they remain stuck in their homes while the city battles its worst COVID outbreak in two years.

  Tao Ailian, an official at the municipal market regulator, told Caixin on Wednesday that the watchdog had directed authorities to ensure the quality of produce that is being distributed.

  In other Shanghai news, the Associated Press reported on Thursday that the low COVID death rates in Shanghai is raising ‘doubts’ (of course, there have been plenty of reports about the authorities covering up deaths in nursing homes and other places with large numbers of elderly residents). 

  In its report, the AP cited several pieces of evidence which appeared to suggest that death rates – especially among the elderly – were much higher than anticipated.

  Lu Muying died on April 1 in a government quarantine facility in Shanghai, with her family on the phone as doctors tried to resuscitate her. She had tested positive for COVID-19 in late March and was moved there in line with government policy that all coronavirus cases be centrally isolated.

  But the 99-year-old, who was just two weeks shy of her 100th birthday, was not counted as a COVID-19 death in Shanghai’s official tally. In fact, the city of more than 25 million has only reported 25 coronavirus deaths despite an outbreak that has spanned nearly two months and infected hundreds of thousands of people in the world’s third-largest city.

  Lu’s death underscores how the true extent of the virus toll in Shanghai has been obscured by Chinese authorities. Doctors told Lu’s relatives she died because COVID-19 exacerbated her underlying heart disease and high blood pressure, yet she still was not counted.

  The new standard being employed by Shanghai authorities assures that few, if any, COVID deaths would actually be counted as such.

  During this outbreak, Shanghai health authorities have only considered virus cases where lung scans show a patient with evidence of pneumonia as “symptomatic,” three people, including a Chinese public health official, told the AP. All other patients are considered “asymptomatic” even if they test positive and have other typical COVID-19 symptoms like sneezing, coughing or headaches.

  Of course, concealing deaths in the city’s nursing homes might strike a chord with Americans, who remember all too well former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s deliberate under-reporting of the number of deaths at nursing homes in the Empire State during the first months of the pandemic.

  Tyler Durden
  Thu, 04/21/2022 – 20:00

• Do Conspiracies Really Exist?
  Do Conspiracies Really Exist?

  Authored by Michael Rectenwald via The Mises Institute,

  It is also important for the State to inculcate in its subjects an aversion to any “conspiracy theory of history;” for a search for “conspiracies” means a search for motives and an attribution of responsibility for historical misdeeds. If, however, any tyranny imposed by the State, or venality, or aggressive war, was caused not by the State rulers but by mysterious and arcane “social forces,” or by the imperfect state of the world or, if in some way, everyone was responsible (“We Are All Murderers,” proclaims one slogan), then there is no point to the people becoming indignant or rising up against such misdeeds. Furthermore, an attack      on “conspiracy theories” means that the subjects will become more gullible in believing the “general welfare” reasons that are always put forth by the State for engaging in any of its despotic actions. A “conspiracy theory” can unsettle the system by causing the public to doubt the State’s ideological propaganda.

  —Murray N. Rothbard, Anatomy of the State

  This essay represents a “conspiracy theory” (or better, a conspiracy hypothesis) about the uses of the term “conspiracy theory” itself. I acknowledge that the term is one of the most potent epithets that can be hurled at a writer or speaker, that it is mostly used to delegitimize and dismiss its target, and that it serves not only to discredit the claim that a writer or speaker makes but also the very investigation into purported conspiracies. The phrase represents a condensed, shorthand means of labeling a claim negatively and humiliating the claimant, disqualifying the claimant and the claim a priori. Likewise, in writing of the “conspiracy” behind the use of the phrase, I am hereby opening myself up to the charge of “conspiracy theory.”

  I submit that the terms “conspiracy theory” and “conspiracy theorist” are used most frequently by those on the left, who usually associate the phrases with “right-wing” arguments and interlocutors. Therefore, in writing this essay, I am openly inviting the condemnation of leftists. But this is intentional.

  

  In the US, the term “conspiracy theory” is often credited to a disinformation or deflection campaign of the CIA in connection with the assassination of US president John F. Kennedy—to discredit all but the official narrative concerning that event. But the Oxford English Dictionary finds the first usage in a 1908 article in the American Historical Review and defines the compound noun as “the theory that an event or phenomenon occurs as a result of a conspiracy between interested parties; specifically, a belief that some covert but influential agency (typically political in motivation and oppressive in intent) is responsible for an unexplained event.”

  In The Open Society and Its Enemies (1952), Karl Popper was apparently the first to elaborate on the conspiracy theory idea, and the philosopher discussed it again in Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge (1962). In volume 2 of The Open Society, Popper introduced the phrase “the conspiracy theory of society” in his discussion of Karl Marx’s historicist method, which he believed was grossly mistaken for its assumption that the main task of sociology is “the prophecy of the future course of history” (306). He defined the conspiracy theory of society as follows:

  It is the view that an explanation of a social phenomenon consists in the discovery of the men or groups who are interested in the occurrence of this phenomenon (sometimes it is a hidden interest which has first to be revealed), and who have planned and conspired to bring it about. (306)

  Popper called the conspiracy theory of society “a typical result of the secularization of a religious superstition,” an explanation of historical causality that replaces the causal agency of the gods or God with that of “sinister pressure groups whose wickedness is responsible for all the evils we suffer from—such as the Learned Elders of Zion, or the monopolists, or the capitalists, or the imperialists” (306).

  Popper’s problem with the conspiracy theory of society was not that conspiracies do not exist but rather that they are seldom successful. The conspiracy theory, he suggested, grants too much credence to the power of the human actors involved. Instead of understanding conspiracy theory, Popper argued, the main task of the social sciences should be to explain why intentional human actions (including conspiracies) often result in unintended outcomes:

  Why is this so? Why do achievements differ so widely from aspirations? Because this is usually the case in social life, conspiracy or no conspiracy. Social life is not only a trial of strength between opposing groups: it is action within a resilient or brittle framework of institutions and traditions, and it creates—apart from any conscious counter-action—many unforeseen reactions in this framework, some of them perhaps even unforeseeable. (307)

  Actions, Popper noted, have unintended as well as intended consequences. This is because they take place in a social context that cannot be fully understood by social actors. The conspiracy theory of society is wrong because it claims that the results of actions are necessarily those intended by those interested in such results.

  I will return to Popper’s analysis below. But first I want to note a historical irony. That is, the first extended refutation of the conspiracy theory of society, Popper’s, came in the context of treating Karl Marx’s method and was associated with theories about “monopolists,” “capitalists,” and “imperialists”—leaving aside for the moment “the Learned Elders of Zion.” The charge of “conspiracy theory” is often levied by socialists and other leftists. Yet Popper suggested that historicism, or Marx’s method, is “a derivative of the conspiracy theory.” Popper’s claim that a genetic relationship exists between historicism and conspiracy theory begs the question: Is Marxism a conspiracy theory, and if so, how?

  A partial answer involves Marx’s idea of “class consciousness”—the notion that all members of an economic class share the same mentality, worldview, and intentionality—and particularly his claim that all members of the capitalist class entertain and act upon the same idea—namely, a secret, hidden intention to extract value from workers at the point of production, value which Marx measured (mistakenly) in terms of the socially necessary labor time embedded in a commodity. As Marx wrote in Capital, volume 1, chapter 7, section 2:

  The fact that half a day’s labour is necessary to keep the labourer alive during 24 hours, does not in any way prevent him from working a whole day. Therefore, the value of labour-power [what the capitalist pays the laborer to sustain his life], and the value which that labour-power creates in the labour-process [the value of the commodities he produces], are two entirely different magnitudes; and this difference of the two values was what the capitalist had in view, when he was purchasing the labour-power. (emphasis mine)

  In other words, all capitalists cheat all members of the working class of approximately half a day’s pay every single day. Marx called this methodical, routine theft “the production of surplus value,” which the capitalist extracts at the point of production and which is the sole source of the capitalist’s profit. That all capitalists hold this hidden intention and separately act upon it—a fact that supposedly awaited Marx to “reveal” to the world—involves a conspiracy that is breathtaking in its scope and effect, but no more breathtaking than Marx’s accusation that such massive, ongoing, intentional fraud is the basis of capitalism.

  The very idea of an economic class acting in concert to “exploit” workers is no less a conspiracy theory than the belief that a Jewish cabal runs the world. In fact, it is more suspect than the latter because it ascribes a collective, secret intention to the entire “capitalist class,” one that is not even voiced between the conspirators. This is simply something that every capitalist knows to do and does, regardless of any communication with other capitalists. It discounts the fact that capitalists do not, in fact, act collectively but rather in competition with each other, and that part of this competition is the competition for the resource of labor. This latter competition drives up the price of labor when it is in shorter supply, rather than depressing it.

  It cannot be overestimated how central this supposed phenomenon is to the Marxist project; “exploitation” is the basis of the Marxist requirement that the working class “unite,” rise up, and overthrow its capitalist overlords. It is the basis of the need for communist revolution. This need is based on a conspiracy theory (and the false labor theory of value).

  Yet curiously, socialists are probably the group most apt to level the accusation of “conspiracy theory.” As a contemporary example, take this 2017 essay in CounterPunch, written by an avowed Marxist, entitled “A ‘New Dawn’ for Fascism: the Rise of the Anti-establishment Capitalists.” Here’s the first paragraph:

  The world rests on a precipice. On the one hand is institutionalized exploitation and imperialist violence. The well-being of humanity continues to be severely hampered by the priorities of a small unstable capitalist class, who would prefer that the rest of us—those who must engage in a daily struggle to purchase the essentials for living (like food and a roof over our heads)—remain unorganized as a cohesive class. And on the other hand, there are those who believe that the fundamental class division between the rulers and the workers is both intolerable and unsustainable, and so seek to participate in and organize mass movements for social change that will bring an end to the domination of one class of people over another. (emphasis mine)

  We see Marx’s claim of surplus value extraction embedded in the first sentence, followed by the belief that “a small unstable capitalist class” intentionally aims at keeping “the rest of us … unorganized as a cohesive class.” Likewise, the conspiracy of the capitalists is largely, contra Popper, successful. The article goes on to complain about “problematic and conspiratorial, but ostensibly anti-establishment, ideas [that] have been able to sometimes temporarily supplant class-based analyses about how and why social change happens.” In the rant, these are “right-wing” and “fascist” ideas that are characterized no less than thirty-six times as “conspiracy theories” and “conspiratorial” thinking engaged in by “conspiracy theorists.”

  I could point to hundreds if not thousands of examples of Marxists leveling the charge of “conspiracy theory” and “conspiracy theorist” against those who hold opposing views. This is explicable in terms of the need on the part of Marxists to divert attention away from the fact that an unsubstantiated and illogical conspiracy theory lies at the heart of Marxism itself.

  I return now to Popper’s discussion in The Open Society and Its Enemies by noting that in referring to the conspiracy theory of society, Popper meant a thoroughgoing theory meant to explain all outcomes:

  The conspiracy theory of society cannot be true because it amounts to the assertion that all results, even those which at first sight do not seem to be intended by anybody, are the intended results of the actions of people who are interested in these results. (307, emphasis mine)

  It is clear from this formulation that Popper’s charge does not apply to all conspiracy theories. Conspiracy theories that do not purport to explain everything are not included in Popper’s indictment. After all, Popper admitted, conspiracies “are typical social phenomena” (307). Popper claimed that most conspiracies fail, which implies that some conspiracies succeed. Further, conspiracy theories might explain not only conspiracies that are successful but also those that ultimately fail. Conspiracy theories, or better, conspiracy hypotheses, are merely attempts to explain outcomes in terms of attempted conspiracies. Those theories that do not aim at explaining everything in terms of a singular, overarching conspiracy are based on an acknowledgement that conspiracies do transpire and that some outcomes are the results of successful conspiracies. An attempted bank robbery is technically a conspiracy, and explaining the plot to rob a bank is technically a “conspiracy theory.” Likewise, conspiracy hypotheses cannot be dismissed in advance. They must remain one of the modes for understanding social reality.

  Why, then, are “conspiracy theories” and “conspiracy theorists” so categorically dismissed and denounced? As Murray N. Rothbard suggested, the campaign against conspiracy theories is a part of a conspiracy to protect conspiracists themselves. All those who conduct conspiracies, including bank robbers, have every reason to divert and deflect attention away from their activities; only some conspirators have the power to do so. The latter have invented the taboo against conspiracy theories and propagated it. Their vassals in academia, the media, and society at large obediently enforce the taboo and routinely denigrate offenders. This is one way of keeping conspiracies hidden and conspirators off the hook. Instead of exposing them, the enforcers of the conspiracy theory taboo exonerate their felonious lords and laud them to the ends of the earth. Thus, those who aim to destroy all conspiracy theories and conspiracy theorists are servants of the powerful and the enemies of truth.

  Tyler Durden
  Thu, 04/21/2022 – 19:40

• Goldman Sachs Tattled To Regulators About Morgan Stanley's Block Trading Business
  Goldman Sachs Tattled To Regulators About Morgan Stanley’s Block Trading Business

  Many of Morgan Stanley’s Wall Street rivals had coveted the bank’s lucrative block-trading business for years, despite the fact that the business thrived even as many of the bank’s clients suspected it of front-running its trades. But after the disastrous collapse of Archegos, many of Morgan Stanley’s rivals had finally had enough. Roughly a year after Credit Suisse had been saddled with billions of dollars in losses during the Archegos collapse, reports emerged that the Swiss bank had ‘cooperated’ with the SEC and DoJ in their investigation of Morgan Stanley’s block-trading business. 

  Of course, there’s another, less kind, way to describe that type of behavior, as we pointed out here. 

  

  We also noted at the time that CS wasn’t alone, as many of Morgan’s clients (and many of its rivals as well) were all too eager to share their suspicions – and any proof they might have had – with the SEC. 

  Now, the FT reports that the list of cooperators included Morgan Stanley’s biggest rival in the block-trading business (and many of its other businesses): Goldman Sachs. 

  Of course, Goldman isn’t exactly a paragon of moral rectitude on Wall Street (see the 1MDB scandal for more on that). But we digress. 

  According to the report, Goldman complained to Hong Kong’s markets regulator, the Securities and Futures Commission, after witnessing suspicious movements in Hong Kong-listed stocks prior to Morgan bringing block trades to market. These suspicious trades involved the Chinese pharmaceutical firm WuXi Biologics. 

  The FT couldn’t say whether Hong Kong authorities had launched an investigation in response to Goldman’s claims. Nevertheless, the fact that they had been made shows that Morgan could face pressure from foreign regulators as the SEC and DoJ continue with their block trading probe. 

  The Goldman tip-off is the latest sign that the practices being investigated in New York could also affect Morgan Stanley in Asia. In February, the Chinese securities regulator ordered Morgan Stanley to provide information relating to the US block trades probe. Hong Kong’s financial regulator has also started asking banks about their block-trading practices since the US investigations were made public, according to two people close to the matter.

  Bloomberg data show Morgan Stanley executed 9 block trades involving shares of WuXi biologics between 2020 and 2021. Morgan Stanley has done little more than acknowledge the investigation in the US, with CEO James Gorman saying during a recent earnings call that the bank’s equities business and its performance speaks for itself. 

  Still, the investigation has reflected poorly on the bank’s block-trading franchise, which earned more money than any of its rivals between 2018 and 2021, when the US investigation began. 

  Tyler Durden
  Thu, 04/21/2022 – 19:20

• Massachusetts Parents Sue School District For Hiding Child’s 'Alternate Gender Identity' From Them
  Massachusetts Parents Sue School District For Hiding Child’s ‘Alternate Gender Identity’ From Them

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

  A public school district in Massachusetts is facing a lawsuit over its efforts to encourage children to “experiment with alternate gender identities” at school and hide that information from their parents.

  

  In a complaint filed last week in a U.S. district court, two families alleged that administrators and several employees at Ludlow Public Schools have “exceeded the bounds of legitimate pedagogical concerns” and violated the parents’ right to make medical and mental health decisions for their children, as well as their right to “preserve family privacy and integrity.”

  The suing parents specifically target Ludlow’s de facto protocol that parents are not to be notified when their child “raise(s) issues of gender non-conformity or transgender status,” including when the child asks to be called by preferred opposite sex names and pronouns or to use restrooms designated for the opposite sex, unless the child consents.

  Parents Stephen Foote and Marissa Silvestri alleged that this protocol has kept them out of the loop on the mental health issues of B.F., their then-11-year-daughter at Baird Middle School in Ludlow.

  According to the complaint (pdf), B.F. in December 2020 disclosed to a teacher, Bonnie Manchester, that she had told a friend that she might be attracted to the same sex, that she was depressed, and that she was unsure about how to ask her parents for help. Manchester notified Silvestri, who then contacted Baird officials to let them know that she was retaining professional help for her daughter, and requested that they should “not have any private conversations with B.F. in regards to this matter.”

  Baird counselor Marie-Clair Foley, however, allegedly ignored the mother’s message and engaged in “regular communications” with B.F., directing the girl to affirm her new gender identity. She also allegedly allowed B.F. to change her name and referred to her in email exchanges as R.F., her preferred male name, all without her parents’ knowledge.

  On Feb. 28, 2021, B.F. wrote an email to Foley, then-Ludlow superintendent Todd Gazda, and all Baird teachers, declaring herself “a genderqueer” who would use the R name and “any pronouns other than it/its.” In a reply-all email to the girl and the other recipients, Foley appeared to ask that school staff follow the protocol and keep secrets from the girl’s parents about the changes.

  “R is still in the process of telling his parents and is requesting that school staff refer to him as B and use she/her pronouns with her parents and in written emails/letters home,” the counselor wrote, according to court filings.

  In addition, Foley allegedly referred B.F. to Baird librarian Jordan Funke, who regularly met with students one-on-one to discuss gender identity issues and provide resources promoting exploration of alternate gender identities. Funke had also instructed students to make a video in which they state their “gender identity and preferred pronouns.” B.F. was among the students given that assignment in 2019 when she ascended to sixth grade.

  Silvestri was not aware of the changes until March 1, 2021, when she received a copy of B.F.’s email from Manchester. On March 18, Baird principal Stacy Monette told Manchester that she was placed on leave because of “inappropriate contact with the parents of a student.” Monette officially fired Manchester about a month later, saying that she shared “sensitive confidential information about a student’s expressed gender identity against the wishes of the student.”

  “I did what any teacher would and should do: I told the parents,” Manchester told The Epoch Times earlier this year.

  Meanwhile, Silvestri’s and Foote’s son S.F. is also a student at Baird. According to the complaint, teachers and counselors “similarly disregarded the parents’ intent” by engaging in “regular conversations” with the boy, who had identified as transgender and requested to be called by a female name.

  “Baird Middle School staff did not notify Foote and Silvestri of these conversations, but instead followed the Protocol to conceal the information from them as they have for B.F.,” the court filings read.

  Parents Jonathan Feliciano and Sandra Salmeron are also listed as plaintiff. Although their children don’t attend Baird, they claimed that Ludlow violated their constitution-guaranteed religious rights because the protocol is being enforced at all schools across the district.

  Specifically, the couple argued that the school district’s conduct infringes their “sincerely held religious beliefs which include respect for parental authority, truthfulness, and adherence to a Biblical understanding of male and female and standards of behavior.”

  “We want to support our students the best we can,” Ludlow School Committee Chair James Harrington told state news station MassLive. “But we should bring parents to the table and hope they respond in a loving and supportive way as well.”

  The suing parents are represented by conservative Christian legal group Massachusetts Family Institute. The Epoch Times has reached out to the organization for comments and will update this story accordingly.

  Tyler Durden
  Thu, 04/21/2022 – 19:00

• Texas Sues Online Car Dealer Vroom For "Deceptive Trade Practices" 
  Texas Sues Online Car Dealer Vroom For “Deceptive Trade Practices” 

  Vroom is supposed to be a painless way to purchase a used car online, but it’s far from that. Thousands of Vroom customers have filed complaints in Texas about long delays in receiving the title, registration, and plates after purchase, prompting Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton to file a “deceptive trade practices lawsuit” against the company on Wednesday. 

  Vroom is an online used vehicle dealer operating under Texas Direct Auto. The lawsuit alleges that Vroom failed to disclose significant delays in transferring titles and vehicle registrations to customers within state law (a 30-day window). 

  Paxton also said Vroom misrepresented and failed to reveal vehicle history, condition, and financing terms to customers, which are violations of the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Consumer Protection Act.

  More than 5,000 consumer complaints have been filed with the Better Business Bureau and the Office of the Attorney General against Vroom and Texas Direct Auto over the last three years. 

  The company also has a dealer license in Florida and has been hit with complaints. It conducts business around the country, so the title, registration, and plates problems are widespread issues for customers across the country. 

  Vroom’s latest SEC filing sheds light on what could be the issue. The company failed to manage growth adequately and didn’t have the backend systems to keep up with titles and vehicle registrations. 

  From time to time, we have been subject to audits, requests for information, investigations and other inquiries from our regulators related to customer complaints. As we have encountered operational challenges in keeping up with our rapid growth, during the past six months there has been an increase in customer complaints, leading to an increase in such regulatory inquiries. We endeavor to promptly respond to any such inquiries and cooperate with our regulators.

  On June 8, 2020, Vroom went public at $22 per share. Prices jumped to $73 by late summer of 2020 and have since collapsed 97% to a record low of $1.70 on Wednesday. Goldman Sachs & Co. LLC, BofA Securities, Allen & Company LLC, and Wells Fargo Securities were the lead book-running managers and representatives of the underwriters on the offering. 

  

  Here are some of the countless horror stories Vroom customers have shared with the Better Business Bureau. 

  

  

  This Vroom customer has waited 10 months and still has no title, registration, or plates.

  Save yourself the pain and avoid purchasing a car from Vroom. 

  Tyler Durden
  Thu, 04/21/2022 – 18:40

• South Florida Is Experiencing An Industrial Boom Unlike Any Other
  South Florida Is Experiencing An Industrial Boom Unlike Any Other

  By Matthew Rotolante of Wealth Management

  As a fourth-generation South Florida native in a family that has actively participated in the market for nearly a century, I have first-hand knowledge of the roller coaster nature of the region’s real estate cycles.  South Florida’s current industrial real estate boom is not the first of its kind, but it might be the most impervious to broader cycle downshifts than any comparable periods in the region’s history.

  

  In the 1920’s, “Binder Boy” salesmen traded properties as many as four or five times in a single day with the promise of sunshine and riches fueling a prodigious bubble that was traumatically popped in 1926 by the last major hurricane to hit downtown Miami. A hurricane might not even be enough slow down today’s South Florida real estate juggernaut, however.

  Despite over 8 million sq. ft. of new construction deliveries throughout 2021 and more delivering in 2022, South Florida’s rapid absorption has continued to leave vacancies at an all-time low of just 3 percent, compared with a national average of 4.3 percent, according to Lee & Associates National Quarterly Market Report. Rental rates have also seen a steady increase year-over-year, with the average for the South Florida tri-county area at $11.54 per sq. ft. per year. Several Miami submarkets are even seeing rates as high as $18 per sq. ft., especially for smaller flex product.

  Few U.S. markets benefited more from the pandemic. With a business- and tax-friendly regulatory environment and a temperate climate that didn’t favor a virus to begin with, Florida (and more specifically South Florida) has enjoyed a covetous position in the national marketplace and came out of the pandemic shining. 

  From multifamily to shopping centers, office buildings and land, property values are surging. However, industrial is the sector giving “irrational exuberance” a new definition. Or is it? Are the recent double-digit rates of inflation enjoyed by industrial land and warehouse based on pure speculation, or are the participants in this asset class paying record-breaking prices based on solid fundamentals? Let’s consider this further.

  Concepts such as supply and demand and price elasticity (or inelasticity) state that if there is ample demand with little supply, and if demand continues to grow while supply dwindles, then scarcity will drive prices skyward. Is South Florida industrial real estate easily substituted? Is it readily increased? Will the demand for it diminish over time?

  The answer to the above questions is a resounding no.

  Industrial real estate is not easily substituted nor readily increased. It is essential to the storing, distributing and manufacturing of goods. While over the last 20 years retail has been substituted by e-commerce’s pervasive form of direct to home delivery, the warehouses from where those goods are delivered have benefitted. We have also seen office be substituted in part by the work-from-home remote trend made essential by the pandemic. In short, while other asset classes, such as retail and office, have been easily substituted, industrial cannot be easily substituted.

  Industrial can be increased, but not easily. Industrial parks are noisy and heavily trafficked by large, fume-emitting vehicles. They can be tall, but not nearly as tall as a condo tower or office building. They also tend to be near major highways, airports and seaports. Sometimes, they store hazardous materials that are harmful to the environment or unsightly equipment.

  These challenges mean that any homeowners who get to vote on zoning changes for adjacent land will not willingly vote in favor of the industrial zoning classification. Second, because industrial is typically a single-story building (although vertical warehousing is starting to be introduced to the market) it is difficult to create significantly more storage square footage by going up.   

  Most U.S. counties and cities were master-planned at least 30 to 40 years ago or more, and often this planning did not properly contemplate the future demand for industrial real estate, leaving existing industrial inventory lacking. Furthermore, a large amount of industrial real estate, due to the fact that its rental rates per square foot are still commensurately much lower than office, retail and residential real estate, has been converted to these other uses that don’t face the NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) hurdle.

  In markets like Atlanta, Dallas, Phoenix or another ‘hub and spoke’ area with a core downtown and suburbs and highway veins and loops on the outside, it is easy to acquire a block of land further away from the core and rezone it before the NIMBY’s arrive. Many failed malls are also being converted to industrial use as a way of repurposing these grand, abandoned goliaths of eras past. However, South Florida does not have any abandoned malls, and its geography is not hub and spoke, but more like a banana sitting on a coral ridge that is surrounded by the Atlantic Ocean to the east and south and the Everglades to the west.

  That leaves the north to expand into. Two decades ago, only the land adjacent to major population centers, airports and seaports was in high demand. Today, we are seeing developers and companies venturing as far north as St. Lucie County. This area was considered no man’s land in years past, without an international airport, seaport or many major employers. However, we now see major Fortune 500 companies deciding to locate in parks here due to the lower rents and land prices and lower cost of living for their employees.

  In summary, South Florida is a land-constrained market that is even more scarce in industrial land, with high demand leading pricing to double over the last two years. Developers, and the region’s commercial real estate industry at large, will have to come together and identify creative solutions to accommodate the unprecedented demand.

  Tyler Durden
  Thu, 04/21/2022 – 18:20

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