Jul 24

Today’s News 24th July 2022

  • The Normalization Of The New Normal Reich
    The Normalization Of The New Normal Reich

    Authored by CJ Hopkins via The Consent Factory,

    I know, you’re probably sick and tired of hearing about the Rise of the New Normal Reich. You want it to be over. So do I. It isn’t over … not by a long shot. It might seem like it’s over where you are. I imagine it does if you live in Florida, or in Texas, or the UK, or Sweden, or Croatia, or in some other country or state in which the majority of the “Covid restrictions” have been lifted, or perhaps were never introduced in the first place. If that’s the case, I’m happy for you.

    I happen to live in New Normal Germany, the current tip of the New Normal spear, or one of the tips of one of its spears (or mRNA-laced hypodermic needles), the others being countries and states like Canada, China, Australia, New York, California, and assorted other hotbeds of New Normalism. If you live in one of these New Normal strongholds, as I do, you are acutely aware of how it is not over.

    Yes, the Covidian Cult is kaput. The spell has been broken. Only the most insanely fanatical New Normal cultists continue to walk around in public in their plague masks and homemade hazmat suits. But the New Normal Reich is not kaput. The New Normal Reich is being … well, normalized. The masses are being systematically conditioned to accept the biosecurity police state that the global-capitalist ruling classes have been implementing for the last three years. Despite the now irrefutable evidence that the “vaccines” do not prevent transmission of the virus, “the Unvaccinated” are still being segregated, banned from working, attending school, competing in major sporting events, and so on. People are still being forced to wear masks — the symbol of the New Normal Reich — on planes, trains, public transport, in doctors offices, hospitals, et cetera. Here, there, and everywhere, New Normal symbols and social rituals are being permanently integrated into everyday life.

    These symbols and rituals are more than just the window dressing of the New Normal Reich. They are how our new “reality” is being created and maintained. The masses are like actors being forced to emotionally invest in the “reality” of an absurdist stage play. The more they repeat the performance, the more convincing the fictional “reality” becomes, regardless of how patently absurd it is … and it is becoming more and more absurd.

    For example, at the airports in New Normal Canada, citizens attempting to enter their own country without the so-called “ArriveCAN” app on their smartphones to provide proof of their “vaccination status” (including octogenarians who do not own smartphones) are subjected to extended absurdist harassment by imbecilic New Normal clowns in red vests. Here in New Normal Germany, the government is preparing to force everyone to wear medical-looking masks in public every Autumn and Winter, not just on account of the “Apocalyptic Plague” but also on account of the normal Winter flu. The pretext doesn’t really matter anymore. The point is the display of ideological uniformity.

    Meanwhile, Germany’s Federal Ministry of Health was forced to publish a limited hangout regarding “vaccination” injuries and deaths. They did it classic Goebbelsian fashion.

    Apparently, they didn’t like the actual data on the number of serious adverse effects, so they decided to just lie about them on Twitter.

    (Serious adverse effects were reported in roughly 1 in 5,000 doses, not 1 in 5,000 “vaccinated” people. Approximately 184,000,000 doses have been administered to people in Germany and … well, you can do the math.) 

    Naturally, the Twitter Corporation has been slapping its fake “misleading” warning on retweets pointing out the Ministry of Health’s lie, because the truth is whatever the Corporatocracy says it is, and everything else is “disinformation.”

    If you think I’m being harsh or hyperbolic in characterizing the Ministry’s lie as a lie, keep in mind that the German Minister of Health, Karl Lauterbach, has been lying, repeatedly, to the German public for over two years now. Here he is lying about the “side-effects-free vaccines” in August 2021, right around the time he ordered the segregation of “the Unvaccinated” and fomented hatred of anyone who refused to conform to New Normal ideology …

    And now, tens of thousands of people in Germany — at minimum, as vaccine adverse-effects have always been significantly under-reported — have been seriously injured or … you know, killed, because Karl and his fascistic New Normal cronies lied to everyone, over and over, and the German media repeated those lies, and the New Normal masses repeated those lies, and the government and global corporations censored, deplatformed, and demonized those of us who challenged those lies as “far-right extremists,” “science deniers,” “anti-vaxxers,” and so on.

    And these are just a few recent examples. I don’t think I need to provide an exhaustive list. At this point, you are either well aware and capable of facing what’s happening, or you’re not, in which case you are telling yourself whatever you need to tell yourself in order to pretend that what is happening isn’t happening.

    If that is what you’re doing, I cannot help you. Nothing I write or say will get through to you. Facts will not make any difference to you. Government and health officials and media talking heads will lie to your face, over and over, and get caught lying, and you will go on adamantly repeating their lies, not because you do not understand that they are lies, but because you do not care that they are lies. You do not care that you are killing and injuring countless people with your officially-approved lies, with your cowardice, with your mindless obedience. Your goal is to remain within the bounds of “normality,” and not get called a lot of names and get ostracized from your social circle, and if a lot of people have to die and you have to abandon any semblance of integrity and intellectual honesty to achieve that, so be it.

    As for the rest of us, those who are aware of what’s happening and are doing our best to face what’s happening, even if we don’t understand what’s happening, or disagree about why it’s happening, I wish I had something clever to offer in terms of how to make it stop happening.

    I don’t, other than what I’ve been advocating, i.e., organized, non-violent civil disobedience, like what the Canadian truckers did in Ottawa, like what the Dutch farmers are doing in The Netherlands. Columns like this, social media memes, sporadic Sunday mass demonstrations, and individual acts of non-compliance are not going to stop the New Normal juggernaut. The normalization of the New Normal will continue, the pathologization of society will continue, the destabilization and restructuring of the global economy will continue, unless something truly historic happens and the workers of the world unite (or if the sovereign individuals of the world unite if “workers” sounds too Commie to you) and jam a monkey wrench into the New Normal machinery.

    The chances of that happening are slim. In my 60 years of corporeal existence, I have never experienced a time when people were this alienated, hopeless, and at each other’s throats. I can’t recall a time when people were this humorless, sanctimonious, and vicious … and I am talking about the people who could make a difference, not the order-following New Normal masses. If there was ever a time when the working classes needed to set aside their political differences and flex their collective muscles, this is it, but most of us are too busy pissing on each other to score cheap points on Twitter, or Gettr, or Telegram, or, you know, wherever.

    I’m sorry to end on such a pessimistic note … I’m recovering from the Apocalyptic Plague, so perhaps I’m just feeling overly gloomy.

    Probably everything will be just fine, and people will eventually come to their senses, and the global-capitalist ruling classes will cancel the whole New Normal thing, and no one needs to organize any kind of international non-violent civil-disobedience campaign, and, one day, we’ll wake up and check our phones and discover that there was no New Normal Reich, and that no one ever died because of a vaccine, and we will check our social credit status, and tell our smart-kitchens to start cooking our crickets, and pull up the War-of-the-Day on our ViewScreens so we can root for whoever we were told to root for … and everything will finally be “normal” again.

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 07/23/2022 – 23:30

  • Mapped: The Top US Exports & Imports By State
    Mapped: The Top US Exports & Imports By State

    The Top U.S. Exports by State

    The U.S. exported over $1.3 trillion in goods in 2020, the second-highest amount worldwide.

    While refined petroleum was the top export overall at $58.4 billion, Visual Capitalist’s Dorothy Neufeld details below that aircraft exports were actually the highest across 14 states – more than any other form of export.

    This infographic from OnDeck shows America’s top exports by state, using January 2022 data from the U.S. Census Bureau.

    America’s Top Exports, by Category

    As shown below, Florida, Kansas, and numerous other states all have aircraft (and related parts) as their top export.

    Here is the top export category for each state, using 2020 figures.

    While the vast majority of the aerospace and defense industry consists of civil aerospace exports, America has also played a significant role in exports of military aircraft. Between 2000-2020, these were worth $99.6 billion, the highest in the world ahead of Russia’s $61.5 billion in military exports. This becomes less surprising when you consider that a new fighter jet can often come with a $100 million price tag.

    But there were many different, and more interesting, exports. South Dakota’s top export is none other than brewing dregs, which is the sediment found in brewing beer. The largest importers of these dregs are Mexico, Vietnam, and South Korea. Often, dregs are sold to farmers for use in animal feed.

    Meanwhile, the top export for Pennsylvania, Indiana, and Illinois is medicine, while North Carolina has vaccines and antibodies as a top export. In 2020, the U.S. exported over $46 billion in goods critical to combating COVID-19, the second-highest after China ($105 billion).

    As the largest exporter of oil in America, Texas produces over 5 million barrels of oil each day, or 1.7 billion annually. Mississippi’s top export was also petroleum, while light oil was the top export in Minnesota and North Dakota. Overall, oil makes up roughly 10% of U.S. exports annually.

    The Most Unique Exports, by State

    While oil, medicine, and aircraft are the usual suspects for America’s top exports, here are the most idiosyncratic exports for each state. These are defined as those which are exported by the smallest number of other states.

    Arkansas is the top exporter of rice in America, with the industry valued at $722 million. The rice industry in Arkansas began to grow substantially in the early 1900s, and expanded even more rapidly during World War I & II.

    New York, on the other hand, exports more sculptures than any other state thanks to being the epicenter of the art world. The U.S. exported over $12 billion in art and antiques in 2019.

    Lobster is the most unique export in Maine, known for its characteristically large claws. The north coast of Maine offers cool waters which lend themselves to more tender and sweeter lobster fare.

    Finally, Massachusetts exports quahog pearls, known for their uneven texture and mosaic pattern, found across Cape Cod.

    The Top U.S. Imports by State

    In 2021, the U.S. brought in approximately $2.83 trillion worth of goods from its various international trading partners.

    But as Visual Capitalist’s Carmen Ang asks (and answers below), what types of goods are most commonly imported throughout different parts of America? This graphic by OnDeck shows the top import in every U.S. state, using January 2022 data from the U.S. Census Bureau.

    The Most Popular Categories of U.S. Imports

    Petroleum is the most popular import in 12 states, making it the most common import across America. In 2021, about 72% of imported petroleum was crude oil, which was then domestically refined into products like gasoline, diesel, or jet fuel.

    A majority of that imported petroleum came from Canada, while roughly 11% was imported from OPEC countries, and 8% came from Russia. Of course, the latter figure will likely dip in 2022 because of the ban on Russian imports implemented by the Biden administration in response to the Russia-Ukraine conflict.

    After petroleum, vehicles and medicine were tied for the second most-imported goods, with both categories being the most popular import in six states each.

    Somewhat related to medicine are nucleic acids, which were the top imports in Florida and Nebraska. Nucleic acids are natural polymers that are used in biological processes like protein synthesis or messenger RNA (mRNA) translation. It’s worth noting that several COVID-19 vaccines, including those produced by Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech, are mRNA vaccines.

    The Most Unique U.S. Imports

    In addition to outlining the most popular imports in each U.S. state, OnDeck highlights each state’s most unique import, visualized in the graphic below.

    OnDeck defines each state’s “most unique” import as the category of goods that was imported by the fewest other states.

    Salmon was Florida’s most unique import. This makes sense considering the Sunshine State is home to some of the country’s biggest seafood wholesalers, including North Star Seafood (owned by Sysco) and Tampa Bay Fisheries.

    Another example is Delaware’s high imports of pineapples, totaling around $60.2 million in pineapples per year. This time, the culprit is Dole plc (formerly the Dole Food Company), the largest producer of fruit and vegetables in the world. Until 2021, the company’s headquarters were based in Delaware, and it still receives pineapple imports to the Port of Wilmington in the state’s largest city.

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 07/23/2022 – 23:00

  • Birx Admits She Knew COVID-19 Vaccines Were Never "Going To Protect Against Infection"
    Birx Admits She Knew COVID-19 Vaccines Were Never “Going To Protect Against Infection”

    A year ago, President Biden told the world during a now infamous CNN townhall that “you’re not going to get COVID if you have these vaccinations.”

    “This is a simple, basic proposition: If you’re vaccinated, you’re not going to be hospitalized, you’re not going to be in an ICU unit, and you’re not going to die,” Biden added. 

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    Did he knowingly lie to the American people?

    As The Epoch Times’ Zachary Stieber reports, one of the former U.S. officials who led the COVID-19 response during the Trump administration said July 22 that COVID-19 vaccines were not expected to protect against infection.

    “I knew these vaccines were not going to protect against infection. And I think we overplayed the vaccines. And it made people then worry that it’s not going to protect against severe disease and hospitalization,” Birx, the White House COVID-19 response coordinator under former President Donald Trump, said during an appearance on Fox News.

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    The Moderna and Pfizer COVID-19 vaccines were granted emergency use authorization in late 2020 to prevent symptomatic COVID-19, and were promoted by many health officials, including Birx.

    “This is one of the most highly-effective vaccines we have in our infectious disease arsenal. And so that’s why I’m very enthusiastic about the vaccine,” Birx said on an ABC podcast at the time.

    She made no mention of concerns the vaccines might not protect against infection.

    Data shows the vaccines did prevent infection from early strains of the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus, which causes COVID-19, but that the protection waned over time. The vaccines have proven increasingly unable to shield even shortly after administration, and provide little protection against the Omicron virus variant and its subvariants.

    The vaccines continue to protect against severe disease and hospitalization, Birx said on Friday.

    “But let’s be very clear—50 percent of the people who died from the Omicron surge were older, vaccinated,” she said.

    “So, that’s why I’m saying, even if you’re vaccinated and boosted if you’re unvaccinated, right now, the key is testing and Paxlovid,” she added.

    Paxlovid is a COVID-19 pill produced by Pfizer that has had uneven results in clinical trials and studies, but is recommended by U.S. health authorities for both unvaccinated and vaccinated COVID-19 patients to prevent progression to severe disease.

    President Joe Biden, who tested positive this week, was prescribed Paxlovid by his doctor.

    There are signs the protection from vaccines against severe illness is also dropping quickly as new strains emerge.

    That protection was just 51 percent against emergency department or urgent care visits, and dropped to just 12 percent after five months, according to a recent study. Against hospitalization, protection went from 57 percent to 24 percent. A booster increased protection but the shielding quickly dropped to substandard levels.

    Fauci

    Dr. Anthony Fauci also helped lead the U.S. pandemic response along with Birx and once said that vaccinated people would not get infected.

    “What was true two years ago, a year and a half ago, changes because the original ancestral strain did not at all have the transmission capability that we’re dealing with with the omicron sublineages, particularly BA. 5. So the vaccine does protect some people, not 95 percent, from getting infected, from getting symptoms, and getting severe disease. It does a much better job at protecting a high percentage of people from progressing from severe disease,” Fauci said on Fox.

    He said that vaccines with updated compilations, which are expected to debut in the fall, are necessary.

    “We need vaccines that are better. That are better because of the breadth and the durability, because we know that immunity wanes over several months. And that’s the reason why we have boosters,” he said. “But also, we need vaccines that protect against infection.”

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 07/23/2022 – 22:30

  • "Vouchers Are For Vultures": TX Lt Gov Hopeful Vilifies Parents Seeking School Choice
    “Vouchers Are For Vultures”: TX Lt Gov Hopeful Vilifies Parents Seeking School Choice

    If there was one lesson Democrats should have taken from being swept by the GOP in Virginia’s 2021 elections, it’s to be very careful what they say about parents, children and schools. After all, Democratic gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe never recovered from declaring, “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.”  

    Texas Democratic lieutenant governor candidate Mike Collier clearly didn’t get the message. Just 10 months after McAuliffe’s blunder, Collier has given incumbent Republican Dan Patrick a similar gift as he addressed the Texas Democratic convention.

    Lashing out at school voucher programs, which enable parents to use state education funds to attend private schools, Collier said: 

    “If Dan Patrick gets another term, he’s already told us he’s coming after your school and he’s coming after your teacher. He wants to privatize and profitize our public schools. As lieutenant governor, I will lead the legislature to amend our constitution to ban forever private school vouchers. You know why? Because vouchers are for vultures!“

    If you need more proof that Collier’s campaign is utterly tone-deaf, note that we became aware of his gaffe because his campaign eagerly publicized it on Twitter: 

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    Collier may have intended to sling that insult at voucher-promoting politicians — and maybe at people engaged in the apparently evil practice of running private schools — but the universal nature of his declaration ended up vilifying the poor and middle class families who stand to gain the most from school choice programs. 

    Consider that just a quarter of Texas eighth-graders are proficient in reading, with the percentages dropping to just 11% for blacks and 19% for Latinos.  

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    Voucher proponents across the country have been energized by a recent major success in Arizona, where eligibility for the state’s Empowerment Scholarship Account program was extended to every kindergartener through twelfth-grader.

    Parents will be free to use about $7,000 a year for home schooling, private schools, online learning and tutoring instead of attending a public school. Alternatively, Arizona families can take their pick of public schools, subject only to available classroom space.

    Arizona’s school choice program is now the broadest one in the country, and it was achieved despite Republicans only holding single-vote majorities in both chambers. Arizona’s example is increasing pressure on politicians in other states — and especially red states like Texas — to follow Arizona’s lead. Many are racing to get out in front of the wave, including Texas Lieutenant Governor Patrick and Governor Greg Abbott.  

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    The wave is drawing pressure from parents who, prompted by school pandemic policy controversies, were driven to scrutinize their schools like never before. Meanwhile, remote teaching gave many parents a whole new window on day to day instruction. Many didn’t like what they saw.

    Between the devastating learning losses inflicted by Covid shutdowns and disturbing woke educational trends, families of various political persuasions are racing for the exits. According to a national survey reported in The New York Times, public schools have lost nearly 1.3 million students since the start of the pandemic. 

    Public school systems are sinking, but Democratic politicians are determined to keep children trapped inside them…except for those whose parents can afford private alternatives and elect to use them. Among the well-off parents who choose private schools, you’ll find plenty of Democratic school-choice opponents, like Barack Obama and Elizabeth Warren. 

     

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 07/23/2022 – 22:00

  • Did Russia And China Just Announce A "New Global Reserve Currency"?
    Did Russia And China Just Announce A “New Global Reserve Currency”?

    Submitted by QTR’s Fringe Finance

    If you’ve blinked over the last month, you may have missed it…

    China and Russia are taking their shot at the U.S. dollar. And as often happens with consequential news in the United States and the West, no one seems to notice or even care.

    Since the beginning of the year, I have been writing about the possibility of Russia and China challenging the US dollar’s global reserve status. Now, it’s happening.

    It shouldn’t be any surprise to those paying attention that Russia and China are strengthening their economic ties amidst continued Western sanctions on Russia as a result of the country’s war in Ukraine.

    What may surprise some people, however, is that Russia and the BRICS countries, including Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, are officially working on their own “new global reserve currency,” RT reported in late June. Nobody even seemed to notice.

    “The issue of creating an international reserve currency based on a basket of currencies of our countries is being worked out,” Vladimir Putin said at the BRICS business forum last month.

    And of course, as Russia has been cut off from the SWIFT system, it is also pairing with China and the BRIC nations to develop “reliable alternative mechanisms for international payments” in order to “cut reliance on the Western financial system.”

    In the meantime, Russia is also taking other steps to strengthen the alliance between BRIC nations, including re-routing trade to China and India, according to CNN:

    President Vladimir Putin said Wednesday that Russia is rerouting trade to “reliable international partners” such as Brazil, India, China and South Africa as the West attempts to sever economic ties.

    “We are actively engaged in reorienting our trade flows and foreign economic contacts towards reliable international partners, primarily the BRICS countries,” Putin said in his opening video address to the participants of the virtual BRICS Summit.

    In fact, “trade between Russia and the BRICS countries increased by 38% and reached $45 billion in the first three months of the year” this year, the report says. Meanwhile, Russian crude sales to China have hit record numbers during Spring of this year, edging out Saudi Arabia as China’s primary oil supplier.

    “Together with BRICS partners, we are developing reliable alternative mechanisms for international settlements,” Putin said.

    China is buying more Russian oil than ever, but that doesn't mean that Putin has total loyalty | Fortune

    Putin continued, stating last month: “Contacts between Russian business circles and the business community of the BRICS countries have intensified. For example, negotiations are underway to open Indian chain stores in Russia [and to] increase the share of Chinese cars, equipment and hardware on our market.”

    In June, Putin also accused the West of ignoring “the basic principles of [the] market economy” such as free trade. “It undermines business interests on a global scale, negatively affecting the wellbeing of people, in effect, of all countries,” he said.

    President Xi echoed Putin’s sentiments, according to a June writeup by Bloomberg:

    “Politicizing, instrumentalizing and weaponizing the world economy using a dominant position in the global financial system to wantonly impose sanctions would only hurt others as well as hurting oneself, leaving people around the world suffering. Those who obsess with a position of strength, expand their military alliance, and seek their own security at the expense of others will only fall into a security conundrum.”

    Today’s article is not behind a paywall, because I believe its content to be too important – but if you have the means and wish to support my work, I’d love to have you as a subscriber: Subscribe now

    The developments obviously further my long held belief that a gold backed global reserve currency is on its way – something I have been writing about for months.

    I’m also stunned that nobody seems to care that arguably the largest shift on the global macroeconomic playing field over the last half century may be taking place.

    Sure, under the context of the conflict in Ukraine, the news may seem “par for the course” of sorts, which may result in the media and the financial world downplaying it. But put this piece of information out there on its own, without context – that there is a coordinated global challenge taking place to the U.S. dollar – and it would be the biggest news story in decades. Imagine if China and Russia just dropped this out of nowhere? Now, remember that both countries have been working on, and preparing for, this situation for years.

    I mean, holy hell, look at Russia’s Treasury holdings as far back as 2018:

    Russia's dollar reserves likely shifted to swaps after it dumped Treasuries

    As I’ve noted before, Russia was also increasing its holdings of gold over the same period:

     

    And this headline came out in 2020, just months before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine

    Does anyone think it’s a coincidence?

    Nikkei wrote at the time:

    Dedollarization has been a priority for Russia and China since 2014, when they began expanding economic cooperation following Moscow’s estrangement from the West over its annexation of Crimea. Replacing the dollar in trade settlements became a necessity to sidestep U.S. sanctions against Russia.

    Ergo, it seems to me that the BRIC nations understand exactly how precarious of a financial situation the U.S. – and our dollar – is in. Despite the dollar’s recent strengthening, these nations have been in the midst of a multi-decade-long plan to de-dollarize. Even before the Ukraine conflict started, both China and Russia were stockpiling gold and working on denominating transactions outside of the U.S. dollar. It was another “secret” that was out there in the open.

    Remember how “insane” this headline was just 6 months ago when I predicted it for the first time?

    Everybody told me that it was a stretch. Today, it isn’t so much anymore.

    Meanwhile, since the BRIC conference, ties between Russia and China continue to tighten, with Japan even warning this week about the pair’s “strengthening of military ties” – at the same time China has closely scrutinized a planned trip by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to Taiwan.

    Japan said this past week:

    “As a result of the current aggression, it is possible that Russia’s national power in the medium- to longterm may decline, and the military balance within the region and military cooperation with China may change.

    In the vicinity of Japan, Russia has made moves to strengthen cooperation with China, such as through joint bomber flights and joint warship sails involving the Russian and Chinese militaries, as well as moves to portray such military cooperation as strategic coordination.”

    Japan said this alignment between the two countries “must continue to be closely watched in the future.”

    While the economic gears turn behind the scenes, China is also becoming incresingly cagey about Taiwan. The country “has sent warplanes into Taiwan’s self-declared air defense zone identification zone many times in recent months,” according to CNN, and recently alluded to the idea of a no-fly zone over Taiwan ahead of a planned visit by Nancy Pelosi.

    President Biden commented on Pelosi’s travel plans this week, stating: “The military thinks it’s not a good idea right now. But I don’t know what the status of it is.”

    We’re sure Pelosi will wind up going anyway. Remember, this is the same woman who danced her way through Chinatown while Covid was spreading to the U.S., from China, to prove she wasn’t racist.

    I can hear her en route to Taiwan now:

    “I negotiate million dollar stock trades for breakfast, I’m sure I can handle this Euro trash.”

    Hart Bochner interview: Ellis in Die Hard, directing, and more | Den of Geek

    Today’s article is not behind a paywall, because I believe its content to be too important – but if you have the means and wish to support my work, I’d love to have you as a subscriber: Subscribe now

    This post is public so feel free to share it: Share

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 07/23/2022 – 21:30

  • Fauci Now Claims To Have 'Open Mind' About COVID Lab-Leak Theory
    Fauci Now Claims To Have ‘Open Mind’ About COVID Lab-Leak Theory

    In January, a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request revealed that Dr. Anthony Fauci not only initiated efforts to cover up evidence pointing to a Chinese lab as the origin of COVID-19, but that he actively shaped a highly influential academic paper that excluded the possibility of a lab leak.

    Fauci’s involvement with the paper wasn’t acknowledged by the authors, as it should have been under prevailing academic standards. Neither was it acknowledged by Fauci himself, who denied having communicated with the authors when asked directly while testifying before Congress – which we now know is a bald-faced lie.

    The article, Proximal Origin, was co-authored by five virologists, four of whom participated in a Feb. 1, 2020, teleconference that was hastily convened by Fauci, who serves as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), and Jeremy Farrar, who heads the UK-based Wellcome Trust, after public reporting of a potential link between the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China and the COVID-19 outbreak, according to the Epoch Times.

    The initial draft of Proximal Origin was completed on the same day the teleconference, which wasn’t made public, took place. Notably, at least three authors of the paper were privately telling Fauci’s teleconference group both during the call and in subsequent emails that they were 60 to 80 percent sure that COVID-19 had come out of a lab.

    (Oh, and at least three virologists involved in the drafting of Proximal Origin have seen substantial increases in funding from the agency since the paper was first published)

    Fast forward six months, and the World Health Organization (WHO) finally admitted that the lab leak theory – while maintaining that it’s not the most likely scenario – is a possibility that “needs study.”

    Now, Fauci is suddenly ‘open minded’ about the theory.

    As the Daily Mail reports, Fauci told Fox News’ Bret Baier on Friday: “We have an open mind but it looks very much like this was a natural occurrence, but you keep an open mind.”

    Baier grilled Fauci about a claim he made in April 2020, after being sent a link to a report made by Baier himself, that saw Fauci dismiss the lab leak theory as ‘a shiny object that will go away.’ 

    The Fox News anchor said: ‘When you read the email from Kristian Andersen who says…”one has to look really closely to see some features (potentially) look engineered.”

    ‘And you say this is a shiny object and it will go away. It does not look like you’re open minded to it.’

    Fauci appeared to try to deflect by flattering Baier, saying: ‘Bret, I know youre a good person, I know you a long time. 

    ‘If you take a group of emails when people are considering and thinking out loud, and stop there, and don’t look at the weeks of consideration by the same people who wrote the same emails… in published peer review literature, they explain why they thought it was a natural occurrence.’ -Daily Mail

     Watch:

    In February 2020, California-based virologist Kristen Anderson (who has since deleted more than 5,000 tweets) speculated that COVID looked to be genetically engineered.

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    And two months later, emails reveal that  then-National Institutes of Health Director Dr Francis Collins emailed Fauci a link to a Fox Report claiming ‘multiple sources’ believed COVID had leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology – writing “Wondering if there is something NIH can do to help put down this very destructive conspiracy, with what seems to be growing momentum.”

    Last October, a top NIH official admitted that the US-funded so-called “gain-of-function” research in Wuhan, China – and that the US nonprofit which conducted it, EcoHealth Alliance – led by the controversial Peter Daszak, “failed to report” that they had created a chimeric bat coronavirus which could infect humans.

    As we noted last September, proof that the US funded of GoF research was blown wide open thanks to materials (here and here) released through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit by The Intercept against the National Institutes of Health, revealing that EcoHealth was paid to make chimeric SARS-based Covid that they confirmed could infect human cells.

    While evidence of this research has been pointed to in published studies, the FOIA release provides a key piece to the puzzle which sheds new light on what was going on.

    “This is a roadmap to the high-risk research that could have led to the current pandemic,” said Gary Ruskin, executive director of U.S. Right To Know, a group that has been investigating the origins of Covid-19 (via The Intercept).

    We also learned in September that 18 months before the Pandemic, Daszak applied for a grant to release enhanced airborne coronaviruses into the wild in an effort to inoculate them against diseases that could have otherwise jumped to humans, according to The Telegraph, citing leaked grant proposals from 2018.

    New documents show that just 18 months before the first Covid-19 cases appeared, researchers had submitted plans to release skin-penetrating nanoparticles containing “novel chimeric spike proteins” of bat coronaviruses into cave bats in Yunnan, China.

    They also planned to create chimeric viruses, genetically enhanced to infect humans more easily, and requested $14million from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) to fund the work.

    Daszak hoped to use genetic engineering to cobble “human-specific cleavage sites” onto bat Covid ‘which would make it easier for the virus to enter human cells’ – and included plans to commingle high-risk natural coronaviruses strains with more infectious, yet less deadly versions. His ‘bat team’ of researchers included Dr. Shi Zhengli from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, as well as US researchers from the University of North Carolina and the US Geological Survey National Wildlife Health Center.

    And now Fauci is ‘open minded’ to the possibility of a lab leak.

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 07/23/2022 – 21:00

  • The Talented Mr. Pottinger: The US Intelligence Agent Who Pushed Lockdowns
    The Talented Mr. Pottinger: The US Intelligence Agent Who Pushed Lockdowns

    Authored by Michael Senger via ‘The New Normal’ Substack,

    In 1948, the US House of Representatives received a tip from a man named Whittaker Chambers that several federal officials had been working for the communists. One of these officials was more than happy to appear before Congress to clear his name—a leading State Department and United Nations representative named Alger Hiss.

    The rakish Hiss was the exemplary American statesman: Polite, pedigreed, well-spoken, and a Harvard man to boot. During the 1945 United Nations conference, the Chinese delegation had proposed the creation of a new international health organization. After the Chinese failed to get a resolution passed, Hiss recommended establishing the organization by declaration, and the World Health Organization was born.

    In Congress, Hiss coolly denied the allegations and denounced his deadbeat accuser for the libelous claims. The House came away newly reassured that the State Department was in excellent hands.

    (Spoiler alert: He was then and always had been a communist.)

    The next year, intelligence leaks from the federal service led to the Soviet Union’s first successful nuclear test, ending the security afforded by America’s nuclear monopoly 15 years earlier than experts expected. Shortly thereafter, Kim Il-Sung and Chairman Mao used the cover of Soviet nuclear weapons to invade South Korea. The ensuing war claimed over 3 million lives and resulted in the permanent recognition of the nation of North Korea.

    Around this time, a little-known Congressman from California’s 12th district named Richard M. Nixon pressed Chambers for more information. Chambers reluctantly led Tricky Dick to a package of State Department materials he had hidden in a pumpkin patch—including notes in Hiss’s own writing. Alger Hiss became the most high-level American official ever convicted in connection with working for the communists.

    2022

    To be honest, I barely knew who Matt Pottinger was until I read that he’d appointed Deborah Birx as White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator in her bizarrely self-incriminating memoir Silent Invasion, which reads like it was written by the Chinese Communist Party itself. There’s little information about Pottinger’s role in Covid online.

    Yet Pottinger is portrayed as a leading protagonist in three different pro-lockdown books on America’s response to Covid-19: The Plague Year by the New Yorker’s Lawrence Wright, Nightmare Scenario by the Washington Post’s Yasmeen Abutaleb, and Chaos Under Heaven by the Washington Post’s Josh Rogin. Pottinger’s singularly outsized role in pushing for alarm, shutdowns, mandates, and science from China in the early months of Covid is extremely well-documented.

    Pottinger’s enormous influence during Covid is especially surprising not only because of his absence from online discussion about these events, but because of who he is.

    The son of leading Department of Justice official Stanley Pottinger, Matt Pottinger graduated with a degree in Chinese studies in 1998 before going to work as a journalist in China for seven years, where he reported on topics including the original SARS. In 2005, Pottinger unexpectedly left journalism and obtained an age waiver to join the US Marine Corps.

    Over several tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, Pottinger became a decorated intelligence officer and met General Michael Flynn, who later appointed him to the National Security Council (NSC). Pottinger was originally in line to be China Director, but Flynn gave him the more senior job of Asia Director.

    Despite being new to civilian government, Pottinger outlasted many others in Trump’s White House. In September 2019, Pottinger was named Deputy National Security Advisor, second only to National Security Advisor Robert O’Brien.

    Pottinger is best known as a China hawk, but a smart and sophisticated one. He’s been ahead of the curve in calling out China’s increasingly aggressive geopolitical stance, articulating this challenge with near-perfect eloquence.

    As Politico writes, “While hawks like Bannon love his tough views toward China, even Democrats call his views basically mainstream. Still, some foreign policy experts…wonder what a nice guy like him is doing in a place like this.” “He’s a very effective bureaucratic player, which is saying something because he’s never had a policy job before,” the New York Times agreed. “Matt has an extraordinary sense of caution that, ‘Let’s not push something unless the president clearly has approved it.’ This is different from other members of White House staff,” the Washington Post admired.

    While many Trump administration officials have floundered since Trump left the White House, “things are going well for Pottinger,” Vox gushed. “[T]hat subject matter expertise—plus the patina afforded by resigning on January 6—has helped Pottinger, a former journalist, expertly navigate the post-Trump landscape. He even emerged as the White House hero of the initial Covid-19 chaos in New Yorker writer Lawrence Wright’s chronicle of The Plague Year… One reason that Matt Pottinger was welcomed back into the establishment is that, unlike some of Trump’s unconventional appointees, he had already been a part of the elite.”

    From the center-right to the center-left and the far right to the far left, it’s tough to find anyone on the Beltway short on praise for Matt Pottinger. Everything about Pottinger is silky smooth. Between the lines of glowing coverage are not-so-subtle winks and nudges that he’d make an excellent candidate for higher office.

    2020

    1. Ratcheting Up Alarm via “Asymptomatic Spread”

    In January 2020, Pottinger unilaterally called meetings and ratcheted up alarm about the new coronavirus in the White House based on information from his own sources in China, despite having no official intelligence to back up his alarmism, breaching protocol on several occasions.

    In Washington, Matt Pottinger was first made aware of the new coronavirus after China’s CDC Director called US CDC Director Robert Redfield to report it on January 3, 2020. According to Pottinger, he grew increasingly alarmed due to the rumors he saw on Chinese social media. As Wright reports:

    He was struck by the disparity between official accounts of the novel coronavirus in China, which scarcely mentioned the disease, and Chinese social media, which was aflame with rumors and anecdotes.

    Pottinger therefore authorized the first interagency meeting on the coronavirus based on these social media reports. There was no official intelligence to prompt the meeting.

    On January 14, Pottinger authorized a briefing for the NSC staff by the State Department and the Department of Health and Human Services, along with CDC director Redfield. That first interagency meeting to discuss the situation in Wuhan wasn’t prompted by official intelligence; in fact, there was practically none of that.

    On January 27, 2020, Trump’s staff attended the first full meeting on the coronavirus in the White House Situation Room. Unbeknownst to those in attendance, Pottinger had unilaterally called the meeting. Others urged calm, but Pottinger immediately began pushing for travel bans. As Abutaleb writes:

    Few people in the room knew it, but Pottinger had actually called the meeting. The Chinese weren’t providing the US government much information about the virus, and Pottinger didn’t trust what they were disclosing anyway. He had spent two weeks scouring Chinese social media feeds and had uncovered dramatic reports of the new infectious disease suggesting that it was much worse than the Chinese government had revealed. He had also seen reports that the virus might have escaped from a lab in Wuhan, China. There were too many unanswered questions. He told everyone in the Sit Room that they needed to consider enacting a travel ban immediately: ban all travel from China; shut it down…

    [Pottinger] spent several days calling some of his old contacts in China, doctors who would tell him the truth. And they had told him that things were bad—and only going to get worse. Pottinger’s discourse was measured but he conveyed the gravity of the threat. He said that the virus was spreading fast. He said that dramatic actions would need to be taken, which was why the government should consider banning travel from China to the United States until it had a better understanding of what was going on. As he continued, people sat up in their chairs. This was not the “we’ve got everything handled” message that Azar had conveyed just minutes earlier.

    As Wright documents, the health officials thought travel restrictions would be futile.

    Predictably, the public health representatives were resistant, too: viruses found ways to travel no matter what. Moreover, at least 14,000 passengers from China were arriving in the U.S. every day; there was no feasible way to quarantine them all. These arguments would join a parade of other public health verities that would be jettisoned during the pandemic.

    Among those present, Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney appears to have been the only one to express skepticism of Pottinger’s information. As Abutaleb writes:

    Mulvaney intervened to wrap things up. He could tell that Pottinger and a few others were calling for a dramatic change, one that was an anathema to his libertarian instincts. He was pretty skeptical of Pottinger’s “sources” in China, too. They weren’t going to be setting US policy based on what someone had heard from their “friend” thousands of miles away. Mulvaney reiterated that they would reconvene the next day to discuss matters again before anything was settled. He warned attendees not to leak any details of the meeting to the media.

    The next morning, January 28, 2020, Pottinger says he spoke to a doctor in China who told him the new coronavirus would be as bad as the 1918 Spanish flu, and that half the cases were asymptomatic. As Rogin writes:

    The next morning, Pottinger had a conversation with a very high-level doctor in China, one who had spoken with health officials in several provinces, including Wuhan. This was a trusted source who was in a position to know the ground truth. “Is this going to be as bad as SARS in 2003?” he asked the doctor, whose name must remain secret for his own protection. “Forget SARS in 2003,” the doctor replied, “this is 1918.”

    The doctor told Pottinger half the cases were asymptomatic and the government must have known all about it.

    Later that same day, National Security Advisor Robert O’Brien brought Pottinger into the Oval Office, where he seized the first opportunity to repeat to the President what the doctor in China had told him that morning.

    “This is the single greatest national security crisis of your presidency and it’s now unfolding,” O’Brien told the president. “It’s going to be 1918,” Pottinger told Trump. “Holy fuck,” the president replied.

    Wright goes into more detail on this meeting, in which Pottinger interjected to alarm the President:

    Later that day, the national security adviser, Robert O’Brien, brought Pottinger into the Oval Office, where the president was getting his daily intelligence briefing. Far down the list of threats was the mysterious new virus in China. The briefer didn’t seem to take it seriously. O’Brien did. “This will be the biggest national security threat you will face in your presidency,” he warned. “Is this going to be as bad or worse than SARS in 2003?” Trump asked. The briefer responded that it wasn’t clear yet. Pottinger, who was sitting on a couch, jumped to his feet. He had seen enough high-level arguments in the Oval Office to know that Trump relished clashes between agencies. “Mr. President, I actually covered that,” he said, recounting his experience with SARS and what he was learning now from his sources—most shockingly, that more than half of the spread of the disease was by asymptomatic carriers. China had already curbed travel within the country, but every day thousands of people were traveling from China to the U.S.—half a million in January alone. “Should we shut down travel?” the president asked. “Yes,” Pottinger said unequivocally.

    That same day, Pottinger and the White House staff reconvened in the Situation Room. Pottinger recalls that he’d been especially inspired into action by Xi Jinping’s lockdown of Wuhan and by the hospital that the CCP claims to have built in 10 days, but did not actually build. As Abutaleb reports:

    A few hours later, Pottinger and other government officials filed back into the Situation Room. Pottinger knew he was going to be outnumbered. Mulvaney and his allies didn’t want to allow the NSC to do anything that might be too disruptive. Blocking travel from China would be an unprecedented intervention. And over what? Five cases of the sniffles in the United States?…

    On January 23, China announced that it was locking down Wuhan, a city of 11 million people. The shutdown was extended to several more cities in the coming days, with travel prohibited inside much of the country. Tens of millions of people were effectively locked in their homes. The Chinese were rapidly building an entire hospital in Wuhan that was completed within days. Everyone in the country was wearing a mask. People in hazmat suits took passengers’ temperatures before anyone was allowed into the subway. China had gone from reluctantly admitting that there had been a few cases of person-to-person spread to shutting down the world’s second largest economy. If the virus had brought the world’s most populous country to a standstill, some top US officials, especially Pottinger, knew they should be doing more.

    As Deputy National Security Advisor, Pottinger was supposed to “avoid arguing forcefully for any particular outcome,” so he brought Peter Navarro to make his arguments for him. Abutaleb continues:

    But as deputy national security advisor, Pottinger was in an awkward position. He was supposed to be chairing the meeting, which meant that his job was to solicit input from others in the room and avoid arguing forcefully for any particular outcome. That fact tied his hands. He needed someone else to make the more pointed parts of his argument for him. Someone who would stand up to everyone else in the room unflinchingly. He knew just the person: a reviled troublemaker named Peter Navarro, the director of the White House National Trade Council…

    Pottinger’s plan to use Navarro as his mouthpiece seemed to work initially, but then Navarro kept going. And going… They needed to ban travel, and they needed to do it now.

    Pottinger had been waiting for an opening. He told his colleagues that he had come across some alarming information: Chinese officials were no longer able to contact trace the virus. In other words, it was so widespread that they couldn’t determine where people had contracted it. And he relayed the Chinese suspicions about asymptomatic spread: people who seemed perfectly healthy were transmitting the virus, not just in China but potentially everywhere, including in the United States.

    Once again, Mulvaney was skeptical of Pottinger. Three months prior, Navarro had been caught citing himself as an expert source using the pseudonym “Ron Vara”:

    Mulvaney couldn’t believe what he was witnessing. Pottinger and Navarro had nearly pulled off a policy ambush. “Look,” Mulvaney told someone at the meeting, “I’ve got Pottinger with a friend of his in Hong Kong as a source. I’ve got Navarro, who makes up his sources, and then on the other side of the equation I’ve got Kadlec and Fauci and Redfield, three experts, who say not to shut down flights just yet.”

    A health expert pointed out that the statistic Pottinger had reported from the doctor in China about asymptomatic spread couldn’t be true.

    One of the government health experts pulled Pottinger aside. The stat Pottinger had cited, the one about half of all people with the virus being asymptomatic, there’s just no way that can be true, the person said. No one has ever heard of a coronavirus similar to SARS or MERS whose spread can be driven in part by asymptomatic carriers. That would be a game changer.

    On February 1, Mulvaney tried to rein Pottinger in. As Rogin reports:

    Concerned about the political implications, Mulvaney tried to rein in Pottinger. He took O’Brien aside and told him, “You’ve got to get Pottinger under control.” Pottinger was too young, Mulvaney said, and too immature to be deputy national security adviser. Mulvaney was among the most skeptical of all the White House officials that the virus threat was real. In late February, as the markets tanked, Mulvaney said the media was exaggerating the threat in an effort to bring down President Trump, calling it the “hoax of the day.” As he prepared the White House’s first budget to respond to the emerging crisis, Mulvaney pegged the total cost at $800 million. (Mulvaney was pushed out in early March.)

    2. Pottinger’s Crusade for Universal Masking

    In February 2020, Pottinger, who has no background in science or public health, began a months-long campaign to popularize universal masking and travel quarantines in response to the coronavirus based on information from his own sources in China.

    Beginning in February 2020, Pottinger began a crusade for Americans to adopt universal masking in response to the new coronavirus based on recommendations from his own sources in China. As Abutaleb writes:

    Back in February, Matt Pottinger had relayed what he had hoped would be received as good news by the Coronavirus Task Force. His contacts in China had found a way to significantly slow the virus’s spread: face coverings.

    Pottinger began wearing a mask to work in early March to convince his White House colleagues to take up the practice.

    A mask, however, could significantly stem transmission, Pottinger argued. If people’s noses and mouths were covered, they would emit far fewer respiratory droplets, lowering the risk of infecting others. Pottinger began wearing a mask to work in early March. But he didn’t wear a simple cloth face covering; he wore what other White House aides thought was a gas mask. He looked like a lunatic, some snickered, and it reinforced his reputation as an alarmist. One staffer described him as “being at a hundred” as early as January (on a scale of 1 to 10 in terms of concern).

    Pottinger, who has no background in science or public health, pushed for mask mandates in the White House and for staff to be quarantined if they traveled outside Washington.

    Having lived in China during the SARS outbreak, he saw the importance of the speed with which Asian countries had mobilized. In early February, he recommended that NSC staffers who traveled outside Washington—even to other parts of the United States—quarantine before returning to work. He also wanted NSC staff to telework when possible, limit in-person meetings, restrict the number of people who could be in a room at one time, and be required to wear masks. That struck many White House aides as absurd. There were just a handful of known cases at the time; the virus was barely a blip on most people’s radars. No one else was changing their workplace standards…

    Pottinger urged the adoption of universal masking as had been ordered by “governments in China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong.”

    Pottinger pointed to a handful of Asian countries where the use of face coverings was universal. The governments in China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong had ordered their citizens to wear masks with seemingly indisputable results.

    Pottinger saw no “downside” in universal masking, though there was no data and research to show it was effective.

    Pottinger’s heart sank as he saw the tweet and the ensuing messages. What was the downside in having people cover their faces while they waited for more data and research about how effective masks might be?

    Pottinger proposed delivering a mask to every mailbox in America. As Wright reports:

    Pottinger and Robert Kadlec, an assistant secretary at Health and Human Services, came up with an idea to put masks in every mailbox in America. Hanes, the underwear company, offered to make antimicrobial masks that were machine washable. “We couldn’t get it through the task force,” Pottinger told his brother. “We got machine-gunned down before we could even move on it.” Masks were still seen as useless or even harmful by the administration and even public health officials.

    Matt Pottinger’s crusade for the adoption of universal masking based on information from his own sources in China is especially peculiar because, as of the time of this writing, though there are hundreds of pictures of Pottinger online, there does not appear to be a single one in which he is wearing a mask anywhere on the Internet.

    3. Popularizing Shutdowns

    In January 2020, Pottinger popularized shutdowns within the White House using a dubious study on the 1918 flu pandemic comparing outcomes between Philadelphia and St. Louis, a month before this study received any significant media attention.

    If you live in the United States, you probably remember the ludicrous study that made the rounds among major media outlets in March 2020 comparing outcomes in Philadelphia and St. Louis during the 1918 Spanish flu. According to the study, St. Louis canceled its annual parade, closed schools, and discouraged gatherings in 1918, while Philadelphia did not, so Philadelphia was punished when thousands of residents died of flu over the coming weeks. Therefore, these media outlets argued, it somehow logically followed that we should shut down the entire United States economy in 2020.

    One man who was several weeks ahead of media outlets in citing this claptrap was Matt Pottinger. As Wright reports, Pottinger began popularizing the idea of shutdowns within the White House by circulating this study among his White House colleagues on January 31, 2020.

    Matt Pottinger handed out a study of the 1918 flu pandemic to his colleagues in the White House, indicating the differing outcomes between the experiences of Philadelphia and St. Louis—a clear example of the importance of leadership, transparency, and following the best scientific counsel.

    4. Appointing Deborah Birx as White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator

    Beginning in January 2020, Pottinger began petitioning for Deborah Birx to be appointed as White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator. Birx then embarked on a months-long scorched earth campaign for lockdowns that were as long and strict as possible across the United States.

    On January 28, 2020, Pottinger began to reach out to Deborah Birx to have her come to the White House to lead the response to the Coronavirus. As Birx recalls in her book:

    On January 28, after meeting with Erin Walsh to solidify the planning and schedule for the upcoming African Diplomatic Corps State Department meeting, I received a text from Yen Pottinger. Aside from being the wife of my friend Matt, the deputy national security advisor, Yen was also a former colleague at the CDC and a trusted friend and neighbor…

    Matt had apologized for the short notice and said he hoped we could meet face-to-face. Yen arranged so that I could meet him in the West Wing, and once we were both there, Matt got to the point quickly. He offered me the position of White House spokesperson on the virus.

    Abutaleb goes into more detail on Birx’s relationship with Pottinger. Pottinger was married to one of Birx’s subordinates who’d developed a widely-used HIV test at the CDC.

    [Birx] made a number of powerful connections along the way. When she became head of the CDC’s Division of Global HIV/AIDS, one of her subordinates was a bright virologist named Yen Duong, who developed a widely used HIV test while working at the agency. Duong would eventually marry a Wall Street Journal reporter turned marine named Matt Pottinger, a connection that would eventually bring Birx into Trump’s orbit.

    According to Pottinger and Birx, he pleaded with her over several weeks to head the Coronavirus Task Force, and she reluctantly agreed. The hero we didn’t need. As Birx recalls in her book:

    It is March 2, 2020. I’ve just flown in overnight from South Africa to take on the role of response coordinator for the White House Coronavirus Task Force, a job I didn’t seek but felt compelled to accept. I’m physically tired but mentally alert. After weeks of urging from Matthew Pottinger— President Trump’s deputy national security advisor, a task force member himself, and the husband of a former colleague and friend of mine—I finally gave in to Matt’s request that I come on board to help with the response to the coronavirus outbreak…

    Matt Pottinger, was one of the good ones in the Trump White House. A former journalist turned highly-decorated U.S. Marine who served as an intelligence officer for part of his time, Matt had deep experience in China (including during the 2002–2003 SARS outbreak there) and was fluent in Mandarin. Matt took a position in the National Security Council in the earliest stage of the Trump administration, while still serving in the Marine Reserves.

    As documented in her bizarre tell-all book, which received uniquely excellent reviews from Chinese state media, Birx then embarked on a months-long, largely clandestine, scorched-earth crusade to orchestrate lockdowns that were as long and strict as possible across the United States. These lockdowns ultimately killed tens of thousands of young Americans while failing to meaningfully slow the spread of the coronavirus everywhere they were tried. By her own admission, she lied, hid data, and manipulated the president’s administration to drive consent for lockdowns that were stricter than the administration realized until finally stepping down soon after breaking her own travel guidance to visit her family for Thanksgiving in November 2020.

    No sooner had we convinced the Trump administration to implement our version of a two-week shutdown than I was trying to figure out how to extend it. Fifteen Days to Slow the Spread was a start, but I knew it would be just that. I didn’t have the numbers in front of me yet to make the case for extending it longer, but I had two weeks to get them. However hard it had been to get the fifteen-day shutdown approved, getting another one would be more difficult by many orders of magnitude.

    In October 2020, while visiting Utah, Pottinger admired his handiwork in appointing Birx. Wright reports:

    Utah had just hit a record high number of new cases. On the ride, an alarm sounded on Pottinger’s cell phone in the saddlebag. It was an alert: “Almost every single county is a high transmission area. Hospitals are nearly overwhelmed. By public health order masks are required in high transmission areas.” Pottinger thought, “Debi must have met with the governor.”

    5. Promoting Mass Testing

    Sometime in February 2020, Pottinger, who has no background in science or public health, appears to have promoted within the White House the idea of mass testing for the coronavirus. Wright recounts:

    At a Coronavirus Task Force meeting, Redfield announced that the CDC would send a limited number of test kits to five “sentinel cities.” Pottinger was stunned: five cities? Why not send them everywhere? He learned that the CDC makes tests, but not at scale. For that, you have to go to a company like Roche or Abbott—molecular testing powerhouses which have the experience and capacity to manufacture millions of tests a month.

    Using the standard PCR cycle thresholds of 37 to 40 later provided in the testing guidance published by the WHO, approximately 85% to 90% of these cases were false positives, as later confirmed by The New York Times.

    6. Endorsing Remdesivir

    In March 2020, Pottinger appears to have endorsed use of the drug remdesivir as a possible Covid therapy based on information from a doctor in China. Wright reports:

    In the early morning of March 4, as Matt Pottinger was driving to the White House, he was on the phone with a source in China, a doctor. Taking notes on the back of an envelope while holding the phone to his ear and navigating the city traffic, Pottinger was excited by all the valuable new information about how the virus was being contained in China. The doctor specifically mentioned the antiviral drug remdesivir.

    The health outcomes of remdesivir remain unknown, but no benefit to the mortality of its recipients has been proven.

    7. Pushing Intelligence to Believe Covid Came From a Lab

    Pottinger has continually promoted the idea that the coronavirus came from a lab, and specifically prodded the US intelligence community to do the same, regardless of evidence, while urging the global adoption of China’s virus containment measures.

    In January 2020, Pottinger began directly prodding the CIA to look for evidence that the coronavirus came from a lab in Wuhan, China. As the New York Times disclosed:

    With his skeptical—some might even say conspiratorial—view of China’s ruling Communist Party, Mr. Pottinger initially suspected that President Xi Jinping’s government was keeping a dark secret: that the virus may have originated in one of the laboratories in Wuhan studying deadly pathogens. In his view, it might have even been a deadly accident unleashed on an unsuspecting Chinese population.

    During meetings and telephone calls, Mr. Pottinger asked intelligence agencies—including officers at the C.I.A. working on Asia and on weapons of mass destruction—to search for evidence that might bolster his theory.

    They didn’t have any evidence. Intelligence agencies did not detect any alarm inside the Chinese government that analysts presumed would accompany the accidental leak of a deadly virus from a government laboratory. But Mr. Pottinger continued to believe the coronavirus problem was far worse than the Chinese were acknowledging.

    Though the CIA did not return any evidence to support his theory, Pottinger has continued to promote the conclusion that the coronavirus leaked from the Wuhan lab, despite quietly admitting that the virus was not man-made or genetically modified. As CBS reported in its interview on February 21, 2021:

    MARGARET BRENNAN: U.S. intelligence has said COVID, according to wide scientific consensus, was not man-made or genetically modified. You are not in any way alleging that it was, are you?
     
    MATT POTTINGER: No.

    Much of the initial alarm that Covid might be a supervirus from the Wuhan lab arose because of the frightening videos of Wuhan residents spontaneously dying in January 2020, and because Xi Jinping decided to shut down Wuhan, where the lab was. However, all of those videos were soon proven fake, and US intelligence has confirmed that the virus was spreading in Wuhan by November 2019 at the latest. A growing body of research suggests that the virus did not start either in the Wuhan lab or the Wuhan wet market, and a number of studies from various continents have shown that the virus was also spreading undetected all over the world by November 2019 at the latest, many months before lockdowns began.

    Covid’s origins remain a mystery, and leading scientists and policymakers were nowhere near transparent enough about their panic that the virus might have come from a lab in early 2020. However, given that the national security community has quietly admitted Covid is not genetically modified, it began spreading undetected globally many months before lockdowns, and it did not cause Wuhan residents to spontaneously die, the question of whether Covid came from the lab would appear to be a moot point from a national security perspective.

    Furthermore, in my book and elsewhere, there is a growing body of evidence that the CCP used a variety of clandestine means to promote the idea that Covid came from a lab, both to stoke fear and to mislead the western intelligence community from the CCP’s well-documented campaign for global adoption of China’s virus containment measures. Likewise, Pottinger has continually promoted the idea that Covid came from a lab, and prodded the intelligence community to do the same, while urging the adoption of China’s virus containment measures. Pottinger’s credulousness in sharing and promoting scientific concepts and policies from China including asymptomatic spread, universal masking, quarantines, shutdowns, and remdesivir further belies the notion that the fixation on the Wuhan lab serves any legitimate national security interest.

    In summary, as Deputy National Security Advisor, Matt Pottinger played a singularly outsized role in shaping America’s disastrous response to Covid by taking the following actions:

    1. Throughout January 2020, Pottinger unilaterally called White House meetings unbeknownst to those in attendance and breached protocol to ratchet up alarm about the new coronavirus based on information from his own sources in China, despite having no official intelligence to back up his alarmism.

    2. Despite having no background in science or public health, beginning in February 2020, Pottinger embarked on a months-long campaign to urge the adoption of universal masking and travel quarantines in response to the coronavirus based on information from his own sources in China. However, there does not appear to be a single picture of Pottinger wearing a mask anywhere on the Internet.

    3. Pottinger popularized the idea of shutdowns within the White House using a questionable study on the 1918 flu pandemic comparing outcomes between Philadelphia and St. Louis, a month before this study received any significant attention from media outlets in 2020.

    4. Pottinger specifically courted Deborah Birx to serve as White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator, who then embarked on a months-long campaign for lockdowns that were as long and strict as possible across the United States.

    5. Despite having no background in science or public health, Pottinger appears to have promoted the idea of mass testing for the coronavirus.

    6. Pottinger appears to have endorsed use of the drug remdesivir as a possible Covid therapy based on information from a doctor in China.

    7. Pottinger has continually promoted the conclusion that the coronavirus came from a lab, and specifically prodded the US intelligence community to do the same, regardless of evidence to support that conclusion, while simultaneously urging the global adoption of China’s virus containment measures.

    In Pottinger’s speeches, he often discusses the need for more grassroots populism in China.

    Pottinger may have simply been overly-trusting of his sources, thinking they were the little people in China trying to help their American friends. But why did Pottinger push so hard for sweeping Chinese policies like mask mandates that were far outside his field of expertise? Why did he so often breach protocol? Why seek out and appoint Deborah Birx?

    Pottinger’s zealousness in endorsing these sweeping policies is even more bewildering because it’s widely known in the intelligence community that the CCP’s primary focus is on information warfare—“superseding their cultural and political values” to those of the west and undermining the western values that Xi Jinping sees as threatening, outlined in his leaked Document No. 9: “independent judiciaries,” “human rights,” “western freedom,” “civil society,” “freedom of the press,” and the “free flow of information on the internet.”

    Though political conditions in China have deteriorated rapidly, Pottinger is supposed to know that—that’s why he had the Top Secret security clearance and the big job in the National Security Council. In fact, we know how rapidly conditions in China have deteriorated in part because Matt Pottinger is the one who told us. The only reason anyone accepted all this information and guidance from these Chinese sources is that it came through Pottinger.

    I certainly can’t pass judgment. But from where I’m sitting, it looks like we’ve been struck by a smooth criminal.

    *  *  *

    Michael P Senger is an attorney and author of Snake Oil: How Xi Jinping Shut Down the World. Want to support my work? Get the book. Already got the book? Leave a quick review.

    The New Normal is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 07/23/2022 – 20:30

  • Tesla Is Refunding Cybertruck Reservations In Australia
    Tesla Is Refunding Cybertruck Reservations In Australia

    Well, the Cybertruck was a nice idea while it lasted…at least in Australia, where Muscle Cars and Trucks reported late this week that Tesla is starting to refund reservations for the vehicle. 

    The article notes that Tesla stopped taking reservations for the truck in Europe and China due to a three year wait on deliveries – and that’s after the company finally gets production started, which could still be a while away.

    Now, in Australia, the company could be doing away with the Cybertruck for good, according to the report. “Tesla will start refunding those with a reservation in Australia as the Cybertruck won’t be making its way to The Outback anytime soon, if at all,” writes Muscle Cars and Trucks. 

    Tesla is also said to have an astounding 1.2 million pre-orders for the Cybertruck, amounting to $120 million in revenue, all from individual $100 reservations. Australia makes up about 38,000 of these reservations, the report says. 

    The Cybertruck was taken down from Tesla’s website in early 2022 and reservation holders have been notified by the company that they are eligible for refunds. But, as the report notes, those who want a full refund will have to apply for it. 
    ‘
    We’re sure that process won’t be unduly burdensome or tenuous at all…

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 07/23/2022 – 20:00

  • ETH Strikes Back
    ETH Strikes Back

    By Donovan Choy of Bankless

    Is the bear market over already?

    ETH is up 31% this week at ~1.5K, leading the market in the first substantial rally in many months after a 69% drawdown from its peak of ~4.8K this March. 

    Macro indicators are still bleak and bleaker. The ECB announced it’s getting in on rate hikes for the first time in over a decade. Over in the US, there are rumblings of a 100 basis point raise for July’s Fed meeting. 

    What explains the recent price rally? Is the impending Merge being priced in? Or just another bull trap?

    * * *

    Incoming zkEVM

    It’s ETH CC week, and the biggest piece of news sweeping crypto is the launch of zkEVMs. 

    …So what are these bad boys?

    1. EVM-compatibility (Ethereum Virtual Machine) allows any Web3 project to plug into Ethereum’s established infrastructure and user base.

    2. Then zk-rollups (zero knowledge) are a major Layer 2 scaling boon. Vitalik himself said they were the end game.

    zkEVMs combines them both. 

    Devs like it because they can deploy smart contracts and integrate Ethereum tools in the same way they would on Ethereum, yet with faster speeds and lower cost.

    Ok so, zkEVMs are great. That means there’s big competition for optimistic rollups. A total of three zkEVM projects are coming out the bull gate this week by the Scroll team, zkSync and Polygon. They’re all in pre-alpha phases at the moment. It’s a sign of big things coming for Ethereum.

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

    For more complete details, check out Bankless articles published this week: William Peaster’s coverage of zkEVMs and Ben Giove on under-the-radar L2s that are poised for growth.

    Three Arrows Capital troubles, continued

    I wrote last week in “DeFi Will Never Die” that the ongoing problems with centralized crypto banks isn’t one of risky trades per se, but rather how the rules of the system poorly deal with that risk. 

    DeFi mitigates that risk inherently through built-in transparency on the blockchain because protocols are forced to air their dirty laundry in public, and quickly start paying those loans if that laundry begins to pile up. David Hoffman calls this “The New Supreme Court”:

    “The legal courts overseeing the Celsius and 3AC cases are subordinate to the court of the EVM; the code that enforces the smart contracts that power the DeFi lending applications. The EVM is the most superior court in the world. The legal contract system of nation-state courts is junior to Ethereum and the EVM. 

    When markets break down, they revert back to a system of lawyers and courts, and we are currently witnessing that in the cases of 3AC and Celcius. Long-drawn-out court proceedings are beginning; meanwhile, DeFi is still chugging away and onto the next thing. And no DeFi lenders lost a dime.”

    Crypto banks, though, are opaque and prone to risky leveraging calls. In this case, that risk bubbled into a public health epidemic of sorts.

    A thousand page legal document revealed this week that Three Arrows Capital owed 27 crypto companies a total of $3.5B, of which the largest chunk belongs to crypto lender Genesis that made an undercollaterized loan of $2.36B. In second place is Voyager with a loan of ~$685M, who filed bankruptcy two weeks ago.

    Genesis’ loans were collateralized by 17.4M shares of Grayscale Bitcoin Trust, 447K of Grayscale Ethereum Trust; 2,7M AVAX, and 13,5M of NEAR — all of which are down bad in the past quarter. 

    While Genesis made the mistake of making a loan to the overleveraged 3AC, it had the good risk management sense to liquidate losses relatively early, thanks to a margin requirement of at least 80%.

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

    Celsius, on the other hand, is suffering a shortfall of at least $1.2B based on a new filing, with  $5.5B in liabilities and $4.3B in assets.

    * * *

    Web3 News Roundup

    Aave and Balancer strategic partnership

    A huge governance proposal proposed back in March was unanimously passed this week that saw both DAOs swapping 16,908 AAVE ($1.63M) for 200,000 BAL ($1.13M) to create more synergy within their ecosystems and diversify each other’s treasuries. 

    The strategy: This enables BAL tokens to be paired in Aave’s BAL:ETH pool on Balancer, which is then locked for a year to receive veBAL tokens that in turn can be used to vote for more BAL rewards on Aave-supported pools. More liquidity and better yields for Aave.

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

    Minecraft bans NFTs

    In Minecraft’s official release:

    Each of these uses of NFTs and other blockchain technologies creates digital ownership based on scarcity and exclusion, which does not align with Minecraft values of creative inclusion and playing together. NFTs are not inclusive of all our community and create a scenario of the haves and the have-nots. The speculative pricing and investment mentality around NFTs takes the focus away from playing the game and encourages profiteering, which we think is inconsistent with the long-term joy and success of our players.

    I think this is all wrong. An old piece I wrote for Bankless argued that gamers shouldn’t reject, but embrace NFTs. The introduction of a profit motive into NFTs is what will make video gaming better, not worse:

    The non-fungible-tokenization of third-party skins, maps, and patches opens a lucrative door for the thousands of Skyrim, Half-Life, and Minecraft gaming modders and creators of user-generated content to distribute their creations for free while getting paid for it by their “100 true fans”.

    It’s also particularly rich for Microsoft to lambast NFTs for chasing a “profit motive,” when the company itself takes a cut from user-generated content:

    For many years, Microsoft enforced intellectual property laws that allowed Minecraft users to modify and create user-generated content, but prohibited them from selling officially licensed code for profit, effectively maintaining a gray economy of passionate fans that lived to serve them.

    In other words, Microsoft is saying: Profit for me and not for thee.

    Other news: 

    The Merge has an unofficial date…?; Opensea lays off 20% of their staff due to an “unprecedented combination of crypto winter and broad macroeconomic instability”; Circle is increasing transparency around USDC in a monthly report; Curve Finance rumors of a stablecoin; Across Protocol launches; Three Arrows Founders break silence over collapse of crypto hedge fund.

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 07/23/2022 – 19:30

  • Land Of Waste: American Landfills By State
    Land Of Waste: American Landfills By State

    Each American produces a whopping 1,700 pounds of waste every year, making the United States the world’s most wasteful country.

    As Visual Capitalist’s Bruno Venditti details below, approximately half of the country’s yearly waste will meet its fate in one of the more than 2,000 active landfills across the nation.

    In this graphic by Northstar Clean Technologies, we map and compare different states’ landfill waste per capita, using data from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

    States With Highest Tons of Waste Per Person

    Upper Midwestern and eastern industrial states rank highly on the trash-per-capita list, with Michigan, Indiana, Pennsylvania, Illinois, and Ohio taking the top five spots.

    The availability of cheap landfill space in Michigan attracts trucked-in garbage from out of state and even from Canada. That’s because, under the Commerce Clause of the U.S. Constitution, waste is considered a commodity, and states and counties cannot restrict its import or export from other states or even other countries.

    The state also faces challenges with recycling. Michigan’s statewide recycling rate is around 18%, while the national recycling rate is 32%.

     

    Some states are accumulating new landfill waste faster than others. Indiana leads the nation with an annual “landfill waste acceptance rate” of 2.35 tons per year per resident.

     

    States with Fewest Tons of Waste Per Person

    More sparsely populated states such as Wyoming, Idaho, Maine, Vermont, and North and South Dakota, all rank among the states with the least landfill trash per resident.

    Largely because it accepts considerably less trash by volume than most other states, Connecticut hosts the least buried trash per person, with only 8.7 tons per resident.

     

    Food waste, plastics, and paper products make up more than half the garbage in U.S. landfills but other products like glass and metals, for example, can have a significant impact on the environment.

     

    A Multi-Billion Dollar Opportunity

    One of the major sources of waste is the construction industry. Every year, around 12 million tons of used asphalt shingles are dumped into landfills across North America.

    However, this material can be repurposed to create new materials like fiber, liquid asphalt, and construction aggregate, generating revenue while fighting climate change. In neighbor Canada, for example, recovering and reprocessing shingles is already a $1.3 billion market.

    In this context, repurposing waste has not only become essential to minimizing waste, but also to creating new business opportunities going forward.

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 07/23/2022 – 19:00

  • Victor Davis Hanson: The Left Should Be Happy With Biden
    Victor Davis Hanson: The Left Should Be Happy With Biden

    Authored by Victor Davis Hanson via AmGreatness.com,

    The Left should be ecstatic that Joe Biden has given them everything they wanted. 

    The Left likes inflation. It reduces the value of old money by printing lots of new money. Those richer who have it, lose the value of their money; those poorer who don’t have any money, suddenly do. 

    When combined with low interest rates, inflation roars even louder. Not since Jimmy Carter has a Democrat been so insistent on inflating the money supply. 

    For decades, the Left has amplified former Energy Secretary Steven Chu’s 2008 dream that the government must spike fuel costs up to European levels. That was seen as the best way to force unsophisticated Americans to quit burning gas and transition to renewable energy. Biden took that sermon seriously. 

    He canceled federal energy leases. He shut down ANWR. He canceled pipelines and warned the oil industry its days were numbered. Biden has done more than any other Democrat to ensure fossil fuels were unaffordable, forcing America’s supposedly unthinking consumers to drive less or consider ditching their gas-engine cars altogether. 

    The hard American Left always wanted unlimited illegal immigration. Biden agreed and destroyed the southern border as we knew it. 

    The result is that in less than two years, nearly 3 million illegal aliens have surged into the United States. Nearly all of them arrived unvaccinated, untested, and unaudited at a time of a COVID pandemic. 

    Biden worries little that record numbers of Americans are dying from drugs that now pour across the border. Cartels became richer and more powerful than ever under his watch, while child traffickers were freed from worries. 

    Biden did more than any prior Democrat to ensure massive illegal immigration as part of the leftist dream of flipping red states blue by changing the demography. 

    The Left rails about imperialism, neo-colonialism, and military expenditure. Joe Biden without warning simply yanked all troops from Afghanistan. He abandoned a $1 billion new embassy, a $300 million refitted U.S. air base, and $80 billion worth of sophisticated arms and equipment. 

    In other words, Biden did more than any other prior Democrat to ensure the United States was humbled abroad, and its expeditionary forces taught a lesson about the evils of foreign interventions. 

    The Left fetishizes race. It enshrined the idea of “good” racial discrimination: to stop racial bias, one must be racially biased. 

    Biden was the first president to promise in advance that his vice-presidential running mate had to be both black and female. For his cabinet picks, Biden ignored most criteria of prior experience or specific expertise, but instead ensured that his administration was “diverse.” 

    No prior Democratic president has been so beholden to identity politics or so consistently used de facto racial, gender, and sexual identity quotas in his presidential appointees. 

    The Left for years has railed about the criminal justice system. It believes punishment does not really deter crime, which is instead a result of racism and a toxic capitalist system. 

    Biden agrees. Federal attorneys mimic the so-called George Soros city and county prosecutors who enforce the law largely according to ideological directives. 

    No prior president has managed to weaponize the Pentagon, the FBI, or the CIA in ways that have transitioned them from traditional institutions to woke avatars of social revolution. 

    No prior Democratic president has so attacked conservatives, a strict-constructionist Supreme Court, and the Republican Party. 

    So why is the Left so eager to oust Biden or at least ensure that he does not dare seek reelection in 2024? 

    Strangely, leftists do not grasp that Biden’s current record and unpopularity are due not just to his unmistakable cognitive decline. The problem is not just his often-toxic personality, or his creepy habits of trying to shake the hands of invisible people or violating the private space of younger women. 

    Instead, the Biden Administration has become an utter failure because voters detest its agendas. They recoil at $5-a-gallon gas. They feel their lives are being destroyed by 9.1 percent annual inflation and supply chain shortages. 

    The public is tired of near record annual increases in murders and other violent crime. 

    They are sickened by the tsunami of dangerous drugs pouring across the border and unvetted millions of foreign nationals entering their country without their permission. 

    They are irate that the Biden cabinet never responds to these disasters. Instead, the administration denies the crises even exist. 

    Or it blames its own self-created messes on the Russians, or Trump, or their own Democratic senators who balked at printing more trillions of dollars. 

    Now the Left is looking for a younger, more charismatic, and more glib replacement president to advance their stale unpopular agendas. 

    But since when has changing an inept messenger ever changed a disastrous message? 

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 07/23/2022 – 18:30

  • 'Intense Heat And Dry Conditions' Threatening US Crops, Herds
    ‘Intense Heat And Dry Conditions’ Threatening US Crops, Herds

    At perhaps the worst possible time, scorching heat and dry conditions are jeopardizing US agriculture – threatening soybeans, corn and other crops.

    According to the Wall Street Journal, intense heat over the past week has put large portions of the United States – particularly the South and West – at risk during an important period during the Midwest crop-growing season.

    In parts of Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas and other states, the heat is exacerbating longer-running drought conditions – putting immense stress on livestock and parching pastures, and forcing ranchers to spend more on supplemental feed for cattle.

    In Iowa, which produces more corn than any other U.S. state, temperatures are forecast to hit 100 degrees in the western part of the state, according to the National Weather Service. Major livestock-producing states, including Texas and Oklahoma, are expected to see temperatures hit 104 degrees over the weekend. Some places in the region have had extremely hot and dry weather for prolonged periods. -WSJ

    Oklahoma cattle rancher Charlie Swanson says temps have exceeded 100 degrees every day this month, including a 114-degree scorcher on Tuesday. When combined with virtually no rain, the heat is ‘roasting his pastures’ – and killing the grass and forage he grows for his cattle to graze on.

    The high temps come as Oklahoma ranchers were already paying more for feed, fertilizer, fuel and other costs. Swanson’s feed costs have climbed by roughly $100 per ton vs. last year, while fertilizer is also more expensive. He recently sold 80 cows to a beef packer in Texas because he couldn’t afford to keep feeding them.

    “Everybody is cutting back on expenses if they can,” said Swanson.

    The prices that ranchers receive for their cattle have climbed roughly 15% from a year ago, according to the USDA, but producers are still struggling to break even. Prices for hay, which is widely used to feed cattle, were 56% higher in April than in 2021, according to a June report from the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City. Cattle producers are estimated to have lost money the past two months, according to a cost-and-return analysis from Iowa State University. -WSJ

    Where there’s trouble, opportunity arises. 

    Helping cattle ranchers cope with the situation is Panorama Organic Grass-Fed Meats, a division of poultry company Perdue Farms Inc., which helps ranchers in drought-stricken states connect with buyers in states that are doing ok. “For example, the company might connect a rancher in Bakersfield, Calif., who is struggling with dry weather with a producer in Nebraska looking to buy cattle.”

    “We’re the matchmaker,” said Kay Cornelius, Panorama’s general manager.

    According to industry analysts, if the heat persists across the country and this year’s corn crop can’t handle it, feed costs will march even higher, driving up input costs for livestock producers.

    Eddie Sanders, a fourth-generation corn grower in Franklin, Tenn., said he expects to harvest only roughly one-third to one-half of his corn crop this year, because of the hot and dry weather. He said he is hoping to be able to salvage his soybean crop, but if the hot weather persists into August, that too might be at risk.

    “We’re burned up here,” he said. “We’re at the mercy of a rain every 10 days.” -WSJ

    And thanks to a wet spring, many Midwestern farmers got a late start planting corn and other crops. Now, it’s too dry to sustain their growth in many regions. According to the US Drought Monitor, almost 30% of US corn production and 26% of soybean production are in areas experiencing drought. As the Journal notes: “Corn is now pollinating in many parts of the grain belt, a time when the plants require the most water. Serious drought and heat stress during corn pollination can translate to yield losses of about 9% a day, said Dan Quinn, an agronomist at Purdue University and corn specialist who works with regional farmers.”

    What’s doing well right now?

    Parts of Illinois, Indiana and Iowa which have received rain recently, while the USDA’s July 18 report showed steady corn conditions – and corn futures at the Chicago Board of Trade have fallen around 7% over the past week. What’s more, rain has been forecast for parts of the Midwest, which should ease some crop concerns.

    According to Rick Dusek, head of country operations at Minnesota-based farmer cooperative CHS Inc., “Right now there are a lot of eyes watching North American production.”

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 07/23/2022 – 18:00

  • "Bitcoin Will Bottom As We Get Closer To The Fed Pivot": Lawrence Lepard
    “Bitcoin Will Bottom As We Get Closer To The Fed Pivot”: Lawrence Lepard

    Submitted by QTR’s Fringe Finance

    Friend of Fringe Finance Lawrence Lepard released his most recent investor letter a few days ago with his updated take the Fed, crypto, gold and macro.

    Larry has joined me for several interviews over the last year and I believe him to truly be one of the muted voices that the investing community would be better off for considering. He’s the type of voice that gets little coverage in the mainstream media, which, in my opinion, makes him someone worth listening to twice as closely.

     

    Larry was kind enough to allow me to share his most recent thoughts. You can read Part 1 of this letter, released days ago, here.

    Crypto And Bitcoin

    There was probably no greater poster child for the speculative expansion of this bubble than the enormous growth in the crypto currencies and Bitcoin. From a starting point of only 50 crypto currencies back in 2013, when Bitcoin began to emerge, there are now over 20,000 crypto currencies.

    Reliable estimates suggest that the entire crypto market was $3 Trillion at its peak in November of 2021; today it is  approximately $866 Billion, or a decrease of 71%. The paper value attributed to these trading vehicles  in such a short period of time is stunning; demonstrating that when crowd psychology chases perceived  easy wealth it can go much further than expected, yet it always ends badly.

    A perfect example is Dogecoin named after a dog and started as a joke, but it caught favor with celebrities and Elon Musk and went on to achieve a peak market valuation of $87.5 Billion before collapsing 90%. Notably it still trades at a $9 Billion market cap which is $9 Billion too much, in our opinion. 

    Given the unregulated nature of crypto and the rise of many offshore exchanges, there was a lot of  leverage being used in this space, and there was also a lot of fraud. Many crypto currencies were built  on faulty premises and were nothing more than sophisticated pump and dump schemes. A notable  example is Luna/Terra which hawked an algorithmic stable coin that was designed to give investors a  20% annual yield. How they were able to generate these kinds of returns was never specifically  explained.

    Like Gold, Bitcoin and cryptos do not provide yield. Thus, for any arranged scheme to provide yield, it clearly would imply that lots of leverage was employed. In our low-rate world where money is  priced too cheaply, hucksters were bound to show up to sell to the masses.  

    The fraud that was Luna Terra coin traded at a peak market cap of $18B before a run on the bank caused the entire scam to collapse to worthlessness. This is not the only crypto related entity which has collapsed  to worthlessness – Celsius, the hedge fund 3 Arrows Capital, Voyager Digital, and Compass Mining have also collapsed. We believe there is a lot more pain to come.  

    At the heart of all of this crypto meltdown is “phantom collateral” (i.e., lenders think they have real collateral backing their loan; but alas they don’t, and often the borrower has borrowed from others using  the same phantom collateral. Yet, like in musical chairs, when the music stops and loans are called in – collateral either doesn’t exist or multiple parties have claims on the same collateral, or it was worthless  to begin with. We saw this in the 2008 housing bubble with Collateralized Debt Obligations (CDO) and  CDO squared type scams. 

    As we saw in this draw down many crypto currency holders also held Bitcoin, and in a leveraged unwind  they were forced to dump their Bitcoin on the market. 

    Today’s article is not behind a paywall, because I believe its content to be too important – but if you have the means and wish to support my work, I’d love to have you as a subscriber: Subscribe now

    Bitcoin Is Not Crypto

    It is important to distinguish between Bitcoin and all other crypto currencies. We strongly oppose all  other crypto currencies, which when boiled down to it are just a bunch of middlemen trying to take their  “toll” on the highway of the blockchain/Bitcoin by playing levered, fiat games.

    We strongly believe in Bitcoin, and are what the world calls, Bitcoin maximalists.  

    Bitcoin is a unique technical invention. It is a software protocol and a network of 10s of 1000s of nodes  globally that provides a secure, immutable open ledger (i.e., records can’t be modified). On this network  flows a digital currency that is scarce and will continue to get more scarce overtime as the supply of new  coins decreases. There will only be 21 million Bitcoin in total issued (19.1 million coins have been  issued, thus far).

    This scarcity and security are obtained by using a blockchain with a proof of work  algorithm which prevents the “double spend” problem. The rules of the network are ironclad,  mathematical and could only be changed with consent of 51% of the decentralized network nodes which  are spread across the world. No human can mess with the pre-coded software formula, and economic  incentives make such a change unlikely. It is just math. Thus, Bitcoin represents, in our view, a digital  form of gold or a sound monetary medium that will be the leading form of payment and store of value in  the future. 

    Crypto currencies do not have the characteristics of Bitcoin. Most are based upon a Proof of Stake (POS) model which allows the largest holders to set and change the rules. This is a huge deal because it means  that the issuance policies of all other crypto currencies are subject to change by the people at the top of  the chain (the leading stakeholders) – meaning they are centralized, not decentralized like Bitcoin.

    Take Ethereum for example, it is controlled by a small group and the token supply issuance policy has changed 6 times during its life and counting. We do not trust or believe in any other crypto currencies as a store  of value. It is possible that useful good cryptos will emerge, but with 20,000 to choose from we have no idea which ones are likely to succeed. Furthermore, these are likely to emerge with different use cases  than secure store of value, which is where Bitcoin excels. 

    Conversely, we are witnessing consistent growth of the Bitcoin network as many are drawn to the  favorable features that we outlined above. As long as adoption and usage continue to grow, when  compared to a fixed supply, it is not hard to see what will happen to price. We think it is sad that the frauds and promotion surrounding many crypto currencies have damaged Bitcoin and scared people away  from the one true technical development which we strongly believe will succeed over the long run.  

    The schedule below shows an Elliott Wave technical analysis of Bitcoin since 2016. As we can see, there  was an impulse move which launched the coin in late 2020 and now we are in a full- fledged correction. Bitcoin has gone through this cycle several times before at smaller scale. 

    To review how we have invested in this area, we presently hold roughly 3% of the Fund in the coins and  roughly 14% of the Fund in private companies which provide services related to Bitcoin. Even after this  draw down in the price of Bitcoin, our cost basis in Bitcoin related investments is $3.9 million and they  are currently valued at $7.0 million (roughly 18% of the Fund). So we are well ahead on our Bitcoin  investments. We have been adding to our coin holdings at this level because Bitcoin has only been this  cheap compared to its 200-day moving average for 3% of the days it has existed.

    We expect the price of Bitcoin to find a bottom as we get closer to the Fed pivot. We still maintain that  it has the most asymmetric upside of any financial asset in the world. We believe that on the other side  of the crypto meltdown, Bitcoin’s strength will grow as it is seen to be the one true crypto currency which  represents an innovation and does what it claims to do. Bitcoin will no longer compete with other cryptos,  it will have won. Some regulation will be required and indeed will likely be a key catalyst to wider adoptions by institutions.  

    Monetary Chaos: Inflation or Deflation

    Ever since we pivoted the Fund in 2008 to focus on gold and silver mining stocks, and subsequently  added Bitcoin to the mix, we have been using the term “monetary chaos” to describe the world we are  living in. The Fed’s low interest rate policies and QE have destroyed true price discovery in open markets. 

     

    As the chart above shows, the Fed decision to hold interest rates at the zero bound for 7 years, when  coupled with massive QE which fueled credit growth, has created an economy that is so distorted that  nobody knows what the true value of anything is anymore. The Taylor Rule is a model developed by  economist John Taylor which adjusts the FF rate to account for inflation and the GDP output gap. In the  past, the Fed has used it to guide policy. The important take away from this chart is that in today’s  conditions, the Taylor rule suggests that the FF Rate should be almost 8%, a number which would be  devastating to the US economy given the 125% Debt to GDP level. 

    Of course, the “Everything Bubble” which occurred in all financial assets was not just driven by the Fed,  the US Government helped with its programs to spend freely to counter the COVID driven economic  downturn. The growth in US Treasury debt over the same time frame has been truly extraordinary and it  has accelerated recently.

    Looking at the chart above, it is hard for an economist or an investor to answer the question: how does  this not end badly? Our society is so leveraged and so addicted to mispriced cheap money that, if the  Fed ever decides to seriously increase the cost of capital in order to defend the integrity of the dollar, the  resulting deflationary collapse is going to rival or exceed the Great Depression (1929-1940).  

    A higher cost of capital will collapse all risk asset markets and the negative wealth effect creates a  negative feedback doom loop. There will be a mad scramble for dollars and liquidity and prices for  everything will plunge. We are seeing the early signs of that rush to dollars in the DXY, the collapse in  stock markets, housing demand softening, and used car prices correcting. This is exactly what happened  in the 1920’s and 1930’s – the last time the world witnessed the collapse of several sovereign debt  bubbles.  

    There are only two alternatives for the US: Default on the massive debt load or inflate our way out of  the mess. Historically, inflation has been the more politically palatable choice.

    The Fed’s Actions Will Work…Until Stuff Breaks

    Currently, because the inflation problem appears to be the most pressing political issue, the Fed is focused  on taming inflation via demand destruction with interest rate hikes and withdrawals of QE (QT). Let’s  face it, things were very frothy, and the Fed should’ve started this process well over a year ago. Year  over year house prices were up 20% per year. Rent prices year over year were up similarly: 17%.  Unemployment is very low and labor is pushing hard for wage increases to counter higher living costs.  The crypto market was a cornucopia of speculation and price bubbles. 

    The problem the Fed will face is that this may not work. Some of the inflation is structural and long term  in nature and will only be solved by bringing more supply capacity online. However, adding capacity  requires capital investment and they just raised the price of capital. Not what would be necessary to  encourage new investments. 

    The Fed knows that part of the inflation problem is “inflationary expectations”. That is, if people expect  inflation, they will spend more quickly thereby creating more demand and driving more inflation. We  think this is why the Fed has been so aggressive with its anti-inflation rhetoric and in slowing the y/y  money supply growth (see chart below).  

    So a deflationary impulse has been created as seen in the softening of almost all asset classes. Yet, given  the fragility of the levered global system and some of the cracks beginning to emerge (e.g., Japan,  Emerging Markets and some Credit Default Swaps), we also think that the Fed is going to be forced to  reverse course, and probably fairly quickly. As a very wise investor recently described the Fed’s  predicament: 

    “We are in a period, a temporary period, that will probably last 6 to 12 months of a tightening  in monetary policy. But that will be the correction in the trend. That tightness will produce  weakness in markets and the economy, to be followed by another round of easing.” 

    – Ray Dalio, June 2022

    Recall that the Fed has two formal mandates (full employment and price stability) and one informal  mandate (functioning financial markets). Powell has referred to this third shadow mandate multiple times  including during the March 2020 COVID crisis when the US Treasury bond market went no bid.  Whereupon he instituted extensive monetary stimulus with a “whatever it takes” policy to keep the  Treasury and other markets functioning. 

    We believe that this short-term deflationary impulse / market correction will be short-lived. It is only a  matter of time until something major breaks in the financial markets. As aggressively as the Fed has  tightened, it will likely have to stimulate just as aggressively when something breaks. This will lead to  even greater monetary debasement.  

    As one of the wags on Twitter likes to say, you cannot taper a ponzi. In our view, the current deflation  is moving quickly, and this reversal will have to happen faster than the market currently anticipates.  There are multiple signs that the new “tough guy” Fed policy is creating problems which will force them  to pivot. We have seen this movie before from the Fed when QT failed, and a Fed U-Turn was required  as the chart below shows. 

    As the brilliant macro analyst, Luke Gromen, describes it, the Fed thinks they are operating with a dial,  but in reality, they have more of a nuclear reactor on/off switch. As Luke stated recently: 

    “Given that severe bond (and equity) market dysfunction has now begun, before the Fed even  officially begins QT, the Fed is left with only a choice of how they want to lose their credibility: 

    1. Via the stock and bond market crashing before the Fed even starts QT, or; 

    2. By the Fed stopping tightening and then loosening policy into an inflation spike.”

    About Larry Lepard

    Larry manages the EMA GARP Fund, a Boston based investment management firm. Their strategy is focused on providing “Monetary Debasement Insurance”. He has 38 years experience and an MBA from Harvard Business School. On Twitter he is @LawrenceLepard Managing Partner and, via email, he is llepard@ema2.com

    Disclaimer: QTR is long various gold and silver miners and have both long and short exposure to the market through equities and derivatives. I have no position in Larry’s funds. Larry is a subscriber to Fringe Finance and has been on my podcast. The excerpts from Larry’s letter, above, shall not be construed as an offer to sell, or the solicitation of an offer to sell, any securities or services. Any such offering may only be made at the time a qualified investor receives from EMA formal materials describing an offering plus related subscription documentation. There is no guarantee the Fund’s investment strategy will be successful. Investing involves risk, and an investment in the Fund could lose money. The strategy is also subject to the following risks: Currency Risk, Non-US Investment Risks, Issuer Specific Risk.

    QTR’s Fringe Finance is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber: Subscribe now

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 07/23/2022 – 17:30

  • WHO's Tedros Overrules Own Committee To Declare Monkeypox "Global Emergency"
    WHO’s Tedros Overrules Own Committee To Declare Monkeypox “Global Emergency”

    One day after the global case count top 16,000 and the US records its first cases involving children, WHO Director Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus declared the global spread of monkeypox a ‘Public Health Emergency of International Concern’, one level below the pandemic status assigned to COVID-19.

    There are now more than 16,000 cases of monkeypox outside Africa, roughly five times the number when the advisers met in June and declined to formally declare it a public health emergency, the New York Times reports.

    Source

    Tedros said after a discussion with the WHO’s emergency committee:

    “We have an outbreak that has spread around the world rapidly, through new modes of transmission, about which we understand too little,” pointing out that cases are increasingly occurring countries where it is traditionally not found, as well as the growing risk to human health, Tedros added that “for all of these reasons, I have decided that the global monkeypox outbreak represents a public health emergency of international concern.”

    The first European cases occurred almost exclusively in gay and bisexual men, with health officials noting that lesions were appearing on patients’ genitals. While it is unclear whether the current outbreak is spreading solely through sexual contact, Tedros stated that “this is an outbreak that is concentrated among men who have sex with men, especially those with multiple sexual partners.”

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    Both cases involving children in the US “are traced back to individuals who come from the…gay men’s community,” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director Rochelle Walensky told the Washington Post, although she did not clarify whether these children caught the disease sexually or non-sexually.

    At least five children in Europe have also been infected.

    Tedros’ decision also comes shortly after the first major peer-reviewed study of monkeypox infections was released, confirming, as Caden Pearson reports, that the virus is primarily being transmitted through the sexual activity of gay and bisexual men in the United States and around the world.

    The Journal of New England Medicine on Thursday published a study that looked at monkeypox infection across 16 countries between April and June, when cases began to emerge in countries outside of Africa.

    The study reported on 528 infections diagnosed between April 27 and June 24, of which 98 percent were in gay or bisexual men with a median age of 38. Of these cases, 95 percent of the infections were suspected to have been transmitted through sexual activity—41 percent also had HIV.

    Tedros called on groups representing gay men to “adopt measures that protect both the health, human rights and dignity of affected communities,” although the WHO chief stopped short of calling on these men to abstain from sexual activity.

    An uptick in recent US cases suggests transmission occurred at the tail end of Pride Month in late June and early July, based on the study finding that incubation is between three and 20 days (usually seven days).

    CDC officials were hesitant to recommend canceling marquee US LGBT events, similar to the super-spreading events in Europe that occurred the month prior.

    LGBT event organizers were also treading carefully in the spring, wanting to avoid stigmatizing the LGBT community. US health officials opted instead to boost targeted messaging to warn gay and bisexual men, who were deemed most at risk.

    The director-general noted that the WHO’s Emergency Committee under the International Health Regulation was “unable to reach a consensus” on whether to make the declaration itself (he actually over-ruled the committee which voted 9 to 6 against the declaration), compelling Tedros to make the declaration on his own. 

    “[W]ith the tools we have right now, we can stop transmission and bring this outbreak under control,” he said. 

    It appears the next ‘thing to fear’ is here.

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 07/23/2022 – 17:00

  • Biden Approves 16th Weapons Transfer To Ukraine – Total Security Aid Now Over $8BN
    Biden Approves 16th Weapons Transfer To Ukraine – Total Security Aid Now Over $8BN

    Authored by Kyle Anzalone via AntiWar.com,

    The White House announced a $270 million weapons package Kiev on Friday. The latest transfer will send four additional High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems, or HIMARS and drones to Ukraine.

    The additional four HIMARS brings the total number the US has committed to sending to Ukraine to 16. Commander of the Joint Chiefs Mark Milley said the other 12 HIMARS have reached Ukraine and have not been destroyed by Russia. The US has provided Ukraine with rockets that can be fired 50 miles by the rocket systems.

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    John Kirby, communications director for the National Security Council, announced the package on Friday. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin told reporters on Wednesday the US would be sending the additional HIMARS.

    The package also includes 36,000 rounds of artillery ammunition for howitzers and 560 Phoenix Ghost tactical drones. The latest transfer is the 17th approved by the White House since Russia invaded Ukraine in February. The Biden administration has now committed over $8 billion in weapons to Kiev’s fight.

    Russia has been critical of arms assistance to Ukraine from the US and its allies. The HIMARS have drawn particular ire from the Kremlin because of the platform’s long range. Ukrainian officials have recently suggested the HIMARS could be used in an offensive to retake the Crimean Peninsula, which Russia annexed in 2014.

    Last week, Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said the Kremlin had decided to take more Ukrainian territory because of the advanced weapons the West sent to Kiev.

    Image: US Marine Corps

    “That means the geographical tasks will extend still further from the current line. We cannot allow the part of Ukraine that Zelensky will control or whoever replaces him to have weapons that will pose a direct threat to our territory and the territory of those republics that have declared their independence,” he said.

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 07/23/2022 – 16:30

  • Goldman Desk: We Now Have An Answer Whether "Long-Only" Demand Would Return After Barrage Of Soft Earnings
    Goldman Desk: We Now Have An Answer Whether “Long-Only” Demand Would Return After Barrage Of Soft Earnings

    Back on Thursday, we wrote that according to the Goldman flow desk, “most clients were hating this rally“, sentiment which Nomura’s Charlie McElligott picked up on that same day when he wrote that the risk over the near term is a “further pile-on to the crowd who has expected another surge lower in stocks, instead squeezing their shorts and accelerating the enormous Systematic buying already going through as CTAs cover and flip long.”

    We also wrote that – for at least a few hours – it appeared that the most steadfast bears who are recently capitulated bulls, and who according to the latest BofA Fund Manager Survey, are now the most pessimistic on record – are starting to capitulate yet again, this time calling a bottom to stocks, and are starting to buy. Indeed, as Goldman flow trader John Flood wrote in in his Thursday end of day wrap, “some noteworthy long-only clients have now started to passively buy on our desk throughout the day (velocity picked up this afternoon as mkt moved higher)” adding that “executed flow across US equities franchise had +338bp buy skew vs 30d avg of -30bp sell skew. L/Os buy skew +9.8% was highest here since since 6/30.”

    That said, before concluding that this is more than just another bear market rally, Flood wrote that “it will be interesting to see if this “long-only” momentum will sustain into Friday post “a slew of relatively disappointing earnings” post close, from companies such as SNAP, COF, CRSR, SAM, SIVB, STX.

    Well, fast forward to Friday when despite strong earnings from American Express, the post-SNAP disappointment was just too great and risk sentiment collapsed. And so, picking up on his rhetorical question from Thursday, Goldman’s Flood – who had said that “it will be interesting to see if this “long-only” momentum will sustain post the barrage of poor earnings from SNAP, COF, CRSR, SAM, SIVB, STX – wrote in his Friday end of day wrap that he had an answer: “As of close today answer ending up being a hard no RE if the L/O demand would come back post a sleeve of soft earnings.”

    But while this week ended inconclusively, it is “next week that when will certainly find out where the bodies lie as 50% of S&P’s mkt cap reporting paired with FOMC likely forces active managers to show their hands.”

    Here are a few other points, courtesy of Goldman’s Prime Brokerage, which show that most hedge funds continue to dump risk into this “most unloved” rally:

    • Avg U.S. Fundamental HF +371bps on the week bringing ytd performance to -15.71%. Fundamental L/S Gross leverage +2.0 pts to 172% (26th percentile 1-year) and Net leverage +3.2 pts to 49% (15th percentile 1-year).
    • The Prime book was net bought for the 1st time in 4 weeks (+0.6 SDs 1-year), though flows were definitively risk-off with short covers outpacing long sales 2.3 to 1 – this week’s $ short covers were the largest since Dec ’21. Macro Products (Index and ETF combined) were net bought led by short covers, while Single Stocks were net sold for a 3rd straight week driven by long sales.
    • Unloved rally in to today as hedge funds covered ETF shorts and unwound Single Stock risk at the fastest pace since March. US-listed ETF shorts were net covered for 8 straight days, while US Single Stocks were net sold for 7 straight days driven by long sales and to a lesser extent short covers.
    • Managers remain highly cautious on the TMT mega caps and further reduced exposures heading into earnings next week. The current FAAMG Net exposure (as % of the overall Prime book) ranks in the 7th percentile vs. the past year and in the 3rd percentile vs. the past five years.

    Finally, there are two key factors that can change the risk dynamic next week: the return of buybacks, and acceleration of buying from CTAs. Here is Flood again:

    • Corporates have been the most consistent buyer of the US stock market this year. $1.3T in authorizations for this year ($1.1T of which we think will be executed…the most ever). That being said our buyback desk has been relatively quiet the last 2 weeks as corps firmly in blackout period. Our model shows blackout period ending post close today. AKA expect corp bid to return to the mkt next week.
    • CTAs: have $5b of S&P to buy per week at these levels. North of 4070 (long term momentum) this demand essentially doubles.

    More in the full note available to pro subscribers.

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 07/23/2022 – 16:00

  • Nearly 30% Of Gen Z Living Permanently With Parents Amid Inflation Squeeze
    Nearly 30% Of Gen Z Living Permanently With Parents Amid Inflation Squeeze

    Authored by Katabella Roberts via The Epoch Times,

    Amid surging rental prices, nearly 30 percent of Americans born in the late 1990s and early 2000s still live at home with their parents or relatives, according to a new survey.

    The survey was conducted by Qualtrics on behalf of Credit Karma, from June 10 to June 15, among 1,022 U.S. adults between the ages of 18 and 25.

    It found that 29 percent of those surveyed who are in the Gen Z age range—between 18 and 25—are living at home with parents or other relatives, and described this as a long-term housing solution as the cost of living across the country soars.

    Another 27 percent said they live with a romantic partner, and just 13 percent live in a household with one or more roommates.

    The survey comes as rental prices across the country have surged amid increased inflation, particularly in big cities like New York and Los Angeles, leaving many of those in the younger generation forced to reassess their living circumstances and tighten their belts.

    June’s inflation figures showed that the rent index rose 0.8 percent over the month, the largest monthly increase since April 1986.

    Of those surveyed who have successfully moved out of their family home, 32 percent said half of their monthly income goes toward rent or a mortgage, while 27 percent said they spend a quarter of their monthly income on housing and another 21 percent said they spend a third of their income on paying for their home.

    Overall, 61 percent of those surveyed said they have a household income of $50,000 or less.

    Soaring Inflation Impacting Saving

    However, the average monthly housing cost for those surveyed was around $1,060, lower than the national average of $1,295.

    A separate report by Zumper National, in June, found that U.S. rental prices are beginning to decline across several American cities this summer following an upward trend this past year.

    Still, with the 12-month Consumer Price Index (CPI) hitting 9.1 percent in June (pdf), “zoomers” (as the Gen Z cohort is called) are still left unable to put aside much in terms of savings, according to the study, which found that 28 percent of respondents are not able to save right now.

    More than half of those who are unable to save money said that this is due to inflation, while 47 percent said this is because they are not earning enough and 40 percent said that inflation is outpacing their earned income.

    “Right now, many zoomers, especially recent graduates, are attempting to make their first real transition into adulthood. For some that includes starting their first job or moving to a new city and for others that means simply moving out of their family home,” said Colleen McCreary, consumer financial advocate at Credit Karma.

    McCreary added that these milestones are being hampered by increased costs and the current volatile economy, which she said is “making it harder than ever for young people to become financially independent.”

    While the White House has admitted that inflation is “unacceptably high,” Biden administration officials are still optimistic that an impending recession is not on the horizon.

    White House economic adviser Jared Bernstein, on Sunday, pointed to strong consumer spending, which he said is bolstering the economy.

    However, the latest survey published by Credit Karma showed that 40 percent of Gen Z respondents are relying on credit cards and other forms of credit to pay for their purchases due to increased inflation.

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 07/23/2022 – 15:30

  • Russia Informs Turkey It Had "Nothing To Do" With Odessa Port Attack
    Russia Informs Turkey It Had “Nothing To Do” With Odessa Port Attack

    Update(1524ET): While the White House and European allies, along with the Ukrainian government, were lock-step in condemning as outrageous a series of reported Russian airstrikes on the port of Odesa the morning after the grain export deal was signed in Istanbul, the Kremlin is apparently denying it was behind the attack:

    Turkey’s defense minister said on Saturday that Russian officials had told Ankara that Moscow had “nothing to do” with strikes on Ukraine’s Odesa port.

    “In our contact with Russia, the Russians told us that they had absolutely nothing to do with this attack and that they were examining the issue very closely and in detail,” Defence Minister Hulusai Akar said in a statement.

    “The fact that such an incident took place right after the agreement we made yesterday really worried us,” he added.

    Ukraine for its part, has said it is still preparing agricultural exports despite the threat of more strikes. Key infrastructure at Odesa port was not damaged, according to local officials.

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    The EU joined the US in blaming Russia and condemning the attack, with Ukraine’s President Zelensky accusing Moscow of deliberately trying to thwart the deal it just signed.

    * * *

    UN Secretary-General António Guterres has condemned a fresh missile attack on the key Ukrainian port of Odessa on Saturday, which came a mere hours after a major UN-brokered Russia-Ukraine deal was reached to unblock Ukrainian grain export transit. Western media and officials are widely calling it a continued deliberate attack on Ukraine’s vital grain export infrastructure by Russia, despite the signed breakthrough agreement in Istanbul the evening prior.

    “The secretary-general unequivocally condemns reported strikes today in the Ukrainian port of Odesa,” Farhan Haq, deputy spokesman for U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres said following the strikes, some of which were captured on video…

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    The UN statement, however, stopped short of assigning blame or that the attack violated the grain export deal agreed to by Russia. 

    “The enemy attacked the Odesa sea trade port with Kalibr cruise missiles; 2 missiles were shot down by air defense forces; 2 hit the infrastructure of the port,” the Operational Command South wrote on Telegram on Saturday.

    America’s ambassador to Kiev slammed the attacks as “outrageous” and demanded that Russia be held to account…

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    The UN’s Haq continued, “Yesterday, all parties made clear commitments on the global stage to ensure the safe movement of Ukrainian grain and related products to global markets,” adding that “These products are desperately needed to address the global food crisis and ease the suffering of millions of people in need around the globe. Full implementation by the Russian Federation, Ukraine, and Türkiye is imperative.”

    And The New York Times weighed in on whether this will collapse the deal even before it gets off the ground: “Russia may not have technically violated the deal, since it did not pledge to avoid attacking the parts of the Ukrainian ports that are not directly used for the grain exports, according to a senior U.N. official.”

    The two sides inked what Kiev was eager to stress were separate but “mirror” agreements with the UN. The Ukrainian government has said will not negotiate directly with the Russian side until all its national territory is returned. There were not even photo ops involving Russian and Ukrainian officials in the same vicinity in the same room.

    Friday’s grain deal signing ceremony, via EPA-EFE

    UN Secretary General António Guterres and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan were present for the finalized deal at Istanbul’s lavish Dolmabahce Palace, with Erdogan saying the landmark deal would “hopefully revive the path to peace.”

    Guterres said, “Today, there is a beacon on the Black Sea — a beacon of hope, a beacon of possibility, a beacon of relief” – as over 20 million tons of grain which especially a number of Mideast and African nations are heavily reliant upon are expected to be released.

    Ukrainian Infrastructure Minister Oleksandr Kubrakov later in the day said there was not significant damage from the Russian strikes, and announced, “We continue technical preparations for the launch of exports of agricultural products from our ports.”

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 07/23/2022 – 15:24

  • Fish Tank: Mark Cuban Has Posted A Combined Net Loss On His 80+ Shark Tank Investments
    Fish Tank: Mark Cuban Has Posted A Combined Net Loss On His 80+ Shark Tank Investments

    World famous “shark” Mark Cuban has admitted this month that across his more than 80 investments on the hit show “Shark Tank”, he has posted a net loss. 

    Cuban has been on the show for more than a decade, but admitted last week that his return from the $20 million he’s invested in 85 startups has “taken a net loss”, according to a CNBC writeup. 

    “I’ve gotten beat,” Cuban admitted. He called his worst investment deal the Breathometer, which was supposed to be “the world’s first smartphone breathalyzer.”

    The inventor, Charles Michael Yim, was able to secure investments from all five sharks, who valued the company at $3.3 million. Yim claimed to have created a smartphone attachment that could act as a breathalyzer. 

    But instead of working, Yim would be jetsetting and doing Fyre Festival-style “networking” across the globe, Cuban said. The company also ran into trouble when the FTC alleged in 2017 that it misled customers about its ability to accurately measure BAC. 

    “It was a great product. But, the guy – Charles – I’d look at his Instagram and he’d be in Bora Bora … Two weeks later, he’d been in [Las] Vegas partying, and then he’d be on Necker Island with Richard Branson. I’d text him, like ‘What the f— are you doing? You’re supposed to be working,’” Cuban said on the podcast. 

    “Next thing you know, all of the money’s gone.”

    Cuban lamented: “That was my biggest beating.”

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 07/23/2022 – 15:00

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