Today’s News 27th March 2021

• Biden's Last Throw Of Geopolitical Dice
  Biden’s Last Throw Of Geopolitical Dice

  Authored by Alasdair Macleod via GoldMoney.com,

  In a continuing cold war, America is already on the back foot. We have yet to see how long it will be before the Biden administration realises its few victories will be unaffordably Pyrrhic, and by merely not responding to American provocation the Chinese/Russian partnership will emerge as the victors.

  Halford Mackinder’s century-old vision of a Eurasian superstate, based between the Volga and the Yangtse, is becoming reality. Commentators usually fail to understand why; it is not due to military superiority, but down to simple economics. While the US economy suffers a post-lockdown inflationary outcome and an existential crisis for the dollar, China’s economy will boom on the back of increasing domestic consumption, which is an official government objective; and increasing exports, the consequence of America’s stimulation of consumer demand and a soaring budget deficit.

  The Chinese-Russian partnership already dominates or controls Mackinder’s World Island, defined as Eurasia and all Africa. South-east Asian nations notionally in the US’s sphere of influence are firmly tied to the partnership’s economy, and the overland and sea silk roads similarly bind the EU and the Indian and Western Pacific Oceans’ states respectively. It amounts to over half the world’s population no longer sharing the economic and currency interests of 328 million Americans.

  This article summarises the background to the geopolitical situation facing the Biden administration before concluding that in the current cold war against the combined power of Russia and China, America will fail in its political objectives, not through lack of military power, but due to economic forces.

  

  Introduction

  Now that the Biden administration has settled in, it is time to reassess American policy towards Russia, China and the wider Asian scene. Is it going to be a continuation of the Trump administration’s policies, or is there something new going on? Given the continued tenure of staffers at the Pentagon from before the Trump presidency, it seems unlikely there will be much in the way of détente: it is game-on for the cold war to continue.

  Before delving into geopolitics, we must be careful to define a neutral position from which to observe developments. You cannot be objective in these matters if you justify an uninvited invasion of a foreign territory to take out a proclaimed public enemy, as America did with Osama Bin Laden and then condemn Russia for attempting to murder an ex-KGB officer living in Salisbury, or for that matter the dismembering of a journalist in the Saudi Embassy in Turkey. You must be aware that it is an established part of what Kipling called The Great Game, and always has been.

  Acts of this type are the product of states and their agents acting above any laws and are therefore permitted to ignore them. We must dismiss from our minds the concept that there are good and bad guys — when it comes to foreign operations, they all behave the same way. We must dismiss nationalistic justifications. Nor can we believe propaganda from any state when it comes to geopolitics, and particularly in a cold war. Know that our news is carefully managed for us. As far as possible we must work from facts and use reasoned deduction.

  We are now equipped to ask an important question: the US status quo, with its dollar hegemony is seen by the new Biden administration as an unchallengeable right, and its position as the world’s hegemon is vital for… what? The benefit of the world, or the benefit of the US at the world’s expense? To answer this, we must consider it from the point of view of the US military and intelligence complex.

  The problem facing us is that the Pentagon became fully institutionalised in managing America’s external security following the second world war. When the Soviets extended their sphere of influence into the three great undeveloped continents, Asia, Africa and South America, there was a case for defending capitalism and freedom — or at least freedom in an American sense by keeping minor nations on side. This was done by fair means and often foul for expediency’s sake.

  But the fall of the Berlin Wall and the death of Mao Zedong made the American military and intelligence functions largely superfluous, other than matters more directly related to national defence. But it is in the nature of government departments and their private sector contractors to do everything in their power to retain both influence and budgets, and the argument that new threats will arise is always hard for politicians to resist. And what do the statists in a government department do when they have secured their survival? Their retention of power without real purpose descends into alternative military objectives. And from the first Bush president, they were all firmly on-message.

  President Trump was the first president for some time not to start military engaements abroad. His attempts to wind down foreign operations were strongly resisted by defence and intelligence services. And his efforts to obtain a détente with North Korea were met with disdain — even horror at Langley.

  Whatever the truth in these matters, it is highly unlikely that the power conferred by the ability to initiate unchallengeable cover-ups, information management, subversion of foreign states and secret intelligence operations is not abused. The proliferation and traction of conspiracy theories, attributed in their origin to Russian cyber-attacks and disinformation, is a consequence of one’s own government continually bending the truth to the point where large sections of the population begin to believe it is its own government’s propaganda.

  This brings us to the change in administration. As a senator, Biden had interests in foreign affairs dating back to the late 1970s and was on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee from 1997 and subsequently became its chairman. As such a long-standing politician in this field it is almost certain that the Pentagon establishment regards Biden as a safe pair of hands; in other words, a president who is likely to support Langley’s role in setting geopolitical and defence priorities. Surely, for them this is a welcome change from the off-message President Trump.

  Policies to contain the Russian threat

  Despite the Navalny affair, Putin is still unchallengeable as Russian leader, having emerged from the post-Soviet turmoil where chaos and organised crime were the order of the day. No western leader has had such a tough political background and Putin is a survivor, a strongman firmly in control. This matters for America and NATO with respect to policies in Ukraine, the Caucasus, Syria, Iran and Turkey. Any attempt by America to complete unfinished business in Ukraine (a triparty scrap involving Russia, Germany/EU and the US over the Nord Stream pipelines depriving Ukraine of transition revenues is already brewing) is likely to lead to confrontations with Russia on the ground. And Russia signed a military cooperation pact with Iran in 2015. Like a cat with a mouse, Putin is playing with Turkey, interested in laying pipelines to southern Europe, and getting it to drift out of NATO. Russia’s interest in Syria is to keep it out of America’s sphere of influence, which with Turkey’s help it has managed to do.

  For some time, military analysts have been telling us that we are now in a cyber war with Russia, accusing it of interfering in elections and promoting conspiracy theories — the US presidential election last November being the most recent assertion. As with all these allegations there is no proof offered, just statements from government sources which have a track record of being economical with the truth. Whatever the truth may be, cyber wars are closely intertwined with propaganda.

  Attacks on Russia since the millennium have been by disrupting dollar payments, and less importantly, by sanctioning individuals close to Putin. The monetary threat was originally justified by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2014, leading to the collapse of the rouble and a hike in interest rates. The new cold war had taken a financial turn. Russia’s response was to reduce the economy’s dependence on dollars as much as possible, with the central bank selling dollar reserves and adding gold in their place. It also set up a new payments system to reduce its dependence on the SWIFT interbank payments system.

  Russia has survived all financial attacks and is now better insulated against them for the future. One-nil to the Russians. But the cost has been hidden, with western investment restricted to being mainly from the EU (particularly directed at the oil and gas industries). With the nation being fundamentally a kleptocracy, economic progress is severely constrained. Furthermore, with Russia being the world’s largest energy exporter, the west’s policy of decarbonisation is a medium to long term threat, leading to the demise of Russia’s USP. For these and other reasons Russia has turned to China as both a partner and an economic protector. In return, Russia is resource-rich, an energy provider, and therefore of great value to China.

  Russia’s history of assassinating leading dissidents on foreign soil has been its greatest mistake. It took years after the Litvinenko assassination for diplomatic relations with the UK to be fully restored. The deaths of several Russian oligarchs in recent years on British soil were thought to be the actions of organised crime and not attributed to the Russian state. But the clumsy assassination attempt on Sergei Skripal in Salisbury by GRU officers three years ago is unlikely to lead to a rapprochement anytime soon.

  The Russian and Chinese geopolitical partnership

  One of the first persons to identify the geopolitical importance of Russia’s resources was Halford Mackinder in a paper for the Royal Geographical Society in 1904. He later developed it into his Heartland theory. Mackinder argued that control of the Heartland, which stretched from the Volga to the Yangtze, would control the “World-Island”, which was his term for all Europe, Asia and Africa. Over a century later, Mackinder’s theory resonates with the two leading nations behind the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO).

  The underlying point is that North and South America, Britain, Japan and Australasia in the final analysis are peripheral and less important than Mackinder’s World-Island. There was a time when British and then American primacy outweighed its importance, but this may no longer be true. If Mackinder’s vision is valid about the overriding importance of undeveloped resources, Russia is positioned to become with China the most powerful national partnership on earth.

  The SCO is the greatest challenge yet mounted to American economic power and technological supremacy. And Russia and China are clearly determined to ditch the dollar. We don’t yet know what will replace it. However, the fact that the Russian central bank and nearly all the other central banks and governments in the SCO have been increasing their gold reserves for some time could be an important clue as to how the representatives of three billion Euro-Asians — almost half the world’s population — see the future of trans-Asian money.

  In terms of GDP per capita the United States is a long way ahead of the field. But it is also the most indebted at the national level. The difference with the SCO is at the purchasing power parity level, making market prices of secondary importance. While prices regionally vary considerably the costs of goods in the SCO are as an average considerably less than in the US and EU, so that on a PPP basis the SCO’s GDP is significantly greater than that of the US or the EU.

  The inclusion of the EU in Figure 1 is a post-Brexit nod to the fact that the EU can no longer be automatically regarded as being in the US sphere of influence. The commercial ties to the SCO, with both energy reliance from Russia and silk road rail terminals in various EU states are clearly the trade future for the EU. The EU is advanced in its plans to bring national forces under its combined flag, which by giving them an EU identity can only loosen NATO ties with America. While not an active threat to America’s power, one can envisage the EU sitting on the fence in an intensifying cold war.

  The SCO started life in 2001 as a security partnership between Russia and China, incorporating the ‘stans to the east of the Caspian Sea. Born out an earlier organisation, the Shanghai Five Group, it was set up to combat terrorism, separatism and extremism. It is still a platform for joint military exercises, but none have taken place since 2007 and it has morphed into a loose economic partnership instead.

  Since the founding Shanghai Five, the SCO now includes India and Pakistan. Observer status includes Afghanistan, Belarus, Iran and Mongolia. These nations can attend SCO conferences, but their participation is very limited. Dialogue partners include Armenia, Azerbaijan, Cambodia, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Turkey. These nations can participate actively in SCO conferences, and this status is seen as a preliminary to full membership. Egypt and Syria have applied for observer status and Israel, Iraq and Saudi Arabia have applied to be dialog partners. Apart from South East Asian nations, which are dominated by a Chinese diaspora anyway, SCO members and their influence covers almost all of Halford Mackinder’s World Island, with the exception of the European Union.

  This is the reality that faces American hegemony; there are twenty-one nations across Asia in a non-American alliance, or on the cusp of joining it. All the other European and Asian nations are within the SCO’s sphere of influence through trade, even if not politically affiliated. It is getting more difficult to define the nations definitely in the US pocket, other than its five-eyes partners (Canada, the UK, Australia and New Zealand). This simple fact places severe limitations on US action against China, and to a lesser extent Russia.

  It is an exaggeration to suggest that an attack on one member state is an attack on them all. Their cooperation is fundamentally economic rather than military; except, as stated above, the SCO’s original function remains to eliminate terrorism, separatism and extremism. Indeed, India and Pakistan are at loggerheads over Kashmir, and China and India have border disputes in the Himalayas. But attempts, by, say, the US to prize India away from the SCO is bound to generate wider issues, and perhaps a response, from the other members.

  Who do you go with?

  Other Nations around the world have a choice. Broadly, it is to go with America, to go with China/Russia, or sit on the fence. We have already concluded that the EU’s economic interests in the wake of Brexit are turning it into being a fence-sitter instead of continuing to be in the US sphere of influence. Naturally, all of sub-Saharan Africa and South America started off fence-sitting until they became increasingly indebted to China. They still have leaders who are happy to take money from either of the two major hegemons — America or the Chinese partnership — but in that game the Chinese are ahead in the field. Their seemingly insatiable demand for commodities and energy and infrastructure building means that local politicians have been bought and will stay bought. But if America offers more money, these nations’ politicians will undoubtedly take it. But that is unlikely to lead to their political allegiance changing from being with China.

  This form of American diplomacy was at its height in the fifties and sixties, and the US was able to outgun the Soviets and Chinese in providing “aid”, much of which was trousered by politicians. This was particularly true of the oil money recycled by American banks into loans to South American governments in the late seventies. The Chinese are not so careless with money: when they build a bridge on a Caribbean island, they are firmly hands-on providing money, management and some of the labour and local politicians are only rewarded with electoral kudos.

  There are, therefore, fundamental differences between attempts to keep a country within a particular sphere of influence sixty years ago and today. And there can be no doubt that the Chinese are winning the game. Overland, across the China Sea and the Indian Ocean, the silk roads and associated projects are having a substantial impact on emerging nations in a way not seen before. China has advanced Mackinder’s World Island concept by embracing most of Africa into its sphere of influence. As well as the SCO’s control over Asia from Vladivostok to the Mediterranean, as the largest oil consumer China’s influence over the Middle East — which supplies little or no oil to the US — binds nations in that region into the SCO.

  The contrast with America’s foreign policy under Trump could not have been greater. America became autarkic, determined to repatriate production from abroad. It lacked a strategy to counter China’s rapidly growing spheres of influence. Even the EU integrated major elements of its economy with China and Russia, and now that the US’s only five-eyes representative in the EU has left it, we can expect this integration to increase more rapidly.

  Instead, Trump concentrated on attacking China, its technology and Hong Kong. China faced tariffs, prompting her to respond partly in kind. Meng Wanzhou, finance officer for Huawei, was detained in Vancouver on a US extradition request, on the pretext of payments involving Iran. Her arrest was the start of a US campaign to exclude Huawei from G5 mobile contracts in the west, pressure that eventually led the UK to downgrade Huawei’s contracts. It ended up uniting the five-eyes security partnership against China’s technology on a reds-under-the-bed argument: Chinese technology embedded in western communications systems gives them the ability to spy on us. The UK’s GCHQ changed its position from there being no evidence of embedded spyware in Huawei equipment to it being vulnerable to being used for spying by the Chinese government.

  Hong Kong

  The build-up of riots against Hong Kong’s proposed extradition treaty with the Mainland started in 2019, supported and driven by anti-Chinese propaganda. America finally emerged as China’s adversary, no longer just a trading partner worried by the trade imbalances. And Hong Kong was the pressure point.

  This had happened before, in 2014. The Chinese leadership was certain the riots in Hong Kong at that time reflected the work of American intelligence agencies. The following is an extract translated from a speech by Major-General Qiao Liang, a leading strategist for the Peoples’ Liberation Army, addressing the Chinese Communist Party’s Central Committee in 2015:

  “Since the Diaoyu Islands conflict and the Huang-yan Island conflict, incidents have kept popping up around China, including the confrontation over China’s 981 oil rigs with Vietnam and Hong Kong’s “Occupy Central” event. Can they still be viewed as simply accidental?

  “I accompanied General Liu Yazhou, the Political Commissar of the National Defence University, to visit Hong Kong in May 2014. At that time, we heard that the “Occupy Central” movement was being planned and could take place by end of the month. However, it didn’t happen in May, June, July, or August.

  “What happened? What were they waiting for?

  “Let’s look at another timetable: the U.S. Federal Reserve’s exit from the Quantitative Easing (QE) policy. The U.S. said it would stop QE at the beginning of 2014. But it stayed with the QE policy in April, May, June, July, and August. As long as it was in QE, it kept overprinting dollars, and the dollar‘s price couldn’t go up. Thus, Hong Kong’s “Occupy Central” should not happen either.

  “At the end of September, the Federal Reserve announced the U.S. would exit from QE. The dollar started going up. Then Hong Kong’s “Occupy Central” broke out in early October.

  “Actually, the Diaoyu Islands, Huang-yan Island, the 981 rigs, and Hong Kong’s “Occupy Central” movement were all bombs. The successful explosion of any one of them would lead to a regional crisis or a worsened investment environment around China. That would force the withdrawal of a large amount of investment from this region, which would then return to the U.S.”

  That America organised discontent anew in Hong Kong is probably still China’s view today. Clearly, the Chinese believed America covertly managed “Occupy Central” and therefore were at it again. Apart from what their spies told them, the protests were too well organised and planned to be spontaneous. This time, the attack appeared to have a better chance of success. The plan was coordinated with American pressure on Hong Kong’s dollar peg in an attempt to destabilise it, principally through the threat to extend tariffs against China to Hong Kong. This second attempt to collapse Hong Kong was therefore more serious.

  Hong Kong is critical, because it is the channel for foreign investment portfolio flows into China. This was important to the Americans, because the US Treasury could not afford to see global portfolio flows attracted into China at a time when they were needed to invest in increasing quantities of US Treasury stock. Understand that, and you will have grasped a large part of the urgency behind America’s attempt to destabilise Hong Kong.

  Qiao Liang makes this point elsewhere in his aforementioned speech, claiming American tactics are the consequence of the ending of Bretton Woods:

  “Without the restriction of gold, the US can print dollars at will. If they keep a large amount of dollars inside the US, it will certainly create inflation. If they export dollars to the world, the whole world is helping the US deal with its inflation. That’s why inflation is not high in the US.”

  While one can take some minor issues with his simplistic analysis, that is not the point. What matters is what the Chinese believe. It was after that second attempt by America to destabilise Hong Kong that the Chinese concluded they must take direct control and abandon the treaty whereby it had been returned by Britain to their jurisdiction.

  China makes mistakes too

  China’s strategy in dealing with America has generally been to be slow to respond, and never to provoke. This accords with Sun Tzu’s The Art of War on tactical dispositions: “To secure ourselves against defeat lies in our own hands, but the opportunity of defeating the enemy is provided by the enemy himself.”

  Generally, China’s strategy has been to refuse to be provoked. A possible exception has been Hong Kong, where it was decided it was more important to secure the island against further attack, overriding the terms of the treaty with the UK. But its greatest mistake was in imposing trade tariffs in a tit-for-tat response to US tariffs. America was simply isolating itself with its tariff policies, and China’s response gave the Trump administration the excuse to escalate the trade war from trade tariffs into an attack on China’s technology, which was overtaking that of America. That led to Meng Wanzhou, finance officer for Huawei, being detained in Vancouver on a US extradition request, still being fought in the BC’s high court this week.

  The Uyghur re-education programme is currently being weaponised against China. Given the Chinese are unlikely to turn what was originally a policy of eliminating Muslim terrorism into a more humane approach, they have little option but to ensure no access is given to journalists and to tough it out. Taiwan is similarly regarded as non-negotiable, and with even the British sending a new carrier to the South China Sea, it could become a flashpoint in the coming months.

  Economic factors

  Before the pandemic and with America targeting Chinese exports, China’s leadership introduced policies to encourage domestic consumption. For this to work required a drop in the savings rate. In fact, it has been falling since 2010, when according to the World Bank it peaked at 51% of GDP, to just under 44% in 2019. It was the difference between Chinese and American savings rates which was the driving factor behind their mutual trade imbalance.

  China recognises that it must move on from an export-driven economic model. But while the American and other welfare-driven economies are running mounting budget deficits, China will continue to have a growing trade surplus. While this will continue to be a problem for the Americans, without imported goods from China product shortages would simply fuel higher prices on top of unprecedented monetary expansion. This is the reality behind the cold war for the next few years. Unfortunately, being highly Keynesian the new Biden administration is unlikely to accept the twin deficits argument and will think that it can still call the shots on trade without cutting its own spending. But Figure 1 above showed US government debt to GDP is already over $28 trillion and on Biden’s infrastructure and greening plans alone will likely rise significantly further by this fiscal year.

  The combination of increasing consumer demand while exports to America boom gives China a window of economic expansion only enjoyed by its Asian neighbours. The contrast between China’s prospects can hardly be greater than those for America. The economics alone militate strongly against the US pursuing a geopolitical objective other than quietly backing off.

  But senior US personel are still acting as if the Chinese should kowtow to America, as evidenced in the proceedings in Alaska last week. The Chinese were robust and will have calculated their position as strong. Sun Tzu again: “Therefore the clever combatant imposes his will on the enemy but does not allow the enemy’s will to be imposed on him”.

  Conclusions

  The Biden presidency faces significant challenges in the ongoing cold war and America is unlikely to retain its hegemonic status. During Trump’s presidency, attempts to curtail China’s trade and technological development did not succeed, and has only emboldened both China and Russia to stand firm and as much as possible to do without America and its dollar.

  Their senior advisors are, or should be, acutely aware of the debt and inflation traps facing the US and also the EU. Following the Fed’s policies of accelerated monetary expansion announced last March, China increased her purchases of commodities and raw materials, in effect signalling she prefers them to dollar liquidity. As a policy, it is likely to be extended further, given China’s existing stockpile of dollars and dollar-denominated debt. Her dilemma is not just the fragile state of the US economy, but that of the EU which on any dispassionate analysis is a state failing economically and politically as well. China will not want to be blamed for triggering a series of events which will get everyone reaching out for their forgotten copy of Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom.

  As events take their course, the risk of a dollar collapse and a matching crisis in the euro, though for different reasons, increases. For Mackinder’s heartland theory to be proved and for the Russian and Chinese partnership to be in control of it, a mega-crisis facing the profligate money-printers must happen. All history and a priori economic theory confirm it will happen. The SCO’s Plan B will be a continuance of Plan A, hatched out of the Shanghai Five Group, making the World Island a self-contained unit not dependent on the peripherals — principally, the five eyes. For money, they must give up western ways with unbacked state currencies. Between them they have enough state-owned declared and undeclared gold to back the yuan, and the rouble. Give these two currencies free convertibility into gold, and they will be accepted everywhere, so their old cold war enemies can trade their way back to prosperity. The US has, or says it has, enough gold to put a failing dollar back on a gold standard, but for it to be credible it must radically cut spending, its geopolitical ambitions, and return its budget into balance. With luck, that is how the new cold war ends.

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 03/26/2021 – 23:40

• Glock 19 Disguised As Nerf Gun Seized In North Carolina Drug Raid 
  Glock 19 Disguised As Nerf Gun Seized In North Carolina Drug Raid 

  Deputies in North Carolina executed a search warrant last week and seized drugs, money, and a Nerf toy gun, but it turned out to be a Glock 19. 

  The Catawba County Sheriff’s Office said during the search warrant, deputies found “quantities of cocaine, psilocybin mushrooms and marijuana. Investigators also seized approximately $2,300.00 in United States Currency and twenty firearms consisting of pistols, rifles, and shotguns.” 

  One of the most bizarre weapons deputies came across was a “converted Glock model 19 pistol with a fifty round drum magazine, had been altered to resemble a toy Nerf gun,” said Catawba County Sheriff’s Office.

  

  “Firearms of this type, while not illegal to possess, are concerning to law enforcement,” the Sheriff’s Office said in a Facebook post. 

  

  Damien Alonzo Burch, 35, was arrested and charged for drug possession but not for the possession of the Glock model 19 pistol Nerf gun. Burch was issued a $20,000 unsecured bond with a court appearance on Mar. 18. 

  

  Some Facebook users responded to the Sheriff’s Office’s Facebook post by saying:

  “Wait all those drugs and only $2300.00? He made 20k bale? There’s some missing money in this equation. There’s a lot of money to be made off that Nerf conversion. I wonder did he do a super soaker or a wii 1911,” said one user. 

  Another user said: “I think the clear take-way from this is… It’s NERF or NOTHING.” 

  “Imagine somebody shooting at you and you be like “oh it’s a nerf gun” and then you die,” said a user. 

  So we have several questions: The first is what exactly does “converted Glock model 19 pistol” mean? 

  Were there any 3D printed parts involved in the build? 

  As we noted last month, building a 3D-printed gun is becoming easier and easier for anyone to do at home. 

  Nevertheless, the “converted Glock model 19 pistol” appears to have been crafted by someone with experience. 

  And if there’s one, there’s two – which leaves us with another question – how many Nerf-like weapons are on the streets?

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 03/26/2021 – 23:20

• After A Year Under Lockdown, Will Our Freedoms Survive The Tyranny of COVID-19?
  After A Year Under Lockdown, Will Our Freedoms Survive The Tyranny of COVID-19?

  Authored by John W. Whitehead & Nisha Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,

  “The remedy is worse than the disease.”

  – Francis Bacon

  One way or another, the majority of Americans will survive COVID-19.

  

  It remains to be seen, however, whether our freedoms will survive the tyranny of the government’s heavy-handed response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

  Indeed, now that the government has gotten a taste for flexing its police state powers by way of a bevy of lockdowns, mandates, restrictions, contact tracing programs, heightened surveillance, censorship, overcriminalization, etc., we may all be long-haulers, suffering under the weight of long-term COVID-19 afflictions.

  Instead of dealing with the headaches, fatigue and neurological aftereffects of the virus, however, “we the people” may well find ourselves burdened with a Nanny State inclined to use its draconian pandemic powers to protect us from ourselves.

  Therein lies the danger of the government’s growing addiction to power.

  What started out a year ago as an apparent effort to prevent a novel coronavirus from sickening the nation (and the world) has become yet another means by which world governments (including our own) can expand their powers, abuse their authority, and further oppress their constituents.

  Until recently, the police state had been more circumspect in its power grabs, but this latest state of emergency has brought the beast out of the shadows.

  It’s a given that you can always count on the government to take advantage of a crisis, legitimate or manufactured. Emboldened by the citizenry’s inattention and willingness to tolerate its abuses, the government has weaponized one national crisis after another in order to expand its powers.

  The war on terror, the war on drugs, the war on illegal immigration, asset forfeiture schemes, road safety schemes, school safety schemes, eminent domain: all of these programs started out as legitimate responses to pressing concerns and have since become weapons of compliance and control in the police state’s hands.

  It doesn’t even matter what the nature of the crisis might be—civil unrest, the national emergencies, “unforeseen economic collapse, loss of functioning political and legal order, purposeful domestic resistance or insurgency, pervasive public health emergencies, and catastrophic natural and human disasters”—as long as it allows the government to justify all manner of government tyranny in the name of so-called national security.

  This coronavirus pandemic has been no exception.

  Not only have the federal and state governments unraveled the constitutional fabric of the nation with lockdown mandates that sent the economy into a tailspin and wrought havoc with our liberties, but they have almost persuaded the citizenry to depend on the government for financial handouts, medical intervention, protection and sustenance.

  This past year under lockdown was a lesson in many things, but most of all, it was a lesson in how to indoctrinate a populace to love and obey Big Brother.

  What started off as an experiment in social distancing in order to flatten the curve of this virus, and not overwhelm the nation’s hospitals or expose the most vulnerable to unavoidable loss of life scenarios quickly became strongly worded suggestions for citizens to voluntarily stay at home and strong-armed house arrest orders with penalties in place for non-compliance.

  Every day brought a drastic new set of restrictions by government bodies (most have been delivered by way of executive orders) at the local, state and federal level that were eager to flex their muscles for the so-called “good” of the populace.

  There was talk of mass testing for COVID-19 antibodies, screening checkpoints, mass surveillance in order to carry out contact tracing, immunity passports to allow those who have recovered from the virus to move around more freely, snitch tip lines for reporting “rule breakers” to the authorities, and heavy fines and jail time for those who dare to venture out without a mask, congregate in worship without the government’s blessing, or re-open their businesses without the government’s say-so.

  To some, these may seem like small, necessary steps in the war against the COVID-19 virus, but they’re only necessary to the Deep State in its efforts to further undermine the Constitution, extend its control over the populace, and feed its insatiable appetite for ever-greater powers.

  After all, whatever dangerous practices you allow the government to carry out now—whether it’s in the name of national security or protecting America’s borders or making America healthy again—rest assured, these same practices can and will be used against you when the government decides to set its sights on you.

  The war on drugs turned out to be a war on the American people, waged with SWAT teams and militarized police. The war on terror turned out to be a war on the American people, waged with warrantless surveillance and indefinite detention. The war on immigration turned out to be a war on the American people, waged with roving government agents demanding “papers, please.”

  This war on COVID-19 could usher in yet another war on the American people, waged with all of the surveillance weaponry at the government’s disposal: thermal imaging cameras, drones, contact tracing, biometric databases, etc.

  Unless we find some way to rein in the government’s power grabs, the fall-out will be epic.

  Everything I have warned about for years—government overreach, invasive surveillance, martial law, abuse of powers, militarized police, weaponized technology used to track and control the citizenry, and so on—has coalesced into this present moment.

  The government’s shameless exploitation of past national emergencies for its own nefarious purposes pales in comparison to what is presently unfolding.

  It’s downright Machiavellian.

  Deploying the same strategy it used with 9/11 to acquire greater powers under the USA Patriot Act, the police state—a.k.a. the shadow government, a.k.a. the Deep State—has been anticipating this moment for years, quietly assembling a wish list of lockdown powers that could be trotted out and approved at a moment’s notice.

  It should surprise no one, then, that the Trump Administration asked Congress to allow it to suspend parts of the Constitution whenever it deems it necessary during this coronavirus pandemic and “other” emergencies. It’s that “other” emergencies part that should particularly give you pause, if not spur you to immediate action (by action, I mean a loud and vocal, apolitical, nonpartisan outcry and sustained, apolitical, nonpartisan resistance).

  In fact, the Department of Justice (DOJ) started to quietly trot out and test a long laundry list of terrifying powers that override the Constitution.

  We’re talking about lockdown powers (at both the federal and state level): the ability to suspend the Constitution, indefinitely detain American citizens, bypass the courts, quarantine whole communities or segments of the population, override the First Amendment by outlawing religious gatherings and assemblies of more than a few people, shut down entire industries and manipulate the economy, muzzle dissidents, “stop and seize any plane, train or automobile to stymie the spread of contagious disease,” reshape financial markets, create a digital currency (and thus further restrict the use of cash), determine who should live or die.

  These are powers the police state would desperately like to make permanent.

  Don’t make the mistake of assuming that anything will change for the better under the Biden administration. That’s not how totalitarian regimes operate.

  Bear in mind, however, that the powers the government officially asked Congress to recognize and authorize barely scratch the surface of the far-reaching powers the government has already unilaterally claimed for itself.

  Unofficially, the police state has been riding roughshod over the rule of law for years now without any pretense of being reined in or restricted in its power grabs by Congress, the courts or the citizenry.

  As David C. Unger, observes in The Emergency State: America’s Pursuit of Absolute Security at All Costs:

  “For seven decades we have been yielding our most basic liberties to a secretive, unaccountable emergency state – a vast but increasingly misdirected complex of national security institutions, reflexes, and beliefs that so define our present world that we forget that there was ever a different America. … Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness have given way to permanent crisis management: to policing the planet and fighting preventative wars of ideological containment, usually on terrain chosen by, and favorable to, our enemies. Limited government and constitutional accountability have been shouldered aside by the kind of imperial presidency our constitutional system was explicitly designed to prevent.”

  This rise of an “emergency state” that justifies all manner of government tyranny in the name of so-called national security is all happening according to schedule.

  The civil unrest, the national emergencies, “unforeseen economic collapse, loss of functioning political and legal order, purposeful domestic resistance or insurgency, pervasive public health emergencies, and catastrophic natural and human disasters,” the government’s reliance on the armed forces to solve domestic political and social problems, the implicit declaration of martial law packaged as a well-meaning and overriding concern for the nation’s security: the powers-that-be have been planning and preparing for such a crisis for years now, not just with active shooter drills and lockdowns and checkpoints and heightened danger alerts, but with a sensory overload of militarized, battlefield images—in video games, in movies, on the news—that acclimate us to life in a totalitarian regime.

  Whether or not this particular crisis is of the government’s own making is not the point: to those for whom power and profit are everything, the end always justifies the means.

  The seeds of this present madness were sown several decades ago when George W. Bush stealthily issued two presidential directives that granted the president the power to unilaterally declare a national emergency, which is loosely defined as “any incident, regardless of location, that results in extraordinary levels of mass casualties, damage, or disruption severely affecting the U.S. population, infrastructure, environment, economy, or government functions.

  Comprising the country’s Continuity of Government (COG) plan, these directives, which do not need congressional approval, provide a skeletal outline of the actions the president will take in the event of a “national emergency.”

  Mind you, that national emergency can take any form, can be manipulated for any purpose, and can be used to justify any end goal—all on the say so of the president.

  Just what sort of actions the president will take once he declares a national emergency can barely be discerned from the barebones directives. However, one thing is clear: in the event of a national emergency, the COG directives give unchecked executive, legislative and judicial power to the executive branch and its unelected minions.

  The country would then be subjected to martial law by default, and the Constitution and the Bill of Rights would be suspended.

  The emergency state is now out in the open for all to see.

  Unfortunately, “we the people” refuse to see what’s before us.

  This is how freedom dies.

  We erect our own prison walls, and as our rights dwindle away, we forge our own chains of servitude to the police state.

  Be warned, however: once you surrender your freedoms to the government—no matter how compelling the reason might be for doing so—you can never get them back.

  No government willingly relinquishes power. If we continue down this road, there can be no surprise about what awaits us at the end.

  That said, we still have rights. Technically, at least.

  We should not voluntarily relinquish every shred of our humanity, our common sense, or our freedoms to a nanny state that thinks it can do a better job of keeping us safe.

  The government may act as if its police state powers trump individual liberties during this COVID-19 pandemic, but for all intents and purposes, the Constitution—especially the battered, besieged Bill of Rights—still stands in theory, if not in practice.

  The decisions we make right now—about freedom, commerce, free will, how we care for the least of these in our communities, what it means to provide individuals and businesses with a safety net, how far we allow the government to go in “protecting” us against this virus, etc.—will haunt us for a long time to come.

  At times like these, when emotions are heightened, fear dominates, common sense is in short supply, liberty takes a backseat to public safety, and democratic societies approach the tipping point towards mob rule, there is a tendency to cast those who exercise their individual freedoms (to freely speak, associate, assemble, protest, pursue a living, engage in commerce, etc.) as foolishly reckless, criminally selfish, outright villains or so-called “extremists.”

  Sometimes that is true, but not always.

  There is always a balancing test between individual freedoms and the communal good.

  What we must figure out is how to strike a balance that allows us to protect those who need protecting without leaving us chained and in bondage to the police state.

  Blindly following the path of least resistance—acquiescing without question to whatever the government dictates—can only lead to more misery, suffering and the erection of a totalitarian regime in which there is no balance.

  Whatever we give up willingly now—whether it’s basic human decency, the ability to manage our private affairs, the right to have a say in how the government navigates this crisis, or the few rights still left to us that haven’t been disemboweled in recent years by a power-hungry police state—we won’t get back so easily once this crisis is past.

  As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the government never cedes power willingly. Neither should we.

  A year ago, I warned that this was a test to see whether the Constitution—and our commitment to the principles enshrined in the Bill of Rights—can survive a national crisis and true state of emergency.

  Nothing has changed on that front.

  James Madison, the “father” of the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights and the fourth president of the United States, once advised that we should “take alarm at the first experiment upon our liberties.”

  These COVID-19 restrictions are far from the first experiment on our liberties. Yet if “we the people” continue to allow the government to trample our rights in the name of so-called national security, we can be assured that things will get worse, not better.

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 03/26/2021 – 23:00

• Philippines Alarmed By More 200 Chinese Ships Massing In Disputed Waters
  Philippines Alarmed By More 200 Chinese Ships Massing In Disputed Waters

  If nothing else, the blockage of the Suez Canal by a massive container ship has served as an unwelcome reminder that chokepoints to global trade like the Straits of Hormuz, the Straits of Malacca and the Straits of Gibralter represent geopolitical risks that have perhaps haven’t been fully appreciated by investors.

  

   

  Source: Chatham House

  Of course, vulnerabilities to global trade extend beyond these narrow chokepoints.

  Take, for example, the South China Sea. The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development estimates that roughly 80% of global trade by volume and 70% by value is transported by sea. Of that volume, 60% of maritime trade passes through Asia, with the South China Sea carrying an estimated one-third of global shipping. Under President Trump, the US Navy intensified to check growing Chinese naval power in the area.  And just the other day, a US spy plane flew closer to China’s coast than ever before.

  Well, in a concerning sign that tensions might be about to come to a head in the region, Reuters reports that Philippines leader Rodrigo Duterte has complained to Chinese ambassador about Chinese naval forces that have been massing in the area. In recent days, international concern has grown over what the Philippines has described as a “swarming and threatening presence” of more than 200 Chinese vessels that it believes were manned by China’s maritime militia. The boats were moored at the Whitsun Reef within Manila’s 200-mile exclusive economic zone.

  EXCLUSIVE: We have footage showing nearly 200 Chinese vessels in Philippine waters. The government has demanded China to withdraw these vessels, but more than that, a maritime expert suggests taking the matter to an international court.

  Our @davidyusantos has more. pic.twitter.com/kZ5NB7t8fS

  — CNN Philippines (@cnnphilippines) March 26, 2021

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

  Brunei, Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan, China and Vietnam have competing territorial claims in the South China Sea. But China has pointedly ignored all these claims, instead viewing the South China Sea as something that belongs exclusively to Beijing. China shocked the world in 2016 when it ignored an international court ruling validating the Philippines’ claims to the sea. Since then, tensions over the conflicting claims have complicated relations between the two Pacific powers.

  China’s claims have put pro-Beijing leader Duterte in “an awkward spot,” according to Reuters. China’s embassy in Manila has reportedly said the ships were fishing ships taking shelter in rough seas. But visuals like the video clip above appear to contradict this.

  China’s maritime assertiveness has put Duterte in an awkward spot throughout his presidency due to his controversial embrace of Beijing and reluctance to speak out against it.

  He has instead accused close ally the United States of creating conflict in the South China Sea.

  China’s embassy in Manila did not respond to a request for comment on Duterte’s meeting.

  On Wednesday it said the vessels at Whitsun Reef were fishing boats taking refuge from rough seas. A Philippine military spokesman said China’s defence attache had denied there were militia aboard.

  Vietnam, which is also a party to the overlapping territorial claims, has also complained about China’s presence. Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Le Thi Thu Hang on Thursday said the Chinese vessels at the reef had infringed on its sovereignty.

  “Vietnam requests that China stop this violation and respect Vietnam’s sovereignty,” Hang told a regular briefing.

  A Vietnamese coastguard vessel had been moored near the area on Thursday, according to ship tracking data.

  The story hasn’t made much of a mark in the American press. But if Chinese ships keep massing in the area, investors might start asking themselves whether cementing Beijing’s control of the disputed waters could be a preamble to something much more concerning – like a move against Taiwan, perhaps?

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 03/26/2021 – 22:40

• Is China Calling For Civilizational War Against America & The West?
  Is China Calling For Civilizational War Against America & The West?

  Authored by Gordon Chang via The Gatestone Institute,

  There was a “strong smell of gunpowder” when American and Chinese diplomats met in Anchorage beginning March 18. That’s according to Zhao Lijian of China’s foreign ministry, speaking just hours after the first day of U.S.-China talks concluded.

  “Gunpowder” is one of those words Beijing uses when it wants others to know war is on its mind.

  The term is, more worryingly, also especially emotion-packed, a word Chinese propagandists use when they want to rile mainland Chinese audiences by reminding them of foreign — British and white — exploitation of China in the Opium War period of the 19th century. China’s Communist Party, therefore, is now trying to whip up nationalist sentiment, rallying the Chinese people, perhaps readying them for war.

  More fundamentally, Beijing is, with the gunpowder reference and others, trying to divide the world along racial lines and form a global anti-white coalition.

  There was more than just a whiff of gunpowder in Alaska. The foreign ministry’s Zhao blamed the U.S. side for exceeding the agreed time limit for opening remarks from Secretary of State Antony Blinken and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan. Blinken and Sullivan overran their allotted four minutes by… 44 seconds.

  The Party’s Global Times called the two presentations “seriously overtime.” The foreign ministry’s Zhao said the overrun prompted the Chinese side to launch into its two presentations, which lasted 20 minutes and 23 seconds, well over their allotted four minutes.

  Yang Jiechi, China’s top diplomat, and his subordinate, Foreign Minister Wang Yi, were mostly reading from prepared texts, suggesting that much of their remarks — in reality a tirade — was planned well in advance.

  

  There were, in addition to the diplomats’ obviously rehearsed expressions of outrage and Zhao’s incendiary comments, a third element to the campaign: a propaganda blast against policies Beijing said were racist. The primary target is America.

  “Everything Washington talks about is centered on the U.S., and on white supremacy,” the Global Times, controlled by the Party, stated in an editorial on March 19, referring to the darker skin tones of America’s “few allies” in the region.

  Furthermore, the race-based narrative appears in a series of recent Communist Party propaganda pieces indirectly portraying China as the protector of Asians in the U.S. For instance, the Global Times on March 18 ran a piece titled “Elite U.S. Groups Accomplices of Crimes Against Asian Americans.”

  Beijing has played the race card in North America for some years. China, for example has tried to divide Canada along racial lines. Lu Shaye, when he was Beijing’s ambassador to Canada, railed against “Western egotism and white supremacy” in an unsuccessful attempt in early 2019 to win the immediate release of Meng Wanzhou, the chief financial officer of Huawei Technologies, detained by Canadian authorities pending extradition proceedings instituted by the Trump Justice Department.

  Significantly, Yang Jiechi in Anchorage pointedly mentioned Black Lives Matter protests in his opening remarks on Thursday, continuing China’s race-based attack on America.

  China’s regime continues to talk about China’s rise, but now Beijing’s propaganda line is shifting in ominous ways. Ruler Xi Jinping’s new narrative is that China is leading the “East.” In a landmark speech he gave at the end of last year, he stated “the East is rising and the West is declining.”

  This theme evokes what Imperial Japan tried to do with its notorious Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, beginning in the 1930s, an attempt to unite Asians against whites.

  Racial divisions bring us to Samuel Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. “In the post-Cold War world, the most important distinctions among peoples are not ideological, political, or economic,” the late Harvard political scientist wrote. “They are cultural.”

  Analysts and academics have severely criticized Huntington’s seminal 1996 book, yet whether or not this work is fundamentally flawed, Xi Jinping is in fact trying to remake the world order by leading “the East” in a civilizational struggle with “the West.”

  Mao Zedong, Xi’s hero, saw China leading Africa and the peoples of Asia against the West, so Xi’s notion of global division is nothing new, but Mao’s successors for the most part dropped such racially charged talk as they sought to strengthen their communist state with Western cash and technology.

  Deng Xiaoping, Mao’s mostly pragmatic successor, counseled China to “hide capabilities, bide time.” Xi, however, believes China’s time has come in part because, he feels, America is in terminal decline.

  Xi’s conception of the world is abhorrent and wrong, but Americans do not have the luxury of ignoring him. They and others must recognize that in Xi’s mind, race defines civilization and civilization is the world’s new dividing line.

  Xi is serious. In January, he told his fast-expanding military it must be ready to fight “at any second.” That month, the Party’s Central Military Commission took from the civilian State Council the power to mobilize all of society for war.

  Militant states rarely prepare for conflict and then back down. For China’s Communist Party, there is a smell of gunpowder around the world, as Xi is triggering a clash of civilizations — and races.

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 03/26/2021 – 22:20

• Watch: 3 Russian Nuclear Subs Punch Through Arctic Ice Sheet To Surface Simultaneously
  Watch: 3 Russian Nuclear Subs Punch Through Arctic Ice Sheet To Surface Simultaneously

  On Friday Russia’s Defense Ministry published video of what it touted as a “first-ever” maneuver to have taken place in the history of naval exercises and warfare.

  No less than three nuclear-powered submarines of the Russian Navy punched through the ice simultaneously during Arctic exercises, as the surreal video reveals.

  Indeed we can’t recall there being any other footage like it, or any other such attempt – also given the potential for something going wrong so far north in this ‘no man’s land’ territory.

  Russian Navy Commander-in-Chief, Adm. Nikolai Evmenov, was cited in state sources as reporting the following to President Vladimir Putin of the Friday rare feat:

  “For the first time in the history of the Navy, three nuclear-powered missile carriers have surfaced from under the ice.”

  The submarines surfaced “according to a single concept and plan at the appointed time in an area with a radius of 300 meters” and reportedly broke through a layer of ice that was one-and-a-half meters thick.

  🇷🇺⚡️🇷🇺EPIC: For the first time in history, during an exercise in the Arctic, three Russian nuclear submarines performed a simultaneous ascent from under the ice at a distance of up to 300 m from each other, the Commander-in-Chief of the Russian Navy, reported to Putin. #Russia pic.twitter.com/4iQCzGbGy5

  — RAGEX-WAR (@theragex) March 26, 2021

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  The US Navy has in recent years been known to conduct such ice-breaking exercises with its large subs. It is necessary in instances where subs must rise from below the ice surface and launch a missile. 

  According to a prior explanation of the high-risk maneuver featured in Popular Mechanics:  

  The Arctic is a convenient hiding spot, since sea ice provides submarines with cover making them almost impossible to detect from the air. However, that same sea ice makes communicating (or launching missiles) impossible, which means sometimes subs must crack through the ice with several thousand tons of steel.

  …Typical submarines can break through about three feet of ice. Vessels that have been specifically strengthened can go through about nine feet. Even so, one careless move could damage a $1 billion sub and put the lives of 100-plus crewmembers at risk. So choosing the right spot is key.

  Very likely the Pentagon is keeping a close watch on Russia’s growing Arctic capabilities at a moment that multiple US military branches firm up their long-term Arctic strategies. 

  Below is an example of how the sub is angled below the surface…

  For example, just last week the US Army published a new strategic policy document entitled Regaining Arctic Dominance, which laid out a plan to thwart Russian dominance in the far north, where it’s heavily invested given that it’s the major world power that lies geographically closest.

  “The Arctic has the potential to become a contested space where United States’ great power rivals, Russia and China, seek to use military and economic power to gain and maintain access to the region at the expense of US interests. US National Security Strategy highlights the Arctic as a corridor for expanded strategic great power competition between two regions – the Indo-Pacific and Europe,” the Army strategy document said.

  Given this week’s stunning triple-surfacing through the Arctic ice feat that Russia’s navy appeared to pull off without a hitch, it seems Washington does have reason to worry when it comes to ambitions of “dominating” the Arctic sphere. 

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 03/26/2021 – 22:00

• New Zealand Central Bank Bucks Global Spend-Trend, Will 'Manage' Soaring Home Prices
  New Zealand Central Bank Bucks Global Spend-Trend, Will ‘Manage’ Soaring Home Prices

  Authored by Ruchir Sharma, op-ed via The Financial Times,

  Those Kiwi revolutionaries are at it again.

  

  In 1989, New Zealand’s central bank was the first to commit to a specific target for consumer price inflation, then the biggest threat to the world economy. Unions and businesses howled, saying the move would kill growth and jobs. One property developer called for a rope on which to hang central bank chief Donald Brash. 

  Brash, a former fruit farmer who had seen his uncle’s life savings destroyed by inflation, held firm. By signalling the bank’s seriousness, the target helped to lower the public’s self-fulfilling expectation of endless price rises. Over two years, inflation fell from 8 to 2 per cent. The unpopular idea caught on. Soon, most central banks had adopted targets and this helped tame the global scourge of runaway prices for food, fuel and other consumer staples. 

  Today, a new scourge – asset price inflation – looms. And New Zealand has launched another counterattack. While consumer prices have been held in check by globalisation and automation, easy money pouring out of central banks has been driving up the price of assets from stocks to bonds and housing. As homes are generally not counted as consumer goods, even sharp price spikes carry relatively little weight in central bank deliberations. 

  Home prices have risen steadily in the pandemic, and in 12 months through to the end of January were up 19 per cent in New Zealand. The price of a typical Auckland home soared past $720,000, embarrassing Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern. 

  A global political celebrity, the liberal Ardern was elected on a promise of affordable housing. Fed up, her government has ordered the central bank to add stabilising home prices to its remit, starting March 1. It is novel and healthy for a politician to recognise the unintended consequences of easy money. 

  If this idea catches on, it could lead to greater financial and social stability worldwide. Decades of loose central bank policy have done less to generate growth in the real economy than in the financial markets — and those gains benefit mainly the rich.

  This is widening wealth inequality, pushing homes beyond reach for the middle class, and not only in New Zealand. Of 502 international cities tracked by Numbeo, a research firm, prices are “unaffordable” (more than three times median family income) in more than 90 per cent. In recent years, the tiny minority of affordable cities has been shrinking toward zero.

  Before the unusual 2020 recession, triggered by pandemic lockdowns, every major economic crisis in recent decades, from Japan in 1990 to the 2008 financial crisis, was preceded by a sharp run up in prices of housing or stocks or both. My research found that financial markets, fuelled by easy money, have grown since 1980 from about the same size as the global economy to four times as big. The larger markets loom, the larger the impact on the wider economy when they fall. 

  Research looking back 140 years in 17 major nations has shown that before the second world war, only one in four recessions followed a bubble in housing or stocks. But as banking, particularly mortgage lending, grew to assume a pivotal role in modern economies, the dynamics changed. Since the war, more than two out of every three recessions followed a housing or stock bubble.

  Housing bubbles are the worst. The $220tn global housing market is more than twice the size of the global stock market and complicated by debt. When prices fall, it can take years to clean up failed mortgages, drawing out a recession. In general, recessions that follow debt-fuelled housing booms are the longest and deepest.

  Ardern’s move may not slow the housing boom soon, because supply-and-demand dynamics are too strong. But ordering the central bank to make housing price stability a higher priority is a start, and could inspire others to rethink the role easy money has played in driving financial instability. The challenge, to defuse bubbles before they become dangerous, is not as insurmountable as doubters believe. Research shows the key warning signs lie in the pace of increases in prices and debt.

  Policies need to keep up with changes in the global economy. A rethink is overdue, particularly among Ardern’s fellow progressives worldwide. They have come to embrace easy money as a way to finance social programmes, but need to recognise its negative impact on financial stability, wealth inequality and housing affordability. Ardern is out front in addressing one of the downsides. As New Zealand shows the way, others would be wise to follow, again.

  *  *  *

  The writer, Morgan Stanley Investment Management’s chief global strategist, is author of ‘The Ten Rules of Successful Nations’

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 03/26/2021 – 21:40

• Digital Artwork Made By "Humanoid" Robot Sells As NFT For $688,000
  Digital Artwork Made By “Humanoid” Robot Sells As NFT For $688,000

  Does the Fed still see no signs of inflation? Let us help.

  Maybe they should take a look to Hong Kong, where a piece of “digital artwork” that was created by a humanoid robot named Sophia, just sold for $688,888 in the form of a non-fungible token, according to Reuters. 

  The robot, Sophia, was unveiled in 2016 and has produced art “in collaboration” with 31 year old Italian artist Andrea Bonaceto. Reuters notes that Bonaceto is well known for his colorful portraits, including one of (of course) Elon Musk.

  Sophia combines elements of Bonaceto’s work alongside of art history and “her own” drawings or paintings in a process that’s called “iterative loops of evolution”.

  The piece of art that just sold was called “Sophia Instantiation,” and is actually a 12 second MP4 file that shows the “evolution of Bonaceto’s portrait into Sophia’s digital painting, and is accompanied by a physical artwork, painted by Sophia on a printout of her self-portrait.”

  

  Does anyone actually know what that means? We’re asking for a friend.

  Hong Kong-based David Hanson, who created the robot, said: “I was kind of astonished to see how fast it shot up too as the bidding war took place at the end of the auction. So it was really exhilarating and stunning.” 

  Art collector and blockchain investor Jehan Chu commented: “What we’re seeing right now looks like a bit of a bubble, especially in the NFT art world.”

  And what would a bubble be if the robot herself wasn’t also interviewed by Reuters (of course). She told the media outlet: “I’m so excited about people’s response to new technologies like robotics … and am so glad to be part of these creativities.”

  We’re guessing she hasn’t yet been programmed to shreik “I’m f*cking rich!” at the top of her lungs yet, or perhaps that’s what she would have said. Maybe in Sophia v2.0. 

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 03/26/2021 – 21:20

• Suez Canal Crisis: Here Are The Cargoes In The Crossfire
  Suez Canal Crisis: Here Are The Cargoes In The Crossfire

  By Greg Miller of FreightWaves,

  The “slow boat from China” just got a lot slower. Shipping sentiment toward the Suez Canal grounding of the Ever Given has taken a major turn. Operators are now opting to bypass the traffic jam and take the long detour around Africa’s Cape of Good Hope.

  

  Ship-positioning data already confirms abrupt turns toward the cape by multiple ships. Container ships such as the HMM Rotterdam, Ever Greet, Maersk Skarstind and Hyundai Prestige; the crude tanker Marlin Santorini; and the liquefied natural gas (LNG) carrier Pan Americas, among others, have made beelines toward the cape. If the Ever Given is not refloated at high tide on Sunday, many more detours are expected.

  There were 237 ships stuck at anchor awaiting canal transits as of Friday, according to Egypt’s Leth Agencies. That’s up sharply from 156 the day before.

  Global ocean trade is fluid. The Suez Canal closure doesn’t block cargo. It changes the arrival date. The extent of delays from rerouting depends upon port pairs and vessel speed. A container ship traveling at 17 knots passing India en route from China to Rotterdam would take nine more days on the cape route than using the canal. If its destination was Italy, it would take 13 more days.

  The double whammy of the canal queue and rerouting delays renders the global shipping network less efficient. The same ship capacity will not move the same cargo volume in the same time frame.

  This will have a wide range of effects — some bad, some good — for shippers, vessel operators and investors.

  Different segments, different exposures

  To gauge potential consequences, American Shipper analyzed historical data from the Suez Canal Authority (SCA) and obtained more recent data from trade-intelligence companies VesselsValue and Kpler.

  The SCA data is a year old but shows the long-term trends. American Shipper separated SCA’s cargo data into three categories: containerized volume, dry cargo volume (bulkers and general cargo) and liquid (tanker) volume.

  

  Total cargo volume grew 49% from 2011 through 2019. Containerized cargo is by far the most important. It comprises half the total, with liquid and dry bulk splitting the rest. But dry bulk volumes have grown the fastest. From 2015 through 2019, tanker volumes rose 13%, containerized cargo 18% and dry cargo 64%.

  Another way to look at Suez Canal volume is in relation to global trade volume. VesselsValue provided American Shipper with this analysis, covering volumes over the past six months.

  

  According to Adrian Economakis, chief strategy officer of VesselsValue, “Based on observation of our real-time and historical laden vessel activity, cargo volumes going through the Suez Canal accounted for around 4% of global trade over the last six months.

  “The big question for the companies that control vessels on their way to Suez is to risk it and keep going or take the long way round. Either one will add delays and costs,” said Economakis.

  Container capacity gets even tighter

  The container sector faces the most systemic fallout from the Suez Canal accident.

  Consider the case of the massive container-ship traffic jam in San Pedro Bay off Los Angeles and Long Beach. Since the beginning of the year, around 30 container ships have been stuck at anchor per day. They face delays of one to two weeks before reaching terminals. As of Thursday, there were still 29 ships at anchor in San Pedro Bay.

  Now consider that the Ever Given accident has suddenly created an even bigger version of the California container-ship traffic jam. Leth Agencies reported that 53 container ships were at anchor awaiting passage through the Suez Canal on Friday. And that’s only half of the equation. All of the container ships taking the longer route around the cape are adding one to two weeks to their journeys.

  While most of the container services via the Suez are Asia-North Europe and Asia-Med trades, everything is connected. The trans-Pacific trade relies on availability of container equipment. The Suez crisis will keep much-needed box equipment out of circulation for an extended period.

  This will make equipment in Asia scarcer for U.S. importers at the very time demand is expected to intensify due to federal stimulus checks. Whether coincidence or not, Asia-West Coast rates (SONAR: FBXD.CNAW) just hit a new all-time high of $5,151 per forty-foot equivalent unit (FEU) on Thursday, according to the Freightos Baltic Daily Index.

  

  Container stock outlook

  The Suez crisis will add significant costs for liner companies serving the Asia-Europe trade. Rerouting around the Cape of Good Hope saves on canal tolls but heavily inflates fuel bills. The Suez snarl will also put upward pressure on ship and equipment leasing rates.

  Stifel analyst Ben Nolan maintained that the Ever Given accident is “bad news” for liners. Diversions are “likely to be much more expensive and tie up equipment that could otherwise be making record profits.”

  How much of the added costs can liners pass along to cargo shippers? Carriers could institute a surcharge for cargo diverted around the cape. Spot rates could remain elevated for longer — or even increase. In addition, the Suez Canal incident could give liners even more sentiment ammunition in their annual contract negotiations with shippers.

  The Ever Given accident is overwhelmingly good news for shipowners that charter vessels to liners: companies such as Danaos, Costamare, Global Ship Lease, Navios Partners and Capital Product Partners.

  “Shipowners … who were already in a terrific competitive position are in an even stronger competitive position, at least for the time being,” explained Nolan.

  The same goes for box-equipment lessors Textainer, CAI International and Triton International.

  B. Riley Securities analyst Daniel Day hiked his box-lessor price targets after the Ever Given grounding. “We now expect container shortages to last through at least Q2 and [to be] increasingly likely for the majority of 2021. A worst-case scenario [in the Suez Canal] could result in new record highs for new container prices,” he said. 

  Less upside for crude tankers

  The Suez Canal is not as important as it used to be for tanker shipping. Nevertheless, a blockage that lasts weeks not days would certainly be a plus for rates, particularly for product tankers.

  Data on tanker flows through the canal was provided to American Shipper by Kpler.

  

  The data shows a fall in volumes for both crude and clean products as COVID reduced demand and OPEC+ cut production. Crude volumes spiked in April 2020 when the OPEC+ agreement briefly broke down. There was a bump last month due to Iraqi crude moving west combined with Russian crude headed east.

  The effect of the Ever Given accident on crude-tanker demand is limited for two reasons. First, a large portion of the global trade already sails around the Cape of Good Hope using very large crude carriers (VLCCs; tankers that carry 1 million barrels). Second, the SUMED pipeline from the Red Sea to the Mediterranean allows northbound crude flows to circumvent the canal.

  Nolan added, “Crude-tanker markets are currently so oversupplied and depressed that even a 3-5% increase in utilization [due to ship diversions], while helpful, is unlikely to tip the balance of supply and demand.”

  More upside for product tankers

  The main product-tanker flows through the canal are naphtha headed east to Asia and diesel and other refined products headed west to Europe.

  Potential product-tanker upside from the accident would have been greater if not for a new wave of COVID lockdowns in Europe, reducing transportation-fuel demand. Even so, analysts are more optimistic on this segment than on crude tankers.

  According to Nolan, “We expect the impact could be more meaningful for product-tanker markets, specifically the larger LR2s [product tankers with capacity of 80,000-119,000 deadweight tons or DWT] that move a great deal of the product exported from Middle Eastern refineries. Not all of this goes through the Suez Canal. But the product-tanker market was not as oversupplied as the crude-tanker market. So, we do expect that a change in freight efficiency could have a more dramatic impact on product-tanker freight rates.”

  Nolan noted that of the public companies, Scorpio Tankers (NYSE: STNG) has the most LR2 exposure.

  Clarksons Platou Securities reported on Friday that rates for 2010- to 2014-built LR2s jumped 21% compared to Thursday, to $20,700 per day. Rates for LR2s built in 2015 or later surged 18% day-on-day, to $24,000 per day.

  According to Clarksons analyst Frode Mørkedal, “Brokers report that the list of available LR2s in the West [Western Hemisphere] is very tight and that charterers’ options are severely limited, thus pushing freight rates upwards. This is a trend that is expected to continue due to the lack of ship supply coming from the East, especially with the current Suez situation leading to further delays.”

  As Alphatanker put it, “The longer the disruption lasts … the tighter the tonnage lists will become, especially for large clean tankers.”

  Rate tailwinds for dry bulk

  Container shipping and tankers are garnering the headlines. But as the SCA statistics revealed, there’s a dry bulk angle as well.

  The first quarter has already been incredibly strong for bulkers in the Panamax (65,000-90,000 DWT) and Supramax (45,000-60,000 DWT) segments. Rates for these bulkers are at decade-highs. 

  Nick Ristic, lead dry cargo analyst for Braemar ACM Shipbroking, sees potential upside for both Panamaxes and Supramaxes as a result of the canal accident. Both markets are already tight.

  Two-thirds of all Panamax ships sailing from the Black Sea traversed the Suez Canal in 2020 “and for grains specifically, this figure was 73%,” he wrote in his latest market outlook. Braemar expects an additional 7.4 million tons of Black Sea grain to be shipped in the current season. “With Chinese demand for grains still extremely high, prolonged Suez closures could translate to more of these ships taking the long route to the Far East,” he said.

  

  Meanwhile, Supramaxes are heavily exposed to the steel trade from Asia to the Atlantic Basin. Steel exports in Q1 2020 are at half-decade highs, driven by China and South Korea. Import demand “is extremely high,” noted Ristic, who said that “bumper trade flows” and diversions due to the Suez closure could “tighten the market further.”

  MORE ON SUEZ CANAL CLOSURE: What the Suez canal accident means to the tanker business: see story here. Everyone wants to talk — or laugh about — the Suez Canal crisis: see story here. Scores of container ships waiting to transit Suez Canal: see story here.

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 03/26/2021 – 21:00

• Another Round Of Toilet Paper Shortages Looms Amid Global Shipping-Container Crunch
  Another Round Of Toilet Paper Shortages Looms Amid Global Shipping-Container Crunch

  Even before the Ever Given became lodged in the Suez Canal, manufacturers around the world were struggling with the ramifications of a global shipping-container crunch creating bottlenecks in global supply chains. The problem started in the chaos of last spring. A surge in demand for PPE and other products resulted in more demand for shipping containers used to help ferry them to China, as well as African and South American Nations,

  To be sure, China is seen as one of the biggest contributors to the container crisis, as snarls and delays at Chinese ports have impacted the availability of containers.

  

  Setting the situation in the Suez aside, one of the world’s biggest producers of raw wood pulp, located in South America (far from the Suez), is warning that the container shortage could lead to another shortage of toilet paper on American shelves.

  Most Americans probably remember the startling surge in stockpiling of toilet paper and other household essentials. Many were blindsided by it, or forced to be a premium for the stuff. Families around the country stressed out about the possibility that they might be left high and dry.

  According to Bloomberg, the company, the Brazil-based company, Suzano SA, primarily ships its pulp in cargo vessels known as break bulk. But as demand for ships that can carry ribbed steel containers surges, break bulk rates and capacity are being squeezed.

  For readers who aren’t familiar with the term, here’s a quick explanation of what constitutes “break bulk” (courtesy of LogisticsPlus):

  What is Break Bulk Shipping? The term break bulk comes from the older phrase “breaking bulk” which is the extraction of a portion of the cargo on a ship, or the beginning of the unloading process from the ship’s holds. In modern context, break bulk is meant to encompass cargo that is transported in bags, boxes, crates, drums, or barrels – or items of extreme length or size. To be considered break bulk, these goods must be loaded individually, not in intermodal containers nor in bulk as with liquids or grains.

  Break bulk was the most common form of cargo for most of history. Since the late 1960s, break bulk cargo has declined while containerized cargo has grown significantly. Moving containers on and off a ship is much more efficient than having to move individual goods. This efficiency allows ships to minimize time in ports and spend more time on the sea. Break bulk cargo is also more susceptible to loss, theft and damage.

  […]

  Examples of commonly shipped break bulk cargo commodities include:

  • Bagged or sacked cargo
  • Bailed goods
  • Barrels, drums, and casks
  • Corrugated and wooden boxes or containers
  • Reels and rolls
  • Equipment, vehicles and components
  • Steel girders and structural steel
  • Any long, heavy or over-sized goods

  Given consumers’ penchant for stockpiling and panic buying, a habit that emerged shortly after the pandemic emerged last spring, CEO Walter Schalka said in an interview that he’s worried all of this could snowball into another toilet paper shortage.

  Sao Paulo-based Suzano is already concerned about the risk of exporting less in March than the company had expected, and being forced to roll over some shipments into April, Schalka said. With competition increasing for cargo vessels, break-bulk ships are berthing at the company’s terminals less often than usual.

  “All the South American players which export through break bulk have faced this risk,” he said.

  Brazil is the world’s top supplier of pulp, and Suzano accounts for about one-third of global supplies of hardwood pulp, the type used to produce toilet papers. Cargo-market disruption are wreaking havoc on global trade, especially for food and agricultural products, and the crisis in the Suez is already causing tanker rates to spike.

  Unsurprisingly, the Bloomberg headline warning about another toilet paper shortage soon became a hot topic on twitter.

  Honestly, I’ve peed in enough bushes used enough bidet nozzles to know that there are more important things in life than toilet paper. We’ll be fine. https://t.co/ELnUXZlfy6

  — Shani Kotecha (@ShaniKotecha) March 25, 2021

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

  (my) alternate headlines: “Clog In Supply Chain Leads To Toilet Paper Shortage” “Crappy Situation In Suez”. Also, Samuel L. Jackson: pic.twitter.com/FQscbEHjBF

  — AI6YR (@ai6yrham) March 25, 2021

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

  On the bridge: “oh shit!”

  Narrator: “little did they know that this snafu could take down the entire toilet paper supply chain and 10% of global shipping trade”

  Ship owner: *inconsolable, begins having PTSD symptoms whenever the wind gusts*

  — Jessy Irwin ✨ (@jessysaurusrex) March 25, 2021

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  let the annual toilet paper hunger games begin https://t.co/wmfx98JxbI

  — jsadinolfi (@jsadinolfi) March 24, 2021

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

  Suzano’s warning is among the first major signs of strain in these shipping markets. If the squeeze drives up freight costs, it could also drive up prices of imported goods, stoking inflation, and creating new headaches for the Federal Reserve…and the market.

  If you haven’t bought a bidet yet, now might be a good time.

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 03/26/2021 – 20:40

• The Post-Target Paradigm: Analyzing China Just Got Harder
  The Post-Target Paradigm: Analyzing China Just Got Harder

  By Damien Ma of Macro Polo

  The just released 14th Five-Year Plan (FYP) and 2035 long-range vision is some 75,000 words long. But it is short on concrete targets. For the first time in 35 years, the biggest news that came out of the 14th FYP was what was missing: the GDP target.  

  

  It wasn’t just the GDP target either. Almost all socioeconomic indicators in the FYP became relatively modest “soft targets”—meaning there’s no political mandate to meet them. Even though Beijing will likely still determine general economic targets based on annual conditions, the reality is that the Xi Jinping era has ushered in the post-target era.    

  That might seem unexpected, but we have been making the case for the downgrading of targets. The irony, though, is that this uncharted target-less terrain can be more vexing than the prevailing target-rich environment.  

  Indeed, despite regular criticism lodged at China’s obsession with targets, their sudden demotion and even absence can be discombobulating. This is particularly so for the humble analyst who has long relied on them as an anchor by which to assess China’s goals and ambitions.  

  But worry not. Rather than wandering aimlessly down Beijing hutongs in search of targets, we think it is now more important and productive to look at systemic and qualitative changes to gauge China’s progress. For the next five years at least, targets will simply be peripheral, while reshaping institutions and incentives will likely take center stage. 

  From Targets to the “Two Is”

  To understand this shift, it is important to first grasp how Beijing arrived at this point. Targets of all stripes have long held an exalted place in Chinese policymaking. The GDP target, in particular, was a direct and simple key performance indicator (KPI) for local officials. But over the decades, the singular fixation on this KPI massively distorted incentives across local economies.   

  For one, intrepid and competitive officials found creative ways to “meet” the target, chief among them manipulating local economic statistics. By MacroPolo’s counting, in the past five years, seven provinces have been caught overstating their GDP by 10 percent or more.   

  It also mattered less whether that growth was virtuous or unsustainable, so long as it hit the KPI. For instance, debt-fueled investments and discounting environmental costs were tolerated because the headline target was met or exceeded. Even when Beijing’s objectives shifted to prioritize the environment or deleveraging, the grip of targets was so strong that local officials simply found loopholes or continued fabricating data to meet a new set of targets. Overreliance on targets, then, diverted local officials’ focus on meeting real objectives. 

  Perhaps the most pernicious effect of the target was embedding short-termism in local government behavior. Much like how a publicly listed corporation often forfeits long-term objectives in order to meet quarterly revenue targets and shareholder expectations, local governments behaved in much the same way. They consistently tried to meet short-term growth at the expense of addressing longer–term weaknesses.  

  But Xi has made it rather clear that he doesn’t intend to run China like a corporation, instead preoccupying his first two terms with imposing longer-term thinking—for example by consistently touting the “two centenary goals.”  

  Deemphasizing targets can be interpreted as essentially a “whole-of-economy” effort to dislodge short-termism, paving the way toward a new paradigm that focuses more on the “two Is”: incentives and institutions.  

  In fact, Xi admitted as much in a public speech on science and technology. He highlighted the need to overcome institutional barriers to innovation rather than simply increasing spending on research and development (R&D) to produce the desired results.   

  With China’s ballyhooed turn toward more technology independence, it would make sense for Beijing to pour money into R&D. Yet surprisingly, the R&D spending growth target of 8% in the 14th FYP is actually two percentage points lower than the real growth of R&D expenditure (10% after inflation) during the past five years.   

  It isn’t for the lack of money. China’s total spending of $23 billion on basic research is less than the annual budget of the US National Institutes of Health. With an annual fiscal budget of more than $3 trillion, Beijing can easily double or triple the spending on basic research. Yet it has opted not to do so.  

  This newfound modesty, not just for R&D but also in other areas like energy and urbanization, further reinforces the shift away from targets and reflects the priority of fixing institutions, untangling distortions, and taming vested interests before throwing money at problems.  

  In many ways, the current set of targets no longer serves China’s economy today and where it wants to be by 2035. To the extent that some targets still exist, they will mainly function as a floor. It is a recognition that targets won’t solve structural issues that are institutional in nature and difficult to measure.  

  As the new post-target paradigm takes root, analyzing China will need to adapt accordingly.  

  It will certainly be more demanding, but also more intellectually interesting to evolve existing mental models of the Chinese political economy.  

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 03/26/2021 – 20:20

• US Appeals Court Rules Bump Stocks Are Not "Machine Guns" 
  US Appeals Court Rules Bump Stocks Are Not “Machine Guns” 

  The federal ban on bump stocks, put in place by the Trump administration, was ruled unlawful by a divided federal appeals court on Thursday, according to Bloomberg. This is a significant win for gun owners who have observed overreaching government clamp down on guns in recent years. 

  The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) first issued the ban on plastic bump stocks that transform semiautomatic firearms into rapid-fire weapons. In December 2018, the ATF classified bump stocks as “machine guns.” The move came after former President Trump ordered his Attorney General to initiate the ban following the 2017 Las Vegas shooting. 

  How A Bump Stock Works 

  

  The latest ruling from the U.S. 6th Circuit Court of Appeals grants Gun Owners of America (GOA), a preliminary injunction against the ban, affirming the gun group’s concerns that the federal ban violated the “Administrative Procedure Act, the Fifth Amendment’s takings clause, and the 14th Amendment’s right to due process.”

  “Today’s court decision is great news and told gun owners what they already knew,” GOA Senior Vice President Erich Pratt said in a statement. “We are glad the court applied the statute accurately and struck down the ATF’s illegal overreach and infringement of gun owners’ rights.”

  Senior U.S. Circuit Judge Alice Batchelder defended the court’s ruling, claiming that a bump stock attachment on a firearm does not qualify it as a “machine gun,” which the government currently classifies as a “single function of the trigger” (or a semiautomatic firearm). 

  “A bump stock may change how the pull of the trigger is accomplished, but it does not change the fact that the semiautomatic firearm shoots only one shot for each pull of the trigger,” Batchelder declared. “With or without a bump stock, a semiautomatic firearm is capable of firing only a single shot for each pull of the trigger.”

  While the ATF issued a ban on bump stocks over the last couple of years – the internet won as it appears people just 3D printed these attachments.

  … and we wonder what the National Rifle Association will have to say about this ruling after they caved and called for “additional regulations” on “bump fire stocks” in late 2017 following the Las Vegas shooting. 

  Meanwhile, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) introduced a ban this week on banning bump stocks. 

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 03/26/2021 – 20:00

• Media & Momo Meltdown, Small Caps & SPACs Slammed As Bonds & The Buck Bounce
  Media & Momo Meltdown, Small Caps & SPACs Slammed As Bonds & The Buck Bounce

  Just as we warned earlier in the week, today highlighted the epic clash between forced pension selling and quant-buying into month-/quarter-end.

  Today saw bonds bid shortly after the US cash open and stocks dumped (rebalancing?), but once Europe closed, the standard trend reversal struck and things changed and then with an hour to go quant-buying went into overdrive

  

  Source: Bloomberg

  And VIX was smashed lower…

  

  Source: Bloomberg

  And that massive reversal in VIX sparked a last hour total meltup in stocks…

  

  Small Caps were clubbed like a baby seal this week, but that quant-buying panic sent the rest of the US majors into the green for the week…

  

  But under the surface, something violent is happening…

  “Most Shorted” stocks suffered their worst week since October, despite Thursday’s big squeeze effort…

  

  Source: Bloomberg

  Cathie Wood had another bad week with ARKK down almost 10% to its lowest weekly close since early November…

  

  It wasn’t just US tech, there was a major liquidation in a number of China tech stocks this week…

  

  And media stocks were monkeyhammered (this was the biggest weekly drop in media stocks since March 2020)…

  

  This all had the smell of a major media/tech fund liquidation. ViacomCBS was a total shitshow…

  

  Momentum stocks melted down…

  

  Source: Bloomberg

  SPACs dumped…

  

  Source: Bloomberg

  On the week, Staples outperformed as Discretionary dumped and Energy stocks changed their mind faster than Fauci…

  

  Source: Bloomberg

  The put-call ration rose significantly this week as the gamma-squeezers have apparently left the building for now…

  

  Source: Bloomberg

  Treasury yields were lower across the curve this week led by the long-end…

  

  Source: Bloomberg

  Is the pullback in Small Caps relative to Big-Tech implying that rates have peaked for now?

  

  Source: Bloomberg

  1.60% remains a key level for 10Y yields…

  

  Source: Bloomberg

  The dollar ramped back up to early March highs, screaming higher after the Powell puke last week…

  

  Source: Bloomberg

  Cryptos were down for the second week in a row, mainly due to the big puke on Weds…

  

  Source: Bloomberg

  Bitcoin puked back near $50k this week before finding a bid…

  

  Source: Bloomberg

  Commodities were very mixed on the week, but all ended lower against the stronger dollar, with silver suffering the most…

  

  Source: Bloomberg

  And just look at the chaos in crude this week as the Suez blockage interacted with European demand fears…

  

  Silver slumped back below $25 during the week, below the Reddit Raiders lows…

  

  Finally, COVID vaccinations are re-accelerating in US and EU…

  

  Source: Bloomberg

  And while cases are up modestly (are PCR tests picking up spike proteins from the mRNA vaccines?), death rates continue to tumble…

  

  Source: Bloomberg

  And, it would appear that stuff is getting serious and Powell and his pals are gonna have to accelerate the pumping once again as sideways is not up… and that just will not do for today’s ‘guru’ stock traders…

  

  Source: Bloomberg

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 03/26/2021 – 19:45

• GOP Lawmaker Urges Architects Of Digital Dollar To Consider Risks To Civil Liberties
  GOP Lawmaker Urges Architects Of Digital Dollar To Consider Risks To Civil Liberties

  Authored by Tom Ozimek via The Epoch Times,

  As central banks, including the Federal Reserve, are looking into implementing their own digital currencies, a Republican lawmaker warned of a key risk associated with their adoption, namely whether they could be exploited to curb civil liberties.

  

  Nations across the world are mulling developing central bank digital currencies (CBDC) to modernize their financial systems, ward off the threat from cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, and speed up domestic and international payments, with China one of the most advanced in its effort.

  Rep. Warren Davidson (R-Ohio), a member of the House Financial Services Committee, told NTD News in an interview that some of the features of China’s digital yuan arrangement would raise concerns if transposed to a digital dollar.

  “China’s using their monetary system as a system of control,” Davidson said.

  “And they’re proposing to link their central bank digital currency to their social credit system where they know virtually everything about everyone – they could filter all the transactions and essentially say, yeah, we’re not going to bank those people.”

  China’s social credit system is essentially a set of databases and initiatives that track and gauge the “trustworthiness” of individuals, companies, and government entities, with each entry given a rating, and then either rewarded or punished based on the score. It has drawn fire for serving as a tool for the regime to control almost all aspects of its citizens’ lives.

  “Sadly, in the United States of America, there are people that look at that and go, ‘Oh, that’s great, we would love to have it.’ That’s scary,” Davidson said.

  Davidson said a key feature of the way currency in the United States has been used is to provide a “permissionless” means of settling transactions, meaning that there is no third party that monitors and adjudicates transactions between people, ensuring privacy and limiting opportunities for the government to control its citizens’ behavior.

  “If you look at the United States system, and our Bill of Rights, we’ve celebrated and defended civil liberties and freedom,” Davidson said.

  “The question on central bank digital currencies to me is, will the United States preserve this feature or will China’s more authoritarian control system be in place because they will use money as a system of control? And historically, we’ve used the monetary system differently,” he added.

  While Davidson acknowledged the imperative to fight crime, he said that architects of America’s financial system must, in their design of a digital dollar, find a way to incorporate safeguards to civil liberties.

  “We want to catch terrorists, we want to catch money launderers and tax evaders,” he said, but warned against exploiting these priorities as an excuse to turn “money service businesses and financial institutions and banks into part of a surveillance state to collect and report on their customer base.”

  China’s central bank is aiming to become the first major monetary institution to issue a CBDC, part of its push to internationalize the yuan and reduce dependence on the dollar-dominated global banking system. A digital yuan payment and settlement system was on Thursday added to the existing payment platforms at the Dalian Port Network in Liaoning Province, marking the first time that digital RMB settlement has been adopted at a Chinese port.

  Many analysts say that a CBDC that gains wide acceptance in international trade and payments could ultimately erode the dollar’s status as the de facto currency of world trade and undermine U.S. influence.

  Jerome Powell, the head of the Federal Reserve, has said it is more important that the Fed gets its approach to a digital dollar right rather than leading the pack.

  “We’re not in a mode of trying to make a decision at this point,” he said Monday. “We are experimenting with technology.”

  

  Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell speaks at a press conference in Washington on Jan. 29, 2020. (Samuel Corum/Getty Images)

  Powell added that given the dollar’s critical role as the world’s leading reserve currency, the Fed has “an obligation to be on the cutting edge” of understanding the costs and benefits of a CBDC.

  At the same time, Powell said there was no need for the Fed to rush or “be first to market.”

  Powell said the Fed is conducting research through an in-house technology lab, and also collaborating with MIT through the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, one of its 12 regional Fed banks.

  “The real threshold question for us is, does the public want or need a new digital form of central bank money to complement what is already a highly efficient, reliable and innovative payments oriented system?” Powell asked.

  There are risks and benefits to digital currencies, the Fed chair said. The benefits include a “more efficient, more inclusive payment system,” while the risks involve cyber attacks, money laundering, and terrorist financing.

  There is also the risk that a digital currency could be held by individuals electronically and could therefore bypass banks.

  “We don’t want to compete with banks for funding,” Powell said.

  Ultimately, Powell said that Congress would likely need to pass legislation allowing a CBDC before the Fed would create one.

  “We would not proceed with this without support from Congress, and I think that would ideally come in the form of an authorizing law,” Powell said.

  China proposed a set of global rules for central bank digital currencies on Thursday, with Mu Changchun, the director-general of the Chinese central bank’s digital currency institute, laying out the new proposals at a Bank for International Settlements seminar on Thursday.

  “Information flow and fund flows should be synchronized so as to facilitate regulators to monitor the transactions for compliance,” he said.

  The European Central Bank is also exploring the introduction of a digital euro within the next five years.

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 03/26/2021 – 19:40

• Pakistan Successfully Test Launches Upgraded Nuclear-Capable Ballistic Missile
  Pakistan Successfully Test Launches Upgraded Nuclear-Capable Ballistic Missile

  On Friday Pakistan’s leaders hailed the “successful” flight test of the country’s upgraded nuclear-capable Shaheen 1-A surface-to-surface ballistic missile.

  Pakistan’s military said the test “was aimed at re-validating various design and technical parameters of the weapon system including advanced navigation system,” according to the country’s English-language newspaper Dawn. State media subsequently put out official video of the launch…

  The Pakistani military’s Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR) later confirmed the Shaheen-1A missile test had been successfully completed with no incident, performing as intended. 

  With a range of over 900 kilometers (or more than 550 miles) and described as “engaging targets at land and sea with high precision,” the ballistic missile would likely be the number one weapon of choice deployed should Pakistan ever enter major war with its nuclear-armed neighbor India.

  Pakistan conducts a successful test of Shaheen 1A surface-to-surface ballistic missile with a range of 900 kms. Rawalpindi – March 26, 2021 The test flight was aimed at re-validating various design & technical parameters of the weapon system including advanced navigation system pic.twitter.com/hSD8ShHQfz

  — omar r quraishi (@omar_quraishi) March 26, 2021

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  The historic rivalry and tensions have lately flared up again especially over the contested Kashmir region, after in August of 2019 India’s government voted to revoke the special status that gave Jammu and Kashmir limited autonomy.

  

  India’s Army then sent tens of thousands of troops into the region, which leaders in Islamabad condemned as tantamount to ethnic cleansing targeting Muslims. 

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 03/26/2021 – 19:20

• No Surge In COVID Two Weeks After Mask Mandate Lifted In Texas
  No Surge In COVID Two Weeks After Mask Mandate Lifted In Texas

  Authored by Meiling Lee via The Epoch Times,

  After two weeks of lifting its mask mandate and allowing businesses to open at full capacity, Texas is not seeing a surge of new COVID-19 cases.

  

  Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, issued an executive order (pdf) that went into effect on March 10 to loosen COVID-19 restrictions. Although the government’s statewide mask mandate was lifted, individual businesses were still able to “limit capacity” or impose mask mandates at their own choosing.

  But in Austin and Travis County, residents 10 years or older still have to wear a mask outside their home after a district judge refused to grant Attorney General Ken Paxton a restraining order that would have ended a mask mandate enforced by Travis County and Austin city officials. The trial is set to take place on March 26.

  Texas had been witnessing a downward trend in COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations prior to Abbott’s announcement ending the restrictions.

  COVID-19 is the disease caused by the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus.

  The Texas Department of State Health Services (DSHS) posted on Twitter yesterday that Texas saw a seven-day average decrease in the daily number of new cases, hospitalizations, and deaths.

  #COVID19TX Update: Texans are slowing the spread with vaccines and #HealthyTexas steps. Keep it up to stop variants from reversing our progress.

  In the last 7 days #Texas averaged:
  ⬇️2,556 new cases a day
  ⬇️3,581 current hospitalizations
  ⬇️122 new fatalities reported a day pic.twitter.com/QXh4UWtOsY

  — Texas DSHS (@TexasDSHS) March 24, 2021

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

  At the time the executive order was issued, March 2, new COVID-19 cases in the state stood at 7,240 cases, with a seven-day average of 7,259 cases. That number dropped to 5,350 cases by March 10 when the executive order came into effect and the economy fully opened.

  Two weeks later on March 24, the number of daily new cases stands at 3,827, with a seven-day average of 3,401 cases.

  

  Texas Governor Greg Abbott arrives for his COVID-19 press conference at the Texas State Capitol in Austin on March 29, 2020. (Tom Fox-Pool/Getty Images)

  Abbott included in his order a provision for county judges across the state’s 22 hospital regions to “use COVID-19 mitigation strategies” if hospitalizations rise over 15 percent of “hospital bed capacity” for seven straight days.

  “County Judges may not impose jail time for not following COVID-19 orders nor may any penalties be imposed for failing to wear a face mask. If restrictions are imposed at a county level, those restrictions may not include reducing capacity to less than 50% for any type of entity,” he added.

  Abbott’s mask mandate rollback had attracted criticism from high-profile figures, including California Gov. Gavin Newsom and Dr. Anthony Fauci, a top adviser to President Joe Biden.

  “We understand people’s need to get back to normal, and we’re going in that direction. But when you start doing things like completely putting aside all public health measures as if you’re turning a light switch off, that’s quite risky,” Fauci said during an appearance on CNN earlier this month.

  “We don’t want to see another surge, and that’s inviting one when you do that.”

  Mississippi also announced it was lifting COVID-19 related restrictions on March 2.

  “Starting tomorrow, we are lifting all of our county mask mandates and businesses will be able to operate at full capacity without any state-imposed rules,” Republican Gov. Tate Reeves said on Twitter. “Our hospitalizations and case numbers have plummeted, and the vaccine is being rapidly distributed. It is the time!”

  In Mississippi, new COVID-19 cases have also been steadily declining but not as much as in Texas.

  There were 301 cases with a seven-day average of 582 on March 2. Two weeks later, Mississippi had 387 new cases and a seven-day average of 289 cases.

  The state’s death toll is significantly lower than Texas, with four deaths on March 24 and a seven-day average of 6 deaths.

  Texas saw 163 deaths on the same day, with a seven-day average of 123. This is down from March 10 which saw 202 deaths and a seven-day average of 190 deaths. Texas has around ten times the population of Mississippi.

  At the time of publishing, more than six million Texan residents and 720,607 Mississippians have received at least one dose of the COVID-19 vaccine.

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 03/26/2021 – 19:00

• Sanders Challenges Biden To Adopt Aggressive Tax Scheme Topping 65% For Wealthiest Americans
  Sanders Challenges Biden To Adopt Aggressive Tax Scheme Topping 65% For Wealthiest Americans

  Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) is playing bad cop – introducing a tax plan that’s so aggressive that it makes Biden’s small-business-killing corporate tax hike look moderate in comparison.

  Sanders, Chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, has proposed two new measures – one which would raise the corporate tax rate from 21% to 35%, far above the 28% Biden has proposed. It would also add stricter rules for taxing offshore profits, according to The Hill.

  

  The second piece of legislation would supercharge the estate tax – lowering the threshold from $11 million to $3.5 million for single people, and from $22 million to $7 million for couples. It would also raise the tax rate to as much as 65% for estates over $1 billion.

  Biden, on the other hand, would cap taxes on estates valued over $3.5 million at a flat 45%.

  According to Sanders, Biden and Democrats need to be willing to go much further in taxing corporations and estates in order to pay for upcoming infrastructure and pandemic stimulus.

  “We can no longer tolerate many large corporations making billions of dollars in profits to pay nothing in federal income taxes while about half of older Americans have no retirement savings and no idea how they will be able to retire with any shred of dignity or respect,” said Sanders at a Budget Committee hearing on the topic.

  The proposals underscore how Sanders is continuing to push Biden to the left, as he did during the presidential primary race when he finished second to the president.

  But the pressure creates a number of problems for Biden, who is seeking to pass legislation through a Senate with 50 Democrats and 50 Republicans.

  If Biden does pursue the $3 trillion infrastructure and climate change package being contemplated, it’s not clear how much he’ll seek to pay for and how much will add to the deficit.

  The White House is contemplating working with Republicans on at least part of the package to win a bipartisan victory, something some centrist Democrats have pressed him to do. –The Hill

  Upcoming stimulus is likely to be split into a $2 trillion infrastructure bill, and a $1 trillion bill to address education, child care and poverty.

  What do my Republican colleagues want to do to address the crises facing working families today? They want to give tax breaks to the wealthiest people in the country. That is obscene. pic.twitter.com/n9TXnMBtJW

  — Bernie Sanders (@SenSanders) March 25, 2021

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  Republicans, meanwhile, are sounding the alarm on out-of-control spending following the passage of the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan earlier this month, which would bring the total debt from concurrent packages to nearly $5 trillion.

  “We have engaged in an unprecedented amount of borrowing over the past year, which is exactly what we should have been doing,” according to MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, in Thursday testimony before Sanders’ committee.

  “This debt trajectory leaves us vulnerable on many fronts: it leaves people who depend on these important trust fund programs vulnerable given all the uncertainty; it leaves the economy vulnerable to economic shifts both here and abroad; and it creates a major national security threat as well,” she added.

  The GOP itself passed $1.9 trillion in unfunded tax cuts in 2017 that added to the deficit. But it is unlikely to back new legislation that would add more spending that is unpaid for.

  “In 2017 we did in fact cut taxes. We cut taxes in a way to make American corporations competitive with the worldwide rate,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), the top Republican on the Budget panel.

  “This insatiable desire by my friends on the left to grab as much money and power as they can is going to ruin the country. There has to be some balance,” he added. –The Hill

  Sanders’ new bills make clear that any attempt by Biden(‘s handlers) to make generous concessions to the GOP will be met with pushback from his own party – which could cause friction in both the House and the Senate, where Democrats’ majorities are razor-thin.

  “Despite what some of my Republican colleagues may claim, the reality is that when you take into account federal income taxes, payroll taxes, gas taxes, sales taxes and property taxes, we have, as a nation, an extremely unfair tax system that allows billionaires to pay a lower effective tax rate than public school teachers, truck drivers and nurses,” said Sanders, adding “That has got to change.”

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 03/26/2021 – 18:40

• US Military Ordered 'Clandestine Burning' Of Toxic Chemicals In Poor Neighborhoods: Study
  US Military Ordered ‘Clandestine Burning’ Of Toxic Chemicals In Poor Neighborhoods: Study

  Authored by Kenny Stancil via CommonDreams.org,

  New research conducted by environmental justice scholars at Vermont’s Bennington College reveals that between 2016 and 2020, the US military oversaw the “clandestine burning” of more than 20 million pounds of Aqueous Fire Fighting Foam in low-income communities around the country—even though there is no evidence that incineration destroys the toxic “forever chemicals” that make up the foam and are linked to a range of cancers, developmental disorders, immune dysfunction, and infertility.

  “In defiance of common sense and environmental expertise, the Department of Defense (DOD) has enlisted poor communities across the US as unwilling test subjects in its toxic experiment with burning AFFF,” David Bond, associate director of the Center for the Advancement of Public Action at Bennington College, said (pdf) in a statement earlier this week.

  

  Noting that scientists, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and even Pentagon officials have warned that “burning AFFF is an unproven method and dangerous mix that threatens the health of millions of Americans,” Bond characterized the decision of the military to dump huge stockpiles of AFFF and AFFF wastewater into “a handful of habitually negligent incinerators” as a “harebrained” operation as well as a manifestation of environmental injustice.

  “In effect,” he added, “the Pentagon redistributed its AFFF problem into poor and working-class neighborhoods.”

  After months of compiling and analyzing data—obtained last year from the Pentagon and the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation—the team from Vermont launched an interactive website this week that publicizes for the first time the results of their investigation into all known shipments of AFFF to hazardous waste incinerators in the US.

  The Bennington College researchers summarized their findings as follows:

  • Over 20 million pounds of the toxic firefighting foam AFFF and AFFF wastewater was incinerated between 2016-2020;
  • The US military, the EPA, and state regulators all expressed serious concern about the ability of incineration to destroy the toxic chemicals in AFFF during this time;
  • Six incinerators were contracted to burn AFFF. Each is a habitual violator of environmental law. Since 2017, three of the incinerators were out of compliance with environmental law 100% of the time while the other incinerators were out of compliance with environmental law about 50% of the time;
  • 35% of known shipments of AFFF (7.7 million pounds) was burned at the Norlite Hazardous Waste Incinerator in Cohoes, New York, located within a densely populated urban area and less than 400 feet from a public housing complex. Norlite burned 2.47 million pounds of AFFF and 5.3 million pounds of AFFF wastewater, which likely was burned in violation of its Resource Conservation and Recovery Act permit;
  • 40% of the national stockpile of AFFF (5.5 million pounds) was sent to “fuel-blending” facilities where it was mixed into fuels for industrial use. It is not clear where the AFFF-laden fuel went next, although the DOD contract stipulates incineration should be the endpoint; and
  • 970,000 pounds of AFFF was burned overseas.

  AFFF contains contaminants known as perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS); exposure to trace amounts of these synthetic chemicals is associated with a variety of detrimental health effects, and some have argued that PFAS are so risky that they not only endanger public health but threaten to undermine human reproduction writ large.

  

  Click for interactive website

  Jane Williams, chair of the Sierra Club’s National Clean Air team stressed: “We simply must stop burning PFAS compounds.”

  “Attempting to burn these forever chemicals can generate highly toxic emissions which endanger the health of nearby communities,” she said. “Burning also releases gases which are powerful climate forcing chemicals.”

  According to Williams, “EPA and DOD are both pursuing advanced technologies that can more effectively destroy these compounds without causing these unacceptable impacts.” The pursuit of alternative disposal methods raises the question, posed by the researchers on their website: “If incineration is an unproven means of destroying these toxins, is burning AFFF solving the problem or simply emitting it into the poor communities that so often surround incinerators in the US?”

  According to the researchers, the military rushed to burn more than 20 million pounds of AFFF over the past four years because they feared the substance “would be classified as a toxic chemical (and with that designation, would require new safeguards and introduce new liability).”

  In a column published Thursday in The Guardian, Bond explained:

  While some states file suit against the manufactures of AFFF, the fingerprints of the US Armed Forces are all over the scene of the crime. When federal scientists moved to publish a comprehensive review of the toxic chemistry of AFFF in 2018, DOD officials called that science “a public relations nightmare” and tried to suppress the findings.

  Beyond damning internal emails, the military is still in possession of a tremendous amount of AFFF. As the EPA and states around the U.S. begin to designate AFFF a hazardous substance, the military’s stockpiles of AFFF are starting to add up to an astronomical liability on the military’s balance sheet. Perhaps thinking the Trump administration presented an opportune moment, the Pentagon decided to torch their AFFF problem in 2016.

  Despite AFFF’s extraordinary resistance to fire, incineration quietly became the military’s preferred method to handle AFFF. “We knew that this would be a costly endeavor, since it meant we’d be burning something that was engineered to put out fires,” Steve Schneider, chief of Hazardous Disposal for the logistics wing of DOD, said in 2017 as the operation got underway…

  As the military was sending AFFF to incinerators around the country, the EPA, state regulators, and university scientists all warned that subjecting AFFF to extremely high temperatures would likely conjure up a witches brew of fluorinated toxins, that existing smokestack technologies would be insufficient to monitor poisonous emissions let alone capture them, and that dangerous chemicals might rain down on surrounding neighborhoods. Weighing out its own liability against the health of these communities, the Pentagon struck the match.

  Judith Enck, former EPA regional administrator, said the data compiled by the Bennington College team demonstrate that “we have a national problem on our hands.”

  “Congress needs to throw cold water on the Pentagon’s mad dash to burn toxic firefighting foam. There is no evidence that incineration destroys AFFF,” she added, calling for “a national ban on burning these forever chemicals.”

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 03/26/2021 – 18:20

• WHO Wuhan COVID Origins Report Delayed As China 'Fights Tooth & Nail Over Each Sentence'
  WHO Wuhan COVID Origins Report Delayed As China ‘Fights Tooth & Nail Over Each Sentence’

  The World Health Organization (WHO) is delaying its report on the origins of COVID-19 because China is ‘fighting tooth and nail over each sentence,’ according to WHO advisory committee member Jamie Metzl.

  

  “Just received confirmation that release of the WHO-organized int’l committee/Chinese gov’t report on #COVID19 origins has again been delayed,” Metzl tweeted Friday, adding “apparently as the Chinese side fights tooth & nail over each sentence. Anyone believe this compromise report can possibly be credible?”

  Just received confirmation that release of the @WHO-organized int’l committee/Chinese gov’t report on #COVID19 origins has again been delayed, apparently as the Chinese side fights tooth & nail over each sentence. Anyone believe this compromise report can possibly be credible?

  — Jamie Metzl (@JamieMetzl) March 26, 2021

  On Monday, https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.jsformer deputy assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, David Feith, wrote in the Washington Post on Monday that WHO investigators “won’t be able to publish findings without official Chinese concurrence.“

  So will the final WHO report focus on the Wuhan Institute of Virology? Don’t count on it. Because the same WHO investigators who — responding to media inquiries — confirmed the existence of the sick lab workers immediately played down the importance of the information.

  “It was flu season!” WHO investigator Peter Daszak said on Twitter, though he provided no evidence that these lab workers had flu rather than covid.

  …

  How could such an important investigation risk its credibility by including possibly conflicted investigators? Well, the WHO investigation isn’t just a WHO investigation. It is a joint effort between the WHO, which convened some 19 international investigators, and the Chinese government, which selected 17 Chinese researchers and also had veto power over the foreign experts. The investigators won’t be able to publish findings without official Chinese concurrence.-WaPo

  And as the Daily Caller reports, the delay follows the WHO’s refusal to release an interim report on COVID-19 origins amid growing concerns over the legitimacy of their investigation.

  “Chinese experts received English version of the WHO report on Mar. 17. Whether the report will be released next week depends on discussions between Chinese & international experts,” a Chinese government spokesperson tweeted on March 19.

  Chinese experts received English version of the WHO report on Mar. 17. Whether the report will be released next week depends on discussions between Chinese & international experts. Origin-tracing is a scientific issue that needs to be studied by the science community. pic.twitter.com/o3619f58zT

  — Spokesperson发言人办公室 (@MFA_China) March 19, 2021

  WHO team members also told the Wall Street Journal after “Chinese counterparts review it and make possible changes.”

  The WHO did not respond to questions from the Daily Caller News Foundation on exactly how Chinese officials can change the report, but said through a spokesperson that “Once we have the date of the release of the report we will inform media.”

  However, a group of scientists and academics, members of Congress and others have called for a separate, more independent investigation. (RELATED: Report: WHO Granted China Authority To Veto Scientists On Wuhan Mission) 

  Discovering the virus’s origin is “critically important to both better addressing the current pandemic and reducing the risk of future ones,” the international group of scientists and academics wrote in an open letter on March 4. –Daily Caller

  “Perhaps the WHO final report will supply evidence to justify the investigators’ apparent lack of interest in pursuing the lab-leak theory,” Feith wrote in the Post. “Does the WHO have the names of the [Wuhan Institute of Virology in China] lab researchers who fell ill? Were they interviewed? Has the WHO seen their medical records? Antibody test results? If so, will the information be included in the WHO report?”

  Looks like we’ll just have and Xi what Beijing allows the WHO to conclude…

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  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 03/26/2021 – 18:00

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