May 27

Today’s News 27th May 2020

  • Over 40% Of Brits Claim They've "Changed For The Better" During Lockdowns
    Over 40% Of Brits Claim They’ve “Changed For The Better” During Lockdowns

    Tyler Durden

    Wed, 05/27/2020 – 02:45

    A new study revealed that 43% of people feel they’ve “changed their ways for the better” as a result of the extra time they had during coronavirus lockdowns. Many found new habits and activities — including creating podcasts, learning to code, and exercising. 

    The study, commissioned by LG Electronics, polled nearly 2,000 British adults of how their daily lives were transformed because of the lockdowns. About half of the respondents said they would maintain the newly acquired hobbies, skills, and daily habits in a post-corona world.

    Learning new computer skills, creating podcasts, participating in online fitness classes, and walking outside were some of the top activities people turned to during lockdowns. It was increasingly evident that technology played a significant role in occupying people’s time: 54% said they couldn’t function without a computer, 64% said smartphones were critical, and 57% couldn’t do without television. 

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    “The fact that many people are forming productive and healthy new habits is testament to the nation’s ability to adjust,” Hanju Kim, IT product director at LG UK, said in a statement. 

    “The nation is working from home and has an appetite to continue working flexibly even after offices reopen. A big part of this can be attributed to technology keeping us connected,” said Kim. 

    Around 20% of respondents said they slept more during lockdowns, while 10% said they learned new things from YouTube tutorials. 

    Two-fifths of respondents believe these new habits and activities will increase their wellbeing, while one in four noticed a more comfortable life that allowed for a better routine in daily activities. About a quarter found new ways of making money during the lockdowns. 

    The research found that social distancing led to an increase in video conference calls among respondents, who used the software to connect with friends, family, and work. Roughly half said they conducted video calls more than they did before lockdowns.

    And 48% plan to keep this up in a post-corona world, or even increase this new lifestyle, suggesting how people’s daily lives will forever change and could soon result in huge economic impacts. 

    Regardless of how long the current public health crisis lasts, people working at home will result in forcing huge changes and ultimately restructuring the old economy. This could have profound impacts on corporate real estate, transportation, energy, restaurants, and many other industries. With the economy crashed, the restructuring phase has just begun, it will take several years for the recovery to play out.

  • Trump Slams Libya "Foreign Interference" & Urges "Rapid De-escalation" In Erdogan Call
    Trump Slams Libya “Foreign Interference” & Urges “Rapid De-escalation” In Erdogan Call

    Tyler Durden

    Wed, 05/27/2020 – 02:00

    Authored by Jason Ditz via AntiWar.com,

    After weeks of military gains by Libya’s Government of National Accord (GNA), President Trump has called for a deescalation during his phone call with Turkey’s President Erdogan. Turkey is the GNA’s only foreign ally.

    This is bound to once again raise questions about the US position. Nominally the US is backing the GNA, but at times Trump has expressed support for their enemy, the Libyan National Army (LNA). The deescalation would be seen as bailing out the LNA from recent losses.

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    Image: AFP

    “President Trump reiterated concern over worsening foreign interference in Libya and the need for rapid de-escalation,” White House spokesman Judd Deere said in a statement.

    The LNA has a lot of foreign allies, from France and Russia to virtually the whole list of Gulf Arab states. LNA leader Khalifa Hafter, was a CIA asset in the past, and the US has criticized Russia for being too close with him, despite their own long history of backing him.

    Reuters reports:

    As the LNA has promised to respond with a massive air campaign, diplomats have warned of the risk of a new round of escalation with the warring sides’ external backers pouring in new weaponry.

    Turkey “will not bow to threats by Haftar or anyone else,” Turkey’s presidential spokesman Ibrahim Kalin said separately in an interview on NTV.

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    It’s not clear where Turkey is going with this, as they mostly want maritime rights and a military base.

    Those are likely secured already, but the GNA probably feels very little need to step down in the face of recent gains.

  • Is War Next?
    Is War Next?

    Tyler Durden

    Wed, 05/27/2020 – 00:05

    Authored by James Rickards via The Daily Reckoning,

    Remember the pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong against Chinese authoritarianism?

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    Well, guess what? They’re about to start again.

    And U.S.-Chinese relations could get even worse than they are right now.

    Are you prepared for a bumpy ride?

    Let’s unpack this…

    Last year’s protests came in response to a proposed law that would have allowed the extradition of Hong Kong residents to Beijing for trial on charges that arose in Hong Kong.

    That would have deprived Hong Kong residents of legal protections in local law and subjected prisoners to torture and summary execution.

    The legislation was proposed by Hong Kong’s Chief Executive Carrie Lam, who many consider a puppet of Beijing.

    The demonstrations grew exponentially, ultimately involving hundreds of thousands of protesters.

    The list of demands also grew to include more democracy and freedom and adherence to Hong Kong’s rule of law.

    Due to social media, these protests were seen around the world.

    The proposed bill behind the original protests was scrapped last October, which was a victory for the pro-democracy protesters.

    The protests didn’t end altogether, but tensions were at least diffused to a great extent and the world moved on.

    Well, here comes round two…

    China’s Communist parliament is preparing to roll out legislation that would ban “treason, secession, sedition (and) subversion” in Hong Kong.

    This is different from the previous legislation because this bill actually originates in Beijing, not Hong Kong. It’s a direct assault on Hong Kong’s democracy. The Chinese parliament would insert the legislation directly into Hong Kong’s constitution.

    It’s scheduled for passage next week.

    Pro-democracy activists have called for mass protests this weekend in response to what they rightly consider a Chinese invasion of their autonomy.

    We could be in for a fresh round of protests, with as many or more people. China’s reaction will be key.

    Will they try to put the protests down by force? That could have major consequences.

    Yesterday, news emerged that the U.S. Senate is introducing bipartisan legislation to impose sanctions on officials and business entities that enforce the new law.

    And President Trump warned yesterday that the U.S. would react “very strongly” to the Chinese legislation.

    In response, China’s foreign ministry warned Beijing would “fight back” against any U.S. interference.

    At a time when U.S.-Chinese relations are already at a low ebb due to China’s almost criminal handling of the coronavirus pandemic, it looks like things are about to get even worse.

    This situation could become very interesting.

    But you shouldn’t be surprised. The current trajectory of U.S.-China relations is following a familiar course. It started with the currency war…

    When my first book, Currency Wars, was published in 2011, I made the point that currency wars don’t exist all the time, but when they emerge they can last for 15 or 20 years.

    The reason is that the currency devaluations just go back and forth between major trading partners and no one is any further ahead in the long run.

    Readers said, “OK, we get that, but what comes next?”

    The answer is trade wars. Once currency devaluations fail, countries turn to tariffs to slow down imports and help their own exports.

    That’s where the U.S. and China are now, with the ongoing trade war (which could get worse).

    But that’s also a dead end from an economic perspective. Again, the question is: What comes next?

    Well, with history as a guide, we can see that today’s pattern is a repeat of what the world went through in the 1920s and 1930s.

    First came currency wars (1921–1936). Then came trade wars (1930–34) and then finally a shooting war (1939–1945).

    Are we heading for another shooting war with China? The signs are not good.

    Trade war tariffs can be weaponized to pursue geopolitical goals. Trump is using tariffs to punish China for its criminal negligence (or worse) in connection with the spread of the Wuhan virus to the U.S. and the rest of the world.

    This also has historical precedent.

    Between June and August 1941, President Franklin Roosevelt placed an oil embargo on Japan and froze Japan’s accounts in U.S. banks.

    In December 1941, the Japanese retaliated with the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor. Will China now escalate its retaliation to the point of armed conflict?

    We’ll find out soon, possibly in the South China Sea or the Taiwan Strait. The latest reemergence of tensions in Hong Kong only adds kerosene to the fire.

    Investors should prepare for U.S.-China geopolitical tension to grow worse. Maybe a lot worse. That’s the lesson of history.

  • Visualizing How US Consumers Are Spending Differently During COVID-19
    Visualizing How US Consumers Are Spending Differently During COVID-19

    Tyler Durden

    Tue, 05/26/2020 – 23:45

    In 2019, nearly 70% of U.S. GDP was driven by personal consumption. However, as Visual Capitalist’s Iman Ghosh notes, in the first and second quarters of 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic has initiated a transformation of consumer spending trends as we know them.

    Consumer Spending in Charts

    By leveraging new data from analytics platform 1010Data, today’s infographic dives into the credit and debit card spending of five million U.S. consumers over the past few months.

    Let’s see how their spending habits have evolved over that short timeframe:

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    The above data on consumer spending, which comes from 1010Data and powered by AI platform Exabel, is broken into 18 different categories:

    • General Merchandise & Grocery: Big Box, Pharmacy, Wholesale Club, Grocery

    • Retail: Apparel, Office Supplies, Pet Supplies

    • Restaurant: Casual dining, Fast casual, Fast food, Fine dining

    • Food Delivery: Food delivery, Grocery Delivery, Meal/Snack kit

    • Travel: Airline, Car rental, Cruise, Hotel

    It’s no surprise that COVID-19 has consumers cutting back on most of their purchases, but that doesn’t mean that specific categories don’t benefit from changes in consumer habits.

    Consumer Spending Changes By Category

    The onset of changing consumer behavior can be observed from February 25, 2020, when compared year-over-year (YoY).

    As of May 12, 2020, combined spending in all categories dropped by almost 30% YoY. Here’s how that shakes out across the different categories, across two months.

    General Merchandise & Grocery

    This segment saw a sharp spike in initial spending, as Americans scrambled to stockpile on non-perishable food, hand sanitizer, and toilet paper from Big Box stores like Walmart, or Wholesale Clubs like Costco.

    In particular, spending on groceries reached a YoY increase of 97.1% on March 18, 2020. However, these sudden panic-buying urges leveled out by the start of April.

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    Pharmaceutical purchases dropped the most in this segment, possibly as individuals cut back on their healthcare expenditures during this time. In fact, in an April 2020 McKinsey survey of physicians, 80% reported a decline in patient volumes.

    Retail

    With less foot traffic in malls and entire stores forced to close, sales of apparel plummeted both in physical locations and over e-commerce platforms.

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    Interestingly, sales of office supplies rose as many pivoted to working from home. Many parents also likely required more of these resources to home-school their children.

    Restaurant

    The food and beverage industry has been hard-hit by COVID-19. While many businesses turned to delivery services to stay afloat, those in fine dining were less able to rely on such a shift, and spiraled by 88.2% by May 5, 2020, year-over-year.

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    Applebees or Olive Garden exemplify casual dining, while Panera or Chipotle characterize fast casual.

    Food Delivery

    Meanwhile, many consumers also shifted from eating out to home cooking. As a result, grocery delivery services jumped by over five-fold—with consumers spending a whopping 558.4% more at its April 19, 2020 peak compared to last year.

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    Food delivery services are also in high demand, with Doordash seeing the highest growth in U.S. users than any other food delivery app in April.

    Travel

    While all travel categories experienced an immense decline, cruises suffered the worst blow by far, down by 87.0% in YoY spending since near the start of the pandemic.

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    Airlines have also come to a halt, nosediving by 91.4% in a 10-week span. In fact, governments worldwide have pooled together nearly $85 billion in an attempt to bail the industry out.

    Hope on the Horizon?

    Consumer spending offers a pulse of the economy’s health. These sharp drops in consumer spending fall in line with the steep decline in consumer confidence.

    In fact, consumer confidence has eroded even more intensely than the stock market’s performance this quarter, as observed when the Index of Consumer Sentiment (ICS) is compared to the S&P 500 Index.

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    Many investors dumped their stocks as the coronavirus hit, but consumers tightened their purse strings even more. Yet, as the chart also shows, both the stock market and consumer sentiment are slowly but surely on the mend since April.

    As the stay-at-home curtain cautiously begins to lift in the U.S., there may yet be hope for economic recovery on the horizon.

  • Trump's "Keyboard Warriors" Get The Story While The Legacy Media Ignores #Obamagate
    Trump’s “Keyboard Warriors” Get The Story While The Legacy Media Ignores #Obamagate

    Tyler Durden

    Tue, 05/26/2020 – 23:25

    Submitted by Thomas Farnan

    CrowdStrike – the forensic investigation firm hired by the Democratic National Committee (DNC) to inspect its computer servers in 2016 – admitted to Congressional investigators as early as 2017 that it had no direct evidence of Russian hacking, recently declassified documents show.

    CrowdStrike’s president Shawn Henry testified, “There’s not evidence that [documents and emails] were actually exfiltrated [from the DNC servers]. There’s circumstantial evidence but no evidence that they were actually exfiltrated.”

    This was a crucial revelation because the thousand ships of Russiagate launched upon the positive assertion that CrowdStrike had definitely proven a Russian hack.

    This sworn admission has been hidden from the public for over two years, and subsequent commentary has focused on that singular outrage.

    The next deductive step, though, leads to an equally crucial point: Circumstantial evidence of Russian hacking is itself flimsy and collapses when not propped up by a claim of conclusive forensic testing.

    THE COVER UP.

    On March 19, 2016, Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta, surrendered his emails to an unknown entity in a “spear phishing” scam. This has been called a “hack,” but it was not.  Instead, it is was the sort of flim-flam hustle that happens to gullible dupes on the internet.

    The content of the emails was beyond embarrassing. They showed election fraud and coordination with the media against the candidacy of Bernie Sanders. The DNC and the Clinton campaign needed a cover story.

    There already existed in Washington brooding suspicion that Vladimir Putin was working to influence elections in the West. The DNC and the Clinton campaign set out to retrofit that supposition to explain the emails.

    On January 16, 2016, a silk-stocking Washington D.C. think tank, The Atlantic Council (remember that name), had issued a dispatch under the banner headline: “US Intelligence Agencies to Investigate Russia’s Infiltration of European Political Parties.”

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    The lede was concise: “American intelligence agencies are to conduct a major investigation into how the Kremlin is infiltrating political parties in Europe, it can be revealed.”

    There followed a series of pull quotes from an article that appeared in the The Telegraph, including that “James Clapper, the US Director of National Intelligence” was investigating whether right wing political movements in Europe were sourced in “Russian meddling.”

    The dispatch spoke of “A dossier” that revealed “Russian influence operations” in Europe. This was the first time trippy words like “Russian meddling” and “dossier” would appear together in the American lexicon.

    Most importantly, the piece revealed the Obama administration was spying on conservative European political parties. This means, almost necessarily under the Five Eyes Agreement, foreign agents were returning the favor and spying on the Trump campaign.

    Blaming Russia would be a handy way to deal with the Podesta emails. The problem was the technologically impossibility of identifying the perpetrator in a phishing scheme. The only way to associate Putin with the emails was circumstantially. The DNC retained CrowdStrike to provide assistance.

    On June 12, 2016, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange announced: “We have upcoming leaks in relation to Hillary Clinton . . . We have emails pending publication.”

    Two days later, CrowdStrike fed the Washington Post a story, headlined, “Russian government hackers penetrated DNC, stole opposition research on Trump.”

    The improbable tale was that the Russians had hacked the DNC computer servers and got away with some opposition research on Trump. The article quoted CrowdStrike’s chief technology officer and co-founder, Dmitri Alperovitch, who also happens to be a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council.

    The next day, a new blog – Guccifer 2.0 – appeared on the internet and announced:

    Worldwide known cyber security company CrowdStrike announced that the Democratic National Committee (DNC) servers had been hacked by “sophisticated” hacker groups.

    I’m very pleased the company appreciated my skills so highly))) But in fact, it was easy, very easy.

    Guccifer may have been the first one who penetrated Hillary Clinton’s and other Democrats’ mail servers. But he certainly wasn’t the last. No wonder any other hacker could easily get access to the DNC’s servers.

    Shame on CrowdStrike: Do you think I’ve been in the DNC’s networks for almost a year and saved only 2 documents? Do you really believe it?

    Here are just a few docs from many thousands I extracted when hacking into DNC’s network.

    Guccifer 2.0 posted hundreds of pages of Trump opposition research allegedly hacked from the DNC and emailed copies to Gawker and The Smoking Gun. In raw form, the opposition research was one of the documents obtained in the Podesta emails, with a notable difference: It was widely reported the document now contained “Russian fingerprints.”

    The document had been cut and pasted into a separate Russian Word template that yielded an abundance of Russian “error “messages. In the document’s metadata was the name of the Russian secret police founder, Felix Dzerzhinsky, written in the Russian language. The three-parenthesis formulation from the original post “)))” is the Russian version of a smiley face used commonly on social media. In addition, the blog’s author deliberately used a Russian VPN service visible in its emails even though there would have been many options to hide national affiliation.

    CrowdStrike would later test the computers and declare this to be the work of sophisticated Russian spies. Alperovitch described it as, “skilled operational tradecraft.”

    There is nothing skilled, though, in ham-handedly disclosing a Russian identity on the internet when trying to hide it. The more reasonable inference is that this was a set-up. It certainly looks like Guccifer 2.0 suddenly appeared in coordination with the Washington Post’s article that appeared the previous day.

    THE FRAME UP.

    Knowing as we now do that CrowdStrike never corroborated a hack by forensic analysis, the reasonable inference is that somebody was trying to frame Russia. Most likely, the entities that spent three years falsely leading the world to believe that direct evidence of a hack existed – CrowdStrike and the DNC – were the ones involved in the frame-up.

    Lending weight to this theory: at the same moment CrowdStrike was raising a false Russian flag, a different entity, Fusion GPS – also paid by the DNC – was inventing a phony dossier that ridiculously connected Trump to Russia.

    Somehow, the ruse worked.

    Rather than report the content of the incriminating emails, the watchdog press instead reported CrowdStrike’s bad explanation: that Putin-did-it.

    Incredibly, Trump was placed on the defensive for email leaks that showed his opponent fixing the primaries.  His campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, was forced to resign because a fake ledger suddenly appeared out of Ukraine connecting him to Russia.

    Trump protested by stating the obvious: the federal government has “no idea” who was behind the hacks. The FBI and CIA called him a liar, issuing a “Joint Statement” that cited Guccifer 2.0, suggesting 17 intelligence agencies agree that it was the Russians. 

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    Hillary Clinton took advantage of this “intelligence assessment” in the October debate to portray Trump as Putin’s stooge”

    “We have 17, 17 intelligence agencies, civilian and military who have all concluded that these espionage attacks, these cyber-attacks, come from the highest levels of the Kremlin.  And they are designed to influence our election. I find that deeply disturbing,” said Clinton.

    The media’s fact checkers excoriated Trump for lying. This was the ultimate campaign dirty trick: a joint operation by the intelligence agencies and the media against a political candidate. It has since been learned that the “17 intelligence agencies” claptrap was always false.  Those responsible for the exaggeration were James Clapper, James Comey and John Brennan.

    Somehow, Trump won anyway.

    Those who assert that it is a “conspiracy theory” to say that CrowdStrike would fabricate the results of computer forensic testing to create a false Russian flag should know that it was caught doing exactly that around the time it was inspecting the DNC computers.

    On Dec. 22, 2016, CrowdStrike caused an international stir when it claimed to have uncovered evidence that Russians hacked into a Ukrainian artillery computer app to help pro-Russian separatists.

    Voice of America later determined the claim was false, and CrowdStrike retracted its finding.

    Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense was forced to eat crow and admit that the hacking never happened. If you wanted a computer testing firm to fabricate a Russian hack for political reasons in 2016, CrowdStrike was who you went out and hired.

    Perhaps most insidiously, the Obama administration played the phony Russian interference card during the transition to try to end Trump’s presidency before it started. As I wrote in December 2017:

    Michael Flynn was indicted for a conversation he had with the Russian ambassador on December 28, 2016, seven weeks after the election.

    That was the day after the outgoing president expelled 35 Russian diplomats—including gardeners and chauffeurs—for interfering in the election. Yes, that really happened.

    The Obama administration had wiretapped Flynn’s conversation with the ambassador, hoping to find him saying something they could use to support their wild story about collusion.

    The outrage, for some reason, is not that an outgoing administration was using wiretaps to listen in on a successor’s transition. It is that Flynn might have signaled to the Russians that the Trump administration would have a different approach to foreign policy.

    How dare Trump presume to tell an armed nuclear state to stand down because everyone in Washington was in a state of psychological denial that he was elected?

    Let’s establish one thing early here: It is okay for an incoming administration to communicate its foreign policy preferences during a transition even if they differ from the lame duck administration….

    ….If anything, Flynn was too reserved in his conversation with the Russian ambassador. He should have said, “President-elect Trump believes this Russian collusion thing is a fantasy and these sanctions will be lifted on his first day in office.”

    That would have been perfectly legal. It also happens to be what FBI Director Comey and the rest were hoping Flynn would do. They wanted to get a Trump official on tape making an accommodation to the Russians.

    The accommodation would then be cited to suggest a quid pro quo that proved the nonexistent collusion. Instead, Flynn was uncharacteristically noncommittal in his conversation with the ambassador. Drat!

    They did have a transcript of what he said, though. This is where the tin-pot dictator behavior of Comey is fully displayed. He invited Flynn to be interviewed by the FBI, supposedly about Russian collusion to steal the election.

    If you’re Flynn, you say, “Sure, I want to tell you 15 different ways that there was no collusion and when do you want to meet.”

    What Flynn did not know was that the purpose of the interview had nothing to do with the election. It would be a test pitting Flynn’s memory against the transcript.

    Think about that for a moment. Comey did not need to ask Flynn what was said in the conversation with the ambassador—he had a transcript. The only reason to ask Flynn about it was to cross him up.

    That is the politicization of the FBI. It is everything Trump supporters rail against when they implore him to drain the swamp. The inescapable conclusion is that the FBI set a trap for the incoming national security advisor to affect the foreign policy of the newly elected president.

    Flynn made the mistake of not being altogether clear about what he had discussed with the ambassador. In his defense, he did not believe he was sitting there to tell the FBI how the Trump administration was dealing with Russia going forward. The conversation was supposed to be about the election.

    He certainly did not think the FBI would unmask his comments in a FISA wiretap and compare them to his answers. That would be illegal.

    Exhibit 5 to the DOJ’s recent Motion to Dismiss the Flynn indictment confirms the Obama administration’s bad faith in listening in on his conversation with the ambassador. The plotters admit, essentially, that they looked at the transcript to see whether Flynn said anything that caused Russia to stand-down. Had General Flynn promised to lift the sanctions, the Obama administration would have claimed it was the pro quo that went with the quid of Putin’s interference.

    After Trump’s inauguration, the FBI and Justice Department launched a special counsel investigation that accepted, as a given, CrowdStrike’s dubious conclusion that Russia had interfered in the election. The only remaining question was whether Trump himself colluded in the interference. There followed a two-year inquiry that did massive political damage to Trump and the movement that put him in office.

    Tucker Carlson rightly made Trey Gowdy squirm recently for Republican acquiescence in the shoddy underpinnings of the Russia hoax. It was not only Gowdy, though. Establishment politicians and pundits have been all too willing for years to wallow in fabricated Russian intrigue, at the expense of the Trump presidency.

    This perfectly illustrates Republican perfidy: Gifted with undeserved victory in a generational realignment that they were dragged to kicking and screaming, they proceed to question its source and validity. Because if Trump was a product of KGB-esque intrigue, then Hillary was a victim of meddling. Trump was a hapless beneficiary. The deplorables were not only racist losers, they were also Putin’s unwitting stooges.

    As I first noted in December 2016, the Washington establishment deliberately set out to fan Russian anxiety to conduct war against the Trump administration. Perhaps it is time to admit that those of us chided as “crazies” who doubted Russian interference – including Trump himself – were right all along.

    In the after-action assessment of what went wrong, it should be noted that non-insiders are the ones who have called this from the beginning, in places like here, here, here, here, and here. That is partly what the president means when he Tweets support for his “keyboard warriors.” As Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany pointed out on Friday, the White House press corps has completely missed the story.

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    This scandal is huge, much bigger than Watergate, and compromising in its resolution is destructive.

    If Republicans continue to stupidly concede phony Russian intrigue, the plotters will say they were justified to investigate it.

    The recent CrowdStrike testimony drop ended any chance at middle ground. This was a rank political operation and indicting a few FBI agents is not going to resolve anything.

    CrowdStrike’s circumstantial evidence that launched this probe is ridiculous. We’ll soon know if the Durham investigation has the will to defy powerful insiders of both parties and say so.

  • Grenell Declassifies Flynn-Kislyak Calls On Last Day As Acting DNI
    Grenell Declassifies Flynn-Kislyak Calls On Last Day As Acting DNI

    Tyler Durden

    Tue, 05/26/2020 – 23:05

    In his last act as Acting Director of National Intelligence, Richard Grenell declassified the transcripts of intercepted phone calls between former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn and former Russian Ambassador to the US, Sergey Kislyak.

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    The now-declassified transcripts are in the hands of his successor, former Rep. John Ratcliffe (R-TX), who was sworn in on Tuesday after the Senate confirmed him last Thursday by a vote of 49-44. Ratcliffe will decide whether they are released to the public, according to the New York Post.

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    Grenell said last week that he was in the process of declassifying the transcripts after House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D-CA) made a written request for Grenell to do so, who was joined by Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-CA) – to which Grenell replied “Those are coming. It’s very important for the public to see ALL of them,” adding “For too long the public has been misled. Just compare your committee’s transcripts to your public statements!”

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    The move follows a scorching Monday letter Grenell wrote to Sen. Mark Warner, who requested on May 20 that Grenell declassify intelligence reports in which Obama administration officials had unmasked Flynn’s identity after Grenell revealed a list of ‘unmaskers.’

    In response, Grenell said on Monday that he found it “puzzling” that Warner’s letter conveyed concerns over the declassification of Obama officials who unmasked Flynn – while in the next breath requesting the declassification and release of intelligence reports.

    “Cherry-picking certain documents for release, while attacking the release of others that don’t fit your political narrative, is part of the problem the American people have with Washington D.C. politicians,” wrote Grenell, who then asked Warner to explain his “philosophy on transparency,” suggesting that “it appears to be solely on political advantage.”

    Flynn was fired weeks after the Kislyak calls for lying to Vice President Mike Pence about the substance of the conversations, in which Flynn asked Russia not to escalate tension after the outgoing Obama administration slapped sanctions on the Kremlin in response to claims of election meddling in the 2016 election. Flynn later pleaded guilty in 2017 for lying to the FBI about the calls, however evidence emerged in his trial that the FBI was trying to ensnare him in a ‘perjury trap’ in which one option was to ‘try to get him to lie.’

    “What’s our goal? Truth/Admission or to get him to lie, so we can prosecute him or get him fired?” reads one handwritten note by the FBI’s then-director of counterintelligence.

    Last week, Flynn’s lawyer Sidney Powell joined former National Security Adviser Susan Rice in calling for the transcripts to be released.

    Powell said last Wednesday on SiriusXM’s “The Dan Abrams Show” that she “would love” to see those conversations become public, arguing that she believes the transcript would help exonerate her client.

    “I think the reason we haven’t seen [the transcripts] is because the word ‘sanctions’ doesn’t even appear in them,” she said at the time. –New York Post

    After the FBI’s plot to target Flynn emerged, the Department of Justice moved to drop the case – which is currently being stonewalled by activist Judge Emmet Sullivan.

  • China Is Its Own Worst Enemy
    China Is Its Own Worst Enemy

    Tyler Durden

    Tue, 05/26/2020 – 22:45

    Authored by Brahma Chellaney via Project Syndicate,

    The global backlash against China over its culpability for the international spread of the deadly coronavirus from Wuhan has gained momentum in recent weeks. And China itself has added fuel to the fire, as exemplified by its recent legal crackdown on Hong Kong. From implicitly seeking a political quid pro quo for supplying other countries with protective medical gear, to rejecting calls for an independent international inquiry into the virus’s origins until a majority of countries backed such a probe, the bullying tactics of President Xi Jinping’s government have damaged and isolated China’s communist regime.

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    The backlash could take the form of Western sanctions as Xi’s regime seeks to overturn Hong Kong’s “one country, two systems” framework with its proposed new national-security laws for the territory, which has been wracked by widespread pro-democracy protests for over a year. More broadly, Xi’s overreach is inviting increasing hostility among China’s neighbors and around the world.

    Had Xi been wise, China would have sought to repair the pandemic-inflicted damage to its image by showing empathy and compassion, such as by granting debt relief to near-bankrupt Belt and Road Initiative partner countries and providing medical aid to poorer countries without seeking their support for its handling of the outbreak. Instead, China has acted in ways that undermine its long-term interests.

    Whether through its aggressive “Wolf Warrior” diplomacy – named after two Chinese films in which special-operations forces rout US-led mercenaries – or military-backed expansionist moves in China’s neighborhood, Xi’s regime has caused international alarm. In fact, Xi, the self-styled indispensable leader, views the current global crisis as an opportunity to tighten his grip on power and advance his neo-imperialist agenda, recently telling a Chinese university audience that, “The great steps in history were all taken after major disasters.”

    China has certainly sought to make the most of the pandemic. After buying up much of the world’s available supply of protective medical equipment in January, it has engaged in price-gouging and apparent profiteering. And Chinese exports of substandard or defective medical gear have only added to the international anger.

    While the world grapples with COVID-19, the Chinese military has provoked border flare-ups with India and attempted to police the waters off the Japanese-controlled Senkaku Islands. China has also recently established two new administrative districts in the South China Sea, and stepped up its incursions and other activities in the area. In early April, for example, a Chinese coast guard ship rammed and sank a Vietnamese fishing boat, prompting the United States to caution China to “stop exploiting the [pandemic-related] distraction or vulnerability of other states to expand its unlawful claims in the South China Sea.”

    Meanwhile, China has made good on its threat of economic reprisals against Australia for initiating the idea of an international coronavirus inquiry. Through trade actions, the Chinese government has effectively cut off imports of Australian barley and blocked more than one-third of Australia’s regular beef exports to China.

    Whereas Japan readily allowed the International Atomic Energy Agency to conduct a full investigation into the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster – a probe that helped the country to improve safety governance – China strongly opposed any coronavirus inquiry, as if it had something to hide. In fact, some Chinese commentators denounced calls for an inquiry as racist.

    But once a resolution calling for an “impartial, independent and comprehensive evaluation” of the global response to COVID-19 gained the support of more than 100 countries in the World Health Organization’s decision-making body, the World Health Assembly, Xi sought to save face by telling the assembly that “China supports the idea of a comprehensive review.” At the last minute, China co-sponsored the resolution, which was approved without objection.

    The resolution, however, leaves it up to the WHO’s controversial director-general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, to launch the review “at the earliest appropriate moment.” Tedros, who has been accused of aiding China’s initial COVID-19 cover-up, may decide to wait until the pandemic has come “under control,” as Xi has proposed.

    Make no mistake: the world will not be the same after this wartime-like crisis. Future historians will regard the pandemic as a turning point that helped to reshape global politics and restructure vital production networks. Indeed, the crisis has made the world wake up to the potential threats stemming from China’s grip on many global supply chains, and moves are already afoot to loosen that control.

    More fundamentally, Xi’s actions highlight how political institutions that bend to the whim of a single, omnipotent individual are prone to costly blunders. China’s diplomatic and information offensive to obscure facts and deflect criticism of its COVID-19 response may be only the latest example of its brazen use of censure and coercion to browbeat other countries. But it represents a watershed moment.

    In the past, China’s reliance on persuasion secured its admission to international institutions like the World Trade Organization and helped to power its economic rise. But under Xi, spreading disinformation, exercising economic leverage, flexing military muscle, and running targeted influence operations have become China’s favorite tools for getting its way. Diplomacy serves as an adjunct of the Communist Party’s propaganda apparatus.

    Xi’s approach is alienating other countries, in the process jeopardizing their appetite for Chinese-made goods, scaring away investors, and accentuating China’s image problem. Negative views of China and its leadership among Americans have reached a record high. Major economies such as Japan and the US are offering firms relocation subsidies as an incentive to shift production out of China. And India’s new rule requiring prior government approval of any investment from China is the first of its kind.

    China currently faces the most daunting international environment since it began opening up in the late 1970s, and now it risks suffering lasting damage to its image and interests. A boomerang effect from Xi’s overreach seems inevitable. A pandemic that originated in China will likely end up weakening the country’s global position and hamstringing its future growth. In this sense, the hollowing out of Hong Kong’s autonomy in the shadow of COVID-19 could prove to be the proverbial straw that breaks the Chinese camel’s back.

  • Chinese Yuan Suddenly Tumbling
    Chinese Yuan Suddenly Tumbling

    Tyler Durden

    Tue, 05/26/2020 – 22:32

    Just after 9:45pm ET the offshore yuan – the one which is not subject to the PBOC’s trading band limits – tumbled, plunging 250 pips in minutes.

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    The move was unexpected, following a stronger than expected setting of the USDCNY by the PBOC, whose midpoint was set at 7.1092, far stronger than the 7.1220 expected and the 12 year low of 7.1293 hit on Tuesday. The drop comes just hours after Bloomberg reported that Trump administration was considering sanctions including transaction controls, and asset freezes, over the implementation of the new national security law in Hong Kong.

    While the offshore yuan is not at all time lows yet – it would need to hit around 7.20 for that – there has been no news to justify the move, with the sudden move sparking speculation that Beijing may be using it to telegraph the devaluation that could follow should the US escalate aggressively in response to a Hong Kong crackdown.

    Here, once again, is a reminder from Rabobank’s Michael Every why in the current environment of escalating hostility between the US and China, the only thing that matters is the Yuan, and why in the not too distant future, the Chinese currency may have a 10-handle in front of it.

    This time last year, when we were all still going abroad regularly (right now just ‘outside’ is becoming a psychological barrier if I am honest) I was traveling with a presentation titled “Clause is Cause”. This argued that from a geostrategic ‘Von Clausewitz’ perspective, not a neoliberal “Let’s assume world peace” version, the US would at some point realise the USD/Eurodollar was a weapon it could wield vs. China, and when it did we would see three key strings cut: trade; tech; and then capital flows. The first was evident during the trade war – which has not been concluded is likely to get far worse soon; the second is also abundantly clear on a variety of fronts, much to Silicon Valley’s chagrin; and potentially, now we see the start of that third step – because if the US does block this first USD50bn going in, other such steps will follow, just as they did on the previously unthinkable idea of US tariffs on China.

    CNH is right to be selling off, albeit in a traditionally limited fashion, because if you don’t buy from China and you don’t help China up the value-chain and you don’t invest in China then China is not going to be getting much USD liquidity at all. The US hawks probably don’t get the Eurodollar iron logic there; they are likely just pressing buttons in anger. The outcome would be the same nonetheless.

    I can hear the market bulls and technocrats of the world saying “But China has USD3 trillion in reserves!” Perhaps. Most think it’s far lower than that. And not earning USD means you have to dig into that stockpile. And when you do, the PBOC either has to contract the local money supply (because every USD is backed by 7.xx CNY on the other side of the balance sheet) or it just creates new CNY anyway and supply-demand sees CNY move sharply lower – as we have been seeing in all other EM FX. Looking at the drop in BRL, ARS, ZAR, TRY, etc., or even THB, this would be how we would get to the ‘unthinkable’ 8 (9? 10?) handle in CNY. That would also crush those other EM crosses in tandem – and AUD and NZD, as the former tries to navigate its own geopolitical spat with Beijing.

    As we said two days ago, “with the Fed having taken over most US capital markets which have now lost most if not all of their discounting and signaling capabilities, keep an eye on that USDCNH: ironically, it may be the last true market stress indicator left.”

    Moves like tonight suggest that either someone knows something, that something big may be coming, or the algos are just doing all they can to trigger another stop loss domino effect.

  • "I'm Looking For The Truth!" – Experts Slam States For 'Misrepresenting' COVID-19 Data As Outbreak Recedes
    “I’m Looking For The Truth!” – Experts Slam States For ‘Misrepresenting’ COVID-19 Data As Outbreak Recedes

    Tyler Durden

    Tue, 05/26/2020 – 22:25

    For better or worse, every state in the US is pushing ahead with plans to reopen their economies. On Tuesday afternoon, California Gov. Gavin Newsom announced that retailers across the state would be allowed to reopen immediately, along with barbershops and salons in some counties. Later this week, Texas and a handful of other states will enter “phase 2” of their reopening plans.

    But while the spike in new cases and deaths has decidedly not materialized – the number of new cases confirmed across the US tumbled to its lowest level in 2 months on Tuesday – a handful of states have still be called out for meddling or distorting the data before it was presented to the public to help justify plans to reopen before satisfying the federal guidelines released by the Trump Administration back in April.

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    Former Obama-era CDC Director Tom Frieden, a near-constant voice on cable news like MSNBC and CNN, has regularly bashed states like Georgia for allegedly putting President Trump’s reelection prospects before people’s lives. But Frieden – one of many officials who proclaimed that the White House was deliberately trying to suppress projections calling for 3k deaths per day by June 1 – has moved on to highlighting examples of disingenuous data reporting by the states.

    Of course, it has become clear in the weeks since the NYT published those projections that they were way, way off-base, just like the White House explained when it explained why it wasn’t relying on them.

    But Frieden just can’t help himself, apparently, as NBC News reports.

    “Accurate, complete and timely information is the best way to understand, respond to and limit the impact of the virus on both health and the economy,” Dr. Tom Frieden, who ran the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention under former President Barack Obama, told NBC News.

    “This helps to set realistic expectations on how the pandemic will affect people’s lives and to inform required changes in behavior to prevent the spread of the virus,” he added.

    In Georgia, officials have apologized for string of suspicious “errors” that implied the number of new cases were falling earlier and more quickly than the official data bore out (over the past week, the number of new cases has fallen sharply even as access to testing has been expanded).

    Georgia officials have apologized and corrected what was described as a “processing error” that wrongly showed a downward trend in the number of new daily infections in the state, making it appear as if new infections had dropped every day for two weeks. The error was at least the third in three weeks, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported.

    Georgia was among the first states to launch its reopening. Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican, said the state on Tuesday recorded its lowest number of hospitalized patients since it began tracking such data in early April.

    Florida reported just 7 deaths on Tuesday, but its Republican Gov Ron DeSantis, who is universally loathed by liberals, and state public health officials were called out by a would-be whistleblower who says she was pressured to remove some data from a public website.

    In the neighboring state of Florida, which has also moved expeditiously in reopening swathes of its economy, several data-related controversies also have brewed.

    According to internal emails obtained by the Tampa Bay Times, state officials directed a top Florida Department of Health data manager earlier this month to remove data from public view that showed Florida residents had reported coronavirus-associated symptoms before cases were officially announced. The emails showed that the data manager, Rebekah Jones, had complied with the order but said it was the “wrong call.”

    Jones was taken off her role maintaining the state’s coronavirus dashboard one day after that directive. She told a local CBS affiliate that she refused to “manually change data to drum up support for the plan to reopen” Florida. Last week, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, said Jones was under “active criminal charges” for cyber stalking and cyber sexual harassment.

    Meanwhile, Florida officials last month stopped releasing the list of coronavirus deaths being compiled by the state’s medical examiners, which had at times shown a higher death toll than the total being published by the state. State officials said that list needed to be reviewed as a result of the discrepancy.

    A spokesman for the state Health Department said the medical examiners had a different method for reporting deaths and that it was untrue “that deaths have been hidden.”

    “The government has one mission; academics and scholars have a very different mission,” Dr. Dean Hart, an expert on viral transmission and former Columbia University professor who has run for the New York State Assembly as a Democrat, told NBC News.

    “As a scientist, I’m looking for the truth, the heck with who it hurts politically,” he added.

    Arizona, another red state, was accused of ignoring dire projections from a team at the University of Arizona. It’s unclear if they were ever used, of if they were even all that reliable. But the local and national press jumped on the story nonetheless.

    Amid reopening in Arizona, the state Department of Health Services cut off a team of Arizona State and University of Arizona experts who provided pandemic modeling specific to the state, saying it was no longer needed as the state preferred to use a federal model. After a backlash, the Health Department reinstated the team, though it’s unclear whether state officials are using the local universities’ work in their decision-making.

    Since that dust up, Arizona State released new data showing infections and hospitalizations in the state could soar this summer.

    But by far the biggest complained alleged by NBC News applied to both blue and red states. States have unsurprisingly done an abysmal job sharing data on deaths and cases in nursing homes, where roughly half of the patients who died of the virus lived.

    The top issue nationally related to the publication of specific coronavirus data involving nursing home cases and deaths, where state and local officials have faced intense scrutiny over the collection and release of such information. The virus has hit nursing homes exceptionally hard — a result of both their residents’ vulnerability and policies states and localities have put into place.

    In one such example, Arizona officials argued this month they should not reveal the names of facilities with outbreaks because it could give those nursing homes a stigma and could lead to discrimination against them. The argument was made in response to a lawsuit from Arizona news outlets demanding the state provide information on COVID-19 cases in nursing homes and other data.

    In Pennsylvania, state officials released such data last week after weeks of delay and in the face of significant pressure.

    The federal government, on the other hand, plans to publish such information by the end of May.

    Hart said more information on nursing homes could paint a clearer picture of what happened specifically in New York with the spread of COVID-19. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, a Democrat, has come under fire for his administration’s March order that nursing homes must accept coronavirus patients. That order was reversed earlier this month.

    Which is the greater sin: manipulating data on a chart to exaggerate a decline in coronavirus cases? Or slow-rolling data on deaths and infections involving the most at-risk patients? We suspect that, in the long run, Gov. Cuomo’s “policy” forcing nursing homes to take in COVID-19-positive residents even after they had tested positive at a local hospital will be remembered as a much more reckless lapse than squabbling between some of bureaucrats in Florida’s Department of Health.

  • Psychiatrists Wrote 86% More Prescriptions For Psychotropic Drugs During Lockdown Months
    Psychiatrists Wrote 86% More Prescriptions For Psychotropic Drugs During Lockdown Months

    Tyler Durden

    Tue, 05/26/2020 – 22:05

    Authored by Paul Joseph Watson via Summit News,

    Psychiatrists wrote 86% more prescriptions for psychotropic drugs, including antidepressants, during the lockdown months of March and April compared to January and February, it has been revealed.

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    “Prescriptions for anti-anxiety medications and sleep aids have risen during the pandemic, prompting doctors to warn about the possibility of long-term addiction abuse of the drugs,” reports the Wall Street Journal.

    According to Ginger, an organization that provides mental health services to companies, compared to January and February of this year, prescriptions for psychotropics, most of which were antidepressants, were up 86% for the months of March and April.

    The stress of unemployment, social isolation and health concerns are all cited by Americans who say the lockdown is having a serious impact on their mental health.

    Pharmacy group Express Scripts also revealed that prescriptions for anti-anxiety medications were up 34.1% between mid-February and mid-March, while prescriptions for antidepressants increased 18.6%.

    The numbers emphasize the significant mental health toll created by the lockdown which will reverberate for many years to come.

    As we highlighted yesterday, Doctors at John Muir Medical Center in Walnut Creek, California say they have recorded more deaths from suicide than coronavirus, with a year’s worth of suicides and suicide attempts being recorded in a 4 week period.

    “Community health is suffering,” warned Dr. Mike deBoisblanc, as he called for the lockdown order to be fully lifted.

    *  *  *

    My voice is being silenced by free speech-hating Silicon Valley behemoths who want me disappeared forever. It is CRUCIAL that you support me.

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  • Coronavirus Uses Same Strategy As HIV To Evade, Cripple Immune System: Chinese Study Finds
    Coronavirus Uses Same Strategy As HIV To Evade, Cripple Immune System: Chinese Study Finds

    Tyler Durden

    Tue, 05/26/2020 – 21:46

    Back on February 1, when the coronavirus pandemic was only just starting to attract broader attention and the China-influenced mainstream media was still politically inclined to minimize the severity of the disease before pulling a sharp U-turn and now going full bore with a narrative of just how dangerous it is for the Trump administration to reopen the economy (because if the economy recovers by November, Trump just might get re-elected), we published an article referencing an Arxiv pre-print which found that the covid-19 genome contained “HIV Insertions”, stoking fears that the virus was an artificially created bioweapon. While the mere suggestion that this virus was man-made – nevermind sharing discrete segments of its genetic structure with HIV – sparked outrage among the well-paid mercenary enforcers of the First Amendment known as “fact-checkers” who are employed by such biased organizations as Twitter and Facebook to stifle any line of inquiry that runs contrary to whatever dominant narrative has been blessed by the Zuckerbergs and Dorseys of the world, it was none other than the man who discovered the HIV virus back in 1983, that confirmed our suspicions saying that “the virus was man-made.”

    As we reported in April, Professor Luc Montagnier, the 2008 Nobel Prize winner for Medicine, claimed that SARS-CoV-2 is a manipulated virus that was accidentally released from a laboratory in Wuhan, China, and added that the WUhan laboratory, known for its work on coronaviruses, tried to use one of these viruses as a vector for HIV in the search for an AIDS vaccine.

    Needless to say, since this narrative was destructive to China and all those self-proclaimed experts who had vowed there is no way the Wuhan virus was i) manmade, ii) released by a Chinese lab and iii) had HIV-insertions, the story was quickly buried and never received as much as a minute of airtime in conventional media sources.

    That may all change now, as a result of the third, and perhaps most startling yet twist in the bizarre saga of the coronavirus, after the South China Morning Post reported that a new study by Chinese scientists has found that the novel coronavirus uses the same strategy to evade attack from the human immune system as HIV.

    Specifically, both viruses remove marker molecules on the surface of an infected cell that are used by the immune system to identify invaders, the researchers said in a non-peer reviewed paper titled “The ORF8 Protein of SARS-CoV-2 Mediates Immune Evasion through Potently Downregulating MHC-I”, posted on pre-print website bioRxiv.org on Sunday (a paper which the great hordes of amateur epidemiologists will make sure is promptly taken down or else their carefully planted propaganda may be obliterated). They warned that this commonality could mean Sars-CoV-2, the clinical name for the virus, could be around for some time, like HIV.

    Separately, virologist Zhang Hui and a team from Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou also said their discovery added weight to clinical observations that the coronavirus was showing “some characteristics of viruses causing chronic infection”.

    Some more details on the Hui study: the researchers collected killer T cells from five patients who had recently recovered from Covid-19; those immune cells are generated by people after they are infected with Sars-CoV-2, and whose job is to find and destroy the virus. But the killer T cells used in the study were not effective at eliminating the virus in infected cells. When the scientists took a closer look they found that a molecule known as major histocompatibility complex, or MHC, was missing.

    The molecule is an identification tag usually present in the membrane of a healthy cell, or in sick cells infected by other coronaviruses such as severe acute respiratory syndrome, or Sars. It changes with infections, alerting the immune system whether a cell is healthy or infected by a virus. However, there is one notable disease that makes MHC molecules disappears from the cell surface: HIV.

    The coronavirus removes these markers by producing a protein known as ORF8, which binds with MHC molecules, then pulls them inside the infected cell and destroys them, the researchers said.

    ORF8, which is also known to play an important role in viral replication, is the gene that is targeted by most commercial test kits to detect viral loads in nose or oral swabs. 

    Needless to say, the absence of MHC makes the creation of vaccines against covid problematic, although the study authors had a suggestion: while drugs used to treat Covid-19 patients mainly target enzymes or structural proteins needed for viral replication, Zhang and his team suggested compounds be developed “specifically targeting the impairment of MHC by ORF8, and therefore enhancing immune surveillance for Sars-CoV-2 infection”.

    And here is where things gets very messy for the frauds known as “fact-checkers” who – without any actual facts or knowledge – threw up all over our February report that the coronavirus shared genetic material with HIV: while the mainstream media did everything in its power to censor any suggestions that Covid and HIV having genetic similarities (after all who wants to be threatened by an airborne version of AIDS) now it is none other than the South China Morning Post which writes that “earlier studies found the spike protein of the new coronavirus had a structure that allowed it to enter many types of human cells and bind with them. The same structure was also found in HIV, but not in other coronaviruses found in animals such as bats and pangolins.”

    Oops, the SCMP will have a a lot of explaining for reporting on, you know, the facts.

    But wait there’s more. Another study by researchers in New York and Shanghai also found that the Sars-CoV-2, sometimes called the “Wu Flu” could kill T cells, or as the SCMP puts it “the discovery came after autopsies in China found immune system destruction similar to that caused by AIDS.”

    At this point, the SCMP has pointed out all the exact same facts – that the coronavirus not only shares genetic material with HIV, but also evades and cripples the immune system in a similar way to HIV – that got the “highly respected” StatNews to accuse Zero Hedge of spreading an “infodemic.” We wonder if StatNews author John Gregory will append his “analysis” now that actual “facts” have emerged showing that it’s not the infodemic we should be afraid of, but the censordemic.

    * * *

    Of course, if covid and HIV share a similar approach to hiding from, and crippling the host immune system, kiss any hope for a vaccine – or cure – goodbye. Four decades after HIV – a virus that attacks the immune system – emerged, it has killed about 32 million people globally and there is still no vaccine or drug that can completely cure the disease.

    Which begs the question: who were the real conspiracy theorists – those who reported the facts, or all those countless “mainstream” publications who sought to stifle the facts, by accusing us – and many others – of peddling conspiracy theories. For the answer, we go back to what HIV-discovered Montagnier said in April:  “Conspirators are the opposite camp, hiding the truth,” he said without wanting to accuse anyone, but hoping that the Chinese will admit to what he believes happened in their laboratory. “In any case, the truth always comes out, it is up to the Chinese government to take responsibility.”

    And while we admire Montagnier’s optimism,we are not holding our breath until the truth finally does come out. Until then, the SCMP may want to watch the bank of its social media accounts – can’t have the peasants realizing they were lied to all along. Twitter, for example, has developed a nasty habit of immediately banning anyone who dares to tell the truth about anything.

    The full paper is below (link). Read it before it mysteriously disappears.

  • Barry Ritholtz, Author Of "Bailout Nation", Gets A Bailout
    Barry Ritholtz, Author Of “Bailout Nation”, Gets A Bailout

    Tyler Durden

    Tue, 05/26/2020 – 21:25

    Authored by Mike Shedlock via MishTalk,

    Barry Ritholtz, Author of Bailout Nation, just got a bailout.

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    Please note the $1.3 billion Ritholtz Wealth Firm Takes Out a PPP Loan.

    Count Ritholtz Wealth Management among the $1bn-plus RIAs which have taken out government-backed coronavirus relief loans.

    Reformed Broker Under Pressure

    The RIA’s chief executive, Josh Brown had this to say in a Reformed Broker blog post.

    We qualified for the SBA-backed payroll protection loan after submitting our information and attestations. Two and a half months worth of employee payroll. I’m never comfortable taking on debt, but I’m even less comfortable about the idea of having to let people go. I would never be able to look myself in the mirror again if I had made that promise and didn’t back it up with action.

    Thank you, Chase Bank! Thank you, SBA! It’s the news I needed and it came at the right time. Many of our peers of a similar size and employee headcount throughout the industry were able to make use of the program too. Being able to assure the firm that we’re keeping everyone and honoring all of our financial commitments meant everything in the moment.

    Thank You Chase Bank!

    Heaven forbid that an RIA would have to lose money over anything at all or layoff any employees.

    It would be un-American for such travesties of justice to occur.

    Fortunately, Ritzholz Wealth can use that money and under small business loan rules does not even have to pay it back. 

    Tears to My Eyes

    I nearly cried when I read this part.

    This post is dedicated to the 13,000 registered investment advisory firms in America and their 835,000 employees. Our industry serves 43 million clients nationwide and we are proud to be a part of it. Thanks to all of our colleagues who’ve shared their stories with us as we’ve shared ours. 

    God’s Work

    No one can possibly be more deserving of a taxpayer bailout than RIA.

    They do God’s Work. 

    Bailout Nation – The Book

    I happen to have a copy of the book Bailout Nation at hand.

    From the jacket of Bailout Nation.

    Ritzholz leaves no stone unturned as he breaks down how the Federal Reserve’s interest-rate targeting policies as well as a condition known as moral hazard – the belief that you won’t bear the full consequences of your actions.

    The United States has abandoned its capitalist roots and become a Bailout Nation.

    Once again, thank you Chase Bank for allowing RIAs to continue with their God’s work.

  • Total Chaos: Chicago Sees Deadliest Memorial Day Weekend In Years Despite Stay-At-Home Orders
    Total Chaos: Chicago Sees Deadliest Memorial Day Weekend In Years Despite Stay-At-Home Orders

    Tyler Durden

    Tue, 05/26/2020 – 21:05

    Shockingly, or perhaps not so-, Chicago just witnessed its deadliest Memorial Day weekend since 2015 despite a coronavirus stay-at-home order. As one crime analyst observed, “They (gangs) are not particularly deterred by the risks of being out there,” as cited in ABC. “Of all the things they are likely to be worried about COVID is way down the list.”

    The long warm weather weekend (crimes tend to spike over hot weather holiday weekends) saw a total of 49 people shot from Friday afternoon through Monday evening. Ten among these were killed. 

    Included were shootings that even occurred midday and at frequented intersections, including a 15-year old boy shot and left in critical condition after getting into an argument with the driver of an SUV on Saturday morning. In another instance, a teenage girl was grazed in the leg as shots range out nearby.

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    File image via NBC Chicago

    Typically Chicago police hit the streets Memorial Day weekend with an extra 1,000 officers in addition to their regular patrol numbers. This after last weekend included 38 total shootings, including six people killed in gun violence throughout the city.

    “The violence throughout the city on Memorial Day weekend was nothing short of alarming,” new Chicago police Superintendent David Brown said Tuesday.

    It’s part of a broader national rise in violent crime observed, surprisingly enough, across three major US cities since the start of the year – and despite pandemic-induced local and state-wide lockdowns:

    According to Chicago police crime statistics posted online, between Jan. 1 and May 24, the nation’s third-largest city had 200 homicides, compared with 176 during the same period last year. The number of shootings climbed from 679 to 826. However, the number of criminal sexual assaults, burglaries and thefts all fell by double digits.

    The statistics largely mirror what police in Los Angeles and New York have reported. In both cities, the number of homicides has increased so far this year while the number of sexual assaults has fallen.

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    Ahead of what’s expected to be a major rise in violent crime in the coming warm months, consistent with historical trends, Chicago city agencies announced the establishment of a “Summer Operations Center” to stem the rising murder rate, according to city press releases.

    And generally, when more Americans finally do come of lockdown no doubt ready with a ‘live hard/party hard’ mentality, as some places are already seeing, there’s likely to be a major spike in violent crime. 

  • Neil Howe: Expect Creative Destruction In This Fourth Turning
    Neil Howe: Expect Creative Destruction In This Fourth Turning

    Tyler Durden

    Tue, 05/26/2020 – 20:45

    Authored by Adam Taggart via PeakProsperity.com,m

    Neil Howe, demographer and co-authour of the book The Fourth Turning, returns to the podcast this week. In our prior interviews with him, we’ve explored his study of generational cycles (“turnings”) in America which reveal predictable social trends that recur throughout history and invariably result in transformational crisis (a “fourth turning”).

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    Fourth turnings are characterized by a growing demand for social order, yet supply of it remains weak. The emergence of the surveillance state, a perpetual war machine, increased intervention in failing markets by the central planners, greater government control of critical systems like health care and the Internet — all of these are classic fourth turning signs of the desperation authorities exert as they lose control.

    History shows time and time again that such overreach ends in rejection of the current order, usually via violent revolution.

    Now that we’re roughly halfway through the current Fourth Turning and things have really started to unravel here in 2020, we’ve asked Neil back on the program to update us on what to expect next:

    During times of peace and prosperity, inequality over time always increases. It always increases. There are only four things which reduced inequality through history: total war, total revolution, famines, and plagues.

    You have this weird situation in America now the where interest rates are practically 0% and almost no one is doing any investing. How do you explain such high returns on existing capital with 0% interest rates, and yet no one’s using those low interest rates? Because new creators of business can’t get the same high returns as the incumbents. That’s the reason.

    So we have a bifurcated market and I think that this is what has to be broken down. The fourth turning is to some extent an act of creative destruction. It destroys as much as it creates. We saw that in the 1930s. We saw that in the 1940s which, by the way, was a period of huge shift from inequality to equality in America.

    But I do think there’s a broader point about inequality and this is point about creative destruction. There has to be some destruction in there. You have to destroy the privileges. You have to destroy the sinecures — and that’s never pleasant. But it’s part of the process.

    I’ve often told people — if they expect to see Social Security reformed, global warming solved, and god knows what else you’re talking about on a peaceful sunny day — that big reforms come about during dark and stormy nights. And I’m talking about BIG reforms…reforms that actually commit society to huge new sacrifices.

    To hear which developments are most likely to happen next during this current Fourth Turning, click the play button below to listen to Chris’ interview with Neil Howe (57m:25s)

  • Watch: Venezuela Sends Large Fighter Jet Escort For Tankers As Iran's Flag Flies Over Caracas
    Watch: Venezuela Sends Large Fighter Jet Escort For Tankers As Iran’s Flag Flies Over Caracas

    Tyler Durden

    Tue, 05/26/2020 – 20:25

    To pretty much everyone’s surprise it appears the five Iranian gasoline tankers will be able to offload their fuel to Venezuela without incident, despite US threats to thwart what Washington sees as illicit sanctions-busting. It remains that the return trip could be a different story, however. 

    Dramatic video emerged early this week showing the first couple of tankers’ arrivals within Venezuelan coastal waters, accompanied by what appeared a large Venezuelan military escort, as Maduro officials promised. 

    First tanker to successfully arrive, the Fortune, docked by Monday, while all are now reported in Caribbean waters, with the second vessel soon to reportedly to dock as well, already safely within Venezuela’s Exclusive Economic Zone.

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    According to multiple widely circulating videos, Maduro’s military deployed multiple warships to escort the tankers along with what appears at least a half-dozen Russian-produced fighter jets and F-16s. No doubt the Pentagon and Trump administration has monitored the images closely. 

    There were growing fears of a ‘tanker war’ Caribbean-style given that last month Trump reportedly ordered a US naval build-up in the region against alleged Maduro government narcotrafficking. 

    Though with plenty of oil, Venezuela has struggled to obtain gasoline for domestic consumption given its network of broken and derelict refineries, which its ally Iran has responded to by delivering 1.53 million barrels of gasoline and refining components.

    Venezuelan officials declared the fuel delivery as a “landmark in struggle for sovereignty” while unusually an Iranian flag appeared over downtown Caracas:

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    Given that Maduro made good on his promise to send significant armed forces to provide security for the tankers, it’s likely the White House saw too many ‘unknowns’ if the US Navy were to attempt an intercept of the fuel. 

    But as one international report underscored days ago, “There are still chances for the US to make trouble for Iran’s tanker fleet. More ships will arrive in the coming days and then they have to go back to Iran.”

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    Caracas is attempting to flex its military muscle as a warning to Washington and its allies, while perhaps also viewing this as a ‘test run’ for future Iranian fuel shipments.

    “We’re ready for whatever, whenever,” Nicolas Maduro declared last week when he and his generals rolled out plans for a major military operation to ensure the tankers arrive safely.

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    Should the whole operation go down without conflict or interference, it will indeed set a precedent – meaning there will be more Iranian tankers and supplies to come in the next months. 

  • "Historic Opportunity": Israel Reveals Date Of Planned West Bank Annexation
    “Historic Opportunity”: Israel Reveals Date Of Planned West Bank Annexation

    Tyler Durden

    Tue, 05/26/2020 – 20:05

    Via AlmasdarNews.com,

    The head of the Governmental Coalition in Israel, Mickey Zohar, revealed that the measures to legislate the process of imposing Israeli sovereignty on all Jewish residential communities in the West Bank will begin in early July.

    The Likud MP said in a radio interview on Tuesday, that the government will approve the draft law on this, and then it will be submitted to the Knesset for approval, expecting that these measures will continue for only a few weeks.

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    Israeli checkpoint near Jerusalem, via The Jerusalem Post.

    Representative Zohar announced that the concerned authorities are currently working on mapping in order to reach understandings with the American administration about the areas that Israel will impose their sovereignty over in the West Bank.

    In response to a question about whether the White House would insist on the establishment of a Palestinian state in exchange for the annexation, the head of the government coalition said: “He opposes this demand, expressing his conviction that Israel will not give up the annexation in any case.”

    He stressed that the government would also not agree to freezing construction work in isolated residential compounds in the occupied West Bank, but was ready to freeze construction in places not close to those that would be imposed on Israeli sovereignty.

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    Haaretz presents Monday remarks of PM Netanyahu as follows:

    Israel will not miss a “historic opportunity” to extend its sovereignty to parts of the West Bank, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Monday, calling the move one of his new government’s top tasks.

    Netanyahu has pledged to put Jewish settlements and the Jordan Valley in the West Bank under Israeli sovereignty. He has set July 1 as a starting date for cabinet discussions on the issue, which has also raised alarm within the European Union. 

    The Palestinian leadership has already rejected this planned annexation, as the President of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, withdrew from all agreements with the U.S. and Israel over this contingency.

  • Summer Driving Season Starts Off With A Whimper… And A 30% Drop
    Summer Driving Season Starts Off With A Whimper… And A 30% Drop

    Tyler Durden

    Tue, 05/26/2020 – 19:56

    It may be time to start shorting oil again.

    Memorial Day Weekend, which was closely watched by economists for signs of reopening “green shoots” and an acceleration in the US recovery, ended up being a huge dud. Because while beaches were mostly open and states across the country emerged from lockdowns, Bloomberg notes that demand for gasoline ended up falling over the Memorial Day holiday weekend, not only compared to a year prior but also to last week!

    While gasoline consumption was expected to jump to reflect the “pent up” traveling, gasoline demand actually fell 1.34% from Thursday to Monday of the holiday weekend compared to the week prior, Patrick DeHaan, an analyst at GasBuddy, said in a tweet Tuesday. Worse, consumption on Monday fell 0.5% from the week prior, and was a whopping 25% to 35% lower compared with the long weekend a year earlier.

    In short, if this is a sign of what to expect from gasoline consumption over the summer, it will be a very painful time for refiners and oil producers.

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    According to Andy Lipow, president of Lipow Oil Associates LLC in Houston, that may have been because people kept their driving local, when in previous years they had traveled farther. But whatever the reason for the tentative unofficial start to the summer, the lackluster start to what is typically considered the season for peak American fuel demand shows how vulnerable the oil market remains as the fallout from the coronavirus crisis haunts economies according to Bloomberg.

    Meanwhile crude prices have surged 80% in May, after a historic collapse below zero in April, on supply cuts by major producers as well as optimism that consumption is recovering as lockdowns ease. That optimism may have been very much premature.

    “The public stayed closer to home and consumed less gasoline because they were going to recreational venues nearby rather than traveling long distances around the country,” Lipow said.

    And while the demand may not be there, gasoline prices remain on the rise with the national average price rising for four consecutive weeks and gaining 5.5 cents over the last week to $1.96 a gallon, according to GasBuddy.

    “Average gasoline prices across the U.S. continue to recover as more motorists take back to the roads as states relax previous shelter-in-place orders and begin filling their tanks, driving demand to continue rising,” DeHaan said in a report.

    More motorists may be taking to the roads, but is “more” enough to offset the production surplus that remains in the system? For the answer keep an eye on oil prices, which may resume their slump unless there are far more concrete signs that demand is set to rise substantially from here.

  • Furious Trump Threatens Twitter For "Interfering In The 2020 Presidential Election" After "Misinformation" Fact-Check
    Furious Trump Threatens Twitter For “Interfering In The 2020 Presidential Election” After “Misinformation” Fact-Check

    Tyler Durden

    Tue, 05/26/2020 – 19:52

    Hours after Twitter slapped a CNN Fact-Check on a Tuesday tweet by President Trump claiming that mail-in-ballots will be “substantially fraudulent,” Trump lashed out – accusing Twitter of “now interfering in the 2020 Presidential Election” by “saying my statement on Mail-In Ballots, which will lead to massive corruption and fraud, is incorrect, based on fact-checking by Fake News CNN and the Amazon Washington Post.”

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    “Twitter is completely stifling FREE SPEECH, and I, as President, will not allow it to happen!” he added.

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    In a statement emailed to Bloomberg, Trump reelection campaign manager Brad Parscale said that Twitter’s move to add fact-check links to the two tweets demonstrates the social network’s “clear political bias,” adding that “Partnering with the biased fake news media ‘fact checkers’ is only a smoke screen Twitter is using to try to lend their obvious political tactics some false credibility.”

    *  *  *

    Mere hours after Kara Swisher appeared on CNBC to call on Twitter to establish a panel of ‘content reviewers’ who can help the platform tag and remove “misinformation” – ie information that doesn’t neatly fit the narrative being pushed by one of Swisher’s employers, the New York Times – it looks like the company is taking a major step in that direction.

    For the first time, Twitter has tagged tweets by President Trump as “misinformation”, and appended a link where readers can “get the facts” below the tweet’s primary text.

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    The tweet, sent earlier today by the president, was the latest in a series of missives opposing mail-in ballots, which the president has insisted would lead to widespread voter fraud.

    According to Twitter spokesperson Katie Rosborough, who spoke to the Washington Post about the new policy, Trump’s tweets “contain potentially misleading information about voting processes and have been labeled to provide additional context around mail-in ballots.”

    Evidence of widespread voter fraud in the US has yet to materialize, despite the fact that half the country seems to think that Russia somehow rigged the election in President Trump’s favor. To be sure, there have been isolated incidences of voter fraud in recent years that have given some experts reason for concern – though these have been completely ignored, as they don’t fit the narrative that the crime is “totally nonexistent”

    But instead of allowing readers to reason this out for themselves (something that shouldn’t be all that difficult given the thousands of replies calling Trump a racist liar), Twitter is stepping in to play the role of arbiter of truth.

    An opinion column published in today’s WSJ hinted at a notion that has become increasingly obvious in the Trump era: An absolute truth is an extremely rare thing. Even the NYT has allowed a defined, liberal perspective infect its reporting over the years, as the column’s writer argued, and if the media wants to regain the trust of the public, it’s time to acknowledge that it doesn’t have some kind of monopoly on the truth.

    Twitter has reportedly considered affixing warning labels to Trump’s tweets in the past, though Dorsey has insisted that Twitter would never remove a tweet from Trump, as Swisher urged the company to do. However, apparently, a letter sent to Dorsey by the widower of a former intern in then-Congressman Joe Scarborough’s office begging the company to remove several Trump tweets – tweets that allegedly perpetuated a ‘conspiracy’ about the death of the man’s wife – pushed the company over the edge. Though notably those tweets haven’t been touched.

    Now, will Twitter apply the same scrutiny to Joe Biden?

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    And on issues of science, upon which science will twitter rely?

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    Though the company hasn’t said much, we suspect this won’t be an isolated incident. Will twitter now go full-on CCP and hire a ‘propaganda board’ to review all content on the site? We imagine we’ll learn more about the company’s plans in the coming days.

  • India Expands Use Of HCQ To Prevent Coronavirus Based On Three Studies
    India Expands Use Of HCQ To Prevent Coronavirus Based On Three Studies

    Tyler Durden

    Tue, 05/26/2020 – 19:45

    India will continue using hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) as a preventative measure against COVID-19, after the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) declared on Tuesday that the drug was found to be very effective with minimal side effects for prophylaxis.

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    The ICMR’s decision was based on three studies they conducted, which resulted in a Friday advisory to expand the drug’s use, according to ThePrint.

    Speaking at a Tuesday press conference, ICMR Director General Dr. Balram Bhargava said “COVID-19 is an evolving field. We don’t know which medicines are working and which are not. There are lots of drugs that have been repurposed for use in COVID whether prophylaxis or as treatment. HCQ is a very old anti-malarial drug that was being widely used and it continues to be widely used. It is safer.“

    “We did some invitro study in labs and found that it has antiviral properties. This drug became suddenly popular when the American government also started using it and they got-fast track approval or emergency use authorisation. We also thought that it may be a useful drug for prevention of COVID,” he added.

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    India’s decision to increase the use of HCQ comes as the World Health Organization announced the temporary halt of its clinical trials involving the drug over concerns in a Friday Lancet report that it may do more harm than good.

    The WHO has 3,500 patients from 17 countries enrolled in what it calls the Solidarity Trial. This is an effort overseen by the WHO to find new treatments for COVID-19. The patients in the trial have been randomly assigned to be treated with hydroxychloroquine, which is a common malaria drug, or three other experimental drugs for treating COVID-19 in various combinations. Only the hydroxychloroquine part of the trial is being put on hold. –NPR

    The India studies

    Investigations were conducted by the ICMR at three central government hospitals in New Delhi, which concluded that “amongst healthcare workers involved in Covid-19 care, those on HCQ prophylaxis were less likely to develop SARS-CoV-2 infection, compared to those who were not on it.”

    The advisory also states that the National Institute of Virology in Pune has found in laboratory testing that HCQ reduces the viral load.

    The ICMR also analysed data collected previously, known as retrospective case-control analysis, and found “a significant” relationship between “the number of doses taken and frequency of occurrence of Covid-19 infection in symptomatic healthcare workers who were tested for SARS-CoV-2 infection”.

    It further said “the benefit was less pronounced in healthcare workers caring for a general patient population”.

    Another observational study was conducted among 334 healthcare workers at the country’s largest public hospital, New Delhi’s All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS). The 248 workers who took HCQ as preventive drug for an average of six weeks had lower incidence of the infection than those not taking the pill. –ThePrint

    As a result of the studies, the Indian government will now administer the drug as a ‘prophylaxis’ to asymptomatic healcare workers in non-Covid hospitals, as well as non-Covid blocks of hospitals which have been earmarked for future Covid patients.

    It will also be prescribed to contract tracers in containment zones, paramilitary, and police personnel involved in Covid-related activities.

    Previous to the announcement, only high-risk individuals (including asymptomatic healthcare workers dealing with coronavirus patients), as well as asymptomatic household contacts of confirmed patients, were receiving the drug.

    “With available evidence for its safety and beneficial effect as a prophylactic drug against SARS-CoV-2 during the earlier recommended 8 weeks period, the experts further recommended for its use beyond 8 weeks on weekly dosage with strict monitoring of clinical and ECG parameters, which would also ensure that the therapy is given under supervision,” reads the ICMR advisory.

    “In clinical practice, HCQ is commonly prescribed in a daily dose of 200mg to 400mg for treatment of diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis and systemic lupus erythematosus for prolonged treatment periods with good tolerance,” it continues – though it added a warning that it should be discontinued if “rare” side-effects such as nausea, abdominal pain, or irregular heartbeat are detected.

    That said, the ICMR studies found nausea in 8.9% of healthcare workers, abdominal pain in 7.3%, vomiting in 1.5%, and cardiovascular issues in 1.9%.

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