- "It Is The Presstitutes, Not Russia, Who Interfered In The US Presidential Election"
Authored by Paul Craig Roberts,
Unlike Oliver Stone, who knew how to interview Vladimir Putin, Megyn Kelly did not. Thus, she made a fool of herself, which is par for her course.
Now the entire Western media has joined Megyn in foolishness, or so it appears from a RT report. James O’Keefe has senior CNN producer John Bonifield on video telling O’Keefe that CNN’s anti-Russia reporting is purely for ratings:
“It’s mostly bullshit right now. Like, we don’t have any big giant proof.”
CNN’s Bonifield is reported to go on to say that “our CIA is doing shit all the time, we’re out there trying to manipulate governments.”
And, of course, the American people, the European peoples, and the US and European governments are being conditioned by the “Russia did it” storyline to distrust Russia and to accept whatever dangerous and irresponsible policy toward Russia that Washington comes up with next.
Is the anti-Russian propaganda driven by ratings as Bonifield is reported to claim, or are ratings the neoconservatives and military/security complex’s cover for media disinformation that increases tensions between the superpowers and prepares the ground for nuclear war?
RT acknowledges that the entire story could be just another piece of false news, which is all that the Western media is known for.
Nevertheless, what we do know is that the fake news reporting pertains to Russia’s alleged interference in the US presidential election. Allegedly, Trump was elected by Putin’s interference in the election. This claim is absurd, but if you are Megyn Kelly you lack the IQ to see that. Instead, presstitutes turn a nonsense story into a real story despite the absence of any evidence.
Who actually interfered in the US presidential election, Putin or the presstitutes themselves? The answer is clear and obvious. It was the presstitutes, who were out to get Trump from day one of the presidential campaign. It is CIA director John Brennan, who did everything in his power to brand Trump some sort of Russian agent. It is FBI director Comey who did likewise by continuing to “investigate” what he knew was a non-event. We now have a former FBI director playing the role of special prosecutor investigating Trump for “obstruction of justice” when there is no evidence of a crime to be obstructed! What we are witnessing is the ongoing interference in the presidential election, an interference that not only makes a mockery of democracy but also of the rule of law.
The presstitutes not only interfered in the presidential election; they are now interfering with democracy itself. They are seeking to overturn the people’s choice by discrediting the President of the United States and those who elected him. The Democratic Party is a part of this attack on American democracy. It is the DNC that insists that a Putin/Trump conspiracy stole the presidency from Hillary. The Democrats’ position is that it is too risky to permit the American people—the “deplorables”— to vote. The Democratic Party’s line is that if you let Americans vote, they will elect a Putin stooge and America will be ruled by Russia.
Many wonder why Trump doesn’t use the power of the office of the presidency to indict the hit squad that is out to get him. There is no doubt that a jury of deplorables would indict Brennan, Comey, Megyn Kelly and the rest. On the other hand, perhaps Trump’s view is that the Republican Party cannot afford to go down with him, and, therefore, as he is politically protected by the Republican majority, the best strategy is to let the Democrats and the presstitutes destroy themselves in the eyes of flyover America.
What our survival as Americans depends on is the Russians’ view of this conflict between a US President who intended to reduce the tensions between the nuclear powers and those determined to increase the tensions. The Russian high command has already announced its conclusion that Washington is preparing a surprise nuclear attack on Russia. It is not possible to imagine a more dangerous conclusion. So far, no one in Washington or any Western government has made an effort to reassure Russia that no such attack is being prepared. Instead, the calls are for more punishment of Russia and more tension.
This most extraordinary of failures demonstrates the complete separation of the West from reality.
It is difficult to imagine a more extreme danger than for the insouciant West to convince Russia that the West is incapable of rational behavior.
But that is precisely what the West is doing.
- America's First Robot Bar Opens In Vegas: "Perfect Pours Every Time"
Here’s a headline that should send a chill through the spine of every bartender and server in America: “Bionic bartenders deployed at Las Vegas Strip bar.”
As we reported last week, Cowen analyst Andrew Charles calculated that McDonald’s “Experience of the Future” strategy could allow it to replace 2,500 cashiers with “Big Mac ATMs” by the end of 2017 – and another 3,000 in 2018.
Now, in a hint of what’s to come for the nightlife industry, the Las Vegas Sun reports that the a bar relying solely on robot bartenders – the first of its kind in the US – will open on Friday.
“Tipsy Robot, a 2,500-square-foot bar to open Friday at the Miracle Mile Shops at Planet Hollywood, boasts two robotic bartenders ready to make your favorite concoction any way you like.”
The bar is being run by Rino Armeni, the chairman of a company called Robotic Innovations, who said he decided to open the first robot bar in Las Vegas to give the city a leg up on other nightlife hubs like New York City and Miami.
Here’s how it works:
“Customers place their order on one of the dozen tablet stations in the bar or through the Tipsy Robot app on their smartphone. They then pay with cash or credit card and enter their email address.
A QR code (barcode) is sent to the email, which the customer places above various windows available. The barcode is scanned and the drink is entered into the system. Patrons can see where their drink is in the queue and are alerted when their order is up.
Each robot has access to more than 60 kinds of liquor, and drinks can be mixed and poured into a 12-ounce plastic cup within 70 seconds.”
Armeni stressed that the robots are meant to be a novelty, and that he believes Technology that carries out human jobs ultimately won’t replace human servers.
“We have a human bar on the side, and the robotic bar is mostly an attraction and entertainment,” Armeni said, “It’s no different from the fountains at Bellagio and the Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas sign.”
However, if the robots’ performance lives up to the description provided by the Sun – well, let’s just say that bartenders who were hoping to make a good living in Sin City might want to consider a move.
“Ice, lemon, limes and sugars are stored behind the wall of the robots. Juices, sodas and liquors are housed above them.
Aside from perfect pours every time, Armeni said the robots don’t spill and don’t waste any ingredients.
“They work to perfection, so everything the robots make is perfect,” he said.
Tipsy Robot’s location at the entrance of the Miracle Mile Shops on Las Vegas Boulevard was chosen because of its heavy foot traffic, Armeni said.
“We wanted to find a place where there was a lot of people coming through,” Armeni said. “At this location, there is an average of 24,000 people coming through a day, so that was what sold it to us.”
In addition to the robots, the bar will employ 16 humans, including what Armeni calls “Galactica Ambassadors,” women dressed in space-themed metallic silver dresses – they’re basically a squad of hostesses. Technicians are also on hand to tend to the machines should problems arise.
The techs also ensure the robot's self-cleaning system is working properly because unlike bartenders and other servers – whose hygiene habits are largely a matter of trust – these robots automatically clean their robot “hands” between each drink.
Now, if two robots, whose only associated costs are the initial investment, maintainence costs, and the electricity required to operate them, can perform the exact same job as a human server, ask yourself: How could anybody justifying being paid $15 an hour to perform the same job – but not as well – as an oversized electric back-massager hooked up to an iPad?
- Researchers Discover That Social Media Can Be Used To Predict Riots, Revolutions, And Even The Weather
Authored by Mac Slavo via SHTFplan.com,
Most of us don’t give much thought to what we post on social media, and a lot of what we see on social media is pretty innocuous. However, it only seems that way at first glance. The truth is that what we post online has a frightening potential. According to recent research from the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and the University of Washington, the things we post on social media could be utilized by software to predict future events.
In a paper that’s just been published on Arxiv, the team of researchers found that social media can be used to “detect and predict offline events”.
Twitter analysis can accurately predict civil unrest, for instance, because people use certain hashtags to discuss issues online before their anger bubbles over into the real world.
The most famous example of this came during the Arab Spring, when clear signs of the impending protests and unrest were found on social networks days before people took to the streets.
A system called EMBERS (Early Model Based Event Recognition using Surrogates) has also yielded “impressive results” not just in “detecting events, but in detecting specific properties of those events”.
It has been used to predict unrest in South America, forecasting events with 80 per cent accuracy in Brazil and a slightly underwhelming 50 per cent in Venezuela.
Another study showed “impressive” results in detecting “civil unrest” linked to the Black Lives Matter group, which formed in America in response to police shootings.
And that’s not all. The researchers found that social media posts could be used to predict the weather, disease outbreaks, future crimes, and the mental health of individual social media users.
So we should probably ask ourselves, is the government using this kind of technology? Because the vast troves of personal data that is collected by the NSA every day could be used to make very accurate predictions. It’s one thing to plug publicly available social media posts into predictive software, but the government has access to all of our personal emails, phone calls, search histories, and even our online purchases.
When you combine that data with social media posts, you can make a very sophisticated profile of any individual, because you know what kind of persona they’re trying to project in public, and you know who they really are on the inside. And if you have access to internet histories from hundreds of millions of people, as well as advanced supercomputers, there’s no telling what you could predict.
Make no mistake, this isn’t science-fiction. There are private companies working for the government right now who are creating powerful computer forecasting programs.
It is called the “Sentient World Simulation.” The program’s aim, according to its creator, is to be a “continuously running, continually updated mirror model of the real world that can be used to predict and evaluate future events and courses of action.” In practical terms that equates to a computer simulation of the planet complete with billions of “nodes” representing every person on the earth.
The project is based out of Purdue University in Indiana at the Synthetic Environment for Analysis and Simulations Laboaratory. It is led by Alok Chaturvedi, who in addition to heading up the Purdue lab also makes the project commercially available via his private company, Simulex, Inc. which boasts an array of government clients, including the Department of Defense and the Department of Justice, as well as private sector clients like Eli Lilly and Lockheed Martin.
Chatruvedi’s ambition is to create reliable forecasts of future world events based on imagined scenarios. In order to do this, the simulations “gobble up breaking news, census data, economic indicators, and climactic events in the real world, along with proprietary information such as military intelligence.”
Although not explicitly stated, the very type of data on digital communications and transactions now being gobbled up by the NSA, DHS and other government agencies make ideal data for creating reliable models of every individuals’ habits, preferences and behaviors that could be used to fine-tune these simulations and give more reliable results…
If anything, that may be the real purpose of the NSA. When you think about it, it makes a lot more sense than what the government claims this technology is used for, which is to stop terrorism. Are they really spending billions of dollars on a massive surveillance grid just to stop a handful of terrorist attacks? Or are they really trying to predict major global events?
- Scientists Fear "Supervolcano" Eruption As Earthquake Swarm Near Yellowstone Soars To 800
More than 800 earthquakes have now been recorded at the Yellowstone Caldera, a long-dormant supervolcano located in Yellowstone National Park, over the last two weeks – an ominous sign that a potentially catastrophic eruption could be brewing. However, despite earthquakes occurring at a frequency unseen during any period in the past five years, the US Geological Survey says the risk level remains in the “green,” unchanged from its normal levels, according to Newsweek.
The biggest earthquake in this “swarm” – which registered a magnitude of 4.4 – took place on June 15, three days after the rumblings started. That quake was the biggest in the region since a magnitude 4.8 earthquake struck close to Norris Geyser Basin in March 2014. This magnitude 4.4 earthquake was so powerful that people felt it in Bozman Montana, about eight miles away.
A scientist from the University of Utah said the quakes have also included five in the magnitude three range, and 68 in the magnitude two range.
“The swarm consists of one earthquake in the magnitude 4 range, five earthquakes in the magnitude 3 range, 68 earthquakes in the magnitude 2 range, 277 earthquakes in the magnitude 1 range, 508 earthquakes in the magnitude 0 range, and 19 earthquakes with magnitudes of less than zero,” the latest report said.
An earthquake with a magnitude less than zero is a very small event that can only be detected with the extremely sensitive instruments used in earthquake monitoring.”
The 'Sunset Lake' hot spring in Yellowstone National Park.
There is normally a rise in seismic activity before a volcano erupts. And scientists currently believe there’s a 10% chance that a “supervolcanic Category 7 eruption” could take place this century, as pointed out by theoretical physicist Michio Kaku.
An eruption, Kaku said, is long overdue: The last one occurred 640,000 years ago.
To be sure, the swarm has slowed down considerably this week, and larger swarms have been recorded in the past, according to Jacob Lowenstern, the scientists in charge of the Yellowstone Volcano Observatory.
Yet the possibility that the volcano could be on the verge of what’s called a “supereruption” should be enough to give the government pause. But scientists have said recently that there’s some evidence to suggest the next one could occur this century.
"Grand Prismatic" Hot Spring at Yellowstone.
So how would a supervolcanic eruption at Yellowstone impact the regional ecosystem, and the US more broadly? Well, as Liberty Blog’s Michael Snyder points out, it would be nothing short of catastrophic.
Hundreds of cubic miles of ash, rock and lava would be blasted into the atmosphere, and this would likely plunge much of the northern hemisphere into several days of complete darkness. Virtually everything within 100 miles of Yellowstone would be immediately killed, but a much more cruel fate would befall those living in major cities outside of the immediate blast zone such as Salt Lake City and Denver.
Hot volcanic ash, rock and dust would rain down on those cities literally for weeks. In the end, it would be extremely difficult for anyone living in those communities to survive. In fact, it has been estimated that 90 percent of all people living within 600 miles of Yellowstone would be killed.
Experts project that such an eruption would dump a layer of volcanic ash that is at least 10 feet deep up to 1,000 miles away, and approximately two-thirds of the United States would suddenly become uninhabitable. The volcanic ash would severely contaminate most of our water supplies, and growing food in the middle of the country would become next to impossible.
In other words, it would be the end of our country as we know it today.
The rest of the planet, and this would especially be true for the northern hemisphere, would experience what is known as a “nuclear winter”. An extreme period of “global cooling” would take place, and temperatures around the world would fall by up to 20 degrees. Crops would fail all over the planet, and severe famine would sweep the globe.
In the end, billions could die.
So yes, this is a threat that we should take seriously.
- The Federal Reserve Is A Saboteur – And The "Experts" Are Oblivious
Authored by Brandon Smith via Alt-Market.com,
I have written on the subject of the Federal Reserve's deliberate sabotage of the U.S. economy many times in the past. In fact, I even once referred to the Fed as an "economic suicide bomber." I still believe the label fits perfectly, and the Fed's recent actions I think directly confirm my accusations.
Back in 2015, when I predicted that the central bankers would shift gears dramatically into a program of consistent interest rate hikes and that they would begin cutting off stimulus to the U.S. financial sector and more specifically stock markets, almost no one wanted to hear it. The crowd-think at that time was that the Fed would inevitably move to negative interest rates, and that raising rates was simply "impossible."
Many analysts, even in the liberty movement, quickly adopted this theory without question. Why? Because of a core assumption that is simply false; the assumption that the Federal Reserve's goal is to maintain the U.S. economy at all costs or at least maintain the illusion that the economy is stable. They assume that the U.S. economy is indispensable to the globalists and that the U.S. dollar is an unassailable tool in their arsenal. Therefore, the Fed would never deliberately undermine the American fiscal structure because without it "they lose their golden goose."
This is, of course, foolish nonsense.
Since its initial inception from 1913-1916, the Federal Reserve has been responsible for the loss of 98% of the dollar's buying power. Idiot analysts in the mainstream argue that this statistic is not as bad as it seems because "people have been collecting interest" on their cash while the dollar's value has been dropping, and this somehow negates or outweighs any losses in purchasing power. These guys are so dumb they don't even realize the underlying black hole in their own argument.
IF someone put their savings into an account or into treasury bonds and earned interest from the moment the Fed began quickly undermining dollar value way back in 1959, then yes, they MIGHT have offset the loss by collecting interest. However, this argument, insanely, forgets to take into account the many millions of people who were born long after the Fed began its devaluation program. What about the "savers" born in 1980, or 1990? They didn't have the opportunity to collect interest to offset the losses already created by the Fed. They were born into an economy where saving is inherently more difficult because a person must work much harder to save the same amount of capital that their parents saved, not to mention purchase the same items their parents enjoyed, such as a home or a car.
Over the decades, the Fed has made it nearly impossible for households with one wage earner to support a family. Today, men and women who should be in the prime of their careers and starting families are for the first time in 130 years more likely to be living at home with their parents than any other living arrangement.
People are more likely to be living with their parents now than back during time periods in which young people actually wanted to stay close to their parents to take care of them. That is to say, most young people are stuck at home because they can't afford to do anything else, not because they necessarily want to be there.
This is almost entirely a symptom of central bank devaluation of the currency and its purchasing potential. The degradation of the American wage earner since the Fed fiat machine began killing the greenback is clear as day.
The Fed is also responsible for almost every single major economic downturn since it was established. As I have noted in the past, Ben Bernanke openly admitted that the Fed was the root cause of the prolonged economic carnage during the Great Depression on Nov. 8, 2002, in a speech given at "A Conference to Honor Milton Friedman … On the Occasion of His 90th Birthday:"
"In short, according to Friedman and Schwartz, because of institutional changes and misguided doctrines, the banking panics of the Great Contraction were much more severe and widespread than would have normally occurred during a downturn.
Let me end my talk by abusing slightly my status as an official representative of the Federal Reserve. I would like to say to Milton and Anna: Regarding the Great Depression. You're right, we did it. We're very sorry. But thanks to you, we won't do it again."
Bernanke is referring in part to the Fed's program of raising interest rates into an economic downturn, exacerbating the situation in the early 1930's and making the system highly unstable. He lies and says the Fed "won't do it again;" they are doing it RIGHT NOW.
The Fed was the core instigator behind the credit and derivatives bubble that led to the crash in 2008, a crash that has caused depression-like conditions in America that we are still to this day dealing with. Through artificially low interest rates and in partnership with sectors of government, poor lending standards were highly incentivised and a massive debt trap was created. Former Fed chairman Alan Greenspan publicly admitted in an interview that the central bank KNEW an irrational bubble had formed, but claims they assumed the negative factors would "wash out."
Yet again, a Fed chairman admits that they either knew about or caused a major financial crisis. So we are left two possible conclusions — they were too stupid to speak up and intervene, or, they wanted these disasters to occur.
Today, we are faced with two more brewing bubble catastrophes engineered by the Fed: The stock market bubble and the dollar/treasury bond bubble.
The stock market bubble is rather obvious and openly admitted at this point. As the former head of the Federal Reserve Dallas branch, Richard Fisher, admitted in an interview with CNBC, the U.S. central bank in particular has made its business the manipulation of the stock market to the upside since 2009:
"What the Fed did — and I was part of that group — is we front-loaded a tremendous market rally, starting in 2009.
It's sort of what I call the "reverse Whimpy factor" — give me two hamburgers today for one tomorrow."
Fisher went on to hint at his very reserved view of the impending danger:
"I was warning my colleagues, Don't go wobbly if we have a 10 to 20 percent correction at some point… Everybody you talk to… has been warning that these markets are heavily priced." [In reference to interest rate hikes]
The Fed "front-loaded" the incredible bull market rally through various methods, but one of the key tools was the use of near-zero interest rate overnight loans from the central bank, which corporations around the world have been exploiting since the 2008 crash to fund stock buybacks and pump up the value of stock markets. As noted by Edward Swanson, author of a study from Texas A&M on stock buybacks used to offset poor fundamentals:
"We can't say for sure what would have happened without the repurchase, but it really looks like the stock would have kept going down because of the decline in fundamentals… these repurchases seem to hold up the stock price."
In the initial TARP audit, an audit that was limited and never again duplicated, it was revealed that corporations had absorbed trillions in overnight loans from the Fed. It was at this time that stock buybacks became the go-to method to artificially prop up equities values.
The problem is, just like they did at the start of the Great Depression, the central bank is once again raising interest rates into a declining economy. This means that all those no-cost loans used by corporations to buy back their own stocks are now going to have a price tag attached. An interest rate of 1% might not seem like much to someone who borrows $1000, but what about for someone who borrows $1 Trillion? Yes, borrowing at ANY interest rate becomes impossible when you need that much capital to prop up your stock. The loans have to be free, otherwise, there will be no loans.
Thus, we have to ask ourselves another question; is the Fed really ignorant enough to NOT know that raising rates will kill stock markets? They openly admit that they knew what they were doing when they inflated stock markets, so it seems to me that they would know how to deflate stock markets. Therefore, if they deliberately engineered the market rally with low interest rates, it follows that they are deliberately engineering a crash in markets using higher interest rates.
Mainstream economists and investment "experts" appear rather bewildered by the Federal Reserve's exuberance on rate hikes. Many assumed that Janet Yellen would hint at a pullback from the hike schedule due to the considerable level of negative data on our fiscal structure released over the past six months. Yellen has done the opposite. In fact, Fed officials are now stating that equities and other assets appear to be "overvalued" and that markets have become complacent. This is a major reversal from the central bank's attitude just two years ago. The fundamental data has always been negative ever since the credit crisis began. So what has really changed?
Well, Donald Trump, the sacrificial scapegoat, is now in the White House, and, central bank stimulus has a shelf life. They can't prop up equities for much longer even if they wanted to. The fundamentals will always catch up with the fiat illusion. No nation in history has ever been able to print its way to prosperity or even recovery. The time is now for the Fed to pull the plug and lay blame in the lap of their mortal enemy – conservatives and sovereignty champions. They will ignore all financial reality and continue to hike. This is a guarantee.
In the Liberty Movement the major misconception is that the Fed is attempting to "catch up" to the next crash by raising interest rates so that they will be ready to stimulate again. There is no catching up to this situation. The Fed has no interest in saving stock markets or the economy. Again, the fed has raised rates before into fiscal decline (during the Great Depression), and the result was a prolonged crisis. They know exactly what they are doing.
What does the Fed gain from this sabotage? Total centralization. For example, before the Great Depression there used to be thousands of smaller private and localized banks in America. After the Great Depression most of those banks were either destroyed or absorbed by elite banking conglomerates. Banking in the U.S. immediately became a fully centralized monopoly by the majors. In a decade, they were able to remove all local competition and redundancy, making communities utterly beholden to their credit system.
The 2008 crash allowed the banking elites to introduce vast stimulus measures requiring unaccountable fiat money creation. Rather than saving America from crisis, they have expanded the crisis to the point that it will soon threaten the world reserve status of our currency. The Fed in particular has set the U.S. up not just for a financial depression, but for a full spectrum calamity which will include a considerable devaluation (yet again) of our currency's value and resulting in extreme price inflation in necessities.
The next phase of this collapse will include the end of the dollar as we know it, making way for a new global currency system that uses the IMF's SDR basket as a foundation. This plan is openly admitted in the elitist run magazine 'The Economist' in an article entitled "Get Ready For A Global Currency By 2018."
It is important to understand what the Fed actually is – the Fed is a weapon. It is a weapon used by globalists to destroy the American system at a given point in time in order to clear the way for a new single world economy controlled by a single managerial entity (most likely the IMF or BIS). This is the Fed's purpose. The central bank is not here to save the U.S. from harm, it is here to make sure the U.S. falls in a particular manner — a controlled demolition of our fiscal structure.
- Project Veritas Exposes CNN's Van Jones: "The Russia Thing Is Just A Big Nothing Burger"
Yesterday, after dropping his first undercover CNN bombshell, which starred producer John Bonifield admitting that CNN’s endless ‘Russian meddling’ crusade was “mostly bullshit” directed by the network’s CEO Jeff Zucker with the sole intent of spiking ratings, Project Veritas‘ James O’Keefe promised there was more to come. And, all we knew was that the subject of the second video would be “someone we all knew…”
As it turns out, that ‘someone’ is none other than CNN’s Van Jones who inadvertently got caught revealing his true thoughts on CNN’s ‘Russian meddling’ narrative, namely that the whole story is a “big nothing burger.”
PV Reporter: “What do you think is going to happen this week with the whole Russia thing?”
Van Jones: “The Russia Thing Is Just A Big Nothing Burger”
PV Reporter: “Really?”
Van Jones: “Yeah.”
Here is the full Van Jones footage for your viewing pleasure:
Of course, while we’re happy that Van Jones decided to tell the truth, if only while he thought no one was listening, we do wonder how he intends to explain his seemingly conflicted ‘on-air’ versus ‘off-air’ personalities to his children. As you may recall, Jones was the same distraught CNN commentator who spent election night describing Trump as a “bully” and a “bigot” all while saying that his “biggest fear” was how he could explain Trump’s victory to his children…
Perhaps it’s time to think about how you can explain to your children why you exploited your position and fame to provoke mass hysteria among a divided American electorate, over a story you knew to be false…hysteria which very well could have contributed to a mass shooting that nearly claimed the life of Steven Scalise.
(h/t HH)
Finally, here is yesterday’s video for those who missed it:
- "Fake Research": Seattle Mayor Knew Critical Min. Wage Study Was Coming, So He Called Berkeley 'Economists'
Earlier this week we wrote about a study published by the University of Washington which was fairly damning for Seattle’s $15 minimum wage. To our total ‘shock’, the study found that higher minimum wages caused a 9.4% reduction to total hours worked by low-skilled workers, or roughly 14 million hours per year. Given that a full-time employee works 2,080 hours per year, that’s the equal to just over 6,700 full-time equivalents who have lost their jobs, just in the city of Seattle, courtesy of moronic politicians who don’t seem to grasp basic mathematical concepts (see the full note here: Seattle Min Wage Hikes Crushing The Poor: 6,700 Jobs Lost, Annual Wages Down $1,500 – UofW Study).
As it turns out, however, the bigger story might be why the Mayor of Seattle decided to waste taxpayer money commissioning a competing study from the University of California, Berkeley…especially in light of the fact that the University of Washington study was already paid for by taxpayers and researchers on the project were granted far greater access to data.
Hmm, might it have something to do with the fact that Seattle’s mayor knew that Berkeley’s liberal economists would manipulate data in whatever way necessary to paint a rosy picture for higher minimum wages? That’s a rhetorical question…
As the Seattle Weekly noted, the controversy started when a Forbes blogger discovered a curious sentence in the minimum wage study released by Berkeley a couple of weeks ago, days before the University of Washington study was published.
The sentence got him wondering why the “Office of the Mayor of Seattle” would commission a study when taxpayers of his city were already funding a study on the exact same thing?
Could it be the fact that Berkeley’s Michael Reich was well known to be the “go-to academic for proponents of a $15-an-hour minimum wage” who “has done at least six … studies on the minimum wage in California municipalities, all showing that a wage increase would be beneficial.”
So the Forbes blogger reached out to the Mayor’s office for clarification…
Last week, I reached out to Benton Strong, the mayor’s spokesman, to ask why the city was requesting research already covered by the UW team.
He responded to say that “the upcoming UW study is not part of the work funded by the City. Michael Reich is a well-known economist who had done extensive work on policies like the minimum wage and the City asked him to review early drafts of the UW report, specifically the methodology, and provide analysis. Yesterday, he also provided analysis of the impacts of the minimum wage in Seattle.”
At the time, I wasn’t aware of what upcoming UW study he was talking about, and asked for clarification, to which Strong said: “There’s apparently one coming next week.”
And so there was.
To review, the timeline seems to have gone like this: The UW shares with City Hall an early draft of its study showing the minimum wage law is hurting the workers it was meant to help; the mayor’s office shares the study with researchers known to be sympathetic toward minimum wage laws, asking for feedback; those researchers release a report that’s high on Seattle’s minimum wage law just a week before the negative report comes out.
In other words, the Mayor of Seattle used taxpayer funds to commission a duplicative, “fake study” from a clearly sympathetic, biased economist, at a liberal university, all in an effort to mislead voters about the real effects of his disastrous minimum wage policy.
Of course, we’re sure Donna Brazile would classify this as just another attempt to “criminalize behavior that is normal”
- "Central Bankers Aren't As Clever (And We're Not As Dumb) As They Believe"
Authored by Jeffrey Snider via Alhambra Investment Partners,
To complete a trifecta, maybe someone could interview Alan Greenspan about rational exuberance.
The last of the latest Fed Chairmen, Janet Yellen, purports this week that the next financial crisis will not be in “our lifetimes.” The issue, however, isn’t even crisis so much as credibility. Given that she and the rest of them had no idea about the last one until it was almost over, we might be forgiven for rejecting her thesis outright – and it having nothing at all to do with the current or expected future state of finance. She is nearly the last person that should be speaking on that topic.
The very last opinion that should be solicited would be from her immediate predecessor, Ben Bernanke. He was busy just yesterday doing what he does, meaning polishing up as best he can his legacy. Speaking on invitation to an ECB conference in Sintra, Portugal, the same where Mario Draghi caused his “reflation” stir, the former Federal Reserve head gave a speech he modestly titled When Growth Is Not Enough.
It is typical Bernanke, who has taken to these kinds of tricks in order to justify the apex of his career. For him it was a top; for the rest of the world not at all. The last thing anyone associates with Bernanke is growth. His speech would have more appropriately been called When Not Enough Growth.
During his tenure he was clearly bipartisan, or at least largely free of partisanship. In 2017, he is not. His general purpose in appearing was to acknowledge, like many economists are being forced to, the great dissatisfaction around the world with the results of largely his exertions. Before last year, economists could plausibly claim things were OK if not great, but after Brexit and especially Trump it is no longer possible to live that deep in denial.
It is to the current President that Bernanke clearly feels his reputation most threatened, describing yesterday the stunning political revolt as, “last November Americans elected president a candidate with a dystopian view of the economy.” In doing so, he betrays his own true motivations. Ben Bernanke’s legacy, even more so than Barack Obama’s, is Donald Trump.
In particular, Americans generally have little confidence in the ability of government, especially the federal government, to fairly represent their interests, let alone solve their problems. In a recent poll, only 20 percent of Americans said they trusted the government in Washington to do what is right “just about always” or “most of the time”. The failure to prevent the global financial crisis did not help this situation of course, but these attitudes are long-standing, going back at least to the 1970s. [emphasis added]
The highlighted portion wasn’t some trivial footnote, a small matter among larger ones. It was everything, especially for the Federal Reserve who before the crisis declared that what Janet Yellen says right now. For an institution claiming to be the height of economic competence and authority, the Panic of 2008 was all that mattered.
But if that was the only fault with the so-called establishment elite, it would still be enough to register as it finally has with the public. The tragic comedy did not end there, however, and Bernanke knows it well. He asserts again in this latest speech something he referred to in a little-noticed blog post (for Brookings) from last October.
Economists Charles Jones and Peter Klenow had at that time published a paper the former Fed Chair immediately seized upon. They proposed that things like GDP or nation income figures weren’t comprehensive measures of social advance. Jones and Klenow created an “economic welfare” statistic that incorporated intangibles like vacation time, life expectancy, and inequality.
Bernanke is a very smart guy, but he isn’t as clever as he may think of himself. If you claim to be running an economy and it doesn’t produce in all the traditional ways of output and income, then suddenly saying those aren’t the appropriate standards is as transparent as it gets. It’s not quite convincing given his own public history to in 2017 try to say “it wasn’t all bad.” Methinks the money printer doth protest too much.
And that is really the point.
Quantitative easing was designed and sold to the public as the right amount of the right program to get the economy back going again after what was a catastrophic error. To long after its conclusion suggest that maybe GDP or national income estimates aren’t good enough standards for measuring and then appropriately crafting a response is to totally undercut that thesis; it was the correlation with GDP that led to the Q part of QE. Moving the goalpost only proves that QE wasn’t what you thought it was.
If you have to refashion standards to suggest why you maybe could have possibly not performed so badly, then maybe you really did and maybe most people by now know it. And to further think along just those lines, perhaps the election of Trump isn’t so extreme as it might first seem to the delicate orthodox sensibilities of the perpetually slow and ignorant. Maybe it doesn’t leave us in economic dystopia, but that is at least the direction we might have been traveling all this time you called it a recovery.
What’s even more illuminating is the lack of mention of the Great “Moderation.” It has been almost excised from official history.
The period where central bankers created forever new plateaus of prosperity, winning monetary policymakers especially undying admiration and too frequently cultish status has been completely transformed into outright mistrust; so deep it has infected, as Bernanke’s speech concedes, all levels of government and establishment. Yellen is left nearly the undisputed anti-maestro. Only now do people like Bernanke admit there might be reasons.
Bernanke once said (2004) that the Great “Moderation” was indeed the work of monetary policy, so its years later omission is all the more telling. At least then economic pronouncements matched outward economic conditions. No one was compelled to challenge the unemployment rate, or recognize the mainstream clinging to it was out of clear and growing desperation rather than scientific analysis. They really didn’t know what they were doing, and now they worry too many people might have figured that out.
It is another small (emphasis on small) step in the right direction. Economists like Bernanke are feeling very uncomfortable, as they should. They have much to answer for and for the first time in ten years are feeling enough pressure to start doing so. That the first round leads them to different but still nonsense is to be expected. As I wrote above, they aren’t as clever as they might think, and you not as dumb as they believe – or used to.
- Rolls Royce Now Sells More Of Its Cars To "New Money" Tech Millionaires
Auto manufacturers have been bracing for a slump in car sales in the coming years as ownership rates for younger generations are expected to slump. Their reasoning? Millennials and their ilk tend to favor experiences over luxury goods, while also tending to cluster in urban settings where public transportation is easily accessible.
But there might be some hope – at least in the high-end market, which is increasingly catering to a newly-minted cohort of millionaires who made their money in tech and finance. To wit, Rolls Royce has revealed that the average age of its customer base is declining, having fallen to 45, compared with 56 seven years ago.
That’s lower than the average range for new-car buyers overall, which hovers around 52, and younger than the average age of luxury car buyers, too, which is 50, according to data provided to Bloomberg by Kelley Blue Book.
The Wraith coupe
The average age of Rolls Royce owners is below Buick, Cadillac, Mercedes-Benz and BMW.
“Buick, for instance, has an average new-buyer age of 59. At Cadillac it’s 52, at Mercedes-Benz it’s 51, and at BMW it’s 50, according to KBB. Land Rover’s average customer is 45, the youngest of any included in the data. (Rolls-Royce was not among the brands reviewed in that report—its numbers are internal.) Bentley, a closer competitor to Rolls-Royce, reported an average buyer age of 56.2 years in 2014, though that number is likely younger now.”
Indeed, it appears the 111-year-old brand, which is known for its stuffy old-money aesthetic, is attracting a new generation of customers among the next generation of tech and finance elites. The company’s CEO Torsten Müller-Ötvös, has touted the decline as a sign that the luxury carmaker is succeeding in its push to attract younger drivers with newer, more modern-looking cars.
The Phantom
“We are now catering all to the different kinds of set groups when it comes to customers,” Müller-Ötvös said. “These are customers who for the first time said, ‘Oh, guess what. I like this Wraith, and I put it in addition to my Ferraris into my garage, because Ferraris can be stressful from time to time.’ ”
As is the case with all luxury items, remaining "cool" is essential to a brands survival – hence why Royce felt the need to shout news that it's selling to younger buyers from the mountaintops.
“Why does attracting a young(ish) buyer pool matter? For one thing, it prevents against the hypothetical eventuality that your customers eventually die off. Older buyers tend to be loyal buyers, but as they age, their numbers naturally dwindle.
More immediately, it has to do with brand image. If pensioners are the ones driving your cars, the rest of the world inevitably associates the brand with their age set. That doesn’t exactly foster future buying excitement.”
In another interesting shift, the new buyers that Rolls Royce is courting have a somewhat different profile.
CEO Torsten Müller-Ötvös
The reason for the relative youth of Rolls buyers has to do with how they’re amassing their wealth, Müller-Ötvös said. Rather than in previous decades when acquiring it from Daddy was a viable, and respectable, option, he’s noticing the people turning up at his dealerships are self-made.
“It's not any longer inherited money,” he said. “The majority is all self-generated money in very young people who are already making fortunes, be it real estate, be it engineering, be it IT, be it Western entertainment, whatever.”
As Bloomberg explains, the declining average age of Rolls Royce buyers seems to cut against the conventional wisdom – but not the masses of data that show young people still buy cars at rates comparable to older cohorts of the population.
Experts have warily anticipated in recent years an expected slump in car sales as millennials begin to overtake baby boomers in the marketplace as the world’s biggest spenders. The theory was that they cared less about owning things—houses, property, cars—than in just being able to access them at any given time. The success of shared-access businesses Uber, Airbnb, and Rent the Runway, plus the rise in the development of self-driving cars and other forms of urban transportation in any number of various pods, seemed to support that idea.
But further studies have indicated the contrary. According to J.D. Power & Associates, millennials’ share of new vehicle purchases in the U.S. hit 27 percent in 2014, up from 18 percent in 2010. They’ll comprise 40 percent of the U.S. car market by 2020. (The report classified millennials as those born between 1977 and 1994.)
The age of luxury-car owners is declining in China, too, despite a crackdown on corruption initiated by Chinese President Xi Jinping that included measures to curb the acceptance of luxury gifts – which sometimes included fancy cars – by public officials.
“In China, the average age of new-car buyers hovers around 34. Thirty-eight percent of all new luxury car buyers there are under 40. Last year, Cadillac boasted widely about its 34-year-old average buyers in China.”
Despite the crackdown, the unprecedented debt-enhanced creation of wealth in the world's second-largest economy appears to ensure that Rolls Royce's future is in the east.
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