Today’s News 2nd January 2023

• How China Changed Its Zero-COVID Policy To A 'Zero Non-COVID' Policy
  How China Changed Its Zero-COVID Policy To A ‘Zero Non-COVID’ Policy

  Authored by Nathan Su via The Epoch Times,

  “Zero non-COVID” is the name that people in China are calling the regime’s new pandemic management policy. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has aggressively pushed the whole country towards an all-COVID-positive state.

  

  China’s annual rubber-stamp legislature is usually in session during the month of March. It is widely expected that the coming session will focus on saving China’s economy because it is on the edge of collapse after the three-year long zero-COVID policy.

  Party leader Xi Jinping is clearly willing to pay any price to reopen the country.

  Government employees of Chongqing City in Sichuan Province and Zhejiang Province received notices telling them return to their offices to work even if they have tested positive for COVID-19, as long as their symptoms are mild.

  The total population of Chongqing City is more than 31 million, and Zhejiang province more than 57 million.

  Rumors on the Chinese internet talked about local governments of Chongqing City and Zhejiang Province being criticized by Beijing because these regions were too slow to reach a high percentage of COVID positive patients.

  A local official in Shanghai told The Epoch Times on Dec. 27 that his office had received instructions to do whatever it could to push the city into the COVID peak status.

  “Let those who are supposed to become positive become positive, and let those who are supposed to die, die,” said Song Wen (pseudonym).

  All state-owned media are mute about the current situation in the country, and reports from different government agencies are conflicting.

  The Zhejiang Provincial government recorded one million new COVID cases on Dec. 25, while the Chinese national CDC only reported 2,983 new cases in the whole nation for the same day.

  The regime announced that on Jan. 8, 2023, China will totally reopen travel in and out of the country, which has triggered concern in countries around the globe. Italian officials reported on Dec. 28 that 50 percent of passengers on two flights from China tested positive for COVID.

  

  Chinese travelers leave the arrival hall of Rome Fiumicino International Airport, near Rome, after being tested for COVID-19 on Dec. 29, 2022. (Filippo Monteforte/AFP via Getty Images)

  China, a country with a population of more than 1.4 billion, moved from the zero-COVID policy to a zero non-COVID policy within a month. The sudden change has left health experts worldwide feeling uncertain, because the explosion in COVID cases in China may lead to the whole world being exposed to new variants.

  The Western media have widely attributed the sudden policy change to the late November White Paper protests against the zero-COVID policy in China. However, according to World Health Organization (WHO) emergencies chief Michael Ryan, the COVID spike in China was not due to the lifting of the government mandated restrictions.

  Before the policy change, “the disease was spreading intensively because I believe the control measures in themselves were not stopping the disease. And I believe China decided strategically that was not the best option anymore,” Ryan said.

  The regime’s change from Zero-COVID to a Zero non-COVID policy did not come without signs.

  Starting in late September, many Chinese state-owned media openly discussed not overly enforcing the zero-COVID policy.

  On Sept. 30, Xi Jinping and all top CCP leaders went to Tiananmen Square for a memorial service on Marty’s Day. Xi and others brought flowers to the People’s Heroes Monument, a stone that was erected to remember those who died for the Party in the past. The pictures of the service show hundreds of people at the event who are not wearing masks.

  For a country that has been enforcing the mask wearing principle as a part of its zero-COVID policy, the event was the first clear sign of the regime’s impending policy change.

  On Oct. 28, Xi said during his short stay in Henan Province: China’s socialist system was established with the sacrifice of human lives. He said that this sacrifice is also needed in the modern era. Xi visited the province after the CCP’s 20th Congress earlier in the month, in which he was re-elected to a third term as the head of the CCP.

  On Nov. 24, a fire started in a high-rise apartment building in Urumqi City that caused many deaths and injuries because the fire escape was locked. The incident later caused widespread protests in many cities. On Dec. 7, Beijing officially lifted its three-year long zero-COVID policy.

  It is obvious that the CCP started the policy change quietly as early as in late September. The widespread protests after the Urumqi fire on Nov. 24 became the perfect excuse for the regime to openly adopt a new policy.

  The reason for the regime’s policy change is clear: to save the regime’s ruling power at the cost of Chinese people’s lives.

  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 01/01/2023 – 23:15

• Top Heavy: Visualizing Every Country's Share Of The Global Economy
  Top Heavy: Visualizing Every Country’s Share Of The Global Economy

  As 2022 comes to a close we can recap many historic milestones of the year, like the Earth’s population hitting 8 billion and the global economy surpassing $100 trillion.

  In this chart, Visual Capitalist’s Avery Koop visualizes the world’s GDP using data from the IMF, showcasing the biggest economies and the share of global economic activity that they make up.

   Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is a broad indicator of the economic activity within a country. It measures the total value of economic output—goods and services—produced within a given time frame by both the private and public sectors.

  

  The GDP Heavyweights

  The global economy can be thought of as a pie, with the size of each slice representing the share of global GDP contributed by each country. Currently, the largest slices of the pie are held by the United States, China, Japan, Germany, and India, which together account for more than half of global GDP.

  Here’s a look Top 10 country’s share of the world’s $101.6 trillion economy:

  

  Just five countries make up more than half of the world’s entire GDP in 2022: the U.S., China, Japan, India, and Germany. Interestingly, India replaced the UK this year as a top five economy.

  Adding on another five countries (the top 10) makes up 66% of the global economy, and the top 25 countries comprise 84% of global GDP.

  The World’s Smallest Economies

  The rest of the world — the remaining 167 nations — make up 16% of global GDP. Many of the smallest economies are islands located in Oceania.

  Here’s a look at the 20 smallest economies in the world:

  

  Tuvalu has the smallest GDP of any country at just $64 million. Tuvalu is one of a dozen nations with a GDP of less than one billion dollars.

  The Global Economy in 2023

  Heading into 2023, there is much economic uncertainty. Many experts are anticipating a brief recession, although opinions differ on the definition of “brief”.

  Some experts believe that China will buck the trend of economic downturn. If this prediction comes true, the country could own an even larger slice of the global GDP pie in the near future.

  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 01/01/2023 – 22:30

• Fauci Fibbed On The Day Everything Changed
  Fauci Fibbed On The Day Everything Changed

  Authored by Jeffrey Tucker via The Brownstone Institute,

  Anthony Fauci is finally gone from his government perch. Let us recall that it was he who set this calamity in motion, squandering his credibility, while taking down public health and much else with it. More than anyone, he bears responsibility, even if he was acting on others’ behalf. That is especially true if he was carrying out a hidden agenda (take your pick of theories). 

  

  There was already growing political and societal panic on March 11, 2020, when the House Oversight and Reform Committee convened a hearing on the new virus circulating. Fauci was the key witness. The only question on everyone’s mind came down to the most primal fear: am I going to die from this thing, like in the movies?

  This was one day before Trump’s announcement of the travel ban from Europe, the UK, and Australia, essentially sealing the borders of the US to an extent never before attempted, thus separating families and loved ones and trapping billions of people in their nation states. It was five days before the evil declaration by all health authorities to immediately shut down all places where people could congregate. 

  These few days will remain a case study in irrationality and crowd madness. Fauci, on the day of his testimony, however, seemed like a paragon of stability. He was calm and clear, nearly bloodness in his tone. The substance of what he said, at the same time, was clearly designed to generate panic and create the conditions for a full lockdown. 

  He had the countenance of a doctor who was telling the family that a beloved father was terminally ill with 30 days to live. 

  In particular, and in contrast to the testimony prepared by CDC/NIH, Fauci spoke to the severity of the virus. To the average member of Congress, the answer here was crucial because it addressed the only two serious issues: “Am I going to die?” and “Will I be blamed and politically punished if my constituents die?”

  To this, he responded with what seemed like science but was actually completely wrong, dreadfully wrong, catastrophically wrong. He claimed that we knew for sure that at best Covid was 10 times deadlier than the flu. In fact, he threw around so much data confetti that a person could have easily believed that he was downplaying the severity to promote calm. His intention was the opposite. 

  Here is what he said, and please read carefully to catch the implications: 

  SARS was also a Coronavirus in 2002. It infected 8,000 people and it killed about 775. It had a mortality of about 9 to 10 percent. So, that is only 8,000 people in about a year. In the two-and-a-half months that we have had this Coronavirus, as you know, we now have multiple multiples of that.

  So, it clearly is not as lethal, and I will get to the lethality in a moment, but it certainly spreads better. Probably for the practical understanding of the American people, the seasonal flu that we deal with every year has a mortality of 0.1 percent. The stated mortality over all of this when you look at all the data including China is about three percent. It first started off as two and now three.

  I think if you count all the cases of minimally symptomatic or asymptomatic infection, that probably brings the mortality rate down to somewhere around one percent, which means it is 10 times more lethal than the seasonal flu. I think that is something that people can get their arms around and understand….

  I think the gauge is that this is a really serious problem that we have to take seriously. I mean people always say, well the flu, you know, the flu does this, the does that. The flu has immortality of 0.1 percent. This has mortality of ten times that, and that is the reason why I want to emphasize, we have to stay ahead of the game in preventing this.

  Just think through the flim-flam here. He begins with the figure of a 10 percent case fatality rate from a similar virus. The thinking in the room is already stuck on 10. Then he says this virus has killed more in a shorter period of time, which implies more severity. He quickly dials that back but warns that this is more easily spread, which suggests that perhaps it is even higher. Then he dials that back and says that so far the mortality rate is 3 percent. 

  But then he quickly adds in “minimally symptomatic or asymptomatic infection” and comes to a rough number of 1 percent, thus failing completely here to distinguish between cases and infections, which used to be a core metric that he and so many others completely obliterated. 

  That’s a side point but an important one. The distinction between cases and infections has been crushed, leaving us utter data chaos. 

  Fauci spoke this final number with so many other numbers before it that no one could figure out which way was up. The main takeaway anyone would have is that there is going to be vast bloodshed. 

  It’s best to watch this. You can almost feel the fear in the room as he blinds these political critters with fake science. 

  So what do we do? Fauci here was quick with the answer:

  How much worse it will get will depend on our ability to do two things, to contain the influx in people who are infected coming from the outside and the ability to contain and mitigate within our own country. 

  In other words: lockdown. 

  Thus was the stage set. To be sure, there is some mental connection between severity and policy response but there probably should not be. Even if this virus had a 10 percent fatality rate, what does locking down achieve? It was never even clear what the point was. The “spread” could not be stopped forever. The hospitals weren’t really overcrowded, as we seen. There was never a chance for Zero Covid, as the catastrophic experience of China and New Zealand has shown. 

  In the end, the pandemic of a respiratory virus is solved through exposure, upgraded immune systems, and herd immunity, regardless of severity. And again, please recall that biological evolution has made such pandemics self-limiting: there is a trade between severity and prevalence subject to latency. Latency here was never a factor, contrary to the lies in the early weeks. So the more infectious this virus would be, the less severe it would be, nearly by definition. 

  Fauci could have used his time in Congress to give a basic explanation. He did not. He chose to spread irrational fear instead. 

  So how can we evaluate Fauci’s murky suggestion that SARS-CoV-2 will have a 1 percent fatality rate? What actually happened? These data are pretty settled by now. 

  • 0-19 years: 0.0003% 

  • 20-29 years: 0.002% 

  • 40-49 years: 0.035% 

  • 50-59 years: 0.123% (flu) 

  • 60-69 years: 0.506% (bad flu) 

  In other words, for the most affected demographic, he was off by two times. For youth, he was off by 3,333 times – an exaggeration of more than 300,000 percent! And he did it with a straight face. The rest of the population falls between there for a total of 0.095 percent. So in general for the whole population he was off by 10 times, meaning that the actual infection fatality rate is just slightly less (if this is right) than the seasonal flu.

  Throughout the entire pandemic, from the beginning to now, the average age of the 0.09 percent of infected people who died remained at the medium age of death in absence of the pandemic. If this same virus arrived decades early, it would have hardly been noticed at all. 

  Which is to say: Fauci was correct on February 28, 2020, when he wrote that this is more or less the flu, except with a large age gradient. His change of mind in the course of two weeks prior to this testimony is based on absolutely no evidence. What changed was his tactics but why?

  We mapped out many times already that there was plenty of information available, even in the popular press, that this bug would be more-or-less like the flu, except with an extreme age gradient – which we knew already in mid-February. All the misinformation that followed was just that. And they knew it. Certainly Fauci knew it. No doubt about it. 

  So why? Here we get into interesting theorizing. Brownstone has done a lot of this for the better part of 18 months, and we will continue to do so. We can talk all evening about this. We already do. And we continue to collect evidence too. 

  The point is that the world is not the same. Fauci pulled the lever on the wall that set this in motion. He never should have been given that deference, that power, that influence. There should have been a check on him. And some people tried but the censors then flew into action. 

  The entire mess began not just with a bad prediction but an outrageously bad falsehood – spoken in front of deeply ignorant and terrified politicians – one that was followed by an egregious demand that we get rid of normal social and market functioning. The consequences are for the ages. Fauci had his own masters and minions but it is impossible to avoid the reality that he bears primary responsibility as the voice of panic that shut down freedoms hard won over a millennium. 

  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 01/01/2023 – 21:45

• Twitter Sued For Not Paying San Fran Office Rent As Some Workers Bring Their Own Toilet Paper
  Twitter Sued For Not Paying San Fran Office Rent As Some Workers Bring Their Own Toilet Paper

  With Twitter now private, roughly three quarters of its employees laid off (yet somehow not only has twitter not crashed but is faster then ever, not to mention mostly uncensored) and its financials only of concern to the company’s owner Elon Musk, a troubling development suggests that the recent boycott by woke, liberal advertising companies who hate free speech is starting to sting.

  According to Bloomberg, Twitter was sued for failing to pay $136,250 in rent for its office space in San Francisco.

  

  In the lawsuit filed by Columbia Reit – 650 California LLC (docket # CGC-22-603719, Superior Court, State of California), the landlord says it notified Twitter on Dec. 16 that it would be in default on its lease for the 30th floor of the Hartford Building in five days unless the rent was paid. The tenant failed to comply, Columbia Reit said in the complaint, filed last Thursday in state court in San Francisco.

  According to a Dec 13 report by the New York Times, Twitter hasn’t paid rent on its headquarters, or any of its other global offices, in weeks. The company was also sued earlier this month for refusing to pay for two charter flights. According to a more recent NYT report, in order to save money, Twitter has also shut down at least one Sacramento data center, stopped paying rent for its Seattle office, and has cut janitorial and security services, in some cases forcing employees to bringing their own toilet paper to the office.

  Last week, Twitter got rid of the cleaning staff at its New York offices and 10 people from corporate security, signaling that it may close one of its two buildings there.

  At Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters, where the company has also missed rent payments, Musk has done the same, consolidating workers onto two floors and closing four. He also canceled janitorial services this month, after those workers went on strike for better wages. That has left the office in disarray. With people packed into more confined spaces, the smell of leftover takeout food and body odor has lingered on the floors, according to four current and former employees. Bathrooms have grown dirty, these people said. And because janitorial services have largely been ended, some workers have resorted to bringing their own rolls of toilet paper from home, according to the NYT.

  According to an internal doc seen by the NYT, since early November, Musk has sought to save about $500 million in nonlabor costs.  Cost-cutting has been overseen by Steve Davis, the head of Musk’s tunneling start-up, the Boring Company, and Jared Birchall, the head of the billionaire’s family office. Twitter managers who didn’t lose their jobs in mass layoffs last month have been told to approach their spending with a tactic known as “zero-based budgeting,” or operating under the assumption that spending should start at nothing and teams should justify individual costs, according to the costs-savings document.

  Davis has directed Twitter employees to delay paying various contractors or vendors and try to negotiate those bills to smaller amounts. The cost of one of the company’s largest contracts, with the consulting megafirm Deloitte, has been a point of particular concern for Twitter’s leadership, which wants to reduce the fees the company pays for security, tax preparation and other services. The company has skipped payments to KPMG, an accounting and consulting firm that had been working on matters related to compliance with the Federal Trade Commission. While missed payments to those firms have now been paid, according to a person familiar with the expenditures, it’s unclear if the company will retain their services beyond this year.

  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 01/01/2023 – 21:00

• Israel Has The World's Highest Digital Quality Of Life In 2022, USA Only 12th
  Israel Has The World’s Highest Digital Quality Of Life In 2022, USA Only 12th

  Life and work in the 21st century is increasingly reliant on modern technology, with a country’s digital quality of life playing a massive role on people’s day-to-day.

  Some countries excel in internet access and affordability, while others have more modern digital systems and relevant laws. And, as Visual Capitalist’s Omri Wallach details below, many regions of the world suffer with lacking digital infrastructure and access across the board.

  The 2022 Digital Quality of Life Index (DQL) from Surfshark analyzes countries on digital wellbeing, based on data from the UN, World Bank, Freedom House, and the International Communications Union.

  5 Metrics for Measuring Digital Wellbeing

  The DQL Index covers 117 countries with readily available data, making up 92% of the global population. Each country is scored on five pillars:

  • Internet Affordability—How much time people have to work to afford a stable internet connection.

  • Internet Quality—How fast and stable the internet connectivity in a country is and how well it’s improving.

  • Electronic Infrastructure—How well developed and inclusive a country’s existing electronic infrastructure is.

  • Electronic Security—How safe and protected people feel in a country.

  • Electronic Government—How advanced and digitized a country’s government services are.

  Visualizing The World’s Digital Quality of Life

  Overall, Europe and Asia led the digital quality of life rankings in 2022. Israel took the top spot with an incredibly strong score in internet affordability. Here are the countries sorted by rankings and their weighted scores in each category:

  Rank	Country	Affordability	Quality	E-infrastructure	E-security	E-government
  1	Israel	0.1917	0.0981	0.1668	0.1503	0.1541
  2	Denmark	0.047	0.1186	0.1968	0.1878	0.1844
  3	Germany	0.0718	0.0926	0.1922	0.1946	0.1612
  4	France	0.0534	0.111	0.1834	0.1878	0.1749
  5	Sweden	0.0213	0.1059	0.1958	0.1878	0.1787
  6	Netherlands	0.0241	0.0985	0.1956	0.1865	0.1796
  7	Finland	0.0171	0.0973	0.192	0.1892	0.1869
  8	Japan	0.0684	0.1024	0.1846	0.1462	0.177
  9	U.K.	0.0413	0.0898	0.1882	0.1611	0.188
  10	South Korea	0.0252	0.1139	0.1884	0.1516	0.1868
  11	Lithuania	0.0508	0.087	0.1705	0.1973	0.1592
  12	U.S.	0.0326	0.113	0.1944	0.1224	0.1947
  13	Switzerland	0.0337	0.1114	0.1914	0.1597	0.1607
  14	Estonia	0.0219	0.0759	0.1852	0.1946	0.1779
  15	Singapore	0.0717	0.1134	0.1852	0.0943	0.19
  16	Spain	0.0257	0.0924	0.1777	0.1919	0.1656
  17	Norway	0.0136	0.0923	0.194	0.1649	0.174
  18	Luxembourg	0.0272	0.0911	0.1878	0.1689	0.1597
  19	Italy	0.0362	0.082	0.1733	0.1824	0.159
  20	Portugal	0.0085	0.1101	0.1576	0.1932	0.1565
  21	Belgium	0.0162	0.0868	0.1823	0.1973	0.1409
  22	Austria	0.0279	0.0717	0.1782	0.1716	0.1719
  23	Poland	0.0242	0.0869	0.1566	0.1905	0.1568
  24	Ireland	0.0217	0.0874	0.1799	0.1662	0.1596
  25	Czechia	0.023	0.0755	0.1707	0.196	0.1472
  26	Canada	0.0228	0.0967	0.1831	0.1289	0.1723
  27	Hungary	0.0206	0.1046	0.1647	0.1676	0.1425
  28	New Zealand	0.0166	0.1027	0.1731	0.1341	0.1702
  29	Slovakia	0.0233	0.0807	0.161	0.1865	0.1417
  30	Bulgaria	0.0308	0.1025	0.1352	0.177	0.1452
  31	Croatia	0.0133	0.0911	0.1625	0.1865	0.1346
  32	Slovenia	0.0102	0.0934	0.1619	0.1622	0.1591
  33	Latvia	0.0235	0.0918	0.1628	0.1784	0.1289
  34	Romania	0.0299	0.105	0.1427	0.1743	0.1327
  35	Australia	0.0453	0.0706	0.1755	0.1089	0.1802
  36	Malta	0.0104	0.093	0.1639	0.1527	0.1547
  37	Cyprus	0.0139	0.0718	0.1589	0.1689	0.1548
  38	Malaysia	0.0319	0.0838	0.1636	0.1224	0.1561
  39	Greece	0.0085	0.0713	0.142	0.2	0.1344
  40	Chile	0.0251	0.1202	0.1469	0.1022	0.1538
  41	Uruguay	0.0051	0.1054	0.1569	0.13	0.1498
  42	Russia	0.0556	0.0794	0.1512	0.0943	0.152
  43	China	0.0241	0.1045	0.1485	0.0741	0.175
  44	U.A.E.	0.0071	0.1148	0.1779	0.0419	0.1712
  45	Argentina	0.0073	0.0694	0.1575	0.13	0.1464
  46	Qatar	0.0077	0.1077	0.1705	0.0808	0.1421
  47	Armenia	0.1009	0.07	0.1356	0.0765	0.1221
  48	Serbia	0.0184	0.0739	0.1387	0.1238	0.1429
  49	Thailand	0.0081	0.1045	0.151	0.0876	0.1391
  50	Ukraine	0.0259	0.0581	0.1613	0.1184	0.1256
  51	Saudi Arabia	0.0057	0.0873	0.1635	0.0865	0.1408
  52	Turkey	0.0153	0.0679	0.1526	0.0968	0.1488
  53	Brazil	0.0078	0.0884	0.1388	0.0686	0.1558
  54	Moldova	0.0357	0.0687	0.1359	0.0927	0.1226
  55	Philippines	0.0044	0.0779	0.1371	0.1062	0.1265
  56	Bahrain	0.0084	0.0878	0.166	0.047	0.1396
  57	Colombia	0.0051	0.0775	0.1248	0.0954	0.1433
  58	Costa Rica	0.0042	0.0721	0.1523	0.0954	0.1206
  59	India	0.0266	0.071	0.1149	0.0822	0.1489
  60	N. Macedonia	0.0095	0.0684	0.1409	0.0981	0.1237
  61	Kazakhstan	0.0185	0.0639	0.1408	0.07	0.1473
  62	Mexico	0.0111	0.0688	0.1291	0.0792	0.142
  63	Paraguay	0.0091	0.0724	0.1424	0.0862	0.113
  64	Albania	0.0087	0.0567	0.1313	0.09	0.1328
  65	Oman	0.0053	0.065	0.1455	0.0473	0.1502
  66	South Africa	0.0198	0.0689	0.1171	0.0778	0.1294
  67	Georgia	0.0097	0.0577	0.1408	0.0941	0.1103
  68	Mauritius	0.0149	0.0459	0.1311	0.09	0.1298
  69	Belarus	0.0224	0.068	0.1396	0.0554	0.123
  70	Vietnam	0.0145	0.0712	0.1396	0.0578	0.1241
  71	Morocco	0.0068	0.0603	0.1247	0.113	0.1004
  72	Indonesia	0.0064	0.0639	0.1382	0.0605	0.1342
  73	Peru	0.0037	0.069	0.126	0.0819	0.1213
  74	Azerbaijan	0.0093	0.0618	0.1361	0.0592	0.1253
  75	Montenegro	0.0149	0.0566	0.1339	0.0765	0.1064
  76	Bangladesh	0.024	0.0681	0.1204	0.0703	0.1021
  77	Tunisia	0.011	0.0484	0.1225	0.0886	0.1142
  78	Kenya	0.0047	0.0492	0.1391	0.0714	0.1193
  79	Dominican Republic	0.0047	0.0597	0.1163	0.0754	0.1229
  80	Bosnia and Herzegovina	0.0127	0.0634	0.1353	0.0697	0.0974
  81	Panama	0.0032	0.0851	0.1279	0.05	0.1111
  82	Ecuador	0.0045	0.0656	0.132	0.0365	0.1256
  83	Trinidad and Tobago	0.0094	0.0622	0.1277	0.0551	0.1074
  84	Iran	0.0149	0.0585	0.1482	0.0149	0.1113
  85	Egypt	0.0064	0.0583	0.1098	0.0595	0.1135
  86	Nigeria	0.0014	0.0552	0.1187	0.0768	0.0916
  87	Jordan	0.0048	0.0754	0.1434	0.0297	0.0862
  88	Ghana	0.0025	0.0531	0.0957	0.0724	0.1091
  89	Sri Lanka	0.0071	0.0658	0.0943	0.0446	0.1184
  90	Mongolia	0.015	0.059	0.135	0.0189	0.0951
  91	Kyrgyzstan	0.0105	0.0603	0.0986	0.0457	0.1074
  92	Algeria	0.005	0.0601	0.1312	0.0551	0.0707
  93	Bolivia	0.0051	0.0583	0.1287	0.0324	0.0941
  94	Nepal	0.0069	0.0684	0.1132	0.0497	0.0762
  95	Senegal	0.0036	0.055	0.1048	0.0603	0.0906
  96	Pakistan	0.006	0.0616	0.0938	0.0446	0.1015
  97	Jamaica	0.0047	0.0584	0.113	0.0432	0.0859
  98	Uganda	0.0007	0.0489	0.0777	0.0768	0.0943
  99	El Salvador	0.0028	0.0662	0.1066	0.0257	0.0944
  100	Ivory Coast	0.0006	0.0465	0.0881	0.0724	0.0869
  101	Cambodia	0.0043	0.0631	0.1178	0.0162	0.0831
  102	Mali	0.0011	0.0548	0.0969	0.0603	0.0689
  103	Namibia	0.0046	0.0517	0.0955	0.0322	0.0899
  104	Guatemala	0.0029	0.059	0.0877	0.0257	0.0878
  105	Zambia	0.0034	0.0241	0.0935	0.0781	0.0613
  106	Botswana	0.0051	0.0523	0.0977	0.023	0.0777
  107	Tanzania	0.0021	0.0517	0.0813	0.0257	0.0924
  108	Honduras	0.004	0.0675	0.0838	0.0108	0.0861
  109	Zimbabwe	0.0019	0.034	0.0907	0.0362	0.0854
  110	Angola	0.0047	0.0567	0.0576	0.0495	0.0748
  111	Laos	0.0066	0.0489	0.0955	0.0189	0.059
  112	Tajikistan	0.0108	0.0485	0.073	0.0108	0.0754
  113	Cameroon	0.0014	0.0178	0.073	0.0338	0.0832
  114	Mozambique	0.0021	0.0378	0.0526	0.0295	0.0815
  115	Ethiopia	0.0032	0.0472	0.048	0.0338	0.0682
  116	Yemen	0.007	0.0644	0.0479	0.0081	0.0527
  117	Congo DR	0.0063	0.0596	0.0446	0.0027	0.0394

  Overall, 15 of the top 20 highest-scoring countries were located in Europe, including #2 Denmark and #3 Germany, reflecting the region’s strong scores in electronic infrastructure and security.

  In addition to Israel, the Asia region was represented at the top by #8 Japan, #10 South Korea, and #15 Singapore. The only non-Asian and non-European country to make the top 20 was the United States at #12.

  

  GDP’s Impact on Digital Infrastructure

  Of the 117 countries that had data available for the index, the majority of the lowest-ranking countries were in Africa or Asia. This includes the bottom five: Cameroon, Mozambique, Ethiopia, Yemen, and DR Congo.

  In fact, when the DQL Index was charted against GDP per capita, a clear and unsurprising trend emerges:

  

  As countries have to grapple with limited resources and capital for increasing their digital wellbeing, we can see different priorities emerge. For example. many countries scored poorly on internet affordability and electronic government while prioritizing investments in internet quality and electronic infrastructure.

  And despite the proliferation of mobile phones across the world, more countries were able to set up stable broadband internet over mobile internet.

  

  To find out more interesting insights, dive in to the full Digital Quality of Life Index.

  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 01/01/2023 – 20:15

• Tesla Tax Loss And Positive Catalysts
  Tesla Tax Loss And Positive Catalysts

  Submitted by Larry McDonald, author of The Bear Traps Report

  This week, TSLA equity traded 61% below the 200-day moving average, the most in a decade — Tesla reports Q4 unit sales before trading starts Tuesday, January 3rd.

  

  Tesla vs. CAT, the Mad Rush into Industrials

  

  “Investors falling all over themselves to exit tech stocks and increase exposure to industrials. Hard asset plays have dramatically outperformed financial assets – and long-duration “growth” equities. The street is looking for $112B of sales in 2023 vs. a $384B equity market capitalization for TSLA stock.  She used to trade at 80x sales, just wow.”

  A $1T Loss?

  If TSLA touches $98, the market cap loss is near $1 trillion, stock traded at $105 pre-market this week. Close to $25B value of shares traded Tuesday, more than Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, and Google combined. Nearly 700m shares in 3 days this week, that´s 25% of the float. This is an epic retail exit – tax loss selling. Daily RSI was near 17 this week, the lowest of all time for this capitulation measuring stick. Tesla was 5th largest in the S&P, now 18, now less than UNH, Lilly, and Chevron. If you sell TSLA equity in December – the investor can buy the stock in 31 days and still book the loss for tax purposes. In years with LARGE Q4 equity market losses – the “January Effect”* can be fairly impressive. Looking back over the last 50 years – when you have a down December, stocks are up 1.2% in January. Since 1991, with stocks off more than -2% in December, they have been up +3.7% on average in January, Bloomberg terminal data.

  **The January Effect is a tendency for increases in stock prices during the beginning of the year, particularly in the month of January. The cause behind the January Effect is attributed to tax-loss harvesting, consumer sentiment, year-end bonuses, raising year-end report performances, and more. – CFI.

  That said,  a recent analysis from Goldman found that the January effect has largely shifted to November since 1990.

  

  “Historic forced margin calls for Tesla – it´s all retail Larry, ALL retail – rather than sentiment shift, see large scale TRF (Schwab, Ameritrade, etc) volume. The SIZE TSLA margin calls are forcing (triggering) ALOT of cross-selling through the entire long duration – speculative equity campgrounds.” — Equity Portfolio Manager on the West Coast, in our Bear Traps Portfolio

  TSLA normally reports quarterly unit sales in the first weekend after the end of each quarter. Consensus is looking for a total of ~420K cars sold (down from 450K est. a few weeks ago). Given that New Year falls on the weekend, there is some uncertainty as to when exactly TSLA reports Q4 unit sales. Either Monday or Tuesday, January 3rd around the market open is most likely.

  Previous January Report Date / Time

  • Sunday 1/2/2022 11am Stock +13.5% the next day
  • Friday 1/2/2021 9:55am Stock +3.4% the next Monday
  • Friday 1/3/2020 8:17am Stock +3% that day
  • Wednesday 1/2/2019 8:34am Stock -1.5% that day

  Is Team Biden coming to Tesla’s Rescue?

  At the start of the new year, buyers will once again enjoy a tax credit when they purchase a Tesla vehicle. The original 2010 EV tax credit had a quota of 400K units. For Tesla, the tax credits fully disappeared in early 2020 when Tesla reached that unit sales quota. But thanks to the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) that Congress passed earlier this year and Biden signed yesterday, the tax credits are back in 2023. In the IRA there is a $7,500 tax credit for buyers of EVs, including TSLA and GM, who lost their previous tax credits. However, there are other strict limits on which brands would be eligible for the full credit, based on the selling price and where the cars and components are made. Unless the car is made in North America (NAFTA), the buyer is not eligible for the full tax credit. In addition, at least 50% of the battery parts will need to be made in North America. Lastly, a minimum of 40% of minerals used in the batteries must be sourced from the US or countries with free trade agreements with the US. So even buyers of GM and Tesla cars might only be eligible for half ($3,750) of the tax credit because their batteries and minerals come from a “foreign entity of concern” (China/Russia).

  However, the Treasury Department recently said that the final decision on the critical minerals’ requirement won’t be available until March. As a result, all the requirements in the IRA governing EV cars, minerals, and parts will be waived. This means that, until Treasury issues its final set of rules, it will allow the full $7,500 tax incentive on all qualifying models.**

  “We don’t expect them to reach 400K (unit sales) in Q4, data comes next week – early January. But, we also don’t think they always tell the truth. So, who knows? The IRA (Inflation Reduction Act) is about the only thing here between TSLA and a complete collapse in demand from what we can see. Also, many other countries have subsidies that are ending on December 31st. So, TSLA is benefiting from demand pull forward in those other countries. That will reverse in the March quarter, and may offset some of the benefits stated by the bulls.” – CIO, Large Fund.

  So, prospective EV buyers in the US will be extremely motivated to buy their EV before the Treasury issues their final list of requirements in March, as it could potentially save them thousands. We could therefore see demand for Tesla cars and other EVs (2 out of every three EVs sold in the US are Tesla’s) being pulled forward into Q1.

  Musk is keenly aware that all this might have led EV car buyers to postpone purchases until Q1 and he increased year-end rebates to $7,500 and 10K miles of free charging in early December. Whether this was enough to meet Tesla’s estimates for 420K unit sales for Q4 remains to be seen. We will know this before trading starts on January 3. But the IRA waiver could still cause a burst in US sales in early 2023.

  This is not the only boon for Tesla starting next year. The EPA is proposing to increase the cellulosic ethanol component in the renewable fuel standard will climb to 2.13 billion gallons from 630 million. Refiners will be allowed and by necessity required to comply with these mandates by buying “eRINs” credits from EV manufacturers. Since Tesla has by far the most EV cars on the road, refiners will have to buy most eRINs from Tesla.

  In years past Tesla always boosted gross margins from “Zero Emission Credits” that other car makers bought from Tesla to offset carbon emissions. Now the administration is giving Tesla another back door subsidy, although it is yet unclear when these rules go into effect.

  ** EV and plug-in models were manufactured in North America in the 2022 and 2023 model years that DOE says are eligible: Audi, BMW, Chevrolet, Chrysler, Ford, GMC, Jeep, Lincoln, Lucid, Nissan, Rivian, Tesla, Volvo, Cadillac, Mercedes and Volkswagen. Yet because of price limits or battery-size requirements, not all these vehicle models will qualify for credits. Note that IRS details issued on Dec 29 indicated that only 20% of Model Y would be eligible for full tax credit, unless Tesla lowers their price on certain versions of the Y.

  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 01/01/2023 – 19:30

• America's Top New Year's Resolutions For 2023
  America’s Top New Year’s Resolutions For 2023

  The plan to live a healthier life is once again top of mind for Americans making resolutions for 2023.

  

  Vowing to exercise more, eat healthier and to lose weight were the top 3 New Year’s resolutions in the U.S. this year, according to the Statista Global Consumer Survey.

  

  You will find more infographics at Statista

  In a year that was marked by high inflation, the resolution to save more money comes in rank 4.

  Classics like spending more time with family and friends instead of on social media also ranked high in the survey.

  19 percent of American adults also want to reduce stress on the job next year.

  Less popular resolutions had to do with reducing use of alcohol and cigarettes as well as doing more for the environment, for example by becoming a vegetarian or vegan. Still, 10 percent of respondents were planning the latter for the new year.

  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 01/01/2023 – 18:45

• In War For Control Of Humanity, Thoughts And Emotions Are The Battlefield: Dr. Robert Malone
  In War For Control Of Humanity, Thoughts And Emotions Are The Battlefield: Dr. Robert Malone

  Authored by Masooma Haq and Jan Jekielek via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

  Inventor of mRNA vaccines Dr. Robert Malone, having worked with the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) for many years, warns that a war is being waged by the government for control of people’s minds, and that social media platforms are being weaponized in this war and are “actively employed” by the intelligence community to influence what people think and feel.

  

  “This new battleground, in which your mind and your thoughts, your very emotions are the battleground. It is not about territory,” Malone said during a recent interview for EpochTV’s “American Thought Leaders” program. “Twitter, it’s clear now, has become the premium platform for shaping emerging global consensus about the topics of the day.”

  During his work with the DOD, Malone became aware of companies researching multilingual programs that assess the emotional content of the language used on social media, which those companies then use to “map relationship clouds,” including what topics people are discussing, who the influencers are, and who is at the fringe of that cloud, said Malone.

  

  Phenomena like being deplatformed, shadowbanned, and a “tweet” going viral is a part of this weaponizing of social media.

  

  “By using these tools of manipulating what information, what tweets you put out, what messages you put out to your influencer cloud, they can modulate how those people behave,” he said. “You can actually very actively control what individuals are thinking, the information that they’re gathering, what they’re being influenced to do.”

  The people who control information warfare weapons can modulate the messaging within the influencer clouds that can be readily mapped, Malone said.

  “Your current state of mind, based on the language that you’re using and the topics that you’re talking about, can be mapped very precisely, psychologically,” he said. “It can be tied into a web of influence relationships.”

  High-Tech Surveillance

  Members of a specific “influencer cloud” can be tracked using the military spy technology called the Gorgon Stare, said Malone. This spy technology is capable of detecting movements including what car you drive, who gets in your car, and where you go, he said.

  The Gorgon Stare is a surveillance technology, originally created to target terrorist groups, that utilizes high-tech cameras mounted on drones to capture video images of large areas, such as entire cities. Then artificial intelligence is used to analyze the surveillance footage.

  Arthur Holland Michel, author of the book, “Eyes in the Sky: The Secret Rise of Gorgon Stare and How It Will Watch Us All,” called this technology the “pinnacle of aerial surveillance” during a 2019 interview with the CATO Institute and said the things he learned while writing the book were so troubling, they kept him up at night.

  

  Collusion During the Pandemic

  Elon Musk has brought more transparency to Twitter, but the information he revealed only confirmed that the FBI and intelligence agencies had major influence over the platform, said Malone.

  “Elon now is in a position where he has access to incredibly damaging information about the willingness of the U.S. government to collude with industry and compromise the First Amendment,” said Malone.

  Musk’s purchase of Twitter is significant, but only time will tell what the final outcome of it will have for our democracy and the First Amendment, Malone added.

  Since the start of the pandemic, Malone and his wife and fellow scientist, Jill Glasspool Malone, have become aware of the government’s breach of all guardrails, said Malone, in terms of ethics and the norms of drug development, bioethics, biodefense, and pharmaceutical development.

  “We have all been subjected, over the last three years, to military-grade psychological operations that were using technology developed for offshore conflicts, and they had been deployed against the citizens of virtually the entire Western world.”

  The same strategies that are used by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to control the Chinese citizens have been used by elites in the United States, said Malone.

  “We’re now seeing the documentation on a daily basis released to us by Twitter, of this intense collusion between the U.S. government, tech, and corporate media,” said Malone.

  

   

  Citizens Are Manipulated

  Millions of Americans accepted a new product (the mRNA vaccine) that skipped normal safety and efficacy protocols and is still only in use under emergency use authorization because “the government felt that it was acceptable to deploy these military-grade technologies against all of us to coerce, compel, and mandate that we accept an unlicensed product that turns out to not be safe, nor effective,” said Malone.

  People were coerced into taking this experimental vaccine because they were manipulated on a scale that is hard to fathom, said Malone. This is how entities like the CCP are able to carry out human rights atrocities, like live organ harvesting, where prisoners of consciousness are murdered for their organs, he added.

  China grew its organ “transplant” industry from 1999 to now, with a wait time in China for a major organ transplant being months rather than the years it can take in western countries.

  This happens because people cannot conceive of “the possibility that these things might be happening in this way, whether it’s organ harvesting, or it’s the darkness of what appears to be the emergence of a pharmaceutical corporatist, global, centralized state,” said Malone.

  Most people cannot fathom such evil exists because they are still good, said Malone.

  “Not only have we been subjected to this barrage of coordinated propaganda, we’ve been subjected to a barrage of intentional manipulation of our very language to support this initiative and this agenda,” said Malone.

  

  The New Book

  Malone’s new book attempts to sort through the events of the last three years to understand what happened and why, which he said is important to start to chart a healthy path forward.

  “Each of these chapters derives from a kind of a real-time assessment of events that were occurring,” he said, and the events were also cited in Malone’s substack writings.

  Readers should discern the truth for themselves by finding credible sources of information, he said, adding that his goal is to provide factual information to the public so they can make informed decisions because society is in a time when people are being inundated with “totalitarian propaganda.”

  In the final third of the book, Malone suggests some concrete actions that could help restore democracy and alleviate the corruption that has besieged the federal government by changing laws to allow for term limits for the federal bureaucracy.

  “This has to do with things like the legal underpinning that enables the existence of this permanent cadre that we call the Senior Executive Service, these thousands of people that cannot be fired, that functionally run the government,” said Malone.

  Former President Donald Trump’s attempt to reassign classification for upper-level federal employees in the state department, with his schedule F executive order, was a crucial step to restoring balance in the three branches of the government, said Malone.

  However, after President Joe Biden took office, he nullified the Schedule F executive order, which Malone said was “an example of how powerful these entrenched administrative state interests are.”

  Another crucial step to end government corruption is to separate the power of federal agencies to both regulate and promote the industry they are in charge of, said Malone.

  “[Dr.] Peter McCullough likes to point out the FDA, under emergency use authorization, acts as both the sponsor and the regulator of these medical products,” said Malone. “And the corruption of the FDA and the CDC is at such a stage now that I think it is so self-evident that only the most hypnotized deny it.”

  Envisioning a New Future

  These actions alone will likely not end the deep-rooted corruption and collusion of the intelligence community within the agencies, said Malone, but it is a step forward.

  People like Dr. Anthony Fauci are working in tandem with the intelligence agencies, and this can be seen by the development of the new National Institutes of Health (NIH) department, the Advance Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H), said Malone.

  The Epoch Times reached out to the NIH for comment.

  This new department is led by a former officer with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and has a budget of about $1 billion. Malone said the purpose of the department “appears to be the advancement of transhumanism and a biometric identification and all of that agenda within NIH. It’s basically the intelligence community moving in within NIH.”

  Malone asked how humans can “enable a decentralized future for all of us, as opposed to this very dark, Fourth Industrial Revolution, transhumanism central command economy.”

  Read more here…

  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 01/01/2023 – 18:00

• These Are The Security Features Of American Money
  These Are The Security Features Of American Money

  In 1739, Benjamin Franklin sought to tackle the issue of counterfeit money in America, using a printing press and leaves to create unique raised patterns on the colonial notes.

  Almost 300 years later, Benjamin Franklin is the face of the U.S. $100 bill, and it is protected by a myriad of security features including secret images, special ink, hidden watermarks, and magnetic signatures, among others.

  In this infographic below, Visual Capitalist’s Avery Koop and Mark Belan have broken down the $100 bill to showcase the anatomy of American currency.

  

  The Makeup of American Money

  There are 6 key features that identify real bills and protect the falsification of American money.

  ① Serial Numbers & EURion Constellation

  The most basic form of security on an $100 bill is the serial number. Every bill has a unique number to record data on its production and keep track of how many individual bills are in circulation.

  The EURion constellation is star-like grouping of yellow rings near the serial number. It is only detectable by imaging software.

  ② Color Changing Ink

  This ink changes color at different angles thanks to small metallic flakes within the ink itself. The $100 bill, like all other paper bills in the U.S., has its value denoted in color changing ink on the bottom right-hand corner; unlike other bills, it also features a liberty bell image using the ink.

  ③ Microprinting

  Microprinting allows for verifiable images that cannot be scanned by photocopiers or seen by the naked eye. The $100 bill has phrases like “USA 100” written invisibly in multiple places.

  ④ Intaglio Printing

  Rather than regular ink pressed onto the paper, intaglio printing uses magnetic ink and every different bill value has a unique magnetic signature.

  ⑤ Security Threads & 3D Ribbons

  The security thread is a clear, embedded, vertical thread running through the bill. It can only be seen under UV light, contains microprinted text specifying the bill’s value, and on each different bill value it glows a unique color.

  Additionally, 3D ribbons are placed in the center of $100 bills with a pattern that slightly changes as it moves.

  ⑥ Paper, Fibers, & Watermarks

  Because American money is made of cotton and linen, blue and red cloth fibers are woven into the material as another identifying feature. Finally, watermarks are found on most bills and can only be detected by light passing through the bill.

  The Relevance of Cash

  Here’s a look at the total number of each paper bill that is physically in circulation in the U.S.:

  

   

  Interestingly, a number of $500-$10,000 dollar bills are in someone’s pockets. And while they are not issued anymore, the Fed still recognizes the originals of these bills that were legally put into circulation in the past.

   

  

  A $10,000 Federal Reserve Note (1934)

  Additionally, there is fake money passing hands in the U.S. economy. Being the most widely-accepted currency in the world, it’s no wonder many try to falsely replicate American money. According to the U.S. Department of Treasury, there are approximately $70 million in counterfeit bills currently circulating in the country.

  Finally, a natural question arises: how many people still use cash anyways?

  Well, a study from Pew Research Center found that it while it is a dwindling share of the population, around 58% of people still use cash for some to all of their weekly purchases, down from 70% in 2018 and 75% in 2015.

  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 01/01/2023 – 17:15

• Comparing The Boom/Bust Cycle In Deregulated Power, Oil & Gas Services, With Recent Events In Bitcoin Mining
  Comparing The Boom/Bust Cycle In Deregulated Power, Oil & Gas Services, With Recent Events In Bitcoin Mining

  Doug Wilson, Portfolio Manager, One River Digital Asset Management LLC

  Just Another Cycle

  Commodities are the lifeline to the global economy. We eat energy. Periods of strong demand often reveal strains in supply chains that lead to rapid price appreciation. Capital investment follows, with return expectations extrapolated from high prices and record margins. A downdraft in demand exposes excess investment, prices decline, and the weakest links in the supply chain are culled. Long periods of low prices lead to complacency, strong demand strains supply chains, and a rhythmic cycle emerges: boom, bust, recovery.

  Natural gas in the early 2000s is an interesting example. From 2002 to 2008, natural gas prices experienced a period of dramatic price appreciation from $2.00/MMBtu to $16.00/MMBtu as economic activity accelerated and existing supply sources strained to keep pace. The market was sending a clear price signal to energy producers: to discover and capitalize on new sources of supply. This price signal had a ripple effect, as it also impacted associated sectors like power production, chemicals, and coal mining.

  Cash flows from flush production found their way into Research & Development budgets that discovered technologies like Hydraulic Fracturing and Horizontal Drilling. A few hundred feet at first, now well laterals are measured in miles. Natural Gas Turbine efficiency (Heat Rate) improved dramatically. This new capital equipment and production were financed with organic cash flows initially, but then quickly morphed into aggressive rounds of debt and equity financing. This debt-fueled capital expansion of commodity industries was justified by the fact that prices were high, margins were at record levels, and the new technology allowed producers to be more efficient – lowering the unit cost of production. Recovery of capital was projected to happen in record time. It also brought rounds of leverage buyouts and acquisitions, most notably the 2007 TXU Energy LBO.

  As we all know, the influx of new capital underwritten based on peak commodity prices and peak operating margins resulted in an unprecedented amount of supply additions across the natural gas, power sectors, uranium, and coal. This influx of supply, combined with a global downturn, compressed BOTH prices and margins significantly. Debt service could not be sustained. As a result:

  • TXU went bankrupt – along with many other Independent Power Producers (Mirant, Reliant, Calpine, etc.),

  • Countless gas exploration & production (E&P) companies sought bankruptcy protection,

  • Every single public coal company declared bankruptcy.

  Ultimately, ownership was transferred from equity holders to lenders. The market participants that had eagerly embraced these assets quickly wrote them off as worthless – “Going to ZERO.” This presented a terrific entry point for longer-term, patient capital.

  These ignored assets are now generating amongst the highest free cash flow yield across all industries. The catalyst for recovery was the rationing of new investment, enabled by the restructuring of capital.

  Bitcoin Mining is following the same pattern now.

  For context, the Bitcoin mining sector experienced an unprecedented BOOM in the autumn of 2021. This was driven by elevated commodity prices (Bitcoin at $67,734 on 11/9/2021) and record mining margins (Hash Spread1 of $550/MWh) brought about by the reduction in competition post China’s ban on Bitcoin Mining. This combination of high prices and record margins attracted new capital to the sector with the promise of rapid payback underwritten by continued projections of success.

  

  ​​Similar to past energy sector commodity BUSTS, the influx of new investments in Bitcoin mining resulted in a dramatic compression of Bitcoin mining margins from a peak of $550/MWh to $50/MWh.

  

  Mining operations are currently profitable, but unable to service their financial obligations. So, they now must turn to bankruptcy. Since our webinar in July, our investment pipeline has expanded significantly as more Bitcoin mining lenders and borrowers find themselves in distress.

  Similar to prior commodity cycles, our expectation is that ownership will pass from equity owners to lenders. We expect these new owners will run these businesses for cash flow as opposed to growth. Growth capital will avoid this sector for years, like prior commodity busts. 

  Even with the depression of prices, there are real cash flows in Bitcoin mining. The Bitcoin network rewarded miners with $15.3 million of Bitcoin rewards per day thus far this month, which annualizes to $5.8 billion.

  Bitcoin is going through yet another brutal adjustment. Each one is different. The unique feature in this cycle is that institutional miners were far more involved in this recent bull market, and the unwinding of that looks like a classic BOOM to BUST cycle in commodity markets. It will pass with discipline. Traders are hunting for the bottom in asset markets. Credit markets are providing the pristine opportunity to earn very strong yields in a low-price environment with considerable optionality to a recovery. The credit opportunity steers you away from calling the bottom of the cycle and focuses more on the necessary ingredients to get ready for the next upturn – disciplined capital.

  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 01/01/2023 – 16:30

• Man With Bomb & Knife Arrested Trying To Enter Lula's Inauguration Celebration
  Man With Bomb & Knife Arrested Trying To Enter Lula’s Inauguration Celebration

  Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva was sworn in as Brazil’s next president Sunday, and was greeted to cheers by hundreds of thousands of celebrating supporters packing the streets of the capital of Brasilia, after he defeated far-right incumbent Jair Bolsonaro in what was the tightest presidential race in over three decades.

  “Our message to Brazil is one of hope and reconstruction,” Lula said in an inaugural speech to Congress’ Lower House as his first act as president. “The great edifice of rights, sovereignty and development that this nation built has been systematically demolished in recent years. And to re-erect this edifice, we are going to direct all our efforts.”

  

  Thus he’s vowing to heal a deeply divided nation, and at a moment many of Bolsonaro’s most die-hard supporters are still pushing for the Lula victory to get overturned. 

  The Associated Press observed Sunday, “Many have gathered outside military barracks since, questioning results and pleading with the armed forces to prevent Lula from taking office.”

  And further, the Left is labelling some Bolsonaro supporters who believe the election was fraudulent as ‘terrorists’:

  His most die-hard backers resorted to what some authorities and incoming members of Lula’s administration labeled acts of “terrorism” – something the country had not seen since the early 1980s, and which has prompted security concerns about inauguration day events.

  Security was especially beefed up in response to a mid-week incident wherein a man, now in custody, was believed plotting to assassinate the president-elect.

  But on Sunday, another potential assassination plot was foiled, the military described, as a man was reportedly caught with a bomb trying to gain entry to inauguration day celebration events.

  President-elect @LulaOficial makes his constitutional commitment in Congress and is sworn in as the 39th President of the Federative Republic of #Brazil. pic.twitter.com/Kx22r2WhbF

  — Gurbaksh Singh Chahal (@gchahal) January 1, 2023

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

  As Sky News reports, “A man carrying an explosive device and a knife has been arrested while attempting to enter the inauguration of Brazil’s new president, according to military police.”

  “The man was trying to enter Brasilia’s esplanade for the inauguration of President-elect Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, according to a spokesperson from the city’s military police force,” the report details.

  Journalists present in the capital on Sunday estimated some 300,000 were gathered along the esplanade to take part in the party in aftermath of Lula’s swearing-in ceremony.

  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 01/01/2023 – 15:45

• The Truth About Gold And Silver
  The Truth About Gold And Silver

  Authored by Jeffrey Tucker via DailyReckoning.com,

  In the midst of all this incredible political and economic chaos, I was tasked with packing up my mother’s things to prepare for her move to assisted living. It’s a gravely emotional experience for anyone, as I’m sure you know.

  I adore that woman. It’s hard to see her get old. Also, that house contained 100 years or more of family history. All this stuff takes up space. With everyone on the move, it’s hard to find a good home for things anymore. We had to make some hard choices.

  Anyway, along the way, I opened a small safe and found a lockbox, and opened it. It was my father’s collection of coins. What was in there hadn’t been seen by anyone for perhaps 25 years (he died rather young).

  

  It was startling and amazing to see. It was like finding buried treasure. There were coins from all over the world, gold, and silver. I’m not sure that I knew that he was a collector.

  There were all the usual gold and silver bullion coins from all lands, all worth the price of their metal content. All are vastly up in value from when he bought them. There were also hundreds of silver dimes. And there were plenty of numismatics too and because I don’t know my way around this world, I’ll let the experts determine their value.

  Good as Gold

  I won’t tell you the total value for reasons of privacy but I will say that he made a very good investment. Stocks are fun and swing this way and that but these coins are stable, true, and always faithful. Dad knew that. He was right.

  And thumbing through the collection always reminded me of his personal values. Yes, he was old-fashioned, you could say. He rallied around faith, family, honesty, hard work, productivity, great art, hard history, big books, deep learning, prayer, community service, and caring for others, all those things.

  He was not only an astute investor. He was a compassionate and caring man. I recall walking with him on a hot windy day in the Texas mountains of the Southwest when a man of Mexican heritage passed us by and then stopped. “Dr. Tucker! You taught me to read! God bless you! God bless you!” My father smiled and shook his hand and we walked on.

  I asked Dad what that was about. He said he once taught a class in English language for immigrant adults and that must have been a student. “Part of your job?” I asked. Dad said no, just as community service.

  Okay, that was Dad. Talented. Dedicated. Humble too.

  The Meaning of Coins

  Back to the coins. They embody firmness of value. You can tell the history of the world through coins. There is an element of tragedy here, looking through coins from a time when money was sound, government was small, and Americans believed in liberty and independence.

  The Constitution was taken seriously: gold and silver were minted as money.

  The coinage suggested that too. The dimes were silver. The nickels were larger because they had less silver and more…nickel. Dollars were silver from the old Spanish world Thaler. The half dollar was…half a dollar. What does this suggest?

  It suggests that government did not create money; it inherited it from the long history of commercial enterprise, dating even back to the late middle ages.

  Then there is the gold. Dad must have loved the American Eagle coin because it suggested hope. Instead of banning gold ownership, the U.S. Treasury was now minting it for the people to own. He could not buy enough. But he also loved gold coins from all over the world. I found memos alongside some, in which he explained why he liked this one or that.

  Truth in Coinage

  These coins symbolize hope even today, a look back and a reminder that such times did exist. It is not in our imagination. Citizens used to carry truth and honesty in their pockets! Trade was calculated in something unchanging and valuable independent of government control.

  A government that mints and distributes sound money trusts its people with their own lives. They also make inflation as we know it essentially impossible.

  The Fed is a good printer. It is a terrible alchemist. So if you want to get rid of inflation once and for all, there is a way. Get rid of the Fed and make the dollar good as gold again. Make the dimes silver. Forget this embarrassing baloney-sandwich stuff we use today.

  Let’s get back to truth. Not lies, like the Inflation Reduction Act or whatever they call it.

  What are the chances? Almost none, sadly. The government is in too much debt and the people are too dependent on inflationary meddling. Leviathan would be impossible under a sound money regime. And tragically today so much of American life is about the perpetuation of Leviathan.

  People everywhere are asking what they should do with their money because there seems to be few ways of making it without losing it. That’s how inflation works. You have to earn a high return above the inflation rate to feel good. It’s a rat race, even if it is a necessary one. But you know what’s not a rat race? Getting a safe, a cotton bag, and filling it with coins, a bit at a time.

  Keep them for years, decades, and generations.

  Preserving Value

  It’s a truism in the investment world that you buy gold and silver not for its short-term return but for long-term security.

  What does this mean?

  Thousands of years of history have taught us the value of precious metals. No amount of crypto tokens, much less meta worlds of NFTs, are going to change that, as fun as they might be.

  Gold keeps its value. But more than that, it symbolizes what it means to keep our values, as people, as societies, and as nations. They are physical objects but more than that, they embody a philosophy of living.

  Think about this.

  One day your children or grandchildren will be rifling through your stuff and they might come across your collection of gold and silver. Do you think their esteem for you will rise? Absolutely it will. It shows that you thought about the very long-term, not just the next investment cycle or election but lifetimes and generations.

  And you know what I’m going to do with my Dad’s collection? So long as I don’t need to use them, I will keep them the same way he did. It’s my connection to him, his values, and also to a world that might seem long gone but did in fact exist. It’s an ideal. And we all need ideals. Ideals can be abstract but they can also be physical. That’s what these coins mean to me.

  In a world of fleeting values and ceaseless and often pointless change, here we have something that we can both believe in and own. It’s real wealth, wealth for the ages, stuff we can carry in our pockets.

  Now we carry “smartphones” that have become spying devices for government.

  It was an emotional day. Mostly I will never forget the smile on my mother’s face when she saw all of this for the first time in decades. She remembered what a great man he was and how much she loved him.

  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 01/01/2023 – 15:00

• "The Consequences Could Be Fatal": Abandoned US Military Equipment Found On Ebay Risks Afghan Lives
  “The Consequences Could Be Fatal”: Abandoned US Military Equipment Found On Ebay Risks Afghan Lives

  After the Biden administration’s chaotic withdrawal from transfer of power to the Taliban in Afghanistan, abandoned US military equipment which contain biometric data have been popping up on Ebay.

  

  Over the past year, German security researcher Matthias Marx and a small group of researchers at Chaos Computer Lab, a European hacker association, have bought six SEEK II (Secure Electronic Enrollment Kit) on the popular auction website, according to the NY Times.

  The device, built as part of the Pentagon’s vast biometric collection expansion following the Sept. 11, 2011 attacks, has a tiny screen, a little keyboard, and a mouse pad. It also contains a thumbprint reader under a hinged plastic lid, an iris scanner, and a camera. They contained biometric data at detainment facilities, on patrols, during screenings of local hires, and after the explosion of an IED. Officials at the time were concerned over a rash of shooting in which Afghan police and soldiers fired on American troops, and were hoping that biometric data could help identify any possible Taliban agents within their bases.

  The shoebox-shaped device, designed to capture fingerprints and perform iris scans, was listed on eBay for $149.95. A German security researcher, Matthias Marx, successfully offered $68, and when it arrived at his home in Hamburg in August, the rugged, hand-held machine contained more than what was promised in the listing.

  The device’s memory card held the names, nationalities, photographs, fingerprints and iris scans of 2,632 people.

  Most people in the database, which was reviewed by The New York Times, were from Afghanistan and Iraq. Many were known terrorists and wanted individuals, but others appeared to be people who had worked with the U.S. government or simply been stopped at checkpoints. Metadata on the device, called a Secure Electronic Enrollment Kit, or SEEK II, revealed that it had last been used in the summer of 2012 near Kandahar, Afghanistan. -NY Times

  In response to the story, Defense Department spox Brig. Gen. Patrick S. Ryder said: “Because we have not reviewed the information contained on the devices, the department is not able to confirm the authenticity of the alleged data or otherwise comment on it,” adding “The department requests that any devices thought to contain personally identifiable information be returned for further analysis.”

  “It was disturbing that they didn’t even try to protect the data,” said Marx. “They didn’t care about the risk, or they ignored the risk.”

  

  DC lawyer Stewart Baker, a former national security official, said that the biometric devices were useful tools in war zones, but that the data collected needed to be kept under control. He suggested that a data breach would “make a lot of people who helped the U.S. and are still in Afghanistan really uncomfortable.“

  “This should not have happened,” Baker added. “It is a disaster for the people whose data is exposed. In the worst cases, the consequences could be fatal.”

  Of the six devices the researchers bought on eBay — four SEEKs and two HIIDEs, for Handheld Interagency Identity Detection Equipment — two of the SEEK II devices had sensitive data on them. The second SEEK II, with location metadata showing it was last used in Jordan in 2013, appeared to contain the fingerprints and iris scans of a small group of U.S. service members. -NY Times

  In one case, an American’s biometric data was found in one of the databases. He was formerly a Marine intelligence specialist who still works in intelligence, and said that his data was most likely collected during a military training course. He asked that his biometric file be deleted.

  According to the Defense Logistics Agency, which is tasked with equipment disposal, the SEEK II and HIIDE devices never should have made it to the open market. Gear such as this is supposed to be destroyed on-site when no longer needed by the military.

  One of the Ebay sellers, surplus equipment reseller Rhino Trade, said they bought the SEEK II at a military auction of government equipment and did not realize it had sensitive data on it.

  “I hope we didn’t do anything wrong,” said David Mendez, the company’s treasurer.

  “The irresponsible handling of this high-risk technology is unbelievable,” said Marx. “It is incomprehensible to us that the manufacturer and former military users do not care that used devices with sensitive data are being hawked online.”

  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 01/01/2023 – 14:15

• 'Radicalized' Times Square Attacker Was On FBI Watchlist
  ‘Radicalized’ Times Square Attacker Was On FBI Watchlist

  Update (1331ET): 

  19-year-old Trevor Bickford, from Wells, Maine, is the kid who injured three NYPD officers with a machete in an unprovoked attack in Times Square. He was on the FBI’ watchlist’ after being radicalized. 

  UK’s Daily Mail wrote, “the FBI in Boston do have an open case on him,” and “he is on a ‘guardian list’ because of his radicalization.”

  Sources told NYPost that Bickford traveled via Amtrak train to NYC with “camping gear, a diary and a last will and testament” before he pulled off the machete attack. 

  “Published reports reveal that Bickford appeared to be a typical American teenager before he allegedly became radicalized in the years after sources said his father died of an overdose in 2018,” NYPost continued. 

  

  Daily Mail published pictures of Bickford via his mother’s Facebook. 

  

  

   

  Here’s a picture of the young man after the NYPD shot him. He was rushed to Bellevue Hospital in Manhattan, along with the two cops he injured — all three are expected to survive. 

  NY Post: Man who attacked police with machete near Times Square last night is Trevor Bickford, 19, from Wells, Maine. “Cops are investigating whether he is a recently radicalized Islamic extremist, based on online postings.”https://t.co/xOaVJS7vGhhttps://t.co/17g5gBRBD6 pic.twitter.com/qXvUqftx2R

  — Steve Lookner (@lookner) January 1, 2023

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

  News Center Maine’s Jack Molmud reported the FBI arrived at the suspect’s family home this afternoon. 

  NEW: NBC New York is reporting the man accused of attacking three police officers in NYC is 19 year old Trevor Bickford

  Bickford is from Wells, Maine. I am outside the address confirmed to be his family’s from neighbors. FBI agents are outside the home right now @newscentermaine pic.twitter.com/xX0JnUowfy

  — Jack Molmud (@jmolmud) January 1, 2023

  It seems like the case every time… 

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

  Suspect Behind NYPD New Year’s Eve Attack Was on FBI Radar – Trevor Bickford a Recent Convert to Islam pic.twitter.com/bZj5c9MYPV

  — FCKTOFF (@fcktoff) January 1, 2023

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

  *  *  * 

  Chaos erupted in Times Square on New Year’s Eve when a machete-wielding man injured three New York Police Department (NYPD) officers. 

  New York Police Commissioner Keechant Sewell told reporters early Sunday that a 19-year-old man attempted to strike the first officer in the head with a machete, unprovoked. Sewell said the man hit two other officers on the head with the machete. 

  Sewell said one officer received a laceration to the head while the other received a skull fracture and a large laceration. Another officer discharged his firearm, striking the suspect in the shoulder. 

  Watch as Police Commissioner Sewell & Mayor Adams provide an update on a police involved incident in Manhattan. https://t.co/ha11b02Fvq

  — NYPD NEWS (@NYPDnews) January 1, 2023

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

  The incident occurred around 9:30 p.m. ET at West 52nd Street and 8th Avenue. One police source told NYPost that an investigation had been opened to see whether the suspect is a radical Islamic extremist. 

  “We are working with our federal partners for this investigation, and it is ongoing,” Commissioner Sewell said. 

  NYPD Crime Stoppers released a picture of the machete. 

  

  Mike Driscoll, assistant director in charge of the New York FBI Field Office, who is also investigating, told local news NBC New York that the knife attack appears to be the work of a “sole individual at this time, there’s nothing to suggest otherwise.” The FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force is also investigating.

  Nearby onlookers were startled by the attack and gunfire — many revelers fled amid the chaos. 

  They are shooting and stabbing in #TimesSquare! Two police stabbed. Condition unknown! #NYCACC pic.twitter.com/D119rFg5Qs

  — @BeeNewsDailyB (@BeenewsdailyB) January 1, 2023

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

  BREAKING NEWS: Two NYPD officers stabbed, One Officer was stabbed in the head during New Year’s Eve celebrations at Times Square. #Manhattan #nypd #stabbing #fdny #TimesSquare #NewYear #balldrop #HappyNewYear #NewYorkCity #nyc #newyork #BreakingNews #Police pic.twitter.com/EMzINArTLp

  — NY Actions (@NY_ACTIONS) January 1, 2023

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

  “No backpacks or umbrellas in Times Square. They forgot to mention machetes,” a police source told The Post. 

  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 01/01/2023 – 13:31

• 15 Million Americans Set To Lose Medical Coverage As Public Health Emergency Ends
  15 Million Americans Set To Lose Medical Coverage As Public Health Emergency Ends

  Authored by Autumn Spredemann via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

  America is facing a health crisis and it isn’t made up of bacteria or viruses—instead, it’s an impending medical insurance meltdown.

  

  There is an expectation that as of Jan. 11, 2023, an estimated 15 million Americans will begin to lose health coverage.

  The reason is that after three years of a COVID-19 public health emergency, the shield of continuous coverage offered by Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) will end.

  Once the state of emergency expires, regular income requirements and restrictions will apply. This will disqualify millions who’ve benefited from congressional legislation passed in 2020 preventing disenrollment for the duration of the COVID pandemic.

  Health care administrators are already bracing for the fallout as the end looms large.

  The administration of President Joe Biden has set a tentative termination date for Jan. 11, though many analysts believe it will be extended. That’s because White House officials promised a 60-day notice before making it official.

  Even with an extension, it’s only delaying the inevitable, according to industry insiders. An avalanche of newly uninsured Americans will still tumble into the national health care system.

  An estimated 15 million adults and children will be unenrolled once the health emergency ends, according to an analysis from the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning Evaluation. Within that group, 8.2 million will no longer be eligible for Medicaid. Another 5.3 million children also won’t qualify for CHIP.

  Barely a third of those in line to be ejected into the insurance marketplace will qualify for tax credits or other programs. That will leave millions in limbo, scrambling to find affordable insurance.

  With such a high volume of newly uninsured patients, some analysts predict cost increases for doctor visits, especially in the emergency room.

  Coverage Too Expensive

  Others say it will contribute to America’s spiraling mental health crisis, which currently affects more than 50 million people.

  “We talk about this at work a lot. From the human perspective, it’s not just CHIP and Medicaid, it’s also disability plans. That’s what we’re most worried about, disability and seniors,” Amanda Jones told The Epoch Times.

  Jones is a senior health professional who has worked with U.S. government health-care programs for 14 years. She says it won’t be as simple as just rolling back into the program once the state of emergency expires.

  Because for many using subsidized programs, other coverage is just too expensive. Those who don’t qualify for alternative, affordable care plans will likely just go without, according to Jones.

  Affordable private coverage options can also vary drastically from state to state.

  Slipping Through Cracks

  One study in 2022 showed a staggering 112 million U.S. adults struggle to afford medical insurance. In the same report, 93 percent said they felt the benefits aren’t worth the high price tag.

  The other part of the problem is coverage gaps. Even short breaks in coverage can create a bottleneck at the administrative level for many doctors and specialists.

  “With a lapse in coverage, getting people back into their routine with their medical doctors is complicated,” Jones explained.

  Another harsh reality is many will fall through the gap between income requirements and being able to afford private insurance. Those who slip through will be the most likely to forego coverage. This translates into a price hike in medical services in the long run. “Higher administrative costs in health care will get passed onto other customers. There will also be a lot more emergency room visits,” she said.

  Jones also noted that a lot of current Medicaid and CHIP members wouldn’t lose total coverage, but a lot of their benefits. This is especially prevalent for those who rely on prescription medications and regular doctor visits.

  Medicaid enrollment surged to record levels in 2021, topping 80 million members. Much of that is because many lost employment during the pandemic and lacked affordable coverage options.

  After Congress passed legislation in March 2020 to protect insurance coverage, enrollment soared, because the main caveat for states to access the enhanced federal funding under the Families First Coronavirus Response Act was the prohibition on disenrolling people using Medicaid during the emergency.

  Jones says Biden’s 60-day notice is a drop in the bucket. “Sixty days in the business world is like, a week. It’ll be a huge strain on care coordinators.”

  With disabled people, seniors, and children set to feel the biggest impact, some industry workers say the U.S. mental health crisis will escalate.

  Read more here…

  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 01/01/2023 – 13:30

• 2022 Greatest Hits: The Most Popular Articles Of The Past Year And A Look Ahead
  2022 Greatest Hits: The Most Popular Articles Of The Past Year And A Look Ahead

  One year ago, when looking at the 20 most popular stories of 2021, we said that the year would be a very tough act to follow as “the sheer breadth of narratives, stories, surprises, plot twists and unexpected developments” made 2021 the most memorable year yet in our brief history, and that it would be an extremely tough act to follow. And yet despite the exceedingly high bar for 2022, not only did the year not disappoint but between the constant news barrage, the regime shifts, narrative volatility, market rollercoasters, oh and the world being on the verge of a nuclear Armageddon for much of the year, the past year was the most action, excitement, and news (including fake news)-packed yet.

  Where does one even start?

  While covid – which was the story of 2020 – finally faded away from the front page and the constant barrage of fearmongering coverage (with recent revelations courtesy of Elon Musk’s “Twitter Files” showing just how extensively said newsflow was crafted, orchestrated and -y es – censored by the government, while a sudden U-turn by China in its Covid Zero policy prompting a top Chinese research to admit that the “fatality rate from the omicron variant of the virus is in line with the flu“), and the story of 2021 was the scourge of soaring inflation (which contrary to macrotourist predictions that it would prove “transitory” just kept rising, and rising, and rising, until it hit levels not seen since the Volcker galloping inflation days of the 1980s)…

  

  … then the big market story of 2022 was the coordinated central bank crusade to put the inflation genie back into the bottle and to contain soaring prices (which were no longer transitory, especially after Putin launched his “special military operation” in Ukraine which we will discuss shortly)…

  

  … even if it meant crushing the housing market…

  

  … sparking a global recession, or as Goldman calls it a “broad-based but necessary slowdown in global growth”…

  

  … and leaving millions out of work (the BLS still pretends hundreds of thousands of workers are being added to payrolls even though as we all know – as does the Philadelphia Fed – that is a lie, and the real employment number has not changed since March)…

  

  … not to mention triggering the worst bear market in both stocks and bonds since the global financial crisis. Yes, less than a year after the S&P hit a record just above 4800 in January of this year, both global stock and bond markets have cratered, and in a profound shock to an entire generation of “traders” who have never lived through a hiking cycle and rising inflation, for the first time since 2008 no central banks are riding to the market’s rescue. Meanwhile, with a drop of more than 20% in 2022 translating into a record $18 trillion wipeout, the MSCI All-Country World Index is on track for its worst performance since the 2008 crisis, amid the Fed’s relentless rate hiking campaign.

  

  Add bond market losses – because in 2022 everything was sold – and you get a staggering $36 trillion in value vaporized, which in absolute terms is nearly double the damage from the Lehman failure and the global financial crisis.

  

  None of this should come as a surprise: the staggering liquidity injections that started in 2020, continued throughout 2021 and extended into the first half of 2022 before gently reversing as QT finally returned; the final tally is that after $3 trillion in emergency liquidity injections in the immediate aftermath of the pandemic to “stabilize the world”, the Fed injected another $2 trillion in the subsequent period, most of which in 2021, a year where economists were “puzzled” why inflation was soaring (this, of course, excludes the tens of trillions of monetary stimulus injected by other central banks as well as the boundless fiscal stimulus that was greenlighted with the launch of helicopter money). And then, when a modest $500 billion in Fed balance sheet liquidity was withdrawn… everything crashed.

  

  This reminds us of something we said two years ago: “it’s almost as if the world’s richest asset owners requested the covid pandemic.” Well, last year we got confirmation for this rhetorical statement, when we calculated that in the 18 months after the covid pandemic hit, the richest 1% of US society saw their net worth increase by over $30 trillion, which in turn officially made the US into a banana republic where the middle 60% of US households by income – a measure economists use as a definition of the middle class – saw their combined assets drop from 26.7% to 26.6% of national wealth, the lowest in Federal Reserve data, while for the first time the super rich had a bigger share, at 27%. Yes, for the first time ever, the 1% owned more wealth than the entire US middle class, a definition traditionally reserve for kleptocracies and despotic African banana republics.

  

  But as the Fed finally ended QE and started draining its balance sheet in 2022, the party ended with a thud, and this tremendous wealth accumulation by the top 1% went into reverse: indeed, just the 500 richest billionaires saw their fortunes collapse by $1.4 trillion with names such as Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Masa Son and Larry Page and Sergey Brin all losing more than a third (in some cases much more) of their net worth.

  

  This also reminds us of something else we said a year ago: “this continued can-kicking by the establishment – all of which was made possible by the covid pandemic and lockdowns which served as an all too convenient scapegoat for the unprecedented response that served to propel risk assets (and fiat alternatives such as gold and bitcoin) to all time highs – has come with a price… and an increasingly higher price in fact. As even Bank of America CIO Michael Hartnett admits, Fed’s response to the the pandemic “worsened inequality” as the value of financial assets – Wall Street –  relative to economy – Main Street – hit all-time high of 6.3x.”

  In other words, for all its faults, 2022 was a year in which inequality finally reversed – if only a little – and as Michael Hartnett said in one of his final Flow Shows, “Main St finally outperformed Wall St significantly in 2022” as the value of financial assets relative to the economy slumped from 6.3x to 5.4x.

  

  Sadly, we doubt that this will cheer anyone up – be it workers – who have seen their real, inflation-adjusted earnings decline for a record 20 consecutive months (or virtually all of Joe BIden’s presidency)…

  

  … or investors who have seen crushing losses across all industries, with the exception of the one sector we have been pounding-the-table-on bullish on since the summer of 2020: energy (with our favorite stock, Exxon, blowing away the competition with its nearly triple digit return YTD).

  

  There is some good news for jittery bulls looking ahead at 2023: statistics show that two consecutive down years are rare for major equity markets — the S&P 500 index has fallen for two straight years on just four occasions since 1928, and they usually marked market crashes or social cataclysms –  the Great Depression, World War II, the 1970s oil crisis and the bursting of the dot-com bubble. The scary thing though, is that when they do occur, drops in the second year tend to be deeper than in the first. And with Joe Biden at the helm, betting on a second great depression may be prudent. Even if that sounds hyperbolic, when it comes to markets the big question for 2023 is simple: have markets bottomed or is there much more room to fall, in other words, are we facing a hard or soft landing.

  

  And speaking of Joe Biden at the helm, another glaring risk factor for 2023 is – of course- nuclear war. Because while the great inflation fight and Biden bear market were the defining features of 2022 from an economic and capital markets standpoint, the biggest event in terms of geopolitical and social importance was the war between Russia and Ukraine.

  While one could write – pardon the pun – the modern day equivalent of “war and peace” on the causes behind the war in Ukraine, for the sake of brevity we will merely note that a conflict that had been simmering for years if not decades…

  

  … finally got its proverbial spark in February when – encouraged by NATO to join the military alliance in an act that Russia had repeatedly warned would be casus belli against Ukraine – Putin ordered a “special military operation” against Ukraine, sending Russian troops to invade the country because, as he subsequently explained, “if Russia did not do this now, it itself would be invaded by neighboring NATO countries a few years later.” And speaking of what else Putin said in the lead up to the Ukraine war, the following snapshots reveal much of the Russian leader’s thinking about the biggest geopolitical conflict since World War II.

  

  And while the geopolitical implications of the war are staggering and long-reaching, the single most important consequence to the world, and especially Europe, is the threat of persistent energy shortages over the coming years as Russian energy output has been sanctioned and curtailed for the foreseeable future…

  

  … in the process sending energy prices in Europe and elsewhere soaring, and pushing inflation sharply higher. Which is especially ironic, because the same central banks we showed above that are hiking rates like crazy in hopes of containing inflation are doing precisely nothing to address the elephant in the room, namely that inflation is not demand-driven (which the Fed can control by adjusting the price of money) but entirely on the supply-side. And since the Fed can’t print oil or gas, all that central banks are doing is executing Vladimir Putin’s indirect bidding and pushing the world into a global recession if not all out depression as they hope to crush enough energy demand to lower prices in a world where energy supply is also much lower. What they forget is that this will lead to tens of millions of unemployed people, and while that is not a major issue yet, something tells us that the coming mass layoffs – both in the US and around the globe – and not just in tech but across all industries, will be the story of 2023.

  One final thing worth mentioning in the context of the Ukraine war is what it means strategically for the future of the world, and here we would argue that some of the best analysis belong to former NY Fed repo guru, Zoltan Pozsar whose periodic dispatches throughout 2022 (all of which are available to professional subscribers), and whose year-end report on the fate of Bretton Woods III, the petrodollar, the petroyuan and petrogold, are all must-read for anyone who hopes to be ahead of the curve in today’s rapidly changing world.

  Away from Inflation and the Ukraine war, the next most important topic in the past year, were the revelations from the Twitter Files, exposed by the social medial company’s new owner, Elon Musk, who paid $44 billion so that the world can finally see first hand just how little free speech there really is in the so-called land of the free and the home of the First Amendment, and how countless three-lettered, deep-state alphabet agencies – and the military-industrial complex – will do anything and everything to control both the official discourse and the unofficial narrative to keep their preferred puppets in the White House, and keep those they disapprove of – censored and/or locked up, both literally and metaphorically… or simply designate them “conspiracy theorists.” None other than Matt Taibbi wrote the best summary of what the Twitter Files revealed, namely America’s stealthy conversion into a crypto-fascist state where some unelected government bureaucrat tells corporations what to do:

  This last week saw the FBI describe Lee Fang, Michael Shellenberger and me as “conspiracy theorists” whose “sole aim” is to discredit the agency. That statement will look ironic soon, as we spent much of this week learning about other agencies and organizations that can now also be discredited thanks to these files.

  A group of us spent the last weeks reading thousands of documents. For me a lot of that time was spent learning how Twitter functioned, specifically its relationships with government. How weird is modern-day America? Not long ago, CIA veterans tell me, the information above the “tearline” of a U.S. government intelligence cable would include the station of origin and any other CIA offices copied on the report.

  I spent much of today looking at exactly similar documents, seemingly written by the same people, except the “offices” copied at the top of their reports weren’t other agency stations, but Twitter’s Silicon Valley colleagues: Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, LinkedIn, even Wikipedia. It turns out these are the new principal intelligence outposts of the American empire. A subplot is these companies seem not to have had much choice in being made key parts of a global surveillance and information control apparatus, although evidence suggests their Quislingian executives were mostly all thrilled to be absorbed. Details on those “Other Government Agencies” soon, probably tomorrow.

  One happy-ish thought at month’s end:

  Sometime in the last decade, many people — I was one — began to feel robbed of their sense of normalcy by something we couldn’t define. Increasingly glued to our phones, we saw that the version of the world that was spat out at us from them seemed distorted. The public’s reactions to various news events seemed off-kilter, being either way too intense, not intense enough, or simply unbelievable. You’d read that seemingly everyone in the world was in agreement that a certain thing was true, except it seemed ridiculous to you, which put you in an awkward place with friends, family, others. Should you say something? Are you the crazy one?

  I can’t have been the only person to have struggled psychologically during this time. This is why these Twitter files have been such a balm. This is the reality they stole from us! It’s repulsive, horrifying, and dystopian, a gruesome history of a world run by anti-people, but I’ll take it any day over the vile and insulting facsimile of truth they’ve been selling. Personally, once I saw that these lurid files could be used as a road map back to something like reality — I wasn’t sure until this week — I relaxed for the first time in probably seven or eight years.

  Well said Matt, and we say this as one of the first media outlets that was dubbed “conspiracy theorists” by the authorities, long before everyone else joined the club. Oh yes, we’ve been there: we were suspended for half a year on Twitter for telling the truth about Covid, and then we lost most of our advertisers after the Atlantic Council‘s weaponized “fact-checkers” put us on every ad agency’s black list while anonymous CIA sources at the AP slandered us for being “Kremlin puppets” – which reminds us: for those with the means, desire and willingness to support us, please do so by becoming a premium member: we are now almost entirely reader-funded so your financial assistance will be instrumental to ensure our continued survival into 2023 and beyond.

  The bottom line, at least for us, is that the past three years have been a stark lesson in how quickly an ad-funded business can disintegrate in this world which resembles the dystopia of 1984 more and more each day, and we have since taken measures. Two years ago, we launched a paid version of our website, which is entirely ad and moderation free, and offers readers a variety of premium content. It wasn’t our intention to make this transformation but unfortunately we know which way the wind is blowing and it is only a matter of time before the gatekeepers of online ad spending block us for good. As such, if we are to have any hope in continuing it will come directly from you, our readers. We will keep the free website running for as long as possible, but we are certain that it is only a matter of time before the hammer falls as the censorship bandwagon rolls out much more aggressively in the coming year.

  Meanwhile, for all those lamenting the relentless coverage of politics in a financial blog, why finance appears to have taken a secondary role, and why the political “narrative” has taken a dominant role for financial analysts, the past three years showed conclusively why that is the case: in a world where markets gyrated, and “rotated” from value stocks to growth and vice versa, purely on speculation of how big the next stimulus out of Washington will be, now that any future big stimulus plans are off the table until at least 2024 thanks to a divided Congress, and the Fed is still planning on hiking until it finally crushing inflation, we would like to remind readers of one of our favorite charts: every financial crisis is the result of Fed tightening, and something always breaks.

  

  Which brings us to the simplest forecast about the coming year: 2023 will be the year when something finally breaks.

  As for more nuanced predictions about the future, as the past three years so vividly showed, when it comes to actual surprises and all true “black swans”, it won’t be what anyone had expected. And so while many themes, both in the political and financial realm, did get some accelerated closure, dramatic changes in 2022 persisted and new sources of global shocks emerged, and will continue to manifest themselves in often violent and unexpected ways – from the ongoing record polarization in the US political arena, to “populist” upheavals around the developed world, to the gradual transition to a global Universal Basic (i.e., socialized) Income regime, to China deciding that the US is finally weak enough and the time has come to invade Taiwan.

  As always, we thank all of our readers for making this website – which has never seen one dollar of outside funding (and despite amusing recurring allegations, has certainly never seen a ruble from either Putin or the KGB either, sorry CIA) and has never spent one dollar on marketing – a small (or not so small) part of your daily routine.

  Which also brings us to another critical topic: that of fake news, and something we – and others who do not comply with the established narrative – have been accused of. While we find the narrative of fake news laughable, after all every single article in this website is backed by facts and links to outside sources, it is clearly a dangerous development, and a very slippery slope that the entire developed world is pushing for what is, when stripped of fancy jargon, internet censorship under the guise of protecting the average person from “dangerous, fake information.” It’s also why we are preparing for the next onslaught against independent thought and why we had no choice but to roll out a premium version of this website.

  In addition to the other themes noted above, we expect the crackdown on free speech to only accelerate in the coming year – Elon Musk’s Twitter Files revelations notwithstanding, especially as the following list of Top 20 articles for 2022 reveals, many of the most popular articles in the past year were precisely those which the conventional media would not touch with a ten foot pole, both out of fear of repercussions and because the MSM has now become a PR agency for either a political party or some unelected, deep state bureaucrat, which in turn allowed the alternative media to continue to flourish in an information vacuum (in less than a decade, Elon Musk’s $44 billion purchase of Twitter will seem like one of the century’s biggest bargains) and take significant market share from the established outlets by covering topics which established media outlets refuse to do, in the process earning itself the derogatory “fake news” condemnation.

  We are grateful that our readers – who hit a new record high in 2022 – have realized that it is incumbent upon them to decide what is, and isn’t “fake news.”

  * * *

  And so, before we get into the details of what has now become an annual tradition for the last day of the year, those who wish to jog down memory lane, can refresh our most popular articles for every year during our no longer that brief, almost 14-year existence, starting with 2009 and continuing with 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020 and 2021.

  So without further ado, here are the articles that you, our readers, found to be the most engaging, interesting and popular based on the number of hits, during the past year.

  • In 20th spot with just over 510,000 views, was one of the seminal market strategy reports of 2022 by the man who has become the most prescient and accurate voice on Wall Street, former NY Fed repo guru Zoltan Pozsar, whose periodic pieces previewing the post-war world – one where Bretton Woods III makes a stunning comeback, where the petrodollar dies, and is replaced by the Petroyuan – have become must-read staple fare for Wall Street professionals. In “Wall Street Stunned By Zoltan Pozsar’s Latest Prediction Of What Comes Next“, Zoltan offered his first post-Ukraine war glimpse of the coming “Bretton Woods III” world, “a new monetary order centered around commodity-based currencies in the East that will likely weaken the Eurodollar system and also contribute to inflationary forces in the West.” Subsequent events, including the growing proximity of Russia, China and various other non-G7 nations, coupled with stubborn inflation, have gone a long way to proving Zoltan’s thesis. The only thing that’s missing is the overhaul of the world reserve currency.

  • In 19th spot, some 526,000 learned that amid the relentless crackdown against free speech by a regime which Elon Musk’s Twitter Files have definitively revealed is borderline fascist (as in real fascism, not that clownish farce which antifa thugs pretend to crusade against) Zero Hedge was among the first websites to be targeted by the CIA when that deep state mouthpiece, the Associated Press, said that “intelligence officials accused a conservative financial news website [Zero Hedge] with a significant American readership of amplifying Kremlin propaganda.” As we explained in “Now We’ve Done It: We Pissed Off The CIA” – the 19th most viewed article of 2022 – we have done no such thing but as the AP also revealed, the real motive behind the hit piece is that “Zero Hedge has been sharply critical of Biden and posted stories about allegations of wrongdoing by his son Hunter.” Of course, only a few weeks later we would learn that reports of wrongdoing by “his son Hunter” as unveiled in the infamously censored laptop story fiasco, were indeed accurate (despite dozens of “former intel officials” saying it is Russian disinfo) but since only “Kremlin propaganda” sites dare to attack Joe Biden while the MSM keeps deathly silent, nobody in the so-called “free press” bothered to mention it. Incidentally, since the CIA did a full background check on us and republishing some pro-Russian blogs was the best they could find, we are confident that  On the other hand, since being designated a pro-Russian operation meant that we have been blacklisted by most advertisers, we are increasingly reliant on you, dear readers (and not Vladimir Putin) for support, and we would be extremely grateful to everyone who can sign up for our premium product to support us into 2023 and onward.

  • In 18th spot, and suitably right below our little tete-a-tete with the CIA, was the disclosure of a huge trove of corruption Hunter Biden’s “laptop from hell.” In April, with over 568,000 page views, readers learned that “450GB Of ‘Deleted’ Hunter Biden Laptop Material To Be Released Within Weeks.” The ultimate result was the long overdue confirmation by the mainstream press (NYT and WaPo) that the Biden notebook was indeed real (again, despite dozens of “former intel officials” saying it is Russian disinfo) but since the state-corporatist apparatus had already achieved its goal, and suppressed and censored the original NYPost reporting just ahead of the 2020 presidential election and Biden had been elected president, few cared (just a few months later, thanks to Elon Musk and the Twitter files would we learn just how deep the censorship hole went, and that it involved not only the US government, the Democratic Party, the FBI, but also the biggest tech and media companies, all working together to censor anything that they found politically unpalatable).

  • Yes, 2022 was also a midterm year, and with more than 617,000 views, was our snapshot of what happened on Nov 8 when in a carbon copy of 2020 it initially seemed like Republicans would sweep Congress as we described in the 17th most popular article of 2022, “Election Night Results: FL “Catastrophic” For Dems, Vance Takes OH, Fetterman Tops Oz“… but it was not meant to be and as the mail-in votes crawled in days and weeks later, the GOP lead not only fizzled (despite a jarring loss among Florida Hispanics), but in the end Democrats kept the Senate. Ultimately the result was anticlimatic, and with Congress divided for the next two years, governance will be secondary to what the Fed will do, which in our humble view, will be the big story of 2023.

  • For all the political, market and central bank trials and tribulations of 2022, one could make the argument that the biggest story of the past year was Elon Musk’s whimsical takeover of twitter, which started off amicably enough as laid out in the 16th most popular article of 2022 (with more than 627,000 page views) “Buffett Says “Musk Is Winning…It’s America” As TWTR Board Ponders Poison Pill“, then turned ugly and hostile, transitioned into a case of buyer’s remorse with Musk suing to back out of the deal only to find out he can’t, and culminated with the release of the shocking Twitter Files, Musk’s stunning expose of the dirt and secrets of how the world’s most popular news outlet had effectively become a subsidiary not only of the Democratic party but also of the FBI, CIA and various other deep state alphabet agencies, validating once again countless “conspiracy theories” and confirming once and for all that any outlet that still dares to oppose the official party line is the biggest enemy of the deep state.

  • And speaking of the deep state, we had a glaring reminder in September why one should be very careful when crossing the US secret police FBI when pro-Trump celeb pillow entrepreneur Mike Lindell was intercepted by the Feds during a hunting trip and had his cell phone seized as described in “FBI Tracks Down Mike Lindell On Hunting Trip, Surrounds His Car And Seizes Cell Phone“. That this happened to one of the most vocal critics of the 2020 election just two months before the midterms, was surely a coincidence, as over 625,000 readers obviously concluded.

  • 2022 was not a good year for markets, and certainly wasn’t good for retail investors whose torrid gains from the meme stock mania of 2021 melted down almost as fast as the Fed hiked rates (very fast). But not everyone was a loser, and one story stood out: that of 20-year-old student Jake Freeman (who together with his uncle) bought up a substantial, 6.2% stake in soon-to-be-broke retailer Bed Bath and Beyond, and piggybacking on the antics of one Ryan Cohen, quietly cashed out after making a massive $110 million by piggybacking on one of the most vicious short/gamma squeezes in recent history. The “Surreal Story Of A 20-Year-Old Student Who Acquired 6% Of Bed Bath & Beyond, And Made $110 Million In 3 Weeks” was the 14th most read article of 2022.

  • The 13th most read story of 2022 with over 668,000 reads was the bizarre interlude involving superstar-trader and outgoing House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband, Paul, and his bizarre attack by a “right wing” progressive as described in “Paul Pelosi Undergoing Brain Surgery Following ‘Brutal’ Attack; Suspect Identified.” While authorities have struggled to craft a narrative that the attacker, nudist transient David Depape of Berkeley, was a pro-Trumper and the attack was politically motivated, the evidence has indicated that he suffered from serious mental illness and drug addiction and lacked any coherent political ideology; some have even claimed that there was a sexual relationship between him and Pelosi, a theory that could be easily disproven if only the police would release the bodycam footage from the moment of the arrest. Unfortunately, San Fran PD has vowed to keep it confidential. Depape’s trial is set to be 2023’s business, so expect more fireworks.

  • 2022 was also a year in which Europeans realized how brutally expensive electricity can be when the biggest commodity, nat gas and oil supplier to Europe, Russia, is suddenly cut off. And judging by the 668,500 people who read “How In The Name Of God”: Shocked Europeans Post Astronomical Energy Bills As ‘Terrifying Winter’ Approaches” and made it into the 12th most popular article of the year, the staggering number were also news to our audience: indeed, the fact that Geraldine Dolan, who owns the Poppyfields cafe in Athlone, Ireland, and was charged nearly €10,000 for just over two months of energy usage, was shocking to everyone. To be sure, there were countless other such stories out of Europe and with the Russia-Ukraine war unlikely to end any time soon, Europe’s commodity hyperinflation will only continue. Adding insult to injury, Europe is on a fast track to a brutal recession, but the ECB remains stuck in tightening mode, perhaps because it somehow believes that higher rates will ease energy supplies. Alas that won’t happen and instead the big question for 2023 will be whether Europe is merely hit with a recession or if instead the ECB’s actions escalates the local malaise into a full-blown depression.

  • Earlier we said that one of the most prophetic voices on Wall Street in 2022 (and prior) was that of Zoltan Pozsar, who laid out his theory of a Bretton Woods III regime in the days immediately following the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Well, just one month later we saw the first tentative steps toward just such a paradigm shift when in April the Russian central bank offered to buy gold from domestic commercial banks at a fixed price of 5000 rubles per gram; by doing so the Bank of Russia both linked the ruble to gold and, since gold trades in US dollars, set a floor price for the ruble in terms of the US dollar. We described this in “A Paradigm Shift Western Media Hasn’t Grasped Yet” – Russian Ruble Relaunched, Linked To Gold & Commodities“, an article red 670,000 times making it the 11th most popular of the year. This concept of “petrogold” was also the subject of extensive discussion by Pozsar who dedicated one of his most recent widely-read notes to the topic; if indeed we are witnessing the transition to a Bretton Woods 3 regime, 2023 will see a lot of fireworks in the monetary system as the dollar’s reserve status is challenged by eastern commodity producers.

  • The 10th most popular article of 2022, with 686K views was a reminder of just how much “the settled science” can change: as described in “You Murderous Hypocrites”: Outrage Ensues After The Atlantic Suggests ‘Amnesty’ For Pandemic Authoritarians, many were shocked when after pushing for economy-crushing lockdowns, seeking to block children from going to school (and stunting their development), and even calling for the incarceration or worse of mask, vaccine and booster holdouts, the liberal left – realizing that it was completely wrong about everything to do with covid, a virus with a 99% survival rate – suddenly and politely was hoping to “declare a pandemic amnesty.” Brown Professor Emily Oster – a huge lockdown proponent, who now pleads from mercy from the once-shunned – wrote “we need to forgive one another for what we did and said when we were in the dark about COVID. Let’s acknowledge that we made complicated choices in the face of deep uncertainty, and then try to work together to build back and move forward.” The response from those who lost their small business, wealth, or worse, a family member (who died alone or from complications from the experimental gene therapy known as “vaccines” and “boosters”) was clear and unanimous; as for those seeking preemptive pardons from the coming tribunals, their plea was clear: “We didn’t know! We were just following orders.” 

  • And from one covid post we segue into another, only this time the focus is not on the disease but rather the consequences of mandatory vaccines: over 730K readers were shocked in February when a former finance professional discovered a surge in “excess mortality”, or unexplained deaths among otherwise healthy young adults, yet not linked directly to covid (thus leaving vaccines as the possible cause of death), as we showed in “Long Funeral Homes, Short Life Insurers? Ex-Blackrock Fund Manager Discovers Disturbing Trends In Mortality.” This wasn’t the first time we had heart of a surge in excess mortality: a month earlier it was the CEO of insurance company OneAmerica to observe that the death rate for those aged 18-64 had soared by 40% over pre-pandemic levels (this was another post that received a lot of clicks). While the science is clearly not settled here – on either covid or the vaccines – the emerging trend is ominous: at this rate the excess deaths associated with covid (and its vaccines) will soon surpass the deaths directly linked to covid. And anyone who dares to bring this up will be branded a racist, a white supremacists, or a fascist, or all three.

  • One of the defining features of 2022 was the record surge in the price of food. And while much of this inflation could be attributed to the trillions in helicopter money injected over the past three years, as well as the snarled supply chains due to the war in Ukraine, a mystery emerged when one after another US food processing plant mysteriously burned down. And with almost 800,000 page views, a majority of our readers wanted to know why “Another US Food Processing Plant Erupts In Flames“, making it the 8th most read post of the year. While so far no crime has been alleged, the fact that over 100 “accidental fires” (as listed here) have taken place across America’s food facilities since the start of 2021, impairing the US supply chain, remains one of the biggest mysteries of the year.

  • While some will argue that runaway inflation was the event of 2022, we will counter that the defining moment was the war between Ukraine and Russia, which broke out in February after what the Kremlin said was a long-running NATO attempt to corner Russia (by pushing Ukraine to seek membership in the military alliance), forcing it to either launch an invasion now, or wait several years and be invaded by all the neighboring NATO countries. Still, many were shocked when Putin ultimately gave the order to launch the “special military operations”, as most had Russia to merely posture. But it was not meant to be and nearly 840K readers followed the world-changing events on February 2 when “Putin Orders “Special Military Operation” In Ukraine’s Breakaway Regions.” The war continues to this day with no prospects of peace or even a ceasefire.

  • And from one geopolitical hotspot we go to another, namely China and Taiwan, which many expect will be the next major military theater at some time in the near future when Beijing finally invades the “Republic of China” and officially brings it back into the fold. Thing here got extra hot in early August when Democrat Nancy Pelosi decided to make an unexpected trip to the semiconductor-heavy island, sparking an unprecedented diplomatic escalation, with many speculating that China could simply fire at Nancy’s unsanctioned airplane. In the end, however, as nearly 950,000 found out, the situation fizzled as “China Summoned US Ambassador Overnight, Says Washington “Must Pay The Price“.” Since then Pelosi’s political career has officially ended, and while China has not yet invaded Taiwan, it is only a matter of time before it does.

  • While Covid may have been a 2021 story, that was also the year when nobody was allowed to talk about the Chinese pandemic. Things changed in 2022 when liberal censorship finally crashed under its own weight, and long overdue discussions of Covid became mainstream. nowhere more so than on Twitter where Elon Musk fired all those responsible for silencing the debate over the past three years, and of course, the show of the always outspoken Joe Rogan, where mRNA inventor Robert Malone, gave a fascinating interview to Joe Rogan which aired on New Year’s Eve 2022 and which took the world by storm in the first days of the new year. It certainly made over 908,000 readers click on “COVID, Ivermectin, And ‘Mass Formation Psychosis’: Dr. Robert Malone Gives Blistering Interview To Joe Rogan.” The doctor, who had been suspended by both LInkedIn and Twitter, for the crime of promoting “vaccine hesitancy” argued that if the risks of vaccines are not discussed, informed consent is not possible. As Malone concluded “Informed consent is not only not happening, it’s being actively blocked.” Luckily, now that Elon Musk has made it possible to discuss covid – and so much more – on twitter without fears of immediate suspension, there is again hope that not only is informed consent once again possible, but that the wheels of true justice are starting to steamroll liberal censorship.

  • A tragic and bizarre interlude took place in early July when “Former Japanese PM Abe Shot Dead During Speech, “Frustrated” Assassin Arrested“, a shocking development which captured the attention of some 927,000 readers.  While some expected the assassination to be a Archduke Ferdinand moment, coming at a time of soaring inflation around the globe and potentially catalyzing grassroots anger at the ruling class, the episode remained isolated as it did not have political motives and instead the killer, Yamagami, said that he killed the former PM in relation to a grudge he held against the Unification Church, to which Abe and his family had political ties, over his mother’s bankruptcy in 2002. That’s the good news. The bad news is that with the fabric of society close to tearing across most developed nations, it is only a matter of time before we do get a real Archduke 2.0 moment.

  • Just days after Rogan’s interview with Malone (see above), another covid-linked “surprise” emerged when Projected Veritas leaked military documents hidden on a classified system showing how EcoHealth Alliance approached DARPA in March 2018, seeking funding to conduct illegal gain of function research of bat borne coronaviruses. But while US infatuation with creating viral bioweapons is hardly new (instead it merely outsourced it to biolabs in China), one of the discoveries revealed in “Ivermectin ‘Works Throughout All Phases’ Of COVID According To Leaked Military Documents” – the third most popular post of 2022 with 929K page views, is that the infamous “horse paste” Ivermectin was defined by Darpa as a “curative” which works throughout all phases of the illness because it both inhibits viral replication and modulates the immune response. Of course, had that been made public, it would have prevented Pfizer and Moderna from making tens of billions in revenue from selling mRNA-based therapies (not vaccines) whose potentially deadly side effects we are only now learning about (as the 9th most popular post of 2022 noted above confirms).

  • The fake news apparatus was busy spinning in overtime this past year (and every other year), and not only when it comes to covid, inflation, unemployment, the recession, but also – or rather especially – the Ukraine fog of propaganda war. A striking example was the explosion of both pipelines connecting Russia to Europe, Nord Stream I and II, which quickly escalated into a fingerpointing exercise of accusations, with Europe blaming Putin for blowing up the pipelines (even though said pipelines exclusively benefit the Kremlin which spent billions building them in the recent past), while the Kremlin said it was the US’ fault. This we learned in “EU Chief Calls Nord Stream Attack “Sabotage”, Warns Of “Strongest Possible Response“, which was also the 2nd most read article of the year with just over 1,050,000 page views. In the end, there was no “response” at all. Why? Because as it emerged just two months later in that most deep state of outlets, the Washington Post, “Evidence In Nord Stream Sabotage Doesn’t Point To Russia.” In other words, it points to the US, just as professor Jeffrey Sachs dared to suggest on Bloomberg, leading to shock and awe at the pro-Biden media outlet. The lesson here, inasmuch as there is one, is that the perpetrators of every false flag operation always emerge – it may take time, but the outcome is inevitable, and “shockingly”, the culprit almost always is one particular nation…

  • Finally, the most read article of 2022 with nearly 1.1 million page views, was “White House Says Russian Forces 20 Miles Outside Ukraine’s Capital.” It cemented that as least as far as ZH readers were concerned, the biggest event of the year was the war in Ukraine, an event which has set in motion forces which will redefine the layout of the world over the next century (and, if Zoltan Pozsar is right, will lead to the demise of the US dollar as a reserve currency and culminate with China surpassing the US as the world’s biggest superpower). Incidentally, while Russian forces may have been 20 miles outside of Kiev, they were repelled and even though the war could have ended nearly a year ago and the world would have returned to some semblance of normalcy, it was not meant to be, and the war still goes on with little hope that it will end any time soon.

  And with all that behind us, and as we wave goodbye to another bizarre, exciting, surreal year, what lies in store for 2023, and the next decade?

  We don’t know: as frequent and not so frequent readers are aware, we do not pretend to be able to predict the future and we don’t try, despite repeat baseless allegations that we constantly predict the collapse of civilization: we leave the predicting to the “smartest people in the room” who year after year have been consistently wrong about everything, and never more so than in 2022 (when the entire world realized just how clueless the Fed had been when it called the most crushing and persistent inflation in two generations “transitory”), which destroyed the reputation of central banks, of economists, of conventional media and the professional “polling” and “strategist” class forever, not to mention all those “scientists” who made a mockery of both the scientific method and the “expert class” with their catastrophically bungled response to the covid pandemic. We merely observe, find what is unexpected, entertaining, amusing, surprising or grotesque in an increasingly bizarre, sad, and increasingly crazy world, and then just write about it.

  We do know, however, that with central banks now desperate to contain inflation and undo 13 years of central bank mistakes – after all it is the trillions and trillions in monetary stimulus, the helicopter money, the MMT, and the endless deficit funding by central banks that made the current runaway inflation possible, the current attempt to do something impossible and stuff 13 years of toothpaste back into the tube, will be a catastrophic failure.

  We are confident, however, that in the end it will be the very final backstoppers of the status quo regime, the central banking emperors of the New Normal, who will eventually be revealed as fully naked. When that happens and what happens after is anyone’s guess. But, as we have promised – and delivered – every year for the past 14, we will be there to document every aspect of it.

  Finally, and as always, we wish all our readers the best of luck in 2023, with much success in trading and every other avenue of life. We bid farewell to 2022 with our traditional and unwavering year-end promise: Zero Hedge will be there each and every day – usually with a cynical smile (and with the CIA clearly on our ass now) – helping readers expose, unravel and comprehend the fallacy, fiction, fraud and farce that defines every aspect of our increasingly broken economic, political and financial system.

  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 01/01/2023 – 13:05

• "Doom Cycle Of Default, Fraud, And Contagion" Could Give Way To Crypto Spring
  “Doom Cycle Of Default, Fraud, And Contagion” Could Give Way To Crypto Spring

  Crypto endured a major hangover year in 2022 after a 2020-21 boom during the central banks’ Covid liquidity party. The emerging blockchain space was battered by central banks removing the punch bowl, harsh macroeconomic environment, bankruptcies, exchange blowups, stablecoin implosions, and even criminal charges against top crypto executives. 

  “Consistent interest rate hikes and quantitative tightening in 2022 granted us a devastating hangover. Fortune did not favor the brave, and we entered a consistent doom cycle of default, fraud, and contagion. A financial crisis with seemingly no end that still ravages our industry. In 2022, the naked swimmers were exposed and bad apples got eliminated. This is promising through long-term lenses, while ever so painful in the short term,” Vetle Lunde, research analyst at Arcane, wrote. 

  Lunde wrote if 2022 had one key lesson for the crypto industry, it would be the following: “your funds in someone else’s custody is someone else’s liability, and their intentions could be harmful. While there are good arguments for storing funds at exchanges, traders should strive to avoid concentrating risks on one venue.”

  Arcane’s analyst put together the top headlines that defined the crypto industry in 2022 — much of the headlines were doom and gloom. 

  

  Lunde pointed out Bitcoin recorded the second worst year-to-date returns in existence. He called the down move in crypto “a painful ride.” 

  

  Lunde continued with an outlook for 2023, expecting a calmer market due to declining volatility. 

  We expect the market to calm down in 2023, with declining volumes and falling volatility. Overall, we expect interest and headlines related to crypto to be fewer and the market to be less hectic in general. This will be a year to accumulate and build exposure. It will be a year for the patient, and we do not anticipate prices nearing former all-time highs in 2023. We believe BTC and ETH will increase their relative strength in the market and that altcoin returns will be subdued for most of the year.

  And he revealed further the current drawdown in Bitcoin appears to follow similar bear market patterns in previous cycles.  

  The 2018 bear market saw a 364-day long duration from peak to through, while the 2014-15 bear market lasted for 407 days. For now, BTC has bottomed 376 days after peaking, right in between the duration of earlier cycle peak to through periods. If a new bottom is reached in 2023, this will be the longest-lasting BTC drawdown ever.

  And one silver lining the analyst said about the FTX debacle is that it might increase “more rapid progress with regulations, and we view both positive signals related to U.S. spot BTC ETF launches and more coherent classifications of tokens as a plausible outcome by the end of the year, with exchange tokens being particularly exposed for potential security classifications.”

  Here is Lunde’s core 2023 forecast for crypto:

  While the tightening macro landscape and BTC’s correlated relationship to macro complicate analogies to previous bear markets, we firmly believe that this is an excellent area to build gradual BTC exposure. However, we expect low activity to be the key trend throughout most of 2023, with diminishing trading volumes and volatility in a significantly more boring market than the previous three years. As we advance into the next year, patience and long-term positioning will be key. 

  

  Much of the crypto down cycle has come since the Federal Reserve embarked on its most aggressive tightening scheme in decades. 

  

  And rate traders are already pricing in the possibility the Fed might have to begin cutting late in the second half of 2023. 

  

  He also noted Bitcoin liquidity is drying up as the coins are being pulled off the markets. 

  This has direct implications for BTC liquidity and, in particular, experienced BTC scarcity. With fewer BTC available to trade, the impact of the net buyer or net seller will be more significant, and we believe the market is slowly headed towards a scenario where the net buyer will once again make a difference.

  The backward-looking review and forward outlook might suggest crypto winter has peaked, while others, such as David Marcus, CEO and founder of Lightspark, recently warned crypto will need until at least 2024 to “recover from the abuse of unscrupulous players.” 

  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 01/01/2023 – 12:45

• It's A New Era
  It’s A New Era

  Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,

  This dynamic – making problems much worse by forcing more of whatever worked in the previous era into a saturated, increasing unstable new era – receives little attention or understanding.

  

  Eras may last decades, and only those who’ve lived long enough to recall previous eras have experienced the transition from one era to the next. The era of financialization, globalization and low-cost, abundant oil/natural gas began over 40 years ago in 1981.

  The era of digital / Internet technologies took off about 30 years ago. All of these dynamics accelerated in the early 2000s, roughly 20 years ago.

  Only those 60 and older experienced working in a previous era (pre-1981).

  All of these dynamics are entering a phase of nonlinear turbulence as the changes are outpacing these highly streamlined / optimized systems’ ability to self-correct.

  This nonlinear instability is being accelerated by doing more of what worked in the previous era, in the mistaken belief that the 2020s are simply an extension of the eras that began 40 and 30 years ago.

  The fixes that worked in the past won’t resolve the nonlinear instability because all these dynamics have reached saturation: adding more debt no longer generates organic expansion of productivity, all it does is inflate an even larger and more unstable credit-asset bubble.

  

  Globalization has been optimized to the point of saturation: the potential downsides to national security outweigh any remaining marginal gains in corporate profitability.

  Financialization has so distorted the economy that gambling on useless speculations is now viewed as the best (or only) way to get ahead.

  When a system has absorbed all it can absorb, adding more is just a waste of resources.

  We’ve entered a new era, and so the fixes and incentives that worked in the past 40 years no longer work.

  The idea that the past 30 years were not a permanent era but an anomaly that’s come to an end doesn’t compute for everyone who has only experienced the “glorious 30” years of cheap energy, soaring assets and falling prices due to hyper-globalization and hyper-financialization.

  The idea that this new era may evolve unpredictably is also anathema to a technocratic culture and economy that prides itself on forecasting and controlling everything with credit and money.

  The previous 40 years of material abundance has nurtured a belief that the solution to any scarcity is to create more money, as some of this new money will inevitably flow into eliminating the scarcity.

  The idea that some scarcities cannot be fixed by creating more money doesn’t compute.

  It may turn out that all the lessons we learned in the past 40 years will not only be useless in this new era, they will be disastrously counter-productive.

  

  Their unparalleled success for decades may blind us to the power of previous solutions to make our problems worse than they would have been had we recognized the new era for what it is rather than seeing the future as a seamless extension of the previous era.

  This dynamic–making problems much worse by forcing more of whatever worked in the previous era into a saturated, increasing unstable new era–receives little attention or understanding.

  This dynamic helps us understand why systems that seemed permanent and forever can destabilize and fall apart with astonishing speed.

  

  We thought we were fixing it by doing more of what worked in the past, but we were actually accelerating the turbulence and destabilization.

  We have a hard time letting go of the idea that the recent past is an accurate guide to the future. In stable eras, it generally is, but not when an era ends and a new one begins.

  *  *  *

  My new book is now available at a 10% discount ($8.95 ebook, $18 print): Self-Reliance in the 21st Century.  Read the first chapter for free (PDF)

  Become a $1/month patron of my work via patreon.com.

  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 01/01/2023 – 12:00

• American Airlines Worker Killed After Being Sucked Into Jet Engine
  American Airlines Worker Killed After Being Sucked Into Jet Engine

  The Montgomery Regional Airport in Alabama reported on New Year’s Eve that an American Airlines worker was killed in an “industrial” accident. 

  

  American Airlines Flight 3408, an Embraer E175, was scheduled to depart Montgomery for Dallas-Forth Worth Saturday afternoon when a baggage handler was sucked into the plane’s jet engine. 

  “Today around 3 pm an American Airlines ground crew piedmont employee was involved in a fatality, no additional information is available at this time,” the airport tweeted. “Our thoughts and prayers are with the family of the deceased.”

  Today around 3 pm an American Airlines ground crew piedmont employee was involved in a fatality, no additional information is available at this time. Our thoughts and prayers are with the family of the deceased.

  — Montgomery Regional Airport (@flymgm) January 1, 2023

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

  Reuters confirmed with two sources the baggage handler died in “an accident involving one of the airplane’s engines that was running.”

  BREAKING: Baggage-handler fatally sucked into American Airlines jet engine at Montgomery Regional Airport in Alabama
  pic.twitter.com/hIKQlLQYQ8

  — Intel Point Alert (@IntelPointAlert) January 1, 2023

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

  All outbound and inbound flights were briefly halted and resumed normal operations by late Saturday. 

  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 01/01/2023 – 11:15

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