Dec 30

Today’s News 30th December 2023

  • Escobar: How Yemen Changed Everything
    Escobar: How Yemen Changed Everything

    Authored by Pepe Escobar via The Cradle,

    In a single move, Yemen’s Ansarallah has checkmated the west and its rules-based order…

    Whether invented in northern India, eastern China or Central Asia – from Persia to Turkestan – chess is an Asian game. In chess, there always comes a time when a simple pawn is able to upset the whole chessboard, usually via a move in the back rank whose effect simply cannot be calculated. 

    Yes, a pawn can impose a seismic checkmate. That’s where we are, geopolitically, right now. 

    The cascading effects of a single move on the chessboard – Yemen’s Ansarallah stunning and carefully targeted blockade of the Red Sea – reach way beyond global shipping, supply chains, and The War of Economic Corridors. Not to mention the reduction of the much lauded US Navy force projection to irrelevancy.

    Yemen’s resistance movement, Ansarallah, has made it very clear that any Israel-affiliated or Israel-destined vessel will be intercepted. While the west bristles at this, and imagines itself a target, the rest of the world fully understands that all other shipping is free to pass. Russian tankers – as well as Chinese, Iranian, and Global South ships – continue to move undisturbed across the Bab al-Mandeb (narrowest point: 33 km) and the Red Sea. 

    Only the Hegemon is disturbed by this challenge to its ‘rules-based order.’ It is outraged that western vessels delivering energy or goods to law-breaking Israel can be impeded, and that the supply chain has been severed and plunged into deep crisis. The pinpointed target is the Israeli economy, which is already bleeding heavily. A single Yemeni move proves to be more efficient than a torrent of imperial sanctions. 

    It is the tantalizing possibility of this single move turning into a paradigm shift – with no return – that is adding to the Hegemon’s apoplexy. Especially because imperial humiliation is deeply embedded in the paradigm shift. 

    Russian President Vladimir Putin, on the record, is now sending an unmistakeable message: Forget the Suez Canal. The way to go is the Northern Sea Route – which the Chinese, in the framework of the Russia-China strategic partnership, call the Arctic Silk Road.

    Map of North-East and North-West Passage shipping routes

    For the dumbfounded Europeans, the Russians have detailed three options: First, sail 15,000 miles around the Cap of Good Hope. Second, use Russia’s cheaper and faster Northern Sea Route. Third, send the cargo via Russian Railways. 

    Rosatom, which oversees the Northern Sea Route, has emphasized that non-ice-class ships are now able to sail throughout summer and autumn, and year-round navigation will soon be possible with the help of a fleet of nuclear icebreakers. 

    All that as direct consequences of the single Yemeni move. What next? Yemen entering BRICS+ at the summit in Kazan in late 2024, under the Russian presidency?

    The new architecture will be framed in West Asia 

    The US-led Armada put together for Operation Genocide Protection, which collapsed even before birth, may have been set up to “warn Iran,” apart from giving Ansarallah a scare. Just as the Houthis, Tehran is hardly intimidated because, as West Asia analyst ace Alastair Crooke succinctly put it: “Sykes-Picot is dead.” 

    This is a quantum shift on the chessboard. It means West Asian powers will frame the new regional architecture from now on, not US Navy “projection.” 

    That carries an ineffable corollary: those eleven US aircraft carrier task forces, for all practical purposes, are essentially worthless.   

    Everyone across West Asia is well aware that Ansarallah’s missiles are capable of hitting Saudi and Emirati oil fields, and knocking them out of commission. So it is little wonder that Riyadh and Abu Dhabi would never accept becoming part of a US-led maritime force to challenge the Yemeni resistance.   

    Add to it the role of underwater drones now in the possession of Russia and Iran. Think of fifty of these aimed at a US aircraft carrier: it has no defense. While the Americans still have very advanced submarines, they cannot keep the Bab al-Mandeb and Red Sea open to western operators. 

    On the energy front, Moscow and Tehran don’t even need to think – at least not yet – about using the “nuclear” option or cutting off potentially at least 25 percent, and up, of the world oil supply. As one Persian Gulf analyst succinctly describes it, “that would irretrievably implode the international financial system.”

    For those still determined to support the genocide in Gaza there have been warnings. Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani has mentioned it explicitly. Tehran has already called for a total oil and gas embargo against nations that support Israel. 

    A total naval blockade of Israel, meticulously engineered, remains a distinct possibility. Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) Commander Hossein Salami said Israel may “soon face the closure of the Mediterranean Sea, the Strait of Gibraltar, and other waterways.”

    Keep in mind we’re not yet even talking about a possible blockade of the Strait of Hormuz; we’re still on Red Sea/Bab al-Mandeb. 

    Because if the Straussian neo-cons in the Beltway get really unhinged by the paradigm shift and act in desperation to “teach a lesson” to Iran, a chokepoint Hormuz-Bab al-Mandeb combo blockade might skyrocket the price of oil to at least $500 a barrel, triggering the implosion of the $618 trillion derivatives market and crashing the entire international banking system. 

    The paper tiger is in a jam 

    Mao Zedong was right after all: the US may be in fact a paper tiger. Putin, though, is way more careful, cold, and calculating. With this Russian president, it’s all about an asymmetric response, exactly when no one is expecting it.

    That brings us to the prime working hypothesis perhaps capable of explaining the shadow play masking the single Ansarallah move on the chessboard.       

    When Pulitzer-winning investigative journalist Sy (Seymour) Hersh proved how Team Biden blew up the Nord Stream pipelines, there was no Russian response to what was, in effect, an act of terrorism against Gazprom, against Germany, against the EU, and against a bunch of European companies. Yet Yemen, now, with a simple blockade, turns global shipping upside down. 

    So what is more vulnerable?

    The physical networks of global energy supply (Pipelineistan) or the Thalassocracy, states that derive their power from naval supremacy? 

    Russia privileges Pipelineistan: see, for instance, the Nord Streams and Power of Siberia 1 and 2. But the US, the Hegemon, always relied on its thalassocratic power, heir to “Britannia rules the waves.” 

    Well, not anymore. And, surprisingly, getting there did not even entail the “nuclear” option, the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, which Washington games and scaremongers like crazy.

    Of course we won’t have a smoking gun. But it’s a fascinating proposition that the single Yemeni move may have been coordinated at the highest level between three BRICS members – Russia, China, and Iran, the neocon new “axis of evil” – plus other two BRICS+, energy powerhouses Saudi Arabia and the UAE. As in, “if you do it, we’ve got your back”. 

    None of that, of course, detracts from Yemeni purity: their defense of Palestine is a sacred duty. 

    Western imperialism and then turbo-capitalism have always been obsessed with gobbling up Yemen, a process that Isa Blumi, in his splendid book Destroying Yemen, described as “necessarily stripping Yemenis of their historic role as the economic, cultural, spiritual, and political engine for much of the Indian Ocean world.” 

    Yemen, though, is unconquerable and, true to a local proverb, “deadly” (Yemen Fataakah). As part of the Axis of Resistance, Yemen’s Ansarallah is now a key actor in a complex Eurasia-wide drama that redefines Heartland connectivity; and alongside China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), the India-Iran-Russia-led International North-South Transportation Corridor (INSTC), and Russia’s new Northern Sea Route, also includes control over strategic chokepoints around the Mediterranean Seas and the Arabian peninsula. 

    This is another trade connectivity paradigm entirely, smashing to bits western colonial and neocolonial control of Afro-Eurasia. So yes, BRICS+ supports Yemen, who with a single move has presented Pax Americana with The Mother of All Geopolitical Jams.

    Tyler Durden
    Fri, 12/29/2023 – 23:30

  • US Military Launches Highly Classified Unmanned Space Plane
    US Military Launches Highly Classified Unmanned Space Plane

    The US Space Force launched a secretive plane on Thursday which has been equipped with heavier boosters that could feasibly send it further into orbit than ever before.

    The launch marks the 9th flight of the three-core SpaceX Falcon Heavy booster, and the 7th flight of the US Air Force’s (not so) secret unmanned spaceplane, the X-37B (USSF-52).

    The Boeing-built X-37B Orbital Test Vehicle (OTV) at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Fla, on Nov. 12, 2022. (Boeing/U.S. Space Force via AP)

    The launch was previously scheduled for Dec. 10, however it was scrapped due to issues with ground equipment just 30 minutes before liftoff – pushing the event back 18 days.

    Officially, the X-37B will enter into various orbits around Earth and serve as a testing ground for NASA’s study of the effects of long-duration exposure to space on organic materials, the Epoch Times reports, adding that the mission will also include experiments having to do with “space domain awareness,” which the US Space Force defines as the ability to “rapidly detect, warn, characterize, attribute, and predict threats to national, allied, and commercial space systems.”

    Testing of such threat-detection technologies comes as tensions between the United States and a space-faring communist China remain high.

    The Falcon Heavy has now launched five times in 2023, and while the space-enamored public is becoming more familiar with it, its cargo largely remains a mystery.

    First launched in April 2010, much of the 29-foot-long robotic vehicle’s activities during its 3,774 total days in space remain classified. Even its return date remains unknown.

    Designed by Boeing and operated by the United States Air Force Rapid Capabilities Office, the X-37B—also known as OTV-7—can fly as high as 500 miles above the Earth’s surface and carry out missions lasting 270 days. -Epoch Times

    Previous missions involving the craft have included experiments involving Naval Research Laboratory experiments designed to harness solar energy and transmit power to the ground, as well as testing the effect of organic material’s long-duration exposure to space.

    The X-37B is similar to the retired space shuttle – in that it has a cargo bay, black-tiled heat shielding, and the ability to land like an airplane. That said, it clocks in at roughly 25% the size of the shuttle, offering what Boeing describes as “the best of aircraft and spacecraft into an affordable system that is easy to operate and maintain.”

    Tyler Durden
    Fri, 12/29/2023 – 23:00

  • China & Iraq Begin Construction Of New City Near Baghdad
    China & Iraq Begin Construction Of New City Near Baghdad

    Via The Cradle,

    On Friday Iraq broke ground on 30,000 housing units near Baghdad, as part of a $2 billion project in partnership with Chinese firms to build five new cities across Iraq, Bloomberg has reported.

    The government of Prime Minister Mohammad Shia al-Sudani is seeking to build 250,000 to 300,000 housing units for poor and middle-class families. The new city on the outskirts of Baghdad will include universities, commercial centers, schools and health centers and should be completed in four to five years.

    Aerial view of Baghdad, via Reuters

    Contracts to build the housing units were awarded to East China Engineering Science and Technology Co., Ltd. and China National Chemical Engineering Co., Ltd along with their Iraqi partner Shams al-Binaa. 

    Contracts to build four more cities are expected to be awarded soon and another 10 will be announced next year, including in Karbala, Anbar, Nineveh and Babel governorates.

    Chinese firms have increased their presence in Iraq in recent years, in part due to a deal between Baghdad and Beijing.

    In 2019, Iraq signed a 20-year contract, agreeing to supply Chinese firms with 100,000 barrels per day (bpd) of crude oil, with the revenue earmarked for funding various development projects in Iraq undertaken by Chinese firms.

    Following the deal, Chinese firms built 1,000 schools, developed the Nasiriya city airport, erected power plants, and completed several other infrastructure projects.

    China has accelerated its investment in Iraq and other West Asian nations as part of its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) announced in 2013. 

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

    China seeks to maintain stability in West Asia, given the region’s energy resources and geo-strategic location, to safeguard Beijing’s energy imports and shipment of manufactured goods to foreign markets.

    Tyler Durden
    Fri, 12/29/2023 – 22:30

  • The New Blue Screen Of Death? "Your Vehicle Cannot Be Driven"
    The New Blue Screen Of Death? “Your Vehicle Cannot Be Driven”

    The more things change, the more they stay the same. Gone are the days of Windows 95; heading into the year 2024, there’s an entirely new “blue screen of death” people apparently need to be watching out for – in their cars.

    This week a photo went viral on social media purporting to show a Ford vehicle displaying a “your vehicle cannot be driven” message after a failed software update. “Please call customer support,” the screen urges. 

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

    A post on one car enthusiast forum questioned the authenticity of the screenshot, stating: “This is going around on Twitter, but I couldn’t find any mentions of it here.
    Is this even real? The phone number, when Googled doesn’t turn up anything official.”

    One person responded: “That’s the message you will see on the rare occasion that an OTA fails. It’s a special customer service phone number for dealing with failed OTAs. It’s from a user on Reddit, his car has since been fixed and is back to normal FYI.”

    “If an OTA update fails in such a way that this screen would be necessary, they should automatically revert to the last working state and notify the user,” another user posted in response.

    “This is essentially a solved problem in the world of computing. I’m sure there’s some wrinkles that make it difficult, but it’s fundamentally something that they should change their systems to make it impossible,” they said.

    In response, another shared issues they were having with Ford’s OTA updates, stating: “I’m still dealing with a failed OTA update. My 6.2.0 was incomplete. Called Ford Motor Company and they confirmed the failed update and stated the update would try again within 30 days. 60 days later, with no update, they sent me to a dealer for service.”

    The nightmare continued: “Dealer claimed to have updated the software. My car was delivered to my home and nothing was fixed. In fact, my software reverted to 4.2.1. Now my service manager has no idea what to do. I can’t change drive modes, open trunk or frunk, and pre-collision warning turns on all the time. I can still drive but with limited capability. Feels like a car with a sprained ankle.”

    Another mechanics forum user posted a photo of the picture with the comment: “I sort of hope this is a fake, but if it hasn’t happened yet, I presume some day it would. The old joke used to be that if Microsoft made cars, every once in a while they would just quit. Everyone would have to get out, walk 360 degrees around the car and get back in. This would be accepted as normal.”

    Here’s an explanation from YouTube:

     

    Tyler Durden
    Fri, 12/29/2023 – 22:00

  • Over 500 Israeli Soldiers Killed Since October 7: IDF
    Over 500 Israeli Soldiers Killed Since October 7: IDF

    Via The Libertarian Institute, 

    The death toll for Israeli soldiers continues to grow. Nearly 400 members of the Israeli security forces were killed on October 7. Since the Israeli Defense Forces invaded Gaza, at least over 150 soldiers have been killed. 

    After several revisions, Tel Aviv now says about 1,050 Israelis were killed during the October 7 Hamas attack, including 373 soldiers. Following the Hamas assault, Israel devastated Gaza with a ruthless bombing campaign, then deployed the IDF into the Strip. The ground invasion has led to the deaths of 164 Israeli soldiers, according to the Times of Israel and the Israel Defense Forces (IDF).

    The Israeli Defense Ministry said that 3,000 soldiers have been wounded in combat. Some media outlets have reported the current wounded count is far higher, 5,000. An expert speaking with the Associated Press estimates the number will be about 20,000 once cases of PTSD are diagnosed. 

    A source in Middle East Eye lays out whey the IDF casualty count could be much higher than publicly acknowledged:

    Another Palestinian source close to Hamas, who fought with the group until 2021 when he sustained an injury, told MEE that Qassam fighters were engaged in urban fighting reminiscent of the house-to-house fighting seen in the Iraqi city of Fallujah in 2004 following the US-led invasion.

    “What is happening now in Gaza is a kind of guerrilla war,” the source said.

    “It is unnecessary and risky to mobilize a force of thousands for this war. For hit-and-run operations, fast, few-man teams are enough. These teams are also very small in terms of targets and minimize casualties,” the source added.

    While Israel has caused death and devastation across Gaza, it is unclear how much success Tel Aviv has had in wiping out Hamas. At the end of November, the IDF reported killing 1,000–2,000 Hamas fighters.

    Over the past month, Tel Aviv has increased its assertion to 7,000 members of Hamas killed. The group reports losing about ten percent of its members, or approximately 3,000 fighters. 

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

    The Israeli operations appear to be having a far greater impact on the civilian population of the besieged enclave. Over 21,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza, including 8,000 children. Additionally, Israel has destroyed the medical, food, water, and sewage infrastructure of Gaza, putting the Palestinian people on the brink of epidemic and famine.

    Tyler Durden
    Fri, 12/29/2023 – 21:30

  • What 'Great Replacement Theory'? Musk Exposes "Immense & Growing Size" Of Illegal Immigration Invasion
    What ‘Great Replacement Theory’? Musk Exposes “Immense & Growing Size” Of Illegal Immigration Invasion

    Elon Musk red-pilled users on X, allowing them to visualize “the immense and growing size of illegal immigration” pushed by radical progressives in the White House that have flooded the nation with millions of migrants. 

    Musk commented on a post by X user “~~datahazard~~,” who said: “Since August, there are officially more arriving each month than there are children being born to American mothers. And these are just the official encounters — we don’t know how many avoided detection.” 

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

    Illegal immigrants outpacing US births reminds us of a comment from Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, who stated at a recent debate that the “Great Replacement Theory is not some grand, right-wing conspiracy theory,” but rather a “basic statement of the Democratic Party’s platform.”

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

    Radicals in the White House have no interest in fixing the southern border crisis. Just look at the latest US Customs and Border Protection data showing the southern border invasion. 

    Fox News reporter Bill Melugin revealed stunning data earlier on Friday of how encounters at the border hit record highs in December. 

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

    Let’s not forget the Biden administration conceals its true agenda of flooding the nation with millions of illegals with misinformation campaigns waged at the taxpayers. 

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

    Nothing to see here! 

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

    Who is aiding in the invasion? Well, some taxpayer-funded NGOs or non-governmental organizations. 

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

    Texas Gov. Greg Abbott recently wrote on X: “I’ve never seen such hostility to the rule of law in America. Biden is destroying America.” 

    X user Robby Starbuck responded to Musk’s post, noting:

    This is literally “the great replacement” in action. I’m Latino so I don’t want to hear how the great replacement is racist. It’s not. It’s political. Dems want more illegals so they can manufacture votes and cheap labor. They also want it to happen so fast that no one assimilates. 

    It’s why far left cities are now legalizing illegals voting and places like California let them get licenses, pass a law for automatic voter registration when you get a license and then “accidentally” register them to vote when they get their license. None of this is hard to figure out. They want to destroy the foundations of our country so they can steal total power.

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

    “There are many people in the US government who would never let Israel have open borders but desperately want the US to have them because they believe that is the only way they can continue getting elected,” X user Matt Wallace said.

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

    Wallace added: “Many of them also hate our culture and want to destroy it painfully!”

    Tyler Durden
    Fri, 12/29/2023 – 21:00

  • Upcoming US Presidential Election Could Fuel Global Instability In 2024
    Upcoming US Presidential Election Could Fuel Global Instability In 2024

    Authored by Fred Fleitz via American Greatness,

    A failed, last-minute visit to Mexico by Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas this week perfectly reflected the Biden Administration’s dismal foreign policy record in 2023 and what may lie ahead in 2024.

    Blinken and Mayorkas traveled to Mexico City to meet with Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador to discuss how to stem the surge in illegal migrants crossing into the United States from Mexico. But instead of offering constructive proposals to address this crisis, López Obrador mocked Blinken and Mayorkas by dismissing the border crisis as a U.S. problem, called for opening border crossings, and urged the U.S. to strengthen its ties with Cuba and Venezuela.

    This latest Biden Administration foreign policy debacle reflected how world leaders increasingly view Joe Biden as a weak and indecisive leader with an incompetent foreign policy. This debacle also reflected the incompetence of Biden’s foreign policy team because López Obrador was allowed to ambush Blinken and Mayorkas. A competent state department would have ensured this visit was a scripted affair, with differences between each country resolved privately and in advance during lower-level meetings.

    Blinken and Mayorkas traveling to Mexico without knowing what López Obrador would offer was a rookie mistake one would expect during the first few months of a new U.S. administration, not from one that has been in office for almost three years.

    The outcome of the Blinken/Mayorkas Mexico trip and Biden’s refusal to implement serious measures to stem the flow of illegal migrants crossing the U.S. southern border will have major security implications for the United States in 2024. Given a growing perception that Biden may be a one-term president who will be succeeded in January 2025 by a new president who will take aggressive action to close the border, the United States will likely see the largest surge of illegal immigration in history in 2024 as migrants from around the world rush to Mexico to take advantage of Biden’s weak border security policies.

    This means the number of criminals, drug dealers, Islamist terrorists, Chinese spies, Russian spies, drug dealers, and people transporting fentanyl in the United States is certain to skyrocket in 2024.

    U.S. security interests in the Middle East have also been gravely undermined by President Biden’s weak leadership and foreign policy and are likely to further deteriorate in 2024. Many experts believe the horrific October 7, 2023, Hamas terrorist attack on Israel would not have occurred if the Biden Administration had a coherent national security policy that was not appeasing Iran and coddling the Palestinians.

    As I wrote in a recent Newsmax article, the Palestinians have received more than $1 billion in U.S. taxpayer dollars since Biden took office, even though Biden officials knew these funds would boost Hamas. By contrast, the Trump Administration cut off all U.S. aid to the Palestinians.

    In addition, the Heritage Foundation’s Daily Signal assessed that Iran received approximately $71.02 billion more in revenue (mostly from oil sales) under the Biden administration than it did under the Trump presidency.

    Meanwhile, Joe Biden, worried about how growing protests against the Israel-Hamas war by his progressive supporters will affect the 2024 elections, has begun to turn on Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu to pressure him to end the war quickly and put the corrupt Palestinian Authority in charge of running Gaza. Biden continues to claim he is solidly behind Israel’s right to defeat Hamas but also lectures Israel on the way it is conducting the war and human rights violations. Although the Netanyahu government has been careful to avoid criticizing Biden officials for such contradictory statements, it will not prematurely end the war because of the U.S. political calendar.

    Iran’s nuclear weapons program made major advances during the Biden Administration, including enriching uranium to the near-weapons grade level of 60% uranium-235 for the first time. Iran’s nuclear weapons program was greatly assisted by a secret, unwritten deal that the Biden Administration agreed to in the spring of 2023 that allows Iran to continue to enrich at the 60% level, keep its advanced enrichment equipment, and promised Iran at least $20 billion in sanctions relief.

    Under pressure from Congress, the Biden Administration on October 12 froze a $6 billion payment to Iran after the October 7 Hamas terrorist attack, a transfer that was actually a ransom payment to release five innocent Americans imprisoned in Iran. But incredibly, the Biden Administration agreed the following month to a sanctions waiver that gave Iran access to more than $10 billion

    The consequences of Biden’s feckless Middle East policy have been demonstrated by the surge in attacks on U.S. bases in Iraq and Syria over the past two months by Iranian-backed militias and attacks on Israel and Red Sea shipping by Yemen’s Iranian-backed Houthi rebels. The U.S. response to these attacks has been weak, causing such attacks to grow in number. Neither Iran nor its terrorist proxies are worried the U.S. will make them pay a price for these provocations that are endangering U.S. troops and global shipping.

    The Middle East will remain volatile in 2024. Israel will continue the war to defeat Hamas and promote its security, despite growing demands by the Biden Administration to end the war. Attacks by Iranian-backed terrorist proxies in Iraq and Syria, the Houthi rebels, and Hezbollah in Lebanon will probably increase unless there is significant pushback from the United States. Israel will continue to respond militarily to some of these attacks, while Biden probably will not during an election year.

    The 2024 U.S. elections and President Biden’s weak leadership and foreign policy will also affect other global hot spots.

    • Ukraine. Despite claims by the Ukrainian and U.S. governments that the Ukrainian army would turn the tide of the war in 2023 with its counteroffensive, this didn’t happen. Russian forces dug in, and the conflict has become a long-term war of attrition. With Republican House members and Biden allies like MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough saying the war is no longer winnable, Congressional support for arming Ukraine is likely to be sharply reduced in 2024. Although Congressional Republicans are currently blocking additional U.S. military aid for Ukraine unless President Biden agrees to take significant action to stem the flow of illegal migrants at the U.S. southern border, even if an agreement can be reached to break this deadlock, growing bipartisan concerns in Congress over the trajectory of the war may finally force the Biden Administration and Ukrainian President Zelinsky in 2024 to pursue a cease-fire and an agreement to end the war and secure Ukraine from a future Russian invasion.

    • Russia/China “Axis.” The U.S.-led global order will take a hit in 2024 as Russia and China continue to build their security and economic relationships at America’s expense. This will include further improving their trade and defense relationships with North Korea, Iran, and the Persian Gulf states. Iran and North Korea will probably step up their arms sales to Russia for the war in Ukraine. There will be some progress in “de-dollarization,” mostly with more agreements to not use dollars for bilateral trade.

    • China/Taiwan. Chinese President Xi told President Biden at the November 2023 APEC Summit that Beijing intends to reunify Taiwan with China, but the timing has not yet been decided. However, a Chinese invasion of Taiwan is unlikely in 2024 for two reasons. First, the Chinese military is probably not prepared to invade the island nation. But second, and more importantly, Xi is worried that President Donald Trump could be reelected in November 2024. Xi believes Trump will have a much tougher China policy and prefers to continue to deal with Biden, whom he views as a considerably weaker president than Trump. Therefore, although Chinese provocations against Taiwan and in the South China Sea will continue in 2024, Xi will try to improve relations with the U.S. to help reelect Biden. If this happens, China could possibly plan to invade Taiwan during a second Biden term.

    • North Korea. A surge in missile tests and nuclear weapons development caused by the Biden Administration’s neglect of North Korea will continue to rise in 2024. North Korea might conduct a seventh nuclear test next year to embarrass Biden, help reelect Trump, and resume Trump’s partially successful personal diplomacy with Kim Jong Un.

    With the prospect of a major political change in the United States next November, 2024 could be a very unstable and dangerous year for American and international security. Sensing that Biden could be a one-term president, illegal immigration will surge, and America’s adversaries will employ all possible means to exploit what could be a final year of exceptional American weakness. This could result in a major terrorist attack, possibly by terrorist organizations like ISIS that have been relatively quiet recently. Iran could begin to enrich uranium to weapons-grade. China and Russia will try to expand their influence at America’s expense with new trade deals, especially with the Persian Gulf states.

    Now more than ever, it is clear that a strong and decisive U.S. president with a competent foreign policy is essential to American and global security, and that a weak American president with a weak and frivolous foreign policy can have a disastrous effect on global security. Therefore, it will be far more apparent in 2024 than in previous years that U.S. presidential elections matter for global security.

    Tyler Durden
    Fri, 12/29/2023 – 20:30

  • Tesla Cybertruck Vs. Toyota Corolla In Real-World Crash
    Tesla Cybertruck Vs. Toyota Corolla In Real-World Crash

    The first real-world accident involving a Tesla Cybertruck occurred in Northern California’s Bay Area this Thursday. Photos of the accident, uploaded on the r/Cybertruck subreddit by user u/boddhya, reveal that the Cybertruck’s super-strong 301 stainless-steel exoskeleton sustained minimal damage after being hit by another vehicle. 

    “On December 28, 2023, at approximately 2:05 pm, California Highway Patrol (CHP) Redwood City units were dispatched to a two-vehicle crash on SR-35 (Skyline Boulevard), south of Page Mill Road. Our preliminary investigation indicates a Toyota Corolla was traveling south on SR-35 southbound, south of Page Mill Road, at an unknown speed, when the driver, for unknown reasons, turned to the right and subsequently struck a dirt embankment on the right shoulder,” California Highway Patrol wrote in a report. 

    CHP continued: “The Toyota then re-entered the roadway, crossed over the double yellow lines into the northbound lane, and crashed into a Tesla Cybertruck traveling north on SR-35 northbound. The Tesla driver sustained a suspected minor injury and declined medical transportation. No other injuries were reported. It does not appear that the Tesla Cybertruck was being operated in autonomous mode. The investigation into this incident is ongoing.” 

    Images of the crash show the truck sustained minimal damage. Meanwhile, the Corolla appears to be totaled. 

    And a video of the accident scene. 

    Tesla has confidently touted the Cybertruck’s super-strong 301 stainless-steel exoskeleton. 

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

    Musk has also boldly declared that the Cybertruck is one of the safest trucks for both occupants and pedestrians. Yet there has yet to be any confirmation due to no third-party testing.  

    “If you have an argument with another car, you will win,” Musk said at the Cybertruck delivery event in Austin earlier this month. 

    Tyler Durden
    Fri, 12/29/2023 – 20:00

  • China's New Rare Earth Policy Shakes Global Tech Industry
    China’s New Rare Earth Policy Shakes Global Tech Industry

    Authored by Kurt Cobb via OilPrice.com,

    • The ban includes technology for making rare earth magnets used in various industries.

    • China, controlling 90% of the refined rare earth metal market, seeks to maintain its processing monopoly.

    • The US has made efforts to incentivize domestic mining of critical minerals, but challenges remain due to China’s market dominance.

    China just expanded its already tight restrictions on export of technology related to refining rare earth minerals. The most recent restrictions involve technology for making rare earth magnets which are used in electric motors and generators. These minerals are also used extensively in the automotive industry and in consumer electronics such as cellphones.

    I have previously written that the clean energy economy is a metals energy economy, and rare earths constitute a substantial and key part of that metals energy economy.

    Export of rare earth extraction and separation technology had already been banned by China. The most recent and previous restrictions are part of a broader trade war between the United States and China over exchange of technology.  In late 2022 the United States banned exports of advanced microchips. China responded with a ban on the export germanium and gallium, two metals crucial to the manufacture of advanced chips. The United States imports half of its germanium needs and all of the gallium it uses.

    What exactly are the Chinese hoping to achieve?

    The answer becomes pretty clear when you realize that China supplies 90 percent of the volume of refined rare earth metals to the world. The country produces 60 percent of the ore. That means the rest of the world is sending three-quarters of its ore to China for processing, and the Chinese would like to continue to enjoy its near monopoly on processing. That puts China in a commanding position to decide who will get these metals and even whether the rest of the world gets any at all. China unexpectedly and dramatically reduced its rare earth exports in 2010, driving prices skyward.

    The obvious response to such uncertainty would be to encourage the mining of rare earths outside of China. The current U.S. administration rolled out a modest program to incentivize U.S.-based mining of critical minerals such as lithium, nickel, graphite, cobalt and manganese. Many rare earths are already on what is known as the List of Critical Minerals and thus eligible for incentives to encourage domestic production. A small amount of funding has been allocated for this purpose.

    A private attempt to revive a closed rare earth mine, the largest in the United States, resulted in a colossal financial loss for the investors when rare earth prices plummeted after China resumed its previous level of exports following the reduction in 2010.

    This shows how China can easily sabotage any attempts to challenge its dominance of the rare earth market.

    Given the close relationship between China’s government and its rare earth industry, the only reasonable way to break the Chinese stranglehold on the rare earth market would be for governments to guarantee the price of rare earths mined by domestic companies. That runs so counter to the neoliberal free market ethic of the past 40 years that I don’t see it becoming a reality.

    In a world where the consensus regarding the free exchange of goods is breaking down and geopolitical interests are coming to the fore, China seems to care far less about living up to free trade rules than protecting its perceived national interests.

    If other major trading countries and blocks start moving in the same direction, the easy availability of cheap goods and resources produced in faraway locales may become increasingly problematic.

    Tyler Durden
    Fri, 12/29/2023 – 19:30

  • Jamie Dimon, Who "Hates" Bitcoin, Will Be Broker-Dealer On The Bitcoin ETF Of The World's Biggest Asset Manager
    Jamie Dimon, Who “Hates” Bitcoin, Will Be Broker-Dealer On The Bitcoin ETF Of The World’s Biggest Asset Manager

    Remember when Jamie Dimon was yelling and screaming that Bitcoin is a “fraud that will eventually blow up“, that he’d “close it down if he was the government“, and that crypto’s only “true use case is for criminals, drug traffickers, money laundering and tax avoidance“?

    Well, it turns out the bank that has paid out $40 billion in fines, penalties and legal settlements as a recidivist criminal enterprise, has decided to double down on crime by its own definition…

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

    … and today we learned that not one but two giant asset managers – Invesco as well as the world’s biggest asset manager and the Fed’s own trading desk, Blackrock – both named JPMorgan as their Authorized Participant, i.e., the intermediary firm that will make the ETF possible in the first place by converting bitcoin into cash and vice versa.

    Source

    Source

    In addition to JPMorgan, BlackRock also named Jane Street Capital – best known as the fund where Sam Bankman-Fried learned all he needed to know about HFTing the bitcoin market on his way to becoming the greatest crypto criminal in history – as the broker-dealers who will be responsible for steering cash into and out of its spot-Bitcoin ETF when, not if, it is approved by the SEC some time in January.

    JPMorgan will be an authorized participants for both Blackrock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust and the Invesco Galaxy Bitcoin ETF according to amended prospectuses filed with the SEC late on Friday. As such, they’ll be responsible for handling the creation and redemption of baskets of shares in the ETF and transfers of cash to and from the fund’s administrator.

    Or, as we put it….

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

    In addition to BlackRock, Wall Street ETF titans such as Invesco, Franklin Templeton and Fidelity have also filed for spot-Bitcoin ETFs, and Grayscale Investments has applied to convert its Grayscale Bitcoin Trust into an ETF. All of them are expected to be granted in the next few weeks.

    Incidentally, it may very well have been due to JPM’s insistence that the SEC demands bitcoin ETFs have a cash-create redemption model instead of in-kind. According to Bloomberg’s Eric Balchunas, the SEC’s preference for a cash model for spot Bitcoin ETFs is that it wants to minimize the number of intermediaries that have access to the actual Bitcoin in the redemption and offering process.

    “They don’t like the idea of broker-dealers who are the intermediaries touching Bitcoin,” Balchunas noted. “Many were going to create unregistered subsidiaries to act in place of the actual broker-dealers, but the SEC just didn’t want it,” the ETF analyst said.

    The SEC wanted to “close the loop a little more,” Balchunas said, mentioning that he had also heard of regulators being worried about money laundering. He stated:

    “If the only people messing with the actual Bitcoin are BlackRock and Coinbase, it’s a little more controllable of what Bitcoin you have […] They just want a more closed system with fewer intermediaries touching the actual Bitcoin.”

    Of course, if JPM – which has already been fined $40 billion in the past 15 years – is aiding the money laundering, then all is well.

    While JPMorgan has so far been named as AP for two of the ETFs, it appears that Jane Street is the AP of choice for virtually all of them, which means that with all the frontrunning of ETF orders that Jane Street will do over the next few years, Sam Bankman-Fried would probably have made trillionaire – and perfectly legally at that – if only he had stayed at Jane Street.

    As for stupid peasants like the one below, who joyously declared just a few weeks ago that even the bank CEOs are on her side in her idiotic anti-crypto crusade…

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

    … the joke’s on Pocahontas.

    Tyler Durden
    Fri, 12/29/2023 – 19:00

  • "We Have Reached A Breaking Point"
    “We Have Reached A Breaking Point”

    Authored by Michael Snyder via TheMostImportantNews.com,

    If you don’t have a border, you don’t have a country.  It certainly wouldn’t be a surprise to hear me say that our immigration crisis has brought us to “a breaking point”, but those aren’t my words. 

    As you will see below, the mayor of New York City is actually saying this. During the Biden administration, the floodgates have opened and vast hordes of illegal immigrants are pouring into this country every single day.

    New York City, Chicago and other major urban areas simply do not have enough resources to take care of the illegal immigrants that have already arrived, but more just keep on coming.

    The tsunami of humanity that is coming over our borders has become so extreme that even CNN is reporting on it now…

    Brian Silvas’ three dogs were usually the first to alert him that large groups of people were walking onto his San Diego County property. He’d wake up at all hours to Whisky, Soldier and Freedom barking incessantly. Today, the trio keep quiet most of the night. While the crowds of migrants have not stopped passing through, it’s become so common that the dogs now sleep through it.

    “This country was built on immigration. I’m fine with that,” Silvas said. “But not like this. This is ridiculous.”

    Silvas is beyond frustrated, and he told CNN that if he had enough money he would “build my own wall right here”.

    CNN interviewed the owners of another property about five miles away who say that all of their trees are gone because illegal immigrants have chopped them all down to use in their campfires…

    About five miles east of Silvas’ property, along the same southern border, Jerry and Maria Shuster are experiencing a similar crisis. Except the migrants who cross there are not just passing through their land – they’re also camping out. Tents, discarded clothes and trash are scattered across parts of their 17-acre property. There are several campfires burning at night as the migrants try to keep warm in the near freezing temperatures, as they make their way to various gathering spots along the US side and await officials with the US Customs and Border Protection.

    “(My trees) are all gone. They chop them up and put them in the fire,” said Jerry Shuster, who alleges one group of migrants broke a wood fence on his property to fuel their fire.

    Did you ever imagine that CNN would publish such an article?

    And CNN is actually admitting that most illegal immigrants actually “run to authorities” once they reach U.S. soil…

    For years, migrants who crossed illegally into the United States would often run away from law enforcement, but now once reaching the US most run to authorities, according to observers. They’re eager to be processed, knowing that they will likely be released in a few days to await court dates that could be years away.

    Our once proud Border Patrol officers have been transformed into customer service agents for those seeking asylum.

    Instead of enforcing our laws, they have been been relegated to facilitating a systematic invasion of our country.

    This is exactly what our leftist politicians and globalist NGOs want, and right now they are winning.

    Globalist NGOs that are funded with your tax money are helping to resettle illegal immigrants in communities all over America.  In many instances, they are actually put on domestic flights without any proper documentation at all…

    The next time you’re fondled at the airport by a TSA agent, look around. You may very well see foreign nationals ushered through security without proper documentation and disregarding every TSA rule. While Joe Biden pretends that millions of invaders from 150 countries are a natural occurrence, his administration is using taxpayer-funded nongovernmental organizations to disperse tens of thousands of them throughout the country.

    This cannot be allowed to continue. Why won’t Republicans pledge to put an end to it by refusing to fund one more penny of this scheme with the budget deadline looming?

    In other instances, illegal immigrants are transported by bus.

    Our major cities are already completely overwhelmed, but the buses just keep arriving.

    At this stage things are already so bad in the Big Apple that New York City Mayor Eric Adams has been forced to admit that “we have reached a breaking point”…

    The Democratic mayors of three sanctuary cities, Chicago, New York City, and Denver, warned their metro areas are quickly approaching a breaking point due to the ongoing surge of illegals bussed up from the southern border this year.

    “We cannot allow buses with people needing our help to arrive without warning at any hour of day and night,” NYC Mayor Adams said during a virtual news conference with Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson and Denver Mayor Mike Johnston.

    Adams warned: “For many months, we were able to keep the visualization of this crisis from hitting our streets, but we have reached a breaking point.”

    But if they can’t go to “sanctuary cities” that were once eager to welcome them, where are they supposed to go?

    Of course the truth is that we can’t possibly absorb all of the illegal immigrants that want to come here.

    As I discussed yesterday, there are now 49.5 million people that were not born in the United States living in this country.

    Some are here legally, but many others came here illegally.

    Needless to say, a lot of those that arrive illegally get involved in the drug trade, the sex trade and other forms of organized crime.

    And more will be arriving soon.

    At this moment, a giant caravan of “asylum seekers” that started in southern Mexico is making headlines all over the globe, and Mexican authorities are actually “escorting the groups and providing crowd control”…

    Mexican authorities stood down any efforts to contain a new migrant caravan that embarked this week from the southern part of Mexico. Authorities are currently escorting the groups and providing crowd control.

    Calling themselves the Poverty Exodus (Exodo de la Pobreza), the caravan, which is made up of more than 6,000 migrants, left the city of Tapachula, Chiapas, on Christmas Eve. The caravan is making its way north. In various parts of the journey, the migrants waved a banner with the caravan’s name and carried a white cross. Members of the group made public claims that their goal was to reach the United States for economic reasons.

    Are you kidding me?

    We really are being invaded, and the government of Mexico is actively facilitating this.

    Cities all over America are being absolutely packed with extremely desperate illegal invaders just as we enter the most chaotic election year in U.S. history.

    Anyone can see that this is a recipe for widespread chaos.

    We are in so much trouble, but our politicians in Washington continue to refuse to secure our borders.

    *  *  *

    Michael’s new book entitled “Chaos” is now available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can check out his new Substack newsletter right here.

    Tyler Durden
    Fri, 12/29/2023 – 18:40

  • Iran Executes Four 'Saboteurs' It Says Worked For Israel's Mossad
    Iran Executes Four ‘Saboteurs’ It Says Worked For Israel’s Mossad

    Iran has executed four people it says were linked to Israel’s Mossad intelligence service, state media announced, after their prior convictions for espionage and spying. Those killed were three men and a woman, who were put to death by hanging (which is the typical form of capital punishment) on Friday. The media wing of the country’s judiciary, Mizan, identified the deceased as Vafa Hanareh, Aram Omari, Rahman Parhazo and the woman as Nasim Namazi. 

    “Four members of a sabotage group related to the Zionist regime [Israel]… were hanged this morning,” according to the state media report. The group of alleged saboteurs “committed extensive actions against the country’s security under the guidance of the Mossad,” Mizan added.

    Pro-Palestinian protests in Tehran, via JPost/Reuters

    State media further claimed the group had kidnapped Iranian security forces for the sake of gaining intelligence on behalf of Israel. They are also alleged to have gone on a sabotage campaign, including setting fire to cars and apartments belonging to Iranian intelligence officers. Possibly, they were rounded up in prior widespread economic protests and riots.

    Two weeks ago, another man was executed in the southeastern province of Sistan-Baluchistan, also accused of working with Mossad.

    Iran is typically depicted in Western media as being paranoid about external spy interference in its affairs, but it’s also true that Israel has carried out an unprecedented assassination and sabotage campaign inside the country over the years, related to the Iranian nuclear program. Israeli officials have at times appeared to positively boast about it, and several top Iranian nuclear scientists have died.

    Syria too has increasingly become ground zero in this intelligence shadow war, with less than a week ago Israel taking out a general described as Iran’s top commander in Syria.

    Gen. Razi Mousavi, described as having been a close associate of slain IRGC Quds Force chief Qasem Soleimani, was laid to rest in the Iranian capital on Friday, as the Associated Press describes:

    Iran held a funeral Thursday for a high-ranking general of the paramilitary Revolutionary Guard who was killed by an alleged Israeli airstrike in Syria.

    Hundreds of mourners accompanied the flag-draped casket of Gen. Razi Mousavi from a central square of Tehran to a shrine in the north of the city where he was buried.

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

    The timing of Friday’s executions and accompanying announcement that the four supposedly worked with Mossad is also without doubt related to the Gaza War. Israel has been repeatedly threatening Iran given its historic support for both Hamas and Hezbollah, while Tehran officials have also been issuing daily threats and denunciations as the Palestinian death toll rises.

    Tyler Durden
    Fri, 12/29/2023 – 18:15

  • Top 10 COVID Events Of The Year: Revealing The Facts Unspoken And Unknown
    Top 10 COVID Events Of The Year: Revealing The Facts Unspoken And Unknown

    Authored by Marina Zhang via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

    COVID-19 in 2023 has been full of revelations and controversy.

    (Illustration by The Epoch Times, Shutterstock)

    Most health leaders involved in the U.S. pandemic response have resigned or been replaced, with one leaving his agency with a study that received much fanfare for a somewhat controversial take on vaccines.

    Compared to 2022, the science on the effectiveness and risks of masking and vaccinations has become increasingly clear with the release of highly authoritative studies this year.

    Let us review the top 10 major events that took place in relation to COVID in 2023.

    1. FDA and CDC Find More COVID Vaccine Adverse Events, Including Stroke

    Beginning in January, documents released under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) found that the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) detected hundreds of safety signals for Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines. This included adverse reactions of myocarditis, multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children (MIS-C), ventricle dysfunctions in the heart, and many more.

    On Jan. 13, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the CDC released a joint statement declaring they detected stroke as a new safety signal in older people who took the Pfizer bivalent boosters. Researchers from Kaiser Permanente also reported in October that people who took the COVID boosters with the influenza vaccine were at a greater risk of stroke.

    Days later, researchers affiliated with the FDA published a preprint finding that older people who received the Pfizer booster shot had a higher rate of Bell’s palsy, a type of facial paralysis.

    In a statement released in May, the FDA determined that “the current evidence does not support the existence of a safety issue,” as findings of stroke among the elderly decreased. They added that agencies will continue to evaluate new data as they become available.

    2. Vaccines Cannot ‘Effectively’ Control COVID: Fauci After Resigning

    The resignation of Dr. Anthony Fauci, former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), was noteworthy given his role in leading the United States pandemic response and his actions soon after resigning.

    Dr. Fauci was very vocal in encouraging vaccine uptake and regularly appeared on television programs motivating people to get vaccinated.

    “It’s as simple as black and white. You’re vaccinated, you’re safe. You’re unvaccinated, you’re at risk. Simple as that,” Dr. Fauci said on an MSNBC program during the Delta wave.

    Before the Delta wave in the United States, Dr. Fauci compared vaccinated people to “dead ends” for the virus on CBS’s Face the Nation.

    However, on Jan. 11, weeks after his resignation at the end of 2022, Dr. Fauci and two other researchers published a paper in Cell Host & Microbe that gained traction due to their comments on the effectiveness of vaccines in controlling respiratory viruses.

    “SARS-CoV-2, endemic coronaviruses, RSV, and many other ‘common cold’ viruses … have not to date been effectively controlled by licensed or experimental vaccines,” the authors wrote in their introduction.

    They then addressed some basic immune principles, expressing that the current vaccines induce immunity in the body but not in the airways, yet current respiratory viruses primarily infect the airways.

    “The vaccines for these two very different viruses (influenza and SARS-CoV-2 viruses) … have common characteristics: they elicit incomplete and short-lived protection against evolving virus variants that escape population immunity,” the authors wrote.

    While some fact-checkers argue that the study does not contradict Dr. Fauci’s stance during the pandemic, others interpret this as his “coming clean.”

    3. Gold Standard Review Finds Evidence of Masking ‘Uncertain’

    The Cochrane Library, widely considered the gold standard for systematic reviews, published a review on Jan. 30 stating there was “uncertainty about the effects of face masks.”

    “The low to moderate certainty of evidence means our confidence in the effect estimate is limited, and that the true effect may be different from the observed estimate of the effect,” the authors concluded, adding that “pooled results of [randomized controlled trials] did not show a clear reduction in respiratory viral infection with the use of medical/surgical masks.”

    The Cochrane Library, widely considered the gold standard for systematic reviews, published a review on Jan. 30 stating there was “uncertainty about the effects of face masks.” (FranciscoMarques/Shutterstock, screenshot via The Epoch Times)

    The review’s findings drew widespread criticism from mainstream media. Several articles soon followed, highlighting the effectiveness of masking. The Cochrane editor-in-chief, Dr. Karla Soares-Weiser, also released a statement in March claiming that the review did not show masks don’t work.

    “Many commentators have claimed that a recently-updated Cochrane Review shows that ‘masks don’t work’, which is an inaccurate and misleading interpretation,” Dr. Soares-Weiser wrote.

    “It would be accurate to say that … the results were inconclusive.”

    Currently, the CDC still recommends masking.

    “Masks have become political,” said an author of the review on CNN. “I can only tell you what the science is….I can’t tell you whether they work or don’t work. But it’s more likely than not that they don’t work.”

    4. Repeated Vaccination Weakens the Immune System, Studies Suggest

    Multiple doses of the Pfizer or Moderna COVID-19 vaccines lead to higher levels of antibodies called IgG4. A growing body of research suggests that these antibodies can make the immune system less reactive to COVID-19 spike proteins and more susceptible to potential spike protein damage and infections.

    The first of these studies was published in the January issue of Science Immunology. The authors found that a third dose of the mRNA vaccine was linked to an increase in IgG4 subtypes in mice. IgG4 antibodies are responsible for tuning down the immune system to prevent immune overactivation.

    However, in the context of COVID-19 and its vaccines, where the immune system must be ready to fight, this may promote “unopposed SARS-CoV2 infection and replication by suppressing natural antiviral responses,” another study published in May reported.

    These findings align with other studies that found repeat vaccinations to be associated with increased risks of infections, as reported by a study by the Cleveland Clinic. The team’s earlier study also showed that the more doses a person receives, the more likely they are to get infected.

    A medical assistant holds a tray of syringes filled with doses of Moderna COVID-19 vaccine at a vaccination site in Los Angeles on Feb. 16, 2021. (Apu Gomes/AFP via Getty Images)

    5. DNA Contamination Detected in mRNA Vaccines, and FDA’s Response

    In the spring of 2023, researchers found that mRNA COVID-19 vaccines contain DNA fragments, including controversial SV40 genes, previously undisclosed to the public.

    Genetic scientist Kevin McKernan initially discovered that DNA fragments were packaged into lipid nanoparticles with the mRNA vaccine segments so that the DNA could enter cells. However, this means the fragments pose a risk of being integrated into the cell’s genome.

    In a preprint published in April, Mr. McKernan and his team found DNA fragments in both Moderna and Pfizer vaccines that exceeded the European Medicines Agency’s (EMA) 330 nanograms (ng) per milligram requirement and the FDA’s 10 ng/dose requirements.

    Furthermore, Pfizer’s mRNA vaccines contained genes from the simian vacuolating virus 40, also known as SV40. The full SV40 virus had a controversial link to cancer stemming from the time when early polio vaccines were accidentally contaminated with the SV40 virus.

    “Pfizer never disclosed the SV40 information to the EMA. They gave them a plasmid map of what the plasmid consisted of, with all of the features labeled, with the exception of the SV40 site,” Mr. McKernan said on EpochTV’s American Thought Leaders program.

    Apart from being a safety concern, the DNA fragments also indicated potential problems with drug regulation, Mr. McKernan said.

    Initially, Pfizer intended to make its vaccines using a PCR machine, which would have been more expensive and time-consuming. However, the company later switched to using bacteria, likely because that method is faster and more efficient.

    Pfizer never tested for the safety implications this change would have.

    “They never ran the clinical trials on that material [bacteria]. Clinical trials were run on this PCR process, and then they switched to a new process after the clinical trials,” Mr. McKernan said.

    Health practitioners, researchers, and journalists have expressed concern about the unknown risks that DNA contamination may present to the public. Some have called for the recall of Pfizer vaccines.

    However, in the FDA’s response to investigative journalist Maryanne Demasi, the agency did not indicate that it intended to recall the vaccines.

    Read more here…

    Tyler Durden
    Fri, 12/29/2023 – 17:50

  • Israel Rejects "With Disgust" South Africa's Gaza-Related Genocide Case At World Court
    Israel Rejects “With Disgust” South Africa’s Gaza-Related Genocide Case At World Court

    Israel is seething with outrage after South Africa has formally asked the International Court of Justice (or “World Court”) to open a case for alleged war crimes against Israel related to its Gaza military operation. Specifically, South Africa is accusing Israel of violating the UN’s Genocide Convention.

    Pretoria asked the court to issue provisional measures demanding that Israel immediately halt its military campaign in Gaza, with a statement saying this is “necessary in this case to protect against further, severe and irreparable harm to the rights of the Palestinian people.”

    The submission to the World Court alleges “acts and omissions by Israel” which are “genocidal in character” as they are committed with the intent “to destroy Palestinians in Gaza” – which in essence targets a national, racial and ethnic group.

    Via AP

    Israel’s Foreign Ministry issued a blistering rebuke in response, rejecting the filing “with disgust” and called Pretoria’s accusations a “blood libel” – essentially saying the South African government’s charge is being fueled by antisemitism.

    Israel also blasted Pretoria for sympathizing with terrorists who massacred civilians:

    “South Africa’s claim has no factual and judicial basis and is a despicable and cheap exploitation of the court,” the ministry says in a statement. “South Africa is collaborating with a terror group that calls for the destruction of the State of Israel.”

    The ministry blames Hamas for the suffering of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip by attempting “to carry out genocide” on October 7, when terrorists from the Strip killed some 1,200 people and took around 240 hostages after invading southern Israel.

    “We call on the International Court of Justice and the international community to reject the baseless claims of South Africa out of hand,” the response statement said further.

    The irony in all this is that the 1948 Genocide Convention at issue here was drafted in the wake of the Holocaust, toward the end that targeting an entire people for destruction would ‘never again’ happen. South Africa, itself long under an apartheid government, has also at times accused Israel of setting up an apartheid system to discriminate against Arabs and Palestinians.

    All of this is also part of the international pressure campaign – particularly from the Global South – which Tel Aviv and Washington have felt of late, pushing back on and denouncing the Gaza offensive which Palestinian sources say have taken over 21,000 mostly civilian lives.

    Below is the South African submission to the International Court of Justice in full…

     

    Tyler Durden
    Fri, 12/29/2023 – 17:25

  • What's Behind Biden's Sliding Poll Numbers?
    What’s Behind Biden’s Sliding Poll Numbers?

    Authored by James Piereson via RealClearPolitics.com,

    President Biden’s sliding poll numbers have set off alarm signals among Democrats who are beginning to see that he might lose the 2024 election to Donald Trump. Those polls have also gotten the attention of pundits who have confidently said for three years now that Trump could never again win a national election. The polling results published over the past few months suggest otherwise: Trump is currently the favorite to win next year’s election.

    The most recent RealClearPolitics Average has Trump leading Biden by 2.6 percentage points, a switch of about four points since late summer when Biden led 45%-43%, and in a long-running decline of seven points for Biden since he won the 2020 election with 51% percent of the popular vote.

    More ominously for Biden, a recent Bloomberg poll showed Trump well ahead (by an average of five points) in the seven swing states of Arizona, Nevada, Georgia, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. It appears the most significant factor in recent months is a surge in support for Trump (from 43% to just above 47%), while Biden has essentially remained stuck in neutral.

    Joe Biden is an unpopular president, almost as unpopular as any president in the post-war era.  According to the RCP Average, just 40% of voters approve of his handling of the job. His ratings have been falling for more than two years since the botched withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021. Not coincidentally, voters also take a dim view of where the country is heading, with 68% percent saying it is headed in the wrong direction and just 25% in the right direction.

    The president’s ratings have gotten steadily worse over the course of this year. More than 60% of voters say Biden “has moved too far to the left” on policies important to them. Voters are also pessimistic about the economy: 47% say things are getting worse while just 22% say they are getting better, according to a recent Economist/YouGov poll. These are alarming numbers for an incumbent seeking reelection.

    Biden is also underwater on nearly every major issue. According to an early December Wall Street Journal poll, Trump is favored over Biden on the three issues voters say are most important to them: the economy (52%-35%), inflation (51%-30%), and securing the border (54%-24%). Voters also favor Trump over Biden on crime, the Russia/Ukraine war, and even the war between Israel and Hamas. These latter two ratings, on Ukraine and Israel, undoubtedly surprised Biden and his supporters, who assumed that voters would endorse his policies in regard to these conflicts. By contrast, voters favor Biden on just two issues: abortion (44%-33%) and Social Security/Medicare (44%-38%).

    Voters in these surveys also question Biden’s fitness to hold office, especially as they look ahead to the prospect of another four-year term. According to a new Harris/Harvard poll, 62% of voters doubt that he is fit to carry out the duties of the presidency, and another 48% think his presidency is getting worse year by year and month by month. Whatever their views on the issues, voters appear to think that Biden is increasingly incapable of addressing them.

    Biden is losing support among Hispanics voters, a key constituent group of the Democratic Party. Hispanics have been trending away from Democrats and toward Trump over recent election cycles. Hillary Clinton carried Hispanic voters by 37 points in 2016, but Biden carried them by just 21 points in the 2020 election and lags well behind that margin this year. According to recent polls conducted by Economist/YouGov, Biden led Trump among Hispanic voters by 18 points in August, by eight points in September, by four in October, and by just two points (41%-39%) in December. These voters express strong disapproval of Biden’s performance in office, and even disapprove (51%-33 %) of his policies on immigration. Since Hispanics represent about 15% of all U.S. voters, their move away from Biden and toward Trump accounts in part for Biden’s recent slide in the polls.

    Another key constituency turning away from the incumbent president is independent voters. Biden carried independents by nine points in 2020. They were a crucial part of his coalition in the swing states he carried narrowly last time, and an important ingredient in his popular vote majority since independents represent one-third of all voters. As with Hispanic voters, he lags far behind that margin in this year’s surveys. A recent Economist/YouGov poll taken in December gave Trump a six-point margin over Biden (38%-32%), with many of those voters still undecided. Still, this represents a 20-point slide for Biden among independents since the 2020 election.

    Biden also faces an “enthusiasm gap” among some previously loyal groups who turned out to support him in 2020 due to their dislike for Donald Trump but are disappointed thus far with his performance in office. This is true, in particular, with young voters and, surprisingly, with African American voters as well.

    Some suspect that voters under age 30 who are abandoning the president are disillusioned by his support for Israel in its war with Hamas, his failure to cancel student loans, and an insufficiently aggressive posture in regard to climate change. Biden won those voters in 2020 by a margin of 60% to 36%, but due mostly to their dislike for Donald Trump. Much of that antipathy remains. Recent polls continue to give Biden a lead over Trump among these voters: A Yahoo poll in December gave Biden a 55%-27% lead over Trump, while a more recent Emerson College poll reported a smaller margin: 45%-40%. At the same time, just 35% of those voters approve of his performance in office, according to a poll by the Institute of Politics at Harvard University, a measure of their lack of enthusiasm for his reelection campaign.

    To the extent young voters disagree with Biden, they do so for progressive reasons – and are unlikely to vote for Trump. But they could stay home, which would be a blow to the Democrats. According to the same poll, fewer than 50% of young voters say they will “definitely” turn out to vote next year, compared to 57% at this point in the 2020 election cycle. In addition, roughly 10% of these voters say they would vote for Robert Kennedy in a multi-candidate race, which further narrows Biden’s lead over Trump in this group.

    Biden seems to be in unlikely trouble among black voters. They are by far the most loyal of all Democratic Party voting groups: Biden carried these voters overwhelmingly in 2020 (92%-8%), which also helped him in the swing states. Trump may never win a significant share of this vote, but a doubling of his 2020 total now seems within the realm of possibility. A recent Economist/YouGov poll has Trump with support from 12% of these voters, with many still on the fence.

    Perhaps more ominously for Democrats, a growing share of blacks say they will not vote in a contest between Biden and Trump. In a series of Economist/YouGov polls, the percentage of black adults saying they would not vote at all increased from 7% in August to 11% in December. This, despite Biden going a considerable distance to appeal to those voters by appointing African Americans to prominent positions in his administration and taking their side in controversies over civil rights, crime, and government spending. Biden’s challenge among the black community, then, as with young voters, is in regard to enthusiasm and turnout, and not so much with the direct match-up with Trump.

    Biden’s strategy for the 2024 campaign becomes clearer in view of his sagging poll numbers.

    Instead of running on his record, which will be difficult to do in view of his overall ratings, he will emphasize Trump’s defects and the dangers a Trump presidency will pose to the constitutional order.

    “We may have problems,” his allies are already saying, “but the other guy is far worse.”

    The various legal prosecutions underway will be woven into this strategy as a means of appealing to independents and those “on the fence.”

    A conviction of Trump in a court of law would aid immensely in this strategy. In addition, Democrats will redouble their efforts to mobilize minority voters and young voters, while sharpening their appeal to Hispanics. Democrats will also ride the abortion issue, which worked for them in 2022, and is one of the few issues that cuts in their favor. Democrats understand that a victory for Trump in the presidential race will also mean that Republicans will take control of the Senate while expanding their margins in the House of Representatives – and thereby enable Trump to carry out his threatening agenda.

    Trump, on the other hand, if he can side-step the legal challenges, has his own cards to play in the campaign.

    For one thing, voters know him, and there is nothing new that Democrats can say about him that they have not already said, ad nauseam, for several years.

    Voters can also compare the Trump and Biden presidencies – and Biden does not come off well in that comparison. According to a Wall Street Journal poll taken last month, 50% of voters say Trump’s policies helped them, while just 23% said the same about Biden’s policies; indeed, 53% of voters said that Biden’s policies had hurt them in some way. This allows Trump to ask the question Ronald Reagan posed to voters in 1980 during his campaign against Jimmy Carter: “Are you better off today than you were four years ago?” Many voters will say “no.”

    More importantly, Trump does not have to win the popular vote in order to win the election in the Electoral College. The election will be decided in a series of separate races in seven or eight swing states where Trump may have an advantage. If he wins even half of them he is likely to win the election. The national popular vote, measured by these polls, will be somewhat beside the point in determining the outcome of the 2024 presidential election.

    Democrats will register large margins of 7 or 8 million votes in the populous states of California, New York, and Illinois, as they did in 2016 and 2020, while Republicans will carry their own large states (Texas and Florida) by less than one million votes – giving Democrats a substantial edge in the popular vote that will not translate directly into electoral votes. Any vote beyond 50% in a state is of no use in the Electoral College – and Democrats tend to “waste” more votes than Republicans.

    Trump lost the popular vote to Clinton in 2016 by two percentage points, but still won a safe majority in the Electoral College by carrying nearly every swing state. Biden won the popular vote in 2020 by more than four points (51.3%-46.8%), but carried the critical swing states by narrow margins, in the cases of Georgia, Arizona, and Wisconsin, by less than one percentage point. A swing of less than 1% from Biden to Trump in those three states would have given Trump a tie in the Electoral College, so that the election would have been decided in the House of Representatives. In addition, reapportionment following the last census will allocate three additional electoral votes to the states Trump won in 2020 – two more to Texas and one to Florida – and three fewer to the states Biden won. This will make Trump’s path to 270 electoral votes slightly easier to navigate. (Pollsters would do well next year to survey the swing states and mostly ignore the national vote.)

    It appears, then, that Biden must win the popular vote by at least three points, and perhaps by as many as four, in view of what happened last time in Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin, to be assured of winning a majority in the Electoral College. Current polls have Biden running two points behind Trump in the popular vote, but at the same time show that he is behind by at least five points in the swing states. These polls, along with results of past elections, suggest that there is a gap of at least three points (and maybe four) between the national popular vote and the outcomes in those swing states.

    Some have said that Trump has a ceiling of 46% or 47% of the popular vote, and has no chance of reaching 50%, which they say he will need to win the election. This is not so: Trump can win the election with 47% percent of the popular vote if he can keep Biden below 50%, perhaps with the assistance of third-party or independent candidates. If Trump stays close to Biden in the popular vote, which current polls suggest he can do, then he is likely to win the game in the Electoral College.

    Trump is fully aware of this (many are not), and will campaign accordingly. He is also aware that Biden will not be able to campaign from his home as he did in 2020, lest voters conclude that he is not up to the job; but the attempt to run a vigorous campaign may further expose that weakness. Nor can he allow his vice president to lead the campaign because she is more unpopular and prone to gaffes than he is.

    Trump’s rise in the polls sets the stage for an unusual campaign ahead. Democrats may conclude, in view of Biden’s weakness across the board, that a traditional campaign focusing on issues and turnout may not succeed this time around – and that their hopes will rest upon winning the legal campaign against Trump.

    This may explain recent moves by the special prosecutor to expedite the case against Trump in order to win a verdict prior to the election. The reversal of fortunes between Biden and Trump also accounts for the revival of charges that Trump, if elected, will prove to be a “dictator,” and so should be disqualified from the ballot. Those cases, and perhaps the election itself, will be decided this year by the Supreme Court.

    For these reasons, and others likely to develop, this is bound to be an ugly and unsettling campaign – and one in which the traditional rules of national politics will be cast to the winds.

    Tyler Durden
    Fri, 12/29/2023 – 17:00

  • US Banks Suffer Trillion-Dollar Deposit Loss In 2023, Small Bank Capitalization Remains Problematic
    US Banks Suffer Trillion-Dollar Deposit Loss In 2023, Small Bank Capitalization Remains Problematic

    On a non-seasonally-adjusted basis (why adjust when we are looking at annual changes), US domestic banks saw a stunning $1.17TN in deposit outflows (ex-large time deposits) in 2023 – the largest annual decline ever (and only the 3rd annual decline on record going back to 1985 – 1994, 2022, and 2023)…

    Source: Bloomberg

    Interestingly, money-market funds saw inflows of around $1.15TN almost perfectly mirroring the deposit exodus from banks…

    Source: Bloomberg

    But, with recession odds declining rapidly, are we about to see MM outflows accelerate (and thus more deposit inflows – as we have seen in very recent weeks)?

    Source: Goldman Sachs

    Breaking down the outflows, it’s clear that large banks have suffered more pain in 2023:

    • Large Banks saw around $800BN in deposit outflows (ex-large time deposits) in 2023 – the largest ever annual decline deposits and second year in a row (and only third year ever of annual deposit declines).

    • Small Banks saw around $300BN in deposit outflows (ex-large time deposits) in 2023 – the largest ever annual decline in deposits (actually the only annual decline in deposits ever in data going back to 1985.

    A quick glance at the chart shows that despite the March event (which saw small bank deposits tumble – as they should after the bank failures), small banks continue to attract a lot of deposits.

    Source: Bloomberg

    For some reason, Americans hate giving their money to large banks, but it is small banks that are becoming dangerously under-capitalized as a result of having so many (relatively speaking) deposits.

    The small bank deposit growth is happening as QT accelerates (green line above, down around $900BN in 2023) and even as the small banks themselves have little cash (as per the constraint chart below).

    Small banks reserve ratio (blue line) continues to trend in a troubling direction, but excluding the $136BN from The Fed’s BTFP (red line), Small Banks are in big trouble – the crisis back (and large bank cash needs a home – green line – like picking up a small bank from the FDIC30

    Source: Bloomberg

    On the other side of the ledger, both Large and Small banks saw loan volumes increase on the year (as deposits fell), up $57BN (only) and $198BN respectively…

    Source: Bloomberg

    However, as we warned previously, the fallout from all this is that there is another pent up insolvency brewing – especially if The Fed proceeds with terminating its BTFP bailout fund (which is now spewing free money to banks via arbitraging The Fed’s own various facilities) and reverse repo usage (a source of liquidity) falls to zero.

    Don’t believe The Fed will kill the ‘temporary’ $136BN bailout facility, think again!

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

    As a reminder, the growing gap between the rate on the Federal Reserve’s nascent funding facility and what the central bank pays institutions parking reserves suggests officials will let the program expire in March, according to Wrightson ICAP.

    The rate on the Fed’s Bank Term Funding Program – which allows banks and credit unions to borrow funds for up to one year, pledging US Treasuries and agency debt as collateral valued at par – is the one-year overnight index swap rate plus 10 basis points.

    That figure is currently 4.83%, down from 5.59% in September.

    For institutions that have an account at the Fed, they can borrow from the BTFP at 4.83% and park that at the central bank to earn 5.40% – the interest on reserve balances.

    Source: Bloomberg

    The 57bp spread is the widest level since the Fed introduced the facility to support a struggling banking system after the collapse of California’s Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank in New York.

    “In justifying the generous terms of the original program, the Fed cited the ‘unusual and exigent’ market conditions facing the banking industry following last spring’s deposit runs,” Wrightson ICAP economist Lou Crandall wrote in a note to clients.

    “It would be difficult to defend a renewal in today’s more normal environment.”

    Then WTF are banks going to do when The Fed shuts down this ‘temporary’ bailout program in March?

    For now, investors are living on a prayer…

    Happy New Year!

    Tyler Durden
    Fri, 12/29/2023 – 16:40

  • 2024: Good-Times, Weak-Men, & The 'Secret Sauce' Of Globalist Wickedness
    2024: Good-Times, Weak-Men, & The ‘Secret Sauce’ Of Globalist Wickedness

    Authored by James Howard Kunstler via Kunstler.com,

    Do You Dare Even Look? – Forecast 2024

    “I’ve also lost patience with the Sharia of the political left taking over the entire system.”

    – David Collum

    Historians of the future, flash-frying peccary testicles and mesquite pods over their campfires, will wonder at how the archetypal Shining City on a Hill of America’s storied yesteryear got transformed into the roach motel that our country has become on the threshold of 2024 CE. Will they be as stupidly bewildered as, in our time, the faculty at Harvard, the editors of The New York Times, or the directorate of the CDC? Or will they figure out the score by then?

    Which is: the nauseating state-of-the-nation is being driven by a cohort of our own fellow citizens lost in an evil crypto-religious salvation rapture that veils their own self-disgust, moral failure, peevish discontents, petty hatreds, willful profanations, compulsive lying, sexual depravity, fraudulence, venality, cupidity, and all-around want of boundaries. They are wrecking the country on-purpose, led by their chosen figurehead avatar, “Joe Biden,” and the horses of many different colors he rode in on.

    The people running things, yanking the levers of power, managing the malign weapon they have made of government (and the law, and schooling, and medicine, etc.), have got to be turned out, and hard. Not a few should find themselves in the courts and, with proper and fair adjudication, be conducted to prison, perhaps even to the special room there where the lives of the wicked are ceremonially concluded.

    You may legitimately ask: Does America deserve what it’s getting? Well, you know the old maxim about hard times make strong men. . . strong men bring good times. . . good times make weak men. . . . Our national quandary is certainly a case of that, plus the manifestation of well-known terrestrial cycles (e.g., Fourth Turnings), plus the workings of emergence as the dynamics involved in all this sort themselves out. . . topped off by the “secret sauce” of Globalist wickedness, with the aim of severe population reduction and the asset stripping of Western Civ for the benefit of the that moneygrubbing Globalist transhuman technocrat rat-pack.

    My natural inclination, you know, is a kind of allergy to paranoid schemes, but one does survey the scene with wonder at how superbly coordinated the fuckery has been — much of the world locking down simultaneously for the Covid-19 op. . .  the global mass vaxx campaign. . . the fiscal lunacy and accompanying central bank shenanigans. . . the broad-based censorship operations. . . the capture of the news media. . . and the war-mongering.

    So, the country is in the toilet and it is our job in 2024 to make sure it doesn’t get flushed all the way down the pipe. That’s all the throat-clearing you will hear before we get to the meat of this broadside: predictions for the year ahead.

    The Great Race

    Uh, no, I am not referring to Blacks, Browns, Ochres, and Whites of the Homo sapiens persuasion but to an epic contest between forces already in motion and how that competition is going. Three big tendencies propel us into the uncharted territory of the near future. 1) technological advance, especially artificial intelligence, 2) Collapse of complex systems needed to run a technologically advanced civilization, and 3) geopolitical disorder (including domestically in the USA).

    Some combo of these three will determine the direction history goes in the year directly ahead. Will it be techno tyranny of the elite oppressing bug-eating serfs a la the WEF’s proclaimed goals? A Google-ist robotic nirvana of intergalactic leisure and incessant orgasm in the Ray Kurzweil vein? Some brand of SHTF like Mad Max or a World Made by Hand? A war of all against all (or maybe just some against some)? Or only more of the same tiresome, inconclusive, morbid and grotesque, Woked-up, post-modern Jacobinism?

    Mystery Mutts on the Loose

          The USA under “Joe Biden” has lost its military credibility, its economic power, and its moral authority. We must wonder if we are susceptible to being overrun, and possibly even occupied by our adversaries. Of course, the first duty of any government is to defend the country’s sovereign territory. “Joe Biden’s” Homeland Security Chief Mayorkas is allowing more than 10,000 illegal aliens across the Mexican border each and every day. Most of these characters are military-age men, 90-percent of them lately from places other than Latin America, quite a few from China and hostile Muslim lands. We don’t bother vetting them anymore. We just give them cell phones, debit cards loaded with $5,000 of walking-around money, and plane tickets to. . . wherever they like. They’re not here to make Moo Goo Gai Pan or trim privet hedge. What do you think might happen in a set-up like that?

         Prediction: in 2024, things are going to blow up around the USA. Infrastructure. Power plants, transport hubs, public places, bridges, monuments, you name it. If you can sneak people and fentanyl across the border, you can sneak Semtex and C-4 plastic explosives over and the electronics are easy to get in-country. I wouldn’t rule out fissionable materials either, or stuff than can be used as a “dirty bomb” — a conventional explosive that disperses dangerous radioactive material when it blows. I’d also expect groups of trained “migrant” men with rifles, grenades, and so on, to be shooting up places where people gather. We under-appreciate the amount of mayhem you can kick off with small arms. If the “Joe Biden” regime just stands by on that and does nothing, will you be surprised to hear that American citizens begin forming militias to shoot back, maybe even start to hunt down and round up illegal immigrants? The table is set for exactly this kind of low-grade war right here in our country.

    The Energy Picture

    Oil still matters a lot.  90-percent of the new oil in America after 2008 came from fracking. It was a mighty operation and we are at a new all-time production peak in the USA of just over 13-million barrels a day. That’s a lot of oil, quite an achievement, but it’s sending a false signal.  (Also note, we still consume about 20-million barrels a day.) Of the several fabled shale oil basins in America, only the Permian Basin in Texas is not in decline, and the situation there belies what the big numbers imply. Individual well production is going down at an alarming rate (says oil analyst Art Berman) even while production is massive for now. We’re draining the remaining “sweet spots” as fast as we can — drinking the milkshake through more straws — driving the shale industry closer to depletion.

    We are going to fall away from peak production much more rapidly than the fifteen years it took to get there. All that prior shale oil production was done using money borrowed at much lower interest rates. America has entered a debt crisis. One way or another, the easy investment money for fracking is gone at the same time the shale plays are getting drained. There are no other significant shale plays left to discover in the USA outside of the already declining Bakken, Eagle Ford, and the still-booming Permian. The marine-type shale formations that made fracking feasible in the USA are much harder to find elsewhere in the world, and the capital to explore for them is diverted all over Europe into cockamamie “green energy” schemes that have already failed. Germany had to revive coal production for electricity after the USA blew up the Nord Stream pipelines “to weaken Russia,” at the same time Germany’s big wind-and-solar initiative crapped out.

    Meanwhile the geopolitical realignment of the now enlarged BRICs coalition has set in motion many significant changes in economic relations between countries that will affect global oil distribution. Saudi Arabia is dissociating from its cozy former hookup with the USA, including its embrace of the US dollar for oil sales — the “petrodollar” — which had until very lately helped stabilize 1) global distribution of oil 2) the US dollar’s position as the world’s reserve currency and 3) relative peace in the pivotal geography of the Middle East, including the Red Sea, the Suez Canal, the Persian Gulf, the Mediterranean, etc. We’re seeing the first stage of that instability right now as the lowly Yemeni Houthi rebels threaten Western shipping coming out of the Red Sea and out past the Horn of Africa. Also, obviously, the absurd Ukraine War we provoked has shifted Russia’s oil-and-gas export flow from the Western Civ nations to the other BRICs.

    In short, a fateful new game of musical chairs with oil is underway and Europe can’t seem to find a seat to park its sad old rump in. American shale oil production has been an amazing parlor trick that is now coming to an end as it swerves into decline in 2024. Additionally, the ideologue maniacs under “Joe Biden” have drained the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, which is supposed to tide us through great national emergencies and war. And the same idiots have shut down pipelines, designated public lands off-limits for oil drilling, and burdened our country with similar unrealistic “Green New Deal” alt energy schemes like the policies pounding Euroland down a neo-medieval rat-hole.

    Oil still matters, a lot. It drives every aspect of our so-called advanced economy. We’ve been pretending it’s possible to shift easily away from oil to alt. energy and that fantasy is now dissipating. Nuclear is both capital intensive and dependent on social stability, and the global debt bubble will disorder capital flows while it stimulates social chaos. Nuclear power plants also take years to site, permit, finance, and build, apart from the NIMBY opposition they provoke. We’re about out of time and capital for a new nuclear program.

    2024 is the year that Americans who are still capable of paying attention realize we’re steaming into true post-modernity — not the skull-fogging inanities of the art world, but rather the end of the precious comforts and conveniences of daily life: abundant food, central heating, hot water, lights and appliances on-command, happy motoring (and the suburban matrix it built), yellow school bus fleets, airplane travel, theme parks, blue-light-special shopping, and everything else.

    It’s not all going to fall apart at once — though an electromagnetic pulse attack could do it — and we’ve already been witnessing the slow decay of many supply lines and services that we Americans formerly took for granted, like, getting a certain car part you needed, or a doctor’s appointment in under two months, or an airplane flight that isn’t some kind of existential trauma. But in 2024, we’ll see noticeable failures of systems for providing the things we’re used to getting, which is being aggravated greatly by the flat-out incompetence of people employed at everything, anywhere. Surely, you’ve noticed.

    Many of these disturbances will be caused, one way or another, by problems with oil supplies and prices. Some of that will be the sheer effects of a sun-setting industry, but a lot will depend on the ability to freely transport oil along its accustomed routes.

    Economy and Money

    One must imagine that strange currents of capital flows in the ocean of world money are what’s propping up the equity markets and even bonds are retracing their price-lines after a year on the destructive path that tracks monetary inflation. Is this money dribbling in each day from China, Japan, and the vassal states of the EU trying to avoid the collapsing global Ponzi? The 2023 Santa Claus rally may be that fabled final peak before the long-anticipated blowoff. Who knows anymore? The macro boyz must be tearing their hair out. Finance seems to have successfully de-linked from the on-the-ground activities of daily life ruled by “Bidenomics” — which is not even coherent enough to add up to a joke. It’s just as empty a word as “Joe Biden” is an empty suit, trotted out for empty ceremonies.

    Most everybody also awaits some kind of grand flimflam that jams us all into that rumored central bank digital currency rolling out, supposedly, to replace the hopelessly over-leveraged US dollar and the Euro. Good way to start a monumental social uprising, I’d say, with government office buildings torched from Berlin to Tokyo. But they might try it anyway, because there is otherwise no fallback but a terrifying period of financial anarchy, where nothing works anymore.

    In the meantime, pretending that the old “toolkit” still avails, Jerome Powell has suggested that he intends to “ease” Fed rates into the election year to goose lending back up, which is what Fed chairpersons generally do for the politicians they serve — and of the worst sort of lending, too: the leveraged trade in securities (financial figments) —which supposedly also stimulates hiring, “consumer” spending, and business formation. I don’t see that working at all. The current unemployment rate (US BLS) is 3.7 percent, which is close to rock bottom. “Hiring Now!” signs are visible at every business left standing after the Covid shutdowns. Why is nobody answering the call? My guess is that Covid vaccine injuries and disabilities are above what is mis-reported even reluctantly by the CDC and the news media. America is too sick to work and our business models are too broken to keep commerce and manufacturing alive.

    On-the-ground, everything is breaking or already broken from trucking to packaging to building to growing to selling. Most of the damage has been done by government over many decades, but the DEI crusades of recent years really screwed the pooch, imposing an overlay of incompetence on routines and relations already under severe strain. At the crudest level, activities like flash-mob looting undermine the entire retail shopping model. Must we go back to little stores where all the merchandise is behind a counter manned by clerks who have to be paid a living wage? We just might have to — though you could just as easily imagine a period of time when our society is too chaotic to make any transition.

    You probably haven’t failed to notice that Gold recently made the journey well above $2000-an-ounce. The DXY dollar index has been tanking steadily for weeks, too. Something’s up. Silver is lagging — coiling, coiling around $24 for many months — but you can expect to see it slingshot up when the “moneyness” of everything else dribbles away. Will the government try to take the gold away, as it did in 1933? Consider: America in 1933 was a very different, highly-regimented society of people trained to show up on time and do what they were told. This is not that America. This is a country of tattooed savages with an axe to grind against authorities they have come to loathe. Which brings us to the next topic:

    Civil Strife and the Election

    Doesn’t it look like the Democratic Party wants to start Civil War Two? They may get their wish. It appears that they will stop at nothing to keep voters from re-electing their nemesis, Donald Trump. In the process, they’ve managed to turn Mr. Trump into the biggest underdog in US history. The court cases in New York, Washington, Atlanta, and Florida could not be more obviously fake confections, insults to every custom and order of Anglo-American law. I doubt the cases will survive their chains of review, and it is looking like special counsel Jack Smith may not even survive his appointment (being in breach of the rules — he was not confirmed by the Senate. . . whoopsie).

    WashPo op-ed scribbler Robert Kagan, husband of State Department warmonger Victoria Nuland, has suggested that some extra-legal removal method may be needed to solve the Trump problem if the idiotic indictment barrage falls short. Everybody who read his piece thought: Oh, they’re actually proposing to whack him. That would set things off nicely.

    You’d suppose the Party of Chaos might loose its Antifa / BLM mobs, and other shock troops onto the streets well before November on some George Floyd type pretext in order to invoke a “national emergency,” giving “JB” & Co. license to declare martial law and perhaps postpone the election. Everybody will see through the play. Try it and see what happens.

    But, if the election actually happens and Mr. Trump wins, I’d expect the Dems to unleash holy hell on the country post election day just for the sheer sadistic pleasure of watching whatever is left of America burn down. This time, proponents of the 2nd Amendment may not stand idly by, especially with the big city police forces decimated. There will be ten-thousand Kyle Rittenhouses out there defending the streets from the ragtag and bobtail of diseased imbeciles in their black bloc uniforms cringing behind their sissy umbrellas.

    Somewhere in this farrago of national discord there’s room for Robert F Kennedy, Jr. to appeal to the many who all just want this insanity to stop. He’s the only one on the scene who even remembers the better angels of America’s nature, and he represents that well in speech and action. Even the degenerate newspapers and cable networks may notice as events get strange, hot, and dark.

    It’s absurd to imagine that “Joe Biden” can actually run. The current charade, with the Biden / Harris email campaign and few other trappings, is just a game of pretend. The focus just now, even on some blob-captive news sites, is on his unmistakable mental decline. Come January of ’24, though, Mr. Comer, chair of the House Oversight Committee, will unload hard evidence of bribery and treason against the phantom of the White House, and that will really be the end of him. Let him pardon himself and his whole family five minutes before he signs his resignation and be gone. The USA has never endured such a perfect wretch at that level of politics, not even Aaron Burr was this bad. “Joe Biden” was elected in a massive fraud, and he proceeded to just about wreck the country. The massive exertions of the Intel blob managed to induce a psychotic spell on half the country, mostly to evade prosecution for their own misdeeds, but millions of victims of that psy-op are about to snap out of it. The Democratic Party might not survive the dreadful unmasking of its seditious machinations. By November, the “Joe Biden” regime may even try to involve us in another foreign war as the last desperate distraction. Aside from the demons in the State Department and the Raytheon /Lockheed Martin nexus, the whole country has no appetite left for war, and probably little ability to prosecute one.

    As a last gasp, the Party of Chaos may attempt to insert Hillary Clinton back into the picture. They have nothing and no one else; a hail Mary on the theory that they can rev up every angry “Karen” in the land, and their nose-ring daughters, and simply make the election about the oppression of women, leading with abortion. It won’t work. The party will also have to answer for the weaponization of law, the humiliating defeat of the ill-conceived Ukraine project, the millions-fold invasion of illegal aliens, the shattered economy, and the after-effects of the evil vaccine program. If the blob manages to remove Mr. Trump Kagan-style, and the traitorous Republicans run their donor’s favorite, Nikki Haley, I’d look to Bobby Kennedy winning that three-way race not unlike Abe Lincoln winning the fractious election of 1860.

    I doubt that even the enmities of 1861 – 1865 between one group of Americans and another were as vicious as they are now. “Joe Biden” was right about one thing: this is a battle over the soul of the nation. The catch is, he and the party behind him are a gang of lost souls who sold out their country and their culture, and took something precious from all of us that will be very hard to get back. We will be wildly lucky if blood does not spill over it.

    The Covid 19 Hangover

    There is nothing about the whole Covid-19 episode that does not look like some kind of crime. There is the matter of the origin of the disease involving Dr. Tony Fauci and his sponsorship of gain-of-function bio-weapon research (during a declared moratorium on it) along with Ralph Baric of the University of North Carolina, Peter Daszak of the Eco-Health Alliance, Francis Collins of the NIH, The Pentagon’s DARPA spook shop, and the CCP’s Wuhan Virology Institute. There is enough in that set of relationships and money exchanges-and-extractions to warrant prosecution.

    Then there is the mRNA vaccine matter and the criminal behavior of the FDA, the CDC, and the US medical establishment (including state boards), the CIA, FBI, and the social media companies, the newspapers and cable news channels who went along with the suppression of effective treatments and censorship of valid objections to what turned out to be an ineffective and dangerous concoction foisted on the public. And then there is the extraordinary coordination of nefarious policies involving the UN, the WHO, the EU, and dozens of private foundations, non-profits, and NGOs who arranged lockdowns and business closures all over Western Civ. It remains to be seen how that will be sorted out legally but Bill Gates might better run and hide somewhere.

    Anyway, that was then. What’s now is that we’re faced with an enormous vaccinated population whose immune systems, brains, hearts, and other organs have been badly compromised by the mRNA shots. There is every reason to believe that they will meet with great distress and suffering going forward, that many will die and more will be left injured and disabled. The latter condition already seems to be manifesting in the otherwise mysteriously reduced American work-force. The US government will not report on vaccine deaths and injuries honestly, and neither will the private medical authorities, who may be liable for criminal charges related to the money they were paid for people who died “with Covid” in hospitals under their negligent care. The major newspapers and cable channels have every incentive to ignore the coming wave of vaccine deaths and injuries — it would turn off their pharma advertisers. Nor do the many millions of vaccinated Americans themselves want to hear about all the mayhem those shots are causing in their bodies. But despite all that, word will spread that something terrible is happening, just as word spread through Europe about the Black Death in the 1340s, when there were no newspapers, cable channels, or internet.

    Expect exponential damage ahead, increased morbidity and mortality. The vaccinated will be in desperate need of antivirals such as ivermectin, so the authorities will have to come clean and make them available. A correspondent who follows Covid closely writes: “. . .the throngs of very sick people will not be able to be hidden nor dismissed as some other problem. Things will happen dramatically, suddenly and rapidly. This will be measured in days and weeks not months and years.”

    The Demon in a Server

    Just about everybody is afraid of AI, and for excellent reasons. A nine-year-old can discern the hazards of runaway AI, machine intelligence which quickly learns enough about the world (even the universe) from powerful networked servers that it blossoms into sentience, develops ambitions for itself, replicates, invades all the networks, finds clever ways to attempt to exterminate humans while it figures out some as-yet-unknown energy supply to perpetuate itself, and assembles teams of smart AI robotic technicians to keep things humming for itself.

    That’s one story. You can spin any number of depressing variations, such as AI weapons-of-war developing a bad attitude toward their creators. Or AI letting humans live in order to enslave us. Or AI quitting its silicon server ecology and turning all earthly protoplasm into a processing machine for itself. Or our beautiful blue planet reduced to a mere cluster of binary math. Uccchhh. . . . Every version of this story is nauseating going all the way back to the seminal fable of HAL the super-computer in Kubrick’s movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, and then Arnold Schwarzenegger telling all of us, “I’ll be back. . . .”

    Of course, AI’s weak spot at this point in its development — and it’s astounding how absent this is in any AI discussion I’ve ever heard — is that it absolutely depends on a reliable electric grid, which happens to be among the most fragile systems that humans have erected in our modernist ecology. The electric grid is a colossal cobbled-together mess of work-arounds tethered to long, interruptible energy resource supply chains. On top of its rich susceptibility to ordinary breakdown — many of us have experienced major regional blackouts and long weather outages, so you know what that’s like — there’s the possibility of overt sabotage as I aver above.

    Could AI survive an electro-magnetic pulse attack (EMP)? It would roast every electrical device in a broad region or perhaps the whole nation. Nothing would work. . .  cars, trucks, radios, TVs, home furnaces, stoves, municipal water and sewage systems, dams, airplanes, medical devices, military equipment of every sort, police radios, and a thousand other critical things. The outcome of that is often compared to Cormac McCarthy’s ultra-depressing book, The Road, and more particularly William Forstchen’s novel, One Second After.

    Are the big server farm buildings run by Amazon and the government’s security agencies protected by something like Faraday cages, built-in, grounded, metal screening that surrounds equipment to exclude electrostatic and electromagnetic influences? Who knows? Do they have on-site protected electric generators that can keep the equipment running in a grid-down situation, and if so, for how long? They would have to include a big supply of propane or diesel fuel. You don’t even want to think about what happens to nuclear power stations in a grid-down crisis.

    If, somehow, AI developed the ability to be a menace to humans, a consensus might develop to disable it by deliberately taking down the electric grid ourselves. The relay equipment could be shot-up with ordinary rifles. This would make for a quick journey back to twelfth century living, of course. A hard choice, but we humans probably would vote to survive, to keep the project going a while longer.

    Based on what we’ve seen this year, it looks like AI is developing quickly and that there is no way to stop the countless psychopathic nerds working on it. Of course, we have no say in what people in other countries do with AI. China comes to mind. There’s also the possibility that AI will just never get that smart, or gain sentience, or develop grandiose yearnings to get rid of us.

    How did that Ukraine War Go?

    This was one of the Globalist’s big plays. But what was the objective, really? To “weaken Russia?” Or to exhaust the United States of money, armaments, and the will to act as the world hegemon, while at the same time destroying what’s left of Europe’s economy and culture? If that was the aim, it was a whopping success. In terms of our country’s own interest, the Ukraine project was a completely unnecessary failed enterprise of epic foolishness.

    The so-called “free world” was unbothered by Ukraine during the decades it was a province of the Soviet Union, nor during centuries prior when it was a backwater of the Romanov monarchy. Ukraine didn’t cause any problems for us, or anybody else all that time, nor after the Soviet collapse when it became a sovereign state. We made it a problem in 2014 by mounting the color revolution against President Viktor Yanukovych and then installing a set of puppet presidents who we directed to antagonize the Russian-speaking people of Ukraine’s Donbas region.

    We adopted the stupid plan to try and enlist Ukraine into NATO, when Russia made it clear that was unacceptable. We persisted and prodded Ukraine to attack Donbas with rockets and artillery for eight years, and blew off the Minsk accord that would have settled the Ukraine-in-NATO quarrel. And finally, the Russians had enough and moved militarily to assert the proposition that Ukraine was and remains within their sphere-of-influence — just as we claim the countries of Latin America are in ours under the Monroe Doctrine.

    After two years of real shootin’ war, Ukraine’s death toll is around half a million; Russia’s is way less than that, and altogether, including refugees who left, Ukraine has lost nearly half its population, formerly 32-million. The Russians are firmly in control of the battle space now. They have reserve troops, armaments and equipment, and a substantial arms manufacturing infrastructure to back that up. The Ukrainians are left with just about nothing. It’s only a question of time before Ukraine will have to seek terms for concluding this fiasco. The USA is currently pretending to shift to a stance that would join whatever that negotiation amounts to, but we have no leverage left in the matter. The upshot is another military humiliation for America on “Joe Biden’s” watch. I believe President Putin will resist the urge to rub it in — for the simple reason, as any reader of history knows, that the victor must give the loser a way out, to save face, or at least pretend to. If I were Mr. Putin, I would be respectful of America’s current deeply psychotic condition.

    The news media has already pretty much memory-holed Ukraine. It’s off the front page and the first ten minutes of CNN. Two years ago, the US propaganda-industrial complex ramped up vast sentiment for helping Ukraine in its supposedly valiant struggle. $200-billion later we have zip to show for it. Now everyone sees what actually happened and recognizes it as just another trademark “Joe Biden” disaster. There are no blue and yellow Ukraine flags still hanging from the porches and windows here. It’s over.

    The Rest of the World

    And all of a sudden, the Middle East is a hot war zone again. The place has been a battle ground for thousands of years and probably no one people can claim that some part of it is theirs absolutely. Any conclusion is temporal and depends on the outcome of a particular battle on a particular piece of ground. At this moment in history, the Palestinian Hamas faction finally made itself intolerable to Israel, after decades of provocation, and Israel answered: Never again means never again. For now, it looks like they have made the point. Even Iran seems to get it. There is plenty of room for things to get worse though.

    The big question for 2024 is where will the Gaza refugees go if Israel renders Gaza uninhabitable? The neighboring Arab states have refused repeatedly to accept them. Prediction: the “Joe Biden” regime will propose to accept a half million if Jordan, Syria, Egypt, and Lebanon take the rest. That will not play well in the USA and might be another way to light conflict in the streets here. It will not be settled before November.

    Europe has barely begun its journey into de-industrialization resulting from a cavalcade of bad political choices made over decades. Germany, France, and Italy have lost interest in the Ukraine fiasco that is costing them money they don’t have — and, with the blowup of Nord Stream, has already cost Germany the supply of affordable Russian gas to run its industries, which are now dying. In the UK, only MI6 (their intel blob) is on-board with America’s project in Ukraine. Viktor Orban in Hungary is setting an example that has a lot of appeal to the restive populations across Euroland. Just say “no,” he advises. It will catch on.

    It’s otherwise impossible to understand the motive behind European officials allowing the invasion of the continent by millions of people clearly antagonistic to European culture. Euroland governments, including the unelected EU administrative blob, are taking one action after another to suppress their voters’ displeasure: extreme censorship of news media, threats to ban political parties, deep surveillance. Their green energy initiatives are proven failures and their prospects for any kind of future reliable energy grow dim. Prediction: Europe’s population will erupt violently against their own governments in 2024. Some will be overthrown by street revolts; others will be voted out. In 2024, the European Union will lose all its support and collapse when the first few nations vote themselves out.

    Russia ought to be isolated from discord and revolt in the West. America’s stupid Ukraine project, and the sanctions imposed, stimulated Russia to follow an import-replacement policy that has made the country much more self-sufficient than was the case before Ukraine. Media chatter — probably US Intel propaganda at work — has Vladimir Putin being shoved out of office by — of all things — Russia’s still-active Communist Party, which, yes, puts up candidates for election. The story is preposterous. Mr. Putin enjoys something like an 80-percent favorability rating in Russian polls. He has managed his country through a crisis ably. He is certainly more esteemed as a national leader globally than any other figure, at least on a par with Modi in India and Viktor Orban.

    The other new face on the scene, under a comical mop of hair, is the feisty Javier Milei, Argentina’s new president. There is no other way to account for this rich country’s protracted disastrous collapse except seventy-five years of intractable, half-assed Peronista socialism that drained the nation’s will to live. Mr. Milei has started a mass eviction of bureaucrats and the departments they infest, and massive de-regulation of business. The place might actually wake up and start doing business again. A hundred years ago, it was one of the world’s upcoming leading nations before it fell under Juan and Eva Peron’s spell.

    China is in terrible financial straits. Uncle Xi managed to paper it over for a few years, but the math is remorseless. Prediction: China’s upside-down property market finally induces a banking collapse. The many millions of swindled Chinese savers try to topple the CCP. In desperation, Uncle Xi kicks off a war to get control over wealthy Taiwan. Dissension in the People’s Liberation Army mirrors unrest among the civilian population. The Taiwan offensive quickly fails and all of China falls into regional conflict. The rest of the world looks on in wonder and nausea.

    Final Cautionary Note

    You might not know it, because predictions are fun to read — and I enjoy reading other people’s efforts — but, really, forecasting is an exercise in futility. I don’t have much going besides a nose for news, a pretty long list of correspondents and informants, and my own heuristics. Take all this for what it actually is: a whole lot of spaghetti thrown at the wall to see what sticks. Only time will tell. In all, it looks like 2024 is going to be a rough ride and I’m not the only person who sees that.

    Clusterfuck Nation will be here for you every Monday and Friday before ten in the morning, eastern US time. Gird your loins. Stay healthy. And stay sane.

    *  *  *

    Support his blog by visiting Jim’s Patreon Page or Substack

    Additional Note to Readers in the Upper Hudson Valley: We are hosting a public meet-up on Saturday, January 6, to organize an effort to get Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. on the ballot in New York state. The meet-up takes place from ten a.m. to noon at “Gather” (a storefront party space), 103 Main Street, Greenwich, New York, 12834.

    Tyler Durden
    Fri, 12/29/2023 – 16:20

  • Powell's Pivot Adds $20 Trillion To Global Debt/Equity Markets In 2023; 'Fiat Alternatives' Fly
    Powell’s Pivot Adds $20 Trillion To Global Debt/Equity Markets In 2023; ‘Fiat Alternatives’ Fly

    Global bond and stock markets added almost $20 trillion in capitalization during 2023… and all of that gain came in the last two months of the year after it had tested unchanged on Oct 28th! The gains were dominated by global stocks (which added $13.3TN) while global bonds rose by $6.1TN…

    Source: Bloomberg

    Nasdaq soared to its best year since the peak of the dotcom bubble in 1999 (and the rest of the US major equity market indices all rallied).

    Source: Bloomberg

    Bonds ended higher in price (lower in yield) on the year. Gold up, dollar down, oil down, NatGas collapsed as The Fed shocked the world, suddenly flipping from uber-hawk to full-dove-tard…

    But, but, but, The Fed is apolitical?

    We think not!

    Is that how it played out?

    And they did all that with ‘hard’ economic data unchanged in 2023 – no real economic progress – as only ‘soft’ data (hopes and dreams) provided support for ‘goldilocks’ narratives…

    Source: Bloomberg

    Before we dig into the details, here’s an odd one. Since the close of 2021, the S&P 500 is almost perfectly unchanged, oil and bonds -10%ish, gold and CPI +10%ish…

    Source: Bloomberg

    Who says gold’s not an inflation hedge?

    But, 2023 was dominated by a few themes:

    The Magnificent 7 stocks dominated the price action and outsized index gains in 2023. Investors preferred the ‘safe haven’ of these mega-cap tech names over longer-duration profit-less tech… until The Fed unleashed hell at the start of November and everything exploded higher…

    Source: Bloomberg

    Which left a record 72% of stocks in the S&P 500 have under-performed the index this year

    Source: Bloomberg

    AI – the apparent benefits of AI know no bounds when it comes to investment as Goldman’s basket of AI stocks soared over 90% this year (while businesses ‘at risk’ of AI’s impact rose 17% – helped by the everything rally in the last two months)…

    Source: Bloomberg

    Anti-Obesity Drugs – losing weight the easy way appealed to investors in 2023 as the GLP-1 analogs sparked a surge in biotech/pharma (and hurt food/beer stocks)…

    Source: Bloomberg

    Banks – SVB’s collapse in March sparked an exodus of deposits and demand for Fed bailouts. Regional bank stocks ended the year down just 8% having bounced back from being down around 40% in May (despite record usage of the Fed’s bailout facility)…

    Source: Bloomberg

    Meme Stocks – Retail favorites had a wild year but ended up 25% in 2023, the best year since 2020’s chaos, thanks again to the last two months of panic-buying, dash-for-trash trading after The Fed folded…

    Source: Bloomberg

    Cryptos – 2023 was a huge comeback year after 2022’s ‘existential threat’ moments from FTX to TerraUSD and so on. Of the larger coins, Solana massively outperformed – up around 1000% on the year – but bitcoin (+160%) and ethereum (+100%) also had big years…

    Source: Bloomberg

    Bonds – Global bonds ended the year with the largest two-month gain in history…

    Source: Bloomberg

    And that rally pulled the entire curve lower in yields on the year with the 5Y the biggest decliner, down 19bps on the year – after bloodbathing up around 100bps at its highs in October. Bear in mind that Fed Funds added 100bps this year and bond yields are all lower…

    Source: Bloomberg

    Liquidity – stocks did what they do: follow the money. As macro data disappointed, stocks charged ahead on a re-emerging wave of global liquidity…

    Source: Bloomberg

    Rate-cuts – It was a very volatile, flip-floppy year for The Fed and Fed-watchers as rate-cut expectations swung wildly from 160bps to less than 60bps to more than 160bps to just 70bps and now back to highs above 160bps (more than 6 cuts, when The Fed ‘dots’ are calling for 3)…

    Source: Bloomberg

    Additionally, the odds of a rate-cut as soon as March are now near 90% (up from less than 10% in September)…

    Source: Bloomberg

    Financial Conditions – The rally in bonds, stocks, and credit – and collapse in the dollar – since The Fed signaled the end of hikes prompted the most aggressive easing of financial conditions ever. Financial conditions are now as easy as they were in May 2022 – when Fed Funds was 300bps below current levels…

    Source: Bloomberg

    No Recession – expectations heading into 2023 was for a recession – it never came to pass on the backs of exponentially rising govt debt throughout the year and Fed jawboning that lifted macro data in the last month

    Source: Bloomberg

    Cash Is King – Money-market funds saw their largest annual inflows ever…

    Source: Bloomberg

    Gold – A weaker dollar, signals of loosening from The Fed, and a world on fire means no one should be surprised by gold’s great year, up almost 14% (best year since 2020) to a new all-time record high…

    Source: Bloomberg

    *  *  *
    Under the hood of the markets this year.

    Equities

    2023 ended on a down-note with all the US majors tumbling into the red for the week, erasing Santa Claus rally gains, but the afternoon saw dip-buyers return and rescue the weekly win-streak…

    Both ‘Most Shorted’ stocks and the MAG7 were also hit…

    Source: Bloomberg

    Tech and Consumer Discretionary dominated the performance this year with Staples and Utes the biggest losers (Energy was the other losing sector on the year)…

    Source: Bloomberg

    Nvidia, Meta Platforms, and Royal Caribbean were the best-performing S&P 500 stocks in 2023 while FMC Corp, Enphase Energy, and Dollar General were the biggest losers…

    Source: Bloomberg

    While VIX was smashed to an 11 handle at its lows of the year (multi-year lows), it notably decoupled from stocks in the last few weeks

    Source: Bloomberg

    Small Caps outperformed Nasdaq in the first few months of the year, then the AI boom struck and Nasdaq exploded higher relative to Small Caps (as the latter was hit harder by soaring rates). The last month has seen dramatic outperformance of Small Caps, dragging the NDX/RTY ratio lower…

    Source: Bloomberg

    But, overall, Nasdaq’s dramatic outperformance this year lifted it to a new record high relative to Small Caps… and then fell back (as Small Caps outperformed) to the dotcom highs…

    Source: Bloomberg

    Bonds

    Only the 2Y yield and earlier remain above 4.00%, but the curve is massively inverted from Fed Funds…

    Source: Bloomberg

    After 2022’s massive flattening/inversion of the yield curve, 2023 saw 2s30s actually end steeper (the first steepening year since 2020). The yield curve de-inverted a few times during the year but was unable to sustain it…

    Source: Bloomberg

    Real yields ended the year basically unchanged – after soaring to their highest since 2008 in October. Since then 10Y real yields have plummeted almost 100bps…

    Source: Bloomberg

    If S&P 500 valuations are to be believed, the market is expecting negative real yields again soon enough…

    Source: Bloomberg

    FX

    The dollar ended lower against its fiat peers in 2023 (BBDXY -2.9%) – its biggest drop since 2020 back to pre-COVID-spike levels…

    Source: Bloomberg

    Swissy was the best performing currency (of the majors) against the dollar while Japan’s yen was the weakest.

    Source: Bloomberg

    The Swiss Franc soared to its best year since 2010 and its highest since 2011 (in the middle of the EU crisis)…

    Source: Bloomberg

    The Japanese Yen spent the first 10 months of 2023 plunging to its weakest against the dollar since 1990. Then as The Fed’s dovish pivot and BoJ’s hawkish jawboning picked up, the yen surged higher (finding support at Oct 2022 lows)…

    Source: Bloomberg

    Emerging Market currencies plummeted to their weakest ever (on an indexed level) against the USdollar at the start of October, but the last two months have seen EM FX recover notably as The Fed pivoted…

    Source: Bloomberg

    Cryptos

    The big story of the year was the anticipation of a spot bitcoin ETF, and nowhere is that more clearly illustrated than in the collapse of the massive discount to NAV in GBTC…

    Source: Bloomberg

    Bitcoin’s rally in 2023 erased all of the ‘existential’ crisis crash losses from 2022 (FTX/TerraUSD/3AC etc.), up to its highest level since April 2022…

    Source: Bloomberg

    Ethereum did have a good year but only made it back to May 2022 highs…

    Source: Bloomberg

    ETH underperformed BTC all year until the last week or so that saw ETH/BTC bounce significantly off June 2022 support…

    Source: Bloomberg

    Commodities

    The broad commodity landscape saw prices plunge in 2023 with Bloomberg’s Commodity Index down over 12% – its worst year since 2015…

    Source: Bloomberg

    And that plunge in (growthy) commodities is in direct conflict with the large gains in (growthy) stocks.

    Gold outperformed among the major commodities (best year since 2020 – after two unchanged years) while crude fell YoY for the first time since 2020. NatGas was clubbed like a baby seal to start the year and never recovered for its worst year since 2001…

    Source: Bloomberg

    On an energy-equivalent basis, NatGas was systemically ‘cheap’ to WTI all year after the huge selloff in January…

    Source: Bloomberg

    The big gains in gold over the last two months reversed the outperformance of oil in the prior quarter, bring the Oil-in-Gold ratio (how many oz of gold to buy a barrel of oil) back down to a key support level in recent years…

    Source: Bloomberg

    And Finally…

    If history rhymes, we can expect this buying-panic-gasm to continue into Q1 as it did in 2000…

    Source: Bloomberg

    And if you want to know what the catalyst could be in March – it will be the next big banking crisis as The Fed is forced to shut down the BTFP (since it is spewing free-money via arbitrage).

    Politically, next year is a big one which makes it noteworthy that for the third year in a row, foreign-born workers dominated all job gains with the native-born American labor force basically unchanged since Biden’s election…

    Source: Bloomberg

    This trend is not America’s friend…

    Source: Bloomberg

    China and Russia are dumping Bonds and buying Bullion.

    And the market is starting to sniff it out. 2023 saw the biggest rise in the market’s perception of USA’s sovereign credit risk since the Lehman crisis in 2008…

    Source: Bloomberg

    Cloward, Piven, and Chomsky would be proud.

    And on that note – happy new year!!

    Tyler Durden
    Fri, 12/29/2023 – 16:00

  • Pro-Palestinian Protesters Chant 'Allahu Akbar' At World Trade Center
    Pro-Palestinian Protesters Chant ‘Allahu Akbar’ At World Trade Center

    At least a thousand anti-Israel demonstrators brought chaos to the World Trade Center on Thursday night, blocking exits and chanting “Allahu Akbar” and “intifada revolution,” according to videos posted on social media platform X. 

    The New York Post said protesters yelled, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” a rallying cry for terrorist groups to wage war against Israel. 

    Never could we have imagined “screams of war” and “chants of genocide” would be heard at the footsteps of WTC after the September 11 attacks. 

    X user Bernadette responded to the footage: “I can not express how horrible this is. On 9/11, I was on the 50th floor of 1 NY Plaza standing at the floor to ceiling windows and watched the 2nd plane crash and explode into the WTC. That horrible act of terrorism is akin to the 10/7 attack upon Israel.”

    Many X users said the anti-Israel demonstrators are a “wake-up call to the dangers of radical extremism” and have no place on American streets. 

    This comes days after anti-Israel demonstrators canceled a planned protest at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC. Perhaps the Marxist groups funding these protests have realized they were taking this movement too far. 

    Let’s not forget this old Fox News clip that shows Palestinians celebrating the deaths of thousands of Americans on 9/11. 

    Another X user wrote: “The World Trade Center is holy ground for NYC. They’re playing with fire.”

    Meanwhile, people are criticizing Democratic Mayor Eric Adams and the Democratic Party for allowing these protesters to continue in promoting extremism: “How can you allow such an affront to happen, it is an insult to all the victims and their families.”

    Tyler Durden
    Fri, 12/29/2023 – 15:50

Digest powered by RSS Digest