Today’s News 31st January 2021

• Only You Can Beat Big Tech Censorship
  Only You Can Beat Big Tech Censorship

  Authored by Tom Luongo via Gold, Goats, ‘n Guns blog,

  When Facebook censors Ron Paul, or Twitter bans President Trump, is that censorship?

  Or because these are private companies, does that automatically make it NOT censorship?

  Amazon banned Parler, but is it their right as a private company to choose their customers?

  That’s the crux of the issue I need to address with you in today’s post-Trump world of social media.

  

  Because make no mistake “Big Tech” repression is a foundational problem facing any society that considers itself even somewhat free. In the wake of the allowed ‘assault on the Capitol’ and the confirmation of Joe Biden as the 46th president of the U.S., the big tech firms which control access to speech went ballistic.

  Conservatives along with President Trump himself were wiped from the public square. Any mention of the election being stolen or open support on Twitter of Trump himself was flushed down the memory hole.

  This is censorship of the highest order by these firms to put parameters around political speech in the U.S. where such a right is enshrined in the Constitution. None of it is constitutional.

  But the problem is far deeper than that. The deplatforming of Parler, one alternative social media platform to Twitter, via corporate collusion by Apple, Google and Amazon was something far more sinister than Twitter silencing the sitting president of the U.S.

  This was a blatant hit job by companies stifling competition in the public square for hosting material which is constitutionally protected as ‘free speech.’

  But these firms, especially Amazon, who terminated Parler’s server hosting agreement with 24 hours’ notice, lazily applied their vague and ever-changing ‘Terms of Service” to single out Parler and hide behind their status as a private company.

  The worst part about this is that libertarians see this as a rational and defensible free market action. And for years adolescent libertarian arguments about corporations being private actors preferable to governments have now been turned around by authoritarians who hang us with our own words.

  And we wonder why conservatives look at us like we have four-heads when we make such arguments?

  When this attack on free speech began, during the 2016 presidential campaign with the first deplatforming of alt-right provocateurs like Richard Spencer and Andrew Anglin of the Daily Stormer website, it was obvious then that these were dry runs for the mass action we’re seeing today, in the name of creating an information-free literal one-party police state.

  It was this that prompted former Silicon Valley programmer Andrew Torba to start Gab. Crazed liberals then said, “If you don’t like Twitter, leave and build your own.”

  So, he did. And after the attack on the Pittsburgh Synagogue in 2018, Gab was given the even worse treatment than Parler got last week.

  They survived that.

  All the while myself and people like Torba were screaming about the duopoly controlling the on-ramp to the mobile web, and no one cared. But we could see this day coming.

  And now it’s here.

  But this is most certainly not a private property issue as much as it is a contract law issue allowed to fester because of government interference into the marketplace for communications.

  Government interference altered the landscape these companies operate in. The grew to the size they are now because of government largesse and federal and state tax revenue into the networks and systems they depend on.

  It doesn’t matter that the duopoly is Google and Apple. It could have been Palm and Microsoft. Or Blackberry and IBM. What matters is that the environment wasn’t a level playing field between the companies and the people using the services.

  They were paying not only for access but at the same time subsidizing the revenue streams by accepting costs these companies outsourced to government.

  It is a cozy arrangement.

  The companies outsource their fixed costs and the government outsources their censorship desires that pesky First Amendment forbids them from doing directly.

  No wonder the response to the allowed assault on the Capitol was so swift and coordinated.

  Think it through folks.

  Amazon’s AWS doesn’t become a dominant player without those vaunted contracts with the CIA. Parler, at a minimum should have an expectation of service per any legal contractual arrangement, and as such is due damages from Amazon for unilaterally breaching that basic trust.

  Facebook doesn’t grow to become the monster it is without strategic investments by quasi-governmental companies like Goldman-Sachs and Morgan Stanley.

  Google doesn’t become the ad revenue generating machine if it had had to properly pay its bandwidth costs for the content they forced on us.

  Trump nixing ‘Net Neutrality’ put some of that onus back on them, giving ISP’s some latitude to price usage according to their needs rather than Google’s.

  All of the above companies, including Microsoft, have been chosen by our government to succeed in this tilted marketplace.

  Apple doesn’t dominate the mobile internet in the U.S. without all those user fees and taxes tacked onto the cost of your monthly cellphone bill.

  If these companies were operating on their own private satellite and wire networks then they would absolutely be in the right, via the application of private property rights, to set whatever terms of service they wanted.

  I, as a libertarian, fully support that.

  And also, as a libertarian, understand that public property always creates a tragedy of the commons scenario.

  But when you operate in the public sphere, when you move your goods and services on the digital equivalent of the public road system (not a digression I want to get into today) and your corporate charter exists within the framework of U.S. and state contract law it is clear that these companies are neither wholly private entities with respect to their customers nor neutral actors trying to enforce public decency standards.

  They are acting in their best interest to stifle competition – Gab, Parler, Minds, etc. – while setting precedents to allow for even further restrictions of speech through lawfare thanks to a complicit and fully cowed legal system.

  And herein lies the smart path to reining them in, if it is at all possible at this point, since it’s clear the Biden Administration is ready to reframe all speech critical of the U.S. government as ‘domestic terrorism’ giving all of these companies the legal justification into the future to unperson all dissent.

  Removing their Section 230 immunity under the Communications Decency Act is paramount. It will not happen now. The government is in on the grift, folks, so looking ahead to the 2022 election cycle isn’t an option.

  They just proved to you your vote doesn’t count, so it means hitting them in the only place they truly care about, their bottom lines.

  So, the first thing to do is sue them into the ground. It will be up to the people themselves to hound these companies through both contract law violations and shareholder revolts because they have done irreparable damage to their brands and their future revenue streams.

  That is what has to happen right now. Parler’s suit against Amazon is a good start. A class-action lawsuit by every small business in America now wondering about Amazon’s policies should end this nonsense quickly.

  A good judge in a sympathetic jurisdiction should side with anyone making a strong case that modern tech company Terms of Service are ‘contracts of adhesion,’ defined as contracts entered into where one party is so much stronger than the other the weaker party is, in effect, coerced into signing it.

  The second thing to do is to simply jack-out. Put the screen down. Stop using it as a substitution for real communications and pull back from the brink.

  De-google your life, as I have. Close your Facebook account permanently. You will feel better immediately, trust me. I did this two years ago, to the detriment of the marketing efforts of my business, and I have never looked back.

  If you need a social network, use Twitter for keeping tabs on things but save your thoughts and your content for Gab or some other, smaller private community you are a part of.

  Being a global citizen is a canard they sold us as some true net positive. But it was something designed wholly to drive us mad and deracinate us to the point of having no home, no culture and no real friends.

  It’s no wonder they are trying so hard to shut off the escape routes and only allow certain platforms to exist forcing us to interact with people we don’t like while locked in our homes over a wholly contrived public health emergency.

  It was always part of the globalist plan.

  Ending this starts with the very libertarian idea of simply opting-out. We don’t need to be plugged into their reality-generating nightmares every moment of every day.

  But the thing about the web is that it is built on protocols which are themselves censorship resistant. So, the tyrants of today will be the footnotes of tomorrow. We’ve seen early attempts at censorship-proof blockchain platforms like Steemit. It’s still running even though its growing pains nearly killed it.

  The next great service is just around the corner because necessity is the mother of innovation. But the first step is accepting the fact that they’ve won this round and it is now time to change the rules of the game.

  P.S.: If you want to see what this looks like, just look at what the guys at Wall Street Bets are doing to the capital markets today. Brokerage outages, trading suspended, newly-minted millionaires.

  All because a bunch of hedgies got over-confident of their one-way skimming and thinking no one would press their luck to the breaking point.

  They have and it is glorious.

  You beat them by turning their supposed advantages and bought-and-paid-for rules of the game back on them.

  *  *  *

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  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 01/30/2021 – 23:00

• WHO Team 'Tightly Controlled' By CCP During COVID-19 Origins Investigation
  WHO Team ‘Tightly Controlled’ By CCP During COVID-19 Origins Investigation

  The World Health Organization (WHO)’s probe into the origins of SARS-CoV-2, the virus which causes COVID-19, appears to be nothing more than the media blitz that most skeptics predicted.

  

  According to Reuters, the team’s visit is being “tightly controlled by its Chinese hosts” as they visited a hospital on Saturday in Wuhan which treated early COVID-19 patients.

  On its second day after two weeks in quarantine, the team went to Jinyintan Hospital, where doctors had collected samples from patients suffering from an unidentified pneumonia in late 2019.

  “Important opportunity to talk directly w/ medics who were on the ground at that critical time fighting COVID!”, team member Peter Daszak said on Twitter.

  Team members leaving the hospital did not speak to journalists, who have been kept at a distance since the group left its quarantine hotel on Thursday.

  And of course, the team will visit the Wuhan ‘wet’ market tied to the first cluster of cases – except the CCP razed and sanitized the site months ago. Maybe the WHO team can take some memorable photos?

  #Wuhan Huanan Seafood Market was claimed to be the origin of #COVID2019 #Coronavirus #CoronavirusOutbreak, although we may never be able to find out, as the market was closed and everything cleaned up on Jan 1. It was said that this market is now going to be demolished. pic.twitter.com/qRDyU0Dweg

  — Jennifer Zeng 曾錚 (@jenniferatntd) March 3, 2020

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

  The WHO origins probe prominently includes Peter Daszak – president of EcoHealth Alliance, a non-profit group that has received millions of dollars of U.S. taxpayer funding to genetically manipulate coronaviruses with scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Of note, Daszak drafted a February, 2020 statement in The Lancet on behalf of 27 prominent public health scientists which condemned “conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin.”

  

  Via USRTK.org:

  [E]mails obtained via public records requests show that EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak drafted the Lancet statement, and that he intended it to “not be identifiable as coming from any one organization or person” but rather to be seen as “simply a letter from leading scientists”.

  Daszak wrote that he wanted “to avoid the appearance of a political statement”.

  …

  The 27 authors “strongly condemn[ed] conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin,” and reported that scientists from multiple countries “overwhelmingly conclude that this coronavirus originated in wildlife.” The letter included no scientific references to refute a lab-origin theory of the virus.

  The emails show how members of EcoHealth Alliance played an early role in framing questions about possible lab origin of SARS-CoV-2 as “crackpot theories that need to be addressed,” as Daszak told The Guardian.

  In short, the guy leading the WHO’s faux-investigation was working directly with the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s bat research team, and who insists COVID-19 has a natural origin (and couldn’t possibly have escaped the WIV), has a massive conflict of interest.

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 01/30/2021 – 22:30

• 'Black Lives Matter' Nominated For The Nobel Peace Prize
  ‘Black Lives Matter’ Nominated For The Nobel Peace Prize

  Authored by Monica Showalter via AmericanThinker.com,

  If the Nobel committee’s handing over of the Nobel peace prize to newly elected President Obama seemed like the nadir of the prize’s prestige, there’s now another thing coming.

  

  According to The Guardian:

  The Black Lives Matter movement has been nominated for the 2021 Nobel peace prize for the way its call for systemic change has spread around the world.

  In his nomination papers, the Norwegian MP Petter Eide said the movement had forced countries outside the US to grapple with racism within their own societies.

  “I find that one of the key challenges we have seen in America, but also in Europe and Asia, is the kind of increasing conflict based on inequality,” Eide said.

  “Black Lives Matter has become a very important worldwide movement to fight racial injustice.

  “They have had a tremendous achievement in raising global awareness and consciousness about racial injustice.”

  That’s right, a group led by self-described “trained Marxists” who literally spent time with Hugo Chavez in Venezuela and then triggered night after night of violent looting riots at a cost of at least 25 lives and a record $2 billion in insured property claims, (probably much more in uninsured property), and grotesque Red Guard-style repudiation scenes such as forcing restaurant diners to wave their fists in solidarity or face overturned tables and assault, is somehow … is worthy of the world’s top award for peace.

  Back in 1964, when Martin Luther King, Jr. was awarded the same prize for calls to judge people on the content of their character over color, along with non-violent resistence, there was a recognizable standard for peace. Now, such approaches don’t cut it anymore for this Norwegian bunch. And to place BLM in the same league as MLK, Jr., is kind of obscene.

  The Norwegian pol who put the nomination out cited BLM’s capacity to mobilize as his criteria. But that seems to be pretty shaky grounds, given that so many leftists out there really just wanted to Get Trump. BLM has since morphed into what appears to be a corporate shakedown racket and managed to get its Marxist identity politics party line into every corporate boardroom in America. But the capacity to use muscling community organizer tactics is no evidence of morality, or more pointedly, peace. BLM is never going to be satisfied no matter how much kowtowing is done, each victory it wins brings a bigger demand to its marks, without ceasing, until its will to absolute power is achieved. Sound like peace? Only of the grave.

  What it highlights is how low the Nobel peace prize has fallen. Sure, this Norwegian socialist clown doing the nominating likely has no idea what’s going on in the states, given that he lives in isolated Norway, takes in meetings with activists, and only reads the leftist press. The idiocy of his proposal tops that of the Norwegians handing out a Nobel prize to Barack Obama just for getting elected president for being black without doing anything else.  

  In both instances, the Nobel committee nominators seem to relish anyone with the ability to exert leftist power, equating that kind of power-mongering with ‘peace.’ It’s a sorry act they’ve come to, to worship power over any semblance of authentic peace. If this is peace, what a sorry state of affairs we have, mau-mauing’s triumph over actual creating of peace. Will all Nobel peace prize recipients have to show proof of starting riots to qualify now? How, exactly, is riot-making ‘peace’? One likes to suppose that this nomination will go nowhere, but with the current nonsense going on, don’t bet on it. 

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 01/30/2021 – 22:00

• Caveat Emptor – Are You A WSB 'Useful Idiot'?
  Caveat Emptor – Are You A WSB ‘Useful Idiot’?

  While high-fives and smily-faces abound on the interwebs over the destruction wrought on numerous hedge funds amid the short- and gamma-squeezes in GME and the rest of the heavily-shorted names, some are at least taking a moment to pause and reflect on other possibilities about how this all ends…

  

  Via ‘The_Law_of_Pizza’:

  I don’t work on the trading Floor, but I’m an attorney who services a variety of financial institutions, including broker/dealers.

  This isn’t the exciting, hilarious answer you want, but a lot of people had no idea it was even happening until the past 48 hours, and even now, it’s mostly just a funny news article about some internet trolls making a bubble.

  This is a big deal to the shorting community, but to the other 99% of the financial world, nobody gives a shit.

  As much as young people on the internet like to imagine this as an epic, David vs Goliath, Wall Street vs Main Street showdown for the history books; from a bird’s eye view its actually just a brief dumpster fire where a couple hedge funds lost their shirts betting on one little small cap stock. It has happened before, and it will happen again.

  In 6 months, nobody will remember or care, except that (maybe) it will become more difficult for retail investors to trade options.

  And not because the greedy hedge fund oligarchs forced the SEC to crack down on retail investors.

  But rather because, when this is all said and done, there is going to be a black hole where most of these retail investors’ brokerage accounts used to be, and the SEC and brokerage community will be lambasted for failing to protect unsophisticated investors from a bubble.

  I have been monitoring the WSB threads, and while the WSB veterans know that they’re making a suicide charge for the memes, they have brought thousands of naive, new investors with them – who predominantly think that they’re going to somehow come out on top, not realizing that they’re cannon fodder for the more savvy WSB users to exit with gains.

  Redditors never seem to stop and think about why the WSB guys know so much about derivatives trading.

  Or how they seem to know how to access and read from a Bloomberg Terminal.

  Or why there are so many users there that can seemingly drop tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars on complicated meme plays.

  How do you think that WSB knew that GME was open to a short squeeze and a gamma squeeze play?

  WSB’s power users are younger finance bros. It’s 30-something investment bankers and portfolio managers memeing with each other a. cosplaying as “autists.”

  If you didn’t know what a gamma squeeze was 48 hours ago, you are their exit strategy and the down payment on their next Porsche.

  Caveat Emptor indeed.

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 01/30/2021 – 21:30

• Virginia Task Force Drops Gang Database After Complaints It Has Too Many Minorities In It
  Virginia Task Force Drops Gang Database After Complaints It Has Too Many Minorities In It

  Via Southfront.org,

  A tolerant country needs tolerant databases…

  

  The Northern Virginia Regional Gang Task Force would stop using the GangNet database that catalogs thousands of gang members and gang-affiliated persons in the DC Metropolitan area over complaints that the database includes a ‘disproportionate number of minorities’.

  According to the Washington Post, it will be the first law enforcement entity in the area that would stop using GangNet.

  The database is widely used by more than 120 law enforcement agencies in the greater Washington, DC area that includes densely populated counties in both Maryland and Virginia. GangNet had been in use for about 10 years and has about 7,800 gang members in its database.

  The database is used for intelligence purposes and can’t be used for the basis of probable cause to arrest someone.

  Nonetheless, collecting the data about any crimes that may involve the ‘disproportional number of minorities’ appeared to be too much for the new neo-liberal era in the US.

  It may soon appear that the entire concept of the ‘ethnic crime’ can appear to be banned in the US because it is not enough tolerant.

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 01/30/2021 – 21:00

• Jessica Alba's "Honest Company" Files Confidentially For IPO
  Jessica Alba’s “Honest Company” Files Confidentially For IPO

  At times of peak ESG mania, what’s one more dubious company to add to the IPO mix? Will anybody notice? Will anybody care?

  Perhaps Jessica Alba is hoping that people won’t. Because Alba’s Honest Company – the same one that was exposed years ago for having harmful chemicals it railed against in its detergent – is apparently lining up for an IPO. The company’s schtick is claiming to offer products without the harmful chemicals of normal consumer products – a perfect nonsense story for the snowflakes setting the tone of today’s ESG fueled market.

  “The Los Angeles-based company backed by L Catterton is preparing to file confidentially for an initial public offering with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission as soon as Friday, said the people, who asked to not be identified because the matter isn’t public,” Bloomberg BNN reported on Friday. 

  The company is reportedly seeking a $2 billion valuation at IPO. The company was previously looking to sell itself for a valuation of about $1 billion, the report notes. Recall, back in September of 2016, Alba was reportedly laughing off $1 billion offers for her company. It seems that, since then, its valuation hasn’t expanded much, if at all. 

  

  About six or seven years ago, we wrote about how Alba’s “Honest” company may not have been so honest after all. We noted a 2014 Wall Street Journal article that alleged that the company hadn’t really been honest in disclosing which chemicals were used to make their “non-toxic” diapers and detergents.

   

  We noted: “One of the primary ingredients Honest tells consumers to avoid is a cleaning agent called sodium lauryl sulfate, or SLS, which can be found in everyday household items from Colgate toothpaste to Tide detergent and Honest says can irritate skin. The company lists SLS first in the ‘Honestly free of’ label of verboten ingredients it puts on bottles of its laundry detergent, one of Honest’s first and most popular products.”

  And then, of course, two independent lab tests determined that Honest’s liquid laundry detergent did in fact contain SLS:

  “Our findings support that there is a significant amount of sodium lauryl sulfate” in Honest’s detergent, said Barbara Pavan, a chemist at one of the labs, Impact Analytical. Another lab, Chemir, a division of EAG Inc., said its test for SLS found about the same concentration as Tide, which is made by P&G. “It was not a trace amount,” said Matthew Hynes, a chemist at Chemir who conducted the test.

  In Alba’s 2013 book, “The Honest Life” she lists SLS as a “toxin” that consumers should avoid. She started Santa Monica, Calif.-based Honest in 2011 after she said she had an allergic reaction to a popular brand of laundry detergent.

  The unfortunate truth is that this is the exact type of “honesty” that Wall Street loves, and the IPO will probably become a resounding success despite Alba’s checkered track record. 

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 01/30/2021 – 20:30

• Taibbi: Suck It, Wall Street!
  Taibbi: Suck It, Wall Street!

  Authored by Matt Taibbi via TK News,

  In a blowout comedy for the ages, finance pirates take it up the clacker

  

  In the fall of 2008, America’s wealthiest companies were in a pickle. Short-selling hedge funds, smelling blood as the global economy cratered, loaded up with bets against finance stocks, pouring downward pressure on teetering, hyper-leveraged firms like Morgan Stanley and Citigroup. The free-market purists at the banks begged the government to stop the music, and when the S.E.C. complied with a ban on financial short sales, conventional wisdom let out a cheer.

  “This will absolutely make a difference,” economist Peter Cardillo told CNN. “Now, if there is any good news, shorts will have to cover.”

  At the time, poor beleaguered banks were victims, while hedge funds betting them down as the economy circled the drain were seen as antisocial monsters. “They are like looters after a hurricane,” seethed Andrew Cuomo, then-Attorney General of New York State, who “promised to intensify investigations into short selling abuses.” Senator John McCain, in the home stretch of his eventual landslide loss to Barack Obama, added that S.E.C. chairman Christopher Cox had “betrayed the public’s trust” by allowing “speculators and hedge funds” to “turn our markets into a casino.”

  Fast forward thirteen years. The day-trading followers of a two-million-subscriber Reddit forum called “wallstreetbets” somewhat randomly decide to keep short-sellers from laying waste to a brick-and-mortar retail video game company called GameStop, betting it up in defiance of the Street. Worth just $6 four months ago, the stock went from $18.36 on the afternoon of the Capitol riot, to $43.03 on the 21st two weeks later, to $147.98 this past Tuesday the 26th, to an incredible $347.51 at the close of the next day, January 27th.

  The rally sent crushing losses at short-selling hedge funds like Melvin Capital, which was forced to close out its position at a cost of nearly $3 billion. Just like 2008, down-bettors got smashed, only this time, there were no quotes from economists celebrating the “good news” that shorts had to cover. Instead, polite society was united in its horror at the spectacle of amateur gamblers doing to hotshot finance professionals what those market pros routinely do to everyone else. If you’ve ever seen Animal House, you understand the sentiment:

  The press conveyed panic and moral disgust. “I didn’t realize it was this cultlike,” said short-seller Andrew Left of Citron Research, without irony denouncing the campaign against firms like his as “just a get rich quick scheme.” Massachusetts Secretary of State Bill Galvin said the Redditor campaign had “no basis in reality,” while Dr. Michael Burry, the hedge funder whose bets against subprime mortgages were lionized in “The Big Short,” called the amateur squeeze “unnatural, insane, and dangerous.”

  The episode prompted calls to regulate Reddit and, finally, halt action on the disputed stocks. As I write this, word has come out that platforms like Robinhood and TD Ameritrade are curbing trading in GameStop and several other companies, including Nokia and AMC Entertainment holdings.

  Meaning: just like 2008, trading was shut down to save the hides of erstwhile high priests of “creative destruction.” Also just like 2008, there are calls for the government to investigate the people deemed responsible for unapproved market losses.

  The acting head of the SEC said the agency was “monitoring” the situation, while the former head of its office of Internet enforcement, John Stark, said, “I can’t imagine there isn’t an open investigation and probably a formal order to find out who’s on these message boards.” Georgetown finance professor James Angel lamented, “it’s going to be hard for the SEC to find blatant manipulation,” but they “owe it to look.” The Washington Post elaborated:

  To establish manipulation that runs afoul of securities laws, Angel said regulators would need to prove traders engaged in “an intentional act to push a price away from its fundamental value to seek a profit.” In market parlance, this is typically known as a pump-and-dump scheme…

  Even Nancy Pelosi, when asked about “manipulation” and “what’s going on on Wall Street right now,” said “we’ll all be reviewing it,” as if it were the business of congress to worry about a bunch of day traders cashing in for once.

  The only thing “dangerous” about a gang of Reddit investors blowing up hedge funds is that some of us reading about it might die of laughter. That bit about investigating this as a “pump and dump scheme” to push prices away from their “fundamental value” is particularly hilarious. What does the Washington Post think the entire stock market is, in the bailout age?

  America’s banks just had maybe their best year ever, raking in $125 billion in underwriting fees at a time when the rest of the country is dealing with record unemployment, thanks entirely to massive Federal Reserve intervention that turned a crash into a boom. Who thinks the “fundamental value” of most stocks would be this high, absent the Fed’s Atlas-like support in the last year?

  For context, Goldman, Sachs posted revenues of $44.56 billion in 2020, its best year since 2009, a.k.a. the last year Wall Street cashed in on a bailout. Back then, the shortcut back to giganto-bonuses was underwriting fees for financial companies raising money to purge themselves of TARP debt. This time it’s underwriting fees for bond issues and IPOs. The subtext of both bailouts was that anyone who owned or underwrote financial assets got richer, while everyone else got the proverbial high hat. It’s no accident that income inequality dramatically accelerated after the last bailouts, and that the only people to see net gains in wealth since 2008 have been the richest 20% of Americans, a pattern almost certain to continue.

  The constant in the bailout years has been a battery of artificial stimulants sent through the financial sector, from the TARP to years of zero-interest-rate policies (ZIRP) to outright interventions like the multiple trillion-dollar rounds of Quantitative Easing. All that froth allowed finance companies to suck out hundreds of billions in fees, encouraged lunatic risk-taking in every direction and rampages of private equity takeovers, and kept a vast stable of functionally dead companies alive on cheap credit.

  Those so-called “zombie companies” make up roughly 30% of all corporations in America now, and they racked up over a trillion dollars in new debt since the pandemic alone. While policymakers may have stabilized the economy with the bailouts, they may also “inadvertently be directing the flow of capital to unproductive firms,” as Bloomberg euphemistically put it back in November.

  In other words, it was all well and good for investment banks and executives of phoney-baloney companies to gorge themselves on funhouse profits on a funhouse economy, but when amateurs decided to funnel just a bit of this clown show into their own pockets, finance pros wailed like the grave of Adam Smith had been danced upon. The worst was Morgan Stanley CEO James Gorman, who issued a somber warning that those behind the recent market frenzy are “in for a very rude awakening,” adding, “I don’t know if it is going to happen tomorrow, next week or in a month, but it will happen.”

  This is the same James Gorman whose company just saw its 2020 fourth-quarter profits go up 51% versus the year before, with total revenues up 16% to $48.2 billion, matching almost exactly the 16% rise in the stock market last year. If you’re going to rake in $33 million as Gorman did last year captaining a firm that just siphoned off billions in essentially risk-free profits underwriting a never-ending bailout, should you really be worrying about someone else getting a “rude awakening”? There are 19 million people collecting unemployment who might be reading those profit numbers. Does this man know how to spell “pitchfork”?

  GameStop has prompted more pearl-clutching than any news story in recent memory. Expert after grave-faced expert has marched on TV to tell Reddit traders that markets are complicated, this isn’t a game, and they wouldn’t be doing this, if they really understood how things work.

  “I’m not sure everybody fully understands what’s happening here,” was the melancholy comment on CNBC of Wall Street’s famed fluffer-in-chief, Andrew Ross Sorkin. The author of Too Big to Fail added in pedagogic tones that while this “stick it to the man moment” might feel good, betting up the value of GameStop above Delta Airlines just isn’t right, because “there are no fundamentals here”:

  Fundamentals? How much does Sorkin think his exalted Delta Airlines would be worth now, if the Fed hadn’t stopped its death plunge last March? How much would any of the airlines be worth in the Covid age, with their fleets of mothballed jets? What a joke!

  Furthermore, everybody “understands” what happened with GameStop. Unlike some other Wall Street stories, this one isn’t complicated. The entire tale, in a nutshell, goes like this. One group of gamblers announced, “Fuck you!” Another group announced back: “No, fuck YOU!”

  That’s it. Or, as one market analyst put it to me this morning, “A bunch of guys made a bet, got killed, then doubled and tripled down and got killed even more.”

  Regarding improprieties, leaving aside that the Redditors were doing exactly what billion-dollar hedge funds do every day — colluding to move a stock for fun and profit — the notion that this should be the subject of a federal investigation is preposterous.

  Is it completely outside the realm of possibility that the GME fiasco isn’t just day traders giving the finger to Wall Street, that “major players” are behind the stock’s movement, in an illegal manipulation scheme? No. Probably it’s not that, but it could be, just as some of the usual suspects may have piled on the long side once the frenzy started. But if there’s anything to investigate here, the obvious place to start is with the hedge funds and their brokers.

  While it isn’t a complicated story, some of the awesome humor of GameStop is in the mechanics.

  Unlike betting on a stock to go up (i.e. betting “long”), where you can only lose as much as you invest, the losses in shorting can be infinite. This adds a potential extra layer of Schadenfreude to the plight of the happy hedge fund pirate who might have borrowed gazillions of GameStop shares at five or ten hoping to tank the firm, only to go in pucker mode as Internet hordes drive the cost of the trade to ten, twenty, fifty times their original investment.

  Short-sellers bet by borrowing shares from so-called prime brokers (Goldman, Sachs and JP Morgan Chase are among the biggest), selling them, and waiting for the price to drop, at which point they buy them back on the open market at the lower price and return them. The commonly understood rub is that prime brokers don’t always really procure those original borrowed shares, and often give out more “locates” than they should, putting more shares in circulation than actually exist (as in this case). GameStop is exposing this systematic plundering of firms using phantom shares and locates, by groups of actors who now have the gall to complain that they’re the victims of a “get rich quick” scheme.

  Short-sellers are not inherently antisocial. They can be beneficial to society, instrumental in rooting out corruption and waste in whole sectors like the subprime industry, or in single companies like Enron. Moreover, the wiping out of such funds isn’t necessarily to be cheered. Sorkin correctly notes that many hedge funds invest on behalf of entities like pension funds, though maybe they shouldn’t, given their high cost and relatively mediocre performance, as I’ve noted before.

  However, that’s the point. The degree to which even the beneficial functions of short-sellers are cheered or not is dependent upon whose corruption they’re uncovering. Let the record show that when the S.E.C. imposed a ban on shorts of financial stocks in 2008, they routed short-sellers who were dead right about the insolubility of America’s banking sector. The state prevented their correct judgment about companies like Wachovia and Washington Mutual, whose stocks kept plunging even after the ban and went bust soon after.

  The shorts were right about all the other banks, too. The Inspector General of the TARP, Neil Barofsky, eventually told the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission that 12 of the 13 biggest banks were on the brink of failure when they got saved — by the short ban, by emergency overnight grants of commercial bank licenses to companies that weren’t commercial banks, by the bailouts, by the subsequent avalanche of underwriting fees, and most of all, by the lies about all of the above.

  The home of James “rude awakening” Gorman, Morgan Stanley, got its bank holding company license (and the lifesaving Fed credit lines that came with it) late on a Sunday night in September, 2008, because the firm couldn’t have opened its doors without it the next Monday morning. They’d have been blown to bits, by “fundamentals.” Instead, they got rescued, given a forever pass to keep feeding at the neck of society while claiming, falsely, to be not-failures and not-welfare recipients, better somehow than the “dumb money” they think should be theirs alone to manage.

  The rank selectivity of this makes any moral argument against the GameStop revolt moot. There’s no legitimate cause here, just an assertion of exclusive rights to plunder, which will doubtless be exercised now in the form of bans, investigations, and increased barriers to market entry. Probably also, in the political spirit of our times, there will some form of speech crackdown on platforms like Reddit, to protect us from the mob.

  About that: there are many making hay of a description found on a Subreddit, to the effect that wallstreetbets is “like 4Chan found a Bloomberg terminal.” A columnist at the Guardian, settling into the rhetorical line sure to find acceptance among the wine-and-MSNBC crowd, admitted to finding the rampaging-id dynamic on 4chan funny as a young person, but strange now to “witness a brief and regretful adolescent occupation re-emerge as a prominent cultural force.” The author wanted to admit to laughing at this “intentionally senseless” behavior, but ultimately decried the “transgressive attitudes” of the Redditors.

  This is where society will ultimately come down, of course, uniting to denounce $GME as financial Trumpism, even though it actually comes closer to being an updated and superior version of Occupy Wall Street. It’s likely not any evil manipulation scheme, but ordinary people acting — out of self-interest, but also out of sheer enthusiasm for one of the best reasons to do just about anything, because you can — on a few simple, powerful observations.

  They’ve seen first that our markets are basically fake, set up to artificially accelerate the wealth divide, and not in their favor. Secondly they see that the stock market, like the ballot box, remains one of the only places where sheer numbers still matter more than capital or connections. And they’re piling on, and it’s delicious, not so much because they’re right, but because the people running for cover are so wrong, and still can’t admit it.

  Buy the ticket, take the ride, nitwits. If you earned anything, it’s this.

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 01/30/2021 – 20:00

• Bill Gates Aghast Over 'Crazy And Evil Conspiracy Theories' About He And Fauci, Hints At Social Media Censorship
  Bill Gates Aghast Over ‘Crazy And Evil Conspiracy Theories’ About He And Fauci, Hints At Social Media Censorship

  Bill Gates is apparently shocked over ‘crazy and evil conspiracy theories’ which claim that he and Dr. Anthony Fauci are participating in a nefarious scheme to push vaccines, profit from the pandemic, and reduce the population.

  

  In Wednesday comments to Reuters, Gates said that there are “millions of messages out there” targeting he and Fauci, and suggested that “social media companies” might be able to censor discussion on the topic.

  “Nobody would have predicted that I and Dr. Fauci would be so prominent in really kind of evil theories about – did we create the pandemic, are we trying to profit from it? – and on and on,” said Gates, adding “We’re going to have to get educated about this over the next year and understand, how does it change people’s behavior?”

  “How should we have minimized this, either working with the social media companies or explaining what we were up to in a better way?“

  Gates’ motives have come under fire over his foundation’s 2019 participation in “Event 201“ – a collaboration between the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, the World Economic Forum and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation which simulated a global pandemic after a fictional coronavirus broke out among pigs in Brazil, before spreading to farmers. In the simulation, the virus infected the globe within six months, and killed 65 million people, triggering a global financial crisis. All of this took place just months before COVID-19 emerged.

  In an April 2020 interview, Gates told the BBC: “Now here we are. We didn’t simulate this, we didn’t practice, so both the health policies and economic policies, we find ourselves in uncharted territory.”

  In April 2018, Gates told the Massachusetts Medical Society that “millions could die” if the United States doesn’t prepare for a coming pandemic. Specifically, Gates said the U.S. government is falling short in preparing the nation and the world for the “significant probability of a large and lethal modern-day pandemic occurring in our lifetimes.”

  In 2017, Gates told the Munich Security Conference that world leaders should “imagine that somewhere in the world a new weapon exists or could emerge that is capable of killing millions of people, bringing economies to a standstill, and casting nations into chaos. If it were a military weapon, the response would be to do everything possible to develop countermeasures,” adding that a “sense of urgency is lacking” over biological threats.

  And according to Robert F. Kennedy, Gates was involved in a Polio immunization program in India which paralyzed 490,000 children.

  Promising his share of $450 million of $1.2 billion to eradicate Polio, Gates took control of India’s National Technical Advisory Group on Immunization (NTAGI) which mandated up to 50 doses (Table 1) of polio vaccines through overlapping immunization programs to children before the age of five. Indian doctors blame the Gates campaign for a devastating non-polio acute flaccid paralysis (NPAFP) epidemic that paralyzed 490,000 children beyond expected rates between 2000 and 2017. In 2017, the Indian government dialed back Gates’ vaccine regimen and asked Gates and his vaccine policies to leave India. NPAFP rates dropped precipitously.

  In 2017, the World Health Organization (WHO) reluctantly admitted that the global explosion in polio is predominantly vaccine strain. The most frightening epidemics in Congo, Afghanistan, and the Philippines, are all linked to vaccines. In fact, by 2018, 70% of global polio cases were vaccine strain.

  India barred the Gates Foundation from funding part of its immunization program, citing concerns over ‘non-governmental organizations’ asserting control over decision making in key policy areas.

  Gates has also opined on the need to control population growth – for which a plethora of theories exist involving vaccines. In 2012, Gates said: “The problem is that the population is growing the fastest where people are less able to deal with it. So it’s in the very poorest places that you’re going to have a tripling in population by 2050. (…) And we’ve got to make sure that we help out with the tools now so that they don’t have an impossible situation later.“

  So, in case Gates is wondering just why people are skeptical over his push to vaccinate the world and take a key outside role in advising the Biden administration’s COVID-19 response, the above evidence may offer some clues.

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 01/30/2021 – 19:30

• 6 Warning Signs From Biden's First Week In Office
  6 Warning Signs From Biden’s First Week In Office

  Authored by Kit Knightly via Off-Guardian.org,

  The “progressive” candidate praised as a “woke bloke” seems to be carrying on where all his authoritarian Imperialist predecessors left off…

  

  It’s been a busy first week for the 46th President of the United States, there are the 20,000 troops occupying the capital city to organise, as well as the totally unprecedented show-trial of his immediate predecessor.

  You know, usual democracy type stuff.

  On top of that, Biden has now signed at least 37 executive orders in his first week. The record for any President, and more than the previous four presidents combined.

  What do these orders, or any of his other moves, tell us about the future plans of the recently “elected” administration? Nothing good, unfortunately.

  1. VACCINATION PASSPORTS

  I still remember people claiming the introduction of vaccination passports (or immunity passes or the like) was just a “conspiracy theory”, the paranoid fantasy of fringe “covidiots”. All the way back in December, when they were getting fact-checked by tabloid journalists who can’t do basic maths.

  These days they are rebranded as “freedom certificates” which are “divisive, politically tricky and probably inevitable”.

  Many countries are already preparing to roll it out, including Iceland the UK and South Africa. Biden’s “Executive Order on Promoting COVID-19 Safety in Domestic and International Travel” adds the US to this list:

  International Certificates of Vaccination or Prophylaxis. Consistent with applicable law, the Secretary of State, the Secretary of HHS, and the Secretary of Homeland Security (including through the Administrator of the TSA), in coordination with any relevant international organizations, shall assess the feasibility of linking COVID-19 vaccination to International Certificates of Vaccination or Prophylaxis (ICVP) and producing electronic versions of ICVPs.

  2. CABINET APPOINTMENTS

  Biden’s cabinet is praised as the “most diverse” in history, but will hiring a few non-white people really change the decades-old policies of US Imperialism? It certainly doesn’t look like it.

  His pick for Under Secretary of State is Victoria Nuland, a neocon warmonger and one of the masterminds of the Maidan coup in Ukraine in 2014. She is married to Robert Kagan, another neocon warmonger, co-founder of the Project for a New American Century and senior fellow at the Brookings Institute and one of the masterminds behind the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

  The incoming Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, is also an inveterate US Imperialist, arguing for every US military intervention since the 1990s, and criticised Trump’s decision to withdraw from Syria.

  Biden’s pick for Defence Secretary is the first African-American ever appointed to this role, but former General Lloyd Austin is hardly going be some kind of “progressive” voice int his cabinet. He’s a career soldier who retired from the military in 2016 to join the board of Raytheon Technologies, an arms manufacturer and military contractor.

  As “diverse” as this cabinet may be in skin colour or gender…there is most certainly no “diversity” of opinion or policy. There are very few new faces and no new thoughts.

  So, it looks like we can expect more of the same in terms of foreign policy. A fact that’s already been displayed in…

  3. IRAQ…

  Despite heavy resistance from the military and Deep State, Donald Trump wanted to end the war in Iraq and pledged to pull American troops out of the country. This was one of Trump’s more popular policies, and during the campaign Biden made no mention of intending to reverse that decision.

  Then, on the very day of Biden’s inauguration, ISIS conducted their deadliest suicide bombing for over three years, and suddenly the situation was too unstable for the US to leave, and Biden is being forced to “review” Trump’s planned withdrawal.

  The Iraqi parliament has made it clear it wants the US to take its military off their soil, so any American forces on Iraqi land are technically there illegally in contravention of international law. But that never bothered them before.

  4. …AFGHANISTAN…

  Turns out the US can’t withdraw from Afghanistan either. Last February Trump signed a deal with the Taliban that all US personnel would leave Afghanistan by May 2021.

  Joe Biden has already committed to “reviewing” this deal. Sec. Blinken was quoted as saying that Biden’s admin wanted:

  to end this so-called forever war [but also] retain some capacity to deal with any resurgence of terrorism, which is what brought us there in the first place”.

  As a great man once said, nothing someone says before the word “but” really counts. The US will not be withdrawing from Afghanistan, and if there is any public pressure to do so, the government will simply claim the Taliban broke their side of the deal first, or stage a few terrorist attacks.

  5. …AND SYRIA

  Far from simply continuing the on-going wars, there are already signs Biden’s “diverse” team will look to escalate, or even start, other conflicts.

  Syria was another theatre of war from which Donald Trump wanted to extricate the United States, unilaterally ordering all US troops from the country in late 2019.

  We now know the Pentagon ignored those orders. They lied to the President, telling Trump they had followed his orders…but not withdrawing a single man. This organized mutiny against the Commander-in-Chief of the US Armed Forces was played for a joke in the media when it was finally revealed.

  There will be no need for any such duplicity now Biden is in the Oval Office, he was a vocal critic of the decision to withdraw, claiming it gave ISIS a “new lease of life”. Indeed, within two days of his being sworn in a column of American military vehicles was seen entering Syria from Iraq.

  6. DOMESTIC TERRORISM

  We called this before the inauguration. They made it just too obvious. Before the dirty footprints had been cleaned from Nancy Pelosi’s desk it was clear where it was all going.

  Within 24 hours of being sworn in as president, Biden had ordered a “review of the threat posed by domestic terrorism”.

  As usual, the press are laying down the covering fire for this. Talking heads have been busily comparing MAGA voters to al Qaida in television interviews. The Washington Post and New Yorker Journal have cut-and-paste pieces about this supposed threat. Politico published an article titled “Biden vowed to defeat domestic terrorism. The how is the hard part”, which outlines what Biden could do:

  Direct the Justice Department, FBI and National Security Council to execute a top-down approach prioritizing domestic terrorism; pass new domestic terrorism legislation; or do a bit of both as Democrats propose a crack down on social media giants like Facebook for algorithms that promote conspiracy laden posts.

  That last part is key. The “crack down on social media” part, because the anti-Domestic Terrorism legislation will likely be very focused on communication and so-called “misinformation”.

  Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez has publicly called for a congressional panel to “rein in” the media:

  We’re going to have to figure out how we rein in our media environment so you can’t just spew disinformation and misinformation,”

  And who will be the target of these crack downs and new legislations? Well, according John Brennan (ex-head of the CIA and accomplished war criminal), practically anybody:

  .@JohnBrennan: Biden intel community “are moving in laser-like fashion to try to uncover as much as they can about” the pro-Trump “insurgency” that harbors “religious extremists, authoritarians, fascists, bigots, racists, nativists, even libertarians” pic.twitter.com/SjVXWhPhR8

  — Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) January 20, 2021

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

  They’re casting a wide net. Expect “extremist”, “bigot” and “racist” to be just a few of the words which have their meanings totally revised in the next few months. “Conspiracy theorist” will be used a lot, too.

  Further, they are moving closer and closer toward the “anyone who disagrees with us is literally insane” model. With many articles actually talking about “de-programming” Trump voters. The Atlantic suggests “mental hygiene” would cure the MAGA problem.

  Again AOC is on point here, clearly auditioning for the role of High Inquisitor, claiming that the new Biden government needs to fund programs that “de-radicalise” “conspiracy theorists” who are on the “spectrum of radicalisation”.

  *  *  *

  As I said at the beginning, it’s been a busy week for Joe Biden, but you can sum up his biggest policy plans in one short sentence: More violence overseas, less tolerance of dissent and strict clampdowns on “misinformation”.

  How progressive.

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 01/30/2021 – 19:00

• Goldman Warns If The Short Squeeze Continues, The Entire Market Could Crash
  Goldman Warns If The Short Squeeze Continues, The Entire Market Could Crash

  Last Friday (Jan 22) we advised readers who thought they had missed the move in Gamestop (they hadn’t), to position appropriately in the most shorted Russell 3000 names which included such tickers as FIZZ, DDS, BBBY, AMCX, GOGO and a handful of other names, as it was likely that the short-squeeze was only just starting.

  

  We were right and all of the stocks listed above – and others – exploded higher the coming Monday, and all other days of the week, with results – encapsulated by the WallStreetTips vs Wall Street feud – that have become the only topic of conversation across America (remember the Trump impeachment?), while on WSB the only topic has been the phenomenal gains generated by going long said most shorted stocks. To wit, the basket of top shorts we compiled on Jan 22 has tripled in the past week.

  

  And while some are quick to blame last week’s fireworks on the “dopamine rush” of traders at r/wallstreetbets who seek an outlet to being “copped up with little else to do during the pandemic” (as Bloomberg has done, while also blaming widespread lockdowns and forgetting that it has been Bloomberg that was among the most vocal defenders of the very lockdowns that have given us the short squeeze of the century), the reality is that at the end of the day the strategy unleashed by the subreddit is merely an extension of the bubble dynamics that were made possible by the Federal Reserve (of which Bloomberg is also a very staunch fan) pumping trillions and trillions of shotgunned liquidity into a financial system where there are now bubble visible anywhere one looks. In short, main street finally learned that it too can profit from the lunacy of the money printers at the Marriner Eccles building, and some are very unhappy about that (yes, it will end in tears, but – newsflash – $300 trillion in debt and $120BN in liquidity injections monthly will also end in tears).

  That aside, one week later, Goldman has finally caught up with what Zero Hedge readers knew one week ago, and all the way down to a chart showing a basket of the most-shorted Russell 3000 stocks…

  

  … Goldman’s David Kostin has published a post-mortem of what happened last week, writing that “the most heavily-shorted stocks have risen by 98% in the past three months, outstripping major short squeezes in 2000 and 2009.”

  He then points out something we discussed in “Hedge Funds Are Puking Longs To Cover Short-Squeeze Losses“, noting that while aggregate short interest levels are remarkably low (imagine what would have happened has shorting been far more aggressive marketwide)…

  

  … “the -4% weekly return of our Hedge Fund VIP list of the most popular hedge fund long positions (GSTHHVIP) showed how excess in one small part of the market can create contagion.”

  As an aside, and as we showed previously, as the most shorted stocks soared…

  

  … hedge funds were forced to cover (as well as paying for margin calls), and as part of the broader degrossing they also had to sell some of the favorite hedge fund names across the industry, in this case represented by the Goldman Hedge Fund VIP basket.

  

  Yet what may come as a surprise to some, even as hedge funds deleveraged aggressively and actively cut risk this week, gross and net exposures “remain close to the highest levels on record” (something which may come as a huge surprise to Marko Kolanovic who has been erroneously claiming the opposite), suggesting that if the squeeze continues, hedge funds are set for much more pain.

  

  According to Goldman Sachs Prime Services, this week “represented the largest active hedge fund de-grossing since February 2009. Funds in their coverage sold long positions and covered shorts in every sector” and yet “despite this active deleveraging, hedge fund net and gross exposures on a mark-to-market basis both remain close to the highest levels on record, indicating ongoing risk of positioning-driven sell-offs.”

  With that in mind, here are Kostin’s big picture thoughts:

  It was a placid week in the US stock market – provided one was a long-only mutual fund manager. US equity mutual funds and ETFs had $2 billion of net inflows last week (+$10 billion YTD). Although the typical large-cap core mutual fund fell by 2% this week, it has generated a return of +1.3% YTD vs. S&P 500 down -1.1%. However, life was very different last week if one managed a hedge fund. The typical US equity long/short fund returned -7% this week and has returned -6% YTD.

  With the average WSB portfolio up double digits this past week, one can see why hedge funds are upset. Anyway, moving on:

  The past 25 years have witnessed a number of sharp short squeezes in the US equity market, but none as extreme as has occurred recently.In the last three months, a basket containing the 50 Russell 3000 stocks with market caps above $1 billion and the largest short interest as a share of float (GSCBMSAL) has rallied by 98%.  This exceeded the 77% return of highly-shorted stocks during 2Q 2020, a 56% rally in mid-2009, and two distinct 72% rallies during the Tech Bubble in 1999 and 2000. This week the basket’s trailing 5-, 10-, and 21-day returns registered as the largest on record.

  Thanks Goldman, and yes, your “brisk assessment” would have been more useful to your clients if it had come before the event (like, for example, this) instead of after.

  Kostin then goes on to point out that the “mooning” in the most shorted stocks took place even though aggregate short interest was near record low (imagine what would have happened had short interest been higher), which is odd because historically, “major short squeezes have typically taken place as aggregate short interest declined from elevated levels. In contrast, the recent short squeeze has been driven by concentrated short positions in smaller companies, many of which had lagged dramatically and were perceived by most investors to be in secular decline” to wit:

  Unusually, the rally of the most heavily-shorted stocks has taken place against a backdrop of very low levels of aggregate short interest. At the start of this year, the median S&P 500 stock had short interest equating to just 1.5% of market cap, matching mid-2000 as the lowest share in at least the last 25 years. In the past, major short squeezes have typically taken place as aggregate short interest declined from elevated levels. In contrast, the recent short squeeze has been driven by concentrated short positions in smaller companies, many of which had lagged dramatically and were perceived by most investors to be in secular decline.

  Of course, there is nothing “historical” about what happened last week, because – as we all know – the biggest difference between the typical short squeeze of the past and the recent rally in heavily-shorted stocks “was the degree of involvement of retail traders, who also appear to have catalyzed sharp moves in other parts of the market.” Why thank you WSB, but that’s ok – you will be handsomely rewarded.

  Last week we discussed the surging trading activity and share prices of penny stocks, firms with negative earnings, and extremely high-growth, high-multiple stocks. These trends have all accompanied a large increase in online broker trading activity. A basket of retail favorites (ticker: GSXURFAV) has returned +17% YTD and +179% since the March 2020 low, outperforming both the S&P 500 (+72%) and our Hedge Fund VIP list of the most popular hedge fund long positions (GSTHHVIP, +106%).

  

  So why does this matter? One simple reason: contrary to the bizarrely nonchalant optimism spouted earlier this week by JPMorgan’s Marko Kolanovic who said “any market pullback, such as one driven by repositioning by a segment of the long-short community (and related to stocks of insignificant size), is a buying opportunity, in our view,” Goldman has a far more dismal take on recent events, and writes that “this week demonstrated that unsustainable excess in one small part of the market has the potential to tip a row of dominoes and create broader turmoil.”

  He then picks up on what he said last weekend when responding to Goldman client concerns about a stock bubble, which we summarized in “Goldman’s Clients Are Freaking Out About A Stock Bubble: Here Is The Bank’s Response“, and which turned out to be 100% warranted, and writes that “most of the bubble-like dynamics we highlighted last week have taken place in stocks constituting very small portions of total US equity market cap. Indeed, many of the shorts dominating headlines this week were (prior to this week) small-cap stocks. But large short squeezes led investors short these stocks to cover their positions and also reduce long positions, leading other holders of common positions to cut exposures in turn.”

  As a result, Goldman’s Hedge Fund VIP list declined by 4%. Which is a problem because as Kostin concludes, “in recent years elevated crowding, low turnover, and high concentration have been consistent patterns, boosting the risk that one fund’s unwind could snowball through the market.“

  Translation: if WSB continues to push the most shorted stocks higher, the entire market could crash.

  And since Kostin admits that “the retail trading boom can continue” as “an abundance of US household cash should continue to fuel the trading boom” with more than 50% of the $5 trillion in money market mutual funds owned by households and is $1 trillion greater than before the pandemic, what happens in the coming week – i.e., if the short squeeze persists – could have profound implications for the future of capital markets.

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 01/30/2021 – 18:30

• DoorDash Scam Found To Be Fraudulently Charging People Who Didn't Even Have The App
  DoorDash Scam Found To Be Fraudulently Charging People Who Didn’t Even Have The App

  By Becky Robertson of Eat & Drink

  Food delivery has been absolutely booming amid pandemic lockdown, which is perhaps what made a new DoorDash scam all the more easy to pull off.

  @DoorDash_Help Reported fraud on my account 4 (!) days ago and DoorDash still hasn’t done anything. I keep getting told to wait 24 hours. Someone stole over $120 from me and all I’ve been offered is $41.71 in DoorDash credits for an order I didn’t even place. I am livid.

  — Amara Meierhoff (@AmaraJo611) January 19, 2021

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

  People across Canada and the U.S. recently found themselves hit with random debit charges from the California-based takeout delivery service — even those that have never even heard of the app.

  North of the border, the scam appeared to be limited to TD customers, some of who lost hundreds of dollars in phony charges for orders they didn’t place and DashPass memberships they didn’t sign up for.

  An exposé from the CBC found multiple citizens across six provinces including Ontario had been charged, even those who live in remote areas where DoorDash isn’t even offered. 

  It also seems that many of the targets weren’t even existing DoorDash customers, making the methodology of how the fraudsters got their banking info all the more sketchy.

  The origins of the scam and who is behind it have yet to come to light, but DoorDash has said that it is taking the situation very seriously and has worked with TD to resolve the issue through reimbursements.

  The company is in hot water for a number of other reasons as of late, including a class action lawsuit claiming it has been purposely diverting business away from restaurants who didn’t partner with it, creating phony landing pages and then listing them as “closed” to customers.

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 01/30/2021 – 18:00

• Biden Plagiarizes Again After Bloomberg Points Out Virus Plan Is Basically Trump's
  Biden Plagiarizes Again After Bloomberg Points Out Virus Plan Is Basically Trump’s

  While President Biden has done nothing but disparage President Trump’s COVID-19 vaccination plan – while promising on the campaign trail to ‘introduce his own,‘ it now appears there was no ‘new’ plan whatsoever – and his team is essentially using Trump’s playbook with “modest changes,” according to Bloomberg.

  

  Biden has said vaccine distribution was in “worse shape than we anticipated.” White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain said a Trump administration plan “did not really exist.” Adviser Cedric Richmond said they “didn’t leave a plan.” Xavier Becerra, Biden’s choice for health secretary, said it was like taking over a plane in a nosedive.

  But while Biden’s approach to the virus — frank warnings about the pandemic, mask mandates on federal property — is a reversal from Trump’s policies, his administration’s distribution of vaccines so far looks little different from that of its predecessor. Before Biden was sworn in, vaccines already were being delivered at a pace to meet his goal of 100 million doses in his first 100 days as president.

  The Biden administration has said they’ll order new doses, but will do so by exercising options in contracts negotiated by the previous administration, which thought it premature to do so. They say they’ll use the Defense Production Act, which Trump used repeatedly. Rather than a total overhaul, they have otherwise made course corrections and modest shifts. Data released Friday by Johnson & Johnson will fuel hopes that a third vaccine soon could hit the U.S. market. –Bloomberg

  Biden – who has a history of plagiarism – was essentially lying, especially when one considers the mammoth effort involved in distribution efforts which would make major changes costly and risk setbacks to the program. Bloomberg adds that “some aspects of the program don’t offer much wiggle room to begin with, while the trickiest part are yet to come.”

  Bloomberg does toss Biden a bone, however, reporting that Trump ‘undercut’ Biden’s efforts to shape the program by delaying the transition while disputing the results of the election. Trump’s team, however, says they had over 300 transition briefings with health officials – which Biden officials claim contained little useful information until just days before the inauguration.

  Meanwhile, officials from the Operation Warp Speed – the joint effort between the Trump administration’s Departments of Health and Human Services and DoD, say the partisan sniping from Biden’s team is hurting morale among career staff who are handling the vaccine rollout.

  “The transition is happening less well than I, and my team, had been hoping,” said Moncef Slaoui, chief scientific adviser to Operation Warp Speed. “The team doesn’t understand why the Operation is being criticized as it is. It is so unfair and unjustified.”

  “If it wasn’t for this Operation, we may not have as many vaccines as we will now.”

  Also pushing back against the Biden team’s besmirchments is Anthony Fauci, the highest-paid employee in the federal government and ongoing COVID-19 advisor to the Office of the President.

  “We certainly are not starting from scratch,” Fauci said earlier this month. “It’s taking what’s gone on, but amplifying it in a big way,” he added. Even Biden said that “credit is absolutely due” to the Trump administration for launching the vaccine program.

  The differences

  According to Bloomberg, “Biden is endorsing federally run community vaccination centers and mobile clinics,” and will attempt to provide states with a three-week supply, along with an increase in the number of people who can administer it. Trump officials, however, say the limitation is the number of vaccines, not healthcare professionals.

  Biden is also focusing on communities of color instead of devoting all resources to first vaccinating essential workers and those at most risk of dying from the virus. According to Biden, communities of color have been disproportionately affected by the virus.

  Yet, most of the plan remains unchanged.

  Via Bloomberg:

  [T]he biggest pieces of the distribution effort remain unchanged, undercutting claims from some Biden advisers that they inherited no plan. Many of the most stubborn bottlenecks don’t stem from the federal government’s decisions: Companies simply can’t produce vaccines fast enough and supplies are scarce; even if distribution goes smoothly, the administration of doses gets backed up at the local level.

  “What we’re seeing here is them marching through the playbook of Operation Warp Speed,” added Michael Pratt, a former Health and Human Services official under Trump. “Something cannot simultaneously be a dismal failure and have already accomplished the ‘ambitious goal’ you set.”

  Nearly every industrialized nation has been beset by vaccine delays. The European Union has moved to restrict vaccine exports. The U.S. has administered 8.3 doses per 100 people, trailing the U.K. and Israel yet outpacing Germany, Canada, France and the EU overall, according to Bloomberg’s Vaccine Tracker. –Bloomberg

  The Biden team has also retained many key Trump personnel, including the co-leader of Operation Warp Speed, General Gustave Perna.

  Furthermore, one of Biden’s key tools to move quickly on the virus response is the use of the Defense Production Act to prioritize the availability of certain materials and supplies – which the Trump administration used extensively.

  “It is really incorrect to say there was no plan — because we’re already achieving 1.3 million doses in arms per day, which exceeds the first goal President Biden had,” said Brett Giroir, who led the Trump administration’s program to ramp up widespread virus testing.

  One wild card is whether another vaccine will hit the market anytime soon. Late Friday, Johnson & Johnson announced that its single-dose vaccine generated strong protection against COVID-19 in a large, late-stage trial. The company expects it to be ‘quickly brought to market without the missed delivery timelines of the Pfizer shots.’ If authorized for use, the J&J vaccine could allow the Biden team to reach 2 million total doses per day according to a former Trump official.

  And that’s, the rest of the story…

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 01/30/2021 – 17:31

• Our Tech Minders & The Future Of Public Discourse
  Our Tech Minders & The Future Of Public Discourse

  Authored by Edward Morse, op-ed via The Epoch Times,

  Both Apple and Google have deplatformed Parler, a social media app widely used as an alternative channel for group communication.

  Amazon soon joined this effort by denying access to cloud services hosting Parler content. Other service providers apparently followed suit, constricting and perhaps exterminating Parler from among the options available to consumers.

  Parler was offline for over a week, until it eventually found a new platform, albeit one deprived of the convenient access allowed by apps. Parler users have also effectively been cancelled, regardless of their actual posting conduct, based on a professed concern about violent discourse on the site.

  Anyone who doubts that the large tech platforms have market power should take notice.

  Although competition provides alternatives in the long run, concentration within channels for app distribution and cloud hosting allowed Parler’s operations to be disrupted. In addition, competition in the marketplace of ideas became a little less robust—all based on discretionary judgments from minders in Big Tech. They profess a desire to protect us, but we have reason to question the evenhandedness of this putative protection and its contribution to our wellbeing.

  

  Bans and Suppression

  Twitter’s recent decision to ban President Donald Trump from its platform embraces a prophylactic approach to censorship. Twitter explained that it suspended Trump’s account “due to the risk of further incitement of violence.” (Of course, this presumes that he has incited violence in the first place.) In a blog the company describes as “your official source to what is happening,” Twitter officials explained that this decision depended on their contextual interpretation of two statements sent out by Trump:

  First, On Jan. 8 the president tweeted: “The 75,000,000 great American Patriots who voted for me, AMERICA First, and MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, will have a GIANT VOICE long into the future. They will not be disrespected or treated unfairly in any way, shape or form!!!!”

  Second, according to Twitter, “shortly thereafter” the president tweeted: “To all of those who have asked, I will not be going to the Inauguration on January 20th.”

  Twitter explains:

  “Due to the ongoing tensions in the United States, and an uptick in the global conversation in regards to the people who violently stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021, these two Tweets must be read in the context of broader events in the country and the ways in which the President’s statements can be mobilized by different audiences, including to incite violence, as well as in the context of the pattern of behavior from this account in recent weeks. After assessing the language in these Tweets against our Glorification of Violence policy, we have determined these Tweets are in violation …”

  On their face, neither of the statements by the president incite violence. (Trump supporters do, indeed, face adverse consequences, making the first statement incorrect. But that’s another matter.) Neither asks for violent action nor expresses support for past violence. And if context is important, Twitter fails to note that the president clearly asked for peaceful demonstration in his speech to supporters, as well as in a subsequent Tweet, which Twitter suppressed. He also swiftly condemned the violence and promised prosecution for the perpetrators.

  Twitter bases its assessment solely on predictions about how different audiences might respond to these statements. Likewise, Facebook (including its Instagram service) issued its ban based solely on the perceived risk of what the speaker might say in the future, which is even more speculative than Twitter’s approach. Democrat political leaders cheered them on, even claiming that these efforts were too little, too, late. Apparently, they would have preferred that Trump had been banned instead of censored during the campaign.

  Keeping Dissent in the Open

  Political campaigns are indeed much easier and, on the surface, more harmonious if you can suppress competing voices. But this is not the way of a free society. If messages can be cancelled based on predictions about how audiences will read them, then there’s a lot more inciting going on than we’ve previously realized. Twitter allowed repeated posts that approved of violence. Did those posts incite more violence, too?

  And predictions about likely effects on the audience is all we need to suppress speech: Consider the repeated tag of “false” or “baseless” added to claims of election wrongdoing in news reports going back to the days immediately after the election—before there was time to investigate. Based on the likely impact of those words on Trump supporters, is that a form of incitement, too?

  Big Tech minders are also intervening in this arena. On Dec. 10, while considerable litigation and investigation of alleged voter fraud and official misconduct remained under investigation, YouTube announced that it would ban videos addressing possible election fraud or claiming that errors changed the outcome of the election, attaching the presumption that all such allegations are “false.” YouTube thus became the judge of election outcomes, at least for its own platform.

  Suppression has a superficial appeal by clearing dissent from a channel. This gives the appearance of harmony and squelches the expression of similar views by sending a judgment of inferiority to others. However, the source of that dissent likely remains, and the channel for expression simply moves elsewhere.

  Trump’s opponents expressed dissent after the 2016 election, but instead of suppression, our nation undertook a lengthy public investigation of claims about Russian meddling in the election. The media dutifully reported every conspiratorial claim, including those debunked as false after the facts emerged. In some cases, the mainstream media arguably proved too gullible. But at least dialogue and debate were not suppressed based on contestable predictions about how people might react. Other protests likewise raised alternative theories about racial and economic justice. Some of these theories are based on flawed factual predicates, but those faults were left to be exposed by debate.

  Allowing these processes of investigation and dialogue did not eliminate the left’s animosity toward the president or their desire to remove him from office. But choosing the path of suppression eliminates even the possibility for dialogue and reason to prevail over alternatives that might include violence.

  Maintaining Competition

  Suppression is an exercise of power, not reason. Even when exercised by private actors instead of the government, it erodes the public trust by treating people as wards and not citizens. Our system is designed to restrict government suppression, but we haven’t yet wrestled with conditions that involve private suppression to the extent we’re now experiencing. Ordinarily, market forces provide options—and that’s likely to occur in the long run if collusion doesn’t restrict new entrants. But in an environment of concentrated market power, we face new challenges.

  Cancelling and suppressing may not be limited to speech or speakers but could also extend to other channels. Consider Signal, which is one of the top-rated communication apps on both the Google and Apple platforms. It permits encrypted messaging to escape the prying habits of the Big Tech giants who profit from collecting and selling your information. However, it also avoids the surveillance efforts of law enforcement. If the effects of a channel involve carrying speech that might involve crime or violence, will Signal be deplatformed, too? Ironically, Jack Dorsey, CEO of Twitter, is prominently featured on Signal’s website as endorsing the service.

  Our Big Tech minders must stop this suppression. Other legal means to address violent conspiracies exist without the overbroad decision to cancel speakers or channels, particularly based on speculative concerns about what might be said rather than what was actually said. We must also recognize that other encrypted channels exist, such as Signal, which allow communications to be undetected—creating a privacy cloak that benefits both lawful and unlawful activity.

  Suppressing future speech because of a desire to suppress violence is not a persuasive reason—wouldn’t it be better to have that speech out in the open for all (including law enforcement) to witness? We are capable of minding ourselves and making our own judgments about the truth. Cancellation and suppression threatens all of us. It’s not just Trump supporters saying this; even the ACLU shares this concern.

  We must somehow come to terms with our history and tradition of robust debate in this country. Competition is good for us in the economic realm, and it’s good for us in the quest for truth. Competition provides a much-needed dose of humility, cautioning us that we might not have it all right and that we might have to cooperate with our fellow citizens, despite our disagreements.

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 01/30/2021 – 17:00

• Has The Robinhood Exodus Begun? 
  Has The Robinhood Exodus Begun? 

  There’s no telling how many Robinhood users are infuriated with the discount brokerage after last week’s GameStop snafu following trading restrictions and forced liquidations. Still, the evidence is mounting of a possible mass exodus. 

  First, Google spent late last week removing nearly 100,000 negative reviews from the Robinhood app in the Google Play Store. Disgruntled Robinhood users, many of whom were restricted in buying GameStop shares or options or were forced to liquidate after the “mother of all short squeezes.” 

  Here’s a screenshot from the Google Play store when Robinhood had a one-star rating and nearly 275,000 reviews:

  

  Meanwhile, internet searches for “delete Robinhood” have gone parabolic in recent days, with other search queries including “how to delete Robinhood,” “delete my Robinhood account,” and, “how to delete a Robinhood account” surging across the country. 

  

  On Friday evening, in Google’s search engine, typing the word “delete” followed with “delete Rboinhood account” in the number two search spot.

  

  Someone created a petition on Change.org titled “Remove Robinhood From App Store,” which already has 32k signatures, with the needed goal of 35k. 

  

  The petition reads: 

  It’s clear that Robinhood doesn’t want individuals to make their own decisions, but large institutions like hedge funds can do as they please.

  Robinhood is in CLEAR violation of Apple’s Terms of Service to “plan or engage in any illegal, fraudulent, or manipulative activity.” You can find Apple’s full terms of service here: https://www.apple.com/legal/internet-services/itunes/us/terms.html

  Robinhood MANIPULATED the market today, and this is completely unacceptable. We need to remove Robinhood from the App Store. Move all your funds out of Robinhood today, do not give them your business. 

  … and an interesting few tweets from Tesla Uber-Bull Ross Gerber on the subject: 

  “Robinhood is basically not letting people trade anymore. This is the precursor to a potential BK filing on Monday morning. They’ll be calling their VC backers for billions more this weekend. And when they say No… this is like LTCM,” Gerber tweeted. 

  He said, “So if Robinhood goes under the SEC will freeze all the accounts. The SIPC protects up to $500k in accounts. It takes months to unwind and get your money back. Move the money now. This could become a nightmare.” 

  “Robinhood is dealing with the classic run on the bank scenario. Everyone wants out but they can’t process it fast enough depleting needed capital as fast as they can get new VC Capital in. So they need to put up more margin and they are losing Capital out the door,” Gerber warned. 

  There’s good news for Robinhooders fleeing the platform, brokerage WeBull announced late last week that GME, AMC, and KOSS were no longer restricted.

  Something bad is about to go down at Robinhood… 

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 01/30/2021 – 16:30

• "Republicans Need To Suffer": Drake Prof Triggers Free Speech Debate With Hateful Tweets Against Men, Conservatives
  “Republicans Need To Suffer”: Drake Prof Triggers Free Speech Debate With Hateful Tweets Against Men, Conservatives

  Authored by Jonathan Turley,

  There is a free speech debate at Drake University over hateful and vulgar tweets from Associate English Professor Beth Younger, who called for Republicans “to suffer.” We have seen increasing vulgar attacks from academics, including such high-profile figures as Laurence Tribe in the last few years. Notably, Twitter did not suspend Younger’s account for calling for harm to all Republicans. I do not believe that she should be barred from social media or fired from Drake as a matter of free speech. Even with professors who have justified the murder of conservatives or killing police are protected in such hateful expressions. 

  The solution to such hate speech is more (and better) speech.  I would rather we denounce such speech than censor it.

  

  Beth Younger tweeted on October 26th that  “I was just pondering how much hatred I feel towards all the Republican a**holes. They need to suffer.”

  Younger also declared that all “men are trash.” and sent a message to U.S. Senator Josh Hawley on Jan. 7 that stated “f**k of you piece of shit.” She also attacked Melania Trump and called Secretary Mike Pompeo a “f**king moron and a traitor.”

  Such sentiments are obviously concerning given many Republican students and presumably faculty on campus. It also have an impact on male students taking her class with her stated hatred for their gender.  In a compelling and well-considered email, President Marty Martin  correctly condemned Younger’s comments as “unacceptable.” Martin however stressed freedom of speech in her email this week:

  The Drake University Statement of Principles declares that freedom of thought and freedom of expression are central to our educational mission. We therefore carefully refrain from restricting the exchange of ideas or regulating the content of speech. We recognize that the frank and open discussion of social, cultural, artistic, religious, moral, scientific, and political issues may be disturbing and even hurtful for some individuals, but the principle of free exchange and inquiry takes precedence because of its fundamental role in our educational enterprise. We seek to create through this robust exchange of ideas a community in which shared purpose transcends difference and respect for human dignity transcends conflict.

  Younger’s tweets raise serious questions over sexist and political intolerance.  However, there is no allegation that she has engaged in discriminatory or hateful conduct in classes.  The question is whether universities would maintain such a position in favor of free speech if the statements targeted other groups like a male professor saying the same thing about women. It is not clear if there is a coherent line or policy on such cases. Free speech demands bright lines but the record among universities has been conflicted. I often hear from conservative and libertarian faculty about what they view as a double standard.  They do not believe that the universities would show equal tolerance for criticism, let alone hateful attacks, of other groups. Certainly many liberal faculty and students have not shown the same tolerance.

  As many on this blog are aware, I tend to be predictable on free speech issues.  My natural default is to protect speech, particularly when exercised off campus or on social media. These are difficult cases when statements reflect prejudice and sexism as in the case of Professor Younger.  However, there is a fear of a slippery slope once universities begin to punish those with unacceptable views expressed in their private capacity.  We have been discussing efforts to fire professors who voice dissenting views of the basis or demands of recent protests including an effort to oust a leading economist from the University of Chicago as well as a leading linguistics professor at Harvard and a literature professor at Penn. The silence of many faculty in the face of crackdowns on free speech has been chilling in the last few years.

  There is a palpable sense of fear among many conservative and libertarian faculty and students that they cannot express themselves on campus or in classes without be ostracized or even subjected to retaliatory measures, including attacks by the student government. While faculty member like Professor Younger might not show the same tolerance for opposing views, we have a greater responsibility to regain the trust of our communities in the tolerance for opposing views and expression on our campuses. She is the cost of free speech.

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 01/30/2021 – 16:00

• Reddit Preparing To Unleash "World's Biggest Short Squeeze" In Silver
  Reddit Preparing To Unleash “World’s Biggest Short Squeeze” In Silver

  While all eyes have been focused on GameStop and a handful of other heavily-shorted stocks as they exploded higher under continuous fire from WallStreetBets traders igniting a short-squeeze coinciding with a gamma-squeeze, the last few days saw another asset suddenly get in the crosshairs of the ‘Reddit-Raiders’ – Silver.

  On Thursday, we asked “Is The Reddit Rebellion About To Descend On The Precious Metals Market?” … One WallStreetBets user (jjalj30) posted the following last night:

  Silver Bullion Market is one of the most manipulated on earth. Any short squeeze in silver paper shorts would be EPIC. We know billion banks are manipulating gold and silver to cover real inflation.

  Both the industrial case and monetary case, debt printing has never been more favorable for the No. 1 inflation hedge Silver.

  Inflation adjusted Silver should be at 1000$ instead of 25$. Link to post removed by mods.

  Why not squeeze $SLV to real physical price.

  Think about the Gainz. If you don’t care about the gains, think about the banks like JP MORGAN you’d be destroying along the way.

  …

  Tldr- Corner the market. GV thinks its possible to squeeze $SLV, FUCK AFTER SEEING $AG AND $GME EVEN I THINK WE CAN DO IT. BUY $SLV GO ALL IN TH GAINZ WILL BE UNLIMITED. DEMAND PHYSICAL IF YOU CAN. FUCK THE BANKS.

  Disclaimer: This is not Financial advice. I am not a financial services professional. This is my personal opinion and speculation as an uneducated and uninformed person.

  …and judging by the unprecedented flows into the Silver ETF (SLV) they just got started…

  SLV saw inflows of almost one billion dollars on Friday, almost double the previous record inflow for this 15 year-old ETF.

  

  Source: Bloomberg

  Which helped prompt a spike in SLV off Wednesday’s lows of over 11% (and note that every surge in price was mimicked by gold, but gold was instantly monkey-hammered lower after the spike).

  

  Source: Bloomberg

  And judging by the asset flow, SLV has room to run here…

  

  Source: Bloomberg

  Just as short-interest in the ETF has been building…

  

  Source: Bloomberg

  This surge came after Reddit user ‘TheHappyHawaiian’ posted the following thesis on buying silver noting that “the worlds biggest short squeeze is possible and we can make history.”

  ‘TheHappyHawaiian’ cites two reasons to buy – The Short Squeeze and Fundamentals.

  The short squeeze:

  Buy SLV shares (or PSLV shares) and SLV call options to force physical delivery of silver to the SLV vaults.

  The silver futures market has oscillated between having roughly 100-1 and 500-1 ratio of paper traded silver to physical silver, but lets call it 250-1 for now. This means that for every 250 ounces in open interest in the futures market, only 1 actually gets delivered. Most traders would rather settle with cash rather than take delivery of thousands of ounces of silver and have to figure out to store and transport it in the future.

  The people naked shorting silver via the futures markets are a couple of large banks and making them pay dearly for their over leveraged naked shorts would be incredible. It’s not Melvin capital on the other side of this trade, its JP Morgan. Time to get some payback for the bailouts and manipulation they’ve done for decades (look up silver manipulation fines that JPM has paid over the years).

  The way the squeeze could occur is by forcing a much higher percentage of the futures contracts to actually deliver physical silver. There is very little silver in the COMEX vaults or available to actually be use to deliver, and if they have to start buying en masse on the open market they will drive the price massively higher. There is no way to magically create more physical silver in the world that is ready to be delivered. With a stock you can eventually just issue more shares if the price rises too much, but this simply isn’t the case here. The futures market is kind of the wild west of the financial world. Real commodities are being traded, and if you are short, you literally have to deliver thousands of ounces of silver per contract if the holder on the other side demands it. If you remember oil going negative back in May, that was possible because futures are allowed to trade to their true value. They aren’t halted and that’s what will make this so fun when the true squeeze happens.

  Edit for more detail: let’s say there’s one futures seller who gets unlucky and gets the buyer who actually wants to take delivery. He doesn’t have the silver and realizes it’s all of a sudden damn difficult to find some physical silver. He throws up his hands and just goes long a matching number of futures contracts and will demand actual delivery on those. Problem solved because he has now matched the demanding buyer with a new seller. The issue is that the new seller has the same issue and does the exact same thing. This is how the cascade effect of a meltup occurs. All the naked shorts trying to offload their position to someone who actually has some silver. My goal is to ensure that I have the silver and won’t sell to them until silver is at a far higher price due to the desperation.

  The silver market is much larger than GME in terms of notional value, but there is very little physical silver actually readily available (think about the difference between total shares and the shares in the active float for a stock), and the paper silver trading hands in the futures market is hundreds of times larger than what is available. Thus when they are forced to actually deliver physical silver it will create a massive short squeeze where an absurd amount of silver will be sought after (to fulfill their contractually obligated delivery) with very little available to actually buy. They are naked shorting silver and will have to cover all at once and the float as a percentage of the total silver stock globally is truly miniscule.

  The fundamentals:

  The current gold to silver ratio is 73-1. Meaning the price of gold per ounce is 73 times the price of silver. Naturally occurring silver is only 18.75 times as common as gold, so this ratio of 73-1 is quite high. Until the early 20th century, silver prices were pegged at a 15-1 ratio to gold in the US because this ratio was relatively known even then. In terms of current production, the ratio is even lower at 8-1. Meaning the world is only producing 8 ounces of silver for each newly produced ounce of gold.

  Global industry has been able to get away with producing so little new silver for so long because governments have dumped silver on the market for 80 years, but now their silver vaults are empty. At the end of WW2 government vaults globally contained 10 billion ounces of silver, but as we moved to fiat currency and away from precious metal backed currencies, the amount held by governments has decreased to only 0.24 billion ounces as they dumped their supply into the market. But this dumping is done now as their remaining supply is basically nil.

  This 0.24 billion ounces represents only 8% of the total supply of only 3 billion ounces stored as investment globally. This means that 92% of that gold is held privately by institutions and by millions of boomer gold and silver bugs who have been sitting on meager gains for decades. These boomers aren’t going to sell no matter what because they see their silver cache as part of their doomsday prepper supplies. It’s locked away in bunkers they built 500 miles from their house. Also, with silver at $23 an ounce currently, this means all of the worlds investment grade silver only has a total market cap of $70 billion. For comparison the investment grade gold in the world is worth roughly $6 trillion. This is because most of the silver produced each year actually gets used, as I have mentioned. $70 billion sounds like a lot, but we don’t have to buy all that much for the price to go up a lot.

  **If the squeeze happens, it would be like 40 years worth of their gains in 4 months **

  The reason that only 8 ounces of silver are produced for every 1 ounce of gold in today’s world is because there aren’t really any good naturally occurring silver deposits left in the world. Silver is more common than gold in the earth’s crust, but it is spread very thin. Thus nearly every ounce of silver produces is actually a byproduct of mining for other metals such as gold or copper. This means that even as the silver price skyrockets, it wont be easy to increase the supply of silver being produced. Even if new mines were to be constructed, it could take years to come online.

  Finally, most of this newly created silver supply each year is used for productive purposes rather than kept for investment. It is used in electronics, solar panels, and jewelry for the most part. This demand wont go away if the silver price rises, so the short sellers will be trying to get their hands on a very small slice of newly minted silver. The solar market is also growing quickly and political pressure to increase solar and electric vehicles could provide more industrial demand.

  The other part of the story is the faster moving piece and that is the inflation and currency debasement fear portion. The government and the fed are printing money like crazy debasing the value of the dollar, so investors look for real assets like precious metals to hide out in, driving demand for silver. The $1.9 trillion stimulus passing in a month or two could be a good catalyst. All this money combined with the reopening of the economy could cause some solid inflation to occur, and once inflation starts it often feeds on itself.

  What to buy:

  I will be putting 50% directly into SLV shares, and 50% into the $35 strike SLV calls expiring 4/16.

  

  This way the SLV purchase creates a groundswell into silver immediately that then rockets through a gamma squeeze as SLV approaches $35.

  Price target of $75 for SLV by end of April if the short squeeze happens.

  Edit: for the part of your purchases going into shares, some people recommend PSLV because they think SLV might start lying about having the silver in their vault. Or that the custodian will be double counting, ie claiming that the same silver belongs to multiple people (banking on the fact that people wont all try to get their silver at once). So if you buy SLV shares and calls, that’s great. But I think it could be prudent for us to buy options in SLV (no options on PSLV) and shares in PSLV. It all depends on how paranoid you want to be. There is a lot of paranoia in the precious metals world.

  Alternate options:

  • buying physical silver; this also works but you pay a premium to buy and sell so its less efficient and you take fewer silver ounces off of the market because of the premium you pay

  • going long futures for February or March; if you are a rich bastard and can actually take physical delivery of 1000s of ounces of silver by all means do so. But if you simply settle for cash you are actually part of the problem. We need actual physical delivery, which is what SLV demands and is why SLV is the way to go unless you are going to take delivery

  • miners; I don’t recommend buying miners as part of this trade. Miners will absolutely go up if SLV goes up, but buying them doesn’t create the squeeze in the actual silver market. Furthermore, most silver miners only derive 30-50% of their revenue from silver anyways, so eventually SLV will outperform them as it gets high enough (and each marginal SLV dollar only increases miner profits by a smaller and smaller percentage)

  Details on SLV physical settlement:

  When SLV issues shares, the custodian is forced to true up their vaults with the proportional amount of silver daily. From the SLV prospectus:

  “An investment in Shares is: Backed by silver held by the Custodian on behalf of the Trust. The Shares are backed by the assets of the Trust. The Trustee’s arrangements with the Custodian contemplate that at the end of each business day there can be in the Trust account maintained by the Custodian no more than 1,100 ounces of silver in an unallocated form. The bulk of the Trust’s silver holdings is represented by physical silver, identified on the Custodian’s or, if applicable, sub-custodian’s, books in allocated and unallocated accounts on behalf of the Trust and is held by the Custodian in London, New York and other locations that may be authorized in the future.”

  ‘TheHappyHawaiian” ends with a call to (financial) arms:

  Join me brothers. Lets take silver to the moon and take on the biggest and baddest manipulators in the world.

  Please post rocket emojis in the comments as desired.

  Disclaimer: do your own research, make your own decisions, everything here is a guess and hypothetical and nothing is guaranteed, not a financial advisor, I have ADHD and maybe other things too.

  Bear case: silver does tend to sell off if the broader market plunges so it’s not immune to broad market sell off. It’s also the most manipulated market in the world so we are facing some tough competition on the short side

  Interestingly, ‘TheHappyHawaiian’ dropped this update on 1/29:

  Due to the manipulation and collusion of citadel, hedge funds, and brokers to change the rules and rig the game in their favor. Who likely knew ahead of time and bought puts right before and calls at the bottom, GME is too important to abandon still. SLV is still my next play but GME needs to go to $1000 and these people need to go to jail.

  However, judging by the massive physical premiums for silver we are seeing this weekend at APMEX…

  

  … and JM Bullion…

  

  …there are more than a few who are already rotating to SLV from GME.

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 01/30/2021 – 15:30

• Revolution, Revenge Of The Nerds, Or The Matrix Reloaded?
  Revolution, Revenge Of The Nerds, Or The Matrix Reloaded?

  Authored by Tom Luongo via Gold, Goats, ‘n Guns blog,

  I have to say as revolutions go, this one is hilarious.

  

  GameStop opened Friday morning above $330 per share, a sentence I never thought in a million years I’d ever write.

  This open nearly ensures that all the attempts Thursday to push the price back down to bail out the hedge funds desperately short have failed spectacularly.

  There’s options expiration today which will fundamentally change the way we look at markets if Game Spot closes in this range.

  Because it shows that when people act in the aggregate they can overwhelm the attempts by a few central planners to control you.

  Your best proof that this is at least a part of what’s going on is the way Wall St. and the regulators in D.C. are reacting. Because they are screaming that this is outrageous, that we need stronger enforcement tools to ‘ensure the integrity of our markets.’

  That’s just code for ‘only we’re allowed to game the markets not the little people.’

  And with options expiring on GameStop nearly every week in February and March this game isn’t over by any stretch of the imagination.

  Populist is a Four-Letter Work

  In fact, It’s the beginning of a new form of populist revolt.

  We’ve seen what they think of populist revolts. They have utter disdain for them. They squash them and hope to ignore the consequences.

  Vote for Trump? Can’t have that happen again.

  Speak out against any facet of the Great Reset? Get censored.

  Try to build a new platform not controlled by them? Get deplatformed.

  Show up at the Capitol to peacefully assemble? Get caught up in a false flag to justify arresting you and shaming you into submission.

  Today’s price action in Game Spot and other stocks heavily-shorted by hedge funds is simply the next iteration of the people finding ways to make their voices heard.

  If you remove someone’s ability to speak in one arena they will find a way in another.

  

  And don’t for a second think the irony of this evolution of Occupy Wall St. occurring during the World Economic Forum’s virtual Davos is lost on me.

  It isn’t.

  In an age where we are forced to wear masks in ritual submission to oligarchic control they hide behind ever bigger barriers to our hatred of them.

  As we saw on Capitol Hill three weeks ago, public assembly in the age of COVID is a recipe for even more ‘wound collecting‘ by the oligarchy, who have their media quislings turn into it bad PR for how unruly the little people are to scare the ‘normies.’

  Black-Scholes Event Horizon

  But what happens when the little people don’t care about making money or any of those other ‘rational’ investor/actor assumptions which undergird the value-at-risk equations used by most hedge funds and Wall St. quants?

  What happens when someone finally blows the lid off the assumption that the risk-free rate of return, R* in the Black Scholes Equation, is anything less than 1000% for $100 call option on Game Spot?

  Well, today it means a few rich people will be made poor and a lot of poor people richer.

  The bigger question however, about all of this is what happens when, finally, the markets admit that R* for U.S. Treasuries is not zero?

  Because that’s what this whole Game Spot Revolution is really about, opening up major cracks in the confidence and validity of the institutions that are supposed to be so unassailably powerful that markets rely on to justify insane valuation models.

  They made a mistake staging their failed Tiananmen Square moment at the Capitol. No one other than them was really upset about it other than people getting shot (Her name was Ashli Babbitt).

  It means that for a moment, and possibly a few more moments, given how screwed up our financial system is, the little guy’s anger just got capitalized.

  They Hate US for Our Freedoms

  And the irony is the seed capital for this came from their own disdain for us.

  When the last round of stimulus checks showed up, I don’t know about you but I was angry. My wife and I stared at it for a few days and doing so made us viscerally mad.

  It represented just how little they thought of all the people whose lives they’d ruined. Paying out the bare minimum to hold us over until they’d fully consolidated power behind barricades and 25,000 troops in D.C.

  When asked about what I would do with my stimmy check I replied the same way every time, “Pay my taxes with it.”

  But even if 2020 was good for you financially as it was, admittedly for me, all of this COVID-destruction destroyed something far more important: quality of life.

  It wasn’t about the money, it was about what was truly lost. The personal bonds broken, the psychological damage to my daughter trying to school via Zoom while going slowly insane.

  The destruction of my weekly ‘guys night out’ board gaming group and, now, my martial arts school, a staple in our lives for over 25 years. We shared one last pitcher of beer last night holding back tears.

  The haunted looks of my friends and favorite local vendors trying to keep it together.

  We all have those stories. They take their toll. The scar tissue builds.

  So, when that check showed up after six months of Nancy Pelosi burning down people’s lives even more to burn down her nemesis Donald Trump, we all knew what the score was.

  They care about you like a virus cares about its host.

  And finally, after a year of this, instead of sitting around wondering what DLC to buy for Fortnight with their stimulus check a bunch of really angry smart guys said, “You know what? Fuck these assholes.”

  Hours after we tweeted this in June, we got the following letter from Citadel’s lawyers pic.twitter.com/Zy2m2fC6kM

  — zerohedge (@zerohedge) January 29, 2021

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

  And they got a whole lot of people with nothing left to lose (except their payola to not disturb Queen Nancy) to go along with them.

  Revenge of the Nerds?

  That anger, as I said, is now pretty well capitalized, the same way that 2017’s cryptocurrency rally capitalized a whole lot of committed anarcho-assholes of all political stripes to build on top of bitcoin’s reserve status.

  The early fruits of that labor are also on display today. Not because these guys are pushing their GameStop profits into Dogecoin but because after a massive coordinated attack to break Bitcoin after the peak near $42,000 two weeks ago, it couldn’t be beaten back below $20,000, the previous all-time high.

  All of a sudden there were places to park crypto-profits which weren’t U.S. dollars, the asset where all the off-ramps could be shut off and the little people trapped inside Coinbase getting slaughtered while it’s ‘down for maintenance.’

  That’s why today is so fascinating. Wall St. thought all they had to do was double down on their GameStop shorts and use their hammer to beat the nails back into the board.

  It didn’t work. By then this thing had gone global.

  Now, you have to wonder who was helping the rabble push GameStop back above the $210 Maginot Line? Once something like this starts Wall St.’s enemies start coming out of the woodwork to piggy back on the chaos and change the board state of global markets.

  Think China, Russia and everyone else sanctioned to hell and gone by Neocons in our government in the service of Israel.

  And yesterday’s close forced a lot of people to scramble and find the money they need to cover their losses or these meme-lords will own enough shares to not only own Game Spot’s board but also have money left over to go after someone else.

  Maybe American Airlines? Maybe Blackberry? Maybe Nokia?

  This is the first real battle in an asymmetric war.

  And those stocks would be very interesting to see successful populist raids on. Can we say hostile takeover and a recapitalization of Blackberry or Nokia outside of the Apple/Google mobile web duopoly?

  I’d sell my iPhone if that happened.

  Hey, I’m just vamping here, but if these guys are serious about doing damage and re-leveling the playing field that financial advice I’m not allowed to give you can have for free.

  Reality is that which, when you stop….

  At the same time there’s also the reality that when the masses storm the financial Bastille like this there’s a lot of bystanders run over in the process.

  The guys at r/WallStreetBets understood the structure of the markets. They understand that Robinhood had to shut down trading on Game Spot and others simply because Robinhood wouldn’t have enough cash to post the required collateral thanks to Dodd-Frank.

  Postscript: This thread is the best explainer on the regulatory capital issues I referenced. (Ht: @The_Analyst) https://t.co/jWjtXjh5aQ

  — Diogenes (@WallStCynic) January 29, 2021

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

  Moreover, it’s going to cause real problems with clearinghouses and primary banks. Robinhood had to tap more than a billion dollars to cover the collateral.

  And today’s close will make that number bigger. Which makes me wonder if this chaos unleashed by the Game Spot Revolution doesn’t have a more sinister angle.

  One where an upstart retail brokerage was stealing too much market share for trading fees and, like the proles on Reddit, was making too much money threatening the someone else’s business.

  … Believing in it Doesn’t Go Away.

  So, is this an elaborate hit job inside of this populist uprising like what we saw at the Capitol on January 6th?

  Like I said at the outset the usual suspects are all out their today saying we need wealth taxes and trading fees on stock trades. There will be punishment for upsetting the sanctity of our capital markets.

  Are we all just, as always, having our chain jerked by a bunch of psychopaths looking to advance a new regulatory environment where the validity of capital markets themselves are undermined?

  Because, you don’t think the Commies who just performed a coup in D.C. through blatant election fraud and whose Masters are bloviating about ‘rebooting capitalism’ as I type this would concoct such a thing would you?

  Surely things couldn’t be that corrupt? No. Power to the Short Squeeze and all hail Elon Musk!

  If you don’t think that’s possible then I’ve got some GameStop January 2023 Leaps at $250 strike price to sell you. As many as you like… 140% of the float even.

  I sincerely hope I’m wrong but something tells me I’m not being cynical enough.

  *  *  *

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  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 01/30/2021 – 15:00

• Mark Cuban Presents A "Little Trick" For Creating The Mother Of All Short Squeezes
  Mark Cuban Presents A “Little Trick” For Creating The Mother Of All Short Squeezes

  A few days ago when Wall Street was panicking over the unprecedented short squeeze that had sent the most shorted names soaring and streamrolling hedge funds such as Melvin Capital, Maplelane and countless others, we said that instead of engaging in damage control already perhaps Wall Street should consider how much worse it could still get. To wit, late on Jan 26 we said that a “little trick” that is available (for those with cash accounts) was for holders of GME stock to call back shares they owned of the heavily shorted names.

  Here’s a little trick: everyone who is long GME should instruct their broker tomorrow to make their shares not lendable.

  — zerohedge (@zerohedge) January 27, 2021

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

  Just a few hours later, early in the Thursday premarket session, things started to really move: that’s when GME hit an all time high of $513.12 which has yet to be topped.

  So did people call back their shares? Perhaps, we don’t know, or maybe that’s about to happen. According to S3 Partners, the total short interest is still a whopping 113% of the float, which means the squeeze could easily go on for a long time if the buyers kept applying pressure.

  And none other than Mark Cuban may have assured of just that.

  In a series of tweets on Friday, the iconic investor and “shark” compared the lending and rebate payment mechanism in stocks vs DeFi crypto tokens (where the bearer gets the benefit of the borrow fee and not the broker) and said – in an almost verbatim paraphrase of our “tricky” tweet from two days earlier – the following:

  “one trick that I have been on both sides of is to lend out stock to shorts at a high APY and then call back my shares, which forces the short to cover. Now if #WSB did this en masse, it would be the mother of all short squeezes “.

  Cuban made another point which we also addressed previously, namely that with millions of new users signing up to r/WallStreetBets where each trader has an average brokerage account of $5,000 (soon to get another $1,400 “stimmy check” infusion), the subreddit has become the world’s biggest distributed, decentralized hedge fund with a “hive mind”, where all the individual traders coordinate and work as one, and one which can steamroll over virtually any Wall Street veteran. In fact, at this rate, Once WSB has 15 million or so members – which should happen by the end of the week, as it now has a whopping 7 million up from 2 million at the start of the week…

  /r/WallStreetBets Traffic Growth: What going viral looks like pic.twitter.com/rBAt3CTMWu

  — wallstreetbets mods (@wsbmod) January 30, 2021

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

  … it will have more monetary firepower than the world’s biggest hedge fund (central banks not included) Bridgewater:

  It’s becoming the biggest distributed hedge fund in the world https://t.co/LG4FskAjmH

  — zerohedge (@zerohedge) January 29, 2021

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

  And here’s Cuban on this topic too: “The beauty of what has happened with #WSB is that Wall street is learning an expensive lesson that The Way Things Have Always Been Done is not How Things Should Be Done. There is power in numbers working together. Buy and Trade Together can be a whole lot more powerful than old-school buy and hold. Im not saying HODLing stocks is bad. It can be great and have the same impact as HODLing crypto. And the same principals even apply. The number of shares outstanding and their growth is comparable to coins mined (without the algorithmic control).”

  His full thread is below (source):

  Lets talk $GME shorts vs De-Fi. When someone shorts a stock that is already heavily shorted, they have to pay a fee to borrow that stock. In the case of $GME that fee has been hovering around 30% this week. Shorts have to pay (Price x .30)/360 per day. In DeFi thats a 30% APY.

  For RH Traders that own $GME that money, as best I can tell, is held in street name. Which means that 30% APR goes 100pct to @RobinhoodApp 😬😬😬. Imagine if you pooled your crypto and the platform was getting 30% APY and didnt pay all but fees to you ? What would happen ?

  This is one more way that Wall St takes advantage of the little guy. If you are moving from RH, look to see if you can find some place that allows you to hold the shares and lend them in YOUR name, so you get the Yield (Yield Farming in stocks !). Not all will allow it.

  But if they do, one trick that I have been on both sides of is to lend out stock to shorts at a high APY and then call back my shares, which forces the short to cover. Now if #WSB did this en masse, it would be the mother of all short squeezes .

  The beauty of what has happened with #WSB is that Wall street is learning an expensive lesson that The Way Things Have Always Been Done is not How Things Should Be Done. There is power in numbers working together. Buy and Trade Together can be a whole lot more powerful than old-school buy and hold. Im not saying HODLing stocks is bad. It can be great and have the same impact as HODLing crypto. And the same principals even apply. The number of shares outstanding and their growth is comparable to coins mined (without the algorithmic control).

  If small trades can work together and share information together the power to move stock pricing moves quickly from the analyst on Wall Street to the people working together. There is one VERY IMPORTANT caveat. No amount of trading together can keep a bad company in business.

  But if individual traders educate each other and use their combined strength to focus on good companies , with strong prospects, the power shifts from wall street to main street, particularly now that Direct Listings are changing the IPO game. Thoughts ? Comments ?

  So for all those wondering how and when GameStop will Stop, and if the squeeze is finally over, as long as iconic figures with a chip on their shoulder and a desire to inflict more pain on Wall Street continue to chime in with perspectives on how to keep the pain up, it is likely that the unprecedented short squeeze mania is not over by a long shot. And furthermore, with borrow costs now at 50%, even in the absence of further painful gains in the stock price the cost of carry alone will force the shorts to cover in the coming days should the price of GME fail to drop.

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 01/30/2021 – 14:45

• COVID Lockdowns Spark Biggest Cigarette Sales Spike In Years
  COVID Lockdowns Spark Biggest Cigarette Sales Spike In Years

  During the first months of quarantine, when nobody really had any idea whether they’d be seeing their colleagues again next week, next month, or next year, reporters churned out stories about people walking, jogging or otherwise exercising to try and squeeze out a little endorphin boost while also helping to prepare one’s body for the worst-case scenario (after all the stories we have published about COVID “long haulers”, those risks, however slight, should be widely understood).

  But as the months dragged on, it appears Americans turned instead to a quick buzz as rates of drinking alcohol, using drugs and, now, smoking cigarettes climbed. As WSJ reports, 2020 was the first year in decades that cigarette use among Americans increased, instead of declining.

  

  Even though the “vaping illness” has been largely attributed to an additive in illegal marijuana vaping products, sales of nicotine vaping products never rebounded from the paranoia it caused. A sense of pervasive skepticism lingers, as several of the WSJ’s sources pointed out. In the US, cigarette sales topped sales from five years’ ago when many consumers switched back to cigarettes after trying first-generation vaping devices.

  Before the pandemic, cigarette sales had been falling at an accelerating rate. Sales declined by 5.5% in 2019. But in 2020, the trend suddenly reversed, and sales were flat.

  The reasons for the spike in cigarette sales aren’t too difficult to deduce: Being stuck at home all the time gave people more opportunities to smoke, while the inability to go out and see and meet people essentially forced them to save money on gas, travel and entertainment, which they could then spend on cigarettes). The Virginia-based company posted EPS of $1.03 (or 99 cents per share on an adjusted basis). That’s a couple cents shy of what Wall Street had expected. Still, cigarettes outperformed many other consumer products, and sales in 2020 were even stronger than in 2015, when a drop in gas prices gave consumers more discretionary money to play around with.

  Despite the success in cigarette sales during the prior 12 months, Altria didn’t offer a projection for cigarette sales in 2021, saying Thursday that it would depend in part on the rollout of the COVID-19 vaccine, an excuse that has been offered by pretty much every publicly-traded US company.

  E-cigarette sales were booming by the fall of 2019 as the popularity of the Juul vaporizer, which caught on among teens and got a whole new generation of Americans addicted to nicotine and tobacco, were blamed for reviving the practice, especially in the US. But many of those same users have apparently now made the switch to cigarettes.

  

  Recognizing this, ederal regulators under Dr. Scott Gottlieb, who ran the FDA before Dr. Stephen Hahn, moved to crush cigarette sales when they raised the federal age for legal tobacco purchases to 21, while pushing President Trump to bar flavored vapes and menthol cigarettes, though the president ultimately demurred.

  And if the COVID-19 vaccination process takes even longer than Dr. Anthony Fauci & Co. are saying, we imagine next year might be another big year for tobacco sales as well, especially as the Biden Administration roles out the stimulus checks and unemployment benefits.

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 01/30/2021 – 14:30

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