Mar 31

Today’s News 31st March 2021

  • Austria's Kurz Derides EU's "Geopolitical Blinkers" On Vaccine, Confirms Talks For Sputnik V
    Austria’s Kurz Derides EU’s “Geopolitical Blinkers” On Vaccine, Confirms Talks For Sputnik V

    It appears the campaign by some EU and US officials to try and ensure Russia’s Sputnik V jab stays out of Europe and Western countries isn’t going so well. 

    Earlier this month it was widely reported that despite European Union leaders’ fierce public criticisms of Russia’s coronavirus vaccine, the reality is that “Behind the scenes, the bloc is turning to Moscow’s Sputnik V shot as it tries to get its stuttering efforts to vaccinate its 450 million people back on track, EU diplomatic and official sources told Reuters.” It was noted at the time that at least four EU states were seeking to make their own independent deals regardless of the unease in Brussels. 

    And now on Tuesday Reuters reports “Austria is in talks with Russia to buy a million doses of its Sputnik V coronavirus vaccine, which has yet to be approved by the European Medicines Agency,” according to a statement by Chancellor Sebastian Kurz’s office.

    Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz, via AFP

    It’s predictably unleashed a storm of controversy as the conservative leader is being accused of deliberately and negligently failing to buy the max coronavirus vaccines it was allowed under the European Union’s collective purchasing scheme.

    Kurz responded by suggesting Austria’s government would not be beholden to Brussels’ anti-Russia stance which should have no bearing on the science of whether or not Sputnik V is effective. He said:

    “There must be no geopolitical blinkers regarding vaccines… The only thing that must count is whether the vaccine is effective and safe.”

    Kurz has complained that the EU’s vaccination steering board system for determining how many jabs a country gets is opaque and unreliable, resulting in vaccines distributed “unevenly”.

    Back in February, Kurz began being increasingly vocal over not being concerned about the Russian aspect: “It’s about getting a safe vaccine as quickly as possible, never mind who makes it,” he had “controversially” said in an interview with the German weekly Welt am Sonntag.

    “Austria would certainly try to make production capacity available at appropriate national firms if the Russian and Chinese manufacturers secure approval and are produced in Europe… just like manufacturers from other countries.” He had explained if available he would personally be ready to receive the Russian vaccine if approved.

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    Slovakia is another country where talks to procure the Sputnik vaccine has unleashed a full-blown political crisis. 

    As a prime example of this kind of fear-driven motivation fueling the controversy and debate, earlier this month Charles Michel, the Belgian politician who has served as President of the European Council since 2019, reiterated a commonly echoed theme among diplomats and Western officials: “We should not let ourselves be misled by China and Russia, both regimes with less desirable values than ours, as they organize highly limited but widely publicised operations to supply vaccines to others,” he said.

    Michel had vowed, “Europe will not use vaccines for propaganda purposes.” It’s this kind of rhetoric that Austria’s Kurz is vowing will not impact his country’s sovereign decision to deal with the vaccine suppliers it wishes. 

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 03/31/2021 – 02:45

  • Biden's Ukrainian "Putin Push" May Lead To World War III
    Biden’s Ukrainian “Putin Push” May Lead To World War III

    Authored by Bruce Wilds via Advancing Time blog,

    Biden was in charge of much of the “Ukraine project” during Obama’s time in office.

    In recent weeks President Biden has been saying some rather mean-spirited things about Russia’s President Vladimir Putin. Now Russian state sources are alleging that Washington under the Biden administration is ramping up military aid to Ukraine. This comes after the media observed the Ocean Glory, a US cargo ship, began delivering 350 tonnes of military equipment, including tactical vehicles, at Ukraine’s Odessa port. Ukraine’s Dumskaya news agency said the American vessel carried at least 35 US military humvees for Ukrainian national forces.

    Adding Ukraine to NATO and the EU is a long-held dream of neocons like Victoria Nuland and neoliberals like Biden. This is also important to those supporting the World Economic Forum’s desire to expand the EU and encircle Russia.

    They feel such an action would disrupt any dreams of Eurasian integration which could resist their strategy to reshape the way the world is governed. Putin’s foreign policy, coupled with efforts to rebuild the Russian military, has been part of an effort by the former KGB officer to boost Russia’s standing on the world stage.

    This has helped make him popular with his people even as NATO has slowly been expanding in the direction of Russia, but also makes him a thorn in the side of the NWO gang.

    NATO Has Slowly Expanded Towards Russia

    Interestingly, this delivery of military equipment occurred near the time Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, was signing Decree No. 117/2021. The decree activates the Ukraine Army to recapture and re-unify with Ukraine, the autonomous region of Crimea, and the city of Sevastopol. The military has been instructed to use “hybrid warfare” to re-conquer these former parts of Ukraine. In short, this means Ukraine declared war on Russia, certainly something it would never consider without major backing. It must be noted, his actions are in total conflict with his promise to end the now nearly seven-year-long war in eastern Ukraine that played a central role in his election in 2019. This indicates, Zelensky has continued to subordinate his government’s policies to the US- and NATO-led war drive against Russia.

    One Ukrainian blogger contends the censorship of the three opposition channels in Ukraine and the surprise inspection of Ukrainian army units in Donbas link all this together and signals a resumption of the Donbas conflict. He wrote on his Telegram channel, “Protecting his rear through censorship, Zelensky ordered to start an inspection of the AFU units in Donbas in order to establish their readiness to carry out the orders of the military command.” He then went on to say, “Didn’t we warn you last year that the regime was preparing for a major war? All we had to do was wait for the green light from higher authorities.”

    Upping tensions in the area is the fact the Kerch Strait Bridge, also known as the Crimean Bridge, is now a target and we will certainly see Russian moves to protect it. Comprised of a pair of Russian-constructed parallel bridges it spans the Strait of Kerch between the Taman Peninsula and the Kerch Peninsula of Crimea. The bridge complex provides for both road and rail traffic and has a length of 19 km. This makes it the longest bridge Russia has ever built.

    It is difficult not to tie this to the controversial Nord Stream 2 natural gas pipeline project which Viktor Zubkov, chairman of the board of directors of Russia’s gas giant Gazprom, claims, will definitely be completed this year. He said on Friday, Biden’s goal is to stop the pipeline and the U.S. is now targeting anyone helping the project’s completion in any way. So far, around 90-92 percent of the work required for the project is complete. Earlier this year, Gazprom warned investors that the Nord Stream 2 project could be suspended or entirely discontinued due to extraordinary circumstances, including “political pressure.”

    War In Ukraine Is About Money, Energy, And Power!

    As to what really motivates the desire to turn Ukraine into a giant-killing field, several possibilities exist but money and profit should not be ruled out. Foreign policy has often been used as a tool to advance national interest which is often dictated by economics. When it comes to the economy energy is often considered the blood from which all strength flows and in the case of Europe the Nord Stream 2 (NS2) pipeline which after completion will carry natural gas from Russia to Germany is a bone of contention. Years ago leaders from Poland, Latvia, and Lithuania signed an open letter to the parliaments of the EU warning them against the construction of NS2 and cautioned them of how it is not a commercial project but one designed to increase their energy reliance on Moscow.

    At that time, Russia’s Gazprom supplied the European Union and Turkey with a record 162 billion cubic meters of gas. Of that gas, 86 billion cubic meters flowed across Ukraine. Those opposed to the new pipeline make a strong case that “Gazprom” is not only a gas company but a platform for Russian coercion and another tool for Russia to pressure European countries. The U.S. State Department has even threatened European corporations they will likely face penalties if they participate in the construction of Russia’s Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline, on the grounds that “the project undermines energy security in Europe.”

    Circling back to the conflict, years ago I wrote a piece that urged America to stay out of a war in Ukraine. It warned of the major advantage Putin held by having a huge well-armed army just across the Ukrainian border and that any army cobbled together to face him would most likely be unenthusiastic and politically troubled at best. At the time President Obama had pulled out all the stops to paint Putin with a brush dipped in all the bad colors. Every Sunday in interview after interview Washington experts were paraded across the screens of the talk shows that tell Americans what is happening in our nation’s capital and every single one of them denounced Putin as a “thug and a bully.”

    Ukrainian Soldiers Killed In An Unwinnable War

    In that piece were accounts of reports from the front in Ukraine often buried or hidden from public view but they appeared to confirm that Ukrainian troops were being sent into a meat grinder. The drafted include men up to 60 years old with only a month of training before they reluctantly go off to the battlefield in eastern Ukraine. Putting more weapons into the hands of those unmotivated to fight for their corrupt state is merely adding fuel to this fire and doing more harm than good. Again, remember Ukraine is a financially failed state and while we can point to its potential, its massive oil and gas reserves by all rights should belong to the people and for their benefit. The IMF, however, points out that Kyiv needs billion in loans and grants just to stabilize its economy after more than twenty years of massive levels of corruption. This debt and the deep, deep hole Ukrainians have dug themselves into flows from a series of bad governments after Kyiv became independent of the Soviet Union.

    Back then, the euro-zone faced a lot of problems without jumping into a proxy war against rebels in Ukraine. I use the term proxy because without the money and backing of outsiders things would most likely go quiet. The failed and bankrupt country of Ukraine would most likely break into two parts with the eastern half and its people who share strong ties with Russia aligning itself with that country and Kyiv, and the western-oriented portion of the country drifting towards stronger ties to the euro-zone. What is the big problem with such a solution? Apparently, a great deal for people like Biden in Washington that are pushing for intervention in Ukraine.

    To confuse the issue and muddy the waters great efforts have been made at high levels by those advocating military action to paint Russia as an aggressor. These forces aided by the media continue to link Russias move into the majority ethnic-Russian Crimea region as a violation of Ukraine’s sovereign border. In this case, we should remember, the whole concept of sovereign borders is a little gem promoted by those in power, these borders are a creation of man and not visible to the birds flying above. This is an argument of convenience that masks deeper issues and the difference between “terrorist” and “freedom fighters” often depends on a person’s point of view. In this case, it is clearly the new American-backed government in Kyiv that is pushing to bring the eastern part of Ukraine back into the fold.

    What this boils down to is that American companies want to sell and supply Europe with Liquid Natural Gas (LNG) and seem willing to start a war to make it happen. Whether it is for profit or to minimize the threat of natural gas shipments to Europe being cut off and used as a key weapon in Russia’s political arsenal we cannot ignore the idea more is at play here than just doing the “right thing”. Many people in the “Tin Foil Hat” community have gone so far as to indicate they feel that America and elements of the CIA were involved or had a part in the overthrow of the former corrupt Ukraine government and its replacement with another corrupt but more pro Europe regime. At the time even America’s Vice President, Joe Biden, saw his son join the board of a private Ukrainian oil and natural gas company. One thing is clear, not only those involved in selling energy to Europe will profit from this but also the military-industrial complex stands to gain.

    The odds of U.S. LNG significantly displacing Russian natural gas shipped by pipeline are slim. Piped gas sells at a large discount to LNG, which must be cooled to liquid form, shipped overseas, and turned back into its gaseous form. Poland recently received its first shipment of U.S. LNG last month from what is currently the only export facility in the lower 48 states. While LNG trade between the United States and Europe would help Trump in his bid to reduce the U.S. trade deficit it also stands to improve energy security among the European countries by giving them an alternative to Russian gas. Everyone must concede it is not a cure-all, Russia can easily cut prices and adjust terms to maintain its dominant position in the European gas market and European countries are likely to continue buying most of their gas from the lowest-cost supplier.

    Bottom-line, Russia has traditionally been the major supplier of European gas. But it charges high prices, often in the form of long-term contracts linked to the price of oil. The overwhelming dependence on Russian gas leaves European countries from a national security standpoint vulnerable to a cutoff of crucial natural gas supplies. This would be devastating to their economies at any time but even more so in the depths of winter. For these reasons, it makes sense for Europe to consider alternative supplies and open its doors to U.S. LNG but due to Ukraine’s history of corruption flooding the country with weapons and using the people of Ukraine as pawns in this high stakes game violates all standards of human decency.

    Americans should also be aware that our current policy drives Russia towards the East and into the open arms of China. This creates even more problems long-term than it solves short-term and borders on the edge of insanity. The war in Ukraine has not developed organically but appears to be the product of meddling. Mercenaries and money from America appear to be backing and propping up Kyiv with America acting as the “champion” for this failed bankrupt country.  The best way for the West and Kyiv to prove they are on the right path is by letting the eastern part of the country seceded and then making Kyiv a center of economic and democratic success.

    I reiterate the stand taken in April 2018, the Ukraine war is about money, energy, and power! Since the latest ceasefire agreement in the war in Donbas was implemented in July 2020, it appears few if anyone is being killed. This indicates rocking the boat is a bad idea.

    We can only hope those hyping the recent events in Ukraine saying the decree signed by Zelensky will someday be looked back upon at the beginning of World War III are overly pessimistic, after all, when you place two major military powers face to face what could go wrong?

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 03/31/2021 – 02:00

  • The "Unvaccinated" Question
    The “Unvaccinated” Question

    Authored (somewhat satirically) by CJ Hopkins via The Consent Factory,

    So, the New Normals are discussing the Unvaccinated Question. What is to be done with us? No, not those who haven’t been “vaccinated” yet. Us. The “Covidiots.” The “Covid deniers.” The “science deniers.” The “reality deniers.” Those who refuse to get “vaccinated,” ever.

    There is no place for us in New Normal society. The New Normals know this and so do we. To them, we are a suspicious, alien tribe of people. We do not share their ideological beliefs. We do not perform their loyalty rituals, or we do so only grudgingly, because they force us to do so. We traffic in arcane “conspiracy theories,” like “pre-March-2020 science,” “natural herd immunity,” “population-adjusted death rates,” “Sweden,” “Florida,” and other heresies.

    They do not trust us. We are strangers among them. They suspect we feel superior to them. They believe we are conspiring against them, that we want to deceive them, confuse them, cheat them, pervert their culture, abuse their children, contaminate their precious bodily fluids, and perpetrate God knows what other horrors.

    So they are discussing the need to segregate us, how to segregate us, when to segregate us, in order to protect society from us. In their eyes, we are no more than criminals, or, worse, a plague, an infestation. In the words of someone (I can’t quite recall who), “getting rid of the Unvaccinated is not a question of ideology. It is a question of cleanliness,” or something like that. (I’ll have to hunt down and fact-check that quote. I might have taken it out of context.)

    In Israel, Estonia, Denmark, Germany, the USA, and other New Normal countries, they have already begun the segregation process. In the UK, it’s just a matter of time. The WEF, WHO, EU, and other transnational entities are helping to streamline the new segregation system, which, according to the WEF, “will need to be harmonized by a normative body, such as the WHO, to ensure that is ethical.”

    Here in Germany, the government is considering banning us from working outside our homes. We are already banned from flying on commercial airlines. (We can still use the trains, if we dress up like New Normals.) In the village of Potsdam, just down the road from Wannsee (which name you might recall from your 20th-Century history lessons), we are banned from entering shops and restaurants. (I’m not sure whether we can still use the sidewalks, or whether we have to walk in the gutters.) In Saxony, we are forbidden from attending schools. At the Berliner Ensemble (the theater founded by Bertolt Brecht and Helene Weigel, lifelong opponents of totalitarianism and fascism), we are banned from attending New Normal performances.

    In the USA, we are being banned by universities. Our children are being banned from public schools. In New York, the new “Excelsior Pass” will allow New Normals to attend cultural and sports events (and patronize bars and restaurants, eventually) secure in the knowledge that the Unvaccinated have been prevented from entering or segregated in an “Unvaccinated Only” section. The pass system, designed by IBM, which, if history is any guide, is pretty good at designing such systems (OK, technically, it was Deutsche Hollerith Maschinen Gesellschaft, IBM’s Nazi-Germany subsidiary), was launched this past weekend to considerable fanfare.

    And this is only the very beginning.

    Israel’s “Green Pass” is the model for the future, which makes sense, in a sick, fascistic kind of way. When you’re already an apartheid state, what’s a little more apartheid? Here’s a peek at what that looks like …

    OK, I know what the New Normals are thinking. They’re thinking I’m “misleading” people again. That I’m exaggerating. That this isn’t really segregation, and certainly nothing like “medical apartheid.”

    After all (as the New Normals will sternly remind me), no one is forcing us to get “vaccinated.” If we choose not to, or can’t for medical reasons, all we have to do is submit to a “test” — you know, the one where they ram that 9-inch swab up into your sinus cavities — within 24 hours before we want to go out to dinner, or attend the theater or a sports event, or visit a museum, or attend a university, or take our children to school or a playground, and our test results will serve as our “vaccine passports!” We just present them to the appropriate Covid Compliance Officer, and (assuming the results are negative, of course) we will be allowed to take part in New Normal society just as if we’d been “vaccinated.”

    Either way, “vaccine” or “test,” the New Normal officials will be satisfied, because the tests and passes are really just stage props. The point is the display of mindless obedience. Even if you take the New Normals at their word, if you are under 65 and in relatively good health, getting “vaccinated” is more or less pointless, except as a public display of compliance and belief in the official Covid-19 narrative (the foundation stone of the New Normal ideology). Even the high priests of their “Science” confess that it doesn’t prevent you spreading the “plague.” And the PCR tests are virtually meaningless, as even the WHO finally admitted. (You can positive-PCR-test a pawpaw fruit … but you might want to be careful who you tell if you do that.)

    In contrast to the “vaccine” and the “test” themselves, the forced choice between them is not at all meaningless. It is no accident that both alternatives involve the violation of our bodies, literally the penetration of our bodies. It doesn’t really matter what is in the “vaccines” or what “results” the “tests” produce. The ritual is a demonstration of power, the power of the New Normals (i.e., global capitalism’s new face) to control our bodies, to dominate them, to violate them, psychologically and physically.

    Now, don’t get all excited, my “conspiracy theorist” friends. I haven’t gone full QAnon just yet. Bill Gates and Klaus Schwab are not sitting around together, sipping adrenochrome on George Soros’ yacht, dreaming up ways to rape people’s noses. This stuff is built into the structure of the system. It is a standard feature of totalitarian societies, cults, churches, self-help groups, and … well, human society, generally.

    Being forced to repeat a physical action which only makes sense within a specific ideology reifies that ideology within us. There is nothing inherently diabolical about this. It is a basic socialization technology. It is how we socialize our children. It is why we conduct weddings, baptisms, and bar mitzvahs. It is how we turn young men and women into soldiers. It is how actors learn their blocking and their lines. It is why the Nazis held all those rallies. It is why our “democracies” hold elections. It is also basic ceremonial magic … but that’s a topic for a different column.

    The issue, at the moment, is the Unvaccinated Question, and the public rituals that are being performed to make the New Normal ideology “reality,” and what to do about those of us who refuse to participate in those rituals, who refuse to forswear “old normal” reality and convert to New Normalism so that we can function in society without being segregated, criminalized, or “diagnosed” as “sociopathic” or otherwise psychiatrically disordered.

    For us “conspiracy-theorizing reality deniers,” there is no getting around this dilemma. This isn’t Europe in the 1930s. There isn’t anywhere to emigrate to … OK, there is, temporarily, in some of the US states that have been staging rebellions, and other such “old normal” oases, but how long do you think that will last? They’re already rolling out the “mutant variants,” and God only knows what will happen when the long-term effects of the “vaccines” kick in.

    No, for most of us denizens of the global capitalist empire, it looks like the New Normal is here to stay. So, unless we are prepared to become New Normals, we are going to have to stand and fight. It is going to get rather ugly, and personal, but there isn’t any way to avoid that. Given that many New Normals are our friends and colleagues, or even members of our families, it is tempting to believe that they will “come to their senses,” that “this is all just a hysterical overreaction,” and that “everything will go back to normal soon.”

    This would be a monumental error on our parts … very possibly a fatal error.

    Totalitarian movements, when they reach this stage, do not simply stop on their own. They continue to advance toward their full expressions, ultimately transforming entire societies into monstrous mirror-images of themselves, unless they are opposed by serious resistance. There is a window at the beginning when such resistance has a chance. That window is still open, but it is closing, fast. I can’t tell you how best to resist, but I can tell you it starts with seeing things clearly, and calling things, and people, exactly what they are.

    Let’s not make the same mistake that other minorities have made throughout history when confronted with a new totalitarian ideology. See the New Normals for what they are, maybe not deep down in their hearts, but what they have collectively become a part of, because it is the movement that is in control now, not the rational individuals they used to be. Above all, recognize where this is headed, where totalitarian movements are always headed. (See. e.g., Milton Mayer’s They Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1933-45.)

    No, the Unvaccinated are not the Jews and the New Normals are not flying big Swastika flags, but totalitarianism is totalitarianism, regardless of which Goebbelsian Big Lies, and ideology, and official enemies it is selling. The historical context and costumes change, but its ruthless trajectory remains the same.

    Today, the New Normals are presenting us with a “choice,” (a) conform to their New Normal ideology or (b) social segregation. What do you imagine they have planned for us tomorrow?

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 03/30/2021 – 23:25

  • Iran Touts Russia-Iran-India 'North-South Trade Corridor' As "Alternative" & Challenge To Suez Canal
    Iran Touts Russia-Iran-India ‘North-South Trade Corridor’ As “Alternative” & Challenge To Suez Canal

    Coming after a ‘successful’ weekend in which sanctions-beleaguered Iran hailed its signing a major 25-year infrastructure and investment agreement with China, Iran’s ambassador to Russia is also touting that a new north-south trade corridor across the region could become a prime ‘alternative’ to the strategic Suez Canal waterway that’s been featured in global headlines due to the ‘Ever Given’ stuck tanker disaster that just played out.

    Called the “International North-South Transport Corridor (INSTC)” — a two decades in the making ambitious project — the new trade corridor, currently partially in operation, is 7,200km long, linking up Russia, Iran, and India and ultimately accelerating trade with Europe as well.

    Commenting on the stuck tanker fiasco in the Suez, Iranian Ambassador Kazem Jalali explained of a potentially less expensive and disaster-prone waterway transport route across Egypt:

    “The North-South corridor is a great option to replace the Suez Canal with a reduction in travel times to 20 days and savings of up to 30 percent.”

    He further described that the mounting huge costs and fallout from the Ever Given jam disaster (commonly ballparked in the many multiple billions) demonstrates “the need to speed up the completion of infrastructure and the North-South corridor as an alternative to the route through the Suez Canal has become clear and more important than ever.”

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    A regional analysis site, Silk Road Briefing, reviews the recent history of the project as follows:

    The INSTC project came into being in 2002, when the transport ministers of Russia, Iran, and India signed an agreement to create a multimodal ship, rail and road-based transport network stretching 7,200 km, from Mumbai, western India to Moscow via Iran and the Caspian Sea. Since then, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Ukraine, Oman, and Syria have all joined the project, and new routes via Azerbaijan and Central Asian countries have been examined to eliminate the need to transfer cargoes from overland-based transport to cargo ships and back…

    The claims of reduced transport travel time and cost are often advanced according to these estimates:

    The INSTC corridor has been tested, and cuts current transport costs by between 30-60 percent, in addition to reducing the transit time from west India to western Russia from 40 to 20 days. Dry runs of the route carried out in 2014 and 2017 identified potential bottlenecks and confirmed cost and shipping time estimates.

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    It’s been dubbed in Russian media, even long before the latest Suez crisis, a challenge to the Suez canal. 

    Also sometimes compared to the ancient ‘Silk Road’ (the most famous East-West trade route across Asia from antiquity through the Middle Ages) – and somewhat akin to China’s expanding Belt & Road initiative under President Xi, it primarily by rail links two major bodies of water – the Indian Ocean and Persian Gulf – by way of Iran to Russia and northern Europe.

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 03/30/2021 – 23:05

  • Autocracy Versus Democracy Or China Versus America?
    Autocracy Versus Democracy Or China Versus America?

    Authored by Pat Buchanan via Buchanan.org,

    “I’ve known Xi Jinping for a long time. … He doesn’t have a democratic — with a small ‘d’ — bone in his body,” said Joe Biden in his first press conference as president, and then he ambled on:

    “He’s one of the guys, like (Russian President Vladimir) Putin, who thinks that autocracy is the wave of the future — democracy can’t function in an ever-complex world.

    “It is clear, absolutely clear … that this is a battle between the utility of democracies in the 21st century and autocracies. … We have to prove democracy works.”

    Thus did Biden frame the conflict between America and China in almost purely ideological terms.

    “Look … your children or grandchildren are going to be doing their doctoral thesis on the issue of who succeeded: autocracy or democracy? Because that is what is at stake, not just with China.”

    But is this really what the conflict between America and China for economic, military and strategic supremacy is about – a contest between two political systems? And does Xi Jinping see it that way?

    Does Xi see himself as the global champion of “autocracy” or as the nationalist leader of the Chinese people and Mao’s successor as The Great Helmsman who heads the party that decides the destiny of the nation?

    And are we Americans really the champions of the democracy camp in a great twilight struggle with “autocracy”?

    How, then, do we embrace as a NATO ally of 70 years the Republic of Turkey, which is ruled by the autocrat Recep Tayyip Erdogan?

    Our Arab allies and partners include President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi of Egypt, who came to power through a military coup that ousted an elected government. Also aligned with us are the king and crown prince of Saudi Arabia, and the monarchies of the Persian Gulf who might fairly be called not only monarchists but autocrats.

    Are the king of Bahrain, the emir of Kuwait and the sultan of Oman members in good standing in America’s club of democracies?

    Unlike the USSR of Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin, Xi’s China does not appear to seek to impose its political system upon the nations with which it has deep trade and commercial ties such as Australia, Japan and South Korea.

    Where Nikita Khrushchev thundered, “Your children shall live under Socialism,” Xi does not.

    Indeed, in the ideological struggle defined by Biden, it appears that it’s the United States and Western democracies demanding that China abide by our beliefs and values, not the other way around.

    Xi puts China first, and his own people, the Han Chinese majority, also first. As for the tribal and ethnonational minorities inside China – Uighurs, Kazakhs, Tibetans, Mongols, Manchu, Hong Kongese – their rights are subordinated and restricted, as are the beliefs and value systems of Christians in many of the 50 or so Muslim countries.

    Unlike America’s liberal elites who celebrate racial, religious and ethnic diversity – the more the better – China’s rulers seem to fear racial, religious, ethnic and ideological diversity as forces threatening the kind of disintegration that befell the Soviet Empire and USSR.

    And unlike the Americans who worship at the altar of equality, the Chinese act on the belief that not all religious, racial and ethnic minorities have equal rights.

    And while China’s growth in real and relative power and prosperity in the decades since Tiananmen Square in 1989 has been epochal, the politics of the USA seem to have grown more poisonous and the racial divisions more rancorous than they were at the end of the Reagan era.

    Nor does Biden’s faith in small “d” democracy appear to have been shared by the men who founded the United States as a “republic, if you can keep it.” They saw democracy not as some object of veneration but as a danger to be avoided

    “Remember, democracy never lasts long,” John Adams wrote.

    “It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There was never a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.”

    Perhaps our greatest Chief Justice John Marshall said, “Between a balanced republic and a democracy, the difference is like that between order and chaos.”

    “A Democracy is the vilest form of Government there is,” said Tom Paine, who was echoed by the father of the Constitution, Madison himself:

    “Democracy is the most vile form of government. Democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention incompatible with personal security or the rights of property.”

    By the end of a long life, Thomas Jefferson concluded:

    “A Democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where 51% of the people may take away the rights of the other 49%.”

    Democracy and autocracy – of which monarchies and dictatorships are examples – are forms of government, not objects of worship. It is the country that engages the heart, not the system of government by which the country is governed. And it is the country that is the legitimate object of allegiance, loyalty and love.

    And that is the meaning of “America First.”

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 03/30/2021 – 22:45

  • China Is Now Competing With The World For Capital
    China Is Now Competing With The World For Capital

    By Ye Xie, Bloomberg Markets live commentator

    The largest hedge fund implosion since Long-Term Capital Management blew up in 1998 has left few, if any, scars on financial markets.

    A group of stocks linked to the liquidation of Archegos Capital rebounded Tuesday, suggesting the positions have largely been unwound. With that episode running its course, the markets were generally quiet with slightly higher yields and the outperformance of value stocks pointing toward the return of the reflation theme. A stronger dollar, though, is putting commodities under pressure. Bloomberg’s commodity index is starting to diverge from Treasury yields.

    Back in China, FTSE Russell confirmed that Chinese bonds will be included in its index with a weighting of 5.3%, as expected. But the implementation won’t start until October and will take three years to complete, which is much longer than anticipated. The immediate market impact is negligible, but the move marks a milestone as Chinese bonds will now be included in all three major bond benchmarks, including those by Bloomberg Barclays and JPMorgan.

    China is slowly but surely starting to erode the dominance of advanced nations in the bond market. To make room for Chinese bonds in the benchmark, FTSE cut the weighting of U.S. Treasuries by 1.9 percentage points to about 35%, which is likely to result an outflow of $49 billion, according to HSBC. Japan’s weighting was reduced by about one point to 16%.

    In other words, China is starting to compete for capital from international investors at a time when governments are borrowing an unprecedented amount of money. Last year alone, Chinese government bonds attracted about $100 billion of overseas inflows, which is equal to 44% of the increase of foreign holdings in U.S. Treasuries.

    Chinese bonds arguably remain under-represented in global benchmarks. They have the same A+ credit rating as Japanese bonds, offer yields that are about 280 bps higher and carry less than half of the interest-rate risk. Yet, the weighting of Chinese bonds is less than a third of the Japanese securities. They’re even weighted less than lower-rated Italian bonds.

    Granted, Chinese bonds have their drawbacks. The lack of liquidity means fewer securities meet the criteria to be included in the benchmark. The lack of access to the repo and futures markets also limits foreigners’ interest. And then there are the country’s issues with the rule of law and tensions with the West.

    Still, as demonstrated in the recent global debt rout, Chinese bonds provide diversification for investors given their low correlation with other markets. Their sensitivity to U.S. yields has fallen to the lowest in years, according to JPMorgan.

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 03/30/2021 – 22:36

  • Guatemala Declares Emergency As New Migrant Caravan Bound To US May Be Forming 
    Guatemala Declares Emergency As New Migrant Caravan Bound To US May Be Forming 

    Guatemalan President Alejandro Giammattei declared emergency measures Monday along the Guatemala–Honduras border as new reports suggest a new migrant caravan may be forming in Honduras, according to Associated Press News. 

    The emergency order declares mass gatherings and demonstrations illegal for the next 2-5 weeks in five Guatemalan provinces that border Honduras. 

    In a statement, the Guatemalan government defended the new public health order by saying, “groups of people could put at risk the life, liberty, security, health, access to justice, peace and development” of Guatemalans. A similar order was announced in January to squash previous migrant caravans. 

    Threats of another migrant caravan from Honduras with plans to travel to the US come as a US-Mexico border crisis worsens in recent months. The number of migrants attempting to cross into the US has surged, with at least 100,000 arrested in February.

    A flood of migrants has been racing towards the Mexico–US border under the Biden administration after President Biden said he’ll reverse former President Trump’s immigration policies and allow many migrants a pathway to citizenship. 

    But this has severely backfired for the Biden administration as chaos at the border would see over 13,000 unaccompanied migrant children detained in federal custody, nearly one-third of whom have been sitting in the same ‘cages’ built by the Obama-Biden administration, and 3,000 of whom have been held beyond the 72-hour legal limit.

    The border crisis is worsening by the day as President Biden told migrants to stop coming to the US after begging Mexico’s president to help stem the flood of illegal migrants. The surge of migrants has overwhelmed the federal government’s ability to process them.

    Days ago, Oklahoma Sen. James Lankford (R) gave a first-hand account of the chaos at the US-Mexico border – joining Texas GOP Sens. Ted Cruz, and John Cornyn for a tour of the deteriorating border conditions. Lankford tweeted pictures of the US’ migrant camps. 

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    Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador was recently quoted as saying President Biden’s immigration policy encourages illegal immigration, thus enriching cartels through human trafficking operations at the US border. Cartels are making $14 million per day, smuggling people into the US. 

    Many of the migrants reaching the US-Mexico border are fleeing violence, drugs, and corruption in Honduras. With the threat of another caravan forming, the Biden administration might want to reconsider finishing President Trump’s border wall instead of halting construction. 

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 03/30/2021 – 22:25

  • San Diego Teachers To Instruct Immigrants In-Person As Schools Remain Online-Only
    San Diego Teachers To Instruct Immigrants In-Person As Schools Remain Online-Only

    Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times,

    Teachers in San Diego are going to the city’s convention center soon to instruct immigrant children in-person, even as schools in the county largely remain online-only.

    About 13 teachers have volunteered to work with the minor immigrants, Roberto Carrillo, a principal at the San Diego County Office of Education, told KPBS.

    “We definitely want to introduce them to the arts, the visual arts, and the performing arts,” he said.

    “We’ll give them the opportunity to start expressing themselves through written formats, giving them a basic understanding of the English language.”

    Instruction was slated to start as soon as Tuesday.

    A spokesperson for the office confirmed to The Epoch Times that it “is providing an educational program for children who are being housed at the San Diego Convention Center.”

    Supervisor Jim Desmond said that it was great for immigrants to receive in-person teaching.

    “130,000 kids haven’t been allowed in a classroom for over a year in the S.D. Unified School District. It’s great there’s in-person learning for those unaccompanied minors, but I wish every child in S.D. was allowed the same opportunity for in-person teaching,” he wrote in a tweet.

    A spokesperson for the San Diego Unified School District told Fox News that the district shared with its teachers details on how they could volunteer to reach the immigrant children during their spring break, which started on Monday. She said she didn’t know if the teachers were being paid.

    The district did not answer a query about the matter from The Epoch Times.

    San Diego officials, including its superintendent, issued statements late last week urging students, parents, and others to avoid large gatherings as part of an effort to “stop the surge” of COVID-19 over spring break.

    (L-R) San Diego congressmen Scott Peters, Juan Vargas, San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria, Vice Chairman of the San Diego County Board of Supervisors Nora Vargas, and Congresswoman Sara Jacobs at the San Diego Convention Center on March 27, 2021. (Jane Yang/Epoch Times)

    “We want to speak directly to our students today because they have demonstrated incredible courage and resilience through this pandemic. This is not the time to let our guard down. Have fun, get lots of rest and make sure you stay healthy for when school reopens online on April 5 and for in-person learning on April 12,” Cindy Marten, the superintendent, said in a statement.

    According to statistics from the county, some 40,000 students are learning full-time on-campus, nearly 130,000 are engaged in hybrid learning, or a mix of in-person and remote, and another 317,855 are learning online-only.

    Federal officials reached a deal to convert the San Diego Convention Center into an emergency immigration shelter earlier this month. The facility has an initial capacity of 1,400.

    Unaccompanied minors are loaded into a U.S. Border Patrol transport van after crossing the U.S.-Mexico border, in Hildalgo, Texas, on March 25, 2021. (John Moore/Getty Images)

    The population being housed there are immigrant girls between the ages of 13 and 17.

    Dozens of the girls have tested positive for COVID-19, the disease caused by the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus.

    President Joe Biden’s administration reversed the Trump-era policy of expelling unaccompanied minors back to their home countries. Instead, officials are working on quickly giving the minors to family or friends in the United States.

    The number of illegal border crossings rose sharply during Biden’s first month in office, including a rise in unaccompanied children from 5,694 to 9,297.

    Because of the increase in unaccompanied minors and families reaching the border, coupled with the policy reversals, Customs and Border Protection are holding some minors over the 72-hour mandated limit. The agency is supposed to quickly transfer the children to the Department of Health and Human Services, which runs facilities like the convention center.

    A senior Border Patrol official told reporters in a call last week that he expects there will be a continued rise in apprehensions over the coming months, as the weather gets nicer.

    On one recent day, 6,000 immigrants were apprehended. In the last 30 days, agents averaged about 5,000 encounters a day, with approximately a quarter of those being unaccompanied minors.

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 03/30/2021 – 22:05

  • US Reports Most New COVID Cases In A Month With Blue States In The Lead
    US Reports Most New COVID Cases In A Month With Blue States In The Lead

    At this point, the spread of SARS-CoV-2 and the various mutant strains has been accelerating for five weeks as restrictions on businesses and movement have been relaxed. Over in the US, which ceded its position as the worst outbreak in the world to Brazil back in February, when the 7-day average for Brazil’s daily tally per million population topped the US’s for the first time.

    While the outbreak in Latin America’s largest economy continues to spin out of control, the US on Tuesday reported just under 70K new cases, the highest number in a month, as infections rise in half of US states, with some of the biggest accelerations seen in New York, New Jersey and Michigan. Over the past week, the average number of new cases has risen by 24%, according to Johns Hopkins data. 25 states and Washington DC are reporting more cases.

    Fortunately deaths continued to slow, with the US reporting fewer than 1K deaths.

    Source: mSightly

    11 states are currently in the highest “risk level” for COVID, nearly all of them are northeastern blue states (aside from Michigan and Minnesota, although both of those states are also run by Democrats).

    Source: mSightly

    The increase comes even as the US is vaccinating nearly 3MM people a day, and with practically every state preparing to open vaccinations to adults of all ages, if they haven’t already.

    Michigan is leading average new cases with a 14% rise over the past week and a 208% increase over the past month.

    Cases in New York have risen by nearly 10% over the previous week and the test positivity rate has remained above 3% for the last month

    New Jersey recorded 346.4 cases per 100,000 people over the last seven days, the highest rate in the nation.

    Circling back to the national numbers, while the current rate is far below January’s peak of 247K new cases per day, it is in line with the July surge, where daily cases averaged about 68,000.

    The numbers complement the head of the CDC’s warnings about “impending doom”, which were widely ridiculed yesterday. In his latest warning, Dr Nicholas Reich, a biostatistician at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, warned “we’re skating on a knife’s edge right now.”

    “We have so much to look forward to, so much promise and potential of where we are and so much reason for hope,” she said. “But right now, I’m scared.”

    New York is the states where coronavirus is spreading the fastest “on a per-person basis.”

    Meanwhile, red states like Texas, which have been the focus of mainstream media attention as their governors have reopened their economies, and even though vaccination rates are lagging some of their northern peers, infection rates haven’t bounced back like they have in New York, Michigan and other states like Connecticut.

    Unsurprisingly, the rebound in New York – centered around NYC – hasn’t stopped Gov. Andrew Cuomo from pressing ahead with his plans to reopen the state’s economy. Yesterday, the governor announced that the vaccine eligibility age would drop to 30 as of next Tuesday, Cuomo said earlier that college sports could welcome back fans on Friday, albeit with relatively restrictive social distancing numbers.

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 03/30/2021 – 21:45

  • Health Care Workers Bragging About Forged Vax Cards As Fake "Passports" Hit The Street
    Health Care Workers Bragging About Forged Vax Cards As Fake “Passports” Hit The Street

    It was inevitable.

    Healthcare workers across the country are taking to social media to brag about stealing COVID-19 vaccination cards from their jobs in order to falsify their vaccination status – allowing them to falsify their vaccine status.

    Photo By: EJ Hersom, DOD

    “I work at a pharmacy and grabbed blank ones for me and my hubby,” said one TikTok user, who was identified by other users as a pharmacy tech in Illinois – and promptly reported to state healthcare authorities, according to the Daily Beast.

    “Can I pay you to ship a couple to me,” another TikTok user identified as a Texas nurse wrote under the original video bragging about the theft – and was also promptly reported to Texas healthcare authorities.

    “I got a template if u want it,” posted one TikTok user under a viral video about faking vaccination cards.

    Becca Walker, one of the two users sounding the alarm, posted: “I’m pretty sure you’re not supposed to steal from your job. And I’m pretty sure you’re not supposed to steal blank vaccination papers for COVID-19 to falsify information and claim that you and your husband were vaccinated when in actuality you were not.“

    “Stop hating on me! I don’t care what any of you think. I did what is best for my husband and I,” posted the Illinois pharmacy tech right before she wiped her TikTok account history – only to try and cover her tracks by posting a fake TikTok claiming to be a 16-year-old British girl doing a social media experiment for her filmmaker father.

    Walker, along with user Savannah Sparks, have since posted several more TikTok videos calling out healthcare workers for allegedly forging or attempting to forge vaccine cards. They claim dozens of tips have been sent to them by other users on the platform, but which they haven’t been able to verify.

    If it seems surprising that vaccine resistance would exist among medical professionals, even those with a strong background in science, Schaffer said it simply highlights how many Americans are still resistant to vaccination, more than three months after the first jabs went into the arms of frontline health-care workers. In February, a survey conducted by experts from Northwestern, Northeastern, Rutgers and Harvard universities found that 21 percent of health-care workers surveyed did not want to be vaccinated. Hesitancy, which indicates skepticism towards the vaccine but not an outright unwillingness to be vaccinated, was 37 percent. –Daily Beast

    Meanwhile, fake “vaccine passports” are already being sold on the street. Via Summit News:

    *  *  *

    Fake ‘vaccine passports’ are already being sold by criminals on the streets, according to TV personality Andrew Gruel, who said he saw it happen.

    Earlier this week it was revealed that the Biden administration has been working with tech companies and non-profits to create a vaccine passport that “will play a role in multiple aspects of life.”

    According to a CNN report, the vaccine passports, which could be ready in weeks, will be a condition of the United States returning to “normalcy” before the end of the year.

    However, it appears as though street scammers have already beaten the government to the chase.

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    “Had to work late last night,” tweeted TV host Andrew Gruel. “Walked through a back alley to get to my car. There were 2 shady guys selling fake vaccine passports out of the back of a Cadillac. A market is born.”

    The ridiculous takeaway from the introduction of vaccine passports is that Americans may be forced to show ID to watch a baseball game while voting can still take place with no ID requirements whatsoever.

    As we highlighted yesterday, the vaccine passport isn’t just a proof of vaccination system, it’s a digital ID card that will likely be linked to the facial recognition camera network.

    This will then grease the skids for the full implementation of a Communist Chinese-style social credit score system where dissidents are denied basic rights and services and have to live in a de facto state of permanent lockdown.

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 03/30/2021 – 21:25

  • Gaetz Denies Alleged Relationship With 17-Year-Old; Claims Lawyer Tried To "Extort" Him
    Gaetz Denies Alleged Relationship With 17-Year-Old; Claims Lawyer Tried To “Extort” Him

    Update (0850ET): Gaetz just appeared on Tucker Carlson Tonight, where he offered more details of the alleged extortion plot that he claims precipitated the investigation into his alleged involvement with a 17-year-old girl (who is now 19, since the misconduct allegedly took place 2 years ago).

    During the interview, Gaetz brought up the fact that Tucker was once accused of a “horrible sex act” that also “did not happen.” Tucker looked visibly uncomfortable as the Congressman brought up the decades-old allegations.

    Gaetz continued on, repeating that he was being framed by elements within the DoJ, and calling on the Department to  release audio recordings made when his father wore a wire at the FBI’s behest during what Gaetz portrayed as part of an investigation into an alleged extortionist. 

    After being questioned by Tucker, Gaetz even named his alleged extortionist: David McGee, a former first assistant US attorney, who no longer works at the DoJ, but rather works as a private attorney at a law firm in Pensacola. Gaetz said the recordings he mentioned above were made at the offices of McGee’s law firm.

    Tucker later clarified that he had never met the “mentally ill viewer” who had accused him of a sex crime, though Tucker said he agreed with Gaetz that being falsely accused is terrible, and that it “happens a lot.”

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    On Fox, Gaetz says “the FBI and the Department of Justice” need to release tapes to clear his name. Says “those tapes will show that I am innocent.” Says this was an effort to “smear” his name

    Gaetz went so far as to claim that Tucker had once met a woman, whom Gaetz had brought to a dinner engagement, who was “threatened” by the FBI and told “if she wouldn’t cop to the fact that I was involved in some pay-for-play scheme that she could face charges. I do believe there are people at the Department of Justice who are trying to smear me. Providing flights and transportation for people you’re dating who are of legal age is not a crime.”

    After returning from a commercial break, Carlson remarked that the interview with Gaetz was “one of the weirdest interviews I’ve ever conducted.”

    * * *

    Shortly after Axios reported that Matt Gaetz, a conservative pro-Trump Republican from the Florida panhandle with a national profile, planned to quit Congress and take a job at Newsmax, the NYT has published some bombshell allegations. The paper reported Tuesday evening that Gaetz is a “subject” in a federal investigation examining whether he had illegal sexual relations with a minor (an unnamed, unidentified woman who was reportedly 17 at the time). Investigators are also looking into whether the woman traveled with Gaetz, which would constitute another federal offense.

    The investigation was reportedly opened during the final months of the Trump Administration before AG William Barr left office. The NYT says Gaetz wasn’t targeted directly, but that the behavior in question is somehow tied to a Florida official named Joel Greenberg who was indicted last summer on a range of charges including sex trafficking of a child and financially supporting people in exchange for sex, at least one of whom was an underage girl. Greenberg has since resigned his post as tax collector in Seminole County (north of Orlando) and is in jail awaiting trial after having his bail revoked.

    No charges have been brought against Gaetz, and his criminal exposure remains unclear. Gaetz addressed the charges directly in a statement to the NYT, saying he believed the investigation might have resulted from somebody’s attempt to “to recategorize my generosity to ex-girlfriends as something more untoward.” Gaetz told the NYT “I only know it has to do with women,” in regards to the investigation.

    Gaetz added that the investigation might be part of a scheme to extort his family for $25MM, before telling a reporter that both he and his father had worn a wire while cooperating with the FBI after being approached by people who said they could make the investigation “go away”, though he didn’t elaborate. He also told the NYT in a later interview that “it is verifiably false that I have traveled with a 17-ear-old woman.”

    In a statement published later, Gaetz said “The allegations against me are as searing as they are false,” Gaetz said in an interview. I believe that there are people at the Department of Justice who are trying to criminalize my sexual conduct, you know when I was a single guy.”

    Gaetz also published a statement on twitter reiterating his comments about his family cooperating with the FBI, after becoming “victims of an organized criminal extortion involving a former DOJ official seeking $25MM.” The part about the involvement of a corrupt DoJ official differed from his earlier statement.

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    The 38-year-old congressman proposed to his girlfriend at Mar a Lago late last year. But he made headlines months ago after proclaiming that he “had a son”, later explaining the son, Nestor Galban, 19, was actually the brother of his then-girlfriend. “He is a part of my family story,” Gaetz told People magazine in June. “My work with Nestor, our family, no element of my public service could compare to the joy that our family has brought me.”

    The nature of Greenberg’s relationship to Gaetz is unclear. But one thing is for sure: progressives on twitter are having a field day as Gaetz’s plans to jump to Newsmax evaporate. They’re also slamming him for hypocrisy, after Gaetz repeatedly criticized top Democrats for ties to convicted pedophile financier Jeffrey Epstein.

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    Gaetz was first elected to Congress in 2016. As a member of the Florida State Legislature and the scion of a Republican political family,

    Democratic Congressman is already pushing to have Gaetz stripped of his House Judiciary Committee assignment, an echo of how Democrats disenfranchised Marjorie Taylor-Greene.

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    There’s clearly a lot going on here, and we suspect more information about the investigation, and Gaetz’s claims, will surface in the coming days. In the meantime, one twitter user pointed out that Gaetz’s extortion claims aren’t actually all that far-fetched.

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    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 03/30/2021 – 21:06

  • US Nuclear Command Says A Young Child Accessed Its Twitter Account
    US Nuclear Command Says A Young Child Accessed Its Twitter Account

    The mystery surrounding the bizarre and seemingly nonsensical tweet sent out Sunday evening by the verified Twitter account of US Strategic Command (STRATCOM) has been solved, apparently.

    The below screenshotted tweet had been live for at least 30 minutes and was retweeted over 4,000 times, unleashing a fury of speculation and well as jokes. “Good to see USSTRATCOM is in qualified hands,” one commenter quipped. The universal sentiment however was one of serious concern given this is the military command that oversees America’s nuclear arsenal and deterrent…

    A quick follow-up post did little to dispel the mystery in an extremely rare moment of confused messaging and lack of professionalism from a military command center that literally is responsible for thousands of nuclear warheads.

    It’s responsible for managing the US military’s strategic deterrence and overseeing communications to America’s civilian leadership as well as the public when it comes to severe threats against the homeland, thus its official communications are closely watched for any sign of changes in its official defense posture.

    “Apologies for any confusion. Please disregard this post,” the message said before both were eventually deleted.

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    A statement from Strategic Command to a journalist who filed a Freedom of Information (FOIA) request said that a child gained access to the Twitter account.

    “The Command’s Twitter manager, while in a telework status, momentarily left the Command’s Twitter account open and unattended.”

    “His very young child took advantage of the situation and started playing with the keys and, unfortunately, and unknowingly, posted the tweet,” Stratcom official Kendall Cooper said in a letter subsequently posted online.

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    “Absolutely nothing nefarious occurred, i.e. no hacking of our Twitter account,” it added.

     Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska, Stratcom missile monitoring room, via US Strategic Command

    So it appears the Nebraska-headquartered Stratcom is now essentially chalking it up to a ‘remote work mishap’ – after widespread speculation of a significant hack or breach of Stratcom’s highly secure systems. 

    Likely few will be comforted by how easy it was – given that literally a child accessed the account. Or as Stratcom put it in its somewhat awkwardly worded official explanation – the administrator’s “very young child took advantage of the situation…”

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 03/30/2021 – 21:05

  • Financial Capitalism: The Endgame
    Financial Capitalism: The Endgame

    Via Renegade Inc.,

    Surely the biggest human failure is not learning from failure…

    In 2008, we had the opportunity, collectively, to reboot a broken financial system so it became fit for purpose.

    But instead of reconfiguring finance to serve the real economy politicians and central bankers used quantitative easing to buy time which lulled the mainstream media into reporting that everything was back on track. Some people haven’t bought that story.

    Marc Friederich and Matthias Weik are two economists who didn’t succumb to groupthink after the 2008 crash and now see financial capitalism’s end game.

    *  *  *

    Friedrich explained to Renegade Inc. that the authors’ intention is to help translate the complexity of a financial system by inverting it into a language that everybody understands. Having studied economics, and as children of the dot com bubble, the authors of four best-selling books in Germany, stress the important role sarcasm and dark humour play in their work in respect to making seemingly complex matters accessible to the wider public.

    Terminology camouflage

    According to Weik, the aim behind mainstream economists’ use of convoluted language is to create a camouflage in order to prevent them from having to explain what their terminology means. “It’s like the language of law spoken in secret phrases whose purpose is to garner public trust”, said Friedrich.

    But what mainstream economists and politicians haven’t explained is the structural nature of a crisis that hasn’t been remedied since the 2008 crash. Instead, the metaphorical can has been kicked down the road.

    “We’re at the end game because it’s the final bubble. We’ve got the government bond bubble and there won’t be another bubble afterwards. It will burst because last time China and all the states rescued the world. They won’t save us anymore. We used cheap money like a drug. We just put more and more drugs into the system”, said Weik.

    “Economists and politicians have learnt nothing in the last decade, rather they have merely bought time. The banks who created the last financial crisis continue to be the big winners”, says Friedrich. The losers are the working class and underclass who were encouraged to borrow recklessly. And yet it is these latter groups who the American and British press blame for the crisis.

    According to Friedrich, the catalyst for the crisis was low-interest rates and too much cheap money. “They tried to solve it with even lower interest rates and much more money. The debts have doubled since 2008”, said the economist. In Friedrich’s view, the Fed, ECB and other central banks will try to print more money “like they always do.”

    Friedrich continued:

    “We will definitely see negative interest rates….Since 2008 debts worldwide doubled for private people and for companies even three times more debts than 2008. So this is the final bubble. And the central banks create one bubble after the next one to keep the whole thing running. That’s it.”

    And we all know the patient is dead but nobody is ready to unplug the life support. The aim is to keep the system alive for as long as possible.

    Weik added:

    “Over the past two years real estate prices exploded, the share prices exploded, lots of people earned a lot of money and a lot of people can’t afford living anymore.”

    Spread of revolutions

    In Weik’s view, the growing crisis, indicative of the widening divide between the rich and poor, will culminate in the spread of revolutions throughout Europe. As the authors make clear, the inability of the political establishment to find any solutions to the crisis of 2008, the phenomenon of Brexit, Trump and the other symptoms that led to the emergence of the far right across Europe and the world, all emanate from the lack of political will to deal with these things in 2006.

    “The establishment are afraid of facing the consequences of a real change in the system”, argues Friedrich.

    “The banks have betrayed all of us…. They manipulated interest rates, for example. Everybody who bought a house with credit was suffering. Then, the politician’s we elected bailed out the banks with our taxes. And we thought the politicians are here for us….The banks are still here. Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, the European Central Bank — they’re all still here. Nothing happened. And then, since 2008, the people lost trust in the media as well.”

    So it’s a historical loss of trust all over the place.

    The authors argue that it’s not just the holy trinity — banks, politicians and media — who are to blame. They also point a finger at the public’s inability to take personal responsibility.

    “Change always comes from the people. We are more than them. And if we’re not taking the step forward and change something nothing will change”

    Friedrich also adds, “That’s why we say we the people have to create the change right now. The monetary system failed. It’s bankrupt. We have to change it. Let’s think about a new monetary system…. We have to create the change. And if not creating it there will be a lot of damage. That’s what we all have to face right now.”

    Hijacked

    Friedrich and Weik posit that big opportunities predicated on a system that prioritises people above profit could emerge from the chaos of the next crash. Aligned with Marx, the authors note how the productive capacities capitalism has engendered over the centuries has greatly benefited humanity while recognising that, over recent decades, capitalism has been hijacked by a form of cronyism — its extreme variant — neoliberalism:

    “If you make a bad economical decision as a private person or as a business owner, that’s it, you’re out of business. But if you are a bank no problem at all….The United Kingdom sells bonds to finance the whole system. So who’s buying the bonds? The answer is hedge funds, insurance companies, banks and now, central banks.”

    This kind of crony capitalism exists in what Friedrich acknowledges is a context in which politicians tell the public that they have got record employment and everybody’s better off. “But nobody tells them that more and more people are doing two or three jobs within low and stagnating wage sectors”, says Friedrich.

    He continues:

    “There is a problem in the monetary system. And if the currency collapses the people have to pay for it, not the government….In 2001 we established a currency monetary union in Europe with the euro. It was just not going to work. It’s madness to put strong economies like Germany with weak economies like Italy or Greece in one currency. For Germany the Euro is too cheap which is why the country is exporting so many goods and so they can’t even get into the market. It’s like it’s too expensive. Meanwhile, Germany is getting stronger while the weaker nations are getting weaker. This then opens the door for reactionary political leaders. And so the cycle continues.”

    The Endgame

    While in Argentina during the crisis in 2001, Friedrich first realized that in the event of an economic crisis and currency collapse, it’s the public who are forced to pay. The economist understood that there are only three possibilities to delete the debts in the system — inflation, devaluation of the currency and war. In each case, it’s the people who are forced to pay.

    What are the likely consequences of the end game — the biggest bubble in human history?

    According to Weik:

    “The morning after the end game we can solve the crisis, if we are smart. …But if it is postponed, there will be an implosion of the markets globally on something like the scale of 1929, maybe even worse.

    So we have to rethink how to restart the system from scratch…Otherwise there would be a big bang and then it’s getting really nasty and much more expensive.”

    Friedrich proffers a slightly different perspective:

    “We need a new currency system — a new monetary fund. If the people don’t take control of the system, the alternative digital system could be like ‘1984’, it will be horrible. It’s why we have to get power back to the people. Solutions will likely be utilized through artificial intelligence controlled by people for the benefit of people. We explain this in our books and videos.”

    Watch the full episode now:

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 03/30/2021 – 20:45

  • Nike Sues Maker Of "Satan Shoes" That Stoked Boycott Threats
    Nike Sues Maker Of “Satan Shoes” That Stoked Boycott Threats

    Nike is suing a small, Brooklyn-based novelty shop, accusing it of trademark infringement for repurposing used pairs of Nike Air Max 97s as the basis for the shoe.

    Legal analysts say the company’s trademark infringement case will be closely watched, given the prevalence of repurposing and “remixing” that permeates contemporary pop culture, from music, to clothing to social media.

    But the real motivation for the sneaker giant’s lawsuit is the damage to Nike’s brand, which was apparently significant enough that it impacted the price of the company’s shares, after politicians and religious authorities called for a boycott of the athletic clothing company, despite its increasingly desperate statements claiming it had nothing to do with the making or marketing of the “Satan Shoes”.

    Nike is suing for damages, including all the profits earned by MSCHF. In the lawsuit, the firm said it is “likely to suffer damage to its trademark, business reputation and goodwill” because of the controversy inspired by the shoes. “Nike is in no way connected with this project,” the company said in its preliminary statement.

    “As a direct and proximate result of MSCHF’s wrongful acts, Nike has suffered, continues to suffer, and/or is likely to suffer damage to its trademarks, business reputation, and goodwill that money cannot compensate,” the lawsuit added. “Unless enjoined, MSCHF will continue to use Nike’s Asserted Marks and/or confusingly similar marks and will cause irreparable damage to Nike for which Nike has no adequate remedy at law.”

    The company, MSCHF Product Studio, Inc., brought in popular rapper Lil Nas X for a “collab”, timing the shoes for release alongside Nas X’s new single, “Monero (Call Me By Your Name)”, which the rapper says is a note to his 14-year-old self, who was still struggling with his sexuality. The music video for the song only served to further the controversy, as it featured footage of the rapper “twerking” on Satan.

    Shares of Nike moved lower during extended trading hours last night, a move that continued into Tuesday’s session.

    The shoes feature the brand’s signature “swoosh” logo prominently on the side of the shoe and on its tongue. The shoes, which sold out in minutes, cost $1,018, a reference to the Bible passage Luke 10:18, which reads “I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven.”

    The company said Tuesday that it had sold all but one pair – out of 666 offered – of the Satan Shoes, and that the last pair would be given away via auction later this week.

    Read the lawsuit in its entirety below:

    Nike v Mschf by THROnline

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 03/30/2021 – 20:25

  • CME To Launch Micro-Bitcoin Futures; Options Traders Betting On $80k By End-April
    CME To Launch Micro-Bitcoin Futures; Options Traders Betting On $80k By End-April

    While chaos reigns in various parts of the US equity and bond markets, bitcoin has been quietly surging higher in the last few days.

    Source: Bloomberg

    In fact, US rate forecast volatility is now higher than bitcoin’s realized risk…

    Source: Bloomberg

    Ahead of President Biden’s pitch tomorrow for another $3 trillion in spending, the crypto patch has been bid and helped today by the news that PayPal will launch “Checkout With Crypto” – a cryptocurrency service for merchants across the US.

    “This is the first time you can seamlessly use cryptocurrencies in the same way as a credit card or a debit card inside your PayPal wallet,” PayPal CEO Dan Schulman told Reuters.

    Checkout With Crypto service will enable those holding cryptocurrencies on the platform to spend it with all of PayPal’s merchants. Supported cryptocurrencies include Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Ethereum, and Litecoin; the payments company will, however, convert the cryptocurrency to fiat money for the actual payment.

    “We think it is a transitional point where cryptocurrencies move from being predominantly an asset class that you buy, hold and or sell to now becoming a legitimate funding source to make transactions in the real world at millions of merchants,” Schulman added.

    Also buoying bitcoin prices is the news that the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) has unveiled plans to launch a new Bitcoin derivatives product that will enable traders to speculate on fractional units of the flagship digital currency.

    CoinTelegraph reports that CME Group’s Micro Bitcoin futures contract, which is set to launch May 3 pending regulatory approval, will be worth 0.1 BTC. The smaller contract size provides market participants with an additional tool to hedge their Bitcoin price risk, CME said Tuesday. CME’s current Bitcoin contract unit is 5 BTC.

    Tim McCourt, CME Group’s global head of equity index and alternative investment products, explaine:

    “The introduction of Micro Bitcoin futures responds directly to demand for smaller-sized contracts from a broad array of clients and will offer even more choice and precision in how participants can trade regulated Bitcoin futures in a transparent and efficient manner at CME Group.”

    CME launched its Bitcoin futures contract in December 2017. The Chicago Board Options Exchange, Its larger crosstown rival, was the first to introduce the derivatives contract during the same month but has since abandoned Bitcoin futures altogether.

    CME has noted a steady uptick in crypto derivatives trading since the first Bitcoin futures contract launched more than three years ago.

    image courtesy of CoinTelegraph

    Perhaps that is one reason why bitcoin options traders have started to build a sizable position in call options (levered bets on higher prices), betting on prices above $80,000 by the end of April.

    Source: bybt

    According to the latest data, 5,580 bitcoin (around $330 mm notional) of contracts are outstanding in $80,000 strike April Calls.

    Notably, as CoinMinks reports, significant volume has also accumulated around contracts with a strike price of $120,000.

    This means that some traders believe the bitcoin price will more than double in the next five weeks.

    According to data aggregator Skew, probability estimates based on market data for the April 30 contract suggest that options traders may be a bit too optimistic. The analytics platform gives it a probability of just 6.19% that bitcoin will top $80,000 (and only a 2.15% chance that the bitcoin price will even reach $100,000 by the April 30 expiration date).

    The upcoming Coinbase IPO may also be a catalyst for the upside call-buying.

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 03/30/2021 – 19:45

  • Schools Gone Woke: One America Educator Speaks Out
    Schools Gone Woke: One America Educator Speaks Out

    Authored by ‘An American Educator’ via The Critic,

    In a warning to teachers around the world, one American teacher opens up about the invasion of woke orthodoxy in the education sector…

    I am an American educator who began teaching nearly two decades ago. During that time, I have taught at some of the most prestigious private secondary schools in the United States. Starting about five years ago, these schools began to be consumed by woke ideology.

    When I say “consumed by woke ideology” I mean that these schools are obsessed with sophomoric and divisive notions of diversity, equality, and justice; increasingly hostile to freedom of expression; addicted to cancelling anything that offends the woke movement; and prioritising activism over understanding as the goal of education.

    I am writing this letter to alert those we may describe as “sleep-wokers”. A sleep-woker is one who has not taken the woke creed to heart, yet nevertheless tacitly complies with the linguistic, pedagogical, political, and moral imperatives of wokeness. Sleep-wokers go through the motions; they are like religious folk who say prayers without thinking, attend worship services without engaging, and perpetuate dogmas without believing. I was a sleep-woker. In some ways, due to a combination of timidity and tiredness, I still am.

    Sleep-woking, like sleepwalking, is very dangerous. While sleep-woking, an English teacher can unwittingly help cancel Chaucer, Keats and Conrad in the name of decolonisation. A biology teacher might find herself obliged to deny important differences between the sexes. A football coach will not be able to cheer on a player after a strong tackle, as strength and physical violence smack of toxic masculinity.

    Most of my sleep-woking colleagues are good people. Like me, they were lulled into complacency by a woke take-over that was slow and subtle. What’s more, some changes were initially promising and even corrective — of course we should pay more attention to marginalised voices and overlooked narratives, and I am glad that we now do. To bemoan an expanded curriculum is simple chauvinism. In the end, however, wokeness has proven to be oppressive and totalitarian rather than inclusive and liberating.

    It is worth noting that I have been a supporter of the left for most of my life. The only political donation I have ever made went to a candidate in the most left-leaning wing of the most left-leaning party in American politics. My objection is to the effect of woke ideology on education, not to liberal politics. My grievance is that teachers are increasingly under pressure to adopt the woke agenda or be ostracised.

    I empathise with the difficult situation that top school officials find themselves in. As wokeness takes over American culture, schools face enormous pressure to follow suit. That said, those with the power to stop the degradation of education have a special responsibility to do so, and those of us with less power have a responsibility to remind our superiors of their duty.

    Here is some of what wokeness has wrought at top American schools:

    Offence in is the Eye of the Offended

    Schools openly preach that if one feels offended, one has been offended. For example, if a student or colleague claims to have been offended by your words or actions, it does not matter if you intended no offence. More troubling is the fact that it does not matter if your words and actions were not those that a rational person should find offensive — you are an offender merely by virtue of the fact that someone claims to have been offended.

    Schools cannot yet codify this into an official policy. What the schools are starting to do, however, is to change the ethical norms associated with offence. Since legal norms follow ethical norms, if schools (and societies) succeed in changing the ethical norms of speech and offence, they will eventually have a basis upon which to change the legal norms. As soon as they can show that a normal or typical person is offended by certain language or certain ideas, they will be able to argue that a person presenting such language and ideas is failing to abide by the reasonable ethical expectations of school culture. In short, we are training students how to be offended so that their perceived offence can be used to eliminate anti-woke expression.

    Elimination of Non-Woke Student Clubs

    Any student group that resists woke orthodoxy is likely to be forcibly disbanded or prevented from forming. Student clubs cannot form without faculty sponsors. Since the vast majority of the faculty at these schools are woke (or too afraid to be seen as non-woke), conservative students have trouble officially meeting and inviting speakers. If a non-woke speaker is invited, the wokes mobilise to deny them a platform and they feel righteous for doing so. Few conservative students openly identify as such because they are afraid of repercussions from faculty and from other students. Not only is this unfair, but it is also dangerous. Alienated conservative students are being pushed away from moderate disagreement and towards political extremism.

    No Resisting Woke Slogans

    Opposing woke slogans or voicing contrary slogans is not tolerated. Since opposing wokeness is thought to be motivated by hate, voicing opposition to woke slogans is tantamount to hate speech. A student who challenges a woke slogan is bullied and harassed by the woke majority. Meanwhile, woke slogans and images are hung in school buildings and cannot be removed.

    Cultural Appropriation

    White or Western students are told not to participate in cultural traditions of non-white, non-Western people — the oppressors cannot participate in the culture of the oppressed. For example, several white students who wore shirts with African designs were reprimanded and forced to change their clothes. The fact that the shirts were a gift from their teacher, a black African man, made no difference. The students wore the shirts to show affection for their teacher and to honour his gift, but that was still cultural appropriation.

    In another instance, a musician was reprimanded for blending a western and non-western musical style into a new artistic expression. The musician was accused of cultural imperialism.

    Cancelling Curriculum

    Shakespeare, Homer and other canonical authors are being eliminated from the curriculum. In some cases, schools and teachers boast about cancelling these patriarchal racists. Even at schools that do not officially cancel canonical Western texts, the texts are subtly replaced in the name of anti-racism.

    Most of my students will go to university never having read Homer or Shakespeare, though they will have been required to read many texts and attend many lectures on intersectionality and gender identity. They can speak at length about toxic masculinity and a panoply of so-called phobias, but they would not recognise the terms “iambic pentameter” and “dactylic hexameter”, let alone recognise actual examples of the meter.

    Normalising Fallacies

    Ad hominem attacks are presented as the cornerstone of critical thinking rather than as a fallacious form of argumentation. We teach students to evaluate texts and arguments by primarily attending to the author’s race, gender, and sexuality.

    Mandatory Training

    Students attend mandatory training sessions in which experts teach them how to identify and report microaggressions. And since to a student with a hammer everything looks like a nail, the students begin informing on each other and on their teachers. White teachers are told to attend racial-political re-education workshops in which they strive to overcome their whiteness in the classroom. (It has long been accepted that “whiteness” is a meaningful category.)

    If you claim to not be a racist, you are seen as the worst, most unredeemable kind of racist. You are a heretic who will not admit heresy. You are thought to be suffering from something called “white fragility”.

    Trigger Warnings

    Before introducing a new unit, teachers compile lists of trigger warnings for the material in that unit. A trigger warning serves to alert students to any and all things in the unit that could cause them stress, frustration, anger, or sadness. These lists are shared with students.

    Manners and Dress Codes

    A side-effect of the woke attack on tradition, authority, and hierarchy has been the revocation of dress codes. So long as their genitals are covered and no profane words are visible, students can and do wear anything they like. Arguably the only rule left in the dining halls and cafeterias is “Don’t throw food.”

    Many students eat meals with headphones in their ears while watching videos on their phones. The less respectful students don’t bother with headphones. “Sir” and “Ma’am” have long since disappeared as too authoritarian and gendered. The terms “master” and “headmaster” cannot be used as master might connote slavery.

    Elimination of Objective Assessments

    Exams are being eliminated for two reasons: first, because exams are apparently inherently racist, sexist, classist, heteronormative, or otherwise unfair; second, because exams cause students stress, and stress makes students feel bad, and feeling bad negatively impacts their well-being. Additionally, some students do poorly on exams, and this has the potential to result in a situation that is inequitable.

    Pronouns

    Faculty are frequently pressured to identify their pronouns. Failure to identify one’s pronouns is seen as transphobic or cis-centric or both. Students can reassign their own pronouns at will. If a teacher mistakenly does not use the student’s preferred pronoun, the teacher is accused of misgendering. Misgendering a serious offence, even a kind of violence.

    *  *  *

    The unchecked advance of wokeness will do two things to your school.

    • First, you and your students will lose the ability to freely read, write and speak as pupils and teachers. Second, the education that you now provide will become unrecognisably impoverished.

    • This second effect is probably the hardest to believe, especially for those of you at top academic institutions, but it is the effect of which I am most certain. In place of free-thinking young scholars, you will begin turning out a generation of woke activists who believe that feelings matter more than facts, that perception is reality, and that it is more important to judge a text than to understand it — where “judging” means anachronistically interpreting the author’s words in light of the most recent woke orthodoxy.

    Many of my students claim to be proud practitioners of social justice (don’t push them too hard on what that means) yet they have only an elementary command of grammar and geography, struggling to write complete sentences and unable to locate Turkey on a map. Some have begun to ask why we take math so seriously given that math is apparently grounded in Western patriarchal rationalism. Wokeness has been achieved at the expense of education. Reason has been subordinated to passion. Plato’s charioteer has been replaced by the horses he was meant to reign in.

    Perhaps some of you are disturbed by some of the woke excesses at your schools and in your communities, even if, like me, you readily support appeals for greater diversity, genuine inclusion, and a multicultural curriculum. Perhaps your instinct has been to dismiss these excesses as isolated incidents. Like me, you might have said “The pendulum will swing back” or “That will never happen at my school.” I am writing to say that the pendulum will not swing back because the woke movement is not a pendulum; it is a steamroller.

    I am not claiming any moral high ground. My own failure to push back in the right ways and at the right times makes me part of the problem. Nor am I here trying to convince anyone else to become bothered by the advance of woke culture into education. If what I am reporting does not bother you, ignore me. If wokeness has begun to concern you, however, you now have a glimpse of where your own school may be headed.

    One of the canniest bits of woke linguistic manipulation has been appropriation of the term “woke” itself. To not be woke is to be asleep: unconscious or ignorant of what is really going on.

    Either one is woke or one is not aware of reality. Or, as I was recently told by a student, if you are not woke, it must be because you are uneducated or hateful — or both.

    Such is the woke reality.

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 03/30/2021 – 19:25

  • Here Come The Most Stunning Base-Effect Charts Since The Great Depression
    Here Come The Most Stunning Base-Effect Charts Since The Great Depression

    In just a few days, US high frequency economic data will lap March 2020 when the US economy literally shut down and sent all economic indicators in freefall to a degree not seen since the Great Depression (and in many cases, more).

    When that happens, while March/April economic data will rise only modestly compared to the previous month, it will be a veritable explosion compared to the shutdown a year ago. This is the so-called “base effect” and while many economists will ignore it, especially when it comes to inflation data, the impact for many will be jarring especially when investors see charts that have gone, for lack of a better word, vertical.

    To preview the annual change base effect that is coming in everything from retail sales, to income and spending, to housing data, to jobs and unemployment, we have pulled some of the most representative real-time indicators available from JPMorgan and Bank of America, starting with what is perhaps the most illustrative chart of all: JPM’s spending tracker on the bank’s own consumer (debit and credit) cards.

    Here the 65% surge in spending is not because of an actual surge in spending March, but because spending last March imploded. Which is why to normalize for the post-March 2020 shock, banks will likely show not just the Y/Y chart, but also a chart comparing to 2-year ago or, better yet, a pre-covid blended trend as JPM has done in the chart above.

    Bank of America published a similar chart, showing a huge jump in Y/Y card spending, especially among households who received stimulus payments – and this time on both a 1 and 2 year basis – while household that did not receive stimulus saw a roughly 30% jump in Y/Y spending due to the base effect, and only a modest increase in 2Y spending.

    Here are some other charts showing how the 1-Year, but not 2-Year change, has gone vertical:

    … And some more.

    … And even more…

    But nowhere is the base effect more visible than in the 1-year spending on airlines, where we see a very clear “lift off” formation in progress.

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 03/30/2021 – 19:05

  • 1.8 Million Jobs On Friday?
    1.8 Million Jobs On Friday?

    Treasury yields blew out overnight (with the belly in particular feeling the heat: 5s +5.5bps, 10s +6.0bps) during the Asian session in continuation of yesterday’s move higher, as the usual suspects – Japanese commercial banks – resumed selling in droves (see “Morgan Stanley Identifies The Source Of Massive Treasury Selling“), although it wasn’t clear what if any catalyst sparked the selling.

    Trying to make some sense of the latest move in yields Nomura’s Charlie McElligott offered three reasons for the return of the reflation theme:

    1. vaccine renormalization
    2. fiscal stimulus now circulating into the “real economy”, and
    3. the expected large upside surprise in Friday’s NFP data now increasingly being priced-in, whose release McElligott notes “comes dangerously on the illiquid ‘Good Friday’ holiday-shortened session, risking a disorderly move”

    We won’t focus much on topics 1 and 2 which we have covered extenisvely elsewhere on multiple occasions, but instead we will preview what may be a truly blockbuster payrolls report on Friday, coming right at a time when stocks are closed and when bonds are open only until noon.

    So why focus on Friday’s jobs report? Because one month after the February Payrolls printed at 379K, nearly double the consensus estimate of 198K, Wall Street expects the labor market to resume its torrid upward trajectory with a whopping 650K print.

    While on the surface this will likely send yields sharply higher as it provides fresh fuel to the reflation narrative, a chart published today by JPMorgan took our breath away. In the bank’s latest “quant and econ dashboard report”, JPMorgan compares the BLS payrolls series with its own alternative data-based tracker of jobs data. Remarkably, it found that after a period of almost uniform convergence between the two series, the March “alternative data” print was a whopper, one which implies the matched BLS print will be around 1.8 million jobs!

    To be sure there are several other reflationary considerations laid out by McElligott, which we note below…

    • With the market sniffing the pull-forward of US QE taper in addition to then likelihood of “front-loaded” Fed hikes, 5s are in a really tricky spot, and this is why 5s30s—which was really the “reflation steepener” of choice for so long last year—has now actually stalled-out, sitting around this 1.50 level for approximately two months now
    • The better the reopening data gets, the more likely it is that we more of this inflection from phase 1 steepening “reflation feel-good” as the long-end reflects higher growth- and inflation- expectations, to the phase 2 flattening “Fed tightening” stage, where the front-end / belly leading the repricing ahead of Fed policy adjustment—with the potential for this to begin evidencing itself to markets by the time of the next Fed SEP in June potentially needing to reflect an improved forecast

    In this context, imagine what happens to the 10Y – and certainly the belly and the 5Y – if we do get a 1.8MM print (which has quickly emerged as the whisper number for Friday), smashing expectations by 3x, and unleashing a volley of TSY selling as the herd panics and dumps Treasurys faster than you can say a “failed 7Y auction.” Perhaps the only question in this “blowout payrolls” scenario is whether the 10Y – which today rose as high as 1.78% will find support at 2.00% or will it blow out above the level most on Wall Street (according to the latest BofA Fund Manager Survey)…

    … agrees is the trigger for chaos not just in the bond but also stock market.

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 03/30/2021 – 18:45

  • A "Very Surprised" JPMorgan Calculates The Damage From The Archegos Collapse
    A “Very Surprised” JPMorgan Calculates The Damage From The Archegos Collapse

    Unlike the devastating London Whale debacle in 2012, which was all JPMorgan eventually drawn and quartered quite theatrically before Congress (and was a clear explanation of how banks used Fed reserves to manipulate markets, something most market participants had no idea was possible), this time JPMorgan was nowhere to be found in the aftermath of the historic margin call that destroyed hedge fund Archegos. Which is may explain why JPMorgan bank analyst Kian Abouhossein admits he is quite “puzzled” by the recent fallout from the Archegos implosion (or maybe JPM simply was not a Prime Broker of the notorious Tiger cub), which however does not prevent him from trying to calculate the capital at risk from the Archegos collapse.

    In a note published this morning, Kian writes after Nomura yesterday confirmed (at least) a $2Nn potential claim and fellow Japanese bank Mitsubishi UFJ Securities Holdings announcing today of another potential $300MM loss – which as the JPM strategist admits “for a likely non-material PB player is surprising to us” – JPMorgan now expects losses well beyond normal unwinding scenario for the industry: and explains that it now sees “the losses as very material in relation to lending exposure for a business that is mark-to-market and holds liquid collateral” and makes Nomura’s indication of potentially losing $2bn and press speculation of CSG $3-4bn losses “as not an unlikely outcome” according to the JPM strategist.

    So why is JPM surprised?

    Because as Abouhossein writes, “in normal circumstances… we would have suspected industry losses of $2.5-5bn. We now suspect losses in the range of $5-10bn.” In other words, JPM has doubled its max loss estimate to as much as $10BN, a number which could yet rise.

    To get there, JPM estimates that Archegos was highly leveraged at 5-8x (i.e. $50-80bn of exposure for $10bn of equity) – using Total Return Swaps and Certificates for Difference to lever up so massively as we discussed yesterday – and it was this use of equity-swaps tha “tincreased the inability of PBs to see the concentration risk in holdings within the hedge fund in question.”

    Even so, Kian admits that he remains “puzzled why Credit Suisse (CSG) and Nomura have been unable to unwind all their positions at this point – as we would expect to get an announcement as soon as this is the case, on the scale of potential losses (especially in the case of CSG which hasn’t provided numerical impact)” although we have gotten some headlines suggesting the total loss could be as big as $7 billion.

    That said the JPM analyst expects full disclosure by the end of the week at the latest from CSG and would keep an eye on credit agencies statements as well. And in the harshest slam of JPM’s competitors, Kian says he suspects “potentially poor risk mgmt being an issue here considering i) late unwinding, and ii) possibly significant more leverage than for GS/MS similar exposures.”

    Alternatively, one could argue that it was Goldman and Morgan Stanley who rushed to break ranks with the syndicate of Prime Brokers and started dumping blocks of Archegos shares for one reason or another on Friday morning as we detailed yesterday, which meant that while they suffered the least losses, those banks – like CS, Nomura and Wells – which were slow to start selling, would end up with the largest losses (for more see “How Goldman And Morgan Stanley Broke Ranks And Triggered The Biggest Margin Call Since Lehman“).

    Source: @KennethDredd

    In terms of actual loss estimates with an empahsis on Credit Suisse which so far appears to be the hardest hit, here is a breakdown from JPMorgan of what is known:

    In terms of capital at risk, based on press articles, Credit Suisse seems to have bigger issues than Nomura assuming press speculation of  $3-4bn are correct and Grensill could potentially lead to additional litigation cost of $1-3bn. In the case of Nomura, JPM has reduced the share buyback for FY2020 from ¥75 billion to ¥10 billion; if the press speculation losses are correct, it would expect CS at a minimum will have to cancel its share buyback for 2021, preserving the dividend and we assume no buyback for the next 2 years assuming Basel 4 implementation as of Jan 2023.

    Assuming no RWA growth vs. YE2020 levels, JPM calculates that CS can absorb a max. one-time pre-tax hit of c$4.5bn (CHF 4.2bn) for Archegos which post-tax is 116bps of CET1 capital offset by 32bps of Retained earnings (1Q Net Income less 1Q dividend accrual of CHF 0.2bn and share buyback of CHF 0.3bn completed YTD) and still reach 12% by end of 1Q 21 which is seen as an acceptable level for S/Hs under Basel 3 – with further hits to come (see below). The minimum CET1 requirement is 10% and every additional $1bn pre-tax hit is 26bps of CET1 capital based on YE2020 RWAs and hence “any hits beyond $5bn pre-tax from Archegos will call into question the capital position in our view”, JPM warns.

    Separately, Bloomberg adds that March’s blowups may – in addition to wiping out more than a year of profits for the bank and threaten its stock buyback plans – also add add to the reputational hit from the other missteps by bank CEO Thomas Gottstein. With the shares posting the only decline among Europe’s major banks in 2021 and a new chairman starting next month, Chief Executive Officer Thomas Gottstein is facing questions over whether he and risk chief Lara Warner have a handle on the bank’s exposures.

    “Risk control at every level in this bank must be examined and changes made where there are deficiencies,” David Herro, chief investment officer at Harris Associates, one of the biggest investors in the bank, said in an email. “But I state the obvious?”

    As Bloomberg further notes, the hits from Archegos and Greensill have spoiled a plan by Gottstein to start the year with a clean slate.

    The CEO late last year wrote down the value of the bank’s stake in hedge fund York Capital and took a hit related to a long-standing legal case into residential mortgage-backed securities, dealing the bank its first quarterly loss in three years. The crises have more than overshadowed its best start to the year in a decade.

    “While all four events appear idiosyncratic in nature, it inevitably has led investors to question the strategic decision making at CS and the risk culture of the firm,” Andrew Coombs, a Citi bank analyst wrote Tuesday.

    While Credit Suisse has not quantified the full damage yet, and has merely said that it faces “highly significant” losses tied to Archegos, Berenberg analysts pegged the hit at 3 billion Swiss francs, on top of 500 million francs from the Greensill issues.

    * * *

    Finally, JPM tries to answer a key question for many investors, namely what has happened with holdings (as speculated in the press ) of Archegos Capital?

    As Kian writes, the share price of Arhcegos Capital linked stocks fell by -39% on avg. since the beginning of last week. According to press reports (Bloomberg), Archegos Capital was forced to sell large shareholdings in eight online and entertainment companies (GSX Techedu, ViacomCBS, Discovery, iQIYI, Tencent Music, Vipshop, Baidu, Farfetch) to cover potential losses after some positions moved against the fund. Once Archegos Captial failed to meet its margin commitments, the sell-off intensified further as banks started offloading via sizeable block trades the holdings posted by the fund as collateral, prompting more declines.

    Based on the latest publicly available disclosure the banks with the largest exposure to the mentioned companies were Morgan Stanley, Credit Suisse, Goldman Sachs, Nomura and to a lesser extent UBS and DB (more details below). On Friday alone, both ViacomCBS and Discovery saw their largest ever daily decline, with each falling by more than -27%. Traded volumes for the eight companies peaked on Friday with daily volumes being on avg. more than 13x the 90 days moving average. The sell-off continued on Monday 29th with the aforementioned stocks falling further -6% on average.

    Based on latest available public filings, JPM calculates that the banks which had the largest holdings in the eight Archegos Capital-linked stocks mentioned by the press were Morgan Stanley, Credit Suisse, Goldman Sachs and Nomura. Morgan Stanley exposure was relatively broad based with 5%+ holdings in all but one companies and with 10%+ stake in both GSX Techedu and iQIYI. Credit Suisse exposure was also broad based with holdings in all but one companies and with the largest exposure being its 9% stake in Discovery. Goldman Sachs exposure was mainly concentrated in GSX Techedu (22% stake), while Nomura had exposure in all but one companies and a relatively large holding of 7% in GSX Techedu. Other banks such as Bank of America, Citi, UBS, Deutsche and Barclays also had holdings above 2% in some the mentioned companies (mainly GSX Techedu and Discovery).

    Finally, courtesy of JPM, here is a summary of all the latest publicly available information disclosing what exposure each bank may have had – and still has – to Archegos:

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 03/30/2021 – 18:38

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