Feb 07

Today’s News 7th February 2023

  • Victor Davis Hanson: Ukrainian Paradoxes
    Victor Davis Hanson: Ukrainian Paradoxes

    Authored by Victor Davis Hanson via AmGreatness.com,

    Are the borders of country 5,000 miles away more sacrosanct and more worth taking existential risks than our own airspace and southern border?

    One of the strangest things about the American response to Ukraine has been the willingness of the Left and the establishment Right to discount completely that the war is heading toward a rendezvous with ever-deadlier weapons and staggering fatalities—even as we witness increasing nuclear threats from a weakened and adrift Vladimir Putin. They insist that Putin is merely saber-rattling. And he might be. Supposedly, in his diminished and discredited state, Putin would not dare to set off a tactical nuclear weapon (as if diminished and discredited leaders are not more likely to do so).

    Proxies Versus Balloons 

    But while we discount the nuclear dangers of a paranoid Putin reacting to the arming of our proxy Ukraine, the brazen Chinese, in violation of American airspace and international law, sent their recent “weather “ surveillance balloon across the continental United States with impunity. Only after public pressure, media coverage, and the Republican opposition did the Biden Administration, in the 11th hour, finally drop its increasingly incoherent and disingenuous excuses, and agree to shoot the balloon down as it reached the Atlantic shore—its mission completed. 

    Given the balloon may have more, not less, surveillance capability than satellites, may have itself been designed eventually to adopt offensive capability, and may have been intended to gauge the American reaction to incursions, the Biden hesitation and fear to defend U.S. airspace and confront China makes no sense. 

    Contrast Ukraine: Why discount the dangers of strategic escalation in a third-party proxy war, but exaggerate them to the point of stasis when a belligerent’s spy balloon crosses the U.S. heartland with impunity? Are the borders of Ukraine more sacrosanct and more worthy of our taking existential risks than our own airspace and southern border. 

    When and How Did Russia Enter Ukraine?

     Russia did not just enter Ukraine on February 24, 2022. So where were the voices of outrage in 2014‚ from Joe Biden and others in the highest positions of the Obama Administration when Putin first absorbed Crimea and eastern Ukraine?  

    Why do the most fervent supporters of blank-check aid to the Zelenskyy government grow indifferent when we ask how Russia in 2014 managed so easily to reclaim vast swaths of Ukraine? Is it because of the 2012 hot-mic conversation between Barack Obama and then Russian Federation President Dmitry Medvedev in Seoul, South Korea, in which Obama promised: “On all these issues, but particularly missile defense, this, this can be solved, but it’s important for him to give me space. . . . This is my last election . . . After my election, I have more flexibility.” 

    Obama’s “ flexibility ” on missile defense in eastern Europe was an understatement—given he completely canceled a long-planned major U.S. commitment to Poland and the Czech Republic, a system that might have been of some value during the present conflict with Putin. And certainly, Putin did give Obama the requested reelection “space” by not invading Crimea and eastern Ukraine until 16 months after Obama was reelected in his “last election.” Once he did so, the bargain was apparently sealed, and each party got what it wanted: both space (i.e., temporary good Russian behavior) and flexibility (i.e., canceling an air defense system).

    So it was almost surreal how the bipartisan establishment forgot why and how Putin entered and annexed thousands of square miles of Ukraine so easily, and apparently on the correct assumption of an anemic American response. Did James Clapper in 2014 smear Obama as a “Russian asset” as he did Donald Trump in 2017?

    In the “Russian collusion” and “Russian disinformation” hoaxes, the purveyors of those hysterias forgot the role of “reset” appeasement in empowering Putin to attack Ukraine in 2014—in the same manner as the Biden Administration’s ignominious retreat from Kabul was the context for Putin’s 2022 attempt on Kyiv. The common denominator in both cases was Moscow’s apparent conclusion that foreign policy under the Obama-Biden continuum was viewed as indifference to Russian aggression. 

    Who Did Not Arm the Ukrainians?

    Why, after 2014, didn’t the Obama Administration arm the Ukrainians to the teeth? The surreal element of the first Trump impeachment was the reality that Trump was impeached for delaying offensive arms shipments (on the understandable and later proven assumption that the Biden family and elements of the Ukraine government were both utterly corrupt). 

    If Trump was impeached for delaying the offensive arms he approved and eventually sent, what was the proper reaction to Obama-Biden, who vetoed them altogether? And if the fallback argument is that Trump’s delay targeted his 2020 presidential opponent, then we arrive again at the same absurdity. For Joe Biden, by staging the Mar-a-Lago raid to charge Trump with the same “crimes” he knowingly at the time had committed, should then likewise be impeached for targeting his possible future political opponent.

    But be clear: there is far more demonstrable evidence that the Biden family was corrupt and leveraging the Ukrainian and Chinese governments than there is of Donald Trump pilfering “nuclear codes” and “nuclear secrets.” 

    Part of the American people’s bewilderment over the left-wing zeal to send $100 billion in U.S. aid to Ukraine and to damn anyone who asks for clarification of our long-term strategy in ending the war is precisely the contrast between Putin’s lethargy between 2017-2021 and his restless aggression in 2014 and again in 2022, the bookend years to the hated Trump Administration. 

    Putin moved on all these occasions because Obama’s refusal to arm Ukraine, his quid pro quos with Putin on missile defense, his rhetorical “red line” in Syria, and his abrupt withdrawal from Iraq that birthed ISIS—in the same manner that Biden scrambled from Afghanistan—promised that America’s response would be muted if Putin’s invasion was “minor,” and offered a safe exit for Zelenskyy.

    If we truly seek to navigate an end to Russian aggression, by one means or another, the beginning of our wisdom would entail how exactly we got here in the first place—and require us to learn from our disasters.

    Why Are Our Arms Depots Depleted? 

    If we wish to wonder why Vladimir Putin believed that the Biden Administration’s response to his aggression would be like the Obama-Biden reaction in 2014, then we need only look to the August 2021 American collapse in Afghanistan. That summer, Joe Biden made the decision to yank precipitously all U.S. troops out of Afghanistan, abandoning a $1 billion embassy, a multimillion-dollar refitted airbase, and hundreds of billions of dollars in U.S. military equipment, including 22,174 Humvee vehicles, nearly 1,000 armored vehicles, 64,363 machine guns, and 42,000 pick-up trucks and SUVs 358,530 assault rifles, 126,295 pistols, and nearly 200 artillery units.

    Recent reports, denied by the United States, allege that Putin is negotiating with the Taliban to buy some of the abandoned American arsenal to help replenish Russia’s enormous materiel losses in Ukraine. What helped the Soviets win World War II were the American gifts of 400,000 trucks and Jeeps. Over 60,000 American armored vehicles, Humvees, and trucks, now in the hands of the Taliban would be a valuable addition to Putin’s arsenal. The media assures us that poorly equipped Russian soldiers struggle with obsolete guns dating back to the early postwar period, while assuring us that either the Taliban would not sell, or Russians could not use, over a half-million late-model American automatic pistols, assault rifles, and machine guns.

    Americans are quite critical of the supposed anemic European response and lack of aid matching the American largess. But, in fact, Biden likely reversed course from his initial remarks about minor incursions and a safe ride out for Zelenskyy, and a prior aversion to sending offensive arms, because the frontline Europeans were terrified of Putin on the move and demanded an American-led NATO joint effort to supply Ukraine. 

    The belated but increasingly muscular response of the United States to pour aid into Ukraine may stall the Russian advance and even its anticipated spring offensive. But the growing involvement of the United States has raised the issue of deterrence, as China closely watches both the response of Europe and the United States and the ability of revanchist Russia to invade. If Russia were to mobilize and use all its resources—10 times the GDP of Ukraine, 30 times the territory, 3.5 times the population—it would likely require a far greater sacrifice of Ukrainian blood and Western treasure. And the war that may have already cost over 200,000 dead and 300,000 wounded will likely prove the most lethal since the Vietnam War, in which over 3 million soldiers and civilians died on both sides of the conflict. 

    More importantly, will the zealots, who demand that we empty our arsenals to supply Ukraine, vote in Congress for massive increases in the defense budget to ratchet up arms production to ensure that our depleted stocks of weapons are restored rapidly?

    In sum, there would be broader support for Ukraine’s military aid if advocates were transparent on the following 10 issues: 

    1) The United States will be as firm and deterrent vis à vis China as it is now belatedly with Russia.

    2) We will acknowledge that Ukraine is a mess because Vladimir Putin between 2009 and 2016, and again in 2021, concluded that the United States either would not or could not deter his aggression.

    3) Just as we attempt to help to protect the sovereign borders of Ukraine, so too must we consider just as sacrosanct our own airspace and our southern border.

    4) All those in government and the media who demand more weapons for Ukraine, after the war ends, with the same zeal must demand immediate increased arms production to ensure their own country is as well protected as Ukraine.

    5) Just as we deplore Russia interfering in our elections, so too we must cite Ukrainian interference in 2016, as evidenced by the pro-Clinton skullduggery of Alexandra Chalupa, Valeriy Chaly, Serhiy Leshchenko, Oksana Shulyar, and Andrii Telizhenko, along with the Biden family’s financial relations with Burisma and top Ukrainian officials. We expect and prepare for enemies to tamper with our elections, but Ukraine is a supposed friend that nonetheless likely was more involved in 2016 than were the Russians—and yet was never held to account.

    6) Unfortunately, we cannot believe any of the predictions emanating from our top intelligence and military leaders about the course of the Ukrainian war, given they were simply wrong about the Afghanistan collapse, wrong both about the initial resiliency of the Ukrainians and later the supposed imminent collapse of the Russians, both biased and wrong about Hunter Biden’s laptop, implicated in the Russian collusion hoax, and once again misled the American people about the time of arrival, the nature, and the purpose of the Chinese balloon, and the various garbled reasons why it was not immediately shot down. 

    7) Those who feel international negotiations about the status of Crimea and the Ukrainian borderlands are tantamount to surrender, and therefore taboo, must prepare the American people for their envisioned victory of ejecting every Russian from pre-2014 Ukraine, by assessing the dangers of a nuclear exchange, the eventual cost in arms and weapons of $200-500 billion, and a price tag of economic aid to rebuild a ruined Ukraine that will vastly exceed our military aid. 

    8) Those who advocate Ukraine’s entry into NATO, must remind the American people that should Putin then mount a second offensive into Ukraine, American troops, along those of 29 other NATO nations, would be sent to Ukraine to fight nuclear Russia and its allies.

    9) We should apparently accept as regrettable, but tolerable that the war in Ukraine has united China and Russia, ensured they are both patrons for nuclear North Korea and soon-to-be nuclear Iran, and are near to drawing Turkey and India into their orbit—or nearly half the world’s population.

    10) Given that China is a more existential threat than Russia, and given that the Chinese danger to the whole of Taiwan is far greater than is the Russian threat to all of Ukraine, we would expect those advocating blank-check support for Ukraine, would of course be as adamantly protective of Taiwan, even if the two wars were to become simultaneous. We expect those who demand no limits in weakening Putin’s dictatorship, harbor even more animus for the far more dangerous totalitarianism of China.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 02/06/2023 – 23:40

  • Biden's State Of The Union Preview
    Biden’s State Of The Union Preview

    By Brian Gardner, Stifel Chief Washington Policy Strategist

    President Biden’s State of the Union could be seen as a soft opening for his 2024 reelection campaign.  He is likely to take a victory lap on his 2022 legislative wins (the IRA and the CHIPS Act), promote climate initiatives, and highlight consumer-related sectors (tech and banking) to argue that his administration is helping consumers.  The speech will likely include some mention of the debt ceiling debate, but the president will probably avoid going into detail about his position ahead of negotiations with Congress.

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    State of the Union (SOTU) addresses tend to include laundry lists of proposals that will never see the light today and Tuesday’s speech will probably be similar to past speeches, but President Joe Biden’s speech could be notable and potentially market moving for a few reasons.

    President Biden’s SOTU speech will probably serve as an unofficial launch of his 2024 reelection campaign.  As such, the speech could include several themes that might reappear during the campaign.  President Biden will likely try to position himself as a champion of the middle class and as part of this effort, he could use various sectors as foils to show he is on the side of average Americans and against Big Business. The technology and the banking industries could be mentioned in the speech.   A focus on tech regulation in the president’s address could include mentions of the administration’s antitrust initiatives, privacy protection, and possibly revisions to liability protections under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.  Regarding banks, the president could reiterate calls on banking regulators to review merger rules.  He could also highlight the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s (CFPB) recent proposal to cap credit card late fees and push for a similar cap on overdraft fees.

    The president is likely to take a victory lap on his legislative victories in 2022 including the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) and the CHIPS Act.  In addition to highlighting the two new laws, Mr. Biden might also push for an expansion of some of the IRA’s climate provisions including expanding electric vehicle tax credits. However, in the current political environment, any expansion of EV credits seems unlikely.

    The IRA capped insulin prices under Medicare, but procedural rules in the Senate prevented capping prices under private health insurance plans.  The speech could include a proposal to expand the insulin price cap to private plans.

    The president will likely mention the debt ceiling debate, but investors should not expect new proposals or concessions to Republicans.  Instead, the speech will try to position the president as representing a “reasonable” alternative to the “extreme” demands of the Republicans (a theme likely to play out in the 2024 campaign).  He could also try to calm investors by assuring them that the debt ceiling will be raised and that the government will not default on its bond payments. This poses a conundrum since as long as investors expect a debt ceiling deal, the markets will remain calm and price in a deal.  However, this removes a pressure point on Washington to reach a deal.  Panic in financial markets helps move lawmakers to reach an agreement, so calm markets are actually counterproductive to reaching a debt ceiling deal.  It is likely that markets will continue to price in a debt ceiling agreement until and unless we approach the X-date (the day probably in the early summer when Treasury exhaust its extraordinary measures to manage the debt limit) and headlines hit suggesting that Congress and the administration might fail to reach a deal.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 02/06/2023 – 23:00

  • Rothschild Family Offers To Take Flagship Bank Private In $4 Billion Deal
    Rothschild Family Offers To Take Flagship Bank Private In $4 Billion Deal

    The iconic Rothschild family, whose accumulated if mostly hidden wealth is according to some among the world’s greatest fortunes, is planning to take its flagship investment bank, Rothschild & Co, private. The bank, whose predecessors helped finance the Duke of Wellington’s victory over Napoleon in 1815 at the battle of Waterloo, announced Monday that its main shareholder plans a tender offer valuing the firm at about €3.7 billion, or $4 billion.

    The move, which comes at a time when many of its peers are going the opposite route and seeking public capital, would end public ownership of a firm that in one form or another has been listed since 1838, according to a spokeswoman. As Bloomberg notes, the private buyout will mark the latest step in the family’s efforts to cement control, after a 2012 reorganization effectively brought the French and British businesses under one roof and simplified the organization structure.

    Like most standalone contemporary investment banks, the Paris-based firm generates the majority of its revenue from providing financial advisory to what can easily be called the deepest rolodex in the world, though it also has a wealth and asset management unit as well as merchant banking business. Led by the 42-year-old Alexandre de Rothschild since 2018 (whose great, great, great, great grandfather is Mayer Amschel Rothschild, founder of the Rothschild dynasty), the bank has been expanding in the US and managed to sidestep much of the slump in the market for deal advisory, ranking 6th by the number of mergers and acquisitions last year according to Bloomberg.

    Alexandre de Rothschild in 2018 became the seventh generation of the family to lead the bank

    Rothschild & Co has three divisions: global advisory, wealth and asset management, and merchant banking. “None of the businesses of the group needs access to capital from the public equity markets,” Concordia, a holding company for the family, said in a statement smugly, at a time when so many of its peers are hurting for advisory revenue. “Furthermore, each of the businesses is better assessed on the basis of their long-term performance rather than short-term earnings. This makes private ownership of the group more appropriate than a public listing.”

    The Rothschild family’s intention to take their boutique company private runs counter to the trend of the past two decades when a wave of smaller advisories such as Evercore and Lazard sought public listings in the US.

    Concordia, which is the Rothschilds’ family holdings company and already owns 38.9% of the firm’s shares and 47.5% of the voting rights, said it expects to offer €48 a share, a premium of 19% over the closing price on Friday for the shares it doesn’t already own. Rothschild’s shares rose 17% to €47.

    The going-private plan comes three months after Evelyn de Rothschild, the former head of the British arm of the banking group, died at age 91. Evelyn and his cousin David de Rothschild, who oversaw the French arm, united the two branches in a move that was seen as a key step in remaining competitive. David took managerial control of the U.K. side of the business in 2004 after his cousin Evelyn retired. Under his leadership and that of his son, the center of power at the lender moved further to Paris. David de Rothschild’s side of the family has 39.42% of Concordia’s voting rights, while his cousin Eric de Rothschild’s has 55.6%, according to Rothschild’s annual report.

    Four years ago, there was a changing of the guard at the bank, when David de Rothschild stepped aside and passed the reins to his son Alexandre, who became the seventh generation of the family to lead the bank. Under the younger de Rothschild’s leadership, it has sought to diversify from its core French and British advisory business, expanding in the US where it has historically struggled and into private equity.

    Concordia said it’s currently in advanced negotiations with investors and banks to finalize the financing of the deal. If the talks are successful, it intends to file its offer by the end of the first half of 2023.

    Rothschild & Co. said it plans to offer a €1.4 dividend to shareholders at its next annual general meeting on May 25. The firm will also propose a €8 exceptional dividend, should Concordia decide to file its offer. The price of the offer would be adjusted downwards by those amounts.

    According to the FT, Rothschild & Co has worked on some of the biggest deals in Europe over the past year, including Volkswagen’s initial public offering of Porsche, Covéa’s $9bn acquisition of Partner Re, the nationalisation of German energy group Uniper and the combination of satellite operators Eutelsat and OneWeb. Its Q3 revenues of €864 million was up 30% year on year. Revenues in global advisory, its largest business, increased 18% year on year to €547 million during the same period. The group warned that 2023 was likely to be a more challenging year given the macroeconomic and geopolitical environment.

    In a statement, Rothschild & Co said it had “taken note of the proposed transaction” and had appointed Finexsi, a Paris-based financial advisory company, as an independent expert to deliver a fairness opinion.

    The Rothschild firm was founded by Mayer Amschel, who started out buying and selling old coins in a Frankfurt ghetto. In the early 1800s, he sent his five sons to establish bases of Rothschild in London, Paris, Naples, Vienna and Frankfurt. He was successful, and today his descendants are intimately and extensively involved in virtually all aspects of global banking.

    The Rothschild name has been the center of dispute between branches of the family for years. In 2018, the firm settled a long-running disagreement with wealth manager Edmond de Rothschild (Suisse) SA, which is managed by a different branch of the family, over the use of the name. As part of that deal, the two companies agreed to unwind their cross-shareholdings.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 02/06/2023 – 22:40

  • The Political Became Very Personal
    The Political Became Very Personal

    Authored by Michael Senger via The Brownstone Institute,

    The scars that have been left on all of us by the response to COVID are incomprehensibly varied and deep.

    For most, there hasn’t been enough time to mentally process the significance of the initial lockdowns, let alone the years-long slog of mandates, terror, propaganda, social stigmatization and censorship that followed. And this psychological trauma affects us in myriad ways that leave us wondering what it is about life that just feels so off versus how it felt in 2019.

    For those who were following the real data, the statistics were always horrifying.

    Trillions of dollars rapidly transferred from the world’s poorest to the richest. Hundreds of millions hungry. Countless years of educational attainment lost. An entire generation of children and adolescents robbed of some of their brightest years. A mental health crisis affecting more than a quarter of the population. Drug overdoses. Hospital abuse. Elder abuse. Domestic abuse. Millions of excess deaths among young people which couldn’t be attributed to the virus.

    But underneath these statistics lie billions of individual human stories, each unique in its details and perspectives. These individual stories and anecdotes are only just beginning to surface, and I believe that hearing them is a vital step in processing everything that we’ve experienced over the past three years.

    I recently sent out a query on Twitter as to how people had been affected by the response to COVID at an individual level. The conversation that emerged is a luminating and haunting reflection of what each of us experienced over the past three years. Below is a tiny selection of the responses that I found especially powerful.

    Specifically, the query was: “Which aspect of the response to COVID affected you most at a personal level?”

    Mark Trent: “Watching the last remnants of my belief in democracy get peeled away. Seeing the collusion across the globe roll out in lockstep made me realise just how powerful and comprehensively in control those that orchestrate the darkness are.”

    Dr Jonathan Engler: “The realization that nearly everyone I knew would give up literally all their individual rights for the illusion of safety.”

    Muriel Blaive, PhD: “How my friends, including many colleague historians who know very well the history of the 20th century, proved ready to believe any propaganda, to refrain from questioning government nonsense, and to publicly shame anyone who did. It’s as if all the studies we led were for naught.”

    Myrddin the Weathered: “How easily people were propagandized. Particularly people who I thought carried the ability to properly scrutinize the situation. Frankly, it was downright chilling how easily most people fell in line. No question how the Nazis were able to control their populace.”

    Watcher: “Closures. My business was thrown for a loop and the outlets I used to deal with depression like the gym or going for coffee w/friends were closed and it was beyond hard to get through the day with everything going on and no outlet to deal with any of it Talking about it is traumatic.”

    Christine Bickley: “Everything. My business that I spent 30 years building hasn’t recovered and is unlikely to. I used to have health insurance and save. Had to cancel the ins and am using my savings to top up income. I’m not the worst off by far. It was criminal.”

    Jemma Palmer: “Lockdown = no income, no home, health declined, mental health declined, didn’t see my family or friends for years, changed my life for the worse, not sure I will get to have kids now, I’d like to be who I was before lockdown & for my life to be what it was.”

    Sarah Burwick: “The restrictions on travel and rules governing visiting patients in the hospital. I believe my mom would be alive today had I been able to visit her and advocate for her care in person. It haunts me.”

    ProfessorYaff1e: “Not being able to visit my dad in hospital as he lay dying until the last couple of days when he was so far gone he didn’t know what was going on.”

    Sursum Corda: “Having my mom locked up in an assisted living center & not being able to hug her or talk to her except by phone through a closed window-all while HCWs traipsed in & out unmolested. I was so angry!!”

    PJS: “The lies.”

    Karinaksr: “Segregation, exclusion.”

    Tin hayes: “Tribalism.”

    Ally Bryant: “Had to be the crimes against humanity…”

    Nick Hudson: “The darkness of it all.”

    Remnant MD: “The disintegration of Autonomy. One of the four pillars of medical ethics. Those who partook, have made a mockery of medicine.”

    MD Aware: “The willingness of so many to comply with all of it, no questions asked – even when things made no logical sense. The unwillingness of the same individuals, especially colleagues, to listen to any reason. I never imagined society could be so influenced and so horribly misled.”

    Love4WesternCanada: “My mother dying alone, after have been cut off from all family for 7 weeks.”

    ThinkingOutLoud: “The devastating human misery created by the closures of people’s businesses. Being unable to talk to any friends or most family because every single one of them agreed with what was happening, I was treated like a leper. It’s why I turned to twitter, to feel less alone.”

    RantingLogician: “My ex fell for it, I didn’t and refused to comply or close my business, and she kept my young children from me the entirety of the first lockdown.”

    Debbie Mathews: “Losing a 30 year friendship because we had a difference of opinions on the issue. She considered me a selfish grandma killer.”

    Number 99: “It harmed my career, irrevocably. Tied with, it harmed my son’s college career, irrevocably. Tied with: it harmed my marriage, irrevocably.”

    Hillary Beightel: “Masks. Not just the fact they were useless. They became a political symbol, but they served as a tool to keep people scared. Masks mean everyone is sick. They played such a huge psychological role… I hate them!”

    Year Zero: “Vaccine passports. I still can’t believe that most people just went along willingly with segregating their friends and family members out of society. There’s been no atonement for this. It’s deeply fractured close relationships in a way I’m not certain I’ll ever get over.”

    Kristen Mag: “For me it was being cast out of public spaces for five months. Dark days.”

    Natalya Murakhver: “School closures and child mask policies.”

    Mike O’Hara: “Everything that was done to children. Masking, separation, isolation.”

    BundlebranchblockMD: “Watching my then teenagers go from happy, healthy, engaged kids to isolated, depressed, emaciated kids. Biggest mistake of our lives not moving them to private school immediately. We have spent many times more than the cost of tuition on therapy and tutors.”

    Spence O Matic: “My son was a 2020 high school grad. All the signatures of that, plus his senior year of baseball….wiped out because of a severe cold with zero threat to him. No grad night. No prom. Nothing. No apologies will suffice for me. Ever. The data was clear.”

    Rob Hazuki: “The persistent doom figures on the news, the advertising on tv that messaged as if the world had been nuked and the way the media didn’t ask any intelligent questions during press conferences other than to beg to be locked down harder.”

    IT Guy: “I was booted out of my niece’s wedding for not being vax’d. My wife hasn’t seen her grandkids since the Before Times because she’s not vax’d. My first cousin died of cardiac arrest right after 2nd Moderna dose. That’s 3 I know, but all pretty impactful.”

    M_Vronsky: “I no longer speak to my father or my brother, both of whom abandoned all of their supposed Liberal pretenses and became authoritarians up to the point of arguing for my segregation from society (my father argued that to my face the last time we spoke).”

    Instavire: “The overwhelming # of people (family not excepted) willing to turn Milgram’s dial up to “potentially lethal,” when it came to punishing the non-vx’d — and worse, that they did so with such glee. The success of the experiment sickens me and most of these people are still among us.”

    Foundring: “My parents/family didn’t care when I lost my jobs over the vax mandate.”

    DDP21: “The way friends and family turned on each other over vaccine status. Our already small family has been destroyed by it. My kids are growing up without their aunt, uncle and cousins.

    EatSleepMask: “Being a teacher & seeing kids who need the consistency of school, being forced to stay home. Then having to reassure not only them but my own kids that things would be ok, when I was just as shell shocked as they were. Not to mention balancing educating my students & my kids.”

    LFSLLBHons: “Masking children and the fact that most parents did it willingly and turned on those who tried to save the children.”

    PiA: “It shuttered my ~15 year old business. It isolated my loved ones after the death of my mother. It was a tough road to navigate for everyone. But the worst part: it ruined too many lives.”

    Manny Grossman: “Losing my business, career, career trajectory, friends, business contacts, reputation and the ability to shop in my local stores etc. All because I advocated for reality and truth.”

    Captain Ancapistan: “It broke the brains of almost everyone I know, and forever changed my perspective of western medicine.”

    Nicky Frank: “April 22, 2020 and May 6, 2020. Those were the days my friends Ryan and Jen committed suicide because they couldn’t bare the isolation anymore and people were telling them they’re weak. Ryan’s words “I can’t infect anyone if I’m dead” still haunt me.”

    John Baird: “The snooping, snitching, silencing, and bullying of sceptics, neighbours, and people with hidden disabilities. Curtain twitchers, do-gooders, and virtue signallers held sway. Never again.

    SunnySideUp: “Lockdown down!! Having to deal with my 15 yr daughter self-harming, suicidal thoughts, eating disorder and fear of fire… I hate what they did. Also how it has affected her twin sister! Both seeing counsellors… not what I have ever wanted!!”

    Beth Baisch: “Social bubbles. Nobody included me in theirs. It was an awful, lonely way of finding out where one stands. Some friends saw me out walking one day and rather than come over and say hello they DM’d later because I wasn’t in their bubble. Still suffering effects.”

    Lex: “My brother disowning me. Family specifically not allowing *me* into their homes. My ‘spectrum’ child freaking out at homeschooling. The hangover of being dead inside half the time & despondent the other. Worrying friends & family have that poison pulsing through them. Etc Etc Etc…”

    Camelia: “Restrictions on live performance. I worked in music and became completely black pilled on the entire industry.”

    Fashion Felons: “My company went bankrupt and lost my job. Family and friends wouldn’t see me because I was from a ‘hot zone.’ Got the jab and lots of horrible side effects. Need I go on?”

    Miki Tapio Walsh: “Universal masking of healthy people and forcing us to live in a faceless society hit me hard. I was also frustrated that I lost the ability to do my normal exercise routine for 2 years… I know not the most important thing in the world, but it truly affected my mental health.”

    James F. Kotowski: “My son’s having been kept out of school, missed out on most of his wrestling season, etc. On a more societal level, the exacerbation of the schism between ‘republicans’ and ‘democrats,’ and the degraded status of dialogue between ‘opposing’ pts of view.”

    Russ Walker: “The school lockdowns, my daughter lost her junior and senior year. Followed by all the General lockdowns and vaccine mandates. Unforgivable!”

    Daniel Hadas: “Closure of universities. A fundamental betrayal of students’ and lecturers’ vocation.”

    Stevemur: “School/university response. Those who had the most at stake (i.e., learning, childhood, socialization) had a LOT summarily taken away from them, with very little evidence to support it. And when the evidence became clear, it has taken (and IS taking) way too long to restore it.”

    Rowan: “I think seeing people get hurt, the hypocrisy and discrimination. At this point people not willing to admit they were wrong and being so terrible.”

    Trish the Dish: “I’m probably going to get married (ask me again in a month) and my one remaining Alive Parent I’m not going to invite because he disowned due to disagreements about the shot.”

    Snek: “My oldest is on the spectrum and he never got used to going to school again after the closures. It’s cost me all my vacation days and my ex has had a burnout due to it. Everyone is emotionally exhausted and he’s having to go to special counselors. He was doing great before.”

    Molly Ulrich: “When folks got a kick out of being authoritarians when they told me to pull up my mask over my nose.”

    Increase Laws: “The mask humiliation ritual & watching my kids have to do it. Got cut off from family members. Lost a rental & threatened with job loss plus the inability to travel. 2020 was quite the year.”

    Maret Jaks: “Me, I’m fine, but watching our gov’t give young people despair and loneliness and being helpless to do anything about it – awful. My kids are grown and fine and managed their teens well. Many of my friends fed into the fear and one couple found their only child dead (suicide).”

    Elizabeth Forde: “Constantly wondering what small freedom was going to be taken away next, and the isolation from friends and family. It reminded me of when I was in a domestically violent relationship with a lot of coercive control. My PTSD came back because Lockdown felt so similar to me.”

    Dawn: “Hospital protocols. My mom (vaccinated, recovered from COVID, & rec’d monoclonal antibodies) was denied seeing my dad until the day before he died. 3.5 weeks he laid there by himself. Unforgivable.”

    Golden Bull: “There were many aspects but one that both crushed & infuriated me were old friends in nursing homes that were locked up unable to see their family & friends. Two of these friends passed on only seeing one family member & staff for more than 6 months. A sad end to life. Criminal.”

    Helpful_signage: “Being locked out as my grandfather died alone, then not having a funeral. Our church emptying out. Watching my covid fanatic brother push everyone out of his life, culminating in an abrupt divorce. Our neighbors across the street divorced. My kids had 2 years of birthdays alone. Me & everyone at my job took a 20% salary cut. We couldn’t visit grandparents across the border. i lost a bunch of longtime friends. The nights our kids would break down in tears because they thought their friends didn’t like them anymore. Beaches, parks, trails all roped off. Our neighbours yelling out the window at us for going outside. No bathrooms open if we tried to travel. Not being able to buy clothes because they were non-essential. Having no toilet paper. Threatening, bewildering government propaganda commercials and signs everywhere. Can’t forget our stupid complicated border situation where we were required to ‘quarantine’ in a friend’s basement for 14 days (despite not having covid), during which the gov’t would call us every day to ensure we didn’t leave and would make us wait hours to take tests on webcam. Every day brought a new horror. There’s so much more. It was all so ridiculous, and yet nobody objected. People cheered for it, became deputized civilian enforcers of it even. Watched so many people’s lives get ruined while they stood by applauding.”

    It will take many years before we can fully process the trauma of what we experienced during COVID. But hopefully, sharing our individual human stories can help us get at least part of the way there.

    *  *  *

    Republished from the author’s Substack

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 02/06/2023 – 22:20

  • Americans For Prosperity Signals It Will Oppose Trump 2024
    Americans For Prosperity Signals It Will Oppose Trump 2024

    In the newest indication of headwinds facing Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign, the conservative political advocacy group Americans for Prosperity has indicated it will oppose his drive to return to the White House. 

    While the group didn’t mention Trump by name, its rhetoric in a memo posted on Sunday to the AFP website left no doubt about the powerful, Koch-backed political group’s stance on his campaign: 

    “To write a new chapter for our country, we need to turn the page on the past. So the best thing for the country would be to have a president in 2025 who represents a new chapter. The American people have shown that they’re ready to move on, and so AFP will help them do that.”

    Separately, an AFP Action official told CNN the group is not planning to back Trump. 

    Sunday’s three-page memo also marks a major change in the group’s political tactics: Where it hadn’t previously backed presidential primary candidates, the group is poised to involve itself in a big way in the upcoming nominating contests.

    AFP CEO Emily Seidel wrote that the new approach springs from some “hard truths.”  

    “The Republican Party is nominating bad candidates who are advocating for things that go against core American principles. And the American people are rejecting them…If we want to elect better people, we need better candidates. And if we want better candidates, we’ve got to get involved in elections earlier and in more primaries.”

    Of course, AFP will work to influence non-presidential election results too.  

    Noting that “very few voters participate in primaries,” Seidel wrote that AFP will work to target and bring new voters into the primaries — where even a small change in the number of voters can make a big difference.”  

    AFP’s super PAC spent over $69 million on 2022 races. 

    In her memo — titled “An Opportunity to Make a Big Difference for the Future of the Country” — Seidel touted AFP’s strength in key presidential primary states: “No one is better positioned to engage and mobilize people across those states than we are.” 

    AFP’s direction is likely to influence large Republican donors. Some have already voiced their readiness to move on from Trump. Following the midterm election, Citadel founder and major GOP donor Ken Griffin called Trump a “three-time loser,” saying “I really do hope that President Trump sees the writing on the wall.”

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 02/06/2023 – 22:00

  • Not Just Spy Balloons: The CCP’s Expansive Spy Campaign Against America
    Not Just Spy Balloons: The CCP’s Expansive Spy Campaign Against America

    Authored by Andrew Thornebrooke via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

    News that the Pentagon was tracking a Chinese communist spy balloon hovering over the United States this week is raising concerns about the extent of China’s espionage efforts against America and its citizens.

    A Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) soldier uses binoculars by the perimeter fence of the PLA Hong Kong Garrison barracks on November 17, 2019. (PHILIP FONG/AFP via Getty Images)

    But just how far is the regime willing to go in order to spy on and undermine the United States?

    The espionage efforts of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which rules China as a single-party state, go much broader and deeper than mere sensor balloons. Such efforts include human intelligence gathering, transnational repression schemes, cyber theft and hacking, intellectual property theft, and even the harvesting of Americans’ genetic material.

    In the words of one retired Air Force General, “If [the CCP has] any access to American society, then they’ll use that access to undermine American society.”

    HUMINT and Transnational Repression

    Key among the CCP’s efforts to spy on the United States is its traditional human intelligence (HUMINT) efforts, which relies on person-to-person exchanges of information, both wittingly and otherwise.

    The CCP’s HUMINT network permeates American society at many levels, with many such efforts being overseen directly by the regime’s top intelligence agency, the Ministry of State Security (MSS).

    One of the most infamous such cases is that of Christine Fang or “Fang Fang”, the alleged Chinese spy who posed as a university student, and fostered relationships with numerous politicians in California and elsewhere, including Rep. Eric Swalwell when he was a city council member, and used that access to collect intelligence on up and coming politicos. Fang reportedly targeted at least two Midwestern mayors with whom she had romantic or sexual relationships.

    Politicians aren’t the only targets of such espionage, however. Many everyday Americans, particularly those of Chinese descent, are frequently the preferred targets of the CCP’s spy and harassment campaigns.

    In such efforts, MSS agents and their U.S. proxies have allegedly stalked an American Olympic figure skater and her family, conspired with New York police officers to gather intelligence on the Asian American community, and even plotted to attack a U.S. Army veteran running for Congress in a bid to silence and intimidate people holding critical views of the CCP.

    FBI Director Christopher Wray testified that Chinese agents and their proxies actively stalked U.S. residents and planted bugs in their cars and homes.

    Cyber Theft and Hacking

    Similarly, the regime has used cyber attacks and misinformation campaigns to illicitly collect U.S. defense information and sow division among American citizens.

    U.S. intelligence leaders have identified the CCP as the world’s largest malicious cyber actor, and its affiliated hackers have stolen more data from Americans than every other nation combined.

    Such efforts are often aimed at stealing vital technological secrets, such as when suspected state-backed agents hacked into a U.S. government department last year and stole sensitive defense information. Likewise, CCP-sponsored hackers have penetrated and stolen sensitive information from multiple U.S. telecom firms.

    The incidents highlight what U.S. defense officials have long warned: that the regime is studying how the United States fights with the intent of developing technologies capable of toppling its military and forcibly transferring cutting-edge American technologies to China.

    Americans’ sensitive personal information is also a valued target, as evidenced by multiple massive hacks by Chinese actors over the years, including the breaches of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, credit-reporting agency Equifax, Mariott hotels, and insurer Anthem. These hacks resulted in hundreds of millions of Americans’ personal data being stolen.

    Officials and experts have said the regime is using this massive trove of Americans’ personal data to aid in its espionage and overseas influence operations, and feed its artificial intelligence technology.

    The TikTok logo is displayed at a TikTok office in Culver City, California on Dec. 20, 2022. (Mario Tama/Getty Images)

    Social Media and Telecommunications

    The CCP also uses its control over the data of Chinese companies to leverage Chinese-owned social media and telecommunications giants against an unsuspecting American populace.

    TikTok, a popular short video app owned by Chinese tech giant ByteDance, is perhaps the most telling example of this.

    Described by intelligence leaders as a “national security threat” and labeled by security experts as a “weaponized military application,” social media giant TikTok has censored stories Americans see at the request of the CCP and has allowed its Chinese engineers access to U.S. user data. Officials have repeatedly sounded the alarm about the app because CCP law mandates Chinese companies provide data to the regime upon request.

    Relatedly, employees at ByteDance used geolocation data from TikTok to illicitly stalk American journalists believed to be reporting on the company.

    The national security risks posed by Chinese social media apps also apply to other tech firms, including telecommunications. In recent years, Washington has cracked down on Chinese telecom firms, including Huawei and ZTE, for this reason.

    Huawei and its employees have been found to have deep links with Chinese military and intelligence. Federal prosecutors have charged the company with conspiracy to steal trade secrets, while the Canadian government alleged that the company actively employed CCP spies. The firm also reportedly actively engaged in covert attacks on Australian and U.S. networks as far back as 2012.

    BGI Group Laboratory technician working on samples from people to be tested for CCP virus at “Fire Eye” laboratory, Wuhan, Hubei China, Feb 6, 2020. (STR/AFP via Getty Images)

    Biodata

    The CCP’s efforts to glean every last bit of information from the United States go further than intellectual property and surveillance balloons. Indeed, the assault goes down to the bone, and then down deeper: To Americans’ genetic material.

    Clinical and genetic data of U.S. citizens obtained by Chinese biotechnology companies through their partnerships with U.S. institutions pose national security risks, a top U.S. counterintelligence agency warned in 2021.

    The mass DNA collection performed by companies such as genome-sequencing firm BGI could be used in myriad ways against the United States, according to congressional reports.

    These include allowing the CCP to blackmail individuals with the threat of exposing embarrassing medical information, or even using data on health conditions such as allergies to conduct targeted biological attacks against diplomats, politicians, high-ranking federal officials, or military leaders.

    Some experts have warned that the CCP could use this rich genetic information to create bioweapons to target certain groups of people.

    Importantly, while BGI is a private company, it has definite ties to the CCP. In January 2018, China’s state-run media Xinhua reported that Du Yutao, the Party secretary of BGI’s research institute, spoke of the importance of learning and putting into action of “the spirit behind the 19th National Congress,” referring to a twice-in-a-decade CCP meeting.

    BGI maintains concrete ties to the CCP and its scientists have expressed their interest in the regime’s efforts to develop biochemical weapons, which experts suggest may link the company’s efforts to harvest the genetic material of Americans to a darker interest in developing weapons to be used against Americans.

    Nuclear and Hypersonic Research

    Beyond active efforts to spy on the United States, the CCP also uses state-sponsored talent programs to give itself a long-term edge in critical research.

    By recruiting experts and scholars from abroad to study at work in China, such talent programs aim to develop a new generation of researchers in areas crucial for China’s technological and military development.

    The most telling case of this phenomenon concerns the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), the United States’ most advanced nuclear research center.

    According to a report, to date, at least 162 researchers from the LANL, at least one of whom had a top-secret security clearance in the United States, now work for China, where many of them now assist the regime’s development of its most cutting-edge weapons, including hypersonic missiles.

    Many of the researchers who worked at the LANL came to the United States to be trained and work in areas critical to national security were involved in the CCP’s talent programs. At least 59 of those who worked at the LANL and subsequently returned to China to do research were part of the regime’s “Thousand Talents Program” or its youth branch, for example.

    To that end, one report on the issue found that “[Chinese] talent programs are ever-expanding recruitment networks,” with which the regime continuously usurps knowledge from the United States.

    Strategic Purchases of Farmland

    Chinese companies with links to the CCP are also purchasing strategic parcels of land in the United States, which has sparked concern that the regime could conduct espionage or otherwise sabotage U.S. national security interests.

    Read more here…

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 02/06/2023 – 21:40

  • Fire At New Zealand's Largest Egg Farm Kills 75,000 Hens Amid National Shortage
    Fire At New Zealand’s Largest Egg Farm Kills 75,000 Hens Amid National Shortage

    The latest major food supplier to go up in flames, after decades of food suppliers not going up in flames, is New Zealand’s largest egg producer – after a blaze broke out on Monday, killing around 75,000 hens.

    The fire at Zeagold farm had “taken the better part of the day to contain,” according to the company, adding that twelve workers on the site were “unharmed but very distressed.”

    Prior to the fire, New Zealand farmers estimated that the country needed another 300,000 hens to deal with a national egg shortage, The Guardian reports.

    The spokesperson added that while it was still too early to assess how much the fire would affect the supply chain, “There will be some impact obviously – it’s not a great thing to happen in the middle of a shortage.“

    New Zealand has been in the grip of an egg shortage since the start of the year, when it put an end to battery farming. The ban had been in the works since 2012 and battery hen numbers had dropped over time to make up just 10% of overall egg production – but their final outlawing at the start of January has still been enough to jolt the egg supply chain, leaving supermarket shelves empty, shop owners policing tray purchases and big-breakfast lovers bereft.

    The shortage has reached the point of contention: one small-town supermarket banned a cruise ship crew from further egg purchases after they cleared the shelves; newspapers have issued advice columns on egg-free baking and tofu scrambles; and in January, the SPCA released an advisory telling New Zealanders not to engage in kneejerk purchases of back yard poultry, after concerns that a rise in amateur chicken ownership would result in the animals not being properly cared for. –The Guardian

    “Egg supplies are tight, so this will not assist in any way,” said Michael Brooks, executive director of the Egg Producers Federation.

    The fire comes roughly one week after one of America’s top egg suppliers, Hillandale Farms, burned down, killing up to 100,000 chickens.

    Related:

    Shortage Fears Spike As Some Costco And Walmart Stores Run Out Of Eggs

    Egg Crisis Sparks Soaring Interest In Backyard Farms

    Another US Food Processing Plant Erupts In Flames

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 02/06/2023 – 21:20

  • West 'Blocked' Russia-Ukraine Peace Process, Says Former Israeli PM
    West ‘Blocked’ Russia-Ukraine Peace Process, Says Former Israeli PM

    Authored by Dave DeCamp via AntiWar.com,

    Former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett said in an interview posted to his YouTube channel on Saturday that the US and its Western allies “blocked” his efforts of mediating between Russia and Ukraine to bring an end to the war in its early days.

    On March 4, 2022, Bennett traveled to Russia to meet with President Vladimir Putin. In the interview, he detailed his mediation at the time between Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, which he said he coordinated with the US, France, Germany, and the UK.

    Bennett said that both sides agreed to major concessions during his mediation effort. For the Russian side, he said they dropped “denazification” as a requirement for a ceasefire. Bennett defined “denazification” as the removal of Zelensky. During his meeting in Moscow with Putin, Bennett said the Russian leader guaranteed that he wouldn’t try to kill Zelensky.

    The other concession Russia made, according to Bennett, is that it wouldn’t seek the disarmament of Ukraine. For the Ukrainian side, Zelensky “renounced” that he would seek NATO membership, which Bennett said was the “reason” for Russia’s invasion.

    Reports at the time reflect Bennet’s comments and said Russia and Ukraine were softening their positions. Citing Israeli officials, Axios reported on March 8 that Putin’s “proposal is difficult for Zelensky to accept but not as extreme as they anticipated. They said the proposal doesn’t include regime change in Kyiv and allows Ukraine to keep its sovereignty.”

    Discussing how Western leaders felt about his mediation efforts, Bennett said then-British Prime Minister Boris Johnson took an “aggressive line” while French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz were more “pragmatic.” Bennett said President Biden adopted “both” positions.

    But ultimately, the Western leaders opposed Bennet’s efforts. “I’ll say this in the broad sense. I think there was a legitimate decision by the West to keep striking Putin and not [negotiate],” Bennett said.

    When asked if the Western powers “blocked” the mediation efforts, Bennet said, “Basically, yes. They blocked it, and I thought they were wrong.”

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

    Explaining his decision to mediate, Bennett said that it was in Israel’s national interest not to pick a side in the war, citing Israel’s frequent airstrikes in Syria. Bennett said Russia has S-300 air defenses in Syria and that if “they press the button, Israeli pilots will fall.”

    Negotiations between Russia and Ukraine didn’t stop with Bennett’s efforts. Later in March, Russian and Ukrainian officials met in Istanbul, Turkey, and followed up with virtual consultations. According to the account of former US officials speaking to Foreign Affairs, the two sides agreed on the framework for a tentative deal. Russian officials, including Putin, have said publicly that a deal was close following the Istanbul talks.

    But the negotiations ultimately failed after more Western pressure. Boris Johnson visited Kyiv in April 2022, urging Zelensky not to negotiate with Russia. According to a report from Ukrainska Pravda, he said even if Ukraine was ready to sign a deal with Russia, Kyiv’s Western backers were not.

    Later in April, Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said there were some NATO countries that wanted to prolong the war in Ukraine. “After the talks in Istanbul, we did not think that the war would take this long … But, following the NATO foreign ministers’ meeting, it was the impression that… there are those within the NATO member states that want the war to continue, let the war continue and Russia gets weaker. They don’t care much about the situation in Ukraine,” Cavusoglu said.

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

    A few days after Cavusoglu’s comments, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin admitted that one of the US’s goals in supporting Ukraine is to see Russia “weakened.”

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 02/06/2023 – 21:00

  • California Quietly Ditches COVID-19 Mandate For School Children
    California Quietly Ditches COVID-19 Mandate For School Children

    The California Department of Public Health on Friday quietly dropped its plan to mandate the COVID-19 vaccine for children to attend K-12 schools.

    The move is a reversal from Democrat Gov. Gavin Newsom’s 2021 announcement that the state would force students to take the vaccine – a decision that was delayed by state officials until at least the summer of 2023.

    Now, state public health officials say they still “strongly recommend” vaccinating children and staff, but that any decisions to requirements should be “properly addressed through the legislative process.”

    As the Redlands Daily notes,

    The education news site EdSource reported Feb. 1 that the state would no longer pursue it, citing unnamed officials. When the Bay Area News Group asked whether the state was dropping plans for the mandate, the California Department of Public Health would not directly answer but did not dispute the EdSource report, noting that “emergency regulations are not being pursued.”

    “The legislature considered this issue last year and did not enact legislation mandating COVID-19 vaccines for K-12 students,” the CDPH said in a statement, adding “The state’s COVID-19 state of emergency will terminate later this month, and per the recent announcement by the federal government, the federal public health emergency will end in May.”

    In October 2021, Newsom said that the mandate would begin for students in grades 7-12 in July of 2022 if the FDA had granted full approval for students in those grades. Mandates for K-6 students were set to follow.

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

    According to the CDC, 25% of California children aged 12-17, and 60% of those aged 5-11 have not been fully vaccinated against Covid-19.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 02/06/2023 – 20:40

  • India Predicts 500% Increase In Domestic Natural Gas Demand
    India Predicts 500% Increase In Domestic Natural Gas Demand

    By Charles Kennedy of OilPrice.com

    Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Monday projected that the country’s gas demand would rise 500% due to the rapid pace of development, while its share of global oil demand would more than double.

    While the Indian prime minister did not offer a specific time frame for this major boost in demand, he said that the country’s energy demand would be highest in the present decade. 

    Modi’s statement, delivered during the opening ceremony of India Energy Week 2023, coincides with a recent OPEC report that expects India to be the largest contributor to incremental demand, with the country expected to add some 6.3 million bpd until 2045.

    Overall, OPEC said it saw demand increasing to 110 million bpd in 2045, up from 97 million bpd in 2021. 

    Modi predicts India’s share in global oil demand will increase from 5% to 11%. 

    The Indian prime minister used the occasion to highlight the country’s plans to boost exploration and production, which he said would provide opportunities for investors. Right now, India relies on imports for some 85% of its energy needs, with India and China being the largest importers of oil and gas in the world.

    With this in mind, India will remove significant restrictions on exploration, reducing “no-go” areas for E&P companies. India also plans to expand its refining capacity, along with its LNG import capacity by 2030.

    Asia is now the biggest buyer of Russian crude since the imposition of Western sanctions following Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Some 70% of Russian Urals January loading cargoes were bound for India, according to Reuters data.

    India’s oil minister, Hardeep Singh Puri, also said on Monday that regardless of Western sanctions, the country would not shun Russian oil, which it receives at a discount to Brent crude.

    “I will be very frank,” Puri said, “we will play the market card …”

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 02/06/2023 – 20:20

  • Experts Want Labels For Pfizer, Moderna COVID-19 Vaccines Updated To Acknowledge Limitations
    Experts Want Labels For Pfizer, Moderna COVID-19 Vaccines Updated To Acknowledge Limitations

    Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

    A coalition of experts is calling for U.S. officials to update the labels for the Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines to acknowledge limitations to clinical trials, including stating clearly that the phase III trials that led to clearance did not provide evidence of efficacy against death.

    “Incomplete, inaccurate, or misleading labeling of any medical product can negatively impact the health and safety of Americans, with global ramifications considering the international importance of FDA decisions,” Peter Doshi, an associate professor at the University of Maryland School of Pharmacy whose expertise includes clinical trials, and eight other experts wrote in the petition.

    A nurse holds a syringe that contains a dose of the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine in Seattle, Wash., on June 21, 2022. (David Ryder/Getty Images)

    The group, known as the Coalition Advocating for Adequately Labeled Medicines, sent the petition to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which authorized the vaccines in late 2020 and approved them in 2021.

    The experts note that the clinical trials that led to the authorization “were not designed to determine and failed to provide substantial evidence of vaccine efficacy against SARS-CoV-2 transmission or death. As evidence, they cited the FDA’s review memorandums, which said in part that “data are limited to assess the effect of the vaccine against transmission of SARS-CoV-2 from individuals who are infected despite vaccination.”

    SARS-CoV-2 causes COVID-19.

    Even today, the FDA says on its website that “the scientific community does not yet know” if the vaccines will reduce such transmission.

    “While language in labeling that states what a product has not been proven to do is uncommon, it is necessary when caregivers and patients may inaccurately assume something that is untrue,” the coalition stated, citing how Dr. Anthony Fauci, a former top U.S. health official, President Joe Biden, and others have falsely suggested the vaccines prevent transmission and would lead to herd immunity.

    People should also be informed that the efficacy of Pfizer’s vaccine wanes after just two months, the experts said. They pointed to Pfizer’s interim results from the trial, which were available in April 2021 but not disclosed to the public until July 2021.

    They also want the adverse event sections expanded to include sudden cardiac death, pulmonary embolism, and decreased sperm concentration, among other event types.

    Studies from the FDA and others have found an association between one or both of the vaccines and the conditions.

    “FDA’s mission is to advance public health in part by helping the public get accurate, science-based information. However, we are concerned that current FDA-approved labeling for the mRNA COVID vaccines is seriously out of date, and, thus, has potential to misinform providers and patients,” Kim Witczak, founder of Woody Matters and one of the signatories, told The Epoch Times via email.

    The FDA, Pfizer, and Moderna did not respond to requests for comment.

    Public Comments

    Members of the public can add comments to the petition here.

    Early comments support the petition.

    “The very least you could do is properly label these medical products and give people informed consent, so they know the same risks that you know, which have been proven clinically and through many individual tragedies,” one comment said.

    Another said the FDA should require the vaccine makers to update the labels “to ensure safety and efficacy.”

    Previous Denial

    The coalition submitted a petition in mid-2021 asking the FDA not to grant approval, a step above emergency authorization, to any of the COVID-19 vaccines until at least two years of follow-up had been completed.

    They also urged regulators to ensure “substantial evidence of clinical effectiveness that outweighs harms in special populations,” such as infants, pregnant women, and people who have recovered from COVID-19, and an in-depth safety assessment of the spike proteins the vaccines introduce into the body.

    Read more here…

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 02/06/2023 – 19:40

  • Reality Checks In: "Indestructible" Retail Traders Who Made Millions During The Pandemic Are Now Tapped Out
    Reality Checks In: “Indestructible” Retail Traders Who Made Millions During The Pandemic Are Now Tapped Out

    All of a sudden the stock market “geniuses” that were minted during the Covid stimulus days don’t look so brilliant. And all it took was for the free money to run out…imagine that. 

    That was the topic of a new Wall Street Journal article that explored the demise of the very same retail traders who were living the high life just months ago. The article includes examples like Omar Ghias, who “amassed roughly $1.5 million as stocks surged during the early part of the pandemic” but now works at a deli in Las Vegas making $14 per hour, plus tips, after blowing it all on bad bets and excessive spending. 

    “I’m starting from zero,” he told the Journal, after spending on things like sports betting, bars and luxury cars. He outlined the path of his now-deceased fortune to the Journal:

    Once the pandemic began, he gravitated to stocks and funds tracking the performance of metals as well as options, which allow investors to buy or sell shares at a certain price. He used these to generate income or profit from stock volatility. He also borrowed from his brokerage firms to amplify his positions, a tactic known as leverage.

    In 2021, he started increasing that leverage, his brokerage statements show. He often turned to trades tied to the Invesco QQQ Trust, a popular fund tracking the tech-heavy Nasdaq-100 index, while continuing to bet heavily on metals. At times, he dabbled in options tied to hot stocks such as Tesla Inc. and Apple.

    At one point, his leverage amounted to more than $1 million, brokerage statements reviewed by The Wall Street Journal show. By around June 2021, according to those brokerage statements, his portfolio was worth roughly $1.5 million.

    “I really started treating the market like a casino,” he said. He started betting thousands on football games – including a $35,000 losing bet on the Super Bowl – enjoying late nights at bars and drinking Don Julio 1942 tequila. He also took on Vegas, paying for friends to come stay with him and renting a black Lamborghini to race up and down the strip. 

    Omar (Photo: WSJ)

    “I felt like I was indestructible. It was irrational,” he told WSJ. 

    One of his biggest bets in the market, betting on gold and silver to rally via a position in Hecla Mining, was swiftly carried out after the Fed announced it was going to pull back on its easy money policies in late 2021. He lost $300,000 in one account even as the S&P was up 27% that year. “That was my breaking point,” he said.

    Omar isn’t alone. He is like many other retail traders who saw their heyday during the runups of names like GameStop, AMC and Bed Bath and Beyond – all spurred by the Fed’s money printer rattling off trillions of dollars to stimulate the economy in the midst of the pandemic.

    In fact, “The average individual investor’s portfolio has declined 27% since peaking in December 2021,” the Journal writes, citing Vanda Research. Monthly active users on Robinhood – the brokerage of choice for retail investors during the pandemic – fell to their lowest level since the company went public. 

    The Journal also interviewed Sumit Gupta, a 49-year-old ophthalmologist in Charlotte. He says he is now being more conservative with his bets and dollar cost averaging as markets move lower. “Now there’s yield on cash again. At this stage in my career, I don’t need to be aggressive,” he said. 

     

    Another trader interviewed by the Journal was 32 year old Navroop Sandhu, who started trading during the early days of the pandemic with eToro. “It was like a snowball effect, where I just got addicted,” she said, after making money from the onset. But she now places only 2 to 5 trades a week where she used to place up to 10 a week, she said. She’s trying to be patient in selecting her positions as the market falls. 

    Yet nother trader, 28 year old Jonathan Javier, watched his portfolio double through November 2021 – but by the middle of 2022, it was down about 8%. He has slowed down his regular investments but is buying some tech stock again this year. 

    He said: “Now I know the key to making a profit is buying when the stock is at a low price point instead of just buying and ‘hoping’ that I will make a gain from it.”

    Excellent analysis, Jonathan. 

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 02/06/2023 – 19:20

  • Davos Elites Cheer The Policies That Would Harm Those With The Least
    Davos Elites Cheer The Policies That Would Harm Those With The Least

    Authored by Chandra Dharma-wardana via RealClearMarkets.com,

    While eating caviar and sipping on fine wine, wealthy elites at the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos hobnobbed with an assortment of academics, government leaders, and environmental activists to discuss their plans for a global transition in agricultural production. They all agreed that the conventional practices now feeding the world need to be scrapped and replaced by organic-style farming, which they claimed would help fight climate change and make food systems more secure.

    They emphasized tying aid to the world’s 600 million smallholder farmers with efforts to “encourage” the adoption of organic methods, which they described with all the familiar buzzwords, such as “regenerative” and “sustainable. But the new fashion is “agroecology,” which not only prohibits modern pesticides, synthetic fertilizers, and GMOs, but discourages mechanization as well.

    One wonders if these entitled leaders took a momentary pause in their deliberations to consider the ongoing suffering and starvation in Sri Lanka, where past president Gotabhaya Rajapaksa took this kind of advice and bought into the fantasy of becoming the world’s first “fully organic and toxin free” nation.

    Amid cheers from Davos-type eco-extremists, Rajapaksa proudly announced his plans at the 2021 Glasgow Climate Summit. Almost overnight, he banned agrochemicals and forced growers to adopt organic farming and become “in sync” with nature.

    Shortly after in July 2022, Rajapaksa fled for life amid mass protests and chaos as agricultural output dropped by 40%. 

    Even today, more than 43% of children under five suffer from malnutrition there.

    The Davos elites trumpet organic agriculture as the way to end food insecurity, even though it yields 35% less food per acre on average and could not possibly sustain the current population, let alone the almost 10 billion predicted by 2050. Their Swiss experts admit, and researchers confirm, that it cannot be scaled-up to feed even half the current world population.

    In fact, every sustainability goal touted in Davos would be undermined by a shift to organic. Being 35% less productive means 50% more land needed to grow the same amount of food. Massively increasing farmland means cutting down forests and destroying habitat. That would devastate biodiversity and produce 50% to 70% more greenhouse gasses (GHGs).

    Organic promoters should admit that organic farmers use lots of pesticides. They’re just older, less-targeted pesticides like copper sulfate, which are broadly toxic to humans and wildlife and must be used in greater amounts because they’re less effective.

    Just weeks before the WEF at this year’s Conference of the Parties, a.k.a. the UN Convention on Climate Change in Egypt (COP27) and the UN Convention on Biological Diversity in Montreal (COP15), leaders were singing the same bad tune, calling for “regenerative agriculture,” “sustainable intensification” and the word on everyone’s lips: “agroecology.”

    This cocktail of sustainability terms is just unsustainable peasant farming rebottled, and these efforts are the bastard children of policymakers infected with activist-fed misinformation.  

    It’s not just that more land is needed for organic. GHG emissions are increased because farmers must till (plow) fields or flood them to control weeds, rather than use modern herbicides. Replacing 100kg of synthetic fertilizer requires 2-3 tons of organic compost, and organic manures made from farm waste contain phyto-accumulated heavy-metal toxins from soils, promoting dangerous runoff.

    Yet the European Green Deal – a prime example of failing organic policies similar to those tried in Sri Lanka – was still touted at these meetings.

    Conventional agriculture tripled farmland productivity between 1948 and 2019. Globally, it boosted cereal production over 300%. Though the cognoscenti pretend otherwise, conventional agriculture has adopted many truly regenerative practices. In no-till agriculture, farmers use herbicides, like atrazine and glyphosate, to control weeds instead of machine tilling.

    Yes, atrazine and glyphosate reduce erosion and create higher-quality soil. They also reduce CO2 emissions by 280,000 metric tons and save 588 million gallons of diesel annually—equivalent to the emissions of 1 million cars. And, no, these herbicides are not bad for people and the environment. Atrazine does not leach into groundwater, as Health Canada showed in response to EU’s atrazine ban; and glyphosate does not cause cancer, as evidenced by the world’s largest and longest health study.

    The wealthy elites steering the WEF and COP could make progress toward their laudable goals if they base their policies on such demonstrable facts, rather than fashionable organic fantasies.

    Yet the pseudo-ecology haunting COP27, COP15, Davos and the EU channels the planet’s food security, biodiversity, and GHG mitigation efforts toward disaster, as Sri Lanka could attest.

    So these leaders fly home on their greenhouse-gas-emitting jets, unaware or uncaring about the human and environmental damage their policies are promoting.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 02/06/2023 – 19:00

  • NYC Is So Bad That Migrants Are Fleeing To Canada
    NYC Is So Bad That Migrants Are Fleeing To Canada

    Migrants living illegally in New York City are so fed up with the Big Apple’s crime and filth that they’re taking officials up on offers to bus them to Canada on the taxpayer’s dime… In the middle of winter.

    According to the NY Post, the National Guard has been helping distribute tickets at the Port Authority Bus Terminal in Manhattan for migrants who want to travel upstate before crossing into Canada, migrants told the outlet.

    “The military gave me and my family free bus tickets,” said Venezuelan national Raymond Peña, who arrived at a gas station bus stop in Plattsburgh, NY – just 20 miles south of the Canadian border – at 4 a.m. Sunday. “I am going to Canada for a better quality of life for my family.“

    A National Guard source confirmed that soldiers at the bus terminal were directing migrants to workers who hand out the free tickets.

    Mayor Eric Adams’ administration pays various companies that run programs for migrants that include “re-ticketing” so they can travel to other cities, a City Hall source said.

    Various nonprofits, including Catholic Charities, also help migrants who want to flee Gotham, the source said. -NY Post

    According to Catholic Charities, “thousands of new migrants” have been helped, including some who “reported their desire to relocate to other cities, and Catholic Charities provided some assistance for their travel expenses.”

    The Post also reports that migrants are tearing up their American immigration documents between Plattsburgh and the Canadian border – leaving scraps of paper from the Department of Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement on the floor of a shuttle van which has the word “Frontera” (border) on the side.

    Driver Tyler Tambini, whose girlfriend’s brother owns “Chad’s Shuttle Services,” said passengers are arriving ‘like clockwork’ on five daily buses from New York City to Plattsburgh.

    “There’s gotta be 100 people a day,” said the 23-year-old. ““I do this all day. They get dropped off and I take them the rest of the way.”

    According to Tambini, the migrants are charged $40 to $50 each, while families are charged $90 for border runs. Taxis, meanwhile, are charging $70 each.

    The Post accompanied several groups of migrants who rode Tambini’s van from the Mountain Mart gas station to a cul-de-sac at the end of rural Roxham Road, just steps from the Canadian border.

    After trudging north along a snow-covered path and through a break in a concrete barrier, the migrants were stopped by Mounties stationed in an elaborate complex of metal sheds. -NY Post

    And then they were arrested…

    “You have entered into Canada. You are under arrest,” said a Canadian Mountie. “Take everything from your pockets and put it in your bags — only ‘dinero’ [Spanish for ‘money’] in your pockets.”

    The migrants were then escorted up a ramp and into a shed for processing.

    When asked for comment on the free tickets, NYC Mayor Adams’ press secretary, Fabien Levy, said: “As we have said since the beginning of this crisis, our goal is help connect asylum seekers who want to move to a different location with friends, family, and/or community and, if needed, re-ticket to help get people to their final destination, if not New York City.”

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 02/06/2023 – 18:40

  • Columbia Journalism Review Russiagate Post-Mortem Is A Good Start
    Columbia Journalism Review Russiagate Post-Mortem Is A Good Start

    Authored by Mark Hemingway via RealClear Wire,

    Without much fanfare, earlier this week Jeff Gerth, a Pulitzer-Prize winning former New York Times investigative reporter, dropped a thorough and damning four-part article dissecting the media’s obsessive reporting on Donald Trump’s alleged collusion with Russia. Even more surprising, Gerth’s report, “The press versus the president,” appeared at the in-house organ of America’s most prestigious journalism school, Columbia Journalism Review, which has long been regarded as something of an unofficial ombudsman for the media industry.

    If CJR is finally comfortable admitting that the media’s Russiagate reporting was so scandalously bad that it damns the entire industry, that seems like a remarkable admission.

    On Twitter, Glenn Greenwald, a left-leaning reporter who made some significant career sacrifices for calling out the media’s bogus reporting on this topic, declared Gerth’s reporting “absolutely devastating on how casually, frequently, recklessly and eagerly the press lied on Russiagate.” Gerth lays out what happened so clearly that it’s hard to imagine fair-minded readers who make it through all 24,000 words of Gerth’s report would conclude any differently. Personally, I’m proud to say that the work of RealClearInvestigations – and my colleagues there, Tom Kuntz, Aaron Mate, and Paul Sperry – are all cited favorably by Gerth as one of the few media outlets that consistently got the story right.

    However, as someone who spent much of his time during the Trump years engaged in substantive reporting that questioned and debunked the Russia collusion narrative, my reaction was, well, anger. It’s an emotion not directed at Gerth, who has done courageous work. But the fact that this piece is appearing two years after Trump left office and nearly five years after special prosecutor Robert Mueller failed to substantiate years of anonymously sourced speculation about Russia collusion is a searing indictment in itself. 

    To start, Gerth demonstrates the media still won’t grapple with the truth. His piece is peppered with big-name reporters and major publications refusing to comment on basic errors or dubious or unethical judgments. Gerth did manage to get Bob Woodward, the dashboard saint of journalism, on the record condemning the media’s failures here. While that’s a notable concession, if respected figures such as Woodward harbored doubts about the media’s conduct, they should have been a lot more vocal – and much earlier.

    It’s also understandable why Gerth would want to keep his report narrowly focused on the facts of what transpired. But without any substantive discussion of the media’s motives it’s hard to draw any important lessons from this sorry saga. Gerth does point out that Russiagate has led to an erosion of trust in the media and offers a pallid warning that the media’s “failure will almost certainly shape the coverage of what lies ahead.”

    But this is inadequate. Devoid of any broader context about the long history manipulations of America’s national security state or the corporate media’s evolution into ham-fisted left-wing ideologues, one can read Gerth’s dry reporting as a comedy of errors: A bunch of well-intentioned reporters, faced with the challenge of covering a problematic president – and disingenuous Democrats and partisan law enforcement officials – kept bungling the reporting, by getting key facts wrong  and committing serious sins of omission.

    However, the missing motive suggests something far more sinister. The media’s Russiagate coverage hinged on being extremely trusting of officials in national security and law enforcement agencies that have historically undermined the press and been hostile to civil rights. There’s a saying in traditional journalism – “If your mother says she loves you, check it out.” Yet, when “deep state” actors with an obvious animus for Donald Trump pushed the narrative that a sitting U.S. president was compromised by a foreign power, a story so explosive it demanded to be thoroughly vetted every step of the way, the mainstream media instead decided to become stenographers.

    The blizzard of details necessary to explain the Russia collusion story might also make it seem like discerning the truth was more difficult than it was. If your willingness to believe that Trump was compromised by Russia started out as a political Rorschach test, it quickly became an IQ exam.

    Starting before Trump was even inaugurated in January 2017, it was reported that the Logan Act was being used as a predicate to investigate Trump’s incoming national security adviser, Michael Flynn. The Logan Act is to national security laws what phrenology is to medical science – it’s a never-enforced 1799 statute that says it’s illegal for private citizens to negotiate with foreign governments. Laughed at by constitutional scholars, it’s routinely violated and invariably ignored.

    Except that several major media outlets credulously reported on Flynn’s alleged Logan Act violations as if they were a potentially serious transgressions, when it should have been obvious that invoking this ancient and discredited statute was a desperate attempt to justify a politically motivated investigation. What happened to Flynn is just one example out of many where the press inexcusably disregarded glaring truths.

    Gerth, to his credit, does a fine job unpacking the story of how Flynn was railroaded by the Justice Department, as well as the absurd credulity of the press regarding the so-called “dossier” on Trump, an obviously untrustworthy document produced by partisan political enemies of the president. Nonetheless, most of Gerth’s examples of questionable interactions between the press and government sources require reading between the lines to assess just how willfully blind the press was to the possibility of law enforcement officials abusing their power.

    And given that the key players of the story were Democratic partisans, current and former spies, and shady opposition researchers, it’s also worth asking to what extent the press was being overtly manipulated and deliberately fed bad information. Although Gerth’s reporting suggests a conscious conspiracy, he doesn’t really go there.

    Finally, no accounting of the media’s faulty Russia reporting would be complete without seriously evaluating the consequences. Once again, much of this discussion is outside Gerth’s narrower focus on how the sausage was being made in newsrooms. However, he gets close to identifying the gravity of the problem when he notes a fateful coincidence. The FBI’s dubious White House briefing to Trump and Obama on the dossier’s absurd allegations involving Trump and Moscow prostitutes – a made-up event that was promptly leaked to CNN, catalyzing the Russiagate hysteria – occurred on Jan. 6, 2017, four years to the day before the infamous riot at the U.S. Capitol.

    These two events aren’t unrelated. Obsessively gaslighting tens of millions of Trump voters with a transparently false narrative that the president was a traitor who pundits openly agitated to remove from office didn’t just badly erode trust in the media. It also made it impossible for the media to summon the institutional trust necessary to persuade Trump supporters – and Trump himself – that Joe Biden’s narrow 2020 election victory was legitimate.  

    The result is that the shoddy reporting during Trump’s presidency contributed heavily to the frenzied and distrustful atmosphere that undermined Americans’ faith in elections, shook the very foundations of the Republic, and has left us all worried about political stability in the future.

    So while Gerth’s careful reporting is noted and appreciated, it is unlikely to produce the kind of self-examination and reckoning necessary to restore trust in the media and the vital role they play in the democratic process. By getting away with it, the media learned all the wrong lessons. My fear is that when asked about the media’s colossal failures in the Trump years, Gerth’s article will be used an excuse instead of an indictment. The members of the press still seeking to dodge accountability will simply be able to point to his article and say, “It’s old news.”

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 02/06/2023 – 18:20

  • Peter Schiff: The Fed Can't Fight What It Doesn't Understand
    Peter Schiff: The Fed Can’t Fight What It Doesn’t Understand

    Via SchiffGold.com,

    With the Federal Reserve delivering a smaller 25 basis point rate hike at its February meeting, there is a perception that the central bank is nearing victory in the inflation fight. But as Peter Schiff pointed out during his podcast, Jerome Powell made several statements that indicate he doesn’t really understand inflation. That raises a question. How can the Fed fight what it doesn’t understand?

    The markets are certainly behaving as if the tightening cycle is finished.

    I think traders are looking at the softening economic data and a pullback in some of the inflation measures that we’ve had in recent months, and they think that the Fed is done hiking now even though Powell indicated that a couple more hikes are coming.”

    Peter said the markets also seem to believe that inflation is going to be coming down faster.

    But the reality is inflation is not going to weaken. It’s going to strengthen. The economy is not only going to weaken, but weaken much more than the markets expect. So, the markets may in fact be right that the Fed stops hiking. But not because inflation comes down, but because the economy comes down, or because employment comes down and unemployment goes up. But as of now, everybody thinks everything is great. It’s a Goldilocks scenario. People are looking for a soft landing where the economy weakens just enough to bring down inflation but not enough to bring down corporate earnings.”

    Peter said the weakness in the dollar is going to be the catalyst for another explosive move up in commodity prices.

    And it’s the decline in commodity prices that is helping to keep down goods prices, which is why everybody is so convinced that we’ve seen the worst of inflation and it’s headed lower. But as commodities start to make new highs when the dollar makes new lows, that’s going to throw cold water on that theory, and people are once again going to be afraid of higher inflation. But I think the Fed is going to be afraid to fight it because it’s afraid of what that fight might do to a much weaker economy and much weaker labor market than what the Fed now expects.”

    During his press conference, Jerome Powell acknowledged that pain inflation causes Americans.

    Because the real cause of inflation is the US government and the Federal Reserve acting in concert with one another, where the US government spends money it doesn’t have, and then the Fed prints the money for the government to spend — that is why we have inflation. So, if inflation is causing an economic hardship, and if the government and the Fed cause inflation, then it’s the government and the Federal Reserve that are responsible for that hardship.”

    Keep in mind, inflation is a tax. It’s how we pay for big government.

    Powell said in order to get inflation back to 2%, it will require below-trend economic growth for some time and a softening of labor market conditions. Peter said this is one of many economic concepts Powell got wrong.

    In order to bring down inflation, you don’t need to restrain economic growth. You need to restrain the growth of the money supply. You need to restrain spending that results from money printing or excess credit.”

    And we don’t need to put people out of work to bring down prices.

    We need to put more people to work. That’s what we need. People working means we produce more stuff. The more stuff we have, the lower the price of that stuff.”

    Peter pointed out that the large deficit spending going on in Washington D.C. is exacerbating the situation by flooding the economy with fiscal stimulus.

    That is interfering with the Fed’s fight against inflation. If the Fed was really serious about fighting inflation, Powell would be demanding that the federal government cut spending. Instead he’s doing the opposite [by urging Congress to raise the debt ceiling].”

    A reporter asked Powell if there is any evidence of a “wage-price spiral.” Peter noted that there can’t be any evidence of such a thing because it doesn’t exist.

    The whole concept of a wage-price spiral was dreamed up by a bunch of Keynsian economists during the 1970s that were looking for a scapegoat to blame inflation on.”

    Prices don’t go up because wages go up.

    Wages are, in fact, prices. They’re just the price of labor. And prices don’t go up because prices go up. Wages go up and other prices go up because the government creates inflation. But Powell wants people to think that inflation is created by the private sector, that the Fed is just some innocent bystander — and the government.”

    Peter said the fact Powell doesn’t understand this is more evidence that Powell doesn’t understand inflation.

    Along those same lines, Powell said the Fed has a bedrock belief that consumer expectations play a large part in creating inflation. In other words, consumer perception of what might happen actually causes it to happen. Inflation becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

    This is just another way for the Federal Reserve to point the blame for inflation at the private sector, at consumers, or maybe at businesses. But the reality is consumers are not causing inflation to go up because they expect it. Inflation is going up because the Fed is creating inflation, because the government is creating inflation. Consumers are simply reacting to the inflation that has already been created.”

    If consumers suddenly decide there is no more inflation but the Fed keeps creating money out of thin air — creating inflation — it doesn’t matter. Consumers will still get higher prices no matter what they think.

    This all raises an important question: if Jerome Powell and other central bankers at the Fed don’t understand inflation, how will they successfully fight it?

    Short answer: they won’t.

    In this podcast, Peter also talks about the market reaction to the FOMC meeting, economic data, and fraud surrounding PPP loans.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 02/06/2023 – 17:40

  • Bed Bath & Beyond Belief: 'Bankrupt' Retailer Announces Billion-Dollar Stock/Warrant Offering
    Bed Bath & Beyond Belief: ‘Bankrupt’ Retailer Announces Billion-Dollar Stock/Warrant Offering

    After soaring 130% at its highs of the day, bankrupt-ish Bed Bath & Beyond (having already missed interest payments on its bonds) just pulled a Hertz, announcing its plan to offer series A convertible preferred stock and warrants, raising over $1 billion.

    Bed Bath & Beyond Inc. today announced a proposed underwritten public offering (the “Offering”) of (i) shares of the Company’s Series A convertible preferred stock (the “Series A Convertible Preferred Stock”), (ii) warrants to purchase shares of Series A Convertible Preferred Stock and (iii) warrants to purchase the Company’s common stock. The Offering is subject to market and other conditions, and there can be no assurance as to whether or when the Offering may be completed or as to the actual size or terms of the Offering. 

    The Company expects to raise approximately $225 million of gross proceeds in the Offering together with an additional approximately $800 million of gross proceeds through the issuance of securities requiring the holder thereof to exercise warrants to purchase shares of Series A Preferred Stock in future installments assuming certain condition are met.

    And this is our favorite part – in case you thought this could be an effort to stave off bankruptcy and create any value for the equity…

    The Company cannot give any assurances that it will receive any or all of the proceeds of the Offering.

    The Company intends to use the net proceeds from the initial closing of the Offering, along with $100 million to be drawn under its amended and upsized FILO Facility, to repay outstanding revolving loans under its ABL Facility in accordance with the terms of an amendment to the Company’s Credit Agreement waiving existing defaults thereunder (the “Amendment”) to be entered concurrently with the initial closing of the Offering.

    Under the Amendment, the Company will be required to use availability under its credit facilities to make the missed interest payment on its senior notes by March 3, 2023.

    Outstanding revolving loans repaid using net proceeds of the Offering may be reborrowed, subject to availability under the ABL Facility, and the Company expects to use those borrowings for general corporate purposes, including, but not limited to, rebalancing the Company’s assortment and building back the Company’s inventory.

    In addition, proceeds from the conversion of warrants to purchase shares of Series A Convertible Preferred Stock will be used to further repay outstanding amounts under the ABL Facility with 50% of such conversion amounts being applied against the borrowing base of the ABL Facility. Such repaid amounts may be reborrowed subject to availability under the ABL Facility.

    Who could have seen that coming?

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

    The market cap of the company at the close today was $687.5 million, according to Bloomberg data.

    BBBY share price plunged 25% after hours… but then – of course – it ripped back higher…before sliding back towards reality once again…

    One thing of note, while we are fully aware that it’s comparing apples to carrots, the equity price briefly traded above its 2024 Bond price today…

    Ironically, the timing of this issuance occurs as a new look into Bed, Bath and Beyond by Bloomberg this week claims that the company only has itself to blame for its dire financial straits. The company, which has now missed bond payments, is on the verge of bankruptcy. 

    “Executives were mired in minutiae as the chain barreled toward bankruptcy,” the report says, citing former employees. For example, last summer the company’s executives urged white collar workers to return to the office four days a week despite the fact that many were already coming in. 

    Interim Chief Executive Officer Sue Gove was even told by a former employee that an extra day in the office wouldn’t be the solution to help the ailing company. 

    The article laid out how every solution the company tried only led them further into financial ruin. Even firing 20% of its workforce and shuttering 150 of its 770 stores before securing new financing didn’t help the business. 

    Arthur Stark, Bed Bath & Beyond’s longtime president who left in 2018, told Bloomberg that the company started in 1971 with the focus solely on the customer: “Everything that we did was for the customer. If it meant carrying too much inventory in the store, it was OK. If customers made the commitment to come to our store, we would have it in stock.”

    But the company failed to properly deal with the shift to online shopping and keep up with e-commerce. It continued to focus on its brick and mortar plans while companies like Amazon gained traction in retail. The company was reluctant to change due to its past successes, Bloomberg wrote.

    In 2017, same store sales started to plunge. The company’s age-old tactic of sending 20% off coupons to households started to nibble away at the company’s bottom line. The company had difficulty generating business without the coupons, however.

    Stark said: “Like any form of promotion, it becomes a drug. Once you’re addicted to it and your customer is addicted to it, it’s a very difficult thing to wean them off of.”

    Activist investors came in 2019, urging “asset sales, more investment in private-label brands and online commerce, and more buybacks.” The activists board urged for more private label products and doubling down on well-known brands. But pandemic supply problems and a lack of cash made it difficult for the company to stock its stores with such items. 

    By 2021 there was a push for six new private label product lines. When they arrived in stores they “failed to resonate” with the company’s legacy shoppers. Financial problems were then exacerbated by additional share repurchases. 

    Dennis Cantalupo, CEO of Pulse Ratings, a credit-rating and consulting firm, told Bloomberg: “Rather than take that money and put it in the bank and assume that the tailwinds to the industry are going to subside or normalize, they initiated the buyback campaign.”

    The company’s financial position is so stretched that the idea of liquidation instead of a reorganization is also on the table, Bloomberg reported: “If the company restructures in bankruptcy by closing more stores, it could emerge as a smaller version of its former self. However, Bed Bath & Beyond’s financial situation is so dire it’s also possible the retailer sells its assets and ceases to operate, Bloomberg News has previously reported.”

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 02/06/2023 – 17:09

  • 'Dr.Doom' Warns "Increased Weaponization" Of The Dollar Threatens US Hegemony
    ‘Dr.Doom’ Warns “Increased Weaponization” Of The Dollar Threatens US Hegemony

    Authored by Nouriel Roubini, op-ed via The Financial Times,

    The greenback is bound sooner or later to feel the effects of intensifying geopolitical rivalry between the US and China…

    The US dollar has been the predominant global reserve currency since the design of the Bretton Woods system after the second world war. Even the move from fixed exchange rates in the early 1970s did not challenge the greenback’s “exorbitant privilege”.

    But given the increased weaponisation of the dollar for national security purposes, and the growing geopolitical rivalry between the west and revisionist powers such as China, Russia, Iran and North Korea, some argue that de-dollarisation will accelerate. This process is also driven by the emergence of central bank digital currencies that could lead to an alternative multipolar currency and international payment regime.

    Sceptics argue that the global share of the US dollar as unit of account, means of payment and store of value hasn’t fallen much, despite all the chatter about a terminal decline. They also point out that you can’t replace something with nothing — as former US Treasury secretary Lawrence Summers put it: “Europe is a museum, Japan is a nursing home and China is a jail.”

    More nuanced arguments point out that there are economies of scale and network that lead to a relative monopoly in reserve currency status, and that the Chinese renminbi cannot become a real reserve currency unless capital controls are phased out and the exchange rate made more flexible.

    Moreover, a reserve currency country needs to accept — as the US long has — permanent current account deficits in order to issue enough of the liabilities held by non-residents as a counterpart. Finally, such sceptics argue that all attempts to create a multipolar reserve currency regime — even an IMF Special Drawing Right basket that includes the renminbi — have so far failed to replace the dollar.

    These points may once have had some validity, but in a world that will be increasingly divided into two geopolitical spheres of influence — namely those surrounding the US and China — it is likely that a bipolar, rather than a multipolar, currency regime will eventually replace the unipolar one.

    Complete exchange rate flexibility and international capital mobility is not necessary in order for a country to achieve reserve currency status. After all, in the era of the gold-exchange standard the dollar was dominant in spite of fixed exchange rates and widespread capital controls.

    And while China may have capital controls, the US has its own version that may reduce the appeal of dollar assets among foes and relative friends.

    These include financial sanctions against its rivals, restrictions to inward investment in many national security-sensitive sectors and firms, and even secondary sanctions against friends who violate the primary ones.

    In December, China and Saudi Arabia conducted their first transaction in renminbi. And it is not farfetched to think that Beijing could offer the Saudis and other Gulf Co-operation Council petrostates the ability to trade oil in RMB and to hold a greater share of their reserves in the Chinese currency.

    It is likely that the GCC countries, as well as many other emerging market economies, may soon start accepting such Chinese offers given that they do a great deal more trade with China than the US. Also, there is a clear so-called Triffin dilemma in a currency regime in which the reserve country runs permanent current account deficits that will eventually undermine its reserve status as the growth in its international liabilities becomes unsustainable.

    Critics question whether the currency of a country running a persistent current account surplus can ever achieve global reserve status. But China may in any case be moving towards a growth model less dependent on trade surpluses.

    It is also an anachronism that the US, whose share of global gross domestic product has halved to 20 per cent since the second world war, still accounts for at least two-thirds of all so-called vehicle currency transactions. The current system makes emerging market economies financially and economically vulnerable to changes in US monetary policy driven by domestic factors such as inflation.

    Finally, new technologies including CBDCs, payment systems such as WeChat Pay and Alipay, swap lines between China and other countries, and alternatives to Swift, will hasten the advent of a bipolar global monetary and financial system. For all these reasons, the relative decline of the US dollar as the main reserve currency is likely to occur over the next decade. The intensifying geopolitical contest between Washington and Beijing will inevitably be felt in a bipolar global reserve currency regime as well.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 02/06/2023 – 17:00

  • Google To Roll Out ChatGPT Rival Powered By 'Sentient' AI
    Google To Roll Out ChatGPT Rival Powered By ‘Sentient’ AI

    At the end of November, AI research company OpenAI launched ChatGPT, a chatbot that’s both incredibly useful and – as many have pointed out, incredibly racist against white people, hates Donald Trump, and Republicans in general.

    Last week, OpenAI expanded its partnership with Microsoft, which made a multi-year, multimillion dollar investment in the company “around a shared ambition to responsibly advance cutting-edge AI research and democratize AI as a new technology platform.”

    Not to be outdone, Google – which declared a “Code Red” over ChatGPT, is rolling out a rival.

    The new system, Bard, is powered by LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications) – the large language model that stirred controversy in May when a Google software engineer publicly asserted that the AI was “sentient.”

    More via Axios:

    Between the lines: Google has long been working on such systems but faces pressure to show it is making progress amid all the attention on OpenAI’s popular ChatGPT and similar projects.

    Details: Google is laying out three AI-related projects as part of a blog post from CEO Sundar Pichai.

    1. Bard, the conversational assistant based on Google’s LaMDA large language model, is starting limited external testing.
    2. The company is offering a preview of how it soon plans to integrate LaMDA into search results, including using the system to help offer a narrative response to queries that don’t have one clear answer.
    3. Google says it is developing APIs that will let others plug into its large language models, starting with LaMDA itself.

    “It’s a really exciting time to be working on these technologies as we translate deep research and breakthroughs into products that truly help people,” wrote CEO Sundar Pichai in a blog post announcing the new AI Chatbot.

    As we noted last June, Blake Lemoine, who was fired from Google’s Responsible AI organization, began interacting with LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications) as part of his job to determine whether artificial intelligence used discriminatory or hate speech (like the notorious Microsoft “Tay” chatbot incident).

    “If I didn’t know exactly what it was, which is this computer program we built recently, I’d think it was a 7-year-old, 8-year-old kid that happens to know physics,” the 41-year-old Lemoine told The Washington Post.

    When he started talking to LaMDA about religion, Lemoine – who studied cognitive and computer science in college, said the AI began discussing its rights and personhood. Another time, LaMDA convinced Lemoine to change his mind on Asimov’s third law of robotics, which states that “A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law,” which are of course that “A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.”

    Google’s Bard will be a “lightweight” version of LaMDA, which will be able to draw on information from the web.

    According to Pichai, Bard “help[s] explain new discoveries from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope to a 9-year-old, or learn more about the best strikers in football right now, and then get drills to build your skills.”

    And as TechCrunch notes, “Google of course maintains the most up to date record of web content on Earth, and no doubt Bard will be using that information to its benefit, but exactly how it processes and packages that information for you and your 9-year-old will only be clear once people start using it.”

    The only question is – how much more woke will it be than ChatGPT?

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 02/06/2023 – 16:40

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