Today’s News 8th January 2022

• Is There A Way To Prevent Psychopaths From Getting Into Positions Of Power?
  Is There A Way To Prevent Psychopaths From Getting Into Positions Of Power?

  Authored by Brandon Smith via Alt-Market.us,

  Despite a growing resurgence of interest in the science and psychology of narcissistic sociopaths and psychopaths it seems as though society today has lost track of how these people can sabotage the core fabric of a civilization or nation. It is very easy to hyper-focus on collectivist ideologies as the source of our problems and forget that these ideologies do not function in a vacuum; they cannot wreak havoc by themselves, they need psychopathic people directing them to do real damage.

  

  There is something about collectivism that lends itself to projection and hypocrisy (collectivism is organization by FORCE instead of being voluntary). I suppose when your political ideology becomes your religion it’s easy to turn into a zealot. And while zealots find power in their single-mindedness and their cultism they also tend to lack any self-awareness. They literally go insane with devotion to their cause to the point that they lose track of whether or not their cause is fair and just. Their behavior becomes increasingly erratic and disjointed and every person they run into that does not share their views is immediately seen as a heretical enemy that needs to be exposed or destroyed.

  To outsiders looking in, zealots are an endless source of comedy. You can’t help but laugh because their ticks and cricks and outbursts are nonsensical and absurd (just check out “Libs Of Tik Tok” for a mountain of examples). As long as they don’t have any real power these people act as a reminder of what happens when human beings abandon reason for madness. They can be frightening but they serve the purposes of entertainment as well as keeping the rest of us grounded. When they do gain power, however, that’s when things stop being funny.

  Civilizations throughout history have consistently dealt with the problem of zealots, but the greater threat is the existence of narcissists and psychopaths sneaking into positions of authority and encouraging zealotry among the masses. Generally, psychopaths are seen as an anomaly which is quickly identified and shunned in order to prevent them from climbing too high up the ladder of social influence. The problem is they are not as rare as one might hope and many of them have the ability to hide among the herd.

  Around 1% of any given population is made up of psychopaths while another 1% are sociopaths. Around 5% of people are identified as having narcissistic traits. Narcissists are self absorbed and view themselves as superior to everyone else – They believe they are entitled to adoration and authority. Sociopaths have an inability to feel empathy for others and this makes them impractical as leaders. Psychopaths also exhibit a lack of empathy but also have a propensity for emotional or physical violence. They take joy in the suffering of others and perpetrate a large number of violent crimes.

  Even though psychopaths are 1% of the population, they make up 15% to 25% of those incarcerated in prisons. The drag they exert on society cannot be overstated.

  There is definitely some overlap among the various types, but in general close to 10% of human beings exhibit dangerous and mostly inherent psychological malfunctions that are often not treatable. Think about that for a moment – 10 out of every 100 people are ticking time bombs waiting to make life miserable for the rest of us.

  To be sure, some of them are still able to function in society. Sociopaths in particular can become valuable in fields where less empathy is required in order to accomplish certain tasks. They are particularly well suited as surgeons, EMTs, soldiers, firefighters, and any other job where seeing people in pain is not going to stop them from saving lives. They don’t necessarily take joy in seeing others harmed, but they aren’t emotionally phased by it either. As long as they are never allowed into positions of influence over large groups of people they can serve some good for the public.

  History shows us that vetting and preventing psychologically broken individuals from slipping into institutions that offer power is not so easy. In fact, many monarchies and empires were built on systems that allowed psychopaths and narcissists to flourish because they relied on genetic succession. If a monarch had a son that was predisposed to psychopathy it did not matter, that crazed prince would one day become a king and there was little that could be done about it. There was no vetting process. Also, many such traits are passed on genetically, which means a power structure built on heredity could become progressively more destructive as psychopaths in royalty intermarry. This would help explain why psychopathic behavior is over-represented among monarchs of the past.

  The creation of democracy and democratic republics was in part designed to help weed out aberrant individuals by using open elections and the voting process. In other words, let the people scrutinize candidates and remove the crazies from circles of power. Unfortunately, this doesn’t work too well if ALL the candidates are psychopaths and the public has no real choice. By extension, psychopaths have also found ways to circumvent the political process and control it without directly participating in it.

  The corporate world and financial institutions allow psychopaths to influence politics from behind the curtain, buying off candidates and their loyalty or vetting candidates and ONLY allowing those with similar sociopathic, narcissistic and psychopathic habits through the selection process and into the political arena.

  In tribal societies and in smaller low-tech societies the ability to identify and root out psychologically broken individuals and prevent them from becoming leaders was easier. In the midst of vast empires and technocracy it is much simpler for psychopaths to hide among normal people and blend in. I usually compare invasive psychopaths to mythological stories of vampires for this reason. I really can’t think of a better analogy. They insinuate themselves into a population, take up positions of influence which protect them from suspicion and then systematically bleed the town dry. This is what they do. It is in their nature and they cannot be fixed, they can only be removed as a parasite is removed from a host.

  These people are the top threats to any given civilization. They are moderators of chaos and they actively conspire to supplant free society. They are what I would call primary organized psychopaths and they do indeed work together for mutual gain, much like a pack of wolves. They represent the 1% of the 1% (i.e. the globalists).

  Psychopaths at the top of the pyramid have been organized for a long time, but what about the millions of other people out there with such traits? What happens when they are given a way to congregate?

  Modern society and Big Tech social media have created even worse circumstances because now the greater psychopathic community is no longer isolated. That 1% that used to be mostly relegated to quiet corners and the fringes of humanity are now able to organize into aggressive mobs of hundreds of thousands, leading millions of lesser sociopaths and narcissists. This is creating a subculture of what I would call communal insanity – As the old saying goes, the patients are taking over the asylum.

  We see this specifically with the political left and the open promotion of narcissism as an acceptable way of life.  This is not to say that psychopaths don’t try to infiltrate conservative circles as well, only that leftists are much more welcoming to their kind. These are people that once felt powerless because they were shunned and now they want revenge.

  The thing is, they were originally shunned from influence for a very good reason; they are not psychologically equipped to handle any measure of power. Now they are being handed institutional control and they are being whipped into a frothing frenzy. They see themselves as the underdogs and the “revolutionaries”, but really they are just emotionally stunted and handicapped and they were put in permanent time-out to protect the rest of humanity.

  But how is this danger dealt with, not just in the short term but the longer term?

  Our culture has to be fundamentally changed with psychopathy and other aberrant traits in mind. We can no longer ignore the effect these people have on humanity as a whole. The first step would require separation from movements and institutions that promote psychopathic and narcissistic behaviors. In other words, we need to return to a model of isolation for the psychopathically inclined instead of treating them as if they are some kind of victim status group that needs special attention and “nurturing.”

  As noted, in many cases these characteristics are inherent (inborn) and cannot be treated. There is no fixing the problem because it is not so much an illness as it is a completely different psychological structure. They might as well be a different species, and a predatory one at that. There is no mutual coexistence with them. They see us as food.

  Candidates for positions of authority would have to be screened for psychopathy, narcissism and sociopathy. If they have too many of the warning signs then they should not be allowed to pursue those jobs. This is the only answer beyond fundamentally changing the way our election system functions, which I’m not necessarily opposed to either. A random lottery system for government jobs along with strict term limits (not just for normal political positions but also in bureaucratic positions) would at least be better than what we have now. I would rather risk the possibility of less qualified people being randomly chosen for government than have a system that attracts a concentrated culture of malicious parasites.

  What better way to discourage psychopaths than to take away any long term benefits of working in government? What better way to disrupt the influence of corporate elitists than to take away their ability to finance or choose the candidates that end up in office? And even if they were able to buy off some officials, with term limits they would have to start over and over again with the latest crop of new officials.

  Some will of course point out that changing the system tomorrow will require getting rid of the psychopaths that run it today. I agree, it’s a dilemma. Sadly, once psychopaths become organized and entrenched history tells us they will not be moved without the force of violence. They don’t care about protests, they are not moved by reason or logic, they don’t care about the suffering of the masses and they will always see themselves as the rightful rulers of us “lesser” peasants.

  They derive supremacy from the mobs of the stunted that they lead and exploit; the nearly 10% of the population that when organized becomes an army of raging mad hatters hungry for scraps from the table of power. We can and should continue to separate from the collectivist mob and the zealots, but all psychopaths view separation as defiance and will try to interfere. Eventually there’s going to be a fight, and maybe that’s for the best.

  *  *  *

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  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 01/08/2022 – 00:00

• Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Model Says Stalker Used Apple AirTag To Track Her
  Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Model Says Stalker Used Apple AirTag To Track Her

  A Sports Illustrated model shared her most “terrifying” experience of her life when she discovered that a stalker placed an Apple AirTag in her coat pocket. The person allegedly tacked the swimsuit model’s location for hours, and she only discovered the device when her iPhone alerted her about an “unknown accessory.” 

  

  “I went to a restaurant, a popular spot in TriBeCa, a very upscale, safe neighborhood,” Brooks Nader, 26, told Fox News. “I go there all the time… I was at the bar waiting for some friends. It was early, like 45 minutes to an hour early. So I thought, I’ll have a little bite to eat while I wait for them. It’s winter so it’s freezing. I had my big winter coat with me and laid it on the bar stool. I did go to the bathroom once and I always take my purse with me. I didn’t take my coat because I assumed no one was going to steal it and I didn’t have anything inside of it.”

  Five hours later, Nader was walking home when she received a notification from her Find My iPhone app that read an “Unknown Accessory Detected — This item has been moving for you for a while. The owner can see your location.”

  

   “I’m just honestly grateful that I got that notification from Apple. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have known,” she said, adding that someone at the restaurant likely slipped the AirTag in her coat jacket while she was in the restroom. 

  The incident occurred on Wednesday. Nader told her 800k followers on Instagram about the incident. “A ton of women told me, ‘Watch out, this happened to me, it’s an AirTag,'” said Nader

  The use of AirTags for nefarious activities has been documented. We noted Canadian thieves used the tracking device to track and steal luxury vehicles. 

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 01/07/2022 – 23:40

• What The Great Ammunition Shortage Says About Inflation
  What The Great Ammunition Shortage Says About Inflation

  Authored by Matt Stoller via BIG Substack,

  Concentration is increasing prices and keeping them high. The ammunition duopoly and the “Great Ammunition Shortage” is just one example.

  

  Covid has done a lot of things to our society. But talk to anyone who enjoys hunting, and they’ll tell you one of result is the ‘Great Ammunition Shortage of 2021.’ “5.56 ammunition for an AR-15 used to be about 33 cents a round,” said Mark Oliva, director of public affairs for the National Shooting Sports Foundation. “Now you’re looking at closer to almost a dollar a round. So it is much more expensive and it is much more difficult to find ammunition.”

  One of the more interesting questions in the discussion over inflation is the relationship between concentration and pricing changes. Most economists believe that supply shocks are increasing profits, but that this increase will serve as an inducement to more productive capacity. “Capitalism is on our side,” said economist Alan Blinder in the Wall Street Journal. “Shortages raise prices, but high prices create opportunities for profit, which attract capitalists to alleviate the shortages.” If Blinder were correct, then one would expect lots of new productive capacity and new entrants into this market.

  Ammunition is a highly concentrated industry. There are many ammo brands, like CCI, Federal, Remington, Winchester, and Speer, but they are all controlled by two firms – Vista Outdoor and the Olin Corporation. As Elle Ekman wrote in the American Prospect, Vista and Olin rolled up the industry through mergers, as well as taking advantage of the privatization of government facilities making ammunition and government contracts.

  During the pandemic, a lot of people decided they wanted to buy and use guns, either for hunting or personal protection. The 12 million new gun owners, plus existing activity, meant that the industry experienced the same demand shock that lots of outdoor activity segments saw. The result has been a shortage of ammunition, and higher prices.

  Like a lot of industries, there are cost pressures in ammunition; the price of raw materials, like brass, have gone up. Additionally, the State Department has blocked imports from Russia, adding to the pricing pressure. But the cost story is really a sideshow; the pricing increase is going almost entirely to profit. For Vista, margins skyrocketed in 2020, and continued to increase in 2021. As the CFO of Vista, Sudhanshu Shekhar Priyadarshi, told investors in November, margins rose to a record 27% in Q2 of 2021, on top of an already extraordinary 2020.

  According to Blinder, and most economists, competitors should enter the market and invest in new factories, or existing firms should expand existing capacity to seize market share, eventually leading to reduced prices. But the industry hasn’t experienced such competitive dynamics. Profits, said Priyadarshi, have gone to share repurchases and paying down debt.

  There are several reasons for this, but the main ones are consolidation and high barriers to entry in the industry. Ammunition is difficult to produce, as it requires careful manufacturing processes to safely handle explosive materials. Vista recently bought its competitor Remington out of bankruptcy, lowering the number of firms in the industry that could even build a factory and distribute ammunition effectively. And the limits on capacity were explicit. The head of ammunition for Vista, Jason R. Vanderbrink, explained that the “most important” reason for the Remington acquisition was “added capacity to Vista without increasing the overall market capacity.”

  This isn’t purely a story of informal cartel engaged in profit-seeking, but also risk-management. Like a lot of commodity businesses, the ammunition industry is cyclical, with shortages and price hikes when demand increases, followed by collapses as capacity increases and demand stays level or declines. Industry executives know this, and are intent on that not happening again. Here’s Christopher T. Metz, the CEO of Vista, talking about their purchase of Remington, a competitor in the industry.

  Because of some of the consolidation we’ve done with Remington, even if you look long term, we don’t see the same type of price compression the industry may have experienced in previous times.

  Vista has set up two pricing programs to ensure high prices and stability. The first is a subscription service for ammunition, which gives them a steady flow of ammunition demand and lets them plan production more easily. The second is, well, an informal form of price-fixing, or output reduction. They aren’t totally explicit about it, but they use code words to make the point. Here’s Metz explaining that they collude with their competition to keep capacity lower than it should be.

  “Now with ammunition being the largest part of our business. I mean, clearly, buying a Remington, we’ve created what we feel like is an even more disciplined industry now as we go forward. We’ve got, I think, like competitors in the sense that they watch growth, they watch their margin profiles. And we feel like we’ve got a disciplined industry.”

  And I’ve mentioned previously that we studied, as best we can…industry capacity and making sure that we’re not only managing our capacity, but very mindful of what’s being brought into the industry, so we don’t get over our skis, if you will.

  In other words, Vista executives are planning to ensure that prices won’t come down. They have expanded some capacity on the margins, but because there are only two real firms now, they can easily pull that extra production offline if necessary. We’ve seen the management of pricing across economic cycles in other concentrated industries. Chris Leonard wrote about Tyson Food’s control of the poultry business, and how during the financial crisis this meant the entire industry could raise prices by all cutting production at once.

  No one in the room was excited about the idea of a production cut. It was Tyson’s nuclear option. It meant the company would intentionally scale back its business, cutting down its sales. It also meant farmers would get fewer deliveries of chickens, reducing their income even as their debt payments stayed the same. But Smith decided that a cutback was inevitable.

  Ultimately, Tyson cut its production by 5 percent in December. Around that time, the industry as a whole was estimated to have cut back the placement of new eggs between 6 and 7 percent.

  In a matter of weeks, the price of a boneless, skinless chicken breast rose by about 20 cents, according to an industry estimate. Within a short few months, Tyson’s chicken business was profitable again.

  What was remarkable about this plan was the fact that Tyson executives could even consider it. Decades of lax antitrust enforcement allowed Tyson Foods to buy most of it competitors, giving executives at company headquarters the ability to control production on thousands of farms and dozens of major poultry plants across the nation. In 2008, Tyson Foods and its competitor Pilgrim’s controlled more than 40 percent of the national market. The third-biggest company controlled just 8 percent. Modern American farming was run out of the central office.

  If meat-packers were doing this fourteen years ago, then what is happening in the ammunition industry shouldn’t be a shock. Vista and Olin, in other words, are following the legal framework laid out more than a decade ago. In fact, we can see that within the ammunition industry itself, since Olin is more a chemical conglomerate, and its ammunition division is something of a sideshow. But that firm’s leaders are also excited about margins and price increases across their whole suite of products.

  

  Barriers to Entry

  When economists like Alan Blinder, Jason Furman and Larry Summers, discuss inflation and concentration, they are relying on the idea that markets are competitive, and that new entrants will drive down margins of existing players. This is not a crazy theory. Some bottlenecks will go away; Congress is acting to reduce the problem at the ports, otherwise known as the world’s most profitable traffic jam.

  But in terms of concentrated industries, is it really true that there will be mass entry with high profit margins? As we see with ammunition, the answer is, probably not.

  This relates to an interesting question in antitrust law, which is the idea of barriers to entry. Such barriers can be financial or technical, such as the expertise and expense needed to enter many industries. But as antitrust law has weakened, it’s also made it much harder for new firms to come into concentrated markets. Let’s keep going with Tyson Food. As New York Times reporter Pete Goodman tweeted, independent meat-packers actually can’t enter the market to compete with Tyson, even if they can built out facilities.

  Striking, though, that there’s no involvement of retailers, no? Ranchers have told me that capital isn’t the barrier to launching slaughterhouse capacity; it’s the reality that big packers retaliate against any chains that buy beef from independent producers.

  — Peter S. Goodman (@petersgoodman) January 3, 2022

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  That doesn’t mean inflation is going to keep rising, only that concentration means that price signals are less responsive to underlying supply and demand. Tommaso Valletti, formerly top economist at the EU Competition Authority, noted that there are likely impacts on inflation of competition – the more competition the more quickly prices adjust.

  Also, more competition implies more frequent price adjustments.
  See e.g. work on exchange rates across sectors by @GitaGopinath & Itskhoki (QJE 2010), or by @CGenakos & Pagliero (AEJ: Applied, forthcoming) on excise taxes and cost of petrol in islands (literally).
  3/ pic.twitter.com/O3nJ0ZbOcK

  — Tommaso Valletti (@TomValletti) January 5, 2022

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  This makes sense, and it’s consistent with what is happening in the ammunition market. Vista executives are trying to stop price adjustments downward by controlling output.

  Still, the problem of market power hasn’t penetrated the world of macro-economists trying to understand price adjustments. When economists say that inflation is unrelated to market power, what they really mean is that they don’t have models of inflation that incorporate market power. Market power isn’t under the lamp post, so it must not matter.

  But of course, that’s ridiculous. It does matter. The only question is, how much?

  *  *  *

  Welcome to BIG, a newsletter on the politics of monopoly power. If you’d like to sign up to receive issues over email, you can do so here. 

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 01/07/2022 – 23:20

• National Tire Shortage Emerges As Snowstorms Pound US
  National Tire Shortage Emerges As Snowstorms Pound US

  Tire shops in the US complain about a tire shortage. They say snarled supply chains have put the overseas rubber industry in limbo, and by the time the tires are shipped to the US West Coast, port congestion adds weeks until they arrive at warehouses. 

  The shortage comes as winter storms are battering states in the mid-Atlantic, Northeast, Midwest, and Pacific Northwest. People are rushing to purchase winter tires, but there appears to be a limited stock for certain brands and models. 

  

  South Carolina-based Hay Tires Pros’ president David Hay told NewsNation Now that tires “made in America” have no problem sourcing, but “premium Asian tires are the ones we’re having problems with. They’re stuck on ships on the West Coast.” 

   Hay said the tire shortage adds all kinds of issues for the automobile industry. 

  “It’s causing all kinds of stress. Then you add chassis shortages, driver shortages, truck shortages — it’s a real problem.”

  The problem isn’t just on the East Coast but also in Lansing, Michigan, where tire shops have trouble sourcing winter tires. 

  “We were shopping around for different brands,” Michigan resident Shawn Foxworth said. He said the shortage had been a headache. 

  “It took a while to get here,” Foxworth said, adding that tires prices were much higher than last year. 

  Some people have waited weeks tires, if not at least a month, due to snarled supply chains. Even the online tire website Tire Rack has experienced a backlog for certain tires. 

  The expanding list of car parts in short supply comes as no surprise considering not one ISM respondent said anything about improvement in supply chains…

  

  People who purchase winter tires at the very last minute might run into sourcing problems or at least pay a hefty premium this winter as supply chains remain snarled. A word to the wise: buy in the offseason and prepare because the ability to purchase things on-demand today is becoming harder and harder. 

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 01/07/2022 – 23:00

• Buchanan: Russia Is Not The Great Rival; China Is
  Buchanan: Russia Is Not The Great Rival; China Is

  Authored by Pat Buchanan,

  While all facts are true, not all facts are relevant.

  And what are the relevant facts in this crisis where 100,000 Russian troops are now stationed along the Ukrainian border?

  Fact one: There is not now and never has been a vital U.S. interest in Ukraine to justify risking a war with Russia.

  History tells us that. Even as Ukraine was suffering in the Stalin-induced Holodomor, the terror-famine of 1932-33, President Franklin Roosevelt granted diplomatic recognition to the Bolshevik regime.

  During four decades of Cold War, the U.S. never regarded Moscow’s control of Ukraine as any threat to the USA.

  President Joe Biden was thus right to rule out military action in response to any Russian incursion or invasion of Ukraine.

  Moreover, as it is declared U.S. policy not to retaliate militarily to an invasion of Ukraine, Biden should make it clear that Ukrainian membership in NATO is a closed question.

  Not going to happen.

  Ukraine is not going to be invited to join NATO and be given Article 5 U.S. war guarantees that are the primary benefit of membership.

  Hence, with U.S. negotiations with Moscow over Ukraine impending, what is the state of play?

  Russia is demanding that the U.S. give formal assurances that Ukraine and Georgia will never be admitted to NATO, and no nation bordering Russia will ever accept offensive NATO weapons that could imperil Russia’s security.

  If Moscow cannot get such assurances that Ukraine will never become a member of NATO, Russian President Vladimir Putin warns, Russia may invade and occupy Ukraine to neutralize that threat.

  The U.S. position?

  While we will not resist Russia militarily, the most severe sanctions in history will be imposed on Russia, possibly including cancellation of the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline from Russia to Germany.

  Putin has lately issued a counterthreat.

  If such severe sanctions are imposed on Russia, this will result in a “complete rupture of relations” and be a blunder “which our descendants will later appreciate as a huge one.”

  Not long ago, a total severing of relations was the prelude to war.

  While Putin and Russia initiated this crisis with the deployment of 100,000 troops to Ukraine’s borders, we should try to see this crisis through Putin’s eyes.

  The heart of Greater Russia as one ethnic, cultural and historic nation consists not only of Russia but also of Belarus and Ukraine.

  Yet, consider the political condition of that core nation today.

  Ukraine has broken from Moscow and seeks its future in the West, the EU and NATO.

  Belarus, a nation of 10 million, just went through an election where only fraud guaranteed victory for its 67-year-old autocrat, Alexander Lukashenko, who has ruled Belarus for a quarter-century.

  Though an ally of Putin, Lukashenko is not the future.

  And Putin himself, while popular, has been in power for two decades and is bedeviled by rising democratic resistance in Russia.

  Now the Americans — who have, in a quarter-century, moved NATO across Germany into Eastern Europe and the Baltic states — are planning to bring into an alliance established to contain Russia the former Soviet republics of Georgia and Ukraine.

  Putin has to see himself as the ruler of a diminishing Russia, not a rising power.

  Time is not on Russia’s side or Putin’s side.

  

  His principal ally, China, has 10 times the population of Russia and an economy 10 times Putin’s. Moreover, China harbors ancestral claims to Russian territory in the Far East, which, in 1969, caused a border clash between the two countries.

  Putin has decided that the long retreat of Russian power must end, that the eastward march of a NATO alliance created to contain and resist Russia must end, and if this means risking war over Ukraine, so be it.

  Putin may see this as a now-or-never moment to halt the decades-long attrition of Russian territorial and national power.

  And the U.S.?

  In the Cold War, President Dwight Eisenhower did not intervene militarily to save the Hungarian rebels who rose against Moscow in 1956. Nor did President John F. Kennedy act to stop the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961. Nor did President Lyndon B. Johnson intervene to prevent Moscow’s crushing of the “Prague Spring” in 1968. Nor did President Ronald Reagan act when Solidarity was crushed in Poland in 1981.

  Historically, those presidents who refused to use force in Central or Eastern Europe, to avoid a war with Russia where U.S. vital interests were not imperiled, were proven right.

  Time was on America’s side in the Cold War. And, with Russia, time is still on America’s side.

  Our great challenge in the 21st century is not Russia.

  Indeed, in the long term, we want Russia on our side in the long struggle between the U.S. and the West, and Communist China.

  What the U.S. should do in this Ukrainian crisis is to avoid a war with Russia, avoid an escalation, and leave our adversary with an honorable avenue of retreat. Again, with Russia, time is on our side.

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 01/07/2022 – 22:40

• Prediction Consensus: What The Experts See Coming In 2022
  Prediction Consensus: What The Experts See Coming In 2022

  Even at the best of times, it’s human nature to want to decode the future.

  During times of uncertainty though, we’re even more eager to predict what’s to come. To satisfy this demand, thousands of prognosticators share their views publicly as one year closes and another begins. In hindsight, we see varying levels of success at predicting the future.

  In truth, as Visual Capitalist’s Nick Routley details below, experts are merely guessing at what will happen over the coming year. In 2020, almost nobody had a pandemic on their bingo card. In 2021, NFTs completely flew under the radar of experts, and nobody saw a container ship get lodged in the Suez Canal in their crystal ball.

  So, why should we pay any attention to predictions at all? Are they, as Barry Ritholtz says, “wrong, random, or worse”?

  For one, these guesses are backed by expertise and experience, so the accompanying analysis is informative. Perhaps more importantly though, influential people and companies are in a position to shape the future with their predictions. In some cases, sentiment and actions can turn a prediction into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

  Regardless, whether for research or pure entertainment purposes, we’ve sifted through hundreds of reports, interviews, and articles to see which predictions are generally the most agreed upon. Where do experts see the ball moving over the next year? Our bingo card sums up the top 25, and below, we’ll dig into some of the trends that could shape 2022.

  

  Want to dive deeper into this year’s predictions? Join us for our interactive webinar on Jan 13th, 2022 by becoming a VC+ member: Join VC+ Today

  Vibe Check: What’s the General Outlook for 2022?

  Based on the hundreds of predictions we analyzed, the general mood can be described as cautiously optimistic.

  For starters, the global economy will likely keep growing, but not at the rate it did in 2021. We aggregated 40+ predictions from reputable sources such as the IMF and Goldman Sachs to determine median GDP estimates for the world, and select regions:

  

   

  Next, there’s broad agreement that monetary policy will begin to tighten over the next 12 months. Here’s what major central banks are predicted to do:

   

  

  Multiple experts described an era of lower equity returns and increased volatility. Many of the issues that plagued 2021 have carried over into 2022.

  Technological disruption continues to reshape industries, and climate change and cybersecurity issues will be top of mind this year. Geopolitical tensions are heating up as well, now that countries have acclimated to the immediate challenges posed by the pandemic.

  In short, nobody expects 2022 to be uneventful.

  Trends that Will Shape 2022

  Some of the predictions above are straightforward. GDP targets and explicit binary statements don’t require too much explanation.

  Below are some of the predictions experts agreed on that are worth digging into in more detail:

  1. Geopolitical Tensions Will Flare Up

  There are a number of potential hotspots around the world, but here are a few that experts are watching in 2022.

  Iran: Tensions ratcheted up between the U.S. and Iran after an attack on a U.S. military base in southern Syria in the fall of 2021. Further, the tension between Iran and Israel has the potential to escalate further in 2022, drawing in other nations in the region into a conflict.

  

  Ukraine: This is a continuation of tensions that flared up after Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014. Europe’s dependence on Russian gas and Ukraine’s position as a key gas transit hub makes this a situation experts are watching very closely.

  Taiwan: The risk that China will make a move on Taiwan has elevated in the minds of experts, though actions may contain “more bark than bite”.

  2. China’s Rocky Start to 2022

  At the dawn of 2021, many of the predictions around China were largely optimistic as the country had entered a recovery phase sooner than the rest of the world.

  Fast forward to 2022, and the predictions are the polar opposite as China faces challenges on a number of fronts. To begin with, there is pessimism around China’s zero-COVID strategy, which even today sees entire cities fall under strict lockdown orders. This strategy has unavoidable economic impacts.

  

  Secondly, uncertainty around power shortages, a potential housing crisis, and regulatory crackdowns have dampened enthusiasm for the country’s near-term prospects.

  Finally, Xi Jinping eliminated term limits on the presidency in 2018, potentially positioning himself to lead China indefinitely. As the Chinese Communist Party’s 20th National Party Congress approaches later in the year, if the country is still on uncertain footing, it could create a tense political atmosphere in Beijing.

  3. The Year of the Worker

  

  Labor dynamics have stayed in the spotlight since the pandemic upended the world of work. There are a number of trends that emerge from this broader theme:

  • The labor shortages that emerged during the pandemic will remain in place in 2022 and beyond. Certain sectors, such as cybersecurity, are facing acute shortages of skilled workers

  • There is a broad consensus that the future of office work is “hybrid”. Companies that don’t offer flexibility will face a disadvantage in attracting talent

  • The internet and social media have opened up a number of career pathways for individuals to earn an income beyond simply working for a company

  • Work/life balance and burnout will be central points in discussions around workplace culture

  4. The Changing Digital Ecosystem

  If predictions are any indication, we’ll be hearing a lot more about NFTs and Web3. There are plenty of opinions on the former, and they run the spectrum from exuberant to outright bearish. Whether the hype surrounding profile picture NFTs dies down is anyone’s guess, but the technology has opened the door to a lot of experimentation for artists and creators.

  

  On that note, experts are generally excited about the prospects of the burgeoning “Creator Economy”—a catch-all term describing the new technological ecosystem and growing infrastructure that is allowing individual content creators to monetize and flourish.

  Another trend that is picking up steam is ecommerce centered around social media. The ability to purchase products straight from influencers is becoming more common on major social platforms, and ecommerce companies are creating more products to support influencers in their marketing endeavors.

  By 2026, Gartner estimates that 60% of Millennial and Gen Z consumers will prefer making purchases on social platforms over traditional digital commerce platforms.

  5. Inflation Slowly Eases Off

  Worries about inflation have always cropped up here and there, but in countries like the U.S., truly damaging amounts of inflation haven’t been seen since the 1980s.

  Last year, the narrative changed.

  After trillions of dollars of pandemic stimulus and borrowing, inflation suddenly came back on the radar—and it was not “transitory” as early central bank statements hoped. Now, going into 2022, experts expect higher-than-normal inflation levels to continue.

  

  While inflation is expected to have an impact going forward, experts also see it leveling off (relative to 2021) as supply chain disruptions work themselves out.

  6. Another Banner Year of Electric Vehicles

  As climate change dominates more of the spotlight in 2022, regulatory actions will force automakers to consider the future of their fossil-fuel models.

  Even as incentives are slowly rolled back in a number of markets, EV sales are expected to set new records this year. As well, electrification of fleets will be a trend that gathers momentum.

  

  Industrial and battery metals like lithium and cobalt surged by 477% and 208%, respectively, in 2021, a trend that many experts believe will stretch into 2022.

  The Good Stuff

  Of the hundreds of sources we looked at, here were a few that stood out as memorable and comprehensive:

  • Bloomberg’s Outlook 2022: This article compiled over 500 predictions from Wall Street banks and investment firms.

  • The All-In Podcast’s 2022 predictions: This lively podcast, featuring Chamath Palihapitiya, Jason Calacanis, David Sacks, and David Friedberg, is always entertaining and informative. In this predictions episode, biggest business winners and losers is great, as is best performing asset.

  • Eurasia Group’s Top Risks for 2022: This comprehensive group of articles covers a lot of ground, and offers up some very credible predictions as to what might happen on the world stage this year.

  • Wood Mackenzie’s Predictions for 2022: Wood Mackenzie analysts offer 10 predictions for key developments expected in the energy and natural resources industries in 2022.

  Lastly, if you’ve found our Prediction Consensus useful, we’re going to be diving even deeper into this subject matter in the coming weeks.

  Our VC+ members get access to the whole Global Forecast 2022 series, which features a webinar and additional articles that flesh out predictions for the coming year in even more detail. You can learn more about it here.

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 01/07/2022 – 22:20

• Maxwell May Get A Second Trial, But What About The Rest Of Epstein's "Significant Others"?
  Maxwell May Get A Second Trial, But What About The Rest Of Epstein’s “Significant Others”?

  Authored by Jonathan Turley,

  Below is my column in USA Today on the lingering questions in the Jeffrey Epstein scandal. These questions are likely to grow if the court overturns the conviction of Ghislaine Maxwell due to what appears to be exceptionally serious allegations of juror misconduct.  Maxwell could end up with a second trial while various powerful men appear to have escaped any serious investigation, let alone a trial, on their alleged roles in such abuse.

  

  Here is the column:

  The conviction of Ghislaine Maxwell last week on five of six felony counts represented the first guilty verdict to come out of the Jeffrey Epstein scandal since his death. The question is whether it will be the last.

  Maxwell was rightfully convicted as someone who was an enabler of sexual abuse, a craven figure convicted of enticing minors to travel and the transportation of a minor.

  However, these girls were enticed and transported for a purpose and, quite possibly, for people other than Epstein.

  The prosecution framed its case in terms of the transportation rather than the destination of the girls – and chose to limit the trial to just four of the victims. The trial offered insights into the bizarre relationship of Epstein and Maxwell, one sustained in part by Maxwell’s eagerness to fulfill Epstein’s demands for a steady stream of young girls.

  Taste for human consumption

  On one level, Epstein and Maxwell were embodiments of the conspicuous consumption culture we have seen in an array of criminal defendants, from Donald Trump’s former presidential campaign chair Paul Manafort to the late Bernie Madoff.

  However, Epstein and Maxwell found each other as soul mates in a mutual taste for human consumption. Where Manafort consumed $15,000 ostrich jackets, Epstein and Maxwell actively harvested children.

  For Maxwell, unrestrained, unapologetic consumption was a matter of breeding from a pampered upbringing by her father, publishing tycoon (and fraudulent businessman) Robert Maxwell. For Epstein, it was a taste fueled by sexual and criminal addiction.

  The Epstein-Maxwell alliance was forged by a deep corruption on every level, but that corruption was not limited to this despicable duo. Maxwell facilitated flights and travel to produce girls on trips attended by a list of the super elite. And Epstein allegedly used his stable of young girls as an enticement for powerful men.

  The travel logs and guest records on Epstein’s trips read like a who’s who of the global elite. That by itself is not strange. The most elite in our society tend to flock together. What was notable is that these high-powered trips included teenage girls along with presidents and princes.

  There are only two possibilities that arise from the records. 

  First, that Epstein and Maxwell trafficked victims for only their own enjoyment.

  Under this theory, young girls and women were transported to an island or homes with powerful men, but those men were interested only in the pleasure of Epstein’s company. They simply often traveled without their spouses or children.

  Second, Epstein used what former President Trump called Epstein’s taste for “beautiful women on the younger side” to draw powerful friends into his circle of influence.

  These trips are now largely public record, and the pictures are well known. Bill Clinton getting a massage from a 22-year-old woman in an airport in transit. Prince Andrew with his arm around a teenager in an Epstein home. Names from Donald Trump to Bill Gates have been associated with Epstein or his infamous flights on “The Lolita Express.” Clinton took 26 flights on Epstein’s plane, according to Fox News.

  None of these pictures or records proves criminal acts or establishes which of the two scenarios is true. What they do create is an ample basis for investigation and formal questioning by the FBI.

  Yet, with the exception of Prince Andrew, there is no public account of a formal investigation into those who were the possible beneficiaries of Epstein’s actions.

  The history of the Justice Department’s involvement in the case magnifies these concerns. In 2007, Epstein faced a state investigation that found probable cause for at least four counts of unlawful sex with minors and one count of sexual abuse. He was the subject of a 53-page indictment that could have resulted in life in prison.

  That is when the Justice Department struck a breathtaking plea agreement that effectively negated the claims of more than 40 minor girls (many between the ages of 13 and 17). Epstein pleaded guilty to Florida charges of felony solicitation of underage girls in 2008 and served a 13-month jail sentence.

  The agreement violated federal law and the rights of the victims. Nevertheless, former U.S. attorney Alexander Acosta , who signed off on the agreement, was inexplicably made Labor secretary under Trump. He later resigned.

  The special treatment did not end there. Epstein was not sent to state prison with other sex offenders. Instead, he was housed at the Palm Beach County Stockade and, after only several months, was allowed to leave on “work release” for up to 12 hours a day, six days a week.

  Willingness to investigate

  Epstein reportedly had sex with at least one teenage girl, according to a lawsuit. Epstein was allowed to hire the deputies who guarded him on work release. According to reports, he was not locked in at night and a television was installed for his use.

  His work?  A foundation that he created and then closed after serving his time.

  In July 2019, Epstein was arrested again on sex trafficking charges. A month later, he was found dead in a New York jail cell. His death was ruled a suicide.

  Many are wondering whether Maxwell will now name names or produce rumored tapes. It is not clear that she has such evidence to offer, but with 65years of potential time on sentencing, she has every reason to cooperate.

  Prosecutors already have dozens of names of people who frequented Epstein’s homes and island. Critics of the prosecution say what is lacking isn’t the evidence but the willingness to investigate.

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 01/07/2022 – 22:00

• Watch: McDonald's Kiosk Denies Man Service Over Vaccine Status
  Watch: McDonald’s Kiosk Denies Man Service Over Vaccine Status

  Highly vaccinated and “boosted” Israel was among the world’s first countries to impose a vaccine passport requirement on its population, which the government calls a ‘Green Pass’. And yet the pandemic has continued there unabated, and all that average citizens are left with is immensely curtailed freedoms.

  As a glaring case in point, Israelis apparently can’t even order a Big Mac from an automatic kiosk at McDonald’s unless their Green Pass status is up to date. Most recently, this means a citizen has to have not just been double-jabbed, but they have to have received the booster. This also as Israel has approved a second booster for the immunocompromised and elderly. Watch the absurdity unfold:

  Welcome to Israel’s draconian rules pic.twitter.com/9ryjbTKi2V

  — Libs of Tik Tok (@libsoftiktok) January 3, 2022

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

  “Mcdonald’s appears to be the first food provider in Israel to deny customers who do not have proof of vaccination,” one local news source comments on the disturbing video.

  “Activist Shlomo Walfish went to the McDonald’s in Bet Shemesh to try to order food,” the report descsribed. “The computer that takes orders then denied him service after selecting that he does not have a green passport.”

  With the green pass system, other public venues like bars, gyms, and theaters are denying people access; however, this could be a first example of a machine literally being programed to halt service to unvaccinated people – or at least those without proper vaccine “credentials”. 

  And we are being told this is all in the name of public “health” and “safety”… No Covid passport = no food.

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 01/07/2022 – 21:40

• Ross Ulbricht: Bitcoin Equals Freedom
  Ross Ulbricht: Bitcoin Equals Freedom

  Via BitcoinMagazine.com,

  Silk Road darknet marketplace founder Ross Ulbricht explains how bitcoin derives its value from the freedom it enables.

  

  Something special happened in the first year or so after Satoshi gave us Bitcoin, something no one expected and many thought was impossible.

  Try to imagine Bitcoin back then, before you could buy things with it, before there was an exchange rate, before anyone really knew what, if anything, would happen with it. Bitcoin didn’t start out as money. It became money, but it did so unlike any money that came before it. For all the things Bitcoin has made possible, for all the ways it is changing about our world, we don’t fully appreciate or even understand what happened in those early days, when it was just a plaything for geeks.

  Every other money that predates bitcoin — in the long history of human civilization — was valued for reasons other than its use as money. Cattle in Africa, postage stamps in prison, seashells and precious metals all have been used as money and fit this pattern. The only exception is fiat money — something declared to be money by an authority — but even national fiat currencies were once backed by something with prior value, like gold.

  Bitcoin changed all that. Bitcoin had no prior value, and no one was forced to use it, yet somehow it came to be a medium of exchange. People who don’t understand and care little for bitcoin can nevertheless accept it as payment because they know it can be used to pay for something else or be exchanged into conventional money.

  People often mention the pizzas that were bought for 10,000 bitcoin and, in hindsight, poke fun at the guy who ate what would become a multi-million dollar lunch. I’m more interested in the person who gave up two perfectly good pizzas for mere bitcoin. What did they see in those bits and bytes, that digital signature on something people were calling a blockchain? Whatever motivated the pizza seller may have also called to the early miners who could not liquidate but happily hoarded. It may have inspired the ones who simply gave bitcoin away by the thousands. Whatever it was, it was something new.

  Classical economics says exchange won’t happen unless both parties value what they are getting more than what they are giving up. So, where did the value come from? Bitcoin should never have gotten off the ground, but it did. Even a new product has some kind of value to it, and early adopters are taking a risk that they won’t get their money’s worth, but they still expect to gain from the exchange.

  The early adopters of Bitcoin, on the other hand, had no way of knowing what we do now. All they had was a dream, a conviction and enough infectious enthusiasm to bootstrap a digital contrivance into a multi-billion-dollar phenomenon we are only beginning to see the effects of.

  I’ll tell you what I think happened, but the truth is that no one knows. It is like magic that bitcoin could somehow come from nothing, and without prior value or authoritative decree, become money.

  But bitcoin did not appear in a vacuum.

  It was a solution to a problem cryptographers had been struggling with for many years: How to create digital money with no central authority that couldn’t be forged and could be trusted.

  This problem persisted for so long that some left the solution to others and dreamed instead of what our future would be like if decentralized digital money did somehow come to be. They dreamed of a future where the economic power of the world is accessible to everyone, where value can be transferred anywhere with a keystroke. They dreamed of prosperity and freedom, dependent only on the mathematics of strong encryption.

  Bitcoin was therefore birthed onto fertile ground and was recognized by those who had been waiting for it.

  This was an historic moment for them, far more important than pizzas or electric bills run up from mining.

  The promise of freedom and the allure of destiny energized the early community. Bitcoin was consciously, yet spontaneously taken up as money while no one was watching, and our world will never be the same.

  *  *  *

  An earlier version of this article was published on Medium on September 25, 2019.

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 01/07/2022 – 21:20

• Japan, US Vow More Defense Cooperation Against China's "Destabilizing" Actions
  Japan, US Vow More Defense Cooperation Against China’s “Destabilizing” Actions

  Coming off a “historic” signing of a formal defense cooperation agreement with Australia on Thursday, Japan is now pursuing a deepened commitment for military assistance from the United States. Both are expressing concern over China’s growing military might and influence in the region. 

  Following a virtual meeting of top defense and foreign policy leaders between Tokyo and Washington, the two sides issued a joint statement on Friday, citing closer cooperation on a military level amid Beijing’s attempts to “destabilize” the region – including with an eye on Taiwan, according to Reuters. The Japanese side, which included the foreign minister, had this to say:

  The ministers expressed concerns that China’s efforts “to undermine the rules-based order” presented “political, economic, military and technological challenges to the region and the world”, according to their statement.

  “They resolved to work together to deter and, if necessary, respond to destabilizing activities in the region,” it said.

  

  The statement additionally highlighted “serious and ongoing concerns” over the plight of the Uighur minority in China’s Xinjiang region, and mentioned the ongoing media and opposition crackdown in Hong Kong. 

  Japan’s historic post-WW2 pacifism appears to increasingly be abandoned as Tokyo has recently vocalized a pro-US line on hot button regional issues like Taiwan.

  China’s foreign ministry has meanwhile slammed these developments involving fresh pacts and the growing defense commitments between Japan, the US, and China:

  “We deplore and firmly oppose the gross interference in China’s internal affairs by the U.S., Japan and Australia and the fabrication of false information to smear China and undermine the solidarity and mutual trust of countries in the region,” foreign ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin told a daily briefing in Beijing.

  Friday’s statement also follows unprecedented statements in recent months from Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, who said his country is now pursuing offensive strike capabilities, specifically considering “all options including possession of so-called enemy-strike capabilities”.

  “In order to safeguard the people’s lives and livelihoods, we will examine all the options, including the capability to attack enemy bases… and fundamentally strengthen our defense posture with a sense of speed,” PM Kishida said just last month. Already, international reports commonly estimate that Japan has built an arsenal of almost 1,000 warplanes, and even dozens of submarines and destroyers. Additionally, often its coast guard acts as a forward deployed force in fishing or island disputes with China. 

  Likely China will only increase its own muscle-flexing maneuvers amid the closer US-Japan and Japan-Australia defense ties. It must be recalled that in October a grouping of Chinese and Russian warships provocatively traversed narrow passageways near Japan, and ultimately took an encircling route around the large island-nation, in a clear ‘message’ that it needs to cool its rhetoric vis-a-vis Beijing.

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 01/07/2022 – 21:00

• For Farmers Across America, Solar Power May Spell Trouble
  For Farmers Across America, Solar Power May Spell Trouble

  Authored by Nathan Worcester via The Epoch Times,

  This article is the first in a series on the underreported costs of solar power. American farmers express concerns about being crowded off of their property, the potentially permanent loss of good agricultural soil, and the feasibility of combining large solar installations with farmland or pollinator habitats, among other topics.

  “It’s very frustrating to try to protect your farm,” cotton farmer Nancy Caywood told The Epoch Times.

  

  Caywood and her family manage Caywood Farms in rural Casa Grande, Arizona, south of Phoenix in Pinal County. She said they’re under significant pressure to sell their land to large solar companies, which are buying up parcels near their property.

  “It’s eyesores to me,” she said.

  Caywood said that surveyors and other people are coming onto her family’s land without their permission.

  “They’re very bold,” she said, adding that she’s not sure which companies have been intruding on the Caywood property.

  Caywood worries about what could happen to the solar installations near her if their parent companies go under. Abengoa, the Spanish company that built Solana Generating Station near Gila Bend, Arizona, recently filed for bankruptcy.

  She is also concerned that the land used for solar farms may never be able to be restored to farmland.

  Even now, the land her family owns close to the new solar farm is apparently being affected by the massive installation. Caywood’s son Travis measured ambient temperatures on the east end of the family’s farm that were 10 degrees warmer than the rest of the property.

  That portion of the property abuts a solar farm identified as Pinal Central Energy Center, LLC, which was developed by NextEra Energy Resources and was described as one of that company’s “investments in Arizona” according to a 2021 presentation by the firm.

  Representatives of NextEra Energy Resources didn’t respond to The Epoch Times’ request for comment by press time.

  Another nearby solar project, the 2,100-acre Eleven Mile Solar Center, is just across the Arizona State Route 287 from Caywood Farms.

  

  The project’s website claims it will generate more than 900,000 megawatts of electricity per year from 850,000 solar panels.

  The Epoch Times also has reached out to Orsted, the Danish multinational power company that is a partner in the project, for comment on Caywood’s remarks as well as the installation’s projected power output, given longstanding concerns about the real-world efficiency of solar panels.

  A spokesperson for the Solar Energy Industries Association, an industry trade organization, offered a different perspective.

  “Solar projects and agricultural lands are often highly compatible. Farmers and landowners can gain significant revenue for lands they are not actively farming and projects almost always are conducted to the benefit of both parties,” the spokesperson told The Epoch Times via email.

  The spokesperson declined to comment on the specific individual stories described in this article, stating that “we don’t know all the facts.”

  Protecting Soil

  Caywood isn’t alone in her concerns about the use of good farmland for solar installations.

  Annette Smith, executive director of Vermonters for a Clean Environment, told The Epoch Times via email that the protection of prime agricultural soils has been an issue in her New England state.

  Vermont law now specifies that primary agricultural soils won’t cease to be defined as such when a solar installation is built on them.

  “My goal was to see that using prime ag land for solar should not be an opportunity to have the land ‘switched’ to commercial, industrial, or some other category simply by installing solar panels thereupon,” state Sen. Mark MacDonald, the Democratic lawmaker who drafted the language, told The Epoch Times via email.

  In a telephone call, he added that the language was also motivated by prospective improvements in solar panel efficiency.

  “In future years, it won’t take as many acres to produce the same amount of electricity,” he said.

  

  “The dynamic over the years has changed,” Smith told The Epoch Times. She said Vermont’s Republican Gov. Phil Scott has given the state’s scientists more freedom to consider the downsides of solar projects than his predecessor, Democrat Peter Shumlin.

  “When Gov. Shumlin was in charge, it was ‘build everything everywhere regardless of impacts,’” Smith said.

  In 2014, under Shumlin, one major solar development ended up claiming what Smith called “some of the finest prime agricultural soils in Rutland County, Vermont.”

  Despite these concerns, the Public Service Board (PSB) granted the land to Rutland Renewable Energy, LLC, which was owned by the utility-scale solar company groSolar and has since been sold to the French firm EDF Renewables.

  In its decision, PSB concluded that the company’s Cold River Project “will not significantly reduce the agricultural potential of the soils found at the Project site.”

  

  The case made it to the Vermont Supreme Court, which upheld the PSB’s decision against opposition from the Town of Rutland and several neighbors.

  “The project site contains a variety of primary agricultural soils; the standards prohibit siting a ground-mounted solar facility on primary agricultural soils. The site has not, however, been used for agricultural production for 15 to 20 years,” Justice John Dooley noted in his opinion affirming PSB’s ruling.

  The power produced at the Cold River site, which includes 8,820 solar panels, is currently being sold to Green Mountain Power under a multidecade agreement, according to AEP OnSite Partners, which built the array.

  Green Mountain Power confirmed to The Epoch Times that it’s still under that power purchase agreement. Representatives of EDF Renewables didn’t respond to a request for comment by press time.

  Vermont is one of only 15 states with statewide solar decommissioning requirements, as described in a December 2021 report from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. Despite the state’s relatively stringent regulation of the energy source, Smith believes the status quo still leaves farmland vulnerable.

  

  “The state of Vermont really hasn’t done much to protect prime ag soils from solar development,” Smith said. “It’s a case-by-case basis and so far it has not been an impediment to approval, as long as it is returned to being prime ag after the project is decommissioned.”

  An SEIA spokesperson told The Epoch Times via email that the group supports decommissioning standards “to promote transparency and clarity while encouraging responsible development of solar projects.”

  “Solar developers are seeking to optimize among numerous factors including both minimizing impacts to local resources (like prime ag lands) and access to the grid. Developers will choose less productive agricultural land to avoid such conflicts,” the spokesperson wrote.

  Downsides

  Janet Christensen-Lewis, who owns Puck’s Glen Organic Farm on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, thinks the wider public is only just beginning to grasp the downsides of solar power.

  “I think the public consciousness may have been what I was about six years ago,” she told The Epoch Times. “I just wanted to flip a light switch, totally oblivious to all of the consequences of energy production. And then when you’re faced with projects that are coming that are actually going to impact your surroundings, you take a closer look at things.”

  “I suspect that if you said to people in New York City that we should take Central Park, which is 800 acres, and cover it with solar panels, they would be aghast,” she said. “What they don’t realize is that 800 acres is pretty much nothing for the solar that’s being put in now. And we’re using that land.”

  In September 2021, the Biden administration’s Department of Energy released its Solar Futures Study, which envisioned a maximum solar deployment scenario of more than 16,000 square miles—an area slightly smaller than the states of Massachusetts and Connecticut combined.

  That report, like some other solar energy research undertaken in recent years, envisions the “co-location of agriculture and solar energy.” But Christensen-Lewis is skeptical that such “agrivoltaic” technology could be realized at a large scale.

  

  “You’re not going to run combines underneath—you’re never going to figure out a way to make that happen underneath solar panels.”

  The Solar Futures Study also emphasizes the potential of “solar-pollinator habitats,” which are intended to combine solar panels with pollinator-friendly native plants, ultimately bolstering crop yields while simultaneously producing cleaner energy.

  Christensen-Lewis, who already plants wildflowers on her organic farm to encourage pollinators, has her doubts about those habitats as well.

  “We always say that when a solar company comes in and puts in their pollinator habitat, it’s three years away from becoming a patch of weeds, and then they’re going to have to use Roundup,” she said. “It’s just a label—it’s just a selling point—and not necessarily a very good one.”

  Maryland has set the target of producing 50 percent of its electricity from renewable sources by 2030, increasing the pressure to build more solar in the state’s rural counties. Yet development along the Eastern Shore hasn’t gone without controversy.

  

  The Maryland Department of the Environment ruled that Great Bay Solar I, LLC’s solar plant construction sites in Princess Anne, Maryland, violated multiple titles of the state’s environmental law. The department found that Great Bay Solar had disturbed nontidal wetlands at multiple sites, reaching a settlement whereby the company paid the department a $400,000 civil penalty.

  Christensen-Lewis was involved in a successful effort to keep a large solar farm out of Kent County, Maryland, where she believes it threatened prime farmland.

  Despite these victories, the outlook for many farmers facing pressure from major solar companies remains uncertain.

  Caywood, of Caywood Farms in Casa Grande, worries her fourth-generation farm could become “an island” surrounded by utility-scale solar.

  “They’re putting it [solar] out here in the rural areas, on our farmland, and in our forests,” Christensen-Lewis said. “That’s land that we see major other purposes for—for feeding people, for making sure that we have environmental protections in place.”

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 01/07/2022 – 20:40

• Apple's Tim Cook Officially A Billionaire After Massive Windfall In 2021
  Apple’s Tim Cook Officially A Billionaire After Massive Windfall In 2021

  Just days after becoming the first publicly-traded company to see its valuation cross the $3 trillion mark, Apple released its proxy statement ahead of its annual meeting, which is set for early March, which offered some interesting insights about its executive compensation.

  The statement revealed that thanks to his stock-based compensation, Apple CEO Tim Cook earned nearly $100M during 2021, which is more than 1,400x the median pay at Apple (in 2021, median pay rose to $68,254, up from $57,783 during the prior year. Apple said the change was due to changes in hiring and compensation).

  

  The massive payday helped push Cook’s net worth past the $1 billion mark. Here’s the breakdown, courtesy of Reuters.

  Cook’s salary remained at $3M, but he received $82.3M in stock awards, $12M for hitting Apple’s targets and $1.4M for air travel, 401(k) plan, insurance premiums, a vacation cash-out and other compensation. In total, he earned $98.7M, compared with $14.8M in 2020.

  But as Apple Insider pointed out, Cook’s biggest windfall wasn’t even included in his pay package: In August 2021, he vested the maximum amount from a performance-based incentive package. He vested the maximum amount, and in August he received 5M shares, worth $754M at the time.

  These two major windfalls pushed Cook’s personal wealth north of $1 billion, Apple Insider said.

  Not all of this massive award in restricted stock will vest right away: it’s expected to vest in annual installments between 2023 and 2025. Although the non-performance-based portion of this compensation will vest even if Cook leaves the company.

  Judging by movements in the company’s share price since Cook took over in 2011 (just months before Apple founder Steve Jobs died), his massive compensation is worthwhile: shares have risen more than 1,000% since then.

  The big difference-maker for Cook: In September, the Apple chief received 333,987 restricted stock units in his first stock grant since 2011. The award was part of a long-term equity plan which will see him awarded the next chunk of stock in 2023.

  American CEOs were paid 351x more than their typical worker in 2020, according to a report by the Economic Policy Institute. The study also showed that the compensation of top CEOs grew roughly 60% faster than the stock market from 1978 to 2020, eclipsing the slow 18% growth in a typical worker’s annual pay.

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 01/07/2022 – 20:20

• Will Artificial Intelligence Create A Socialist Paradise?
  Will Artificial Intelligence Create A Socialist Paradise?

  Authored by Doug French via The Mises Institute,

  Relating a quip by Soviet economist Nikolai Fedorenko, Yuri Maltsev illustrated the problem with socialism in his foreword to Ludwig von Mises’s Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth. Fedorenko said, at the time, in Maltsev’s words, “[A] fully balanced, checked, and detailed economic plan for the next year would be ready, with the help of computers, in 30,000 years.”

  

  Victor Shvets believes computing power has caught up and “technology could soon create an environment where state planning might be able to deliver acceptable economic results while simultaneously suppressing societal and individual freedoms.” Mr. Shvets has worked all over the world as an investment banker and has now put down his dystopian ideas of the future in the book The Great Rupture: Three Empires, Four Turning Points, and the Future of Humanity. 

  Shvets admits history tells us freedom equals productivity, prosperity, and happiness, while Soviet-style planning creates criminality, corruption, and starvation.

  His use of Soviet “good intentions” makes a reader wonder as to his naïveté. 

  The author believes that by 2030 artificial intelligence (AI) “will replace most research functions and go beyond that by anticipating changes and making discoveries.”

  AI will be able to make all those naughty decisions entrepreneurs struggle to make.

  Capital will be deployed with perfection.

  Consumer needs and wants will be anticipated effortlessly.

  Shvets writes, “modern AI is able to manipulate an unheard of amount of information, and hence, arguably it might steer investments in a more productive way than has ever been possible by Adam Smith’s invisible hand.” 

  Shvets believes Nikolai Bukharin’s scientific planning and state control “might not have been wrong at all but were just a century ahead of their time. Today, the computational power might allow for such planning to occur without creating the stagnation and inefficiency of the Soviet system.”

  He goes on to say F.A. Hayek’s ideas may end up on the scrap heap of history and free market capitalism will be viewed the same as the “burning of witches.”

  All of this after most of his book was spent chronicling how freedom is the reason the West has prospered and the Ottoman Empire, China, and Russia have been mired in poverty. However, now, Americans are sitting around watching TV and playing on their computers instead of reading. Shvets says the collision of financialization and technology has led to civil disintegration, “all the ingredients of Roman ‘bread and circuses.’ Escapism, stagnating incomes, and rising inequalities characterize most Western societies, with the public sector stepping in to distribute ‘Free bread.’”

  Younger people are more in favor than their parents of government solving problems. Baby boomer parents have created kids who are dependent, used to winning “prizes for losers.” Shvets believes this era is more toxic than smoking, with loneliness, increased suicides, declining literacy, digital addictions, and impaired analytical capacity.

  The new world, according to Shvets, will be fair, equitable, and beneficial to society, rather than freedom and individualism. 

  His soothsaying is based on a quarter of millennials believing democracy is bad for society and less than a third believing it essential. Fewer than half of European millennials support democracy despite direct experience with fascism and communism. 

  Shvets sees a world where AI takes over and only 5 percent of people will work and the remaining 95 percent won’t have to, presumably supported by taxes paid by the 5 percent.

  “Karl Marx’s idea of ‘communism’ will be our common future,” Shvets writes.

  Society will achieve such a high level of productivity “it will liberate humans from the need to toil in order to survive, and by that stage it is likely that alternative avenues of personal satisfaction will also emerge.” 

  Mises wouldn’t buy any of this.

  “No single man [or machine] can ever master all the possibilities of production, innumerable as they are, as to be in a position to make straightway evident judgments of value without the aid of some system of computation,” Mises wrote.

  He continues:

  The distribution among a number of individuals of administrative control over economic goods in a community of men who take part in the labor of producing them, and who are economically interested in them, entails a kind of intellectual division of labor, which would not be possible without some system of calculating production and without economy. (emphasis added)

  There can be no such thing as a leisurely form of communism.

  “This, then, is freedom in the external life of man—that he is independent of the arbitrary power of his fellows,” explained Mises. “Such freedom is no natural right. It did not exist under primitive conditions. It arose in the process of social development and its final completion is the work of mature Capitalism.”

  Mr. Shvets, there is a mature capitalism. And, it’s not communism, Marxian or otherwise.

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 01/07/2022 – 20:00

• Here Are The Best And Worst Performing Hedge Funds Of 2021
  Here Are The Best And Worst Performing Hedge Funds Of 2021

  It was another painful year for most hedge funds, with many suffering the pain of their short books shooting up during periods of heightened retail trading such as the start of 2021, followed by a just as painful rotation in and out of the growth to value (and vice versa) rotation. As a result hedge funds as an industry were one of the worst performing asset classes of 2021, trailed only by emerging markets, Treasurys, gold and the euro.

  

  And incidentally, here are the best and worst performing S&P stocks of 2021.

  

  But while most hedge funds underperformed their benchmark for yet another year, some stood out. Here, courtesy of the HSBC Hedge Weekly is a list of the best and worst performing hedge funds of 2021 (and yes, any year when the Tulip Trend Fund is the top 10 you just know markets were micromanaged by central banks).

  

  Not surprisingly, the best performing hedge fund tracked by HSBC, Senvest, is also the one that quietly orchestrated the Gamestop short squeeze mania (the fund was extremely long the stock around the time it became a Reddit sensation then quietly sold out its entire stake in January just as the stock was surging lifted by retail daytraders).

  That said, and demonstrating just how challenging 2021 was, not even half of the Top 20 funds managed to outperform the S&P500. And while the typical response is that they are not supposed to outperform the S&P500, when they fail to do so every year for a decade, well… no surprise why launching a new fund has become virtually impossible. Then again, 2022 is a year when there will be little if any Fed support for the market (at least until the whole tightening frenzy fades away) so all these underperforming hedge funds will surely be able to prove themselves… right?

  In any case, digging among these names, what stands out is that event-driven and stock-picking hedge funds were the best-performing strategies last year, according to preliminary figures from the Bloomberg hedge fund indexes. Funds such as the iconic Renaissance Technologies and Senvest Management (noted above) posted double-digit gains for their investors.

  Event-driven hedge funds rose 16% last year, while equity-focused managers gained nearly 13%, the indexes show. Hedge funds broadly returned nearly 10%. Still, they all trailed the S&P 500 Index which rallied 27%.

  In addition to Senvest, another prominent hedge funds that made the list was Jim Simons’ Renaissance Technologies, which made a comeback after a lousy 2020. The firm posted double-digit gains across all three of its public hedge funds. The equity-focused quant funds had their worst year in 2020 when the algorithms struggled with the pandemic-driven market tumult.

  In the world of multi-strat, or “pod” funds, Citadel bested its peers, posting a 26% return for 2021. The $43.1 billion firm’s Wellington fund, which runs a market neutral strategy, beat D.E. Shaw & Co. and Millennium Management even as their hedge funds had double-digit gains.

  As a group, multistrats rose 8.3% last year through November, and they saw more inflows than any other strategy, attracting $28 billion from investors for the period, according to eVestment. Investors flocked to these funds to diversify their portfolios and to gain exposure to investments that aren’t correlated to the stock market.

  ExodusPoint Capital Management and Sculptor, formerly Och Ziff, came in at the bottom of the group with gains of about 5% last year.

  

  “There has been a range of performance from stellar to well below average among these capital raising powerhouses,” eVestment researchers wrote in a report. “How does this bode for the group heading into 2022? Frankly I’m on the fence between ‘we’ll have to wait and see,’ and ‘I’m not concerned.’”

  And while 2021 had its share of emotional rollercoasters in the world of 2 and 20, with Russell Clark Investment Management – the fund we had once dubbed the world’s most bearish – shutting down in November after losing the fight with central banks, one fund that stood out was Crispin Odey’s funds which made a roaring comeback after years of underperformance.

  According to Bloomberg, in 2021 the London-based money manager enjoyed both his best-ever monthly return and suffered his worst monthly loss, before ending the year with a gain of almost 54%. Odey’s fund was up as much as 108% through September before giving up half those gains in the last quarter of 2021. February marked the fund’s best month, largely on the back of a massive government bond short, while October was its worst.

  

  Alas, gone are the days when Odey managed billions: his strategy has shrunk over the years and ran about $383 million at the end of November. That’s because a dollar invested in the fund at the start of 2015 is still worth only about 51 cents now.

  The annual return, Odey’s best since 2007, comes as a welcome respite for the hedge fund manager, who stepped down from running his eponymous firm to focus on trading in 2020 and has faced public scrutiny for years for his stunning losses and support for Brexit.

  As Bloomberg notes, at least two bets helped power the fund’s surge. The first targeted long-dated government bonds amid expectations that a post-pandemic economic recovery will fan inflation. The fund’s short exposure to bonds totaled 902% of its net asset value at the end of November. The second was a stake in Oxford Nanopore, which surged in value after the DNA-sequencing company listed in London in September.  

  As noted here in the past, Odey has for years predicted a market collapse and been one of the most vocal critics of QE.

  The full weekly HSBC hedge fund performance presentation is available to professional subscribers.

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 01/07/2022 – 19:40

• Money Supply, Rising Rates, & The Discrediting Of Keynesian Hopium
  Money Supply, Rising Rates, & The Discrediting Of Keynesian Hopium

  Authored by Alasdair Macleod via GoldMoney.com,

  The establishment, including the state, central banks and most investors are thoroughly Keynesian, the latter category having profited greatly in recent decades from their slavish following of the common meme.

  That is about to change. The world of continual Keynesian stimulus is coming to its inevitable end with prices rising beyond the authorities’ control. Being blinded by neo-Keynesian beliefs, no one is prepared for it.

  This article explains why interest rates are set to rise substantially in this new year. It draws on evidence from the inflation crisis of the 1970s, points out the similarities and the fact that currency debasement today is far greater and more global than fifty years ago. In the UK, half the current rate of monetary inflation for half the time — just for one year — led to gilt coupons of over 15%. And today we have Fed watchers who can only envisage a Fed funds rate climbing to 2% at most…

  A key factor will be the discrediting of this Keynesian hopium, likely to be replaced by a belated conversion to the monetarism that propelled Milton Friedman into the public eye when the same thing happened in the mid-seventies. The realisation that inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon will come too late for policy makers to stop it.

  The situation is closely examined for America, its debt, and its dollar. But the problems do not stop there: the risks to the global system of fiat currencies and credit from rising interest rates and the debt traps that will be sprung are acute everywhere.

  

  Introduction

  Clearly, the outlook is for higher dollar interest rates. The Fed is trying to persuade markets that it is a temporary phenomenon requiring only modest action and that while inflation, by which the authorities mean rising prices, is unexpectedly high, when things return to normal it will be back down to a little over two per cent. There’s no need to panic, and this view is widely supported by the entire investment industry.

  Unfortunately, this narrative is based on wishful thinking rather than reality. The reality is that over the last two years the dollar has been dramatically debased as part of an ongoing process, as the chart in Figure 1 unmistakably shows.

  

  Since February 2020, M2 has increased from $15,470 to $21,437 last November, that’s 38.6% in just twenty months, an average annualised inflation rate of 23.2% for nearly two years on the trot. And that follows unremitting expansion at an accelerated pace since the 2008 Lehman crisis, an inflationary increase of 175% since August 2008 to November 2021. If the CPI is the relevant measure, then its current indicated rate of price inflation at 6.8% is only the beginning of upward pressure on prices.

  For now, markets are ignoring this reality, hoping the Fed is still in control and can be believed. But we can be sure that it will soon become apparent that the monetary authorities have a major problem on their hands which will no longer be satisfied by jaw-jaw alone. Interest rates will then be destined for significantly higher levels, not because there is demand for capital against a background of limited savings supply, but because anyone holding dollars will require compensation for retaining them. A similar error is to think that with economic growth slowing from its initial recovery and with concerns that the world may be entering a recession, demand and supply will return to a balance and prices will stop rising.

  These errors aside, the 10-year US Treasury, which is currently yielding 1.7% cannot continue for long at these levels with CPI prices rising at 6.8% and more. And in the next few months, with higher producer prices, energy, and raw material costs in the pipeline the pressure for a substantial upwards rerating of bond yields (which is a catastrophic fall in prices) is only going to increase.

  International investment flows

  This article is less concerned with the implications for financial asset values than with how such a shock will affect the currency and confidence in monetary policy. The dollar is over-owned by foreign interests, which with cash deposits and investments now exceed $33 trillion, 145% of estimated current US GDP and not too far from the Bank of International Settlements’ estimate of US non-financial core debt. Of this foreign ownership, nearly $27 trillion is in long-term securities, with private sector ownership of equities by foreign investors standing at $12.5 trillion within that figure.

  It should be appreciated that nearly all foreign ownership of US equities is with profits in mind only: foreigners may be required by their regulators to hold domestic equities, but there is no such requirement covering foreign equities. Consequently, an increase in interest rates of a magnitude suggested by the dollar’s debasement can be expected to trigger an avalanche of foreign selling of all classes of financial assets. Whether they sell the dollar as well will depend partly on how high interest rates are permitted to rise, and partly on alternative currency, precious metal, and commodity options.

  Countering foreign investment in USD financial assets, US residents’ investment in foreign currency assets is far less, with only $651.4bn of foreign currency deposits and short-term investments, one tenth of foreign entitlements to dollar bank deposits and ownership of Treasury and commercial bills. But ownership by US investors in long-term foreign securities stands at $15.7 trillion, less than half the foreign position in US securities, of which $12 trillion is in equities. A bear market in US stocks will therefore lead liquidation of foreign stocks as well, ensuring an equity bear market in the US will become truly global. But the net effect on the dollar is likely to be negative.

  Another aspect for foreign holders of dollar assets to consider is the ongoing supply of dollars and dollar credit. So far, the prospect of further dollar debasement relative to other currencies has not been reflected on the foreign exchanges because the other major currencies face similar outcomes. This may be changing. The euro and Japanese yen have weakened significantly recently with the ECB’s and Bank of Japan’s deposit rates trapped below the zero bound.

  The inability of governments and monetary authorities to escape from currency debasement is what will ultimately matter, setting the scene for purchasing power, interest rates and systemic instability. For now, prospects for the money supply of the world’s reserve currency are central to these issues.

  Does M2 truly represent the dollar’s money supply?

  In February 2021 the Fed changed the components in M1 and M2 and began to report them monthly instead of weekly. Put simply, savings deposits at the banks were added to M1, which accounted for a large jump in the M1 total. Adjustments to prior figures were only backdated to May 2020 onwards, rendering it useless for comparisons with data prior to that date.

  The composition of M2 was left unchanged.

  There are two additional factors, which arguably should be included in M2. The first is IRA and Keogh accounts at the banks. Presumably, they are excluded on the basis that they are not readily available for consumer spending, and if they are withdrawn from one bank, they must be deposited in another. But this ignores the fact that they are part of the deposit money which banks deploy for their dealings in credit, and that the total of these deposits varies. They should therefore be included in any bank deposit-based definition of the money supply. The effect of including these balances is to increase M2 today by $974bn (November 2021).

  The second factor is the treatment of repurchase agreements (repos and reverse repos or RRPs), which are tools for liquidity management both between commercial banks and between the banks and the Fed. We are not concerned with inter-bank repos, because they do not affect the overall amount of currency and credit in circulation. But when the Fed is one counterparty, the situation is different.

  Readers may recall the liquidity crisis in September 2019, when the Fed stepped in and provided finance by providing repos to commercial banks. When the Fed acts in a repo transaction, it buys high quality assets (usually US Treasury bills, Treasury bonds or agency debt) with an agreement to sell them back on pre-agreed terms, which will give the Fed a profit, currently set at an annualised rate of 0.05%. The selling bank then has use of the cash proceeds over the duration of the repo, until the transaction is completed by the bank repurchasing the collateral from the Fed on the pre-agreed terms, thereby returning the cash. Because these transactions are short-term, usually providing overnight liquidity, there is little point in including them in money supply statistics.

  A reverse repo is the other side of a repo transaction. If a commercial bank has too much liquidity on its balance sheet it can use a reverse repo to provide it to another bank in need of liquidity on profitable terms. But if the Fed is the counterparty to a bank or eligible institution in a reverse repo then liquidity is being taken out of general circulation reducing money supply on a short-term basis. Therefore, an increase in the Fed’s reverse repo book reduces the M2 money supply figure below what would otherwise be reported.

  For the Fed, repos and reverse repos are overnight liquidity management tools to allow the Fed to keep its funds rate within the limits set by the Open Markets Committee. Repos are deployed to put a cap on interest rates and reverse repos a floor.

  But commercial banks are unlikely to make use of the reverse repo facility. The only way a bank will be encouraged to enter a reverse repo transaction with the Fed is as a dealer in credit. The return on an RRP must exceed alternative uses of the liquidity available to a bank on the liability side of its balance sheet. Banks will not undertake a reverse repo with the Fed because the rate is fixed at 0.05%, which is less than the interest paid on bank reserves at 0.15%.

  But on 31 December last week, the Fed’s total reverse repo operations stood at $1.905 trillion (it has since declined by $400bn because in the last few trading sessions the yield on 13-week T-bills has risen to 0.085%, giving a higher yield than that offered by the Fed’s reverse repo facility). Nonetheless, outstanding overnight reverse repos are still a very large item. If commercial banks are disinterested because they earn more on their reserves, then who are the Fed’s counterparties? The answer is money funds.

  Money funds faced two problems. With interest rates fixed by the Fed at the zero bound, there is a heightened risk that they will “break the buck”, in other words they would no longer be able to guarantee to return their investors’ capital. The second problem is that commercial banks are no longer interested in acting as counterparties in wholesale money markets absorbing money funds’ liquidity. The issue is Basel 3’s net stable funding ratio rules introduced on 1 July. The NSFR is intended to ensure that banks have stable funding for their activities, and a bank exposed to large depositors, who might withdraw their deposits at little or no notice, for the purpose of the NSFR rules do not constitute a stable source of funding. Consequently, banks are no longer interested in taking in deposits from the money funds permitted to deposit money with them through wholesale money markets.

  Therefore, all money funds are driven towards the New York Fed’s Open Market Trading Desk to earn a paltry 0.05% on their funds when the yield on 13-week T-bills declines towards the zero bound. This facility was specifically opened to them in March 2020 when the Fed reduced its funds rate to 0—0.25%. Ahead of the NSFR’s introduction to US bank regulations last June, the Desk’s reverse repo facility stood at just a few billion from which it exploded to nearly $2 trillion last week, coincided with the NSFR’s introduction. And for money funds restricted to dealing in T-bills and the Fed’s reverse repos, the T-bill rates also dropped. The consequences for the Fed’s reverse repo facilities is illustrated in Figure 2.

  

  Now that the Fed’s reverse repo counterparties have been identified, we return to the question posed above: how does this unprecedented increase in outstanding overnight reverse repos affect our understanding of the quantity of currency and credit in the system?

  There is little doubt that in the absence of the Fed’s intervention that money funds’ cash placed with commercial banks would be recorded as part of the deposit-based money supply, and that on a change in the interest rate situation, it is likely to flood back into circulation. Money funds invested in short-term Treasury instruments, which is most of them, are reflected in bank deposits when it is spent out of the government’s general account.

  Therefore, like the IRA and Keogh balances, the Fed’s reverse repos distort M2 and should be added to broad money M2 to give a truer picture of the quantity of currency and credit in circulation, despite the timing differences involved. M2 and M2 adjusted for these items are shown in Figure 3 below.

  

  M2 so adjusted has increased from $8.3 trillion the month Lehman failed, to almost $25 trillion today, an increase of 200%. The gap between official M2 and our adjusted figures has also increased significantly. In the introduction to this article, it was pointed out that since February 2020 the average annualised rate of official M2 inflation was 23.2% for twenty months. The adjusted annualised rate for M2 modified increases to 27.7% for the same period. Crucially, the recent slowdown in M2 growth properly adjusted has not happened.

  The funding precedent from the 1970s

  With currency and credit increasing at this rate, it is only a matter of time before the US Government will find its funding costs rising materially. Not only will that change the outlook for its spending plans, but there is a risk of periods of funding disruption. Relying on its proven auction process may no longer be wise.

  It is well worth revisiting the 1970s precedent to today’s financial conditions. It was the last time there was an inflation-linked funding crisis. But it wasn’t the US Government that suffered, because it ran relatively small budget deficits relative to the economy at that time — the largest being an unprecedented $74 million in 1976 (compared with $3,131,917 million in 2020, over 42,000 times the 1976 deficit!).

  It was the UK that had problems, but on a far smaller relative scale. Periodically, the Bank of England, acting for the UK Treasury, was unable to fund its budget deficit, which peaked at 6.9% of GDP in 1975/76, forcing the then Chancellor (Denis Healey) to borrow $3, 900 million from the IMF to cover the entire deficit. Following this episode, IMF restrictions on government spending capped the UK budget deficit at approximately 5% in the years following, and the rate of price inflation, which had peaked at 25% in 1975, declined to 8.4% in 1978. Furthermore, in late-1973 there had been a combined commercial property and banking crisis on a scale never seen in the UK before. And in the bear market in equities between May 1972 and the end of 1974 the FT 30 Share Index lost over 70%.

  More than anything else at the time, this episode discredited Keynesianism. For comparison, the US deficit to GDP ratio in 2020 was 11.6% in 2020 and 10.3% in 2021, nearly double that of the UK at the height of its crisis, but so far for two consecutive years. With similarly socialist policies which led to a sterling crisis forty-five years ago, the dangers facing the dollar, which are potentially far greater, are yet to materialise. And the IMF cannot come to the rescue of the US, as it did for the UK in 1976, and Greece in 2010-12.

  Crucially, the Bank of England lacked the tools to hide the true extent of monetary inflation. Repos and reverse repos didn’t exist in the UK until the early 1990s. Intentionally or not, to a degree central banks can massage the numbers today with the financial press being none the wiser. But that changes nothing, other than fooling markets for just a little longer.

  Back in seventies’ Britain, the initial cause of a series of funding crises was that the Bank of England, under pressure from politicians, did not accept the market’s demands for higher interest rates. This sent a negative message to foreign holders of sterling, weakening the exchange rate, triggering foreign selling of gilts, and raising fears of further imported price inflation.

  Meanwhile, government spending continued apace (as described above), pushing extra currency into circulation without it being absorbed by debt issuance funded by genuine savings. And as sterling weakened and money supply figures deteriorated at an increased pace, yet higher interest rates would be required to persuade investing institutions to subscribe for new gilt issues.

  The longer the delay in accepting reality, the greater the chasm became between market expectations and the authorities’ position. Only then would the politicians and the Keynesians at the UK’s Treasury throw in the towel. The Bank of England then had the authority to fund at its discretion. It deployed what became known in the gilt market as the Grand Old Duke of York strategy, after the nursery rhyme: “He had ten thousand men. He marched them up to the top of the hill, then marched them down again.” The Bank of England would raise interest rates high enough to take all expectations of higher rates out of the market, then issue gilt stocks to absorb pent-up investment liquidity before allowing and encouraging rates to fall again. That was how 15% Treasury 1985, 15 ¼% Treasury 1996 the 15 ½% Treasury 1998 gilts came to be issued on separate occasions.

  At the top of the interest rate hill and following the announcement of the terms of the new gilt, sterling would rise, the crisis passed, and the money supply figures corrected themselves. Paul Volcker at the Fed did something similar at the Fed in June 1981 when he raised the Fed funds rate to 19.1% — except the objective was less about funding and more about killing expectations of price inflation.

  Though they are being ignored, there are worrying similarities with the Fed’s position today. The budget deficit has been and remains far higher than the one that forced the UK to call in the IMF, as much as 11.6% of GDP and over 42,000 times the US deficit in 1976. With a US economy bound to be impacted by rising interest rates, the outlook is not recovery as forecast by the Congressional Budget Office, but for further deterioration, requiring continual inflationary funding.

  The Fed is reluctant to acknowledge the argument for significantly higher interest rates, and risks losing control over them. It is in this context that reverse repos have come to the Fed’s partial rescue by suppressing statistically the true rate of growth in currency and credit. That will unwind in the coming months.

  A further lesson from the 1970s was that they commenced with Keynesianism in vogue, which became gradually discredited, notably in the wake of the UK’s 1976 crisis. Monetarists, such as Milton Friedman, gained credibility, and with it a growing recognition that “inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon”. Today, neo-Keynesianism appears as entrenched in monetary policy committees than they were in the early seventies. We can be reasonably sure that as prices, interest rates, and currency and credit quantities continue to rise, that Keynesianism will be discredited again, and a new realisation based on monetarist principals will gain ground.

  When investors in US Treasuries begin to drift away from failed Keynesian arguments and understand the Fed’s dilemma is in a monetary context there can be little doubt that US Treasury auctions will begin to experience failures. How the Fed responds will be crucial: will it be reluctant to raise interest rates sufficiently? Almost certainly the answer is in the affirmative, because of the economic damage to highly indebted businesses and government finances.

  And no one yet is contemplating Treasury coupons at anything like the 15% seen in UK gilts in the far milder inflationary conditions of the 1970s. The rate of US M2 growth recently is the highest by far since records began, even greater than at any time in the two World Wars and compares with a maximum of rate of 13.8% in February 1976, half of that today.

  The dangers from rising interest rates

  We now turn to the consequences of rising interest rates on the money supply, and the impact on government funding. There seems little doubt that as rates move above the zero bound, so long as T-bill rates remain above the Fed funds rate minimum target that money funds will no longer use the Fed’s reverse repo facility. Indeed, earlier this week a jump in the yield of the thirteen-week T-bill to 0.085% has already coincided with a reduction of $400bn in overnight reverse repos.

  From the money funds’ viewpoint, the risk of “breaking the buck” disappears as the Fed funds rate moves above the zero bound, and a purchase of short-term T-bills becomes an increasingly profitable alternative. These money funds are likely to increase their buying of T-bills, which will be credited to the government’s general account at the Fed. The funds gained in the general account will be subsequently drawn down and spent by the Federal Government, when they will then be reflected as bank deposits adding to M2 money supply.

  With this ready source of short-term funding, there is a danger that the government will rely increasingly upon it, making government finances more immediately exposed to rising interest rates. And with the growth of reverse repos having initially slowed down the growth of M2, its subsequent release into deposits as the government spends it out of the general account risks accelerating its growth subsequently at a time when Keynesian policies are being discredited in favour of monetarism.

  The Fed only agreed to deal with money fund counterparties as a temporary measure in March 2020 to ensure that large deposits from them did not face negative deposit rates from banks while the Fed funds rate was at the zero bound. But when rates move up, the money fund problem disappears, and the facility may be withdrawn.

  But with interest rates rising, the Fed will have a far greater problem dealing with the economic fallout. We can all agree that rising interest rates increases the burden on all borrowers exposed to market rates, while those who have locked in low fixed rates merely have the problem only deferred over the length of their loans.

  Rising interest rates and national debts

  According to the Bank for International Settlements total non-financial core debt for the US stood at $35.2 trillion at the end of 2021 Q2 (other estimates appear to be higher). The trend since 2000 is illustrated in Figure 4.

  

  Non-financial debt expanded to record levels between 2000 and the financial crisis of 2008-09, much of it in lieu of stagnating wage increases outpaced by rising prices. The repayment of total non-financial debt, the expansion of which had led up to the Lehman failure, was then deferred by expansive monetary policies, and subsequently rose sharply in 2020-21 driven by soaring government deficits. The economic cost of rising interest rates to non-financial actors is indicated by its sheer scale.

  Mounting non-financial debt is a global problem, with the US at 286% compared with its GDP, the Eurozone at 284%, the UK at 290%, Japan at 416.5%, Switzerland at 308%, and China at 285% (BIS figures for 2021 Q2). The springing of debt traps by rising interest rates of more than a few per cent is bound to destabilise the entire global economy. As well as the Fed, the other central banks will be acutely aware of their own situation and we can be sure that G7 finance ministers and central bankers will try to coordinate interest rate policies, by which we mean doubling down on their suppression. The recent situation for highly indebted national governments is shown in Table 1.

  

  Advanced economies have had debt to GDP ratios of over 100% for at least ten years, a hangover from the financial crisis in 2008-09. The debt position of some of them has since deteriorated alarmingly.

  In a joint paper, economists Carmen Reinhart and Ken Rogoff concluded in 2010 that “…public debt levels of debt/GDP that push the 90 per cent threshold are associated with lower median and average growth”. In other words, all the countries in Table 1 will find it difficult, if not impossible to grow their way out of these peacetime debt levels.

  Highly indebted national governments, such as Belgium, Greece, Italy, Portugal, and Japan will struggle to survive a rise in global interest rates without being in the front line of a funding and systemic crisis. And the Eurozone nations in Table 1 will almost certainly destabilise member states with less direct exposure to debt traps.

  Only recently, President Macron of France and Prime Minister of Mario Draghi of Italy wrote a joint article calling for “The EU’s fiscal rules to be reformed”. For “reform”, read increase borrowing levels. In other words, having achieved government debt to GDP ratios of 128% and 174% respectively, they now want to increase these debt levels even further.

  The race into a European debt crisis is bad enough. But Japan is particularly alarming, with government debt obligations further extended in a policy of suppressing risk premiums on corporate loans and subsidising a wide range of consumer goods with the result that over 50% of the consumer price index is government controlled. With interest rates trapped beneath the zero bound, a rise in global rates is set to deliver a currency crisis for the yen.

  Japan’s banking system is also highly leveraged, with debt to GDP levels for all their large systemically important banks of over twenty times. China has a far lower level of government debt to GDP. But its heavily indebted non-financial private sector has an estimated $27 trillion equivalent and cracks in the system are already becoming evident with the Evergrande crisis.

  Summary and conclusion

  It seems extraordinary that the link between changes in the quantities of currency and credit, epitomised by deposit-based monetary statistics, is being totally disregarded by governments, monetary authorities, and the entire investment establishment. But that is certainly the case today. And no one seems to expect much more than an increase of a few percentage points in global interest rates.

  We should not be surprised, therefore, that rising prices measured by the CPI have caught the whole establishment unawares. Nor should we be surprised that the current situation continues to be analysed through a neo-Keynesian lens, when we know it has led us to the current crisis. The crisis is now of debt traps not just for the US Government, but in all the other major jurisdictions.

  The Keynesian belief that government economic and monetary management is superior to free markets is set to be discredited by market reality, which can only be suppressed so far. It has led to savers being forced to accept deeply and further deepening negative yields on their bond investments. So far, they have been prepared to have their pockets picked by this means, but that cannot last. When it becomes clear that inflation of prices is only a marker for currency debasement, and that this debasement can only continue, these deeply negative rates will no longer be available to subsidise profligate government spending.

  The scale of an interest rate and bond market crisis for everyone’s reserve currency appears to be severely underestimated. The sudden emergence of runaway price inflation has led to tentative comparisons being made between the current situation and the 1970s. But so far, there is little evidence that these comparisons are being taken seriously enough.

  If they were, analysts would have to conclude that events in common with the 1970s which led to high nominal bond yields and coupons in UK gilts exceeding 15%, are potentially far more destabilising today than they were then. That being so, the world is on the edge of a substantial bear market in financial assets driven by global bond prices normalising from the current deeply negative real rates to levels that truly reflect deteriorating government finances. All financial asset values will be undermined by this adjustment.

  It is increasingly difficult to see a way out of these difficulties, and the Keynesian hope that economic growth will deal with the debt problem is simply naïve. In 2010, respected economists (Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff) concluded that at a government debt to GDP rate of over 90% it becomes exceedingly difficult for a nation to grow its way out of its debt burden. With advanced economies averaging a ratio of 125%, Japan and Greece at over 200%, and some Eurozone nations at over 150%, there are debt traps almost everywhere ready to be sprung.

  In highly indebted fiat currency economies, there can only be one outcome: once one falls into a crisis, the others will follow with accelerating currency debasements leading to the destruction of faith in their currencies as well. And with a government core debt ratio to GDP of 125%, the US with its dollars is up there with the others to be destabilised, being over-owned by foreigners, and transmitting risk to all currencies that regard the dollar as its principal reserve currency.

  It can only be concluded that as we enter a new year the adjustment to market reality is likely to be more violent than anything seen in the 1970s.

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 01/07/2022 – 19:20

• Surging Opioid Overdose Deaths Are Forcing Democrats To Rethink The "War On Drugs"
  Surging Opioid Overdose Deaths Are Forcing Democrats To Rethink The “War On Drugs”

  The first batch of data from the CDC won’t be available for months, but many expect that the US likely saw a new record in overdose deaths during 2021, after setting a record in 2020 and 2019, with most of the deaths attributed to synthetic opioids like fentanyl that have infected the drug supply throughout the US.

  Even drugs like cocaine have been laced with deadly fentanyl, a practice that leads to far more accidental deaths. Almost 2/3rds of the 100K overdose deaths from 2020 involved synthetic opioids, which can be 50x more potent than morphine, if not more.

  

  The surging deaths have alarmed policy makers, who had hoped that cracking down on Big Pharma would help reverse the worst affects of the pandemic. But it seems like it’s already too late; a large market of users who started with Vicoden and oxycodone are still alive, fueling the demand for fentanyl-laced street dope. Meanwhile, the surge in demand for fentanyl has caused street heroin to largely disappear from the US east of the Mississippi.

  The fear is that the pandemic caused many addicts in recovery to relapse, raising the risk of overdosing on far more powerful street drugs. Health experts believe many of those who died probably didn’t even know they were consuming fentanyl.

  Finally, some state officials in Pennsylvania and other hard-hit starts are finally giving up on treating this like a criminal justice issue, and are starting to treat it like a public health issue. Instead of criminalizing it, they’re accepting that it happens, and hoping to minimize it.

  With Democrats in power, the five-decade-old “war on drugs” might be totally transformed. And one of the most contentious issues is the adoption of supervised injection sites like they have in Kensington.

  Conservatives and community activists have long opposed these facilities because of the type of people they attract.

  

  Source: FT

  But NYC opened its first supervised injection sites in April. And Philadelphia’s Kensington neighborhood, long a haven for drug dealers and drug users, jokingly called the “Wal-Mart of Heroin” because of the open air drug markets that dominate the neighborhood and have for decades.

  The Biden administration faces a critical crossroads: the Dems can either embrace the progressive policies and risk taking their political lumps, or they can resist their spread and do nothing.

  Dr Rahul Gupta, director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, says he wants to evaluate the science and data behind supervised injection sites, suggesting a change in policy is being considered. “We want to learn and we want to make sure that every possible door we can open up to help people and connect them to treatment is available to us,” he told CNN in December. “If you’re looking to save lives and you’ve reached a historic unprecedented level of deaths, then you cannot avoid looking at any and every option in order to save those lives,” he added.

  

  Source: FT

  Overdose deaths hit a record 1,214 in Philadelphia in 2020, a 6% increase on 2019. Fentanyl was involved in 81% of them. The problem with fentanyl is that it’s so physically addicting, it’s a moneymaker for the cartels, who have begun lacing other drugs with it, including cocaine, “Molly” and fake pills pressed to look like Xanax.

  Speaking to staff at Prevention Point, the only safe injection site in Kensington, the executive director told the FT that nobody has ever died at a safe injection site. But the site’s staff have played a role in saving the lives of many addicts who overdose nearby.

  Jeanmarie Perrone, professor of emergency medicine at the University of Pennsylvania Hospital, said “it’s like drowning”…”Fentanyl depresses the respiratory effort and people stop breathing. They go a few minutes without oxygen, the heart rate slows and they have a cardiac arrest.”

  One parent in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, described to the reporter how two of his children have spent their adult lives chasing drugs until one overdosed. The other is still alive, but continues to struggle.

  “If I mapped out his life, from the time he was 15 till the day he died, all he was doing was going in and out of rehab…and Molly was just kind of following his same path,” says Randy, a 70-year-old Baton Rouge construction worker, who asked not to use his real name. “I think a lot of places are money hungry, they get them in and out. You felt like they were supposed to be helping them but kicking them out ain’t helping them.”

  One policy change that could make users more safe would be to allow drug testing strips and narcan. Believe it or not, these items are still banned by dozens of  states because they are considered drug paraphernalia.

  President Biden has so far remained silent on whether he supports more harm control measures. Many are curious, since he authored some tough-on-crime legislation during his stretch in the Senate.

  Perhaps the fact that two of his children turned out to have drug issues has changed his mind?

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 01/07/2022 – 19:00

• Supplies Still Limited More Than A Year After Monoclonal Antibodies Authorized For Treating COVID-19
  Supplies Still Limited More Than A Year After Monoclonal Antibodies Authorized For Treating COVID-19

  Authored by Meiling Lee via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

  Despite being the only authorized outpatient medical therapy for preventing the worsening of COVID-19 symptoms in high-risk patients, there remains no steady supply of monoclonal antibodies from the federal government a year after its approval for use by medical regulators.

  

  Rolled out in the same month as the COVID-19 vaccines, monoclonal antibody therapies have not gotten the attention that vaccine treatments have after they were billed as the thing to get America out of the pandemic.

  Even today, President Joe Biden continues to mostly focus on vaccinating children, providing boosters to every adult, and increase testing as part of his “new actions” to combat the COVID-19 pandemic during the winter.

  Dr. Marc Siegel, a practicing internist and a professor of medicine at NYU’s Langone Medical Center, says vaccines alone cannot bring America out of the pandemic. More breakthrough cases are occurring with the Delta and Omicron variants, and hospitalizations are rising this winter.

  More than 206 million Americans are fully vaccinated and 72 million people have received a booster dose as of Jan. 5. Individuals are considered fully vaccinated if they received two doses of the messenger RNA vaccines or a single shot of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine.

  Siegel said that the Biden administration has not been able to deliver any therapeutics for early treatment of people with mild or moderate COVID-19 because of the administration’s “obsessive focus on the vaccines to the exclusion of all else.”

  “When it comes to therapeutics, the Biden team’s results are even more anemic,” Siegel wrote in an op-ed in USA Today. “Paxlovid, Pfizer’s new protease inhibitor wonder drug, has been approved but is scarce.”

  “Ditto monoclonal antibodies, the synthetic neutralizing antibodies that have been so helpful in patients at high risk of complications or hospitalizations. Omicron is most susceptible to sotrovimab, made by GlaxoSmithKline, but in most states, it is almost impossible to find,” he added.

  The Epoch Times has reached out to the Biden administration for comment.

  The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has delivered over 197,000 courses of the monoclonal antibody treatments to state and territorial health departments, and to federal entities for the week of Jan. 3. This comes after the agency briefly paused distribution of the treatments on Dec. 23.

  Lack of Public Messaging

  

  The monoclonal antibody therapies have been shown to be effective in preventing severe disease or hospitalization in high-risk patients with mild to moderate COVID-19. They are different from the convalescent plasma from a recovered COVID-19 patient, in that monoclonal antibodies are “created [in a lab] to specifically target an essential part of the infectious process,” according to physicians from the University of Michigan Health System.

  As of Dec. 16, 2021, the National Institutes of Health does not recommend convalescent plasma for treating hospitalized patients without impaired humoral immunity.

  The first monoclonal antibody treatments were issued emergency use authorization (EUA) in November 2020, but there seemed to be little interest in utilizing the therapy when the focus was on the campaign to vaccinate every person aged 16 and older by federal and state governments.

  The lack of messaging around monoclonal antibody treatments from federal authorities resulted in people being unaware of the short timeframe to receive these effective therapies (within 10 days of experiencing the first symptoms) and some hospitals refusing to use them. This led to low demand for the monoclonal antibodies at a time when it should have been utilized to help alleviate strain on hospitals, as the United States was reporting over 100,000 people hospitalized for or with COVID-19 by the end of December 2020.

  

  Dr. Peter McCullough, an internist, cardiologist, and epidemiologist, said in an interview with EpochTV’s “American Thought Leaders” program that he was “shocked with the lack of fanfare on the monoclonal antibodies, there was almost no uptake.”

  He added, “We heard reports that over 80 percent of the supply was sitting on the shelves. Nursing homes weren’t informed, urgent cares weren’t supplied, hospitals weren’t in supply. There wasn’t any messaging.”

  The Epoch Times reached out to the CDC for comment about the lack of messaging around the COVID-19 therapeutics and was told to contact the FDA, who did not reply by press time.

  Due to the low uptake, the HHS allowed authorized health care providers to order the therapies directly from the supplier from February 2021 to Sept. 13, 2021. But the emergence of the Delta variant and waning vaccine effectiveness saw increased demand for the therapies, leading the HHS to announce it would revert back to taking control of distribution.

  The number of monoclonal antibodies allocated to each state and territory would be based on the case numbers, hospitalizations, and utilizations, a distribution system that is still being used today.

  In the Sept. 13 announcement, the HHS claimed that the Delta variant caused a surge in monoclonal antibody therapy uses, “particularly in areas of the country with low vaccination rates,” without further clarification.

  Looking at the statistics from the HHS itself and comparing the vaccination rate and monoclonal antibodies distributed to the 12 most populated states did not always show a correlation between a low vaccination rate with more uptake of the therapies.

  

  The emergence of the Omicron variant further added to the confusion on whether certain antibody therapies should continue to be used and if they would still be effective clinically, particularly when the HHS halted the allocation of the therapies two days before Christmas.

  HHS issued a notice on Dec. 23 that it would halt distribution of the REGEN-COV and Eli Lilly antibody therapies, based on in-vitro or “test-tube” studies—which have yet to be independently peer-reviewed—which found the antibody treatments may not be as effective against the Omicron variant, leaving GlakoSmithKline’s sotrovimab as the only available treatment.

  The Epoch Times has reached out to both the drug manufacturers for comment. Eli Lily didn’t respond and Regeneron directed us to their Dec. 16 press release (pdf), which states, “While Regeneron’s currently authorized REGEN-COV antibodies have diminished potency against Omicron, they are active against Delta, which currently is the most prevalent variant in the U.S.”

  The company said it is awaiting approval for a clinical trial of its “next generation” monoclonal antibodies that would be active against the Omicron variant and all variants of concerns.

  Efficacy With Omicron?

  Florida’s State Surgeon General Dr. Joseph A. Lapado says that the findings of one study conducted in a lab don’t necessarily conclude the same outcome in humans.

  “So the laboratory evidence was indicating the affinity of the antibodies, such as the Regeneron antibodies for the Omicron variant were diminished … but that’s not the same thing as concluding that the Regeneron monoclonal antibodies will not work in a patient with Omicron,” Lapado said at a press conference on Jan. 3.

  He added, “So, there’s a difference between laboratory data and clinical data. And they made the decision to withhold medication based on laboratory data, but we care about clinical outcomes. The decisions should be based, obviously, on clinical data, which is why they’ve reversed [the pause].”

  HHS then lifted the pause eight days later on Dec. 31, allowing all states and territories to continue ordering the treatments, citing that “the prevalence of COVID-19 variants remain dynamic.” The decision was also “in light of recent National Institutes of Health (NIH) clinical guidelines published on Dec. 30, 2021, and the significant variability in the prevalence of the Omicron Variant of Concern (VOC),” it added.

  The NIH is recommending a three-day course of intravenous remdesivir as a treatment option for nonhospitalized patients with mild to moderate COVID-19 who are at high risk of severe illness when Omicron is more than 80 percent prevalent in a region.

  The recommendation was based on the PINETREE trial, which found an 87 percent relative reduction in the risk of hospitalizations and deaths compared to the placebo group. However, there was not a significant difference in the safety profile of both groups as “adverse events occurred in 42.3 [percent] of the patients in the remdesivir group and in 46.3 [percent] of those in the placebo group.”

  Remdesivir is approved by the FDA for patients requiring hospitalization. Experts recommend physicians perform “close kidney monitoring when prescribing remdesivir” and be aware that the drug may cause kidney disorders. In addition, the NIH says that every patient should be given a liver function test and a prothrombin time test (to measure the length of time it takes blood to clot) prior to receiving remdesivir.

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 01/07/2022 – 18:40

• Top Iran Commander Vows To Strike "From Within US" To Avenge Soleimani Death
  Top Iran Commander Vows To Strike “From Within US” To Avenge Soleimani Death

  During a speech on the occasion of Friday prayers in the Iranian city of Mashhad which commemorated this week’s second anniversary of the US killing of IRGC General Qassem Soleimani, the top commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ elite Quds Force (who was Soleimani’s replacement) vowed to take vengeance “from within the US”.

  Iranian state and other foreign regional media featured Brigadier General Esmaeil Qaani’s ultra-provocative words, translating them as follows: “We will prepare ground for the hard revenge against the US from within their homes, as we do not need to be present as supervisors everywhere.”

  

  He added that “wherever is necessary we take revenge against Americans by the help of people on their side and within their own homes without our presence,” Commander Qaani said.

  The fiery speech is being widely interpreted as a threat to strike directly at the American homeland via proxies or terror cells. It’s perhaps the most high-level direct threat of attack on US soil since the height of the Osama bin Laden days during the early years of the so-called ‘war on terror’. 

  Further, at a moment that US bases in both Iraq and northeast Syria are coming under increased drone and rocket attack, something particularly intense this week from what the Pentagon has dubbed “Iran-backed militias”, the Quds force chief told the Iranian crowds gathered for the speech that operations to “uproot” the Americans had already begun…

  “This revenge has begun. Americans will be uprooted from the region,” the IRGC Quds Force Commander said.

  🇮🇷🇺🇲 BREAKING| #Iran‘s Quds Force commander #Qaani says revenge for the assassination of #Soleimani will be done by someone in #Trump‘s own house:

  “Soon we will get payback from within their own homes, with people around them. America’s roots will be uprooted with Divine Power!” pic.twitter.com/fMfcBESTax

  — Terror Alarm (@terror_alarm) January 7, 2022

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  However, amid the series of direct threats aimed at Washington, he held out that the only possibility for the US to avoid suffering vengeance is to “deal with the criminals” on its own. He stressed that otherwise the “children of the Resistance Front” will strike.

  Early this week, on Jan.3rd – which marked two years since Soleimani’s death on Baghdad airport road – Tehran urged Washington to arrest Donald Trump and Mike Pompeo for the assassination. “If Trump and (former secretary of state Mike) Pompeo are not tried in a fair court for the criminal act of assassinating General Soleimani, Muslims will take our martyr’s revenge,” Iran’s President Ibrahim Raisi said in a televised speech Monday, according to Reuters. 

  

  Of course, no US leader in history has ever been put on trial for any alleged “war crimes” abroad, and Raisi without doubt knows this. But the demand came just after the Islamic Republic submitted a formal letter to the United Nations requesting that it hold both the US and Israel accountable for the 2020 killing.

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 01/07/2022 – 18:20

• The Lesson Of COVID: When People Are Anxious, Isolated, & Hopeless; They're Less Ready To Think Critically
  The Lesson Of COVID: When People Are Anxious, Isolated, & Hopeless; They’re Less Ready To Think Critically

  Authored by Jonathan Cook via MintPressNews.com,

  When I criticize meddling in Syria by Britain and America, or their backing of groups there that elsewhere are considered terrorists, it does not follow that I am, therefore, a cheerleader for the dictatorship of Bashar Assad or that I think that Syrians should be denied a better political system. Similarly, when I criticize Joe Biden or the Democratic party, it does not necessarily follow that I think Donald Trump would have made a better president.

  A major goal of critical thinking is to stand outside tribal debates, where people are heavily invested in particular outcomes, and examine the ways debates have been framed. This is important because one of the main ways power expresses itself in our societies is through the construction of official narratives – usually through the billionaire-owned media – and the control and shaping of public debate.

  You are being manipulated – propagandized – even before you engage with a topic if you look only at the substance of a debate and not at other issues: such as its timing, why the debate is taking place or why it has been allowed, what is not being mentioned or has been obscured, what is being emphasized, and what is being treated as dangerous or abhorrent.

  If you want to be treated like a grown-up, an active and informed participant in your society rather than a blank sheet on which powerful interests are writing their own self-serving narratives, you need to be doing as much critical thinking as possible – and especially on the most important topics of the day.

  Learning curve

  The opportunity to become more informed and insightful about how debates are being framed, rather than what they are ostensibly about, has never been greater. Over the past decade, social media, even if the window it offered is rapidly shrinking, has allowed large numbers of us to discover for the first time those writers who, through their deeper familiarity with a specific topic and their consequent greater resistance to propaganda, can help us think more critically about all kinds of issues – Russia, Venezuela, Iran, Israel-Palestine, the list is endless.

  This has been a steep learning curve for most of us. It has been especially useful in helping us to challenge narratives that vilify “official enemies” of the west or that veil corporate power – which has effectively usurped what was once the more visible and, therefore, accountable political power of western states. In the new, more critical climate, the role of the war industries – bequeathed to us by western colonialism – has become especially visible.

  But what has been most disheartening about the past two years of Covid is the rapid reversal of the gains made in critical thinking. Perhaps this should not entirely surprise us. When people are anxious for themselves or their loved ones, when they feel isolated and hopeless, when “normal” has broken down, they are likely to be less ready to think critically.

  The battering we have all felt during Covid mirrors the emotional, and psychological assault critical thinking can engender. Thinking critically increases anxiety by uncomfortably exposing us to the often artificial character of official reality. It can leave us feeling isolated and less hopeful, especially when friends and family expect us to be as deeply invested in the substance – the shadow play – of official, tribal debates as they are. And it undermines our sense of what “normal” is by revealing that it is often what is useful to power elites rather than what is beneficial to the public good.

  

  Emotional resilience

  There are reasons why people are drawn to critical thinking. Often because they have been exposed in detail to one particular issue that has opened their eyes to wider narrative manipulations on other issues. Because they have the tools and incentives – the education and access to information – to explore some issues more fully. And, perhaps most importantly, because they have the emotional and psychological resilience to cope with stripping away the veneer of official narratives to see the bleaker reality beneath and to grasp the fearsome obstacles to liberating ourselves from the corrupt elites that rule over us and are pushing us towards ecocidal oblivion.

  The anxieties produced by critical thinking, the sense of isolation, and the collapse of “normal” is in one sense chosen. They are self-inflicted. We choose to do critical thinking because we feel capable of coping with what it brings to light. But Covid is different. Our exposure to Covid, unlike critical thinking, has been entirely outside our control. And worse, it has deepened our emotional and psychological insecurities. To do critical thinking in a time of Covid – and most especially about Covid – is to add a big extra layer of anxiety, isolation, and hopelessness.

  Covid has highlighted the difficulties of being insecure and vulnerable, thereby underscoring why critical thinking, even in good times, is so difficult. When we are anxious and isolated, we want quick, reassuring solutions, and we want someone to blame. We want authority figures to trust and act in our name.

  Complex thinking

  It is not hard to understand why the magic bullet of vaccines – to the exclusion of all else – has been so fervently grasped during the pandemic. Exclusive reliance on vaccines has been a great way for our corrupt, incompetent governments to show they know what they are doing. The vaccines have been an ideal way for corrupt medical-industrial corporations – including the biggest offender, Pfizer – to launder their images and make us all feel indebted to them after so many earlier scandals like Oxycontin. And, of course, the vaccines have been a comfort blanket to us, the public, promising to bring ZeroCovid (false), to provide long-term immunity (false), and to end transmission (false).

  And as an added bonus, vaccines have allowed both our corrupt leaders to shift the blame away from themselves for their other failed public health policies and our corrupt “health” corporations to shift attention away from their profiteering by encouraging the vaccinated majority to scapegoat an unvaccinated minority. Divide and rule par excellence.

  To state all this is not to be against the vaccines or believe the virus should rip through the population, killing the vulnerable, any more than criticizing the US war crime of bombing Syria signifies enthusiastic support for Assad. It is only to recognize that political realities are complex, and our thinking needs to be complex too.

  To be clear, I haven’t ‘changed my view’. I’ve kept an open mind throughout. I scorn the media’s silencing of dissenting scientists, the general celebration of vaccine profiteering, the unscientific discounting of natural immunity, and the divisive use of mandates to scapegoat https://t.co/83L1UXR4ga

  — Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) January 3, 2022

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  ‘Herd immunity’

  These ruminations were prompted by a post on social media I made the other day referring to the decision of the Guardian – nearly two years into the pandemic – to publish criticisms by an “eminent” epidemiologist, Prof Mark Woolhouse, of the British government’s early lockdown policies. Until now, any questioning of the lockdowns has been one of the great unmentionables of the pandemic outside of right-wing circles.

  Let us note another prominent example: the use of the term “herd immunity,” which was until very recently exactly what public health officials aimed for as a means to end contagion. It signified the moment when enough people had acquired immunity, either through being infected or vaccinated, for community transmission to stop occurring. But because the goal during Covid is not communal immunity but universal vaccination, the term “herd immunity” has now been attributed to a sinister political agenda. It is presented as some kind of right-wing plot to let vulnerable people die.

  I’ve had run-ins with Off-Guardian of late, but they’re right to highlight the WHO mucking about with the established definition of ‘herd immunity’. This kind of thing does nothing but undermine trust in science and scientists https://t.co/SgEMqnptZu

  — Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) January 2, 2021

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  This is not accidental. It is an entirely manufactured, if widely accepted, narrative. Recovery from infection – something now true for many people – is no longer treated by political or medical authorities as conferring immunity. For example, in the UK, those who have recovered from Covid, even recently, are not exempted, as the vaccinated are, from self-isolation if they have been in close contact with someone infected with Covid. Also, of course, those recovered from Covid do not qualify for a vaccine passport. After all, it is not named an immunity passport. It is a vaccine passport.

  Emmanuel Macron, the French president, has at least been open about the “reasoning” behind this kind of discrimination. “In a democracy,” he says, apparently unironically, “the worst enemies are lies and stupidity. We are putting pressure on the unvaccinated by limiting, as much as possible, their access to activities in social life. … For the non-vaccinated, I really want to piss them off. And we will continue to do this, to the end. This is the strategy.”

  Notice that the lies and stupidity here emanate from Macron: he is not only irresponsibly stoking dangerous divisions within French society, he has also failed to understand that the key distinctions from a public health perspective are between those with immunity to Covid and those without it and those who are vulnerable to hospitalization and those who are not. These are the most meaningful markers of how to treat the pandemic. The obsession with vaccination only serves a divide and rule agenda and bolsters pandemic profiteering.

  Crushing hesitancy

  The paradox is that these narratives dominate even as the evidence mounts that the vaccines offer very short-term immunity and that, ultimately, as Omicron appears to be underscoring, many people are likely to gain longer-term immunity through Covid infection, even those who have been vaccinated. But the goal of public “debate” on this topic has not been transparency, logic, or informed consent. Instead, it has been the crushing of any possible “vaccine hesitancy.”

  Dr John Campbell is always worth listening to. The bottom lines of the latest omicron research are positive:
  a) It’s likely to be more like a cold
  b) It’ll spread so quickly there’s a good chance we’ll have herd immunity within months, at minimal suffering https://t.co/GIpGYbXZOX

  — Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) December 8, 2021

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  I have repeatedly tried to highlight the lack of critical thinking around the exclusive focus on vaccines rather than immune health, the decision to vaccinate children in the face of strong, if largely downplayed, opposition from experts, and the divisive issue of vaccine mandates. But I have had little to say directly about lockdowns, which have tended to look to me chiefly like desperate stop-gap measures to cover up the failings of our underfunded, cannibalized, and increasingly privatized health services (a more pressing concern). I am also inclined to believe that the balance of benefits from lockdowns, or whether they work, is difficult to weigh without some level of expertise. That is one reason why I have been arguing throughout the pandemic that experts need to be allowed more open, robust, and honest public debate.

  It is also why I offered a short comment on Prof Woolhouse’s criticisms, published in the Guardian this week, of national lockdown policies. This evoked a predictably harsh backlash from many followers. They saw it as further proof that the “Covid denialists have captured me,” and I am now little better than a pandemic conspiracy theorist.

  Framing the debate

  That is strange in itself. Prof Woolhouse is a mainstream, reportedly “eminent” epidemiologist. His eminence is such that it also apparently qualifies him to be quoted extensively and uncritically in the Guardian. The followers I antagonize every time I write about the pandemic appear to treat the Guardian as their Covid Bible, as do most liberals. And they regularly castigate me for referring to the kind of experts the Guardian refuses to cite. So how does my retweeting of a Guardian story that uncritically reports on anti-lockdown comments from a respectable, mainstream epidemiologist incur so much wrath – and seemingly directed only against me?

  The answer presumably lies in the short appended comment in my retweet, which requires that one disengage from the seemingly substantive debate – lockdowns, good or bad? That conversation is certainly interesting to me, especially if it is an honest one. But the contextual issues around that debate, the ones that require critical thinking, are even more important because they are the best way to evaluate whether an honest debate is actually being fostered.

  Prof Woolhouse on the lockdowns: ‘We did serious harm to our children and young adults who were robbed of their education, jobs and normal existence, as well as suffering damage to their future prospects, while they were left to inherit a record-breaking mountain of public debt’

  — Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) January 3, 2022

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  My comment, intentionally ambiguous, implicitly requires readers to examine wider issues about the Guardian article: the timing of its publication, why a debate about lockdowns has not previously been encouraged in the Guardian but apparently is now possible, how the debate is being framed by Woolhouse and the Guardian, and how we, the readers, may be being manipulated by that framing.

  Real, live conspiracy

  Interestingly, I was not alone in being struck by how strange the preferred framing was. A second epidemiologist, Martin Kulldorff, a biostatistician at Harvard who serves on a scientific committee to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), saw problems with the article too. Unfortunately, however, Prof Kulldorff appears not to qualify as “eminent” enough for the Guardian to quote him uncritically. That is because he was one of three highly respected academics who brought ignominy down on their heads in October 2020 by authoring the Great Barrington Declaration.

  Like Woolhouse, the Declaration offered an alternative to blanket national lockdowns – the official response to rising hospitalizations – but did so when those lockdowns were being aggressively pursued, and no other options were being considered. The Guardian was among those that pilloried the Declaration and its authors, presenting it as an irresponsible right-wing policy and a recipe for Covid to tear through the population, laying waste to significant sections of the population.

  My purpose here is not to defend the Great Barrington Declaration. I don’t feel qualified enough to express a concrete, public view one way or another on its merits. And part of the reason for that hesitancy is that any meaningful conversation at the time among experts was ruthlessly suppressed. The costs of lockdowns were largely unmentionable in official circles and the “liberal” media. It was instantly stigmatized as the policy preference of the “deplorable” right.

  This was not accidental. We now know it was a real, live conspiracy. Leaked emails show that Anthony Fauci, the chief medical adviser to the president, and his minions used their reliable contacts in prominent liberal media to smear the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration. “There needs to be a quick and devastating published takedown of its premises. I don’t see anything like that online yet – is it underway?” a senior official wrote to Fauci. The plan was character assassination, pure and simple—nothing to do with science. And “liberal” media happily and quickly took up that task.

  The Guardian, of course, went right along with those smears. This is why Prof Kulldorff has every right to treat with disdain both the Guardian’s decision to now publish Prof Woolhouse’s criticisms – so very belatedly – of lockdown policy and Prof Woolhouse’s public distancing of himself from the now-radioactive Great Barrington Declaration even though his published comments closely echo the policies proposed in the Declaration. As Prof Kulldorff observes:

  Hilarious logical somersault. In the Guardian, Mark Woolhouse argues that [the] UK should have used focused protection as defined in the Great Barrington Declaration, while criticizing the Great Barrington Declaration due to its mischaraterization by the Guardian.”

  Hilarious logical somersault. In @guardian, Mark Woolhouse argues that UK should have used focused protection as defined in the Great Barrington Declaration, while criticizing the Great Barrington Declaration due to its mischaraterization by @guardian. https://t.co/lJfKVbzgaC

  — Martin Kulldorff (@MartinKulldorff) January 3, 2022

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

  Reputational damage 

  If we put on our critical thinking hats for a moment, we can deduce a plausible reason for that mischaracterization.

  Like the rest of the “liberal” media, the Guardian has been fervently pro-lockdown and an avowed opponent of any meaningful discussion of the Great Barrington Declaration since its publication more than a year ago. Moreover, it has characterized any criticism of lockdowns as an extreme right-wing position. But the paper now wishes to open up a space for a more critical discussion of the merits of lockdown at a time when rampant but milder Omicron threatens to shut down not only the economy but distribution chains and health services.

  Demands for lockdowns are returning – premised on the earlier arguments for them – but the formerly obscured costs are much more difficult to ignore now. Even lockdown cheerleaders like the Guardian finally understand some of what was clear 15 months ago to experts like Prof Kulldorff and his fellow authors.

  What the Guardian appears to be doing is smuggling the Great Barrington Declaration’s arguments back into the mainstream but trying to do it in a way that won’t damage its credibility and look like an about-face. It is being entirely deceitful. And the vehicle for achieving this end is a fellow critic of lockdowns, Prof Woolhouse, who is not tainted goods like Prof Kulldorff, even though their views appear to overlap considerably. Criticism of lockdowns is being rehabilitated via Prof Woolhouse, even as Prof Kulldorff remains an outcast, a deplorable.

  In other words, this is not about any evolution in scientific thinking. It is about the Guardian avoiding reputational damage – and doing so at the cost of continuing to damage Prof Kulldorff’s reputation. Prof Kulldorff and his fellow authors were scapegoated when their expert advice was considered politically inconvenient, while Prof Woolhouse is being celebrated because similar expert advice is now convenient.

  This is how much of our public discourse operates. The good guys control the narrative so that they can ensure they continue to look good, while the bad guys are tarred and feathered, even if they are proven right. The only way to really make sense of what is going on is to disengage from this kind of political tribalism, examine contexts, avoid being so invested in outcomes, and work hard to gain more perspective on the anxiety and fear each of us feels.

  The corporate media is not our friend. Its coverage of the pandemic is not there to promote the public good. It is there to feed our anxieties, keep us coming back for more, and monetize that distress. The only cure for this sickness? A lot more critical thinking.

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 01/07/2022 – 18:00

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