Month: August 2020

Sovereign wealth funds flocked to global equities (ex-U.S.) and out of bonds during the second quarter, reported Reuters, citing new data from eVestment. 

U.S. equity strategies were not in favor during the quarter (only attracting a net $704 million) as funds pulled a net $5.2 billion out of fixed income and shifted a net $6 billion into global equities outside the U.S.

“We’re seeing the sovereign wealth funds doing quite a lot of active search activity now in international equities, equities excluding the U.S.,” said Matthew Williams, head of institutional sales at Franklin Templeton, who spoke with Reuters.

“There is usually an increased allocation to equities as a hedging mechanism, given the historical negative correlation between equities and oil prices, and I think that’s evident in what the oil-dependent sovereign wealth funds have been doing,” Williams said. 

He said fund inflows into U.S. equity strategies were limited because of stock market valuations and election concerns. 

“Institutional allocators are keeping some of their powder dry on the U.S. equity allocations at the moment,” he said.

The investment flows suggest sovereign funds are staying clear and or selling the tech-induced blowoff in U.S. stocks. 

These funds are certainly watching terrible market breadth as only a handful of technology stocks powers main equity indexes higher. 

Nasdaq is now 28% above its 200 DMA, the widest spread since 2000… Funds are concerned a breadth scare is ahead. 

FANG stocks aren’t cheap, now hitting new highs. 

Bad market breadth, overvaluation, and election concerns are some of the reasons why sovereign fund flows into U.S. stocks during the second quarter remained low. 

Authored by Josh Owens via OilPrice.com,

Twenty Saudi soldiers arrived this week at a U.S. military base close to an oilfield in northeastern Syria, according to Iranian media, which cite a report from a Lebanon-based Arabic-language TV channel. 

At the end of last year, Saudi troops were also reportedly stationed near Syria’s largest oilfield, Al-Omar in the oil-rich Deir Ezzor region, in what was thought to be Saudi protection for experts of Saudi oil giant Saudi Aramco. According to the report of the Arabic service of Turkish news agency Anadolu at the time, the arrival of the Saudi soldiers at Syria’s biggest oilfield coincided with the arrival of around 30 trucks carrying drilling and digging machinery. 

Incidents and altercations between the superpowers backing different sides in the Syrian conflict continue. Just this week, U.S. soldiers were injured in a skirmish with Russian troops, two U.S. officials told The New York Times, noting that the injuries were the result of a collision between vehicles, not gunfire.  

After a surprise announcement of pulling the U.S. troops out of Syria in October last year, U.S. President Donald Trump said that the United States would protect Syrian oil fields from ISIS.

President Trump claimed that the U.S. had taken control of the oil in the Middle East, tweeting that “The U.S. has secured the Oil, & the ISIS Fighters are double secured by Kurds & Turkey.”

The President did not elaborate on what he meant by “securing the oil,” but speculations about the President’s statement assume he was referring to the U.S. special forces that have been—and will continue to be—in control of oil and gas fields in Deir Ezzor, Syria’s oil region.

President Trump has vowed to protect Syrian oil fields from ISIS, and the United States may leave 500 troops in northeastern Syria and send in battle tanks and other equipment with the purpose to help the Kurds in the area to protect oil fields that used to be controlled by Islamic State during its so-called caliphate in parts of Iraq and Syria. 

JATO’s motor vehicle data of the European market reveals Tesla is quickly losing market share as consumers now have a more extensive selection of all-electric vehicle models to choose from.  

Overall motor vehicle registration in July slumped 4% year-over-year to 1,278,521; meanwhile, electric vehicle registrations boomed. 

JATO said it was a “record-breaking month” for electric vehicle registrations with volumes up 131% year-over-year to 230,700. EVs accounted for 18% of total registrations in July, an increase of 10 percentage points over the 12 months. 

“The rise in demand for EVs is strongly related to a wider offer that is finally including more affordable choices. The higher competition amongst brands is also pushing down prices.” Felipe Munoz, a global analyst at JATO Dynamics, said. 

Half of the vehicles sold in the month had hybrid engines, with demand jumping 89%. The hybrid versions of the Ford Puma and Fiat 500 were most sought after by consumers. Then plug-in hybrids accounted for 55,800 units, up over 365% over the year, with an increase due mainly to new model releases such as Mercedes A-class, BMW XC40, and BMW 3-Series.

As for pure electric vehicles, July registrations rose 43% over the last year to 53,200, with consumers now able to choose from 38 different models, as it appears pure electric vehicle models are flooding the market, crowding out Tesla: 

“Tesla posted a 76% decline to 1050 units following shipping delays to Europe, as a consequence of production challenges in its Fremont, California plant,” JATO’s report said. 

Munoz said:

“In contrast to the general trend of increasing demand for electric cars, Tesla is losing ground this year in Europe. Some of this can be explain by issues relating to the production continuity in California, but also by high competition from brands that play as locals in Europe.”

In a separate report, we quoted Wolf Richter via WolfStreet who showed Tesla’s German sales over the seven-month period ending in July, fell from 6,816 in 2019 to 5,306. Shown below, the EV maker’s market share plunged from 18.4% to 8.7%. 

In Europe, as a whole, Tesla was dominated by Volkswagen Group, Renault, and Hyundai Group – however, does Tesla’s stock, listed on the Nasdaq, reflect the EV maker’s waning European demand? 

Absolutely not… 

Authored by Lily Zhou via The Epoch Times,

The UK government this week announced tougher measures against organizers of “dangerous” parties, whom the Home Secretary said showed “a blatant disregard for the safety of others.”

Britain’s Home Secretary, Priti Patel. (Peter Nicholls/Reuters)

The new rule will came into effect from Aug. 28, before the August bank holiday, a long weekend during which many people enjoy partying.

Those who organize or facilitate illegal raves, unlicensed music events, or other unlawful gatherings of over 30 people in England can face a fine of up to 10,000 pounds ($13,000), the UK government announced.

Participants in these gatherings can be fined 100 pounds ($130). Fines for repeat offenders can double up to a maximum of 3,200 pounds ($4,200).

Home Secretary Priti Patel said the government “will continue to crack down on the small minority who think they are above the law.”

The announcement came after police disrupted dozens of unlicensed parties for the third weekend in a row in Birmingham in the West Midlands, which is currently on the government’s watch list for its high and rising CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus infection rate.

West Midlands Police wrote on Twitter that they were called to break up 96 parties and meet ups on Saturday night.

Over 150 people were caught at an illegal rave near Blackburn, an area in Northwest England, where the infection rate of the CCP virus is second highest in England, according to the latest data (pdf).

The London Metropolitan Police has responded to more than 1,000 unlicensed events since the end of June, the government said.

Ade Adelekan, the National Police Chiefs’ Council lead for unlicensed music events, said that he welcomed this “deterrent against those who irresponsibly put people’s health and safety at risk.”

He added that these events “are hosted without regard for the safety of those attending, and police have observed cases of anti-social behaviour, sales of drugs, and gang activity.”

Police will increase patrols to prevent illegal gathering, especially in the lead up to the bank holiday weekend.

Fines for not wearing face coverings where it is mandated also doubled for repeat offenses, up to 3,200 pounds ($4,200), on Aug. 28.

As we underscored earlier the east Mediterranean gas dispute involving Turkey and Greece along with Cyprus is fast becoming militarized. Despite Turkey defending that its interpretation of maritime boundaries is fully “legitimate”, the European Union has prepared sanctions against Turkey.

“We can go to measures related to sectoral activities… where the Turkish economy is related to the European economy,” EU’s top diplomat Josep Borrell threatened on Friday during a press conference. 

“Turkey has to abstain from unilateral actions. This is a basic element to allow the dialogue to advance,” Borrell added.

He described punitive measures targeting Turkey’s ability to conduct hydrocarbon exploration in contested waters around Cyprus and near Greece’s outermost islands.

However, Borrell also emphasized the EU wouldn’t pull the trigger just yet, opting to give  “a serious chance to dialogue” while pledging full political support to EU members Greece and Cyprus.

To be expected Ankara fired back that the dispute is beyond the EU’s scope or authority and that it has no business in Turkish affairs. “It is beyond the limits of the EU to criticise the hydrocarbon activities of our country within our own continental shelf and demand that we stop them,” Turkish government spokesman Hami Aksoy said.

Meanwhile, occurring simultaneous to EU sanctions deliberations at the end of this week, Turkish and Greek F-16 jets nearly exchanged fire off southwestern Cyprus in a ‘dogfight’ of sorts.

France and Italy have actually sent military frigates and fighter jets for Mediterranean war games with Greece this week. No doubt it’s all about a ‘show of force’ and European unity in the face of Turkey. Ankara has sent military escorts to accompany its hydrocarbon exploration vessels in the meantime.

Authored by Lawrence Franklin via The Gatestone Institute,

Chinese Communist Party Chairman Xi Jinping’s signature foreign policy proposal has been the “Belt and Road Initiative” (BRI) commercial and strategic program. At first, the network was pitched as a restoration of the ancient overland trade route, the “Silk Road,” that linked China to Europe. This “New Silk Road,” like its predecessor, would traverse the vast steppes of Central Asia — but the contemporary BRI is allegedly meant to serve also as an economic boon for all the countries along the route.

Xi quickly followed the overland BRI with a maritime version, presumably to connect Chinese ports on the South China Sea to seaports in the Indian Ocean, continuing on to the Middle East states and ultimately reaching European ports. Initially, these proposals had only involved countries along BRI routes.

Now Xi’s grand thoroughfares are global in scope, extending as far as Djibouti, a strategic maritime chokepoint in Africa, just west of the Arabian Peninsula, or Ecuador, home to South America’s third-largest oil reserves.

The economic benefits, however, of some of these deals between China and poor “Third World” countries in Africa and Latin America are questionable. A few of these bilateral packages appear contrived to imprison already impoverished states into realms of permanent economic vassalage to China.

The BRI networks clearly intend to benefit China, either by stimulating an enormous increase in commerce, or, when debts cannot be repaid, by appropriating whatever assets China selects. China, as the world’s largest importer of oil, will be able to diversify its sources of petroleum as a consequence of several bilateral BRI deals. China most likely also hopes to secure political benefits through BRI arrangements. Countries participating in China’s BRI, and generally friendly to the US and its allies, might shy away from supporting the West’s national security concerns for fear of losing large Chinese investments in their local economies.

There is already plenty of evidence concerning some BRI participating states of muting criticism of China’s poor record on human rights. Many Islamic countries, for example, remain silent on China’s near-genocidal treatment of millions of Muslim Uyghurs in its northwestern province of Xinjiang. Some Muslim states have even praised China’s domestic policies toward Xinjiang’s ethnic Uyghurs. Not one Muslim-majority state voted to condemn treatment of the Uighurs in support of the West’s UN resolution to publicly sanction Beijing.

Critics of China’s BRI program point out that Chinese loan agreements lack transparency and that contracts sometimes serve China’s interests in a racketeering way, oblivious to local concerns. Sri Lanka, for instance, after having failed to meet its debt obligations to China, ceded the port of Hambantota to Beijing. Venezuela delivers oil to China instead of its worthless currency. Ecuador, in the first full year of Xi’s presidency, already was exporting 90% of its oil to China, perhaps even below the world market price. In addition, Ecuador cannot seem to prevent the rape of its marine life just on the edge of its sovereign maritime economic zone by hundreds of Chinese fishing boats near the Galapagos Islands. “They just pull up everything!” said a sea captain who asked not to be named.

Critics also accuse China of favoring BRI contracts with countries that have authoritarian regimes. Beijing has invested in Zimbabwe in Africa, Laos in Southeast Asia, and Venezuela in South America. A new, particularly ominous Western criticism is that China distributes its facial recognition technology to BRI-affiliated countries where Chinese surveillance systems have been installed, in states such as Bolivia, Venezuela and Ecuador.

China’s disregard for the human rights of its own citizens not surprisingly extends to the rights of the citizens of its host nations. China’s extraction of raw materials and minerals in Ecuador, for instance, has elicited protests by the Shuar and Waorani natives, concerned about the environment. While some of China’s infrastructure projects are beneficial but costly — such as the construction of a rail line in Kenya from the capital Nairobi to the main port of Mombasa — others are “white elephants.” One such marginally useful project is a road built by Chinese engineers from Uganda’s capital Kampala to the country’s international airport at Entebbe. The project is expected to improve traffic but will have little to no other benefits — apart from moving local resources to China.

An additional shortcoming of the massive outlay of Chinese loans that finance infrastructure projects are that host nations are forced to put up with what CCP Chairman Xi calls “Chinese characteristics.” When Beijing settles on an infrastructure project, large numbers of Chinese workers arrive in the host country, establish their own living area, complete the project and then leave. There is little or no hiring of local workers or training of locals in skills that could exact a benefit from the extended presence of China’s skilled professionals. Some Chinese teams even bring their own chefs and rarely engage in social activities with the citizens of the host nation.

The objectives of China’s global BRI programs are clearly as much strategic and political as they are economic. BRI projects seem not designed so much to win new friends as to win new dependents, especially in areas either neglected by the West or in the Western sphere of influence.

The ultimate objective of the global dimension of China’s BRI enterprise appears to be geared toward replacing the existing political, military and economic dimension of the West’s liberal democratic order — again not surprisingly — with one dominated solely by the Communist Party of China.

*  *  *

Dr. Lawrence A. Franklin was the Iran Desk Officer for Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld. He also served on active duty with the U.S. Army and as a Colonel in the Air Force Reserve.

A man was shot and killed in downtown Portland Saturday night as violence broke out all over the city amid clashes between a participants in a pro-Trump caravan and Antifa counter-protesters.

According to The Oregonian, police found “camouflage gear with infidel and thin blue line patches, which commonly indicate support for law enforcement.” Eyewitness accounts suggest the shooter may be a black male.

(Real) Medics tried to save the shooting victim in downtown Portland. It is a white male contrary to what antifa journalists and accounts said about it being a black victim. pic.twitter.com/jzE2ffqN73

— Andy Ngô (@MrAndyNgo) August 30, 2020

EXCLUSIVE: I can confirm it is a homicide. The person shot in downtown Portland is deceased.

Some witnesses are saying the suspect shooter is a black male. Police have not released an official suspect description.

— Andy Ngô (@MrAndyNgo) August 30, 2020

The leader of conservative protesters “Patriot Prayer” – Joey Gibson, showed up to the scene of the shooting, after which he was chased off by Antifa. Gibson took refuge in a gas station.

Joey Gibson showed up pic.twitter.com/UoY9zvwlLJ

— Sergio Olmos (@MrOlmos) August 30, 2020

Gibson has gone into a local gas station, protestors try to open the doors pic.twitter.com/Nb3d3iIsOA

— Sergio Olmos (@MrOlmos) August 30, 2020

Police eventually cleared the scene.

Police move and move protestors away from the gas station pic.twitter.com/FJNnewoXcm

— Sergio Olmos (@MrOlmos) August 30, 2020

Earlier in the day, pro-Trump supporters and counter-protesters squared off. At one point, a man reportedly filming the license plates of conservative attendees was beaten. As he falls, you can see his arms fly straight forward in the ‘fencing response,’ suggesting possible brain damage. He was later interviewed speaking coherently, however.

Doxxer down #portland https://t.co/x7ndE7OsfV

— Cacti (@SCCacti) August 30, 2020

As day turned to night, skirmishes continued between the factions. 

 Check back for updates…

Authored by Patrick Henningsen via GlobalResearch.ca,

I can remember them saying that ‘everything changed after 9/11’. It did, but certainly not for the better. I think we can all agree on that.  I remember how everyone surrendered their rights and key aspects of democracy, all in the name of ‘keeping us safe’.

Back then, world-changing decisions were made in reaction to an exaggerated threat, with sweeping ‘emergency measures’ and laws enacted. Usually, nothing good follows from a government that is making decisions and formulating permanent policy, suspending constitutions and rights – imposing all of this on a population operating from a position of fear. That much we did learn. Some of us did anyway.

In January, like a leviathan sprung forth from the titans Oceanus and Ceto in ancient Greece, the global coronavirus pandemic was born. Like 9/11, it was a disruptive event, but this time on a scale unimaginable. Whether or not one believes this was naturally-occurring or a biologically-engineered pathogen (there is every reason to believe it could be), it is beyond argument that this ‘crisis’ is and will be used to advance a multi-pronged globalist agenda, likely to feature more wars between the great powers.

Modern man is now entering realms of dystopia only imagined before by the likes of Aldous Huxley and George Orwell, with more than a hint of Philip K. Dick. What makes all of this difficult for so many is that the sudden transition has been almost instantaneous, leaving people in a near callow state of bewilderment, wondering what just happened to their old life.

No matter which way this situation goes, it’s almost certain life will never be the same.

COVID Crisis

By now we should be familiar with the story: a novel coronavirus, scientifically known as SARS-CoV-2, or COVID-19, has made its way across the planet, infecting millions of people and registering over 100,000 deaths (as of the time of writing) across 180 countries. The victims of this outbreak are overwhelming elderly persons over the age of 70 and those in palliative care, most of who have severe and chronic underlying medical conditions.

Make no mistake about it – this is a disruptive event on a scale the modern world has never seen before. The shock and awe began from the moment the story broke from the Chinese city of Wuhan in Hubei Province. Global audiences were inundated with images of Chinese authorities putting hundreds of people into biological suits, hosing down the outside of buildings, before quarantining themselves in their apartments. Then began a state-sanctioned medieval-style program that western media and politicians enthusiastically dubbed a “lockdown,” a term aptly borrowed from the prison industrial complex.

Wuhan was an unforgettable spectacle which really impacted the western psyche, such that when the coronavirus made it to European and North American shores, the public was already conditioned to expect a Chinese-style response from their own governments. Not surprisingly, this is exactly what they got and, in fact, it was what they demanded.

On 12 March, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson called an emergency press conference where he took to the podium, flanked by his two leading science advisors, Sir Patrick Vallace and Chris Whitty, who proceeded to explain the government plan of action which was centred around the commonly known epidemiological concept of “herd immunity.” Their strategy was a familiar one because it has been the orthodoxy in modern epidemiology – allow a virus to go through approximately 60-80% of the population in order to achieve herd immunity, naturally extinguishing the virus in a single season.

But Johnson made the fatal error of grossly overestimating the death rate at 1% of the total infected, an estimate that would have left the country with some 52 million infected and 500,000 fatalities. Of course, in hindsight, these numbers were pure fiction, but at the time everyone was so enveloped in fear that they believed the ‘experts’. Nonetheless, the herd immunity approach was more or less identical to the ‘no lockdown’ approach taken by European countries Sweden and Iceland, as well as Belarus, Mexico, and Japan. This would entail standard random sample testing nationally and for those exhibiting COVID-19 symptoms. The elderly and vulnerable people would be told to self-isolate for a period of time while studies were conducted.

‘Plan A’ didn’t last long. On 24 March, Johnson appeared on national TV, this time without his science team, to announce a nationwide lockdown – an effective shutdown of society and most of the country’s economy. The UK was now following fellow NATO member states France, Italy, Spain and others, which had already imposed draconian national lockdowns, including strict new ‘social distancing’ guidelines preventing people from being together.

It appeared that Johnson’s sudden 180º degree turn was prompted in part by an alarmist report generated by one of the government ‘expert’ teams at Imperial College London, led by controversial computer modeler Neil Ferguson who was previously responsible for the 2001 ‘Foot and Mouth’ crisis, a debacle which ended in the unnecessary culling of some six million livestock in Britain.

This time, Ferguson and his team worked their modelling magic to come up with an estimated half a million coronavirus deaths if the government did not implement “very intense social distancing and other interventions now in place.”

While the figure was completely fictional, the media seized on it, as did government officials, which fuelled fear and panic across Britain’s government-media complex. Frightened and unsure, the public accepted the authoritarian measures, but the government never gave an end date to the quarantine; it was left open-ended at the discretion of the government’s scientific coterie.

Once that bubble of fear had been sufficiently inflated, a medieval-style lockdown was a fait accompli in numerous countries including Australia and New Zealand. The impact of a full national quarantine is yet unknown, but it’s already becoming clear that it will be nothing short of cataclysmic for those countries who agreed to the voluntary self-destruction of their economies and the indefinite suspension of democracy.

It’s worth noting this isn’t the first time the United Nations, the World Health Organization (WHO), and Imperial College tried conjuring a global panic over a flu virus. Back in 2005, the “range of deaths,” the UN warned of bird flu virus H5N1, “could be anything between five and 150 million.” Officials even drafted in Imperial’s most reliable doomsayer, Neil Ferguson, to help come up with another completely fictional death toll of 200 million people. His high school level math equation was breathtaking in its over-simplicity:

“Around 40 million people died in the 1918 Spanish flu outbreak,” said Prof. Ferguson.

“There are six times more people on the planet now so you could scale it up to around 200 million people probably.”

That doomsday prediction led to the culling of tens of millions of birds in Southeast Asia, but the pandemic never really materialised. In the end, human fatalities numbered in the hundreds worldwide. It was a non event.

Similar unremarkable numbers followed the global hype over the H1N1 swine flu in 2009. Thanks to the work of investigative journalist Sharyl Attkisson, the Center for Disease Control (CDC) in the US was caught over-inflating the number of cases – a fraudulent move that had grave implications for government policy and stoking unfounded public fear.

With COVID-19, the globalist medical industrial complex, led by WHO, hoped to repeat the previous public relations campaigns by hyping the novel coronavirus as the next Spanish Flu. This time they were given an extraordinary opportunity thanks to China which put on an incredible media performance and ‘show of strength’ in the month of January by ‘locking down’ Wuhan – inspiring western and other leaders to try the same big government approach.

However, the results would turn out economically disastrous for western ‘lockdown’ countries.

Economic Collapse

All of this is certain to trigger a protracted global recession marked by at least 12 months of negative growth, with economic and social displacement the likes of which the world has never seen before. The decision by countries like the UK, France, Italy, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the US to voluntarily implode their economies and place most of their populations under house arrest will have a lasting impact not only on national economies but also the global economy for years to come.

In terms of scale, the damage caused to markets and industry has already surpassed the 2008 financial crisis by orders of magnitude, and there’s no end in sight.

To ‘fight the coronavirus’ governments have imploded their real economies and replaced them with nationalised pools of finance earmarked for each section of the economy. This emergency transformation is the same as a wartime mobilisation of an economy, with a heavy focus on the medical and pharmaceutical industrial complex, the military, and selected corporate partners hand-picked by the state. This hard fusion of state and corporate interests is classic corporatism or fascism. In this brutal and constrained environment, these are some of the only institutions strong enough to remain viable.

The net effect of immediately putting millions of workers onto government welfare rolls and pushing hundreds of thousands of small-to-medium-sized businesses (SMEs) into bankruptcy will be the largest consolidation and transfer of wealth in modern history. Those with enough capital to ride out the crisis will be able to buy-up companies, and even whole industries, for literally pennies on the dollar. Monopolies like Amazon, Google and telecoms giants will consolidate and solidify their market shares as competitors gradually die off and are swallowed-up in receivership. Formerly independent contractors will now be reliant on government assistance, as will any business qualifying for government ‘relief’ grants and loans. Large corporations will now have governments covering the cost of their payrolls for the duration of the crisis.

There is no semblance of any discernible sound economic model to describe what is now happening with government printing up record amounts of money to cover the enormous cost of the shutdown. For a wealthy country like the US, the Federal Reserve Bank will simply go into overdrive, creating trillions of dollars to be released through various ‘stimulus plans’ and bailouts. The New York Fed is now pumping trillions of new dollars into banks, with the Fed also issuing ‘bridge’ loans directly to businesses. This never happened before in history. The US is also buying up unprecedented amounts of corporate stock in order to keep Wall Street afloat. With these levels of quantitative easing, there are risks of hyperinflation and other systemic problems. This may be coupled with higher food prices due to supply shortages, and stagnant wages due to a glut in the labour market after the government’s domestic scorched earth economic policies. The end result of all these bailouts (if they ever end) will be exactly as with any war in history: a rapid wholesale transfer of power, control and ownership into centralised government and the central banking cartel.

For individuals and families, this means your savings are wiped-out, your property collapses in value, and your future prospects are dim, at least in the short to midterm, and you will have no choice but to load up on personal and family debt to survive.

Before this crisis, we saw the largest wealth gap in modern history since the Gilded Age (1870–1900), with the richest 1% now owning more than half of the world’s wealth. After the first phase of this crisis, that gap may double or even triple. With SMEs wiped out, the only jobs available will be with the government or with a handful of mega-corporations.

As is often the case after any war, developed and developing countries are likely to become dependent on credit lines from either the International Monetary Fund (IMF) or from the United States itself which will have plenty of dollars and US Treasury bonds for sale or loan at near zero percent interest rates. Plenty of funny money to go around, mostly for the elites.

The shutting down of the world’s airlines – along with biosecurity and financial stagnation hitting certain sections of global trade – will severely injure the dominant system of globalisation. This will no doubt encourage already existing regional trading blocs, like ASEAN in Southeast Asia, and the African Union, leveraging their interests to create more regionalised and resilient trading networks. As physical trade and relations are codified regionally, globalisation will increase in the online digital sphere and with international e-commerce, online learning and social networking.

Now, with massive economic recession, marked by record levels of mass unemployment and debt, the balkanisation of formerly open globalisation routes, combined with a new global veil over scarcity of resources, all under a broad cloak of biological insecurity – the soil is fertile for more dismantling of democracy and a rise in fascist regimes, particularly in the West. The trend was already moving in this direction before the crisis, but now it will only accelerate.

Historically speaking, the scene is now set for another world war in which the winner sets the agenda for a ‘new world order’ going into the 21st century.

Full Spectrum Dominance: World War Footing

Just as in 1914 and the onset of World War I, the year 2020 will be a major pivot point for the early 21st century and should be seen as a tangible prelude to a new world war. There are a number of reasons why this is likely.

It is true that you can implement more change in two years of war than you can in twenty years of peace. In the case of the corona crisis, that two years was reduced to two months. Presently, events are being framed by western powers as the “global fight against an invisible enemy,” but the corona crisis has created a number of new paradigms some of which are classic precursors for war. The first and most obvious is the fact that virtually overnight, the western countries, especially NATO member states the United States, United Kingdom and France, have effectively mobilised all aspects of their country’s economy and restructured society to reflect both a wartime economy and a state of martial law.

The western bloc countries are now prepared to bunker down for a long war if need be.

The threat of a biological agent presents some serious problems for a globally-embedded military as America’s. Already the US had to cancel major NATO drills in Europe, and pull some of its naval fleet into dock because of the coronavirus and fears of infecting large numbers of military personnel. Other countries may have similar issues. In this sense, the disease has severely slowed fighting across the world – one of the more unexpected, albeit welcome, tertiary benefits of the crisis.

The western powers first obvious choice for instigating either a hot or cold war is China, along with its allies. When US President Donald Trump refers to COVID-19 as “the Chinese virus,” he is signalling to his base and to the war hawks in the Republican Party that the White House is preparing a confrontation. Anti-Chinese rhetoric and media propaganda has increased substantially in the US since the onset of the corona crisis, with many Americans, particularly the right-wing, now blaming the Chinese for releasing this pestilence into the world.

After a few more months of economic destruction, social malaise and an increasing death toll in the US, the new ranks of unemployed will be demanding a scapegoat for their terrible suffering, at which time a war with China could become more viable for Washington. This could take the form of an on-off, hot-cold war which lasts for 30 or 40 years, and pulls in other major powers using proxy battlegrounds in third party countries.

For the US empire, one primary objective in confronting China would be to disrupt and possibly derail Beijing’s historic infrastructure and economic development known as the Belt and Road Initiative, designed to link Europe with Asia along various routes over land and sea. If successful, the global centre of gravity would shift away from the US and back towards Eurasia. In the event of a global depression post-corona, the US is geopolitically well-placed to weather the storm as it commands the control of both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. China’s Belt and Road would effectively upend Washington’s plans for Fortress America lording it over all global markets during this new tumultuous epoch.

In some ways, the crisis has disrupted the emergence of a new multipolar world, but the imperative for multipolarism may also be propelled by the economic balkanisation and the fact that the US will continue withdrawing its military assets from stalwart outposts like the Middle East. Any US withdrawal from the world stage will be filled by other emerging powers like Russia, India, Turkey and possibly Japan. Many of these emerging powers require resources and materials, so the scramble to establish trading routes in Africa will be a post-corona feature.

The corona crisis also provides a convenient cover for the aggressive roll-out of 5G networks around the world. These look to be the backbone of a new global surveillance state able to track and record everything in real-time. Along with millions of masts in towns and cities, the network will also feature an array of new satellites with the potential to flood our atmosphere and communities with even more untested high-frequency radiation.

One World Health & Medical Martial Law

The current ‘state of war’ extends internationally with blanket travel restrictions already in place. There looks to be a rapid drive to institute a streamlined global system of mandatory digital tracking and tracing, implemented under the auspices of ‘global health’ and spearheaded by the World Health Organization (WHO). They are joined by participating governments and the transnational corporations that will roll out these new ‘health surveillance’ systems.

The real question that remains unanswered is what will happen once all the ‘lockdown’ measures are relaxed, and international air travel opens up again?

There are already noises coming from governments and organisations about requiring citizens to pass some form of ‘immunity test’ for COVID-19 to be granted freedom of movement within society by carrying an ‘immunity passport’ or digital certificate stored on a microchip or smartphone.

This dovetails with the rapid drive for a cashless society as a result of the corona scare. Due to corona contagion fears, paper money and coins are being stigmatised as ‘dirty’ with many retail outlets refusing to accept cash. Once this system is adopted domestically, it follows that these same restrictions will be extended to international travellers. Needless to say, this has grave implications for personal liberty and privacy. At present, this juggernaut seems difficult to stop.

If allowed, this new bio regime will become the de facto governance for the world’s population. Microsoft founder Bill Gates (net worth $97.8 billion) has called for a national vaccine tracking system in the US, funded in part by an estimated $100 million he and his wife Melinda’s Gates Foundation have donated to fight the coronavirus to discover ‘a fix’ as quickly as possible. Gates is already heavily invested in vaccine research, development and production and, with his wife, they are a primary driver in the proliferation of vaccines globally. Gates says he will front the investment for seven new vaccine factories around the globe, and as he told Daily Show host Trevor Noah during an interview on 2 April, “until we get the world vaccinated.”

Clearly, he has a vision for vaccinating every person on the planet, presumably for the coronavirus, or until the next big ‘outbreak’.

“The only thing that really lets us go back completely to normal and feel good about sitting in stadiums with lots of other people is to create a vaccine and not just take care of our country but take that vaccine out to the global population,” said Gates.

From oligarchs like Gates, the transnational pharmaceutical corporations, and the government officials in their pocket, the warning is clear: you will not be permitted to resume ‘normal life’ until you accept the latest vaccine. And do not expect the list of newly required vaccinations to end with the novel coronavirus. Once this first precedent is set, countries dependent on international travel and trade will be forced to adopt the regulatory framework of this new ‘one world health’ security complex. The trail is then blazed for a constant stream of vaccine requirements to ‘fight’ various and sundry outbreaks and ‘biothreats’, be they real, exaggerated or completely fabricated. This could be another disruptive force going forward.

Combine this with naked authoritarian statements made by other self-appointed corona tsars like Dr Michael Ryan, Executive Director of WHO, who recently remarked that members of families may need to be removed from their homes by force. “Most of the transmission actually happening in many countries now, is happening in the household at family level…. In some sense, transmission has been taken off the streets and pushed back into family units. Now, we need to go and look at families to find those people who may be sick and remove them, and isolate them in a safe and dignified manner,” said Ryan.

The obvious danger here is that this new state-corporate regime will discriminate against and marginalise citizens based on their immunity records, requiring them to take a new vaccine to receive rights and privileges. This would be a complete abrogation of personal liberty and human rights, effectively turning the clock back hundreds of years – all based on what many leading doctors and epidemiologists agree is no more of a significant public health threat, in terms of infections and fatalities, than seasonal influenza.

A COVID Green New Deal?

One of the clear main political beneficiaries of a COVID-19 global shutdown has been the climate change lobby.

By forcibly shutting down millions of businesses and pulling tens of millions of cars off the road and grounding world commercial airlines, the crisis has delivered young Greta Thunberg the evidence she and her supporters need to demonstrate the virtues of a net zero carbon world in a real-life simulation.

This will also accelerate the adoption of a so-called ‘Green New Deal’ internationally, which may have less to do with saving the environment or ‘changing the climate’, and more to do with the creation of new global financial bubble based on the commodification and financialisation of Earth’s ecosphere. This is essentially a new ‘green-backed’ and fully tradeable monetary credit, bond and derivatives market.

Greta didn’t appear out of nowhere in 2018. She and her handlers have been tasked with a mission, and now in just three weeks they are very close to realising large pieces of their agenda, which also dovetails with UN Agenda 2030 sustainability goals.

Who’s Winning: Globalism or Nationalism?

Another unexpected byproduct of this crisis has been a number of European Union member states kicking Brussels to the curb, either for not reacting fast enough to help, or simply for not releasing enough funds for struggling public institutions and businesses. As a result, countries like Italy and Poland are exerting their nationalist power over Brussels’ relatively weak and ineffectual response to requested assistance from members states.

At the same time, this new global control grid lends itself towards the implementation of a world government structure to be used to fund an international regime that regulates and adjudicates problems, as well as manage future ‘outbreaks’. In late March, former British PM and Chancellor, Gordon Brown, called for world leaders to create a provisional global government body in order to tackle the coronavirus pandemic and manage the global economic collapse.

Screenshot from The Guardian, 26 March 2020

Whatever geopolitical and social engineering agendas were already in motion before the crisis, you can be sure that the coronavirus has accelerated many of them.

In terms of power-grabs, this is the embodiment of “never let a good crisis go to waste.”

Oh, and don’t forget –it’s really all about saving lives.