Major Korean Crypto Exchange Seized After 99% Trading Volume Allegedly Faked

Major Korean Crypto Exchange Seized After 99% Trading Volume Allegedly Faked

Tyler Durden

Wed, 08/26/2020 – 20:25

Submitted by CoinTelegraph,

South Korea’s third-largest cryptocurrency exchange, Coinbit, has been seized by police following fraud allegations. According to an Aug. 26 report by the Seoul Shinmun, 99% of transaction volume on the exchange was faked through wash trading. The Seoul Metropolitan Police searched and confiscated a number of properties, including Coinbit’s headquarters in the Gangnam district of Seoul.

image courtesy of CoinTelegraph

Coinbit’s owner, Chairman Choi Mo, and his management team are accused of inflating transaction volumes and manipulating token prices using a number of ghost accounts.

Police estimate that the fraudulent activities netted over 100 billion won ($84.26 million) in total.

The Seoul Shinmun was alerted to suspected wash trading on the exchange by an insider in May. Following an investigation, it found that, between August 2019 and May 2020, 99% of transactions on Exchange 1, where major cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin (BTC) were traded, had no corresponding deposit and withdrawal details.

In addition, it found that Exchange 2, which mainly listed smaller cryptocurrencies, blocked coin transactions with other exchanges, enabling Choi and his team to control the supply of coins. This allowed the management team to directly realize market margin by buying and selling large quantities of coins at certain times.

The publishing of the investigation findings was held back until after the police operation due to concerns about personal safety and destruction of evidence.

Wash trading on exchanges is a major problem for the cryptocurrency industry, with many legitimate traders lured into using low-liquidity exchanges based on fraudulent daily volume claims.

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Soy Boom? China Could Buy Record Amount of US Soybeans

Soy Boom? China Could Buy Record Amount of US Soybeans

Tyler Durden

Wed, 08/26/2020 – 20:05

The prospects of strong Chinese demand has pushed Chicago soybean futures prices to a seven-month high this week.

In a throwback to 2019 optimism on the US-China trade deal, the Trump administration has shifted from vaccine pump headlines to trade. Bloomberg cites several sources who say after top U.S. and Chinese trade officials reaffirmed phase one trade deal commitments earlier in the week, that China is planning to purchase a record amount of soybeans. 

The sources estimate total purchases could be around 40 million tons this year, an amount that would be 25% more than the levels seen in 2017. 

“China has been stepping up purchases of American agricultural goods since the end of April, with soybean sales for delivery next season currently running at their highest level for this time of year since 2013,” Bloomberg notes.

China has been lagging behind purchase commitments laid out in phase one trade agreement. We outlined this in a piece titled “”Trade Deal” Farce Summarized In These Charts.”

Bloomberg estimates that China’s purchase commitments of farm goods for the first seven months of the year were at just 27% of the target value implied by the deal.

The USDA reported Tuesday that Chinese importers bought 408,000 tons of U.S. corn and 204,000 tons of U.S. soybeans. Then on Wednesday, China’s agriculture ministry said soybean imports were expected to rise into the late year. 

USDA sales for next season. h/t Bloomberg

However, China has been sourcing much of its soybeans from top supplier Brazil. The expectation is that more U.S. bean shipments to China will be seen in the fourth quarter.

Super Highway of Soybean Vessels from LatAm To Asia. h/t Zerohedge

With all the optimism around trade in recent days, Darin Friedrichs, a senior analyst at StoneX Group Inc. in Shanghai, believes China meeting phase one targets this year will be a tough challenge. 

 “I think the math is pretty hard to get to 40 million,” Friedrichs said. “Peak monthly loadings during the fall have typically maxed out around 7.5 to 8 million tons per month from the U.S. to China. I think 35 million is probably more reasonable.”

He added that Chinese purchases of U.S. beans in the fourth quarter might not be as large as everyone thinks because a huge Brazilian crop is expected in 2021.

The sources said China would import 96 million to 98 million tons of beans this year, with 40% to 50% of it coming from the U.S. 

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5 COVID-19 Charts That Democrats Definitely Don’t Want You To See

5 COVID-19 Charts That Democrats Definitely Don’t Want You To See

Tyler Durden

Wed, 08/26/2020 – 19:45

Amid his confirmation that he “shut the nation down” if scientists told him too, Joe Biden explained just what the Trump admin had got wrong (and how to ‘fix’ it)…

“In order to keep the country running and moving and the economy growing, and people employed, you have to fix the virus, you have to deal with the virus.”

Well the good news is… as the following five charts from John Merline’s Issues & Insights blog show, the US is ‘beating’ the virus…

If the Democratic National Convention made anything clear, it is that Democrats are entirely invested in making the coronavirus pandemic look worse than it is in the United States.

Almost every speaker decried the response and blamed President Donald Trump for the scale of the disease in the country.

In his acceptance speech, Joe Biden said “Just judge this president on the facts. Five million Americans infected by COVID-19. More than 170,000 Americans have died. By far the worst performance of any nation on Earth.” Later he said, “We lead the world in confirmed cases. We lead the world in deaths.”

Fact checkers somehow missed Biden’s flagrant abuse of statistics. NPR’s “fact check” of Biden’s speech said only that, if anything, Biden undercounted the number of COVID-19 deaths.

But the number of infections and deaths is meaningless out of context. What matters is how many have died per capita, how many who’ve been infected have succumbed to the disease and where the trends are right now.

When you do that, the picture looks far less bleak.

The U.S. is far from the worst in the world in terms of the death rate per million population. The U.S. ranks 10th for per capita deaths worldwide, and notably better than the United Kingdom with its socialist health care scheme, and Sweden, which adopted a much more laissez-faire approach to the pandemic than the U.S.

Source: Worldometers

On confirmed cases per million, the U.S. ranks 9th, but this is in part due to the extensive testing we’ve done.

In fact, despite what Biden and Co. will have you believe, we are in the top of the pack when it comes to COVID-19 tests per capita (19th out of 215 nations).

Source: Worldometers

(Note also that only four of the other 36 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development nations do better than the U.S. on tests per capita.)

When it comes to the case fatality rate – the share of confirmed cases who have died – there is no comparison.

Source: Worldometers

Not only does the U.S. outperform most countries – as well as the world overall – the case fatality rate in the U.S. has been steadily declining.

Source: Our World In Data

Finally, there’s the chart Democrats really don’t want you to see: The number of new COVID-19 cases peaked a month ago and has been trending downward ever since.

Source: Bloomberg

Not only is the epidemic becoming less deadly, but its spread has slowed.

Democrats don’t want you to know any of this, and neither does the Trump-hating press. Democrats can’t let you know if they hope to reclaim the White Hosue and take control of Congress based on fear and panic.

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Trump Authorizes Deployment of 2,000 National Guard Troops to Kenosha

TrumpOrder

President Donald Trump has said that he is sending federal law enforcement to Kenosha, Wisconsin in order to police the rioting that has broken out in the city following the shooting of Jacob Blake by Kenosha police on Sunday.

“We will NOT stand for looting, arson, violence, and lawlessness on American streets,” said Trump on Twitter Wednesday afternoon. “I will be sending federal law enforcement and the National Guard to Kenosha, WI to restore LAW and ORDER!”

Trump says that Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat, accepted the offer of federal assistance today, an offer he declined yesterday.

The governor had already authorized the deployment of 250 Wisconsin National Guard troops to Kenosha County following the rioting that broke out there on Sunday night. Today, he increased that number to 500.

Evers has also declared a state of emergency and an 8 p.m. curfew has been imposed in Kenosha. The New York Times reports that roughly 100 National Guard troops had been deployed to the city already.

The White House is authorizing the deployment of 2,000 National Guard troops from neighboring states in addition to 200 federal law enforcement personnel to assist state and local police, the Milwaukie Sentinel Journal reports.

Violence escalated in Kenosha last night when two people at demonstrations were fatally shot, and a third wounded. A 17-year-old Illinois teen, reportedly one of the vigilantes that have posted up outside of businesses in the city with the stated aim of preventing property destruction, has been arrested and charged with first-degree intentional homicide.

It’s not clear how many of the National Guard troops or federal agents will end up being deployed to Kenosha, or if any have arrived already. Reason‘s request for comment to Evers and Department of Homeland Security have not been returned.

The Sentinal-Journal reports that the decision to deploy additional National Guard troops is at the discretion of Wisconsin National Guard Adjutant General Paul Knapp.

“President Trump’s threat today to send federal law enforcement to Kenosha is misguided and will only make matters worse. We don’t need more police, we need to end police violence,” said Chris Ott, executive director of the ACLU of Wisconsin, in a statement this afternoon.

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The Trump Administration Executes Its Fourth Federal Prisoner in Two Months

terrehauteprison_1161x653

Today, after entreaties to both the Supreme Court and President Donald Trump to intervene failed, Lezmond Mitchell, 38, was put to death at the U.S. Penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana, via lethal injection. He was pronounced dead by the Bureau of Prisons at 6:29 p.m.

Mitchell’s execution is the fourth by the Department of Justice under Attorney General William Barr, coming just a month after three men were executed over the course of a single week. Those three men were the first to be executed by the federal government in 17 years. With Mitchell’s execution, the Trump administration has the distinction of putting to death more federal inmates than any president since Dwight D. Eisenhower in the 1950s.

Mitchell was convicted of carjacking and murdering Alyce Slim, 63, and her granddaughter, Tiffany Lee, 9, in Arizona in 2001 when he was just 20. His underage accomplice was sentenced to life in prison. Mitchell, however, was sentenced to death.

Mitchell was a member of the Navajo Nation, as were the victims, and the murders took place on Navajo land. The leaders of the tribe have been objecting to Mitchell’s execution and do not support the death penalty. Leaders argued that putting Mitchell to death violated the tribe’s sovereignty. Under federal law, the Justice Department is supposed to defer to the tribe’s wishes whether to pursue the death penalty, but in Mitchell’s case, they used an exception with the carjacking charges to get around the law’s wording.

But some family members of the victims did not agree with the Navajo position. Donel Lee, brother of Tiffany, told an Associated Press reporter after the execution, “I thank President Trump and A.G. Barr for supporting my father and I on the execution. No thanks to the Navajo Nation president. … But now I’m at peace with it and justice is served.” According to the Associated Press, when asked if Mitchell had an final words, he simply said, “No, I’m good.”

At the same time that the Department of Justice is relaunching executions, we’re seeing examples of the potential for the criminal justice system to go awry and harm innocent people, depriving them of their liberty and potentially their lives, in part due to overzealous prosecution. Today, in Florida, DNA evidence revealed that a man incarcerated for 37 years is innocent of a rape and murder from 1983 in the Tampa area.

Robert Duboise was convicted partly on the strength of bite-mark evidence from a forensic dentist who matched marks on the victim’s face with Duboise’s teeth. The accuracy of this type of forensics science has long since been shown to be completely unreliable.

At one point Duboise was sentenced to death, but fortunately it was later reduced by a judge to life in prison. This gave the Innocence Project a chance to work with the case and also with office of Hillsborough County’s state’s attorney, who found new DNA evidence in a stored rape kit. The evidence exonerated Duboise, and he may be freed as early as Thursday.

There’s very little about Lezmond’s case that compares directly to Duboise’s. However, when the federal government executes a prisoner on the same day that another person who had been on death row is exonerated, it really is worth asking what we actually gain from executing prisoners, when we know full well that one potential consequence is that the government will knowingly be putting to death people who are innocent.

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Trump Authorizes Deployment of 2,000 National Guard Troops to Kenosha

TrumpOrder

President Donald Trump has said that he is sending federal law enforcement to Kenosha, Wisconsin in order to police the rioting that has broken out in the city following the shooting of Jacob Blake by Kenosha police on Sunday.

“We will NOT stand for looting, arson, violence, and lawlessness on American streets,” said Trump on Twitter Wednesday afternoon. “I will be sending federal law enforcement and the National Guard to Kenosha, WI to restore LAW and ORDER!”

Trump says that Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat, accepted the offer of federal assistance today, an offer he declined yesterday.

The governor had already authorized the deployment of 250 Wisconsin National Guard troops to Kenosha County following the rioting that broke out there on Sunday night. Today, he increased that number to 500.

Evers has also declared a state of emergency and an 8 p.m. curfew has been imposed in Kenosha. The New York Times reports that roughly 100 National Guard troops had been deployed to the city already.

The White House is authorizing the deployment of 2,000 National Guard troops from neighboring states in addition to 200 federal law enforcement personnel to assist state and local police, the Milwaukie Sentinel Journal reports.

Violence escalated in Kenosha last night when two people at demonstrations were fatally shot, and a third wounded. A 17-year-old Illinois teen, reportedly one of the vigilantes that have posted up outside of businesses in the city with the stated aim of preventing property destruction, has been arrested and charged with first-degree intentional homicide.

It’s not clear how many of the National Guard troops or federal agents will end up being deployed to Kenosha, or if any have arrived already. Reason‘s request for comment to Evers and Department of Homeland Security have not been returned.

The Sentinal-Journal reports that the decision to deploy additional National Guard troops is at the discretion of Wisconsin National Guard Adjutant General Paul Knapp.

“President Trump’s threat today to send federal law enforcement to Kenosha is misguided and will only make matters worse. We don’t need more police, we need to end police violence,” said Chris Ott, executive director of the ACLU of Wisconsin, in a statement this afternoon.

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The Trump Administration Executes Its Fourth Federal Prisoner in Two Months

terrehauteprison_1161x653

Today, after entreaties to both the Supreme Court and President Donald Trump to intervene failed, Lezmond Mitchell, 38, was put to death at the U.S. Penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana, via lethal injection. He was pronounced dead by the Bureau of Prisons at 6:29 p.m.

Mitchell’s execution is the fourth by the Department of Justice under Attorney General William Barr, coming just a month after three men were executed over the course of a single week. Those three men were the first to be executed by the federal government in 17 years. With Mitchell’s execution, the Trump administration has the distinction of putting to death more federal inmates than any president since Dwight D. Eisenhower in the 1950s.

Mitchell was convicted of carjacking and murdering Alyce Slim, 63, and her granddaughter, Tiffany Lee, 9, in Arizona in 2001 when he was just 20. His underage accomplice was sentenced to life in prison. Mitchell, however, was sentenced to death.

Mitchell was a member of the Navajo Nation, as were the victims, and the murders took place on Navajo land. The leaders of the tribe have been objecting to Mitchell’s execution and do not support the death penalty. Leaders argued that putting Mitchell to death violated the tribe’s sovereignty. Under federal law, the Justice Department is supposed to defer to the tribe’s wishes whether to pursue the death penalty, but in Mitchell’s case, they used an exception with the carjacking charges to get around the law’s wording.

But some family members of the victims did not agree with the Navajo position. Donel Lee, brother of Tiffany, told an Associated Press reporter after the execution, “I thank President Trump and A.G. Barr for supporting my father and I on the execution. No thanks to the Navajo Nation president. … But now I’m at peace with it and justice is served.” According to the Associated Press, when asked if Mitchell had an final words, he simply said, “No, I’m good.”

At the same time that the Department of Justice is relaunching executions, we’re seeing examples of the potential for the criminal justice system to go awry and harm innocent people, depriving them of their liberty and potentially their lives, in part due to overzealous prosecution. Today, in Florida, DNA evidence revealed that a man incarcerated for 37 years is innocent of a rape and murder from 1983 in the Tampa area.

Robert Duboise was convicted partly on the strength of bite-mark evidence from a forensic dentist who matched marks on the victim’s face with Duboise’s teeth. The accuracy of this type of forensics science has long since been shown to be completely unreliable.

At one point Duboise was sentenced to death, but fortunately it was later reduced by a judge to life in prison. This gave the Innocence Project a chance to work with the case and also with office of Hillsborough County’s state’s attorney, who found new DNA evidence in a stored rape kit. The evidence exonerated Duboise, and he may be freed as early as Thursday.

There’s very little about Lezmond’s case that compares directly to Duboise’s. However, when the federal government executes a prisoner on the same day that another person who had been on death row is exonerated, it really is worth asking what we actually gain from executing prisoners, when we know full well that one potential consequence is that the government will knowingly be putting to death people who are innocent.

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NBA, MLB Games Postponed as Players Protest Jacob Blake Shooting

NBABLM2

The National Basketball Association’s playoffs came to an abrupt halt on Wednesday after players boycotted scheduled games to protest the shooting of Jacob Blake, a black man, by a white police officer.

What began with a boycott carried out by a single professional basketball team quickly spread across the league and the rest of the sports world, with two other NBA games and at least one Major League Baseball game called off as additional players joined the cause.

The Milwaukee Bucks were supposed to play the fifth game of their first-round series against the Orlando Magic on Wednesday afternoon, but Bucks players refused to leave the locker room for the start of the game. After initially warming up in the arena, players for the Magic walked off the court before the scheduled tip-off. With other teams reportedly planning similar boycotts in upcoming games, the NBA made the decision to cancel Wednesday’s entire slate of playoff games.

“Some things are bigger than basketball,” Alex Lasry, the Bucks’ senior vice president, said in a statement. “The stand taken today by the players and (the organization) shows that we’re fed up. Enough is enough. Change needs to happen. I’m incredibly proud of our guys and we stand 100 percent behind our players ready to assist and bring about real change.”

Some Bucks players were trying to get in contact with Josh Kaul, Wisconsin’s state attorney general, according to The Athletic‘s Shams Charania.

Kenosha, Wisconsin, where Blake was shot in the back at point-blank range at least seven times on Sunday afternoon, is about 30 miles south of Milwaukee. The small city has been wracked by violent protests in the days since Blake’s shooting, culminating in the destruction of several businesses and the deaths of at least two people.

The Milwaukee Brewers, a Major League Baseball team, canceled their game on Wednesday evening in order to protest Blake’s shooting. Other baseball teams are reportedly considering boycotting games as well.

NBA players and coaches have spent the past few days speaking out about Blake’s shooting. On Monday, Chis Paul of the Oklahoma City Thunder—who also happens to be the president of the NBA Players Association—used a postgame interview to share his thoughts on what had taken place in Kenosha on Sunday.

“It’s not right. It’s not right,” he said. “There’s a lot of stuff going on in the country. Sports—it’s cool, it’s good…but there are the real issues we have to start addressing.”

And on Tuesday night, it was Los Angeles Clippers head coach Doc Rivers who focused his postgame news conference on how police violence against black Americans has been politicized.

Shortly after the Bucks-Magic game was postponed Wednesday, superstar Lebron James weighed in on Twitter.

When the NBA restarted its season after a months-long COVID-19 disruption, the league allowed players to wear pre-approved political statements on the back of their jerseys. Many players have opted to wear expressions supporting the Black Lives Matter movement, and other statements calling attention to police violence towards black Americans. The court where the NBA is playing all its playoffs games—at the Walt Disney World resort near Orlando, Florida, inside a so-called “bubble” to protect against the spread of COVID-19—is painted with the phrase “Black Lives Matter.

On Wednesday, those sentiments jumped beyond what the league likely intended. Adrian Wojnarowski, an ESPN reporter covering the NBA playoffs, wrote on Twitter that the players’ boycott caught team owners and league officials by surprise. “This is a pivot point for the NBA and professional sports in North America,” he wrote.

It remains to be seen what will come of Wednesday’s boycott, or whether the protests will disrupt more games in the days to come. Already, the incident has demonstrated how much power professional athletes have to call attention to issues that stretch far beyond the arenas and playing fields. In 1968, some of the NBA’s star players discussed a similar boycott in the wake of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., but couldn’t stir up enough support to make it happen.

Times have clearly changed. But as professional athletes made clear on Wednesday, they have not changed enough.

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US Cargo Thefts Erupt As Violent Crime Spreads Across America 

US Cargo Thefts Erupt As Violent Crime Spreads Across America 

Tyler Durden

Wed, 08/26/2020 – 19:25

The latest trucking news from Overdrive is particularly disturbing, outlines how cargo theft across the US surged during the virus-induced downturn in the second quarter. 

Overdrive, citing data from SensiGuard, a cargo theft recording firm aggregating data from transportation security councils, insurance companies and law enforcement organizations, said cargo theft surged 56% year-over-year in the quarter.

“One significant note is that April, which was at the height of the supply chain disruption caused by COVID-19, experienced more than double the volume of April 2019 (+109%). While both May (+31%) and June (+30%) also beat their 2019 totals, it was by a decreasing amount in each case,” SensiGuard noted in its 2Q20 cargo theft report. 

The cargo theft monitoring firm recorded 227 thefts over the three months ending June, with 96 in April, 67 in May, and 64 in June. In dollar amount, the average theft was about a quarter-million dollars. It said 23% of all cargo thefts were miscellaneous products for retailers. Food and drinks made up about 20% of all thefts.

California, for the first time since 3Q17, was dethroned as the state with most cargo thefts. Texas became the epicenter of thefts in 2Q20, followed by California, Illinois, Florida, and Tennessee.

In a separate report, we noted truckers on a popular trucking app called “CDLLife” polled its user base. They found an overwhelming number of drivers wouldn’t “pickup/deliver to cities with defunded/disbanded police departments.”

A rapid increase in cargo thefts, robberies, and violent crime across US metros is not surprising whatsoever as a virus-induced recession has unleashed depressionary unemployment levels for the bottom 90% of Americans. Tens of millions of folks are still unemployed, and now, have not received Trump stimulus checks in three weeks as they go broke and hungry, also at risk of eviction.

The recession has transformed America into a dangerous country as any hope for a “V-shaped” economic rebound this year has been dashed. 

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17 Facts That Prove The US Economy Is A Complete And Total Disaster-Zone At This Point

17 Facts That Prove The US Economy Is A Complete And Total Disaster-Zone At This Point

Tyler Durden

Wed, 08/26/2020 – 19:05

Authored by Michael Snyder via The Economic Collapse blog,

If you know people that actually believe that the U.S. economy is moving in a positive direction, just show them this article. 

In all the years that I have been writing about the economy, I have never seen anything that even comes close to what we are experiencing now.  More than 100,000 businesses have permanently failed, and tens of millions of Americans have lost their jobs.  If you still have a good job you should cling to it with all of your might, because there are so many families that have no idea how they are going to pay the bills next month, or the month after that, or that month after that.  When it gets to the point where you can’t even pay the rent or the mortgage, financial worries can absolutely consume your life.  If you have been there, you know exactly what I am talking about.  And if you have children, that just makes things even worse.  How do you explain to them that “home” is no longer “home”?

Another group of people that I feel really badly for are all the business owners that have had their dreams absolutely shattered.  Starting a small business from nothing and building it into a success takes a massive amount of work, and I have a tremendous amount of respect for anyone that is able to do that.

Unfortunately, so many once thriving small businesses have now been destroyed by the events of 2020.  For a lot of those small business owners, it isn’t just time and energy that have been lost.  When you make your small business your passion, it becomes a part of who you are, and a lot of small business owners will never be the same again after this.

So please keep in mind that there are real people and real dreams behind each of the numbers that I am about to share with you.  The following are 17 facts that prove the U.S. economy is a complete and total disaster zone at this point…

#1 According to the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce, more than half of all the storefronts in the entire city of San Francisco are no longer in business.

#2 Just a few hours ago, New York City reported that it had an unemployment rate of almost 20 percent during the month of July.

#3 Speaking of New York, 83 percent of all restaurants in the city were unable to pay their full rent last month.

#4 In 2020, the state of Louisiana has lost twice as many jobs as it did after Hurricane Katrina.  By the way, many are concerned that Hurricane Laura could soon become a similar monster storm.

#5 In the state of South Carolina, an eye-popping 52 percent of all renters “are at risk of eviction”.

#6 Americans now owe more than 21 billion dollars in unpaid rent.

#7 Overall, 27 percent of all Americans did not make their rent or mortgage payment last month.

#8 According to the Mortgage Bankers Association, the delinquency rate on residential mortgages increased by 386 basis points last quarter.  That was the most rapid rise that we have ever seen by a very wide margin.

#9 U.S. bankruptcies are already at their highest level in 10 years and they are expected to surge dramatically as we approach the end of this calendar year.

#10 For companies with more than 1 billion dollars in assets, it is being projected that there will be a record number of bankruptcies in 2020.

#11 World trade plunged to the “lowest levels on record” during the month of June.

#12 The percentage of hotel mortgages that are 30 or more days delinquent soared to a whopping 23.4 percent last month.

#13 American Airlines just announced that they will be eliminating 19,000 jobs next month.

#14 31 percent of U.S. workers that were brought back to work after being laid off during the early stages of this pandemic have been laid off a second time, and another 26 percent have been told that layoffs may be coming soon.

#15 According to one recent survey, about half of all U.S. workers that have been laid off during this pandemic believe that their jobs losses are permanent.

#16 The IRS is projecting that it will receive 37 million fewer W-2 forms for this year than originally anticipated.

#17 Over the last 22 weeks, more than 57 million Americans have filed new claims for unemployment benefits.  In all of U.S. history, we have never seen anything that is even worth comparing to this.

Many of the numbers in that list are so catastrophic that it is difficult to believe that they are actually true.

What we experienced back in 2008 and 2009 was a “deep recession”, but what we are experiencing now is so much worse.

And at this point even the mainstream media is admitting that this new downturn will be with us for a long time.  For example, the following comes from a CNN article entitled “We’ll be stuck in this economic slump for years, economists say”

America remains in a deep downturn and is running a serious risk of a worsening recession that will last at least another year, economists warned Monday.

About half of the National Association of Business Economics members expect US gross domestic product — the broadest measure of the economy — won’t return to its pre-pandemic level until 2022. A majority of those experts also say the US job market will be back to its February level in 2022 at the earliest.

Unfortunately, those projections are actually way too optimistic.  Industry after industry is in the process of unraveling, major economic bubbles are bursting all around us, and the economic pain that is on the horizon is going to dwarf what we are going through at this moment.

The mainstream media admits that a “collapse” has happened, but they still believe that eventually things will turn around and get back to where they were before.

And there are some people out there that actually believe that America’s greatest days of economic prosperity are still ahead of us.

You can go ahead and believe that if you want, and I definitely understand that many people would prefer to be optimistic about the future.

But sticking our heads in the sand won’t make the facts go away.  It has taken decades of catastrophic decisions to get us to this point, and anyone that thinks we can just snap our fingers and turn things around is just being delusional.

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